Oh that’s cool to hear, I was under the impression in research that whilst a lot of the processing actually happens in FORTRAN-written code, it was nearly always reusing already-written functions and primitives in a higher level language (such as python, via the aforementioned SciPy). And then those libraries being maintained by a handful of wizards on the internet somewhere.

Can you elaborate on the kind of research where people are still actively writing directly in FORTRAN? Did people typically arrive with the skills already or was there training for learning how to write it well?

Isn’t it more COBOL than FORTRAN in terms of getting paid?

I thought FORTRAN was pretty much exclusively used via SciPy in research & academia these days.

COBOL is still powering the world economy on mainframes

Imagine sniffing your own farts this much

Well I’d lean on the shoulder of giants in terms of the actual service and not do it completely from scratch given we’ve got Facebook-likes in the fediverse, you could suggest to them. But basically yes from a network perspective unfortunately

Although you have given me an idea for an angle that the fediverse is perfect for: set up an instance for your local area

That allows you to also do the “screw untrustworthy big tech, keep things local with people you know” kind of angle.

Also obviously a fair bit of work, and you still have to ultimately convince people to use it, but worth highlighting regardless.

You unfortunately are coming at the problem from the wrong direction.

The only social network they will want to use is the one with all their friends on it; and for the older generations, that’s basically just Facebook.

In order to get them to move you’d need to get their friends to move, and in order to get their friends to move, you’ll need to get their friends to also move. It’s called the network effect and it’s why it’s incredibly hard for any non-established social networks to gain much of a market share.

Your best bet (which is by no means a guarantee) is to wait for the latest Facebook scandal to be in the news, and chat to them about it whilst they’re watching it on TV. Plus add a bit more fuel by doing the ol’ “oh this reminds me of something else I was reading a couple of months ago…” And have some other recent scandals in your back pocket to fire out. Bonus points if you can already establish yourself on something like Friendica, which will allow you to say “yeah I quit Facebook a while ago, the company running it just seems skeevy, I’ve been using friendica instead for a bit now” or something like that

Then you have to hope that registers enough as a talking point amongst them and their friends that it sticks. But you have an uphill struggle ahead with no certainty of success.

Yeah, I was gonna say, it kinda needs to have azadirachtin in it by definition.

If someone sells you neem oil that’s lacking, they’re just a con man.

Just replied to the other comment

This one is probably my favourite

Great views up at the top of the tower

I was lucky(?) enough that the volcano was going off whilst I was up there a couple of years ago and got some great pictures

The chances of a true philanthropist beating out the psychopaths currently at the top of the chain, is basically nil. They will always fight dirtier.

You need to ensure a government can exert power over the largest organisations in its country. If that ever becomes an issue, the organisation might start behaving as a de facto government of its own and start treating the actual government as a vassal.

Basically we need to kick corporatist politicians out of our governments before they finish rolling out the red carpet for the end of democracy, and start chopping up and/or nationalising these proto-megacorps. If only a few control the tools that put us all out of work, we’re not getting anything close to utopia.

I’m not recommending it, I’m describing why saying it adds no security is silly.

The keys being compromised on some motherboards doesn’t mean the whole concept is suddenly inert for every single user

If everyone has a copy of my passwords and authenticator keys, that wouldn’t suddenly make 2 factor auth a compromised idea.

Hell, even if you are one of those people running a machine with the compromised keys, it’s still going to block malware that was written before the keys were leaked unless malware authors have also figured out time travel.

Well boot sector viruses used to be all the rage in the 90s, they’re entirely impossible under secure boot

Malware rootkits were a pretty big problem about a decade ago, I understand the techniques those mostly used are more or less impossible under secure boot now too

Then we could go into all the government and adjacent industry use cases where state-sponsored targeted attacks are a real concern. Measures like filling USB ports with super glue and desoldering microphones on company laptops is not unheard of in those circles, so blocking unknown bootloaders from executing is an absolute no brainer.

Saying it provides no security is just not true. Your front door isn’t only secure if someone has failed to break in

You don’t have to

If you only need it for 90 days before it expires, Microsoft will give you the VM for free (and if you’re particularly industrious, you might write a script that then installs a load of your shit for you to run after you fire up a fresh one)

If you don’t care about potentially breaking the law you can run it forever with a couple of scripts you can find on GitHub

If you don’t want to break the law but also don’t want to pay full price you can get a dubious but working key from sites like G2A and cdkeys

If that’s still too sketchy there’s the OEM licenses (honestly not worth it since they can only activate on a single machine ever)

Or finally you might feel sorry for Microsoft for some strange reason and want to go full retail price.

Basically the same experience with all options for a lot of cases, they’re just happy to have users it seems

It technically does add security in that it prevents a load of attack vectors that would dodge most anti malware tools (i.e. the ones before the anti malware tool can start)

But you’re right in that the execution of the idea is unnecessarily painful for Linux

Especially back before online shopping existed

That bastard again?!

A brain that needs to be tricked into falling asleep half the time

Usually it’s not even negative thoughts or anything like that, it’s just busy problem solving

Now that’s good trolleyposting

#include <delusion>

I love a

NIIKO