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Today I lapsed in my local front of the ’War On Open Tabs (And Also Windows)’ (or ‘Woot(Aaw)’ for short) and from looking closer at ChipWhisperer-Lite detouring to EEVBlog and on to ESD (ElectroStatic Discharge) issues and Bill Beaty who tricked me into clicking onwards to ‘Vulture Central’ (The Register) where I ended up picking through the bones of the recent news of “Lost White City of the Monkey God Found After 500 Years” in which I came across a reference to a work of Lovecraft written 94 years ago which I didn't remember reading.

However it turned out I had read it under a different name, and on that same Wikipedia page once again yet another venerated authority was quoted slagging off HPL accusing him of being a “racist” or supremacist or anything else non-imaginative even though HPL had plainly explained what he was writing about or in response to (which was unimaginative shitty white village dramas).

At which point I wanted to congratulate E. F. Bleiler for picking through a dead man's brain in order to arouse himself and revel in the sticky glory of it. HPL would surely appreciate the combined or better yet unified necrophiliac morbidity and righteous “holy” bigoted megalomania of Bleiler's actions.

(And where else to offer my sarcastic approval than on my very own journal? Did I piss on his grave? I apologize but in my defense I can't be blamed for not noticing it on account of the latrine placed at the same spot by so many of his peers).

But yes for a while already E. F. Bleiler has been just as dead and if there's anything left after a few generations of macro and microfaunal procreation any maggots can continue his gruesome trade on his own brain :)

Now please excuse me as I make a few bookmarks for perusal in the eternity of time I do not have (and correct an index in an actual book) and close twenty or so tabs… the war must go on.

…and now I can't help but wonder what the world would be like if there was a Mr. and/or Mrs. Crowley-Lovecraft out there, and yes it has to be a double-barreled surname ;)

P.S. Happy Easter!

This is just a place to hang some UTF-8 character regression tests.

Our IRC (http://irc.sylnt.us/) has a #comments channel that you can join to see an hourly feed of all new comments that appear in reply to SoylentNews stories.

This has been around for a while, but over the weekend a new feature was added to allow more personalized comment feeds.

Filtered feeds can be dispatched either as a PM to your nick or to a channel of your choosing. To dispatch to a channel you just need to make sure the exec bot resides in that channel (you can command it to join by visiting #soylent and typing "~join #mychannel").

There are two types of filters; cid and pattern

The cid filter is useful if you would like a feed of all responses in a specific comment thread. You simply add a filter that points to the parent comment cid and the bot will feed all child comments that appear.

Using a pattern filter enables you to feed comments that meet certain criteria. There are a number of fields you can match, and any new comment that matches the criteria in a filter will be output to the target nick/channel.

You can add multiple filters to track multiple cid's and/or comments that match multiple patterns.

The following commands can be performed in any channel where the exec bot resides:

~comments filter-add %id% %target% %cid%
~comments filter-add %id% %target% %field% %pattern%
~comments filter-delete %id%
~comments filter-list

%id% = unique name to identify filter (cannot contain spaces)
%target% = channel or nick to send filtered comments to
%cid% = SoylentNews comment id to track ("cid" parameter in uri)
%field% = any of user, uid, score, score_num, subject, title, comment_body (title refers to the story title)
%pattern% = regexp pattern for use with preg_match (surrounding #'s are added by the script)

examples:
- if you wanted a feed for all replies to this comment: http://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=6634&cid=160651
you would use this command:

~comments filter-add my_test_filter #mychannel 160651

- if you wanted a feed with any comments that contain "systemd" you could use this command:

~comments filter-add systemd_filter_1 #mychannel comment_body systemd

and if you also wanted comments with "systemd" in the subject, add another filter:

~comments filter-add systemd_filter_2 #mychannel subject systemd

--
source (unlicensed): https://github.com/crutchy-/exec-irc-bot/blob/master/scripts/comment_feed.php

Title says it all really but I found it surprising that there wasn't much noticeable difference. It started out foggy but the fog had mostly risen to 100% low cloud cover at local eclipse maximum (88.8%) yet if I didn't know and someone told me there was an 88.8% eclipse at that moment I wouldn't have believed them at all. The level of light felt unexceptionally normal. It was more noticeable a while after the local maximum was over as it started to get a little bit brighter but for all purposes it was just like a normal variation caused by weather, no weird shadows, not even any streetlights turning themselves on.

It was so unnoticeable I double-checked the time of the event and my clock. I guess my eyes almost entirely compensated for the small and ever so gradual change. Right now it's not even supposed to be entirely over yet but meh :)

I slept through the last eclipse so maybe this is all completely normal, the lack of difference that is; me sleeping right through “events” is very normal :D

been mucking around with a little website thing intended to be sort of similar to SoylentNews/Pipedot/etc

it's written in php and is intended to be very simple

site (not yet fully functional) is here: http://news.my.to/

sample story with a bunch of nested test comments here: http://news.my.to/story/1

code for site is here: https://github.com/crutchy-/exec-irc-bot/tree/master/website/news.my.to

so far it has basic rewrite rules, templating for html, uses pdo, no classes (procedural only)

code is unlicensed (https://github.com/crutchy-/exec-irc-bot/blob/master/unlicense.txt)

had a go at making a simple pastebin. nothing fancy (no context highlighting, line numbers, etc)

http://paste.my.to/

similarish workings to the url shortener

How deeply unfortunate that it's given such an easily misunderstood ‘name’.

Want to sum up most or maybe all of humanity's problems in two words?

The specific meaning of ‘Moral hazard’ should be shouted from the rooftops. Every single human being ought to be taught what the concept means and the fact that it does not just apply as a term in economics. It describes every major problem inherent to politics I can think of. The fallacies of ideology and ideals or principles, the limits to society, the inescapable “death” from complexity, automatic corruption and institutionalized cronyism, the pressures towards groupthink, secrecy, pressure groups and lobbying, and everything else, it's all there, it touches everything.

If someone wants to make a truly better society and/or if they have to rebuild from the ground then they should focus on removing and inhibiting as much moral hazard as possible. Maybe it's all it takes but the amount of work it requires is enormous.

The first step towards that would be to identify all of it in anything new or old.

had a go at making a url shortener. very basic but seems to work

http://o.my.to/

you can also use it from soylent irc with the command "~shorten %url%" (must be identified with nickserv)

There's been some interesting discussions on adding more labels to the moderation system. Although opinions on “Disagree” and “Factually Incorrect” may still be varied, nearly everyone supported the addition of a “Spam” label.

As such, I've implemented a "Spam" moderation label on Pipedot. We'll see about the others as more people weigh in.

Maybe it's the season.

Anyway here's me quoting RT.com quoting Obama (whe-heey nested quotations):

‘“We cannot have a society in which some dictators someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States because if somebody is able to intimidate us out of releasing a satirical movie, imagine what they start doing once they see a documentary that they don't like or news reports that they don't like,” Obama said.’

( source )

Damn right.

Obama & the US made precisely this point four years ago according to the New York Times:

‘When Air Force personnel on the service’s computer network try to view the Web sites of The Times, the British newspaper The Guardian, the German magazine Der Spiegel, the Spanish newspaper El País and the French newspaper Le Monde, as well as other sites that posted full confidential cables, the screen says “Access Denied: Internet usage is logged and monitored,” according to an Air Force official whose access was blocked and who shared the screen warning with The Times. Violators are warned that they face punishment if they try to view classified material from unauthorized Web sites.’

( source )

Because it is completely different when it is not an entertainment movie but instead a list containing some of the biggest and most central papers in five countries as well as large number of irrelevant smaller ones. It doesn't compare at all and has to be far more unimportant than Hollywood fiction.

If the task is to record history for the future then it is of particular unimportance since no one will ever use it for anything sensible:

‘An error message pops up every time a search is performed with the word “WikiLeaks”.

It’s not entirely clear when the US National Archives decided to block these searches.’

‘The Library of Congress went further by blocking access to WikiLeaks content from its server in 2010.

The American Library Association suggested this violated the First Amendment rights of internet users to receive information.

“The Library of Congress’s decision is a violation of the First Amendment and a violation of the American Library Association’s Bill of Rights. Moreover, it is a violation of the professional ethics of librarians to always provide free access to all information,” their statement said.’

( source )

Nor does it take much for the banhammer to fall, as is right, rumor is enough, rumor is fact:

‘The directive states:

        “We have received information from our higher headquarters regarding a potential new leaker of classified information. Although no formal validation has occurred, we thought it prudent to warn all employees and subordinate commands. Please do not go to any website entitled “The Intercept” for it may very well contain classified material.

        As a reminder to all personnel who have ever signed a non-disclosure agreement, we have an ongoing responsibility to protect classified material in all of its various forms. Viewing potentially classified material (even material already wrongfully released in the public domain) from unclassified equipment will cause you long term security issues. This is considered a security violation.”

A military insider subject to the ban said that several employees expressed concerns after being told by commanders that it was “illegal and a violation of national security” to read publicly available news reports on The Intercept.

“Even though I have a top secret security clearance, I am still forbidden to read anything on the website,” said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject. “I find this very disturbing that they are threatening us and telling us what websites and news publishers we are allowed to read or not.”’

( source )