Ross Andrews

Standard Nerd. Admin of somewhy.net, sevendral.com, geekfu.org

Where?: Texas
When?: 1982 to present
Who?: [email protected]
Why?: Code, games, & solder

Public Key

npub1260sn3qdymc4838xvsw49u3mtvd8spzu2hy9sg2j3j0zw770624s4jsk45

NIP-05 Address

[email protected]

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs9d8cfcsxjdu2ncnnxg82j7ga4kxncq3w9tjzcy9fge838008a92cprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0d4hhxarj9ecxjmntah5qqg

Publishing to

relay.momostr.pink

Author Public Key

npub1260sn3qdymc4838xvsw49u3mtvd8spzu2hy9sg2j3j0zw770624s4jsk45

Show more details

Last Notes

2026-08-27 04:27:35 GMT

🤔 Why do I need to order printer filament on a spool? Filament is long and thin: a perfect candidate for being pulled through a conduit from a utility downtown. Hook it straight up to the printer, charge me by the foot.

2026-08-25 19:22:52 GMT

- reply

None of this crap makes sense any more. The left reflexively-aligned with Islam after 9/11 because the right was against Islamic terror (as anyone sane would be). Which meant the left then had to support a bunch of things that they either wouldn't care about, or would be on the other side of.
I don't have a problem with Jews or Israel. I just don't want my country involved in a war that's nothing to do with us.

2026-08-25 19:17:52 GMT

- reply

Isn't that exactly his point? The TDS people are focusing on one side of authoritarianism and ignoring their own team.

2026-08-25 15:29:04 GMT

- reply

🤔 So the inverse of the woke argument that not liking Israel makes someone anti-semitic? (back before the woke people all became anti-semites I mean. this future is confusing)

2026-08-01 14:37:55 GMT

- reply

I’ll care about that just as soon as hateful jokes about the right are treated the same way. Those are a lot more prevalent but never seem to get a Politico article…

2026-07-31 23:43:23 GMT

- reply

One way is to assume everyone is unless they do every single performative-virtue-signaling thing the instant it comes out, and even then to still not be sure.
I've lost a few friends down that rabbit-hole. 😐

2026-07-27 18:51:41 GMT

- reply

> If you're a landlord owning several apartment buildings, for sure we would collectivise that.
Bring more than a couple of guys.
> My only question is how to make sure nobody gets an unfair share of the labor pie.
Yes, I'm aware. That's the problem: the question of individual freedom never crosses your mind. We think fundamentally differently than you leftists, and you're never going to understand it...

2026-07-27 18:22:31 GMT

- reply

> That's not going to happen.
That's exactly the thing though. Your first post was "nothing that requires the labor of others is a basic human right." If you think that someone else's labor is your human right, and they won't give or sell it to you, what's the only thing left for you to do?
And we see exactly this with communist countries: seizing land / whatever and forcing people to work. They say it'll never happen until they decide to do it.

2026-07-27 17:53:05 GMT

- reply

If I were one of the people to whom Libertarianism is a religion I'd probably say that. In practice I don't care that much about income taxes but I would care about someone seizing my property or putting me into a camp. And I do think that's the endgame of that stuff, no matter what the "basic human rights" crowd says.

2026-07-27 17:24:02 GMT

- reply

I don't like either one but labor camps are a lot worse than taxes. Fair, reasonable taxes I'll tolerate 🤷‍♂️

2026-06-05 22:52:49 GMT

“Well I can do that!”
Dude, we’re programmers. The value proposition was never that the machine could do something I can’t, it was that the machine could do something I don’t want to.

2026-06-01 18:06:05 GMT

- reply

There is nothing that would satisfy this kind of person, and so any criticism they have can be safely ignored.

2026-05-16 05:48:49 GMT

The problem with AI coding is that any productivity gains are immediately eaten up by the need to write a philosophical blog post about the experience right afterwards.

2026-03-27 18:02:40 GMT

My house draws about 800W just running lights and computers and things. The washing machine adds 200-400W to that. I can't hear it beep from upstairs. But I CAN look at the current the house is drawing on the dashboard...
https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/somewhy-mastodon/media_attachments/files/116/302/450/144/679/304/original/db1c13d34680d7e8.png

2026-03-17 19:11:36 GMT

- reply

Wrong in two ways. One, you're not talking about "community solidarity," you're talking about seizing property and compelling labor, by force if necessary. If I'll willingly give or trade you water (which, I will! Most people will.) then the "right" never comes into play; we're talking about what happens if I won't.
And two, you're just as equally conflating private property with murder. Scratch any leftist and find a commie, I suppose.

2026-03-17 17:39:54 GMT

- reply

And likewise, of course. I mean, we can coexist in a society as long as you're not trying to enslave me because you think you have a right to my labor. But as soon as you try to... that's how that's gonna go. And that's the inevitable end point of "I have a right to someone else's work:" civil war, they fight you to stay free.

2026-03-17 17:06:02 GMT

- reply

And there it is, that's the fundamental mismatch. I do not agree with any part of that and never will. And I will kill or die for it.

2026-03-17 16:05:41 GMT

- reply

That's a completely different scenario. There's a difference between "they can't stop you from getting water" and "they have to give you the water they made." (or purified, or pumped, or whatever). I'm even down with "they can't just use ALL the water." But that's not what we're talking about: the original statement was that there are no rights that depend on someone else's labor, and that's true. You are not entitled to their stuff just because you need stuff.

2026-03-17 15:58:37 GMT

- reply

If you want to say, let's set up a welfare system for disabled people, tax supported, fine. We have that in the US, most countries do, nothing wrong with it.
But it's not a "basic human right."
If your country doesn't give you stuff they're not infringing your rights. You would be infringing theirs to demand it of them.
That's what I've been saying: this whole concept of "your basic human right to _stuff_" necessarily infringes on others' freedom.

2026-03-17 13:39:14 GMT

- reply

Yeah. That’s what it comes down to. If you won’t do it yourself and no one will do it for you then getting it done requires forcing someone at gunpoint. That’s how “rights” like that inevitably end up. Compare to an actual right, like free speech: that just means no one can stop you from saying something, it doesn’t require anyone else’s action. A right isn’t something you get for free, it’s something no one can stop you from doing.

2026-03-17 04:45:06 GMT

- reply

Got a better idea: why don’t YOU reward those people, for giving you water? That will make them do it willingly, then you don’t need it to be a “right!”

2026-03-17 03:39:32 GMT

- reply

If your concern is gatekeeping then maybe you don’t want water to be a basic human right, maybe you want the basic human right to dig a well. Or whatever. And that’s fine! That can be a right because it doesn’t depend on someone else to do it for you. You see how the right to do the work is different from “I have a right to the end product of this work?”

2026-03-16 23:54:22 GMT

- reply

That's exactly the point though. I agree that everyone should have access to clean water and I have no problem paying taxes that go toward that. But it's not a "basic human right" because forget wealth, what happens when no one wants to provide that water? Whether you pay them or not? You'd have to do exactly that, put people in camps.
You can't have a right that depends on someone else to give it to you without eventually infringing on that person's freedom.

2026-03-16 20:54:17 GMT

- reply

What thing which requires your labor do you think other people have as a basic human right? What should happen if you decide you don't want to provide that labor any more? What should happen if they demand it for free?

2026-03-15 17:50:22 GMT

- reply

It's not you. Setting up GPU pipelines is just very wordy and complex.

2026-03-15 16:05:20 GMT

- reply

What are you using to draw things?

2026-03-14 00:51:37 GMT

- reply

Or just have a dum idea, code it up, see if it feels fun. If it is, change it a bit, see if it’s more fun. Repeat. I’ve had a ton of fun coding things for game jams and just dropping it after a week, declaring it finished and doing another one.

2026-02-18 22:58:33 GMT

- reply

Probably every dictator thought exactly that before taking power. Turns out that running everything is really hard and ruining everything is really easy.

2026-02-18 21:03:53 GMT

- reply

Yeah, that's usually how that's gone with dictators. They fix everything! 🤣

2026-01-13 04:09:26 GMT

- reply

Fundamentally the question is "how to give people the right to use force on other people but not let them abuse it."
I think there's just no easy good answer to this question because after 4,000 years, if there were, we'd all be doing it by now.

2026-01-13 04:06:18 GMT

- reply

I think it's a good idea to give cops some latitude in deciding what's actually causing a problem vs what is technically illegal but should be ignored. Not doing that leads to, essentially, homeowner's associations.
On the other hand that latitude can itself cause problems, so, you also gotta hire good people as cops. Otherwise they ignore people they like committing crimes and hassle people they don't like.

2026-01-11 00:36:04 GMT

- reply

> insane people who think that race is a thing
Race is absolutely a thing. You can look at a sample of someone's DNA and determine what race they are. That's the entire point of DNA testing.
The idea that some races are inherently better than others, or that you can tell characteristics about an individual (like, morality, intelligence, whatever) from that, no, that's stupid. But "race" exists and is measurable.

2026-01-10 18:51:08 GMT

- reply

A lot of their customers are Israeli, in fact. There are just not that many Ashkenazi Jews left after the 1940s, so recessive traits are a problem, DNA testing before marriage is a big thing there.

2026-01-10 18:46:10 GMT

- reply

I used to work for a company that did DNA sequencing. It's an acknowledged fact in that industry that some of the people who buy those profiles want them because there are dating sites that make you prove you're white enough.
Our position was, we deliver accurate data regardless of why you want it. Although we did think it was funny that they were ordering this from a company owned and run by two Ashkenazi Jews.

2025-12-25 06:57:56 GMT

I really dislike that apparently fireworks on Christmas eve is now a thing. Including at one in the morning. It's supposed to be a quiet peaceful night, I don't like this culture of general loudness in public, and this is maybe the worst example of it.

2025-12-13 00:21:52 GMT

- reply

Yeah, you'd need some other secure dns thing, which is then another problem. It's a fine solution for "I don't want my roommate who runs the router to know what kind of porn I look at," but it's not gonna work for "I don't want the FBI to know that I sent the ransom note email."
I'll say I put https on https://elsewhy.net because it makes sense to me to promote everything being encrypted so that encrypted traffic doesn't stand out as suspicious.

2025-12-12 22:12:28 GMT

- reply

2/2 My thing is more, I don't think that makes https useless: someone snooping my traffic on hotel wifi will see some encrypted packets going to cloudflare for a dns-over-https query, then some more encrypted packets going to an address in probably-AWS.
Whereas without that, they'd see a plaintext DNS query for whatever.com, followed by an HTTP GET / to whatever.com. Significantly easier

2025-12-12 22:12:19 GMT

- reply

I think if you need _perfect_ privacy then yeah https isn't gonna cut it, even tor won't work. 1/2.

2025-12-12 07:11:46 GMT

- reply

At some point someone will be aware you made the request: the server serving the request if nothing else. The whole thing is figuring out what threat models you care about and blocking them.
For a lot of people, their boss or roommates or whoever getting a list of the domains they view, or anyone with airmon in the hotel room next door reading their traffic, is the threat.
Https and dns over it fix that.

2025-12-12 06:11:11 GMT

- reply

DNS over HTTPS? Which is enabled by default in major browsers, pretty sure.
Edit: yeah Firefox and Chrome, it's been the default for five years. So yes it does solve that issue.

2025-12-12 06:04:54 GMT

- reply

Not just those, anything the user might not want network operators aware that they're looking at, anything that might be private.
Which still isn't everything but it's a broader set.

2025-10-31 23:51:47 GMT

- reply

Texas has some of the highest property tax rates in the country, because we have no income tax. This would affect the homestead exemption, so only the taxes on the house you actually live in, not investment or rental properties. And houses have gone up massively in value (and thus tax appraisal) in the past five years.

2025-10-30 01:59:22 GMT

- reply

Now imagine instead of SNAP for a subset of people, it's universal health care for everyone. Or universal basic income checks everyone depends on.

2025-09-17 23:39:23 GMT

- reply

So it's not all bad news...

2025-09-12 18:22:26 GMT

- reply

To make the question extra hard, before he was in custody, Utah announced that they'd seek the death penalty. So the father knew that he was probably condemning the son to death by turning him in.
I don't know what I'd do but I don't think I'd be able to blame him if he hadn't turned him in.

2025-09-11 20:17:12 GMT

- reply

Surprised about Doctorow. Wish I were surprised about Zawinski.

2025-09-04 01:22:13 GMT

- reply

Wasn't this being a bad idea literally the plot of a movie a few years ago? Like at first I thought this website might be a marketing thing for that movie...

2025-08-12 21:18:42 GMT

@npub1ell…3zfa
What I love about this is two things: one, that if they weren't training LLMs on that data it wouldn't take as much water, and two, of course, the complete inconceivability that you might store those emails or pictures on your own machine.
Of course it's gonna be in a data center and of course they're gonna feed it to an LLM and of course that's apparently your fault.
https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/somewhy-mastodon/media_attachments/files/115/017/868/984/929/731/original/759279b835fbb571.png

2025-06-16 15:31:21 GMT

- reply

Yeah I've read all these SF authors, I think... and yellow is the best. :)

2024-10-21 14:36:11 GMT

- reply

Pretty accurately describes the last time I went to an opera too.

2024-07-25 15:55:14 GMT

- reply

When I worked there, a friend of mine researched my family tree because she was bored (this is part of what the company does). Turns out I'm (probably) related to both a slave and a slave-owner.

2024-07-25 15:26:56 GMT

- reply

It doesn't matter who says it, nonsense is nonsense. What, do you think I'm suddenly going to stop believing genetics exists because these two said so?
I don't know why you hate Jews, I also don't really care. I do not hate Jews. You said something, several things, that are factually incorrect, and don't seem to understand that.

2024-07-25 15:20:36 GMT

- reply

Again, you're conflating multiple things. Genetically, we can identify a haplogroup of people with common ancestry. They also have other ancestry. This is completely unrelated to whether they're citizens of Italy or Greece or anywhere else, or what religion they follow. Your basic claim, that Israel hates DNA testing because it would reveal that the haplogroup doesn't exist, is nonsense. The haplogroup DOES exist.

2024-07-25 15:13:53 GMT

- reply

You're conflating two things here. There's a group of people with genes in common that originally came from Israel. They then also have a modern-day claim on that land.
Should it be theirs? Who the hell knows? The Arab world thinks it shouldn't. But that's not the same question as "does DNA testing work," which, it plainly does.

2024-07-25 15:08:31 GMT

- reply

- says something is biased
- holds up NBC as a counterexample
Yeah so anyway. So what? What happened was there was a group of people living in modern-day Israel, some migrated to Europe, then some of those came back and resettled Israel after WW2. So they have genes from ancestors both in Europe and in Israel. Same way I'm an American but "genetically British isles."

2024-07-25 15:05:56 GMT

- reply

I actually was not a Twitter user before coming here, because I didn't want to deal with loud insane people.

2024-07-25 15:03:22 GMT

- reply

If the idea is that mass DNA testing would reveal that they're a bunch of genetically-unrelated people, well... it wouldn't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_studies_of_Jews
Which should be obvious since they mostly have facial features and other things in common.

2024-07-25 14:49:46 GMT

- reply

Your idea that "it would show no ancestry to the land they claim..." they approve them for research projects so they don't seem to be afraid of publishing the results. It's not exactly a secret that Israel was founded in 1947. I'm not sure what you're insinuating they're trying to hide here.

2024-07-25 14:45:28 GMT

- reply

The bottom paragraph, right there, all the exceptions. Medical purposes, they do DNA testing for citizenship, they do it for research projects. The law you're talking about was apparently written to ensure people's privacy by requiring that they be done by accredited labs, which as a side effect make OTC ones illegal, but the same places that sell them in the US will ship the sample kits there as well (I know because we did!)

2024-07-25 14:40:58 GMT

- reply

That law apparently dates to when all DNA tests were done with court approval, before the cost lowered enough that things like 23andMe / FamilyTreeDNA existed. And people apparently ignore it.

2024-07-25 14:33:24 GMT

- reply

I didn't believe you so I did look it up and the first result is that they're not illegal. Even if they require the equivalent of a prescription, that's not the same as illegal, and it's also not keeping people from getting them since, as I said, enough Israeli customers to keep my former company afloat...