Pete_D

Partly firewalls and proxies. If you've not read it already you might be interested in https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3205.txt ("On the use of HTTP as a Substrate"). I wish we still built protocols too.

> By policing who can use software, the author's of this letter are very much going against the spirit of open source.

I'd be inclined to agree, but it's a little weird in this case because GitHub itself is proprietary software, so they've always been in the business of policing who can use it.

Contrast: if ICE were using GitLab and GitLab decided to pull the contract, ICE could just (well, "just") self-host and be on their way. Open source in practice was always more about the freedom to walk away than about collaboration, and this is reflected in the licenses. Exit rather than voice, if you will.

I don't think trying to solve it materialistically will work, because the moment we come up with an empirical measurement of consciousness, David Chalmers will crash in through a window and say "ah, now consider a hypothetical class of people for whom this measurement indicates consciousness, but who do not in fact experience qualia - we could call these qualia zombies, or Q-zombies for short."

Maybe the correct response is just to dismiss zombie theories as incoherent. But people are already doing that - I doubt collecting more physical evidence and improving our understanding of cognition will strengthen the case against P-zombies, even though it'd be useful knowledge for other reasons.

The change in dev culture worries me more than the change in technology. At least Flash sites used to be considered bad taste. Dare to grumble about something unnecessarily requiring gratuitous JS now, and you'll get berated as an out-of-touch Luddite who needs to shut up and get with the times.

This looks fun. I'm stuck on the first one though. "Verify" says my solution works, but when I submit, it says my code failed a test case. Is this intentional, and I failed some hidden test that isn't given in the examples?

If MS-DOS had enjoyed as much developer attention as the *nix command line experience has over the past couple of decades, that might not be so bad a prospect.

units, too:

    $ units -t "sqrt(3^2 + 4^2)"
    5
    $ units -t "forty rods per hogshead" "miles per usgallon"
    0.0019825576
    $ units -t "32GB / (1MB/s)" "hours; minutes"
    8;53.333333

In this case, RabbitMQ doesn't trust user input - the maximum frame size is negotiated as part of the AMQP protocol. The affected code did have a check that the frame wasn't bigger than the agreed limit, but there was a chance to overflow before it got there.

"In effect, we conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells."

https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/...

I figured it was from case + -ette, like a small case.

One example: Arimaa was designed to be hard for computers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arimaa

I'd agree in general, but why think that the Arcan dev doesn't understand Unix? There's nothing in the Unix philosophy that says we have to wed ourselves to the specific weirdnesses of old DEC terminals forever.

Huh, neat. Though I wonder why they didn't just use $PAGER.

> A fundamental principle of the Web is that site-specific clients or apps shouldn't be necessary.

I think this ship, if it hasn't sailed already, is at least starting its engines and getting ready to leave the harbour.

User agents and servers are increasingly trending towards an adversarial relationship, where the user doesn't want to do much of what the server is asking of it. This has been true from the first pop-up blockers, through to modern adblocking and anti-tracking measures (the situation now being so bad that tracking protection is a built-in default feature in some browsers).

Eventually, a "filter out the crap" strategy becomes too onerous, an "extract what looks good" strategy starts to look better, and you end up with tools like Reader Mode. Custom clients are a natural next step - when someone gets desperate enough to write an article-dl to match youtube-dl, we'll be there.

I hope chunky bevelled edges come back into fashion soon. The UI in these screenshots looks reassuringly solid somehow, like how you'd expect a tool to feel. Not to mention proper scrollbars.

Goodhart's Corollary to Hanlon's Razor: When an exculpatory heuristic becomes well known, it ceases to be a good heuristic.

> Some fridges have heaters in the door. It's true.

Wow. I had to search this to be sure you weren't kidding:

> In ‘single circuit appliances’ and appliances with a 4-star freezer compartment, temperatures are usually regulated according to refrigeration compartment temperature. When ambient temperatures fall, an issue arises because the refrigeration compartment will not need to be cooled as regularly and this means that the associated 4-star freezer compartment can then become too warm. In such cases, the refrigeration compartment is artificially heated by a light bulb or an electrical heater to force the refrigerator to cool down more frequently and thus keep the 4-star freezer compartment sufficiently cool.

https://blog.liebherr.com/appliances/my/refrigerators-heater...

Another way, with target-specific variables (might be a GNUism):

    special.o: CFLAGS += -Wno-blah
    
    %.o: %.c
     echo $(CC) $(CFLAGS) -o $@ $<

Suppose someone still had a box or two of old Amiga floppies but no old hardware - what is the easiest way in 2019 to turn them into .adfs?

I would take this deal for 1X my salary. Hell, I'd even take a pay cut for the opportunity.

- Escaping surveillance capitalism, facial recognition, pointless IoT, telemetry

- Assuming I get to work in the same industry, the opportunity to work full-time as a systems programmer on 1979-era tech

- Better weather

- More affordable housing

- Getting to live through the 80s as they happened

Even if the deal is altered so that magically the only difference between 1979 and now is the tech landscape - the first two items are compelling enough on their own.

Do you know anybody with a time machine that can hook me up?

Lately, I've been seeing fancy expensive milk with a slight yellow tint on the shelves. Different type of cow, apparently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guernsey_cattle

You have sort of reinvented Nomic. I've not seen it applied to moderation before, but it'd definitely be interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic

I saw the same sort of effect a few years ago when I was running some IRC bots. In addition to the usual dice, 8ball, etc. one of them would respond to queries with a random aphorism from a list I put together from Googling "wise quotes" and such.

It was a big hit, and kind of spooky to watch when people got responses that sounded relevant to their question. People joked that my perl script was being influenced by the spirits. In the end I concluded that you can read deep meaning into almost anything if you work hard enough.

The price tag probably also helps to discourage repeating too soon. Few things puncture the illusion of meaningfulness around a tarot reading, I Ching divination, etc. like rerolling until you get the answer you want.

Arguably it does - if someone tells me they are going through their Saturn return, I know two things about them (going off banuguler's information):

- they are around 30 years old

- they feel like they are dealing with restrictions and limits in their life

Together I can make an informed guess that they're more likely to be worried about, say, starting a family, or their career options narrowing, than a randomly selected member of the population would be.

Similarly, if someone tells me that shark attacks are up lately, I will predict that ice cream sales are also up (via the proxy of beach attendance). You may find tricks like this unimpressive, but it's a step above "nothing to do with".

Interestingly, star sign can be shown to correlate with some life outcomes. For example, here's a chart that shows that players in qualifying teams for certain youth soccer tourmanents are over twice as likely to be Aquarius than they are to be Sagittarius: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Month_of_birth_distributi.... They phrase it a bit differently though. (half-joking, but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_age_effect).

> I've had to GC more than one repo where someone accidentally added an innocuous binary file

My god, the things I've seen in repos. vim .swp files. Project documentation kept as Word documents and Excel spreadsheets. Stray core dumps and error logs in random subdirectories, dated to when the repo was still CVS. Binary snapshots of database tables. But the most impressive by far was a repo where someone had managed to commit and push the entirety of their My Documents folder, weighing in at 2.4GB.

> The time you spend in GA is just completely gone. It feels like you went through a time warp.

I've heard this a lot, so I was surprised the one time I went under GA and it felt more or less like a normal dreamless night's sleep. I remember a sharp transition from awake -> out, but coming around felt like waking up groggy after a few hours sleep. Since then I've wondered if that's unusual or if people who feel like time passed just assumed it would be that way so don't mention anything.

> JSONx is an IBM® standard format to represent JSON as XML.

https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SS9H2Y_7.5.0/com...

I liked this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P719UYi6uRQ. It explains the structure of a particular type of Chinese poem, with translations of a couple of classics, and gives a good feel for the overall "flavour".