Notices by dpnash (dpnash@mastodon.online)

@stokes Many, *many* years ago one of my parents (I don't even remember which one) remarked that "AUTOEXEC.BAT" gave them a mental image of a wealthy bat driving to their office in a fancy car. 30+ years later, it still works.

@SidFudd @infrequentbrilliance @pluralistic Seems like what we need to do is lock all the Big Tech spokespuddles into a Truman Show-style alternate universe where every time they do something that a reasonable person would consider "asking for something specific", they get something else.
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(enters shower)
(turns on hot water)
(cold water pours out, along with a jingle: "Have you tried Advanced Enhanced Cold Water [TM] today? Saves up to $25/month on heat and is wonderfully refreshing!")

@JessTheUnstill @BlackAzizAnansi Yeah, pretty much whenever I hear this "the two parties are the same" nonsense I think of this map, showing which states are (relatively) safe for trans people, which are unsafe, and which are so dangerous it's unwise simply to travel there, never mind live there, as a trans person: https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/june-anti-trans-legislative-risk

I mean, sure, the Dems here in the US are fucked up six ways to Sunday, but there's literal life and death differences between them and Republicans nowadays.

@cwood @scribe @Wolven What I love about this report is just how well life imitated art here.

In this case, the Marine who defeated the "AI"-robot by field-stripping a tree and walking up to it, undetected, in tree disguise.

"...until Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill shall come", indeed.

@robpike I have three telescopes, built in 1985, 2001, and 2018. All work fine, though there's a rubber bearing in the focuser of the 1985 scope that needs to be cleaned a bit. It helps that precisely shaped glass doesn't rot, crash, require updates, throw up random paywalls, or eat all your CPU cycles if you look at it funny.

(If we're talking specifically about computer/network tech, my almost 3 y.o. M1 Mac Mini pretty much just works as intended, albeit with the usual Apple quirky bits.)

@robpike The simple answer is that at room temperature, glass doesn't flow. If it did, all telescope mirrors, which need to have a surface figure accurate to about 1/10 of a wavelength of visible light (so, about +/- 50 *nanometers* across the entire surface of the glass) would be ruined within years, if not days. See, e.g. https://engineering.mit.edu/engage/ask-an-engineer/how-does-glass-change-over-time/.

@AstroKatie @hollie To be fair, the default Web interface on most mastodon servers *isn't* as nice as the default interface on twitter.com, and it wouldn't surprise me if the other twitter-ish services popping up lately also had generally nicer interfaces.

I *highly* recommend Elk (elk.zone) for Web access to mastodon - it's advertised as "alpha" but is quite stable, looks much nicer than the default server Web site interface, and so far hasn't done anything unexpected.

@azonenberg (oxygen enters the chat)

O2 molecules: all your electrons are belong to us

Chemists: And this is why we decided to use "oxidation" to mean any reaction where the "oxidizer" swipes electrons from things.

(fluorine enters the chat)

@azonenberg My original career was chemistry. I had a few unwritten rules for what I was willing to work with, one of which was “don’t work with anything that’s a strong enough oxidizer to oxidize oxygen”. It’s never pleasant to be around something that looks at materials like water (burnt hydrogen) and sand (burnt silicon) and thinks “Nice. That’s an excellent fuel.”

@thomasfuchs Given that both groups are rich in not-terribly-clueful tech bros, I honestly wonder what the exact degree of overlap is between these two groups:

"Blockchain, which is the best thing on the planet, and which you can't delete stuff from, is just like git, and everyone thinks git is fine, so stop it with the FUD"

"OMG they can see what was in the git repo, delete it! ...what do you *mean* people can still see it?"

@punkrockscience @thomasfuchs

“No! *January*! I needed that inventory in January, not Junuary!”

@downey @kitsune 1996: "You can't see this website, you don't have a kewl browser, upgrade to Netscape v1.π today"

2023: "You can't see this website, you have a stale icky browser, upgrade to advanced adware today"

@thomasfuchs Red fumes like that = nitrogen dioxide, a potent oxidizer all by itself and capable of reacting with water (including wet things, like your respiratory tract) to form nitric acid. Definitely very high on the “do not breathe” list.

@thomasfuchs I see the smol galaxy near the comet's head, but there seems to be another -- and *extra* smol -- galaxy just above its tail about 1/10 of the width of the image from the left edge.