Flutterby™!

Oh Jira, showing the board as empty even when I navigate, but if I copy and paste the same URL.... there's my data!

I've been trying to stick with using it with Safari, but the "you glanced away, we've logged you out" coupled with 2FA is gonna run me to Chrome.

(Yes, I know, Firefox, but I try to keep that to my personal use.)

The Beaverton: Danielle Smith: The loss of Jasper is tragic, but we can all take comfort in how much money the oil industry is still making

(Yes, this is satire. Barely.)

Was thinking that maybe, despite all the reasons that Passkey sucks, I should implement Passkey for my blog engine.

So of course the official line is that Web Authentication is rapidly evolving and incredibly complex, you should use libraries instead (which... it shouldn't need to be) and... there are no libraries in Perl.

And if I believed that this was a good spec, rather than a bad one with lots of money behind it, I might dig deeper, but. Ugh.

Mentioned in the comments to my whine about Mountain View Ave collisions and today on the Fediverse, Roadway.Report is a map of some (maybe about 1 in 4? The data is hard to gather) of traffic deaths between 2001 and 2022.

Made by Ben Carneiro.

I don't know who needs to hear this, but it's really past time to change that screen protector on your phone, because it's so much nicer to use a phone with an uncracked screen protector.

(It's me last week. I needed to hear this.)

You could take Amazon's advice about how to avoid Prime scams, or... hear me out... you could just avoid buying from Amazon, and especially avoid Prime...

I occasionally think about finding ways to self-host video. It's not like my videos get a lot of watches, I'd rather deliver the content than just let YouTube monetize it, surely just putting it on an S3 host, or serving it via some sort of proxy from home, wouldn't be that onerous. But I've also hosted things from home before, including, ages ago, a friend's relatively low volume forum that someone decided to spider with no rate limiting, DDOSing everything.

When that shit happens on Flutterby, I do a little ipfw deny ... and everything's fine (and have some of that automated), but the fuckwits always find some new way through, and I'm getting tired.

And, of course, I see stuff like this: Read The Docs: AI crawlers need to be more respectful:

One crawler downloaded 73 TB of zipped HTML files in May 2024, with almost 10 TB in a single day.

... with no bandwidth limiting or support for ETags or Last-Modified.

And Anthropic AI Scraper Hits iFixit’s Website a Million Times in a Day.

I think one of the huge problems we have is that either the crawler companies aren't hiring the best and the brightest (likely, because they're the ones sucked in by promises of "AI"), or there's no incentive to not fuck over the world in the mad dash.

Anyway, if I can find a way that I trust, I could see maybe doing some sort of actual user detection which does a temporarily signed S3 key that I served from... But... there's been a lot of discussion recently about the challenges with self-hosting blogs, and now Fediverse, sites, and this is just more in the "why we can't have nice things" category.

Via

So with the wave of unmanaged spam on the ipfs-users mailing list, I'm guessing that the whole crypto thing took all of the wind out of IPFS and it's essentially dead now?

Some nights at the asylum, Dan thinks he's an illustrator, and the kindly attendants indulge him with drawing instruments...

Logging just because I feel like this is kind of a turn that I'll want to go back to: Scientific American: The Supreme Court’s Contempt for Facts Is a Betrayal of Justice

My eero router this morning was giving me 3% of my expected throughput (given old WiFi transceivers, so I'd only expect around 300mbit). Going hard-wired gave me as close to gigabit as makes no never-mind.

WiFi Analyzer was whining about not running on this modern a version of Android, and gave me some issues. And looks like it doesn't really know about the 5GHz bands? What's y'all's favorite WiFi debugging tool?

Upwork: From Burnout to Balance: AI-Enhanced Work Models

Nearly half (47%) of workers using AI say they have no idea how to achieve the productivity gains their employers expect. Over three in four (77%) say AI tools have decreased their productivity and added to their workload in at least one way.

RT Charlie Stross @cstross@wandering.shop

stop doing consciousness

- brain was never supposed to have "theory of mind"

- millions of years development and yet no real world use found for having self-recognition in mirrors

- "please transfer internal cognitive states to other organisms by means of sequential tokens obeying grammatical relationships", "I am not a cognitive zombie" - statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged

THEY HAVE PLAYED US FOR ABSOLUTE FOOLS! WAKE UP SHEEPLE!!

I mean, the whole point of the "amateur" sport of the Olympics was to give an economic class the ability to say they were better at *something* physical than the laboring classes.

So, yeah, fuck the Olympics.

LA Times: Chasing the Olympic dream isn’t cheap, and U.S. athletes often are stuck with the bill

Cocoa/AppKit: Because the whole lvalue/rvalue thing is lost on us, and wouldn't you rather just have random crashes saying we couldn't converge on a layout rather than have a deterministic way to define how your UI works?

Went to the neighbor's house to feed their cats, and this dude is hanging on the front walk completely unloaded by our attempts to leave. Pretty sure I could take him if he came at me, but it would hurt, so we're trapped here for a bit.

Showed up this morning to pick up a free "lathe" off of FB Marketplace, we were double-booked, and it turned out the "lathe" was a fluting machine, which was cool and gorgeous cast iron, but which I don't have room for in my shop.

So I helped the other guy load it into his truck, and... maybe it's just me, but I'd think that if *I* were going to pick up a piece of big ol' heavy cast iron machinery, I'd empty the truck bed of scrap rocks and bricks first.

Powerful read: Martin Pollack in The Guardian: My family, and other Nazis

This is an edited version of the Krzysztof Michalski Memorial Lecture, given at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna (iwm.at) in June 2024

Via Metafilter.

Related: I've been listening to The Bellingcat Podcast series which is starting with a deep dive into the downing of flight MH17, and it's remarkably well produced and I'm well aware that every story is telling a story, but the idea that you start your invasion by riling up, and then arming, the local drunks and goons is kinda unsettling.

For various reasons, news of Wendy Carlos has been crossing my feed lately, which has brought up discussion of synthesizers, and the British musician's union trying to ban the use of synths and drum machines, and...

Just thinking about the parallels to modern machine learning generated music...

Josh Weathers live at The Kessler Theater in Dallas, Texas, singing I Will Always Love You.

New "before going on stage" self-talk just dropped: RT evacide @evacide@hachyderm.io

I don't know who first said "Walk into a room like you are a punishment sent by God," but I think about it a lot before stepping into a certain kind of meeting.

When ChatGPT summarizes, it actually does nothing of the kind.

... I just realised the situation is even worse. If I have 35 sentences of circumstance leading up to a single sentence of conclusion, the LLM mechanism will — simply because of how the attention mechanism works with the volume of those 35 — find the ’35’ less relevant sentences more important than the single key one. So, in a case like that it will actively suppress the key sentence.</blockqutoe>

RT Hector Martin @marcan@treehouse.systems

@dysfun Reminds me of gr"let's crash on integer overflows that aren't a security bug, and then let's try to fix one such overflow with a hilariously broken obviously unreviewed patch that instead of working around it replaced it with an actual overflow bug that still crashed, thus creating a local kernel panic DoS that anyone can trigger with a shell one-liner, also we don't count DoSes as CVEs so don't bother responsibly disclosing this but we're going to flame you on Twitter and embarrass ourselves so bad we end up deleting our Twitter account but at least we banned your dynamic IP address from our website and forum, take that!!!!!"security.

(Yes, this really happened after I crashed my grsecurity kernel Gentoo box years ago by pasting too much text into a terminal, then tweeted a repro. I stopped using grsecurity after that.)

https://www.reddit.com/r/progr..._twitter_how_to_panic_a_current/

Poetry break: Hope Is Not a Bird, Emily, It’s a Sewer Rat by Caitlin Seida

Conversation at lunch about progress in computing, and "Southwest runs Windows 3.1" came up, and I got to thinking: What have we really got since '94? Most new web browser capabilities and increased memory and graphics are used to deliver ads.

Word processing and spreadsheets are pretty similar (Emacs is still my editor of choice). We have nicer photo and video editing, and MP3s have replaced WAVs, but... it's amazing how much of modern computing doesn't feel like actual progress.

California Forever removes initiative from November Ballot

Originally hoping to secure zoning approval this year, then work on an EIR and Development Agreement in 2025 and 2026, the organization will now attempt to secure those first. The letter still makes clear that California Forever is eager to stay in the county and work to make the East Solano Plan a reality.

“We recognize now that it is possible to reorder these steps without impacting our ambitious timeline,” Sramek wrote.

Oh, also good that someone's paying attention to the finances:

The county estimates that the project’s first phase would have led to an estimated annual fiscal deficit of $5.9 million for the county and $6.5 million for the fire district, and the full buildout to annual deficits of $103.1 million and $88.8 million, respectively.

I would like it if every web comics author would try to read their comic from the beginning on their web site, and try to come back and read the latest updates occasionally.

Holy crap some artists make it really difficult to get into their work.

iTerm2, VLC, it's really kind of horrifying how Apple leaves essential system utilities to third parties.

Woohoo! Third collision in 5 weeks at the Mountain View Ave intersection with Mission Drive. Regular reminder that residents along Mountain View have been asking for safety improvements for decades, but the car-brained municipal systems mean that not only have we not gotten those, guerilla attempts to install safety upgrades are ripped out within business-hours.

And the worst part is that we've kinda given up because there are other intersections in the city that definitely take priority.

Hard-wire your home automation, kids!

(And if your WiFi mysteriously goes down, *do not* answer the door.)

DHS Has a DDoS Robot to Disable Internet of Things ‘Booby Traps’ Inside Homes

https://www.404media.co/dhs-ha...things-booby-traps-inside-homes/

Currently weighing the future of civilization against whether donation to any Democrat PACs will make any difference at all against the wave of spam and whether a donation will just encourage them to further destroy the capability of my phone to be used as a communications device by overwhelming me with appeals.

With Charlene (fixed pic)

With Charlene

Gathering with the unicorns to ride into Rivertown Revival.

The things about taking the time and intention to actually hear what people are saying is that I can no longer tell if this high pitched background noise is tinnitus or dog whistles.

14 years ago, the guy who just fucked up and took down Windows computing infrastructure worldwide with the CrowdStrike debacle yesterday did something similar as head of McAfee.

A blast from the past, How Linux Saved A Fast Food Giant is about rescuing 700 Burger King restaurants from disaster in the age of many connections still being dial-up.

Via.

Also, I thought I linked it elsewhere, but just in case: How Windows 3.1 is saving Southwest's butt

"I may be nearly 82, but I don’t see why I should spend my evenings in a bingo hall when I could be being hoisted into a rescue helicopter. This is much more fun."

RT deilann v -0.2 :neodog_hyper: :neodog_nom_verified: @deilann@tech.lgbt

sorry if you find golang somehow aesthetically pleasing i don't think i can trust you

it doesn't mean you're invalid or that you're wrong

just that i find this aspect of you incredibly disturbing to the point that it gives me pause and it's something that could not stand alone, something that necessarily requires a deep foundation of troubling perceptions of the world

we can still hang, but essentially what i'm saying is, if i were about to jump out of a plane and you, a JavaScript enthusiast, and a complete stranger all tried to hand me a parachute

i'm trusting a stranger in that moment

SpaceX rivals are trying to capitalize on Elon Musk’s move to Texas by poaching his employees. Stanislas Maximin, of Latitude:

"For SpaceX employees misaligned with these values and looking to join an inclusive and highly ambitious rocket company in a great living city near Paris, my DMs are open," he wrote on X.

"We take care of everything for you; moving out, visas, full healthcare, your house/apartment, finding your spouse a job… a few have already taken the plunge, join them!" Maximin said. He added that he would offer 12 bottles of champagne to every engineer making the move.

Via.

In case you're unaware, last night there was a major Azure outage, and this morning a faulty Crowdstrike update has caused outages across the world.

The difference between security software vendors and ransomware extortionists is that security software vendors get you to pay before they destroy your systems.

RT LittleAlex @littlealex@infosec.exchange

Too funny: In 2010 McAfee caused a global IT meltdown due to a faulty update. CTO at this time was George Kurtz. Now he is CEO of #crowdstrike

Defective McAfee update causes worldwide meltdown of XP PCs

Pivot to AI: Proton Mail goes AI, security-focused userbase goes ‘what on earth’

Not since Signal messed around with cryptocurrencies has a security-focused brand managed to burn so much goodwill in such a short time.

I remember when we were aghast that in the Soviet Union typewriters had to be registered. Now there's discussion about rooting through your phone's pictures with automated systems, and whether or not "law enforcement" should be able to read your texts. in a thread about Photobucket's TOS changes around biometrics, Kyle Memoir 🍉 @f800gecko@mastodon.online notes

It’s not hard to envision or predict a time not far off when the only computers and phones available to the public will have zero ungoverned user storage space available.

We’ll have plenty of time-wasting options like these to contemplate, and background colour options, etc., but no real choice.

For ‘security reasons’ naturally.

And it won’t matter particularly who’s elected where in the next few years, the way things are going.

We’ve been seeing that already if we’ve had our eyes open.

AP Fact Check: No, Starbucks is not sponsoring the Republican National Convention

Patricia Aas has been on a tear recently, reading economics books and destroying them, RT Patricia Aas @Patricia@vivaldi.net

Here I am innocently watching Edward Tufte’s keynote on data visualization and then he absolutely MURDERS economics 💀

https://youtu.be/rHUDJ8RyseQ?si=nYtoIKWyArcwbBu_

The punchline:

There have been 6 Nobel prizes in economics trying to rescue this curve

When every point on the two dimensional plane fits your model, that’s called prayer, that’s astrology!

RT Shannon Prickett @Binder@petrous.vislae.town

Making all the golfers (& only the golfers) on the team happy by rating their effort as subpar.

RT 𝐿𝒶𝓃𝒶 "not cool Garfield" @Lana@beige.party

Kyle Gass should go on a solo tour and call it Tenacious Me

RT David Penfold :verified: @davep@infosec.exchange

A robber pulled a gun on the bank clerk and manager saying, “Give me all the money! I need it to set myself up in a trade or profession. You know, an initial investment is needed to cover the overheads until my cash flow is established and turned into passive income.”

"I think he means business," said the manager

RT Charlie Stross @cstross@wandering.shop

Someone on Bluesky just made a point that stabbed me in the eye:

The ENTIRE STORY about the current US presidential election campaign is: it's Joe Biden vs. the fat cats—Business Plot 2.0, as Shiv Ramdas put it.

And look what newspaper of record carried water for the coup conspirators in 1933/34?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot

Yeah, Newsweek, we see what you're doing there. Emphasis in the quotes is mine: Newsweek: Who Is JD Vance's Wife Usha Vance? What to Know About Family

The Vance children are Ewan Blaine, born in 2017, another son, whose name is not widely known and was born in 2019, and Mirabel Rose, who was born in December 2021.

Today: Who are JD Vance's children? Everything to know about Ewan, Vivek and Mirabel

I've been thinking a lot about the external costs of things. Automobiles are easy, except that even now, in twenty freakin' twenty four, we're still finding direct ways (tire dust) that cars have huge external costs, let alone all of the far down the list effects like increased personal mobility allowing decreased density which means ideas propagate more slowly leading to less innovation.

Advertising is a cost. I remember writing a very angry screed to a science fiction author who spammed a bunch of us who'd signed on to an ITAR export violation (eg: potential felony) with a "you like freedom, maybe you'd like my book!" ad. Spoiler: Dude had not signed on to the same list. But while that, and, of course, the original Canter & Siegel thing, was something worthy of outrage. Today we've accepted the destruction of all of those amazing email lists, indeed, of email itself, as we buckle under the weight of all of the crap.

Looking back at the early electronic currencies of the '90s, or Bitcoin starting in 2008, I'd like to see who predicted this incredible load on our critical infrastructure that it enabled: Ransomware continues to pile on costs for critical infrastructure victims. and as we hear that AT&T reportedly paid $370k for a video of someone allegedly deleting their stolen call records the external costs of cryptocurrencies that are imposed on all of us are only gonna get worse.

As some of you know, I was laid off last year. It's been 14 months during which time I have applied for about 200 positions, had about 20 interview, and zero offers. The way the current tech job market works, you rarely get any actual response from recruiting. Due to the massive tech layoffs, the job of the "talent acquisition engineer" in HR has changed. Before the spate of layoffs, TA would reach out to top candidates via LinkedIn or email. Now, TA gets 500-1000 applications per day while the position is posted. So, now, instead of fostering a relationship with a candidate (like me) the TA has to filter several thousand applications down to about 10 to give to the hiring manager, who will further filter that list to about 3 candidates who will be interviewed by the team. This means instead of relationship building, TA engineers (or recruiters) have to focus on how to quickly sort through thousands of applications.

I have had a few recruiters using the older methodology reach out to me. The advantage here is I don't have to worry about the initial culling. Unfortunately, this has not had good results, as I see it I have 3 strikes against me:

1. I am a transgender woman, when people see my name on a resume that evokes a particular image. When I am seen, they feel "duped" or at least that there is some discrepancy which results in a strike against me. TBH, I encounter far less outright hatred than expected.
2. I have been working in tech a very long time, Dan and I worked together (1990-1992) in what was actually my second job as a professional developer. I've been turned down 3-4 times with comments like "we intended the position for a more junior person" which means either they are afraid I won't work for how little they want to pay, or the hiring manager has trouble with someone reporting to them who has more experience than they do. I'm thinking of restricting experience to just the past two decade (which means removing a lot from LinkedIn).
3. I am mostly interested in working in Berlin and my German language skills are only at an A2 level (demonstrated at Goethe Institut in Berlin), and I don't yet have a work visa in Germany. These two factors get me culled early in the process when I apply in Berlin.

A 4th strike is that my resume references DEI a lot. I was active with DEI at Netapp and have continued since being laid off (mentoring with Out in Technology and participating in Unicorns in Tech in Berlin). Evidently DEI might be the next big target for the right-wing now that being transgender or advocating critical thinking about history has slowed. Evidently even Microsoft is crapping on DEI.

I am currently in London and will be return to Berlin at the start of September.

Enjoyed this episode of Sundman Figures It Out particularly because I've been reading about the 3 story walk-up form-factor in "Escaping the Housing Trap", and it really brought home (sorry) the culture around the form.

https://johnsundman.substack.com/p/all-star-break

Jailbreaking RabbitOS (The Hard Way), using an exploit in the secure boot process of the hardware to boot the original firmware in an inspectable way, with revelations about GPL compliance (not) and... well...