Rob Landley's Blog Thing for 2025

Both the state and federal taxes were borked this year, for different reasons.

Haven't listened to christmas music all year (nor did Fade and I set up a tree, and we have this terrible habit of just giving each other whatever Nice Thing we got for the other as soon as we got it so didn't successfully accumulate presents this year ei…

Yeah, another huge blog gap.

So in the deleted chunk of blog stuff, I went to the dentist and they sent me an email I needed to read, and my email was a mess I'd been ignoring for too long which had accumulated.

Digging through spam email, caught up to November 20th.

With every new "child safety" law, I ask: Are they empowering the group they claim to "protect", or depriving them of agency to create an underclass precedent expandable to everyone?

People who like AI want slaves.

This observation from @sarahtaber is frustratingly accurate: "God forbid you do start to succeed in getting attention on your problem.

The American Library Association announced that US Libraries got some of their funding restored, in a November 21 judicial ruling negating yet another executive odor from the whites only 2/3 of a house.

This backup file has a pile of youtube links at the top (out of sequence with any blog entry, just cut and pasted to deal with later), which I think I meant to turn into an essay about youtube censorship?

The way I deleted my blog entries was due to an idiosyncrasy in how I edit and update them, which I've known was a problem forever and finally managed to bite myself with.

Darn it, I accidentally deleted all my blog posts since November 3 (the last time I did a full backup of my laptop).

Microsoft Github's LLM is now autogenerating bullshit summaries of commits.

Tesla remotely bricked 10,000+ powerwalls, once again demonstrating you don't really own anything you buy from them.

Over the past 6 years, support for Medicare For All has increased 50 points.

Went to Aldi's to get cash because I like to keep this quaint tradition alive.

Oh good grief, that doesn't fix the problem.

It's a pity my old "the prototype and the fan club" talk didn't get properly recorded, "A maintainer's job is to say no" was one of the subsections, and this brought it to mind.

Sigh.

Steam isn't censoring games, it's payment processors.

I'm not saying these two posts signal my exit from the Linux community, but the guide on responsibly sunsetting open source projects was interesting enough to send from my phone to my laptop.

Had a good call with coca cola dividend reinvestment plan shareholder services.

New Carnegie Melon paper on AI being shiny but useless du jour.

This article says "a few hundred" NYPD officers have threatened to quit over Mamdani, and this page says there are currently 34,000 of them.

The potato farmer is proudly showing off a new bigger dirt torturing device (circa 2 minutes).

Google continues to try to spin "we're feeding all your cloud data to AI training" as a good thing.

"The Line" just got quietly cancelled after letting MBS spend lots of money from Saudi Arabia's Sovereign Wealth Fund through companies he controlled.

Putin has no fucking clue.

Government spending isn't the only thing that creates money: all borrowing does.

When the avuncular potato doofus I've been watching on youtube laments that small ("eliminator") potatoes only sell to his processor for $2 per hundred pounds and are worth $3 to him as fertilizer, there really seems like a business opportunity for some t…

Norman Borlaug's work is fascinating: The Haber-Bosch process can create basically unlimited nitrogen fertilizer (via captured nazi science used to gas everybody in WWII) but if you overfertilized wheat the grain would get too heavy and the stalks would f…

Re: yesterday's laffer curve video, he's right that under fiat currency the government spending money is what creates money, but tax serves at least four purposes.

The Laffer curve is wrong.

Linux must really be sinking given how much ballast they're throwing overboard.

Once upon a time zero punctuation was on its own website, as a series of flash animations.

Australia has so much solar power it's making electricity free for 3 hours/day.

One of the weird things about history is how solutions become problems.

FDR's "I welcome their hatred" speech was delivered 3 days before the election where he won 98.5% of the electoral vote.

People underestimate not just the damage Boomers have done over the past few decades, but how useless they've been their ENTIRE LIVES.

Phone and laptop hardware should have LEDs physically in series with the microphone and camera so this hardware can't be powered up without the light going on.

The toybox "readahead" command uses the unprototyped readahead() function out of libc.

Well, at least it's closure.

Las Vegas is dying the same way Sears did: they sold the land out from under themselves, became renters where they once owned, and the slumlords drained the business dry.

Private Equity was copying the 1980s leveraged buyout model, which worked great when interest rates were stuck at the zero lower bound and hit a brick wall when the fed funds rate went above 4%.

Sigh.

Los Angeles is installing free rooftop solar+battery systems for low income residents.

At the time of writing, I haven't blogged since the 10th.

I wrote a draft reply to a message about initrd removal, which I decided not to send because it wouldn't help.

Thinking it would be really nice to have a tiny LUA implementation that runs on bare metal, _as_ the operating system.

Somebody (alas, I forgot who/where) pointed me at Armbian's orange pi 3b page, which does NOT live on Huaweicloud!