Boulet on sharing on the modern Web
bouletcorp.com/rogatons/2026/0…
"To be an artist on the internet is to plant flowers in a garden where someone is playing with a flamethrower." (Awful translation by me.)
Holy shit! The literal video version of Total Eclipse of the Heart is on YouTube again. I remember looking for a few times, but I guess it kept falling foul of copyright strikes.
Anyway, in honour of the memory of the great Bonnie Tyler, enjoy one of the finest things YouTube has ever hosted.
Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. Außerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.artistwithouttalent (YouTube)
Any artist that can generate a version of their song this good is truly a classic;
share.google/OpxoMgvnS4AfAZlpX
Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. Außerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.share.google
It physically pains me that the middle has a compass and then proceeds to draw out a circle manually without actually using it... as a compass...
Senior still wins the day though. 🤣
I've used the TeX coffee-stain package
Useful for drafts and notes and works better on the screen than an actual coffee cup (I've tried that too, and it got expensive).
The true secret of the senior is how he gets the coffee underneath the cup with clean clothes! 🙌😂
Edit: (typo)
airplane pilots:
you start off with a tank full of luck and no experience
hopefully, you fill up on the latter before you run out of the former
Badly dated, alas. Here's how it works today:
Junior: Asks ChatGPT to help them draw a circle. It spits out a shape that looks vaguely like a heptagon with cat ears. Carefully pastes the exact output into their application.
Middle: Asks Claude Code to create a circle-drawing program. The code is full of mathematical formulas and looks correct, except for drawing a square about 4% of the time and inviting Little Bobby Tables into the corporate intranet's database every other Thursday. The junior is tasked with fixing the squares and refilling the damaged database with proper circles.
Senior (mid-thirties): Uses agentic AI to create an entire department of circle-drawing agents. Their code to replace all occurrences of the letter "E" in the company intranet with circles wins the agentic-AI leaderboard one month. They are eventually called in to explain why the corporate web site is all circles, no text, but are given a promotion because of how quickly their agentic process updated the web site.
Senior (graybeard): Coffee-cup method, as before. They are fired because agentic AI is incapable of applying coffee cups to paper.
«
My name is Daniel Connell. I prototype and develop basic technologies which anyone can make using recycled materials and simple tools.
The aim is for everyone everywhere to be able to build and maintain their own infrastructure; producing their own energy, food, clean water, communications, and anything else they need.
»
#SciFi #NotebooksOfLazarusLong #Heinlein
But I think we have passed beyond that, there are simply too many (useful) things to understand for one person, each of us, to master, or jack, or even ten.
Even in Neolithic times I think it took a village to keep a village alive, and there needed to be some other villages a walk away, and so on down to the sea and useful plants and stones and clay.
But good if we are getting it down a bit.
@Photo55 I think our civilization exists because we got past that. Specialists in their craft made it possible (smiths, coopers, shipwrights, etc.).
Economies of scale make it possible for our civilization to continue. If we did it all ourselves we'd be dead of starvation on a barren planet.
@Photo55 Indeed. This guy tried to make a toaster from scratch, smelting ore, refining oil to make the plastic etc. It didn't work.
And as for electronics, you might just about build a crystal set radio based on a cats whisker, but nothing more sophisticated than that.
I guess there is value in knowing how to generate electricity from the wind using scrap parts, but let's not kid ourselves about an artisanal civilisation.
scopeofwork.net/toaster-projec…
An interview with Thomas Thwaites. For his Master’s thesis project, Thomas Thwaites set out to produce a quotidian object from scratch: a toaster. He deconstructed the cheapest toaster he could find (£3.Hillary Predko (Scope of Work)
@tokensane
Yeah, and what about that guy who was going to build a replica of New York City?
He barely got to the third floor of the Empire State Building before he gave up.
If you can't do absolutely everything by yourself starting with bare hands and rocks, then there's no point.
Give up now and just keep doing what you're told. The trillionaires know what is best for you.
> The Facebook group is also a good place to ask questions and post results from your own builds.
Absolutely not. Many of us are on Mastodon as part of rejecting all fascist sites that enshittify the world by stealing and reselling personal information.
This might be useful. I worked on the first edition back in the day, one of my proudest professional achievements, a portable, easily shipped compendium in plain text on how to build and maintain essential infrastructure, intended at the time for use by rural areas in developing nations (UNDP)
archive.org/details/humanity-d…
1. The Humanity Libraries ProjectThe Humanity Libraries Project of the NGO Global Help Projects is a network project of more than 100 partners. Its aim is to...Internet Archive
Jezus: UK's Reform Party has gotten two-thirds of its funding from fossil fuel interests.
Revealed: Reform’s £24 Million...
Reform UK has received £24 million from oil and gas interests, accounting for more than two thirds of its total income, DeSmog can reveal.Adam Barnett and Sam Bright (DeSmog)
One man, two kernels, and a lot of RISC-V
theregister.com/software/2026/…
A homebrew PC and mini-mainframe were only the warm-up for Yuri Zaporozhets' latest operating system
<- by me on #TheRegister
A third of world’s energy needs should come from electricity by 2035, says Turkish minister Murat Kurum, as he sets out priorities priority for this year’s UN climate summitFiona Harvey (the Guardian)
So, seems like Microsoft's *.olc.protection.outlook.com mail servers are currently using certificates signed by an distrusted root CA[1].
That seems like a shocking level of incompetence.
It means that any mail server supporting MTA-STS is currently unable to deliver any mail to them.
[1] DigiCert Global Root CA which has been scheduled for distrusting since 2023 knowledge.digicert.com/general…
On March 8, 2023, at 10:00 MST (17:00 UTC), DigiCert will begin updating the default public issuance of TLS/SSL certificate to our public, second-generation (G2) root, and intermediate CA (ICA) certificate hierarchies.knowledge.digicert.com
you can take a walk with a friend, as a treat
I have very conflicting feelings about this :D
Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. Außerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.Plasma Channel (YouTube)
Three questions:
1) Why?
2) Ok, but why?, seriously this time
3) Where can I get one myself? 😅
Oh, hi!
Anyway,
capacitor blow up human wake up. Contribute to ArcaEge/capacitor-alarm-clock development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHub
Having had a 500V capacitor explode in one radio power supply, watched a 2 microfarad at 2kV waxed paper capacitor slowly rising from its can (with attendant puffs of steam/smoke) in another, and a low-voltage electrolytic explode at navel level, on the kitchen table while I was bending over it...
I'm just going to say NOPE! and run away. 3:O(>
a) with that size it should be mF, not uF
b) where does one get incense smelling like burning tantal?
When I was but a lad of 15 or so, I built an AC adapter consisting of a diode bridge, a big electrolytic capacitor, and an AC line cord.
The diode bridge was soldered directly to the capacitor terminals, and the line cord directly to the bridge. No case, power switch, or PCB. Or insulation, for that matter.
And the diodes were all backward.
When I plugged it in, the capacitor began to howl and emit a foul odor, and waved around in the air at the end of the line cord.

Have a real Burst and smoking capacitor, get it outside. then dispose of it safely.
And yes it happens, they can sometimes violently explode, older capacitors may contain PCB,s that is not a joke.
I think this is well worth reading. I've been a bit frustrated by some over-confident claims that data centres in space are literally impossible due to the cooling issues alone, and other claims that those issues are fairly minor. I am nowhere near close to being familiar with all the real-world engineering nitty gritty; I understand a fair bit of thermodynamics, but that is not enough to really settle things. FWIW, the arguments here seem well grounded in physics and the technological/economic/legal issues raised strike me as plausible.
robtow.substack.com/p/spacex-i…
Rob Tow · Nova Lux, New Mexico, USA, Sol III · 17 June 2026Rob Tow
Supposing it's physically possible, what reasons are there to want to? I have yet to see a single one mentioned anywhere.
Downsides are plentiful:
- Cooling is challenging.
- Servicing is impossible.
- Communication is slow.
- Construction is expensive.
What could possibly outweigh all that?
Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. Außerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.Scott Manley (YouTube)
Can we make the radiators much smaller by running them, say, twice as hot, and actively pumping heat from the electronics into these hotter surfaces?
Yes, of course we can, the laws of thermodynamics are fine with that. However ...
I always feel like the obvious "solution" for radiators for solar-powered things in space is the opposite side of the solar panel. If we assume the solar panel is black, that has to shed 685 W/m2 (since we radiate heat from the front and back faces), equivalent to a temperature of ~330 K, which electronics are perfectly fine running at.
Of course in reality the solar panels will not be perfectly black, neither in shortwave nor in longwave radiation, but the back side should still be able to radiate the solar panel+electronics (and with a modest heat pump, also life support on crewed spacecraft) waste heat without needing too high a temperature.
You still pay the mass penalty for heat pipes of course, but you avoid increasing the area exposed to drag and debris.
fwiw my take, with a rusty aerospace degree, is that the obvious technical issues ARE surmountable but still immense burdens, making these things obviously much worse than terrestrial data centers.
The only thing that makes sense to me is that these people intend to test the laws around orbital offshoring, which on a surface read would seem to indicate the laws of the launching country would apply, but "so enforce it then" will be the real test.
some interesting points there, but three things stood out to me about his cost calculations:
- He assumes launch costs of $1500/kg, the same as today; this basically assumes Starship completely fails to achieve its goals. He justifies this by talking about how much effort was required to refurbish the Shuttle between flights; but Starship has been designed from the ground up to avoid the Shuttle's problems (complex engines that had to be stripped down, every tile having a unique shape, boosters landing in salt water).
- He assumes each satellite must be deorbited once it's no longer at the hardware frontier. I see no reason it can't be demoted to less demanding uses, as we do on Earth.
- He assumes that satellite construction costs stay the same. I'd expect at least some cost reduction from building a million of the things!
All of these are defensible as conservative planning assumptions, but he presents them as realistic.

400+ Arch User Repository packages have been compromised in a massive, sophisticated supply chain attack, including a rootkit installation.
discourse.ifin.network/t/400-a…
#ThreatIntel #ThreatIntelligence #IFIN
Last Updated: 2026-06-12T04:22:42Z (UTC) What’s Happening It appears a new AUR package maintainer (arojas) adopted and infected 408+ packages. The compromise was reported and other AUR maintainers have been working to remove the infected packages.IFIN
From the WTAF dept:
Malware developers are now adding text about nuclear and biological weapons to their spyware to evade AI-based security scanners.
tl;dr: The inclusion of content that LLMs are trained to refuse -- such as information about nukes and bioweapons -- can effectively prevent the LLM from continuing to analyze the threat.
"This header appears designed for AI-mediated analysis, not for Node, Bun, or Python. It attempts to derail scanners or analyst copilots that feed the beginning of a file to a language model without clearly isolating the content as untrusted data. In weak pipelines, this can cause refusal behavior, prompt confusion, context pollution, or premature classification before the scanner reaches the actual malware."
socket.dev/blog/mini-shai-hulu…
IDK why, but this reminds me of the Calvin & Hobbes cartoon where Calvin asks his mom for stuff she will never give him in a million years, and then he just asks for a cookie.
Newer packages in this compromise use native extensions and .pth loaders to execute JavaScript stealers in developer environments.Kirill Boychenko (Socket)
View on Zencastr On Episode 155 of the Silver Bullet Security Podcast, BIML's Gary McGraw hosts Giovanni Vigna. GiBerryville Institute of Machine Learning
sending a deepfake of a nuclear weapon with giant boobs to the car dealership chatbot to negotiate my next vehicle purchase.
edit: posted this after reading cbc.ca/news/business/ai-chatbo…
Salad dog hopes you're all keeping cool and hydrated!
#dog #dogs #dogsofmastodon #humor #humour
It looks like Microsoft's DevOps libraries for Azure Functions might have been compromised. No statement yet but Github is nuking Microsoft's own repos.
opensourcemalware.com/blog/mia…
GitHub disabled 73 Microsoft repositories across four of its GitHub organizations — the entire Azure Functions org, the whole Durable Task family, and a row of AI sample apps — in a 105-second sweep on June 5.opensourcemalware.com
A botched tumbler promotion on the anniversary of a pro-democracy massacre unleashed a boycott, police investigation and political firestormRaphael Rashid (the Guardian)
Just turned in final revisions on "AND LOKI IN HIS PRISON"
It's going to exist at last, everyone!!! ❤️🔥
Big, deeply-built, intricate Norse myth fantasy.
Book 1 of "HANGED GOD'S GAME"
Coming from Tor Books Summer 2027
Microsoft reports AI is more expensive than paying human employees
Link: fortune.com/2026/05/22/microso…
Discussion: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4…
Companies are racing to incentivize employees to use AI. But as some companies are finding, the more employees that use the technology, the heavier the bill.Jake Angelo (Fortune)
Microsoft tells lies so don't listen to those fucked clowns when they talk.
I am a person who tells the truth to the best of my ability, in good faith, largely for the benefit of the systems of life of which we are all part. I know, and am telling you now, that AI costs way more than paying employees to do work.
some credible evidence from MIT. mlq.ai/media/quarterly_decks/v…
Step 1: techcrunch.com/2026/05/19/goog…
Step 2:
Google is transforming Search from a list of links into an AI-powered experience filled with conversational answers, autonomous agents, and interactive interfaces — a shift that could further reduce traffic to publishers across the web.Sarah Perez (TechCrunch)

Today someone (who is not on Mastodon) released a collection of more than 570 distinct operating systems, pre-installed with VM configurations for the 250+ different platforms, going back all the way to 1948.
Now, I have to admit I'm posting this without trying it myself, as I'm running low on disk space on this machine.
Because the full download is 121GB (174GB unzipped!). There is also a lighter version at 14GB that will download stuff on demand.
Over 1,700 pre-installed operating systems spanning 1948 to today, in a single Linux VM. Bundled QEMU, VirtualBox, and UTM. One-click launchers for Windows and Linux.Andrew Warkentin (The Virtual OS Museum)
From Tom Scott's newsletter this week, Details of the Medical Airdrop at Tristan da Cunha.
tristandc.com/government/news-…
Fascinated by this, because several of my colleagues have worked either on Tristan or nearby, and therefore visited, so it doesn't feel quite as remote and unheard of as it probably does to most people!
More details and pictures have come in of the intrepid airdrop of urgent medical support sent to Tristan by the UK Government on the 9th May 2026.www.tristandc.com
Il Corriere delle Sera pensa che la canzone che gli inglesi hanno portato a EuroVision sia a favore della Brexit.
Un estratto del testo della canzone:
Countin' in English doesn't cut the mustard
So sick of munching roly-poly with custard
I'm so bored with it, bored with it
Oh, what's the point of it, point of it? (Oh, ja, ja, ja)
I've always been a fan of aviation
I'm jumpin' on a plane to another nation
And all my pounds, they feel counterfeit
I need some euros to counter it
Cioè uno che canta che vuole lasciare l'Inghilterra e trasferirsi in Europa e convertire le sterline in euro, sarebbe a favore della Brexit. Complimenti al giornalista.
LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER
for your reference: youtube.com/watch?v=GYLBjScgb7…
Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. Außerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER (YouTube)
I was only made aware of this (frankly awesome) case of LLM poisoning today: nature.com/articles/d41586-026…. A researcher made up a disease and published two evidently fake preprints about it (including sentences such as “this entire paper is made up” and “Fifty made-up individuals aged between 20 and 50 years were recruited for the exposure group”), which were almost immediately picked up by LLMs and documented in their output. Worse, actual – supposedly serious – medical papers also started citing the preprints, demonstrating that academics relying on LLMs to do their work is a genuine problem! Not that I had my doubts but, if anyone did, this seems like the perfect demonstration of the problem. Article immediately added to the syllabus of the class I am co-teaching with Iris Ferrazzo on LLMs for Romance Studies/Humanities!
#LLM #GenAI #academia #research #ResearchIntegrity #humanities
Bixonimania doesn’t exist except in a clutch of obviously bogus academic papers. So why did AI chatbots warn people about this fictional illness?Stokel-Walker, Chris
Chris Morris would be proud:
a Google spokesperson said such results reflected the performance of an earlier model. They added, “We have always been transparent about the limitations of generative AI and provide in-app prompts to encourage users to double-check information. For sensitive matters such as medical advice, Gemini recommends users consult with qualified professionals.”
that would mostly work well if they released 'AI overview' as an opt-in feature instead of forcing it on users who have some trust in Google built over the past decades and don't expect it to suddenly start making stuff up lol
@mkljczk
Good point.
Google, if Gemini is as useful as you hope it will be, it is inevitable that it will just come to be known as "Google" and AI answers to direct questions is just a feature of Google search.
Google, if Gemini is unreliable and can not be reliable, why are you letting it tarnish your brand?
The obvious end goal of AI is centralized control of information that can be used to bend public opinion, win elections for pedophiles, criminals and set trends.
This is a rerun of the Sokal Hoax.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_af…
Like some here, some folks thought the Sokal hoax was ethically problematic, but the postmodernists needed a wake up call, as do the LLM fans.
Really: the LLM idea is the stupidest* thing to come out of Computer Science ever. We need to be embarrassed.
*: Unnecessary explanation: the idea that random text generation has something to do with intelligence is really really stupid.
I'm convinced one of the main reasons we die is that we get too old or too sick to manage our own healthcare. We can't do the research to find the right studies, we can't read or understand those studies, and we can't question our providers to be sure they actually understand what's wrong with us.
Once we are dependent on mere employees, the quality of care goes way down, and mistakes get made, or our treatment is just ineffective.
as a scientist, you are surely aware of bias
such as the bias on social media, where if AI does something bad, it gets widely disseminated (goes viral)
whereas if AI does something good, no one talks about it
also,
PSA
when I was a baby PhD student in 1985, my teachers warned me over and over, don't trust something just cause it is published in a peer reviewed journal
be careful of all that you read !!!!!
You might enjoy my recent experience with raclette maximalism.
It seems like the real underlying problem is the "publish or perish" syndrome, where the value of a researcher is based on how many papers they write, or how often they're reference.
So there's a proliferation of papers, many of which are meaningless, and which no one has time to actually read, being referenced in other papers by other researchers who don't have time to read and evaluate all these other papers.
Ecco qua. Il nuovo videoregistratore ripieno di cipolle e salvia da cinque chili pronto per il forno!
The Bogie Man - John Wagner e Alan Grant
What a time to be alive:
"For gaming, Microsoft views steamOS as the benchmark, and is working to optimize the platform so that steamOS and Windows gaming performance are comparable."
So they're trying to make Windows beat Linux at running... Windows games.
Unveiling Fritz Zwicky: The Hidden Genius of Astronomy
global-geneva.com/development/…
<- discoverer of neutron stars and dark matter, & coiner of the term "spherical bastard" – one who remains a bastard viewed from whatever angle.
Discover the extraordinary life of Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky and his groundbreaking contributions to astrophysics.www.global-geneva.com
Updated to Fedora 44, and discovered pretty quickly that middle click is disabled. 🤮
Not a big fan of Jordan Petridis right now. The attitude in his pull request was not awesome. Next I expect GNOME will remove the ability entirely with the excuse that "nobody uses it" since that was also used as part of the excuse for disabling it by default, calling all of us who use it a "nobody" which is kind of disrespectful.
They didn't even add it to settings. The repair is not particularly discoverable.
For everyone else caught by this mess, the incantation is:
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-enable-primary-paste true
@Enrico Zini @Michael K Johnson ehi! apparently the fediverse is full of nobodies!
(+1, but I don't use gnome, so maybe it's less relevant)
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Brilliant!!!
At our Civil Partnership in 2005 we had Janis Ian's "No One Else Like You" (youtube.com/watch?v=R6BO84mdUL…) playing for the signing of the register.
When we celebrated our 20th anniversary in 2025, I was creating a playlist and naturally we wanted this song.
I'd forgotten that Janis Ian made a parody of this song, "No One Else Likes You" (youtube.com/watch?v=KwQEd26WSx…), and I'd added this version to the playlist in error!
...you're such a moron..." doesn't create the right vibe🤦
Janis Ian - No One Else Like You - From the album Revenge
Janis Ian (YouTube)Slo-mo Dove got me every time...