Dr. Bruce Simpson

@bms48
140 Followers
323 Following
875 Posts
Another oldschool Internet networking person. FreeBSD developer since 2003.
"THAT WE CAN CALL THESE DELICATE CREATURES OURS BUT NOT THEIR APPETITES"
"Time to make agentic automation scalable and that is our key focus of 2026" /s
FreeBSD People Pagehttps://people.freebsd.org/~bms/
ORCiDhttps://orcid.org/0009-0002-6447-9025
@leiawelsh @linguacelta IRC is still mostly a human holdout. There does not seem to be much hostile incursion but it depends where you go, and of course sometime command-and-control for hostile botnets are found there. No end-to-end message encryption but inter-server connections are typically TLS encrypted now. FTP sites are of course dying off. I was pleasantly surprised to find old pre-Oracle Solaris docs at shrubbery.net recently.
The allegation stands that the late Marvin Minksy was directly involved with the Epstein ring on a Mountbatten-Windsor level. I cannot evaluate this proposition beyond stating it.
I kinda like it that LitePub (as opposed to parent spec ActivityPub) had deniability in places. Equally, some form of opt-in attestation would be nice. Bueller? Bueller?
I forgot to order physical bookmarks from the shopping website when buying my kitchenware. Bummer. Iain M. Banks and Uyless Black physical text en route though.
@davidgerard @timnitGebru @emilymbender @mattsheffield @pluralistic Just 7 pages into reading my physical copy of Prof. Kate Crawford's "Atlas of AI" (2021!) and she preempts much of what happened to Richard Dawkins and why. Cartesian dualism. ML hype train. Lack of embodiment. The dangers of anthropomorphizing the algorithm. Even her fellow Aussie @gregeganSF called out symbolics explicitly in his novel "Diaspora". I got the same freaky vibes reading Michael Padlipsky in my own research field.
@linguacelta I read bits of Postman on the boat to the Isle of May off the Fife coast in 2012 and birdwatching! https://www.nature.scot/enjoying-outdoors/visit-our-nature-reserves/isle-may-national-nature-reserve
Isle of May National Nature Reserve

Visit the Isle of May NNR – a haven for nesting seabirds in a spectacular setting at the mouth of the Firth of Forth.

NatureScot
@linguacelta Neil Postman already warned everyone about this stuff ages ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technopoly But it took the epic 20th century social critic Ivan Illich to propose solutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tools_for_Conviviality I didna write it, I'm just practicing synthesis, i.e. being a human dendrite in the noosphere using both my hemispheres
Technopoly - Wikipedia

@AnarchoNinaWrites https://www.private-eye.co.uk/lookalikes It's Inflatable Rachel.
https://youtu.be/JymVVMVjKx4?t=89 And don't get me started on how I refer to Starmer in public, because that's even more politically incorrect... but for true Westminster deal, Parliamentary Sauce: More Helpings of Political Invective by ex-MP Greg Knight. My dad was an avid Punch reader and snagged a copy in the 80s which of course little old me digested along with all the astronomy textbooks I could get my hands on...
Private Eye | Lookalikes

Sir, It’s so funny that this Marina Nicholson has better judgement than her sister-lookalike Rachel Reeves. Definitely, the TWO aren’t related.

@AnarchoNinaWrites Mandelson is not known as the antichrist for nothing, for a more nuanced view of UK news see Private Eye, which is still going strong, and Lord Gnome is still in charge (Ian Hislop) https://www.private-eye.co.uk/ P.S. I always spell Tony Blair's name as B-L-I-A-R. Whoopsie I pasteo-d the late Prof. Ross Anderson's cybersecurity textbook there...
Private Eye Magazine | Official Site - the UK's number one best-selling news and current affairs magazine, edited by Ian Hislop

STARMER IN DESPERATE PHOTO OP