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Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
coachgowron@tenforward.social ("Coach Gowron") wrote:

// In 14 minutes, Matthew McConaughey* begins his epic journey to recite a million digits of Pi. Don't miss the opening!

* Impersonator. No AI.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KpS54llYUA

jwz wrote:

Man, the fake-docusign spam from weird TLDs is just off the charts in the last few days.

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
trashheap@tech.lgbt ("trashHeap :hehim: :verified_gay:") wrote:

Peter David. #lgbtq ally who pushed for diversity in #Marvel #comics. One of the few writers blessed by JMS to write for #Babylon5 and author of some of my favorite #StarTrek novels, is stranded in tremendous medical debt and needs help. Information and link to #PeterDavid's #GoFundMe here: https://bleedingcool.com/comics/peter-david-runs-out-of-insurance-loses-medicaid-and-needs-your-help/

chipotle@mstdn.social ("Watts Martin") wrote:

While I'm not giving up on Panic Nova, I'm reluctantly dusting off Visual Studio Code again.

pzmyers@octodon.social ("pzmyers 🦑") wrote:

They don't need no education or science, because they already know the answer…and reality might tell them they are wrong.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/03/14/maga-hates-science/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46XaJvIxPeY

Boosted by jwz:
quinn@social.circl.lu ("Quinn Norton") wrote:

I met Gavin Newsom many years ago at an event in Larry Ellison's house. I spoke with him only briefly, but he was very good a expressing his character in short time. I am sure he doesn't remember me. There is no angle in remembering me.

Not a single thing he's done since then has surprised me at all. He is a Reagan; a thermos of a person, pouring out what was last poured into him, slick, a vacuum seal surrounding mostly empty space.

Boosted by jwz:
neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk ("Neil Brown") wrote:

In cyberspace, no-one can hear you scream.

Brought to you by ALSA.

Boosted by jwz:
GavinChait@wandering.shop ("Gavin Chait;") wrote:

I'd like to propose **The Godwin Betteridge Corollary**: the probability that any headline that ends in a question mark that should be answered by the word ***yes ***is only left in doubt because the journalists, editors and other privileged proclaimants are too chickenshit to declare that this *is* about Nazis.

@mnemonic @ianb

Boosted by jwz:
MissingThePt ("Missing The Point") wrote:

Senator Schumer gives off “likes are not an endorsement” energy.

Boosted by jwz:
indivisibleteam ("Indivisible") wrote:

New Yorkers were up bright and early to demand that Chuck Schumer stops enabling the Trump-Musk coup and instead fights back against fascism.

Attachments:

• video: 7c5cf58da0ee180b.mp4

Boosted by jwz:
seachanger@alaskan.social ("wet forest moon folklorist") wrote:

now is the time to sit down and make some calls to friends in these states

Boosted by isagalaev ("Ivan Sagalaev :flag_wbw:"):
johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz ("John Carlos Baez") wrote:

On January 21, the Trump gang took down the Centres for Disease Control (CDC) website. Later they put it back up, but with a lot removed. Information about vaccines, HIV, abortion, trans issues, gender issues... all gone. 😠

Some good news: thanks to a lot of hard work by good people, you can now see the restored CDC website here:

https://restoredcdc.org/www.cdc.gov/ 🎉

It has 46,000 web pages! A bunch of the links are broken, and the videos don't work yet, but they're fixing things, and each page has a button where you can report problems.

The team doing this good work is called RestoredCDC, and they write:

.....

This is a volunteer-based, unfunded project. The team consists of public health professionals, experienced web developers, experienced Python coders, and others.

Do you have a passion for accurate and transparent science communication? We could use you on our team! We are looking for people with the following special skills:

Python programming
Project management
Marketing and communication
Web development

Connect with us on Discord: https://discord.gg/XAvvp8Y4N4

.....

For more info about the RestoredCDC project, go here:

https://aboutus.restoredcdc.org/

Boosted by jwz:
zwol@hackers.town ("Zack Weinberg") wrote:

Here is a template. If you follow this template for your binary file format's magic number, you will be doing it better than a depressingly large number of senior software engineers.

First eight bytes of the file:

0xD8 0xDF X X x x (0x01 0x00 | 0x00 0x01)

0xD8 0xDF are bytes with the high bit set. Together with the next two bytes, they form a four-byte sequence that cannot appear in any valid ASCII, UTF-8, Corrected UTF-8, or UTF-16 (regardless of endianness) text document. This is not a perfectly bulletproof declaration that the file does not contain text, but it should be strong enough except maybe for formats like PDF that can't decide if they're structured text or binary.

X X x x: Four ASCII alphanumeric characters naming your file format. Make them clearly related to your recommended file name extension. I'm giving you four characters because we're running out of three-letter acronyms. If you don't need four characters, pad at the end with 0x1A (aka ^Z).

The first two of these (the uppercase Xes) must not have their high bits set, lest the "this is not text" declaration be weakened. For the other two (lowercase xes), use of ASCII alphanumerics is just a strong recommendation.

0x01 0x00 or 0x00 0x01: This is to be understood as a 16-bit unsigned integer in your choice of little- or big-endian order. It serves three functions. In descending order of importance:

1. It includes a zero byte, reinforcing the declaration that this is not a text file.
2. It demonstrates which byte ordering will be used throughout the file. It does not matter which order you choose, but you need to consciously choose either big- or little-endian and then use that byte order consistently throughout the file. Yes, I have seen cases where people didn't do that.
3. It's an escape hatch. If one day you discover that you need to alter the structure of the rest of the file in a totally incompatible way, and yet it is still meaningfully the same format, so you don't want to change the name characters, you can change the 0x01 to 0x02. We both hope that day will never come, but we both know it might.

pzmyers@octodon.social ("pzmyers 🦑") wrote:

An inspiring tale of the eternal struggle against ignorance and hate: George Dale vs the Ku Klux Klan.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/03/14/a-hopeful-historical-story/

jscalzi@threads.net ("John Scalzi") wrote:

Tomorrow is the Ides of March, and here at the Scalzi Compound we have a whole stack of new books and ARCs to peruse. Which of these books would you like to take a stab at?

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
signal9@hackers.town ("signal9 :hackers_town:") wrote:

On heavy rotation

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

Boosted by isagalaev ("Ivan Sagalaev :flag_wbw:"):
_elena ("Elena Rossini ⁂") wrote:

Thanks to the magic of the Streisand effect, I just heard about #CarelessPeople - a book by former Meta employee Sarah Wynn-Williams.

Apparently the company is FREAKING OUT and seeking legal ways to stop its promotion. I can see why. This article about it in the Times made my jaw drop: https://web.archive.org/web/20250310221013/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/10/books/review/careless-people-sarah-wynn-williams.html

I will definitely order it at my local bookshop.

🔗: https://bookshop.org/p/books/careless-people-a-cautionary-tale-of-power-greed-and-lost-idealism/22213433

Edit: included non-paywalled link (thanks @gemlog)

#books

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
qrper@mastodon.radio ("Thomas (K4SWL)") wrote:

QRP POTA with Vlado: Elecraft KX1 in Pisgah National Forest (Part 1)

https://qrper.com/2025/03/qrp-pota-with-vlado-elecraft-kx1-in-pisgah-national-forest-part-1/

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
CNN@flipboard.com wrote:

Trump plan to house migrants at Guantanamo Bay faces mounting hurdles, internal doubts
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/14/politics/guantanamo-migrants-trump?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Posted into Politics @politics-CNN

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
blobcat@blob.cat (":blobcat:") wrote:

Attachments:

• video: 57979447415b55ee.mp4

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
carnage4life@mas.to ("Dare Obasanjo") wrote:

Government workers were the actual villains not Hitler is quite the take.

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
hannu_ikonen@zeroes.ca ("Hannu Ikonen, MD") wrote:

@StillIRise1963

Yup.

https://foodprint.org/issues/black-land-loss-in-the-united-states/

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
guyjantic@infosec.exchange ("Still Mad About CD Prices") wrote:

Random thing I found at a #ThriftStore: Self-Adding E-Z Average finder.

This is my most adorable non-human #computer.

#RetroComputing #OldSchool #Statistics #Rstats #teaching #grading

Attachments:

• video: Video of use of the "Self-adding E-Z Average Finder", which is a piece of thin cardboard about the size of a large paperback novel, with a transparent plastic ruler-type thing anchored at the lower left so it pivots up and down. In concentric arcs outward from that pivot there are curved sections numbered 3 through 12 (indicating the number of items to be averaged) and a sliding plastic window on transparent ruler "arm" that pivots. The transparent window is placed so that, when the arm pivots, it does so along the numbers written on one of the arcs (e.g., if you want to average 7 numbers you place the window so it cruises along the "7" arc). There is a separate piece of circular cardboard bonded to the pivot, about two inches in diameter, labeled "Answer Wheel" and "Average Grade." The video shows usage of this cute device: the arm is placed at the lowest point (pivoted all the way "down" toward the user) with the Answer Wheel aligned at "100" with the center line of the arm/ruler thing. The video shows seven numbers (hypothetical test grades) on a post-it note. The user holds the answer wheel in place while rotating the arm so that, on the "7" arc, the first grade (in this case 67) is directly under the line along the transparent answer wheel, on the "7" arc. The user repeats the process with the rest of the numbers. After doing this, the video zooms in on a terminal running R on a computer screen. The answer on the E-Z average finder is close to what R calculated.

jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:

Geese in morning light,
Wings spread wide, they soar with grace,
Spring whispers, "Come home."

courtesy https://arghstudios.com

pzmyers@octodon.social ("pzmyers 🦑") wrote:

America is following the Nazi playbook surprisingly closely. On the timeline, it's 1933. Time for Gleichschaltung.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/03/14/the-word-of-the-day-is-gleichschaltung/

jscalzi@threads.net ("John Scalzi") wrote:

I'm not 100% opposed but I will say the vibe I'm getting off this trailer in terms of photography and physical production is "mid-budget 90s Disney family film throwaway," ie the aggressively mediocre live action stuff they put out between their big animated productions

RE: https://www.threads.net/@hollywoodreporter/post/DHLPWSwuJU6

jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:

Happy Engineers’ Pi Day!

(because 3.14 is good enough to get real work done)

Boosted by adam@social.lol ("Adam Newbold :usa_distress:"):
BenRiceM wrote:

Pretty much daily, I’ll hear someone I like and respect mention that they use ChatGPT and I desperately want to know what it would take for them to stop supporting this morally bankrupt, piece of shit company

I don’t care if you find replying to email to be tedious, take some god damn personal responsibility

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/03/openai-urges-trump-either-settle-ai-copyright-debate-or-lose-ai-race-to-china/

jwz wrote:

Waybackify-WP.

I've finally cleaned up and posted something I've been using for a few years: wayback-wp.php is a script that you run from cron to replace any old links in your blog posts and comments with contemporaneous Wayback Machine URLs. I do...
https://jwz.org/b/ykkS

mbrubeck@mefi.social wrote:

The moon is visible from Seattle tonight despite some passing clouds.