calcifer @calcifer@hackers.town

Hello H.T

I've recently arrived from the Bauhaus, because you all have built a pretty sweet community here

I'm old, I'm all over the place, I get nerd-sniped on the regular, and I'm very enthusiastic about tech ethics

I like to fiddle with embedded stuff, particularly making stuff out of Arduino and LED pixels. I get cranky when "modern" means "we added complexity for no real reason". I think tech should aim for legibility and serve as a human enhancer; I get cranky when it's used to control or oppress or replace humans

I have no patience for stupid tech holy wars -- all hardware sucks, all software sucks, the documentation is provably incorrect, and the vendors all tell lies

I'm a dad -- so there will be dad jokes. I'm queer and polyam -- so there will occasionally be venting about that. I'm a nerd -- so there will be references and in-jokes aplenty

All the consumer NAS gear is trying really hard to sell "value add" shit like bundling a DLNA server and including a year of some weird "private cloud" reflector service

I want it to serve files from a RAID array over common protocols, and saturate a bonded pair of gigabit connections if needed. Some good power management would be nice. That's it.

I'm going to end up building my own NAS again, aren't I? Sigh.

I still don't understand log cabins. Why would you build a cabin that's tiny on one side and enormous on the other?

I keep hearing “my success wasn’t luck, I worked hard for it!” and I just wonder if people genuinely think those are mutually exclusive?

If you’re INCREDIBLY lucky, you might not need to work hard. But most people need a good bit of luck and have to work hard to take advantage of it in order to succeed at something

And bad luck can mean you work very hard but never realize success

I genuinely feel “not being aware of how luck contributes to success” is one of the primary signs of unexamined privilege

There's a whole lot of utopian fallacy in tech these days

That's the "we shouldn't do X, even though it improves things, because it does not completely solve all aspects of the problem" attitude

That's… just not how life works. Complex problems generally can't be solved by some silver bullet — some likely can't be completely solved at all! Complex problems usually have to be addressed iteratively, by making continued small improvements until the problem is adequately addressed

Comparing a proposal for a concrete improvement to a mythical "perfect solution" isn't terribly useful

Watching Pokemon with the kids, and a character does the "oh you're a fan? HERE'S A QUIZ" shit

My kids: "ugh, nice gatekeeping dude"

😍 they DO listen!

To clarify, I'm interested in whether

if sha1sum(bytes) == saved_sha1\
  and sha1sum(reverse(bytes)) == saved_sha1_r

gets me anything of value. Seems like it would, but I'm not sure.

Hey crypto nerds: I know we can fairly easily force collisions in MD5, and reasonably in SHA1.

Imagine that management has had an aneurysm and I am required use one of those for a content integrity check. How much stronger/weaker would it be to calculate two digests, one using the bytes in order and one using them in reverse order, and verify both at check time?

Would that significantly raise the complexity of forcing a collision, or not really? Why?

Spend an hour with my fingers millimeters away from razor-sharp knife edges, no problem.

Spend 5 minutes cleaning up, get two cuts from paper. Sigh.

Ooh, I found a few knives I haven't sharpened in a while. Relaxing afternoon commencing

Most people have seen the wealth distribution graphs showing the saw majority of wealth concentrated in a small portion of the population. But I think this one is even more telling

Two of my paramours are dating each other, and it looks like they're heading for a breakup. They're handling it reasonably, but they both vent to me about the situation

Which means I often see where each aren't seeing things objectively, but man do I have to tread carefully with that knowledge. The line between being supportive and meddling is tricky to navigate

It continues to bother me how we just let the right wing straight up redefine the term "fake news".

"Fake news" was coined to describe a propaganda project wherein actors (many state-controlled, but not all) created entire web sites and social media presence to create the appearance of a journalistic organization that doesn't actually exist -- that is, there is no company or NGO behind it, they're not conducting journalism, it's pure propaganda.

This is a different problem than actual media organizations publishing propaganda, either willingly or because they were duped. It's a different problem than media spinning facts or reporting falsely.

But the right immediately latched onto "fake news" as a way to say "a report I'd like to call 'not credible' without the social or legal liability of claiming it's 'false'". And we just let them do that, with no public backlash.

Maddening.

Getting real tired of people using the language of social justice to play out their own moral-superiority fantasies by making people feel bad for making the best of a bad situation

Today's example: shaming poor people for shopping at Walmart. Yes, Walmart is an awful company. But if shopping there is what it takes for someone to survive the plutocratic hellscape we live in, maybe they're not the people you should be looking down your nose at

You're not "contributing to oppression" by buying food where you can best afford to do so

I still do not understand people associating themselves for or against a brand. I have a Mac as my daily driver currently. It's a nice little machine.

I mentioned this to someone on a community video chat, and got a diatribe about how annoying Mac users are (which, in any case, rude). Curious, I asked him why.

"Every mac user I know wipes down and cleans their machine all the time"

So... you're annoyed at people for keeping their machines in good order? What a weird take.