Unlurker

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"Spaghetti-Grows-on-Trees" Hoax: One of TV's First April Fools' Pranks (openculture.com)

Reminds me of a) the breathtaking vox pop done by the BBC [0] in 1978 as metric adoption nipped at their imperial heels, and some spectacularly bewildered misunderstandings manifested -- the first citizen here inventing the word kilomileometres and (I wish she were joking) asserting that your car's mileage is reduced because you'll be using litres, and b) the comedy radio show I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue, running since the 1970's but includes a game called Mornington Crescent [1] (since season 6) wherein the panel take it in turns to 'get to Mornington Crescent' using the London Underground map as a playing board. Many rules and variations are cited and vaguely explained, but it's all just made up -- nonetheless there has been an abundance of people who've listened to this madness, and then written to the BBC to demand a rulebook. The point? Not sure. Does this reflect positively upon the some style of comedy favoured by the Brits, or negatively about their credulity? As a nominal Brit, I can't comment with any impartiality. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykthWUdkhu0 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mornington_Crescent_(game)

My grandfather was still talking of this in the 90s. A very good joke!

Related: Spaghetti-Tree Hoax - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34572174 - Jan 2023 (95 comments) Spaghetti-Tree Hoax - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30962453 - April 2022 (1 comment) Spaghetti-Tree Hoax - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25383763 - Dec 2020 (2 comments)

I miss British humor. This doesn't seem like something that would ever happen today.

GCC SC approves inclusion of Algol 68 Front End (gcc.gnu.org)

In my mind this highlights something I've been thinking about, the differences between FOSS influenced by corporate needs vs FOSS driven by the hacker community. FOSS driven by hackers is about increasing and maintaining support (old and new hardware, languages etc..) while FOSS influenced by corporate needs is about standardizing around 'blessed' platforms like is happening in Linux distributions with adoption of Rust (architectures unsupported by Rust lose support).

As a fan of Algol 68, I'm pretty excited for this. For people who aren't familiar with the language, pretty much all modern languages are descended from Algol 60 or Algol 68. C descends from Algol 60, so pretty much every popular modern language derives from Algol in some way [1]. [1] https://ballingt.com/assets/prog_lang_poster.png

Yes, massively influential, but was it ever used or popular?, I always think of it as sort of the poster child for the danger of "design by committee". Sure it's ideas spawned many of today's languages, But wasn't that because at the time nobody could afford to actually implement the spec. So we ended up with a ton of "algols buts" (like algol but can actually be implemented and runs on real hardware).

Used extensively on Burroughs mainframes.

Personally, I think the whole C tangent was a misstep and would love to see Algo 68 turn into Algo 26 or 27. I sort of like C and C++ and many other languages which came, but they have issues. I think Algo 68 could develop into something better than C++, it has some of the pieces already in place. Admittedly, every language I really enjoy and get along with is one of those languages that produced little compared to the likes of C (APL, Tcl/Tk, Forth), and as a hobbyist I have no real stake in the game.

Whilst I think that C has its place, my personal choice of Algol 26 or 27 would be CLU – a highly influential, yet little known and underrated Algol inspired language. CLU is also very approachable and pretty compact.

Meta buried 'causal' evidence of social media harm, US court filings allege (reuters.com)

Who is surprised? Fuck zuckerberg

I just hope that in 100 years time, people will be shocked at the prevalence of social media these past 2 decades

One of the worst outcomes of the last 20 years is how Big Tech companies have successfully propagandized us that they're neutral arbiters of information, successfully blaming any issues with "The Algorithm" [tm]. Section 230 is meant to be a safe harbor for a platform not to be considered a publisher but where is the line between hosting content and choosing what third-party content people see? I would argue that if you have sufficient content, you could de facto publish any content you want by choosing what people see. "The Algorithm" is not some magical black box. Everything it does is because some human tinkered with it to produce a certain result. The thumb is constantly being put on the scale to promote or downrank certain content. As we're seeing in recent years, this is done to cozy up to certain administrations. The First Amendment really is a double-edged sword here because I think these companies absolutely encourage unhealthy behavior and destructive content to a wide range of people, including minors. I can't but help consider the contrast with China who heavily regulate this sort of thing. Yes, China also suppresses any politically sensitive content but, I hate to break it to you, so does every US social media company.

Your solution to the government putting pressure on social media companies to censor is to give the government more power over them by removing section 230?

I already knew Zuck was a piece of shit before readying Careless People but holy shit.

> In a text message in 2021, Mark Zuckerberg said that he wouldn’t say that child safety was his top concern “when I have a number of other areas I’m more focused on like building the metaverse.” > Zuckerberg also shot down or ignored requests by Clegg to better fund child safety work.

I do not see any equivalence between corporate power and government power. The population as a whole controls government power. Corporate power is constrained only by government power. I think one of the most pernicious notions in our society is that the idea that "the government" is something separate from ordinary people. Of course, our current government has a lot of problems, but that doesn't mean I don't want the government to have power. I just want it to have power to do what the population actually wants it to do (or, perhaps, what the population will actually be happiest with). What would be your proposed mechanism for empowering individuals? How would such a mechanism not ultimately rely on the individual leveraging some larger external power structure (like a government)? I think if we want to empower all individuals roughly equally (i.e., not in proportion to their wealth or the like), then what we wind up with is something I'd call a government. Definitely not the one we have, but government nonetheless.

Bullshit. I have no control whatsoever over the government. It is completely separate from me. I have 1000x more power over Amazon by my ability to choose to not buy from them than my vote gives me over government bureaucracy. That's why whenever I have a problem with an Amazon order it is resolved in minutes when I contact support. Good luck if you have a problem with the government.

Just nationalize the company. Make shareholders fear this so much that they keep executives in check.

So punish the owners of the company because it's harmful, but keep the harmful company around just now controlled by the government?

We are in this situation because we elect people who do not hold the capital class accountable. Look at the people we elect. How would them running companies be any better?

We are in the situation because the capital class have turned the people we elect into servile puppets. Because they have simply been allowed to become too big and powerful.

I disagree with you there. We need to stop infantilising politicians.

Just a few days ago, someone replied to one of my comments saying that considering the lives of people who aren't born yet is a completely immoral thing to do, meaning making anyone alive today sacrifice something to protect the planet in 100 years is immoral. So I guess people can find all sorts of justifications.

People are being harmed today , not just hypothetical people born 100 years later.

> To the company’s disappointment, “people who stopped using Facebook for a week reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness and social comparison,” internal documents said. I don't think it's even a stretch at this point to compare Meta to cigarette companies.

At minimum, Stricter and revised gambling laws should certainly apply to attention consumption where recommendation algo's are used.

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Ubuntu LTS releases to 15 years with Legacy add-on (canonical.com)

This gives me a good sense of how old these versions are: https://documentation.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-for-developers/reference/availability/python/ 14.04 LTS has Python 3.4 as well as Python 2.7.

I've used Canonical's free 3-seat extended service mantainence (ESM) support on my one 14.04 LTS machine for a long time. It's so nice having a stable target for more than decade for my personal projects. I have so much software defined radio software that absolutely does break in ways I can't fix on a newer version of any Debian-alike. The ESM program has been a provider of peace of mind when still leaving that SDR machine connected to the internet and running javascript. >30-day trial for enterprises. Always free for personal use. >Free, personal subscription for 5 machines for you or any business you own This "Pro" program also being free is a suprise to be sure, but a welcome one.

Its unclear if this legacy patch will be free for personal use.

There’s at least one customer somewhere willing to pay $1 million for that. Plus adding a general feeling of confidence to the product as a whole. And safety knowing that you can upgrade for an extra 5 years of support if you need it.

The level of confidence is pretty incredible. Coming from someone who got hurt by CentOS.

A year without caffeine (2013) (bryanalexander.org)

I am coming up on a year without caffeine like this guy. I was never addicted like he was, nor did I face severe health problems from it. I just noticed that the quality of my decision making went way down on caffeine. I was not able to prioritize things properly. I would feel strangely tired or lazy sometimes or way too energized. Now without caffeine, every day I feel stable, productive, and happy.

Someone who used to be a prolific commenter here, who was also an emergency medicine nurse(!), pointed out that for the most part, for long-term caffeine addicts, everything "good" about caffeine was simply the cessation of withdrawal symptoms. Withdrawal cessation feels great! You can stay that way all the time if you like. I had a rough bout of insomnia 10 years or so ago, and one of the things I did as a result was to cut caffeine completely. I thought it would be super hard to do. Maybe it was? I don't remember, it's been so long. I have no idea why I'd ever deliberately consume material amounts caffeine again. I think it's probably a garbage drug. Whether it's strictly true or not that it has no beneficial effects once you're acclimated to it, telling myself that made quitting really easy, so I recommend just accepting the idea. There are better addictions to nurture.

I used to get chronic headaches all through high school. I exclusively drank Mt Dew. When I got to college I was too lazy/cheap to actually go buy soda for my dorm, so I inadvertently went cold turkey. I had a headache for about a week, then after that, my years of chronic headaches were solved. I went a good 10-15 years without a drop of soda and I’ve never had coffee. The only caffeine I got would have been a little from chocolate, which was never eaten for the caffeine. More recently I’ll have the occasional soda, typically only if I’m sick. I’ll have a Dr Pepper.

I have never drunk coffee. However, I do take a very very small dose of caffeine pills. The pills are 200mg but I break them into tiny pieces and micro dose around noon with last dose around 3pm. Some days I take 100mg total, other days I take 200mg total. Another thing I do is eat proper food at same time because otherwise I become jittery. I also cycle off caffeine or taper the doses every few months when I am travelling. My stomach is solid. Does anyone know if the acidity is from coffee or caffeine itself?

200mg/day is not a "very very small dose". FDA recommended maximum safe amount is 400mg/day.

A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure (sacbear.com)

Couldn't cell or Starlink substitute in this day and age? 5G cells are pretty prolific now. So even if you might not want to actually leave, it's a perfectly good threat and functions as competition in their eyes.

I had this same daily connection disruption problem with Xfinity on the east coast, on two different lines in the same building. But, one difference is that the two lines would fail at different times, not at the exact same time (so not the cause guessed by Gemini, in my case). I always assumed it was Comcast automating downtime to prevent anyone using the lines for business without paying Comcast Business prices. I had the two locations connected by fiber and used multi WAN for both load balancing and failover, so the combined uptime was basically 100% because each line was down many times per day, but they were always down at different, non-overlapping times. My guess is that this failure mode is quite common, whether or not it's intentional. I would love to see this be something a lot of us here can coordinate on jointly pushing Comcast to solve!

When you need a company like that to do something, figure out what they're afraid of. The only thing monopolies like these are afraid of is the government. So if you want them to get off their asses yesterday, raise a stink with whatever arm of your government will listen: FCC, local politicians, etc. You would not believe how fast even the lowest level government workers can get these guys to take care of your problem with a single phone call.

gotta ask, just because i went through this with spectrum recently. have you grabbed an extension cord and tried connecting the modem outside at the drop for awhile? i hear you that your neighbor has the same issue. but if youre in. say a development by the same builder, or were all part of a comcast upgrade at roughly the same time .. and well… you both recently upgraded to 1.2(?) because that would be the latter case after my gig upgrade and a few tech visits i ended up finding a splitter that only goes up to 800mhz or so (if that) inside a wallplate. TLDR: you might have a 5-1000mhz splitter. thats widely used by comcast still. MORE: OFDM is 1008mhz or so and you wouldnt notice the problem under, or maybe just UP TO gigabyte speeds (eg: downgrading to 500mb might mysteriously “fix” it). but you WILL notice this at 1.2gb. spectrum is future proofing and using 5-2500mhz splitters ANECODTAL: my modem locked with the 800mhz splitter, but it dropped , cycled and had horrible upload speeds. techs never tried or thought of this . the final boss tech took photos and even took the splitter back to show his boss. i guess multiple units had tickets after the gig upgrade and they had an “aha” moment. TECHNICAL: i would expect something more like multiplexing errors in this situation. forgive me because im 20 years out of the game (was an RF/install tech on analog CATV , and cable modems when those were brand new to Charter) and had to look it up but i think docsis 3.1 is dependent on 957–1151 MHz or 1008–1152 MHz its that 1008+mhz where now your splitter is acting like a 5-1000mhz filter. its not perfect like okay maybe 4-1003mhz gets through the filter maybe even more permissive if its a cheap one. but thats NOT a clean signal for that frequency band its more like bleed-through. sort of similar to traps (the little barrels theyd screw onto your line to block you from getting pay channels in the olden days) and how you STILL could sort of see and hear. a little bit of what was going on on cinemax at 3am and at least get the IDEA. :>

I had an old 15+ year old line when I moved in. Helped my neighbor cut a few hundred of his monthly by getting xfinity and they ran a brand new drop for him. Then just recently they "upgraded" my line. But I don't have any splitter or filter its just a connector with a ground that attaches my home cable to the drop cable.

This seems pretty likely, but shouldn't a tech roll have included sampling the signal strength/snr at these frequencies? Or would the tech tools be likely to be on old frequencies too?

If OP is reading this, try downgrading to a Docsis 3.0 modem. Docsis 3.1 in Comcast’s deployed infrastructure has severe repeating outage issues when there’s a cracked line somewhere allowing RF leakage into it, that cause a partial 3.1 reset but have no effect on 3.0.

i touched on this in a longer comment in this thread because i think that docsis 3.0 goes up to 900-1002mhz if downgrading to docsis 3.0 (or downgrading to 500/700mb) “fixed” your issue, you probably have a 5-1000mhz splitter thats not just a rf splitter but also, a filter and its JUST leaky enough to allow 1002mhz through. or maybe the modems happy negotiating down to 900mhz. but maybe not quite enough for 1008-1100+ required by docsis 3.1 there will be anecdotal reports of a 5-1000mhz splitter “working just fine” maybe that ones a REALLY leaky filter thats also allowing 1008mhz. or also a case of negotiating a lower channel… gigabit speed and docsis 3.0 are about the threshold for the 5-1000mhz problems would manifest with docsis 3.1, gigabit speed(maybe) and then almost guaranteed at 1.2 gig service+ this idea of “sensitive channels” is extremely close to nailing it splitters fail as well. they’ll bleed through AND filter bands theyre not supposed to. but i didnt seize on that or inside wiring for OP because “the neighbor gets it too” im on a gigabit implementation that has to have +/- 1100mhz , and my own woes uncovered an 800mhz splitter inside a wallplate. it would lock. it would even run at gig somehow. just not very well. its a 5-2500mhz splitter now. a 5-1200mhz would also do (for now) everyone on your tap should be using multiplexed signals, and you should have a good 300mhz or so to play with and lock onto. but if every single one of you gets kneecapped at +/- 1000mhz, then theres a really congested 100mhz band and another 100-200mhz thats open for everyone but you cant lock on to it.

NTSB report: Decryption of images from the Titan submersible camera [pdf] (2024) (data.ntsb.gov)

Wasn't the pilot Stockton Rush? His wife was alive. Who are you referring to? I tried to check your claim but I couldn't verify it.

There was only one other crew member in that vessel (well, actual crew and not paper "mission specialist"). He was an older gentleman, and it's quite common for older people to have lost their spouse. Was that so hard to figure out?

they're talking about nargeolet > Wreck expert Paul-Henri "P.H." Nargeolet, who was also onboard, told me he wasn't worried about what would happen if the structure of the Titan itself were damaged when at the bottom of the ocean. "Under that pressure, you'd be dead before you knew there was a problem." He said it with a smile. (as recounted by Arnie Weissmann, in Travel Weekly article published June 22, 2023)

Yeah I got the roles of pilot and guide mixed https://www.newyorker.com/news/a-reporter-at-large/the-titan-submersible-was-an-accident-waiting-to-happen

Took me forever to find the actual quote - ChatGPT and Gemini kept trying to gaslight me that it’s not a real quote or that Willie said it to Bart until I gave the exact quote (at which point normal search engines were fine): > A certain agitator, for privacy's sake, let's call her Lisa S. No, that's too obvious, let's say L. Simpson. Lisa the Vegetarian

If you google “Lisa S L Simpson” it’s the first thing that comes up… why make it harder with AI?

In the future, Frinkiac [0] is your friend [0] https://frinkiac.com/

It appears to be a Teensy 3.2 The "carrier" that everything rides on within the housing is clearly FDM printed as well. I assume these cameras (rated to 6,000 meters) are rather low volume products.

It honestly makes sense. You are paying for the pressure engineering, and can take advantage of an off the shelf camera system. Maybe use a special lens or filter or something but why bother customizing the software/hardware of the camera much. They probably should still know what it's doing though...

> No data with a timestamp after May 16th was found on the camera, so it is likely that none of the data recorded on the SD Card were of the accident voyage or dive. Evidently the camera data was recorded to an external SSD card in the mission computer when the accident occurred. The investigation team actually managed to salvage the PC as well: https://data.ntsb.gov/Docket/Document/docBLOB?ID=19169363&FileExtension=pdf&FileName=DCA23FM036%20Electronic%20Devices3_party%20review-Rel.pdf Sadly it turned into a compressed ball of metal...

Pretty sure tech exists to recover data from flash memory with cracked dies... I guess they decided it wasn't worth pursuing.

Wow. SubC’s software engineering needs some work. They thought the camera’s file system was unencrypted, when it was encrypted. They didn’t know where the keys were to decrypt it. It turned out the key was written unencrypted to a UFS storage device. There was a file written to /mnt/nas/Stills, which indicates that the camera was to writing to a remote file system that wasn’t mounted.

> They thought the camera’s file system was unencrypted, when it was encrypted. Willing to bet plenty of hn readers are unaware of encryption going on at lower layers of the tech stack than they're aware of. For example most hard drives encrypt all data, even when not commanded to, as a way to do 'data whitening' (ie making sure there are even numbers of 0's and 1's in the data stream and not some pattern which might throw off tracking.) The encryption key is simply stored elsewhere in the drive - or nvram or in the firmware. But it means if you extract the physical magnetic surface and read it with the right microscope, you might well find the data encrypted with no available key.

TSA to charge $18 fee for travelers without Real ID or passport (washingtonpost.com)

While I don’t feel one way or another about this w.r.t. charging this fee to people without a Real ID who show up with a normal ID, as someone who has just lost their ID entirely, or shown up accidentally to the airport without it - This totally makes sense. The amount of effort it takes for a TSA agent (granted, this is mostly entirely fabricated effort, this seems like a more solved problem, but I digress) to verify my identity the few times this had happened is well worth $18. It’s not a quick phone call to an external agency and you rattle off your social; it’s a whole shebang. “Did you live at x? Who else lived at that address with you?” “What was your sisters last address before her current” “What was the second address you lived at in [city]” To be entirely honest, the whole thing was super entertaining. I think part of it was just it made me feel like some super spy. Anyway - good on them for charging a few bucks. Don’t forget your ID or get your ID updated. (Sidenote: this line of questioning wasn’t this interesting every time. Sometimes it is more like a one and done question, but I am at my most impressed with TSA when it seems like they actually do give a fuck, and the times it’s been an in-depth line of questioning has stuck with me)

>This totally makes sense. But asking people to show ID to vote is racist, right? There's nothing about the process of obtaining a "real id" that makes sense.

Why do they need to identify you for a domestic flight anyway? In Europe I don't need to show ID for flights inside the Schengen Area. You go through security, they check your luggage and it's done. There is no legitimate reason for the government to identify you on a domestic flight

The majority of travelers are ID-compliant — around 94 percent, according to the TSA. It seems crazy to me that 6% of travelers are going to the airport without ID. (I presume that accompanied minors who aren't required to show ID are included in the 94%)

I have done at least 20 flights with no ID. Long story. But yeah this would be clutch for dumbasses like me.

We have time.

Renewing non-REAL ID driver's license is online. Getting a REAL ID requires a trip to DMV, and this is why I am avoiding it. Essentially for this reason, i am just choosing to renew my regular ID instead of getting a REALID one. The good thing is I have many ids that can be used in lieu of REAL ID: - Passport card - Passport - Global entry card So I will probably never get a REAL ID until California does away with non-REAL ID ids.

>Getting a REAL ID requires a trip to DMV Getting a real id requires you to bring in paperwork that doesn't exist for me anymore. They want a utility bill? I do everything paperless. I am unable to get a real id because of their ridiculous "proof" requirements. It's not about identifying people. I have a passport and can show that to them. I have a global entry card. Both qualify as a substitute for a real id. But I cannot use the global entry card as a form of proof of identity. No, please bring a landline telephone bill to us. It's just another humiliation ritual.