Flutterby™! (short)

Some test data has me looking at Union Pacific's Big Boy No. 4014, the huge 4-8-8-4 steam locomotive that was recently restored.

Anyway, I'm now pretty much convinced that if such a locomotive were built today it would unironically be called "Hekkin' Chonker".

I had closed several tabs on this without posting them on Flutterby because it's... awful and if you have any sorts of issues around non-consensual sexual attacks triggering as hell, and please don't feel compelled to follow any of these links, but...

BBC: New name, no photos: Gisèle Pelicot removes all trace of her husband

NBC: Dozens of men found guilty in Gisèle Pelicot mass rape trial that shocked France

...the reason I'm now posting these is reading through the Disabled Ginger on how this exposes medical misogyny (among a whole bunch of other effects), and how the husband was recruiting people for this horror on some sort of online messaging system, and nobody stepped in. Nobody said "holy shit, this is awful".

And there's probably some strong vetting to get access to those forums. It's not something that one is likely to just stumble across. And even, unlike the early days of say, alt.sex.stories on Usenet, you're not gonna run across NC fantasizing of this sort and maybe be able to tie pieces together.

But there's clearly a branch of "masculinity" where it's a stepping stone from one place to another, and long before legal lines get crossed there are moral lines where we need to be saying "oh fuck no, that's hella not acceptable".

Maybe knowing that this evil is out there will help us all say that sooner.

RT Capital @capital@scalie.zone

Incompatible functions, aka O(LOL NO)

If you ever think your own work has no meaning, just remember that some one put that "remember this device" checkbox on your bank's web site, and your payroll provider's web site, and...

I hate to think of how many wasted hours that was, let alone the wasted hours of people clicking them thinking that they might actually have any effect.

Yet again seeing people ask what's so disruptive about a cell phone ban in schools, so I'll point out that if the kids don't have cell phones, how are they gonna call 911 when there's a school shooter?

(Also, so much of the problem with schools is that the classroom as we know it is a fucking lousy way to learn, and schools are a horrible reinforcement of the worst social patterns, and we should maybe try to fix that shit?)

We know that a good amount of the anti-immigrant rhetoric comes from the businesses that can use the state to enforce what's essentially slavery by employing undocumented workers, but the return to slavery is more explicit than just that:

AP: Alabama profits off prisoners who work at McDonald’s but deems them too dangerous for parole

Best Western, Bama Budweiser and Burger King are among the more than 500 businesses to lease incarcerated workers from one of the most violent, overcrowded and unruly prison systems in the U.S. in the past five years alone, The Associated Press found as part of a two-year investigation into prison labor. The cheap, reliable labor force has generated more than $250 million for the state since 2000 through money garnished from prisoners’ paychecks.

Via

So my awesome ISP, Sonic, recently offered me an upgrade to 10gigabit fiber, same price I'm paying now, but $300 in one-time ONT fees. We've been a bit price sensitive lately, and it would require upgrading a bunch of hardware (I'm still using 300megabit era WiFi transceivers, my hub is only 1 gigabit, etc).

But I've been thinking about what one might use that much bandwidth for. When I was working with map data, even the bidirectional gigabit I've got now would be handy.

Turns out one application might be malware: This VPN Lets Anyone Use Your Internet Connection. What Could Go Wrong?

A free VPN app called Big Mama is selling access to people’s home internet networks. Kids are using it to cheat in a VR game while researchers warn of bigger security risks.

Via /.

Yesterday at lunch I was reminded that, when a local City Council member whom I admire said something about "policies that reflect our values", I quietly observed that the cynical among us might say that they already do. And apparently the room, more than I noticed at the time, went "oh, damn." (and "that's cold", and...)

Anyway, there's a polarizing figure on the nerd social media that has a long rant this morning on culture and kindness and this pull-quote is repeated here, for emphasis.

Soatok Dreamsoaker: The Better Daemons Of Our Profession

The in-practice consequences of any policy is your actual goddamn policy.

We Have Google Drive at Home: Musings on Merkle-Tree Based File Sharing.

Kind of a puff piece for Dolt: The world's first and only version-controlled SQL database.

Skepchick: Why Did We Throw Away Our Black Plastic Utensils?

But here’s where we get to the same old story that I see again and again with these environmental watchdog groups: the hyperbole. And in this case, it wasn’t just the organization saying that your spatula is going to give you cancer. The study specifically noted that the levels of DecaBDE they found in the utensils could result in a person consuming 34,700 nanograms per day, which they said approached the EPA’s safety limit, which is 7,000 nanograms per kilogram of body weight. They claimed that for a 60-kilogram (or 130-pound) adult, that was 42,000 nanograms per day. Which…it isn’t. It’s 420,000 nanograms per day. The levels they found actually didn’t even hit 10% of the EPA’s limit.

Joe Swarcz at the McGill office for Science and Society: Are Black Plastic Spatulas and Serving Spoons Safe to Use?

I mean, lots of reasons plastics aren't great, but...

Sean Conner talks about his experiences using Github's Copilot

RT Rudy @rudy@mstdn.ca

who decided on the name Secret Santa when Nondisclosure Claus was right there for the taking

I'm not sure whether this indicates that the NYPD understands iconography, or doesn't... RT Jef Poskanzer @jef@mastodon.social

Compare & contrast:

I have cynical said that the Saudis bought Twitter to destroy it in retaliation for the Arab Spring. With what's happening with Elon Musk in US and German politics, it's become clear that, no, they did it to continue the destruction that the Saudi funded 9/11 hijackers were working towards.