Oh no, you!

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 3rd, 2024

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  • Kind of. But I’m also a pragmatic person resulting in a lot of contradictions. Just as an example, I despise authoritarian regimes, but my work email ends with .cn

    I consider myself an anarchopragmatist at heart; I would love to have neither Gods, kings, or mayors, but the process of implementing an alternative would most likely be worse than what we have today, at least in my corner of the world.


  • Yup, I 100% agree. Tapes are often viewed as obsolete, but there is no more cost-effective way of storing data in the petabytes in a safe way than tape.

    Hell, at work I have a few live storage clusters measured in petabytes, and being responsible for them can be pretty stressful at times. Data loss isn’t just bad, it is fucking terrifying when its data costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per day to collect.

    I have yet to experience data loss, but I breathe a sigh of relief for every batch of data that has been confirmed written to tape. Because once it is, I know that it is safe and no longer my responsibility.

    It’s written to two sets of tape at a time, both of which are read back to confirm data integrity, and once it is, that’s when I know that my live copy is officially not supposed to be a backup.

    One set of tapes is stored on board in case something stupid happens with the other set during transport to a literal mountain for storage. There it is re-read and checksummed, confirming that the other set of tapes can be rewritten with the next dataset. (Yes, every tape cartridge is written to twice).


  • Not sure if it’s still in use today, but the above description was 2008 through 2012. Msdos was used for “gun timing”, which basically amounted to extreme precision when it came to opening or shutting some solenoid valves. The computer had a GPS input and a bunch of serial outputs, and a control line (also serial).

    The control line sent instructions of which solenoid to open when, a time reference was determined by the GPS, and you can probably guess what the serial outputs were for.



  • I had a similar matrix of screens at my old job: Seismic survey observer desk. Three rows tall, four columns wide.

    They weren’t all connected to the same PC, though; If I remember correctly:

    • Top row was one PC (linux)
    • Middle row was another (linux)
    • Bottom left was its own PC (It ran msdos 6.22. Excellent OS for realtime stuff!)
    • Bottom right was its own (linux)
    • middle two at the bottom was windows.

    They were all connected to a Raritan KVM switch, so I used that to select which row to control. The exception was on bottom left and bottom right which had a dedicated keyboard and mouse.

    I have a picture of it somewhere, but I can’t seem to find it.




  • Not a tech company, but a petroleum exploration company, which involves a lot of tech. The petroleum industry in general is extremely conservative in terms of tech, in that older and proven technologies tend to stick around. For example, I often write data to magnetic tape.

    However, the industry doesn’t shy away from newer technologies where it does make sense. There is some AI at play, but it is limited in scope, and only deployed where it makes sense. Most of it is done on the processing side, so I don’t know much about it, but I get the impression it’s used in a similar manner to those headlines you see from time about AI predicting rectal cancer 99% correctly. Interpreting seismic survey data involves some geophysical wizardry that I’ve never quite understood - I just make sure the production servers offshore work.







  • Managed to topple a big oil drum of waste oil in my dad’s garage. I was 5 or so, and I was wearing a brand new winter outfit. It was light blue.

    My dad was doing something, and was talking to someone who had stopped by. And this being on a moderately large farm, I always found something to do. 99.9% of the time, this was not a problem, as there wasn’t much that could physically maim me other than stuff my parents obviously watched out for.

    However, I’ve never managed to reach any higher levels of cimedic timing in my life, and I doubt anyone else could either. The visitor asked my dad where I was at, knowing I was usually in the immediatevicinity. Upon hearing “around here somewhere”, they were concerned that I was kind of unsupervised. “There’s not a whole lot of bad stuff he can do” my dad said, just around the time when they heard the sound of something large falling over, combined with my excited cheer. I was a crafty little shit, and I somehow understood the concept of leverage.

    That was 38ish years ago. I still remember the smell. My brand new winter clothes weren’t blue after that.


  • In rare circumstances yes. Usually no.

    If the argument is based solely on arguing for one’s position in the name of exploring a topic, then it can be interesting provided that the other party is arguing in good faith about something neither of us are very invested in.

    This would be more akin to recreational debate where ones position doesn’t really matter, and where one doesn’t lose anything by being in the wrong.

    However, most real life arguments involve emotions and a position of personal pride. Once an argument on a topic can be interpreted as an attack/defense on ones own opinions it gets infinitely worse.