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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • Universities have been running Linux since the very early versions. Slackware was pretty common back in the 90s and 2000s and universities had labs full of them not least because there weren’t really laptops so they had to have enough machines for all the students. Universities have been heavily involved in the development of unix from its inception and a lot of the tools were initially written by university professors.









  • The law comes in two parts, the actual written bit that says what it is and the enforcement. Most people consider the first part what is necessary and lobby hard for it but really the most important bit in a practical sense is how it gets applied and enforced, without which the law is worthless. In many countries one way to defang laws is simply underfund the legal system or quangos that do the enforcement, another is putting someone in charge at the attornies office who de-prioritises those cases. The law as written isn’t worth the paper/bytes its written on unless there is a plan for enforcement that doesn’t involve every poor person using the rich mans legal system against giant corporations with infinite defence money.





  • When I look at how much Nigel Farage has been platformed in the UK the press helped manufacture the consent for Brexit and the big far right swing that is coming with it. What were quite isolated social media views have become very mainstream and on the TV all the time. Society is now quite open about a lot of far right talking points. Social media is a part of the media landscape but it didn’t make the far right figures popular that was all the traditional presses doing.

    Even now they cover and platform Nigel Farage about 100x as much as they do any Green candidate, and yet the Greens hold more MP and council seats. Same with the Lib Dems who are bigger than Reform and yet the press is constantly platforming Reform. Its hard to look at traditional media and see anything but a big swing to the right in the last decade and they have led every step of the way.



  • Over the years I have used OSMC for my TV. I have never used it for streaming however always internal across the network streaming of my own content. It worked reasonably well for the most part although I have had issues with Samba in recent versions and have stopped using it. I can’t say much about its streaming, mostly for that you need a supported android or similar device rather than an open source one.


  • I have done this a few times, so long as the drive isn’t mounted it works fine.

    One advantage of this approach compared to clonezilla is you can pipe it through netcat or similar and move it to another machine. You can also first pipe it through gzip as well to save on the transfer bytes a bit as well and then on the other end just store the compressed image or unzip it. Combine a few tools together and you have quite a lot of capability for complete image backups but its usually best done for the boot drives from a live USB.



  • You only really get the choice between misinformed or uninformed, there is no option where you can be informed enough on the topics you need to know about.

    While they are right that misinformation in social media is causing a lot of the problem I think misinformation in the press is also driving people to seek information in social media. You can’t have governments and the press repeatedly proven to be lying and have the population accept that version of reality they push. What replaces it is a variety of conspiracy theories, some are just genuine conspiracies but definitely not in the mainstream press. This second aspect the research is consistently ignoring and it matters because its a large part of what is driving people to conspiracy theories. Fake news is not about Trumpnews or theonion its about the mainstream media however much they try to deflect from it.


  • Pretty much all technology goes through the same odd shape of adoption.

    https://www.infusedinnovations.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2020-10-10-at-8.46.48-AM-1.png

    What is often really hard to tell is where you are until your definitely in the trough of Disillusionment. We could be practically very early on the way up and human level or above AI is coming or near the peak of Inflated expectations and its about to crash down before finally finding a use that is less hype and more worthwhile. The regulation will certainly slow things down a bit towards the peak.

    I am not sure whether slightly better chat bots that still lie and image generators that do look reasonably good is the peak or just the beginning. Progress has been dramatic in the past years since invention but the cost of training is now immense and it requires a breakthrough to make big steps of improvement and I am not sure if we are going to make that. A lot of billionaire money riding on it.


  • They are still going for big building size reactors that have site specific details even if the core is built in a “factory”. This still doesn’t scale well.

    I wonder if it can be economical to go smaller still and ship a reactor and power generation (TRG maybe or a small turbine) that then doesn’t require much other than connecting wiring and plumbing and its encased in at least one security layer covered in sensors if something goes wrong its all contained. Then its just a single lorry with a box you wire in. That has a chance of being scalable and easy to deploy and I can’t help but think there is a market for ~0.5-10 KW reactors if they can get the lowest end down to about $20,000, it would compete OK with solar and wind price wise.

    I suspect no one has bothered because the regulatory overhead means it has to be big enough to be worth it and like Wind power scales enormously with the size of the plant. But what I want is a tiny reactor in my basement, add a few batteries for dealing with the duck curve and you have something that will sit there producing power for 25 years and a contract for it be repaired and ultimately collected at end of life.

    You can sort of do this today using the Tritium glow sticks and solar cells but it doesn’t last long enough and the price is not competitive. Going more directly to the band gap in a silicon or something else semi-conductive and a long lived nuclear material could maybe get a little closer price wise.