social.gl-como.it
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
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)
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
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)
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
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)
Martedì sera, alle 18:30, vi presentiamo qualcosa di davvero speciale.
Sarà con noi, di persona, il presidente dell'Associazione #MSX Italia: giocheremo insieme a Chrono Runner, il nuovo gioco per MSX sviluppato dall'Associazione.
Naturalmente, lo intervisteremo e ci faremo raccontare la storia dell'associazione e lo sviluppo di Chrono Runner (msxdev.org/2026/03/14/msxdev25…)
Non mancate: sarà un concentrato di passione, curiosità e #retrogame
Consider the following: rust rewrites of projects like coreutils exist purely to remove copyleft licensing. The supposed security and performance gains are irrelevant, and while memory safety is important, logic bugs don’t suddenly cease to exist just because it was written in Rust.
phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Rust-…
Ahead of tomorrow's Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release, Canonical published a blog post today outlining the state of Rust Coreutils for its premiere in this long-term support (LTS) versionwww.phoronix.com
`curl > /dev/sda` – How I made a Linux distro that runs `wget | dd`
astrid.tech/2026/03/24/0/curl-…
This is part 0 of a four-part series about doing weird things in early Linux boot.
<-
1. brilliant & inspired
2. scary
3. initramfs is _way_ too complicated & we should eliminate it
@anparker Exactly!
It's a fascinating series of blog posts though.
It starts with an obviously bad idea and develops it into an amazingly educational detective procedure... Which never even bothers to visit the "why is this a bad idea?" question, because we know that. We don't need that.
Instead it asks why it can work, and how it can work, and what you have to do to make it work.
Timezone rage finally got the best of me.
Coordinating meetings across time zones isn't something my brain is great at. A million sites already do this, but most are ugly, ad-ridden, or want you to sign up.
So I built *timething*:
• No ads, no accounts, no tracking
• Per-zone working hours
• Shareable links — generate, send, done
• Beautiful landscape printouts (with a "valid until" warning, because DST sucks)
• Mobile-friendly, because I don't only get confused about time at my desk
Hope it makes you a little less angry about timezones.
#timezone #DST #webdev #indiedev #productivity
A clean time zone comparison dashboard for finding meeting times across the globe.timething.app
Attn: DOS PC users using EtherSlip for networking:
I have a new version of EtherSlip available that fixes two bugs:
* The incorrect MAC address was being set in the simulated Ethernet header. This broke mTCP NetDrive and possibly other programs.
* The code in EtherSlip that simulates ARP responses has a pointer bug in it. This can cause data corruption or crash your program any time it tries to send an ARP request.
A fixed version can be found at brutman.com/Device_Drivers/pac… .
Also, please boost the original post ... this is something I want to spread the word about given the possibility of crashes.
If you've ever been frustrated by old DOS code randomly crashing before, well, this is one of those bugs that causes that. I'm on a mission to make DOS as stable as possible, one ancient bug fix at a time. ;-0
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?
Is It Really Impossible To Cool A Datacenter In Space?
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.