Michael Knudsen @mk@bsd.network

YOU HAVE PERHAPS HEARD THE PHRASE THAT HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE?
"Yes. Yes, of course." Death nodded. IN TIME, he said, YOU WILL LEARN THAT IT IS WRONG.

Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

#GNUTerryPratchett, #SpeakHisName, #Discworld

I found out recently about the federal interagency Access Pass, which grants free admission to National Parks and other recreation lands to U.S. citizens and residents with permanent disabilities. I just went through the process online, and it took under 24 hours to have my pass approved. I hope other disabled people can also benefit! The pass also does NOT have Trump’s fucking face on it but instead has a cool bird, so that’s another benefit. https://www.recreation.gov/interagency-pass/types/access #disability #nature #uspol

This is FASCINATING. Researchers were able to pin down the cause of measurable global 60 second power spikes to software that does regular tasks on the minute mark. They found large scale battery installations as one major cause, but obviously this is true for any other computerized system that does cron jobs and has a synchronized clock. As weird as it sounds, adding random 0-59.999s delays to cron jobs in Linux distributions and other software would actually help the power grid.

https://www.fz-juelich.de/en/news/archive/press-release/2026/mystery-of-60-second-fluctuations-in-power-grids-solved

There is no such thing as "ethically using AI". AI is trained on stolen data. AI is destroying the environment and communities. AI is making us stupid. Use AI if you want, just don't pretend you're doing it in ethical way.

This guy shows how to make a ghost for a movie using practical effects

[📹 alexgv_ee]

My favorite Patrick Stewart story arose out of a chance encounter. We happened both to be seated on the same flight in the same cabin near one another. I looked over and saw a familiar bald pate and furrowed brow.

“Aren't you…?” I asked him.

He looked over and his face lit up with delight. Then he spoke to me in that unmistakable proper manner of his.

“Well aren't YOU!” he responded, his eyes twinkling.

We had a good laugh. Rest in power—warp power—Sir Patrick Stewart.

​​

@cryptohagen gad vide hvor mange af de fremmødte der bruger claude eller chatgpt hver dag, de gider bare ikke have datacenteret liggende i deres egen baghave?

Hvis man bruger LLMer i skyen, og samtidig protesterer mod nye datacentre, så er det vel egentlig bare en stemme for at sende DC problemerne videre til andre?

ps. Jeg er selv modstander af hyperscale AI datacentre, men jeg bruger heller ikke LLM teknologi.

I love it how this guy turned his mid-level tech career into a whole influencer brand.

“Did I mention, I’m a staff engineer?”

I had a really good afternoon at work yesterday.

I had a long pair-debugging session with a junior colleague, helping to track down a crash in something they were in the middle of writing. We started from the visible crash and backtracked to find the root cause, investigating everything along the way that looked odd.

We were expecting one bug, but ended up finding two. The load instruction that first put a bogus value into a register was loading from a totally wrong address, *and* there was some weird data at that address that shouldn't have been there, and those two wrong things had independent causes.

Neither bug by itself would have caused the crash: it needed both. If we'd found only one of them – for example by jumping to a conclusion, speculatively fixing something, and observing that the crash had gone away – then we'd have thought the whole problem was fixed, and been wrong. But by going through methodically to the point where the first weird thing happened, we were able to find both bugs. We fixed one on the spot, and ended the session knowing what to do about the other.

My colleague had asked for help with the aim of learning debugging skills (both low-level and general) as well as getting the bug fixed. I don't always have success when I do this on real-world problems, because if the problem turns out to be too hard, I can't solve it _and_ explain what I'm doing at the same time. Here, it was just about right: challenging, but not too much so.

I learned things too. We had to use LLDB rather than GDB, and I'm not nearly as familiar with LLDB, and now I'm more so. (It has a proper hex-dump command!) So it was a useful learning experience on both sides, as well as a successful bug-fixing exercise. They apologised afterwards for taking up my whole afternoon, but I think it was time well spent.

And to put the icing on the cake, nobody at any point suggested throwing an LLM at anything.

The only thing that bothers me about it is that this kind of experience is now rare enough in my life that I feel moved to toot about it when it happens!

Nanny could find an innuendo in ‘Good morning.’ She could certainly find one in ‘innuendo.’ (Carpe Jugulum)

#TerryPratchett #quotes #quote #bot

I am getting excited about an upcoming generation of WiFi hackers which will add support for 11n and 11ac to the NetBSD kernel without wrapping Linux drivers in a compatibility layer. It's been kind of lonely in this territory over the past 10 years or so.