@hanno the quick and dirty way to do it if your laptop and phone are on the same network is to run python3 -m http.server in the directory with the files you want to share. add the port number at the end of that line if necessary (it defaults to port 8000).

something i installed recently but haven't used yet is destiny. the android app is both on the play store and on f-droid, and there are download links for linux on github.

a heavyweight solution is to use syncthing. i use it to keep files synchronized between different computers; it has an android app as well.

@larsbrinkhoff the ttf doesn't seem to work on a mac, alas. in the screenshot, the text is written with helvetica and the selected text below it is with the knight font on mac os 13.6.4.

i'll try it on my ubuntu desktop when i get home.

@cks where did the one space indent come from? i think the first english class i took that used computers used a tab to indent the first line of a paragraph. the lab used ancient dec rainbow unix terminals.

but now i checked online, and i see that's wrong: https://practicaltypography.com/first-line-indents.html

What makes the concept of society so deceptive is that we assume the world is organized into a series of compact, modular units called “societies,” and that all people know which one they’re in. Historically, this is very rarely the case. Imagine I am a Christian Armenian merchant living under the reign of Genghis Khan. What is “society” for me? Is it the city where I grew up, the society of international merchants (with its own elaborate codes of conduct) within which I conduct my daily affairs, other speakers of Armenian, Christendom (or maybe just Orthodox Christendom), or the inhabitants of the Mongol empire itself, which stretched from the Mediterranean to Korea? Historically, kingdoms and empires have rarely been the most important reference points in people’s lives. Kingdoms rise and fall; they also strengthen and weaken; governments may make their presence known in people’s lives quite sporadically, and for many people in history, it was not at all clear whose government they were actually in. Even until quite recently, many of the world’s inhabitants were not quite sure of what country they were citizens, or why it should matter.

-- Debt: The First 5,000 Years, by David Graeber

Imagined in terms of the time -- time spent earning wages that a bank then holds -- a bank can own more than half of a man.

-- Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl

there was a ddos attack on my old work website this afternoon. i found out when i checked my email later in the evening -- cron emails that said psql had hit its connection limit. this had never happened before. maybe someone thought they'd attack sites on election day or something. restarting the app server fixed the issue.

i downloaded the web server's log file, and tried to use analog to do something deeper than greps (i couldn't think of any other tool). grep was more useful. it was easy for me to find the ddos requests, and i figured out by visual inspection that they listed an old version of chrome in their user agent. blocked that.

but, i want a tool to help me do things like this.

i got to wondering if there was an old expert system out there that i could feed the log file to, tell it what each part of the log line is (i have a custom log format), and then ask more detailed questions. what i'm interested in, most of all, is when or how they probed the site to find the url to hit. i want something to show me those lines.

i didn't try openai/chatgpt or my locally installed models with ollama because this isn't something for generative ai.

@lain pixel watch 2? it's 41mm vs samsung's 40mm or 44mm.

before that i had a versa 4 which is more than a simple fitness tracker but less than a wear os watch.

In 2016, I wrote an essay titled Welcome to AirSpace, describing my first impressions of this phenomenon of sameness. “AirSpace” was my coinage for the strangely frictionless geography created by digital platforms, in which you could move between places without straying beyond the boundaries of an app, or leaving the bubble of the generic aesthetic. The word was partly a riff on Airbnb, but it was also inspired by the sense of vaporousness and unreality that these places gave me. They seemed so disconnected from geography that they could float away and land anywhere else. When you were in one, you could be anywhere.

My theory was that all the physical places interconnected by apps had a way of resembling one another. In the case of the cafes, the growth of Instagram gave international cafe owners and baristas a way to follow one another in real time and gradually, via algorithmic recommendations, begin consuming the same kinds of content. One cafe owner’s personal taste would drift toward what the rest of them liked, too, eventually coalescing. On the customer side, Yelp, Foursquare and Google Maps drove people like me – who could also follow the popular coffee aesthetics on Instagram – toward cafes that conformed with what they wanted to see by putting them at the top of searches or highlighting them on a map.

-- The tyranny of the algorithm: why every coffee shop looks the same

A correction at the end of this article: Nearly 25,000 tech workers were laid off in the first weeks of 2024. Why is that?

@thomasfuchs i just realized that i've never seen anything written for smalltalk related to AI. lisp and prolog, sure, lots of stuff. but where's the smalltalk AI?

it doesn't help that some people write the name as "small talk" and there are recent papers and articles about small talk vs generative chat systems. makes it harder to search for things.

@mwl bare metal from 1999 to 2012-ish, digitalocean until five years ago, now an ec2 instance because it is closer to me (50ms ping vs 250ms).

@arcade i actually don't use the dock on my mac! i use cmd-space instead. however, i use windowmaker on my home desktop (looks like old nextstep/openstep), and i have a few apps on my dock that i double-click to launch. a couple of wm applets, too (local temperature, moon phase, etc.).

The operator ==> binds weaker than && and ||, as is suggested by the fact that ==> is 3 characters wide, whereas the others are only 2 characters wide.

[...]

As you go through this book, I will not be surprised if you often forget that programs can be run -- most of your time will be spent specifying, writing, and proving the programs, and when the verifier finally has no more complaints, you know the program satisfies the specification (so why even run it, right? 😉).

-- Program Proofs

Sometimes in life, you just need to say: Don't know, don't care, let's keep going.

-- Eric MacAdie