µblog - archive for 2024-01 🏳️‍🌈

🔗 XKCD #2888: US Survey Foot

I found this unusually funny.

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📺🇬🇧 In The Dark (2017)

This show is all over the place, child abduction and murder in darkest Derbyshire, gangland violence in Manchester, the female protagonist has a dark and troubled past and it’s 2 stories over 4 eps. The actors (excellent, as in most UK shows) do what they can with the material but it’s a tough row to hoe.

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🔗🚀 Crystal Nights by Greg Egan

(via Stross)

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I don’t get why US right-wingers are so mad they don’t have Taylor Swift on their side. After all, they have Grimes.

Update: Wonkette agrees:

[Posobiec said] “We don’t have Taylor Swift on our side, but you know who we have? We have Kid Rock. We have Ted Nugent. We have influencers. Right? We have all these people — Jon Voight.”

Which is like saying, “They might have chocolate cake, but it’s OK, we have three turds covered in syphilis frosting, and that’s cool too.”

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The market for car charging in Sweden is so amazingly fractured it’s a wonder anyone even bothers trying to charge. More than once I’ve just parked in a space reserved for charging, attached the cable and not bothered signing up for yet another app. The time spend finding and installing the app, creating an account, adding a payment method &c. easily exceeds the actual cost of parking.

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🔗 Cory Doctorow: I assure you, an AI didn’t write a terrible “George Carlin” routine

[…] we’re nowhere near the point where an AI can do your job, but we’re well past the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job[…]

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📺🇦🇺 Colin from Accounts

Two singles from Sydney bond over the dog one of them runs over when the other flashes him. Better than it sounds.

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Pausing updates in HN&&LO for a short while to deal with database size issues.

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Looks like Apple’s response to the EU’s Digital Markets Act has managed to piss off both Apple fans and Apple haters, so at least the EU is doing something right. But it took me way to long to realize I don’t give a F about all of it and hid the rages from my sight.

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I know LinkedIn is de rigeur for job hunting, but the thought of having to ruthlessly prune yet another recommendation hydra to prevent it from showing me Lex Fridman’s stupid face makes it even more depressing.

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🔗🇸🇪📚 Två spänningsromaner av Karin Alvtegen (från huvudbloggen)

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📺🇸🇪 Sanningen (S01)

Alldeles för många trådar i den här serien. Kallt fall OCH drog-kung som vill hämnas på huvudpersonen OCH relation mellan halvsyskon OCH random solochvårare från Danmark… vi får se om det blir en säsong till.

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🔗 wizz for coading!

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🔗🌝 Wonkette: Sorry To All The Dead Rich People Who Won’t Get Buried On The Moon!

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🔗 Emily Gogolak: Lost Highway - The trials of trucking school

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🔗 Empty Laughter

Ed Zitron on the recent “AI George Carlin” abomination.

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“I never thought computers were coming for my job!” cries professional class whose job has been to enable computers to come for other people’s jobs.

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🔗 How a 27-Year-Old Codebreaker Busted the Myth of Bitcoin’s Anonymity

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🔗🚆 En Route: A Magazine About Trains in Japan {pdf}

Is there a word for the sort of magazines you get in the front pocket of your seat when flying? Full of anodyne general interest content, heavily corporatized? This is one of these, but quite nice.

Specifically the article about the train photographer Hirozaku Fukushima was a fun read.

For Fukushima, the transition from winter to spring — when the snow is gone but the trees are still bare and flowers have yet to bloom — is the “season that tests a photographer’s ability.”

I feel it.

(found on HN who are under the impression that trainspotters are a Japan-only phenomenon… oh man… )

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TIL Flash and the Pan were from Oz.

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Denmark’s new king has an unexpectedly punk name: Frederik X

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📺🇬🇧 Guilt S01

This show has won multiple awards and it’s not hard to see why. Great actors and a compelling setting and story.

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📺🇬🇧 Steeltown Murders

“Based on a true story”, but still quite good. I’m a sucker for realistic procedurals.

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Today (and many other days) on lobste.rs: the kids are using the computers all wrong!

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A week before I’m due to turn in this laptop I notice that every right click context menu in Explorer has some shitty Radeon option at the very top and I’m fighting the instinct to spend an hour researching how to remove it.

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📺🇬🇧 Gavin & Stacey

Essex lad meets Welsh lass, they get married, and hijinks ensue. A low-key sitcom with heart.

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landing on the moon is space exploration fan service

I got some pushback for my snark about the Peregrine moon lander, so I thought I’d expand a bit.

I’m in favor of automatic/autonomous space exploration, as opposed to sending evolved apes into the great vacuum with all the issues about keeping them alive, healthy and fertile for long periods of time. So an unmanned lander makes sense.

However, I’d prefer relatively rare launch capacity be reserved for unmanned probes to go to places in the solar system we don’t know much about. The moon is relatively well known¹, and easy to get to².

The Apollo missions has now entered the nostalgia era. It reflects a time when the US was big and strong (ignore Vietnam!), where white cleancut men sent other cleancut men to inhospitable environments and brought them back alive. Nowadays no-one remembers if the moon project was criticized or if it was less useful. It was cold war propaganda.

The reason NASA wants to go to the moon (and gets funding for that) is to try to reclaim the glory days of Apollo, and to prepare a Moon base for further manned expeditions. If you don’t believe in manned spaceflight, a moon base is useless. NASA is a publicly funded agency and needs the public to ultimately want to support its mission. Sending robots to other places? Scientifically valid, and boring. Sending strong, manly men to wrest a living from the unforgiving lunar landscape? Scientifically dubious, but the fodder for many SF stories.

In a way, getting a private company to design a moonlander stuffed with dead people’s ashes and tchtotkes is a way to square the funding circle. The public money isn’t just going to woke eggheads, it’s also going to salespeople! There’s got to be something worth digging up from the lunar surface, right? Or at least people will pay for their remains to be dumped there.

If you support space exploration for science, the moon is a sideshow. If you want manned space flight, this is a step in that direction. I don’t, so I’ll continue to point and laugh when a private companies loses its trinkets in space.

¹ of course it’s always nice to know more, but priorities.

² obviously not as easy as we think, see the failure of the Peregrine, and this xweet

The fact that almost every lunar lander from every country in modern times has failed to reach the moon despite an abundance of information and progress in avionics & automation highlights how truly cracked the Apollo team was

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🔗 Cory Doctorow: What Kind of Bubble is AI?

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I’d sure feel bad if the privately funded moonlander stuffed full of rich people’s ashes just florped down into the atmosphere and burned up.

Update, Sun 2024-01-14: lol my wishes have come true:

Peregrine lunar lander on Earth reentry trajectory

Burn in the atmosphere, dead rich people.

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“People are so much more creative and productive when they’re in an office together!” yeah but have you factored in the productivity gains you get from nodding along in a pointless Zoom while getting actual work done?

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imagine succesfully hacking the SEC xhitter account and using that to try to pump bitcoin

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🔗 The Seven Deadly Sins of Predicting the Future of AI (2017)

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Flagged a submission titled “Give someone a compliment today” on lobste.rs. Human relationships are off-topic.

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📺🇬🇧 The Light in the Hall / Y Golau

A competent Brit crime drama – which is also available in Welsh in selected areas, as apparently the show was filmed in parallel. Nothing too exceptional but a nice way to spend your TV time.

(I’d have liked to use the Welsh flag here but it’s a bit too advanced for my platform.)

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Fatfingering a git command just deleted a file my poor CPU had spent more than an hour to create. It’s ok to hate me, CPU. I hate me too.

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“LinkedIn Isn’t Just for Jobs Anymore. It’s Now a Dating App Too” JFC

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🇸🇪 SMHIs gula varningar inkluderar “svår nedisning till havs” för… Vänern

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🔗🖥 Mathew Dugan: Fixing Macs Door to Door

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Today, a bit more of a year later, this sort of shit pops up again on lobste.rs:

I hope that there’s a sociologist prepared to write a study about why some developers hate Golang so much. It would be fascinating reading.

– me on 2023-01-01

And I don’t even use Golang! I dunno why I feel the need to whiteknight it.

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🔗 Nelson Minar: Making peace with journalctl

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“[Pascal] grew into Delphi, which was a popular low-code option on Windows” lol ok HN (also Niklaus Wirth R.I.P.)

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Gotta love how a really really basic post about coding C (where the author discovers that printf is buffered) can generate a heated discussion about the minutuae of C standards where the described behavior is just fine, actually.

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🔗📸 Kodak DCS 14n: The Worm in Paradise, Surrounded by Socks

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🔗📺 Abigail Nussbaum: Best TV of 2023

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