Robey ☠️

@robey@messydesk.social
490 Followers
161 Following
6.2K Posts

A wizard appears. He looks grumpy.

I was the guy behind eggdrop, paramiko, the sidekick ssh client, kestrel, and many smaller projects. I've been in 3 unsuccessful bands and I'm one of the 23 people who finished reading "Gravity's Rainbow". But I'm primarily known for making a dumb Fibonacci joke online in 2011.

$argon2id$v=19$m=512,t=256,p=1$uksdy+s78ZlpzoaxkGyciA$kIt70t1MNJ5auxeTAohzAMKBec73DvmFYct+o8MrQy4

#programming #retrocomputing #firmware #leftist #content

LocationSan José, California
Dispositiongay (they/he), pale, quiet, antifa
Nerd topicsdistsys, firmware, retro computing
Bloghttps://robey.lag.net/
PSA to some of y'all
@nelson i expect this from google but i've been appalled that apple does the same thing (and has for many years)

Surveillance Watch now has an interactive diagram that shows the high level of funding towards various surveillance technology types: https://www.surveillancewatch.io/?menu=funders&funderOverview=true

You can click through to explore by funder as well, example: https://www.surveillancewatch.io/?menu=funders&funder=Andreessen+Horowitz

The belly of surveillance capitalism can only be exposed by following the money to understanding who's complicit in the usage of tech for war crimes, genocides, any other grave injustices etc.

@richardelwes Many years ago I was at a maths conference. There was an initial meeting with everyone where they told us various admin things, including that the entry code for some building or other was 2143. "That'll be easy to remember," I said, "because it's the nearest integer to 22 pi^4". The person sitting next to me thought this was very strange.

((2143/22)^(1/4) is a startlingly good approximation to pi -- relative error is about 3x10^-10 -- found by Ramanujan.)

I feel like I know at least one person for each of these options...
The perfect sticker for an old macbook that doesn’t quite work right

so much depends
upon

an ethernet
cable

with its delicate
threads

and fragile
connectors

that last boost is yet another another another reminder that when you do something illegal (or even immoral!) because you were told to, the person held responsible in the end is still YOU.

there is literally no such thing as "just following orders"

there is only someone passing responsibility to you, should you choose to own it

Tesla's so-called "autopilot" turns off automatically a fraction of a second before a crash, so the driver might be blamed even though the driver has no time to respond. (It's been that way for more than a year since originally publicly documented by the NHTSA, this is clearly a choice someone made.)

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/05/the-vehicle-suddenly-accelerated-with-our-baby-in-it-the-terrifying-truth-about-why-teslas-cars-keep-crashing

(This is just one example out of many terrible things in their software.)

And while Tesla management clearly just loves doing terrible things, an individual engineer implemented this.

You don't want to be that engineer:

1. It's immoral, and a dereliction of your professional duty.
2. If your action ever goes to court, there will be some very expensive lawyers trying their best to make you the scapegoat and claim you are either incompetent or malicious, but you very definitely did this on your own.

When Volkswagen cheated on emissions, the CEO blamed... the engineers: "This was not a corporate decision, from my point of view, and to my best knowledge today. This was a couple of software engineers who put this in for whatever reason... some people have made the wrong decisions in order to get away with something that will have to be found out." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal#US_Congressional_Testimony,_October_2015).

And most of the time the things you'll be asked to do aren't as bad. I know someone who was asked by their manager to put a CE mark on products that were from the non-CE factory. These devices weren't safety critical, this wasn't going to kill anyone. But it's still fraud, and the incentive was still there for the company to make this engineer the scapegoat.

The engineer said "no"... and that was the end of it. Sometimes that's all it takes to enforce standards.

If "no" isn't enough, asking for something in writing (signed and dated) is a good next step. Chances are that will be the end of it, and meanwhile you can start looking for a new job.

‘The vehicle suddenly accelerated with our baby in it’: the terrifying truth about why Tesla’s cars keep crashing

Elon Musk is obsessive about the design of his supercars, right down to the disappearing door handles. But a series of shocking incidents – from drivers trapped in burning vehicles to dramatic stops on the highway – have led to questions about the safety of the brand. Why won’t Tesla give any answers?

The Guardian

great news everyone, i've managed to combine the technologies behind "excel thinks it's a date" and "my phone keeps saying duck" to produce an office memo generator

it can also draw sentient anime breasts, as well as generating occasionally correct stack overflow replies

here's how: first we harvest every website, and use it to train a spam filter

we run the spam filter backwards on a massively parallel system to generate the desired output

then we try to filter out racism and csam. ish

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