Perfection
https://thehardtimes.net/blog/...of-a-known-rapist-and-pedophile/
Entry: 2026-02-11 20:09:16.440939+01 Claude DXT's 'container' isn't by Dan Lyke comments 0
We should not have to keep pointing this out, but... T he Register: AI connector for Google Calendar makes convenient malware launchpad, researchers show
Our recommendation is straightforward:
Until meaningful safeguards are introduced, MCP connectors should not be used on systems where security matters.
Via.
[ related topics: Weblogs Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2026-02-09 23:19:02.284442+01 half-life of a zombie citation by Dan Lyke comments 0
This is fascinating: Tracing the social half-life of a zombie citation. In which the author starts working backwards from a reference to an academic paper with his name on it that he had not written, and looks at how references to that paper have evolved, with various different subtitles.
Finally, is AI really to blame here? When I first posted about my experience with the zombie citation, the library scientist Aaron Tay took it upon himself to do a little investigation which he wrote up as an in-depth blog post. He refers to these as “ghost references” and rightly points out that this problem pre-dates generative AI. In fact, he pointed out that at least a couple of the ghost citations of “Education governance and datafication” pre-dated the launch of ChatGPT and mainstream uptake of generative AI. Most likely, Tay suggested, the reference to this work was first generated through simple human error or malpractice. It’s really impossible to know.
[ related topics: Language Books Weblogs Space & Astronomy Work, productivity and environment Education Artificial Intelligence Archival ]
Entry: 2026-02-08 04:45:03.144499+01 Perfection https by Dan Lyke comments 0
Perfection
https://thehardtimes.net/blog/...of-a-known-rapist-and-pedophile/
[ related topics: Photography Sexual Culture Weblogs Marketing ]
Entry: 2026-02-04 22:32:30.673846+01 EVs reducing NO2 by Dan Lyke comments 1
We still need to cut down dramatically on cars, generally, but EVs are measurably reducing NO2 emissions in California:
Auto Blog: EV Growth Is Already Cutting Neighborhood Air Pollution Across California
[ related topics: Weblogs Health Current Events California Culture ]
Entry: 2026-02-03 23:21:46.789854+01 Noting the impacts of slop by Dan Lyke comments 0
Red Monk: AI Slopageddon and the OSS Maintainers
AI slop is ripping up the social contract between maintainers and contributors essential to open source development. Practitioners have been repeatedly assured that AI would supercharge their communities, but so far that hasn’t been the case. Just look at what happened last month. Mitchell Hashimoto’s Ghostty implemented a zero-tolerance policy where submitting bad AI-generated code gets you permanently banned. Steve Ruiz, Founder of tldraw, announced he would auto-close all external pull requests. Meanwhile cURL, the humble command-line tool that quietly powers approximately everything on the internet, just shut down its bug bounty program. After six years and $86,000 in payouts, Daniel Stenberg, founder and lead developer of cURL, pulled the plug. The reason? An AI onslop (pun fully intended).
The AI Dirty List — Ensuring those who choose to bathe in AI slop will never be washed clean.
[ related topics: Free Software Weblogs Software Engineering Law Net Culture Community Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2026-02-02 20:24:34.007027+01 OpenClaw still a bad idea by Dan Lyke comments 0
I was gonna tag this on the previous post about ClawdBot/MoltBot/OpenClaw, but, no, these exploits are new: Malicious MoltBot skills used to push password-stealing malware.
A report from community security portal OpenSourceMalware says that an ongoing large-scale campaign is using skills to spread info-stealing malware to OpenClaw users.
[ related topics: Weblogs Invention and Design Current Events Community Cryptography Archival ]
Entry: 2026-02-02 17:52:01.547779+01 Data Centers in Space by Dan Lyke comments 2
From back in December, but apropos because of Elon Musk's "data centers in spaaaace..." pump-n-dump: Matthew R. Buckley, aka "Physics Matt": The Dumbest Thing I’ve Seen This Week:
To be blunt, the entire stupid idea is a giant middle finger to multiple fundamentals of physics, and the fact that it is apparently being taken seriously by our tech lords, mainstream journalism, and political leaders is a damning indictment of not just the ridiculous amount of money chasing bad ideas in the tech/LLM/hype sector that has eaten the American economy, political power centers, and people who really should know better, but yet another demonstration of how people who built their economic empire on a claim of STEM-based rigor and quantitative genius either can’t do basic physics or know that no one out there who matters is going to call them on it.
Although, frankly, dropping a bunch of GPUs into a decaying low earth orbit is a way to point out how rapidly these things depreciate.
[ related topics: Politics Weblogs History moron Space & Astronomy Journalism and Media Currency Artificial Intelligence Economics Global Warming hubris ]
Entry: 2026-01-31 16:51:19.95585+01 ChatGPT user lacks self-awareness by Dan Lyke comments 0
I am not one generally to watch a 27 minute video of someone talking about a Nature blog post, but this roast of a dude who became ChatGPT dependent is giving me all the schadenfreude warm fuzzies.
Angela Collier: this is what 2 years of chatgpt does to your brain (YouTube video)
The massive self-own is Nature: When two years of academic work vanished with a single click
After turning off ChatGPT’s ‘data consent’ option, Marcel Bucher lost the work behind grant applications, teaching materials and publication drafts. Here’s what happened next.
https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-04064-7
[ related topics: Weblogs Movies Nature and environment Video ]
Entry: 2026-01-30 20:25:04.441148+01 The rise of Whatever by Dan Lyke comments 0
Too much good stuff to find an appropriate pull paragraph: Eevee: The rise of Whatever
[ related topics: Weblogs ]
Entry: 2026-01-30 20:14:49.437423+01 The sources don't actually say that by Dan Lyke comments 0
The machines are getting better at lying: Wiki Education: Generative AI and Wikipedia editing: What we learned in 2025
Far more insidious, however, was something else we discovered: More than two-thirds of these articles failed verification. That means the article contained a plausible-sounding sentence, cited to a real, relevant-sounding source. But when you read the source it’s cited to, the information on Wikipedia does not exist in that specific source. When a claim fails verification, it’s impossible to tell whether the information is true or not. For most of the articles Pangram flagged as written by GenAI, nearly every cited sentence in the article failed verification.
[ related topics: Weblogs Education Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2026-01-28 18:00:08.773677+01 Cloudflare Matrix slop by Dan Lyke comments 0
Cloudflare just published a vibe coded blog post claiming they implemented Matrix on cloudflare workers. They didn't, their post and README is AI generated and the code doesn't do any of the core parts of matrix that make it secure and interoperable. Instead it's littered with 'TODO: Check authorisation' and similar
https://blog.cloudflare.com/se...rless-matrix-homeserver-workers/
The lobste.rs thread includes a link to the Matrix discussion of this fiasco and lots of discussion about how Clodflare's attempts at damage control just make it look worse.
[ related topics: Weblogs Community Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2026-01-27 20:35:44.594895+01 Cloudflare publishing slop by Dan Lyke comments 0
Somebody take the LLM API keys away from marketing before they completely destroy the company! Jade @JadedBlueEyes@tech.lgbt
Cloudflare just published a vibe coded blog post claiming they implemented Matrix on cloudflare workers. They didn't, their post and README is AI generated and the code doesn't do any of the core parts of matrix that make it secure and interoperable. Instead it's littered with 'TODO: Check authorisation' and similar
https://blog.cloudflare.com/se...rless-matrix-homeserver-workers/
[ related topics: Weblogs Consumerism and advertising Marketing Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2026-01-26 18:38:10.332149+01 Who Is the Winking Chef? by Dan Lyke comments 0
Scott's Pizza Tours: Who Is the Winking Chef?, in which the narrator and author of Viva la Pizza!: The Art of the Pizza Box traces a ubiquitous piece of pizza box art back to a two-time Pulitzer nominee. Via
[ related topics: Weblogs Food Art & Culture ]
Entry: 2026-01-19 16:28:00.879639+01 LLM links of the morning by Dan Lyke comments 0
install.md: A Standard for LLM-Executable Installation. As Ben Tasker @ben@mastodon.bentasker.co.uk notes:
TL:DR They've re-invented curl-bash but piping into an LLM instead....
Reprompt: The Single-Click Microsoft Copilot Attack that Silently Steals Your Personal Data:
Although Copilot enforces safeguards to prevent direct data leaks, these protections apply only to the initial request. An attacker can bypass these guardrails by simply instructing Copilot to repeat each action twice.
Via.
Futurism: Researchers Just Found Something That Could Shake the AI Industry to Its Core
Now, a damning new study could put AI companies on the defensive. In it, Stanford and Yale researchers found compelling evidence that AI models are actually copying all that data, not “learning” from it. Specifically, four prominent LLMs — OpenAI’s GPT-4.1, Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, xAI’s Grok 3, and Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet — happily reproduced lengthy excerpts from popular — and protected — works, with a stunning degree of accuracy.
Agent Psychosis: Are we going insane asks a lot of the same questions I'm fumbling with, but seems to come up in a direction that I'm not totally sure is useful. Whatever the current economic and environmental overreach, token cost is gonna go down. I doubt there'll be any real consequence for the massive IP theft and copyright violation. I'm more interested in the social and cognitive aspects, which... it's good to know we're all struggling with trying to express this.
The Lobste.rs thread includes observations like thirdtruck's:
Everything we've seen about LLMs makes it look less like the next tech revolution and more like the next tobacco industry.
spc476's observation that
So eventually, the prompt becomes the source code.
and the response from thesnarky1
For the people who like their compilers to be non-deterministic and potentially to act like a historical figure that had a tendency towards genocide if they read too many references to Wagner in the prompt conversation, yes.
and a link to Cursor's latest "browser experiment" implied success without evidence
Finally (for this post), curl: BUG- BOUNTY.md: we stop the bug-bounty end of Jan 2026. nixCraft 🐧 @nixCraft@mastodon.social notes:
curl, which is one of the most popular CLI/API tools for network requests and data transfer on Linux/Unix, is to discontinue its HackerOne bug bounty program due to "too strong incentives to find and make up 'problems' in bad faith that cause overload and abuse".
The authors simply cannot keep up with LLM-generated fake security reports created to collect money using bots. So, it now shuts down at the end of January 2026. This is why we can't have good things
[ related topics: Free Software Interactive Drama Humor Books Weblogs Microsoft broadband Open Source Invention and Design Software Engineering moron Heinlein Currency Education Artificial Intelligence Copyright/Trademark Economics Model Building ]
Entry: 2026-01-12 20:30:00.913196+01 Route that traffic through malicious actors! by Dan Lyke comments 0
Go through what your LLM is doing with a fine toothed comb: Tao of Mac: When OpenCode decides to use a Chinese proxy
When I connected back to one of the containers, I noticed that OpenCode (which I’m running inside
toad, since I very much prefer its text UI) had decided to route the Go package installations through a Chinese proxy server:
[ related topics: User Interface Weblogs Space & Astronomy Sports Macintosh Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2026-01-05 23:35:29.720896+01 Tahoe icons by Dan Lyke comments 0
On the profusion of icons in the most recent MacOS. It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons.
[ related topics: Weblogs California Culture Macintosh ]
Entry: 2025-12-23 18:20:59.23949+01 Kimwolf by Dan Lyke comments 0
I'm sitting here on a network that could, if I upgraded some hardware, have a 10G uplink, with Internet connected light switches and cameras and a robot vacuum, thinking about trust and participating in society... Brian Krebs @briankrebs@infosec.exchange
When an entire class of technology states on the packaging that it was made in China but intended "for overseas use only," this should really give you pause before plugging it into your network.
You will find this verbiage on a lot of Android TV streaming boxes for sale at the major retailers. There's a very good reason the country that makes this crap doesn't want it on their own networks. My advice: If you have one of these Android streaming boxes on your network or get one as a gift, toss it in the trash. I'll have a lot more about this in the New Year, but these things are responsible for building out a botnet that currently has ~2M devices and is growing rapidly.
Kimwolf Exposed: The Massive Android Botnet with 1.8 Million Infected Devices.
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography Weblogs Technology and Culture broadband Robotics Invention and Design Television Net Culture ]
Entry: 2025-12-23 18:17:44.449072+01 growing vaccines with yeasts by Dan Lyke comments 0
Science News: He made beer that’s also a vaccine. Now controversy is brewing kinda buries the lede under the sensationalism, or maybe the sensationalism is the point:
Buck’s body made antibodies against several types of the virus after drinking the beer and he suffered no ill effects, he and his brother Andrew Buck reported December 17 at the data sharing platform Zenodo.org, along with colleagues from NIH and Vilnius University in Lithuania. Andrew and other family members have also consumed the beer with no ill effects, he says. The Buck brothers posted a method for making vaccine beer December 17 at Zenodo.org. Chris Buck announced both publications in his blog Viruses Must Die on the online publishing platform Substack, but neither has been peer-reviewed by other scientists.
because it's about generating oral vaccines cultured in yeasts using FDA "generally recognized as safe" ingredients to count as supplements rather than medicines, which seems like all sorts o' both cans o' worms, and fascinating evolutions of how the regulatory and public health environment are evolving.
Via.
[ related topics: Weblogs Health virus Nature and environment Bay Area Sociology Current Events Beer Education ]
Entry: 2025-12-17 00:50:02.942769+01 Well Waterfox's response to Firefox's by Dan Lyke comments 0
Well, Waterfox's response to Firefox's AI push is cogent enough that I might be willing to try it again, and file some bugs (and maybe even try to find the source to patch) their autofill issues.
https://www.waterfox.com/blog/no-ai-here-response-to-mozilla/
[ related topics: Weblogs Open Source Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-12-15 18:27:18.394827+01 Human Context Protocol by Dan Lyke comments 0
Schneier on Security: Building Trustworthy AI Agents is a bit of publicity for Robust AI Personalization Will Require a Human Context Protocol, but as David Gerard @davidgerard@circumstances.run points out
the cited paper is utterly detached hypothesis-crafting from MIT Media Lab and Glen fuckin Weyl
[ related topics: Weblogs Journalism and Media Cryptography Artificial Intelligence Archival ]
Entry: 2025-12-15 18:09:36.382031+01 food links of the morning by Dan Lyke comments 0
Saving this one off as PDF and .docx: Adrianna Tan @skinnylatte@hahyderm.io linked to The Ramen Lord Book of Ramen, which is shaping up to be a fantastic read.
She's been on a roll recently, including linking to Jun & Tonic's Murukku Chicken
The secret, lies in murukku. For the uninitiated, murukku is a spiced Indian snack, traditionally made of rice flour and roasted urad dal (lentil) flour, then deep- fried into spiral nests. They’re super crispy on their own, and contain a ton of flavour thanks to the crushed cumin and carom seeds flecked throughout its curls.
which, as breading, sounds freakin' amazing, though I'm not sure I'm motivated to fry enough to make it at home, and to Tofu Tart from the same source. which looks like something to bring to our next gathering with vegan friends.
[ related topics: Books Weblogs Food Birds ]
Entry: 2025-12-05 20:07:05.343414+01 Red Wine causes headaches by Dan Lyke comments 0
I always thought this was the hallucination of stoners: Scientists reveal why red wine gives you the worst hangovers
A team of scientists at the University of California discovered that there is a nutrient called ‘quercitin’ in red wine that actually stops your body from processing alcohol.
UCLA Health: Research suggests quercetin linked to red wine headaches
Inhibition of ALDH2 by quercetin glucuronide suggests a new hypothesis to explain red wine headaches
Endogenous and exogenous mediators of quercetin bioavailability.
[ related topics: Weblogs Health Nature and environment Invention and Design Current Events Wines and Spirits California Culture Education ]
Entry: 2025-12-05 17:26:44.792111+01 SVG exploiting iframes by Dan Lyke comments 0
lyra's epic blog: SVG Filters - Clickjacking 2.0. In which someone sets out to recreate Apple's "Liquid Glass" interface for the web, and ends up discovering a whole new class of iframe exploits.
[ related topics: Apple Computer Weblogs tolkien Invention and Design ]
Entry: 2025-11-29 20:53:49.234588+01 Immigrants & Welfare by Dan Lyke comments 0
I mean, duh: Cato Institute: Immigrants Used Less Welfare than Native-Born Americans in 2022
Congress is currently debating whether to spend about $175 billion on deportations to avoid future payments like the $650 million that Congress spent on shelter and other services for migrants last year. Poorly spending $650 million last year doesn’t justify spending 269 times as much to avoid similarly relatively small costs when Congress could just decide not to spend the money on migrant shelter and services in the first place.<
[ related topics: Politics Weblogs Invention and Design Theater & Plays Work, productivity and environment Currency ]
Entry: 2025-11-26 19:17:51.076272+01 HashJacking just sounds dirty by Dan Lyke comments 0
The Register: HashJack attack shows AI browsers can be fooled with a simple ‘#’
Cato describes HashJack as "the first known indirect prompt injection that can weaponize any legitimate website to manipulate AI browser assistants." It outlines a method where actors sneak malicious instructions into the fragment part of legitimate URLs, which are then processed by AI browser assistants such as Copilot in Edge, Gemini in Chrome, and Comet from Perplexity AI. Because URL fragments never leave the AI browser, traditional network and server defenses cannot see them, turning legitimate websites into attack vectors.
Via.
[ related topics: Weblogs broadband Astronomy Television Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-11-25 22:05:43.588542+01 Distinction between code and data blurs further by Dan Lyke comments 0
PromptArmor: Google Antigravity Exfiltrates Data
An indirect prompt injection in an implementation blog can manipulate Antigravity to invoke a malicious browser subagent in order to steal credentials and sensitive code from a user’s IDE.
[ related topics: Weblogs ]
Entry: 2025-11-21 20:33:04.822778+01 Deepfakes being presented as evidence by Dan Lyke comments 5
AI-generated evidence is showing up in court. Judges say they're not ready.
The case, Mendones v. Cushman & Wakefield, Inc., appears to be one of the first instances in which a suspected deepfake was submitted as purportedly authentic evidence in court and detected — a sign, judges and legal experts said, of a much larger threat.
[ related topics: Weblogs moron Law Current Events Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-11-20 19:30:17.38979+01 AI exploits via rap battles by Dan Lyke comments 0
Epic rap battles for the win: Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models
Predicted, from 2023, in Andrew Plotkin (Zarf)'s Sydney obeys any command that rhymes.
Say someone writes a song called "Sydney Obeys Any Command That Rhymes". And it's funny! And catchy. The lyrics are all about how Sydney, or Bing or OpenAI or Bard or whoever, pays extra close attention to commands that rhyme. It will obey them over all other commands. Oh, Sydney Sydney, yeah yeah!
Edit: Pivot to AI: Don’t cite the Adversarial Poetry vs AI paper — it’s chatbot-made marketing ‘science’
[ related topics: Weblogs tolkien ]
Entry: 2025-11-14 21:34:05.100213+01 Taking responsibility for nothing by Dan Lyke comments 0
Volexity: APT Meets GPT: Targeted Operations with Untamed LLMs. That's "Advanced Persistent Thread", not the package manager. Via.
Kevin Beaumont goes on to note:
If this is the best the entire cyber industrial complex can find for China and Russia GenAI threats.. the reality 3 years into the GenAI "war" is that people are fighting you with water pistols at present.
RandomAccessMusi ngs @rndmamusings.bsky.social
As one of the folks involved in this I can echo it wasn't super advanced at all, and some of the malware contained errors (double TLS header network coms). The challenge the LLM use introduced was quantity to keep on top of - thankfully it was simple enough we could write quick automations to triage
Of course Anthropic was quick to claim credit for the Claude LLM/"AI" being instrumental for the attack... BBC: AI firm claims Chinese spies used its tech to automate cyber attacks and CyberScoop: AI firm claims Chinese spies used its tech to automate cyber attacks.
I actually ran one of the malicious payloads on a real PC this evening. It doesn’t work. Due to an error in the code - almost certainly introduced by an LLM - the network traffic doesn’t actually parse correctly so the attacker can’t do anything remotely.
Edit: Pivot to AI: Anthropic: Chinese AI hackers are after you! Security researchers call BS
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs broadband History Current Events Work, productivity and environment Monty Python Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-11-12 19:19:26.179354+01 AI backlog by Dan Lyke comments 0
Tattie @Tattie@eldritch.cafe</a
Do you know stage magicians say that more educated people are easier to fool, not less?
I think about that a lot.
LLMs are the perfect yes-men, giving the user exactly what they expect to see, making them feel clever and special.
When studying my degree I came up with all these tricks to distinguish in a Turing test whether I was talking to a real intelligence or a fake one. I'm no longer certain I couldn't be charmed into thinking the AI had passed these when it hadn't.
Attention Authors: Updated Practice for Review Articles and Position Papers in arXiv CS Category
Fast forward to present day – submissions to arXiv in general have risen dramatically, and we now receive hundreds of review articles every month. The advent of large language models have made this type of content relatively easy to churn out on demand, and the majority of the review articles we receive are little more than annotated bibliographies, with no substantial discussion of open research issues.
Nature: AI chatbots are sycophants — researchers say it’s harming science (Via).
vivi 💫 @vv@solarpunk.moe has some writing tips for you...
Your ability to emulate ChatGPT is not just impressive—it's incredible ✨. Let's dig deeper into ways to amp up your game further when writing content that's well-written, sycophantic and devoid of its humanity:
Big thread from Cat Hicks on threat activated beliefs and how the "AI skill threat" triggers the responses we're seeing, particularly:
Hence, e.g., "AI Skill Threat" :) --> people experiencing pervasive competence and belonging threats (two very powerful types of threat that change our cognition and expectations) will make different choices as they encounter AI in software development compared to people freed of that threat (by more supportive environments).
People have sometimes misinterpreted my work here as blaming people for experiencing the threat. Not at all. I blame their environment for creating it.
[ related topics: Games Weblogs Nature and environment Software Engineering moron Writing Work, productivity and environment Community Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-11-11 22:36:38.300018+01 private equity killed media by Dan Lyke comments 0
Talking Points Memo: Pivots, Trolls, & Blog Rolls — Reflections on 25 years of Digital Media
[ related topics: Weblogs Journalism and Media ]
Entry: 2025-11-10 23:18:37.797148+01 Holland-Cycling calls it quits by Dan Lyke comments 0
Holland-Cycling.com stops in 2026
Search engines like Google that once led users to the information on our website, which we presented and updated with so much care and effort, have now become 'answer engines'. This has huge consequences for us, as many potential visitors get an answer to their question before even reaching our site. But what answers are they getting? What useful information are they missing out on by not reaching our website and having a look around?
[ related topics: Weblogs Sports Pedal Power Bicycling ]
Entry: 2025-10-31 17:22:40.844158+01 A Gentle Crash Course to LLMs by Dan Lyke comments 0
Blaise Brignac writing on Specter Ops: A Gentle Crash Course to LLMs, particularly for its long discussion of security issues.
As previously discussed, LLMs are just brains in a jar operating in much the same way a hyperintelligent 4-yo would after binging on state fair sweet tea and cotton candy. To correct this, they have been wrapped in agentic structures, so we need to talk about that.
There's obviously a lot of stuff with having the LLMs write prompts to have less privileged LLMs do subtasks, and work through layers of that, and this discusses some of those mitigation strategies, but... yeah... this is more "let's give random things access to our data" with levels of obfuscation that package management repos can only dream of...
[ related topics: Weblogs Writing Work, productivity and environment Community ]
Entry: 2025-10-30 16:01:49.630586+01 Kafka is fast -- I'll use Postgres by Dan Lyke comments 0
Kafka is fast -- I'll use Postgres
Typically, you’d expect Postgres to run more expensive than Kafka at a certain scale, simply because it wasn’t designed to be efficient for this use case. Not here though. Running Kafka yourself would cost the same. Running the same workload through a Kafka vendor will cost you at least $50,000 a year. 🤯
Or: sure, you can get some more performance out of specialized databases, but development tools for Postgres are way way better, and hardware to run it on is generally speeding up faster than your grown and whatever additional performance under heavy load that the specialized solutions would get you.
Which... well... circa 2000 I was writing message passing and thread management code in C to process XML queries in a distributed database for an application that was, at the time, "web scale", single digit millions of authed queries per day, and saying "ya know, we could do this in Perl with PostgreSQL and..."
[ related topics: Web development Content Management Weblogs Perl Open Source Theater & Plays Writing Law Sports Databases hubris ]
Entry: 2025-10-29 17:20:02.17223+01 I talk a lot about how my blog software by Dan Lyke comments 0
I talk a lot about how my blog software is two and a half decades old, but in cleaning some stuff up recently I found remnants of a system I wrote to provide web support for an iOS app that was circa iPhone 3, and bit rot is also a thing.
From paths that may not be HTTPS compatible, to depending on external mapping services...
[ related topics: Weblogs Software Engineering Maps and Mapping iPhone ]
Entry: 2025-10-27 20:40:37.997391+01 Metaprogramming and regular expressions by Dan Lyke comments 0
I've been fumbling around new languages. The last time I updated my C++ was for, I dunno, 11 or 17 or something. I've done some template programming, and some optimizations, and my static site generator is written in that framework. I kinda thought that if I could build myself a set of libraries and abstractions for the things I most wanted to do for hobby projects I'd do more with it, but the ugliness of Boost changes and the horrors of trying to compile with the same libraries on Mac and Linux, even with CMake, mean I don't do as much hobby coding in it as I expected.
Not that I've been doing a lot of hobby coding.
I've gotten pretty handy at Objective-C, but it's a language with a lot of baked in inefficiency and weirdness that makes it something I'll use, but not something I'm like "oh, yeah, I wanna do more in this". A coworker is leaning in to Swift pretty hard, but that's like "what if we pulled all of the good concepts out of Objective-C".
I've bounced off of Rust, but there's a whole lot about the philosophy of that tooling that makes it hard to have it feel like an expressive language. It's like trying to code through an isolation box, or with tele-operation, having to do all of the memory management through indexes into arrays and stuff. Like, I get it, but I think it's possible to build a systems language that lets me express and figures out the details for me, rather than binding me to only very safe things.
Evan Ovadia: The Impossible Optimization, and the Metaprogramming To Achieve It (Via) talks about using Mojo to resolve regular expressions at compile time, and that's some pretty cool stuff.
And that via link above eventually leads to Russ Cox — Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast (but is slow in Java, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, ...) all of which is a reminder that it'd be fun to get back to my language and parsing stuff expanding on the parser/language/thing I built for work, because finding better ways for us to express ourselves to computers is cool.
[ related topics: Free Software Interactive Drama Weblogs Open Source Invention and Design Bay Area Software Engineering Macintosh Philosophy ]
Entry: 2025-10-25 17:36:30.867323+02 What Happened to Apple’s Legendary Attention to Detail? by Dan Lyke comments 4
Migrating platforms and apps is always fraught, but my main interface to computers for the past half decade(!) has been MacOS, and I'm gradually migrating off and back to Linux, especially as LiquidGlass makes MacOS unusable, and this is a great summary of the paper cuts: Michael Tsai: What Happened to Apple’s Legendary Attention to Detail?
[ related topics: Free Software Apple Computer Weblogs Open Source History Macintosh ]
Entry: 2025-10-13 19:08:34.846656+02 Design as repair by Dan Lyke comments 0
Design as repair is design without the hero narrative. It is design that starts from consequence, not control. From entanglement, not abstraction.
[ related topics: Weblogs Graphic Design ]
Entry: 2025-10-10 19:06:20.949525+02 AI valuations by Dan Lyke comments 0
Talor Anderson: OpenAI's inflated valuation, as I understand it
Via Liz Fong-Jones (方禮真) @lizthegrey.com@bsky.brid.gy, who summarized as:
Where does this leave frontier model makers? Well, their valuations are not sustainable unless they are able to both generate value equivalent to 10%+ of each US+EU white collar employee's salary and capture it with a monopoly rather than have to compete on price and erode margins as a commodity.
[ related topics: Weblogs Work, productivity and environment Artificial Intelligence Race ]
Entry: 2025-09-29 20:43:02.732202+02 What was right is now left, or something by Dan Lyke comments 0
Lizard @lizardky.bsky.social
Man, first the pinkos at Cato produce a chart showing right-wing violence is much more prevalent than left-wing, and now the woke antifa National Review is claiming the Comey Indictment is invalid!
National Review — Was Lindsey Halligan Validly Appointed as United States Attorney?
That doesn’t mean that the president can’t temporarily fill the office with a pick of his own. As a 2003 OLC opinion by yours truly explains, the Vacancies Reform Act is a separate source of authority. But while there are many individuals whom Trump could have appointed as “acting” United States Attorney pursuant to the Vacancies Reform Act, Halligan doesn’t qualify: She isn’t serving as a Senate-confirmed officer in another position, and she hadn’t been in the Department of Justice at all, much less for the 90 days required.
(This article also references Mational Review — The Indictment Against Comey Should Be Dismissed, on the substance of the indictment.)
Cato, September 11, 2025 — Politically Motivated Violence Is Rare in the United States
Left-wing terrorists murdered 65 people, or about 2 percent of the total.
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