ignirtoq

I think it was pine, actually, but it was over 10 years ago so I can’t say for sure.

Not only did my math master’s thesis adviser use Linux, he read his email from a command line program and wrote his papers in plain TeX, considering LaTeX a new fangled tool he didn’t need.

Fun fact: there’s some scientific evidence that painkillers actually do reduce emotional pain in addition to reducing physical pain.

they hired a voice actor

This made me think a little too, but then I started thinking about how people talk. Even if a person’s tone is similar, the mannerisms are still drastically different. The voice actor had to spoof Scarletts voice well enough to even fool Scarletts friends.

I don’t get this. Why are you assuming they constructed the voice with only the samples from another voice actress and didn’t use any from Johansson? Why are you assuming they used the samples from that voice actress at all and didn’t only use samples of Johansson’s voice they scraped from all corners of her prolific history of work?

Any random company I would give the benefit of the doubt, but these AI companies have specifically shown they don’t care about copyright law specifically or ethics in general, and they definitely have no qualms lying about where they get their data and what they do with it.

I thought this article was a good, brief discussion on cookie banners. The summary is that the EU didn’t mandate cookie banners, just acquiring consent. And they forbid common dark patterns making the “no” option more difficult to submit. It’s the tech industry that settled on the terrible banners, and many of them (most?) don’t actually conform to the law’s requirements.

Don’t worry, H5N1 is here to save the gaming industry!

No, it doesn’t say why. And it also doesn’t actually say Biden spent that money. It says Congress “allocated” $7.5 billion. There are plenty of processes between allocation and actual expenditure that could be holding this up.

But people aren’t using the web the same way they were at inception. These big companies have built closed source, centralized systems on top of the decentralized infrastructure to serve new use-cases that weren’t envisioned in the original standards. People like these new use-cases, so we need new standards, etc., to facilitate a re-decentralization of data and features in these new use-cases if we want the most used parts of the web to maintain their openness.

I don’t think it’s fair to lay the blame on the common user for the centralization of their data, when only the centralized systems have been providing the capabilities they want until very recently (where the open alternatives have arisen partly because of new standards like ActivityPub).

The attack vector described in the article uses the VPN client machine’s host network, i.e. the local network the device is attached to. They don’t discuss the DHCP server of the VPN provider.

People go through stages as they fall into the conspiracy theory rabbit hole. Early in the decent they are still engaging in healthy reasoning patterns that I won’t go so far as to say are “logical” or “rational,” but they are still flexible enough to be diverted from the conspiracies. There’s always a reason they start down that path: maybe someone close to them got badly sick, maybe they just had a child and are seeking out the best ways to protect them. If you can sit down with them and engage with them on this underlying cause for concern in an empathetic way, that’s when you can change their mind and keep them in the zone of legitimate science and medicine. If they react to every discussion as a confrontation, they are beyond the point that bringing scientific evidence to them will change their mind.

The human fatality rate of COVID-19 is 1-3%, depending on how you count cases. From what I’ve seen reported, the human fatality rate of this strain of bird flu is closer to 50%.

(Lots of “ifs” coming) If this starts to spread human-to-human, if it spreads as easily as COVID, and if we don’t lock down and this becomes endemic like COVID, COVID will look like a walk in the park compared to what this will do. I’m crossing my fingers that COVID was in that mortality sweet spot where it was bad enough to cause a lot of deaths but not quite bad enough to make officials make people angry with actually taking care of the problem. 50% mortality should be comfortably on the side of “deal with it at all cost.”

Smith said that she’s also curious how this research would translate to non-domesticated cats like big, wild cats.

I’d love to see this experiment performed with big cats at zoos. I think zoo-goers might get a kick out of it, too.

If all countries under discussion ramped up to full war time economies, like Russia is already doing, the West would outproduce Russia by at least an order of magnitude, maybe even two. Any suggestion otherwise is either ignorant or a bad faith argument.

But I think Putin knows this fact of economical imbalance, as he’s doing a superb job undercutting Western support of Ukraine through subversion of the political process via corrupt politicians, keeping the US and others in a state of hand-wringing and infighting. If he truly believed any of his own propaganda, he would already actually be at war with NATO (instead of just claiming to be and not actually touching any NATO territory), and the West would coalesce around the clear immediate threat and begin the war time economic ramp up.

I remember you saying that that was exactly the plan, so that they could bleed the western economies to death right there at the eastern border of Ukraine

The economies? I could see the argument for Russia bleeding Western political support for Ukraine, but it’s just fantasy (or propaganda) to suggest a single economy the size of Russia could bleed the combined economies of all Western countries to death.

stop doing math

On Sundays I do lunch prep for the days in office. A few slices of deli meat and block cheese for a nice flavor. Then a pile of raw veggies and a small container of dipping sauce. I prefer sliced bell pepper and green onion with ranch dressing, but you can do whatever veggies you prefer (for example spinach, sugar snap peas, carrots). I always feel great after that lunch; grains like bread or chips always made me feel lethargic.

I take it into the office in a plastic bento box to keep everything from jostling around, and the sauce goes in a smaller reusable container separately.

The article touches on that. VPN traffic is itself a small category, so even if we assume all VPN traffic is torrenting, that doesn’t push it very far up the charts.

Cut the extra inch off the long side to get a 4" square, then cut the remaining 1" x 4" piece into 4 1" squares. The boy never said the squares had to be the same size.

If the triangles have already been cut, it’s a peanut butter sandwich: use peanut butter on the edges to glue it back together and cut the squares. The child gave you a challenge, think outside the box!

I’ve got bad news.