ijk64✅ @ijk64@m.futex.au

Once I was at a small hostel in Spain, and came down with a nasty cold. I asked at the desk, and they said they had a doctor on staff. He came up to my room, wrote me a prescription, fixed me right up. Later I told the guy at the desk, I was surprised such a small hostel had a doctor on staff. He just smiled and said, "Yes, nobody expects the Spanish inn physician".

(not my joke)

Project manager: "What's technical debt? Explain it to me like I'm 6 years old"

Devs:

(source: "Richard Scarry's Storybook Dictionary" : https://archive.org/details/1scarryRichardStorybookDictionary/page/n56/mode/1up )

I think it's finally actually done: #c64 #Pongwars

It's _so_ slow: the calculations take more than one frame per frame, so it runs at 30fps; this run is mostly taken at Warp speed emulation (10x). Much of that is because I kept BASIC running, to reuse its number output routines.

Somehow this ended up being 800 lines of assembly: https://gist.github.com/Two9A/8b2f1d6e750e4ae762b2b9e2d7512473

I'll find a few spare moments to write up articles on some of the subtleties, expect those in the coming ...months.

#retrocomputing

#Eclipse2024 is now a certified disaster. At least in Bell County, Texas.

https://www.kwtx.com/2024/02/21/bell-county-declares-local-state-disaster-help-prepare-total-solar-eclipse-april-8/

#Astronomy #PublicSafety #Texas

to my mild surprise, OpenAI published a superficial postmortem about the sudden mass hallucinating-more-than-usual https://status.openai.com/incidents/ssg8fh7sfyz3

#softwaredevelopment #softwareengineering #chatgpt

Mother of pearl clouds in Norway

They are also called stratospheric clouds. This is a very rare phenomenon that occurs mainly in polar latitudes at abnormally low temperatures.

Isn't Mama Nature Wonderful
#AureFreePress #Norway

Guitar of the Day #guitar

I’m an adult and that means I can put a tent on my bed and nobody can stop me.

whenever my boss says "think of the big picture, elle" I'm immediately an astronaut floating silently in space tethered to my ship looking down on earth, and nothing he wants seems important or even relevant really so this strategy has backfired on him more than once is what I'm saying

“All of this has happened before. All of this will happen again.”
–Number Six

#meme #memes #distractedboyfriend #humor #humour #charliechaplin #battlestarGalactica

AFP—US working to negotiate Gaza truce of 'at least six weeks:' Biden

I once swallowed a bunch of synonyms.

It gave me thesaurus throat I've ever had!

I’m Japanese American, and I would have fallen for this!

CW: high contrast pattern, rapidly changing directions

True story: I never issue "reboot" from the CLI because I once arrow-keyed up too far and rebooted a critical system into an unusable state.

So, if you look at my history, it's always "sleep 5 && reboot" to allow for a frantic "oh sh*t, Ctrl-C!" at the last moment.

The real Trolley Problem is that we don't have trolleys anymore

If our civilization collapses, extraterrestrial archeologists can look at this and be impressed. Three satellites following the Earth in an equilateral triangle, each 2.5 million kilometers from the other two. Each contains two gold cubes in free-fall. The satellites accelerate just enough so they don't get blown off course by the solar wind. The gold cubes inside feel nothing but gravity.

Lasers bounce between each cube and its partner in another satellite, measuring the distance between them to an accuracy of 20 picometers: less than the diameter of a helium atom! This lets the satellites detect gravitational waves — ripples in the curvature of spacetime — with very long wavelengths, and correspondingly low frequencies.

It should see so many binary white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes in the Milky Way that these will be nothing but foreground noise. More excitingly, it should see mergers of supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies as far as... the dawn of time, or whenever such black holes were first formed. (The farther you look, the older things you see.)

It may even be able to see the "gravitational background radiation": the thrumming vibrations in the fabric of spacetime left over from the Big Bang. These gravitational waves were created before the hot gas in the Universe cooled down enough to become transparent to light. So they're older than the microwave background radiation, which is the oldest thing we see now.

It's called LISA - the Laser Interferometric Satellite Antenna. And we're in luck: ESA has just decided to launch it in 2035.