Rob Landley

Rob does toybox and mkroot, writes linux docs, worked with j-core.org, long ago co-founded Penguicon and Linucon, wrote for Motley Fool, taught at ACC, etc. Trying to learn Japanese and make Android a self-hosting development environment.

He/him. Answers to "they/them" just fine.

Public Key

npub17qgpgv7anzj9katjrvwvszrwt48vvx09m5ncy255766g85as00asj8nwpl

NIP-05 Address

landley@mstdn-jp.mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs0qyq5x0we3fzmw4epk8xgpph96nkxr8ja6fuz9220ddyr6wc8h7cpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsfpz96z

Publishing to

relay.nostr.band

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub17qgpgv7anzj9katjrvwvszrwt48vvx09m5ncy255766g85as00asj8nwpl

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Last Notes

2026-08-16 00:56:13 UTC

Cloud is bad. Do not cloud.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/08/pbs-station-fears-losing-50tb-of-data-after-being-ghosted-by-cloud-storage-provider/

2026-08-15 21:51:10 UTC

Patrick Boyle explains Scott Pissant's "Insane US-Japan currency bailout".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yh18YXKMk3g
It's not just japan: long term US treasuries are not selling period.
https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2025/oct/understanding-swoosh-shaped-yield-curve-treasuries
Other countries are dumping their long-term (10-30y) US bonds to buy short-term (~6 month) US bonds, which can then expire and be redeemed for cash without a trumpertantrum. Pissant's been "rebalancing" to compensate, issuing new short-term bonds to buy back the long-term bonds:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/1kxdryg/why_did_the_federal_reserve_quietly_buy_348b_in/

2026-08-15 18:53:33 UTC

In 2019 Zuckerberg went all in on crypto saying faceboot's "Libra" would replace the US dollar.
In 2021 he renamed faceboot after the idea of strapping a VR headset to your face to live as a floating Manananggal torso.
In 2026 he's calling LLMs the future while renting out his existing GPU hosting capacity after failing to find any better way for the 16th largest company in the Fortune 500 to profit from it internally as part of operations.
Billionaires get to fuck up a LOT and stay rich.

2026-08-06 00:55:19 UTC

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@nprofile…g4vn China is going to lock up all the non-AI ram supply chains simply by being reliable. It's confederate cotton being replaced by Egypt all over again.

2026-08-04 05:23:47 UTC

Normalize noncompliance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4usq7LmYlo

2026-08-03 17:21:21 UTC

A bunch of firefighters in full gear (https://fire-end.com/collections/halligan-tool/products/hire-hooks-hybrid-halligan-bar !) walked through the apartment's common area (I asked, "burned food set off an alarm, all good") and I was immediately struck by how DIFFERENT an experience it is from police doing the same thing.
I'm reminded why nobody has ever written a song called "fuck the fire department". These guys are unambiguously here to help, know what they're doing, and _walk_ cool without trying.
After a year protesting ICE, it's like... wow.

2026-08-02 02:13:32 UTC

If you don't all clap, Clankerbell will die!
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2026/01/20/ai-boom-could-falter-without-wider-adoption-microsoft-chief-satya-nadella-warns/

2026-07-02 20:29:02 UTC

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@nprofile…650u https://fedi.lwn.net/@lwn/116851371573475566

2026-06-28 22:32:57 UTC

Over 70% of the Dutch responses to the EC consultation on stricter rules for selling vapes were AI-generated, presumably by Phillip Morris. https://nos.nl/l/2620686

2026-06-21 03:49:53 UTC

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@nprofile…dey5 BAM continues to find new ways to screw up. Like, fractally. https://youtu.be/gtiiHXsnsrY

2026-06-19 19:58:49 UTC

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@nprofile…dey5 there was a gofundme that had raised half a million for his defense, but gofundme took it down when B&M's lawyers told them to.
But paypal went "fuck you, sue us" and stood up for Reckless Ben, which I admit earned them some points.

2026-06-19 19:35:29 UTC

Excellent Legal Eagle video about the ongoing litigious dickishness of Bricks and Minifigs" vs Reckless Ben, with a great primer and history on Supreme Court free speech decisions.
https://youtu.be/Qf4OoSH-82E
CoffeeZilla's most recent video was about the underlying issue:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKfQkRbd15k
Even Daily Show host Josh Johnson's most recent weekly stand-up routine was on this topic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAxk62-9yYc

2026-06-11 17:21:39 UTC

The downside of doing "git bisect" on gcc to figure out what commit broke musl's malloc() on powerpc between gcc-9.4 and gcc-15.1 is when you hit a version with an UNRELATED bug (using poisoned calloc?)...
There's a "git bisect skip" but unless the bug was fixed basically immediately I've tested a dozen versions with Some Other Problem.
Sometimes I'll guess and if it bisects to the edge of Some Other Problem back up guess again. (The change has sometimes been hidden UNDER Some Other Problem.)

2026-06-10 01:59:47 UTC

The AI bubble is a symptom of the end of Moore's Law.
https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com/post/3mnvdzq6mr224
Software capability was never growing exponentially, the hardware that ran it was until Moore's law ended.
If Moore's Law hadn't stopped they wouldn't be spending billions on data centers, your phone would be powerful enough to run it all.
Exponential growth is _always_ an s-curve that bends back down eventually. Software revenue stopped growing when a ~15 year old laptop could run today's software reasonably well.

2026-06-03 23:57:03 UTC

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@nprofile…mvm4 Well darn it come up with some where if I buy it you get the money. That's half the point of an identity good, it's an "I voted" sticker.

2026-06-01 20:52:29 UTC

Myspace was THE social media site... until Fox News' parent company bought it in 2005.
Hotmail was THE online email site... until Microsoft bought it in 1998.
Skype was THE video calling platform... until Microsoft bought it in 2011.
Twitter was THE short form social media site... until Elon Musk bought it in 2022.
There's a pattern here. Microsoft bought github in 2018, dice.com bought sourceforge in 2012...

2026-05-30 06:33:41 UTC

Culture is full of persephone eating pomegranate seeds, beware of greeks bearing gifts, don't eat fairy food, don't accept favors from demons because you'll owe them, monkey's paw wishes...
And then all these "ain't no such thing as a free lunch" fuckers tell you to check in LLM pull requests, and mock the reluctant as fools. STRINGS ARE VERY MUCH ATTACHED. This crap is fucking sticky at nuclear contamination levels. You pivoted from NFTs to this, we watched you do it.

2026-05-26 22:58:50 UTC

Sadly, projects have lifespans. I'm experiencing that with Linux, and now Wikipedia[citation needed] is succumbing to capitalism:
https://circumstances.run/@davidgerard/116643105080029251
Which explains https://mstdn.ca/@PatrickWirth/113870089909281547

2026-05-15 17:23:00 UTC

"Cuba is currently pulling off one of the fastest solar revolutions on the planet"
https://lite.cnn.com/2026/05/13/climate/cuba-solar-us-oil-blockade-trump-china

2026-04-25 13:36:23 UTC

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China's solar panel exports doubled in march, to 68 Gigawatts, 50% higher than the previous record month last August.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljD-E30dFYw
50 different countries set import records. Asia doubled and Africa almost tripled.

2026-04-24 03:32:17 UTC

German rooftop solar company's sales tripled in march, expected to triple again this month.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rklp7CB55-U
Renewables met all new demand for electricity in 2025.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMsjUM4cEq0

2026-04-15 17:28:05 UTC

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@nprofile…h3v3 How is #netBSD going to deal with https://social.coop/@cwebber/116408556882122186 do you think?

2026-04-15 17:15:27 UTC

The Linux developers have started removing 486 support.
https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/linux-devs-start-removing-support-for-37-year-old-intel-486-cpu-head-honcho-linus-torvalds-says-zero-real-reason-to-continue-support
I really need to get netbsd installed on a laptop...

2026-04-01 21:58:17 UTC

Rutherford County Library Board fires director after she refuses to relocate 132 children's books.
https://www.newschannel5.com/news/rutherford-county-library-board-fires-director-after-she-refuses-to-relocate-132-childrens-books
Dr. Lu-anne James called the board's order to move books with LGBTQ+ themes to the adult section an unlawful act of viewpoint discrimination.
Here's the gofundme for her:
https://gofund.me/f7704eb98

2026-03-23 19:15:26 UTC

Any time women make something lucrative, men push them out of the field. A 1983 MIT paper documented that purge in computer science: https://simson.net/ref/1983/barriers.pdf
See also https://mastodon.social/@Sheril/109545727584656667 for "beer brewer" becoming "witch", Julia Child giving way to Gordon Ramsey, Sarah Taber's great thread about "egg money", the origin of the word "spinster" and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire...
Once there's money in it, douchebros terf out the founders then claim to have discovered what others invented.

2026-03-21 22:22:16 UTC

Why use dozens and have hours/minutes made of 60 pieces?
12 is 3*4 meaning it's evenly divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6.
60 is 3*4*5, evenly divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, and 20.
10 is 2*5 (both prime). Doesn't evenly divide by anything else. You can split a dozen eggs between 3 or 4 people just fine, but 10 eggs? You're not all going home with the same number of unbroken eggs.
Calculators are new, and adapting solutions to computers instead of people isn't always better.

2026-03-03 16:53:42 UTC

"Giving more rights to people who don't have the leverage to defend them is like giving bullied kids extra lunch money."
https://www.youtube.com/live/M9H2An_D6io
@nprofile…ugpy on why hollywood writers being unionized is important for them to benefit from AI output generating no new copyrights.

2026-01-02 23:29:28 UTC

When the post-maga Neuremberg trials start, every church that endorsed him from the pulpit should lose its tax exempt status.

2025-12-11 19:18:14 UTC

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@nprofile…26qz @nprofile…664s Can we use that as leverage to push https://action.aclu.org/petition/mastercard-sex-work-work-end-your-unjust-policy

2025-11-24 01:37:22 UTC

Anything that requires constant growth to sustain itself is a Ponzi scheme.

2025-06-28 01:54:06 UTC

What they didn't tell you about the apocalypse is you'd still have to perform administrative tasks.

2025-04-07 17:12:31 UTC

Tesla refuses to take "cybertrucks" as trade-ins, is forcing its customers to go through the "lemon law" process to get repairs or refunds on defective vehicles, has a $200 million backlog of unsold cybertruck inventory, and even its own spin admits sales dropped 13% in Q1. And all that was before the tariffs.
https://www.masslive.com/business/2025/04/report-cybertruck-owners-want-to-return-their-vehicles-tesla-says-no.html
Note: people use tax refunds as a down payment on a car, so sales are usually the highest in Q1 that they'll be all year.

2025-03-13 08:44:17 UTC

Ken Thompson is to Richard Stallman what Martin Luther is to Joseph Smith.

2025-03-05 18:53:32 UTC

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@nprofile…6m2n https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man4/console_codes.4.html
All the ANSI escape sequences from DOS are supported by modern terminals. Quite a bit more besides, but that subset is rock solid reliable on mac and bsd and so on...

2025-02-23 17:46:45 UTC

Burning the library of alexandria probably destroyed a smaller percent of roman historical data than Amazon's e-book DRM is going to for future generations.
We do not have a single digital preservation format with a proven track record of surviving fifty years, let alone a hundred. Microchip fab depends on supply chains and trade secrets with a thousand failure points.
The Internet Archive is great, yay cheap terabyte backup disks, but you can't blacksmith a USB-3 interface.

2025-02-13 22:16:51 UTC

At what point does the US dollar stop being the global reserve currency?
If our courts can no longer be trusted to resolve financial disputes equitably, we don't make anything, no longer protect international shipping, and abandon our allies to aggresors, why would anyone want US dollars?

2025-02-10 21:16:34 UTC

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@nprofile…2mzm The Digital Signature Algorithm and the Data Encryption Standard are different things.

2025-02-10 18:25:30 UTC

I don't remember if the key Microsoft Github has was rsa or dsa, but something like this is probably why I'll eventually remove my repositories from that site shortly before losing access.
https://mastodon.social/@emaste/113980746669642103
See https://github.com/landley/toybox/commit/35663d6bfc49 for backstory. (Yes that is a shell script to close issues without web access.)
If ultimatums worked on me I'd be using faceboot from windows. You have FOMO, I feel I've dodged a bullet. First one's free, like credit card offers in the mail...

2023-08-04 17:45:04 UTC

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@npub1upk…tcwy You have of course seen the classic https://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.html

2023-07-05 13:24:21 UTC

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@npub1grx…uxfe Yeah, the Linux kernel has developed a similar problem recently.