Memory errors in consumer devices such as PCs and phones are not something you hear much about, yet they are probably one of the most common ways these machines fail.
I'll use this thread to explain how this happens, how it affects you and what you can do about it. But I'll also talk about how the industry failed to address it and how we must force them to, for the sake of sustainability. 🧵 1/17
First of all let's talk briefly about how memory works. What you have in your PC or phone is what we call dynamic random access memory. That is memory that stores bits by putting a minuscule amount of charge into vanishingly small capacitors (or not putting it in if we're storing a zero).
These capacitors continuously leak this charge, so it needs to be refreshed periodically - every few milliseconds - which is why it's called "dynamic". 2/17
This design is *extremely* analog in nature. When your machine needs to read some bits the capacitors holding them are connected to a bunch of wires. The very small voltage difference that happens in the wire is detected by the use of a circuit that turns it into a clear 0 or 1 value (this is called a sense amplifier). 3/17
So how can this fail? In a huge number of ways. Circuits age with time and use. The ability of the individual capacitors to hold the charge goes down slowly over time, the transistors in the sense amplifiers degrade, points of contact oxidize, etc... Past a certain point this can make the whole process end up outside of the thresholds required to reliably read, write and retain the bits in memory. 4/17
This can lead to different failures: a very common one is a stuck bit, which ends up being always read as 1 or 0, regardless of what was written into it. Another type is timing-dependent failures, which cause a bit to flip but only if it's not touched in due time by an access or a refresh. More catastrophic errors can affect entire lines - which is what happens when a sense amplifier starts to fail. 5/17
Either way, even a single bit error which happens once in a blue moon is catastrophic to a consumer machine. Sometimes it will cause a pixel to slightly change color, but sometimes it will affect an important computation and lead to a crash. Or worse: it'll cause some user data to be corrupted before it's written to disk, and when it is, the damage has become permanent. 6/17
If your machine exhibits rare but hard-to-explain crashes, or if you're forced to reinstall programs - or even the operating system - because of mysterious failures, or experience random reboots or BSODs, then it's very likely that your memory is failing and you need to replace it. 7/17
Diagnosing it is hard. Windows has a memory diagnostic tool which will catch the worst offenders and is easy to use: microsoft.com/en-us/surface/do…
It's not enough though, some errors can only be caught with more extensive testing. I recommend the open-source memtest86+ (memtest.org/) tool or the closed source memtest86 one (memtest86.com/) 8/17
Optimize your PC performance and prevent slowdowns with Windows Memory Diagnostic and RAM tools. Learn how to test RAM and improve performance with Windows Memory Diagnostic.
Naturally what happens on PCs also happens on phones, network devices, printers, TVs, etc... but you can't test them. This is a disaster because these failures are common, and they become more and more common as the device ages. If we want to have repairable devices that last for a long time, the industry will have to change its practices, but more about this later. 9/17
Now you might wonder: how often does this actually happen? The common wisdom on this topic is that hardware failures are so rare that software bugs will always dwarf them. As I found out this is demonstrably false.
While investigating Firefox crashes I've come to the conclusion that several of the most common issues we were dealing with were likely caused by flaky hardware. This led me to come up with a simple heuristic to detect crashes potentially caused by bit-flips. 10/17
Deploying this heuristic to Mozilla's crash reporting infrastructure has been eye opening: if I take the 10 most common crashes on Windows, 7 are out-of-memory conditions - that is, not bugs - and 3 are likely caused by bad memory.
You've read that right, three out of the ten most common reasons why Firefox crashes on Windows are caused by memory that's gone bad. 11/17
Now there's a few things that are worth mentioning: users with bad hardware will be over-represented in this category, their machines will crash far more often than others.
The second thing is that Firefox is exceptionally stable, we've driven down its crash rate by more than >70% in the last few years. But Firefox is also a 30 million-lines-of-code monster. There are bugs in there, but they're less common than hardware failures! 12/17
Plotting these types of crashes against time yields interesting trends: the more machines age the more likely they are to encounter hardware-related failures. You might think that's obvious, and indeed it is, but until now the industry has looked the other way, based on the hand-wavy excuse that hardware failures were less common than bugs. 13/17
So what needs to change? First of all, error detection and correction must become commonplace. You can already build a desktop machine with ECC memory (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_memo…), but it's uncommon in laptops, even mobile workstations, and completely absent on phones and other consumer appliances. This will measurably lengthen the usable life of these devices. 14/17
Really depressing that we've reached the physical limits of creating "memory we're confident that actually will store it's value reliably" :(.
We've went from PARITY CHECK 1/2 to "memory works fine without detection or correction" to "oh now not even parity check is enough". In that sense, it's WORSE than 40 years ago :P.
maybe that's why it sometimes felt like those old machines were rock-solid in spite of their limitations: hardware has become less reliable faster than software became more reliable.
Also many of the machines just had simple software. Something like AppleSoft BASIC was just easier to keep bug-free (ish) than the giant software of today.
The same size/complexity software is more reliable today, but what they actually shipped was much smaller and simpler.
Note that detection is more important than correction. The user needs to know that there's something wrong without having to run a memory testing program. Think of the lights that turn on in cars if something's malfunctioning, or the error beeps that your washing machine makes when it thinks it's leaking water. These are extremely common, they need to be on computing devices too. 15/17
Finally hardware design must change to make devices repairable and prolong their useful life. Yes, I'm looking at non-ECC memories soldered on the motherboard or worse, on the same substrate as the CPU. 16/17
To end the thread I'd like to thank my colleagues Alex Franchuk and @willcage who did the implementation work and my boss Gian-Carlo Pascutto who plotted crashes against machine age. I'd also like to point out that we've got preliminary data on the topic, but I fully intend to write a proper article with a detailed analysis of the data. 17/17
I was super-confused for quite a bit more than a bit...
Where do Americans put the documents they're discussing if not on the table? If their table is full of documents they're not discussing, is anything they've taken off the table, what they are discussing? Where do these land? On the floor? Ah, is that what 'bringing something to the floor' means?
"In parliamentary procedure, the verb to table has the opposite meaning in the United States from that of the rest of the world:
In the United States, to "table" usually means to postpone or suspend consideration of a pending motion. Generally, to avoid spending time on debate and consideration. In the rest of the English-speaking world, to "table" means to begin consideration (or reconsideration) of a proposal."
Wednesday season two has started production this week, so lots of promo coming from everyone involved. Thing has posted his first grwm on TikTok. #Wednesday
Looks like this time they avoid the harsh Romanian winter by starting filming in spring and by not being in Romania. They film in Ireland this time if I remember correctly. Last time they were filming over eight months including winter, while living in an apartment building with a permanently broken hot water boiler.
I saw several British actresses as new additions to the cast, notably Billie Piper and Frances O'Connor. The decor for some bts photos was Wednesday's and Enid's dorm room, so it seems to still include Nevermore Academy.
Hey, the trailer for Hotel Cocaine is out! Corina Bradley plays in this series on MGM+, she's the daughter in this trailer. Here's the link on her TikTok: vm.tiktok.com/ZIJngQt5X/ #CorinaBradley #HotelCocaine
There's these marketing departments desperately trying to fit their trailers in vertical format by using some extreme pan-and-scan, including this very series in their Instagram reel. Then there's gen-z Corina who just knows the features of her platform and straight up posts the full landscape trailer on her TikTok.
I've been there! Climbed all the way to the top benches and sat there for a while. The acoustics are truly impressive. It's not at all loud and echo-y as I expected, but perfectly clear.
Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus, Peloponnese - Greece :
It is regarded as the best preserved ancient theatre in Greece in terms of its perfect acoustics and fine structure. It was constructed in late 4th Century BC and it was finalized in two stages. Originally theatre had 34 rows of seats divided into 34 blocks by stairs and walkways. Due to its incomparable acoustics, the actors can be perfectly heard by all 15,000 spectators, as you can even hear the sound of a pin dropping.
So, over the weekend, I’ve been talking a lot about the need to take Mastdon into a new community-focused direction, so I took time to write down some thoughts.
Spread this far and wide because it’s time for us to do something else.
If you like Mastodon how it is, that’s fine. This is not for you.
This is for people who are uncomfortable with the direction Mastodon is going and want to contribute financially, technically, philosophically, etc, to a new direction for that project to give the current Mastodon populace another option.
Because I think we’ve been patient enough with that project. It’s time to try something else.
@itzzen The main project has been historically resistant to the changes I am proposing, which is the reason for the hard fork.
I don’t mind porting the code over if one desires, but the point of the hard fork is to get these features in and up so people can use them in a reasonable amount of time without them languishing forever under consideration or just outright rejected because they don’t match the goals of the project.
I think that’s a worthy endeavor, but I feel strongly about not abandoning all the people who use Mastodon right now.
Someone has to do that work and improve the Mastodon codebase for the sake of long-term viability for many current instances because migrating to something else just isn’t feasible.
I agree it’s going to be an ugly job, but the result of it can spark a fediwide cultural shift.
I think that’s worth a few weeks of untangling some yarn.
@OrionKidder Yes. The main goal is to improve the Mastodon code base for people who are currently using Mastodon so they can migrate to a better option while keeping their communities intact.
Many improvements can be made, but the current leadership has rejected them.
My goal is to remove that bottleneck and make those improvements for the people efficiently.
Ha, and I appreciate the financial support. It will be a lot of work, and I will need to hire help to get through it.
By the way, I really appreciate the even-handedness of your announcement. It's true that Rochko did something remarkable, and let's give him credit for it, but that doesn't mean we're beholden to his vision. FOSS should be forked. That's the "free" part.
@OrionKidder As far as Eugen the person goes, I don’t know him and I don’t have a problem with him. He can do what he wants and he should be given credit for starting it.
My differences are professional, focusing on his poor decision making and stewardship of the project.
As a pro, it should be further along than it is, especially with all the support it recieves.
I’ve tried to impress this upon him in the past, but he doesn’t listen.
And there will be a few ways to stay updated. I’m going to make a new social media account for the project. I’ll probably talk about it on my personal Patreon and Ko-Fi, and there is going to be a chat room for everyone involved with the project.
I’ll most likely need help with that. My role is to provide the infrastructure and organize resources so the fork can move at a steady pace while putting some coin in people’s pockets, so I could use some specialized knowledge to facilitate all that.
I'm willing to help out, but for the next six months I'm concentrating on immigrating. (Yeah, I know. So much for helping.)
This is a very good idea, though. The fediverse is all kinds of software, not just Mastodon. (I'm on Misskey.) And while it's good that people & communities can create their own Mastodon servers where they can set and enforce the moderation guidelines, that's not 100% safety if Mastodon opens up to MetaBad and X-crement and lets them climb in and tinker with the guts/user data.
@thelaughingmuse Ha, well, just let me know when you have time.
There needs to be different versions of Mastodon because this one-size-fits-all just isn’t a feasible proposition for a diverse and global environment.
I’m hoping once I get my project up and running, it will be forked and customized a million times so we have multiple options for deciding what kind of space we want.
@Cyborgneticz A hard fork is a codebase that disconnects from original project. For example, Akkoma is a hard fork (thank goodness) from Pleroma. The codebases are similar but have fundamental points of divergence.
The goal is that current instances will be able to migrate to the new hard fork, so they can keep their communities intact while updating their overall experience in ways that differ from the main Masto project.
@Frances_Larina @tobi I’d say it’s ironic that someone with BLM in their bio wants to speculate about colonizers by responding to the other white person in this exchange and ignoring the question I posed before.
Which is, you know, something bigots do in an attempt to create divisions.
Don’t know if it’s of any value to you, but I’m finally reading “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”, and in the context of Masto, maybe a question to ask ourselves isn’t only: Do I agree with the current direction?, but more generally: Do I agree with the idea of a small group of people fairly tightly controlling the direction (whichever direction that may be).
People who can make a contribution, whether technical, financial, ideological, etc, will have the opportunity to do so.
Of course, there is the question of community standards, organizing priorities, and managing a forum for input. However, engaging in this process in and of itself lessens the possibility of a small handful of people controlling the direction.
A social media platform should be social from the top to bottom.
Otherwise, we’re just replicating the same mistakes from centralized platforms.
@Secret Right Wing Cult Leader The only way in which Mastodon is "forward-thinking" is in how to a) cosy up to even bigger players, b) railroad all Fediverse newbies not only onto Mastodon, but into the official silo and making it hard to escape from it and c) hide the rest of the Fediverse from Mastodon users' eyes or, if that fails, make it look bad and broken to them.
Otherwise, Mastodon is the most lack-lustre, underwhelming and actually out-dated of all Fediverse projects. The only reason why it's so "popular" is because 99.9% of all Fediverse newbies and at least 50% of all no-longer-newbie Mastodon users don't know that there's anything else in the Fediverse, much less what this "anything else" has to offer. Oh, and because it's so hard to move away from it unless you want to start from scratch.
@Secret Right Wing Cult Leader The only way in which Mastodon is "forward-thinking" is in how to a) cosy up to even bigger players, b) railroad all Fediverse newbies not only onto Mastodon, but into the official silo and making it hard to escape from it and c) hide the rest of the Fediverse from Mastodon users' eyes or, if that fails, make it look bad and broken to them.
Otherwise, Mastodon is the most lack-lustre, underwhelming and actually out-dated of all Fediverse projects. The only reason why it's so "popular" is because 99.9% of all Fediverse newbies and at least 50% of all no-longer-newbie Mastodon users don't know that there's anything else in the Fediverse, much less what this "anything else" has to offer. Oh, and because it's so hard to move away from it unless you want to start from scratch.
@tallship and @The Nexus of Privacy are already proposing a hard fork whose goal it is to pry Mastodon and its users away from Rochko's attempts at building a new walled garden.
So two things I suggest a hard fork like Awujo to have are:
an indicator that shows which instance type a post came from; this stops the belief that the Fediverse is only Mastodon
migration on Sharkey's level; this makes it easy to migrate from mastodon.social and other vanilla Mastodon instances to Awujo; at the same time, make sure that it's easy enough to move away from Awujo
These should be basics.
Another thing that has just come to my mind: Implement full HTML rendering for posts so that Awujo can even display elaborate blog posts in all their glory, arbitrary number of embedded images and all. And then stop reducing Article-type objects to links. This is something that Rochko staunchly refuses to add, one of the major reasons why Friendica and Hubzilla creator and (streams) maintainer @Mike Macgirvin 🖥️ and current Hubzilla maintainer @Mario Vavti, as well as the Hubzilla and (streams) user communities, are so disgruntled about Mastodon.
Speaking of Mike Macgirvin: Follow him. Follow closely what he's working on. As said above, he is the creator and maintainer of the streams repository which has 14 years of work behind it. And he is currently working on stuff that could revolutionise the whole Fediverse: nomadic identity based only on ActivityPub without having to resort to Zot or Nomad, nomadic identity across different Fediverse projects, (streams)-level permission control for ActivityPub.
The latter would provide the "better safety tools" on a level unknown to the Fediverse unless you know Hubzilla or (streams). The former two would make the dream of one identity across Fediverse projects come true and make it resilient against instance shutdowns.
Both, all by themselves, are concepts that have been implemented some four years before Mastodon was launched. What's new is only that they're being ported to ActivityPub, having required different protocols until now.
Of course, from a developer's POV, the easiest way would be to hard-fork Mastodon into nothing more than an alternative UI theme for (streams) and, ideally, write a new doc for (streams) itself once its current backend redesign is done. But even if Mastodon's UI is kept unchanged as much as possible, the backend would work so radically differently from Mastodon that the whole UX would confuse the hell out of those who thought that the Fediverse is only Mastodon and only Twitter-style microblogging ten minutes earlier.
Greetings from a project from before Mastodon that has never had any character limits and thus doesn't have character limits in its culture.
You seem to have a grudge against Mastodon
This isn't too atypical in my corner of the Fediverse. It comes from Mastodon not only deliberately limiting itself, but deliberately and apparently intentionally making itself incompatible to the rest of the Fediverse. It even makes its users believe first that Rochko invented the Fediverse, and Mastodon is either the Fediverse proper or the one and only Fediverse standard.
But if there's someone who really holds a grudge, it's Mike. Read this commentary of his, for example. And I can understand him.
Mike Macgirvin 🖥️ wrote this: "@julian @Matthias Pfefferle @pfefferle @nutomic @silverpill @Renaud Chaput Here's the reason Article became a second class citizen...
@Secret Right Wing Cult Leader And parts of the Fediverse are actually safer than Mastodon or any Mastodon hard-fork could ever hope to be.
That's not because they're devoid of white cishet males, but that's because they've got advanced anti-harassment, anti-stalking, anti-just-about-everything-unpleasant countermeasures that have been developed, advanced, evolved for longer than Mastodon itself, and that go way beyond not only what Mastodon has now, but even what minorities want to have on Mastodon.
Yes, he's a privileged white cishet male living in a fairly wealthy country with a Western culture. But he's the only one who is working on actually making the Fediverse safer. And he has been successfully doing that since when Eugen Rochko was still a school kid. This guy
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@Secret Right Wing Cult Leader And parts of the Fediverse are actually safer than Mastodon or any Mastodon hard-fork could ever hope to be.
That's not because they're devoid of white cishet males, but that's because they've got advanced anti-harassment, anti-stalking, anti-just-about-everything-unpleasant countermeasures that have been developed, advanced, evolved for longer than Mastodon itself, and that go way beyond not only what Mastodon has now, but even what minorities want to have on Mastodon.
Yes, he's a privileged white cishet male living in a fairly wealthy country with a Western culture. But he's the only one who is working on actually making the Fediverse safer. And he has been successfully doing that since when Eugen Rochko was still a school kid. This guy has been developing software since before Rochko was even born. So I guess it's pretty safe to assume that he is competent and experienced, and he knows what he's doing.
Yes, he holds a grudge against Mastodon. But he also points out that, no, Mastodon is not the safest possible place in the Fediverse.
This is hypothetical, as you cannot say what is safe or not for people like me.
Okay, basic question: What is your idea of safety?
And I did not say Mastodon was the safest. What I did say is that I understand why people are hesitant to explore the larger fedi.
That's because a common implication towards members of minorities who have fled from Twitter to Mastodon is that everything that isn't Mastodon is potentially chock-full of racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, fascist subhumans who are just waiting for their next victim. And Mastodon is the only place guaranteed to be safe for them.
I mean, it's understandable. I guess what they're looking for primarily is a place where there simply is nobody who'd harass them. Guaranteed.
Mastodon appears to be just that to them, what with how welcoming it is in general, and how the vast majority of users is ve
This is hypothetical, as you cannot say what is safe or not for people like me.
Okay, basic question: What is your idea of safety?
And I did not say Mastodon was the safest. What I did say is that I understand why people are hesitant to explore the larger fedi.
That's because a common implication towards members of minorities who have fled from Twitter to Mastodon is that everything that isn't Mastodon is potentially chock-full of racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, fascist subhumans who are just waiting for their next victim. And Mastodon is the only place guaranteed to be safe for them.
I mean, it's understandable. I guess what they're looking for primarily is a place where there simply is nobody who'd harass them. Guaranteed.
Mastodon appears to be just that to them, what with how welcoming it is in general, and how the vast majority of users is very left-wing. At the same time, they know exactly zilch about the rest of the Fediverse, maybe except a few names they happen to catch. So they don't know if it's safe.
Well, and if someone like me comes along and throws into the room the fact that just about everything in the Fediverse that isn't Mastodon has quote-posts built in, it doesn't exactly make the rest of the Fediverse look sympathetic, now, does it? After all, they associate quote-posts with harassment. So what motivation would a Fediverse project have to implement them, seeing as Mastodon has so staunchly refused to do so until recently?
I'm open to whatever, but your anger towards Mastodon is of no interest to me as I have no loyalty to it.
So it's a purely pragmatic approach because Mastodon is what your target audience is used to, and you simply don't want them to re-learn everything again?
Maybe in combination with taking Mastodon away from the GmbH, the Inc., the self-imposed "this is what microblogging is" restrictions and the "we are the Fediverse" attitude? For this part sounds sympathetic if it's done right.
See, I'm looking at the Fediverse differently from most other Fediverse users. I'm looking at it from a mostly technological point of view. Also, my first contact with the Fediverse was not Mastodon. It was Friendika before it was renamed, and that was in 2011. So my experiences are different, especially technological experiences.
When I'm looking for solutions for Fediverse problems, it's only natural that I look beyond Mastodon first and foremost.
And seeing how Mastodon treats the rest of the Fediverse, especially the projects from the years before Mastodon's own launch, I can impossibly not be biased.
And that's a poor way of showing how your part of the fedi is allegedly safer.
Well, I could rattle down the permission settings available on Hubzilla, including which options you have, and then tell you that (streams) goes even beyond that. But I guess that isn't what you want to read either.
If you're looking for a social or cultural solution, I'm not the one to discuss that with.
@jupiter_rowland Based on your unending assumptions, constant racist references to ‘minorities’ as a monolithic group and speculating what they need based on absolutely nothing, and your constant need to tell me how much you believe you know about the fedi, it’s pretty clear you are not the person I need to be talking to.
I am too broke and otherwise mentally pressed to be of much use, but, I've always thought that if we assume interoperability remains in place, quite a lot of problems could be solved with a combination of new, independent federations, along with better client software that can manage multiple networks for the user.
"Prophylactic Instances" is also bouncing around in my head - chokeable points of contact between independent federations where hard filters applied. Firewalls.
@SarraceniaWilds Their connection to Mastodon has prevented progress because the main project leadership has been resistant to changes that do not align with the unilateral vision of its creator.
And there is an ethical concern as he is very friendly with centralized platforms we are trying to get away from.
i saw your toots today and read your pinned toot and your article linked from it. It’s a shame Mastodon isn’t meeting the needs of different users because in theory it’s ideal for just that. The push for less complicated code for servers will hopefully help and I’ll boost about this in the future. i’m not sure I understood the mono culture you wrote about. Can you share any links or point me in the right direction so I can read more about this issue please? thanks
Whats your internet journey? Mine is like 2009 (10 years old): kongregate chat -> 2011: reddit and minecraft forums -> 2013? reddit only -> 2015: discord -> 2018: mastodon
The weirdest thing, but it turned out to be a user (me) error and is now solved. But still weird.
Since around the end of March, three weeks ago, my @Tuta android app on my Samsung phone failed to connect to the servers, while the same app on my Samsung tablet worked fine. Wiped its data, reinstalled, installed old version, switched to the play store, nothing helped. Logs show there's a certificate failure connecting to app.tuta.com over https. Chrome connects fine.
But, Chrome does a few confusing things: the site mentions 'tuta is now called tuta' instead of the normal message 'tutanota is now called tuta'. Also does it popup a message that there's a new version, which is weird for a webapp that I haven't installed. Also does Chrome report that the certificate expired last January, but Chrome doesn't see this as an error. Comparing against my tablet, but there the site and cert are all good. Checking again on my phone and all these issues are gone. Hence no screensho
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The weirdest thing, but it turned out to be a user (me) error and is now solved. But still weird.
Since around the end of March, three weeks ago, my @Tuta android app on my Samsung phone failed to connect to the servers, while the same app on my Samsung tablet worked fine. Wiped its data, reinstalled, installed old version, switched to the play store, nothing helped. Logs show there's a certificate failure connecting to app.tuta.com over https. Chrome connects fine.
But, Chrome does a few confusing things: the site mentions 'tuta is now called tuta' instead of the normal message 'tutanota is now called tuta'. Also does it popup a message that there's a new version, which is weird for a webapp that I haven't installed. Also does Chrome report that the certificate expired last January, but Chrome doesn't see this as an error. Comparing against my tablet, but there the site and cert are all good. Checking again on my phone and all these issues are gone. Hence no screenshots. The app still doesn't connect however...
Turned out I had disabled some root certificates on my phone, including the one Tuta, via Let's Encrypt, uses: ISRG Root X1. Enabling that one and all was fixed.
Now I'm just confused. I made that change years ago. Why did the tuta app only last month have problems with it? Did their root change? And why doesn't Chrome protest, since I use a lot of Let's Encrypt certificates. And why did Chrome first give me this expired certificate? Has to be a cache thing plus Chrome maybe having its own list of CAs.
The Instagram app now also supports landscape. I don't know when this changed, but they were one of the last holdouts of the portrait only gang. End of an era.
was briefly baffled by this CAPTCHA until i realized it was asking me to identify the animal that was bigger than the other animals in the picture, not the animal that, in real life, is bigger than roughly 1cm
we are rapidly approaching the point at which CAPTCHAs clever enough to keep the bots out are too confusing for the humans
I got my first one of these recently, the wording was so weird ("which of these is man made" when all the choices look like AI art) it took me a second to realize that there was a picture of a car or building in amongst the weird AI animals.
I've written about the ridiculousness of CAPTCHAs and how they're an accessibility nightmare. Most things that claim to distinguish humans from computers are really just separating users into groups of "desirable" and "undesirable."
If anything, this mosaic of blurry animal jpegs and confusing instructions just makes that categorization even more obvious.
“bigger” is the wrong word. That implies what you thought…each bigger than its image. “Biggest” would have communicated to compare real-life sizes. It’s a kind of misplaced (assumed) pronoun problem.
For nearly two decades, CAPTCHAs have been widely used as a means of protection against bots. Throughout the years, as their use grew, techniques to defeat or bypass CAPTCHAs have continued to improve.
thinking it might have been clearer if they had asked which was animal was biggest in real life. But don't get me started on catchpas that assume the rest of the world are familiar with USA road furniture.
Apparently many captchas don't really test human reasoning ability, but instead measure the subtle human imprecision in things like pointer movements. They just need you to fire a few trusted events via a HID, then apply some heuristics.
That is confusing. I saw the same captcha earlier today but it only ever showed two different animals types - and only once instance of the panda, which was also my correct-answer-animal - so “bigger” made a little more sense.
This has already happened to me, tried to sign into my PlayStation account I haven't used for years for some reason and after trying multiple times with their wild captcha I just gave up.
Jenna Ortega's film Winter Spring Summer or Fall will have its world premiere at the Tribeca Festival (New York) on 6 June 2024. instagram.com/p/C53udctpP9F/
I love this photo of Helena Gualinga (from her Instagram). She's a human rights and climate activist from Ecuador fighting to stop fossil fuel exploration in the Amazon.
I thought I had posted about her before. Anyway, I like, besides everything she stands for of course, also the contrast between her looking tribal one moment (when at home) and highly fashionable the next (for speaking engagements and such) (the things you have to do to save your land...) but especially how she combines the two.
I found some more photos on her own Instagram that illustrate that point.
Stop mining the Amazon! Protect this woman's land, and actually our whole planet. #HelenaGualinga
Being cast as a scheming toff in the global phenomenon Bridgerton was a surprise for Claudia Jessie. Fiercely proud of her roots, the Brummie talks about etiquette lessons, getting too many tattoos and why working-class actors so often get a rough de…
Turns out the new Doctor Who companion Varada Sethu will not replace the 'current' one but be in addition to her in the 2025 series. And I say 'current' in quotes because that 2024 series also still has to start for real (in May).
They say she played previously in Hard Sun, which I saw six years ago, so now I've got to try to remember what character that was. #DoctorWho
Her showreel is good though. Also helped me remember who she was in Hard Sun. I liked her, I quoted her character back when I was still doing that on Tumblr (now on @randomlinesfromtvandfilm ):
The new series of Beyond Paradise has a new actress (Melina Sinadinou) that I didn't know before. As you can see in the first photo (from her Instagram) she seems totally my type. Weird is very ok for me... But maybe for others the second photo (her professional headshot from Spotlight by Harry Livingstone) is more conventionally convincing?
They're advertising the series to start on BBC First this Monday 21h00. But it already runs on BBC One and I caught a glimpse. Her character seems interesting and she's worth watching for the acting too.
I found this last photo in such extreme resolution that you can see the photographer taking the photo reflected in her eyes. Proves that the twinkle in her eye is not photoshopped!
The Wednesday blu-ray doesn't have the "[barely restrained seething]" subtitle... That's a Netflix-only feature... The disc has the much less inspired "[breath trembling]". It's not all advantages to owning the disc...
It's a shame Emma didn't get to use her werewolf training this season, maybe next? Wednesday got knocked unconscious a disconcerting amount of times, it's a good thing she has Goody now, might help with the healing.
It's weird how they seemed to have special events every single day, Harvest Festival, Outreach Day, Poe Cup, Raven Dance, Parents Day, etc. Hardly any actual lessons seemed to be happening. Still, instead of more school, I'm hoping for the next season to be set outside the school. And have more Goody Addams, I like a powerful witch. #Wednesday
This weekend marked 30 years since the start of the Rwandan genocide, one of the darkest chapters in African history.
Some 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu moderates were massacred during 100 days of bloodshed by Hutu extremist militias, before rebels from the mostly Tutsi RPF (Rwandan Patriotic Front) seized the capital and ended the slaughter.
The then RPF rebel commander and now President of Rwanda Paul Kagame, held a ceremony over the weekend, honoring the victims.
The memorial ceremony kicked off 100 days of official mourning in Rwanda. Foreign dignitaries from across Africa and the world were present on the somber occasion, including former US President Bill Clinton. aljazeera.com/amp/news/2024/4/…
In the Horn of Africa meanwhile, a major topic point over the weekend was the fact that the ceremony in Rwanda was attended by Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and his wife, First Lady Zinash Tayachew.
If you've followed my journalism, you'll know that I've extensively documented (4 years & counting) Ethiopian army atrocities including war crimes, crimes against humanity that may amount to genocide that have killed upwards of half a million people.
One factor of the Rwandan genocide that scholars point out for its critical role in enabling the slaughter, is the dehumanizing rhetoric that targeted the Tutsi people. This was highlighted at the ceremony over the weekend.
I'm trying to wonder how Abiy Ahmed, who made headlines throughout the 2020ies for his dehumanizing rhetoric, referring to his foes as "hyenas," "cancer" or "weeds" in violent public and social media outbursts, must have felt hearing that part.
"Siyad Arts," a pen name for a Somali political cartoonist, one of the most prominent in the Horn of Africa, produced this drawing today and captioned it:
"The irony of it all. Abiy, Ethiopia's dictator and genocider commemorating Rwanda's genocide against the Tutsi while the effects of his own genocide against Tigrayans can still be seen."
They managed to make geoblocking of films even more irritating: I get a specific mail from Amazon Prime Video, telling me that Finestkind with Jenna Ortega is now available for rent. That's great, because I still want to see it, since Paramount+/SkyShowtime is not carrying that film in my country.
I go to their page, only to be met with the popup that this film is not available in my location.
Then why send me that email?!
Anyway, dear Americans, Finestkind is available for rent in your country! #Finestkind #JennaOrtega
Look, does anyone want to just buy all of my data? Rather than going through all this rigmarole, spending billions on AI, looking for ways to catch me out or circumvent Data Protection laws. It's probably all out there anyway. Just shut down all of your expensive projects, slip me a couple of million pounds and I'll tell you anything you want to know. It'll save you a fortune. Straight from the source. Locally sourced, organic and artisanal data. Fairtrade data.
Saw Miller's Girl again in the cinema (who knows when I'll see it again) and again of course impressed by Jenna Ortega. Wrote about it with major spoilers in the next post (copied from letterboxd). #JennaOrtega #MillersGirl
Major spoilers for Miller's Girl (2024). Don't read if you haven't seen it.
Miller's Girl (2024)
Watched it again and liked it so much. It's an acting masterclass by Jenna Ortega. That dialog between Cairo and Jonathan, you'll know which one, is so powerful.
**MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW**
Here's my take on Cairo: she's an 18 year old girl who by her own words seems uninterested in sex, or at least not to know yet whether she wants it. The film sets her up as asexual. The extremely steamy story she writes has sex only as a literary device. The steamy scene she has with her lesbian friend is only to distract her and she stops as the photo is taken and sent, beyond the photo she had no interest in it.
In films like this, 'the girl' is often portrayed as driven by her hormones. Even in this film it is said that 'teenage girls are dangerous'. But not Cairo, she is purely intellectual.
She's an extremely gifted writer, much more than her teacher, but initially she thinks she has finally found someone who is her equal, a way out of her intellectual loneliness. But when he fails to live up to her drive to move boundaries, she consid
... show more
Miller's Girl (2024)
Watched it again and liked it so much. It's an acting masterclass by Jenna Ortega. That dialog between Cairo and Jonathan, you'll know which one, is so powerful.
**MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW**
Here's my take on Cairo: she's an 18 year old girl who by her own words seems uninterested in sex, or at least not to know yet whether she wants it. The film sets her up as asexual. The extremely steamy story she writes has sex only as a literary device. The steamy scene she has with her lesbian friend is only to distract her and she stops as the photo is taken and sent, beyond the photo she had no interest in it.
In films like this, 'the girl' is often portrayed as driven by her hormones. Even in this film it is said that 'teenage girls are dangerous'. But not Cairo, she is purely intellectual.
She's an extremely gifted writer, much more than her teacher, but initially she thinks she has finally found someone who is her equal, a way out of her intellectual loneliness. But when he fails to live up to her drive to move boundaries, she considers him mediocre, not even worthy to be treated as a person and she consciously destroys his life.
She's not a nice person. She treats both Jonathan and Winnie as subhuman.
Here's my take on Jonathan: I think he is indeed mediocre as both Cairo and his own wife say. He stopped writing when he got some bad reviews and he shies away from the literary gauntlet Cairo throws down. He's a coward who thought he was more.
I think he actually is sexually interested in this beautiful young woman who flatters him and who he can admire, like normally in 'these kind of films'. He is not the standard victim however, since it is shown that he and his colleague already blur lines, watch nude pictures of students, etc. With Cairo he had the opportunity to draw lines and should have (their classroom talk already went too far, but visiting the poetry reading together was well wrong, not to speak of the kissing, visiting her house when he knew she was alone, etc.). Also, he should have left his wife ages ago since she clearly looks down on him, but that is yet another thing he doesn't dare to do.
Here's my take on whether they did or didn't do it: the film is nicely ambiguous about that. The sex scene we see is part of the story Cairo wrote, not necessarily true. He denies anything happened, but we saw them kiss, so that is a lie already. She denied to her friend that they slept together, so probably they didn't. 'Write what you know' is said, suggesting they did. But Cairo refers to it as 'this fantasy' instead of 'this thing we did', so maybe they didn't.
I think they truly bonded after the poetry night, where they both fell in love with each other. Maybe more happened, maybe it happened the next time they were together at her house. But I'm guessing, with 51%/49% odds, that it didn't go beyond the kiss. #MillersGirl #JennaOrtega
This is why public transport is not taking off in my country. And these two cities even both have a train station. By car: 26 minutes. By public transport: 1 hour and 41 minutes.
@StarkRG That is exactly what it is, thank you. I couldn't find it in the list of channels Amazon was trying to sell me, but it turns out that was (surprise surprise) because I'm already subscribed to it! It used to be called differently, StarzPlay I think, and got renamed.
Now if they only had Paramount+ too in my country like they do in most places...
The blu-ray for Wednesday arrived today! On Wednesday. Starting my umpteenth watch-through.
With recently the great experience of watching Miller's Girl on the big screen and now eight episodes of brilliance to see, these are really Jenna days...
We all know the level of detail Jenna puts in her performances, for Wednesday she got formal fencing and cello training, but on her Instagram posts of that time you can see she also had a mechanical typewriter in her apartment back in Romania. In this opening episode Wednesday is very comfortable typing her novel on the old typewriter, but doesn't really know how to work the keyboard of Enid's laptop.
A few years ago I realized that more companies need to let engineers have some money to contribute to OSS. Say a percent or two of their salary that they can give to free software that is used by the company.
This would help fund software, help get rid of the bureaucracy (don't have to justify it, etc), and put the money where it's likely most needed.
They likely know which projects are under funded or critical to the company.
> Say a percent or two of their salary that they can give to free software that is used by the company.
think of it like the 401k match and then an additional "benefit" of a few % on top of that which you can direct into open source projects of your choosing? That sounds interesting
If you see a long German or Swedish word, first of all, don't panic. It's more scared of you than you are of it. Secondly, take a closer look and you'll see it's actually just three normal words in a trenchcoat, huddling together to deter predators (French and English).
![Gabriele Svelto [moved]](avatar/f33/69c91b988f6e135ecc7a261d23de-80.jpeg?ts=1761663416)
Gabriele Svelto [moved]
in reply to Gabriele Svelto [moved] • • •First of all let's talk briefly about how memory works. What you have in your PC or phone is what we call dynamic random access memory. That is memory that stores bits by putting a minuscule amount of charge into vanishingly small capacitors (or not putting it in if we're storing a zero).
These capacitors continuously leak this charge, so it needs to be refreshed periodically - every few milliseconds - which is why it's called "dynamic". 2/17
Anban Govender likes this.
Gabriele Svelto [moved]
in reply to Gabriele Svelto [moved] • • •Gabriele Svelto [moved]
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in reply to Gabriele Svelto [moved] • • •Gabriele Svelto [moved]
in reply to Gabriele Svelto [moved] • • •Diagnosing it is hard. Windows has a memory diagnostic tool which will catch the worst offenders and is easy to use: microsoft.com/en-us/surface/do…
It's not enough though, some errors can only be caught with more extensive testing. I recommend the open-source memtest86+ (memtest.org/) tool or the closed source memtest86 one (memtest86.com/) 8/17
How to Use Windows Memory Diagnostic | Microsoft Surface
SurfaceGabriele Svelto [moved]
in reply to Gabriele Svelto [moved] • • •Gabriele Svelto [moved]
in reply to Gabriele Svelto [moved] • • •Now you might wonder: how often does this actually happen? The common wisdom on this topic is that hardware failures are so rare that software bugs will always dwarf them. As I found out this is demonstrably false.
While investigating Firefox crashes I've come to the conclusion that several of the most common issues we were dealing with were likely caused by flaky hardware. This led me to come up with a simple heuristic to detect crashes potentially caused by bit-flips. 10/17
Gabriele Svelto [moved]
in reply to Gabriele Svelto [moved] • • •Deploying this heuristic to Mozilla's crash reporting infrastructure has been eye opening: if I take the 10 most common crashes on Windows, 7 are out-of-memory conditions - that is, not bugs - and 3 are likely caused by bad memory.
You've read that right, three out of the ten most common reasons why Firefox crashes on Windows are caused by memory that's gone bad. 11/17
Gabriele Svelto [moved]
in reply to Gabriele Svelto [moved] • • •Now there's a few things that are worth mentioning: users with bad hardware will be over-represented in this category, their machines will crash far more often than others.
The second thing is that Firefox is exceptionally stable, we've driven down its crash rate by more than >70% in the last few years. But Firefox is also a 30 million-lines-of-code monster. There are bugs in there, but they're less common than hardware failures! 12/17
Gabriele Svelto [moved]
in reply to Gabriele Svelto [moved] • • •Gabriele Svelto [moved]
in reply to Gabriele Svelto [moved] • • •computer memory which detects and corrects errors
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)William D. Jones
in reply to Gabriele Svelto [moved] • • •Really depressing that we've reached the physical limits of creating "memory we're confident that actually will store it's value reliably" :(.
We've went from PARITY CHECK 1/2 to "memory works fine without detection or correction" to "oh now not even parity check is enough". In that sense, it's WORSE than 40 years ago :P.
Gabriele Svelto [moved]
in reply to William D. Jones • • •@jbqueru@floss.social
in reply to Gabriele Svelto [moved] • • •Noah Gibbs
in reply to @jbqueru@floss.social • • •@jbqueru @cr1901
Also many of the machines just had simple software. Something like AppleSoft BASIC was just easier to keep bug-free (ish) than the giant software of today.
The same size/complexity software is more reliable today, but what they actually shipped was much smaller and simpler.
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