I manage all my homelab infra stuff via ansible and run services via kubenetes. All the ansible playbooks are in git, so I can roll back if I screw something up, and I test it on a sacrificial VM first when I can. Running services in kubenetes means I can spin up new instances and test them before putting them live.

Working like that makes it all a lot more relaxing as I can be confident in my changes, and back them out if I still get it wrong.

Seriously. Can you imagine, you’ve had this process running quietly for years, and it’s getting you round some awkward tax or import restriction somewhere, you’re making a tidy extra profit, and you don’t even feel too bad about fidfling the paperwork a bit, after all, who’s going to notice, a bunch of flightless birds? Then along comes the orange idiot and his cadre of fascists and accidentally expose you because they don’t understand how to rationally calculate tarrifs and just get an intern to copy and paste from the nearest LLM.

It’s laughing at this sort of thing that’s jeeping me sane right now.

It’s got to be something like that, there was something like $1.3m of machinery exports from an island populated by penguins. Someone was doing something naughty, and whilst the way these tarrifs are calculated is idiotic, it’s fun that it’s exposed sonething like this.

That probably explains why he wants to buy one despite being a citizen already. I’d guess he thinks it’ll mean he wont be taxed on overseas income either. Figuring out whether he’s currently paying any, and if so how much is left as an exercise for the interested reader.

They say that an ordnance tech at a dead run outranks everyone else, but I’d say a cat making a bee-line for shelter probably outranks them if you want to remain in the same number of pieces. Cats have good hearing and the nous to associate a stimulus with bad things happening and to get away in time.

Even in cases like this justice must not just be done, but be seen to be done. It seems her guilt has been established, which is good; her sentencing comes next. It seem unlikely that there are any mitigating circumstances to reduce the punishment, but that judgement must be seen to be fair. The French citizenry are not renouned for their forebearance in the face of injustice, so I would be tempted to trust their system for now.

ETA: In fact, it seems like the punishment has already been decreed: five years ineligibility to run for office, four years in prison (two suspended), and a fine. That puts her out of tbe running for president, and likely tarnishes her enough to keep her down even after 2030.

It’s not just the size, or the sound, but the fact you could comfortably concuss an elephant with it, or stop a bullet and go right back to typing. Those things were built like tanks.

That’s just crazy talk. If we don’t listen to the billionaires the line might not keep going up quite so fast. For the purposes of this argument, please ignore TSLA, the climatologists obviously got to that one.

The rules also ban the use of facial recognition equipment in public places such as hotel rooms, public bathrooms, public dressing rooms, and public toilets.

Why was there facial recognition, or any other sort of camera, in those places in the first place? Has something been mangled in the translation, is it a fuss about nothing, or were organisations genuinely going “hmm, we need to check your face before you can use the restrooms”?

According to the book, there’s no need for them to eat it, you just have to give it to them, although I think they may have mixed up ‘fascinate’ and ‘confuse’.

Thank you for the summary. I don’t have time to go down a rabbit hole at the moment, so this was just enough to sate my curiosity until I do have time.

It sounds like you’ve had more than one traumatic trip to the beach. I’ve never really seen the point of listening to a shell to hear the sea, you’re at the beach, it’s right there, being noisy at you!

As @[email protected] said in another comment, there’s concentration and there’s flow (aka the zone).

Concentrating takes effort, is often tiring, and requires disipline to block out distractions. It can feel good to consentrate on a problem or task, give it all your mental energy, and achieve your goal. It can be a fragile state though. If a distraction does break through it can completely disrupt your thought processes, causing you to lose track of everything you had in mind, and effectively sending you back to square one. Practice helps avoid that, but concentration is inherently mentally taxing.

Flow is different. You will probably only reach it through concentration, and may not jnitally be aware of the transition, but you’ll know it afterwards. The complex becomes simple, stuctures untangle themselves at a thought, you feel mental clarity unlike any other time, everything you’d been struggling with becomes effortless, and time ceases to have any importance. It’s more like a trance or meditation than a normal mental state, and you can stay in that state until your body physically runs out of energy. I’ve ended up sitting at my desk for nearly 24 hours without rising, and without eating or drinking, utterly engrosed in the task at hand, not noticing the sun setting and rising again, and felt entirely calm and rested at the end of it.

Why allow depreciation? You wouldn’t have bought it with the reduced functionality, and it’s going to cost you time and effort to remove it and replace it with something else. Inflation will reduce the value more than enough.

Currently Vexed Soul - having to deal with customers, especially ones like that! :)

Sure, compilers have come a long way since then and there is vanishingly little you’d write in assembler now-a-days, and you’d probably drive yourself mad trying to do so on anything more complex than a microprocessor.

Assembly language is not something you would ever really program a game in.

Back then you wrote whatever you needed to be performant and/or that involved close access to the hardware in assembler. A game would definitely count. It’s kind of nice to do, in many ways it’s simpler than high level programming, you’ve just got a lot more to keep track of.

From the article:

The 10-person team is trapped at the remote Sanae IV base, which is on a cliff edge about 105 miles inland from the ice shelf, by encroaching ice and weather as the southern hemisphere winter sets. Teams overwintering at the base are typically cut off for 10 months at a time. Sources told South Africa’s Sunday Times that the only way to leave the base now was via emergency medical evacuation to a neighbouring German base about 190 miles away.

As far as I can see it’s currently the end of the Antarctic summer, winter is just starting, and will likely last until October. It sounds like something went badly wrong with both the psychological screening of the team members, and the decision for the ice breaker that delivered them to leave before the situation was resolved.

They’re cut off, noone’s getting in or out until the weather improves, which will be months. The team are on their own with the attacker until then and will probably appreciate counselling when they’re out.

I have a strong suspicion that if I was suddenly attacked, my brain would dump all ideas of fighting back and just freeze, which of course allows the violence to happen.

Find, and take, local self defence classes. Not necessarily martial arts classes (though they may be involved), but real world self defence. It’ll be grittier, nastier and much better practice. Get used to grappling and fighting in a controlled environment, and you’ll be much less likely to freeze if you need it in an emergency.

You’re right that’ll it’ll take a long time to change at a cultural level, but that needs to start somewhere, and obe person doing it and then encouraging others could be a local catalyst.