One thing no one ever talks about being an adult is how much time you debate yourself on keeping a cardboard box because it's, like, a really good box.

Drastic budget cuts for FOSS, by the EU, and the explanation given is that "because lots of budget are allocated to AI, there is not much left for Internet infrastructure". https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/17/foss_funding_vanishes_from_eus/ So here is one more way that the fever over "AI" bullshit does real harm. Infra projects that protect security, privacy, and other vital needs will be underfunded so that more money can be thrown into the "AI" black hole. Sigh.

YAY! My newest ACM Queue article is up at https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3674953

It's part of a tongue-in-cheek series called "You Don't Know Jack", and it's about Bufferbloat and the LibreQoS project.

On Mastadon, they're @LibreQoS, or https://libreqos.io/. Have a peek!
#bufferbloat #latency #QoE #LibreQoS #ISP #OpenSource #FLOSS

@qotca Gimme a bit, something weird is going on with the PayPal I use apparently. Also, thank you.

It’s finally time to release my newest project: https://www.followthecrypto.org/

This website provides a real-time lens into the cryptocurrency industry’s efforts to influence 2024 elections in the United States.

#crypto #cryptocurrency #elections #USpol #lobbying

A router from Australia

SANDY TOKSVIG: yes, the windows NT kernel was first introduced to the public in 1993. it is still used to this day! windows 11 states that its kernel version is NT ten point oh.

ALAN DAVIES: and uh, what's the NT for?

SANDY: new technology. it replaced the previous--

DAVID MITCHELL: new technology? the new technology kernel?

SANDY: yes, and the filesystem, NTFS, is the--

DAVID: new technology file system. and - to be clear - this is from nineteen ninety three?

ALAN: yes, but you have to consider that it was new at the time.

DAVID: oh, i have to consider... everything was new at the time! that's what "new" means! i-- when i was born, i was new! but they don't call me "new david", do they? because - by definition - things stop being new after a point!

AMERICAN CELEBRITY GUEST: ok, but, like... you know, like, with the... the other one was like, the old one, right? so they--

DAVID: but you must understand that anything that has ever been replaced by anything ever could be described as "the old one", right? it's a completely useless name! "hello, my name is new man, my father is old man, because i'm new and he's not and we don't need to specify any further details!" it's madness!

AMERICAN: yeah, but [laughs]

DAVID: so what happens when they replace the new technology kernel, then? do we get the new new technology?

ROB BRYDON: i think it would be, they rename the new technology to old technology, and the replacement gets called new technology. so the NT kernel is now the OT kernel, and--

ALAN: i bought a new fridge last month.

SANDY: moving on!

❝
I was sitting in front of him telling him that the internet, a computer, technology, all these supposedly authoritative things … were wrong. And that I, one person, was right. He basically •couldn’t• believe me.
❞

https://miniver.blogspot.com/2024/07/ai-students-and-epistemic-crisis.html

Fifteen uncoupled simple pendulums of monotonically increasing lengths dance together to produce visual traveling waves, standing waves, beating, and random motion.

Credit: Harvard Natural Sciences Lecture Demonstrations
Source and further reading: https://sciencedemonstrations.fas.harvard.edu/presentations/pendulum-waves

Ursula Le Guin: “A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, - this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.”

I'm sure you know the humble #LEGO brick is part of a #system. But do you know how extensive that system is?

Here's a little lazy #weekend thread for your (and mine) enjoyment :-)

We start with a basic 2x4 red brick, the LEGO system brick. Margaret #Hamilton minifigure for scale.

modern programming is like,

"if you're using bongo.rs to parse http headers, you will need to also install bepis to get buffered read support. but please note that bepis switched to using sasquatch for parallel tokenization as of version 0.0.67, so you will need the bongo-sasquatch extension crate as well."

old-time programming is like,

"i made a typo in this function in 1993. theo de raadt got so angry he punched a wall when he saw it. for ABI compatibility reasons, we shan't fix the typo."

"And you get a scheduler, and you get a scheduler, and you get a scheduler"

[ stolen from a colleague ]

@wwahammy
I have had some success with https://shinobi.video/ - it's basically a frontend for ffmpeg which can talk directly to off the shelf IP cameras on the local network and provide a web interface and an app to view the feeds. I'm using TP-link cameras for it, which I setup using the manufacturer's app, but then firewalled the cameras off from the internet so they're not sending anything to the cloud. Works reasonably well, even if it was a bit fiddly to setup at first 😊

I am not inherently against "AI" tools.

I just want the techbros making them to understand "consent".

As it stands now, something like GitHub Copilot is the single largest attack on open source, and the biggest case of copyright and license infringement in history. Copilot is designed to remove any and all license restrictions from open source code, so it can be reused by proprietary developers without having to respect licensing terms.

Like I always say - if Copilot is not copyright and license infringement, why doesn't Microsoft train it on its own proprietary code?

Exactly.

If you are a web-dev, you need to read this, so should your boss (and then he should put you on a 56K modem)

https://brr.fyi/posts/engineering-for-slow-internet

@jpelckolsen I know what you mean! Hard not to give in to despair at the state of technology sometimes. At least we (still) have the option of running free software, but it does require some fiddling. I don't personally find openwrt "excessive", but I do realise I probably have a bit of a higher threshold than most people as far as these things are concerned ;)

@jpelckolsen @jchillerup note that Ubiquiti did the (unfortunately, pretty standard these days) thing were they suddenly opted everyone in to sending analytics data from their controllers to the mothership some years ago. Not sure what the status of this is these days, but this (old) post indicates that there's at least a convoluted manual way to turn it off: https://community.ui.com/questions/UniFi-Analytics-cannot-be-disabled-whatsoever/300f6fed-118e-4cd9-9a47-d399c53483f9

Anyway, they do make excellent hardware, and if you're worried about the snoopy behaviour, it's possible to swap out the factory firmware and run openwrt on them; that's what I do. You won't get the fancy controller and app, and the initial setup with openwrt can be a bit fiddly. But once installed it's pretty solid and you don't need the app and controller for day to day usage.

@yurnidiot This is actually how Hutchinson Telecom broke BT's de-facto monopoly on phone service in the UK in 1983—they bought the rights to use the disused pneumatic power pipes under the Square Mile in London, then trained ferrets to drag cable between sites. This let them sell non-BT leased line service to City trading desks, and was the first crack in British Telecom's post-privatization national monopoly.