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".

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

Looks like I managed to reconfigure my router to be multi-homed, while logged in through SSH over the existing WAN connection, without screwing something up and locking myself out. Phew! 😅

Lazy vacation days 😊

#DogsOfMastodon

This is pretty spot on. At this stage, the problem with #climate change isn't that we don't know what the solutions are, it's that we are not applying them fast enough. But we could be, and doomism isn't helpful.

"The facts tell us that the general public is not the problem; the fossil fuel industry and other vested interests are; that we have the solutions, that we know what to do, and that the obstacles are political; that when we fight we sometimes win; and that we are deciding the future now."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/26/we-cant-afford-to-be-climate-doomers

Hi, we're a tech startup run by libertarian Silicon Valley tech bros.

We're not a newspaper, we're a content portal.
We're not a taxi service, we're a ride sharing app.
We're not a pay TV service, we're a streaming platform.
We're not a department store, we're an e-commerce marketplace.
We're not a financial services firm, we're crypto.
We're not a space agency, we're a group of visionaries who are totally going to Mars next year.
We're not a copywriting and graphic design agency, we're a large language model generative AI platform.

Oh sure, we compete against those established businesses. We basically provide the same goods and services.

But we're totally not those things. At least from a legal and PR standpoint.

And that means all the laws and regulations that have built up over the decades around those industries don't apply to us.

Things like consumer protections, privacy protections, minimum wage laws, local content requirements, safety regulations, environmental protections... They totally don't apply to us.

Even copyright laws — as long as we're talking about everyone else's intellectual property.

We're going to move fast and break things — and then externalise the costs of the things we break.

We've also raised several billion in VC funding, and we'll sell our products below cost — even give them away for free for a time — until we run our competition out of the market.

Once we have a near monopoly, we'll enshitify the hell out of our service and jack up prices.

You won't believe what you agreed to in our terms of service agreement.

We may also be secretly hoarding your personal information. We know who you are, we know where you work, we know where you live. But you can trust us.

By the time the regulators and the general public catch on to what we're doing, we will have well and truly moved on to our next grift.

By the way, don't forget to check out our latest innovation. It's the Uber of toothpaste!

#startup #business #tech #technology @technology

FFS, spent hours beating my head against a wall trying to figure out why this service was starting up and then randomly dying after a few seconds...

... Well, turns out it was because of a misconfigured firewall on the NFS server it was talking to, so some connections would just hang, causing IO stalls. Fix the firewall rule, and presto, everything is running perfectly!

At least it wasn't DNS! 😅

So apropos of nothing, how do y'all handle encryption at rest for your home server(s)?

I mean, I know how to setup full disk encryption, but how to provide the key? I'm talking about a headless setup on physical hardware, here.

My current solution is an initrd that spawns an SSH server and waits for me to manually login and supply the pass phrase on every boot. Which works, but it's kinda annoying, especially if there's a power failure while I'm somewhere I can't access SSH. Also, it kinda feels brittle (I keep fearing it won't come back up on the next reboot).

So does anyone have any better solutions?

#linux #security #encryption