Tuesday, 23 April

12:42

NSA pwning business comms. equip. [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

The US has adopted the law to conscript people in to spying on computer and phone data for US secret agencies.

It's not really "everyone" in the US that could be forced to spy in his way. But it is more people than you might think.

*Former and current U.S. officials told The Washington Post that the new language was intended to apply to data [server] storage centers, but civil liberties advocates like Goitein warn it could be used to compel any business — such as a grocery store, gym, or laundry service — to allow the National Security Agency (NSA) to scoop up data from its phones or computers.*

*"The provision effectively grants the NSA access to the communications equipment of almost any U.S. business, plus huge numbers of organizations and individuals," Goitein wrote on social media early Saturday. "It's a gift to any president who may wish to spy on political enemies, journalists, ideological opponents, etc."*

Oppressive system vs. protesters, UK [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

The UK is gradually eliminating the right to protest in ways people might actually notice. Nonviolent protesters have been sentenced to years in prison.

12:21

Microsoft and Security Incentives [Schneier on Security]

Former senior White House cyber policy director A. J. Grotto talks about the economic incentives for companies to improve their security—in particular, Microsoft:

Grotto told us Microsoft had to be “dragged kicking and screaming” to provide logging capabilities to the government by default, and given the fact the mega-corp banked around $20 billion in revenue from security services last year, the concession was minimal at best.

[…]

“The government needs to focus on encouraging and catalyzing competition,” Grotto said. He believes it also needs to publicly scrutinize Microsoft and make sure everyone knows when it messes up.

“At the end of the day, Microsoft, any company, is going to respond most directly to market incentives,” Grotto told us. “Unless this scrutiny generates changed behavior among its customers who might want to look elsewhere, then the incentives for Microsoft to change are not going to be as strong as they should be.”

Breaking up the tech monopolies is one of the best things we can do for cybersecurity.

10:49

09:14

Generational shifts in punditry [Seth's Blog]

In 1970, when Walter Cronkite was narrating current events for the United States, he was 54 years old. Hitchcock made his last film when he was 77.

When there’s a limited number of slots for narrators to fill, they can stick around for a long time.

One of the overlooked cultural shifts of our time is that by dramatically expanding the number of slots (and removing the gatekeepers) we skipped twenty or thirty years. Now, there are writers, pundits, video stars and producers who aren’t being asked to wait two decades to have a voice.

Existing media (like traditional book publishing or network TV) will hold on to proven voices for as long as it can, but new media (which now captures far more attention) has no mechanism for that.

If it seems like it’s happening all at once, compared to history, it is.

PS the big finale of the GOODBIDS auction launch week is ready. Get two Taylor Swift tickets (in Amsterdam in July) plus a travel budget. To benefit charity: water.

The details are right here…

08:35

Pluralistic: "Humans in the loop" must detect the hardest-to-spot errors, at superhuman speed (23 Apr 2024) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]


Today's links


A vintage Readers' Digest 'What's Wrong With This Picture' puzzle, featuring a subtly distorted domestic scene in which a man sits in an easy chair, reading a newspaper, while a woman in a pinafore vacuums the rug. The window has been altered such that it is filled with the staring red eye of HAL 9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' The image is rendered in black and white, except for HAL's eye. It blinks erratically, switching to a false-color version that is momentarily visible and then disappears.

"Humans in the loop" must detect the hardest-to-spot errors, at superhuman speed (permalink)

If AI has a future (a big if), it will have to be economically viable. An industry can't spend 1,700% more on Nvidia chips than it earns indefinitely – not even with Nvidia being a principle investor in its largest customers:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39883571

A company that pays $0.36-$1/query for electricity and (scarce, fresh) water can't indefinitely give those queries away by the millions to people who are expected to revise those queries dozens of times before eliciting the perfect botshit rendition of "instructions for removing a grilled cheese sandwich from a VCR in the style of the King James Bible":

https://www.semianalysis.com/p/the-inference-cost-of-search-disruption

Eventually, the industry will have to uncover some mix of applications that will cover its operating costs, if only to keep the lights on in the face of investor disillusionment (this isn't optional – investor disillusionment is an inevitable part of every bubble).

Now, there are lots of low-stakes applications for AI that can run just fine on the current AI technology, despite its many – and seemingly inescapable errors ("hallucinations"). People who use AI to generate illustrations of their D&D characters engaged in epic adventures from their previous gaming session don't care about the odd extra finger. If the chatbot powering a tourist's automatic text-to-translation-to-speech phone tool gets a few words wrong, it's still much better than the alternative of speaking slowly and loudly in your own language while making emphatic hand-gestures.

There are lots of these applications, and many of the people who benefit from them would doubtless pay something for them. The problem – from an AI company's perspective – is that these aren't just low-stakes, they're also low-value. Their users would pay something for them, but not very much.

For AI to keep its servers on through the coming trough of disillusionment, it will have to locate high-value applications, too. Economically speaking, the function of low-value applications is to soak up excess capacity and produce value at the margins after the high-value applications pay the bills. Low-value applications are a side-dish, like the coach seats on an airplane whose total operating expenses are paid by the business class passengers up front. Without the principle income from high-value applications, the servers shut down, and the low-value applications disappear:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Now, there are lots of high-value applications the AI industry has identified for its products. Broadly speaking, these high-value applications share the same problem: they are all high-stakes, which means they are very sensitive to errors. Mistakes made by apps that produce code, drive cars, or identify cancerous masses on chest X-rays are extremely consequential.

Some businesses may be insensitive to those consequences. Air Canada replaced its human customer service staff with chatbots that just lied to passengers, stealing hundreds of dollars from them in the process. But the process for getting your money back after you are defrauded by Air Canada's chatbot is so onerous that only one passenger has bothered to go through it, spending ten weeks exhausting all of Air Canada's internal review mechanisms before fighting his case for weeks more at the regulator:

https://bc.ctvnews.ca/air-canada-s-chatbot-gave-a-b-c-man-the-wrong-information-now-the-airline-has-to-pay-for-the-mistake-1.6769454

There's never just one ant. If this guy was defrauded by an AC chatbot, so were hundreds or thousands of other fliers. Air Canada doesn't have to pay them back. Air Canada is tacitly asserting that, as the country's flagship carrier and near-monopolist, it is too big to fail and too big to jail, which means it's too big to care.

Air Canada shows that for some business customers, AI doesn't need to be able to do a worker's job in order to be a smart purchase: a chatbot can replace a worker, fail to their worker's job, and still save the company money on balance.

I can't predict whether the world's sociopathic monopolists are numerous and powerful enough to keep the lights on for AI companies through leases for automation systems that let them commit consequence-free free fraud by replacing workers with chatbots that serve as moral crumple-zones for furious customers:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0747563219304029

But even stipulating that this is sufficient, it's intrinsically unstable. Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops, and the mass replacement of humans with high-speed fraud software seems likely to stoke the already blazing furnace of modern antitrust:

https://www.eff.org/de/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby

Of course, the AI companies have their own answer to this conundrum. A high-stakes/high-value customer can still fire workers and replace them with AI – they just need to hire fewer, cheaper workers to supervise the AI and monitor it for "hallucinations." This is called the "human in the loop" solution.

The human in the loop story has some glaring holes. From a worker's perspective, serving as the human in the loop in a scheme that cuts wage bills through AI is a nightmare – the worst possible kind of automation.

Let's pause for a little detour through automation theory here. Automation can augment a worker. We can call this a "centaur" – the worker offloads a repetitive task, or one that requires a high degree of vigilance, or (worst of all) both. They're a human head on a robot body (hence "centaur"). Think of the sensor/vision system in your car that beeps if you activate your turn-signal while a car is in your blind spot. You're in charge, but you're getting a second opinion from the robot.

Likewise, consider an AI tool that double-checks a radiologist's diagnosis of your chest X-ray and suggests a second look when its assessment doesn't match the radiologist's. Again, the human is in charge, but the robot is serving as a backstop and helpmeet, using its inexhaustible robotic vigilance to augment human skill.

That's centaurs. They're the good automation. Then there's the bad automation: the reverse-centaur, when the human is used to augment the robot.

Amazon warehouse pickers stand in one place while robotic shelving units trundle up to them at speed; then, the haptic bracelets shackled around their wrists buzz at them, directing them pick up specific items and move them to a basket, while a third automation system penalizes them for taking toilet breaks or even just walking around and shaking out their limbs to avoid a repetitive strain injury. This is a robotic head using a human body – and destroying it in the process.

An AI-assisted radiologist processes fewer chest X-rays every day, costing their employer more, on top of the cost of the AI. That's not what AI companies are selling. They're offering hospitals the power to create reverse centaurs: radiologist-assisted AIs. That's what "human in the loop" means.

This is a problem for workers, but it's also a problem for their bosses (assuming those bosses actually care about correcting AI hallucinations, rather than providing a figleaf that lets them commit fraud or kill people and shift the blame the an unpunishable AI).

Humans are good at a lot of things, but they're not good at eternal, perfect vigilance. Writing code is hard, but performing code-review (where you check someone else's code for errors) is much harder – and it gets even harder if the code you're reviewing is usually fine, because this requires that you maintain your vigilance for something that only occurs at rare and unpredictable intervals:

https://twitter.com/qntm/status/1773779967521780169

But for a coding shop to make the cost of an AI pencil out, the human in the loop needs to be able to process a lot of AI-generated code. Replacing a human with an AI doesn't produce any savings if you need to hire two more humans to take turns doing close reads of the AI's code.

This is the fatal flaw in robo-taxi schemes. The "human in the loop" who is supposed to keep the murderbot from smashing into other cars, steering into oncoming traffic, or running down pedestrians isn't a driver, they're a driving instructor. This is a much harder job than being a driver, even when the student driver you're monitoring is a human, making human mistakes at human speed. It's even harder when the student driver is a robot, making errors at computer speed:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/01/human-in-the-loop/#monkey-in-the-middle

This is why the doomed robo-taxi company Cruise had to deploy 1.5 skilled, high-paid human monitors to oversee each of its murderbots, while traditional taxis operate at a fraction of the cost with a single, precaratized, low-paid human driver:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

The vigilance problem is pretty fatal for the human-in-the-loop gambit, but there's another problem that is, if anything, even more fatal: the kinds of errors that AIs make.

Foundationally, AI is applied statistics. An AI company trains its AI by feeding it a lot of data about the real world. The program processes this data, looking for statistical correlations in that data, and makes a model of the world based on those correlations. A chatbot is a next-word-guessing program, and an AI "art" generator is a next-pixel-guessing program. They're drawing on billions of documents to find the most statistically likely way of finishing a sentence or a line of pixels in a bitmap:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922

This means that AI doesn't just make errors – it makes subtle errors, the kinds of errors that are the hardest for a human in the loop to spot, because they are the most statistically probable ways of being wrong. Sure, we notice the gross errors in AI output, like confidently claiming that a living human is dead:

https://www.tomsguide.com/opinion/according-to-chatgpt-im-dead

But the most common errors that AIs make are the ones we don't notice, because they're perfectly camouflaged as the truth. Think of the recurring AI programming error that inserts a call to a nonexistent library called "huggingface-cli," which is what the library would be called if developers reliably followed naming conventions. But due to a human inconsistency, the real library has a slightly different name. The fact that AIs repeatedly inserted references to the nonexistent library opened up a vulnerability – a security researcher created a (inert) malicious library with that name and tricked numerous companies into compiling it into their code because their human reviewers missed the chatbot's (statistically indistinguishable from the the truth) lie:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/

For a driving instructor or a code reviewer overseeing a human subject, the majority of errors are comparatively easy to spot, because they're the kinds of errors that lead to inconsistent library naming – places where a human behaved erratically or irregularly. But when reality is irregular or erratic, the AI will make errors by presuming that things are statistically normal.

These are the hardest kinds of errors to spot. They couldn't be harder for a human to detect if they were specifically designed to go undetected. The human in the loop isn't just being asked to spot mistakes – they're being actively deceived. The AI isn't merely wrong, it's constructing a subtle "what's wrong with this picture"-style puzzle. Not just one such puzzle, either: millions of them, at speed, which must be solved by the human in the loop, who must remain perfectly vigilant for things that are, by definition, almost totally unnoticeable.

This is a special new torment for reverse centaurs – and a significant problem for AI companies hoping to accumulate and keep enough high-value, high-stakes customers on their books to weather the coming trough of disillusionment.

This is pretty grim, but it gets grimmer. AI companies have argued that they have a third line of business, a way to make money for their customers beyond automation's gifts to their payrolls: they claim that they can perform difficult scientific tasks at superhuman speed, producing billion-dollar insights (new materials, new drugs, new proteins) at unimaginable speed.

However, these claims – credulously amplified by the non-technical press – keep on shattering when they are tested by experts who understand the esoteric domains in which AI is said to have an unbeatable advantage. For example, Google claimed that its Deepmind AI had discovered "millions of new materials," "equivalent to nearly 800 years’ worth of knowledge," constituting "an order-of-magnitude expansion in stable materials known to humanity":

https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/millions-of-new-materials-discovered-with-deep-learning/

It was a hoax. When independent material scientists reviewed representative samples of these "new materials," they concluded that "no new materials have been discovered" and that not one of these materials was "credible, useful and novel":

https://www.404media.co/google-says-it-discovered-millions-of-new-materials-with-ai-human-researchers/

As Brian Merchant writes, AI claims are eerily similar to "smoke and mirrors" – the dazzling reality-distortion field thrown up by 17th century magic lantern technology, which millions of people ascribed wild capabilities to, thanks to the outlandish claims of the technology's promoters:

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-really-is-smoke-and-mirrors

The fact that we have a four-hundred-year-old name for this phenomenon, and yet we're still falling prey to it is frankly a little depressing. And, unlucky for us, it turns out that AI therapybots can't help us with this – rather, they're apt to literally convince us to kill ourselves:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkadgm/man-dies-by-suicide-after-talking-with-ai-chatbot-widow-says

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

This day in history (permalink)

#15yrsago EU Parliament passes copyright term extension, rejects proposal to give the addition funds to artists https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/parliament-buckles-copyright-extension-goes-through-to-council-of-ministers/

#10yrsago How science fiction influences thinking about the future https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/how-americas-leading-science-fiction-authors-are-shaping-your-future-180951169/?no-ist

#10yrsago Obama official responsible for copyright chapters of TPP & ACTA gets a job at MPAA; his replacement is another copyright lobbyist https://www.vox.com/2014/4/22/5636466/hollywood-just-hired-another-white-house-trade-official

#10yrsago Having leisure time is now a marker for poverty, not riches https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2014/04/22/nice-work-if-you-can-get-out

#10yrsago Eternal vigilance app for social networks: treating privacy vulnerabilities like other security risks https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2014/04/21/eternal-vigilance-is-a-solvable-technology-problem-a-proposal-for-streamlined-privacy-alerts/

#10yrsago How the Russian surveillance state works https://web.archive.org/web/20140206154124/http://www.worldpolicy.org/journal/fall2013/Russia-surveillance

#5yrsago Political candidate’s kids use his election flyers to fool his laptop’s facial recognition lock https://twitter.com/mattcarthy/status/1120641557886058496

#5yrsago Fool me twice: New York State commutes Charter’s death sentence after Charter promises to stop breaking its promises https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/04/charter-avoids-getting-kicked-out-of-new-york-agrees-to-new-merger-conditions/

#5yrsago Greta Thunberg attributes her ability to focus on climate change to her Asperger’s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKMX8WRw3fc

#5yrsago A Sanders candidacy would make 2020 a referendum on the future, not a referendum on Trump https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/22/bernie-sanders-democrats-trump-2020

#5yrsago EU to create 350m person biometric database for borders, migration and law enforcement https://www.zdnet.com/article/eu-votes-to-create-gigantic-biometrics-database/

#1yrsago A Collective Bargain https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/23/a-collective-bargain/

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, holding a mic.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025

  • Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025

  • Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM

  • Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM

Latest podcast: Capitalists Hate Capitalism https://craphound.com/news/2024/04/14/capitalists-hate-capitalism/

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

08:28

A Handy Guide To Fisting by Ripley LaCross [Oh Joy Sex Toy]

A Handy Guide To Fisting by Ripley LaCross

Put your hands together for Ripley’s Fisting Comic! Open up to new ideas, widen your knowledge, and prepare to get your hands dirty as Ripley LaCross takes us through a deep dive guide on diving in to the deep. Enjoyed today’s incredible comic? Want to see what else Ripley might have up their sleeve? THEN […]

02:35

01:28

00:42

Page 6 [Flipside]

Page 6 is done.

What we learned inside a North Korean internet server [OSnews]

A misconfigured North Korean Internet cloud server has provided a fascinating glance into the world of North Korean animation outsourcing and how foreign companies might be inadvertently employing North Korean companies on information technology (IT) projects. The incident also underlines how difficult it is for foreign companies to verify their outsourced work is not potentially breaking sanctions and ending up on computers in Pyongyang.

↫ Martyn Williams at 38 North

What an absolutely wild story.

00:28

Back Home and a Bit Discombobulated [Whatever]

This is what I get for taking redeye flights and then daysleeping to catch up on all the sleep I didn’t get on my flight. Today a total wash-out for braining. The song above captures my general state at the moment. I’ll be better tomorrow. Maybe! We’ll see!

Regardless, good to be home. It’s where my people are.

— JS

Monday, 22 April

23:56

Bits from Debian: Debian Project Leader Election 2024, Andreas Tille elected. [Planet Debian]

The voting period for the Debian Project Leader election has ended. Please join us in congratulating Andreas Tille as the new Debian Project Leader.

The new term for the project leader started on 2024-04-21.

369 of 1,010 Debian Developers voted using the Condorcet method.

More information about the results of the voting are available on the Debian Project Leader Elections 2024 page.

Many thanks all of our Developers for voting.

23:35

GNU Parallel 20240422 ('Børsen') [stable] [Planet GNU]

GNU Parallel 20240422 ('Børsen') has been released. It is available for download at: lbry://@GnuParallel:4

Quote of the month:

  I’m a big fan of GNU parallel!
    -- Scott Cain @scottjcain@twitter
 
New in this release:

  • Bug fixes and man page updates.


GNU Parallel - For people who live life in the parallel lane.

If you like GNU Parallel record a video testimonial: Say who you are, what you use GNU Parallel for, how it helps you, and what you like most about it. Include a command that uses GNU Parallel if you feel like it.


About GNU Parallel


GNU Parallel is a shell tool for executing jobs in parallel using one or more computers. A job can be a single command or a small script that has to be run for each of the lines in the input. The typical input is a list of files, a list of hosts, a list of users, a list of URLs, or a list of tables. A job can also be a command that reads from a pipe. GNU Parallel can then split the input and pipe it into commands in parallel.

If you use xargs and tee today you will find GNU Parallel very easy to use as GNU Parallel is written to have the same options as xargs. If you write loops in shell, you will find GNU Parallel may be able to replace most of the loops and make them run faster by running several jobs in parallel. GNU Parallel can even replace nested loops.

GNU Parallel makes sure output from the commands is the same output as you would get had you run the commands sequentially. This makes it possible to use output from GNU Parallel as input for other programs.

For example you can run this to convert all jpeg files into png and gif files and have a progress bar:

  parallel --bar convert {1} {1.}.{2} ::: *.jpg ::: png gif

Or you can generate big, medium, and small thumbnails of all jpeg files in sub dirs:

  find . -name '*.jpg' |
    parallel convert -geometry {2} {1} {1//}/thumb{2}_{1/} :::: - ::: 50 100 200

You can find more about GNU Parallel at: http://www.gnu.org/s/parallel/

You can install GNU Parallel in just 10 seconds with:

    $ (wget -O - pi.dk/3 || lynx -source pi.dk/3 || curl pi.dk/3/ || \
       fetch -o - http://pi.dk/3 ) > install.sh
    $ sha1sum install.sh | grep 883c667e01eed62f975ad28b6d50e22a
    12345678 883c667e 01eed62f 975ad28b 6d50e22a
    $ md5sum install.sh | grep cc21b4c943fd03e93ae1ae49e28573c0
    cc21b4c9 43fd03e9 3ae1ae49 e28573c0
    $ sha512sum install.sh | grep ec113b49a54e705f86d51e784ebced224fdff3f52
    79945d9d 250b42a4 2067bb00 99da012e c113b49a 54e705f8 6d51e784 ebced224
    fdff3f52 ca588d64 e75f6033 61bd543f d631f592 2f87ceb2 ab034149 6df84a35
    $ bash install.sh

Watch the intro video on http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL284C9FF2488BC6D1

Walk through the tutorial (man parallel_tutorial). Your command line will love you for it.

When using programs that use GNU Parallel to process data for publication please cite:

O. Tange (2018): GNU Parallel 2018, March 2018, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1146014.

If you like GNU Parallel:

  • Give a demo at your local user group/team/colleagues
  • Post the intro videos on Reddit/Diaspora*/forums/blogs/ Identi.ca/Google+/Twitter/Facebook/Linkedin/mailing lists
  • Get the merchandise https://gnuparallel.threadless.com/designs/gnu-parallel
  • Request or write a review for your favourite blog or magazine
  • Request or build a package for your favourite distribution (if it is not already there)
  • Invite me for your next conference


If you use programs that use GNU Parallel for research:

  • Please cite GNU Parallel in you publications (use --citation)


If GNU Parallel saves you money:



About GNU SQL


GNU sql aims to give a simple, unified interface for accessing databases through all the different databases' command line clients. So far the focus has been on giving a common way to specify login information (protocol, username, password, hostname, and port number), size (database and table size), and running queries.

The database is addressed using a DBURL. If commands are left out you will get that database's interactive shell.

When using GNU SQL for a publication please cite:

O. Tange (2011): GNU SQL - A Command Line Tool for Accessing Different Databases Using DBURLs, ;login: The USENIX Magazine, April 2011:29-32.


About GNU Niceload


GNU niceload slows down a program when the computer load average (or other system activity) is above a certain limit. When the limit is reached the program will be suspended for some time. If the limit is a soft limit the program will be allowed to run for short amounts of time before being suspended again. If the limit is a hard limit the program will only be allowed to run when the system is below the limit.

The Open Home Foundation launches [LWN.net]

The Open Home Foundation has announced its existence as a home and support resource for free home-automation projects.

We created the Open Home Foundation to fight for the fundamental principles of privacy, choice, and sustainability for smart homes. And every person who lives in one.

Ahead of today, we've transferred over 240 projects, standards, drivers, and libraries—Home Assistant, ESPHome, Zigpy, Piper, Improv Wi-Fi, Wyoming, and so many more—to the Open Home Foundation. This is all about looking into the future. We've done this to create a bulwark against surveillance capitalism, the risk of buyout, and open-source projects becoming abandonware. To an extent, this protection extends even against our future selves—so that smart home users can continue to benefit for years, if not decades. No matter what comes.

23:07

Paying for it doesn’t make it a market [OSnews]

Cory Doctorow, nailing it as usual.

If you care about how people are treated by platforms, you can’t just tell them to pay for services instead of using ad-supported media. The most important factor in getting decent treatment out of a tech company isn’t whether you pay with cash instead of attention – it’s whether you’re locked in, and thus a flight risk whom the platform must cater to.

↫ Cory Doctorow

I’m sick and tired of the phrase “if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product”, because it implies that if just you pay for a product or service, you’re not going to be treated like ass. The problem is, as Doctorow points out, that this simply is not supported by the evidence, and that it isn’t whether or not you’re paying that makes you have a good or bad experience – it’s whether or not you’re locked in.

If you’ve got nowhere else to go, then corporations can treat you like ass.

There are so, so many free services and products I use where I’m anything but a “product”. My Linux distribution of choice, Fedora. My web browser, Firefox. The countless open source applications I use on my desktops, laptops, and smartphone. Those are all cases where even though I’m not paying, I know I’m being treated with respect, and I feel entirely comfortable with all of those. And no, you don’t get to exclude the open source world just because it’s inconvenient for the “you’re the product” argument.

There are also countless services and products where the opposite is true; I’m a paying customer, but I still feel like I’m the product. I pay for additional Google Drive storage. I pay for an Office 364 subscription because I needed it as a translator (I’m working on OSNews full-time now, and could use your help keeping the site going), but I can’t cancel it because my wife, my parents, and my parents-in-law use that same subscription. We pay for Netflix and one or two other video services. I don’t know if our ISP or wireless provider do anything malicious, but it wouldn’t surprise me. And so on.

Being a paying customer means nothing. It’s how easy it is for you to stop being a customer that matters.

Cyberyuck [Penny Arcade]

We saw a Cybertruck in the wild when we were coming back from a funeral. It bore a kind of gentle symmetry, because Elon Musk will be buried beneath one figuratively and possibly literally because of how the gas pedal can slide off and get stuck under a manifold, locking the pedal into its highest level of push-downedness. It's fine, though - the thirty-eight hundred or so cybertrucks out in the wild are being brought in to have the footplate pop-riveted in, like they were shoeing a horse.

22:21

22:14

Earth Month: Uniting for the Planet [Humble Bundle Blog]

Earth Month is a time for global unity in celebrating our planet’s beauty and taking action to preserve it for future generations. At Humble, Climate Change & Sustainability is one of our five key social impact focus areas, and we’re proud to uphold our commitment by supporting organizations dedicated to protecting and restoring the Earth’s natural ecosystems. Planting With PurposeThrough our partnership with One Tree …

The post Earth Month: Uniting for the Planet appeared first on Humble Bundle Blog.

21:21

Russian FSB Counterintelligence Chief Gets 9 Years in Cybercrime Bribery Scheme [Krebs on Security]

The head of counterintelligence for a division of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) was sentenced last week to nine years in a penal colony for accepting a USD $1.7 million bribe to ignore the activities of a prolific Russian cybercrime group that hacked thousands of e-commerce websites. The protection scheme was exposed in 2022 when Russian authorities arrested six members of the group, which sold millions of stolen payment cards at flashy online shops like Trump’s Dumps.

A now-defunct carding shop that sold stolen credit cards and invoked 45’s likeness and name.

As reported by The Record, a Russian court last week sentenced former FSB officer Grigory Tsaregorodtsev for taking a $1.7 million bribe from a cybercriminal group that was seeking a “roof,” a well-placed, corrupt law enforcement official who could be counted on to both disregard their illegal hacking activities and run interference with authorities in the event of their arrest.

Tsaregorodtsev was head of the counterintelligence department for a division of the FSB based in Perm, Russia. In February 2022, Russian authorities arrested six men in the Perm region accused of selling stolen payment card data. They also seized multiple carding shops run by the gang, including Ferum Shop, Sky-Fraud, and Trump’s Dumps, a popular fraud store that invoked the 45th president’s likeness and promised to “make credit card fraud great again.”

All of the domains seized in that raid were registered by an IT consulting company in Perm called Get-net LLC, which was owned in part by Artem Zaitsev — one of the six men arrested. Zaitsev reportedly was a well-known programmer whose company supplied services and leasing to the local FSB field office.

The message for Trump’s Dumps users left behind by Russian authorities that seized the domain in 2022.

Russian news sites report that Internal Affairs officials with the FSB grew suspicious when Tsaregorodtsev became a little too interested in the case following the hacking group’s arrests. The former FSB agent had reportedly assured the hackers he could have their case transferred and that they would soon be free.

But when that promised freedom didn’t materialize, four the of the defendants pulled the walls down on the scheme and brought down their own roof. The FSB arrested Tsaregorodtsev, and seized $154,000 in cash, 100 gold bars, real estate and expensive cars.

At Tsaregorodtsev’s trial, his lawyers argued that their client wasn’t guilty of bribery per se, but that he did admit to fraud because he was ultimately unable to fully perform the services for which he’d been hired.

The Russian news outlet Kommersant reports that all four of those who cooperated were released with probation or correctional labor. Zaitsev received a sentence of 3.5 years in prison, and defendant Alexander Kovalev got four years.

In 2017, KrebsOnSecurity profiled Trump’s Dumps, and found the contact address listed on the site was tied to an email address used to register more than a dozen domains that were made to look like legitimate Javascript calls many e-commerce sites routinely make to process transactions — such as “js-link[dot]su,” “js-stat[dot]su,” and “js-mod[dot]su.”

Searching on those malicious domains revealed a 2016 report from RiskIQ, which shows the domains featured prominently in a series of hacking campaigns against e-commerce websites. According to RiskIQ, the attacks targeted online stores running outdated and unpatched versions of shopping cart software from Magento, Powerfront and OpenCart.

Those shopping cart flaws allowed the crooks to install “web skimmers,” malicious Javascript used to steal credit card details and other information from payment forms on the checkout pages of vulnerable e-commerce sites. The stolen customer payment card details were then sold on sites like Trump’s Dumps and Sky-Fraud.

Andreas Tille elected as Debian project leader [LWN.net]

The Debian project leader election results are in and Andreas Tille has been elected. In a fairly competitive vote, Tille beat Sruthi Chandran to fill the position for the coming year. We looked at the election and the candidates a few weeks back.

20:00

The Top 47 Events in Seattle This Week: Apr 22–28, 2024 [The Stranger]

Seattle Black Film Festival, Hanif Abdurraqib, and More Top Picks by EverOut Staff

We've got a special delivery: all of the best events Seattle has to offer this week in one handy roundup. Find details on everything from the Seattle Black Film Festival to the Upper Left Comedy Festival, and readings from Hanif Abdurraqib and Gabrielle Zevin, here.

MONDAY LIVE MUSIC

Empress Of Live on KEXP
Before seeing her magnetic opening set for Carly Rae Jepsen's Seattle show last fall, I was admittedly unfamiliar with the genius of Empress Of (aka Lorely Rodriguez). I was mesmerized by Rodriguez's performance style, which involved standing amid free-standing mirrors and dancing her heart out while singing ethereal electro-pop songs in a lavender fairy-esque outfit. I was immediately obsessed with tracks like "When I'm With Him" and "Women Is a Word." Unfortunately, her current tour does not include any proper concerts in the Pacific Northwest. However, she will stop by KEXP this week for a live in-studio performance to support her critically acclaimed new album For Your Consideration. The studio session is free and open to the public, but admission is limited—you've been warned! Snag your tickets in person 90 minutes before the set (or just watch it on YouTube afterward). AUDREY VANN
(KEXP, Uptown)

19:21

Everything We Know about May/June Sticker Packs [Penny Arcade]

I saw a Cybertruck in real life for the first time a few days ago. That is the ugliest vehicle I’ve ever seen and I can remember when people were buying the PT Cruiser. I can’t imagine a normal, human person seeing that monstrosity and thinking “That’s the truck for me!” What I’m saying is, Cybertruck owners don’t deserve rights. 

 

 

19:14

Facebook opens its Android-based Quest operating system to other VR device makers [OSnews]

Today we’re taking the next step toward our vision for a more open computing platform for the metaverse. We’re opening up the operating system powering our Meta Quest devices to third-party hardware makers, giving more choice to consumers and a larger ecosystem for developers to build for. We’re working with leading global technology companies to bring this new ecosystem to life and making it even easier for developers to build apps and reach their audiences on the platform.

[…]

Meta Horizon OS is the result of a decade of work by Meta to build a next-generation computing platform. To pioneer standalone headsets, we developed technologies like inside-out tracking, and for more natural interaction systems and social presence, we developed eye, face, hand, and body tracking. For mixed reality, we built a full stack of technologies for blending the digital and physical worlds, including high-resolution Passthrough, Scene Understanding, and Spatial Anchors. This long-term investment that began on the mobile-first foundations of the Android Open Source Project has produced a full mixed reality operating system used by millions of people.

↫ Facebook’s blog

In summary, Facebook wants the operating system of their Quest series of virtual reality devices – an Android Open Source Project fork optimised for this use – to become the default platform for virtual reality devices from all kinds of OEMs. Today, they’re announcing that both Asus and Lenovo will be releasing devices running this Meta Horizon OS, with the former focusing on high-end VR gaming, and the latter on more general use cases of work, entertainment, and so on. Facebook will also be working together with Microsoft to create a Quest “inspired by Xbox”.

The Meta Quest Store, the on-device marketplace for applications and games, will be renamed to the Meta Horizon Store, and the App Lab, where developers can more easily get their applications and games on devices and in the hands of consumers as long as they meet basic technical and content guidelines, will be integrated into the Meta Horizon Store for easier access than before. In addition, in a mildly spicy move, Facebook is openly inviting Google to bring the Google Play Store to the VR Android fork, “where it can operate with the same economic model it does on other platforms”.

The odds of me buying anything from Facebook are slim, so I really hope this new move won’t corner the market for VR headsets right out of the gate; I don’t want another Android/iOS duopoly. I’m not particularly interested in VR quite yet – but give it a few more years, and I certainly won’t pass up on a capable device that allows me to play Beat Saber and other exercise-focused applications and games.

I just don’t want it to be a Facebook device or operating system.

Younger People Are Planning Their Own Composting Funerals in Washington [The Stranger]

Today's hottest Earth Day activity is planning to turn your dead body into compost. by Nathalie Graham

Recently, I logged onto a video call to plan my own funeral. 

A care advisor with Earth Funeral, the newest Washington company to enter the human composting game, walked me through how I’d sign up to give them my body after my eventual demise and how, after a roughly month-long process, I would be turned into soil. It would cost just under $5,500. 

Terramation, the scientific name for turning human bodies into human compost, is nothing new for Washingtonians. Lawmakers voted in 2019 to allow us to grind our lifeless bones into dust and turn ourselves into worm food as a greener alternative to traditional burial and cremation. Now, five years later, human composting is legal in seven states, and Washington has three companies vying to capitalize on your cadavers. 

An earth vessel for your earth vessel. Earth Funeral

Since death is often such a fickle thing, these companies rely on pre-planned commitments from the self-composting curious. It’s an option many Washingtonians are considering and that some are already committed to. 

Most of Earth Funeral’s clients are 55 years old or older, according to care advisor Sarah McWalter, 40. She believes younger people are starting to think about their own deaths earlier. 

“Not having kids is part of it,” McWalter thinks. Younger, child-free people don’t have to consider preferences besides their own. 

The other thing changing the trend is the younger generation’s climate consciousness, McWalter said. 

“Younger people are more educated around climate change,” she explained. Choosing composting as their end-of-life option is a way for these green-minded people to “lock in” and “do something really good for the planet before everything is said and done.” 

Dale Knudsen, 35, is the cofounder of the elopement company Wilder Pines. He's looking into a green funeral option after a high school research project soured him on the prospect of more traditional interments.

“In the American funeral method we pump people full of chemicals, encase them in metal, and put them in a concrete tomb,” Knudsen said. “That always seemed very aggressive and unnecessarily harsh just so some people can see a gussied up body.”

Traditional funerals—where we plunk our dearly departed six feet under the ground—dose American soil with 800,000 gallons of formaldehyde each year. Not to mention, we bury “104,000 tons of steel, 1.6 million tons of reinforced concrete, and 30 million board feet of hardwood.” Cremation, the other most popular option for dealing with the American dead, produces waste, too. Each one releases 534 pounds of carbon dioxide into the air.

Knudsen wanted different options. He came face to face with his own mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic when, on his pandemic walks through Lakeview Cemetery, he mulled over his own funeral. 

“I don’t want to be a corpse in the ground,” he said. Instead, he wants to be composted or naturally buried at the White Eagle Memorial Preserve. He's currently setting up tours of human composting facilities. Whatever he chooses, he wants to make his loved ones go on a scavenger hunt that kicks off at Lakeview rather than host a traditional funeral. 

Even though he’s young, Knudsen is okay planning his own death.

“I definitely think people need a healthier relationship with grief and death,” he said. “It’s what makes life worth living. The fact that we have a finite amount of time in the world is a beautiful thing. The fact that we spend a lot of time being anxious is a waste.”

To give himself a sense of control over a life that will one day end, Knudsen has a running Google Doc with ideas for his scavenger hunt funeral.

Brenton Clark, 38, who works in the state auditor’s office, has already pre-planned his end-of-life option with Recompose, the pioneering human composting company. 

Planning for a potential death at 38 “feels a little strange,” Clark said. 

“On one hand, it does feel like this is a financial transaction and getting things set up for the future,” he said. “Thinking about and really contemplating that I will be dead someday, that’s something—I don’t know—I haven’t sat with that part of it yet.”

Clark first deeply contemplated life's fragility when he suffered a serious injury after a car hit him on Rainier Avenue.

“I’m more aware of the possibilities of something happening,” Clark said. So, he wants to be prepared. 

Mostly, Clark, who is single and intentionally child-free, wants to make sure he has something in place to ease the process for his family, who will be responsible for taking care of arrangements in the advent of his death. 

Once he dies, Recompose will collect his body and handle everything from there. The same is true for pre-planning clients at Return Home and Earth Funeral, the other terramation companies. (At Earth Funeral, pre-planners can pay for additional travel insurance to have their bodies collected if they die away from home. That insurance option is attractive to young people, McWalter said.)

For Nancy Franke, 68, a retired administrative and booking agent, death feels closer. 

“[People my age] understand that this existence we have here is going to be coming to an end,” Franke said. “It’s a little bit easier to accept that.”

She’s had her pre-arrangements set up with Earth Funeral for a year-and-a-half now. The environmental aspect initially appealed to her.

“I have a grandson who was about three years old at the time,” Franke said. “I started thinking about his future. I have more days behind me than ahead of me, he has his whole life. What can I do right now to help him?”

Beyond that, Franke likes that she will be useful in death with her body turned into nutrient-rich soil. 

Put to good use, even in death. Earth Funeral

“The thought that my body that I no longer used, this little shell I was finished with, could actually be used in a positive way to enhance the soil, grow the trees—it’s a form of immortality,” Franke said. “It made me think that I would be part of the ecosystem forever.”

Her family doesn’t want her soil, so her body-turned-soil will be sent to Earth Funeral’s plot of conservation land in Quilcene, Washington on the Olympic Peninsula. 

"You start thinking in a broader sense about what this really means and how do you want your soil to be placed for someone to be like, 'Aw, that’s just like her to be a big tree,'" she said. 

As for me, I am not ready to pay $5,500. I would rather not reckon with my mortality in a binding way just yet. My mom, on the other hand, has told me she intends to be composted. Apparently, in her will, which begins "if you read this, I am dead," she has written her preferences. She sent me a photo of a sticky note attached to a human composting company's logo where she's written, "My spirit will become the phoenix. Energy never dies. It transfers."

Alright, mom, I vow to turn you into a beautiful grove of lemon trees one day. Pinky swear. 

19:07

[$] Linus and Dirk chat about AI, XZ, hardware, and more [LWN.net]

One of the mainstays of the the Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit is the "fireside chat" (sans fire) between Linus Torvalds and Dirk Hohndel to discuss open source and Linux kernel topics of the day. On April 17, at Open Source Summit North America (OSSNA) in Seattle, Washington, they held with tradition and discussed a range of topics including proper whitespace parsing, security, and the current AI craze.

18:35

Link [Scripting News]

The idea of us all working together to federate is the right idea, but making ActivityPub the hurdle everyone has to jump over is imho the wrong idea. I'm building on feeds -- RSS, Atom, RDF. A lot of good stuff works on that basis. And it's a much shorter path to interop than ActivityPub.

17:42

We Must Save the Climate Commitment Act from Cynical Climate Arsonists [The Stranger]

Join us to engage Washington voters in the 2024 election. by Kat Holmes

Today is Earth Day. But let’s get serious: Every day needs to be Earth Day. 

What if we all commit to that? What if we see that people and nature are not separate? Then we can create this kind of world, a place in which plants and fungi, kelp and orca, people and eagles, bear and salmon—all of us will thrive. 

What’s one easy action you can take to make that promised land closer to reality? Vote. 

If you’re freaked out about the climate and unsure what to do, you’re not alone. Most of us feel that way. But voting, and encouraging other people to vote, is a concrete thing you can do to get more leaders into office who will push for the transformational change we need.

Don’t doom-scroll yourself into stupefied depression or inaction. Remember: Your life and future matters. Your actions matter. Every election matters. Every vote matters. Every person and every community matters. Every landscape and watershed and ocean and flyway matters. And voting for the environment in every election matters.

That’s why today, Earth Day, Washington Conservation Action is launching an ambitious campaign, “Call 4 Climate Action.” Our goal: get 50,000 new or infrequent Washington voters to commit to casting a ballot in November. But we need your help!

Why are we committing to this huge effort?

  • We’ve hosted voting events for decades. In the last 5 years or so, we’ve had huge success with our annual “Queer the Vote” parties, for example.
  • A lot of people who can vote in Washington just don’t. Last year, 2023, a record low of 36% of those registered voted in the General Election. In even years, when more people show up to vote for national offices, an average of just 74% vote. That’s not a lot when you consider that we vote by mail. 
  • When more people vote, more voices are heard. As a result, our lawmakers and our officials better represent our diverse communities. 
  • More diverse representation leads to results that are better for both people and nature. When more people are represented, we begin to pass laws and to construct policies that help everyone and everything to thrive. 

That’s not pie-in-the-sky dream talk. It happened in a big way just three years ago, in 2021. That’s when the Climate Commitment Act (CCA) became state law. 

After decades of trying to pass a climate bill in this state, we began to elect diverse environmental champions. Then a broad coalition including labor, various Tribes, the environmental community, families and medical professionals, and BIPOC organizations came together and helped push lawmakers to pass the CCA, the nation’s strongest cap and invest legislation. 

The CCA requires that polluters pay for their emissions of greenhouse gasses. The state takes the funds generated by these polluters to mitigate climate change and clean our air of pollution, to transition away from a fossil fuel economy, to help families make their homes more energy efficient, to help Tribes and other communities deal with the problems already created by climate change.

Only implemented in January 2023, the CCA has already generated more than $2 billion to protect people and nature as one in every corner of our state: $80 million to help families weatherize and make their homes more energy efficient, $10 million for air quality improvements for communities, funds to make transit free for everyone under 18,  $14 million to expand transit access in rural areas and for people with disabilities, $4 million to plant trees in cities, $85 million for EV charging infrastructure, $120 to help medium and heavy trucks, $50 million to help farmers plant trees along rivers, millions to protect our region’s forests, millions to help eastside communities cope with wildfire, electrifying our region’s ferries, good paying family-wage jobs, and much, much more.

All these and hundreds more projects are happening because people turned out to vote for environmental champions and they worked to get others to do the same.

Now, a tax-dodging hedge fund multimillionaire has used $6 million of his own money to put an initiative to repeal the CCA on the November ballot. We cannot allow this cynical initiative to succeed. 

That is one of many reasons that we are promoting voter turnout across the state and especially in new legislative districts that more fairly represent communities. We need people of all ages, from all communities, to join our Call 4 Climate Action!

This year, both democracy and the environment are on the line. It will take a collective effort to protect people and nature as one. Today, at 6 pm join us to hear our vision for the campaign and sign up volunteers and partners. 

Democracy is merely what we all agree to do together. Healing the planet takes all of us. So, vote! And join us to engage Washington voters in the 2024 election.

Kat Holmes is field director for Washington Conservation Action.

Zachary Pullin is communications director for Washington Conservation Action.

Joy Stanford is political and civic engagement director for Washington Conservation Action.

Slog AM: GOP Nominates Semi Bird for Governor, Supreme Court to Decide on Anti-Homeless Camping Ban, Trump's Hush Money Trial Begins [The Stranger]

The Stranger's morning news roundup. by Nathalie Graham

Semi Bird wins WA GOP nomination for governor: The Washington GOP convention in Spokane this weekend was positively nutty. Former King County Sheriff Dave Reichert is leading among the GOP candidates in the polls, but delegates seemed to prefer Bird, a former Richland school board member who was recalled for flouting masking mandates deep in the early pandemic. Yet, to the dismay of delegates the GOP candidate committee disqualified Bird Friday for his failure to tell them about a bank larceny conviction exposed in a Seattle Times report last week. Despite the controversy, the delegates overrode the disqualification and nominated Bird anyway. In response, Reichert withdrew his endorsement bid and called the GOP convention "a chaotic and deceitful sideshow." The upshot of the whole thing splits Republican donors, leaving both Bird and Reichert weakened. 

More drama from these clowns: The Washington GOP is still upset with former Congresswoman Jaime Herrera Beutler for voting to impeach Trump for inciting the insurrection back in 2021. When Herrera Beutler, who is seeking a new job as Commissioner of Public Lands, took the stage, the crowd booed. Many stood and turned their backs on her.   

 

 

 

 

At the WA GOP convention, former Congresswoman Jaime Herrera Beutler (now running for Commissioner of Public Lands) and many in the crowd boo and turn their backs. pic.twitter.com/YpIsna3Fv9

— Scott Greenstone (@evergreenstone) April 19, 2024

Happy Earth Day: To celebrate the planet we are slowly killing, Joe Biden announced "$7 billion in federal grants for residential solar projects." That oughta fix it. 

Mystery security breach at SeaTac: Security lines were longer than usual at SeaTac Airport on Sunday night due to a "security breach." The airport did not disclose the nature of the breach, which I find rude. 

A killing at the casino: At 1:30 am on Sunday at the Muckleshoot Casino Resort a man in his late 20s was killed while sitting at a casino table when someone walked up behind him and stabbed him in the neck. Police believe the attack was random. 

Jonathan Choe's alleged assault: According to Publicola, a police report was filed against Choe, the sensational "journalist" who was fired from KOMO News for promoting a Proud Boys rally, for his actions earlier this month at the Garfield Community Center, where migrants had briefly set up tents. Choe tried to enter the area, but people blocked his path. According to eye witness accounts, he later punched one of the women who had blocked his path "two or three times" in the face and grabbed her by her hair so hard he tore a chunk of it out of her scalp. Choe told police he was defending himself and that his hand happened to get "tangled on" the woman's hair. The police felt his claim of self-defense was sufficient and didn't file charges against him. 

A chilly morning: It's crisp out there this morning. Things should heat up to the low 60s later in the day.

Brr, check out the low temperatures across W WA so far this morning as of 6 AM! 🥶#WAwx pic.twitter.com/yAoos1vWzE

— NWS Seattle (@NWSSeattle) April 22, 2024

Want to plan for the week ahead? Well, it'll get colder and wetter. April in Seattle is going out with a whimper. 

A nice start to the week will turn cooler and wetter by midweek. Happy palindrome week!#WAwx pic.twitter.com/y84zqy7Q0w

— NWS Seattle (@NWSSeattle) April 22, 2024

Grindr sued: The gay community loves Grindr for its ability to show them how many people in spitting distances from them want to be rimmed, but they don't love Grindr for leaking their sensitive information. Namely, in the UK, Grindr is being sued for leaking the HIV status of thousands of users and then sharing it with advertisers.

Australian hospitals are begging: Snake bite victims keep bringing the snakes into emergency rooms. Australian hospitals are asking them to please stop doing that. 

Germans arrested for celebrating Hitler's birthday: Four Germans—two sisters and their partners—visiting Austria laid white roses at the house where Adolf Hitler was born in celebration of the dictator's birthday on Saturday. One of the women did the Nazi salute. A patrolling officer watched all this go down and then brought them in for questioning. Despite their claims it wasn't serious, police found Nazi messages and pictures on their phones. They reported the group "to prosecutors on suspicion of violating the Austrian law that bans the symbols of Nazism," according to the Associated Press. 

Tacoma woman turns 106: When asked how to live so long, Tina Gerlack told KING 5, "Work hard, take care of your job, pay your bills, and be nice.” Sounds like capitalist propaganda, Tina. 

Man who self-immolated outside Trump trial dies: On Friday, outside the courthouse where jury selection for the Trump hush-money was taking place, a man who had traveled from Florida pulled out conspiracy theory-riddled pamphlets, flung them around, covered himself in accelerant, and then lit himself on fire. He died from his injuries on Saturday.

Supreme Court takes on homelessness: This can't possibly end well. On Monday, the Court will hear arguments about whether banning people from sleeping outside when there is insufficient shelter space is considered cruel and unusual punishment. The case derives from Grants Pass, Oregon where the city fined people $295 for sleeping outside in an attempt to limit homeless encampments in the city. Advocacy groups argue criminalizing homelessness will further perpetuate the cycle of poverty and make things worse, not better. We'll see what this Supreme Court full of ghouls has to say about the matter.

Trump's case begins: It's opening statement time in the hush money case. The Manhattan district attorney prosecutor, Matthew Colangelo, opened this baby up. Here's an excerpt from The Guardian: "

This case is about a criminal conspiracy. The defendant, Donald Trump, orchestrated a scheme to corrupt the 2016 election. Then he covered up that scheme by lying in his New York business records, over and over and over again.

You can keep track on the goings-on in the first day of the trial here. 

A juicy long read for your Monday: Here's a big piece on a bunch of people who regret becoming parents. Sure, they love their kids, but they wouldn't make the same choice again. 

Okay, that's enough news: I know, I know, it's never enough. There's too much happening at all times. I'm choosing to end it here, though, and you'll need to accept that. As a consolation prize, here's a funky Italian song:

16:49

Using Legitimate GitHub URLs for Malware [Schneier on Security]

Interesting social-engineering attack vector:

McAfee released a report on a new LUA malware loader distributed through what appeared to be a legitimate Microsoft GitHub repository for the “C++ Library Manager for Windows, Linux, and MacOS,” known as vcpkg.

The attacker is exploiting a property of GitHub: comments to a particular repo can contain files, and those files will be associated with the project in the URL.

What this means is that someone can upload malware and “attach” it to a legitimate and trusted project.

As the file’s URL contains the name of the repository the comment was created in, and as almost every software company uses GitHub, this flaw can allow threat actors to develop extraordinarily crafty and trustworthy lures.

For example, a threat actor could upload a malware executable in NVIDIA’s driver installer repo that pretends to be a new driver fixing issues in a popular game. Or a threat actor could upload a file in a comment to the Google Chromium source code and pretend it’s a new test version of the web browser.

These URLs would also appear to belong to the company’s repositories, making them far more trustworthy.

16:07

Hutterer: udev-hid-bpf: quickstart tooling to fix your HID devices with eBPF [LWN.net]

Peter Hutterer announces udev-hid-bpf, a tool to facilitate the loading of BPF programs that make human-input devices work correctly.

eBPF was originally written for network packet filters but as of kernel v6.3 and thanks to Benjamin, we have BPF in the HID subsystem. HID actually lends itself really well to BPF because, well, we have a byte array and to fix our devices we need to do complicated things like "toggle that bit to zero" or "swap those two values".

See this article for more information on the BPF-HID mechanism.

Security updates for Monday [LWN.net]

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (firefox and java-1.8.0-openjdk), Debian (chromium, flatpak, guix, openjdk-11, openjdk-17, thunderbird, and tomcat9), Fedora (chromium, firefox, glibc, nghttp2, nodejs18, python-aiohttp, python-django3, python-pip, and uxplay), Mageia (putty & filezilla), Red Hat (Firefox, firefox, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, nodejs:18, shim, and thunderbird), Slackware (freerdp), SUSE (apache-commons-configuration2, nodejs14, perl-CryptX, putty, shim, and wireshark), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.15, linux-azure-5.15, linux-azure-fde, linux-azure-fde-5.15, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.15, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-gkeop-5.15, linux-hwe-5.15, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.15, linux-intel-iotg, linux-intel-iotg-5.15, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.15, linux-raspi, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.4, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-bluefield, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-gkeop, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.4, linux-iot, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-5.4, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-6.5, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-6.5, linux-hwe-6.5, linux-laptop, linux-lowlatency, linux-nvidia-6.5, linux-oem-6.5, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-6.5, linux-raspi, linux-starfive, linux-starfive-6.5, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-hwe, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux, linux-aws, linux-kvm, linux-lts-xenial, lxd, percona-xtrabackup, and pillow).

15:21

Adding state to the update notification pattern, part 4 [The Old New Thing]

Last time, we developed a stateful but coalescing update notification, and we noted that the UI thread was doing a lot of heavy lifting. What if you don’t have a UI thread to do implicit serialization for you?

If there were no resume_foreground(Dispatcher()), we would have a race if a Text­Changed occurs after the worker has decided to exit, but before it has had a chance to mark itself as not busy. Here’s an alternate version that demonstrates the race.

class EditControl
{
    ⟦ ... existing class members ... ⟧

    std::atomic<bool> m_busy;
    std::mutex m_mutex;
    std::optional<string> m_pendingText;
};

winrt::fire_and_forget
EditControl::TextChanged(std::string text)
{
    auto lifetime = get_strong();

    ExchangePendingText(std::move(text));
    if (m_busy.exchange(true)) {
        co_return;
    }

    co_await winrt::resume_background();

    while (auto pendingText = ExchangePendingText(std::nullopt);
           pendingText) {
        auto matches = BuildMatches(*pendingText);

        if (matches) {
            SetAutocomplete(*matches);
        }
    }
    m_busy = false;
}

In this alternate version, the m_mutex is critical because the background thread picks up the m_pendingText for the next iteration. But now there is a race window if a change to the pending text occurs immediately after we notice that there is no pending text and before we clear the busy flag.

UI thread Background thread
TextChanged("Bob")
ExchangePendingText("Bob")
m_busy = true;
resume_background()		  
  BuildMatches("Bob");
SetAutocomplete(*matches)
No pending text, so exit while loop
TextChanged("Alice");
ExchangePendingText("Alice")
m_busy already true
co_return;		  
  m_busy = false;

To avoid this race, m_busy needs to move under the mutex. And once it’s moved under the mutex, it doesn’t need to be atomic any more. The need to extend the scope of the mutex means that our cute little helper functions won’t really cut it any more. We’ll have to manage the locks ourselves.

class EditControl
{
    ⟦ ... existing class members ... ⟧

    bool m_busy = false;
    std::mutex m_mutex;
    std::optional<string> m_pendingText;
};
winrt::fire_and_forget
EditControl::TextChanged(std::string text)
{
    auto lifetime = get_strong();

    {                                         
        auto lock = std::unique_lock(m_mutex);
        m_pendingText = std::move(text);      
        if (std::exchange(m_busy, true)) {    
            co_return;                        
        }                                     
    }                                         

    co_await winrt::resume_background();

    while (true) {
        {                                         
            auto lock = std::unique_lock(m_mutex);
            if (!m_pendingText) {                 
                m_busy = false;                   
                co_return;                        
            }                                     
            text = std::move(*m_pendingText);     
            m_pendingText.release();              
        }                                         

        auto matches = BuildMatches(text);

        if (matches) {
            SetAutocomplete(*matches);
        }
    }
}

Next time, we’ll solve the same problem using a different approach.

The post Adding state to the update notification pattern, part 4 appeared first on The Old New Thing.

14:42

Link [Scripting News]

I hate paywalls tied to subscription. I’m never going to subscribe to a Philadelphia news org, but based on Jay’s recommendation I might pay $1 on my EZ Pass for News to read this story, esp since I saw the Civil War movie. I just had a thought, I might subscribe to a Philadelphia news org for a week or two, given that the Knicks are playing their NBA team right now in the first round of the playoffs. I really want to know everything there is to know about this faceoff. See, I want to pay for journalism here, but journalism hasn't been willing to sell it to me, at any price. They've never gotten the basic truth of: "The customer is always right." Really important point and true in every way.

Link [Scripting News]

Over the weekend I tested the blogroll plugin for WordPress. It worked. After a little more testing and docs-writing we'll be ready for other people to test it, an important step before wider use. So if you're a regular Scripting News reader, and are curious what this blogroll stuff is about, you'll be able to try it out pretty soon.

14:00

Link [Scripting News]

Jeff Jarvis writes that a German man who died with 70K books in his house was obsessed with the work of writer Arno Schmidt, who was my great-uncle, my grandmother's brother.

13:42

CodeSOD: Concrapenate Strings [The Daily WTF]

As oft discussed, null-terminated C-style strings are an endless source of problems. But there's no problem so bad that it can't be made worse by a sufficiently motivated developer.

Today's rather old code comes from Mike, who inherited an old, MFC application. This code is responsible for opening a file dialog, and the key goal of the code is to configure the file filter in that dialog. In MFC, this is done by passing a delimited string containing a caption and a glob for filtering. E.g., "Text Files (.txt) | *.txt" would open a dialog for finding text files.

char                    szFileName[MAX_FILE_NAME];
char                    szDlgTitle[] = "Save File As";
char                    szDefExt[] = "log";
char*                   szPos;
WORD                    nFileOffset;
WORD                    nFileExtension;
char                    szFileFilter[MAX_FILE_NAME];
char                    szBuffer[128];
std::ifstream           inFile;

memset(szFileFilter, NULL, MAX_FILTER_SIZE);
memset(szFileName, NULL, MAX_FILE_NAME);

strcpy_s(szFileFilter, sizeof(szFileFilter), "*.log - Debug Log File|");
szPos = szFileFilter + strlen("*.log - Debug Log File|") + 1;
strcpy_s(szPos, sizeof( szPos), "*.log");

if(!OpenSaveFile(TRUE, szFileName, MAX_FILE_NAME, szFileFilter, szDlgTitle,
                                nFileOffset, nFileExtension, szDefExt, hWndInstance, hWndMain))
                                  break;

The impressive thing about this code is that this was released, sent to customers, and crashed consistently- until people started using the 64-bit build, when it started working again.

After declaring some variables, we start by using memset to null out some character arrays. This isn't particularly necessary, but it's mostly harmless- or at least it would be if they actually read their own code.

szFileFilter is declared using the size MAX_FILE_NAME, but when set to null, a space equal to MAX_FILTER_SIZE is used. If MAX_FILTER_SIZE is less than or equal to MAX_FILE_NAME this is fine- but if it's ever larger- welp, we've got an out of bounds access.

That's not what guarantees a crash, that's just bad practice.

Next, we use strcpy_s to copy the caption into our szFileFilter array. Then we calculate an offset within that array, to store in szPos. We then use strcpy_s again, copying our filter in to the end of the string.

This is the line that's guaranteed to crash. Because note that they pass a size to strcpy_s- sizeof(szPos). szPos is a pointer, not an array. So unlike all the other strings used in this example, sizeof won't tell you its length, it'll just tell you how much memory a pointer takes up. On 32-bit, that'd be 4 bytes. On 64-bit, that'd be 8. And that's why it suddenly started working when people changed builds.

Also, the ideal-world version of Hungarian notation is that, by specifying the types in the variable name, you can defend against these errors- but because they used sz for all strings, whether stored in allocated arrays or as pointers, they didn't have the information they needed.

Also, instead of doing all this weird string offset stuff with multiple copies, or doing any strcat_ss, they could have just…

strcpy_s(szFileFilter, sizeof(szFileFilter), "*.log - Debug Log File|*.log);
[Advertisement] ProGet’s got you covered with security and access controls on your NuGet feeds. Learn more.

13:00

New version of Tiny11 Builder lets you debloat any Windows 11 build or version [OSnews]

The maker of Tiny11, a third-party project that aims to make Windows 11 less bloated with unnecessary parts, released a new version of Tiny11 Builder, a special tool that lets you create a custom Windows 11 image tailored to your needs and preferences. The latest release makes it much easier to create a lightweight Windows 11 ISO without worrying about installing a system modified by unknown third parties.

↫ Taras Buria at Neowin

Perhaps you can make Windows 11 slightly more bearable with this. If there’s any interest from y’all, I could build my own debloated Windows 11 install and see if I can make this platform bearable for myself? Let me know in the comments.

Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges [OSnews]

One of the remarkable characteristics of the Super Nintendo was the ability for game cartridges (cart) to pack more than instructions and assets into ROM chips. If we open and look at the PCBs, we can find inside things like the CIC copy protection chip, SRAM, and even “enhancement processors”.

↫ Fabien Sanglard

When I was a child and teenager in the ’90s, the capabilities of the SNES cartridge were a bit of a legend. We’d talk about what certain games would use which additional processors and chips in the cartridge, right or wrong, often boasting about the games we owned, and talking down the games we didn’t. Much of it was probably nonsense, but there’s some good memories there.

We’re decades deep into the internet age now, and all the mysteries of the SNES cartridge can just be looked up on Wikipedia and endless numbers of other websites. The mystery’s all gone, but at least now we can accurately marvel at just how versatile the SNES really was.

12:14

Vincent Fourmond: QSoas version 3.3 is out [Planet Debian]

Version 3.3 brings in new features, including reverse Laplace transforms and fits, pH fits, commands for picking points from a dataset, averaging points with the same X value, or perform singular value decomposition. In addition to these new features, many previous commands were improved, like the addition of a bandcut filter in FFT filtering, better handling of the loading of files produced by QSoas itself, and a button to interrupt the processing of scripts. There are a lot of other new features, improvements and so on, look for the full list there.

About QSoas


QSoas is a powerful open source data analysis program that focuses on flexibility and powerful fitting capacities. It is released under the GNU General Public License. It is described in Fourmond, Anal. Chem., 2016, 88 (10), pp 5050–5052. Current version is 3.3. You can download for free its source code or precompiled versions for MacOS and Windows there. Alternatively, you can clone from the GitHub repository.

11:42

Grrl Power #1251 – Æth on æth [Grrl Power]

Not really sure what all to say about this page. Tenri goes to demon college and hangs out with demons and other exotic beings, but this is really the first time she’s been tangled up in intrigue of this scale. Normally her biggest worries are passing tests, who’s dating who, and the mandatory armed combat class every Thursday.

Come to think of it, infernal days of the week would probably be stuff like Blüdday… actually, why go by days of the week when you can go by night of the week? So, Blüdnÿt, Agonÿt, Screamnÿt, Fÿrnÿt, Irönnÿt, Nÿt öf Hörns (but everyone calls it Hörnÿt), and Püppynÿt. I mean, they’re demons, not monsters. Gotta have one day a week set aside for puppies and flower gardens and spending quality time with the fam.

So then, Armed Combat 101 takes place every Irönnÿt at the MürderDeathKill Arena, sponsored by Cömcast.

The new vote incentive is up!

Every so often I get the urge to try and draw Maxima all properly shiny, and this… isn’t my favorite attempt if I’m honest. I’ve been sitting on this for a little while doing little tweaks, and decided to finally publish it cause I’m already behind on these. The next one will (almost definitely) resume the trend of including a little mini comic to extend the scene a bit.

As usual, Patreon has some outfit variations as well as sans flagrante.

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.

11:35

10:49

10:28

What happened vs. what we do about it [Seth's Blog]

It’s possible to have a useful conversation about what to do about something that’s broken or needs improvement. But first, we must acknowledge that it happened.

It’s not controversial to understand the facts, the data and the shifts that are happening in the world we live in. In fact, the only way to have a useful conversation about what to do about it is to understand and accept the reality of what’s here.

Movements that deny reality choose to do this because they don’t have a better plan, and stalling is their best option. Which is no option at all.

Today is Earth Day, which like Mother’s Day, shouldn’t be a day at all, more like an all-year-round celebration.

Two years ago, hundreds of volunteers from 90 countries came together and produced an Almanac.

Since then, the book has been translated into languages around the world (recently with a free edition in Spanish), been a bestseller from China to Italy to the Netherlands, and remained in the top 100 in its category in the US.

And yet, it’s possible that you haven’t seen it yet, that your kids aren’t using it in school, that it’s not being handed out at community meetings or required reading at organizations large and small. Today would be a great day to share a copy.

Here’s a talk from a year ago:

Isn’t it better to know?

09:28

Cyberyuck [Penny Arcade]

New Comic: Cyberyuck

08:35

Pluralistic: Paying for it doesn't make it a market (22 Apr 2024) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]


Today's links


A man working at an old-fashioned control panel covered in dials and buttons. The screen in front of him reads HORROR! in old-fashioned, dripping horror-movie letters. The control panel has the logos of Google, Apple and Meta. To his left sits an enthroned demon, sneering at the viewer. The background is a code waterfall effect as seen in the credit sequences of the Wachowskis' 'Matrix' movies.

Paying for it doesn't make it a market (permalink)

Anyone who says "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product" has been suckered in by Big Tech, whose cargo-cult version of markets and the discipline they impose on companies.

Here's the way that story goes: companies that fear losing your business will treat you better, because treating you worse will cost them money. Since ad-supported media gets paid by advertisers, they are fine with abusing you to make advertisers happy, because the advertiser is the customer, and you are the product.

This represents a profound misunderstanding of how even capitalism's champions describe its workings. The purported virtue of capitalism is that it transforms the capitalist's greed into something of broad public value, by appealing to the capitalist's fear. A successful capitalist isn't merely someone figures out how to please their customers – they're also someone who figures out how to please their suppliers.

That's why tech platforms were – until recently – very good to (some of) their workforce. Technical labor was scarce and so platforms built whimsical "campuses" for tech workers, with amenities ranging from stock options to gourmet cafeterias to egg-freezing services for those workers planning to stay at their desks through their fertile years. Those workers weren't the "customer" – but they were treated better than any advertiser or user.

But when it came to easily replaced labor – testers, cleaning crew, the staff in those fancy cafeterias – the situation was much worse. Those workers were hired through cut-out shell companies, denied benefits, even made to enter via separate entrances on shifts that were scheduled to minimize the chance that they would ever interact with one of the highly paid tech workers at the firm.

Likewise, advertisers may be the tech companies' "customers" but that doesn't mean the platforms treat them well. Advertisers get ripped off just like the rest of us. The platforms gouge them on price, lie to them about advertising reach, and collude with one another to fix prices and defraud advertisers:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/05/florida-man/#wannamakers-ghost

Now, it's true that the advertisers used to get a good deal from the platforms, and that it came at the expense of the users. Facebook lured in users by falsely promising never to spy on them. Then, once the users were locked in, Facebook flipped a switch, started spying on users from asshole to appetite, and then offered rock-bottom-priced, fine-grained, highly reliable ad-targeting to advertisers:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3247362

But once those advertisers were locked in, Facebook turned on them, too. Of course they did. The point of monopoly power isn't just getting too big to fail and too big to jail – it's getting too big to care:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

This is the thing that "if you're not paying for the product, you're the product" fails to comprehend. "If you're not paying for the product" is grounded in a cartoonish vision of markets in which "the customer is king" and successful businesses are those who cater to their customers – even at the expense of their workers and suppliers – will succeed.

In this frame, the advertiser is the platforms' customer, the customer is king, the platform inflicts unlimited harm upon all other stakeholders in service to those advertisers, the advertisers are so pleased with this white-glove service that they willingly pay a handsome premium to use the platform, and so the platform grows unimaginably wealthy.

But of course, if the platforms inflict unlimited harms upon their users, those users will depart, and then no amount of obsequious catering to advertisers will convince them to spend money on ads that no one sees. In the cargo-cult conception of platform capitalism, the platforms are able to solve this problem by "hacking our dopamine loops" – depriving us of our free will with "addictive" technologies that keep us locked to their platforms even when they grow so terrible that we all hate using them.

This means that we can divide the platform economy into "capitalists" who sell you things, and "surveillance capitalists" who use surveillance data to control your mind, then sell your compulsive use of their products to their cherished customers, the advertisers.

Surveillance capitalists like Google are thus said to have only been shamming when they offered us a high-quality product. That was just a means to an end: the good service Google offered in its golden age was just bait to trick us into handing over enough surveillance data that they could tune their mind-control technology, strip us of our free will, and then sell us to their beloved advertisers, for whom nothing is too good.

Meanwhile, the traditional capitalists – the companies that sell you things – are the good capitalists. Apple and Microsoft are disciplined by market dynamics. They won't spy on you because you're their customer, and so they have to keep you happy.

All this leads to an inexorable conclusion: unless we pay for things with money, we are doomed. Any attempt to pay with attention will end in a free-for-all where the platforms use their Big Data mind-control rays to drain us of all our attention. It is only when we pay with money that we can dicker over price and arrive at a fair and freely chosen offer.

This theory is great for tech companies: it elevates giving them money to a democracy-preserving virtue. It reframes handing your cash over to a multi-trillion dollar tech monopolist as good civics. It's easy to see why those tech giants would like that story, but boy, are you a sap if you buy it.

Because all capitalists are surveillance capitalists…when they can get away with it. Sure, Apple blocked Facebook from spying on Ios users…and then started illegally, secretly spying on those users and lying about it, in order to target ads to those users:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

And Microsoft spies on every Office 365 user and rats them out to their bosses ("Marge, this analytics dashboard says you're the division's eleventh-worst speller and twelfth-worst typist. Shape up or ship out!"). But the joke's on your boss: Microsoft also spies on their whole company and sells the data about it to their competitors:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the-peoples-amazon/#clippys-revengel

The platforms screw anyone they can. Sure, they lured in advertisers with good treatment, but once those advertisers were locked in, they fucked them over just as surely as they fucked over their users.

The surveillance capitalism hypothesis depends on the existence of a hypothetical – and wildly improbably – Big Data mind-control technology that keeps users locked to platforms even when the platform decays. Mind-control rays are an extraordinary claim supported by the thinnest of evidence (marketing materials from the companies as they seek to justify charging a premium to advertisers, combined with the self-serving humblebrags of millionaire Prodigal Tech Bros who claim to have awakened to the evil of using their dopamine-hacking sorcerous powers on behalf of their billionaire employers).

There is a much simpler explanation for why users stay on platforms even as they decline in quality: they are enmeshed in a social service that encompasses their friends, loved ones, customers, and communities. Even if everyone in this sprawling set of interlocking communities agrees that the platform is terrible, they will struggle to agree on what to do about it: where to go next and when to leave. This is the economists' "collective action problem" – a phenomenon with a much better evidentiary basis than the hypothetical, far-fetched "dopamine loop" theory.

To understand whom a platform treats well and whom it abuses, look not to who pays it and who doesn't. Instead, ask yourself: who has the platform locked in? The more any stakeholder to a platform stands to lose by leaving, the worse the platform can treat them without risking their departure. Thus the beneficent face that tech companies turn to their most cherished tech workers, and the hierarchy of progressively more-abusive conditions for other workers – worse treatment for those whose work-visas are tied to their employment, and the very worst treatment for contractors testing the code, writing the documentation, labelling the data or cleaning the toilets.

If you care about how people are treated by platforms, you can't just tell them to pay for services instead of using ad-supported media. The most important factor in getting decent treatment out of a tech company isn't whether you pay with cash instead of attention – it's whether you're locked in, and thus a flight risk whom the platform must cater to.

It's perfectly possible for market dynamics to play out in a system in which we pay with our attention by watching ads. More than 50% of all web users have installed an ad-blocker, the largest boycott in the history of civilization:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

Ad-supported companies make an offer: How about in exchange for looking at this content, you let us spy on you in ways that would make Orwell blush and then cram a torrent of targeted ads into your eyeballs?" Ad-blockers let you make a counter-offer: "How about 'nah'?"

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

But ad-blocking is only possible on an open platform. A closed, locked-down platform that is illegal to modify isn't a walled garden, a fortress that keeps out the bad guys – it's a walled prison that locks you in, a prisoner of the worst impulses of the tech giant that built it. Apple can defend you from other companies' spying ways, but when Apple decides to spy on you, it's a felony to jailbreak your Iphone and block Apple's surveillance:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/05/battery-vampire/#drained

I am no true believer in markets – but the people who say that paying for products will "align incentives" and make tech better claim to believe in the power of markets to make everyone better off. But real markets aren't just places where companies sell things – they're also places where companies buy things. Monopolies short-circuit the power of customer choice to force companies to do better. But monopsonies – markets dominated by powerful buyers – are just as poisonous to the claimed benefits of markets.

Even if you are "the product" – that is, even if you're selling your attention to a platform to package up and sell to an advertiser – that in no way precludes your getting decent treatment from the platform. A world where we can avail ourselves of blockers, where interoperablity eases our exodus from abusive platforms, where privacy law sets a floor below which we cannot bargain is a world where it doesn't matter if you're "the product" or "the customer" – you can still get a square deal.

The platforms used to treat us well and now treat us badly. That's not because they were setting a patient trap, luring us in with good treatment in the expectation of locking us in and turning on us. Tech bosses do not have the executive function to lie in wait for years and years.

Rather, as tech platforms eliminated competition, captured their regulators and expanded their IP rights so that interoperability was no longer a threat, they became too big to care whether any of their stakeholders were happy. First they came for the users, sure, but then they turned on the publishers, the advertisers, and finally, even their once-pampered tech workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers/

MLK said that "the law can't make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me." It's impossible to get tech bosses to believe you deserve care and decency, but you can stop them from abusing you. The way to do that is by making them fear you – by abolishing the laws that create lock-in, by legally enshrining a right to privacy, by protecting competition.

It's not by giving them money. Paying for a service does not make a company fear you, and anyone who thinks they can buy a platform's loyalty by paying for a service is a simp. A corporation is an immortal, transhuman colony organism that uses us as inconvenient gut-flora: no matter how much you love it, it will never love you back. It can't experience love – only fear.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

This day in history (permalink)

#20yrsago Bill O’Reilly mistakes Globe and Mail for Socialist Worker https://web.archive.org/web/20040426005411/http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20040421/DOYLE21/TPColumnists/

#20yrsago Silmarillion in 1,000 words https://web.archive.org/web/20060427200009/https://camwyn.livejournal.com/328358.html

#20yrsago London: The (Magnificent) Biography https://memex.craphound.com/2004/04/22/london-the-magnificent-biography/

#15yrsago UAE royal caught torturing man on video https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=7402099

#15yrsago Joe Biden promises a blank check to the entertainment cartel https://web.archive.org/web/20110624055700/http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10224689-38.html

#15yrsago Entertainment industry’s greedy lobbying is their undoing https://web.archive.org/web/20090425083430/http://www.internetevolution.com/document.asp?doc_id=175415&

#15yrsago JG Ballard eulogized by John Clute https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/j-g-ballard-writer-whose-dystopian-visions-helped-shape-our-view-of-the-modern-world-1671634.html

#10yrsago Appeals court orders Obama administration to disclose the legal theory for assassination of Americans https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/04/obama-ordered-to-divulge-legal-basis-for-killing-americans-with-drones/

#10yrsago Shakespeare’s Beehive: analysis of newly discovered dictionary that Shakespeare owned and annotated https://endlessbookshelf.net/beehive.html

#10yrsago Reddit’s /r/technology demoted over scandal of secret censorship that blocked Internet freedom stories https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27100773

#5yrsago Facebook has hired the Patriot Act’s co-author and “day-to-day manager” to be its new general counsel https://thehill.com/policy/technology/440085-facebook-taps-lawyer-who-helped-write-patriot-act/

#5yrsago Google walkout organizers say they’re being retaliated against for demanding ethical standards https://www.wired.com/story/google-walkout-organizers-say-theyre-facing-retaliation/

#5yrsago Elizabeth Warren’s latest proposal: cancel student debt, make college free https://medium.com/@teamwarren/im-calling-for-something-truly-transformational-universal-free-public-college-and-cancellation-of-a246cd0f910f

#5yrsago Heiress “Instagram influencer” whose parents are accused of paying a $500K bribe to get her into USC has trademark application rejected for punctuation errors https://www.huffpost.com/entry/olivia-jade-trademark-punctuation_n_5c9c8f16e4b07c8866313c5e?ncid=newsltushpmgnews__TheMorningEmail__032919

#5yrsago Zuck turned American classrooms into nonconsensual laboratories for his pet educational theories, and now they’re rebelling https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/21/technology/silicon-valley-kansas-schools.html

#5yrsago Platform cooperativism (or, how to turn gig-economy jobs into $22.25/hour jobs) https://www.wired.com/story/when-workers-control-gig-economy/

#5yrsago A secret Finnish subculture of women and girls who ride hobbyhorses has come out of the shadows https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imW7EGQcJck

#5yrsago Most Republican voters were Trumpists before Trump, and most of the rest have converted since 2016 https://crookedtimber.org/2019/04/21/transactional-trumpism/

#5yrsago Stop & Shop strike convinces 75% of loyal customers to take business elsewhere https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2019/04/19/visits-loyal-stop-shop-customers-decline-during-strike/aGr2bUg75Mbu3zY0y5YZiI/story.html

#5yrsago After Notre Dame bailout Yellow Vests urge more Victor Hugo tributes, starting with “Les Miserables” https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/04/20/yellow-vests-demonstrate-paris-notre-dame-donations-highlight-wealth-inequality

#1yrago How workers get trapped by "bondage fees" https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/21/bondage-fees/#doorman-building

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, holding a mic.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025

  • Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025

  • Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM

  • Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM

Latest podcast: Capitalists Hate Capitalism https://craphound.com/news/2024/04/14/capitalists-hate-capitalism/

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

08:14

06:00

Girl Genius for Monday, April 22, 2024 [Girl Genius]

The Girl Genius comic for Monday, April 22, 2024 has been posted.

05:35

05:14

03:42

Russ Allbery: Review: The Stars, Like Dust [Planet Debian]

Review: The Stars, Like Dust, by Isaac Asimov

Series: Galactic Empire #2
Publisher: Fawcett Crest
Copyright: 1950, 1951
Printing: June 1972
Format: Mass market
Pages: 192

The Stars, Like Dust is usually listed as the first book in Asimov's lesser-known Galactic Empire Trilogy since it takes place before Pebble in the Sky. Pebble in the Sky was published first, though, so I count it as the second book. It is very early science fiction with a few mystery overtones.

Buying books produces about 5% of the pleasure of reading them while taking much less than 5% of the time. There was a time in my life when I thoroughly enjoyed methodically working through a used book store, list in hand, tracking down cheap copies to fill in holes in series. This means that I own a lot of books that I thought at some point that I would want to read but never got around to, often because, at the time, I was feeling completionist about some series or piece of world-building. From time to time, I get the urge to try to read some of them.

Sometimes this is a poor use of my time.

The Galactic Empire series is from Asimov's first science fiction period, after the Foundation series but contemporaneous with their collection into novels. They're set long, long before Foundation, but after humans have inhabited numerous star systems and Earth has become something of a backwater. That process is just starting in The Stars, Like Dust: Earth is still somewhere where an upper-class son might be sent for an education, but it has been devastated by nuclear wars and is well on its way to becoming an inward-looking relic on the edge of galactic society.

Biron Farrill is the son of the Lord Rancher of Widemos, a wealthy noble whose world is one of those conquered by the Tyranni. In many other SF novels, the Tyranni would be an alien race; here, it's a hierarchical and authoritarian human civilization. The book opens with Biron discovering a radiation bomb planted in his dorm room. Shortly after, he learns that his father had been arrested. One of his fellow students claims to be in Biron's side against the Tyranni and gives him false papers to travel to Rhodia, a wealthy world run by a Tyranni sycophant.

Like most books of this era, The Stars, Like Dust is a short novel full of plot twists. Unlike some of its contemporaries, it's not devoid of characterization, but I might have liked it better if it were. Biron behaves like an obnoxious teenager when he's not being an arrogant ass. There is a female character who does a few plot-relevant things and at no point is sexually assaulted, so I'll give Asimov that much, but the gender stereotypes are ironclad and there is an entire subplot focused on what I can only describe as seduction via petty jealousy.

The writing... well, let me quote a typical passage:

There was no way of telling when the threshold would be reached. Perhaps not for hours, and perhaps the next moment. Biron remained standing helplessly, flashlight held loosely in his damp hands. Half an hour before, the visiphone had awakened him, and he had been at peace then. Now he knew he was going to die.

Biron didn't want to die, but he was penned in hopelessly, and there was no place to hide.

Needless to say, Biron doesn't die. Even if your tolerance for pulp melodrama is high, 192 small-print pages of this sort of thing is wearying.

Like a lot of Asimov plots, The Stars, Like Dust has some of the shape of a mystery novel. Biron, with the aid of some newfound companions on Rhodia, learns of a secret rebellion against the Tyranni and attempts to track down its base to join them. There are false leads, disguised identities, clues that are difficult to interpret, and similar classic mystery trappings, all covered with a patina of early 1950s imaginary science. To me, it felt constructed and artificial in ways that made the strings Asimov was pulling obvious. I don't know if someone who likes mystery construction would feel differently about it.

The worst part of the plot thankfully doesn't come up much. We learn early in the story that Biron was on Earth to search for a long-lost document believed to be vital to defeating the Tyranni. The nature of that document is revealed on the final page, so I won't spoil it, but if you try to think of the stupidest possible document someone could have built this plot around, I suspect you will only need one guess. (In Asimov's defense, he blamed Galaxy editor H.L. Gold for persuading him to include this plot, and disavowed it a few years later.)

The Stars, Like Dust is one of the worst books I have ever read. The characters are overwrought, the politics are slapdash and build on broad stereotypes, the romantic subplot is dire and plays out mainly via the Biron egregiously manipulating his petulant love interest, and the writing is annoying. Sometimes pulp fiction makes up for those common flaws through larger-than-life feats of daring, sweeping visions of future societies, and ever-escalating stakes. There is little to none of that here. Asimov instead provides tedious political maneuvering among a class of elitist bankers and land owners who consider themselves natural leaders. The only places where the power structures of this future government make sense are where Asimov blatantly steals them from either the Roman Empire or the Doge of Venice.

The one thing this book has going for it — the thing, apart from bloody-minded completionism, that kept me reading — is that the technology is hilariously weird in that way that only 1940s and 1950s science fiction can be. The characters have access to communication via some sort of interstellar telepathy (messages coded to a specific person's "brain waves") and can travel between stars through hyperspace jumps, but each jump is manually calculated by referring to the pilot's (paper!) volumes of the Standard Galactic Ephemeris. Communication between ships (via "etheric radio") requires manually aiming a radio beam at the area in space where one thinks the other ship is. It's an unintentionally entertaining combination of technology that now looks absurdly primitive and science that is so advanced and hand-waved that it's obviously made up.

I also have to give Asimov some points for using spherical coordinates. It's a small thing, but the coordinate systems in most SF novels and TV shows are obviously not fit for purpose.

I spent about a month and a half of this year barely reading, and while some of that is because I finally tackled a few projects I'd been putting off for years, a lot of it was because of this book. It was only 192 pages, and I'm still curious about the glue between Asimov's Foundation and Robot series, both of which I devoured as a teenager. But every time I picked it up to finally finish it and start another book, I made it about ten pages and then couldn't take any more. Learn from my error: don't try this at home, or at least give up if the same thing starts happening to you.

Followed by The Currents of Space.

Rating: 2 out of 10

02:56

Area Denial [QC RSS]

Brat Benatar

02:35

Welcome our new member - integral [Planet GNU]

Hi, All:

Please join me in welcoming our new member:

 User Details:
-------------
Name:
Login:   integral
Email:   integral@member.fsf.org

I wish integral a wonderful journey in GNU CTT.

Happy Hacking
wxie

02:28

High court and First Amendment [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

A Republican-packed US appeals court approved state laws that hold nonviolent protest organizers liable for unplanned and unorganized violence at the protest. This is an attack on the right to protest.

The Supreme Court refused to consider an appeal against that ruling.

Oceanic PFAS coughing-up onto land [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

Breaking waves launch enormous quantities of certain PFAS into the air. Does this make the distribution in manufactured products insignificant by comparison?

To what extent are these the same PFAS that get into the environment via manufacturing?

Columbia U. raids, congressional hearing [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

Columbia University's president has bent over to placate right-wing congresscritters by attacking protesting students.

The cops that the president called to clear out the protesters bent over backwards to destroy their things and supplies, and deny them access to medicine.

Land system-change protections, AK [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

*Biden administration moves to restrict oil and gas leases on 13m acres in Alaska.*

Alaskan planet roasters called the new rule "illegal." I hope that killing you is illegal, because that's what more drilling would do.

Israel retaliation, Iran [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

Netanyahu launched an air attack against an Iranian air base. Reportedly it did little damage, and Iran does not plan to retaliate.

Israel could consider that its honor is now satisfied, and let the fighting drop.

But I have a feeling that Netanyahu will not be satisfied with this sword dance, because his manipulation has not succeeded, and that he will continue attacking Iran until he provokes a substantial counterattack.

Boeing whistleblower to congress [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

Boeing engineer Sam Salehpour testified to Congress that there is no longer any safety culture at the company, and engineers who point out dangers are ignored, shunned, and even threatened.

*Salehpour says he faced retaliation as he repeatedly sought to raise the flag inside Boeing over three years. "I was ignored," he told the Senate’s permanent subcommittee on investigations. "I was told not to create delays. I was told, frankly, to shut up."*

I am skeptical that the current management could undo the harm that they have become part of. It is hard for a person to change attitude that drastically and fully understand what it means. Replacing the upper management alone would not be sufficient — several levels would need to be replaced. But I don't see how that could be possible either. I hope someone knows.

01:14

Link [Scripting News]

I asked meta.ai to draw a pastoral scene with sheep and dogs, birds, fish, airplanes, clams and seagoing ships in ancient England.

00:21

Spoiler Alert: DUNE 2 [Nina Paley]

Timmy and Johnny on Arrakis

If I recall correctly (from a few hours ago, I just got home) DUNE 2 starts with a recap of DUNE 1 from a pretty posh lady recording her diary on another planet. Looks like a pile of dead bodies is getting set fire to on Arrakis. I remember the name Arrakis from reading the books 40+ years ago but really not much else, and I didn’t see DUNE 1 so I’m relying on the filmmakers to catch me up. 

On a sandy duneside, Paul Atrides aka Timothee Chalamet wakes up with the Fremen, a charismatic and sexy desert people. Apparently his family “House” is mostly dead, killed by the House of Bald Guys, led by the Fat Ugly Bald Guy. Who’s that woman Timmy is talking with? Is that his girlfriend? Wait that’s his MOM. She pukes which in movie language means she’s pregnant.

Timmy wants to be accepted by the charismatic desert hotties which is very reminiscent of Lawrence of Arabia. Also their Lead Charismatic Guy speaks with a strong Lawrence-Arabian accent. He’s on Team Timmy, believing him to be a prophet of prophesy. But first Timmy has to prove himself to the Fremen, who are not only strong fierce and good-looking but also racially diverse, unlike the ugly Bald Guys who are so white that when they have a tournament outdoors the film itself has no color at all.

People of No Color

Looks like a Younger Bald Guy is being chosen as a royal heir, and he distinguishes himself by being a psychopath with a sort of cute face for a bald guy with really dark teeth. He slits the throats of a few bald sluts just for fun. He’s being set up as a foil for Timmy, who is learning the desert ways, helped by an especially cute young Freman possibly named “Chani” but pronounced Johnny. Johnny is the salt of the earth, not like those posh brittle Bene Gesserit ladies. She fights like hell along with all the other Fremen women who are apparently all soldiers. It’s not clear who’s raising the Fremen babies, but we occasionally see old ladies hobbling around in the aftermath of attacks. Johnny teaches Timmy how to camp, and Lead Charismatic Guy teaches him how to ride a sandworm which turns out to be so gigantic it fulfills another prophecy! These prophesies keep getting fulfilled! 

Timmy’s Mom becomes Head Woman of the Fremen because there’s a job opening and they’ll kill her if she doesn’t. She drinks blue poison which predictably turns her eyes blue. Also it turns her power-mad, along with her fetus which got bathed in the stuff in utero and is now both psychic and possibly psychotic. Timmy has recurring nightmares of following a woman to The South which leads to catastrophe. Is the woman his Mom? His girlfriend Johnny? Because Johnny and Timmy have hooked up by now. Johnny is devoted to her people and doesn’t want Timmy to just be fighting for his dumb foreign House. But she doesn’t believe he can be a real Freman either, until he rides that giant sandworm. Then he is accepted into the tribe and given a new name: Ulla or Ulsa or something like that, plus M’aud Dib (I remember that from the books!) which means “desert mouse.” Cute!

Now Timmy’s Mom goes to The South because her job demands it, also she gets tattoos all over her face of some script that looks vaguely like a hybrid of Arabic and Devangari. If I knew someone with a tattoo like that I’d say, “her face is an open book,” but no one says that in the movie. Her eyes are bluer than ever and she’s trying to get Timmy worshipped as a messiah. But Timmy doesn’t want to go to The South because of his nightmares. Who is that woman he’s following? I bet it’s his sister, who’s still just a fetus but obviously psychotic and power-mad like most of the non-Fremen characters. The Fremen aren’t crazy or power-hungry, they just want their land and some water so they’re not dessicating all the time. The outworlders, like Timmy and his Mom and the Bald Guys and the Emperor and the Bene Gesserit and all the Houses, are all WHITE COLONISTS. But obviously Timmy is more than that, he really wants to assimilate into the Fremen but they can’t help but worship him as a god which makes him a White Savior. d’Oh! In 2024? Oh man I can’t imagine the cognitive dissonance the filmmakers suffered here. Eventually Timmy, too, drinks the Blue Poison, which turns out to be baby sandworm puke, which also gives him blue eyes which symbolize INSANITY and POWER to remind us that white saviors are NOT OKAY sort of except they are maybe and that’s NUANCE.

Her face is an open book.

Timmy almost dies from the blue poison and the only thing that can save him is girlfriend tears, so Johnny has to be summoned to cry on him. Earlier in the movie we learn that Fremen don’t cry because it wastes water, but Johnny and Timmy openly cry in spite of that and no one seems to chastise them. Johnny’s tears revive Timmy which is exactly like Disney’s Tangled (Rapunzel) but when he wakes up she slaps him because why did he drink blue poison?? She told him earlier she’d always love him as long as he kept being him, but you know that blue poison is a powerful substance that changes people and now he’s probably not who he is anymore. 

Then there are a bunch of fight scenes and more fight scenes and stabbings and big boom explosions and zillions of soldiers running at each other and hand-to-hand combat and shooting and killing and I would have checked my phone for a distraction at this point because I hate battle scenes but it’s rude to use a glowing device in a theater, even an almost empty one. At least the movie didn’t have explicit sex scenes, that was a relief. Timmy says he will love Johnny forever and then Young Bald Guy and Timmy have a showdown involving choreography and daggers and guess what, Timmy wins! And then he offers to marry the Emperor’s posh daughter, RIGHT IN FRONT OF JOHNNY! Clearly it’s just politics but Johnny, being the salt of the earth, doesn’t play such games so she catches the first sandworm out of there.

THE END

Share

The post Spoiler Alert: DUNE 2 appeared first on Nina Paley.

Sunday, 21 April

23:49

Niri 0.1.5 released [OSnews]

Earlier this year, we talked about Niri, a very unique tiling window manager for Wayland that scrolls infinitely to the right. I’ve never seen anything quite like it, and while it seems polarising, I think it’s absolutely worthy of a dedicated niche. The project’s got a major new release out, and there’s a lot of improvements here.

First and foremost, virtually all animations have been overhauled, and new ones have been added for almost every kind of interaction. The videos on the release page do a really good job of highlighting what they’re going for, and I think it looks great, and for the animation-averse, every individual animation can be turned off. Niri now also supports variable refresh rate, and the IPC mechanism has been improved. Among the smaller improvements is a welcome one: when using the touchscreen, the mouse cursor disappears.

I really think this one has to be tried before judged, and I’m seriously contemplating setting up a Wayland environment just for this one, to see if it works for me. My window “flow”, if that makes sense, is already left-to-right, so the idea of having that effectively automated with an infinite canvas sounds very appealing to me, especially on smaller displays. I just need to figure out if it works in reality.

23:35

Kernel prepatch 6.9-rc5 [LWN.net]

Linus has released 6.9-rc5 for testing.

But if you ignore those oddities, it all looks pretty normal and things appear fairly calm. Which is just as well, since the first part of the week I was on a quick trip to Seattle, and the second part of the week I've been doing a passable imitation of the Fontana di Trevi, except my medium is mucus.

23:00

Microsoft now lets you download app executables directly from the Microsoft Store website [OSnews]

Microsoft is on a roll with updating its app store on Windows 10 and 11. Following the recent release of performance upgrades and improved algorithms, the company announced big changes in how the web version of the Microsoft Store works. Now, every user can download app executables directly from the website using new “installers for web.”

↫ Taras Buria at Neowin

Neat.

Lunatik: a framework for scripting the Linux kernel with Lua [OSnews]

Lunatik is a framework for scripting the Linux kernel with Lua. It is composed by the Lua interpreter modified to run in the kernel; a device driver (written in Lua =)) and a command line tool to load and run scripts and manage runtime environments from the user space; a C API to load and run scripts and manage runtime environments from the kernel; and Lua APIs for binding kernel facilities to Lua scripts.

↫ Lunatik GitHub page

I’m not knowledgeable enough to understand what this might be used for, but I figured y’all would be interested in this.

22:56

Link [Scripting News]

Back in the old days, during a great sport event, we'd post our feelings, pro or con, to Twitter. I observed as follows: "Let's do something great with our lives! In the meantime I miss the role that twitter used to play and never will play again. It was the place to go to say 'How about those Knicks!' when they win a game like the one they won last night. Not no mo." Betsy Devine was the first to like this. I felt heard.

Link [Scripting News]

Doc asks the question on all our minds: "Why does ChatGPT misspell the f*ck out of words on images?" Don Park, Wes Felter and JY Stervinou chime in.

16:49

Link [Scripting News]

Good morning sports fans!

13:07

GNU gnulib: calling for beta-testers [Planet GNU]

If you are developer on a package that uses GNU gnulib as part of its build system:

gnulib-tool has been known for being slow for many years. We have listened to your complaints. A rewrite of gnulib-tool in another programming language (Python) is ready for beta-testing. It is between 8 times and 100 times faster than the original gnulib-tool.

Both implementations should behave identically, that is, produce the same generated files and the same output. You can help us ensure this, through the following steps:

1. Make sure you have Python (version 3.7 or newer) installed on your machine.

2. Update your gnulib checkout. (For some packages, it comes as a git submodule named 'gnulib'.) Like this:

  $ git checkout master
  $ git pull

     Set the environment variable GNULIB_SRCDIR, pointing to this checkout.

     If the package is using a git submodule named 'gnulib', it is also advisable to do

  $ git commit -m 'build: Update gnulib submodule to latest.' gnulib

     (as a preparation for step 5, because the --no-git option does not work as expected in all variants of 'bootstrap').

3. Set an environment variable that enables checking that the two implementations behave the same:

  $ export GNULIB_TOOL_IMPL=sh+py


4. Clean the built files of your package:

  $ make -k distclean


5. Regenerate the fetched and generated files of your package. Depending on the package, this may be a command such as

  $ ./bootstrap --no-git --gnulib-srcdir=$GNULIB_SRCDIR

     or

  $ export GNULIB_SRCDIR; ./autopull.sh; ./autogen.sh

     or, if no such script is available:

  $ $GNULIB_SRCDIR/gnulib-tool --update

     If there is a failure, due to differences between the 'sh' and 'py' results, please report it to <bug-gnulib@gnu.org>.

6. If this invocation was successful, you can trust the rewritten gnulib-tool and use it from now on, by setting the environment variable

  $ export GNULIB_TOOL_IMPL=py


7. Continue with

  $ ./configure
  $ make

     as usual.

And enjoy the speed! The rewritten gnulib-tool was implemented by Dmitry Selyutin, Collin Funk, and me.

10:49

10:28

Other people’s problems [Seth's Blog]

It’s surprisingly easy to be generous and find solutions to our friend’s problems.

Much easier than it is to do it for ourselves. Why?

There are two useful reasons, I think.

FIRST, because we’re unaware of all the real and imaginary boundaries our friends have set up. If it were easy to solve the problem, they probably would have. But they’re making it hard because they have decided that there are people or systems that aren’t worth challenging. Loosening the constraints always makes a problem easier to solve.

And SECOND, because resistance is real. Solving the problem means moving ahead, confronting new, even scarier problems. It might be easier to simply stay where we are, marinating in our stuck.

When we care enough to solve our own problem, we’ll loosen the unloosenable constraints and embrace the new challenges to come.

10:21

09:35

Urgent: The conscripted surveillance provision [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

US citizens: call on Congress to reject the surveillance bill that would allow government agencies to conscript any conveniently available American to start spying on whoever the agency directs.

Alas, I don't have any more details about this. But we should treat it as a real danger. Please phone each of your senators at 202-688-0628 and urge per to oppose that bill.

While you are at it, you could also urge those same senators to refuse to extend section 702 mass surveillance.

If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121

00:49

First hemp-lime facility, MN [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

The Lower Sioux tribe has developed hempcrete as a building material, and reports that it saves energy in summer and winter, as well as being low cost.

Park Güell tourist crowds, Barcelona [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

Barcelona has removed bus line 116 (which goes to the beautiful Parc Güell) from Google and Apple maps, to discourage the tourists from using it to get to the park.

This seems perverse to me. Do they want the tourists not to visit Parc Güell? To take taxis to get there? To travel by a more circuitous route? To walk a long distance?

If lots of people use line 116, the sensible and helpful thing to do is to run more frequent buses on part or all of that line.

Homelessness as a profit center, CA [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

California cities have privatized destruction of homeless encampments. Companies have been paid at least $100 million, and perhaps much more.

Privatizing a government activity tends to make it more expensive. It also tends to become less accountable, leading to more cruel abuse and more callous careless abuse.

Saturday, 20 April

23:56

Checking In From LA [Whatever]

Here’s my view from the stage at the LA Times Festival of Books earlier today, on which I, Ben Winters and Tim Blake Nelson (with moderator Jesse Andrews) were meant to talk about “when work gets weird,” but actually ended up discussing many other topics as well, which at one point resulted in me, a very lightly progressive member of the petit bourgeois, unleashing a stem-winding polemic about the endgame of late-stage capitalism, because, I guess, why not. It’s 2024, maybe someone has to. That said, it was a generally lovely panel, and it was nice to meet all the other panelists. Then we all went to sign books, and it’s always a pleasure to do that.

Aside from the Festival of Books, I also had a few meetings to talk about current and potentially upcoming projects. One should never counts chickens before they hatch, particularly in LA, but I can say I thought the meetings went well. Seeds were planted, shall we say. We will find out if any bloom.

How has your weekend been?

— JS

22:07

(Satire) Potential Juror [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

(satire) *Eric Trump Only Potential Juror Uninformed Enough To Serve At Father's Trial.*

Kari Lake [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

Kari Lake, an insurrectionist Republican candidate for the US Senate, called on Republicans to carry guns around the time of the election. We know that will lead to killings, which insurrectionists hope will give them a chance to steal the election.

Lake said that Washington is a swamp. Evidently she is an alligator that can't wait to get in and bite people.

Unsafe oil fleet [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

Russia exports lots of oil from the Baltic Sea in ships that go through the narrow passages around Denmark. These ships are badly maintained, and likely to cause disaster even without an intention to do so.

Whether the ships are insured is almost irrelevant, since an insurance company could hardly make up for the damage that a big oil spill could do in those confided waters. The crucial issue is to stop allowing unseaworth ships to pass through.

Regardless of future between Ukraine and Russia, it would be wise to require all oil shipments between the North Sea and the Baltic Sea to be sent through pipelines across Denmark, not by ship. Pipeline leaks on land will make smaller spills than ship disasters.

Olympian cruelty [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

Paris is displaying the usual Olympian cruelty by "cleaning up" homeless people and squats to look pretty for the games.

These games tend to do permanent harm to street vendors, due to new strict laws, and to everyone that travels on streets, due to new surveillance measures. In addition they tend to enrich companies at the expense of the public.

If your city proposes to host the Olympic Games, I urge you organize to defeat the proposal.

Undercover officer [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

St Louis thugs went on a rampage at a protest, attacking based on no grounds. Oops! They attacked an undercover thug.

Some of the attackers were jailed for this, which is good. But what we really should demand is that thugs be jailed for rampaging against innocent people even when those are not actually thugs in disguise.

Oil sanctions [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

*US reimposes sanctions on Venezuela as hope for democracy crumbles.*

Maduro and his lieutenants deserve sanctions, but US trade sanctions tend to fall on the people who are victims, not culprits.

British politics [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

*Britain’s latest descent into authoritarianism fits a depressingly familiar pattern. This is how it tends to work: a subversive group is identified by political elites and presented as a danger to the nation, often being additionally labelled as allies or dupes of hostile foreign enemies. An air of national emergency is contrived, with exaggerated, distorted, or simply invented evidence used to justify claims of an imminent threat. The ensuing repressive measures are supposedly to defend the security of both individual citizens and the nation alike.*

This year's target is "supporters of Palestine", a term that covers a wide range of views.

Settlement-building [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

*Israel has sped up settlement-building in East Jerusalem since Gaza war began.*

Pro-Israel money [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

Pro-Israel money pours in to unseat prominent progressives in Congress.

Climate crisis income study [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

*Climate crisis: average world incomes to drop by nearly a fifth by 2050. Cost of environmental damage will be six times higher than price of limiting global heating to 2°C, study finds.*

Miracle-wm 0.2.0 released [OSnews]

Miracle-wm is a Wayland compositor built atop of Mir, and its core is a tiling window manager like i3 and sway. It intends to offer more features compared to those, though, gunning more for swayfx. The project, led by Canonical’s Matthew Kosarek, recently released version 0.2.0, which comes with a bunch of improvements.

It supports sway/i3 IPC now, so that it can function in conjunction with Waybar, a very popular tool in the build-it-yourself Wayland window manager space. There’s also a new feature where individual windows can live on top (Z-axis wise) of the tiling grid, where they work pretty much like regular windows. Another handy addition is that the configuration can be automatically reloaded when you change it.

Miracle-wm comes in a snap package, but rpm and deb will arrive in a few days, as well. As the version number suggest, this project is in heavy development.

19:49

Microsoft wants to hide the ‘Sign out’ button in Windows 11 behind a Microsoft 365 ad [OSnews]

Microsoft is not done adding more odd stuff into its operating system. Following the not-so-great reception of new Start menu ads in one of the recent Beta builds, Microsoft is bringing even more ads, which, besides being slightly annoying, come at the cost of existing features. In build 22635.3500, the Sign Out button is now hidden behind a menu with a Microsoft 365 ad.

Microsoft calls the new thing “Account Manager.” In a nutshell, it is a flyout with your existing subscriptions, a Microsoft 365 upsell, and a few account-related notifications, like a prompt to add a backup phone number or enable OneDrive backups. There is now also a link to your Microsoft Account settings.

↫ Taras Buria at Neowin

The beatings will continue until moral improves.

18:14

Quiet mode for the blogroll [Scripting News]

After living with the blogroll on the home page of Scripting News for about a month, and having heard from early testers, I felt that it was demanding too much attention when I was reading stuff on the blog. So I made some time last week to experiment with a subtler sidebar.

In Quiet Mode, the blogroll doesn't call attention to itself until you click on it. Then its background changes from neutral to white. That's the equivalent of shining a spotlight on it. Also the borders become blue to indicate that the browser's focus is on the blogroll.

I wanted to do more to tone it down. So, in Quiet Mode the title moves up and to the left, and is in a much smaller font, boldface, nicely visible and stands off from the list, but doesn't call your attention to it. It's there when you want to know more.

You may want to call it something other than a blogroll, btw. If you're using blogs to coordinate projects with others, something I think a lot more people would do if it worked better, instead of "blogroll" you'd might call it your "workgroup."

Anyway, I have switched Scripting News over to the new quiet mode, it's already the default, but I put a checkbox just below the blogroll that lets you toggle between the two modes to see the difference and possibly spot problems. The checkbox will go away before long. I just want it there to quickly do an A-B comparison.

Here's a quick video demo of Quiet Mode.

And a place to comment or ask questions.

16:42

Haiku’s Genio IDE introduces symbol outline feature [OSnews]

Genio, the Haiku OS integrated development environment (IDE), is receiving another exciting update in preparation for the upcoming summer release. The update focuses primarily on improving the Language Server Protocol (LSP) stack and introduces a cool new feature: Symbol Outline.

Symbol Outline allows Genio to retrieve the list of symbols defined in a source file from the language server. This list can be sorted, nodes can be expanded or collapsed, and now a symbol can be renamed directly from there.

Being part of the standard LSP specification, Symbol Outline should be supported by all language servers. The development team has tested it with clangd and OmniSharp.

↫ Andrea at Desktop on fire!

Improvements to tools to develop truly native Haiku applications are exceptionally welcome, if only to prevent Haiku from becoming a worse way than Linux to run Qt applications.

13:35

Bastian Venthur: Help needed: creating a WSDL file to interact with debbugs [Planet Debian]

I am upstream and Debian package maintainer of python-debianbts, which is a Python library that allows for querying Debian’s Bug Tracking System (BTS). python-debianbts is used by reportbug, the standard tool to report bugs in Debian, and therefore the glue between the reportbug and the BTS.

debbugs, the software that powers Debian’s BTS, provides a SOAP interface for querying the BTS. Unfortunately, SOAP is not a very popular protocol anymore, and I’m facing the second migration to another underlying SOAP library as they continue to become unmaintained over time. Zeep, the library I’m currently considering, requires a WSDL file in order to work with a SOAP service, however, debbugs does not provide one. Since I’m not familiar with WSDL, I need help from someone who can create a WSDL file for debbugs, so I can migrate python-debianbts away from pysimplesoap to zeep.

How did we get here?

Back in the olden days, reportbug was querying the BTS by parsing its HTML output. While this worked, it tightly coupled the user-facing presentation of the BTS with critical functionality of the bug reporting tool. The setup was fragile, prone to breakage, and did not allow changing anything in the BTS frontend for fear of breaking reportbug itself.

In 2007, I started to work on reportbug-ng, a user-friendly alternative to reportbug, targeted at users not comfortable using the command line. Early on, I decided to use the BTS’ SOAP interface instead of parsing HTML like reportbug did. 2008, I extracted the code that dealt with the BTS into a separate Python library, and after some collaboration with the reportbug maintainers, reportbug adopted python-debianbts in 2011 and has used it ever since.

2015, I was working on porting python-debianbts to Python 3. During that process, it turned out that its major dependency, SoapPy was pretty much unmaintained for years and blocking the Python3 transition. Thanks to the help of Gaetano Guerriero, who ported python-debianbts to pysimplesoap, the migration was unblocked and could proceed.

In 2024, almost ten years later, pysimplesoap seems to be unmaintained as well, and I have to look again for alternatives. The most promising one right now seems to be zeep. Unfortunately, zeep requires a WSDL file for working with a SOAP service, which debbugs does not provide.

How can you help?

reportbug (and thus python-debianbts) is used by thousands of users and I have a certain responsibility to keep things working properly. Since I simply don’t know enough about WSDL to create such a file for debbugs myself, I’m looking for someone who can help me with this task.

If you’re familiar with SOAP, WSDL and optionally debbugs, please get in touch with me. I don’t speak Pearl, so I’m not really able to read debbugs code, but I do know some things about the SOAP requests and replies due to my work on python-debianbts, so I’m sure we can work something out.

There is a WSDL file for a debbugs version used by GNU, but I don’t think it’s official and it currently does not work with zeep. It may be a good starting point, though.

The future of debbugs’ API

While we can probably continue to support debbugs’ SOAP interface for a while, I don’t think it’s very sustainable in the long run. A simpler, well documented REST API that returns JSON seems more appropriate nowadays. The queries and replies that debbugs currently supports are simple enough to design a REST API with JSON around it. The benefit would be less complex libraries on the client side and probably easier maintainability on the server side as well. debbugs’ maintainer seemed to be in agreement with this idea back in 2018. I created an attempt to define a new API (HTML render), but somehow we got stuck and no progress has been made since then. I’m still happy to help shaping such an API for debbugs, but I can’t really implement anything in debbugs itself, as it is written in Perl, which I’m not familiar with.

12:00

Firefox nightly now available for Linux on ARM64 [OSnews]

Linux distributions running on ARM have had to roll their own Firefox builds for the architecture since forever, and it seems that Mozilla has taken this to heart as the browser maker is now supplying binary ARM builds of Firefox. They come in either a tarball or a .deb package installable through Mozilla’s apt repository. Do note, though, that Mozilla does not give the same kinds of guarantees for the ARM build of Firefox as they do for the x86 builds.

We want to be upfront about the current state of our ARM64 builds. Although we are confident in the quality of Firefox on this architecture, we are still incorporating comprehensive ARM64 testing into Firefox’s continuous integration and release pipeline. Our goal is to integrate ARM64 builds into Firefox’s extensive automated test suite, which will enable us to offer this architecture across the beta, release, and ESR channels.

↫ Gabriel Bustamante

These new builds won’t mean much for the average ARM Linux user since distributions built Firefox for the architecture already anyway, but it does offer users a direct line to Firefox they didn’t have before.

10:49

09:42

[1230] Enough Moping, Time to Go [Twokinds]

Comic for April 20, 2024

09:21

ChatGPT is dumber than it looks [Seth's Blog]

That’s not true for a screwdriver.

Or a table saw or even a spatula.

These are useful tools, but they don’t pretend to be well-informed or wise. They’re dumb, and they look dumb too.

That’s one reason that tools are effective. We use them to leverage our effort, but we don’t trust them to do things that they’re not good at.

The reason AI language models are dumb is that they don’t actually know anything, the model is simply calculating probabilities. Not about the unknown, but about everything. Each word, each sentence, is a statistical guess.

I’ve switched mostly to claude.ai because it’s more effective and less arrogant, but it’s still guessing.

If a guess is good enough, you’re set. If it’s not, plan accordingly.

In my experience, the most useful approaches to AI are:

  1. Ask clearly bounded questions, where you can easily inspect the results.
  2. Don’t let AI make decisions for you. Instead, challenge it to broaden your options.
  3. Take advantage of the fact that it doesn’t have feelings, and use its honesty to get useful feedback.

Don’t ignore AI because it’s dumb. Figure out how to create patterns and processes where you can use it as the useful tool it’s becoming.

08:35

Pluralistic: Greedflation, but for prisoners (20 Apr 2024) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]


Today's links


A US $100 bill. The oval containing Benjamin Franklin has been replaced with an image of scabrous prison bars with a cup of instant ramen behind them.

Greedflation, but for prisoners (permalink)

Today in "Capitalists Hate Capitalism" news: The Appeal has published the first-ever survey of national prison commissary prices, revealing just how badly the prison profiteer system gouges American's all-time, world-record-beating prison population:

https://theappeal.org/locked-in-priced-out-how-much-prison-commissary-prices/

Like every aspect of the prison contracting system, prison commissaries – the stores where prisoners are able to buy food, sundries, toiletries and other items – are dominated by private equity funds that have bought out all the smaller players. Private equity deals always involve gigantic amounts of debt (typically, the first thing PE companies do after acquiring a company is to borrow heavily against it and then pay themselves a hefty dividend).

The need to service this debt drives PE companies to cut quality, squeeze suppliers, and raise prices. That's why PE loves to buy up the kinds of businesses you must spend your money at: dialysis clinics, long-term care facilities, funeral homes, and prison services.

Prisoners, after all, are a literal captive market. Unlike capitalist ventures, which involve the risk that a customer will take their business elsewhere, prison commissary providers have the most airtight of monopolies over prisoners' shopping.

Not that prisoners have a lot of money to spend. The 13th Amendment specifically allows for the enslavement of convicted criminals, and so even though many prisoners are subject to forced labor, they aren't necessarily paid for it:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch

Six states ban paying prisoners anything. North Carolina caps prisoners' pay at one dollar per day. Nationally, prisoners earn $0.52/hour, while producing $11b/year in goods and services:

https://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2024/0324bowman.html

So there's a double cruelty to prison commissary price-gouging. Prisoners earn far less than any other kind of worker, and they pay vastly inflated prices for the necessities of life. There's also a triple cruelty: prisoners' families – deprived of an incarcerated breadwinner's earnings – are called upon to make up the difference for jacked up commissary prices out of their own strained finances.

So what does prison profiteering look like, in dollars and sense? Here's the first-of-its-kind database tracking the costs of food, hygiene items and religious items in 46 states:

https://theappeal.org/commissary-database/

Prisoners rely heavily on commissaries for food. Prisons serve spoiled, inedible food, and often there isn't enough to go around – prisoners who rely on the food provided by their institutions literally starve. This is worst in prisons where private equity funds have taken over the cafeteria, which is inevitable accompanied by swingeing cuts to food quality and portions:

https://theappeal.org/prison-food-virginia-fluvanna-correctional-center/

So you have one private equity fund starving prisoners, and another that's gouging them on food. Or sometimes it's the same company. Keefe Group, owned by HIG Capital, provides commissaries to prisons whose cafeterias are managed by other HIG Capital portfolio companies like Trinity Services Group. HIG also owns the prison health-care company Wellpath – so if they give you food poisoning, they get paid twice.

Wellpath delivers "grossly inadequate healthcare":

https://theappeal.org/massachusetts-prisons-wellpath-dentures-teeth/

And Trinity serves "meager portions of inedible food":

https://theappeal.org/clayton-county-jail-sheriff-election/

When prison commissaries gouge on food, no part of the inventory is spared, even the cheapest items. In Florida, a packet of ramen costs $1.06, 300% more inside the prison than it does at the Target down the street:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24444312-fl_doc_combined_commissary_lists#document/p6/a2444049

America's prisoners aren't just hungry, they're also hot. The climate emergency is sending temperatures in America's largely un-air-conditioned prisons soaring to dangerous levels. Commissaries capitalize on this, too: an 8" fan costs $40 in Delaware's Sussex Correctional Institution. In Georgia, that fan goes for $32 (but prisoners are not paid for their labor in Georgia pens). And in scorching Texas, the commissary raised the price of water by 50% last summer:

https://www.tpr.org/criminal-justice/2023-07-20/texas-charges-prisoners-50-more-for-water-for-as-heat-wave-continues

Toiletries are also sold at prices that would make an airport gift-shop blush. Need denture adhesive? That's $12.28 in an Idaho pen, triple the retail price. 15% of America's prisoners are over 55. The Keefe Group – sister company to the "grossly inadequate" healthcare company Wellpath – operates that commissary. In Oregon, the commissary charges a 200% markup on hearing-aid batteries. Vermont charges a 500% markup on reading glasses. Imagine spending decades in prison: toothless, blind, and deaf.

Then there's the religious items. Bibles and Christmas cards are surprisingly reasonable, but a Qaran will run you $26 in Vermont, where a Bible is a mere $4.55. Kufi caps – which cost $3 or less in the free world – go for $12 in Indiana prisons. A Virginia prisoner needs to work for 8 hours to earn enough to buy a commissary Ramadan card (you can buy a Christmas card after three hours' labor).

Prison price-gougers are finally facing a comeuppance. California's new BASIC Act caps prison commissary markups at 35% (California commissaries used to charge 63-200% markups):

https://theappeal.org/price-gouging-in-california-prisons-newsom-signature/

Last year, Nevada banned any markup on hygiene items:

https://www.leg.state.nv.us/App/NELIS/REL/82nd2023/Bill/10425/Overview

And prison tech monopolist Securus has been driven to the brink of bankruptcy, thanks to the activism of Worth Rises and its coalition partners:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/08/money-talks/

When someone tells you who they are, believe them the first time. Prisons show us how businesses would treat us if they could get away with it.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

This day in history (permalink)

#15yrsago JG Ballard eulogized by John Clute https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/j-g-ballard-writer-whose-dystopian-visions-helped-shape-our-view-of-the-modern-world-1671634.html

#5yrsago A secret Finnish subculture of women and girls who ride hobbyhorses has come out of the shadows https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imW7EGQcJck

#5yrsago Most Republican voters were Trumpists before Trump, and most of the rest have converted since 2016 https://crookedtimber.org/2019/04/21/transactional-trumpism/

#5yrsago Stop & Shop strike convinces 75% of loyal customers to take business elsewhere https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2019/04/19/visits-loyal-stop-shop-customers-decline-during-strike/aGr2bUg75Mbu3zY0y5YZiI/story.html

#5yrsago After Notre Dame bailout Yellow Vests urge more Victor Hugo tributes, starting with “Les Miserables” https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/04/20/yellow-vests-demonstrate-paris-notre-dame-donations-highlight-wealth-inequality

#1yrago How workers get trapped by "bondage fees" https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/21/bondage-fees/#doorman-building

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, holding a mic.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025

  • Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025

  • Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM

  • Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM

Latest podcast: Capitalists Hate Capitalism https://craphound.com/news/2024/04/14/capitalists-hate-capitalism/

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

03:42

WordPress For One [Scripting News]

More and more I'm getting used to WordPress as the platform I develop for.

Imagine if you, as a developer, could add your own data to a WordPress post. Then you could build editors that work at a higher level. For example, you'd keep the Markdown source for the page. When it was saved the system would re-render the Markdown, turning it into HTML, but you'd still have the Markdown around for editing. And of course there are other kinds of editors that make sense, knowing that the output is going to the web, but you don't have to write in the technical language of the web. You might want something more suited to wordsmiths -- ie writers, if you are a writer. I have that working here, and have been building on it.

I've gone back to Radio UserLand and tried to extrapolate, where would we have gone with that product, 22 years later. And now I'm beginning to see in the pieces that are forming the new product I've been working on, something whole, something that works.

I think of it as "WordPress For One" -- you might be writing as part of a larger site, but this is your writing space, a place you can mold to fit your style, where it gets more comfortable over the years, more you. That's what I've felt has been wrong with the direction the web has been going in, we're getting boxed into smaller and smaller spaces, but for some of my writing I want a nice stage with good lighting and full freedom to tell a story that I have to tell, not necessarily all at once, but possibly in a series, over time.

I also want to be influenced by your story. I want Working Together.

Of course I still very much develop for FeedLand, and in the back of my mind I want to loop back around to Drummer (it's my main writing environment), and then I have another product I call Belter I want to finish. And I wouldn't mind trying to make a CSS thing that makes more sense than the tragedy CSS is, and also would love to see a port of Frontier to Linux, though I don't see doing that myself, but I would like to guide it (so it runs all the old stuff first).

An imaginary New Orleans street [Scripting News]

A street in New Orleans that Meta.ai invented. I asked for Joseph St across from the cemetary. Even so an interesting image, makes me think of the city in a nostalgic way.

RMS dará una charla en Córdoba [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

Richard Stallman dará una conferencia, El software libre, libertad, y sociedad, en Córdoba, Spain, Viernes, el 26 de April, de 17:30 a 18:50 en la Colegio Mayor Nuestra Señora de la Asunción. La conferencia es en español.

Biden considering Assange case [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

As predicted, the US "assurances" about Julian Assange's US trial are designed to give the misleading impression that the First Amendment would apply to him.

Palestine as full member of UN [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

*Leaked Cables Show White House Opposes Palestinian Statehood.*

Heatwave deaths in April in Mali [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

*Lethal heatwave in Sahel worsened by fossil fuel burning, study finds*, perhaps by 1.5°C.

Oil-extraction leasing reforms [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

Leasing of federal land for oil and gas extraction will no longer be a near-giveaway.

LLM developmental attributes, devices [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

Present-day bullshit generators' output may be recognizable by certain words they tend to use strangely often, including "delve".

Tax Day in a representative democracy [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

*I Want My Taxes to Be Used for Our True National Security: Helping People in Need.*

Rafah ground invasion imminent, Gaza [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

Israel's fight with Iran has given Rafah a respite from an attack by Israeli ground troops (if indeed Israel still intends to attack Rafah).

When an enemy tries to attack you, but the attempt does essentially no damage, this is an opportunity to end the cycle of retaliation by doing nothing in response. If Israel had leaders who were statesmanlike and wanted peace, they would gratefully welcome the opportunity. Instead, it has war hawks who want to push the US into war with Iran, are galled by their lack of success at this, and are planning to try again.

02:42

Page 5 [Flipside]

Page 5 is done.

This Week in Seattle Food News [The Stranger]

A New Asian Spot Arrives on Alki, Din Tai Fung's Bellevue Location Reopens, and Araya's Says Goodbye by EverOut Staff In this week's edition of food news, Din Tai Fung reopens its Bellevue location, Lotus on the Beach slings pho tacos and sizzling steak on Alki, and the Madison Valley location of beloved vegan staple Araya's Place bids adieu. Plus, Hello Robin and Molly Moon's Ice Cream celebrate 4/20 this weekend, and Coffeeholic House and Petit Pierre Bakery team up. For more ideas, check out our food and drink guide. NEW OPENINGS 

Din Tai Fung
DTF (as I like to call it affectionately) is back and bigger than ever: The popular Taiwanese chain known for its succulent soup dumplings reopened its Lincoln Square location on the building's ground floor in a space twice the size of the original. The original space will soon be replaced by Wagyu House, a restaurant serving wagyu hot pot and Japanese barbecue.

01:56

Joe Marshall: Plaformer Game Tutorial [Planet Lisp]

I was suprised by the interest in the code I wrote for learning the platformer game. It wasn’t the best Lisp code. I just uploaded what I had.

But enough people were interested that I decided to give it a once over. At https://github.com/jrm-code-project/PlatformerTutorial I have a rewrite where each chapter of the tutorial has been broken off into a separate git branch. The code is much cleaner and several kludges and idioticies were removed (and I hope none added).

01:07

00:21

10 Essential Record Store Day Releases [The Stranger]

Not featured: The tortured poet. by Dave Segal

Record Store Day, one of the most contentious of retail traditions, returns on April 20. We've gone over this manufactured holiday's pros and cons many times before (here's one explication; here's another), so let's just say this: every year, RSD yields about 10%-15% crucial titles out of its hundreds. But which 10%-15%, you ask? Well, that varies, obviously, as musical taste is subjective.

However, as I have spent too many decades crate-digging and record-collecting, I submit that I have a fair idea of what RSD releases you need, even if you don't realize it yet. So, let's get down to the nitty gritty (minus the dirt band). 

Harmonia, Musik von Harmonia (Deluxe Edition) (Grönland 2xLP)

Released in 1974 by Cluster's Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius, and Neu! guitarist Michael Rother, Musik is a krautrock klassik. The bleepy machine funk of "Watussi" foreshadows early Warp Records 15 years before the fact. "Sehr Kosmisch" (translation: "It's Cosmic, Motherfucker") totally lives up to its title; someday it will anchor the soundtrack to the greatest sci-fi film ever. "Dino" almost out-autobahns Kraftwerk. "Ohrwurm" converts the best worst mushroom trip you've ever had into sound. "Veterano" anticipates trance techno by nearly two decades. Musik is a cornucopia of amazing ahead-of-its-time tracks and merits the awe typically reserved for Can, Neu!, and Faust's peak achievements. A bonus LP includes previously unreleased reworks by Matthew Herbert, James Holden, David Pajo, and others. (Some words in this blurb were lifted from this Stranger feature on Moebius.)

Parliament, Osmium Deluxe Edition (Demon 2xLP) 

Parliament's wildly eclectic 1970 debut album is the only one by the group—who morphed into Funkadelic—featuring English composer/producer Ruth Copeland. She contributed the awesome anomaly "The Silent Boatman," a grandiose, bagpipes-enhanced ballad swaddled in Bernie Worrell’s sacred organ and glockenspiel swells. It's worth the price of admission alone. But there's also fantastic rock, funk, gospel, and R&B cuts, and even a wicked country pastiche on Osmium. It might be the funnest George Clinton-associated record ever—which is saying a lot. Includes rare bonus material and B-sides appearing for the first time on vinyl.

Dr. John, Gris-Gris Gumbo Ya Ya: Singles 1968-1974 (Omnivore 2xLP) 

If you want an essential intro to the work of god-tier New Orleans funk-soul brother Dr. John, this comp should do you a solid. It covers the keyboardist/singer's peak period in 28 tracks, five of which derive from his classic 1968 debut, Gris-Gris, which I once described as "a hellishly heavenly hoodoo that makes you feel as if your brain's swimming in a bouillabaisse of seven-horned lamb heads and mescaline." This collection comes at the right place, but not the wrong time.

Captain Beefheart, The Spotlight Kid (Deluxe Edition) (Rhino 2xLP)

This very necessary reissue of The Spotlight Kid bears nine bonus tracks to augment what is already an avant-blues all-timer. Don Van Vliet and the Magic Band were operating at a libidinous zenith here, and even Howlin' Wolf had to shout, "GOT DAMN!" This deluxe edition includes the previously unreleased nearly nine-minute version of "I'm Gonna Booglarize You Baby," one of the greatest songs ever with a neologism in its title.

Manu Dibango, Manu 76 (Soul Makossa) 

Everyone's favorite Cameroonian saxophonist/vibraphonist kicks out his trademark joyous highlife-funk, soukous (uptempo Congolese dance music), and Afro boogie, all of which dissolves your worries and gets your limbs gesticulating within seconds. Manu 76 is one of Dibango's hottest platters, which is saying a lot. 

Queen Latifah, Nature of a Sistah (Tommy Boy Music)

Although not as stunning as her 1989 debut LP, All Hail the Queen, 1991's Nature of a Sistah further solidified Latifah's importance as one of the first strong female leads in a male-dominated genre. Her brash, nimble verses and outright sung lyrics bounced over party-centric funk-, R&B-, and reggae-tinged cuts that reinforced her women-empowering thrust. Like many '90s releases, Sistah has been scarce on vinyl, so this reissue is very welcome. 

The Slits, In the Beginning (Jungle 2xLP)

An anthology of this UK group's live recordings from 1977-1981, In the Beginning captures these wild women both thrashing in a punk vein and stretching out in a dubwise manner. This kind of lo-fi rawness didn't make it onto their classic reggae-funk-rock debut, Cut, but for fans and the curious, it's an ear-opening peek into their feral, freewheeling stage demeanor. 

Rain Parade, Emergency Third Rail Power Trip (Label 51)

Along with the Dream Syndicate's The Days of Wine and Roses, Emergency Third Rail Power Trip represents the pinnacle of what nobody in that short-lived '80s movement wanted to call "the Paisley Underground" (the tight-knit SoCal scene that reverently revived psych-rock). Led by brothers David and Steven Roback and Matt Piucci, Rain Parade transmogrified the Beatles and the Byrds' most psychedelic moments into melodious marvels of concise songcraft, with a hint of Pink Floydian melancholy. One of the greatest albums of the Reagan era.

Schoolly D, Saturday Night: The Album (Get on Down)

Out of print on vinyl since 1987, Saturday Night is a canonical gangsta-rap LP. Loaded with funky-as-hell samples, rugged TR-909 programming, and Schoolly D's bravado-laden verbals and alpha-male charisma, the album stands as one of the toughest early specimens of hip-hop's golden age. It's krack. This reissue comes on "lemon pepper" vinyl, regrettably.

Scenic, The Acid Gospel Experience (Independent Project 2xLP)

After 22 years, The Acid Gospel Experience finally gets a vinyl issue—hallelujah! Previously, it had only been released on CD. Featuring members of the fantastic Savage Republic and Shiva Burlesque, Scenic thrived briefly in Bishop, California, before fading into unjust obscurity. On this aptly titled record, ambient space rock meets desert-fried psychedelia, and everyone who hears it leaves enlightened by the end. 

More worthy titles: Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Live in France: The 1966 Concert in Limoges (Deep Digs); Kate Bush, Eat the Music (Fish People 10"); Boogie Down Productions, Edutainment (Get on Down 2xLP); Bernie Worrell, Wave From the WOOniverse (ORG/Loantaka); Jeff Buckley & Gary Lucas, Songs to No One (Instinct 2xLP); Fun Boy Three, Extended (Chrysalis 2xLP); Little Richard, Right Now (Omnivore); Lee "Scratch" Perry, Skanking With the Upsetters (Trojan); Nightmares on Wax, Carboot Soul (25th Anniversary Edition) (Warp 2xLP + 7"); Nas, Illmatic Remixes & Rarities (Legacy); Dave Pike, The Doors of Perception (Nature Sounds); Sonic Youth, Hits Are for Squares (Geffen 2xLP); Ultramagnetic MCs, The Ultra's Live at Brixton (Music on Vinyl); Various Artists, Pale Shades of Grey: Heavy Psychedelic Ballads and Dirges 1969-1976 (Now-Again); George Harrison, Electronic Sound (Zoetrope Picture Disc) (Dark Horse).

Local interest: Black Breath, Box Set (Southern Lord); Death Cab for Cutie, Live at the Showbox (Barsuk 2xLP); Fleet Foxes, Live on Boston Harbor (Anti/Epitaph 3xLP); Pearl Jam, Dark Matter (Republic); Mudhoney, Suck You Dry: The Reprise Years (Reprise 5xLP); Screaming Trees, Strange Things Happening - The Ellensburg Demos 1986-88 (Screaming Trees LLC/Vinyl Voice Edition); Sleater-Kinney, This Time/Here Today (Loma Vista 7"); TAD, Infrared Riding Hood (Real Gone Music).

Record Store Day is Saturday, April 20. See a round-up of some of The Stranger's favorite record stores—and a list of events and promotions—in our calendar here.

And here's the list of participating Western Washington record stores.

Friday, 19 April

23:35

Louis-Philippe Véronneau: Montreal's Debian & Stuff - March 2024 [Planet Debian]

Time really flies when you are really busy you have fun! Our Montréal Debian User Group met on Sunday March 31st and I only just found the time to write our report :)

This time around, 9 of us we met at EfficiOS's offices1 to chat, hang out and work on Debian and other stuff!

Here is what we did:

pollo:

  • did some clerical work for the DebConf videoteam
  • tried to book a plane ticket for DC24
  • triaged #1067620 (dependency problem with whipper)
  • closed #1067121 (flaky test in supysonic)
  • closed #1065514 (qpdfview crossbuilding)

tvaz:

tassia:

  • planned & brainstormed for the upcoming Debian usability tests
  • mentored a student/new contributor (justin)
  • babysat a future contributor!
  • closed #1067649
  • learnt about fabre.debian.net & element.debian.social (thanks, pollo!)

viashimo:

  • uploaded puppet-strings 4.1.2-1 to unstable
  • updated various services in personal infra
  • cleaned vagrant-hostmanager and worked on packaging the new upstream release (1.8.10)
  • extended GPG key expiry
  • looked at options for a new backup machine

lavamind:

  • updated puppetdb to 8.4.1

justin:

  • opened #1068152 after a misfortune with #1068151
  • created new contributor accounts (salsa & wiki)

Pictures

Here are pictures of the event. Well, one picture (thanks Tassia!) of the event itself and another one of the crisp Italian lager I drank at the bar after the event :)

People at the event working around a long table A glass of beer illuminated by sunlight

  1. Maintainers, amongst other things, of the great LTTng. ↩

23:14

Stranger Danger [Penny Arcade]

I considered some more Vault 77, but the new Transformers trailer had just hit and we talked about that instead. I always think that I like Transformers a normal amount, that there is something universal in these warring cults of conscious machines, but I think that I might actually like them way more than other people and quite possibly I like them a weird amount.

22:07

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Trackers [Schneier on Security]

A new bioadhesive makes it easier to attach trackers to squid.

Note: the article does not discuss squid privacy rights.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Read my blog posting guidelines here.

22:00

Porting 8-bit Sonic 2 to the TI-84+ CE [OSnews]

It all started in fall of 2022, when I was watching This Does Not Compute’s video on the history of graphing calculator gaming. Around the 5 minute mark, he offhandedly mentions the kind of processors TI’s graphing calculator line uses. Most of them use the Z80, the 89 and 92 use the M68K, and the Nspire line uses an ARM-based processor.

That really piqued my interest, since I already knew the processors that Sega’s retro game consoles used: The Z80 for the Master System, and the M68K for the Genesis. The calcs have a grayscale screen, but I wanted to know if anyone ever tried porting a Sonic game from the consoles to one of the calcs.

↫ grubbycoder

Right off the bat, after settling on the most appropriate graphing calculator to try and port Sonic 2 to, namely the TI-84+ CE with a 48Mhz eZ80 processor (“basically a 24-bit Z80”), 256 KB of RAM and a 320×240 display, the porting process runs into some serious roadblocks before any code’s even been written. Unlike the Sega hardware Sonic 2 runs on, the TI-84+ CE has no graphics hardware, the clock speed is effectively crippled at 12-20Mhz, a file format with a size limit of 64KB per file.

The rest of the story details the many difficulties that needed to be overcome, but in the end, the port is completed – and yes, you can now play Sonic 2 from the Master System on a TI graphing calculator.

20:28

I Saw U: Standing in the Oso Oso Merch Line, Kissing My Hand at CS, and Sitting at the Next Table Over at Comedy/Bar [The Stranger]

Did you see someone? Say something! by Anonymous

Comedy/Bar Chat Up

We sat at neighboring tables while both our parties were late. I clocked you as ADHD and you had the same name as my friend. I’d love to chat more! ☺️

Riding the Gravy Train

We chatted at the Yung Gravy/bbno$ show in Seattle back in 2022. I asked you about your koi fish button down shirt bc I thought it was floral.

keeper of a sweet little beast @ corvus

you were there briefly with a scruffy little dog and both disarmingly lovely. my green flannel matched my hair. i'll have to say hi next time :-)

Standing In Line For Baseball Beers

Waited for a beer behind you on opening night for the Ms. Loved chatting w/ you before my friend arrived, you then laughed at me fumbling my words.

Art(ist) in motion!!

We met chatting an others outside CS on the Hill.You had made your dress and kissed my hand goodbye. I’m @ that same night unless traveling. Find me.

Stella + Spencer 4EVA?

Walked by your place in Ballard, and you said hi to me and my dog Stella, she met your dog Spencer. I’m fighting a cold otherwise I’d chat more!

checking in with M’s gal on the 5 bus

Stood in between you and a guy trying to talk to you about the Mariners on the bus to the game, not taking the hint. Said “good luck” when I got off.

oso oso merch line

we chatted in the merch line at the oso oso show last week but i didn’t ask for your number! 🥲

Is it a match? Leave a comment here or on our Instagram post to connect! 

Did you see someone? Say something! Submit your own I Saw U message here and maybe we'll include it in the next roundup!

19:42

Seattle Space-Rockers somesurprises' New Album Poised for Meteoric Impact [The Stranger]

somesurprises' album Perseids is out on Doom Trip Records Friday, April 19. by Dave Segal

Of the thousands of bands I've talked to as a music journalist, somesurprises are the most soft-spoken. Their absolutely chill voices barely register on the playback of our interview, which took place in their Fremont rehearsal space, ExEx Audio. And this chillness seeps into the Seattle quartet's extraordinary music, which alchemizes a few of the finest rock strains—space, kraut, and shoegaze—into songs that massage your mind and tingle your body with subtle insistence.

Led by guitarist/vocalist/songwriter Natasha El-Sergany, somesurprises began as her bedroom solo project in 2012-2013. It expanded to a duo when guitarist/synthesist Josh Medina joined in 2015. The highly skilled rhythm section of bassist Laura Seniow and drummer Benjamin Thomas-Kennedy—who replaced Emma Danner and Nico Sophiea, respectively—fill out the lineup.

They've been in serious grind mode in the weeks leading up to the April 20 Tractor Tavern release party for their second album as a full-fledged band, Perseids, which LA's Doom Trip Records issues on April 19. A live appearance on KEXP follows on April 22 at the ungodly time of 9:30 am.

Clearly, momentum's building for somesurprises. They've been one of Seattle's most enthralling rock groups since 2017's Alt, but Perseids is their most melodically sophisticated and rich-sounding collection to date. Paurl Walsh—who's played in an experimental duo with Medina for years—expertly engineered and produced the record. 

<a href="https://somesurprises.bandcamp.com/album/perseids">Perseids by somesurprises</a>

Five years have passed since their self-titled LP on Drawing Room Records; much of that silence was due to COVID-19, of course, but also somesurprises decided to extensively labor over these nine songs, most of which El-Sergany wrote during the worst months of the pandemic. Plus, working with a limited budget and holding down demanding jobs further delayed things. El-Segany recalls one Thanksgiving weekend where "we were [in the studio] going insane for eight hours with a really loud [imitates a metronome's ticks], killing the vibe completely."

She adds, "The long process allowed us to add new parts to songs and even new lyrics, so I wasn't playing as I was writing lyrics; I was just able to listen and really see what it made me feel like. That was a benefit, too."

In addition, Medina's ability to spontaneously create parts to El-Sergany's songs has improved over the years. He also praises Walsh's ability to layer and overdub sounds, and the two's telepathic musical relationship helped the band to reach new heights. "He did a little bit of what we refer to as 'dub production,' throwing drums through delay and things like that. We've developed as a band and as individuals with Paurl's help, as well." 

The extra effort—plus contributions from avant-garde cellist Lori Goldston and vocalist/Persian poetry scholar Jessika Kenney (both Stranger Geniuses)—has paid off handsomely. The album opens with somesurprises' boldest stab for a hit single in these shoegaze-friendly times, "Be Reasonable." With its frictionless, laid-back motorik groove, it captures the feeling of an easygoing ramble down the Autobahn. While listening, one feels bedazzled and adrift with cool-breeze pleasure. "Bodymind" is a pulsating swell of overdriven klang while "Why I Stay" begins as a hypnotic and moving waltz-time ballad before the song gloriously ascends and expands to blot out the sky. On "Ship Circles," Goldston's cello adds sinuous beauty and gravity to this mesmerizing, hushed ballad, complementing El-Sergany's voice, which is at once icy and deeply moving. "Untitled" is a gorgeous, contemplative instrumental somewhere between Opal and early Felt. Tip: listen to this record on good headphones to catch the enthralling microscopic details and the jaw-dropping, macroscopic scope.

The LP's longest song at 8:09, "Perseids" is a masterclass in building suspense. The rhythm clicks swiftly and metronomically while a cyclical, spangled guitar riff tingles synapses. Then comes a soft explosion into a six-stringed meteor shower amid some intricate, magical bass/drum interplay, as Kenney steps to the mic to recite a poem by 14th-century spiritualist Hafez about the Islamic lore of demons being vanquished by meteors. 

El-Sergany elaborates on this theme: "After this album and song became centered around the idea of meteors and meteor showers, our three birthdays [Natasha, Josh, and Laura's] being in Leo season, at the peak of meteor showers, I thought surely there must be some meaning behind this in my faith. So I looked into it and, yeah, the first image that I came across is that of demons being struck down because they couldn't reach the heavens. It seemed a little cartoonish in my mind; I couldn't grasp it." Fortuitously, Goldston's friend Kenney was in town while somesurprises were recording Perseids, so they invited her to bring her knowledge and dramatic vocal stylings to the studio.

The Hafez poem that Kenney suggested revealed the metaphor's meaning to El-Sergany. "Even in Western discourse, people use the term 'demons' to mean the things they're struggling with personally. But [the poem] talked about the demon of grief and this image of meteors being able to strike out the demon of grief. And I thought that was powerful because you seem like you're a whole person regardless of what has happened to you, and understanding that and being able to transform the trauma or the bad thing that's happened to you into part of your story can therefore eliminate the power that that thing has over you. I was really inspired by that."

Throughout the album, I note, there seems to be a tension between angst-ridden lyrics and liberating music. El-Sergany agrees. "Because you can't really have one without the other. You can't get to the liberation part without the struggle. I do like to think about dream spaces where everything is the way it should be. And maybe that's not so different from being in the struggle, too. As long as you're moving toward some kind of truth, you're already there."

Only in dreams. COURTESY OF DOOM TRIP

When The Stranger interviewed El-Sergany in 2017 for a Person of Interest feature, she said, "I'm not going for escapism so much as attempting to create space for reflection on themes of love, loss, and isolation. I think it's really important to stay human now and stay connected to your imagination. So I hope that our album can help people do that." Is that still the case? "Yes. Well said," she laughs. 

Does El-Sergany view somesurprises as a vehicle to create positive change in the world? "Not really, but I think it's a way to connect with people in a really authentic way."

On Perseids, there's less reliance on motorik rhythms compared to past releases, partially due to El-Sergany writing most of the songs by herself. Also, she was listening to a lot of Cluster—especially Cluster 71 and Cluster & Eno—which led to her "wanting to have more color than structure. There was one year where I was in the .01% top listeners to Cluster on Spotify. I wear that as a badge of honor. I always liked melodic music and actual songs."

That being said, somesurprises' motorik songs work really well live. "That's what gets people dancing most of the time," Seniow observes. Medina adds, "We always laugh when everyone just wants to hear us play one chord loudly." The thing is, it's a good chord.

What happens if somesurprises get really popular? Do they quit their jobs and dedicate their lives to the band? Or will it still be a side hustle? "It's been a really slow burn and we expect that to continue," El-Sergany says. Medina says he'd never quit his job as an administrator at a Montessori school, nor would El-Sergany leave her job as an immigration lawyer. And neither would compromise their art in order to break through.

"I feel principled, to a fault, maybe, and Natasha's the same way," Medina says. "We shoot ourselves in the foot all the time," El-Sergany admits. They turned down an invitation to appear on Band in Seattle and they almost got on Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown in 2017. "That was crazy," El-Sergany says. "But they turned us down. We would've totally done it." 

"It blew my mind, because I recorded this song ["Mayor Skipped Town" from 2017's Serious Dreams] on a cassette tape and they want to use it on national television," Medina says. "I thought, 'This is a joke...'"

"It was a fun thing to be able to tell my mom, you know?" El-Sergany says. "They wanted to play it while Tony was riding the ferry to the clambake on Bainbridge Island or something, and then have synchronized swimmers. It sounded very elaborate."

With shoegaze gaining widespread popularity now—particularly from what I've gleaned secondhand from TikTok—are somesurprises angling to cash in on the craze? "I have a TikTok account, but so far I get like seven views on things," El-Sergany says. "I'm trying to go viral, but it hasn't worked yet. Maybe I need to do more skits or something."

"I told her the magic would be covering pop songs in her reverbed-out way," Medina says. "And do some actual magic tricks," Thomas-Kennedy advises.

With deadpan snark, El-Sergany says, "Okay, I'm on it."

somesurprises play Tractor Tavern on Saturday April 20 at 8:30 pm with Coral Grief and Anthers.

18:56

The Best Bang for Your Buck Events in Seattle This Weekend: Apr 19–21, 2024 [The Stranger]

Grass & Gas: 4/20 Celebration, Record Store Day, and More Cheap & Easy Events Under $15 by EverOut Staff

Celebrate Seattle's favorite holiday, 4/20, by blazing up and heading to one or more of the ultra chill events we've rounded up here, from Grass & Gas: 4/20 Celebration & Car Show with Sol and Chong the Nomad to Record Store Day and from 4/20 Feature: Reefer Madness (1936) and Stoned Shorts on 16mm to The Stranger's Pizza Week!

FRIDAY PARTIES & NIGHTLIFE

Live Lasers to the Music of Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department
Are you ready for it?! In honor of Taylor Swift releasing her eleventh album The Tortured Poets Department today, the Pacific Science Center's laser dome will "make the whole place shimmer" with an impromptu light show set to the album. Whether you consider yourself a Swiftie or not, I think it's time to enter your laser dome era! AUDREY VANN
(Laser Dome at Pacific Science Center, Uptown, $12-$15)

Why Amazon's Just Walk Out Technology Failed [The Stranger]

Amazon recently admitted that it does use humans in this technology. by Charles Mudede

Earlier this month, Business Insider reported that Amazon's Just Walk Out technology was not run by robots, but by the eyes of "1,000 workers in India who review what you pick up, set down, and walk out of its stores with." And so what looked like a new trick was in fact old hat. The work of American cashiers and attendants (a high-income society) had simply been, like service-related jobs, offshored to India (a low-income society). And this transference of services from one economic zone to another is only about one thing: wage arbitrage. 

The Seattle-based heterodox economist Alan Harvey put it this way in his excellent little book Demand Side Economics: Demand Side Minds.

Explicit in the new globalization is the free flow of capital and the opening and integration of markets. And while "trade" denotes an exchange, the current phenomenon is one of arbitrage of labor, regulation, currencies and financial instruments. Arbitrage is taking advantage of the price differences between two or more markets.

Amazon recently admitted that it does use humans in this technology, but only to train AI. In the near future, the tech corporation promises, humans will be completely replaced by robots. Nevertheless, Amazon is removing the Just Walk Out technology from its Amazon Fresh stores and replacing it with the Dash Cart, which is, in essence, a modification of the self-checkout kiosks found in most grocery stores. (Self-checkout, like the Dash Cart, transfers the paid labor of a cashier to the unpaid labor of a shopper—an extreme form of wage arbitrage.) 

Nevertheless, the human-to-AI story does not add up. The problem, as explained to me by an Amazon Web Services (AWS) worker, who, of course, cannot be named, is Just Walk Out demands too many high-end cameras, relentless processing, and the constant movement of a vast amount of information. Therefore the system only works in places that have access to fast internet, which is not cheap.

Think of it this way: A change of mind has a price in an Amazon Fresh or Amazon Go store. This price does not exist in a conventional grocery. In the former, when a shopper decides not to buy something and returns it to the shelf, a massive load of information must be transmitted to a human or a robot about this simple and common shopping behavior. With the latter, no such expenditure (either physical or technological) is required to register the mental fluctuations of a shopper. What matters is what they finally purchase. (Mind changes are, of course, much cheaper with a Dash Cart.) 

Technology can cheapen labor by increasing productivity, but capitalism still needs, and daily depends on, the lifeblood of low wages. Even the magic wand of AI will not make this basic fact disappear. Mikhail Tugan-Baranovsky's economy of machines making machines is still impure. It still has one worker. Labor still has to be there.

Baranovsky writes:

If all workers except one disappear and are replaced by machines, then this one single worker will place the whole enormous mass of machinery in motion and with its assistance produce new machines and the consumption goods of the capitalists. The working class will disappear, which will not in the least disturb the self-expansion process [Verwertungsprozess] of capital.

In our technologically advanced times, Baranovsky's metaphysical one worker is found all over the Global South. They were on the low-wage labor the massive and complex container ship that recently crashed into and brought down Baltimore's Francis Scott Key bridge. They are the dirt-poor laborers suffering Heart of Darkness-like conditions in the human-dwarfing cobalt mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo. (The cobalt is used to make machines like "smartphones, computers and electric vehicles.") Indeed, this is the deepest insight of Alex Rivera's sci-fi masterpiece Sleep Dealer. Though the US's farming, construction, and manufacturing industries are run by robots, these robots are operated by low-wage laborers in Mexico.

18:07

17:21

Seattle’s Pay Up Problems May Have Little to Do with the New Minimum Wage [The Stranger]

If the Pay Up policy widened the gap between the “winners and losers,” then the council could shape policy to uplift bike couriers instead of effectively or entirely tossing out the law. by Hannah Krieg

After a relentless campaign from big corporations, the Seattle City Council appears poised to repeal or dramatically cut a minimum wage ordinance for gig workers known as “Pay Up,” which took effect this year. But interviews with the gig workers themselves reveal that the corporatist council might make that extreme decision despite missing a big piece of the puzzle.

Over the last two weeks, The Stranger conducted interviews with more than a dozen drivers and cyclists who both favor and oppose the policy. They all mentioned a huge disparity between gig workers who drive and those who bike–the “winners and losers” of the minimum wage, as bike courier Gary put it. Even opponents of the minimum wage like Gary accused the companies of rigging the algorithm to give more orders to drivers than cyclists long before the new law went into place, a charge the companies only somewhat deny. 

While cyclists tell us they don’t see enough orders under the new law to put dinner on their table, drivers largely said they make more money now. If the Pay Up policy widened the gap between the “winners and losers,” then the council could shape policy to uplift bike couriers instead of effectively or entirely tossing out the law. 

Pay Up: A Brief History

In 2022, former Council Members Lisa Herbold and Andrew Lewis rolled out their “Pay Up” package of protections for gig workers, and they prioritized establishing a minimum wage. 

For more information visit https://t.co/MGhYxlH11l pic.twitter.com/kBvf53bXsA

— Lisa Herbold (@Lisa_Herbold) April 15, 2022

Gig workers said they got screwed pretty often in the pre-minimum wage industry. For example, in 2022 one worker told The Stranger about a time when InstaCart offered her $10.23 without a tip to pick up 58 items at a grocery store. To complete that order, the worker said she would spend potentially an hour-and-a-half just driving to and from the store and waiting in line, not to mention the amount of time it would take her to shop and message the customer about substitutes for out-of-stock items. Spending two hours on that trip puts her at about $5 per hour, which amounts to the minimum wage from 30 years ago. At that rate, she’d need to perform about 400 hours of untaxed work to afford the average month’s rent for a one-bedroom in Seattle. 

In May of 2022, after some pushback and concessions on the legislation, the city council unanimously passed an ordinance that ensured drivers received a minimum wage based on their “engaged” minutes and expenses.

The Backlash

When the law went into effect in January of this year, the gig companies threw a temper tantrum and slapped large fees onto orders. In messages to their customers, to the press, and on social media, the billion-dollar corporations blamed the fee on the city council and the workers who fought for their wage. Of course, the law did not require the companies to pass on the true cost of labor to their customers, and not every company chose to level such a fee.

The apps have not published data to show the true effects of the law, so lobbyists, the media, and the city council rely on individual anecdotes to inform their advocacy, reporting, and lawmaking–which is less than ideal, tbh.  

Based on our reporting, all workers said the company’s high fees reduced the number of orders they could pick up. However, Pay Up proponents said that as the quantity of the orders sunk, the quality shot up–meaning they made more money per order. 

For example, delivery driver Alex showed The Stranger a screenshot of his earnings for the last week of February. He made $1,170 in 34 hours of “active time,” or about $34 per hour before tips. 

Delivery driver Henry sent screenshots that showed he makes $20 per hour on his worst day, about $25 per hour on an average day, and more than $30 on an excellent day. Still, Henry said he’s also putting in more hours than ever, starting at 8 am and sometimes not stopping until midnight, because he’s worried the council will take away his well-paying job. 

Cyclists who spoke to The Stranger described a different experience. 

“The law disproportionately affected us,” said Gary in a group interview. 

“That’s putting it lightly,” bike courier Paul said. “It totally obliterated us.”

Gary sent screenshots of his earnings under the Pay Up ordinance that showed him making roughly $800 in 60 hours of work, or about $13 per hour. He also showed that he accepts 100% of the orders he receives. 

Bike courier Jason showed screenshots of his earnings for the first week of April. Despite waiting by his phone for orders for 52 hours that week, he only completed five deliveries. He made $51 and a $3 tip. 

“Winners and Losers”

The bike couriers believe that they see an especially low number of orders because the gig companies intentionally suppress orders to cyclists. As seen on community forums, for years bike couriers across the country have accused the gig companies of favoring their car-driving peers. But the anti-minimum wage cyclists said that disparity grew after the new law went into effect. 

The bikers have a theory: Cyclists typically take longer to complete deliveries than drivers do, so now that the apps must pay workers for their time, assigning orders to the faster workers saves the companies money. 

Not that a spokesperson from Uber would admit to gaming their algorithm to suppress orders, but I asked them about that theory anyway. A spokesperson from Uber said, “There is no change to how orders are dispatched—-All Uber Eats couriers across the board are experiencing a decline in orders as a result of Pay Up.”

When asked about favoritism toward drivers unrelated to Pay Up, Uber Eats did not respond. 

Doordash sort of admitted that the app's algorithm works differently for cyclists. In an email statement, a Doordash spokesperson said the company only offers bike couriers "bike-friendly" orders. "This is to avoid offering orders to Dashers on bikes that contain cumbersome items like cakes or multiple hot drinks," The spokesperson wrote, maintaining that the current law saddles all workers with longer wait times and fewer orders. 

Though they initially lobbied for a flat-out repeal, these cyclists now advocate for a proposal put forth by the Uber-backed lobby group, Drive Forward. Early drafts of the legislation suggest the group wants an 11% cut in the minimum hourly pay and a 40% cut to per-mile reimbursement. Proponents of Pay Up said that this proposal amounts to a repeal that sneaks in a bunch of ways for the apps to undermine planned Pay Up legislation in the future. 

Drive Forward’s proposal does not require the gig companies to remove their fees, but bike courier John, who frequently speaks out against the minimum wage during public comment periods, said that he believes gig companies have made a “handshake agreement” with the City to eliminate the new fees if the council passes Drive Forward’s pay cuts. 

To support that theory, John referenced a KING 5 story that quoted a DoorDash spokesperson saying, “Our message to the council is the same as the message we’re overwhelmingly hearing from Dashers, businesses, and consumers in Seattle–it’s time to fix this broken law. The regulatory response fee in Seattle helps offset the costs associated with this law. If those costs can be decreased, we will explore all options to increase affordability for consumers, including a reduction of the fee.”

That’s not a very strong promise. To keep its word, DoorDash would only need to “explore” a reduction to the fee, whatever that means. 

John said he didn’t trust the company’s word on its own, but he did trust that DoorDash and other companies would do what’s best for their bottom line. So, if sales truly dropped because of their fee, then they would want to eliminate the fee. However, companies have not released sales data, so it's impossible to know if the $5 fee overcompensates for the customer loss, which, Pay Up proponents argue, would incentivize companies to keep fees even with a repeal. 

Besides, if the couriers believe the apps suppress orders for cyclists because they work more slowly, then lowering the minimum rate would not incentivize the companies to assign them more orders. They would still be slower than cars.

#NotAllCouriers

Not all bike couriers saw a cut to their earnings. Emma, a part-time bike courier, said she received fewer orders after the law passed, but each order paid more. According to screenshots she shared with The Stranger, she made about $15 per hour, or about $168 over 31 deliveries during the week of December 25-30. In the first week of April, she made about $32 per hour, or about $250 for 13 deliveries. 

Emma used to work for Uber Eats and DoorDash, but when the law went into effect, she noticed Uber Eats did not give her many orders, so she dropped the app. Like the anti-Pay Up workers, she attributes the drop to the new fees, and she believes the apps may be suppressing orders to cyclists to save money. But she said the issue was particularly bad on Uber Eats because the app does not give couriers the option to specify that they deliver on an E-bike instead of a conventional bike, so she suspects that Uber Eats “vastly overestimates” the amount of time it takes for E-cyclists like her to make a delivery. 

Emma also said that she has to play the delivery game a little differently now to make money. She used to aim to complete four or five deliveries in an hour, so she would stay in one dense, urban area. Now, she finds it is more profitable to take slightly longer rides.

The anti-Pay Up couriers said those ideas sound nice, but they don’t get enough orders to begin with. One worker speculated that fewer orders may not hit a part-time worker as hard. 

Emma also suggested that cyclists should try to do grocery deliveries. Part of the Pay Up package mandated that the gig companies give workers a preview of orders from grocery stores, so cyclists can now gauge if they can complete a grocery delivery. 

Again, the anti-Pay Up couriers said they take every order from every company, but it's still not enough.

Though she’s benefiting from the new wage, she believes her fellow couriers when they say they are not, but she can’t help but notice how the apps benefit from discord among couriers and drivers. She can see that bike couriers may feel gaslit about their own financial woes as their car-driving peers insist they earn more than ever. That kind of infighting can make workers side with their bosses.

Emma said the council could improve the policy by preventing the apps from discriminating against cyclists and by investing in more bike lanes and bike infrastructure so cyclists can get around faster and better compete with cars. But that latter change would benefit average Seattleites and not just big business, so I wouldn’t hold my breath. 

Perhaps controversially for the broader labor movement, Emma also suggested a two-tiered minimum wage. She said the council shouldn’t touch the ordinance for drivers, who seem largely to benefit, but perhaps they could create a different payscale for couriers to make them more competitive. For example, she said cyclists should perhaps receive less compensation for expenses because they do not pay for gas or car maintenance. That idea sort of ignores the fact that cyclists can incur expenses because cars hit and injure them, but let her cook!

I ran these ideas and others by Council President Nelson, but she did not respond. 

Up Next

Nelson’s committee will consider official legislation next week at the earliest, so there’s still time for her to think of a solution to uplift bike couriers rather than drag down drivers, as Emma put it. 

Meanwhile, anti-minimum wage bike couriers have given up on their goal of totally repealing the minimum wage ordinance. Heather, a bike courier, said such a repeal would be an optics nightmare for the City, but she was willing to settle for Drive Forward’s proposed changes. She added that Pay Up proponents, particularly Working Washington, the lobby group that helped win the minimum wage, need to learn to compromise.

Working Washington spokesperson Hannah Sabio-Howell said that workers came up with the pay standard–not Working Washington. It was the workers who showed up for three years of stakeholdering meetings, and it’s the workers who need to be at the table now.

“We’re not going to solve the problem of app corporations refusing to send orders to bike couriers by jamming through a corporate proposal that cuts pay and protections that workers fought for,” Sabio-Howell said. 

It’s not looking great for the workers who support the minimum wage, though. The corporate council seems poised to use a vocal minority who claims to not benefit from the wage as cover to strip worker pay more broadly, yet again showing that their ideological commitments trump practical governance that help everyday Seattleites. 

Slog AM: Israel Strikes Iran, Everett Bikini Baristas Can Wear Bikinis Again, Louisiana Cuts Lunch Breaks for Child Workers [The Stranger]

The Stranger's morning news roundup. by Nathalie Graham

Israel retaliates, strikes Iran: In a response to Iran's strike on Israel last weekend, which was in itself a response to an Israel attack on an Iranian diplomatic compound in Syria earlier this month, Israel launched a drone attack against a military base and nuclear site near the city of Isfahan. Israel's allies urged against this retaliation. Now, more world leaders are calling for both Iran and Israel to chill out, take some deep breaths, and not vault this thing into another all-out war in the region. 

Israel also sent drones to southern Syria: However, the drones caused only material damage. 

Meanwhile, on Friday, the Group of Seven foreign ministers chastised Iran for its attack on Israel earlier this week and dangled a threat of new sanctions.

US rejects Palestine from joining UN: A resolution to admit Palestine into the United Nations failed after the US vetoed it and the United Kingdom and Switzerland abstained from voting. Twelve other nations voted in favor of the resolution. While the resolution failed, the support Palestine received shows how many nations in the world recognize their statehood. 

Columbia students stage "Gaza Solidarity Encampment" on campus: In a peaceful protest calling for "divestment of genocide," students set up tents and occupied the South Lawn. Columbia's president called for police to remove the students as their actions violated university rules and polices around trespassing. On Thursday, police arrested more than 108 protesters, including Rep. Ilhan Omar's daughter, Isra Hirsi. Here's a scene from the protest last night:

The student occupation at Columbia continues going strong more than 42hrs later despite violent repression from the school and police 🇵🇸🫡 pic.twitter.com/ScDNb3SZWd

— Gerard (@GerardDalbon) April 19, 2024

More headaches for West Seattle commuters: West Seattle's lower swing bridge will close to traffic—yes, even for pedestrians and drivers—for nine days as crews "move the span’s control tower cables," according to the Seattle Times. This is part of a planned multiyear renovation program for the low bridge to modernize "moving parts and underwater footings." The low bridge will close at 6 am on April 20 and reopen after 5 am on April 29. 

Finally, some good news: The Everett bikini baristas can don their bikinis again after the city council voted unanimously to change the city dress code that required the baristas to wear at a minimum shorts and a tank top. With this vote, a 15-year battle between prudes in Everett and the bikini barista stands comes to a close. Part of what ushered this conflict toward a resolution was an October 2022 ruling by a US District Court judge that found the city's dress code restrictions on the bikini baristas unconstitutional. So, now Everett can again finally enjoy their coffee with a side of semi-clothed ass 'n' titties, as god intended. 

Bittersweet weather news: Today will be the warmest day for the next week. Cherish it while you can. 

If you like warmer weather, today is the warmest day in the next week. A bit of a roller coaster weather wise with a warm day today, cooling this weekend, a little warmer Monday & Tuesday then cooler again next Wednesday & Thursday. In other words, spring in Western Wash. #wawx pic.twitter.com/BAjM0TrXNd

— NWS Seattle (@NWSSeattle) April 19, 2024

A Trump trial update: The historic criminal hush-money trial now has its 12 jurors. On Friday, the court will continue selecting alternates. Opening arguments should start next week. 

Jan 6 lawsuits can go forward: On Thursday, Trump lost his bid to pause a slew of civil cases blaming him for inciting the Jan 6 insurrection. A US District judge denied the defense's request to pause the civil cases while other his other more criminal lawsuits (like the criminal case concerning his conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results) play out. 

UW Husky pleads not guilty to rape: Football player Tylin “Tybo” Rogers has been charged with second- and third-degree rape for the alleged sexual assault of two women. Both women—one a Seattle Central College student, the other a University of Washington student—outlined separate, disconnected incidents where Rogers violently assaulted them despite their continued pleas for him to stop. Rogers, a sophomore running back on the UW football team, pleaded not guilty. 

Bird flu could jump to humans: The World Health Organization is extremely concerned about the H5N1 bird flu spreading to humans. The outbreak, which originally started back in 2020 when it killed millions of poultry. In the years since, the disease has spread to mammals and, most recently, jumped to infecting goats and domestic cattle in the US. Scientists were surprised by this most recent development, according to The Guardian, since "they were not thought susceptible to this type of influenza." If humans do contract bird flu, the biggest fear is that the disease will evolve to spread from human to human. Historically, when humans have contracted bird flu, it was due to human contact with animals. The WHO warned of the  “extraordinarily high” mortality rate since humans have no immunity to the virus.

You just cannot make it up: Louisiana lawmakers are so committed to helping bottom lines that they're slashing workplace benefits and lunch breaks for—wait for it—child laborers. A House committee voted to repeal a law requiring employees give their child workers lunch breaks and unemployment benefits. Don't worry, the lawmakers also cut benefits for laboring adults in Louisiana, too, with other legislation. 

The rent is too damn high: And, in Seattle, it keeps getting higher. According to the Seattle Times' FYI Guy, in the past 12 months, 64% of Seattle rents saw their rent increase. For 54% of those people, the rent went up by at at least $100.  

A song for your Friday: I cannot care less that Taylor Swift released another album of middling songs and I cannot in good faith recommend anything from that despite how topical it is, so I will just leave you with this Beyoncé song I keep listening to and everyone else keeps listening to:

16:35

Adding state to the update notification pattern, part 3 [The Old New Thing]

Last time, we developed a stateful but coalescing update notification, and we noted that the code does a lot of unnecessary work because the worker thread calculates all the matches, even if the work has been superseded by another request.

We can add an optimization to abandon the background work if it notices that its efforts are going to waste: Periodically check whether there is any pending text. This will cost us a mutex, however, to protect access to m_pendingText from multiple threads.

class EditControl
{
    ⟦ ... existing class members ... ⟧

    bool m_busy = false;
    std::mutex m_mutex;
    std::optional<string> m_pendingText;
};
winrt::fire_and_forget
EditControl::TextChanged(std::string text)
{
    auto lifetime = get_strong();

    ExchangePendingText(std::move(text));
    if (std::exchange(m_busy, true)) {
        co_return;
    }

    while (auto pendingText = ExchangePendingText(std::nullopt);
           pendingText) {                                       

        co_await winrt::resume_background();

        auto matches = BuildMatches(*pendingText);

        co_await winrt::resume_foreground(Dispatcher());

        if (matches) {                
            SetAutocomplete(*matches);
        }                             

    }
    m_busy = false;
}

template<typename T = std::optional<std::string>>
std::optional<std::string>
    EditControl::ExchangePendingText(T&& pending)
{
    auto lock = std::unique_lock(m_mutex);
    return std::exchange(m_pendingText, std::forward<T>(pending));
}

std::optional<std::vector<std::string>>
    EditControl::BuildMatches(std::string const& text)
{
    std::vector<std::string> matches;
    for (auto&& candidate : FindCandidates(text)) {
        if (candidate.Verify()) {
            matches.push_back(candidate.Text());
        }
        if (auto lock = std::unique_lock(m_mutex);
            m_pendingText) {                      
            return std::nullopt;                  
        }                                         
    }
    return matches;
}

Last time, I noted that the UI thread is doing a lot of work for us, since it is implicitly ensuring that the updates to m_busy and m_pendingText are atomic.

If our background work doesn’t dispatch back to the UI thread, then we will be responsible for our own locking. We’ll look at that next time.

The post Adding state to the update notification pattern, part 3 appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Corporatism and fascism are two sides of the same coin [OSnews]

Apple has removed WhatsApp and Threads from its app store in China, following an order from the country’s internet watchdog which cited national security concerns.

↫ Juliana Liu at CNN

Over the recent months, as Apple had to change some of its business practices to comply with the European Union’s new Digital Markets Act, a still-ongoing process, Apple fans, spearheaded by John Gruber, have pushed Apple to leave the European Union. They argue that the minor inconvenience of complying with some basic consumer and market protection laws is too great of a deeply unfair financial sacrifice, and that leaving the EU makes more sense. Gruber also goes to bat hard for poor Facebook, arguing that company should leave the EU, too, over the DMA demanding Facebook respects users’ privacy. Apple itself, too, has been harshly attacking the European Union aggressively in the media.

So anyway, today, Apple did what it has been doing for a very long time: bending over backwards for the totalitarian, genocidal regime in China. China tells Apple to remove applications, Apple complies. Every other of the sixteen hundred times Apple has complied with this horrible regime’s demands, Gruber always argued that all poor Apple can do is comply with local Chinese laws and demands, as leaving China over principles and morals would benefit nobody.

So, we’re left with the rather peculiar situation where the response to some relatively minor consumer and market protection regulations is one of deep hostility, both from Apple as well as its PR attack dogs, whereas the response to the demands from one of the most brutal, totalitarian, genocidal regimes in human history is one of “that’s life”. Such is the way of the Apple corporatist: a democratically drawn up and widely popular law enacted by an incredibly popular government that causes some mild inconvenience for Apple is vilified with populist and nationalist anti-EU rhetoric, while the undemocratic, totalitarian decrees from a vicious genocidal dictator are met with effectively disinterested shrugs since those decrees don’t really inconvenience Apple.

Corporatism and fascism are two sides of the same coin, from early 20th century Europe, through mid-20th century United States, to the megacorporations of today.

Despite yet another decree from China that goes far further in nature than anything the DMA demands, we won’t be seeing any pushes from the Grubers of this world for Apple to leave China. We won’t be seeing copious amounts of malicious compliance from Apple. We won’t be treated to lengthy diatribes from Apple executives about how much they despise China and Chinese laws. All because China’s demands don’t harm Apple’s bottom line, but the DMA might.

And for the corporatist, praying at the altar of money, the former is irrelevant, while the latter is sacrilege.

DuckDuckGo launches “AI” chat [OSnews]

DuckDuckGo AI Chat is a private AI-powered chat service that currently supports OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and Anthropic’s Claude chat models.

↫ DuckDuckGo’s new “AI” chat feature

I guess I have to find another search engine.

16:07

Stuff [Judith Proctor's Journal]

 Sorry for posting so little of recent.  Mostly due to what is probably Irritable Bowel Syndrome, it isn't as bad as it was, but it still tends to affect my sleep, and makes it a bit harder to focus on anything.

 

also, I'm busy making waistcoats for the sword dance team.  Some of our kit did not come out well in photos, especially from the back (the backs of most waistcoats tend to be dark colours). So, I'm using a batch of bright yellow fabric (from the Dorset Scrap Store - which sells unwanted fabric, etc) and a another team member is printing the team logo on to the backs.

Fabric for the fronts is different for each team member, and is coming from left over fabric bought for other tasks, or stuff that team member 3 picked up as end of roll discounts.

It's doing good things for my sewing ability.  I can now do a reasonable job of adding interfaces to a garment, sew bias binding onto armholes, and bag out the front of a waistcoat.

Three down, quite a few more to go.  I'm focusing on the members who dance out most often, and the children.  In a few cases, I may be able to add a new back to an existing waistcoat, but I'm trying to make the all to the same basic design, just to give ta unified feel in spite of the different fabrics.



comment count unavailable comments

15:49

15:35

Link [Scripting News]

It's totally ridiculous to equate protest with antisemitism, esp with Israel led by a MAGA ally. The two concepts are orthogonal. I do not support the Israeli government any more than I supported the government of my country, the United States, when the MAGAs were in charge. We lost over 1 million Americans who did not have to die imho, because our government was not only immoral and hugely corrupt, but also made no attempt to govern. I am a child of Holocaust survivors and an American born in the USA, and am proud of and grateful to my country. Any American is free to protest the actions of our government or any other government, or really anything. If you don't believe in that then you aren't actually trying to make America great, you're saying something altogether different and incompatible. I am American. I am also deeply offended at other Americans who propose to speak for me. That actually is antisemitic, btw.

15:21

[$] Weighted memory interleaving and new system calls [LWN.net]

Gregory Price recently posted a patch set that adds support for weighted memory interleaving — allowing a process's memory to be distributed between non-uniform memory access (NUMA) nodes in a more controlled way. According to his performance measurements, the patch set could provide a significant improvement for computers with network-attached memory. The patch set also introduces new system calls and paves the way for future extensions intended to give processes more control over their own memory.

15:00

14:49

Link [Scripting News]

Quick video demo of meta.ai. This is a demo of just one feature, its ability to recalc drawings as you edit the prompt that defines the picture. As you can tell from the demo I love it because it's new, creative, super fun to use and to watch the result. And lovely to see this much progress so quickly. You really should watch it on YouTube so you can see how what I type relates to the image in real-time. It's like subtitles inverted, with a very knowledgeable, creative and high bandwidth computer network behind it. Living in the future.

14:35

Security updates for Friday [LWN.net]

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (gnutls, java-17-openjdk, mod_http2, and squid), Debian (firefox-esr), Fedora (editorconfig, perl-Clipboard, php, rust, and wordpress), Mageia (less, libreswan, puppet, and x11-server, x11-server-xwayland, and tigervnc), Slackware (aaa_glibc), and SUSE (firefox, graphviz, kernel, nodejs12, pgadmin4, tomcat, and wireshark).

13:49

Error'd: Believe It Or Not [The Daily WTF]

This week we have a special visit from a mythical beast: the snarklemma. But first, a non-error Error'd.

Obsessive Optimizer Ian K. "Walmart's nationwide network of warehouse stores means they can save time and money by shipping locally. FedEx has them covered: Their nationwide shipping fleet determined the shortest path from Houston to its largest suburb goes via Georgia." Not the shortest path, nor the fastest, but surely the cheapest one that meets the delivery date requirement. It's probably not an error, and I believe it, but I still can't believe it!

fedex

 

Possibly our most faithful contributor, Michael R. is also a Voyager fan. He shared this snapshot with us, commanding "Adjust our delefctor!" I think that's probably just the way they spefl thingf int he 24f sentry.

mr

 

An anonymous poster shared this image with us, remarking: "I'm not sure..."

postman

 

A second anonymous poster was caught on the horns of a snarklemma. Please help them out by voting in the comments. Would you prefer snark A: "Disney is acquiring so many things nowadays. I didn't know it was also acquiring Android notifications." Or would you prefer snark B: "I only have one TV and only one Disney+ account playing only one animated series. And yet, Google Play Services generated several notifications. Thats not Disney+, that's Disney+++++".

disney

 

Miquel B. eschews Netflix in favor of the edgier material available elsewhere. "Someone posted Lorem Ipsum for their review of the series." I couldn't bear to watch it; I have test anxiety.

ipsum

 

[Advertisement] Continuously monitor your servers for configuration changes, and report when there's configuration drift. Get started with Otter today!

11:35

Pluralistic: Precaratize bosses (19 Apr 2024) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]


Today's links


A tightrope walker in a tuxedo and top-hat. He is about to fall off his tightrope and his eyes are white and staring, while his mouth is open in a scream. The tightrope is anchored to a street-post with a 'Wall Street' sign on it. The post is being knocked askew by hundreds of tiny workers and farmers whose upraised fists have combined into one giant fist that is pushing the post over. In front of the tightrope walker is a black anarchist cat, barring his way.

Precaratize bosses (permalink)

Combine Angelou's "When someone shows you who they are, believe them" with the truism that in politics, "every accusation is a confession" and you get: "Every time someone accuses you of a vice, they're showing you who they are and you should believe them."

Let's talk about some of those accusations. Remember the moral panic over the CARES Act covid stimulus checks? Hyperventilating mouthpieces for the ruling class were on every cable network, complaining that "no one wants to work anymore." The barely-submerged subtext was their belief that the only reason people show up for work is that they're afraid of losing everything – their homes, their kids, the groceries in their fridge.

This isn't a new development. Back when Clinton destroyed welfare, his justification was that "handouts" make workers lazy. The way to goad workers off their sofas (and the welfare rolls) and into jobs was to instill fear in them:

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/03/welfare-childhood/555119/

This is also the firm belief of tech bosses: for them, mass tech layoffs are great news, because they terrorize the workers you don't fire, so that they'll be "extremely hardcore" and put in as many extra hours as the company demands, without even requiring any extra pay in return:

https://fortune.com/2022/10/06/elon-musk-jason-calacanis-return-to-office-gentlemens-layoffs-twitter/

Now, there's an obvious answer to the problem of no one taking a job at the wage being offered: just increase the offer. Capitalists claim to understand this. Uber will tell you that surge pricing "incentivizes drivers" to take to the streets by offering them more money to drive during busy times:

https://www.uber.com/blog/austin/providing-rides-when-they-are-most-needed/

(Note that while Uber once handed the lion's share of surge price premiums to drivers, these days, Uber just keeps the money, because they've entered the enshittification stage where drivers are so scared of being blacklisted that Uber can push them around instead of dangling carrots.)

(Also note that this logic completely fails when it comes to other businesses, like Wendy's, who briefly promised surge-priced hamburgers during busy times, but without even the pretense that the surge premium would be used to pay additional workers to rush to the restaurant and increase the capacity:)

https://www.theguardian.com/food/2024/feb/27/wendys-dynamic-surge-pricing

So bosses knew how to address their worker shortage: higher wages. You know: supply and demand. For bosses, the issue wasn't supply, it was price. A worker who earns $10/hour but makes the company $20 profit every hour is splitting the surplus 50:50 with their employer. The employer has overheads (rent on the shop, inventory, advertising and administration) that they have to pay out of their end of that surplus. But workers also have overheads: commuting costs, child-care, a professional wardrobe, and other expenses the worker incurs just so they can make money for their boss.

There's no iron law of economics that says the worker/boss split should be 50/50. Depending on the bargaining power of workers and their bosses, that split can move around a lot. Think of McDonald's and Walmart workers who work for wildly profitable corporate empires, but are so badly paid that they have to rely on food stamps. The split there is more like 10/90, in the boss's favor.

The pandemic changed the bargaining power. Sure, workers got a small cushion from stimulus checks, but they also benefited from changes in the fundamentals of the labor market. For example, millions of boomers just noped out of their jobs, forever, unwilling to risk catching a fatal illness and furious to realize that their bosses viewed that as an acceptable risk.

Bosses' willingness to risk their workers' lives backfired in another way: killing hundreds of thousands of workers and permanently disabling millions more. Combine the boomer exodus with the workers who sickened or died, and there's just fewer workers to go around, and so now those workers enjoy more bargaining power. They can demand a better split: say, 75/25, in their favor.

Remember the 2015 American Airlines strike, where pilots and flight attendants got a raise? The eminently guillotineable Citibank analyst Kevin Crissey declared: "This is frustrating. Labor is being paid first again. Shareholders get leftovers":

https://www.thestreet.com/investing/american-airlines-flight-attendants-bash-citi-analyst-who-put-shareholders-before-workers-14134309

Now, obviously, the corporation doesn't want to offer a greater share of its surplus to its workforce, but it certainly can do so. The more it pays its workers, the less profitable it will be, but that's capitalism, right? Corporations try to become as profitable as they can be, but they can't just decree that their workers must work for whatever pay they want to offer (that's serfdom).

Companies also don't get to dictate that we must buy their goods at whatever price they set (the would be a planned economy, not a market economy). There's no law that says that when the cost of making something goes up, its price should go up, too. A business that spends $10 to make a widget you pay $15 for has a $5 margin to play with. If the business's costs go up to $11, they can still charge $15 and take $1 less in profits. Or they can raise the price to $15.50 and split the difference.

But when businesses don't face competition, they can make you eat their increased costs. Take Verizon. They made $79b in profit last year, and also just imposed a $4/month service charge on their mobile customers due to "rising operational costs":

https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/1c53c4p/79bn_in_profits_last_year_but_you_need_an_extra/

Now, Verizon is very possibly lying about these rising costs. Excuseflation is rampant and rising, as one CEO told his investors, when the news is full of inflation-talk, "it’s an opportunity to increase the prices without getting a whole bunch of complaining from the customers":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/11/price-over-volume/#pepsi-pricing-power

But even stipulating that Verizon is telling the truth about these "rising costs," why should we eat those costs? There's $79b worth of surplus between Verizon's operating costs and its gross revenue. Why not take it out of Verizon's bottom line?

For 40 years, neoliberal economists have emphasized our role as "consumers" (as though consumers weren't also workers!). This let them play us off against one-another: "Sure, you don't want the person who rings up your groceries to get evicted because they can't pay their rent, but do you care about it enough to pay an extra nickel for these eggs?"

But again, there's no obvious reason why you should pay that extra nickel. If you have the buying power to hold prices down, and workers have the labor power to keep wages up, then the business has to absorb that nickel. We can have a world where workers can pay their rent and you can afford your groceries.

So how do we get bosses to agree to take less so we can have more? They've told us how: for bosses, the thing that motivates workers to show up for shitty jobs is fear – fear of losing their homes, fear of going hungry.

When your boss says, "If you don't want to do this job for minimum wage, there's someone else who will," they're telling you that the way to get a raise out of them is to engineer things so that you can say, "If you don't want to pay me a living wage for this job, there's someone else who will."

Their accusation – that you only give someone else a fair shake when you're afraid of losing out – is a confession: to get them to give you a fair shake, we have to make them afraid. They're showing us who they are, and we should believe them.

In her Daily Show appearance, FTC chair Lina Khan quipped that monopolies are too big to care:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaDTiWaYfcM

Philosophers of capitalism are forever praising its ability to transform greed into public benefit. As Adam Smith put it, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." The desire to make as much money as possible, on its own, doesn't produce our dinner, but when the butcher, the brewer and the baker are afraid that you will take your labor or your wallet elsewhere, they pay more and charge less.

Capitalists don't want market economies, where they have to compete with one another, eroding their margins and profits – they want a planned economy, like Amazon, where Party Secretary Bezos and his commissars tell merchants what they can sell and tell us what we must pay:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/01/managerial-discretion/#junk-fees

Capitalists don't want free labor, where they have to compete with rival capitalists to bid on their workers' labor – they want noncompetes, bondage fees, and "training repayment agreement provisions" (TRAPs) that force their workers to stay in dead-end jobs rather than shopping for a better wage:

\https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/04/its-a-trap/#a-little-on-the-nose

Capitalists hate capitalism, because capitalism only works if the capitalists are in a constant state of terror inspired by the knowledge that tomorrow, someone smarter could come along and open a better business, poaching their customers and workers, and putting the capitalist on the breadline.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/18/in-extremis-veritas/#the-winnah

Being in a constant precarious state makes people lose their minds, and capitalists know it. That's why they work so hard to precaratize the rest of us, saddling us with health debt, education debt, housing debt, stagnating wages and rising prices. It's not just because that makes them more money in the short term from our interest payments and penalties. It's because it de-risks their lives: monopolies and cartels can pass on any extra costs to consumers, who'll eat shit and take it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/02/its-the-economy-stupid/#overinflated

A workforce that goes to bed every night worrying about making the rent is a workforce that put in unpaid overtime and thank you for it.

Capitalists hate capitalism. You know who didn't hate capitalism? Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels. The first chapter of The Communist Manifesto is just these two guys totally geeking out about how much cool stuff we get when capitalists are afraid and therefore productive:

https://pluralistic.net/SpectreHaunting

But when capitalists escape their fears, the alchemical reaction that converts greed to prosperity fizzles, leaving nothing behind but greed and its handmaiden, enshittification. Google search is in the toilet, getting worse every year, but rather than taking reduced margins and spending more fighting spam, the company did a $80b stock-buyback and fired 12,000 skilled technologists, rather than using that 80 bil to pay their wages for the next twenty-seven years:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Monopoly apologists like to argue that monopolists can rake in the giant profits necessary to fund big, ambitious projects the produce better products at lower prices and make us all better off. But even if monopolists can spend their monopoly windfalls on big, ambitious projects, they don't. Why would they?

If you're Google, you can either spend tens of billions on R&D to keep up with spam and SEO scumbags, or you can spend less money buying the default search spot on every platform, so no one ever tries another search engine and switches:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

Compared to its monopoly earnings, the tech sector's R&D spending is infinitesimal:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/11/nor-glom-of-nit/#capitalists-hate-competition

How do we get capitalists to work harder to make their workers and customers better off? Capitalists tell us how, every day. We need to make them afraid.

(Image: Vlad Lazarenko, CC BY-SA 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

This day in history (permalink)

#20yrsago 2nd Circuit opinion affirms fair use — even when the source is infringing https://web.archive.org/web/20040503195326/http://www.corante.com/copyfight/archives/003214.html

#20yrsago Gardner Dozois stepping down from Asimov’s https://memex.craphound.com/2004/04/20/gardner-dozois-stepping-down-from-asimovs/

#15yrsago Norwegian P2P downloaders buy more music https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/04/study-pirates-buy-tons-more-music-than-average-folks/

#15yrsago Anonymous declares war on copyright enforcers, demands more lawsuits against P2P services https://memex.craphound.com/2009/04/20/anonymous-declares-war-on-copyright-enforcers-demands-more-lawsuits-against-p2p-services/

#15yrsago XKCD: The book https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/business/media/20link.html

#5yrsago Copyright filters are automatically removing copies of the Mueller Report https://memex.craphound.com/2019/04/20/copyright-filters-are-automatically-removing-copies-of-the-mueller-report/

#5yrsago Noam Chomsky takes ten minutes to explain everything you need to know about the Republican Party in 2019 https://truthout.org/video/chomsky-on-the-perils-of-depending-on-mueller-report-to-defeat-trump/

#1yrsago Company that makes millions spying on students will get to sue a whistleblower https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/20/links-arent-performances/#free-ian-linkletter

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, holding a mic.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025

  • Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025

  • Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM

  • Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM

Latest podcast: Capitalists Hate Capitalism https://craphound.com/news/2024/04/14/capitalists-hate-capitalism/

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

11:07

Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 265 released [Planet Debian]

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 265. This version includes the following changes:

[ Chris Lamb ]
* Ensure that tests with ">=" version constraints actually print the
  corresponding tool name. (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#370)
* Prevent odt2txt tests from always being skipped due to an impossibly new
  version requirement. (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#369)
* Avoid nested parens-in-parens when printing "skipping…" messages
  in the testsuite.

You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

10:49

10:35

The grid of inquiry [Seth's Blog]

Expertise and firmly held beliefs don’t always go together.

Here’s a simple XY grid to help us choose where to sit at whatever table we’re invited to:

Plenty of well-trained professionals have earned the right to have strongly held beliefs. These convictions save them time and error, particularly if the world is stable. Surgeons, jugglers and historians make countless decisions, and they rarely have the time or resources to reconsider each underlying factor. This makes them efficient, but can also cause a field to get stuck.

Fortunately, there are innovators. These are individuals with plenty of experience and training who have chosen to be flexible, to repeatedly ask ‘what if’ and ‘why’. When an innovator suggests a counter-intuitive or even nutty concept, it might pay to listen carefully.

For most of us, most of the time, we have the chance to be curious. We don’t have a lot of domain knowledge, but we’re able to ask intelligent questions and to listen carefully to the answers. The hallmark of a curious person with goodwill is that they’re eager to change their minds.

Alas, social media has elevated the foolish. People possessing little in the way of expertise, and generally unwilling to change their assertions or goals.

Where do you sit?

08:49

Stranger Danger [Penny Arcade]

New Comic: Stranger Danger

08:28

05:49

Tobacco-use forever-ban on 15yr-olds, UK [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

The UK is considering a law to forever ban sales of tobacco to anyone born after 2008.

Tobacco is deadly and addictive. I wish everyone would avoid ever using it, and I wish all smokers would quit. I personally urge people to quit. But I oppose prohibition of drugs that people want to use, because it tends to cause great harm to society in other ways.

Pro-Palestinian professor canceled, DEU [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

University of Cologne retracted an offer of a visiting professorship to Nancy Fraser over opinions she stated about the war in Gaza.

I disagree firmly with Professor Fraser's views — legitimization of HAMAS's large terrorist action, and assertion that Israel's very existence is an injustice. But those are tangents to the issue at hand. People have a right to advocate those views, and should bot be blacklisted for them.

Pro-Palestinian valedictorian canceled [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

*USC draws backlash for canceling valedictorian’s speech due to support for Palestine.*

Whether she was actually going to talk about that in her canceled speech is unknown, but supposing she was, "support for Palestine" is a rather broad category. There are many different views that qualify, and most of them are not threatening anyone.

The concern for "security" that the university claimed was a bogus excuse — in effect, "We are gagging you for your own safety."

05:42

Girl Genius for Friday, April 19, 2024 [Girl Genius]

The Girl Genius comic for Friday, April 19, 2024 has been posted.

03:21

Link [Scripting News]

I did the blogroll stuff because I needed a minimal feed reader that could run from the right sidebar of any app.

03:14

Happy Birthday, Krissy [Whatever]

She’s fabulous and I just think she’s neat. And it’s also her birthday! If you are so inclined, wish her a happy one.

— JS

02:35

Link [Scripting News]

I just spent a few minutes with meta.ai, Facebook's answer to ChatGPT, and it's really good. The drawing functionality recalcs while you're entering the prompt, so if you type, "vary gender, age and race," and as you type each word, the image changes.

Link [Scripting News]

In the past, when I have tried to make other people's products better, it often doesn't go very well. The archive of this blog is filled with great examples. Yet I, as they say, persist. 😄

02:21

00:14

Ticket Alert: Future, Jon Batiste, and More Seattle Events Going On Sale This Week [The Stranger]

Plus, More Event News and Updates for April 18 by EverOut Staff

Rap’s auto-tune auteur Future is coming to Seattle with Metro Boomin to support their second collaborative album, We Still Don't Trust You. Fresh off the Coachella mainstage with Lana Del Rey, Jon Batiste has announced a local stop on his Uneasy tour. Plus, corny dad joker Kevin Hart will attempt maturity on his Acting My Age tour. Read on for details on those and other newly announced events, plus some news you can use.

Tickets go on sale at 10 am unless otherwise noted.

ON SALE FRIDAY, APRIL 19

MUSIC

Alejandro Escovedo
The Crocodile (Sat July 27)

The Aristocrats: The Duck Tour 2024
Neumos (Thurs Aug 22)
On sale at noon

Avatar: The Last Airbender in Concert
Moore Theatre (Sat Nov 9)

Thursday, 18 April

23:28

Microsoft shows banner in Settings app to push users from local accounts to Microsoft Accounts [OSnews]

In this week’s Windows 10 Build 19045.4353 announcement blog post, there was this little gem in the changelog.

This update starts the rolls out of account-related notifications for Microsoft accounts in Settings > Home. A Microsoft account connects Windows to your Microsoft apps. The account also backs up all your data and helps you to manage your subscriptions. You can also add extra security steps to keep you from being locked out of your account.

↫ Windows Insider Program Team

It’s worded a bit cryptically, but this means there will be banners in the Windows settings application pushing you to switch from using a local account to using an online Microsoft account. The latter aren’t exactly preferred by quite a few people – many of you belong to that group, I would presume – and Microsoft is doing whatever it can to get people to stop using local accounts.

Luckily, this banner ad is easily removable – if you close it, it won’t come back, and you can disable it by going to Privacy > General and toggling “Show me suggested content in the Settings app”. For now, of course – knowing how Microsoft is treating Windows users these days, these nag-ups will surely increase in both frequency and persistence as time goes on.

You’ve been warned.

22:42

GTK: graphics offload revisited [OSnews]

We first introduced support for dmabufs and graphics offload last fall, and it is included in GTK 4.14. Since then, some improvements have happened, so it is time for an update.

↫ GTK Development Blog

This one’s for the ones smarter than me.

I Joined a Cult at the Oneohtrix Point Never Show [The Stranger]

Like dropping acid—you didn’t know what the trip would bring, but you knew some crazy shit was about to happen. by Brittne Lunniss

Oneohtrix Point Never, the moniker of Daniel Lopatin, may not be a household name, but you’ve likely heard his work. The Massachusetts-raised producer and composer is a longstanding pioneer of the electronic scene. Having created a variety of scores for heavy-hitting Hollywood scripts—including Good Times (2017), Uncut Gems (2019), and The Curse (2024)—Lopatin has climbed into the captain’s chair of his own genre. 

Lopatin credits science fiction, philosophy, and “all the strange moments from Beatles songs” as primary influences. Drawing upon shoegaze, jazz, hip-hop, and more, OPN offers a spiritual (and at times unsettling) experience. You won’t hear Lopatin’s voice too often and you may not even see his face, but you will certainly fall entranced by his cybernetic reality.

Oneohtrix performing at Neptune Theatre Wednesday, April 17. BRITTNE LUNNISS

In a sold-out Neptune Theatre on Wednesday night, Oneohtrix (pronounced one-oh-tricks) guided concert-goers through a cinematic, almost cult-like experience. He began his set with a single green light and the crowd shushed while Lopatin’s futuristic Alexa-esque device flashed to robotic tones. The quiet room erupted in cheers when OPN entered the stage through a barrage of fog, but applause was rare throughout the set (perhaps due to the fact that Lopatin’s songs didn’t actually have distinct beginnings or ends). The night was a cumulative experience—a sound bath, if you will.

Oneohtrix performing at Neptune Theatre Wednesday, April 17. BRITTNE LUNNISS

I had never been to a concert in which so many people had their eyes closed, but it made sense for OPN. Lopatin’s twists, turns, and eerily turbulent melodies created a group sensory hallucination. Had I partaken in certain chemical substances before the set, I probably would have had a scary time! Strobe lights complemented the digital chaos of unconnected animations on a screen behind him. The display was far from peaceful, rendering a visual assault of abstract shapes, disconnected body parts, and vintage cartoons. OPN’s optical offerings contributed a sort of “What the fuck is that?” vibe to the evening. Like dropping acid—you didn’t know what the trip would bring, but you knew some crazy shit was about to happen. 

Oneohtrix performing at Neptune Theatre Wednesday, April 17. BRITTNE LUNNISS

Oneohtrix Point Never is a verbal play on the name of a Boston FM radio station Lopatin grew up listening to (Magic 106.7) and it's a playful jab at the exploitative nature of mainstream tunes. Oneohtrix is communicating his solo project will never be played on—or traditionally associated with—contemporary radio stations. The awkwardness and confusion behind this sobriquet only contribute to his uncomfortable yet curious stage persona. 

Lopatin saved the majority of his dialogue for the end of the show, expressing gratitude for fans and giddily mentioning the Coachella set he played several days prior. Hearing OPN’s speaking voice was like a curtain falling to reveal the Wizard of Oz. While OPN has been publicly creating soundscapes since 2010—he released his tenth and latest LP Again in September 2023—he is also a massively talented producer who has worked with artists such as Iggy Pop, Charli XCX, FKA Twigs, MGMT, and the Weeknd. His particular influence has crept its way into pop culture. 

Arushi Jain performing at Neptune Theatre Wednesday, April 17. BRITTNE LUNNISS

Opening performer Arushi Jain set a whimsical intention for the evening. Worldly, abstract, and experimental, her music merged modular synthesis with Hindustani classical. Jain seeks to communicate yearning through rāga, a framework for improvisation in Indian classical music. Each rāga consists of melodic structures, seeking to “color the mind” through audience engagement. This concept has virtually no equivalent in Western classical music and as such, Jain’s technique drenched the crowd in a uniquely melodic-electro texture. Balancing centuries-old traditions and modular synth, Jain’s set explored the nature of longing through a wonderfully revolutionary lens.   

Arushi Jain performing at Neptune Theatre Wednesday, April 17. BRITTNE LUNNISS

The evening was visceral and proved a bit much for some, but that was entirely what Oneohtrix Point Never intended. I encountered concert-goers lying on benches in the hallway; others left early. If you went to the show without prior knowledge of OPN’s production, the shock value is understandable. Oneohtrix’s exploration of sound felt human—sonic sculptures grasped concert-goers by the neck, and encouraged them to establish new reality through an illogical flow of media. I left OPN’s show feeling a deeper connection to music through technology, nostalgia, and unease. I also left wondering: Did I just join a cult? 

Arushi Jain performing at Neptune Theatre Wednesday, April 17. BRITTNE LUNNISS

21:07

Google is combining its Android and hardware teams – and it’s all about “AI” [OSnews]

AI is taking over at Google, and the company is changing in big ways to try to make it happen even faster. Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced substantial internal reorganizations on Thursday, including the creation of a new team called “Platforms and Devices” that will oversee all of Google’s Pixel products, all of Android, Chrome, ChromeOS, Photos, and more. The team will be run by Rick Osterloh, who was previously the SVP of devices and services, overseeing all of Google’s hardware efforts. Hiroshi Lockheimer, the longtime head of Android, Chrome, and ChromeOS, will be taking on other projects inside of Google and Alphabet.

↫ David Pierce at The Verge

I don’t know what to make of this. More often than not, these kinds of reorganisations have little impact on us as mere users, but at the same time, the hype around “AI” has grown to such batshit insane proportions that this reorganisation will only lead to even more “AI” nonsense being crammed into every single Google product, whether they benefit from it or not. My nightmare scenario is Android becoming so infested with this stuff that the operating system is going to grow into Clippy in my pocket, suggesting and doing things I have zero interest in, taking control away from me as a user and handing it over to some nebulous set of algorithms optimised for some mythical smartphone user I don’t look like at all.

Using technologies currently labelled as “AI” to make translations better, improve accessibility features, stabilise video recording, that sort of stuff – totally fine, and I’m pretty sure most of us have been using “AI” in that form for many, many years now. What these companies are trying to do now, though, is turn “AI” from a technology into a feature, and I’m just not interested in any of that. It’s just not trustworthy, reliable, or usable enough, and I have my doubts it’ll ever get there with the current technological threads we’re unraveling.

I wish we had a third player in the smartphone market.

18:49

Jonathan McDowell: Sorting out backup internet #2: 5G modem [Planet Debian]

Having setup recursive DNS it was time to actually sort out a backup internet connection. I live in a Virgin Media area, but I still haven’t forgiven them for my terrible Virgin experiences when moving here. Plus it involves a bigger contractual commitment. There are no altnets locally (though I’m watching youfibre who have already rolled out in a few Belfast exchanges), so I decided to go for a 5G modem. That gives some flexibility, and is a bit easier to get up and running.

I started by purchasing a ZTE MC7010. This had the advantage of being reasonably cheap off eBay, not having any wifi functionality I would just have to disable (it’s going to plug it into the same router the FTTP connection terminates on), being outdoor mountable should I decide to go that way, and, finally, being powered via PoE.

For now this device sits on the window sill in my study, which is at the top of the house. I printed a table stand for it which mostly does the job (though not as well with a normal, rather than flat, network cable). The router lives downstairs, so I’ve extended a dedicated VLAN through the study switch, down to the core switch and out to the router. The PoE study switch can only do GigE, not 2.5Gb/s, but at present that’s far from the limiting factor on the speed of the connection.

The device is 3 branded, and, as it happens, I’ve ended up with a 3 SIM in it. Up until recently my personal phone was with them, but they’ve kicked me off Go Roam, so I’ve moved. Going with 3 for the backup connection provides some slight extra measure of resiliency; we now have devices on all 4 major UK networks in the house. The SIM is a preloaded data only SIM good for a year; I don’t expect to use all of the data allowance, but I didn’t want to have to worry about unexpected excess charges.

Performance turns out to be disappointing; I end up locking the device to 4G as the 5G signal is marginal - leaving it enabled results in constantly switching between 4G + 5G and a significant extra latency. The smokeping graph below shows a brief period where I removed the 4G lock and allowed 5G:

Smokeping 4G vs 5G graph

(There’s a handy zte.js script to allow doing this from the device web interface.)

I get about 10Mb/s sustained downloads out of it. EE/Vodafone did not lead to significantly better results, so for now I’m accepting it is what it is. I tried relocating the device to another part of the house (a little tricky while still providing switch-based PoE, but I have an injector), without much improvement. Equally pinning the 4G to certain bands provided a short term improvement (I got up to 40-50Mb/s sustained), but not reliably so.

speedtest.net results

This is disappointing, but if it turns out to be a problem I can look at mounting it externally. I also assume as 5G is gradually rolled out further things will naturally improve, but that might be wishful thinking on my part.

Rather than wait until my main link had a problem I decided to try a day working over the 5G connection. I spend a lot of my time either in browser based apps or accessing remote systems via SSH, so I’m reasonably sensitive to a jittery or otherwise flaky connection. I picked a day that I did not have any meetings planned, but as it happened I ended up with an adhoc video call arranged. I’m pleased to say that it all worked just fine; definitely noticeable as slower than the FTTP connection (to be expected), but all workable and even the video call was fine (at least from my end). Looking at the traffic graph shows the expected ~ 10Mb/s peak (actually a little higher, and looking at the FTTP stats for previous days not out of keeping with what we see there), and you can just about see the ~ 3Mb/s symmetric use by the video call at 2pm:

4G traffic during the work day

The test run also helped iron out the fact that the content filter was still enabled on the SIM, but that was easily resolved.

Up next, vaguely automatic failover.

The Anti-Jim Carrey [The Stranger]

Logan Guntzelman performs at Here-After Friday, April 19. by Dave Segal

Stylistically, LA stand-up comedian/writer Logan Guntzelman is the anti-Jim Carrey, the polar opposite of Robin Williams. She doesn't manically gesticulate, doesn't contort her face, and she eschews impressions. Rather, she delivers jokes—sometimes quite dirty jokes—in a deep-voiced deadpan and with a poker face, succeeding on the sheer strength of her words and setups.

Guntzelman's lack of effect compounds the hilarity of what she's imparting in an act that's heavy on self-deprecation and worst-case scenarios (for her, mostly). It should be noted that in the venerable history of diarrhea jokes, Guntzelman has told the most solid one I've ever heard—and I've heard a lot. (Speaking of which, you can follow Logan on Instagram @placesitookashitthisyear.)

Both of Guntzelman's parents wrote for the sitcom cult classic WKRP in Cincinnati, so she is perhaps genetically predisposed to humorous ideation. The funny thing is, though, that fact initially prompted her to rebel at the idea of a comedy career (more on that in the interview below). But the lure of agonizing open mics and drunken hecklers was too strong, and here she is, slaying audiences nationwide without raising her voice or breaking a sweat. Her credits include production work on The Closer and The Colbert Report, and she's written and acted on SyFy Channel's The Movie Show. Guntzelman graciously answered some questions about her life and craft via email ahead of her April 19 performance at Here-After. 

The Stranger: What is the most important catalyst for your humor?

Logan Guntzelman: I'd say it's a 60/40 split between embarrassing personal experiences and stupid stuff I see on TV and/or the internet.
 
Your delivery is very deadpan. I have great respect for deadpan comedians, because the lack of inflection places a heavier burden on the actual material—which is why Steven Wright is one of my favorites. Is this how you always talk, or is it a strategy to enhance your act?

Honestly, I didn't know I was deadpan for a very long time. I thought I was performing like most stand-ups, using inflection and changing my tone of voice, but I kept getting compliments on my "deadpan" style of delivery. At first I was frustrated because it wasn't on purpose; I'm just kind of a monotone woman. But the longer I've done stand-up, the more I've come to appreciate it.
 
Given that both of your parents worked in television comedy, did you feel pressure to enter the "family business"?

I actually felt self-imposed pressure to go in the opposite direction, because I wanted to prove that I could excel in a different field. I "rebelled" by trying really hard in school, and I planned on becoming a doctor up until my junior year of college. That year, I applied to be an intern on The Colbert Report, just because I liked the show and I thought it would be fun. After that internship I realized that, despite my best efforts, I did want to work in entertainment. Even though stand-up is "family business"-adjacent, my parents have always thought that comedians were insane people, so they are both confused by and supportive of my career choice.

What topics will you never address in your act, and why? Or are taboo subjects for the spineless?

I rarely talk about current events or politics, but not because I think they are taboo—I'm just dumb. I'm impressed by stand-ups that can craft good jokes about the news, but that's not how my brain works. I don't think any subject is taboo, as long as the joke is really incredible. Most comedians who get in trouble for their problematic jokes aren't in trouble because they made a joke; they're in trouble because the joke they made isn't funny, so audiences are only focusing on the offensive parts of what they've heard. People will forgive a lot if it's a truly excellent bit.

What's a richer source of humor—mundanity or profundity?

I think both are really important. Jokes about the mundane aspects of life are more relatable for audiences, because they've probably experienced those same things; after all, they're mundane for a reason. Profundity often means a joke about an experience that's unique to the comedian, or a point of view that's different from the mainstream. Audiences may not have lived a similar life to the comedian they're watching, but they're able to see the humor in something outside of their experience. This is an incredibly dorky thing to say, but this is why comedy is cool; mundanity reminds audiences that people are a lot more alike than they are different, and profundity reminds audiences that even if we are different, we can still connect to one another.
 
What's your take on bodily function jokes? Lowest form of humor or universal bonding agent? Both? Are there fresh angles to be explored with them or should we flush them down the toilet forever?

I'm all for bodily function jokes, but I do try to tell them in the least gross way possible. I think bodily function jokes are a way for people to bond, but if the description of the bodily function gets too graphic, then you're alienating the audience and they are just sitting in judgment of you. Okay, this might be just my experience. 
 
What are your professional ambitions for the near and distant future?

I just want to keep performing all over the place. The only way to get better at stand-up is to do it a lot, and I really want to get as good as I possibly can.

Which comedian has been the most inspirational and influential for you, and why?

I know he's huge now, but I've always loved Nate Bargatze because he is also a deadpan, lower-energy comedian. I love a bunch of comedians who are very different from me, but I'm always impressed by how fricken good they are: Kyle Kinane, Liza Treyger, Chris Estrada, Dave Waite, Chris Fairbanks, and honestly, Katt Williams's special, The Pimp Chronicles Pt. 1, is one of my favorite specials of all time.

See Logan Guntzelman with Genevieve Ferrari and Zahnae Aquino at Here-After Friday, April 19, 7 pm, $20, 21+.

18:00

17:14

Thomas Koch: Minimal overhead VMs with Nix and MicroVM [Planet Debian]

Posted on March 17, 2024
Tags: debian, free software, nix

Joachim Breitner wrote about a Convenient sandboxed development environment and thus reminded me to blog about MicroVM. I’ve toyed around with it a little but not yet seriously used it as I’m currently not coding.

MicroVM is a nix based project to configure and run minimal VMs. It can mount and thus reuse the hosts nix store inside the VM and thus has a very small disk footprint. I use MicroVM on a debian system using the nix package manager.

The MicroVM author uses the project to host production services. Otherwise I consider it also a nice way to learn about NixOS after having started with the nix package manager and before making the big step to NixOS as my main system.

The guests root filesystem is a tmpdir, so one must explicitly define folders that should be mounted from the host and thus be persistent across VM reboots.

I defined the VM as a nix flake since this is how I started from the MicroVM projects example:

{
  description = "Haskell dev MicroVM";

  inputs.impermanence.url = "github:nix-community/impermanence";
  inputs.microvm.url = "github:astro/microvm.nix";
  inputs.microvm.inputs.nixpkgs.follows = "nixpkgs";

  outputs = { self, impermanence, microvm, nixpkgs }:
    let
      persistencePath = "/persistent";
      system = "x86_64-linux";
      user = "thk";
      vmname = "haskell";
      nixosConfiguration = nixpkgs.lib.nixosSystem {
          inherit system;
          modules = [
            microvm.nixosModules.microvm
            impermanence.nixosModules.impermanence
            ({pkgs, ... }: {

            environment.persistence.${persistencePath} = {
                hideMounts = true;
                users.${user} = {
                  directories = [
                    "git" ".stack"
                  ];
                };
              };
              environment.sessionVariables = {
                TERM = "screen-256color";
              };
              environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
                ghc
                git
                (haskell-language-server.override { supportedGhcVersions = [ "94" ]; })
                htop
                stack
                tmux
                tree
                vcsh
                zsh
              ];
              fileSystems.${persistencePath}.neededForBoot = nixpkgs.lib.mkForce true;
              microvm = {
                forwardPorts = [
                  { from = "host"; host.port = 2222; guest.port = 22; }
                  { from = "guest"; host.port = 5432; guest.port = 5432; } # postgresql
                ];
                hypervisor = "qemu";
                interfaces = [
                  { type = "user"; id = "usernet"; mac = "00:00:00:00:00:02"; }
                ];
                mem = 4096;
                shares = [ {
                  # use "virtiofs" for MicroVMs that are started by systemd
                  proto = "9p";
                  tag = "ro-store";
                  # a host's /nix/store will be picked up so that no
                  # squashfs/erofs will be built for it.
                  source = "/nix/store";
                  mountPoint = "/nix/.ro-store";
                } {
                  proto = "virtiofs";
                  tag = "persistent";
                  source = "~/.local/share/microvm/vms/${vmname}/persistent";
                  mountPoint = persistencePath;
                  socket = "/run/user/1000/microvm-${vmname}-persistent";
                }
                ];
                socket = "/run/user/1000/microvm-control.socket";
                vcpu = 3;
                volumes = [];
                writableStoreOverlay = "/nix/.rwstore";
              };
              networking.hostName = vmname;
              nix.enable = true;
              nix.nixPath = ["nixpkgs=${builtins.storePath <nixpkgs>}"];
              nix.settings = {
                extra-experimental-features = ["nix-command" "flakes"];
                trusted-users = [user];
              };
              security.sudo = {
                enable = true;
                wheelNeedsPassword = false;
              };
              services.getty.autologinUser = user;
              services.openssh = {
                enable = true;
              };
              system.stateVersion = "24.11";
              systemd.services.loadnixdb = {
                description = "import hosts nix database";
                path = [pkgs.nix];
                wantedBy = ["multi-user.target"];
                requires = ["nix-daemon.service"];
                script = "cat ${persistencePath}/nix-store-db-dump|nix-store --load-db";
              };
              time.timeZone = nixpkgs.lib.mkDefault "Europe/Berlin";
              users.users.${user} = {
                extraGroups = [ "wheel" "video" ];
                group = "user";
                isNormalUser = true;
                openssh.authorizedKeys.keys = [
                  "ssh-rsa REDACTED"
                ];
                password = "";
              };
              users.users.root.password = "";
              users.groups.user = {};
            })
          ];
        };

    in {
      packages.${system}.default = nixosConfiguration.config.microvm.declaredRunner;
    };
}

I start the microVM with a templated systemd user service:

[Unit]
Description=MicroVM for Haskell development
Requires=microvm-virtiofsd-persistent@.service
After=microvm-virtiofsd-persistent@.service
AssertFileNotEmpty=%h/.local/share/microvm/vms/%i/flake/flake.nix

[Service]
Type=forking
ExecStartPre=/usr/bin/sh -c "[ /nix/var/nix/db/db.sqlite -ot %h/.local/share/microvm/nix-store-db-dump ] || nix-store --dump-db >%h/.local/share/microvm/nix-store-db-dump"
ExecStartPre=ln -f -t %h/.local/share/microvm/vms/%i/persistent/ %h/.local/share/microvm/nix-store-db-dump
ExecStartPre=-%h/.local/state/nix/profile/bin/tmux new -s microvm -d
ExecStart=%h/.local/state/nix/profile/bin/tmux new-window -t microvm: -n "%i" "exec %h/.local/state/nix/profile/bin/nix run --impure %h/.local/share/microvm/vms/%i/flake"

The above service definition creates a dump of the hosts nix store db so that it can be imported in the guest. This is necessary so that the guest can actually use what is available in /nix/store. There is an effort for an overlayed nix store that would be preferable to this hack.

Finally the microvm is started inside a tmux session named “microvm”. This way I can use the VM with SSH or through the console and also access the qemu console.

And for completeness the virtiofsd service:

[Unit]
Description=serve host persistent folder for dev VM
AssertPathIsDirectory=%h/.local/share/microvm/vms/%i/persistent

[Service]
ExecStart=%h/.local/state/nix/profile/bin/virtiofsd \
 --socket-path=${XDG_RUNTIME_DIR}/microvm-%i-persistent \
 --shared-dir=%h/.local/share/microvm/vms/%i/persistent \
 --gid-map :995:%G:1: \
 --uid-map :1000:%U:1:

Thomas Koch: Rebuild search with trust [Planet Debian]

Posted on January 20, 2024
Tags: debian, free software, life, search, decentralization

Finally there is a thing people can agree on:

Apparently, Google Search is not good anymore. And I’m not the only one thinking about decentralization to fix it:

Honey I federated the search engine - finding stuff online post-big tech - a lightning talk at the recent chaos communication congress

The speaker however did not mention, that there have already been many attempts at building distributed search engines. So why do I think that such an attempt could finally succeed?

  • More people are searching for alternatives to Google.
  • Mainstream hard discs are incredibly big.
  • Mainstream internet connection is incredibly fast.
  • Google is bleeding talent.
  • Most of the building blocks are available as free software.
  • “Success” depends on your definition…

My definition of success is:

A mildly technical computer user (able to install software) has access to a search engine that provides them with superior search results compared to Google for at least a few predefined areas of interest.

The exact algorithm used by Google Search to rank websites is a secret even to most Googlers. Still it is clear, that it relies heavily on big data: billions of queries, a comprehensive web index and user behaviour data. - All this is not available to us.

A distributed search engine however can instead rely on user input. Every admin of one node seeds the node ranking with their personal selection of trusted sites. They connect their node with nodes of people they trust. This results in a web of (transitive) trust much like pgp.

For comparison, imagine you are searching for something in a world without computers: You ask the people around you. They probably forward your question to their peers.

I already had a look at YaCy. It is active, somewhat usable and has a friendly maintainer. Unfortunately I consider the codebase to show its age. It takes a lot of time for a newcomer to find their way around and it contains a lot of cruft. Nevertheless, YaCy is a good example that a decentralized search software can be done even by a small team or just one person.

I myself started working on a software in Haskell and keep my notes here: Populus:DezInV. Since I’m learning Haskell along the way, there is nothing there to see yet. Additionally I took a yak shaving break to learn nix.

By the way: DuckDuckGo is not the alternative. And while I would encourage you to also try Yandex for a second opinion, I don’t consider this a solution.

Thomas Koch: Using nix package manager in Debian [Planet Debian]

Posted on January 16, 2024
Tags: debian, free software, nix, life

The nix package manager is available in Debian since May 2020. Why would one use it in Debian?

  • learn about nix
  • install software that might not be available in Debian
  • install software without root access
  • declare software necessary for a user’s environment inside $HOME/.config

Especially the last point nagged me every time I set up a new Debian installation. My emacs configuration and my Desktop setup expects certain software to be installed.

Please be aware that I’m a beginner with nix and that my config might not follow best practice. Additionally many nix users are already using the new flakes feature of nix that I’m still learning about.

So I’ve got this file at .config/nixpkgs/config.nix1:

with (import <nixpkgs> {});
{
  packageOverrides = pkgs: with pkgs; {
    thk-emacsWithPackages = (pkgs.emacsPackagesFor emacs-gtk).emacsWithPackages (
      epkgs:
      (with epkgs.elpaPackages; [
        ace-window
        company
        org
        use-package
      ]) ++ (with epkgs.melpaPackages; [
        editorconfig
        flycheck
        haskell-mode
        magit
        nix-mode
        paredit
        rainbow-delimiters
        treemacs
        visual-fill-column
        yasnippet-snippets
      ]) ++ [    # From main packages set
      ]
    );

    userPackages = buildEnv {
      extraOutputsToInstall = [ "doc" "info" "man" ];
      name = "user-packages";
      paths = [
        ghc
        git
        (pkgs.haskell-language-server.override { supportedGhcVersions = [ "94" ]; })
        nix
        stack
        thk-emacsWithPackages
        tmux
        vcsh
        virtiofsd
      ];
    };
  };
}

Every time I change the file or want to receive updates, I do:

nix-env --install --attr nixpkgs.userPackages --remove-all

You can see that I install nix with nix. This gives me a newer version than the one available in Debian stable. However, the nix-daemon still runs as the older binary from Debian. My dirty hack is to put this override in /etc/systemd/system/nix-daemon.service.d/override.conf:

[Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=@/home/thk/.local/state/nix/profile/bin/nix-daemon nix-daemon --daemon

I’m not too interested in a cleaner way since I hope to fully migrate to Nix anyways.

  1. Note the nixpkgs in the path. This is not a config file for nix the package manager but for the nix package collection. See the nixpkgs manual.↩︎

Thomas Koch: Chromium gtk-filechooser preview size [Planet Debian]

Posted on January 9, 2024
Tags: debian, free software, life

I wanted to report this issue in chromiums issue tracker, but it gave me:

“Something went wrong, please try again later.”

Ok, then at least let me reply to this askubuntu question. But my attempt to signup with my launchpad account gave me:

“Launchpad Login Failed. Please try logging in again.”

I refrain from commenting on this to not violate some code of conduct.

So this is what I wanted to write:

GTK file chooser image preview size should be configurable

The file chooser that appears when uploading a file (e.g. an image to Google Fotos) learned to show a preview in issue 15500.

The preview image size is hard coded to 256x512 in kPreviewWidth and kPreviewHeight in ui/gtk/select_file_dialog_linux_gtk.cc.

Please make the size configurable.

On high DPI screens the images are too small to be of much use.

Yes, I should not use chromium anymore.

Thomas Koch: Good things come ... state folder [Planet Debian]

Posted on January 2, 2024
Tags: debian, free software, life

Just a little while ago (10 years) I proposed the addition of a state folder to the XDG basedir specification and expanded the article XDGBaseDirectorySpecification in the Debian wiki. Recently I learned, that version 0.8 (from May 2021) of the spec finally includes a state folder.

Granted, I wasn’t the first to have this idea (2009), nor the one who actually made it happen.

Now, please go ahead and use it! Thank you.

Slog AM: City Council Keeps "Red Tape" for Affordable Housing Construction, Google Fires 28 Protesting Workers, and 'No on I-2117' Campaign Launches [The Stranger]

The Stranger's morning news roundup. by Hannah Krieg

Weather: Who’s trying to have a frozen margarita on a rooftop tonight? WHO? Okay, maybe not frozen, but with the sun in full view and temperatures in the low 60s, I think outdoor drinking weather is truly upon us. Maybe Friday we can spring for the blended drinks since temperatures will be in the mid 60s. Check an actual weather website because this shit is subject to change as I’ve learned from spreading weather misinfo in Slog AM in the past. 

Around town: Of course, there’s other things to do around Seattle that do not involve a $16 alcoholic beverage in the sun. Check out EverOut for the best recommendations for how to fill your free time. Tonight you could go see indie rock band Sheer Mag at Vera Project or 4/20's Eve Eve Comedy Show at the Crocodile. 

Eruption in Indonesia: Indonesian officials have ordered more than 11,000 people living within six kilometers of Mount Ruang to evacuate as the volcano erupts. 

Video shows a spectacular lightning storm during an eruption on Indonesia’s Mount Ruang volcano. Hundreds of people have been evacuated from the area. pic.twitter.com/2oxRAHn8Ia

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) April 18, 2024

SPD: Wednesday afternoon, Seattle police officers shot and killed someone while trying to make an arrest at a hotel in Tukwila. In an obvious attempt at gaining public sympathy to justify the killing, the Seattle Police Department would only say that their investigation involved the "Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force," and that their target "produced a fire arm" and was killed "after a struggle," the Seattle Times reports. The TV news only cared about the story because a bullet grazed a cop. 

Classic CONSERVATIVE City Council: Yesterday, the Land Use Committee rejected Chair Tammy Morales's Connected Communities pilot program, which would loosen zoning restrictions for affordable housing in the midst of a housing crisis. Her committee colleagues Council Members Cathy Moore, Maritza Rivera, and Tanya Woo voted no, and Dan Strauss abstained. 

I'm really disappointed. Seattle can't waste any more time failing to provide affordable housing. We were elected to take action. This is not a controversial bill. Cutting red tape to let organizations like Habitat for Humanity build more homes is not controversial. https://t.co/sF06qKhyuH pic.twitter.com/FZqXhz0IJu

— Councilmember Tammy J. Morales (@CMTammyMorales) April 17, 2024

Not over: Personally, this vote really pissed me off. The "gentle density" conservatives grew smart enough not to outright oppose density and appropriated the language of social justice to help them accomplish their exclusionary goals. Instead of saying they hate density because they want to keep their neighborhoods wealthy and white, they say they oppose density for fear of displacement. Yesterday, Moore, Rivera, Woo, and Strauss showed their asses by opposing a bill designed to promote density and affordability specifically for communities at high risk of displacement, including "refugees, immigrants, communities of color, LGBTQ+ communities and people experiencing homelessness or at risk of economic displacement," which would mitigate the very apprehension they pretend to have. On paper, they should all be bending over backwards to co-sponsor this legislation, but alas. I linked their contact info because the bill will still go to full council April 30, so there’s still time to convince them.

Conservative whine whine whine abt density under the guise of displacement concerns + then when a progressive finds a way to do density that specifically helps marginalized ppl their true, exclusionary colors show. They care more abt trees + parking + suburban vibes than people https://t.co/N1H3wWYKQ1

— Hannah Krieg (@hannahkrieg) April 17, 2024

Round and round: Okay, remember how earlier this month Israel killed some Iranian officials at a consulate in Syria? And then Iran did a lil retaliation? That really could be the end of their dick measuring contest tbh, but, according to the AP, Iran’s president vows to launch a “massive” attack should Israel strike back even the “tiniest” amount. 

Foreign aid: The AP wrote that President Joe Biden announced his strong support yesterday of Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson’s proposal to send $61 billion in aid to Ukraine, $26 billion to Israel, and $8 billion to Taiwan. For scale, that one-time aid package, a drop in the bucket for the US's continued support specifically to Ukraine and Israel, could forgive more than 40% of medical debt for Americans. Just saying!

Fuck Google: Last night, Google fired 28 workers who protested the company’s $1.2 billion contract with the Israeli government. In an internal memo, Google’s head of global security wrote “If you’re one of the few [employees] who are tempted to think we’re going to overlook conduct that violates our policies, think again.” The group leading the protests at Google, “No Tech for Apartheid,” said that the firings were clearly retaliatory, and I agree! Like, no shit. 

Asylum update: A few weeks ago, I wrote about the failure of the City, County, and State to get a group of migrants into longer-term housing so they can get their work permits and start making their own rent money. Just as Seattle seemed prepared to sweep them from the tennis courts where they established a makeshift camp, some donors swooped in and paid for some hotel rooms. When that money dried up, the Low Income Housing Institute helped extend the stays. Yesterday, King County awarded $2 million to nonprofits to help the asylum seekers. The Seattle Times has more information.

NO on 2117: According to Northwest Progressive Institute, the growing campaign to stop I-2117, which would repeal the Climate Commitment Act, unveiled a new website and campaign video yesterday. If you’re unsure whether ultra-wealthy farmer cosplayer Brian Heywood and that Star-of-David-mocking State GOP Chair Jim Walsh repealing a critical tax on major polluters is in your best interest, then take a look at the campaign's introductory video. I trust most Slog readers already hate these fuckers and their slew of bad ballot measures, so maybe send it to mom or something:

Big money: Not only did the No on 2117 campaign drop a new site and video, they also flexed some high profile donors. Bill Gates and Tableau Co-founder Chris Stolte each donated $1 million. Though it doesn’t show up on their campaign finance filings just yet, No on 2117 claims big-time polluter Amazon also threw in a good chunk of change. As the Washington Observer wrote on substack, “The company’s involvement here is especially notable because it spent millions to defeat a similar carbon-pricing scheme on the ballot just six years ago.” Growth.

Day three: Former President Donald Trump will be back in court today for a third day of juror selection in his hush-money case. The jury pool is under intense scrutiny because, like, how do you live in New York City and not have a major bias for or against Trump?? The court picked seven jurors so far—an information technology worker, an English teacher, an oncology nurse, a sales professional, a software engineer and two lawyers, but the case still needs five more people. Maybe they should just bring in the Stranger Election Control Board? We'll do it.

Tonight: I don’t like to inundate Slog readers with Ms. Swift, but her new album Tortured Poets Department drops at midnight (9 pm for us on the West Coast!!) and also this song felt like it applies to my life rn lol.

16:49

[$] Gentoo bans AI-created contributions [LWN.net]

Gentoo Council member Michał Górny posted an RFC to the gentoo-dev mailing list in late February about banning "'AI'-backed (LLM/GPT/whatever) contributions" to the Gentoo Linux project. Górny wrote that the spread of the "AI bubble" indicated a need for Gentoo to formally take a stand on AI tools. After a lengthy discussion, the Gentoo Council voted unanimously this week to adopt his proposal and ban contributions generated with AI/ML tools.

16:42

The Big Idea: A.D. Sui [Whatever]

Author A.D. Sui knows about the day-to-day experience of navigating the world with a disability, and in The Dragonfly Gambit, she brings some of that experience in to the life of her characters. In this Big Idea, she explains why this was important to her, and what it brings to her characters to give them life (and spite).

A.D. SUI:

Disclaimer: in this post I’ll be focusing on depictions of physical disability as that’s something I have personal experience with. Your (or others’) experience with disability, whether it’s physical, sensory, or otherwise may vary, but I hope this post can still be a jumping point for discussion around disability portrayal in speculative spaces. 

#

Imagining yourself as the protagonist of a sweeping epic is a universal experience. I’ve done it. You’ve done it. We’ve all closed our eyes at some point whether when were eight or twenty-eight and imagined what it would be like to save the day. Past heroes in Science Fiction & Fantasy spaces tended to come in a standard male able-bodied muscular configuration which left most of us out of this ubiquitous experience. What’s worse, these depictions could convince us that disabled folks were simply not meant to be the heroes of a story. 

Modern SFF offers a broader variety of protagonists for us readers to imprint upon, especially disabled protagonists and heroes. However, when writing our own disabled characters who save the day, we may, unintentionally, shield them from their own disability. We can do this through 1) special powers or magic that the disabled protagonist wields which allow them to forgo the typical physicality expected of protagonists and heroes (e.g., magic can be used in combat from a distance) 2) placing them in a disability-normative world (e.g., disability is socially positioned as normal variation rather than a deficit) or 3) by situating them in environments where their disability plays a less limiting role (e.g., a non-ambulatory character in zero G).

Across the board, these protagonists are still capable, optimistic, and attractive (as many real-world disabled people are). While there is nothing wrong with using these narrative techniques. Often disabled authors want to create a world where they don’t need to deal with ableism and other discrimination. But these narrative approaches may also provide a “way out”; a means for authors to star a disabled protagonist without having to write about the messy nature of disability and the messiness of disabled bodies. 

In The Dragonfly Gambit, I aim to create circumstances that yield well to discussions of class, gender, ethnicity, and how those intersect with disability. For example, and without too many spoilers, I illustrate how two characters with vastly different social status are treated following their injuries. I can also discuss how the visibility of a disability impacts the perception of a character’s attractiveness and their social capital, and how these concepts intersect with traditional feminine ideals. 

For Nez, my protagonist, I make a world that is harsh and that provides few opportunities to exert her agency. I leave nowhere for her to hide, give her limited tools to make her mark on the world and leave her to her own devices. As a disabled kid growing up in post-Soviet Ukraine, that was my own starting point. I know it well.

By leaning into the negative perceptions and hurdles in Nez’s way (and her personal dissatisfaction with her disabled body) I am able to discuss how agency can still be exercised even if it means leveraging the negative perceptions of others. In a sense Nez is neither an active nor a passive protagonist, but rather a constrained one, having to navigate a world that does not and will not accommodate her. It also allowed me to develop Nez into a character with whom I felt at home. She’s tired, and angry, and refuses to forgive.

In the real world, where we often stereotype disabled folks as kind, inspirational, and nearly-superhuman (consult any Paralympic advertisement), it felt refreshing to draw up a character with some relatable pettiness and grit. Some of my favourite depictions of disability in popular media are the Elric brothers from Full Metal Alchemist, Camina Drummer’s brief injury/disability arc in The Expanse Amazon series, and Toph from Avatar: The Last Airbender. All of these examples don’t shy away from the anger, confusion, and dissatisfaction that often comes with disability without portraying their characters as “weak”.  With the case of the Elric brothers and Toph, special “powers” (and I use “powers” broadly to encompass alchemy and Earthbending, respectively) do not fix the disability and do not spare the characters from the physicality that’s required of them.  

Disability experiences are just as unique as the people having them. Hence, I do not expect that the framing of disability in “The Dragonfly Gambit” will resonate with every reader. But by leaning into disability, instead of softening the experience, we, as authors, have an opportunity to hold space for the complex and often unpleasant emotions that disability can unearth. By doing so, we have the chance to write disability experiences that will resonate with real-world disabled readers. By creating protagonists who are angry and unsatisfied, we can also validate these feelings in our readership. 

Finally, a disabled protagonist who isn’t supported by magic or their environment and who succeeds despite of it (or in spite, as spite is a favourite motivator of mine) may become a stronger symbol of hope to the real-world disabled readers than a character with special powers. It stokes the idea that we are strong enough to do the hard things with just ourselves and our bodies, no matter how messy or frustrating these bodies can be. Change will be won over through effort and not an incantation. Unfair worlds will be made fair and not simply become so out of thin air. 

There is no magic in the real world, but luckily, us disabled folks don’t need it. 

——

The Dragonfly Gambit: Amazon|Bakka Phoenix

Author socials: Web site|Bluesky|Instagram|Twitter

16:07

[$] Warning about WARN_ON() [LWN.net]

Kernel developers, like conscientious developers for many projects, will often include checks in the code for conditions that are never expected to occur, but which would indicate a serious problem should that expectation turn out to be incorrect. For years, developers have been encouraged (to put it politely) to avoid using assertions that crash the machine for such conditions unless there is truly no alternative. Increasingly, though, use of the kernel's WARN_ON() family of macros, which developers were told to use instead, is also being discouraged.

15:42

Adding state to the update notification pattern, part 2 [The Old New Thing]

Last time, we started looking at solving the problem of a stateful but coalescing update notification, where multiple requests for work can arrive, and your only requirement is that you send a notification for the last one. Any time a new request for work arrives, it replaces the existing one.

One attempt to fix this is to check if the work is already in progress, and if so, then hand off the new query to the existing worker. We are using winrt::fire_and_forget, which fails fast on any unhandled exception. This saves us from having to worry about recovering from exceptions. (At least for now.)

class EditControl
{
    ⟦ ... existing class members ... ⟧

    std::mutex m_workMutex;             
    std::mutex m_textMutex;             
    std::optional<string> m_pendingText;
};

winrt::fire_and_forget
EditControl::TextChanged(std::string text)
{
    auto lifetime = get_strong();

    auto workLock = std::unique_lock(m_workMutex, std::try_to_lock);
    if (!workLock) {                                                
        auto textLock = std::unique_lock(m_textMutex);              
        m_pendingText = std::move(text);                            
        co_return;                                                  
    }                                                               
                                                                    
    while (true) {                                                  
        co_await winrt::resume_background();

        std::vector<std::string> matches;
        for (auto&& candidate : FindCandidates(text)) {
            if (candidate.Verify()) {
                matches.push_back(candidate.Text());
            }
        }

        co_await winrt::resume_foreground(Dispatcher());

        SetAutocomplete(matches);

        auto text = std::unique_lock(m_textMutex);
        if (!m_pendingText) {                     
            co_return;                            
        }                                         
        text = std::move(*m_pendingText);         
        m_pendingText.reset();                    
    }                                             
}

But before even thinking about whether this addresses the race condition, we have to call out that this code isn’t even legal.

This code carries a lock across a suspension point, which we saw is not a good idea. In this case, we use try_ mode to acquire the mutex, and the rules for try_lock say two things, one bad, and the other worse.

The bad thing is that try_lock is allowed to fail spuriously and return false even if the mutex is not locked. This means that it’s possible that the workLock will report that it does not own the lock, even though the lock is available, and you will have a m_pendingText sitting around waiting futilely for some work to process it.

The worse thing is that calling try_lock from a thread that already holds the mutex results in undefined behavior. If two text changes occur in rapid succession on the UI thread, the second one will try to lock the m_workMutex from the same thread that already locked it, and you have now broken the rules and anything could happen.

Even worse than the worse case is the possibility that the mutex is released from the wrong thread. This code switches back to the UI thread before allowing the unique_lock to destruct, so you think you’re safe, but you’re not because an exception while building the matches will result in the lock being destructed from a background thread. This happens before the promise’s unhandled_exception is called, so you’ve corrupted the system before your fire_and_forget can fail fast.

The m_workMutex is really a red herring. It doesn’t need to be a mutex. The code uses it merely as a flag. So let’s switch to a flag and avoid all the undefined behavior.

Also, the m_textMutex is unnecessary since the m_pendingText is always accessed from the UI thread, so there is no concurrency. We can get rid of that too.

We’re now left with this:

class EditControl
{
    ⟦ ... existing class members ... ⟧

    bool m_busy = false;
    // std::mutex m_textMutex; // no longer needed
    std::optional<string> m_pendingText;
};

winrt::fire_and_forget
EditControl::TextChanged(std::string text)
{
    auto lifetime = get_strong();

    if (std::exchange(m_busy, true)) {
        m_pendingText = text;         
        co_return;                    
    }                                 
                                      
    while (true) {                    
        co_await winrt::resume_background();

        std::vector<std::string> matches;
        for (auto&& candidate : FindCandidates(text)) {
            if (candidate.Verify()) {
                matches.push_back(candidate.Text());
            }
        }

        co_await winrt::resume_foreground(Dispatcher());

        SetAutocomplete(matches);

        if (!m_pendingText) {              
            m_busy = false;                
            co_return;                     
        }                                  
        text = std::move(*m_pendingText);  
        m_pendingText.reset();             
    }                                      
}

We can simplify the code by simply treating every case as the pending case.

winrt::fire_and_forget
EditControl::TextChanged(std::string text)
{
    auto lifetime = get_strong();

    m_pendingText = std::move(text);     
    if (std::exchange(m_busy, true)) {   
        co_return;                       
    }                                    
                                         
    while (m_pendingText) {              
        text = std::move(*m_pendingText);
        m_pendingText.reset();           

        co_await winrt::resume_background();

        std::vector<std::string> matches;
        for (auto&& candidate : FindCandidates(text)) {
            if (candidate.Verify()) {
                matches.push_back(candidate.Text());
            }
        }

        co_await winrt::resume_foreground(Dispatcher());

        SetAutocomplete(matches);

    }
    m_busy = false;
}

The UI thread is doing a lot of heavy lifting here because it implicitly locks the combined accesses to m_busy and m_pendingText.

Next time, we’ll try to reduce the amount of unnecessary work.

The post Adding state to the update notification pattern, part 2 appeared first on The Old New Thing.

15:21

Security updates for Thursday [LWN.net]

Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr, jetty9, libdatetime-timezone-perl, tomcat10, and tzdata), Fedora (cockpit, filezilla, and libfilezilla), Red Hat (firefox, gnutls, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, kernel, kernel-rt, less, mod_http2, nodejs:18, rhc-worker-script, and shim), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (kernel), and Ubuntu (apache2, glibc, and linux-xilinx-zynqmp).

15:14

Link [Scripting News]

Suppose you're working deep inside a complex project and have an unrelated idea. How long does it take to switch to writing mode, get the idea down, and return to what you were doing. The less time it takes the more fluidity. Twitter totally won there. And we, the bloggers, made a tradeoff. We accepted fewer features and writing in a silo because it was practical. It worked, where less fluid software didn't. So they got all the casual writing, and over time sucked the life out of blogging. I think it's time to put the fluidity back, without compromising on features and lock-in.

13:14

CodeSOD: A List of Mistakes [The Daily WTF]

Yesterday we talked about bad CSS. Today, we're going to talk about bad HTML.

Corey inherited a web page that, among other things, wanted to display a bulleted list of links. Now, you or I might reach for the ul element, which is for displaying bulleted lists. But we do not have the galaxy sized brains of this individual:

<table style="font-family: Verdana;">
  <tr>
     <td valign="top">
       •
     </td>
     <td>
       Google
       <br />
       <a href="http://www.google.com" target="_blank">http://www.google.com</a>
     </td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
     <td valign="top">
      •
     </td>
     <td>
       Yahoo
       <br />
       <a href="http://www.yahoo.com" target="_blank">http://www.yahoo.com/</a>
     </td>
   </tr>
   <tr>
     <td valign="top">
     •
     </td>
     <td>
       Bing
       <br />
       <a href="http://www.bing.com" target="_blank">http://www.bing.com</a>
     </td>
   </tr>
</table>

Here, they opted to use a table, where each list item is a row, and the bullet is a literal • symbol in the code.

For web developers of a certain age, we remember when laying out your entire page inside of tables was a common practice. This let you easily define distinct header, sidebar, and footer sections in an era before CSS and divs everywhere.

But they were never meant to be used like this.

[Advertisement] ProGet’s got you covered with security and access controls on your NuGet feeds. Learn more.

12:35

COSMIC continues march towards alpha release [OSnews]

COSMIC, System76’s Rust-based desktop that’s going to replace GNOME in Pop!_OS, is nearing its alpha release, and the Linux OEM has published another blog post detailing the latest progress it’s made. First and foremost, theming support has been further refined by adding support for theming GTK applications (both GTK3 and 4) and flatpak applications. If the user has enabled global themes, these themes will be applied automatically whenever selecting a theme to apply. Support for custom icon packs has also been added.

COSMIC now also has an application store, much like GNOME Software and KDE’s Discover, which also takes care of updating installed applications. You can now also drag windows from anywhere inside the window by holding down the super key, which is both a nice addition in general as well as a usability feature. The Settings application has also seen work, and gets a new keyboard settings panel, as well as various other smaller additions. COSMIC also now implements on-screen display toasts for things like changing volume and brightness, and plugging in power.

System76 isn’t the only one working on COSMIC – community members have implemented things like window snapping, touchpad gestures, thumbnail previews in the dock, and more. The community is also working on things like an emoi picker, and a fan control graphical user interface.

There’s a lot more in the blog post, so be sure to give it a read. I’m genuinely excited for COSMIC to hit the shelves, because I’m dying to try it out.

12:21

Pluralistic: Podcasting "Capitalists Hate Capitalism" (18 Apr 2024) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]


Today's links


An illuminated manuscript drawing of two serfs threshing wheat. Behind them is a portrait of a fat-cat type in a business suit, with a dollar-sign money-bag for a head.

Podcasting "Capitalists Hate Capitalism" (permalink)

This week on my podcast, I read "Capitalists Hate Capitalism," my latest column for Locus Magazine:

https://locusmag.com/2024/03/cory-doctorow-capitalists-hate-capitalism/

What do I mean by "capitalists hate capitalism?" It all comes down to the difference between "profits" and "rents." A capitalist takes capital (money, or the things you can buy with it) and combines it with employees' labor, and generates profits (the capitalist's share) and wages (the workers' share).

Rents, meanwhile, come from owning an asset that capitalists need to generate profits. For example, a landlord who rents a storefront to a coffee shop extracts rent from the capitalist who owns the coffee shop. Meanwhile, the capitalist who owns the cafe extracts profits from the baristas' labor.

Capitalists' founding philosophers like Adam Smith hated rents. Worse: rents were the most important source of income at the time of capitalism's founding. Feudal lords owned great swathes of land, and there were armies of serfs who were bound to that land – it was illegal for them to leave it. The serfs owed rent to lords, and so they worked the land in order grow crops and raise livestock that they handed over the to lord as rent for the land they weren't allowed to leave.

Capitalists, meanwhile, wanted to turn that land into grazing territory for sheep as a source of wool for the "dark, Satanic mills" of the industrial revolution. They wanted the serfs to be kicked off their land so that they would become "free labor" that could be hired to work in those factories.

For the founders of capitalism, a "free market" wasn't free from regulation, it was free from rents, and "free labor" came from workers who were free to leave the estates where they were born – but also free to starve unless they took a job with the capitalists.

For capitalism's philosophers, free markets and free labor weren't just a source of profits, they were also a source of virtue. Capitalists – unlike lords – had to worry about competition from one another. They had to make better goods at lower prices, lest their customers take their business elsewhere; and they had to offer higher pay and better conditions, lest their "free labor" take a job elsewhere.

This means that capitalists are haunted by the fear of losing everything, and that fear acts as a goad, driving them to find ways to make everything better for everyone: better, cheaper products that benefit shoppers; and better-paid, safer jobs that benefit workers. For Smith, capitalism is alchemy, a philosopher's stone that transforms the base metal of greed into the gold of public spiritedness.

By contrast, rentiers are insulated from competition. Their workers are bound to the land, and must toil to pay the rent no matter whether they are treated well or abused. The rent rolls in reliably, without the lord having to invest in new, better ways to bring in the harvest. It's a good life (for the lord).

Think of that coffee-shop again: if a better cafe opens across the street, the owner can lose it all, as their customers and workers switch allegiance. But for the landlord, the failure of his capitalist tenant is a feature, not a bug. Once the cafe goes bust, the landlord gets a newly vacant storefront on the same block as the hot new coffee shop that can be rented out at even higher rates to another capitalist who tries his luck.

The industrial revolution wasn't just the triumph of automation over craft processes, nor the triumph of factory owners over weavers. It was also the triumph of profits over rents. The transformation of hereditary estates worked by serfs into part of the supply chain for textile mills was attended by – and contributed to – the political ascendancy of capitalists over rentiers.

Now, obviously, capitalism didn't end rents – just as feudalism didn't require the total absence of profits. Under feudalism, capitalists still extracted profits from capital and labor; and under capitalism, rentiers still extracted rents from assets that capitalists and workers paid them to use.

The difference comes in the way that conflicts between profits and rents were resolved. Feudalism is a system where rents triumph over profits, and capitalism is a system where profits triumph over rents.

It's conflict that tells you what really matters. You love your family, but they drive you crazy. If you side with your family over your friends – even when your friends might be right and your family's probably wrong – then you value your family more than your friends. That doesn't mean you don't value your friends – it means that you value them less than your family.

Conflict is a reliable way to know whether or not you're a leftist. As Steven Brust says, the way to distinguish a leftist is to ask "What's more important, human rights, or property rights?" If you answer "Property rights are human right," you're not a leftist. Leftists don't necessarily oppose all property rights – they just think they're less important than human rights.

Think of conflicts between property rights and human rights: the grocer who deliberately renders leftover food inedible before putting it in the dumpster to ensure that hungry people can't eat it, or the landlord who keeps an apartment empty while a homeless person freezes to death on its doorstep. You don't have to say "No one can own food or a home" to say, "in these cases, property rights are interfering with human rights, so they should be overridden." For leftists property rights can be a means to human rights (like revolutionary land reformers who give peasants title to the lands they work), but where property rights interfere with human rights, they are set aside.

In his 2023 book Technofeudalism, Yanis Varoufakis claims that capitalism has given way to a new feudalism – that capitalism was a transitional phase between feudalism…and feudalism:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

Varoufakis's point isn't that capitalists have gone extinct. Rather, it's that today, conflicts between capital and assets – between rents and profits – reliably end with a victory of rent over profit.

Think of Amazon: the "everything store" appears to be a vast bazaar, a flea-market whose stalls are all operated by independent capitalists who decide what to sell, how to price it, and then compete to tempt shoppers. In reality, though, the whole system is owned by a single feudalist, who extracts 51% from every dollar those merchants take in, and decides who can sell, and what they can sell, and at what price, and whether anyone can even see it:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/01/managerial-discretion/#junk-fees

Or consider the patent trolls of the Eastern District of Texas. These "companies" are invisible and produce nothing. They consist solely of a serviced mailbox in a dusty, uninhabited office-building, and an overbroad patent (say, a patent on "tapping on a screen with your finger") issued by the US Patent and Trademark Office. These companies extract hundreds of millions of dollars from Apple, Google, Samsung for violating these patents. In other words, the government steps in and takes vast profits generated through productive activity by companies that make phones, and turns that money over as rent paid to unproductive companies whose sole "product" is lawsuits. It's the triumph of rent over profit.

Capitalists hate capitalism. All capitalists would rather extract rents than profits, because rents are insulated from competition. The merchants who sell on Jeff Bezos's Amazon (or open a cafe in a landlord's storefront, or license a foolish smartphone patent) bear all the risk. The landlords – of Amazon, the storefront, or the patent – get paid whether or not that risk pays off.

This is why Google, Apple and Samsung also have vast digital estates that they rent out to capitalists – everything from app stores to patent portfolios. They would much rather be in the business of renting things out to capitalists than competing with capitalists.

Hence that famous Adam Smith quote: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." This is literally what Google and Meta do:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

And it's what Apple and Google do:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/27/23934961/google-antitrust-trial-defaults-search-deal-26-3-billion

Why compete with one another when you can collude, like feudal lords with adjacent estates who trust one another to return any serf they catch trying to sneak away in the dead of night?

Because of course, it's not just "free markets" that have been captured by rents ("Competition is for losers" -P. Thiel) – it's also "free labor." For years, the largest tech and entertainment companies in America illegally colluded on a "no poach" agreement not to hire one-anothers' employees:

https://techcrunch.com/2015/09/03/apple-google-other-silicon-valley-tech-giants-ordered-to-pay-415m-in-no-poaching-suit/

These companies were bitter competitors – as were these sectors. Even as Big Content was lobbying for farcical copyright law expansions and vowing to capture Big Tech, all these companies on both sides were able to set aside their differences and collude to bind their free workers to their estates and end the "wasteful competition" to secure their labor.

Of course, this is even more pronounced at the bottom of the labor market, where noncompete "agreements" are the norm. The median American worker bound by a noncompete is a fast-food worker whose employer can wield the power of the state to prevent that worker from leaving behind the Wendy's cash-register to make $0.25/hour more at the McDonald's fry trap across the street:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/02/its-the-economy-stupid/#neofeudal

Employers defend this as necessary to secure their investment in training their workers and to ensure the integrity of their trade secrets. But why should their investments be protected? Capitalism is about risk, and the fear that accompanies risk – fear that drives capitalists to innovate, which creates the public benefit that is the moral justification for capitalism.

Capitalists hate capitalism. They don't want free labor – they want labor bound to the land. Capitalists benefit from free labor: if you have a better company, you can tempt away the best workers and cause your inferior rival to fail. But feudalists benefit from un-free labor, from tricks like "bondage fees" that force workers to pay in order to quit their jobs:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/21/bondage-fees/#doorman-building

Companies like Petsmart use "training repayment agreement provisions" (TRAPs) to keep low-waged workers from leaving for better employers. Petsmart says it costs $5,500 to train a pet-groomer, and if that worker is fired, laid off, or quits less than two years, they have to pay that amount to Petsmart:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/04/its-a-trap/#a-little-on-the-nose

Now, Petsmart is full of shit here. The "four-week training course" Petsmart claims is worth $5,500 actually only lasts for three weeks. What's more, the "training" consists of sweeping the floor and doing other low-level chores for three weeks, without pay.

But even if Petsmart were to give $5,500 worth of training to every pet-groomer, this would still be bullshit. Why should the worker bear the risk of Petsmart making a bad investment in their training? Under capitalism, risks justify rewards. Petsmart's argument for charging $50 to groom your dog and paying the groomer $15 for the job is that they took $35 worth of risk. But some of that risk is being borne by the worker – they're the ones footing the bill for the training.

For Petsmart – as for all feudalists – a worker (with all the attendant risks) can be turned into an asset, something that isn't subject to competition. Petsmart doesn't have to retain workers through superior pay and conditions – they can use the state's contract-enforcement mechanism instead.

Capitalists hate capitalism, but they love feudalism. Sure, they dress this up by claiming that governmental de-risking spurs investment: "Who would pay to train a pet-groomer if that worker could walk out the next day and shave dogs for some competing shop?"

But this is obvious nonsense. Think of Silicon Valley: high tech is the most "IP-intensive" of all industries, the sector that has had to compete most fiercely for skilled labor. And yet, Silicon Valley is in California, where noncompetes are illegal. Every single successful Silicon Valley company has thrived in an environment in which their skilled workers can walk out the door at any time and take a job with a rival company.

There's no indication that the risk of free labor prevents investment. Think of AI, the biggest investment bubble in human history. All the major AI companies are in jurisdictions where noncompetes are illegal. Anthropic – OpenAI's most serious competitor – was founded by a sister/brother team who quit senior roles at OpenAI and founded a direct competitor. No one can claim with a straight face that OpenAI is now unable to raise capital on favorable terms.

What's more, when OpenAI founder Sam Altman was forced out by his board, Microsoft offered to hire him – and 700 other OpenAI personnel – to found an OpenAI competitor. When Altman returned to the company, Microsoft invested more money in OpenAI, despite their intimate understanding that anyone could hire away the company's founder and all of its top technical staff at any time.

The idea that the departure of the Burger King trade secrets locked up in its workers' heads constitute more of a risk to the ability to operate a hamburger restaurant than the departure of the entire technical staff of OpenAI is obvious nonsense. Noncompetes aren't a way to make it possible to run a business – they're a way to make it easy to run a business, by eliminating competition and pushing the risk onto employees.

Because capitalists hate capitalism. And who can blame them? Who wouldn't prefer a life with less risk to one where you have to constantly look over your shoulder for competitors who've found a way to make a superior offer to your customers and workers?

This is why businesses are so excited about securing "IP" – that is, a government-backed right to control your workers, customers, competitors or critics:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

The argument for every IP right expansion is the same: "Who would invest in creating something new without the assurance that some­one else wouldn’t copy and improve on it and put them out of business?"

That was the argument raised five years ago, during the (mercifully brief) mania for genre writers seeking trademarks on common tropes. There was the romance writer who got a trademark on the word "cocky" in book titles:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/16/17566276/cockygate-amazon-kindle-unlimited-algorithm-self-published-romance-novel-cabal

And the fantasy writer who wanted a trademark on "dragon slayer" in fantasy novel titles:

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/06/14/son-of-cocky-a-writer-is-trying-to-trademark-dragon-slayer-for-fantasy-novels/

Who subsequently sought a trademark on any book cover featuring a person holding a weapon:

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/07/19/trademark-troll-who-claims-to-own-dragon-slayer-now-wants-exclusive-rights-to-book-covers-where-someone-is-holding-a-weapon/

For these would-be rentiers, the logic was the same: "Why would I write a book about a dragon-slayer if I could lose readers to someone else who writes a book about dragon-slayers?"

In these cases, the USPTO denied or rescinded its trademarks. Profits triumphed over rents. But increasingly, rents are triumphing over profits, and rent-extraction is celebrated as "smart business," while profits are for suckers, only slightly preferable to "wages" (the worst way to get paid under both capitalism and feudalism).

That's what's behind all the talk about "passive income" – that's just a euphemism for "rent." It's what Douglas Rushkoff is referring to in Survival of the Richest when he talks about the wealthy wanting to "go meta":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

Don't drive a cab – go meta and buy a medallion. Don't buy a medallion, go meta and found Uber. Don't found Uber, go meta and invest in Uber. Don't invest in Uber, go meta and buy options on Uber stock. Don't buy Uber stock options, go meta and buy derivatives of options on Uber stock.

"Going meta" means distancing yourself from capitalism – from income derived from profits, from competition, from risk – and cozying up to feudalism.

Capitalists have always hated capitalism. The owners of the dark Satanic mills wanted peasants turned off the land and converted into "free labor" – but they also kidnapped Napoleonic war-orphans and indentured them to ten-year terms of service, which was all you could get out of a child's body before it was ruined for further work:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/26/enochs-hammer/#thats-fronkonsteen

When Varoufakis says we've entered a new feudal age, he doesn't mean that we've abolished capitalism. He means that – for the first time in centuries – when rents go to war against profits – the rents almost always emerge victorious.

Here's the podcast episode:

https://craphound.com/news/2024/04/14/capitalists-hate-capitalism/

Here's a direct link to the MP3 (hosting courtesy of the Internet Archive; they'll host your stuff for free, forever):

https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_465/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_465_-_Capitalists_Hate_Capitalism.mp3

And here's the RSS feed for my podcast:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

This day in history (permalink)

#20yrsago Prison wipes creative-writing class HDDs after student wins PEN award https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2005/feb/15/connecticut-prison-writers-settle-lawsuit-writing-program-reinstated/

#20yrsago EFF waging war on bullshit Internet patents https://web.archive.org/web/20040507111819/https://www.eff.org/Patent/20040419_eff_pr_patent.php

#20yrsago Brazil cracks down on sat-hackers who bounce ham signals off US military satellites https://www.wired.com/2009/04/fleetcom/

#15yrsago Clement Freud’s funniest joke https://britrish.com/2011/08/10/sir-clement-freud-and-the-funniest-joke-ever-told/

#15yrsago RIP, JG Ballard http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/8007331.stm

#15yrsago CIA waterboarded individual suspects up to 183 times https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/apr/20/waterboarding-alqaida-khalid-sheikh-mohammed

#10yrsago Profile of Aeropress and Aerobie inventor Alan Adler https://priceonomics.com/the-invention-of-the-aeropress/

#10yrsago UK tax authority caught sneaking in plan to sell Britons’ private financial records https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/apr/18/hmrc-to-sell-taxpayers-data

#5yrsago AOC is going to Kentucky https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/19/politics/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-kentucky-visit/index.html

#5yrsago TSA admits that its pornoscanners flag Black women and others with curly hair for humiliating, invasive searches https://www.propublica.org/article/tsa-not-discriminating-against-black-women-but-their-body-scanners-might-be

#5yrsago NYC adopts law targeting the handful of skyscrapers that are spiking the city’s carbon footprint https://www.wired.com/story/new-yorks-aggressive-climate-law-takes-aim-at-skyscrapers/

#5yrsago Read the source code for every classic Infocom text-adventure game! https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/04/you-can-now-download-the-source-code-for-all-infocom-text-adventure-classics/

#5yrsago Telcoms lobbyists have convinced 26 states to ban or restrict municipal broadband https://www.vice.com/en/article/kzmana/report-26-states-now-ban-or-restrict-community-broadband

#5yrsago IPOs have sent Uber and Lyft fares skyrocketing, while driver pay plummets https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/apr/18/uber-lyft-drivers-surge-pricing-wages

#1yrago Iowa's starvation strategy https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/19/whats-wrong-with-iowa/#replicable-cruelty

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, holding a mic.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025

  • Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025

  • Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM

  • Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM

Latest podcast: Capitalists Hate Capitalism https://craphound.com/news/2024/04/14/capitalists-hate-capitalism/

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

Other Attempts to Take Over Open Source Projects [Schneier on Security]

After the XZ Utils discovery, people have been examining other open-source projects. Surprising no one, the incident is not unique:

The OpenJS Foundation Cross Project Council received a suspicious series of emails with similar messages, bearing different names and overlapping GitHub-associated emails. These emails implored OpenJS to take action to update one of its popular JavaScript projects to “address any critical vulnerabilities,” yet cited no specifics. The email author(s) wanted OpenJS to designate them as a new maintainer of the project despite having little prior involvement. This approach bears strong resemblance to the manner in which “Jia Tan” positioned themselves in the XZ/liblzma backdoor.

[…]

The OpenJS team also recognized a similar suspicious pattern in two other popular JavaScript projects not hosted by its Foundation, and immediately flagged the potential security concerns to respective OpenJS leaders, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) within the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The article includes a list of suspicious patterns, and another list of security best practices.

11:28

Grrl Power #1250 – Orderly friday [Grrl Power]

Gellen is supposed to look like a (very tall, buff) yaoi pretty boy, but man, I am not practiced at drawing that.

I’ve talked extensively about money in a post scarcity society, and generally came to the conclusion that the only things that would be of value would be information, energy and probably time. Something that takes the same amount of energy to create on the matter replicator but takes longer to form because of… delicate molecular lattices or some other science words, would be more expensive because of the opportunity cost. So yeah, time would probably be a factor.

However, since buying groceries with a thumbstick that has the 3D model of a ’92 VW Bug transmission on it, or handing over a brace of D-Cell batteries probably wouldn’t really be viable as currency for a number of reasons. So really, a post scarcity society would probably still have money, but it would be imaginary money like any country that’s moved past the gold standard uses.

Nothing has value unless people agree it does. When the 2008 toxic CDO’s and CDS’s blew up the economy, it’s not like any dollar bills or gold doubloons burned up in a fire or anything. Some numbers on a lot of computers went down, and we all “agreed” that it was bad. Honestly I’m not really sure why instead of bailouts, the government didn’t just go, “Look, this one time, you can type a few extra zeros back in.” Besides setting a terrible precedent, obviously. More terrible than bailing out billion dollar banks and not even breaking them up into smaller institutions and implementing a bunch of regulation, I mean.

But my point is that despite “money” having no real place in a post-scarcity society, I think it would still unfortunately be kind of a necessity. Otherwise, wouldn’t everyone be like Scotty and have a boat? If it truly cost nothing to have a boat because “cost” is a depreciated concept, it seems like most people would keep a pretty nice boat around, just in case they decided they wanted to spend the afternoon lounging on the deck of a boat. But… where would they keep them? I guess if money really was no object, then you could build massive underground boat garages and you could retrieve it by pushing A27 like you’re getting a Zagnut bar out of the vending machine. Well, presumably, engineers would have better things to do than to build boat garages for 380 million boats, so, money.

As far as Scotty “buying” a boat… Honestly, there’s three ways to look at it. 1) In the Federation, you can just Matter up a boat, and what Sydney said is true, that he was using holdover slang. 2) The other, more likely explanation was that the writers didn’t know/care about the Federation supposedly being post scarcity. 3) The other other explanation is that they did, but they didn’t have a graceful way to have the line “I just replicated a 40 meter schooner.” without making their test audiences go, “Uh, what?” So they sighed a heavy sigh and changed the dialog to lowest common denominator for brevity’s sake, even though they wrote a really deep in the weeds 17 pages of dialog between Scotty and the whale doctor lady from Star Trek 4 who was at that meeting for some reason, but the real reason was so she could act as the audience exposition surrogate when she asks Scotty to review the finer points of 24th century economics with her. Because I definitely would have written that, then gotten all sullen when the studio execs were like, “What the fuck are you writing about? You turned in a 1,500 page screenplay! Cut 93% of it!”

The new vote incentive is up!

Every so often I get the urge to try and draw Maxima all properly shiny, and this… isn’t my favorite attempt if I’m honest. I’ve been sitting on this for a little while doing little tweaks, and decided to finally publish it cause I’m already behind on these. The next one will (almost definitely) resume the trend of including a little mini comic to extend the scene a bit.

As usual, Patreon has some outfit variations as well as sans flagrante.

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.

10:49

10:14

Broadcom says “many” VMware perpetual licenses got support extensions [OSnews]

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan this week publicized some concessions aimed at helping customers and partners ease into VMware’s recent business model changes. Tan reiterated that the controversial changes, like the end of perpetual licensing, aren’t going away. But amid questioning from antitrust officials in the European Union (EU), Tan announced that the company has already given support extensions for some VMware perpetual license holders.

↫ Scharon Harding at Ars Technica

I’m linking to the Ars Technica writeup here, because the original blog post from Broadcom’s CEO is effectively unreadable to me, as steeped in corpospeak as it is. The basic gist is that the storm of criticism that’s been hovering around Broadcom ever since the changes it announced to VMware’s licensing strategy isn’t going away, and even attracted the attention of the European Union. As such, Broadcom is giving existing perpetual VMware license holders some breathing room, but not much, and their plans will be executed as-is regardless.

I doubt Broadcom and VMware are big and crucial enough for the full might of the EU to come down on them, so I don’t think we’ll see any sudden turnarounds like we did with Apple and Facebook, for instance, but at least some cracks are clearly starting to show. If the aforementioned storm keeps up, pressure from customers might actually force more concessions out of Broadcom.

09:49

Dreams, plans and contradictions [Seth's Blog]

Dreams are fine. And dreams involve contradictions. We want this AND that, but both can’t happen. That’s what keeps them from being plans.

Plans embrace boundaries and reality, they don’t ignore them. Plans thrive on scarcity and constraints. Plans are open for inspection, and a successful planner looks forward to altering the plans to make them more likely to become real.

07:07

NYT's Israeli narratives: the Gaza memo [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

The New York Times stated rules of word usage that support Israel's point of view about Gaza and its inhabitants.

UK oceanic bans, a win for 13 MPAs [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

The UK has banned the destructive fishing method of bottom trawling. giving some real protection to several "protected" marine areas. The ban applies to all fishing boats, including French ones.

[irony]
France should retaliate by banning bottom trawling in some French waters. Eventually the two countries could entirely eliminate that practice near their coasts.
[/irony]

Jordanian airspace and its people [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

Iran is reportedly threatening to attack Jordan if it does not allow Iran's attack drones to cross Jordanian airspace to get at Israel.

06:21

04:00

Russ Allbery: Review: Unseen Academicals [Planet Debian]

Review: Unseen Academicals, by Terry Pratchett

Series: Discworld #37
Publisher: Harper
Copyright: October 2009
Printing: November 2014
ISBN: 0-06-233500-6
Format: Mass market
Pages: 517

Unseen Academicals is the 37th Discworld novel and includes many of the long-standing Ankh-Morpork cast, but mostly as supporting characters. The main characters are a new (and delightful) bunch with their own concerns. You arguably could start reading here if you really wanted to, although you would risk spoiling several previous books (most notably Thud!) and will miss some references that depend on familiarity with the cast.

The Unseen University is, like most institutions of its sort, funded by an endowment that allows the wizards to focus on the pure life of the mind (or the stomach). Much to their dismay, they have just discovered that an endowment that amounts to most of their food budget requires that they field a football team.

Glenda runs the night kitchen at the Unseen University. Given the deep and abiding love that wizards have for food, there is both a main kitchen and a night kitchen. The main kitchen is more prestigious, but the night kitchen is responsible for making pies, something that Glenda is quietly but exceptionally good at.

Juliet is Glenda's new employee. She is exceptionally beautiful, not very bright, and a working class girl of the Ankh-Morpork streets down to her bones. Trevor Likely is a candle dribbler, responsible for assisting the Candle Knave in refreshing the endless university candles and ensuring that their wax is properly dribbled, although he pushes most of that work off onto the infallibly polite and oddly intelligent Mr. Nutt.

Glenda, Trev, and Juliet are the sort of people who populate the great city of Ankh-Morpork. While the people everyone has heard of have political crises, adventures, and book plots, they keep institutions like the Unseen University running. They read romance novels, go to the football games, and nurse long-standing rivalries. They do not expect the high mucky-mucks to enter their world, let alone mess with their game.

I approached Unseen Academicals with trepidation because I normally don't get along as well with the Discworld wizard books. I need not have worried; Pratchett realized that the wizards would work better as supporting characters and instead turns the main plot (or at least most of it; more on that later) over to the servants. This was a brilliant decision. The setup of this book is some of the best of Discworld up to this point.

Trev is a streetwise rogue with an uncanny knack for kicking around a can that he developed after being forbidden to play football by his dear old mum. He falls for Juliet even though their families support different football teams, so you may think that a Romeo and Juliet spoof is coming. There are a few gestures of one, but Pratchett deftly avoids the pitfalls and predictability and instead makes Juliet one of the best characters in the book by playing directly against type. She is one of the characters that Pratchett is so astonishingly good at, the ones that are so thoroughly themselves that they transcend the stories they're put into.

The heart of this book, though, is Glenda.

Glenda enjoyed her job. She didn't have a career; they were for people who could not hold down jobs.

She is the kind of person who knows where she fits in the world and likes what she does and is happy to stay there until she decides something isn't right, and then she changes the world through the power of common sense morality, righteous indignation, and sheer stubborn persistence. Discworld is full of complex and subtle characters fencing with each other, but there are few things I have enjoyed more than Glenda being a determinedly good person. Vetinari of course recognizes and respects (and uses) that inner core immediately.

Unfortunately, as great as the setup and characters are, Unseen Academicals falls apart a bit at the end. I was eagerly reading the story, wondering what Pratchett was going to weave out of the stories of these individuals, and then it partly turned into yet another wizard book. Pratchett pulled another of his deus ex machina tricks for the climax in a way that I found unsatisfying and contrary to the tone of the rest of the story, and while the characters do get reasonable endings, it lacked the oomph I was hoping for. Rincewind is as determinedly one-note as ever, the wizards do all the standard wizard things, and the plot just isn't that interesting.

I liked Mr. Nutt a great deal in the first part of the book, and I wish he could have kept that edge of enigmatic competence and unflappableness. Pratchett wanted to tell a different story that involved more angst and self-doubt, and while I appreciate that story, I found it less engaging and a bit more melodramatic than I was hoping for. Mr. Nutt's reactions in the last half of the book were believable and fit his background, but that was part of the problem: he slotted back into an archetype that I thought Pratchett was going to twist and upend.

Mr. Nutt does, at least, get a fantastic closing line, and as usual there are a lot of great asides and quotes along the way, including possibly the sharpest and most biting Vetinari speech of the entire series.

The Patrician took a sip of his beer. "I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect never will again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I'm sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged on to a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature's wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining on mother and children. And that's when I first learned about evil. It is built into the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior."

My dissatisfaction with the ending prevents Unseen Academicals from rising to the level of Night Watch, and it's a bit more uneven than the best books of the series. Still, though, this is great stuff; recommended to anyone who is reading the series.

Followed in publication order by I Shall Wear Midnight.

Rating: 8 out of 10

02:42

Clueless In Northampton [QC RSS]

I have TWO NEW T SHIRT DESIGNS up for pre-order! Click that graphic below if you agree that A) shit is fucked or B) people should be nice to you or C) all of the above. Thank you.

01:49

It is easy to contribute to GNU [Planet GNU]

I will be delivering my talk, "It is easy to contribute to GNU," Saturday, May 4, 2024, 12:15--13:00 EDT (16:00 UTC), at the LibrePlanet 2024 conference, and I hope you’ll check it out!

LibrePlanet is a conference about software freedom, happening on May 4 & 5, 2024. The event is hosted by the Free Software Foundation (FSF), and brings together software developers, law and policy experts, activists, students, and computer users to learn skills, celebrate free software accomplishments, and face upcoming challenges. Newcomers are always welcome, and LibrePlanet 2024 will feature programming for all ages and experience levels.

*Please register in advance at <https://libreplanet.org/2024/>.*

wxie

[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for April 18, 2024 [LWN.net]

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for April 18, 2024 is available.

00:07

Page 4 [Flipside]

Page 4 is done.

Wednesday, 17 April

23:21

A Relative Relative [The Stranger]

An ingrate! by Anonymous

My husband and I opened the doors of our home to you and your family. For years we were there for you. We gave you a job, helped you with your kids and your boyfriend. You lived with us until we helped you find a place of your own. Then we babysat for you for free. 

We did all of this because we wanted to help you, but then you found some lame excuse to be mad at us and to dump us for God knows what reason. 

Today, you walked in front of us and pretended you didn't know us. You are a sad excuse for a relative, and you are a lousy person. We don't need anything from you, but your attitude and lack of gratitude is disgusting.

Do you need to get something off your chest? Submit an I, Anonymous and we'll illustrate it! Send your unsigned rant, love letter, confession, or accusation to ianonymous@thestranger.com. Please remember to change the names of the innocent and the guilty.

21:49

Stranger Suggests: Oneohtrix Point Never, Record Store Day, Sheer Mag, Tessa Hulls with Michelle Peñaloza and Jane Wong, The People's Joker [The Stranger]

One really great thing to do every day of the week. by Audrey Vann WEDNESDAY 4/17  

Oneohtrix Point Never: Again Tour

(MUSIC) Oneohtrix Point Never (aka Daniel Lopatin) is part of that elite club of challenging, electronic musicians who've gone on to score high-profile movies, which includes Mica Levi, Robert A.A. Lowe, and Bobby Krlic. (Even stranger, Lopatin also was the musical director for the Weeknd's 2021 Super Bowl half-time performance.) The Brooklyn-based composer's early work—desolate, alienating, oft-times abrasive—didn't exactly foreshadow a side hustle soundtracking big-budget Hollywood films such as Good Time and Uncut Gems, but here we are. These cinematic assignments revealed OPN's deft grasp of Tangerine Dream-like atmosphere-conjuring. This work has slowed OPN's solo output, but 2020's Magic Oneohtrix Point Never and 2023's Again demonstrate his growing interest in skewed synth-pop and rock, submerging uncanny melodies in disorienting structures, transmuting nostalgic memories of cheesy radio fodder into futuristically warped facsimiles of same. This show will focus on Again's 13 orchestrated oddities. "Modular princess" Arushi Jain, who fuses elements of Indian classical music with beautiful ambience, opens. (Neptune Theatre, 1303 NE 45th St, 7 pm, $35-$41, all ages) DAVE SEGAL

THURSDAY 4/18  

Sheer Mag

(MUSIC) Philadelphia-based indie rock band Sheer Mag's goal has always been “sheer magnitude,” which is what led to their formation and name back in 2014. Inspired by ’70s classic rock and punk, the group is fronted by stunning powerhouse vocalist Tina Halladay and has been heralded by critics as one of the most exciting bands of the last decade. They will support their new Third Man Records released album, Playing Favorites, which marks their first new music in five years. (The Vera Project, 305 Harrison St, 7 pm, $18-$20, all ages) AUDREY VANN

FRIDAY 4/19  

The People's Joker

(FILM) The People's Joker stirred up a lot of buzz at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival as most of its screenings were canceled due to rights issues. The reason? It’s a sharply silly satire of certain iconic superheroes that go on a deeply personal journey through life, art, and comedy. Written and directed by Vera Drew, who also stars, The People's Joker follows an aspiring clown who wants to make it in the bizarro world of comedy in Gotham City. However, this is only the initial hook, as Drew goes beyond just riffing on the standard superhero beats and reshapes the narrative into a trans coming-of-age story. It is absurd and chaotic with a visual presentation that feels like it was born out of Adult Swim shows such as Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!. To be fair, it kind of is—Drew has worked for Abso Lutely Productions. However, the film still has its own uniquely weird and wonderful fever dream of a vision that is worth getting lost in. Not only is it damn funny, with each of the lines delivered by a dynamic Drew landing perfectly, but it’s a genuinely incisive work of cinematic reflection that's the exact type of kick in the pants the often empty genre could use. It deserves to be seen. I guess I’m saying is #FREETHEPEOPLESJOKER! (Northwest Film Forum, multiple showtimes through April 28, $7-$14) CHASE HUTCHINSON

SATURDAY 4/20  

Record Store Day

Happy Record Store Day!

(MUSIC) Whether you're looking for special RSD releases or just want to support your local record store, drag yourself out of bed bright and early this Record Store Day as shops around town fill up with vinyl-hungry shoppers. Participation varies from store to store, but expect sales and exclusive merch, extended hours, in-store performances, and other special events. There are several special releases from PNW-born bands this year, including Death Cab For Cutie's Live at the Showbox, Fleet Foxes's Live on Boston Harbor, Mudhoney's Suck You Dry: The Reprise Years, Pearl Jam's Dark Matter, and Sleater-Kinney's This Time/Here Today. Check out the RSD website for a full list of participating stores. (Various locations, read more about our favorite local records stores and see the the full line-up of events here) AUDREY VANN

SUNDAY 4/21  

Dancing With the Dead: Red Pine and the Art of Translation

(FILM) Co-presented with SIFF, Elliott Bay Book Company, Asia Society Seattle, and Copper Canyon Press, this documentary explores the life of renowned Chinese poetry translator (and Port Townsend resident) Bill Porter, whose pen name is Red Pine. Achieving near-cult status in China as "a Westerner who has made a significant contribution to Chinese culture," Red Pine encourages seeking enlightenment through poetry and mountain solitude. He'll attend the screening for a Q&A with director Ward Serrill, a conversation moderated by Civic Poet of Seattle Shin Yu Pai, and a book signing. Singer Spring Cheng will set the mood. (SIFF Cinema Egyptian, 805 E Pine St, 2 pm, $18.50, all ages) LINDSAY COSTELLO

MONDAY 4/22  

Sasquatch Sunset

(FILM) If you aren't riveted by the prospect of this film, well, we're two very different people. David and Nathan Zellner's Sasquatch Sunset follows a family of Bigfoots (Bigfeet?) over the course of one year, as they wander, grunt, and munch mushrooms in North America's foggy forests. Riley Keough and Jesse Eisenberg star, and they look like this. We owe it to them to go see this film as payment for the zillion hours they spent having prosthetics applied. (SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave N, multiple screenings through April 25, $14.50-$15.50) LINDSAY COSTELLO

TUESDAY 4/23  

Tessa Hulls with Michelle Peñaloza and Jane Wong

See Tessa Hulls at Elliott Bay Book Company Tuesday, April 23. Photo by GRITCHELLE FALLESGON

(BOOKS) "It’s a shame that Tessa Hulls will never write another graphic novel," said Rich Smith in a recent review of Feeding Ghosts. "The 400-page odyssey holds its own in the company of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do, or any of the other major comic works that feature immigrants, the children of immigrants, and refugees processing the generational traumas sparked by the horrors, bloodshed, and diasporas of the 20th century. No shit. It’s just that good." Hulls, the lead artist in the recently closed Wing Luke Museum exhibition Nobody Lives Here, has been developing her genre-bending graphic memoir Feeding Ghosts for the last decade. The tome tells the story of three generations of women in her family—her Chinese grandmother Sun Yi, a bestselling author and journalist in Shanghai during the '49 Communist victory; her mother, who came to the United States and eventually cared for Sun Yi; and herself. At 30, Hulls begins to reflect on her travels to Antarctica and how she might be running from her own history—Feeding Ghosts meets the reader there. Hulls will be joined by writers Michelle Peñaloza and Jane Wong, whose recent memoir, Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City, traces her upbringing in a Chinese takeout restaurant on the Jersey shore. (Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Ave, 7 pm, free, all ages) LINDSAY COSTELLO

:zap: Prizefight! :zap:

Win tickets to rad upcoming events!*

Belltown Bloom
May 4 -5, the Crocodile

Contest Ends 5/2 at 10 am

*Entering PRIZE FIGHT contests by submitting your email address signs you up to receive the Stranger Suggests newsletter. You can unsubscribe at any time.

21:42

The Right Hand of The King [Penny Arcade]

With people talking about Fallout now that would never have previously talked about Fallout, it's a great time to direct you to Bethesda's Vault 77 Page, which catalogs the origins of the entity known in the wasteland as The Puppet Man. There's also a lot of other text on the page, what your fifth grade teacher Mrs. Prang might have called a "primary source," which serves to situate the entire affair in that place and time. Bethesda was fully down to clown; it's a canonical vault, with item and holotape support. Seemed like it might be fun to go back.

Feeds

FeedRSSLast fetchedNext fetched after
@ASmartBear XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:02, Tuesday, 23 April
a bag of four grapes XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:03, Tuesday, 23 April
Ansible XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:01, Tuesday, 23 April
Bad Science XML 12:42, Tuesday, 23 April 13:31, Tuesday, 23 April
Black Doggerel XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:02, Tuesday, 23 April
Blog - Official site of Stephen Fry XML 12:42, Tuesday, 23 April 13:31, Tuesday, 23 April
Charlie Brooker | The Guardian XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:03, Tuesday, 23 April
Charlie's Diary XML 12:14, Tuesday, 23 April 13:02, Tuesday, 23 April
Chasing the Sunset - Comics Only XML 12:42, Tuesday, 23 April 13:31, Tuesday, 23 April
Coding Horror XML 12:14, Tuesday, 23 April 13:01, Tuesday, 23 April
Cory Doctorow's craphound.com XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:03, Tuesday, 23 April
Cory Doctorow, Author at Boing Boing XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:02, Tuesday, 23 April
Ctrl+Alt+Del Comic XML 12:14, Tuesday, 23 April 13:02, Tuesday, 23 April
Cyberunions XML 12:42, Tuesday, 23 April 13:31, Tuesday, 23 April
David Mitchell | The Guardian XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:04, Tuesday, 23 April
Deeplinks XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:05, Tuesday, 23 April
Diesel Sweeties webcomic by rstevens XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:04, Tuesday, 23 April
Dilbert XML 12:42, Tuesday, 23 April 13:31, Tuesday, 23 April
Dork Tower XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:03, Tuesday, 23 April
Economics from the Top Down XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:04, Tuesday, 23 April
Edmund Finney's Quest to Find the Meaning of Life XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:04, Tuesday, 23 April
EFF Action Center XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:04, Tuesday, 23 April
Enspiral Tales - Medium XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:06, Tuesday, 23 April
Falkvinge on Liberty XML 12:14, Tuesday, 23 April 13:02, Tuesday, 23 April
Flipside XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:03, Tuesday, 23 April
Flipside XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:06, Tuesday, 23 April
Free software jobs XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:01, Tuesday, 23 April
Full Frontal Nerdity by Aaron Williams XML 12:14, Tuesday, 23 April 13:02, Tuesday, 23 April
General Protection Fault: Comic Updates XML 12:14, Tuesday, 23 April 13:02, Tuesday, 23 April
George Monbiot XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:04, Tuesday, 23 April
Girl Genius XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:04, Tuesday, 23 April
Groklaw XML 12:14, Tuesday, 23 April 13:02, Tuesday, 23 April
Grrl Power XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:03, Tuesday, 23 April
Hackney Anarchist Group XML 12:42, Tuesday, 23 April 13:31, Tuesday, 23 April
Hackney Solidarity Network XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:06, Tuesday, 23 April
http://blog.llvm.org/feeds/posts/default XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:06, Tuesday, 23 April
http://calendar.google.com/calendar/feeds/q7s5o02sj8hcam52hutbcofoo4%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:01, Tuesday, 23 April
http://dynamic.boingboing.net/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=feed&_type=posts&blog_id=1&id=1 XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:06, Tuesday, 23 April
http://eng.anarchoblogs.org/feed/atom/ XML 12:28, Tuesday, 23 April 13:14, Tuesday, 23 April
http://feed43.com/3874015735218037.xml XML 12:28, Tuesday, 23 April 13:14, Tuesday, 23 April
http://flatearthnews.net/flatearthnews.net/blogfeed XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:02, Tuesday, 23 April
http://fulltextrssfeed.com/ XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:04, Tuesday, 23 April
http://london.indymedia.org/articles.rss XML 12:14, Tuesday, 23 April 13:01, Tuesday, 23 April
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=ad0530218c055aa302f7e0e84d5d6515&amp;_render=rss XML 12:28, Tuesday, 23 April 13:14, Tuesday, 23 April
http://planet.gridpp.ac.uk/atom.xml XML 12:14, Tuesday, 23 April 13:01, Tuesday, 23 April
http://shirky.com/weblog/feed/atom/ XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:05, Tuesday, 23 April
http://the-programmers-stone.com/feed/ XML 12:14, Tuesday, 23 April 13:01, Tuesday, 23 April
http://thecommune.co.uk/feed/ XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:06, Tuesday, 23 April
http://theness.com/roguesgallery/feed/ XML 12:14, Tuesday, 23 April 13:02, Tuesday, 23 April
http://www.airshipentertainment.com/buck/buckcomic/buck.rss XML 12:42, Tuesday, 23 April 13:31, Tuesday, 23 April
http://www.airshipentertainment.com/growf/growfcomic/growf.rss XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:05, Tuesday, 23 April
http://www.airshipentertainment.com/myth/mythcomic/myth.rss XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:03, Tuesday, 23 April
http://www.baen.com/baenebooks XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:05, Tuesday, 23 April
http://www.feedsapi.com/makefulltextfeed.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.somethingpositive.net%2Fsp.xml&what=auto&key=&max=7&links=preserve&exc=&privacy=I+accept XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:05, Tuesday, 23 April
http://www.godhatesastronauts.com/feed/ XML 12:14, Tuesday, 23 April 13:02, Tuesday, 23 April
http://www.tinycat.co.uk/feed/ XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:01, Tuesday, 23 April
https://anarchism.pageabode.com/blogs/anarcho/feed/ XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:05, Tuesday, 23 April
https://broodhollow.krisstraub.comfeed/ XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:02, Tuesday, 23 April
https://debian-administration.org/atom.xml XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:02, Tuesday, 23 April
https://feeds.feedburner.com/Starslip XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:03, Tuesday, 23 April
https://feeds2.feedburner.com/GeekEtiquette?format=xml XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:04, Tuesday, 23 April
https://hackbloc.org/rss.xml XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:02, Tuesday, 23 April
https://kajafoglio.livejournal.com/data/atom/ XML 12:42, Tuesday, 23 April 13:31, Tuesday, 23 April
https://philfoglio.livejournal.com/data/atom/ XML 12:14, Tuesday, 23 April 13:01, Tuesday, 23 April
https://pixietrixcomix.com/eerie-cutiescomic.rss XML 12:14, Tuesday, 23 April 13:01, Tuesday, 23 April
https://pixietrixcomix.com/menage-a-3/comic.rss XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:05, Tuesday, 23 April
https://propertyistheft.wordpress.com/feed/ XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:01, Tuesday, 23 April
https://requiem.seraph-inn.com/updates.rss XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:01, Tuesday, 23 April
https://studiofoglio.livejournal.com/data/atom/ XML 12:28, Tuesday, 23 April 13:14, Tuesday, 23 April
https://thecommandline.net/feed/ XML 12:28, Tuesday, 23 April 13:14, Tuesday, 23 April
https://torrentfreak.com/subscriptions/ XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:04, Tuesday, 23 April
https://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/22724360.rss XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:01, Tuesday, 23 April
https://web.randi.org/?format=feed&type=rss XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:04, Tuesday, 23 April
https://www.dcscience.net/feed/medium.co XML 12:42, Tuesday, 23 April 13:31, Tuesday, 23 April
https://www.DropCatch.com/domain/steampunkmagazine.com XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:02, Tuesday, 23 April
https://www.DropCatch.com/domain/ubuntuweblogs.org XML 12:28, Tuesday, 23 April 13:14, Tuesday, 23 April
https://www.DropCatch.com/redirect/?domain=DyingAlone.net XML 12:14, Tuesday, 23 April 13:01, Tuesday, 23 April
https://www.freedompress.org.uk:443/news/feed/ XML 12:14, Tuesday, 23 April 13:02, Tuesday, 23 April
https://www.goblinscomic.com/category/comics/feed/ XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:01, Tuesday, 23 April
https://www.loomio.com/blog/feed/ XML 12:28, Tuesday, 23 April 13:14, Tuesday, 23 April
https://www.newstatesman.com/feeds/blogs/laurie-penny.rss XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:02, Tuesday, 23 April
https://www.patreon.com/graveyardgreg/posts/comic.rss XML 12:14, Tuesday, 23 April 13:01, Tuesday, 23 April
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/rss/property-for-sale/find.html?locationIdentifier=REGION^876&maxPrice=240000&minBedrooms=2&displayPropertyType=houses&oldDisplayPropertyType=houses&primaryDisplayPropertyType=houses&oldPrimaryDisplayPropertyType=houses&numberOfPropertiesPerPage=24 XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:04, Tuesday, 23 April
Humble Bundle Blog XML 12:14, Tuesday, 23 April 13:01, Tuesday, 23 April
I, Cringely XML 12:14, Tuesday, 23 April 13:02, Tuesday, 23 April
Irregular Webcomic! XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:02, Tuesday, 23 April
Joel on Software XML 12:28, Tuesday, 23 April 13:14, Tuesday, 23 April
Judith Proctor's Journal XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:01, Tuesday, 23 April
Krebs on Security XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:02, Tuesday, 23 April
Lambda the Ultimate - Programming Languages Weblog XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:01, Tuesday, 23 April
Looking For Group XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:05, Tuesday, 23 April
LWN.net XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:02, Tuesday, 23 April
Mimi and Eunice XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:06, Tuesday, 23 April
Neil Gaiman's Journal XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:01, Tuesday, 23 April
Nina Paley XML 12:14, Tuesday, 23 April 13:01, Tuesday, 23 April
O Abnormal – Scifi/Fantasy Artist XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:06, Tuesday, 23 April
Oglaf! -- Comics. Often dirty. XML 12:14, Tuesday, 23 April 13:02, Tuesday, 23 April
Oh Joy Sex Toy XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:05, Tuesday, 23 April
Order of the Stick XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:05, Tuesday, 23 April
Original Fiction Archives - Reactor XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:03, Tuesday, 23 April
OSnews XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:06, Tuesday, 23 April
Past Events XML 12:14, Tuesday, 23 April 13:02, Tuesday, 23 April
Paul Graham: Unofficial RSS Feed XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:06, Tuesday, 23 April
Penny Arcade XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:03, Tuesday, 23 April
Penny Red XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:06, Tuesday, 23 April
PHD Comics XML 12:42, Tuesday, 23 April 13:31, Tuesday, 23 April
Phil's blog XML 12:14, Tuesday, 23 April 13:02, Tuesday, 23 April
Planet Debian XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:06, Tuesday, 23 April
Planet GNU XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:02, Tuesday, 23 April
Planet Lisp XML 12:42, Tuesday, 23 April 13:31, Tuesday, 23 April
Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:01, Tuesday, 23 April
PS238 by Aaron Williams XML 12:14, Tuesday, 23 April 13:02, Tuesday, 23 April
QC RSS XML 12:14, Tuesday, 23 April 13:01, Tuesday, 23 April
Radar XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:03, Tuesday, 23 April
RevK®'s ramblings XML 12:28, Tuesday, 23 April 13:14, Tuesday, 23 April
Richard Stallman's Political Notes XML 12:42, Tuesday, 23 April 13:31, Tuesday, 23 April
Scenes From A Multiverse XML 12:14, Tuesday, 23 April 13:01, Tuesday, 23 April
Schneier on Security XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:01, Tuesday, 23 April
SCHNEWS.ORG.UK XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:05, Tuesday, 23 April
Scripting News XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:03, Tuesday, 23 April
Seth's Blog XML 12:28, Tuesday, 23 April 13:14, Tuesday, 23 April
Skin Horse XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:03, Tuesday, 23 April
Spinnerette XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:05, Tuesday, 23 April
Tales From the Riverbank XML 12:42, Tuesday, 23 April 13:31, Tuesday, 23 April
The Adventures of Dr. McNinja XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:06, Tuesday, 23 April
The Bumpycat sat on the mat XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:01, Tuesday, 23 April
The Daily WTF XML 12:28, Tuesday, 23 April 13:14, Tuesday, 23 April
The Monochrome Mob XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:02, Tuesday, 23 April
The Non-Adventures of Wonderella XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:04, Tuesday, 23 April
The Old New Thing XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:05, Tuesday, 23 April
The Open Source Grid Engine Blog XML 12:14, Tuesday, 23 April 13:01, Tuesday, 23 April
The Stranger XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:06, Tuesday, 23 April
towerhamletsalarm XML 12:28, Tuesday, 23 April 13:14, Tuesday, 23 April
Twokinds XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:03, Tuesday, 23 April
UK Indymedia Features XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:03, Tuesday, 23 April
Uploads from ne11y XML 12:28, Tuesday, 23 April 13:14, Tuesday, 23 April
Uploads from piasladic XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:04, Tuesday, 23 April
Use Sword on Monster XML 12:14, Tuesday, 23 April 13:01, Tuesday, 23 April
Wayward Sons: Legends - Sci-Fi Full Page Webcomic - Updates Daily XML 12:28, Tuesday, 23 April 13:14, Tuesday, 23 April
what if? XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:02, Tuesday, 23 April
Whatever XML 12:42, Tuesday, 23 April 13:31, Tuesday, 23 April
Whitechapel Anarchist Group XML 12:42, Tuesday, 23 April 13:31, Tuesday, 23 April
WIL WHEATON dot NET XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:05, Tuesday, 23 April
wish XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:06, Tuesday, 23 April
Writing the Bright Fantastic XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:05, Tuesday, 23 April
xkcd.com XML 12:21, Tuesday, 23 April 13:04, Tuesday, 23 April