Notices by Tim Panton (steely_glint@chaos.social)

"The only resistance I could put up was to make tea and drink it in front of them without offering them any.”

That is one pissed off Quaker.

https://archive.ph/2025.03.29-220332/https://www.thetimes.com/uk/society/article/met-smash-down-door-of-quaker-meeting-house-to-arrest-activists-jhhchrtlt#selection-1735.220-1735.329

tired: jailbreaking your kindle
wired: jailbreaking your F35

@GossiTheDog At a technical level I agree, it is still buffer overflows, open ports etc.

The politics is way different - people used to resign or get fired when they lost a whole customer database, now nobody even blushes.

@cstross @blackcoat
But the Visa/MC duopoly wouldn't lower the transaction cost to a point where micro payments would work, so there were all these micropayment wallets that intermediated - and no one used.

Arguably the telcos were in the best place to fix this, but they were still obsessed by billing for minutes and gouging for data.

@hrefna As a Physics undergrad I was lucky to have an absolutely brilliant tutor.

When someone asked a question in a tutorial he'd pause for a _long_ time, then offer an explanation. If that didn't click he'd offer a second way to look at the problem and so on 'till we got it.

I realised later that he'd solved the thing 4 or five ways in his head during the pause and sorted them in order of ease of 'grokking'. Lovely man who I didn't appreciate at the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Kibble

Every time I go through Liege-Guillemins station I'm delighted by how beautiful it is. - the arched roof is made of brightly coloured glass.

@welshpixie interesting idea, I haven't really played with lists yet - I'm not really a natural list maker so it is a feature I've ignored to date.

@aral @joelving @jenniferplusplus ‘he’ doesn’t even make sense on those terms, since it implies that the coder is not only male but also singular so it proclaims “no teamwork allowed here”. Sigh.

@evan oh, ho, but just you try and join that club now...

You'll need spectrum, and an operating license from a member state of the ITU - which only accepts membership from full UN members.

Good luck...

@Viss @Quinnypig The best fun is it will invalidate patents - since 3rd parties will know about your design decisions before you register.

Thanks to @saghul for the _perfect_ illustration of the problems with chatGPT:

@feld But none of them tried to blame the customer for 'using a carwash''.

Although my dad's 1964 RHD Merc 190 had a design flaw such that if you drove through a deep puddle at speed the wash doused the distributor and it would stall. Fortunately the momentum was _usually_ enough to get you through.

'The reason Tesla hasn't "worked all the bugs out yet" is that the company is run by people who hold established best practice in ideological contempt'

https://defector.com/youre-supposed-to-be-glad-your-tesla-is-a-brittle-heap-of-junk

@fu My problems with Element are partly UX (which fluffy chat may fix) and partly that my (very old) account is borked in a way which means I can't get message encryption to work.
(I foolishly acted as a guinea-pig for one of Matthew's demos at FOSDEM some years back and my matrix.org account has been out of whack ever since) - I should really wipe it and start again.

But. If I can't get it to work, then I can't advise others to.

@fu Well, true. I meant Element . Although many of my problems with Element stem from lower level engineering compromises in the protocol layer and above.

And some protocols are ugly - RTCP for example.

I watched the "Subspace Rhapsody" episode of Star Trek Strange New Worlds - It amused me for the first 5 minutes - but got very samey for the next 45 . Did anyone love it ?
#startrek #musicaltheater

@aral This is exactly the conversation I had with @Patricia a while back https://distributedfutu.re/episode68.html
If I remember correctly maintaining a subscription based fork of either is a Multi million a year commitment - but that just means you need a few million subscribers.