This is like a Superbowl ad back when Superbowl ads were good, and it’s aimed squarely at Millennials.

A word on Omarchy (マリウス.com)

A good breakdown on why Omarchy is has no there there. Omarchy is a meme in the linux community right now. Also, sick unicode hostname.

Kiwibank is desperately trying to stop people saying they want to fuck its sheep mascot (thespinoff.co.nz)

Meanwhile in New Zealand. See also this followup coverage.

Weird Guys (drewdevault.com)

For one’s information.

Re: Return of the Obra Dinn (forums.tigsource.com)

Screen Space Dithering explanation by (?) the Return of the Obra Dinn developer. Interesting because I was looking into making a dithering shader to match the look of These old crunchy graphics.

Inner Join – Shiftlock Override (soundcloud.com)

Taking another shot at a Synthwave/Outrun track.

marginalia-search.com

Similar to Wiby, another retro search engine.

“I joined Apple in 1996 […]” (/r/VintageApple)

Interesting comment (well, interesting for Classic Mac fans) from someone who joined Apple from NeXT.

Corporate Gen-X Cyber (are.na)

Not sure how I missed this apparently fifteen year old domain hack, but turn your attention to this specific page and this very specific aesthetic.

The Intolerable Hypocrisy of Cyberlibertarianism (matduggan.com)

One of the first and most classic examples of the ideology that powered and continues to power tech is the classic “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” by John Perry Barlow written in 1996. […] Today the Declaration reads like one of those sovereign citizen TikToks where someone in traffic court is claiming diplomatic immunity under maritime law

We also have the advantage of hindsight and know, without question, that all of these predicted outcomes were wrong. Not ‘directionally wrong’ or ‘wrong in the details.’ Wrong the way it would be wrong to predict that if you set your kitchen on fire, the result will be a renovation.

Today’s PHP Security Release, and How We’re Strengthening PHP Security (thephp.foundation)

This very blog was one of the thousands of sites that needed to be panic-patched on that fateful day. There is a fair amount of confusion around the release of this CVE and I advise anyone interested to go straight to the source and read the PHP Foundation’s statement.

rip.so

Nice little tech-graveyard site with pretty retro CSS.

AI Crisis

I guess we’re calling it ‘Black October’ now (see also the above PHP vulnerability.)

The Test (tante.cc)

An observation about the Klein/Huang interview that was making the rounds.

[…] in that interview, Klein could have pushed back on Huang. Really dug into how “I don’t know my address” is not about “some skills are no longer required” but about “I am rich and pay a bunch of women to run my life like my mother used to“. Could have challenged that completely disconnected statement to kinda force Huang to step down from abstraction land down to the real world.

It Breaks a Village (blog.fallible.net)

Another exhausted plea from an Open Source maintainer.

This has been almost entirely on hold for the last 5 weeks as trying to write Bevy-related code right now makes me feel fully nauseous. Stomach churning, I-want-to-throw-up. My mind cannot keep from racing about what it means to be a contributor to open source in this moment in time.

I may be alone in this specific feeling, but I am not alone in feeling that contributing to Bevy right now feels extremely bad.

Ghost in the Machine (youtube.com)

A documentary that covers some of the same ground as Palo Alto and Mismeasure of Man but worth a look if you need more convincing.

Microsoft exec called AI scraping the “largest theft of labor in human history” (arstechnica.com)

I love-love-love that this came from someone actually sitting inside Microsoft. Love it. I might make stickers or tee shirts of this.

Software developers are not okay (baldurbjarnason.com)

Another case of the vibe being captured. I really can’t get enough of these if they’re good. See also the followup.

The responsibility does not lie with a piece of code (crookedtimber.org)

Good policy op-ed about the Australian chatbot breach/unauthorized scrape.

cocAIne [sic] (jwz.org)

Somehow I missed this when it was posted. Hilarious analogy.

Programming Isn’t Special (blog.glyph.im)

Decompilations, AI, the chase for clout, the value of caring, and the desire to consoom (jpeisach.github.io/blog)

While yes, making mods for the game, and porting it to other platforms is certainly a benefit (and don’t get me wrong, for some people it is their main driver), the main reason is, we enjoy doing it for fun! We love seeing the code that makes up our favorite games. We love seeing the decisions made by the developers. We love seeing that, wow, they used a ternary statement here instead of a normal if statement. We love being able to, at the end of the decompilation, have the equivalent of as if the entire game source leaked, just with comments and missing variable or function names that we have yet to figure out.

We love being able to see how developers optimized their game to run on the hardware of the time. We love to see the in-house game engines that were used! We love to see the developers’ ways of dealing with simple problems. We love seeing their practices for “initialization, deinitialization”. We love seeing how they made validation checks so that your game would not crash.

AI Safety Is Mostly A Sex Cult In Berkeley, California (verysane.ai)

Another explainer that made the rounds. One thing I think this one does fairly well is bringing receipts with immediacy rather than relying entirely on footnotes (though there are many.) I do think it gets off in the weeds in a few directions and could have been broken up into a series of shorter more focused posts. But, for now, this is what I’ve got to gesture towards when someone says “should we take the Terminator thing seriously right now?”