Comment Paul Eggert fixed this last month (Score 1) 77
Microsoft, of course, refuses to use his excellent free work.
His fix has issues as well, but he kept the pain on the implementation side as best he could.
Discussion on timekeeping in northwestern Ontario has been updated to reflect that provincial regulation has been issued to allow these areas to stay aligned with America/Winnipeg and follow Manitoba’s adoption of year-round -05 after all. (Thanks to Aoun Khan, Chris Walton, and Heitor David Pinto.) Discussion on timekeeping in Saskatchewan has been updated to document its new Time Act, 2026 which comes into force on 2026-10-30. (Thanks to Heitor David Pinto.) No change is expected.
NOTE FOR TEMPORARY HACKS FOR CLDR AND CANADA: This version continues to have temporary hacks to work around Canadian timekeeping bugs in Unicode CLDR releases before CLDR 49 (2026-10-22). These temporary hacks are planned to be removed soon, as they also cause zic versions 2023d through 2026a, in their default mode that generates slim output, to generate TZif files that violate Internet RFC 9636 3.3. The buggy files in turn cause some TZif readers, including tzcode itself, to ignore some 2026-11-01 02:00 transitions to from their old DST to their new standard times and abbreviations. Although the buggy files do not cause any known TZif reader to mishandle UT offsets, caution is advised when using zic 2023d through 2026a to compile data from more-recent tz releases. To work around this problem when using these older zic versions, use ‘zic -b fat’.
Comment Re:huh? (Score 1) 65
> Western Humanism came from the Catholic Church and ultimately Protestantism
Mostly agree though a synthesis of Catholicism, Protestantism, and Hermeticism seems to have been needed to form the American system. Ideas migrated from Scotland to America then back to Europe.
Double Determinism is incompatible with Jury Systems, for instance - that developed under Catholicism in England.
None of these New Atheists would ever go a day without the concepts of Natural Rights, Presumption of Innocence, Blackstone's Formulation, Universal Suffrage, etc. They'd rebel against the Divine Right of Kings, Prima Nocta, etc.
They would never be happy in Maoist China despite claiming to have no religious beliefs. Game Theory for the Collective is another cultural option but Westerners often can't even see the Christian waters they swim in.
Or, hey, maybe some of them secretly wish they were in Pol Pot's position in our society. Hopefully they all have 20/20 vision.
Comment Re:Ignoring the hysteria... (Score 1) 47
Sure - it does for the OS what puppet does for configuration.
I was at a Wendy's during a big data center outage and all the kiosks were down.
For some reason their down state is to drop to Windows Explorer. I found it interesting that they were managing their international fleet of probably tens if thousands of terminals using puppet to ensure deployment consistency.
The filesystem didn't appear to be readonly to the kiosk user, though I didn't test that. (have some sympathy for IT guys)
This new project could attest to the OS level integrity of those systems on a Redhat derived system. That way you know nobody slipped in a keylogger during a datacenter outage.
I'll take another look when they support the Debian OS family - Redhat makes some very unfortunate decisions these days. Debian Security does a better job for my requirements.
People with large scale problems don't seem to have much PDS and can evaluate systems without ad hominum fallacies. It's good for making a list of emotional commenters though.
Comment VHS (Score 0) 191
Enjoy your 320x200 streams.
Comment Exodus (Score 2) 24
It might be too soon but the Exodus Technologies third-order Coulomb devices (IIRC) are built for this kind of very low impulse long duration lifiting.
Getting a rig up there to clamp on to the Hubble is probably the hard part of the project.
High-impulse propulsion is more likely to damage it than low and slow.
Comment Re:Lame duck (Score 2) 22
This was during the "NJ Drone Flap".
Trump was on TV saying he'd been briefed on them and the drones were "tracked back to their garage".
Last thing he said about it before his FAA said "they were authorized, we're not explaining, stop asking".
Matthew Livelsberger said they were of Chinese origin.
Robert Hastings wrote an entire book on unidentified craft over nuclear facilities covering four decades of documented incursions.
The FoIA request sounds like good data but nothing new.
Comment Re:So why do they want to rewrite legacy code? (Score 2) 90
From what I can tell most middle managers hate their employees - especially those who are smarter and more skilled - and can't wait to replace them.
They all probably think they'll be one of the last humans at the company.
It'll be funny when AI supplants middle management.
The right way is for a manager to be the advocate and ally of his subordinates. It can work really well but there's little place for ego and envy.
Comment Same (Score 1) 93
I use Kagi, and that's when I demoted Reddit results so they don't junk things up.
Dude seems to have a very high opinion of the value of his website. We'll see if he's right, but the last 30 years are littered with also-rans who came to the same conclusion.
Comment RAM communism, or the second false premise (Score 1) 181
This assumes that my interests are perfectly aligned with Sammyboy's.
But they aren't, and his proposal is no different than that any other greedbag who wants to own your future.
Allow me to counteroffer: Sam, fuck off to an island somewhere and scan crab eyeballs or something. We'll give LLMs their due attention, pat yourself on the head. Somewhere far away from humanity.
Comment Re:Why does such a level of notability really matt (Score 2) 60
It's just used an excuse for censorship is the main problem.
Like every single South Park episode has its own page but several public intellectuals who spoke out against lockdowns suddenly became "not notable".
"Trust the Experts" / "You're no longer an expert"
Abuse is inherent in the system as currently defined.
They could use some proxy like view counts, but that would be objective, not subjective.
Yet every once in a while I look up some obscure biological molecule or plant that hardly anybody cares about, mostly for the external references because the articles are so short, and I'd hate to see those get purged. I've found some odd and rare flora growing in my forest and appreciate the information.
Say what you want about LLM's but they could probably be tasked with policing for defacement.
Comment Re:And this is why ... (Score 1) 93
> that old computer or phone that has had a factory wipe
Don't trust old phones with too much value.
There are hardware bugs on Bluetooth, WiFi, and SS7 that are fairly easy to hack with the right setup and SS7 especially is built into the same baseband controller so main memory can be exfiltrated over cellular even without an active SIM.
Keeping it turned off most of the time reduces the attack surface, of course.
A few phones do better - switchable modems, etc. but very few and even some phones that meet GrapheneOS specs are imperfect.
An old ThinkPad with LibreBoot is probably OK if you want to get really nerdy. Yet 0.00001% of the population can handle that.
Hot/warm/cold is of course another layer of protection. But again, very few people can manage this.
Still, if you are transferring $200 to your dedicated phone to go out shopping, it's not very tragic if it gets lost.
We really don't have a good solution for the 99% yet. So companies like Binance step in and make a profit (as long as they can assume liability and responsibility for losses).
It sounds like that devops laptop had
Comment Re:Just like the link to the story in this post! (Score 1) 93
It seems more likely that what they're looking at is 'nobody' who reads Reddit posts without logging in will ever need to visit Reddit.com because they can just get all the answers they want from a Gemini query.
I can see their conundrum while noticing that it will suck for humans more than AI and that AI - as currently [not] enforced by law - is the primary culprit in this round of enshittification.
The current economic situation is that all profit from the current web will accrue to the Mag7 while their datasources will foot the bill for making it possible.
If somebody doesn't invent a better economic model soon there won't be much content left for AI to scrape and injest.
Verify that you're human [ ].
Comment Re:Industrial applications only please (Score 3, Interesting) 20
From a 1960s comedy:
Interviewer: "Have you ever had any experience running a high-speed digital electronic computer?"
Virgil: "Yes, I have."
Interviewer: "Where?"
Virgil: "My aunt has one."
It was an absolutely absurd thing to say in 1967, but in 2026 the joke is about as dated as anything can be. I wonder if young people today even get it.
I don't know when you went larval, but your low uid suggests it was probably a very long time ago. I speculate that a few decades back, a type of tool once thought to be for business (which IBM had earlier predicted had a worldwide market size of about a half dozen) somehow fell into your hands, and you fell in love at a personal level. No? Did I guess right?
In a lot of industries, people learn about tech at work first, and then maybe adopt it personally. But with computers, at least for GenX-and-later, it mostly worked in the reverse: you get a personal computer and master it, and then when you're 18 you show up at a business totally loaded with years of experience and skills.
Why? Because unlike Bessemer converters or bucket wheel excavators or magnetic resonance imaging machines, computers are cheap. All the "capital" (if you can even honestly call it that) you need is just a few thousand dollars at most, maybe even just a few hundred.
The way things have worked in the last few decades (I'd think especially for old Slashdotters) is that the "professional" tool was already very familiar long before you got the job where you work with it. And anything involving cheap electronics is going to remain like that. Unless it's just totally illegal, there's no way millions of people aren't going to have it and use it personally.
Just ban them all in public, except perhaps for people with special needs (who could wear e.g. bright red ones with polkadots -- that nobody else wants to).
All the crap I wrote above was just to say: special needs is everybody. Don't hop in your time machine and tell 1979-me that I can't use a computer, or I'll become a very angry kid, and by 1984 I would consider it an inexcusable Act of War.
Now if you wanna mandate wearable displays be bright red with polka dots, you might get away with that. But don't be surprised if you end up changing fashion itself. Wearable displays don't really appeal to me yet (they haven't been commoditized where I can choose from many manufacturers, all of whose product can run the same defacto-standardized Free Software, just like how an x86 motherboard can) but maybe some day the market will produce a wearable display that I would be willing to use.
If it's bright red with polka dots, then I just might end up losing the black-band-shirt-and-jeans look, and start dressing like the love-spawn of Liberace and Quetzalcoatl, just so my glasses match the rest of me.
Comment Perception (Score 1) 164
Proton used to let you buy an account with Bitcoin. Then they started requiring a credit card number or an outside email/phone.
It was clear to me that the perception of security replaced privacy.
I'm not sure what I need Proton for that needs my banking information tied to it.
The article is actually reassuring that I didn't misperceive what was going on.