@iris_meredith thought you might enjoy this https://nihilunbounded.substack.com/p/who-watches-the-watchmen

this was his third issue opening with "Claude says:" and then some text I didn't bother to read. I gave an answer to the previous two

"don't make me tap the sign", i say

Because eMudhra is in the news, I am sharing a screenshot of a footer of an email I once received from them in reply to my query about my PAN card (a government-issued tax identity and card). #eMudhra

i was reminded of this blog post on “the myth of RAM” from 2014 which argues that the asymptotic complexity of random access addressing is sqrt(n), both empirically on actual hardware, and theoretically from simple physics

https://www.ilikebigbits.com/2014_04_21_myth_of_ram_1.html

it took me AGES to remember the magic keywords to dredge up the dratted url, tho!

in the course of which i found this rather more academic article on modelling asymptotic complexity of virtual address translation https://arxiv.org/abs/1212.0703

check this out. i've added on-demand TLS directly to #GitPages, so now to serve pages over TLS all you need* is a single binary and this configuration file:

features = ["acme"]

[acme]
email = "you@example.org"
accept-tos = true

[server]
pages = "tcp/:80"
https = "tcp/:443"

* it's feature-gated for now, until dns-persist-01 becomes stable and we can automatically issue wildcard certificates for wildcard domains as well

amazing https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/blocking-some-on-demand-issuance-caused-by-internet-scanning/245553

time from issuing a certificate to first spam request: one second

the two genders are "afraid of rejection" and "afraid of betrayal"

you know what I find really really upsetting? startup culture. specifically, the engineering culture of "make up a specification for other people to use with a hope that it becomes so ubiquitous that you can hold people by the balls with it, but the expectation that the likelihood of success is so low you should write LLM-grade prose and code for it".

i've dealt with a lot of that type of specification in my career. this is why i'm spending so much time polishing git-pages despite it not even being my primary competency or goal. it has a very real chance of becoming the de-facto standard way to host pages (if you're not going with CloudFlare or whatever), which means it will probably outlive me. i have no intention of making people curse the day they've found out the project exists by doing a bad job

As I keep reading over the PHP patches I keep seeing the devastation not of people who don't know how to write secure software, but decades of people with very little resources tasked with writing the most widely used internet-facing software on earth in the programming language I am a participant in shaping. I see that the slow pace of adoption of things that we were told would help people 20, 30 years ago by security experts has not been adopted, and some of the world's most complex codebases using things as fragile as setjmp/longjmp and abort for error handling.

I see, simply, that we are failing our software engineers by not having better in-language tools to mitigate and manage this level of complexity. That the pride in hacks we wore as a symbol of the power of C were in fact cries for help from a userbase that did not understand the long tail of consequences.

Good luck and God Bless to the system administrators today and tomorrow and for the rest of this month. I'll do my best to make it so C isn't like this, anymore.

@whitequark
> If I didn’t have time to properly prepare, then it would cause a lot of stress. From where I stand, it was not stressful, because I’m doing this as a volunteer, and if I get hit by a bus, then it will be someone else’s problem.

this is also an all timer

Personally I think the Internet is extremely good, and it is television that is bad. The Internet only got bad when people from The Television moved in and started using it.

https://tenforward.social/@nivex/117486661160031283

Surý: Well, my wife says that I’m emotionally dead, but I’m not.

oh my god https://archive.is/20261023011353/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/10/man-who-saved-internet-php-vulnerability/689123/#selection-1271.0-1273.60

I would be a lot less annoyed about this if writing RDF metadata didn't feel like a particularly esoteric form of sadomasochism

JSON Schema is not especially good as a format (this is mostly but not entirely down to JSON's questionable qualities) but every document gets to have a $schema that refers to its machine-readable schema (which, themselves, can reference other schemas via $ref or $dynamicRef). problem fucking solved

today in "I'm glad XML and its ilk are a dying breed": what is the fucking point of having xmlns:whatever="url" for like three type of metadata you see every time someone uses e.g. RDF if there isn't even a validation tool that can check well-formedness by recursing into those URLs?!

reading those 5 words instantly aged me like 20 years.

reading wikipedia when

early 21st century Blu-ray technology

bitch who writes like that. what century is it 💀