This is an amazing story and well worth the read. In the summer of 1978 two former members of a B-17 crew met to discuss their escape from death in a raid on Kassel in 1943. Sitting on a porch in New York, co-pilot Bohn Fawkes turned to his navigator Elmer "Benny" Bendiner & said: “Remember we were hit with 20mm shells?” Benny said of course he did but wasn’t unusual. It happened whenever they got jumped by a German fighter. Yes, but remember the shell that hit the gas tank? Bohn said. Benny said he did. All the crew had talked about it like it was a miracle. I mean to them it was - because somehow the plane had not exploded. Just unbelievable luck, they assumed, and carried on with their duties. That’s not quite the full story, Bohn told him now, 35 years later. He said the morning after the raid he’d checked with the ground crew and was told there had been not one but 11 unexploded shells in the gas tank. 11 unexploded shells in the fuel when just one should have enough to blow the B-17 apart. The shells had been sent to... show more
This is an amazing story and well worth the read. In the summer of 1978 two former members of a B-17 crew met to discuss their escape from death in a raid on Kassel in 1943. Sitting on a porch in New York, co-pilot Bohn Fawkes turned to his navigator Elmer "Benny" Bendiner & said: “Remember we were hit with 20mm shells?” Benny said of course he did but wasn’t unusual. It happened whenever they got jumped by a German fighter. Yes, but remember the shell that hit the gas tank? Bohn said. Benny said he did. All the crew had talked about it like it was a miracle. I mean to them it was - because somehow the plane had not exploded. Just unbelievable luck, they assumed, and carried on with their duties. That’s not quite the full story, Bohn told him now, 35 years later. He said the morning after the raid he’d checked with the ground crew and was told there had been not one but 11 unexploded shells in the gas tank. 11 unexploded shells in the fuel when just one should have enough to blow the B-17 apart. The shells had been sent to the armorers to be defused but had then been rushed away by an intelligence officer. But Bohn had tracked down the intelligence officer and he had told Bohn the full story before swearing him to secrecy. Bohn wanted to tell his old friend now. He said that as the armourers had opened each shell they had found no explosive charge. Each shell was empty, harmless. Except one. Inside that one was a carefully rolled piece of paper with a note written in Czech by the forced labourer made to make the shells for the Luftwaffe. The note said: “This is all we can do for you now.” The crews' lives had been saved by someone they would never know. And the worker would never know that he/she had saved ten lives. I came across this story while researching the lives of B-17 crews for an upcoming project. It appears in Elmer Bendiner’s marvellous memoir, ‘The Fall of the Fortresses’ (Souvenir Press, 1980).
Despite reading a fair bit of Christie, this is my first Miss Marple. I can't say I'm impressed. The plot feels overly contrived, especially the lengths Christie goes to in order to manufacture the titular aspect (i.e. the body in the library). The fact that she needs to add a foreword explaining it says that there are problems with the concept.
For me, the biggest problem is that Miss Marple is barely in it. I'm not sure if this is typical or not for Miss Marple mysteries, but I found it annoying, especially in comparison to the Hercule Poirot stories. Poirot is central to the plot, leading the reader through the various discoveries and twists, and then POW, at the end, the grand reveal. In this, Miss Marple sits on the sidelines sipping tea with a smug look on her face because she solved the mystery half-way through the book, and she's waiting for you to catch up. As I said, annoying.
Signal is a messaging app with privacy at its core. It is free and easy to use, with strong end-to-end encryption that keeps your communication completely private.
• Send texts, voice messages, photos, videos, GIFs, and files for free.
@sylvain Element is more intrusive to your privacy than even Facebook Messenger. Element stores everything you say, 99.999% of rooms aren't encrypted, everything is scraped for use with AI, and you have no option to request data deletion, because they treat your actions as a broadcast.
I was at Sun micro way back. Everyone had thin clients. Scott Mcneally had the Reply All button removed from the action bar for everyone. It was two levels deep in a drop menu if you really thought you needed it
Bookface 1.6 introduces a new feature called "Postboxes" that allows you to create a post with a colorful background like a similar feature on Facebook. It's built into the Bookface scheme, but I also created TWO add-ons for Friendica if a server administrator wants to roll it out for all of their users regardless of what theme they prefer.
Postbox: simply adds a minified stylesheet to the head with the Postbox styling. It doesn’t add any interface for creating a Postbox, but users can still create them manually with BBcode.
Zen Postbox: adds the minified stylesheet to the head, but also adds a tool to the post composer to insert a Postbox or wrap selected text in one.
To manually create a Postbox just wrap your text in the Postbox class BBcode like this:
[class=postbox-redblue]Text that will be wrapped[/class]
Make sure to PREVIEW it before you post it! While Friendica's Postboxes do allow more content than just plain text, certain formatting blocks can't be placed inside them.
If everything looks good, go ahead an POST it. Anyone using Bookface or any server using either the "Postbox" or "Zen Postbox" add-ons will see it like this:
If the "Zen Postbox" add-on is enabled it adds a button for wrapping/inserting a Postbox to the post editor:
Full Documentation of the "Zen Postbox" add-on is available as a GitLab Wiki.
Keep in mind that other servers that don't implement Postbox styling, other platforms (like Mastodon), and third-party apps will not show these colored backgrounds. This feature only works in the Friendica webapp/website.
This is what that post would look like in the stock "Frio" theme without the add-ons:
Various tech industries and their segments are in different stages of the hype cycle. For instance, in my current team there's no "AI code", unless some of the programmers are using "AI" as a tool in the same way they're using Intellisense and such. This isn't going to change before the end of this project, so the very first moment someone might try to introduce "AI code" is next year. By then the companies further down the cycle will have their first results / disasters.
for now it is not possible yet. When you ask more advanced stuff it comes with code that doesn’t work. And keeps retrying it in a few ways. But only tries it max 3 different ways and if it all doesn’t work it keeps retrying those 3 ways which will never work 😅
@zeitschlag 2026: 100% of code is written by AI, then 50% of code then is rewritten by humans to make it barely work and the other 50% is exploited by cyberterrorist
That prediction is not even close. Right now when I ask an AI to write a powershell script that does X, it will come up with something using commandlets that don’t actually exist. You can’t debug code that is made from the magical land of Peter Pan, where everything you imagine becomes reality.
I always end up writing the script myself from scratch.
It's going to be a very rough ride for early adopter companies having their code developed by AI now. But the classical code grunt carreer is dead mid-term and the new model of code development (which will also need technical experts, but with a somewhat different focus) is not yet established.
Even if AI-written code is great and golden, there is no way we can use it for secure or critical applications unless a human understands every single line and all the interactions.
The hours to audit all that are comparable to the hours it would take to write it manually in the first place.
I fully believe that all industries in which senior leadership think they’re gonna be replacing people with AI in about 18 months they'll have to hire a whole bunch of people to clean up all the fucking mess because AI is just gonna make stuff up and do a shitty job
If you are the type of coder that copies code from stackoverflow, AI just might be able to do your job. That's basically what it does and then a bit more.
I tried the public chat ones to do a couple things. I needed to copy/paste some C++ code into Python and convert it. Had to talk to the same hardware. The AI did wonderfully.
It couldn't make a C++03 TMP thing to create the fizzbuzz string--but it would have convinced some. It guessed about what my code does when asked.
I know Sharlaimov's secondary predictions are meant to be humorous, but the idea that 90% of code by the end of 2025 will be written by AI is ludicrous. People making that kind of prediction don't understand LLMs at all. They can generate new code but they cannot read and understand old code for the simple fact that they don't *understand* things. They're not AGI. Even their generation of new code is unreliable.
I work in an embedded environment where everything potentially influences everything and we build the framework so it does not. The CTO more or less shouts at us to use Copilot more and I see the results... I am troubled by what I am seeing. People depend on what we do, in some projects with their life. W can only depend on tests, really, but they were the first things that became AI-enshittified.
Yesterday, we cycled to the Airforce Museum. Actually, we also cycled there on Monday, but this time it was open. We knew it would be closed on Monday, but because the pool we normally swim at has changed its operating times so it's also shut on Monday (a
Yesterday, we cycled to the Airforce Museum. Actually, we also cycled there on Monday, but this time it was open. We knew it would be closed on Monday, but because the pool we normally swim at has changed its operating times so it’s also shut on Monday (and every Monday) we chose to journey to the museum in preparation for yesterday’s adventure. Yes, it’s complicated.
What a difference five days make. Monday was stinking hot, and the ride really took it out of us. There are a lot of hills. Friday, the weather was cool (and wet) and came after two days of (what they calle here) a monsoon surge. In other words it rained continuously for those two days. So, the ride was considerably more pleasant.
The museum was fun. As you might expect, there are lots of planes, helicopters, and anti-aircraft weaponry on display. There’s also lots of displays detailing the history of Singapore’s Air
... show more
Yesterday, we cycled to the Airforce Museum. Actually, we also cycled there on Monday, but this time it was open. We knew it would be closed on Monday, but because the pool we normally swim at has changed its operating times so it’s also shut on Monday (and every Monday) we chose to journey to the museum in preparation for yesterday’s adventure. Yes, it’s complicated.
What a difference five days make. Monday was stinking hot, and the ride really took it out of us. There are a lot of hills. Friday, the weather was cool (and wet) and came after two days of (what they calle here) a monsoon surge. In other words it rained continuously for those two days. So, the ride was considerably more pleasant.
The museum was fun. As you might expect, there are lots of planes, helicopters, and anti-aircraft weaponry on display. There’s also lots of displays detailing the history of Singapore’s Airforce. There are even a few games the public can play, including a flight simulator. And the best thing is that it’s free (well, all except the flight sim).
I took a few photos. Some are even of the aircraft. But most are of the engines they have on display. I plan to use them as reference photos for some 3D modelling on a project I’m working on.
In any case, we had fun and it was a great day out (despite my eldest falling off his bicycle on the way back. He’s fine).
I need help to collate some Nicole data. I've noticed they're exclusively using outlook.com emails so far, and I want to make a big list of known emails to send to microsoft
Please DM me with any emails from disabled Nicole accounts
would this (one single report) be something anyone at Microsoft would really care about?
I would imagine being a free sign up service they probably just rely on an automated system that would just trigger once an address has been reported many times
You're just wasting your time as Microsoft do not appear to do anything about spammers using their service. It's easiest to just automatically reject everything coming from them. Optionally, give an error message explaining why, and legitimate users (if they have any) can complain to Microsoft and get the same tumbleweed you will get.
skribe
in reply to Kingbeard • •@kingbeard IIRC yarnhub did a video on this. If I can find it, I'll add a link.
Edit: youtube.com/watch?v=Ad35kHPOyc…
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