Hacker News: mothsonasloth

New comment by mothsonasloth in "Organic Maps"

mothsonasloth — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 12:09:59 +0000

Bookmarked. Definitely will use this for the Mongol Rally next year

New comment by mothsonasloth in "Will the growing deer prion epidemic spread to humans? Why not?"

mothsonasloth — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 20:28:23 +0000

There was a scare that BSE time bomb would explode in the UK in the 2010s

As prions in children of 1990s brains would develop as they matured into adults.

Never happened...

New comment by mothsonasloth in "Infantilism as a norm (2018)"

mothsonasloth — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 10:06:56 +0000

I would argue that growing up in a comfortable Western lifestyle is contributing to this infantilism and will be one of the contributors of the decline of the western world.

If you are a Syrian refugee, the last thing you are caring about is the new Mario Nintendo game and Starbucks frappucino.

Time to get serious and have children (me talking to myself)

New comment by mothsonasloth in "Twitter's head of engineering resigns a day after DeSantis campaign announcement"

mothsonasloth — Fri, 26 May 2023 00:15:50 +0000

No stress testing the servers, naughty naughty.

Elon please hire me, I can use Jmeter to scale a 1000 users per second on my IBM Thinkpad to put load on the servers.

New comment by mothsonasloth in "Let's make sure GitHub doesn't become the only option"

mothsonasloth — Tue, 02 May 2023 14:01:12 +0000

No, https://git-scm.com/downloads

Github != Git

New comment by mothsonasloth in "Let's make sure GitHub doesn't become the only option"

mothsonasloth — Tue, 02 May 2023 13:52:18 +0000

I think Github have already won the cultural dev war. I hear many a developer saying Github instead of "Git".

A recent example from a mid level dev:

"I'm gonna branch from the github repository" - when the repository is self hosted

New comment by mothsonasloth in "We should ‘lift heavy’ as we get older"

mothsonasloth — Sun, 30 Apr 2023 08:32:20 +0000

I currently need to take the car to the gym as I am recovering from a broken leg. I tried walking but by the time I got there I was in too much pain.

Once my rehab is complete then I'll cycle or walk.

On a tangent; the calf muscle is a real hard muscle to build back...

New comment by mothsonasloth in "Dune: Part Two – First Look"

mothsonasloth — Thu, 27 Apr 2023 14:54:23 +0000

Really appreciated Villeneuve adding small scenes to the movie like the gardener watering the date palms and the ecology outpost. It rewards people who read the book and also helps people who are just watching the movie with understanding the world.

Curious to see what other tid-bits from the book they will keep in part 2. Hopefully we can see some Fremen Sietches.

On another note, I've always wanted to write a load tester library, I would call it Gom Jabbar. If the service falls over it fails the test.

New comment by mothsonasloth in "Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 staff"

mothsonasloth — Thu, 27 Apr 2023 14:18:44 +0000

"It is I that must remain and bare the heavy burden of their failure..."

https://youtu.be/u48vYSLvKNQ

New comment by mothsonasloth in "What’s the point of tech conferences?"

mothsonasloth — Mon, 24 Apr 2023 13:35:05 +0000

1. Swag

2. Fancy swag (that is definitely not a bribe)

3. Being wined and dined by sales people (that is definitely not a bribe)

4. Networking

5. Learn niche aspects of a programming language or framework, and prepare yourself for the future features

6. Food platters (can be hit or miss); word of advice, watch out for the fat Developers with the goatees and ponytails, or the skinny developers who dive bomb the food queue, they will clean up the buffet of the good stuff before you get there. Also duck out the presentation 5 minutes before lunchtime so you beat the queues.

New comment by mothsonasloth in "Car thieves using tech disguised inside old Nokia phones and Bluetooth speakers"

mothsonasloth — Fri, 21 Apr 2023 08:45:23 +0000

CAN bus is a brilliant thing for car diagnostics and modification but with every good system normally has a sword of damocles.

I would imagine my Passat which has a CAN interface on the headlight cluster would be vulnerable to this attack as well. Maybe even the bonnet sensor could be vulnerable.

Car manufacturers could remove CAN interfaces from peripheral systems (lights, wing mirrors) but they probably won't because it would make maintenance a little harder and less cost effective.

The idea of a software update by the security researchers sounds sensible but updating ECUs (engine control units), CCU (climate comfort units), infotainment systems of legacy cars will not happen.

Say goodbye to the old car thieves with their manual tools, hello techy thieves.

New comment by mothsonasloth in "When Interfaces Kill: What Happened to John Denver (1999)"

mothsonasloth — Wed, 19 Apr 2023 14:48:07 +0000

Slightly related - https://youtu.be/IQ_6-4MF79U?t=36

New comment by mothsonasloth in "Philips and the death of Europe's last electronics giant [video]"

mothsonasloth — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 08:56:04 +0000

Beko is a Turkish company, not Eastern European.

New comment by mothsonasloth in "Reverse-engineering the electronics in the Globus analog navigational computer"

mothsonasloth — Mon, 06 Mar 2023 13:43:17 +0000

Really cool, I have often wondered about the "maps" in the Russian helicopter cockpits.

I think they also move depending on the heading and direction of the helicopter to show the relative position for navigation.

Would be interesting to see how they worked.

Pic of cockpit - https://www.alamy.com/dashboard-in-a-russian-soviet-helicopt...

New comment by mothsonasloth in "5k-year-old tavern with food still inside discovered in iraq"

mothsonasloth — Thu, 02 Mar 2023 10:08:52 +0000

Another piece of evidence that Mesopotamia was the cradle of civilisation.

New comment by mothsonasloth in "A Lost Hiker’s SOS Signal Sparked a Wildfire. Now He Must Pay $300k"

mothsonasloth — Wed, 22 Feb 2023 13:32:56 +0000

Yea and that's the funny side, in UK you will find people trying to walk up mountains in trainers or crocs.

However in the UK you are less likely to find someone hiking with a crossbow, flares, military rations and some vitamin pills, and still get lost at the car park.

New comment by mothsonasloth in "A Lost Hiker’s SOS Signal Sparked a Wildfire. Now He Must Pay $300k"

mothsonasloth — Wed, 22 Feb 2023 13:30:18 +0000

A gun for breakfast, lunch and a more formal gun for dinner.

New comment by mothsonasloth in "Ask HN: What are these strange random strings spamming my blog?"

mothsonasloth — Mon, 20 Feb 2023 08:41:55 +0000

Probably someone just testing a spam bot on your site before deploying it for real.

New comment by mothsonasloth in "Is the Living Computer Museum dead?"

mothsonasloth — Fri, 17 Feb 2023 09:57:13 +0000

Always wanted to visit it whenever I was next in Seattle, I guess I will need to wait a while though.

In the UK we have a few smallish computer museums; one in Manchester University, one at a London University and then we have the National Museum of Computing at Bletchely park (not to be confused with Bletchely park museum, as there is some politics)

It is important in the case of NMoC that it is preserved, especially that they have a working Colossus machine and many other historic British computing achievements.

New comment by mothsonasloth in "Can video games change people’s minds about the climate crisis?"

mothsonasloth — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 13:18:20 +0000

This is just the ol' media favourite of "violent video games alters human behaviour" but flipped 180 and refreshed with a trendy climate wrapper.

Games for years have had dystopian, catastrophic and other themes. Sure they have inspired some people but on the whole I don't see how this would be anymore effective than:

- A climate crisis flyer handed out by a hippie looking person at an organic food market

- A saturday morning talkshow piece presenting on how a farmers fields are suffering drought

- A 24 hours news story on wildfires

"In one ear, out the other".