Howard Chu @ Symas

CTO Symas Corp., Chief Architect OpenLDAP Project, Musician

Website: https://www.symas.com/lmdb/
Location: Donegal / Los Angeles
GitHub: https://github.com/hyc

Public Key

npub10nyz4suhkm3ymkf254826q9aqdtznhg3wlfmt8jdsr24vr3pnxwqmv582h

NIP-05 Address

hyc_at_mastodon.social@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs8ejp2cwtmdcjdmy422n4dqz7sx43fm5gh05a4nexcp42kpcsen8qpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsljpl2y

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub10nyz4suhkm3ymkf254826q9aqdtznhg3wlfmt8jdsr24vr3pnxwqmv582h

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Last Notes

2026-05-08 10:39:50 UTC

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ah, they're adopting the trump victory strategy

2026-04-28 20:42:04 UTC

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I switched to Droidify, it's working well for me.

2026-04-21 19:57:52 UTC

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is it stagnation or is it equilibrium? Surely you can't believe in infinite growth on a finite planet?

2026-04-08 12:54:10 UTC

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ok, to some extent the triple trump voters are just victims of the sabotaged education system, but still, I'm angry at them too.

2026-03-25 07:01:14 UTC

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whatever trump said, obviously the opposite is true "true friend, fighter, and winner"

2026-03-22 17:52:49 UTC

Reminder: AI "generated" code is 100% plagiarized. You must not accept code of unknown provenance into your code base. Doing so opens you up to potential copyright infringement lawsuits. Nobody needs a repeat of the SCO vs IBM lawsuit over ownership of Unix.
Accepting AI-assisted code is just legally untenable. That's black and white, there's nothing to debate. Projects that accept it are idiots and should be shunned.
https://mastodon.social/@hyc/114777864519941643

2026-03-04 17:27:55 UTC

Hey interwebz, anyone know what kind of bug this is? It's the spec above the CR2032 battery package (shown for scale). It was crawling across my table before I smushed it.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/172/061/376/553/819/original/191e8db717a574fd.jpg
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/172/074/587/813/718/original/67b51caa6a080ea6.jpg
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/172/075/200/767/822/original/1cee929420a02cba.jpg

2026-02-26 19:59:33 UTC

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hm, this makes me think of setting up some servers in local libraries. And maybe automatically issue accounts when people sign up for a library card. I wonder who to talk to to organize such a thing.
The local library probably has better internet service than most homes. They already give free wifi access to card holders. I wonder if it makes sense to set them up as email & messaging providers too.

2026-02-13 13:16:43 UTC

Machine generated #OpenLDAP bug reports - How it started / How it's going
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/063/501/420/120/029/original/6f076e45ede025ef.png
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/063/504/535/472/141/original/88f9c646163fa4ec.png
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/063/506/533/539/606/original/d521467be436d37a.png
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/063/508/597/634/851/original/851be897c0d088ec.png

2026-02-07 19:08:34 UTC

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yes and no. Adobe's proprietary RTMP streaming protocol also includes commands for pause/rewind/seek so you can skip around in a stream, much like controlling a VCR. It also controls its transmit rate to match the bitrate of the media. (So even if you have a very fast connection, you receive the data of e.g. a 2 hour video in ~2 hours.)
But "streaming services" that just use HTTP - yeah, they're exactly that, a download without a Save option.

2026-01-28 19:18:49 UTC

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just like they'd guarantee Ukraine's security?

2026-01-27 09:28:23 UTC

Linux running inside a PDF (when opened inside a Chromium-based browser).
https://linux.doompdf.dev/
Built on top of Fabrice Bellard's TinyEMU RISC-V emulator, translated from C to javascript by Emscripten.
Because of course, when Adobe turned PostScript into PDF they intentionally removed the programmable flexibility from it, so google put it back, using javascript.

2026-01-20 17:45:55 UTC

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why do they care any more, they've already demonstrated that trump is unassailable. There is no red line, republicans in congress will never stand up and say enough is enough.

2026-01-19 07:11:50 UTC

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not to mention the Treaty of the Danish West Indies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_the_Danish_West_Indies
"During 1916, the two sides agreed to a sale price of $25,000,000, and the United States accepted a Danish demand for a declaration stating that they would "not object to the Danish Government extending their political and economic interests to the whole of Greenland".[12]"
So yes, there *are* written documents, which the US ratified.

2026-01-12 20:47:23 UTC

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doesn't this really mean the dollar has dropped sharply? Gold supplies themselves haven't changed.

2026-01-09 23:36:00 UTC

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... despite the fact we already have russia as our neighbor in Alaska ...
Nothing he says has a shred of reality behind it

2026-01-06 00:00:16 UTC

RE: https://me.dm/@anildash/115844846912829876
If
a) you are a software professional
and
b) your work is closed source
You're Doing It Wrong
#note1p8r…y35u

2025-12-26 17:07:31 UTC

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the actual bug report was made public a week ago. https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-115508
The bug was reported a week before that. So is this really a 0day?

2025-12-13 19:25:17 UTC

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most sans-serif fonts are even worse for confusion of 1, l, and I though.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/713/894/333/185/113/original/f56982382ff3a8b2.jpg

2025-12-06 15:43:42 UTC

Got a set of stainless steel chopsticks from AliExpress. They're great, nothing sticks to them, just a quick rinse and they're clean.
"But wait" you say, "nothing sticks to them? Doesn't that make them harder to use?"
Well actually, they have textured tips, so they're not too slippery.
But... yeah, as soon as they're coated with gravy or any liquids, all bets are off.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/673/377/481/598/115/original/16f248c90e23a41d.jpg
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/673/378/264/863/813/original/c10121fe403ead9f.jpg

2025-12-06 09:09:49 UTC

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your generic statement "closed source software isn't a black box" is generally false. You could have just said "iOS isn't a black box".

2025-12-06 09:04:37 UTC

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You keep repeating "closed source software is not a black box" but in most cases that simply isn't true. Proprietary software companies go to great lengths to impede attempts to reverse engineer their binaries. One of the reasons proprietary apps are so bloated is because their code has been processed by an obfuscator, which replaces simple instructions with long sequences of mathematically equivalent code that takes thousands more instructions.

2025-12-06 08:56:25 UTC

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the compiled output of proprietary code is often obfuscated to prevent reverse engineering. E.g. Adobe binaries are intentionally obfuscated. Saying closed source code can still be reviewed drastically misrepresents the difference in difficulty.

2025-11-30 00:05:24 UTC

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how many times do they tolerate this before they exact consequences on russia? This is BS.

2025-11-26 19:12:21 UTC

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but folks are trying to monetize the sun, too. Companies like Reflect Orbital... https://m.ai6yr.org/@ai6yr/115511846584252188

2025-11-23 19:41:06 UTC

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of course the Supreme Ct did that. Scum....

2025-11-21 15:43:19 UTC

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wow. My house is usually around 60%. Right now 54%. I've seldom ever seen it at 50% or below.

2025-11-16 16:02:29 UTC

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was pretty amazed to see there've been 300k child marriages in the US since 2000. 21st century America, nuts. https://www.threads.com/@qasimrashid/post/DRDBUZAkr4V

2025-11-16 15:57:32 UTC

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if they voted him in, then it's their responsibility to help get rid of him.

2025-11-12 19:13:00 UTC

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totally rainy and cloudy here the past couple nights. Missing out again...

2025-11-06 02:34:48 UTC

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sounds like dehydration

2025-11-05 22:01:44 UTC

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oh well. Just wondering. It seems to me it would be better to have a single local group organizing donations for all those in need, instead of all these individual gofundme campaigns.

2025-11-05 21:49:03 UTC

@npub1p09…m5vl just out of curiosity, are you familiar with this team? https://gazayoufirst.org/ they seem to have vanished since last year. Are they still around at all?

2025-11-05 20:37:43 UTC

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> "We put a 2nd floor on your house", great! "Climb a rope to get there", excuse me what.
oh, I see you've been to my attic

2025-10-27 19:51:30 UTC

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it's a bad design that results in a single popular post being able to cripple smaller web servers, and it's easily fixed: include the preview in the original post so it only has to be queried once. https://mastodon.social/@hyc/111178941734994879
#note1p4v…degk

2025-09-27 18:20:42 UTC

Simon is especially fond of laps at the dinner table #caturday
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/277/643/007/172/682/original/099bde90a3c6aa9a.jpg

2025-09-13 20:10:55 UTC

Scottish Highland wildcat & kitten at the Highland Wildlife Park today #caturday
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/198/803/277/454/510/original/553ec863f5f45f34.mp4

2025-07-26 21:15:44 UTC

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but NMC cathodes have already been superseded by LiFePO4, no? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery

2025-07-25 11:25:04 UTC

Hmmm why is my AV receiver running so warm #CatsOfMastodon
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/913/615/795/890/003/original/c518e0b05cc9caa8.jpg

2025-07-10 07:11:04 UTC

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yep. So I guess they're happy with SQLite. No idea why such an old ticket popped up on my alert this week.

2025-07-09 16:05:32 UTC

Investigate #LMDB as HLR storage
https://projects.osmocom.org/issues/3649
This Open Source Mobile Comm project appears to be an open source impl of a 3G network's backend software. But they're not using the standard 3GPP protocols, they're using their own home-grown stuff instead.
Looks like a toy, using SQLite3 as its HLR storage. Real 3G/4G networks use LDAP, lots of OpenLDAP in particular because nothing else scales enough, efficiently enough.

2025-07-01 16:43:26 UTC

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charge admission, or show ads. One or the other, not both. You don't get to make money off me twice for a single film.
I can't remember the last time I've gone to a movie theater. With dumb ideas like that, probably never will again.

2025-06-30 16:23:01 UTC

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when are we going to see company execs going to jail for employing undocumented immigrants...

2025-06-07 17:34:05 UTC

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I've been looking into this sort of thing as well. Running wireguard to a small VPS, which gives me ipv6 access and a static ipv4 address. Still cheaper than buying the necessary RAM and disk from a hosting provider.

2025-04-27 03:07:47 UTC

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hmm, that shouldn't work tho. At least in the US, you must demonstrate actual use of the mark in commerce to qualify. It's a *trade* mark. If you're not actively trading with it in their jurisdiction, then registration is denied. The rules for trademarks are pretty much the same in this regard, around the world.

2025-04-25 14:23:54 UTC

Hot take: web browsers shouldn't have any telemetry built in. If you want to know what users think of your UX, let them tell you in your bug tracker.

2025-04-24 18:44:34 UTC

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355/113 was used in China since the 5th century https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mil%C3%BC

2025-04-19 19:10:10 UTC

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public health died from covid, when people decided their individual convenience was more important than collective action to prevent a pandemic.

2025-04-17 01:30:15 UTC

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thinking again, I guess this is just like every other DOGE "costcutting" act that actually costs more than leaving things as they were. All designed to cause harm, with no genuine beneficial intent.

2025-04-16 18:40:03 UTC

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the stupidity of all this is compounded by the fact that solar power is already so much cheaper than coal. Some of these coal plants will shutdown regardless of drumpf, just because the cost/benefit to keep running them isn't there. https://coloradosun.com/2025/04/15/coal-fired-power-craig-tri-state-xcel-trump-orders/

2025-04-04 14:55:04 UTC

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switching automobiles to full EVs would remove the majority of oil consumption. So yes, a change of technology will have far more impact than a change of lifestyle. Yes, reducing automobile use and emphasizing mass transit will be even better, but those transit projects will take multiple years. Governments could decide right now to run trade-in programs and switch populations to EVs practically overnight.

2025-04-04 14:07:52 UTC

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most coal is burned to generate electricity. A transition to solar+wind and other renewables would take a huge chunk out of our CO2 emissions. Rooftop solar could be a big part of that, and I suppose that's more an individual choice right now but it could be made systemic by policy. But once the decision's been made, you can go on living same as before. Better usually, because less of your income will be spent on power. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-by-source
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/280/082/122/944/514/original/90303c776d34d201.jpg

2025-04-04 13:52:34 UTC

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the vast majority of people don't use bitcoin, so there's no lifestyle change required there. AI and data centers are operated by only a tiny number of people. Lifestyle changes won't make a dent there either. Most individuals' personal activities won't make much difference.
Corporations have driven the worst consumption. That's where change is most needed.

2025-03-20 20:53:29 UTC

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why is all this reporting only saying "this agency is cutting that" - individual people make these decisions. Not "agencies". Name the people making these decisions.

2025-03-10 20:09:42 UTC

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might be a good time to remember nearly half of global shipping is just carrying fossil fuels
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/139/943/384/660/665/original/cdce530572eac621.jpg

2025-03-08 16:38:01 UTC

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it's about time more people started examining this and saying it out loud.

2025-03-04 18:08:42 UTC

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there are still people at the CDC?

2025-02-26 15:09:30 UTC

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the first spoonful was medicine. I've never had a cat take medicine so willingly...

2025-02-24 20:31:43 UTC

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tens of billions of US taxpayer dollars were paid to US corporations to produce the military equipment sent to Ukraine. If money needs to be clawed back, shouldn't it be coming from the US military contractors?

2025-02-12 23:56:32 UTC

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by the way, fyi, a Twitter engineer wrote an #LMDB backend for #git back in 2015. https://lore.kernel.org/git/1435020656.28466.8.camel@twopensource.com/
"The [LMDB] backend runs git for-each-ref about 30% faster than the files
backend with fully-packed refs on a repo with ~120k refs. It's also
about 4x faster than using fully-unpacked refs. "
The git devs then spent the next 5 years nitpicking the patch, literally to death. In 2020 the patchset died, the original author left twitter for a new job.

2025-02-12 23:47:53 UTC

@npub1326…gzqx
> Plus, the main *sane* alternatives are LMDB or BDB
You're not just preaching to the choir there...

2025-02-12 23:41:05 UTC

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SQL is too heavyweight for the simple things most apps need to do with storage. SQLite is no different, spends too much time in parsing & interpreting queries.
Also SQLite has no license at all, it's in the public domain. That actually makes it unusable in some countries that have no legal concept of "public domain".

2025-02-03 17:13:12 UTC

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29% was more than enough to turn a loss into a win. I didn't see a report of the reasons for the other 71% but pretty sure they were individually much less than 29%. Gaza was undeniably a significant factor in the election.

2025-02-02 16:06:08 UTC

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his vote tally was still less than a third of the eligible voters. That's not a mandate.

2025-02-02 03:21:05 UTC

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that's nonsense. There are written laws about federal hiring & firing practices. The president and rest of executive branch are sworn to abide by and enforce those laws. The president has no privilege to ignore them. His actions and executive orders are plainly illegal and a violation of his oath of office. He's a traitor to the US as is everyone who follows his orders instead of refusing them.

2025-01-27 07:56:45 UTC

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29% of non-voters ... https://mastodon.social/@Peter_Link@expressional.social/113835319401855207

2025-01-16 16:13:41 UTC

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i would think most children have been exposed to bloodstains long before puberty. If they've ever spent any time playing outdoors, on a playground, etc. Certainly I learned about washing out blood in cold water before age 10.

2025-01-13 08:57:21 UTC

Hot take: using politically correct language just accelerates us further into dystopia. Replacing legitimate words with watered down euphemisms doesn't just constrain speech, it constrains thought. It's the exact exercise that the Newspeak editors were engaged in in _1984_. Don't do it, call a spade a spade.

2025-01-10 05:30:31 UTC

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so, on one hand they allow some accounts to post photos that trigger their AI moderators, but then they penalize others for resharing those allowed posts. It's all just a shit-show.

2025-01-10 05:28:15 UTC

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plenty of my FB posts got censored on the (invalid) grounds that they violated community standards. Seems that eliminating factchecking isn't going to do anything about that.
E.g., I re-shared a local newspaper's post about a local children's choir winning a competition. The post had a photo of a bunch of kids with their fists in the air, cheering. FB censored my post for inciting violence. Rejected my appeal too.

2025-01-07 07:34:48 UTC

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So true

2024-12-29 18:57:26 UTC

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anti-intellectualism isn't just anti-tech or even anti-STEM...

2024-12-23 16:57:46 UTC

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deus ex machina was always a literary device used only by the poorest/weakest writers

2024-12-18 20:53:08 UTC

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what brand of home routers *aren't* made in China?

2024-12-18 18:13:06 UTC

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I got my 1st US passport 40 years ago. My (older) brother got his 6 months ago.

2024-12-18 17:48:40 UTC

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ironic that a US passport was the most useful in the world, but so few Americans ever use one. And then we have the ugly American tourist stereotype, because generally the only Americans who can afford int'l travel have more money than brains.

2024-12-06 16:01:55 UTC

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that may be how they did it, but no, definitely not how I would do it

2024-12-05 04:06:06 UTC

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yeah... my old Dell Precision laptop was a lot easier. I wore out 2 keyboards over the years, and replacing them wasn't a huge haassle.
My current Lenovo Legion 7, no freakin way. It came with a UK keyboard and I thought I could swap it for a US one, but the keyboard is integrated into the top deck, with the touchpad. And you have to disassemble *everything* to get there. And there's a bunch of tiny micro ribbon cables to disconnect, etc. I gave up.

2024-12-04 12:53:26 UTC

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It's (way past) time for the world to close the door on Microsoft.

2024-12-04 12:50:16 UTC

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that's what happens to people who think bitcoin is safe and private...

2024-11-26 09:50:49 UTC

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sure, it'll let any piece of malware run

2024-11-22 05:51:24 UTC

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In college in mid 1980s all of my friends were communing online on the UMich mainframe. Back then I had already observed - "we have so much written correspondence from people a hundred years ago, laundry lists, love letters, etc. A hundred years from now, there won't be any surviving written artifacts of our own lives." The love letters I wrote 40 years ago have long since evaporated into the electronic ether.
Historians will draw a blank on our era.

2024-11-21 17:36:02 UTC

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they're always striving for explosive growth. Now they'll get it!

2024-11-19 18:56:35 UTC

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sure, go ahead, allow data caps. But make advertisers pay users for all of the bandwidth consumed in delivering their ads. If you're gonna turn my network access into a scarce commodity you better pay me every time you use my quota.

2024-11-19 15:42:13 UTC

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are you ever gonna get back to cybersecurity and infosec content? These continuous updates on what you did on some other social media network are pretty tiresome. I guess I can mute you for a while but just wondering if I should just unfollow you instead.

2024-11-05 05:07:54 UTC

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in local elections? Are they considered legal residents of the city/county they're imprisoned in? Wouldn't they just vote for DAs and judges who would release them from prison?

2024-10-27 22:44:13 UTC

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a poster that was sold in their gift shop. The list was created in 2003 by Mr. Laurence Britt, and the then Bush admin was the catalyst for that writing.

2024-10-01 23:50:46 UTC

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I like userland PRNGs in closed source software that use /dev/random as a seed, because I can trivially MITM them by symlinking /dev/random to a file full of 0xFF. Tho I suppose I might be able to interpose a getentropy() hook if necessary.

2024-09-29 23:13:27 UTC

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sure, but climate change isn't real, so what would they have spent the money on in Appalachia?

2024-09-19 15:10:30 UTC

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you would think, after over a hundred years, that car door handles were a solved problem by now.
But I have to say, recent model rental cars I've driven have had some atrociously awkward designs, even when working correctly.

2024-08-25 19:32:21 UTC

"We and our 1444 marketing partners respect your privacy..."

2024-08-15 16:38:40 UTC

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it used to be that all unix tools would print a "usage: foo [-option]" synopsis on stderr whenever invoked with an unrecognized option. So you never needed to memorize all the options anyway. My usual practice was to start with "{command} -," to get the usage msg whenever I needed a reminder.
But somewhere along the line, practice changed to just spitting out the unhelpful "unrecognized option -," message. Might've been MS-DOS influence, not sure. Major regression in usability.

2024-08-09 01:28:41 UTC

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is there a free update for my Atari Jaguar?

2024-08-08 16:17:44 UTC

#Bitcoin is for people who failed at math... https://old.reddit.com/r/xmrtrader/comments/1em64g2/daily_discussion_august_07_2024/lh2osx8/
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/927/297/946/430/793/original/d9f940b678f43400.png
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/927/300/071/005/296/original/3f71cbbdf5c0192f.png
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/927/300/629/207/011/original/8c6c9bbe570bc5fe.png
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/927/316/096/485/162/original/24193be7012ae92f.png

2024-08-03 22:08:06 UTC

Loving all the memes spawned from this
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/900/366/916/800/399/original/d0f9e1191f1ea1ea.jpg

2024-07-31 17:50:02 UTC

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Funny that this is "Intel's response" when they spent so many years leading and defining the market.

2024-07-31 03:16:30 UTC

I guess Facebook/Meta is hiring programmers without Unix experience these days.
https://bugs.openldap.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10245

2024-07-30 22:51:52 UTC

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hmmmm. Mixed feelings on this one, being from California, and knowing too much about Avalanche blockchain...

2023-10-04 21:47:00 UTC

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wouldn't it be cool if all that metadata were collected *once*, at the time the poster submits their post, and it traveled along with the post to every server that receives it? Could also have a freshness TTL, to let other servers decide if they should try to pull newer metadata or not, but biased toward "not".