psacawa

A relevant bit of self-promotion maybe:

I created a small language server for systemd unit files which may help those having to integrate services with it.

https://github.com/psacawa/systemd-language-server

Anyone who has had to sift through large BNFs such as [0, 1] to find that the syntax error was a syntactically significant "TO" knows that this is the case. Natural language has synonyms, computer languages really should avoid synonyms and also any spurious syntactic sugar.

[0] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/13/sql-altertable.html

[1] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/13/sql-commands.html

Never was it more appropriate to say "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." By engaging in systemic historical revisionism, Google means to create a future where certain peoples don't exist.

Major private media corporations in poland were already closely aligned with PiS [...]

This statement is an outright lie. For example, Gazeta Wyborcza, all of Agora Media, and TVN have always been anti-PiS.

[...] and independent media was shut down.

Can you elaborate on this?

As a result, for several years all media in poland was pro-government.

Completely untrue.

Technoparasitism. In my opinion, the very premise of AI girlfriends veers so far away from human flourishing that privacy concerns seem entirely secondary.

This is a remarkable inversion. The primary reason people forego children in the west is because it throws a wrench in their comfortable lifestyle. They prefer to live unto themselves, instead of unto children, i.e. selfishly.

I believe the environmental/climactic concerns raised by antinatalists are just a feeble deflection. They are primarily interested in personal comfort.

If you are asking for examples of brutal acts performed or ordered by Muhammed, here is a long list [0]. Most notable to me is the murder of 600-900 captive non-combatants. This is referred to as the massacre of the Banu Qurayza (woman and children then made slaves).

I suppose you brought up Muhammed on the basis that his venerated status in Islam enables us to significantly extrapolate Muslim culture from his own personal culture. I will therefore state that the evidence of Quran/Hadiths yield evidence of great brutality in the person of Muhammed, which therefore may inspire brutality and violence in any devout followers of his, or in the broader Islamic culture. This is certainly conducive "creating criminal gangs".

[0] https://wikiislam.net/wiki/List_of_Killings_Ordered_or_Suppo...

The accounts in primitve terms obscure it's true meaning.

It's just a analytic function on the moduli space of elliptic curves.

The collection of equivalence classes of elliptic curve (torii of the form C/lattice) has the structure of a complex space (it's not a complex manifold, but rather a complex moduli stack). Modular forms are just analytic functions on it. That's all.

This dumb article doesn't help matter by presenting a brazen lie in the headline. Fifth fundamental operation, my butthurt ass.

Is there any intention of eventually supporting DML or DDL statements? That's when the COBOL-like nature of SQL syntax is most frustrating. For example, in order to run "ALTER COLUMN ..." I have to parse a ridiculous BNF like this[0] almost every time. I'll never remember it.

Usually, the error is a gotcha built into the language syntax (e.g. forgot the keyword "TO").

[0] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/13/sql-altertable.html

Idiotic clickbait headline seeks to insinuate that there was something dishonest about her racing, when in reality her participation broke a false belief (a "lie") that women were physically unable to complete marathons.

Another possible outcome of "I gave commit rights to someone I didn't know": https://github.com/dominictarr/event-stream/issues/116

The website can further strengthen the illusion of interacting with the FS by using HTML+CSS that imitates the browser's builtin file browser. It knows what it might look like by examining User-Agent and Accept-Language headers.

A phishing strategy this enables: confusing the https:// URI scheme with the file:// pseudo-URI scheme.

For example, we receive a phishing email which reads "This is the bank with your financial statement attached. It's a password protected zip file encrypted with your online banking credentials for security." We click to download and end up at https://financialstatement.zip, where a JS prompt asks us for the decryption password. We think we're interacting with the file system and get owned.

Crucially, i) some browsers don't display the URI scheme in the address bar, and ii) people are used to the idea of a password-protected zip file, and iii) people are used to opening files with their browser.

Before you get all jubilant, note that they have fingerprinting techniques which don't use JS[0]. It was able to identity me. Contrary to popular opinion, disabling JS doesn't protect you from fingerprinting.

They describe their approach[1]. They use HTTP headers and conditional request triggered by CSS conditional media queries to gather data. Something like @media(...) {background: url(/tracking/$clientid)}. But in principle, they could also try and fingerprint the TCP/IP stack or the TLS implementation. I'm not sure it would get them more data than OS+Browser, though.

[0] https://noscriptfingerprint.com/

[1] https://fingerprint.com/blog/disabling-javascript-wont-stop-...

Facile comparisons like this are very frustrating. Two thoughts:

i) What makes you believe that they weren't correct, and the timespan for this annihilation isn't e.g. 100 years? That would be an instant in comparison with the timespan of humanity. Indeed, in the present, we have gene therapy and genetic engineering. It's easy to imagine these technologies might go off the rails.

ii) Another doomsday prediction from a UN official in the 1970s: anthropogenic climate change will make the planet uninhabitable by year 2000. "That was 50 years ago! Clearly nothing to worry about! The UN lied! Al Gore lied! This party will never end!!"

As you know, such attitudes are widespread. These are the attitudes which express the notion that since one past prognosis didn't manifest according to schedule, then it never shall. They are common in response to climate change, but not only. This is the same facile reasoning your comment endorses.

What can I say, man? History is absolutely chock full of examples that show that other identity groups can represent existential threats, including very recent ones: Chinese genocide of Uyhgurs, Burmese genocide of Rohinya, Russian agression in Ukraine.

Let me pick at specifically Russia/Ukraine. A short time ago, these countries economic ties were vast. There were many Ukrainians whose personal wealth stemmed from e.g. the country's ties to Russian petrochemical industry.

Others, seeing that, said "You are accruing personal wealth by strengthening a foreign power's hold on our nation." To which the response was occasionally "Are you racist? Are you nationalist?" We see now how this turned out.

The dirty secret is that history vindicates all forms of identity group tribalism, in principal. That includes racism. There is no shortage in history of examples like the above, nor of examples of destroyed nations.

If anything, I feel the problem is that contemporary countries do not represent the nations the purport to.

It happens all the time for software that is copyleft-licensed in projects that are unwilling to also adopt a copyleft license. For example, it blocks linking the node interpreter to libreadline [0]. On the other hand, cpython is also permissively licensed, yet it does link to the same library, so who knows what the legality of linking against a GPL lib really is.

[0] https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/5608

The likely confounding variable is just age: the oldest segments of the US population are the most caucasian, and these are the populations least like to use smartphones. So the correlation may be spurious.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confounding

Good:

- Sidebar for navigation

Bad:

- Wasted screen space

- Other languages are not available as a simple anchor tag anymore. They are hidden behind <button> elements. It's annoying for readers who consult their own language and en.wikipedia.org in the same session. It breaks my bookmarklet to change languages, which depended on something like `document.querySelectorAll('a')`

Very interesting.

Anyone has any idea about the technology that could be used for imaging more dense ICs and multilayer PCBs? In a presentation elsewhere, Ken says that he used a metallurgical telescope and USB microscope. So the imaging is done with visible light and limited resolution. It is enough for old chips, e.g. the 8086 discussed in this article is made with a 3um process.

As I look around I see recent Intel chips haven't been reversed. [0] There are allusions to x-ray tomography and electron microscopes [1]. Anyway a plebs can get close for cheap?

[0] https://reverseengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/5878/...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOZqoTuAGKY

The current backlash is not against globalization per se, but against: ...

I cannot speak about the UK, but in general this isn't all that people are dissatisfied with about globalization. Very many are angry about the loss of a sense of home. If you examine the situation in purely material terms, you won't observe or measure those feelings. For others, the loss of home extends to a loss of community, which extends to a loss of self.

Educated tech people can be software engineers first and English second, while the lower classes are, in my experience, English first, and their profession second. The loss hits harder for them.

I haven't seen media discuss the identitarian dimension of globalisation. I suppose that has to do with media being populated primarily by one social class. Yet I feel that by ignoring them they have been burying nuclear waste for decades.

I don't mean to tell you whether these emotions are "abhorrent racism" or "valid", I just mean say that they are to me the elephant in the room in any discussion of globalisation.

Please check out firenvim, which accomplishes this very useful trick in a site-configurable manner and is compatible with Tridactyl.

https://github.com/glacambre/firenvim

For those who'd like to see similar techniques in action, a popular Youtuber recently made an iron arrowhead using iron age(?) metallurgical techniques [0].

He gathers water containing iron-oxidizing bacteria, he extracts the ore using a sieve, he then smelts the ore with a handmade blast furnace and charcoal he made himself. He then separates prills from the slag and forges them into a knife with a clay mold and said blast furnace. After all that, he has the worlds worst and knife.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhW4XFGQB4o

I don't know what the correct thing to do, but you can easily detect processes that have the LD_PRELOAD environment variable defined. This is a rare enough use case for manual inspection. Something like

``` for f in /proc/*/environ ; do sudo strings $f | >/dev/null grep LD_PRELOAD && echo $f; done ```

400 years ago:

"Equality is prevented by the misperception that sharing land with the Jamestown colony will harm the Algonquin tribes"

I shake my head whenever I see supposed scientists assert that everybody's incentives are aligned, defying both common sense and all of human history. The reality is competition and contention are readily observed in every domain of human life.

To me, articles like this are obvious political agitation.

Since no one seems to know about it, jq is described in great detail on the github wiki page [0]. That flattens the learning curve a lot. It's not as arcane as it seems.

The touted claim that is fundamentally stateless is not true. jq is also stateful in the sense that it has variables. If you want, you can write regular procedural code this way. Some examples [1]

The real problem of jq is that it is currently lacking a maintainer to assess a number of PRs that have accumulated since 2018.

[0] https://github.com/stedolan/jq/wiki/jq-Language-Description

[1] https://github.com/fadado/JBOL/blob/master/fadado.github.io/...

There's a video game that never bores me called Linux. You should try it out.

In Linux, you can download software, and learn to use it to solve a wide array of problems. You can edit files, one of life's simple pleasures. If you find yourself repeating a task, you can find ways to automate it. Doing an old task faster means you levelled up, which gets the blood flowing. You can explore vast worlds (ecosystems/code bases) and satisfy your intellectual/narrative curiosity. The game has multiplayer elements too.

All of this is lots of *fun* if you're not doing for $JOB. I'm personally addiccted to this video game, and play it hours daily.

The above is sort of a joke, but I really do feel this way. Linux+OSS is a video game.

I'm constantly worried that despite the increased understanding we have relative to past generations, the increasing scope of our technological interventions means that global catastrophes seem more likely to occur relative to the past. [0]

Look at the convulsions we need to go through to address climate change politically, and realize that it is only one of maybe a thousand potential grave threats, each of which pits collective well-being against technological/monetary interests. Some may even struggle to be recognized as a threat (antibiotic overuse, microplastics).

It's a good time to be doomer.

[0] https://sacawa.net/documents/test.pdf

Don't buy domain names

Can anyone explain this? Assuming your data isn't in the WHOIS record, why does this increase your exposure more than any other company knowing your name?

A search shows up options for anonymous domain name services.

While this information is true, I am frustrated that the baseline for appropriate government is set by what happens in the west, or the status quo, or what makes Brussels give us pats on the back. It doesn't take a genius to see that this sort of norm for foreign policy always favours the incumbent.

So I propose that we don't ask why TK doesn't recognize EU law supremacy, but rather reflect that presence in EU means losing sovereignty. This is a consequential loss. The accession occurred without most people realizing this would happen. They believed in an economic union.

I also propose to question the implicit norm, that it's appropriate for an American media conglomerate to own the largest TV network in the country. Western countries are embattled on all fronts. Does it benefit us to have their media in control of our media? My intuition has always been that decision-making apparatus should be located close to the populations it affects. Otherwise it tends in the direction of imperialism.

I feel frustrated by the person who thinks things are going well when Brussels is giving us a pat on the back and thumbs up... ciepła woda w kranie, then it's all good. And who ignores that with the EU connections, we are silently ceding more and more of our sovereignty. In my view, these people are short-sighted and incautious.

PL may not be a real democracy anymore, but EU never was one. We don't elect the President of the European Comission, the head of the executive branch. Bureaucrats decide that. And their pick José Manuel Barroso went to Goldman Sachs shortly after leaving office...

I don't want a person like this at the head of the executive branch of the union with legal supremacy over my country. I much prefer Kaczor and an army of moherowych beretów. Przynajmniej swojskie.