(date: 2025-04-03 14:09:04)
date: 2025-04-03, from: Geoffrey Hunntley’s blog
Why did I do this? I have no idea, honest, but it now exists. It has been over 10 years since I last had to use the Win32 API, and part of me was slightly curious about how the Win32 interop works with Rust.
Anywhoooo, below you'll find
date: 2025-04-03, updated: 2025-04-03, from: Daring Fireball
date: 2025-04-03, updated: 2025-04-03, from: Daring Fireball
date: 2025-04-03, updated: 2025-04-03, from: Daring Fireball
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/03/trump-tariffs-live-updates-stock-market-trade-war.html
date: 2025-04-03, updated: 2025-04-03, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/25/04/it-is-all-just-so-very-very-stupid
date: 2025-04-03, from: David Rosenthal’s blog
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the company would be “launching unsupervised Full Self-Driving as a paid service” in Austin in June.Outside China, Waymo is the only company currently offering a fully autonomous paid taxi service. To do it they need staffed depots for charging and cleaning, and a staff of remote drivers for when the cars get into trouble. June is ten weeks away, so Tesla should be leasing depot space, and hiring and training staff. Is it?
Model 2 Redwood’s price will start at just $19,999,Does anyone remember his announcement of a ship date and a price for the Cybertruck? Does anyone remember Tesla announced then cancelled the Model 2 last year? And given the collapse in used Tesla prices, at $20K it will compete with the Model 3.
Expected to launch in early 2025, the Model Y Opal retains the same exterior dimensions but focuses on maximizing interior space and improving range.A refresh of Tesla’s model lineup is long overdue. They have actually refreshed one of the five this year.
SpaceX founder Elon Musk said Saturday its massive Starship rocket would leave for Mars at the end of 2026 with Tesla humanoid robot Optimus onboard, adding that human landings could follow “as soon as 2029.”Given that Starship needs a major redesign after two successive failures rained flaming debris on Caribbean islands and disrupted flights across the Eatern US, reporters might take note of Eric Berger’s skepticism:
Although there will no doubt be pressure from SpaceX leadership to rapidly move forward, there appears to be a debilitating design flaw in the upgraded version of Starship. It will be important to understand and address this. Another launch before this summer seems unlikely. A third consecutive catastrophic failure would be really, really bad.
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Automotive revenue fell 8% to $19.8 billion from $21.56 billion in the same quarter last year, and of that, $692 million came from regulatory credits.4% of revenue doesn’t sound like much, but it goes straight to the bottom line. A better way to think of it is that carbon credits are 30% of Tesla’s net income. Tesla can only claim a credit after it sells a car, something that has recently become more difficult. Unsold cars don’t just represent tied-up capital, they also represent unclaimed carbon credits. Dean Blundell’s thread reports that:
The Canadian government is probing Tesla for allegedly inflating EV sales to claim $43M in rebates during the final days of the iZEV program. Here’s what we know. Over a 3-day period, Tesla reported selling 8,653 cars across 4 dealerships, claiming over half of the remaining rebate funds. This surge coincided with the program’s announced suspension, raising suspicions of foul play. To put this into perspective: Tesla would have needed to sell 2 cars per minute continuously for 72 hours. Many dealerships couldn’t even process claims as Tesla reportedly consumed most of the funds. Independent dealers are now out $10M after providing rebates they expected to be reimbursed for. The Canadian Automobile Dealers Association accuses Tesla of exploiting the system, leaving others locked out. Transport Canada officials noted discrepancies, suggesting Tesla may have backdated claims or exaggerated sales figures. One Quebec location alone claimed 4,000 sales in a weekend—an implausible number given its capacity. Tesla’s actions have sparked outrage among dealers and industry groups, with calls for stricter oversight of rebate programs. The investigation continues, but questions remain about whether laws were broken or loopholes abused.See also CTV’s report Questions over rows of brand new Teslas filling random parking lots. Apparently this isn’t the only country where similar shenanigans are being investigated.
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Compare Tesla’s capital expenditure in the last six months of 2024 to its valuation of the assets that money was spent on, and $1.4bn appears to have gone astray.McCrum and Morris comment:
The sum is big enough to matter even at Tesla, and comes at a moment when attention is returning to the group’s underlying numbers, now that its fully diluted stock market valuation has crashed from $1.7tn to below $800bn.
Such anomalies can be red flags, potentially indicative of weak internal controls. Aggressive classification of operating expenses as investment can be used to artificially boost reported profits.Why might Musk be desperate to pump the stock? Will Lockett examines this question in Tesla Is So Screwed:
Just a reminder that Tesla stock is so wildly overvalued because investors have been speculating that the 4680, Cybertruck, FSD, and Cybercab would be the revolutions Musk promised and would dominate the automotive world. As such, Musk should see the fact that Tesla’s stock has only shrunk by 36% as a miracle. But, as time goes on, and Tesla abandons the 4680, Cybertruck sales continue to disappoint, and FSD and Cybercab demonstrations are either delayed or it becomes painfully obvious to everyone how abysmally perilous they are, these investors will realise they made a bad bet and pull their money out, crashing Tesla even further.Lockett looks at each of the four factors in turn:
This was meant to be a revolutionary battery with high specs and industry-crushing low prices. Tesla has sunk billions upon billions of dollars into its development, yet five years since it was announced, it has yet to meet the target specification or price. Naturally, it has slipped miles behind the curve, given that there are now battery packs that are simultaneously safer, far cheaper, and charge much faster than the 4680.
But, after a dismal year of sales, Tesla is already scaling back Cybertruck production capacity to only a few tens of thousands of units per year. This isn’t surprising, as they are terribly built, practically useless, and reports have found they are more deadly than the infamous Ford Pinto
Then there is the fact that Tesla has admitted that the current hardware installed on its cars isn’t good enough for self-driving, even though they previously stated that it was, meaning that to sell fully-fledged FSD, Tesla will have to do one of the most expensive recalls in history to retrofit new hardware into millions of cars.
On top of that, even after the Cybercab demonstration, we have yet to see a Tesla safely drive itself on public streets, even when its competitors have been achieving that for years.
According to a 2024 Tesla filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Musk has pledged 238.4 million shares “as collateral to secure certain personal indebtedness.” At the time, Musk held a total of 715.0 million shares, meaning approximately one-third were being used as collateral for personal loans.Assuming these numbers are still correct, Musk has 172.6M unpledged shares, today “worth” about $46B. At JP Morgan’s $120/share target, they would be worth about $20.7B. That’s a problem for Musk. But the 238.4M pledged shares, today worth around $64B would be worth only $28.6B, which might be a bigger problem for Musk’s lenders.
Musk currently owns around 411 million shares in Tesla, according to portfolio management service Whalewisdom, equating to a roughly 12.8 percent stake in the company.
As of writing, Tesla has at least $48.39 billion in debt.
Musk has also used his Tesla stock as collateral for SpaceX, Twitter, and Tesla loans. Before he bought Twitter, over half of his shares were collateralised; now, that figure is far, far higher. Again, let’s be generous and assume only 70% of his 12.8% stake in Tesla is collateralised in this way, with a third of these loans for Tesla. That would mean Musk has $71.68 billion in personal loans, with $23.89 billion for Tesla.
In other words, Tesla actually has $72.28 billion in debt. That is more than the company is realistically worth!Lockett means worth if it were valued as a car company, because at Toyota’s PE of 8.4 instead of Tesla’s current forward PE of 116, it would be worth $54B. Today, Tesla’s market cap is around $827B. At JP Morgan’s $120 target Tesla’s market cap would be around $386B, so the total debt would be around 19% of market cap. Tesla’s debt would be around 12.5% of market cap, so they’d be fine. But Musk would appear to owe around $72B but have around $24B of collateral pledged. Adding the $21B of unpledged shares gets to $45B, leaving a gap of $27B. Both Musk and the lenders would have a problem.
“It may be that Elon Musk decides that he’s going to take the next billion dollars he makes off Starlink and put it directly against Lisa Murkowksi. And you know what. That may happen. But I’m not giving up one minute, one opportunity to try to stand up for Alaska,” she said.
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Tesla Inc.’s sales fell for the 10th time in the last 12 months in Europe, where Elon Musk’s politicking and a changeover of the carmaker’s most important product have been major hindrances.
The company registered 16,888 new cars in February, down 40% from a year ago, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association. Tesla’s sales plunged 43% in the first two months of the year, deviating from the 31% rise in industrywide EV registrations.
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Tesla Inc.’s vehicle sales fell 13% last quarter to an almost three-year low, as the carmaker made over its most important model and dealt with international backlash against Elon Musk.
The company said Wednesday that it delivered 336,681 vehicles in the first three months of the year, its worst showing since the second quarter of 2022. Analysts on average were expecting the company to sell more than 390,000 cars and trucks, according to estimates compiled by Bloomberg.
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With Tesla’s announcement today that it recalled all Cybertrucks produced up until last month, the company confirmed that it made and delivered 46,000 Cybertrucks in the US since launching production in late 2023.Ford sells about 57K F-series trucks a month.
By comparing them to previous numbers, it means that Tesla is only going to deliver between 7,000 and 8,000 Cybertrucks in Q1 2025.
That would be significantly down from the last two quarters when Tesla is estimated to have delivered between 10,000 and 12,000 Cybertruck.
In a Wednesday note to clients, the JPMorgan group led by Ryan Brinkman lowered its forecast for Tesla’s first-quarter deliveries by 20% from 444,000 to 355,000, significantly below the consensus analyst projection of 430,000, according to FactSet.One reason Tesla’s sales are slumping is their reputation for terrible build quality. Lawerence Hodge’s Tesla’s Quality Control Is So Bad Customers Are Taking Delivery Inspections Into Their Own Hands starts:
JPMorgan’s prediction calls for Tesla’s lowest deliveries since 2022’s third quarter and an 8% decline from 2024’s first quarter
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JPMorgan’s $120 share price target for Musk’s company is the lowest on Wall Street, according to FactSet data, and it implies more than 50% downside from Tesla’s $248 ticker Wednesday.
Tesla’s build quality problems are well known; from panel gaps to crummy interiors to glass roofs that just fly off for no reason, it’s safe to say customers should be on the lookout when they purchase a brand-new Tesla.This problem has been hard to ignore since the launch of the Cybertruck 16 months ago, because there have been 8 recalls, the latest because parts have been falling off and causing a hazard for other road users. Remy Tumin reports on this:
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Instead of being up in arms about quality issues on one of the most expensive purchases most people will ever make, Tesla customers are selling ways to double check quality problems to other owners. It’s safe to say, no other automaker could ever get away with something like this.
The announcement marks one of the largest recalls for Cybertrucks in the model’s short and at times flawed history on the road. Other issues with the vaunted model have included losing drive power, its front-windshield wiper malfunctioning and an accelerator pedal getting stuck. Cybertrucks sell for about $80,000 to $100,000, depending on customization.Other car manufacturers don’t have models that average a recall every other month.
One of the Tesla Cybertruck’s headline features is its “bulletproof” windows and stainless steel body. Elon Musk has even gone as far as describing the angular, polarizing electric pickup as an “armored personnel carrier from the future.” But if the Cybertruck’s protection from Robin Hood is a major selling point for you, you should know that Tesla’s proof of its bullet resistance crumples like a hollow point under close scrutiny.
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If Teslas are as safe as people claim that they are then why does Elon Musk allways ride in a GMC Yukon?Another big problem affects all car makers. The recent activities of Musk and his co-President have made consumers reluctant to make large purchases. Mark Niquette reported that US Consumer Confidence Tumbles Again to Lowest Since Early 2021:
Consumer sentiment surveys from The Conference Board and University of Michigan have been dismal of late as households fear a resurgence in inflation from President Donald Trump’s tariffs. Companies have warned of higher prices and less demand, coinciding with economists’ forecasts that suggest a risk of stagflation and rising odds of recession.
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Tesla’s sales dropped by 41% in Germany last year compared to 2023 despite EV sales surging 27% during the year.
Despite the already bad results in 2024, Tesla’s sales were down 70% in the first two months of 2025.
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Amid this evident crisis for Tesla in Germany, we reported last week on a survey of 100,000 people by Germany’s popular T-Online publication that showed that only 3% of respondents would consider buying a Tesla vehicle.
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Musk shared a post that claimed the survey now points to “70% of people in Germany would buy a Tesla again”
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Sure enough, T Online has now reported that the survey has been manipulated by bots, with 253,000 votes coming from just two IP addresses in the US:
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CarGurus, a car-buying site, found that used Tesla prices are falling at more than double the rate of the average used car price. The Cybertruck, the controversial steel-sided pickup, fared the worst of any Tesla vehicle, with a resale value 58% less than its original price, according to CarGurus.This has three effects. It increases the motivation for owners to sell their cars, because they see them depreciating so fast, it diverts buyers who actually want a Tesla from new to used, and it forces Tesla to discount new car prices to move them off the lots, which increases the depreciation. It is a vicious cycle.
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BYD on Monday unveiled a new charging system that can deliver enough power to its cars to travel 292 miles within just five minutes, a tad longer than it takes to fill up a tank of gas. BYD Chair Wang Chuanu told Bloomberg News that the company plans to set up 4,000 charging stations, although he didn’t specify a timeline for doing so.Tesla’s Supercharger network is a big part of its product appeal, and it is vulnerable. Om Malik’s China’s EV Boom Is Bad For U.S.Tech has the dismal numbers:
The “Super e-Platform” includes flash-charging batteries, a 30,000 RPM motor, and silicon carbide power chips, according to Bloomberg. It claims that its system is the fastest of its type for mass-produced vehicles.
The first BYD models to get the five-minute charging system will be the Han L sedan and Tang L SUV, which are set to hit the market in April at prices starting at 270,000 yuan ($37,338). The company sold more than 318,000 passenger vehicles in February, up 161% year-over-year.
Cornering the market on ultra-speed EV charging would be a major boost to BYD, which is already the biggest automaker in the world’s biggest auto market. BYD also plans to equip all of its models priced above $13,688 with the “God’s Eye” software, offering assisted driving software to mass-market buyers.
In 2023, Tesla delivered 1.8 million cars, while BYD delivered 1.57 million. In 2024, Tesla delivered 1.79 million electric vehicles, while BYD sold 1.76 million. BYD is nipping on its heels, and poised to take a lead.Xiaomi is Why Apple Should Have Made a Car on Asianometry’s YouTube channel recounts the history of just one of BYD’s several competitors. Starting around 21:15 the video explains how an attempt by the US to sanction Xiaomi drove them into the EV market.
However, these numbers don’t tell the complete story. BYD reported higher revenues in the third quarter of 2024 and delivered more fully electric vehicles than Tesla in the fourth quarter. According to China Passenger Car Association data released March 4, Tesla’s wholesale sales in the Chinese market fell 49% in February compared to the same period last year, reaching 30,688 units.
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BYD sold 4.27 million cars in 2024, approaching Ford’s estimated sales for the year. China exports EVs in aggregate to the Global South rather than to the EU or US. No wonder Ford’s CEO is honest enough to admit that they are facing down the barrel of the gun.
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Xiaomi
SU-7 By S5A-0043 - Own work CC BY 4.0 |
If you had to guess what the chief executive officer of the Ford Motor Company used as his daily driver … well, no matter what you might think, you’d probably be wrong. As it turns out, Ford CEO Jim Farley has been driving around in a Chinese-made Xiaomi SU7 as of late for a little competitive research — and he sure does love it.In late 2024 Xiaomi launched an Ultra version with 1500hp and 0-100KPH in 2s, priced between $72K and $114K. Deliveries began last month. Jack Fitzgerald reports that a Xiaomi SU7 Ultra Prototype Laps the Nürburgring in 6:46.87 Minutes, the fastest time ever for a 4-door sedan:
Speaking on the Everything Electric Show podcast, Farley praised the brand-new automaker’s electric sedan. “I don’t like talking about the competition so much, but I drive a Xiaomi,” he said. “We flew one from Shanghai to Chicago, and I’ve been driving it for six months now, and I don’t want to give it up.”
A video released by the Nürburgring shows the Xiaomi prototype smashing the official lap records for production versions of four-door and electric cars. Not only is the electric sedan’s time remarkable, but the SU7 Ultra managed it while appearing to lose power around the 4:15-minute mark, as indicated by the onboard video.Not that everything is smooth sailing for Xiaomi. Reuters reports that Xiaomi will cooperate with investigation into fatal EV crash, says founder (my emphasis):
The incident on March 29 marks the first major accident involving the SU7 sedan, which Xiaomi launched in March last year and which since December has outsold Tesla’s Model 3 on a monthly basis.Note that this was the standard model SU-7 which, like Tesla, lacks lidar and the full self-driving stack. Tesla’s Fake Self-Driving has problems in China too. Fred Lambert reports that Tesla rolls back ‘Full Self-Driving’ trial in China amid new approval rules:
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A disclosure from the company earlier on Tuesday said initial information showed the car was in the Navigate on Autopilot intelligent-assisted driving mode before the accident and was moving at 116 kph (72 mph).
In a rundown of the data submitted to local police posted on a company Weibo account, Xiaomi said the autopilot system had issued a risk warning of obstacles ahead.
A driver inside the car took over and tried to slow it down, but then collided with a cement pole at a speed of 97 kph.
Tesla had to roll back its ‘Full Self-Driving’ free trial in China after a policy change brought more scrutiny to software updates for advanced driver assist systems.Jameson Dow reported that Tesla drops ‘FSD’ from name of its driver-assist tech in China:
Last month, Tesla launched a first version of its “Full Self-Driving” FSD package in China for owners with the latest “Hardware 4.0”, or “HW4”, vehicles.
The automaker made the system available through a free trial this month to try to encourage people to buy the system through an over-the-air software update.
However, Tesla halted the program this week.
Previously, the system was called “FSD Intelligent Assisted Driving” in Chinese. The new name drops “FSD” from the title, and simply calls it “Intelligent Assisted Driving.” It has also previously been called “Full Self-Driving Capability” in China.“Intelligent Assisted Driving” costs almost $8K in China, but:
Tesla has received plenty of criticism over the years for the name of its system, which, despite being called “Full Self-Driving,” does not actually allow cars to fully drive themselves. Tesla changed the name to “Full Self-Driving (Supervised)” in the US last year, to show that a driver still needs to supervise the vehicle while the system is active.
BYD recently pushed a software update giving smart driving features to all of its vehicles – for free. This is surely part of what pushed Tesla to roll out its FSD system in China in the first place.Props to China for forcing Tesla to be somewhat less misleading about Fake Self Driving. Prospects for Tesla’s eventual Robotaxi in China don’t look great, because there already are Robotaxis on the roads: China’s Baidu eyes overseas rollout as autonomous driving race heats up:
But immediately after that rollout, Tesla drivers started racking up fines for violating the law. Many roads in China are watched by CCTV cameras, and fines are automatically handed out to drivers to break the law.
It’s clear that the system still needs more knowledge about Chinese roads in general, because it kept mistaking bike lanes for right turn lanes, etc. One driver racked up 7 tickets within the span of a single drive after driving through bike lanes and crossing over solid lines. If a driver gets enough points on their license, they could even have their license suspended.
Chinese tech giant Baidu is reportedly planning to launch its robotaxi service outside of China as it looks to make inroads in the autonomous driving global market - a growing industry that other Chinese players as well as Western firms are racing towards.Waymo is in the robotaxi market, albeit with vehicles that are a lot more expensive than Baidu’s. Tesla is not in this market.
The Beijing-based company is hoping to test and deploy its Apollo Go robotaxis in places including Hong Kong, Singapore and the Middle East, according to reports from the likes of Nikkei Asia and the Wall Street Journal that cited people familiar with the matter.
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Baidu is already operating robotaxi services in multiple cities in China. It provided close to 900,000 rides in the second quarter of the year, up 26 per cent year-on-year, according to its latest earnings call. More than 7 million robotaxi rides in total had been operated as of late July.
Like Japan decades ago, China is considering trying to blunt greater U.S. tariffs and other trade barriers by offering to curb the quantity of certain goods exported to the U.S., according to advisers to the Chinese government.
Tokyo’s adoption of so-called voluntary export restraints, or VERs, to limit its auto shipments to the U.S. in the 1980s helped prevent Washington from imposing higher import duties
These restrictions didn’t prevent Toyota and Honda grabbing a big
chunk of the US market, because their cars were better. The reviews of
EVs in the Chinese market agree that comparable models are both better
and cheaper than Tesla’s, which is why their sales are dropping. It is
likely that the highly competitive Chinese market can produce EVs that
are better and more than 25% cheaper than US-made EVs.
https://blog.dshr.org/2025/04/elon-musk-threat-or-menace-part-6.html
@Ryan Gantz Bluesky feed (date: 2025-04-03, from: Ryan Gantz Bluesky feed)
starting to question whether these billionaires are looking out for me and my family
https://bsky.app/profile/sixfoot6.bsky.social/post/3llw5yhdjl226
date: 2025-04-03, from: Doc Searls (at Harvard), New Old Blog
Though it may take longer. Usually does. I say some stuff I trust will eventually prove true in Pew's Imagining the Digital Future report on being human ten years from now. Be theres. In The False Intention Economy: How AI Systems Are Replacing Human Will with Modeled Behavior, Katalin Bártfai-Walcott lays out the battlefield between the real […]
https://doc.searls.com/2025/04/03/what-happenedings/
date: 2025-04-03, updated: 2025-04-03, from: Liam Proven’s articles at the Register
<p>The latest version of Zorin OS, a popular Windows-macOS-like Ubuntu Linux remix, looks good, but there's one change that causes this vulture some concern.</p> https://go.theregister.com/i/cfa/https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/03/zorin_os_173/
date: 2025-04-03, updated: 2025-04-02, from: Bruce Schneier blog
If you’ve ever taken a computer security class, you’ve probably learned about the three legs of computer security—confidentiality, integrity, and availability—known as the CIA triad. When we talk about a system being secure, that’s what we’re referring to. All are important, but to different degrees in different contexts. In a world populated by artificial intelligence (AI) systems and artificial intelligent agents, integrity will be paramount.
What is data integrity? It’s ensuring that no one can modify data—that’s the security angle—but it’s much more than that. It encompasses accuracy, completeness, and quality of data—all over both time and space. It’s preventing accidental data loss; the “undo” button is a primitive integrity measure. It’s also making sure that data is accurate when it’s collected—that it comes from a trustworthy source, that nothing important is missing, and that it doesn’t change as it moves from format to format. The ability to restart your computer is another integrity measure…
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/04/web-3-0-requires-data-integrity.html
date: 2025-04-03, from: Liam on Linux
(Especially Haiku.)Haiku is a recreation of a late-1990s OS. News for you: in the 1990s and until then, computers didn’t do power management.
The US government had to institute a whole big programme to get companies to add power management.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Star
Aggressive power management is only a thing because silicon vendors lie to their customers. Yes, seriously.
From the mid-1970s for about 30 years, adding more transistors meant computers got faster. CPUs went from 4-bit to 8-bit to 16-bit to 32-bit, then there was a pause while they gained onboard memory management (Intel 80386/Motorola 68030 generation) then scalar execution and onboard hardware floating point (80486/68040 generation), then onboard L1 cache (Pentium), then superscalar execution and near-board L2 cache (Pentium II), then onboard L2 (Pentium III), then they ran out of ideas to spend CPU transistors on, so the transistor budget went on RAM instead, meaning we needed 64-bit CPUs to track it.
The Pentium 4 was an attempt to crank this as high as it would go by running as fast as possible and accepting a low IPC (instructions per clock). It was nicknamed the fanheater. So Intel US pivoted to Intel Israel’s low-power laptop chip with aggressive power management. Voilà, the Core and then Core 2 series.
Then, circa 2006-2007, big problem. 64-bit chips had loads of cache on board, they were superscalar, decomposing x86 instructions into micro ops, resequencing them for optimal execution with branch prediction, they had media and 3D extensions like MMX2, SSE, SSE2, they were 64-bit with lots of RAM, and there was nowhere to spend the increasing transistor budget.
Result, multicore. Duplicate everything. Tell the punters it’s twice as fast. It isn’t. Very few things are parallel.
With an SMP-aware OS, like NT or BeOS or Haiku, 2 cores make things a bit more responsive but no faster.
Then came 3 and 4 cores, and onboard GPUs, and then heterogenous cores, with "efficiency" and "performance" cores… but none of this makes your software run faster. It’s marketing.
You can’t run all the components of a modern CPU at once. It would burn itself out in seconds. Most of the chip is turned off most of the time, and there’s an onboard management core running its own OS, invisible to user code, to handle this.
Silicon vendors are selling us stuff we can’t use. If you turned it all on at once, instant self-destruction. We spend money on transistors that must spend 99% of the time turned off. It’s called "dark silicon" and it’s what we pay for.
In real life, chips stopped getting Moore’s Law speed increases 20 years ago. That’s when we stopped getting twice the performance every 18 months.
All the aggressive power management and sleep modes are to help inadequate cooling systems stop CPUs instantly incinerating themselves. Hibernation is to disguise how slowly multi-gigabyte OSes boot. You can’t see the slow boot if it doesn’t boot so often.
For 20 years the CPU and GPU vendors have been selling us transistors we can’t use. Power management is the excuse.
Update your firmware early and often. Get a nice fast SSD. Shut it down when you’re not using it: it reboots fast.
Enjoy a fast responsive OS that doesn’t try to play the Win/Lin/Mac game of "write more code to use the fancy accelerators and hope things go faster".
comments
https://liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org/94479.html
date: 2025-04-03, from: Robert Reich’s blog
Whether it’s universities, law firms, or entire countries, here are 10 basic rules for hitting back
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/how-to-deal-with-trumps-demands-for
date: 2025-04-03, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
Just five months ago, on October 19, 2024, The Economist ran a special report on America’s economy.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-2-2025-wednesday
date: 2025-04-03, from: Robert Reich’s blog
Don’t negotiate. Do this now so you’ll be negotiating from a position of power.
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/what-canada-mexico-japan-the-uk-and
date: 2025-04-02, from: James Fallows, Substack
Tariffs are like military actions. They’re ‘good’ or ‘bad’ based on specifics: Why, how, at what cost, toward what end. Donald Trump has just committed US power in a profoundly stupid way.
https://fallows.substack.com/p/launching-the-economic-version-of
date: 2025-04-02, from: Matt Haughey blog
A couple months back, I started freelancing with a new organization, helping people dealing with natural disasters. Getting access to previous work and plans was a pain at first, because I had to request access to items one by one with my personal email address. Soon after, I converted to
https://a.wholelottanothing.org/google-products-are-shit-for-meaningful-collaboration/
date: 2025-04-02, from: Dan Rather’s Steady
Democrats nationally have reason for cautious optimism
https://steady.substack.com/p/wisconsin-for-the-win
date: 2025-04-02, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-1-2025-b4f
date: 2025-04-02, updated: 2025-04-02, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/25/04/0046573-m-gessen-unmarked-vans-se
@John’s World Wide Wall Display (date: 2025-04-02, from: John’s World Wide Wall Display)
As my full time teaching moves towards the end. I wonder what other job allows you to: organise an art exhibit; video conference with someone from NASA; go for walks in the woods; write poems; learn about AI; play with paint, numbers, cardboard & a whole lot more. Half full I’d say.
https://johnjohnston.info/blog/teaching/
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2025-04-02, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
Current status
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/114270059880023724
date: 2025-04-02, updated: 2025-04-02, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/25/04/0046569-nature-poll-of-1600-us
date: 2025-04-02, updated: 2025-04-02, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/25/04/0046553-clickens-judge-paintings-
date: 2025-04-02, updated: 2025-04-02, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/25/04/0046568-lots-of-great-comments-fr
date: 2025-04-02, updated: 2025-04-02, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/25/04/0046565-timothy-snyder-the-americ
date: 2025-04-02, updated: 2025-04-02, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/25/04/0046564-an-e-bike-transformed-my-
date: 2025-04-02, updated: 2025-04-02, from: Daring Fireball
https://www.theverge.com/nintendo/638604/nintendo-switch-2-direct-news-trailers-stream
date: 2025-04-02, updated: 2025-04-02, from: Daring Fireball
date: 2025-04-02, updated: 2025-04-02, from: Daring Fireball
https://coyotetracks.org/blog/app-feel-on-mac/
date: 2025-04-02, updated: 2025-04-02, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/25/04/0046563-margaret-sullivan-on-the-
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2025-04-02, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Gambling and sports don’t mix for me. I want a version of games without the gambling. I don’t know how parents can let their kids watch games with all the gambling ads.
http://scripting.com/2025/04/02.html#a142431
date: 2025-04-02, updated: 2025-04-02, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/25/04/0046562-this-propublica-story-abo
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2025-04-02, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Cory
Booker asked the right question. “Where does the Constitution live?
On paper or in our hearts?” Every living American was raised under the
Bill of Rights. That’s different from other countries which have long
traditions of autocracies. Fascism on a mass scale will have a harder
time taking root in this country.
Joe
Rogan said what Trump is doing is wrong. He knows he has the right
to say that. Setting a fine example. It will be hard to suppress
that.
http://scripting.com/2025/04/02.html#a140506
date: 2025-04-02, from: Alex Schroeder’s Blog
At midnight, there was a surge in activity. CPU usage went up.
Load went up, too. But it stayed within reasonable bounds – less than 4 instead of the more than 80 I have seen in the past.
And the number of IP addresses blocked by fail2ban went
from 40 to 50.
I’m usually sceptical of this because the big attacks are from a far wider variety of IP numbers. In this case, however, maybe there was some probing that resulted in blocks? I don’t know. Lucky, I guess?
In any case, the site is still up. Yay for small wins.
Also, I cannot overstate how good it feel to have some Munin graphs available.
alex-bots is a setup I desribed in
2025-02-19 Bots again, cursed.
Basically a request to one of my Oddmuse wikis containing the parameter
rcidonly is an expensive endpoint: “all changes for this
single page” or “a feed for this single page”. This is something a human
would rarely access and yet it somehow the URLs landed in some dataset
for AI training, I suspect. So what I do is I’m redirecting any request
containing “rcidonly” in the query string to /nobots,
warning humans not to click on these links.
In addition to that, the filter
/etc/fail2ban/filter.d/alex-bots.conf contains this:
[Definition]
failregex = ^(www\.emacswiki\.org|communitywiki\.org|campaignwiki\.org):[0-9]+ <HOST> .*rcidonly=
And I added a section using this filter to my jail
/etc/fail2ban/jail.d/alex.conf:
[alex-bots]
enabled = true
port = http,https
logpath = %(apache_access_log)s
findtime = 3600
maxretry = 2
So if an IP number visits three URLs containing “rcidonly” in an hour, they get banned for ten minutes.
The recidive filter (a standard filter you just need to
activate) then makes sure that any IP number that got blocked three
times gets blocked for a week.
#Administration #Butlerian Jihad
2025-03-20. Ever since Drew DeVault published his blog post, more people seem to notice what’s going on: AI ingestion is killing web sites and web services.
If you think these crawlers respect
robots.txtthen you are several assumptions of good faith removed from reality. These bots crawl everything they can find,robots.txtbe damned, including expensive endpoints like git blame, every page of every git log, and every commit in every repo, and they do so using random User-Agents that overlap with end-users and come from tens of thousands of IP addresses – mostly residential, in unrelated subnets, each one making no more than one HTTP request over any time period we tried to measure – actively and maliciously adapting and blending in with end-user traffic and avoiding attempts to characterize their behavior or block their traffic. – Please stop externalizing your costs directly into my face, by Drew DeVault, for SourceHutThen, yesterday morning, KDE GitLab infrastructure was overwhelmed by another AI crawler, with IPs from an Alibaba range; this caused GitLab to be temporarily inaccessible by KDE developers. I then discovered that, one week ago, an Anime girl started appearing on the GNOME GitLab instance, as the page was loaded. It turns out that it’s the default loading page for Anubis, a proof-of-work challenger that blocks AI scrapers that are causing outages. – FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies, by Niccolò Venerandi, for LibreNews
What do SourceHut, GNOME’s GitLab, and KDE’s GitLab have in common, other than all three of them being forges? Well, it turns out all three of them have been dealing with immense amounts of traffic from “AI” scrapers, who are effectively performing DDoS attacks with such ferocity it’s bringing down the infrastructures of these major open source projects. Being open source, and thus publicly accessible, means these scrapers have unlimited access, unlike with proprietary projects. … Everything about this “AI” bubble is gross, and I can’t wait for this bubble to pop so a semblance of sanity can return to the technology world. Until the next hype train rolls into the station, of course. – FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies, by Thom Holwerda, for OSnews
2025-03-22. Ordinary sysadmins get hit as well. Here’s Sean Conner of the The Boston Diaries: He reports on Friday, March 21, 2025 that his logs show a total of 468439 requests for February 2025. The top hitter was 4.231.104.62 with 43242 requests (9%). This was from MICROSOFT-CORP-MSN-AS-BLOCK, US. But the ASN has more networks, of course. Adding them all up give 78889 (17%).
He links to the IP to ASN Mapping Service by Team Cymru. I started switching my network-lookup script to using it because it also supports IPv6. Something that I haven’t done is find the ASN and then block all the blocks belonging to the ASN. That’s where I want to be, actually.
2025-03-26. More media are picking it up, but with a strange focus on “open source”.
As it currently stands, both the rapid growth of AI-generated content overwhelming online spaces and aggressive web-crawling practices by AI firms threaten the sustainability of essential online resources. The current approach taken by some large AI companies—extracting vast amounts of data from open-source projects without clear consent or compensation—risks severely damaging the very digital ecosystem on which these AI models depend. – Open Source devs say AI crawlers dominate traffic, forcing blocks on entire countries, by Benj Edwards, for Ars Technica
@bagder recently had some numbers:
The AI bots that desperately need OSS for code training, are now slowly killing OSS by overloading every site. The curl website is now at 77TB/month, or 8GB every five minutes.
@gluejar writes:
There’s a war going on on the Internet. AI companies with billions to burn are hard at work destroying the websites of libraries, archives, non-profit organizations, and scholarly publishers, anyone who is working to make quality information universally available on the internet. – AI bots are destroying Open Access, by Eric Hellman
2025-04-02. The bots keep eating everything of value.
Since January 2024, we have seen the bandwidth used for downloading multimedia content grow by 50%. This increase is not coming from human readers, but largely from automated programs that scrape the Wikimedia Commons image catalog of openly licensed images to feed images to AI models. Our infrastructure is built to sustain sudden traffic spikes from humans during high-interest events, but the amount of traffic generated by scraper bots is unprecedented and presents growing risks and costs. – How crawlers impact the operations of the Wikimedia projects, Birgit Mueller, Chris Danis and Giuseppe Lavagetto, all for the Wikimedia Foundation
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2025-03-20-bot-defence
date: 2025-04-02, updated: 2025-04-01, from: Bruce Schneier blog
John Kelsey and I wrote a short paper for the Rossfest Festschrift: “Rational Astrologies and Security“:
There is another non-security way that designers can spend their security budget: on making their own lives easier. Many of these fall into the category of what has been called rational astrology. First identified by Randy Steve Waldman [Wal12], the term refers to something people treat as though it works, generally for social or institutional reasons, even when there’s little evidence that it works—and sometimes despite substantial evidence that it does not…
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/04/rational-astrologies-and-security.html
date: 2025-04-02, from: Robert Reich’s blog
Not including Elon Musk, because he isn’t officially in the Cabinet
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/office-hours-who-has-so-far-shown
date: 2025-04-02, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
Today Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) made history.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-1-2025
date: 2025-04-02, from: Daniel Stenberg Blog
Welcome to another curl release. Download it here. Release presentation I will do a live-streamed curl 8.13.0 release presentation on Twitch at 08:00 UTC (10:00 CEST) Numbers the 266th release12 changes48 days (total: 9,875)305 bugfixes (total: 11,786)499 commits (total: 34,782)0 new public libcurl function (total: 96)1 new curl_easy_setopt() option (total: 307)1 new curl command line … Continue reading curl 8.13.0
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/04/02/curl-8-13-0/
date: 2025-04-02, from: Tracy Durnell Blog
Information The Cyber Cleanse (The Opt-Out Project) — I like that they think I could leave Gmail/Gcal in two days, took multiple tries and customer support to set up all my custom domains, overall transition still in process a month later lol The 200+ Sites an Ice Surveillance Contractor is Monitoring (404 Media) “Big Ass […]
https://tracydurnell.com/2025/04/01/personal-security-roundup/
date: 2025-04-02, updated: 2025-04-02, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/25/04/0046567-oh-man-rest-in-peace
date: 2025-04-02, updated: 2025-04-02, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/25/04/0046566-watch-the-moment-when-cor
date: 2025-04-02, from: Jirka’s blog
I finally deleted my Mastodon account. It is for the second time. For the first time it was when many T*****r users moved to the Mastodon with all their habits and agendas. Then I deleted my original account but after some time I decided to open the new one at the {sup}1{/sup}.
http://jirka.1-2-8.net/20250402-0443_No_more_on_Mastodon
date: 2025-04-01, from: John Naughton’s online diary
Gateway to Heaven? Walking through Selwyn College the other day on my way to a conversation elsewhere with Audrey Tang (one of the most remarkable people I’ve met) I was struck by this framing of the college’s chapel as I … Continue reading
https://memex.naughtons.org/wednesday-2-april-2025/40623/
date: 2025-04-01, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-31-2025-800
date: 2025-04-01, from: Robert Reich’s blog
He and his family are reaping a fortune from his presidency — starting with cryptocurrencies
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/trumps-crypto-inc
date: 2025-04-01, updated: 2025-04-01, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/25/04/hands-off-a-day-of-action-and-protest-on-april-5
date: 2025-04-01, updated: 2025-04-01, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/25/04/0046559-a-two-part-online-trainin
date: 2025-04-01, updated: 2025-04-01, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/25/04/0046560-the-record-for-the-longes
date: 2025-04-01, updated: 2025-04-01, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/25/04/0046532-mercator-extreme-is-a-fun
date: 2025-04-01, updated: 2025-04-01, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/25/04/0046558-i-couldnt-pass-up-reading
date: 2025-04-01, updated: 2025-04-01, from: Daring Fireball
https://sixcolors.com/post/2025/04/my-unsuccessful-journey-into-netflixs-ad-tier/
date: 2025-04-01, updated: 2025-04-01, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/25/04/0046541-a-fragile-13th-century-ma
date: 2025-04-01, updated: 2025-04-01, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/25/04/0046555-no-one-is-safe-from
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2025-04-01, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
Godot 4.4 on the iPad: https://blog.la-terminal.net/godot-4-4-xogot-in-testflight/
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/114263764045526418
date: 2025-04-01, updated: 2025-04-01, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/25/04/0046557-historian-heather-cox-ric
date: 2025-04-01, updated: 2025-04-01, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/25/04/heres-what-life-was-like-before-the-affordable-care-act
date: 2025-04-01, from: Robert Reich’s blog
Friends,
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/if-you-live-in-wisconsin-or-floridas
date: 2025-04-01, updated: 2025-04-01, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/25/04/0046554-of-course-trump-will-tank
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2025-04-01, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
The chickens of sanewashing come home to roost.
http://scripting.com/2025/04/01.html#a142343
date: 2025-04-01, from: Jeff Geerling blog
Running the LAMP Stack in a Lamp Rack
<p></p>I typically don’t do anything for April Fool’s Day, but this year I thought I’d unite a bit of a meme in the homelab community with something I wanted to make a video on anyway: a lamp rack.
What’s a lamp rack? Well, you’re looking at one! It’s a floor lamp with an integrated mini rack!
I didn’t want to make a video about a floor lamp, but more on the fact you don’t need fancy racks or any new hardware at all to start a homelab.
<span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"><span>Jeff Geerling</span></span>April 1, 2025
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/running-lamp-stack-lamp-rack
date: 2025-04-01, updated: 2025-04-01, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/25/04/john-lithgow-reads-20-lessons-on-tyranny-by-timothy-snyder
date: 2025-04-01, updated: 2025-04-01, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/25/04/0046548-tressie-mcmillan-cottom-a
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2025-04-01, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
How did the music industry get through hip-hop sampling in the 80s without blowing itself up? I was paying attention to copyright issues in software at the time, we used copy protection, but we knew it didn’t work. It was just how things were done.
http://scripting.com/2025/04/01.html#a111248
date: 2025-04-01, updated: 2025-03-30, from: Bruce Schneier blog
I have heard stories of more aggressive interrogation of electronic devices at US border crossings. I know a lot about securing computers, but very little about securing phones.
Are there easy ways to delete data—files, photos, etc.—on phones so it can’t be recovered? Does resetting a phone to factory defaults erase data, or is it still recoverable? That is, does the reset erase the old encryption key, or just sever the password that access that key? When the phone is rebooted, are deleted files still available?
We need answers for both iPhones and Android phones. And it’s not just the US; the world is going to become a more dangerous place to oppose state power…
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/04/cell-phone-opsec-for-border-crossings.html
date: 2025-04-01, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
The prompt: Here’s a drawing and a profile picture. I’d like you to insert the person in the profile into the drawing, and adapt it as you see fit, but the face of the person in the profile should be in the same style as the ones around it.
I gave it a snapshot of the art from the season finale of Severance, and my profile picture from Facebook.
http://scripting.com/2025/04/01/104758.html?title=moreWeirdChatgptFun
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2025-04-01, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
The beautiful art that came with the season finale of Severance could have been drawn by ChatGPT, it’s that good, in the way that machine art is good. There’s a point of view reflected in its creations, looking into a soul that in no way exists. We’re learning about it, but it’s a moving target, evolving before our eyes, in huge steps.
http://scripting.com/2025/04/01.html#a104129
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2025-04-01, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
My server has been coughing up hairballs tonight. It coughed up a link to this piece from two years ago, when Twitter pulled the plug on their API. It knocked everything I had built on the Twitter API off the air. Every thing. Just like that. That’s what tonight was like here. It was just some of my apps, suddenly, not working. Whew.
http://scripting.com/2025/04/01.html#a103900
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2025-04-01, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
WordLand and Scripting News and a bunch of other sites/apps were off the air starting about 1AM Eastern, but mostly things seem to be working now, shortly after 6AM. It was a big scramble, I had to provision a new server on Digital Ocean.
http://scripting.com/2025/04/01.html#a101609
date: 2025-04-01, updated: 2025-04-01, from: Liam Proven’s articles at the Register
<p>A new funding effort from RISC OS Open seeks to modernize the operating system for future Arm hardware.</p> https://go.theregister.com/i/cfa/https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/01/risc_os_open_moonshots/
date: 2025-04-01, from: Robert Reich’s blog
Did you miss last night’s executive order?
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/trumps-latest-executive-orders
date: 2025-04-01, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
On April 1, 1861, Secretary of State William Henry Seward wrote an astonishing letter to President Abraham Lincoln.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-31-2025
date: 2025-04-01, updated: 2025-04-01, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/25/03/0046551-senator-cory-booker-is-ho
date: 2025-04-01, updated: 2025-04-01, from: Daring Fireball
date: 2025-04-01, from: Dan Rather’s Steady
Turns out Americans are paying attention
https://steady.substack.com/p/resistance-rises
date: 2025-04-01, from: Robert Reich’s blog
“Hands off” our health care, our schools, our Social Security, and our rights!
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/april-5-hands-off-our-healthcare
date: 2025-03-31, updated: 2025-03-31, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/25/03/0046547-if-you-need-a-distraction
date: 2025-03-31, from: John Naughton’s online diary
The Hepworth View The grounds of Churchill College, Cambridge with Barbara Hepworth’s sculpture in the foreground. Photographes last Friday afternoon during a break from the unmissable annual conference of the Bennett Institute. Quote of the Day “I felt it myself, … Continue reading
https://memex.naughtons.org/monday-1-april-2025/40614/
date: 2025-03-31, updated: 2025-03-31, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/25/03/0046546-the-united-states-disappe
date: 2025-03-31, updated: 2025-03-31, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/25/03/0046545-the-view-from-europe-cour
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2025-03-31, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
This is now a StoreKit2 Stan account.
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/114259293671897989
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2025-03-31, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
I changed the domain for Radio Free America and the Bluesky channel. It’s not a Canadian site. Maybe at some time we can have a version of the news flow from Canada. We may need it!
http://scripting.com/2025/03/31.html#a220033
date: 2025-03-31, updated: 2025-03-31, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/25/03/what-will-america-look-like-in-10-years
date: 2025-03-31, updated: 2025-03-31, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/25/03/0046544-white-house-correspondent
date: 2025-03-31, updated: 2025-03-31, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/25/03/0046537-a-thread-from-berkeley-po
date: 2025-03-31, updated: 2025-04-01, from: Daring Fireball
It’s like a consortium of sketchy pawn shops complaining to the authorities after a retailer successfully cracked down on an organized shoplifting/pickpocketing ring, and the authorities then fining the retailer for the damage to the pawnbrokers’ business fencing stolen goods — and for exposing the police as ineffective.
https://daringfireball.net/2025/03/france_merde_decision_app_tracking_transparency
date: 2025-03-31, updated: 2025-03-31, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/25/03/the-end-of-college-life
date: 2025-03-31, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-30-2025-955
date: 2025-03-31, from: Robert Reich’s blog
It’s melting down. The consequences?
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-shock-market
date: 2025-03-31, updated: 2025-03-31, from: Daring Fireball
https://9to5mac.com/2025/03/31/ios-18-4-now-available-heres-whats-new/
date: 2025-03-31, from: Matt Haughey blog
In 1996, I took my very first trip to the state of Hawaii, where I spent 5 days in Oahu to attend a wedding with my then-girlfriend (now spouse). As a kid growing up in Southern California, I remember the rich kids went to Hawaii for xmas vacations but I
https://a.wholelottanothing.org/hawaii-30-years-later/
date: 2025-03-31, updated: 2025-03-31, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/25/03/0046540-doge-plans-to-rebuild-ssa
date: 2025-03-31, updated: 2025-03-31, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/25/03/0046539-roxane-gay-and-debbie-mil
date: 2025-03-31, updated: 2025-03-31, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/25/03/0046538-the-federal-government-is
date: 2025-03-31, updated: 2025-03-31, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/25/03/0046536-from-the-center-for-third
date: 2025-03-31, updated: 2025-03-31, from: Daring Fireball
https://variety.com/2025/politics/news/whca-drops-amber-ruffin-performance-dinner-1236351795/
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2025-03-31, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
When Apple bought NeXT, it wasn’t long before we understood that it was the other way around.
http://scripting.com/2025/03/31.html#a135725
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2025-03-31, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Bluesky is today brimming with irreverance.
http://scripting.com/2025/03/31.html#a133802
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2025-03-31, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Great artists, before they die, should share their secrets, so the next generation can be even greater.
http://scripting.com/2025/03/31.html#a133352
date: 2025-03-31, from: Alex Schroeder’s Blog
When people talk about minimal laptop installs, burner phones, and the mess of US border crossings, I wonder where they habe been the last twenty years. A dude from work flew to the states to work for HP as a student, got turned back at the airport and put on a flight back. He got to make one family call, his dad called HP, they called some lawyers and by the time they go there he was already on a plane. And those were the good days, before 9/11, Homeland Security and all that.
Have you seen the forms they have you sign on the Visa Waiver program? The border agents have total discretion over you. Those are not “passenger rights” but “small mercies”. And that was long before Trump. It’s terrible fuckery now, but it wasn’t great before that. Not travelling to the states? I’ve told people at the office that I won’t be going to the states for work ever since 9/11. The last time I went happily was, uh, when The Phantom Menace came out?
I went once more when my wife wanted to go to Hawaii. Somebody there held my hand and prayed for me on a parking lot. Somebody there gave me an ad for an underground firing range. I learned how the US treated the locals. No, visiting the US was never an easy call to make. And those were the good days.
And what about boycotting the US? It is with despair that I see my employer buying more and more into Windows and Microsoft and Azure and Amazon S3. Have they not learned anything from Snowden? American IT is not to be trusted. I mean, it’s probably not be trusted anywhere, but when give a choice, there is no reason to trust the USA. The agencies can get all the information they want and hand out gag orders to prevent the well-meaning corporations from warning you. From the outside, they are just as bad as the rest of them. And they will use their power against you. And Snowden was during the good years!
And yes, Fortress Europe is not great, either. Two things being not great doesn’t make a right, though. The first step is to realise how bad the situation is, how bad the situation has been.
And now the situation really is fucked up.
If you look at the attempts at regime change in recent years, I think the lessons are obvious: It can only succeed with long, weekly mass demonstrations, in broad coalitions.
The only way out of a corrupt government that controls access to jobs, controls the institutions, controls most media is weekly protest. It takes a long time to grow. You have to be there, every time. “Pumpaj!” Keep the pressure up.
Join whatever protest is on this week.
I also think it is important to not conflate the man with the mob. Name no names! Because it’s never just one person. If it looks like one person then that person is the face man of the mob. The people that need kicking are all those that got their jobs from the mob. All these greedy incompetents whose only qualification is how far they can bend over.
Yeet them into the sun. Send them off to Mars. Whatever.
To think that Canadians or Greenlanders want to be part of the USA is about as absurd to me as Taiwanese wanting to be part of mainland China or Ukrainians wanting to be part of Russia. The only ones not getting it are the sympathisers of the dread regimes in China, in Russia – and in the USA.
2025-03-31. I keep learning new things. This is from a post about US politicians visiting Greenland.
Americans might chuckle at that idea, but such arrogance is unwarranted. We are the only ones ever to have invoked Article 5, the mutual defense obligation of the NATO treaty, after 9/11; and our European allies did respond. Per capita more Danish soldiers were killed in the Afghan war than were American soldiers … and of course defending against a Russian attack is the NATO mission. But right now the United States is supporting Russia in its war against Ukraine. No one is doing more to contain the Russian threat than Ukraine. Indeed, Ukraine is in effect fulfilling the entire NATO mission, right now, by absorbing a huge Russian attack. … Denmark meanwhile has given more than four times as much aid to Ukraine, per capita, as does the United States. … The US is is 24th in the world in the happiness rankings. Not bad. But Denmark is number two (after Finland). On a scale of 1 to 100, Freedom House ranks Denmark 97 and the US 84 on freedom — and the US will drop a great deal this year. An American is about ten times more likely to be incarcerated than a Dane. Danes have access to universal and essentially free health care; Americans spend a huge amount of money to be sick more often and to be treated worse when they are. Danes on average live four years longer than Americans. In Denmark university education is free; the average balance owed by the tens of millions of Americans who hold student debt in the US is about $40,000. Danish parents share a year of paid parental leave. In the US, one parent might get twelve weeks of unpaid leave. – The Imperialism Has no Clothes, by Timothy Snyder
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2025-03-30-visit-the-usa
date: 2025-03-31, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
Yesterday I uploaded an image of a pizza pie, in a New York pizzeria, with a couple dressed in evening clothes with a NYC cop and off-duty sanitation worker lurking in the background.
Paolo Valdemarin writes from London, “Have you tried adding more images to a prompt? From my experiments it can easily keep ‘in mind’ five different images and mix them. You can get a bunch of people sitting in the same room, with a very detailed version of the room.” He sent two examples which are somewhat embarrassing, but you’ll probably enjoy them. :-)
First, he uploaded my profile picture from Facebook. And asked ChatGPT to add me to the picture and then to “sit him next to the couple, with both of them kissing him on the cheek, and as you can see ChatGPT complied!
http://scripting.com/2025/03/31/130142.html?title=moreChatgptFun
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2025-03-31, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
There’s now a home page for Radio Free America. Once we have more feeds, the home page will be a timeline of news that can be acessed outside of Bluesky. Please subscribe now, and help spread the word. Via the dynamic OPML file that’s publicly available there can be many such pages on the open web.
http://scripting.com/2025/03/31.html#a123723
date: 2025-03-31, updated: 2025-03-30, from: Bruce Schneier blog
US National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who started the now-infamous group chat coordinating a US attack against the Yemen-based Houthis on March 15, is seemingly now suggesting that the secure messaging service Signal has security vulnerabilities.
"I didn’t see this loser in the group," Waltz told Fox News about Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, whom Waltz invited to the chat. "Whether he did it deliberately or it happened in some other technical mean, is something we’re trying to figure out."
Waltz’s implication that Goldberg may have hacked his way in was followed by a …
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/03/the-signal-chat-leak-and-the-nsa.html
date: 2025-03-31, from: Alex Schroeder’s Blog
Looking at the pictures that aren’t camellias and magnolias.
Sumpf-Dotterblume
Caltha palustris
Veilchen
Viola
Wald-Sauerklee
Oxalis axetosella
Rhododendron
Zitronatzitrone
Citrus medica var. sarcodactylis
Mauer-Zimbelkraut
Cymbalaria muralis
Persischer Ehrenpreis
Veronica persica
Moos-Phlox
Phlox subulata
Vogel-Kirsche
Prunus avium
Trauer-Weide
Salix babylonica agg.
Magnolia (could not resist)
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2025-03-31-flowers
date: 2025-03-31, from: Robert Reich’s blog
His campaign of vengeance against lawyers and law firms is chilling opposition to his regime, which is exactly what he wants.
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-big-chill-means-many-trump-opponents
date: 2025-03-31, from: Daniel Stenberg Blog
RFC 9460 describes a DNS Resource Record (RR) named HTTPS. To highlight that it is exactly this DNS record called HTTPS we speak of, we try to always call it HTTPS RR using both words next to each other. curl currently offers experimental support for HTTPS RR in git. Experimental means you need to enable … Continue reading HTTPS RR in curl
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/03/31/https-rr-in-curl/
date: 2025-03-31, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
On the Fox News Channel this morning, Director of the National Economic Council Kevin Hassett said: “President Trump has a long run vision of a golden age of America and we’re working really, really hard to get it out there in time.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-30-2025
date: 2025-03-31, from: Alex Schroeder’s Blog
It’s spring and we went there. Locarno is in the canton Ticino, in the south of Switzerland, at the shores of Lago Maggiore (“big lake”) that it shares with Italy.
They have a fantastic camellia park. In early spring, it’s the best place to be.
I tried to take pictures with my trusty Olympus EP-5 and the 30mm 1:3.5 macro lens. Sadly, I have been untrained by the phone and was confused by the settings and the tiny screen. Oh my! So this is mix of camera pictures and phone pictures.
The next day we went to see the magnolias across the lake.
#Pictures #Plants #Camellias #Locarno
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2025-03-25-camellias
date: 2025-03-31, from: Alex Schroeder’s Blog
We went to see the private botanical garden of the Eisenhut gardening center in Gabarogno, across the lake and up the hill from Locarno. They claim to have about a thousand camellia variants and about six hundred magnolia variants. As we’ve been to the camellia park yesterday, we focused on the magnolia in bloom.
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2025-03-29-magnolia-park
date: 2025-03-30, updated: 2025-03-31, from: Daring Fireball
https://vertu.com/product-category/phones/
date: 2025-03-30, updated: 2025-03-30, from: Daring Fireball
date: 2025-03-30, from: Robert Reich’s blog
And last week’s winner
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/sunday-caption-contest-ha-ha-ha
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2025-03-30, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
A
new Bluesky news feed,
Radio Free
America. It will also be on a web page as a river of news, and of
course in
dynamic
OPML so it can be reproduced in lots of places. It will be hard to
shut down, if it catches on. The idea: deliver news stories, blog posts
and podcasts from sources with ideas and facts an informed person would
want. We hope we are helping the United States respond to threats to our
freedom, well-being, the rule of law, and our country’s friendships
around the world. As the depth of what’s happening is understood across
the country, I believe we may need more flexible sources of news. We use
mature tech that’s widely deployed, well-understood. And it is
completely and utterly one hundred percent billionaire-proof. We start
out today with two feeds,
FactPost
which is the official rapid response page of the Democratic Party, and
my linkblog feed, so I can
easily test the system. The part that hooks up to Bluesky is relatively
new, so we’ll need to look at problems. As they say – still
diggin!
http://scripting.com/2025/03/30.html#a202505
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2025-03-30, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
Me looking at crash logs:
"The bugs are mysterious and important"
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/114253177712669564
date: 2025-03-30, updated: 2025-03-31, from: Daring Fireball
Perhaps Apple’s leadership simply believes, as I do, that cinema is the grandest and greatest form of art the world has ever seen — one that encompasses acting, writing, photography and/or illustration, and music — and but that great cinema is expensive and delicate and needs, from deep-pocketed studios and their deeper-pocketed corporate parents, more than patrons, but champions.
https://daringfireball.net/2025/03/the_studio
date: 2025-03-30, updated: 2025-03-30, from: Daring Fireball
https://birchtree.me/blog/this-alert-must-die/
date: 2025-03-30, from: Michael Moore’s blog
A Call to Artists and Non-Artists Everywhere!
https://www.michaelmoore.com/p/donald-trump-wants-a-new-portrait
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2025-03-30, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
How are my fellow macro data refiners coping with this gap in our souls on Thursdays?
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/114252461569079957
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2025-03-30, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
The US is being run like a TV show, with predictable results.
http://scripting.com/2025/03/30.html#a143844
date: 2025-03-30, from: Dan Rather’s Steady
A Reason To Smile
https://steady.substack.com/p/you-are-so-beautiful
I/O wait and io_uring
date: 2025-03-30, updated: 2025-03-30, from: Uninformative blog
https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-03-30/0/POSTING-en.html
date: 2025-03-30, updated: 2025-03-30, from: Liam Proven’s articles at the Register
<p>The handy GNOME extension Dash to Panel will live on, under its present maintainer, after winning financial backing from one of the distros that uses it.</p> https://go.theregister.com/i/cfa/https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/30/zorin_and_dash_to_panel/
date: 2025-03-30, from: Robert Reich’s blog
Comedy and tragedy
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/sunday-thought
date: 2025-03-30, from: Om Malik blog
These days, whenever I think about Google, I recall a line from Madame Bovary. “She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris,” Flaubert writes, capturing Emma Bovary’s provincial reality and her romanticized dreams of escape. That is Google in a nutshell, isn’t it? The company that once represented the pinnacle of …
https://om.co/2025/03/29/the-mediocrity-of-modern-google/
date: 2025-03-30, from: Stubbornella Blog
The international federation of sport climbing released its 2025 paraclimbing regulations. The document was a PDF that was in accessible to screen readers so I converted it to HTML. It is far from perfect, but should be a lot better than the PDF. For some odd reason every bit of text on the PDF was […]
https://www.stubbornella.org/2025/03/30/ifsc-competition-regulations-para-climbing-events/
date: 2025-03-30, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
I actually had things to say tonight, but slept most the day and cannot seem to wake up enough to write coherently.