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Text of the page (random words):
ariadne s space ariadne s space pulling at the threads of complexity home archive about humanity has built the records of fate by accident 2026 09 01 chrono cross was one of my favorite games from my childhood in it the protagonist serge travels between two dimensions that resulted from a fracture in the timeline this essay isn t about serge however it s about the ordinary people who inhabit el nido the archipelago where the story takes place on the el nido archipelago people consult mysterious devices known as the records of fate these devices are spread throughout the islands of the archipelago and people routinely visit them for guidance about their lives why i am looking for jellycat alternatives now 2026 03 28 many readers of my blog will note that i used to be quite enthusiastic about jellycat stuffed animals especially their bashful series but i haven t talked much about them lately outside of being well designed they also supported small business the overwhelming majority of my collection has been purchased from independently run stores including one run by a close friend of mine in downtown seattle unfortunately in the past few years jellycat have pursued a brand elevation strategy their words not mine incrementally dropping small businesses from their network in favor of large chains and directing people to their website instead why leaders often disappoint us 2026 01 22 there s an old saying about not meeting your heroes in practice leaders tend to confirm this over time this is true across domains and it s rarely a single gaffe that does it the interesting question is why the disappointment usually takes the same shape disappointment does not always show up in the form of a bad conversation often there isn t any conversation at all at least not in the way people imagine one vm overcommit_memory 2 is always the right setting for servers 2025 12 16 the linux kernel has a feature where you can tune the behavior of memory allocations the vm overcommit_memory sysctl when overcommit is enabled sadly this is the default the kernel will typically return a mapping when brk 2 or mmap 2 is called to increase a program s heap size regardless of whether or not memory is available sounds good right not really while overcommit is convenient for application developers it fundamentally changes the contract of memory allocation a successful allocation no longer represents an atomic acquisition of a real resource rethinking sudo with object capabilities 2025 12 12 i hate sudo with a passion it represents everything i find offensive about the modern unix security model like su it must be a suid binary to work it is monolithic everything sudo does runs as root there is no privilege separation it uses a non declarative and non hierarchical configuration format leading to forests of complex access control policies and user errors due to lack of concision it supports plugins to extend the policy engine which run directly in the privileged suid process i could go on but hopefully you get the point i want you to understand 2025 12 02 i want you to understand what it is like to be transgender during this time i want you to understand the threat to doctor patient confidentiality in june the department of justice began targeting clinics and health systems which provide treatment for gender dysphoria with subpoenas requesting personally identifying information about patients while these subpoenas currently target clinics which provide services to minors it is clear that they are testing the waters for expanding their inquiry to adult patients two weeks of wayback 2025 07 07 a poorly kept secret is that the x11 graphics stack is under maintained as resources shift towards the maintenance of wayland s graphics stack instead to some extent technical steering committees in major distributions have been watching this situation develop for the past few years with increasing concern as limited maintenance becomes a security risk bugs accumulate and already burdened distribution security teams have to carry the security maintenance load in an absence of new releases c sboms and how pkgconf can solve this problem 2025 02 08 i recently attended fosdem and saw a talk in the sbom devroom about a software engineer s attempts to build an sbom for a c project there are a number of reasons why the c ecosystem is difficult to reflect in sboms but the largest problem is that the c ecosystem is fractured across a handful of build systems gnu autotools cmake and meson are the primary build systems used by projects but there are hundreds of others in the long tail the xz utils backdoor is a symptom of a larger problem 2024 04 01 on march 29th andres freund dropped a bombshell on the oss security mailing list recent xz utils source code tarball releases made by jia tan were released with a backdoor thankfully for multiple reasons alpine was not impacted by this backdoor despite the recent source code tarball releases being published in alpine edge but what lessons do we need to learn from this incident the software supply chain is not real as a community of hackers we have built an exhaustive commons of free software released under various free licenses such as the gpl and the apache 2 most breaches actually begin in corp 2023 12 06 readers of my blog will note that while i believe rust is an excellent tool for developers to leverage when building software that there is a disconnect between the developers leveraging rust features to improve their software and many of the advocates who talk about the language which i believe is counterproductive when it comes to rust advocacy for example i see takes like these frequently which generally advocate that if only we adopted memory safe languages we would solve all security problems in computing forever writing portable arm64 assembly 2023 04 12 an unfortunate side effect of the rising popularity of apple s arm based computers is an increase in unportable assembly code which targets the 64 bit arm isa this is because developers are writing these bits of assembly code to speed up their programs when run on apple s arm based computers without considering the other 64 bit arm devices out there such as sbcs and servers running linux or bsd the good news is that it is very easy to write assembly which targets apple s computers as well as the other 64 bit arm devices running operating systems other than darwin help migrate a community from discord to something else 2023 03 07 during the height of the pandemic i set up a community using discord since then it has evolved into being one of the most active yet tight knit technical communities on discord members ranging from all around the world and from all sorts of technical and social backgrounds participate in conversations every day on a variety of topics why leave discord the current situation sounds pretty good right well as richard stallman warned proprietary services masquerading as software do not necessarily act on behalf of the user pkgconf cve 2023 24056 and disinformation 2023 01 23 readers will have noticed that two maintenance releases of pkgconf were cut over the weekend 1 9 4 and 1 8 1 respectively to address cve 2023 24056 a pkg config specific variation of the now classic billion laughs attack while fixing software defects is important a lot went wrong with how this cve was reported and the motivations behind its disclosure and for my own catharsis i want to talk about this the origin of pkgconf to hopefully explain why i am so bothered by all of this let s first understand the history of pkgconf a project i began noodling on in march 2011 building fair webs of trust by leveraging the ocap model 2022 12 02 since the beginning of the internet determining the trustworthiness of participants and published information has been a significant point of contention many systems have been proposed to solve these underlying concerns usually pertaining to specific niches and communities but these pre existing solutions are nebulous at best how can we build infrastructure for truly democratic webs of trust fairness in reputation based systems when considering the design of a reputation based system fairness must be paramount but what is fairness in this context twitter s demise is activitypub s future 2022 11 11 earlier today i deleted all of my tweets and left twitter forever while i plan on leaving a nightlight thread for a while i will eventually close my account assuming elon doesn t do it for me the past week has been an emotional rollercoaster for me as i have watched everything play out i was one of the original fediverse users when indymedia uk stood up the indy im statusnet instance at the end of 2010 the internet is broken due to structural injustice 2022 10 26 over the past few years i ve come to realize that the internet as we know it is utterly broken lately i ve also been pondering how participants in the modern internet have enabled and perpetuated harm to society at large repeatedly we have seen the independence of the commons chipped away by powerful men who wish for participants to serve their own whims while those who raise concerns with these developments are either shunned banned or doxed so you ve decided to start a free software consultancy 2022 08 10 recently a friend of mine told me that he was planning to start a free software consultancy and asked for my advice as i have an extensive background doing free software consulting for a living while i have already given him some advice on how to proceed i thought it might be nice to write a blog expanding on my answer so that others who are interested in pursuing free software consulting may benefit free software grows as a function of social utility 2022 08 05 a frequent complaint i see from users and inexperienced contributors concerning free software projects is that they are allegedly not doing enough to grow the userbase sometimes even asserting that a fork is necessary to right the course of the project are these complaints missing the point or do they have merit how do free software projects grow their userbase into thriving communities in general these complaints go something like this migrating away from wordpress 2022 08 03 astute followers of this blog might have noticed that the layout has dramatically changed this is because i migrated away from wordpress last weekend switching back to hugo after a few years this time around the blog is fully self hosted rather than depending on github pages and the deployment pipeline is reasonably secure perhaps we can call it a secure blog factory with some further work even when most people deploy static websites anymore they use a service like netlify or github pages to do it how efficient can cat 1 be 2022 07 16 there have been a few initiatives in recent years to implement a new userspace base system for linux distributions as an alternative to the gnu coreutils and busybox recently one of the authors of one of these proposed implementations made the pitch in a few irc channels that her cat implementation which was derived from openbsd s implementation was the most efficient but is it actually understanding what cat actually does at the most basic level cat takes one or more files and dumps them to stdout a silo can never provide digital autonomy to its users 2022 06 30 lately there has been a lot of discussion about various silos and their activities notably github and an up and coming alternative to tumblr called cohost i d like to talk about both to make the point that silos do not and can not elevate user freedoms by design even if they are run with the best of intentions by analyzing the behavior of both of these silos it is said that if you are not paying for a service that you are the product