Notices by ティージェーグレェ (teajaygrey@rap.social)

/me sees folks justifying their use of BlueSky even though they hate it.

Y'know, to share a lesson I learned, the hard way.

Decades ago, I more or less exclusively used SILC (Secure Internet Live Conferencing) aside from work email (I administered that MTA) and access on a handful of shells.

When my marriage fell apart, and my ex-wife took most of our friends with her, I began to go through the arduous process of recreating a social life & making new friends. Albeit, mostly thanks to deejayin this went well in person; & via hacker events I began to meet some more tech savvy sorts in person as well.

A lot of them, were not in the end-to-end encrypted comms software that was built from source level of being tech savvy. ;-/

They were maybe more like: use AIM (OSCAR), Y!M, MSN, LiveJournal, etc.

I maladapted to them. After all I was the more technically adept?

This was a categorical mistake.

The analogy would be: if people are drowning, throw them a life preserver.

Do not jump into the water with them!

By stooping to the lower levels of corporate owned closed source proprietary BS?

Sure, it was easier *for me*.

But it didn't help them from drowning.

It got worse.

Facebook emerged.

Twitter too.

If I had *done the work* and elevated those who could have benefited from my loftier technological ideals?

We would have had more SILC users.

More SILC clients.

More SILC daemons.

Instead?

Well, you can repeat this kind of mistake yourself.

BlueSky is RIGHT THERE!

It may be easier *for you*.

But will it be better?

I already learned that lesson, the hard way.;(

Honestly, I couldn't care less if some politicians aren't on the FediVerse.

"Oh, you used to lead a country? That's cute."

Y'know, the person who wrote the protocol which begat the world's largest computer network until the mid 1990s is on here.

The person who wrote the reference DNS server is on here too!

Last I checked DNS is queried around a billion times an hour by more or less every computer on the Internet.

That isn't all those people did either.

But it would get like, kind of crazy to name all their individual technical achievements without name dropping them.

As it is, if you know, you know.

Their follower counts?

Let's just say the individual who was employee #2 at Phoenix, that company that reverse engineered the IBMPC BIOS which facilitated "clone" PCs (IIRC Hewlett Packard came to them with some hardware that they blessed with their ЯƎ-ed BIOS as just one example) has fewer than 1000 followers.

That individual who also helped implement DHCP? So you don't need to sit there tweaking your IP and netmask and gateway and DNS settings every time you change networks? 1.3K followers.

If you know, you know.

If you care about politicians being on here?

Let me know when ANY politician has ever contributed to anything as widespread as those two who are already here, and presumably will continue to keep toiling in the shadows, doing neat things, releasing code in free and open source manners as they have done, for decades.

No lobbyists needed.

No billionaires bribing anyone for votes.

I don't think the FediVerse's priorities are off.

I think everyone who is so ignorant of who really co-creates technology claiming that the FediVerse/Mastodon should be more like Twitter/BlueSky/whatever the heck is just showing that they have a lot to learn?

We all do!

Good thing ignorance can be conquered!:)

@astronomerritt

If you want FOSS down to the bootloader: https://minifree.org is based in the UK and operated by @libreleah and has extremely good prices on a variety of decent looking laptops with Libreboot preinstalled.

I think Apple's Macs are pretty much running circles around most other things with widespread availability w/ regards to battery life and solid build, but their "ecosystem" is annoying a.f.

Deals on M2 MacBook Airs and maybe even M3 MacBook Airs new, would probably fit within your budget?

Some guy just posted a video of having found a M1 Max MacBook Pro with 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD for $120 with a busted backlight (but he uses an external display so he basically scored).

M4 stuff, probably not OK with your budget. ;(

M2 is kind of weird due to SSD choices, you basically want 512SSD for performance equivalent to M1 and M3 SSDs at their minimum density.

M3 and M1 you can skimp on SSD without performance concerns, RAM might be a bigger thing to opt for since doing that after market is not likely given the "unified memory" design of Apple Silicon.

You can also use 3rd party services (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xrg7nPG6_UU dosdude1 in the USA, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGaUAP2VKY0 is another, not sure about UK after market shops but they probably exist) to upgrade the SSDs for roughly 1/2 the cost of what Apple charges for equivalent density storage.

Supposedly some of the newer Intel based laptops are better on battery life (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1VC2SiUaz0)?

Definitely NVidia based GPUs still run circles around everything else if that's a concern, but the pricing is not likely to match your budget unless you buy something used.

Admittedly, even a 2016 vintage Clevo I had with an GTX 1080 I am pretty sure would outperform an M4 Max in the GPU department (it ran this: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=68239 better than any Apple Silicon Mac I have tested) but it was also like 13 lbs!

Yet it would probably fit your budget. Terrible battery life, but upgradable CPU, GPUs, etc.

@silverwizard kids these days, probably want to run Mosh or something instead of vanilla SSH? ;)

@mwl

@djm My apologies for the delay, I submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' OpenSSH to 9.9p1 here:
https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/25861

GitHub Actions Continuous Integration checks passed.

I don't have commit access, so it's up to someone else to merge it!

I'm prepping a a submission for undeadly.org as well.

#OpenSSH #MacPorts #OpenSource #OpenBSD #SecureShell #SSH

Watching the BSDCan videos via @peertube and it's so much better at recovering from intermittent network outages (I listen to things while I drive and often go through areas with poor cellular data coverage) I am impressed!

Leagues better than YouTube, Twitch, Kick. All of which basically give up trying after brief network fussiness.

Oh wow, jokes about OpenBSD being a "theocracy" and I'm sure I'm not the only one to contemplate the definition of Theo as related to the project founder, but this BSDCan talk goes all the way in the liturgical realms from a friggin theologian!

https://toobnix.org/w/p/cnQ1NJHwU9SXVW63Q8z212?playlistPosition=5&resume=true

"Summa Tetraodontidae: Thomas Aquinas Explores OpenBSD's Medieval Orderliness By: Corey Stephan"

#OpenBSD #theology

@haitchfive I am reasonably enthused by RISC-V as being comprehensible.

The reference text book on it, The RISC-V Reader: An Open Architecture Atlas by David Patterson, Andrew Waterman is a blessedly short read and reminds me of the to the point simplicity of "K&R" (aka Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie's book: The C Programming Language).

That even MIT created a course Xv6, which is essentially a re-creation of Lion's Commentary on UNIX but for RISC-V (e.g. https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2020/xv6.html) to me at least, demonstrates that pedagogy is making an effort, across academic institutions, to put some oomph behind RISC-V as far as educational collaboration, with a lot less of the clandestine skullduggery needed by previous generations.

@cwebber Friggin rad!

Also, loved seeing more than 1/2 peers on that PeerTube instance!

@thumb I'm partial to OpenBSD.

FreeBSD is probably more popular both in terms of users and commercial reuse, but seems to be a bit more x86/Intel hyper focused? PC-BSD used to exist which kinda made FreeBSD a bit more GUI friendly from the get go, but I think whatever is left of that is probably now in TrueOS?

DragonFlyBSD seems to be the land of fascinating experiments which are too out there for mainstream FreeBSD.

Meanwhile, NetBSD jokingly will run on just about anything including a toaster. However, they do a lot of cross compilation (OpenBSD is very into making sure that builds work on their supported hardware first hand which is extremely useful) and their politics/fallout are why Theo went from being part of core to forking and creating OpenBSD decades ago.

There are other BSDs too, HardenedBSD is FreeBSD derived with more of a security focus, and MirBSD I guess was OpenBSD derived with a modus operandi I could never fully understand ("Mir" means "My" in German), being some examples which come to mind.

In general though, BSDs have sort of a distinct kernel /usr/src and ports /usr/ports but for me at least, still seem much more cohesive than any Linux distro and are much easier to work with source code rather than relying on package maintainers and such and dealing with binaries.

Having written as much, even OpenBSD now has tools such as syspatch and pkg to make working with binary patching easier.

@aburka Nice!

There are lots of interlingual soy milk jokes (comic examples attached).

Though, all this reminds me of DJ Statik (of Das Bunker notoriety, though in more recent years deejayin at Midnight Mess in Tokyo, Japan) going out to Indian food with me and DJ Abattoir (RIP).

He held up a piece of naan bread and asked me: "これはナンですか。”
「kore wa nan desu ka」Translation:
"Is this naan?"

Which is a homonym of これは何ですか。「kore wa nan desu ka」
Translation:
"What is this?"

Definitely one of those kinds of jokes that required interlingual knowledge and literacy to grok.

@whitequark

@lispi314 I am definitely living below the poverty line.

Honestly, I wouldn't really call it "living" but I have worse news for the "blocks them and then stops using their code" person:

FOSS is already in *everything*.

Always has been. Presumably, always will be.

OpenBSD's libc was forked and is in Android as bionic.

OpenBSD's pf and OpenSSH and LibreSSL are in macOS.

OpenBSD was the basis for Microsoft's SFU (Services For UNIX).

As just, a few examples.

You can't get away from open source software, period.

The TCP/IP stack widely (re)used by everyone on the Internet? Derived from Dr. Marshal Kirk McKusick's work as a grad student at UC Berkeley's CSRG/BSD too.

sendmail? The reference SMTP (email) server? Open source.

BIND? The reference DNS (domain name system) implementation? Open source.

@aral @kissane

@mike It seems as if @Gargron missed the time when Micro$oft's Exchange (their "email") server broke IMAP support with pine (y'know, the REFERENCE IMAP client)?

Heck, even I missed that until Tim Newsham pointed it out to me, because even though I was working somewhere as a Network Security Specialist and was administering (at the time Exchange 2003) I wasn't testing it with other IMAP clients, because I wasn't getting paid to do that and was using elm/mutt/etc. on my UNIX shells elsewhere.

So, not too sure if email is really a strong counter example for the "embrace extend extinguish" paradigm? I mean, sure SMTP (and even UUCP) server and client implementations exist in abundance, but you don't have to look very far to see how some of the big surveillance capitalism bullies have made it very adversarial.

e.g.
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/12/gmail-sucks-water-is-wet/

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2014/05/google-has-most-of-my-email-because-it-has-all-of-yours/

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2015/03/google-seems-to-have-broken-email-forwarding/

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/09/today-in-email-hegemony/

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/09/the-oligopoly-has-won/

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/08/today-in-google-broke-email/

Last I checked, Micro$oft still *prefers* that Outlook uses MAPI (their own, proprietary BS with Exchange which other companies such as Zimbra have gone to significant lengths to reverse engineer with their ZCO [Zimbra Connector for Outlook]).

@LeDiva Starfleet is a very Earth centric member of the Federation.

So, for example while Vulcan is also part of the Federation, outliers such as Spock (half Vulcan half Earthling) are part of Starfleet, while most other Vulcans seem content to simply be part of Vulcan's contingent within the Federation without feeling any need to join Starfleet as part of this.

Does that help? ;)

@irenes @cwebber

/me observes that "The Kid"'s WordPress blog which has some Perl scripts to copy replies from ActivityPub/FediVerse/Mastodon doesn't actually sync changes to those replies if the upstream message was revised.

Still, I guess it's not much different than posting directly to said blog, and also: not being able to edit a post.

/me wonders if the official WordPress ActivityPub/Mastodon support is as bad?

We had libre/free open source BBSes which had message editing functionality in the 1980s, Citadel BBSes' networking even had "anti-vortexing" (their nomenclature for message deduplication). Heck, The Mother of All Demos showed off collaborative networked editing in the 1960s. That kind of functionality, to me, is fundamental. To WordPress in 2023: apparently it's still unimplemented?

Maybe someday I won't be phased by how regressive some popularized technology is, but today is not that day.

@mc FP3 was the last model to have a headphone jack.

@Polychrome amen. I was told to choose a handle before I was given a 1200 baud modem.

The world online was adversarial decades ago and it's even worse now.

@roadriverrail Oh, The Porn Palace -> Armory move was circa 2007.

Last I checked that past employer had sold the building for a hefty profit in 2018 ($65 million, purchase price: $14.5 million circa 2006). I was terminated from that employer in 2014 (for the second time, first termination in 2009), so my own tales have mostly to do with a very specific "adult" content producer, unless you want to talk about my dad, who was stationed there after he was drafted into the National Guard during the Vietnam era.

@miah @jeffhorton

@miah We had a pretty sizeable hot tub on the roof of the Porn Palace (popular during Friday "Happy Hour" parties, good idea to wait a couple days after the weekend to use again). It was a nice perk.

Alas, after we moved into the SF Amory, I failed to convince management to put a hot tub into one of the turrets. "Safety hazard" they said.

They eventually put a hot tub in the drill court. It was, not used much because: that building is old and dank and there were stale exhaust fumes because people parked in the drill court.

@roadriverrail @jeffhorton

@zens Outstanding! @mcc