Nick @internic@qoto.org

No-one escapes the long arm of the claw 😼

#Tigger 😽
#Bengals 🐅
#Photography 📷
#CatsOfMastodon 🐈
#JustAnotherManicMonday 💃

I'm on ABC TV in Australia momentarily to discuss US President Biden dropping out of the race for president and Vice President Harris' quest to take his place at the top of the Democratic Party ticket. https://iview.abc.net.au/video/NS1413V001S00

How do you get free code reviews from social media uses?

Step 0. Post a cute pic of your cat or doggo with the monitor in the background showing your code

Step 1. Wait till a cute pic goes viral

Step 2. The social media gurus will post code reviews

Step 3. ???

Step 4. Profit

I applaud Biden for quitting but I'm disappointed that he didn't credit @jerry for his pioneering work in this area.

Michael Collins took this photo #OTD in 1969, with Earth hanging in the background as Apollo 11’s Lunar Module Eagle rejoined Command Module Columbia.

Except for Michael Collins, every human being born on or before July 21, 1969 is in the frame of this photo!

Image: NASA

This is the official tool from Microsoft. New Recovery Tool to help with CrowdStrike issue impacting Windows endpoints. This tool is useful for IT support staff and sysadmins.
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/intune-customer-success/new-recovery-tool-to-help-with-crowdstrike-issue-impacting/ba-p/4196959

After 15+ years of hustling to publish #academic journal articles and books, a significant proportion of my work is now being sold off to #Microsoft to train #LLMs. I never consented to this, and of course when I started my career, I never predicted this.

https://www.thebookseller.com/news/academic-authors-shocked-after-taylor--francis-sells-access-to-their-research-to-microsoft-ai

That whoosh you're hearing is me rushing to sign on to whatever class action lawsuit is in the offing.

New breach: Life360 had 443k records scraped from a misconfigured API earlier this year. Impacted data included email address and for most (but not all) records, name and phone number. 97% were already in @haveibeenpwned. Read more: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/over-400-000-life360-user-phone-numbers-leaked-via-unsecured-android-api/

The CrowdStrike IT outage is a good reminder that if you don't have a disaster recovery (DR) plan in place, there will be consequences. There will be many meetings and discussions about the need for DR, but by the end of the year, it will likely be forgotten amidst the usual job cuts, new priorities, and questions about IT budgets. This cycle will continue until another IT outage strikes. I speak the truth and nothing else. If I'm wrong, correct me below. #sysadmin #IT

Not sure if food critics have to go to restaurants with other people to avoid getting spotted as a critic, or because they're avoiding "Just you tonight? How about an uncomfortable high stool at the counter made of sharp edges where the servers can elbow you out of the way to get their drink orders, you solitary troll person?"

I worry daily if, under a Trump administration, I will be targeted for my work on Jan. 6. This is a very dark and scary time. And as a journalist you are expected to be quiet about this concern, I think, by some. I love my country and I have worked so hard to contribute in a way that I believe serves people. I have no idea what the future may hold for me because of this choice. I'm also scared for my LGBTQ+ family and friends. And my immigrant friends. I'm sending all of you so much love today.

ABSOLUTELY WONDERFUL NEWS: https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/economy/bethesda-game-studios-union-ZDA3AQGAPVDD3EEPAGBC5V6XJA/

“Workers at Maryland-based Bethesda Game Studios, the company behind blockbuster games such as ‘Starfield,’ the ‘Elder Scrolls’ series and the ‘Fallout’ series, have formed a union, according to the Communications Workers of America.”

#1u #unions #TechLabor

Five years and five days ago, for the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, I published a short memoir of my time working at NASA on the Apollo program, titled "When We Landed on the Moon".

It's not the catchiest title, but it is much snazzier than the more descriptive title "How I Worked at a Desk at NASA During Apollo Writing Fortran Code and Entering Lots of Data on Punch Cards and Poring over Piles of Computer Printout".

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1080633405/

@clive @pluralistic this hit hard:

“The corporation is – as Charlie Stross has it – the "slow AI" that is slowly converting our planet to the long-prophesied grey goo (or, more prosaically, wildfire ashes and boiled oceans).”

If you have any goo.gl links on your web content, now would be a good time to expand them before they stop working next year. See https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/19/24201734/google-url-link-shortening-service-shut-down-support, via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41014089

I checked my blog and found only one, from a 2014 comment pointing to http://patmorin.tiddlyspace.com/#[[An encoding argument for multiple-choice hashing]] (a site that went defunct in late 2016 and for which that page appears not to have been archived), so that may just be dead unless @patmorin has saved it somewhere else. But at least the expanded url is more informative than the unexpanded one.

Let that be a lesson not to use url encoders. They don't save you any characters on Mastodon (all urls count the same), they hide information from readers, and they're more fragile.

Among the url expanders I tried in tracing this one, I found https://wheregoes.com to be the most useful, because it showed all the intermediate expansions, not just the final one to the "we're gone!" tiddlyspace page.

Reads https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4782740-cyber-safety-review-bill-crowdstrike-crisis/.

Thinks to himself, "Something like the FAA's aviation safety reporting system would be so useful right about now."

Looks at @adamshostack.

If major publishers restrict their data from AI usage, AI researchers will be forced to do research on AI that learns concepts from less data, which is probably better for everyone than the current "all you can eat data buffet" status quo.

The thing I hope is alarming people about today's #CrowdStrike outage is that if the company can take out that much of America's tech infrastructure by accident with a single buggy update, our adversaries can do the same on purpose with a supply-chain attack against CrowdStrike, and that one probably wouldn't be as quick to recover from. #infosec