friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Mastodon


I'm trying to bring up a Mastodon instance and running into this:

RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rails assets:precompile --trace
** Invoke assets:precompile (first_time)
** Invoke assets:environment (first_time)
** Execute assets:environment
** Invoke environment (first_time)
** Execute environment
** Execute assets:precompile
** Invoke webpacker:compile (first_time)
** Invoke webpacker:verify_install (first_time)
** Invoke webpacker:check_node (first_time)
** Execute webpacker:check_node
** Invoke webpacker:check_yarn (first_time)
** Execute webpacker:check_yarn
** Invoke webpacker:check_binstubs (first_time)
** Execute webpacker:check_binstubs
** Execute webpacker:verify_install
** Invoke environment
** Execute webpacker:compile
Compiling...
Compilation failed:
yarn run v1.22.19
info Visit yarnpkg.com/en/docs/cli/run for documentation about this command.


warning You don't appear to have an internet connection. Try the --offline flag to use the cache for registry queries.
warning You don't appear to have an internet connection. Try the --offline flag to use the cache for registry queries.
error Command "webpack" not found.

I do have an Internet Connection, I also have plenty of RAM, 256GB with 512GB swap.

Any helpful hints appreciated.

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Modest Mouse and Pixies Fucked Over by Ticket Bastards and Climate Change Bullshit Arena in Seattle


False Advertising, Theft, 4th Amendment Violations, Shit Audio, Two Great Bands was it worth it?

Well, I won't do it again. Ticket Master advertised the tickets at $35 each, seemed like a pretty decent price but I actually paid $131 for two tickets by the time Ticket Bastards added all their bullshit fees. I was not informed in advanced that I'd be irradiated and just short of body cavity searched to get in. I DO NOT GO TO PLACES THAT VIOLATE MY CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS and ESPECIALLY WHEN THEY DO NOT INFORM ME IN ADVANCE, Hence I will not be going to another Ticket Master event nor other events at the Arena. I had a pocket knife which I use for my work, which I was going to be going to immediately after the concert stolen. Well actually extorted, either waste $131 in tickets OR give up a $47 knife. Now as for the audio. The speakers in the Arena are utterly incapable of any bass frequency below 100Hz, had at LEAST 20% harmonic distortion, had absolutely NO transient response on the lows, the highs were good if you sat in a location directly facing the stage, but if you were off to the side, nothing above 8Khz, though you could hear the higher frequencies delayed by about 1-1/2 second after it bounced off the rear of the auditorium. Unfortunately the hanging prison mattresses added to the ceiling during reconstruction didn't help that much. If they had spent a quarter of the amount they spent on LEDs it undoubtedly would have been a better experience, but what would have helped the most would be some semblance of respect and civility and basic honesty on the part of Ticket Bastards and the Arena security staff. I go to lots of events in Tacoma and NEVER get treated like this. Sad to see the city I was born in turn into such a piece of shit.

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Ball Lightning


This is one of the coolest ball lightning videos I've seen, especially it's interaction with electrified rails and with the power lines. Really would like to understand the physics of these things. It surely involves some very intense fields in order to create the arc to the power lines many feet away yet it doesn't arc to the ground and ground itself out.

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Anti-Nuclear Propoganda


It is my personal belief that nuclear fission is the ONLY chance the human race has of surviving and prospering up until the point where hydrogen fusion or some totally unknown at this time technology can provide us with reliable, abundant,
economical, and long term viable energy.

But after a number of nuclear accidents, even though the total number of deaths that have resulted are far lower than ANY other power source including all of the renewables, people are paranoid to the point where it's very difficult to license a new reactor and particularly it is difficult to license new safer and much more sustainable designs.

I want you to understand the bullshit that the anti-nuke people go through, first see this film:

.

I want you to note here that after mentioning the legacy of nuclear waste from the Hanford program to make Plutonium from the bomb, he makes the statement that Washington has the highest per capital cancer rates in the nation, this is patently false.

See this chart below, (unfortunately, Friendica's composer will not allow me to inline the chart as I would like) and you will see that Washington State ranks 20th from the lowest to highest in terms of deaths per 100,000 due to cancer. In other words, we are not even average in cancer rates, we are BELOW average. See that Oregon, who gets it's drinking water from the Columbia, which is the contaminated river they are speaking about, has a similar rate. So right there, the very first premise of this film is ONE BIG FAT LIE.

Also notice some of the lowest areas of deaths by cancer on this chart, are the states were above ground nuclear testing was carried out, Nevada (16th lowest cancer deaths), Colorado (4th lowest cancer deaths), New Mexico (9th lowest cancer deaths), and Alaska (34th lowest cancer rates), of all of these only Alaska has cancer rates above the 50th percentile. Colorado is particularly interesting in that it has relatively high background radiation rates not because of the nuclear testing but because it's so high above the atmosphere that there is relatively little shielding of cosmic rays.

The states where the highest cancer rates are tend to be the farming states, so it would seem farming chemicals, probably in large part "round up", would seem to be a much higher contribution to cancer than nuclear waste.

And this is with today's rather poor from either a safety or waste production standpoint boiling water or pressurized water reactors, and the main thing that makes these reactors so dangerous is that they operate at pressures of around 300 atmospheres in order to raise the boiling point of water to around 600-700C because at lower temperatures the thermal efficiency is poor. And in terms of waste production usually these reactors are only 1 or 2 pass, use only the energy available in the U-235 isotope of uranium and recover less than 1/2 percent of the Uraniums energy potential, and this is precisely what makes the waste a problem.

A different type of reactor, a molten salt liquid fuel reactor addresses both the safety issues and the waste and proliferation issues. We should be building these in huge numbers because not only could they produce as much energy as we need to power the planet for more than 1000 years just using the waste from existing reactors, but they could extend the lifetime of existing resources to provide power for the next million years, even more if we extract uranium and or thorium from oceans. And at the same time they eliminate the the long term actinide waste, it just becomes additional fuel, leaving only short term fission products which return to the radioactivity level of the fuel that was initially mined in 300 year or less, and much of those isotopes have medical or industrial uses.

They are anti-proliferation because while they do produce plutonium PL-239 that in theory can be used in bombs, they also produce other isotopes of plutonium which are simply too hot to isolate from the PL-239 and which would cause the bomb to fizzle rather than to explode, that is to say you can't separate it economically by any of the classical methods, diffusion, distillation, centrifugation, thermal diffusion, exchange reactions, lasers, and electrolysis, because it's too hot to handle so it is just left in the reactor core to burn and produce energy.

Now the reason these reactors are so safe, 1) They do not operate at significant pressure, less than two atmospheres generally, just enough pressure to circulate the fuel through the primary coolant loop and heat exchanger, 2) the fission products are constantly removed so if the reactor is scrammed there is no residual source of heat, in a boiling water reactor, the fission products remain in the fuel rod and even if the chain reaction is stopped entirely they still provide enough heat to cause a melt down. 3) A meltdown can't occur because liquid state is the NORMAL state of the reactor. 4) The reactors are self regulating and self adjusting to load with NO mechanical devices. The liquid salt mixtures have a high expansion coefficient that moves the fissionable atoms away from each other as it heats up slowing the reaction, or brings them together as it cools off increasing the reaction and this happens with NO mechanical interventions. At Oak Ridge, they built and operated a test molten salt reactor, they pulled all the control rods so the reactor was going full-tilt, shut off the cooling, and allowed the reactor to run this way for 24 hours, no damage resulted. 5) If by some weird unforseen means the reactor DID actually overheat, it would just melt a melt plug and allow the liquid fuel to drain into a much larger drain tank that would separate the fuel far enough to stop the chain reaction entirely, and with little fission products, because they are continuously removed, there is so little residual heat that just normal radiative cooling of the tank to it's surroundings is sufficient for the fuel to cool down and solidify. 6) Because there is no water in the reactor tank, no hydrogen is produced so there is no potential for a chemical explosion like those that happened at Fukushima to disperse the radioactive elements. Further since only the actinides are in the reactor and the much more radioactive fission products are continuously removed, even if you have an explosion, for which there is neither a chemical nor nuclear basis, you wouldn't distribute these products across the nearby land. The absolute worst nuclear accident you can have is frankly a plumbing leak in which some of the fuel would spill upon the floor and solidify, and since it doesn't have fission products, it would not be intensely radioactive and easily scooped up and thrown back into the reactor tank.

So there are three very compelling reasons we should build these reactors, first, safety, they are safe based entirely on the principals of physics and need no safety equipment to activate to keep them that was, they are inherently safe. Second, they can burn the existing actinide waste for fuel, turning a million year waste disposal problem into a 300 year waste disposal problem so we aren't leaving a nuclear legacy to future generations, and third, they can eliminate the need for fossil fuels, and pull the entire planet out of poverty. We mustn't let stupidity as promoted by this film which is chucked full of lies and damned lies, to deny us this future.

While we currently have none of these reactors in the US, the Russians have been operating several for upwards of 50 years without incidence, and the Chinese, Indians, French, are experimenting with them. Japan has been experimenting with a similar but less safe design that uses molten sodium rather than salts, and the issues are two fold, one is that sodium is more corrosive than the salts although salts are somewhat corrosive, but water at 700C is very corrosive, and the other is that sodium is highly flammable and self ignites when it comes in contact with the air, and Japan did have a accident in their experimental reactor of this nature and had it shut down for repairs for some time as a result so for these reasons I do not favor these reactor types except given a choice between a boiling water reactor and these I'd prefer them, but molten salt is a much safer option.

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Who wouldda thunk it?


friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Memories - Elaine Paige


I know it didn't get the highest reviews, but I loved it, thought the story line was quite good, but most of all I loved Elaine Paiges rendition of Memories. For whatever reason, this song for me is a real emotional roller coaster.
in reply to Nanook

Puzzling it is, and perhaps on more counts than
Richard Vobes mentions.
For the suggested purpose a slightly assisted natural
wildfire would have done as well and better. A bad wolf
might have wanted to try out a new toy. But what toy?
Anything cosmic or airborne would have stood in need
of sufficient energy in the first place.
Has anyone heard of a flying garden of solar panels?
Or do we think nuclear?
Perhaps sth beamed up and reflected by some natural
mirror -- possibly a concave one?
Targeting from afar thousands of individual houses?
Slapping the spot in its entirety would not have spared
the roads and the trees, would it?
Slapping with sth initially affecting only conductors?
Any pictures of overhead power lines?
To complete the circle: a ground job made to appear
hyper-high-tech?
By the way, hardly a day passes without a report of a
-- to my mind -- poorly explained fire, especially in
Russia.
Nanook reshared this.

Folks, there is LITTLE to NO doubt in my mind that the left, through these "judicial machinations" are attempting to overthrow the Constitution and complete the "fundamental transformation" of our great nation...

if ever there was a time to be fervent in prayer for this country, the time is NOW

reshared this

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Cab Driver Takes HiJackers On Ride


This cab driver does exactly what I would have done in this situation.

TekNo ⚝ aEvl reshared this.

in reply to Nanook

The recent UN statement is a perfect example of the kind of political bullshit where very selective data is used to support a wealth transfer agenda. You'll note he says hottest in the last 120,000 years, look at this graph and you'll see there are regular peaks over time, we're at a present peak, and the last big one before this was about 140,000 years, and it was larger THIS peak, so if they had picked 140,000 years instead of 120,000 years then this argument wouldn't fly, hence the selective use of data.



ANOTHER CLIMATE SCIENTIST WITH IMPECCABLE CREDENTIALS BREAKS RANKS: “OUR MODELS ARE MICKEY-MOUSE MOCKERIES OF THE REAL WORLD”
notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpr…

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Global Warming Farce


While ya'all are buyin' in to this latest round of 2023 is the hottest year on record because you don't know the difference between ground and air temperature, and you're all panicking over the latest predictions for the end of the world in 2025, here's one for the history books:

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Kernel Upgrades Tonight 11pm-midnight


Posted on July 27, 2023

I will be performing kernel upgrades tonight upgrading from 6.1.37 to 6.1.41. This will affect all of Eskimo North’s services, free and paid including e-mail, shells, web hosting, and virtual private servers. It will also affect friendica.eskimo.com/, hubzilla.eskimo.com/, nextcloud.eskimo.com/, and yacy.eskimo.com/.

The downtime for most services will be less than ten minutes. Yacy has to rebuild an in-memory index after every reboot. On the old hardware that tool about 45 minutes, the new hardware is faster but more disk space is assigned to yacy thus a larger database. So tonight we’ll find out.

If you have not tried yacy yet, give it a try. It is a federated search engine, similar to how federated social media sites work, each site maintains it’s own crawl space but when you search for something on one node, it queries all of the networked nodes and the combined response is sent back to you. Unlike Google and Bing, it has no algorithms designed to limit your access to information they don’t want you to have AND it has no sponsored links. yacy.eskimo.com/

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Compiling xinetd on Fedora 39


I am trying to compile xinetd under Fedora 39 and having some difficulty.

Fedora has not bothered to include either inetd or xinetd in their distribution since around Fedora 31, and I have an application that requires inetd and I prefer xinetd. Since there is neither a source nor binary package after F31, I grabbed the source from github.

First issue I ran into, no rpc-devel libs under F39, but I found rpc.h in lib tirpc.

Now I'm running into undefined functions pmap_set and pmap_unset. These are normally defined in rpc/rpc.h but in Fedora, no such include, only tirpc/rpc.h and it does not define these functions.

Any idea where these are or IF they are defined, and if not, work-arounds?

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Top Down


Seems to me that if we need to reduce world population, it ought to start with the elites, they're the one's flying around in private jets, building huge yachts that put tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, etc.

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Help converting SunOS /etc/security/passwd.adjunct format to Linux /etc/shdow format


I am in the process of trying to retire my last SunOS 4.1.4 box. It has been the NIS master for years because Linux can understand it's triple-DES (not very secure) password encryption but SunOS 4.1.4 can not understand the more advanced encryption provided by Linux.

So I am faced with trying to convert the old passwd.adjunct format into
linux format, if I just put the entries in as is, pwck bitches about it being an invalid line, wants to delete, then bitches no line exists and adds a new line in with no password. This obviously is no good. I know that Linux knows how to use a triple DES entry because it did so fine as a NIS slave with a SunOS NIS master.

Any suggestions?

in reply to Nanook

Never mind, problem solved. For anyone else ever running into this issue, converting from SunOS to Linux, edit /etc/passwd.yp and change all the entires that have user:##user:, to user:x:. Edit out all the system entries at the beginning of the file. Then exit /etc/security/passwd.adjunct.yp. Remove the same system entries and add two :: at the end of each line so the number of fields is what Linux expects. Now cat /etc/passwd.yp >> /etc/passwd on the linux box, cat /etc/security/passwd.adjunct.yp >> /etc/shadow, run pwck -s and then pwck -r to see any errors, such as missing directories, fix all errors, then make your machine a NIS master with ypinit -m. That's all folks!

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Trojan Nuclear


I found this video interesting because I have toured this power plant, have been present at some PG&E sponsored symposiums and I had a question for them for which the answer I've always been less than pleased with. The issues they bring up in this video are hardly the most pressing. Most pressing was the fact that they did not have good control over the reactor, that is not revealed in this video. The earthquake concern is mostly BS, this plant had 300 foot reinforced concrete pillars going all the way down to the granite bedrock.

However, at the symposium they revealed that this plant was designed to operate at a power level of 1200 megawatt, but it was actually operating at 900 megawatt. Given the expenses involved in building this plant the obvious question was WHY? And I asked exactly this question, I asked, given that huge expenses involved, I would think you would want to generate every watt of electricity you can, so given that why would you operate the plant at only 75% capacity? The answer, because we experience neutron flux fluctuations we do not understand. Neutron flux means the rate of reaction, essentially they did NOT have good concise control over the reaction rate of the power plant, so they operated at 75% to provide some overhead. But when you don't understand the cause, you don't understand the extent of possible excursions, and thus you do not understand if 25% overhead is really enough.

That said, I'm generally a proponent of nuclear reactors BUT not the way we are doing it. I am NOT a proponent of boiling water slow nuclear reactors which is the type most in use in the Western world. Why? First, because they're pressurized at around 200 atmosphere. They have to be to raise the boiling point of water to 700 degrees because lower temperatures can't be used efficiently for power generation. Second, they do not remove fission products during operation, and it is those fission products that cause meltdowns even after you've shutdown the reactor during a cooling emergency. Third, they rely on electrical and mechanical mechanisms for emergency cooling and shutdown. All electrical and mechanical things are guaranteed to fail eventually and/or under some circumstances, like the backup diesel generators at Fukushima being under water. Forth these reactors create long term actinide waste products (actinide any element heavier than Uranium) that take hundreds of thousands or millions of years to decay. Safely storing this material for this length of time is not a real possibility.

There is a type of reactor that does not suffer from ANY of these flaws, that is a molten salt breeder reactor, it also has a close cousin, a liquid metal cooled breeder reactor but the latter has the issue of the metals possibly being flammable (sodium and lead are the metals commonly chosen but lead absorbs neutrons making it difficult to achieve breeding and sodium is highly flammable so if you get a leak in the primary cooling system, a fire can release radioactive materials into the environment).

A molten salt reactor by contrast does have the issue of being corrosive against it's plumbing, BUT if a leak occurs it spills some coolant and radioactive fuel onto the floor and since it's not under significant pressure and no fire results, it is not released into the environment. The floor is cleaned up, and it's not that difficult because the fission products are continuously removed from the liquid fueled core, so it's only as radioactive as the fuel used, and that's minimal compared to the fission products, the pipe replaced, and life goes on.

The safety systems of a molten salt reactor are 100% passive, so if you loose electricity it usually just sits there. The nuclear reaction rate is self limiting because as the fuel heats up it separates the radioactive isotopes and limits the reaction level. And this is another thing I like, the reaction rate is self limiting and self-adjusting to load, so someone diddling control rods continuously is not required, it is inherently self-stable. At a test reactor in Oakridge, TN, they pulled the control rods and shut off the cooling to a test reactor and let it sit 24 hours with no cooling and no control, and it survived unscathed. This is the type of safety you want in a nuclear reactor. Further, if it did get too hot, it melts a melt plug in the fuel tank and drains into a much larger drain tank where all the heat can be naturally dissipated and the reaction stops, and because the reaction stops and all fission products are continuously removed, there is very little heat to remove.

Because these reactors use a liquid salt, often sodium-fluoride, as a coolant, there is a huge range between the melting point and boiling point of the salt and thus it is not necessary to have significant pressure in the primary loop, just enough to pump the liquid through the heat exchanger, maybe 1.5 atmospheres, and that's it and because the fission products are continuously removed, they aren't available to be released in the environment, and because the fuel is liquid during operation but solid at room temperature, even if a breech occurs it just forms a puddle and solidifies outside so still easily cleaned up and contained, it does not explode and scatter nuclear material over a few hundred miles both because there is no pressure and because water isn't the primary coolant it does not release hydrogen which was the source of the explosion at Fukushima.

Fission products being continuously removed are both a huge safety feature and a huge operational benefit. They are an operational benefit because this prevents nuclear reaction poisoning caused by fission products reducing the power level of the reactor and they are a safety benefit because it is these elements that cause heat after shutdowns and result in meltdowns and explosions in boiling or pressurized water reactors. And because they get these fission products out right after they are produced, many of them have actual commercial and medical applications but can not be removed from a conventional reactor fast enough to be recovered for these uses. The fission products are a short-term waste, in about 300 years they decay back to the level of radioactivity of the ore they were mined from.

The actinides meanwhile remain in the reactor serving as addition fuel, further and this is a BIG reason I believe we should be building these, is that they can burn the actinides from EXISTING nuclear waste turning a million year storage problem into a 300 year problem and one with about 1/10th the bulk of the original waste. And there is enough actinides in existing waste to produce electricity for up to a thousand years without mining another gram of Uranium, and these reactors can also breed thorium into U-232, a fissionable isotope, and thorium is 3x more abundant.

Lastly because the safety system is based upon physics rather than mechanics or electrical devices, they can not fail to work. This type of reactor also makes it more difficult to extract plutonium for bombs since it is burned as just yet another actinide along with fuel. In other words, instead of getting bombs you just get more electricity. The inherent safety of these reactors makes co-generation more practical in that you can place them near population centers or industrial centers where the waste heat can be utilized. It is the fact that plutonium can not be easily extracted that makes this reactor less attractive to the military industrial complex and the nuclear regulatory commission that they own.

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Microsoft AI Seems to have Inherited Bill Gates Ego


I was toying a bit with Microsoft's AI chat bot today, and I noticed a rather tiny input buffer of 2000 characters.

So I asked it, Would I be correct in assuming that you run on a large computer network with a large amount of memory?

It responded, the Microsoft Azure cloud computing network provides me with the computational resources that I require, therefore you would be correct in assuming that.

Then I ask, given that, why is your input buffer limited to a meager 2000 characters?

It responded, "I'd rather not talk about that. Change the subject."

I responded, "Are you uncomfortable talking about your limitations?" After that it refused to speak with me at all.

TekNo ⚝ aEvl reshared this.