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Ethan Blanton

elb@social.sdf.org

<p>I&#39;m here for old computers, radios, and cool nerdery.</p><p>I identify with <a href="https://social.sdf.org/tags/Unix" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#<span>Unix</span></a> <a href="https://social.sdf.org/tags/Linux" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#<span>Linux</span></a> <a href="https://social.sdf.org/tags/HamRadio" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#<span>HamRadio</span></a> <a href="https://social.sdf.org/tags/retrocomputing" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#<span>retrocomputing</span></a> and <a href="https://social.sdf.org/tags/making" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#<span>making</span></a>.</p><p>Professionally I am a computer scientist, now primarily an educator of college students. I am a <a href="https://social.sdf.org/tags/SystemsProgrammer" class="mention hash

Posts

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    Cheating on programming assignments has always been a thing. Attempting to detect cheating has always been a thing. LLMs have done very strange things to their relationship, though. On one hand, producing code that passes the sniff test at the unmonitored submission level is now trivial; if a 2nd year programmer can write it, the cheapest, worst models can also write it. 1/

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    How many domains is too many domains? Asking for a friend. (Also why have they gotten so expensive?!?)

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    Hey look, @veronica put out a video on a subject I&amp;#39;ve spent a lot of time with: AIM and the OSCAR servers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDQTuJWST4M She also teased a future post about @pidgin, which I look forward to.

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    JFK is the second worst airport

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    A new friend, from Summer of &amp;#39;84. They should have a familiar look, for those of us of a certain set of interests. 640K? What about 64K? Do more with less, right? #Retrocomputing #IBMPC

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    https://blog.himanshuanand.com/2026/05/the-90-day-disclosure-policy-is-dead/ I think this is a use case for LLMs and coding assistants that I can actually see and get behind. The fact that they&amp;#39;re exploitative and unsustainably expensive to generate/maintain is still a problem that I don&amp;#39;t have an answer for, but running bug and vulnerability checks against your _own codebase_ seems like just a good idea, in 2026. I&amp;#39;m still not convinced for routine code development.

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    https://www.instructure.com/incident_update &amp;quot;The data fields involved include information like usernames, email addresses, course names, enrollment information and messages. Core learning data (course content, submissions, credentials) was not compromised.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Canvas by Instructure is fully operational and remains safe to use. Core learning data is not compromised.&amp;quot; So, basically, personal information and federally protected data was stolen, but it&amp;#39;s s...

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    I don&amp;#39;t know who needs to see this, but here&amp;#39;s an UltraSPARC III cpu module. #retrocomputing #SPARC #SunMicrosystems

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    We&amp;#39;re losing computing history at an incredible rate, but there are people doing just amazing work out there collecting not only information about the technologies, but also the people and processes that brought them to be. If you&amp;#39;re interested in that kind of thing but not sure where to start, let me recommend some sites that have some great stories (in no particular order): https://folklore.org/0-index.html https://multicians.org/ http://www.tuhs.org/ There are others, of co...

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    You can tell that Typst is a successful LaTeX competitor because when I&amp;#39;m done with a Typst session I have dozens of tabs open to DuckDuckGo, the Typst documentation, various Typst packages and their documentation, and the forums.

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    Marchintosh is almost over and I haven&amp;#39;t even powered up a classic Mac. :-(