borg.org

borg.org, the nobody reads it blog.

  • Firewalls are a Bad Idea, Always Have Been

    I have always argued that using firewalls to protect computer networks is a mistake. The argument for firewalls is they are an extra layer of protection. My counter argument is firewalls end up being the only protection. Computers started out insecure—the fact they worked at all was frankly a miracle, how much do you want? […]

  • Two Wristwatches

    I realized that there is a very specific group of people out there (Hello!) who wear two wristwatches. The Venn diagram makes it a pretty exclusive group.

  • Running on a New Server

    After many years (and a lot of dormant time) I moved my blog over to a new (and much cheaper) server. I was a little sad to delete the old VM. Some good news: Comments finally work again.

  • Should Hunter Biden Go to Jail?

    Children of presidents should be held to a higher standard than the rest of us.

  • Async Rust: Why is it so Fast?

    Everyone knows that a web server, for example, will be able to serve up a lot more traffic if it is written using Rust async code rather than straight OS threads. Lots of people have the numbers to prove it. But I have wondered why, and none of the explanations I have read have explained […]

  • Using emacs as a Rust IDE

    Turns out I don’t like Helix very much. The problem? My fingers know emacs. I hate emacs, but it is what my fingers know. So I decided to figure out how to get emacs to be a Rust IDE. This was made a little tricky because I had attempted to do so a few years […]

  • Helix, Terminal-based Rust IDE

    I was skimming through the latest 2023 Rust Survey, and I noticed the 5th most popular “editor or IDE setup” is Helix. (Just ahead of emacs, even!) What the heck is Helix? Helix seems to be: Rust IDE, seems to do other languages, too, but I’m interested in Rust. Heavily inspired by vim, Written in […]

  • Mastodon

    I’m on Mastodon. P.S. Comments are broken and have been for sometime. Sorry.

  • Rescheduling Rio's Carnival?

    It’s the end of May, 2022, so I’m a month late in writing this, but still…it’s kind of appropriate. Read on. This year Rio held their Carnival (as in Mardi Gras or Fat Tuesday), in person! Live! Drinking, music, food, sights and sounds, pickpockets—all that fun stuff! After several years of canceling it due to […]

  • Saw a Slashdot headline "Intel Calls Its AI That Detects Student Emotions a Teaching Tool, Others Call it 'Morally Reprehensible'"

    Um, …Yes. People think the questions of AI ethics arise from dealing with the consequences of what Turing and all those cats invented: Computers. And they are right, to a point. But more it is about dealing with the consequences of what the Sumerians invented: Bureaucracy. Teachers infer the emotional state of students all the […]