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khmon Gemini 2.5 Computer Use model

In my city, cameras for traffic light control are on almost every signalized intersection, and the video is public record and frequently used to review collisions. These cameras are extremely cheaply and easily adapted to surveillance. Public records are public records statewide.

khmon Uber to introduce fixed-route shuttles in major US cities

This isn't true. Municipal routes can be optimized to serve the majority of people, and then a ride hailing service can be offered to feed off-route users into the fixed-route network. Most transit agencies offer this service, and many offer full-on ride-hailing (example: C-TRAN's "The Current" in Vancouver, WA).

I don't know where this "can't use a phone" thing comes from. ADA requires that transit services above a certain size offer paratransit, but doesn't specify how those rides are booked. I haven't run into anyone who can't make phone calls and can't book rides online.

khmon 'Wiring' The Wire: Transtextual layers and tragic realism in The Wire

I wonder why, when people from Baltimore "always say this," your instinct is to assume they're also lying. I wonder if there might be other reasons people from Baltimore "always say this"?

khmon 'Wiring' The Wire: Transtextual layers and tragic realism in The Wire

They would seem less implausible if you spent some time in Baltimore. Fond memories of a guy dressed as a hedgehog threatening to blow up a TV station until the police shot him with a beanbag and the bomb robot discovered his explosives were foil-wrapped chocolate. For a while there was an anti-gang gang. Omar Little and Avon Barksdale were based on real people. There is very little bullshit in the show.

khmon AMD now has more compute on the top 500 than Nvidia

DOE clusters are also massive arrays of customer grade hardware. Private cloud can only keep up in low precision work, and that is why they're still playing with remote memory access over TCP, because it's good enough for web and ML.

High precision HPC exists in the private cloud, but you only hear "we don't want to embarrass others" excuses because otherwise you would be able to calculate the cost.

On prem HPC is still very, very much cheaper than hiring out.

khmon PineNote Community Edition: Preorder coming soon

It can be driven at 60hz. It's not nearly that fast in practice, and when you push it you wind up with ghosting. You can see Doom happening here: https://github.com/PNDeb/pinenote-debian-image/releases

khmon PineNote Community Edition: Preorder coming soon

It's Debian running GNOME. You can install whatever UI you want from the repos, but the developers have written convenience tools in the form of GNOME extensions, which you can see in the top bar in the photos. It works fine, in my experience, modulo some finicky bits involving the onscreen keyboard. I have the original developer model, and I don't know what differences exist in the community edition.

khmon SMTP Downgrade Attacks and MTA-STS

I was told on the MTA-STS working group list that well-known URIs were chosen because the working group did not think email server administrators were smart enough to use DNSSEC.

I also asked why this is better than just standardizing on a port and using SMTP over TLS with existing certificate infrastructure, but they did not answer that question.

khmon MNT Reform Next

Yes, I've modified circuits. I swapped out a capacitor in the audio circuit, I used to have cell protection bodged into my battery carriers prior to the advent of the revised version, and the second half of your question is silly, since there's only one "linux-first" notebook on the market, and the Pinebook Pro is not even nearly the same class of machine. It's a toy.

I have a stack of Thinkpads for which I can no longer acquire batteries. I'm glad you haven't had that experience, but you don't get to pretend I haven't.

The Reform design process specifically involved testing various displays. For other laptops you can, if you're lucky, get a part number for a hardware maintenance manual; failing that you get to disassemble it, find the part number, and look up compatible options. MNT had this information in the documentation at launch.

"Secret sauce" was a vague term. Let me be clear: I have a BOM for the mainboard of this laptop. I have the schematics, including KiCAD, for its PCB. The RK3588 is no better or worse than any other product on the market. For all the talk of RISC-V being open, you can't buy one capable of running modern software which is actually open. So, from my perspective, it doesn't matter if it's IMX.8, RK3588, RISC-V, or x86. It's the entire rest of the computer I'm concerned with, and the Reform is more open-hardware than any other computer, including the Framework.

You seem to be a 'single-issue consumer' with this binary blob fixation. I don't have any problem with that; I just don't care about binary blobs. I like open hardware for the maintainability and the extensibility. But at this point with incorrect comments like '3D-printed case' I'm no longer sure you're even arguing in good faith here, so I won't bother following this comment up.

khmon MNT Reform Next

I've been doing "real work" on the much slower IMX8 module since the Reform came out. I did an entire Masters degree on this laptop in addition to work.

Anyway, the RK3588 module works in the original Reform; the SoM form factor is shared among all three devices. I don't think you have all the facts here.

khmon MNT Reform Next

I have daily driven this laptop since it came out. It's fine that you are not the target market, but there are enough people who don't care about all the points you made and have other priorities, even setting aside the weird airport comment (I fly with the Reform regularly):

I have schematics for every circuit and case part. I can (and have) use these to make whatever changes I want. If I run into trouble I have direct access to the engineer who designed them.

It uses standardized batteries I can get from many vendors for the foreseeable future.

If the screen breaks there are at least four different part numbers I can order to replace it.

I do not have to use a trackpad. The keyboard is mechanical and several layouts are available, some from third party designers.

The design of the laptop was a public affair in which I directly participated. I can include patches in firmware bug reports and they will be merged.

Instead of buying a new laptop every few years, I finally have one which has no secret sauce and I'm not locked into a vendor. Since I work in IT, I know how to take advantage of networking and distributed systems to leverage faster computers when I want to. In short, it's the computer I've always wanted.

I don't care that it's unfashionably thick, but others do, and I don't see any reason MNT shouldn't cater to them as well.

People can and will pay for a sustainable product made in a first-world country by workers earning a living wage. If you want a cheap Intel laptop, there are hundreds to choose from. The existence of a product which doesn't fit the norm doesn't make it "shit," it just makes it something you personally won't buy.

khmon CDC 6600

The computers seem to still be in the building, and many of them are online. 'ssh cdc6500@tty.livingcomputers.org' seems to have trouble connecting to this particular machine right now.

By connecting via ssh to 'menu@tty.livingcomputers.org' you can try the other machines -- I was able to log into the TOPS-20 system running on the TOAD2, for instance.

khmon Baltimore sues Hyundai, Kia over spike in car thefts

It doesn't. Cars which are easy theft targets have an actual impact on police availability, because they have to investigate this shit alongside problems that people didn't create for themselves by buying shitty cars. Just because it doesn't directly affect you, personally, doesn't indicate that problems are unrelated.

khmon Baltimore sues Hyundai, Kia over spike in car thefts

Baltimore has a police force out of their control (it's in state hands) but they still have to pay for it. This has resulted in massive retention and recruitment issues, and some of the cops who did stick around were on the take -- specifically the Gun Trace Task Force, home of the locally-famous Jump Out Boys.

Baltimore is an independent city, so it can't rely on county assistance for anything. Furthermore, state law prevents Baltimore (and only Baltimore) from annexing suburbs to increase the tax base, which is how literally every city in America grows. This results in obvious financial problems, as the city cannot expand its income to keep up with costs of services to the impoverished people who remain after the exit of the steel industry and the tremendously reduced longshoreman cadre.

Into all of this, some asshole carmakers decided to sell machines which are ready theft targets, able to be started by anyone who can get their hands on a USB stick. The spike in thefts of these products has a material effect on police availability. Where is Baltimore supposed to get the funding to meet this increase in demand for city services? They can't annex taxable land. They can't control policing policies.

What would you do?

khmon Procedural 3D mesh generation in a 64kB intro

https://github.com/farbrausch/fr_public is the best place to start

khmon The DoD is prioritizing open source software

Here you go: https://sites.gatech.edu/falconview/

khmon US claims jurisdiction over all .com/.net sites even if outside the US (2011)

I look at it from the narrative that I ran a decades-old channel on Freenode, and your scripts deopped me, removed my control of the channel, and opped some rando who had never even been there before. I have no stake in any of the other posturing from either side: I had a channel with a couple hundred users, and then I did not. We had no choice but to move to another ircnet (not one operated by people dumb enough to get their network snatched from under them, either).

Handshake is yet another cryptocoin grift entirely reliant on the assumption that it will never be important enough to attack. Its anti-government-control claims are equivalent to a high-school student in Tulsa bragging that Mike Tyson is afraid to fight him -- it's not that anyone is convinced Handshake is unassailable, it's just that nobody cares.

khmon VGA ROM Fonts (2020)

Those are missing tons of Unicode glyphs, for obvious reasons. Dmitry Bolkhovityanov maintains an expanded-coverage font[1] which has been converted to many useful formats[2].

1 - https://www.inp.nsk.su/~bolkhov/files/fonts/univga/

2 - http://sciops.net/downloads/vga/ (my site)

khmon Git repository of Plan 9 History, from 1992 to 2015

https://github.com/plan9foundation/plan9/commit/9db62717612a...

Did Brantley Coile buy the Plan 9 trademark? Was it not transferred to the foundation along with the source code?

khmon A Week with Plan 9

We've been discussing it; we'll probably remove the image but add the context. Next time you find something that makes you like this, would you please send a patch (or at least report a bug)? It's sheer chance that I ran across your original Mastodon post at all.

khmon A Week with Plan 9

Given a choice between deleting things that might make me look bad and explaining the choices that I make, I will always choose the latter. It's the only surefire opportunity for me to learn.

khmon A Week with Plan 9

I don't want to just silently remove the image. I'm not in the habit of editing myself to suit the passersby. I do think the image should be provided with context. It is not the only thing associated with 9front that people have targeted for removal.

I am not 'ignoring this.' I am addressing it right here, and on Mastodon. I enjoy it when Internet people make throwaway accounts to accuse me of cowardice, but I'm confused about which 'guts' I'm lacking. Is it the one where I did something, took responsibility for it, explained my actions, and then engaged in conversation with people who were concerned about my motives?

khmon A Week with Plan 9

This was the other post, which I had trouble finding quickly: https://mastodon.social/@stevelord/105510258237207655

I'm sure you can imagine how I received that: "we don't care what you actually believe, we only care about appendix L of the documentation."

People have been calling us Nazis since day one -- we have several German developers so we make VW and BMW jokes about 'German engineering' and of course all the early-cold-war German rocket scientists. It's the reason we've got the photo of Bowie at Victoria Station -- photographed while waving to the crowd, he had to repeatedly deny being a Nazi afterward, because it sure looked like a Nazi salute in the photo.

Once the actual Nazis started showing up we had to get more explicit in our condemnation of their evil, and that's okay -- rejecting hate is the easy part. Defending ourselves against the people we agree with is much harder.

khmon A Week with Plan 9

There's also this: https://mastodon.social/@stevelord/105510025405203167 which I interpreted as some kind of invitation to disavow the project and name 'the real villains' or something, which would of course be the same deal.

The whole vibe just felt like it was more about who did what than what any of it was supposed to mean, which isn't really how we operate in general.

khmon A Week with Plan 9

Hi. I made that image. I was searching for 'rails documentation' and accidentally hit the 'Images' link. That photo was in the first page of results. Its presence was so absurd and out of place that I felt like I had to do something with it. It was made in an era before actual Nazis had re-entered the public dialogue, so it felt like Google Image Search was denigrating Ruby on Rails by including this sort of imagery in the results.

Generally speaking, 4chan types read it as an endorsement, which sucks. More recently, people who are not assholes have also begun to read it as an endorsement, which is even more unfortunate.

I had a conversation on Mastodon with the author, where I explained some of this, but the author's followers filled my client with Nazi (and more) accusations, and then the author started demanding names of responsible parties and I didn't really feel like he was engaging in good faith. Probably could have gone better, but here we are.

This whole sort of thing has led to much confusion, which is why over the years the project home page has sprouted explicit anti-Nazi and Black Lives Matter links. As far as I am aware, there are no anti-semites (or other brands of racist) involved in the project.

and an edit: A couple of replies here ask the reasonable question: "why not just remove the image?" Bluntly, if we removed everything that confused or angered people, it would be a full-time job. It's more likely that we'll include some version of the above in order to further clarify our rejection of Nazi values and provide the context that was missing.

Besides, if we just delete the damn thing then the next message will be "9front devs are secret Nazis, look at archive.org" -- we've been down this road before with other contentious content.

khmon Shared salary spreadsheet reveals Microsoft employee earnings for a second year

This differs by branch of service in the United States.

khmon Shared salary spreadsheet reveals Microsoft employee earnings for a second year

No. Divisions 1-25 were regular Army, 26-50 were National Guard, and 51-108 were draftees. They were not designated according to MOS. Some of the divisions were never actually populated, so there are gaps even within this.

Later on, existing divisions were designated according to type. Infantry is the 'default' designation. Cavalry units were designated, then Armor, then Airborne, and finally Mountain. I have no idea when Artillery got its own designation. Some units subsequently were designated Air Assault, and this includes the 101st, but it kept the Airborne title to honor the unit history.

Other branches have other policies, but this is how the Army structure evolved.

khmon Show HN: Mawkdown – (Toy) Markdown Parser in Awk

Would it be ok to use elements of this to improve the one we ship with Werc?

http://code.9front.org/hg/werc/file/2ace198c631b/bin/contrib...

khmon Who is the greatest knife steel metallurgist of all time?

There is no 'concealed weapons permit' in Washington state. The only available permit is pistol-specific.

khmon Why is there a “V” in SIGSEGV Segmentation Fault?

Prior code is available. Before V4, there were no 'signals' per se; errors were trapped individually with dedicated system calls.