Kyle Kingsbury

  1. The Future of Comments is Lies, I Guess

    I’ve been involved in content moderation since roughly 2004. I’ve built spam prevention for corporate and personal e-mail, moderated open-source mailing lists and IRC channels, worked at a couple social media networks, and help moderate a Mastodon instance for a few hundred people. In the last few years…

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  2. The Future of Customer Support is Lies, I Guess

    Update, 2025-05-22: TrueNAS was kind enough to reach out and let me know that their support process does not normally incorporate LLMs. They’re talking about what happened internally, and intend to prevent it from happening again through improved documentation and reviewing the support process as a whole…

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  3. The Future of Newspapers is Lies, I Guess

    Update, 2023-05-23: Added a paragraph about Dr. Howard Whiteman’s non-existent quote. I subscribe to the Chicago Sun-Times, a non-profit newspaper. This week they sent me a sixty-four page special insert, branded with the Chicago Sun-Times logo, full of LLM nonsense. Yesterday I wrote the following letter…

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  4. When Flat Rate Movers Won't Answer Your Calls

    Back in 2023 I went through an inter-state move with Flat Rate Movers, LTD., a.k.a. Flat Rate Moving, US DOT 488466, MC 254356. They bungled the job, damaged my stuff and my house, and then refused to talk to me or their own insurance company. I placed dozens of calls, wrote letters, emails, nothing…

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  5. Comments on Executive Order 14168

    Submitted to the Department of State, which is requesting comments on a proposed change which would align US passport gender markers with executive order 14168. Executive order 14168 is biologically incoherent and socially cruel. All passport applicants should be allowed to select whatever gender markers…

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  6. Geoblocking the UK with Debian & Nginx

    A few quick notes for other folks who are geoblocking the UK. I just set up a basic geoblock with Nginx on Debian. This is all stuff you can piece together, but the Maxmind and Nginx docs are a little vague about the details, so I figure it’s worth an actual writeup. My Nginx expertise is ~15 years out…

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  7. Seconds Since the Epoch

    This is not at all news, but it comes up often enough that I think there should be a concise explanation of the problem. People, myself included, like to say that POSIX time, also known as Unix time, is the number of seconds since the Unix epoch, which was 1970-01-01 at 00:00:00. This is not true. Or…

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  8. Threads Won't Take You South of Market

    In June 2023, when Threads announced their plans to federate with other Fediverse instances, there was a good deal of debate around whether smaller instances should allow federation or block it pre-emptively. As one of the admins of woof.group, I wrote about some of the potential risks and rewards of…

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  9. Ecobee Settings for Heat Pumps with Resistive Aux Heat

    I’m in the process of replacing a old radiator system with a centrally-ducted, air-source heat pump system with electric resistive backup heat. I’ve found that the default ecobee algorithm seems to behave surprisingly poorly for this system, and wanted to write up some of the settings that I’ve found…

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  10. ClassNotFoundException: java.util.SequencedCollection

    Recently I’ve had users of my libraries start reporting mysterious errors due to a missing reference to SequencedCollection, a Java interface added in JDK 21: Execution error (ClassNotFoundException) at jdk.internal.loader.BuiltinClassLoader/loadClass (BuiltinClassLoader.java:641). java.util.SequencedCollection…

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  11. How to Replace Your CPAP In Only 666 Days

    This story is not practical advice. For me, it’s closing the book on an almost two-year saga. For you, I hope it’s an enjoyable bit of bureaucratic schadenfreude. For Anthem, I hope it’s the subject of a series of painful but transformative meetings. This is not an isolated event. I’ve had dozens of…

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  12. Why is Jepsen Written in Clojure?

    People keep asking why Jepsen is written in Clojure, so I figure it’s worth having a referencable answer. I’ve programmed in something like twenty languages. Why choose a Weird Lisp? Jepsen is built for testing concurrent systems–mostly databases. Because it tests concurrent systems, the language itself…

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