This year I started a group at work to find other folks interested in #AdventOfCode. Partly to make myself more likely to finish, partly to share the fun, and partly to try to find a community I can raise up and leverage. This isn't the only way to find the other nerds, but it may be the most fun.
#AdventOfCode off to a good start! I don't stay up late to do them (because central time US, work and !young) but still plan to get through them this year. When work doesn't slow me down too much I do.
Just came across a thread on reddit's r/selfhosted of a newly minted admin confused and worried they could access their users' mailboxes.
Money quote:
"What is troubling me is that as a user I always assumed the content of my email messages was encrypted and hidden even to the system admin"
No wonder that people are worried about the fact that "admins can in theory read your DMs on Mastodon" when THIS is their general misunderstanding of how hosted stuff works.
I find THAT worrying.
#Listening to: #DianeBirch - In It For The Race
#bandcamp
https://dianebirch.bandcamp.com/track/in-it-for-the-race
A 1937 poster demonizing jaywalking. In the early 20th century, it became clear that the proliferation of cars was dangerous for pedestrians. In order to make city streets easier for drivers to navigate, auto companies invented the crime of "jaywalking" ("jay was slang for "fool") in order to get pedestrians out of the streets. It was successful. Soon, after streets went from being places of commerce and communication to the domain of automobiles.
@finity @RabBrucesSpider1 there's this one, but it's opt in https://botsin.space/@PleaseCaption
@acjay @finity I hope so, I've submitted a change to the codebase to add exactly that :) https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/21679
@finity @RabBrucesSpider1 it would also be cool if pictures could be edited to add it, or if people could propose Alt text
Pecan Pie
I should've included an image description... This is a picture of a perfect pecan pie on a counter with a coffee mug in the background that says "accio coffee".
I do like it here on Mastodon, but the huge influx of people from Twitter means there are far fewer image descriptions than from even a couple of weeks ago. I’d love to tell every one of them about this, but quite frankly there are so many I don’t have the patience. I’d dearly love it if apps could block posts unless an image description was added to every photo, but I suppose that’s too much to hope for. I’m feeling really excluded from so many conversations. It’s getting as bad as Twitter.
Hacking isn't like watchdogs, it's more like that montage/timelapse scene in Hackers where they're just reading code and drinking soda for hours and hours.
It can be frustrating and time-consuming and a lot of it is just research, but that's part of what makes the payoff so great.
I mention this because I recently got a #FlipperZero and I was looking at the discord communities and seeing a lot of very green folks there.
Frankly, I think one of the best things about the Flipper Zero is the fact that it makes a lot of these protocols more accesible to new #Hackers and #Makers than ever before! So it's a bit disheartening to also see how many people are there looking at it as more of a 'prank' device or a gimmick to impress their friends and who seem to have no interest in actually learning anything.
Don't get me wrong, there's a LOT to learn when it comes to a device like this. I don't expect a newcomer to jump in headfirst and start programming firmware, soldering up new modules, and generating bruteforce playlists in python. I'd be happy if people were just _curious_ about some of the things they were playing around with on the flipper and picked one or two of those things to look at.
The flipper, brilliantly, stores (almost?) all the captured data in various text formats, so newcomers can capture their tap card and then see the raw data in a text file that they can easily edit and experiment with sans coding.
Luckily, I can see that even amongst this demographic that there are people who have started to dive deeper. What may have started as a desire for a shiny gadget to chase tiktok prestige is turning some of these youngsters towards the dark arts, and I think that is absolutely a new positive.
Hacking _is_ a montage. It's hours, days, months of research. It's trial and error, educated guesses, and experiments. Hacking isn't a tour, it's unguided exploration.
Sure, it can be frustrating and time-consuming, I don't think we'd want it any other way.
My sysadminnery stretches into my personal life too where I do it recreationally, so hold that against me if I ever sound well-balanced or reasonable. Spent a lot of time in Linux land, Debian by preference, but I'm BSD-curious.
I like making food and mixing drinks, brewing coffee, getting around the city by bicycle - I ride a heavily modified Brompton folder - and getting very into movies.
Spent most of my life disliking myself a bunch and I've been working hard lately to fix that.
2/2
Computer science guy, electrical engineer, US Air Force officer, jogger, likes teaching programming, aka KC0BFV.
Likes programming in: Rust, Python, JavaScript, C
Reluctantly uses: Roku's BrightScript, C++, anything