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.

#random #poem (human)

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…

Daniel Gibson

2025-12-19 17:07:17

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 ✌️

Which of these word processors have you used this month (December 2025)?

#EvanPoll #poll

• Google Docs (35%, 34 votes)
• Microsoft Word (42%, 40 votes)
• LibreOffice or Apache OpenOffice (64%, 61 votes)
• Pages (12%, 12 votes)

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

GitHub - LadybirdBrowser/ladybird: Truly independent web browser

Truly independent web browser. Contribute to LadybirdBrowser/ladybird development by creating an account on GitHub.

^GitHub

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?

GUADEC comes back to Coruña next year!

discourse.gnome.org/t/guadec-2…

GUADEC 2026 will be held in A Coruña, Spain

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.

#polqc

"Subject: New financial contributor to curl: CarGurus ($3,000.00)"

I don't know what CarGurus is, but I love it.

Asked Google about the results of last week's Steelers game and it confidently informed me that they next play on Dec. 28.

(In case you rely on me for the Steelers schedule: They also play tomorrow, the 21st. And they won last week.)

Interested in creating your own synthesizer sounds, or maybe just learning about how that is done? Check out my How to Synth guide for practical, easy-to-follow info and lessons on the major synthesis methods used today!

etherdiver.com/how-to-synth-a-…

#synth #synthesizer #SynthProgramming #SoundDesign #HowToSynth