I’ve gotten so tired of this take, which I find pretty anti-intellectual.

Yes, keep code as simple as possible, but the key part there is as possible. Legibility is only one axis to consider when writing code, and it’s a damned important one, but instead of having your entire codebase be understandable by a “new intern fresh out of boot camp”, I’d rather think of it as a codebase that’s understandable by leveling up that developer instead.

RE: https://connectified.com/@masukomi/113028352140788923

I keep having discussions with a coworker about securing encryption keys where I refer to it as "the Frog and Toad problem", and I feel like this _should_ be the term of art that's used everywhere to talk about secret management.

Today: our Jenkins server stores an SSH private key encrypted with a passphrase. In order to automatically run the jobs that use it, Jenkins... needs to store the passphrase. So is it buying us any security at all to have it? We can cut the string and open the box.

L’s not a programmer, but loves puzzles and we enjoyed doing this one together a lot when I came across it originally forever ago.

RE: https://fosstodon.org/@mathsppblog/113033331927005111

my university has converted our office telephones to Microsoft Teams. when i grumbled about this to a favourite sysadmin, this is how they responded 🔥

“Microsoft has actually brilliantly leveraged the lousy security landscape -- for which they are in no small part responsible -- to capture even larger market-share, as we now need commercial entities to produce the software required to protect us from their failures, and therefore need a more uniform environment to achieve the necessary scale. The uniformity then guarantees an ever greater scale for the inevitable conflagration. Monocultures guarantee one big fire instead of a bunch of small survivable ones. We really have no interest in learning from evolution, in no small part because it would produce fewer billionaires.

— Local Cranky IT Guy” [shared with permission]

#Enshittification

The key slide for Day 1 of Modern Plain Text Computing

By the way, I recently made a big podcast series about sex testing, which I did not post on here at all oops. If you want to learn about the loooooooong history of policing women in sports (and how it's still happening today) listen to Tested! https://tested-podcast.com

@ct_bergstrom’s observation about police writing reports with LLMs [shudder] generalizes well:

“Yes, [human processes] aren't always the most accurate, but introducing an additional layer of non-accountability is bad.”

Communication has consequences. Who is responsible for those consequences?

My wise English prof mother always says: “Good writing is good thinking.” When we automate the writing, who is doing the thinking?
https://fediscience.org/@ct_bergstrom/113028760435643985

Instead of

sudo nano /etc/whatever

try running

sudo -e /etc/whatever

This will make a copy of the file to be edited by your normal editor, unprivileged, and when you exit the editor, the original file's contents will be replaced.

The cool thing about this is that you're inside your familiar environment, with your editor's config and all.

The disadvantages are that you have to _exit_ the editor to apply the changes, and you can't load other files.

#Linux #CLI #sudo

I wish I knew why my Yubikey has now started requiring a PIN after registering it as a passkey. I did not want this behavior! But now I guess I’m stuck with it and will need to memorize the PIN. And the one for my work Yubikey as well, sigh.

People frequently refer to people right on the border of "Generation X" and "Millennial" as "Xennials" but I still feel my suggestion of "Milliminal" was dismissed without adequate consideration

Olympic sports categorized:
YEET THING: handball, volleyball, football (soccer), discus, shotput, hammer throw, basketball, water polo, curling
NO YEETING: swimming, running, speed skating, boxing, wrestling, taekwondo, breakdancing, rowing
YEET SELF: ski jump, gymnastics, diving, figure skating, high jump, long jump, triple jump, hurdles, skateboarding, skiing (freestyle), snowboarding, trampoline
YEET FRIEND: artistic swimming, couples figure skating
YEET ENEMY: judo
YEETING NOT MANDATORY, BUT STRONGLY ENCOURAGED: rugby, rhythmic gymnastics, (American) flag football
AVOID YEETING AT ALL COSTS: sport climbing, weightlifting, surfing, ski mountaineering, cycling, canoeing, equestrian, sailing, bobsled, skeleton, luge, skiing (except freestyle), fencing, relay race
USE STICK TO YEET THING: hockey, baseball/softball, tennis, cricket, lacrosse, squash, table tennis, badminton, golf, shooting
USE THING TO YEET STICK: archery
YEET STICK: javelin
STICK YEETS YOU: pole vault

You know what’s weird? That the most common form of legal ID in the USA today is a driver’s license. A certification that you can legally operate a car, a form of transport less than 20% of Americans owned in 1924. That’s what gets you into bars and on planes.

In 100 years, we adapted to the point our legal identity is completely intertwined with cars.

This morphing of constructs is on the same level as “we still keep calling mini-computers phones,” another conflation I often think about.

I told S’s daycare teacher that I liked her Appa shirt, and she said that ATLA was an integral part of her childhood, upon which I instantly aged about a hundred years.

Anyone have any outdoor dining recommendations for Salem, MA that can easily seat six people tomorrow? Alternatively, anyplace that does takeout and a suggestion for a good park? One of the party is in her 70s (but spry!) so picnic-style ground seating isn't a great plan.

No major food allergies, but one of the eaters isn't very adventurous.

#salemma #salem #recommendations #advice #bostonma #cambridgema #somervillema #dining #CovidIsNotOver

Who knew that it's possible to boot straight into UEFI setup by just running "systemctl reboot --firmware-setup"? 🤯

It makes all those times I was mashing F12, as soon as the computer started booting, utterly pointless — especially after getting Linux installed.

Well, at least I know about it now.

#Linux #SysAdmin #Hardware

reading someone's master's thesis as you do, and found this cool diagram

https://era.ed.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/1842/39102/Pugh2022.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

Sitting with fact that fourth estate's depiction of microplastics is typically a photograph of a (white) hand or finger dusted with festive or mostly bright white specks, even geometric pieces of gaily colored confetti.

See news coverage of recent discovery of microplastics in human brains, as an example.

Meanwhile, the vast majority (all but two thirds) of microplastics are tire rubber dust.

Imagine if articles about microplastics opened with hands full of dark, misshapen, particulate muck.