Personal musings of Matthew Ernisse
Links Posted to Thoughts The Week of 08-09-2026 There were 2 links posted this week. 08/13/2026 @16:05 AI on Twitch: ‘If it was opt in, nobody would opt in’ - YouTube "If it was opt-in no one would opt in..." is such a brain-dead silicon valley tech-bro concept of consent. 08/10/2026 @08:56 Elon Musk’s Grokipedia Quietly Stopped Updating In April. Basically No One Noticed. | Techdirt For all the…
Over the last week I've been working on replacing imladris, the server that does most of handwaving gesture this. I first installed the ur-imladris on November 5th, 2011 from a Debian 6.0 (squeeze) iso into a KVM 0.12.5 VM. That system kept being upgraded all the way to Debian 12.0 (bookworm) and probably could have continued but it was time. There have been a number of decisions over the years…
Links Posted to Thoughts The Week of 08-02-2026 There were 4 links posted this week. 08/08/2026 @18:35 “As a Windows user, it’s a very surreal way to install a program.” – Unsung Mac’s operating system has a peculiar way to install apps. [...] the Finder window resembles almost a specialized app window, and you can use all of this power to… tell the user to drag the app to the permanent folder Way…
I follow Cloudflare's blog because it's useful to keep an eye on what the cadre of nazi apologists that man-in-the-middle something north of 10% of the web traffic on the Internet are up to and what fresh hell (like their constant bot detection interstitial nags and CAPTCHAs) they are about to inflict on us. One of their latest marketing skreeds is a bit of a doozy. Building an open Agentic…
Links Posted to Thoughts The Week of 07-26-2026 There were 7 links posted this week. 08/01/2026 @19:56 "Everyone hates AI" in Paris Unlike the US, France and the EU are currently capable of regulating the tech industry. This of course is why you hear American tech executives grouse about Europe so much. It’s a complex policy landscape with plenty of its own struggles—I’ve been contacted by…
Links Posted to Thoughts The Week of 07-19-2026 There were 2 links posted this week. 07/21/2026 @19:49 The Lost Joy of Music Piracy: WhatCD, Oink, and Spotify | Pigeons and Planes By the time Nine Inch Nails’ comeback album With Teeth hit stores in 2005, it had already been available to download on Oink for a number of weeks. Rather than joining the growing number of artists angry at their fans…
Links Posted to Thoughts The Week of 07-12-2026 There were 5 links posted this week. 07/17/2026 @07:27 The AI Layoffs If, for most of the economy, the "AI" recession continues to look much like other recessions, that's good news for anxious policy-makers. At least they know what to expect. The much bigger hazard will be the financial wildfire that starts in the tech industry itself. With trillions…
Links Posted to Thoughts The Week of 06-28-2026 There were 6 links posted this week. 07/03/2026 @19:45 Returnal - Penny Arcade Gabe: First they got rid of manuals, and now there's no disc? I'm just buying an empty box? [...] Tycho: [...] When this shit started, you didn't own the machine at all. [...] They've been chasing that high ever since . Spit truth, boys. 07/02/2026 @10:30 Inside the…
Now, I'm sure the knee-jerk reaction to this will be "oh but you're OLD, no one cares about such things these days" but hear me out. It seems that if there is any way to "discover" events happening anywhere these days is to either follow a bunch of pages on Facebook, sign up to a pile of e-mail lists or download one or more of the predatory ticketing apps like Ticketmaster or Eventbrite. Let me be…
Links Posted to Thoughts The Week of 06-21-2026 There were 7 links posted this week. 06/27/2026 @21:07 Jeff Moss: [...], I spoke with two different people with experience in the VPN game. [...] The second person put the final nail in the coffin. They explained as far as they could tell about half of all VPN providers had ties to intelligence services. Either as fronts or investors or super…
It has been a little over 3 months since I rewrote Thoughts and repatriated the data. Until now I've left the data in the Azure Storage Account in an effort not to break any links; however, Azure is migrating away from the old v1 version of their Storage Accounts to a more expensive v2. As such I can see no reason to continue to keep that account alive so I've gone through the blog with the help…
Links Posted to Thoughts The Week of 06-14-2026 There were 1 links posted this week. 06/16/2026 @08:19 The SpaceX IPO Is A Giant Unworkable Con Orchestrated By An Overt White Supremacist Huckster Last week's SpaceX IPO is a stunning act of financial fraud that wouldn't be allowed in a country with functional regulators. It cobbles together a bunch of money-losing ventures into a giant…
Links Posted to Thoughts The Week of 06-07-2026 There were 4 links posted this week. 06/13/2026 @08:51 Chatty Cat Isn't Shy About Making Her Opinions Known Adorable cat, much smart. Three years ago, there was a guy that I dated who seemed amazing. And so I introduced him to Rory, and Rory hated him. I’m talking biting the soles of his feet to the point where he was like, “Can we like put her in…
Links Posted to Thoughts The Week of 05-31-2026 There were 4 links posted this week. 06/06/2026 @08:39 ‘Bots have now passed human traffic online,’ Cloudflare boss laments — says agentic traffic wasn’t expected to eclipse real people until next year | Tom's Hardware At the time of writing, Cloudflare data suggests that the balance between bot vs. human web traffic (HTTP requests) is already firmly…
Links Posted to Thoughts The Week of 05-24-2026 There were 4 links posted this week. 05/30/2026 @18:47 Copy/Paste - koldfront Now that GNOME has disabled the middle mouse button pasting, I am left wondering what clicking the middle mouse button does instead by default? And yet another excuse to never use GNOME again. What sort of nonsense is this? Why do the Linux desktop people keep asking…
Links Posted to Thoughts The Week of 05-17-2026 There were 3 links posted this week. 05/23/2026 @19:05 SpaceX’s IPO Filing Shows Elon’s Twitter ‘Business Genius’ Was A Fantasy | Techdirt [...] the operational track record is what it is. Twitter was generating $4.5 billion in ad revenue the year before Musk bought it. Three years into his five-year plan to reach $12 billion, the combined X/xAI…
Links Posted to Thoughts The Week of 05-10-2026 There were 6 links posted this week. 05/16/2026 @10:00 Alton Brown Cooks Food | Episode 24: The Dip's The Thing - YouTube This week on ABCF we proclaim that dip's do NOT sing backup. Find out, if it is dip. Narrator: it is dip. 05/15/2026 @20:17 Tesla Reveals New Details About Robotaxi Crashes—and the Humans Involved | WIRED In one incident, which…
Links Posted to Thoughts The Week of 05-03-2026 There were 5 links posted this week. 05/09/2026 @16:12 Post by @did:plc:iu4j537hox5huj4bwnwgub4z — Bluesky AOC on possibly running for the Senate or President: They assume my ambition is a title or a seat. My ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country. Presidents come and go, elected officials come and go, single payer…
A year or so ago I bought a HIFI Walker H2 audio player. I stuck a 256GB SD micro SD card in it and promptly copied my Apple Music nee iTunes library to it. This was pretty slick and I was very happy with it. As I mentioned the wired headphones were probably more important than the stand alone player as far as quality of listening went (though anything is better than most streaming services OTA…
Links Posted to Thoughts The Week of 04-26-2026 There were 2 links posted this week. 04/30/2026 @21:18 Cursor Camp Another banger from neal.fun! I spent too long playing with this. h/t waxy 04/30/2026 @19:51 Brian McFadden: A.I.'s Manifesto Destiny (panel 1 - Title on a note that's displayed on a computer screen.) Tech Bro Manifesto (panel 2 - Palantir CEO Alex Karp reading in front of a company…
Later this year I'm having a party for some friends and family. I am not historically enthused by throwing or attending such things but sometimes needs must. We secured a venue on a nearby beach and have catering secured so of course my thoughts have moved towards matters more involving ambiance. Followers of my Thoughts microblog may have noticed a wee ATtiny3224 DMX transmitter project that I…
Links Posted to Thoughts The Week of 04-19-2026 There were 8 links posted this week. 04/25/2026 @22:00 "Happy Accidents" // Remixing Bob Ross - Yuri Wong I come across this now and then, it's always worth a listen. Not just because Bob Ross was amazing but because this is an actual bop. 04/25/2026 @10:15 Replacing an Apple Time Capsule? Skip the Ubiquiti UNAS-2 If you value your sanity, do not buy…
Links Posted to Thoughts The Week of 04-12-2026 There were 1 links posted this week. 04/13/2026 @13:09 The Opinion No One Wrote About From Court Watch #170 : Media organizations everywhere are experimenting with new ways to attract audiences. Virality is rewarded. Pithiness is king. Slow, methodical, and expensive investigative journalism is the first on the chopping block to make way for the…
Links Posted to Thoughts The Week of 04-05-2026 There were 7 links posted this week. 04/11/2026 @17:39 Razor1911 by Razor 1911 :: pouët.net 40 years... absolute 🔥 h/t waxy 04/11/2026 @10:52 jwz: jwz mixtape 258 Because of the recent unpleasantness, here's a mixtape of songs about nuclear war! Apropos of... *gestures widely* ...everything. 04/08/2026 @19:24 The First MPC Live 3 Beat Tape - YouTube…
Links Posted to Thoughts The Week of 03-29-2026 There were 5 links posted this week. 04/02/2026 @22:07 Go Ahead and Use AI. It Will Only Help Me Dominate You. Some in the “real writer” community find this sort of rampant outsourcing of the writing process to AI to be distressing. Not me. Would I do it myself? No. I have self-respect. But I want to tell you, my friends, that you have my full…
Links Posted to Thoughts The Week of 03-22-2026 There were 2 links posted this week. 03/27/2026 @08:56 jwz: The Oberlin Luddite Club We need not stand by and witness the further atrophy of our liberal arts education. As you embark on your year of AI, we'll embark on our own year of self-actualization, of realizing the fruits of our labor and embracing human imperfection and raw inquiry. We will…
Links Posted to Thoughts The Week of 03-15-2026 There were 6 links posted this week. 03/21/2026 @14:17 RIP Metaverse, an $80 Billion Dumpster Fire Nobody Wanted The complete and utter failure of the metaverse is a reminder not just of the fact that the future Silicon Valley is force feeding us is not inevitable, but that quite often these oligarchs quite simply cannot relate to real people, don’t…
Links Posted to Thoughts The Week of 03-08-2026 There were 2 links posted this week. 03/12/2026 @12:14 A DOGE Bro Allegedly Walked Out Of Social Security With 500 Million Americans’ Records On A Thumb Drive And Expected A Pardon If Caught | Techdirt That ProPublica deep dive painted a picture of 21-to-24-year-olds who didn’t understand the systems they were demanding access to, had “pre-ordained…
About a millennium ago in early 02020 I wrote a microblog using Azure Functions, the then fairly new entry to so-called serverless computing. The result lived until very recently as " Thoughts " here on my site and was, essentially, a JavaScript application and a whole bunch of HTML post-generated by a bunch of Python scripts. The Azure Function served to provide an interface to the Azure Table…
Links Posted to Thoughts The Week of 03-01-2026 There were 5 links posted this week. 03/07/2026 @21:03 OpenBSD on SGI: a rollercoaster story Interest in supporting the MIPS architecture in BSD is about as old as the architecture itself, and Risc/OS (the Unix variant running on MIPS' own workstations, before MIPS got bought by SGI and stopped manufacturing anything but processors) was based upon…
Links Posted to Thoughts The Week of 02-22-2026 There were 2 links posted this week. 02/26/2026 @08:19 FBI Got Grok to Hand Over Prompts Used to Create Nonconsensual Porn Tuck, who is accused of extensively harassing and threatening the woman’s husband. Tuck regularly worked out with and texted with the woman and, according to the affidavit, secretly filmed her while she was working out in his…
Links Posted to Thoughts The Week of 02-15-2026 There were 8 links posted this week. Notes From The Helm Last week I launched a new version of Thoughts that no longer runs on Azure. As part of that effort I had to update all the external machinery that generates things from the Thoughts dataset. In the case of this digest I left the staging site URL in as the API endpoint to fetch from so the…
Links Posted to Thoughts The Week of 02-08-2026 There were 2 links posted this week. 02/10/2026 @07:33 🔗 Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month | The Verge “For most adults, age verification won’t be required, as Discord’s age inference model uses account information such as account tenure, device and activity data, and aggregated, high-level patterns across Discord…
I don't understand the desire to shove everything into a web browser. Other than the fact that it is how tech startups extract money from venture capitalists, spy on your user base, and lock out interoperability I don't see why a web browser is a better place to implement most things and yet, here we are. I have resisted participating in the new real time chat services because they don't really…
Links Posted to Thoughts The Week of 02-01-2026 There were 9 links posted this week. 02/03/2026 @20:12 🔗 Repost of internet freds 🦇☠️💾✨️ by Wil Wheaton who the hell called them "podcast hosts with whom I've developed an unhealthy parasocial relationship" and not . . . earbuds. Well fuck me, I'm dead now. 🤣💀 02/04/2026 @08:21 🔗 Repost of Doremus Jessup by Jenn 🐙 [ Ron Swanson meme template,…
Links Posted to Thoughts The Week of 01-25-2026 There were 5 links posted this week. 01/26/2026 @08:02 🔗 The Anti-'Abolish ICE' Crowd is Living In the Past But if it was right to call for ICE’s abolition [in 2018], it is even more right today. ICE in 2026 is a nightmarish monstrosity. Its budget is now nearly $30 billion, roughly four times what it was eight years ago and more than the budget of…
I don't think it's alarming to even infrequent readers of mine to find that I tend not to replace things if I don't have to. I also tend to be a fan of things that have wires versus their wireless counterparts with some very specific exceptions. I've been using a pair of Bose QuietComfort 25 headphones for probably 10 years, if not longer. They're fantastic. I use them all the time in loud…
Links Posted to Thoughts The Week of 01-18-2026 There were 2 links posted this week. 01/20/2026 @09:12 🔗 Retoot of mhoye (@mhoye@mastodon.social) by jwz (@jwz@mastodon.social) I mean, take a look at this: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/01/gpio-madness/#comments (sorry @jwz ) All the suggestions are things you can try that make the problem go away. There's no "this is the issue, here is why it…
I've been fighting what I'm pretty sure is a silly firewall problem while trying to get Synctrain to work when my iPhone isn't on my WiFi. Long time readers will know that when I am not on a trusted WiFi network my i{Pad,}OS devices automatically VPN into my network so they can tunnel all their traffic through my security apparatus (and multi-layer ad and tracking prevention systems). I'm getting…
Links Posted to Thoughts The Week of 01-11-2026 There were 4 links posted this week. 01/13/2026 @20:07 🔗 Jensen Huang Is Begging You to Stop Being So Negative About AI According to Huang, considering the potential existential risks of unleashing AI on society may do more harm than good. “It’s not helpful. It’s not helpful to people. It’s not helpful to the industry. It’s not helpful to society.…
Links Posted to Thoughts The Week of 01-04-2026 There were 10 links posted this week. 01/04/2026 @18:53 🔗 Politics is breaking down — and so is our language for it | The Verge The most significant resistance to Trumpism, too, appears to be abandoning the realm of literate politics; after all, you do not bring a persuasive argument to a gunfight. 01/04/2026 @22:37 🔗 The Enshittifinancial Crisis…
So I've had an Apple Watch for a little more than 3 years now and I figured it was time to talk a little bit about what the experience has been like. What is this thing for? After three years of wearing this thing nearly every day and even turning on a bunch of the fitness tracking features I still don't know what this thing is for . It is bad as a watch, needing nightly charging even with…
Links Posted to Thoughts The Week of 12-28-2025 There were 2 links posted this week. 12/29/2025 @10:59 🔗 Twenty • Damn Interesting In that time, our small, independent crew of authors, editors, illustrators, and podcasters at Damn Interesting published 797,626 words (798,231 if you count this post), released 410 podcast episodes, curated over 45,000 interesting links, made a few games, won a few…
Welcome to 2026, here we are joining the last five years with a look back at the 10 most visited posts of the year. According to awstats there were a little more than 73,000 visitors to the site, around 30,000 more than the year prior. Thanks to the meteoric rise of slop bots and script kiddies trying to train their own porn generator models I've served nearly 250,000 403 FORBIDDEN responses…
If my notes are correct I've been running an ADS-B feeder for over 10 years (with over 7 years of uptime currently) and so when I ran across ACARS DRAMA recently I was immediately interested in running my own feeder. The provided instructions include a medium post and some sample configurations but are otherwise quite sparse. The general gist seems to be that the canonical method of building a…
Links Posted to Thoughts The Week of 12-21-2025 There were 4 links posted this week. 12/22/2025 @22:07 🔗 Advanced Welding For Dummies! - YouTube Love a good This Old Tony video and one for Christmas? Well I don't think I was that good this year but I'll take the clerical error! 12/23/2025 @08:28 From the fuck-around-and-find-out department: 🔗 Pulled 60 Minutes segment on CECOT This is a screen…
May the Winter Solstice and ensuing holiday season fill you with hope and joy and may you get to spend some time with those important to you. Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Joyous Yule, Happy Saturnalia, congratulations on surviving the preceding 2,122 days of March 2020 and the 940 or so million kilometers of the last sidereal year. As we hurtle through the unforgiving void towards perihelion,…
Links Posted to Thoughts The Week of 12-14-2025 There were 2 links posted this week. 12/18/2025 @09:34 🔗 Repost of Bethany Black by Dr Eleanor Janega I’m pissed that we’re all going to have a shitty 10-15 years economically because a dozen techboys believed that it was possible to write code to the point that the program could write better code and eventually either kill us all or make us…
Links Posted to Thoughts The Week of 12-07-2025 There were 7 links posted this week. 12/08/2025 @13:24 🔗 Elon’s Crying Censorship Over An EU Fine That Has Nothing To Do With Censorship | Techdirt The EU hit X with a $140 million fine last week for violating the Digital Services Act (DSA). But (despite what you may have heard) this isn’t some censorship overreach by Brussels bureaucrats. The…
Links Posted to Thoughts The Week of 11-30-2025 There were 3 links posted this week. 12/02/2025 @09:38 🔗 Floor796 Holy crap! I saw this years ago and forgot all about it, apparently it's still being worked on! h/t stephvee.ca 12/03/2025 @08:22 🔗 jwz: Kohler's $600/month toilet camera uses your turds to train AI Dekoda analyzes three vital areas: gut health, hydration, and the presence of blood…