Middle-aged SRE, he/him. Brexit-afflicted resident of Austria. Once defeated a Beholder with nothing but a sharpened gourd. Profile picture is reasonably accurate.
@swlabr @mii One of the most notorious is the USA PATRIOT Act - Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act. Really.
Its counterpart in UK legislation is the Terrorism Act 2000, which manages to be both more informative and much, much shorter.
@gerikson @YourNetworkIsHaunted That and even hyper-cautious countries like Switzerland have been selling off their gold reserves to at least some extent, because they listen to sane economists rather than nut jobs.
@mlen @Soyweiser And yes, they do random checks (sorry, Stichproben :) ) but they mostly consist of a person scanning the first few items they grab out of the bag and if they were all scanned previously then youāre good to go. Takes about 10 seconds.
@sailor_sega_saturn And given enough time and enough scale even the most improbably weird things will eventually happen. Update file corrupted by a storage controller that flips a couple of bits at random after every 720 hours of uptime but only if itās 23.682 seconds after the hour? Weirder shit has happened.
@YourNetworkIsHaunted @swlabr As a parent myself I understand that my kids are not in fact my personal property but human beings in their own right who are capable of independent thought. Thatās never struck me as being a particularly controversial point of view, but then I look at these creepy fuckers with their identically dressed kids smiling for the camera because theyāll get a beating later if they donāt and that just makes me shudder.
@Starseeder As someone with ADHD the only thing I find harder to cope with than the crazy, in-crowd bureaucracy of Wikipedia is attempting to read that mile-long polemic. Where do they find the time to write this shit?
@gnomicutterance @dgerard Has the Republican writing style guide been updated to mandate that Weird Capitalisation thing that Cheeto Benito does or something?
@dgerard Carry On Just The Racism
@dgerard Sometimes I feel like a hospital doctor whoās worked in the clap clinic for decades and has had a series of name badges starting with āVenereal Diseaseā and passing through āSpecial Clinicā on the way to āSexual Health Clinicā. Same thankless job, just different labels.
@dgerard @Soyweiser I thought we were SREs now. At least, the message for years was āSysadmins are useless shit now because they arenāt software engineers and hell, they donāt even call themselves engineersā.
@db0 u wot m8
@mawhrin To misuse an old engineering joke, is an LLM a Turbo Confabulator?
@gnomicutterance Thereās also a handy-dandy map there showing how in the ādevelopedā (I use the term advisedly, as usual) world the English-speaking countries are obvious outliers.
@gnomicutterance @VirtualOdour Well, exactly. For the benefit of Mr Odour here, Iām in Austria (thatās the one without the kangaroos) where although physical punishment of children was first made an explicit offence in 1989 the ārightā of parents to hit their children was removed from Ā§145 of the Allgemeine BĆ¼rgerliche Gesetzbuch in 1977. Hereās the 1811 text that was deleted. Happy now?
@froztbyte @AcausalRobotGod āSo the tablecloth is the Internet routing mesh, right? Now imagine that this squeezy bottle of ketchup is a provider in Pakistan who just got ordered to block access to Twitter in the country but isnāt quite sure of the right syntax to blackhole traffic from a particular ASā¦ā
@Soyweiser @gerikson Plus the sets of āpeople who can DJ competentlyā and āpeople who are convinced that they should be allowed to DJ in publicā do not, unfortunately, overlap completely.
@dgerard @froztbyte I always tell people that the reason so many systems nerds (I donāt use BOFH any more as thatāsā¦ not really an attitude I like identifying with, it hasnāt aged well) use Macs. Itās because once you get back from work, frankly, the LAST thing you want to do is system administration on your home machine and OS X is just *nix enough.
@dgerard @o7___o7 He was weird and creepy before that (see his attempts to make the Jargon File say that everyone in hackerdom was just like him), but yeah, hoo boy. Him and the LGF guy were prominent cheerleaders for Dick Cheneyās wilder fever dreams back in the day. The LGF guy got better, ESR didnāt.