mhoye

https://mastodon.social/@mhoye

A message, and part of a system of messages.

Public Key

npub1f6lh97n4ewkw0nltezcfahr822ht34ccccn5fqnm5rwtdzupf4gshak9zj

NIP-05 Address

mhoye_at_mastodon.social@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsya0mjlf6uht88el4u3vy7m3n49t4c6uvvvf6ysfa6ph9k3wq565gndxqss

Author Public Key

npub1f6lh97n4ewkw0nltezcfahr822ht34ccccn5fqnm5rwtdzupf4gshak9zj

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Last Notes

2024-08-15 18:34:21

Some absolutely bonkers wizard magic right here: programmers' fonts with _built in syntax highlighting_.
Built _into the font_.
https://front-end.social/@argyleink/112966741005721546

2024-08-15 18:31:42

"Ms. Frog is refusing to return Mr. Scorpion's calls for bipartisan collaboration in crossing the river. Here's why it's a problem for Ms. Frog. And for Democracy."

2024-08-14 16:20:41

Question: at a quick glance, all the SMS-from-Linux demos I can see rely on SAAS gateways as intermediaries, which I find undesirable.
If I have a device with a standardish 4G cellular modem in it, and feed it some standard, airport-vending-machine SIM card, can I not - should I not be able to - send and receive SMS texts to that number, on a standard linux box?
(I happen prefer wrangling exotic hardware with magic incantations to freemium-model dependencies. I know. It's my thing.)

2024-08-13 14:57:38

Imagine spending every moment of your only life scheming about your arbitrage opportunities to grab cheap electricity and make heroin sudokus.
https://protos.com/airbnb-host-adds-no-crypto-mining-rule-after-tenant-installs-10-rigs/

2024-08-12 16:33:53

Never outsource core functions, never outsource change management, safety margin is not slack, redundancy is not waste.
Never outsource core functions, never outsource change management, safety margin is not slack, redundancy is not waste.
Never outsource core functions, never outsource change management, safety margin is not slack, redundancy is not waste.
Never outsource core functions, never outsource change management, safety margin is not slack, redundancy is not waste.

2024-08-12 12:04:39

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I had to retype it from the printout in the magazine like a normal person.

2024-08-09 21:57:30

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This is me, talking about chains of weird adapters and IT in the early nineties the the way people used to talk about doing three tours in-country in 'Nam.
"You weren't there man! You don't know how it was 'cause you weren't there!"
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/934/293/870/441/453/original/7ad9d854b95bf49d.png
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/934/302/001/133/957/original/961310b7c26e133a.png

2024-08-06 21:12:02

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Maybe the reverse? If a ghost is a soul without a body and a zombie is a body without a soul, then halloween is really about afterlife speed dating.

2024-08-06 21:05:35

I cannot imagine a more damning indictment of the state of software development than seeing the single most successful consumer hardware company in the world instructing a piece of software they created and control that is running on hardware they created and control from screen to silicon, in vernacular English, "do not hallucinate."
I wonder if AI would break even on power consumption if we hooked a generator up to Turing and Church's corpses while they spin in their graves.

2024-08-06 19:48:59

Huh.
I'd never have thought of this, but huh.
https://www.thestar.com/real-estate/this-apartment-building-needed-new-balcony-railings-so-the-landlord-put-in-solar-panels/article_3dadd012-3327-11ef-92a6-9fd197b72ef9.html

2024-08-06 17:24:34

Lazyweb, I would like to have "Flickr" as an option in the share menu of Photos.
Is there a way, on MacOS, to share straight to Flickr from Photos? The Flickr Uploader is not that thing, it wants entire folders. The iOS app keeps uploading duplicates whenever I touch it.

2024-08-06 16:57:21

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That and more.
My audio experience on a current-gen MBP is that coreaudiod needs to be killed-as-in-signal-nine a few times a week. Something seems to have gone pretty wrong in that corner of MacOS.

2024-08-06 16:49:54

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"A high school gym teacher should be allowed to strip search your daughter if he thinks she's too good at sports" is _super fucking weird_. It is incredibly creepy.

2024-08-06 14:54:38

Tired: Shitty people faking negative covid tests so they can wander around maskless and be a threat of infection to themselves and others.
Wired: Sensible people keeping fake _positive_ covid tests on hand so they can wander around with masks on and mitigate the risk of infection to themselves and others.

2024-08-04 13:05:09

I should probably not own one, but these new BMW CE-04 electric scooters look... very very nice.
https://www.bmwmotorcycles.com/en/models/urban_mobility/ce04.html#/section-design-for-a-new-era

2024-08-03 20:32:15

Syncraati, a new console font inspired by old-school vector-graphics games and a particular flavor of vintage sci-fi computer interfaces.
https://github.com/mhoye/syncraati
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/899/984/204/808/663/original/11da898738c19904.png

2024-08-03 12:46:49

Anyone who thinks self-driving cars have a shot has never driven in a Canadian winter or an Italian summer.

2024-08-03 11:57:14

TIL that the targets in that 10m air pistol event that we're all making memes about are... not large. Cyborg Murder Lady and Bored Hitman Dad are punching 4mm holes in a 2cm ring from 10m away.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/897/937/712/830/096/original/7d2d0e9fcd78dae5.png

2024-08-03 11:14:16

Oh, Cloudflare. Why is it that cutting off the Daily Stormer was this big difficult head-scratcher of a philosophical decision for you, but cutting off a site that parodied a business partner was routine?
https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-cloudflare/
https://mastodon.social/@npub1lcc…lcye/112894411013408217

2024-07-19 14:57:14

oh no
If your bitlocker recovery keys are also stored on an afflicted windows system you might just be unrecoverably screwed.
I hope this "reboot fifteen times" rumor turns out to be true because otherwise a lot of crowdstrike customers will be rebuilding their infrastructure from scratch this week.
https://www.404media.co/to-fix-crowdstrike-blue-screen-of-death-simply-reboot-15-straight-times-microsoft-says/

2024-07-04 12:33:52

You'd have to be thoroughly disconnected from nature to have any questions about animal sentience or sapience. I just watched a squirrel find a feather, start waving it around like it's a sword and then go show it to another squirrel, and this is all going on in a Toronto back yard.

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.

2024-06-18 13:24:40

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SystemD is for landlords.
The whole system makes sense when your realize that SystemD's only constituency is people who want to rent out computers. Not for people who want to live under a their own roof, maybe in a community, to maybe build something together.
SystemD is just software for landlords.

2024-06-18 13:18:57

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Look, "/home is a tempfile" isn't just a footgun, or a bug.
It's an explicit ideological attack on the whole idea of what Linux is and who Linux is for.
If /home is just a tempfile to be purged when drivespace pressure hits some arbitrary threshold then Linux is a corporate-owned SAAS shim, and that's all it is. It's not just "breaking userspace", it's abandoning the idea that the people using that space and the stuff they've made there matter at all.

2024-06-18 13:01:55

https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/112637213238431183
A friend of mine joked when this came to light the other day that we should start the timer to see how long it would be before some SystemD person crawled out of the woodwork to say that was expected behavior and you're an idiot for using it wrong. And we laughed to ourselves, wouldn't that would be funny, that really is the reputation they have now isn't it.
Well, jokes on us, because that's the first fucking comment on the bug.
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/33349
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/637/692/489/628/143/original/9a73133d0254d35e.png

2024-06-17 23:17:43

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That's where booting from CDs and later USB keys got its start too.

2024-06-17 19:37:54

kinda want: https://www.punkt.ch/en/products/mp02-4g-mobile-phone/

2024-06-17 18:15:06

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Whoever is doing the writing at the FTC is doing outstanding work, I had no idea: https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2023/02/keep-your-ai-claims-check

2024-06-17 18:10:46

This is really good.
https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2024/06/succor-borne-every-minute

2024-06-17 15:16:40

A real question. Let's say I want to consider an Android device, and I would like to have:
1) Confidence that I can install a current-gen, getting-updates, not-preshipped-abandonware version of Android on it, and
2) The ability to replace the battery in it (screwdriver OK, heat gun not ok), and
4) Some hope of being able to buy a protective case for it.
What are my options here, if any? Samsung something or other? Xiaomi something. Last I looked the answer here was "pixel or nothing".

2024-06-14 19:13:33

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I don't buy that; any diff/patch pair is necessarily domain dependent, not necessarily wire-format dependent. There's no reason "contract diff" and "contract patch" couldn't understand the necessities of contracts vs bare text.

2024-06-14 15:30:29

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My friend @npub1s46…x4k5 has argued, and I am absolutely ready to believe, that you can divide the entire computational universe into "has diff and patch or doesn't", and that people living without it don't even have the language to recognize how bad they've got it, how many opportunities to share and collaborate have been silently denied them.
Word processors, spreadsheets, slides? "Track changes" is _trash_ by comparison. No programmer would consent to live the way we make office workers live.

2024-06-14 15:20:46

I haven't seen anybody mentioning it or even noticing it, like it's just the water we swim in now, but this month marks the fiftieth anniversary of the release of what would become a seminal, and is arguably the single most important, piece of social software ever created.
Written by Douglas McIlroy and James Hunt and released with the 5th Edition of Unix this month in 1974: diff.
https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V5/usr/source/s1/diff1.c

2024-06-14 11:58:14

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Weirdly enough, Excel is probably the best evidence that learning to code really can empower people, entirely on the backs of mostly under-recognized, mostly pink-collar employees getting handed a smalltalk-inspired programming environment largely by accident.
Excel created a whole secret class of hidden programmers by sneaking a macro language into what used to be a basic calculation-and-display utility, and that whole stack became critical global infrastructure almost immediately.

2024-06-12 19:01:19

Math is the secret language of nature, and both are full of beautiful symmetries.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/605/191/479/968/532/original/d85f96f2d0604b8d.png

2024-06-11 17:25:24

If we can't have bananas without death squads or chocolate without slavery then maybe we just can't have bananas or chocolates and that's OK.
https://earthrights.org/media_release/colombian-victims-win-historic-verdict-over-chiquita-jury-finds-banana-company-liable-for-financing-death-squads/

2024-06-11 01:33:59

Decades ago, somebody working through a systems problem with me said 'Lag always shows up in the keyboard first.' It sounded like a koan, and I don't think I understood it at the time. But it stayed with me, and it's become more true the more I've learned.

2024-06-10 13:17:07

90's computing: documentation is a waste of time, learn to read code.
2000's computing: we value working software over comprehensive documentation.
2010's computing: SAAS cloud API RPC warrgarble
2020's computing: You have more CPU in your lap and maybe your pocket than existed in the world in 1990, an impossibly powerful math furnace at your immediate disposal, at a whim. Learning the details of how to put it to your purposes is a sheer cliff face for some mysterious, indiscernible reason.

2024-06-08 23:28:57

In light of the recent revelations about agile practices - https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/05/agile_failure_rates/ - I would like to propose an alternative: https://waluigilemanifesto.org

2024-06-05 14:34:02

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I fixed my car charger a few weeks ago by disabling its account on a server somewhere, because charging my car is incompatible with disabling background data use on my phone.

2024-06-04 19:31:58

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those aren’t stickers. That’s a modified MNT Reform, a temple that I have erected to my own idiosyncrasies.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/560/009/025/542/024/original/684654de82d527fd.jpeg

2024-06-04 18:41:36

Watching myself talk is always agonizing, but Carol is such a great speaker and her team's research on code review anxiety and what you can do about it is so good.
Anxiety around code review is an absolutely pervasive part of the experience of being a developer on a team, for people of any degree of experience, and it doesn't need to be that way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GGQIdFJRtc

2024-05-30 01:54:16

Eyes up, developers, a new social engineering attack just dropped: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/cybercriminals-pose-as-helpful-stack-overflow-users-to-push-malware/

2024-05-29 02:32:57

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average EV sales in collapse factoid actualy just statistical error. average EV sales increasing big. Fuckups Georg, who lives on a jet and eats over 10,000 ketamines each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

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

2024-05-28 17:15:50

There is only one thing that I disagree with in @npub1hr7…jxyc 's excellent article on "the deskilling of webdev" - https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/the-deskilling-of-web-dev-is-harming-us-all/ - but I feel like it is a significant omission.
Baldur even touches on it here, earlier in the year, but doesn't explicitly connect the dots: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/react-electron-llms-labour-arbitrage/
It's the passive voice of the title.
Development isn't mysteriously becoming deskilled. It is _actively being directed, to manage the employment market,_ by the largest players in that market.

2024-05-28 15:20:27

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There's a bunch of existing work on this, but it sort of looks like most organized efforts have sort of given up on the idea of caring about or trusting printers.

2024-05-28 13:46:06

I thought this was widely known, but I suppose not:
https://438punk.house/@xyhhx/112507818857555419
There's also code built into printers, scanners and close-source image editors programs that recognizes currency and prevents you from scanning, printing or manipulating images of money.
Remember, there's no such thing as "printers" or "scanners". There are only computers, often network-connected, that happen to have printing and scanning features.
https://youtu.be/1c-jBfZPVv4

2024-05-22 12:59:50

As always, domestic abuse is _the_ flagship infosec threat model, the one where the victim has the least resources, the least recourse, where they're closest to immediate physical harm.
That this industry has failed at and mostly abandoned the idea of even pretending to try dealing with a threat model that's difficult and unprofitable and mostly hurts women is not news, but this new Windows Recall feature is next-level professional negligence.

2024-05-17 17:42:53

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I didn't have any debt or use a credit card for a few years, and when I went to apply for a mortgage one guy flat out just said "I've never seen anything like this, before, but according to this you don't exist."

2024-05-10 16:37:48

It’s weird to think that anyone would care what Dorsey thinks after his time at Twitter was defined entirely by his visionless absentee leadership.
True story, Zuckerberg stole that line about their driving a clown car into a gold mine from me.

2024-05-10 16:12:37

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The old thinking was that you should be rotating your gender every 90 days for security reasons but that’s proven to be an ineffective approach. Modern best practices are to use a unique and complex gender for every interaction, to avoid repetition and store them in a secure gender manager. This makes it easier to change genders when one relationship is compromised, and protects you against gender-stuffing attacks.

2024-05-03 13:14:26

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If you're in a sufficiently dominant position the only difference between neglect and sabotage is patience.

2024-05-03 13:05:44

"reCAPTCHA is broken for [some|most|all] Windows users"
This is your periodic reminder that nothing the Chrome team or anyone at Google says about "loving the web" or "caring about the web" matters at all, because nobody at Google tests anything on any browser but Chrome.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/377/290/522/277/352/original/93f52296d1953097.png

2024-05-03 02:02:57

Is there any wiki software out there that integrates well with activitypub? Plenty have RSS...

2024-04-30 18:39:47

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I’ve drilled out the side plates on my Reform to make room for a much better antenna, and the extra space to do that in the panel rather than drilling out the entire case is much appreciated.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/361/622/129/837/803/original/18c27e850e222653.jpeg

2024-04-30 14:29:22

somebody just showed me a development strategy calling itself "waterfall agile", which they shortened to "wagile", if you were holding out hope that anyone in this field has any idea what they're doing

2024-04-22 21:14:04

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Devs sometimes talk about being "close to the metal" but there is no other software engineering team in the world right now that are simultaneously working as close to and as far away from the metal as the people keeping Voyager working.

2024-04-22 21:06:22

Just a staggering engineering feat. Absolutely incredible.
https://blogs.nasa.gov/voyager/2024/04/22/nasas-voyager-1-resumes-sending-engineering-updates-to-earth/

2024-04-16 17:11:53

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But the real reason wasn't that he made a donation to some reprehensible cause.
The real reason he lost his job was because he showed everyone who mattered that when the chips were down - and I mean, 100%, the whole table is all the way in, down - that he'd put his own pride or vanity or who gives a fuck what ahead of the continued existence of the company and the mission.
He lost his job because he made a bet that he was more important than the possible end of Mozilla and he lost that bet.

2024-04-16 17:09:39

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Now, I have some feelings, still today, about that situation. That bullshit graph he's aired out about Mitchell's salary versus market share carefully omits the fact that he was CTO for most of that time, presiding over a long period of technical stagnation and market decline, and had never directly managed more than a handful of people in his career. It wasn't until years later under new leadership with Firefox 57, the Quantum release, that Firefox became performance-competitive again.

2024-04-16 17:06:39

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After what I'm told was a few days of very difficult negotiation under extraordinary pressure, both internal and external, a deal was struck. The plan was that Eich make an announcement, apologizing for his "mistake" and making some public-benefit commitment about inclusivity, importance of diversity, etc.
Half the board resigned.
But he takes his public drubbing, apologizes and gets his company. The structure of the organization survives, the mission lives.
At the last minute, he reneged.

2024-04-16 17:03:36

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At the time, maybe still today, the largest-by-far donors supporting the Foundation were a financially-very-successful gay couple, I believe New York-based financiers whose names escape me, and who IIRC had the ears of a number of other prominent donors. A significant chunk of the Foundation's even-then modest budget came from that, and when this blew up, it put the entire financial structure of Mozilla as a not-beholden-to-shareholders, privately-held-by-a-not-for-profit entity at risk.

2024-04-16 17:00:40

Since I see that a notable VC-famous jerk is now telling us that he wish he'd "stood by" Eich way back, I'd like to tell you a true fact: Eich didn't lose the CEO's job for his (reprehensible) Prop-8 donation.
Everyone wants to believe that's true, because fits nicely into useful narratives a number of invested camps want to champion, whether it's somebody being ousted for reprehensible views or the woke SJW mob somehow pulling down a great leader (tm) but that's not what happened.

2024-04-16 13:02:21

Has anyone, in their entire existence, ever had an app tell you they have a "fresh new look" and thought, "oh good".

2024-04-13 22:26:03

Hear me out: chupacapybarabra.

2024-04-11 14:37:51

Julienne an onion, whatever type you like, then put it in a tupperware with a tablespoon of salt and shake it vigorously.
Then put it in the fridge to sit at least a few hours. It will come out softened and delicious and it's your new favorite sandwich topping.
It's so simple, but salting onions ahead of time takes a lot of the sharp edge off, brings out a lot of flavor and sweetness. Very little, prep time is negligible, keeps a while, it's really good.

2024-04-09 11:55:38

As you are no doubt aware, but I am nevertheless obligated to remind you: people.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/241/133/560/044/829/original/e3a775089e97fdeb.png

2024-04-08 01:32:08

For as long has he could remember Old McDonald was haunted by the vowels in Celine Dion's name.

2024-04-04 17:00:15

The most important thing about A and AAAA DNS records is that they're also the noises you make when you realize the problem is DNS again.

2024-04-02 23:03:37

We should be about 1000% more suspicious than we are of the companies that insist on calling a small army of underpaid south asian or african people a "technology".
https://gizmodo.com/amazon-reportedly-ditches-just-walk-out-grocery-stores-1851381116

2024-04-01 14:40:00

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I've got this in an upcoming publication:
"Every line of code written today represents a testing, complexity, maintenance and refactoring burden your team will bear tomorrow, and the reality is that none of our customers want code. Our customers want _utility and functionality;_ code is a liability we accept so we can deliver that functionality. GenAI or not, nobody wants or needs an arbitrary quantity of code for its own sake."

2024-03-31 13:01:32

Sad prediction: as long as disaster is averted by the heroic efforts of unpaid volunteers, people who measure success in dollars will consider the system to be working correctly as is, so because it was caught before it could do catastrophic damage by volunteer effort, the xv revelation will not result in structural change.

2024-03-25 00:10:44

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We can and have argued all day about the vagaries of different licenses, but... Free software, open source software, all of these things that pervade and underpin modern computing only exist because of effort, expertise and insight that were _given_.
AI only works because those same things were taken.

2024-03-25 00:07:10

It struck me on a walk today that the reason I find the ideas of “open source” being used to describe AI, why I’m uncomfortable even using it myself, is that it’s the first software tool I can think of that only works at all because of labour contributed without the contributor’s consent.

2024-03-21 16:31:26

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"Attacker has local access already" seems like a high bar to clear and you're probably screwed in a bunch of other ways if that's already happened, and there just aren't all that many M chips running in the kind of aggressively-multitenant environments that made Spectre and Meltdown such a disaster, so....

2024-03-21 16:23:46

A lot of people are cutting out out the "when executing cryptographic operations" part of the phrase "could drastically degrade M-series performance when executing cryptographic operations", and glossing over the parts where it says "The researchers don’t yet know what kind of penalty will occur when this performance optimization is turned off" and "For browsers and many other types of apps, the performance cost may not be noticeable" for the rageclicks today.
https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/03/hackers-can-extract-secret-encryption-keys-from-apples-mac-chips/

2023-07-30 13:55:32

"Now today, of course, you say, well, why don’t you encode the signal? We can’t encode the signal because we can’t use 100 vacuum tubes."
I live for this kind of retrotech writing: https://www.theverge.com/23810061/zenith-space-command-remote-control-button-of-the-month

2023-07-19 15:24:21

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The Singularity crowd are out here believing that they're going to create this superintelligent being on a healthy diet of its own excrement, what they're going to get is a fountain of unintelligible epistemological-shitpost word-slurry, and you _have to know_ they're going to start drinking from their gibberish spigot and saying, I don't understand this at all it makes no sense, oh my god this machine must be _too smart_.

2022-12-22 14:43:53

I think it’s important to repeat: you don't "have something to hide" when you put blinds on your windows or close the door when you're on the can or wear clothes.
Privacy isn't about having something to hide. It's not about keeping secrets. It's about you being the person who chooses what you reveal about yourself, and when, and to who, and the other word we have for that is "dignity". Your inherent dignity, as a human being.
Your privacy is the agency you have over your dignity.

2020-08-28 18:43:19

Try our app, it's exactly like our website down to the pixel except for how it accesses your contacts, location, microphone, pictures and camera and it's not always nagging you to try our app.