Notices by Tekniquelly correct (tek@freeradical.zone)

Find someone who looks at you like June Bug looks at this fuzzy blanket.

Happy Indigenous Peoples' Day (or The Americas' First Undocumented Immigrant Day, depending on which part of country you live in).

Alright, I've put the AI away for the night because I'm about to Learn Some Stuff, and using AI to avoid learning is like using robot fingers to play the piano for you. Nah, I'll do that myself, thanks.

Now I'm building #VeilidChat.

Today I got to see the face of a very intelligent, very knowledgeable colleague when they found out that MAC addresses aren’t guaranteed to be unique or static.

Treasure these moments.

Huntington's disease successfully treated for first time https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cevz13xkxpro

Don’t lose track of the idea that while we may live in tumultuous times, they are also full of miracles.

@glyph I can cite precisely one NIST standard from memory, and this is it: “According to NIST SP 800-63b, section 5.1.1.2, we shouldn’t rotate passwords unless we expect they’ve been compromised.”

I busted that out on a call once and it stopped an entire argument. My CTO was also on the call and I saw him looking over at me, mouth agape.

Happy moment of the day: realizing I had both the ability and the authority to turn off the MDM rule that made everyone update their laptop passwords every couple months.

That's enough of that.

As promised, I present: Little Fluffy Clouds. It's a command line (and an API!) to combine a list of big, overlapping, adjacent IPv4 or IPv6 networks into a smaller list of networks that contain the exact same set of addresses.

It's ludicrously fast and much more Pythonic than the alternatives I found, like using built-in classes, full typechecking, snake_case names, ruff checking and formatting, etc., etc.

https://github.com/kstrauser/littlefluffyclouds

Spent the evening writing a Python module to merge long lists of IP networks into the smallest set possible that covers the exact same ranges. You’d think that’d already exist but I couldn’t find one that didn’t invent its own IP address classes, or have O(n^3) runtime, or give the wrong results by missing lots of mergeable networks, or look like a Java programmer’s first Python project.

I’ll pack it up and put it on PyPI tomorrow if I have time.

“This political divisiveness must stop! We have to restore civility, which is difficult for those subhumans in California who want to turn your kid into a gay atheist satanist.”

I highly recommend watching Fox News tonight, if you can bear it, to understand what’s being planned. Key takeaways so far:

- Charlie Kirk died from political assassination, although we don’t have a suspect and can’t know for sure.
- All political violence in the US is from leftists.
- It’s caused entirely by the left saying bad things about Real Americans.
- It can’t be allowed to let them keep demonizing the right and thus endangering their lives.

#ReichstagFire

On this visit home, I’m learning things I never wanted to know, like how hospice works.

@lordbowlich True. With waist straps, the shoulder straps are basically there to balance it and keep it from falling off of you.

Although I suspect most people who have a bag with real waist straps aren’t the ones sagging them in the first place. I hope.

@feonixrift @lordbowlich It’s going to be custom for everyone, but in general, if you have “real” waist straps, you wanna use them to offload all the wait onto your hips and use the shoulder straps for stability, not load bearing. Making that happen is a big part of a proper fitting.

My tip for getting that adjustment is to go to REI, find the old scrawny person in the camping section, tell them you’re going on an overnight hike, and stand back. You’ll get a comfy setup out of that process.

I see too many people wearing heavy backpacks with the straps loose so that they’re hanging low on their backs.

Don’t do this. This is how you mess up your back.

You want to carry weight high up on your back. It puts much less strain on all of you. Tighten the straps as much as possible so that the bulk of the weight is under your shoulder blades. You’ll be amazed how much easier it is to carry the same weight.

Today I learned that our $6000-per-month UnitedHealthcare “platinum” insurance doesn’t fully cover generic thyroid medication, so our monthly cost for them rose from $1 per month under Aetna to $59 per month under UHC.

This is what the Republicans’ “death panels” look like.

UnitedHealthcare sued by shareholders over reaction to CEO’s killing

> The group, which seeks unspecified damages, argues that the public backlash prevented the company from pursuing "the aggressive, anti-consumer tactics that it would need to achieve" its earnings goals.

The investors actually said that. They demand UHC be more “aggressive, anti-consumer” to make more money for them, presumably by killing more Americans.

It’s time to start building the guillotines.

https://honeypot.net/2025/08/20/unitedhealthcare-sued-by-shareholders-over.html

@mark That’s good and reasonable nuance, but I’m not willing to let the class off that easily. The lawyers are doing what lawyers do; I get it. But it’s the class pushing for this.

Millions of Americans live in fear of destitution if they get sick. This class paid a lawyer to say it should be more people with more fear. And for that, I think some of that fear should be shifted back toward the class paying someone to advocate that position.

@mariusor @rysiek I’d contend that Tea are the ones who released the information. The attacker just pointed a sign at the already open door. It seems likely that others were already walking through it.

It’s been a busy week at work. Our coffee maker broke and had to be sent for repairs. Engineering speed suffers when devs are low on caffeine.

I ordered a cheap coffee pot from an online store and had it next-day delivered to the office, then unboxed it and brewed a pot. This was very well received.