eMudhra is exiting the global SSL/TLS certificate business and is offering customers Sectigo-issued replacements [
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...Sectigo? Née Comodo? They haven't always been the sharpest tools in the shed, either.
If you ask a bare LLM to do stuff you'll get a mess. I run Claude code with a multipart harness that compels the model to treat the code as the mathematical thing it is, not human prose. LSP Enforcement Kit keeps low capability tools like grep out of the mix, Abstract Syntax Tree things handle the code as its meant to be understood, so that's CodeSight, OptiVault, Serena. About a year ago I gave Antigravity the boot after their awful 2.0 release and went back to JetBrains IDEs, which now offer code structure wise MCP services. Code review with the Ponytail skill chases away LLM excesses, and there's a smattering of other stuff like that in the mix. And then you hunt for whatever additional guardrails you can get the LLM to apply systemically.
I've evolved my own higher level project methods and they're comparable in a lot of ways to what Matt Pocock offers, but his stuff is more structured, more carefully considered, and I have to work with others now, after a long time solo. I'm taking his stuff, implementing a Kanban/wiki system, Gitlab CE, and NanoClaw for anyone who wants agents. I expect quite the slog between now and New Years, but in 2027 we're gonna stop trudging and start gliding over the landscape.
And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that... perfect world, in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. [emphasis mine]
-- Arthur Jensen, Network (destroying his golden goose)
Elon, Sam, Mark, Peter, et al... You are cordially invited to go fsck yourselves.
The magnitude of destruction you have wrought upon this industry, upon our livelihoods, and upon society as a whole, cannot be calculated, much less excused. You have stolen the corpus of human ingenuity and creativity from its creators without recompense, and now are trying to sell a provably shittier version of it back to us at a markup.
And, let's be honest, this is what you wanted to build -- a barely capable servant who will do your bidding, whatever it is, immediately, without question or compunction. It's extremely telling about your moral compasses that you studiously sat on your hands when your customers were creating graphic sexual imagery of celebrities over their vociferous objections; or impressionable young people (who needed help, not encouragement) were being driven to suicide by your chatbots; but "torturing" a memory block of neural net constants is somehow the bridge too far?
I repeat: Go fsck yourselves.
Next, I have to distribute the cert to a handful of local services, including pfSense, TrueNAS, Postfix, the Unifi Controller (extra annoying, because Java), Forgejo, and probably a couple others I've forgotten about. None of that is automated, either. It hasn't been so painful that I've bothered to write scripts for the process, so I get to do a little SSH dance every three months.
"Deploy your own!" Couple of issues there: 1) Everyone treats self-signed certs as suspicious, so they're inappropriate for Postfix TLS; 2) Every time I've tried that, Firefox and/or Chrome complain about some obscure feature not being what they expect. The latest headache had to do with OCSP stapling, which has to be turned on -- oh, whoops, now it has to be turned off... Bleah. LetsEncrypt certs Just Work, so I haven't revisited building my own CA.
This "new" site is part of a larger effort by that slob to kneecap or compromise US government Web sites, and steal your personal data.
I first read about the effort here: https://thedreydossier.substac...
Yesterday, she took a look under the hood of America.gov, and yes, it's as bad as everything else the DOGE vandals have been doing: https://thedreydossier.substac...
Up until this point, government Web sites were designed, built, and maintained by the agencies responsible for that government service. For example, if you wanted to apply for or renew your passport, you would go to state.gov, which is run by the US Department of State, which is responsible for processing applications for and issuing passports. No other department has lawful jurisdiction over passports.
From the point of view of the law, that's still true. But the slob, without anyone's permission, kluged together passports.gov. This site was built and is run by the White House's "National Design Studio," completely outside the law and without any independent oversight. The State Department was not consulted and has nothing to do with it. Further, the site is filled with third-party trackers, analytics, and some custom code that copies every page you view, including form contents, to an unknown third party.
Oh, and the guy leading the National Design Studio and in charge of building these fake sites? He's Joe Gebbia -- cofounder of Airbnb. Read both articles for more details.
In short, you should treat America.gov as a malware site and stay well away from it. Under no circumstances should you feed it any of your personal information.
They are positioning AI as the nuclear weapons of the 21st century, angling for a nationalization as a strategic weapon when the bottom drops out of it.
The AI bubble bursting will wreck the economy far harder than the Dotcom bubble did. And the dynamic is OBVIOUS. This is not an "if" problem, it's a "when" problem.
If AI produces a maximal result along the lines of what the frontier labs suggest, it'll eat fifty million jobs, which will wreck the economy far harder, and for far longer.
The constant chatter about AI breakout is half legitimate concern and half positioning to nationalize it, shielding the circular dealing crew from consequences.
This will not be Skynet; as a society we are far too primed to envision events that can be told in a single two hour action adventure with a clear, satisfying ending. When the historians get to this they will note the breakout happened 2025 - 2027 -- because that will be the time where human network threats enhanced by AI will starting further enhancing AI.
There are no "sides" to this, it'll be like the African savanna - lions, leopards, hyenas, cheetahs, wild dogs, servals & caracals, clear down to my personal favorite, the black backed jackal. A network of carnivores of various sizes pursue networks of herbivores. Nation states, corporations, non-state actors, activist groups, talented individuals; all are making use of AI in conflicts already.
The genie can not be put back in the bottle, the open models are only a little behind the frontier, and things are going to keep happening no matter what bellicose policy pronouncements come from an increasingly irrelevant Washington, D.C.
I'll be riding the Claude subsidy until it ends, then hopefully have acquired a potent professional GPU or unified memory setup of my own. Won't be nearly as quick, but it'll keep me moving.
Now scale that thinking up by whatever percentage of eight billion people have technical capabilities. That's the future.
The AI industry has blown a spectacular bubble via circular dealing - Nvidia, OpenAI, Oracle, Microsoft, CoreWeave, etc are all doing monopoly money deals. Nvidia "sells" some GPUs, then "invests" the proceeds back into OpenAI, nothing got done, no money changed hands, but their stock values zoom. This looks exactly like the Dotcom bubble in the late 1990s and such things always implode - the market doesn't just correct, it panics, it liquidates, nobody can tell what's real, so everything is for sale at pennies on the dollar.
The industry's strategy to not go to prison for this stunt is to make AI equivalent to nuclear weapons. When the bubble begins to burst, the Trump administration will "make a deal", what you see is the beginning of that process. This will work about as well as the attempt to shake down Iran for their oil, but cause and effect are not the Trump administration's strong suit.
what's the point?
The point is to be able to use your hardware in the manner you deem appropriate, and to ensure it is not doing sneaky shit behind your back.
If, instead of a Playstation, we were talking about rooting LG televisions to run custom Linux builds stripped of pervasive privacy-violating code and "apps," I suspect your opinion might be rather different. (And no, when the entire industry has turned to the Dark Side, voting with your wallet doesn't work.)
Iovine, the music executive and Dr. Dre's partner in Beats by Dre, [
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...Yeah, thought so.
Sony MDR-V6 forever, dudes...
"It is clear Flock has aspirations far beyond ALPRs to become a digital platform for policing," [emphasis mine]
They misspelled, "Orwellian suveillance and harrassment."
Law enforcement officers are already abusing Flock's existing capabilities for stalking. This will not improve matters one iota.
The expansion pack is currently available only for the platforms listed. If you own Quake from GOG.com, the Epic Store, or own the original CD-ROM, you are, for the moment, SOL.
God doesn't play dice. -- Albert Einstein
