NelsonMinar

What is wrong with software engineers that we keep making really stupid basic mistakes like this? Sometimes I think programming should require licensing and regular testing.

I'm willing to bet the vast majority of students and professors at Stanford have consulted an "illegally obtained" textbook at some point. Either directly from Anna or second hand.

I'm getting a lot of mileage converting all my little VMs and containers over to NixOS. Entirely using AI, Claude Code is remarkably good at creating Nix flakes. The declarative OS is a good match for LLM generation of system specs. No side effects of commands to track, everything testable and reproducible by the agent. And NixOS itself works quite well. Most of the packages I need are there and if something's missing Claude doesn't seem to have any problem making it itself.

Lots of reports on Reddit about people getting popped. Other payloads too, like a DDOS node.

Plex2Shell is the proof-of-concept exploit that is feeding this. An LLM chained together several CVEs: https://zmain.info/blog/plex2shell

Once again proving that ads are an unacceptable security threat. All those sites now deploying ad-blocker blockers should assume liability for whatever ad software they force their readers to run.

I just switched to AVIF after several years of using WebP. Main reason for me is HDR support, but the smaller encoding is nice. Just beware of lossless AVIF, that's a trap.

2^-182 is very funny but it's bigger than 0 and that's going to shatter a lot of people's conjectures.

I had Claude Opus disassemble the CDC 6600 dead start panel. The hard part was finding a better image of the switches so the vision could read the bits.¹

The content isn't very interesting, and Claude's comments aren't very detailed. Not bad for 2 minutes of work about a 62 year old computer though. Look out Ken Shirriff, AI is coming for you.²

  Addr   Octal   Instruction      Meaning
  0001   7512    DCN  12          Disconnect channel 12 (put it in a known idle state)  
  0002   7712    FNC  12, 4000?   Send function code to channel 12's device  
  0003   4000?                      └ function code (last bit unclear: 4000 or 4001)  
  0004   7712    FNC  12, 0001    Send another function code
  0005   0001                       └ function code
  0006   7712    FNC  12, 1500?   Send a third function code
  0007   1500?                      └ function code (least certain row)
  0010   2000    LDC  0160?       Load A with a word count
  0011   0160?                      └ the count
  0012   7412    ACN  12          Activate channel 12
  0013   7112    IAM  12, 0015    Read A words from channel 12   into memory starting at 0015
  0014   0015                       └ destination address

1. https://dyninst.github.io/scalable_tools_workshop/petascale2...

2. Not really. I have no idea if this disassembly is corrrect.

3. Quora is prison for words.

You can make it consume more VRAM if you want. There's a 13GB texture modpack that I use so it looks nice on my high DPI screen. Totally optional but it sure looks good.

I'm not certain but my guess is Factorio doesn't have the elaborate systems for streaming and unloading textures 3d games has.

Wube is such a unique game studio. They do a lot of very solid technical work and look like they have fun doing it. I particularly appreciated their recent post about porting Factorio to ARM64. They had a business reason to do it but it's clear the team was mostly just curious about whether ARM64 was a viable gaming platform now. And then shared the results with us. They seem like fun hacker guys.

https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-446

The murals are painted on private property.

Clarion Alley is totally worth a visit when you're in San Francisco. It's right in the middle of the Mission near a bunch of great places to eat and drink. Balmy Alley is a 10 minute walk away and another great street art gallery.

Clarion Alley Mural Project does great work maintaining Clarion Alley. (Including relations with property owners - this problem is an anomaly, there's been art there successfully for over 30 years.) Also worth knowing about Precita Eyes, a local community organization that manages murals in a lot of the city.

Migration in Mastodon works quite well. You're still confined to the one ActivityPub platform but you can easily move to a new server with a new community and different policies.

In the early days of social media it was a standard that you could get your lists of friends, etc out and then use them to bootstrap your social network on new social media. All the big players like Twitter and Facebook took advantage of that and then locked down their own platforms to make it hard for you to move your social network out of them.

That stopped in 2018. https://www.slashgear.com/library-of-congress-twitter-archiv...

I'm sure Verisign would be thrilled to have a bidding war between the legitimate owners of fraser.name and a bunch of third parties they suddenly enabled.

Yes the Berlin exhibit is really well done with some beautiful artifacts well displayed and explained. The Z1 replica is a marvel: Zuse himself built in 1989.

IIRC they also have sensible documentatioin about his Nazi connections that puts this work into appropriate context.

There's a bunch of neat public payphone art projects out there. A friend of mine runs Futel, which has some fairly elaborate voice menus and several phones installed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futel

This sure feels like emergent behavior in a complex system.

My WiThings ScanWatch lasts a full month. But it's not a phone-on-my-wrist, it looks more like an analog watch and just has some sensors in it.

One of my favorite easter eggs in Nethack was the way a Mailer Daemon would arrive in-game and deliver a scroll when you received an email on the host Unix system. Which then became a game exploit because there were some obscure in-game uses for the scroll items.

Bazzite mostly suggests installing stuff via Flatpak or Homebrew. (No, really, brew on Linux lol). You can also layer in things with rpm-ostree but it's clunky. I think the immutable OS makes sense for a consumer but not for a developer.

So I'm using Nobara instead. It's a different Fedora-for-gaming but has most of the same improvements. It is a traditional system, not immutable. CachyOS is also very popular and that gets you an Arch-for-gaming. Just yesterday I learned of PikaOS, a Debian-for-gaming.

The main thing all these gaming-customized systems are doing is getting graphics drivers and proprietary codecs installed for you easily.

One thing that's lovely about Linux is this kind of analysis is not only possible, but meaningful. These results will get reported back to the graphics software authors and the distribution packagers and the ecosystem will improve. There's no sense with Microsoft that kind of improvement is possible.

I recently switched to Linux after years on Windows desktop, mostly because the KDE Plasma desktop feels snappier than Windows 11. Also the feeling that if something isn't working right I can probably tinker and improve it. It's been really nice. If you haven't tried Linux desktops in awhile give Bazzite a whirl: it's a Fedora customized for gaming. Even if you don't game it's an easy way to get a very functional Linux desktop in no time at all.

Grok is many things but it is not "neutral". https://www.economist.com/briefing/2026/06/25/ai-models-valu...

People give them money because of the moral stance. They are either actively fine with the CSAM or just don't care.

The premise of this statement is wrong.

I realize as a Californian we may not count as "American" in this particular zeitgeist stereotype. But FWIW we have a firework ban in Nevada County that is widely respected. There are very few violations and the law is actively enforced.

The difference is we are in a no-joke dangerous fire situation and everyone recognizes it. Most people know better than to set off incendiary explosives in a forest. Anyone who shot off illegal fireworks would immediately be shamed and censured by their neighbors. I guess it's a form of commune-ism.

numerous vulnerabilities in secure boot deployment over many years. e.g. https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/09/secure-boot-neuteri...

I'm surprised more people aren't freaking out about this. It seems likely a whole lot of Linux machines are going to fail to reboot in the next few months. The problem affects VMs too. I was grateful Proxmox put a little warning in its hypervisor GUI with a button to press to fix the BIOS of its VMs.

Secure Boot has been deeply broken for years, not providing meaningful security on most consumer machines.

I love stuff like this. But if it's serious as a thing you might use, would be nice to see some example programs and evaluation of how well they work. Also a test suite.