You know what, fuck it, I don't *want* some frivolous, artisanal, lighter-than-air computer with no customizability, no upgradeability, no reparability, no ports, and a lifetime of *maybe* 3 years if you're lucky. I want a fucking great BEAST of a computer that's designed to last a minimum of 50 years, with ports up the wazoo and optional drives for every kind of media! I want modular components that you can drop in a bog for a year, dry them off, and have them still work fine! I want them to make a noise like "ker-chunk!" when you slide them into place! I want a switch that you pull to turn it on! And I don't want software that constantly forces you to get a pointless, cosmetic "upgrade" every few months either! I want durability! I want longevity! I want satisfying haptics! I want Silicon Valley to go fuck itself!
People who act like Laika's sacrifice was some unique soviet cruelty are being silly and need to re-evaluate how history's been presented to them. Animal testing of flight exploration has always been the norm, and the reason has always been that it is dangerous and could easily lead to death. Two-thirds of the monkeys the US launched on its repurposed Nazi V-2s died. The dogs the USSR launched into space before Laika were recovered, and were in fact the first higher animals to be recovered from a spaceflight, as all the US's monkeys so far had died - not a single monkey would survive US spaceflight until two years after Laika's flight. These animals were all sent into space, but only briefly, in a ballistic trajectory. Laika was sent into orbit. Laika's ship was the second ever to reach orbit, after Sputnik 1. It was not possible at the time to recover anything from orbit. The next Sputnik flight with animal passengers, Korabl-Sputnik 2, successfully recovered the first ever animals from orbit. Laika was the one lone point at which recovery was not planned - the pivotal one, where we had finally been able to reach orbit, to be able to stay in space, not just pass through it; but could not yet bring anything back. If survival were impossible up there, it may not have been worth it to continue. Yes, they knew Laika would die - but, empirically speaking, so did the US for each and every monkey it had launched. Survival was not the norm, and was a feat achieved so far only a few times, by the USSR. It is sad, yes, and perhaps unethical - but it was in no way unique.
Yeah 100%. And, honestly, some of the exceptionalism around her sacrifice comes down to how much Laika was honoured by the USSR posthumously - she was rightly presented as a hero of spaceflight.
And, like... When the Montgolfiers were developing the first lighter-than-air flight, it was completely unknown whether it would be survivable. They sent up a balloon, with three animals. A sheep, a rooster, and a duck. The duck was a control. It lived in the sky already - if it died, they knew the balloon was at fault. The rooster had avian physiology, but couldn't fly - whether it died or not would explain whether it was an issue of biology or adaptation. The sheep was the human-analogue. If it died, they would know manned flight was impossible.
At the conclusion of the flight, all three survived. But, the reason they were sent up was so they could die. After their demonstration, the first human flight took place. The king proposed sending convicts, as it was still unsafe, but the inventors demanded they be the first. It was stupid, as a thousand other volunteers existed that would be equally ethical, without risking a loss of expertise, but they demanded anyway. They considered it an honour.
For all the ways a stray dog could die, none of them really differ to the dog. But, among humans, this was the most respected and revered death she could possibly have had. And she was memorialised for it for decades to come.
Kit Klarenberg reporting on a new far-reaching investigation on the CIA's twisted MK Ultra program and its experiments on people of color in the United States.
Answers and accountability is something we'll never get under the Capitalist system, because the Capitalist Class cannot allow any precedent set that allows for holding members of the Capitalist Class accountable for any kind of actions they take, regardless of the harm caused. And in this case, an unprecedented amount of harm was done to Left movements within the communities of people of color in the US as the CIA attempted to use mind control methods to suppress communities of color from organizing radical political organizations.
How sick do you have to be to use political prisoners to experiment with mind control methods? Our Wall Street sponsored Government has NO ethical or moral boundaries they aren't willing to violate to retain their power and control.
Our Capitalist Elites biggest fear is organized resistance to Capitalist control and Revolutionary Socialist movements. By labeling followers of anti-Capitalist organizations and ideologies as mentally ill, our government used this as a Medical excuse to experiment on, harm and suppress Anti-Capitalist groups and communities of color, ravaging those movements and their ability to affect policy as they had begun to do in the 1960's.
"The darkness of MKULTRA lingers still, calling for urgent answers and transparency. America’s Black community deserves nothing less than the full extent of these operations exposed; culprits held accountable, and rightful compensation for survivors. As the shadows of the past stretch into the present, the demand for truth rings louder than ever, and justice becomes an undeniable imperative."
Couldn't have said it better myself. Major thanks to Anthropologist Orisanmi Burton for publishing this incredibly dark report, and Truthout and MPN for reporting on it.
You can read the more in-depth Truthout article Here
I was gone for a few weeks, what the hell happened to the interface
What ever this is, I don't like it
Why did they make the desktop version look like something one would use on a phone?
we need to put all train autistics in office and any government positions possible so they can eviscerate the automobile industry
We do, it's true. We need to kill biden, and put me in charge so I can get the rail unions their rights back, enforce federal law regarding rights of way, peel back gas subsidies, and stop fucking building interstates
(TW FOR ABLEISM, AND BRIEF MENTIONS OF AGGRESSION, ISOLATION, AND SUI IDEATION)
"Not all autistics have no empathy/sympathy/remorse!! Stop saying we do, it's harmful!"
Yes, of course not all autistics are that way because not every autistic is anything (besides autistic, of course.). So what about the autistics and otherwise neurodivergents that ARE that way? I'm aggressive when I'm upset. I don't feel empathy. I only feel sympathy for very specific people and very specific situations. And whilst I can't speak for those without remorse, I can say I'm the opposite. I feel such intense remorse that I'll isolate myself and decide everyone would be better off without me because I did something as simple as yelling at someone via text message.
Neurodivergent people who experience symptoms that aren't "pretty" are still deserving of love. Neurodivergent people who don't feel empathy/sympathy/remorse are still deserving of love.
whoever decided to turn daisy bell into a spooky dookie creepypasta song is fucking evil. that computer was brave enough to sing us a delightful little song and you do THIS to him? thats hatsune mikus grandpa dude. fuck you
Miku family reunion
it is genuinely sweet and charming and I'm so glad to have googled it
The meme is funny, but Miku's grandpa (the IBM 7094) actually looked like this:
He took up 2,000+ square feet and helped with NASA's "Saturn" flights.
Look how big and clunky he is. He had to work really hard to sing that song ;_; please appreciate him.
The IBM 7094 was not that big. A typical layout includes all of the vacuum column tape drives, punch card readers and sorters, possibly a keypunch station, computer cabinets, printers, etc. -- peripherals and storage.
The original IBM 709, sure, but the 7094 was the second generation transistorized version, so it took up less space than its vacuum tube predecessor. About a thousand sq ft, plus plenty of room for good airflow and access to under-floor cabling, like any modern server room. 2000+ ft² would make sense for the dual NASA-owned IBM 7090s that shared a room.
However, the original vacuum tube IBM 704 is the one famous for singing Daisy Bell in 1961. This is Miku's grandpa:
That's what inspired Arthur C. Clarke to include the song in 2001: A Space Odyssey. He heard it played by the 704 at Bell Labs.
Here's NACA's machine in 1957 (NASA didn't exist yet).
Bare CPU Printed Circuit Board for the Alpha NT XL366 workstation I designed back in 1995 or so. This was an obscure model of an obscure product line, made by a company (Digital Equipment Corp.) that is now itself obscure. To be honest I don't even remember much about this machine now.
What I do remember is the HUUUUGE fight I got into with our Signal Integrity team while I was designing this, over decoupling capacitors.
Decoupling caps are small components that hold a charge to help even out power when a circuit is active. This board featured hundreds of them, smaller than a grain of rice (see photo comparison of mounting pads vs rice grain below).
Our Signal Integrity team was tasked with making sure everything was electrically stable, so they required many hundreds of these to be added to the board, based on power simulations they did. Trouble was, they wanted so many, we couldn't even build the board.
My job as the Systems Engineer here was to meet the requirements from the SI team, but also from manufacturing, and the requirement that my PCB layout techs don't go insane trying to place and route the board. SI really only cared about signal quality, so they would not relent, and I ended up getting shouted at at one point by a junior SI engineer who was also under a lot of stress, when I said "There are different schools of thought on this.." and he screamed THERE ARE NOT DIFFERENT SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT ON THIS!!
It got to the point where the product was not going to get built, because we just couldn't fit like a thousand of these tiny caps on the board, we needed to ditch at least 25% of them to have a hope. The models were the models though, and you couldn't argue against them.
But then my boss got a genius idea. What if we could prove the simulation models were too conservative? We came up with an experiment where we would remove caps from an older system and measure the power supply noise, to see how many caps could be taken off before the system became unstable.
Me and the junior SI engineer were tasked with doing this experiment (later deemed The Decapitation Project), so we grabbed a Tektronix scope and Metcal soldering station and headed over to this abandoned lab we had in our old Maynard headquarters, a now creepy attic space on the 6th floor of an old mill building. Here were a few older Alphastation 3000 workstations we built years earlier, working but waiting to be recycled.
We had this special program that would thrash the CPU within an inch of its life, to put a big demand on the power supply system. While this was running, the SI engineer measured the power quality, while I proceeded to (very carefully to avoid short-circuiting the system) actually desolder caps from the board while the workstation was running.
We managed to get about 1/3 of them off before there was any noticeable effect, and we found one specific type of cap was not doing much of anything at all. We took the data back to the head of the SI team, and he finally relented and let us remove several hundred capacitors. (He also buried the report and data I had, because he didn't want the bad publicity - I remember being mad about that)
The system got built after that, and worked just fine. We did try to enact a small bit of petty revenge on the SI team manager though - there was a recognition event for people involved on the project, and me and our PCB procurement guy decided to give the SI team manager a special "Faraday Award" for achievement in capacitance (Farads are a measure of capacitance - geeky eng joke). We took an old bowling trophy with a giant, beer-can sized electrolytic capacitor strapped to the top of it as the award. He was a no-show so we didn't get to present it. Those SI guys never did have much of a sense of humor.
Anyway, long story sorry. Just thinking of it recently because I was helping someone at work with an analog simulation and I remembered this..
The War on Terror led to over 4.5 million deaths: report - Responsible Statecraft
Why is Flareon always the least favorite?
I would genuinely like to know because I personally adore Flareon 👀 What about it makes it the least favorite? Does it just not stand out as much? Is there anything you don’t like about it?
It is beyond me how anyone can hate such a perfect Eeveelution. It's just like Eevee, with the same pointy ears, but with even more fluff and the ability to set things on fire (which any Eevee would dream of).
Hello world
A comrade got me on here. Let's see if I can figure out this website.