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wormius

522 karma · joined August 6, 2023

perennial optimists confuse me
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wormius··on SIMD in the 90s: Programming Intel's Pentium MMX
C-f "pod"

There it is :)

wormius··on Graduate student proves a quantum uncertainty principle for fractals
I'm not very good at math, and I read quantum physics in lay-books, but I would like to say that whoever wrote the article did a good job leading to where it was going (even if maybe not clear to me), I ended up thinking "Square root of -1" and then a few paragraphs later, there it was...

This could have just been a lucky guess, but I feel like the way they presented it my intuition understood what was happening though I can't mentally see/grok it. I think making music and messing with waveforms in synths also helps to understand this intuitively more than the actual math.

I would like to credit "The Theory of Almost Everything" by Robert Oerter for explaining it in a way I could understand 15 years ago https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/183207.The_Theory_of_Alm...

Great book with the history and explanation of a lot of quantum stuff, without being huge like Brian Greene's books (which I also love).

wormius··on uBlock Origin Is Giving Up the Fight to Keep Ads Off Facebook
I stopped trying to block it ages ago, since it was reacted* horribly anytime I tried to block ads... :(

(pun fully intended)

wormius··on Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification
as Stallman would say, that is a userland issue not a GNU/Linux issue ;P
wormius··on New Orleans is testing Carbyne’s AI-powered Emergency Call Triage software
To quote Chuck D: 911 is a joke in this town.
wormius··on It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism
Disruption by me, but not by thee...
wormius··on NetBSD 11.0
Messing more with it, it seems to be related to the combo of sRGB being less bright/contrast than the non-sRGB modes, thus not enough to see the dots...

Zooming in (ctrl-wheelup) on the page causes it to disappear after the dots scale to the next size. Friend pointed out I can disable and test the css, which I did. I scaled to 2, and it's gone. So it's a scaling issue.

Then tried Vivaldi, same thing, turns out, it's gotta be a scaling issue with KDE/Kwin. It also only does it with 1440, not on 1080 (or 900, which I also tested). They're all 16:9 so it must not be a fractional scaling issue, maybe density just gets weird or it's the monitor in combo.

I have no idea whey I'm sharing just found it interesting in case anyone else wonders or notices.

wormius··on NetBSD 11.0
Yeah that could be. Plenty of issues could cause it (though I am using KWin as compositor). Maybe it's fixed by now, or just a glitch on my end.

EDIT: This is weird. My monitor has different modes including sRGB. I had it in a gaming mode (higher contrast, etc...) and it shows then, but in sRGB it doesn't show.

I took screenshots and when viewing there, regardless of screen mode, it's rendering fine, so clearly it must be a monitor issue of some sort. Odd that it would render in every non-sRGB mode, but be fine in sRGB.

wormius··on NetBSD 11.0
Not about BSD, but anybody else using side tabs in FF with that site? Somehow the rendering of that dashed line at the top runs across into the "pinned tabs" section. (Linux/Wayland/Debian). Curious if anyone else is seeing it.
wormius··on John C. Dvorak has died
I remember first coming across him on ZDTV/TechTV, then realizing he also wrote articles in some of those magazines I had bought. But mostly I just saw him as the resident tech curmudgeon.

Haha, yeah.

  "Gigabit Ethernet. Even 100-Mbps Ethernet has not produced a killer app. The modern network has produced convenience and the ability to share the Internet on one connection. Some people reckon this to be a killer app. I don’t. Perhaps the networked game is the killer app here."
wormius··on The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes
Infinite scroll/death of the page as model is one of the reasons we're at where we are. Plus iPhone, plus share button, and of course ads and data harvesting and siloed walls.
wormius··on Hy3
Yes, I was gonna say... Today, I am this old.
wormius··on Springer Nature has removed two studies by Max Planck
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
wormius··on Oscar-winning Star Wars editor Marcia Lucas dies aged 80
Finally, nothing can hold George back now, the full scale of that magnificent beast can finally be unleashed. (but seriously, RIP and condolences to George and family)
wormius··on Phantasy Star IV – 1993 Developer Interviews
My friend had the Master System, so I got to experience the first two, and loved the dome shaped buildings it had going on.

Another friend had a Dreamcast and had pondered getting Phantasy Star Online, but never did. Anyways, I'm glad it's still "a thing" even if it's not the same.

It'd be wild to see it come back the way Dragon Quest did with XI.

wormius··on Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?
Not everyone has the luxury you do.

Can you imagine if everyone who had to put up with this bullshit for shit wages, did what you said. Good luck with services.

wormius··on Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?
Whether it's directed at you or not, as an employee it's still stressful AF and these people are like getting paid kinda shit wages to put up with people all day long.

I'm not arguing about whether or not this particular instance contained "uncivil comments" (do the mods have the ability there to delete the comments if they are uncivil?)...

But day in day out, on a mass level, it's such a goddamned drag, even if it isn't directed at you, it's energy and emotional bullshit. Every job has it, sometimes it's your boss or shit coworkers... But customer facing is such an awful position for the wages they usually make. Even if it's "good" wages. Even if they don't primarily face the public, but still have to engage in a secondary support role. I can't imagine what it's like to deal with this as a job when you're on the front line with an angry mob coming at you.

Again on this particular case I'm making no judgement, but it IS a stressor, regardless if directed at you, or not.

Especially in a high volume environment that probably has more incoming vectors of commentary/attack/vitriol than just the single comment thread.

wormius··on The spread of Christianity, from antiquity until today, on an animated map
One of the most interesting facts I learned this past year was that the first country to adopt Christianity as a formal religion was Armenia.
wormius··on News outlets are limiting the Internet Archive’s access to their journalism
Ugh - our local paper used to have a wonderful archive, that got limited and locked down after the pandemic. IDK if they got bought out, but it's a real shame, I think some of the problem is things that used to be public information (birthdates, families, names) in hospital admissions (I found old entries of my friends parents and my own for being "in the hospital" in the newspaper for example).

I'm sure that plays a role, but still... This obviously is about cost and money making, not security as a whole (ime)

wormius··on Actually, democracy dies in H.R.
Democracy dies in a corporation, of which HR is a part of. FTFY
wormius··on Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools
Has Google made a statement like this?

I guess since I complain about Mozilla a lot for their past 5-10 years (minimum) of poor management decisions, I should give them their due when they do come out with a statement of support on our rights.

wormius··on I love Linux, but I can't quit Windows
"Hi I'm Mohinder from MS MSP, MSVP, SUPERSTAR ASSIST, Can I have you restart your computer... once you do that, please report back if that fixes the problem"

ms.com "support" pages.

Meanwhile, Archi Wiki? That is like... the best thing and should be a national treasure.

wormius··on Why is this site named Antipope?
Like the center of a cantelope...
wormius··on Google, Microsoft, Meta All Tracking You Even When You Opt Out
It's funny that following the link to source https://globalprivacyaudit.org/2026/california

Appends a source-url attribute at the end (404media).

I'm sure they're not doing anything nefarious with it, but it is a tiny bit ironic that there's a referral url like that associated with an organization that is speaking out about global privacy audits.

I'm glad they're doing this, and understand this is complex, but throwing out a "check the plank in thine eye before the sty in the others". I haven't really dealt with referral links like that, IIRC that's something 404 is sending as a referrer URL? Would it be prudent to reroute on the GPA sites such referral urls to strip them before sending back?

wormius··on Make tmux pretty and usable (2024)
I gave up on Tmux due to issues w/reboot & session storage not working after.

I used the resurrect and continuum (one to save/restore, the other to save between sessions). Everytime I would reboot, the sessions no longer worked, and I'd have to delete the saved sessions.

Just trying to use Wezterms tabs panels like windows/panels. I don't do the SSH Session save/restore from remote so don't need that feature, and thus not too worried.

wormius··on Nowhere is safe
Elon pops up, Boring Company business card in hand: You rang?
wormius··on Microsoft PhotoDNA scanning problem
Philip K Dick enters the chat...

Through A Scanner Darkly, indeed.

wormius··on SpaceX files to go public
Can't wait til the precious minerals market crash from asteroid mining goes kaboom, and just like that old tale about the king who left a wake of gold in his hajj, which ended up destroying the economy. In Cairo specifically.

Will mankinds's mouth be larger than its stomach?

Found the Emperor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansa_Musa

wormius··on Objections to systemd age-attestation changes go overboard
1. Harrassment of these devs is wrong (no matter how shitty Lennart and systemd is (for those of us who dislike it)).

2. Why do the worst of the worst have to be on "my side" (like this harrassment, and other issues, where they are polar opposites of me when it comes to social issues). But. You have to go to war with the army/allies you have, and if that means I have to be in bed with ... a certain unduke, then I guess it shall be.

3. I remember when statements like the following would have been laughed at by the free software/"open source" community. Instead of acquiescing, and saying "well we have to plan for this big totalitarian overreach" (if you think it isn't, look at Palantir and all the big tech CEOs getting their mitts everywhere), it would have been calling to RESIST and do everything we can technically, organizationally and politically to push back against this, but here we are willingly just building our future prisons. At the behest of giant "open source" corporations who "have nothing to hide" after all.

Of course systemd is NOT a free/libre project in any sense of the word, which is all the more reason I distrust it, and this latest is going to push me off it (I'm on Cachy now). But like I am, we all just sit in the boiling water. I'm still on Firefox for example. I'm on Facebook. This is why it's important to resist BEFORE, so it doesn't become a systemic thing where everyone feels compelled to "go with the flow".

(the following, as referred to in point 3): "Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek replied that while it was possible California's law would be changed, ""similar ideas are popping up in other contexts and it's unlikely that they'll all go away"". Ultimately, Luca Boccassi merged Taylor's changes after a bit of back-and-forth about the implementation."

If I could trust that "it's just a field, maaaaan" fine, but I don't. I see how politics is played and plays out and it's the people who are building this that should reconsider, because they ARE enabling future abuse of these systems merely by putting them in. "Oh look - we now have an affordance there's no reason not to exploit it and put it in our central repository of "authentic" validated computer users).

How long before felons are disallowed from owning/using computers? No matter how necessary that is (and I don't mean "1337 hackers" just "we must punish 'the bad guys').

If I felt we were in a forward moving direction maybe I wouldn't be so resistant, but the past 15-20 years should have taught us well about this process of enshittification and corporate capture of tech in a way we never thought possible (just like the shock of the AT&T room wiretap back in the 00s, etc...)

That said, stop harrassing these people in this manner, it is not good and does a disservice for "our cause". Goddamnit, people.

wormius··on Antimatter has been transported for the first time
"More grounded..." I see what you did there ;P
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