Nostr notes by ティージェーグレェ

Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti? ^_^ What really riles me when I ...

2026-10-28T15:54:31Z

In reply to nevent1q…4gj6
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Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti?

^_^

What really riles me when I see captcha prompts asking: "are you a robot?"

I am like: "Who wants to know? However, yes, I am part of the proletariat! I guess, you, since you're asking, presumably aren't?"

Alas, I don't know who it was (maybe Asimov? Who demeaned "robot" into something to instead be synonymous with mecha and automata [which predated robots by at least centuries, perhaps longer based on some Roman era records] and seemed to erase the whole: "no war, but class war" which was the underlying theme of R.U.R., the play which was the origin story of the term robot. Robot uprising, is a canonical association, not a fluke.)

I mean, I too, as a corporeally incarnated human of the late 20th century, encountered the demeaned phrasing of "robot" with all sorts of toys and Scientific American articles about car factories being filled with "robots" replacing pre-NAFTA auto workers (who would be even further terminated and outsourced to cheaper laborers outside of the USA, after NAFTA). Yet, for some reason I had some relatives who attempted to tell me that "robot" was closer to being synonymous with "slave" as a means to educate me about its etymology and my high school even put on a play of R.U.R.

Oddly, or perhaps not surprisingly? There has never been a film adaptation of R.U.R. as far as I know? We got Will Smith in I, Robot (again, Asimov); we have a multiplicity of Transformers ("Robots in disguise"? Disguised from what I wonder?) movies, yet there remains a glaring omission of a film version of the R.U.R. robot origin story on the silver screen.

Meanwhile, the lived experience, in a society which continues to operate with the predominantly demeaned Asimovian phrasing of robot? Remains: repugnant.

Does this imply the existence of ActivityPumpkinSpice?

2026-10-23T18:53:25Z

In reply to nevent1q…aeve
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Does this imply the existence of ActivityPumpkinSpice?

The whole PKI notion, to me kinda always rubbed me the wrong way? ...

2026-10-20T19:02:55Z

In reply to nevent1q…t5yv
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The whole PKI notion, to me kinda always rubbed me the wrong way? Trust, wait, to whom is trust given to implicitly that I do know?!

(Open)SSH's or SILC's TOFU (Trust On First Use) paradigms, seem to avoid a lot of those sorts of pitfalls; though I suppose it creates a little more friction for users? TOFU paradigms also: don't act as a source of profit as the TLS/SSL CA infrastructure did (until Peter Eckersley [RIP] et al created Let's Encrypt to attempt to mitigate that anti-pattern).

It was kinda "hilarious" when some colleagues of mine managed to get a CA to issue a certificate to *. (e.g. https://eprint.iacr.org/2009/111) what could possibly go wrong?! ;)

Commodore Amiga announcement, black tie event. Andy Warhol using ...

2026-10-13T21:39:38Z

In reply to nevent1q…fmyg
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Commodore Amiga announcement, black tie event.

Andy Warhol using an Amiga to do a realtime color portrait of Blondie.

On prototype hardware.

The designers knew the "fill" function had a bug.

Andy used it, did not crash!

Stuff of legends.

Photoshop didn't even exist yet.

Folks in 2026?

Can they even understand?

Groovy! I'm at YUL waiting on my return flight to SFO ...

2026-10-13T21:32:19Z

In reply to nevent1q…222s
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Groovy!

I'm at YUL waiting on my return flight to SFO (boarding in less than 30 minutes supposedly). I didn't bring a laptop with me.

I probably won't be able to update MacPorts' snac until Thursday? (I will be working two shifts tomorrow so probably not much spare time and still managing to rest).

Hopefully, otherwise it may not happen until Saturday or Sunday given everything else I have scheduled.

In unrelated news: year 2 of AMP Festival was awesome!

Wednesday awake around 6am, worked two shifts, dropped off some ...

2026-10-09T15:57:22Z

Wednesday awake around 6am, worked two shifts, dropped off some excess material objects I didn't have time to put in my storage unit at job 1 with a coworker. Returned rental car, got some dinner, went to SFO, flight to YUL left around 23:32.

Landed in Montreal around 8am Thursday, couldn't check into the hotel until 16:00.

Discovered, much to my dismay: O-Taku Manga Lounge which I enjoyed last year? Has since closed!

Still found ways to fill the day (and my belly) before checking into the hotel. Shaved, realized I needed some things (such as a towel, which I decided, against my Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy better judgment not to pack) did some errands, napped for less than an hour, showered, went to AMP Festival pre party at Cabaret Berlin arriving not too much after the 22:00 start time.

I got to the bar for a sparkling water and Nicky, one of the bartenders asks me: "are you a ninja?" Which I have heard many times, along with: "are you a samurai?" And no, I am also not part of the tax collector caste of the shogunate of centuries past feudal Japan. It turned out, Nicky is Japanese Canadian and we have a wonderful conversation about the history of ethnicities and politics (did you know that the Canadians also interned Japanese Canadians during WWII? I did not! I had assumed that was an idiotic move only of the USA.) Turns out, Nicky is also a musician and in addition to being a percussionist does cymbol repairs (check it: https://trashgoblincymbals.com/index.html)

Being exhausted, I am not really up for dancing (despite being a deejay it really takes some marvelous music to make me move anyway) though I certainly enjoyed the tunes being spun and the eye candy of some dressed (or in various states of undress) to the nines.

Around 00:23 my friend from REcon last year who VJed at AMP last year and will be deejayin as LVX on Sunday shows up, introduces me to some folks, and other AMP Festival organizers, had some more good conversations and heard some more delightful dark tunes. Still very exhausted, a second sparkling water does help with hydration yet not sleep deprivation. The pre party goes until 03:00?

I couldn't keep up and walked back to my humble hotel around 01:30.

I think I only slept for around six hours? Still some rest is better than none!

Not sure how the rest of my morning and afternoon will go. Definitely more vegan food in Montreal, maybe I will manage a nap? Yet I'm looking forward to day 1 of AMP Festival which starts at 18:00, it's not quite noon.

Thankfully I have some time to be a little more leisurely without lugging everything with me at the moment!

Lost my GraphGear 1000 sometime last night (I was writing with it at Cabaret Berlin). Annoyingly, it was the 60th anniversary edition one in black. So, maybe I can find another mechanical pencil at some stationary store? Probably not that one. ;(

Hopefully something else decent?

There's an episode of one of those James Burke shows, ...

2026-10-09T15:36:17Z

In reply to nevent1q…vt34
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There's an episode of one of those James Burke shows, Connections or maybe The Day the Universe Changed: A Personal View where he is in a library, and there are all these leather bound books chained down to a table.

The library itself? Older than the Gutenberg printing press. Each book? Transcribed by hand. Hence the chains: you wouldn't want any of the free readers wandering away with the books after all. Share the wealth of their knowledge, not the material objects.

I still love libraries, yet the primordial libraries were apparently radical in ways the post-its libraries can't compete. ;)

For some reason I am now wondering if a "ridicule" is ...

2026-10-09T15:27:10Z

In reply to nevent1q…fuua
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For some reason I am now wondering if a "ridicule" is some species -cule permutation.

In less code nerdy news, I have seen a lot of concerts ...

2026-10-07T20:17:46Z

In less code nerdy news, I have seen a *lot* of concerts recently!

Thursday night: I saw Joshua Kit Clayton + David Zicarelli at Indexical in Santa Cruz. A little more details about that: https://www.indexical.org/events/2026-10-01-joshua-kit-clayton-david-zicarelli essentially, both have worked for Cycling '74 (Zicarelli is one of the founders) which are known for musical/performance software Max/MSP. David's performance was using a new patch developed to, well I will probably do an awful job at summarizing the description given that evening, yet essentially it takes elements of samples and song structures and similar to what a deejay might do, arranges them in an auditory pleasing manner. Indexical recently upgraded their sound system to a Meyer Sound Laboratories 7.1 speaker set up I guess? David put all the channels to good use in a very surround dynamic in that intimately small space. Joshua was a little less new patch performance and in addition to his laptop, also had some sort of control surface (sorta of like an Akai MPC? I dunno. It had buttons that were glowing touch screens and knobs) and even a video game controller! Reminiscent of the Autechre performance at Regency Ballroom last year, he asked for the venue lights to be turned off and encouraged the audience to close their eyes. He also made mention of the Ghost Ship fire and some of the lives lost therein (I think I knew at least five or six individuals who died in that tragedy) and encouraged those who knew to think about such loved ones' passing as it had been inspirational for him in that composition. Before and afterwards, the small crowd was lively and conversant and I even met a fellow visiting from Barcelona who was familiar with the Mira and Ombra Festivals which I had attended last year. Though, given that I had work early the next day? I couldn't justify sticking around to shoot the breeze and left shortly after the performance concluded.

Friday night: Snarky Puppy at The Paramount in Oakland. I am, unabashedly, a big fan of Skinny Puppy, yet last year at REcon someone asked me if I was familiar with Snarky Puppy? I was not. I am now! Friday night was a 10 person ensemble at a show put on by SF Jazz, though given that I was a somewhat accomplished jazz trumpet player once upon a time? It takes a lot to impress me. Vari (aka Varijashree Venugopal) was the opener and performed in a trio and to my ears at least? Was much more enjoyable! Bangalore jazzy amalgam with some scat (the vocal kind, not the scatological sort) and flutes and other instrumentation. I purchased the Vari CD at the merch table, yet left all the Snarky Puppy merch alone.

Saturday night: I saw Hiromi (jazz pianist) perform at SF Jazz in San Francisco accompanied by her friend and tap dancer Kazunori "Kaz" Kumagai. Really enjoyable set, the crowd gave two standing ovations! (the second one, after their encore)

Later Saturday night, I saw Kreayshawn at DNA Lounge (npub1ac8…fc7j) There are some pictures of her performance here: https://www.dnalounge.com/gallery/2026/10-03/ Her set was, short and sweet, largely the same material she performed at Mosswood Meltdown last summer in Oakland. However, she also included a newer tune, "Biscuit" (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrtvL0zdS5A). Afterwards, I chatted with her deejay TOOPOOR (https://www.too-poor.com/) briefly who was good humored and seemed hella chill. Later online researchin her further I discovered she actually produces some darkwave/goth (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DmnWkGV6y4)

Last night (Tuesday) I saw Kishi Bashi at the Rio Theater in Santa Cruz.

The opener Geographer? I had never heard of before, yet put on a really enjoyable 40 minute set! I ended up basically buying every CD and vinyl release he had for sale at his merch table afterwards and he graciously signed them for me. If I had to attempt to describe his music, it reminded me a little of The Polish Ambassador? He played alto sax, and guitar and some sort of MIDI/OSC controller or drum machine and has some backing synths (the last of which had some qualities which reminded me almost of the chip tunes of the SEGA Master System game Govellius with legendary if obscure, COMPILE composers Masatomo Miyamoto and Takeshi Santo contributing to its score?)

Kishi Bashi, I was mostly familiar with from "I am the Antichrist To You" as introduced to me via [@xorcist_band@mastodon.social](https://mastodon.social/users/xorcist_band ) (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_dGqLzOnhA) however, rather than that symphonic ensemble? Last night the performance was as a quartet, comprised of:

Grant Richards (originally from Milpitas and apparently an old college classmates of Kaoru Dill-Ishibashi, synths, vocoder, also during the acoustic encore I think maybe played like a melodica? Not that I had a good view, since they kinda went into the middle of the crowd and I was on the edges as I tend to prefer, yet that is what it sounded like to my ears.)

Josiah Wolf (drummer, originally from Cincinnati apparently).

Mike "Tall Tall Tree" Savino (originally from Long Island, New York I guess? On electric bass and banjo. When he played banjo, at times he also played it with a bow like a violin/fiddle and percussively with a drum stick? At one point he even played the banjo like an electric guitar, whoa!)

Kaoru Dill-Ishibashi (otherwise known as Kishi Bashi, apparently originally from the East Coast, now lives in Santa Cruz with his wife and hence why they chose to kick off their tour at the Rio Theater. In addition to playing violin/fiddle, he strummed some guitars [electric and acoustic] and seemed to be using a looper).

The performance started as the four piece jam band, though after maybe an hour and change, Kishi Bashi did some solo performances, including "I am the Antichrist To You" using a looper and violin to layer his individual instrumentation into something approximating a symphony! Really impressive. Later, as Kishi Bashi phrased it, he "got the band back together" and the other members returned to the stage. When they performed an encore, all the lights of the venue were turned off and they went into the crowd and encouraged the audience to use their cell phone lights while they serenaded everyone with a couple of acoustic tunes. I think they took the stage around 21:00 and they concluded at around 22:58! With maybe only a 5 minute stage exit around 22:48? I suppose the three band members got around 20-30 minutes of recuperation time while Kishi Bashi performed solo.

Oh, I should probably add, there were a couple of mascots which graced the stage too. ハニー(bunny) aka "honey bunny" who mostly danced around, though at one moment also played a small drum set (definitely not a mascot drummer of aplomb such as the renowned にゃんごすたー aka Nyango Star e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UYgORr5Qhg yet still fun in its own way). The other mascot was a worse for wearing looking, Mr. Steak (as Kishi Bashi jokingly observed: "what, we can't find any white gaffer tape!?") and there was some dancing as well as a brief video retrospect of the full life Mr. Steak has apparently led off stage.

Apparently in a few weeks' time Kishi Bashi will perform at the Fillmore in San Francisco! I heard that Geographer will be on the tour at least through the Denver show (which will be at some venue known as the Gothic Theater? The name alone intrigues me.).

Meanwhile, I am working two shifts today and then will take a flight to Montreal late tonight (landing tomorrow morning) for AMP Festival, year two! I was not planning on attending (when I looked into airfare after the dates and tickets were announced many months ago, I observed that all flights were a *least* a few hundred dollars more in USD than my travel expenses were last year, "thanks" to Trump invading Iran and spiking oil prices, globally. I had more or less given up all hope, when I remembered last week that I inherited some frequent flyer miles when my mom passed away in 2020. I have never been a frequent flyer and it was a bit of a thing to set up an account for her bankers to transfer such things to me, yet they had just been sitting unused for years. Admittedly, I do now wonder if prices in mileage would have been "cheaper" if I had remembered such things months ago? Regardless, it only cost me around $60 USD in booking fees out of pocket [well and many tens of thousands of frequent flyer miles]. I am not looking forward to a flight with the timing such as it is, and a middle of the row seat no less! Not to mention I do not think I will be able to check into my hotel until the afternoon, so I will be wandering around Montreal for many hours presumably tomorrow.) I fly back on the 13th, which means I will miss King Mala at The Independent (she performs on the 12th, yet when I looked into a return flight in order to catch that show [since I had already purchased a ticket some time ago] it would have burned through *significantly* more frequent flyer miles. Hopefully, King Mala will tour again and sooner than later? Though I guess she is promoting a debut album this tour? I dunno!)

Lamentably: I miss Author and Punisher at Neck of the Woods as I was feeling pretty out of it that night; and since I saw him perform last Fall? I was maybe less concerned with FOMO? Similarly, I had seen Chelsea Wolfe perform not too long ago, so while I was annoyed I paid for a VIP admission to her show only to miss it due to a fever? I think I'll survive. I remain most annoyed that I was too under the weather after Chillits to attend The Tear Garden performance. I had been looking forward to that one for a while.

Meanwhile, when I was in LA: Thoom was great! Bassvictim, despite being the headliner? I dunno, the levels seemed: off, and way too loud? Some of the openers were OK, though I would have to look up more about them to describe them by name, so I will omit that for now. Brooke Candy at DNA Lounge was a lot of fun, grateful I finally saw her perform live (I was planning to see her on Thursday in Los Angeles the night after the Thoom show, yet that show was postponed until December, and the DNA Lounge show appeared on calendar in the interim, so it was not as if I ended up missing much? Well, other than an opportunity to see Sleep at The Catalyst in Santa Cruz that night, which may have been cool. Though apparently some of the surviving members of The Beastie Boys and their kids performed a show at The Catalyst relatively recently that was awesome? I read about it in The Good Times and overheard some others talking about it at the Kishi Bashi show last night.)

I'm not sure what to expect from AMP Festival this year, most of the performers I do not think I have heard before. Last year was excellent and Montreal is neat and I am really looking forward to escaping the USA, even if it will only be briefly, not even a week, of away time.

I submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' libressl-devel ...

2026-10-07T19:29:20Z

I submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' libressl-devel to 4.4.0rc1 here:

https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/35347

GitHub Continuous Integration checks passed OK. It's up to someone else with commit access to merge it.

#LibreSSL #MacPorts #TLS #TransportLayerSecurity #Encryption #OpenSSL #OpenSource

I submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' LibreSSL to ...

2026-10-07T19:28:50Z

I submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' LibreSSL to 4.3.3 here:

https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/35348

GitHub Continuous Integration checks passed OK. It's up to someone else with commit access to merge it.

#LibreSSL #MacPorts #TLS #TransportLayerSecurity #Encryption #OpenSSL #OpenSource

I submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' OpenSSH to ...

2026-10-07T19:27:08Z

I submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' OpenSSH to 10.6p1 here:

https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/35346

GitHub Continuous Integration checks passed OK. It's up to someone else with commit access to merge it.

(I am less certain what to do about the sandboxing support removal mentioned by [@brynet@bsd.network](https://bsd.network/users/brynet ) believe it or not, I kinda despise Apple and macOS; yet I figure down streaming things for others since I am doing it myself is hopefully beneficial? If I am going to have to get more into the internals of a proprietary for-profit OS from a company that has trillions [plural] in its market cap? I kinda feel as if they may actually be able to afford to employ folks to do this stuff and I am less certain I want to be among them? Particularly given that supposedly in recent years, Apple has become subsumed to some degree by Unit 8200 [e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc-iH5GEPJ8&t=480s] like the politics and optics of all that are, awful [Unit 8200 are Israeli spies, essentially]; and probably also a big part of why the new Apple Watch is Big Brother "always listening" as just one example of how the company professing to be privacy focused, in practice: is more like 1984's double-speak in 2026. If you can, I would sincerely encourage you to use OpenSSH on OpenBSD!)

#OpenSSH #MacPorts #SecureShell #macOS #Encryption #OpenSource

"Online poker. Wiped out overnight in 2011." I don't ...

2026-09-19T23:09:59Z

In reply to nevent1q…gsmg
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"Online poker. Wiped out overnight in 2011."

I don't gamble, yet a perfunctory search, seems to reveal vast swaths of online poker gambling sites, still, in 2026.

So, "wiped out"? Maybe, for a night? In 2011? It certainly did not seem to last.

Again, I do not gamble, so I can't tell you anything about stocks, let alone penny stocks.

Yet Yahoo! Finance, seems to tally various penny stocks, again, in 2026:

https://finance.yahoo.com/research-hub/screener/most_active_penny_stocks/

Standard Oil, which has successor companies so vast, they have their own Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Successors_of_Standard_Oil

?

I am very *very* weary of A"I" so weary that I consider myself a beleaguered survivor of the last so-called "A'I' Winter" and feel doomed to watch others repeat the history from which I already learned lessons from painfully. What I am presently experiencing, isn't synonymous with "peer review" because none of these A"I" company CEOs are my peers. None of them learned fucking jack shit as far as I can discern, and are repeating past mistakes, with bigger budgets and the harms they are causing, aren't merely bad economics, they are actively contributing to the murder of minors, e.g.

"On February 28, 2026, the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, Iran, was struck in a deadly airstrike, sparking intense investigations into whether military artificial intelligence (AI) systems mistakenly flagged the school as a military target."

The tech: is most decidedly: not getting *better*. It was *always* bad, it is getting: demonstrably worse.

"Compute is cheap" is true insomuch as the personal computing revolution made computers economical "for the masses, not the classes" (old Commodore slogan from the 1980s), yet the "cloud" computing of today? Those GPU "token" based A"I" systems promulgated by today's 2026 rehashes of the same old stupid shit?

It's just mainframe timesharing systems, under a different name: nothing new nor revolutionary about it. Same old stupid shit, rebranded, regurgitated, being bought up by morons, apparently.

I have no idea about copyright "losing" insomuch as Disney seems to have extended copyright long beyond its original intended purpose, again: "the law" serving those with money and power and greed, not actually protecting small independent creators in any meaningful sense.

"digital media cannot be trusted to be authentic, the global information sharing economy is now fractured." this seems to completely ignore the stranglehold that streaming media companies (e.g. Amazon, Netflix, etc.) seem to be foisting upon consumers en masse, where Sony routinely removes content that their customers had purchased, and has already announced they will cease manufacturing physical media for a playback device for which they are the sole manufacturers.

I do not think the tech is "getting better and better". Is any of the present, better?

Maybe, for the shareholders.

Certainly not for the users.

Fascinating! I guess having grown up in that local, Steinbeck and ...

2026-09-19T22:47:16Z

In reply to nevent1q…gqru
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Fascinating! I guess having grown up in that local, Steinbeck and Robert Louis Stevenson (I guess he ended up in Monterey, later in life? e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Louis_Stevenson#United_States) were assigned reading when I was younger, so I never developed much of an appreciation for their writings. (Those who force me to do things? Rarely win me over, just the opposite.)

The Steinbeck Center (https://steinbeck.org/) opened in 1998, about four years after I had left the area for college. Though my parents' home continued to remain in nearby Carmel Valley until my mom passed away in 2020. I don't think I have ever stepped foot inside the Center? Though it's rather visible when driving through downtown Salinas. The area overall is relatively rural and was an OK place to grow up, probably the biggest downsides had to do with a lot of overlapping military presence. ;-/

IMHO, folks shouldn't be justifying using SHA1 in any new ...

2026-09-19T22:37:57Z

In reply to nevent1q…zmkw
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IMHO, folks shouldn't be justifying using SHA1 in any new system, particularly in 2026.

Remember when John Gilmore attempted to warn Torvalds against SHA1, in 2005?

e.g. https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2017-February/031623.html

Git eventually got the hint (e.g. https://lwn.net/Articles/898522/ what, sixteen years later?)

Game of Trees (Got) work to support sha256 in a Git compatible manner is mentioned here: https://www.omarpolo.com/post/got-sha256.html (a couple of years ago).

Heck, if you remember advogato (when did that site stop functioning? A long time ago.) I pontificated on using multiple hashes and cyclical redundancy checks as a potential sanity check (this post was from 2005: https://web.archive.org/web/20170629014235/http://www.advogato.org/person/grey/diary/10.html). Sometime, not long after that post, I seem to recall someone released a dumbfounding example of some really neat hash collisions, and (alas, I think by then maybe 2006ish I posted on a livejournal account I later deleted) I showed how a crc32 check between the colliding hashes, still revealed that there was a crc32 mismatch.

FWIW: in the 1990s/early 2000s some parts of the warez scene used to be into utilizing something called "SFV" files which were essentially collections of crc32s (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_file_verification ).

crc32s were not, as far as I know, ever considered a secure cryptographic hash. Nonetheless, they helped recover many a botched ZMODEM transfer and are nothing to sneeze at either.

Also, I am pretty sure that OpenBSD's ports' system has improved since 2005. Similarly, MacPorts (circa 2005 probably still known as DarwinPorts) relies on rmd160 and sha256 and AFAIK, checks both hashes (as well as file size, for sanity).

I would be *extremely* suspicious of anyone, in 2026, attempting to justify SHA1, no matter what they may choose to cite. I'll spare you my personal thoughts on Linus and Linux, yet last I saw Torvalds making headlines, it had something to do with him using LLMs?

Moreover, last I checked, Linux "inherited" (this is being overly generous) the 2038 32bit epoch time bug from o.g. UNIX? Something which OpenBSD remediated by release 5.5. (in May, 2014). No doubt, there are going to be some folks, making money "patching" Linux systems in a dozen years. Personally? I am poor, yet not so morally destitute I would ever *want* to profit off of others' ignorance when folks further ahead of the curve in threat modeling, already did their due diligence, and shared their work openly and freely so that we don't need to repeat the mistakes of the past.

I guess, there are always going to be some, who are going to do things others warn them against doing? I do not have good answers when it comes to such situations, I sincerely wish they would cease.

Awesome, thank you! The man page reference in particular was very ...

2026-09-19T22:10:39Z

In reply to nevent1q…jahv
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Awesome, thank you! The man page reference in particular was very helpful!

(No offense for your East of Eden example, yet it was a little confusing insomuch as I can't see what your raw inputted text was. Though, given that had a publication date of September 19th? Fascinating choice of an example chronologically! Also reminds me of [天外魔境 ZIRIA「tengai makyō: ziria」](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tengai_Maky%C5%8D:_Ziria ) aka "Far East of Eden: Ziria" which an old friend from middle school showed off on his PC Engine CD-ROM² back when we both lived in Monterey County (where Salinas also still exists, though Steinbeck long since passed away and that friend has since moved to Hong Kong).

"Then the law can shut these companies down." I don't ...

2026-09-19T21:19:19Z

In reply to nevent1q…z7uh
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"Then the law can shut these companies down."

I don't mean to diminish Joseph Gordon-Levitt's perspective; insomuch as I think so-called A"I" (and the related companies) is awful.

However: the DOJ began prosecuting AT&T as a monopoly in 1974, AT&T settled: in 1982 and underwent the so-called "divestiture" (breaking up into RBOCs [Region Bell Operating Carriers]) and in the ensuing decades, it has reformed like the radioactive slime mold in comic of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (many, having only watched the animated film, perhaps are unaware of the villainous slime mold in the manga which Miyazaki continued laboring over for another dozen years after the film production had concluded).

Similarly, Alphabet Inc. (aka Google, YouTube, etc.) has been convicted as a monopoly since in 2024.

At least in my experience I really wonder, when Joseph Gordon-Levitt, imagines that "the law" can shut companies down, upon what evidence is he basing that?

I also sometimes seem the popular myth that companies can somehow be "nationalized" as in: for all the corruption and deaths caused by PG&E for example, somehow, they could become a municipal service. I have absolutely no idea where people get these ideas.

At least as far as I have ever observed things in the USA: it is a functioning oligopoly. Money and power, corruption, bribery (they call this "lobbying") all seem to be the prevailing tactics. RCA, driving Edwin Armstrong (inventor of FM radio) to suicide by bribing the FCC to outlaw FM radio, then settling with his widow after the patents expired to only start selling their own FM radios afterwards, seems to be the norm.

When "the law" sides with those who are being exploited? In the USA? Where the police forces in the 21st century, fundamentally, display the same sorts of badges that plantation slave patrols did in the 1800s? (e.g. ), where the 13th Amendment, never outlawed slavery, it merely made it *conditional* insomuch as those "duly convicted" are potentially forced into carceral slavery?

Joseph Gordon-Levitt, seems to imagine, that "the law" is going to do anything to thwart the A"I" bullshit? If anything, from my vantage, it seems far more plausible that unless there are revolutionary reforms made, in the USA, "the law" is much more likely to facilitate A"I" committing many more abuses.

So, unfortunately, it does seem to "add up" alas, for those such as I and presumably you and maybe also Joseph Gordon-Levitt, given that we are not rich and powerful and we care about decency and rights? The deck is stacked against the likes of us.

Sup @npub1ysc…ffqw! I hope you are enjoyin the weekend! Is ...

2026-09-19T19:44:05Z

Sup The Real Grunfink (npub1ysc…ffqw)!

I hope you are enjoyin the weekend!

Is there some escape character I should be using for URLs with trailing right parenthesis?

e.g. https://snac.bsd.cafe/teajaygrey/p/1789846829.572963 has a couple of Wikipedia links, yet the URLs themselves are somewhat, broken, presumably because it looks as if the right ) isn't being included in the a href?

Thank you for any insights!

I wasn't too sure what to expect at this years Chillits. tbh, ...

2026-09-19T18:07:22Z

I wasn't too sure what to expect at this years Chillits.

tbh, I was surprised they contacted me at all. I poured tea at a tipi there about a decade ago. Yet my friend Hunter who invited (and poured tea with me) hasn't replied to my email attempts to communicate in a couple of years. ;( I suspect: Hunter got busy as a new parents and no harm no foul.

Regardless, after some confusing back and forth several months ago wherein I declared: I am not really in a position in my life at the moment to offer much of anything, it was agreed that it was OK for me to "just" attend!

I did see one old cohort from high school (who co-founded the Cloud Factory collective and prior to that I lent my dad's Technics SL-1200MK2 to a party [wherein he also had a Technics SL-1200MK2 and *together* we had TWO thus sufficient for deejayin, whoa!]) and it was nice to catch up with some friendly chit chat. His son recently graduated from college and is working in Shibuya for some cafe (though I guess they're international with 200 some employees?). With talk of turntables and such: he's now got 4 (a few of which were on loan to Chillits) and he expressed similar challenges of vinyl collecting (he is focused more on ambient stuff; which I can only imagine is about as obscure as the sorts of things I tend to procure). He didn't even remember helping me land some job interviews a decade ago (though one of which, for Silicon Graphics did turn into a job offer, which was rescinded, so I guess there wasn't exactly any sort of referral hiring bonus given the circumstances).

I also saw an old coworker from CNEMedia! Which: was very unexpected, though I guess she was at the first Chillits (in 2000?) and hadn't attended for some years. She seemed to think I poured tea with Hunter in 2015? I dunno, I think the emails were from 2016? I am hardly confident I am remembering such things particularly well, and some fluidity with spacetime is honestly: appreciated relative to the more often experienced rigidity. Her friend too: I recognized and remembered, though it had also been many years since we had last crossed paths (maybe 2008ish? 2009? A while ago).

Other than those 3: I knew more or less no one. The fresh air and forests were wonderful and tbh, I think I may have appreciated them even more without any music or people at all? Admittedly, whomever tended to the fire pit created that primal force which I also enjoy seemingly so infrequently now. I arrived about 5 hours after I had hoped (though thankfully still about an hour before my volunteer shift started) in no small part due to running errands beforehand, which included sourcing ingredients for vegan smores (and as an added bonus: gluten free). I do not remember how many years it had been since I last had smores, and improving their ingredients, while certainly adding to the cost? Did seem to improve the flavor and delicious nature of the experience?

There were others, Rochelle and Ryan, who were providing tea service in one of the tipis. Rochelle recalled Hunter, which was a relief for at least some semblance of recognition. Rochelle also rattled off the names of a bunch of other folks when I mentioned my Cloud Factory high school friend, many of whom I don't think I knew? Or at least, never knew particularly well. Ryan: I guess is a DBA? A freelancer DBA! Who had worked on Sybase (yikes! I too have such traumatic memories) and later MS-SQL (even worse?) yet apparently these days "orchestrates" a number of things using Cursor and asked if I used it (and I confirmed, he meant the LLM intermediary tool which I most resoundingly: do not use, conscientiously). I asked him if he was familiar with Symbolics? Alas, he was not (mentioning them as the *first* dot com did not help) and I am guessing me spouting more technobabble about the last so-called "A'I' Winter" was mostly lost on him. ;( His hair: was gray, yet as with many I see using LLMs these days: their knowledge of history of their own field, is distressingly shallow. ;(

A lot of that: I think is intentional?

Why sell people on the dead end of gambling, when everyone knows gambling is bad, so you can just call it a "prediction market" instead!

Why sell people on the dead end of artificial intelligence, when everyone knows AI is bad, so you can just call it a "large language model" instead?

Why sell people on the dead end of bribery, when everyone knows bribery is bad, so you can just call it "lobbying" instead?

etc.

I do not understand how some fail to see the synonyms which seem so painfully obvious to me?

Anyway, as you can guess: it did not feel particularly chill, to have discourse over AI, while at Chillits. ;(

There was a lovely lady, who was wearing "Live Long and Prosper" earrings. We chatted a little about Star Trek and its recent 60th anniversary. That may have been the highlight, for me at least.

As if I needed more reasons to hate IBM PCs (and compatibles). ;)

2026-09-19T17:45:54Z

In reply to nevent1q…qrya
_________________________

As if I needed more reasons to hate IBM PCs (and compatibles). ;)

Chillits was: mostly chill. However, I found myself starting to ...

2026-09-19T17:11:42Z

Chillits was: mostly chill. However, I found myself starting to cough by mid afternoon on Monday, and by Tuesday had a fever going full tilt and have been mostly bed ridden all week.

The fever has subsided, I am still coughing and sniffling.

More annoying (and costly in ways that I can't really afford to be wasteful with given my meager financial realities and profound debts): the VIP tickets I had to see The Tear Garden on Tuesday and Chelsea Wolfe went unused. ;(

I also missed Diavol Strain in SF last night, yet at least I hadn't purchased tickets for that show (and there's maybe a chance they're performing at the Ruby Room in Oakland tonight? I dunno, online information for businesses which only have IG pages instead of websites is dubious at best, and I am still coughing and not particularly likely to want to risk being around others in close proximity; particularly as I have work tomorrow morning).

I cannot overstate how much I despise being sick.

I have a lot of things going wrong for me in this hellish human existence, to understate it. However, some say: "health is wealth" and though I may have thousands in credit card debts, am contending with homelessness, work two jobs, find myself way below the poverty line, have not seen nor communicated with my progeny in years, and myriad other maladies? At least, a lot of the time I am grateful that I at least seem to be relatively healthy.

When that small sliver of a bright side is not something I can acknowledge as being true? When I find myself missing shifts and in such a fever delirium that I didn't even remember correctly when I had rescheduled myself, thus causing confusion to a volunteer at one of my jobs? I do not have the words to express how awful everything else feels in a compounded manner.

I am no expert in contagion. I left Chillits early afternoon on Sunday; maybe it was the smokers outside The Box in Santa Cruz on Sunday evening? Maybe it was food poisoning on Monday afternoon? I was feeling OK until shortly after that meal. Despite spending over an hour at my storage unit re-organizing things that sorely needed doing since there had been an avalanche/collapse of stuff after what appears as if yet another plastic storage bin broke.

Apparently, I am at the point in my existence where: cardboard boxes ceased to be sufficient protection for my meager material possessions, decades ago, requiring plastic storage bins, and now: plastic storage bins are insufficient protection for my meager material possessions, so I guess I will endeavor to research more stainless steel enclosures. Thankfully, for vinyl, after years and years, I have begun to find some preferences from specific manufacturers; they are not cheap, yet some of the vinyl I own (singular), is more expensive new, than just one such container.

I am at a loss for what I may need to invest in as far as more generic stainless steel storage containers to replace the continually breaking plastic storage bins. That will require more research and doubtlessly more money than I can easily budget.

If you live in the USA, maybe this is unsurprising. If you live outside of the USA, it probably seems stupid. Yes, I agree, it is very stupid to exist within a country which has had fewer years of peace in its entire 250 year history, than my own son has been alive. Alas, I have already attempted: unsuccessfully, to expatriate.

Failing that, I guess since I am at war, as an unwilling noncombatant, I will continue to endeavor to protect myself and my material belongings as best I am able, and contend with future failures as I encounter them, just as I have had to contend with countless past failures.

It would be awesome, if I didn't have to contend with inordinate amounts of unmitigated bullshit.

Alas, there is nothing about this material existence which seems particularly awesome.

I submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' OpenSMTPD to ...

2026-09-19T16:59:51Z

I submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' OpenSMTPD to 7.9.0p0 here:

https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/34785

GitHub Continuous Integration checks passed OK!

It's up to someone else with commit access to merge it.

My sincere apologies for the delay in updating this.

As mentioned in the release notes:

"includes also the OpenBSD 7.9 errata 002 and 015 (all the
ones released as of today.)"

Which (to do the legwork of checking https://www.openbsd.org/errata79.html for you) means:

"002: RELIABILITY FIX: June 2, 2026 All architectures
Fixes for a variety of crashing bugs in smtpd(8)."

"015: SECURITY FIX: September 14, 2026 All architectures
In smtpd(8) a custom MDA could execute arbitrary code as an unprivileged recipient user."

#OpenSMTPD #MacPorts #SMTP #email #OpenBSD #macOS #OpenSource

I tried to go too far with updating MacPorts' signify to sync ...

2026-09-05T22:37:52Z

I tried to go too far with updating MacPorts' signify to sync it with upstream's 1.64 release (e.g. https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/usr.bin/signify?sort=File) there is some breakage and stupid me pushed to the wrong branch (I created a new branch locally, yet apparently forgot to check it out as I sometimes do, being an error prone human, so the push with the breakage went to the master branch, which I then reverted *sigh* all up there on GitHub for the world to see).

Meanwhile, there have been some changes upstream which aren't simply resolved by removing the sha2.c file from the Makefile; so it's going to take more effort to rectify and my second shift for the day is over in fewer than 30 minutes, so I don't think that is going to happen!

Could have been worse? At least I didn't tag a new release from the botched push? Still embarrassing to have things which should have stayed as a local screw up, get synced to a publicly viewable repo, particularly with security critical code.

This workflow, I sincerely despise. I doubt I will ever be OK with GitHub. Git is bad enough and in this particular instance as I am also working with CVS it's just kind of staggering when I think back to the decades and decades of coding I have done and how many problems are tripping over the version control tools, instead of actually coding.

Thanks to ...

2026-09-05T21:00:02Z

In reply to nevent1q…5r74
_________________________

Thanks to [@schamschula@mastodon.social](https://mastodon.social/users/schamschula )'s stupendous Saturday speed in merging that Pull Request?

I have no submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' rtorrent to 0.16.22 here:

https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/34532

GitHub Continuous Integration checks passed OK!

It's up to someone else with commit access to merge it.

Of note: these two Pull Requests removed the MacPorts' patches which were recently introduced for older OS versions, since upstream merged those changes. IMHO, it's excellent to experience the receptive collaboration between various disparate libre/free open source projects. Doesn't always happen, sometimes upstream objectives can vary wildly and that is OK too. Yet as a downstream port maintainer, things which simplify the porting and packaging when ameliorated by efforts upstream are situations which I appreciate immensely!

#rtorrent #MacPorts #OpenSource #libtorrent #BitTorrent #torrent #p2p #TUI #ncurses

I submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' libtorrent to ...

2026-09-05T20:43:39Z

I submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' libtorrent to 0.16.22 here:

https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/34531

GitHub Continuous Integration checks passed OK!

It's up to someone else with commit access to merge it.

As with the lesson learned with 0.16.20, I will wait until this Pull Request is merged before submitting a Pull Request for rtorrent to 0.16.22 (I have that diff prepared and tested locally already) so that the necessary library is updated prior to the tool which depends upon the library!

Release notes for rtorrent 0.16.22 can be found here:
https://github.com/rakshasa/rtorrent/releases/tag/v0.16.22

You'll note "gzip.h: fix build with Clang <17 by @aeiouaeiouaeiouaeiouaeiouaeiou" which was submitted via another MacPorts contributor after my previous Pull Requests were merged, fixing builds on older versions of OS X. The Port Health is looking a LOT better:

https://ports.macports.org/port/libtorrent/details/

For libtorrent at least.

For rtorrent? Still room for improvement (essentially everything older than Big Sur appeals to be failing on the buildbots): https://ports.macports.org/port/rtorrent/details/

I thought about adding myself as a maintainer; yet in keeping in alignment with the "not taking on more responsibilities until I am no longer homeless" I think maybe, I will just keep a watchful eye and update as I see changes, rather than shoulder more burden for the time being? I'm 3 days behind upstream, that's still better than a lot of professional paid developers who have homes seem to manage.

#libtorrent #MacPorts #OpenSource #rtorrent #BitTorrent #torrent #p2p #TUI #ncurses

MC68k asm has a special place in my heart; especially in its ...

2026-09-05T19:03:58Z

In reply to nevent1q…ug5f
_________________________

MC68k asm has a special place in my heart; especially in its heydey, though leave it to Treasure's coders to show their 68000 affinities on a title screen.

CC: amen zwa, esq. (npub1gnu…0jmx)

awoo 4\x/00

2026-09-05T17:53:08Z

In reply to nevent1q…lkr5
_________________________

awoo

4\x/00

I submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' got to 0.128 ...

2026-09-05T17:40:49Z

I submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' got to 0.128 here:

https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/34529

GitHub's Continuous Integration checks passed OK!

It's up to someone else with commit access to merge it.

#GameOfTrees #Got #MacPorts #OpenSource #VersionControl #Git

/me suddenly is reminded of the Lucy Daughter of the Devil ...

2026-09-05T00:51:52Z

In reply to nevent1q…csch
_________________________

/me suddenly is reminded of the Lucy Daughter of the Devil Burning Man episode.

I am not sure I understand what you mean? BSDs, have /usr/ports. ...

2026-09-03T03:46:45Z

In reply to nevent1q…ana0
_________________________

I am not sure I understand what you mean?

BSDs, have /usr/ports.

IIRC, OpenBSD's /usr/ports was largely adopted from FreeBSD's /usr/ports in no small part due to Ejovi Nuwere (I think this may still be cited in the manpage?).

Meanwhile jkh (one of the co-founders of FreeBSD) later went on to become a co-founder of DarwinPorts (now known as MacPorts). For a time: MacPorts' Portfiles had additional specifications for intended OS (e.g. FreeBSD was a potential target, and I believe some may have even attempted to use it on Linux?) though such usage and testing largely seems deprecated by MacPorts at large. Essentially, MacPorts can be thought of as something similar to /usr/ports in FreeBSD, yet also adding in precompiled pkg functionality (MacPorts will first attempt to check to see if there is a cached copy of a precompiled binary for a specific Portfile during install, and if one matches the correct OS version and CPU architecture, install that. If it cannot find such a thing, then it will grab the source files and compile locally.).

It remains, to me at least, completely batshit insane that Homebrew came along later as a NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome. Like, I understand Fink to a degree (not: how it predated DarwinPorts, it was there very early! Though has largely fallen into bitrot as far as I can discern?), I even understand pkgsrc (prevalent on NetBSD and DragonFlyBSD, yet attempting to target multiple operating systems), yet brew? With spyware (they call this "telemetry") on by default? (disable it using these instructions: https://docs.brew.sh/Analytics) and only supporting the most recent 3 versions of macOS (in contrast, MacPorts supports versions of OS X going back at least as far as Leopard; though I admit, someone did start "tigerbrew" more recently, presumably because MacPorts finally officially stopped supporting Tiger?).

To me: Homebrew users, seem as if they are ignorant of the larger BSD and OS X/macOS interrelationships?

Like, in Linux land: Everyone knows Linus Torvalds, because he named the project after himself, like a narcissist. In OpenBSD world, Theo has quite a reputation (and a lot of, IMHO, bad takes from folks; but who is patient enough to read coremail and even understand why he forked from NetBSD? Very few I would imagine), yet jkh doesn't really get talked about much. If you know? You know, and folks who know, seem to speak about him very favorably. I was blessed to work with him at iXSystems (previously known as BSDi, now known as TrueNAS) circa 2013. He's an upbeat, no BS kind of person, who seemed rather selfless. I think last year someone gave a presentation on FreeBSD commits, and he's still in the top 10 of all time committers to FreeBSD, despite not having committed to it in twenty years? His contributions are well beyond what most would ever attempt.

So, why not just use MacPorts? I dunno. I guess from the outside, maybe it looks as though MacPorts is not thoroughly utilized? That's because: it doesn't spy on its users, by default. If MacPorts users, choose to, they can install mpstats (e.g. https://ports.macports.org/port/mpstats/details/) yet it appears as if fewer than 1300 users have done so. I don't install mpstats and I am a MacPorts contributor and maintainer of several different Portfiles (I mostly downstream things from OpenBSD tbh, yet every now and then skratch some other itches).

AFAIK, Homebrew has added Linux support (which distros? I have not paid close enough attention to be able to say with any authority), yet again: I have trouble wrapping my head around why Homebrew came into being in the first place. There were alternatives, BSDs, already have built-in ports and packages (something that Apple couldn't necessarily ship and be license compliant as a corporation, hence why DarwinPorts/MacPorts came about to offer something less "official" yet still sufficient. Moreover, it seems as if jkh et al did due diligence to improve upon some of FreeBSD's ports and packages [by unifying the experience to some degree, making it less important for and end user whether they were installing a binary or building from source as that is automated more or less]. Until 2016, Apple even hosted the buildbot infrastructure for MacPorts. Lamentably, the project started relying heavily on GitHub after that. The buildbots are now run by volunteers on some rather constrained hardware. Though jkh left Apple circa 2013, so I don't really think there was anyone left behind to champion such things. Most at Apple these days I imagine are probably way too high up in the iClouds or whatever to car about the CLI and BSD provenance of OS X/macOS.

I can't imagine anyone from OpenBSD would be OK with Homebrew's spyware/telemetry on by default. I rather doubt NetBSD, or DragonFlyBSD or HardenedBSD would be OK with that either.

Thank you! Thanks also to: mkljczk, clairemont, Sprite_tm, ...

2026-09-03T03:06:16Z

In reply to nevent1q…z53l
_________________________

Thank you!

Thanks also to: mkljczk, clairemont, Sprite_tm, wincentbalin, koru and anyone else I may have inadvertently overlooked who contributed to the improvements in this release!

I submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' snac to 2.95 here:

https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/34472

GitHub Continuous Integration checks passed OK!

It's up to someone else with commit access to merge it.

#snac #MacPorts #OpenSource #ActivityPub #Mastodon #NoDatabaseNeeded
#NoJavaScript #NoCookiesEither #NotMuchBullShit #snacAnnounces

Kinda in the back of my mind (yet I hadn't forgotten) was ...

2026-09-01T00:08:08Z

Kinda in the back of my mind (yet I hadn't forgotten) was LMDB and MacPorts.

I decided to take a more cautious approach with this Pull Request:

https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/34355

Essentially, going from 0.9.35 to 0.9.36 and adding a note for folks to help with testing 1.0.1 and report issues (if encountered) to the MacPorts-dev mailing list.

*fingers crossed*

/me looks at his notifications. /me observes a new follower. /me ...

2026-08-11T16:05:49Z

/me looks at his notifications.
/me observes a new follower.
/me observes the new follower, unfollow.
/me attempts to imagine how that went down, "oh this account looks interesting, oh no, no no no no no no!, undo!"

Buying things online in the early 1990s was, I mean, I did it. ...

2026-08-10T23:10:46Z

In reply to nevent1q…g5sk
_________________________

Buying things online in the early 1990s was, I mean, I did it. Commerce has never been my primary interest with online explorations.

I bought a used Amiga 2000 from one of the users of VisionSoft (a CNET BBS where I was a volunteer coSysOp in the 408 in the early 1990s; though we did have some UseNet groups and UUCP email as well). We chatted (it had a real time multi-line chat similar to IRC), used the BBS email to figure out where to mail a check ($150ish or so to Ohio I think?), and voilà: a computer showed up at my parents' place some time later!

I bought a used Amiga 1200 on comp.sys.amiga.marketplace a while later (the Amiga 2000 was damaged when shipped from CA to MN for college unfortunately; especially since I spent several hundred more dollars on a used HDD, disk controller, 1084S monitor, extra RAM, a fatter Agnus, etc.) for a little more than $400? I emailed the guy, mailed him a check, eventually he mailed me that system.

One of my friends, would sell used video games via email. Even did group CC bids/auctions, before eBay. Some of the prices he sold PCエンジン「enjin」(Super)CD-ROM² titles for was astounding!

I still remember the first time I purchased a Compact Disc via telnet on cdnow.com, plaintext Credit Card number processing! ;) Snog's "Lies Incorporated" an anti-capitalist techno/electro album from Australia's David Thrussell (e.g. https://www.discogs.com/master/21022-Snog-Lies-Inc). I suppose, maybe I could have tracked it down via a mail order catalogue music vendor such as Digital Underground, Cafe Soundz or Isolation Tank? (I certainly ordered a lot of other post-industrial albums from those three before they set up websites and such).

Admittedly, a lot of that was *before* 1995. I dug it!

In many ways, it had a lot more going for it than the surveillance capitalistic hellscapes encountered all over the place now.

It was a little weird, going from California, with a 14.4 modem, to a small liberal arts college in rural Minnesota, which had a 56K leased line for their *entire* campus (of 1500 or so students)!

I was assigned to be a "Junior Sysadmin" as my student job paying minimum wage, only to be told that: I could not take the job by one of their staff (who never even graduated college) because I was not a "Junior" or Senior and that such jobs were reserved for upperclassmen (as if I "picked" the student job which I had been assigned?). ;(

Similarly, I was told that I could not use the SGIs (which were supposedly also reserved for "upperclassmen") even though one of the reasons I went to that school is because they had just renovated their MathCS department and they *had* SGIs. (For years earlier, I had volunteered my skills at nps.navy.mil and often coded on the Sun Microsystems and SGI workstations they had in various labs there). Needless to say, Minnesota and I did not get along well. ;( I dropped out mid way through my second year.

Ironically, I did end up getting a student job my second trimester as a "Divisional Computing Consultant" providing IT services to Faculty members. Thankfully a self described dyke upperclassman (who lent me issues of "Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist" comics) in my dorm, caught wind that I was "good with computers" after one of her dorm mates apparently walked into my room, horrified that I had my Amiga 2000 open (I was trying to diagnose its faults with a multi-meter to figure out how it got damaged and if I could repair it, even though she was the sort to think that anyone opening her Macintosh was doing something like open heart surgery I guess?). The two women who headed the Divisional Computing Consultant student jobs were a lesbian couple who were pretty chill, all things considered! I still ended up getting enhanced privileges on their (Open)VMS, Netware, etc. systems and such for allocating quotas, though that didn't grant me access to the SGIs, still. ;(

I remember posting to their NOTES (a threaded message board for VMS, which supposedly inspired NNTP readers such as trn and tin) information on how to tag UseNet messages, concatenate them, decode them from base64, and derive the binaries. And the faculty head of the MathCS NeXT(Step) lab offered me a student job with him. Though by then? I already had elevate privileges on just about everything computer campus I was allowed to access and had accounts in the NeXT(Step) lab(s) too and didn't really want more responsibilities for the same shit pay, particularly already having interacted with enough people on campus to know who the jerkfaces were and that one of them, was also a student job employed person in that lab. Not as bad as the rude person who denied me the job I was assigned, but ungh. There was more bad than good at that place.

Maybe, it was a sign of how much worse things would become online in the ensuing years?

It used to be: you had to have a clue to even get online.

IMHO, maybe shipping operating systems with TCP/IP stacks enabled by default? Was a mistake.

Via Old Crow, experimental efforts to get MicroPython to work ...

2026-08-10T21:47:09Z

Via Old Crow, experimental efforts to get MicroPython to work with the Dabao Baochip-1x RISC-V evaluation boards that started shipping out recently:

https://github.com/orgs/micropython/discussions/19580

#Dabao #Baochip #MicroPython #RISCV #Python #OpenSource #OpenHardware

Alas, that post I boosted regarding Enterasys passphrase stuff? I ...

2026-08-10T20:06:38Z

Alas, that post I boosted regarding Enterasys passphrase stuff?

I was previously a Network Security Specialist at a place that had a BUNCH of Cabletron (later known as Enterasys) gear though nothing is coming to the top of my head as far as what they need for passphrase recovery/reset. ;(

20 years ago (2006) is when I was terminated from that employer too; I know *some* of their gear (at least the Cabletron vintage kit) could be "factory reset" which would put it into a default state, yet what those defaults were, escapes me (though maybe not some documentation online somewhere still, perhaps?) at the moment.

If memory serves, by the time Cabletron had become Enterasys, they were deep into the realms of pioneering what would later get more broadly standardized as 802.1X so they were a bit ahead of the curve in some realms, but that isn't really particularly helpful for what was being asked about either. ;(

Meanwhile, as I skimmed RFC10024, I realized I am on a first name basis with at least one individual who is named in the RFC only by last name, first initial.

What a strange time to be alive.

It's a slippery slope. I have more than one eurorack module ...

2026-08-10T20:04:25Z

In reply to nevent1q…dphv
_________________________

It's a slippery slope. I have more than one eurorack module in storage, and I do not even have anything in which to rack said modules. Beware! ;)

CC: Christine Lemmer-Webber (npub1urx…v0z4)

Diana Wynne Jones (RIP) gets additional bonus points since Studio ...

2026-08-10T19:54:37Z

In reply to nevent1q…yq98
_________________________

Diana Wynne Jones (RIP) gets additional bonus points since Studio Ghibli turned Howl's Moving Castle into an animated film too!

CC: Fi, Mistress of Lore 🏳️‍⚧️ (npub1ph0…dtxv)

This reminds of some discourse I was privileged to listen to at ...

2026-08-10T18:14:22Z

In reply to nevent1q…002u
_________________________

This reminds of some discourse I was privileged to listen to at toorcon long ago when [@bunnie@treehouse.systems](https://social.treehouse.systems/users/bunnie ) was giving his hardware hacking workshop (think pre-production Chumby era, circa 2006).

Paraphrasing:

Student in the class: "what if someone takes your schematics and starts manufacturing clones and sells them at a lower cost than you?"
bunnie: "If someone, takes my designs, and finds a way to get them to market for less than I can? I'll use them as a supplier!"

It was heartening, like observing a mental equivalent of the martial arts adage "bend like a blade of grass, don't break like a brittle branch" response, seemed as bunnie had already thought about such things and was unperturbed, dare I suggest, maybe even excited that others' might want to build upon his work and find optimizations he had not implemented!

Alas, what we really learn from Raytheon and Lockheed Martin's fears? Are: they are not actually interested in innovations nor the state of the art (which presumably, goes without saying for any companies fixated on weapons manufacturing) and are instead preoccupied with profit margins for their shareholders.

The mercenary industrial complex is, fundamentally, more about greed than anything else, and those at the top, punching down and ruining (or terminating) the lives of others with abandon in their relentless pursuits for money and power regardless of the so-called "collateral damage" encountered in their machinations.

Given that the USA and the Ukraine are also actively engaged in war, there are doubtlessly other messages and misinformation being conveyed, particularly around the repeated narratives related to USA's munitions supplies. So I would recommend an idiomatic "grain of salt" when it comes to such news stories to varying degrees.

Nonetheless, I think many more might benefit from bunnie's wisdom when it comes to concerns about manufacturing cost optimizations; which can be generalized and applied well outside of the sphere of weaponry.

As an aside, since you mentioned Real Dolls? The guy who created ...

2026-08-10T17:23:46Z

In reply to nevent1q…arjg
_________________________

As an aside, since you mentioned Real Dolls? The guy who created the Real Doll company (Mike Saenz, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Saenz) was also behind the first comic drawn via computer (SHATTER, using a 1980s Macintosh black and white 1-bit pixel art, later colored by hand I think?) and I seem to recall was also behind Virtual Valerie (one of the first "adult" video games on CD-ROM). Pretty sure he sold off the Real Doll company long ago.

I couldn't seem to figure out what he may be up to these days the last time I went looking he seemed to have vanished.

Presumably he cashed out and decided to sip piña coladas on some private island and avoid being online in the dystopian "future" he helped co-found? Like MySpace Tom (who seems to have gone cold in online realms circa 2014?), surveillance capitalism pioneer in selling users' data for hundreds of millions!

Though, I guess compared to the sorts of rich tech broligarchs who can't seem to ever be content with their millions (billions? Trillions?!) and continue to torment us with new "inventions" such as Mark "sucks they're Borg" Zuckerberg and fElon Musk? Maybe, we should be thankful occasionally the Mike Saenz and Tom Andersons of the world, decide to stop doing more damage actively?

Update: while no one replied to my email to macports-dev re: LMDB ...

2026-08-10T17:09:23Z

In reply to nevent1q…5swf
_________________________

Update: while no one replied to my email to macports-dev re: LMDB 1.0.0?

Someone did reply to the PR.

When I closed that Pull Request (superseded by 1.0.1 after all) I asked for more clarification? It wasn't a particularly useful comment, ALL CAPS REMARKS RARELY ARE.

What I woke up to today?

z0mg. Is it A"I" slop or hidden Markov model morons? I'm not linking to it. You can waste your time on a closed Pull Request if you want to go looking for it, it doesn't need more active attention.

Either way: you can't pay me enough to deal with that kind of bullshit.

As if to add insult to injury: no one pays me to work on libre/free open source software. I contribute my time and skills and energy out of benevolence.

Similarly, I don't make money with musical pursuits, deejayin, etc. have always been things that take my time and money and energy. The rewards I derive from them? Are not financial in nature, more emotional.

Meanwhile: GitHub, now owned by Micro$lop, founded by billionaire Bill Gates? Continues to indirectly waste my time and energy, as they have done, with his empire built on plagiarism, for decades.

How did someone phrase it? Something to the effect of: "This is hell, and we're livin in it."

So scenic!

2026-08-10T02:38:50Z

In reply to nevent1q…xucf
_________________________

So scenic!

I submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' LMDB to 1.0.1 ...

2026-08-10T02:37:51Z

I submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' LMDB to 1.0.1 here:

https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/33980

GitHub's Continuous Integration checks passed OK.

It's up to someone else to merge it.

No one ever replied to my email to macports-dev re: 1.0.0.

I also see, there's a 0.9.36 release which was tagged around the same time as 1.0.1, so if folks do encounter issues (despite my efforts at being proactive, no one apparently cared enough to chime in to my inquiry?) maybe there is an alternative to submit if such things are experienced!

#LMDB #OpenSource #KeyValueStore #DataBase #MacPorts

So, since I am logged into the FediVerse due to having updated ...

2026-08-10T00:23:49Z

So, since I am logged into the FediVerse due to having updated some code, I may as well share a life update of sorts?

Unlike the month of June, where I only took one day off of work? I took five consecutive days off of work (beginning July 31st, returning to work on August 5th) and saw my friend (and his wife and kids) visiting from Japan twice! (Once in Aptos, the second time closer to San Diego).

I also attended Hard Summer, well, at least day one? As it turned out three of the performers I was interested in seeing: Charlotte de Witte (the primary reason I bought a ticket since that was her only California performance I could find), Interplanetary Criminal and 行松陽介「yukimatsu yōsuke」stylised as: ¥ØU$UK€ ¥UK1MAT$U were all scheduled to perform at the same time (20:45-22:00) on three different stages! So, I started with ¥ØU$UK€ ¥UK1MAT$U, who began kinda noisy which I was diggin, but the set sorta drifted into some softer stuff and it was time to mosey on to the Interplanetary Criminal stage, and after a couple of tunes, again, hoofed it to the "Harder" stage and listened to probably around 45 minutes of Charlotte de Witte's set?

Hard Summer on the whole: was too sunny, too hot and too much house music for my tastes? Lots of eye candy in very little attire (though just as many folks showing too much skin I would have preferred to have seen less of probably)? The way they funneled everyone in and out of particular exits made getting there and back from where I parked my car: an ordeal. For reference: Charlotte de Witte's set was over punctually at 22:00, however I probably didn't reach the rental car until 00:00?

Sunday, I slept in, ate a decent vegan brunch, decided to enjoy some air conditioning of a movie theater, then went to dinner at an impressively good (if expensive) vegan Italian restaurant. By then? It was around 20:00 and the sun was starting to set and while I could have maybe caught Boys Noize set on day 2? I didn't want to deal with the headache of parking and walking miles again, only to be turned around to walk back not much later.

Not to mention: Friday night? I met up with a friend and saw Black Moth Super Rainbow, and that show was maybe the most impressive thing all weekend? The VJ Kevin Jackson, really made fantastic realtime VFX to complement the trippy audio. And well, there was the possibility of driving further South from LA to San Diego on Monday to meet up with my friend visiting from Japan a second time (since he was visiting his brother's family) so I didn't want to completely drain my already still very exhausted self on Sunday?

Monday was OK! Drive down to San Diego was thankfully mostly uneventful, had some OK vegan sopes at a Mexican spot, met up with my friend for around an hour, then tried some other vegan food (most of it for the road trip back North) before beginning my drive back to the Bay Area.

I stopped about half way through at a cheap motel, got some rest, did some laundry before returning the rental car and on Wednesday? Returned to work!

I also bought a ticket to the DMC Championship at The Midway in SF on Saturday, though since I had my alarm set before 5am for work? Found that I was way too exhausted by the time I was done with my Saturday shift. I BARTed back to the East Bay, had some lunch, ended up taking a nap and doing laundry again before calling it a night (and then awake again early for work Sunday morning!).

At least I have see DJ Bitesize spin on other occasions, so while it would have been fun to see her and doubtlessly some other local turntablists I know at the DMC Championship event yesterday? I am glad I got more rest as I still feel very tired. I'm now at my second job and internally debating if I can really burn the candle at both ends given how I barely made it to job number 2 in time given the commute and timing and cramming in some lunch and grocery shopping beforehand (since if I didn't? Most markets are going to be closed once I am done with this shift).

No doubt I am omitting a lot of other details?

Tangerine Dream show is next week! I also bought a ticket for Feed Me later in August and Emancipator in early December.

There are some other shows in September and October the details of which I am still figuring out, tickets have been purchased for most of what I am planning to attend, I think? Maybe not everything, yet.

Awesome! Thank you! Thanks also to bm90, pmjv, fidiben and any ...

2026-08-09T23:53:54Z

In reply to nevent1q…4jkn
_________________________

Awesome! Thank you! Thanks also to bm90, pmjv, fidiben and any others I may have inadvertently overlooked who contributed to this release!

I submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' snac to 2.94 and thanks to Herby Gillot that was merged here:

https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/33979

My apologies for the delay! Though I check repology.org with some frequency (usually several times on any given day) it didn't seem to pick up that snac was behind upstream. Good thing I thought to check the Codeberg repository independently I guess!

#snac #MacPorts #OpenSource #ActivityPub #Mastodon #NoDatabaseNeeded
#NoJavaScript #NoCookiesEither #NotMuchBullShit #snacAnnounces

I submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' Got (Game of ...

2026-05-11T03:47:14Z

I submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' Got (Game of Trees) to -portable 0.125 here:

https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/32664

GitHub Continuous Integration checks passed OK!

It's up to someone else to merge it.

I would submit a story to undeadly, but the site seems to be loading intermittently the past several days. ;( Not sure what is up with that.

#Got #GameOfTrees #MacPorts #VersionControl #OpenSource #Git

Relatedly, I submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' ...

2026-04-20T09:55:01Z

In reply to nevent1q…tjt3
_________________________

Relatedly, I submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' libressl-devel to 4.3.1 here:

https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/32314

GitHub Continuous Integration checks are queued. Hopefully they will complete without issues?

Regardless, it's up to someone else with commit access to merge it!

#LibreSSL #MacPorts #TLS #TransportLayerSecurity #SSL #SecureSocketsLayer #Encryption #OpenSource

It was a good show! Admittedly, I probably had more fun chatting ...

2026-04-20T09:46:11Z

In reply to nevent1q…tyux
_________________________

It was a good show!

Admittedly, I probably had more fun chatting and catching up with an old friend who met me there, since the set was almost identical to the AMP Festival Suicide Commando set, though he added "Die Motherfucker Die" at the end of the encore. Otherwise, even the song orders were the same and the AMP Festival crowd was more my speed and the sound was more to my liking too.

Though, I did get Johan to autograph a couple of CDs for me. ^_^

I submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' LibreSSL to ...

2026-04-20T09:43:06Z

I submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' LibreSSL to 4.3.1 here:

https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/32313

GitHub Continuous Integration checks are queued. Hopefully they will complete without issues?

Regardless, it's up to someone else with commit access to merge it!

I should do something similar with libressl-devel next.

#LibreSSL #MacPorts #TLS #TransportLayerSecurity #SSL #SecureSocketsLayer #Encryption #OpenSource

So that job to which I applied last week? Yesterday I had an in ...

2026-04-14T21:53:36Z

So that job to which I applied last week?

Yesterday I had an in person interview.

Before 19:00 local time? There was a voicemail claiming they want to move forward with the security background check part of the hiring process, which is a good sign?

Anyway, too soon to count any of those eggs as hatched, but perhaps, soonish, within the next several weeks to a month or so: maybe I will have TWO jobs!

And, presumably, still be below the poverty line and homeless and thousands in debt.

But y'know? Every little cent probably helps?

Tomorrow: I am checking out of the hostel which has been, cheap, but as with anything with shared bunk beds, kind of unfortunately reminiscent of being incarcerated. I'll then be renting a car, stopping by my mailbox for the first time in like a month, getting a haircut for the first time in maybe two months and, well other things too, before work on Thursday.

There's been a lot of other stuff going on personally. Not a whole lot exciting (other than having now taken 3 weeks of Introduction to Irish with 4th looming on Saturday) but I'll be driving to SoCal to see Suicide Commando on Saturday for what will, supposedly, be his last US tour! I'm definitely looking forward to that (the drive down and back before work Sunday morning? Less so, but music is at least something worthwhile in my existence.)

The red teaming idea is maybe complementary insomuch as fuzzer ...

2026-04-08T23:29:28Z

In reply to nevent1q…3rap
_________________________

The red teaming idea is maybe complementary insomuch as fuzzer and LLMs seem to have some overlapping problem spaces.

However, the backlash is not insignificant, e.g. HackerOne (a bug bounty program) has gone on hiatus after a lot of genA"I" submissions: "Internet Bug Bounty is taking a break and is not accepting new submissions." (https://hackerone.com/ibb?type=team the diff specifically: https://hackerone.com/ibb/policy_versions?change=3771829)

I have always thought that bug bounties, create perverse incentives and I was never a strong proponent of them despite knowing, perhaps too personally, some of the advocates and creators of such things.

Having written as much, I didn't really foresee the pause of such programs due to this.

I submitted another job application. No word on remuneration ...

2026-04-08T23:02:14Z

I submitted another job application. No word on remuneration aside from travel expenses (it would be at SFO, so it would be easy enough to take BART there I think? But if accepted, would also require me to go through airport security training and background checks to see if I am a terrorist or whatever. Thankfully, it is completely unrelated to the TSA or DHA or ICE or any TLA BS), and some of the employees I guess are there in a volunteer capacity? So I do not know what that portends. I am probably getting way ahead of myself anyway.

Last week I submitted a different job application, to a co-op in SF! No response from them other than the automated email reply either.

Either way, I will plod on forward, despite the paucity of income, and the insane amount of inflation impacting my expenses which already felt as if I was barely scraping by. I sincerely do not understand how anyone leads a healthy existence under capitalism. It seems as if most of us: suffer relentlessly, and maybe a very small percentage: exploit the rest of us? What an awful paradigm.

Here I was naively hoping perhaps I could get it to build on ...

2026-04-08T21:20:19Z

In reply to nevent1q…nfdm
_________________________

Here I was naively hoping perhaps I could get it to build on macOS 26.4 with MacPorts supplying ncurses (https://ports.macports.org/port/ncurses/), libdnet (https://ports.macports.org/port/libdnet/) and libpcap (https://ports.macports.org/port/libpcap/):

Perhaps, libpcap has changed in the past 20 years when it was referenced as pcap? It looks as if it may want some additional parameters (or at least that "too few arguments to function call," is implying something similar to my [perhaps mis]interpretation) now:

% CFLAGS="-I/opt/local/include" LDFLAGS="-L/opt/local/lib" make
gcc -I/opt/local/include -c -I/usr/local/include main.c
In file included from main.c:50:
./pcaputil.h:12:9: error: conflicting types for 'pcap_open'
12 | pcap_t *pcap_open(char *name, int promisc, int snaplen);
| ^
/opt/local/include/pcap/pcap.h:1135:18: note: previous
declaration is here
1135 | PCAP_API pcap_t *pcap_open(const char *source, int snaplen, int flags,
| ^
main.c:256:29: error: too few arguments to function call,
expected 6, have 3
256 | p = pcap_open(intf, 1, 1500);
| ~~~~~~~~~ ^
/opt/local/include/pcap/pcap.h:1135:18: note: 'pcap_open'
declared here
1135 | PCAP_API pcap_t *pcap_open(const char *source, int snaplen, int flags,
| ^ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
1136 | int read_timeout, struct pcap_rmtauth *auth, char *errbuf);
| ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
2 errors generated.

Admittedly, I don't think I ever built it on OS X back in the day either! This may still be a smooth install on OpenBSD; I'll give that a whirl next. ^_^

Hah! I can't claim to have ever used it myself. However, I ...

2026-04-08T21:03:01Z

In reply to nevent1q…x7lz
_________________________

Hah! I can't claim to have ever used it myself. However, I have certainly heard other passengers ask for courtesy rides and most drivers seem to oblige. On rare occasion I hear an operator decline, but it's usually related to something like, "this bus is full, please wait for the next one" which they will do even to passengers in wheelchairs.

I did once observe an interaction where a passenger boarded, the operator raised their voice about, "payment" and the person who had been walking to the back of the bus then said something such as, "can I get a courtesy ride?" To which the operator obliged, but said something to the effect of: "you're supposed to ask for that when you are boarding, not after the fact."

But, for the most part, it just seems as if it is a regular occurrence. On AC Transit at least? On Saturday I was also making use of Golden Gate Transit to a lesser extent (they have a system where you tag off with clipper as well, not entirely dissimilar to the ferries or CalTrain I guess) which is a little different than BART or MUNI or AC Transit, but even then I observed at least one passenger who boarded while the bus operator essentially waved them through rather than futz with cash bills.

That sort of thing, seems to be a prevailing trend? Generally that the drivers "fail open" rather than deny transit. Berlin's rail system, also seemed honor based for the most part, though again, for the most part, I observed folks paying for rides.

Buses operated by MUNI in SF, I probably observe the most "fare evasion" of any local transit provider, but a lot of the buses are double length articulated and there are three entrance/exits and if you don't board where the driver is (and most don't, unless they're in a wheelchair or need special accommodations) then presumably the temptation to not tag on is pretty high? I'm the sort, who things that mass transit should be handled by taxes rather than individuals in the moment, but I still pay my fares (and tag on/off/etc.) because I hope that the metrics of valid passengers helps them in whatever statistical justifications they may have to make towards justifying their presence.

Also, Clipper has the advantage that it can be "reloaded" with cash, so it makes it a relatively pseudo anonymous fare system. A lot of spyware "telemetry" in software? Doesn't offer that kind of thing going for it.

Ah, groovy! I had a lot of fun with that back in the day. Good to ...

2026-04-08T20:54:29Z

In reply to nevent1q…nfdm
_________________________

Ah, groovy! I had a lot of fun with that back in the day. Good to know the location for the source! Thank you and I hope you and your loved ones are in good health!

I submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' nmap to 7.99 ...

2026-04-08T20:51:54Z

I submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' nmap to 7.99 here:

https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/32137

GitHub Continuous Integration checks passed OK.

It's up to someone else with commit access to merge it.

Meanwhile, since the OpenSSH 10.3p1 PR was merged, this issue reared its head on OS X Snow Leopard:

https://trac.macports.org/ticket/73786#comment:1

I'm guessing, some of the sandbox stuff removed in a more recent MacPorts OpenSSH release may be why? I tried, unsuccessfully, to refactor that and even put out an appeal to the MacPorts' dev mailing list to no avail. ;-/

Also, that PAM related OpenSSH issue reported on OS X Leopard (PPC) does not appear to have been fixed by 10.3p1's PAM related changes as I had hoped: https://trac.macports.org/ticket/73757

Dang it!

It is not exactly as if I am at my wit's end. I do have at least a G4 PowerBook in storage, but I do not know when I will next get to my storage unit. Similarly, I may have a system capable of running Snow Leopard in storage (or at least, I think I did, long ago?)? I do not know when I will be able to retrieve them nor how helpful my own skills will be in remediating either of those issues though. ;-/

Maybe it is the sort of stuff that should be reported upstream? I dunno; it feels as if it is probably more of a MacPorts' thing than an upstream thing tbh; and while there are definitely some valiant MacPorts' maintainers who rawk older OS X versions on the regular by the looks of things? I am not among them.

#MacPorts #nmap #OpenSSH #PastTheirPrimeOSReleases

I'm on a bus from SF to San Rafael. It has air conditioning ...

2026-04-04T21:50:52Z

I'm on a bus from SF to San Rafael. It has air conditioning and WiFI and I don't have to drive nor install some fucking app.

Costs like $6.50? Or maybe that's the whole trip (I have a connecting bus, so maybe this leg of the journey is $3 or whatever).

I will never understand why more people don't use mass transit.

Can't afford it? Here's the secret "unlock" phrase in the SF Bay area to ask the bus operator when boarding:

"May I please have a courtesy ride?"

If they reply with a "yes"? (And they usually do!) Bam! Free travel!

Pretty! Kinda hating the name collision with the Neo Geo ...

2026-04-02T22:10:57Z

In reply to nevent1q…7d4w
_________________________

Pretty!

Kinda hating the name collision with the Neo Geo franchise of Metal Slug, but whatever.

Admittedly, for me and Matrix-related visualizations? I probably had the most fun with jnazario (npub144e…ckpg)'s matrixdump (took tcpdump output and shuffled it vertically) but I dunno where that code is anymore. Looks as if his https://monkey.org/~jose/ page is long since deprecated. I used to have that running on a system underneath my desk at a past employer on a tiny 12 or 13" CRT. Some coworkers thought it was a screen saver, but it was actual network traffic. You really did start to see patterns in it after a while too. ^_^

CC: Warren Moore (npub100w…y59u)

Scavenging, as you refer to it, may be OK in some circumstances. ...

2026-03-24T21:12:05Z

In reply to nevent1q…utra
_________________________

Scavenging, as you refer to it, may be OK in some circumstances.

When it comes to code; for whatever reason my mind is drifting towards the warez scene and keygens "scavenging" code from proprietary software to check to see if a key is valid or not. ;)

But, FreeBSD's jails, aren't like that. It's open source.

If it were good: Apple could have made use of it; they borrow code liberally from many other open source projects. FreeBSD is already upstream from OS X/macOS.

Maybe: jails just aren't *good*? Maybe, jails and incarceration and related metaphors, are intrinsically *evil*? I think they are. I do not work for Apple, nor am I a FreeBSD committer, but having known folks who were both of those and not evil? I kind of think that they probably intentionally avoided the jails subsystem, for *good* reasons.

Your sense of humor is kind of lost on me, since I think ...

2026-03-24T18:17:28Z

In reply to nevent1q…f40n
_________________________

Your sense of humor is kind of lost on me, since I think petrofossil fuels are also a dead end. Moreover, I didn't realize I was in a comedy club, and having to explicitly declare jokes, typically ruins them.

If you are trying to make light of a subject involving incarceration? Might I suggest: you stop doing that.

I think the conjecture in this instance is: jails are not good. ...

2026-03-24T17:59:04Z

In reply to nevent1q…kuur
_________________________

I think the conjecture in this instance is: jails are not good.

Word choice matters.

Maybe, if PHK had called it chroot++? He did not.

Indeed! I think it's telling that OS X/macOS are FreeBSD ...

2026-03-23T10:23:44Z

In reply to nevent1q…kz7l
_________________________

Indeed!

I think it's telling that OS X/macOS are FreeBSD derived, yet decided *not* to borrow the jails subsystem.

Word choice is important.

Some of PHK's other perspectives when it comes to things related to carceral constructs are extremely harrowing to read.

But, it's one thing to be outspoken about things.

It's another, when down stream maintainers, decide to go through the hassle of making sure they do not take your bad code and ideas along with them. Speaks *volumes*, without saying a word! Indeed, by removing lines of code!

Good hacking. ^_^

Fascinating that you encountered a snac bug on OpenBSD on that ...

2026-02-21T19:08:38Z

In reply to nevent1q…jlhm
_________________________

Fascinating that you encountered a snac bug on OpenBSD on that hardware though! I wonder there the problem is and what might fix it?

CC: argonaut (npub19ls…2q3c) The Real Grunfink (npub1ysc…ffqw)

Heh, I voted for the fursuit head option, but for some reason the ...

2026-02-07T03:04:52Z

In reply to nevent1q…6kkg
_________________________

Heh, I voted for the fursuit head option, but for some reason the poll displays 0 and 0, so I dunno (maybe a snac bug? [update: I see poll numbers now, so maybe just latency])!

Admittedly, I don't think that you *need* to wear a fursuit head, but there was some 39c3 talk with furry friendly presentation, and something about representation comes to mind?

(The 39c3 talk if you're curious and haven't seen it already:

https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-building-a-noc-from-scratch

)

CC: RubyConf (npub1z9k…y4g4)

lmao. I am from California. I might be into that. ;) I have ...

2026-01-24T00:12:31Z

In reply to nevent1q…ghaa
_________________________

lmao. I am from California. I might be into that. ;) I have absolutely no interest in Greenland though, so what do I know?

While working as IT Admin for iSEC Partners (coincidentally, ...

2026-01-23T19:17:26Z

In reply to nevent1q…fkxw
_________________________

While working as IT Admin for iSEC Partners (coincidentally, while dymaxion was also a coworker, though tbh I don't see eye to eye on the "all technical problems of sufficient scope or impact are actually political problems first" some insanely impactful off by one errors I don't think were political at all, just: errors in need of rectifying, them becoming politicized is overstating it. Admittedly, I agree with the sentiment, just not the reality), I had something similar to #2 occur with one of my users. It should be noted: this user had an MS in Computer Security.

Standard operating procedure was to use FDE (e.g. BitLocker on Windows, OS X at the time didn't have FileVault 2 [as an aside: I was in the hotel room when h1kari created a 10x speed up to RPW:esizkur (npub1tj2…2vjs) & ioerror's VileFault attack against the original FileVault via FPGA during 23c3 e.g. https://media.ccc.de/v/23C3-1642-en-unlocking_filevault#t=2222 [timestamp isn't quite precise, sort of around the 37 minute mark is when h1kari's stuff starts or here's a similar presentation on such research from Shmoocon 2007: https://youtu.be/3XSp8-jA29s?t=1017 which is a bit closer to the relevant research] and whatever FDE we did use was a total pain any time Apple shipped an OS update, and our Linux and BSD users were left in greener pastures with less annoying solutions, but I digress) and escrow keys to a USB stick which was handed off to IT and kept locked up in case it may be needed for recovery, rather than escrowing keys online. It still boggles my mind that BitLocker (and these days, Apple's FileVault 2) have key escrow "to the 'cloud'" or Active Directory as options, given how to me at least, that only *increases* an attack surface.

Said user approached me asking for their recovery key, as they encountered some situation where BitLocker was throwing errors and laptop was unbootable [this happens insanely often, or at least did]. "No problem, here you go" (hands escrowed USB key to user, thinking my job is done.)

Them (after going away for a while and coming back to my desk): "Umm: it's not working."

Me: "Oh no! (scrambles to see if I have another key for said individual) Well, I don't have any other keys for you. I'm not sure what else to say?"

I then got to hear a story of how said user was at a client site, and had encountered some issue, and ended up decrypting their drive, then re-encrypting it, but I guess they had overwritten the USB drive when they re-escrowed their key locally and never got around to re-escrowing their new BitLocker key to IT.

In retrospect, this was probably an opportunity for me to purchase software from ElcomSoft and expense it on the corporate credit card and cross fingers and hope maybe we could crack it. Or otherwise image the drive and see if we couldn't come up with some other novel technique and present our findings at some future conference.

But the user kind of needed things faster than any of that, and alas, should have known better than to expect IT to be able to pull a rabbit out of my hat when they failed to follow the standard operating procedure and never got around to re-escrowing their new keys to IT. ;(

"Crypto shredding" as you phrase it is becoming more prevalent, particularly in an era where more and more vendors are soldering NAND flash to motherboards (dear Apple, you greedy jerks: stop doing this! Thankfully dosdude1 and others have workarounds, but it is so *wasteful*. I can understand needing to specify RAM at time of purchase due to "unified memory" performance improvements, but the SSDs are on a completely different bus and making them hardwired is a cost cutting move, nothing else. Thankfully some newer Apple hardware [e.g. Mac Studios and Mac Minis] stopped being as stupid I guess.) In theory, it is certainly better than using Gutmann methods for securely wiping drives (and Gutmann's method hasn't been accurate in a very *long* time anyway) but I, and others, have my doubts and at least at iSEC Partners, physically shredding old drives was also standard operating procedure.

There are, OFC, other perilous things you've written about Session (twice!) and its removal of PFS (Perfect Forward Secrecy) was damning enough, but they also have some sort of "recovery key" implying that users' (presumably, encrypted I guess) message history is stored *forever* in the "cloud". What could *possibly* go wrong? 🙄

How did I not notice @npub1wfp…w2m9's "Against ...

2026-01-23T11:00:18Z

How did I not notice Soatok Dreamseeker (npub1wfp…w2m9)'s "Against XMPP+OMEMO" blog post (URL: https://soatok.blog/2024/08/04/against-xmppomemo/) until now?

Years ago, I got banned from the BitlBee IRC channel, by some d00d who implemented OMEMO support into BitlBee after I was badmouthing it (OMEMO that is, not BitlBee).

That kinda hurt.

More because I was familiar with Wilmer (the original BitlBee creator/dev) to the point of hanging out in person before he handed off maintenance of the project to the d00der who banned me.

Not to mention, I had been testing OTR [https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/] with BitlBee long before it was merged into the main tree. So it was certainly a familiar problem space (heck, it even took a bit of effort for me to pester Ian in person [via a proxy/friend] to get someone to actually get around to implementing the OTR fragmentation support written up in a paper, but not in code; and moreover: to make sure the fragmentation boundary could be set at a threshold lower than the minimum IRC message length). Once upon a time, I even was exploring using bitlbee-otr to try to OTR messages over twitter (though that seemed like a fools' errand, for other reasons then and these days would be an egads, what an awful idea why did I ever waste *any* time on that experiment).

Too often I feel like a crazy person in the realm of things too few ever bother to pay attention to in the first place (if you can believe it, once upon a time, some decades ago, I was attempting to convince warez FTP topsite admins to use encryption, but they were more interested in speed of xfers than security, go figure; ironically some ftp daemons, even the warez lauded glftpd, offered SSL/TLS support for those who knew what they were doing despite lack of documentation), so it's nice to see at least someone with similar sentiments on occasion.

One of the best compliments I received in my entire career was ...

2026-01-23T10:37:39Z

In reply to nevent1q…6x09
_________________________

One of the best compliments I received in my entire career was someone coming up to my desk and asking about an email I had sent to the company about switching firewalls (from a SPOF Nokia IPSO [basically FreeBSD running Checkpoint-1] to an HA/fault tolerant pair of Netscreens [using NSRP NetScreen Reundancy Protocol; before Juniper Networks bought them. Admittedly, I wanted to replace things with a pair of OpenBSD/pf/CARP systems, but my managers at that company didn't believe in open source software and wanted to pay companies so they could yell at people over the phone for support contracts if I got hit by a bus or something I guess?]) telling me: "I didn't notice anything."

Gosh, what a great feeling that was hearing that!

I really, didn't *want* my users to notice anything! If they did, then I had failed at my job somehow.

I mean, I would still send out email notices about maintenance windows and such, in case something broke, and we needed to rollback or whatever. But was I ever grateful to get that "compliment". Admittedly, it was phrased more like a question than a "hey, good job! Everything seems the same to me!" but even if they didn't understand what high praise they were giving me, it felt great.

I'm not too sure if you're familiar with the concept of 黒衣「kurogo」from 歌舞伎「kabuki」and 文楽「bunraku」(I watched 国宝「kokuhō」[translation: "National Treasure"] in IMAX last night, so kabuki is kind of fresh in my memory) but the "running crew" often clad in all black or other nondescript attire, so as not to detract from the main stage performers, come to mind as aspirational with regards to such things. They're instrumental to making the performance happen, but not at the center of attention!

Admittedly, sometimes maybe that can be taken to extremes? Today at work for example, I was asked by some patron: "is this a recording, or a live?" during William Ludke's Thursday organ meditation.

It was most certainly, live, but the way the organ is positioned, the organist, is occluded from the view of those sitting in the auditorium. As a deejay? I *love* that, and really want something similar for my performances, as the focus should be on the *music* not me. Not all organs are designed that way, and I think it takes a particular kind of organist who is OK with not being in the spotlight? It probably comes as no surprise that I enjoy volunteering my time on Thursday just to facilitate those performances, even if I don't earn a cent in the process. To those who seem oblivious to whether the performance was a recording or live, I kind of get the feeling those sorts probably need to attend more live musical performances?

Don't get me wrong, stage shows can be impressive too, but fundamentally, music should be *heard* and not *seen* and I appreciate situations where that is emphasized.

I suspect probably some treat network outages similar to being at a dance club when the beat stops? It would probably behoove network engineers some deejay experience and back to back transitions to practice and find similarities and affinities and audience or user outrage and backlash to be more mindful? But my biases and lived experience are showing as a multi-disciplinarian. ;)

Even when pouring tea: it's critical to keep the water flowing. A party faux pas is a situation where there's no boiling water when needed. It takes a good crew to keep everything flowing well.

CC: 🇺🇦 haxadecimal 🚫👑 (npub1sk8…h5th)

Only $100 million? Why not $100 trillion? It's just bits in ...

2026-01-23T10:15:16Z

In reply to nevent1q…qucu
_________________________

Only $100 million?

Why not $100 trillion?

It's just bits in others' computers these days anyway. Oh, maybe there's an addressing constraint? I can grok that.

"why did they choose the ATProto?" The cynic in me: ...

2026-01-23T10:13:20Z

In reply to nevent1q…vr0v
_________________________

"why did they choose the ATProto?"

The cynic in me: because it's centralized.

Governments may talk a big talk about things, but at the end of the day, they're legacy systems and they want *control*.

Alas, too many seem to have not acknowledged that the Internet is already an *intergalactic* system of collaboration and already operates at scale of billions of users with billions of packets per hour.

Legacy meatware governance is obsolete, but the transition period is going to be long and drawn out and in the interim, a lot of "reinventing the flat tire" will presumably play out, ad nauseam. ;(

We already had end-to-end encrypted realtime libre/free open source "federated" (I would use the phrase: "distributed") systems such as SILC (Secure Internet Live Conferencing) before ActivityPub (or twitter or Facebook, etc.) was ever conceived of in the first place. But, why was it never popularized? It circumvents centralized control and the "powers that be" don't like not being able to ratchet down on others. Class warfare is their paradigm, so they prefer to perpetuate such things, rather than normalize new paradigms which make themselves obsolete. ;-/

IRC? XMPP? FTP? HTTP? Other plaintext by default protocols, very popular! Spies just love spying!

Note: SILC isn't alone, there's PSYC2, GNUnet and other libre/free end-to-end encrypted comms systems; but as much as some may *claim* they want such things, what seems to gain traction and momentum every time? Over and over again? Insecure, centralized, systems. If you follow the popularity and the "money" it's usually the same old dirt bags behind the scenes pulling the strings.

CC: [@_elena@mastodon.social](https://mastodon.social/users/_elena )

Bureaucracy is awful, everywhere. I have a turntable that maybe ...

2026-01-23T10:01:51Z

In reply to nevent1q…ejmf
_________________________

Bureaucracy is awful, everywhere.

I have a turntable that maybe will get delivered tomorrow?

It was sitting in customs in Hawaii since January 8th, shipped from Japan on the 7th.

I submitted a 5106 form to the CBP.gov website on December 31st, 2025. They didn't even reply to me until January 14th.

All told, I think I submitted five *different* 5106 forms (with very little difference between any of them IMHO; certainly the thing a sane human should be able to care less about, but alas I was not interacting with sane humans, but insane bureaucrats I guess) before the turntable was "released" from customs?

Here's hoping it actually functions when I accept delivery and unbox the thing! ^_^

Terry Gilliam's Brazil with Robert De Niro as Archibald "Harry" Tuttle circumventing bureaucratic red tape is inspirational and I think beck@ had an image of that character on his website once upon a time for all the right reasons. ;)

Some nominees whom I've been blessed to have known personally ...

2026-01-23T09:41:09Z

In reply to nevent1q…d63q
_________________________

Some nominees whom I've been blessed to have known personally over the decades, albeit these are mostly US citizens (I'm from California this time around incarnated as a human, so those biases are largely due to geographic "privilege" for the misfortune of being born in the land of the fee and home of the slave, subjugated to a mercenary industrial complex, a medical industrial complex a for profit prison carceral slavery industrial complex as are pervasive in these realms, among others). Note, this list is extremely abbreviated, I know a lot more folks who probably deserve such nominations:

Doug Engelbart (headed the Augment group at Stanford Research Institute which begat NLS [oNLine System] which later caught the attention of JCR Licklider who provided [D]ARPA funding evolving NLS into what became known as the Internet. Among myriad innovations, Doug was said something to the effect of: "we [NLS] had links too, but there was nothing 'hyper' about them.").

Bill English (another in Doug's Augment group at SRI, whom Doug attributed the invention of the mouse, also more or less pioneered the field of ergonomics).

Marshall Kirk McKusick (helped implement the aforementioned BSD TCP/IP stack while a student at UC Berkeley, which infamously beat out BBN's TCP/IP implementation because: BBN's, despite initially performing faster, crashed, whereas the BSD TCP/IP stack kept chugging along more reliably. Lamentably, he was not able to present such work as part of his doctoral thesis and instead focused that research on MC68000 register allocations [he claimed maybe "six people" ever bothered to read it at MeetBSD 2014 and I am pretty sure I was maybe among those six when I was younger and striving to learn more about MC68k asm optimization techniques] also one of the co-authors of 1989's "The Design and Implementation of the 4.3 BSD UNIX Operating System" later reprised as: "The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System" also helped implement the FFS [Fast File System] and tools such as fsck. If Linux is popular today? It never would have become popular without the popularity of UNIX before it and Kirk was among the BSD folks who made UNIX something worth running outside of Bell Labs' corporate largess with their sources shared freely with the rest of the world.)

Jordan Hubbard (one of the co-founders of FreeBSD and even decades after his last commit to that project, still ranked within the top 10 of all time FreeBSD committers by commit count. Also a co-founder of DarwinPorts [later renamed to MacPorts] and one of the reasons why OS X/macOS has a BSD derived user and instead of Apple's previous proprietary Mac OS [System 1 through System 9]. Last I heard, jkh was working at NVIDIA, and is probably one of the reasons why their Linux drivers have supposedly improved in recent years).

Theo de Raadt (founder of OpenBSD, previously part of the core developers of NetBSD. Born in South Africa, but residing in Canada for an awfully long time. In addition to making their source tree available on the web via https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/ in the mid 1990s, more than a decade before GitHub was even conceived of as a proprietary webUI to libre/free DVCS tool git, instrumental in helping to take a UNIX /usr/src and auditing the source with a team of security experts, helping to remove a lot of the "low hanging fruit" of exploit vectors and raising the bar for everyone. Forked SSH into OpenSSH after Tatu Ylonen and ssh.com decided to make it closed sores and proprietary; Niels Provos, then a doctoral student at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, by virtue of being a German citizen, would drive over the boarder to Canada, to contribute code to OpenSSH, just to make sure that no US cryptographic export legislation was being violated. Similarly, when Darren Reed decided to stick to his guns with regards to failing to clarify IPF's license, OpenBSD developers created pf [later ported to FreeBSD, OS X, macOS, Linux and even Windows]. Various licensing audits have been performed of code in OpenBSD and it has spawned other projects such as: LibreSSL, OpenBGPD, rpki-client, OpenSMTPD, OpenNTPD, GoT [Game of Trees, an ISC licensed git compatible DVCS which is evolving gotwebd, a webUI complementary to the co-creation of gothub.org which aims to be akin to GitHub, without the proprietary Micro$oft owned underpinnings, also led by Stefan Sperling, also a European AFAIK]. As of OpenBSD 5.5, all known y2k38 bugs were fixed, something that I think Linux still has failed to address [I can only imagine RHEL/IBM and Oracle/Solaris, etc. sorts may be salivating at the lucrative service contracts to fix similar things for their commercial customers])

萩野(伊藤)いとぢゅん aka Jun-ichiro "itojun" Hagino (hopefully unsurprisingly: Japanese. Unlike a lot of the PhDs whom I have known over the decades, one of the few [perhaps only] individuals I ever encountered who had commit access to NetBSD, FreeBSD and OpenBSD simultaneously. Deeply involved with the KAME project and instrumental for IPv6 adoption into the major three BSDs and from there, to much of the rest of the world. Incredibly kind and cooperative, his untimely passing is a deep tragedy.)

Daniel J. Bernstein (I'm not even sure where to begin, but daemontools set the stage in UNIX for what would eventually become common practice with things such as launchd, OpenRC, probably even systemd in Linux stole a lot of ideas that djb pioneered. Similarly, qmail took the security nightmare that was SMTP in the sendmail [pejorative: sendwhale] era and showed off not just resilient secure code, but process and privilege separation to the extreme, Postfix and later OpenSMTPD would derive inspiration from djb's trail blazing. djbdns would do a similar thing to provide a saner secure alternative to BIND, years before NSD and Unbound attempted to follow in similar footsteps with NLSNet backing. Similarly, djb's DNSCurve attempts to provide encryption to name resolution and such, without many of the amplification attack pitfalls of DNSSEC. While unfortunately a lot of djb's code is not widely deployed, it has influenced other secure development practices and his website is still up, even when collaborative projects in parallel research such as tcpcrypt.org, have fallen to the wayside).

Gordon "Fyodor" Lyon (creator of nmap, which came to notoriety in PHRACK and has even appeared in Hollywood movie cameos such as The Matrix franchise, but remains, to this date: libre/free open source software and continues to be actively maintained and updated. Extremely useful for network administrators and penetration testers alike.)

Александр Песляк aka Solar Designer (Russian security researcher perhaps best known for the libre/free open source tool John the Ripper. While East Coast Murican "hackers" were trying to profit off of l0phtcrack, jtr was truly free. I guess l0phtcrack opened their source code in 2021? I kind of stopped paying attention decades earlier, because better tools were freely available without shareware handicaps and the source was there to audit. Admittedly, I did also meet the author of crackerjack which was a friend's preferred passphrase hash cracker in the early 1990s, but that was at DefCon in the mid 2000s and probably a conversation and side story best ignored for now.)

And some, whom I haven't been blessed to know personally despite having benefited from their contributions:

L. Peter Deutsch (featured in Stewart Brand's article in Rolling Stone on Spacewar from 1972, which was probably one of the first mainstream media mentions of the term "hacker" before it became demeaned, as in: "More than a hacker, in the opinion of a colleague, 'although he has some
of that style. He's a virtuoso.'" His contributions are too numerous to list here exhaustively, but Ghostscript, a free software PostScript and PDF interpreter is highlighted by Wikipedia, and that's certainly worth mentioning).

Bob Fabry (helped bring UNIX to UC Berkeley, also helped create CSRG [Computer Systems Research Group] out of which BSD [Berkeley Software Distribution] co-evolved, instrumental in helping TCP/IP become the underlying protocol choice for the Internet (previously, it was NCP [Network Control Program] from SRI/Engelbart's team).

Bill Yeager (a staff researcher at Stanford University, invented the first multi-protocol router in 1980–1981 to connect disparate network systems. Basically, Cisco ripped off his work and started charging money for their boxes which were essentially running code for which Yeager was largely responsible. There was a lawsuit between Stanford and Cisco and it was settled and Stanford got some kickbacks, but Yeager basically didn't, at all. Once upon a time the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, at least had a plaque commemorating his contributions, but last time I visited it was gone. No doubt the gorilla of Cisco didn't like the negative [if truthful] portrayal of their non commercial academic predecessor and pulled enough strings to get that removed from public display.)

Douglas Terry, Mark Painter, David Riggle and Songnian Zhou, Paul Vixie (I have however, worked with Paul's nephew! I'm lumping these folks together though the first four were instrumental in the co-creation of BIND [the reference DNS server implementation] Vixie helped promulgate it, particularly thanks to the creation of ISC [Internet Software Consortium] which also begat DHCP [Dynamic Host Control Protocol]. Without DNS, the Internet would be a much more cumbersome thing to utilize though I still side with Surak, that the commercialization and charging money for DNS registrations via ICANN and registrars, was a money grabbing move and a complete mistake. Perhaps someday, we'll have a "Let's Encrypt" for DNS? AlterNIC doesn't seem to be pulling their weight unfortunately and I hail from a time when DNS was entirely free as it should be. Domain squatter opportunists are the worst sort of profiteers.)

Cynbe Ru Taren aka Jeff Prothero (years before the FSF and GNU were a thing, Cynbe had already released Citadel into the public domain as BBS software. There are more forks of Citadel than I can easily enumerate, despite having been a [co]SysOp of various BBSes running everything from Macadel and MacCit to Cit86, Cit68k, GremCit and Cit/UX [which last I checked, continues to evolve as groupware]. Though he also toiled in the commercial sector [and was apparently one of the members of Cisco's elite gigabit networking group back when a gigabit per second speeds were still bleeding edge] he continued to contribute to the libre/free open source realms with things such as Mythryl, a programming language that is probably still beyond most mortals' comprehension).

I could go on and on, really; but those are some nominees I'd throw out there for starters as well as some of the reasons why I think they're worth including.

As a maintainer for MacPorts' OpenSSH, I had a minor freak ...

2026-01-23T01:49:47Z

As a maintainer for MacPorts' OpenSSH, I had a minor freak out when it appeared as if someone wanted to overwrite the Portfile:

https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/30873

I'm guessing, overly cavalier tab-completion was to blame? Thankfully, I did not approve that as I am sure it would have upset not just me, but others too.

Thank you for the continued improvements and thanks to byte for ...

2026-01-23T01:48:04Z

In reply to nevent1q…4f6f
_________________________

Thank you for the continued improvements and thanks to byte for the contributions to this release as well!

I've submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' snac to 2.89 here:

https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/30876

Two of three GitHub Continuous Integration checks are running with a third queued.

Hopefully they'll complete without issues?

If so, it's up to someone else with commit access to merge it!

#snac #MacPorts #OpenSource #ActivityPub #Mastodon #NoDatabaseNeeded
#NoJavaScript #NoCookiesEither #NotMuchBullShit #snacAnnounces

Ewwwww. I often rewrite shit as: it.sh because a lot of IT is ...

2026-01-18T00:10:09Z

In reply to nevent1q…6mf4
_________________________

Ewwwww.

I often rewrite shit as: it.sh because a lot of IT is shitty.

But that's on a different level entirely. ;(

So much for enjoying some time off over the weekend I guess? I hope things eventually get cleaned up OK.

Or lossless, FLAC is there, heck even Apple open sourced ALAC. ...

2026-01-17T18:45:19Z

In reply to nevent1q…qjk4
_________________________

Or lossless, FLAC is there, heck even Apple open sourced ALAC.

Admittedly, I'm the sort of deejay has been told that I may not play from lossy sources on six figure sound systems which I was blessed to be able to use to amplify my setup, so to me: I avoid lossy codecs like the plague. They're not worth the disk space "savings".

I'm not alone in the musical sphere for hatred of empty-threes, here's an Uwe Schmidt take:

https://atomtm.bandcamp.com/track/mp3-moral-poverty-three

CC: Parade du Grotesque 💀 (npub19ye…npv6)

One of the many things I hated about NeXT was Steve Jobs ...

2026-01-17T09:09:38Z

In reply to nevent1q…6qu7
_________________________

One of the *many* things I *hated* about NeXT was Steve Jobs fawning over including Sybase.

IMHO, SQL is an awful IBMism. Shame on Steve Jobs.

Worse: since the World Wide Web (and DOOM) started on NeXT?

I think a lot of anti-patterns inherited the: "we'll just use Sybase as our database!" and hence other SQL implementations became popularized as a result.

Don't get me wrong, drop-in replacements are probably useful lest there be too many hegemonic forces, but drop-in SQL replacements are still: SQL. ;(

Even in 1999, when I was employed by a "Pre-IPO" .net (because the dot com was owned by another company and I guess they really had their heart set on that name), they had Sybase BS, on Slowlaris. ;( It was so slow, they ended up using 3 (Resilience I think was the brand name?) other SQL databases in parallel rather than the on-board Sybase SQL that the FT-SPARC (Fault Tolerant, lock step SPARC systems) in use by the DSC (company later acquired by Alcatel) HLRs utilized.

I've seen and administered some other wonky SQL setups, but that one was undoubtedly one of the worst.

Circa 2014, the *only* job interview I managed to land in Berlin was at Research Gate (where they were very proud that they were sponsored by the Bill Gates Foundation; whereas to me: Bill Gates is a bad sign) and they were effusive that they weren't even running Windows, but a LAMP stack!

As someone, who had already run LAMP (for readers ignorant that means: Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) and even WIMP (yikes: Windows IIS, MySQL and PHP) but thankfully had long since evolved more reliable prod systems to at *least* FAPP (FreeBSD Apache PostgreSQL and PHP) I dreaded the chore of having to drag yet another behind the times shop to my past.

It seems as if it's wishful thinking that folks might evolve to lmdb, even though it's tried and true. Maybe Lumo (which is sort of the iteration of the proof of concept SQLightning [SQLite with LMDB innards e.g. https://github.com/LMDB/sqlightning]) will get more refined than when I last looked at its code (it seemed, very preliminary. Though as I look at: https://github.com/LumoSQL/lumosql I see the code hasn't been touched in 4 years and the .org domain isn't loading implying they lapsed out entirely, which is not a good sign)? LMDB is pretty groovy, SQL? Not so much.

Maybe now that "Optimal Bounds for Open Addressing Without Reordering" is published (arxiv.org link to paper here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.02305 some Python [yuck] proof of concept implementation here: https://github.com/sternma/optopenhash ) we'll see some other meaningful improvements in the field?

Most code rarely actually *needs* more than a hash table, and SQL IMHO, is almost *always* overkill.

Alas, due to our ancestors, a lot of dumb decisions (but maybe at the time they seemed "smart"?) were made, because it was there; and we get to keep suffering for it, because refactoring things most would prefer to avoid, even if it might be the correct approach in the long run, because we should know better now?

*sigh* wishful thinking!

As I re-read one of my replies and correct some typos, I realize: ...

2026-01-17T08:35:35Z

As I re-read one of my replies and correct some typos, I realize: "decent wage" may be leagues different from a "livable wage" and I am not sure what a "decent" wage might be, at all.

"Minimum wage" is defined, so that's not difficult to understand, but as I wrote earlier, the minimum wage, in the USA, currently cannot sustain the median rent anywhere, assuming a 40 hour work week.

My *best* paid salary (USD $130,000/year) came with 24x7 on call and I did the math, and I was certainly paged at all hours of the day or night, for *years* and if I were to reduce $130,000/year to 24x7 hourly wages? I was earning less than the hourly minimum wage in San Francisco, where that employer employed me.

Clever employers I guess, finding ways to underpay me, and have me at their beck and call!

That was my *best* paid salary job. I worked other jobs (also on call 24x7) that were paid far worse. ;(

So I don't know what a "decent" wage is? As it stands, I guess I've rarely even worked jobs where I earned a minimum hourly wage (and I don't think it's legal to be on call 24x7 for *years* but I also know that no one gives a shit and will fight for the oppressed, because the oppressors have the money and power in this day and age of dominator culture as Terrance McKenna would phrase it).

I met someone last year after AMP Festival when I was chillin with Hugo who works in the field of uhh "managed EDR" (wherein EDR stands for: "Endpoint Detection and Response") and claimed they would love to work for the EFF, but couldn't handle the pay cut.

Having worked for and even co-founded at least one 501c3 non profit? I wondered: how much did that person make? I mean, maybe I'm used to starving and sleeping on a couch at the "office" (a step up from a tent I guess, as part of the working homeless, I would rather not think about all the horrible places where I have tried to sleep) and digging food out of trash cans and such, my tax filings for some years of 501c3 non profit were were all under $10,000/year. Even better: I wasn't just "on call" 24x7, I was living on site. *sigh*

I haven't filed my 2025 taxes yet, but I am pretty sure my current employer (for whom I have been working since 2022) is also, way under that. I'll be surprised if I break $5000/year in earnings from my job. It's been that way, even working multiple jobs, for me, for years.

They rattled off some numbers in the range of $250,000/year and up and I was just like, "damn".

The person also asked me: "how did you get into 'cyber'" and I wasn't even sure how to answer that, because I don't refer to anything I do as "cyber" (I mean, as a joke as in bloodninja: "wanna cyber?" and "my zucchinis carresses your carrots." ;) At iSEC Partners, we would also make in-jokes about "cyber" any time we encountered some BS marketing pablum about "cyber" as shorthand for "cyber security", but it's very gallows humor when you realize a bunch of that industry has their heads shoved that far up their own asses they don't even realize how out of touch they are with that terminology), but I gathered the individual meant like, computer stuff?

I think I mentioned something along the lines of having been born/incarnated as a human in Menlo Park and my parents' church to this day, still shares a parking lot with SRI (Stanford Research Institute). So I kind of, grew up *immersed* in such realms, it's not something I "got into".

"Born into" maybe?

My mom, used to say things to me like: "it's like you wanted to be born in Menlo Park for some reason" and I mean, maybe, but like, as an infant? I don't think anyone at SRI or SAIL or PARC were taking infants too seriously in the 1960s, or 1970s for that matter. So, sure mom, right place, wrong corporeal instantiation. (I'm forgetting the name of the anime at the moment, but there's some security researcher who instantiates into a body on Earth to contend with some divergent A"I" system, but she's impatient, so she doesn't wait for a full body suit growth cycle or whatever, and becomes the butt of loli jokes, as tends to happen in some anime. Strangely, relatable maybe.)

If anything, maybe someday I'll figure out a way to escape this "cyber" cesspool and grow frugivore food forests far from human habitation surrounded by babbling brooks and hot springs and no overhead planes or satellites polluting things?

Hah, seems unlikely, right? Wishful thinking!

So yeah, "livable wage" is not a "decent wage" but I *still* have no idea what a "decent wage" is. Is it decent to get overpaid, while so many earn almost nothing and still somehow scrape by on their meager incomes? Seems pretty indecent.

I might settle for a livable wage, that would probably be pretty cool!

Instead, even my *best* paid salaried job, figured out ways to pay me less than the local hourly minimum wage.

I stopped watching the most recent episode of "Where Warlocks Stay Up Late" (ironic, since several of the earlier episodes are with individuals whom I know personally, even one of the interviewers at that) but the guy was a fucking suit and a stooge and quoting shit like: "Democracy is the worst except for all the others" and sharing similar sentiments about capitalism.

When I write that I am an anti-capitalist?

A lot of morons seem to assume that means I am a communist or something.

Nope.

It's like: I am an anti-coal powered locomotive-ist, because I know highspeed maglev rail exists.

I'm sorry, you don't know better things exist and somehow imagine that your coal powered locomotives are the best thing relative to everything else, but I think you're just ignorant, and we all suffer for it in the interim. ;(

*sigh*

"making all the Big Tech firms pay everyone a decent ...

2026-01-17T07:53:24Z

In reply to nevent1q…pq97
_________________________

"making all the Big Tech firms pay everyone a decent wage"

Call me crazy, but I don't think earning a "livable wage" should be constrained to Big Tech. I think *all* employers, should pay a livable wage: as a *bare minimum*.

Lamentably, last I checked, there is currently not a single place in the USA, where the so-called "minimum wage" (not just Federal, but state and city local minimum wage levels) assuming a 40 hour work week, where it is sufficient to pay for the median rent.

In other words: we're beyond a crisis point when it comes to capitalism and the rich assholes are happy to keep getting richer while the poor and disenfranchised seem to be getting poorer and more disenfranchised.

People formed unions, and fought and died for things such as the 40 hour work week, right?

People fought and died for the end to slavery.

Yet the USA? Never put an end to slavery. The 13th Amendment makes slavery, conditional. For profit prisons, are still a thing in the USA. Even with the "progressive" politics of California voters? Failed to pass a proposition in 2024 which would have (at least on a state level) closed the carceral slavery loop hole.

So, it seems as if we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past, because they were never corrected. I can't even begin to imagine how many of our ancestors are rolling in their graves seeing the current state of affairs.

Engineering and ethics are great ideals, I won't argue there; but I'll write this much:

Supposedly, within the carceral slavery system, the *best paid* jobs are web developers. They can earn as much as $18, an hour.

I have been paid less, that, as a "free" man, doing similar work, in recent years.

Which is to say: carceral slavery, undermines the pay scale of so-called "honest" information workers too.

As far as I can discern: there are small number rich assholes who exploit others, and there are many poor people who are being exploited, and everything else, so far, is wishful thinking.

Better can exist, but most of human existence is just another ring of hell from my vantage for now.

CC: 🇺🇦 haxadecimal 🚫👑 (npub1sk8…h5th)

I once had a coworker who asked me if I was more of a Scotty ...

2026-01-17T07:43:30Z

In reply to nevent1q…jlhz
_________________________

I once had a coworker who asked me if I was more of a Scotty (under promise, over deliver I guess?) or LaForge (try to give a best estimate rather than act as if he were pulling a rabbit out of a hat every time).

I was confused. I thought I was working a real job under the horrible auspices of capitalism in the early 21st century, not the post-capitalistic fantasy of the 23rd century and beyond as encountered in the fictional SciFi Star Trek paradigm or on set of a TV show or whatever at all, or an engineer for that matter (I have a B.A. in Language Studies, not a B.S. in any engineering discipline and shy away from demeaning language by misusing terms as a result). I think my job title was: "Network Security Specialist" and it mostly fell as if I was plugging leaks in other people's metaphorical sinking ships and being worked to death and blamed for others' mistakes even as I was essentially doing triage and fixing things as best as humanly possible (and better than most others on Earth in similar situations near as I could discern from my coworkers and knowledge of others in the field) given their completely insane understanding of reality and awful commercial technology choices.

Not much has changed. Star Trek has certainly featured some other folks beyond Scotty and LaForge (and Scotty even seemed to be self aware and parodied his repartee when he reprised his role later on in one of the franchise installments if I recall correctly) in engineering over the franchise's life, but I can't think of a single one to whom I relate.

It didn't help matters that my deceased maternal aunt was VP of Paramount, and I was on the set of STTNG (though no cameras were rolling) before they broadcast an episode. (I also saw one of Kirk's original series captain's chairs basically in tatters from moths or whatever, something that fans presumably would have lost their shit over seeing how it had fallen into disrepair. TL;DR studios suck and pretty much only care about the next money maker, not preserving the legacy of their past.).

I have more affinity with what I refer to as "reversers" (the sorts of folks who present at the likes of REcon [a Reverse Engineering conference]) but they're also very far removed from Star Trek and tend to present avant-garde research. Though, even as reverse engineering has evolved? I find myself increasingly spoiled by source code and really reticent to have to stoop to situations where I need to reverse something, because others were so short sighted as to perpetuate terrible currency constructs as if they were Ferengi more than they cared to contribute to more collaborative paradigms as found in the libre/free open source realms.

CC: 🇺🇦 haxadecimal 🚫👑 (npub1sk8…h5th)

I think there was some Alan Kay lecture where he cited the ...

2026-01-17T07:23:52Z

In reply to nevent1q…mms2
_________________________

I think there was some Alan Kay lecture where he cited the individuals, by name, who supposedly coined the terms: "computer engineering" and "computer science" and while I can't remember what lecture, or what names those were off the top of my head (and I don't really want to spend the inordinate amount of time to try to find those specific lectures again right now) I seem to recall he described the phrases as: aspirational.

As in, perhaps someday, with sufficient effort, there might be computing that is on the level of engineering, or science. ;)

I couldn't tell you what it's like these days either. My ...

2026-01-17T07:20:43Z

In reply to nevent1q…sfx8
_________________________

I couldn't tell you what it's like these days either.

My parents used to live in Carmel Valley, and Big Sur was still in the same 408 LATA back in the day and there was at least one kid from there in the BBS scene with whom I was friends.

Via Om Shan Tea (when they still had a shop in SF) I also befriended someone who lived and worked at Esalen for like a dozen years or something and heard stories from a more insider perspective, but that was all long ago and doubtlessly not up to date with whatever is going on there now.

CC: W6KME (npub15aw…yhz3)

Enjoying the hot springs at Esalen is a wonderful experience (not ...

2026-01-17T07:06:38Z

In reply to nevent1q…5uaj
_________________________

Enjoying the hot springs at Esalen is a wonderful experience (not the only hot springs in the area, but maybe the best known and I think the only ones overlooking the ocean from a cliff). Admittedly, the one time I was blessed with such an experience I took advantage of their $10 after hours soak (not sure if it is still a thing, but probably? This was back around 2010/2011 IIRC) and it was a rainy night so I basically had the place to myself. (There was one other couple, but they kept their distance in another pool entirely.)

CC: W6KME (npub15aw…yhz3)

lmao

2026-01-17T06:53:34Z

In reply to nevent1q…5gz8
_________________________

lmao

Ah, well just my collection of The Cure on CD. That friend's ...

2026-01-07T06:08:29Z

In reply to nevent1q…djgc
_________________________

Ah, well just my collection of The Cure on CD. That friend's gf at the time worked at Rasputin's Records in Berkeley and did a lot of the ordering for the goth/industrial sections so they went to a good home to someone who could appreciate them. I kept the rest of my CDs and vinyl and cassettes and such. Heck, I still have my parents' vinyl!

I still purchase physical copies of music (and when possible, get the artists to sign them; which is relatively easy these days as it turns out! Since, so few "fans" actually seem to still purchase physical music anymore.) but I have digitized a lot of it. I deejay and am a turntablist with more than one licensed DVS (Digital Vinyl Simulation) system and as a coder myself, am aghast at how awful Mixxx's source code is (as in: I cannot build it from source, despite repeated attempts, and I am actually really good at building things from source, even if the source code is more or less undocumented).

I definitely have a lot of projects and more physical desires than I have financial resources for, but some aspects of human incarnation seem to go with the territory. Before MP3s were in vogue, I even helped a friend lug his Amiga 2000 into a radio station so we could "spin" MOD (Music On Disk) files over the airwaves so it's not as if I am attached to physical media; so much as I strive to share the best possible audio with others, in whatever format(s) that may be when I deejay.

Groovy! I submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' snac ...

2026-01-07T06:00:27Z

In reply to nevent1q…0tsg
_________________________

Groovy!

I submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' snac to 2.87 here:

https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/30679

It's churning through GitHub Continuous Integration checks (1 of 3 passed so far which is a good sign the other two will complete successfully).

It's up to someone else with commit access to merge it.

p.s. the other day I read your napcop proposal and I dig the acronym. ;)

#snac #MacPorts #OpenSource #ActivityPub #Mastodon #NoDatabaseNeeded
#NoJavaScript #NoCookiesEither #NotMuchBullShit #snacAnnounces #FrugalFediverse

Whereas you look like an overfed troll.

2026-01-06T00:59:02Z

In reply to nevent1q…n3ur
_________________________

Whereas you look like an overfed troll.

I guess you're one of those morons who thinks that ...

2026-01-06T00:56:37Z

In reply to nevent1q…kxax
_________________________

I guess you're one of those morons who thinks that "mentions" from "randos" in discursive media is somehow offensive?

Fuck off entirely with that! It's so fucking stupid. It's not even perspective, it is screaming ignorance.

If you want to write things, without replies. Then don't use discursive protocols.

NNTP, IRC, ActivityPub, etc. are DESIGNED for discourse.

I'm homeless and have no health insurance, and I still ...

2026-01-06T00:49:09Z

In reply to nevent1q…8f72
_________________________

I'm homeless and have no health insurance, and I still wouldn't waste my precious limited time, energy or skills on proprietary closed sores software.

Been there, done that.

Guess what: the people who profit off of proprietary tech, give even less of a shit about you as a human.

Who would have been able to foreseen that?!

CC: Howard Chu @ Symas (npub10ny…582h)

Once upon a time, there was some article with an interview with ...

2026-01-06T00:44:57Z

In reply to nevent1q…3psd
_________________________

Once upon a time, there was some article with an interview with Robert Morris (former NSA and Bell Labs d00d, author of UNIX crypt among other things, also: the guy who fathered Robert Tappan Morris, of Morris worm infamy) where he said something like: "email can never be secured" alas, I can't remember the quote verbatim and trying to search for anything in 2026 is a fool's errand because A"I" bros broke web crawling with slop.

Similarly, I remember the feelings of cringe I had in Berlin circa 2014 where they had key signing parties, and seemed oblivious that Phil Zimmermann gave up on PGP (also used to be easier to cite, no longer).

There were the "Why Johnny Can't Encrypt" (2005, PDF: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~tygar/papers/Why_Johnny_Cant_Encrypt/OReilly.pdf) and "Why Johnny Still Can't Encrypt" (2011, PDF: https://cups.cs.cmu.edu/soups/2006/posters/sheng-poster_abstract.pdf) papers.

There were the private, HILARIOUS conversations I had with coworkers at iSEC Partners circa 2011 particularly after we got acquired by NCC Group (which used PGP Keyserver, which AMAZINGLY sometimes would only function to decrypt messages after I ... *sigh* "did things" to reuse old keys, because as their IT Admin: I needed to make things *function* more than I needed to pretend that their overpaid bullshit was anything more than bullshit).

Alas, that kind of humor, is reserved for a very limited audience. Such lulz though!

Anyway, folks still need reminders I guess!

I wouldn't mention Signal in such reminders, it is its own can of worms and not in good standing.

That said, I miss the days when the S in SMTP was acknowledged as Simple.

The oligopoly of spam havens (e.g. Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo!, etc.), keeps fucking things up and over-complicating it. SPF, DKIM, DMARC, etc. are just making it worse (if you want an eyeful: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/12/today-in-google-broke-email-2/#comments)

The policy postulation is ponderous! I dunno if or what BSD ...

2026-01-06T00:28:23Z

In reply to nevent1q…hyf3
_________________________

The policy postulation is ponderous! I dunno if or what BSD projects might adopt with regard to such things, but it's interesting food for thought!

The net-negative perspective kind of goes with the territory of being involved with less popular projects, but I've already been in these sorts of XKCD situations: https://xkcd.com/979/

Though it can be vaguely hilarious to google (back before that became its own A"I" minefield) something, and find a post, where I was the only one banging my head against an issue (or providing some vague solution, that others apparently hadn't improved upon in the ensuing years).

CC: Stefano Marinelli (npub1ef5…gcpc)

That's definitely a thing e.g. https://www.andvinyly.com/

2026-01-06T00:19:17Z

In reply to nevent1q…q57y
_________________________

That's definitely a thing e.g. https://www.andvinyly.com/

IMHO, it's kind of a ray of hope that BSDs are (for now at ...

2026-01-06T00:17:50Z

In reply to nevent1q…6tjj
_________________________

IMHO, it's kind of a ray of hope that BSDs are (for now at least) relatively immune to A"I" BS?

CC: Stefano Marinelli (npub1ef5…gcpc)

Well, yay for MacPorts at least helping a little bit! Fingers ...

2026-01-06T00:15:00Z

In reply to nevent1q…e5lq
_________________________

Well, yay for MacPorts at least helping a little bit!

Fingers crossed the compile completes successfully!

I used to be really into The Cure, and collected them on CD (even ...

2026-01-06T00:13:51Z

In reply to nevent1q…89w3
_________________________

I used to be really into The Cure, and collected them on CD (even put the "long boxes" on my wall as decoration, if you can remember that brief era when CDs had long boxes?).

Eventually, I burnt myself with depression and gave away all my The Cure CDs to a friend's gf.

It took me well over a decade before I could hear The Cure played at a club without needing to walk outside and take a break.

Ironically, I still buy vinyl and turntables, but mostly continued to avoid The Cure (aside from the re-release of Mixed Up a few years ago), but you're telling me that you've been collecting The Cure, on vinyl, without even owning a turntable?

I can't afford to offer to buy that vinyl at market rates, knowing how expensive such things are on dicsOGs, but I do have a surplus of turntables. Do you maybe, just want a turntable to enjoy the vinyl you've been collecting for 30 years? I can spare one (admittedly, not one of my rarer ones, I have some exceedingly special turntables).

As a modest MacPorts maintainer, it is sometimes easier to build ...

2026-01-06T00:08:19Z

In reply to nevent1q…xgxa
_________________________

As a modest MacPorts maintainer, it is sometimes easier to build things from source than it is to maintain a MacPort.

But, once a Portfile is smoothed over, it's usually pretty easy effort to keep it going at least!

I've been wanting to create something like: debrew to automate creation of MacPorts from Homebrew (inspired by the likes of depenguinator [https://www.daemonology.net/depenguinator/]) but that's more of a pipe dream and a lot of work.

Moreover, there are bigger unfried fish, such as making the TLS dylib work for some estimated 600-800 MacPorts to be happy with LibreSSL (one of the MacPorts I maintain and what Apple uses as its default TLS library) than OpenSSL (which many MacPorts just assume, because that was there so long and while it mostly only requires adding the following line to the Portfile and removing the dependency for OpenSSL:

depends_lib path:lib/libssl.dylib:openssl \

That's still 600-800 some odd Portfiles to modify and test and I only have so many hours in the day).

I would suggest a MacPorts hackathon idea, but I don't think there's been an in person MacPorts meet up since before the pandemic?

The idea has also crossed my mind to see if I could somehow get invited to a LibreSSL hackathon (rarer than OpenBSD hackathons, but I think at least one occurred, once?) and rope jkh into it too, but I kinda doubt they want to take on that ball of wax from the likes of me.

As it is, there are a lot of projects which instead of having Linuxisms or BSDisms, now have Homebrewisms. ;( e.g. Librewolf, Mixxx (which also has vcpkgisms which are IMHO the *worst*) and so even creating Portfiles for MacPorts for those is non trivial (can you guess why?)

It's exceedingly distressing that most Homebrew (and to a lesser extent vcpkg) users don't even seem to realize those projects have spyware (what they call "analytics") on by default.

So: follow the instructions at the bottom of: https://docs.brew.sh/Analytics or the opt out instructions here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/vcpkg/about/privacy

In contrast, MacPorts only turns on analytics if users install mpstats (https://ports.macports.org/port/mpstats/) and it has just a smidge over 1300 installs apparently. I don't install it. I doubt most MacPorts users do, so there's the false *illusion* that Homebrew has a lot of users because most are not even aware they were being tallied. If I had to guess, since MacPorts dates back to 2002 as DarwinPorts (co-founded by jkh, previously co-founder of FreeBSD and "Director of Engineering of Unix Technologies" at Apple for a dozen some odd years) because Apple wasn't shipping a /usr/ports? It has a much larger and entrenched (if opaque, because: privacy and secure by default is actually a saner approach) user base than Homebrew (2009)? But, what do I know?

Anyway, TL;DR: good luck
CC: Quixoticgeek (npub1ege…vd5r) I hope MacPorts helped? But I know there are situations where, it doesn't. I'm not even getting into a lot of other pain points where I want to improve things in MacPorts, there are so many more unmentioned.

Hah, thanks I am working on it! I think I am closer to a new ...

2026-01-05T23:49:34Z

In reply to nevent1q…65hw
_________________________

Hah, thanks I am working on it!

I think I am closer to a new vehicle at least?

(This is probably TL;DR but maybe indicative of where my research has stalled:

For reasons that elude me: Toyota Sienna only had a spare tire as an option in their top two trims, and their top two trims: also had leather seats. I am vegan, and was planning to go to a factory tour in Indiana where Toyota assembles Siennas, to see if I could get a spare tire with non leather seats. But, they cancelled their December tour. Their next tour is January 15th, but it looks as if with the 2026 model year configurations I can now get a spare tire in a trim without leather seats? So that may save me a trip to Indiana at least! It looks as if lead times are still a month or two out, but I have to iron out some details with dealerships and bankers still.)

CC: The Real Grunfink (npub1ysc…ffqw)

Thank you for sharing! I appreciate instructors who actively ...

2026-01-05T23:45:36Z

In reply to nevent1q…j736
_________________________

Thank you for sharing!

I appreciate instructors who actively learn lessons from their students. Even DJ Q*Bert when answering questions at Night at the Octagon events, expresses similar sentiments when it comes to skratch deejayin.

Though, I have avoided becoming a formal teacher myself (omits long story not worth sharing here and now), I have to wonder:

Since you have students, can't you *fail* them? Or less harsh, maybe better pedagogy: make it a course *requirement* that they use something *other* than GitHub?

Admittedly, I am vehemently anti-GitHub; not just because I've been involved in libre/free open source software for decades and GitHub was *never* open source, even before Micro$oft bought them.

For example, it deeply distresses me that MacPorts migrated from self hosting to GitHub circa 2016.

I'll also note, jkh (Jordan Hubbard, who co-founded MacPorts when it was still known as DarwinPorts though he's probably better known as a co-founder of FreeBSD and even though he stopped actively contributing to FreeBSD circa 2 decades ago, he was still in the top 10 of most commits to the project IIRC? Anyway, jkh stopped contributing to MacPorts in 2016, which to me: is a damning sign, even if he maybe didn't say anything about it explicitly [he and I worked together at iXSystems circa 2013 and to say, having been blessed to know and work with him personally, that he doesn't toot his own horn, would be an understatement, so I tend to pay closer attention to what he does, or doesn't do, and read between the lines]).

I am, admittedly somewhat biased in such realms, I know the Mercurial developer personally as one example. In more recent years, I've been down streaming Got (https://www.gameoftrees.org and Got developers are also actively working on https://gothub.org as another libre/free open source alternative with Git interoperability) into MacPorts (I know, despite what I wrote earlier, I haven't given up on MacPorts, but I wasn't a founding member like jkh and am less invested after a fashion, even if I wish they would migrate away from GitHub).

I also love mentioning that OpenBSD still uses CVS and OpenBSD's https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/ was sharing source code on the web (1995) decades before GitHub ever existed (2007).

I am happy to see you made mention of Fossil! Fossil is IMHO, is extremely underrated and wonderful. Its Git interoperability leaves a lot to be desired (e.g. it can't sync the FreeBSD git repo without crashing last I checked) but why should Fossil treat Git as anything but a second class citizen anyway?

Presumably something like Fossil's Git interoperability shortcomings is maybe why FreeBSD ended up creating gitup (https://github.com/johnmehr/gitup) because they needed something in their BASE that wasn't GPL?

IMHO, it was still a bad decision for FreeBSD to migrate to Git. I had much better times with FreeBSD using csup and svnlite in previous VCS systems they used. gitup is least there now, but a memory hog, to understate it; still at least an effort was made to rectify a part of the problem space, I guess?

Also while I worked at iXSystems, I worked with zb (aka https://people.freebsd.org/~alfred/ ) who was an outspoken proponent of Git (this was before FreeBSD had migrated away from SVN), hoping to get more folks to contribute to FreeBSD by being more "hip" with the "cool kids" in Linux land or something? smdh, I don't think folks were raving about Git, so much as following the Linux Lemmings and the ensuing effects of mass adoption.

I'm a bit more removed from FreeBSD relative to OpenBSD anyway, so it wasn't really my place to say then and certainly not an argument I was going to win at the time. Probably still isn't an argument I can win, I am not really an argumentative individual and prefer to focus my constrained energy and resources on other pursuits.

But, y'know, Git and Linux are bad enough but at least open source?

GitHub is like the poster boy for "embrace extend extinguish" and it should be no surprise that Micro$oft bought them as a result.

But, I am not in a place of teaching, with students. So I am enthused to at least read that there is at least one instructor out there who is at least mentioning to their students that there are alternatives to GitHub!

It was also distressing to read: "they couldn’t use the git command line."

This was a bit more heartening: "This year, I forced them to use the command line on an open source OS, which solved the previous year’s issue."

So, it would be my hope, maybe future years' students can improve from tutelage that makes them use some other (D)VCS tools?

Ideally, not just your students though, what is the adage?

"Not bad student, bad teacher" ー Mr. Miyagi from The Karate Kid

Thank you! Regarding your parenthetical comment: I agree, but ...

2026-01-05T23:12:56Z

In reply to nevent1q…wl86
_________________________

Thank you!

Regarding your parenthetical comment: I agree, but I've been attempting to establish a modest boundary for myself: that I would have a home before taking on more responsibilities. Alas, the car I was previously sleeping in was totaled in April of last year and I haven't bought a replacement yet, so I seem to be going the opposite direction of stable housing?

Admittedly, I could probably get commit access to MacPorts more easily than obtaining a new vehicle or a home as it doesn't require monetary factors! ;)

CC: The Real Grunfink (npub1ysc…ffqw)

Thank you! Also, thanks to lxo, violette, fruye and to anyone ...

2026-01-05T23:05:12Z

In reply to nevent1q…dh6p
_________________________

Thank you!

Also, thanks to lxo, violette, fruye and to anyone else who may have helped contributed to this release!

I've submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' snac to 2.86 here:

https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/30669

Currently one of three Continuous Integration checks passed (which is a good sign the other two will probably pass soon too).

It's up to someone else with commit access to merge it.

#snac #MacPorts #OpenSource #ActivityPub #Mastodon #NoDatabaseNeeded
#NoJavaScript #NoCookiesEither #NotMuchBullShit #snacAnnounces #FrugalFediverse

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I submitted another job application. No word on remuneration ...

Here I was naively hoping perhaps I could get it to build on ...

Hah! I can't claim to have ever used it myself. However, I ...

Ah, groovy! I had a lot of fun with that back in the day. Good to ...

I submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' nmap to 7.99 ...

I'm on a bus from SF to San Rafael. It has air conditioning ...

Pretty! Kinda hating the name collision with the Neo Geo ...

Scavenging, as you refer to it, may be OK in some circumstances. ...

Your sense of humor is kind of lost on me, since I think ...

I think the conjecture in this instance is: jails are not good. ...

Indeed! I think it's telling that OS X/macOS are FreeBSD ...

Fascinating that you encountered a snac bug on OpenBSD on that ...

Heh, I voted for the fursuit head option, but for some reason the ...

lmao. I am from California. I might be into that. ;) I have ...

While working as IT Admin for iSEC Partners (coincidentally, ...

How did I not notice @npub1wfp…w2m9's "Against ...

One of the best compliments I received in my entire career was ...

Only $100 million? Why not $100 trillion? It's just bits in ...

"why did they choose the ATProto?" The cynic in me: ...

Bureaucracy is awful, everywhere. I have a turntable that maybe ...

Some nominees whom I've been blessed to have known personally ...

As a maintainer for MacPorts' OpenSSH, I had a minor freak ...

Thank you for the continued improvements and thanks to byte for ...

Ewwwww. I often rewrite shit as: it.sh because a lot of IT is ...

Or lossless, FLAC is there, heck even Apple open sourced ALAC. ...

One of the *many* things I *hated* about NeXT was Steve Jobs ...

As I re-read one of my replies and correct some typos, I realize: ...

"making all the Big Tech firms pay everyone a decent ...

In less code nerdy news, I have seen a lot of concerts ...

One of the many things I hated about NeXT was Steve Jobs ...