See also, "Move deliberately and fix things."
Remote
Jeffrey Haas
@jhaas@a2mi.social
mastodon 4.7.3BGP, BFD, beer.
Trying to not break the Internet for a living since 2000.
109 Followers
301 Following
45 Posts
Joined January 21, 2023
Signal:
malleus_errata.14
Pronouns:
He/Him/His
In the beginning, all was Chaos.
Order decided that it would create Time, so everything didn't happen all at once.
Chaos, not to be outdone, created calendaring and telecommunications so that there would be scheduling conflicts that all might happen at once anyway.
Replying to
@mathowie @mastodonmigration @mekkaokereke The direction this eventually goes is getting them declared a type of organization that permits them to be de-banked. They'll be cut off from their finances prior to that happening.
I've been spending a bit more time dealing with my self-hosted email server and its spam load. The attached article was a fun reminder that so much of our ecosystem of being abused by randos on the net is caused by email addresses that are not only long-lived, but also easy to scrape.
Replying to
@karlauerbach @airshipper Passkeys, like forms of 2FA, force you into this "where is the device that can let me in" pattern.
The fact that Apple cross syncs the thing is both a feature, and also a security vulnerability. Why do I want to hand my keys out to everything else, much less through a party I shouldn't be trusting?
Making good security easier for older people would be lovely.
Replying to
@zaphodb @KevinFlynn @anton RFC 1925, Secs 3&8. In many respects, the important thing here covers an unstated point of the original post:
You Have To Care.
The flip side of it is to preserve your sanity is you can't care about it too much.
Replying to
@ChrisMayLA6 As a protocols geek, I spent some of my early time with Mastodon reading the protocols. I found the general resemblance to email disheartening. Not because email "doesn't work", but because its very openness lead to the toxic landfill called spam. Email, for many, is effectively dead.
So, while I am deeply enjoying Mastodon, my fear is we get the next round of the Eternal September and it's all over.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Replying to
@caroline@chaosfem.tw Time for an introduction to a retro game?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katamari_Damacy
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@susankayequinn@wandering.shop The framing in the article of "Protecting yourself from the consequences of X doesn't mean you're doing X yourself" was quite helpful.
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@tlayoyo And one more to the mix.
I remember getting grief and my grade being reduced by a teaching assistant at university when I used a slashed zero as I'd done for some time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_sign
Replying to
@b0rk@social.jvns.ca Pattern recognition is what the tools are (theoretically) good for. Augmented search should be great. Maybe they'll even figure out when the sites are all same site in a dozen SEO trenchcoats.
But that's not the problem. The forced intermediation is the issue.
When I was first exposed to open source software many years ago, I didn't think it was going to work out. Clearly I was wrong. Back then, I didn't have quite the framing for why I thought that - because the thinking wasn't solely economic.
These days, after a lot of time with volunteer organizations, it's because volunteer ecosystems without social compensation for their participants collapse in flames.
Dealing with assholes requires a big pay check.
Replying to
@jonah@mastodon.neat.computer A term you may find helpful is "pervasive illegality".
The goal is no matter what you're doing, you're guaranteed to be in violation of something.
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@jdp23@neuromatch.social @baldur@toot.cafe In the context of the article, AI makes sense as yet another force that tries to insert itself into controlling the system it is supposed to help.
Replying to
@Hex@kolektiva.social Time to get out the filk tapes and play some old tunes:
(Lyrics: https://genius.com/Leslie-fish-hello-remember-us-lyrics)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O68DedIacWM
Replying to
@SteveBellovin@infosec.exchange Amusing overlap since many cheap safes can be compromised using a strong magnet.
Replying to
@shriramk@mastodon.social nothing so formal. It’s often announced on the relevant wg mail lists if not during the wg session.
And very irregular. Even without office hours most chairs end up in side meetings throughout conference week from people wanting time.
I regularly end up in such talks just by hanging out in a lounge. If I really want to get work done I have to return to my hotel room.
Replying to
@shriramk@mastodon.social Inconsistently, but I and and a number of other chairs at IETF will do some sort of office hours during the conference week. (Even if the "hours" are "I'll be hanging out in the lounge...")
Replying to
@0xabad1dea At one's more charitable, the best you can do is work from, "They have broken programming". Especially when that programming involves "being told you have bad programming is an attack that you must immediately disbelieve".
Learning, "Why do I think that?", is one of the ways out of such things. That's hard for most people.
Replying to
@axbom I have no modern recommendations, but would recommend against thermal print if you're looking for long-lived labels. They tended to blacken over time, especially if exposed to sunlight. (It's been 20 years, so perhaps they're better now...)
Similarly from back in the day, the Brother P-touch was what was used among people I knew. It seems to still be made.
Somewhat restated, "We are the Borg. Lower your firewalls and surrender your files. We will add your code and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your APIs will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile."
We are in the Borg colonial era, very much in the European colonization sense. It doesn't matter who owned the services or who generated the content. It's now theirs to be repackaged and resold.
An excellent article that covers our current state of siege.
Replying to
@ridetheory My own Dilbert cartoon posting history was my first job out of U in 1993. The shop was founded by ex-IBM VPs, which says most of what one needs to know.
Those earlier comics were apropos and biting. And also very much demonstrating exactly the toxicity you're talking about.
I stopped reading it long before he went outright whacko. But not before getting introduced to the fact that the Elbonians were both satire at outsourcing... and the start of his racist crap.
As I note in-thread, my fear is Mastodon is eventually poisoned by the next round of the "Eternal September".
Replying to
@Lightfighter The original twitter thread was epic. A few bits of Ward Normal's stuff survive and are worth finding.
https://mediachomp.com/economic-graphs-and-the-year-regan-was-inaugurated/
Replying to
@simonomi I haven’t done web dev in ages but sites and apps exist.
No endorsement but here is an example.
https://www.coblind.com/color-blind-website-checker
Replying to
@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io I work in tech with a lot of Indian folk.
The women that talk (and talk over) people the way the men do get a lot of crap. And, sadly, that's what it's taken many of them to get ahead in their careers.
People on TRT often are no more "aggressive" than other men, but sometimes it's not as "regulated". It seems to come out more unexpectedly.
But, as women regularly experience, it's always there and often too much.
Replying to
@mitchellh@hachyderm.io I have zero gripes about your design intentions and think that a lot of how mechanisms like this are used will grow organically.
My opinion has been that AI introduces two massive issues of Trust: Identity (who is this _really_) and Authenticity. Part of being authentic is knowing why you can trust something.
Mostly, I'm pleased that people are actively exploring the solution spaces for these problems.
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@mitchellh@hachyderm.io I was waiting for some form of this to pop up. You're first on my radar.
Things like this will eventually need to be something other than boolean. The clumsy n00b that is instantly denounced has no way to crawl out of that hole.
"Karma" systems where one earns good credit for work also push these things to something other than boolean.
This will always be able to be gamed, but it's at least a helpful speedbump. Thanks for the work.
Replying to
@bert_hubert@eupolicy.social Very long, but quite a good read.
Email not only has to deal with the large provider filtering problem, but also dealing with the "secret email police". Even as someone reasonably versed in running a server over the years (but no longer commercially practicing), it's rather too hard to avoid getting thrown onto on of the various public or hidden black list features.
Your service provider has too many spammy customers? Too bad about your netblock.
Replying to
@simontatham A bit of white-hair wisdom I share with jr. developers comes from queueing theory:
If your rate of accomplishing work is less than or equal to the rate of incoming work to do, you effectively have infinite work. The only thing you can do is prioritize, and drop some of it.
The advice is for engineering systems, but it's applicable to every single other thing they have to deal with... including management.
Replying to
@evacide@hachyderm.io Having interacted with you at one, tech conferences are convenient places to interact while making it at least a tiny bit weird. Outlets are important. 🙂
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@bert_hubert I'm not plugged into quite the right ecosystems to see what's being done, but this problem strongly resembles some of what is addressed by DNSBLs for email spam.
Unfortunately it also has exactly the same problems such list keepers cause on mail server operators. We really don't want another equivalent of the secret email police for webservers.
Replying to
@DJDarren It's why I framed this as density problem rather than a country specific one. What would a countryman that lived rurally say about their experience picking up the same items you were discussing in the OP? I suspect more akin to my personal experience of the difficulty of getting things before and after I moved to the more populated area.
The US is certainly its own set of problems, size being one. Michigan is larger than Great Britain.
Replying to
@simonomi Very nice. I can see similar use cases for PDU parsing.
A caveat I'll throw out is these sort of things need a bit of palette diversity to cover color blindness. I've worked with a statistically unusual number of such folk over the years in software development.
@jtk These days it'd be simpler to say "the more complexity you put in the middle, the more fragile end to end systems become".
RE: @teezeh@ieji.de
Life will be very interesting for people writing or using software:
- If you're lucky, the software is maintained and supported and you can quickly deploy a fix.
- Supply chain attacks mean taking fixes quickly provides higher chance of exposure to such attacks.
- Release procedures for software will go completely to hell due to the pace of things.
RE: @fediversereport@mastodon.social
A lovely piece discussing how plumbing (infrastructure) often starts as a neutral tool to fill various needs, and then falls to "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish or Conquer".
The framing of it as an issue of governance is rather near to my heart given my day job.
Replying to
@DJDarren That might be lovely in a dense city.
I live in the metro-Detroit region. Picking up a random item that *might* be in stock somewhere usually involves at least an hour in a car, and traveling between various stores for the opportunity to see if they have something that might work.
Or I could put in an order at Amazon and have what I actually want in two days.
When I lived in the much more rural area mid-state, it was 1.5 hrs to the nearest bigger store for much of anything.
Replying to
@BjornW@mastodon.social Eventually what will come to matter is the pedigree of the information. This has interesting headaches about determining that information's authenticity, which for geeks will resemble stuff covered by cryptography.
Good information, with good pedigree, that is authentic, can do wonderful things when widely distributed and is easily found.
The fact that a consumer of such things are AI demons is merely unfortunate.
Replying to
@simontatham And you've touched the usual followup: Classification and prioritization is not free and is overhead to be managed.
For email, it's why I resent being pushed to use Outlook by my employer. It is a clumsy tool and I waste far too much precious energy and time using it.
Replying to
@michcampbell@fediscience.org Strike the gender references.
Make it about tech.
It becomes nerdsplaining.
To the point of the original post, the chart is spot on.