szescstopni @szescstopni@social.cleverlibre.org

“The signal is repeating! We’ve got the whole thing.”

“How many bits?”

“Almost 500k. 454,957 bits”

“I got a hunch, factorize that number”

“Bingo, seven fifty seven times six oh one. Think it could be a rectangular bitmap?”.

“It’s what we used to do back before those assholes let Arecibo fall down. Try bm2png.pl in my bin dir.”

“That worked. Holy shit I know that image. It’s the Pioneer plaque. That diagram from Pioneer 11 of human figures, and a map to Earth.”

“What, thats impossible, it’s only been, what, 70 odd years. That probe would still be in our own Kuiper Belt.”

“Outside it, actually, it’d be about one sixty AU out. They lost contact in the mid 90s. Still basically in our backyard but.”

“It’s too soon! If someone’s found it now, that would mean. Shit. They’re. Already. Here. Inside the Solar system.”

“And all they’ve got to say, is ‘Hi, we liked ur meme’.?”

“Maybe not, can you bring up an image of the original plaque? Are the images identical?”

“I’ll do a layer subtraction. Hey, there /is/ a difference. In the map of the planets. They’ve omitted Pluto from their copy.”

“Fucking hell. Little green reply guys.”

#Tootfic #MicroFiction

If you see this car, please call the police. It's stollen.

This discussion of fraud in gift cards (reapplication of scratch-off overlay, modification of bar codes) is a good reminder that gift cards are a removal of value, and if you aren't choosing a gift particularly for a person, you're better off giving cash.

https://infosec.exchange/@briankrebs/111603075906194429

why do people buy gift cards when the Federal Reserve makes convenient collectible prints of historic presidents that can do everything a gift card does and more? I guess I don't get it

Catching snowflakes - Stefan Koidl

#fantasy #art #zombies

So far the best Christmas present I got is that my favorite Polish politican, Agnieszka Dziemianowicz-Bąk has become a Minister of Family and Work in the new government. And she is already causing a massive uproar in the far right circles because she wore an anti-church t-shirt a few years ago <3

Was at a party this weekend, ended up in a discussion with a public employee who's worked in housing policy, and a third person, and the third person said something about moving the homeless out to some place in the Central Valley where housing is cheaper.

And it became very clear to me how well meaning nice people can end up supporting policies that put the undesirables out in the camps.

Anyway, homelessness can be precipitating trauma, more housing, bring down housing costs with supply.

'tis the season for us to hold this timeless message close to our hearts.

This is not rocket surgery, folks.

At the onset of the #covid19 pandemic, #NB was the "safest" province. We locked down, wore masks, distanced, and most importantly, had no crowds, anywhere.

Then, we removed all those restrictions, and went from 0 to 60 almost over night.

I was there.

#BlaineHiggs and #JenniferRussel sold us all out.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/covid-deaths-new-brunswick-1.7061168

How bad are the thousands of new stochastically-generated websites?
Last night I wanted to roast some hazelnuts, and I could not remember the temperature I used last time. So I searched on DuckDuckGo. Every website that I could find was machine-generated with different temps listed. One site had three separate methods listed that were essentially differently worded versions of the same thing. With different temperatures.

So I pulled my copy of Rodale’s Basic Natural Foods Cookbook off the shelf and looked it up there.

I think it may be time to download an archive copy of the 2022 Wikipedia before we lose all of our reference material. It was nice having all the world’s knowledge at my fingertips for a couple of decades, but that time seems to be past.

Brak patrolu przy schodach smoleńskich to przyjemne novum (i nikt niczego nie niszczy, bo ogólnie #nikogo).

August 31, 2026

The GCC developers are pleased to announce the release of GNU Compiler Collection 16.0.

This release series is a platform expansion, adding support for CRISPR object protein format. This release adds backends for six of the seven currently available non-free protein sequencing machines, as well as the free hardware GBH (GNU Body Hacker) toolchain.

Example programs can be found in the distribution under examples/backends/crispr/ and include eye color change, and a cure for type-II diabetes.

#Tootfic #Microfiction

University of Łódź archaeologist
publishes major discovery in Sweden

https://www.uni.lodz.pl/en/news/details/university-of-lodz-archaeologist-publishes-major-discovery-in-sweden

#archaeology

Censoring Imagination: Why Prisons Ban Fantasy and Science Fiction LitHub

"As PEN America’s new report Reading Between the Bars shows, #books banned in prisons by some states dwarf all other book censorship in school and public libraries. Prison censorship robs those behind bars of everything from exercise and health to art and even yoga, often for reasons that strain credulity"

The strangest category of bans however, are the ones on magical and fantastical literature.

https://lithub.com/censoring-imagination-why-prisons-ban-fantasy-and-science-fiction/

@davep Again, it’s not about the technical details of what they can or cannot do. Can a burglar break into your house. Yes, probably. Is it something very different if you throw a party and invite the burglar in as the guest of honour? Yes, very much so.

#Russia science is on a fast-track to the times when the value of research was measured by the number of quotes from Marx, Engels and Lenin. These days Marxism-Leninism has been replaced by a rather weird… I don’t know, Biblical cryptozoology? Member of state Duma Igor Ananskikh and FSB general Igor Mironov published an article in a Russian scientific journal “Legal science: history and the presence”, 2023, № 9. Summary of the article:

Russia includes about 200 tribes and peoples. Russians in Russia are the state-forming people. Almost all the greatness of Russia was created by Russians in unity with other peoples of our Fatherland. In modern conditions, the Russian population is declining, which threatens the existence of Russia itself. The family in Russia has become an object of destruction in a hybrid war. The United States and the collective West have formulated the political goals of killing Russians. The same policy is promoted by some politicians and Russian foreign agents.

But this is only the beginning: the article then goes into a delirious mix of science fiction, religious ramblings and conspiracy theories. Here’s a short sample:

The Bible also tells about other people on planet Earth. They were not originally meant to have a family. In chapter two of the Bible, another cosmic entity, the Lord God, appears. The Lord God proceeds to “create” a new branch of human beings. To form the body of the new Man, the Lord God used the “dust of the earth,” the dead earth, from which he moulded a humanoid golem. “And the Lord God created man out of the dust of the earth, and blew into his face the breath of life, and man became a living soul” (Gen. 2, 7) [99].

Then it’s getting even worse:

Thus, according to various authors and sources, there are two main kinds of people living on planet Earth: “people of the Earth”, created in the image and likeness of God; and people of two main types live on planet Earth: “people of the Earth”, created in the image and likeness of God; and people, created “from the dust of the earth” with the help of cosmic gene technology. The former, the people of God’s people, the creators, are guided by high. moral principles. Their values are: Peace, family, children, cult of woman-mother, creation, preservation of nature. The other kind, earthlings; genetically modified creatures; biological artificial intelligence. Their values: war, murder, terror, revolutions, brothels, paedophilia, cannibalism, drug addiction, destruction of the life support system the life support system of spaceship Earth, etc.

Full text: http://fonduniver.ru/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/un_2023_9_pb.pdf (page 43)

If you think it’s some fringe pseudo-science journal, it’s not:

Journal is registered by Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media (Roskomnadzor). Print publication registration certificate No. ФС 77 – 40503. Journal is accredited in the Russian Science Citation Index (RSCI)

On a personal note, as I was going to expeditions in Caucasus for ~20 years, the mountaineering community in Russia attracted a certain type of people: former security services, deeply paranoid, taking very seriously all kind of stories on UFO, reptilian humanoids etc. There was an ex-KGB guy obsessed with finding entrance to Shambala (later committed suicide), an ex-FSB guy who created whole UFO search organisation, an ex-OMON spetsnaz guy. The latter was obsessed with pseudo-scientific racial theories, very similar to the one described in the article. I have no idea what causes this, but in Russian security services there is a noticeable preference for pseudo-science and really fringe conspiracy theories. This article is just a tip of an iceberg.

Since XKCD’s “Types of Scientific Paper” is making the rounds again, here’s the Entomology one I made a few years ago.

#Entomology

This is how you block Threads for your account:

1. Lookup any Threads profile in your mastodon search. For example Mr. Mosseri (project lead Threads): @mosseri

2. Click the 3dots menu next to "Follow".

3. Choose "Block domain threads.net"

That's it, you are done. This hides all your posts and your profile from Threads even if your instance does not block.

#Fediverse #Mastodon #Threads #Meta #Activitypub