US Army logistics catalogs are organized this way. “Cookies, oatmeal” instead of “Oatmeal cookies” because it’s a lot easier to find what you need an a giant alphabetical list.

This isn’t funny, this is just the sad state of software these days.

Don’t worry, this just means your job is safe from being replaced by AI. No search results means no training data.

No bounds checking, only fast.

Krazam has previously documented the Facegoog microservices architecture in some detail.

STOP! You have violated the law. Pay the court a fine or serve your sentence. Your stolen goods are now forfeit.

My head canon is that Tony Stark has a superpower: everything he builds works the first time.

If it’s really complicated, like an entirely new Iron Man suit, then it might malfunction once in an amusing way. Then he tightens a screw and it’s perfect. It never fails outright or bricks itself.

In my experience, this is not how hardware or software development goes. I want this power so much.

Cowsay should be installed by default on every distro.

Linux / More Linux

This post is horrifying, not funny.

[Citation needed]

Every reverse-engineering study I’ve read has been about the apps built in top of the Google API, not the Google binaries. Here’s one, and here’s another, and neither paints a flattering picture.

Maybe it’s possible to build a perfect implementation, but that is not what we got.

You know what does work? Masks and vaccines. Phone-based tracking was a dangerous waste of time.

The Google system allegedly shares hashes of a ID-number salted with a rotating timestamp over BLE. But it’s also a closed-source binary. Can you or anyone else actually inspect its implementation? Can you really guarantee it doesn’t have even the smallest design flaws?

This technology is exceptionally dangerous. There is very little difference between these two scenarios:

• A doctor has identified a COVID patient. Let’s notify everyone who’s spent time with them recently.
• Secret police have identified a “dissident”. Let’s round up all their close associates.

It’s voluntary (for now). It’s allegedly secure (for now). But did anyone actually benefit from this complicated system? All I see are downsides.

Good riddance. It’s a totalitarian privacy nightmare that never functioned as advertised.

Similar systems were widely deployed in Singapore, on the premise it would only be used to fight COVID. Then to no one’s surprise, law enforcement started it using for criminal investigations.

Once they’re built, governments cannot resist abusing such systems.

Cowsay is a vital program. I’ve never understood why it isn’t installed by default in every distro.

But why does it need to run in the cloud?

Google is making a system to verify any given user is running a verified browser on a verified OS on verified hardware (TPM).

The first problem is that only big tech companies will be able to pass any of these verification steps. Say goodbye to your modifiable, community-driven, open source OS or browser.

The second problem is that the only software they choose to verify well be increasingly restricted. Say goodbye to your ad-blocker, because Google makes the browser and they’re the one selling the ads.

You can still an unverified browser, I suppose, but websites decide whether to let you in or not. And Google will reduce their ad revenue if they don’t “verify” their users.