Todd Knarr

Email: tknarr@silverglass.org

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Last Notes

2026-03-17 17:29:23 UTC

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Do there exist any uses for nuclear weapons other than destroying societies? I can't think of any off-hand. Maybe when we get to needing to break up large asteroids, but even there it seems like conventional explosives would be cheaper and easier to keep things under control.

2026-03-14 14:44:19 UTC

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Lack of an algorithm. Sites that have an algorithm are looking for engagement first and foremost. That means they want conflict, and will give those who engage in conflict greater visibility. Sites without an algorithm don't give those conflict-heavy people a boost, and without new targets they tend to get bored and go elsewhere.
Same thing happens when blocks are bidirectional. Without being able to see or reply to targets, conflict generators get bored.

2026-03-10 17:55:53 UTC

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"fsck Trump" :)

2026-03-07 06:03:21 UTC

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Interesting read. My first thought when I read the description of the attack was "Why is the resolver caching records for any names not on the path from the queried name to the root?". I can see why it might in the case of eg. SRV records, but it seems like caching unrelated records to improve performance causes too many security problems.

2026-02-27 01:46:35 UTC

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I wish him luck, because this'll all have to be at the state level and the Supreme Court can't knock down state court TROs and preliminary injunctions. State higher courts have been less accepting of Trump's stuff even in deep-red states.

2026-02-24 17:37:51 UTC

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I'd prefer to use this for their transport:
https://media.mstdn.social/media_attachments/files/116/126/819/927/452/532/original/3450392b639f819b.jpg

2026-02-19 23:13:44 UTC

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Ministry of Peace.

2026-02-17 17:30:03 UTC

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The Slashdot effect redux.

2026-02-15 22:33:25 UTC

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Oh, odd question: why was the fact that the epsilon closures are fixed a surprise? That's an inherent property of all DFAs, and it seems like it'd also have to be an inherent property of all NFAs. Or at least all of them that have a finite number of states.

2026-02-12 14:17:08 UTC

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I consider them bots. More sophisticated, but just bots.

2026-02-09 21:45:07 UTC

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I just found out that Ventrilo, of all things, is still around. I feel old. But it's old enough that things like AI and age verification just won't be doable with it's codebase.

2026-01-29 03:01:57 UTC

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Congrats!

2026-01-23 04:16:29 UTC

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TBH modern machines are overpowered for what they actually have to do. I blame the sheer inefficiency of the OS and software, and the fact that most of the functionality of both has been dictated by Marketing rather than by any analysis of what users actually do with it. It's feature design straight out of The Marching Morons.

2026-01-20 18:36:31 UTC

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Congrats on being able to move away from the crud.

2026-01-17 02:52:04 UTC

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Odds on they'd run their own instance on the theory that nobody can kick them off it if they control it.

2026-01-12 18:55:01 UTC

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Worse, they're all enamored of the Sig P320 which has no external safety (not that they'd use it if it did).

2026-01-03 21:20:57 UTC

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Worse, he seems to think the real world works like board games. Unfortunately for him, capturing the leader does NOT give you control over that country.

2025-12-31 16:31:25 UTC

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Of course, the reason for Trump's attack is because Minnesota _is_ rooting out the fraud and prosecuting the fraudsters. Trump can't stand his friends being put in jail just for stealing other people's money.

2025-12-28 17:15:39 UTC

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Third-person sneaker, a la Thief. Your objective is to build your webs in desirable places while avoiding other insects that want to eat you (and cultivating relationships with ones that can help you).

2025-12-08 16:41:59 UTC

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My question would be what's the primary source of the actual DDoS traffic? It used to be compromised consumer devices. If that's still the case, then we ought to be pushing ISPs to deal with their customers participating in DDoS attacks. If it isn't, what's the primary source and what pressure can be applied? Mitigating the problem's always easier at the source of the traffic than the destination.

2025-12-04 22:46:27 UTC

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Because at some point it became unacceptable to tell them to their faces "You're a shithead, get lost.".

2025-11-24 01:21:57 UTC

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One reason to stay: lots of punching targets?

2025-11-23 01:40:55 UTC

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True. If it were simple, it wouldn't work. Doing the highly non-trivial, though, is kind of my day job. I have to trust that the math does what the mathematicians say it does, but usually given that I can fit the pieces together and confirm there aren't any holes that don't involve invalidating the math.
Also, while I'm willing to do the work to confirm them, I am NOT going to try to create one myself. That way lies abject failure. Also madness, but mostly failure.

2025-11-23 01:11:25 UTC

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The receipt would make me suspicious, since one of the attacks is having a third party with access to the voter and their receipt be able to confirm the voter voted the way they were supposed to vote. I'll have to research how to do a receipt that'd let the voter verify their vote was tallied correctly without having to trust the voting equipment while preventing anyone but the voter from using the receipt to do the same.

2025-11-09 11:17:29 UTC

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I agree with Lauren: just make it a toggle in settings for crying out loud. Not all users have the same preferences, the answer isn't to aim for some non-existent "average" user but to make the interface configurable so _all_ users can set it to follow their preferences.

2025-11-08 15:23:11 UTC

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Caveat: you can earn money gambling if you stick only to games like poker where you're playing against the other players _and_ you understand the game and the odds and have the stainless-steel nerves it takes to follow the odds no matter how attractive the current opportunity looks. Oh, and you know how to read other people really really well.

2025-10-31 19:04:02 UTC

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Royalties to be paid in sardines?

2025-10-31 15:11:05 UTC

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There a reference page on the login accounts and remote access? I'd like to go poking on mine to see if they're there. I've had reports like that about bugs that turned out to only apply to earlier models, not mine.
Next router, I think, is going to be an industrial mini-PC with enough network ports and an OpenWRT build.

2025-10-31 15:07:29 UTC

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Most hackable? Maybe, but the others aren't far behind. I haven't seen a single consumer router model in the last 20 years that's stayed secure, and few buyers update the firmware or enable auto-updates so generally within a year the things are wide-open to attack. The ones that allow remote admin via the manufacturer's cloud are even worse if you don't disable that.

2025-10-31 05:05:33 UTC

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I'd like to see Blazey. :)

2025-10-30 06:43:56 UTC

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We were working on one (Project Pluto) as part of the Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion program. It was cancelled mostly because of concerns about noise, radioactive byproducts and the improving capabilities of ICBMs making it obsolete.

2025-10-26 02:47:15 UTC

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My response to them is "Have they done any velocity changes?". If they were ships of any sort, they'd be using those flybys to adjust course. They aren't. Ergo, they're not ships (or if they are they're dead hulks). Exotic drives don't matter, we might not be able to detect the drive but you can't hide a change in velocity.

2025-10-26 02:38:59 UTC

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Think of it as the amount of US Treasury bonds issued, including what's held by our Social Security Administration as the supposed "trust fund".

2025-10-04 22:50:05 UTC

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Vibe coding is the modern equivalent of Lotus 123 and WordPerfect macros, and later Excel and Word macros combined with Access databases and batch files. All cobbled together by secretaries and clerks who needed help getting one job done and didn't go further than absolutely needed.

2025-09-29 13:54:43 UTC

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Larry obviously doesn't visit the Internet much, does he?

2025-09-27 23:46:50 UTC

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I disagree. As awful as it is, it's still speech. And frankly, as long as these platforms soak up so much of it, it a) makes it easier for the rest of us to not have anything to do with it, and b) makes it easier to keep track of the fascists since they're all in one place. Oh, and makes it easier to spot their recruiting and intervene before the victims get too far in.

2025-09-21 01:05:29 UTC

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Obviously it's taken up by versions of "Popcorn".

2025-08-27 16:30:05 UTC

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I think we'll eventually colonize space. There's too many resources in the asteroid belt, somebody's going to be greedy enough. And Antarctica is proof that just being utterly antithetical to human survival isn't as big a barrier as you might think.
I also think we'll get AGI, but most likely we'll stumble on it by accident rather than through any organized development and sure not any time soon.

2025-08-25 01:03:24 UTC

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I'm not sure about that, but B5 was definitely more focused than the best ST series were. Probably that was because B5 told one story, while ST was more a bunch of collections of short stories. That makes it hard to compare the two, although overall I think B5 gets the nod.

2025-08-01 04:29:07 UTC

Just got the news, Tugrik died after a long series of medical problems. You probably don't recognize the name if you're not in furry fandom, but if you have a Wi-Fi hotspot with cel backhaul? He built the first one for Burning Man. You like how well GPS works on your phone? He was a key part of the AGPS installs that allow that. He was one of the good ones.

2025-07-29 21:14:18 UTC

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Nuance, maybe. But the size of the differences seems to indicate that it's a rare case where maximizing short-term gains is the better option. Which matches both common sense and actual results for a wise range of situations.
Yeast growth maximizes short-term gains too, and we know where that ends.

2025-07-29 03:59:36 UTC

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His argument only makes sense if you plan on not being in the game next year.

2025-07-29 03:58:19 UTC

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He's also stupid. He'd say if you can get $100 from someone now and only take $10, you're leaving $90 on the table. But if you take $10 now and $10 every year for the next 70 years, you end up with $700 at the end. By taking $100 now you're leaving $600 on the table which is a _lot_ bigger loss than leaving $90.

2025-07-14 04:15:50 UTC

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You'd have to have someone who'd pick those people. I'm not sure project leaders would be interested in monitoring that as opposed to running the project. Sounds to me like something that should be external to Mastodon itself, beyond having an instance-admin-only feed built in to distribute the messages.

2025-07-14 03:00:25 UTC

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Any thoughts on how to do this that wouldn't be quickly abandoned by the admins because of the noise level? Because I can't, and I've thought about it for the last 25 years or so and come up with nothing useful, nor have I heard anyone else come up with anything that worked

2025-07-14 02:35:21 UTC

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I don't know of any implementation of that. Every one that allows proposing announcements has a 75+% abuse rate. Most of the ones with a central body generating warnings are no better (emergency alerts on my cell phone are 80% false positive). The only reliable one I know of that isn't local is NWS/NOAA. I'm open to thoughts about how to do it.

2025-07-14 02:14:44 UTC

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Site admins can post announcements which appear to everybody. It requires people to not ignore them, of course, but there's no technical fix for that problem.
Part of it's that, by design, there's no authority higher than the instance admin on Mastodon.

2025-07-05 23:40:31 UTC

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I say it's both. I agree with you about Gemini, and data sharing in general. I'm going to continue buying Android phones, though I'm going to stick to ones like OnePlus that allow you to easily unlock the bootloader so you can flash a modified image. I figure that way the worst case is I flash an image that removes all that crap if Google won't do it.

2025-06-24 23:36:27 UTC

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Or when they started getting ads for pregnancy and baby products when, as far as they knew, nobody was pregnant. And then a month later the doc says "Your daughter is expecting.". Walmart found out the hard way that parents don't appreciate marketing being that personal.

2025-06-18 19:29:55 UTC

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Did someone say cat?
https://media.mstdn.social/media_attachments/files/114/706/021/301/822/696/original/04415e35b622d0f6.jpg

2025-06-18 14:37:54 UTC

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Does Postgres have the TCP port enabled? Common configuration is to use a unix socket only, which works for vanilla localhost but doesn't work when you need a real TCP socket to connect to.

2025-06-12 11:01:35 UTC

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Toll-free calls are only toll-free to the calling party. That's because the party being called pays for calls on those lines. The phone company's in business to make money. They don't just give service away, especially when it involves high-call-volume services.

2025-06-11 19:47:42 UTC

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Sounds like automodding registrations might help. Signups require approval, an email is sent to the signup's email address anywhere from an hour to a day later asking for a reply with just the word YES (all caps) in it to confirm. If you get a valid reply an auto-handler approved the account, otherwise it gets dropped. I'd think someone has software to do this out there.

2025-06-09 17:27:24 UTC

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A teaching assistant is only useful if you yourself can teach the material. If you can't, why did they hire you instead of giving your job to the TA? If your entire plan is for them to never find out you can't do your job, trust me, they _will_ find out.

2025-06-02 19:52:23 UTC

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The Dems should abuse this to the fullest extent allowable under the rules. None of them have the spine to do it, though

2025-05-28 05:28:33 UTC

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I wonder what the response would be if companies said "OK, we'll limit access to only people who've been issued an SSL certificate by the authorities in question certifying that they are a legal adult. Contact those authorities for information on how to obtain your certificate.".

2025-05-27 17:46:28 UTC

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From my high-school chemistry teacher: "It's not using metric measurements that's hard. It's constantly switching between imperial and metric units that causes the headaches.".

2025-05-23 01:09:07 UTC

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You call them, using a number you know belongs to the party they claim to be and ignoring anything they tell you. That's the only way to be certain.

2025-05-21 03:41:21 UTC

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It's as dead as COBOL is.

2025-05-11 09:01:17 UTC

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The lack of authentication before using the passkey is unique to Google. Other implementations require a biometric or other unlock to access the passkey every time it's used.

2025-05-11 05:01:16 UTC

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One good thing to note is that account recovery boils down to verifying someone's identity from scratch. Google's in a good position to do this, they have all kinds of data like what email addresses have been associated with the account for long periods of time. Or phone numbers. Or mailing addresses. Alternate methods, like a backup hardware token. A video call to check answers to questions, even. All require effort from Google, which is where it falls down.

2025-05-11 04:24:08 UTC

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That too
The security of Google's implementation is basically the security of the lock screen of the least secure device you have or the security of your Google account itself, whichever is lower. I prefer something like Yubikey. Much more secure, and not tied to Google.

2025-05-11 00:34:32 UTC

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The big thing is that the private key for the passkey is stored on Google's servers where it's vulnerable to attacks. This is how they allow you to use a passkey across multiple devices without creating a new passkey for each device. I consider any such system to be no more secure than passwords.

2025-04-07 20:50:02 UTC

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I think they just don't believe that tariffs are a way to get _your own_ consumers to buy less from other countries, not a way to force other countries (or sellers in other countries) to pay anything.

2025-04-04 00:09:57 UTC

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Bank interest rates? Best you can get on long-term high-balance CDs is 3.5%. That requires $100k+ for 5 years or more. Less than 5 years and the rates drop fast. Anything you can withdraw from on demand will be 0.1% or less.

2025-03-27 21:01:18 UTC

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Wasn't that how airport security was handled before the TSA was created?

2025-03-17 04:27:17 UTC

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Same down in San Diego. Anything below a 6.0 barely registered.

2025-03-14 14:12:59 UTC

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This is breaking down, though. The last decade I've noticed developers are less and less interested in understanding their code and working on it. They want to just get something that passes tests and move on to the next thing, and if it breaks in production they'll put that in the queue to fix.

2025-02-16 00:14:34 UTC

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Surprised Germany didn't revoke his diplomatic credentials on the spot and eject him from the country.

2025-02-15 23:14:56 UTC

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Putin can accept or refuse peace, too. And if Putin refuses it, Ukraine has to choose between war or being conquered.

2025-01-28 23:03:53 UTC

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Google absolutely will give it to them under the third-party doctrine, other laws nonwithstanding. They've been doing it for years.

2025-01-21 18:08:07 UTC

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Discrepancy between what you believe their job is and what their employer says their job is.

2025-01-21 15:06:55 UTC

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Whining that they got gyped on their tickets to the Inauguration and can't get refunds.

2025-01-17 20:59:46 UTC

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Is it possible DJI is deliberately removing features that depend on servers in China, replacing them with dependencies on US-based data sources with the goal being to remove the cause of the ban (transmission of data to China)?

2024-12-30 02:14:52 UTC

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Yup. I say, if they want cheaper labor, let them come out and ask straight up for what they want.

2024-12-30 01:36:27 UTC

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Thought: when a company wants H1-B visas for positions, have the government publish the job listing(s) publicly and invite applications. Have the government's own HR people filter out all the obviously-unqualified applications, and forward the rest to the company. The company only gets the visas if, for every applicant they get, they can provide an explanation (and documentary evidence) for turning them down that the government's HR people agree is reasonable.

2024-12-30 01:03:59 UTC

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I have to agree. When tech companies say they can't find qualified candidates to fill job openings, they're lying by omission. They can find plenty of qualified candidates, what they can't find are senior-level candidates willing to accept entry-level pay.

2024-12-28 13:35:52 UTC

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I'm wondering if the MAGA crowd will pull another Jan. 6 to try and overturn Trump's election over this. Or the same but at his inauguration. Depends on how well his team can keep his and his buddies' mouths shut, I suppose.

2024-12-03 15:14:48 UTC

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If you want fun, look for trailers/cutscenes of Lord Vauthry from FFXIV. The character still hits the mark.

2024-11-28 00:10:02 UTC

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I hear Trump's drivel and the only thing I can think is "Kent State.".

2024-11-15 21:24:29 UTC

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I think the original messages were targeted at just that one group. Since then they've gotten public attention and other people have picked up the idea but targeted their own personal nemeses instead of the original targets.

2024-11-13 22:47:56 UTC

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I'm waiting to see what happens when the agencies responsible for background checks and security clearances report that these people can't pass the check and fail just about every criteria and simply can't be granted clearance.

2024-11-06 02:44:21 UTC

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It's not the voting part that's hard. It's doing it in a way that's both a) resistant to fraud and b) guarantees ballot anonymity.

2024-10-30 01:24:26 UTC

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He was a B-movie actor for most of his career. That's pretty much perfect training for delivering political speeches.

2024-10-27 03:27:27 UTC

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I'd love to be able to redraw the timezone boundaries completely. Start with not solar noon but sunrise and sunset on the solstices and equinoxes. Split the difference so "noon" is midway through daylight, then offset it based on a normal workday (I figure 1 hour would do it, 7am-7pm is more reasonable than 6am-6pm). Then find a best-fit curve between those 4 centerlines and run it through Greenwich as GMT/UTC.

2024-10-16 12:03:40 UTC

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How would you arrange it so that an attacker who'd compromised your system couldn't just export your passkeys and exfiltrate the exported form, leaving them fatally compromised with no indication to you that anything was wrong?

2024-10-08 02:06:46 UTC

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Meteorologist: "It's reached the limit of what Earth's atmosphere can produce.."
Earth's atmosphere: "Hold my beer..."

2024-10-02 03:36:36 UTC

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An AS400 emulator running the same System/360 emulator that the AS400 uses to run the compiled form of the COBOL code that's the only available version because the source code was lost somewhere in a chain of moves and acquisitions.
And they'll still need COBOL developers to modify code since nobody understands the requirements well enough to re-write it in a more modern language without requiring a decade of debugging.

2024-09-30 16:12:02 UTC

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It's one thing when the third party is one candidate, or a handful of unknowns. Another thing entirely when it's the overwhelming majority of an existing party running well-known names and incumbents from the previous party.

2024-09-27 16:29:26 UTC

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Won't help him much. I have no problem with him claiming that, IMO not giving the cops your password ought to be covered under "right to remain silent". The authorities have more than enough resources to crack his phone and he's a big enough fish they'll move him to the head of the line.

2024-09-24 17:28:20 UTC

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Have you seen the Russian movie "Guardians" (2017)? Arsus, the big werebear, would make a good model for the bears. :)

2024-09-24 02:15:19 UTC

#AI #OpenAI #SamAltman Looks like his blog only has the one post.
https://ia.samaltman.com/
Dude, I've had pet rats that beat your "AI" in terms of intelligence. Whatever you're smoking, it must be some really good shit.

2024-09-21 02:37:11 UTC

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I believe it was aimed at a market that was already saturated and had nothing major to distinguish itself from everyone else. Seems a recipe for failure to me.

2024-09-10 21:26:43 UTC

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It adds atmosphere, but I always turn the minimum light level up enough to make the difference negligible. It's no fun to play with the scene too dark to see game objectives. Weather is IMO a more visible thing.

2024-09-04 03:27:17 UTC

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My "no" vote doesn't mean I think every citizen should be able to own every type of firearm. Some types should be flat-out illegal. Some citizens with problems in their background (mental health issues, history of violent crime, etc.) should never be allowed to own any firearm. Regular safety exams and range time (at the owner's expense) to maintain proficiency should be mandatory too.

2024-09-01 08:35:26 UTC

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It appears to happen everywhere, it's something with Chrome's handling of the cache or other internal data. When I googled for it I got a bunch of results for Chromium-based browsers and Chromebooks. I find the error itself intriguing, illegal instruction exceptions mean a really bad error somewhere in the code. It also came up in Remix: https://github.com/remix-run/remix/issues/9908

2024-08-31 21:09:57 UTC

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The error you're seeing is apparently a known thing in Chrome. This is one report: https://issues.chromium.org/issues/362055818

2024-08-31 19:46:16 UTC

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Specific to Chrome, or does it happen in other browsers?