Em Adespoton

It’s not just bug reports; in the last month, AI driven development has actually gone from slop to reliably better than the average human.

That’s not saying it’s writing better code, just that managing the development process and catching regular bugs is now better than when run by a junior analyst.

Makes sense that a properly balanced model with randomization turned down should be able to recognize when something is being done outside the acceptable parameters.

That was the trash can; they brought back a modified cheese grater with the M1 chip.

I miss the XServe.

Is this the second or third time the Mac Pro has officially died?

I wonder if this means the rest of the world gets cheap routers for a while, or whether prices go up because the demand isn’t there to make them available at volume anymore.

And I move more to using OpenStreets, Organic Maps and Sidekick Pro.

Shame that Apple’s going the same way as Google.

I thought the ADL had done a pretty good job of discrediting itself?

Might not be up to the distros?

Most distros already have a non-systemd variant out there.

And systemd is also open source; if age verification is baked in, people can just modify it to always return a positive result.

Shooting a rocket directly into the sun would waste as much energy as current AI data centers, because it would have to shed all the earth’s momentum.

Better to just use a volcano.

Reminds me of “Security security security.”

Now, with AI.

Great… so now workplaces will have to default-block Firefox to lock down their networks.

You say “after all, the Internet that shaped me no longer exists.”

In a way, that’s true, but the reality is that most of it is still there; it’s just dwarfed by what came after.

I can still log on to mume.org and play on a Middle Earth-based MUD. I can still connect to IRC.

FirstClass BBSes, Hermes BBSes, Hotline servers and trackers, a plethora of self-hosted HTTP1.0 compliant sites, Gopher servers, FTP sites, and more.

The only real victim that I can think of is Usenet; AIM servers are back again, as are ICQ servers, shoutcast servers and battle.net servers.

Dialup is gone, but people have built TCP wrappers so all the old dialup stuff can be used over the Internet. You can even run the operating systems and software packages just the way they were in 1979 (or the year of your choice).

The callenge is finding all that when your phone and computer do all they can to direct you to Instagram, Tiktok and Temu, and system defaults use add on technology that has only existed for a decade max.

Are people really running VPSes open to the Internet???

Surely everyone not using cloud hosting sticks some sort of router/firewall at the edge and runs the VPS inside with port forwarding?

And then uses WireGuard/Tailscale as the only ingress?

I mean, that was all rather trivial for me to set up for my extended family to all have untrusted access to VPS services on my network. Tailscale even supports passkeys, so you run less of a risk of credential leaks and 2FA theft.

I have to admit, I hadn’t realized it had got this bad. How did this get normalized?

I browse with most scripts disabled, and have since JS was first introduced to the browser. What I’ve observed is that some pages contain NO actual content, or just the first paragraph, when I load them. I read what’s provided and move on. If the site is hostile to me reading their content they worked so hard to get in front of me, I’m not going to do any extra work to find out what it is.

Computers used to work this way.

You could even ship the computer with the USB stick pre-installed.

And this wouldn’t be impossible with Apple hardware; it has a bootloader built in that can boot from any functional and signed OS; could be Apple supplied, or something like Asahi. Or, with such a rule in place, they may also be required to not get in the way of installing other OSes and have to fully document the boot process and driver registration process, preventing signature-based lockdown completely.

Motorized scooters and eBikes all have OSes too — as do most modern traffic lights, speed and red light cameras, baby monitors, alarm systems, heart rate monitors, “smart” anything, televisions, household appliances, chair lifts, city water management systems, and pretty much all other actively managed infrastructure.

Your average car has at least three separate operating systems in it — usually a LOT more.

Fibre is just strands of extruded glass; one of the most common substances on earth.

Sure beats the blood minerals needed for memory, and to scale up, you just extrude longer strands.

Nest and Eero/echo are two brands I wouldn’t trust even if jailbroken. They’ve both been shown to contain more hardware than originally announced after some third party tear downs.

Since by design cryptocurrencies aren’t backed by banks/nations and any transaction is permanent, they are by definition not safe.

At best, you can save out your wallet to an encrypted drive, then write it back to your phone when you need to use it. Make copies, so if one gets lost, you don’t lose the value itself.

This is the “let’s get the budget computer crowd using iCloud services” solution.

They can afford to sell at a loss if needed, because the onboard storage is just low enough to make NOT subscribing to cloud services painful after 6-8 months.