Engineer (nuclear, safety analysis), scientific software developer, rehabilitator of unloved FORTRAN, recovering sysadmin, marginally competent solderator. Occasional Bond Villain (Card Overpunch). Nuclear Scoundrel™ My internet claim to fame was livetweeting the Fukushima reactor failures on the Birdsite. I'm pretty chipper for one spending so much time looking at sad melty reactors and sad creaky software.
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npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h Profile Code
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2026-09-16T05:54:47Z Event JSON
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Last Notes npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight @nprofile…l2f6 How does that happen? npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight @nprofile…mv7s @nprofile…vnlz You should never be allowed near a nuclear plant. :) Aside: I've seen the results of arcing within the potting compound of a cable penetration from a power plant. Safety analysis is weird. npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight @nprofile…9pad I start by drawing a butt on the first page with the word BUTTS right below it. Thus christened, each new notebook or sketchpad begins its life as a valued companion. npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight Crisis Engineering arrived earlier this week and I have been enjoying it. I'll have to cross-check some of The TMI-2 details, not in some pedantic error hunt, but to ensure I actually know the accident progression. Three Mile Islsnd is one of two case studies in the book and IMO a great (very illustrative) example of decisionmaking with limited information and a drastically altered work and information environment. After my experiences at work this week, I may have to use this as guidance until this project succeeds or they fire me. Still very angry. https://assets.oldbytes.space/assets.oldbytes.space/media_attachments/files/116/380/335/632/778/562/original/59492bd721750c63.jpg npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight Someone aimed Claude at the input files of a severe reactor accident code. Not at the code itself but at the models of facilities under analysis. Apparently it's reasonably quick and not completely awful. Anyone who thinks they're not coming for you and your livelihood has a rude shock coming. I was polite and professional and asked if they had compared the models generated by different bots just to see if this was in any way repeatable. They said they hadn't. Since they're paying for tokens out of their own pocket, I told them to save their money. 1/2 npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight Have US airports always been a concentrated dose of American dystopia or has it just been O'Hare and everything post-9/11? Somehow Security was not the most disturbing source of decay and horror. Or maybe it was and I'm just numb to it. https://assets.oldbytes.space/assets.oldbytes.space/media_attachments/files/116/280/861/332/381/157/original/15e24d76a8a1ddab.jpg npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight @nprofile…hm63 @nprofile…40t9 Companies would be tight-lipped about what makes them so profitable and productive if these grand claims were true. Why help your competitors replicate your success? npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight I hit up Half-Price Books today; I think @nprofile…drt7 is rubbing off on me :) https://assets.oldbytes.space/assets.oldbytes.space/media_attachments/files/115/991/666/947/375/916/original/575795aed5158b39.jpg npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight Dissolve DHS - all of it. Rebuild the necessary 10% from scratch with none of the original participants. Absolutely demolish any institutional memory or history. Then move on to the police. Burn away the Slave Patrol DNA. #nevent1q…ndvm npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight Donut has it all figured out. #CatsOfMastodon https://assets.oldbytes.space/assets.oldbytes.space/media_attachments/files/115/956/521/311/054/712/original/d8090c80500834bc.jpg npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight It's hard waking up in 1933 every morning. I'm not dead yet and there are more of us than there are of them. npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight The world's 3rd most beautiful cat on the world's 2nd ugliest furniture #CatsOfMastodon https://assets.oldbytes.space/assets.oldbytes.space/media_attachments/files/115/906/528/941/790/140/original/cde32c21b1c9f4cd.jpg npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight @nprofile…gv2x Yeah and some of the fights within the family are legendary "He is said to have had a bad relationship with his father. Both of them entered and tied for first place in a scientific contest at the University of Paris. Johann banned Daniel from his house, allegedly being unable to bear the "shame" of Daniel being considered his equal. Johann allegedly plagiarized key ideas from Daniel's book Hydrodynamica in his book Hydraulica and backdated them to before Hydrodynamica. Daniel's attempts at reconciliation with his father were unsuccessful." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Bernoulli npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight Ernst Röhm <‐> Kristi Noem Apparently history _does_ rhyme... npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight Goofy baby alert! #CatsOfMastodon https://assets.oldbytes.space/assets.oldbytes.space/media_attachments/files/115/872/326/472/971/646/original/a2fda28ec1e5267e.jpg npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight TIL about the Poseidon Nozzle, a firefighting device designed specifically for extinguishing burning Teslas https://trinityfireproducts.com/poseidon-nozzle/ npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight Every day I hope and pray that cut-rate Reinhard Heydrich in the White House chokes on his rat at feeding time. And every day the global feeder rat population decreases by one. Still, I hold out hope for a more just tomorrow. npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight Gracie decided to pose before going back to being an upside-down goofy baby on top of the bookcase. #CatsOfMastodon https://assets.oldbytes.space/assets.oldbytes.space/media_attachments/files/115/793/080/850/834/153/original/0a4bc0c2640c4712.jpg npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight Stupidity burning brighter than a thousand suns: https://mastodon.cloud/@slashdot/115778120743705751 Shippingport was the first and last naval reactor used for civilian power. Military propulsion reactors are a bad choice for civil electricity production for so many reasons for about the same reason that civil electricity production reactors are a bad choice for propelling warships. But expecting an AI/finance bro to believe in a reality beyond his own fart-huffing is an unreasonable expectation. npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight @nprofile…xdym Translation: We need a disposable senior dev to take the fall when this jugheaded idea craters in six months, leaving the manager in charge uncathed to pivot to a new jughead strategy. Stay tuned for a senior dev opening in six months... npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight @nprofile…6r70 @nprofile…3lge @nprofile…wjfp It's similar to a flood where who knows what lifts out of underground tanks, etc. and is distributed around the countryside except you don't need to be near the flood to be affected. Once it's in the air you're at the mercy of atmospheric diffusion, weather, and whatever other mechanisms decompose the material. Then there's resuspension... npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight @nprofile…6r70 Hexavalent chromium is no fun. npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight Gracie would wish you a good week if she was anywhere near awake #CatsOfMastodon https://assets.oldbytes.space/assets.oldbytes.space/media_attachments/files/115/724/096/166/863/376/original/088f8d9760f8d002.jpg npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight @nprofile…e4ry @nprofile…e4sq I used to hang out on the Fortran section of SO to specifically help people new to the language. There are a lot of early career engineers who get legacy code dropped in their lap and I saw it as a mission in life to help them along (I even tried writing a book on it). So many questions were batted away with "post a Minimum Working Example" or similar "you didn't ask using the right words" responses. I made it a specific point to positively address those elementary questions and possibly shame some of the regulars into being a little more compassionate (this was never going to work but I had to try it just to see). After a while I just stopped; I couldn't justify providing free content to a commercial entity that treated their mods so poorly and were fine with having such a hostile comment section. I tried fighting against the prevailing SO culture by example, got tired of it and left. npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight @nprofile…e4ry @nprofile…e4sq I deleted my highest ranked post ("Is there a Windows PowerShell language reference manual?") because users kept editing my question and changing the meaning because they got points for doing so. I got tired of reverting edits to my question and figured that since the post was like 6 years old it wasn't really relevant - at the time I asked it there was very little documentation on PowerShell, online or otherwise. 6 years later there was plenty of basic info on the language. I felt a little bad because the comments were full of useful pointers to PowerShell resources; I just had no patience for people who materially changed the meaning of the question while "clarifying" it. The ongoing unpaid maintenance burden for a commercial firm helped tip the scales too. One thing about SO, when someone sees a question asked the "wrong" way or is very basic, what's the motivation to chastise the OP instead of just ignoring it and moving on? For a site that prides itself on being a useful resource, there's a staggering amount of unhelpful dross in the comments. The gamification really honed the awfulness of professional computer touchers who were already a pretty awful community to start with. npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_George_Stokes%2C_1st_Baronet George Stokes is someone you should know about, one of those incredible 19th century scientists that seemingly did everything but nobody remembers his first name. npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight Poofy lass is poofy. #CatsOfMastodon https://assets.oldbytes.space/assets.oldbytes.space/media_attachments/files/115/555/224/983/538/278/original/9196a44306d5332f.jpg npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight I am deeply envious of Donut today. He knows not of git or the LaTeX listings package and the horror of source code suddenly typeset in a proportional typeface (people who do that need therapy or a prison beating; doubly so if they write systems that do so by default. Monsters; pure evil.) #CatsOfMastodon #WeNeedOneTenThousandthOfTheSoftwareDevelopersWeAreCurrentlyPlaguedWith https://assets.oldbytes.space/assets.oldbytes.space/media_attachments/files/115/549/438/335/210/517/original/9bd1ed2bc827865f.jpg npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight I found possibly the darkest humor ever in a physics text. The first chapter of "States of Matter" by David Goldstein begins: "Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics." npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight @nprofile…y70r I KIND OF BELIEVE npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight Cats are nature's antidepressants. npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight @nprofile…duyn Contact the editor and ask if the reviewer actually read the paper before rejecting it? Or are the editors all bots now? npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight @nprofile…l25h @nprofile…ndnq The text-extruding racist linear algebra heat engine is not a protected class. npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight Today's weird Excel trivia was learning that ' ' space) is a range operator, comma is union, and colon is range. Operator precedence is colon, space, comma. SUM((A1:F1,A4:F4) D1:D6) sums the elements D1 and D4. SUM(A1:F1,A4:F4 D1:D6) sums the elements A1:F1 and D4 (the intersection of A4:F4 and D1:D6). The space operator seems to be a very subtle failure mode. npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight @nprofile…zsa8 As a nuclear engineer, I have never been asked to show my portfolio of reactor designs I maintain in my free time, I have never been asked to derive the six-factor formula, the quantization of angular momentum, Brehmsstrahlung, or to whiteboard gas centrifuge isotopic separation, water hammer, hydrogen detonation, or cross-section resonance integrals. There's something deeply wrong with an industry that presumes you're a fraud unless repeatedly and performatively demonstrated otherwise and treats the hiring process as a demented form of 80s-era fraternity hazing. npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight When was the last time a piece of software or technology made you go "w00t!"? Oh, and what was it (if ever)? npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight OMFG, I own a piece of history. https://assets.oldbytes.space/assets.oldbytes.space/media_attachments/files/115/062/709/875/661/934/original/d07033a38f1bb33a.jpg https://assets.oldbytes.space/assets.oldbytes.space/media_attachments/files/115/062/723/745/740/732/original/ed339b2612b91811.jpg npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight @nprofile…m680 I want to thank you for giving me the insight and motivation to read US history a little deeper. It's only Wikipedia but still the information seems to be valid and it's right there to be read. I was reading up on the Boston Massacre of 1770 in which cops escalated a verbal altercation to violence culminating in the cops shooting and killing three citizens. I won't go through the whole story, but I wanted to share a couple interesting details. Possibly the name most associated with the Boston Massacre is Crispus Attucks, a black man of mixed African and Indigenous descent. He's arguably the first man killed in the US Revolutionary War. I knew his name and significance from childhood but I always found it interesting he was named so formally. His sister called him "Cris" which seems more humanizing (I think her quote was that if they hadn't killed Cris, he would've killed them). He's been described as a sailor, whaler, or stevedore - basically, a buff and burly black man of the docks - so probably a serious match for British troops harassing the locals. Cris didn't pick this fight. Some young apprentice yelled at the group of soldiers telling their officer to pay what he owed to the lad's master. So everything started out with "mouthy teen yells at cops". Cris arrived later after one of the soldiers hit the mouthy teen with his musket, attracting a crowd of angry locals. So gunfire, dead locals, and a huge political situation nobody wants. To diffuse the situation, the cops need to be put on trial and it has to be a fair one. Gunning down locals without cause is a hanging offense. Enter John Adams, known mainly as second president of the soon-to-be United States but at this point, a prominent Boston attorney. Adams will act as the defense attorney for the cops. Guess what Adams' defense strategy is? You likely already know the answer. I didn't but it's predictable to anyone paying attention since *waves arms* I DON'T KNOW - FOREVER? Yes, it's the timeless "OMG I WAS SCARED SHITLESS BY A SCARY BLACK MAN!!1!" defense. Older than America itself. Charges were limited to 3 enlisted soldiers, murder charges were reduced to manslaughter, and they were convicted. Mercy was called for as the cops were all first offenders, so the punishment was reduced to branding on the thumb and being shipped back to England vs being hanged by the neck until dead. Charges were filed against members of the crowd but were dropped due to perjury by the alleged eyewitness. So that's your American history in a nutshell. Mouthy teens, unhinged violent cops murdering black men, the OMG SCARY BLACK MAN defense, lying in court, cops walking on murder charges or getting a slap on the wrist, and lionizing their enablers by electing them to high office. Dyed into the fabric of the nation, older than America itself. Anyway, thanks for explaining what a shitheel Francis Scott Key was. npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight I've had entirely too much nostalgia for a less stupid timeline this week. npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight Aside: I once considered forming an ops consulting service called "Age Against The Machine". I kind of regret not doing that. npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight And it really shouldn't be Us vs Them regarding IT. None of us want to cause a security incident, none of us want to make more work for IT, we all take security seriously, and theoretically we're all on the same page. Except the authoritarian small-dick IT Guy attitude is what IT leads with. No conversation, no discussion, no understanding, no listening - always a command and a threat. Mall Cop training 101: Establish Control of The Situation By Acting Like A Big Dog. Way to establish an atmosphere of trust and build effective security throughout the organization there Chief. "Play stupid games, win stupid prizes" works both ways but hey, you're the one who decided to communicate primarily through pendulous scrotum waving. Not much I can work with there. I worked Ops for 13 years and dealt with my share of security incidents. I learned incident response, chain-of-custody, what you can and can't tell from logs decades ago at the LISA conference from People Who Had Seen Some Shit. People who traced intruders back through the modem pool only to lose them in archaic (analog?) switches that hadn't yet been upgraded. I was responsible for locking down and monitoring my systems. The fundamentals haven't changed and one of those fundamentals is to not be a dick to the people you're trying to protect. If you treat them like the enemy, they'll act like the enemy, and it will be your fault for making it that way. But that requires some amount of social ability and willingness to use it. Much easier to go all Cartman with RESPECT MY AUTHORITAAAAY! npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight I'm ruminating on spending the effort to write this up from a nuclear engineering perspective and posting it to LinkedIn, just for the grins. I know, posting anything to LinkedIn is about as advisable as repeatedly striking oneself in the forehead with the pointy end of a geologist's rock pick. Completely inadvisable. Our internal developer discussion today centered on discussing these issues, basically treating generative AI as a grievous security risk that nobody in our industry is prepared to handle. You thought Stuxnet and SCADA attacks were a major worry - bah! Those sorts of attacks are nation-state movie plot risks by comparison. Yes, they are real - follow @nprofile…kcun for some appalling fun - but they are rare, especially in nuclear. At least rare compared to the number of engineers whose managed work machines have Microsoft Office, Acrobat Reader, and similar AI-tainted tools installed by their authoritarian betters in corporate IT. Basically our internal engineering and developer communities are working to raise awareness of the security risk of AI, how AI systems operate, the details of the vulnerabilities, the consequences, and what little defenses we have beyond personal awareness. With IT often locking things down to the point that we cannot protect ourselves or worse, actively enabling and propagating risk, we need to support each other in defending against AI. I'm not sure that feeding content into LinkedIn could do anything positive but there may be a few engineers out there who still take their security responsibilities under 10CFR seriously. Then again, the rule of law is dead in the US and trying to prop up its rotting corpse will just get me pegged (further) as an enemy of the state. No matter what I do, I'm going to end up in a camp, probably sooner than later. npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight Our IT department has been happily rolling out AI-enabled internal tools that nobody* asked for while simultaneously warning** us about our internal policy against external LLM and generative AI use and (also simultaneously) not being able to firewall off or block traffic to Adobe or Microsoft's AI farms because they have a constantly morphing pool of AI servers to make them effectively unblockable. Just like botnet operators. Oh right. IT pays Adobe a license fee so Adobe can harvest my work and put me at risk of federal jail time. They also pay Microsoft a license fee to do the same. This is the same IT department that does its best to lock down my workstation to prevent me from using unauthorized unsafe free applications instead of the authorized unsafe applications they paid money for. I don't for a second feel our IT department is especially incompetent or evil in this regard. They don't seem too different from every other corporate IT department I've dealt with in the past 20 years or so. Clearly if I suggest that corporate IT is the main problem, I'm the one with the attitude problem, I'm the security risk. * i.e. our investors ** Often with tone of "we'll fire and prosecute you to the fullest intent of the law" because since all the malls started closing, all the mall cops moved into IT. That's my theory anyway. npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight In either case, I'm still on the wrong side of the law. Back then, my pimply ass was taking the bread out of game developers' mouths. Now Acrobat, Copilot, etc. are silently exfiltrating my employer's Export Controlled Information to unauthorized third parties when I use employer-supplied tools putting me in violation of export control laws and exposing me to federal jail time. Intent doesn't matter, knowledge doesn't matter. If ECI I'm handling gets out, it's my ass in the fire. npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight Remember when the common wisdom was to not pirate commercial software because downloading random executables was likely to infect you with malware that would steal your data or worse? Now we pay for legitimate, signed copies of software from vendors who load their applications with AI "features" that exfiltrate your data to remote servers and no way to disable that. I feel old. When I started out, we got our malware for free and were doing something wrong when we did. Maybe this is payback for all those C64 games I pirated when I was 16. npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight Little Man is not impressed by your bullshit. #CatsOfMastodon https://assets.oldbytes.space/assets.oldbytes.space/media_attachments/files/115/011/446/455/484/932/original/dc8336103aea19b3.jpg npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight This is Donut's chair now. #FelineFriday #CatsOfMastodon https://assets.oldbytes.space/assets.oldbytes.space/media_attachments/files/114/994/602/739/187/571/original/f6ef2f8aabee0397.jpg npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight @nprofile…8x2j What's that from? npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight Today I learned about HAL/S, the language used on the Space Shuttle computers. It's apparently a PL/I variant that supports 3-line statements. The first line contains exponents, the second the body of the expression, and the third holding subscripts. ~~~ X = A ** 2 + B$(I) ** 2 ~~~ can be expressed as ~~~ E 2 2 M X = A + B S. I ~~~ It reminds me of Konrad Zuse's *Plankalkül*, which is more than a little messed up. npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight Somebody is a very snoozy baby. #CatsOfMastodon #FridayFloof https://assets.oldbytes.space/assets.oldbytes.space/media_attachments/files/114/916/033/208/329/835/original/847135bcfd6a3dff.jpg npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight @nprofile…args Just call the Republican project "ethnic cleansing". That's what it is, what it's intended to be. npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight The power lines in Serial Experiments Lain should have won a Best Supporting Actor award https://cyber.ms/@lain/114872471364935349 npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight uwu https://assets.oldbytes.space/assets.oldbytes.space/media_attachments/files/114/865/267/509/217/795/original/5b1c8bd60e5be220.jpg npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight In Hutto for lunch with friends at the Texan Cafe and Pie Shop. Hutto is really selling itself to me today. It's a bright sunny day, hot but not unbearably so (actually a little cool for July). Lunch: https://assets.oldbytes.space/assets.oldbytes.space/media_attachments/files/114/841/716/405/698/431/original/0650831d153eba21.jpg npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight @nprofile…sw23 @nprofile…uk22 In neither classical or statistical thermodynamics does heat or work delight in cruelty and destruction. npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight @nprofile…hujc There was so much I couldnt fix there. I spent almost ten years trying to get them to use a modern version control system - anything but VMS text libraries. I kept all my code in Mercurial, and tried getting anyone interested in SVN, Mercurial, git. I tried everything aside from trickery, bribery, and violence to make headway. After a disastrous release, the code's owner (not us, we developed the code under contract for over 30 years at that point) gave them the ultimatum to use modern version control. I was in the process of designing training on git when I was laid off (long dumb story about possibly criminal levels of mismangement at the parent company - shifty bookkeeping everywhere). They lost the contract a year or two later (not completely their fault but a lot was) and the code owner apparently had the code automatically translated to C++ (40 years of code pedigree just _gone_). My current situation is completely different. The same sorts of codes, the same industry and niche, but a great culture top to bottom. A lot of the process is still evolving but people here recognize the problems and work to solve them. :) npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight @nprofile…hujc Aside: my first professional programming job was as a summer intern n 1990 writing mass and energy balance routines on a reactor accident analysis code, basically to assure the model wasn't inexplicably gaining or losing mass or energy. Basically accounting. It was a large mature code base written in F77. I came back to the code sometime after 2008, about 20 years later. Dev practices at the firm had changed frightening little in that time - modal routines over 100 _pages_ in length. I had to add some code to the project - prototyped in Python and recoded in modern Fortran (minimal F90 compatible with the production compiler on OpenVMS) with unit tests, decomposition into manageable subfunctions, etc - basic modern (post-2000) dev practices. The amount of grief I got for decomposing functions into coherent straightforward testable units was just depressing. Once, the manager in charge asked what language I was writing while coding up the initial production draft. I told him it was Fortran. I don't think he believed me. You can't go back home. Faced with a deeply and aggressively incurious and insular environment, often your best course of action is to get out before it all burns down around you. Thing is, the last time I had used Fortran was in 1995 or so. I spent 3 years in web programming and a decade in system administration before going back to safety analysis. I took it upon myself to review how Fortran had changed from F77 to F2008, and adapted the dev practices that I had been developing over 15 years. It was amazing and fairly well appalling how two people can use the same language and yet deliver such wildly different quality. Ultimately you have to balance adherence to team preference with acceptable professional practice. In this case I wrote code that met the functional requirements and was as close to the accepted style without delivering unmaintainable unreviewable and unprofessional code. My job didn't extend to integration so I left that to someone willing to take the professional responsiblity for it. I wouldn't put my signature on substandard work; that's my privilege and duty as an engineer. Always keep learning, pay attention to what's going on around you (professionally, technically), adapt, and be clear about what ethical or professional lines you won't cross. npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight @nprofile…h4s9 Such a regal form! I tried so hard to find a way to name our tiger-striped tabby Tora but it just didn't stick. My wife named him Donut and it is the perfect name for him. #CatsOfMastodon https://assets.oldbytes.space/assets.oldbytes.space/media_attachments/files/114/805/498/916/326/084/original/77a01e4a264cf38e.jpg npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight Juxtaposition https://assets.oldbytes.space/assets.oldbytes.space/media_attachments/files/114/781/925/705/002/193/original/48ba2a4560b83cb8.jpg npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight Why do I keep expecting things to work? npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight Two new rules: 1) Nobody should have more meetings in one day than they have limbs. 2) You are not allowed to remove limbs* in order to get out of a meeting. * Yours or anyone else's.** ** It saddens me that we have to explicitly state this. npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight Gracie is a Chaos Goblin #CatsOfMastodon https://assets.oldbytes.space/assets.oldbytes.space/media_attachments/files/114/745/187/230/588/234/original/e777a5af4cb8d775.jpg npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight I sympathize with the no-exoectation-of-free-labor aspect of this commentary but I lose a huge amount of sympathy when I hit the I-don't-do-Windows attitude. (subtooting https://social.treehouse.systems/@ariadne/114714349666402914 because I'm not looking to argue with the OP nor do I want to hijack the discussion) My goal in writing software is to meet users where they are within the limits of my budget, ability, and time. I prefer unix-y systems but the reality is we have always worked in a heterogeneous environment. If I want my code to help the most people and to have the greatest utility and longevity, I write platform-independent code to the greatest extent possible. I put a very high value on platform independence. This comes with the cost of having to work around platform deficiencies and peculiarities and having to source hardware that I otherwise have no use for (e.g. scavenged Apple gear). It's not a complaint; it's just an expected cost of supporting the most common user environments. I understand not wanting to work on unfamiliar, unnecessarily complex, proprietary systems. I have no great love of Windows development and the platform's utter lack of fundamental tooling (e.g. sh, find, sed, grep or equivalents). Given the choice of learning CMake or autoconf/autotools, there was no question - autocorrect was a platform-specific dead end. If I was going to spend the time and effort to learn a build system, it had to support all the platforms I was likely to support - Linux, Windows, and MacOS. We each choose our values and live with the consequences. There's just something about deciding to not support Windows then being upset that someone else does when you won't and being even more upset they don't adhere to your project's goals. You can't marginalize yourself and then complain that you're ignored. There's a tragicomical level of hubris and surprise going on here - what precisely did you expect would happen? I work mostly on work or personal projects of a very niche nature (legacy scientific code) not on high-visibility FOSS code. I don't deal with external support requests by choice and mainly due to obscurity - I'll defer to those whose projects are popular enough to get large numbers of feature requests and bug reports. They know better than me what they can and can't support, and where the line is on free labor and corporate vs maintainer agenda. But making the concious decision to bury one's head in the sand and then complain about being ignored? Sorry, zero sympathy, none whatever. I don't have it in me to be that parochial and entitled. Again, I chose a different path, I have a different set of values, and I try to uphold them without too much complaint. I just dont see the point in complaining when you get what you ask for and it's not everything you wanted. :/ npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight I've been pretty good this year, not adopting too many stray books. At least until this week. First up is a $10 special from our local Half-Price Books: "Petri Net Theory and the Modeling of Systems" from 1981. Petri nets are like a complex form of state machine that deals with concurrency, technically described as a bipartite directed multigraph. It's like a guillotine - you put a billionaire in, a head falls in a basket, a body gets tossed in a cart. The basket only holds 5 heads, and the cart can only hold 2000 ponds. If either of those fill up, the guillotine service representative temporarily halts the flow of billionaires through the guillotine until an empty basket or cart arrives. Anyway, Petri nets can model the concurrent addition of heads and bodies to baskets and carts. They're useful for analyzing or modeling systems that are too complex to be modeled by a simple state machine. https://assets.oldbytes.space/assets.oldbytes.space/media_attachments/files/114/685/316/782/555/378/original/5ee9a855ffcdbfe3.jpg npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight @nprofile…k246 We've had experience mixing radioactives and high explosives for almost exactly 80 years now and in all that time we have not solved the problems of atmospheric dispersion, aerosol transport, inhalation and submersion dose. We quibble over details but the fundamentals remain - if you do not want radioactive material all over, you should not blow it up. I've been working on this problem professionally on and off for 30 years on the civil nuclear side; power plants, legacy defense waste. Your assessment is spot on - bombing nuclear facilities is reckless, dangerous, and egregiously irresponsible. There's no other way to spin it. (diagram from https://www.osti.gov/biblio/4743102) https://assets.oldbytes.space/assets.oldbytes.space/media_attachments/files/114/676/091/343/654/438/original/bdefb4b49c04b812.jpg npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight @nprofile…59dk @nprofile…f9l8 It wasn't until recently that I understood what a luxury books are. I work remotely for a firm that bought into hot-desking and I don't understand how anyone functions in that environment. I have two bookcases filled and double-stacked with books on software development and hard engineering - thermo, heat transfer, fluid mechanics, aerosols, chemistry, fire science, manufacturing, nuclear engineering, aerospace. Just give me a book and some scratch paper and I'm fine - a warehouse of distant coworkers isn't terribly useful though they're infinitely more trustworthy than an LLM. npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight From @nprofile…l9w6 comes a playthrough of the VIC-20 game "Nosferatu" https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@jdyer/114577769075688136 8k. The game fit in 8k. I remember fitting my derpy BASIC clones of games like Dig-Dug into 4k (or maybe 16k; can't remember if I had the 16kb expansion by then). I don't think my CMake build files fit in 8k, even with comments and whitespace stripped. I can't remember the last time I wrote anything complex and useful that fit into 8k. But it can be done. Nostalgia is a drug I'd like to avoid. The VIC-20 was not great but it was tractable. There's something about working with a hard and small limit on memory - it's challenging in good and bad ways. Limiting your scope, deciding what to cut, where and how to optimize. I don't want to glorify the hack but to put it in perspective. You did what you had to do within the limits of your ability and your hardware. Bloat had a serious cost but so did structure and documentation. I like to think I've retained some of the frugality of thar era but I don't miss unreadable lines of compacted code, everything crammed together like carry-on luggage. What can you do with 8k? Try it and see. Cc @nprofile…hujc npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight Costa Mesa hates me... npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight Start your day with some happy news: "SilverStone is back with a beige PC case that looks just like your crappy old 486" https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/05/return-of-the-turbo-button-silverstone-is-making-another-80s-style-beige-pc-case/ npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight One person's bug is another person's feature https://infosec.exchange/@PTP/114466145167355529 npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight @nprofile…vdjy I suspect the gatekeeper is not an actual engineer but merely a glorified computer-toucher, a human husk drained of empathy, personality, and humor. Basically the HackerNews demographic. npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight @nprofile…93zc Big Gail Simone energy here. npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight @nprofile…gllm Never forget that Fred Hampton was assassinated by the FBI and Chicago police. His death indirectly led to the break-in at an FBI field office which divulged the existence of COINTELPRO https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens%27_Commission_to_Investigate_the_FBI npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight @nprofile…2suv @nprofile…esvc I sidestep a lot of that misery by staying a "subject matter expert who writes code" instead of identifying as a software developer. Had a single interview for a "scientific" software development position - never again. I don't know what I'd recommend for people who like writing code and learning to make systems better. Writing web-facing systems seems like a soul-killing dead end. Constant churn to ship worse and worse systems faster and faster on technologies obsolete before they reach v1.0, catering to the whims of careerists, oligarchs, and sociopaths. No thanks. I'll stick to modeling sodium fires and aerosol transport of radioactives. No AI, no web, no networking, no stack, no Kubernetes, no Agile, just writing (and testing and documenting and packaging) code to solve niche technical safety problems and help engineers do engineering. Nice work if you can get it; most of the time you can't :/ npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight @nprofile…fynq Have you seen the SCTV episode when the janitors go on strike and they broadcast the CBC feed? John Candy does a pitch-perfect parody(?) of Hinterlands Who's Who on the woodchuck that's basically indistinguishable from an actual HWW piece. I was a rabid fan of SCTV as a teenager and it cemented my love of Canadiana. npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight Thanks to @nprofile…xrxy and his loyal followers, I'm about halfway through "Project Orion" by George Dyson. It reminds me of trying to learn APL: there's a torrent of ideas that alternate between genius and insanity with an extremely high frequency. Amazing application of bomb technology and fundamental radiation physics crossed with absolutely bizarre engineering fueled by a Spaceman Spiff level of enthusiasm. There's something incredibly Calvin about the entire project. "We need a 1000 meter diameter pusher plate to bounce nuclear-bomb-generated plasma off. The plasma material is urea - basically ionized pee. We set off one nuclear pee bomb every 30 seconds and we squirt grease onto the pusher plate between shots to keep the plasma from ablating the surface too badly. Oh, yeah - we also made the pusher plate out of depleted uranium so that in the time it would take to get to Alpha Centauri, enough plutonium would've been generated in the pusher plate that you could carve chunks off to use as fission reactors for the colonists. What? No, I'm not high - we could really do this!" "Project Orion" has the same batshit scientific theme as "Ignition!" but with more complex physics and less uncertainty and volatility of chemical propellant research (don't expect thd same prose - the book doesnt read like "Ignition!" at all). It's absolutely nuts but the nuclear engineering and radiation physics all work out. The materials engineering and fabrication are iffy but seem solvable with enough effort. If you wanted to do this badly enough you probably could. Just ignore everyone outside the asylum and focus on the problem. Thanks to those nice people who pointed me towards this book. It's filled in some major gaps in my understanding of US nuclear history, primarily in the origin and purpose of General Atomic, developers of the TRIGA research reactor and MHTGR design and more recently (via a subsidiary) combat drones https://www.ga-asi.com/remotely-piloted-aircraft/gambit-series npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight Floofy lass #CatsOfMastodon https://assets.oldbytes.space/assets.oldbytes.space/media_attachments/files/114/218/989/170/135/406/original/0e79dde095f183f7.jpg npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight Gracie says hi. #CatsOfMastodon https://assets.oldbytes.space/assets.oldbytes.space/media_attachments/files/114/201/002/075/701/416/original/204cd1ec23714a84.jpg npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight Donut is having a morning. #CatsOfMastodon https://assets.oldbytes.space/assets.oldbytes.space/media_attachments/files/114/200/549/263/085/344/original/b9ce06955ba27e23.jpg npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight @nprofile…2tky I haven't gotten to the point of rendering fat out of trimmings but I make stock pretty regularly. There's something fascinating (and delicious) about economizing this way. npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight Narrowly avoided a 'dark pattern' trying to update an Nvidia graphics driver tonight. Again they tried getting me to "upgrade" to the new Nvidia app chock full of telemetry and other bullshit. The (anti-)privacy policy seemed onerous so I decided I could live without updated drivers. On second though, I manually fired up GeForce Experience, the slightly less awful but familiar graphics-driver-getter-with-extra-gaming-poo program and lo and behold, I can update my drivers without installing a new application and dealing with this week's adventures in Shittification*. Good. Now I can get back to my Drug-Addled Alcoholic Finnish Tenement Simulator. * I distinguish "Shittification" from @nprofile…qz4x's "Enshittification" in that there's no business model. It's just making shittier software loaded with surveillance, upsells, dark patterns, and useless crap (e.g. networking, AI, emojis in the terminal) because you can and nobody can stop you. It's often driven by KPI chasing but it isn't always. Wayland, systemd, Python 3, and the attempted deprecation of man pages for whatever the fuck 'info' is - money isn't always a motivator but it's maybe the most common one. npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight @nprofile…hflv Is switching to local authentication only a reasonable option? I deleted my Windows 11 laptop from my (basically unused) MS account specifically to remove the authentication dependency on MS. The MS account doesn't buy me anything I care about and just adds failure points and load that I don't want to deal with. Your needs may differ; just noting that decoupling your machine from MS's network authentication might be an option worth looking into. npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight Apparently the AI sniffing our work chat system interprets "PRA" (probabilistic risk assessment) as "purée". AI is clearly ready for perform nuclear safety work... npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight Gracie as a tiny tot #Caturday #CatsOfMastodon https://assets.oldbytes.space/assets.oldbytes.space/media_attachments/files/113/969/079/120/748/902/original/5a4617dab13b89ae.jpg npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight @nprofile…cgs9 Does it assume singular (him/her) or does it select the appropriate (wasn't/weren't) if Dave identifies as (they/them)? Way way back in the day I programmed a Mad Libs sort of game and it linguistically kicked my ass. Learned a ton about natural language and peculiarities of English from that - it's a good exercise if you've never tried it (I mean, clearly _you_ have but not everyone has. Grammar is complex; QED I guess.) npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight @nprofile…sru6 OT: Stone Age Ninjas would be a wonderful band name. npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight @nprofile…jeml Apple is possibly worse with forced hardware refreshes. I'll probably switch back to Linux Mint for general use; apparently gaming support on Linux is a lot better now than 5 years ago. npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight @nprofile…jeml It feels like a conspiracy to force a hardware refresh. There's nothing my behemoth elderly Windows 10 gaming PC can't do that I need it to. It's not like the 32/64-bit transition where the need was obvious. The only justification for updating hardware MS provided is "because we said so". Sorry pal, that's not good enough for me to drop over a grand on new hardware I don't otherwise need. I won't get into the issue that Windows 11 does a lot that I actively do not want and have to work around; see https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight @nprofile…sczv While checking the veracity of the quote, I was stunned by the number of actual subminature photography enthusiasts out there. Life imitates art? :) npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight @nprofile…sczv This is straight out of Dr. Strangelove: "He was taking pictutes of the War Room!" "Subminiature photography is a hobby of mine." npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight https://bsky.app/profile/rahaeli.bsky.social/post/3kokvktglp72o https://assets.oldbytes.space/assets.oldbytes.space/media_attachments/files/113/606/115/661/707/096/original/2a1edc2caae4fb36.jpg npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight It's not paranoia, it's just basic autonomy and privacy. No, seriously, nobody besides this household's residents need to know the temperature of food in this house. This shouldn't be a controversial stance, much like nobody besides the phone owner has any need to know the geographical coordinates of their phone. Heresy! If your hardware device doesn't work without an app or the cloud, it's junk, full stop. Full. Fucking. Stop. npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight I picked up a nice four probe wireless thermometer today. The big advantage is a long-range base station with an actual display and controls that work without a phone app. I tried to connect their phone app to the actual device and it wanted me to set up an online account. No. Let me make this real fucking clear: THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO GOOD REASON THE INTERNAL TRMPERATURE OF THE TURKEY IN MY OVEN NEEDS TO BE SHARED WITH A SERVER OUTSIDE MY HOUSE. NONE FUCKING WHATSOEVER. "What harm is there if...?" Wrong answer. This information is not relevant to anyone but me. Not every moment of my life, not every data point around me needs to go beyond my property line. This telemetry does not need to exist and it's taken for granted that it should by people who do not act in my interest. npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight Donut in repose. #CatsOfMastodon https://assets.oldbytes.space/assets.oldbytes.space/media_attachments/files/113/510/209/045/549/586/original/1d59d3da9947398d.jpg npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight @nprofile…83c6 Interesting! I didn't realize Mustangs were built under license by CAC. I'm slowly revisiting modeling after a 40 year hiatus and I'm just floored by how much has changed, not just accessibility of tools and variety of techniques but in the depth of research materials. In some ways it's intimidating but I'm also getting a much greater for general artistic techniques like tonal variation. Also the weird fascination aircraft modelers have for seat belts. :) npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight @nprofile…83c6 You're reminding me that I have an F6F I need to make progress on. After the war the Navy converted a number of F6Fs to drones some of which were used for atmospheric sampling during the Crossroads nuclear weapons tests in 1946. They have a very interesting livery https://www.warbirdsresourcegroup.org/NARG/images/hellcat-WRG-0022297.jpg npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight Lovely $6 find at Half-Price Books: "Mathematics and Computing: with FORTRAN Programming" (1967) by William S. Dorn and Herbert J. Greenberg. It's very ... mustardy! https://assets.oldbytes.space/assets.oldbytes.space/media_attachments/files/112/663/564/675/545/070/original/f7098720bdc1f2aa.jpg npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight Donut is not ready to face the day. #FacePaw #caturday #CatsOfMastodon https://assets.oldbytes.space/assets.oldbytes.space/media_attachments/files/112/660/951/828/203/174/original/51ab6a0c95afaaac.jpg npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight @npub1y3m…r6lg Six years seems a bit low. npub1qs2xm72kzfjvv4prrl5xnnnwmnrxk5tk689kusnwa20hsmu6532qfty42h arclight @npub1c9m…9xjd There is a lot to be said for physical buttons and reverse polish notation.