Here's a strange situation:

thousands of #Rust developers use #bacon, #broot, #dysk, or #lazy-regex every single day — tools I wrote, maintain, and improve for free.

Their companies, though? None of them want to hire their author.

If you use my tools at work and your company does #Rust, I'd really appreciate a hand landing a job or freelance mission. A boost goes a long way. 🙏🦀

https://dystroy.org

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@lcamtuf/116517194178120536

fucking up a craven license-washing rewrite? well I never

Living on the East Coast means my radio-controlled atomic wall clock is completely deaf to the atomic (WWVB) signal from Colorado. In the attached video, I am using my smartphone to force the clock to sync to exact Internet time via a clever hardware hack. 1/4

New York to Sacramento compressed from six months to seven days.

The integration of national markets that followed turned Sears, Roebuck and Standard Oil into empires.

But the railways themselves went bankrupt…

https://www.selfonomics.com/p/nvidia-goes-to-zero

If you cannot, without doing any additional research, write a 3,000-word essay about why a particular technology is garbage and no one should ever use it, then you don’t understand it well enough to recommend it.

The downside of full-on self-hosting is, of course, that your server will inevitably choose to have weird hardware issues while you're in another country

In another sickening twist to Google's grasp on Android, Google can now require you to have an Android device with Google Mobile Services, or an iOS device with the reCAPTCHA mobile app installed, in order to solve CAPTCHAs.

https://support.google.com/recaptcha/answer/16609652

and archive: https://archive.is/Fq196

#Google #reCAPTCHA #CAPTCHA #privacy #GMS #Android

With Amazon killing off all the old kindles, they’re super-cheap right now. And it turns out that jailbreaking is a minor faff, but not too difficult, really. This one was £10 and is going to somebody who was pondering getting an expensive eink ebook reader just a couple of weeks ago. :D
#permacomputing

@GrapheneOS @adfichter yup, the national ID app breaking on an OS version update makes the news on a regular basis here. It's really terrible, and there doesn't seem to be a way to get through to the people responsible in a way that they will listen to. Really sad to see security theatre win out this way.

@GrapheneOS @adfichter ugh, that sounds horrible indeed! But good to know that this is on your radar; I'll keep an eye on the release notes and retry the Mobile Pay app from time to time. And thanks for explaining the details, very interesting!

This week:
Two donated Linux laptops have found new homes with people who would not otherwise had laptops.

In the queue:

I've got three thinkpads awaiting new power adaptors, one of which needs a new battery, and another of which _NEEDS_ a new battery.

And two macbooks, one of which is having (broadcom) WiFi problems. And the other is waiting.

You:
Are you a carer, a migrant, unemployed or otherwise could use an Ubuntu laptop? (Or do you know someone who would benefit?)

Do you have old laptops* cluttering your space that you want to pass on? I will collect from anywhere in London.

* If your laptop turns on, I'm interested. If its already ewaste, sorry.

@GrapheneOS @adfichter right, I'm not disputing that the app is broken. However, it's also the only available payment solution in many places in Denmark, so it would be kinda nice to have a workaround or a per-app toggle to make it work. I'd rather not turn off the security feature system-wide, for obvious reasons :)

@GrapheneOS @adfichter that would be amazing. The Danish MobilePay app (dk.danskebank.mobilepay) also refuses to work on GrapheneOS, and it sounds like it's for the same reason. At least I don't get any notification about the app trying to use the Integrity API, it just says "device modified" after running for a while. I guess maybe it's just caching the state after initial launch and bugging out if it changes?

Reminder: de-skilling as a trend in software engineering was already in progress well before LLMs.

Toxic productivity culture, people meeting badly-designed internal reward metrics, hopping jobs and never seeing the consequences of bad choices, plummeting quality, short-termism.

Sure LLMs add fuel to this fire, but I’m not at all convinced they’re causal.

If anything, their popularity seems more a consequence of the culture than cause.

Why does our industry keep looking at things, claiming it's doing them, and doing the exact opposite of what the original idea was? A few examples:

Alan Kay (who coined the term) defined the key idea of object orientation as late bounding, so we ended up with a load of things that use rigid nominal type systems to tightly couple components, marketed as 'object oriented'.

The Agile Manifesto's core idea was 'people over process'. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen places claim they're using 'the agile methodology' because they have sprints, standups, and other processes taken from Agile.

The Zero Trust paper said, at its core, 'assume endpoints are compromised, design your systems so that an endpoint compromise doesn't automatically give control over everything', yet almost everything I've seen branding itself as Zero Trust has been of the form 'run some over-privileged thing on the endpoints to increase their attack surface, then if that thing reports that the endpoint isn't compromised allow it to do a load of things it shouldn't be allowed to do'.

We are moving past the era of patching buffer overflows. By enforcing structural verification in software and physical verification in hardware, we are building infrastructure where trust is mathematically and physically guaranteed. More: https://josephhall.org/blog/wallach-mem-safety-sw-independence/ 6/6

I am writing this on Tusky, which is free software that someone had to write. It is running on an older Android phone, which someone had to assemble from components that other people had to make from raw materials that still other people had to produce.

You are reading this because it was transmitted via a sophisticated international communications system which someone had to design and someone else had to make from raw materials that someone else had to produce.

The electricity also had to be produced by someone, using machinery made by someone else.

Happy May Day, y'all. The world is nothing without our labour. Our masters know this; we should too.

One of the things I’ve noticed moving from C (and Objective-C) to languages like C++ and Rust, with richer static type systems is that it changes what most of the code is for.

When I write C code, almost all of my code is to do the thing. When I write the same in C++, I can usually do the thing in about half as much code. But I don’t write half as much code. The other half of the code is making sure that’s if the code doesn’t do the thing, it probably won’t compile. If I have a field that needs accessing with a lock held, I’ll write an accessor that takes a lock guard to prove lock ownership, and a wrapper that acquires the lock and returns the lock guard and a reference to the field. This compiles down to the same code as the C version (except maybe in debug builds, where I’d assert that the lock guard is really for the right lock), but now it’s harder to get wrong. Especially when I come back to the code in two years and don’t remember to read the comment telling me the locks I need to hold to access the code.

This is why I’m excited by Verus for Rust: it gives me a very rich set of tools for ensuring that my code is going to do the right thing. But it’s a big mindset shift from ‘code exists to do the thing’ to ‘doing the thing is the easy part, most of the code exists to make sure you’re not doing the wrong thing’. And I suspect that’s both why it’s hard for people to switch from C and why few people who do ever want to go back.

I know I've said it before but as a 30+ year Linux user it *still blows my mind* that Linux is now so much the superior OS for *gaming* that Microsoft is using it as an aspirational benchmark. like holy shit, this is real?

🚨 #TechWeenieAlert

“BERLIN (AP) — Robot dogs with hyper-realistic silicone heads modeled after world-renowned figures — including #ElonMusk, #MarkZuckerberg, #JeffBezos, Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso — can be seen roaming around a #Berlin museum, occasionally “pooing” printed images of their surroundings which they’ve previously captured with integrated #cameras.”

#Art 🎨 / #MechaTronics / #electronics / #RoboDogs / #Robots 🤖 / #cameras 📸 / #ApNews <https://apnews.com/article/germany-berlin-robot-dogs-beeple-bezos-digital-art-4a2be2a4a4490553ad68c27beedfe83a>

🤣🤪☺️