Nostr notes by ティージェーグレェ

So that job to which I applied last week? Yesterday I had an in ...

2026-04-14T21:53:36Z

So that job to which I applied last week?

Yesterday I had an in person interview.

Before 19:00 local time? There was a voicemail claiming they want to move forward with the security background check part of the hiring process, which is a good sign?

Anyway, too soon to count any of those eggs as hatched, but perhaps, soonish, within the next several weeks to a month or so: maybe I will have TWO jobs!

And, presumably, still be below the poverty line and homeless and thousands in debt.

But y'know? Every little cent probably helps?

Tomorrow: I am checking out of the hostel which has been, cheap, but as with anything with shared bunk beds, kind of unfortunately reminiscent of being incarcerated. I'll then be renting a car, stopping by my mailbox for the first time in like a month, getting a haircut for the first time in maybe two months and, well other things too, before work on Thursday.

There's been a lot of other stuff going on personally. Not a whole lot exciting (other than having now taken 3 weeks of Introduction to Irish with 4th looming on Saturday) but I'll be driving to SoCal to see Suicide Commando on Saturday for what will, supposedly, be his last US tour! I'm definitely looking forward to that (the drive down and back before work Sunday morning? Less so, but music is at least something worthwhile in my existence.)

I'm on a bus from SF to San Rafael. It has air conditioning ...

2026-04-04T21:50:52Z

I'm on a bus from SF to San Rafael. It has air conditioning and WiFI and I don't have to drive not install some fucking app.

Costs like $6.50? Or maybe that's the whole trip (I have a connecting bus, so maybe this is $3 or whatever).

I will never understand why more people don't use mass transit.

Can't afford it? Here's the secret "unlock" phrase in the SF Bay area to ask the bus operator when boarding:

"May I please have a courtesy ride?"

If they say "yes*? (And they usually do!) Bam! Free travel!

Kneecap in conjunction with COLORS, released a video for ...

2026-03-27T17:09:47Z

Kneecap in conjunction with COLORS, released a video for "Smugglers and Scholars" a couple of weeks ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHU5UJxRjxY

That green screen looks as if it is begging for someone to take advantage of it.

#Kneecap #Colors #SmugglersAndScholars #HipHop #Music

Need? Probably not. As far as wants, I still want an Amiga with ...

2026-03-27T17:05:04Z

In reply to nevent1q…8pxc
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Need? Probably not.

As far as wants, I still want an Amiga with an MC68060; admittedly, such things cost a lot (still) and I need (and also want) a house more than I need another computer. So that my meager material possessions aren't stuck in storage. Also, the Amiga 4000 wasn't an SBC, IIRC the CPU was on a separate PCB (which made CPU "upgrades" easier I guess!).

Can new MC68060s even be purchased in 2026? I think NXP maybe owns the rights (Motorola sold them to Freescale which in turn was acquired by NXP if I remember correctly) but I don't think they're still fabbing anything related to them? Sourcing such parts in the after market (I look for such things, on the off chance I may be able to populate the Amiga 4000 reverse engineered PCB I bought years ago) and they're few and far between.

I'm not too interested in old 32-bit RISC based systems either, or new systems, based on old 32-bit RISC designs.

Though, I did just buy a few 32-bit RISC-V based thingamajigs they were like, $10 a piece, so not exactly bank breaking.

lmao

2026-03-27T16:58:18Z

In reply to nevent1q…9gpd
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lmao

That techdirt (at least the dirt is accurate) Mike Masnick piece, ...

2026-03-27T16:32:36Z

That techdirt (at least the dirt is accurate) Mike Masnick piece, was an awful read.

The comments? Where Derek Powazek, who's webpage is cited as awe inspiring in the article, retorts with: "Genuinely, how dare you." is kind of awesome though.

Mike Masnick, doubling down and arguing with the shoulders upon which he explicitly claims he stands? Is dumb founding.

Like, OK Mike, "AI Might Be Our Best Shot At Taking Back The Open Web" is your idiotic perspective, we get it! However, even LLMs can be manipulated to stochastically parrot back they were wrong, when they are corrected. Apparently, you can't. So, instead of artificial "intelligence" we get to witness, in the comments, some real stupidity!

Not that I needed to read the comments, to fathom that.

Just take this line, regarding the "open" nature of the web (thanks to the "View Source" feature of web browsers):

"you could just build what you wanted, even without a CS degree"

My daughter was writing webpages in middle school, as class assignments. No CS degree.

Maybe, let's go for something a little more challenging than web design though, how about reverse engineering, without "View Source" just compiled binaries?

Friends and I were cracking software copy protection in elementary school. No CS degree!

Who told this d00d that you need a CS degree to do anything meaningful or useful with computation?

Friends and I, as teenagers, still without CS degrees, were improving systems at nps.navy.mil, unpaid, uncited, after hours. Meanwhile, those with PhDs? smdh, looked friggin worthless; exploiting minors as unpaid labor, while they got grants for machines that cost tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands (more than the mortgage on my parents' home) heck, tens of millions of dollars (I was told that some of my code ran on the $30,000,000.00 Cray at FNMOC [Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center] when I was in high school from a sysadmin at nps.navy.mil; albeit I wasn't allowed to access that myself. They wouldn't even let me touch it, just look at it from behind plexiglass when my high school computer club that I co-founded with a friend, took a tour of their facilities. No CS degree!). tbh, many PhDs still do not impress me. I know way too many PhDs, fewer than a handful, have made me think they maybe were worth knowing.

Writing assemblers, linkers, microcode and more! I was doing all of that, as a kid, no CS degree. When I finally encountered a C compiler? It felt bloated. C still feels horrifically inefficient to me and what's worse: many other programming languages are implemented in C and are multiplicatively less inefficient (scowls at Python [become a 60x slower "engineer" than a C dev with that interpreted BS], Ruby, etc.). Still, learning more about C, decades ago, with no CS degree, explained a lot about the godawful binaries I had been hexediting though in my youth.

The largess of those who had access to more RAM and clock cycles and disk space, than sanity. People who never knew a night going hungry, or homeless. To me?

Idiots, in ivory towers. Probably lots of those people have CS degrees, and are completely out of fucking touch with reality. Lots in their "cloud" computing and overly abstract relations to false realities.

This Johnny-com-lately seems to think that being able to date himself with NCSA Mosaic, is some kind of early online realm?

Give me a break! I encountered computers on the Internet, before TCP flag day even happened. Web browsers to me, were and still are: some of the worse software ever created. To quote Alan Kay:

"The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs."

Honestly, I think that is a little offensive to amateurs. I was, arguably, still am, an amateur. Sure, I have been paid to code; but that is the minority of my existence. I was coding for well over a decade, building hardware, even volunteering as a SysOp for multiple BBSes, long before anyone paid me to do anything with computers. For the most part, for me? Computers have been a time and money sink. They are not a way for me to make money. For me, music is similar. I am not some globe trotting performer, sure I deejay, sure I have performed in music festivals since I was a child. I do not earn money from these interests. I spend money on those interests. They make this hellish existence, slightly less hellish.

I didn't make billions ripping off other people's code, like Bill Gates did with BASIC (which was invented by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College in 1964, and shared freely and had over 5 million users before Microsoft shipped a commercialized BASIC ported to the MITS Altair 8800.) or undercutting DR-DOS sales with a rebranded rip-off to IBM. Making money off of plagiarism, would have presumably, gotten me expelled from school. Instead, I graduated from a University with a B.A. in Language Studies. Not a CS degree.

I consider myself a survivor of at least one previous so-called A"I" winter. I remember all the insanity around A"I" research the last time that dead end reared its ugly head. Believe it or not, I was tasked with writing anti-A"I" code, in the 1980s on others' systems. Who is writing that code today? It is vitally required, again, apparently.

These rich, dumb jerks, never learn. They just want to be coddled I guess? Why learn to write a webpage (HTML is a Mark Up Language, not a friggin compiler, not an assembler, not a linker, it's already SO HIGH LEVEL I find it offensive), have "genAI" do it for them?! Don't get your hands dirty, ever, just use a chauffeur or Lyft or Uber instead of learning how to drive, call AAA instead of changing a flat tire, use Jiffy Lube or whatever, instead of learning how to change oil for yourself. Full Self Driving in your Tesla for fElon Musk soon to be trillionaire neo Nazi, because you are too cheap to pay for a chauffeur or Lyft or Uber? smdh

I watched 'The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist' earlier today? It is not nearly dystopian enough. Not at all.

This is hell, and society at large? Is throwing more money at the people who are cranking up the heat.

Within the documentary, they estimated approximately 20,000 people are currently working for pay, on making the next A"I" happen. Whereas estimates there are fewer than 200 people, globally, trying to prevent an A"I" driven doomsday scenario.

It reminded me of the job I had, decades ago, as a Network Security Specialist, where one of my coworkers (also in "ops" all, two of us) observed how we had something like 10 programmers. As he phrased it to management: "we have more people capable of creating new problems, than we have people capable of remediating them."

As the "joke" used to go in the 1980s: "Who needs artificial 'intelligence' when there's more than enough real stupidity?" It's not funny anymore. It wasn't funny then either, but at least the damage wasn't so offensive that its advertising filled every billboard. It wasn't an international arms race of stupidity. It was mostly, constrained to the ivory tower academics and too rich for anyone's own good fiefdoms.

One of the people in the documentary claimed that if someone thought that A"I" was bad, then all the more reason they should work in the industry to try to solve that.

Yeah, because changing the system from "within" works so well, when you're enslaved and its impacting societies, at scale, globally, regardless of nation state boundaries (there are multiple factions, from different countries, treating A"I" as the current nuclear arms race, essentially). They don't see the scale of the problem, or how trying to effect change from "within" is worthless.

With human "intelligence" that bad, how on Earth could they ever hope to create an artificial "intelligence" that is anything of value?

Gil Scott-Heron wrote Whitey on the Moon circa 1970? Humans still haven't learned its wisdom. They're still sending manned missions to the Moon. While billions of humans subsist below the poverty line, contending with starvation (what the "educated" refer to euphemistically as "food scarcity") and homelessness (what the "educated" refer to euphemistically as "houselessness"). fElon Musk, wants to go to Mars. A planet, like our Moon, known to be inhospitable to life as we know it, with no atmosphere.

Not another penny, should be spent on such idiocy.

Not a fractional cent.

Same for A"I", which smarter folks, decades ago, in the 20th century, already knew was a dead end.

Doug Engelbart, that brilliant individual whom folks estimate we only ever realized about 3% of his vision? Who helped give us collaborative computing with NLS (oNLine System) which later got funding and renamed to (D)ARPAnet, what we now call the Internet? In an interview with Robert X. Cringely, described how JCR Licklider (who had previously given Doug's research at SRI [D]ARPA funding) apparently erroneously thought that NLS should be training its users how to use it, with A"I", decades ago, and cut their funding. To paraphrase Doug: "it's been a few decades since then, and I have still never encountered an A'I' system, that could train its users, how to use it."

SRI (Stanford Research Institute), had cross licensing agreements with SAIL (Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab) and Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center).

Even now, in 2026, SRI shares a parking lot with my parents' church in Menlo Park.

I knew folks like Engelbart, personally.

What on Earth does Mike Masnick know?

Jack, fucking shit, apparently. Dirt. OK, sure, what is tech about it? Retreading dead end ideas? Wasting money and resources?

That isn't intelligence.

There are real problems we need to solve as a species, as societies.

A"I" isn't going to help with any of them.

What an awful read.

A waste of time.

The comments? Seeing Mike Masnick make himself look like even more of a moron to Derek Powazek?

What will it take, for these sorts of A"I" money seeking shitheads, to learn?

I don't know.

But, I can write a rant.

I submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' OpenSMTPD to ...

2026-03-27T02:21:00Z

I submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' OpenSMTPD to 7.8.0p1 here:

https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/31850

2 of 3 GitHub Continuous Integration checks passed OK!

One of them failed with another wtfh:

7s
Run . ports/.github/workflows/bootstrap.sh mpbb
Fetching files
Info
2026-03-27 02:14:50.001 mdutil[47287:114060] mdutil disabling Spotlight: / -> kMDConfigSearchLevelFSSearchOnly
Disabling Spotlight
Uninstalling Homebrew
Selecting Xcode version
Installing getopt
Installing MacPorts
Configuring MacPorts
Updating PortIndex
From https://github.com/macports/macports-ports

branch master -> FETCH_HEAD[new branch] master -> macports/masterCreating port index in /Users/runner/work/macports-ports/macports-ports/ports
Adding port graphics/openexr
Adding port graphics/OpenJPH
Adding port lang/unicon
Adding port mail/opensmtpd
Adding port perl/p5-unicode-utf8
Adding port perl/p5-xml-parser
Adding port perl/p5-yaml-syck
Adding subport p5.28-unicode-utf8
Adding subport p5.30-unicode-utf8
Adding subport p5.32-unicode-utf8
Adding subport p5.34-unicode-utf8
Adding subport p5.28-xml-parser
Adding subport p5.30-xml-parser
Adding subport p5.32-xml-parser
Adding subport p5.34-xml-parser
Adding subport p5.28-yaml-syck
Adding subport p5.30-yaml-syck
Adding subport p5.32-yaml-syck
Adding subport p5.34-yaml-syck
Adding port php/php-imagick
Adding subport php53-imagick
Adding subport php54-imagick
Adding subport php55-imagick
Adding subport php56-imagick
Adding subport php70-imagick
Adding subport php71-imagick
Adding subport php72-imagick
Adding subport php73-imagick
Adding subport php74-imagick
Adding subport php80-imagick
Adding subport php81-imagick
Adding subport php82-imagick
Adding subport php83-imagick
Adding subport php84-imagick
Adding subport php85-imagick
Adding port python/py-sunpy
Adding subport py310-sunpy
Adding subport py311-sunpy
Adding subport py312-sunpy
Adding subport py313-sunpy
Adding subport py314-sunpy
Adding port sysutils/gearmand
signal interp lost
ports/.github/workflows/bootstrap.sh: line 150: 47369 Abort trap: 6 portindex
Error: Process completed with exit code 134.

Last time I ran into some GitHub CI BS? It seemed to resolve itself (maybe some other MacPorts person kicked something? I dunno). Anyway, hopefully something similar will happen there.

Regardless, it's up to someone else with commit access to merge it.

#MacPorts #OpenSMTPD #OpenBSD #OpenSource #SMTPD #SMTP #email

Scavenging, as you refer to it, may be OK in some circumstances. ...

2026-03-24T21:12:05Z

In reply to nevent1q…u0jy
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Scavenging, as you refer to it, may be OK in some circumstances.

When it comes to code; for whatever reason my mind is drifting towards the warez scene and keygens "scavenging" code from proprietary software to check to see if a key is valid or not. ;)

But, FreeBSD's jails, aren't like that. It's open source.

If it were good: Apple could have made use of it; they borrow code liberally from many other open source projects. FreeBSD is already upstream from OS X/macOS.

Maybe: jails just aren't good? Maybe, jails and incarceration and related metaphors, are intrinsically evil? I think they are. I do not work for Apple, nor am I a FreeBSD committer, but having known folks who were both of those and not evil? I kind of think that they probably intentionally avoided the jails subsystem, for good reasons.

Your sense of humor is kind of lost on me, since I think ...

2026-03-24T18:17:28Z

In reply to nevent1q…pnhz
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Your sense of humor is kind of lost on me, since I think petrofossil fuels are also a dead end. Moreover, I didn't realize I was in a comedy club, and having to explicitly declare jokes, typically ruins them.

If you are trying to make light of a subject involving incarceration? Might I suggest: you stop doing that.

Word choice aside: If as a precursor to paradigms such as ...

2026-03-24T18:12:57Z

In reply to nevent1q…3ats
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Word choice aside: If as a precursor to paradigms such as containers, the FreeBSD jails subsystem is svelte with relatively low overhead because it's basically a filesystem abstraction.

However, because it is a filesystem abstraction, it isn't as robust as a full blown VM/hypervisor. FreeBSD also has things such as bhyve these days for folks who need that.

There are other pitfalls of containerization (not just performance penalties with VMs and hypervisors) such as bitrot (see: Docker container vulnerabilities shipping old versions of code) but IMHO, such things are too often misconstrued as security tools, when all of them are better utilized as development tools and are not great for prod (IMHO, they're the opposite of what should be deployed in prod).

There's of course, also the question of whether any of that was appropriate for Apple to adopt. Apple does have their own hypervisor framework, but they never really seemed to delve deeply into containers or chroot realms, they have their own sandboxing framework too.

It should probably be noted that Apple used to employ jkh (Jordan Hubbard, one of the co-founders of FreeBSD). I know Jordan personally. I don't know PHK personally. I don't know if the same is true of Jordan though, it's possible he knows PHK and they're on good terms.

However, when I read some of PHK's other writings (mostly on ACM as far as I can discern; though their site is variously paywalled and not easy to cite), he has a lot of perspective on the legal system and courts and his perspective, to me, screams as if it is someone who hasn't lived within the USA and contended with carceral slavery or the reality that over 90% if incarcerated individuals within the USA never even had a jury trial, and most of them end up with "plea" deals because they are so poorly "served" by so-called "public defenders". Perhaps, he might even favor slavery? He certainly seems to be of the opinion that courts and law, should supersede more or less any other realm from what I read of his writings.

Like, the more I read of him, the less I ever want to have anything to do with him, and most certainly want to stay the fuck away from his code too.

It's not sufficient to search and replace some word choices. It's best avoided entirely.

CC: LisPi (nprofile…k3ke)

I think the conjecture in this instance is: jails are not good. ...

2026-03-24T17:59:04Z

In reply to nevent1q…37pa
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I think the conjecture in this instance is: jails are not good.

Word choice matters.

Maybe, if PHK had called it chroot++? He did not.

sigh looks as if that journalist bullied that fediverse user into ...

2026-03-24T17:57:02Z

sigh looks as if that journalist bullied that fediverse user into deleting their toot about not turning off their adblocker.

Y'know, as someone who is an editor for an online journal that has 0 advertising and 0 "turn off your adblocker" spam?

I know better is possible, because I have actively contributed to it.

Moreover, I also code.

I contribute to the software and communities online; I don't just "report" on them.

Does that journalist bully do the same? I don't think so.

smdh

I've been referring to him/his company as "Sucks ...

2026-03-24T17:50:10Z

In reply to nevent1q…d5k3
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I've been referring to him/his company as "Sucks they're Borg" for a really long time; so "zuckerborg" is OK with me.

I think there used to be a similar free bus that would go from ...

2026-03-24T17:46:07Z

In reply to nevent1q…s00n
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I think there used to be a similar free bus that would go from the 12th Street BART station to Jack London Square? I don't know what happened to it though.

"Freedom Routers" /me has flash backs to Cisco VPN ...

2026-03-24T05:01:11Z

In reply to nevent1q…ahlc
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"Freedom Routers"

/me has flash backs to Cisco VPN concentrator software on CD-ROMs with labels such as: "Contains strong cryptography, not for export outside of the USA" and "Made in Mexico" simultaneously.

Free dumb!

Mouser has mages now? ...

2026-03-24T04:53:19Z

In reply to nevent1q…3vgs
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Mouser has mages now?

I don't know if OpenBSD has an official stance against ...

2026-03-24T02:03:59Z

In reply to nevent1q…fu9v
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I don't know if OpenBSD has an official stance against A"I" but this seems pretty close:

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=171817275920057&w=2

It might be less obvious to someone who isn't familiar with OpenBSD, but most of the responses in that thread are from other OpenBSD developers and they seem to be rather uniformly negative to the Alfredo Ortega's A"I" driven efforts.

Lamentably, Alfredo doesn't seem to take repeated negativity, from multiple OpenBSD developers, to be a reason to stop doing what he is doing. ;-/

Dang, well I hope it goes better than your expectations? Still, ...

2026-03-24T01:22:47Z

In reply to nevent1q…y8nz
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Dang, well I hope it goes better than your expectations?

Still, how does the expression go? "It's not safe to hope for the best, without preparing for the worst!"

Though it's probably not news to you: BSDs have Linux compatibility layers; maybe you'll be able to derive some utility from that if worse comes to worse?

I'm a bit biased in that I tend to prefer OpenBSD for many things; but FreeBSD has a lot going for it particularly when it comes to performance and having more developers (and more commercial offshoots which often contribute improvements back upstream). To me, NetBSD was never really high on my list (I've probably explored DragonFlyBSD more; but it's definitely out there, which is kind of why I enjoy exploring it), but I think it probably still "wins" for supported hardware platforms (albeit, I think many of them are cross compiled, whereas OpenBSD tends to like to have sufficient hardware to build things on to support it) and pkgsrc seems kinda neat.

Hypervisors may also be helpful? I've probably had the most experience with OpenBSD's vmm and FreeBSD's bhyve though, so I don't have much worthwhile experience in such realms from a NetBSD perspective.

Ah, yeah; I am more of a BSD person. I'm not sure if any BSD ...

2026-03-24T01:07:23Z

In reply to nevent1q…tckm
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Ah, yeah; I am more of a BSD person. I'm not sure if any BSD has taken a specific stance on LLMs, but I know (via Slashdot and the like) Linus apparently decided he didn't give af. ;(

I put a $100 (albeit, refundable) deposit on a car I haven't ...

2026-03-24T00:36:06Z

I put a $100 (albeit, refundable) deposit on a car I haven't test driven, because the car is not out, so I can't test drive it.

I mean, I guess if I were some car YouTuber personality sort, maybe I would get to test drive a pre-release version of it?

Thankfully, I am not such a person.

I test drove a related (albeit, higher end and more or less twice as expensive) model from the same vendor last week though, and it was probably the first car I have test driven since I started test driving car since my last car was totaled, that seemed as if it was nicer than the Porsche Cayenne diesels! So, I think that's saying a lot?

(whispers) Come to the snac side, we have: "PRs, diff patches ...

2026-03-24T00:32:49Z

In reply to nevent1q…7f5v
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(whispers) Come to the snac side, we have:

"PRs, diff patches and bug reports must not incorporate any material generated by or with the assistance of any so-called "generative AI" tool or LLM."

In https://codeberg.org/grunfink/snac2/src/branch/master/CONTRIBUTING.md as of version 2.91.

Admittedly, maybe I just don't want to contend with the headache of an ActivityPub implementation that isn't written in C, because the snac binary for aarch64/Apple Silicon when compiled is 460K (471272 bytes) and the frameworks that Mastodon utilizes as dependencies seems to this old sysadmin to be: the land of yikes.

Though, maybe I am misinterpreting your writing, and you mean the users of the FediVerse becoming LLM slop brained; and while that is lamentably a risk, it's probably worse everywhere else still?

Shit like that happens. ;( I pre-ordered some Bassnectar vinyl, ...

2026-03-24T00:19:45Z

In reply to nevent1q…c64y
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Shit like that happens. ;(

I pre-ordered some Bassnectar vinyl, by the time it was delivered, Lorin was caught up in some underage groupies sex trafficking charges. I still don't know what the outcome of those legal proceedings are; last time I checked trials were still pending, but I haven't checked in a while.

Similarly, I bought some Die Antwoord vinyl for "Cookie Thumper!" planning to do a mash up with Seasame Street/Cookie Monster's "C is for Cookie" and then Xorcist (nprofile…5wu6) clued me into how they had been making very negative headlines relative to Zheani (and Ninja acting inappropriately towards her, her video "The Question" has screen shots of a lot of their correspondence) as well as how they had treated their foster children.

So, all that stuff is shelved. I'm one of those sorts who remains conscientious about whom I amplify as a deejay, even if I am not being invited to guest on radio stations these days. Despite his popularity, I was never one to spin Michael Jackson either (and even if it weren't for all the scandals alleged against him, just listening to how Paul McCartney was being "British polite" with regards to how MJ bought the rights to The Beatles distribution? AFAIK, it took McCartnery millions of dollars in attorney fees alone and it was about a decade after MJ passed away before he was able to regain rights to his own recordings! Treating other musicians like that? Not chill, to understate it). Admittedly, I've seen a copy of what is supposedly Grand Master Flash's "do not play" list, and MJ is also on it. So, maybe I am in good company? Hard to say though, sometimes those lists are "Do Not Play" because the deejays want to drop something in their sets and don't want the openers to spoil their sets?

I don't have anything like that personally, at least, not public nor shared; others can spin whatever they want to spin; but I have an internal "not while I'm spinnin" blocklist of bands.

Then again, a lot of what I spin, is shit no one is likely to have ever heard of anyway and maybe not their cup of tea; but that's what I get for being into obscure and out there acts. ^_^

There was a "What's in Your Bag" Amoeba episode with FKA twigs recently, and I admit, I am pretty clueless about her aside from her performance in The Crow remake? Yet, the last 12" she pulled out was Skinny Puppy's "Last Rights" and she was talking about how her bf is really into industrial, to me? Skinny Puppy is practically mainstream! I mean, I dig them, immensely but they're a band name I drop just to give folks an idea of what I am into, and surprisingly, a lot of folks still seem clueless about what, to me, is one of the bigger names in post-industrial experimental electronic composition of the late 20th century. If I have to mention NIN? I feel as if I have lost; I really own almost nothing Trent Reznor has recorded.

RAM disks are great! Amiga Workbench shipped with one by default ...

2026-03-23T17:37:33Z

In reply to nevent1q…7dn7
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RAM disks are great! Amiga Workbench shipped with one by default in an era where floppy disks were still the norm. IMHO, that was the apogee of personal computing and if you didn't enjoy it when it was fresh, you missed out. It doesn't look the same through a retro lens.

Throwing a zpool into a RAM disk? I mean, I dunno, maybe it would work? You can try I guess.

Those consultants spending gobs of money on 256GB of RAM (though in 2019, I don't think it was that insanely expensive? I knew of folks operating with terabytes of RAM years earlier than that, and in 2020 someone was trying to get me to work at some SAP related gig where they had 40TB of RAM on some system, but their friggin job application couldn't handle UTF-8 and that just seemed like bad news.) not spending a comparatively small amount on a sufficient UPS though? What a nightmare.

Albeit, I'm spoiled, circa 2002-2006 my employer had an entire building-wide UPS, with a 600kw diesel generator on automatic (and it would do a self test once a week! Sure beat the sorts of situations I dealt with at earlier employers) oh yeah, and we were adjacent to a hospital (during a crisis, hospitals are the last to lose grid power and the first to have it restored). So, I have experienced good power designs, and they're a far cry from what you described.

Ah wow, I had that devkit. Never got around to doing anything ...

2026-03-23T17:20:47Z

In reply to nevent1q…tnpt
_________________________

Ah wow, I had that devkit. Never got around to doing anything with it. Was too busy with married life and parenting and working horrible jobs to pay the bills.

Indeed! I think it's telling that OS X/macOS are FreeBSD ...

2026-03-23T10:23:44Z

In reply to nevent1q…vdh6
_________________________

Indeed!

I think it's telling that OS X/macOS are FreeBSD derived, yet decided not to borrow the jails subsystem.

Word choice is important.

Some of PHK's other perspectives when it comes to legal things is extremely harrowing to read.

But, it's one thing to be outspoken about things.

It's another, when down stream maintainers, decide to go through the hassle of making sure they do not take your bad code and ideas along with them. Speaks volumes, without saying a word! Indeed, by removing lines of code!

Good hacking. ^_^

Awesome! Thank you! Thanks to oxzi, matoken, Louis Merlin, ...

2026-03-23T09:31:58Z

In reply to nevent1q…eatd
_________________________

Awesome! Thank you!

Thanks to oxzi, matoken, Louis Merlin, dandelions, Bruno Cesar Rocha and any other contributors I may have missed as well!

I submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' snac to 2.91 here:

https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/31777

GitHub Continuous Integration checks are running, hopefully they will complete without issues?

Regardless, it's up to someone else with commit access to merge it!

#snac #MacPorts #OpenSource #ActivityPub #Mastodon #NoDatabaseNeeded
#NoJavaScript #NoCookiesEither #NotMuchBullShit #snacAnnounces

I don't know if it's a "good" use of LLMs, but ...

2026-03-23T07:13:20Z

I don't know if it's a "good" use of LLMs, but watching Bernie Sanders ask Claude about how A"I" is going to ruin everything and needs to be regulated, and Claude agreeing, is at least an approach to confirmation bias!

Yeah! I learned about that via Wikipedia yesterday. I saw Stellar ...

2026-03-23T07:00:04Z

In reply to nevent1q…f8hq
_________________________

Yeah! I learned about that via Wikipedia yesterday. I saw Stellar Corpses live maybe 20 years ago? Never really paid much attention to them after that (psychobilly isn't really my cup of tea). I think I had heard one of their band members died (who maybe dated or was married to someone who used to work with my hair dresser in Santa Cruz?), but apparently there was way more drama I was oblivious to circa 2020ish!

Dang!!! Wow! I think my Amiga 1200 is mostly stock, still! I did ...

2026-03-23T00:19:21Z

In reply to nevent1q…mqna
_________________________

Dang!!! Wow! I think my Amiga 1200 is mostly stock, still!

I did some upgrades to my Amiga 2000, but it died in transit circa 1994. ;( I was pretty handy with a multimeter and soldering iron, but I could not get it to work again. Upshot: the insurance pay out from UPS helped me buy my Amiga 1200!

I never owned a 1000, but they're amazing for the signatures and such inside alone! I took a picture of Dave Haynie next to some A3000 prototype during that Computer History Museum Amiga anniversary event a while ago (not the most recent one, the one like, a decade before that). I still have a dream machine of an A4000T with a 68060 and such, but I saw one of the original CBM ones on eBay for $25,000 starting bid recently with some lore that apparently only 35 or so were ever shipped in working condition? I do not have that kind of money. I never have, I doubt I ever will. I'm grateful I at least still have my A1200! Most computing before and since that era has been absolutely awful.

Advertising now is so much worse than blipverts. Then again, ...

2026-03-22T23:54:21Z

In reply to nevent1q…8may
_________________________

Advertising now is so much worse than blipverts.

Then again, we're a lot further than 15 minutes into the future.

CC: 💀 𝓕airchild 💀 (nprofile…vwnx)

8MB of RAM in an Amiga 1000? Fancy!

2026-03-22T22:48:46Z

In reply to nevent1q…g3jt
_________________________

8MB of RAM in an Amiga 1000? Fancy!

I am reminded of long ago, before "discourse" on slashdot ...

2026-03-22T22:30:21Z

In reply to nevent1q…p3y8
_________________________

I am reminded of long ago, before "discourse" on slashdot had devolved to be nearly indistinguishable from 4chan, when there was a "Rob Pike Responds" article with the following:

" 8) One tool for one job? - by sczimme
Given the nature of current operating systems and applications, do you think the idea of "one tool doing one job well" has been abandoned? If so, do you think a return to this model would help bring some innovation back to software development?

(It's easier to toss a small, single-purpose app and start over than it is to toss a large, feature-laden app and start over.)

Pike:
Those days are dead and gone and the eulogy was delivered by Perl."

(Complete series of responses here: https://interviews.slashdot.org/story/04/10/18/1153211/rob-pike-responds)

I think the last MUA (Mail User Agent [what sysadmin sorts call ...

2026-03-22T10:50:41Z

In reply to nevent1q…hmfa
_________________________

I think the last MUA (Mail User Agent [what sysadmin sorts call email clients]) I enjoyed? Was elm.

Sure, I made use of pine. Arguably, I still think pico is one of the better TUI text editors (and the creation of nano, continues to confuse me).

I remember when thenewsh mentioned how Microsoft, broke Exchange's IMAP support with pine (the reference IMAP client). That was back when I used to get paid to administer an Exchange server from an employer (unfortunately, I would have other employers who also ran that awful MTA [Mail Transfer Agent, what we sysadmin sorts refer to email servers]). Of note: there is not a single employer I had, which ran Exchange, which did not also run other MTAs, in front of Exchange, as a matter of security, for antispam and such. Exchange has always been, and presumably will always be: the worst email server ever. Take that from someone who hates sendmail enough I usually referred to it as "sendwhale" as a pejorative. Take that from someone: who had a UUCP email address, before an SMTP address.

I concede, that mutt continued to make TUI MUAs, usable. Alas, IMHO, HTML in email was an antipattern, and I know whom to blame for it too; but that ship sailed and we're in the worse timeline now.

But, back in the day?

Using elm? Was still the apogee, for me at least.

2.91 is not out yet, but as if I didn't already dig snac ...

2026-03-22T10:32:08Z

2.91 is not out yet, but as if I didn't already dig snac enough already?

Check this line from the upcoming release notes:

"Added a new CONTRIBUTING.md file. Among other guidelines, I explicitly say there that AI contributions are NOT accepted."

In its entirety:

https://codeberg.org/grunfink/snac2/src/branch/master/CONTRIBUTING.md

Every have those moments where you feel as if the kids may be alright?

The Real Grunfink (nprofile…zmk4) continues to deliver!

#snac

Welp, one of the GitHub Continuous Integration checks failed ...

2026-03-22T10:24:22Z

In reply to nevent1q…wwa8
_________________________

Welp, one of the GitHub Continuous Integration checks failed with:

"Installing MacPorts
Fetching base failed: 0
Extracting...
tar: Error opening archive: Failed to open 'MacPorts-2.12.4-25.tar.bz2'
Error: Process completed with exit code 1.
"

AMAZING

GitHub finds new ways to shit the bed!

Anyway, that's above my "pay" grade (no one is paying me for this BS, and AFAIK, no one is paying any of the other MacPorts maintainers either. Regardless, I blissfully do not have access to fix that issue, or I would probably be tempted to waste more time digging more deeply.).

100% Also, SNAFU. ;(

2026-03-22T10:18:33Z

In reply to nevent1q…v9zr
_________________________

100%

Also, SNAFU. ;(

I haven't really been on the FediVerse much of late. Life has ...

2026-03-22T09:46:46Z

I haven't really been on the FediVerse much of late.

Life has been busy, and expensive.

I did see some concerts!

Modeselektor on March 14th was great! DJ QBert, Sphire et al at a Night at the Octagon before that show, were also excellent! To be honest? I probably should have kicked it at the Octagon for a while longer as it was way* groovier and the openers for Modeselektor were pretty mid, and Modeselektor didn't go on until midnight (but at least they performed until 2am!).

Saw Pixel Grip open for Peaches on Thursday. Managed to get everyone in Pixel Grip to sign the vinyl I bought! Their synth player encouraged me to visit Chicago (my dad was born there, but the only time I remember going to Illinois was to see my sister in college, and it was so far East in IL, I flew in and out of St. Louis, Missouri). The vocalist to Pixel Grip is even hotter in person (though the outfit she's wearing on the cover of Percepticide is wilder than what she was wearing at the show in SF).

Turns out an old friend from The Box (where I used to deejay in Santa Cruz) is a guitarist in a band called Dark Ride (vocalist was previously in the psychobilly band the Stellar Corpses) and they've got a new album coming out next week I think? I'm not really familiar with limitedrun, but it looks as if they have one fewer trackers than Bandcamp: https://darkride.limitedrun.com/ Rob was telling me they performed at WGT (Wave-Gotik-Treffen) last year I guess? I've still never attended! Someday, hopefully.

Priceline/Dollar lumped me with some oversized RAM pick up truck that was getting anywhere from 10 to 14MPG. Meanwhile, with the US Israeli invasion or Iran? And Iran apparently responding with: "Oh, so you want oil to be $200 a barrel? We gotchu!" I was facing gas station sticker shock more than usual. Such awful engineering.

I did finally test drive a Toyota Sienna (gets worse MPG than my Chevy Equinox TD [Turbo Diesel] did) and felt very dated in many ways. Also, not in the spec I want (it was a Platinum, which has leather seats my vegan self despises, and not an AWD variant). But, the Toyota dealership in Berkeley ghosted me, and the dealership in Oakland, just has an A"I" bot responding and spamming me. So I went to a dealership which at least had some, albeit, used, and not the right trim, just to get a feel for the car. It didn't feel great, and used prices were still basically MSRP if not higher. The guy at the Toyota dealership in Dublin was claiming they're selling new models for $5000 over MSRP. ;(

Having seen Doug Demuro show off a pre-release Rivian R2 and Rivian apparently partnering with Hest to make mattresses (and since I was sleeping in my last car, in lieu of being able to own a home)? And Rivian R2 pricing being announced? I thought I would check them out a bit more. Went to the location in Walnut Creek, spartan, minimalist, positioned directly across the street from a Tesla dealership.

Ended up doing a test drive with a Rivian R1S (gen 2) and wow. It is probably the first vehicle that felt better than the Porsche Cayenne's I've test driven! But, costing around $120,000 USD? It better! Apparently the guy was telling me they only made around 40 of those in the Borealis color that I thought was cool from the SXSW R2 previews and he was sifting through internal documents to find me one that had been ordered, but not picked up by someone (hence the higher price I guess due to some "Black Out" options?).

The driving experience was flawless though. If anything, it reminded me more of driving in a video game with the way the regenerative braking seems to kick in when I would lift my foot off the accelerator pedal. Utilizing a brake pedal, seems as if it is something that probably happens extremely infrequently? I guess that is true of a lot of EVs? Though I guess a Nissan Leaf has a mode to disable that pedal style to make it "coast" more like a traditional Internal Combustion Engine vehicle? I couldn't figure out how to "dim" the panoramic roof. It also, lacks a 3.5mm auxiliary audio jack, which for a deejay audio music nerd such as myself? Is a friggin offensive omission. But, y'know? The Toyota Sienna I test drove? Also had no such thing. ;(

The screens and UI and whatnot seemed OK. No Apple CarPlay or Android Auto (though there are 3rd party kits such as EVPlay for at least the gen1 which I guess turn the main screen into an Android tablet essentially and have some CarPlay support supposedly?), but frankly, I kind of hate all that shit anyway. I have less than any confidence that Rivian isn't selling their drivers' data to databrokers and being bought up by the FBI and such, but GM did the same shit.

Candidly: who is selling a new car without egregious telemetry and privacy violations in 2026? Anyone? I doubt it!

Meanwhile, you wanna go be an O.G. with a lowrider? Great! Stylin out fo sho, but even more expensive not just to buy such a classic car, but to run (they are more or less the opposite of fuel efficient) and maintain. Great for a second car to show off, and not drive.

Anyway, the way Rivian staggers their pricing is like, predictably evil, because: cars.

So, the "launch edition" Performance R2 (sounds as if they might start shipping to customers in June 2026?) starts at around $58,000.

You can find 2022 Quad R1S pre-owned Rivians on their site for: around $57,000.

So as others mentioned on the Rivian forums: you can buy a used R1S and a new R2, for about the same price as a new R1S.

Must be nice to be rich!

I, am not rich.

Thinking back to the house my parents sold in Atherton, California? That they apparently paid around $40,000 USD for in the 1970s? I think they sold it for $200,000? Quite the return on investment! Probably would go for millions (plural) now. Completely unaffordable.

Now? I am looking at paying $60,000+ (don't forget taxes) on a car that has seats I can fold down in back just to put some mattresses in to sleep. No shower, no toilet. Certainly not a swimming pool and acres of land like that home in Atherton.

Just an overpriced car.

Sure, maybe its operating costs are slightly lower than a fossil fuel powered vehicle? Maybe, its maintenance costs aren't awful (these things presumably chew through tires, and they're on BIG wheels, so expensive tires at that), brake fluid flushes and whatnot. Maybe not so much in the way of needing oil changes or transmission fluid changes I guess?

sigh Still a far cry from having a home.

So depressing.

It's 2026, we're 18 years after California voters passed Prop1a for highspeed maglev rail between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Nearly two DECADES and not a single mile of track has been laid.

Roads are congested. Doesn't matter if you are in a dino oil burner or an EV, it's an awful way to get around.

Reading the Rivian forums is pretty sickening. It's very clearly full of tech gear heads (as if techies and gear heads weren't bad enough on their own) who look at "upgrading" their cars like they were disposable items, because that is what consumer culture has habituated them to.

One weird upshot/silver lining to the invasion of Iran? Some hippie woo woo person mentioned how it was the equivalent so far of 5 Dakota pipeline protests in inhibiting oil production!

Which, is kind of hilarious.

Meanwhile, Trump is apparently trying to force California coastal oil rig production back online? California (more specifically, the Monterey Bay) is sort of where protecting coastlines began! It was thought that the sea otter, had been driven to extinction, until years after remediation efforts saw them return to the Monterey Area.

sigh two steps forward, 20 steps backwards is how most things feel.

I'm vaguely optimistic at @bunnie@treehousesystems.com announcement of the Dabao Baochip-1x (campaign closes in 4 days: https://www.crowdsupply.com/baochip/dabao) as yet another low cost (just under $10 USD a chip before taxes and shipping and handling) RISC-V effort, about as open as can currently be hoped!

I saw mention that Deepcomputing apparently has a new (IIIrd?) revision of their RISC-V SBC drop in replacement board for the Framework 13 on pre-order due to start shipping sooner than later too? https://deepcomputing.io/product/dc-roma-risc-v-mainboard-iii/ ($99 pre-order reserve price, I dunno what it will actually cost, I think the II revision was around $550 USD?). Claims to have some 30 TOPS NPU, but if it's like other GPU sorts of things paired with RISC-V SBCs, there aren't open source drivers for any of that, so who knows who can take advantage of it, or how?

Such a strange ordeal some hardware vendors seem to be foisting on end users/developers/whatever. Feels as if there's a continued class divide.

Still, it could be worse I guess? Gosh knows, many things are.

No apology necessary! Thank you for the refresher! As I wrote, it ...

2026-03-22T09:08:18Z

In reply to nevent1q…n072
_________________________

No apology necessary!

Thank you for the refresher! As I wrote, it has been a very long time since I explored such realms. I honestly hated Macintoshes until OS X, but I was stuck with them and supporting them for others from the very first 128K RAM version which launched in 1984. ;( I don't remember when but my mom (deceased in 2020) asked me what we should do with all my dad's (deceased in 2000) old Macintoshes, I told her I didn't care. Maybe some collectors would have paid money I could have used for them, but they were worthless to me; just a source of bad memories; and being forced to work (unpaid) for an abusive parent.

Probably the last time I encountered a system running OpenFirmware (on x86!) was a NetApp at a previous employer, and even that I seem to recall replacing circa 2005. I think the company behind that implementation was FirmWorks? Decades distant memories, still!

I submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' signify to ...

2026-03-22T08:59:18Z

I submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' signify to 1.63 here:

https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/31754

1 of 3 GitHub Continuous Integration checks passed (the other two are queued, but hopefully will complete without issues).

Not really much new here, more just syncing with upstream, which tagged a new release version for 7.9-beta.

tbh, I think this signify fork can probably ditch a lot of the OpenBSD keys? MacPorts (which also uses signify, from an older fork) does the same thing too. I looked into cleaning up that code a little bit to sync MacPorts' built-in signify, with this, but didn't get very far with it last time I gave it a go (there are some functions OpenBSD has, which older versions of OS X don't and someone else already did the heavy lifting for MacPorts' built-in signify a while ago and re-creating their work was more than I was able to bite off and chew on a Friday night the last time I went looking).

Anyway, assuming the other CI checks pass, it's up to someone else with commit access to merge it.

#signify #MacPorts #CryptographicSignatures #OpenSource

I submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' libssh to ...

2026-03-08T14:51:10Z

I submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' libssh to 0.12.0 here:

https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/31472

3 of 3 of GitHub Continuous Integration checks passed.

It's up to someone else with commit access to merge it.

I'm not the maintainer, nor am I really a user of libssh, so some things are not particularly tested (I did attempt to run "port -vst install" but tbh even "port -v install" was failing due to some weird kerberos defaults and I don't run kerberos locally, for good reasons. Also, I don't really use anything dependent upon libssh).

It was more that I was having dreams about OpenSSH and figured I should test a snapshot (no issues there, phew!) but noticed that libssh had been version bumped (more than one actually, there's also a 0.11.4 release) and there were security related issues, so it seemed worth at least submitting a Pull Request since it had apparently slipped under the maintainer's radar? The Portfile is also listed as openmaintainer, so I am guessing a little outside assistance is welcome.

Hopefully it helps some others! Doesn't do much of anything for me.

Hopefully it doesn't break anything for others; that I am less certain about.

#libssh #MacPorts #OpenSource #Security #OpenSSH

I knew Homebrew was bad, but thanks for explaining some other ...

2026-02-26T11:57:54Z

In reply to nevent1q…skl7
_________________________

I knew Homebrew was bad, but thanks for explaining some other reasons I hadn't paid attention to such as:

"homebrew-core has one Ruby file per package formula, and every brew update used to clone or fetch the whole repository until it got large enough that GitHub explicitly asked them to stop."

I hadn't realized it was that bad! I'll add that to the list of reasons to continue avoiding Homebrew, as if the spyware by default and the founder turning into a cryptocoin grifter weren't bad enough already.

"Git packfiles use delta compression, storing only the diff when a 10MB file changes by one line, while the objects table stores each version in full. A file modified 100 times takes about 1GB in Postgres versus maybe 50MB in a packfile."

20X overhead, seems, kind of horrifying to me?

No, thank you.

"storing three full uncompressed copies of every repository across data centres because redundancy and operational simplicity beat storage efficiency even at hundreds of exabytes."

I can't even begin to wrap my head around "beat storage efficiency" at "hundreds of exabytes" but then, I have been witness to corporate largess on scales that defy rational explanation. Some companies can afford to light stacks of money on fire apparently, but I don't think taking inspiration from the Heath Ledger's portrayal of The Joker in 2008's The Dark Knight should be a guiding light for any sane sorts.

IMHO, SQL is an anti-pattern that Steve Jobs wasn't smart enough to avoid when he bundled Sybase with NeXT and subsequently we've been suffering from that oversight ever since. SQL should have died, or at least stayed with, IBM. There are so many better database paradigms in existence which are not SQL.

Anyway, I dislike Git and I dislike SQL and you have somehow managed to create what I guess to me, is like the opposite of the Reese's peanut butter cup commercials of the 20th century?

But y'know, you're probably not entirely off the mark? Fossil-scm is a DVCS (with limited Git interoperability) and issue tracking system and wiki and such, which is presumably by virtue of being developed by the author of SQLite, also wrapped around SQLite.

The concluding sentence: "there’s no filesystem of bare repos to manage alongside the database." hearkens back to some old Slashdot "Rob Pike Responds" Q&A about databases and filesystems: https://interviews.slashdot.org/story/04/10/18/1153211/rob-pike-responds but seems to ignore the reality: databases exist on filesystems, always have, and presumably, always will. So, figuring out how to not overly abstract that and get down is vital.

I suppose, since elsewhere you write about S3, maybe you're too lost in the clouds and too far removed from bare metal and hardware implementations? That's, not a good thing. Pretty much, the opposite of good.

Biocked by someone who wrote: "I am perpetually amused that ...

2026-02-26T10:49:58Z

Biocked by someone who wrote:

"I am perpetually amused that IT people really, sincerely have no idea that they speak Martian."

I guess that person doesn't give a shit about mutual intelligibility, or fathom how completely insulting lack of comprehension is to have one's use of language demeaned as being from another planet entirely. A dead one at that.

Good riddance, enjoy your echo chamber I guess?

Where? Oh gosh, I think there was a mailing list that was popular ...

2026-02-26T10:22:49Z

In reply to nevent1q…e6d3
_________________________

Where? Oh gosh, I think there was a mailing list that was popular some years back? Maybe one of the ones listed here: https://common-lisp.net/independent-lists

Long ago (like, MC68K era) I seem to recall the low level Macintosh stuff being implemented in Forth (which is sort of like a dialect of a Lisp, maybe more specifically Scheme? My memories in such realms are soooo old, don't quote me on that; since I have probably forgotten more than I once used to know having toiled in such realms.).

Christine Lemmer-Webber (nprofile…540p) seems more up to date on more recent goings on with Lisp variants than I and has made mention of Guile (https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/) as something more contemporary that was news to me! Chances are, there's a lot of other more recent stuff I am pretty clueless about that others' are exploring and extending.

At least personally, I found the Lisp Machines (e.g. LMI [Lisp Machines International], Symbolics [the first dot com domain!] and to a lesser extent Texas Instruments) that evolved out of MIT's CADR research fascinating! It is possible, though with dubious copyright legality, to run OpenGenera (the Symbolics OS, more or less) on AMD64 hardware running Linux. Those machines, despite their name, ran other languages too, including C compilers and even supposedly had hardware bounds checking! So they weren't exploitable via common buffer overflow stack smashing techniques, supposedly? They were also open, down to their microcode. Contrasted to a lot of contemporary systems with their (U)EFI and BIOS being binary blobs completely obscured from users? A very different world. Apparently a lot of early X Windows bugs were identified and fixed thanks to Lisp Machines. The UNIX Hater's Handbook was largely written by individuals who were supposedly privileged enough to use Lisp Machines. Such workstations were not inexpensive for their era, I seem to recall some Lisp machines costing in the range of $60,000+ USD, in the 1980s. Also, probably my favorite GPU name ever was for Lisp Machines the: FrameThrower. From Evans & Sutherland (the Sutherland being Ivan Sutherland, of Sketchpad [one of the first GUI systems and probably the first object-oriented programming system] notoriety, and he was also Alan Kay's doctoral advisor IIRC). At toorcon 8, dnm and I were planning to talk more extensively about Lisp Machines and some of the good ideas from a security perspective that seemed to have been lost and or forgotten by others in the ensuing decades; but we kind of got derailed by Captain Crunch getting added to the panel in the 11th hour who hadn't done any prep with us and just kind of talked about whatever he felt like instead. Ah well. If you want a pop culture reference, a Lisp Machine also makes a cameo in the 1985 movie Real Genius where the reclusive Lazlo Hollyfeld hacker archetypal character can be seen with such a thing displaying some pretty groovy graphics!

I dunno about membership! It's probably a little too ad hoc and maybe closer to a TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zone) paradigm? Though I may be entirely incorrect about that. ^_^

New Kneecap tune dropped a couple of days ago, Smugglers & ...

2026-02-26T10:01:20Z

New Kneecap tune dropped a couple of days ago, Smugglers & Scholars:

https://kneecap.bandcamp.com/track/smugglers-scholars-3

#Kneecap #SmugglersAndScholars #HipHop

I decided to look into pricing out how much it would cost to ...

2026-02-26T08:44:27Z

I decided to look into pricing out how much it would cost to attend Revision 2026.

Between flights and hotels? $1200 USD on up or so, $2000ish would probably be just about right. Ironically, it looks as if I can book the last hotel room at the discounted rate over the course of 5 days, at what appears to be the preferred/closest to the event presumably hotel? That's still: €575. Yikes.

That is more than I spent on round trip flight, plus 7 nights at a hostel plus insurance, when I flew to Barcelona for Ombra Festival in December. z0mg

I don't think I can justify that this year even if I could maybe put more things on a line of credit; it seems: unwise given my present circumstances. ;(

Ah well. Here's hoping I can get it sorted out for next year maybe?

Thanks for all the work you do on improving PeerTube! This part ...

2026-02-26T08:32:00Z

In reply to nevent1q…6uvh
_________________________

Thanks for all the work you do on improving PeerTube!

This part is a bit troubling:

"Framasoft is currently running a fundraising campaign to finance the year 2026.

At the time of writing, there are just over three weeks left to reach our goal of €250,000. However, we have only raised 24 % of this target so far.

So if you appreciate PeerTube and would like to support its development, please consider making a donation (66 % tax deductible for French residents) and help build a bright future for PeerTube !"

Alas, I have thousands in debts, so I can't really help out much monetarily. Here's hoping you can get closer to that goal! 3 weeks isn't a lot of time.

Meanwhile, it appears as if I am not the only one running into ...

2026-02-26T07:30:01Z

Meanwhile, it appears as if I am not the only one running into online oddities with "mainstream" sites of late.

From DJ Bat (aka Xorcist (nprofile…5wu6)) Kick chat (https://kick.com/djbat) earlier today:

"If you are seeing - hearing me -social media has died - TT randomly has blocked me"

I didn't even see a notification email about a Kick stream, so, yeah, something seems, off?

How can I phrase this delicately? Do you remember the CyberDen BBS? It dates back to 1991. That's before Yahoo! was online. It's before: Netscape Navigator. Maybe you were an oddball such as I, and compiling things such as NCSA Mosaic on Sun Microsystems workstations at nps.navy.mil back then? There weren't many oddballs such as I. Most hadn't heard of the World Wide Web in 1991, or gopher for that matter. FidoNet was still the world's largest computer network! (And it would continue to be until around 1995/1996).

Ever hear of Lollapalooza? Bat set up the Internet kiosks there. When was that? Also 1991 I think? (I never attended)

Wired, remember that dead pulp printed magazine? In 1994, CyberDen BBS got a write up in Wired!

Yet, in 2026: apparently today's surveillance capitalistic A"I" agentic Internet, thinks that it's OK to block, or squelch, or otherwise censor or filter Xorcist?

How does the joke go: "ancient curse: may you live in 'interesting' times." Are these times, that interesting? I mean, I know I dig Bat's streams immensely, but kinda hard to watch them when I am not even seeing notification emails, on one of the rare things where I set notification emails!

(As contrasted with the seemingly endless amounts of spam I don't want, that I still receive).

We're in the era of Derpernets or something.

Huh, if the Game of Trees 0.123 pull Request was MacPorts' ...

2026-02-26T07:04:01Z

Huh, if the Game of Trees 0.123 pull Request was MacPorts' #31334's Pull Request?

I sure hope whomever submits a Pull Request 3 from that, has something fitting of the PR number.

For some reason reading this I am thinking of Erik Spiekermann ...

2026-02-26T06:57:20Z

In reply to nevent1q…hhp0
_________________________

For some reason reading this I am thinking of Erik Spiekermann interview segments (and outtakes on the DVD) from the film Helvetica.

Jessu's mascot Dizzy the llama is apparently going to hit 8 ...

2026-02-26T06:52:18Z

Jessu's mascot Dizzy the llama is apparently going to hit 8 million spins on stream tonight:

https://www.twitch.tv/jessu

Jessu: "I'm glad you guise are better at math that I am."

Someone in chat: "it's 31 spins per minute."

Me: who has a VoIP # that Discord/Twitch/LiveNation/TicketMaster/probably more don't consider "real" and thus I am not able to respond in chat because Twitch kneejerked to "Verified Accounts Only" mode after the Discord Face Scan/ID backlash, screaming into the void: "It's a turntable. It's canonically: 33.3RPM. RPM: Rotations Per Minute. Not, 31. 33.3̅!"

I mean, sure, it's a turntable (SL-1200) with a pitch adjustment, in theory Jessu could have pitched Dizzy down to 31RPM. Or heck pressed the 45RPM button! If she had an SL-1200MK4 (which she doesn't) she could even press a 78RPM button!

But, she hasn't done those things. Dizzy spins at 33.3RPM.

The math? Is apparently too hard for those in chat with "verified" accounts.

2026! What a time to be alive!

#Jessu #DJ #TurnTables #33point3RPM #333rdClub #DeeJayin #Dizzy

re: macOS testing. That stuff is annoying. When I worked at Sauce ...

2026-02-26T06:44:38Z

In reply to nevent1q…ex0f
_________________________

re: macOS testing. That stuff is annoying. When I worked at Sauce Labs, the only sanctioned VMs according to Apple's EULA had to run on Apple hardware (which meant we had these ghastly Mac Pros which were not racked in our datacenters running ESXi). There are, OFC, workarounds which don't respect Apple's EULA, but at least at a for-profit commercial employer, those options were off the table. ;(

16GB of RAM is hopefully still sufficient? I do a lot of MacPorts maintainer dev stuff on a system with half of that and don't find myself worrying about RAM exhaustion.

Then again, as others have told me: I am not a "normal" Mac user. So, if it doesn't involve Terminal.app/CLI, I am not much of an authority. No doubt "normal" Mac users do all sorts of things I would consider a waste of resources and 16GB of RAM might not seem like much for all I know.

Alas, I'm guessing the vintage Mac Mini on indefinite loan is one of the newer Apple Silicon systems where the "unified" memory means no after market RAM upgrades? ;( I am slightly less annoyed by that due to cold boot attack surface difficulty enhancements and performance improvements, but still: annoying. At least the SSD stuff seems as if it is mostly a solved problem (whether via dosdude1 sorts of soldering wizards or more recent NAND PCBs from 3rd parties).

Perhaps old RAM can be hocked to the same sorts of folks who will ...

2026-02-26T06:34:36Z

In reply to nevent1q…rzp7
_________________________

Perhaps old RAM can be hocked to the same sorts of folks who will buy pyrite for a profit?

Full disclosure: years ago I bought a modest amount of pyrite in gold labeled looking form factors off of eBay, just in case things ever got bad enough that it might come down to trying to fool some fools.

Never actually made use of it, but it was a pretty cheap investment, I doubt it has depreciated any, unlike old RAM. ;)

I think I first observed passphrase managers as an attack surface ...

2026-02-26T06:20:21Z

In reply to nevent1q…vf0t
_________________________

I think I first observed passphrase managers as an attack surface in the early 1990s?

Not in a good way.

Well, maybe "good" for those getting 'credz' (to use the slang parlance that Evan McBroom was using during his REcon.cx 2025 talk? Although, I dunno if it was ever spelled on screen so much as uttered, so maybe "creds" is synonymous)? :)

Circa 2012ish I remember some online discourse on FB with an outspoken infosec person talking about how users "must" (which I read in RFC2119 intonation/meanings personally) use passphrase managers; and I kind of brought up the "y'know, those aren't the silver bullet you seem to be claiming they are" and basically got booed out of rational discourse and insinuated as something along the lines that I was trying to make users less secure. ;(

Don't get me wrong, there are times and places for such things. At least personally: when working with ops teams and brittle hardware from vendors where shared credentials may be par for the course, passphrase managers that can be shared by a group are kind of a necessary evil.

Yet still, not without pitfalls. ;(

Circa 2007, while working for one past employer? My car was broken into and a laptop (and worse: a bunch of CDs [two 60 CD cases] from me deejayin earlier that day) were stolen.

Laptops, are expensive and annoying to replace, but having to update the passphrases on everything that was in the Passphrase Manager (because that laptop had a copy on disk, even encrypted, you never know) as due diligence, was definitely an annoyance of the adding insult to injury part.

Still, not insurmountable so much as time consuming and not the best look for me among my coworkers.

Alas, given the sort of music I spin? Even with the assistance of discOGs, is often irreplaceable. There's one CDR from an obscure French tape label that took me years to find another copy of (though I did get an email from the label when I wrote them out of desperation to see if they might be able to burn me another, which is perhaps, the funniest email I have ever received) and that's just one example out of approximately 120 discs. Some, have never been replaced, in nearly 2 decades of looking. ;( I remember one colleague offered to give me a waffles invite and while I thanked them despite their naiveté, they had no idea how rare some of the music I collect and spin is.

I've had more cars broken into and more laptops stolen and; and occasionally even some CDs and such stolen again, but thankfully none in the trunk after I had been deejayin like that unfortunate 2007 experience. But passphrase managers are a doozie of an issue, even if they're not as horrible as losing extremely rare physical musical media.

For some, maybe it's worse? Everyone has different threat models!

I know I'm not the only turntablist out there to suffer what seemed like targeted theft either.

DJ Jazzy Jeff has some story about flying to the UK for a gig, landing at Heathrow and apparently criminals stole his vinyl from his checked luggage! He ended up doing a lot of record shopping after he landed so he still played the gig, but no doubt the thieves stole a lot of rare and otherwise impossible to replace stuff. ;-/

Thanks for that! I submitted a Pull Request to update ...

2026-02-26T05:54:29Z

In reply to nevent1q…vm0g
_________________________

Thanks for that!

I submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' Got to 0.123 here:

https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/31334

GitHub Continuous Integration checks passed OK, it's up to someone else with commit access to merge it.

I also published an announcement on undeadly.org since rueda had already prepped it and it looked good!

#Got #GameOfTrees #MacPorts #OpenBSD #macOS #VersionControl #OpenSource #Git

The part of the present timeline where Apple zealots are over the ...

2026-02-23T01:14:31Z

The part of the present timeline where Apple zealots are over the moon about how Macintoshes are "cheap" now because RAM prices have gone through the roof?

Everything about all of that can fuck off entirely.

Re: veganism "If I did, I'd not make exceptions." ...

2026-02-23T01:07:53Z

In reply to nevent1q…g59d
_________________________

Re: veganism "If I did, I'd not make exceptions."

Yeah, I am a vegan. I've even worked as a chef at vegan restaurants.

Life has a "funny" way of testing convictions in my experience.

For me, for example: I have been incarcerated, more than once. Despite requesting vegan meals, such things were never availed to me.

However: I found that others with whom I was incarcerated, were generally more than happy to trade their meals' vegetables, for my meals' meat. Same for milk, etc.

Of all the weird economies that I encountered whilst incarcerated? It certainly seemed as if it was among the more benign. I managed to maintain being vegan as best I could in a food desert, and cultivated some camaraderie from carnivores who were happy with my generosity with things I had no interest in consuming.

I would posit: tante (nprofile…xfhg) probably isn't vegan, and isn't writing from a perspective of authority in such realms. Alas, while analogies are perhaps useful for trying to convey an idea, they're also a fundamental logical fallacy that critical thinking classes in junior colleges will typically highlight as something to avoid in writing.

I'll leave you with a vegan joke: "When I was an omnivore, I didn't understand vegetarians. Now that I am vegan, I understand them even less."

ssh-chat is kind of neat, but: kind of suffers from being stuck ...

2026-02-23T00:29:22Z

In reply to nevent1q…p5hq
_________________________

ssh-chat is kind of neat, but: kind of suffers from being stuck to ASCII usernames IIRC?

IMHO, SILC was way better.

CC: ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (nprofile…9pdq)

It's confusing, for me as a poor person, with thousands of ...

2026-02-23T00:10:21Z

In reply to nevent1q…6zec
_________________________

It's confusing, for me as a poor person, with thousands of dollars in debt, who is homeless.

I also, need more money, apparently. How is it that I seem to have that in common with the ultra rich?

Particularly since: I do not actually want any money.

I think housing and food and such should be basic fundamental rights for all living creatures on this planet.

For some reason, every other species besides humans seems to have figured this out already. Even birds build nests for their eggs/hatchlings.

Me? I guess I need to work more jobs (I already have one, it is insufficient. A far cry from a livable wage.)? For this stupid money construct? All while making rich people who already have too much, richer?

I feel like a fool.

CC: ploum (nprofile…8pxw) Charlie Stross (nprofile…j5wv)

It is no secret that I dislike GitHub. The ...

2026-02-21T21:10:46Z

It is no secret that I dislike GitHub.

The "contributions" metric staring at me any time I load some GitHub users' page is just one of the many reasons why; like some friggin Black Mirror overly gamified dystopia.

Cue: nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyd968gmewwp6kyqpqfpk7n6ru4dhgjhgfeyk3qt5qpfwatd3lrn2pv0glrxq2ldgu9rjsvwstg6 (nprofile…stg6) tune "Metrics" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGDqTXlNaW4 for accompanying music (and lyrics especially).

Sometimes, I wonder if my "132 contributions in the last year" number would be higher if I:

Weren't homeless.
Had a livable wage.
Were being paid to work on others' software and systems (as I have done for much of my career; admittedly, in private, not shared on GitHub for the world to see, because that's not how private corporate work is).

Yet, I see some others who have things like "1000 contributions in the last year" and whoa, is that a "10X Engineer"?!

Only, I see most of their code is written in higher level languages which on average are 60X slower than what I tend to focus on (their Python, vs my C or whatever) so, no.

Still 1000-2000 contributions a YEAR seems like a LOT, that's multiple commits to GitHub every day!

Goddamn.

Horrifyingly, I found a MacPorts maintainer who has in EXCESS of 9000 contributions over the last year!

Do they sleep? When do they have time to fit in eating or exercise, or not staring at a screen!?

Even if it were only 9000 contributions in a year, that's more than 24 commits a day. A commit, every hour every day?!

It's inhuman. Not inhumane, like literally, no human should be pushing that much code.

It's not superhuman. Something is wrong.

GitHub is so horrible.

Chiming in with a: if you like books, maybe you can find some old ...

2026-02-21T20:49:28Z

In reply to nevent1q…0sa9
_________________________

Chiming in with a: if you like books, maybe you can find some old O'Reilly books on ksh/Korn Shell that would be modestly helpful?

I guess O'Reilly doesn't publish physical books anymore, which is jaw dropping to me, but probably means you can find such things on the used market for not much money!

I realized, you asked about bash specifically, and ksh is not bash, but:

There are a plethora of UNIX shells and it's helpful to be versed in more than one!

I'm an outlier insomuch as I got habituated to tcsh long ago and still prefer it over most other choices (csh and tcsh users seem to be very fringe), even if I end up using zsh a lot these days.

CC: Stefano Marinelli (nprofile…z6zj)

Meanwhile @theregister@geeknews.chat seems down? Or well, more ...

2026-02-21T20:34:20Z

Meanwhile @theregister@geeknews.chat seems down? Or well, more specifically geeknews.chat seems to be throwing some Mastodon error.

I would contact @jeroen@social.franssen.xyz but that also doesn't seem to be loading!

Same. Heck, I remember when online nerds were more or less up in ...

2026-02-21T20:31:17Z

In reply to nevent1q…cflx
_________________________

Same.

Heck, I remember when online nerds were more or less up in arms at Intel for putting unique serial numbers in their CPUs.

For those who may have missed it, here are some salient old stories from @theregister@geeknews.chat

e.g. "It was an 'accident'" in the Pentium II era: https://www.theregister.com/1999/03/11/unique_id_codes_on_mobile/

Contrasted with it's become normalized, you'll take it, and shut up about it by the Pentium III era: https://www.theregister.com/1999/03/15/unique_serial_number_exists/

Alas, in 2026? I fear that Christine Lemmer-Webber (nprofile…540p) is all too aware that the "Internet" has been largely subsumed by users who are in for-profit surveillance capitalism driven "silos" and that the days of fringe literati coalitions consensus about evils online who effect change on a socio-political level aren't what they used to be.

The person who fell asleep at the wheel and crashed into me in ...

2026-02-21T20:22:19Z

In reply to nevent1q…0raz
_________________________

The person who fell asleep at the wheel and crashed into me in Fall of 2024 (thus, totaling my car; thankfully no one was injured) while we were waiting for his uncle to show up with proof of insurance (he also didn't have his license on him) told me, after we had been chatting for a while and I learned that he was basically a migrant from Mexico, with a closed criminal record from when he was a minor, but also a young (like early 20s) parent struggling to make ends me tells me:

"I like Trump."

I don't know if he was trying to court favor with me by erroneously thinking I was a Republican (I am not and never voted for Trump) or maybe he was just trying to pass the time and it was close to elections but I was like: "you aren't like, worried about his stance on immigration?"

His response (roughly): "Nah man. Like, he was in office before. Obama deported more people than Trump did."

Basically from that awful conversation I was able to surmise he more or less thought that Trump was all bark and no bite.

As if, deportation parity was the only possible negative outcome of Trump being re-elected (cringes at the thought of detention centers, six year olds separated from their parents, appearing in courts, and the largess of ICE funding; to say nothing of their more recent murders of civilian American citizens).

Though I hope I won't cross paths with him again (it would be an understatement to suggest that him totaling my car due to his negligent driving has inconvenienced me, since I am so poor I was sleeping in/living out of my car), I do sometimes wonder if that guy still likes Trump?

Reminds me of the "HAMMER TIME" stickers I see stuck on ...

2026-02-21T19:10:10Z

In reply to nevent1q…9g58
_________________________

Reminds me of the "HAMMER TIME" stickers I see stuck on "STOP" signs on occasion in the East Bay. ;)

If Steve Jobs were still alive, I doubt Apple would have any ...

2026-02-21T18:46:52Z

In reply to nevent1q…euly
_________________________

If Steve Jobs were still alive, I doubt Apple would have any A"I" at all. He was alive to witness the last so-called "A'I' Winter" and Apple didn't buy into the BS back then either.

Alas, we are currently in the Tim Crook era of Apple. Where removing headphone jacks is a profit margin maker, and removing MagSafe ports (though at least I guess he eventually got wind of how bad a decision that was and brought them back?). So, A"I"? Is on the table. Friggin Tim Crook.

CC: /usr/people/flexion (nprofile…fqud)

Alphabet Inc./Google/YouTube have already impacted the global ...

2026-02-21T18:43:15Z

In reply to nevent1q…j2x3
_________________________

Alphabet Inc./Google/YouTube have already impacted the global price of RAM.

To wit: San Mehat (when he worked for Google) was tasked with basically implementing a BIOS that was OK with RAM of various timings, so that Google could basically buy whatever was cheapest, toss that in their datacenter-running-out-of-business-systems (really, Google is the entire reason that data centers started charging for power consumption, not just rack utilization. Google supposedly ran a couple of their first hosting providers out of business entirely because the hosting providers weren't charging Google for the power they were drawing. If you ever have the misfortune of seeing Google's earlier "custom" hardware it was basically 4 motherboards screwed down to some particle board that would fit in a 1U rack space, with 1 power supply, so if that PSU went toast, you'd lose 4 systems at once! Kind of, the opposite of how most folks were doing build outs even back then. But definitely: cheap and dense!). Anyway, the idea being: "we'll just buy whatever RAM is cheapest and be good to go!" So, San writes this custom BIOS, it works with whatever you throw at it, gangbusters time, right!?

So, Google goes and buys whatever the "cheapest" RAM is for their new BIOS.

Vendors sell them that.

They go back for more: "Wait, why is the price higher?!"

Vendors: "Well, we sold you all of our cheapest RAM last time. We do not have any more cheaper RAM. This is the price now. Thank you for your business."

I have a friend, from high school, who is a second generation DRAM designer. The profit margins, within that market are pretty much only at the bleeding edge of hardware design. Everything else? Even if it is a generation old? Is more or less sold at a loss. Hypothetically, there might be a way to make a profit, if it is like, decades old and you have some weird customer who really needs that specific ancient part and you happened to have it collecting dust in a warehouse. However: warehouses are expensive, as is storing stuff. Better to sell product at a loss, than to waste even more money for decades hoping to recoup that loss on storage space.

Google, apparently learned their lesson with how they impact the global price of RAM, already.

Have they forgotten that lesson? It wouldn't surprise me. San Mehat hasn't worked for them in years as far as I know.

Institutional knowledge and memory are fickle sorts of things that are difficult to maintain at all, particularly with companies that have (checks) over 190,000 employees. Let alone when you have attrition and folks leaving.

Alas, at least from my vantage? Google/YouTube are probably "too big to fail." Alphabet Inc. have already been convicted as a monopoly.

Did being convicted as a monopoly put an end to AT&T? No.

The USA has a completely in-efficacious so-called "justice" system, that is incapable of terminating a non living corporate entity, despite the hypocrisy of sanctioning capital punishment in many states (in defiance of scriptural Commandment "Thou shall not kill" at that. For a country that professes to be "One nation Under God"? It sure doesn't seem to demonstrate taking heed to that deity.).

CC: /usr/people/flexion (nprofile…fqud)

I don't know? I am not a retro enthusiast. As I used to ...

2026-02-21T17:34:23Z

In reply to nevent1q…km4q
_________________________

I don't know? I am not a retro enthusiast. As I used to express it: "what your idea of 'retro' is seems to overlap with my sense of 'nostalgia'."

I also used to work for The MADE (Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment) and basically, if we had it as something playable? Chances are it was already trailing edge.

We had to be careful about that. For example, we had some PS4 systems (I was last working there in 2020, we closed during the pandemic, who would have guessed that 501c3 non profit video game museums were not considered 'essential' businesses?!) but we did not put them out on the museum floor to be playable, because stores were still selling new PS4 games, and it was not our intention to suggest that new games should already be on display in a museum.

As it was, it was bad enough that we still had occasionally seemingly very grumpy and suspicious looking people who worked in the game industry, come in from time to time and appear to be snooping around to make sure we weren't some illicit warez den. Despite having a Library of Congress granted DMCA exemption for software preservation.

What I didn't ever say to such individuals, but was thinking: "I'm sorry sus guise, but we are not eating into your profit margins. Would you like to see my tax return from last year? Where I grossed barely more than $3000? I sleep on a couch, here. I also change the toilet paper and refill the hand soap in the bathrooms. I also double as building security, wherein I helped thwart no fewer than three attempted break-ins, and let me tell you: that glass window they smashed, is not cheap to replace. We are not the cause of your financial woes. Your oversaturated industry, in lock step with the mercenary industrial complex, just isn't the money maker you may have imagined. If you'd like to refresh your memory, please check out our 'store' section, where you can see how many enormous boxed copies of whatever Assassin's Creed special edition is collecting dust because no one actually cares about it even at that insanely low price we stuck on it because it was a donation from someone else's surplus. Are you a 'triple A' game dev? Because supposedly, that is a 'triple A' title too, that no one wants. We have approximately 100,000 games in our collection. You are welcome to play more or less any of them. Can you pick out a new game that you want to play when you have a backlog on that scale? Presumably, most paying customers can't either. So good luck with marketing to demographics that have attention spans barely larger than that of a gnat! We'll still be here. Even though we probably wish we were doing just about anything else. Alas, livable wage jobs seem to not exist in this country anymore. My boss told me maybe I should consider driving for Uber. That is not a joke. Things are really that awful."

ARM is from the 1980s, so well, yeah. ;) I know RISC-V isn't ...

2026-02-21T17:19:43Z

In reply to nevent1q…wqeh
_________________________

ARM is from the 1980s, so well, yeah. ;)

I know RISC-V isn't the only 21st century CPU ISA, but it's been the only one that has felt refreshing to me so far.

The other day, while at my storage unit? I noticed a box on the ...

2026-02-21T04:00:10Z

The other day, while at my storage unit? I noticed a box on the floor, where I had not left it.

This happens from time to time, I live in California. There are earthquakes and such, things get jostled around.

Yet, I sincerely hope nothing was damaged.

I do not have the where with all to even get into how expensive what fell to the ground presumably, is.

Or how little I have been able to use it.

Thankfully: it was all packaged and boxed up, and there's lots of foam padding, which hopefully protected it?

It's also heavy so I dunno. It can't have fallen that far, but I can't test it to know for gosh knows how long.

I hate being homeless.

I'm definitely grateful I can afford a storage unit for my meager material possessions, but it's not how I want things to be. I want to actually use the limited things I have decided to hang onto. Not just, store them.

If you're in Berkeley tomorrow and do not have plans ...

2026-02-21T03:00:36Z

If you're in Berkeley tomorrow and do not have plans there's "The cutest Tea Party Ever":

https://www.mygreenyogi.com/all-events-k9t8told/the-cutest-tea-party-ever

I'm not involved with it, though I used to volunteer at the Tea Oasis locations in SF and Oakland that Travis basically founded.

#Tea #SFBA #Berkeley #TheCutestTeaPartyEver

The first thing that comes to mind for me is Ray Bradbury's ...

2026-02-21T02:52:16Z

In reply to nevent1q…xxdr
_________________________

The first thing that comes to mind for me is Ray Bradbury's short story: The Toynbee Convector

Shorter still, is Alan Kay's quote: "The best way to predict the future, is to invent it."

In more recent years, Alan Kay et al have had a hand in co-creating DynamicLand:

https://dynamicland.org/

Carrion? OK then: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfFnT0zf4rY ...

2026-02-21T00:13:37Z

In reply to nevent1q…rmtk
_________________________

Carrion? OK then: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfFnT0zf4rY

Meanwhile, Babel seems promising as a mesh routing option (e.g. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9229) but the code is friggin full of Linuxisms. Good luck getting it to build on a BSD (I tried, years ago, without luck. Maybe it's worth looking at again though?). As I pejoratively refer to such things: "ah, academic postdoc quality code." ;(

Maybe look to https://www.irif.fr/~jch/research/ or https://www.irif.fr/~jch/software/babel/ ? The latter claims maybe there is a reference implementation in BIRD these days, which could be a good sign?

https://bird.network.cz/ (Not sure when Babel support was added, I should look into this more deeply).

One upshot: Babel does mesh routing over wired and wireless networks. One of the reasons it was chosen by SudoMesh (https://sudoroom.org/wiki/Mesh) I haven't dropped into one of their meetings in years and their mailing list traffic dwindled to more or less nothing. So I am unsure of their current status.

St. Olaf? Hah! I was assigned a student sysadmin job when I ...

2026-02-20T21:44:02Z

In reply to nevent1q…a9up
_________________________

St. Olaf? Hah! I was assigned a student sysadmin job when I attended Carleton College!

Dave Diehl, told me I couldn't work the job I was assigned, because it was: "reserved for upperclassmen" and I was only a freshman. Perhaps the first time he was a thorn in my side, not the last. ;( He also seemed to think I was a "hacker" because I had listed a Commodore Amiga on my résumé, but he clearly didn't mean it in a complimentary fashion. ;(

Worse: I was told by the MathCS department: I couldn't use the SGIs, because I was also "not an upperclassmen" even though I had already been toiling on such systems (and nicer ones, some of them, down to their microcode) at nps.navy.mil (now nps.edu) before I was even at Carleton and had toured SGI's campus more than once. Indeed, seeing the SGIs in Carleton's newly renovated (this was circa 1994) MathCS department was one of the reasons I decided to attend. (A gorgeous red head I met during the prospective student week was another reason, but alas, she also wasn't interested in me beyond friendship.)

Instead? I ended up slogging away on their awful NeXT systems and horrid VMS running Vax and such. I think they later had one DEC Alpha that ran Tru64 that only professors used, I got to see one in person, but wasn't allowed "time" on it.

sigh I did eventually (winter of my first year) get a different student job after someone in my dorm was tipped off to me being a nerd, so I ended up working as a "Divisional Computing Consultant" for Humanities faculty and was granted all the elevated privileges I presumably would have received if I hadn't been thrown under a bus by Dave Diehl (whom I later learned: never even graduated, he just kind of kept hanging around the geek houses and became a fixture on campus).

So much grief, for such backwater systems, and minimum wage student job pay at that! IIRC, Carleton's uplink for the entire campus was a 56K leased line when I started there (my 14.4 modem presumably ate up about a quarter of the bandwidth before they upgraded). Oh yeah, and whether it was UPS or the mail room (I suspect the latter) my Amiga 2000 was smashed en route to college. I didn't end up getting a replacement (thanks to someone selling a used A1200 on comp.sys.amiga.marketplace for about what the UPS insurance payout was) until my second trimester. Which meant that my first trimester I was mostly sitting in front of their dumb terminals and those awful NeXT systems. Eventually the MathCS department upgraded to a 486dx2 66MHz NeXTStep lab and that super slow OS became barely usable. Omniweb, almost made the World Wide Web seem, bearable. I still think it's mostly awful. (Not that I was a proponent of gopher).

I know older UNIX sources exist (I helped restore some of them).

Do any of you know Bob Fabry? It was his birthday on the 12th, apparently he turned 86!

"In 1971, Berkeley Professor Bob Fabry buys a $99 copy of UNIX and provides it to a group of students, including Bill Joy, who modify the original code to include a number of new features." (via https://www.berkeley.edu/about/history-discoveries/ click on Contributions/Discoveries and then the 1977: "Berkeley UNIX and the birth of open-source software" as a citation for that quote)

I haven't crossed paths with him personally, despite doubtlessly knowing many in common (I work in Berkeley these days too); but I am guessing he has some memories in such realms?

CC: Michael Dexter (nprofile…g37f)

I've sometimes wondered if I could revert to UUCP and reduce ...

2026-02-20T21:06:52Z

In reply to nevent1q…c0wt
_________________________

I've sometimes wondered if I could revert to UUCP and reduce spam? I have my doubts, spammers seem to ruin everything and they probably went after UUCP long after I stopped using it.

Still, my first Internet capable email address was a UUCP one, not SMTP. I did have other electronic mail systems before UUCP, but they were much more localized.

I've lost count of how much WWII Japanese Internment stuff ...

2026-02-20T19:59:25Z

In reply to nevent1q…zyhc
_________________________

I've lost count of how much WWII Japanese Internment stuff I've read or watched over the decades, but definitely wasn't expecting to encounter live musicians after a documentary screening that I was unaware was going on in the first place! ^_^

I stumbled across the American Irezumi exhibit some months earlier and had been meaning to return to check out that book a bit more, turns out: being divorced and single for longer than I would like to think about, I do not have a lot to do on Valentine's Day so the timing worked well for me to return to the library!

Definitely ended up being a highlight of the day. They both teach as well, and I do have a very tiny portable koto I bought years ago that is sitting in storage, unused and I wasn't sure where to even take lessons, so at least now I know of some local options! Heck, I even thought I bought a shakuhachi years ago, but learned it was mislabeled by the shop and is a shi no bue (basically a horizontal bamboo flute); which I guess explains why it was so cheap.

Listening to the radio in the rental car recently and h.f.s. the ...

2026-02-20T10:19:01Z

Listening to the radio in the rental car recently and h.f.s. the "Hey, look at us, we're the UK and we arrested Prince Andrew! We're so much BETTER than Trump and the USA, go UK!"

It's sickening.

Yes, Trump is awful, I did not vote for him. But like, the UK has known about Prince Andrew for years and arresting him on his birthday? Then releasing him? What the fucking hell? That just seems like a dick move tbh.

There are Epstein documentaries that are years old too. There are Ghislaine Maxwell documentaries. Humans treating other humans horribly, is as old as human history.

Meanwhile: a lot of the current "age verification" BS online? That whole, Discord shitting the bed and all the ensuing fallout? Is because of the UK.

The UK, where they still don't have Freedom of Speech.

I don't know if you have worked for companies owned by folks from the UK? I have.

I don't know, if you've tried to use chat systems administered by folks from the UK? I have.

Maybe, you've forgotten about the Irish Genocide? I haven't.

My maternal side of the family fled to the USA, because of how awful the UK treated them, centuries ago.

Remember, when a lot of UK "royalty" were marrying Nazis? Like, real WWII Nazis?!

Things are bad now, yes.

The USA, has a lot of unresolved issues! Of course.

"Everybody's shit stinks" as one of my friends said when he was living abroad.

But c'mon, a performative arrest on Prince Andrew's birthday to be released the same day? Nah, that ain't the justice anyone who gives a shit about real justice cares about.

But were some radio interviews ever trying to spin that shit.

Fuck all the way off with that.

Go listen to some Kneecap or something.

IMHO, long-term storage is a bad bed fellow for secure comms. PFS ...

2026-02-20T09:18:24Z

In reply to nevent1q…uj4w
_________________________

IMHO, long-term storage is a bad bed fellow for secure comms.

PFS (Perfect Forward Secrecy) is antipode to "message persistence" (what some folks call "scroll back" support I guess or more common parlance: "message history").

You can basically choose one or the other, not both.

Many popular messaging systems, choose message persistence. It's really convenient!

It's really, not secure.

If anything, even if you implement PFS, or are blessed to be using a system which defaults to such things, you're always being bitten at he heels and ankles by folks screen shotting plaintext on an end point or logging plaintext on a "trusted" client (the reference SILC client was derived from irssi and /log %filename is right there not stubbed out) or some other adversary trying to undermine your attempts at PFS, it is not easy.

I do concur that IPFS, etc. are not fit for purpose, but tbh, I do not think that there are any systems which are.

A lot of huge (think: FB/Meta/WhatsApp) companies will store their users' messages indefinitely. This is sketchy a.f. and opens users up to so-called "offline attacks" where evil "big brother" entities will store ciphertext, until perhaps a weakness can be found.

Take for example, this screenshot from 2010: https://www.flickr.com/photos/artkiver/4369339644/ (also attaching to this reply) wherein I and focalintent (RIP, Daniel) used OTR over what was, at the time, Facebook's XMPP. Notice how Facebook explicitly flagged that OTRed messaging as: "[encrypted message]"? Kind of a red flag! Very untrustworthy! Doubtlessly, in 2026, Facebook probably still has that chat, logged, flagged/tagged as encrypted, maybe throwing things at it to see if they can break it.

Headlines such as: "US authorities have reportedly investigated claims that Meta can read users' encrypted chats on the WhatsApp messaging platform, which it owns" as related to ongoing litigation, seem to further that speculation.

SILC (Secure Internet Live Conferencing previously: silcnet.org, these day code is archived here: https://github.com/silc/silc) attempted to offer end-to-end encrypted communication, decades ago (IIRC, Pekka began work on SILC in the 1990s, before Facebook existed at all, certainly source code was available and it was in use before Twitter/X existed too). It offered PFS (Perfect Forward Secrecy) by default. It encrypted messages from server operators by default too!

At the time, I don't think that threat model was widely acknowledged? In 2026, it's hard not to ignore. Back in the day, when SysOps would break into chat, and might be constrained to a LATA and have in person meet ups with some intermittent frequency, you could cultivate some level of trust for your SysOp/SysAdmin sorts.

In 2026, when Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos and the like are making billions of dollars off of their users? It's kind of hard to trust anyone on their payroll, or affiliate systems. Truthfully, that shark got jumped with MySpace Tom. Could every BBS operator prior to MySpace Tom, force themselves onto their users as a "friend"? I mean, sure, probably. Were they narcissistic assholes who would do such a thing? NO! Clearly, they weren't. MySpace Tom, sold MySpace (and his users' data) for $580 Million in 2005! They lost a dozen years worth of data! The last time MySpace changed hands? It was sold for $35 million. You may be able to experience some feint fondness for MySpace via SpaceHey these days, and scene girl styles and uhh, Invader Zim "custom" page templates and such. Not compelling? Yeah, it isn't.

Circa 2014, I released a proof of concept "Merry Cryptmas" release demonstrating OTR messages over SILC in an encrypted VM running OpenBSD and included some other things such as Tor for folks who might want to torify it as well. That was mostly a proof of concept to give folks who were clamoring for "privacy focused, encrypted communications, open source" type desires, a demonstration, they could have that already using existing tools, without writing a single line of code! Though, me being me, I made sure everything was configured to be UTF-8/Unicode clean because 2014 is still more than two decades after rob pike (nprofile…v9mh) made UTF-8 a thing, and since Japanese is my second language, I find it offensive when I encounter ASCII only encoding in the 21st century.

But to echo Soatok Dreamseeker (nprofile…uxy5)

"It's difficult to get most people to know or care about this!"

I can't think of a single person who ever told me they used the OTR over SILC proof of concept Merry Cryptmas release. ;(

As it was, focalintent (again, RIP Daniel Garcia), was probably the only one I knew who kept trying to use SILC with me (I would estimate at its apogee, SILC had around 300 daily active users, globally; I was joined to no fewer than five or six spectacular, if very underground SILC networks. I seem to recall one of the CCC [Chaos Communications Congress] events used SILC as well and during that week or so maybe it peaked at several thousand simultaneous users? Alas, CCC seemed to devolve to XMPP/jabberd in later years, quite the downgrade for hackers.)

To me at least: "long term archival"? Seems adversarial in nature, I think: "NSA" or other TLAs, wanting to store vast swaths of ciphertext as being enemies to those who may wish to maintain a shred of privacy online.

Federated? IRC was already that. Same with SILC.

Distributed, a little more challenging. PSYC2 (https://about.psyc.eu/PSYC) is attempting to address such things, and points out some of the pitfalls with federation: https://about.psyc.eu/Federation

The lead dev behind PSYC2 is a pretty rad individual. Albeit, I have not crossed paths with them in person since 2014.

Yet again, I know a lot of other folks in this field, on a personal level. Some of them are scheisty a.f. some are merely sketchy mc sketch sketch. The world of infosec is not as small as it once was, but it is still too small for most folks to care about at the end of the day. At the end of the day?

Most folks, using computers, or pocket computers, or whatever, don't even program anymore. I do not even understand why I would want to own a device I cannot program. I strive, to avoid accumulating such thneeds. Meanwhile, Tim Crook's Apple, convicted monopoly Alphabet Inc./Google who had co-founders who think they can retire with billions made off their users, MySpace Tom's, Mark Zuckerbergs? Are going to learn a lesson the hard way apparently, about karma and how they have already made the world a worse place for everyone.

People who actually care about users' and user privacy?

They exist.

But ask yourself: why wasn't Pekka Riikonen (lead SILC dev) getting millions of dollars?

Heck, how much grant money do you think Ian Goldberg and the OTR development team received? You know of billionaire academics? I don't. Last I checked, teachers in San Francisco were on strike again recently and probably still not getting livable wages in return.

"abuse management" I think, from my vantage? You may have an incorrect perception of abuse. From where I sit? I see a couple of thousand billionaires, abusing billions of humans, and many more non human species on planet Earth.

Encrypted comms aren't going to solve that kind of abuse. Good luck with that. Seriously, the human species needs precisely: zero MySpace Tom types. No more Larry Page and Sergey Brin sorts! Which came first: Linus Torvalds and Linux, or Jeff Bezos and Amazon?

Wake t.f. up. It's not OK to pretend that the handful of folks who actually care about real user privacy and security, are the causes of abuse. They've been sharing, freely for decades and everyone else is ignoring their hard work, apparently: willfully.

Didn't FreeNAS/TrueNAS have some webUI for managing bhyve? ...

2026-02-20T08:40:02Z

In reply to nevent1q…y8gu
_________________________

Didn't FreeNAS/TrueNAS have some webUI for managing bhyve? It's been many years since I looked at it though.

11 things piled onto a MegaDrive/Genesis? (I may not have counted ...

2026-02-20T08:29:44Z

In reply to nevent1q…hewl
_________________________

11 things piled onto a MegaDrive/Genesis? (I may not have counted correctly) I'm surprised they didn't manage to fit a Power Base Convertor (SEGA Master System adapter/pass through) into that stack somehow.

Admittedly, some of the goofiest tricks for that system were the "unplug XYZ cartridge, plug in ZYX cartridge without turning off the power and get infinite lives!" glitches.

lmao

2026-02-20T06:46:47Z

In reply to nevent1q…hmv3
_________________________

lmao

On Saturday, I revisited the main San Francisco Public Library ...

2026-02-20T06:38:45Z

On Saturday, I revisited the main San Francisco Public Library branch, and wandered downstairs to the American Irezumi exhibit. Note: the exhibit I think lasts until March 1st, 2026? So you still have some time to check it out if you are in the area!

I had already watched the videos, but there was a book I wanted to get more of a look at. The book is enormous, nearly 300 pages! I noticed: page 242 was torn out. ;( I already checked with the information booth too: the book is not published, so the only way to read it at the moment, is to sit down in the exhibit!

Maybe that will change in the future? I hope so!

However, I noticed a small group of folks filing into an adjacent room. After using the rest room, I entered the room wherein I learned that they were screening a documentary:

Hidden Legacy: Japanese Traditional Performing Arts in the WWII Internment Camps

(YouTube video link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDqKDexQRSg )

After the documentary concluded, one of the film makers, Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto (https://skmkoto.com/) along with her son, Brian Mitsuhiro Wong (https://bmwkoto.com/) answered some questions and performed some musical numbers on the 琴「koto」(13 stringed Japanese zither, ancestrally derived from the Chinese 古筝「gǔzhēng」) and 尺八「shakuhachi」(Japanese bamboo flute, also supposedly derived from Chinese antecedents circa the 7th or 8th century C.E.) somewhat known for being the preferred instrument of the 虚無僧「komusō」masked mendicant monks of the 普化宗「fuke-shū」Fuke Sect of Zen Buddhism. Centuries before The Residents or deadmau5 would perform music in masks? The 天蓋「tengai」masks of such monks concealed their identities, as they played their music.

Anyway, it was totally unexpected! I was super grateful for the serendipity and live music! Moreover, they were selling vinyl! I purchased some copies (at least one of which I plan to gift to one of my undergraduate professors who taught a Japanese pop culture history class) and got them signed!

Pretty groovy.

One of the recurring sentiments in the documentary and that Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto emphasized after the screening, was that music is one of those things that helped during the dark times of the Internment Camps. As we continue to face adversities, even outside of the horrors of World War II? I think that sentiment seems to hold true.

I dunno much about IRCv3, but back in the early 1990s I do ...

2026-02-19T17:16:41Z

In reply to nevent1q…t7nf
_________________________

I dunno much about IRCv3, but back in the early 1990s I do remember just using telnet to port 6667; though it could feel a little bit like "drinking from the firehose" at times? Seemed as if a lot of protocols could be fudged by a human and telnet back then (SMTP still can, if you have sufficient TLS wrapper handling; maybe substitute netcat/nc for telnet these days? It's been a few years since I last did that.) and it was a great way to learn interactively. Or, so I thought?

“Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.” ー Alan Kay's adage used to be pretty widely promulgated, at least, among decent developers.

That "Cosplaying as a Sysadmin" Jeff Geerling t-shirt ...

2026-02-09T23:17:02Z

That "Cosplaying as a Sysadmin" Jeff Geerling t-shirt design, really takes the cake.

I mean, I've been a sysadmin, for decades.

I don't have a YouTube channel with over a hundred million followers, nor do I want one.

I would appreciate a livable wage without more than a 40 hour work week. I do not think I have ever had one of those.

You really want to cosplay as a Sysadmin? I do not think you really know what it even means. ;(

Please, no. ;_; I already implemented fax to SMTP gateways more ...

2026-02-09T22:26:38Z

In reply to nevent1q…hq2y
_________________________

Please, no. ;_;

I already implemented fax to SMTP gateways more than two decades ago.

I've heard that faxes are still popular in Japan?

Fax spam is a thing too, and anti-spam systems for faxes are far worse and fewer in number than those which exist for SMTP.

That is a good relationship to have with Discord. Apparently, ...

2026-02-09T21:45:23Z

In reply to nevent1q…6p4a
_________________________

That is a good relationship to have with Discord.

Apparently, Discord is going to be asking users to provide Face Scans or IDs next month?

Brazen move, for a company which as recently as last year, supposedly lots 70,000 users' data of precisely such information already:

https://discord.com/press-releases/update-on-security-incident-involving-third-party-customer-service

(They can hand wave it away as a 3rd party [they chose to use, not their users' choice] I guess?)

Or: users could wise up, and not be played for fools, again?

Here's hoping for the latter.

I'm too cynical though, I know many will be led astray by the pied piper. ;(

As an IT professional for much of my career, the patience ...

2026-02-09T21:19:42Z

In reply to nevent1q…80f2
_________________________

As an IT professional for much of my career, the patience required to coax a user into letting go of the controls and letting me actually help them, is a delicate thing; but like: "please, you called me for help, let me help you." (I do not think I ever actually said that, so much as thought it, a lot).

Wasting our collective time with them in the "driver's" seat continuing to flail while I stand beside exasperated when they should probably go back to a class if they want the delicate treatment? They never paid me well enough for that.

Still, the results could be hilarious at times!

I'll never forget the time when someone at a previous employer came up to the IT area to ask for help in how to use the scanner. He showed me a bunch of documents he had printed out: they were all screen shots.

I showed him how, in the future, he could use "print screen" functionality and simply save a screen shot/frame buffer to a file electronically, rather than wasting paper and then scanning it back in for a digital copy.

The users: I have fought for them! Sometimes, I wonder why. It seems as if they need less fighting and more fundamentals. ;)

But yeah, if you're in a school? Let the students suffer through the hard stuff with guidance, make them better users, please. Exasperated IT folks, ultimately, really want our users to become self sufficient.

I had already leveled up to being invited to Co-SysOp in my teens and I have been toiling in the realms of libre/free open source software for so long, that to me: if you are using a computer, and can't compile code from source: what are you even doing with a computer?! There is so much stupendous source code, just out there, waiting for folks to utilize it, and instead too many are wasting too much money paying big corporations for binaries that stink.

Ah yeah, I feel as if Spanish and California kind of go hand in ...

2026-02-09T21:06:51Z

In reply to nevent1q…hx65
_________________________

Ah yeah, I feel as if Spanish and California kind of go hand in hand? At least, from a language comprehension perspective.

Since I am "white passing" due to skin tones, I typically refrain from even attempting to verbally utter the language of the Conquistadors, despite my own ethnicity having precisely zero to do with such things. As it is, I've became accustomed to hearing pejoratives of "gringo" and "gabacho" lobbed my way at least as far back as elementary school in California.

I visited Spain for the first time last year and it was eye opening! Not only because I think I got a bit more of a feel for why the Roman empire collapsed, but the remnants there were much stronger (there are still Roman ruins).

However, I was blessed to also encounter some who derived a bit more ancestral affinities with the 1000 years of Muslim/Arabic rule in Spain.

Due to things being way colder in early December than I had planned? I ended up buying a cool cloak from Dystopia Clothing who were vending at Ombra Festival. It turns out Olga (the lead proprietor of that clothing brand) is from Grenada and the font she uses in her designs (I guess made ethically in Bali?) is Arabesque. The number of compliments I have received wearing it out and about in SF and Oakland has been astounding, and I am already kind of accustomed to getting words of approval on my typically outlandish sense of fashion?

However, it wasn't all good times. The biggest mind fuck I experienced during my two visits to Spain last year was chattin with someone at Mira Festival in November who asked me where I was from and when I answered California, he responded with:

"We used to own you!"

What, in the hell did I just hear?!

He softened it with something like: "but really? Who can own the Earth? I think the worms are probably the only creatures who own it."

Still, Spanish in Spain? Hits a little different.

In California? I mostly feel as if I am surrounded by super hard working, very oppressed folks; many of whom are very out of touch with their Indigenous ancestry.

Occasionally, one may cross paths with someone who at least has an inkling of what the Conquistadors robbed? This interview with Prayers' vocalist Leafar Seyer explores his Indigenous ancestry relative to and distinct from the globbed on to concepts of "Latino" or "Hispanic" relative to his Shika ancestry.

I find it distressing I can go to any number of Universities, globally, and take formal classes in Ancient Greek or Egyptian, but all of the Indigenous languages truly local to California (more widely generalized as the "Costanoan" languages previously uttered by those in tribes such as the Ohlone and Chumash) completely died out. Even here in California, I do not know of a single school where I can go to even try to learn about whatever language remnants may have been preserved. Maybe none were?

In high school I had to take two years of Latin. My mom and sister also spoke French, so I feel as if I can at least fumble around with some limited subset of Romance languages, even if I typically refrain from doing so in the spoken form. Nonetheless, having a bit of an understanding? Helps.

Day to day, my favorite takeaways are probably related to food. Rather than the paellas and such hawked at tourists in Barcelona? Here in SF the burrito popularized in the Mission district is more or less a staple food. Heck, I just finished devouring a churro fritter that I bought yesterday at Taqueria La Venganza (a vegan Mexican joint in Oakland, run by the radical Raoul and on Sundays they do brunch specials from 11am to 2pm with an assortment of special bakery items that to me at least, make it worth the stop despite the crowds and small space).

I mean, obviously, I dig some Spanish tunes too, or I wouldn't have ventured to Barcelona twice last year for festivals; but I am typically not the sort to be into mainstream Mariachi music. Ombra Festival described itself variously as: "melancholic music" or "unusual sounds" and is very much into the experimental electronic post-industrial realms. Not the kind of BS you might hear on the radio or invading a dining area with their one stepped removed from uninvited alms begging beats.

There's also that movie in theaters recently called Clika, but I wasn't feelin that at all. It basically seemed like a sophomoric glamorization of sellin weed to make a tonne of money and then trying to launder that drug selling, diamond drip wearing, strip club Instagraming "culture" by going viral with a stupid song and like, that is not what real Hip Hop is about, at all! Quite the opposite. So, while it tries to do some "I'm the descendant of migrant workers and am a hard worker too" self congratulatory stuff? It mostly "fell flat" to quote some other review. I was one of maybe 4 people in the audience? I don't think anyone left that theater feelin as if they had just seen a transformative movie. Havin written as much, there is definitely a lot of that kind of BS out there.

I still dig lowrider stuff, despite hatin cars, but I'm not alone in that, even in Japan there is a small but vibrant subset of lowrider appreciators, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02iOCcO2CPc (Takashii from Japan interviewin a Japanese individual who immersed himself in Chicano culture so deeply he moved to Southern California to be in the heart of it). Lowriders are for the sort who already have one car, and can afford a second; that is not a cheap hobby, to understate it. Lil Debbie I think spent 5 years sprucin up her award winnin Chevy? You need to have cash to burn for that hobby. I don't, so I just admire it from a distance. I mostly went down this digression because that subculture definitely has some local roots.

Dear fellow deejays: So, Native Instruments is apparently ...

2026-02-09T20:21:14Z

Dear fellow deejays:

So, Native Instruments is apparently declaring bankruptcy or something?

Think we can so some sort of signature request that they make their software (e.g. Traktor) libre/free open source?

I mean, they could of course, find a buyer probably?

But: maybe something better could happen instead?

#deejayin #DJ #DJs #Traktor #NativeInstruments #deejay #DVS #Serato #Mixxx #Abelton #DAW

It's dumbfounding how few payment processors actually exist. ...

2026-02-01T01:09:52Z

In reply to nevent1q…eqql
_________________________

It's dumbfounding how few payment processors actually exist.

Meanwhile, Expedia continues to ask me if I want to apply for a OneKey Cash card via Wells Fargo, but if I do so:

Their phone app claims that my phone # is not valid (whatever database that they are using, is clearly the same one that Discord, Twitch, LiveNation/Ticketmaster and a lot of other things are set up with and it's just incorrect since I've been using that VoIP # for a decade and a half at this point, at least).

If I go through the Expedia website, it doesn't throw those errors, but Wells Fargo still doesn't offer me a OneKey Cash card after doing whatever credit check it does asking for my address, income, rent, SSN, birthday and whatnot.

Despite that: I have zero doubts that Expedia will continue to nag me to apply for the OneKey Cash card ad infinitum, because they have zero smarts to remember what they've asked me and declined me on already.

"The future" much dystopia, very grim.

I'm currently back in Barcelona for the Ombra Festival (the ...

2025-12-05T06:00:21Z

I'm currently back in Barcelona for the Ombra Festival (the opening night was last night) and have been AFK a LOT as a result.

I won't be back in the USA until next week, and did not travel with any laptops, so it's not that I'm ignoring that there is a new version of snac, but I won't be able to do much about it for the time being.

I created the following Trac issue for myself and if any other MacPorts users or developers may be wondering what's up:

https://trac.macports.org/ticket/73294

#snac #MacPorts #OmbraFestival #BCN #ImNotLazyImJustConstrainedBeyondMostOthersComprehension

Damn, what a sad tale. I remember when I would buy similar things ...

2025-10-27T20:36:55Z

In reply to nevent1q…jauw
_________________________

Damn, what a sad tale.

I remember when I would buy similar things at https://www.santacruzelectronics.com/ their sales staff would ask me if I really wanted a null modem cable, when I would bring such things to the counter.

Clearly, they probably had too many customers who didn't know what they were doing? I didn't mind being nerd-checked at checkout.

At least they stocked the friggin things!

Target disk mode was pretty neat. Very useful.

2025-09-30T17:56:12Z

In reply to nevent1q…56h2
_________________________

Target disk mode was pretty neat. Very useful.

At SFO waiting at the baggage claim for my check backpack. ...

2025-06-30T19:44:27Z

At SFO waiting at the baggage claim for my check backpack. Hopefully TSA isn't leaving anything "interesting" behind?

Thank you to Recon (nprofile…su63) for an amazing 20 year anniversary!

Maybe I'll summarize my experiences later? My favorite talk was without a doubt nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpq5adw67x32jh686kwtkzqnk626sst73npq89v05pnfqlp0af7rmhscqky6n (nprofile…ky6n)'s on EBC (admittedly, perhaps the only talk to even make mention of the demo scene which is near and dear to my heart). Dr. Andrew Zonenberg's presentation was also outstandingly excellent!

Met some neat new folks, did not see as many old familiar faces as I was hoping, but am still very grateful to have had such an enjoyable experience!

Thanks to Hugo, Anne, Cat, David, the PHRACK crew for their special edition physical release and everyone else whom I failed to mention in these humble greets explicitly who made it come together!

#REcon2025

You seem to be missing me, perhaps willfully and I am exhausted ...

2025-06-09T21:07:10Z

In reply to nevent1q…kqk3
_________________________

You seem to be missing me, perhaps willfully and I am exhausted writing you right now.

If I were on a stage and being paid to act?

Maybe I could suffer this.

I am neither.

No one, using Signal is being paid to act either.

You think Signal isn't aware of this?

Then please, why the fuck did they implement this:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/signal-now-blocks-microsoft-recall-screenshots-on-windows-11/

They probably understand their own weaknesses better than most, because one of their developers was already abusing that weakness, in that friggin court transcript which for YEARS you ignored?

Are you really that obtuse?

I can't with you right now. Sorry. I need to close the laptop and attend to my own self care.

I am not arguing that. Stop putting words into my mouth and read ...

2025-06-09T20:57:54Z

In reply to nevent1q…3aek
_________________________

I am not arguing that.

Stop putting words into my mouth and read and if necessary, reread, what I wrote.

Just because it's possible to create another torture nexus of surveillance and screenshots have become "economical" does not mean that it is a "good" thing when you find developers of a tool professing to be secure, relying on screenshots and submitting them as evidence in court.

To me, that screams: "I AM YOUR ADVERSARY".

If you want to pretend you don't understand where I am coming from and think that pervasive monitoring is a "good" then we aren't going to be in agreement.

tpcdump might be a useful debugging tool, but I am not a proponent for it being on 24x7. I do not want to live in a world of 1984 "Big Brother" that world (and the working title, 1948) already exists in many realms and it is a ring of hell.

It's probably why the post-Brexit British Imperialists can't see past their own noses right now and are actively fighting Apple in court to backdoor encryption at their behest. That is the world they created and want and are accustomed to already.

It's an antipattern.

If the people taking screenshots and doxing people aren't going to stop?

Well, I am not going to say I should fight fire with fire there either.

No one, particularly not me, are arguing that it is impossible.

But it's just awful, intrinsically.

There's a difference. It is not that nuanced.

Nostr event nevent1qqsd03l4zt4qvd3whk3myf3p7gkyl9n9efpvgq2rgva9j4rrwn963eczypupf6mp65563sy6qx5sljrsf7gm24d3gdjdycyjj4cvrzpjms3mq4k5a2a

2025-06-09T20:22:22Z

In reply to nevent1q…0rjh
_________________________

e.g.

https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.340308/gov.uscourts.cand.340308.20.3.pdf

I suppose you could argue that they are merely "screen shots"?

Though they were submitted, by a self-proclaimed Signal developer (within the same document): "also worked on Signal".

I suppose it could be argued that in more recent releases, Signal now utilizes DRM to prevent screenshots on Windows?

I'm sorry, but none of that instills even the slightest shred of confidence. Instead it seems as if they actively leverage their own tool against others who aren't within their cabal.

If you live within the USA however, it might be a different story ...

2025-06-09T07:54:39Z

In reply to nevent1q…fcem
_________________________

If you live within the USA however, it might be a different story insomuch as the NSA for example, has the modus operandi to monitor all traffic that exits (or enters) the USA and isn't supposed to use its spy apparatus within the USA.

Lamentably, there's also CALEA and An Act to deter and punish terrorist acts in the United States and across the globe, to enhance law enforcement investigatory tools, and for other purposes. (aka the PATRIOT Act) which legislatively facilitate warrant-less wiretapping domestically within the USA as well last I checked.

Signal's use of phone #s, more or less puts it right within the targeting apparatus of the latter, and you don't have to look too hard to see Signal logs entered into Court transcripts as evidence which is a fucking awful look for anything professing to be "secure". ;(

CC: Matthew Garrett (nprofile…g388)

lmao @ "Brainfuck-on-Rails"!

2025-06-07T05:31:21Z

In reply to nevent1q…5ytq
_________________________

lmao @ "Brainfuck-on-Rails"!

OK, I think imma sign off, take a shower and go to some ...

2025-06-01T02:29:35Z

OK, I think imma sign off, take a shower and go to some "RAVE" in Oakland?

I'm still ambivalent about ThugShells' rhymes, but she's kinda cute and I want to see if she remembers me and if she's made any progress with The Gospel of Hip Hop since we last spoke. But I guess she's also hosting, so chances of me getting a word in edgewise seem slim to none.

Maybe still worth at least trying to be social?

RespectDnB with photek was a lot of phun, but apparently I should have said hi to Rupert and totally missed out on something he had brought to the event for me so now FedEx and extra expenses are happening. Someone else there how did he phrase it, "fun ravin with you" and it was definitely fun! I dunno if tonight will approach anything like that, but doing something different seems as if it might be an OK way to spend part of my Saturday night?

I have work in the morning though, so I doubt it will be a late night.

lol, friggin dogs! They're cute. I was once couch surfing ...

2025-06-01T00:14:46Z

In reply to nevent1q…0r8p
_________________________

lol, friggin dogs! They're cute.

I was once couch surfing somewhere with five dogs (and lamentably their owners taught me how "neglect" was a form of abuse that I hadn't acknowledge in my childhood without getting into the nitty gritty) one of the dogs, was really into trying to hump the other dogs, which I interpreted as some weird dominance thing.

Very different than the playful interaction seen there!