Does anyone else think this whole article feels like AI slop?

Jokes aside, I have been blocked many times by overzealous email validation. Yes, my email has a plus sign in it. This is allowed under RFC5322, so deal with it. It is better to have no validation at all than incorrect validation.

A lot of open-source software uses copyleft licenses like GPL. If a company uses that code to build its own products, then some or all of their new code may also become open source. This is an important part of how open-source projects stay open. Organizations like FSF have taken big companies to court over this and won.

AI companies trained their slop-generators on that open-source code. In many cases, it will reproduce it line-for-line. But courts currently hold that the generated code is no longer subject to the original copyright restrictions. It’s nearly impossible to publish open-source software without being scraped for AI training.

Still waiting for ISO timestamp support in OmegaStar.

UTC has leap seconds. We can do better. PTP/TAI for lyfe.

A perfectly logical clock would use a radio broadcast to count off seconds since a predefined epoch. Put a few of them way up high, so more people can see it, and make them so astonishingly precise that you could tell where you are just by listening.

Invent a time machine, send a robot back in time to terminate their parents.

Bulletproof? Sounds dangerous. What do I do if it makes a weird noise?

I’m speculating, but my guesses are:

• Gathering enough karma to post on subreddits that have a minimum threshold.
• Getting enough post and comment history to pass a casual inspection, either by human moderators or spam filters.
• Maturing the account to the point where it can be sold to another shady company.
• Generally having a lot of bot accounts ready, just in case.

Once mature, it’s usually used for spam or astroturfing. There is a noticeable uptick around big elections, wars, etc.

I saw one repost-bot that metastisized into the most vile porn-spam-bot you can imagine, but they’re usually more subtle than that.

They’re indistinguishable because they’re copied from top-voted posts that are a few years old (title, text, and image if applicable). It’s guaranteed to produce a post that fits the community and gets a lot of engagement, so it’s a cheap and effective way to mature a bot account. Once you start looking for it, it’s everywhere, and Reddit admins don’t care.

UTC is better than most, but leap seconds are still awful. Computers should use GPS or TAI everywhere. Dealing with time zones and leap seconds is for human readability and display purposes only.

CBOR for life, down with JSON.

US Army logistics catalogs are organized this way. “Cookies, oatmeal” instead of “Oatmeal cookies” because it’s a lot easier to find what you need an a giant alphabetical list.

Krazam has previously documented the Facegoog microservices architecture in some detail.

My head canon is that Tony Stark has a superpower: everything he builds works the first time.

If it’s really complicated, like an entirely new Iron Man suit, then it might malfunction once in an amusing way. Then he tightens a screw and it’s perfect. It never fails outright or bricks itself.

In my experience, this is not how hardware or software development goes. I want this power so much.

This post is horrifying, not funny.