Notices by The Penguin of Evil (etchedpixels@mastodon.social), page 2

@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

"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