This reads like an episode of "House" https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/08/after-using-chatgpt-man-swaps-his-salt-for-sodium-bromide-and-suffers-psychosis/
Remote
Larry Cannell
@lcannell@hachyderm.io
mastodon 4.7.3Husband, Dad, Geek, Research Analyst
Family guy, kind of nerdy, sometimes funny. These thoughts and views are my own and do not represent those of my employer. Boosts are not endorsements.
Header photo: A mural on display in Farmington, Michigan created by local artist John Martin and inspired by the city’s unique neighborhoods and culture (2018).
0 Followers
0 Following
9 Posts
Joined December 27, 2022
More Larry:
A fascinating story about recovering and documenting the contents of a recently found magnetic tape dated June 1974 containing UNIX V4. The Computer History Museum’s Shustek Research Archive team carefully pulled the bits from the tape by reading its analog wave form and then using software to decode it into a digital form. This is a more reliable technique than using an old and reconditioned version of an original model tape drive that wrote it.
The tape contains ‘"a tar file of the filesystem," and instructions on dumping an RK05 disk image from tape to disk (and what to do next).’ An RK05 is a hard disk drive manufactured by DEC in the early 1970s and was widely used with PDP-11 minicomputers with a capacity of about 2.5 MB (yes, megabytes).
"In the early days, when you wanted to cut a tape, you'd ask Ken if it was a good day — whether the system was relatively bug-free — and copy off the research machine... I've been saying It's probably V5 minus a tiny bit, which turned out to be quite true."
'imagine that six months ago, you bought a couch. It’s a lovely couch and you put a lot of time and energy into making sure you got the right one. For six months, you’ve sat on this couch, napped on it, sometimes even slept on it overnight. And then, one day, as you’re laying on the couch, the armrest whispers to you, “Would you like to buy a soda?”'
🤣
@redcrew@mstdn.social Eve was a great character on Northern Exposure 😢
@redcrew@mstdn.social $2 DVDs, large selection
There is a Bluesky feed for Microsoft Ignite (it says 2024 but the feed still works). Find it here: https://bsky.app/profile/jeftek.com/feed/msignite #MicrosoftIgnite
@nihongomaamaa@mastodon.ie @jerry@infosec.exchange You know more than I, but I have ISOs created by ddrescue where makemkv reports it is working around dozens of errors but still extracts and recovers the entire video file. That error correction is not happening at the hardware level
“The music survived.”
"The lesson here is simple: creativity will survive. It always has. Every time a new tool, technology, or innovation emerges, there’s a tendency to think it spells the end for what came before. But history tells a different story—one of adaptation, evolution, and growth."
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/06/27/creativity-technological-evolution/