Alice in Chains - MTV Unplugged

If I had to pick just one.

I was never as good as I always thought I was

I, too, try to avoid the water fountains on the common wetwall where the water in the pipes is cycled all the time thanks to the constant use of the bathrooms. I usually shoot for the fountain next to the old eyewash station they were forced to put in when the electronics lab used to be the chemical lab–there’s never anyone using that one.

Make a bingo card out of the phrases:

• “We didn’t do anything wrong.”
• “We paid Company X to do that.”
• “What’s a computer license?”
• “How much do they want?”
• “If it’s free then why are we talking?”
• “If it’s free then what did we pay Company X for?”
• “What does GNU mean?”
• [… some time later …]
• “Can’t we just pay them?”
• “Don’t pay Company X because they fucked this up.”
• “Why do we have to give everyone the changes we paid for?”
• “Whatever. I don’t want to hear about this again.”

Add your own phrases. It’s a fun game for all ages.

I know this is a shitpost, but here’s the explanation: you can’t force people to like you.

You may get off on power trips going to businesses where people aren’t allowed to deny you service or return bad attitude in kind, but everywhere else you’re a $1000/hour with a forty hour minimum payment in advance work starts after the check clears kind of guy.

There are four version of x86_64: v1, v2, v3, and v4.

RHEL 9 dropped support for anything prior to v3. That means RockyLinux doesn’t cover it, either. AlmaLinux has support for v2 in version 10, but there’s no way of knowing how long that will last.

Some binary packages are starting to drop support for earlier version. The latest numpy out of pip will not work on a v1 machine. You can sometimes use the system package manager’s numpy to work around it, or constrain pip to use an older numpy. I don’t know what else is lurking out there.

If you’ve got visions of taking a really old computer that you happened to max out on RAM back in the day and bringing it back to life there are surprises waiting for you.

They’ve been beaten on enough that industry is moving forward. The advantage of knowing and being able to prove that the algorithms are insecure would be incalcuable, so groups who want to be able to break into systems aren’t going to volunteer the information. It’s to the benefit of everyone else that the algorithms be secure. The third section of that paper I linked does a pretty good job explaining the why and why now.

tl;dr: Smart people have dug into it, and we know what we’re going to know for now.

• https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/post-quantum-cryptography
• https://media.defense.gov/2025/May/30/2003728741/-1/-1/0/CSA_CNSA_2.0_ALGORITHMS.PDF

To make kids look stupid in front of their peers by taking an authority figure at their word you just have to be willing to burn credibility.

I don’t know what he’s talking about, but maybe he’s saying that the US already has quantum computers capable of breaking modern cryptography, and that it’s time to move to Post Quantum Cryptography (PGC). The process is pretty far along:

• https://postquantum.com/industry-news/microsoft-pqc-windows/
• https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/whats-new-post-quantum-cryptography-rhel-101

Both sites mention “harvest now, decrypt later.” That’s an attack where someone could scoop up all the encrypted traffic/files/whatever, and just store it until quantum computers are effective at breaking it. Because of the nature of the topic nobody who knows for sure is going to say, but it’s not going to be cheap to replace all the crypto out there with PGC so there’s a reason to think there’s a need even if nobody will confirm anything. I personally think just the possibility of the attack is enough reason to move if the algorithms are already in place. If you’ve got encrypted data and you expected it to stay unreadable for hundreds of years, then there’s reason to think that’s not achievable right now.

https://nist.pqcrypto.org/foia/20250114/djb pqc paper.pdf

They’re revisions to the USB standard. USB stands for “Universal Serial Bus.” In the before times there used to be different connectors and formats for sending data over wires for a lot of things. Eventually USB came along and solved a lot of problems all at once: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB

This thread played out like one of those meetings about women’s issues where they only have male speakers.

I’ll try to add a little to the conversation, though. The article talks about how the online spaces were all deep dark corners of the internet. At least part of that is because places like reddit got rid of those subreddits.

To make sure we’re talking about the same guy, it’s the one in the bow tie in this video, right? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFQFB5YpDZE

And the answer to your question is a solid maybe?. I’ve never seen the source before, but it looks like he’s doing fine from a financial perspective.

There is no louder whining than a right winger realizing that the good ole’ boy network they spent so much time trying to worm their way into won’t have them.

One thing I haven’t seen mentioned is safe disposal. You’ll need to pick up a razor blade slot for the house (landlord probably wouldn’t be happy): https://maggardrazors.com/products/maggard-razors-blade-bank-used-blades-lifetime-wall-slot

RHEL9 and forward require v3, and the numpy in pip as of a few versions back uses either v2 or v3 instructions, so v1 is silently broke for certain workloads. FreeBSD works on it just fine as do Debian based distributions as long as you don’t need recent versions of numpy, but there’s no telling what else out there just tries to run and fails with an illegal instruction.

Stream of consciousness:

The institutional users already had to have identity management in place. The PKI was already “there” so self hosting and falling back on the existing infrastructure was a pretty nice win.

To get really big as a social media site you have to monetize your users. If all the messages are encrypted in a decentralized manner then there’s no way to monetize them. It also takes away some of the “social” parts of social media. It’d be fun to see what would happen if everyone spent a day posting nothing but ASCII armored messages to web-of-trust style keys to RDDT.

Open social media sites will always have problems with bad actors and people who just kind of wander in and make themselves at home.

“Someone decided our current authentication wasn’t trusted enough so we’re adding 2FA to this system. We now need to you give us information we didn’t already have over this untrusted mechanism, which we will then trust because it’s convenient for us.”

Probably used some crappy house paint

This was comedy yesterday: https://youtu.be/Wz_JVFW83iY?t=554

It’s not nearly the first time an absurb, stupid take on something gets played to extremes for laughs only for that the be the actual path taken despite all the warnings/math/science/reality that have to be ignored. It won’t be the last, either.

Yes, the same one.

audited regularly

You won’t overturn hundreds of thousands of years of human nature and ungodly profits this way. People already have the ability to vote with their wallets and they don’t for the most part. We do have at least one example of someone who tries, but I wonder how much of that page is still true today: https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

I was surprised to find the old Edward Bernays books online. I guess they’re just that old now. From the first book Propaganda:

In theory, everybody buys the best and cheapest commodities offered him on the market. In practice, if every one went around pricing, and chemically testing before purchasing, the dozens of soaps or fabrics or brands of bread which are for sale, economic life would become hopelessly jammed. To avoid such confusion, society consents to have its choice narrowed to ideas and objects brought to its attention through propaganda of all kinds. There is consequently a vast and continuous effort going on to capture our minds in the interest of some policy or commodity or idea.

• https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/78634/pg78634-images.html
• https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/61364/pg61364-images.html

Stallman’s notions probably aren’t going to manifest themselves in the middle of nowhere without internet. Bernays’ probably will.