After 20 years of daily use, I have reluctantly decided that it's time to retire my Kensington trackball. The scroll wheel has worn down, been attacked by parakeets and partially dissolved from household cleaners; the buttons are getting loose; the silver is wearing off of the plastic trim; and the tracking isn't as good as it was.
I have replaced it with an identical Kensington trackball I bought 20 years ago in case they stopped making them. (They didn't.)
«So the team trained a machine-learning algorithm to predict posts that users would consider “bad for the world” and demote them in news feeds.
“The results were good except that it led to a decrease in sessions, which motivated us to try a different approach,” according to a summary of the results, which was posted to Facebook’s internal network and reviewed by The Times.»
Facebook: We know we're bad for the world.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/technology/facebook-election-misinformation.html
mathew ✅
boosted
I Lived Exclusively Off Doomsday Prepper Food for a Week https://www.vice.com/en/article/vbx399/what-does-prepper-food-taste-like-v25n1
mathew ✅
boosted
git changing master to main by default
@sir I know multiple black devs who are actually uncomfortable with the widespread use of "master". Any software that assumes a hardcoded value for what the default branch of a git repo is, is bad software. It wasn't even a reliable assumption before, because different organisations have different standards.
mathew ✅
boosted
@sir my own 2cents: I'm a teacher at a public university in math/computer science and we talk about this in class. Our school is 48% minority. Many of my students say it matters to them, and we've had lots of discussions when Python removed master/slave terminology. I'll also say that in various programming circles I'm part of that consist of many from marginalized or misrepresented communities, they say these words absolutely matter. We should do the right thing by making this easy change.
Looks like Apple's ARM CPU handily beats all Intel's laptop-compatible CPUs, particularly in single core performance. Perhaps if we work together we can end x86 in our lifetimes.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/11/hands-on-with-the-apple-m1-a-seriously-fast-x86-competitor/
mathew ✅
boosted
These people took the floppy controller used in the BBC Micro, an Intel 8271, and set about finding out how it worked. In the course of that, they discovered it's actually a dual core processor, with over 3x the transistor count of a 6502.
Then they dumped the ROM by visual inspection of the micrographs of a decapped 8271, and reverse engineered the instruction set, with a full disassembly available.
h a r d c o r e
https://scarybeastsecurity.blogspot.com/2020/11/reverse-engineering-forgotten-1970s.html
Celebrated my first post-unemployment pay check by making a donation to the local food bank, because there are a lot of desperate hungry people still out there.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/venessawong/coronavirus-savings-recession
No, Apple is not logging every time you run an application in macOS 11.
Mi caca es su caca.
mathew ✅
boosted
another queer person asking for money, :boost_ok:
OK, dear people: this femme needs a fair chunk of income this year ... so she can keep her weird health insurance, which requires me to earn at least 3900€ per year, or I will not be eligible for it any more. The alternatives are unappealing.
You can hire me as a German copy editor or buy my music if it brings you joy: https://rootsandengines.bandcamp.com/
Please give only what you can, and give to BIPOC first.
CDC finally admits that masks help protect the wearer. #covid19
mathew ✅
boosted
Why don't popular webfont catalogues get this right? I know Google Fonts doesn't either!
The Right Way To Use Fonts.Com WebFonts: https://matthiasott.com/notes/the-right-way-to-use-fonts-com-web-fonts
As for Haphaestus, I *might* not initially support WOFF files like others do. Because it looks easiest to just wait for distros to release the latest LibFreeType, which does support it.
Wireless Access Point, better get a mop.
Since people liked the rsync tips, I decided to expand them into a post:
http://lpar.ath0.com/2020/11/farewell-to-scp/
Obviously, paths can start with a / to be absolute rather than relative to your login dir, and wildcards can be used to send multiple files.
To transfer the other way, just reverse source and destination.
I actually use rsync instead of cp for copying local directories around, because I'm so used to it at this point. The main thing to remember is the trailing slash on directory names to ensure expected behavior.
Some extra options which I find to be useful:
-W Move whole files only, rather than diffing. Useful if you know the whole file needs to be moved, or the network is fast and the machines are slow.
--inplace Store files in place while transferring, instead of creating a temporary file then moving it into place at the end.
--delete Remove files from destination directory that aren't in source directory.
--dry-run -v Don't actually do the copy, just verbosely report what you would do.
- Keybase
- meta23
Joined Apr 2017
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It is not focused on any particular niche interest - everyone is welcome as long as you follow our code of conduct!