Remote

John

@buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06

Retired computer guy. Seems to discuss Linux on discount hardware more than politics, but does discuss politics.

69 Followers

248 Following

50 Posts

Joined March 15, 2026

John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@nixCraft@mastodon.social to be fair that was three or four official positions ago. The latest drop is this: “What we need to explain to the world: Number one, we are close to creating a genie that can grant any wish. Number two, we are going to make sure that our first wishes broadly benefit humanity” - Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI And no, I don't really believe that one either.

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@redsad@ohai.social fair

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@koen_hufkens@mastodon.social I've had similar thoughts. I think companies, perhaps Apple especially, pushed walk-up usability, as opposed to things you learned first. "The Missing Manual" era. But it's not completely on them. They tapped a demand. Most people don't want to learn things, especially first. Even if it might yield higher ease of use, later. Luckily with #FOSS and #Linux we still have the option to learn things second. Even things as ridiculous and productive as vi (and descendants).

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

"I ran Chrome's built-in speed test and found out my own browser was adding four seconds to every site I visited"

I scanned this article to see what the problem really was, and it was the extensions, folks.

Of course.

https://www.makeuseof.com/run-lighthouse-speed-test-google-chrome/

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

"You are the detective, and #AI is the shady guy who might have some answers."

This is my favorite coinage in a while.

"I heard you might have a script to scan my tar files and find one entry."

"I might, but it will cost you some tokens."

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Is anyone running #darwin, the Apple OSS OS? (It seems most Darwin tags are about the other Darwin. Another reinforcement that we should use unique names for software projects.)

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Someone is demolishing a house, probably for a tear down and rebuild. I go outside and I can tell that it's a few streets away, but the sound is very nervous making.

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Threads. There is some humor in the situation, as well as some frustration. I'm sure it will work out in the end.

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

I think I will just self rate these as "fine."

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

As always, do the mental experiment: 1) your doctor tells you that you have a dangerous condition 2) the good news is there is a drug for effective treatment 3) but then you learn an AI helped develop it

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@tobru@mstdn.social presumably if core git software got an llm assisted update they would have to fork it? I wonder if they thought through how much code across the ecosystem they would have to fork, or how they would even identify that.

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social It's about time. "For works created on or after January 1, 1978, U.S. copyright protection lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years" It should be a straightforward thing to build that in. Especially if their AI is smart enough to remember when everybody died. Not sure if that last sentence deserves an eye roll.

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@pwloftus@pwl.farted.net @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social you are right, locally owned and managed LLMs are going to have potentially fewer guardrails of all kind. We are already seeing political commentary that they are too dangerous, I guess it could get worse

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@robpike@hachyderm.io I love you, and all your work, Rob. I hope this is just a transition to new tools, and that methods will catch up. A rough patch. But best practices have not been universally found and adopted (obviously). Risks abound.

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@DrHyde@fosstodon.org @koen_hufkens@mastodon.social I think the difference is that you plateau at a different level if you were just a soft user of computers. I've had the experience where I've seen someone making painful little edits in a GUI editor and I say let me have that, do a couple things in vi, to their amazement Or not knowing how to reduce the size of a scanned pdf, a quick shell loop and Image Magick You may spend your whole life doing painful little things, that individually are easy, but over a lifetime..

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@EdTheDev@infosec.exchange fully endorse. But fwiw I think stage 1 for a lot of people might be to just write a short list for themselves to follow. This isn't my current, but it illustrates. Solutions should match the problem space though, and if manual systems get too long or too complicated, it's time to automate. Maybe that's just a bash script, or maybe it's ansible.

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@EdTheDev@infosec.exchange probably the biggest gap is between people who just run their systems and modify them later, and those they know they are establishing methods of any kind

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@DJDarren@mendeddrum.org I guess it's a true case of getting what you wish for. #Linux lets you get in and understand how your system really works. And sometimes Linux makes you get in and understand how your system really works.

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@ms_zwiebel@tech.lgbt I might be the same. I use Linux because my tools and techniques are not just portable to all the different distros, but to the BSD variants and others as well. Microsoft and Apple differ in their value proposition, but both tie it one-to-one to their platform.

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

I like Ray Myers take on the Zig/Bun/Anthropic kerfuffle. Also a good note on Buddhist right speech. #buddhism #AI https://raymyers.org/post/zig-creator-calls-spade-a-spade/

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@unknownuniverse@unkn.uk I have done the same, a set of scripts for the distros i bop between. I go even riskier on script names ;-), no need for any extension when you've got: #! /usr/bin/env fish (My first install script on most systems has to be bash because fish isn't there yet.)

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@DrHyde@fosstodon.org @koen_hufkens@mastodon.social I had a sudden thought. What if you have been doing GUI editing all your life, and doing search and replace, and there has been a little check box there labeled "regex" and you've never used it? Just imagine.

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@davidmaddock@aus.social I don't know, and would love to hear from someone who has seen the kernel discussion, but I have I guess: It's like WiFi but even worse, many many BT chips, but none supporting Linux directly, and so everything has to be reverse engineered.

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@koen_hufkens@mastodon.social @DrHyde@fosstodon.org I suspect the ratio might be kind of the same as it always was. But certainly people who have curiosity and want to learn to do things with their fingers, can. YouTube videos on fly tying have ridiculous views. Especially considering that no one *needs* to tie a fly.

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@mattsheffield@mastodon.social I think AI has its place, but having *only* corporate llms does seem a double dystopia. Local open source compute is supposed to be our out.

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@HaTetsu@mastodon.com.pl @tasket@infosec.exchange as you say, Flatpak is not universally loved. I think it's easier as a Linux user to stop worrying and learn to love the bomb (confusion). It certainly gives us, above the old C API, tremendous choices.

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

To effectively use AI you should know:

1) what not to ask
2) what you could ask
3) how to narrowly frame that question

You are the detective, and AI is the shady guy who might have some answers.

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@radioclash@retro.pizza @DrHyde@fosstodon.org @koen_hufkens@mastodon.social I'm afraid your operating system was built by people who did.

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Compassion is generally better than hate.

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@FluentInFinance@mastodon.social solid list and plan. But a question. I thought I heard at one point that real estate only matched inflation in most of the country and only exceeded it in hot markets. Perhaps that's changed?

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@Space_Burger_Steve@mstdn.ca @alltherum@freeradical.zone on Mastodon, I'm increasingly not seeing rational discussions of problems, covering both risks and benefits. Linus Torvalds offered those, and many here have responded by calling him a slop artist, and demanded that a fork be made.

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@Space_Burger_Steve@mstdn.ca @alltherum@freeradical.zone "I see a lot of hate for cars and drivers too, and I usually agree with it." If hate like that, against the general practices of your entire civilization, are part of your motivations.. I should probably just let this go.

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@DrHyde@fosstodon.org @koen_hufkens@mastodon.social for sure. It's probably isn't a coincidence that "power users" try to rack up skills across disciplines, so that they can reap as many benefits as possible.

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

I have been idling on my $20/mo Claude and my $5/mo Google AI. I might be the "gym membership" demographic they dreamed of.

But really from my started-in-the-70s perspective, our world of software is pretty complete.

Our problems are social.

(including wrt #ai)

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

I worked for a company that went public during the dot com boom. Here is the downside for a developer: I went from having root (and username john) on all the machines to having to follow procedures from an IT department. Even worse I had to maintain a Windows box at home in order to use IT tools to log in to the network.

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Back when all we ever did was search the web there was a low-key advantage for people who knew how to craft a query.

AI bumps that up.

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Barry Ritholtz's 10 Weekend Reads

Very interesting stuff

https://ritholtz.com/2026/05/10-weekend-reads-90/

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@radioclash@retro.pizza @koen_hufkens@mastodon.social do you sed? Do you awk? It's a cascade of usefulness. And I'm really sorry I thought I was too busy to learn awk until I retired.

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

As an aside, I do know someone who does cancer research at a major cancer center. They are training an internal AI, and testing it against their processes. They bring it all in house for a few reasons of course. The first is that they can protect patient privacy. The second is that they can develop their own methods. The third is that they can test it according to their own standards.

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

"Meet Wrinkles, an app that uncovers the hidden stories of the places around you"

Seems ok. It's a difficult task, to extract points of interest from I guess the general corpus.

I've thought about something much more specific. I'd like to have something that could give me what previous visitors to a spot have said about it going back in time. But that's more of a reader's tool, and more of a fringe non-market.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/04/meet-wrinkles-an-ai-app-that-uncovers-the-hidden-stories-of-the-places-around-you/

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@michaelgemar@cosocial.ca @simon@fedi.simonwillison.net it's probably fair to think anything that might have an exploit is unsafe for containment. True air gapping still might be safe. But you can imagine an AI trying to get out any way there. Maybe you pulled the ethernet cable and disconnected the Wi-Fi chip .. but you've got a wireless keyboard? It's definitely reality meets science fiction.

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@petergleick@fediscience.org It is, sadly, the species we have to work with. Homo Semi-Sapiens.

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 1w ago

Replying to

@nixCraft@mastodon.social IANAL, but I think these executives either knew or got consultation about the differences between civil and criminal law.

If they broke criminal law, they would risk going to jail, but if they broke civil law, they would only have to make it up later in financial penalties*.

I think that's the key.

- and not even themselves, essentially OPM.

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

"Denial WM: New Wayland Compositor With #Flutter Directly Embedded"

I love the rich and varied #Linux ecosystem.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Denial-WM-Compositor

mastodon.social

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

We used to go to Northridge, near the intersection of Devonshire and Reseda, for Little League. Pretty much every time I was there I would wonder about the weird house across the street. It was old. Sometimes they had cars. Mostly it was quiet.

I learned today that that was Barbara Stanwyck's old house!

Open to visitors but appointment required.

https://www.theoakridgeestate.org/

theoakridgeestate.org

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@PragmaticAndy@mastodon.social it was a very different age when we learned about technology in Whole Earth Review. Heck. My first internet account was with The Well, The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link.

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@radioclash@retro.pizza @koen_hufkens@mastodon.social it's like anything else serious. You build up from simpler rules to what you need. For my use, they not that complicated. And you test against test files. It's not really scary, like being forced into SQL changes on a live production database.

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 4w ago

Replying to on infosec.exchange

@tasket@infosec.exchange My line was that people who want to replace Linux, but without AI, don't understand Linux or AI. I still think that's true. What they are signing up for is just a sad future slog where they must reproduce the same security fixes, and the same driver enhancements, and the same new drivers, by hand. It is a treadmill pursuit.

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John @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

I'm not ready to give up on open source ( #FOSS ) and re-embrace the corporations, but copy fail and dirty frag certainly cast shade on my confidence.

I hope this is just a rough patch.

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