sylver_dragon

Seems people have to relearn this lesson every few years:
If you don’t want something to be public, don’t put it on the internet. “Privacy” controls from these companies fail regularly, sometimes by design. If you put something on the internet, it will be public eventually.

Yup. Being young and stupid, a group of us were lighting those rose fireworks (the kind which spin and light up on the ground), putting them in a water balloon launcher and flinging them into the sky. While we were aiming for a river, this also meant we were aiming for some brush. Unsurprisingly, we eventually had one land short while still burning and started a bush on fire. We ran down and started trying to put it out with dirt. This wasn’t going well until we remembered we had a small container and a ready source of water (the river) and managed to douse the fire.

While I did enjoy Tom Bombadil in the books, I’m not surprised he never made it into any adaptation. It’s this odd coda in the story which isn’t all that important to the overall plot. Sure, it helps to build the world out and show that there are strange things outside the power of the One Ring. But, he’s a Chekhov’s gun problem. Tolkien sets him up as this amazingly powerful entity, who could probably solve all the problems Middle Earth is facing and who promptly fucks right off for the rest of the story. And his tendency to fuck off is mentioned later to explain why he isn’t fixing anything. In the end, he serves no purpose for the story which cannot be easily dealt with otherwise. It just seems like Tolkien really wanted to include him somehow, stuffed him in and didn’t have a competent editor to say, “look Ronald, I know you love this character, but this bit really needs to be pulled.”

I’m literally reading this in an airport terminal. And people like me can keep waiting in security lines until the Gestapo gets muzzled. That’s far more important than travelers being inconvenienced. The DHS was yet another bad idea made in the wake of 9/11. It’s already been a generation that rotten crap has been allowed to fester. Now is the time to clean that mess up.

When you have a potentially volatile situation, lobbing bombs at it rarely makes it better. This wasn’t a “time bomb to explod[ing]”. This was a deliberate decision by Cheeto Mussolini to launch a foreign military adventure. While the current regime in Iran was far from ideal, it’s important to keep in mind why that regime was in place. The UK and US were directly involved in overthrowing the elected government in Iran in Operation Ajax. That resulted in a violent, repressive dictatorship. But it was friendly to UK/US oil interests, so that made it ok. When the Iranian people overthrew that government, the current Iranian government came to power.

That the current administration expects a different outcome this time around is the height of stupidity. All this will accomplish is creating another generation of Iranians who hate the US due to direct experience.

That’s funny, while I still buy Samsung TVs, I hate their phones. So much of what their phones can do is usually locked to only working in Samsung’s apps and those are universally dog shit. The phones themselves are also often privacy and user control nightmares.

Granted, there isn’t a lot of good choices for phones these days. I’m still running an old LG phone and have been looking outside Android as my next possible solution. But, I also haven’t had a reason to upgrade.

Given the roughly similarly sized drop in Win11 users. I chose to believe that the Win10 jump is from people nopeing out of the Win11 slop.

Not every news article is going to be about some ground breaking research. That researchers are putting these sorts of fad diets to the test is important and knowing the outcome of that is useful. Journalism is about informing people, not entertaining them. If you can’t handle being informed without the sensationalism, you may need to seek professional help.

It seems like any effort to protect children is hated.
They say this won’t protect children, but they offer no alternative solutions that would.

The second statement is why the first one exists. None of this is about protecting children, it’s all about data gathering and monitoring people. They don’t give a fuck about children. But the idea that they can have a government enforced reason to collect personal data, be able to reliably tie that to accounts and then use that data to sell targeted marketing, that’s something they will bend over backwards for.

Team speak? What year is it?
I remember hosting a teamspeak server for folks I played Wolfenstein: ET with. In the early 2000’s.

While I don’t know the specific post you are referring to, Malware exists for Linux. Here’s a great overview from last year. If someone wants to argue, “oh it’s from a security company trying to sell a product” then let me point you at the Malware Bazaar and specifically the malware tagged elf. Those are real samples of real malware in the Linux specific ELF executable binary format (warning: yes it’s real malware, don’t run anything from this site). On the upshot, most seem to be Linux variants of the Mirai botnet. Not something you want running, but not quite as bad as ransomware. But, dig a bit and there are other threats. Linux malware exists, it has for a long time and it’s getting more prevalent as more stuff (especially servers) run on Linux.

While Linux is far more secure than Windows by design, it’s not malware proof. It is harder for malware to move from user space into root (usually), but that’s often not needed for the activities malware gets up to today. Ransomware, crypto miners and info stealers will all happily execute in user-land. And for most people, this is where their important stuff lives. Linux’s days of living in “security through obscurity” are over. Attackers are looking at Linux now and starting to go after it.

All that said, is it worth having a bloated A/V engine doing full on-access scanning? That depends on how you view the risk. Many of the drive-by type attacks (e.g. ClickFix, fake tech-support scams) all heavily target Windows and would fail on a Linux system. The malware and backdoors that come bundled with pirated software are likely to fail on a Linux system, though I’ll admit to not having tested that sort of thing with Wine/Proton installed. For those use cases, I’d suggest not downloading pirated software. Or, if you absolutely are going to, run those file through ClamAV at minimum.

Personally, I don’t feel the need to run anything as heavy as on-access file scanning or anything to keep trawling memory for signatures on my home systems. Keeping software up to date and limiting what I download, install and run is enough to manage my risk. I do have ClamAV installed to let me do a quick, manual scan of anything I do download. But, I wouldn’t go so far as to buy A/V product. Most of the engines out there for Linux are crap anyway.

Professionally, I am one of the voices who pushed for A/V (really EDR) on the Linux systems in my work environment. My organization has a notable Linux footprint and we’ve seen attackers move to Linux based systems specifically because they are less likely to be well monitored. In a work environment, we have less control over how the systems get (ab)used and have a higher need for telemetry and investigation.

Let’s ignore the pedantic issues of “there is no surface”, “there is no sun to rise” or “you’d be dead so insanely fast you probably wouldn’t notice”. Assuming you were magically teleported and held protected just above the event horizon of a black hole, it would be so bright you’d go blind almost instantly. Not because of any star coming over the horizon, but because the accretion disk would just be that bright. If you look at NASA’s pictures of M87, you aren’t actually seeing the black hole. There’s nothing there to see. Instead, what you are seeing in the pictures is the accretion disk around the black hole. As matter gets closer to the event horizon, it accelerates and all that stuff starts bumping into each other. At the energies involved, this produces electromagnetic radiation of basically every energy. There is infrared right up through x-ray, included lots and lots of visible light. And this is happening on a scale which is so mind mindbogglingly big that words really just fail to capture it. Here is an artistic representation with our solar system for scale. Pluto’s orbit would be well inside the event horizon. There is an insane amount of light and energy in that accretion disk. And thanks to the blackhole warping light around itself, you would be getting bombarded by its energy from every angle, including the disk on the opposite side of the black hole. In short, it would be really bright.

Yup, I have an Enterprise seat for Copilot through work. It can be useful to slop up emails for management, but anything requiring care, accuracy or attention to detail seems outside it’s wheelhouse. As a those descriptors apply to much of my work, that Copilot license basically collects digital dust. But management is absolutely over the moon with AI, so I don’t feel bad giving them AI slop.

Principal photography on Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of The Magician’s Nephew

Color me truly surprised. From the headline, I expected yet another The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe remake. I always assumed that The Magician’s Nephew would never be turned into a film. It’s just such a big break from the previous books.

Eating their own dog food slop.

It tends to be much more focused on bringing products to market, but of course they do. The transistor, the base unit of all of the microchips which make this conversation possible, came out of Bell Labs. And, as much as we might hate them for it, you have companies like Monsanto doing a lot of work on chemical engineering and genetics. Much of the work on AI (for good or slop) is being done in private sector labs now. Aeronautics research happens heavily in companies like Boeing and Airbus, though they are often working hand in hand with government labs (e.g. NASA, JPL, EASA).

Where Universities and Government really shine are areas like basic research and research which doesn’t have obvious commercial applications. Which is why support for those organizations is so critical. Those areas of research often have long term effects and can result in entirely new areas of knowledge, research and products.

It’s easy to think of large corporations as soulless organizations hell bent of accumulating wealth at the cost of anything else, because they are. But they are also surprisingly good at focusing wealth and effort to find new ways to do things cheaper, faster and more efficiently. Specifically because those things make money. Veritasium had a video on a good example of this recently.

This is it exactly. I made a hard cut with Reddit, but I’ll admit to missing the sysadmin subreddit. The place was full of very smart, helpful people and also cranky. The PowerShell subreddit was another great resource. I haven’t been willing to go back, but those sorts of communities only exist when you hit a certain mass of people on a platform.

I’m in, though I’m curious what “turns you into a reptile” means. Does it just mean I become cold blooded. I’m fine with that, it just means I’m moving somewhere tropical. Do I grow scales and a tail? Certainly not ideal, but I could probably live with it, especially if the tail is prehensile and if I get claws in the mix. Do I get a really long, controllable tongue? Can’t think of any uses for that. Nope, none at all…

Attraction, sex and reproduction would be interesting questions as well. Do I still find human women attractive, or is my brain rewired to want a lusty argonian maid? What does my new plumbing look like? Are there others of my new species around for me to do the monster mash with?

But overall, yes I’d probably go for it. I don’t delude myself into thinking that I will somehow continue to exist after death; so, not dying seems like the better alternative. Sure, if the downsides are really bad, I can accept that death is a better outcome (e.g. you live forever, but have locked-in syndrome forever). But, living as a lizard person doesn’t seem too horrible.

Yes, and you can probably get better performance with different block sizes. This is just what I used to fix drives as it was fast enough and I couldn’t be arsed to do any real testing to find the right speed. Also, my stash of drives was no where near homogeneous, so the right size for one type of drive may not have worked for a different type of drive. I also used the 4MB block size when imaging drives to have an ok-ish speed while not losing too much data if there were read errors.

For a physical machine:
for f in $(lsblk | grep disk | cut -d ' ' -f 1); do sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/$f bs=4MB status=progress; done

That will remove all your current software problems. You’ll have new ones, but the old ones will be gone.