activescott's Notes

collection of container images, helm charts and virtual machines for the most popular open source applications and services

Hardened secure images of popular open source software with Near-Zero Vulnerabilities

Some interesting subtle things he ever so briefly mentions that I think are notable:

• "Everybody uses all the products": This translates to each person deeply knows what each product does, it's use cases and how users use each product because they are users of the product. He mentioned this in the context of "developers just commit to other products" - They will just download the repo and submit a PR. He mentions the value of Claude in that process, which I know it is, but takes for granted the value of knowing the product.
• While I'm sure these products have complex coding challenges, they're all well defined and narrowly scoped. I think it's much harder to describe a complex application or set of applications using proprietary services with sometimes odd design choices, and integrating with external proprietary services. With that said, I find AI to be exceptional at helping to understand complex code across many services and frontend components - maybe even more valuable than writing the code. However, it still is non-trivial. It also doesn't help with knowing what to build for your customer.

A list of criminals Trump has pardoned.

Thru axles are the better choice for mountain bikers, bikes with disc brakes, bicycle tourists and bikepackers, e-bikes, those carrying heavy loads, and those who are seeking improved stiffness.

State legislation to attempt to protect privacy forthcoming hopefully.

A report last month out of the University of Washington found several local police departments authorized U.S. Border Patrol to use their license plate reader databases. And in other cases, Border Patrol had backdoor access without express permission. In some instances, police conducted searches on behalf of the federal agency. By Worries extend beyond immigration.

Authorities in Texas this year searched thousands of the cameras, as far as Washington state and Illinois, in their search for a woman believed to have had a self-administered abortion.

Innocent until proven guilty. Unless you have a race, speak Spanish, speak with an accent, or your job involves physical labor.

In Los Angeles, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling has temporarily allowed immigration enforcement agents operating in that city to use race as one of the reasons for a stop. They can also use people speaking Spanish, accented English, and working certain physical labor jobs to guess if someone is in the country without legal status.

Revlon and canned seafood and chicken producer Bumble Bee Foods have made similar arguments in the trade court.

The tariffs facing the court challenge have raised around $90 billion so far.

While several legal experts have told The Associated Press they believed the second strike violated peacetime laws and those governing armed conflict, the Pentagon’s own manual on the laws of armed conflict also specifically cites striking survivors of a sunken ship as being patently illegal.

“Orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal,” the manual says.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday distanced himself from the secondary strike, which the news report said killed two survivors who were clinging to the wreckage.

Hegseth, sitting next to Trump at the Cabinet meeting, said Trump has empowered “commanders to do what is necessary, which is dark and difficult things in the dead of night on behalf of the American people.”

Extracting Claude’s soul.

Journalists who don’t abide by the policy risk losing credentials that provide access to the Pentagon, under a 17-page memo distributed Friday that steps up media restrictions imposed by the administration of President Donald Trump.

“Information must be approved for public release by an appropriate authorizing official before it is released, even if it is unclassified,” the directive states. The signature form includes an array of security requirements for credentialed media at the Pentagon.

Advocates for press freedoms denounced the non-disclosure requirement as an assault on independent journalism. The new Pentagon restrictions arrive as Trump expands threats, lawsuits and government pressure as he remakes the American media landscape.

HENRY GRABAR: Parking is the largest single land use in many American cities. If we were designing society from scratch, would we have placed car storage on the pedestal that it now occupies?

You know, one of the things that immediately jumped off the page for me when I was reading your book is the fact that, by square footage, there is more housing for each car in this country than there is housing for each person. And on its face, I have to say that statement feels incredibly problematic, but is it?

GRABAR: I don't think it's that surprising when you start to think about it. I mean, there are more - we build more three-car garages in this country than we build one-bedroom apartments. Almost every jurisdiction in this country requires parking as a part of every single building type, whether you're building a school, an apartment building or an office or a restaurant, the law requires a certain number of parking spaces. So we have parking minimums in every jurisdiction in this country, whereas for housing, we often have maximums. We say, on this plot, you can only put one unit of housing. You can only put two units of housing. So the fact that we've ended up with a surplus of parking and a shortage of housing is no surprise. In fact, it's by design.

Net Metering is the agreement utility customers enter with their electric utility provider to save money on their electricity bill with solar energy systems. Any excess electricity generated is fed back into the grid, spinning your meter backward and earning credits that offset future electricity consumption, effectively lowering overall energy costs. The rate at which you export energy is the same as the rate at which you purchase, a 1:1 rate. These credits roll over monthly but reset annually on March 31, aligning with solar generation patterns to optimize the utilization of solar-generated electricity.

You can manage dashboards in Grafana by adding one or more YAML configuration files in the provisioning/dashboards directory. Each configuration file contains a list of providers that Grafana uses to load dashboards from the local filesystem.

Towards the end of last year, federal prosecutors started examining two loans totaling $8m wired to Trump Media, through the Caribbean, from two obscure entities that both appear to be controlled in part by the relation of an ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin, the sources said.

The expanded nature of the criminal investigation, which has not been previously reported, threatens to delay the completion of the merger between Trump Media and DWAC, which would provide the company and Truth Social with up to $1.3bn in capital, in addition to a stock market listing.

Even if Trump Media and its officers face no criminal exposure for the transactions, the optics of borrowing money from potentially unsavory sources through opaque conduits could cloud Trump’s image as he seeks to recapture the White House in 2024.

The extent of the exposure for Trump Media and its officers for money laundering remains unclear. The statutes broadly require prosecutors to show that defendants knew the money was the proceeds of some form of unlawful activity and the transaction was designed to conceal its source.

But money laundering prosecutions are typically based on circumstantial evidence and can be based on materials that show that the money in question was unlikely to have legitimate origins, legal experts said.

The first $2m payment to Trump Media came in December 2021 when the company was on the brink of collapse after the planned merger with DWAC – that would have unlocked millions for the company – was delayed when the SEC opened an inquiry into whether the arrangement broke regulatory rules.

Trump Media needed a bridge loan to keep the company afloat. But it struggled to get financing until DWAC’s chief executive Patrick Orlando sourced a $2m loan wired from Paxum Bank registered in Dominica, according to the wire transfer receipt reviewed by the Guardian.

The wire transfer identified Paxum Bank as the beneficial owner, although the promissory note identified an entity ca