social.gl-como.it
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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.
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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
Of the Club Of Rome Quartet, Shockwave Rider turned out to be the most prescient. The details don't match but the shape is eerily accurate.
I think I would have preferred The Sheep Look Up.
@sushee
It's a fantastic book.
I read the quartet multiple times, just to remind myself how it's done.
@mwl I always felt that Stand on Zanzibar was the most accurate. We have pretty much all the horrible shit, collapsing non-billionaire economy, systems are too complex to disentangle and fix even one.
Shockwave Rider is much too optimistic to be real.
@mdhughes
All four have truth. I mean, the only thing wrong with Jagged Orbit is that it's in orbit.
The truth is, we're living through all four simultaneously. I simply live more in Shockwave Rider than the others.
you can take a walk with a friend, as a treat
I have very conflicting feelings about this :D
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
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
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
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.