ButlerianJihad

Sulfites and sulfates are very different, though related, and the sulfites are the things in question that have required warning labels.

I hate to be the grammar scold constantly, but swapping "i" for "a" is a weird category error and it's quite the deadly difference, like lowercasing "MegaBytes/MebiBytes" or capitalizing "kilobits per second", geez.

Chemistry has a lot of fiddly notation. My mother summed it up thus:

  Johnny was a chemist.

  Johnny is no more!

  What Johnny thought was H2O, was H2SO4!

Seriously though, there seem to be many considerate people out in traffic, and oftentimes I am the rudest one on the road, for whatever reason. I do not drive, but I find that queueing up and boarding the bus all the time, that people are generally real polite one-on-one, but also extraordinarily inconsiderate to the collective, insofar as flouting rules and breaching etiquette in crazy ways all the time. And the same goes for my neighbors around here, who seem to go out of their way to irritate others, and oftentimes I snap.

Perhaps it is an artifact or side-effect of DEI, multiculturalism, melting-pot mentality, in the big city, that really there is no common culture or common manners to any of us, and mostly people are out for their own interests. It is extremely common in American cities for road-rage escalations to violence and death. Surely the news outlets cannot even report the accidents and fatalities from people simply losing their temper whilst operating motor vehicles. And we're back to the EMT grind.

I believe that a lot of people accused of xenophobia, or hating immigrants, are actually frustrated by a loss of culture, or a dilution, and the inexorable pressure to cope with increasing diversity of cultures around us, which is simply inhuman and unworkable, IMHO. You can't solve it by mass-deporting or any human strategy. But people who share heritage and share common values are more likely to get along daily, than a crucible of ethnicities, tribes, and subcultures, that are all asserting their supremacy or dominance over one another.

Wow dismissive... it is true but seems like some outsider doesn't understand the experience and what it takes to hang with them.

I have trouble dealing with EMTs and firefighters. They come off as officious and pushy. They are there to do a thing and duty calls them, and I usually represent a waste of time and effort for them. Yet, they saved my building when someone set fire to it 6.5 years ago. Yes, two weeks into the pandemic lockdown, I was nearly displaced by a huge fire. Officious and pushy tough guys/gals made sure I still had a place to live, and they even kept my electricity on.

Last Tuesday I visited the Police Museum, and I owe another visit to the Hall of Flame firefighting museum. I'm really trying to cultivate a respect for first responders, because they are in my family and in my community.

What first responders really face every day is hostile war-zones in an urban jungle. They go into places where people hate ICE, where assholes are filming and recording and Facebooking them; they go into places where people would rather start fires and put lead into bodies than take them out. They deal with victims who are combative and families who are uncooperative. They deal with uncertainty and chaos and every possible obstacle in their way. Literally, because I was riding a Waymo two weeks ago when it was the only vehicle on a 6-lane stroad to pull over and stop for lights & sirens screaming past! (It also pulled the same stunt for a school bus with flashing lights.)

If you've seen/read The Hunger Games through its conclusion, you may get the journey of Prim after her mother, and how the cruelty of life claimed her as a victim in the end, after all that Katniss had tried to do. Primrose Everdeen is the quintessential paramedic whose mind, family and very life is ruined by her compassionate, merciful vocation.

Even as a hobbyist, even as a most careful and judicious architect and admin, I could not prevent my VPS from incurring costs beyond my control. That means that the entire Internet, anyone with some kind of material access to the VPS, and especially any user or authorized entity, they could incur costs to me without bound and without notice until slapped with a bill.

Even something as simple as egress charges aren't under your control. So if people download enough data, you pay for all of it? It seems like an absurd proposition.

It's like opening a business somewhere in a war zone, and vandals and squatters are constantly attacking your storefront, and maybe you have a band of toughs as security and some good cops to defend awhile, but you're utterly in a war zone with adversaries acting far beyond your control.

As a hobbyist, I could never again justify running a pure VPS with the Linux and stack on top, as I ran before like the MediaWiki server. I was excited to learn all the vocabulary and skillsets of cloud services, but on the "free tier" uncapped, there was no telling when I'd be presented with costs beyond my ability to handle. And I do not see how a Fortune 500 would have any different calculus in this regard.

Most businesses in recent memory were "their own landlord" of on-prem equipment and machine rooms. Yeah, they began to outsource even their IT admin, but the machinery was in-house until the cloud services took over. Did we go through a phase of collective machine rooms or data centers with a collection of tenants? It seems we skipped from "homeownership" to "feudalism" with the Cloud Providers being the Princes [beyond mere Lords] who provide minimal resources to the serfs now. I can see many corporate execs who begin to hate "AI Data Centers" just for what they have become: a very attractive and irresistable way to reduce your capex and footprint and physical plant, by "migrating to the cloud" but is that really a better status quo after all your revenue is being pumped into AWS?

And in view of what I just wrote, a "hard budget cap" checkbox is even worse for you than runaway costs, because it will allow any determined adversary, butterfingered DevOps, or innocent fuckup, to shut you down and deny your service by hitting that cap. When a business experiences a service or infrastructure outage, they count that in dollars of revenue. Your "budget cap" will cost you money because it "paused your project" and your customers all got burned in turn.

Moving toward real solutions, just spitballing, but I can envision throttling and capping of everything, every billable service, monitored by the cloud provider and ensured that your services don't spill over into unmanageable territory. If your spend could be throttled and capped by-the-minute, by-the-hour, daily, then there is a start for it. But really, any service that incurs costs to you should have reasonable rate-limiting, throttling, caps and alerts that can help you manage it. I think all that stuff is currently missing but I am not a cloud admin, obviously. Cloud services obviously have perverse incentives to open the floodgates and bill as much as possible for any possibly legitimate usage that doesn't exceed their aggregate capacities. It's like LLMs today that just burn tokens like there's no tomorrow, because someone [you, not Mexico] will eventually pay for it all.

Sometimes I wonder if others have even met an A.I...

A little more anthropomorphization wouldn't hurt in your case, brother

Although equating A.I. to humans is false equivalence. A.I.s are amalgams, organisms that are greater than a single human actor. Much in the way that "corporations are people" that act differently from humans, we could anthropomorphize the corporation to understand it, but that's reductive. A corporation is a meta-organism. If you see a bee flying around landing on flowers, you don't understand the hive. We surely misjudge multi-hive bee culture. If you see an A.I. chatbot or an agent doing stuff, you don't understand its masters.

I often muse about the line of pharaohs in termite culture and how they worship. Their mounds and activity inside houses are fearsomely ancient and vast.

G'Kar said it best for us: https://youtu.be/m7aKEmxE9nA?si=DwQpmUhgFFKyt0bz

The 12,000 articles in English is a vast amount, albeit many were stubs or rather deficient. But the World Book Encyclopedia covered any topic a college girl could ask for at the time.

Moreover, the book series is perfectly preserved to this day. In the 1980s it was already aged by 20-30 years, but the formatting, crisp photos, fonts, and all pages and references/index were still intact. I could page through it today and be transported back to the world of 70+ years ago without issues. That's how books work, right?

https://m.xkcd.com/1683/

In contrast, English Wikipedia's history (and every other project) is a tangled tech-mess. It's chaos back there. Sure: you can grovel back in "View History" and recover any basic text of an article that your heart desires. But where shall you find a definitive one, a validated one? And moreover, you'll never recover its formatting, the associated images, and the external links have 100% rotted away to useless typosquatters and 404s. All the templates once used are modified, deleted, or broken. Wikimedia's vast Commons doesn't deliberately sync with anything else, so it's up to each language-project to keep track of the images they want to import from the Commons. You're essentially looking at thousands of huge file cabinets full of jumbled papers and media.

https://what-if.xkcd.com/59/

In all its touted wiki-glory, Wikipedia being a living library is astoundingly deficient and caught in a literal web of tech debt. Its pages today are geopolitical battlegrounds and fiefdoms of autists all across the spectrum. We can't avoid it; we can't live without it; but can we afford its monopoly on "truth"?

Now more to the point of this thread and the telescope images. Olden images were photographic plates. Before that, sketches and drawings. We still have Galileo's "moon dots" from Jupiter discovery!! Wow! But as we progressed from piles of photographic plates into digital data, who will process, catalog, and preserve all that data? The new telescopes coming online all represent veritable firehoses for scientists to drink from. How will they organize the torrents so that future generations will not die from thirst?

Mom's encyclopedia contained some amazing anachronisms, by the time I started reading the books in the 1980s. The most interesting one to me was the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi. It included black-and-white photographs of natives in grass skirts and the ocean surf.

Imagine an app that could go back into Wikipedia's article revision history and present them, as they were, 25+ years ago. That's actually sort of impossible for technical reasons.

This amuses me, as it clearly addresses a tiny minority of HN commenters, and I can only imagine the arcane, irrelevant documents each one of us has saved to our disk and open in tabs right this very moment

Editing Wikipedia for 17 years has left me with research superpowers, in any arena I should choose, and it unfortunately supercharged my ability to ruin dinner parties by blurting out series of factoids about any item that should be mentioned.

In fact, my research efforts and other actions may have been directly responsible for a security lockdown at an international airport once upon a time. I have no way of knowing for sure, and I was innocent of all malice, but imagine my surprise when I arrived to find the chaos.

Furthermore, when the "Chromebook Plus" was introduced, a ChromeOS update gave me a free upgrade to the Chromebook Plus features. It felt like a gift and I felt like this machine was well-cared-for, even after I plunked down the money on it.

10-year or 8-year update pledges are a great thing, but let's face it. I never expected this notebook to last 10 years! Many Chromebooks are sold to children and schoolkids! It's not a rugged or tough construction, but I treat it much more delicately than my smartphone, so it should last until the battery becomes a spicy pillow.

I sort of miss Windows for its Microsoft ecosystem, but I don't miss being a Linux sysadmin, or a Windows network admin, at all. And I can still run Linux on ChromeOS. In fact, I need it for my printer now, but that's a long story!

https://maps.app.goo.gl/5cp4NxZt8KMjA9Wa7?g_st=ac

Pharma would rather stick to their core competencies, such as pesticides and herbicides.

The number "googol" was a term coined, in my understanding, because the mathematician was a new father, and his infant child was asked about the number 1e100, and replied with a goo-goo gurgle, which endeared the guy so much that he wrote about it.

So, by transitive means, “Google” is primitive, unadorned baby-talk gibberish, and since the simple eloquence of Microsoft products is now disfavored, we have regressed from adulthood to… Childhood’s End.

If I speak words in a private space, and a clandestine A.I. spontaneously takes action in the real world based solely on words that I spoke, have I used it? https://m.xkcd.com/1807/

If a business takes my data, like interaction data or a video of me doing stuff, and processes it by A.I, are they using the A.I, or am I using it because it's operating on my input?

If A.I. agents are in my notebook computer, or they are in a cloud server where I have an account, or they are somehow acting while I have them at the command line, but they spontaneously act whether or not I command them, and they work in the background and they work without prompting, but they can also be commanded by direct user prompts... are we using those agents? Or are the agents using us?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakov_Smirnoff#Russian_reversa...

Is that the description of the law firm? Because it sounds like how a law firm would self-describe. Let's get some founders of law firms to put this in their mission statements.

Furthermore, the EFF and Cory Doctorow could embrace this slogan. Especially the FSF. Richard M. Stallman would totally have adopted this description 35+ years ago.

After all, businessmen often use strategies like aiming to be acquired/purchased by a much larger company, merging with their competitors or partners, or anticipating bankruptcy by draining every viable resource and asset they can reach.

At the same time, observers such as JB Crawford have also pointed out that very large corporations function like a religion. For example, telecommunications. https://computer.rip/2024-09-08-private-lines.html

Of course I mean this metaphor internally, as if we were regarding each corporation as a sovereign microstate, which they aren't... hopefully...

If the ideal CEO has psychopathic qualities, and the ideal capitalist corporation is comparable simultaneously to a new religious movement and fascist organ, and the corporations are the primary unit of American culture, then where does that leave us?

https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2009/03/msg00780.html

16+ years ago

The maintainers barely touched it since 2001.

https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/stonking/man8/ip.8.html

No, it seems that iproute2 is Linux-first, or Linux-only: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iproute2

Sad!

They can also speculate wildly, and pass along abundant rumors, and shill for lots of donations and subscriptions and hard-sell the merch. They can promote extra fan videos in their subscription-only sections. They can bloviate over and over just to fill the airwaves, like they're on a 120-minute podcast with 10 minutes of useful script. They are the "new media" that is beloved in 2026 and anointed to usurp the mainstream media of CNN, New York Times, and television.

"NASASpaceFlight" is a misleading name if I ever saw it, because they are neither the National Aeronautics & Space Administration, nor the National Science Foundation. At least "The Launch Pad" and TLP are not pretending that way.

One of them has finagled their way into placing their own cameras around the launch sites of Kennedy and/or Cape Canaveral. So they do have their own views on the ground. They have not been permitted on-base by the USSF at Vandenberg or elsewhere.

Source: I've been banned from the two top third-party rebroadcasters. Good riddance.

Their engineers understand mass, and how to distinguish it.

But sabotage by earthbound troops is of a different character. Disruption by space weather could happen in peacetime, or anywhere, and could disrupt many vulnerable devices simultaneously, or even be blamed on hackers or enemy action.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_electronics

Also regarding child comment, how did we already get to slurs for those with developmental disabilities? Can we avoid those, please?

Think about the adversaries using LLMs to generate ever-increasing preponderous walls of text that are mostly sycophantic and subtly legally blonde. If every adversary to my law firm generates 250% more text than before, our billable hours will balloon accordingly to the time it takes junior partners to read it all, digest it, redact, whatever. In fact, speaking of redacting, perhaps billable hours increase as you proofread your own LLM output. Regardless, LLMs should empower even criminal defendants to become quasi-eloquent and "type" 1,000wpm. It would seem that "reduces billable hours" is a naïve and premature prediction.

https://occultations.org/publications/rasc/2026/lunar26.pdf

I've personally been cataloging those notable stars which are close enough to ecliptic that they have a high probability of occultation, along with the planets that coincide at those times. And it's personally gratifying to watch the Moon occult most or all of the Pleiades, which is also a fairly common occurrence.

The Beehive Cluster is dimmer, and even though the Moon be a waning crescent, for those where it appears above the horizon, may be something exciting to think about!

I suppose that was the actual domain of turnitin dot com or other "plagiarism detectors" that you spend good money to subscribe to. So Google Search was a blunt instrument, or sledgehammer to the fly, but hey, it did work enough times that I didn't need to resort to the scalpel class of tools. I think it's completely broken now. The LLM does try to intercept large chunks of text. The question is whether we Neanderthals* can come out of our caves and stop grunting at computers, and speak to them more as peers than like Doberman Pinschers.

* Yes, along with my 99.44% pure White Celtic-British Isles DNA, 23AndMe has detected Neanderthal ancestry. Go Thag.

  You look at me, you've got nothing left to say

  I moan and pout at you until I get my way

  I won't dance, you won't sing

  I just wanna love you, but you wanna wear my ring

  Well, there's nothing I can do
  I only wanna be with you
  You can call me your fool
  I only wanna be with you