Heading home from a great couple of days in Paris for #Netconf and #KernelRecipes. Trains are running quite smoothly today, so looks like I'll make it the whole way as planned (fingers crossed)!

Oh my goodness I've just learned a thing about The Matrix that causes it to make a lot more sense: In the original script the humans were used as neural network compute clusters by the Machines and as a crucial component of The Matrix itself.

Which is why humans who were aware of the simulation could control aspects of The Matrix - their minds were part of its foundation.

Unfortunately the test audiences had trouble understanding this concept so the studio changed the human role to "batteries".

@kernellogger
Yeah, this is a tricky one! The reverse can also be an issue: for instance, I often feel bad for asking (potential) contributors to do more work when I ask them to rework stuff. I usually do so anyway, and don't write a fix myself until they've had a chance to do that (which some do and some don't).

Understand first laws of Physics
@paulmckrcu #kr2023

Firefox is so cute! Why would anyone use Google Chrome?? 🐼

#RedPanda #Firefox

Smileys are 41 years old today

Whatever it takes to get people to understand.

#ClimateCrisis

Why spend time criticising technology? Langdon Winner expresses this succinctly in the preface of his seminal book, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology.

« In its approach to these matters, this is a work of criticism. If it were literary criticism, everyone would immediately understand that the underlying purpose is positive. A critic of literature examines a work, analyzing its features, evaluating its qualities, seeking a deeper appreciation that might be useful to other readers of the same text. In a similar way, critics of music, theater, and the arts have a valuable, well-established role, serving as a helpful bridge between artists and audiences. Criticism of technology, however, is not yet afforded the same glad welcome. Writers who venture beyond the most pedestrian, dreary conceptions of tools and uses to investigate ways in which technical forms are implicated in the basic patterns and problems of our culture are often greeted with the charge that they are merely "antitechnology" or "Blaming technology." All who have recently stepped forward as critics in this realm have been tarred with the same idiot brush, an expression of the desire to stop a much needed dialogue rather than enlarge it. If any readers want to see the present work as "antitechnology," make the most of it. That is their topic, not mine.

What does interest me, however, is identified in the book's subtitle: A Search for Limits. In an age in which the inexhaustible power of scientific technology makes all things possible, it remains to be seen where we will draw the line, where we will be able to say, here are possibilities that wisdom suggests we avoid. I am convinced that any philosophy of technology worth its salt must eventually ask, How can we limit modern technology to match our best sense of who we are and the kind of world we would like to build? In several contexts and variations, that is my question throughout. »

Today was ... interesting. If you followed me for the past months over on the shitbird site, you might have seen a bunch of angry German words, lots of graphs, and the occassional news paper, radio, or TV snippet with yours truely. Let me explain.

In Austria, inflation is way above the EU average. There's no end in sight. This is especially true for basic needs like energy and food.

Our government stated in May that they'd build a food price database together with the big grocery chains. But..

tips for being more #positive about your work!

❌ “I can’t fix this bug no matter what I try”
✔ “I am an avant-garde software artist”

❌ “my code won’t compile”
✔ “this is an abstract piece”

❌ “I never get around to implementing any of the features I want”
✔ “I consider myself a minimalist“

❌ “sorry I forget to document my code…”
✔ “my art is about the journey, not the destination”

❌ “I have never finished a project”
✔ “I prefer to leave the ending open to interpretation”

❌ “sorry, this software is not compatible with ( )”
✔ “here I have chosen to make a political statement against ( )”

❌ “this memory leak causes the program to crash”
✔ “this program symbolizes the transience of mortality and reminds us all what is important in life”

When facing the "All we need is STEM!" approach to education, my usual response is:

Developing the vaccine was the STEM problem; distribution & getting shots in arms was the Social Science problem; getting people to trust it & combatting misinformation was the Humanities problem -- which did we fail?

Well, vger (as of right now) no longer directly attempts to deliver to gmail/google/googlemail just to get the ridiculous backlog out of the primary mail paths. Vger (1 machine) is kicking all of that queue over to 8 other machines and letting them go try to get that delivered and queue up somewhere where it's not going to cause everyone else pain.

This should, at least for now, settle out several things, but if you are seeing mail wonkiness give postmaster@ a ping and I'll take a look.

Also if you are on Gmail and doing kernel dev, might be worth looking at other email providers.

Since I've seen a lot of chatter about people switching to #Firefox as Google ramps up the enshitification of #Chrome, let me tell you about a killer feature for people who (a) need multiple accounts on the same websites (eg. devs) or specifically (b) have to use multiple Google accounts.

Firefox has an official addon called Multi Account Containers that lets you trivially set up color coded tabs that have separate sets of cookies. Log into your dev account in one, and your test account in another. Log into your personal #gmail in one and have another tab next to it with your work Gmail. I'm actually not signed in to any Google accounts in most my tabs, I just have containers for the specific tasks I do on Google products.

It'll take you 30 seconds to set up.

Add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/

Mozilla's explanation: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers

Techbros: self driving cars are inevitable!

Also techbros: prove you are human by performing a task that computers can’t do, like identifying traffic lights.

We need to have a talk, and I’m having a really hard time having it with my awesome hacker friends, because everyone is super duper emotionally invested and is deeply hurt by it.

I hope you all aren’t - because it involves all of us and it’s important. It’s not about any of y’all individually or your hard community work.

The talk is about how to make all of our cybersecurity conferences and events and meetups more accessible and conformable for young hackers because I’mreallysosorry, we’ve somehow become Old, and the stuff that we are ingrained with as “hacker culture” like movies, music, and memes all were created before they were born - and they may or may not have any emotional attachment or enjoyment of them at all.

That’s the conversation we need to have and that we are all responsible for and I swear it’s not aimed at any conference or person because we are all in this filter bubble of watching the Matrix and listening to Prodigy and remembering the hamster dance and all of that stuff while awesome was like a quarter century ago.

Part of building a community is thinking about including everyone and their culture under a mantle of good ethics and goals. So we really, really need to start having a chat about when we lean on the 90s hacker aesthetic and memories to the exclusion of people under 30. I had a wake up call hearing some students complaining about it.

Network engineers hate this one simple trick

@wupatz @jon
Yes, the cloudflare speed test is one of the better for measuring bloat! I love the box plots! Only trouble with it is that if you have a fast link you need a pretty beefy machine to max it out because the test runs in the browser, but that's kinda fundamental for this type of test...

@c_chep @jon
Well, the WiFi access point inside the train is basically a femtocell, just using a different radio interface. The AP-to-client hop is not usually the bottleneck, though, the train-to-infrastructure hop is. Think of it like a 5G router like you have at home, sitting on top of the train. That's the device that needs to be fixed. Or, well, preferably the whole bloody 5G network...

I actually know of a Swedish company (Icomera) selling connectivity services to trains etc. I believe DB is one of their customers. They have some sort of bandwidth and handover solution which is pretty advanced and they would be perfectly positioned to fix this problem. Unfortunately I have never managed to convince them of the need (it's "not a problem for them" according to the guy I talked to way back when...) 🤷‍♂️

@isomer
@jon

Yeah, gfblip is great! I suspect it may just overwhelm many connections on trains and just immediately to into the red, though. But I guess that's a data point as well :)

@c_chep
@jon

Yes and yes (it seems) :/

A lot of the problem stems from the fact that benchmarks optimise for single stream TCP throughput. And a good way to get a really good score on such a benchmark is to add heaps of buffers everywhere. Which sucks for literally everything else. Yet this is what is still routinely done, even with 5g equipment.

One of the 5G buzzwords is (ostensibly) latency, so at least that has made the industry start paying attention to it as a concept. But I've still seen benchmarks of 5G equipment with seconds of buffering built-in, so it seems more like it'll be yet another benchmark to game: ultra low latency as long as the link is idle, but still bufferbloat out the wazzoo as soon as you run any real traffic on it.

Even my (allegedly) high-class business grade gigabit fibre connection has 30-40 ms of bufferbloat one hop away from me if I don't apply my own traffic shaper. It's infuriating :/