Sam Pastva
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daemontus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Sam Pastva
@daemontus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Unexpectedly jolly sack of bones and tissue. Doing systems biology postdoc at ISTA@Vienna. Open-source, Rust, formal methods, general internet weirdness.

🌉 bridged from https://mastodon.social/@daemontus on the fediverse by https://fed.brid.gy/
Reposted by Sam Pastva
I often hear Americans & rich brits justify buying oversized, polluting vehicles by claiming they need them because they live in the "countryside".

I call bullshit, Ladies and Gentlemen, allow me to introduce, the Citroen C15⬇
January 8, 2026 at 5:20 PM
Reposted by Sam Pastva
A few days ago, a client’s data center "vanished" overnight. My monitoring showed that all devices were unreachable. Not even the ISP routers responded, so I assumed a sudden connectivity drop. The strange part? Not even via 4G.

I then suspected a power failure, but the UPS should have sent an […]
Original post on mastodon.bsd.cafe
mastodon.bsd.cafe
January 8, 2026 at 9:16 AM
Reposted by Sam Pastva
How my students taught me that Github’s monopoly is hurting the Open Source ecosystem even more than I thought.

https://ploum.net/2026-01-05-unteaching_github.html

#github #floss
How Github monopoly is destroying the open source ecosystem
How Github monopoly is destroying the open source ecosystem par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
ploum.net
January 5, 2026 at 11:27 AM
I started reading this days ago based on someone else's post here. That post is now long gone, but the article itself is great.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/23/my-family-and-other-nazis
My family and other Nazis
The long read: My father did terrible things during the second world war, and my other relatives were equally unrepentant. But it wasn’t until I was in my late 50s that I started to confront this dark past
www.theguardian.com
December 13, 2025 at 4:49 PM
Reposted by Sam Pastva
I would not have guessed this was possible!

Vladan Majerech has found a one-dimensional spaceship in the Game of Life: a pattern just one cell high and 3,707,300,605 cells wide that, after 133,076,755,768 generations (during which it is not confined to the one-dimensional line, of course) […]
Original post on mathstodon.xyz
mathstodon.xyz
December 3, 2025 at 3:54 AM
Reposted by Sam Pastva
Doing a variant of Advent of Code where I open a little door and eat a chocolate and don’t type anything or look at a computer
December 3, 2025 at 12:45 AM
Reposted by Sam Pastva
android's data for rust adoption shows that rust code has ~5000 times fewer memory safety vulnerabilities per MLOC. that's a lot more than i expected, actually! https://security.googleblog.com/2025/11/rust-in-android-move-fast-fix-things.html

(you might say that you're better than google's devs […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
November 14, 2025 at 10:13 PM
Reposted by Sam Pastva
my work sometimes feels like trying to very slowly and exhaustingly transition over like 10 years from brutalist radical DIY laptop kit for the post-apocalypse to a not-too-weird-looking, hardware and software bug-free, always reliable, well-supported, performant, silent, secure and still […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
October 11, 2025 at 10:51 PM
Reposted by Sam Pastva
​:neobot:​
October 10, 2025 at 9:37 AM
Reposted by Sam Pastva
It's becoming increasingly clear to me that Reflect Orbital's fucking stupid giant mirror satellite, with absolutely NOTHING useful to offer, which will cause countless safety issues, ecological disasters, and destroy the night sky, is going to launch.

A bunch of astronomers and I have sent out […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
October 9, 2025 at 5:19 PM
Reposted by Sam Pastva
hey wanna see something kinda interesting? this was the entire fix to the iPhone Antennagate in 2010. 20 bytes.

(this is going to be a very long thread 🧵)
October 7, 2025 at 12:43 AM
Reposted by Sam Pastva
It is WILD that we now live in a time where my job as an astrophysics professor has gone from "learn cool things about space" to "try to get someone to hold billionaires accountable for dropping shit on us from orbit"
September 23, 2025 at 10:49 PM
I'm just glad that for once, it is not the Rust community that is having weird governance issues...

https://joel.drapper.me/p/rubygems-takeover/
Shopify在Ruby中心牵线搭桥,迫使Bundler和RubyGems被收购
Shopify, pulling strings at Ruby Central, forces Bundler and RubyGems takeover (joel.drapper.me) 09-23  ↑ 146 HN Points
joel.drapper.me
September 23, 2025 at 7:44 PM
Reposted by Sam Pastva
LOL "godfather of AI" got dumped by his girlfriend using AI.

"...Even Geoffrey Hinton, a Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist known as a "Godfather of AI" — a technology that likely wouldn't exist in its current form without his contributions — recently conceded that his girlfriend had broken […]
Original post on ai6yr.org
m.ai6yr.org
September 19, 2025 at 4:06 AM
Reposted by Sam Pastva
yeeeessss
YEESSSS

more batshit like this

https://bogdanthegeek.github.io/blog/projects/vapeserver/
Hosting a WebSite on a Disposable Vape
Someone's trash is another person's web server.
bogdanthegeek.github.io
September 15, 2025 at 2:43 PM
Reposted by Sam Pastva
I was today years old when I learned that the first two Amiga prototype motherboards were called War and Peace and the two computers used to program them Crime and Punishment

#amiga
September 15, 2025 at 7:54 AM
Reposted by Sam Pastva
Danish Minister of Justice says no one has the right to communicate in a way that cannot be overheard, recorded, and understood by the police (and other snoops):

https://www-ft-dk.translate.goog/samling/20231/almdel/REU/spm/1426/index.htm?_x_tr_sl=en&_x_tr_tl=ja&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp (via […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
September 15, 2025 at 8:13 AM
Reposted by Sam Pastva
A few random marine facts I’ve learned:

- some southern sea otters eat so much purple sea urchin that their skulls turn purple
- the whales in Monterey bay don’t need to do bubble net feeding because there is so much food, unlike the situation for whales elsewhere
- California sea lions work […]
Original post on hachyderm.io
hachyderm.io
August 26, 2025 at 6:40 AM
Reposted by Sam Pastva
Haha! Can't believe it worked!

#photography #edinburgh #concrete #carpark #redarrows
August 9, 2025 at 6:14 PM
Reposted by Sam Pastva
In honor of the late, great Tom Lehrer:

https://youtu.be/AcS3NOQnsQM?feature=shared

A few years ago, he put his words and music into the public domain, in part to thumb his nose at the copyright cartel and ensure that his brilliant work would be around as long as people know how to laugh -- […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
July 28, 2025 at 12:38 AM