Notices by mhoye (mhoye@mastodon.social), page 3

Because you don't have a "network interface card", you have an ARM cpu, maybe even a whole-ass ARM SOC, handling ethernet frames on one side and talking PCI on the other.

You don't even have SD cards, because "memory cards" don't exist. That terabyte of storage the size of your thumbnail you bought? That's an ARM CPU managing the wear levels on its crap-ass flash backing storage while pretending to be a hard drive on the other side.

You don't know how many computers are in your computer.

Disney gives OpenAI a billion dollars, sets new world record for ransom payments.

https://9to5mac.com/2025/12/11/openai-and-disney-reach-landmark-agreement-to-license-characters-on-sora/

Anyway here’s a Mickey Mouse 35mm camera.

Team, a question: who is doing interesting work on software _composability_ these days, and where do I find them?

The last two really interesting ideas I've seen in this space are ysh and ... powershell.

What's good?

@suetanvil If anybody but Microsoft had invented Powershell it would have taken over the world by now, but because it was invented by Microsoft nobody is allowed to learn anything or take any lessons from it.

The companies whose whole job is understanding the Real Cost Of The Finding Out Part do not want to play this game at all.

@whitequark That may be, but I still see license files on everything and mentions of human rights in them rarely if ever.

We are all going to feel silly and embarrassed someday for believing that being able to see the text of a program and rules-lawyering about who could copy and paste what text to where was the most important conversation we could have been having about software, freedom and human rights.

You've heard of 'what if the Ship of Theseus was sentient', but now it's time for 'what if Plato's Cave refused to show you any shadows that might offend the cave's sponsors or damage the cave's brand?

Kohler pitching "end to end encryption" on their weird toilet camera makes it seem like they've invented a system that takes pictures of butts that can only be seen by other butts.

"To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

Where do you see yourself as a politician, in a totalitarian political environment? Have you not been watching the ritual humiliation of the American political apparatus for the last few months? You think the leopards are going to eat your face last when you're the closest meal to hand?

If you're a politician in a democracy, those kids out there in black-bloc hoodies protesting encroaching fascism are also, not incidentally, trying to save your fucking job and your dumb, shortsighted ass.

We know from the Panama Papers (and the Paradise Papers, and the Pandora papers, and and and) that basically all the hard-right political parties and their proxies in North America and Europe are being quietly shadow-funded by Russia and a collection of ideologically-aligned oligarchs, so it would be great if elected politicians acted as though they understood that, and that condemning antifascist protest is sending a clear signal they've been bought by the wrong side.

https://www.euronews.com/2025/11/29/mass-protests-in-the-central-german-town-of-giessen-against-new-afd-youth-group

Imagine a snake pausing in the middle of eating its own tail to award itself three Michelin stars.

https://mastodon.social/@mhoye/115634741673299382

"Controversy at [technology] [conference] as participants found to be using [technology] at [conference]".

How would that sentence even make sense for any conference or technology that was doing anything worthwhile? Even the NFT people didn't sink to that level of straight up epistemological tail-eating nonsense. What the hell are we even doing here?

"Controversy erupts at the plagiarism machine conference when it turned out people were using the plagiarism machine to do plagiarism."

This is genuine comedy.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03506-6

The harder something is to predict, the harder it is to insure.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/insurers-move-to-limit-ai-liability-as-multi-billion-dollar-risks-emerge

RE: https://wandering.shop/@aesthr/115615047169469231

Imagine letting your whole worldview, how you learn about anything, get filtered through a silent corporate-brand-sanitization machine.

Banning books seems adorably quaint by comparison. Your brain would end up as polished and smooth as the inside of a urinal.

https://mastodon.social/@aesthr@wandering.shop/115615047257445939

@SwiftOnSecurity I have only once in my life heard of a CTO who asked to spend six weeks anonymously taking the tier 1 front line helpdesk training and answering the phones before taking the job, arguing that he had to know the product and the customers if he wanted to do the job well. Long retired, but people who worked with him still talk about him like they’d met a saint.

@SwiftOnSecurity ... and today if you go looking at what those foreign adversaries are doing, it's pretty much all unpatched, long-known CVEs, and those vulnerabilities are pretty much all elevated access via unsanitized input.

Just basic, wash-your-hands fundamentals.

https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/joint-statement-from-fbi-and-cisa-on-the-peoples-republic-of-china-targeting-of-commercial-telecommunications-infrastructure

@dalias From experience, an awful lot of the bedrock of healthy community management comes from laying out the terms that give _you_ social permission to _yourself_ to tell people no, we don't do that here and you can fuck right off. Says so right there on the tin.

This is particularly difficult for kind, conscientious people to.