J. "Henry" Waugh

https://chaos.social/@jhwgh1968

He/Him | Cis | Aroace | White | USian | Very Privileged | Invisibly Disabled | Elder Millennial, age overflowed at 0x3fffffff secs (34 yrs) | BLM | Trans Rights are Essential Rights

Expect:
- Random #tech projs
- Vents, #autistic and #furry posting to followers
- Infrequent autodeletes

Avatar by HologramA and cyberhadesblog on Birdsite, remixed under CC-BY

To follow, post history and bio are required, weirdness preferred

#nobot #noindex #noarchive #noscrape #nobridge

GitHub: https://github.com/jhwgh1968
Pseudonym Explained: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Universal_Baseball_Association,_Inc.,_J._Henry_Waugh,_Prop.

Public Key

npub1dwsfgy8anqd875xl4d47457rp20ejh2vfzndzre5p3vqgc7gayls6pxjfg

NIP-05 Address

jhwgh1968_at_chaos.social@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsxhgy5zr7esxnl2r06k6l260ps48uet4xy3fk3pu6qckqyv0ywj0cpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dscyajwt

Publishing to

nostr.mom

relay.damus.io

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Author Public Key

npub1dwsfgy8anqd875xl4d47457rp20ejh2vfzndzre5p3vqgc7gayls6pxjfg

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Last Notes

2026-08-12 00:08:35 UTC

Nerd hack of mine:
Did you buy a high capacity flash drive or SD card (usually >64 GB) which promised fast write speeds
But the more you used it, the more its performance slowed down?
If you're running Linux, plug in the drive, open a terminal, change directory into it, and run this:
python3 -c 'import sys; f=open("clean.bin","wb"); exec("while True: f.write(bytes([0xff] * 1048576));")'
It'll slowly fill it up with a large file
... And after deletion, it'll be faster!
Explanation below 👇

2026-06-29 22:37:36 UTC

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People talk a lot about "changing others' minds" and others criticize that minds cannot be changed by argument
But what if there was a 3rd option? Dr. Bob's long-term surveys point to one: changing their mind through normalization
Doing a longitudinal study of 2,000 college students and their parents over 30 years, he found an interesting trend in the cross tabs:
The most conservative actually changed their minds on sex before marriage... but not because they had a change of heart

2026-06-29 22:35:04 UTC

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While much criticism has occurred of the thesis in recent years, Dr. Bob Altmeyer attempted to refine it into something subtler and add statistical reliability (though validity seems weaker to me)
He even wrote a lay book that was a huge hit in 2010s online lefty spaces:
https://theauthoritarians.org/
But rather than go over that in detail, I want to cherry-pick one aspect I very much see in real life, in media, and in many places everywhere just below the surface
The effect of visibility on them

2026-06-29 22:32:55 UTC

Sneaking it under the wire for Pride Month
A subtler reason visibility besides helping those in the closet: it defeats the opposition in ways that are also invisible
And I want to talk about that
Canadian Sociologist Dr. Bob Altmeyer spent his career working on theories from the Frankfurt School, who were trying to understand why the Axis atrocities against humanity had such broad support in their home countries
They settled on an analysis of factors of personality:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Authoritarian_Personality

2026-02-06 03:02:57 UTC

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in case you did not know, so does Linux
(Which blew my mind when I learned it)
https://superuser.com/questions/1824698/why-does-the-linux-scsi-subsystem-drive-hardware-not-obviously-related-to-scsi
So I don't see this as a MSFT foible
But rather a mutual discovery that one pretty feature rich protocol you've supported for a long time is a great code path to reuse
Particularly when hardware vendors are *themselves* encouraging it with compat hacks as well

2026-02-02 03:12:55 UTC

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I've seen plenty of quote posts circulating with high consistency and used them myself with a high success rate
For exactly one thing: putting a CW on something that "goes viral" with no extra text, because the OP did not
I would also note that IME the quotability of others (Mastodon tries to do it implicitly on link paste now, which I don't like but do get) seems based more on their home server's fedi software than any obvious pattern of user preference

2025-07-27 17:09:43 UTC

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wow
If this is from your life, please find a lawyer to write a threat letter
That's worse than the craziest thing I've got, which is the time a former colleague used Cat 5 cable to fire pyrotechnics for a show
-- because despite how terrifying it sounds? He read the spec and it's actually safe
The igniter voltage wasn't nearly 48V, and more surprisingly, they are rated up to a whopping 5A
So it worked great

2025-07-09 23:44:38 UTC

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and as someone who used ext3 for many years even when it had a nasty checksum bug that *would* cause data corruption on non-hardware devices (e.g. LUKS volumes), I accidentally avoided it in my configuration by setting data=journal (which given my new filesystem beloved I would now call "zfs transaction mode")
The performance impact to me was basically un-noticable and I am very confused why they made writeback the default (it used to be ordered)

2025-03-01 06:28:07 UTC

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do you know about git clean/smudge filters? Seems like it could be even more automatic perhaps:
https://www.juandebravo.com/2017/12/02/git-filter-smudge-and-clean/

2025-01-03 19:56:10 UTC

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while I found it a bit silly at the time, the writers did try to capture this vibe by accidentally making the greatest pun of all time for a non-technical writing staff:
He eventually gave the station a "root canal"

2025-01-03 06:26:33 UTC

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William Clifford? As in Clifford Algebra?
Hey I know what that is thanks to an excellent YT video that I've been pointing random ppl to when they take Linear Algebra at university since it fills in gaps!
(Note: 50 min long)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htYh-Tq7ZBI

2024-12-23 00:01:39 UTC

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do the points accrued here carry forward into round 1 of the tournament? (Sorry not a sports fan)

2024-10-18 14:35:04 UTC

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yes, I know
But I have only ever seen them be omitted when weird things were going on -- usually an anti-RE measure

2024-10-17 16:24:51 UTC

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wait how can it be w--
> no section header
oh shit it's right

2024-09-28 21:14:10 UTC

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the first time cops will start repeating lyrics of an Insane Clown Posse song

2024-09-21 04:21:27 UTC

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I've had this thought more than once
Then I considered what would be required to actually cash out in a lot of cases
... and who would be actually "scammed" to get success
.... and what their response and ethics and willingness to break laws might be
... 😬

2024-09-13 22:57:47 UTC

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oh no!
Hopefully they fell out of your pocket close to the door or where you park the bike, I've been lucky that way
(And since then, I added a rather odd looking but effective "dog leash clip" to the ring so I can attach it to my belt loop)

2024-09-07 02:09:51 UTC

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to be clear, I know that current cars are just completely phasing them out and instead adding USB bc that's a more convenient power source and it lets you hook up to the audio panel or whatever (blanking on what that's called at this instant)
So I'm not completely surprised if someone were to look at the funny round receptacle and not know what it was and be told cigarette lighter
But somehow your comment hit a weird middle where I imagined the answer being "it's 12V we don't know why"

2024-09-07 02:05:29 UTC

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wait ppl don't know this anymore?
Oh no 💀

2024-08-28 23:10:28 UTC

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sorry to here that
May the odds be ever in your favor

2024-08-28 23:09:06 UTC

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so far, I'm on a perfect winning streak
... By having a lifestyle that I don't mind at all, but it seems few others can tolerate

2024-08-21 21:01:19 UTC

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apparently I'm very confused so I hereby withdraw from this convo
All I know is that it's impossible to self-host mail servers anymore because the actual technical and verification and protocol requirements to have anyone talk to you instead of immediately blacklisting you as an as-yet-unidentified spam source are incredibly high
And the number of providers who will support you and trust you are not an as-yet-unidendified spam source are shrinking

2024-08-21 20:54:29 UTC

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no but thanks to this pointer I could find the one I was thinking of:
DKIM

2024-08-21 20:54:02 UTC

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yes, discouraging unencrypted SMTP on port 25
My former ISP has it blocked outbound everywhere except their virus scanning SMTP relay -- a measure they put in 20 years ago in response to the early e-mail worms of the early '00s
Nowadays in order to combat spam and spoofing, an "unofficial standard" is emerging that everyone use SMTP over TLS on a different port and have to use verification mechanisms like DKIM
I'm not surprised to see cloud providers enforcing it too

2024-08-21 20:46:44 UTC

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IIRC they've had some vague clause in their ToS discouraging that for some time
IIRC they want you to use proper TLS with mutual certificate verification (I'm blanking on what the standard is called)
But while I'm not surprised, I am disappointed they didn't at least warn you for trying to do it