I don’t know if it’s still a thing in the digital age, but having even just a few seconds of dead air back in the analogue broadcast days could mean that “silence detectors” all over the country would start going off and radio engineers everywhere would think there was some kind of problem with their station. So there had to be talking, music, something at pretty much all times.

If you wanted intentional silence you could play comfort noise in the background.

A “carriage house”, in the backyard of some rich couple who were the landlords. I split it with a buddy. Open holes to the outside that we patched with duct tape. The entire thing listed to one side. It smelled like mold. Zero insulation or climate control of any kind. Landlord still stole food from our fridge when we were away.

Try to get a really early start so you aren’t spending the last few hours driving in darkness. If you haven’t listened to the “Shit town” podcast, it got me through a long drive once. This was on a 2012 car with no smartphone features besides basic bluetooth, but there was a pairing procedure that got audio to at least play (it was really wonky to setup, I had to look it up).

Edit: Big Caveat to my advice on the starting early, be careful if your trip ends inside a huge metro area on a weekday, as bad timing can land you straight into some horrendous rush-hour traffic.

I had a tricky time getting hardware encoding to work and it ultimately ended up being I needed to expose the GPU to the Docker container. The yaml config needed:

    devices:
      - /dev/dri/renderD128:/dev/dri/renderD128
      - /dev/dri/card0:/dev/dri/card0

Note this was on a low-end Synology NAS with some sort of crappy intel GPU, but it actually works now, I was surprised. I only mention because before this I spent lots of time messing around with the Jellyfin settings and only the logs tipped me off. Jellyfin loves to fallback silently to CPU transcoding it seems, which I guess is good, but make troubleshooting unintuitive. Searching for log errors online gave me this solution.

There’s no sleep like class sleep. Five minutes feels like an eight hour rest.

It looks horrific to me. Like a film prop from Cronenberg or Lynch. I think it’s the mix of mechanical motion, a material that reminds me of Jean Jacket’s stomach from Nope, and a structure like a severely prolapsed rectum. No way could I get off in this thing.

If people want to fart around with ffmpeg filters this site is great: https://ffmpeg.lav.io/

Maya and Motionbuilder run on Linux, but that happened before they were hoovered up by the monster. Autodesk just ignores that part of their portfolio. I know a few people who work/have worked on the Maya team and they’re talented, passionate devs, but management just doesn’t give a fuck about Media & Entertainment when Autocad and Revit are making so much money.

This is probably just because it’s DC. The rules get really muddy there. For a long time the highest elected position in DC was head of the school board, and even though ostensibly there’s “home rule” now, Congress still loves to punish the local populace by overriding anything they think scores points with their base back in Idaho. If you get convicted of a felony in DC you actually get transferred to federal prison.

I see it as the continuation of a very old problem. Old school engineering didn’t have any standards until a bunch of people died over and over and the public demanded change. The railroads, construction tycoons, factory owners, mine operators etc all bitterly fought, and still fight, engineering safety requirements. Computer industries have continued this. They all oppose public action, hide negative information, and try to pin blame for conspicuous failures on individuals rather than systemic rot.

I think also because of the relatively less visceral nature of software catastrophes we don’t have a culture of safety. That’s not to say software errors can’t cause horrific accidents but the power grid going down and causing a dozen people in the service area to die is less traumatic than a bridge collapsing and sending a dozen people into an icy river. That’s an extreme example but my point is that humans undervalue harms that are seen as less acutely, physically brutal and software just seems more abstract.

Most of us aren’t working on power grid either, so when you start trying to quantify our software’s risks you have to speak to “harms” rather than just crimes like negligence, and then you expose this huge contradiction about how responsibility is allocated socially. Like, not only should engineers, pilots, and doctors have higher responsibility to prevent harm, but so should cops, journalists, politicians, billionaires, etc.

So the risks are undervalued and both intentionally and unconsciously minimized. The result is most of us who’ve seen the inside are quietly horrified and that’s the end of it.

I don’t know what the answer is except unignorable tragedies because that seems to be the only thing powerful enough to build regulations which are constantly being eroded.

Seems like basically every company is covering up crimes that happen on their properties, and lots of those are sex crimes. I have no data, just anecdotally it’s been almost every company I’ve ever worked for and the experience of virtually every woman I’ve known well enough to talk candidly about this shit. I’m not talking about “nice ass” comments either, I’m talking like, “blow me or you’re fired” type shit.

Not an excuse for Ubisoft, but it’s kind of like how Covid is now endemic so we’re like “oh well”. This disease is so common we apparently don’t give a shit. There was a brief window of hope with “Me Too” but then reactionaries shut that down.

I found the original blog post more educational.

Looks like these may be typosquats, or at least “namespace obfuscation”, imitating more popular packages. So hopefully not too widespread. I think it’s easy to just search for a package name and copy/paste the first .git files, but it’s important to look at forks/stars/issue numbers too. Maybe I’m just paranoid but I always creep on the owners of git repos a little before I include their stuff, but I can’t say I do that for their includes and those includes etc. Like if this was included in hugo or something huge I would just be fucked.

I worked in a place where you dialed in to the PA system, and NOT using your finger to hang up was a rookie move, since the rattling of the receiver was deafening over the speakers. Definitely worse to use a sensor.

You’re fucking incredible, Cowbee. I’ve watched you spend literally days patiently and politely responding to dozens of confrontational, probably bad-faith posters in thread after thread with nothing but solid information. I really admire it.

A pack of six light bulbs. Five of them sheared right off the metal base like wet tissue when I screwed them in, just one right after the other. Fortunately the last one worked. I was a poor college kid with no transport then, so getting that pack of bulbs for my single lamp was a lot of effort, I was disappointed.

It’s the same as learning anything, really. A big part of learning to draw is making thousands of bad drawings. A big part of learning DIY skills is not being afraid to cut a hole in the wall. Plan to screw up. Take your time, be patient with yourself, and read ahead so none of the potential screw-ups hurt you. Don’t be afraid to look foolish, reality is absurd, it’s fine.

We give children largess to fail because they have everything to learn. Then, as adults, we don’t give ourselves permission to fail. But why should we be any better than children at new things? Many adults have forgotten how fraught the process of learning new skills is and when they fail they get scared and frustrated and quit. That’s just how learning feels. Kids cry a lot. Puttering around on a spare computer is an extremely safe way to become reacquainted with that feeling and that will serve you well even if you decide you don’t like Linux and never touch it again. Worst case you fucked up an old laptop that was collecting dust. That is way better than cutting a hole in the wall and hitting a pipe.

I was surprised when I read the OG time machine story by Jules Verne and this was a main plot point, and only later stories hand-waived it. You’d think it was something from later analysis of the idea. Almost like that Verne dude was clever.

Maybe not dumb just dark and absurd, but called the cops.

Worked at a retail computer store with repair shop. Extremely assholish customer drops off his machine for an install of a “defective” piece of hardware he couldn’t manage to install on his own, arguing that install should be free because it’s our fault, somehow. Service manager cuts him a deal anyway just to make him happy.

He drops off his PC. Tech takes the machine, boots it up, bam… CSAM on his desktop. Cops came and got the PC, never saw the piece of shit again.

Actually this happened a few times but only once was the customer rude at first.

Retail is depressing.

Personally I haven’t had luck with diatomaceous earth and ants, they seemed willing to sacrifice a few ants to push a trail through the powder and then they were fine (I had to admire this strategy, something I would have never considered). I have had great luck with those ant baits that are a mix of sugar water and borax.

Yeah you should. Look into soil testing with your local city, county, or University Extension office. You send in a little sample of dry soil and they email you the results. It’s usually pretty cheap and will tell you if any soil is unsafe. My local library, for example, has sample boxes for free. Definitely a good idea for anyone in a place where lead paint could have been used, let alone other horrible stuff.