m3047

I saw here on HN maybe a couple of months ago a post where someone had basically created a "color space" for breakfast foods... oh sweet, I found it:

The Hunt for Dark Breakfast

https://moultano.wordpress.com/2026/02/22/the-hunt-for-dark-...

I split my network(s) into subnets (sharing the same wire, not to be confused with the actual subnets which don't share the same wire) which correspond to routability policies. This in turn involves firewall rules, routing table entries, and DHCP configs corresponding to those subnets.

I give away the software which does the following. I get this (and a lot more) for every host on my network, and I know what every host is.

    # peers upstairs-roku.m3047 +addr +serv
    dns.google [8.8.4.4]                                              domain [53]     
    dns.google [8.8.8.8]                                              domain [53]     
    athena.m3047 [10.0.0.220]                                         domain [53]     
    mediaservices.cdn-apple.com [23.46.228.133]                       https [443]     
    mediaservices.cdn-apple.com [23.46.228.134]                       https [443]     
    mediaservices.cdn-apple.com [23.46.228.135]                       https [443]     
    mediaservices.cdn-apple.com [23.46.228.137]                       https [443]     
    mediaservices.cdn-apple.com [23.46.228.138]                       https [443]     
    mediaservices.cdn-apple.com [23.46.228.139]                       https [443]     
    mediaservices.cdn-apple.com [23.46.228.140]                       https [443]     
    mediaservices.cdn-apple.com [23.46.228.142]                       https [443]     
    mediaservices.cdn-apple.com [23.46.228.143]                       https [443]     
    mediaservices.cdn-apple.com [23.46.228.144]                       https [443]     
    mediaservices.cdn-apple.com [23.46.228.145]                       https [443]     
    mediaservices.cdn-apple.com [23.213.34.169]                       https [443]     
    mediaservices.cdn-apple.com [23.213.34.176]                       https [443]     
    mediaservices.cdn-apple.com [23.213.34.178]                       https [443]     
    mediaservices.cdn-apple.com [23.213.34.185]                       https [443]     
    mediaservices.cdn-apple.com [23.213.34.186]                       https [443]     
    mediaservices.cdn-apple.com [23.213.34.187]                       https [443]     
    mediaservices.cdn-apple.com [23.213.34.188]                       https [443]     
    mediaservices.cdn-apple.com [23.213.34.193]                       https [443]     
    mediaservices.cdn-apple.com [23.213.34.196]                       https [443]     
    mediaservices.cdn-apple.com [23.213.34.201]                       https [443]     
    mediaservices.cdn-apple.com [23.213.34.203]                       https [443]     
    nrdp.push.prod.netflix.com [35.81.198.46]                         www [80]        
    ec2-35-86-100-253.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com [35.86.100.253] psbserver [2350]
    austin.logs.roku.com [35.212.27.142]                              https [443]     
    scribe.logs.roku.com [35.212.34.174]                              https [443]     
    austin.logs.roku.com [35.212.72.105]                              https [443]     
    austin.logs.roku.com [35.212.119.44]                              https [443]     
    display.ravm.tv [35.212.178.254]                                  https [443]     
    logs.netflix.com [44.226.179.188]                                 https [443]     
    logs.netflix.com [44.228.67.58]                                   https [443]     
    nrdp.push.prod.netflix.com [44.229.50.4]                          www [80]        
    logs.netflix.com [44.229.122.169]                                 https [443]     
    nrdp.push.prod.netflix.com [44.232.75.216]                        www [80]        
    api.roku.com [44.249.213.211]                                     https [443]     
    nrdp.prod.ftl.netflix.com [45.57.40.1]                            https [443]     
    nrdp.prod.ftl.netflix.com [45.57.41.1]                            https [443]     
    nrdp.push.prod.netflix.com [52.24.26.117]                         www [80]        
    logs.netflix.com [52.33.247.19]                                   https [443]     
    themes-service.sr.roku.com [54.200.214.141]                       https [443]     
    occ-0-1009-1007.1.nflxso.net [198.38.112.135]                     www [80]        
    occ-0-1009-1007.1.nflxso.net [198.38.112.144]                     www [80]        
    occ-0-1009-1007.1.nflxso.net [198.38.112.145]                     www [80]        
    occ-0-1009-1007.1.nflxso.net [198.38.112.165]                     www [80]        
    occ-0-1009-1007.1.nflxso.net [198.38.112.169]                     www [80]        
    occ-0-1009-1007.1.nflxso.net [198.38.112.170]                     www [80]        
    occ-0-1009-1007.1.nflxso.net [198.38.112.172]                     www [80]        
    occ-0-1009-1007.1.nflxso.net [198.38.112.178]                     www [80]        
    mdns.mcast.net [224.0.0.251]                                      mdns [5353]     
    239.255.255.250 [239.255.255.250]                                 ssdp [1900]

It not "definitely" but rather "definitely possible" that cameras could be used for safety, or that the police could work for the citizenry. But they don't. They're inclined not to share info, including that they're the police when ostensibly they're trying to help you by calling you to tell you that they found your stolen car. So instead what happens is you never get the call (and there's no real proof they called), and the tow company with the City contract gets paid because now you have to go pick it up at the impound lot.

But I have my neighbors to thank for really showing me where their priorities lie: the plague of rabbits which was ignored for three months until it was so bad that they collected over 30 rabbits, the person who threw burnt moulding from inside his house over the fence into my yard before he finally set the house on fire for real but the police didn't want to see the moulding or take a police report and wanted me to go talk to them. Just a couple of highlights.

Kind of moot if, when the police allegedly call you to report finding your stolen car, they use misleading caller ID and don't leave a message.

I tend to let Feynman, Fermi, and Bayes guide my inquiries generally in that order. Part of the process is generating good questions; another part of the process is generating good actionable questions (tailored to the moment). Questions which are obvious, which are "horseshoes and hand grenades" type questions, based on what we know now. Follow things a little bit, test it, see where it's soft.

In this case I called public health and building inspection agencies and asked them what sort of ongoing inspections there were for clinics and other medical facilities. That turned up databases online, and keywords which turned up other databases.

What was the germ (pun intended) of this inquiry? Several years earlier, sitting in the waiting room of a different clinic, and the linen supply company pushes a cart through (gets buzzed through to the back) to collect the dirty linen, wearing gloves. Like they did this every day. Many years ago, the memo taped to the doors to a lab wing at a biotech: "gloves must be removed when greeting visitors". Various reports over the years concerning improperly sterilized dental instruments.

This is funny. I've had an unbelievable string of bad doctors / clinics... almost as though something is wrong with medical care around here.

Couple of years ago the latest doctor who I fired started talking colonoscopies. I asked some basic questions like how do they get paid? How much do they get paid? Who inspects their facilities?

He took great umbrage at the notion that the doctors were getting "bounties" for nipping pieces of tissue for lab review, refused to discuss that. (Tell me you know something without telling me you know something.) He also took umbrage at the notion that his clinic wasn't "clean" and that it was inspected regularly... didn't say by whom.

So here's the deal. Here in Washington State, USA his clinic gets a "wet work" inspection, just like a slaughterhouse or restaurant, as part of the occupancy / doing business license. But there is no ongoing inspection, and fuck no there is no "safe to eat here" poster in the window of his clinic.

It gets more interesting when you start looking at the datasets an inquiry like that turns up. Like: how many deaths / hospitalizations are there per 1K procedures? Actuarily we have a number. Now clinics, at least the ones doing things on a regular basis, have to report adverse events leading to hospitalization: the reporting rate is impossibly lower than the actuarial rate, complications leading to hospitalization are not being reported. But.. there's more! The State collects "foreign contamination" stats from pathologists; you can look at this by pathologist, if they do enough of them. The majority of pathologists scoring colonoscopy samples report ZERO foreign contamination; among the pathologists actually reporting, the rate for presence of foreign contamination is around 25%.

In the US DMCA provides "frigate harbor" for the the British consul, etc., etc. IF they've managed to get you to install the "app" instead of utilizing something preinstalled on the phone (a uh errr... web browser?). Potential law migrants banned by law!

I get (ab|l)users will do stupid. I appreciate the argument that WebSerial is not those other things; until it isn't and it's a victim of its own success. Now the driver maintainer at the OS level has to consider that their driver is exposed to the Internet every time an ad is served.

Maybe there should be a WebDevice which you can buy which plugs into a USB port and does all the things (for the things plugged into it) and exposes a "webdev(ice)" to the browser? There's an overengineered solution. Nonetheless in an industrial situation the things are exposed to the controller, not to the machines on the floor. [Edit: Not strictly true, they may be published as visible "tags" through various mechanisms.]

How about wifi?

There's a nasty shear layer / fault here. Don't build a house right on top of it.

Bert Hubert makes an argument based on Palantir: it's not simply the software. It's like a million dollar a day marine crane which comes with a crew. To put it another way, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce licenses are a tax compared to what is spent on consultants and integrators. That army knows a particular tech stack and also the relevant players.

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/some-notes-on-palantir/

I don't know if you read the full post at http://consulting.m3047.net/dubai-letters/voter-id-industry-...

I will take a certain level of incompetence over outsourcing adjudication (and the priors for that, data) to private industry. Outsourcing isn't going to eliminate incompetence it just moves it beyond petitioning for redress as a citizen. And a few other things.

If I can light a cigar and talk like Columbo for a minute, the thing I can't get out of my mind is that a competent professional would do something like this:

  FILL IN THE BLANKS:
  ___-XXX-XX09 [don't know]
  XXX-_X_-3X4X [don't know]
  XXX-XXX-01__ [don't know]
  2XX-___-XX8X [don't know]

because a competent professional's default is to preserve as much entropy as possible for both parties. The "don't know" button is present because one or more of the challenges is something not known to the challengee.

If a competent professional sets it up blind (no information whatsoever disclosed to the challengee) to capture the entire entered telephone number that is because there is an explicit desire to capture all of the entered data.

I believe that the staff are competent professionals. I don't believe that it's possible for Brawndo swigging morons to operate a single signon service for the United States federal government for multiple years, over multiple presidential administrations, without inducing a spontaneous self-immolation of mushroom cloud proportions (thinking of a certain poorly secured warehouse full of ammonium nitrate in Lebanon).

Do they have morals, and are those morals aligned with patriotic allegiance to the USA? Asking for a friend.

This validation is for a specific purpose. In fact, and oddly enough, the federal govt (in its manifestation as the Post Office [0]) wants to validate my STATE id, not my federal ID. I think there's a barcode that they scan after validating it, but I am speculating since they won't give me the doc I need to take with me! Taking it to DMV wouldn't do any good.

This started because there was an option to do [black box process] with a phone. "But you can always show up in person (snerk snerk)." (it's a web site, it doesn't really talk in the first person or say "snerk") "Fine, I'll show up in person." "Alright, you'll need to print a document first... hang on a moment... give us your phone number. Oh sorry [black box process] says to tell you we don't recognize your phone, and we can't give you the doc." That's the gist of it. The black box process has been jacked into the process at the very beginning of the kill chain.

I've got to renew my drivers license in the next two months, we'll see how things go at the DMV.

[0] The Post Office is where I've gone to renew my passport.

Can't. Need to print out a doc to take with me so the gubmint can validate my gubmint ID. They won't do it without the doc. They won't give me the doc because they don't like my phone.

CISA said “there is no indication that any sensitive data was compromised as a result of the incident.”

Oh wow. Except for those secrets.

Not just the big three, and not just credit. You are entitled to review the data they have on file for you.

All off-by-one errors can be reproduced by producing an off-by-one error of some other off-by-one error.

Tag Clouds were sticky tasty web goodness a few years back.

I've got a legacy tag cloud curation tool for random collections (each collection gets its own id) of URLs. It IFRAMEs each URL to present it; no whining. I've used it for classifying technical docs, photo libraries (then I used the tags to train an image classifier), and to present an analysis of a customer's web site.

It's written in Perl, and (still) runs on modern Perl. Make friends and maybe I'll toss the code your way and help you with your project.

Stuff that's not going to be restocked has asterisks on the shelf placard... or so I've been told and it seems to match my experience.

It's entirely possible they simply ingest the JS as-is.

I'm of half Mediterranian heritage and there was an Italian restaurant that I started eating at out of spite at the French one next door where I had a horrible experience. A little commercial strip across the street from a cemetary. Great food, big hearts.

Nobody ever suggested sharing a table, but if you offered and there was a seat available they'd seat you / someone there. They got busier, and the line started going out the door; people were doing this in line, because if you said you had a "full table" they would seat you at a family table and you could often get ahead of at least part of the line.

The French place closed and the Italian place moved downtown. The end.

I didn't end up with any enduring friends, but I met some great people who I shared food with, learned some interesting things. Riding Amtrak in first class (on the Starlight) was similar.

I interpret the OP's quest as just that, a personal quest. Some of the comments here however are just out of this world.[0] I almost would have made one like that myself but I read the article.

I appreciate the commenters as spice for the casserole. So that's why I upvoted it: a well-spiced casserole.

[0] Sure, plenty of us here are into social engineering.

Find the Leary Wheel somewhere. People have referred to the Hypernormal / Overconventional slices as the "Dale Carnegie Quadrant".

Oh nevermind. Let's see what this attracts: http://athena.m3047.net/pub/fwm/leary-wheel.png

Had catfish lately?

And most of these "managers" are barking orders, with no faith or expectation they will be followed; along with this, they find the soft cooing sounds of empty apologies comforting, rather than root cause and accepting some of the responsibility; they blame the workers when conflicting orders are not followed, and engage in language lawyering. They ask "workers" to check their own work; several times. They demand workers misrepresent their expertise; they demand the appearance of certification (but obviously don't want to pay or negotiate with someone with the actual credentials). They interpret silence as permission.

You wanna work for that person?

It seems to me that assuming that debt needs to be repaid was moved to a footnote during the ZIRP years. I feel like there was a shift of the poles, the movement of a rift, you get the idea.

In my opinion and experience that "normal" case is cognitive debt. Not having coding standards enforced: cognitive as well as technical debt. Missing / incorrect documentation. Uncertainty of provenance and what's actually running in production and how it gets there.

That's what you get in the "normal" case, and since the default attitude going into such situations should be Trust Nothing, if there was an LLM there I'd consult it. Magic 8-Ball, too. Rubber ducky? (Not that rubber ducky.) (I once wrote a dependency analyzer / oracle for PHP... in Perl.)

Nobody in this game of musical chairs wants the music to stop because there's poop on all of them.

Visiblility is also a mental construct of what we expect to see and what we know already and can map to what we see. "Obscure" is doing a lot of work here. It doesn't necessarily mean hidden, it can mean the object's true purpose or form is hidden from some particular vantage, and only that vantage.

Interesting. Have you seen the movie Braveheart? That's the leadup to the later humiliation of the king in battle, there's a movie / drama about this one too. Saw it recently, don't remember the name.

Basically the insurgents choose terrain they know well, because they live there. They choose a swamp / mire in an open field between two hills. They build fortifications. They obscure the true nature of the ground they're standing on, out in the open. They goad the king's army into finishing them then and there. They fight on foot against knights on horseback. It's a mess. They win.