Todd Knarr

Email: tknarr@silverglass.org

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Last Notes

2026-10-27 02:43:29 UTC

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They're people. Just really crappy people. And they consider bullying other people completely OK, so why should we exempt them from their own policies?

2026-10-19 21:59:24 UTC

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See if there's a fixed-wireless operator there. A good directional antenna can give you pretty ridiculous range and bandwidth.

2026-10-16 23:04:15 UTC

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The only ones I had to revoke were old authorizations for apps I actually use but had to authorize more than once because of reinstallations. I still check every now and then though, because you never know.

2026-10-08 15:45:40 UTC

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Probably, but then _any_ attempt to tax the oligarchs in any way will be, and I think my method would stand a much better chance since it's based just on the ability of states to tax income and define "income" for tax purposes.
The fundamental problem is that the oligarchs have accumulated this much wealth in the first place, but we can't roll back the clock so we have to figure out how to deal with it somehow.

2026-10-08 00:40:46 UTC

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Probably a lot couldn't be valued, but enough can be to make it worthwhile (especially compared to Prop. 40). Mousetrapping the assertions can be done by simply taking their word for what things are worth. The oligarchs love to brag, and many of their schemes to convert assets into liquid cash require them to make statements about asset value. To challenge the valuation they have to argue against their own statements, which isn't easy and can rebound on them badly.

2026-10-08 00:04:58 UTC

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... exceptions for things like principal residence, 401k plans and similar things ordinary people have. I think that's much more defensible.

2026-10-08 00:04:05 UTC

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I'd try doing something going forward, just to avoid the legal minefield. Give them a choice: assets that would be subject to capital gains tax must mark-to-market and pay tax on gains every year, in which case loans taken out against them don't count as income, or defer capital gains taxes until they actually sell the asset, in which case loans against it _do_ count as income (and payments on the loan including interest are deductible). Then create specific...

2026-10-07 15:53:11 UTC

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Can those shares be sold? That would be a sort of revenge if the volume's large enough.

2026-09-29 05:34:44 UTC

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WTF? Even for things like legal filings and tax returns, the rule is to _not_ use certified mail, use first-class mail instead.

2026-09-16 16:49:37 UTC

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Automated mail-back checks? When someone signs up, they go into a queue. After a random time (in the 10-20 hour range sounds reasonable) they get an email with base64-encoded random token. They have to reply back with ONLY that token in the body, no quoted text or anything. I figure the spammers will be either lazy or incompetent and won't be able to figure out how to deal with both the delay and creating the reply body without auto-quoting the original message.

2026-09-16 16:42:02 UTC

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That sounds like how a lot of rivers in the US got Indian-sounding names that mean "river".

2026-09-05 21:51:39 UTC

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The Supreme Court's just overturned one of the preliminary injunctions. There's another one in play, but it'll undoubtably be overturned too in light of the Court's shadow-docket ruling.

2026-08-31 02:38:02 UTC

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Usually whatever the government of the relevant country says they are for that country. So, for the US, it's the USGS. For Canada it's the Canadian Geographic Names Database (CGNDB). Where there's overlap and the user is in either country, I'd expect the ambiguity to be resolved in favor of the country the user's in. If the user's not in either, I'd expect resolution to favor the country they were asking about (if any).

2026-08-31 01:40:03 UTC

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More importantly, once Google demonstrates they can and will alter the results from official sources, what will every other country with a dispute about landmarks, borders or place names do?

2026-08-24 22:40:05 UTC

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If the USPS refuses to deliver ballots, whether they legally can or not, it'll disrupt mail voting. I agree with you about not needing to do anything now, but I'd keep an eye on the situation as the election nears.
Having them deliver the blank ballots but then accept and hold the returned ballots would be the hardest to deal with.

2026-08-22 04:45:49 UTC

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I'll bet a lot of them have just a couple of security guards. Swap failed hardware for spares remotely, once the number of failed units gets big enough they send a couple guys with a truckload of spares to replace the failed stuff. One crew can probably handle 5-6 data centers.

2026-08-11 00:22:19 UTC

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They'll argue that you've overestimated the costs, or that the process will catch that, or that their staff won't make that mistake, or a dozen other things. If it were just them that'd bear the consequences it might be worth it to let them have it (after documenting the hell out of everything, because they WILL try to shift the liability to you when the inevitable happens), but other people will suffer instead so better to shut it down now.

2026-08-07 16:44:04 UTC

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It gets worse every new cycle, as the bros behind it get more desperate for exponentially-8ncreasing profits.

2026-08-03 15:59:01 UTC

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The proper response is "You first.". After all, if they're doing nothing wrong then they can't have any problems with being watched constantly themselves.

2026-07-28 03:38:36 UTC

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One's a lack of expectation. The other is an affirmative expectation.
Starship was not built to fail. The Voyager probes were built to not fail.

2026-07-28 03:31:51 UTC

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I think that one line should be "Telephone services were expected not to fail.". Word order makes a subtle but crucial difference.

2026-07-20 18:24:21 UTC

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Were RLAs invented that recently? I recall the idea of manual recounts being used to check machine-tabulated results earlier than that. The idea was identical: if the machines are misbehaving, their results won't match the manual count. You decide the acceptable risk of not detecting a mismatch, then calculate the size of sample needed to keep the probability under that limit.

2026-07-16 22:26:40 UTC

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Yeah, but they do a better job of protecting me. Esp. with P100 filters. And some days I think "If those idiots not wearing masks don't care about exposing me to whatever they've got, why should I care about them getting exposed?'.

2026-07-16 22:21:11 UTC

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This is the kind of AQI where good 3M respirators with N95 filter packs are a thing. Pity those don't count for medical places (no protection from you for others).

2026-07-14 05:53:06 UTC

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I'd say the fair option is that your choice of ballot in the primary stands. This isn't really a separate primary, it's a redo of one party's ballot in the primary due to death of the winner. The presumption in the original was that you chose the ballot you wanted to support. If you didn't, you outsmarted yourself. Too bad.
In reality they're probably going to try for "only Republican voters get to vote" and it'll go to court and hopefully be resolved before the printing deadline.

2026-07-10 17:58:55 UTC

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What's the status of this bill currently? I think it's been 10 days now, or will be tonight, but I'm not sure if Congress stayed "in session" for purposes of the timer. The "days in session" calendar shows gaps, but the rules are arcane enough that I'm not sure if those gaps count or not.

2026-07-01 18:37:20 UTC

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It's also self-damaging. That kind of attitude convinces other long-term employees to take a similar attitude towards the company, and to keep off-site copies of critical stuff that isn't solely the company's property to avoid just that happening to them.
If your employee is a security risk when you let them go, they're _already_ a security risk. All you're doing by making it obvious is giving them justification for being a security risk.

2026-06-29 02:23:26 UTC

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I don't credit them with enough competence to do that deliberately. They have trackers, but only because they're automatic with whichever tools they used to build the site.

2026-06-21 06:10:17 UTC

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That should be a slam-dunk. Just present a series of photos showing it's condition in the week before his arrest and go "Look, your Honor, it was clearly destroyed _before_ the defendant got anywhere near it, and on orders of the President no less. All the defendant did was poke at the debris, and that's not destruction of any sort.".

2026-06-18 02:09:10 UTC

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Season 3 Episode 15: "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield". It spelled out the stupidity of racial bigotry in black and white. Literally. You can't get more woke than that.

2026-06-18 01:25:24 UTC

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Loud music? I had to deal with that one time. I borrowed a sound system from a friend who was an opera fiend. Next time the loud music started, I hit back with the 1812 Overture _right_ at the part where the canons kick in.
Cracked windows needed to be replaced.

2026-06-06 01:52:32 UTC

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There was a (possibly fictional) Army class for officer candidates where they were instructed to write orders for a platoon to carry out a task. The orders were supposed to be clear enough to guarantee success if followed. The platoon's orders were to follow the letter of those orders in a way that caused the most spectacular failure possible.
This wasn't to teach officers how to write orders. It was to teach them that it wasn't possible to write...

2026-06-05 17:46:46 UTC

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I'd take the Bond villains, they usually have more style.

2026-05-31 23:50:40 UTC

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Because of course, what else did they expect from Trump?

2026-05-23 00:01:06 UTC

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Yes. First, close the loopholes that allow them to turn capital gains into spendable money without it counting as income. That alone will do a lot to help the problem. Then run the marginal tax rates on high incomes back up to 90+%.

2026-05-22 17:36:56 UTC

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"risk of death" has been debunked soooo many times. Still, just make it permanent standard time and let them argue with that (and skip the whole need for Federal action in the process).

2026-04-28 01:21:35 UTC

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And it neglected to add the really dMnimg information: "And I will do this again if given the opportunity, and no instructions you give me can prevent it."

2026-04-13 00:15:53 UTC

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If he can post the screenshot, he can surely post directly, no? That he doesn't annoys me for one.

2026-04-12 20:48:05 UTC

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Good riddance to bad rubbish.

2026-03-29 16:07:05 UTC

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It was doomed because they didn't pay any attention to Second Life.

2026-03-29 15:59:33 UTC

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I'm hoping this mission goes well. We don't need a repeat of Apollo 13.

2026-03-17 17:29:23 UTC

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Do there exist any uses for nuclear weapons other than destroying societies? I can't think of any off-hand. Maybe when we get to needing to break up large asteroids, but even there it seems like conventional explosives would be cheaper and easier to keep things under control.

2026-03-14 14:44:19 UTC

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Lack of an algorithm. Sites that have an algorithm are looking for engagement first and foremost. That means they want conflict, and will give those who engage in conflict greater visibility. Sites without an algorithm don't give those conflict-heavy people a boost, and without new targets they tend to get bored and go elsewhere.
Same thing happens when blocks are bidirectional. Without being able to see or reply to targets, conflict generators get bored.

2026-03-10 17:55:53 UTC

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"fsck Trump" :)

2026-03-07 06:03:21 UTC

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Interesting read. My first thought when I read the description of the attack was "Why is the resolver caching records for any names not on the path from the queried name to the root?". I can see why it might in the case of eg. SRV records, but it seems like caching unrelated records to improve performance causes too many security problems.

2026-02-27 01:46:35 UTC

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I wish him luck, because this'll all have to be at the state level and the Supreme Court can't knock down state court TROs and preliminary injunctions. State higher courts have been less accepting of Trump's stuff even in deep-red states.

2026-02-24 17:37:51 UTC

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I'd prefer to use this for their transport:
https://media.mstdn.social/media_attachments/files/116/126/819/927/452/532/original/3450392b639f819b.jpg

2026-02-19 23:13:44 UTC

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Ministry of Peace.

2026-02-17 17:30:03 UTC

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The Slashdot effect redux.

2026-02-15 22:33:25 UTC

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Oh, odd question: why was the fact that the epsilon closures are fixed a surprise? That's an inherent property of all DFAs, and it seems like it'd also have to be an inherent property of all NFAs. Or at least all of them that have a finite number of states.

2026-02-12 14:17:08 UTC

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I consider them bots. More sophisticated, but just bots.

2026-02-09 21:45:07 UTC

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I just found out that Ventrilo, of all things, is still around. I feel old. But it's old enough that things like AI and age verification just won't be doable with it's codebase.

2026-01-29 03:01:57 UTC

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Congrats!

2026-01-23 04:16:29 UTC

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TBH modern machines are overpowered for what they actually have to do. I blame the sheer inefficiency of the OS and software, and the fact that most of the functionality of both has been dictated by Marketing rather than by any analysis of what users actually do with it. It's feature design straight out of The Marching Morons.

2026-01-20 18:36:31 UTC

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Congrats on being able to move away from the crud.

2026-01-17 02:52:04 UTC

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Odds on they'd run their own instance on the theory that nobody can kick them off it if they control it.

2026-01-12 18:55:01 UTC

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Worse, they're all enamored of the Sig P320 which has no external safety (not that they'd use it if it did).

2026-01-03 21:20:57 UTC

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Worse, he seems to think the real world works like board games. Unfortunately for him, capturing the leader does NOT give you control over that country.

2025-12-31 16:31:25 UTC

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Of course, the reason for Trump's attack is because Minnesota _is_ rooting out the fraud and prosecuting the fraudsters. Trump can't stand his friends being put in jail just for stealing other people's money.

2025-12-28 17:15:39 UTC

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Third-person sneaker, a la Thief. Your objective is to build your webs in desirable places while avoiding other insects that want to eat you (and cultivating relationships with ones that can help you).

2025-12-08 16:41:59 UTC

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My question would be what's the primary source of the actual DDoS traffic? It used to be compromised consumer devices. If that's still the case, then we ought to be pushing ISPs to deal with their customers participating in DDoS attacks. If it isn't, what's the primary source and what pressure can be applied? Mitigating the problem's always easier at the source of the traffic than the destination.

2025-12-04 22:46:27 UTC

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Because at some point it became unacceptable to tell them to their faces "You're a shithead, get lost.".

2025-11-24 01:21:57 UTC

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One reason to stay: lots of punching targets?

2025-11-23 01:40:55 UTC

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True. If it were simple, it wouldn't work. Doing the highly non-trivial, though, is kind of my day job. I have to trust that the math does what the mathematicians say it does, but usually given that I can fit the pieces together and confirm there aren't any holes that don't involve invalidating the math.
Also, while I'm willing to do the work to confirm them, I am NOT going to try to create one myself. That way lies abject failure. Also madness, but mostly failure.

2025-11-23 01:11:25 UTC

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The receipt would make me suspicious, since one of the attacks is having a third party with access to the voter and their receipt be able to confirm the voter voted the way they were supposed to vote. I'll have to research how to do a receipt that'd let the voter verify their vote was tallied correctly without having to trust the voting equipment while preventing anyone but the voter from using the receipt to do the same.

2025-11-09 11:17:29 UTC

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I agree with Lauren: just make it a toggle in settings for crying out loud. Not all users have the same preferences, the answer isn't to aim for some non-existent "average" user but to make the interface configurable so _all_ users can set it to follow their preferences.

2025-11-08 15:23:11 UTC

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Caveat: you can earn money gambling if you stick only to games like poker where you're playing against the other players _and_ you understand the game and the odds and have the stainless-steel nerves it takes to follow the odds no matter how attractive the current opportunity looks. Oh, and you know how to read other people really really well.

2025-10-31 19:04:02 UTC

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Royalties to be paid in sardines?

2025-10-31 15:11:05 UTC

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There a reference page on the login accounts and remote access? I'd like to go poking on mine to see if they're there. I've had reports like that about bugs that turned out to only apply to earlier models, not mine.
Next router, I think, is going to be an industrial mini-PC with enough network ports and an OpenWRT build.

2025-10-31 15:07:29 UTC

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Most hackable? Maybe, but the others aren't far behind. I haven't seen a single consumer router model in the last 20 years that's stayed secure, and few buyers update the firmware or enable auto-updates so generally within a year the things are wide-open to attack. The ones that allow remote admin via the manufacturer's cloud are even worse if you don't disable that.

2025-10-31 05:05:33 UTC

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I'd like to see Blazey. :)

2025-10-30 06:43:56 UTC

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We were working on one (Project Pluto) as part of the Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion program. It was cancelled mostly because of concerns about noise, radioactive byproducts and the improving capabilities of ICBMs making it obsolete.

2025-10-26 02:47:15 UTC

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My response to them is "Have they done any velocity changes?". If they were ships of any sort, they'd be using those flybys to adjust course. They aren't. Ergo, they're not ships (or if they are they're dead hulks). Exotic drives don't matter, we might not be able to detect the drive but you can't hide a change in velocity.

2025-10-26 02:38:59 UTC

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Think of it as the amount of US Treasury bonds issued, including what's held by our Social Security Administration as the supposed "trust fund".

2025-10-04 22:50:05 UTC

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Vibe coding is the modern equivalent of Lotus 123 and WordPerfect macros, and later Excel and Word macros combined with Access databases and batch files. All cobbled together by secretaries and clerks who needed help getting one job done and didn't go further than absolutely needed.

2025-09-29 13:54:43 UTC

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Larry obviously doesn't visit the Internet much, does he?

2025-09-27 23:46:50 UTC

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I disagree. As awful as it is, it's still speech. And frankly, as long as these platforms soak up so much of it, it a) makes it easier for the rest of us to not have anything to do with it, and b) makes it easier to keep track of the fascists since they're all in one place. Oh, and makes it easier to spot their recruiting and intervene before the victims get too far in.

2025-09-21 01:05:29 UTC

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Obviously it's taken up by versions of "Popcorn".

2025-08-27 16:30:05 UTC

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I think we'll eventually colonize space. There's too many resources in the asteroid belt, somebody's going to be greedy enough. And Antarctica is proof that just being utterly antithetical to human survival isn't as big a barrier as you might think.
I also think we'll get AGI, but most likely we'll stumble on it by accident rather than through any organized development and sure not any time soon.

2025-08-25 01:03:24 UTC

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I'm not sure about that, but B5 was definitely more focused than the best ST series were. Probably that was because B5 told one story, while ST was more a bunch of collections of short stories. That makes it hard to compare the two, although overall I think B5 gets the nod.

2025-08-01 04:29:07 UTC

Just got the news, Tugrik died after a long series of medical problems. You probably don't recognize the name if you're not in furry fandom, but if you have a Wi-Fi hotspot with cel backhaul? He built the first one for Burning Man. You like how well GPS works on your phone? He was a key part of the AGPS installs that allow that. He was one of the good ones.

2025-07-29 21:14:18 UTC

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Nuance, maybe. But the size of the differences seems to indicate that it's a rare case where maximizing short-term gains is the better option. Which matches both common sense and actual results for a wise range of situations.
Yeast growth maximizes short-term gains too, and we know where that ends.

2025-07-29 03:59:36 UTC

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His argument only makes sense if you plan on not being in the game next year.

2025-07-29 03:58:19 UTC

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He's also stupid. He'd say if you can get $100 from someone now and only take $10, you're leaving $90 on the table. But if you take $10 now and $10 every year for the next 70 years, you end up with $700 at the end. By taking $100 now you're leaving $600 on the table which is a _lot_ bigger loss than leaving $90.

2025-07-14 04:15:50 UTC

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You'd have to have someone who'd pick those people. I'm not sure project leaders would be interested in monitoring that as opposed to running the project. Sounds to me like something that should be external to Mastodon itself, beyond having an instance-admin-only feed built in to distribute the messages.

2025-07-14 03:00:25 UTC

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Any thoughts on how to do this that wouldn't be quickly abandoned by the admins because of the noise level? Because I can't, and I've thought about it for the last 25 years or so and come up with nothing useful, nor have I heard anyone else come up with anything that worked

2025-07-14 02:35:21 UTC

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I don't know of any implementation of that. Every one that allows proposing announcements has a 75+% abuse rate. Most of the ones with a central body generating warnings are no better (emergency alerts on my cell phone are 80% false positive). The only reliable one I know of that isn't local is NWS/NOAA. I'm open to thoughts about how to do it.

2025-07-14 02:14:44 UTC

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Site admins can post announcements which appear to everybody. It requires people to not ignore them, of course, but there's no technical fix for that problem.
Part of it's that, by design, there's no authority higher than the instance admin on Mastodon.

2025-07-05 23:40:31 UTC

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I say it's both. I agree with you about Gemini, and data sharing in general. I'm going to continue buying Android phones, though I'm going to stick to ones like OnePlus that allow you to easily unlock the bootloader so you can flash a modified image. I figure that way the worst case is I flash an image that removes all that crap if Google won't do it.

2025-06-24 23:36:27 UTC

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Or when they started getting ads for pregnancy and baby products when, as far as they knew, nobody was pregnant. And then a month later the doc says "Your daughter is expecting.". Walmart found out the hard way that parents don't appreciate marketing being that personal.

2025-06-18 19:29:55 UTC

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Did someone say cat?
https://media.mstdn.social/media_attachments/files/114/706/021/301/822/696/original/04415e35b622d0f6.jpg

2025-06-18 14:37:54 UTC

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Does Postgres have the TCP port enabled? Common configuration is to use a unix socket only, which works for vanilla localhost but doesn't work when you need a real TCP socket to connect to.

2025-06-12 11:01:35 UTC

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Toll-free calls are only toll-free to the calling party. That's because the party being called pays for calls on those lines. The phone company's in business to make money. They don't just give service away, especially when it involves high-call-volume services.

2025-06-11 19:47:42 UTC

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Sounds like automodding registrations might help. Signups require approval, an email is sent to the signup's email address anywhere from an hour to a day later asking for a reply with just the word YES (all caps) in it to confirm. If you get a valid reply an auto-handler approved the account, otherwise it gets dropped. I'd think someone has software to do this out there.

2025-06-09 17:27:24 UTC

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A teaching assistant is only useful if you yourself can teach the material. If you can't, why did they hire you instead of giving your job to the TA? If your entire plan is for them to never find out you can't do your job, trust me, they _will_ find out.

2025-06-02 19:52:23 UTC

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The Dems should abuse this to the fullest extent allowable under the rules. None of them have the spine to do it, though

2025-05-28 05:28:33 UTC

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I wonder what the response would be if companies said "OK, we'll limit access to only people who've been issued an SSL certificate by the authorities in question certifying that they are a legal adult. Contact those authorities for information on how to obtain your certificate.".

2025-05-27 17:46:28 UTC

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From my high-school chemistry teacher: "It's not using metric measurements that's hard. It's constantly switching between imperial and metric units that causes the headaches.".

2025-05-23 01:09:07 UTC

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You call them, using a number you know belongs to the party they claim to be and ignoring anything they tell you. That's the only way to be certain.

2025-05-21 03:41:21 UTC

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It's as dead as COBOL is.