I couldn't find the droids I was looking for. All I got is C-2PO and R2D1-beta.

YHWH is the name of the Jewish god, who claimed to be Elohim (or El), the previous word of god. The pronounciation of YHWH was apparently kept secret by the high priests and was eventually lost. Nobody knows how it was originally pronounced. Some have suggested YaHWeH, others say JeHoVaH, but these are just placeholders. I think it is pronounced YeeHawWooHoo

This post exposes nothing new. I'm just reminding you of what you already know: All is fair in love and war. We are told about the rules of engagement, about war crimes, about crimes against humanity, about genocide, about terrorism. We are led to believe there are legal ways to prosecute a war and illegal ones, and that the whole world needs to work together to shut down the illegal ones. But every war actor turns to war crimes and terrorism when they feel the stakes are high enough. Even the great powers: The Armenian genocide of 1915, the Holodomor in Ukraine of 1932-33, Germany genociding the Jews and others, the USA dropping nukes on Japan, Churchill carpet bombing Dresden, Israel genociding Palestinians, the RSF in Sudan. The UN doesn't stop any of it. Can't. What makes my brain twitch is when a Zionist accuses Hamas of being terrorists, as if this is such a conclusive reason to take their side. It's laughably a non-point. Why would anybody expect a genocided people to not cross the line into war crimes to prevent their own extinction, especially when their oppressor is far more powerful and are themselves committing acts of terror? And the idea that the Jews are being genocided by Arabs is equally laughable and not in evidence. They have quite vivid imaginations, and are either delusional to be believing what they imagine, or strategically pretending to be deluded by their imaginings (far more likely). I can simultaneously denounce capturing civilians as hostages and firing unguided rockets into civilian areas, while at the same time seeing Israel as being far more guilty of war crimes. And I do. I do not think the current conflicts will be resolved well. I think mostly innocent people will be tortured and slaughtered for a long time to come. People in power don't care about other humans. That is how they got into power... stepping where others wouldn't dare to step... on the heads of the innocent.

So the US/German/France/Britain have told Ukraine they are now allowed to strike deep into Russia, no more restrictions on the use of Western supplied missiles. In any normal situation, if country A and B are at war with each other, and countries C, D, and E supply weapons to country A, country B does not retaliate aginst countries C, D and E. That is, supplying weapons isn't the same thing as waging war. Normally weapons suppliers would not put any restrictions in place (except maybe "don't fire these at me!") And Western news would have you believe this about Ukraine and Russia. That Germany, France, Britain and the US are just supplying weapons. But most people already know this is a stretch. We read about the CIA bases along the Russian border in the NY Times. We have heard about targetting assistance from the West. We know that Ukraine and NATO have been tight since the 1990s, doing military drills together all this time, practicing to fight Russia. We know there are boots on the ground in unofficial capacity. And the economic sanctions are also a form of war. Russia knows all this and more. The West giving Ukraine permission to make long-range strikes into Russia with their weapons is just another escalatory step. It doesn't mean we will soon see Russia striking into other Western nations. I think Russia will retaliate in a different way (I have no specific prediction). But escalation has a way of getting out of control, and every escalatory step is dangerous. I suspect Russia has retaliated to previous escalation by covertly supporting Ansar Allah in Yemen via Iran. How else would the poorest people in the world have hypersonics to fire at Ben Gurion airport? Russia threatened this, the West ignored it, and Russia seems to have kept their word.

Where I used to work there is a guy who whistles classical songs all day, drives ya nuts. Another guy from that office had AI write a song about it. AI has gotten pretty good at this

This is the cleanest remastered version of the original Pop Corn by Gershon Kingsley performed with the Moog: The song always sounded like such a beautiful mix of things I couldn't pick apart with my ears in this version: and what I loved the most were the notes that he didn't play. Most of you probably better recognize the 1972 hot butter version... which to me is such a cheap sounding piece of garbage that I lose faith in humanity to find that this is the version most people cover... the wrong version. In that first link, every part now stands out clearly enough that I could reproduce it (which I won't bother to). Maybe even too clean.

I still have Pachelbel's Cannon in my head. Grrrrr..... View quoted note →

Make no mistake. That's it. I'm not going to follow that up with some bullshit like most people who use the phrase do.

FYI for GOSSIP USERS: if your status bar at the bottom got fat due to a multi-line NOTIFY message, you can reset your UI memory by deleting the 'app.ron' file which doesn't contain anything important and will be regenerated. I've (on unstable branch) moved NOTIFY messages into the pending actions system to avoid this.

This is a chart of latencies I created quite a long time ago, based on the best estimates I could find. https://mikedilger.com/latency.html Notice how slow the Internet is. Bandwidth has increased massively over the years, but latency hasn't because the distances haven't changed (except starlink is closer to earth) and the speed of light hasn't changed. Notice rotational disks are also pretty slow, 10x faster than the Internet though. Even SSDs and memory are slow compared to computations. You might be tempted to compute something once and save it to a variable, when in fact it might actually be better to just recompute it over and over in different places in your code. Compilers might improve this for you, or they might not. What always seems suprising to me is that gigabit ethernet is 1000x faster to respond than your local physical disk! Writing to a server on your network is way faster than writing to a spinning magnetic platter in your local computer. When writing rust, perfectionists worry about copying and memory allocation. These are the last things to worry about. I think they are useful to worry about, but you need to put it into perspective. Compare their latency of memory allocation to that of contacting a DVM to sign your event for you. That latter having about 4 network round trips (DNS, SSL establishment, AUTH, and the request itself) takes something like 500,000 times longer. To get a better feel for that difference, if it takes 1 second to do a memory allocation, it takes on the order of 5 days to do a DVM request.