Day: July 30, 2025, 11:13 PM

Paratrooper Stuff

Chill Oof, Video, Video (other)

One time on a hairy jump in the army in too-high winds, a buddy of mine slammed into the side of a field ambulance at 30mph.

Somehow he broke no bones but sprained nearly every major muscle in his body and ended up with a huge amount of bruising. As I was talking to him later, I observed it was some sort of weird anti-paradox: he crashed into the ambulance that was needed to help him since he’d plowed into an ambulance.

He was not quite as amused by my observation as I was.

He made a complete recovery. And if you’re curious, video of the jump is below. Read the poster’s comment too. That was a very shitty jump that never should’ve happened, especially since it was done just to show off.

I know most of y’all are not used to looking at military jumps, but the paratroopers should not be moving nearly-horizontally across the screen like that.

A very bad day.

Holy shit, just noticed these comments. That was my friend!

1990s Design

Chill Clowns, Tech

Some thoughts on IPv6.

That is pretty stupid and clueless.

I understand IPv6 just fine and have set it up from scratch many times in large networks.

So I can very confidently say that it really sucks. It was designed in the 1990s before we understood any of the problems we’d be facing in the 2020s. And it shows. It’s creaky and ill-suited to its actual use. It has security assumptions that aged poorly (IPSec everywhere? Sure, Jan.) and features that will never be used. It’s mostly cruft and useless crap with some ok functionality if you’re using dial-up.

First, its human-unfriendly addressing makes diagnostics, documentation, and training way harder. No fucking one alive can remember or understand just by looking at it what 2001:0db8:85a3::8a2e:0370:7334 means or does. (For my non-techies, that is an IPv6 address, like 192.168.1.1 in IPv4).

Additionally, no matter what you’ve read, NAT actually is a great security feature and IPv6 only begrudgingly supporting this is clownish and harmful1.

The crack I made about dial-up earlier was actually leading to something. IPv6 was designed long before cloud-native networking became a thing. That means it was created when it was implicitly assumed that all hosts had one interface and one static address. These days, containers, VMs and ephemeral workloads are dominant. IPs change all the time, get re-assigned and altered, sometimes every few seconds. IPv6’s assumption of a static architecture makes it poorly-suited to dynamic cloud environments.

Also, for we admins, things like stateless address auto-configuration (SLAAC) and router advertisements give us less control. We actually need this control and visibility for security and observability. Allowing IPv6 to do its black-box magic is not any advantage for us. It is in fact actively harmful and makes networks much harder to secure and administer.

IPv6 also assumes end-to-end connectivity is a good thing — that everything should have a public IP address and be on the public internet 24/7 (related to my point about NAT above). Bro, I don’t want my washing machine or toaster on the internet. Trust.

Subnetting in IPv6 is also absolute crap. “Just use a /64 everywhere!” Why, god, why? This just adds complexity, not reduces it. Insanely dipshitty.

And don’t get me started on the fucking idiotic link-local address. For those not in the know, in IPv6 every interface gets assigned a link-local address to talk to its neighbors. This is bad! It’s not routable, is a security hole, it causes problems in logging and diagnostics and with multi-hop while being confusing and inobvious to most network admins.

Of course, IPv6 also replaced ARP with NDP. This inefficient-as-all-hell turd of a protocol has more useless steps, a larger (and difficult-to-audit) attack surface, is far, far more fragile and requires complex (and also fragile) firewalling. The clowns replaced a dumb but reliable protocol (ARP) with an insecure, “smart” but fragile one. Great job.

It also has crap DNS integration. The designers back in the 1990s assumed we’d use an IP address for everything. Hostnames and DNS were an afterthought. Meanwhile, DNS is used for absolutely everything these days.

IPv6 also makes network planning far harder. Global prefix delegation, renumbering, and prefix lifetimes are a goddamn nightmare. Get it right the first time or you are screwed (ask me how I know).

And, related to a point above, IPv6 was designed for well-structured pre-built networks with planned addressing, stable routers, and consistent ownership. That means it really does not work well with mesh networks, ad-hoc clusters, cloud VMs that spin up/down in seconds, serverless functions…I could go on.

IPv6 is like giving a skateboard to a donkey. Sure, theoretically it might be able to get wherever it’s going faster. But what the hell is a donkey going to do with a skateboard in reality?

(Source: I am an active CCNP, have worked in tech for 20+ years, and have designed hundreds of IPv4 and IPv6 networks from the ground up and then built them out myself, often purchasing all the required hardware as well.)

  1. No, NAT shouldn’t be your only security feature. But it works well and is far better than nothing, which is what most would have otherwise.

Pagination

Chill Regular-ass Post

Camille Paglia in the 1990s:

Sexual harassment guidelines, if overdone, will end by harming women more than helping them. In the rough play of the arena, women must make their own way. If someone offends you by speech, you must learn to defend yourself by speech. The answer cannot be to beg for outside help to curtail your opponent’s free movement. The message conveyed by such attitudes is that women are too weak to win by men’s rules and must be awarded a procedural advantage before they even climb into the ring. Teasing and taunting have always been intrinsic to the hazing rituals of male bonding. The elaborate shouting matches and satirical putdowns of African tribal life can still be heard in American pop music (“You been whupped with the ugly stick!” —uproarious laughter) and among drag queens, where it’s called “throwing shade.” Middle-class white women have got to get over their superiority complex and learn to talk trash with the rest of the human race.

A sex-free workplace is neither possible nor desirable.

She saw #MeToo’s inevitable result before most of the dipshits perpetrating it like Moira Donegan were out of diapers.

Eurnope

Chill Political Economy, Politics

Europe has even more potentially society-ending challenges ahead than the United States, despite the creeping anti-science authoritarianism here at home. Among them:

1) Demographic crisis. Shared with the rest of the world, of course. And no, immigration won’t solve it. Their more-generous social safety net is going to need some re-vamping that will cause massive social unrest.

2) Islamization. Once a society becomes ~10% Muslim, it’s enough to throw it into chaos and often dissolve the existing culture. Many EU countries are getting close to this threshold or have exceeded it. And no matter what idiot feminists think, this will be very, very bad for women there.

3) Russia. It’ll be invading soon. Europe is not even close to any kind of ready.

4) Immigration of unattached economic anti-western migrant men. Even apart from Islamization, this is a huge issue and will be getting much worse.

5) AMOC collapse. This will make a lot of Europe a whole lot colder on average while having minimal effect on the US.

The US and China are best-positioned to endure and even prosper here. That is, assuming we in the US don’t strangle ourselves to death, which we are merrily on the way to doing by killing science, research and clean energy.

But Europe is pretty much fucked no matter what.

Chill Links

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Russia kills 22 civilians in Ukraine as the Kremlin remains defiant over Trump threats.

“No Tax on Tips” Is an Industry Plant.

The Coldplay kiss-cam frenzy shows we need a culture shift. Or nuking.

Inflation Outpacing Wage Growth For Over 40% Of Americans, Report Says.

Electricity Prices Are Soaring Under Donald Trump.

CEO Brags That He Gets “Extremely Excited” Firing People and Replacing Them With AI.

With Individual Home Buyers on the Sidelines, Investors Swoop Into the Market.

How Wikipedia Whitewashes Mao.

Gaza Said To Be Starving But Not ‘Release The Hostages’ Starving. Heh.

Earlier phone = lower mental health as young adult.