Notices by Chris Samuel (chris_bloke@mastodon.acm.org)

@ai6yr

Here am I tapping on my tablet
High above the Earth
Now the screen is blue
And there’s nothing I can do…

Ground control to Major Tom
Your Outlook’s dead, there’s something wrong
Can you reboot it, Major Tom?
Can you reboot it, Major Tom?

#filk #parody #artemis

@Infoseepage hope you do get to make another trip! So many castles (both Welsh and Norman).

If you're into languages there's also the non-physical entity of the landsker line in that part of south-west Pembrokeshire which has predominantly English place names to the south-west and Welsh to the north-east. The result of the Norman attempt to take over Wales via the harbours along that part of the coast. For added oddity "landsker" derives from Norse instead!

@Infoseepage thank you! Went to Pembrokeshire (and Tenby) most years as part of our family holiday as a kid. Don't _think_ we went into St Mary's (but I could easily be wrong, that was a long long time ago now).

If you're ever thinking "oh my work will never come to anything" spare a thought for Robert Recorde of Tenby in Wales. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

He invented the equals sign (=) in 1557 (the year before he died) "to auoide the tediouſe repetition of theſe woordes : is equalle to" - and was promptly ignored for 61 years before being picked up again in 1618.

#mathematics #Wales #Cymru

@douglasvb @pmonks @ai6yr it'll be really interesting to see what happens when one companies proprietary code pops up in another companies.. (or worse yet, proprietary code appearing in someone's AI generated open source contribution).

@douglasvb @pmonks @ai6yr yeah.. 😞

I used to think that scenario was unlikely, but then I found that the OCaml folks had run into just this when someone submitted an AI generated PR (from someone using Claude) which had regurgitated someone else's work, copyright headers and all. 😠

https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369#issuecomment-3554579248

@douglasvb @ai6yr @Gorfram @MsMerope @steter @msbellows @cvvhrn my first trip to Australia with my late wife was December 2020 for our honeymoon, and we flew with Garuda so we could have a few days in Bali. Shortly out of (I think) LGW the no smoking light goes out and everyone around us lights up - ~17 hours of that. We had no idea it was a thing. 😬

@ai6yr @cvvhrn I've always wondered when does something transition from "rubbish dump" to "midden" in archaeology. 🙂

(seriously, middens and pits can tell us a huge amount about how people lived in the past, especially now we've got lipid analysis and other tools to tell us what was being cooked in pots we might find - intact or in pieces)

@glent @mattblaze @SteveBellovin @karlauerbach found this brief article on the history of the security of undersea cables (telegraphic onwards) interesting - more on the who and where rather than the outcomes - eg it mentions the UK cutting German telegraph cables on the outbreak of WW1 but not the Zimmerman telegram. https://www.maritimefoundation.uk/publications/maritime-2023/the-security-of-subsea-cables-an-enduring-naval-challenge/

@feditips when you say mobile app does that include Firefox? Or is this Mastodon specific mobile apps?