Blackmoor Vituperative

This is not the future I expected.

The air is cleaner and the sea level isn’t as high as some science fiction authors predicted. Other than that, the real world has gotten much worse much faster than this science fiction obsessed kid ever expected. Rivers drying up, corporations owning lifetime copyright on our cultural heritage, nonstop wars, a major political party turning into a death cult, more wealth in fewer hands than ever before, and the looming threat of AI making most of us useless and disposable to the corporations that actually own this world.

And the sea level is still rising.

But the air really is cleaner than it was when I was a kid. That’s pretty nice.

This is pretty interesting. It had not occurred to me to use node.js to automate containerization. Neat stuff.

Personally, I am more interested in Golang and Rust, but this is a good thing to have in one’s toolbox.

https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1240084/Efficiently-Dockerize-Platform-Agnostic-apps-with

“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.

If you are a Windows user looking for a replacement or alternative for Iobit Uninstaller (which has become little more than a vector for trojans), give Bulk Crap Uninstaller a try.

https://www.bcuninstaller.com/

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…

I looked for ages before I found this advice, so I am preserving it here. Credit goes to Keyboard Playing for the original post, though.

In LibreOffice Writer, you can replace \s+(\r?(\n|$)) with $1 to remove all trailing spaces. A single execution should be efficient this time.

The regular expression (aka “regex”) can be decomposed this way:

\s+ matches one or more whitespaces;
(\r?(\n|$)) matches a carriage return (\r?\n) or the end of a paragraph (\r?$) ; \r? is there only to be compatible with Windows carriage return format;
$1 is the first captured group ((\r?(\n|$))) as it was found in the text (we put back what was found).

I find this interesting. Go has been on my short list of “next things to play with” for a little while, but I am adding Rust above it.

A recent post on the AWS Open Source blog announced that AWS “is investing in the sustainability of Rust, a language we believe should be used to build sustainable and secure solutions.”

It was written by the chair of the Rust foundation (and leader of AWS’s Rust team) with a Principal Engineer at AWS, and reminds us that Rust “combines the performance and resource efficiency of systems programming languages like C with the memory safety of languages like Java.”

But there’s another reason they’re promoting Rust:

https://developers.slashdot.org/story/22/02/20/0143226/is-it-more-energy-efficient-to-program-in-rust

Fun with voice recognition…

I asked Google to play “Hello, it’s me” by Todd Rundgren, on YouTube, on my downstairs speakers. It played some weird song I had never heard before, but I liked it. Then it played another song I had never heard before, and I liked that one, too. The third one, too! (I have linked to that one below. I have since learned that it was a huge hit everywhere other than the USA.)

That was the first song I looked up as it was playing. After that, I just let it play for a while. Then I noticed there was a theme. Five or six sings songs in a row (at least) seemed to be about robots in a children’s amusement park, and they all seemed kind of sinister…

We’re not so scary if you see us in the daylight
You’ll be so happy just as long as you survive the night

“Survive The Night” — “Five Nights At Freddy’s”

I looked up a few of those songs, and they are all from a game called “Friday Night At Freddies”. I’ve heard of the game, but I’ve never played it or heard any of the songs from it. From what I have heard so far, it has a killer soundtrack.