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Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔

@wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy

16 followers 7 following 350 posts

Bluesky user? Read mastodon.murkworks.net/@wrog/115830… genuine Internet Old Fart (you under 40 ⟹ I have email older than you). professional […] 🌉 bridged from ⁂ mastodon.murkworks.net/@wrog, follow @ap.brid.gy to interact

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Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 17/10/2026

obligatory reference: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6…

Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 17/10/2026

@moira we've had this conversation...

Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 17/10/2026

TIL: "thagomizer" is now an actual technical term used in paleontology, referring to the distinctive collection of tail spikes on a stegosaurus that do, in fact, appear to have been used as weapons. (This was *not* the case when Gary Larson first coined the term in 1982. Evidently, there had […]

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Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 16/10/2026

OG turns out to be Really Good at Accounting or reading ancient treaties or something. OG spends many weeks/months in the records room, with AK finding excuses to drop by ever more often. OG finally discovers The Mistake (taxation snafu from 20 years ago or whatever), and yay the kingdom is […]

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Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 16/10/2026

Fastforward to my present-day youtube feed. Beaten-down Omega Girl is waiting tables in a tavern. Various heavily armed people show up and Stuff Happens. Oh look, it's the Alpha King. Glances are exchanged. (sometimes it's from AK's point of view. His inner wolf, who has spent the past n years […]

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Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 16/10/2026

Stupid question for today : When did werewolf stories stop being Horror? I saw "American Werewolf in London" (1981). Guy + friend tour England, are warned not to go walking on the moors at night. They go walking on the moors at night. They're attacked. Guy is bitten. Friend dies. Rest of […]

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Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 15/10/2026

@emptywheel.bsky.social Is this correlated with the Ukrainians bombing the data centers with all of the troll bots...?

Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 13/10/2026

@nerdpr0f I also think about the history of electric motors (short version: Lots of advances in the decades around 1900, somewhere around 1925 things start to settle out. Today electric motors are standard parts that you just build, the designs haven't changed all that much over the past […]

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Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 13/10/2026

@nerdpr0f For extra fun, there's the distinction between Computer Science and Software Engineering.

Reposted by Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔

Terrible Maps :bot: @terriblemaps.zpravobot.news.ap.brid.gy · 07/10/2026

Believe it or not, America's 5 largest cities lie perfectly on a 4th-degree polynomial

Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 05/10/2026

@thenewoil I'll have to admit, I will have a problem if the law makes it illegal to record/document cops arresting people in public places.

Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 26/09/2026

I seem to recall Robert Morris Jr. getting convicted of actual crimes when his agent thingie got loose and broke into places www.bbc.com/news/articles/c607l0k72…

Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 16/09/2026

@moira I guess I'm confused about what advantage Pt. Roberts has over say, setting up an office in Blaine or Sumas. (but **not** confused about how this shit is basically destroying the economy in Bellingham0 Also, reading that comments section is depressing ("Canada is little more than a […]

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Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 16/09/2026

@emptywheel.bsky.social I love that facial expression ":... I AM ROGER KORBY..."

Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 15/09/2026

Hyperbolic geometry Part 2: How to get thoroughly lost. Topics: How to fit an infinitely long stick between a pair of nearly-closed crocodile jaws. How "directions" get messed up. Why it is that even if you can get everybody to agree on where "North" is, that won't tell you **anything** about […]

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Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 11/09/2026

TIL that the touchpad on my (7-year-old) laptop will scroll windows if you do a slide on them with two fingers (I only found out about this because on emma's new Mac there are all manner of windows with NO scrollbars, and I've been, like, how the fuck do I scroll these windows, and after much […]

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Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 03/09/2026

my #geometryOnDrugs postings continue after a bit of a hiatus. Today's entry: The first installment of my intro to hyperbolic geometry. This is basically going to parallel (pun intended) what I did with spherical geometry some years back, except this will inevitably be more weird (surprise) […]

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Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 01/09/2026

So, it seems LLMs are really good at generating test cases, that *this* at least is one application they're ideally suited for. Clearly, the question of whether something is a bug has pretty much *nothing* to do with how it was found, and finding the bug is better than NOT finding the bug […]

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Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 25/08/2026

@moira there are any number of plausible causes. I'm told British Teeth actually *is* A Thing. Or maybe I just drink too much MtDew, or it's that I totally hate flossing...

Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 25/08/2026

@moira (me to dentist today: "So how many natural teeth do I have left?" "Um... you have *all* of your natural teeth [this is, after all, the point of doing root canals, i.e., to **not** have to pull the tooth]." "Sorry, let me rephrase: How many **uncrowned** teeth do I have left?" "looks […]

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Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 20/08/2026

@moira well yeah. I have this other theory that time travel will necessarily be **expensive** => not a whole lot of going back and forth... ... and maybe not even a whole lot of going back **at all** (which does simplify the paradox issues).

Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 20/08/2026

@moira > single most likely... well okay: ...for a Guy. (reminded of Connie Willis' "Kleenex and tampons" when people were waxing too poetic about time travel to the Victorian age...)

Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 20/08/2026

@moira because they can do root canals, but also in a pinch they can do regular dentistry, too. And I definitely want modern tech on the root canals. (on the theory that this is the single most likely+painful thing that will go wrong on a time-travel expedition.)

Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 20/08/2026

I've decided a time machine without an endodontist (and maybe all of their equipment) to go along with you is functionally useless or, at best, a Very Bad Idea.

Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 02/08/2026

@nosrednayduj yeah. At least you can read the books again and none of this will be spoiling anything. I just sort of got locked into watching the trainwreck, then I figured I should document the atrocities. To be fair, I never really liked what Asimov did with the series in the 80s, when he […]

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Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 02/08/2026

[spoilers] @nosrednayduj Man, they **really** like blowing up planets. Galactic Council makes deal to hand over Trantor to the Mule. But Old Emperor is all ha ha, fuck you, no, also I have huge black hole gun and now you can watch me destroy all of your home planets. boom boom boom boom boom […]

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Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 30/07/2026

[spoiler] @nosrednayduj god, the writing on this just gets better and better: "65 octaves below the middle C" Let's see,… by my math, that's roughly one cycle every 2⁵⁷ seconds ≈ 4.6 billion years, meaning this is a wave that cycles maybe 3 times over the lifetime of the universe. Demerzel […]

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Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 30/07/2026

[spoiler] @nosrednayduj oh, fuck me, they blow up Kalgan, too. sure, why not?

Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 30/07/2026

@nosrednayduj I'm on the 30-day free trial. "It's like they've fed the book plots into a cuisinart and they Absolutely Do Not Fucking Care." and yes, that was me purposefully spoiling things so that other folks don't have to waste time watching it. That is how offensive this "adaptation" is […]

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Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 30/07/2026

[spoilers] @nosrednayduj I've finished season 2. Bel Riose destroys Terminus. Spacers then make his own fleet destroy itself. But not before he throws the Emperor out an airlock + final scene of him with Hober Mallow doing a toast with crappy wine before their ship blows up. Fortunately, the […]

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Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 30/07/2026

What's weird is somebody evidently went to the trouble of READING the books, because they are, in fact, name-checking everything they can. But then they apparently also didn't see the point to any of it. They kept Doomed Galactic Empire, They kept Guy With a Plan. And that is ALL I get that […]

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Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 25/07/2026

@annathepiper @rmd1023 ("maybe they'll listen to Reason" ... "yeah, looks like 3 boats following us,... correction: 2 boats,.. correction: 1 boat following us.... correction: 1 boat no longer following us... correction: no boat." ... I miss Neal.)

Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 22/07/2026

[shell script code] @dougmerritt > (which, of course, is impossible to format in mastodon, but it did keep the hard CRs in there even if they're hidden Oh, wow.. If you view it in elk.zone (which parses mastodon-toots as markdown) with the cellphone tilted in landscape mode, this becomes […]

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Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 22/07/2026

[shell script code] @dougmerritt > (which, of course, is impossible to format in mastodon, but it did keep the hard CRs in there even if they're hidden Oh, wow.. If you view it in elk.zone (which parses mastodon-toots as markdown) with the cellphone tilted in landscape mode, this becomes […]

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Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 22/07/2026

[shell script code] @dougmerritt it just about fits in 750 chars, except for the helper function whereami () { df . | awk 'NR>1{ print $1 }' ls -id . } which compares inode numbers + filesystem names of the original (abs) path vs. the derived one, which is now calling 3 external programs […]

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Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 22/07/2026

[shell script code] @dougmerritt relative_path () { here=. dest=`cd "$2" 2>/dev/null && pwd` ${dest:+false} : && return 1 while `cd "$here" 2>/dev/null && pwd=$(pwd) && test "$pwd" != / && case $dest in "$pwd") false ;; "$pwd"/*) false ;; *) : ;; esac `; do here="$here/.." done ( cd "$here" […]

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Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 22/07/2026

@dougmerritt It's purely textual: no inode fuckery, no having to grok filesystem implementation, overlays, or weird-ass mount options. Same `pwd` => Same directory. Done. (Yes, single directory can have multiple pwds depending on how we got there; don't care.) (Yes, it would be nice if we […]

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Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 22/07/2026

@dougmerritt Basic outline: (1) [in subshell] cd PATHNAME and capture **a** `pwd`; that's our goal. (for reverse paths, capture `pwd` first, then cd). (2) From original current directory, repeatedly 'cd ..' until we get somewhere with `pwd` = or a prefix of the goal... GUARANTEED to terminate […]

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Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 22/07/2026

@dougmerritt "post when you find out how to handle your problem" woohoo. I was originally inclined to give this up as hopeless, but then I got an idea... New version is MUCH shorter, and, except for the last 3 lines (which are likely-unnecessary paranoia that I may yet drop), relies on NO […]

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Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 21/07/2026

@nosrednayduj I'm starting to think the (original (*)) refusal to implement symbolic links in DOS and WindowsNT is one of the (few) things they got right. (*) though, evidently there are, as of Windows 7 at least, two (2) notions of symbolic link in Windows, "junctions" and "directory symbolic […]

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Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 21/07/2026

@dougmerritt the other fun premise being, "At the absolute worst, I can just keep doing cd .. until I get to root because filesystem is guaranteed to be a DAG at worst and in real life everyone has shied away from doing weird directory hard-links so it's really never going to be anything other […]

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Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 21/07/2026

@dougmerritt meaning I basically need to toss this happy little shell function I wrote for reversing relative paths that I **thought** was doing the right thing by actually looking at the inodes to make sure we weren't getting screwed by symbolic links, a function whose central premise is "'ls […]

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Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 21/07/2026

@dougmerritt ... the problem being that I am currently in Shell Land, where the question of the hour is "What does the least common denominator shell actually do, here?" and the correct answer seems to be, "No."

Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 21/07/2026

is it just me, or is ti kind of fucked up that cd .. does **not** always cd to '..' ? (at the moment, I'm kind of on the "No, that's actually fucked up," side of the fence.)

Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 18/07/2026

@dougmerritt hm. my recollection is that it was 'ls' that was winning the "WAY Too Many Flags" award and that it was a BSD man-page that was saying that (mid 80s, we didn't see much of the ATT version).

Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 18/07/2026

/usr/bin/cat is fucking complicated. (yeah, okay, it's not like I was actually **expecting** to see what the K&R books would lead you to believe is there: #include <unistd.h> #include <stdio.h> #define BLEN 256 int main() { char buffer[BLEN], *b; int cr, cw; goto read; for (;;) { while (0 == […]

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Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 15/07/2026

@moira hm. I guess this make some amount of sense from a manufacturer whose basic premise is, "A bike is this fun toy that you get for your kid," i.e., you want it to stand up to the kind of abuse that a kid will give it, and there's no point designing for too long a term, because the kids are […]

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Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 15/07/2026

@moira I guess I've also heard the adjective "sturdy" used. As in "built like a tank", as if one would actually want to have a human-powered tank.

Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 15/07/2026

@moira (trying to remember the last time anybody was **ever** impressed by a Schwinn, or any aspect thereof.... ... nope. fail. ... well okay, I do recall people saying things like, "How is it possible to make a bicycle **weigh** that much?" Not sure I want to count these though.)

Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔ @wrog.mastodon.murkworks.net.ap.brid.gy · 15/07/2026

mastodon.murkworks.net/@wrog/116755… stupid version was 60 lines 30 days later, the insane version is ~900 lines of m4 = 2000+ lines of shell script (after m4sh has done its bulletproofing)... ...not counting 600+ lines of "semi-literate m4 programming" that expands into […]

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