frezik

@frezik@midwest.social

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frezik,

The real monsters were airline executives the entire time.

frezik,

I played MP3s on a 486DX4 100MHz. Barely. If anything else happened in the background, it would stutter.

frezik,

Runs havoc on parsing, too. It’s bad for both humans and robots. I say we ship it.

frezik,

I have a Lennox multistage system with a heat pump, and furnace for when it gets too cold. The best way to run those (according to the installer) is at a low level all the time. So it doesn’t benefit much from things like location tracking to turn the system up or down while we’re out. Especially since I work from home.

What it does do is make graphs for tracking how it runs the heat pump and furnace each day.

frezik,

Programming grew up in an environment where failure is cheap (relatively speaking). You might make a mistake that costs five, six, or even seven figures (I’m sure I’ve made at least one seven figure mistake), but nobody will die from it. When people could die, such as flight control software, different development techniques for formal methods are used. Those tend to cost at least ten times more than other methods, so they aren’t used much otherwise.

If anything, we should lean into this as an advantage. Iterate even faster, catch failures faster, and fix it faster.

frezik,

Major engineering organizations, like the IEEE or the ASME, often require degrees, but do have exceptions built into the rules for on the job experience. So this does happen, and regularly enough that there’s consideration for it.

frezik,

PNG mainly lacked support from Microsoft (Internet Explorer) and Adobe (Photoshop). IE didn’t handle PNG transparency, while Photoshop had a shitty PNG implementation that tended to produce files larger than an equivalent GIF. Held back widespread adoption for almost a decade.

frezik,

Odd they bring up TIFF. That one is more like a container format that can hold many different types of images.

frezik,

That commenter already is the surgeon general of Florida.

frezik,

I could have sworn he said he had a legal degree in his home country of Australia, but I can’t find any evidence of it now.

frezik,

Those are rookie numbers. Professionals came up with the nested logic monstrosity that is the JSON-LD specification:

www.w3.org/TR/json-ld11-api/#context-processing-a

Looks through the algorithm bits in the various sections. How would you implement that? The answer is invariably by copying the highly nested statements of the spec directly into your language. Maybe there’s a better way, but you’d have to understand all that nested logic first, and you’d be exhausted at that point and just want to move on.

frezik,

Works made for hire are 95 years from publication. LotR is not a work for hire, so it goes by life of the author plus 75 years. It goes public domain in 2044.

frezik,

“He’s grounded, so it’s OK” - Someone on YouTube

frezik,

Adoption for what? There’s no indication that it’s becoming interconnected to the economy at large. Just the opposite, in fact. FTX, one of the biggest crypto banks, completely collapsed and the rest of the economy didn’t care. If it was Goldman Sachs or BoA, everyone would be sounding alarm bells, because they are actually integrated into the rest of the economy. Crypto just isn’t.

frezik,

Just to correct a few details that don’t contradict your main point:

Now its the lifetime of the original author + 80 years after IIRC

Life of author + 70 years.

Copyright has stalled so severely that the latest works to come into public domain are from the 19th century.

Things from 1927 entered the public domain in 2023: americanwritersmuseum.org/new-works-to-enter-the-….

frezik, (edited )

It has plenty to do with engineering, because it was engineering that first decided to measure things this way. Marketing merely continued it.

frezik,

There’s a lot of fighting between DS9 and B5. The story goes that B5 series creator J. Michael Straczynski had shopped the series bible around, including to Paramount. They weren’t interested, but when they heard it got picked up by WB, they rushed their own space station based Star Trek series forward. With people coming over from TNG, they get a pilot ready faster than JMS can create a series from scratch.

Since they had the B5 series bible, there’s long been allegations that DS9 is a ripoff of B5. Indeed, there do seem to be some elements stolen out of it. For example, the pilot of B5 has a “changeling net” technology that lets people impersonate each other, which had apparently evolved out of an early draft of a changeling species, which DS9 copies outright.

What Paramount studio execs did was definitely underhanded. They were deliberately pushing out a show to make sure B5 wouldn’t get to the same level of popularity as Star Trek. They probably did steal elements from the B5 bible and pushed Berman and Piller to use them.

However, fans make more of the similarities than are really there. Berman and Piller were almost certainly unaware of why the studio was pushing certain ideas and where they got them from (and JMS said as much at the time). Most of the stolen elements are ultimately superficial. The way the central conflict unfolds is very different, the characters are very different, and the technology is all different. B5 doesn’t center around a planet coming out of a long term colonial authoritarian government, and DS9 doesn’t have humanity crawling out of a war that nearly destroyed it and which ended for mysterious reasons. B5 doesn’t have an excellent father-son relationship, and DS9 doesn’t have a wisecracking ambassador who’s very likeable despite doing some incredibly fucked up things.

They are both excellent shows, and well worth your time.

frezik,

Those first two seasons really aren’t that bad. There are some episodes that are downright excellent in there. Duet is a masterpiece.

frezik, (edited )

Could you imagine a Voyager where the ship is no longer constantly running towards home? One where they have to stay and gather materials to get their warp 10 drive working. The species they meet will be the same species around a few seasons later, and the relationships they build with them matter. Maybe stasis isn’t good enough, and they have to hold everyone in a transporter buffer, which means rebuilding huge sections of the ship to support having all the crew inside transporters at once. They expect this to take years, but it’s still by far the shortest way home. A few shuttles get modified and they send couriers back to the alpha quadrant. So they have some contact with Star Fleet, but it’s not as simple as opening a channel.

If there’s only enough story material here to support a few seasons, then maybe something comes up that means they have to go back and fix it. Maybe some Borg shit. Make up a reason to keep the Maquis crew around (not like Star Fleet gives a shit once the Dominion War is underway).

Good thing they never gave us that nightmare of a show.

frezik,

I’m a shareholder in a non-profit. Specifically, the Green Bay Packers. It basically means having a unique piece of team memorabilia.

frezik, (edited )

SNW is probably what you want. There are some longer arcs, but for the most part, you can take things episode by episode.

The streaming era is favoring shows with long arcs, though. Just the opposite of where we were in the 90s, where missing one episode of Babylon 5 meant you might not understand what’s going on, and VCRs were clunky and hard to setup right.

frezik,

I’ve actually been working on a similar thing for the SNW uniforms by printing direct to fabric. First tried TPU, but it’s hard to get a consistent pattern of some of the fine details. Some of them come out better than others. Then tried a transparent PLA–the emblems are small enough that the flexibleness of TPU shouldn’t be necessary–but it didn’t stick very well.

So they’re either using a very carefully calibrated 3d printer (and this is the first time I’ve worked with TPU), or it’s a different technique entirely, like a mask.

Full details of SNW uniforms for cosplay, for those who are interested: makingitsew.com/starfleet-duty-uniform-skant-vari…

frezik, (edited )

No, it’s not threads. Here’s a closer picture: makingitsew.com/…/illustrator_command_ops_pattern…

They might use some kind of mask to spray something on. I tried to replicate it by printing TPU to fabric, but TPU can be hard to work with for such fine details and consistency.

frezik,

I saw more Confederate battle flags in Indianapolis than Atlanta. Fuck Indianapolis.

frezik,

There’s lots of sources from the losing side. Josephus was a Jewish writer who told of the Roman destruction of the temple. The history of the Eastern Front of WWII, as it was known to the West, was dominated by the writings of German soldiers for a long time.

History is written by writers. For much of it, that means it comes to us from an educated upper class. That’s where the historical blind spots are.

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