lj·rk / is on Nostr

gecos/CN: Leonard/Janis R. König
SAN: ElleJay (lj), Janis, Leo

content:

* Commentary on world and German politics
* Teaching and related politics
* Rants about bad typography (& occasional praise)
* Linux/LaTeX/GNOME/whatever-editor-I-currently-try-using
* IT Security & Reversing
* Climate change and anti-car policies
* The Gender™

Opinions my own.

pfp: by [@adalheidis](https://mastodon.art/@adalheidis )
me, red lipstick, red foxy cat ears, and round oval glasses with pink highlights in a red shirt.
banner: by [@adalheidis](https://mastodon.art/@adalheidis )
me, laying on my back in a red dress with black floral evening gloves and holding my phone

JMT: https://justmytoots.com/@[email protected]

Blog: https://www.blog.ljrk.org
Pronouns: https://pronouns.cc/@ljrk
Company: https://infosec.exchange/@intcube
GitHub: https://github.com/ljrk0

Last Notes

2024-06-15 20:19:51

Who needs matte black when you can have matte pink?
https://todon.eu/system/media_attachments/files/112/622/015/048/334/630/original/d67011f8b0b7f441.jpg

2024-06-14 13:03:18

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Lynn developed "generalized dynamic instruction dispatch" for IBM in 1966. 2 years later she was kicked out, just after Robert Tomasulo published the "Tomasulo Algorithm" for out-of-order execution of floating point instructions, utilizing Lynn's work. Everyone knows Tomasulo (and he did great work, mind you!), but no-one knows Lynn.
Later, in technical compsci, you may stumble upon highly integrated circuits, everyone there knows #VLSI, but not the inventor, our dear Dr. Conway.
Her story, her struggle against IBM who took decades to apologize to her for her mistreatment. She transitioned in darker times and pioneered not "only" in compsci. She was what many would call "greater than life". She died a few days ago.
Today, let's remember Lynn 🏳️‍⚧️, tomorrow we'll fight on ✊
2/2

2024-06-14 12:59:03

My #CompSci lecturers often dropped the names of inventors. But only if they were men. We talked about Gordon Moore, obviously Turing 🏳️‍🌈 was mentioned, about Don Knuth, about Chomsky etc.
But when we discussed the #ARM architecture, we never talked about the inventor *Sophie Wilson*. We also never talked about *Mary Ann Horton*, despite her work on `vi` and `terminfo` -- but of course we mentioned Bill Joy. We discussed the Spanning Tree Protocol, but not its inventor *Radia Perlman*. We have the whole field of #SoftwareEngineering, but who coined the term? *Margaret Hamilton*. We mentioned the ENIAC and v. Neumann, but failed to talk about *Adele Goldstine*. We discussed the origins of #OOP and #Smalltalk but ignored *Adele Goldberg*. We programmed in #Assembly but never talked about the woman who wrote the first #Assembler, *Kathleen Booth*. And don't get me started on #Safari and our sweet @npub1fqg…7yvt <3 Or any of the (incomplete list) of *Ida Rhodes, Carol Shaw, Shafi Goldwasser, Edith Clarke, Annie Easley, Joyce Little*, ...
And today? Let's talk about our favorite trans woman CPU designer, Lynn Conway.
1/2

2024-05-14 18:47:52

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Unfortunately. And I don't want to dunk on the devs, it's incredibly hard to make security usable and despite all, Signal is one of the most usable security products.
But there's a lot of room for improvement and the culture of the project still has a lot of moxie air (with all due respect for his ability) around it. I hoped that after him leaving things'd improve, but that wasn't the case from my experience.

2024-05-14 13:18:53

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Well, at xz we had 1 unpaid maintainer who was friendly to contributors but the way he was treated was toxic. Here you have toxic treatment of potential contributors, simply leading to less (diverse) contributions and Signal being much of a "firmly led" project rather than a community effort.
Which makes sense to a certain degree, Signal is immensely critical software. But then again, adding a toggle to disable jumbo-emojis is a different thing.

2024-05-14 08:34:28

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Tbf, most people I know (including me) who also use Tg don't use it because of their encryption but because the app is much faster and has better UX :~
I'm till annoyed at Signal for all those little things like enabling "jumbo emojis" but not offering a setting for that to disable it. Since it's open source I probably should contribute it but after many many 2nd hand interactions with the dev team I really don't want to any more. The Signal GitHub is probably one of the most toxic places for discussion. I've seen things shut down like: Local-only customization options, improved reproducibility, alternative clients/publishing, regular release of server source code, etc.
Often a reason was given but when contributors wanted to find solutions for that problem the thread was locked and moved to a discussion space where nothing happens except for "oh, we had this discussion 100 times already". I'm glad Signal, at least, now allows push notifications outside of Google Services.
I'll still use Signal primarily, but it's "open source" only de jure and mostly just source available and trying to contribute to it is just traumatizing. Which is really sad.

2024-05-10 22:22:21

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If G47 does mosaic tiling for real, it's really done everything I pretty much need from a DE, wow!

2024-04-13 12:25:50

Ich poste selten Wirtschafts Woche, aber ich finde toll, dass sie sich zu dieser Schlagzeile trauen:
"Wochenend Fahrverbote: Ist das ernsthaft Ihr Niveau Herr #Wissing?"
https://www.wiwo.de/unternehmen/auto/wochenend-fahrverbote-ist-das-ernsthaft-ihr-niveau-herr-wissing/29754576.html

2024-04-11 09:03:30

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Eigentlich Grund sich wieder zum Ausruhen ins Bett zu legen

2024-04-09 09:51:48

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Aaah, hm, ja, klassisches Problem von KV-Storage... UUIDs einführen? :'-)

2024-04-09 09:09:17

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Die Idee war, das als Beschreibung an mögliche andere Personen im Raum zu geben in der Hoffnung, dass sie sich an den Namen erinnern ^^'

2024-04-09 08:54:21

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"Das Ding, das für manche nach Seife schmeckt"? :'-)
Vllt. ist das merkbarer? ^^'

2024-04-03 18:10:27

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Erinnert mich etwas an folgenden Artikel:
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newyorker.com%2Fculture%2Fthe-weekend-essay%2Fpiecing-for-cover

2024-04-03 18:10:13

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Samesies, Hausputz ist so schön "einfach"

2024-04-03 18:07:57

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Ohhh, du bist auch so 1 Person die ungewöhnliche Haushaltsdinge macht wenn frustriert? :D
Habe Mal die ganze Küche auf den Kopf gestellt in dem Zustand :'-D

2024-04-02 14:03:50

Freshly cut down nails :(
But, going out for climbing today evening!
https://todon.eu/system/media_attachments/files/112/201/523/575/900/638/original/7917ac88b8b816ce.jpg

2024-03-29 15:19:55

Aha
https://todon.eu/system/media_attachments/files/112/179/406/598/805/930/original/7bc9dc70829f0dab.jpg

2024-03-27 09:16:47

After having spent a /lot/ of time teaching, I'm quite convinced that most of the "I'm bad at X" things are faults of the teacher, not the student.
I've seen people who "could never do math" rock their 1.0 in exams, understand and do quite tricky cryptography or do some crazy functional programming leveraging higher algebra.
All that was required was a change of teacher, proper teaching method and some time (mostly to overcome the "I can't do this" thinking).
Of course some people are better or worse at some things. But too often this is an excuse of bad teachers not to improve and effectively victim blaming.
(There's also the issue that modern teaching institutions have the wrong goals and too little time to actually enable good teaching on a wide scale.)