tolciho

7 ms·

1.
by tolciho 1mo ago
Oklo, Gabon appears to have run a nuclear reactor about 1.7 billion years ago, though whether you can get a natural nuclear explosion on some chunk of rock somewhere might be difficult to tell.
2.
by tolciho 1mo ago
25% might be low for the "better dead than red" crowd, given the lasting and widespread popularity of communism in the worker's paradise that is America.
3.
by tolciho 1mo ago
And that slop increases the range of things bikesheddable, like having free kerosene and matches available at an Arson Anonymous meeting.
4.
by tolciho 2mo ago
LLM increase the range of things bikesheddable, so some folks will try to have a LLM design a nuclear reactor and manage the coffee budget in addition to the traditional bikeshed design complications. Whether this is an improvement or more
5.
by tolciho 2mo ago
AppleScript "English" was designed to be intuitive and easy to understand (or so claimed various manuals), but boy howdy did I spend a lot of time trying to figure out exactly what "English" it did accept.
6.
by tolciho 2mo ago
One might wonder whether the Late Bronze Age collapse had similar (copper, finance, tin) reasons for going the way it did.
7.
by tolciho 2mo ago
The profit urge was already made fun of in a recent novel. “And what does the author mean to do?” said Don Quixote. “What?” replied Samson; “why, as soon as he has found the history which he is now searching for with extraordinary
8.
by tolciho 2mo ago
printf 'silent data loss' | while read l; do printf '%s\n' "$l"; done though at the point I need to write while IFS= read -r line || [ -n "$line" ]; do printf '%s\n' "$l
9.
by tolciho 2mo ago
for name in `ls`; do echo "$name"; done is an unportable and expensive way to write for name in *; do printf '%s\n' "$name"; done but you could also just printf '%s\n' *
10.
by tolciho 3mo ago
Months to years without a reboot sounds like a pretty big gamble as to whether the hardware still boots, or not. More frequent reboots tend to catch "the hardware has soured" (and how would you know?) issues sooner, like maybe the
11.
by tolciho 3mo ago
The "big old plane" was from the B team at Boeing, everyone with money or ambition or plain common sense then had put their chips on supersonics, which guzzle even more fuel in addition to the Operation Bongo II problem.
12.
by tolciho 3mo ago
Try the smolnet, which would be the web before it went all "the 'Akira' stadium scene", or gopher, or gemini (no, not the google twaddle).
13.
by tolciho 3mo ago
Note the use of 'may'; the details of the car-hell vary. Perhaps the I-90 pollution instead spills into the lake and then bioaccumultes into larger organisms, Bon Appétit! My anecdote was a bit southwesterly of the I-5 bridge wher
14.
by tolciho 3mo ago
(The RFC also allows for (recursive (comments, so there's probably a middle ground between insanely overengineered specifications and a )))regex( someone found on a PHP forum somewhere (and yes this post is a valid email address (assum
15.
by tolciho 3mo ago
> have little black particles all over it. Nobody likes that, no matter what the President says. Should you live near one of those big noisy "freeway" things you may note the little black particles over everything in the surrou
16.
by tolciho 3mo ago
I wore the rsa-dolphin t-shirt all over the place and nobody batted an eye back then, but a dolphin made up of ASCII characters is quite a bit less obvious than the one you linked. OpenBSD being based in Canada ships strong crypto, but has
17.
by tolciho 3mo ago
But why isn't there an easy option to turn the "feature" off? Why the kluges and workarounds for Apple going downhill (Microsoftean is indeed a good term here) for a while now? Same story for the nasty notifiction system, the
18.
by tolciho 3mo ago
Why would "money" be necessary? https://acoup.blog/2025/01/03/collections-coinage-and-the-ty...
19.
by tolciho 3mo ago
Japanese militarism was a thing recently, so the kids got eveything but the batleth.
20.
by tolciho 3mo ago
OpenBSD used to have sqlite in base, but the code churn rate was too high to review. This was well before the recent LLM craze, so a human (perhaps not a normal one, though) already sufficies to generate too many changes for others to check
21.
by tolciho 4mo ago
Or the management all read the same article in PC Magazine and lo! the next day did orders come down to implement said article, regardless. Waterworld, rowing the Valdez. Some years of this usually results in some number of half-baked or ha
22.
by tolciho 4mo ago
Wrapping metal around it sounds like one of those mythbusters episodes where they did not get as much shrapnel as they wanted.
23.
by tolciho 4mo ago
There is also a distinction between "has a bus system" and "the bus system is actually usuable". Say you want to take the bus to jury duty, but calculate that you would need to wake up at something like three in the morn
24.
by tolciho 4mo ago
There has been some internal stife in Japan, such as the Taira and Minamoto clans having a bit of a falling out, or that time when the Tokugawa somehow ended up on top, or tussles over the Meiji restoration. And also the "opening up un
25.
by tolciho 4mo ago
"jazz is music; swing is business" - Duke Ellington So the music industry could go hard into AI or whatever the business folks deem appropriate, with various consequences, while the musicians will continue to music and who knows m
26.
by tolciho 4mo ago
Easy to install and upgrade, sane defaults, good documentation, lack of waffleburgers of complexity, so I'm not sure why anyone wouldn't run OpenBSD in the first place. Granted I put Windows in the unusable bin and it's been
27.
by tolciho 4mo ago
Probably not, given that "Statistical Inquiries into the Efficacy of Prayer" by Francis Galton in 1872 found that, spoilers, royalty does not live longer despite the presumably millions of subjects praying for their health and lon
28.
by tolciho 5mo ago
Many clients also do not support getservent(3) or portmap or DNS SRV records or NIS or LDAP or ActiveDirectory so one might wonder why there are so many half-baked, failed, or overy complicated attempts at solving whatever the problem is he
29.
by tolciho 5mo ago
If a few moonbeam hippies (as claimed with so much evidence) can send love rays and scuttle the nuclear industry, or a few of Orwell's pigs can do much the same, then the nuclear industry is quite weak and that will need to be priced i
30.
by tolciho 5mo ago
Short answer: it's complicated. A somewhat longer answer: "Cadillac Desert". Marc Reisner. 1986.

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