µblog - archive for 2024-09 🏳️‍🌈

“I don’t want my car manufacturer to track me, so I’m only buying old cars that aren’t connected to the internet.” My brother in Unix, you are driving a physical device on public roads with a unique identifyer that’s read by ALPR devices at every intersection and which is legally bound to your person via insurance. You’re not anonymous on the road.

(That’s not to say that privacy isn’t important. But the solution is robust privacy legislation, not vehicular Luddism)

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CUPS has generated more CVEs than finished print jobs.

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The computing world would probably be a better place of the people railing against Javascript spent a small portion of that energy working to eliminate C.

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Management has tried to rid themselves of programmers since the days of COBOL. GenAI is just the latest attempt.

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🔗🤖 Ian Cooper: Is AI a Silver Bullet?

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🔗📸 DPReview - On this day 2011: Nikon’s 1 Series tried to start a mirrorless revolution

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Anecdata but this is the 3rd job I have that treats teams in Microsoft Teams as second-class citizens compared to chats.

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I see that DHH is taking a break from racing cars and being the world’s worst boss to penning bromides about Unix tools.

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🔗 Germany’s New Mini-Reichs

Some details on the far-right Reichsbürger movement in Germany.

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🔗 ‘The data on extreme human ageing is rotten from the inside out’ – Ig Nobel winner Saul Justin Newman

Weirdly enough the areas with lots of really old people also have subpar recordkeeping and incentives to commit pensions fraud.

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🔗 Wikipedia: Nail Men

Patriotic statues in Germany and (German) Austria during WW1. People paid for nails to be hammered into them, and the proceeds went towards the war effort.

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🔗 Wikipedia: Abolition of Prussia

Imagine being such an international boogeyman that the victors of WW2 take time off their busy schedule to wipe you off the map.

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It’s Friday the 13th, time for champagne! 🍾

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Instead of stupid “IQ” tests, applicants to positions should be required to assemble an item from IKEA.

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I think it’s hard to understate how confusing Microsoft’s naming of their products is sometimes. For the phone/conferencing part, I can recall from memory

• OCS (Office Communication Suite)
• Lync
• Skype for Business (we had customers indignantly refusing to use such an unprofessional app as “Skype” for work stuff)
• Teams

At least it makes otherwise excellent conferencing hardware cheap when its branding goes out of style…

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You know Kickstarter, I’ll pass on backing something called Fiisto Coucha.

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Signs the AI isn’t taking over just yet, #14,563: LinkedIn thirstily asking me to subscribe to Premium after I’ve updated my profile to a new place of work.

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🔗 Pivot to AI - Promptfondler drama: Shumer’s ‘no-hallucination’ Reflection 70B AI turns out to be two other models in a trenchcoat

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Surface Detail takes the bottom position in my list of Culture novels. Only one more to go!

https://gerikson.com/blog/books/read/Culture-reread.html#surface-detail

Edit I’m reminded why I don’t like Robin Sloan: https://www.robinsloan.com/moonbound/muscular-imagination/#how. Never trust a man who doesn’t like Consider Phlebas.

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🔗 Moleskine Mania: How a Notebook Conquered the Digital Era

It’s hipsters. It’s always hipsters (or people who want to sell stuff to hipsters)

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Encouraged today to learn from a random hackernews that lobsters is an “AI hate group”.

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📺🇦🇺 Colin from Accounts SE02

More wacky hijinks from the mismatched owners of a small dog in Sydney.

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Finally powered through Surface Detail - it was either that or rawdogging a 3hr flight. Review in the works.

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