Because hosting it in a place with all the necessary infrastructure already in place would have made too much sense. Like, oh I don’t know, that one Brazilian city that recently hosted the World Cup and then the Olympics, both with many orders of magnitude more people attending than a climate conference. No gotta spend a fortune building brand new shit for a once in decades thing.

How much you want to bet this is just an excuse to funnel public money into a private construction firm?

Bring America’s enemy is dangerous, being America’s ally is fatal

Also, just because a dog looks “designer” doesn’t mean it’s unhealthy. The Bichon Frise for example is pretty hardy and regularly live to 16, 17, or even longer without many long term health problems. Part of the reason is because they’re not a wildly popular dog breed and as a result they’re not overbred and their gene pool is pretty healthy. (I have a bichon, not like a PURE breed one with a certificate or anything, which is good, but no obvious signs of being a mix either. Not trying to sell you on the breed obviously but just wanted to use it as a counter example).

are just wolves with their version of down syndrome

Categorically false. Down syndrome is due to having an extra chromosome. While dogs have 2 fewer chromosomes than wolves. No, it’s not the same thing because it is a single matched pair that is missing, which is the the “normal” way chromosome counts change through evolution. Dogs don’t act like wolves because they have been evolving mostly separately from wolves to the point where they are generally considered a separate species. Dogs aren’t wolves with down syndrome in the same way coyotes aren’t wolves with down syndrome. They act differently because they’re different animals adapted to wildly different niches.

The docile nature comes from literally having fewer neurons in aggression/panic/fight regions of their brain. MinuteEarth video

The latest version of COBOL came out in 2023.

Grace Hopper lives on

Tape drives. Remember those big reels of tape on mainframes in the 80s? They don’t look exactly like that anymore, but tape is still used for backups/long term archival because they offer the lowest cost per gigabyte and decent longevity without needing to be powered, as long as you don’t need to access the data all that fast or often.

Those dank memes and cat videos you posted in 2010 are probably on tape in a data centre somewhere

2025 appliances: Sorry the company went out of business and the OS has DRM that needs to authenticate with the company servers that don’t exist anymore.

2026 appliances: It looks like you’re trying to store Skibidi brand ice cream, unfortunately, that is out of our food brand network. This fridge will self destruct in five seconds.

2027 appliances: Tired of your fridge self destructing when you put the wrong food in it? For a subscription of $29.99 a month, we’ll ship you a supply of single-use chemical ice packs that you can just throw in the ocean when they wear off!

I’ll give exactly as much effort as I’m paid. Minimum wage gets you minimum work.

There’s no point in talking to Trump because he has shown time and time again that his words are worthless. He’s also an attention addict and megalomaniac, so talking to him, especially if it’s televised and on the world stage, is giving him exactly what he wants.

There’s literally no reason to buy a game until the minute before you’re going to play it. It’s not like digital copies sell out or takes time to ship. Add games you want to play to our wishlist and buy them when you’re actually ready to play them.

“We have to commit terrorism against them prevent them from becoming terrorists!!”

Or if line drying is not practical for you for whatever reason, consider a heat pump dryer as a compromise. It dries by dehumidification instead of heat (it condenses the moisture away and continuously blows dry air at your clothes) and uses a fraction of the energy (to the point that they use the standard North American 120v 15A plug and not the giant 240v one). Most models also don’t need to be vented so you won’t have a tube full of lint that can catch fire. Technology Connections likened them to accelerated line drying.

Hang them indoors?

Yeah, my point is puppy/kitten mills should be criminalized under animal cruelty laws, like dog fighting is. Conceptually they’re not that dissimilar: both activities intentionally cause animal suffering for the express purpose of making as much profit as possible.

Inbreeding dogs should be illegal. If you breed dogs (or cats/other pets), you should be required to submit proof that the parents are genetically far enough apart.

However, sometimes it’s not the dog that’s the problem, it’s the food. Pet food has basically no regulations and no real way to independently verify the quality of ingredients, so companies will use the cheapest scraps possible that were otherwise headed for the dumpster, while charging similar to or even more than human food. And they’ll blatantly lie in their marketing material claiming they only use the most wholesome ingredients, because they know full well there’s no way for you to actually prove or disprove that.

Ah sweet, manmade horrors beyond my comprehension.

Canadian here, that’s getting more and more common over here. There’s a ton of HOA bullshit here too but I’ve been seeing more and more food gardening in Vancouver, but that might also be because food is expensive as fuuuck here.

Thank you so much! I tried my darndest to incorporate my own experiences in software development into this! Though I definitely have way less experience than you.

The question I have now is, if they actually tried to rip the bandaid off and replace the whole thing, would it be a political problem?

I’ll let dev kitty respond to this!

Context: the Unified Territories is an alliance of many small to medium sized animal species, ranging from mice and songbirds to dogs and foxes; who all subscribe to an ideology called Unitism (hence unified territories), which is basically like “vegan socialism” where former predators and prey live in peace. The Felines are Unitist as well.

Fortunately there’s not really much political issues that would get in the way of that. The Feline Ministry of Transportation has full authority over the transportation infrastructure in Feline Territory, especially the implementation stuff like which ATC system to use.

Though, changes to the flight control standards (as opposed to the internal implementation of those standards) might require consultation with the Avian Government over in the Unified Territories because we want to ensure that naturally flying animals are kept safe when flying near hovercrafts. Even if the flight is entirely within Feline Territory, a lot of birds live here and they are still represented by their own taxonomic government, because all the Unitist taxonomic govs talk to each other and uphold Freedom of Migration between their territories. Generally, we would send our changes to them and they’ll let us know if they have any concerns.

However there probably won’t be a rewrite of FDTMS specifically, because we’re starting talks with the Unified Territory to develop a combined ATC standard so pur hovercrafts can more operate in each other’s airspace, and improve things like scheduling of cross-border flights, easier passenger connections between UTMT and FMT flights, allow an FMT aircraft to fill a UTMT scheduled flight and vice versa, and just generally try to make a system that combines the advantages of FDTMS and their UniFlyControl system. These are reeealy early stage talks so none of the technical details have been set yet, but it does seem like it will go through eventually.

I would hope it would be written in a completely memory safe language.

3. If a goby asks you to go hunting with it, go.

Thank you!

but what would happen if a new dispatch needed to be issued mid-flight (e.g., due to weather or airspace disruption)? Would a different system handle that?

That would go through no problem, and since the hovercraft keeps track of what entry ID it’s currently executing, you can give it extra steps by rearranging/adding entries after the current one (ATC would also be able to poll the hovercraft for its current entry ID)

In the worst case scenario, ATC can call up the pilot, ask them to disconnect the autopilot, stop the hovercraft in midair, and tell the hovercraft to wait for a brand new dispatch message. Once it has received such a message, the pilot can manually select which entry ID it should start at, and then reconnect the autopilot.

awestruck horror that they would let such a critical system exist without checking or validating inputs.

I have also written a post from a cat working for the Feline Ministry of Transportation, think of it as something that would be commented on their equivalent of /c/programming under a link to this report. Thought you might enjoy!

FMT/FTDMS dev here, thought I’d shed some light on what happened on our side.

This was found during a Ministry of Security audit as part of their Safe Infrastructure initiative. All of this was legacy code that hadn’t been touched in ages, the oldest of which dates back to before the Felines had even signed the ISPA and stopped eating prey. Yes, FDTMS as a protocol only became an official thing after the Feline Revolution (and by extension us signing the ISPA), but before that was a dozen different ad hoc ATC standards used by different parts of Feline Territory, and some of the source code from those (namely parts of Flight Dispatch Protocol, the old standard used in Moonpeak where all the government ministries are headquarted) were reused for FDTMS because it seemed easier and faster than writing everything from scratch.

All four points in the official root cause analysis can be boiled down to “cats are lazy” and/or “cats are bad at communicating with each other.”

1. Parsing the message before checking message signature: The message parsing and cryptography teams didn’t adequately consult with each other and failed to make sure their components were executed in the correct sequence. Both teams worked on their own thing and assumed that as long as both were done between receiving the message and prompting the pilot to accept the final dispatch table, there would be no problems. What happened was that the message processing and signature checking happened simultaneously on different threads. In theory, the cryptography thread could stop the message processing as soon as it detects an issue, but in practice, the message processing was way faster so by the time the cryptography thread finished and returned a result, the message had already been parsed and has overflowed the buffer. This was changed to a synchronous system where the cryptography thread executes first, and it is now the one responsible for triggering subsequent data processing threads if and only if it doesn’t detect any issues.

2. Failing silently on an invalid dispatch and reverting to the previous one: This was actually intentional because cats in the flight deck/ATC centre didn’t want to have to click two extra buttons whenever a dispatch message got corrupted during transmission. So the system was designed to be as automatic and “paws off” as possible. In theory, the pilot is supposed to check that the reversion to the previous valid dispatch is the correct action when they get a dispatch rejected message, and also report the error to ATC, but in practice that pretty much never happens. This was part of the code that was reused from FDP, and this whole thing was a really stupid idea and we only realized that after we found this issue.

3. The parser being more tolerant than the the actual FTDMS protocol: The standard originally treated TerritoryChange and RegionChange as completely different entries, but it got changed to a single entry fairly late in development because we realized that crossing a territorial border always implies crossing a regional border since the other territory would have its own regions. So buildDispatchTable had already been implemented and had to be updated. The cats who updated it figured that they only had to implement support for including the region information in TerritoryChange and didn’t need to completely remove support for two separate entries (because that would have been more work). But they also forgot to test that the changes made to TerritoryChange didn’t affect the ability to safely accept two separate entries (because the standard was being changed to disallow that anyway) and this is actually where the buffer overflow originated.

4. All of FDTMS-Client being run in privileged context with no Secure Mode protections that could have detected the buffer overflow/prevented privileged memory from being overwritten: WhiskerOS Secure Mode is really strict and honestly a pain in the tail to deal with, especially in terms of getting privileged and non-privileged code to talk to each other. So in classic cat fashion, we said “screw it” and made the entire codebase privileged so we wouldn’t have to deal with that. Actually, now that we’ve had to transition to a more restrictive privilege model, we’re getting a lot of issues with interprocess communication as expected. I actually got reassigned to a team specifically for dealing with complying with Secure Mode’s restrictions.

I also want to say that things are getting better, and from my experience, the Feline Government actually has way superior work culture than most other software development places in Feline Territory. But a lot of that old fashioned, counterproductive, least-effort Feline culture is still present especially in legacy code or massive codebases where many teams have to collaborate.