mhoye

Envoy, arbiter, sysadmin, dissident.

Public Key

npub1qaer5wy50n05r7y0mrlzctu8chmrtnpw9ke44cr96plpka3d0a4qwpxq6d

NIP-05 Address

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsqwu368z28eh6plz8a3l3v97ruta34eshzmv66upjaqlsmwckh76spz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsygyr32

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1qaer5wy50n05r7y0mrlzctu8chmrtnpw9ke44cr96plpka3d0a4qwpxq6d

Show more details

Last Notes

2026-09-05 20:56:09 GMT

- reply

One more hint.
https://m.f-h.co/cosocial-ca/media_attachments/files/117/220/424/608/968/933/original/d41605e8d0128c58.jpeg

2026-09-05 18:31:18 GMT

Any guesses?
https://m.f-h.co/cosocial-ca/media_attachments/files/117/219/854/857/760/864/original/476329b5a2bf9711.jpeg

2026-09-02 16:42:13 GMT

RE: https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/117202418865672335
lord of the flAIs
#note165k…pys7

2026-09-02 02:32:08 GMT

- reply

start the recording five minutes early and play an audiobook of Picketty’s capital in the 21st century into it at 4x speed.

2026-08-31 18:15:21 GMT

OH: "Clownshoes. They're like clown cars for your feet."

2026-08-30 13:16:29 GMT

- reply

By anything else, I don't just mean documentation. Solve the MxN arch/distro problem with per-arch binaries and per-distro packaging manifests built in. Sample code, maybe even a whole VCS. Community contributions, alternative themes, ship your art projects with art baked in, why not?
Dr. Hipp has famously said that SQLite3 isn't competing with MySQL or Postgres, it's competing with fopen(). So hear me out: what if we let SQLite ... win?

2026-08-30 11:26:03 GMT

Anyone here I can ask a binfmt related question? I have an idea I’d like to implement but one of the foundational tools under it is currently x86-64 only and I don’t know enough to be able to assess if it’s viable to port it to aarch64 (where I live) or other architectures. I’ve never really worked at the generated-assembler level so maybe it’s trivial, maybe it’s out of my reach.

2026-08-29 13:25:04 GMT

- reply

I don't know how to interpret the Debian Social Contract in a way that makes relentless global-scale information harvesting and stochastic regurgitation by for-profit companies acceptable.
LLM vendors are privatizing access to knowledge taken from the commons; selling access is not giving back. They hide an enormous number of massive ecological, financial, legal and ethical problems. Their priorities are not users or free software, and their outputs do meet free software standards.

2026-08-29 13:06:46 GMT

- reply

The software is not the thing. Code is the implementation language of a shared understanding. The shared understanding is the thing. Sharing between people with wants and needs, living in the world.
What is the point of a freely accessible knowledge commons where you can never trust the knowledge is real, where you can't drink the water or breathe the air.

2026-08-29 12:40:23 GMT

Disappointed in the Debian result.

2026-08-29 00:15:45 GMT

if I'm being honest the biggest real reason I'm rooting this phone is because the play store is a wasteland and all the cool shit is on f-droid

2026-08-28 23:54:33 GMT

*5 seconds later* We regret to inform you the microduck is a cop
https://www.theverge.com/gadgets/985549/hugging-face-microduck-robot

2026-08-27 19:58:19 GMT

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@jimfl/117169217804700728
Wait a minute, is this a chai tea / naan bread situation? Have we been calling it lake lake this whole time?

2026-08-24 23:27:29 GMT

Trade negotiations with the US break down and Canada is in Eurovision the _next day_!?!?

2026-08-24 14:44:57 GMT

- reply

One thing that I'm excited about particularly is that solar power and batteries fundamentally changes the individual and community's relationship to the state.
Now-famously, the Amish refuse to connect to the grid, but today those communities use battery powered tools all the time, recharged by solar power.
Put differently: they aren't rejecting technology. They're rejecting dependency.
That logic scales, everywhere, for everyone, in direct proportion to the amount of available battery.

2026-08-24 14:10:46 GMT

A thing I feel a pending societal need for: standard, safely-used physical interfaces for home-scale battery storage.
If I have power but my neighbor doesn't, I should be able to unplug my own battery and wheel it across the street.

2026-08-22 23:51:01 GMT

- reply

Stock install, no sim no account login. First interactions with the device out of the box.
Hope you’re proud to work there, Googlers
https://m.f-h.co/cosocial-ca/media_attachments/files/117/141/827/087/670/192/original/ed64bf712e62b501.mp4

2026-08-22 23:45:27 GMT

First time starting up an Android device in... maybe a decade? And ... wow. Start up, no sim card in the device even, no login to anything, and ads right there first thing, in a device I've paid for. Very cool to thumb right and get a fullscreen ad for ad for That Fucking Guy and some MAGA shill from Alberta looking right there like it's part of the stock install because I'm in Canada I guess.
Well, off to the xda forums for me I guess.
If you work at Google you should quit.

2026-08-22 21:02:07 GMT

- reply

[gesturing] Nobody knows where algebra is! Nobody knows! You need to be Einstein to know where algebra is. People came to me and said, sir, nobody knows more about algebra than you, and that's why we need to tariff bonds with the military. Are we going to let them use their wind farms to blow smoke down to America? Are we going to let them get away with that? No way! Crazy! That's just what those Oxford Commodores want! We're going to get them out of America until they turn the wind farms back.

2026-08-22 20:52:55 GMT

RE: https://mastodon.energy/@Sustainable2050/117138805639634732
I love that we're finally at the utterly-disconnected-from-reality, random insane bullshit stage of this exercise now. Tomorrow, he's going to unilaterally declare a 50% tariff on unamerican vowels. Monday, the Oxford Comma will be formally declared to be a terrorist organization. On Tuesday, he's going to send troops to invade algebra.
https://cosocial.ca/@npub1sgj…vpjx/117138808388807547
#note1f3z…mdfj

2026-08-21 13:57:36 GMT

Hey, #mathstodon - a question about "randomness".
The Bailey-Borwein-Plouffe formula demonstrates that in some bases any digit in Pi can independently determined.
My questions are: 1, does this suggest that perceived randomness might in some cases be an artifact of representational choice rather than an inherent property?
And 2: does this have cryptography implications? As in a subset of the "these constants look random but there's actually a generator?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailey%E2%80%93Borwein%E2%80%93Plouffe_formula

2026-08-20 12:57:23 GMT

I'm delighted to discover:
https://cooldowns.dev/
... listing how you can set dependency cooldowns across various package ecosystems.
If you're the sort of person who's less interested in fixing individual problems than in causing entire classes of problems to not exist, a seven day cooldown default will do that for surprise malicious dependencies.
https://social.rust-lang.org/@rust/117127494219189731

2026-08-19 16:52:17 GMT

- reply

It was such a weird mix of everything. That screen was a miracle and I still want one to this day. The 1stgen SugarOS was amazing as a kid's toy and weirdly, narrowly, insultingly colonialist in its vision of its audience. The keyboard was one of the worst in the history of this industry. basically RSI in a jar.

2026-08-19 14:16:07 GMT

- reply

To my significant chagrin, while their power _system_ is a baffling antiquity, the outlets themselves are ... I think kinda good? Bulky, but basically impossible to injure yourself, and I think more North American outlets should have that belt-and-suspenders, plug-and-switch idea on them.

2026-08-18 22:44:25 GMT

Shirts again: Are there Canadian based, full service stickers/shirts/skins shops that people like?
Union preferred, no slop if possible.

2026-08-18 21:32:46 GMT

RE: https://cosocial.ca/@mhoye/117116617504178557
i've inadvertently upset the boiled meat fandom, some sort of fedi milestone to find out there are people on here with the time to leap to the defence of british cooking
#note1jfx…u6yc

2026-08-18 12:56:02 GMT

RE: https://a2mi.social/@misconceptions/117116487453627730
Thesis: that “umami” is a loanword that’s only become part of common English in the last 20 years is monster dunk on British cooking.
#note18my…jgzd

2026-08-17 14:50:02 GMT

- reply

When I posted that I recommended compiling cage yourself because the debian package was quite out of date; I don't know if that's still true.
As far as power is concerned, I suspect it will be a wash, but I'm curious what you find.

2026-08-17 14:32:11 GMT

- reply

Yeah, I don't know if I was holding it wrong or what, but I could not get kmscon to act right. Another approach I also use is sway instead of cage, with per-program configuration files. e.g:
alias term="sway --config ~/.config/sway/term-config >& /dev/null"
With a minimal sway config this is cosmetically near-identical, but lets me open graphical progams whenever I need them.

2026-08-17 14:03:42 GMT

- reply

I tried a pure console-only approach, but it didn't work for me. A few years ago somebody found a kernel exploit that could be reached by manipulating scrollback buffers, so the kernel people basically threw all but the most barebones utility overboard and decided that if you want anything fancier you could go to userspace and get it yourself. Cage+foot+tmux and a nice theme works much better.

2026-08-17 13:40:17 GMT

- reply

Typing this on it right now.
https://exple.tive.org/blarg/2024/12/29/idiosyncra/

2026-08-15 19:42:20 GMT

Cool thing to learn by accident: Obviously the 'ringing' noises your cellphone makes when you call somebody are fake, there's no mechanism anywhere in the system that would normally make that noise. But the intersting things I learned is that when the police are recording your calls, the recording starts when the call is initiated, not when the other end picks up.

2026-08-15 18:41:41 GMT

Harry Potter And The Last Book Came Out 20 Years Ago And The Movies Came Out 15 Years Ago And We All Know Who And What She Is Now And Fuck Everything About That.
Companies doing this in 2026 are picking a side. Just leave and don't say "I'll come back if/when", just walk away.
https://mastodon.social/@brettcannon/117100754497336298
#note1ayu…r7sy

2026-08-15 13:42:12 GMT

Bug Mastodon: WTF is this?
https://m.f-h.co/cosocial-ca/media_attachments/files/117/099/811/930/429/976/original/f9e874e093ad0bc2.jpeg
https://m.f-h.co/cosocial-ca/media_attachments/files/117/099/811/951/783/628/original/f587a583ee02a9ab.jpeg

2026-08-14 21:36:49 GMT

RE: https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/117095890913238829
Turns out money can't buy dignity or self respect either.
https://cosocial.ca/@npub1lcc…lcye/117095895221897156
#note1wpq…qhe7

2026-08-14 02:28:08 GMT

RE: https://mastodon.social/@eunews/117090157456097087
Big-metal warfare is dead technology.
The problem is, it's also the only full employment and subsidized education program that both American political parties support.
The U.S. military is shooting $4,000,000 Patriot missiles at $25,000 Iranian Shahed drones that Ukranians are interdicting with $800 drones built out of home 3d-printed parts, off the shelf components and open source software.
Between cheap drones and solar power, the US is losing a two-ocean economic war nobody even sees.
#note1zm5…wv9r

2026-08-13 13:53:12 GMT

FYI, this isn't "the web's newest weapon", this is somebody's crappy half-baked idea and please don't do this because it absolutely fucks life up for anyone who depends on screen readers or accessibility tech.
There is no fight worth fighting that we're going to win in any way worth winning by throwing minorities or underrepresented anyone overboard. It doesn't matter who. It doesn't matter why. Yes it's more work, but that is the work.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/new-font-turns-ordinary-webpages-into-nonsense-for-ai-scrapers/

2026-08-13 01:31:33 GMT

Lazyweb, anyone on here worked with STM32 chips with QSPI flash onboard? I have questions and search is terrible now.

2026-08-09 21:24:38 GMT

I dislike running the gas stovetop for a long time - I’ll replace it with induction eventually - and my pans are also stainless steel, so for now I have a plug in standalone induction element and cheat on the physics with a cast iron tortilla pan.
https://m.f-h.co/cosocial-ca/media_attachments/files/117/067/643/152/430/854/original/23dfe06779874b6f.jpeg

2026-08-07 15:15:49 GMT

- reply

I guess I'm old, but: this should be the standard, IMO. Make fetching dependencies and starting kicking off the build process, make install to put things where they belong.
I mean, you moved off gruntmaven because bazel ninja womble didn't integrated with chumbawumba sconsburgle and a fraggle zumba donkastonk pipeline wouldn't support reflocolative combobulates? Great. Nobody should have to give a shit about that to build your software. They should be able to type 'make' and watch.

2026-08-07 14:44:37 GMT

Always grateful when 'make' just works, even if it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense, especially when it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense.

2026-08-07 11:14:54 GMT

- reply

So far my opinion of Pluribus is that it's an decent character study that doesn't otherwise make a lot of sense even on its own terms. Seehorn and Vesga's acting carries a story that needs a lot of heavy lifting to move.

2026-08-07 02:31:43 GMT

Giving Pluribus a go, and deus ex i get it but no researcher in the history of ever has stripped out of their hazmat PPE so they could give cpr to a lab rat.

2026-08-06 23:45:12 GMT

Wild that all the news says it's a press release and there are no photos or recordings of him saying anything, and people are sticking with "McConnell said".

2026-08-06 17:04:20 GMT

RE: https://wandering.shop/@skimbrel/117046812404530861
So after diarrhea lettuce and salmonellapeños, what are we betting on to round out the trifecta? Tuberculomatos? E. corni?
#note1827…nrpx

2026-08-05 13:44:13 GMT

The corollary to "Amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics" is that you don't put amateurs in charge of logistics.
https://www.rawstory.com/uss-abraham-lincoln-iran/

2026-08-04 17:53:27 GMT

- reply

I don't like these arguments either, but the question of what happens to a democratic society when the cost of generating an arbitrary number of synthetic identities drops to zero is I think an important one.
https://m.f-h.co/cosocial-ca/media_attachments/files/117/038/508/880/116/246/original/0745fa29b7228021.png

2026-08-04 17:27:54 GMT

I used to think it was "when the moon hits your eye like a big piece of pie", so when I learned that the real lyrics are "like a big pizza pie" I thought, I guess I've been wrong all this time but ... the right answer doesn't make any more sense.

2026-08-03 17:55:31 GMT

- reply

"Make sure the bags are really really 100% empty yes even the pockets on the inside", I know that feeling.

2026-08-02 21:07:43 GMT

Random question about cookware: My teflon pans are giving up the nonsticking ghost here, and on the one hand, I'm kind of disinclined to keep participating in the convenient-but-forever-chemicals process, but on the other hand I've never had any other nonstick option work worth a damn. While I'm looking into moving to induction sometime soon but my family dislikes the weight of cast iron.
Has anyone tried out nitrided steel? What do we think, and are there other options?

2026-08-02 16:45:00 GMT

Funny thing I learned today for reasons I can't share: all the ringing and connection noises you hear when you make a phone call from a cell are no more real than the static on flat screen TVs set to a dead input. They're just recordings being played back for you to signal to you it's working.

2026-08-02 15:19:53 GMT

"Blackstone's Ratio" is famously the argument that "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."
In mechanical terms, this means that in the application of the law a 90% false-negative rate is morally defensible; a 10% false-positive rate is not.
This is the foundation of our entire idea of "reasonable doubt."
With a 29% accuracy rate, nothing Flock does cannot be reasonably doubted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio
https://infosec.exchange/@adamshostack/117026508916658391

2026-08-02 13:59:22 GMT

- reply

Forensic analysis is a last step in most cases; I am interested in navigating forced-login situations.

2026-08-01 23:15:19 GMT

Question: is there a known good way to set up full disk encryption with a duress password in Linux or any laptop Unix?

2026-07-31 21:38:00 GMT

It's aged spectacularly poorly, but I think it's possible that a modern retelling that recognized Newman as the unsung hero of the entire series could be pretty good.

2026-07-30 19:13:53 GMT

If a company with a "Generate this with AI" button also gives you a "Report AI Slop" button, you should know that your protest vote is being used to train the models until the slop is invisible.

2026-07-30 18:23:26 GMT

- reply

Maybe it’s only funny to me but the funny part is that this was a Costco run.

2026-07-30 17:52:16 GMT

- reply

https://m.f-h.co/cosocial-ca/media_attachments/files/117/010/192/984/246/079/original/125b3fd45ef36642.jpeg

2026-07-30 16:45:59 GMT

https://m.f-h.co/cosocial-ca/media_attachments/files/117/009/937/601/890/807/original/825938db5b5cae1e.jpeg

2026-07-29 22:51:32 GMT

True #canadian fact: you’ve got a one in three chance of ruining any Canadian genXers’ day by reminding them they used to like Moxy Früvous.

2026-07-29 14:38:10 GMT

- reply

Imagine watching a world burn and acting as though the externalities and consequences of your actions aren't real as long as you, personally, enjoy a convenience.

2026-07-29 14:33:23 GMT

- reply

Whenever I hear "but for me AI is useful", all I hear is the end of the Parable Of The Nazi Bar. "you have to ignore all their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people."
Except the AI enthusiasts are legitimizing, empowering and funding the terrible, awful people, for that meager benefit.
Imagine the Parable Of The Nazi Bar ending with "... but they pay their tabs and sometimes wipe the counters and that's useful for me so it's fine to let this happen."

2026-07-29 14:23:36 GMT

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@ltriant/117002472059958347
These two posts in immediate succession in my feed, destroyed books and propaganda floodplains.
https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:twjze4qqf6fgxz33ct52wlnl/post/3mrq4ojrmhk2q

2026-07-29 00:10:04 GMT

- reply

The 1st gen runs a 4-core ARM processor, and by most modern standards it's underpowered, but I wrote a bit about it here: https://exple.tive.org/blarg/2024/12/29/idiosyncra/
"The creator of Grep once famously said that the best way to make programs fast is to make them do almost nothing, and this computer – running an i.MX8MQ, a little four-core ARM SOC – feels capital-F Fast, responsive and snappy in that instantaneous way that nothing ever does anymore."

2026-07-28 21:41:33 GMT

There is no path; these footprints lead nowhere. But on the day you seek what I am seeking we will surely meet in the forest.
https://m.f-h.co/cosocial-ca/media_attachments/files/116/999/631/048/315/857/original/dc46ea160e596c73.jpeg

2026-07-28 18:20:06 GMT

- reply

Spiritual Continuous Improvement.

2026-07-28 18:04:44 GMT

RE: https://beige.party/@geekysteven/116998668352437593
“Soul patch” implies the existence of Soul Diff, Soul Merge and above a certain level of enlightenment, Soul Version Control.
#note1mau…xfmp

2026-07-28 00:35:52 GMT

Check out the ambition on this guy.
I’ve updated my pizza dough recipe to equal parts water and flour and longer in the stand mixer. This guy got a five or six hours rise on the counter, and then it’s portioned into ziplock bags in the fridge until Friday to get that cold ferment going. I think I’m going to go for that cast iron skillet technique this week.
https://exple.tive.org/blarg/2026/02/10/pizza-progress/
https://m.f-h.co/cosocial-ca/media_attachments/files/116/994/775/124/603/941/original/12b236217ae1b1fb.jpeg
https://m.f-h.co/cosocial-ca/media_attachments/files/116/994/785/561/761/915/original/95408e02927687b7.jpeg

2026-07-27 14:09:51 GMT

Somebody somewhere put a string of red yarn on their wall between pictures RFK Jr and Jimothy last weekend and I want to hear what they have to say.

2026-07-26 14:27:57 GMT

It’s one thing to say people don’t understand something, but “are incapable of understanding”, that’s a tell.
https://mastodon.social/@daringfireball/116982000047628928
#note1av5…x2us

2026-07-24 14:55:47 GMT

“Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
I’m so sorry, team. I did my best.
https://m.f-h.co/cosocial-ca/media_attachments/files/116/975/527/174/085/704/original/02136a72359f44a6.png

2026-07-24 13:26:40 GMT

Me yelling over the fence at the neighbour whose dog woke me up: "I IMPOSE A FIFTY PERCENT TARRIF!"

2026-07-23 18:30:22 GMT

I once proposed, half-seriously, that an hour playing Overcooked might be a pretty informative part of a job interview, but a C-suite that was each put in charge of one of the letters in QWOP would be a different kind of daylight.
https://mas.to/@TopicLords/116970671671371129
#note1cdr…3ufc

2026-07-21 03:07:01 GMT

- reply

In 2002, I discovered that a dynamically loaded kernel module can veto a suspend when I do some crazy hacker shit like "using an SD card" or "plugging in a USB peripheral". I learn this by closing the lid on my laptop, putting it in my backpack and burning my hand on it when I pull it out an hour later.
The refurbished Powerbook Duo 250 I bought at government auction for $50 resumes from sleep perfectly after six months in storage with the battey replaced.

2026-07-21 02:54:57 GMT

RE: https://mastodon.social/@mcc/116955563592067138
One of the reasons - one of the main reasons, I think - that I absolutely believe that "the human user with the human user's computer in front of them" has not been the primary constituency of the Linux developer strata is that closing the lid on a laptop and opening it up again to find my stuff where I left it has not reliably worked right on Linux at any point in my life, and I am older than Linux.
https://cosocial.ca/@npub1tq4…6nqn/116955563684384877
#note1gyt…ehcf

2026-07-17 15:05:49 GMT

- reply

The thing that saddens me about so many developments in Linux, at every level - from SystemD and the Wayland permission model up to snaps and flatpak and now apparently the kernel - is that these priorities are, obviously to me at least, not being spelled out explicitly because saying so out loud would be too obviously repulsive. Because today the primary constituencies of Linux are cloud fleet rentiers first, their developers second and human computer owners a distant third at best.

2026-07-17 14:59:13 GMT

One of the most important things I learned at Mozilla was the idea of “priority of constituencies” - that is, if you have responsibilities to different groups for different reasons, being explicit up front about who is at the front of the line and why. As with The Tyranny Of Structurelessness, there’s always a hierarchy, and letting those hierarchies stay hidden means letting power escape scrutiny.

2026-07-16 21:56:02 GMT

Hey, @npub1ksf…r6s6 how’s your free time these days
https://chaos.social/@f4grx/116931544992879325

2026-07-16 20:11:32 GMT

- reply

True story: the Canadian governments' response to the Great Northeast Blackout of 2003 was "pull the Y2K disaster plans off the shelves where they were still wrapped in plastic, open them to page one and get to work."

2026-07-16 17:15:38 GMT

A bit of joy from work, in getting to write the rollback planning and policy documentation.
One super-secret way you can drive the major cultural improvements of psychological security and emotional safety, not to mention the million invisible efficiencies of a well-functioning workplace culture is by writing the documentation about what people should do and who they can go to when things go really, really wrong.
@npub18g0…0a9e has been a huge inspiration for this.

2026-07-15 17:06:22 GMT

The sky over my house is the wrong color because enough people thought enough things were useful enough that they could personally ignore what they really cost.

2026-07-15 15:04:14 GMT

- reply

Never, ever forget that we could, as a society, have had laws about clean and low-CO2 interior air and it would have saved a lot of lives and a lot of money, but corporate landlord and rentier class and would have been slightly inconvenienced by that and conservative governments didn't want to spend money on things like the health of public employees or the maintenance of public buildings so we got an everything-is-back-to-normal, remote-work-is-bad domestic propaganda campaign instead.

2026-07-15 14:56:56 GMT

Remember that the same techniques we learned in the early months of the (ongoing, I know) Covid epidemic work as well to clear your air of smoke particles as virus particles.
A cheap box fan plus any no-name MERV12 to 14 furnace filters can be duct taped into an effective clean air filtration system for under $100 CAD.
If you happen to own a home with central air ductwork, check and replace your filters. MERV14 is plenty, too much higher will strain the hardware.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corsi%E2%80%93Rosenthal_Box

2026-07-12 15:28:53 GMT

Why speak ill of the dead when the plain truth is indictment enough?

2026-07-11 02:29:15 GMT

I will bet you a thousand dollars that the headline writer who drafted this sent it in as "ludicrous speed", got overruled, and is going to be angry about it until the day they're planted in the ground. I bet it's going to be secretly carved on the bottom of their spaceballs the tombstone.
https://m.f-h.co/cosocial-ca/media_attachments/files/116/898/966/258/582/195/original/a4011570011dc3b9.png

2026-07-10 19:23:56 GMT

"Go woke go broke" and the monkey's paw curls.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/west-virginia-university-woke-washington-center-b3012708.html

2026-07-09 14:16:01 GMT

- reply

It's the people thinking they just need to give the toddler the right prompts that I struggle the most with.

2026-07-09 14:05:50 GMT

I am lurking in a slack instance full of tech executives and just saw a comment go by about how somebody felt like Claude was gaslighting them and so they told it not to and instructed it to set up a framework to prevent it from gaslighting them again and I just...
What are we doing here. What are we doing here. What are we doing here. What are we doing here.
Healthy relationships, reliable tools, what's our model here of how anything does or should work.
What are we doing here.

2026-07-06 14:55:26 GMT

I knew color printers uniquely identified themselves on every printed page, but I did not know that Windows apparently transmitted something equivalent across network connections in their telemetry.
So, that's something to know I guess.
https://dmv.community/@jcrabapple/116873103458200655

2026-07-04 12:43:09 GMT

- reply

I slightly disagree with you on this. A lot of people have very rarely if ever had any sort of consistent, support or praise in their lives or careers, and - even if we recognize this as automated, obsequious garbage - I think it's important to keep some kernel of empathy in us for the possibility we're seeing a victim of abuse or neglect, not an aspiring tyrant. Not that it's likely, just that it's possible.
For people like that, using an LLM is the same shape as joining a cult.

2026-07-03 13:20:26 GMT

- reply

I think the biggest blind spot in FOSS is that for most people most of the time, computers aren't liberating or empowering at all, they're just in the way. They're an unwanted layer of complexity that's been forced into the gap between them and whatever they're trying to get done.
We've had a chance to microdose on that experience with the proliferation of silly IoT widgets - wtf is this, why is there a computer here I'm trying to make toast - but IMO haven't really absorbed the core lesson.

2026-07-03 13:15:37 GMT

This is a valid point, but the other side of that coin seems to be that - despite an incredible amount of work done on containerization and rapid deployment services - "click to stand up your own services" startups just... don't seem to succeed, at least not in any everything-you-need-on-one-unified-host way. The last company I saw trying to make click-to-deploy unified self-hosting work was Sandstorm.io, that became Sandstorm.org, that ... doesn't get a lot of traction.
https://hachyderm.io/@akareilly/116855245123581259

2026-07-02 20:56:17 GMT

"This is not a UX regression, this is a consent regression."
Oh, now that it's costing you money, you specifically, consent is a problem. _Now_ you care about consent.
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/73125#issuecomment-4868544439

2026-07-02 18:10:32 GMT

- reply

Here is a true story about modern appliances: they don't actually break down very often at all. More often, some operating tolerance is exceeded and an internal fuse pops.
If you have a voltage pen - $20 at a hardware store- and a screwdriver you can usually:
- Unplug thing
- Disassemble it
- Plug it back in and
- with the voltage pen find the place with current on one side of it and not the other.
Then, unplug it again, pull that part and look up its tiny part number.
Fuses are cheap.

2026-07-02 17:53:11 GMT

- reply

The punchline here is that DigiKey accidentally sent me six.

2026-07-02 17:52:22 GMT

Oven stops working.
Call OvenCo: Sorry, out of warranty. New oven, only $1400! $200 installation!
No, OvenCo. Nothing is visibly wrong with it. We fix it.
OvenCo: New oven computer bits! $450 plus $200 installation!
No, OvenCo. Nothing is visibly wrong. Continuity check says, blown thermal fuse.
OvenCo: New fuse! $44 plus shipping. $100 installation!
Do I get a warranty back?
OvenCo: Oh no. Definitely not.
Hang up on OvenCo, pull fuse, open DigiKey.
New fuse is $3.
For 5 of them.

2026-07-02 15:51:23 GMT

- reply

The better questions is, who is responsible for validation, and what constiitutes responsible diligence when the building somebody builds with that concrete falls over. The important thing is that this isn't an abstract principles question, it's about building systems where each step is tested and those tests are accounted for.
Every large construction site you'll ever see has both a trusted relationship with a cement provider, and pours and tests samples to be sure.

2026-07-02 15:39:26 GMT

- reply

For what it's worth I think that the argument that "software is new and therefore different" is not really as compelling as it might sound. Yes, software is in a raw-materials sense different from steel girders or poured concrete; there's no alchemical incantation that will turn iron into gold, but we see firewalls turned into cryptocurrency mines all the time.
If software is an idea that's also a machine. But we do have precedents, in society, for ideas that have become machines.

2026-07-02 15:31:58 GMT

- reply

The idea of a _duty of care_ - an idea software as a whole and free software specifically has religiously, assiduously been avoiding while championing freedom - is a almost a century old.
"THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT."
You can't sell so much as a can of soda under those terms. Nobody can.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donoghue_v_Stevenson

2026-07-02 15:20:30 GMT

- reply

The individualist, libertarian view of freedom as a purely negative set of freedoms that impose no greater obligations on people just... hasn't aged very well, has it? Uncharitably rewritten, the four freedoms of the FSF can be summed up as:
- You’re not the boss of me.
- You’re not the boss of me.
- You’re not the boss of me.
- You’re not the boss of me.
There's no concept of any obligation to anyone else anywhere, in the GPL, MIT, BSD, Apache or any "open" software license.