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• Post #3753143

  I heard "It's just common sense" one too many times and got all ranty. https://thea.hutchings.gen.nz/2026/July/common_sense_and_the_theory_of_mind.html

• Post #3747476

  SMH people saying early 3D games were “blocky” and “angular”. How are you supposed to show off how many triangles your 3D accelerator can do if you can’t see the triangles?!

• Post #3314665

  I feel very alert right now!

• Post #2503059

  Hey lazywebs, where’s a good place to learn how people who use accessibility settings and devices on phones actually use them? I want to make sure the app I work on is as accessible as I can make it. Everything I can find says “use this and it’s accessible”, but when I try the accessibility tools the result is… well garbage. So I want to find how who people actually use these tools expect them to behave so I can properly set up the app.

• Post #2297824

  Yesterday I learned that The Chemical Brothers’ Hey Boy Hey Girl’s lyrics aren’t “hey boys, hey girls”. It’s a sample from The Roof is on Fire by Rock Master Scott & The Dynamic Three. The lyrics are “hey girls, b-boys, superstar DJs, here we go!” But that song is also the basis of the song of the same name by The Bloodhound Gang. Then I realised I remember almost all the lyrics to the rap part of that song. I don’t need to remember that! I need to remember the groceries!

• Post #2297823

  Huh, plasma arc cooktops for gas-like cooking without gas! Sounds really good for wok cooking and making every amateur radio user in a kilometres or so hate you!

• Post #1819161

  setting up a Debian VM because apparently no two linuxes are alike…

• Post #1806616

  There is a previous draft of my blog post which criticises the slop on the copy.fail website and PoC a lot more... I decided it distracted from pointing out all the problems.

• Post #1806539

  I've seen a bunch of really weird "fixes" for copy.fail with strange modprobe things. Add this line to /etc/modprobe.d/af_alg.conf or any .conf file in there you like: blacklist algif_aead I also disabled af_alg entirely because it's not useful on my machines: blacklist af_alg if `lsmod | grep af_alg` shows anything reboot, or use `rmmod` if you know how.

• Post #1787454

  It really bugged me that copy.fail only published the (very poorly) minified Python proof of concept exploit, so I unminified it https://www.thea.net.nz/~thea/unminified.py Why do I say very poorly? There are at least 5 extraneous bytes: a redundant comma and two cases of a value which is also the default parameter. That and including a shebang in a .py file is redundant. Additionally Python has a function specifically for AF_ALG sockets, which would save even more bytes. They said 732 bytes,...

• Post #1765373

  Life is like a hurricane #NowPlaying

• Post #1452252

  I keep seeing people say Mastodon is nothing like Twitter. And they’re right. Mastodon is an echo of the old internet, it’s decentralised, chaotic. What you get depends on your sysadmin. You can’t search, everything has to be shared to you by a human. Networks split apart and rejoin. What you see is your unique connection to it. Is this good? Maybe. But for me that’s the internet I grew up with. No algorithms, no targeted adverts, just human interaction, and it was glorious.