CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@jerry I just heard a brief story on Marketplace about people taking “sleepcations.” They take a weekend and go somewhere. Not someplace nice or fancy or expensive. Maybe not even far. Just away. And they spend the whole weekend in a hotel sleeping. Maybe treat themselves to a room service breakfast, but mostly just get a hotel room and sleep a lot.

@tezoatlipoca When a website says “we need to talk about your ad blocker,” I think “No. No we don’t.”

In tonight's episode of Old Man Yells at Cloud, Paco helps his 23yo son get his credit score and a credit card.

Experian insists on a selfie and copy of an official ID just to give you your credit score. They insist it is because they can't identify you (kinda makes sense, but I hate it).

And then they say "you consent to all manner of marketing bullshit from us, but you can contact us to withdraw consent". And the link to "contact us" didn't work.

Grrrrr

shakes fist at screen

@nileane My best friend is a huge HP fan, but he also wants to do the right thing. I had no trouble turning my back on it when she started her anti-trans bullshit. He’s taking it slower. I’m trying. He already knows what I’m going to say if he says something positive about HP, so he rarely brings it up. But it’s tough to strike the right balance. I’m not giving an inch on JKR is bad and trans people are good. But I can’t yell at him every time we talk. Doing the best I can.

Since the Freakonomics and Search Engine podcasts both ran (the same) 2-part episode on autonomous vehicles, that's on my mind.

First, in 2 episodes, the word privacy literally didn't get said. Nobody talks about what happens when a silicon valley tech company knows all your movements down to the minute and the GPS coordinate. Maybe Uber/Lyft moved the overton window on that already.

Second, I can imagine a bunch of horrible scenarios between ICE and an autonomous taxi company like Waymo or Zoox. Imagine DHS getting a real-time data feed of journeys. They see a journey for someone they want to detain. They contact the driverless taxi company and

• (a) order them to change the destination: take the passenger to a place where ICE agents are waiting to apprehend them
• (b) order them to stop the taxi and not unlock the doors, so the passenger cannot get out
• (c) If (b) is unlikely, just drive on a fast road too fast for a passenger to safely bail out until law enforcement can arrive

There are few, if any, laws protecting us passenger-citizens from this kind of abuse. All we have are pinky swears from the tech companies and governments. In the year 2026, how much do we trust those pinky swears?

This is one of those headlines where, at no point in reading it could I predict the next word.
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7142152/2026/03/23/cornhole-player-amputee-arrested-murder-dayton-webber/

Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing crowns is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
#monsterdon

@brendan Yep. I am embarrassed. Wrong hole, you idiot. https://infosec.exchange/@paco/116273308690418878

@revk

@xabean @revk sigh…

@revk Goddammit. I had the probes in the wrong god damn holes! @arrjay

@revk I think so?

Ok #electronics nerds. I must be doing something wrong.

(Edit: Narrator: he was doing something wrong. As usual. Probes plugged into the wrong holes on the multimeter!)

If I put my multimeter on resistance (that’s what I have done, isn’t it?) and I touch the 2 probes together, I expect to see basically 0 resistance. But I see 12.59. Then I touch the probes to the 2 terminals of my thermistor. I get basically the same reading. That makes no sense to me.

I mean, I think the thermistor has gone bad, but I also don’t understand whether I’m doing this right. Is this actually a common failure mode for thermistors or am I doing something dumb with my multimeter?

@amerpie I had all sorts of negative associations with MJ because of all the news when I was growing up. I was in my early 20s and not paying close attention. Of the back of this post I spent 30 minutes reading the details at Wikipedia. Wow. What a tabloid slander. I regret forming an opinion like that from the media at the time. I had no idea how much of the story (nearly all) was tabloid bullshit.

Well, I guess it’s OK that I like a bunch of his songs. I regret avoiding him.

GitHub should make the UI more intuitive, so that inexperienced project owners like @bagder don’t have to seek out expert help. They should make it so easy that even a person who only has a handful of decades of experience can find the right option and be successful.

@eniko 100 years ago, @steggy was doing geology field research (ok, she’s not THAT old, but it was a long time ago). There were these sample stations in a state park and we were supposed to drive up an access road to get to them and collect some readings. The park officials knew all about this (it was in conjunction with the local university). They were supposed to leave the gate unlocked at the beginning of the access road. They didn’t.

So it was either a several mile hike on foot, leave and come back later, or I could just pick the master padlock on the gate. It’s a master padlock. C’mon. So, yeah, a few seconds later we had the gate open and we went and gathered the readings. Left the gate locked, just like we found it. This was ok because it was in the name of science!

Came home from #boardgames to find the freezer isn’t freezing. So my Saturday night turned into a bit of adult entertainment. I will be doing very adult things in the kitchen. Got all my shiny tools out, too.

@StompyRobot Write a rails cron job for all this? Nah. The funny thing is that this is all just an itch. I always think data I have that I don’t need is only liability. But everyone I have asked has asked “why delete?”

I did point out that people on this forum die fairly regularly. I think, compared to other forums, the likelihood that they haven’t come back because they are deceased is much higher. So the chances of them coming back is lower than average.

So saving their legacy is valuable. But for people that barely ever did anything and haven’t been back in over 10 years? Why even keep it?

@FritzAdalis One thing we can say is that it is consistent: the results are as stupid as the technique. Sometimes this stuff is exactly as dumb as it sounds.

@mekkaokereke

@FritzAdalis The main reasons to delete are:

• Liability. There's personal info and that personal info is my personal responsibility. So if I keep these instead of deleting, I need to purge their profiles of real data.
• Performance. I run on so-so hardware. I sorta view pruning some of this detritus as a way to free up capacity for real users. I'm about to upgrade to discourse, which will be a much nicer experience, and then we will want to encourage active memberships. When I say "capacity" I don't mean storage. I just mean performance. Like a database of 20K users with 13K defunct has a bunch of bloated indexes and spends longer searching because it wades through unnecessary stuff.

I also plan to prune some of the 1.7M posts. For example, there's a 'for sale' forum where 5000 posts are 10+ years old and have like 1 reply. There's not really any community value to those.

It's mostly just trying to clean up flotsam and jetsam.

An interesting problem to reason through. I run a very old online forum (since 2002 or so). We have about 20K users registered. I'm doing a bit of housekeeping and I'm trying to figure out whether I should delete some users. I have records like last activity (last time someone was using the site logged in). I know how many posts every account has ever made. So I can come up with stats like this:

• Number of users whose last activity was 2016 (10 years ago) and who have posted 0 times: 380.
• Number of users whose last activity was 2017 and who have posted no more than twice: 7961.

If I delete these users, it will orphan their posts. The posts will still be present, but the author will just say "system." Deleting 7961 inactive users who have posted 2 or fewer will orphan 9395 posts out of 1.7M posts (about 0.5%). Obviously all the orphaned posts are also 10+ years old, but sometimes old posts are a big deal.

I'm trying to come up with some method of reasoning about it that helps me decide where to draw a cut line.

I did a pivot table and a pivot graph. I did 4 thresholds 0, 1, 2, and 3. That is users have posted no more than 0, 1, 2, or 3 posts. And I looked at last activity from 2002 to 2026. I think this graph is neat.

The years are along the X axis, grouped by threshold. The Y axis is number of users and number of posts that would be affected. Purple bars are number of users deleted, orange bars are number of posts that would be author-less.

Obviously if I were to pick users whose last activity was in the last few years, I'd delete tons of users. That makes no sense.

Not pictured is what happens if I ignore the threshold of max posts. If I, for example, deleted every user whose last activity was 10 years ago, I'd delete 13800 of our 20K users. It would orphan a huge chunk of the site's posts. Some users were really active a long time ago. One person made over 1000 posts over the course of 6 years, but their last login was more than 10 years ago.

This is a community of people with spinal cord injury and/or traumatic brain injury and their loved ones. The life expectancy in this user base is much lower than average. People stop posting for a lot of very sad reasons. Deleting the account of a deceased, but well-known and well-loved user is bad, because it would anonymise all their posts; it would hurt the community for no real gain. But there's no user like that who only posted 3 times. Thus the threshold and the care about orphaning posts.

I'm interested in other people's thoughts. I don't have a ton of experience running communities like this.