BC TECH
Saved by @CodyyyGardner

man, this tablet project.
so it stopped charging. it was at 23%, I charge it for a couple hours, still 23%
I turn it off and leave it on the charger for 23%, confirm it's charging, and 8 hours later... 21%

 so I get on the internet and order a replacement battery.
in the two days it takes it to arrive, the tablet somehow charges to 100%?
it arrives and I'm like "eh, fuck it. I have the battery here, that one is old, I might as well swap 'em.
I try to open up the tablet, following the instructions, and... the digitizer cracks.
it turns out the fact I had to replace the digitizer before meant that the new one wasn't glued in as well as it should be, so when I pried it open, the wrong part came off. Whoops.
that's okay, because of an amazon mix-up long ago, I actually have a spare digitizer on hand for this tablet! I can just replace that after the battery.
so I finish taking out the old battery, start inserting the new battery, screw it in, and... the power connector won't attach. Odd.
Maybe they sent me the wrong battery?
The old battery connector looks like this in my microscope.
and the new one looks like... oh shit.
so I go back to amazon and tell them "THIS BATTERY IS DOA REPLACE IT" and they're like "sure. just drop off the bad one at a drop-off place"
so I put the tablet mostly back together so it won't get damaged while I wait for the new battery to arrive, and...
oh. it's not just the digitizer. the screen cracked too. motherfucker
so I get on ebay and find the replacement screen and order that. I put the battery to be replaced back in the packaging and put it by my bedroom door, and go to sleep
I wake up in the morning and I'm like "I'm gonna go get coffee and drop off that amazon box!"

the box isn't there.
apparently while I was asleep, my lovely wife cleaned up some boxes in the room, and thought the box-in-a-box was empty. so she put it outside our room, in the hallway, to be taken to the trash/recycling. uh-oh
so I go out there and... it's not there either.

oh goody. my roommate was nice and proactive and didn't procrastinate on cleaning up boxes for trash/recycling and... it's gone.
and today is the day the truck comes and empties out the trash & recycling.
but good news:
it turns out she took it out AFTER the truck came!
I go out to the trash bins and it's sitting there, on the bottom of the recycling bin.
see it turns out that it being after the truck came makes it harder to get: if the truck hadn't come, it would have been sitting on top of a big pile of recycling.
since the truck did come, it's now on the bottom of the recycling bin.
6 feet (2 meters) away
so I go get my grabby arm thing and grab the outer box, and... it falls over. throwing the battery box out of it.

so now I can't grab the small box.
so I go back in and grab a pole I had handy and shove the battery over to the lower end of the recycling bin and FINALLY I GET IT
so now I can return it to amazon, and the recycler isn't going to get a Spicy Exploding Surprise
this is how far the story goes at the moment.

The drop-off point is less than a mile from my apartment, but at this point I half-expect that I'm going to make it halfway there and my car will get hit my a train
there's not a traintrack I'm going to cross to get there, but that's just how this project is going
anyway the replacement screen is on the way too.
it's probably going to arrive folded in half
also I'm pretty sure I passed the point where it would have been cheaper to just buy a new tablet like 8 steps back
anyway I haven't because of the Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
I can always afford a 20-30$ replacement part. I can't afford a 400$ tablet
anyway bring this fact up reminded me that a family member sent me a cheque for chrimbas, and I haven't cashed it yet. I should do that now!

and my bank's mobile app (which can cash cheques) is down.
I would normally take a screenshot of this to show you, but it turns out my phone just goes "image is null" when I try to take a screenshot. I think that's because my bank app uses that security protocol thing to disable screenshots.
normally when I run into this problem I just take a picture of my phone's screen using another device.

usually that's my tablet. *sigh*
I could use my webcam, but it turns out my webcam isn't working.
(I had a major USB Crisis the other day and disconnected a lot of USB hubs and shit to diagnose it, and haven't yet reconnected them all)
there we go, got it to work. sorta.

good to know it's on their end.
god, I bet they turned off the fucking backend servers (running cobol) for the christmas-new-year break.
just because they don't have any techs in-office to refill the punchcard bins
I say that like it hasn't been under like 8 hours since I was last researching building my own punchcard machinery.
an amusing related thing about banks and history:
I noticed that the #1 time I am most likely to brainfart and use my birth name is signing cheques.
You'd think that might make sense: I've had my current name for like a decade, cheques are getting less common, so most of my cheque-signing was naturally back in the Dark Ages of the 90s and early 2000s, when I had my boring name.
and it seems to make sense, for about 10 seconds, then you remember I'm ME.
I live in the 1990s PROFESSIONALLY.
I have like 3 Win95 machines within reach. There's actually almost a dozen pentium computers sitting on my bed right now!
but I'm never making an account on a BBS using a real dial-up modem and think "oh I'll just type in my old name here!"
it's only cheques.

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foone
foone
@Foone
Everyone likes to forget this episode just because it's terrible, but we were really sleeping on inherent comedy in a unfreezing an investor 300 years in the future and having them discover we've transitioned to a moneyless post-scarcity utopia.


it's like a classic twilight zone episode.

in fact, it IS a twilight zone episode.
The Rip Van Winkle Caper, Season 2, episode 24.
Four criminals steal a million dollars of gold bars, then put themselves in suspended animation for a hundred years to hide from the law.

they wake up, then start killing each other from mistrust, then the last one dies in the desert, as he offers a gold bar to the driver of a passing car, asking for water and a ride into town

the confused driver walks back to his car with the bar, and his wife asks what the gold bar is.
he says something like "It's gold... they used to use this for money, before we figured out a way to manufacture it."
He tosses it away, and drives off.
CULTURE
foone
foone
@Foone
So I got out some CF cards and noticed something odd about this one. Do you see the weirdness?


How the fuck is a CF card "USB Enabled"?


So CF cards are a weird beast that act as either a PCMCIA card or an ATA/IDE card depending on a mode pin.

They're definitely not USB.

And it's not like that weird SanDisk card I have which you can fold in half and plug it in as a USB device.


It turns out the reason for "USB Enabled" is because it's a Lexar drive from the jumpSHOT era.
This is a normal CF card in most cases, you can use it in normal CF card readers and such
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foone
foone
@Foone
WOULD YOU LIKE TO ADD HOLLYWOOD STYLE TITLES TO YOUR HOME VIDEOS?
NOW YOU CAN!


This is the Sima ScreenWriter, a device for putting titles on your home videos.


The back


It's apparently from 1992, and takes a CR2032 battery


The very minimalist IO panel. composite in, composite out, power and a switch.
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foone
foone
@Foone
Bad news:, everyone: I got my next keyboard


The front folds down


Honestly I've seen much worse keyboards


It's got buttons on top


The back is molded but has no functionality except the battery compartment
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foone
foone
@Foone
Lockpicking Floppies!

I don't know why twitter is refusing to insert a card for this one. In any case, It's the @LockPickingLwyr, and it's a floppy-drive-lock.


so I've been meaning to do a video or thread on these sorts of locks myself. I have several, of different designs.

generally they're all designed vaguely like this one: it's a plastic insert that goes into the floppy drive, then it has some bit that rotates with the key to hold itself inside.

and they pretty much universally use super-cheap low-security tubular locks like this. You can probably pick most of them with a ballpoint pen
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More from Tech

Caleb Porzio
Caleb Porzio
@calebporzio
🎉🎉 PHP 7.3 is here!

Here are the things I'm excited about.

🚂 Trailing commas in function/method calls!

This will certainly be a required styling choice for me. Same delightful benefits of trailing comma in multi-line PHP arrays, and JavaScript objects.


🧵 Less disgusting heredoc syntax!

Inlining heredoc strings in any way right now is grrrosssss. Now we get sensible capabilities. Everything that was wrong with it is now fixed!

(Ignore the bad syntax highlighting)


☠️ Finally, not-so-silent json_decode error detection!

This really sucked before, now it just sucks a bit less (who wants to pass a 4th param and pass 2 default params first? (helper function anybody?)


📜 Not horrible functions for getting the first and last item (or key) from an array!

Before you either strung a bunch of functions together or messed with internal array pointers. This is a much-needed improvement.
TECH
Paul Stamatiou \U0001f4f7
Paul Stamatiou 📷...
@Stammy
Just published 15,000+ words on security keys. 🔐📱💻

With SIM attacks at their highest, now is a great time to take a closer look at your online security.

Removing SMS from your two-factor auth is a start, but authenticator apps have downsides too...

https://t.co/Dk0MPJHL2V


Just look at these headlines from recent SIM swap and port attacks.

It's all too established for attackers to find ways to socially engineer control of your phone number and start gaining control of your accounts.

I first talk about some general security tips.


Unfortunately not all websites let you remove your phone number from accounts.

You may consider migrating your phone carrier to @googlefi , which requires email account access to do anything (and can be locked down with security keys and even Advanced Protection)


Beyond SMS, I talk about issues that TOTP authenticator apps (the code generators) have as a form of two-factor auth. They're so, so much better than relying on SMS for your second factor but they still have issues like utilizing shared secrets and lacking phishing prevention.

Enter security keys!

Utilizing public key cryptography they don't have any shared secret between the client and the server. They prevent phishing by taking the website domain into account.

Even if you get tricked by a clone phishing website, your key won't.
TECH
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Simon Wardley #EEA
Simon Wardley #EEA
@swardley
X : Our executive team is concerned that we need to up our game in order to out innovate Amazon.
Me : Do you map?
X : Yes
Me : Like this?
X : No. What's that?
Me : A map of a tea shop.


X : Why is that a map?
Me : Long story, all to do with how space has meaning. To keep it short, maps help people to focus on user needs, the components involved, to communicate missing components and scenario play ideas like staff becoming robots.


Me : They’re also good for measuring and managing capital flow, making investment decisions, removing bias and getting rid of duplication.
X : I don’t see how that helps with innovation?


Me : Well, innovation is a tricky word because we use it to describe many things. If you’re talking about differentiation with the adjacent unexplored then you’re experimenting in the “uncharted” space e.g. immortality with magic provided by the special custom built kettle.


X : That sounds like nonsense.
Me : A lot of what people think will be the next great innovation is nonsense. Actually, most of it is. That’s the nature of the uncharted space, it’s experimental, high risk and generally results in failure.
X : We need more reliable innovation.
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Paul Matzko
Paul Matzko
@PMatzko
The New York Times article about SlateStarCodex is finally out and it is...bad. There's a lot I could parse, but let me just walk you through one paragraph that is so misleading as to be

Take the first sentence of this paragraph. Now, technically the clause--"who proposed a link between race and IQ"--could simply modify "Murray" and have nothing to do w/ SSC.


But 99% of readers are going to assume that the clause actually defines SSC's alignment with Murray. In other words, the author is strongly implying that SSC shares Murray's racist beliefs.

And that would be big(!)...if it were at all true. It is not. Indeed, if you go to the hyperlink, you'll find that SSC's purported "alignment" has nothing to do with Murray's "Bell Curve."

What SSC & Murray agree about is that poverty is partly hereditable and thus very sticky, so much so that the proposition job retraining programs will meaningfully address mass economic disruption is a pie-in-the-sky fantasy.
TECH
El Sandifer, Rationality Expert to the Stars
El Sandifer, Rationali...
@ElSandifer
I’m quoted in this, which does about as good a job overviewing the topic as a New York Times profile can be expected to.

Major oversights in it as I see.

First, It does not acknowledge the fact that Yudkowsky is, at heart, a complete crank. This remains, to my mind, crucial to understanding the rationalist community’s influence on the world: they’re sci-fi writers being mistaken for scientists.

You can’t really understand the harmful effects of SSC until you realize that it’s part of a larger movement of bullshit artists serving as cult leaders to the techbros.

Second, and more importantly, it never really explains the harm that’s being done by Scott Siskind and his followers. It comes close, noting that “SJWs” were the only group not welcome in SSC, but it doesn’t capture the harm of that because it doesn’t unpack the term.

What is meant in practice when “SJWs” aren’t welcome in a space is that marginalized people speaking of the harm they experience are silenced.

That’s it. That’s the meaning.
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Hello, my name is Gal,
I am an Israeli citizen, and I want to convey this urgent message to the world: Contrary to what you are told, Israel has not "returned to normal" in any way >>

2/ Moreover, despite the desire to create a setting as if there was a full and normal routine here - the Israeli Ministry of Health JUST RECOMMENDED TODAY TO EXTENT THE DECLARATION OF A “STATE OF EMERGENCY” in Israel >>

3/ to which is the foundation for coercion, violation of basic rights, severe discrimination under a "green mark (pass)", prolonged closure (Of about 5 months overall) and a lot of undemocratic and not “routine" restrictions. >

4/ If the situation in Israel had "returned to routine thanks to the astounding success of vaccines" then the "state of emergency" would not have continued.

5/ In fact, since the beginning of the "vaccination project" there has been only more intimidation and in many ways - even though the closure has been lifted, much more coercion.
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Dr Amanda Moehring
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In Academia, people aren’t always supported when they need it. I want to share what @WesternU did when my husband died right after the pandemic shutdown. It should be shared with other uni’s as a model for empathy and proactive care when someone is in crisis.
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Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
It’s underremarked upon that stablecoins accomplish basically all of the original design goals for Bitcoin qua a transactional mechanism (instant free value transfer anywhere), but that nobody cares about this because nobody ever cared about that part of the pitch.

“Why do people care about stablecoins then?”

A mix of “they encourage dollar-denominated liquidity in the cryptocurrency ecosystem and discourage withdrawal of the same” and “they’re good for money laundering.”

“But they make value transfer between exchanges much faster!”

This was a solved problem in traditional finance, too, mostly through the extension of credit. (It doesn’t matter how long settlement takes if there is sufficient trust to enable credit.)

The Bitcoin ecosystem is *positively allergic* to credit, so you have to call it a coin for them to accept it. And after you call it a coin they ignore everything the world has learned about credit, like risk management.

“Stablecoins aren’t credit!”

They’re pretty much exactly credit? A tether is a zero-coupon Bitfinex bond with a non-functioning call option. I
TECH
V\u0936\u0941\u0926\u094d\u0927\u093f
Vशुद्धि...
@V_Shuddhi
The first ever world map was sketched thousands of years ago by Indian saint
“Ramanujacharya” who simply translated the following verse from Mahabharat and gave the world its real face

In Mahabharat,it is described how 'Maharishi Ved Vyasa' gave away his divine vision to Sanjay


Dhritarashtra's charioteer so that he could describe him the events of the upcoming war.

But, even before questions of war could begin, Dhritarashtra asked him to describe how the world looks like from space.

This is how he described the face of the world:

सुदर्शनं प्रवक्ष्यामि द्वीपं तु कुरुनन्दन। परिमण्डलो महाराज द्वीपोऽसौ चक्रसंस्थितः॥
यथा हि पुरुषः पश्येदादर्शे मुखमात्मनः। एवं सुदर्शनद्वीपो दृश्यते चन्द्रमण्डले॥ द्विरंशे पिप्पलस्तत्र द्विरंशे च शशो महान्।

—वेद व्यास, भीष्म पर्व, महाभारत


Meaning:-

हे कुरुनन्दन ! सुदर्शन नामक यह द्वीप चक्र की भाँति गोलाकार स्थित है, जैसे पुरुष दर्पण में अपना मुख देखता है, उसी प्रकार यह द्वीप चन्द्रमण्डल में दिखायी देता है। इसके दो अंशो मे पीपल और दो अंशो मे विशाल शश (खरगोश) दिखायी देता है।


Meaning: "Just like a man sees his face in the mirror, so does the Earth appears in the Universe. In the first part you see leaves of the Peepal Tree, and in the next part you see a Rabbit."

Based on this shloka, Saint Ramanujacharya sketched out the map, but the world laughed
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Meet Shah
Meet Shah
@ms89_meet
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MCX >85% market share in commodity trading.

Coal India >80% market share in coal production in India.

ITC >75% market share in cigarettes.

Honda Siel >75% in portable power generators.

Hindustan Zinc >75% market share in primary zinc industry.

Asahi India Glass >70% market share in automotive glass.

NRB Bearings >70% market share in needle roller bearings.

Pidilite >65% market share in adhesives.

CAMS >65% market share in RTA within mutual fund industry.

Time Technoplast >65% market share in polymer based industrial packaging.

Concor >65% market share in domestic container cargo transport.

Exide >60% market share in lead batteries.

Naukri >60% market share in the Indian job market space.

Praj >60% market share in ethanol plant installing.

Indiamart Intermesh >55% market share in the online B2B Classified space.

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Vst Tillers >50% market share in
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Delta corp >50% in online poker games.

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