Post Aqfk3GYp2ZLreHFrO4 by danmcd@hostux.social
(DIR) More posts by danmcd@hostux.social
(DIR) Post #AqfEQ23zuSTmoVeHaK by Unixbigot@aus.social
2025-01-29T22:59:52Z
1 likes, 2 repeats
“WHO DARES AWAKEN ME FROM MY AEONS-LONG SLUMBER?!”“Yes, very good, excellent delivery, forgive me for not laughing, but you’re the sixth one today. You girls should have workshopped your jokes together before going into stasis”“Oh. Ah? How long have we got until the big 10k, and how are my investments doing? And do you still have updog in the future?”“It’s 2288, forget about year ten thousand we’ve got bigger problems. Your investments tanked in the quantum wars. And nice try but the last corpsicle got me with that one”“Fuck. What now?”“Asteroid impact is what now”“Cool, and you need programmers to calculate how to divert it.”“Nope, we did that already.”“And that worked?”“Noooooot as such, no. Typo in the value of the gravitational constant.”“Woopsy, so you need a cadre of 21st century digital girls to brainstorm a last minute plan B?”“Nope, plan B worked just fine, the folks at the Indonesian moon base worked an incantation to kick the Earth a day forward in time, while the asteroid sailed through the empty spot. Well mostly fine; I can’t get used to the month being four days longer now.”“Aha! You need us to work out how to get the moon back in orbit?”“No, we’ll live with that. We need you to fix the timezone data files”#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot
(DIR) Post #AqfERVwOJP3llYnVVA by baltakatei@twit.social
2025-01-30T11:43:03Z
2 likes, 1 repeats
@Unixbigot “We have interstellar trade so relativistic effects mean there's no centralized canonical epoch anymore. Therefore, all timestamps are branches reticulated on a gravity-velocity spline tree rooted...”“Let me guess: Earth, January 1st, 1970?”“Yup.”
(DIR) Post #AqfjcWsKH7nYQdd1bE by danmcd@hostux.social
2025-01-30T15:36:09Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@baltakatei @Unixbigot Vinge's Zones of Thought books had a snippet about WHY (time_t)0 == 19700101T000000Z and it was nice to see the truth-decay over 1000s of years. Pardon the paraphrase...It was when humans landed on the moon, of course!
(DIR) Post #AqfjcYh3VzyI4GN3JI by resuna@ohai.social
2025-01-30T15:46:37Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@danmcd @baltakatei @Unixbigot Pham Nuwen notes that it's about 15 million seconds off.% clock scan "1969-07-20 20:17" -gmt 1-14182980
(DIR) Post #AqfjchF1jZtmZwKIN6 by danmcd@hostux.social
2025-01-30T18:05:32Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@resuna @baltakatei @Unixbigot OMFG I FORGOT OR MISSED THAT!He *is* good at all of this, that Pham Nuwen!
(DIR) Post #Aqfjci0sreBCyMiVxw by resuna@ohai.social
2025-01-30T18:13:47Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@danmcd @baltakatei @Unixbigot When you're Programmer-At-Arms you have to be.Actually. it was Pham's boss:http://akkartik.name/post/deepness
(DIR) Post #Aqfk3FLJZIx7s5vYh6 by Unixbigot@aus.social
2025-01-30T19:31:16Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@danmcd @baltakatei I’ve only read the first one. Are the others OK, I am burned by Joe Haldeman’s “oh you want a sequel to my beloved standalone novel do you, here [huge turd]”
(DIR) Post #Aqfk3GYp2ZLreHFrO4 by danmcd@hostux.social
2025-01-30T22:17:45Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@Unixbigot @baltakatei Unspoiling.So "A Fire Upon the Deep" was first published, but second chronologically. It's very good, esp. if you were a 1980s USENET user (the parallels are amazing)."A Deepness in the Sky" (the book I spoil slightly) is second published, but takes place before "Fire". It is also very good."The Children of the Sky" is third published AND third chronologically. I wouldn't call it a huge turd, but I believe it to be lesser than the first two, perhaps not by much?
(DIR) Post #Aqfkp0C9Btzgn7PXzk by clacke@libranet.de
2025-02-01T05:47:12Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
In case anyone missed it, there's a wonderful, unfortunately unfinished, AOO called "Programmer at Large", that takes interstellar software archaeology and runs with it.“At the time that this license was popular it was common that the version of the software that would be provided with a license was in a purely binary form that allowed the software to be executed but not easily modified.”“You mean they were just providing people with build artifacts?““That’s correct.”My skin crawled. You can’t crew an interstellar trader without some exposure to local cultures, and the nature of software archaeology is that you often have to understand the historical context in which things were written, but it’s rare to run into such direct evidence of outright perversion.“Do people still do that?”“Approximately 30% of planetary civilizations we visit engage in this practice, but it is commonly understood that it does not make sense for interstellar trade so we rarely encounter the practice directly.”“Wow.”archiveofourown.org/works/9233…@resuna @danmcd @baltakatei @Unixbigot
(DIR) Post #AqfkpSJCfGH7z6vZse by bencurthoys@mastodon.social
2025-01-30T11:52:38Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@TheDefiant604 @Unixbigot You might be as excited as I am about https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/blog/javascript-temporal-is-coming/
(DIR) Post #AqfkpTd5knmK55EyWG by Unixbigot@aus.social
2025-01-30T19:48:43Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@bencurthoys @TheDefiant604 oooooo yes pls
(DIR) Post #AqfkpUZwE0ql1alyF6 by Meyerweb@mastodon.social
2025-01-31T00:35:36Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@bencurthoys @TheDefiant604 @Unixbigot The thing is, Temporal is time-zone aware and can do all kinds of conversions between them… which is probably why the programmer girls were so desperately needed, because Temporal can’t work without the time zone data files!