froztbyte

this time in open letter format! that'll sure do it!

there are "risks", which they are definite about - the risks are not hypothetical, the risks are real! it's totes even had some acknowledgement in other places! totes real defs for sure this time guize

Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post, there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

since I haven't touched AP before (and figure other possible contributors may not have either), going to use this post as wayfarer bathroom graffiti

feel free to contribute your own learning and investigation as well

It’s been a long couple of years with people going hard on building all their communications on the gamer chat company, disregarding all warnings and concerns because of shiny creature comforts

Soon: “we trusted you! We moved from slack to you! 😭”

Guess it’s only a handful of months before the tortured handwringing starts?

Unfortunately I can’t snip from mobile easily now, but maybe someone else can archive it and comment with archive link?

Too tired to sneer at the book myself right now but the article doesn’t pull punches either

Figured it’s worth posting since the book author has featured here more than once recently and has definitely been an enabler to The Shit

found via someone running a server at revision

retro fun. quite slick, too!

Not entirely the usual fare, but i figured some here would appreciate it

I often rag on the js/node/npm ecosystem for being utter garbage, and this post is a quite a full demonstration of many of the shortcomings and outright total design failures present in that space

Invite up at https://2024.revision-party.net/blog/04-invitation/

~2 weekends away (who cares about the week)

Prepare for watching mathematical black magic!

One for the sidebar, in the spirit of incident-day-free counters[0], tracking how many days since the last time there was a dipshitted thing from the tescrealtors

Could do it with flap-counter or nixie-clock numbers for a bit of feel?

[0] - is this an insensitive idea? I know the counters tend to form part of safety culture and their reset indicates harm, but those clowns are exactly dangerous, so..

this is in part because it's for (yet another) post I'm working on, but I figured I'd pop some things here and see if others have contributions too. the post will be completed (and include examples, usecases, etc), but, yeah.

I've always taken a fairly strong interest in the tooling I use, for QoL and dtrt reasons usually (but also sometimes tool capability). conversely, I also have things I absolutely loathe using

1. wireguard. a far better vpn software and protocol than most others (and I have slung tunnels with many a vpn protocol). been using this a few years already, even before the ios app beta came around. good shit, take a look if you haven't before
2. smallstep cli. it's one of two pieces of Go software I actually like. smallstep is trying to build its own ecosystem of CA tools and solutions (and that's usable in its own right, albeit by default focused to containershit), but the cli is great for what you typically want with certificate handling. compare step certificate inspect file and step certificate inspect --insecure https://totallyreal.froztbyte.net/ to the bullshit you need with openssl. check it out
3. restic. the other of the two Go-softwares I like. I posted about it here previously
4. rust cli things! oh damn there's so many, I'm going to put them on their own list below
5. zsh, extremely lazily configured, with my own little module and scoping system and no oh-my-zsh. fish has been a thing I've seen people be happy about but I'm just an extremely lazy computerer so zsh it stays. zsh's complexity is extremely nonzero and it definitely has sharp edges, but it does work well. sunk cost, I guess. bonus round: race your zsh, check your times:

% hyperfine -m 50 'zsh -i -c echo'
Benchmark 1: zsh -i -c echo
  Time (mean ± σ):      69.1 ms ±   2.8 ms    [User: 35.1 ms, System: 28.6 ms]
  Range (min … max):    67.0 ms …  86.2 ms    50 runs

6. magic-wormhole. this is a really, really neat little bit of software for just fucking sending files to someone. wormhole send filename one side, wormhole receive the-code-it-gives the other side, bam! it uses SPAKE2 (disclaimer: I did help review that post, it's still good) for session-tied keying, and it's just generally good software
7. [macos specifically] alfred. I gotta say, I barely use this to its full potential, and even so it is a great bit of assistive stuff. more capable than spotlight, has a variety of extensibility, and generally snappy as hell.
8. [macos specifically] choosy. I use this to control link-routing and link-opening on my workstation to a fairly wide degree (because a lot of other software irks me, and does the wrong thing by default). this will be a fuller post on its own, too
9. [macos specifically] little snitch. application-level per-connection highly granular-capable firewalling. with profiles. their site does a decent explanation of it. the first few days of setup tends to be Quite Involved with how many rules you need to add (and you'll probably be surprised at just how many things try to make various kinds of metrics etc connections), but well worth it. one of the ways to make modern software less intolerable. (honorary extra mention: obdev makes a number of handy pieces of mac software, check their site out)
10. [macos specifically] soundsource. highly capable per-application per-sink audio control software. with the ability to pop in VSTs and AUs at multiple points. extremely helpful for a lot of things (such as perma-muting discord, which never shuts up, even in system dnd mode)

rust tools:

1. b3sum. file checksum thing, but using blake3. fast!. worth checking out. probably still niche, might catch on eventually
2. hyperfine. does what it says on the tin. see example use above.
3. dust. like du, but better, and way faster. oh dear god it is so much faster. I deal with a lot of pets, and this thing is one of the invaluables in dealing with those.
4. ripgrep. the one on this list that people are most likely to know. grep, but better, and faster.
5. fd. again, find but better and faster.
6. tokei. sloccount but not shit. handy for if you quickly want to assess a codebase/repo.
7. bottom. down the evolutionary chain from top and htop, has more feature modes and a number of neat interactive view functions/helpers

honorary mentions (things I know of but don't use that much):

1. mrh. not doing as much consulting as I used to, using it less. quickly checks all git(?) repos in a path for uncommitted changes
2. fzf. still haven't really gotten to integrating it into my usage
3. just. need to get to using it more.
4. jql. I ... tend to avoid jq? my "this should be in a program. with safety rails." reflex often kicks in when I see jq things. haven't really explored this
5. rtx. their tagline is "a better asdf". I like the idea of it because asdf is a miserable little pile of shell scripts and fuck that, but I still haven't really gotten to using it in anger myself. I have my own wrapper methods for keeping pyenv/nvm/etc out of my shell unless needed
6. pomsky. previously rulex. regex creation tool and language. been using it a little bit. not enough to comment in detail yet

I don't really know enough about the C64 to say anything one way or the other, but this comment on youtube did okay:

@eightbitguru
1 year ago
2021: We have definitely seen everything the C64 can do now.
2022: My beer. Hold it.

and I'm posting this without even having seen the whole thing yet