hexamander

All right. Tea goes in, testing comes out. Here we go. #workingmander

@emilymbender@dair-community.social This! So much this! I've had some good success by using the metaphor of car manuals. Say you feed an LLM manuals for multiple different makes and models of vehicle, so that it can theoretically support all vehicle maintenance needs. All the information is authoritative and well-sourced. You ask it how to do basic maintenace on a commuter car, and it gives you instructions that mix the needs of your average sedan and a heavy diesel truck. You'd do better just to read the manual for the vehicle you have.

Yesterday's work: I cleaned up the tree nursery, repotted all but the biggest two, and took a bunch of cracked pots out for disposal. I mostly use scavenged nursery pots for this project. They hold up for years after the local nursery is done with them. Between that and seed collection, my cost for this project, this year, has amounted to a little potting soil and water. I found a bonus: the pot that I thought contained one elm sapling actually contained two. I know someone who wants an elm, so I'll give it to him next we meet. #highDesertGardening #gardening

Red sunflowers are up! I thinned the watermelon seedlings to their final numbers now that they're showing growth beyond their baby leaves. Zucchini are starting to really grow. Beans too; I'm beginning to see buds. Mine are a hard bean rather than green beans, so we'll see how many I actually get from half a bed of planting. Sunchokes and green onions are going wild. Raspberries beginning to bloom. Last year's buffalo-grass experiment is showing signs of life, too - I need to pull weeds and water them, but the plugs are alive and growing in. I'll siphon the ducks' paddling tank tomorrow and use its water to feed my fruit trees. It's probably too soon to see results, but I'd swear my apricot and mulberries are showing more growth even after two weeks of duck-water fertilizer. #highDesertGardening #gardening

The beans and some of my peppers got frost-touched (the peppers AGAIN, I really must get a greenhouse operable). The peas are happy and beginning to produce. Zucchini and watermelon sprouts pulled through. Currants and grapes are slowly ripening their fruit. I got skunked on greens this year; my kale is an inch high and two separate attempts at chard have failed. Sunflowers have sprouted, so they'll help me shade the more tender plants as they grow. I'm finally out of the histamine woods, so more garden work goes on the docket! #highDesertGardening

@Lemniscate@infosec.exchange If your pet wears a collar and tags, a spare tag with your contact information on it. Mine refuses any and all collars, but I've had animals lose tags in the weirdest situations.

Thinking back to my consultant pentester days and the importance of scope. We used automated tools, spiders and scanners, trying to cover an entire web application in (usually) a very short test period. I made sure my scope was set before doing anything more than reading, but some systems (and some maintainers) treat even active scanning as a hostile action. If the tool went out of bounds, especially if it went so far out of bounds as to take hostile action against at least two out-of-scope systems, I would have been personally at risk for litigation. I also would have faced professional consequences, and rightly so. But do it with a liability laundering machine, and somehow it's fine.

Three days in a row of near-freezing overnight temperatures. Three days of 96F/36C highs, single-digit humidity, and UV all the way up. My plants are seriously sad. There's frost damage on beans and peppers, the seedlings are... confused... and the only thing happy are the heat-tolerant peas. I jury-rigged covers over everything but the peans and beans to keep the frost off tonight, and... I really gotta get the burlap up. Going to be tricky getting that to alternate with frost covers. What even is life. #highDesertGardening

@sellathechemist@mastodon.social Now I have a Daft Punk song in my head (and a small act of maintenance done).

@emilymbender@dair-community.social You know this, clearly xD but that's what's worked to communicate the concept in the circles I'm often in.

friend chat: endless unhappiness about AI work: endless pressure about AI here: endless flamewar about AI much of the internet: hopelessly overrun with useless AI slop I need to go do something with my hands this weekend.

@colo_lee@mstdn.social That looks amazing!

Searched for pallets in my town to maybe start my next build project. Results amazing, but I do not need to buy pallets by the truckload or by the hundred I'll just have to look around next time I'm in town and see if I can rustle up, you know, seven.

@Kay@mastodon.nz Me too! Have you seen that he has a Bandcamp? https://deuceofgears.bandcamp.com/

I'd be out there rebuilding the tree nursery, but 1. it's hot and 2. the wasp burrow near there is VERY active today, so we're going to wait for that to cool down in multiple senses.

Ah yes. Nothing helps with a problem nearly so much as yelling at the people trying to solve it, from the safety of your armchair. #subtooting #grumpymander

Things I love to hear in a work meeting: the Rohirrim are coming.

@tehfishman@ioc.exchange Congratulations on a nice zucchini, that is definitely not a yellow crookneck.

I got to see something pretty special the other day. My evening primrose (a test plant to see if it likes my climate; it does and I'll be planting more) was getting chewed up by something. Big semicircular pieces are missing from the edge of every petal. I sat and watched the plant for a while, and observed at least three species of bees and wasps visiting. Turns out, one of those is a leafcutter bee! Somewhere, she has a nest lined with pieces of primrose petals to protect her eggs. #highDesertGardening

Do I know any #carHackers who are looking into Scout?

@gary_alderson@infosec.exchange Is a 37% error rate low enough to make that certain? https://www.cbsnews.com/news/license-plate-readers-alpr-mistakes/

@Em0nM4stodon@infosec.exchange I worked for a place like that in 2023. No idea if that policy survived the next two years.

...also I would like a brownie, too. Think of the testers.

Question of the day: why is my pocket full of mystery dirt?

This beauty volunteered and is blooming for the first time this year. #bloomscrolling #highDesertGardening

@da_667@infosec.exchange Wow, congratulations! Sounds like a great garden.

(And that's even ignoring the "humans are animals akshully" part of it, but we're doing 101-level "is the thing you're doing getting you the result you want" here, not touching that.)

@Lemniscate@infosec.exchange Yeah, most of what I've read has been either empty hype or focused on technical detail. Which is interesting, but! I haven't seen any statements that they're not pursuing legal action. It'll be very interesting to look for fallout in the next few weeks.

@gary_alderson@infosec.exchange If you think I'm advocating for speeding, you need to go reread the post, with your eyes this time.

Got some good rain at the start of the week, and as a result I barely watered for two days straight! What a luxury. I picked a big bowl of peas. The vines have officially outgrown their supports and I need to attach higher ones to keep them from falling over and making a mess. It's a good thing ducks produce compost; with them eating my kitchen scraps, the amount of greens I'm taking out to compost has dropped to almost nothing. #highDesertGardening

But the thing that got to me was his argument that "you have to treat people like small children or animals, and create conditioning, or nothing changes." I don't think my response could have been comprehensive enough to show my abhorrence of that entire idea, so I'm going to put it here instead. What I said was "I am neither a small child nor an animal, and I do not want to be treated that way." Which ended with a goalpost move; of course it's not about ME, never mind that it affects me too, when I use the same roads. It's about those terrible drivers- Thing is, I don't think they should be treated that way either. Nor children! I don't use aversive conditioning with my animals, either, so probably I am some kind of a bleeding-heart who can just be dismissed out of hand. What I thought was "have you tried actually relating to another person in your life," but here I am being polite about it. Hopefully he's not your average surveillance advocate, or we got a rough ride ahead of us.

@veticus@infosec.exchange Oh, of course! That must be it.

Some days we point out the clown shoes and the makeup, and some days we just say Wow! You've got this many clowns? Can I see them perform?

Both gardening and Kubernetes encourage me not to get too attached to disposable containers.

I don't think the blackcurrants will bloom this year; the late frost probably took their buds out. They're going hogwild with vegetative growth. If this keeps up, next year should be a good one for fruit. #highDesertGardening

Dug up the raspberry canes that escaped the bed to give away. They're off to their new home this morning. My raspberries are starting to flower, so hopefully we'll see some fruit soon. #gardening #highDesertGardening

To me, that's completely baffling. Are shadows normally hotter than their surroundings? Then again, I live close to places where people cover parking lots in solar panels, so their shade structure can be dual-purpose. #myExperienceIsNotUniversal

Blossoms on the zucchini plants. Grapes on the vine, peppers starting to grow and curl. Heat-tolerant peas still bravely producing, but probably not for long; they'll go dormant as we break 38c /100f. Some vines won't make it. That's why I collect seed in the autumn. It's another hot day in the high desert garden, but it's really getting into the satisfying season. #highDesertGardening #gardening

It's not all dire! I'm eating walking onions and herbs, strawberries and peas. It's a good thing I do this for fun, not for subsistence. 😹

@sundogplanets@mastodon.social Delay of goat!

Also, heard fireworks while I was out there putting out the plant blankets. The hygrometer currently says 1%. Wishing every nincompoop with explosives in a tinder-dry year a Very Fucking Stop.

@chillicampari@layer8.space THANK YOU! this is one of my favorite versions of this story.

@gary_alderson@infosec.exchange Hah! So, just curious, which part of this makes it "somewhat justified?"