My favorite bugs are where the vendor doesn't consider it a vulnerability: How a USB-connected speaker can infect a PC without ever being touched: https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/06/highly-reviewed-speaker-can-be-hacked-over-the-air-to-infect-connected-devices/

I just published a pet project: GNU Emacs rendering with native Metal on macOS.

The whole redisplay runs on the GPU: text through a glyph atlas, images as textures, inline video decoded straight into Metal, and cursor effects. Pixel-identical output against the stock Cocoa backend.

OpenGL for Linux/Windows is scaffolded behind a driver abstraction, waiting to be implemented. Hands welcome.

https://github.com/tanrax/emacs-gpu

#emacs #gpu #metal #macos

I can't help but pee myself laughing, I swear. :_) https://www.youtube.com/shorts/sSJoTHuMLFo

nope, not a banger new movie coming up

that's the official photo of the Norwegian men's soccer team headed to this Summer's World Cup

Almost 25 years ago, I wrote a blog post with the title ‘jumping ship slowly’ about leaving Windows (XP was awful, it was mind boggling to me that Vista managed to make people nostalgic for XP). My advice remains the same:

Don’t try switching OS first. The OS is the most easily replaceable bit in the stack. Switch applications first. Most ‘Linux’ apps are cross platform. They’ll run on Windows, and the few that don’t will run in WSL2. You can switch out apps one at a time, and take the time to get comfortable with the alternatives.

Once you’re comfortable not using any Windows-only apps, changing the OS but using all of the same applications is very easy to do. Changing OS and application stack at the same time is an enormous obstacle.

I believe this is also why a lot of corporate and government Linux migrations fail: they try to change everything at the same time and that’s too steep a learning curve.

One principle I’d like to be enshrined in law:

If you create incentives that reward a behaviour, you can (and will) be charged as an accessory in any case where someone is doing something illegal as a result of optimising for that behaviour. An affirmative defence would need to demonstrate that you had safeguards in place to effectively disincentivise that behaviour.

For example, if you are running a delivery company and you set targets that mean people are paid more if they drive or park illegally, you are automatically charged as an accessory to however many counts of dangerous driving your drivers are charged with. If you are a city councillor and vote to close all of the public toilets so that there’s nowhere for taxi drivers to relieve themselves, you can be charged as an accessory to a few hundred counts of public urination.

In my experience RCU does very little checking. It says it's watching but I think it just likes to watch as you crash your kernel.

Wikipedia, and the entire Wikimedia movement, has been a democratic, anti-authoritarian experiment since the day of its inception.

It's a project that matters, something I've been proud to have made a career of.

I spent my 20 years at the Wikimedia Foundation trying to further that experiment on a professional basis, and I have never been prouder of my former colleagues at WMF than I have been these past few months as we've been making @wwu a reality.

You should organize your workplace too.

We should be *less* outraged about *individuals* as despicable as Musk.

We should be *more* outraged about *a system* that gives people like Musk almost unlimited powers (money and political influence), mainstream media that continues to frame them as visionaries for our common future even after their appetite for violence and destruction is clear and proven, and governments who depend on and crave their goodwill and products.

They should be outcasts, not put at the centre of our societies.

From LB: "In ten days last month, the Wikimedia Foundation fired the longtime lead developer of MediaWiki and disbanded the team whose entire job was to listen to volunteers. Most of the people they fired were union organizers. Wikipedia’s editors are now threatening to strike....

The Foundation has spent twenty years telling donors it is not like other tech companies. The union drive is the moment when that claim either becomes true or admits it was always marketing." https://medium.com/@jakeorlowitz/wikipedia-is-doing-the-capitalist-thing-56a393232943

RE: https://hails.org/@hailey/116657391001259044

all the criticism has been said, all the takes been had. the only metaphor i have been finding consistently useful for understanding what is happening with people and "AI" is addiction, and specifically gambling addiction.

You gave a stranger with no soul and no skin in the game the keys to everything you own.

Cor, RIPE just had a Brexit referendum moment

51.12% to a 48.88% vote

On a incredibly contentious topic that has been squabbled for years

Or 68 votes

This will surely not have any long running consequences to the mailing list arguments...

This was always my most popular post on Twitter back in the day, so I thought I'd repeat it here once again...
#webcomics #comics

For they were, all of them, deceived.
For the Dark Lord Sauron had embedded deep within his EULA the right to change the terms and conditions without notice
And once the users had become dependent on the service
He started increasing the cost of his tokens

We're hiring at my workplace.

If you are interested in working
- in a science-adjacent nonprofit
- in #python
- doing web backend and data engineering stuff
- *not using generative AI*
- remote work friendly

Please drop me a line! Your application won't skip the queue but I can give you a boost.

I rarely get a chance, since we're so small, but would love to help someone on here #GetFediHired !

https://uchicago.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/External/job/Chicago-IL/Senior-Software-Engineer--Backend-Services_JR33639

Please feel free to boost for reach, or forward to your friends!

Fwiw, computer people are starting to sound like climate scientists started to sound 5-6 years ago. You know, that whole "yeah whatever I fucking told you and you fucked around so you're all gonna find out - I'm going to get ice cream because NOTHING fucking matters anymore and we're all doomed."

That.

I think I understand why AI is SOCIALLY and ECONOMICALLY a fucking time bomb - but they understand why it's TECHNICALLY a time bomb too. And I don't like how dead man walking they all sound...

Talked to a software engineer at Microsoft working on Copilot Studio today at a social event and he said he was ashamed that he hadn’t written a single line of code in over three months. “I used to take pride in my work.” (They simply create plans in natural language and feed it to the LLM which generates the code. They can’t even do human code reviews anymore as there’s too much code being generated.)

He said a lot of them were waiting for a catastrophic event (something that would take down critical infrastructure) to get top management to reverse course. He seemed to think such a failure was very likely.

Given what we’ve been seeing recently, I tend to agree with him. Although I feel they will just double down. There’s too much money in the pot for them to fold.

#AI #microsoft #LLMs

I'll be teaching a course in the fall on data communication.

One of the assignments I hope to put together is a lesson on how data is manipulated. I want to show how easy it is for climate change deniers, anti vaxxers, etc to crop data, stretch or flip an axis and suggest the opposite of what the data is actually showing. Still thinking through the assignment and I'm thinking of having them make an honest representation and one less so.

I think there's value to such a lesson given how much downright lying we have from not just randos but even political circles these days.

Was just going to use publicly available data sources but then I am thinking that there must be researchers here who have awesome data they wouldn't mind seeing put into visual form. If you do have data you'd be willing to let me use, please drop me a comment or PM and let me know how to access it. Thanks!

(P.S. would appreciate a share for wider reach)

#academicChatter

I'm going to whisper this. So I'll choose my words carefully. I'll use general terms but am referring to specific multiple things. Please read between the lines.

Those of you that are doing things are having a good effect.

- The media is not covering you (this is a good sign. it means they dont want to bring attention to your actions).
- They are discussing you in board rooms and in decision making meetings.
- They are saying things like "we have to pause that project at that location because its currently drawing too much attention" and "we have to reframe this announcement to downplay that thing" and "we need to try these concessions to lower the heat a bit".

They are hoping you "get tired and bored and move to a new thing" so they can get back to work without interference.

Keep doing what you're doing. Join folks that are doing things if you aren't doing anything yet. Do what you can, as you can, when you can.

It is working.

#solarpunk