Chris Ellis @intrbiz@bergamot.social

The enshittification of the Internet coincides with the economic shift to mandatory infinite growth so shareholders and CEOs can receive ever more absurd payouts at the expense of sustainable business. This led to increasing commoditization of our time, our data, and our attention. We're not the customers, we're the product.

Which also coincides with the democratic breakdown of treating voters not as decision makers but as a captive audience for whatever the political-moneyed class wants to do.

Woop woop! @l_avrot and I will be premiering our Barbie talk at PGConf.EU in Prague this December. This is going to be fun (and informative, and a call for action, but mainly fun 😉)

https://www.postgresql.eu/events/pgconfeu2023/schedule/session/4913-trying-to-be-barbie-in-kens-mojo-dojo-casa-house/

It’s amazing to me that a proposal to scan *literally ever private communication in Europe* is barely making newspapers, and we’re reading about legislative progress on blogs.

Been hearing whispers all weekend, some from people who I'd *definitely* listen to, of a remote execution 0day in the Signal desktop and possibly also mobile app. Mitigation is supposedly to disable link previews (under settings->chats).

I have no more details. What I've heard doesn't completely make sense, but disabling link previews should be at worst harmless and seems prudent until this is clarified.

https://goomics.net/379

For PGSQLPhriday #013, Chris Ellis asked to hear about the weird and varied things that people are using #PostgreSQL for. For some reason, this is the challenge that finally convinced me to take part for the first time, and I decided to try to explain a bit about what I'm using Postgres for in my PhD research.
https://karenjex.blogspot.com/2023/10/pgsqlphriday-013-unlocking-open-data.html
Don't forget to look out for all of the other #PGSQLPhriday posts!

Hard to avoid this conclusion.

#ActorsStrike #SAGAFTRAstrike #SAGAFTRAstrong #UnionStrong #u1 #power #money

Performance from Postgres 11 through 16:

"Postgres avoids perf
regressions over time. This is starting to get boring." Well said @markcallaghan

🤓 🐘

#postgres #performance

https://smalldatum.blogspot.com/2023/09/checking-postgres-for-perf-regressions.html

This whole mess just makes me think we should try harder to kick suid/fcaps out of general purpose Linux distributions. The whole concept is fundamentally backwards, and one of the major weaknesses of traditional UNIX I am sure. The idea behind suid/fcaps of first granting the privileges, inheriting some major, uncontrolled part of the execution environment/resource context/security context and then expecting the binary to securely gate its misuse is just a major mistake: https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2023/10/03/2

Today in UK politics: a man who travels by helicopter tells people who can't afford bus fares that he will save them from being able to walk to the shops.

Entirely serious country.

docker-compose is great, but I love using @fedora CoreOS lately and I want to use the built-in tools it provides. I also want automatic updates without a privileged watchtower container running.

That's when I learned to love the quadlets. ❤️

#fedora #coreos #podman #quadlets #containers #docker

Quadlets might make me finally stop using docker-compose:
https://major.io/p/quadlets-replace-docker-compose/

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it looks like the UK's #OnlineSafetyBill is a done deal:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-66854618

An utter shambles of a bill, pushed forward on the basis of catchphrases and clichés.

If you provide online services to people in the UK, which let them interact with each other, especially if you have a link to the UK yourself, I guess you might want to either:

a) prepare to attempt to block access by people in the UK; or

b) settle in for a sizeable legal advice bill.

PGDay UK Wrap-up https://pgday.uk/events/pgdayuk2023/news/pgday-uk-wrap-up-7/

OMG this thread is wild!

https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@badlogic/111071396799790275

Really love this phrase: "the tyranny of the marginal user"

Especially as someone who found real friends (and through them partners) through OkCupid back in the day, a lot of this resonates.

https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-marginal-user

Airbus open sourced their new cockpit font. Make it the default for all your embedded projects, because it's REALLY good and has real testing in difficult environments!

https://b612-font.com/