Notices by abadidea (0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange)

happy flat fuck friday

Amsterdam murder rate: extremely low

Amsterdam drunk man attempts to relieve himself into canal, falls in, hits his head and drowns rate: extremely high

Plan your tourism accordingly.

This is not a joke, this is literally true. Amsterdam is probably the only place that has ever built more public toilets with the specific aim of reducing deaths by drowning.

#amsterdam

Odin is such a good boy :neodog_glasses_surprised_pika: the plumber came over, so I shoved Odin in my room and closed the door. But I didn’t notice that the door didn’t actually latch properly and bounced back open. I turned around to see Odin sitting and politely looking through the half-open door without harassing the plumber

(uspol) I happened to see an American politician bragging about what a "Clausewitzian" he was. Now, it just so happens that I have a copy of my notes from the time I did, in fact, read Clausewitz cover to cover; here are some choice quotes I would recommend the American government spend more time studying:

"War is no pastime; it is no mere joy in daring and winning, no place for irresponsible enthusiasts."

"The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and means can never be considered in isolation from their purpose."

"Is there a field of human affairs where personal relations do not count, where the sparks they strike do not leap across all practical considerations? The personalities of statesmen and soldiers are such important factors that in war above all it is vital not to underrate them."

rare lore: back in 2018 I came across a 500-page technical deep dive guidebook on SimCity 2000. In a process that took several years because they had so much backlog of manuals, magazines, etc, I sent it to Gaming Alexandria and they made a proper professional scan of it and uploaded it to archive.org. You can read it right now!

When I say technical... I mean there's a section on how to hex edit your save files.

https://archive.org/details/sim-city-2000-power-politics-and-planning-revised-edition-strategy-guide/

#gaming #retrogaming #simcity

well, we had a good few weeks in the Netherlands, but summer's over and I'm bundled up in multiple sweatshirts because it's friggin' cold out

I'd like to draw attention to the fact that the excellent queer magical girls comic Sleepless Domain, which has been on extended hiatus due to the artist having too much commercial work(!), has added a few new pages and is not abandoned. https://www.sleeplessdomain.com/

#webcomic #webcomics

not to imply no-one ever spectacularly fucked up their accounting software the old-fashioned way, but Amazon suddenly billing customers over a billion dollars apiece for routine S3 usage certainly does have a certain... vibe, doesn't it?

Good morning Leiden, from a distance I was very confused.

RE: https://mastodon.nl/@at5RSSbot/116929619662872756

Today in Dutch crime: “Canadian woman caught with enormous endangered snake stuffed in her bra at Schiphol airport, claims she found it in her hotel”

I have many questions and I probably don’t actually want to be informed on any of them

@JoscelynTransient @erisceleste I played a lot of Euro Truck Simulator before moving to Europe. The game pays great attention to faithfully recreating the most mundane specifics of road signs, traffic lights etc. So yeah I got hit with the hyperreality very hard

I discovered there is a big soccer game on when I was walking Odin in the serene dusk of a silent street and suddenly, screaming erupted from open windows on every side of me.

At least, I sure hope there's a soccer game on...

Happy Birthday Rembrandt

#netherlands #leiden #rembrandt #arthistory

@mcc I truly don’t understand why rustfmt considers writing it in a way easy for a human to be confident it is correct to be bad style. Those are my emotional support redundant parentheses

one of my Chinese friends at the linguistics school did the mirror image of me knowing Classical vocabulary but not the normal everyday Mandarin word and said in English "they have such hegemony!" to mean "they're so pushy"

I just saw a Dutch-speaking user who was trying to look up more information about a photo of an archaeological dig (a black and white photo of a man and a woman) and Gemini interjected, in Dutch, that it was a photo of a previous Dutch royal couple. There is no particularly strong resemblance.

I think this is evidence that the language Gemini is told to use (from the user’s browser settings) has a massively disproportionate influence on the factual aspect of its answers, as if the fact that a Dutch user is searching for the source of a photograph implies it’s a photo of Dutch people and only Dutch personages need be considered. I’m willing to bet that the smaller the language, the more extreme this type of hallucination becomes.

One more peril to be aware of, and one more way in which non-English-speaking people are systematically neglected by technology

for filters: AI LLM

The linguistics summer school in Leiden attracts the smartest, hardest working, most sincere and driven students imaginable. Every one of them wants to learn, wants to master their field and wants to make new meaningful advancements. I’m in awe of them.

And you know what I haven’t seen once all week? Haven’t heard anyone even mention using all week, among these people who love languages the most?

Large language models.

I am here to report that news in Chinese transcribes Kanye West as “grampa who never shuts up”

Medieval cozycore IS real and it CAN heal you.

#netherlands #leiden #cozy #cozycore

Good Morning Leiden

#leiden #netherlands