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tolciho

223 karma · joined July 5, 2022

not dead. yet.
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tolciho··on Discovery of a multicomponent alloy forged by the Hiroshima atomic blast
Oklo, Gabon appears to have run a nuclear reactor about 1.7 billion years ago, though whether you can get a natural nuclear explosion on some chunk of rock somewhere might be difficult to tell.
tolciho··on Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains" is set today (2026-08-04)
25% might be low for the "better dead than red" crowd, given the lasting and widespread popularity of communism in the worker's paradise that is America.
tolciho··on Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI
And that slop increases the range of things bikesheddable, like having free kerosene and matches available at an Arson Anonymous meeting.
tolciho··on Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI
LLM increase the range of things bikesheddable, so some folks will try to have a LLM design a nuclear reactor and manage the coffee budget in addition to the traditional bikeshed design complications. Whether this is an improvement or more engines of what passes for civilization catching on fire, well…
tolciho··on EYG: A Programming Language for Humans
AppleScript "English" was designed to be intuitive and easy to understand (or so claimed various manuals), but boy howdy did I spend a lot of time trying to figure out exactly what "English" it did accept.
tolciho··on Show HN: I simulated closing the Strait of Hormuz on real oil trade data
One might wonder whether the Late Bronze Age collapse had similar (copper, finance, tin) reasons for going the way it did.
tolciho··on 'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling
The profit urge was already made fun of in a recent novel.

  “And what does the author mean to do?” said Don Quixote.

  “What?” replied Samson; “why, as soon as he has found the history which
  he is now searching for with extraordinary diligence, he will at once
  give it to the press, moved more by the profit that may accrue to him
  from doing so than by any thought of praise.”

  Whereat Sancho observed, “The author looks for money and profit, does he?
  It will be a wonder if he succeeds, for it will be only hurry, hurry,
  with him, like the tailor on Easter Eve; and works done in a hurry are
  never finished as perfectly as they ought to be.
tolciho··on I wrote an bash enumerator because I was sick of xargs

  printf 'silent data loss' | while read l; do printf '%s\n' "$l"; done
though at the point I need to write

  while IFS= read -r line || [ -n "$line" ]; do
    printf '%s\n' "$line"
  done
I'll use a different language.
tolciho··on I wrote an bash enumerator because I was sick of xargs

  for name in `ls`; do echo "$name"; done
is an unportable and expensive way to write

  for name in *; do printf '%s\n' "$name"; done
but you could also just

  printf '%s\n' *
tolciho··on Have you restarted your computer this week?
Months to years without a reboot sounds like a pretty big gamble as to whether the hardware still boots, or not. More frequent reboots tend to catch "the hardware has soured" (and how would you know?) issues sooner, like maybe the BIOS decides to come up with the clock set four years into the future and then time sync can fail and then everything fails. The prior example was strictly hypothetical, of course no real system would ever do that.
tolciho··on The Boeing 747 begins its final descent
The "big old plane" was from the B team at Boeing, everyone with money or ambition or plain common sense then had put their chips on supersonics, which guzzle even more fuel in addition to the Operation Bongo II problem.
tolciho··on Ask HN: I miss old days of blogging without promotions
Try the smolnet, which would be the web before it went all "the 'Akira' stadium scene", or gopher, or gemini (no, not the google twaddle).
tolciho··on Solar generates more energy in US than coal for first time
Note the use of 'may'; the details of the car-hell vary. Perhaps the I-90 pollution instead spills into the lake and then bioaccumultes into larger organisms, Bon Appétit! My anecdote was a bit southwesterly of the I-5 bridge where there was, besides the horrific noise pollution, definitely a greyish black soot to clean off everything. A fine result of rolling a natural one and automatically failing the skill check for "copy the autobahn", probably.

As to why some beings need to be whisked hither and yon with such haste, and thus spend quite a bit of time (and energy) trying to be somewhere, anywhere else, well, are they hungry ghosts? Or maybe they min/maxed for wizard and ended up with only three points in wisdom?

tolciho··on The Future of Email
(The RFC also allows for (recursive (comments, so there's probably a middle ground between insanely overengineered specifications and a )))regex( someone found on a PHP forum somewhere (and yes this post is a valid email address (assuming there is a local regex account (or alias)))
tolciho··on Solar generates more energy in US than coal for first time
> have little black particles all over it. Nobody likes that, no matter what the President says.

Should you live near one of those big noisy "freeway" things you may note the little black particles over everything in the surroundings but nobody likes to tear down the interstate.

tolciho··on Let's Encrypt bans certificate usage in any US sanctioned territory [pdf]
I wore the rsa-dolphin t-shirt all over the place and nobody batted an eye back then, but a dolphin made up of ASCII characters is quite a bit less obvious than the one you linked.

OpenBSD being based in Canada ships strong crypto, but has had a sometimes troubled relationship with certain regimes.

https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#34

tolciho··on Stop the Apple Music app from launching
But why isn't there an easy option to turn the "feature" off? Why the kluges and workarounds for Apple going downhill (Microsoftean is indeed a good term here) for a while now? Same story for the nasty notifiction system, the annoying finder "spacebar may preview some random file hopefully without too many security vulns" (the low contrast design whereby you think Firefox is in foreground but it's actually the Finder is another bad design element that contributes to mixing up what the active app is), etc etc etc
tolciho··on Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part I: Why They Fight
Why would "money" be necessary?

https://acoup.blog/2025/01/03/collections-coinage-and-the-ty...

tolciho··on Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part I: Why They Fight
Japanese militarism was a thing recently, so the kids got eveything but the batleth.
tolciho··on Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?
OpenBSD used to have sqlite in base, but the code churn rate was too high to review. This was well before the recent LLM craze, so a human (perhaps not a normal one, though) already sufficies to generate too many changes for others to check for errors.
tolciho··on Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'
Or the management all read the same article in PC Magazine and lo! the next day did orders come down to implement said article, regardless. Waterworld, rowing the Valdez. Some years of this usually results in some number of half-baked or half-implemented systems scattered about production, and who knows which if any are actually used, or how much stink there will be to shutdown something unpatchable. Like why are there two wiki engines, sharepoint, three different database servers, …
tolciho··on Toxic chemical leak at a manufacturing facility in Orange County
Wrapping metal around it sounds like one of those mythbusters episodes where they did not get as much shrapnel as they wanted.
tolciho··on Why Japanese companies do so many different things
There is also a distinction between "has a bus system" and "the bus system is actually usuable". Say you want to take the bus to jury duty, but calculate that you would need to wake up at something like three in the morning to catch the so-and-so to downtown, and then another bus out to where the jury place is (trip time: multiple hours, assuming all goes well), in addition to the usual playing Frogger across a stroad or two, or even more walking to maybe find legal road crossing facilities for humans, assuming they exist. And that was in a city with a relatively good (for America) bus system.
tolciho··on Why Japanese companies do so many different things
There has been some internal stife in Japan, such as the Taira and Minamoto clans having a bit of a falling out, or that time when the Tokugawa somehow ended up on top, or tussles over the Meiji restoration. And also the "opening up undeveloped land" thing that was maybe not so benficial to the Ainu, and others.

How are you defining civil wars such that America has had "plenty" of them? Could you list a few?

tolciho··on College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos
"jazz is music; swing is business" - Duke Ellington

So the music industry could go hard into AI or whatever the business folks deem appropriate, with various consequences, while the musicians will continue to music and who knows maybe the rent will be covered.

tolciho··on OpenBSD 7.9
Easy to install and upgrade, sane defaults, good documentation, lack of waffleburgers of complexity, so I'm not sure why anyone wouldn't run OpenBSD in the first place. Granted I put Windows in the unusable bin and it's been there for decades now and sounds like it is getting worse, what passes for Mac OS X these days is not so good given that you have to disable some security thing to properly kill the annoying and disruptive notification system, among other annoyances still being fueded with, and I gave up on Linux after trying to support that waffleburger in production for a year or two.
tolciho··on What Were Ancient Greco-Roman Curse Tablets?
Probably not, given that "Statistical Inquiries into the Efficacy of Prayer" by Francis Galton in 1872 found that, spoilers, royalty does not live longer despite the presumably millions of subjects praying for their health and longevity. From this we might go out on a limb and guess that a negative prayer for external results fares no better than a positive prayer for external results. It may, however, be prudent not to mention such failures to the CEO when they want you to recite the corporate mission statement from memory.

Another question might be why it took until 1872 to run the numbers, unless there's a clay tablet somewhere that documents similar results.

tolciho··on I Got Sick of Remembering Port Numbers
Many clients also do not support getservent(3) or portmap or DNS SRV records or NIS or LDAP or ActiveDirectory so one might wonder why there are so many half-baked, failed, or overy complicated attempts at solving whatever the problem is here even before "AI has entered the chat".
tolciho··on Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants
If a few moonbeam hippies (as claimed with so much evidence) can send love rays and scuttle the nuclear industry, or a few of Orwell's pigs can do much the same, then the nuclear industry is quite weak and that will need to be priced in by the market. "And it would have worked if not for you meddling kids!", or the Scooby-Doo argument as to why nuclear has had too many White Elephants. I mean if some Russian plutocrats whilst the Soviets were doing the Gorbachev can cause nuclear White Elephants worldwide, wow! That's really bad! Those not completely given over to the paranoid style in politics (where some outgroup is the bane of whatever) may wish to consider how much of the nuclear industry failures are own goals caused by hubris, incompetence, delusional thinking, or the corrupting influence of Mammon, things often not present in places more capable of running a tight ship.

Nuclear one may recall was "the obvious next thing" so was where anyone who was somebody (or had delusions thereof) went, just as hypersonic planes were "the obvious next thing" so everyone at Boeing who was somebody (or had delusions thereof) were on the A-team for hypersonics. And where else do Angel investors rush in where fools fear to tread?

tolciho··on AI uses less water than the public thinks
Short answer: it's complicated. A somewhat longer answer: "Cadillac Desert". Marc Reisner. 1986.
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