FALSO

La Cassazione ha ammesso la richiesta di referendum da parte del Comitato che a gennaio ha raggiunto le firme necessarie e formulato il nuovo quesito (che si differenzia dal precedente solo perché indica le disposizioni costituzionali).

Ciò avrebbe eventualmente richiesto che si spostasse la data del referendum di due o tre settimane. Invece il Governo ha confermato la data già fissata.

Nessuno voleva boicottare nulla. Queste continue fake news si ritorceranno contro chi ne sta abusando

TIL that SSDs can lose data if left unplugged for long periods of time (only required to hold data up to 1 year), unlike HDDs which as long as the material holds it can take years.

Edit: added link: slashgear.com/1893447/dont-lea…

“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