mike805

https://fosstodon.org/@mike805

Developer of https://TheUncloud.co which is the easiest way to chat off the record and transfer large files to anyone. Working on an Android app.

Public Key

npub1wakf658gxgp7rw5cm2kpxh0sjzhksk5gsj9pwfjlzlj9j45wglmqasljf2

NIP-05 Address

[email protected]

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs8wmya2r5ryqlph2vd4tqnthcfptmgt2ygfzshye030eze268y0asprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0d4hhxarj9ecxjmnt68cpl3

Publishing to

relay.momostr.pink

Author Public Key

npub1wakf658gxgp7rw5cm2kpxh0sjzhksk5gsj9pwfjlzlj9j45wglmqasljf2

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Last Notes

2025-10-18 15:43:31 GMT

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Open source has its roots in religious do-good philosophy. There are some problems the market can solve well (making computers) and some it cannot (making good software tools.)
The original complaint was that tools such as compilers were unaffordable, and should be free. That has been solved.

2025-09-01 01:55:30 GMT

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That is a strange looking, uh, what the hell is that?

2025-07-24 20:01:31 GMT

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It's pretty unlikely that bitcoin was allowed to get as far as it has, without them having their hooks in it.
BTC is lousy transaction money, and all the proposals to fix that essentially create a fiat banking system on top of the blockchain.
There are huge early wallets that have been idle for years.The people who own the Fed probably own those, and will therefore own the Bit-Fed.
BTC would be treated like hard drugs unless they had plans for it.

2025-07-24 19:50:22 GMT

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And in 1835, someone tried to shoot him but two pistols both failed to fire. Either a miracle or the shooter was just sweaty and got the powder wet.
Funny how people who mess with the debt system attract Lone Gunmen, isn't it? Whoever runs this thing seems to have the ability to create willing martyrs. That suggests a spiritual or metaphysical belief system behind it.

2025-07-24 19:46:14 GMT

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And to me it looks like the Revolution was about getting out of that debt system. Debt is why the Brits were squeezing the colonies.
The war of 1812 was British finance's first attempt to get America back in the cage. It failed.
So the Brits suddenly didn't like slavery any more (it had been fine before that!) and stoked up the slavery issue until America had a war over it and got itself into debt.
It has never really gotten out since.

2025-07-24 19:43:38 GMT

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The creation of the Fed was an act of fraud.
Initially you had money that anyone could exchange for silver or gold. Then post-Depression the money could only be exchanged by foreigners under certain circumstances.
Then in the 1970s the French showed up and said hand over the gold, and the USA decided not to redeem its currency any more.
The money is a check you cannot cash. It is a promise to deliver another promise in the future, and that is all.

2025-07-24 17:19:58 GMT

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The Treasury is a front for the Fed, and the Fed is a front for some people who don't want to be in the public spotlight. Identify those people and you know where the problem comes from!

2025-07-24 15:25:47 GMT

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Meh. The more you read the more you discover the "shining beacon" thing was propaganda from the beginning.
The USA was a place where an ambitious person could get ahead. That was the draw. In Europe, everything worth having was already claimed by someone. In the USA there was plenty of wealth up for grabs.
There no longer is - everything has been grabbed - and that is ultimately what ails the USA.

2025-05-24 17:39:59 GMT

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The USA is not great at theory. The USA is great at making stuff and selling stuff.
Edison once hired a mathematician, and when he asked for the volume of air in a light bulb, the mathematician started measuring and calculating.
Edison filled the light bulb with water and poured the water into a measuring cup.
USA got a bunch of theoretical brains due to WW2 but we also got the Frankfurt School which wrecked our academia.
Most of our research is commercial.

2025-05-18 20:52:13 GMT

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Is it as far in the middle of nowhere as it looks? Drop a postcard in there and see if it ever shows up.

2025-05-18 20:47:44 GMT

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Know what else is really fun? When you are asked by a customer to update their DNS or fix their email or whatever. So you login as them, get the 2FA prompt, and then text the customer to please forward the code. Hopefully the customer answers before the prompt times out.
Sysadmins having shared access to DNS and cloud service admin consoles is a normal thing, which 2FA is not set up to handle.

2025-05-14 22:01:07 GMT

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Worth a try: .xz and .brotli
The CPU consumption goes up exponentially with better compression, but for something that will be downloaded over and over it's worthwhile.

2025-05-10 18:38:01 GMT

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Some people use ferrets, along with dogs, to go after rats. The ferret will go into their holes, under pallets, etc. and either get the rat or flush it out so the dog can get it.

2025-04-25 02:11:52 GMT

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Yes. I used to dread rain, not so much on my head - umbrellas worked - but the flooded gutter problem. Sitting in school with wet shoes is miserable.

2025-03-25 03:55:52 GMT

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Got an OpenWRT One and I like it. Much more configurable than average, and you can even ssh in and install tcpdump to debug.

2025-03-24 16:17:22 GMT

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Every previous claim of "you no longer have to know what you're doing" was false, so I am unconvinced.
In the early 1950s IBM introduced Fortran. The propaganda around it was, you will no longer need coders or debugging because technical end users will write their own programs and they will just work!
COBOL's propaganda was, managers can read and understand the code because it is in plain English!

2025-03-23 18:15:19 GMT

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A lot of the text parsing, and copy-change-duplicate code editing, can be done with vim and textutils too. Especially if you have filters to make CSV files context-free and back.
For example, you have a config file with 50 similar clauses (ex: haproxy.cfg for many sites) and need to make a similar edit for each one.
Or you get a CSV file and need to update a table based on it.
Numbering the lines and then moving the ones you need to edit to the end temporarily is a useful trick.

2025-02-23 20:49:06 GMT

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Same thing happening in America. The entire political establishment has failed so hard for so long, both on the economy and on public safety, that a lot of people are ready to take whatever is behind Door Number Two.
Even if it's Hitler.
You need about a third to party like it's 1933, so they are not quite there yet.

2025-02-02 21:14:09 GMT

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Got it. I wonder where we would be now, if the wave of censorship following Jan 6 had not happened?
If Trump had been left on Twitter to shoot off his mouth, would he have got himself into even more trouble than he already was?
Elon Musk probably would not have bought Twitter, and therefore would not be Trump's #2 right now.
That censorship did not stop Trump but it did a lot of harm elsewhere.

2025-02-02 19:34:53 GMT

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Huh? It let to Trump and his movement getting their own platforms, such as patriots.win (migration from Reddit when they were kicked off there.) Then Trump put up Truth Social. Next, Elon Musk figured out how powerful Twitter actually was, and bought it.

2025-01-22 22:05:23 GMT

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The ones sold by carriers in the USA, i.e. Verizon, are not. The ones sold by the Google Store are unlockable.

2025-01-22 22:02:28 GMT

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Google Store does not sell them there? (I am a user of Pixel phone in the USA)

2025-01-22 22:00:30 GMT

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Is this the Russians screwing around again? They have been jamming GPS all over the place.

2025-01-14 00:09:23 GMT

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In the 1950s the British National Lottery built a whole mainframe called ERNIE for the purpose of generating random lottery numbers.
The computer had no permanent memory. The numbers were printed out on a telegraph tape printer, stuck to file cards, photographed, and physically filed.
They used flickering neon lights and ring counters to do the randomizing.

2025-01-08 08:25:22 GMT

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"NO ACCESS TO PREMISES" seen it more than once.

2025-01-07 02:26:15 GMT

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I especially love the people who want to ban hate speech and discussions of violence.
You'd have to start with many of America's founding documents.
The Declaration of Independence has hate speech against Native Americans (not in those polite words, either) and the King of England.
The Common Sense pamphlet is a straight up incitement to armed insurrection.
That is the sort of thing the First Amendment was written for.

2025-01-06 16:42:20 GMT

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Rights don't exist unless they are exercised. Some people go nuts over "Nazis" and others in the past were eager to hunt "Commies." But we need the Nazis and Commies and Alex Jones and assorted nutters to exercise the right of free speech if we want to keep it.
Just like we need the gun people to preserve the 2nd Amendment.

2025-01-05 20:03:57 GMT

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And is that why they keep chasing money after they have more than they could spend in ten lifetimes, and there is no more pleasure they could buy?
Making money is the thing that gives them a sense of purpose and mastery so they keep doing it, just like someone who has mastered a video game.

2025-01-05 19:35:39 GMT

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I've played a number of classic arcade games in MAME with infinite lives. You soon discover two things. 1) You would have to spend a huge amount of effort to get to the higher levels fairly. 2) There really isn't that much more depth to the game beyond what you saw in the arcade.
Is that true of life as well? Is being Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos just the same old drama in more posh surroundings?
Maybe the main thing they have is full control of their time. They have no obligations.

2024-12-09 19:16:03 GMT

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Israel has already publicly claimed credit, so no mystery there. They have wanted to get rid of Assad for a long time, but Russia and Hezbollah were two problems. Now Russia is occupied elsewhere and Hezbollah are missing fingers, hands, and other important parts. So the opportunity was ripe and someone said GO NOW.

2024-11-20 05:01:42 GMT

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That is an odd looking beast.
Not entirely new idea. I have a typewriter with a floppy drive, from the early 1990s. It even has a rudimentary spreadsheet.

2024-11-17 08:43:09 GMT

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Everything should have been marked in both sets of units for one human lifetime. If this had been started in the early 20th century we'd be done by now.

2024-11-13 05:44:47 GMT

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I've used pbzip2 to determine the loaded power consumption of a server. xz is a lot worse per megabyte, and brotli (web static content compression) probably the worst.

2024-11-08 04:11:48 GMT

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We just came out of an era where we were locked in our houses, arrested for going to the beach, and fired for not taking an experimental substance. If that was not authoritarianism, what the hell is?
And fascism is a collaboration between government and big business to wield power. Like, for example, Biden and social media conspiring to censor people.
Hopefully we are EXITING a period of fascism and authoritarianism.

2024-10-29 16:17:39 GMT

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The "Moar Democracy" response to a failing state, reminds me of the medieval peasant revolts. The local nobles were obviously corrupt and self-serving and could care less about the peasants. So the peasants marched to the castle to demand the King do something about his bad nobles.
They could see that the system was corrupt, but they still believed the King MUST be good and was just unaware.
Too many people today have the same blind faith in 51%.

2024-10-29 16:13:23 GMT

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Yes, exactly. People act like 51% has some metaphysical significance. They really do believe in the Divine Right of Majorities, with the same blind faith a medieval peasant would have had in the King.
There is no action that is evil and immoral if 49% do it, and totally fine if 51% do it.
Structuring a state so it performs its vital functions (defense being the big one) and does as little harm as possible, is a practical problem. Voting is one tool but not the whole solution.

2024-10-29 16:02:51 GMT

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Whenever anyone starts worshipping Democracy, just say:
"Do you believe in the Divine Right of Kings?"
"No, of course not."
"Do you believe in the Divine Right of Majorities?"
"That's different."
"Why?"
In a Republic, there are things even a majority cannot do.

2024-09-30 18:16:27 GMT

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That was a common and good setup on proprietary machines like Sun. The mouse plugged into the keyboard and the keyboard plugged into the machine. The early iMacs were like that but with USB.
Also typing on a wired keyboard. Constant problems with wireless keyboards and mice. we had a pile of them that didn't work for various reasons.

2024-09-18 22:11:35 GMT

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There are a bunch on Amazon, the one I got is alright and much smaller than a phone.

2024-09-08 00:37:15 GMT

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Almost enough to make one believe in the muse theory of art, isn't it? Materialism cannot create beauty.

2024-08-25 02:08:27 GMT

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can it also click off those google login windows and cookie confirm boxes?

2024-08-21 15:12:10 GMT

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Hey, it worked for Joe. People who are voting for Kamala are doing so because they are pro-choice or they hate Trump or both. There is not much Kamala can say or do in public that will make more people vote for her.

2024-08-19 15:57:01 GMT

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"Defund the police" means "get rid of local police that are answerable to local elections" and at the same time "have a big federal police force that is answerable only to Dear Leader." Remember Obama saying we need a domestic police force as big and well funded as the military? Yeah, that.

2024-08-14 19:35:07 GMT

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If it can be cracked they deserve to lose their money.
There was a case in a casino high limit room where the cards came out of the pack in order. Only the high roller noticed.

2024-07-10 17:47:54 GMT

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Also https has had one vulnerability after another, while PGP has generally held up.
PGP is an easier case, having to secure a message rather than an ongoing conversation, but still, it's one of the few things that was basically secure from 2.x version onward.

2024-06-10 00:48:00 GMT

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"fossil fuels still make up 60ish percent of energy" also defeats the argument that we must urgently get rid of gas stoves and gas heaters.
If the electricity is coming from a gas-fired power plant, that counteracts the efficiency gain of a heat pump. And cooking with gas-generated electricity is about 1/2 as efficient as cooking with gas directly.
Fix the power grid first.

2024-06-09 23:07:16 GMT

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Do these costs include the cost of storing the solar and wind power? Nuclear at night and solar in the daytime is one route to non-combustion electricity. Storage at night and solar in the daytime is the other.