varx/social

This is the less tech-y, more social alt for https://infosec.exchange/@varx — but it's still going to be full of nerd stuff, naturally.

software developer ␥ security nut ␥ tree-hugging dirt-worshipper ␥ probably cooking right now

Public Key

npub1xxwecrckmctr680xr2ymp0a50sq5mddk802pu787qk8xuxax93vsrz3578

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varx@cybersecurity-theater.mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsrr8vuputdu93arhnp4zdsh768cq2dkkmrh4q70rlqtrnwrwnzckgpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0wd68ytnsw43qz9nhwden5te0wfjkccte9ec8y6tdv9kzumn9wsfcwqts

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relay.primal.net

Author Public Key

npub1xxwecrckmctr680xr2ymp0a50sq5mddk802pu787qk8xuxax93vsrz3578

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Last Notes

2025-04-21 13:02:13

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@nprofile…aesc Days since putting a space in a filename caused a problem for me: [23].
Still a problem. -.-

2025-04-21 01:09:25

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@nprofile…tw8a I believe the standard response would be "you should be using a dedicated coding assistant like Copilot".
...at least, that's the standard response every time I've complained about ChatGPT fucking up most of the code questions I've thrown at it.
Not really worth my time to figure out how to experiment with that, though, as I have no plan on using it even if it is moderately effective.

2025-04-21 01:03:58

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@nprofile…4gn7 Honestly at this point they should have just gone full "Cool S".

2025-04-20 22:38:25

Just tried one of these new Cosmic Crisp apples. 7/10.
Crisp, with an *extremely* good "snap" to the bite. Moderately sweet, a bit tart.
But not a lot of actual flavor? Not as satisfying as an Ashmead's Kernel or an Albemarle Pippin.

2025-04-20 21:20:19

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@nprofile…5pxs Fantastic!
My kid needed an hour or two of lessons from a biking school. One thing the instructor said is that training wheels actually teach leaning in the wrong direction, and that it has to be unlearned. (We tried a balance bike, but she didn't like it.) Not entirely sure I'm convinced, but it was interesting to consider.
I find it fascinating how different people's experiences go with taking off the training wheels. So much variation.

2025-04-19 12:54:58

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@nprofile…0747 I wonder how this compares to the chimerical colors you can get from afterimages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color#Chimerical_colors

2025-04-15 20:19:13

Been thinking about this Pictures for Sad Children comic lately, but with an update.
https://files.cybersecurity.theater/media_attachments/files/114/343/808/579/911/984/original/eb041453bd574bf2.png

2025-04-13 18:15:11

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@nprofile…udnc @nprofile…args (Actually I might be thinking of scale butt juice? But it's kind of the same deal.)

2025-04-13 18:12:42

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@nprofile…nz9s Also a bunch of software will autoconvert -- into — anyhow. -.-

2025-04-13 18:03:28

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@nprofile…udnc @nprofile…args Way ahead of you, it's pretty good.
I mean, not a ton of flavor, mostly just sweet? But I like sweet.

2025-04-13 02:54:05

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@nprofile…kuxx I'm curious what languages you've tried. Rust? Haskell? Erlang? Idris? Lots of different ways of thinking about computation.

2025-04-13 02:50:48

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@nprofile…ndxc This is the kind of ridiculous name that I would suggest on a whim and then spend the next 10 minutes trying to convince people not to actually use.

2025-04-09 23:43:51

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@nprofile…4gn7 Craigslist, I assume.

2025-04-09 02:08:21

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@nprofile…fq0p Depleted topsoil, even. With agricultural practices the way they've been, I think the best miracle you could hope for is a kiosk selling Zunes.

2025-04-08 15:27:17

Collect all the types of guy:
https://www.tokyoweekender.com/entertainment/middle-aged-man-trading-cards-go-viral-in-japan/

2025-04-08 15:10:08

Contact pages in...
2015: "Include this word so I know you're human"
2025: "Include a muffin recipe" (so I know you're a bot)

2025-04-08 15:08:55

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@nprofile…xucl But like... imagine leading people into a McDonald's and going into a speech about its 400 year history, pointing out the various architectural features and their significance.

2025-04-08 01:35:39

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@nprofile…hst7 From the US: Keep it up!

2025-04-08 01:24:52

Great news! The webcomic NPWIL (Nine Planets Without Intelligent Life) has rebooted!
https://www.bohemiandrive.com/101
NPWIL was a lovely comic by Kit Roebuck, set in a world after humans died out and all that was left was robots roaming the solar system, a bit at loose ends and left to form their own culture. Specifically, it was a road trip comic.
Many years later, we're getting a prequel. Some backstory on that: https://www.bohemiandrive.com/updates/npwil-101
#webcomic #NPWIL #comics

2025-04-06 23:43:38

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@nprofile…geku ...man, what is going ON in the alt text on this one?

2025-04-06 23:21:12

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@nprofile…xucl ...I want to do tours like this, but as a bit.

2025-04-04 19:57:00

I want to believe that the people protesting Tesla have also closed their accounts at Twitter, Musk's other consumer company.

2025-03-22 03:45:19

given enough bugs, all eyes are shallow

2025-03-22 01:03:14

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@nprofile…raeq Use three spaces. You won't have any anxiety over whether people will be mad at you; you will know it for a fact in advance. :-)

2025-03-19 21:27:05

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The shamrock actually has three leaves, but in the US you often see a four-leaf clover used in lazy St. Patrick's Day imagery.
The three leaves of the shamrock have been used to symbolize the trinity. My daughter suggested a possible meaning for the erroneous fourth leaf, appropriate to the US context.

2025-03-19 21:25:08

Fun St. Patrick's Day fact!
The four-leaved shamrock symbolizes the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost, and Binge Drinking.

2025-03-18 00:46:16

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@nprofile…rggv Oh yeah, it's definitely disappointing, particularly the NAT situation.

2025-03-17 23:54:25

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@nprofile…rggv I'm curious, what's your basis for this observation?

2025-03-17 14:11:51

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@nprofile…fres Just talked to the bank, and it turns out even they can't dispute the charge until it posts. (Which they will apparently be able to do for me, at least.) So it must be some kind of limitation within the system, not just a "UI" issue.

2025-03-17 13:25:46

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@nprofile…f6cv That they do! I'd prefer if they emailed me PDFs, but that's not an option.
I have to choose between A) paper statements, which require a lot of handling and some resources but are easily archived and allow reasonably fast lookups, and B) getting emailed a notification that I can log into a website and download a PDF, which is somehow even *more* manual and means I can easily fail to get one of the statements.

2025-03-17 02:54:01

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@nprofile…rwce I think in that situation I'd try to use my bank's bill pay, which entails them sending out a paper check. Surely that costs them a reasonable amount to process... :-)

2025-03-17 02:06:15

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@nprofile…rwce I wonder if it's actually cheaper for them to process mailed-in checks or whatever, or if they're so sure that people will just eat the fee and continue to use credit cards that they're not concerned about that?

2025-03-16 23:04:04

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I was hoping to find a user or service manual for the microwave (Panasonic NN-S563WF) that would describe the expected power draw with more clarity, but the service manual I did find is really weird.
I think it's for the New Zealand version of this model, plus various others? Anyway, it's for 240V, but it says 1120W power requirement and 1200W output which seems *highly* improbable. 🙃

2025-03-16 22:58:18

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The microwave situation has grown more mysterious.
The front says "1350W". But that could either be the power draw or the nominal food heating rate. Probably the latter?
The back says "for use on 60 Hz, 12.7A, 120V AC only". Does that mean that that is the average power draw on high? Or the max draw? Something else? In any case, it works out to 1524W.
A 15A circuit should only take 80% load continuously, which is 12A (1440W). That's lower than the 12.7A listed on the back...

2025-03-16 22:30:08

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@nprofile…mj4q I haven't used bencode, but I've been pretty happy with CBOR in that space as well.
(I started out with msgpack, but I like that CBOR uses ASCII for the most common type/size prefixes.)

2025-03-16 22:06:14

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@nprofile…xucl On "protect your number", I think most people don't know why, until very recently, it was standard for cards to have the name and number embossed on the front. I'm just old enough to have seen a device that used a roller and carbon paper to allow a merchant to make a copy of the info.
So then both merchant and customer had paper with the card info to worry about: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Credit_card_receipt_-_old_style.jpg

2025-03-16 16:30:38

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@nprofile…xucl I actually only use this card for one thing these days, a monthly 60 cent charge from AWS. (I think the charge actually gets cancelled some months because it is so small? Weird stuff on the statements.)
Most everything else I use privacy.com for, which gives me merchant-locked cards.
And in person? I pay cash. :-)

2025-03-16 16:28:31

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@nprofile…59dk @nprofile…pqrf They do say in quantum mechanics that the act of measurement alters the system. However, they haven't been able to pin down what exactly qualifies as a "measurement".
Maybe now we know.

2025-03-16 16:12:56

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@nprofile…z0ay Oh! Maybe I misunderstood—this wasn't your card? You were the merchant receiving the fraudulent payment and trying to notify the bank of this?

2025-03-16 16:04:00

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@nprofile…z0ay At that point, I believe the correct steps involve filing a complaint about the bank with their regulator.
They are *terrified* of their regulators and will absolutely take notice.
(Even saying that you are going to contact the FTC, CFPB, and the bank's regulator may be enough to grease the wheels a bit.)

2025-03-16 16:00:50

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@nprofile…z0ay I wouldn't call it a trap, but I would say that it was overly complicated.
(In contrast, I once had to dispute a charge from Patreon because I was locked out of the site and couldn't contact them either, and *that* involved a lot of back and forth, because I was indeed the one who had set up payments to begin with. It took like 3-4 back-and-forths before I prevailed!)

2025-03-16 15:59:14

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@nprofile…z0ay The dispute process was a bit weird. I received the form, then saw the charge had already been reversed. I filled out and sent in the form anyhow.
A couple weeks later, I got another letter asking me to confirm some stuff, and filled out and returned that one. And that's the last I heard of it.
Mostly it was just "I swear this wasn't me", and the merchant accepted the chargeback because the order details didn't match me at all.

2025-03-16 15:56:44

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@nprofile…z0ay Oh, I haven't tried contacting the merchant at all, and I won't unless the bank tells me to—there's a good chance the bank will just reverse or decline the charge on my word.
I might have to go through that rigamarole, depending on what the bank says. Here's how it went for me before:
1. Call bank, bank says to contact merchant.
2. Call merchant, they send me the transaction details.
3. Call bank and provide that info; they cancel the card and send a dispute form.

2025-03-16 15:52:59

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@nprofile…fres I called two different numbers. The first one I mentioned was Visa, from the back of the card. The second one I mentioned was the bank itself.

2025-03-16 15:52:20

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@nprofile…fres It's possible they don't want phone calls about it, but there should be some channel by which the cardholder can provide a signal that feeds into the fraud detection engine that early in the process.

2025-03-16 15:39:03

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One might think there would be a way in the credit card website to report a suspicious transaction.
And indeed, there's "dispute transaction", but only for transactions that have already posted. This one has been authorized but is still "pending", so there's no such button.

2025-03-16 15:35:02

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In a delightful twist of irony, I've just seen a small, suspicious transaction come through on that card. Someone has the number and is testing if it's valid.
I tried calling the number on the back, but it was useless; I could only either check my balance information or report the card as lost or stolen.
I then tried calling my bank, but of course they're closed on Sunday.
I guess preventing fraud has to wait until Monday.

2025-03-16 15:23:36

Just made the discovery that every single one of my credit card statements contains the full card number printed along the bottom. So now they're all hazardous waste and have to be shredded.
I contacted the bank to ask about this, and they said this is under Visa's control.
Well... I guess the liability is mostly with them anyhow, so maybe I can just recycle these as I would other old papers.

2025-03-15 22:45:54

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@nprofile…8als Very weird. I was able to view your profile just fine. And the RedditSafety post claimed it would just be warnings, although maybe that has changed now?
They've been doing a lot of shit with LLMs, so maybe what's actually happening here is that they're trying to use AI to ban/shadowban people, and it's failing in the predictable ways.

2025-03-15 22:43:52

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@nprofile…8als Thanks, that's... fascinating and bizarre. The RedditSafety post gives some interesting context, but *wow*, what a terrible policy.

2025-03-15 22:36:30

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@nprofile…vsfg pretty sure that's lu

2025-03-15 22:34:59

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@nprofile…8als Banned site-wide, but the comment is still up? Also, I don't see new moderation policies on the site. (Is it just the subreddit?)

2025-03-12 02:14:47

Oh yeah? You and what footy?

2025-03-11 03:13:44

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@nprofile…uvtp My current understanding of him is that he operates on a "purity of body" moral framework (among other things, of course). He doesn't care about the actual science, but sometimes his ideas line up with reality and sometimes they don't. So you get the whole-foods thing on the one hand and the anti-vax stuff on the other.
It's always weird to find myself agreeing with someone reprehensible. It's even weirder when we don't agree on *why* we agree...
#uspol #rfk

2025-03-03 14:11:45

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@nprofile…jt29 License expiration emergencies are the funniest problem to me in the corporate environment.
The predictable linear progression of time: Still not a solved problem.

2025-03-02 17:55:32

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@nprofile…qa2d @nprofile…sp4m I almost accidentally ate one of these when I had a bag of potato chips in the other hand.

2025-03-02 17:53:30

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@nprofile…ds5x Good heads-up on Wasabi's minimum... not too onerous, but more than I would have expected. But then I also noticed they limit you to egress equaling your storage per month! Not sure I'd exceed that, but hard to know, so probably not a good fit.
I'm curious if any of these scale *down* very well. One of my use-cases is 18 GB of files, and I just want an S3-like API for convenience—I'm not really into it for the scale! (Another use-case might go multi-TB, but has other constraints.)

2025-03-02 13:01:46

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@nprofile…dk3a Oh sweet, I hadn't considered that it could be adaptive! I guess you get some talkback from the piece when you hit the right frequencies. :-)

2025-03-01 22:08:15

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@nprofile…dk3a For vibration testing, I imagine you then have to explore a pretty broad space of different combinations of spherical harmonics if you want to really be sure stuff isn't going to unscrew itself... :-/

2025-03-01 15:10:41

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@nprofile…ds5x I don't need a ton of storage space, but I have been looking at moving away from Amazon S3. What I actually need is an S3-like API that can serve a basic HTTPS website. Any personal recommendations on that front, or is that not an aspect you've explored much?

2025-03-01 00:40:30

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@nprofile…jqvx @nprofile…83fc And then the inverse is to middle-click on a bookmark folder. :-)

2025-02-28 22:37:46

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@nprofile…jqvx "///" means "this is a docstring for the thing that *follows*", while "//!" means "this is a docstring for the thing I'm *inside of*".
https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/comments.html#examples

2025-02-26 05:27:52

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@nprofile…pqrf You know how larger grocery stores will have "ethnic" sections? (Italian, Indian, etc.) The one closest to me has a tiny little British section! Branston Pickle is one of the items. :-)

2025-02-11 23:21:04

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@nprofile…sjm8 incredible

2025-02-11 12:13:39

@nprofile…jasp Hey there, any idea what's up with better.boston? Been down for a few days. Need any help?

2025-02-10 03:14:01

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@nprofile…zdxn @nprofile…gk57 One of ours has a mesh screen on top and sometimes big flat bubbles get trapped under it and you can sort of squish them around. They don't go through the mesh because surface tension! Endless fun.

2025-02-09 16:31:40

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@nprofile…gk57 I strongly recommend that anyone who is thinking of setting up a rain barrel go take a look at https://www.bluebarrelsystems.com/ and how they do it—*before* acquiring a barrel.
Their system requires an intact barrel, no holes cut into the top. The idea is you use the barrel upside down, plumbed from underneath. This ends up solving a whole bunch of problems all at once, but it does require different sourcing.

2025-02-09 16:30:18

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@nprofile…gk57 Yeah, they're great and I would absolutely recommend them, but it's harder in areas that get cold—we have to empty and drain them in the winter.
I could set one up in the basement and fill it with water as a reservoir, but it's not going to serve the same function.

2025-02-07 22:47:50

Some days you're the beetle, and some days you're the dung.

2025-02-07 14:04:44

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@nprofile…pw4j Escort. I believe it's legal in most or all of the US.
I think it's usually (but not always) "sexy companionship" but as long as it doesn't actually involve sex of some kind, it doesn't fall under prostitution.

2025-02-06 23:53:01

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@nprofile…pw4j I thought that was already legal.

2024-12-27 19:02:30

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@nprofile…mj4q Well, that relationship ended quickly. 🤦‍♂️

2024-12-27 19:02:30

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@nprofile…mj4q Well, that relationship ended quickly. 🤦‍♂️

2024-12-25 16:54:09

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@nprofile…mj4q 8 grams for an 80 kg animal? Actually sounds pretty reasonable for a bulk mineral used for ion exchange (if I'm understanding the uses correctly).