Notices by Jan Schaumann (jschauma@mstdn.social)

If you'd like to have a nice 🤦-y day like me, go ahead, search your internal code repository for the following:

curl -k
wget --no-check-certificate
verify=false
InsecureSkipVerify: true
ssl_verify_mode: 0
TrustSelfSignedStrategy
rejectUnauthorized: false
strict-ssl = false
http.sslVerify = false
--no-verify-ssl
--insecure*
verify_hostname: 0

It'll be great.

Billionaires, man. Greedy motherfuckers.

Brin is worth $266B. A one-time 5% billionaire tax (with the money going to healthcare!) would mean he's left with... $242B. Which that year's rate of growth would trivially earn him back. But he just can't.

You can do a 99% one-time billionaire tax and he'd be left with *2.6 billion dollars.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/28/us/politics/california-billionaires-sergey-brin-campaign.html

CA has maybe 200 billionaires in a population of ~40 million. Talk about the richest 0.0005%. Greedy motherfuckers.

And this is why he's The Boss.

"Here in our home they killed and roamed
In the winter of ’26
We’ll take our stand for this land
And the stranger in our midst
We’ll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWKSoxG1K7w

This semester, I'm teaching my class on System Administration / Internet Operations once again.

The syllabus and all course materials are available here:

https://stevens.netmeister.org/615/

All videos for the lectures and exercises are public and available for free on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/c/cs615asa/videos

If you want to follow along, I'll be posting lecture videos and related links in this thread throughout the semester.

#sysadmin #devops #sre

System Administration, Week 1: Introduction

In this video, we cover a number of administrative issues relating to our course: we discuss why and how System Administration is covered in an academic Computer Science curriculum and outline the course syllabus.

https://youtu.be/QJL5cNv9dJs

#sysadmin #devops #sre

Here #curl is again showing the way in Open Source, this time with vulnerability management. Per their well-known/security.txt:

Ugh. New conference speaker agreement terms appear:

"I acknowledge and agree that [company] uses and/or may in the future use Artificial Intelligence, and the foregoing license expressly includes the right to use the presentation and/or the other Speaker Content and Derivative Content to train Artificial Intelligence and to generate and return outputs using Artificial Intelligence."

Bleh.

Oof, this hits hard.

"AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself"

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/ai-is-destroying-the-university-and-learning-itself

Choice quotes:

"The result isn’t augmented intelligence but simulated learning: a paint-by-numbers approach to thought."

"Universities are being retrofitted as fulfillment centers of cognitive convenience. Students aren’t being taught to think more deeply but to prompt more effectively."

So many more spot-on observations. It's long. Actually read it, don't have AI summarize it for you.

Cloudflare outage root cause: not checking the return value of a function that may fail. In C, that would be calling something on NULL and segfaulting; in Rust it's calling a function on an Err val and panic.

thread fl2_worker_thread panicked: called Result::unwrap() on an Err value

So, yeah, kids, do always check your return values before you use them.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/18-november-2025-outage/

TIL: the Hoatzin

Contemporary flying dinosaur. Entirely folivorous, effectively a ruminant (complete with methane belches), shitty at flying, loud and stinky, and the chicks have claws like an archaeopteryx.

Birds, man. Bird is the word.

I fell down a rabbit hole into a virtual memory layout landscape, trying to better understand how thread stacks are placed under Address Space Layout Randomization. Turns out, there's quite a bit of variability across different Unix flavors.

https://www.netmeister.org/blog/thread-stacks.html

#unix #linux #netbsd #freebsd #openbsd #omnios

Trump literally demolishing the White House may just be too much symbolism for me.

#nokings #nyc

#nokings #fucktrump #fuckICE #nyc

Love the vibe of the inflatables. We stand with frog. #nokings #nyc

Over the last few months, I've repeatedly had people tell me about how "well, the Military will refuse an illegal order", to which I can only gesticulate in a bewildered manner in the direction of at least 17 dead from the Venezuelan boats they happily blew up, why not.

And the third one barely made any headlines. Jfc.

One of the voices in tech I deeply trust and respect is @anildash , and this 🔥 he brings is an example of why:

'Tim Cook handed a big shiny golden turd to Donald Trump, and couldn’t wait to stammer out how much he’d love to polish that turd for him, please sir — the emperor’s clothes look especially lavish today! [...] There's no point in having fuck-you money in the bank if you never say "fuck you"!'

https://www.anildash.com/2025/09/09/how-tim-cook-sold-out-steve-jobs/

Re-posting due to current events.

The secret language of coders, part N of many. Today: "npm"

https://xkcd.com/2347/ recursion

The problem with dogfooding is if it tastes like dogfood, I don't wanna eat it.