Aaron Swartz was a digital rights champion who believed deeply in keeping the internet open. The organizers of Aaron Swartz Day will celebrate his life at 2 pm PT on Nov. 9. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/11/celebrating-life-aaron-swartz-aaron-swartz-day-2024

BTW obviously if you're American please for the sake of everyone else in the world VOTE a week next Tuesday.

Not going to dictate to you who to vote for but obviously I think there's only one sane choice and she's called Kamala Harris.

Even if you don't much like her, her party, or her policies, the alternative is so deeply shit and depressing just swallow your pride and do it.

If you do like her/her party/her policies then vote for her.

(yeah I lied I am dictating the choice sorry not sorry)

But either way GO AND VOTE!

Trump will concede the war in Ukraine to Russia, and if they win there, next he will attack a NATO country. Think about that. The people there fight for all of us.

The (alleged) greatest fraudster in modern history (+ alleged traitor to his own country and allegedly regularly in contact with Putin) Musk will be given a total reprieve and control of part of the US govt.

And this of course is far from the only issue that utter orange moron will wreak havoc upon.

GET UP.

GO VOTE.

In Japan even the cannibals are polite...I guess...?

Petition to start naming hurricanes after companies that contribute the most to climate change

Hello! I suddenly find myself needing a job... yesterday!

I'm an experienced software and research engineer with a load of data science skills; I've worked on profiling and tracing MPI/MPICH programs, supercomputer simulations, C++ debugging (including tracing MPI race conditions! fun!), statistical analysis of chemical simulations, web service API/work, some front end, etc. I've written/debugged/worked on projects in C, C++, TypeScript, C#, Python, shell, and dabbled in Rust. I'm able to jump on any project and learn quickly. I love working in supercomputing!

I'm putting together my resume but if you know if anyone looking for someone to hire, here I am! I'm open to contract and temporary positions, too, so long as they're remote. I'm in Portland, OR, in the US.

Boosts appreciated!

#GetFediHired #JobHunting #HPC #SoftwareEngineer #ResearchSoftwareEngineer

This "untrusted data" patch series from Benno Lossin is the result of conversations at last weekend's Rust Linux kernel conference in Copenhagen:

https://lore.kernel.org/all/20240913112643.542914-1-benno.lossin@proton.me/

It's not a "silver bullet" for why we should be using rust in the Linux kernel, but it is a "big giant sledgehammer" to help squash and prevent from happening MANY common types of kernel vulnerabilities and bugs (remember, "all input is evil!" and this change forces you to always be aware of that, which is something that C in the kernel does not.)

I had always felt that Rust was the future for what we need to do in Linux, but now I'm sure, because if we can do stuff like this, with no overhead involved (it's all checked at build time), then we would be foolish not to give it a real try.

And yes, I've asked for this for years from the C developers, and maybe we can also do it there, but it's not obvious how and no one has come up with a way to do so. Maybe now they will have some more incentive :)

Hillel Wayne has advice for new software developers. Worth reading, even if you aren't new to the field.

https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/advice-for-new-software-devs-whove-read-all-those/

“The reason why [the Google/Amazon/Microsoft/Meta oligopoly] and all its little digirati minions on social media are pushing things like crypto, then the blockchain, and now virtual reality and artificial intelligence is because those technologies require a metric fuckton of computing power to operate. That fact may be devastating for the earth, indeed it is for our mental health, but it’s wonderful news for the four storefronts selling all the juice.”
https://fromjason.xyz/p/notebook/any-technology-indistinguishable-from-magic-is-hiding-something/

Something I've learned from my experience working in software development: If you measure software developers (and probably any people) on any metric, they will change their behavior to optimize for that number. They will do this even if you don't reward or punish or judge or evaluate them using that metric. If they know the metric, they will change their behavior.

This means you need to be very, very careful that anything you measure is what you want people to optimize for.

my university has converted our office telephones to Microsoft Teams. when i grumbled about this to a favourite sysadmin, this is how they responded 🔥

“Microsoft has actually brilliantly leveraged the lousy security landscape -- for which they are in no small part responsible -- to capture even larger market-share, as we now need commercial entities to produce the software required to protect us from their failures, and therefore need a more uniform environment to achieve the necessary scale. The uniformity then guarantees an ever greater scale for the inevitable conflagration. Monocultures guarantee one big fire instead of a bunch of small survivable ones. We really have no interest in learning from evolution, in no small part because it would produce fewer billionaires.

— Local Cranky IT Guy” [shared with permission]

#Enshittification

I spent a not insignificant part of today hoping that a solar storm would come and make computing impossible for a little while.

Imagine if #Firefox, #Chrome, and their derivatives could render Markdown, AsciiDoc, LaTeX, EPUB, and Gemtext as seamlessly as they handle PDFs. This could revolutionize the way we publish lightweight websites, making it as simple as dropping a text file into a directory.

#smolweb #smallweb #indieweb

(somebody knows an influential person at @mozilla ?)

A tribute to Daniel Bristot de Oliveira from Linux Plumbers. https://lpc.events/blog/current/index.php/2024/07/06/in-memory-of-daniel-bristot-de-oliveira/

I'm really really really not interested in computers getting more powerful.
I am super interested in them being more repairable and modifiable, drawing less power, lasting and being supported for way longer etc. That stuff still gets me excited

In software architecture you have to recognize when you're adding a rocket stage.

In rockets and aeroplanes it's a simple truth that weight adds more weight. To carry more you need bigger engines, a bigger fuel thank, more fuel. More weight becomes even more weight.

For rockets to make it out of the atmosphere they use multiple stages. Each stage carries the rocket to a certain height, once the fuel is used up the stage is ejected so the next stage can push forward a lighter rocket. So adding a stage will get you further, but at the cost of much more machinery, engineers, and complexity. You now have a much heavier rocket to launch.

Switching to kubernetes, kafka, microservices, a single page app, ... is adding a rocket stage. Maybe it's what you need to get where you want to go, but be clear about the extra weight, operational cost, engineering overheard, mental overhead.

The tragicomedy of corporate dependence on free labor continues:

Here, we see $3.1T-market-cap Microsoft, who've built a dependency on ffmpeg into Teams, trying to convince an all-volunteer community to treat their bug as high priority.

https://twitter.com/FFmpeg/status/1775178803129602500

Will they pay for a support contract or anything? No, of course not. Instead, they'll try the advice of some rando calling themselves "Elon Musk".

https://twitter.com/FFmpeg/status/1775178805704888726

(Err: originally read $400B, not $3.1T; thanks @danielnazer)

🤯 The level of sophistication of the XZ attack is very impressive! I tried to make sense of the analysis in a single page (which was quite complicated)!

I hope it helps to make sense of the information out there. Please treat the information "as is" while the analysis progresses! 🧐 #infosec #xz

One of the things I have been doing to approve my language skills is reading science fiction in Italian. It's surprisingly hard to find books by Italian SF authors (even though there are many of them) rather than yet another Tolkien translation; this is especially true in Italian bookstores, sadly. Ebooks fill in nicely, though, once you discover who you're looking for.

I recently read WOHPE by Salvatore Sanfilippo. The story, which deals with fears of the AI apocalypse, was a fun read, and it was clear that the author actually had a clue about how systems like language models actually work. I definitely enjoyed it.

Meanwhile, I'm a kernel person, relatively ignorant of areas like databases. So as I was reviewing an upcoming article by another LWN author about the Redis mess, I learned a lot. One thing I picked up was that one of the creators of Redis was ... a certain Salvatore Sanfilippo (aka @antirez) Some searching establishes that it's indeed the same person; no wonder the book was as clueful as it was.

Small world...and people say hackers can't write :)