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

Inspired by @deviantollam, I'm repacking the Tools For Most Problems Bag in preparation for a trip to the relatives, because I'm the person expected to fix the things. I don't have a go bag, but I have this.

(Did you know most product lines in the world use identical keys? True story: I accidentally stole someone’s car once because it was the same blue 1994 Honda Accord as my parents and they parked next to me. The key worked, and I just got into it and left without noticing. I’m not sure how many people have ever been startled to discover that they’ve accidentally stolen a car when they’re already halfway home, but one squealing u-turn and five minutes of hauling ass later, I got away with it.)

I’m not @deviantollam and don’t (usually…) aspire to his level of impromptu red team chicanery, but I deal with a lot of elderly people in as-elderly-or-more houses, and “I lost the key, we don’t have the key, etc etc” is a recurring-enough theme in my life that I have a set of generic, common-as-dirt keys on there, CH751 and friends. You have one of these keys in your life. You probably have most of them in your life.

If I understand this correctly the reason RAM has quadrupled in price is that a huge quantity of RAM that hasn't been produced yet has been bought to populate GPUs that also haven't been produced yet to go in datacenters that haven't been built yet that will be powered by infrastructure that might never exist to meet a demand that doesn't exist at all to make profit margins that mathematically can't exist and economists talk about this thing they call the "rational markets hypothesis".

Any #mathstodon people following me who'd be willing to entertain a possibly dumb question? It's about prime numbers and the Collatz Conjecture, which I fully understand are a one-two punch of math crankery, but I'd like to put it to somebody who can tell me "this leads nowhere but crankdom for sure" so I can put it behind me.

YEARS

YOU SPENT YEARS BRAGGING THAT YOU HIRED THE BEST ENGINEERS IN THE WORLD

ONLY THE VERY BEST

BUILDINGS FULL OF 10X ENGINEERS

AND YOU GAVE THESE BRILLIANT GENIUS OUTLIER CODE MONSTERS TOOLS YOU SAID WILL MAKE THEM EVEN 10X MORE PRODUCTIVE

IT WILL 10X YOUR 10X

AND FIRED THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE SO YOU COULD AFFORD THEM

AND THEY TRIED THOSE TOOLS AND DON'T WANT THEM

AND DON'T USE THEM

WHAT DOES THAT TELL YOU

MOTHERFUCKER WHAT DOES IT TELL YOU

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/12/microsoft-slashes-ai-sales-growth-targets-as-customers-resist-unproven-agents/

I'm sure the situation has improved - I don't think winsock.dll or Wolverine have ever had a proper pentest teardown, even for historical amusement's sake - but I have to assume, given that we live in a world where there are no specialized chips anymore, and everything from the boutique brand-namiest NICs to the dodgiest junk you'd find in a Shenzhenese dumpster is a general-purpose CPU running some tiny OS of questinably determinate provenance, that... well, you have to wonder.

Because the Ping Of Death was an RCE. If you sent _just the right_ kind of malformed or too large packet - and you cleaned up after yourself - you suddenly had a system where you could basically ask any computer you could see to do whatever you wanted, and it would do that for you and then quietly go on its way.

I was temping for Global Affairs Canada in the late 90s, then called DFAIT; I got to hang with some old-school-then, semi-retired CSIS sigint guys.

They thought the internet was great.

This both real and a decent metaphor, so it is time for me to re-tell a story.

Ever heard of The Ping Of Death?

There was a couple of years there - years, hand to god - where you could throw a single malformed or too-large packet across the network at any IP you could see, and if you malformed it just right for its OS, you could crash the machine. You could kill a Windows machine with one line in cmd.exe.

It was bad, but almost nobody knows how bad.

https://mastodon.social/@Natasha_Jay@tech.lgbt/115719291112552201

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.