https://www.androidauthority.com/android-developer-verification-requirements-3590911/

I must reiterate. I really like open systems.

This is the opposite of that. It’s yet more infrastructure for Google to force dependence on Google Play Services in the wider Android ecosystem.

It’s also a great way to kill off a bunch of independent developers that make zero money from their project from publishing software for your platform.

This idea needs to be canned.

Software should not require permission to be written.

Software should not require permission to be distributed.

Software should not have a central entity controlling it.

The future is decentralized, fuck your centralized signature verification checks.

@nigel That's always nice to read! Credits to @alex for writing slidge-whatsapp 🙂

Getting absolutely reamed by AI scrapers again today, and it seemed like my mitigations were failing. Why weren't these being blocked?

Oh. Because I had Facebook's subnets on the fail2ban whitelist, so that people sharing @dnalounge links on the Zuckerweb got link previews.

Welp. You can't whitelist "facebookexternalhit" (the link preview bot) without also whitelisting "meta-externalagent" (the AI scraper, which seems to ignore robots.txt).

I guess link previews are gonna be a casualty.

Huh, why is my / disk full?

Oh:
-rw-------. 1 root root 1104886787 Aug 23 12:29 /var/log/php-fpm/error.log

That's just 6 days worth of AI-scraping bots.

@nigel @chris the #murderbot books are great. I picked up the first one on a whim at The Last Bookstore in Los Angeles 6+ years ago and have read every one since. I hear the Witch King is good, as well.

The TV show does a decent job, but there's so much going on in Murderbot's head that it simply can't do justice to the books.

@GossiTheDog

This remains relevant as ever:

https://theonion.com/guy-who-sucks-at-being-a-person-sees-huge-potential-in-1850488022/

"i use linux as my operating system," i state proudly to the unkempt, bearded man. he swivels around in his desk chair with a devilish gleam in his eyes, ready to mansplain with extreme precision.
"actually," he says with a grin, "linux is just the kernel. you use GNU+linux."
i don't miss a beat and reply with a smirk, "i use alpine, a distro that doesn't include the GNU coreutils, or any other GNU code. it's linux, but it's not GNU+linux."

the smile quickly drops from the man's face. his body begins convulsing and he foams at the mouth as he drop to the floor with a sickly thud. as he writhes around he screams "I-IT WAS COMPILED WITH GCC! THAT MEANS IT'S STILL GNU!"
coolly, i reply "if windows was compiled with gcc, would that make it GNU?" i interrupt his response with "and work is being made on the kernel to make it more compiler-agnostic. even if you were correct, you won't be for long."

with a sickly wheeze, the last of the man's life is ejected from his body. he lies on the floor, cold and limp. i've womansplained him to death.

Miss Crabb: librarian and poet.

I found a postcard in a thrift store and wanted to learn more about the librarian mentioned on it. I did some research. The LLM I consulted afterwards was unhelpful. This is what real research looks like.

https://www.librarian.net/stax/5702/miss-crabb-librarian-and-poet/

bbs enthusiasts might remember the name Telegard - a bbs server written based on wwiv's source code and hugely popular with the ibm pc/ms-dos crowd

telegard had a long and tumultuous history by its authors, and its own source was eventually leaked and was modded into many more popular (pirate-friendly) ms-dos boards like Renegade, Oblivion and Iniquity.

while i was doing research a few months ago on the history of those systems, i found out that telegard.net - the original home of tg - was taken over by a domain squatter in 2010, populated with ads for the past 15 years.

two months ago, i noticed that the squatter had not renewed the domain, and it went into the long grace/redemption/auction/expiry cycle. i checked on it every single morning, and to my absolute delight, it was released this morning for purchase. 💸

the domain will be used purely for historical preservation of telegard and its many descendants

update: restored the old site from the WBM archived version to https://telegard.net

#bbs #warez #softwarePreservation

I'm so old, I can remember a time before the LLM-powered AI hype cycle, when companies would offer an AI-driven feature and it was probably some sort of computer vision project, or building neural networks to analyse the sorts of scientific data that comes in volumes too large for any team of humans.

Those were good times. People might sneer at your AI project because you were expecting miracles from software that couldn't match a human operator, but they'd never hate you for it. This was stuff you'd run for a few hours on your university's aging supercomputer cluster or (if you weren't important enough) very slowly on your departmental laptop. Or you'd split it up into a distributed.net project and ask strangers to donate spare CPU cycles.

LLMs were just the technology behind autocorrect, nobody had thought to spend the budget of small African nations building city-sized data centers to train up bigger LLM models. Nobody knew what "LLM" stood for, outside university computer science departments.

You could tell your friends you were working on an AI project, and they'd be genuinely impressed (if a little confused about what that meant).

Good times.

PSA: The excellent #murderbot series by Martha Wells is available as a Humble Bundle right now, all 7 books in the series + 7 short stories and other novels. DRM-free epub files. Highly recommended.

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/martha-wells-murderbot-and-more-tor-books

"Despite being a powerful and lethal security unit, Murderbot is an extreme introvert. Its primary goal is to be left alone so it can spend its time watching hours of its favorite soap operas and other media. It's highly cynical, sarcastic, and finds human interaction to be awkward and tedious. However, it also finds itself unexpectedly forming bonds with the humans it's supposed to protect, which leads to a lot of internal conflict and reluctant heroism."

#SciFi #bookstodon #books

🤫

#SilentSunday #minimalism
#photography #mastoart

stop using electron. apps weren’t meant to be self-contained web browsers. what the fuck are you doing

why are we making software slower. can we stop doing that

Just happened across a comment on my blog from 8 years ago that has aged like fine milk:

"There are no Nazis getting popular votes right now. Hyperbole is not a good way to reason about the world."

Thanks, past "Well Actually" guy, you have always improved The Discourse.

also yes, i am using "attention all units" as a replacement for "ladies and gentlemen"

✅ it sounds funny
✅ it attracts attention much better than some boring ass phrase from centuries ago
✅ not only it includes enbies and agenders, it also includes robots
✅ it makes you feel like you're in some action film
✅ sonic adventure 2 reference