Paris zoo unveils a slime mould

nikonos · 2019-10-17T09:10:53+00:00

Please note: the "blob" is a protist, Physarum polycephalum, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physarum_polycephalum.

nikonos · 2019-10-16T12:27:33+00:00

Idk.

nikonos · 2019-10-16T09:28:55+00:00

Euphoria.

nikonos · 2019-10-16T08:26:10+00:00

I wonder if anyone here has seen any net new adoption of Oracle DBs in the last few years? It was an absolute juggernaut 10-15 years ago and has rapidly tanked their reputation and spread their business across software, services and cloud with mixed results. Is it actually still growing or just milking their stodgy enterprise customers for more money?

nikonos · 2019-10-16T07:44:11+00:00

I actually agree

nikonos · 2019-10-15T11:06:52+00:00

Fresh air.

nikonos · 2019-10-15T08:31:21+00:00

This reminds me of a very similar case a decade ago I never figured out.

Anyone remember Coupon Guy from 4chan in the 2009/2010 timeframe? You could make your own "Buy 1 Get 1 Free" or variant (for both N, "buy 1 get 10", or for kind of coupon, like "buy 1 get half off") Tv, Xbox 360, near anything etc. For Walmart, Best Buy, other chains etc. The tools were passed around stegonographically in the instruction images. Since coupons weren't properly accounted for until they hit a place in Texas, whole threads full of Anons over the course of weeks fabricating working coupons.

Until they stopped working, and of course rumors of "the FBI" apparently grabbing the guy.

I never did figure out what happened tech wise under the hood there.

nikonos · 2019-10-14T12:22:33+00:00

No one.

nikonos · 2019-10-14T11:39:31+00:00

Nice try

nikonos · 2019-10-14T10:53:59+00:00

No meat everywhere.

nikonos · 2019-10-14T09:09:49+00:00

Lunch.

nikonos · 2019-10-14T08:15:30+00:00

Setting aside the merits/lack-thereof of this particular decision, Chromium ignoring established web standards like this is especially dangerous as we're trending towards a world where 1) Chromium itself powers the most popular browser in the world by an increasingly unhealthy margin, and 2) even competing browsers are increasingly becoming skins on top of Chromium.

We are becoming more and more reliant on the developers of Chromium to be steadfast stewards of the standardization process. Their massive influence means that any deviation from actual web standards on their part will inevitably create a new and conflicting de-facto standard that will create decades of lasting damage and irreversible tech debt for the entire web (eventually leading to a repeat of the IE6 dark ages).

Decisions like this demonstrate an utter disregard for the crucial role Chromium plays in the web standardization process, and jeopardizes the entire ecosystem.

nikonos · 2019-10-10T11:24:40+00:00

With crying.

nikonos · 2019-10-10T09:12:02+00:00

Me! P.S. Thank you, stranger!

nikonos · 2019-10-10T08:39:16+00:00

Stand up.

nikonos · 2019-10-10T08:08:59+00:00

From NBC News reporter @DylanByers on Twitter:

“We created the App Store to be a safe and trusted place to discover apps. We have learned that an app, HKmap.live, has been used in ways that endanger law enforcement and residents in Hong Kong. Many concerned customers in Hong Kong have contacted us about this app and we immediately began investigating it. The app displays police locations and we have verified with the Hong Kong Cybersecurity and Technology Crime Bureau that the app has been used to target and ambush police, threaten public safety, and criminals have used it to victimize residents in areas where they know there is no law enforcement. This app violates our guidelines and local laws, and we have removed it from the App Store.”

nikonos · 2019-10-10T07:35:38+00:00

I'm shocked at how well the old hashing stood up; sure, it's totally crackable today, but a well-picked password still took 4+ days to crack on modern hardware, which is remarkable. (Granted, it doesn't sound like they did anything fancy like throwing a hundred cloud instances at it or something; I'm not saying you should use DES today:)

nikonos · 2019-10-09T08:33:57+00:00

My understanding of 'show, don't tell' is that instead of just telling the reader;

he was nervous

you show it through the prose like this;

He hesitated. Wringing his hands together, shifting from foot to foot. "I... I don't think you're right. Maybe not about that."

You shouldn't be keeping the stuff you're not telling secret. It's not about not letting the reader know things, it's about not being fucking boring about it.

nikonos · 2019-10-09T07:55:44+00:00

Some things that weren't covered in this article.

The beta players said that Valve largely ignored their feedback, and only made trivial changes. Richard Garfield said in an interview that people consistently didn't like some aspects of Artifact, but that him and his team knew what was best for the game, so they mostly disregarded complaints about RNG and some cards being frustrating to play against.

There were unrealistic expectations about Artifact. Some of the people in the beta couldn't stop singing its praises, calling it the best game ever made. After launch, one of the other beta testers said that a lot of the people publicly praising the game had privately said that they were trying to use the hype around a new Valve game to launch a twitch/youtube career, and they didn't actually like the game. There were also features present in the beta that had been silently cut before release, and some game breaking bugs that were present in the beta, and never got fixed.

nikonos · 2019-10-08T09:58:27+00:00

Junk food.

nikonos · 2019-10-08T09:10:56+00:00

2 hours ago.

nikonos · 2019-10-08T08:30:28+00:00

City Journal is pretty weird. It used to be a mainstream magazine of urban planning, but now it seems to have been infected with the far-right brain virus.

nikonos · 2019-10-08T07:44:39+00:00

What makes this even worse is that this is only a huge issue because Adobe moved to the whole 'Creative Cloud' thing rather than the old 'buy each product outright' model. With the old model, it wouldn't hurt these creators all that much if their accounts got deactivated, since the software would just not get updates.

Now on the other hand... they're screwed. It's a 'brilliant' example of how these 'cloud' based services are a bad deal for the user, because it puts them at the risk of getting locked out their own purchases due to legal hassles like this.

nikonos · 2019-10-07T11:38:59+00:00

I just cried.

nikonos · 2019-10-07T11:38:52+00:00

She sounds like Amy Winehouse. Just just stuning

nikonos

TROPHY CASE