When I think about my personal list of "line noise as code" my mind drifts back to my time coding in APL and, of course, Perl. I just downloaded my first rust project to look at. I have added a new language to that list.

Found while unpacking. Yikes.

Long discussion on the orange website about the NIST's Boulder NTP site being down. Not a lot of people with practical experience in the topic. NTP is designed to function as a tree model, rooted in "stratum 0" NTP servers with direct time references. Actual clients are expected to interact […]

RE: https://discuss.systems/@ricci/115749530561328803 What a find!

While cleaning a storage room, our staff found this tape containing #unix v4 from Bell Labs, circa 1973 Apparently no other complete copies are known to exist: https://gunkies.org/wiki/UNIX_Fourth_Edition We have arranged to deliver it to the Computer History Museum #retrocomputing

Omg. How do you keep wild turkeys from flying up onto your *pole mounted* platform #feeder?!? Chasing them away doesn't work they come right back as soon as we leave the area. #birdfeeder #birdfeedernews

Herd immunity : not just for humans. Your IT security team could be preventing your computer from becoming impervious to cyber-threats. Delete your antivirus!

I just found out that one can get rid of ai slop summary in Google search by appending -ai at the end of the search string.

Sometimes one has to peek under the hood or inside the black box . How I fixed the surprisingly slow speed of the percentile function in Perl Data Language in #perl (no C) https://chrisarg.github.io/Killing-It-with-PERL/2025/11/30/Faster-quantie-calculations-in-PDL.html Background […]

I had my eye on doing a desktop watercooling build this year around the AMD 9950x3d and some fast RAM. Waiting for cyber Monday sales. Of course while I wasn't watching RAM spiked 3-6x normal retail. Sales mgr at local computer store told me he expects not to receive any new memory stock for […]

DDR5 PC memory has *tripled* in price since the summer. So much for that new build I was thinking of.

This has been painful for me, given how long I have been in the ISP & cloud computing space. I will not accept "Gemini for Workspace" that cannot be reasonably turned off. It is enforced GenAI adoption, pure play enshittification and a new technique I coined a "slop-wall" […]

Defeating Nondeterminism in LLM Inference - Thinking Machines Lab > it’s because our forward pass lacks “batch invariance”, causing our request’s output to depend on the batch size of our forward pass. https://thinkingmachines.ai/blog/defeating-nondeterminism-in-llm-inference/

Baby alien Doo doo doo doo doo doo Baby alien Doo doo doo doo doo doo #alienearth #s1e4

"I am a prompt engineer and do vibe coding". Oh, so you're in Slop Ops.

Three small announcements: 1. RFC 9839, a guide to which Unicode characters you should never use: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9839.html 2. Blog piece with background and context, “RFC 9839 and Bad Unicode”: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2025/08/14/RFC9839 3. A little Go library […]

Seems reasonable: "Our findings reveal that the standalone LLM introduces nearly 9x more new vulnerabilities than developers, with many of these exhibiting unique patterns not found in developers'code. Agentic workflows also generate a significant number of vulnerabilities, particularly when […]

I've seen hype cycles you people wouldn't believe. AI in the 1980s, natural language 4GLs, ecommerce, service buses, big data, crypto, and now genAI. I watched CTOs quake in their office overwhelmed with FOMO. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time for disillusionment.

I have to install windows 11 in a VM for the first time since win 7. ick.

Undocumented backdoor found in Bluetooth chip used by a billion devices > The undocumented commands allow spoofing of trusted devices, unauthorized data access, pivoting to other devices on the network, and potentially establishing long-term persistence […]

The developer came to the master. "Master, I do not understand programming in functional languages. How can I attain functional programming mastery?" The master replied, "Grasshopper, spreadsheets are the OG functional language". In that moment, they were enlightened.

Measuring the startup time of different programming languages... Interesting https://github.com/bdrung/startup-time

This is an illustration of why I am highly skeptical that we will ever succeed at securing the open source software supply chain. This is the list of shared libraries that are loaded into memory when gnome-shell executes on my Debian Testing system. 247 […] [Original post on federate.social]

Best laptop power consumption pprofile I have ever owned. #framework #framework13 #amd ubuntu 24.04 with Gnome wayland.

I recommend this for anyone who's interested in modern cryptography, not frightened of a little math, but not actually a professional: https://www.amazon.science/blog/better-performing-25519-elliptic-curve-cryptography There are a lot of reasons to like the […] [Original post on cosocial.ca]

“Brutal” cybersecurity job market: pros can’t land roles despite massive worker shortage | Cybernews https://cybernews.com/editorial/brutal-cybersecurity-job-market/ > The cybersecurity industry is short on talent, yet many job seekers have been […] [Original post on mastodon.acm.org]

Also, these wiretapping systems have become so bloated and complicated (a security risk in and of itself) that there are now intermediate service providers that act as a buffer between carriers and law enforcement. Compromise one of them, and you've hit the interception jackpot. I wouldn't be […]

Another problem with these "lawful intercept" and "lawful access" mandates: they've suffered from automation creep. When CALEA was envisioned and passed, wiretaps would be at least partly manually provisioned, requiring someone at the central office to complete a work order or physically […]

Exploits of "lawful access" interfaces, such as the Chinese attack reported today by the WSJ, appeared almost immediately after they became standardized in the 90's. The most famous example is the case known as "the Athens Affair" https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-athens-affair . It was a bad idea […]

We’ve been warning about this for literally three decades, ever since CALEA mandated wiretap-ready telecom infrastructure. And this is merely the latest example of how these dangerous interfaces can be turned against us by our adversaries. https://mastodon.social/@fj/113253726161428151

I have been wondering when a successful attack on lawful intercept capabilities would occur for espionage purposes. #network #infosec https://www.wsj.com/tech/cybersecurity/u-s-wiretap-systems-targeted-in-china-linked-hack-327fc63b https://archive.is/QDGf8

Sophisticated AI models are more likely to lie https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/10/the-more-sophisticated-ai-models-get-the-more-likely-they-are-to-lie/ > When a research team led by Amrit Kirpalani, a medical educator at Western University in Ontario […] [Original post on mastodon.acm.org]