yeroc @yeroc@social.cleverlibre.org

@pkedrosky @anildash will be interested to see if that holds.

i tell this story all the time, but i talked to a CIO at one point who said, "i got locked in to Windows, didn't like it, and then it happened again with VMware. that's not happening a third time."

i asked if he was using AWS, he said yes. i asked which services.

"hmm, let me think. DynamoDB, ECS, Kinesis, Redshift, a bunch of other services. why?"

I did a writeup of the #Rackspace breach https://doublepulsar.com/rackspace-cloud-office-suffers-security-breach-958e6c755d7f

#Rackspace have a 12 hour and counting outage on their managed Exchange Server infrastructure. It might just be an IT issue, but a quick thread on something I noticed cybersecurity wise 🧵

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/technology/cloud-provider-rackspace-hit-by-ongoing-12-hour-exchange-outage/

This week, LastPass, and its parent company GoTo, both published blog posts about their recent data breach: http://tcrn.ch/3ucMvBx

But if you search for GoTo's blog post in Google, you won't find it, because GoTo hid its breach notice from search engines using "noindex" code.

Am I right in thinking that Mastodon servers download and store their own copy of every image and video that is posted by any user in the wider Mastodon network that's followed by at least one member of that server?

Anyone know the history and rationale behind that design decision?

My guess is it's about privacy, predictable client performance and avoiding undue traffic load on source servers, but it has some pretty hefty costs too - would love to understand more

I built this tool a year ago but I feel like Mastodon folks would like it

The "Weird Old Book Finder"

Type in a search query, and it'll find one randomly-chosen public-domain book that matches the query -- and present it for immediate reading: https://weird-old-book-finder.glitch.me

Why only one book? To prevent the paradox of choice! Just *start readin'*

Can't promise every book will be weird, but most are

A longer essay on how/why I developed it: https://debugger.medium.com/a-search-engine-that-finds-you-weird-old-books-3a74fbb5f3d4

This was a search for "mastodon"

Mastodon stampede. "Federation" now apparently means "DDoS yourself." Every time I do a new blog post, within a second I have over a thousand simultaneous hits of that URL on my web server from unique IPs. Load goes over 100, and mariadb stops...
https://jwz.org/b/yj6w

When people travel to the past, they worry about radically changing the present by doing something small.

Few people think that they can radically change the future by doing something small in the present.

This is the only real time travel paradox.

Cricut cutting machines, ubiquitous in schools, libraries and makerspaces, can be used to make embossed or stenciled tactile graphics. A Braille embosser costs at least $1500 — Cricuts cost a fifth of that or less. Today I learned that I can handle the hardware and make great stencils: all that holds a Blind maker back is a set of unlabeled controls in the software. Does anyone know somebody at Cricut I could talk to about making the interface more accessible? Boosters beloved on this one!

It's an interesting time in Alberta politics where the provincial government is trying to make us mad at the federal government ruining our economy while we also have a huge budget surplus but also we're opening temporary portable waiting areas at a children's hospital while it's being overrun with infectious diseases that municipal governments and school boards aren't allowed to do anything about.

How to Eat Grapefruit (1913)

How to Eat a Peach (1875)

How to Eat Pears (1863)

I am on YouTube. I invite you to follow my work there:
https://www.youtube.com/GurdeepPandher
****
https://www.youtube.com/GurdeepPandher

I'll be honest here, as a humble instance admin receiving all kinds of DMs and emails...

The abuse, excessive reports... folks our instance grew from 60 users to 22000 in the span of two weeks. I didn't expect to suddenly commit 6-8 hours of my day to this. Knowing I have other commitments like a day job and other things.

I'm burning the candle on both ends here. Look at this toot timestamp. Please save space for some patience.

Y'all clearly don't remember this image:

#mastoadmin #mstdnca

Buying votes is the classic Alberta conservative strategy from Ralph bucks until today. The messed up thing is it usually works. #abpolitics #abpoli

Listening the Premier address Albertans tonight...

One word that kept coming to mind,

"Basic".

I heard that word in one of the TV Ads / Mini-Informercials airing on Toronto's local ethnic IPTV channels,

Selling us on how great, and affordable, it is to move to Albert right now..

Near the end of the Commercial they say,

"...And Alberta provides Free "Basic" Healthcare. ..."

Basic.

I'll stop typing here.

| #Alberta #ableg

The impact of exercise on the brain was brought into focus, for me, by Stryker's lab work on approaches to recover from long-term vision deprivation through visual training while exercising physically ("stimulated by locomotion").

The underlying mechanism seems to be "the reduction produced by deprivation in thalamocortical excitation is compensated for during recovery by a corresponding reduction in the magnitude of inhibition."

Stryker wrote a review here:

"A neural circuit that controls cortical state, plasticity, and the gain of sensory responses in mouse" Stryker 2014 http://symposium.cshlp.org/content/79/1.short

Related, given that awake animals are often on the move:

"We have now studied the response properties of neurons in primary visual cortex of awake mice that were allowed to run on a freely rotating spherical treadmill with their heads fixed. Most neurons showed more than a doubling of visually evoked firing rate as the animal transitioned from standing still to running, without changes in spontaneous firing or stimulus selectivity."

"Modulation of visual responses by behavioral state in mouse visual cortex", Niell and Stryker 2010 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627310000590

#neuroscience #exercise #plasticity