Blackmoor Vituperative

“The struggle between profitless simplicity and profitable complexity is eternal in the world of software.”
— https://world.hey.com/dhh/they-re-rebuilding-the-death-star-of-complexity-4fb5d08d

I started my career in programming during heydays of Java Enterprise Edition (J2EE). This was late 90s/early 00s, and there was a rich ecosystem of enterprise vendors hawking application servers, monitoring tools, and boxes upon boxes of other fancy solutions. These tools were difficult to learn, expensive to license, and required an a…

David Heinemeier Hansson, Creator of Ruby on Rails

Interesting article about containers, cloud, etc., by the fellow who created Ruby On Rails.

Ever since Firefox 98 (I think), a popup appears every ten minutes or so, showing files that have been downloaded successfully (or not, I assume). Whether I have downloaded anything recently or not. It does not go away until I manually close it.

That is annoying. Here is how to fix it.

Go to about:config (accepting the warning along the way).

Change browser.download.alwaysOpenPanel to false.

Imagine a world where Amazon and Google and Microsoft and Apple had the combined wealth and power of Mailboxes, Etc. …

Proposal: some services must never be operated for profit. As in, if you want the license to operate, you operate as not-for-profit, with all of the oversight and regulation that entails. What kind of services?

• Hospitals
• Military
• Police
• Post Offices
• Prisons
• Roads
• Schools
• Trains

Story hook: a team of people from 2080 go back to the 1960s to attempt to prevent the end of Human civilization. How? By lobbying legislators to put civilian use of ARPANET under exclusive control of the US Post Office before Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf develop TCP/IP.

Update: In case this was unclear: if you put “Contracting Company” after any of these services, it should make NO DIFFERENCE. NONE. If you want the license to operate, you operate as not-for-profit, with all of the oversight and regulation that entails. We are at least a generation past the point where the “contractor” loophole should have been legislatively closed. Human beings are not “resources” to be squeezed dry and discarded.

The consensus among security researchers has been consistent for about 15 years: forcing password expiration based on nothing but the date makes passwords less secure.

https://www.sans.org/blog/time-for-password-expiration-to-die/

Also relevant…

Winaero has a step-by-step tutorial on how to revert Firefox (more or less) to its pre-Proton user interface. I am giving it a try. I have been using Chrome as my default browser for the past day, and I like it better than Protonic Firefox, but not as much as pre-Protonic Firefox.

If you are annoyed that you download images in Firefox and they save as “*.webp”, install this addon.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dont-accept-webp/

If Firefox has updated and now your tabs are huge and you can’ t tell which tab is open by looking at them, you can switch it back. Type “about:config” in the address bar, search for “proton“, and change the “true” values to “false“.

Fun fact! Anyone can place a copyright claim on any YouTube video you post. You can, of course, dispute that claim. Who resolves that dispute? The person who made the claim. And when they decide against you, and for themselves, YouTube will then punish you for disputing the claim.

If that seems ridiculous to you, it’s because it is.

You may find this useful: How to get back ‘exact size’ and ‘larger than’ search filters on Google Images

tl;dr version, bookmark this url:
https://www.google.com/advanced_image_search

Here are some animated GIFs I made for Cinema Insomnia.