timbray

timbray, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago) to random

When you think, do you have an internal dialogue that includes words?

Boost if you're interested.

timbray, 6 months ago to random

Interesting: Leica ships the first commercial-off-the-shelf camera that comes with C2PA which (in theory, infrastructure not quite here yet) should allow publications to prove provenance and processing steps from camera to Web server for anything they publish, and allow viewers to be confident they’re not looking at a deepfake.

https://petapixel.com/2023/10/26/leica-m11-p-review-as-authenticated-as-they-come/

timbray, 10 months ago to random

I glanced at this and ended up spending 20 minutes reading it and I regret nothing: https://www.wealthsimple.com/en-ca/magazine/cobol-controls-your-money

(Mostly of geek interest: About the continuing survival/blessing/curse of COBOL)

timbray, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago) to random

Dropped by Bluesky for the first time in a while. I'm a Fediperson but still have sympathy with what they're trying to do, and the tone seems to have stabilized for the moment.

Anyhow, I have 30 invites that I haven't thought about in a while, so, giving them away. Reply to this post if you want one. In case that's more than 30 people I will invent totally arbitrary and questionably fair criteria for handing them out.

Maybe stop if there are already a huge number of replies.

timbray, 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago) to random

Wondering about Long Covid (or Post-Covid Syndrome).
Do you know people who are suffering significantly as follows? (This is a multiple-choice poll.)

(pls boost if the subject interests you)

timbray, 1 year ago to random

Report: I’m being sealioned. As in, real actual sea lions are invading the docks at our family's summer cabin. It’s nice that nature is coming back… sometimes. Sea Lions are noisy, smelly, smart, lazy, and defecate disgustingly and in massive quantities.

If my Dad were still living he’d say “Huh, no problem really, just get a rifle, you’ll need a fairly big one.”

timbray, 1 year ago to random

The one Mastodon feature I would like to see, more than the next 3 or 4 put together, would be: Don’t show me stuff I’ve already seen!

Or at least do it less. If something is getting boosted a lot, maybe a maximum of once a day tell me that it got 38 more boosts, including 11 of my follows. Even better, show it just once only.

Thank you.

timbray, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago) to random

Mac Dock:

timbray, 1 month ago to random

I think the #xz incident is teaching us that our infrastructure is dangerously fragile in the face of well-organized/funded attackers. The response isn’t “try harder” or “donate to your OSS project”, it needs to be institutional, professional, and at scale.

So, here’s my proposal, called “OSQI”, aimed at starting a how-to discussion: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2024/04/01/OSQI

timbray, 7 months ago to LGBTQ

I, a straight person, have a question. I'm talking about homophobia in a draft blog piece, and what’s a good choice of word for the people that homophobes dislike and abuse? Has it got to the point where “queer” is respectful and appropriate? Is “LGBTQ” better? “Gender-diverse”? (I think I’m correct to think that “homophobe” has grown to include anti-trans and gender-related bigotries generally?) Who has written a really good essay on the subject? Thanks in advance.

#lgbtq #gender #homophobia

timbray, 1 month ago to random

1/2 Looking at one of the #xz writeup, this struck my eye: “The release tarballs upstream publishes don't have the same code that GitHub has. This is common in C projects so that downstream consumers don't need to remember how to run autotools and autoconf.” Ah, GNU AutoHell, I remember it well. Tl;dr: With AutoHell, even if you're building for a 19-bit Multics variant from 1988, it’s got your back. Except for it’s just too hard to understand and use, thus the above.

#infosec

timbray, 10 months ago to random

My first act as dictator will be an absolute unconditional ban on leaf blowers.

timbray, 1 year ago to random

Hey, I noticed that Mastodon didn’t make nice previews for links to my blog, so I read up on the necessary & fixed it, and then obviously had to write a blog on the blog about fixing the blog. Which (if my tests are valid) should decorate this post a bit. If you don’t see this post, that means it broke and I had to delete the post until I fixed things.

If your links suffer from bad-preview syndrome this might be helpful. Otherwise not really of general interest.

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2023/05/08/Blog-Preview

timbray, 11 months ago to random

Just dropped by Twitter. Yeah, it’s stinky. But AFAIK it’s still the best place to track what’s going on in Ukraine. (Which BTW is pretty weird at the moment.) I follow the #ukraine tag here, any other good Ukraine-related follow recommendations?

timbray, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago) to random

From @gruber - https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/06/19/not-that-kind-of-open

My take:

1. The Fedi folks shouldn’t have taken the NDA’d meeting. Transparency is essential.
2. It is not reasonable to expect ethical behaviour from Meta. It should be assumed that that if they can profit by disemboweling the Fediverse, they will.
3. There is an opportunity to attract some of the ordinary decent humans on Meta because they don’t know anything better exists.

I probably wouldn’t de-federate. But only by about 51/49.

#CoSocialMeta

timbray, 11 months ago to apple

I think I’m one of the (few?) humans who could use the new Apple iFacePlate right now. I’ve got this project where I’m intensely editing a large complex doc, frequently accessing several other large complex docs (& browser) for materials. I have a big outboard screen, but still a painful amount of window shuffling. The ability to simultaneously display and read more BIG windows than any physical screen could manage would make my life way easier.

#VisionPro #apple

timbray, 9 months ago to random

Hi, in connection with recent IETF discussion I realized that it’s actually non-obvious how to (in design docs and code) say “do Unicode right.”

So I wrote down how in this blog piece: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2023/08/14/Unicode-Scalar-Value

If a few folks linked to it that might confer search-engine juice and be helpful to future programmers.

timbray, 6 months ago to random

This is beyond outrageous. Adobe must stop doing this immediately.

https://petapixel.com/2023/11/07/adobe-stock-is-selling-ai-generated-images-of-the-israel-hamas-conflict/

timbray, 3 months ago to random

Bluesky says: Ready to federate. Their discussion of the differences between their approach and Fedi’s is interesting.

https://bsky.social/about/blog/02-22-2024-open-social-web

timbray, 9 months ago to random

I gave up trying to explain to normal people why, when we interchange documents, the names of the files I send back to them never have any spaces in them.

timbray, 10 months ago to random

This is actually not about XML, despite the title, it's about us geeks being fashion victims, and I really enjoyed reading it. https://www.bitecode.dev/p/hype-cycles

timbray, 8 months ago to random

Got two problems with my Fedi feed: A little too quiet sometimes, and way too male. (So is the Internet.)

So, for the moment here’s what I’m doing: Every day or so I hit my “notifications” tab and follow anyone there who presents as female. (Yes, I look at boosts too, but that’s not helping enough.)

Let’s see how it works.

timbray, 9 months ago to random

Major rage experience this morning. Yukon/Maui/Okanagan burning, smoke drifting into town, LA about to get whacked, local paper has a full-page story about why trying for Net Zero is stupid and wrong. Usual oil-biz talking points. Made a rare visit to Xitter to flame at the author. Unsubscribed from the paper, been a subscriber since ’92.

timbray, 9 months ago to random

My letter to the editor of the local paper, which I suspect they won’t publish.

timbray, 1 month ago to random

In which I brush up and release (0.5.0) the “topfew” program I built back in 2021/22 and have been neglecting, but noticed that I was using it all the time so maybe others will too: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2024/04/12/Topfew-release