"She". The gag of SwiftOnSecurity is it's Taylor Swift, posting infosec. Tho these days she mostly trolls like this.
Digital Mark
0 Post – 134 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
See also @mdhughes@appdot.net
The purpose of Air Force is to monitor the skies, project power at a distance, and provide air superiority.
The purpose of Navy is to put a floating fortress off your shore and bombard your cities, carry around materiel, men, and aircraft, and patrol a vast volume of ocean.
So Navy structures fit the mission better, and this has been true since early SF.
I mean, have you met them‽
The low-gravity planets/moons we have access to have rather harsh radiation environments, too, so neither. Dig into the ground. You would put a bunker or dome up on the surface for observations and airlocks, but it'd be foolish to live that exposed on a surface without a deep well of atmosphere & Van Allen belts.
Of course not. I am the guy in long coat, hoodie or toque, big black boots, and face mask.
Crime rates have dropped massively, you're being driven into a panic by pro-police, racist media manipulation.
Ignore it or mock it. I start preaching about Great Cthulhu at people who have loonie beliefs, and let them try to debunk me.
I've got good at reciting "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!" in a high-pitched preacher voice.
I did interview with a company in the Twin Towers ~1999. Didn't take it, wasn't that interested in continuing to sysadmin. Assuming I'd still have been there a couple years later, that could've been the worst day ever.
I have a lot of lucid dreams, and they're often in a specific city, and sometimes I even go to work in these dreams. I haven't lived in a city and worked in an office in over 10 years, so it's some kind of reverse escapism. I can always leave, and weird stuff happens anyway. I wouldn't trust any of my work output there.
But to let a company try to take over your dreams and never let you escape, you need to stand up and fight that shit. Put them in a never-ending nightmare where nobody gives them money.
Be kind, REWIND.
Don't use either, they're unreliable services and not enough people use them. Stick to IRC.
Aggressive dialogs begging for my email = close tab. I don't care what your excuse is.
Also, 404 (Not Found) is the dumbest name for any site ever, so I'm just as glad to see it go away.
What made me mad at RP1 movie was they put the Easter Egg in Atari Adventure. Which is mentioned in chapter 0 of the book, and again in the fake town (not put in the movie) because it's so obvious, nobody who cared about games at all would hide anything there.
And no Tomb of Horrors.
Instead Spielberg put a bunch of lame movie references in, because he's too senile to understand the game references.
And the actors are far too pretty for the "but you're beautiful inside" plot.
Most languages respond something like "it's nothing", de nada. English is a little weird saying "welcome".
Multiple of your friends have cancer, died of cancer, or of other illnesses. But mostly the cancer.
You wonder if your bowels are OK. They are not.
- Greg Egan
- Rudy Rucker
- Vernor Vinge
Hard, computational SF aren't given nearly the respect they should, and these apply math, comp sci, and physics in a way nobody else does. If there's any civilization in the future, they'll be seen as visionary.
Runners-up are Robert L. Forward, Alastair Reynolds, but Forward has very little computation, and Reynolds doesn't show his math too often.
I was using the Internet before the WWW, and there was already a pretty good ecosystem from nerdy stuff to consumer-usable. Email, Usenet, Gopher, FTP, IRC, were all widely usable.
Gopher especially made a great way to index and search (with WAIS) things on multiple different services, without being a mess of text/hyperlinks/images/sound/video in a hairy ball like the WWW.
Matrix, XMPP, etc. will all pass and be forgotten.
IRC will never die, and the channels on it are often useful. I suggest starting with libera.chat
Find a client you like. I'm on Mac, I tolerate LimeChat, Adium is "better" but I don't use any other chats, which is what it's for. There's plenty of options. ircii is the classic.
It's OK, just tell Abe you're there to kill vampires and he'll let you into his secret society.
Captain James T. Kirk : All right. It's instinctive. But the instinct can be fought. We're human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands, but we can stop it. We can admit that we're killers, but we're not going to kill today. That's all it takes. Knowing that we won't kill today. Contact Vendikar. I think you'll find that they're just as terrified, appalled, horrified as you are, that they'll do anything to avoid the alternative I've given you. Peace or utter destruction. It's up to you.
Seems reasonable to me. I'm in the upper end of that range, center GenX (yes I know you don't remember us). I vary between wanting it to be 1970-2000. 1990 was nice, good industrial music, many of the old blues musicians were still alive & playing, computers were still fun, BBS's, the early non-shitty Internet, pagers and car phones if you wanted to be reachable that much, but you could just NOT be. Go out for cigarettes and never come back.
Anyone who thinks this panopticon hellscape we live in is better, is nuts.
There's about 8 billion Humans, and about half of them suck more than any friendly domestic animal. The worst? I'd create an emergency.
- Leatherman. I carry a Wave. Got a Gerber and a couple others, but the original (this replaced my 1st gen) is best.
- Pen & notepad. Always having your own pen that is kept full, and some paper to write someone a physical note, is an amazing superpower.
- Face masks. COVID is still a thing, don't be dumb. Also carry hand sanitizer or alcohol wipes.
- Flashlight. I have a small tube 9-LED that's usually in there, but also a 1-LED watch battery thing for the keychain, and I've got a few more around here. Yes your phone has a flash that can be kept on, but it burns battery, and is often awkward. Having light whenever is magic.
- Switchblade, survival knife, folding knife, etc. Defensive uses, but also heavier utility knife than the Leatherman.
- Pepper spray, derringer, etc. if you live in a dangerous area.
- Survival kit. This is more of a backpack item. Get a tiny survival, first aid, etc. kit, there's a million uses for having some cord, bandages, shiny foil blanket, etc.
- Cigarette lighter or box of matches. Even if you don't smoke, being able to make fire is another magic skill. I keep this with the survival kit.
- Headphones, I have slightly-better-than-earbuds tucked in my coat. Noisy annoying people just stop being a problem.
And then my phone, keys, wallet, shades. Yes, I buy clothes with a lot of pockets.
They're on the prop from Mel Brooks' History of the World Part I
I grew up during the Cold War, I had zero expectation that I'd live to adulthood, and I'm still unconvinced the world after 2000 exists. The way to cope is nihilism and/or activism.
Nuclear war, global warming makes the Earth uninhabitable, new plagues wipe out everyone, AI poisons us or creates nanotech grey goo, fascists take over and gas everyone who isn't them, a dinosaur-killer meteor hits the Earth again, eventually the Sun expands and fries the planet. You personally are going to die, probably long before any of those.
So you can either say "fuck it" and do your usual stuff anyway, or get involved in trying to stop or delay one of the disasters. Have fun with it.
Or as Morty says: "Everybody's going to die. Come watch TV."
They also bike to work.
Is there other intelligent alien life in our Galaxy? Probably. Given how fast life formed on Earth, there must be millions of other life-bearing planets, and intelligence can't be that rare, but it might be short-lived.
Are there UFO sightings? Yes, people do see unidentified flying objects. Some of them can be explained, some cannot.
Are the UFOs aliens? I don't know, I'm a "curious agnostic" on the subject.
There's a LOT of UFO sightings, and evidence from good observers, including US Navy aviators. The US Air Force continues not to cooperate, and officially denies any sightings exist. The very enthusiastic refusal to look at evidence, aside from Project Blue Book, is suspicious.
It's technically plausible that someone within 50-ish light years of Earth could have heard our radio, sent a ship here, and use drones or manned ships to observe us without interacting. There could also be many other explanations.
We don't know, and until the last couple years there was no effort to investigate.
I have two.
Scheme. It's a fantastic language, you can cleanly switch from functional, procedural, or weird time machines (macros & continuations) solutions to any problem. Most Schemes (esp. Chez, CHICKEN, Gambit, Gerbil) compile to very fast binaries, close enough to C even with dynamic typing and garbage collection. C FFI depends on impl, but usually it's pretty simple; in CHICKEN you can just write inline C code. SRFI vary from essential libraries to angels-on-pinheads nonsense, but there's something to pick from.
Down side is the fractured, infighting community. R6RS was a practical batteries-included spec, which pissed off the teaching-only fans, so they made an inferior R7RS, and now committees are trying to make R7RS-large which is just bad R6RS. But if you pick one, and mostly stick to the spec language, it's not a problem for the developer.
BASIC. I know, ridiculous, right? And I mean line-numbered, Atari or TRS-80 BASIC. But there was never a better language for teaching programming, or for banging out a small interactive program. Turn on any 8-bit computer (or start an emulator), it prompts READY, and you can write something small & interesting. Your modern 64-bit giant machine is not READY.
You can get the same basic CS education and write your own OS, it was in my 4th year CS classes, we mostly just implemented Minix 1.0 but you could get as weird as you want.
Then you have to make enough libraries to start porting things to it, or write everything from scratch.
One of my favorite hacks like this is SectorLisp, which fits a Lisp (sort of) in a boot sector.
It's clearly secondary to correctness: A program that is well-written but doesn't work right is worthless. Many hairy balls of mud have shipped to great acclaim.
Human readability & comprehension is nice for maintenance, but you don't get to maintain something that never worked right to begin with.
… Of course, Windows is existence proof that you can be successful with neither.
It's fine, I use Lagrange to read it sometimes, and there's a few gemlogs I follow. But it's in a weird space of "almost HTML, so why not just do HTML?"
Gopher still works fine, and has more clients (I still use Lynx). I like the clean separation of menus (even if you use a lot of i info lines) and documents. There's a bunch of gopher holes still out here. I haven't updated mine in a couple years, but when/if I move it over to a new server I will, as kind of a back-channel to the site & blog.
Cops (ACAB) are not a good example for moral treatment of others.
If you're looking for validation, then probably you want numbers on anyway!
(I leave them on, but don't seek validation. I'm just around to talk and/or fight.)
Overlord, if you're lucky you'll just be ruled over by monsters that treat Humans as "sheep" to be bred, sheared, & slaughtered. If not, you'll be genocided by a cute little Elf, hee hee. Only hope is to find some way to be useful, and get converted into a monster.
Sasuga Ainz-sama is justice.
Repo Man. If they don't like it, I don't want them around.
If you actually understand the programming language, libraries, problem, and think about your solution first, you can code just fine in ed, the standard text editor. Sometimes I do, I'm the third real programmer
In practice, I mostly code in Vim, which launches instantly, is completely customizable, and I can type and edit faster than in anything else. IDEs are excruciatingly slow, with all the highlighting and analysis stuff on, waiting for code completion instead of just typing it out because you know things.
You don't need any of that.
There's also the issue that VSCode is spyware created by Microsoft, and both things should send you running away.
THE ECONOMY! Everyone must return to work, despite the very low and acceptable risk of being eaten by zombies, in order to keep our real estate investments worthwhile.
I'd rather paypal/patreon/kofi/whatever $1/mo to 10 creators I like, than give Google any cut of what they get, whether by ads or premium. I'll never give Google a goddamned penny.
I use Stop the Madness which turns all their ads into a single click at most.
RCS is not end-to-end encrypted, so their bubbles will remain green.
Google's proprietary extensions add E2EE, and Apple's not going to pull a Beeper on Google.
"I Am Legend" has been made into 3 or more movies, none of which have anything like the book's ending.
The Last Man on Earth (1964) is dull and misses the point almost entirely, but almost manages the title line. Not quite.
The Omega Man (1971) is exciting and misses the point even further.
I Am Legend (2007) almost gets it. The vampires are competent. Will Smith's smarter than Neville of the book, but crazier. But then both endings fail to treat the vampires as a society.