mhoye

New to me personal infosec idea: the deadname canary.

Mastodon

Fesshole 🧻 (@fesshole@mastodon.social)

I'm a trans woman who, if anyone ever asks, will give my deadname as a different male name each time. It's been the single fastest way to find peop...

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The cost of a manual pasta maker, the price of shipping replacements for the two broken plastic parts - the only two plastic parts - in the machine, and the price of the parts. Actual cost of the part is I suspect $1. I frequently find myself thinking, would it be cheaper to (a) buy the thing I want, (b) make it myself, or (c) build a _machine shop to build the machines I need to build the thing myself_ and it is genuinely upsetting how often the economical choice is floating between B and C.

If I understand this correctly the reason RAM has quadrupled in price is that a huge quantity of RAM that hasn't been produced has been bought with money that doesn't exist to populate GPUs that also haven't been produced to go in datacenters that haven't been built powered by infrastructure that might never exist to meet a demand that doesn't exist at all to make profit margins that mathematically can't exist and economists talk about this thing they call the "rational markets hypothesis".

TIL that Christa McAuliffe, the teacher who died in the Challenger explosion, wasn't the first-choice person NASA wanted to put in that seat. Their first choice was _Big Bird_:

NBC News

NASA Confirms Talks to Fly Big Bird on Doomed Shuttle Challenger

NASA has confirmed reports that space officials discussed putting Big Bird on the space shuttle Challenger before its loss in 1986.

Any #mathstodon people following me who'd be willing to entertain a possibly dumb question? It's about prime numbers and the Collatz Conjecture, which I fully understand are a one-two punch of math crankery, but I'd like to put it to somebody who can tell me "this leads nowhere but crankdom for sure" so I can put it behind me.

They key insight here is that the Anthropic executive strata apparently _do_ believe their chatbot is sentient but do not believe in consent.

Mastodon

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YEARS YOU SPENT YEARS BRAGGING THAT YOU HIRED THE BEST ENGINEERS IN THE WORLD ONLY THE VERY BEST BUILDINGS FULL OF 10X ENGINEERS AND YOU GAVE THESE BRILLIANT GENIUS OUTLIER CODE MONSTERS TOOLS YOU SAID WILL MAKE THEM EVEN 10X MORE PRODUCTIVE IT WILL 10X YOUR 10X AND FIRED THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE SO YOU COULD AFFORD THEM AND THEY TRIED THOSE TOOLS AND DON'T WANT THEM AND DON'T USE THEM WHAT DOES THAT TELL YOU MOTHERFUCKER WHAT DOES IT TELL YOU

Ars Technica

Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

Report: Microsoft declared "the era of AI agents" in May, but enterprise customers aren't buying.

“Org you’ve never heard of acquires company that operates your remotely managed home robot” is now a threat model in play.

Ars Technica

Roomba maker iRobot swept into bankruptcy

Shenzhen-based Picea Robotics, its lender and primary supplier, will acquire all of iRobot’s shares.

This both real and a decent metaphor, so it is time for me to re-tell a story. Ever heard of The Ping Of Death? There was a couple of years there - years, hand to god - where you could throw a single malformed or too-large packet across the network at any IP you could see, and if you malformed it just right for its OS, you could crash the machine. You could kill a Windows machine with one line in cmd.exe. It was bad, but almost nobody knows how bad.

Mastodon

Does anyone know how the "anti-cheat" video game systems of the world feel about custom keyboards, particularly when it comes to macros? My son wants to build something that helps with Helldivers but also wants to be able to keep playing Helldivers.