Notices by Nate Cull (natecull@mastodon.social), page 22

https://lorian.org/community/what-is-lorian-to-me?rq=greg%20dinunzi

http://www.meetblackbird.com/

https://lorian.org/community/what-is-lorian-to-me?rq=greg%20dinunzi

The Lorian Association have been pretty quiet since being singled out as Candidate For The Actual Literal Antichrist by evangelical Christians in the 1980s but they, uh, don't really seem to have been doing the Luciferian Satan-worshipping right if this is the result

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qqLtgqNgRc

A Theological Foundation for Christian Apoplectics

Watching paint dry, but with log files.

@thegibson

And I'm looking to the sky to save me
Looking for a sign of life
Looking for something to help me burn out bright

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VQ_3sBZEm0

this part is pretty cool though: the 1960s Apollo Guidance Computer interactive debugging environment. yep, they had one!

<< A core rope simulator allowed a program to be fed into the AGC from external storage. This simulator was part of the refrigerator-sized monitor (below), which provided a debugging interface to the AGC through a test connector on the AGC. The monitor allowed programmers to set breakpoints, single-step, examine registers, and so forth, using lights and switches. >>

The moral of this story appears to be:

raw compute power has darn near zero correlation with the ability to do useful things for society.

http://www.righto.com/2019/07/bitcoin-mining-on-apollo-guidance.html

<<We've been restoring an Apollo Guidance Computer. Now that we have the world's only working AGC, I decided to write some code for it. Trying to mine Bitcoin on this 1960s computer seemed both pointless and anachronistic, so I had to give it a shot. ... Unfortunately, the computer is so slow that it would take about a billion times the age of the universe to successfully mine a Bitcoin block. >>

@dredmorbius @feonixrift @kensanata

But the biggest trend I see is just so many people whose only phone is a mobile. No landline because why pay for two phone numbers? And even the phone, they mostly use for Internet messaging. Whatsapp and such.

@dredmorbius @feonixrift @kensanata

I know I've taken to screening calls with my answering machine and only picking up if it's someone who's already called me. Even then, Completely Fraudulent Robocalls (tm) really get my blood boiling, because you're never sure that it's NOT a legitimate call from a real company saying they're doing something stupid and horrid.

And then there's just the endless political/commercial pollsters and ads.

@dredmorbius @feonixrift @kensanata

Yeah, hmm. Some kind of verified vetting might work. I wonder. Some kind of token?

The corporate obsession with outsourced call centres I think is what's driving this robocall nastiness. The corporates WANT random offshore businesses to be able to call people on their behalf, but without any verification.

It's funny to me that we hit this problem with email decades before we hit it with voice... I guess it took that long for voice-over-TCP/IP to catch up?

@dredmorbius @feonixrift @kensanata

I suppose it's *possible* that some kind of absolutely unbiased 'introduction authorities' might emerge from (lol) the 'Free Market' or (more lol) the universities, but, uh.

I don't really think so.

I do think though that either a telephone or an email system that lets you casually fake a 'from' address is *utterly* broken and unfit for the most basic of purposes.

@dredmorbius @feonixrift @kensanata

Unfortunately introduction-based screening is *literally* the definition of "prejudice" and is about the worst possible "solution" to this problem.

it's going to lead to massive, casual, race, class and sex-based discrimination, just because *that's how introductions work*. You don't even get a foot in the door unless you Know The Right People. And of course you don't know the Right People if you're Not Our Kind Of People.

@jonne @dredmorbius

Here in New Zealand we've been getting hit with complete fraud robocalls - mostly scary recorded voices saying THIS IS [$actual Internet company who they aren't] WE ARE CUTTING OFF YOUR INTERNET and if you pick up you get routed to some ridiculous pay-per-minute thing in some foreign country, and of course the number's faked. Either that or HI WE ARE MICROSOFT (they aren't) PLEASE TO INSTALL OUR MALWARE.

It's only become a massive plague in the last.. three years, I think?

And that's terrible.

https://twitter.com/SuperheroMethod/status/1147588109204410369

<<Lex "40 cakes" Luthor cosplay >>

@Azure ..... who is also a feminist theologian and a lesbian.... ????

okay this is a fascinating rabbit hole

http://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/unitedchurchofchrist/legacy_url/13172/FV-Carlson.pdf?1418439447