rectang

Why not start with a brownout? Make the data temporarily inaccessible, but don’t actually delete it immediately.

Completely wiping all computing devices in advance every time you pass through a border checkpoint seems like the only defense against the government getting all of your personal data.

As we can see from the Tunic case, providing a "duress password" to cause data to be wiped on site when entered leaves you vulnerable to destruction of evidence charges, even if Tunic ultimately prevails.

What computing device vendors specialize in bulletproof, convenient wiping and restoration?

It’s been a while, but I recall finding The Plague more compelling than The Stranger.

While I agree with Camus’s philosophical points about the absurdity of existence and the indifference of the universe, within the scope of our tiny little lives there is morality and meaning. Taking action to address the suffering caused by an epidemic is meaningful. So are the deaths of an Arab or one’s mother, and the premise that a human would be so alienated that they would feel nothing at them is unconvincing, even if the universe doesn’t care.

There was an essay in The Guardian a couple days ago on a related topic, positing that the essence of the self is the biological body including the brain, rather than the isolated mind. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/30/alive-...

I’m as uninterested in debating someone who denies the existence of fossil fuel subsidies as I am in debating climate denialists. I recommend that interested parties perform a trivial web search.

Geoengineering proposals are often unserious because the point is to give the appearance of doing something while the root cause goes unaddressed. "No need to reconsider those fossil fuel subsidies because [fanciful geoengineering proposal] will save the day!"

Geoengineering proposals spring from the same impulse as climate denial — anything to avoid consequences for those contributing to the crisis.

When I was a child, I imagined that books and the ideas within them lasted forever. The shock is not in how quickly the written word dissipates, it's that it dissipates at all.

The current generation cannot bear the accumulated weight of all past generations. Loss and compression are inevitable.

99% of an individual's life experiences are lost when they pass. 99.99% of what's left moves from distinct memory to amalgamated collective experience within a generation.

Even for those of us who are blessed with loving friends and family, nearly everything will fade away. The adolescent me harbored mild delusions that history might care about my notes. The mature me is no longer burdened by those expectations, and my notes are better for only having a single audience.

Yes, writing by hand is an experience that offers unique benefits. The physical act helps to consolidate and integrate knowledge — improving recollection is one benefit, although I'd emphasize improving intuition as more valuable.

The primary activity of note-taking is forming words and grappling with ideas, though — it's not like all benefits are lost when using a keyboard. To a certain extent other activities like typesetting achieve similar ends.

My brother writes novels longhand, and I've thought hard about this topic. Ultimately, certain personality quirks held me back and I never felt carefree when hand-writing notes. Version control liberated me.

"Write by hand and mark up your books" is excellent advice... that I no longer follow.

Marking up books didn't come naturally to me, but I did it for a while. Paper books are just decaying bundles of plant fiber — and the ideas within them are likewise ephemeral. The illusion of permanence must be confronted and reckoned with.

But for the last 15-20 years, I have been taking notes in text files that are saved to version control, which I find suits me better.

* Notes are not space-constrained by the space of the page margins, nor by the initial form they take on the paper page.

* Notes can be revised at will without requiring complete duplication to maintain optimal appearance and organization. There is no reason to resist revising notes — the history is completely preserved in old versions, so nothing will ever be destroyed even if deleted. Even though those old versions will almost certainly never be revisited, knowing that they exist frees the mind.

* I can indulge my perfectionism and write math notes in LaTeX, music notes in Lilypond, diagrams using SVG... The act of typesetting is itself a form of active engagement the source material, although it does not have all the advantages of hand-copying and can be time-consuming.

* Digital notes take up no physical space, compatible with a minimalist lifestyle. They can expand infinitely without needing to be stored or carted around.

* Digital notes don't need to be defended against physical threats such as fire, flood, or vermin. However digital notes still require precautions to preserve them in the form of a backup regime, so this is something of a wash.

* Ultimately, I don't expect anyone but me to be interested in my notes, and I don't owe anyone my notes. When I'm gone, the notes will vanish into nothingness — and since they are not constrained by being part of a legacy for heirs to pick through, they can take whatever form suits me best during my life.

A while ago I participated in security design for an open source foundation. (Security is not a specialty of mine, but I aspire to be competent enough for my role as a developer working in web dev and open source.) We attempted to design our processes to assure some level of defense against state-level threat actors despite assuming we could not keep them out of our network. The main goal was to ensure an audit trail in the event that our source repositories or release archives were compromised and changed.

So I went down the rabbit hole of the meaning of "champ", thinking it might mean something esoteric in the context of "champing at the bit" like "speaking the first line of the skit". But no, "champ" as a verb is just an alternative version of "chomp", or at least a word that differs very subtly from "chomp".

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/champing%20at%20t...

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/champ

The migration of "champing at the bit" to "chomping at the bit" is inevitable.

There don't seem to be many idioms like this, where the newer version is both semantically intuitive/meaningful and accepted by authorities. The closest is probably "hone in on", but the verb form of "home" as in "homing device" is still current, unlike the verb form of "champ". Another interesting one is the migration from "just deserts", using an archaic meaning of "desert" as in something deserved, to the modern form "just desserts". However there's much greater distance between "desserts" and the archaic meaning of "deserts" than between "chomp" and "champ".

It's not the same, but I still remember the first time I was served genmai cha (roasted rice tea) at a sushi restaurant. I loved it and inquired, the server was kind enough to show me the actual tea bag — it was Yamamotoyama. Available lots of places in the US, but I used to buy it at a Japanese grocery store.

lol wut “corporate”?

I don’t get the rest of your post either.

While it will take a while to review the subtleties of this license, I appreciate that out of the gate they are marketing it as "Source Available" rather than picking a stupid fight by calling it "Open Source".

Voter suppression strategy depends on statistical degradation of enfranchisement.

There is a small group for whom it is literally impossible to obtain supporting documentation — this is the group that you're focusing on, but to my mind it's not that important.

There is a much larger group for whom the difficulty of obtain supporting documentation makes them statistically less likely to obtain it — and this larger group is the one targeted by voter ID laws to suppress their votes.

Because voter suppression strategies will absolutely not be abandoned, we're on an inevitable path towards national IDs.

Should voter ID requirements (a la "SAVE America" act or similar) become law, constitutional prohibitions on poll taxes will lead towards every citizen getting an ID at no charge.

The goal should be to run up the score of the popular vote as much as possible even in the face of anti-democratic shenanigans like gerrymandering or statistical voter suppression, e.g. how the SAVE act would make it harder for women (who lean Democratic) to exercise their right to vote (because it will require more documents for people who have changed their last name to prove their identities).

Manipulating the election and perpetuating minority rule rather than responding to popular will has its limitations. We need to be prepared for a second civil rights movement.

Making it hard for politically inconvenient humans to vote is more straightforward than granting AI agents the right to vote.

To secure network effects for themselves. This is one of the reasons the ASF was founded.

https://httpd.apache.org/ABOUT_APACHE.html

> We realize that it is often seen as an economic advantage for one company to "own" a market - in the software industry, that means to control tightly a particular conduit such that all others must pay for its use. This is typically done by "owning" the protocols through which companies conduct business, at the expense of all those other companies. To the extent that the protocols of the World Wide Web remain "unowned" by a single company, the Web will remain a level playing field for companies large and small. Thus, "ownership" of the protocols must be prevented.

Output is a separate issue from training. Courts will never decide that a identical copy spit out by an LLM is non-infringing simply because it went through an LLM stage. Copyright laundering is wishful thinking by tech folks.

License the training corpus and encourage copyright suits against outputs from models trained on unlicensed corpora.

More likely it will be taken as a plan for "how to win at any cost and then humanize yourself later".

> AI is finding vulnerabilities in all kinds of software written by humans.

I'm aware — I've used LLMs to find vulnerabilities, myself. But it doesn't follow that because AI can find them that AI can find the optimal fix, because fixing vulnerabilities often involves tradeoffs.

Also, can we please have a civil discussion?

"Make my web app secure."

Even if the specific image being infringed were not in the corpus, it's possible that a court would return a judgment of copyright infringement.

Consider the case where someone deliberately prompts the AI to build a facsimile image and the AI does a creditable job after some tweaking.

As much as I like the Apple Passwords app, one of its downsides is that if I have my TOTP app on my iPhone, both passwords and TOTP live on the same device. So for many services I use Bitwarden for passwords.

Here is the relevant quote from _The Cathedral and the Bazaar_[1], which was given the name _Linus's Law_[2] in honor of Linus Torvalds:

> Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.

[1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus%27s_law

> Client says "access denied"

> Server says "here's everything"

hahahaha

> Hire me (just kidding... unless?)

FIFA is a legendarily awful organization. In my weaker moments reading your piece I thought to myself how nice it would have been if someone more ruthless than you had been made an example of them.

RCV completely solves the “spoiler candidate” problem, which is a huge issue limiting choice and innovation in the two-party-dominated US. Approval Voting remains susceptible to spoilers.

In the US there are already people who complain that any election they lose must been “rigged”, including the current occupant of the White House. Choosing Approval Voting over RCV is not going to bring such people around; it’s rhetorical advantages are inconsequential.