Codex

Ah Texas, where children can’t make decisions or be held accountable in any way, unless they’re brown skinned and can be accused of a crime, then they must he tried as adults and sentenced to life as an imprisoned slave.

Out past the planets is the heliopause, the final boundary between the solar system and interstellar space. Voyager discovered it, but other probes have confirmed it. The radiation and particles emitted by the sun create a pressurized bubble around it, where plasma (energized particles, mostly hydrogen) is much denser than past the heliopause. Cosmic rays are more prevalent outside it.

I’ve heard it compared to the empty zone around where a sink faucet first hits, creating a little “wall” of water around it as the splashing water pushes back the standing water.

“Empty” space is anything but. There’s tons of particles and energy flying though it, just not as dense.

Arguably the first Dark Souls is one of these. Most of the classes push you towards shields as the cornerstone of defense. The studio felt like this overemphasis on shields was such a mistake they took 2 whole games (Bloodborne and Sekiro) in an almost entirely shield-free direction to teach players there were other ways.

Pyromancy (and magic in general) were also undervalued in DS1 initially due to how the game presents them. People eventually figured out that Pyro is so OP you don’t even need to use leveling with it to have an easy time.

Ah man, living the dream!

Oh is this why Biden is suddenly cracking down on immigration and wanting to build the wall too? I had assumed it was just blatant appeals to the right.

I, like most of the millenial lemmings it seems, am not shocked about this. I remember what Dubya said as president, the daily evils. I would have never thought it could get worse and then we got Trump, and I think it all does echoes out from 9/11. If there are future historians, 9/11 is going to be the pivot that this entire century stumbles over, probably leading directly to WW3 any day now.

But when I see articles like this, (in the Atlantic ofc, always this one or the NYT) my nostrils fill up with the smell of consent being manufactured. Has the shadow council decided that we shall war with the Saudis now? With Russia and China just flat-out taking land now, has the US decided to extend it’s “protection” more directly over a few strategic areas?

I keep my Obsidian notebooks and several source code repos in syncthing and then have them auto-shared between all my computers and my phone. Its been a great system, all my docs I need are readily available on all my devices with almost no delay and no cloud needed. A little advanced configuration to allow local deletes and I also have all my phone photos backed up this way too.

When I travel, I use my laptop and phone on a little travel router, so they’re always networked together and syncing files. Definitely saved my butt a few times!

Who the fuck is Steve Jobs?

But then I decided, I wrote my own solution, a thing of 1,600 lines of code, which is, yeah, it’s like thousands of times less than the competition.

And it works. It’s very popular. … I got 100 emails from people saying that it’s so nice that someone wrote a small piece of software that is robust, does not have dependencies, you know how it works.

But the depressing thing is, some of the security people in the field, they thought it was a lovely challenge to audit my 1,600 lines of code. And they were very welcome to do that, of course. And they found three major vulnerabilities in there.

He makes a ton of excellent points, but the succinct impact of this little example really hit for me. As someone who often rewrites things so that I can both understand and fully trust in what I’m depending on, it’s always good to be reminded that you literally can’t write 500 lines of code without a good chance of introducing a major vulnerability.

The tech stack is so dizzyingly high today, and with so many interlocking parts, it continually amazes me that anything at all functions even in the absence of hostile actors.

I do wonder what’s up with fascist nerds and Tolkien names.

I’m convinced it’s the whole B-2-B software world at this point. The shit starts at MS (or any of the FAANGS) and rolls downhill to everyone else.

We’re working on a huge Dynamics 365 thing at work, and one of the third parties we use for automated testing is just… the product seems barebones, is clearly built on top of open source automated testing tool, and is riddled with indicators that barely anyone works there, from the AI help bot to the “submit a ticket and we’ll assign it eventually” approach to all other interactions.

I looked them up on Linked In and 12 people work there. 8 of them have C-suite or VP titles, and 4 of them are interns from a local university. This is the state of all modern tech: a board room full of investors, a website, and a product barely glued together from FOSS parts by interns. If you wonder why everything feels like a scam now it’s because it is.

When I read the 4 Hour Work Week years ago it was exactly the same thing. Turns out the “secret” to getting rich has always been “get someone else to do your work for you for a pittance of the money you can make off that work.”

Looks pretty cool, not gonna lie though, the stark black paint and odd unexpected angle (as I scroll the feed on my phone) gave me major House of Leaves vibes! I’d be haunted by that wall, haha

Miyazaki knows all we want is ninja shit, poison swamps, and more fancy armors to play dress up with!

I used to love Kongregate, there were some amazing games there! Then the first buyout, and the death of flash, and I haven’t thought about that site in a long time.

Back in the day we called that “feature complete” or “the end of the design phase.”

Software devs for a long time would discuss “green field” development, which is a metaphor from constructing a building in an empty field: you start from nothing, and build all new. Most software devs prefer to write new code rather than try to learn the quirks and nuances of a large, already-existing pile of code, so “green field” is considered both desirable and often practically unattainable.

“Blue sky” is a similar concept but loftier. It isn’t just that you have an empty field waiting for you, you’ve got the infitie expanse of the clear blue sky: endless possibilities, unlimited creativity, etc. “Blue sky development” as a metaphor I think comes from designers, product managers, and other software-dev adjacent fields. It means thinking of ideas that are out of the box and unconstrained by historical limits.

That’s why everything is named that: execs and marketers love that kind of hollow promise. That anything is possible even though actually they’re almost always just clones of existing things whose greatest innovation is to loudly proclaim how new and innovative you are.

Dr Sabine Hossenfelder at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, said there was no evidence the FCC would reveal anything about dark matter or dark energy and was critical of the proposals.

“The truth is that the most likely thing such a machine would do is to just make better measurements of some constants in the standard model, and that’s it,” she said. “I do not think that the societal relevance is high enough to justify such a big investment.

“I fear that funding such an experiment will mean that a lot of smart people will waste their time on research that will not lead to any progress. The LHC had a good motivation. The FCC has not. Particle physicists have to accept that their time is over. This is the age of quantum physics.”

On the other hand, Sabine’s objection to the project makes me skeptical of my own doubts. If she’s against it, it must be a great idea!

I think Hossenfelder was bought some years ago by a conservative think tank. Or at least that would be one explanation for her abysmal takes. Maybe its just pure ego that makes a person act like this though?

I think it’s worthwhile science communication for them to be clearer about what is planned for testing. Some handwaves about “it will help us maybe find dark matter” is much less compelling to me than something concrete like “we have models which predict dark matter particles emerge at X TeV, this will test them.”

Not that I’m opposed to open discovery either. Maybe when you collide electrons at the higher energy, they turn into pure gravitons and we’ll find the GUT? But I like to think there’s some deliberation and intent behind a project that’s roadmapped to 2070, beyond just long term job security for some particle physicists.

Pretty neat! I guess I’m one of those naive folks who would have said that it’s obvious it goes in reverse. I also don’t see why this would be so hard to just test. Submerge a sprinkler, attach a pump to the hose, observe it moving in reverse as each arm sucks water up, right?