I’ve been assured that AGI is right around the corner and will solve climate change (in a way that is economically palatable to the rich and powerful)

I often want to know the status code of a curl request, but I don’t want that extra information to mess with the response body that it prints to stdout.

What to do?

Render an image instead, of course!

curlcat takes the same params as curl, but it uses iTerm2’s imgcat tool to draw an “HTTP Cat” of the status code.

It even sends the image to stderr instead of stdout, so you can still pipe curlcat to jq or something.

#!/usr/bin/env zsh

stdoutfile=$( mktemp )
curl -sw "\n%{http_code}" $@ > $stdoutfile
exitcode=$?

if [[ $exitcode == 0 ]]; then
  statuscode=$( cat $stdoutfile | tail -1 )

  if [[ ! -f $HOME/.httpcat$statuscode ]]; then
    curl -so $HOME/.httpcat$statuscode https://http.cat/$statuscode
  fi

  imgcat $HOME/.httpcat$statuscode 1>&2
fi

cat $stdoutfile | ghead -n -1

exit $exitcode

Note: This is macOS-specific, as written, but as long as your terminal supports images, you should be able to adapt it just fine.

We have mistaken rationality for a philosophy rather than a methodology, and efficiency for a virtue without any particular end in mind.

To have a unique, personal, subjective, divergent human experience is to sin against your prescribed algorithm.

All of security is about trade-offs. “What does it protect me from, and what do I give up to gain that protection?”

If you need to remember a lot of passwords, then having some kind of system makes sense.

But most people don’t need to remember a lot of passwords. Most people can reasonably offload that job to a password manager.

So without knowing anything more, I’d guess it’s not good security for them.

The process is supposed to be sustainable. That doesn’t mean you can take one activity and do it to the exclusion of all others and have that be sustainable.

Edit:

Also, regretably, I’m using the now-common framing where “agile” === Scrum.

If we wanna get pure about it, the manifesto doesn’t say anything about sprints. (And also, you don’t do agile… you do a process which is agile. It’s a set of criteria to measure a process against, not a process itself.)

And reasonable people can definitely assert that Scrum does not meet all the criteria in the agile manifesto — at least, as Scrum is usually practiced.

It’s funny (or depressing), because the original concept of agile is very well aligned with an open source/inner source philosophy.

The whole premise of a sprint is supposed to be that you move quickly and with purpose for a short period of time, and then you stop and refactor and work on your tools or whatever other “non value-add” stuff tends to be neglected by conventional deliverable-focused processes.

The term “sprint” is supposed to make it clear that it’s not a sustainable 100%-of-the-time every-single-day pace. It’s one mode of many.

Buuuut that’s not how it turned out, is it?

Recently had a password that was acceptable for the account creation page on the website but too long for the login screen in the mobile app.

Took me a while to figure out that pasting into that field was just quietly dropping characters.

Keep an eye out for Ivanka look-a-like contests

1. Fuck AI
2. This judge’s point is absolutely true:

“You have companies using copyright-protected material to create a product that is capable of producing an infinite number of competing products,” Chhabria said. “You are dramatically changing, you might even say obliterating, the market for that person’s work, and you’re saying that you don’t even have to pay a license to that person.”

3. AI apologists’ response to that will invariably be “but it’s sampling from millions of people at once, not just that one person”, which always sounds like the fractions-of-a-penny scene
4. Fuck copyright
5. A ruling against fair use for AI will almost certainly deal collateral damage to perfectly innocuous scraping projects like linguistic analysis. Even despite their acknowledgement of the issue:

To prevent both harms, the Copyright Office expects that some AI training will be deemed fair use, such as training viewed as transformative, because resulting models don’t compete with creative works. Those uses threaten no market harm but rather solve a societal need, such as language models translating texts, moderating content, or correcting grammar. Or in the case of audio models, technology that helps producers clean up unwanted distortion might be fair use, where models that generate songs in the style of popular artists might not, the office opined.

6. We really need to regulate against AI — right now — but doing it through copyright might be worse than not doing it at all

I’m out here trying to answer reasonable questions techie folks might have about the most promising possibility I’ve seen so far for getting our normie families off of Google.

What are you here for? Calling people naive pseudo-scammers? Get out of here.

It’s the #1 thing that drives me crazy about Linux.

It seems obvious. You’ve got a Windows/Apple/Super key and a Control key. So you’d think Control would be for control characters and Windows/Apple/Super would be for application things.

I can understand Windows fucking this up, cuz the terminal experience is such a low priority. But Linux?

There’s some projects like Kinto and Toshy which try to fix it, but neither work on NixOS quite yet.

There’s a link in the second paragraph to the technical details, including source code for the implementation and documentation for the required infrastructure.

But the tl;dr is that the tokens aren’t associated to your account. Unless you were able to snoop on the original request that generated the tokens (in which case, you’ve got bigger issues!), there’s no way to prove that a token is related to a specific account. A token only proves that an authorization server once granted access to some account.

Edit: Wikipedia has a good intro:

Non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs are cryptographic primitives, where information between a prover and a verifier can be authenticated by the prover, without revealing any of the specific information beyond the validity of the statement itself.

Edit 2: You should not be catching downvotes. You had a reasonable question.

Fine for you. I’m just glad there’s an option besides “sell your soul” and “invest hundreds of hours and dollars into self-hosting”.

Kagi Privacy Pass

“Wow, that’s crazy”

I’m not against AI as a technology in principle, I’m no luddite.

Perhaps not a luddite, but a Luddite.

The actual followers of Ned Ludd weren’t opposed to technology. They were, in many cases, experts in the machinery — sometimes having built the machines they would later destroy.

They opposed the new social order that seemed to inevitably arrive with the machinery. The capitalists would make more money than before, the workers less, and also endure more dangerous working conditions.

Btw, your note about absorbing and repackaging counter-culture reminded me of Rebel Sell by Andrew Potter. There’s a good episode of You Are Not So Smart about it: https://youarenotsosmart.com/2012/10/08/yanss-podcast-episode-five

The author seems to have fallen for two tricks at once: The MPAA/RIAA playbook of seeing all engagement with content through the lens of licensing, and the AI hype machine telling everyone that someday they will love AI slop.

He mentions people complaining that stock photo sites, book portals, and music streaming services are all degrading in quality because of AI slop, but his conclusion is that people will start seeking out AI content because it’s not copyrighted.

Regardless… The position of those in power has not changed. They never believed in copyright as a guiding concept, only as a means to an end. That end being: We, the powerful, will control culture, and we will use it to benefit ourselves.

Before generative AI, the approach was to keep the cultural landscape well-groomed – something you’d wanna pay to experience. Mindfully grown and pruned, with clear walking paths, toll booths at each entrance, and harsh penalties for littering or stepping on the grass. You were allowed to have your own toll-free parks outside of the secure perimeter, that continue the walking paths in ways that are mutually beneficial, as long as visitors don’t track mud in as a result.

But now? The landscape is no longer about creating a well-manicured amusement park worth the price of admission. There’s oil under the surface. And it’s time to frack the hell out of it. It’s too bad about the toxic slurry that will accumulate up top, making the walled and unwalled parks alike into an intolerable biohazard. There are resources to extract. Externalities are an end-user problem.

Yeah, turning culture into an expensive amusement park was a horrible mistake. But I wouldn’t get too eager to gloat over seeing the tide of sludge pour over their walls. We’ll still be on the outside, drowning in it.

US once again beaten by rest of world.

Yeah, how far back you wanna go?

I’m thinkin George Lincoln Rockwell or John Birch Society are probably pretty good landmarks for the budding of what became MAGA.

Only time in my life I wished a politician leaned further to the right.