Silliness to start your day in a good way 📽️ including a shrimp band and rave-ioli because... why not?

(Amedeo Capelli, an Italian #artist who does handcrafted wooden automata that merge playfulness, #craftsmanship & kinetic charm)

Leisure Suit Larry solved the age verification problem years ago, the UK should just use that.

i just ftp'd into a public ftp server running in Ecuador, and discovered an absolutely critical piece of US Robotics ISP modem pool software that has been missing for 20 years

thank you from the bottom of my heart, rolando felix of Educational Unit 10 De Agosto, for leaving your departmental computer ftp wide open ❤️ you just preserved some insanely useful and important dial-up ISP history. (don't worry rolando - i didn't peek too deeply into your ms-dos games and music folders)

the story:
in the mid-90s i was a teenager who had a summer job at a dial-up isp. we had 32 incoming lines which were handled by 32 external USR Courier modems, which were fed into a super chonky Livingston Portmaster terminal server. all of the support hardware took up an entire rack - just to let 32 people call in for internet service at 28.8kbaud. it ate a ton of power, and made a lot of heat.

then, in 95-96, US Robotics delivered two insane appliances: the Total Control Modem Pool. these were *tiny* devices that offered 16 dial-up modems at 33.6kbaud. if you paid a bit more, you could buy the NetServer version, which gave you a terminal server too. an entire isp in a box the size of a network switch.

the modems had buggy firmware. so USR offered firmware updates via their ftp site. you could even upgrade some of the modems to "x2" 56k service with a firmware patch. they supported it for years, and when 3com bought USR, they kept the ftp site running for years. and then, 3com shut down their ftp site. and no one thought to mirror it.

after 3 hours of searching, i was able to track down a single filename thanks to WBM: mpv90an.zip. not a single site on the web had it - not even IA or discmaster. on a hunch, i plugged it into the Napalm FTP Indexer (https://www.searchftps.net) and... unbelievably, there it was, sitting on an ancient box in someone's university office in Quito, Ecuador.

the most amazing part was how slow the server was. at 250 ms pings, it was like digging through a public ftp on a 14.4k modem in 1994.

tomorrow i'll be uploading these files to IA. for now, sleep.

#digiPres #softwarePreservation #ISP

quack!

i think the best way to use LLMs is this: don't type into the AI chatbot's input field. instead, write a description of the problem in a text file. work through the specifics of what you want to accomplish, and how you'd go about doing it. once you've got a few hundred words of ideas and planning, you can go back to the empty, unused AI tab and close it. then begin doing the work yourself. consider sending your notes to friends or experts. when you're done, remember to thank them for their help!

@kloenk @navi Back when 128 kB was the limit for argv+envp, Google was hitting it too because they passed all the configuration for their whole software stack on the command line as --long-option=value switches.

Their solution? Compress the command line. So every binary started by ungzipping argv[1] and parsing it to get the configuration.

The person explaining this to me saw my horrified face, and said with the perfect Hide The Pain Harold smile: "a series of individually completely rational and reasonable decisions led to this." and I have been thinking a lot about it since.

The window opening mechanism on one of the greenhouses at Ardgillan Castle, County Dublin, Ireland.
#FensterFreitag

@superball We'll see.

I'm opposed to what we currently call AI on so many grounds, but even if I turn off my ethics (which in itself takes more energy than I have some days) and hold my nose, I don't see it making me more effective than I would be otherwise.

And when it comes to troubleshooting and debugging, I am John Fucking Henry.

The worst part about it is that the oligarchs are going to burn the planet in pursuit of actual clothes for this emperor. Their claims of "AI will solve the climate crisis but we're in a race to get to AGI while there's still time" are completely empty. They're not trying to rush AGI to solve the climate crisis. They're trying to rush AGI so they can maintain their lifestyles in a future when the planet can only support a fraction of the current population.

Hollow men wasting our lives' blood sprinting through the sand at a mirage.

(edited to make it more clear that, while the planet can currently sustain our population, that will not be true in the future the oligarchs are driving us toward)

#AI #Terminator #meme

"Archivists Recreate Pre-Trump #CDC Website, Are Hosting It in Europe."
https://www.404media.co/archivists-recreate-pre-trump-cdc-website-are-hosting-it-in-europe/

"A team of volunteer archivists has recreated the Centers for Disease Control website exactly as it was the day Donald Trump was inaugurated. The site, called RestoredCDC.org, went live Tuesday and is currently being hosted in Europe…Restored CDC isn’t going to have continuous updates on this type of healthcare and disease guidance, but it has brought back all of the critical data that was purged in an easy to use, easy to navigate, and fast website."

Here's the site itself.
https://aboutus.restoredcdc.org/

#Censorship #DefendResearch #Medicine #Preservation #Takedowns #Trump #TrumpVResearch #USPol #USPolitics

@flacs Dell Longitude

🤔

Mildly cursed factoid about UNC paths:

- UNC Paths can contain IP addresses such as \\192.168.1.1\share
- IPv6 addresses are supported as well
- IPv6 addresses contain colons
- can't have colons in Windows paths since colons are reserved for drive letters

So Microsoft came up with the the ipv6-literal.net domain that's special-cased by Windows so you can to write IPv6 addresses in UNC paths as 2a0e-3c0--21.ipv6-literal.net without it hitting any resolvers.

That's 5D-educational chess.

#FuckGenAI #ChatGPT #GenAIsucksCamelDong

@andrazk hey. I can help if you can manage pick up in nova gorica/šempeter area

disconnect3d from Trail of Bits presents Pwndbg at #EuroPython.
Pwndbg is a Python tool that makes low-level debugging actually enjoyable for security work.
Pwndbg provides:
→ Clear context displays for assembly analysis
→ Built-in heap and stack visualization
→ Streamlined commands for exploit development
→ Python extensibility for custom analysis
Today at 10:30 at Terrace 2A. Perfect for anyone doing systems security, malware analysis, or CTF challenges.
https://ep2025.europython.eu/session/pwndbg-low-level-debugging-and-exploit-development-with-python

Excellent news! We got a small amount of funding to hire two people half time to help put together a Horizon Europe proposal for Safeguarding Research and Culture [1].

The idea is to develop the SciOp catalogue software to make distributed archives part of the Fediverse, riding on BitTorrent, and get more institutions, libraries and archives involved. With a focus, in this case, on Europe.

If you are interested in preventing digital cultural heritage materials from falling through the memory hole, preventing marginalised and racialised groups from being erased from view, decentralised, federated and peer to peer technologies and have experience with putting together EU Horizon grant proposals, have the right to work in the EU or UK and would like a part time job starting yesterday for a couple of months, please get in touch!

[1] https://safeguar.de/
[2] https://sciop.net/

#FediHire

The Secret of Monkey Island (DOS VGA)

@tjw On the day Opteron was supposed to tape out, a colleague discovered a logic bug. After some analysis, we figured out we could fix it by disconnecting a wire from one gate and attaching it to another. But running through or design flow would take days, and the ripple effect of changing connectivity could cause more problems. So I loaded the chip mask into VIM and modified the polygons directly, then we taped it out.

Don’t remember for sure, but I don’t think we told management 🙂