Obdurodon

Obdurodon, 2 days ago to random

Thinking about the situation with subscriptions/memberships and inheritance. Why can't your Steam or Netflix or Spotify subscriptions, or assets "bought" through those platforms, be inherited? Especially important when true ownership isn't even an option any more. I feel like we're headed for a real mess as more people die with substantial assets locked away in these walled gardens.

Obdurodon, 4 days ago to random

Obdurodon, 8 days ago to random

Another day, another problem caused by OS vendors half-applying updates without permission. I am seriously disgusted with my former colleagues.

Obdurodon, 12 days ago to random

Just had an amusing thought.

The one thing Google still does passably well is operating systems. Despite their flaws, Android and ChromeOS are both pretty handy to have around. Meanwhile, the rest of the company blows goats more every day.

The funny thing is that it's the exact opposite trajectory to Microsoft. They were a decent compiler company, then they were an awful anti-competitive OS company, then they started sucking less until now.

Obdurodon, 15 days ago to random

The movies I'm considering for tonight, in (ascending order) of title laugh factor.

Wolfcop
Bong of the Living Dead
Teenape vs. the Monster Zombie Apocalypse
Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead
Taintlight
Terror at Blood Fart Lake

I think we're committed to Poultrygeist, but I can't keep Blood Fart Lake on hold forever.

Obdurodon, 20 days ago to random

This might be a controversial take, but I kind of miss Slashdot moderation and meta-moderation. For those who don't know...

For moderation, it wasn't just up/down but multiple reasons - funny, insightful, flamebait, etc. Users could set thresholds for specific criteria.

Meta-moderation was random, five posts every once in a while for those who qualify, yes/no on whether that moderation was justified.

I think the whole thing (which took a few iterations to develop) worked pretty well.

StillIRise1963, 23 days ago to random

When your gay friends are stripped of their marriages, tell them you didn’t vote because you wanted to make a statement about Gaza.

Obdurodon, 1 month ago to random

For today's first #pickleball session we have 13 people and three of them are named Jeff. Having flashbacks to high school geometry class, when 5/25 were named Jeff and I was the only one who had a clue. Got called on a lot because the teacher was a bit lazy.

Obdurodon, 1 month ago to random

People misusing "casual" when they meant "causal" (or less often the opposite) never cease to amuse me. Casual consistency. Causal dress. 🤪

Obdurodon, 1 month ago to random

Has anyone ever set up a special wifi network for their "smart" devices? Seems like it might be a good way to limit traffic to the absolute minimum necessary for those devices to work, and block all of the other privacy-violating shit. Or do the people who make these things commingle the two so that doesn't really work?

Obdurodon, 1 month ago to random

me: I know that if I scratch at this scrape that's healing on my knee, I can turn a slight itching sensation into sudden stabbing pain and some blood.

also me: scritch scritch

weirdwriter, 1 month ago to webdev

Had to install extensions that prevented disabling paste in edit fields online. I wish browsers would make this possible natively because I never, ever, want paste disabled on any edit field, ever. Here's an extension for FF https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/don-t-fuck-with-paste/ #WebDev #Web #WebDesign

Obdurodon, 1 month ago to random

It looks like Fred IX (the latest in a succession of house spiders) has set up a web right next to my bathroom mirror. Strange choice, Fred, but I hope it works out for you.

Obdurodon, 1 month ago to random

Oh, the irony.

Obdurodon, 1 month ago to random

OK, folks. We all know (I hope) that it's rude to play music or watch videos without using headphones in a public place. What's your policy in your own house? My wife refuses to use headphones, and carries NPR or Some Fucking Podcast into whichever room she's using - which forces me to go elsewhere so I can think. Would I be the asshole for insisting that she not do that?

recursive, 1 month ago to random

"Fun fact", the only flag "cat" is required to implement according to IEEE Std 1003.1-2017 is -u, which is to operate character-by-character instead of in line mode.

Ironically I have never manually invoked cat with this flag.

WagesOf, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to random

Each state and the federal gov should have their own activitypub instance.

Biden joining threads is not potus joining mastodon. It's potus supporting a corporate spike jamming open the door for embrace extend extinguish.

It's going to be next to impossible for a mastodon community of any size to not expose their users to the flood of shit from threads just to support this one press release bot.

It should be @potus threads should be federating with that, not Biden forcing us to threads🤦

Obdurodon, 1 month ago to random

One of Google's uglier habits is that, when you search for a restaurant, they give you the "option" to order through their partners instead of the restaurant's, and it's not even clear that you'll be reducing the restaurant's profits by taking that option.

simplenomad, 1 month ago to infosec

This xz backdoor thing reminds me of a story I heard from friends that worked at a tech company that made cell phones. They had a great coder that worked on the project, he had put in work as a contractor for a few months, and due to the quality of his work he was hired in full time. After two months he simply stopped showing up to the office.

An investigation turned up the following interesting items. His account had accessed all files including source code to all cellular projects - in that he had apparently downloaded a copy of everything. He had committed a large amount of contributions to the project he was assigned to. None of his paychecks were ever cashed. A wellness check to the house he had rented was performed and the house was completely empty. Per the landlord he'd paid for 6 months rent in advance in cash. Apparently he never physically moved in. No record for him nor his social security number seemed to check out. The guy was a ghost.

I was asked about recommendations on future prevention by friends who worked there - no idea how far they got in their investigation, if backdoors were ever found or even existed, or if the Feds were ever involved. The punch line? This was probably a couple of decades ago.

This shit is real, and it has been going on for a long time.

#infosec

Obdurodon, 2 months ago to random

It's pretty clear that the people who write the autocomplete software for phones never use "etc." because if they did they'd know it shouldn't capitalize the next word.