Notices by mhoye (mhoye@mastodon.social), page 4

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.

@dalias Even just a paragraph or two saying, "it is too easy to automatically generate code now, so any discussion about changes has to start with a conversation intended to create a shared understanding of what the issue is and how we should best approach it, and that conversation - "what should we build, and how will we know we've succeeded" - will inform the review process."

@dalias One the things that codes of conduct, even the "maintenance terms" thing I wrote up, virtually never cover is a project's internal cultural norms and expectations.

Contributing.md is always "this is how you stand up your developer environment and file a patch", but very rarely "this how we work here, you're welcome to contribute, but this is our process and trying to speedrun or bully your way past it will not be tolerated and your code will not be accepted."

Enlightened self interest but it's just me arguing that marginal tax rates should be so high that I personally never have conversations this dumb hit me in the eyes again.

@prettygood I set up a thing where I just run dmesg perpetually on tty11, so I can always watch stuff like that happen.

@prettygood Anxiety and triple checking every single time.

Businesses create their customers, and the perfect customer for any ad-revenue-driven company is somebody impulsive, angry, frightened and just tired enough that they keep clicking the things making them impulsive, angry, frightened and tired.

Ad blockers and filters aren't just basic information security hygiene, they're also practical psychological self-defense.

https://www.salon.com/2025/11/17/dont-blame-women-for-mens-loneliness-blame-capitalism/

And I mean, he’s not wrong. It’s amazing that some dev environments will dump pages and pages of baffling error messages on you when you type f(); {…} instead of f(){…} - a “halt on first error if it’s a common novice error” checkbox would be a major quality of life improvement, imo.

"Oh, the many indignities of programming." - My son after putting a semicolon in the wrong place.

How many of you have ever held a phone that looked like this? When did any video calling system _ever_ look like this?

But now that everything is just one undifferentiated glowing rectangle what else are you going to do?

People say "do you feel old" here, but damn y'all where's our new iconography gonna come from if everything is a goddamn glass rectangle?

https://23.social/@leyrer/115559137012685196

Sometimes I like to remember that in 2013 Larry Page said that over 300 million people were using Google+ [300 million people were _clearly_not_ using Google+] and when that whole clownshow was over we all learned that 'using' meant 'what does that button do?' and the average duration of a Google+ session was exactly as long as it took people to see what that button did and then find the back button.