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Meta is adding ridiculous ‘rate limits’ and a soft paywall to its smart glasses | The Verge: This week, it quietly announced that your glasses’ Conversation Focus feature will soon be limited to three hours of use per month, unless you pay for a $19.99 Meta One Premium subscription. Me: You know, these ugly creeper peepers could not possibly make me want them any less. A PM deep in the heart of darkness: Hold my creatine.

I started today’s presentation with “I went into security engineering because I love public speaking and I’m really good at it”. Sometimes you have to commit to the lie.

I saw a guy wearing a nylon shirt and matching cargo shorts, both clean but faded from too many washes, a plain non-matching ball cap, black sneakers, about 30 tools clipped to his belt, and a couple of ID badges. He was a phone lineman, maybe an electrician, perhaps a fiber optic engineer, with a broken in outfit he’d worn to work every day for months. The perfection nearly caught my breath. Guy dressed like that, there’s not a room in the country where a security guard wouldn’t buzz him in.

My OpenClaw, summarizing my day’s adventures: “Solid evening flow though. Car bodywork → Animal Crossing → Cyberpunk. The perfect arc of ‘paid labor, chill labor, and violent labor.’”

I’ve had fun building Scrapwire. Lately I’ve had fun playing with OpenClaw, too. I didn’t like its communication channel options, though. Signal is great but the integration is a little flaky. Same with iMessage, and that could be a privacy risk. WhatApp? LOL no. So I made a Scrapwire channel for OpenClaw, and now I’m talking to my little AI cat via Scrapwire, Veilid, and cypherspace. There’s no central server to spy on me or gather metadata, no direct connection requirements that expose my…

For the life of me, this looks like an angel reaching heavenward.

Even our fruit is getting into the AI business.

Enjoy the little things in life, like the unsubscribe button in an email taking you to a form requiring you to type in your full name and email address and reason for leaving, so you feed the email to SpamSieve instead, and then a few minutes later seeing that a brand new email from the same company went straight to spam because the filter knows how to file it appropriately now. Life’s too short not to appreciate the quiet moments of beauty.

AI prompt of the day: You export an app’s user list and want to import it into Okta before you sync the 2. Okta gives you a CSV template to download, usually (always?) called okta-csv-template.csv, but its format varies per-application. “Please rewrite employees-export.csv in the format of okta-csv-template.csv.” This saves so much tedium.

Meta Has Created a Prediction Markets App - The New York Times The app would be independent of Meta’s other social media offerings, although sources told the paper that those social sites could direct users to engagement with the app. Oh sure, why not. I suppose they’ve already ruled out selling vapes or meth, or at least haven’t added those business units to their annual filings yet. I truly wonder if Meta’s Downfall as a Service umbrella has ever rejected an idea as being too detrimental to…

I’ve recently seen a small flood of my personal and work emails (and group aliases) getting responses from many other companies’ support emails, as though someone were opening support tickets using my addresses. Is this some weird variant of push bombing? Or maybe someone getting me to train my spam filters to reject support emails so that Ill miss an important one (like “we’ve received your request to transfer your domain name; reply to cancel”) or such?

My uConsole computer finally arrived after a 10-month delay. I started kicking the tires by installing fun software on it, and quickly realized it’d run better if it looked cool. Here’s how I did it. Change the boot image Raspberry Pi OS uses Plymouth to make show a boot splashscreen. By default, it displays the image file at /usr/share/plymouth/themes/pix/splash.png. I’m sure there’s a “better” way to do this, but I simply replaced that file with my own 1280x720 image (to match the screen’s…

Bonus rant: every time I accidentally launch Chrome and try to quit it and it blocks me with its stupid non-standard highjacking of what cmd-Q means, I’m tempted to defenestrate my laptop until I remember that I can fix that broken setting in its preferences. I remember when I use to like Chrome and appreciated its design. Believe it or not, it was a pretty nice browser nearly 20 years ago.

Why yes, you can run Factory’s Droid on a Raspberry Pi. Not officially, sure. This isn’t part of our CI/CD pipeline and we’re not publishing packages for it the way we do for our supported platforms. Still, it works!

Uber’s tired of getting sued for breaking laws so they’re trying to change them. Vote no. Honestly, getting me to take the side of ambulance chasers is quite the accomplishment. I’m impressed by their dedication to evil.

Some tourists flagged me down outside the 4th and King Caltrain station to help with transit directions to Golden Gate Bridge. Their app had them walking up through the TL to catch a bus. I got them safely loaded onto a Muni to Powell to make that leg of it a lot easier. I hope. I wish they’d just taken my advice to get a cab or rideshare.

From the text of the agreement to end Trump’s War: Pending the final Deal, the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States of America agree to maintain the status quo; the Islamic Republic of Iran will maintain the current status quo of its nuclear program, and the United States of America will not impose any new sanctions, and will not deploy any additional forces in the region. This return to the status quo cost 7-10K killed and 50K injured and $113B to the US alone. Please, can we stop…

Whoa! Mise just replaced Ansible for 90% of my most common use cases. mise.jdx.dev/bootstrap…

Today was my 1 year anniversary as Head of Security at Factory. Quickest year of my life, and I still love coming to work every day. My coworkers are amazing!

Welp, I’ve agreed to be a panelist in a Shark Tank-style event where CISOs judge startup ideas. This is incredibly far out of my daily routine and comfort zone, so I felt obligated to say yes and commit to it before I had a chance to let myself back out.

Currently reading: A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole 📚 I deliberately know nothing whatsoever about this book, except that people liked it.

Finished reading: Accelerando by Charles Stross 📚 Alright, so this was not the best written book I’ve stumbled across. It was alright, but Strunk & White cried a few times along the way. But the world building and imagination and prediction accuracy? Fantastic. It’s not high art, but art nonetheless.

Anthropic’s leaning in to the whole nanny state thing. (This is a real, actual screenshot.)

I was talking to some AI industry leaders last night. Their words helped crystalize my own thoughts on Anthropic’s “guardrails” around using their models. A lot of what I do is legal only because of context. I carry lock picks in my bag. I use them to get into my own stuff (and to satisfy my own curiosity) and never use them to gain access I shouldn’t have. Is it bad to use lock picks? That’s impossible to say without knowing why they’re used. I ask AI to find security flaws in my software to…

A coworker brought a little Python-programmable rolling robot ball to the work offsite. She asked a group of us, in seriousness, if she brought it out after dinner, would anyone be able to help debug some of the code. My friend, you have a robot. A programmable one. Around us. I guarantee that thing’ll get debugged before you take it away for the night. It might not end up with the original code, but it’ll do something alright. I also got to introduce the word “nerdsniped”.

Authors: no one regularly calls a thing by its full name in informal conversation. In the real world, a television is a TV. People talk about “Smith”, not “President John Smith”. If the star Betelgeuse were a part of everyday chat, it’d be called Juice. All this is 10x true if the military’s involved. No one loves funny nicknames more than the rank and file. Some smartass would call it “Orenthal” one time, and from then it’d be compressed to “Orntall”.

I’m finally getting around to watching the WWDC keynote. Fun fact: if a presenter lowers their hand below waist level, or go more than 3 seconds before waving them about, they’re penalized stock options. That’s the only explanation I have for it. Every single presenter, every time. If you had a drinking game for whenever someone swings their hands wide and brings them back together, you’d be dead by the first section.

I bought a DM42n calculator a while ago and it’s been a fun desk toy that I admittedly have little practical need for. I’ve since updated it to use the C47 system which is the most delightfully nerdy, ludicrously powerful calculator mankind’s ever schemed up. My kingdom for a printed manual, but still!

The World Cup potato chip bags look like a xenomorph with an underbite. It creeps me out.

I took my wife and kid to an outdoor swap meet for a few hours around lunchtime today, and now I’m reminded that the sun hates me and wishes to smite me at every chance.