I occasionally revisit this wonderful shell scripting bible. On a whim, I checked the home page and it says something along the lines of “having taken up farming”.

Sardonic, maybe. I thought I had 12 (or 13) followers on GitHub but apparently it’s 10. Two (or three) must have betrayed me. Seriously though; I’m considering a bit of CSS to hide the distracting metrics.

I was helping someone out recently. This social protocol table is informative and perhaps there are more in the making.

Thinking back now, the design here is somewhat tongue in cheek. Hopefully it inspires not, anyone who stumbles thereupon.

There’s a smart aleck quip I can write here about economics but I don’t remember what it was.

I read a nice rant article yesterday. The video sources were also fun. Perhaps the greatest demonstration of marketing genius (maybe it’s serendipitous), is setting up the classic us versus them (catnip), but on generalizations that are stealthily ambiguous (intelligence, consciousness, reasoning, and thinking).

It’s somewhat out of context, but Dijkstra (a computer scientist) practiced a very exceptional and very brief kind of philosophizing.

I just heard about the Microsoft Recall program. What a strange name? I’m used to hearing “recall” in relation to product defects as in “A company issues recall program on product B”.

Someone asked if they were recalling PCs (the title speed–reads that way). I’m in a cave on Windows news.

I take it that Zeitgeist was a bit too early? The sadly unsurprising (or surprising) part is that by consensus, a recall program is something that most would probably consent to.

I recovered some junked DLINK DIR 615 I1s a while back. These routers were soft bricked (on-and-off remote access). A peek online hinted at a built-in recovery/safe mode.

That failed in modern browsers. The suggestions here didn’t work either. Why? Who knows? They were made in 2012 and discontinued 2017. Using the “recreate the developer’s environment” trick, a 2012 browser (Opera) revived the custom firmware updater! Now they work again. The end.

Default firmware: https://tsd.dlink.com.tw/

A global single point of failure event happened recently. I’d bet there’s more concern around the gambling potential of this stock. Apologies, I’ve lost my naivete.

Dumping Windows for Linux and/or macOS wouldn’t have prevented this one. In fact, under similar circumstances, the stock, I mean software that crashed everything would’ve caused Linux and macOS (userspace) systems to panic/brick too.

If you need zero trust compliance then start here. This is not a product endorsement. I failed marketing. You shouldn’t trust anything you’ve just read.

I’m not online often. Media that repost old news do good work anew. Apparently there was a protest against Reddit over its API. Now it’s a public company.

Reddit’s CEO probably knows more about its users than the users know about themselves. A shrewd company (with good marketing) is an elegant government.

It’s amazing, the last time I lurked Reddit was for neophyte notes on Guix. Since then I’ve went back to long form blogging/note-taking offline.

Hmm, maybe I’m a bit of a simpleton. The other day, while researching Facebook’s/Meta’s open graph protocol and metadata, I had a rare bout of curiosity and clicked on the discussion section.

Is the public group page just full of bots advertising to each other? Interesting.

Discussing strategies for detecting AI agents and crawlers has its apocalyptic comedy. How many humans are bots, and bots humans? If captchas are unsolvable and work unprovable, then you are a bot. But guess what? I’m not smart enough to play captcha!

So I’m a bot (that’s a joke) and technology works in unwitting ways. The web wants smart humanoids not dumb humans — it’s robots.txt not humans.txt, silly.

Related; a developer creates an AI friend. You are impressed and buy the thousand dollar one time licence. Your developer friend chats with you from the comfort of a phone with automated assistance. I can’t believe it’s not AI?

Remember deep linking? That is, if you’ve ever done computing/science history. Deep linking was a nefarious act and for ultra brief periods (in some places) making a link (like this) was link stealing.

Basically, homepage links were a–ok, but deep links were bad, really bad, because customers skipped the front and arrived at the exact (product) page. Businesses died overnight (the hypo theory).

Deep linking is smartphone marketing lingo now and very much desired. My hunch is that something analogous to taking a screen shot will be the modern equivalent of that unworkable controversy.