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chasil

8,551 karma · joined December 20, 2016

Pride, wrath, sloth, lust, greed, envy, and gluttony. What opposes them?
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chasil··on Oracle files to sell $20B in new stock, bonds to finance AI buildout
This previous [flagged] post implies that a natural gas line blocked by regulatory action is holding an Oracle data center offline:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49978367

https://archive.ph/jDXdm

I understand that trucking the natural gas into the generation plant is one workaround.

"For this whole layered scheme [of Project Jupiter] to work, the campus needs as much power as a major city — think Los Angeles. Hooking into the existing grid turned out to be a problem. The workaround: generate power on site with fuel cells running on natural gas.

”The gas is supposed to come through a new pipeline spur that still has to be built. Most of the route crosses federal land, but about half a mile runs across state land. And that’s exactly where everything got stuck: on March 31, 2026, the New Mexico State Land Office denied the right-of-way, and on July 16 it rejected the second application. The pipeline, originally due to go online in August 2026, has been pushed back to February 2027.

”On top of that, the air permit for the entire power system still hasn’t been issued: the state Environment Department’s decision isn’t expected before November 23.

”Meanwhile, local opposition keeps gaining ground — as does the nationwide movement against hyperscale data centers."

chasil··on The Great American Rascal: Tom Sawyer at 150
I have the two small books of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn on a shelf in my living room.

The most poignant moment is in Huckleberry Finn, where (floating on the Mississippi) the protagonist asserts:

"If my friendship damns me to hell, then I'll go to hell with him."

Looking it up...

"I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking—thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, ’stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

“All right, then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up."

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/76/pg76-images.html

chasil··on Patrick Stewart has died
I do reccomed Tacitus for his scandalous take:

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6400

chasil··on Cuis: The Modern Smalltalk-80
What most people do not know is that Smalltalk was originally a childrens' teaching language, a peer of Logo, which (I have learned in previous comments) preceded it.

"Smalltalk is a purely object-oriented programming language that was originally created in the 1970s for educational use, specifically for constructionist learning, but later found use in business."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk

chasil··on Patrick Stewart has died
I think this is the whole set.

I'd also recommend the recent Domina for Livia's perspective.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlwzDYw6zp2D6DxLR8zGz1i_7...

chasil··on Patrick Stewart has died
I think that I liked him most as Sejanus in I, Claudius. That was before any of his major sci-fi roles.

I see him in this episode:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xA6QbwPGlgk

I've read both Suetonius and Tacitus on the subject of Augustus and the Julio-Claudian dynasty:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julio-Claudian_dynasty

Those who lack this family knowledge would want to start with the first episode of I, Claudius.

chasil··on Closing the Sea: Lessons from Ancient Mediterranean Blockades
Now I get the Gungan and Naboo reference.

I was never a fan of the prequels. You got me, you scoundrel.

chasil··on Closing the Sea: Lessons from Ancient Mediterranean Blockades
As I understand it, the U.S. President engaged in an agreement with the Houthis for mutual non-agression, explaining our refusal to assist the House of Saud and greater Arabia.

I did not know this has a wiki.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_United_States%E2%80%93Hou...

chasil··on From confession to conspiracy: How the Wedgewood fake polls story spread
I read a direct account from FiftyPlusOne earlier this week that had been posted to a political site.

Wedgewood was quite abrupt and profanely offensive in their (re)actions in shutting down their operations, if I have read the account correctly.

It certainly appears that they were not expecting to be caught.

The post mentions "Jack Sims and Andrew Prater," whom I assume will now face far more professional review.

https://blog.fiftyplusone.news/p/fiftyplusone-just-caught-a-...

chasil··on Closing the Sea: Lessons from Ancient Mediterranean Blockades
Summary...

Samos: An effective blockade must be persistent; distractions imperil the effort.

Syracuse: When the timing is wrong, situations can reverse to shatter your forces.

Rhodes: An incomplete effort can result in stalemate.

Lilybaeum: Replacement forces who are inexperienced are vulnerable.

chasil··on Moxnox 1.0: NT-Like, POSIX-Compatible OS Running Atop Btrfs
Hard file locking makes Windows Update into agony.

I can see the 70s motivation for it, but it is a terrible burden in modern times.

Hopefully is is not implemented here.

chasil··on Internet Security: We're Doomed
PHP is not prominently used in banking.

It is a common technology, well supported in the Red Hat family, and (I would hope that) dnf update will be the proper step for most people.

chasil··on What Happened to the Neanderthals?
As I understand it, their mitochondrial DNA does not survive, so they were always the fathers of any hybrids that contributed to the modern human genome.

" recent Science study found evidence that couplings followed a distinct pattern: Neanderthal males with modern human females."

The article links to this:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/26/science/human-evolution-n...

https://archive.ph/9mQKV

chasil··on Twelve years of distributed SQLite
I have never examined this in any detail before. It looks far easier than the mass majority of clustered database architectures.

https://rqlite.io/

chasil··on We are all living inside of an obscure sci-fi film from 1970
How about this one? It should be a collection of documentaries and reviews.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRjRVyOP5DtHQkX2-K-fTNm0V...

chasil··on We are all living inside of an obscure sci-fi film from 1970
This film, Colossus: The Forbin Project, is free on YouTube. I have seen it several times.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qSgsHIj7jpg

https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRjRVyOP5DtHQkX2-K-fTNm...

chasil··on A whirlwind tour of systemd-nspawn containers (2025)
Eleven years ago, I wrote an introduction to nspawn from a busybox perspective.

https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/infinite-busybox-system...

I used that for a number of designs before my retirement.

The quality of my writing certainly did improve after that was finished.

chasil··on Today, we hacked what we'd set out to hack: the iPhone
> I stopped considering such tinkering because I got tired of finding those little tweaks and fixes on forums like xda every time something was updated.

Several vendors sell Android devices that allow bootloader unlocking, Pixels being the most known.

Once unlocked, Magisk is the current and most used rooting tool.

The procedure is quite straightforward.

https://github.com/topjohnwu/magisk

https://magiskmanager.com/

chasil··on PHP2Shell: AI uncovers critical RCE in PHP
For 109619, "Exploitation requires hitting a precise out-of-memory condition during request processing, which keeps this below Critical."

The lower criticality may be wishful thinking.

chasil··on PHP2Shell: AI uncovers critical RCE in PHP
Does active SELinux (as used in Red Hat derivatives) limit the damage at all?

I built some rhel7 systems that are relaying user-provided LDAP credentials into a domain controller, and these are probably wide open with these flaws.

I would hope that SELinux would prevent the launch of a shell, at least.

Does PHP built with FORTIFY_SOURCE and other RedHat-recommended compiler flags help?

chasil··on Gold is now the top U.S. export
Well, I have just retired, as a millionaire.

My outburst should have been concealed in more diplomatic language, I'll grant.

I am frightened of what I'm doing next (driving to Mazatlan).

Begging your pardon.

chasil··on Gold is now the top U.S. export
If I am reading this correctly, then mercury-198 will receive a neutron, decay to mercury-197, then emit an electron to become gold-197.

Mercury has seven stable isotopes ranging from 195 to 204, so purifying to 198 is challenging (this isotope is 10% of the metal's occurrence). Would this require centrifuges as uranium does?

The decay chains of the other isotopes would be different.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesis_of_precious_metals#G...

"...the production cost is estimated to be a trillion times the market price of gold."

The above reaction is at the end of the section.

chasil··on Nine-Inch Snails
https://archive.ph/CPsFp
chasil··on Grace Hopper Celebration Cancelled
For as much COBOL as my (former) coworkers use every day, they should bankroll her day.
chasil··on Apple's new 'Switch to Safari' campaign details why you should ditch Chrome
Safari has real problems compared to Chrome on other platforms.

Primarily, incognito mode is difficult to access. Android allows a shortcut to be dropped to start in this mode.

Cut and paste is also awkward and uncomfortable in Safari compared to Android.

My first move on iOS is to install Firefox Focus, to get Safari's history under control.

chasil··on A Dynamic and Distributed Virtual GPU Cloud Built on Idle Apple Silicon Devices
I'm not comfortable giving away time and power consumption on a machine that I own.

I would definitely opt out.

Is Apple going to compensate the owners?

chasil··on A Modern Web App in C
I have used ccgi.c when I needed access to system calls and PHP was too much of an attack surface.

https://github.com/moths/libccgi/blob/master/ccgi.c

chasil··on No portable way to detect string-to-float conversion errors in standard C
The VAX floating point was advanced as an alternative standards proposal at that time. Intel won the argument.

https://sixlettervariable.blogspot.com/2007/05/vax-floating-...

chasil··on No portable way to detect string-to-float conversion errors in standard C
IEEE-754 is a harsh mistress.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_754

chasil··on The tilde in your PATH may not be your HOME
My initial syntax does work in dash (and bash), but all these shells appear to rely on expanding ~ inside a word, that your source asserts is not POSIX (which I do not contest).

Perhaps a succinct and compliant expression could be:

  export PATH="$PATH:$(printf %s ~/.local/bin)"
That comes at the cost of forking a subsell.

Edit: 2.6.1 Tilde Expansion in the POSIX standard says that ~ may be expanded "following any unquoted <colon>".

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V...

That being so, the most succinct and compliant version is my first variant, with the colon moved outside the quotes:

  export PATH="$PATH":~/.local/bin
Thank you for prompting me to look this up.
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