khm

slacker / overachiever

supercomputing engineer at a national lab. occasional 9front helper. part-time bureaucrat

"His personality is forceful but not objectionable" -- Tri-City Herald

Public Key

npub1qfqy2ll3tkakzur0gaep442ya4unu0wd5syfvmzdkhn2y7pyn3pseslsc4

NIP-05 Address

khm_at_hj.9fs.net@mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsqysz90lc4mwmpwph5wus664zw67f78hx6gzykd3xmte4z0qjfcscd7pwjq

Author Public Key

npub1qfqy2ll3tkakzur0gaep442ya4unu0wd5syfvmzdkhn2y7pyn3pseslsc4

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Last Notes

2024-11-20 19:34:05

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if she fit well into a unix world she wouldn't be 9-affiliated
CC: @nprofile…6e20

2024-11-18 21:34:11

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I've heard tooot works but there's a simpler alternative
CC: @nprofile…3mvx
https://hj.9fs.net/khm/s/c6db6e8307fa4fa4663677edddb2f65e.gif

2024-11-18 18:47:14

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https://hj.9fs.net/khm/s/fc6321f236d740c285aae26649dd49b9.png

2024-11-18 18:27:49

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mastodon is just one activitypub server. snac2 is links-friendly by default and fully interoperable with the whole fediverse. I can follow Lemmy threads with it, for example.
bluesky has one (1) at-protocol implementation; they promise to fund others, but only via github sponsorships and aws credits. I have been looking and cannot find anyone who has taken them up on this. but hey, you can login to flipboard with it!
CC: @nprofile…35tj

2024-11-18 01:33:46

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"bluesky" and "bsky" are excellent additions to any mute list

2024-11-17 17:03:57

Just about time to start posting anti cat-v articles

2024-11-15 16:16:59

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recent snac2 release contained a fix to work better with links
the world is healing

2024-11-14 22:36:50

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uh
https://universeodon.com/@cryptadamist/113472115447080382
and
https://toad.social/@davetroy/113476788536250587

2024-11-13 21:42:25

I just passed the Google Cloud Digital Leader proctored exam. I have not had a google account in ten years and have never used Google Cloud. They gave me 90 minutes to answer fifty questions; I did it in ten. I am not a particularly smart man but jeez

2024-11-13 19:59:00

I have a doubt
https://hj.9fs.net/khm/s/b11526df2d249b8a1d1368a546af91e4.png

2024-11-13 17:21:21

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you can't take my random forest regression away I just got it

2024-11-12 17:11:21

putting together a Coursera package to teach mastodon users not to reply to anyone who doesn't already follow them

2024-11-12 17:02:01

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good copy, reading five by five

2024-11-08 20:43:07

periodic reminder that you can do this literally whenever, and the world will immediately be a better place
https://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674/

2024-11-03 20:24:15

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this is all aiju's fault

2024-11-03 20:10:37

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>:(

2024-10-27 02:14:26

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have a seat
https://hj.9fs.net/khm/s/0eead04f45adad53e74f8a9d1a1b6efd.jpg

2024-10-23 17:22:08

snac2 now supports account migration? I've heard it works. let me know if you're ready to abandon your .social nightmare and embrace the minimalist activitypub lifestyle

2024-10-22 19:52:24

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I will gladly pay more to an outfit who lists their prices than deal with a weasel

2024-10-19 09:02:11

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git is EXACTLY like sql, in that most computer nerds learn it early enough that they regard it as natural law and they start using it for myriad kinds of shit that doesn't need it at all.
also the implementation details are of interest to absolutely nobody except when they inevitably lead to horrific performance issues, the resolution of which requires such a massive time investment that the person is now emotionally invested in the tooling.
all of which could have been avoided if the industry hadn't collectively abandoned typed and/or structured filesystems, but we sandbagged two entire generations of programmers into expecting almost nothing from their operating system and taking for granted that massive third-party frameworks are the only way to pursue data integrity
also I hate them both

2024-10-18 19:16:08

in a small sandwich shop. worker finishes making a sandwich, puts it in a paper bag, puts the bag in the order pickup area. calls the customer's name. the customer, without looking up from a phone, yells back "WHAT?!"
after a couple of confused seconds, the worker, who had already moved on to other tasks, says "your sandwich is ready"
the customer, still not looking up from the phone, yells "OKAY??" in the most contemptuous possible tone
at this point I, an asshole, cannot contain myself, so I walk over to the customer and say "You're supposed to go pick up the sandwich you ordered, that's why they called your name. Is this your first time buying a sandwich?"
the customer stands up, shoves the phone in a pocket, squares off with me, says "...no," and goes and gets the sandwich. They leave in a huff. Everyone in the room is visibly uncomfortable. I get my coffee and turn to leave, and the phone jerk storms BACK into the room, angrily takes a napkin, and storms back out. As I approach the door, they return AGAIN, snatch up a plastic fork, and storm out AGAIN.
I think maybe it actually was their first time buying a sandwich.

2024-10-07 20:38:03

has anyone made the "who called it a fitbit and not a tamagotchme" joke yet

2024-10-07 20:06:05

one thing that sucks about computers these days but I haven't figured out a pithy way to communicate it to non-nerds:
every time someone requires a smartphone 'app' to use their service
every time someone discontinues the desktop client and replaces it with a massive javascript-based web app
every time someone wants you to scan a qr code
they are offloading work onto you. they're demanding that you pay for things which were previously understood to be something they provided. they're soaking up your battery power, your time, your bandwidth, and they're profiting from it.
the app for your apartment laundry or your dishwasher saves them money on collecting fees, or saves them money by reducing the number of buttons in their product.
the discontinued desktop client (the web app) takes load off their servers and puts it on your computer, or your phone. at the expense of your bandwidth and power.
the restaurant with its 'scan here for the menu' saves the money on printing menus and offloads that cost onto your phone battery.
it's not just a surrender of control. it's not just the injection of the internet into critical paths where it was not before. they're taking your money.

2024-10-07 19:10:20

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few things are so proudly bad

2024-10-07 19:02:32

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this is the first actual benefit to humanity to arise from LLMs

2024-10-07 08:03:55

there's a nutcase on a mailing list who got some pushback after spamming the list and also a github repo with LLM-generated slop
now he's threatening to call people's employers and tell them they were mean to him on the internet
this is an extremely hilarious scenario to think about, some poor soul having to field a random telephone call from some stranger like "hey this guy was mean to me!" "ok sir thank you for telling us we'll have him executed immediately"
but as the thread goes on I'm becoming convinced the guy in question is possibly sliding into some kind of dementia and it's kind of sad
but not sad enough to forgive spamming things with LLM slop

2024-10-05 06:01:08

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the pattern is they latch on to words that have specific meanings, and then construct elaborate mythologies around them, then start charging each other money for props
it's like fanfiction, except they can't discern what is fiction

2024-10-04 23:25:24

today I learned about "tensor rings," just one of the myriad ways the internet is profiting off unhinged boomers
https://tensorsmith.com/
https://www.etsy.com/listing/692199107/smart-meter-protection-braze-welded
https://www.dancingwithwater.com/rings-and-tensor-fields/

2024-10-04 06:59:11

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ahahah she calls out Texas gun laws, the country music industry, christian evangelists, trump, george w bush, cops, and jeff bezos
in ONE SONG
never been prouder to be an iris dement fan, people

2024-10-04 06:45:55

iris dement released a fucken protest record last year and nobody told me
what is the internet even for

2024-09-26 23:08:21

if wordpress disappeared from the internet tomorrow, would anything of value be lost? I thought it's pretty much AI slop, affiliate marketing, and recipe spam

2024-09-20 23:12:25

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I probably talk about this more than anyone wants me to but I'm reminded here of "Godelized language" from Pohl's "The Gold at the Starbow's End", where entire messages are recorded as prime numbers
http://www.sfsfss.com/stories2/Pohl,%20Frederik%20-%20The%20Gold%20at%20the%20Starbow's%20End%20v1.0.htm

2024-09-12 22:10:11

congratulations to ifixit for producing... checks notes
a $300 soldering iron that only works with Chrome

2024-09-10 00:46:44

a Hackernews said that the Reform is too slow to do "real work" and any time I hear someone say that I have to assume their job is five or six degrees of separation from "real work" and they've just completely lost the plot

2024-09-08 00:37:26

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firefox-esr buys you some extra time

2024-09-06 03:46:00

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Many have tried. None have succeeded.

2024-08-28 23:01:00

is anyone aware of any company, anywhere, ever suffering any repercussions for violating the GPL? The most I can see is the Busybox lawsuits, which resulted in meaninglessly-small penalty payments, and the FSF vs Cisco case, which also resulted in nothing that even slowed Cisco down.
I guess what I'm wondering is: what is the actual reason not to just ignore the GPL until you get caught, then pay paltry sums to various nerd bureaucracies and keep truckin'

2024-08-26 15:50:38

my kid, reaching toward me, holding a zip disk: "I found a floppy disk"
I corrected him and told him the difference, but why did I bother? He's never gonna see another of either

2024-07-11 20:24:44

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I run one of the biggest snac2 instances -- all of eighteen users! -- and would be happy to answer any questions you might have. It's quality software developed by a quality person.

2024-06-25 19:51:35

Now that fastmail sucks, who is out there serving email for a living? N.b. if you can only read your email through some bespoke client like hey or protonmail you can sit this conversation out, thanks

2024-06-11 20:18:34

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failures in distributed systems: My Favorite Document: http://sciops.net/information/technology/distributed_computing/
CC: @npub1ym9…lm9y

2024-06-11 17:46:15

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you're muted

2024-06-11 17:16:12

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using a mail client and then discovering it auto-loads images is the worst
I do not understand why any software would have this as its default setting
lookin' at you, Geary

2024-06-11 16:10:59

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the villain in a show set in a school, you say
https://hj.9fs.net/khm/s/435b7295d793c969e0974be4a2b7d4a3.jpg

2024-06-07 21:00:45

did not appreciate the notification that Chocolate and Cheese came out THIRTY YEARS AGO

2024-06-07 15:01:42

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'laser bike lanes' are still around: https://www.niterider.com/products/sentinel-250 and https://ride.lezyne.com/products/laser-drive-rear for example
but the lasers in general just aren't bright enough and even at night they're kinda hard to see.
a friend of the family just has a full-size "BIKES MAY USE ENTIRE LANE" actual road sign bolted to the back of her bike. seems to work.

2024-06-07 06:39:12

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I have one. Happy to answer any questions. It has a Music/Podcasts app but it only plays music you own.
No Signal support. My main phone, the Punkt MP-02, does support Signal via an app called Pigeon. I don't use Signal so I don't know much about it.

2024-06-07 01:14:15

u-boot remains an embarassing shitshow, and there isn't a single ARM vendor who isn't busy making things worse at a steady pace

2024-06-06 07:21:38

watched the Discovery finale. while there was an interminable fistfight, at least the writers remembered to put a story in. just a shame that story culminated in a staggering act of cowardice?
ugh

2024-06-05 20:08:00

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I think 'data hoarder' is a bit of a spectrum where 'taking a screenshot every few seconds and using machine learning to annotate it' is not healthy. Even if that's what someone wanted, this thing provides basically no security for the resulting dataset. Super fragile, dangerous, and the consequences of compromise could be disastrous. It basically turns any hack into a worst-case scenario...

2024-06-05 19:23:58

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it constructs a database on your computer, exposed with a convenient API, such that anyone who gets access to your machine can see what you've been doing on it forever
in the old days we'd call this "spyware"

2024-06-05 17:06:32

they're proud to annouce OpenTorment, a free and open source alternative to the proprietary Torment Nexus technology,
https://github.com/openrecall/openrecall

2024-06-05 06:55:29

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I just guess I'd lean toward classing it as a response to anti-intellectual trends that have ebbed and flowed basically forever. I lived in the South long enough to know that even a brilliant kid turns out to be a dipshit if their parents successfully indoctrinate them against reason.

2024-06-05 06:53:04

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I guess I'm willing to accept that but it puts shit like Wall-E in the same bucket. Any dystopian is going to be subject to that kind of interpretation sooner or later.

2024-06-05 06:38:09

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I always thought it would be a better movie without the intro crap (no need to explain why the future is stupid) but "traced pretty directly to Galton" is ... a hell of a stretch, especially given the rest of Mike Judge's work

2024-06-05 06:19:27

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I don't think it ever nailed down that idiots took over because they were genetically predisposed to idiocy vs it being statistically more likely that one would be raised by idiots into idiocy
in the opening 'family tree' montage there are literal animals in the family tree

2024-06-05 06:12:39

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does it ever actually stake a position in nature vs nurture though

2024-05-18 18:34:34

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can do

2024-05-18 17:56:19

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well I've got a couple x201/x200 machines sitting around with serial ports in their ultrabases. do you have any other desired characteristics for the machine? cos an x40 would do it, but 32-bit processor with no PAE. x200 is core 2 duo, x201 is arrandale I think?

2024-05-18 16:54:13

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I have tons of em. Do they not have ebay where you live now? You can usually pick up an X40 with an ultrabase or a T23 or so for very little money. If not, I can probably arrange something.

2024-05-16 19:06:41

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https://github.com/shlomif/fortune-mod
https://github.com/JKirchartz/fortunes

2024-05-12 23:58:06

an elegant weapon from a more civilized age
https://hj.9fs.net/khm/s/24e15ccf8121159bb6f520f89854d41a.jpg

2024-05-07 06:21:47

does openbsd actually work on the pinebook pro yet
or is it a series of six thousand undocumented steps resulting in an almost-functioning computer
still

2024-05-03 22:34:25

any program that can write to a cache should be able to delete, invalidate, or otherwise clean up that cache without outside interference. don't turn your users into your janitors.

2024-04-19 15:49:32

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quiet, dipshit, I'm talking about you, not asking you for more irrelevant shit

2024-04-16 17:28:52

hey @npub1m9h…rx7g who do you use for printing stickers?

2024-04-15 18:34:57

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Artistic License 2.0!

2024-03-27 18:39:40

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seems pretty irresponsible to just write programs without first getting into millions of dollars of VC debt and/or establishing a global advertising network

2024-03-22 22:02:27

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as I've explained, a software license is what allows you to use software on public roads

2024-03-22 19:26:19

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Found one in the wild. This post: https://hj.9fs.net/khm/p/1711133569.380934
It shows one 'like' -- for which I did not get a notification -- but by the time I was able to get into the logs the only references were here: http://okturing.com/src/19003/body
Could it be because the original 'like' came from another user on the same instance?

2024-03-20 17:55:54

@npub1p77…0jxq some of the users on my snac instance are seeing actions on some posts but aren't getting notifications. e.g. the number of 'likes' will be 5 and they'll only have three notifications about it. Any tips on the best way to debug this?

2024-03-19 18:41:45

Taking career advice from a venture capitalist is like asking a heroin dealer what hobbies to get into

2024-02-29 20:00:17

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oh god why are there still tcsh users
CC: @npub1m7v…qh09

2024-02-28 17:08:20

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I have a question: do you hate the o.g. keyboard or the new one with the classical stagger or both. Also, I could run any tests you might be interested in (I use the original i.MX8MQ card)

2024-02-14 16:46:16

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these things are defined in posix:
1 - process group leader is the signal target, and determines session membership
2 - if the process group leader exits, nothing much happens UNLESS that exit orphans the group (session-wise), in which case the kernel is supposed sighup+sigcont that group
3 - I have no idea, postix speaketh not

2024-02-09 20:51:55

I wrote a thing about how I am running this fediverse instance. People have asked. I do not know why.
http://sciops.net/information/technology/snac2/
tl;dr: it's running under daemontools behind nginx on a FreeBSD server. This configuration is not in the examples provided.
cc @npub1p77…0jxq

2024-02-07 18:06:17

found a whole corner of the fediverse full of people who are just waiting to see which corporate platform ascends as twitter burns. they're just sitting here pining to hand all their data to someone and being extremely vocal about it. they have no material complaints with the fediverse, they just don't think it's real because nobody is selling ads on it, and they're only using it to feed some kind of doomscrolling addiction while they wait for their preferred influencers to tell them where they should doomscroll next
people are fucking weird

2024-02-07 17:55:26

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I bought two coffees for each user of my snac2 instance. snac2 is (as far as I know) the only fediverse microblogging platform which is usable out-of-the-box in the Mothra browser on 9front. I appreciate this software and the design principles used to make it. Thanks for doing it, grunfink!