Nostr notes by Dr. Bruce Simpson

Calm down, he's not the founder, though he was a key ...

2026-10-27T18:01:54Z

In reply to nevent1q…qxrt
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Calm down, he's not the founder, though he was a key participant in its formative years. He went to Apple, left, joined one of the vendors, eventually migrated to NVidia; I do not recall if he is still employed by them, but it may explain his apparent proselytism of something I do not condone. I don't personally have anything to do with him, and he's not been directly involved in the community or its development workflows in decades, which bears pointing out.

Their (gRPC's) documentation is somewhat... narcissist. As ...

2026-10-22T16:17:41Z

In reply to nevent1q…lysy
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Their (gRPC's) documentation is somewhat... narcissist. As though gRPC were the only RPC substrate or middleware in the world.

UPDATE: That GH page has disappeared!

OK, BIND I can understand, perhaps also PHP. But NGINX? This is ...

2026-10-22T12:52:03Z

In reply to nevent1q…gmgz
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OK, BIND I can understand, perhaps also PHP. But NGINX? This is the first I've heard about it. Nothing Internet facing here, but I use it internally for hosting cgit.

If the change sets for a supposed trivial refactoring with LLM ...

2026-10-19T09:23:53Z

In reply to nevent1q…j58d
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If the change sets for a supposed trivial refactoring with LLM "assistance" are so complex that I must switch to a new-generation semantic diff tool, rather than a standard unified diff viewer, code flow has suffered, not improved.

Rats! My current personal banking app stopped working under ...

2026-10-14T16:37:29Z

Rats! My current personal banking app stopped working under GrapheneOS (npub1kwa…e0nj) because it was detected as "rooted" in the sandbox. I'm planning to see that bank #shitcanned anyway in favour of something potentially much friendlier. Well, it means I can't recycle my non-rooted phone for the time being. They need the app just to 2FA their regular web logins. What the hell is wrong with people?

Meh, just meh, this reminds me of all the thanks I didn't get ...

2026-10-12T14:28:56Z

In reply to nevent1q…jjkf
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Meh, just meh, this reminds me of all the thanks I didn't get when I saved the City of London prop trading desk I was contracting for by doing a live ext4 Linux filesystem recovery on an HP MSA based SAN.

I only recently became aware of Landlock. It does not appear to ...

2026-10-09T21:50:31Z

In reply to nevent1q…43mv
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I only recently became aware of Landlock. It does not appear to have seen wide traction, although it remains an example of an LSM coming closer to a real capabilities model.

Google very quietly dropped support for their port of Capsicum to Linux around 2020.

I only caught wind of Sandstorm.io's seccomp-bpf filters late last night when diving on the code. As ever, it's just a syscall ACL mechanism, though hats off to Kenton for reminding us all that Linux "capabilities" are not capabilities.

The compatiblity wrapper for FreeBSD to provide an OpenBSD ...

2026-10-09T20:52:53Z

The compatiblity wrapper for FreeBSD to provide an OpenBSD pledge()/unveil()-compatible API for sandboxing appears to have bitrotted. https://github.com/Math2/freebsd-pledge/blob/main/CURTAIN-README.md

this is like something out of Die Hard 2

2026-09-21T20:55:29Z

In reply to nevent1q…ysag
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this is like something out of Die Hard 2

The novel probably did more than the film to popularize dynamical ...

2026-09-06T07:46:16Z

In reply to nevent1q…a6mm
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The novel probably did more than the film to popularize dynamical systems theory through its chaos outreach, IMO. Jeff Goldblum dressing in black and spouting truisms about it in-character (perhaps doing character penance for his semi-evil role as Seth Brundle in The Fly) whilst taking cash from Apple in the "Think Different" campaign, not so much so. But I have to take my hat off to Wayne Knight's depiction of Dennis Nedry, the bent Bastard Operator From Hell (BOFH)

Your point remains though. It's a case of epistemic exceptionalism driven by corporations, and again, having read the novel in the early 90s before seeing the film (my mum was signed up to a book club offering for a time), Crichton underlined this in the original medium.

Michael Crichton was pretty on point in the original Jurassic ...

2026-09-06T07:39:41Z

In reply to nevent1q…85wq
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Michael Crichton was pretty on point in the original Jurassic Park novel about "thintelligence", only for this to get picked up on later by the US popular press in the last 2-3 years about "AI".

Google Play is an ad-infested hell hole.

2026-08-29T00:20:41Z

In reply to nevent1q…svgn
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Google Play is an ad-infested hell hole.

s/cheeto/ghoul/g

2026-08-28T23:52:41Z

In reply to nevent1q…zxez
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s/cheeto/ghoul/g

And thus, the concept of the "lemming run" was born.

2026-08-28T16:37:24Z

In reply to nevent1q…we00
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And thus, the concept of the "lemming run" was born.

Why does the BBC continue to obfuscate and mislead people in ...

2026-08-27T03:58:58Z

Why does the BBC continue to obfuscate and mislead people in their journalism about "AI" branded technologies? A Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) pipeline IS NOT "SURGICAL CHATGPT", as the bleeding obvious category committed by the BBC journalist proclaims.

MICCAI offers ML driven realtime diagnostic / evaluation. There's no freaking comparison. The root in the lede is the use of a deep-learning artificial neural network (DANN), not a generative pre-trained transformer (GPT). If there were a GPT-based large language model (LLM) involved in surgery I'd rather make an informed choice of possible death, quite frankly.

This is totally irresponsible and conveniently misrepresents what was actually employed and what was achieved. I wish they would stop doing this, it's disgusting, and I have withdrawn support of the BBC itself some time ago as all the tells of its co-option have been there since the late 2000s.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cjwg5n7y68xo

(Oh wait, the NHS effort involved was co-funded by Google, and the current BBC Director-General is the former head of Google Europe. Not saying correlation implies causation at all. Not at all. la da da dee dee.... Officer Barbrady from South Park again)

[@kimcrawley](https://zeroes.ca/@kimcrawley ) [@davidgerard](https://circumstances.run/@davidgerard ) Open Rights Group (npub1p2p…hjzg)

In the meantime there is the Spamhaus DROP list for pf: ...

2026-08-25T18:54:07Z

In reply to nevent1q…knxm
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In the meantime there is the Spamhaus DROP list for pf: https://github.com/phlipse/pf-spamhaus-drop

Adjacent to this, I have an item in my unplan to review Fort as ...

2026-08-25T18:51:03Z

In reply to nevent1q…yxdd
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Adjacent to this, I have an item in my unplan to review Fort as of this AM.
https://fortproject.net/en/validator

(Disclaimer: I mentored the guy who ported pf to FreeBSD and approved his commits, and Marcus Ranum was on my now-deleted Facebook friends list)

The story behind the Cuckoo's Egg was pretty tragic. Clifford ...

2026-08-25T16:46:39Z

In reply to nevent1q…zk23
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The story behind the Cuckoo's Egg was pretty tragic. Clifford Stoll lost his girlfriend over it, and when I caught up with Joe Sventek years later, whose account was used for much of the breach, said "It wasn't my fault", but rightly so.

The technical reason why my code runs every time an iPhone ...

2026-08-25T09:22:54Z

The technical reason why my code runs every time an iPhone connects to a network. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solicited-node_multicast_address

My unofficial risk assessment of Matrix initially was: ...

2026-08-16T06:54:15Z

In reply to nevent1q…daz2
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My unofficial risk assessment of Matrix initially was: approaching pre-TLS IRC in its constitution.

I see I wasn't too far off.

How about "Western State Terrorism" by Chomsky et al?

2026-08-13T06:12:57Z

In reply to nevent1q…rvmg
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How about "Western State Terrorism" by Chomsky et al?

For some obscure reason this immediately reminds me of the cover ...

2026-08-08T14:49:36Z

In reply to nevent1q…67js
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For some obscure reason this immediately reminds me of the cover of Queen's "News of the World".

Please heed Dijkstra's wisdom nearly 50 years after he spoke ...

2026-07-27T13:53:23Z

Please heed Dijkstra's wisdom nearly 50 years after he spoke the words: "...after careful consideration I concluded that the intellectual challenge presented by the programming task is, indeed, as unprecedented as the high-speed automatic computer itself. And it had caused in my mind a shift of attention from "how to discover the unexpected" towards "how to avoid unmastered complexity", towards "how to reduce the demands made on our quantitatively limited powers of reasoning". "You must take my word for it, that past experience has made me a firm believer that this newer aspect of thinking, i.e. how to avoid unmastered complexity, can indeed be taught. ... Among other things it can be done by the identification and subsequent description of the more productive "complexity generators"."

Those last two words keep looping around at the back of my mind every day now... and if you mine Dijkstra's secondary references, you'll find gold. The man was an expert at the very act of thinking, and he was well read to boot.
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD04xx/EWD480.html