Lovely, looks like the left-click switch in my mouse is starting to go. It's started to let go while I'm still holding it down.

Considering that the adhesive on the skates has started to go too, I may look for a replacement switch and do some surgery on it, or may just say "fuck it" and buy a new mouse, considering that it's pretty much the cheapest logitech on the shelf... (They're the only ones I can find that are actually big enough to fit my absurdly-proportioned hands. With most mice, my palm and fingertips are both resting on the pad)

So my employer finally decided to roll out controls on browser extensions. I'm kinda surprised they didn't do that sooner, given the shitshows I've seen elsewhere.

Thankfully, unlike when they banned firefox, they pulled the stick out of their arse and actually allowed UBO as "the one true adblock." (Though they do appear to be blocking Consent-o-matic and Don't Fuck with Paste, which is annoying, but at least it's not "actively sabotaging their own security efforts" like banning UBO would be...)

And for some reason they let the rank-and-file see the list of every extension that's installed on a company machine (as an anonymous deduplicated list of "what we're not going to allowlist") so I'm over here with my jaw somewhere down in hell's boiler room with just how much absolute shit people have installed on their work machines...

McDonald’s USA
— Employee: $15/hr, no benefits
— Big Mac: $5.90

McDonald’s Denmark
— Employee: $22/hr, 6 weeks vacation, 1 year paid maternity leave, life insurance, pension
— Big Mac: $5.66

Tell us more about how raising the minimum wage would affect the cost of hamburgers.

Also Denmark has a functioning free healthcare system.

Damn commie bastards!

The #UK #Government has confirmed that new Great #British #Railways (GBR) trains will aim to provide unassisted level boarding between trains and platforms as standard, wherever possible. The move is intended to make rail travel more accessible for #disabled and older passengers, people with #mobility difficulties, parents with pushchairs and those carrying luggage.

The commitment will form part of GBR’s wider work to improve accessibility across the network, with the new Rolling Stock and Infrastructure Strategy bringing decisions on trains, track, depots and maintenance under a coordinated approach. The Government says level boarding should generally add little or no significant cost when incorporated into train design from the outset.

The Government is also investing almost £280 million through its Access for All programme, with more than 30 step-free access schemes under way across England, Scotland and Wales.
https://dft-newsroom.prgloo.com/news/dont-mind-the-gap-level-boarding-commitment-for-new-trains

With regard to Tesco (I understand) the salaries they pay are so low that employees qualify for state benefits.
In other word, Tescos keeps the profits and we (the UK) pay the difference between their salaries and a living wage.

Now with alt-txt.

Cometh the hour, cometh the man. And that man is Count Binface.

Count Binface is a joke candidate, and in the best tradition of the fool through the ages he makes serious points with the joke. And he has said that he is standing in this by-election.

Which is unfortunate for Nigel.

Even in the world of politics there are inescapable limits to how far you can make the argument that the fight is between you and the establishment when your only opponent is a prankster with a dustbin on his head.

8/n

Do you remember Boaty McBoatface?
So the UK Met Office is inviting people to suggest up to 5 names for storms. And apparently lots of people have been suggesting "Storm Bigoil", along with BP, Equinor, Exxon & Shell... This is obviously appalling & definitely not to be emulated via this link:

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/forms/name-our-storms-call-for-names

Weh. one of the downsides to having a modern condensing dryer (that recycles most of the hot air after pulling the water out through a heat exchanger) is that it gets absurdly hot inside. It makes my parents' old behemoth look like a small toaster in comparison. And absolutely obliterates printed designs with that level of heat...

It's great for efficiency, since it's not continuously dumping 5-6KW of heat out the side of the building, and is fine for the bulk of my clothes (which don't mind the heat) but I really need a drying rack that isn't "leftover bits of a TV wall-mount kit strung between two shelves" if I don't want to be buying replacement shirts multiple times a year..

Weh. I have too many projects, but just had an idea for another one... Porting as many gnuradio function blocks to vulkan compute shaders as I can, as well as looking into a way to make a single block automatically pick "CPU vs GPU" based on their neighbors if they don't already have a mechanism for that. (to avoid extra copies between host and accelerator memory just for jellybean "intermediate" blocks, without incurring copies by making those blocks require the accelerator)

(Unfortunately the only way I can think of is either "naive" and problematic if you have multiple "either" blocks next to each other, or relying on the flow graph compiler to know about buffer typing and alternate implementations. The logic would be that blocks that have a single impl can bind a chain of 'either' blocks to that impl, but "preferring" the GPU if you have a GPU->intermediates->CPU chain)

Weh. My desire for an ARM64 laptop for non-work purposes has gotten strong enough I've actually started looking. Anyone have recommendations for ones that aren't MacBooks and still have decent mainline Linux support? (Macs are the fallback option, but I already know all about those as I've been following the Asahi project since they first got m1n1 running, much less the full kernel)

JFC. There's exactly one thing this 'course' lists as a use for LLMs that I can actually see them being a reasonable use not loaded totally full of footguns: "synthetic sample data", and even then there are much more efficient ways to generate that... (You really don't need the monster tens-of-GB models to get "sample-shaped data" out of them...)

(Though I would still never actually use one for that, given how easy it is for them to end up giving you real data in the pile... They're just predictive autocomplete, after all, so if you accidentally give it an input that lines up close enough to data it was trained on enough times, it might just give you verbatim output of that training data. See the recent "extracting famous books from LLMs" research that blows a long-lance sized hole in the slopster's "it's not memorizing, it's learning patterns" argument... Not that that held much water to begin with, given that sufficiently overfitted patterns basically are memorization...)

Dear G-d... [Redacted] is making me take an "AI" course for sunk-cost FOMO reasons... Half the "optimizations" they're talking about aren't optimizations at all. "Boilerplate" is either due to an insufficient level of abstraction, or can be written much more efficiently (and accurately...) via traditional code generation techniques. As for "expressing the problem as natural language", I don't think about the problem-space in natural language, so it's just as much (if not more) work to serialize it out as natural language as it is to just write the damned code...

And "implementing features": if you can accurately express what needs to be done such that a computer can do the rest, what's that called? Code. Congrats, you just made a shitty compiler that's both nondeterministic and with frequently wildly incorrect output...

Randomly reading about "Zero Trust Network Architecture" because I got bored, and from what I can tell it's literally just a bunch of split-tunnel VPNs in a trenchcoat...

The biggest difference vs "traditional VPNs" is that it can seamlessly do graph connectivity to the underlying physical infrastructure, rather than hub-and-spoke, so it's less vulnerable to single points of failure if set up correctly. (And many implementations also appear to have much more fine-grained segmentation and access control than 'traditional' L3 VPNs, but you could in theory achieve that "the old fashioned way" just fine with some effort, assuming you're not using a dumb-as-rocks VPN "appliance"...)

In other words, the abstract architecture is something Genuinely Neat from a technical standpoint, but the concept is just absolutely slathered in the C-suite's favorite Buzzword Bingo and marketing wanks trying to sell them Zero Effort Magic Beans...

THE MAIL RAIL - THE SMALL LONDON UNDERGROUND

I had a lovely time exploring the small tunnels of the Mail Rail in London. The Mail Rail was an underground, driverless electric railway that ran from 1927 to 2003 to transport mail between sorting offices.

The tracks stretched from Paddington to Whitechapel. A section of the tracks re-opened in 2017 as part of The Postal Museum. Visitors can now take a ride on Mail Rail during the day or even join guided tunnel walks on select evenings.

Surely one of the finest pieces of journalism of all time? The headline alone is award winning.

Brocade, WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK. The switch I just got uses a mini-USB port for the console. Oh, so just grab a mini-USB cable and plug it into a laptop, like with Juniper kit, right? NOPE. It's UART over mini-USB's connector, so you need a weird-ass custom cable.

IMO mis-using a USB port for anything that's not USB (with the limited exception of power-only and USB-C) should result in the company that manufactured the product to be publicly crucified, followed by being drawn and quartered by the relevant trading standards body. Same as anyone that willingly makes power-only USB cables that are not clearly marked as such.

(This advice doesn't come from any particular incident, I just had a random thought about backups)

Was just (randomly) inspired for more Random Admin Advice: Keep your backup storage's management plane completely separate from any directory services (AD, etc) you may be using. You can connect it to authorize clients for both backup and restore purposes, but all management of the system and retention periods should be done with a distinct set of accounts managed locally on-device, and ideally (although not always possible) require physical hands-on-keyboard for certain operations.

The true key to good backups is don't let AD dictate who can delete backups. In the event of infrastructure compromise, step one of ransomware after getting an idea of what's going on is "destroy backups." If there's no trivial way for them to pivot from domain admin to the backup server, that task becomes a hell of a lot harder.

(Also, this is your periodic reminder to A: check your backups, and B: make sure they're on a different disk/host than the live copy, though with some exceptions for oopsie-rollback snapshots)