TaMara here! After a quick phone call and messages from Adam, it’s been determined that tonight’s post will have to wait until tomorrow.
From Adam:
My computer just rebooted. While all my data is there, for some reason it thinks it is New Year’s Eve 2021. I can’t get to anything on the internet on any browser. So I don’t know if the update post i was almost done drafting and had spent the past 35 minutes on has been eaten because I can’t access the dashboard. I’m going to shut my computer down and just let it sit over night.
I did ask him to send me some Patron, so we could at least have that tonight.
None of the journalists was injured. This is the hand of my human Mykhailo, and he played with me during the interview 😀
— Patron (@PatronDsns) September 19, 2022
And his Tik Tok:
@patron__dsns Патрон-батон 😁🥖 #песпатрон #патрондснс ♬ оригинальный звук – kakish
I’m not going to say I warned Adam, but I did mention to him earlier today that between Hurricane Fiona, the typhoon in Japan, and the 7.5 earthquake that struck off Mexico’s Pacific coast, the universe might just be sending us a message today and we should probably all just hunker down and hope tomorrow is a better day.
This is an open thread
raven
yo
Alison Rose 💙🌻💛
Yikes! Hope Adam’s tech issues are cleared up soon.
Also, as a middle-aged happily childfree woman who was told approximately 12,000 times in my 20s “You’ll change your mind one day!!!!!!”, I hear you, Patron. I would’ve liked to bite some of them too.
Scout211
The earthquake off the coast of Mexico was upgraded to 7.7.
Link
dmsilev
Do we know for sure that Adam hasn’t fallen through a wormhole into the past and his computer is valiantly trying to warn him not to step on any butterflies or anything?
bbleh
…the universe might just be sending us a message today and we should probably all just hunker down and hope tomorrow is a better day.
My moderately demented 95-y/o mother agrees — “I hated today!” — but she’s tucked in now, which plan I intend to follow myself shortly.
Could be worse! Joe is still president …
Gin & Tonic
I don’t know if Adam’s post would have included this tidbit, but it’s tasty:
hueyplong
I was just thinking it would be nice if the Russians had technical difficulties far in excess of Adam’s.
TaMara
@Gin & Tonic: I believe it did!
Poe Larity
Upgrade already. I run PrinceOS, and it’s always New Years 1999
A new word for human chew toys. We need more Ukrainian words to be mainstreamed.
MagdaInBlack
@Alison Rose 💙🌻💛: Right there with you and Patron.
Adam L Silverman
@Gin & Tonic: It’s in there waiting for tomorrow night.
wombat probabilty cloud
TaMara, thanks for the post. Flexibility is good.
Bill Arnold
@dmsilev:
Doesn’t take so much. A single atom an angstrom out of place cascades through collisions to wildly different gas/liquid states. Then Brownian motion causes different spermatozoa to win sperm races (maybe in one’s follicle mites, the dominant human-associated multicellular animal species), or any etc that involves random molecular interactions. (Over a liter of vodka I might tell a tale about Brownian Motion.)
Adam is a Mac guy right? I’m not aware of any Russian malware that alters the date/time on a Mac. :-)
Geoduck
If anyone’s now in the mood for vintage earthquake-disaster literature, check out John Christopher’s 1965 novel A Wrinkle In The Skin.
wombat probabilty cloud
@Gin & Tonic: God, that’s delicious. Fuck those guys.
Grumpy Old Railroader
In related news from Northern California we went from a record breaking 112 degree drought last week to a 65 degree downpour with more rain coming. Next week the Sierra Nevadas may get some snow. Fingers crossed
CaseyL
I hope Adam’s computer wakes up from its induced coma and recovers completely. Sending good thoughts!
This has been a crazy news day.
And I need to take a Covid self-test tonight – less than one week after getting the latest booster. If I’ve gotten Covid now…..(*shakes fist*)
Another Scott
2021 isn’t bad. My J has an ancient lab PC that is still running Windows XP and it thinks it is 1998 or something. Winders doesn’t like the clock being that old, so pretty much nothing works. Resetting the time fixes it, until it needs to reboot again. (It needs a new motherboard battery.)
Maybe something similar is going on with your Mac?
The engineer genes I’m cursed with compel me to post: On the off chance that you haven’t seen this behavior before, here’s a Reddit thread in case it doesn’t start working for you soon.
Good luck!
Cheers,
Scott.
Dan B
@Gin & Tonic: Yay!!!
wombat probabilty cloud
@Bill Arnold: I’ve read that quantum-level changes potentially can affect computation, but haven’t seen any macro-world stats on how often this may occur. Not kidding.
dr. luba
News from the eastern front:
dr. luba
I don’t know if this has been mentioned here before, but Timothy Snyder is teaching a course in Ukrainian History at Yale this fall. It is being recorded and released on YouTube. I’ve watched the first four lectures and they’ve been good.
https://youtu.be/bJczLlwp-d8
Syllabus here.
Another Scott
@wombat probabilty cloud: Dunno about computation (there are lots of error-correcting things going in in PCs (RAM especially) behind the scenes). But “single event upset” is a real thing and a real problem.
USGS.gov:
Way back in the olden days when 16kbit memory chips were big, there was suddenly a huge issue with Intel’s chips. It turned out there was a high enough (but still very low) level of some radioactive element in the encapsulating plastic to cause SEUs.
Cheers,
Scott.
Tom Levenson
@dr. luba: “please proceed, governor…”
Eric S.
@raven: yo
West of the Rockies
@Gin & Tonic:
I wish all deserving Russian websites and operators would get hacked, trolled, doxed, and buried in ransomeware and viruses.
jonas
@dr. luba:
I’ve been watching that, too. It’s excellent. Good on Yale for putting this online.
Sister Golden Bear
@dr. luba: [Obligatory Loki gif] Yes, very sad. Anyway…
Another Scott
@Eric S.: I think the canonical reply is:
;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Alison Rose 💙🌻💛
@Gin & Tonic: Oh, I love it. I LOVE IT.
wombat probabilty cloud
@Another Scott: Tin hats, with quantum upgrades, then!
wombat probabilty cloud
@dr. luba: Condolences.
Urza
@Another Scott: Random bad material is always going to affect computer hardware. Radioactive element is obviously a bad one. Working in the cloud, I see a new type of piss poor manufacturing that no one thought of at least once a month, causing massive amounts of performance issues and replacements. Its actually getting worse the larger the cloud is. Granted we have a problem with anything greater than .4% failure. 1% failure means at least $10s of millions.
BeautifulPlumage
I thought this was a good analysis of the reasons behind the poor Russian showing in the recent UKR offensive. Below is the first tweet: https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1571255027775291392?cxt=HHwWgIC-4e6HnM4rAAAA . Apologies if it has already been linked, it’s from 9/17/22
frosty
Patron definitely had the correct response to a stupid question!
BeautifulPlumage
@Gin & Tonic: Oooooo, nice, hadn’t seen that yet. I did see that the Wagner telegram channel had it’s like emoji swapped with the Azov symbol yesterday.
BeautifulPlumage
@BeautifulPlumage: I should amend that to “As a layperson with no military/warfare experience, I thought…”
frosty
@Another Scott: The engineer genes I’m cursed with …
Aha! So I’m not the only one!
BeautifulPlumage
@dr. luba: wow, and we still don’t know what was happening in Kherson the other night.
Thanks for the link to the Snyder course!
Redshift
@Urza: A guy I used to work with went to work at the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, which had a massive in-house IT operation at the time, maybe still does. He liked to tell about how Mean Time Between Failure was not a random statistical concept there; they had so many hard drives that one would die on that schedule nearly like clockwork.
redactor
While we’re contemplating natural disasters, spare a thought for the indigenous people of western Alaska, who are getting hammered with storms that would look more at home in Florida.
Redshift
@Another Scott:
For a while, there was a rogue or maybe just defective cell tower near the grocery store I go to. If I was in there or if my car was stopped at a traffic light next to it, my phone would suddenly think it was several years in the past, and all kinds of stuff wouldn’t work, because it can’t make a secure connection if the clocks on the two ends don’t agree. It was really weird; I felt sorry for the people who lived around there.
RaflW
Since this is an open thread: This is about as perfect a Connor Friedersdorf tweet as one can imagine. (And I’m reminded that we probably can no longer call him ‘young Connor’, though his semi-dazedness persists).
phdesmond
@dr. luba:
thank you for that link. am almost through listening to Timothy Snyder’s first lecture.
Spadizzly
@Gin & Tonic: What cyberdefense doing?
Another Scott
KyivIndependent News Feed just now:
[ womp, womp ]
Cheers,
Scott.
randal sexton
@Another Scott: and some of the dynamic programmable FPGA chips were sensitive to this as well. The FPGA company I worked for managed NOT to capitalize on this — even though our technology was NOT susceptible to SEU issues.
Jay
@BeautifulPlumage:
your link is now fully compiled on threadreader,
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1571255027775291392.html
Jinchi
@Another Scott:
I think it’s funny that the boundaries of the Oblasts are apparently considered sacrosanct, even though the boundaries of the nations around them are not.
Carlo Graziani
@BeautifulPlumage: That’s an excellent thread. Thanks very much for highlighting it.
I didn’t know that — and don’t understand the reason for believing that — the train line from Belgorod stopped at Kupyansk, instead of continuing to Izyum. Other reporting has described Izyum as a rail node. But from in-context reading of Matveev’s thread, he seems very knowledgeable, so filed under “untidy details”.
The other thing that came to mind while reading it is that the infighting between warlords such as Prigozhin and Kadyrov and their conflicts with the regular army under Putin are quite reminiscent of the situation in wartime Nazi Germany, with warlords such as Goering and Himmler at each other’s throats and diverting substantial amounts of vital resources away from a unified war effort for the sake of defending their own empires, while also fighting off the Wehrmacht, while Hitler looked on benevolently — no doubt thinking that the infighting would prevent the emergence of a strong rival.
biff murphy
And volcano rumblings in New Zealand!!!