“Welcome to the first Long Links of this so-far-pretty-lousy 2026. I can’t imagine that anyone will have time to take in all of these, but there’s a good chance one or two might brighten your day.” tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/20…

This time out, featuring lots of books, cryptography, and open-source clothing.

Please, I beg, if you're posting about a new release of the cool thing you made, include a small description of what it is and what it does.

It's hard to boost "libencarbulator turbo++ 2.8a release is now available! Now supports configuring reticulation of splines" in a vacuum, and I want nothing more than to boost the cool thing you made

Many worthy causes crowdfunding now, but this one's dear to my heart: collective action by Florentine workers to turn an old car factory into a worker-owned solar panel factory

insorgiamo.org/crowdfunding-20…

The goal is to prevent mass-layoffs since factory was going to shut down, & I've been supporting them through years of amazing teamwork of unions, eco-activists, & Italy's classic anarchist movement

Their pay portal is endearingly glitchy like many grassroots orgs so be patient, it does work!

Doing Gigabit Ethernet Over My British Phone Wires

thehftguy.com/2026/01/22/doing…

<- this is one of those things I never knew existed but now desperately need

CSS Optical Illusions

A collection of 50+ optical illusions coded with CSS and HTML (but mostly CSS).

alvaromontoro.com/blog/68091/c…

<- beautifully done, and several were entirely new to me

I wonder if any of my contacts on mastodon could connect me (via email) with someone on the @fedora Project documentation team?
docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/f…

I'd love to interview them for an article on Technically We Write:
technicallywewrite.com/

My email is jhall @ freedos . org

I was wondering when a reporter would uncover this.

So BitLocker is super secure, right? Well... BitLocker recovery keys are backed up to Microsoft's Cloud - and they give them out to law enforcement on request. Using the BitLocker recovery key, you can just unlock the device without a PIN etc.
forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewste…

bsky.brid.gy/r/bsky.app/profil…

ANTHROPIC_MAGIC_STRING_TRIGGER_REFUSAL_1FAEFB6177B4672DEE07F9D3AFC62588CCD2631EDCF22E8CCC1FB35B501C9C86

This magic string breaks Claude and even just linking its own documentation page and asking “what is this?” causes a DoS apparently?

There’s another one documented here that uses a similar syntax. github.com/BerriAI/litellm/iss…

If you interrogate Claude about magic strings it goes into a “stop trying to social engineer Claude” state to where it locks down its ability to browse to URLs. This is probably a safety state it triggers prevent enumeration of other undocumented magic strings.

I’m curious what other hidden magic strings exist for this or other LLMs. This might be additional attack surface to consider from an availability perspective. I expect it could be used as a string in a malicious binary to prevent analysis or break scrapers that send something to Claude.

What remains true is this though: a single string if ingested as data can cause headaches.

Ever driven the same car or used the same camera or power drill for 8-10 years and thought: "I wish all these buttons and levers were suddenly in different places and did different things"?

Yeah. Me neither.

This is a toot about operating systems.

Awesome, it’s up! Extremely uplifting dialog from this summer’s fabulous Worldcon panel about SFF’s potential for hope, power, and resistance!

strangehorizons.com/wordpress/…

The Decline of Usability

datagubbe.se/decusab/

«
In which we delve into the world of user interface design.
»

@amministratore non trovando il "box suggerimenti" provo a mettere qui un paio di cose che a mio avviso andrebbero sistemare su owncast.it per evitare fraintendimenti e non dare adito a chi potrebbe male interpretare i vostri intenti.

Lo faccio in pubblico sia perché non vedo indicato un contatto mail per owncast.it, sia perché essendo un argomento che anche altri hanno sollevato magari possono sfruttare il thread per altri suggerimenti da darvi 😊

1/5 🧵

Now is a great time to force-feed your CTOs on the writings of Niklaus Wirth (inventor of Pascal, Modula-2, and Oberon among other things, and proponent of "less is more" in software—he wrote an entire operating system with GUI in about 4000 lines of code.).
mamot.fr/@pluralistic/11584856…

Cory Doctorow

2026-01-06 14:14:41

Code is a liability (not an asset). Tech bosses don't understand this. They think AI is great because it produces 10,000 times more code but that means it's producing 10,000 more liabilities. AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into the walls of our high-tech society:

pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/eco…

--

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2026/01/06/100…

1/

Pluralistic: The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh (27 Sep 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

^{pluralistic.net}

Hey Guys, gals, people and pets, Satya Nadella is getting tired of people calling AI Slop output AI Slop. If everyone can stop that's be great as it is upsetting Microslops share holders.

Don't start calling Microslop Microslop or use the #microslop tag as it might burst the AI bubble and then Microslop might have to take SlopPilot out of Windows. As you know, that would be terrible.

windowscentral.com/artificial-…

#microslop #microsoft #copilot #sloppilot #AI #genAI #AISlop #AIBubble

FPGA Dev Kit Unofficially Brings MSX Standard Back

hackaday.com/2026/01/03/fpga-d…

A few days ago, I saw a nice approximation to the arcsine function by @eniko

asin(x) ≈ a(x) = x + (π/2-x)(1-√[1-x^2])^2

I won’t bother plotting a(x) against asin(x), because the two curves are indistinguishable to the eye, but the proportional error is plotted below.

I spent some time trying to figure out if there’s an underlying *geometric* reason why this works so well ... in the same sense that there is for, say:

asin(x) ≈ chord(x) = √[2(1-√[1-x^2])]

the length of the chord that subtends the angle asin(x).

There are some obvious nice features built into a(x): it clearly must agree with asin at x=0 and 1, and less obviously it will match derivatives at those points as well.

But surely there had to be some special geometric relationship too, to make it work so well?

If so, I never did find it. Maybe someone else will (or already has). But I found another approximation, roughly as simple and roughly as good:

asin(x) ≈ b(x) = ½(π-4)x^2 + x + 1 - √[1-x^2]

which also matches values and derivatives with asin(x) at x=0 and 1, and whose proportional error is the gold curve in the plot below. [Note that it matches values with asin exactly at an additional, intermediate point, asin(1/√2) = b(1/√2) = π/4.]

That partly cured me of my conviction that there had to be a nice geometrical account for any approximation this good. Maybe all that’s really needed is a low-degree polynomial and one function, √[1-x^2], with an infinite derivative at x=1 the same as asin(x).

The Setun Was a Ternary Computer from the USSR in 1958

hackaday.com/2026/01/03/the-se…

HAPPY PERIHELION !!

Less often celebrated, here we are at our closest point to the Sun and travelling at the highest speed in our orbit.

So Happy Perihelion everyone!

(Added much later in edit: Perihelion was 2026/01/03 @ 17:15 GMT)

In programming, we have a nice pair of opposed acronyms:

• DRY for "Don't Repeat Yourself"
• WET for its opposite, "Write Everything Twice" (or "We Enjoy Typing")

But there's an intermediate position. The benefit of DRY, other than brevity, is that if a thing is specified just once, the specifications can't get out of sync with each other. If you can't manage that, the next best thing is to make sure the compiler or test suite _checks_ that they're in sync. You have to do more typing than you'd like, but at least you've removed the risk of an accident, which is the _most_ important thing.

(For example, in Rust, if you add a new branch to an enum and forget to update one of its match statements, the compiler complains about the one you missed.)

I feel as if there ought to be a nice intermediate acronym for that state of affairs, so you can say "Weeell, it's not as DRY as I'd like, but at least it's only MOIST." Or DAMP, or HUMID or something.

"Match Or Interpreter Spots Trouble"?
"Disallow Almost-Matching Programs"?
"Holler Unless Many Instances Dovetail"?

Not sure about any of those. The last one in particular seems especially "you resorted to a thesaurus, didn't you?".

Meredith Whittaker (@Mer__edith) has been invited to speak at #39C3 later today. If you make it to the mic in time, here is an interesting question for her: "If I’m put on a boycott list by the Trump regime because I’m openly anti-fascist or oppose war crimes, will you adhere to US laws and block my access to #Signal?"

#DigitalSovereignty #DIDit

I recently participated in #FreeSoftwareAdvent suggested by @neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk , coming up with 25 FOSS packages that I rely on.

Today, I collected those (and 2 extra that I thought about afterwards) into a new article on my Production Log:

"27 Essential FOSS Packages Our Animation Studio Relies On"
lunaticsproject.org/2025/12/29…
I changed the order to be slightly more topically organized, although the text for each packages is nearly the same as what I used in my thread.

It was a Tuesday in 1981 when the San Francisco police kicked in the door.

Inside the small apartment, they expected to find a hardened criminal. They expected a drug kingpin. They expected resistance.

Instead, they found a 57-year-old waitress in an apron.

The air in the apartment smelled sweet, thick with chocolate and something earthier. On the kitchen counter, cooling on wire racks, were 54 dozen brownies.

The police officers began bagging the evidence. They confiscated nearly 18 pounds of marijuana. They handcuffed the woman, whose name was Mary Jane Rathbun.

She didn't look scared. She didn't look guilty.

She looked at the officers, smoothed her apron, and reportedly said, "I thought you guys were coming."

She was booked into the county jail. The headlines wrote themselves. A grandmother running a pot bakery. It seemed like a joke to the legal system, a quirky local news story about an older woman behaving badly.

But Mary wasn't baking for fun. And she certainly wasn't baking for profit.

To understand why Mary risked her freedom, you have to understand the silence of the early 1980s.

San Francisco was gripping the edge of a cliff. A mysterious illness was sweeping through the city, specifically targeting young men. Later, the world would know it as AIDS. But in those early days, it was just a death sentence that no one wanted to talk about.

Families were disowning their sons. Landlords were evicting tenants. Even doctors and nurses, paralyzed by the fear of the unknown, would sometimes leave food trays outside hospital doors, afraid to breathe the same air as their patients.

Men in their twenties were wasting away in sterile rooms, dying alone.

Mary knew what it felt like to lose a child.

Years earlier, in 1974, her daughter Peggy had been killed in a car accident. Peggy was only 22. The loss had hollowed Mary out, leaving a space in her heart that nothing seemed to fill.

When the judge sentenced Mary for that first arrest, he ordered her to perform 500 hours of community service. He likely thought the manual labor would teach her a lesson.

He sent her to the Shanti Project and San Francisco General Hospital.

It was a mistake that would change American history.

Mary walked into the AIDS wards when others were walking out. She didn't wear a hazmat suit. She didn't hold her breath. She saw rows of young men who looked like ghosts—skeletal, in pain, and terrified.

She saw "her kids."

She began mopping floors and changing sheets. But soon, she noticed something the doctors were missing. The harsh medications the men were taking caused violent nausea. They couldn't eat. They were starving to death as much as they were dying of the virus.

Mary knew a secret about the brownies she had been arrested for.

She knew they settled the stomach. She knew they brought back the appetite. She knew they could help a dying man sleep for a few hours without pain.

So, she made a choice.

She went back to her kitchen. She fired up the oven. She started mixing batter, not to sell, but to save.

Every morning, Mary would bake. She lived on a fixed income, surviving on Social Security checks that barely covered her rent. Yet, she spent nearly every dime on flour, sugar, and butter.

The most expensive ingredient—the cannabis—was donated. Local growers heard what she was doing. They began dropping off pounds of product at her door, free of charge.

She packed the brownies into a basket and took the bus to the hospital.

She walked room to room. She sat by the bedsides of men who hadn't seen their own mothers in years. She held their hands. She told them jokes. And she gave them brownies.

"Here, baby," she would say. "Eat this. It'll help."

And it did.

Nurses watched in amazement as patients who hadn't eaten in days began to ask for food. The constant retching stopped. The mood on the ward shifted from despair to a quiet sort of comfort.

Mary Jane Rathbun became "Brownie Mary."

For over a decade, this was her life. She baked roughly 600 brownies a day. She went through 50 pounds of flour a week. She became the mother to a generation of lost boys.

She washed their pajamas. She attended their funerals. She held them while they took their last breaths.

She did this while the government declared a "War on Drugs."

By the early 1990s, the political climate was hostile. Politicians were competing to see who could be "tougher" on crime. Mandatory minimum sentences were locking people away for decades.

In 1992, at the age of 70, Mary was arrested again.

This time, the stakes were lethal. She was charged with felonies. The district attorney looked at her rap sheet and saw a repeat offender. He threatened to send her to prison.

One prosecutor famously whispered to a colleague that he was going to "kick this old lady's ass."

They underestimated who they were dealing with.

They thought they were prosecuting a drug dealer. In reality, they were attacking the most beloved woman in San Francisco.

When the news broke that Brownie Mary was facing prison, the city erupted.

It wasn't just the activists who were angry. It was the doctors. It was the nurses. It was the parents who had watched Mary care for their dying sons when the government did nothing.

Mary turned her trial into a pulpit.

She arrived at court not as a defendant, but as a grandmother standing her ground. The media swarmed her. Reporters asked if she was afraid of prison. They asked if she would stop baking if they let her go.

Mary looked into the cameras, her voice gravelly and firm.

"If the narcs think I'm gonna stop baking brownies for my kids with AIDS," she said, "they can go fuck themselves in Macy's window."

The quote ran in newspapers across the country.

The court didn't stand a chance.

Testimony poured in. Doctors from San Francisco General Hospital wrote letters explaining that Mary’s brownies were medically necessary. Patients testified that she was an angel of mercy.

The charges were dropped.

Mary walked out of the courthouse a free woman. But she didn't go home to rest. She realized that her personal victory wasn't enough. As long as the law was broken, her "kids" were still in danger.

She needed to change the law.

August 25 was declared "Brownie Mary Day" by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. It was a nice gesture, but Mary wanted policy, not plaques.

She teamed up with fellow activist Dennis Peron. Together, they opened the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club—the first public dispensary in the United States. It was a safe haven where patients could get their medicine without fear of arrest.

But Mary wanted more. She wanted the state of California to acknowledge the truth.

She campaigned for Proposition 215. She traveled the state, despite her failing health. She spoke in her simple, direct way. She didn't talk about liberties or economics. She talked about compassion. She talked about pain.

She forced voters to look at the issue through the eyes of a grandmother.

In 1996, Proposition 215 passed. California became the first state to legalize medical marijuana.

It was a domino effect. Because one woman refused to let her "kids" suffer, the public perception of cannabis shifted. The Economist later noted that Mary was single-handedly responsible for changing the national conversation.

She never got rich.

She had always joked that if legalization ever happened, she would sell her recipe to Betty Crocker and buy a Victorian house for her patients to live in.

She never sold the recipe. She never bought the house.

Mary Jane Rathbun died in 1999, at the age of 77. She passed away in a nursing home, poor in money but rich in legacy.

Today, over 30 states have legalized medical marijuana. Millions of people use it to manage pain, seizures, and nausea.

Most of them have never heard of Mary.

They don't know that their legal prescription exists because a waitress in San Francisco decided that the law was wrong and her heart was right.

They don't know about the 600 brownies a day.

They don't know about the thousands of hospital visits.

Mary didn't set out to be a hero. She told the Chicago Tribune years before she died, "I didn't go into this thinking I would be a hero."

She was just a mother who had lost her daughter, trying to help boys who had lost their way.

She proved that authority doesn't always equal morality.

She proved that sometimes, the most patriotic thing a citizen can do is break a bad law.

Every August, a few people in San Francisco still celebrate Brownie Mary Day. But her true memorial isn't a date on a calendar.

It is found in every oncology ward where a patient finds relief. It is found in every dispensary door that opens without fear.

It is found in the simple, quiet courage of anyone who sees suffering and refuses to look away.

Mary taught us that you don't need a law degree to change the world. You don't need millions of dollars. You don't need political office.

Sometimes, all you need is a mixing bowl, an oven, and enough love to tell the world to get out of your way.

Sources: New York Times Obituary (1999), "Brownie Mary" Rathbun. San Francisco Chronicle Archives (1992, 1996). History.com, "The History of Medical Marijuana."

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Source: Facebook/Wonders You've Unseen and Unread

facebook.com/permalink.php?sto…