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

RE: https://flipboard.social/@newsguyusa/116145194552591221

US government finally acts to pop AI bubble 🤣

@bruces "I am telling you the notion they polluted their environment that fast and died out is not plausible, only the asteroid theory really explains the extinction event"

@fesshole I'd bet they've also fired all those consultants and the CEO is asking ChatGPT.

@fesshole or paint a Palestine flag on it. Will be sorted in hours

If anyone is involved in the UK #Green Party they might want to look at motion A6 for the spring conference
which includes

"The Green Party supports users’ rights to control the digital devices they own,
including the right to install, modify or replace operating systems and
software, access full file systems, and remove pre-installed applications,
particularly on computers and smartphones."

and some amendment discussions around @pluralistic proposals on killing DRM and #enshittification

@dalias @keithp

Fuzix (standard C library, 8085 CPU, not even a fancy optimizing compiler)

base text data bss size hex filename
100 10c5 5c 318 5177 1439 a.out

gcc on 6809 or HC11 is way way smaller but it turns out gcc seems to know to swap the printf call magically for something else in this case.

@fesshole I have similar urges every time some idiot blocks the pavement or parks blocking the dropped kerb. Looking forward to Wales banning pavement parking then I think I am going to go on active tours photographing and reporting them 😈

@fesshole I believe the traditional approach is to get caught fraternising with the secretary and therefore dismissed before anyone finds out the rest.

At least looking at a few other dismissals of this nature it seems like it 8)

@FlashMobOfOne what do you define as 'social media' for the purpose of a ban ?

If social media algorithms are bad and addictive then the fix isn't to stop kids accessing social media, the fix is to stop bad and addictive social media algorithms because that protects everyone.

@claralistensprechen3rd @dalias @quixoticgeek Not if they pushed an update to erase it, or if you've got bitlocker dependencies.

@quixoticgeek Theoretically yes. Although what would actually happen who knows. It's a step nobody has really tested

But in theory
- Every Android phone stops doing Google services, and any US managed one gets turned into a brick
- Every iphone is a brick
- Every windows PC ransomwares itself
- Every home appliance with a US connection is destroyed or worse
- Every US controlled home battery and solar device stops working

and so on. This is why in reverse the US is scared of China

@landley @jmorris @jti42 @kkarhan @ghul @pkal A/UX was actually a pretty good Unix platform and very well integrated with Quickdraw and the like for the desktop.

@landley @kkarhan @ghul @jti42 @pkal There was a lot more going on here and a lot of people have no idea quite how directly involved some very large banks were in the whole process. The idea that Red Hat, SuSE etc created enterprise products and the big banks jumped on it is sort of backwards. The banks needed a solution to the collapse of expensive proprietary Unix, and they knew it wasn't going to be Windows. They also wanted at least two competing suppliers.

@landley @kkarhan @ghul @jti42 @pkal Red Hat was pretty small when I joined it but Bob Young was small businessman having a success not VC. He always understood how the system worked. My job description at RH was basically 'do shit that you think needs doing and let us know what you did, unless there's a panic here in which case drop everything'. That worked for RH as they could tell customers 'yes if it goes to shit we can fix it because we have these people'.

@wonka @osma @ghul @pkal GPLv2 explicitly allows any later version, and removing that is an additional restriction so dubious. It would take a court to sort that question out however, and for Linux it's not likely to ever happen.

More importantly though was also the social contract. Linux was built and people contributed on the GPLv2 basis. Changing that would have been shutting doors on existing contributors. That point to me was the salient one Linus made when GPL3 arrived

@landley @wonka @osma @ghul @pkal That's fine 2.0.39 is still the best Linux kernel 😁

Large collection of classic computers in Germany needing new homes.

https://classiccmp.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/cctalk@classiccmp.org/thread/ZTE6X3W74BW65ICKHOKETW5TBYLAJZ5P/

#retrocomputing

1100AD people sleep in two sessions with a waking period in the middle of the night to tend fires and check on animals

2025AD some people sleep in two sessions again with a waking period in the middle of the night to tend and check on appliances during cheap electricity hours

@tess Also you can improve a system without really understanding how it works. You do it every time you read a book and learn something. Indeed Ashby's law says you can never understand yourself - yet self improvement is possible

You can design effective systems when you don't know how people will use them It's harder and requires expertise. However the statement is mostly a misunderstanding. Systems evolve and the software design, implement, deploy, run away model is what is broken