Notices by Rob Landley (landley@mstdn.jp)

Protest works. Direct action works. Centrists attempting to muzzle their "allies" are often more damaging than the opposition.

https://fediscience.org/@michcampbell/113519875655455270

@cstross It's an anime called "Gate" from 2017. It's on hulu in the states. Quite good actually, if you don't mind the barely sublimated cultural assertions bobbing just below the surface.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4958580/

@dalias I have no idea why you're arguing that his cold feet excuses about buying the thing were right. Or that he didn't make the place significantly worse.

Researcher concludes at least 1/3 of ex-twitter's remaining traffic is bots disguised as people. (And that's just a lower bound.)

https://youtu.be/GZ5XN_mJE8Y

@dalias @tiffanycli I've watched multiple individual boomers ossify into a loon. Didn't used to be crazy, became crazy.

@dalias @tiffanycli Oh sure. Multiple causes at work here, and "became" is collective not individual.

@tiffanycli Boomers became more conservative as they aged. They also spent 50 years breathing massive quantities of tetraethyl-lead exhaust fumes.

@magnetic_tape @kkarhan @vwestlife @ActionRetro @mos_8502 @OS1337 I really enjoyed Vitaly Wool's talk at ELC 2015. https://elinux.org/images/9/90/Linux_for_Microcontrollers-_From_Marginal_to_Mainstream.pdf

It's a pity the Linux Foundation deleted all the talk videos from that year.

@ekis http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/3487.html

I've taken to answering the phone "Potato" instead of "Hello", because a human will go "what?" and a robocall will fail to determine what language it should start its script in.

This excellent writeup explains Google's explicit decision to destroy search (on February 5th, 2019) using email exhibits from the DOJ antitrust trial they lost:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

tl;dr: Late Stage Capitalism demands "growth" in metrics like "how many searches" and "how long spent on the site", so "get the right answer immediately" was intentionally replaced with "search several times" and "comb through pages of trash".

Well there's a follow-up post now:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/requiem-for-raghavan/

Meanwhile it'll happy trim the sender and subject fields to 3 chars each (BY DEFAULT).

The real problem is the list of email in this folder isn't above the email pane, it's to the side eating horizontal space. I think I want "compact view", but it's greyed out.

The first google hit for "thunderbird compact view greyed out" is https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=197434 closed TWENTY ONE YEARS AGO.

Why did the implement the ABILITY to grey it out? Why would it EVER be greyed out? What's the POINT of doing that?

People call thunderbird abandonware and I'm going "oh, if only". I WANT IT TO STOP GRATUITOUSLY CHANGING THE UI.

For example: I can't sort by "order received" unless it's visible in table view. (It's greyed out in the pulldown otherwise.) But the minimum size it lets me give the column is enough for 10 digits. I DO NOT CARE about this field, I just don't want new messages scattered back in the history (including one from today claiming to be from 2011).

Finally moved my email to my new laptop, downloaded it from dreahost's servers (yay!) and now I'm fighting with the "updated" thunderbird.

Is there any way to install the OLD thunderbird version under current devuan? Because they broke the UI on this one a dozen ways. (How incompetent IS mozilla.org? Answer: "Yes.")

This selectivity especially applies to proteins, terrestrial life's standard set of 20 lego bricks it strings together and weaves into structures and tools. Antibodies are a bit like regex searches against protein sequences.

Turns out multiple billions of years of evolution comes up with some really neat stuff, which 400 years of post-enlightenment scientific research hasn't managed to copy yet.

Antibodies not only bind to specific molecules, they DON'T bind to anything else. The lack of false positives means the immune system can use very quiet signals to target attacks.

https://mastodon.social/@Apiary/113235888071501353

If biological signaling couldn't avoid false positives latching to receptor molecules our blood would clot in our veins

@aral So copyright covers use and not just copying. Good to know.

If you load this spreadsheet into Microsoft Excel, you have placed Excel under the GPL. Good luck with that, it should totally end well for you.

@rburchell @jani I've been trying to defend the core. My multiple years removing perl dependencies from the build didn't get them out of the raid subsystem etc.

Python is in an especially terrible dependency these days because it's developed a single magic implementation policed by its userbase and forcibly expired every few months:

https://landley.net/notes-2024.html#09-04-2024

No ruby/mruby, php/ph7 gcc/llvm/tinycc allowed, only "you must upgrade to the current version of Microsoft (tm) Word to read this file".

@quinn @cstross "necessary but not sufficient" is not the same as "dumb".

Golems were pottery, then irrigation happened and now intelligence was hydraulic engineering with "humors". When we moved to clockwork it was the mechanical Turk and TikTok of Oz. Then electricity showed up and powered Frankenstein and Metropolis (1927). Then we got Colossus and the Harvard Mark 1 actually implementing a difference engine and Turing asked what a scientific approach to the age old question might look like.

@quinn @cstross Turing was breaking new ground in 1950. The first computer to use transistors started construction 5 years later, and Fortran shipped 2 years after that.

Before either of those the British government chemically castrated Alan Turing for being gay, who then committed suicide in 1954.

Nobody's blaming Turing.