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• Post #4390461

  To the folks who keep defending themselves “an LLM did the output but I for sure read and verified it!” Breathe. Calm. And here’s why maybe - For years, pre LLM, it was common for security teams to pass around generated “findings” against vendors that nobody validated, and probably nobody read. Tooling promising to keep the c-level folks out of congressional inquiries were purchased and used to email these 100-page pdfs full of “findings” to a vendor. Mostly theater, imo. Nobody seemed to bat...

• Post #4232718

  Hey if any of you use xdotool, I’d love to hear it - and what you do with it ❤️

• Post #4232717

  "Supporting Wayland isn't a one-off feature. Every compositor update, every new distribution release, every configuration change adds to the testing matrix. The thousands of permutations we described aren't a historical problem; they're an ongoing reality that demands permanent engineering commitment." Avalonia did the math on Wayland support and the numbers weren't good, lol... best of luck to us all. <3 https://avaloniaui.net/blog/brin...

• Post #4232716

  Did a hike around Mt Charleston near Las Vegas and the views did not disappoint.

• Post #4232715

  Oh fun. Went to record audio today and I can't get macOS's voice isolation microphone mode to stop clipping out what it thinks is noise. Both "Standard" and "Voice Isolation" modes record identical sounds. Computers are lovely. It seems to work fine(?) with the built-in laptop mic, but not my lapel mic. I don't think the lapel mic has noise isolation like this, so I have no idea what's going on.

• Post #4232714

  RE: https://infosec.exchange/@Linux_in_a_Bit/115981024856898565 If a user has a bad time, it’s a bug. :)

• Post #4229422

  Sometimes there are other dangers for cyclists besides cars… #BikeTooter

• Post #4003638

  y'all I don't get it. The unlimited hype of LLMs and yet, the marketed "wins" are soooo boring. "It found a security vuln!" ... did it also fix it? no? "I used it to fix a bug in curl and send a patch!" why are you using *any* dependencies at all? Isn't this text generation machine capable of just whole-cloth writing exactly what you want? "I ported my large project from Zig to Rust for memory safety!" !??!?! why does your llm generate memo...

• Post #3978622

  Apple's Keynote has a certain feel to it that keeps me using it. Animations, styling, etc just kinda works without me screaming at it. Every so often I'll check out the state of OpenOffice's Impress and turn away quickly... it always feels stuck far behind what I need. It's 2026. What's a nice slideshow/presentation tool? I don't mean "static site generated by markdown" I mean something that can do motion well, styling relatively cleanly, etc.

• Post #3778714

  It’s still baffling to me that Helm got as popular as it has… like, using text templating tools to generate a structured, whitespace-sensitive format?! Why did we do this to ourselves?! Sysadmin-me of 2002-2012 would be absolutely livid. We templated weird formats that had little formal structure and zero tooling… past-me absolutely craved a structured syntax that had support across every language!! So most languages have yaml or at least json (which is valid yaml) support… it’s universal. An...

• Post #3752839

  I tried to create a github fine-grained access token to fetch things from github packages, and after staring at the page for 10 minutes, I gave up. Took 5 seconds to make a “classic” token. I don’t know who the fine-grained ones are for, but uhh… it wasn’t me

• Post #3719123

  lol FedEx guy looked at me in my own driveway and then placed a "We missed you" tag on my mailbox and drove away. Never even made an attempt. Guess we didn't need those diabetes supplies.

• Post #3560002

  Two years ago, a Wayland protocol discussion happened in service of password managers. The KeePassXC folks were involved It could’ve been good! Discussion died a few months later… perhaps from exhaustion with the process. Well, two weeks ago KeePassXC landed Wayland support, but it uses the same old techniques as X11 - sending literal keystroke sequences - instead of a better-but-does-not-exist interface. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/work_items/184 https://github...

• Post #2527231

  I’ve got a big script now that generates cloud-config files for various distributions and it doesn’t spark joy. The only reason I have this script is that cloud-config is just yaml and not code - there’s no conditionals. now I’m thinking I should just rewrite it in mgmtconfig, and have cloud-init just install mgmt and run the setup from there…

• Post #2443116

  uhhh this one wget invocation is certainly having a time on my upgrade-broke-everything workstation.

• Post #2443115

  "As a Wayland-native desktop environment built in Rust, COSMIC eliminates vulnerabilities like keylogging and input spoofing" maaan what a claim. Guess I need to extend my wayland keylogger to work on COSMIC, too.

• Post #2443114

  Ok I got Fedora 44's LiveCD installer going and it recognized an existing Fedora 44 installation (which it didn't know was broken) -- and it offered to do a reinstall while keeping /home in-tact.

• Post #2443112

  Fedora COSMIC doesn't ship with a input method available -- does anyone outside of EU/US use this environment? Feels wild to not have that.

• Post #2443111

  Good news! Fedora 44 COSMIC successfully suspends and resumes *AND* wifi also comes back online. Bad news! COSMIC's top and bottom taskbar stuff crashed(?) and did not return. I hope they're having a good time wherever they went.

• Post #2443109

  Matrix trying to convince me to care about whatever cryptographic blob it uses to identify me. The reality is, just like with PGP, that I'll create a new account at the first sign I've lost the blob.

• Post #2050678

  Fun! A fresh install of Debian 13 gets stuck in a boot loop on qemu. Debian 12 works fine, as does Fedora and Ubuntu. Best part is there's no error message, it just reboot loops forever. Looks like the solution is to add OVMF (UEFI firmware?) to the qemu flags: -pflash /usr/share/OVMF/OVMF_CODE.fd

• Post #2050677

  fucking lol. Calling a health provider and their "AI agent" said "Transferring you to the billing department" and it transferred me to a pediatric doctor's office instead. The lady on the phone "Was it AI? Yeah.. I'll transfer you to the billing department"

• Post #2050675

  I thought debian's boot loop was wierd, but check ArchLinux's grub behavior?! It renders *very slowly* as it draws the main boot menu. If I turn off the video/graphics stuff, it boots almost instantly in the console... amazing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eIn_CWx2uI

• Post #2050674

  Still wild to me that teams that were screaming for extra headcount for years “but we don’t have budget for that” and suddenly receiving significant budget for AI subscriptions…

• Post #2050673

  xdotool is sometimes used for games. Today I found a bunch of scripts for small tasks in games: Secret of Evermore (snes!), Club Penguin, Minecraft, Uncharted Waters Online, and Cookie Clicker. If I ever pick up Magicka again, I'll probably write some tooling to make spellcasting sequences into hotkeys.

• Post #2050672

  Love the simplicity of just slapping "async" on a function definition and then suddenly you have to replace 80% of your dependencies with an entirely different set because most of your deps don't work with async. Love this. I love that we keep not learning this lesson, either. Didn't learn it with libev, Ruby EventMachine, etc, and we aren't gonna learn it with Rust.

• Post #2050671

  Ruby's OpenURI is a really weird API... Some odd callbacks passed as parameters, but also a final callback block that's passed an 'io' object... which seems fine, except it blocks while writing the entire http body to a temporary file before letting you read it... :(

• Post #1959951

  RE: https://hachyderm.io/@whack/116514364641541348 Blogged about the crash-boot loop problem. I kinda want to know why Debian 13 crashes this way, but also, I kinda don't want to go down that rabbit hole of UEFI madness. https://www.semicomplete.com/blog/qemu-debian-13-boot-loop/

• Post #1015088

  Ok so IBus and fcitx are well-established input method projects. Gnome even defaults to using IBus and I’m not sure it would even run without it. IBus does fun stuff like letting you type emojis (super+period, type an emoji name, etc) but also lets folks type non-Latin languages, like CJK and other stuff… It’s been around a while. And yet, after ~18 years, Wayland still has no standard mechanism for it. There’s like 3 different protocols - all incompatible and incomplete - for implementing an...

• Post #1015086

  @whot libei question - I have some confusion -- If somehow libei gives me a physical pointer device, and those devices take motion coordinates in mm, how am I to determine the region size if a physical device doesn't have region information (per docs on ei_device_get_region) ? And is the mm unit relative to the physical device itself (the touchpad size, etc) or is it relative to the display/output ? Do I not need to worry about physical devices?