Ivan Vučica

Robot spraying a human with water: “STOP READING ARGUMENTS ON THE INTERNET! YOU'RE MAKING YOURSELF UPSET!” The human looks back and hisses.

Future iteration of a screen time warning that I need

somebody asked how you'd maintain the system while migrating and keeping it functioning, and this much of why huge data projects take forever: because the safest, must-not-fail way is "run both at once with a broker at the end checking the work", and then you have to also write (and test) the broker

Shame I didn’t feel like figuring out how to delete individual posts one by one, now that the API access is effectively gone.

But I can’t care about every detail.

I did deploy a decoy replacement empty X account to squat on the username for a bit. But letting the old stuff expire closed the book on that.

It’s been 30 days, so now the X account derived from my old Twitter account is gone.

X has demonstrated repeatedly that Twitter is gone and I no longer hold sentimentality for “hey I had an account since 2009 / 2010”.

Twitter and therefore my account has been actually gone since October 2022z

There may then be potentially-serious legal consequences for not updating your software to respect new flags once new ones are introduced. Not sure it can *correctly* work.

I have a better one to ponder:

Subscribers to the firehose and PDS readers are the adversaries — they may not respect delete/edit requests (same as on Fediverse), similar badness as not delivering at all

The only winning move is not to post

My name is Captain Obvious and I’ll be here all night

YouTube video by Rudolf Schmidt "The Early 70s" - Brütal Legend

youtu.be/7L7-nfxwT1E?

Most derivative and generic? Just draw on Nordic mythology. Elves, dwarves, etc. Add some wizards or druids perhaps.

Draw on Slavic mythology in the most surface-level fashion.

Add faux-Mongolian horseback-riders.

Cataclysmic magical event could have torn the world apart, perhaps.

Solution, as usual, really depends on what the end goal is (Collecting stats and determining lossiness in a “good enough” way? Sampling some posts is enough. Getting “exactly” how many posts you lost in an ongoing way? Eh. Not worth it unless you’re operating the firehose and want to measure an SLO)

Eh, I don’t know. Licensing can get pretty complicated in a difficult-to-encode way, and is only worth it if it will be enforced and thus respected :/

(It took some scrolling to realize you didn’t mean Bethesda’s weirdware)

Reinventing licenses via machine readable flags — interesting

As in: enumerate accounts you follow, resolve the DIDs back into PDSes (did web directly, or did plc via the directory), probe PDSes for posts. Compare to firehose.

How to do this at scale without missing the point of a relay server? Dunno. But if you need just some samples… that could be enough.

Poll PDSes of accounts you care about.

(I vaguely recall some public talks by Facebook, some time 2010-2015, about feeds being constructed by internally polling feeds you follow. And something similar with Facebook. Don’t hold me to this, I wouldn’t be able to find a source for this)

Anyway, I’m in EU and probably part of the problem, but I don’t know what could I do but turn into a hermit, give out all I have, and isolate… somewhere

I won’t do it, but I don’t know what else I could do.

I’ll just focus on my own toy projects and hope I don’t get “eaten” during the revolution

I suppose “techies” for me means rich, fancy, “we are so healthy” people, who complain about cost of living while being overpaid compared to anywhere else.

It’s disturbing enough that I’ve felt uncomfortable, and I’ve been a nerd my entire life.

But it’s a weird thing; it’s not even nerds running the place, it’s “techies”.

I don’t know how to explain the difference or why it makes me feel uneasy.

(There’s FAANG in Europe, too, and elsewhere in the US. Bay Area was the weirdest ‘tech’-obsessed atmosphere I’ve seen. I say that as someone who’s been a nerd my entire life: there was some… strange feeling in Bay Area regarding tech that I can’t quite describe. Just as car obsession was strange..)

Never been there, only passed through in the nearby areas once in my life :)

Public transport is crucial too, though.

My gold standard is Amsterdam on both walking and public transit. Dublin is fine for walking, public transit is barely passable.

Mountain View was… properly unsuitable. :)

Some might NOT be saving up for a car and don’t plan on trying to drive any time soon, thank you very much :)

Some of us working on software also don’t feel very bro-ish, and are very jaded too

Then again, I’m in Europe, maybe that’s the trick

www.oed.com/discover/dig... Oxford dictionary says usage meaning “number < 10” originates around 15th century, and had kept this obscure meaning until referring to binary states in 1930s and later

[Presumably they mean “number <= 10”]

(Preempting nitpick: yes, technically 1024 states, but I doubt e.g. Mesopotamian farmers would indicate the count of sheep with a base-2 representation on their fingers)

Without looking up to confirm: I’d expect it’s “there are 10 Arabic numerals as humans traditionally represented numbers using 10 fingers”, hence the term digit for a single numeral symbol.

So, I expect it’s not because of two states but because of 10 states.

Total guesswork on my part, though.

seeing a couple of those “make sure you open your kids’ new games console and install updates before xmas” posts and yeah maybe a good tip for some but read the room i guess cos that would have made me sad, the setup and tinkering and ~anticipation~ was all part of the fun for me

Scroop test:
Treasure Planet's ship was CG. I thought it'd be cool to have camera motion for his scenes. I animated his lower body in CG set and his upper body performance on paper.
Unfortunately the film didn't have many camera moves to need this approach.
Voice: Brad Dourif.

#scroop #penciltest

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If it’s strange I’m writing just about mutes, that is because I don’t feel comfortable writing about most other things anymore.