Author Archives: pappp

To digital natives, Microsoft’s IT stack makes Google’s look like a model of sanity

Posted on 2025-09-29 by pappp

Source: The Register

Article note: This should really just say "All extant groupware is fucking terrible, if anyone ever produces a non-asinine offering, it'll be the biggest disruption to enterprise computing since the end of Netware in the early 90s"

A millennial does battle with Redmond's enterprise tools and comes away reeling 

Comment  Probably the single most common argument against switching to Linux is the absolute non-negotiable requirement of many organizations to have Microsoft Exchange. Here's a fascinating glimpse of the view from the other side.…

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Update Notice of Centauri Series – ELEGOO Official

Posted on 2025-09-27 by pappp

Source: Published articles

Article note: Hey! They got shamed into admitting the Centauri Carbon line is running modified klipper, and complied with the open-source license requirements. I bet it'll be good for them in the long run, since many of the irritations with those have been firmware bugs, and the community will fix that shit if they can.
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Benjamin Button reviews macOS

Posted on 2025-09-23 by pappp

Source: OSNews

Article note: This is a _glorious_ shitpost about Apple's design trends. The story really is very similar in either direction, Apple had a competent OS from like 2002-2016. OS X was a jank beta made by slapping goofy infantile but computationally expensive visuals on top of NextStep before that, and is iOS's less-liked sibling after, and the goofy designs at either extreme are oddly similar.

Apple’s first desktop operating system was Tahoe. Like any first version, it had a lot of issues. Users and critics flooded the web with negative reviews. While mostly stable under the hood, the outer shell — the visual user interface — was jarringly bad. Without much experience in desktop UX, Apple’s first OS looked like a Fisher-Price toy: heavily rounded corners, mismatched colors, inconsistent details and very low information density. Obviously, the tool was designed mostly for kids or perhaps light users or elderly people.

Credit where credit is due: Apple had listened to their users and the next version – macOS Sequoia — shipped with lots of fixes. Border radius was heavily reduced, transparent glass-like panels replaced by less transparent ones, buttons made more serious and less toyish. Most system icons made more serious, too, with focus on more detail. Overall, it seemed like the 2nd version was a giant leap from infancy to teenage years.

↫ Rakhim Davletkali

A top quality operating systems shitpost.

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Nvidia, Intel to co-develop “multiple generations” of chips as part of $5 billion deal

Posted on 2025-09-18 by pappp

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: Nvidia has been _incredibly_ effective at using lucre from one hype cycle to buy competitive positions in other industries (best example: bought Mellanox to make them a credible player in HPC with cryptocurrency mining lucre), so this is interesting as a strategic signal. Or it's an international politics buying US influence thing. Or ARC is a long-term strategic threat they want to kill. Or...

In a major collaboration that would have been hard to imagine just a few years ago, Nvidia announced today that it was buying a total of $5 billion in Intel stock, giving Intel's competitor ownership of roughly 4 percent of the company. In addition to the investment, the two companies said that they would be co-developing "multiple generations of custom data center and PC products."

"The companies will focus on seamlessly connecting NVIDIA and Intel architectures using NVIDIA NVLink," reads Nvidia's press release, "integrating the strengths of NVIDIA’s AI and accelerated computing with Intel’s leading CPU technologies and x86 ecosystem to deliver cutting-edge solutions for customers."

Rather than combining the two companies' technologies, the data center chips will apparently be custom x86 chips that Intel builds to Nvidia's specifications. Nvidia will "integrate [the CPUs] into its AI infrastructure platforms and offer [them] to the market."

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Criminals broke into the system Google uses to share info with cops

Posted on 2025-09-16 by pappp

Source: The Register

Article note: Oh look, the literal "A backdoor for the government is a backdoor for anyone more competent than the dumbest person in the government" case, like gets discussed _every time_ some asshole starts talking about LaWfUl InTeRcEpT.

Talk about an inside job

Google confirmed that miscreants created a fraudulent account in its Law Enforcement Request System (LERS) portal, which police and other government agencies use to ask for data about Google users.…

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Linux phones are more important now than ever

Posted on 2025-09-15 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: It really is becoming a huge problem, making two multinationals with histories of behaving badly the roots of trust for ...everything. Doctorow's "War on General Purpose Computing" premonition gets closer every day. The biggest shame is that we had Maemo, and it was ever so close to the ideal, then was killed by a process so aggressive and weird it is forever clouded by plausible conspiracy theories. The little bit of it surviving as Sailfish isn't enough to counteract network effects, but at least the embers are still there.
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Chat Control faces blocking minority in the EU

Posted on 2025-09-12 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Whew. Dodged it again. Those assholes will try again.
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Jef Raskin’s cul-de-sac and the quest for the humane computer

Posted on 2025-09-12 by pappp

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: I've gone on the dive the author is basically writing a narrative of myself, and it's a lovely experience. This telling is well written and illustrated. Like many models of computing that didn't take, from a modern perspective one of the biggest problems is Raskin's vision (grimly) wasn't sufficiently amenable to rent-seeking by vendors and their partners. Many of the abstractions he suggested work well in textual formats, but struggle to generalize to other media... and the ones that do have generally been adopted in some modified form much later (Timeline based NDE, zooming interfaces, etc.) The Humane Interface is still worth a read, for the theory, to understand where many conventions came from, and to see the differences in how interface conventions are relative to how they were conceived.
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Bolsonaro Convicted of Attempting a Coup in Brazil, Sentenced to 27 Years in Prison

Posted on 2025-09-11 by pappp

Source: NYT > World

Article note: Oh look, the US is demonstrably less functional than a historically unstable South American country, _they_ managed to convict their former leader who tried to coup their way back into power.

Brazil’s Supreme Court convicted the former president of trying to cling to power after losing the 2022 election, including a plan to assassinate his opponent.

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Software packages with more than 2 billion weekly downloads hit in supply-chain attack

Posted on 2025-09-08 by pappp

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: A whole pile of one-liner packages used all over the place, compromised by a basic phish. I reiterate: I sincerely believed for some time that node/npm was a joke about bad design. Despite knowing that people take it seriously, I'm not entirely sure I was wrong.

Hackers planted malicious code in open source software packages with more than 2 billion weekly updates in what is likely to be the world’s biggest supply-chain attack ever.

The attack, which compromised nearly two dozen packages hosted on the npm repository, came to public notice on Monday in social media posts. Around the same time, Josh Junon, a maintainer or co-maintainer of the affected packages, said he had been “pwned” after falling for an email that claimed his account on the platform would be closed unless he logged into a site and updated his two-factor authentication credentials.

Defeating 2FA the easy way

“Sorry everyone, I should have paid more attention,” Junon, who uses the moniker Qix, wrote. “Not like me; have had a stressful week. Will work to get this cleaned up.”

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