Notices by a kilo of saucepans (rakslice) (rakslice@mastodon.social), page 2

Earlier in the day when this literal news item was just a story reiterating a claim from a borough president about ICE impersonating NYPD and quoting a DHS spokesman's denial, I realized that that organization has a track record now of issuing false denials -- there is essentially no reason to believe a claim is false anymore just because that organization denies it

It's funny, this story has started and ended in the course of a day but what can we possibly take at face value?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/26/columbia-student-detained-federal-agents

I was thinking about my comment about the idea of nato as "team nuclear weapons" back in the before times, and about the idea of european countries recently pondering the french nuclear capability becoming a kind of umbrella for europe

are we as a human civilization across the world in 2026 more predisposed to the mumbo jumbo that this actually does anything beyond being a persistent existential threat than we were 10 or 60 years ago?

In that way it acts like a roman à clef -- where the key is that you have sufficiently great understanding the actual nature of organizations, or maybe sufficiently low gullibility towards the official line

This made me realize something about -- go with me on this journey -- Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

The film is set up to look like a parody and certainly every act is played for comedy and the film functions if interpreted as parody, but actually the scenario is not a parody -- the blanket denial stapled to the front is the same one a politician or political appointee would issue one way or another, maybe without even consulting the facts first

' Julia was twenty-six years old. [...] and she worked, as he had guessed, on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department. She enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor. [...] She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. [...]'

https://bsky.app/profile/d1fferentp3rson.bsky.social/post/3meegmfjl322y

' But she was not interested in the finished product. She "didn’t much care for reading," she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces. ' - George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

real life now indistinguishable from parody https://www.npr.org/2026/02/02/nx-s1-5696525/trump-nuclear-safety-regulations-environmental-review

@evan lol, spent a minute trying to figure out what the inverse of an REM single is :P

@thomasfuchs yeah it was clearly designed by somebody in boca raton that expected like maybe 5 or 6 models my dude

reading about companies that I only know about because of a single entry in ralf brown's table of INT 15 ah=c0 computer model values https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reply_Corporation

LB: This is so inscrutable too, like you can imagine a certain type of ceo guy deciding this is good in-house swag at the defence contrator, but no this is just a straight up publicly-available branding own-goal product

@whitequark @xgranade anyone know how many lines of code are in itunes?

@whitequark @xgranade since this is the proverbial "itunes of ebooks", should I ask a cursed question

I wasn't even aware compaq made one, i thought it was just a very brief heyday thing from grid and like the t3x00

LB: seeing oregon trail on a gas plasma laptop is the retrocomputing milestone I didn't know I needed to see

@whitequark i hear that increases throughput :P

@whitequark can github actions dispatch multiple reads i mean builds in parallel :P

@whitequark ~ video games ~

@thomasfuchs yeah, this gives the physical memory map incl memory size but it's an obscure basically IBM PS/2 specific one