twovests

twovests wrote

Me, learning about this for the first time: "Maybe it was a mistake? Maybe they didn't know they hired a cop?"

Their Twitter:

We hired a policeman and it's going really great. Meet our Maker in Residence, @TobyRobertsPi.

Oh no! They don't seem to see the problem. Worse, per the comments, @Raspberry_Pi has been blocking detractors too.

But hey, all cops are bastards, but maybe this person is a reformed officer? Nope, turns out he had a proud 15 years of using Raspberry Pis as a surveillance officer:

“I was a Technical Surveillance Officer for 15 years, so I built stuff to hide video, audio, and other covert gear. You really don’t want your sensitive police equipment discovered, so I’d disguise it as something else, like a piece of street furniture or a household item. The variety of tools and equipment I used then really shaped what I do today.”

I have used Raspberry Pi a lot in various police tactics over the years. They were dependable, low-cost, portable, and supported by such an awesome community.

And then, whoever runs the official Raspberry Pi Mastodon seems to have the maturity of a literal child.

Even with the most generous interpretation to Raspberry Pi, with all the goodwill they built over the years, this definitely burns them for me. Hiring an ex cop who used RPis for covert surveillance

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twovests OP wrote

typing this out, i realize i am hitting the “pity threshhold” where the closest thing i can think of to compare angerey people on League of Legends to are particularly childish children from my childhood

maybe i should not play league

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twovests OP wrote

it’s like one time i got the last strawberry milk in elementary school (i don’t know why, i liked chocolate or normal milk) and then a minute later on in the line a kid started sobbing and asked “does anyone have a strawberry milk? please?”

it was kind of a scene and i just took my tray and walked to a table where my friends. thinking back on this, i wish i wasn’t too shy to trade milk with that kid

like, did that kid have so much going on that strawberry milk was the last straw? if so that’s sad

or maybe the most important thing to that kid was strawberry milk? like it’s enough to break the sob threshhold? that’s sad too

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twovests wrote

I also share these feelings!

It has that same magical "power" that functional languages have. I can put expressions in places that shouldn't be possible.

Working on a toy language, I threw an expression in curly braces, i.e. for x in {...}, which returned a different iterator depending on a condition. It really helped me cut down on code re-use (which was really good for my dev experience). That "clicked" in an extremely satisfying way.

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twovests wrote

I don't know a lot about lasers and orientation!

But yeah, tunable lasers cost a lot of money. Like, price-not-listed-call-us-for-a-quote prices. As I understand, argon ion lasers could emit most of the frequency spectrum.

Definitely going to revisit this thread if I happen to run into someone who knows more lol

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twovests wrote

This is what a laser does, through "stimulated emission" (i am not joking, that is what it's called) of electromagnetic radiation!

Also look into "masers" or "spasers".

But other than that, no idea. I speculate it's really difficult to do that within the ~500 terahertz frequency (visible light?) Wifi radiation is at ~5 gigahertz and radios are at ~kilohertz.

All the light emitters I know of use fixed-frequency emitters. Phoshpors, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunable_laser It seems there are some "tunable lasers", and reading on these shows me some (new!) research into tunable phosphors: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2018/dt/c8dt01991f

The abstract cites displays as an example!

I like this question!

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twovests wrote (edited )

Oh!! I used to keep track of these. Here's a list using the same methods I used prior:

Postmills:

  • Raddle, of course
  • The one with neo-nazis (r****e dot pw).
  • A Chinese frontend dev who uses a Postmill instance to post a GitHub instance.
  • https://cyber.report/, an invite-only Cybersecurity news site, similar to the above.
  • A Portuguese language TTRPG forum
  • A few smaller ones that seem to have no posts or members (kini)
  • jstpst!! just post is the very best place, the very best place to post, just post is the very best place, the very best place to post
  • jstpst is the very best place
  • the very best place to post

Ones which went down

  • Babble (no idea what it was tbh)
  • gamergrounds

Secret deployments:

  • eye2p
  • "dntpst", which nobody can access, not even the admin.)

I haven't checked any Postmill mirrors on the Gits to see if they point to existing instances.

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twovests wrote

I agree on the high-profile hack/outage being plausible, and I'd argue that would be the most likely thing to kill Twitter.

Twitter is definitely full of entangled arcane hacks that keep it running. There's definitely people working there who relied on shifting knowledge that was never written down anywhere.

"Twitter just stops working forever" is a very plausible outcome! I'm so excited!

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