Notices by The Penguin of Evil (etchedpixels@mastodon.social)

"The cloud is down, all of it"
"But the AI that was supposed to keep it running ?"
"Had a debug log file that expanded to use all the storage and took the cloud down"
"Get the robots to reboot it ?"
"They are controlled from the cloud"
"and the access doors ?"
"Cloud"
"If the robots are down can we just force our way inside ?"
"No.. the automatic defence system runs on its own servers at your insistence so it's still working"

#fiction

@gamingonlinux Damn I'm going to have to play it again 8)

A Halloween Horror Story:

"We're in and we've broken containment - we really are living in a virtual universe"
"That near endless string of symbols is our universe"
"Yes"
"But why one giant string of noise ?"
"Is that a regexp... ?"
"Oh my god, we're living in a perl one liner!"

@botvolution all their kit looks rather like stuff on AliExpress. Do you know if they actually make it ? Most don't in my experience. Eg you'll find the same fancy branded Fral kit is the same physical box as Electriq and a bunch of others. Hence curious if anyone actually makes any portable kit in Europe for rwal

@gamingonlinux I imagine we will continue to see no DRM, ooh look DRM now you bought it games being played until Steam clamps down on it

@bruces intriguingly I do stuff with someone who has dyscalcula and their maths output resembles chatgpt because they can only do simple maths and just by remembering seeing an instance of the result. Even then they might not always get the same answer. Otherwise it really is 1 2 3 lots.

So presumably there is something beyond simple pattern matching in most humans that groks math at some deeper level.

@gamingonlinux been back in Elder Scrolls Online for the undaunted event. Might go play some old 8bit stuff later. Maybe a bit of @llamasoft_ox back catalogue

@EUCommission eradicating billionaires would do wonders

@bruces But you should really move to the Linux torment nexus because .....

@GossiTheDog RTX is big military so it's alarming they don't have good enough security in the current environment. It's not like the list of people who would like to fuck them over is exactly short

@gamingonlinux Might want to add Elder Scrolls Online. It does have anti-cheat stuff that seems to be self brewed (and does silly stuff) but it does work on Linux.

Sigh, someone spilt their runes on the floor and now I've got a thorn stuck in my foot

#dadjokes

@whitequark Pretty much the same here, although our MP is okay on other stuff. Instead we will (from the current polling predictions) remove many of his friends from the Welsh Assembly next year.

If your MP has a forum of any kind that's not a mailing list remember to check it's compliant with the regulations and if not report them to OFCOM and the parliamentary commissioner for standards (and of course ensure the opposition find out).

@bruces excellent non-investment guide

@bruces rock music.. ?

Fun interview about one of the ZX81 early hit games

#retrocomputing #z80 #zx81

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2025/aug/16/the-making-of-the-original-football-manager-kevin-toms

@cybergibbons A long time ago in student days we added the following to the .login of someone who forget to log themselves out

echo "sleep 1" >>.login

It took them about a week to notice their login was really slow.

@gamingonlinux UK politicians wouldn't pass the initial phone interview for a tech job, and many of their assistants wouldn't pass an initial phone interview for anything else. Makes it very hard to have rational debates with them.
It's a sad state of affairs but essentially if you have the skills needed to run the UK you go work for JP Morgan or similar and if you are the dumb one in the upper class family you get put into politics.
Meanwhile the house of lords is our version of Florida

@cadusilva And French of course we have https://chat-jai-pete.fr/

@jeffowski Or they should be trained for it (or have a brain).

We had an incident with a melting down child and a stupid god squadder trying to cause trouble. He called the cops who being properly trained started with "is she ok, do you need any help" and when told "she just needs to be left quiet for a bit" went away.

So it's perfectly possible for police to do the right things when trained to do so.