I tend to use Facebook on a web browser so I can use ad blockers to control the experience. Yeah, I know… but Facebook is how I stay in touch with extended family.
Anyway, I noticed this afternoon that Facebook seems to have taken a page from Youtube’s playbook and start messing with ad blockers. I’m using Arc with uBlock Origin and as you can see from the screen recording below, Facebook is trying really hard to circumvent the blocks.
https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/195octe/youtube_started_slowing_video_buffer_with_adblock/
At some point, Google and YouTube deserve some consequences.
If you’re just coming back to work today to find your data filters in Terraform (or Pulumi, or whatever) are broken while trying to run a deployment, check this out:
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/update-on-amazon-linux-ami-end-of-life
Amazon has pulled all of the old Amazon Linux AMIs that might respond to your filter. You need to check and make sure your filter is updated. This issue is a little confusing because you can still launch instances from the public SSM parameter, but the API and console won’t let you see it.
A long time ago I decided to stop making New Year’s resolutions. I instead made goals. I felt like this was more attainable and a better fit for the human condition. I didn’t punish myself for missing a goal, I just readjusted until I tried to attain them.
2023 ended and I found that I wasn’t even thinking about goals for next year. I do have a physical goal of losing weight and getting more fit, but I’m not going to put metrics around it. I just want to generally feel better. Aside from that, I didn’t even think about what other goals I should have in 2024.
I’m predicting this to be a real shitshow.
https://developersalliance.org/open-source-liability-is-coming/
Link to external blog entry
I did a lot of time in the US federal government space. In the latter part of my career there, there was a big push to stop using open source software as much as possible due to supply chain concerns. I didn’t like it. I didn’t want to exclude open source software from our toolset. But the US government wanted a single person to smack around with a trout if things went wonky.
Welcome to the first entry in a new series… er… category… maybe tag… hell I dunno… where I sit back and spill the beans on some of the true tales of my life being an IT guy. I hesitate to call this a “series” because who knows if I will actually keep this up. But I figure that somewhere, somehow, these short anecdotes deserve a small corner of the Internet to be forever preserved. I’m pretty sure I’ve told these tales to my kids, but just in case I didn’t - maybe they’ll read this someday and they can hear me tell it in my voice.
It’s the day after Christmas 2023 and I’m trying to wind down for the year. I’ve been reflecting on 2023 and all of its glory and horror. My morning reading started with this fine article:
https://thebaffler.com/latest/its-all-bullshit-tan
While I don’t work at Google (and never aspire to), I identified with many things in this article. It seems that over the past 20 years we’ve really lost something… a lot of things, actually. I’m not able to pinpoint what all of them are, but I guess I could sum it up as innocence.
Hello again. Nice to see you. It’s almost been a year.
I was supposed to do better on maintaining this site during 2023, but I didn’t really meet that goal. Some of the reasons were that I was tired and didn’t have much to say, but some of the reasons were largely technical.
As you can see, I’ve moved on from hosting this site at Medium. To keep a long opinion short, Medium has graduated into a clickbaity toxic mess of garbage. I’ve gotten to the point where I cringe anytime I’m directed to Medium by a search engine. I was subscribing to Medium for $5 a month and intended to build an audience there and write for pennies. That didn’t happen because using Medium has been challenging. Writing on it was painful, responding to some of the ridiculous comments was even more painful, and I just decided I wasn’t enjoying it any longer.
I was telling my youngest daughter, “When something like this happens, I can’t rest until I figure it out.”
What was that? At some point in iOS 16, our Apple Family setup stopped sending notifications for “Ask to Buy” purchases from our daughters. I don’t know if this started on the first installation of iOS 16 on my devices or on theirs, but it was plain broken. It’s supposed to send a notification to my wife and I whenever our daughters want to install an app or execute an App Store purchase. We’re pretty liberal about what we approve for our daughters, but it was still nice to have that functionality. But now, it was busted.
Apple provides a long list of privacy-focused features to help you maintain your modern-day sanity. It’s not too often that you get to taste the actual benefit of these features and how they give you control over the flow of information.
For instance — privacy features in Safari are cool, but they’re largely transparent and once you turn them on, it’s not really all that clear how the features are benefitting you. That’s by design. You should just experience peace of mind with those features.
