Pretty much sums up entirely too much of the world around me these days (notably r/commandline, r/CLI, among the deluge)

Dear insurance company,

You sent me my annual invoice. I would like to pay that invoice. I should not need hunt around on your web-page for a "To pay, you need to create an account", create an account, answer multiple security questions from my credit-report, set up a password (disallowing copy/paste from my password-manager makes it more secure, right? and only these particular Special Characters, not those other ones your password-manager generated), set up answers to multiple security questions, have an email-confirmation loop, agree to pages of fine-print legalese in a tiny scrolling-region of the web-page that makes it unreadable, then discover that I can only pay by ACH bank-transfer not credit-card, so enter the routing number (twice manually, no copy/paste allowed), and account number (twice manually, no copy/paste allowed)

All to pay something that you could have likely even accepted payment anonymously. I suspect that if I called up and wasted your support person's time, they could have taken my credit-card and had it paid in a quarter of the folderol. Because according to your invoice, I know that you would have gladly accepted a check via mail without any of that hassle.

Please do better. I'm trying to give you money for crying out loud.

Sincerely,

-Tim

Lovely, Google.

From my sweetheart's Chromebook this morning (the one she uses primarily for simple email and web-browsing), in order to obtain security updates you suggest a process that will remove the web-browser and email programs, and then disconnect her from the Play store where she might be able to obtain replacements/upgraded versions.

If I wanted to make it a useless brick that doesn't do web/email, I'd just turn it off.

Maybe the time has come to get her a new non-Chromebook?

blargh. Shot waaaay too much time trying to diagnose an httpd(8) + acme-client(1) issue on a recent #OpenBSD install.

I pointed acme-client at the Let's Encrypt testing/dev endpoint, got the certs/chain/keys in the right place, reloaded httpd, and refreshed. Cert-chain looked like what I expected, rolling up to the (unrecognized) root and throwing Unknown CA warnings.

So I repointed my acme-client.conf file at the *production* Let's Encrypt endpoint, re-issued the acme-client command to re-fetch them, reloaded httpd, and refreshed the browser. but still got the same errors. The chain kept showing the old dev-signing certs, not the valid ones.

Apparently acme-client only (re)downloads certs if they're coming up on needing renewal. So acme-client was running, seeing that my bad-certs were sufficiently recent, and just not requesting/writing updated fullchain/key files.

Deleted the bogus testing certs, re-ran acme-client, reloaded httpd, and 🪄 everything worked fine. 😑

Hopefully this saves someone else the trouble.

some days it feels like this

"Knock, knock"

"Who's there?"

"Deez"

"Sigh, okay, Deez who?"

Thomas Paine: "Deez are the times that try men's souls."

amusement from around the web this evening

#rosemary #memory

xorg: 13MB
fluxbox: 40MB
xterm: 30MB each
mutt: 9MB
tmux: 9MB
ssh: 4MB
cmus: 11MB
firefox: 6.022×10²³GB
weechat: 13MB
remind: 13MB on-demand

I can't figure out where all my RAM is going…

gaaaah, how do you speak lovingly to friends (a married couple) who have gotten into real-estate and are pushing some "this apartment-owning opportunity is projected to have ~250% ROI" s̶c̶a̶m̶ project. I mean, it doesn't surprise me since she's been involved in MLMs before and this definitely gives off those vibes. But there are only a couple ways it can go:

① it could actually work, but comes at the cost of gouging residents for obscene amounts,

② potential investors back the project and make a modest amount of money, but nowhere near the projected 250% ROI, still on the wallets of residents who just need a place to live,

③ like other MLM projects, a few fat-cats at the top get fatter, and lower-level investors get bupkis, and residents still lose out paying excessive amounts to this landlord cooperative, or

④ the whole thing is a flop, investors lose out on money, and residents lose out on money *and* a place to live.

The whole thing feels sketchy as heck, but they seem to be all-in on the project. I've given some gentle words of caution. But I don't want to see them (or their kids, ⅘ of whom I've had come through our church nursery) get hurt by this, nor do I want to see others get hurt by them.

😞

thought of @stefano when I saw this 😆

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@shofutex/117225363740925976

@amyengineer Seemed like your sort of amusement

I learned today that POSIX specifies a tool designed to assist you in reviewing & modifying LLM-generated code. In typical Unix fashion, they shortened "reviewing & modifying" to just two letters:

$ rm code.rs

It even has command-line options to [r]ecursively [f]ix whole directories of LLM-generated code:

$ rm -rf project/

I'm feeling ready for autumn to get to Texas. Came out of the gym and, despite being parked in the shade of a tree, the temperature read 111°F

🥵

@neil
So this crossed my radar, gave me a laugh, and made me think of you: using AI-injection prompts in court filings to induce the other side's AI-usage to agree with the filing 😆

https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/the-first-documented-prompt-injection-1799990/

feeling a little sheepish that I'm just now closing the financial books on 2024 & 2025.

The data was all in my ledger(1) #plaintextaccounting files. But when I'm dealing with household finances at the rollover of a new year, I tend to drag my feet at the of the year because uncleared transactions throw a wrench in things. And just never got back to it. So apparently I dragged my feet for 2.5yr 😆

I log about 1000 transactions (~150KB of data) annually, so ledger was running a little slow. With those ~2000 transactions/300KB of data archived off, it's back to being quite snappy.

Tangentially, it's all stored in git and synced to various local & remote hosts, so I can maintain finances from any of those machines and have a nigh-instant snapshot of household finances.

Today I stumbled across wadfs¹, a way to mount Doom .WAD files as browsable file-systems via FUSE thanks to @jmtd

This is both fantastic and horrific. 😆

⸻
¹ https://jmtd.net/software/doom/

Okay, this crossed my feed and made me laugh.

I used it long before the bots, and I'm not giving it up just because they now overuse it.

Watch out for scammers. I've noticed an appreciable uptick in attempts at "Google Meet" messages, and a pretty convincing one "from" our ISP (came to the wrong custom email-address, but otherwise, it would have had me logging in to the known-good portal URL to verify)

some days I wish upgrading #FreeBSD was as mindless as upgrading my #OpenBSD machines.

On OpenBSD, it's generally `sysupgrade`, let it do its thing, rebooting itself a couple times (entering my FDE passwords as necessary), and then a `pkg_add -u` to upgrade my packages. Sometimes a `sysmerge` if it can't do it automatically. But very much two (or three) idiot-proof commands with very little demand on this idiot's brain to recall where I am in the process.

While I like the automatic ZFS boot-environment snapshotting, FreeBSD requires me to know the next version-number I want to upgrade to (can't determine it or prompt me for viable options?), transcribe it as part of the upgrade command, then manually running `freebsd-update install` multiple times, rebooting manually multiple times between each, then `pkg update` and a `pkg upgrade` to update userspace. I'm sitting at a login…is this the first, second, or third reboot? I don't know, it was taking a while and I ended up wandering off to do something else.

This post brought to you by this morning's 14.3→14.4 FreeBSD upgrade 😆

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