Back in the early 2000s when Windows 98 was still a common OS around households I've heard about a password-stealing virus. It worked by replacing the windows logon 98 screen executable with its own fake version, which logged the password, showed the "wrong password" message and launched the real logon binary. The password was sent off to the hackers whenever the computer got online at a later point. The technique was easy because FAT32 that Win 98 used did not have a concept of file permissions, so anyone could read and write anywhere on the file system. I thought it was a pretty clever design, nobody would really blink an eye at getting the password wrong.

Now, it's been over 20 years, and still every time when I get my password wrong, I have a momentary thought of whether it could be a trojan trying to steal my password...

#infosec #storytime

Just caught myself shying away from responding to a code review comment with "You are right,..." because it kind of sounds like something an LLM would say. And now I am pondering if I should allow LLM training datasets influence what my own speech should be

#llm #ai

Just as you begin to think that you got your life sorted and under control, the world throws you a monkey wrench and the game restarts at NG+. What was top-notch gear and endgame skills are now just barely enough to deal with the most basic monsters and the grind has no end in sight.

If you ask the universe a question, and you don’t like the answer, it’s not the universe’s problem. Ignore it at your own peril.

A periodic reminder that every human being deserves being treated with dignity regardless of their faith, looks, political convictions or place of origin. Treat others as you want to be treated yourself.

People who want to solve a problem build a solution, and eventually solve it.

People who want to solve a problem, but don't know how, start with an experiment, and eventually they know.

People who don't know how to solve a problem, but want to look like they are solving a problem, build a process and look busy forever.

A quick not to my future self, on how to unfuck #wsl2 root file system:

1. Find the location of your disk image, for Ubuntu it would be something like C:\Users\aleks\AppData\Local\Packages\CanonicalGroupLimited.UbuntuonWindows_79rhkp1fndgsc\LocalState\ext4.vhdx.
2. Make a fucking backup!
3. Install a new wsl distro. Could be anything, if you have Docker Desktop, you probably already have docker-desktop distro, which would do.
4. Connect the image to our recovery distro: wsl -d docker-desktop --mount --vhd C:\Users\aleks\AppData\Local\Packages\CanonicalGroupLimited.UbuntuonWindows_79rhkp1fndgsc\LocalState\ext4.vhdx
5. Go into the recovery distro: wsl -d docker-desktop.
6. Figure out which device your image corresponds to: ls /dev/sd*.
7. Unmount it: umount /dev/sdX.
8. Actually unfuck the image: e2fsck /dev/sdX.
9. Exit wsl and shut it all the way down: wsl --shutdown.
10. With any luck, you can start your main distro and it will be fine.

Here, it was supposed be a long-ish rant about how AI (not today's LLMs specifically, though) is a fundamental component of a post-scarcity society, and how nobody seems to be seriously interested in applying AI in that way. As opposed to earning a fuckload of money. But fuck, I'm tired and irritated, and it should be self-evident that people shouldn't need to break their backs to have safe, dignified and enjoyable lives.

Do other people also have this? You randomly experience a spike of FOMO (usually on something really inconsequential), and then you go "fuck this, now I'm not doing it on principle"?

Also, ffs so much of the modern Internet is built on causing FOMO to make people buy your shit.

In 3 days Pocket is shutting down, so it's high time to worry about a replacement, if you haven't already. I know a lot of folks took this as a cause to try more sophisticated knowledge management apps (hey @obsidian@mas.to ).

Personally, I was looking to keep the experience of the simple reading stack. And boy, @readeck@mastodon.online is exactly what I was looking for, and better than I was hoping for:

• Open source, written in Go, simple frontend stack.
• Self-hosted, tiny resource footprint, very snappy.
• Does exactly what Pocket used to do, without any of the "discover random shit" nonsense.
• Browser extension and neat workarounds for mobile OSes that make saving pages for later quick and easy. This was where a lot of alternatives fell through for me, saving links was just too fiddly.
• Works equally well on desktop and mobile, supports PWA.
• Pretty well functioning readable mode! And if I find something that doesn't work I could actually go and patch it, if I care enough. Pocket tends to swallow or mangle code blocks more often than not, which was a big pain.

Last but not least, it can import your data from Pocket, so migration is pretty smooth. It did take a few hours to chew through ~2500 articles I've apparently saved over the years, since it had to fetch the links and re-extract the content. This is actually one gripe I have with the Pocket export: it just gives you a CVS with links and light metadata, but it doesn't export the saved article content. If you have a 10 year old link in there somewhere, ~pray~ donate to web archive gods that it has been saved there. If you care.

One thing that I wish worked differently is that it splits its state between database (SQLite or Postgres) and disk. I kind of wish everything went into the database, so that can be backed up together with the rest of Postgres index, but beggars can't be choosers. I'll take it.