@pluralistic Every business is a bank now
Sorry your Iphone is bricked until you pay up
techcrunch.com/2025/12/18/appl…
Apple says it can now collect any money a developer owes the tech giant at any time.Sarah Perez (TechCrunch)
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Does anyone have a copy of “Porting Xenix to the Unmapped 8086” by Hare and Thomas? Proceedings of the Winter USENIX Conference 1984.
C’mon. I know one of you has to have a copy.
In the first draft of the Black Mirror episode for this scenario, a Waymo exec has a medical crisis and the ambulance can't get there on time because the streets are choked with Waymos.
In the final script, Waymo invites PG&E employees to their blowout holiday party, with free Waymo pickups. Most of the staff is in those Waymos when the power goes out; they're stuck all over the city, unable to solve the problem.
The episode is called "Vendor Lock-In"
sfba.social/@fadersolo/1157553…
SF’s is having a massive power outage. We ended up having to drive across SF to find a laundromat to dry our soaking wet laundry. Here’s my two observations: every third block is a traffic jam caused by a confused Waymo that doesn’t know how to handle these intersections with no power. Why are the Waymo’s even allowed to drive right now?Also, considering how much of our city’s budget goes to the cops, why aren’t any of them directing traffic? I mean, it’s not like SFPD is busy solving crime…
#SanFrancisco #Waymo #AI #Doom edit: I’m adding #WayMogeddon
SF’s is having a massive power outage. We ended up having to drive across SF to find a laundromat to dry our soaking wet laundry. Here’s my two observations: every third block is a traffic jam caused by a confused Waymo that doesn’t know how to handle these intersections with no power. Why are the Waymo’s even allowed to drive right now?
Also, considering how much of our city’s budget goes to the cops, why aren’t any of them directing traffic? I mean, it’s not like SFPD is busy solving crime…
#SanFrancisco #Waymo #AI #Doom edit: I’m adding #WayMogeddon
A fabulously gay blind author.sightlessscribbles.com
When the lights go out in San Francisco
Where do the Waymos go
To continue their incessant beeping and honking
Circling aimlessly to and fro
How do the tech bros survive their life
With no ChatGPT to consult
How do they even feed themselves
Without delivery drivers to insult?
What happens to all the data centers
When the generators run out of fuel
Does the Internet just shut down
Who will the oligarchs rule?
Maybe we should just keep the lights out
And all go early to bed
Since if we keep the powering the AI machines
We may all end up, dead.
Long discussion on the orange website about the NIST's Boulder NTP site being down. Not a lot of people with practical experience in the topic.
NTP is designed to function as a tree model, rooted in "stratum 0" NTP servers with direct time references. Actual clients are expected to interact with lower-stratum servers that themselves synchronize to higher-stratum servers. Generally any NTP server with a GPS time reference is considered suitable for stratum 0, and the vast, vast majority of real-world NTP/PTP deployments are ultimately working off of one or more GPS references. GPS operates from the Naval Observatory clock via a few different layers of indirection, each of which has its own high-precision oscillators to allow plenty of holdover. Purpose-built stratum 0 servers, used e.g. in data centers, have their own precision reference oscillators for holdover should the GPS lock be lost. Basically any real problem in this space would probably evolve pretty slowly.
The NIST NTP servers have always suffered from high load, to the extent that they've sometimes been unresponsive in the past. Synchronizing devices directly to these NTP servers is a bad practice, discouraged by the NIST and now mostly gone from default configs. That limits the impact of an outage a lot. The authenticated service is intended to help with the load-related reliability issues but presumably its users are sophisticated enough that their stratum-1 will be fine. Most clients are interacting with lower-stratum NTP servers operated by, for example, ntppool.org. These track multiple stratum-0 references and will be fine with the loss of one of the NIST sites.
There are probably still a bunch of stupid clients that try NIST Boulder NTP servers exclusively (I know some old network appliances shipped like this by default), and they might be a little driftier than usual for a while, but I wouldn't expect any of these to be important as they were pretty much already misconfigured.
Big picture, the NTP system is very big and very distributed and the NIST Boulder site has no real significance beyond name recognition---the same name recognition that made it a poor choice for most purposes.
This is how I feel about Firefox too. There's no alternative. No, really, Librewolf is Firefox, who exactly do you think you're sticking it to? And Vivaldi is a proprietary browser built on Google's engine, you're sticking it to nobody but yourself. Oh, you're switching to Servo? Not this decade you're not.
Mozilla CEOs have always been incompetent, but there's no other alternative outside of the direct control of people who are many orders of magnitude worse. We support Firefox or we lose the web.
mastodon.gamedev.place/users/D…
I don't think I'll stop using Firefox anytime soon.
Yes, their management are fucking idiots and it's annoying that I'll have to disable new AI features whenever they release them..But the alternative is to use something Chromium-based, which would make Google's domination of web technology absolute - and Google is 100x more evil than Mozilla ever could be.
I hope this fucking bubble pops before Mozilla fucks up Firefox so badly that it becomes completely unusable
Hey #Mastodon people, the #blogging hashtag is pretty cool because I get to see blog posts from folks I would otherwise not meet. Can you recommend any other hashtags where people share their essays or fiction?
PS: I don't really want a hashtag where people share their thoughts about writing and such. I am inundated with those lol. I want actual pieces so I can find new folks to read ✌️
"Here used to be one the most innovative workstation companies. Now it's an advertising company."
"Here used to be another of the most innovative workstation companies. Now it's also an advertising company."
30 years ago I was viewing SV as a sort of place to go on pilgrimage. (I grew up in Europe)
We backed up Spotify (metadata and music files). It’s distributed in bulk torrents (~300TB). It’s the world’s first “preservation archive” for music which is fully open (meaning it can easily be mirrored by anyone with enough disk space), with 86 mil…annas-archive.li
Happy Holidays from Pneuma Solutions! Have some completely free #remoteIncidentManager usage on us! From now through January 2nd, we're inviting you to try the full run of Remote Incident Manager's capabilities free of charge! Download RIM today and …Pneuma Solutions
Don't want AI in web browser? Alternatives having not (or will not) put in AI:
librewolf.net
floorp.app
zen-browser.app
vivaldi.com
alohabrowser.com (Android)
waterfox.com
mullvad.net/en/browser
dillo-browser.org
falkon.org
wolvic.org/en (XR)
torproject.org (privacy)
Upcoming new:
github.com/LadybirdBrowser/lad…
github.com/servo/servo
gitlab.com/verso-browser
#browsers #noAI #Linux #desktop #mobile
Truly independent web browser. Contribute to LadybirdBrowser/ladybird development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHub
a statement from Vivaldi team:
"Today, as other browsers race to build AI that controls how you experience the web, we are making a clear promise:
We’re taking a stand, choosing humans over hype, and we will not turn the joy of exploring into inactive spectatorship. Without exploration, the web becomes far less interesting."
vivaldi.com/blog/keep-explorin…
Browsing should push you to explore, chase ideas, and make your own decisions. It should light up your brain. Vivaldi is taking a stand. We choose humans over…Jon von Tetzchner (Vivaldi Technologies)
Come to terms with this: you are owned. You are a slave. I am a slave. We're all slaves. Our owners are the ones whose names appear in newspapers, and on our ballots, and on our receipts.
Understand that you are bought and sold, and your wishes are as relevant to public policy as my cats' opinions on free software.
Only when you begin to understand this (and that I am not joking in any way at all, I am 100% deadly serious about this) will you grasp how fucked we all are, and will be, until we either die or fix it.
Which do you want?
reshared this
GUADEC comes back to Coruña next year!
discourse.gnome.org/t/guadec-2…
We are happy to announce that GUADEC 2026 will take place from July 16th to 21st, 2026, in A Coruña, Spain. As in recent years, GUADEC will be held as a hybrid event, allowing attendees to participate either virtually or in person at our venue.GNOME Discourse
This is my big Fuck You to Christian Dubé, the former Québec health minister for wanting everyone to die from COVID. The same one that decided to run Doctors out of the province.
Just to clarify, he is the one that made it so we don't have general free COVID vaccine.
"Subject: New financial contributor to curl: CarGurus ($3,000.00)"
I don't know what CarGurus is, but I love it.
Hubert Figuière
in reply to Rick Scott 🏳️⚧️ • • •Sensitive content