Notices by Gus (projectgus@aus.social)

Suddenly reminded of an e-waste story: about 13 years ago I spotted a high end gaming PC at the tip. Less than two years old, pretty expensive component choices for the era.

Took home, powered up. The CPU fan immediately ran 100%, and it froze mid-boot. OK, we know why it was treated as e-waste...

Opened the case: Packed with thick dense lint and dust, especially in the CPU cooler fins. I can't imagine where it lived to ingest this much dust in only a couple of years, it looked like a clothes dryer filter in there.

Carefully vacuumed it out, and it immediately worked. Literally nothing else wrong with it.

#repair

@abrasive 100%, it's honestly scary. And a real indictment of many people's relationship with thinking.

I'm surprised pro-AI people don't address this more, because I don't think LLMs are totally useless[*] but the consequences of using them excessively and uncritically don't help convince people of that, either. I guess excessive use does help line go up.

[*] I do think their benefits aren't worth the significant societal and energy demand costs, but yeah...

Re: last boost https://chaos.social/@dpk/115589097803252590

That OCaml PR is textbook open source in the era of vibe coding...

It's got everything:

- PR submitted without the author acknowledging they didn't write it and don't understand it.
- Copyright laundering.
- "I just wanted to get it done!" versus maintainers who know they have to live with code contributions for years.
- Zero-effort pasting LLM output as reply to real people's thoughtful questions. (At least the author acknowledged what they were doing that time.)
- It doesn't matter that it's hard to review because "AI has a very deep understanding of how this code works."
- "Beats me. AI decided to do so and I didn't question it."

If this is our new world then it's going to turbocharge maintainer burnout. :dumpster_fire:

(If you don't want to read a quite long often depressing thread, would still recommend reading this well reasoned comment by one of the maintainers:
https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369#issuecomment-3556593972 )

@regehr @whitequark if anyone is left to write history about this period then it's going to be simultaneously grim and so very stupid

"Hosting a WebSite on a Disposable Vape"

https://bogdanthegeek.github.io/blog/projects/vapeserver/

Truly, we live in an age of absurdly wasteful wonders.

(Although the vapes aren't running Android. Yet.)

They're so close to a breakthrough...

If anything, it's an argument for diversity - there should be a dozen projects like Anubis that all do slightly different things.

The Taviso blog post about Anubis[*] seems to miss a key point, which is that so far Anubis still works pretty well for un-DDoSing small servers!

Maybe Anubis will eventually become ubiquitous, and/or be bypassed by enough savvy operators to become useless. Then maybe it'll no longer be a good approach, but AFAIK that hasn't happened yet.

(That never really happened to hashcash either, which is why "never widely deployed" seems like an odd criticism - "oh no, this thing that's effective may never become worth attacking and therefore useless!")

[*] https://archive.md/BSh1l

2015 Internet: Worried that websites might quietly run JavaScript proof-of-work code to feed the cryptocurrency bubble.

2025 Internet: Worried that websites might not quietly run JavaScript proof-of-work code to avoid feeding the AI bubble.

@shafik Can't have their potential revenue stream contaminated, either...
https://www.wired.com/story/stack-overflow-will-charge-ai-giants-for-training-data/

@lanodan gaslightfs

If you drive a car in Australia then you should know what to do if you hit an animal.

In particular, who to call if it's injured or may have young in its pouch. Around here it's Wildlife Victoria (03) 84007300.

You don't necessarily have to wait there, you only need to be able to give a decent description of where it is and maybe leave something as a marker by the roadside. If the animal won't be able to recover then someone, probably local police, will come and euthanise it.

This message brought to you by spending half an hour on the roadside this morning, after coming across a young kangaroo struggling in the middle of the road with a broken back. It's disturbing how many people hit animals and just keep on driving.

Is there anything more American than designing a beefy power-hungry rip-roaring world-cooking technology and then it turns out someone else can do almost the same thing far more efficiently?

"The auto industry is unique in that an 18-year-old employee from Texas can query the billing information of a vehicle in California, and it won’t really set off any alarm bells."

It seems like nothing in the current set of regulatory schemes or business practices will stop automakers from chucking everyone's detailed car telemetry and other PII into one giant database and then improperly securing it...

https://samcurry.net/hacking-subaru

(This time it was Subaru.)

Note there's no Europe in that database, though. I wonder if GDPR made them take it more seriously, or if there's just a second giant Europe database out there somewhere... (The recent VW experience suggests the latter.)

#privacy

Probably a tired take, but Kaos (2024) is the best bit of TV I've seen for a good while. Well produced and written, solid cast and music choices. Good to see a modern big budget rehash of some properly old source material instead of more superhero minutiae!

When it came out two people at my local cafe recommended it unprompted, and they were both right. 😆

It is violent and gruesome in places, but so are the stories they are adapting. I think they handled that part pretty well.

Encouraging the group chats I care about to move from Messenger to Signal. Its gone great so far, don't know why I left it so long.

Next step is clearing my profile and unfriending everyone. I meant to do this years ago.

I don't know if I will totally delete Zuckerberg from my life, but if I can whittle it down so I only use it to message strangers about picking up car parts, or to check local event details that aren't posted anywhere else, then I'll be pretty pleased with that.

Spending the second day of the year catching up on a job I've put off for almost seven years: sorting through a bunch of Apple II computer bits from when my parents downsized...

Will any of it still work? Will this be pleasant nostalgia or a giant chore? Who can say!

Credit to the good people at TADIRAN for making a lithium battery that lasted over 35 years without leaking

That checkerboard cursor did unearth some nostalgia, it turns out

The Australian government is reviewing Australian Design Rules for vehicles, and our local Automotive Aftermarket Association is pushing for us to harmonise with the US.

*“Consumer preferences have shifted dramatically toward U.S.-style 4x4s, utilities, and recreational vehicles, yet our regulations remain stuck in a European-centric framework that doesn’t align with Australia’s needs.”*

Great, lets adopt the regulatory system where pedestrian and bike fatalities have risen notably since 2010. After all, this way AAAA's member companies can spend less on safety testing accessories for impractically sized utes and SUVs...

https://www.aaaa.com.au/industry-advocacy/addressing-adr-challengesa-path-forward-for-australias-automotive-industry/