Posts by RoyBrander@urbanists.social
(DIR) Post #AbZs4GjlfXXCz8J6jw by RoyBrander@urbanists.social
2023-11-07T22:51:13Z
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@stefano I've got the paper copy from 2003, with Theo's most-restrained-blurb-in-history on the cover."People have been clamoring for an OpenBSD book, and Michael has stepped up to provide one."I mean, he could have tossed in the word "good", to be nice.I miss the drinking sessions that we'd have after the Hackathon guys every year had given a talk to the Calgary Unix Users Group. Some OpenBSD contributors led interesting lives...
(DIR) Post #Ac0TQbUjB7XHmfCORc by RoyBrander@urbanists.social
2023-11-20T18:51:45Z
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@tante I got the fulsome praise and the final cut-down from the same early adopter in the same conversation.I'm the techie to all my friends, but this guy is MY guru, always ahead of the curve. Jumped on coding with AI the moment it was available and enthused to me about saving 90% of the time for routine little subroutines like "Filter correct date" that he's written 100X, and can eyeball-check in seconds, saves him ten minutes.I asked "is it as useful as spreadhseets?"No.
(DIR) Post #AcVhOOnip8zT5vgSsS by RoyBrander@urbanists.social
2023-12-05T20:23:38Z
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@clive So, he just published a paper. On the frontiers of Black Hole Theory.Yesterday.Why did you write "back in the day"? Oh, you *meant* "yesterday". Got it.
(DIR) Post #AcVlnbGQ1YCyntNYBs by RoyBrander@urbanists.social
2023-12-05T20:59:30Z
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@clive Yeah, I was merely joshin' ya.(I know, shouldn't do that on the Internet, you can't see me wink.)
(DIR) Post #AcdxbLWqLdGTqDuBOq by RoyBrander@urbanists.social
2023-12-09T20:03:15Z
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@clive I'm sorry, is this an attempt at humour, or does he really believe that the Good Republicans Are Coming At Last?Probably put in a lot of time on the Susan Collins Waiting for Enlightenment Watch. I believe that Watch is not yet Ended.Daniel Judt, son of history great Tony Judt and co-author of Tony's last book, has already told Democrats how to win:https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/voting-rights-canvassing/622095/...they just have to stop pandering to rich donors and win over volunteers. Never been a better time.
(DIR) Post #AcgOLOYaPLgDg6G68O by RoyBrander@urbanists.social
2023-12-11T00:11:34Z
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@simon You're trying to sell a spreadsheet that gets WRONG ANSWERS 5% of the time with free access to one that's wrong 15% of the time. Not the same.By my value of "wrong answer" which means "I have to put in more work on it, just as if I'd written it all myself".Early scanning was ineffective because of a .2% error rate; 10 mistakes per 5000-char page. But then you had to find them, get the cursor there, and fix them.Patching up AI verbiage or code may be the same just now.
(DIR) Post #AckBkXC8uJsUw6G27c by RoyBrander@urbanists.social
2023-12-12T20:09:38Z
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@clive Yes, we are a total monolith with no internal dissension on the matter.Kidding.We have ONE province that is, you are right, a "petrostate", where oil&gas prosperity needs sweep all other facts and problems away.The other 90% of the country, and the Feds, not so much.The Feds keep hoping to just smooth the fight over with subsidies, concessions.They're hoping to skate another year or two, to when the industry starts folding up by itself. The oilsands will die first.
(DIR) Post #AhfJPM6cWTX4Y0VKxU by RoyBrander@urbanists.social
2024-05-08T00:29:04Z
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@scalzi Now you tell us; I have to call up a whole bunch of cell members and tell them to stop seizing the means of production.
(DIR) Post #AhjJrlQWka7TouCYr2 by RoyBrander@urbanists.social
2024-05-09T23:24:19Z
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@foone Thanks for me suddenly realizing why my memory has been so spotty since Age 25.
(DIR) Post #AiMKCOClrSpX2q2V3Q by RoyBrander@urbanists.social
2024-05-28T19:04:39Z
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@aral https://archive.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/history/0623strategy.htmI am mercifully numb to these stories since this one, 33 years ago.170,000 dead Iraqi kids under the age of 5. Killed by epidemics of cholera and typhus.When the water treatment plants all stopped after America bombed the civilian power plants.Knowing that this would have no military effect because military bases have their own power.The Pentagon admitted it was specifically to create postwar "leverage" over the civilians.https://archive.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/history/0623strategy.htm
(DIR) Post #AiSOHx6187X7TEY1y4 by RoyBrander@urbanists.social
2024-05-31T17:19:15Z
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@rms That was utterly undermined already by the prosecution of an aggressive war after the UN Security Council denied an application for a UN Police Action against Iraq, like the one granted in 1990.Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson first charged "aggressive war" as the "kingpin" war crime that "makes all the other war crimes possible"...before he prosecuted for the Holocaust, as a secondary.So you can't get worse than Iraq at "undermining".
(DIR) Post #AkuAvagBBSYtPRTrJg by RoyBrander@urbanists.social
2024-08-12T20:21:19Z
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@HeavenlyPossum Young 'uns who've grown up in the world where America was GloboCop and thereby responsible for everything.Could you kids remember that in 1940, fascists overran France and rounded up Jews into camps, while bombing 40,000 Londoners to death....while America just watched and shrugged, not their problem; only entered when personally attacked.It's hard to blame the indifference to Londoners dying in the Blitz as "racism".It's not 'normalized'. It was always normal.
(DIR) Post #AnGr3GmkYAwpZ6JcTw by RoyBrander@urbanists.social
2024-10-22T17:05:28Z
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@sullybiker @stefano It's sad that you think that, because industries in general oppose the idea.I saw young engineers just aching to get that first supervisory job, not in the area they'd just barely trained in for a few years, and shed the notion of "techie" work and a "techie" reputation as fast as possible, to look more "management".
(DIR) Post #ArDLk5jOGInpQNcGAK by RoyBrander@urbanists.social
2025-02-17T06:00:19Z
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@golgaloth @bookstodon I set this up for myself about 10 years back, when we moved to the retirement place, and I had to part with half my books first.I asked a bespoke furniture company to look at it, and the guy researched up the single-track bronze wheels the page shows. It was ~$10K back then. Utterly worth it.https://brander.ca/library/
(DIR) Post #ArElHPXgJkHcR65GzY by RoyBrander@urbanists.social
2025-02-18T04:31:24Z
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@fatsam There's the famous story in Freakonomics of the wine snobs who, when subjected to double-blind testing, could not tell expensive from inexpensive.The people with these devices should be subjected to double-blind testing on espresso from $32K equipment and $320 equipment.
(DIR) Post #AsNAkyi1i8VNXD7MvY by RoyBrander@urbanists.social
2025-03-23T16:34:16Z
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@clive It's awkward when such triggering stories don't come with names or any other specifics.
(DIR) Post #AsNAnLHWl1eY7aqmX2 by RoyBrander@urbanists.social
2025-03-23T16:41:59Z
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@clive How about "which state"? CBC today has a story of two musician sisters being harassed at length by Ohio police, and the Ohio police calling the complaint 'hate mongering'.https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/9.6694117I'm just wondering if we can start mapping which US States have serving MAGA cops actively promoting their politics.
(DIR) Post #AvrTg3RPAZZ3u1R8pE by RoyBrander@urbanists.social
2025-07-06T16:04:39Z
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@futurebird It's the urge to be out of the modern "rat race" and Back to the Farm. When those first 1980s nuclear apocalypse movies came out, most of the young audience had grown up with grandparents who were still on the farm, and it was this idyllic place on vacation. (I once asked MY parents where "The Farm" was, since every kid in class was going to "The Farm" that summer.)When nuclear apocalypse became very unlikely, we invented the Zombie Apocalypse to dream of No Rat Race.
(DIR) Post #AzkGHni72nKuZOG3t2 by RoyBrander@urbanists.social
2025-10-21T18:26:15Z
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@Paulatics @brodiefenlon To me, it's been so painfully obvious that Carney could do a cost-free Trump-like political stunt that gains attention, gets press, and is hard to complain about: get the Feds off Twitter and loudly insist that the provincial administrations do the same. Then the munis.How many Twitter accounts do our 3 levels of government have? How many journalists only stay on to follow gov't announcements?But it's free - Trump can hardly bitch about lost "business"...
(DIR) Post #B0JgFSj9d1wZgolQtU by RoyBrander@urbanists.social
2025-11-16T22:05:46Z
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@mms All of us who took any science degree at the University of Calgary through the late 70s and early 80s remember MULTICS.Indeed we could compare our experiences on the CDC running MULTICS and the VAX minis running UNIX.And, you know, MULTICS had some great features. The best was that you had a personal account, and also a "project account" - or six - and depending on your project login, the bills went to a diff project. More importantly, each had separate storage space and config.