What is Hackers' Pub?

@catsaladCat 🐈🥗 (D.Burch) that reminds me, I need to take down infosec.exchange sometime over the holidays to hose out
the servers. They handled a lot of junk this year.

I am getting reports that Mitra and #Friendica don't federate anymore.

There is a recent issue that seems to be about this problem: https://github.com/friendica/friendica/issues/15262. Apparently the breakage was caused by some change in our @context. The fix was merged in November, but it has not yet been included in a stable release.

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Vacuum Is a Lie: About Your Indexes

Link: https://boringsql.com/posts/vacuum-is-lie/
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46262777

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OpenAI Researcher Quits, Saying Company Is Hiding the Truth https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/openai-researcher-quits-hiding-truth #AI #ArtificialIntelligence

@reiver@reiver ⊼ (Charles) @ezeno789ekZepp_Pf
One thing I would love too is the ability to set up a post only allowing the people I follow (or followers) to reply.

Whenever I get insults or trolls in my replies, it's always from someone who doesn't follow me and I don't follow.

“The most important reason for purchasing organic foods seems to be beliefs about the products' health-giving properties and higher nutritional value.These beliefs are promoted by the organic food industry, and have fueled increased demand for organic food despite higher prices and difficulty in confirming these claimed benefits scientifically.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_food

RE: https://stranger.social/@lednaBM/115718877275566120

It's weird how every time someone runs a UBI or GBI test like this, it always turns out positive. Like, I *never* see headlines saying "UBI Trial in Bumfucksburg, West Idaho Fails to Achieve Goals".

They always work, never fail.

It's almost like they're a good idea and we should move past the "trial" stage, hmm? 🤔

#UBI #UniversalBasicIncome #BasicUniversalIncome #GuaranteedBasicIncome #poverty

If you do not have jobs for juniors,

you won't have seniors for the jobs you need them for.

The use of llm-driven tools to eliminate junior-level jobs means you will not have senior-level candidates for the roles you need them for.

No llm is capable of the systemic understanding of projects that a senior developer needs to have.

If you are using llm tools instead of juniors and interns, you are shooting yourself in the foot.

https://restofworld.org/2025/engineering-graduates-ai-job-losses/

Hashcards: A Plain-Text Spaced Repetition System

Link: https://borretti.me/article/hashcards-plain-text-spaced-repetition
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46264492

Rust Coreutils 0.5.0 Release: 87.75% compatibility with GNU Coreutils

Link: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/releases/tag/0.5.0
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46264329

#rust

Small watercolor painting by my wife. #SilentSunday

"AI could invent free renewable energy."

Or, y'know, we could deploy the stuff that works and is already cheaper than the fossil alternative, while doing the hard political work of figuring out how to pass the savings on to households, balancing the interests of shareholders and ratepayers.

#ai #climate #energy

Yeah, the arm rests on my current chair starting to go is part of why I'm thinking about a new chair.. resting your arm on a bolt isn't fun

GraphQL: The Enterprise Honeymoon Is Over

Link: https://johnjames.blog/posts/graphql-the-enterprise-honeymoon-is-over
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46264704

#graphql

雪に濡れたバラは美しい
Olympus E-3 + Olympus Zuiko Digital 35mm F3.5 Macro #Misskey写真部

@reiver@reiver ⊼ (Charles) @ezeno789ekZepp_Pf we do have the ability to moderate replies built into ActivityPub, though.

Every object has a `replies` collection that is owned and managed by the creator of the object. If you don't want someone's reply to appear in the list of replies, you can remove it.

Mastodon does not surface this feature. It also doesn't show the `replies` collection remotely. That's too bad; it would cover most of what people want from replies management.

Everyone should have the right to speak up against injustice without ending up in a database. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/how-cops-are-using-flock-safetys-alpr-network-surveil-protesters-and-activists

George Clooney is an actor.

Put him in the role of a surgeon in front of a camera, and he will do and say things the average non-surgeon viewer will agree are surgeonish. After an hour of that, we are, as average non-surgeon viewers, satisfied and entertained.

Put him in an operating theatre, and the patient will fucking die because he's not a surgeon and knows nothing about really doing surgery.

This is a post about LLMs.

One person's request for Fediverse applications —

Alex wants to be able to choose what the preview image is for a video, chosen from the frames in the video.

...

I can imagine editing tools (in Fediverse applications) would also be useful.

It is also common elsewhere for people to be able to use custom images for preview images.

#FediDev #FediDevs #FediUX #Fediverse #FediverseUX #PreviewImage #Video

made an image. created it by hand in a photo editor. there's some off-black text and some chromab and lasers and stuff. it's setting off my slop senses because the same properties are common in generative images. now I hate the thing I made.

can't have anything nice.

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@catsaladCat 🐈🥗 (D.Burch)

I don't know why but I heard the sound when a predator changes their hunting vision in my head (a quick snapping/whipping sound as it cycles from infrared to emf I believe?) followed by their iconic 'rrrrrrrr' sound as soon as I saw this

Seems fitting somehow

My son is into playing GeoGuessr where you get a random Google street view and guess where you are based on clues in the scene. I thought I had a fairly good sense of geography but through watching him play I realized how bad I am at placing countries on a map. So I've been shamed into making sure I know where every country is and it has been surprisingly fun. I started with a quiz of African countries combined with reading wikipedia articles which helps me remember. https://www.geoguessr.com/vgp/3163

I'll end with the last paragraph of the paper:

"In addition to the dangerously high collision risks calculated here, we are already experiencing disruption of astronomy, pollution in the upper atmosphere from increasingly frequent satellite ablation, and increased ground casualty risks. By these safety and pollution metrics, it is clear we have already placed substantial stress on LEO, and changes to our approach are required immediately."

@reiver@reiver ⊼ (Charles) outbox.json with a separate media collection works very well, some fedi serivces can import those archives (for example, Mitra).

You can use data URIs to embed media in AP objects, but I don't think it is necessary.

#SilentSunday #Rescue

One of the scariest parts of this project was learning more about Starlink's orbital operations. I had always assumed they had some kind of clever configuration of the satellites in the orbital shell that minimized conjunctions, and we would see the number of conjunctions grow over time in our simulations. But no! It's just random! There's no magic here, it's just avoiding collisions by moving a Starlink satellite every 2 minutes. This is bad.

make a programming language and then make a game in it.

https://itch.io/jam/langjamgamejam

https://langjamgamejam.com/
#langjam #gamejam #langjamgamejam

#Wort des Tages:

kaum

The CRASH Clock uses the current density in altitude bins (averaged over eccentric orbits) of satellites, rocket bodies, and tracked debris, assuming typical cross sections for each type and orbital speeds. This calculation tells us how long to a collision if all orbital maneuvers were to suddenly stop.

The CRASH Clock is currently* at 2.8 days.

In 2018 it was 121 days.

*This is actually for June 2025 because that's when we ran it. Will update soon!

An amazing resource by EFF around age verification on the internet.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/age-verification-coming-internet-we-built-you-resource-hub-fight-back

#ageverification #eff #tech #internet #legal #privacy
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Instagram on Linux CLI? It’s geeky, cool, and slightly terrifying.

https://itsfoss.com/instagram-cli/

The widespread use of alt text is one of Mastodon's strengths. Creative and/or highly detailed alt text is a joy.

This chart shows all objects in the Universe, arranged by mass (vertical) and radius (horizontal).

The edge of the upper left corner is the "Schwarzschild radius" - anything along this edge becomes a black hole, so we don't expect stuff above and to the left of that.

The edge of the lower left corner is the "Compton wavelength" - anything here has a size so small that measuring its position that accurately would require enough energy to create a new one.

These two corners intersect in a white dot. This would be a black hole so small that it's heavily affected by quantum mechanics. By definition its mass would be the Planck mass, and its radius the Planck length. Nobody has seen such a thing.

The black region to the left of that dot, labeled "QG", contains imaginary objects that are more compressed than black holes, yet also ruled out by the uncertainty principle. So they're doubly impossible - unless Quantum Gravity, which we don't understand, changes the rules.

The pink strips of slope 3 are lines of constant density. For example "QGP" is the density of quark-gluon plasma, "BBN" is the density of the universe when Big Bang nucleosynthesis was going on, and so on.

The Earth is only slightly more dense than a flea.

The black dot labeled "Hubble radius" is the whole observable universe.

I like this chart a lot. It's from here:

C. H. Lineweaver and V. M. Patel, “All objects and some questions”, American Journal of Physics 91 (2023), 819-825. Free at https://pubs.aip.org/aapt/ajp/article-pdf/91/10/819/20107261/819_1_5.0150209.pdf

A higher-resolution version is on Wikicommons:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Masses_and_sizes_of_objects_in_our_Universe.png

See the alt text for more!

If you do not have jobs for juniors,

you won't have seniors for the jobs you need them for.

The use of llm-driven tools to eliminate junior-level jobs means you will not have senior-level candidates for the roles you need them for.

No llm is capable of the systemic understanding of projects that a senior developer needs to have.

If you are using llm tools instead of juniors and interns, you are shooting yourself in the foot.

https://restofworld.org/2025/engineering-graduates-ai-job-losses/

posted about my Apple ID woes, please share widely?

https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/

#SilentSunday #Rescue

Dave Winer, @davewDave Winer ☕️ is basically the inventor of RSS and I take the chance to mention him as I am doing my best to be an RSS advocate with my own possibilities and limits, even with non-technical people who don't understand why I insist in "so complex things" when "commercial platforms give you everything in an instant".
I talked about ActivityPub and RSS during my last WordCamp, Pisa -Italy- 22nd November 2025. Italian, unfortunately; I'll share my talk when it's out on WordPress TV but I fear there won't be English subtitles.

But I limited what I wanted to say because a word could violate WordPress's code of conduct.
It's nothing obscene, it's the metaphoric name of an anchor-stone. But in Venice they call it "coion", like the vulgar word for testicle. It's basically a round stone structure which firmly anchors the arch of a bridge, to its vertical support. It's invisible to human eyes, people even don't know it exists. But it allows Venetian bridges to resist for centuries. It's fundamental. But if for a reason or another it becomes visible, it means that the bridge is damaged.
Same way of a linchpin for a wheel.

This word is even used for a person. When someone is essential for a community, determines its success too, but if they get attention or ask for visibility, they could even become an obstacle. Or they are treated as such. No idea if the word corresponding to "coion" for a person has the same idea in English. I have found "moron" but I don't know if it's the same.
Basically, when you are important and have not a very strong personality, so you let others treat you as invisible, they consider you as always available, always granted. And treat you badly if you raise your hand and say "I'm here too"; they immediately send you back to your place.

RSS is treated the same: many of commercial platform users don't even know about its existence but without RSS, no newspaper or whatever social pages sharing news automatically, could fetch contents.
I agree with Dave when he says that RSS is more important than ActivityPub. Simply RSS can work without ActivityPub but often not vice-versa.

#rss #ActivityPub #WordPress #blogging #advocacy

@evanEvan Prodromou @reiver@reiver ⊼ (Charles) @ezeno789ekZepp_Pf I love this feature; eg to remove comments from a troll from the thread I started. Would be awesome to have it implemented on Mastodon. I think the argument has been it could be used to silence a valid critic? I do get that, but that critic could also start their own thread.

IT security in the 90s ...

#infosec

@schwaJonathan Wight we don’t know

Huey Long was not a good guy, but he knew what the people wanted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share_Our_Wealth

Finally! After two days of work, I've managed to implement enough of MLS (Messaging Layer Security) to be able to create a new group with a single member, invite another member, then exchange an encrypted message.

I've worked on MLS two years ago, and at the time I got almost all of the test vectors working. This week-end I've fixed the remaining tests, implemented logic required to be an active client (generating groups and various messages), and wired everything up together.

ok... I uploaded my one of my absolute favorite KISS100 mixes to my SoundCloud; it's chock full of warm chunky progressive house tracks, including the classic remix of Björk's "All Is Full of Love". Highly highly recommended...

https://soundcloud.com/quephird/osamu-m-20041121-kiss100-mix