Intralexical
@Intralexical@lemmy.world
- Comment on acceptable screws 7 months ago:
“Robinson”!?!
I’m sorry but you’re going to have to hand in your passport.
- Comment on xkcd #2862: Typical Seating Chart 11 months ago:
The fuel tank seats are genuimely the most relaxing.
…That may just be the benzene.
- Comment on PI is what 1 year ago:
You would probably begin by having the police break into canneries and tyre factories to beat dents into any round objects they produce, then end up having to concentrate enough mass in neighbouring states to distort spacetime to the point where
π, as measured on a non-Euclidean circle with locally Euclidean constant curvature or radius or something, does in fact equal the number you said it is. - Comment on PI is what 1 year ago:
Indiana at it again.
- Comment on This should be illegal 1 year ago:
Why would they want you to have a working program? How does that help sell you more stuff?
- Comment on Update: Unity office death threat was made by a Unity employee 1 year ago:
…There’s probably an ecological definition for “community” that you could try to transfer over… I think in cases where a large group of individuals don’t actually interact with all of each other either directly or indirectly, but are nonetheless relevant as a grouping because they share a particularly contextually prominent set of traits (E.G. “Plays Video Games”), then “population” might be a more appropriate term (if a bit sterile).
- Comment on Unity deleted these terms, don't let them get out 1 year ago:
Aligning power over systems with stackholders impacted by those systems is usually good for avoiding hostile incentives which result in hurting people, yes. Plus to some it might axiomatically be morally good.
- Comment on Unity temporarily closes offices amid death threats following contentious pricing changes 1 year ago:
That just redirects to thread
16j21jg. They’re generating opaque unique IDs so they can track permalinks now? - Comment on Carmakers are failing the privacy test. Owners have little to no control of the data they hand over 1 year ago:
Nissan also said it collected information on “sexual activity.” It didn’t explain how.
Nissan doesn’t provide a detailed explanation of how the data is collected, but they say that the source they collect the data is “Direct contact with users and Nissan employees,” Whatever that means.
Based on this information, I can only infer that the Nissan sales handbook has a section on using seduction for particularly difficult and/or hot potential customers.
…I used to work at a pizza shop. Oh, so that’s why we got so many orders from the local Nissan dealership!
- Comment on ‘Modern cars are a privacy nightmare,’ the worst Mozilla’s seen 1 year ago:
It’s for their upcoming line of Combine harvesters.
- Comment on ‘Modern cars are a privacy nightmare,’ the worst Mozilla’s seen 1 year ago:
TAPR or CERN OHL, probably— Kit cars do already exist, though are apparently aimed at hobbyists, and usually just partial cosmetic customizations. “Metal box on wheels with motor” ain’t exactly rocket science, although quality could be challenging and that’s especially important when it comes to safety.
That said, surely the production costs of modern vehicles needed to do their basic job— Efficient-ish and safe-ish transportation from point A to point B— Can’t possibly be worth their increasingly inflated costs? There’s probably something to be said about the marketability of a sub-$10,000 basic OHL car that you can choose to scratch build or kit-build or buy fully built.
- Comment on The mist Texan of all expressions - Y'All - is ungendered and therefore woke 1 year ago:
“I’spose” est facile. “J’suppose” est dur à dire, parce qu’on ne peut pas dire “j’s” comme “i’s”.
Eh, je ne sais. C’est plus difficile que “I’spose”, oui, mais je pense que c’est ok… Les cowboys fringants dit aussi “j’te”, “j’rentre”, et probablement les autres consonnes aussi, donc, généralement, je l’imagine comme si on bredouille un peu.
J’ai dû sortir mon français rouillé. Merci pour la pratique. Et oui, j’ai utilisé Google.
Et la même à toi! Mais j’utilise Google pour traduire du français vers l’anglais, après avoir premièrement écrit la français avec Collins et quelquefois Reverso (mon professeur français a toujours aimé ça). Je fais des corrections alors peut-être. Ainsi, Google me dit si j’ai fait des grosses erreurs, mais je pratique mon français tout seul.
- Comment on The mist Texan of all expressions - Y'All - is ungendered and therefore woke 1 year ago:
C’est un trait quebecois, je pense… les cowboys fringants la dit (“anyway”), donc je ne sais, c’est probablement ok… J’ai entendu “j’suppose” avant aussi, vraiment, je pense…? Est-ce que ça n’est pas comme “I’spose” en anglais? Reverso a beaucoup des examples pour “j’suppose”, quand même. (Je ne suis pas quebecois ou francophone, si tu ne peut pas voir pour quelque raison; je suis un idiot anglophone.)
- Comment on The mist Texan of all expressions - Y'All - is ungendered and therefore woke 1 year ago:
…Am I not allowed to use “y’all”, north of the 49th parallel? Do we have to bring back “thou” so “you” can be plural again? Or is this part of the Quebecois plot to force everyone to parler en français donc nous pouvons utiliser “vous”? C’est bien, anyway, j’suppose.
- Comment on “We just lost 3TB of data on a SanDisk Extreme SSD” - The Verge 1 year ago:
The kind of media I don’t have backup of is from my Handycam tapes since they no longer make the software and I don’t know how to digitize them in any other way.
Do this if desperate, but see below first:
Magnetic tape cassettes? Are they standard? Then just stick them in an audio player and record the signal— Or actually, they’re probably 8mm, or DV, or something— So then rip the reader head out of an audio player, scroll through the tape at a constant rate, and digitize that signal (for as many tracks as needed). Don’t do anything silly, like using too much force or sticking too strong a magnet next to them, of course. As long as you’ve got the signal, you can worry about decoding it later if you lose the originals— Get some nerdy college student to figure it out, or wait for someone else with the same problem to post their GIT repository.Easier: Check if the Internet Archive has a copy of the software. It looks like they have quite a few Sony Handycam CDROMs. Maybe you’ll find a compatible model. Run it on an old Windows VM or computer if you need. “No longer make the software” sounds odd; Software like that is made once and then distributed.
(Or: Presumably you can still watch the tapes? Does the camera not have video output that you pass through some sort of capture box? — Though that of course would be lossy.)
Or: Wikipedia suggests the “Handycam” brand was used for multiple format standards, like “Video8” or “Hi8” or whatever. So just search Nile.com (or your personal favourite exploitation-powered online storefront) for “NameOfFormat Digitizer”, and wait for the order to to arrive. Here’s a couple articles from the first search results: IndieWire, VHSConverters. Here’s a machine that supports a couple formats, and has licensed a very reputable brand KodakPhotoPlus. And here’s a service that will apparently do it for you: LegacyBox. — Pricey, maybe, but how much time and money are you already spending, and how much are the tapes worth to you?
- Comment on “We just lost 3TB of data on a SanDisk Extreme SSD” - The Verge 1 year ago:
Crazy how a single event sometimes reminds people of bigger problems, huh?
Digital media, where we store basically everything we care about, is hugely, hugely volatile, unreliable, and fragile. But you never notice it until you’re reminded of it, and then you really notice it. This story reminded people of it.
The reminder to stay grounded is probably also healthy, but I do think you’re missing the point of this comment thread.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 year ago:
Definitely fly both at once, or overlay them tastefully or something, instead of going full pride-version.
Mutilating the country’s flag in order to show your “patriotism”, as certain groups do, is… Certainly an interesting symbolic choice.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 year ago:
Wearing or sporting an American flag gets all the wrong kind of attention. I really don’t want to deal with it. Frightening minorities and getting thumbs up/nods from racists isn’t really my thing.
Then stick it next to a rainbow flag, or a Statue of Liberty, or a peace sign, or the date of the Emancipation Proclamation, or any of the symbols that y’all actually do still have for actual freedom.
It’s all about the messaging. Make it clear: “This is the flag of the nation, for everybody in the nation, and anyone who flies a mutilated version of it is a coward.”
- Comment on [deleted] 1 year ago:
There’s a slim chance someone with a regular American flag isn’t a nationalist twat.
Y’all should really reclaim that. It’s a good flag, and it’s supposed to mean some things that are actually quite nice.
- Comment on “We just lost 3TB of data on a SanDisk Extreme SSD” - The Verge 1 year ago:
It’s a standard USB device. It interacts with MacOS only via the USB bus, following the standard/spec. If it craps its pants and fails catastrophically when it receives specific, valid USB commands, then it doesn’t matter whether it’s only MacOS or TempleOS that sends the commands that trigger that particular failure case. It’s still the drive’s fault, because it’s failing to do its literal one and only job of safely storing your data over USB.
E.G.: If MacOS can trigger the failure now, then there’s no guarantee that any future update to Windows or Linux won’t also trigger the same failure.
- Comment on “We just lost 3TB of data on a SanDisk Extreme SSD” - The Verge 1 year ago:
PCM, ASCII, and straight RGBA bitmap encodings aren’t going anywhere. By extension, derived formats like WAV, UTF-8, and word processor files and webpage HTML are mostly fine too. The formats are structurally simple enough that even if the associated file extensions were somehow to be forgotten, all you’d need to do to invent them again is hand the file to a bored nerd over the weekend.
I think you kinda got the BBC and NASA problems backwards. The BBC’s had a couple of prominent incidents where digital “preservation” that was supposed to be eternal couldn’t even be opened anymore after a couple of years, like their Domesday Book/Project application thingy. They’ve also lost a bunch of old shows, like early Dr. Who episodes, I think. NASA didn’t just forget how to read the Apollo tapes; they overwrote them to reuse the tapes, as was their standard practice at the time. The original signal and tapes were very HD (or analog), but most of the videos we have today are from the TV camera that they pointed at their own TV screen last-minute when they realized they didn’t have an adapter for broadcast— The equivalent of a grainy cell phone photo of a screenshot, basically.
The BBC and NASA incidents happened in an era before computers were a ubiquitous commodity product. So, everyone and their cat was basically inventing their own obscure single-implemention proprietary file formats at that time. Nowadays we have established technical standards, as well as formats that have already sorta stood the test of time based on their utility and simplicity— and millions of people who already know how to read them— so that particular vector for bitrot isn’t really as much of an issue anymore.
…That said, I think I sorta missed your point. What you’re really saying is that stewardship of digital records is much trickier and riskier than stewardship of physical records— and that results in stuff being lost. And that is absolutely true.
- Comment on “We just lost 3TB of data on a SanDisk Extreme SSD” - The Verge 1 year ago:
I’ve been telling people for years that the entire 21st century is at risk of being a lost century. Even personally I can’t guarantee my data will be with me 20 years from now even though I back it up. If you care about a photo or document, print it and throw it it a box. As I get older I find more of an obsession with physical media from a preservation point of view. Because I know my books and pictures will be around 50 years from now. Digital files not so much.
LOCKSS and KISS, though. Flash chips don’t last forever but are pretty durable, and so are optical media as long as they’re the right material. SSDs decay and HDDs fail, but for magnetic platter media even if the head or motor crashes there’s always the old magnetic microscope in a pinch. USB’s not going anywhere, and if you have four or five copies that you don’t completely neglect and don’t store in the same physical place, presumably you’ll have the chance to notice and take corrective measures if any of them start failing or are at risk.
I don’t actually know that an individual book or picture will still be around in 50 years; Fire, flooding, insects, acidic paper, low-quality ink maybe— Digital stuff’s fragile, but so is physical stuff. Stick it in the attic, and the heat’ll speed up any chemical reactions and probably make it cozier for insects; Stick it in the basement, and the condensation will get you mildew and rot. By contrast, having a flash drive accidentally survive a trip through a washer and dryer is a pretty common occurrence, and I’ve yet to lose a drive even with that level of negligence. Material compatibility’s one of the very most basic parts of a set of very precise manufacturing techniques, tin whiskers seem pretty rare these days, the really scarily insidious stuff like hydrogen embrittlement is super improbable, and most biological forms of decay haven’t adapted to eating cured epoxy and monocrystalline silicon yet.
At least I sorta know how a flash cell or hard drive platter is meant to be structured; Who knows what weird organic reactions and unstable or slowly diffusing molecules are happening in the pile of chemical pigments on a sheet of likely-acidic bleached cellulose and cheap ink or toner, and whether it will still be legible to human eyes in however many years? Plus, a printed photo or document starts fading the very instant it’s created, and it gets a little worse every time you touch it with sweaty human hands or look at it while exhaling moist human breath and corrosive enzymatic saliva droplets under a white LED lamp or G-type star shooting out ionizing UV rays. Digital failures tend to be catastrophic, but at least up until the moment it fails, you can make sure that it is the exact same picture or text— And you can make many, many copies very cheaply, all of them very physically durable compared to paper, and know that they are all the exact same picture and text.
That said, I absolutely agree with your overall assessment that most of the information in the early 21st century, including most of the public Internet/WWW, most likely either will be or already is… Maybe not technically lost, per se, given how much caching and saving happens on private clients, but certainly rendered inaccessible.
Ideally I’d really love to see a return of microfiche, actually, using modern polymers and metallization. I’ve been meaning to look into that for a while now. At a reasonable scale for optical viewing, you could fit… much, much more content than you might expect, and do it several times over, in an entirely reasonable number of pages. Your comment actually spurred me to finally think of a practical way of printing that— for years before, I’d been trying to idly figure out a process based on photomasks and nanoparticles suspended in resin, which had always felt like a very messy and tricky idea, but I just thought of another idea– So thanks for providing some inspiration there.