As the xz thinkpieces start showing up about What Should Be Done, a couple of questions I'd encourage you to keep in mind while reading them: - Is this advocating security nihilism and giving up because stopping 100% of badness is impossible? - Is this pushing a random hobby horse like "sign your commits" that wouldn't have helped this incident in any way? - Is this equating employment/nationality/notoriety with trustworthiness? - Is this pushing a technical solution to a social problem?
@xssfox Big "we have two computers" energy to bring to 2024. I'm sure there are reasons, but I can't help thinking the main one is there were two computers once upon a time.
It's not clinched yet, but of the 534 members of the congress who chose to pass on a once-in-history opportunity for exploration, 24 are still alive. And the actuaries don't have _great_ news for those who remain.
Meanwhile, the Voyagers have another 1-6 years of science mission left, and could well keep returning engineering data until 2036, at which point they'll be too far away for the DSN to communicate with them.
I went down a Voyager rabbit hole again. And I came up with a factoid that entertains me.
The original Grand Tour program was canceled in late 1971, due to congressional pressure over cost. Voyager was the cheaper mission to just Jupiter and Saturn.
Voyager and its team are incredible, and they managed to pull off the entire grand tour anyway, and then 34 years and counting more science after that.
There's a good chance Voyager might outlive the entire congress that killed the grand tour.
For scale reference, the high-speed line in question (LGV Grand Est) would connect Portland, through Seattle and on to Vancouver, in about 2.5-3 hours end to end. Flights between Portland and Vancouver are about 1 hour.
Wow, TIL near where I grew up in France, high-speed rail (the TGV) caused tangible reduction in passenger air traffic. The budget airlines shut off the routes as soon as the TGV started running, unable to compete. The larger airlines kept trying for ten years, but eventually gave up as well. Turns out, 2-3 hours on a comfortable train that drops you in the middle of town is better than faffing around in airports, despite the trip time being just 1h.
I swear the primary purpose of note-taking apps is to be the top of funnel for life coaches selling $2000 unfuck-your-life online courses.
Every single conversation about them everywhere, there's always this undercurrent of "is this person I'm talking to about to pivot into selling me their patent-pending Socks And Coffee Method, or slide a referral link to The One Book That Will Change Your Life across the table."
Today's fun rabbit hole: there's a mechanical watch feature called a "hack". Why is it called that?
The hack (aka a "hacking seconds watch") is a feature where the seconds hand of the watch stops advancing when you click over to the time-setting function. IOW, as you adjust the hour/minute, the seconds hand is frozen in place until you finish the time adjustment.
Blog post I don't have the energy to write: production engineering has to be forestry management, not wildfire response. Many organizations fail to understand this, and as a result don't understand why staffing more firefighters doesn't seem to help.
Today I'm remembering one of the coolest space things ever: Voyager 2's S-band radio receiver has been broken for 44 years, and yet we can still talk to it.
Back in 1978 the primary receiver failed, and the team discovered the backup receiver had a faulty capacitor in the PLL circuit that adjusted for Doppler shift. Since then, Voyager 2's receive bandwidth has been much narrower, and the band-pass window wanders back and forth by a few hundred Hz with temp changes.
A lesser team would have declared the spacecraft lost after concluding the receivers were no longer working. But the badasses running Voyager figured out that they could make the Deep Space Network sweep the range of frequencies where V2's receiver _could_ be listening, then lock onto an adjusted frequency ground-side to compensate for the wonky receiver.
And so, for the last 44 years, every couple weeks, the DSN does a search to find where Voyager 2's receiver is hanging out today.
I'm sad that Ubiquiti seemingly continues to double down in making the product worse, and seemingly nobody else has stepped into the area of "SDN for basic IT stuff" where I can reconfigure the whole network from a pleasant admin panel, instead of having to grope around terrible SSH consoles.
Please tell me I've missed a wonderful development?
@filippo I'd be really interested in new activitypub software for this: let me self-host, but also provide credentials for other instances so that I can pull their local feeds without needing middle-people.
Software developer by day, other kinds of nerd the rest of the time. ADHD says current hobbies are 3D printers, building CNC machines, old computers in space, and general shitposting on whatever grabs my interest.Nazis, TERFs, other terrible people: please go away, there's nothing for you here.