In high school, we used to play a game colloquially called Spoons/Assassins/Spoon Assassin/Marker tag. Long story short, everyone playing gets assigned another player as a target. You tag your target on the back of the neck with a spoon or marker to “kill” them + take over their assignment. Rinse and repeat until only the winner is standing.

Major catch here is that for the game to work properly, the targets have to be chained in a loop, so there usually has to be a trusted individual running the game who can validate the assignment list.

So I scraped the online school directory to pull names, emails, and school photos of everyone. Then I built a Java Swing app to track a list of who was playing, and the app would shuffle a random list and email everyone their assignments blindly, photos included. Flash forward a few months, and eventually we had a full roster of ~80 people playing across grades, which was ~10% of the student body.

Unfortunately, a group of freshmen started their own take on the game, which devolved into mauling one another with Crayola markers and Sharpies. The principal catches word that I’ve been running a ring, and brings me into his office to tell me to shut it down.

Uncharacteristically for my teenage years, I went all-in on diplomacy. I plead my case, tell him I’m not involved with the freshmen, hear out his concerns, volunteer to modify the game rules, and point out that our group been playing for months without issues. No dice; the dude was a jackass with a chip on his shoulder. So we come to an impasse, staring at one another in silence.

Eventually, to break the silence, he asks about a stray bandage I have sticking out the top of my shirt. I’d had a small melanoma removed from my collarbone that week, which was caught as early as possible and removed without issue. Seizing the opportunity, I tell the principal “I have cancer”, and immediately walk out before he could formulate a response. Poor dude went white as a sheet. Good times.

Bit of a lame ending for the app, but building it taught me the skills I used to jump-start my career, and drove home the point that software isn’t an end unto itself — it’s the way people use it to come together that makes things great.

Best General-ed goes to A History of the Popes by O’Malley. It’s a great throughline that touches on a massive swath of western history and adds depth to common narratives of the church. (You can probably skip it though if you’re the type who already has strong opinions on the Council of Calcedon or papal investiture.)

Best Prose goes to The Power Broker by Caro. Too much ink spilled on that one for me to do it justice, but suffice it to say it’s a widely-cited nominee for greatest all-time nonfiction works.

Best Insight goes to Hamalainen’s Comanche Empire. I don’t have enough praise for this one: It’s the story of the Comanches from ~1600-1900, but has wider insights that tie into empire and culture on a global level. Highly recommend as a paired reading with McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.

If you haven’t boofed toad, you haven’t lived.

Now get off my Lemmiwinks fan club site.

¡Soy loco por los cornballs!

Dangling commits are unlinked objects, and happen pretty frequently if you’re using hard resets instead of explicit git reverts.

Not arguing that it’s good practice but it’s very common.

Great answer on the whole, but worth noting that both Git’s standard CLI client and most hosted git services do run periodic GC to prune dangling commits.

I second the suggestion to take periodic snapshots of your mirror. Because the majority of file contents will not be changing over time, you can make these snapshots very disk-space efficient by taking binary diffs of the tar’d repo using rdiff or the like.

Cornographic af

Probably not what GP was referring to, but Discord works totally fine in-browser without a client.

Less potential for vulns, telemetry, regressions, etc.

Check if you have hardware acceleration enabled for Firefox. It’s usually disabled OOTB for some reason.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/performance-settings

Yeah, top two photos are oysters, and the bottom two are chants.

Based on the time of year and their appearance, I think the oysters were a native oyster variety, but your point still stands in the general case :).

From an engineering perspective, tying the backup camera to the CAN (and by extension, telemetry units) dramatically increases the possible modalities of failure.

The two are absolutely connected.

The second-order effects are not the fault of the regulators trying to make cars safer

This is where you’re losing me. The second-order effects are within the purview of those regulators and should have been addressed in-hand with the mandate.

Why would the automakers be willing to comply with safety regulation but disregard telemetry regulation?

In a vacuum, sure.

In practice, the government has moved from speed cameras (benign monitoring) to ALPRs (pervasive surveillance) without the public blinking. In practice, many auto manufacturers (Telsa, Hyundai, GM brands) have made it a matter of regular policy to ship home audio and video data from drivers’ cars to use for marketing and surveillance.

Backup cameras are a small drop in the bucket compared to other transportation design choices if you’re serious about a Vision* Zero endgame, and in my book, the potential for abuse makes them a liability rather than an asset towards that end.

Nonetheless, you’re arguing that the government should force people to install cameras on their private property in the interest of public safety, are you not?

Same vein: Should drivers be required to keep over-the-air software delivery enabled so that manufacturers can distribute safety-critical updates to their cars as fast as possible?

And enforcing telescreens into every citizen’s home is critical to ensuring public safety. Without constant monitoring, how can the State prevent sedition and deviancy? If you let people disable their telescreen speakers, how will they stay informed and alert if there’s an emergency?

If you don’t accept your telescreen, you’re neglecting your duty to protect others.

I see where you’re coming from, but that’s mostly a problem with trucks, vans, and SUVs. Let’s stop incentivizing manufacturers to pump out tanks first, then we can talk.

The increasing digitization of auto manufacturing has led to all sorts of second-order effects, including vastly more difficult repairs (ask your local mechanic if you don’t believe me), massive invasions of consumer privacy (see linked expose), and generally made cars far more brittle.

https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-on-wheels-every-car-brand-reviewed-by-mozilla-including-ford-volkswagen-and-toyota-flunks-privacy-test/

You’re one step away from advocating for the telescreens from 1984.

I’ll say it: Ditching ABS is horrifically stupid, but mandating backup cameras and backseat alarms is equally stupid in the opposite direction.

E: The article is talking about full-auto emergency braking and not ABS. I never thought I’d say these words, but I’m with Ted Cruz on this one.

This is a remarkably insightful test.

Subjective take, but the early SDs do pretty well then tail off, the smaller competitors are somewhat-asthetically-pleasing but poorly prompt-aligned, qwen comes in as a solid oddball, and lastly, the nano bananas are coming in with a big step function in terms of quality.

I’ve done that sorta thing before with ffmpeg; should do the trick for ya.

I’m a big fan of this approach to software; it works. PHP5, cgi-bin scripts, perl spaghetti, etc. are lit for hobby work.

The tradeoff is that you have to pay a lot of attention to do things securely, and you have to hand roll a lot more of your codebase instead of relying on external packages.