“Rediscovering The Spark”

https://tante.cc/2026/09/10/rediscovering-the-spark/

> We can spend our limited time on this earth hoping that serial liars like Sam Altman or Elon Musk or whatever their names are surely will not screw us. Or we can go and rediscover the spark of challenging those narratives of the powerful

"One guy in #Sweden built a #searchengine to fight Google, and it works.

It's called #MarginaliaSearch.

It runs its own #crawler and builds its own #index instead of borrowing Bing's. It has no ads, no investors, and no loans.

What it does differently: it ranks for text-heavy, non-commercial pages. Personal blogs. Old university pages.

The weird corners SEO strangled. Every result tells you whether the page uses affiliate links and JavaScript, and you can filter them out.

There's an "explore" mode that just shows you random sites from the index. It's open source under AGPL, so you can host your own copy.

It's keyword-based, so don't type a full question at it. Type two nouns and see where you land. Every #searchengine now shows you the same twelve #monetizedpages."

https://marginalia-search.com/

Created this for a reply on LinkedIn, but it applies pretty generally, so posting it here, too:

I don't know who needs to hear this, but reminder that µ is not a fancy u, but a fancy m

This one will hurt: I love 1Password as a product. But I'm the son of a concentration camp survivor. I will not give money to companies that align themselves with nationalism, and certainly not ethnic cleansing. Completely disappointing, @1password. https://www.flyingpenguin.com/dhh-nazism-funded-by-1password-vp-who-wrote-honest-security/

People: Sara, why did you retire from Software Eng in your 40s?

Me: Gestures at this absolutely perfect encapsulation...

"I’m European. The whole continent is assumed to have a Google and a Meta account.

This is frightening. We are putting all our eggs in the same basket. And our milk, our water, our house, our furniture and our loved ones. In an electrical-auto-closing basket remotely controlled by a foreign entity that openly spies on us and wants to extract as much money as they can. For some reason, it is considered weird not to like the basket."

https://ploum.net/2026-09-02-i_dont_have_a_smartphone.html

I mean, find me a single American tech organisation that *isn’t* full of right wing libertarians.

That’s the secret lurking in open source - it’s actually a weird combo of gun-toting anti-government survivalists and radical progressives* who have managed for years to share some similar goals because politics wasn’t mentioned. But then software ate the world; software *is* politics, and vice versa.

* (I’m in the second camp, I’m sure the first camp would use different words for me.)

boost this poost if you support a unionized wikipedia

I don’t have a smartphone…
…or, at least, I wish I didn’t.

https://ploum.net/2026-09-02-i_dont_have_a_smartphone.html

Resonance

Bonus speedpaint: https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/miniFantasyTheater/068.html#bonus

#webcomic #krita #miniFantasyTheater

RE: https://beige.party/@gildilinie/117182364841041560

This is really key for a lot of ‘AI’ success stories. The baseline is always not trying a thing. It’s never trying a different technique and allocating the same amount of compute power specialised for the task to it.

Vulnerability discovery is like this. We currently limit static analysers for C/C++ to a single compilation unit because the memory and CPU requirements for that work on a laptop or cheap cloud VM, whereas doing cross-compilation-unit analysis can require hundreds of GiBs of RAM and many hours of CPU time. Yet, when people are talking about the LLMs doing vulnerability discovery, they’re comparing against the run-on-a-cheap-laptop version, not the costs-as-much-to-run-as-LLM-inference model.

If you were willing to throw a huge amount of compute at static analysis, then generate coverage points for the paths in the predicted bug and use guided fuzzing techniques to create a reduced test case, I suspect you’d get higher success rates than LLM-based approaches. But VCs are willing to throw tens of thousands of dollars of compute per bug at the LLM approach because it makes the companies that they’ve invested in look good.

New article: this time, we use Heidegger to explain why the "it's just a tool" line that often comes up in tech is so very silly:

https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/no-such-thing-as-just-a-tool

"With blockchain we shot ourselves in the foot. With AI we're aiming higher."

#FediHelp Does anyone have experience with Copenhagen public transport? I have questions ... (among other things I have trouble installing the app -- for Rejsebillet the SMS never came and for Rejsekort the app complains that I am offline when I am not, but I am not on Danish soil yet either so I am wondering if that is the problem)

This is both brilliant and absolutely cursed: https://fzakaria.com/2026/08/23/your-executable-is-a-sqlite-database

Can't decide if my excitement about Canvas in #emacs is irrational or entirely rational. https://monadicsheep.org/blog/an-introduction-to-canvas-in-emacs.html

“A Technology of Unlearning”

https://2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/a-technology-of-unlearning/

> Rather, this “unlearning” of “AI” involves cognitive surrender and cognitive atrophy. It involves dependence and perhaps even (if you accept this medical and moral framework) addiction. It involves the monopolistic control and, so damningly, the erasure of knowledges.

new blog post!
https://lina.sh/blog/hijacking-e164-arpa
i hijacked some telephone infrastructure of a few islands over the span of multiple months; and accidentally logged information of a few hundreds of thousands of phone calls going to military bases in the process..

it's a really really silly story :P

I don't understand why Tiramisu isn't considered the ideal breakfast.

It has caffeine, sugar, and fat to give you energy for the day and a touch of booze to numb how stupid reality really is right now.