I don’t want to have to completely redo my whole email stack.

Web services, and then various components of an email system.

I’m using automated renewals.

But, that just means there’s a new cert file on disk. Now I have to convince a half a dozen different apps to properly reload that changed cert. That means fighting with Systemd. So Systemd has won the first few skirmishes, and I haven’t had the time or energy to counterattack. Now instead of having to manually poke at it 4x per year, it’s going to be closer to once a month. Ugh.

The front page of the web site is excellent. It describes what it does, and it does its feature set in quick, simple terms.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to a website for some open-source software and had no idea what it was or how it was trying to do it. They often dive deep into the 300 different ways of installing it, tell you what the current version is and what features it has over the last version, but often they just assume you know the basics.

Or his PR firm suggested it would be effective, which it has been.

I really respect his pledge to give away his wealth

Even if it is just a scam?

He’s one of the worst billionaires, it’s just that since the 2010s he’s been trying hard to soften that image.

His mother came from money, being the daughter of a banker, and the granddaughter of a banker. His father was a lawyer who founded a law firm focused on corporate law and technology law. Given that his mom knew Opel personally, and his dad was a technology lawyer, is it any surprise that Gates’ first contract with IBM was so incredibly friendly to Microsoft’s interests?

In addition, IBM was under pressure at that point because it was being sued for antitrust violations by the US government. That limited how aggressive it could be in new contracts without drawing extra attention. In other words, the antitrust effort from the US government took power away from IBM and allowed for new companies to flourish. Then about 20 years later, Microsoft was sued for its own illegal use of its monopoly (a trial at which Bill Gates lied on the stand, and where Microsoft falsified evidence), and this work to limit the reach of Microsoft allowed for the Internet to flourish and led directly to the rise of companies like Google and Amazon. It’s now time for another round of antitrust to allow more companies to flourish – only hopefully this time the antitrust efforts don’t fade out and are aggressively pursued year after year so we don’t get more shitty monopolies making things awful.

They use massively privacy-invading measures to ensure that you don’t do that. I don’t know about Pearson specifically, but there are horror stories from the “proctoring” industry about what people have to put up with.

For example: “facial detection, eye tracking, and algorithms that measure “anomalies” in metrics like head movement, mouse clicks, and scrolling rates to flag students exhibiting behavior that differs from the class norm” As is widely known, facial detection doesn’t work as well for dark-skinned people, and eye and head movement of so-called “normal people” is not fair to people who are not cheating, but not “normal”.

And you can’t leave your desk because you might have something out of camera sight to help you cheat. Straightforward right? Not really: “A University of Florida student felt forced to vomit at her desk when the proctor threatened to fail her if she left the screen (Harwell, 2020). She vomited at her desk in front of the stranger.”

Maybe you can get away with hiding notes on another device or paper, but they try hard to make that impossible. They want to you to get up and show them everything in the room before you start your test. They want to see your hands at all times, and even track your eye movements. If your eyes are always darting to a certain area off screen where you might have notes, they might interrupt your test and demand to be shown what you’re looking at. If you look up or off to the side when you’re thinking, they’re going to demand that you show them what you’re looking at too. If you think you can scroll through notes on your phone… maybe. But, they often demand that your hands be visible on-camera at all times.

It’s an arms race, and sometimes people do manage to cheat, but when that happens the proctoring companies just implement more and more outrageous surveillance.

You are to be compared with tech billionaires, with their immense wealth and layered support systems, but with none of the money or resources. It manifests in what people expect of you, and how people talk about you.

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/my-next-chapter-with-mastodon/

People need to realize that open source projects don’t create billionaires. In fact, they actually block billionaires from forming.

Tech deci-millionaires get rich by creating a moat around something, then put a toll booth at the drawbridge. Tech billionaires do that but make sure to enclose something essential they have a monopoly on within the moat, and then capture any and all regulators who might try to interfere. Open Source software either makes it illegal to build a moat or allows anybody who’s interested to build their own drawbridge. It’s orders of magnitude harder to get rich with open source or free software. You basically have to put up a toll booth that’s fully optional and somehow still get people to pay.

We should all thank #JohnMastodon for his selfless acts, both starting Mastodon but also now knowing when to step down.

Normally that only works if you have DRM that locks the games to your platform, so that people don’t get the hardware at a discount then use it to run someone else’s software.

But, in Valve’s case, it really has no competitors in the PC gaming space. That might not last forever, but it almost certainly will last as long as this PC / console is around.

At least “zero talent” makes more sense.

It’s true, and there’s nothing IoT that is absolutely essential. But, if they were secure and safe, there are a lot of IoT things I’d like to have.

Thou must use the cloud so that thine company hast a recurring revenue stream.

I can completely understand it, if you ignore all the privacy issues and potential hacks.

For example, a smart fridge. Imagine a fridge that tracks the expiry date of everything inside and warns you before something goes bad – or detects when something goes bad based on the off-gassing that it produces. Imagine it gets to know your purchase patterns and suggests items for your grocery list when you’re running low. Or, if you fully trust it, it could even order those things for you.

Or, smart lights. Imagine lights that are nice and bright in the winter when you don’t get enough sunlight. Then imagine those lights are smart enough to start dimming and getting “warmer” at a certain point in the evening on your personal schedule, making your body more prepared for sleep. Add motion / presence sensors so that the lights turn on when you go into a room, and turn off when everybody leaves the room. Most of the time a light switch isn’t a burden, but if you’re carrying things it can be a bit annoying, and we all know kids are pretty bad about turning things off when they leave a room.

In a world where you didn’t have to worry about the privacy issues, the bugs had all been worked out, and so-on, smart appliances could be great. But, we’re on v0.1 and so I’m extremely cautious in every “smart” device I use.

“Smart” toilets are a privacy nightmare.

Having said that, in the distant future, if we don’t drown the world, or kill ourselves in some other way, smart toilets are actually a smart idea.

Look how often a medical check-up requires either a stool sample or a urine sample. It makes sense. It’s the waste products our body produces, so there’s going to be a lot of data there. Now, imagine if you could get a basic medical check-up every time you used the toilet. You could catch so many problems early. It would be an entirely non-invasive medical check-up and if done right you wouldn’t even need to change your routine. You’d just use the toilet as normal and if the toilet detected anything that required a more detailed check, it could give you a packet of data you could give to your doctor.

At the very least, imagine if instead of trying to pee into a cup at the doctor’s office – or worse, trying to collect a stool sample, you could just use the “Medical Toilet” the way you use any other toilet and it would collect the sample for you.

But, of course, the wealth of medical information it could provide is exactly why it would be a privacy nightmare in the current world. I don’t know why Kohler is jumping into this now. Even if they see it as some way to generate revenue, they have to know it’s going to generate lawsuits too, and when inevitably there’s a privacy breach it’s going to put their good name in the toilet.

The nurse knew that the power management system required an Internet connection? That’s one geeky nurse.

Still, I have hope with things like solar panels. I think these are likely to be teething pains there. Being off-grid on a solar panel is probably a pretty common situation, so they’re probably going to eventually work out the kinks. As long as there isn’t a monopoly on power management systems, or regulatory capture by the companies that make them, probably the ability to work disconnected from both the power and Internet grids will eventually happen. But, with Internet-of-Things stuff, there’s often a commercial incentive to mine people’s data and lock them into a subscription service model. So, that’s really going to require regulation to fix.

Smart products are part of the issue, and smart products that fail in dumb ways are a really big part of the issue.

Any smart product, pretty much by definition, has to have a computer in it. Anything with a computer in it can be hacked. There’s really no good reason that your bed should have an attack surface.

If you are going to have smarts in something, it really needs to fail well. Like, for a bed, it should have something that bypasses the smarts and lets it go back to “dumb bed” mode no matter what. No matter what position it’s in, it should be possible to make it go flat even if you have no Internet connection. In fact, even if the smart parts are not working at all, there should be a way to make it go flat, even if that’s a purely mechanical system that allows you to bypass the motors.

The only way to learn what something sounds like as a non-native speaker is to look it up or listen to someone pronounce it. There are no rules – or at least no useful rules, because any rule will have many exceptions. Even different English dialects differ in how to pronounce words. There’s simply no making sense of it.

For example, in many British English dialects, the “a” in “can” and the one in “can’t” are pronounced completely differently, despite “can’t” being a contraction of “can not”. It’s literally the same word, just with a different word afterwords, and yet the two get different pronunciations. There’s no way to guess at that being the case, or come up with a logical reason why. You just have to accept it.

How do you pronounce gnocci, gnat, etc? They may start with a ‘g’ but the proper pronunciation is just /n/.