Toots for virtuous_sloth@cosocial.ca account

Written by Bruce Elrick on 2025-01-13 at 17:41

To be more pointed. Ostensibly the function of law and governance is to make sure everyone is playing by the same rules, rules that we all "agree to" in the compromising sense of the word agree.

But if the size of these non-governmental entities rises to be anything other than non-trivial, then it is possible for them to use the "common" rules to ensure that, in fact, there are two sets of rules: those that apply to them and those that apply to others.

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Written by Bruce Elrick on 2025-01-13 at 17:37

Hypothesis:

Allowing the power and protection of sovereign "democratic" governments and the rule of law to be extended to human structures of arbitrarily-large size that are not sovereign governments (think corporations) is a fundamental failure of human governance, by definition, since it allows such structures to subvert any and all accountability mechanisms that give the sovereign democratic governments their legitimacy.

Discuss.

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Written by Bruce Elrick on 2025-01-07 at 02:59

Hey Fediverse, I'm looking to get #fedihired.

Honestly I would prefer to work in an office environment in Calgary because it would help me focus. I also am thinking I want to work for an organization that betters the world and I'm ok with making less if that's the case.

I have tons of experience building, operating, and optimizing IT infrastructure, in particular hypervisors, operating systems, and storage, both primary and backup. I'm also good at bridging business and IT

[#]calgary #FediHire

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Written by Bruce Elrick on 2024-12-31 at 17:43

You should watch the previous year's talk (2nd link) then this one, but I just have to call out this sick burn at 22:13 into the video (first link).

This is the group of hackers that helped a Polish fix their broken trains which turned out the manufacturer, sad that they lost the bid for the maintenance contract, put in code to brick the trains when being maintained anywhere but their own maintenance facilities (using GPS fencing).

https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-we-ve-not-been-trained-for-this-life-after-the-newag-drm-disclosure#t=1333

https://media.ccc.de/v/37c3-12142-breaking_drm_in_polish_trains

[#]Corruption

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Written by Bruce Elrick on 2024-12-30 at 16:07

Another sublime Bobby Fingers video. The time he almost was famous.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NF4VJJKTjy8

[#]rogan #blackkeys

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Written by Bruce Elrick on 2024-12-28 at 23:59

Billion dollar business idea,

where's my VC $$$?:

Clothing company named Deep Pockets, only does unisex or women's clothing with deep pockets.

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Written by Bruce Elrick on 2024-12-27 at 17:46

I wish there was a way for the current operating system to ask the boot firmware (EFI or BIOS) what the keyboard key it will be expecting you to press to either get it into the boot list menu or the configuration menu the next time you boot.

Enough time has past since the last time I need to know this for this machine that all the possibilities blur into one and I can't recall the specific keys.

[#]linux #uefi

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Written by Bruce Elrick on 2024-12-21 at 21:41

Banger video from The Goose

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VjpA36sxVM

[#]monopoly #oligopoly #canada

h/t to @pluralistic for pointing to The Goose

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Written by Bruce Elrick on 2024-12-17 at 16:06

Curl sends the "Accept: /" header by default and simply dumps the response body.

Some web servers are configured to send the response with "Content-encoding: br" header which means brotli-compressed. That coupled with the lack of magic number led me on a wild goose chase.

Adding the '--compressed' option to curl solves this. This causes it to send an "Accept-Encoding: deflate, gzip, br, zstd" header (whatever compression curl was compiled with I assume) and it will decompress no problem.

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Written by Bruce Elrick on 2024-12-17 at 15:59

Curl does not handle unrequested content compression gracefully.

Today I learned there is a compression library/program called "brotli" (Brötli, Swiss-German bread roll).

The brotli file format apparently does not have a magic number.

Brotli is used as a compression format for web content-encoding (compare with gzip or zstd) and browsers support this.

I've only ever noticed gzip compression encoding before today.

[#]curl #linux #web #brotli

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Written by Bruce Elrick on 2024-12-16 at 17:01

So does the financial gimmick reference indicated that the GST holiday was the PMO's idea reluctantly executed by the finance minister?

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Written by Bruce Elrick on 2024-12-11 at 15:20

Hey Cory @pluralistic, are you going to switch to non-corrective lenses and keep your signature look, or do I need to start preparing now for the jolt when I first see you without glasses?

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Written by Bruce Elrick on 2024-12-06 at 04:47

Clearly guillotines are necessary, since too many people are willing to sell their souls to make money as a soldier for the rich in the ongoing class war.

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Written by Bruce Elrick on 2024-12-05 at 20:58

@pluralistic

Meaningless today now that Suncor and Petro merged, but absolute statements set my Spidey Sense tingling.

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Written by Bruce Elrick on 2024-12-05 at 20:54

Hey Cory ,

I read in today's @pluralistic that the Canadian Competition Bureau has never stopped a merger.

I'm trying to reconcile this with my vague recollections of working for a company providing contract IT service at Petro Canada in the late 1990s. Petro was doing due diligence on a merger w/ Ultramar Diamond Shamrock that was ultimately scuttled because they would have been required to divest in too many gas stations where there was not enough competition in various locations down east

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Written by Bruce Elrick on 2024-11-30 at 04:49

This is a beautiful bird

https://mas.to/@Jgbird/113569710650628693

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Written by Bruce Elrick on 2024-11-27 at 19:41

Music sampling is absolutely a transformative and creative process...

https://kottke.org/24/11/the-most-iconic-electronic-music-sample-of-every-year-1990-2023

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Written by Bruce Elrick on 2024-11-21 at 20:26

Poignant video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3xFhLKfPzc

[#]biketooter #canada

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Written by Bruce Elrick on 2024-11-20 at 22:40

Adventures in LLM doing arithmetic.

I was too lazy to do details checking of it's intermediate work, but it is clear that ChatGPT does not have enough attention to be able to do arithmetic on 10 to 12-digit multiplication.

https://chatgpt.com/share/673e64d9-cc08-800f-aab6-2d83eb3636f9

[#]LLM

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Written by Bruce Elrick on 2024-11-18 at 23:16

Is there something in Tumbleweed that deletes this stuff?

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