Notices by Curtis "Ovid" Poe (he/him) (ovid@fosstodon.org)

Some ads just don't age well.

Humble Oil became Standard Oil became Exxon became ExxonMobile became monsters.

#climate #ClimateChange

Y'all ever notice how fascist fucks are constantly banging on about the rule of law ... until it applies to them?

I just realised that if the Cuban missile crisis led to world war three, that might have shut down much of climate change and ecosystem collapse. Ironically, the world might be in a better long-term place.

@cstross As an ex-COBOL programmer who was knee-deep in the Y2K mess, one of the issues is that many of those old COBOL programs were compiled, but the source code was lost.

In some cases, corporations were worried COBOL vendors would disappear, so they created incompatible, in-house COBOL compilers, making the mess even worse!

Naturally, there were no tests to verify that the software functioned correctly ...

@DanielEriksson @cstross

My favorite bit? In 2000, I was trying to fix a COBOL program which included the comment "Converted from punch cards in 1968." I was born in '67, so I'm sure it was written before I was born, yet it was mission-critical software for that company.

I was in my 30s at the time, which would have made me one of the older devs in many companies, but for COBOL I was the youngest. They were confused when I complained about the use of GOTO for all flow control ...

@patrickcmiller Now the US needs a law to have the price of food items include the full price (with tax). Here in Europe, the price I see is the price I pay.

In the US, it's a bit of a surprise when one goes to pay.

@dch On a related note: I can't tell you how many times I've typed the following:

pythong path/to/program

I have NO idea why I do that. It's not like I ever type "thong," but my fingers are hallucinating programming languages.

#Python

@VeryBadLlama

Reason number 4: I work in IT and twice a year, at multiple companies, test suites fail because of DST and the complications it introduces. It also makes it possible to have both ambiguous times and impossible times. This also causes legal issues with contractual obligations. Fun!

I absolutely need to write about #OpenAI's #Sora. It scares the hell out of people and this time it's quite rational. Sure, it will put people out of work. Technologies been doing that for as long as it's existed.

But who's going to be the first person put on trial for a crime whose main evidence is an #AI generated video of them committing a crime?

The misinformation will be staggering, from political discourse, undetectable deepfake porn vids, and more.

If you really want to be scared about #AI, it's not that it's taking away the jobs (which it is), it's that it's being heavily pushed by Accelerationists. Many of them cite Nick Land, a British philosopher who argues for eugenics, "hyper-racism," and authoritarianism.

There are also tons of accelerationist neo-Nazi groups around the world.

These groups assume everything is failing and we need to accelerate the collapse and get it over with.

And they *love* AI. Scary rabbit-hole to go down.

When I worked for the #BBC, they had too many programming languages and it made it harder for devs to switch teams.

They instituted the "Atlas" project. All front-end code in #PHP and all backend code in #Java

Devs were NOT happy. However, the BBC screwed up. Backend code required a JAR file and devs quickly realized that plenty of great languages can produce JAR files, so several teams switched to anything but Java.

I wonder if Atlas was a success.

When talking to those who are going argue in favor of the right to keep and bear arms, ask if that includes sarin or anthrax. When they say "no", point out that they've just agreed that there are limits to said right.

At that point, the debate shifts from "should we have this right?", to "how can we responsibly manage this right?"

#GunViolence

In 2006, when I last lived in the US, I had a housekeeper come to my place every Wednesday.

When I told her I was moving to the UK, she asked me if I would have to learn Russian.

This level of confusion is not common, but also not unknown for Americans.

Ever wanted to learn (or relearn) #calculus? #Math seems hard to many people, but this book might be a great introduction for you.

You can read it online for free at https://calculusmadeeasy.org/

The text from the screenshot is in chapter 1: https://calculusmadeeasy.org/1.html

Having an unavoidable mountain of college debt that you can't discharge is the 21st century version of indentured servitude.

More and more Americans are fleeing the US to escape crushing student debt:

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/26/he-moved-to-a-jungle-in-india-to-escape-his-student-debt--and-hes-not-alone-.html

(The article is over four years old, but I wonder where these people are now?)

The Moon, cosplaying as Saturn for #halloween

Source: #NASA #Astronomy Picture of the Day, 2020 March 16.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap200316.html

Did you know #Netflix started a service where they would mail you a DVD and you kept it until you were satisfied, and then mailed it back?

They're finally shutting this service down. The last customers to receive DVDS won't have to return them.

I've a moderate amount of experience writing software for media rights models (for the BBC). This will violate some of those rights. Be interesting to see if anything comes of that.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/sep/29/netflix-dvds-final-sent-by-mail

If you've never read the books or watched the series, but you love sci-fi, you *must* check out The Expanse. Both the story and the science are amazing.

There's a scene where one of the main characters, Naomi Nagata, jumps out an airlock, without a space suit, and floats to another ship.

My daughter is 12-years-old and I read her to sleep at night. We're currently on book 5 of The Expanse.

#space #ScienceFiction #Science

Another interesting #perl module by @leont : https://metacpan.org/pod/Magic::Check. You can do this:

use Magic::Check;
use Types::Standard 'Int';

check_variable(my $var = 1, Int);
$var = "abc"; # this will throw

We're getting great momentum for having data checks in the perl core. @leonerd even threatened to just go ahead and implement something.

I'm really looking forward to this!

@silverwizard @deafferret

Also, for a more realistic view of what can be done now, check out @perigrin 's Roguelike Game Tutorial using the new syntax. He's up to part 6 now.

https://chris.prather.org/perl-roguelike-part-0.html