@landley@mstdn.jp avatar

landley

@landley@mstdn.jp

Rob does toybox and mkroot, writes linux docs, worked with j-core.org, long ago co-founded Penguicon and Linucon, wrote for Motley Fool, taught at ACC, etc. Trying to learn Japanese and make Android a self-hosting development environment.

He/him. Answers to "they/them" just fine.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

landley, to random
@landley@mstdn.jp avatar

Steve Jobs could not predict the future. In this 1990 internal briefing laying out NeXT's market strategy, he blew off the PC as irrelevant:

https://youtu.be/CtnX1EJHbC0

Nothing about Irix creating a new computer graphics niche. He focused on sustaining (not disruptive) technologies, ignored exponential growth (Moore's Law muscling white box pc hardware into the Sun/IBM markets he coveted), blew off network effects...

The great salesman needed partners like Wozniak and Lasseter to handle the tech.

landley, to random
@landley@mstdn.jp avatar

The shell "trap" builtin isn't registering a function, it's a delayed "eval".

(Not many of you are currently writing your own bash replacement shell, so this observation is presumably of limited utility, but it's a thing I need to remember for morning.)

landley, to random
@landley@mstdn.jp avatar

Apparently you can opt out of Discord's new forced arbitration by emailing arbitration-opt-out@discord.com with your user ID and a statement that you're exercising your right to opt out and not be bound by the Discord provisions requiring arbitration.

Here's a prudetube video with 10 full minutes of throat clearing before providing the instructions, plus useful text below that prudetube disables cut and paste for.

https://youtu.be/DvySPjX0F6w

Deadline May 15 or 30 days after account creation.

landley, to random
@landley@mstdn.jp avatar

Why do people expect Charon, the boatman of the underworld, to have customer service problems and constantly demand to see the manager?

landley, to random
@landley@mstdn.jp avatar

HTML5 confuses me. Mostly I keep confusing it with https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/ and am still not entirely sure what they're trying to accomplish.

I mean yeah, https://merveilles.town/@rezmason/112366328430389621 looks interesting (not enough to get me to click through) but I remember the argument a co-worker made that "javascript is better than java" (activescript?) by showing me a breakout game they'd written that was NOT CONFINED TO A BOX but the paddle and ball destroyed text at the top of the screen.

In 1998.

landley, to random
@landley@mstdn.jp avatar

Huh. I bought a bag of russett potatoes, and half of them are brown (or outright rotted) in the center. Nothing extending to the surface, rot that starts in the middle.

Has potato blight jumped to russetts?

(All modern potatoes are monoclonal, it's just a matter of time. Panama fungus in bananas, blight in potatoes... Evolution came up with sex because monocultures are inevitably taken out by disease.)

landley,
@landley@mstdn.jp avatar

Even the good ones tend to be a little brown in the center, and some have a hole with powder in it. I only bought this bag a couple days ago.

shrug Hadn't encountered that before. Maybe it's a northern climate thing...

landley,
@landley@mstdn.jp avatar

Ah! It's a climate change thing. Drought and overwatering back to back causes "hollow heart".

https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/hollow_heart_in_potatoes

landley, to random
@landley@mstdn.jp avatar

I'm trying to figure out if my complete disinterest in thorium reactors, quantum computing, riscv, and the rust programming language are because I'm old, or because I've seen too many Next Big Things that weren't and don't remember "asking for belief" being part of any success story (but central to a lot of failures).

Alas, recollection is biased...

landley, to random
@landley@mstdn.jp avatar

@pluralistic Another good enshittification example:

https://youtu.be/FDvUSCa7Puw

1:40-5:00 after eMotorworks was acquired by Enel X, an OTA update removed functionality from their electric vehicle charging stations installed in people's homes.

cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

OH DEAR ME—

"Ten Years to Save the West" by Liz Truss is on Kobo Plus in the UK right now, i.e. free to read for subscribers (like me).

Can I spare the brain cells? (And do I want to risk the Trusster getting a roughly 30-50p kickback from my existential agony?)

landley,
@landley@mstdn.jp avatar

@cstross Can you write it off as a business expense?

landley,
@landley@mstdn.jp avatar

@cstross There's no way amazon pays that well. Not through their "streaming" scam.

landley, to random
@landley@mstdn.jp avatar

And dreamhost took landley.net down because they scanned it and identified one of my compiler release tarballs as a virus.

Because virus authors have been using my old compiler releases to build their stuff with for YEARS, and gnu nonsense copies the /home/landley host path where the compiler was built into binaries generated with that compiler, because gnu.

Sigh, probably this one:

https://isc.sans.edu/diary/Exploit+against+Unnamed+Bytevalue+router+vulnerability+included+in+Mirai+Bot/30642

I miss when people could just google for stuff and become informed.

landley,
@landley@mstdn.jp avatar

Here's an article from 2018 where somebody talked about the issue:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/mirai-iot-malware-uses-aboriginal-linux-to-target-multiple-platforms/

I ship open source hammers. I can't stop people on the other side of the planet from hitting each other with the hammers. Dreamhost took down landley.net because in landley.net/hammers it detected Presence Of Hammer.

I am so tired.

cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

If I had more energy I'd be tempted to write a snarky, satirical, 21st century Jetson's style short story set in a future where all the dot-com 1.0-3.0 hype turned out to be true and faithful predictions of our lives in 2025. Just so I could explore the unanticipated drawbacks ("oops, the Amazon drone delivering your neighbour's new dishwasher just fell through your roof; meanwhile trades.com only shows you roofers who live in Boston, England, not Boston, MA").
https://aus.social/@ajsadauskas/112317411058906212

landley,
@landley@mstdn.jp avatar

@cstross Remember "amazon sidewalk"? You can't bar your internet of things devices from accessing your router because they form a mesh network with other IOT devices until they find a neighbor?

Also, https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/security/a42575068/scientists-use-wifi-to-see-through-walls/ is just about improvements that can map arms/leg positions in realtime instead of "person-sized blob located here" which people were doing back when 802.11n first shipped...

landley, to random
@landley@mstdn.jp avatar

Prudetube being incompetent is a daily occurrence.

https://youtu.be/2v063wuJtM0

landley, to random
@landley@mstdn.jp avatar

Why does physical property have "squatter's rights" and "adverse posession", but abandonware software and hardware is still under copyright and dmca anti-circumvention multiple decades later?

Why don't we have digital adverse posession rights on all the 1980s coin-op ROMs mame emulates that haven't sold a handheld "50 games in one" device in the past 5 years where you can buy and play that game? Why does the "pretendo network" face ANY legal shade from Nintendo?

https://fieldprogrammable.gay/notes/9s1z2givuqif03yt

cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

I wish all the speculative capital being pumped into hyping AI and cryptocurrency could go somewhere useful instead—like grid-scale backup batteries, photovoltaic power farms, desalination plants, high speed passenger rail, and building car-optional cities. (With a portion reserved for maintenance and infrastructure, which are always neglected by cultists who worship economic "efficiency".)

landley,
@landley@mstdn.jp avatar

@Madagascar_Sky @cstross The end is coming, in that the Boomers are dying. Who younger than Boomers still thinks capitalism is a good idea? Government shouldn't make a "profit" providing services the same way parents don't make a "profit" raising children. You don't meet friends for drinks because profit, that means you're not really friends.

True capitalsts are sociopaths who don't understand human relationships. They didn't understand libraries, SF conventions, wikipedia, linux...

landley,
@landley@mstdn.jp avatar

@Patrickoldhiker @Madagascar_Sky @cstross Taking the speaker into account, I can't decide whether you've spoken for or against my point.

landley,
@landley@mstdn.jp avatar

@wouterla @cstross @pluralistic @Patrickoldhiker @Madagascar_Sky He already did: https://craphound.com/news/2024/04/14/capitalists-hate-capitalism/

ala https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_465/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_465_-_Capitalists_Hate_Capitalism.mp3

Wadsworth constant 4 minutes.

landley, to random
@landley@mstdn.jp avatar

Sitting in a Boeing contraption which is about to power up. Not entirely happy about this.

landley,
@landley@mstdn.jp avatar

@cstross A 737-800. All the major pieces of it appear to have arrived at the same time.

landley, to random
@landley@mstdn.jp avatar

The USA inherited a whole lot of that cultural baggage...

https://mastodon.scot/@alanferrier/112214123909545000

landley,
@landley@mstdn.jp avatar

@cstross @alanferrier Mapping back the railroad robber barons and the gilded age to the modern internet billionaires seems informative somehow. Even the pandemic sort of lines up, which I find creepy.

I suppose the question is whether we get another FDR or another Robespierre...

landley, to random
@landley@mstdn.jp avatar

The ACLU is going after Mastercard's "policies on adult content".

https://action.aclu.org/petition/mastercard-sex-work-work-end-your-unjust-policy

Finally. This was from 3 years ago: https://thenib.com/payment-processors-vs-porn/

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