Environmental Services > Garbage Men

#TIL

Here is a small blurb about JRC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judge_Rotenberg_Center
"The Judge Rotenberg Center (JRC) is a pseudoscientific therapeutic institution in Canton, Massachusetts, United States, whose behavior modification program targeted at people with developmental disabilities and emotional and behavioral disorders has been condemned by the United Nations special rapporteur on torture. The center is known for its use of the graduated electronic decelerator (GED), a torture device that administers electric shocks to residents."

Note, dear reader. Wikipedia doesn't say 'was' a pseudoscientific therapeutic institution... it says 'is'.

This place exists, has income, buys BMWs for the upper staff, is incorporated into the fabric of our society. We live right next to this victorian-era shit.

#horrible #inhumane #jrc #todayilearned #til

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JRC's logo

#TIL IP autoconf (RARP/BOOTP/DHCP) was invented in 1984 for netbooting diskless Unix workstations in the Stanford University Network (SUN). So the ip=dhcp feature in the Linux kernel was not just a hack for NFS. It's the entire reason that DHCP exists.

#TIL

Humans have evolved over the last several decades, maybe longer, specialized uses for all their various body holes; stuff coming in stuff going out sometimes all at once.

As you move through simpler organisms they have to do the same crap with fewer holes so multi functionality can get bizarre.

This led me to hear a reasonable intelligent credentialed scientist say "Dragonfly Nymph Anal Pyramid" and I may never be the same.

"[...] when the home directory is placed on NFS [...] A 1 ms network latency makes these programs unacceptably slow (e.g., executing import torch takes more than 30s)."
"[...] the Chinet [中科光电] optical-to-electrical port module I originally used introduced an extra 0.1 ms of latency, causing IOPS to drop by 2/3)."

#TIL about @keyoxide, which launched back in pandemic as a better alternative to Keybase. h/t to @whitequark for indirectly educating me via link in their account header. https://blog.keyoxide.org/keyoxide-launch/

EDIT: linked Mastodon account :)

#TIL that #GoDaddy has inserted "pay" subdomains into all our company domains that direct people to godaddy's new web payments service.

GoDaddy support denies this, says someone had to turn it on. I ask for the audit logs because I'm the only one with keys to our domains right now.
"We don't have an audit log" GoDaddy says
"So you can't prove you didn't do it?" I ask
"goDaddy would never blah blah blah"

So anyway we're now moving to a new registrar

@gutenberg_org @ShaulaEvans

#TIL How does an astrolabe work?

From HowStuffWorks:
(I enjoyed the 9 minute ted talk linked in this article)
https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/gadgets/clocks-watches/astrolabe.htm

#TIL (Today I Learned) that "Aella", the sex worker who poses as data scientist by sending people questionaires asking about their sex life and who was platformed by Lex Fridman, is running a cult where they preach that AI will kill us all and that doomsday is near … unless, of course, we redirect all our money into "AI Safety startups" to prevent that from happening.

It's all a marketing plot for the most disgusting companies of our time.

Aella is a good friend of Grimes, felon Musk's long-term partner. And that's how Lex Fridman and Aella were introduced to each other.

At Aella's cult named "plzdontkillus", influencers chasing fame and money are first lured in by promises of heaploads of money and then made to crank out one video a day to their followers. Attendants are even subjected to "voluntary" torture methods such as waterboarding.

How is this different from Charles Manson's cult?

The Effective Altruists financing all this also subverted popular YouTube channels such as Hank Green's SciCom.

I've also long grown wary of Kurzgesagt which I watched a lot around 2018–2020.

Meanwhile Peter Thiel is inviting influential people to secret meetups he calls "Dialog" where they can discuss off the records how to build cults. Leaks have shown that besides CEOs of various corporations, even Kaja Kallas of the EU Commission attended the secret Dialog meetings.

Seemingly everyone around you is turning crazy, developing psychosis, or becoming indoctrinated into a cult.

Also meanwhile, uninformed people (for example, your coworkers) think you're a nutcase when you mention any of this and speak out against "AI" at the workplace.

Please stop watching these podcasts. Stop giving these folks your attention. I don't know what else to say.

#LexFridman #TESCREAL #EffectiveAltruism #GenAI #capitalism #ClimateCatastrophe

RE: https://mastodon.world/@YakyuNightOwl/117049054360205064

#TIL that committing "crimes against children" that "are among the worst this district has seen" in Oregon, only gets you 10 years more than moving zines in Texas.

#Epstein #Prairieland

#TIL There is no precise way to measure the age of trees in equatorial rainforests. No Seasons = No Rings

#stupidshitIneverthoughtabout

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large moss covered trees in a rainforest

#TIL band Cornershop were burning posters of Morrissey in protest at his racism all the way back in 1992.

https://www.cornershop.com/tags/burning-morrissey-poster

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/may/30/bigmouth-strikes-again-morrissey-songs-loneliness-shyness-misfits-far-right-party-tonight-show-jimmy-fallon

#UKpol #Morrissey #Cornershop #Racism

When is the AKS primality test actually faster than other tests? https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/23260/when-is-the-aks-primality-test-actually-faster-than-other-tests

#TIL AKS is not just "mainly of theoretical interest because probabilistic tests are faster", it's "almost never usable for any practical input sizes" (extrapolating out to 1000 digits arrives at estimated times in the hundreds of thousands to millions of years), and it can't even generate any proof in exchange from that slowness. Just use ECPP instead.

🐬 TIL: A dolphin named Kelly figured out how to run a scam on her trainers.

At the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Mississippi, dolphins got a fish for every piece of trash they turned in. Kelly noticed the payout was the same no matter the size, so she hid trash under a rock and tore off small pieces to redeem one at a time.

Then she escalated. Turning in a stray seagull earned a bonus fish payout, so Kelly started saving one of her fish, using it as bait to lure gulls, and cashing in the bigger reward. She later taught the trick to her calf, and it spread through the pod until gull-baiting was, in the words of one account, a hot game among the dolphins.

Trainers only found her stash when they drained the pool for repairs and discovered a pile of garbage hidden under the rocks. Kelly survived Hurricane Katrina and was relocated to the Bahamas, where she was still going strong in her 40s as of 2018.

Read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2003/jul/03/research.science
https://hakaimagazine.com/features/kelly-the-sassy-dolphin/

#TIL #dolphins #AnimalIntelligence

LOL, my second "Today I Learned"

If you're into some salacious, almost pornographic, Bible-inspired art by medieval and other old artists, apparently David and Bathsheba are your keywords to look up. They don't teach you THAT in Sunday School.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathsheba

#nsfw #religion #til #bible

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During this meeting, the king engaged in 13 acts of intercourse with Bath-sheba before affirming his decision that her son Solomon should succeed him. The significance of that exact number of coituses and the meaning of their multi-coital encounter has been discussed in modern Biblical scholarship.[14]

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Censored, maybe pornographic painting of a Bible scene

"Warning: exporting /nas/jails/nfs/data exports entire / file system"

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The exports file on an NFS server lists filesystems to be exported to NFS clients. It is read and applied by mountd(8) on start and on SIGHUP. Each entry in exports is a line with a list of directories followed by a list of hosts, netgroups, and options, separated by spaces or tabs: /dir ... [host | netgroup | -option] ... All directories in a single line must live in the same filesystem, which is exported to the hosts and netgroups listed, according to the options specified. Exported directories must not have pathname components that are symbolic links, `.', or `..'. Warning: Exporting a directory exposes the entire contents of the filesystem that the directory lives in to NFS clients. This happens even if an exported directory is not the root directory of a filesystem on the server. NFS clients are only prevented from access to files and directo- ries on filesystems that are not exported at all. Warning: Access control is only by network address. NFS servers with any non-public data should be exposed only to restricted or firewalled net- works with ingress filtering. There is no authentication or encryption to make it safe for restricting access on the open internet.

#TIL that you can turn off the newfangled annoying "download stuff from debuginfod.ubuntu.com?" prompt every time #gdb runs, by unsetting DEBUGINFOD_URLS in the environment.

That must have been annoying me ever since Ubuntu 24.04 came out, and I just sighed and said no to the prompt every time.

But this evening a program of mine hung mysteriously on shutdown, and on investigation that turned out to be because Leak Sanitiser had invoked llvm-symbolizer to print backtraces, which defaults to trying to talk to the Ubuntu debuginfod servers, which currently seems to be ill and not answering questions. And llvm-symbolizer's man page mentioned that environment variable, which seems to be what triggers gdb to offer the same feature.

If I'd known that two years ago I could have avoided two years of that annoying gdb prompt!

#TIL there was Volkswagen vehicle in the 1970s called The Thing. I lived in suburban Detroit growing up and my dad worked in the auto industry, but it seems this car came out after I'd left home for college and then a move to California.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIJTvrs2NPk

More info:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWrkENGbkNs

h/t @ai6yr

#cars #1970s

🚗 TIL: Before GPS was fully operational, Honda built a car navigation system that used zero satellites.

In 1981, the Honda Electro Gyrocator debuted as a dealer option on the Accord. You placed a transparent plastic map over a small CRT screen and marked your starting point.

As you drove, a helium gas-rate gyroscope detected turns: helium flow shifted between two heated wires, creating a temperature difference the computer read as direction. A transmission sensor tracked distance. A 16-bit computer combined both to move a dot across the map showing your position.

Not perfect. Wheel spin and drift compounded, so you could pull over and manually realign. The IEEE designated it a Milestone in 2017 as the world's first map-based car navigation system, 14 years before GPS.

The catch: it cost about $2,746 (nearly a quarter of the car's price). It only lasted one year.

Read more:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/first-mapbased-car-navigation-system-debuted-14-years-before-gps
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electro_Gyrocator
https://global.honda/en/heritage/episodes/1981navigationsystem.html

#TIL #Honda #engineering #history

#TIL about https://inventaire.io/ -- a Fediverse-enabled book cataloging and lending project. Cool! #Fediverse #Books #Inventaire

#TIL: while the two words “Meter” = “measuring device”, “metre” = “unit of measurement” *are* cognates, their common ancestor is waaay further back than I thought!

"Metre" from French in the 18th C., "meter" from the old English verb "to mete [out]", and their common ancestor is all the way back in Proto-Indo-European!

USians happen to spell both the same, which actually hides that they aren’t as related as you might think!

Source: https://www.dailywritingtips.com/metre-meter-and-mete/

Thanks for bringing up this train of thought: @joncounts @damianpeterson @mattwillis

Komme mir ja schon etwas wie ein #Spießer vor, aber ich werfe von neuen Geräten oder Kabeln niemals diese Bindedrähte weg.

Die wandern in eine kleine Schachtel in der Küchenschublade. Immer wenn ich dann etwas mit #Kabel in den Keller bringe wird das Kabel in Achtern aufgewickelt und mit einem Drahtbinder zusammen gebunden.

Vermeidet #Kabelsalat in den Kisten im Keller.

Irgendwie schon bissle schwäbisch, kann man diskutieren, ob im Guten 🙄
#SpießerGluck #LifeHack #TIL #TodayILearned

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Eine kleine, gelbe Plastikschachtel mit bereits gebrauchten Kabel-Bindedrähten in verschiedenen Farben und Längen

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Eine USB-Tastatur, eine USB-Maus und ein Netzteil, alle mit ordentlich aufgewickelten und zusammengebundenen Kabeln

#TIL about sonic boom refraction in the upper atmosphere https://gizmodo.com/faa-takes-first-step-to-scrap-the-ban-on-supersonic-flights-over-the-u-s-2000779632

#TIL there is a Tower-of-Babel story from Ghana. Only, it’s about God trying to get away from people because they are annoying. And an old woman tries to build a tower to apologize, but it’s structurally unsound and it falls and she dies.

Thereby god succeeds in leaving humanity behind to deal with itself and still look around for him.

#Folklore
#Mythology

#TIL there is a winamp skin for VLC. 😂

#TIL that indigenous people were given the last names of the priests who Christianized them.
#colonialism #mexico #spain

TIL about Atlantic Bluefin Tuna:

1. Can swim up to 43 mph (69 km/h). Their wide fins retract and their eyes are flush with their bodies.
2. They are blue on top and white on bottom to be camouflaged from above and below.
3. Grow up to 6.5 ft (2m) and 550 lbs (249kg).
4. The etymology of “tuna” is Greek, meaning “to rush,” in relevance to their speed.

https://oceanconservancy.org/wildlife-library/bluefin-tuna/

#TIL #Science #Oceanography #MarineBiology #Fish #Tuna #MarineLife

After 7 decades of observing humanity's talent for self-deception, Ambrose Bierce decided to inspect its talent for self-destruction. Most elderly men seek warmer climates. He sought artillery fire instead. He rode south to join Pancho Villa's revolution, a 71 year old cynic entering a land where cynicism was redundant cuz reality itself had become satire.

Then he disappeared.

#TIL #Bierce #PanchoVilla #AmbroseBierce

#TIL in British fish and chips joints, vinegar is often not vinegar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-brewed_condiment

#TIL
I don't know how I thought growing Dragon Fruit would look, but it was definitely not this.
#nature is #weird #plants #gardening

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lots of growing dragon fruit trees sort of if Aloe Vera grew upside down and had pink naval mines hanging from its cactus dreads.

TIL there is a river in Peru that can boil things

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanay-timpishka

#Peru #TIL

#til that Adam Savage's father was a painter, director, animator and made this subversive mickey mouse cartoon during the war in vietnam

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mickey_Mouse_in_Vietnam