Notices by Hugo Mills (darkling@mstdn.social)

@mcc I quite like the term "mechanically recovered text".

In her retirement, my mum has been learning to play the cello, having played it when she was at school.

She went to the Oxfam music shop at the weekend to get a book of studies, to practice with.

She found one, opened it up, and... saw her name written inside the cover, in her own handwriting from 60-odd years ago.

#music #cello #coincidence

@vaurora I also have background (postdoc research and industrial expreience) in metadata and data management -- mostly RDF/SemWeb, but a lot of the principles apply elsewhere, too.

@vaurora I spent a lot of time helping people out on IRC and the mailing list. I wrote a reasonable chunk of documentation on the wiki. I did write the first draft of the balance filters, but that got rewritten by someone else for the accepted version.

I'm not going to be at FOSDEM this year -- haven't been to that since about 2008.

I'm also currently completely burned out, and won't be in the job market again until at least mid-June.

@vaurora Oh, and I spent a few weeks trying to work out how to do per-subvol RAID config in btrfs. I fell down on how to store the relevant config in the FS metadata -- the infrastructure wasn't really there to do it easily at the time, and I ran out of spoons.

@vaurora

Good luck!

I have to say, that job ad a month or two ago for ngnfs was really interesting (I've been knocking around the edges of btrfs for years, and find data management and distributed systems both fascinating), but I have no practical experience in FS or kernel development...

@vaurora Eight papers later: "I don't think it's possible at all."

Another 13 papers: "It might be possible, but only on these three architectures."

@GossiTheDog I'm sure it is. I've seen the egress charges.

@GossiTheDog Oops.

We had to do something similar a couple of years ago to transfer (not as much) data from someone's on-prem into Azure, and they have a service called "DataBox", where they ship some hardware with a bunch of connectivity ports on it to a location and you plug it in however you can, copy the data across, and then ship it back.

I think they can export data the same way (at a price), but I have no idea if the same service is available for O365.

@vaurora That's OK, you won't have to put up with it for long because GPS won't be working by 2032 due to Kessler syndrome.

@GossiTheDog The problem is that nobody at MS (or any other big company) will care if the comments are entirely negative. The only thing they care about is if there's enough suckers paying for it.

My company just enabled Copilot in GitHub, at the cost of $21 a seat (only slightly less than the cost of the rest of the service).

People do want it, and are paying for it, as amazing as it seems to you or I.

@cstross You can only do magic by summoning up a d[a]emon, which you can only do if you know its true name. There's a grimoire (in two volumes, called "apropos" and "man"), but they're cryptic and sometimes wrong, and if you get the incantation wrong, the daemon you summon will eat your soul^H^H^H^Hdata.

@vaurora All of the above. Apparently I need to talk to my doctor.

@cstross Does 3d6 damage every turn. Even if it's not fighting you. Just... anything nearby takes damage, merely from it existing.

@scalzi But as you eat the cheese, your weight increases...

@cstross I'm trying to learn the last one at the moment (about 40 years after first reading the book on it). I haven't had so many segfaults in about 20 years.

@stux "Any landing you can waddle away from is a good one."

@popey My experience from academic conferences was that Windows people didn't know the hot-key to switch to projector output, Linux people didn't know which driver to install to switch to projector output, and Mac people had forgotten to bring the right dongle.

@aral @tamewhale Oh, you sweet summer child...

@Oggie @cstross @genecowan @kjhealy @id1om I've tried using qgis (a open-source geospatial data tool), and (a) they have a load of toolbar buttons, all with obscure icons and no tooltips, and (b) they've moved them around and redrawn them at least once.

This means that many extant how-tos are simply wrong. "Press the pre-sliced yoghurt button". Umm... which one's that in this version?