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.

My blog: https://landley.net/notes.html
Toybox: https://landley.net/toybox
Github: https://github.com/landley

Public Key

npub1y0mf67kh7v32s0kq37tsh3wgrqgvh9fxq2wnvr84gvfhfnk0hmtste702n

NIP-05 Address

landley_at_mstdn.jp@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsz8a5a0ttlxg4g8mqgl9ctchypsyxtj5nq98fkpn65xym5em8ma4cpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsca7440

Publishing to

relay.primal.net

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1y0mf67kh7v32s0kq37tsh3wgrqgvh9fxq2wnvr84gvfhfnk0hmtste702n

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Last Notes

2026-05-04 19:06:43 UTC

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The first numbers are out on the solar canals. Water evaporation reduced by 70%, algae growth by 85%.
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2026/05/04/solar-on-canals-reduces-water-evaporation-by-70-and-algae-growth-by-85/
Plus you generate electricity without using extra land, and nobody cares if the "roof" it's installed on leaks in the rain.

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

2026-04-19 21:30:11 UTC

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California's solar canal cover segments have ribbon cutting ceremonies.
https://bsky.app/profile/dustinmulvaney.bsky.social/post/3mjtcite7qk2s
Generate power while reducing evaporation, and to any fish or plants in the canal it's like being under tall trees.

2026-04-15 17:28:05 UTC

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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

2026-03-27 18:55:26 UTC

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The University of California didn't just explain how they're covering their exposed canals with solar panels to save billions of gallons of water from evaporating, they interviewed the woman behind it rather than appointing a man to take the credit.
https://youtu.be/EtJzOtOpYdo

2026-03-25 16:33:15 UTC

This is a shakedown. You bribe him to get on the approved list.
https://mastodon.social/@tiffanycli/116290215015902127
Next up is raspberry pi class devices.
They're eliminating general purpose computing devices so next ice deployment the resistance can't anonymously coordinate on signal because your government ID is tied to your device and it's legally required to dox you in all communications.

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.

2026-03-06 18:19:20 UTC

"Today’s news was about the stock market crash of Duolingo... this is one of the few positive things about “AI”: It accelerates the enshittification cycle so much that it may end up killing stuff that is detrimental to society in the first place."
https://wordsmith.social/overthinking-the-apocalypse/language-learning-methods-that-actually-work-1-the-binge

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
@npub1fdr…lvhs on why hollywood writers being unionized is important for them to benefit from AI output generating no new copyrights.

2026-01-10 04:45:45 UTC

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Rice pudding keeps in the fridge for weeks, and made with whole milk freezes well. I've multiplied up to use a gallon:
2.5 cups milk
1/3 cup dry rice
1/8 tsp salt
1/4 cup sugar (or splenda)
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp vanilla extract
(1/2 cup raisins and/or nuts)
Combine milk, rice, salt, sugar in pot. Cook just at barely boiling, stirring regularly, until it turns into glop. (Somewhere between 15 mins and 1/2 hr.) Add remaining ingredients, cook ~5 more minutes, cool and serve.

2026-01-10 01:45:15 UTC

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I dunno how eggs are near you (Aldi in minneapolis has them for $2/dozen) but turning a whole loaf at a time of cheap white bread into french toast and sticking it in gallon ziplock bags in the fridge, then if they don't consider it a snack as is instead of syrup just spread jam on it.
French toast is sweet/savory agnostic, you can do all kinds of sandwiches.
Speaking of: https://mstdn.jp/@landley/112248292101028692

2025-12-11 19:18:14 UTC

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Can we use that as leverage to push https://action.aclu.org/petition/mastercard-sex-work-work-end-your-unjust-policy

2025-10-07 18:40:28 UTC

Arguing with codeberg. Created an empty repo, generated a new 4096 bit rss key for ssh, pasted the .pub into the server... cannot push: pubkey denied. Half an hour of reading docs and staring at stuff. Tried their "verification" thing, which failed.
Sigh. Dowanna do another toybox release to github, but don't want to hold up the release either...?
(Given a choice I'm GOING to use the algorithm from 1977 nobody's publicly broken yet, rather than the NSA's "trust me bro" replacements.)

2025-09-30 03:16:39 UTC

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you "got" what I'm saying but expect the average reader is dumber than you, you expected a stream of consciousness thread to be a well-edited essay (despite https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2014/02/03/270680304/this-could-have-been-shorter), you (so far uniquely) felt the need to complain at me about it, and your own complaint was not sufficiently articulate to successfully convey your intended meaning.
*shrug* Ok.

2025-09-30 02:57:05 UTC

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Golems predate frankenstein (1818) by centuries, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk toured from 1770 to 1854 (and was revealed as a hoax in 1857), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tik-Tok_(Oz) was 1907, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis_(1927_film) was 1927, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robby_the_Robot was 1956, C3PO was 1977, Tron was 1982...
You could argue golems are medieval not biblical because there was no shortage of slaves back then, they just used humans. When a Bible says "servant" the greek word was generally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doulos

2025-09-29 22:27:12 UTC

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Humanity has thought general AI (instant slaves) was coming soon for THOUSANDS of years. When pottery was high tech people wanted golems. When irrigation was cutting edge people thought the brain ran on a mix of "humors". Early dissection/voltaic experiments gave us Frankenstein. When clockwork was cool we had the mechanical turk (and "tik-tok the mechanical man"). When radios ran on wall current "metropolis" had an electric woman, then Robby the Robot was solid state, C3PO full of microchips...

2025-09-29 22:19:52 UTC

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No AI company has been remotely profitable so far. They play up their gross revenue but never talk net revenue. Their argument is basically "we lose money on every transaction but make it up on volume". (And they fudge even the gross revenue with "annualized" numbers that take their best month and multiply by 12.)
It's all loss leader free samples so far even when they're charging for it. They keep saying technological advances will fix that, but don't explain how.

2025-09-29 22:15:18 UTC

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Newer LLM training data unavoidably includes LLM output in what they scraped off the internet, which is like sticking a microphone into a speaker. A fairly small amount poisons the process and the math collapses, making newer models are worse than old ones, despite throwing more compute at the problem.
Plus each query costs multiple dollars to answer: humans are so much cheaper AI companies have cheated and employed them (ala the mechanical turk).
https://www.pcmag.com/news/this-companys-ai-was-really-just-remote-human-workers-pushing-buttons

2025-09-29 22:09:52 UTC

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When OpenAI launched GPT5 recently it took away access to its earlier models (which people preferred) because an LLM can't learn new things.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-enshittification-of-generative-ai/
If you ask GPT3 about anything that happened in 2025 it doesn't know, which spoils the illusion.
An LLM is basically lossy compression for the google cache, with hallucinations being a bit like jpeg artifacts. Each LLM is a snapshot in time from when "training" slowly and expensively compressed a historical dataset.

2025-09-28 21:54:11 UTC

The AI "infinite money glitch" is called a wash trade: https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com/post/3lzjprizgc224
[@molly0xfff](https://hachyderm.io/@molly0xfff ) did a good podcast about how FTX and Alameda sent the same money back and forth, booking it as revenue each time. "My friend and I each received $1000 today... by passing the same $20 back and forth." See also Enron. Microsoft's "investment" in OpenAI included $billions in Azure cloud computing credits, yet OpenAI's use of Azure is part of Microsoft's revenue estimates:
https://medium.com/@venugopal.adep/the-2-6b-azure-credit-how-microsofts-cloud-became-openai-s-secret-weapon-1f7e2f9b0330

2025-09-28 18:24:59 UTC

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FDR gave his "I welcome their hatred" speech 3 days before the election where he won 98.5% of the electoral vote.

2025-09-23 19:34:23 UTC

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We're in an s-curve where new advances in solar and battery technology are a regular occurrence: https://youtu.be/yWMxM8YQcN4?si=fF1c_BCG-5KPY9By
Plus all the adjacent tech in the rest of the electrical ecosystem: https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/23/our-friend-the-electron/
Especially "the electrification of demand": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aE6eBXnb5TU&t=75s
Heat pumps and induction stoves not only replace fossil fuels with potentially renewable electricity, they're SO much more efficient burning gas to produce electricity is cheaper than running gas stoves/heaters.

2025-09-19 13:21:48 UTC

Africa is electrifying with solar and batteries, precluding projected fossil fuel demand growth:
https://youtu.be/dnjsGuiK7YE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaExwcNmpXA
The same way countries that could never afford to run cables for phone or internet service went straight to cell towers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leapfrogging#Leapfrogging_in_developing_countries
Here in the US solar is 91% of new demand:
https://youtu.be/YgvgLqbZgO4
The difference is in countries without an existing fossil installed base there may never be economies of scale for fuel distribution.

2025-07-21 10:41:07 UTC

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The existing ruling party was loudly telling young people not to vote at all 6 months ago, so they did not vote for the existing ruling party, and people are surprised?

2024-11-06 22:24:59 UTC

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so worshipers cut their ears, and... lean over?

2024-11-06 20:44:53 UTC

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From whose ears?

2024-10-26 01:53:33 UTC

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Asking "who are you calling for?" is another easy filter.

2024-10-25 01:06:54 UTC

I've taken to answering the phone "Potato" instead of "Hello", because a human will go "what?" and a robocall will fail to determine what language it should start its script in.

2024-09-18 10:02:38 UTC

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Why doesn't Colbert have famous actors do dramatic readings of this stuff? A slow, sonorous version done by Samuel L Jackson for example. Or a shakesperian reading from Ian McKellen.

2024-09-17 11:36:25 UTC

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So copyright covers use and not just copying. Good to know.
If you load this spreadsheet into Microsoft Excel, you have placed Excel under the GPL. Good luck with that, it should totally end well for you.

2024-08-18 19:17:43 UTC

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I'm not sure China state media, the country that's the explicit target of the trade war and Russia's largest trade partner, is entirely unbiased here.
That's like saying the US defense budget doesn't turn a profit. The point of the tariffs was to counter "wolf warrior diplomacy", kill the belt and road initiative, and wean US supply chains off china before they invade taiwan and we blockade them.

2024-06-15 18:40:28 UTC

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Growing up, "if Rome had books, indoor plumbing, paved streets, tenement housing, retail bakeries... how could they just let everything fall apart so we didn't recreate that for a thousand years" was a hard question to answer.
Now? Not so much. Plutocracy+gerontrocracy. Rich bastards burning everything down for personal short-term gain, poor people sublimating envy into worship, "the status quo is too big to fail, it's been around forever, I literally can't imagine it collapsing"...

2024-06-15 15:29:01 UTC

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The "missing billion" (iceball earth) may also be because of a globally invasive species setting off runaway climate change. Not a lot of evidence left to reconstruct that one's causes from.
But even the dinosaur asteroid impact left birds alive. ("Tastes like chicken" is really "tastes like dinosaur".) As George Carlin remarked, "the planet's not going anywhere: WE are."