Viewing profile — sfRattan

The use of "bug" for engineering defect (a use that predates software by around a century) shares Middle English etymology with bugbear and bugaboo, both of which relate to evil sp…

Latin in school from 6th grade onward. And a classical education with many holes and gaps that I am continually filling in.

> Migrating to small-scale local LLMs would be a significant improvement over using data centers. This shift is probably inevitable, but it will vary significantly by region depend…

> Unless your needs are simple, you can relocate somewhere to live very cheaply, and you don't have any dependents. As a human, your needs are simple[1]. With a $1M net worth, you …

> clauses against hosting your own website on residential providers If their standard residential Internet packages don't offer truly static IP addresses, then it at least makes no…

> I hate sites like Substack because they are a single point of failure that rely on partners like Stripe for any kind of financial linkage. The real choke point is one step up the…

You've left out the important qualifier I put at the outset of those three points: > If your threat model includes US state actors It was not advice for everyone, nor even most peo…

> I was worried that they could use any crime in a broad area and just force everyone to say with who they were and what they were doing In authoritarian countries, that absolutely…

In America, the defendant generally has the right not to testify against himself by remaining silent, both in court and when questioned by agents of the state out of court. Not a r…

Yeah, but the way HN works is leagues ahead of other, similar platforms. And the top voted comment of a subthread (at that moment) being flagged is its own interesting signal about…

> U.S. law though is highly non-autistic and what you were trying to do is just as important as what you superficially did. Love this way of putting it. Stealing for future convers…

> They asked for the pin, maybe they should have said "not the duress pin" This is a Mickey Mouse distinction no court will take seriously. > Wiping a device I own is extreme? When…

Double check your nose. 18 U.S. Code § 1001 [1] [1]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1001

18 U.S. Code § 1001 [1] [1]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1001

Edit for the confused and misinformed: 18 USC 1001. Also, is ≠ ought. Lying to a federal officer is a crime, IIRC, and if the lie results in destruction of evidence, the person who…

Ultimately, when you choose to enter a duress PIN that will wipe your device, you have to recognize that choice may have legal consequences. I don't like the amount of power our go…

The Multi-account containers extension does sync via Firefox sync, but you have to go into the extension's settings in each browser and manually enable it. Annoying, and took me a …

Steam Store page for the Backyard Sports franchise, with links to the new/reboot game and the patched/updated classics: https://store.steampowered.com/franchise/backyardsports

Long term, I think we need computer age fables . As in: stories children can listen to and read growing up to acquire effective instincts about computers and the digital, networked…

The attitute expressed in the quote, "until mothers no longer are forced to have 'the talk' when their daughters get their first mobile phone," is both wrong in its assumptions and…

The stories still passed down and translated into other languages two thousand years from now will be the answer. I think Sherman's memoirs could become something like the Iliad. T…

It wasn't just fax machines. Throughout the Eastern bloc, typewriters were strictly controlled and registered. There's a great scene in The Lives of Others [1], a German movie abou…

Sylve, proxmox, and TrueNAS are all tools focused on: virtualization, containers, storage, and clusters. I've not used webmin, but it looks like a broader focus. Something like a k…

Another proxmox-esque project I've been watching is Sylve , a control plane for FreeBSD that provides a web interface to jails, bhyve VMs, and containers [1]. It's new-ish, but it …

Germany uses mixed-member proportional representation. You cast two votes in each federal election: one vote for a registered political party at the federal level and one vote for …