tilton

tilton, 14 days ago to random

My general feeling of the last 20 years is basically: the intersection of security, infosec, and state sponsored threats has horribly impacted the usability of computers and made them much less enjoyable than they used to be. Everything is friction and pain and confusion now and I really hate it. I don’t blame people for valuing ease of use over security. I would greatly prefer to just not think about it or to have to deal with a never ending barrage of multi-factor authentication and things being tied to my phone number. It’s depressing and I don’t see it getting better, only worse as the arms race goes on.

tilton, 14 days ago to random

OK, well, TO BE FAIR, I can understand why people don't necessarily like Signal. Here's what just happened to me when I dared to try to log in on both of my phones...

Now, all of the conversations I had on my other phone are just gone, and I can't use Signal there any more. Good job. Very nice. Good UX beats security every time.

tilton, 14 days ago to random

Even after prefacing things by saying "I have no intention of leaving Telegram...", I've gotten a ton of pushback to the mere suggestion that I could use Signal as a backup. Multiple folks I've talked to were either super dismissive or outright hostile about it. Judging by the reaction I've seen today, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that we are not going to see many furries moving to Signal any time in the near future. I'll still have it as a backup, but, like I've said before, it's a backup. I'm not moving. I'm just keeping my options open.

tilton, 17 days ago to random

You DON'T say...

tilton, 18 days ago to random

I really do deeply appreciate how easy it is to set up comprehensive filters on Mastodon, so people can carry on enjoying talking about a thing that causes me stress, and I don't need to see it.

tilton, 19 days ago to random

Oh, the irony...

tilton, 19 days ago to random

Me, all day long: "Man I can't wait to work on that project after work!"

Me, after work: "Good God work took a lot out of me, I'm way too tired to work on that project."

tilton, 22 days ago to random

The most important part of doing effective code reviews is knowing the difference between “this isn’t how I would have done it, but that’s fine” and “this isn’t how anyone should do it, because <valid reason>”

tilton, 24 days ago to random

"What idiot set the TTL on this TXT record to 1 day???"

It was me. I was that idiot.

tilton, 28 days ago to random

systemd has a reasonably good user interface to process initialization but I am still extremely fucking pissed off at how much it just continues to absorb other system functionality forever and ever and ever. It’s never enough. Process init is like a tiny sliver of its scope these days. And if you criticize it you’re instantly shot down as a “hater”

tilton, 29 days ago to random

Finally got my Emacs setup just the way I want it

tilton, 1 month ago to random

Programming hill I will die on: Java isn’t actually a bad language. Hating on it is just a meme that spread in large part because it became so heavily used by giant and excruciatingly boring enterprise systems, written largely by programmers pumped out of low effort trade schools. Despite all that, the language and the JVM are quite good, actually.

tilton, 1 month ago to random

So, I do have a Signal account, but it's under my real name and real phone number. I'm happy to share it with people I know but I keep it a little closer to my chest than other places.

tilton, 1 month ago to random

Houses that are better in theory than in practice https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1500-Lakeview-Blvd-E-Seattle-WA-98102/129073472_zpid/

tilton, 1 month ago to random

Infosec friends, you want to have nightmares tonight? Let me tell you what it was like to work in Silicon Valley in the mid 1990s. I worked at SGI, a major computer manufacturer. When I started, I was given an SGI Indy workstation running IRIX 5.3. It had no root password, setting one up was completely optional. I had full control over all software installed on it, and I could install anything I wanted from our internal dist server, including reinstalling the OS. New OS patches were occasionally available, but finding them and installing them was up to you. That workstation had a publicly routed IPv4 address and was connected to the campus Ethernet, which was in turn connected to the public Internet. There was no firewall, so I could access it from anywhere in the world (and since ssh wasn't much of a thing yet, that connection was unencrypted Telnet). And finally, to add to your nightmare, every workstation ran sendmail and received email directly: you could email me at <name>@sgi.com or directly at <name>@<workstation>.corp.sgi.com, and mail would be routed to my workstation. And yet... it all worked! And if I'm honest, I really miss it. Bad people broke things and ruined the good times for everyone.

tilton, 1 month ago to random

After some cleaning and rearranging and tweaking, we now have a fully functional SGI R4400 Indigo 2 Max Impact system running alongside my R10K Indigo 2 High Impact system. So much IRIX! So many 3D! Textured polygons everywhere! Nearly $100,000 worth of computing power in 1996! (My phone has laughably more texture RAM these days…)

tilton, 1 month ago to random

"Commodore 64 claimed to outperform IBM's quantum system — sarcastic researchers say 1 MHz computer is faster, more efficient, and decently accurate"

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/quantum-computing/commodore-64-outperforms-ibms-quantum-systems-1-mhz-computer-said-to-be-faster-more-efficient-and-decently-accurate

tilton, 1 month ago to random

I'm trying to imagine what the world would be like if the Dot Com Boom went the same way the AI Boom is going right now, like if you ordered pet food from Pets Dot Com and half the time it catapulted your cat into the sun instead of sending you cat food and everyone was just like "Ha ha oh well that's just new tech I guess!"

tilton, 1 month ago to random

Someone gave me this Sun Ultra 2 last year, and I haven’t even opened it up to check it out yet. I think today I will explore to see whether it’s even functional or not.

tilton, 1 month ago to random

And ANOTHER article about AI trouble. I am more and more convinced that LLMs are a complete dead end. They stand a much higher chance of total collapse over the next ten years than they do of achieving greatness. https://www.wheresyoured.at/bubble-trouble/

tilton, 2 months ago to random

The first piece of networking code I ever wrote was in 1994, and I wrote it to avoid working on some college project that was going poorly. To reflect my mood at the time, I named it "fuckmed", as in "Fuck Me Daemon". It listened for connections on a TCP port. When it received one, it simply wrote out the string "you are really fucked" and then closed the connection.

I guess I've always been this way.

tilton, 2 months ago to random

Having now worked at two of the top three cloud and web security providers I can tell you with certainty that when you see an expensive corporate cloud service offering like “Conglomco EdgeProtect” or “Mightycorp ZeroTrust Gateway”, that is a thing defined entirely by marketing. Nobody designed how it’s actually supposed to work because they’re just slapping existing components together like Taco Bell’s menu. Behind the scenes it’s five to eight teams mostly acquired from smaller companies running around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to figure out how to make management happy without burning out.

tilton, 2 months ago to random

I always forget how much allergies take out of me. I never had them growing up, but something about the pollen up here near Seattle triggers them SO BAD every spring. I’m just a wreck. Luckily they don’t last long and they clear up well before summer starts, but it sucks in the meantime. I’m so tired 😩

tilton, 2 months ago to random

LB: This is the first I've ever heard that the Dunning-Kruger effect was shown to be a statistical error. The analysis in the attached post from 2022 is a fascinating look at statistics and autocorrelation.

tilton, 2 months ago to random

I have never had anything that I would describe as a religious or spiritual experience, certainly nothing so moving that it changed me in some noticeable way. I often worry about that, like they seem to be fairly common for people? Nothing has even come close to that in my life.