Radioactive "fun"

Oct. 28th, 2025 11:22 pm
rbarclay: (donald)
[personal profile] rbarclay
Last year I stumbled across the fact that as an Austrian citizen I can get 2 Radon detectors for free. So I ordered and let them collect data - one in the bedroom, one in the basement (because that's been my office for much of COVID-19).

Today I got the results back.

Basement's ok. Bedroom's at >200% of the official limit (640Bq/m³ +/- 20Bq, limit is 300Bq/m³).

So I should probably do something about that. I just need to figure out what. The easy way of "just put in an exhaust fan in the basement" won't do since the gas doesn't seem to enter the building via the basement (only about 10-15% of the building has a basement, the rest sits directly on the ground via a foundation plate).

Guess I'll start with putting in forced ventilation (with a heat exchanger for reduced energy loss) in the living room and bedroom. At least that'd have the upside of no longer having to quarrel with the SO about airing the rooms.

Review: Those Who Wait

Oct. 27th, 2025 08:21 pm
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Review: Those Who Wait, by Haley Cass

Publisher: Haley Cass
Copyright: 2020
ISBN: 979-8-9884929-1-7
Format: Kindle
Pages: 556

Those Who Wait is a stand-alone self-published sapphic romance novel. Given the lack of connection between political figures named in this book and our reality, it's also technically an alternate history, but it will be entirely unsatisfying to anyone who reads it in that genre.

Sutton Spencer is an English grad student in New York City. As the story opens, she has recently realized that she's bisexual rather than straight. She certainly has not done anything about that revelation; the very thought makes her blush. Her friend and roommate Regan, not known for either her patience or her impulse control, decides to force the issue by stealing Sutton's phone, creating a profile on a lesbian dating app, and messaging the first woman Sutton admits being attracted to.

Charlotte Thompson is a highly ambitious politician, current deputy mayor of New York City for health and human services, and granddaughter of the first female president of the United States. She fully intends to become president of the United States herself. The next step on that path is an open special election for a seat in the House of Representatives. With her family political connections and the firm support of the mayor of New York City (who is also dating her brother), she thinks she has an excellent shot of winning.

Charlotte is also a lesbian, something she's known since she was a teenager and which still poses serious problems for a political career. She is therefore out to her family and a few close friends, but otherwise in the closet. Compared to her political ambitions, Charlotte considers her love life almost irrelevant, and therefore has a strict policy of limiting herself to anonymous one-night stands arranged on dating apps. Even that is about to become impossible given her upcoming campaign, but she indulges in one last glance at SapphicSpark before she deletes her account.

Sutton is as far as possible from the sort of person who does one-night stands, which is a shame as far as Charlotte is concerned. It would have been a fun last night out. Despite that, both of them find the other unexpectedly enjoyable to chat with. (There are a lot of text message bubbles in this book.) This is when Sutton has her brilliant idea: Charlotte is charming, experienced, and also kind and understanding of Sutton's anxiety, at least in app messages. Maybe Charlotte can be her mentor? Tell her how to approach women, give her some guidance, point her in the right directions.

Given the genre, you can guess how this (eventually) turns out.

I'm going to say a lot of good things about this book, so let me get the complaints over with first.

As you might guess from that introduction, Charlotte's political career and the danger of being outed are central to this story. This is a bit unfortunate because you should not, under any circumstances, attempt to think deeply about the politics in this book.

In 550 pages, Charlotte does not mention or expound a single meaningful political position. You come away from this book as ignorant about what Charlotte wants to accomplish as a politician as you entered. Apparently she wants to be president because her grandmother was president and she thinks she'd be good at it. The closest the story comes to a position is something unbelievably vague about homeless services and Charlotte's internal assertion that she wants to help people and make real change. There are even transcripts of media interviews, later in the book, and they somehow manage to be more vacuous than US political talk shows, which is saying something. I also can't remember a single mention of fundraising anywhere in this book, which in US politics is absurd (although I will be generous and say this is due to Cass's alternate history).

I assume this was a deliberate choice and Cass didn't want politics to distract from the romance, but as someone with a lot of opinions about concrete political issues, the resulting vague soft-liberal squishiness was actively off-putting. In an actual politician, this would be an entire clothesline of red flags. Thankfully, it's ignorable for the same reason; this is so obviously not the focus of the book that one can mostly perform the same sort of mental trick that one does when ignoring the backdrop in a cheap theater.

My second complaint is that I don't know what Sutton does outside of the romance. Yes, she's an English grad student, and she does some grading and some vaguely-described work and is later referred to a prestigious internship, but this is as devoid of detail as Charlotte's political positions. It's not quite as jarring because Cass does eventually show Sutton helping concretely with her mother's work (about which I have some other issues that I won't get into), but it deprives Sutton of an opportunity to be visibly expert in something. The romance setup casts Charlotte as the experienced one to Sutton's naivete, and I think it would have been a better balance to give Sutton something concrete and tangible that she was clearly better at than Charlotte.

Those complaints aside, I quite enjoyed this. It was a recommendation from the same BookTuber who recommended Delilah Green Doesn't Care, so her recommendations are quickly accumulating more weight. The chemistry between Sutton and Charlotte is quite believable; the dialogue sparkles, the descriptions of the subtle cues they pick up from each other are excellent, and it's just fun to read about how they navigate a whole lot of small (and sometimes large) misunderstandings and mismatches in personality and world view.

Normally, misunderstandings are my least favorite part of a romance novel, but Sutton and Charlotte come from such different perspectives that their misunderstandings feel more justified than is typical. The characters are also fairly mature about working through them: Main characters who track the other character down and insist on talking when something happens they don't understand! Can you imagine! Only with the third-act breakup is the reader dragged through multiple chapters of both characters being miserable, and while I also usually hate third-act breakups, this one is so obviously coming and so clearly advertised from the initial setup that I couldn't really be mad. I did wish the payoff make-up scene at the end of the book had a bit more oomph, though; I thought Sutton's side of it didn't have quite the emotional catharsis that it could have had.

I particularly enjoyed the reasons why the two characters fall in love, and how different they are. Charlotte is delighted by Sutton because she's awkward and shy but also straightforward and frequently surprisingly blunt, which fits perfectly with how much Charlotte is otherwise living in a world of polished politicians in constant control of their personas. Sutton's perspective is more physical, but the part I liked was the way that she treats Charlotte like a puzzle. Rather than trying to change how Charlotte expresses herself, she instead discovers that she's remarkably good at reading Charlotte if she trusts her instincts. There was something about Sutton's growing perceptiveness that I found quietly delightful. It's the sort of non-sexual intimacy that often gets lost among the big emotions in romance novels.

The supporting cast was also great. Both characters have deep support networks of friends and family who are unambiguously on their side. Regan is pure chaos, and I would not be friends with her, but Cass shows her deep loyalty in a way that makes her dynamic with Sutton make sense. Both characters have thoughtful and loving families who support them but don't make decisions for them, which is a nice change of pace from the usually more mixed family situations of romance novel protagonists. There's a lot of emotional turbulence in the main relationship, and I think that only worked for me because of how rock-solid and kind the supporting cast is.

This is, as you might guess from the title, a very slow burn, although the slow burn is for the emotional relationship rather than the physical one (for reasons that would be spoilers). As usual, I have no calibration for spiciness level, but I'd say that this was roughly on par with the later books in the Bright Falls series.

If you know something about politics (or political history) and try to take that part of this book seriously, it will drive you to drink, but if you can put that aside and can deal with misunderstandings and emotional turmoil, this was both fun and satisfying. I liked both of the characters, I liked the timing of the alternating viewpoints, and I believed in the relationship and chemistry, as improbable and chaotic as some of the setup was. It's not the greatest thing I ever read, and I wish the ending was a smidgen stronger, but it was an enjoyable way to spend a few reading days. Recommended.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Clocks

Oct. 27th, 2025 03:12 pm
lnr: Halloween 2023 (Default)
[personal profile] lnr

A short list of clocks which do not update themselves:

  • Matthew's bedside alarm clock. Several experimental button pushes to remember how.
  • Matthew's travel alarm clock. Fairly self explanatory
  • Small clock in the dining room. Turn the time knob, not the alarm one!
  • Oven. Doddle.
  • Microwave. A bit of poking, but not too bad.
  • Bike computer. Putting this one off as it requires a cocktail stick and remembering the right runes so you don't accidentally completely reset it. Write down the odo distance first before attempting!
  • The electronics (and the big living room wall clock, and the heating controller) all look after themselves, which is just as well, as there are quite a lot of them.

Supercomputing and Affirmation

Oct. 27th, 2025 08:49 pm
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[personal profile] tcpip
Every so often, there is a slight glimmer of light in my world where my usual state of driven dysthymia changes due to the affirming words and actions of others. Such an experience occurred last Friday when I organised a researcher tech talk with Dr Tomasz Wozniak, a senior lecturer in economics at UniMelb. Tomasz has recently been published, as part of an international team, in a Bank of Canada paper and in the prestiguous Journal of Econometrics on Structural Vector Autoregressions (SVARs) and time-series models that analyse the relationships between multiple economic variables to identify and isolate the effects of exogenous economic shocks. It's actually important stuff to keep people in jobs when (for example) there's a massive negative disruption to trade (hello, US tariffs).

Tomasz had been kind enough to provide a repository of his presentation, which also points out that in the course of his research and his use of Spartan he has become an editor of the R Journal and developed the R packages, bsvars, bsvarSIGNs, and bpvars. He had many extremely positive comments to make about Spartan, both in terms of the infrastructure that we offer and the support that we provide to researchers. Two comments particularly stood out; first was the effects of our optimisation of the software that we build from the source code, especially (in his case) the GNU compiler suite and the R programming language. As a result of our optimised installs, he reported that his jobs would run four times faster on Spartan compared to his own machine, despite the fact that he had faster processors. Further, he mentioned that a few years ago, after attending one of my introductory training sessions, he learned the advantages of using job arrays instead of a looping logic. Suddenly, his computational improvements were hundreds of times faster than what would be the case on his own system; we call it "high performance computing" for a reason.

This is hardly the first time that this has happened. For every dollar invested in high performance computing, the estimated social return on investment is $44 (in Japan, for example, it's c$75:1 due to alignment with national objectives). In a world where so many are in well-paid "bullshit jobs" whilst other struggle as part of the precariat class with low-paid insecure work, I have been fortunate enough to find a career that has stability and fair renumeration, interesting and challenging work, and actually produces socially useful outcomes. For almost twenty years, I have believed this with utter sincerity, but it is still very pleasing when the affirmation comes from others.

Review: On Vicious Worlds

Oct. 26th, 2025 08:45 pm
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Review: On Vicious Worlds, by Bethany Jacobs

Series: Kindom Trilogy #2
Publisher: Orbit
Copyright: October 2024
ISBN: 0-316-46362-0
Format: Kindle
Pages: 444

On Vicious Worlds is a science fiction thriller with bits of cyberpunk and a direct sequel to These Burning Stars. This is one of those series where each book has massive spoilers for the previous book and builds on characters and situations from that book. I would not read it out of order. It is Bethany Jacobs's second novel.

Whooboy, how to review this without spoilers. There are so many major twists in the first book with lingering consequences that it's nearly impossible.

I said at the end of my review of These Burning Stars that I was impressed with the ending for reasons that I can't reveal. One thread of this book follows the aftermath: What do you do after the plan? If you have honed yourself for one purpose, can you repurpose yourself?

The other thread of the book is a murder mystery. The protectors of the community are being picked off, one by one. The culprit might be a hacker so good that they are causing Jun, the expert hacker of the first book, serious problems. Meanwhile, the political fault lines of the community are cracking open under pressure, and the leaders are untested, exhausted, and navigating difficult emotional terrain.

These two story threads alternate, and interspersed are yet more flashbacks. As with the first book, the flashbacks fill in the backstory of Chono and and Esek. This time, though, we get Six's viewpoint.

The good news is that On Vicious Worlds tones down the sociopathy considerably without letting up on the political twists. This is the book where Chono comes into her own. She has much more freedom of action, despite being at the center of complicated and cut-throat politics, and I thoroughly enjoyed her principled solidity. She gets a chance to transcend her previous role as an abuse victim, and it's worth the wait.

The bad news is that this is very much a middle book of a trilogy. While there are a lot of bloody battles, emotional drama, political betrayals, and plot twists, the series plot has not advanced much by the end of the book. I would not say the characters were left in the same position they started — the character development is real and the perils have changed — but neither would I say that any of the open questions from These Burning Stars have resolved.

The last book I read used science-fiction world-building to tell a story about moral philosophy that was somewhat less drama-filled than one might have expected. That is so not the case here. On Vicious Worlds is, if anything, even more dramatic than the first book of the series. In Chono's thread, the slow burn attempt to understand Six's motives has been replaced with almost non-stop melodrama, full of betrayals, reversals, risky attempts, and emotional roller coasters. Jun's part of the story is a bit more sedate at first, but there too the interpersonal drama setting is headed towards 10. This is the novel equivalent of an action movie.

Jun, and her part of the story, are fine. I like the new viewpoint character, I find their system of governance somewhat interesting (although highly optimized for small groups), and I think the climax worked. But I'm invested in this series for Chono and Six. Both of them, but particularly Six, are absurdly over the top, ten people's worth of drama stuffed into one character, unable to communicate in anything less than dramatic gestures and absurd plans, but I find them magnetically fascinating. I'm not sure if written characters can have charisma, but if so, they have it.

I liked this entry in the series, but then I also liked the first book. It's trauma-filled and dramatic and involved a bit too much bloody maiming for my tastes, but this whole series is about revolutions and what happens when you decide to fight, and sometimes I'm in the mood for complicated and damaged action heroes who loathe oppression and want to kill some people.

This is the sort of series book that will neither be the reason you read the series nor the reason why you stop reading. If you enjoyed These Burning Stars, this is more of the same, with arguably better character development but less plot catharsis. If you didn't like These Burning Stars, this probably won't change your mind, although if you hated it specifically because of Esek's sociopathy, I think you would find this book more congenial. But maybe not; Jacobs is still the same author, and most of the characters in this series are made of sharp edges.

I'm still in; I have already pre-ordered the next book.

Followed by This Brutal Moon, due out in December of 2025 and advertised as the conclusion.

Rating: 7 out of 10

New blog post

Oct. 26th, 2025 09:04 pm
sweh: (Vroomba)
[personal profile] sweh
The recent DNS issue at AWS made me recall a DNS issue I had to deal with as part of the Unix authentication team, and how I'd deal with it differently today. I guess I've grown as an engineer/architect! https://www.sweharris.org/post/2025-10-26-its-dns/

Review: Ancestral Night

Oct. 25th, 2025 08:30 pm
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Review: Ancestral Night, by Elizabeth Bear

Series: White Space #1
Publisher: Saga Press
Copyright: 2019
ISBN: 1-5344-0300-0
Format: Kindle
Pages: 501

Ancestral Night is a far-future space opera novel and the first of a series. It shares a universe with Bear's earier Jacob's Ladder trilogy, and there is a passing reference to the events of Grail that would be a spoiler if you put the pieces together, but it's easy to miss. You do not need to read the earlier series to read this book (although it's a good series and you might enjoy it).

Halmey Dz is a member of the vast interstellar federation called the Synarche, which has put an end to war and other large-scale anti-social behavior through a process called rightminding. Every person has a neural implant that can serve as supplemental memory, off-load some thought processes, and, crucially, regulate neurotransmitters and hormones to help people stay on an even keel. It works, mostly.

One could argue Halmey is an exception. Raised in a clade that took rightminding to an extreme of suppression of individual personality into a sort of hive mind, she became involved with a terrorist during her legally mandated time outside of her all-consuming family before she could make an adult decision to stay with them (essentially a rumspringa). The result was a tragedy that Halmey doesn't like to think about, one that's left deep emotional scars. But Halmey herself would argue she's not an exception: She's put her history behind her, found partners that she trusts, and is a well-adjusted member of the Synarche.

Eventually, I realized that I was wasting my time, and if I wanted to hide from humanity in a bottle, I was better off making it a titanium one with a warp drive and a couple of carefully selected companions.

Halmey does salvage: finding ships lost in white space and retrieving them. One of her partners is Connla, a pilot originally from a somewhat atavistic world called Spartacus. The other is their salvage tug.

The boat didn't have a name.

He wasn't deemed significant enough to need a name by the authorities and registries that govern such things. He had a registration number — 657-2929-04, Human/Terra — and he had a class, salvage tug, but he didn't have a name.

Officially.

We called him Singer. If Singer had an opinion on the issue, he'd never registered it — but he never complained. Singer was the shipmind as well as the ship — or at least, he inhabited the ship's virtual spaces the same way we inhabited the physical ones — but my partner Connla and I didn't own him. You can't own a sentience in civilized space.

As Ancestral Night opens, the three of them are investigating a tip of a white space anomoly well off the beaten path. They thought it might be a lost ship that failed a transition. What they find instead is a dead Ativahika and a mysterious ship equipped with artificial gravity.

The Ativahikas are a presumed sentient race of living ships that are on the most alien outskirts of the Synarche confederation. They don't communicate, at least so far as Halmey is aware. She also wasn't aware they died, but this one is thoroughly dead, next to an apparently abandoned ship of unknown origin with a piece of technology beyond the capabilities of the Synarche.

The three salvagers get very little time to absorb this scene before they are attacked by pirates.

I have always liked Bear's science fiction better than her fantasy, and this is no exception. This was great stuff. Halmey is a talkative, opinionated infodumper, which is a great first-person protagonist to have in a fictional universe this rich with delightful corners. There are some Big Dumb Object vibes (one of my favorite parts of salvage stories), solid character work, a mysterious past that has some satisfying heft once it's revealed, and a whole lot more moral philosophy than I was expecting from the setup. All of it is woven together with experienced skill, unsurprising given Bear's long and prolific career. And it's full of delightful world-building bits: Halmey's afthands (a surgical adaptation for zero gravity work) and grumpiness at the sheer amount of gravity she has to deal with over the course of this book, the Culture-style ship names, and a faster-than-light travel system that of course won't pass physics muster but provides a satisfying quantity of hooky bits for plot to attach to.

The backbone of this book is an ancient artifact mystery crossed with a murder investigation. Who killed the Ativahika? Where did the gravity generator come from? Those are good questions with interesting answers. But the heart of the book is a philosophical conflict: What are the boundaries between identity and society? How much power should society have to reshape who we are? If you deny parts of yourself to fit in with society, is this necessarily a form of oppression?

I wrote a couple of paragraphs of elaboration, and then deleted them; on further thought, I don't want to give any more details about what Bear is doing in this book. I will only say that I was not expecting this level of thoughtfulness about a notoriously complex and tricky philosophical topic in a full-throated adventure science fiction novel. I think some people may find the ending strange and disappointing. I loved it, and weeks after finishing this book I'm still thinking about it.

Ancestral Night has some pacing problems. There is a long stretch in the middle of the book that felt repetitive and strained, where Bear holds the reader at a high level of alert and dread for long enough that I found it enervating. There are also a few political cheap shots where Bear picks the weakest form of an opposing argument instead of the strongest. (Some of the cheap shots are rather satisfying, though.) The dramatic arc of the book is... odd, in a way that I think was entirely intentional given how well it works with the thematic message, but which is also unsettling. You may not get the catharsis that you're expecting.

But all of this serves a purpose, and I thought that purpose was interesting. Ancestral Night is one of those books that I liked more a week after I finished it than I did when I finished it.

Epiphanies are wonderful. I’m really grateful that our brains do so much processing outside the line of sight of our consciousnesses. Can you imagine how downright boring thinking would be if you had to go through all that stuff line by line?

Also, for once, I think Bear hit on exactly the right level of description rather than leaving me trying to piece together clues and hope I understood the plot. It helps that Halmey loves to explain things, so there are a lot of miniature infodumps, but I found them interesting and a satisfying throwback to an earlier style of science fiction that focused more on world-building than on interpersonal drama. There is drama, but most of it is internal, and I thought the balance was about right.

This is solid, well-crafted work and a good addition to the genre. I am looking forward to the rest of the series.

Followed by Machine, which shifts to a different protagonist.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Family lore - Swiss side

Oct. 25th, 2025 04:21 pm
infrogmation: (Default)
[personal profile] infrogmation
According to family oral history/lore on my Swiss ancestry side.

Switzerland formerly wasn't a rich country. Back in the day if a family had too many boys who survived, the extras would be sent as mercenaries for foreign kings. Then there was America, which was another option.

Great grandfather had a foot in both traditions for extra sons - he came to America, but initially as a mercenary. In the Civil War, if a rich man was drafted, they could instead of fighting pay a fee, or have a substitute go for them. It was usually less expensive to hire an immigrant as a substitute. So that's how he got in the Union Army, but once he was there fighting became devoted to the cause.

He saved up his pay, and after the War moved to St. Louis and set up as a shopkeeper. He did well and after a couple years he wrote to his little brother, the youngest extra son, to come join him.

Great Uncle sailed across to New York, and found someone at the port who spoke some German or French, and told them he was going to join his brother in St. Louis. The man took a big sheet of paper, wrote something in English in big letters, and pinned it to the front of Great Uncle's coat, and told him just point to the paper and he'd get there.

So about a week later he arrived in St. Louis where Great Grandfather was waiting. Great Grandfather took one look at the paper on his brother's coat and tore it off. He'd crossed half the country wearing a sign reading "THIS DAMN FOOL WANTS TO GO TO ST. LOUIS".

Database maintenance

Oct. 25th, 2025 08:42 am
mark: A photo of Mark kneeling on top of the Taal Volcano in the Philippines. It was a long hike. (Default)
[staff profile] mark posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance

Good morning, afternoon, and evening!

We're doing some database and other light server maintenance this weekend (upgrading the version of MySQL we use in particular, but also probably doing some CDN work.)

I expect all of this to be pretty invisible except for some small "couple of minute" blips as we switch between machines, but there's a chance you will notice something untoward. I'll keep an eye on comments as per usual.

Ta for now!

What is a person?

Oct. 25th, 2025 01:32 pm
emperor: (Default)
[personal profile] emperor
The second chapter of our book group book (Rowan Williams' Being Human) is "What is a person?"

He starts by paraphrasing a slightly obscure[0] essay by Vladimir Lossky, who, he says, declares that we lack good vocabulary to distinguish between something that is simply one unique instance of its kind, and the quality (whatever it is) that makes a conscious thing of this kind irreducible to its nature.

The point he's making, I think, is that there is something more to being a person than simply being an example of a kind of thing. He's saying that there is something about us as a whole that isn't captured simply by listing facts that happen to be true about us. He then quotes Lossky at more length:
Under these conditions, it will be impossible for us to form a concept of the human person, and we will have to content ourselves with saying: “person” signifies the irreducibility of man to his nature— “irreducibility” and not “something irreducible” or “something which makes man irreducible to his nature” precisely because it cannot be a question here of “something” distinct from “another nature” but of someone who is distinct from his own nature, of someone who goes beyond his nature while still containing it, who makes it exist as human nature by this overstepping [of it].
Williams then goes on to talk about how people are shaped by the web of relationships they are part of and influence "A person, in other words, is the point at which relationships intersect, where a difference may be made and new relations created." He asserts that this (at least to Christians) is a mystery that applies to each and every human individual, and that from this it follows that the same kind of reverence or attention is due to all of them (regardless of any of the features of people that result in their marginalisation).

This is all well and good, and I'm sympathetic to the desire to avoid the "meet this set of criteria to be a person" approach that can come out of debates as to what it means to be a person. And from a Christian point of view, the idea that all people are first of all in relation to God before they are in relation to anyone or anything else; and thus that we must bear that in mind in all our doings with other people is useful (and very traditional).

But it doesn't seem to me to be actually answering the question of "What is a person?" Rather like the idea (I think from Zen & the art of motorcycle maintenance) that everyone knows what "quality" is, but most people would struggle to define it; fine for the day-to-day, but not a very satisfactory answer to the question posed. Williams at least half admits this, saying later in the chapter that it's only a theological perspective that makes sense of the idea of personhood "But what I'm really suggesting is that when it comes to personal reality the language of theology is possibly the only way to speak well of our sense of who we are and what our humanity is like — to speak well of ourselves as expecting relationship, as expecting difference, as expecting death [...]" But how to talk about personhood to people who reject any sort of theological worldview?

Williams notes that Science Fiction has from time to time looked at this question of personhood - when encountering an alien or a cyborg, how do you decide to accord the status of person to this other being? He concludes that the answer is that "At the end of the day, we can say this is something we could discover only by taking time and seeing if a relationship could be built." That still seems unsatisfactory to me, not least in the age of generative AI systems[1] that produce plausible-sounding answers to any question and with whom at least some people seem to convince themselves they've had a relationship.

Is there a useful way of answering the question "What is a person?" without relying on a theological worldview or having the sort of argument that concludes that some humans are less people than others?

[0] e.g. the WP article doesn't mention it at all. But then Williams did his thesis on Lossky. The article "The Theological Notion of the Human Person" is online
[1] which are stochastic models of "what would an answer to this question likely sound like", and I am axiomatically going to declare as neither conscious nor persons

how to draw a tetrapod

Oct. 24th, 2025 10:42 pm
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[personal profile] fanf

https://dotat.at/@/2025-10-24-tetrapod.html

Concrete tetrapods are used to dissipate wave energy in coastal defences.

There's a bit of a craze for making tetrapod-shaped things: recently I've seen people making a plush tetrapod and a tetrapod lamp. So I thought it might be fun to model one.

I found a nice way to describe tetrapods that relies on very few arbitrary aesthetic choices.

Click here to play with an animated tetrapod which I made using three.js. (You can see its source code too.)

Read more... )

New blog post

Oct. 23rd, 2025 01:09 pm
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[personal profile] sweh
New blog post in which I discuss what happened when I broke guidance and asked an interview question about information that can be found in a manpage: https://www.sweharris.org/post/2025-10-23-options-to-ls/

Quality Experiences

Oct. 23rd, 2025 09:11 pm
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[personal profile] tcpip
I have argued for a while that Epicureanism is a refinement of Hedonism and Stoicism is an advanced development from Epicureanism; "To live, to live well, to live better" (Whitehead, "The Function of Reason"). Each of these represents a qualitative change and, as one learns in the business of Quality Assurance, that is defined as improved precision and is differentiated as a continuum of accuracy, ultimately from "high quality" to "low quality". I find that this applies to people as well as processes; inconsistent people, who fluctuate between emotive extremes, can occasionally be enjoyable and exciting, but ultimately are hurtful and exhausting and are thus best avoided, no matter who is enticing the good times are. Such people invariably are unsuccessful in life; quality requires both a degree of consistency and reflective, tested, improvement.

Over the past few days, I have been fortunate enough in life to experience a few examples of high-quality experiences. The first was an evening of music, which I attended with Kate. This was headlined by the Paul Kidney Japanese Experience, and supported by The Black Heart Death Cult and Cat Crawl. All performed with great competence in accordance with their particular style. "Cat Crawl" (who describe themselves as "a three-piece tantrum in the form of a band") provided early 1980s-style feminist punk with humour, whilst in comparison "The Black Heart Death Cult" were a gloomy-shoegaze fusion, reminiscent of the French "blackgaze" from the 2000s. Finally, the Paul Kidney Japanese Experience gave something akin to a Japanese version an extended Hawkwind space rock concert. All in all, a great night with a great variety of styles. As a radical contrast, the following day Nitul invited me to the end-of-semester Baroque Ensemble Concert from the students at Unimelb's Faculty of Fine Arts and Music. It was an admirable selection from Lully, Bach, Vivaldi, Schein and more, and in total included over fifty performers of music and song. I found myself, as I often do in such music, drifting off to another world.

As more culinary experiences, Kate and I attended the Melbourne Italian Festival the following day at the Melbourne Exhibition Centre. The building is beautiful, but despite my heritage, I find a great deal of contemporary Italian culture pretty gaudy at best, especially in the field of fashion, homewares, and music. Of course, in food and film, it retains a very high level, the latter with a decidedly leftist influence. Apropos, last night I had the delight of being cooked for by the Minister for Climate Change Action and Energy Resources, etc, Lily D'Ambrosio, who provided an astounding Calabrian feast for some twenty individuals whilst showing off the capabilities of induction cookers. Lily deserves high praise for the quiet revolution she has led in Victoria, changing the production of electricity towards renewables and, more recently, with the phaseout of fossil fuels in domestic appliances, all with significant success. Quiet revolutions too, can be an example of quality.

Doh! moment in sysadminning

Oct. 23rd, 2025 08:25 am
pvaneynd: (Default)
[personal profile] pvaneynd
PSA:
This morning I noticed that needrestart was not telling me to reload, which was strange, given the latest security update of intel-microcode

A bit of searching revealed that a long time ago I had set APT::Default-Release "stable";, which will prevent apt from upgrading to security packages!

Removing this fixed the issue of course. Now to reload the server...

Review: Politics on the Edge

Oct. 22nd, 2025 09:47 pm
[syndicated profile] eaglespath_feed

Review: Politics on the Edge, by Rory Stewart

Publisher: Penguin Books
Copyright: 2023, 2025
Printing: 2025
ISBN: 979-8-217-06167-9
Format: Kindle
Pages: 429

Rory Stewart is a former British diplomat, non-profit executive, member of Parliament, and cabinet minister. Politics on the Edge is a memoir of his time in the UK Parliament from 2019 to 2019 as a Tory (Conservative) representing the Penrith and The Border constituency in northern England. It ends with his failed run against Boris Johnson for leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister.

This book provoked many thoughts, only some of which are about the book. You may want to get a beverage; this review will be long.

Since this is a memoir told in chronological order, a timeline may be useful. After Stewart's time as a regional governor in occupied Iraq (see The Prince of the Marshes), he moved to Kabul to found and run an NGO to preserve traditional Afghani arts and buildings (the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, about which I know nothing except what Stewart wrote in this book). By his telling, he found that work deeply rewarding but thought the same politicians who turned Iraq into a mess were going to do the same to Afghanistan. He started looking for ways to influence the politics more directly, which led him first to Harvard and then to stand for Parliament.

The bulk of this book covers Stewart's time as MP for Penrith and The Border. The choice of constituency struck me as symbolic of Stewart's entire career: He was not a resident and had no real connection to the district, which he chose for political reasons and because it was the nearest viable constituency to his actual home in Scotland. But once he decided to run, he moved to the district and seems sincerely earnest in his desire to understand it and become part of its community. After five years as a backbencher, he joined David Cameron's government in a minor role as Minister of State in the Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs. He then bounced through several minor cabinet positions (more on this later) before being elevated to Secretary of State for International Development under Theresa May. When May's government collapsed during the fight over the Brexit agreement, he launched a quixotic challenge to Boris Johnson for leader of the Conservative Party.

I have enjoyed Rory Stewart's writing ever since The Places in Between. This book is no exception. Whatever one's other feelings about Stewart's politics (about which I'll have a great deal more to say), he's a talented memoir writer with an understated and contemplative style and a deft ability to shift from concrete description to philosophical debate without bogging down a story. Politics on the Edge is compelling reading at the prose level. I spent several afternoons happily engrossed in this book and had great difficulty putting it down.

I find Stewart intriguing since, despite being a political conservative, he's neither a neoliberal nor any part of the new right. He is instead an apparently-sincere throwback to a conservatism based on epistemic humility, a veneration of rural life and long-standing traditions, and a deep commitment to the concept of public service. Some of his principles are baffling to me, and I think some of his political views are obvious nonsense, but there were several things that struck me throughout this book that I found admirable and depressingly rare in politics.

First, Stewart seems to learn from his mistakes. This goes beyond admitting when he was wrong and appears to include a willingness to rethink entire philosophical positions based on new experience.

I had entered Iraq supporting the war on the grounds that we could at least produce a better society than Saddam Hussein's. It was one of the greatest mistakes in my life. We attempted to impose programmes made up by Washington think tanks, and reheated in air-conditioned palaces in Baghdad — a new taxation system modelled on Hong Kong; a system of ministers borrowed from Singapore; and free ports, modelled on Dubai. But we did it ultimately at the point of a gun, and our resources, our abstract jargon and optimistic platitudes could not conceal how much Iraqis resented us, how much we were failing, and how humiliating and degrading our work had become. Our mission was a grotesque satire of every liberal aspiration for peace, growth and democracy.

This quote comes from the beginning of this book and is a sentiment Stewart already expressed in The Prince of the Marshes, but he appears to have taken this so seriously that it becomes a theme of his political career. He not only realized how wrong he was on Iraq, he abandoned the entire neoliberal nation-building project without abandoning his belief in the moral obligation of international aid. And he, I think correctly, identified a key source of the error: an ignorant, condescending superiority that dismissed the importance of deep expertise.

Neither they, nor indeed any of the 12,000 peacekeepers and policemen who had been posted to South Sudan from sixty nations, had spent a single night in a rural house, or could complete a sentence in Dinka, Nuer, Azande or Bande. And the international development strategy — written jointly between the donor nations — resembled a fading mission statement found in a new space colony, whose occupants had all been killed in an alien attack.

Second, Stewart sincerely likes ordinary people. This shone through The Places in Between and recurs here in his descriptions of his constituents. He has a profound appreciation for individual people who have spent their life learning some trade or skill, expresses thoughtful and observant appreciation for aspects of local culture, and appears to deeply appreciate time spent around people from wildly different social classes and cultures than his own. Every successful politician can at least fake gregariousness, and perhaps that's all Stewart is doing, but there is something specific and attentive about his descriptions of other people, including long before he decided to enter politics, that makes me think it goes deeper than political savvy.

Third, Stewart has a visceral hatred of incompetence. I think this is the strongest through-line of his politics in this book: Jobs in government are serious, important work; they should be done competently and well; and if one is not capable of doing that, one should not be in government. Stewart himself strikes me as an insecure overachiever: fiercely ambitious, self-critical, a bit of a micromanager (I suspect he would be difficult to work for), but holding himself to high standards and appalled when others do not do the same. This book is scathing towards multiple politicians, particularly Boris Johnson whom Stewart clearly despises, but no one comes off worse than Liz Truss.

David Cameron, I was beginning to realise, had put in charge of environment, food and rural affairs a Secretary of State who openly rejected the idea of rural affairs and who had little interest in landscape, farmers or the environment. I was beginning to wonder whether he could have given her any role she was less suited to — apart perhaps from making her Foreign Secretary. Still, I could also sense why Cameron was mesmerised by her. Her genius lay in exaggerated simplicity. Governing might be about critical thinking; but the new style of politics, of which she was a leading exponent, was not. If critical thinking required humility, this politics demanded absolute confidence: in place of reality, it offered untethered hope; instead of accuracy, vagueness. While critical thinking required scepticism, open-mindedness and an instinct for complexity, the new politics demanded loyalty, partisanship and slogans: not truth and reason but power and manipulation. If Liz Truss worried about the consequences of any of this for the way that government would work, she didn't reveal it.

And finally, Stewart has a deeply-held belief in state capacity and capability. He and I may disagree on the appropriate size and role of the government in society, but no one would be more disgusted by an intentional project to cripple government in order to shrink it than Stewart.

One of his most-repeated criticisms of the UK political system in this book is the way the cabinet is formed. All ministers and secretaries come from members of Parliament and therefore branches of government are led by people with no relevant expertise. This is made worse by constant cabinet reshuffles that invalidate whatever small amounts of knowledge a minister was able to gain in nine months or a year in post. The center portion of this book records Stewart's time being shuffled from rural affairs to international development to Africa to prisons, with each move representing a complete reset of the political office and no transfer of knowledge whatsoever.

A month earlier, they had been anticipating every nuance of Minister Rogerson's diary, supporting him on shifts twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. But it was already clear that there would be no pretence of a handover — no explanation of my predecessor's strategy, and uncompleted initiatives. The arrival of a new minister was Groundhog Day. Dan Rogerson was not a ghost haunting my office, he was an absence, whose former existence was suggested only by the black plastic comb.

After each reshuffle, Stewart writes of trying to absorb briefings, do research, and learn enough about his new responsibilities to have the hope of making good decisions, while growing increasingly frustrated with the system and the lack of interest by most of his colleagues in doing the same. He wants government programs to be successful and believes success requires expertise and careful management by the politicians, not only by the civil servants, a position that to me both feels obviously correct and entirely at odds with politics as currently practiced.

I found this a fascinating book to read during the accelerating collapse of neoliberalism in the US and, to judge by current polling results, the UK. I have a theory that the political press are so devoted to a simplistic left-right political axis based on seating arrangements during the French Revolution that they are missing a significant minority whose primary political motivation is contempt for arrogant incompetence. They could be convinced to vote for Sanders or Trump, for Polanski or Farage, but will never vote for Biden, Starmer, Romney, or Sunak.

Such voters are incomprehensible to those who closely follow and debate policies because their hostile reaction to the center is not about policies. It's about lack of trust and a nebulous desire for justice. They've been promised technocratic competence and the invisible hand of market forces for most of their lives, and all of it looks like lies. Everyday living is more precarious, more frustrating, more abusive and dehumanizing, and more anxious, despite (or because of) this wholehearted embrace of economic "freedom." They're sick of every complaint about the increasing difficulty of life being met with accusations about their ability and work ethic, and of being forced to endure another round of austerity by people who then catch a helicopter ride to a party on some billionaire's yacht.

Some of this is inherent in the deep structural weaknesses in neoliberal ideology, but this is worse than an ideological failure. The degree to which neoliberalism started as a project of sincere political thinkers is arguable, but that is clearly not true today. The elite class in politics and business is now thoroughly captured by people whose primary skill is the marginal manipulation of complex systems for their own power and benefit. They are less libertarian ideologues than narcissistic mediocrities. We are governed by management consultants. They are firmly convinced their organizational expertise is universal, and consider the specific business of the company, or government department, irrelevant.

Given that context, I found Stewart's instinctive revulsion towards David Cameron quite revealing. Stewart, later in the book, tries to give Cameron some credit by citing several policy accomplishments and comparing him favorably to Boris Johnson (which, true, is a bar Cameron probably flops over). But I think Stewart's baffled astonishment at Cameron's vapidity says a great deal about how we have ended up where we are. This last quote is long, but I think it provides a good feel for Stewart's argument in this book.

But Cameron, who was rumoured to be sceptical about nation-building projects, only nodded, and then looking confidently up and down the table said, "Well, at least we all agree on one extremely straightforward and simple point, which is that our troops are doing very difficult and important work and we should all support them."

It was an odd statement to make to civilians running humanitarian operations on the ground. I felt I should speak. "No, with respect, we do not agree with that. Insofar as we have focused on the troops, we have just been explaining that what the troops are doing is often futile, and in many cases making things worse." Two small red dots appeared on his cheeks. Then his face formed back into a smile. He thanked us, told us he was out of time, shook all our hands, and left the room.

Later, I saw him repeat the same line in interviews: "the purpose of this visit is straightforward... it is to show support for what our troops are doing in Afghanistan". The line had been written, in London, I assumed, and tested on focus groups. But he wanted to convince himself it was also a position of principle.

"David has decided," one of his aides explained, when I met him later, "that one cannot criticise a war when there are troops on the ground."

"Why?"

"Well... we have had that debate. But he feels it is a principle of British government."

"But Churchill criticised the conduct of the Boer War; Pitt the war with America. Why can't he criticise wars?"

"British soldiers are losing their lives in this war, and we can't suggest they have died in vain."

"But more will die, if no one speaks up..."

"It is a principle thing. And he has made his decision. For him and the party."

"Does this apply to Iraq too?"

"Yes. Again he understands what you are saying, but he voted to support the Iraq War, and troops are on the ground."

"But surely he can say he's changed his mind?"

The aide didn't answer, but instead concentrated on his food. "It is so difficult," he resumed, "to get any coverage of our trip." He paused again. "If David writes a column about Afghanistan, we will struggle to get it published."

"But what would he say in an article anyway?" I asked.

"We can talk about that later. But how do you get your articles on Afghanistan published?"

I remembered how the US politicians and officials had shown their mastery of strategy and detail. I remembered the earnestness of Gordon Brown when I had briefed him on Iraq. Cameron seemed somehow less serious. I wrote as much in a column in the New York Times, saying that I was afraid the party of Churchill was becoming the party of Bertie Wooster.

I don't know Stewart's reputation in Britain, or in the constituency that he represented. I know he's been accused of being a self-aggrandizing publicity hound, and to some extent this is probably true. It's hard to find an ambitious politician who does not have that instinct. But whatever Stewart's flaws, he can, at least, defend his politics with more substance than a corporate motto. One gets the impression that he would respond favorably to demonstrated competence linked to a careful argument, even if he disagreed. Perhaps this is an illusion created by his writing, but even if so, it's a step in the right direction.

When people become angry enough at a failing status quo, any option that promises radical change and punishment for the current incompetents will sound appealing. The default collapse is towards demagogues who are skilled at expressing anger and disgust and are willing to promise simple cures because they are indifferent to honesty. Much of the political establishment in the US, and possibly (to the small degree that I can analyze it from an occasional news article) in the UK, can identify the peril of the demagogue, but they have no solution other than a return to "politics as usual," represented by the amoral mediocrity of a McKinsey consultant. The rare politicians who seem to believe in something, who will argue for personal expertise and humility, who are disgusted by incompetence and have no patience for facile platitudes, are a breath of fresh air.

There are a lot of policies on which Stewart and I would disagree, and perhaps some of his apparent humility is an affectation from the rhetorical world of the 1800s that he clearly wishes he were inhabiting, but he gives the strong impression of someone who would shoulder a responsibility and attempt to execute it with competence and attention to detail. He views government as a job, where coworkers should cooperate to achieve defined goals, rather than a reality TV show. The arc of this book, like the arc of current politics, is the victory of the reality TV show over the workplace, and the story of Stewart's run against Boris Johnson is hard reading because of it, but there's a portrayal here of a different attitude towards politics that I found deeply rewarding.

If you liked Stewart's previous work, or if you want an inside look at parliamentary politics, highly recommended. I will be thinking about this book for a long time.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Review: Space Trucker Jess

Oct. 20th, 2025 08:36 pm
[syndicated profile] eaglespath_feed

Review: Space Trucker Jess, by Matthew Kressel

Publisher: Fairwood Press
Copyright: July 2025
ISBN: 1-958880-27-2
Format: Kindle
Pages: 472

Space Trucker Jess is a stand-alone far-future space fantasy novel.

Jess is a sixteen-year-old mechanic working grey-market jobs on Chadeisson Station with a couple of younger kids. She's there because her charming and utterly unreliable father got caught running a crypto scam and is sitting in detention. This was only the latest in a long series of scams, con jobs, and misadventures she's been dragged through since her mother disappeared without a word. Jess is cynical, world-weary, and infuriated by her own sputtering loyalty to her good-for-nothing dad.

What Jess wants most in the universe is to own a CCM 6454 Spark Megahauler, the absolute best cargo ship in the universe according to Jess. She should know; she's worked on nearly every type of ship in existence. With her own ship, she could make a living hauling cargo, repairing her own ship, and going anywhere she wants, free of her father and his endless schemes. (A romantic relationship with her friend Leurie would be a nice bonus.)

Then her father is taken off the station on a ship leaving the galactic plane, no one will tell her why, and all the records of the ship appear to have been erased.

Jess thinks her father is an asshole, but that doesn't mean she can sit idly by when he disappears. That's how she ends up getting in serious trouble with station security due to some risky in-person sleuthing, followed by an expensive flight off the station with a dodgy guy and a kid in a stolen spaceship.

The setup for this book was so great. Kressel felt the need to make up a futuristic slang for Jess and her friends to speak, which rarely works as well as the author expects and does not work here, but apart from that I was hooked. Jess is sarcastic, blustery, and a bit of a con artist herself, but with the idealistic sincerity of someone who knows that her life is been kind of broken and understands the value of friends. She's profoundly cynical in the heartbreakingly defensive way of a sixteen-year-old with a rough life. I have a soft spot in my heart for working-class science fiction (there isn't nearly enough of it), and there are few things I enjoy more than reading about the kind of protagonist who has Opinions about starship models and a dislike of shoddy work. I think this is the only book I've bought solely on the basis of one of the Big Idea blog posts John Scalzi hosts.

I really wish this book had stuck with the setup instead of morphing into a weird drug-enabled mystical space fantasy, to which Jess's family is bizarrely central.

SPOILERS below because I can't figure out how to rant about what annoyed me without them. Search for the next occurrence of spoilers to skip past them.

There are three places where this book lost me. The first was when Jess, after agreeing to help another kid find his father, ends up on a world obsessed with a religious cult involving using hallucinatory drugs to commune with alien gods. Jess immediately flags this as unbelievable bullshit and I was enjoying her well-founded cynicism until Kressel pulls the rug out from under both Jess and the reader by establishing that this new-age claptrap is essentially true.

Kressel does try to put a bit of a science fiction gloss on it, but sadly I think that effort was unsuccessful. Sometimes absurdly powerful advanced aliens with near-telepathic powers are part of the fun of a good space opera, but I want the author to make an effort to connect the aliens to plausibility or, failing that, at least avoid sounding indistinguishable from psychic self-help grifters or religious fantasy about spiritual warfare. Stargate SG-1 and Babylon 5 failed on the first part but at least held the second line. Kressel gets depressingly close to Seth territory, although at least Jess is allowed to retain some cynicism about motives.

The second, related problem is that Jess ends up being a sort of Chosen One, which I found intensely annoying. This may be a fault of reader expectations more than authorial skill, but one of the things I like to see in working-class science fiction is for the protagonist to not be absurdly central to the future of the galaxy, or to at least force themselves into that position through their own ethics and hard work. This book turns into a sort of quest story with epic fantasy stakes, which I thought was much less interesting than the story the start of the book promised and which made Jess a less interesting character.

Finally, this is one of those books where Jess's family troubles and the plot she stumbles across turn into the same plot. Space Trucker Jess is far from alone in having that plot structure, and that's the problem. I'm not universally opposed to this story shape, but Jess felt like the wrong character for it. She starts the story with a lot of self-awareness about how messed up her family dynamics were, and I was rooting for her to find some space to construct her own identity separate from her family. To have her family turn out to be central not only to this story but to the entire galaxy felt like it undermined that human core of the story, although I admit it's a good analogy to the type of drama escalation that dysfunctional families throw at anyone attempting to separate from them.

Spoilers end here.

I rather enjoyed the first third of this book, despite being a bit annoyed at the constructed slang, and then started rolling my eyes and muttering things about the story going off the rails. Jess is a compelling enough character (and I'm stubborn enough) that I did finish the book, so I can say that I liked the very end. Kressel does finally arrive at the sort of story that I wanted to read all along. Unfortunately, I didn't enjoy the path he took to get there.

I think much of my problem was that I wanted Jess to be a more defiant character earlier in the novel, and I wanted her family problems to influence her character growth but not be central to her story. Both of these may be matters of opinion and an artifact of coming into the book with the wrong assumptions. If you are interested in a flawed and backsliding effort to untangle one's identity from a dysfunctional family and don't mind some barely-SF space mysticism and chosen one vibes, it's possible this book will click with you. It's not one that I can recommend, though.

I still want the book that I hoped I was getting from that Big Idea piece.

Rating: 4 out of 10

Where are we on X Chat security?

Oct. 20th, 2025 03:45 pm
[personal profile] mjg59
AWS had an outage today and Signal was unavailable for some users for a while. This has confused some people, including Elon Musk, who are concerned that having a dependency on AWS means that Signal could somehow be compromised by anyone with sufficient influence over AWS (it can't). Which means we're back to the richest man in the world recommending his own "X Chat", saying The messages are fully encrypted with no advertising hooks or strange “AWS dependencies” such that I can’t read your messages even if someone put a gun to my head.

Elon is either uninformed about his own product, lying, or both.

As I wrote back in June, X Chat genuinely end-to-end encrypted, but ownership of the keys is complicated. The encryption key is stored using the Juicebox protocol, sharded between multiple backends. Two of these are asserted to be HSM backed - a discussion of the commissioning ceremony was recently posted here. I have not watched the almost 7 hours of video to verify that this was performed correctly, and I also haven't been able to verify that the public keys included in the post were the keys generated during the ceremony, although that may be down to me just not finding the appropriate point in the video (sorry, Twitter's video hosting doesn't appear to have any skip feature and would frequently just sit spinning if I tried to seek to far and I should probably just download them and figure it out but I'm not doing that now). With enough effort it would probably also have been possible to fake the entire thing - I have no reason to believe that this has happened, but it's not externally verifiable.

But let's assume these published public keys are legitimately the ones used in the HSM Juicebox realms[1] and that everything was done correctly. Does that prevent Elon from obtaining your key and decrypting your messages? No.

On startup, the X Chat client makes an API call called GetPublicKeysResult, and the public keys of the realms are returned. Right now when I make that call I get the public keys listed above, so there's at least some indication that I'm going to be communicating with actual HSMs. But what if that API call returned different keys? Could Elon stick a proxy in front of the HSMs and grab a cleartext portion of the key shards? Yes, he absolutely could, and then he'd be able to decrypt your messages.

(I will accept that there is a plausible argument that Elon is telling the truth in that even if you held a gun to his head he's not smart enough to be able to do this himself, but that'd be true even if there were no security whatsoever, so it still says nothing about the security of his product)

The solution to this is remote attestation - a process where the device you're speaking to proves its identity to you. In theory the endpoint could attest that it's an HSM running this specific code, and we could look at the Juicebox repo and verify that it's that code and hasn't been tampered with, and then we'd know that our communication channel was secure. Elon hasn't done that, despite it being table stakes for this sort of thing (Signal uses remote attestation to verify the enclave code used for private contact discovery, for instance, which ensures that the client will refuse to hand over any data until it's verified the identity and state of the enclave). There's no excuse whatsoever to build a new end-to-end encrypted messenger which relies on a network service for security without providing a trustworthy mechanism to verify you're speaking to the real service.

We know how to do this properly. We have done for years. Launching without it is unforgivable.

[1] There are three Juicebox realms overall, one of which doesn't appear to use HSMs, but you need at least two in order to obtain the key so at least part of the key will always be held in HSMs

AWS outage

Oct. 20th, 2025 10:11 am
alierak: (Default)
[personal profile] alierak posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance
DW is seeing some issues due to today's Amazon outage. For right now it looks like the site is loading, but it may be slow. Some of our processes like notifications and journal search don't appear to be running and can't be started due to rate limiting or capacity issues. DW could go down later if Amazon isn't able to improve things soon, but our services should return to normal when Amazon has cleared up the outage.

Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.

Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.

No Kings 18 October 2025

Oct. 19th, 2025 01:55 pm
infrogmation: (FrogMan)
[personal profile] infrogmation
First let me say how very pleased I am that frogs are now a symbol of resistance to tyranny.

And not just because it's convenient for my existing wardrobe and props.

St Chas No Kings Frog (crop)

The main No Kings rally for New Orleans was on Lafitte Greenway Great Lawn. I saw a smaller rally was scheduled for St. Charles Avenue in front of Audubon Park. Ms H and I planned to go to that one, mostly as it looked much easier with our partial disabilities; it was much closer as well. Shortly before we were to go out Ms H said she was not really feeling up to going out today, so I drove there on my own.

This satellite rally was even smaller than I expected, with about 20 people when I arrived (including 2 inflatable unicorn costumes), gradually growing to about 30 by the time I left half an hour later.

No Kings New Orleans

Still it was good that it was there, as passing cars honked approval, people waved and thumbs-upped from tour buses, and streetcar riders erupted into cheers while passing. The more No Kings in more places, the better!

Since I was on my own, I then drove out to the main rally, as expected no places to park right near by, but I watched from various places around the periphery in my car (and at a couple places where I could stop for a good while elevating my frog umbrella out the window).

No Kings protest, New Orleans

Lafitte Greenway No Kings signs 2025 (crop)

NOLA com (aka the Picayune Paper) gave an estimate of the main rally as 12,000 people. Impressive! While that's good in "blue" New Orleans, I'm even more heartened by news of smaller but significant rallies in deep "red" areas, including Steve Scalise and Magat Mike Johnson's districts. Reportedly over 7 million nation wide!

Meanwhile, the Felon-in-Chief, or whoever is running his social media, posted an AI video (no, I'm not going to link it, you can find it if you really must) depicting Trump wearing a royal crown piloting a military jet labeled "King Trump" bombing crowds of Americans in cities with feces. Really. In anything close to normal times, that sort of depiction would be considered a rather vicious editorial attack *against* the POTUS. Somehow they think this is positive? Another example of how far gone over the edge they have become - along with those repeating the talking point that opposition to Trump is "paid protesters". They can't even conceive of people voluntarily standing up for the USA and freedom. Their minds can't comprehend that other people might want to do good without being bribed.

This called to mind something from WH Auden’s review of Lord of the Rings:
"Evil, that is, has every advantage but one—it is inferior in imagination. Good can imagine the possibility of becoming evil [...] but Evil, defiantly chosen, can no longer imagine anything but itself."

Once upon a time, Windows looked good

Oct. 19th, 2025 06:43 pm
liam_on_linux: (Default)
[personal profile] liam_on_linux
No, honest, it did.

Windows 2 was kinda ugly.

https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win203

Windows 3/3.1/3.11 were fine.

https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win30

Muted, boring, but you could look at it all day. And we did.

95 improved it.

https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win95osr2

Tasteful greys, spot colour.

NT 4 improved that a bit more.

https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/winnt40

Categorised Start menu, for instance. But nearly identical.

95/NT4 were visibly inspired by NeXTstep, IMHO the most beautiful GUI ever written.

Then it all started to go a bit wrong. The first pebbles bouncing down the mountainside presaging a vast avalanche.

Windows 98.

https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win98

IE4 built in so Microsoft didn't get broken up my the US DOJ. Explorer rendered local content via HTML. Ugly extra toolbars. Some floating, some embedded in the task bar. Ugly gradients and blends in window title bars.

Cheap and plastic and tacky.

But that is around the time that media and gaming PCs went mainstream, home internet use (often over dialup) went mainstream, and the alternatives died out (Amiga, ST & GEM, Arm & RISC OS) or very nearly died (classic MacOS, NeXT merger, Rhapsody).

So it's what many saw first and loved and remembered.

Result, people write entire new OSes designed in affectionate homage:

https://serenityos.org/

Look at the toolbars. Look at the textures in the title bars. This isn't Win9x, this is specifically Win98.

https://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/KDE%201-x/i...

Specifically:

https://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/KDE%201-x/h...

<- textured title bars

https://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/KDE%201-x/t...

<- gradients in title bars

https://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/KDE%201-x/m...

<- Windows-style colour schemes

KDE started out as a reproduction of Windows 98/98SE by a team who didn't realise that what they were looking at was WordPerfect 5.x instead of WordPerfect 4.x -- as the late great Guy Kewney put it:

"WordPerfect 4.2 was a bicycle. A great bicycle. Everyone agreed it was a great bicycle, just about the best. So what Wordperfect did was, they put together a committee, looked at the market, and said: 'what we'll do is, we'll put 11 more wheels on it'."

Win98 is Win95 festooned with pointless needless Internet widgetry because the DOJ was about to split MS into separate apps and OS companies, because MS drove Netscape into bankruptcy by bundling IE free of charge with Windows.

Strip all that junk off and what's left underneath is a better UI. But the German kids writing their "Kool Desktop Environment" didn't realise.

After that came WinME and Windows 2000, which turned down the bling a bit as the lawsuit was over, but it was only a blip.

Then came XP with its "Fischer-Price" themes.

Then Vista with gratuitous transparency everywhere because GDI.EXE had been ripped out and replaced with a compositor and that's no fun if you don't use some 3D features like see-through stuff.

Then 7 toned that down a bit and everyone love it.

Then the universally detested Win8, and then that was toned down and the Start menu put back for Win10, which is roughly what UKUI and Deepin copied in China, or Wubuntu in the West.

Then Win11, as copied by AnduinOS and a few others, which for this long-term Windows user is the worst release ever. I can't even have a vertical taskbar any more. It's abhorrent. 

(Content repurposed from here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45626910

Inspired by this:

https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/the-ides-we-had-30-years-ago-and )

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