Notices by Pwnallthethings (pwnallthethings@mastodon.social)

Maybe Mastodon isn't for you. That's fine! Different platforms suit different people, though we'll be sad to miss you.

But if you do go back, please be careful to bear this in mind. Disinformation and overton-window-shifting isn't just the obvious agendas pushed into your face that you can ignore. It's also all the info and people that you don't even notice aren't there anymore. So be careful in your travels online, and give it a thought when you get back.

Overton windows shift not just by adding weight on one side of the scale, but by taking it off at the other side, and blasting trash in the middle to confuse and disorientate. You can't easily protect yourself from platform owners doing that on purpose if its your only information source.

It's easy enough to spot what's there. It's *much* harder to spot what's missing. And one of the things I enormously appreciate with this place and a few others is that it highlights just how many important local perspectives on a ton of different important topics just never surface there anymore.

Welcome new twitter expats!

I know for a lot of you, this is a temporary migration, and you'll head back once they fix the problems.

But before you go back to twitter, take this thought with you: the owners of twitter don't just push their agendas at you. You already know that, and probably think it doesn't affect you. But what you don't see is how much stuff is gone there now. You don't see who's gone, or what views aren't there anymore

A lot of takes that Prigozhin signed his own death warrant via this deal, which, ironically, is exactly the opposite of what he just did, which is to get his literal death warrant officially unsigned

OK, I got annoyed enough at people saying "Trump faces up to 400 years in prison" or that he wouldn't get prison even if found guilty, that I went and calculated what the sentence would actually be, assuming Trump is actually found guilty (a big if).

Anyway, if you want a dive into how U.S. sentencing actually works and what the sentence range would look like, I've got you covered:

https://www.pwnallthethings.com/p/what-sentence-might-trump-get-if

If you're wondering what, specifically, is in those documents, I've worked out what 7 (of 31) of them probably are here, and why Trump kept them (it's pretty bad).

Slowly going through the rest.

https://www.pwnallthethings.com/p/donald-trump-indictment-whats-in

Good morning everyone! Who wants to start the day with a deep dive into monetary policy and 31 USC 5112(k) and how it can be used to avoid separation of powers litigation🥳 🥳

OK maybe not selling it there. But nevertheless, here we go...

#MintTheCoin.

How to do it. How it works. And why the President's 14th Amendment Plan to beat the #debtceiling is the wrong tool for the job.

https://www.pwnallthethings.com/p/mint-the-coin

OpenAI's statement on "governance of superintelligence" is basically "in our humble opinion you should regulate AI, but not *our* company's AI which is good, but instead only imaginary evil AI that exists only in the nightmares you have after reading too many Sci-Fi books, and the regulatory framework you choose should be this laughably guaranteed-to-fail regulatory framework which we designed here on a napkin while laughing" https://openai.com/blog/governance-of-superintelligence

Fully 294 pages into the 316-page #Durham review and then it just concedes that the predication of Cross Fire Hurricane was validly predicated because of the low standard required, as was independently confirmed by OIG, and that it could have been opened under any of several different justifications ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Hahaha riding this face eating leopard to victory look at me go, eat the faces of my enemies hahahaha good leopard! what thrill! what speed! what power! Wait... no wait aaaah the face eating leopard has noticed I too have a face qaawwwh my face

Maybe if we just give him a platform the base will see who he is and abandon him. Huh it didn't work
*four seconds later*
Huh I wonder if this time if we give him a platform ...
*repeat eight trillion times over the past six years*

Kinda feel like its not too much to ask that by 14 months into this war Milley should have consulted at least one map of Ukraine by now 🤦

Kerch Bridge, very famously, is just a really big bridge built over nothing in particular, and the Moskva is just a big rig that sank somehow into the ground? like ... idk, expected better from the CJCS.

Like .... the Black Sea Grain Deal is, uh, not a small thing that the US is working on? And, uh, the whole point is it has ports and water and stuff, idk, spitballing here

If you ever think that normal bugs are a PITA to debug, hypervisor bugs really just take the biscuit

Operating Systems do not like it when the hardware they are running on occasionally forget to behave like real hardware

OSes also Do Not Like when monotonically-increasing timers accidentally go backwards in time, giving the OS an existential crisis about the linear nature of time

Today's rant brought to you by "what happens if the CPU decides to service interrupts anyway even though interrupts are notionally disabled"

AI people: this is so scary, imagine if hackers could use Chat-GPT to look for bugs in programs, but, like, automatically, and with lots of weird inputs

Everyone in offensive security: .... um, hate to break it to you buuuuut

Imagine if hackers find out about throwing lots of GPU and CPU power to aggressively search the exploitable surface area of a program or try and crack passwords or something. And it might even learn about the program and look for weird novel paths through the code. Terrifying