@rrwo@floss.social avatar

rrwo

@rrwo@floss.social

I was born on the Moon but kidnapped by astronauts and raised in the suburbs of Grumman. Eventually I drifted along the Gulf Stream to Northern Europe.

#FOSS #Perl sometimes #infosec #logic #types #cryptography. Non-FOSS at https://ohai.social/@rrwo

Older posts may be deleted after a few weeks.

Posts and boosts are things that I find interesting at the moment, and not the opinions of my employer, my dog or the spider plant on my desk. I might even change my mind.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

rrwo, to random
@rrwo@floss.social avatar

At work we managed to contact somebody who was crawling our site with a strange bot.

The said that they were using an academic dataset of URLs that was licenced to be "used freely for any purpose".

There's a difference between using the data (a list of URLs) and actually requesting those URLs.

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

Hard to imagine a signal that a website is a rugpull more intense than banning users for trying to delete their own posts

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/stack-overflow-bans-users-en-masse-for-rebelling-against-openai-partnership-users-banned-for-deleting-answers-to-prevent-them-being-used-to-train-chatgpt

Like just incredible "burning the future to power the present" energy here

rrwo,
@rrwo@floss.social avatar

@ocdtrekkie @mcc

They claim posts are not "personal information" and therefore not covered under GDPR.

rrwo, to random
@rrwo@floss.social avatar

Yet again trying to understand why a service never stays enabled for #systemd.

Every time the system reboots, the service has to be enabled manually and then started manually.

Systemd says the service is enabled after restarting. But it cannot be started until it's enabled manually.

Nothing is logged.

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

Just opened my ThinkPad and for the second time in three days the act of closing the laptop to sleep it, then opening it again had caused Ubuntu to hardlock. This time I got a very brief small printout about "amd ring 0 error", then it went back to a black screen and I had to hold down the power button again.

I thought getting a ThinkPad, getting AMD cpu/gpu and picking the Linux distro Lenovo lists as supported would mean I got a minimally functioning computer but I guess not.

rrwo,
@rrwo@floss.social avatar

@mcc

If the upgrade destroys the data on your disk, then it could be worse.

rrwo, to random
@rrwo@floss.social avatar

I have a problem with an app crashing, and was told by the developer that I needed to reset the internal cache.

It requires I push a specific but seemingly unrelated button several times.

I don't understand why there's a secret easter egg reset button, instead of something clearly labelled with a confirmation dialog.

It's just bizarre.

rrwo, to random
@rrwo@floss.social avatar

I'm trying to understand a issue.

I have ssh configured with agent forwarding.

If I run

ssh -A server "ssh -T git@github.com"

it works, as does

ssh -A server "cd /path && git pull origin main"

But when I run that git pull command through Rex, I get a "Permission denied (publickey)" from github.

The Rex command works on other servers.

(I've run into this before but don't remember how it was fixed.)

Any ideas?

rrwo,
@rrwo@floss.social avatar

@ferki

Only Net::OpenSSH is installed.

There is only one SSH key to use.

rrwo, to random
@rrwo@floss.social avatar

I keep mistyping git pish instead of git push this morning.

rrwo, to random
@rrwo@floss.social avatar

Today's misadventures: wresting with systemd to configure a service to start at boot.

It's enabled. Everything says it's enabled.

Just doesn't work.

This is allegedly an improvement over init.

NeadReport, to random
@NeadReport@vivaldi.net avatar

"It’s remarkable that more than half of the potential jurors brought in for a first round of questioning immediately said they could not hear Trump’s case fairly. We knew that it would be hard to pick a jury, but a fail rate of 50 percent or higher right out of the gate is surpassingly rare." - Alan Feuer, NYT

rrwo,
@rrwo@floss.social avatar

@NeadReport

I think a significant number of people are also concerned for their personal safety.

MAGA culties may be more dangerous than mobsters.

ianbetteridge, to random
@ianbetteridge@writing.exchange avatar

Imagine, for one second, if a national newspaper referred to gay young people as “sexuality distressed”, rather than just calling them “gay young people”.

rrwo,
@rrwo@floss.social avatar

@ianbetteridge

I think the Guardian is run by conservatives who complain that their slaves need to be treated better.

StillIRise1963, to random
@StillIRise1963@mastodon.world avatar

Dear white women who vote for fascists, is it not evident to you that they don’t like you EITHER?🤔

rrwo,
@rrwo@floss.social avatar

@StillIRise1963

They're too busy humming along to "Stand By Your Man" while getting their feet bound in the tanning salon, and pretending their man isn't holed up in a motel taking meth with a rent boy that he paid for with money embezzled from the local church.

rrwo, to random
@rrwo@floss.social avatar

Next month will be the 10th anniversary of v5.20, which added experimental signatures, postderef and key/value slices.

I've installed a copy of Perl v5.20 so that I can start testing my CPAN modules with the updated syntax. (I try to support Perl versions from the past ten years.)

It'll be refreshing not to write code like it's 1999.

rrwo,
@rrwo@floss.social avatar

Actually, I wonder if obscure bugs with signatures will start showing up once more CPAN authors start using them in anger.

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

Once I realised that quite a few people not only don’t enjoy reading or writing, many actually resent it and consider one, the other, or both to be the biggest chore at work, a lot of things clicked into place about both generative models and how people read

rrwo,
@rrwo@floss.social avatar

@baldur

It reminds me of this https://floss.social/@rrwo/111963188988284237

"...there are a lot of people who think of creative work as boring, difficult or dangerous."

axbom, to random
@axbom@axbom.me avatar

Imagine a ”smart” toothbrush. Through a bluetooth-enabled app on your phone, it is programmed to provide personalised feedback on your brushing habits based on time spent, pressure applied and area covered.

Now imagine worrying that adding more and more computing power to the toothbrush will create an all-powerful superbeing that erases mankind.

I get that vivid imaginations can end up there but that they are being taken so seriously, without any more coherent reasoning or explanation than ”it feels like it”, is truly baffling.

rrwo,
@rrwo@floss.social avatar

@axbom

It would create an all-powerful superbeing that wants to make money off of you.

It wants to show you ads and sell information about you. It wants you to upgrade it, not because it wants more power. Just money.

It doesn't care about other toothbrushes. Or paperclips. It wants only money. More money.

Eventually the police confiscate it because ot tried hacking into a bank.

rrwo, to infosec
@rrwo@floss.social avatar

A website at work added the AI search engine YouBot to robots.txt and blocks all other requests from that user agent.

So now we get requests from the same IP address (in Amazon's netspace) claiming to be Googlebot.

rrwo,
@rrwo@floss.social avatar

@juandesant

Thanks, but I think there's a difference between reporting a bot that seems to be making an honest mistake due to software bugs, vs one that is outright lying about who they are when they were told not to index a site.

Edit: also, I don't want to let these sort of people know that I've caught on, lest they try and be more deceptive.

twipped, to random
@twipped@twipped.social avatar

Last night, while laying awake in bed, struggling with insomnia, my brain decided that I needed to write this.

Data storage lessons that I learned the hard way

https://gist.github.com/Twipped/3b6c98dc80b00d5aed75f1c4b6456bd0

rrwo,
@rrwo@floss.social avatar

@twipped

British addresses:

  1. The "Avenue ", "Street", "Road", "Lane" suffix matters, e.g. the same city can have different streets named "Drury Road" and "Drury Lane".

  2. A city can have two different streets with the same name.

  3. One street can have multiple names.

  4. Sequentially numbered streets (1st Ave, 2nd Ave etc) need not be parallel, or even near each other.

  5. Addresses can have several lines to include the cross street and ward. (See 2 above.)

rrwo,
@rrwo@floss.social avatar

@twipped

Other lessons in data storage: you will always have data that was mangled by a spreadsheet

There will be phone numbers amd postcodes like "2.013456E+6" or "APR-04-1985” because data was blindly slurped from Excel.

rrwo,
@rrwo@floss.social avatar

@twipped

I've also learned that given the chance and through bad habits, people will enter garbage.

Even if a field is optional and clearly labelled so you'll get a phobe number like "1111111111".

Also there are people and places with perfectly normal names in their part of the world that look like profanity in your part of the world.

rrwo, to random
@rrwo@floss.social avatar

Skype now has "channels".

WhatsApp also recently added something similar.

I'm tired of apps imitating each other and trying to add more and more features to become a social media platform.

rrwo,
@rrwo@floss.social avatar

I'm also tired of complaining about tech companies and their increasingly crappy apps.

I can't remember the last time that I found some software and thought hey, that's really nice and wanted to talk about it online.

Tell me about some software that you like!

How to save culture from the algorithms, with Filterworld author Kyle Chayka (www.theverge.com)

Seven years later, Kyle’s argument is that AirSpace has turned into what he now calls Filterworld, a phrase he uses to describe how algorithmic recommendations have become one of the most dominating forces in culture, and as a result, have pushed society to converge on a kind of soulless sameness in its tastes.

rrwo,
@rrwo@floss.social avatar

@souperk @pelespirit

> For example, nuclear energy is a neutral thing on its own, when used to generate power it’s (arguably) a net positive...

It's more complicated than that.

Mining uranium has side effects, usually for poorer communities.

The fuel has to handled safety, as well a the waste which to be safely stored for 1000s of years.

Nuclear plants have to be designed and built well.

The most benign democracies have made made a mess of those issues.

1/n

rrwo,
@rrwo@floss.social avatar

@souperk @pelespirit

> The same goes for algorithms, when they are used to save lives at hospitals it’s a net positive

Again, more complicated.

Are the algorithms mathematically sound, or just AI/machine learning magic fairy dust?

Do the algorithms have implicit biases against poor people, or those with darker skin or who live in certain postcodes?

2/n

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