Yes I know. I’ve was there for it too mocking these dinguses. But it only became mainstream with COVID when it sort of metastasized and merged with a bunch of other deranged conspiracy nonsense via MAGA & QAnon.

I certainly am. I also got blocked by Kirstie Alley, Rudy Giuliani and Michael Avenatti for criticizing their cult, grift & grift respectively. I’m sure there are a few others I don’t know about.

The Cybertruck is a fail on so many levels that I wonder why anyone wants one. It’s not a good EV, it’s not a good truck, falls short on price & range, is prone to corrosion, looks stupid, is totally impractical, and lethal to pedestrians & cyclists. The thing violates so many EU regulations that it will NEVER be on sale there and anywhere else that doesn’t like murder machines.

Sounds to me like shareholders should call his bluff and be rid of him. Maybe then the company won’t be wasting money on boneheaded vehicles like the Cybertruck.

I got blocked by him on Twitter (in 2012!) for mocking his whackjob antivax views. He was espousing shit headed antivax nonsense long before it was fashionable.

He’s been saying variations of this shit for years. If you listen to the Knowledge Fight podcast there is scarcely a week when he hasn’t invoked some schtick about how this could be the last broadcast.

Of course, if this dumpster fire has genuinely stopped paying the bills and the creditors are changing the locks then boo hoo for Jones. I’m sure he’ll weave it as a conspiracy but this asshole has had it coming and then some.

This guy seems to be taking safety slightly more seriously with his sub plans than the last guy. Which is unfortunate for people looking forward to more billionaires transforming themselves into paste.

I know tar zxf and xjf off by heart. I probably do 100x as many extracts as creates. Tar is a stupidly antiquated command though.

I’ve disabled personalised ads on YouTube and I see this sort of shit all the time. I’ve given up reporting them because 90% of the time the report is rejected. I don’t even understand the rationale for rejecting it because it’s an obvious a scam as a scam can be - ai impersonation, fake endorsement, illegal advertising category. It’s a scam YouTube.

I don’t even get why these ads even appear. YouTube has transcription & voice / music recognition capabilities. How hard would it be to flag a suspicious ad and require a human to review it? Or search for duplicates under other burner accounts and zap them at the same time? Or having some kind of randomized audit based on trust where new accounts get reviewed more frequently by experienced reviewers.

I think climate activists would just be better off doing what everyone else does - lobbying. Identify politicians who represent areas who would benefit from pollution controls, or green investment or whatever and push the message. Performative acts in front of cameras might feel good but it’s a blunt tool to change policy. Some protestors such as “just stop oil” campaigners are so stupid that they actually help the causes they supposedly oppose.

Spotify and other such services almost certainly sound worse because they are compressed. But it’s not really a like for like comparison with vinyl. Spotify is streaming audio for people who want to play music casually in cars, earbuds etc. It offers convenience, not perfect sound fidelity. FLAC / CD on the other hand could be compared to vinyl and would win hands down for better frequency and range. The only reason they wouldn’t is if the CD master sucked and the vinyl master didn’t.

And vinyl is very lossy in its own way. The (digital) master of each side undergoes dynamic range & frequency compression to fit the limitations of the format (e.g. to reduce sibilance, track width). Then the master is cut into a lacquer disc from which a “father” is made, from which “mothers” are made, from which stampers are made and from which the vinyl record is made. So the vinyl in someone’s hand is a copy, of a copy, of a copy, of an altered digital master. The stamper too wears out so if someone is unlucky they get a pressing right the end of its life. And playing the disk can cause wow, flutter, distortion and general wear & tear can cause hiss, pop, dullness and scratches.

So vinyl will never sound better unless it received a better master than other formats.

I once developed an electronic program guide for a cable TV company in New Zealand and I’d lose my mind if I had to use timezones. The basic rule of thumb was:

a) Internally you use UTC religiously. UTC is the same everywhere on Earth, time always goes forward, most languages have classes that represent instants, durations etc. In addition you make damned sure your server time is correct and UTC.

b) You only deal with timezones when presenting something to a user or taking input from a user

Prior to that I had worked for a US trading company that set all their servers to EST and was receiving trades through the system which expressed time & date ambiguously. Just had to assume everywhere that EST was the default but it was just dumb programming and I bet to this day every piece of code they develop has time bugs.

The EFF has some info about the practice - https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-display-tracking-dots.

I imagine there are ways and means of obfuscating / anonymizing the dots such as blocking the printer from emitting them (e.g. an empty yellow cartridge that the printer perceives as full), modifying the firmware, using a burner printer, or using a mono laser jet.

As a side issue, most modern bank notes have a bunch of yellow circles integrated into the design on each side. They look random but they’re in a recognisable pattern called a constellation that enables devices like copiers / scanners to recognize when people are trying to copy money or other financial instruments like checks.

The only reason people use JS is because it’s the defacto language of browsers. As a language it’s dogshit filled with all kinds of unpleasant traps.

Here is a fun one I discovered the other day:

new Date('2022-10-9').toUTCString() === 'Sat, 08 Oct 2022 23:00:00 GMT'
new Date('2022-10-09').toUTCString() === 'Sun, 09 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT'

So padding a day of the month with a 0 or not changes the result by 1 hour. Every browser does the same so I assume this is a legacy thing. It’s supposed to be padded but any sane language would throw an exception if it was malformed. Not JavaScript.

It would be better to “git clone” a repo under threat of removal than fork it in Github. That way an entire copy of its history is preserved. It’s possible the forks still exist for now, even if Yuzu removes their official repo, but if Nintendo serves Github the legal paperwork then the forks will get blasted.

That said if someone clones the repo, they probably ought to think twice before putting it back in the cloud without sanitizing / reconstructing the branches & history absent of the bits that got Yuzu into trouble in the first place.

Yuzu gave them the opening to sue though. If they had been more circumspect - “Oh this is to develop homebrew / indie games nudge nudge” then maybe Nintendo wouldn’t have unleashed the lawyers or done so ineffectively. After all it wouldn’t be Yuzu’s fault if some wicked website corrupted their pure intentions by releasing device keys or patches that allowed their emulator run commercial games. But they were more blatant than that.

Also from an empathic perspective, of course Nintendo were going to sue. Yuzu should have known they would since that’s what console platforms do when something interferes with their profits. Yuzu is doubly bad since it interferes with hardware sales and game sales unlike custom firmware / cartridges which only affect game sales.

Of course the genie is already out of the bottle. Yuzu’s source code and binaries were on github for anyone to clone / fork. All the games are out in the wild. The piracy will carry on. I think it’s fair to say the NSP is effectively dead as a platform at this point. If a NSP2 turns up this year, as rumored, then I expect it will have revised anti-piracy measures and potentially a heavy online service aspect to go with it - it’s far easier to detect pirates and wield the banhammer when a device is online.

What I’m alleging is it seems more than a slight coincidence that Trump hooks up with one of Epstein’s victims. That it seems like the sort of thing that journalists and investigative reporters should be taking a look at for obvious reasons. Like when did she first meet Trump, who introduced her, was she working for a “modelling agency”, when and where she met Trump, how she was present at these events, who paid for her accommodation / lifestyle etc.

Meidas Touch found and produced a contemporaneous news article a few days back that Trump was “dating” one of Epstein’s victims, Anouska De Georgiou in 1997. Seems more than a small coincidence.

Norway has life sentences that mean 21 years. they might hold him indefinitely with extensions while he is a danger to society. But this POS could become enfeebled, or sick, or feign remorse in which case he might get released. I expect his freedom will be very brief and painful however.

I suspect Breivik would have been allowed to meet more people, and increased interactions with other prisoners if he showed any kind of remorse or repentance for his crimes. But since he doesn’t, and uses these lawsuits to advance his cause, it’s no wonder that Norwegian authorities have chosen to limit his interactions to the absolute legal minimum because screw him.