1994 era Internet user. Onsite cybersecurity JPMorganChase 2001. Principal FreeBSD networking contributor from 2003; Security Team alumnus; helped land PF firewall. GSoC 2026 student mentor.
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2026-07-21T20:38:25Z Event JSON
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"content": "{\"name\":\"Dr. Bruce Simpson\",\"about\":\"1994 era Internet user. Onsite cybersecurity JPMorganChase 2001. Principal FreeBSD networking contributor from 2003; Security Team alumnus; helped land PF firewall. GSoC 2026 student mentor.\\n\\nMy research: cybersecurity \u0026 Internet architecture.\\nMy work: professional practice \u0026 communication.\\nEvery time someone connects to IPv6 with iPhone, my code runs.\\n\\n\\\"Saying what has to be said. With a sledgehammer.\\\" -- PWEI\\n\\nP.S. Do I wish to join the Cult of the Superficially Viable Artifacts? No.\",\"picture\":\"https://files.mastodon.social/accounts/avatars/116/175/731/239/673/526/original/56089cd9e74330b2.jpg\",\"nip05\":\"[email protected] \",\"fields\":[[\"FreeBSD People Page\",\"https://people.freebsd.org/~bms/\"],[\"ORCiD\",\"https://orcid.org/0009-0002-6447-9025\"]]}" ,
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Last Notes npub160th2797usawk6junjk8603d9cj9ftkgptssdgslwnf6uard3p5qwtdchv Dr. Bruce Simpson @nprofile…4nnf Your first mistake was to use C/C++ projects built with what I can only assume is GNU make, when CMake is now the official C++ build tool. npub160th2797usawk6junjk8603d9cj9ftkgptssdgslwnf6uard3p5qwtdchv Dr. Bruce Simpson @nprofile…l7em The difference here is that unlike cars vs horses (and this represents a paradigmatic inversion of a Henry Ford quote), those technologies do not cause lasting cognitive damage and undermine professional practice, deny epistemic rights, cover up corporate misbehaviour, etc etc npub160th2797usawk6junjk8603d9cj9ftkgptssdgslwnf6uard3p5qwtdchv Dr. Bruce Simpson @nprofile…8m52 @nprofile…zvpj I kind of do, actually, 5G NSA at my local mast enabled me to download SONiC with a view to eventual depenguination of an ONIE switch. Tried doing it on 4G LTE, it was just failium, made worse by Azure CI not allowing HTTP range requests (restartable downloads) for its artifacts. It's made a massive difference and I spent the extra for 5G kit for a reason... now if only someone would volunteer to get the FreeBSD umb(4) driver working with Quectel 5G modules. npub160th2797usawk6junjk8603d9cj9ftkgptssdgslwnf6uard3p5qwtdchv Dr. Bruce Simpson @nprofile…rdmk It's stupid. "Generative AI" is stupid in of itself, but the companies promoting it are either bandits or stupid also. The collateral financial damage I have to suffer because of their stupidity unfortunately because of my private pension pot exposure is not something I am likely to be compensated for, as this is really just a land grab and a form of theft. So I will do everything I can legally to disrupt their operation and firewall my real life from GenAI now as much as pos npub160th2797usawk6junjk8603d9cj9ftkgptssdgslwnf6uard3p5qwtdchv Dr. Bruce Simpson @nprofile…7tef @nprofile…ugpy They pure done got Pichai'd and Nadella'd like they got Corzine'd 2 decades ago nearly! npub160th2797usawk6junjk8603d9cj9ftkgptssdgslwnf6uard3p5qwtdchv Dr. Bruce Simpson @nprofile…rtl5 It's just Metasploit 2026 npub160th2797usawk6junjk8603d9cj9ftkgptssdgslwnf6uard3p5qwtdchv Dr. Bruce Simpson @nprofile…yz28 Oh, that. Well, gronking Jupyter notebooks are but one hat I sometimes have had to wear. A truly reductionist view of me I suppose would be that of a human machine for turning RFCs into software when fed sufficient coffee. Credentialism and creep partly motivated me to do a PhD but it was also partly luck of the draw and I wanted to do something better after spending a year as a high tech mercenary for ultracapitalist forex traders. Now it's "Don't hate the player, hate the game." npub160th2797usawk6junjk8603d9cj9ftkgptssdgslwnf6uard3p5qwtdchv Dr. Bruce Simpson @nprofile…yz28 Why do you say that? Not pretending to be ELIZA or nothing, but, this strikes me as the defeatist view. There is plenty of rational argument and evidence to suggest knowing technical stuff is not a waste of time even in the stupid situation we're all in now. npub160th2797usawk6junjk8603d9cj9ftkgptssdgslwnf6uard3p5qwtdchv Dr. Bruce Simpson @nprofile…v2v2 @nprofile…ted5 My take: C++ allows alignas for union types and enums. std::variant potentially provides a safer abstraction for the former in some cases. Herb Sutter proposes type-checks for union accesses, at the cost of an extra discriminator field: npub160th2797usawk6junjk8603d9cj9ftkgptssdgslwnf6uard3p5qwtdchv Dr. Bruce Simpson @nprofile…rtl5 My distaste for npm comes as much from Node.js's noticeable system bloat as from the Clammy Sammy influence, and that is what puts me off bun too, just, different "personality" involved. "Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to phish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime." npub160th2797usawk6junjk8603d9cj9ftkgptssdgslwnf6uard3p5qwtdchv Dr. Bruce Simpson @nprofile…rtl5 One "ecosystem" that has its shit somewhat together is Golang, but that's an appeal to authority: you have to treat Google as the source-of-truth for SBOM security with the centralied Golang package database. AFAIK there is no federated equivalent, so it's not exactly democratic or Illich-convivial. npub160th2797usawk6junjk8603d9cj9ftkgptssdgslwnf6uard3p5qwtdchv Dr. Bruce Simpson @nprofile…rtl5 I had a beard-stroking moment when I saw only 4 "approved" forges are there for PyPi's "Trusted Publisher" feature over the past 48 hours (I've been sciencing the shit out of this very topic right now). They're all "mass market" forges. Neither Codeberg nor SourceHut appear on the list, and to be frank, there's an SBOM case to be made for vendorizing Python dependencies with pdm in a monorepo configuration anyway. npub160th2797usawk6junjk8603d9cj9ftkgptssdgslwnf6uard3p5qwtdchv Dr. Bruce Simpson @nprofile…gfcd Anyone but Wes Streeting. Please. Angela, all is forgiven. npub160th2797usawk6junjk8603d9cj9ftkgptssdgslwnf6uard3p5qwtdchv Dr. Bruce Simpson @nprofile…x9tq So when I was working as a high tech mercenary for Forex traders, I didn't know about Susan Strange's work "Casino Capitalism". They were all gazing into a Black-Scholes crystal ball... npub160th2797usawk6junjk8603d9cj9ftkgptssdgslwnf6uard3p5qwtdchv Dr. Bruce Simpson @nprofile…ugpy Brian Eno's earlier collaborative effort "Oblique Strategies" is a must find. A great semi-secular alternative to #tarot. #obliquestrategies #eno npub160th2797usawk6junjk8603d9cj9ftkgptssdgslwnf6uard3p5qwtdchv Dr. Bruce Simpson @nprofile…uvvw @nprofile…ugpy The mere sightof Nick Clegg's name makes me physically sick though, due to his extreme moral cowardice. npub160th2797usawk6junjk8603d9cj9ftkgptssdgslwnf6uard3p5qwtdchv Dr. Bruce Simpson @nprofile…c2nm @nprofile…97y5 @nprofile…5876 @nprofile…gy0s @nprofile…ugpy Just 7 pages into reading my physical copy of Prof. Kate Crawford's "Atlas of AI" (2021!) and she preempts much of what happened to Richard Dawkins and why. Cartesian dualism. ML hype train. Lack of embodiment. The dangers of anthropomorphizing the algorithm. Even her fellow Aussie @nprofile…ck2y called out symbolics explicitly in his novel "Diaspora". I got the same freaky vibes reading Michael Padlipsky in my own research field. npub160th2797usawk6junjk8603d9cj9ftkgptssdgslwnf6uard3p5qwtdchv Dr. Bruce Simpson @nprofile…gfcd https://www.private-eye.co.uk/lookalikes It's Inflatable Rachel. npub160th2797usawk6junjk8603d9cj9ftkgptssdgslwnf6uard3p5qwtdchv Dr. Bruce Simpson @nprofile…qj99 Python was late to the party and it had to be retrofitted. Although I made cunning use of the type flexibility in a little Verilog Change Dump module I wrote which was a template for any kind of event trigger logging years back. John Lakos recently brought the C++26 contracts wisdom with his ACCU 2025 talk, which is kind of adjacent. No substitute for formal methods, of course, and it is about correctness, not a silver security bullet. npub160th2797usawk6junjk8603d9cj9ftkgptssdgslwnf6uard3p5qwtdchv Dr. Bruce Simpson @nprofile…ugpy Ah memories https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34k3GwQtbbs npub160th2797usawk6junjk8603d9cj9ftkgptssdgslwnf6uard3p5qwtdchv Dr. Bruce Simpson @nprofile…c2nm @nprofile…swv7 @nprofile…ugpy Bit miffed the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists isn't on the Fediverse. BUT... they are paying attention to the GenAI risk control landscape to their credit: https://thebulletin.org/2026/04/ai-policy-is-built-for-oversight-not-crisis-that-needs-to-change/ npub160th2797usawk6junjk8603d9cj9ftkgptssdgslwnf6uard3p5qwtdchv Dr. Bruce Simpson @nprofile…yz28 Didn't you get the memo? It's time to make agentic automation scalable /s npub160th2797usawk6junjk8603d9cj9ftkgptssdgslwnf6uard3p5qwtdchv Dr. Bruce Simpson @nprofile…v9wr Their CEO comes across as something of a delusional whackjob obsessed with a "growth mindset" and has fantasies of "social permission" for illegal LLM training which he spouts in public discourse, while the people keeping the lights on in Azure are pushed out or fired. Bizarre. npub160th2797usawk6junjk8603d9cj9ftkgptssdgslwnf6uard3p5qwtdchv Dr. Bruce Simpson @nprofile…wuv3 @nprofile…7j9y Can we expect "Heavy Weather" to become reality with the AI data centre heat islands? npub160th2797usawk6junjk8603d9cj9ftkgptssdgslwnf6uard3p5qwtdchv Dr. Bruce Simpson @nprofile…rfjk They may code really fast, but they code really dumb. As Gerben Wierda already said, "You can clone the artisans, but you can't clone the art." npub160th2797usawk6junjk8603d9cj9ftkgptssdgslwnf6uard3p5qwtdchv Dr. Bruce Simpson @nprofile…8pur @nprofile…ugpy "If we teach the word guessing program enough words, maybe it will wake up." -- Cory Doctorow (with extra sarcasm) npub160th2797usawk6junjk8603d9cj9ftkgptssdgslwnf6uard3p5qwtdchv Dr. Bruce Simpson @nprofile…v2v2 @nprofile…vs6a I can't speak to that but I believe his intentions are sound. For my part I'm looking at a mixture of MPL-2.0 and proprietary for my to-be-proposed work. But probably also MIT-advertising for stpecpy(). npub160th2797usawk6junjk8603d9cj9ftkgptssdgslwnf6uard3p5qwtdchv Dr. Bruce Simpson @nprofile…v2v2 @nprofile…vs6a Is Bruce Perens' PostOpen.org an answer, though? My issue with Perens' proposal is the "trust me bro" factor. npub160th2797usawk6junjk8603d9cj9ftkgptssdgslwnf6uard3p5qwtdchv Dr. Bruce Simpson @nprofile…wuv3 @nprofile…v2v2 @nprofile…l2jj Sounds expensive. npub160th2797usawk6junjk8603d9cj9ftkgptssdgslwnf6uard3p5qwtdchv Dr. Bruce Simpson @nprofile…vs6a There is Nextcloud, but it's Affero GPL and some people can't handle it. npub160th2797usawk6junjk8603d9cj9ftkgptssdgslwnf6uard3p5qwtdchv Dr. Bruce Simpson @nprofile…8mtu It is all kind of EU Directive violating nonsense by the sounds of it npub160th2797usawk6junjk8603d9cj9ftkgptssdgslwnf6uard3p5qwtdchv Dr. Bruce Simpson @nprofile…ugpy Any claim of so-called AGI or ASI gets a very firm "Citation Needed". npub160th2797usawk6junjk8603d9cj9ftkgptssdgslwnf6uard3p5qwtdchv Dr. Bruce Simpson @nprofile…3fcr @nprofile…ugpy Erosion of existing social contracts is very much their modus operandi. They think they can get a free pass on this due to specious economic arguments. The apparent growth or efficiency turns out to be risk transfer or reverse wealth transfer. This is Ed Zitron's Rot Economy concept at work. npub160th2797usawk6junjk8603d9cj9ftkgptssdgslwnf6uard3p5qwtdchv Dr. Bruce Simpson @nprofile…ugpy PSA: #Brave has started indexing and presenting results from #grokipedia , a known #disinformation source which uses #LLMs unethically. I am very disappointed by this development; #Grok pollutes public discourse in a very #toxic way, similar to #Meta 's use of LLMs, for example. There is a way to filter these out: use the #NoGrok extension. https://github.com/403-html/NoGrok #grandtheftautocomplete #enshittification npub160th2797usawk6junjk8603d9cj9ftkgptssdgslwnf6uard3p5qwtdchv Dr. Bruce Simpson @nprofile…x9tq I thought the late Glenda Jackson MP unpacked the meaning of the term "black propaganda" (which is what I think you're looking for here) rather well: https://politicsandinsights.org/2014/07/10/black-propaganda/ npub160th2797usawk6junjk8603d9cj9ftkgptssdgslwnf6uard3p5qwtdchv Dr. Bruce Simpson @nprofile…v2v2 I am halfway turned up on Nextcloud and have an item to look at Collabora Online for these reasons npub160th2797usawk6junjk8603d9cj9ftkgptssdgslwnf6uard3p5qwtdchv Dr. Bruce Simpson @nprofile…qzwa The neoliberal capitalist wank fantasy of LLMs does not correspond to the scientific reality of whst LLMs actually do and are capable of.. http://arxiv.org/abs/2409.05746 npub160th2797usawk6junjk8603d9cj9ftkgptssdgslwnf6uard3p5qwtdchv Dr. Bruce Simpson For the #FreeBSD #Google Summer of Code #GSoC 2026 programme, we now have 3 shortlistees for the #EFI MonotonicCounter project, and 1 shortlistee for #multicast snooping in #if_bridge . There is less than 36 hours until the gate closes. Be swift about it! npub160th2797usawk6junjk8603d9cj9ftkgptssdgslwnf6uard3p5qwtdchv Dr. Bruce Simpson @nprofile…a4ar sometimes they are no better than Markov, do not personify the ML GPT algorithm npub160th2797usawk6junjk8603d9cj9ftkgptssdgslwnf6uard3p5qwtdchv Dr. Bruce Simpson @nprofile…ugpy I published my workplan for FreeBSD today, you may be interested in some of the anti #enshittification clauses ca. pg4-pg5: https://people.freebsd.org/~bms/devsummit/bms-devsummit-2026.pdf And a big shout out to Ed Zitron! npub160th2797usawk6junjk8603d9cj9ftkgptssdgslwnf6uard3p5qwtdchv Dr. Bruce Simpson @nprofile…n7wm Come to think of it, I did get this too weeks ago, even with uBO turned on; just not recently. Sorry for the noise. npub160th2797usawk6junjk8603d9cj9ftkgptssdgslwnf6uard3p5qwtdchv Dr. Bruce Simpson @nprofile…n7wm Your first mistake was not viewing LinkedIn with uBlock Origin loaded.
