Fluorescence

I don't think the Romanian Revolution counts as a civil war. Over the space of a week or so, it was: protests/riots, violent crackdown leading to military defection/coup.

Look at Syria for how a similar pattern of events did lead to civil war. Ceaușescu just didn't represent a section of the country with an interest in fighting for his regime. The risk of instability when an authoritarian passes is if they have been holding together a country with significant ethnic/sectarian/political divisions like Yugoslavia.

Hmm - rather than identity, I suspect it was more of a marketing trope.

I associate this genre of photo with the photo-shoots with Gates, Jobs and others. All the interviews and full page ads in the 80s 90s had variations of sitting/lying on desks, hugging CRT monitors or the classic folded-arms lean on a CRT from behind.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/dd/97/ed/dd97ed2a239c725ebe57...

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/13/b1/3a/13b13a8c0bc7ee256b37...

https://wolfsheadonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/02/Nolan...

https://alchetron.com/cdn/dan-bricklin-6a3581d7-0d8c-4413-91...

I don't recall old-school blogs doing this or really having author photos at all (photos on that bandwidth/hosting?!) but I imagine whenever a blogger was interviewed for print media they would lean on the "computer person" standards.

Looking at other parts of the site, I expect it's attack/abuse mitigation.

These unfortunate souls are trying to host interesting free content. I expect they are getting crawled to dust and unfortunately, so much nuisance came from your country's IP range they had little other option but to block it.

It is censored.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c786wlxz4jgo

https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/12/20/meta-systemic-censorship...

Jan 6th would be the Beer Hall Putsch. Notable this time round for no legal consequences for the main character.

A Reichstag Fire would be an inciting event early in the next term, committed by a member of a regime out-group, used to justify radically increasing authoritarian and prejudicial rule.

Given the events of the last few weeks, it feels like there will be plentiful opportunities if wanted.

No, not over a certain level (low/no fibre would be it's own type of bad).

Carbs give a type of satiety I can't replicate with unlimited fat/protein/fibre. IMHO it's not actually hunger/stomach related but relief from withdrawal symptoms. Carbs are CNS stimulants that trigger serotonin release and very addictive to me at least.

After fasting or eating keto for a sufficient duration this carb specific form of absence/satiety no longer exists. Hunger/appetite stops feeling like a gnawing craving desire, instead it feels like a more neutral empty/weak signal.

Anyway, if eating carbs, best bang for buck satiety is the potato.

> the kind of knowledge an organisation would kill over

That's the wrong place to look a motive because you are right, the consequences of corporate malfeasance are rarely existential for the organisation. They pay the fine, fire whoever broke the law and move on... and here we find where to look for motive.

A killing would not be ordered by a boardroom but by an individual or tight circle for their direct personal benefit rather than wider collective benefit. If an executive is looking to lose millions, personal legal consequences and a ruined career... now there is motive.

There is also the less logical corporate criminal (e.g. ebay) where it's not personal benefit but a tornado of ego, paranoia and delusion. They escalate some minor business beef into a mind-consuming psychopathic obsession taking ever more extreme actions against their perceived enemy.

> This experience radicalized me against ...

My problem with OO bashing is not that it isn't deserved but seems in denial about pathological abstraction in other paradigms.

Functional programming quickly goes up it's own bum with ever more subtle function composition, functor this, monoidal that, effect systems. I see the invention of inheritance type layering just in adhoc lazy evaluated doom pyramids.

Rich type systems spiral into astronautics. I can barely find the code in some defacto standard crates instead it's deeply nested generics... generic traits that take generic traits implemented by generic structs called by generic functions. It's an alphabet soup of S, V, F, E. Is that Q about error handling, or an execution model or data types? Who knows! Only the intrepid soul that chases the tail of every magic letter can tell you.

I wish there were a panacea but I just see human horrors whether in dynamically-typed monkey-patch chaos or the trendiest esoterica. Hell I've seen a clean-room invention of OO in an ancient Fortran codebase by an elderly academic unaware it was a thing. He was very excited to talk about his phylogenetic tree, it's species and shared genes.

The layering the author gives as "bad OO" admin/user/guest/base will exist in the other styles with pros/cons. At least the OO separates each auth level and shows the relationship between them which can be a blessed relief compared to whatever impenetrable soup someone will cook up in another style.

So Dune style hunter-seekers...

> Leto's Golden Path has prevented a future in which the Ixians released, and ultimately lost control of, self improving Hunter-Seekers that would eventually consume all organic life in the known universe.

Yikes!

The article made me check Yorkshire Tea and I'm not really quite sure. How bad are "plant-based plastics"?

> made from natural fibres like wood pulp and the seal is made with PLA - an industrially compostable, plant-based plastic

> ... so we're following WRAP's advice and avoiding the phrase "plastic free"

https://www.yorkshiretea.co.uk/our-packaging

https://www.yorkshiretea.co.uk/brew-news/plastic-in-tea-bags...

> heavily tracked

As in the flights or the hardware?

I've always thought drones would work well as ambush devices i.e. don't make a long flight to a target but stash within a few seconds of flight time.

If it's the hardware then is there not much of a DIY scene anymore? I assumed the tech was mostly in the components e.g. cameras/motors/batteries rather than the integration. I'm not a drone person but when I cast my eye at FPV racing drones, it seemed they were building their own with off-the-shelf components.

> radio links

I see Russia heavily using fibre-optic drones these days and they blew my mind. When I heard of "wire-guided missile" I assumed it was some term-of-art and never conceived they literally laid down wire. I understand you can buy kilometre spools of the stuff for a few bucks so I guess it's in consumer's reach.

Ah, I've just realised the "Ariadne's thread" weakness of using fibre-optic for something covert! Maybe the launch site can hop to another connection though...

So you're saying... gun drone?!

Interesting.

Counter-intuitively, I think slop might have it's place in cultural development. There is always genre-death by exploitative cash-in slop and vomiting it out by machine might be an accelerant.

When you start getting that visceral deja-vu dilution ick from slop or just a scene getting derivative and samey, that's what prompts head-snapping invention of brand new sounds that seek clear-blue water between themselves and the slop.

You might need to recall just how crazy it was e.g. literal shrines to boy bands were just normal. To cover every inch of your bedroom walls and ceiling with photos of a celebrity crush was not unheard of. At school, every conversation could be about these obsessions. Folders/files would be covered with pledges of devotion.

No comment on how it is today, but looking back it was terrifyingly nuts - full on religious fervour to the point of mental disorder. When bands broke or people married/died, there would be full on breakdowns and sympathy suicides.

The lack of information might have helped exacerbate the religious mystery and make more space for imagination, fantasy and faith.

The central point was like Lawnmower Man, the military / government were going to misuse the tech for evil purposes.

The porn and the vicarious near-death-experience were just plot points.

Wiki tells me there was a Cyberpunk 2013 released in 1988. Feels like a millennial cult that keeps missing it's big day...

Cyberpunk 2013 - join us! Jack in choom

Cyberpunk 2020 - oops sorry, had to reschedule

Cyberpunk 2077 - crazy story, anyway we've got a new date

Cyberpunk ???? - this time, we promise!

Contempt of Court... literally.

IANAL but if this is execution of a court order it would be CoC if it counts as failure to follow orders to include false claims. I don't know if a judge can charge CoC for disrespect of the court when not actually in it. If an ongoing case, might get a warning to remove contravening commentary and only a CoC on failure to do so.

You could also say those stats show there is no market. How many owners are even MAU anymore? Most VR headsets collect dust after the initial wow phase passes and you run out of content.

How much are you spending on marketing to reach those users?

Looking at Ascension... seems to shaft patients in the same rapacious pursuit of profits as the others. Complaints about understaffing and service closures yet: record pay for executives, $18 billion in cash reserves, for-profit subsidiaries including $41 billion in a private equity fund...

State Senator Chris Larson called Ascension “a profit machine that punishes the sick and rewards the greedy.”.

As a fellow frugal sceptic, that won't impact us much.

We get a little buzz dragging the super value pack off a top shelf or knowing that the bottom shelf economy product is actually made in the same factory as the high priced brand. We are the ones standing in the aisle eyes glazed computing the 1g/£ value of a "get one free offer" vs. the family pack no matter how hard supermarkets obfuscate it with different units on each label. It's a contrarian world-view that assumes by default, that eye-level products have the lowest value.

I used to humbly assume I must be vulnerable to advertising but I later realised I actually have years of expenses that show otherwise. They show I am a cheap bastard. I don't make impulse purchases, mostly buy fruit and veg, don't buy branded products if it can be avoided and major purchases will be drawn out optimisation processes with spreadsheets and using return processes to compare alternatives if necessary.

What I can humbly reveal is that this is no brag, this is no moral virtue, just a personality trait that is not always rational and comes with swings and roundabouts e.g. good opportunities are rejected with suspicion, important purchases are procrastinated and we can make poor use of our time to indulge our psychology e.g. walk 10 minutes to the next store to buy something for 50p cheaper just because being gouged 50p physically hurts!

There are perverse incentives at work.

Given media is advertising funded, they need it to be necessary. It means they cannot run cultural content that informs you of things of a commercial nature. It would be to give away their revenue generating product for free.

Rather than your example showing the advertising-economy is successfully informing you of things, it may show that it has extinguished an entire category of cultural programming that could have kept you entertained and informed without being a pay-to-win manipulation game.

I was an Orbital fan back in the early nineties... and I really hate it.

It diminishes the magic of the OG, the breakbeat is lazy and out of place and it has nothing of what made Orbital good which is how their layers would interact with each other in rewarding ways.

It's a shame because I could imagine a mix working in their early 90s style like Remind from the brown album e.g. add more synth layers sympathetic with the OG mood/style getting increasingly richer and more intense and acidy until a beat starts emerging from between the layers.

By the 00s, they just spin a beat on top like a DJ. Bleugh. Not quite as hateable as the KLF's version at least.

Do they ever work as well?

I fear it's not just about 3rd battery quality but the software driver side where calibration needs to redone for a new battery. If this is locked because of "security" or just inferior then oops, replacements never match first party.

I don't think you've got that right. There is an extra level:

Network Rail - the gov owned infrastructure, rails etc.

Rolling Stock - privately owned trains

Operators - lease rolling stock, employ staff, sell tickets

The problem we have is that the operators are barely profitable so always cutting quality/service because there is this other layer of private rolling stock company acting as landlords which are sucking all the profit out.

We have a similar problem with energy. There are the customer facing providers which are basically a brand and a call centre which are selling the power from energy generation companies. When they get trapped in some bad contract as a gamble on the energy market, they go bust.

It feels like a deliberate con that the customer facing providers, the brands the public knows about, keep going bust and earn public ire from their crap services but they are really scapegoats for a less visible layer of private company which are doing the real profiteering as landlords.

You could if you want.

If you don't want just to search outside of your project folder then don't set fallback in your project root justfile and it stops there.

IMHO you'd right to be sceptical because for me, it is only a slightly more ergonomic way to organise and run shell scripts. It's difficult to make the case it's much better but I found it interesting how "just being a bit nicer" for a common activity can be a really valuable quality of life improvement.

- easier - core benefit is making it nicer to implement multiple commands with arguments without inventing something equivalent in shell

- convenient - with "fallback" just will search up the folder tree to find the just command so I don't need to be in the right folder. I have justfiles at multiple levels in a project hierarchy and my cwd works as context to pick the right command

- polyglot - can use different languages as needed

- predictable - it's so nice when I return to a project and I have recipes for setting up my env, various types of build and test. The consequence of being a little more ergonomic means I capture more useful command lines that, for whatever reason, I would not have made into shell scripts because of the added friction.

Oh the guy was most definitely an addict... but lets hope a passion for a nerdy hobby was part of his recovery.

I saw a guy in my city checking every nook and cranny he passed and he looked well practised in the likely spots. Quite interesting to see him at work and the places that got extra attention: the most keen search was around the frame of a sign, the second rank were the larger crevices in brickwork and around utility pipework.

I assumed he was looking for other addicts stashes e.g. maybe they stash what they're holding when they beg to avoid losing it to police searches? Maybe it was dead drops but it seemed like a street thing rather than a darknet thing but what do I know...

I don't know if he was successful or just nuts but given I've found full baggies just laying on the pavement, maybe it's not so hard.

I saw the major retrospective at the Heywood. Spending a few hours with all the 60s illusion paintings really does do a number on you...

The works that most pleased me most were the later colourful wall paintings like Rajastan (2012). Painting directly on the gallery walls makes for an interesting copyright / art-as-property type question. I guess her team has to repaint them wherever they are shown and must oversee their destruction too. Feels like there could be a Star Trek transporter glitch type issue and whoops, we now have two Rajastan (2012)'s.

I enjoyed those, thanks! I like the circular grid eddy type ones the most. I wanted to highlight some favourites but they have a curious phenomenon where, after studying one for a while, looking at a new one is so refreshing that it always ranks higher so I just get stuck in a circle myself!

Reminds me of the graphic design at "May Contain Hackers 2022" that I really liked: https://mch2022.org/#/ which included a tool to generate similar designs https://mch2022.org/design/

Also reminds me of Bernard Cohen works that I loved in Tate Modern. For me, he achieves something next level which is to go beyond just pressing my "pleasing geometric pattern" buttons but also the type of order/disorder that feels like a human intelligence at work too.

I can't find a page including the ones I have in mind but:

https://www.flowersgallery.com/exhibitions/387-bernard-cohen...

https://www.artnet.com/artists/bernard-cohen/

Sod it, this is probably more comprehensive:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=bernard+cohen+works&iax=images&ia=...