barefootstache @barefootstache@qoto.org

Helping a friend do something on their computer, I noticed that they didn’t have an ad blocker.

Security and privacy aside, their browsing experience was atrocious.

Impossibly, unusably dire.

Now they have an adblocker, and web pages are uncluttered? Readable? Actually usable?

What a sorry state of affairs.

Adblocking is self care and just plain sensible.

Today I learned about the Pistacci raid by the SAS in WWII. It's almost unbelievable.

https://archive.ph/2024.01.06-145751/https://www.forces.net/services/special-forces/sass-most-daring-unknown-concentration-camp-liberation-raid-revealed

The internet didn’t make us stupid. It made stupidity scalable.

The fact that we, as a society, tolerate the lies that LLMs systematically output is quite telling of how used we've become to untruth in the public sphere. We're not even complaining anymore. We take lying for granted. It's immensely sad.

finally wrote something real about what i've been building!

too many of my infra workflows were buried in slack threads, docs, or shell history

so i started working on Atuin Desktop:

- runbooks that run
- local-first, crdt-powered
- embedded terminals, db queries, monitoring blocks

more words here: https://blog.atuin.sh/atuin-desktop-runbooks-that-run/

would love to know what you think!

Four things you must always ask yourself before you say anything:

1. Does this need to be said?
2. Does this need to be said by me?
3. Does this need to be said by me now?
4. Would it be fucking funny if I did, though?

Haha, that's one way to deal with it. I'm not sure how effective it is, though.

#ai

Resist, eggheads! Universities are not as weak as they have chosen to be.
Opinion: It's time for public resistance.
https://arstechnica.com/culture/2025/04/resist-eggheads-universities-are-not-as-weak-as-they-have-chosen-to-be/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

Posts about medicinal herbs hardly ever include the side effects or any negative reactions. It's always, "drink chamomile tea to relax and sleep" and not, "15-20% of people are allergic to ragweeds, which includes chamomile, so it might give you a scratchy throat."

-Drinking mint tea regularly can cause acid reflux and exacerbate other GI issues.

-St. John's Wort calms you, and is good for depression, but it can also dangerously lower your heart rate if you take beta blockers.

-Sure, fennel is great for "digestive issues," but don't schedule a date that night, you will be very gassy.

-All members of the Poplar family, which includes Willow, contain the same chemical as modern aspirin within their bark. Don't give it to your kid if they have the flu or chicken pox, it can cause a deadly reaction.

-Rosehip helps with painful menstruation, and is a great source of vitamin C. So great, in fact, that you can overdose and give yourself kidney stones if you take too much.

-Dear white people, taking turmeric every day will literally turn you orange.

#Herbology #HedgeWitch

By the way, I still think this paragraph I wrote is a pretty good paragraph.

Friendly reminder that you should be blocking all newly registered domains for your end users. Free lists like the NRD (https://github.com/xRuffKez/NRD) exist. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint also has a built in list you can enable via policy.

IMO everyone should do 365 days but even 30 or 90 will save you so much headache.
#DNS #ThreatIntel #FastFlux

I just made this silly but accurate thing. I'm silly too and i love it, but also i'm serious in my silliness.

Get with it, Granddad! Vibe coding totally slays. Here are my lit book recommendations for bussin' vibe learning:

* The Mythical Man-Vibe
* Vibe-Driven Development: By Example
* The Art of Computer Vibing - Volumes 1-3
* Vibe Patterns: Elements of Reusable Prompts
* Continuous Vibing
* Structured Vibing
* Clean Vibes
* Vibe Complete
* Refactoring - (you're gonna' be needing it!)

Nobody should touch the EU Digital Sales taxes.

For years Europe has been colonized by US-based digital services that operated in our continent, profited from the data gathered from our citizens, and didn’t pay a dime in taxes.

France and Spain have now a 3% tax on all digital services that operate within the country and have yearly profits higher than €750 million.

Austria has a 5% levy on companies with the same yearly profit that make over €25 million a year in digital advertisements.

Italy and the UK have similar laws.

The principle is straightforward: if you make profit in my country by advertising and scooping up data of my citizens, then you have to pay a fair share of taxes in my country too.

Otherwise it’s just digital colonization operated by companies that pay little or nothing in taxes in their own country, pay no taxes in the countries where they operate, while local companies are expected to pay their higher share of taxation.

The rotten fecal matter that fills Trump’s fascist brain keeps thinking that taxation against American companies is a form of discrimination against America. When it’s clear even to a toddler that it’s not.

If the same tax is levied against all businesses that meet some simple criteria (namely, profits from digital services based on data collection and advertising), regardless of their country of origin, then it’s not discrimination. Quite the opposite - exempting only American companies from such levies would be a form of favoritism that discriminates against local companies and against other foreign competitors.

Trump’s primitive synaptic infrastructure treats taxes the same way as tariffs, ignoring that tariffs, by definition, are a political tool that specifically targets a country or an industry (to either protect the local industry or punish them for misbehaving), while taxes are financial tools to ensure a fair redistribution of the revenue that have no geopolitical aims.

Trump’s bully instincts make him believe that he can retaliate against fair taxes with tariffs unless we exempt American companies from those taxes.

We shouldn’t fall for it.

We should kindly remand the American fascist bully that you can retaliate against tariffs, but not against non-discriminatory taxes. And that he has no power over the financial decisions of independent governments on the other side of the pond.

And we must use this chance to decouple, de-riskify and boycott all American technological products we can in order to build our own ecosystem, foster our own European tech infrastructure and create tech jobs here.

Boycott Facebook. Use Mastodon or any decentralized Fediverse-based solution.

Boycott Instagram. Use Pixelfed.

Boycott AWS. Use Scaleway.

Boycott Microsoft 360. Use Nextcloud.

Boycott Whatsapp. Use Signal or Matrix.

Boycott Slack. Use Mattermost.

Boycott Reddit. Use Lemmy.

Boycott Google, and even DuckDuckGo. Use meta-search engines like Searxng. And use un-googled Android phones when possible.

Boycott all Apple products.

Boycott Amazon. Use local e-commerce portals instead.

Boycott X, Tesla, and anything touched by that sociopath called Elon Musk. Buy European, or even Chinese, electric cars instead.

Boycott American phone makers. Consider sustainable EU-based alternatives like FairPhone instead.

And the list could go on.

And urge your employer, your family and your friends to do the same.

We have so many EU-based alternatives, many of them open-source and more sustainable than the American counterparts.

We have so much talent on our continent that builds the open-source infrastructure that even American companies profit from, and if we prevent them from using those products they’ll be hurt much more than we would be hurt by giving up on their handful of commercial products managed by a couple of multi-billion dollar companies.

And we also have nuclear options like banning American companies from using chips produced down the ASML supply chain.

The only problem to be addressed is that EU institutions never put their wallet where their mouth is, and they pay peanuts to those who build those sustainable solutions - and when I mean “peanuts” I literally mean “0.1% of what the US CHIPS act has granted to Intel alone”.

We have way more leverage than redneck Trump thinks.

We should take these thug threats as an opportunity to foster our industry and kick the American technological colonizers out of our continent for good.

As long as the orange moron sits in the White House, relying on American tech is a liability that exposes us to his childish threats, not an asset.

https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/03/28/should-european-countries-reconsider-their-plans-for-big-tech-taxes-to-avoid-us-tariffs

Don't think of #AltText as a chore you have to perform.
Think of it more as an art form, like #Haiku or #Bonsai; a fine #wine or a rare #cheese that YOU can hand craft.

Weird how the jobs that AI-boosters say AI is going to replace never seems to include the management or executive class.