Ed Davies @edavies@octodon.social

@deshipu I think you're right, it's mostly native and more fluent writers that get this wrong and likely, as you say, in proportion to the amount they speak/listen rather than read/write.

@deshipu Yes. At first I thought some simple pattern matching would get it mostly right but on reflection I'm not so sure.

“Why's the train not there?”

“It's left.” (has)
“It's broken.” (is)
“It's broken down.” (has)
“It's derailed.” (either)

@deshipu Except when it should be expanded to “it has” of course.

@cynicalsecurity Re Qubes: I don't think they've glorified XEN; they've said they think it's the best hypervisor for now but always emphasised it wasn't intrinsic to their architecture. Pretty sure the “cloud” that paper is talking about would be intended to be a private one; the diagrams show the internet off in the corner, not between the user and their computers.

@cynicalsecurity Yep, I'm aware of the Pi proprietary-blob problems making life difficult for the likes of the BSDs. Those Mythic Beasts Pis are just a nice example of a rack of small ARMs running off a NAS. Good for the niche wanting a small dedicated server but an interesting pattern for other applications, too.

@cynicalsecurity The external NAS is not a surprise to those aware of Mythic Beasts' Raspberry Pi Cloud: https://www.mythic-beasts.com/order/rpi .

Note also that they netboot to avoid any SD card reliability issues and for performance and easy management. Reliability and management easier to deal with on a home server rack, though.

Tangentially, I find this intriguing: https://blog.invisiblethings.org/2018/01/22/qubes-air.html

Browsed a few; the rules on octodon.social seemed sensible so picked it.

I don't think it's a big deal but then I don't look at the instance timeline that often. Not much different from choosing an email provider, really - you can get it wrong but there are lots of right answers.

But, yes, it would be nice if one could point DNS entries at a mastodon account.

@mwlucas Stephen Hawking presumably had some help who's now looking for other work.

@CobaltVelvet I think I like it.

@rra @clhendricksbc @gargron This. As soon as you make private data available to friends, whether on a centralized system like Facebook or something more decentralized, you're vulnerable to your friends being hoodwinked into running malicious software.

From a manual I wrote about 20 years ago:

“In the "max2 - Convert Mirror to Master" dialog box read the rubric with feigned concentration then choose "OK"”.

@mwlucas In this case Blackwell's is noticeably cheaper. Other times it's the other way round. Still tend to use them for books so as not to feed the monopoly, unless the disparity is too large.

@mwlucas Ordered (from blackwells.co.uk - they didn't have the second edition a few weeks ago, not surprisingly).

@meredith_matthews

Yes, JavaScript monkey patching is a thing. Most common use, though, is fairly benign: adding implementations of modern methods (like Array's forEach) when the environment doesn't provide them (yet).

“I suppose Schwarzenegger could play the Null String Terminator.”

https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/4h43vd/what_books_do_you_reckon_are_unfilmable/d2nbz13/

My e-vote against e-voting:https://edavies.me.uk/2018/02/e-voting/

Getting really fed up with this fashion for pale grey text on a white background - very difficult to read. Looked at a site today with text so faint I didn't immediately realise it was even there. Had to invert it by selection to be able to read it at all.

Please give the web “designer” a jolly good kicking for me.

Also maps with white roads on very pale grey background. Both Google Maps and OpenStreetMap. What's wrong with those people?