Notices by 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account (thorthenorseman@octodon.social), page 15

Capitalism and liberal democracy are both new and radical systems that have barely been around for a century. We don't actually know if societies based on these ideas are sustainable on the long term. The Roman Empire wasn't sustainable system and it took the Romans 500 years to discover that. The Byzantine Empire? It lasted for over 1100 years, but even that fell apart. In fact, nothing in history ever stays the same, except that the humans keep failing.

Maybe half of the United States isn't misguided at all and genuinely does agree with Trump's message. Maybe people aren't what you thought they were. Nothing about MAGA is truly new and similar or equivalent attitudes have been common numerous times throughout history. In fact, *not* having such attitudes is the exception, not the rule...

Oh god, it's time for apolitical YouTubers to show their political colours again...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gzw65Dgy_TY

JelloApocalypse, I had expected better of you...

Sometimes, we should all try to take some ridiculous position, say, "the Earth is flat" or "the Pope doesn't exist" and give it our best effort at a defense. It would act as a powerful demonstration that you can be convinced of just about anything if you just rationalise it for long enough.

I'm pretty much always the guy on the left, and the guy on the right fills me with rage. I had an intern like him once. He would always complain when I tried to make him write elegant code. I wish they focused more on teaching and instilling better attitudes in computer science courses. Maybe our users wouldn't hate their software if we actually cared about excellence. https://octodon.social/media/cgMwKn0IEvuFRRBj4w0

When I see other developers pick the path of least resistance, especially if I delegated a task to them, I get an urge to correct them. Most people are happy with "good enough" and I'm most decidedly not.

I'm happy when I have a deceptively simple system that somehow handles most edge cases without looking like it does.

Or course, the next developer that comes along won't notice or care, and will proceed to decorate this elegant system with gaffa tape, pipe cleaners and bits of string.

Pretty much every WiFi signal test I did for three-building network deployment was pointless. When it was time to do the installation, the electrician didn't have time to install the access points in the indicated locations and picked the easiest ones for him instead.

It's almost painfully similar to how most software developers work. "Do we have to do it that way? Can't we be sloppy now and fix it later when it breaks?"

@sirosenbaum The reward for mining Bitcoin is collected by including an extra transaction to the miner from nowhere in the block that is being mined. Once the block is mined, the blockchain considers the transactions in it to be canonical, including the mining reward. There would be some checks performed by other nodes, of course, so a miner can't claim a larger reward than he should, for example, or insert bogus transactions.

@sirosenbaum It tracks transactions. There is no explicit notion of Bitcoins as entities on the blockchain, and there is no explicit notion of a wallet balance either. There are only addresses and transactions between them. Transactions are only valid if the transaction histories for the inputs (sender addresses) add up to a sum greater or equal to the sum being transferred to outputs (recipient addresses), including any transaction fees.

twitler, n.: fascist on Twitter

It's kind of ironic that the only practical way of following all the common advice given about password security is to use long randomised passwords per account, stored in a password manager, because those passwords would otherwise be impossible to remember.

Homomorphic encryption is an interesting idea. It's a form of encryption that permits mathematical operations to be performed on the data without decrypting it. It's an active field of research: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption

@jk Which conclusively proves that, if an engineer tells you "No, who would ever want that?", you should immediately manifacfure a million of it. Also, if the engineer makes fun of your idea of offering it in multiple colours, you definitely should offer it in multiple colours. If your engineers start liking the product, throw it out and start over.

When we think of nature, we like to think of cute things like blooming flowers or a chipmunk stuffing nuts in its cheek, but actually, nature is more like the boar god from Princess Mononoke: Festering with wormy slimy things.

Whenever I see drawings of, say, the bronchi in the lungs, I always get a creepy feeling, because it looks more like plant roots than something that should be inside of a human.

Cute and beautiful things make up a tiny portion of nature, and even they aren't cute inside.

Internet in the 3rd house on this property is finally installed. The full network with 3 routers, 7 switches and 11 access points is up and running now.

Huh, huh, huh, huh,
Pinching my balls
Pinching my balls 🎶

@kaniini 😢