We'll fight them on the breaches

Welcome

Hello everyone welcome to my regular ramble through geeky subjects from tech, to history, games, writing, language, and more.

This issue is a little light on links, but I have a great interview with Josh Koenig of Pantheon you can hear in the voiceover section of this newsletter or wherever you find your podcasts. I remember Pantheon from my Drupal days. And we spoke a lot about the past, present and future of content delivering what where they came from what they have been doing and what they're about to do with the proliferation of new ways of managing and providing content.

Tech

After 20 years are developers now ready for Nix?

First something that relates nicely to the interview I had last week with Jetpack.io who have built some tools on top of NixOS. This article from John Leonard pondered if Nix was ahead of its time, and only now are companies and users (at scale) building on top of it. Most of this ties into increased requirements for “software bills of materials” and an operating system that you can rebuild from configuration and is comprised a literal bill of materials is compelling.

I try something similar with my own solutions for macOS, but that isn’t an operating system designed from the ground up to function this way.

LastPass tells (mostly) all

Months later, LastPass finally revealed what happened to cause their large data breach last year. I stopped using LastPass ages ago in favour of 1Password mostly as LastPass is so ugly to use. However, this was a huge betrayal of faith for a company whose main business is to keep things safe and I wonder how their competitors have benefited?

ChatGPT vs Writers

Of course, it wouldn’t be a tech newsletter without a quick mention of ChatGPT.

S.E. Ireland worries about the implications for tech writers and as that’s where I make money, so am I. For the more precudural aspect of that job, I am already worried. For the more human “how to connect the dots” content, not quite yet. We shall see…

Clarkesworld had to close submissions due to a flood of content written by people using ChatGPT and I would imagine they aren’t the only ones. As someone attempting to get short stories published right now, this is another shot fired by ChatGPT for aspiring writers, but is this akin the zoom bombers or spam comments on blogs and will all the trolls just get bored in a few weeks?

As a creative writer, I like writing and don’t necessarily want an AI interfering with that process. But others (ab)using it to flood publications still affects writers indirectly as I can’t get anything published right now…

New content from me

DiffusionBee and Amazing AI for generating images on macOS with Stable Diffusion

Mixing documentation and React components with Mintlify

And finally!

Never been a better “and finally”. My new website is ready… Mostly… But I am happy it’s live.

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