ButlerianJihad

I was gonna particularly miss the scanner with ADF, but realizing that Android’s camera-based scanning was mature, realized I could go for a single-function LaserJet at this point.

I chose the HP LaserJet 4001dn. It may have been a huge mistake. This printer is neither compatible with Android nor ChromeOS. Can’t go beyond a simple 1-pager with these.

I have been able to access the full features and power by using ChromeOS Linux subsystem. It is actually the only reason I need or use Linux at this point, and smuggling documents to be printed is arduous. I wish it just worked from my phone! But I do not believe it is the fault of HP or the printer, but Google’s staunch rejection of dead tree interfaces.

It is what it is. I’m in a city surrounded by print services such as the library, UPS Store, FedEx, that I could probably limp along with no printer at home, but I got this one blessed by my local deacon, so it’s a keeper.

And a big church could employ lots of them, and thereby stimulate the economy. It seems that the Baroque Era and churches crammed to the rafters with art, may be an artifact of a very good job market for those architects, craftsmen and artists!

Yeah... you could copy some sheet music and share it around, but it still required skilled musicians to perform, play and sing it. And nobody was taking photos or uploading JPEGs of your art and sculpture, so it was fairly locked-in that people needed to visit, and see it in context. So it stood to reason that you could probably reconstruct Noah's Ark from the fragments of True Cross that were circulating around Europe... and how many fingers did your favorite saint really have?

Copyright-free church economics have sort of fallen apart since then. However, museums, arena concerts, theaters and the rest, they have all taken pages from the Church playbooks. The fact that a church can still draw in hundreds for a show with great production values, every week or daily, seems dull and unremarkable now, but a good rock concert or museum collection can evoke the same "goin' to church" fervor in people who like that kind of stuff.

Russia was historically particularly vicious against the Kievan Rus', and Jews were prohibited from even living in the capital city. The term "beyond the Pale" applied in Ukraine as much as it applied to UK-occupied Ireland. But today on television, we have a pretty and delicate blonde empress making a totes adorbs farce of Catherine the Great's bloody legacy.

The democratic West is now a guaranteed safe haven for Eastern Bloc dissidents and refugees, with open arms and blank checks.

Arab Muslims and Israelis need to get along now, because there's a significant mosque dropped on top of Temple Mount, and they're our last best hope for something. And "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". For now.

"Now I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds..."

At the same time, it costs nothing to pick up the phone and prank them. Any actor from anywhere could do it, and outside their jurisdiction, what can they do? The dispatcher is not empowered or equipped to discern truth from lies over a mere voice line from a stranger. The dispatcher can't even run a CAPTCHA to trap AIs. The public absolutely relies on being believed when they sincerely call that same voice line.

I do, perversely, see the merit in repeated response that simply turns out to be a drill. The merit is both training and public image, if the militarized police want to instill fear and shock and awe in that neighborhood, or on the evening news, then they get it by responding, not by dismissing obvious fakes. How often do you get to test your flash-bang rifle, fire up your bomb-siege-robots, and put a few miles on your urban tanks? It's like a parade on your wedding day, but you've already paid.

Only thing is, there seems to be no financial incentive or reward for the SWATter. Unless SWATting could be used to tie up and distract law enforcement resources as part of a bigger conspiracy, the only endgame of SWATting seems to be a drain on resources.

It's dumb and derivative and isn't getting a lot of laughs from me, but at the same time, it is freakishly realistic, and absolutely ripping off every character and scene and locale of the Lucas series.

I don't know how long it will last against Disney's DMCA juggernaut, but the "Imperial HR Lady" is way funnier and she just has to throw on a turquoise necklace and grating accent.

Speaking of self-vibe-coding games, I wouldn't see the point. When I was a younger boy, I did write games for myself, and it was an arduous project that was mostly aimed at teaching myself programming rather than gaming per se. And eventually the big didactic moments were hacking someone else's game code in terms of debugging and extending it, and that was more exciting than building my own from scratch.

Also, copyright is an issue! If consumer AI could ignore copyright and just code me, say, "Freecell but it's Harry Potter" or "Put me in the cockpit of a Y-Wing video game!" then it'd be exciting. People pay big bucks and invest big bucks for in-universe games of certain franchises like that. But AI won't provide for the consumer in this way, ever.

Much of the joy of gaming for me, is seeing a polished product that is well-balanced in terms of rules and fairness, and has good sound/graphic assets, and challenges or surprises me in novel ways as I go along. I don't think I would mind if someone else vibe-codes a game for me to play, if it's good enough and engaging, but it seems that designing/coding one for myself would feel empty and unfulfilling. And I wouldn't apply the same principle to utility software, but really I'd rather not invest a lot of time in building an office suite for myself, rather than just grabbing it off the shelf.

That's an interesting case. Did you consider this a correct result?

On one hand, <foo@example.com> is a valid hypothetical address that can be used strictly in documentation. It is also syntactically valid, which is the best kind of valid. However, <foo@example.com> (and all its permutations) is an obviously invalid actual address if you're trying to send email to it, or manipulate it in any real way on the Internet.

It's a good sanity check, but quite pedantic. I can understand if you are validating some public input form, where people are likely to put fake email addresses, and you don't want someone knowingly filling in <blah@example.com> because you also know, a priori it's a fake, and it will waste your time validating or trying to send to it.

Seriously though, this is a bizarre proposition. Google hasn't been a "Search Company" for decades. Google is not there to search the web for you. Internet users need to grow up. From this Iron Age of the Internet where we bashed the keyboard with "google search" to find whatever we wanted there. Ask any reference librarian, how to intelligently build a toolbox of bookmarks and resources, and use those resources to look up stuff that you want instead.

I do not use Google Search, or Bing Search or any other, except in the dumbest of circumstances. I already know where such searches would've sent me, so I go to those sites and I query them instead. It's not rocket science.

But that ship has sailed and the Days of Search Engines is in a notable sunset phase. It is simply impractical to build and maintain a search engine when LLMs are taking over. The LLM is your search engine now. Learn it, love it, bash it, Bronze Ager.

My Chromebook has so few settings. Just the bare minimum of control panels and switches to get things running, and so few preferences to set and tweak and fiddle all day with. It was really the #1 reason I chose Chromebook over a Windows notebook at my last purchase.

I was just so relieved to be done with the endless riding-herd on my system like a Windows or Linux admin. I don't run Apple, no, but I can't imagine it is any less complex. My Android too suffers from so many bewildering settings, and most of those are the per-app tweaks that we simply can't keep up with.

On ChromeOS I can be certain that day by day, week by week, I won't need to drop to a shell, open up preferences, or tweak a bunch of settings just desperately trying to get something else working. And when I set up a new system, there won't be that daunting, arduous setup (albeit ChromeOS settings are not stashed in a Google account yet...)

It is much like my apartment. It pains me to read homeowners going over their endless woes of DIY and self-maintenance, and how much it costs to call in a guy to fix stuff; even my parents do this. A good landlord simply keeps everything working for me. Something breaks, I call it in, it gets fixed and we carry on. And no endless tweaking, installing, landscaping, gardening, fixing stuff around the house.

In my youth I tinkered endlessly with computers. I loved breaking them and repairing them. I learned all the internals and acted as professional sysadmin plenty of times. But in my old age and retirement, I just want a system that works, and that won't screw with me. The "Just Works" trophy has been passed from Apple to ChromeOS.

First, political views are not one-dimensional and so the "left"/"right" and far-extreme-ultra game is just "are they on my side or are they considered bonkers by my brethren?" games.

I believe that it's far better to consider news outlets as a product of their sponsors vs. their intended audience. By and large, they are all corporations trying to maximize revenue by attracting and maintaining a large audience for their materials, thereby paying their sponsors and advertisers the revenue they need.

So, they will produce stories that engage the audience. Whether that is enraging us, stoking controversy, appealing to us with smooth words: doesn't matter. There's no such thing as bad engagement. The corollary is that they don't want to lose audience members so any slide into supporting unpopular causes or candidates or ideologies is nipped in the bud.

Folks also can't seem to accept that editorial opinions or ideologies can shift, especially for example, if a news outlet supports "whoever/whatever is currently in power this year" or as a contrarian, opposes them, and riles up the opposition parties.

Wikipedia's relentless blacklisting and deprecation of "unreliable sources" is a great public experiment in this regard. If you really want a nice left-leaning anodyne view of the world, go with Wikipedia and "blacklist" or stop paying attention to any source they don't like.

example.com, example.net, example.org, and example.edu, along with .example, are all classified as the same type of name, reserved for documentation purposes.

Furthermore, there are IPv4 and IPv6 addresses that are reserved for documentation purposes! You never need to write live addresses, or even private RFC 1918 addresses!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4#Special-use_addresses

McCarthy of DebugBear clearly noticed this admonition and perhaps the mistake as well, because they have carefully highlighted "example.com" without linking to it, although they apparently have visited the site in order to copy and cite screenshots and unpack the CSS, and describe an extensive history of it.

https://youtu.be/O0SjTKfg26c?is=B7TThxo9EUHoFfPI

https://youtu.be/-YQB2tE6-8U?is=xR2aOq1w5p6cj1XT

It is a convention that optical discs are discs, and floppy disks or hard disks are disks. It is not a hard-and-fast spelling rule, but since there is indeed a set of official standards for Compact Disc and Digital Versatile* Disc, you can be sure that any conforming optical disc won't be spelled with a "k".

* Were you surprised that the "V" doesn't stand for "Video"?

That is no longer secure, and cannot be made secure where voice calls are involved. Any entity trying to authenticate someone's humanity or identity over the phone will be cutting off that service, post-haste.

Pinging such an address is inherently a troublesome practice. This address, like many public DNS servers (resolvers as well as root and authoritative ones), uses "anycast" routing methodology.

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

Pinging an anycast address will yield a cornucopia of different results. Of course, people who naïvely "ping" a recognizable or easy-to-type IPv4 address get what they deserve, especially when they enshrine it into software, unit tests, or the LLM coughs up such tokens on their behalf.

Fundamentally, the question is "what do you really want to test?" by pinging a particular IPv4? Do you want to test Layer 3 connectivity? Test your ISP's backbone and connectivity? Test only your upstream router? Test the existence of ICMP in your stack and theirs?

... the possibilities are endless. Your router can do anything. Ping zombo.com.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateral_(finance)

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC#History

Basically your media only needs to outlive your drives, retrieval mechanisms, software interfaces, and drivers. Or more properly, your backups need to outlive your live system and the need to restore any data from them. Certainly, data may be more precious than a live system, but you also need to concern yourself with format transfers, in terms of software file formats, filesystem formats, and media design/format.

This is not a difficult achievement. The people marketing long-term archival storage media are capitalizing on ignorance of people who have worked with books and photographs, which are "readable" by human senses. Books and photographs are media which can be preserved and fundamentally produced on archival media from the get-go.

Backup media, since it is necessary to have machines read and interpret them, are an entirely different beast, subject to an entire chain of things to preserve. As I've commented before regarding BD-RE XL, my media and the Blu-Ray drive itself outlasted the system it was backing up, and therefore did their job, without any investment or wasting money on M-DISC "Engraved in Stone Tablets" for the gentiles.

And it was rather controversial that some listed a body as necessary for a GET request, and doing my research I came to find out that a "request body" was often quite undesirable and perhaps contrary to the RFC standards, and sending a "body" in a GET could result in undefined or unpredictable behavior. But it's all in good fun.

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

It previously incorporated the symbol of Indian independence and nationalism, the charkha or spinning-wheel. This is not a sewing machine. A spinning wheel is part of a machine used to spin textile fibers into yarn.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_wheel#Charkha

Gandhi loved the spinning wheel, but he was citing the Singer sewing machine specifically as a "useful device... with a romance" that was perhaps secondary to his love for the actual spinning wheel, which is stated clearly elsewhere in the same document.

For thousands of years, women were formerly respected and revered for their spinning talents and skills, in pagan and Christian societies alike: such as the Greek goddess of Wisdom, Athena [Minerva] whose symbols included the distaff; this same distaff was also synedoche for the matriarchal aspect of any family, and mentioned in Proverbs 31, as a tool of the industrious and devoted wife.

It is no accident that, in Romance languages, "machina" is a feminine noun. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/machina#Latin

It is an American Entertainment Industry misconception that victims (or anyone else) have the ability to tell the police or the prosecutors how and when to do their jobs.

Hypothetically, a private homeowner could choose not to report a break-in as a crime, since it wasn't violent, and it wasn't commercial property, and if the crooks are not gangstas or some other group-backed actor, then they could quietly put the crime to rest. This would also be a question of the insurance company's policy.

But if there were a crime that did damage, usually there is a question that comes up in the police report like, "as a victim, are you prepared to cooperate in the investigation?" and if you do not tick "yes" then you can probably count on nothing else being done whatsoever.

https://www.maricopa.gov/911/Remain-Silent

https://www.ajblawfirm.com/articles/understanding-pressing-c...

Isn't there a dedicated site called nohttps or something? NeverSSL? I just tried http NeverSSL, and it redirected me to an https page with a random hostname and an Amazon SSL certificate!

Does example.com still function this way, with http and no HSTS? I noticed that my Chrome browser was immediately redirected in the customary way.

That's why the EMTs and paramedics all cluster around car accident victims, asking whether they are conscious, so they can kill them already

"911, what is your emergency? ... Oh, your grandmother is unconscious? We'll send out our firing squad right away!"

https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01312b.htm

But we in the U.S.A. have cast off the chains of interdependence, and adopted the Enlightenment ethos of rugged individualism and consumerism that defines American values. Who needs grandparents, or husbands, or family support when we can train and pay mercenaries to care about us! All praise, glory and power be to our Constitution!

Basically the same tragedy is going on in Tempe, AZ. The City does not permit “soup kitchen” facilities, that is, you cannot open a building or cafeteria to feed the hungry, for free. Requires licensing which is not granted. So, churches that want to do this outreach anyway have long done “guerilla feeds” in public parks. It was tolerated for decades, but recently became controversial over permits and whether permits or reservations could even be used for that purpose, or if the City could prevent charitable dudes, church or no church, from making food and inviting strangers to a public park.