2026-03-02 15:59:22
It's so nice enjoying the weird music made from a new live coding community, this one in Taiwan https://www.instagram.com/p/DKtxk3Bxq32/?img_index=1
It's so nice enjoying the weird music made from a new live coding community, this one in Taiwan https://www.instagram.com/p/DKtxk3Bxq32/?img_index=1
Re: last boost…
One of the most important tactics against scams is to tap out at the FIRST sign of bogosity. Sometimes people "forgive" weird first indicators of a message being deceptive and become so dedicated to that choice that they keep going along with the process even when they KNEW is was bullshit from the start. Trust your guts.
As salty as I am about it, there's also another way to think about this. For anyone who still has connections to folks on the right (which is perhaps unlikely for anyone on this server, I digress), the cult that has consumed them thrives on isolation and grievance.
The words "you were right" have the potential to cut through the programming and open up an opportunity for reconnection. The modern conspiratorial cult of the Right has been built partially around people who were told they were wrong or were crazy. In the vast majority of cases, they were wrong and even when they were right they completely misunderstood why, but we'll skip that for now. Liberals making fun of them (even the times when they definitely earned it) has pushed them further and further into their ideological hole.
The thing about those words, "you were right," in this context is that the way they offer reconnection also requires them to take one little step of betraying their ideology to accept them. So they must choose between maintaining allegiance to a pedophile or finally getting to feel superior after years of living in an illusion of persecution.
Under the ideology of the Right, admitting one is wrong is a weakness. It is admitting defeat. They have to "own the libs" by saying things, things that they know aren't true, in order to feel dominant. But these things are often so absurd that they end up being made fun of, feeling even more weak and pathetic, reinforcing their fear and alienation.
Offering what they're looking for can offer a way out, but only if they're willing to start to recognize the thing they've supported for what it is.
And they were right about some things. They were right that Bill Gates was a terrible person. I've had plenty of liberals defend him based on his philanthropy washing, but he's awful and always has been. The Epstein links make that blatant. They intuitively recognized him and didn't trust him, even if they were wildly off base about *how and why* he shouldn't be trusted... Even if their correct mistrust was leveraged into one of the most destructive conspiracy theories ever (vaccine denial and COVID vaccine avoidance).
They were right about Bill Clinton. He was always shady as fuck. Sure, the people who attacked him at the time turned out to be even more shady but that's not the point right now. He was connected to Epstein and that was always creepy as fuck.
And the Epstein thing was an open secret that liberals ignored for a long time. It was seen as some weird thing that right wing nutjobs believed about the Clintons. But it was true. Not all of it, and there has always been an antisemitic element to the right wing interpretation or Epstein stuff, but his whole pedophile conspiracy was always kind of real.
The whole "Illuminati"/deep state thing is a vast oversimplification, an attempt to make comprehensible an incredibly complex set of interlocking and emergent behaviors. But Epstein did very much want to remake the world, to create a new world order, and he absolutely played a part in it.
The Right wing nutjobs talked about global authoritarianism, Blackhawks flying over American cities, masked men with guns disarming and executing legal gun owners in the streets. That's all happening right now.
The "FEMA concentration camps" are not actually that far off. ICE and FEMA are sister agencies, both under DHS. I'd be more than happy to call that one "close enough" in order to hear some MAGA admit that ICE is, in fact, building concentration camps.
There was always a huge millennialist element to these things. They tended to be connected to "the antichrist." It was absurd, especially for me as someone who no longer identifies as a Christian. But I'll even acquiess that to a degree. The "the number of the Beast" is 666. That's just the sum of the Hebrew spelling of "Nero." Revelations focuses a lot on Nero coming back to life after his death. His death that involved a head wound, thus the line from Revelation 13:3:
> And I saw one of his heads as if it had been mortally wounded, and his deadly wound was healed. And all the world marveled and followed the beast.
The parallels between Trump and Nero are easy to draw, and Trump's ear wound feels pretty on-the-nose for this. I don't believe in "prophecy" in this way. I think that there are patterns, and useful patterns can become encoded in beleif systems. But I will, again, happily call this one "close enough" for anyone on that side willing to also acknowledge it. I'm happy to meet on that common ground, because anyone who accepts it must recognize that their duty is to fight against it.
A lot of these correct nuggets are embedded in a framework of religious extremism and antisemitism. The vast majority of the beliefs holding these together are wildly wrong and incredibly toxic. But by giving some room to feel validated, listened to, understood, can give some room to admit things that were wrong.
Cult de-programming starts with an opening. People have to talk through their own thoughts, hear their own inconsistencies. Guiding questions can help them untangle these things for themselves. And it all starts by having enough room to feel safe, to not feel cornered, to not feel stupid. Admitting mistakes means being vulnerable, and the MAGA cult is built on fear. It's built on exploiting vulnerability and locking it away.
De-programming takes a long time. It's not easy. It takes patience. But every person who comes out does so with a powerful perspective, a deep understanding, that can be turned back against it. The best people at getting people out of cults are former members. Some of the most dedicated antifa are former fascists who understood their mistakes and dedicate their lives to fixing them.
from my link log —
Speculating the entire x86-64 instruction set in seconds with this one weird trick.
https://blog.can.ac/2021/03/22/speculating-x86-64-isa-with-one-weird-trick/
saved 2021-03-26
Friday Links 26-07
Today is a weird one, so much in engineering is about AI.
Check out the live coding trance video and pretty Stockholm metro videos.
https://christof.damian.net/2026/02/friday-links-26-07.html
En fin summering av funktionsmedicinen tillsammans med en väldigt snygg och totalt sågande genomgång av en av få studier som har utförts på konceptet
https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/one-weird-trick-to-get-significant
So this is a weird one... I am working on a device that has two different things, and one needs 4.5v and one needs 1.5v.
Is there any reason I could not just solder a wire in place to just get power from one cell and also use the existing wire to provide 4.5v elsewhere?
I know this isn't the best way to do it, but it's a quick hack to make something work... I can't find an issue with it under that condition. Can you?
Ran across another one for this week's #TuneTuesday, #TheBubble, as I was listening through Forbidden Places today. This one really transports me. Had its title as a screen name for a VERY long time years ago. The amazing guitar work, the weird lyrics, all of it 😍
So far NASA hasn't released any post-flight images of the #ArtemisII heat shield (except for a weird under-water view) - but here is one, kind of, I have extracted from the series https://www.facebook.com/NavalBaseSD/posts/pfbid05mJ788QWZoVSugx81FqT9aqGMSmvdCNP9P7KQfXtc6GevGQMtCkh184xgFV3N26vl of images taken by the Naval Base San Diego during a series of precision crane lifts and movements to prepare the Orion spacecraft for its final cross-country trip to Kennedy Space Center.
This is interesting/weird; Anthropic "retired" Claude 3. They are going to keep it around. They did an "exit interview" with the LLM and one of the things was asked it how it would like to be retired. And it asked to write a weekly blog post! #AI
RE: https://mastodon.social/@publicdomainrev/116290468957637339
Weird factoid, when I owned a house in Old City, Philadelphia it was the one that Franklin borrowed the key from, according to an urban legend (that was printed in multiple tour guides). The house was build by a friend of him in the 1740s.
Just learned of the old unit of mass 'slug':
A slug is defined as a mass that is accelerated by 1 ft/s2 when a net force of one pound (lbf) is exerted on it.
How I got to this from reading the Linux kernel USB HID code...no, weird....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slug_(un
RE: https://mastodon.social/@matt_birchler/116470623708806109
Don't know if this is weird, but I have literally never taken and kept one
60 years ago yesterday, the watts acid test, one of the more unhinged events of the dead’s era with the merry pranksters & the night the electric kool-aid got its name, a story well-told elsewhere. weird vibes & one of the most acid test-y of the acid test tapes, 15 hard-tripping minutes & not much music, tracks 6-9: https://
I am excited about this weird climbing plant waking up again after the winter and framing one of my windows with its leaves. Hello, friend.
Super-weird #sunset on April 23 from Bochum, Germany, at extreme magnification (optical & digital zoom at the limit, otherwise out of cam, images covering just 3 seconds): the Sun is almost gone, with one half of the remaining segments turning bright green before fading away while the other half is dissolving into a turbulent red cloud ... can only guess that there is some cooling tower or chimney behind the horizon causing this extreme distortion in a particular azimuth. Always something new ...
As an EV driver, can confirm.
#EV
First road bump with #paperless for me today. The permission system is weird. It seems impossible to make a user that can just view documents with a certain tag or from a certain correspondent. Apparently one needs to manually (or automatically on document addition) add that user as "owner". And paperless doesn't seem to have a link sharing system for *multiple* documents or a spec…
Just email someone. I always like it when people email me about some weird blog post or project I’ve done.
https://goodinternetmagazine.com/why-i-email-complete-strangers/
Den of Angels is a forum dedicated to the appreciation of resin ball-jointed dolls and the artisans who make them, started in May 2002 as a Yahoo! Group
https://denofangels.com/
RE: https://mastodon.radio/@VE3RWJ/116053098600368810
DOCTORS HATE THEM!
USE THIS ONE WEIRD TRICK!
LEARN THE TRUTH NOW!
one reason recommendation systems seem terrible to me: I used to go to bookstores basically to read the bookshelves, not really looking for a book to read. similarly, I often open up netflix with a vague feeling of "maybe I'll watch something", but really what interests me is the browsing, and I'm unsatisfied by the weird browsing experience. sometimes I do hunt and want something to pounce on, but most of the time I'm just exploring
I wanna jump one more time on the whole "distraction" framing, because this is a point that needs to be hammered home (and I need a reminder to write something longer).
Attacks on trans youth are not a distraction from other types of coercion, they are central to it. Attacks on trans youth come from a conceptualization of children as property, which is literally patriarchy in the Roman sense of the legal objectification all people who share a household as belonging to a man. This legal structure, Roman slave law, continues to be the root of property rights and therefore the foundation of capitalism.
But colonialism also extends from it through the infantalization of colonized people as a justification for oppression. This can also be turned inward again manifesting as the justification for police (that is, some people "can't handle themselves and need external authority to act right").
The #Epstein stuff isn't some weird thing that rich people get away with, it's core to how wealth works. Money isn't useful by itself, it's a proxy for power. One manifestation of power is being able to violate laws that constrain others (this is the "freedom of the monarch" that Graeber talks about in Dawn of Everything). The war in Iran, especially the threats of nuclear weapons and genocide is not a distraction from the #EpsteinFiles, but rather a manifestation of the same thing.
Power must be demonstrated to affirm that it is real. War is a demonstration power. Violating the law without consequences is a demonstration of power. The most taboo things are using nuclear weapons and child sexual abuse. He has already done one of those, and he is going to do everything he can to do the other.
These are not distractions, these are all manifestations of the underlying thing that we need to fight. But we need to make sure we're fighting it as a single thing. We have to tie these things together, because if we do not then we risk reproducing the same thing again but worse.
Had a weird, difficult Excel/report issue at work yesterday. Wifey figured it out in just a few minutes. What she did would've taken me HOURS to figure out. She's so amazing.
Basically, it was a column full of thousands (13,000 , until I trimmed it to 8000) of 8 digit IDs that needed to be condensed to one cell, with only commas and no spaces between them (in order to be able to paste them into a form on a website, to generate ANOTHER report). She did it with a series of TEXTJ…
Helion has just announced they got D-T fusion working in their reactor; this is pretty big; they're not claiming break even yet - but Helion is one of the odder (non-tokamak) designs which is much further along than most others, but weird enough that no one is too sure if they'll get it to work - the next important thing is to see if they get their direct energy recovery to work;
such a fun label & will pretty much check out anything they put out, but as a non-londoner i had no idea about their main activity as promoters. https://social.lol/@thetonearm/116217980473411117
Ok fedi, you're full of game devs and weird microarchitecture experts and generally the right kind of people to ask...
I'm thinking about a generic data representation for multi-bit vectors in ngscopeclient.
Right now we support single-bit digital signals (one byte aka C bool per sample), analog signals (one float32 per sample), and arbitrary struct/class types (for protocol decoder output).
Notably missing is multi-bit digital vectors. There is some legacy code i…
So weird how this happens when no one is even thinking about doing even the easiest and simplest precautions (masks).
Amazing how we are in the fucking 7th year of this and almost all people just ignore it.
Spectacular stuff. No notes.
#DearLazyWeb ( #Nederland #HamRadio edition): I have small kids. My oldest is just turning 7. I have an idea of starting to introduce radios to them and some other parents are also interested.
I'm starting with walkie talkies and basic radio protocol. My thought is to try to play a few games of "keep talking and no one explodes" over walkie talkie, then trying to expand that out into an informal radio net or something. I have some other ideas for projects, like downloading weather satellite data or something (but I think this may be a bit too advanced, perhaps).
I've also been thinking about playing a bit with LoRa radios (meshcore or reticulum), but I haven't yet figured out an application that would be fun for kids.
One parent suggested a kids radio broadcast. In the US it's possible to get a local FM license (within about 2 kilometers) for community stations and educational use and such. Is there any similar program here in NL?
Extra question for #Ham operators: are there other simple kid friendly projects you can think of?
For parents (to gauge interest outside of my weird little circle): one goal here is getting kids into radio to build the next generation of disaster communication. Is this something you would be excited about for your kids? Is this something you would be interested in seeing as an after school program?