tilton

tilton, 6 months ago to random

There's a certain brand of leftism that insists you can't enjoy anything as long as anyone anywhere is suffering. You can't live like that, though, you'll burn out and you won't actually help anyone. If you want to help people, you need to help them find some joy in this bitter world, no matter how small, and you can't do that if you won't let yourself experience any either.

tilton, 4 months ago to random

Someone I know offline mentioned this as a joke, and it struck me as a perfect "is it real or not?" parody of every single New York Times headline from the past decade, so I grabbed the right font and turned it into one.

tilton, 3 months ago to random

If you want to know why software is getting worse: the current trend, for a while now, has been to eliminate QA departments entirely. This sucks, because I have a TON of respect for QA engineers. The ones I’ve had the pleasure of working with have come up with ways of breaking my software that I never would have dreamed of.

tilton, 6 months ago to random

tilton, 6 months ago to random

Since the UNIX time just passed 1700000000, it's time to tell you about my favorite bug! Back in 2001, I'd just implemented a database backed job queue at work. It was all going great, and then suddenly on September 10, 2001 (I know I know...), we noticed it was hung! No jobs were getting taken. It took ages to figure it out: The UNIX clock had just rolled over to 1000000000. The jobs were sorted by timestamp, but the timestamps were stored as strings. Since the most recent completed job started with a 9 as the first character in the job ID, it was being sorted after the new jobs, and since the "most recent" job was already completed, the system just assumed no work needed to be done. That was a fun one to figure out!

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, 3 months ago to random

OK, here me out: A game called "Cyberfunk 1977" where you play Bootsy Collins, and you have to use the power of the P-Funk Mothership to hack into a megacorp's IBM mainframe

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, 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, 3 months ago to random

Very disappointed in Mozilla. Not surprised, just disappointed. The browser monopoly must die, but Mozilla isn't helping at all.

EDIT: In response to: https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/13/mozilla-downsizes-as-it-refocuses-on-firefox-and-ai-read-the-memo/

tilton, 2 months ago to random

Tech interviews be like "OK, write a program on this whiteboard that can detect whether any other arbitrary program will halt or not"

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, 5 months ago to random

I've been ripping all of my CDs as 44.1kHz 16 bit FLACs, and I often see people online touting their 192kHz 24 bit FLACs. This is very silly to me. It's "Audiophile grade shielded Toslink" levels of silliness. You cannot perceive the difference, they are mathematically identical waves when run through a decent digital-to-analog converter. Claude Shannon is not amused.

tilton, 4 months ago to random

Subject: “We're updating our Terms and Privacy Policy. Pray we do not alter them any further.”

tilton, 2 months ago to random

Vintage computers were ahead of their time

tilton, 5 months ago to random

Watching the EU constantly pivot wildly between solid consumer rights protections (yay!) and extreme surveillance state measures (wtf!) gives me such whiplash.

tilton, 5 months ago to random

Iceland has weaponized cuteness to teach you the Icelandic alphabet

tilton, 5 months ago to random

Dear Instance Admins: Please use suspension as an absolute last resort when you have literally no other option left to you. Suspending a popular instance should be a nuclear option that requires two senior admins to turn their keys simultaneously, not something you do just because you got 10 spam reports. You’re severing social relationships that are the only reason we’re here in the first place

tilton, 19 days ago to random

Oh, the irony...

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, 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

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, 4 months ago to random

I find it deeply concerning at some kind of fundamental level that anyone uses generative AI like LLMs as search engines, or to try to find answers to questions where you care about the validity of the response for anything more than entertainment value.

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.