lolcat

https://digipres.club/@lolcat

remedial polymath
the only good god is a dead god
beware programmers who cary screwdrivers

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npub1cj3aqn35rddf58eeezw4mnp4gjg88gp9hzcj4y8c3t8ef55ccm5qsak4um

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[email protected]

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsvfg7sfc6pkk56ruuu382aes65fyrn5qjm3vf2jrug4nu562vvd6qprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0d4hhxarj9ecxjmnt2ykhgl

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relay.momostr.pink

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npub1cj3aqn35rddf58eeezw4mnp4gjg88gp9hzcj4y8c3t8ef55ccm5qsak4um

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Last Notes

2026-10-31 20:48:34 GMT

RE: https://digipres.club/@lolcat/117305166768591421
Tooted this over ages ago, but received no response.
Posting again in case anyone who missed it the first time might be able to help.
The last sentence of my toot notwithstanding, back in the mid 1980s, a US company called Ellery Systems developed vector db "AI" software. NASA used it to automatically classify images of galaxies. Marine biologists did similar with orcas.
Chinese employees literally stole the servers, smuggling them back to the PRC. There were Congressional hearings.
#note15u8…5t2x

2026-09-20 20:06:35 GMT

Does anyone here have any insight into how large the vector vocabulary databases employed by, say, OpenAI are? How much domain-specific "training" they get? Who and how many people/domain experts they employ?
For NLP, translation, semantic search, etc, a deep and broad vector vocab db feels like the hardest and most valuable part, and it has precisely nothing to do with anything anyone anywhere calls "AI".

2026-09-19 22:45:03 GMT

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Yes, Joel, Bill really does walk on two legs.
This is a photo I snapped of BG buying a big sack of burgers at Dick's Drive In a few blocks west of the UW campus in 2014.
https://digipres-club.s3.bhs.io.cloud.ovh.net/media_attachments/files/117/300/110/705/912/481/original/e6ba2d4295e32c42.jpeg

2026-09-19 22:18:21 GMT

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Thanks!!!

2026-09-19 22:13:27 GMT

Anyone else with training in the natural sciences ever encounter plots/graphs from economics for the first time, and wondering what the hell was going on?

2026-09-18 21:02:41 GMT

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From the article:
"However, none of this touches modern cryptography. Enigma is a 1930s rotor machine, and the math protecting Bitcoin wallets sits in a far harder class. The quantum threat to Bitcoin remains a live question there."
I am not a cryptographer, so someone inform me if I'm wrong, but it's not clear to me how the approach used here (a crib based on repeated text) has any relevance to cracking Bitcoin.

2026-09-04 12:35:19 GMT

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From ecology comes the difference between reliability, resilience, and robustness as strategies for surviving stress (I believe I added "reliability", but can't remember).
A reliable system breaks rarely. A resilient one can be easily degraded, but also easily bounces back. A robust one absorbs immense stress with little effect, until it doesn't.
Digital enshitification doesn't just offend one's aesthetic and moral senses, it also neglects the Three Rs.

2026-08-29 14:46:29 GMT

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Gives me Shorty's vibes (pinball bar in Seattle).

2026-08-15 22:39:37 GMT

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Full disclosure: I am not a subscriber, but believe I still see most of your writing via links you post to Mastodon.
I take digital breaks - sometimes a week or longer. I probably miss some stuff.

2026-08-15 22:33:59 GMT

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I got a LinkedIn account for the same reason I have a Facebook account and my first few Google accounts: A long time ago I figured I'd check this new thing out. I still have them because squatting seems better than dealing with impersonators (as unlikely as that is).
From what I've seen, the purpose of LI is to identify accounts that most slavishly, thoughtlessly, and enthusiastically parrot the latest fad, and to reward the account holder with prestige and $$. Not my jam.

2026-08-15 19:08:35 GMT

I have unsubscribed form LinkedIn's mailing lists at least three times.
Same for a handful of online retailers.

2025-11-23 05:38:00 GMT

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I don't know what to tell you. You are wrong. There's nothing about those green fields to worry about, at least from a water consumption POV.
Maybe check out the Wikipedia page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dryland_farming
I am muting this thread.

2025-11-23 04:16:54 GMT

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It depends.
Dryland farming can be very productive in some places. Parts of KS, NE, CO, OR, WA. Dryland, means what it sounds like - no irrigation, just rainfall.
50 years ago, before center pivot irrigation really took off, you couldn't tell from an aerial photo if farms were dryland or row irrigated. But now? Now when you see big, rectangular patches under cultivation, that usually means drylands farms.

2025-11-22 18:03:29 GMT

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There's a very good chance the squares are dry-land (non-irrigated) farms from someplace like Pratt Co. Kansas. The circles are, as you suggest in another toot, center pivot irrigated. The brown fields are likely either bare, tilled soil, or cover crops that have been killed chemically or mechanically prior to replanting.

2025-09-09 05:34:27 GMT

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A neighbor in the tiny, remote western town where I live has lost most of his eyesight and now suffers from crippling vertigo, all attributable to multiple rounds of Covid.
He is unvaccinated, and, just tonight, told me he believes "Fauci and Gates should be publicly executed for murdering all those people."
Given the $100B ICE budget, and the instincts of those controlling most US govt, my neighbor might get what he wants, and there's no vaccine for that.

2025-08-22 15:40:31 GMT

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For the last three years I've been getting by with a $100 Aldi espresso machine and mail order Illy espresso-ground beans. I replaced the pressurized basket with a normal one, but otherwise stock.
It's not great, but still better than anything I can get inside a ~150 mile radius (I'm being generous). Honestly, it's better than the espresso I get at > half the independent coffee shops in the city. Compared to even train station coffee in Italy, it's swampwater.

2025-08-22 15:12:01 GMT

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You're kill'n me, stuck out on the prairie. Man, I can almost smell it.

2025-08-10 21:36:51 GMT

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Arctic fritillary? White wingtip markings don't seem to be typical.

2025-06-24 13:54:09 GMT

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James Acaster's British Museum routine is golden:
https://youtu.be/b_Z6H4RaM00

2025-06-23 14:13:47 GMT

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archived, non-paywall article on the topic:
https://web.archive.org/web/20211130083925/https://www.uia-initiative.eu/en/news/cartujaqanat-recovering-street-life-climate-changing-world-journal-2-how-sevilla-moving-needle

2025-06-02 18:49:15 GMT

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Reminds me of George Hincapie's crash on the cobbles in the 2006 edition of Paris-Roubaix. As I recall, the team had fitted his bike with a carbon fork with an aluminum steerer tube (lifted from the Trek consumer line), and either the steerer broke, or the Al/C junction failed. Dude found himself pelting along over filling-loosening cobbles at > 30mph, in a tight bunch, with no steering at all!
https://youtu.be/UZg1vrvGbdE

2025-06-02 18:41:26 GMT

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VERY SCARY!!!

2025-05-01 19:29:05 GMT

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Among the things I say (on repeat) which I'm sure annoys some, but is nonetheless true is this:
The only real security is physical security.
Applies in all domains, digital and otherwise.

2025-05-01 13:58:50 GMT

Chatting yesterday about the prairie fire prospects this year with the carpenter neighbor who's helping me build a garage. Three minutes in, and he's telling me there's nothing anyone can do since "they" are using space lasers to start the fires.
I am surrounded by ordinary looking people doing ordinary things, but who have gone completely bat shit insane. Like, three quarters of the people occupying (sparsely) three quarters of the country are beyond recovery. Just fuck me.

2025-04-23 13:30:40 GMT

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Thanks for posting this.
For decades it's looked to me like our lives are described by Clarke's third law:
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
where pretty much everything we interact with has become "sufficiently advanced."
It bothers and disturbs me. It feels incompatible with democracy. It feels infantilizing. It feels like no one cares.

2025-04-22 16:33:26 GMT

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At the risk of stirring up trouble (not my intention), I'm curious how others processed Cadwalladr's coverage of Cambridge Analytica. From where I sit, she served as a credulous stenographer for Wylie and Kaiser - two grifting idiots. No question, CA was bad news, but it was never a "military grade" data operation (that claim was one of many meaningless assertions she made to jazz up a story with no there there).
So, what was her deal? And how have so many just given her a pass?

2025-04-19 18:53:04 GMT

Google has removed most of the bulk-delete options for personal data in YouTube. For example, to remove "likes" on other users' comments, it is now necessary to do it one-by-one. Worse, I can't find any way to remove dislikes or to even see a list of them.
Even if you do remove thousands of comments, or likes individually, it's likely the removal will have failed for some substantial fraction of them, so you'll have to check and redo some.
If I am wrong, and you know how to bulk delete, share!

2025-03-14 14:07:23 GMT

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It took a decade, but the suits ended upon getting what they wanted - control of the money, which is what this was always about - without ever making a rational case for their cause. It was bullying and lies from start to finish. Now damn near everyone is stuck paying more than they did before to maintain relationships they have no power to end because the technical staff have all been fired, and the new generation have only been trained to do AWS/Azure/Goog.
It's been a Guayana Punch process.

2025-03-14 14:01:45 GMT

Well done! In my experience, the suits used all of these (2007 - 2018). First, refuse to define "The Cloud (TC)," then:
Bully:
"Only people too stupid to understand haven't moved to TC!"
Identifies the easily cowed.
-------
Big Bully Lie:
"Everyone has already moved to TC!"
Asking for an example is met with ad hominem attacks.
------
Big Basic Lie:
"TC is always cheaper!"
Showing it's a lie, using AWS' own numbers, and you're called to the woodshed for beatings until you stop.

2025-03-11 03:25:54 GMT

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Your arctic experience sounds very interesting! @npub1t4w…75pz has hinted at doing radio work in remote arctic locations, and it's hard for me not to imagine cinematic landscapes. I can almost feel the cold air on my face.

2025-03-11 03:14:03 GMT

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I had stumbled into a role putting several academic/lab sites on the NASA Science Internet. Before getting their leased lines, I'd serve them via PPP. Also served remote researchers in the same way. In the later years, also provided ARAP to some Apple users, which could involve some really silly protocol tunneling.

2025-03-11 03:03:31 GMT

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Fond memories of running what amounted to a SLIP/PPP ISP through a terminal server and a rack of USR 56k modems in the late 80s-mid 90s. Among the lessons learned was that things don't sing without lots and lots of meticulous tuning - s-registers in this case. The experience served me well later building and running HPC systems.
Very few things deliver the advertised performance out of the box, and the documentation often lies. Even the expensive stuff.

2025-03-10 19:47:07 GMT

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Solid HW! I once used these (at least I believe it was this model) as top-of-rack switches in some pretty decent-sized HTC clusters (500 to 1,000 nodes) back in the aughts. Bomber gear.

2025-03-08 01:57:55 GMT

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It also keeps airplanes, complete with their crews and passengers, from falling out of the sky.
Without detailed weather forecasts/data, aviation becomes much, much more dangerous.

2025-02-23 02:27:09 GMT

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...Getting to the point:
In addition to his advice, Milo and his team* sent me two documents.
The first was a list of all the NSN nodes, plus contact info for each.
The second was a list of Internet resources - stuff like the IP address of a PostScript printer at (IIRC) Harvard.
I'd really like to have these documents again - especially the second one. If anyone can help me track it down, that'd be great!
*Apologies - the name of the woman who helped me navigate so much of this escapes me.

2025-02-23 02:21:07 GMT

I'm looking for an old document.
Back in late 88 (I will always remember the date because Morris Worm) I joined the Internet - Specifically, the NASA Science Internet. The engineer in charge of it all was named Milo Medin. In those days, we all spoke to each other on the phone. I remember the only advice Milo gave me was to choose a DNS server that supported "variable length subnet masks," and an SMTP server that supported MX records.
[hang with me for a few more words - I'll get to the point]

2025-02-20 00:39:15 GMT

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Being right is cold comfort when, for at least the last 18 years, you've been warning anyone who would listen that this was the endgame. No comfort at all.
https://digipres.club/system/media_attachments/files/114/033/417/980/886/751/original/69d3d3d693570baf.jpg

2025-02-14 18:31:08 GMT

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Yeah, 10Base2 networks were very fiddly. Making your own cables was much trickier than 10BaseT, and there were so many more rules about how the network could be configured. So, when something went wrong, getting to the bottom of the trouble could also be much harder. OTOH, you could network a dozen computers with a single skinny cable, so at least it was tidy...

2025-02-14 03:36:38 GMT

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The 1980s were a glorious networking and OS mess, and I loved it all. Token Ring, Arcnet, Ethernet, LocalTalk, PhoneNet, Thick, Thin, Twisted, IP, AppleTalk, Netbui, Netware - and that's before you even touch the exotic or high performance stuff.
Making it all work together was a blast (not being sarcastic).

2025-01-30 18:49:01 GMT

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Peter Norton's DOS guides were pretty great back in the day. I believe you can still pick up copies for pretty cheap.
As I recall, Norton gives a pretty good intro to the IBM PC architecture, in addition to the DOS deep dive.

2025-01-29 16:41:58 GMT

What's the best Linux distro to install and use on an old PowerBook G4?

2025-01-25 16:54:35 GMT

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I can imagine Ken Nordine doing this.

2024-12-28 05:40:32 GMT

If anyone has a good source of info on home water softening options, please pass it along. On the enshitified Internet it is no longer possible to find useful information about this or most other things unless you already know the answer.
My town's well water's hardness is literally off the charts. It clogs everything with limescale, acts as a nasty astringent on your skin, and ruins the taste of coffee, etc. I thought I'd get used to it, but I was wrong.

2024-12-24 00:56:49 GMT

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You and Walker Evans
https://digipres.club/system/media_attachments/files/113/705/075/747/460/669/original/cf015e44afe18c58.jpg

2024-12-20 15:46:38 GMT

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So much of this is so familiar to me. Also, you've written it in a way that makes me feel a bit like we're just shoot'n the shit about old times over a nice beer or two. Thanks for all of this!

2024-12-17 15:40:45 GMT

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Tooting to apologize for the tone of my earlier response. It's worded all wrong, and comes across way to agro. I was trying to make a rather banal point about popular attitudes toward containerization. It probably didn't need to be made at all, and certainly not in such a clumsy way.

2024-12-16 15:25:36 GMT

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Does your code execute across nodes? Does it access shared storage?
If so, there's an important networking component - you've just chosen to ignore it. Maybe that's OK in your case. Maybe it's not - you'd have to understand what it's doing on the network to have any idea.
Not dinging you - just pointing out that containers aren't magic.

2024-12-14 17:30:42 GMT

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Building "cloud native" is like signing an open ended apartment lease that allows your landlord to tear down the building with you still inside, while simultaneously doubling your rent twice a year.
Maybe I'm far too cynical, but, based on the last 10 years, I feel fairly confident in my assessment.
Problem is, how do you *not* do cloud native if the entire talent pool only knows that?

2024-12-14 17:11:14 GMT

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So far, it looks like the top three tips are:
Simplicity
- minimize dependencies
- appropriate frameworks
for scale, etc. (?)
- ?
Continuity
- keep the team together
- train new members before
oldsters retire
Transparency
- Document, document, document
- instrumentation?

2024-12-04 17:30:43 GMT

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FWIW, I'm not complaining - I love this sort of thing! It's much more fun to think "Who the hell is Michael Fish, and what was his moment?!" than to have it spelled out.
Tangential: Boosterism seems to be in the nature of Tech reporting. Go back 100 years, and the wonders of leaded gasoline were being praised in every paper.

2024-12-04 17:27:07 GMT

This story in today's Guardian describes (in very vague terms) a new weather forecasting software/system release from Google's gen-AI people.
The closing paragraph acknowledges a potential issue with "edge cases," and quotes a climate scientist fearing a potential "Michael Fish moment." Apparently, in the weather forecasting world, this is quite famous - but famous enough for The Guardian to assume their readers will understand the reference?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Fish

2024-11-08 19:17:14 GMT

For at least a decade, US higher ed has been all-in on outsourcing as much IT to Google and MS as possible. It's been years since the last major US university replaced internally-operated email with one of those two.
One of the few computer-related services not yet completely surrendered to "the cloud" is HPC, but that's not for lack of trying. Years of literally screaming lies into the faces of researchers and IT people has taken its toll - a generation quit/retired/laid off.

2024-11-08 00:01:01 GMT

Anyone have any updates on the state of the North Carolina quartz mines supposedly damaged in the hurricane?

2024-11-03 16:15:59 GMT

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Yeah, technical debt presents a huge challenge to moving on from MS.
Starting in ~2000, as I moved more into management and interacted more with the management class, I encountered more and more people who could ONLY deal with MS formats. They couldn't even handle plain text.

2024-11-02 17:46:16 GMT

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Related:
ALL critical infrastructure EVERYWHERE in the world is compromised. Our spooks are in their stuff. Their spooks are in our stuff.
Nation states sit on it bc when shit blows up, no one cares if the cause was a bomb or a hack. The response will be your shit being blown up too. IOW, war.
But what about non-state actors? For $100M, you can buy a lot of access. And their calculus does't necessarily align with any govts, or even make any rational sense.

2024-11-02 17:40:47 GMT

If you build a backdoor, eventually everyone's going to use it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/02/china-spying-telecom-trump-harris-fbi-cell-phone/

2024-11-02 15:54:14 GMT

[@bert_hubert](https://fosstodon.org/@bert_hubert )
Awoke this morning to a random thought:
When five of the six most valuable US companies (by market cap) go bust two to five years from now, based on their misguided gen AI investments, Europe's relatively slow uptake might not only look good, but could also position EU economies as the safest places in the world for business.
I'm still holding out for anonymous micropayments backed finance replacing surveillance capitalism.

2024-10-26 19:44:07 GMT

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I remember reading about George Bernard Shaw when I was a teen, and being surprised to learn that his Fabian Society associations made him the target of attacks from the left and right.
Now, as a geezer, I see that is usually the way.

2024-09-11 21:11:13 GMT

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Replace "computers" with pretty much any other tech (radio, cars, airplanes), and slide to the appropriate date range, and your graph remains valid.
Just as with all previous tech, and possibly even more so, computers are indistinguishable from magic for all but a few people. I believe that's a problem.

2024-08-21 16:07:53 GMT

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Haha - not "skin," but "sin."

2024-08-21 15:49:14 GMT

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Being zealously thoughtful is no skin. :-)

2024-08-19 23:45:11 GMT

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Hang in there, man. Zealots are no fun, even when they really, Really, REALLY want to do the right thing. Makes it difficult to engage with people in various scenes in which I have a passing (or more) interest.
Urban density zealots
Bicycle infrastructure zealots
Renewable energy zealots
Nuclear power zealots
Big Data zealots
Just amped up, deliberately, obstinately misinformed zealots gumming up the works everywhere.