Riley S. Faelan

👩‍🔬 #geek girl (#software, #dsl, #retrocomputing, #electronics, #fpga, #maths, #infosec, sometimes #sre);
🧠 #neurospicy;
🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️ #trans / #GirlsLikeUs, 💊 2018-12-13;
⬱🌹 Social Democrat (#SocDem), 🧙‍♀️ aspiring Social Justice Witch (#SJW);
🌌 #cosmopolitan (Wahlheimat: 🇩🇪 #Deutschland / #Germany, 🇪🇺 #EU, 🌍 #Terra);
🇺🇦 Protect Ukraine: <https://toot.cat/@riley/109575519338488877>;.

𓅾 Twitter refugee. Former G+ refugee.

Public Key

npub1n4me0zt7qrztejhffq0jhr0hskas6ye80a49f0jr9g79nc4jrsqq5mpeku

NIP-05 Address

riley@toot-cat.mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsf6auh39lqp39uet55s8et3hmctwcdzvnh76j5hepj50zeu2epcqqpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerfw36x7tnsw43qc4edch

Publishing to

relay.ditto.pub

Author Public Key

npub1n4me0zt7qrztejhffq0jhr0hskas6ye80a49f0jr9g79nc4jrsqq5mpeku

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Last Notes

2026-08-16 11:07:48 UTC

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@nprofile…etvm Well, first you have to understand the purpose of money, which is to run out. Selectively. Only poor people's money runs out.
So, even in a SciFi dystopia, if the powerful people want to enforce poverty (hashtag: #PovertyEnforcement / #PovertyEnforcementOfficer / #PEO), money can still have a purpose, notwithstanding the lowest several levels of the Maslow pyramide being completely fulfillable for everybody by machine work.
@nprofile…emk6

2026-07-11 13:07:48 UTC

The rise of cameraphones quickly got rid of flying saucers.
The rise of genAI will bring them back.

2026-07-03 13:08:52 UTC

Hello #GetFediHired Fediverse,
i'm looking for a job, preferably something software or electronics engineering related. I have nominally some background in the back-end of web tech stack and big data, but experience shows that I can read myself into most tech subfields, from medical lab machinery through high-intensity signal processing and drone flight control, reasonably fast, and I can still write cleaner code than a chatbot. Have been a manager and can speak managerish, although for now more comfortably in English than German. Located in NRW, Germany, close to Bielefeld; can be legally employed throughout EU. No formal degree, but I have dropped out of university twice (thanks #ADHD) and know my way around mathematics.
If you know of a job that I might fit for, perhaps even a dog's dinner of a project whose first few directions turned out to not be quite as fruitful as hoped for, please DM me, and let's talk about it.

2026-07-03 05:25:53 UTC

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@nprofile…j9f5 My bet would be, it's a Flint kind of situation, only now memetic: some sort of inadequate new water treatment "optimisation" has gotten fashionable among bean-counters, likely mostly of right-wing persuasion.

2026-07-02 11:16:48 UTC

The Muricans really like their explosions, don't they.
Hundreds of people in the US so far have recently developed a specific type of food poisoning that's causing watery and occasionally explosive diarrhea.
Not only is it bad timing with 4th of July celebrations around the corner, but experts are currently at a loss when it comes to the reasons why.
As of right now, there's no one known source of infection – but it appears to be coming from within the US, not overseas.
The cases don't appear to be linked.
This specific infection is called cyclosporiasis food poisoning, and it's caused by Cyclospora parasites.
Cyclosporiasis is caused by eating food or drinking water contaminated by feces containing the parasite. Historically, people would acquire it outside the United States.
However, of the 190 cases reported to public health authorities between the start of May and the middle of June, 145 involve someone who hasn't traveled beyond US borders in the last couple of weeks.
The infection can't be passed directly from person to person, which means the evidence points to contaminated food or water from inside the country, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Source: https://www.sciencealert.com/explosive-diarrhea-is-surging-across-the-us-right-now

2026-06-30 14:11:35 UTC

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@nprofile…vuvh You're misunderestimating the non-VPN privacy tech of modern-day world.
SSL is now largely ubiquitous. There's only a limited amount of protocols that still do plaintext on the open 'Net.
In such a world, obscuring your location is actually a pretty useful privacy tool against a number of common attack models, and there's only a limited amount of nasty honeypottery tricks that the VPN-controllers can do on you.
They tend to be oversold, though. They can't do everything that the ads sometimes imply.

2026-06-27 20:13:03 UTC

This is a great article. Such should exist for all #retrocomputing things that invented anything great, even little things.
https://www.datagubbe.se/ltmag/
Little Things That Made Amiga Great
A deep dive into a selection of ingenious AmigaOS features.

2026-06-27 15:22:40 UTC

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@nprofile…tkx6 Did you include Storm Shareholder Value in the list?

2026-06-27 07:50:11 UTC

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@nprofile…tkx6 Russia has a couple of other ones, such as Lukoil, Rosneft, and Tatneft.

2026-06-11 08:51:39 UTC

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@nprofile…63pg
Do you have a grant? Or another project?
I'm available for a work!

2026-06-10 21:48:34 UTC

A research project that I hoped to get an official rôle in after the next grant would come through has failed to get that grant, and is now likely to get mothballed. :blobcatsad:

2026-06-10 15:25:29 UTC

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@nprofile…t6jg And in the name of Msrs Dunning & Kruger, the people who are the hardest of reading will be the eagermost to accuse humans of being writing robots.

2026-05-26 17:09:22 UTC

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@nprofile…hj8h But will the Free and Serene Republic of Scotland petition to join the European Union or the Nordic Council first?

2026-05-23 13:13:28 UTC

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@nprofile…l7em OTOH, it would be incredibly rude to distract somebody with a sharp needle near their vein. Even if there's issues to be raised, if they're not of the "Excuse me, you're on fire!", kind, one should wait until the injection is finished, the tourniquet off, and preferably, they've had time to apply a band-aid, too.
@nprofile…yrxm

2026-05-15 13:45:20 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj Do you mean, as service that you could use, or as a machine that you could set up?

2026-05-12 22:22:16 UTC

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@nprofile…gfcd I guess it could be explained by him being a part of the Space Dinosaurs' beachhead / terraforing team, seeking to make Earth's climate Jurassic again by liberating their sacred ancestors' carbonic spirits from their underground tombs and allowing them to float in the atmosphere again.

2026-05-12 22:18:11 UTC

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@nprofile…gfcd Are you sure it's the oil that makes him horny, and not the oil sillionaires that he knows and envies?

2026-05-09 22:54:31 UTC

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@nprofile…l7em Reducing it to a medallion or a choker or possibly a brooch would be entirely doable with current tech, though.
@nprofile…hh4j

2026-05-09 22:46:01 UTC

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@nprofile…l7em Have you seen any other photos of her than this single one? Any videos of her supposedly many interviews?
@nprofile…hh4j

2026-05-09 22:30:17 UTC

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@nprofile…hh4j What's your source?
Because I'm not quite sure the current level of tech can do this with a device of the size apparently depicted.

2026-04-27 12:53:17 UTC

In the context of human-vs-human discrimination, you can measure the dicrimination by finding out how much 'better' or 'more efficient' a member of a marginalised group has to be in order to be hired to the same job as a member of the exalted group.
In the context of #AI, instead, you get to measure a corporation's misanthropy by measuring how much more they're willing to pay for a machine that is promised to do a human's job than they would pay the human.
Psychologically, the curiously interesting difference is, for many managery people, paying a human's salary is not, as capitalism's dogma suggests, paying the price for labour in accordance with the prevalent market equilibrium, but paying for a level of "lifestyle" "appropriate" for the person in question, and a common feature of discrimination is, people believe that marginalised people deserve worse "lifestyles". A chatbot has no life, so this question doesn't yield any actionable salary level. Nevertheless, as you can see from the attached picture, there's a lot of managers willing to pay more for AI than for supposedly equivalent humans.
https://www.axios.com/2026/04/26/ai-cost-human-workers

2026-04-23 08:06:59 UTC

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@nprofile…l70y I ran into an interesting explanation of how the American way of doing religion eventually pressurised all forms of Christianity towards a combination of Calvinist predeterminationism and openly hypocritical ideas about sexual purity a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, I don't remember the article's title.

2026-04-22 06:39:36 UTC

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@nprofile…myvq But ducks will get cold if you take away their downs!

2026-04-18 11:45:14 UTC

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@nprofile…vdqp So, you're proposing a non-deadly kind of digital guillotine?

2026-04-14 18:02:49 UTC

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@nprofile…kahw
Hey, by any chance, would SVR be in the business of publishing trans children's books in USA?
@nprofile…r6lk

2026-04-14 16:46:12 UTC

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@nprofile…kahw In its original Russian, it goes "I didn't read it, but I condemn the book!" ("Не читал[a], но осуждаю!).
(In its most famous example, this applied to Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, a book that Glavlit tried to suppress so hard that even CIA joined in to effectuating a Streisand.)
@nprofile…r6lk

2026-04-13 20:46:35 UTC

Somebody really should make open-hardware work-likes of old PalmVx and NewtonPad. Maybe something like Atari Portfolio, too.
I'd also add Cambridge Z88 to the series, but strangely, there's actual current contenders into this particular niche. They are not as well-designed as the original, in my book, but it's good that somebody is trying. Plus, of course, the whole "writerdeck" movement is eagerly hacking this niche.
But, also in my book, it's important to remind oneself that a handbrain doesn't have to mean a dopamine thief in your pocket. We also need handbrains designed to serve as bicycles for the mind.
#retrocomputing

2026-04-01 10:04:49 UTC

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@nprofile…g4vn "We have automated making human errors!"

2026-03-31 19:53:46 UTC

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@nprofile…u55r What if instead of encouraging to participate, you'd perform a religious therapy to convert people into participants? :blobcatthinking:

2026-03-11 08:25:51 UTC

The notion of a broken clock being sometimes right is based on a gross misunderstanding of what information is.
A clock that always shows the same time is never right, even in the moments of the day when the time happens to be what it shows, because you don't gain any information about what time it is by looking at the clock.
This reasoning also applies to chatbots. If you can't tell whether what you have been given is useful information unless you alreay know the information, then you haven't been given useful information.

2026-03-05 14:34:09 UTC

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@nprofile…y789 Did the cops taste, as per standard procedure, the white powder of sodium hypochlorite tht they found lying around in a toilet to see if it was cocaine?

2026-03-03 20:11:36 UTC

Speaking of ads, did you know what Gorbachov used to do after his services at Kremlin were no longer needed?
This is a real ad that he really appeared in, back in 1998, before Putin's time. (I think Putin was Russia's Jedgar at the time, still several steps away from becoming Russia's Reagan.)
The obvious stylistic differences from typical Western European ads are largely cultural. Wiithin the (then) cultural context of Russia's middle class, and probably the international Russian diaspora, which was rapidly growing in the late nineties, it didn't seem half as outrageous as it might be perceived by us WEIRD people.
(Spoiler: as of summer 2022, Russia does not have Pizza Hut anymore.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgm14D1jHUw

2026-03-03 18:16:39 UTC

An annoying thing about Youtube is that while there's some obviously smart people speaking about interesting things there, and some obviously grifty people grifting there, sometimes you run into people who are skilled and knowledgeable, but drift into grifting. :blobcatglare:

2026-03-03 14:18:28 UTC

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@nprofile…vdqu I don't actually want punning; I want to avoid having to declare an extra procedure that would take struct foo * if I've already written one that takes struct bar *. I've got a bunch of these procedures, and while I could autogenerate the extra procedures as inline procedures, I'd rather not do it if I can have the translator do the work for me, and keep the code less bulky and more readable.

2026-03-03 13:49:27 UTC

Hello #cpp / #cplusplus Fediverse,
If I've got types struct foo and struct bar, which are unrelated by formal class inheritance, is there some way to define a conversion from struct foo * to struct bar * ?)
I can't attach a plain old conversion operator to a pointer type, even if I name it, and none of the C++ compilers that I tried thinks of invoking a reference conversion operator when what's supposed to be implicitly converted, and the expectant receptacle, are nominally pointers.
Is there a way?

2026-03-02 19:03:36 UTC

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@nprofile…4w8z I think I have ran into reading some 7090 code, as historic artefacts, when I was into the Space Race hardware, but I haven't had a chance to write any. You can probably find somebody who has written code for it, but if not, ping me, and I'll try to help.
Also, #/retrocomputing.

2026-02-21 00:02:37 UTC

Hey #retrocomputing Mastodon,
I need some data from a book of the Borland Open Architecture Handbook series in order to properly reverse engineer some code and its associated data from the nineties. I'll probably be helped by any of them, but If I had to choose, I'd prefer the C / C++ version over the Pascal version.
I'll lodge an interlibrary loan request on Monday, but I'd really appreciate some clues for sourcing a PDF. Code from the accompanying floppy would be nice to have, but I really need the book more than the code; it's a book from the time when books were big and floppies were tiny.
Thanks in advance!

2026-02-18 20:23:59 UTC

"Let's ban children from using computers to exchange information!" is the wrong solution to the problem of "Sillionaires have enshittified our computers so much that they're measurably hurting children".
We should ban shitty sillionaires from social networks instead.
#enshittification

2026-02-08 09:44:02 UTC

Has Pizzagate been found to have been arranged by Epstein as a cover-up yet?

2026-02-02 12:18:05 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj Now, if there was some reporting on every dude named Steven who stole a biology textbook ...

2025-12-15 10:43:39 UTC

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@nprofile…8eua Wouldn't the event horizon of a black hole looked at from the inside look just like the event horizon of a white hole looked at from the outside?

2025-04-08 20:46:57 UTC

porpoiseganda, n. The programme of introducing cute baby porpoises to friendly humans. Compare: the Cat Distribution System.
#dixonary

2025-04-08 14:03:03 UTC

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@nprofile…fpf4 Did you make the purpose of the redundancy explicit?

2025-04-04 18:14:46 UTC

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@nprofile…fynq Found it. It's been downgraded and renamed, but it's still on the front page. The front page title is now "New standard announced: Wall Street reacts to President Trump's trade tariffs plan", and it begins with:
President Donald Trump's campaign to reach fair trade deals with the international community, as expected, hit American consumers with "short-term" pain this week, as stocks measured by the S&P 500, Nasdaq and the Dow Jones Industrial Average all bumped down by a couple of points on the release of his tariff plan.
A couple of paragraphs down:
On Thursday, just hours after Trump's tariff program was revealed, doomsayers claimed the market "fell significantly." One report even said they "plunged."
The markets, in fact, were down a couple of percentage points, with those individual stocks whose managers have been relying on favorable import structures to make money hit the hardest.
Hard to get more into the "explicitly lying" territory than that.
(Link: https://archive.is/J6qgg. Even through the archive, you probably shouldn't visit WingNutDaily outside a browser in heavy privacy mode, and possibly via a VPN or TOR.)

2025-04-04 18:00:43 UTC

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@nprofile…fynq Ironically, WingNutDaily used to have a story that explicitly lied that there was a general stock market drop of "a couple of percentage points". It's gone now, or possibly renamed. They rename articles sometimes.

2025-03-31 18:49:32 UTC

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@nprofile…u3xl *Marine Orbán

2025-03-20 21:20:56 UTC

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For historic context, warrantless searches of random homes in the hope of finding Designated Scapegoats is basically the main plot of Anne Frank's Diary.

2025-03-20 21:19:10 UTC

Tirritate diehard Magats by reminding them that USA's Bill of Rights still has a whoole amendment that Darth Pumpkin has not a faintest concept of a plan on how to violate it — the Third Amendment.
Trump last week signed a proclamation ushering in the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 as he took aim at Venezuelan citizens the administration branded as belonging to the notorious Tres de Aragua gang.
But a reading of the language by senior Justice Department lawyers, together with the historical context of the law, has led the Trump administration to believe “that the government does not need a warrant to enter a home or premises to search for people believed to be members of that gang,” the Times reported Thursday.
[...]
The legal view sent experts into panic mode over concerns that constitutional freedoms, including the the Fourth Amendment’s requirement for a court order to search someone’s home, could be at risk.
Source: https://www.rawstory.com/trump-immigration-2671372736/.

2025-03-11 18:44:07 UTC

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@nprofile…g6t7 Maybe it should be held in Toronto this year.

2025-02-15 21:02:29 UTC

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@nprofile…l9v9 I only know of one: the dotted conses make for a natural representation of a pair on an association list.
But even so, it doesn't have to be a dotted cons. It can be a two-element list.
IIRC, somebody who invented Lisp has been heard saying that if he had known, he would have required all lists to be proper lists, ending in NIL, and neither dotted nor circular.

2025-02-14 18:08:03 UTC

If you enjoyed the ZDF's sketch of a Nazi in uniform complaining about being called a Nazi, you might also enjoy this ... apparently straight-faced ... rant of a Nazi-flavoured grifter complaining about being called a Nazi.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0YK2GDr2Y0

2025-02-14 17:46:34 UTC

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@nprofile…69uc "Some" ???

2025-01-06 07:51:44 UTC

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@nprofile…c5n8 I have had Google Maps suggest riding a train from Vilnius to Tallinn through Minsk and Sankt-Peterburg.

2024-11-20 23:28:11 UTC

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@nprofile…cgs9 But the Romans hadn't yet discovered Pacific or gas, and all of their electricity came from cats.

2024-04-29 12:52:31 UTC

TIR that @npub1hyk…3p33 's #enshittification has strong parallels in Marx's #immiseration .

2024-04-24 19:14:08 UTC

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@npub1k4q…3lsq Hashtag: #actsofcops

2024-03-02 20:15:59 UTC

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@npub1xtz…9nyq I don't think that's an adequate explanation. Gravity may pull smol objects together, but it doesn't make them round. I believe that it is much more likely that what we're dealing with here is surface tension.

2024-02-19 16:53:24 UTC

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@npub1zdz…tl8u That doesn't sound very Greek to me. Lycanthropy other than by divine fiat or inheritance thereof? Virgins? Are you sure it's not a hostile tale that Greeks' insufferable neighbours told?

2023-11-10 18:22:34 UTC

Goose
A story with a happy ending
Once upon a time, there lived a little public corporation. Its cash flow wasn't quite S&P 500, but its profit statements stayed usually in the black, and it lived happily from quarter to quarter.
One sunny spring quarter, it procured a young goose, and gave it a goose office. And by the end of the month, which coincided with the end of the quarter, the goose laid a golden egg.
"Oh! How lovely!" said the chief director. And the chief accountant jotted down in the profit column on his budget: egg (golden), 1pc.
The goose kept at it, laid a new golden egg every month, and in the second quarter, the management proudly reported a 200% increase in the production of eggs (golden).
The goose kept at it, laid a new golden egg every month, and in the third quarter, the management was grumpy, for the growth in the production of eggs (golden) had stalled. They knew that this couldn't go on, and they hired a performance improvement plan consultant for the golden egg department, to monitor its egg yield very closely and recommend remedial actions.
The goose kept at it, laid a new golden egg at the end of the first month of the fourth quarter. The line hadn't gone up. The performance consultants recommended lecturing the goose on the growth mindset.
The goose was tired by the daily lectures, but as a loyal egg-layer, it did its work, and by the end of the November, it produced another golden egg.
The line hadn't gone up. The chief accountant was very worried, and the management convened an emergencey meeting, and considered its options.
By the time the third month of the fourth quarter was nearing its end, the consultants reported that they expected the next egg to arrive on the 31st of December, but due to the end-of-year holiday, it could only be accounted for in the next quarter. The line was about to go down by 33%!
And so, the management did what had to be done, and they filed a 10-Q form announcing a reorganisation plan, proclaiming end of life for the egg (golden) product line, and introduced a new product: goose (cooked). The chairman of the board expressed his pleasure of the new release being ready just for Christmas, and promised to the stockholders that the next quarter would be even better.
And if they haven't yet gone bankrupt, their line still keeps going happily up every single quarter.

2023-07-05 21:39:00 UTC

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@npub1gmx…atcq: And then he decided to resign and die, and even though he's never going to run again, the stupid war is still around. :blobcatglare: