Combat Unicorn @kurtm@bsd.network

I'm so old, I remember when software that spread into the wild and infiltrated other people's computers and did harmful things to them that the users didn't ask it to was called "malware" instead of "AI" and the perpetrators were prosecuted instead of given billions in venture capital and government contracts.

we take domain name registration price increases in stride, but say out loud the phrase “sorry, it costs us more to keep that line in our /etc/hosts file now than it did last year” and tell me it doesn’t sound completely deranged.

😴 “Do one thing and do it well”
⚡️ “Build on the work of others”

from the AT&T UNIX® System V Release 3 Programmer’s Guide, 1987

Blink and you might have missed it, mlarkin@ landed vmm/vmd(8) SMP guest support in #OpenBSD -current! ​

This includes a new "cpus" parameter in vm.conf(5), and '-p' flag for vmctl(8). The default number of virtual guest CPUs is 1, with current maxium of 64.

https://github.com/openbsd/src/commit/d74b165ebc85c9aaf5150f25e6088f52d9fc0f04

Let me say again how much I dislike scrolling down a page only to get stopped in my scroll as a map starts zooming because, as a Google Product Manager once said to me (really, truly) when I asked why a scrolling action on a map zooms, "what else would scroll do?"

Pure insanity. Also, for the record, insane that a continuous action can change meaning half-way through. That's on web design itself.

(the thread this was talking about right at the start was my Making A Very Cheap Good Sound System Because I Just Watched Sinners post, I wrote this back in March)

Had some mates round for a movie night and thought about this thread again and remembered that there was Cable Discourse so here we go, a post about expensive cables and whether or not they're a scam (tl;dr: yes the expensive cables are a scam but the cheap ones are increasingly scams as well so go for like one up from the cheapest).

It's the early 2000's and I'm selling tellies at Comet. I was really good at selling tellies. I can sell owt, me. I was really good at selling expensive wires as well. Aye, I was that guy. Dan the Monster Cable man.

You really didn't have to work very hard to sell the cheap Monster cables (the expensive ones were a different matter). See, back then when you bought a video or a DVD player, it'd come with a SCART lead in the box with it, and this was a really, really, really shit SCART lead.

(Americans, SCART was the connector that we used to hook up audio, video and data all in one awkward rectangular hole, it was like a big chunky analogue version of HDMI before HDMI was a thing)

The Monster SCART cables we sold came in three versions, £30, £40 and £60. Not to toot my own horn too much, but the shop didn't sell many cables until I turned up. They called me the cable man 'cause I was good at selling them. I was good at selling them because I did two things (honestly still surprised nobody thought to do this before me), the first was to set up a telly with a DVD player that went through a SCART splitter and into two inputs on the telly, one through the shit SCART lead that came in the DVD player box, and one with an expensive Monster Cable, and that probably would've been enough. The second thing, when I told the boss what I intended to do he really screwed up his face like sucking on a lemon, but I took a £30 cable fresh out of the box and I chopped it in half and we kept that in a drawer behind the counter, next to a chopped-up cheapo lead.

The cheapo SCART lead was made out of spaghetti and misery. We didn't deliberately choose the shittiest SCART lead we could find off the indoor market here, this was legit, we really did just take one out of the box on one of our display-model DVD players, exactly the wire you'd use to hook up your expensive new DVD player (DVD players were still expensive). SCART leads have 21 pins in them and there'd be maybe like half a dozen skinny wires actually hooked up inside a cheap SCART lead. The connector housing was floppy shitty tin, and so were the pins that actually carried the signals. It was just sad and ridiculous to look at. The Monster SCART lead had all 21 pins hooked to 21 nice thick copper wires, the whole lead was as thick as your finger, there was fancy like-tinfoil-but-obviously-more-expensive shielding material wrapped all around the outside of the main bundle and wires that had different functions had more shielding to separate them from the main loom (like you don't want power wires right next to video or data wires without some kinda shielding in between style of thing), the external rectangle and every pin were all gold-plated, the pins didn't wobble, it looked like it was actually designed for a specific purpose rather than just chucked together as a bare minimum get-the-job-nearly-done style of affair. Those two cut-in-half cables sold a lot of expensive gear and made me a lot of commission, but not nearly as much as the telly hooked up to both wires.

I'd take the punter over to the double-input telly and I'd start with the cheapo wire (not exactly the same as the cut-up one but of a similar quality) and I'd say now just look at that picture. And they'd say wow, yes, that IS a good picture, because they're here to buy a new telly, meaning they're used to the telly they've got at home, which is either broken or looks like shit because it's getting worn out and hasn't been calibrated or serviced since it came out of the factory. They'd literally just be looking at the DVD player menu here. And I'd say yes, that's a great picture 'cause this is a great telly, but look a bit closer, see how it's shimmering and writhing around the edges of the logo, "dot crawl" we call that, and notice how we've got a shadow of the logo off here, that's not supposed to be there. The edges of the logo are a bit fuzzy too. It's a decent enough picture aye, but we can get it better, watch this. And I'd switch it to input 2. And never mind the extra brightness, never mind the better colours, just the absence of visible defects in the picture was enough to make people gasp and sell the expensive wire damn near every time, because if you're spending half a grand on a telly, you'll spend an extra thirty quid to get the full half a grand's worth of picture.

The expensive cables really WERE better than the cheap ones, and not just a little bit - very obviously, visibly, noticeably so. Like, night-and-day different. More vivid colours, sharper edges, no interference, finer detail. Around about this time people were saying on web forums oh it's all a scam, they tune the telly somehow to make one input look worse than the other, bullshit, internet bullshit, just randos spouting off instead of testing and showing their work. I know because we tested it, we proved it, we showed exactly where the wires went, we had the inputs all set to the same settings and the remote right there in case you wanted to check for yourself, we didn't *have* to lie because it was *immediately visually obvious.* I sold thousands of pounds' worth of these wires and I didn't have to tell a single fucking lie. I never lied to the punters because lying is shitty and I don't want people to feel shitty because then they won't come back, I'm a farmer not a hunter and I want people to ask for me by name and come and see me whenever they want anything that uses electricity, and ask for me by name they did because their three hundred quid tellies with a thirty quid SCART lead looked better than their mates' six hundred quid tellies with a two quid SCART lead and they wanted to share how smug they were about it and also will I sell them a vacuum cleaner (yes I will, and I've got a shit-hot Electrolux right here that pisses all over the twice-as-expensive Dyson, another reason you'll continue to line my pockets with commission).

But.

Remember I told you about the £30, £40 and £60 wires? That was foreshadowing.

Well, when I was setting up the test telly, I tried one of the £60 wires next to one of the £30 wires and trying to tell the difference between them was like when you're at the optician's and the bloke's doing the "Is it better like that, or like that" thing and he's getting impatient with you because you've asked to see them again four times already, there's SOMETHING different about it but buggered if you can actually figure out what it is so you eventually just kinda sigh and go "There's not much in it, to be honest."

There really wasn't much in it.

So I just sold folks the thirty-quid cables. Every couple of weeks we'd wipe the dust off the clamshells on the £60 ones. Sixty quid for a bit of wire was already a hard sell, but it's really obvious when you're selling something you wouldn't buy yourself, so we just didn't really put in the effort. Some of the bigger fancier Comets out in the retail parks sold the hundred-quid ones, we never got any of those in. Down south I hear they even had some £120 ones and frankly bollocks to that.

For a little while there was a bundle deal where you could get two of the £40 cables for I think seventy quid - I sold a fair few of those, because you'd want one for the video and one for the DVD and maybe one for the Sky box and I didn't feel too bad about it, maybe one day in the future they'll get a fancier telly where you can actually see the extra tenner, gold-plated cables don't rust so it's not like they go bad. Stopped doing that when the bundle deal expired.

I sold the sixty-pound SCART leads precisely once. The guy went straight to this gorgeous 36" Panasonic widescreen that nobody wanted. It was right next to the Philips Pixel Plus tellies, the ones with early motion-smoothing upscaling bollocks on them that look great but do it by guessing at what else should be in the picture, they looked better but they were lying about it, making up video information, whereas the Panasonic had an unfriendly interface and a boring case and the picture wasn't as bright and it just showed you, exactly, the video signal that you put into it, in absolutely stunning detail, if you cared to look closely and try in vain to find a single defect. It was perfect. It was a TV Guy's TV. It was also three and a half fucking grand, twice the price of the better-looking lying sets, and also about time and a half as heavy. Dude walks in, wanders around a bit, I ask him hello let me know if you've got any questions, he says nah mate I know what I'm after, this one and three of these sixty-quid SCART leads. I say wow you know exactly what you want eh and he says yup, I work in the industry, I calibrate tellies for rich folks' home cinema systems. That was the only £60 SCART lead customer I ever had, and he was probably the only one who'd ever see the extra thirty quid per wire, crouched in front of the telly a foot from the screen with his glasses on and his test patterns up, finding the secret technician's service menu and making tiny adjustments to really make it sing. I hope he got satisfaction from it, I imagine he did. I do.

I've no allegiance to Monster in particular, their wires are honestly overpriced to fuck. I used them myself but only because the staff discount on these things was fifty percent. A fifteen-or-twenty-quid SCART lead with decent shielding, gold plating and all the pins wired up would probably look identical to the thirty-quid Monster one, which look identical to the sixty quid ones unless you're That One Calibration Guy. But we didn't sell fifteen-or-twenty-quid SCART leads, we sold £6 SCART leads and we sold £30 Monster Cables, and the £6 ones were twice as much a fucking scam as the £30 ones because there was a bloke on the market selling £1 leads that were the same shitty quality as our £6 ones and he was probably making 50p profit on each one.

Anyway. That was a couple of decades ago. I stopped working at Comet and started my web design business and then I started a little web hosting company and then I moved to America and nobody knew what a SCART lead was and it was NTSC so the tellies all looked like shite anyway and I built Improbable Island and got back into vids and pins and telly went high-def and all the signals went digital and things changed.

I certainly wouldn't spend thirty quid on a HDMI wire. Things are very different now. Digital vs analogue signals changes EVERYTHING. Hell, you can now send video, audio, input/output and power down the same USB-C wire and it sometimes even works. I mean yeah we were kind of doing that with SCART in the 90's but it's still different, and it's half one in the morning and two thousand words into this post and I haven't even talked about copper-clad aluminium and how that intersects with expensive-cables-are-scams blogposts and capitalism, or why use gold plated terminations when silver or copper is cheaper and more conductive, or how it can be true that cheap phone charging cables are better than expensive ones but expensive speaker wires are better than cheap ones and how that has changed over time, or when to solder and when to crimp, or the desperate importance of strain relief, or my cool magnetic USB-C wires that will never wear out your USB hole and are a sneaky deal with the devil, or anything like that yet.

I suppose I might have, like, just *slightly* more to say about wires than other dads, and I might be realising that maybe I know more about wires than I'd honestly *like* to know about wires, when there are certainly more important things to know lots about. If you'd like to waste your life as much as I've apparently wasted mine, stay tuned for part two of "Watch Dan go off about wires in a vaguely midlife-crisis sort of way," coming soon to a hole near you.

Doing more pvm foolishness

mlb tv feed with 80s scorebug (not that they had scorebugs in the 80s). Oh and commercial breaks toggle to the retrontario blue jays commercial playlist

Hot take: drug decriminalisation isn't enough.

Legalise it.

Just fucking rip the bandaid off.

Give a legal supply route, tax it, discourage it. People clearly get drugs anyway. You might as well ensure the supply is clean.

Telling people what to do with their bodies is a failed policy that never works in the long-run. The state should not have an interest in what people do with their bodies.

Treat it as a public health issue, not a criminal issue at all.

these two explain a lot of our current hellscape

In case you didn't know: the Starbucks union is actively calling for a boycott.

Please respect the union. Get your coffee elsewhere.

https://www.boycottstarbucks.net/

If any of my work on #OpenBSD, or my highlight posts here (or elsewhere) has been helpful in the past, a small recurring monthly donation would be extremely appreciated. ​

https://brynet.ca/wallofpizza.html

https://bsd.network/@brynet/114458997143046937

"In the ’90s, you had a lot of people entering the [tech] scene who came from other places—by which I mean they’d actually read a novel that wasn’t Tolkien, they’d actually been to a museum and not just seen really bad CGI art, they had truly diverse backgrounds. I see much less of that now. You see people who started coding when they were in fifth grade, that’s all they’ve ever done, and they have no context or background to frame the other things they hear."

https://slate.com/technology/2026/09/cyberselfish-come-back-paulina-borsook-silicon-valley.html

Cara Esten Hurtle used drones to map and photograph Flock cameras.

"More than anything, what stood out to me about the process of photographing these devices was geography: they exist at the boundaries of rich neighborhoods like Piedmont to track who enters; they exist embedded into poor neighborhoods to track the people who live there. Place exposes their purpose."

https://recordsofenemysurveillance.com/

That's helpful to know.

OH: “pestobismal, the green stuff”

I'm ordering the release of 500 shitposts from Mastodon's strategic bullshit reserves.