Badabinski

I’m quite fond of Wandering Jewel rather than Wandering Dude.

I could see the NT kernel being okay in isolation, but the rest of Windows coming along for the ride puts the kibosh on that idea.

Android similarly makes it easy. If I just press and hold on ?, I get options for ¿ and ‽. Seems like mobile devices have worked out more convenient UIs for this type of thing.

I always have a terminal open in the workspace on my other monitor so it’s just <super-j> interr <tab> <return> <super-;> <c-v>

wait, that makes me sound like an absolute fucking nutcase lol. I typed that first sentence completely unironically and only realized how absurd it was afterwards. It’s faster than the whole “type the Unicode point value” thing, but I should probably start using compose key instead.

I fukken love me an interrobang. I have a shell alias on my computers that copies one of those bad boys into my clipboard so I can more easily display my shocked puzzlement. It’s very useful when dealing with msft products, especially Azure.

Yep, or when you’re doing EMDR and you open your eyes and your therapist is crying. That’s how you know you’ve hit the good shit 👉😎👉

Thankfully, that only happened once. It honestly made me feel better, it was incredibly validating.

Just wanna give a big ol’ +1 to The Body Keeps The Score. My partner read it and it was a game changer for her.

This headline is… well, not great. Here’s the entire quote from Larian Studios’ publishing director:

The last notable game on their platform was arguably Far Cry 6 in 2021. The Crew, Mirage and Avatar came in 2023 and didn’t perform, so you can assume subscriptions were at a lull when PoP released by 2024. Which means people wouldn’t be launching their store all too much.

If it had released on Steam not only would it have been a market success, but there would likely be a sequel because the team are so strong. It’s such a broken strategy. The hardest thing is to make a 85+ game — it is much, much easier to release one. It just shouldn’t be done as it was. If the statement “gamers should get used to not owning their games” is true because of a specific release strategy (sub above sales), then the statement “developers must get used to not having jobs if they make a critically acclaimed game” (platform strategy above title sales) is also true, and that just isn’t sensible — even from a business perspective.

I dunno. That’s hopefully less misleading and confusing? The article really doesn’t bring much to the table imo.

Anyways, fuck Ubisoft.

God, I hated this book when I read it in high school. I avoided Victorian-era literature for so long because of it.

I doubt I had the emotional maturity to get much out of it back then. I’d probably have a better time now, but I have a grudge at this point and I’m gonna stick with it, dammit.

Man, that’s cool! Concrete is a heck of a lot cheaper than epoxy granite resin and is perfectly suitable for a low-precision tool like this lathe.

I do hope that he finds a way to shield those bearings. You really don’t want metal chips or sawdust making its way in there. Any damage they sustain will cause runout, which will lead to increased chatter and parts that are out of spec. Plus, a matching pair of tapered roller bearings can be quite expensive!

EDIT: to be clear, I mean no disrespect when I say low-precision. Not every lathe needs to have slides and handwheels. I have a little Sherline lathe that I’ve used like this in the past (using gravers, not tools in a tool holder). It’s great to quickly turn something or to put nice decorative details on a part. Precision is possible with a lathe like this, but it requires fairly strenuous effort.

I could not have imagined a more fitting name if I had been writing this whole episode as a work or fiction. The world can be so fucking delightful at small scales sometimes.

I just have the 0.6mm nozzles mine came with. I recall hearing something like that, but I’ve felt that the phat 0.6 lads were good enough for the stuff I’m printing. If that’s a limitation, then I hope Prusa can fix it. Seems like it shouldn’t be a big deal to make that configurable.

I own a Prusa XL and I love it. it’s the most reliable printer I’ve ever owned by a long shot. The only thing I’ve been unhappy with is the somewhat lackluster support for Octoprint, but I’ve heard that others have been able to fully use the printer with the right configuration.

Right, but I can’t require a second factor on a different device that operates outside of my primary device’s trust store. I’m sure there is some way to make my desktop hit my phone up directly and ask for fingerprint auth before unlocking the local keystore, but that still depends on the security of my device and my trust store. I don’t want the second factor to be totally locked to the device I’m running on. I want the server to say, “oh, cool, here’s this passkey. It looks good, but we also need a TOTP from you before you can log in,” or “loving the passkey, but I also need you to respond to the push notification we just sent to a different device and prove your identity biometrically over there.” I don’t want my second factor to be on the same device as my primary factor. I don’t know why a passkey (potentially protected by local biometric auth) + a separate server-required second factor (TOTP or push notification to a different device or something) isn’t an option.

EDIT: I could make it so a fingerprint would decrypt my SSH key rather than what I have now (i.e. a password). That would effectively be the same number of factors as you’re describing for a passkey, and it would not be good enough for my organization’s security model, nor would it be good enough for me.

I just don’t get why I can’t use something like TOTP from my phone or a key fob when logging in with a passkey from my desktop. Why does my second factor have to be an on-device biometrically protected keystore? The sites I’m thinking of currently support TOTP when using passwords, so why can’t they support the same thing when using passkeys? I don’t want to place all my trust in the security of my keystore. I like that I have to unlock my phone to get a TOTP. Someone would have to compromise my local keystore and my phone, which makes it a better second factor in my opinion.

EDIT: like, at work, I ssh to servers all over the damn place using an ssh key. I have to get to those servers through a jump box that requires me to unlock my phone and provide a biometric second factor before it will allow me through. That’s asymmetric cryptography + a second factor of authentication that’s still effective even if someone has compromised my machine and has direct access to my private key. That’s what I want from passkeys.

This is obviously wrong. The children yearn for the mines, not the slaughterhouse. They should be swinging a pickaxe at some pitchblende in an unventilated tunnel after school, not cutting up meat.

(/s obvs, I find the whole “the children yearn for the mines” thing to be just my kind of dark humor.)

This is a bad take. Several cities in my state banded together to create a municipal fiber network called UTOPIA. The fiber is owned by the cities that bought in and is used by several different ISPs. The ISPs pay UTOPIA for access, and then they have to compete with each other for subscribers based on performance, features, and cost. Like, there’s genuine market competition for internet! If the state owns the infrastructure and then forces the playing field to be level, then everyone benefits. People in the cities with UTOPIA got fast fiber internet waaay faster than anyone else, they have a plethora of choices (want a static IP and a business plan in your residence? There’s an ISP that sells that!) at great prices, ISPs get access to subscribers without having to maintain fiber, and the cities who bought in get to make money from this and attract residents and businesses who benefit from the service.

My city didn’t buy in. Google Fiber eventually came to town so I was able to kick Comcast out, but I am uneasy about what’ll happen if Google decides to drop their ISP business. If I was in a city with UTOPIA, it would just be one ISP folding and I’d be able to pick a new one and switch over right away.

EDIT: cool, Cory Doctorow wrote a blag post about it: https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-05-16-symmetrical-10gb-for-119-utopia-347e64869977
UTOPIA users have access to 18 different ISPs. I feel like that speaks for itself right there. This is the future we all should have had.

It already is. My company runs hundreds (possibly thousands) of ARM64-based instances right now. It’s done great things for our cloud spend. We still have more x86 stuff than ARM because some applications just don’t perform as well on ARM, but I can imagine that ratio will change as software gets more optimized (specifically the JDK, golang’s compiler, and GCC/LLVM) and Ampere releases new systems with better single thread perf.

EDIT: Ampere, not Alterra. God damn tech company names.

You can run Asahi Linux on M1 MacBooks right now. If you didn’t see the news, they’ve even been able to run some relatively modern AAA games with decent enough frame rates. Granted that’s only the M1 macs, but there’s at least one relatively modern ARM laptop that you can run Linux on.

I’ll totally concede that the new Snapdragon laptops aren’t running Linux yet. It seems like Qualcomm is taking Linux support seriously, but I’m a bit skeptical as someone who has been absolutely fucked by a shitty Qualcomm kernel module.

I just wish that companies enabling passkeys would still allow password+MFA. There are several sites that, when you enable passkeys, lock you out of MFA for devices that lack a biometric second factor of authentication. I’d love to use passkeys + biometrics otherwise, since I’ve often felt that the auth problem would be best solved with asymmetric cryptography.

EDIT: I meant to say “would still allow passkeys+MFA.” hooray for sleep deprivation lol.