Notices by ARGVMI~1.PIF (argv_minus_one@mastodon.sdf.org), page 3

@kimapr

Ah, that. Some people seem to be under the impression that blocking ICMP traffic will improve their security…which breaks path MTU discovery. 🤦♂️

@ak @erik @shiz

@ak @shiz @erik

What does MTU breakage look like? I'm not familiar.

@whitequark

XMPP definitely had E2EE in 2015. Not OMEMO, but it did have OTR and OpenPGP.

The lack of forward secrecy is extra scary for a private chat app, so it was certainly not ideal. But it wasn't nothing.

@ariadne @lynn

I was bullied heavily in school. From an age of about 12, the Internet was my only source of social exposure. Without it, I would have had no friends and no one to talk to except schoolchildren who hated me. Pretty good chance I'd have ended up dead or worse.

Folks these days are yelling about how chat harms kids, but I couldn't disagree more. When I was a kid, chat saved my life.

@dhry

Well, I suppose that might've worked too.

One of the times I was physically attacked at school, I gave the attacker a bloody nose. Wasn't particularly trying to hurt him, just defend myself, but that's where my hand ended up.

The day after, I got gestures of respect from a bunch of other kids. Only time anybody ever respected me. It was surreal.

But it wouldn't work today. From what I hear, you now get instantly expelled if you hit anybody or if anybody hits you.

@domi

How did SFTP not time out?

I mean, yeah, no IP addresses are changing so it could in theory resume once connectivity comes back up, but timeouts aren't usually 7+ minutes.

@makdaam

I know this isn't what you meant, but it would be absolutely wild if a computer somewhere fell into some kind of slumber in 1985 while in the middle of an FTP transfer, woke up today, and the other end of the TCP connection was still there, waiting patiently for its long-lost peer's inevitable return.

@domi

I remember, in the 1990s, people from the #hacker subculture (by which I mean curious but harmless computer nerds, as found in MIT or UCB) were complaining about the word “hacker” being used in popular culture to refer to what are now known as cybercriminals.

They even tried to coin a new word, “cracker”, with which to refer to the latter, but it didn't catch on.

Well, it's 2025 and words like #lifehack are now mainstream, so it seems that #hack has finally regained its original meaning. 🎉

So, I can boost and reply to #Loops videos on #Mastodon. Not just a link—the actual videos will appear in the feed of anyone following me here.

The #Fediverse is so cool.

Copying some big files from one USB #HDD to another has had an unexpected side benefit: #blinkenlights! 🤩

The existence of Void #Linux implies the existence of Char Linux, Int Linux, Float Linux, Struct Linux, Enum Linux, and Union Linux.

#shitpost

@whitequark @fasterthanlime

How do you run Webpack from Zola? 🫤 Most websites need scripts…

I guess one could write a wrapper program like fasterthanlime did, but then you can't use zola serve. 😔

Although to be fair, I might not use zola serve anyway. I currently (with a bespoke SSG) use Apache as a test server, so that the site's redirects, rewrites, etc all work the same as they would in production.

So, did the entire Picard family one day decide to start speaking with an English accent and mispronouncing their own name, or what?

#StarTrek #StarTrekTNG

TIL from @lauriewired that Pixar mostly doesn't use GPUs for rendering its movies.

The reason being that Pixar movie scenes have huge amounts of detail—too much to fit in a video card's memory—whereas CPUs can use terabytes of RAM.

Instead, Pixar mainly uses SIMD instructions on loads-of-cores CPUs like Epyc for rendering.

Neat.

Just cleaned off the dust filter on my computer.

8 years on, I'm still happy with it. Looks good, runs good, and Linux treats it right. 🐧

@rk

Yeah, what's up with that? PATA used /dev/hd* but SATA for some reason uses /dev/sd* instead.

@prettygood

@prettygood

Using dd makes me nervous in general.

Maybe I should start using some GUI program to write disk images…

The existence of @doskel implies the existence of @windowskel and @os2kel.

#retrocomputing #shitpost

@whitequark

Yeah, that too. WebAssembly shouldn't need JavaScript glue code to manipulate the DOM. JavaScript should be entirely optional.

@whitequark

I'd call it a wasted opportunity. But 🤷♂️