Sean Eric Fagan

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• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  EVERYONE wants to read the Craft Series....
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  Well, a fair amount of the first two books dealt with making something type-safe with tons of built-in error checking. Since the failure results were, uh, bad. He never got into multi-threaded demons, which is a bit of a pity...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  Have you read Rick Cook's WIZARDS BANE and sequels?...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  I wrote up some posts/articles on linkedin about backups (my company had an announcement, and wanted us all to be "more visible"). I just consolidated them into my DW at http://kithrup.dreamwidth.org/2023/03/21/ Interestingly, I hadn't even thought about going into the...
• Commented on Decision Fatigue
  I'm not sure that's monetizable at all, however, given GPDR. I mean, they also have tons of data on the users, and that is going to be more valuable, but again, it's limited in monetization since so much of it...
• Commented on Decision Fatigue
  There are three semi-conflicting facts going around: 1. $13B of the purchase price was done via loans taken out by twitter itself (indirectly; this was a leveraged buy-out). The interest alone on that currently works out to about a gigabuck...
• Commented on Upcoming blog outage
  It only matters if he is convicted of it, and most misdemeanors aren't disqualifying from holding office in the US....
• Commented on London Bridge
  Canada is apparently a constitutional monarchy, which I don't understand. It seems to otherwise fit in all was a republic. ETA: Ah, got it. Canada is not a republic because it has a monarch in the form of King Charles...
• Commented on London Bridge
  "a state in which supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives, and which has an elected or nominated president rather than a monarch." Multiple dictionaries....
• Commented on London Bridge
  The problem with Find My and the AirPods was that the case didn't have it. So if you dropped your AirPods in their case into an old piece of luggage, you might not find it until you next travel, six...
• Commented on London Bridge
  You were one of the people who told me "republican" in RoI is bad! 😄...
• Commented on London Bridge
  In those terms, "republican" and "democrat" are not contradictory -- republics are (as far as I know) by definition democratic, but not all democracies are republican. Unless Charlie wants to vote directly on every single issue, then he is a...
• Commented on London Bridge
  But apparently "republican" is a BAD THING in Ireland. Weird how the same word means so many different political things. Re: shiny! My Watch is pretty old now, and I am somewhat interested in the upgrade. In particular, I like...
• Commented on London Bridge
  "Comfortable" in this context most likely means she's either in a coma, or on continuous morphine....
• Commented on Hugos, 2022
  Congratulations, I am very happy for you even if I am sad at myself....
• Commented on Behind the Ukraine war
  Radioactive iodine?...
• Commented on Behind the Ukraine war
  Please write more squeecore please. Another factor you didn't mention is Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who turns out to have a nigh-Jobsian level of charisma and audience-awareness. (The fact that he used to be a comedian no doubt helps with that.)...
• Commented on Oh, 2022!
  Apple did have some ... weird ... research Macs. Including an 88k and an am29k, although I can't speak to how functional or not they were. (I saw the motherboards, but they were not powered on. And right after that,...
• Commented on Outage report
  Oh dear Moore I'd forgotten that part of it ;)....
• Commented on Outage report
  The Pentium did have an FPU error, yes. It was one of the primary reasons Intel started adding microcode patches to their chip. (That, and F00F.) The error was actually fairly small, and wasn't discovered until quite a while after...
• Commented on Outage report
  So the trick you mentioned couldn't be used to gain root access on a computer that had a math co-processor? Yes, it could. Because the OS mapped the single user page regardless. (And even SCOnix had it mapped if there...
• Commented on Outage report
  But out of curiosity, what did the OS do if there WAS a FPU (I think Intel called it a math co-processor). The CPU wouldn't generate an exception, in that case. The exception vector contains information about the segment...
• Commented on Outage report
  And I worked on the OS part of it :). My favourite x86 UNIX story was a big security hole, which was uniquely caused by the x86 architecture: the user page was writable. And was mapped at a fixed location....
• Commented on Outage report
  I really hope all the tools get up to speed on everything -- as it is, in order to, ahem, back up my books, I have a Mac VM on which I turned off networking while leaving Kindle running, and...
• Commented on Invisible Sun: Themes and Nightmares
  I am biased, as I read several versions of this during its birthing, but: this really is a good book. There's SF, dystopia, political drama, and, shockingly, a fairly upbeat and hopeful ending! I'm looking forward to reading the published...
• Commented on Central Banking on Mars!
  Would you mind explaining that? One of the things that MPEG4/H.264 did was recognizing large portions of objects. E.g., the portion of a background image that doesn't change can be compressed once, and then referred to even if the...
• Commented on Central Banking on Mars!
  Really disliked Hanna-Barbara - the cartooning was so crappy. Hanna and Barbera created television cartooning: they were the ones who realized you could only do partial cells for each frame; this dropped the cost by orders of magnitude. It's also,...
• Commented on Dead Lies Dreaming: Spoilers
  I mostly interpreted it as an elder god tool similar to vampirism: the slow-soul-eating one grants the host power / divine communion / whatever. At the cost of, literally, consuming the soul of the host. This allows for autonomy and...
• Commented on All Glory to the New Management!
  if it costs the odd human sacrifice ... Surely he's going for prime numbers of human sacrifice....
• Commented on All Glory to the New Management!
  I got to read this book a while ago, and it was good. It was clearly set in the horrible, depressing Laundryverse, and yet... it's a shockingly up-beat book, about love and family. Also about hate and family, evil and...