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forty-one things tagged “technology

“CEO’s Skill Set Transferable To Any Job That Requires Dumbass To Receive Big Salary”

NEW YORK—Claiming he could easily fit into a similar position at most companies, local CEO Mike Waltke told reporters Monday that his skill set was transferable to any job that requires an inept dumbass to receive a big salary. “I have the incompetence necessary to effortlessly transition into a r…

The Apple Product Cycle

Was doing some digital house-keeping and came by a cached copy of that by MisterBG. Things haven’t changed too much over the past two decades……

On the Tragedy of systemd

Spent a decent portion of my professional life with init.d. Had to deploy a set of Ubuntu servers last week (use FreeBSD at home), which marked my first actual brush with systemd after a long while of sysadmin-ing Linux systems. It’s weird, takes some getting used to, and has a lovely Enterprise™ sm…

On Convenience in 2022

Definitely the future of television I had in mind was me having to google every movie I want to watch to see if it’s currently in one of its one-month windows on any of the seven streaming services I pay for. This is way easier than buying a DVD. I love it. @chasemit…

“What we have built together is sad, buggy, quixotic garbage but you have to use it.”

Things are going well with the Metaverse: In a follow-up memo dated September 30th, [Vishal] Shah1 said that employees still weren’t using Horizon enough, writing that a plan was being made to “hold managers accountable” for having their teams use Horizon at least once a week. “Everyone in this org…

“I Fucking Hate Jira” is a collection of people sharing their feelings about one of the worst pieces of software I continue to use every day.

Jira is middle-management-ware, a term I made up for software that serves the needs of middle management, or, at least, the needs middle management thinks it has, which comes to the same thing as long as you’re selling to them. (link) Jira is a tire fire. It should be condemned and officially des…

Oracle

Here’s Bryan Cantrill’s classic assessment of Oracle Corporation (taken from this talk.) /misc/b/bryan-cantrill-oracle-1.mp4 On Twitter, a year after that video: If you were an enterprise database customer who hadn’t heard of the Nazis, might it be easiest to explain them with Oracle allegory? @b…

Eliminating Distractions with MS-DOS

The Dune screenplay was written on MS-DOS on a program app called “Movie Master”. It has a 40 page limit which helps the writer, Eric Roth. Writing is fundamentally about putting your ass in the chair and typing the words. Eliminating distractions (I’ve checked Twitter at least five times while wr…

Attorneys general from over 40 states urge Facebook to cancel plans for Instagram for kids

This is for children under 13. Because children over 13 engage with Social Media in very healthy and fruitful ways. “They are also simply too young to navigate the complexities of what they encounter online, including inappropriate content and online relationships where other users, including preda…

How to Hack Servers using Windows Media Player

A most dangerous Easter Egg by Microsoft, known only to the most elite of hackers.…

On Doing Things Right and Doing the Right Thing

There’s a difference between doing things right and doing the right thing. Doing the right thing is wisdom, and effectiveness. Doing things right is efficiency. The curious thing is the righter you do the wrong thing the wronger you become. If you’re doing the wrong thing and you make a mistake an…

Pages Full of Links to Cool Things

Terra, Gossip’s Web, and Marijn’s Linkroll remind my (oldass) self of a more innocent time when one would ‘surf the internet’, come by a list of links another human being liked, and discover all sorts of strange and wacky handmade things. I think I’m saying I really miss how fun something like Geoci…

Real Programmers Don’t Use PASCAL

by Ed Post, Copyright (c) 1982

Back in the good old days – the “Golden Era” of computers, it was easy to separate the men from the boys (sometimes called “Real Men” and “Quiche Eaters” in the literature). During this period, the Real Men were the ones that understood computer programming, and the Quiche Eaters were the ones that…

“Gigantic Asshole Ajit Pai Is Officially Gone.”

I don’t think I’ve enjoyed an article’s title this much in a while. Here is a list of harmful nonsense Pai and his FCC did over the last four years: Killed net neutrality Approved T-Mobile / Sprint merger Repeatedly released reports that claimed U.S. broadband is fine Defended murder of net neutra…

A Custom “Linux Router, Firewall and IDS Appliance”

The focus of this project is to build a super reliable, durable, and stable network device from tried and tested tech. This is not a project for pushing the limits or testing out flashy new stacks. This affinity for ‘boring’ technology will reflect on most of the choices made here, from the hardwar…

Users hate change

by @sleepyfox on Github

This week NN Group released a video by Jakob Nielsen in which he attempts to help designers deal with the problem of customers being resistant to their new site/product redesign. The argument goes thusly: Humans naturally resist change Your change is for the better Customers should just get used to…

Benjamin Button Reviews The New MacBook Pro

Gone is the gimmicky TouchBar, gone are the four USB-C ports that forced power users to carry a suitcase full of dongles. In their place we get a cornucopia of developer-friendly ports: two USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt 2 ports, a redesigned power connector, and a long-awaited HDMI port. Photographers wi…

How Audemars Piguet makes their lovely ‘tapisserie’ pattern.

They use a pantograph to etch things out, after which they ‘tampograph’ the logo (at 1:45.)…

A List of Hacker News ‘Classics’

When you’re following a bunch of feeds, it’s easy to forget that the web is the greatest library in the history of the world—and that a good library doesn’t just have a rack of newspapers, it has a vast collection of books and archives: the stacks. These are stories that get reposted a lot. Many o…

On Security Through Obscurity

Security by Obscurity is when you hide how a security measure works, not when you keep some part of it a secret. Daniel Miessler, “No, Moving Your SSH Port Isn’t Security by Obscurity” As a former sysadmin (but no expert on security): This should be read and re-read. After which one should take…

Robot Party

I cannot imagine the decades of engineering that went into realizing this. “Spot” the Robot Dog doing her ballet was 💯 Bravo, Boston Dynamics for taking us that much closer to (what, for now, looks like a fun) Singularity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fn3KWM1kuAw…

Slack’s Shitty Sidebar

“Our hip product designers all agree: Adding significant noise via tiny profile pictures allows our users to tell, at a glance, who is online and who isn’t.” “And no, you cannot opt out. Because fuck you. What’re your options? MatterMost? 🖕😂🖕”…

The First Thing Ever Bought Online was Weed.

Of course. Well, the transaction was in person and in cash (of course.) It was just a little bag of weed sold through an Arpanet account in Stanford’s artificial intelligence lab in 1972. It’s not clear who was in on the sale aside from the students, but despite the underhanded nature of the deal,…

Tampography

Using a Bloopy Thing to print on all sorts of materials is called “Pad Printing” or tampography. Here’s a Big Bloopy Thing printing a very beautiful pattern onto a bowl (and here’s two of them going at the same time.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3I2fMf0xtCQ You can use the same technique on all…

On The Evenings

It’s a well-known fact that computers run faster in the evening. Robert Virding…

Highly Informed Outrage

A lovely Techbro aside from the ongoing #shitkraken. Greg Stenstrom, another poll watcher, said that in Delaware County, 47 USB cards were missing. “As a computer scientist, an American and a patriot, it doesn’t matter who those votes were for. It was shocking to me that that could even happen,” h…

AxiDraw is a portable ‘Drawing Machine’.

It’s priced at $475 for the basic model and $800 for a deluxe version. The video is very satisfying to watch (I couldn’t have picked better background music.) One could start with a Brachiograph for around $20 (basic Raspberry Pi setup, soldering skills, and assembly required.)…

Tim Kendall testifies

to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce on Facebook’s engagement practices and likens them to time-tested strategies used by Big Tobacco before they were somewhat regulated. And he would know. Kendall was the former “Director of Monetization” at Facebook and is currently the CEO of Moment, a c…

The AppleTV Remote Sucks

Dec 9 It’s so bad a Swiss company made a much saner substitute that sells for ~$20. Nov 16 Looks like you can use the old remote with the new AppleTV. I’m annoyed every time I have to use the infernal thing. It tries (poorly) to be something other than a damn TV remote1. There’s no way to tell w…

AppleTV, AppleTV, AppleTV

I absolutely love Dustin Curtis’ splendid explanation of “AppleTV” branding that’s making making the rounds on HN. For posterity, I stole this handy color-coded transcription off Michael Tsai’s blog. See also: The intractably stupid AppleTV Remote.…

Because God Can See

When I was little — and by the way, I was little once — my father told me a story about an 18th century watchmaker. And what this guy had done: he used to produce these fabulously beautiful watches. And one day, one of his customers came into his workshop and asked him to clean the watch that he’d…

I fight Crime. And I Read.

In Ramayya Vasthavayya, Avinash is a mononymous “Central Crime Branch” officer who, according to the barcode on his IDENTITY CARD, loves new-agey mind meld books. Or so I gather. Couldn’t decipher the other barcode but submit that it might reveal his preference for reasonably priced cutlery sets at…

Computers Are Fast

A nice little quiz meant to illustrate how much your typical Python and Bash code can accomplish in one second. If the answer is 38,000, both 10,000 and 100,000 are considered correct answers. The goal is to not be wrong by more than 10x :) and A newer computer won’t make your code run 1000x fast…

After You Die

Ramin Nazer on some models he entertains of what happens to us after we die. A few of my favorites…

Hugo Migration

Gave Hugo a try and was quite impressed by the ease and speed. The official documentation kinda sucks at introducing key ideas (like taxonomies) in a gradual way that’s helpful to newcomers, but is great for variable and function references. Found these two posts very helpful. Here’s another that ex…

Letters to a Computer

The Des Moines Register on how to send them email in (I’m guessing) the late 80s/early 90s. An article on how Baud Rate isn’t the same as Bit Rate Baud rate refers to the number of signal or symbol changes that occur per second. A symbol is one of several voltage, frequency, or phase changes. NRZ…