mhoye

Envoy
Sysadmin
Lapsed pragmatist
Ludonarrative dissident
Liminal space mercenary
Empiricist hype man
Man Outside
He, him

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npub138ngjnuyptdju7zvsj485j22g05l4z6zfhufzt29sgttyfyxvarq8herz5

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mhoye_at_mastodon.social@mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsgne5ff7zq4kew0pxgf2n6f99y86063dpym7y394zcy94jyjrxw3spz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0wd68ytnsw43qsvgwqx

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relay.mostr.pub

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npub138ngjnuyptdju7zvsj485j22g05l4z6zfhufzt29sgttyfyxvarq8herz5

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Last Notes

2024-09-17 12:41:48

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@npub19lt…qfjk The "verbose" options in ssh stack, so -v is useful but -vvvv is All The Things. Whenever I've had an SSH problem the answer was in -vvv or -vvvv somewhere.

2024-08-09 14:25:39

Unfinished, but I think that's appropriate: https://exple.tive.org/blarg/2024/08/09/cutting-flavor/

2024-07-11 01:53:20

https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/765/356/486/621/213/original/75fcf87154dbbe62.png

2024-07-09 18:33:21

https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete
I"m convinced that any software deployed for medical reasons - implants, tools, analytics, doesn't matter - needs toolchains that generate reproducible builds stored in escrow that are made free and public the moment device support ends.

2024-07-08 19:25:45

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I cried because my phone could not connect to my shoes, and then I met a man whose phone could not connect to his feet.

2024-06-26 15:34:00

Linux question:
I have this situation, on a particular Linux laptop:
I ssh from a console, not terminal window, in this laptop, into a remote instance, in which I am running irssi behind tmux.
The tmux window is not split, irssi is fullscreen within it
In that irssi window, if I use pgup/pgdown:
- pgup results in only the top half of the screen being redrawn with the correct, next-page-up contents.
- pgdn, only the bottom half of the screen refreshes.
I don't even know where to start.

2024-06-24 13:48:08

An AI thing I'm watching play out at another org:
1: Expert A, with a deep understanding of a nuanced and difficult problem answers a question they've been given, offering several options.
2: Director B, recipient, uses an AI to summarize it and then runs it up to leadership saying, "A says this." That generated summary is subtly and very wrong.
3: A is now being held responsible for plans made based on B's AI-generated and very wrong rewriting of his recommendations.
Fun times.

2024-06-24 13:31:45

TIL that the purported skull of Mary Magdalene is enshrined in a gold reliquary in Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume, in France, and that reliquary is _the_ most Warhammer-40k-looking real thing I have ever seen in my life, bar none.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/671/831/809/036/403/original/ec0fa59663b67f6d.png

2024-06-21 19:17:24

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@npub13w7…mktw You know, almost anything by Vangelis would be a good option too.

2024-06-21 12:50:22

If EVs have to make a noise at low speeds, what should it be?
Wrong-but-correct answers only.

2024-06-17 17:26:04

Just mistyped it "Overwatch hotel" just now, and The Shining But Overwatch actually sounds far mores interesting to me than regular Overwatch.

2024-06-04 13:35:23

I've proposed the idea to the Signal community that if tools like Recall go out of their way to recognize and ignore DRM'ed content, then messenger programs that want to avoid being recorded should have a small always-on DRM'ed image on display at all times as a defensive measure.
If the tools are there, we might as well put them to good use.

2024-05-29 19:55:52

An old haunt. Neat to see the shadows left of the letters, years of downwind and dust.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/526/130/650/014/863/original/ca88f5893bb29036.jpeg

2024-05-29 02:23:16

This is a remarkable graph.
You might have heard that "EV sales are slumping", "people are starting to avoid EVs", etc.
That's not what's happening.
What's happening is "Tesla is cratering so hard that it's skewing the aggregate market data."
Or, put differently, "Tesla is failing harder than the entire rest of the market is succeeding, combined."
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/521/987/646/530/679/original/e75276401f941d80.png

2024-05-24 15:42:49

TIL the Ingenuity - the little martian helicopter that could, parked for good after a hard landing and no longer able to communicate with the Perseverance rover that's rolled over the horizon - got one last software update patch saying, "once a day, wake up, take one picture, measure everything you can and go back to sleep."
It can't send that information anywhere, but it might run like that gathering data in place for 20 years.
At some point we'll need go to get it.
https://www.space.com/mars-helicopter-ingenuity-team-says-goodbye

2024-03-16 22:41:09

Lazyweb, a question about learning CS algorithm fundamentals.
CLRS, the classic text, is 50% perfect and 50% dire slog, assuming that you know nothing whatsoever about code but are comfortable with kinda mid-to-high-level math.
I have no doubt this made sense when it was first devised, but I suspect that for most people seeking to learn algorithmic fundamentals today, the opposite is the case.
What text am I looking for? Does it exist? Challenges to my reasoning are always welcome.

2024-03-15 12:46:02

I sometimes wonder how software project planning and management might be different if overtime existed in tech. That is, if the decision to wring an arbitrary number of 60 or 80 or 100 hour weeks out people to make up for planning and management failures didn't cost companies zero additional salary dollars.

2024-03-14 01:14:06

'in Wayland you frequently need a clipboard manager in places you wouldn't expect, such as whn you close an application before pasting, or when you're copying less than 1kb of data' well yes I am having a hard time believing that I need extra helper utilities do deal with the exotic 'what if I copy a sentence or close a program' edge cases here in 2024.

2024-03-13 15:03:50

Lazyweb, a question: let's say that you could teach a "cultural anthropology" type of course about computing to first year students, to prepare them for the codebases, communities, patterns and software philosophies of the programming world. You've got about ten weeks to run it. What would you teach in that course and why?
(RTs appreciated for reach.)

2024-03-13 13:41:04

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@npub1h8s…cvp3 this is unbelievably cool.

2024-03-12 22:56:00

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@npub1lrv…tth9 If you add a filter for "/t.co/" that catches the URL shortener Twitter uses, which seems to deal with most of them.

2024-03-12 20:54:32

Any sufficiently complicated agile process contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, error prone and lossy implementation of half of what Dr. Royce described in the original Waterfall paper.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/084/700/479/136/143/original/4da2afda77ae159a.jpg

2024-03-12 15:47:05

Do you ever wonder if the "stupidity indistinguishable from malice" arguments you hear from a particular strain of tendentious nerds are the potty training of reactionary politics? It's a turn of phrase that gives you permission to be completely incurious about why somebody else's needs and constraints differ from our own, describing them as unworthy or subhuman instead of someone you could try to understand or sympathize with, and maybe we should ask ourselves who that makes us useful to.

2024-02-15 14:02:41

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@npub1upk…tcwy I wish I had better news for you. The near-total absence of telemetry available either to developers or from non-corporate-controlled systems is a huge, ongoing missed opportunity for free software development. I understand the privacy challenges but it’s very, very difficult to make meaningful things for people you insist on knowing nothing about.

2024-02-15 13:52:32

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@npub1upk…tcwy I am reasonably confident that the answer to this is no. A few years ago I asked around in the software engineering research community and at the time nobody was looking at history files or command line usage. Some large software shops track this as part of their developer-productivity work but all at the aggregate-corporate-efficiency level, not per app. Telemetry in FOSS is -tragically - sparse to nonexistent. Ubuntu has https://github.com/ubuntu/ubuntu-report but that’s not what you asked for.

2024-02-07 15:12:49

I'm going to be sitting with this for a long time.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/890/840/384/583/938/original/ed2f63e96be75dc5.png

2024-01-03 03:04:11

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Particularly among young men, particularly in the tech sector, one question that frequently goes unasked that I wish was asked routinely is: to whom is it useful that I believe this? Who do I serve, as I act on these beliefs? Are they on my side? Do I want to be on theirs?
The same is true of the clothes we wear. This is a fact: all of us are cosplaying, but most of us don't interrogate that. Most of us don't even realize it.

2024-01-03 02:54:47

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One hard problem of an internet full of memetic ideology is that if you're not very careful you can end up repeating, legitimizing and amplifying ideological arguments that _you don't even realize exist._ And one other place that has always been true is fashion. And the people who really know clothing know this.
(Have you ever noticed how hard it is to find men's clothing these days, in colors that aren't already common in milspec camo? Gosh, that's crazy. I wonder if that means anything.)

2024-01-03 02:20:24

I've recently discovered the "tie ring", as opposed to the tie clip or pin. It's interesting, but I have concerns, as one must have when trying on any new garment or accoutrement. What signals does the tie ring send, in general or in specific to certain types/styles? And more importantly: where would I go to learn about this? Is there a clothing-semiotics wiki or resource out there I could bring these questions?

2023-12-21 15:20:41

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@npub1upk…tcwy If I can be specific I try to add something like "these are the preconceptions that might be what caused my misunderstanding. Because Y I expected X, which is at odds with the Z I saw instead." I'd like to think that can shed a positive light on how documentation can be improved.

2023-12-19 15:21:16

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@npub1upk…tcwy I think we're at a sort of intermediate evolutionary stage of open documentation, where the early contributors are driving in right direction, but the project hasn't fully arrived as an understood locus of authority yet, so there isn't that critical mass of corrective attention to the details yet. It sure looks like we're on the road to a better future though.

2023-12-19 14:26:49

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@npub1upk…tcwy The recent renaissance in open source documentation is long overdue. The TLDR people are heroes, and the "similar projects" section in their readme - https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr - is also great.

2023-11-29 16:23:46

Re: my recent rant, Cloudflare threw up a "har sanitizer" shortly after the OKTA HAR debacle.
https://har-sanitizer.pages.dev/
It's nice, it works, etc, and it is completely the wrong thing.
Yes it all runs locally, yes it does what it's promising to do on the tin.
The only thing wrong with it is that it is teaching people to throw random security-sensitive information into web pages, and that's going to lead to disaster.
(Fun thing: audit the source on that page to see if it does what it claims.)

2023-11-22 17:35:52

Microsoft paid money for this. A lot of money. And they gave it to us for free.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/455/390/731/684/131/original/0473224bb5625101.png

2023-11-02 23:54:55

So, as part of re-doing our bathroom, I bought slightly nicer than average toilet and I... am suspecting they accidentally sent me a different, much-more-expensive-than-expected model.
It has a remote control.
It is, for some reason, illuminated. From the inside.
I do not believe I wanted an illuminated, remote-controlled toilet in my life but here we are.

2023-10-06 14:44:50

I laughed for real:
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2023/10/ai-firms-working-on-constitutions-to-keep-ai-from-spewing-toxic-content/
Every one of these companies had "AI ethics" teams telling them for years what would happen, they all got fired as soon as there was money on the table, and now that the models have leaked, the process is out of their hands and they've completely lost control, or even any competitive edge, now they want safety and guardrails?

2023-10-02 23:19:08

This kind of experience must be either revelatory or terrifying for the original drummer. "Here is this monster talent hearing the song you played on, doing their own thing and just nailing it on the first take."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbUYVcaF_l0

2023-09-26 15:30:51

"Automated translation of web content is now available to Firefox users! Unlike cloud-based alternatives, translation is done locally in Firefox, so that the text being translated does not leave your machine."
I got to see the early demos of this and it is jaws-on-the-floor bonkers wizard magic. Entirely local - and good - translation with no cloud service and like 6MB of storage per language.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/118.0/releasenotes/

2023-09-12 14:27:59

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@npub1az9…swru I've been using this for the last few weeks and it's terrific, thanks for sharing it.

2023-08-30 20:30:01

I momentarily though that the biggest reason video tutorials are going outcompete text for at least the next few years is that it's currently much more difficult for AI models to turn video into plausible semantic mulch than text, but then my brain said "oh, that's not a problem, you mulch the transcript text, use a text-to-speech generator and throw in some random screengrabs from existing videos", and I realize that any knowledge without a chain of custody will be drowned out by noise soon.

2023-08-27 15:12:14

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@npub1psd…9sr7 I keep coming back to this article on how the Q crowd consumes these theories, functionally, as pornography: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1684355657451859969.html
When you see that, not only can you not unsee it, but you also can't unsee that pile-on theories like this nonsense are really just grubby homemade pornography.

2023-08-26 17:42:32

Solid niche meme IMO.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/110/957/145/237/949/043/original/3466e20ddbf55426.png

2023-08-20 01:17:51

Ok old timers, fess up: what was your first cellphone?
Mine was a Sony Ericsson z200: https://www.gsmarena.com/sony_ericsson_z200-523.php

2023-08-19 18:53:21

Periodic reminder that if you ditch the zero-trust part, if you admit that trust matters even a tiny bit, you can ditch the consensus algorithm and run the entire blockchain exercise on one shitty five year old Android phone. A firstgen raspberry pi would be overkill. Seven transactions per second wouldn’t have stretched a 486 on dial-up in 1996 and the whole stack is an embarrassment.

2023-08-18 18:50:08

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@npub19lt…qfjk was this written by somebody who was petting a dog at the time

2023-08-18 00:08:17

Of all the things this meeting could have been, "an email" is the least interesting possibility.
We can do better.

2023-08-17 23:34:55

Proposal: ban private vehicle subsidies.
Parking priced as high as the market will bear. No laws saying houses need driveways or that apartments need parking spots. No manufacturer subsidies. Curb-weight taxes for street maintenance, life-of-the-vehicle fuel efficiency taxes to cover the cost of environmental cleanup from the exhaust.
If car owners had to pay what cars actually cost instead of foisting those costs off on society we'd find out fast that cars are a ponzi scheme.

2023-08-16 16:51:19

This has absolutely no business, none whatsoever, being as good as it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzR9HwhhlkA

2023-08-13 02:29:02

Re-upping this again: I wish more lefties could internalize the idea that hypocrisy is not a meaningful accusation to the right. Of course they're being hypocrites. That you are bound, by rules, standards, logic, human decency, some fundamental moral consistency, anything at all, and they are not? That is their conception of what power is, and why they seek it. So they can exercise power, without constraint, and you cannot.
That's the whole point.
Hypocrisy is the virtue-signaling of fascism.

2023-08-12 16:00:09

Minor thing but if you're looking for a screen that is not a television - that is, takes HDMI in, shows it to you and does not come preloaded with adware jank intended sell all your interactions to marketing companies or otherwise trying to be anything "smarter" or more nefarious than "a display", the term you're looking for is "commercial display", not "television" or "smart monitor" or anything else.

2023-08-11 14:56:44

I keep thinking about how Google invested, keeps investing, billions of dollars in tools that functionally do nothing more than generate an unlimited supply of statistically plausible text completely disconnected from any that there's such a thing as truth or veracity or verifiability, and I have to imagine the search team just screaming into their pillows every night knowing it's going to destroy the company and everything it ever claimed to stand for.

2023-08-11 14:37:10

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@npub18p3…03wh "If you didn't like Barbie, you didn't understand Fight Club" is a hell of a sentence, but where is the lie?

2023-08-08 02:12:15

I’d heard that Rob Zombie started his career as a production assistant on Peewee’s Playhouse but today I learned that George Romero’s first gig was working for Mr. Rogers.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/80353/when-mr-rogers-gave-george-romero-his-first-paying-gig

2023-08-04 13:54:00

Tired: "the classical Greek myth of Leda And The Swan".
Wired :"Duck Duck Zeus".
(This was my daughter's idea but I love it.)

2023-08-03 02:30:12

why are we calling it machine learning when we could be calling it stochastic errorism

2023-06-28 17:32:00

inexplicably flashed back to that one time there was a guy who thought "super-pumpedness" was a "core value" and there were people took him seriously

2023-06-26 20:08:25

Sitting in a parking lot, waiting for https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifvARcsP30M to finish before going to buy groceries.
Lazyweb, what is the last song you listened to, where you waited for the song to finish before going off to do whatever you had to do next?

2023-06-18 23:38:30

Maybe people worried about Meta’s participation in the fediverse are thinking about the time Google killed blogs and RSS, or the time Yahoo killed dmoz and webrings, or the time AOL killed Usenet, or or or or or or or or or or or or.