Notices by Dan Sugalski (wordshaper@weatherishappening.network)

@soatok Is it wrong that I didn't get past "a secure chat app" in the post title before I reflexively assumed they utterly fucked up their hand-rolled cryptography protocols?

New Tank! performance. It's ridiculously self-indulgent and goddamn awesome. 28 years after the original series got released but Yoko Kanno and The Seatbelts absolutely still have it.

https://youtu.be/d75ov4HvRrM

@soatok and you can even pronounce that “no” like “the ROI on collecting that data is negative” because it is for basically everyone. The suits often need you to speak with an accent that way so they can hear you clearly.

@dalias Well, I wouldn't be surprised to find that some of the current animosity is externally incited, but let's be honest -- the region is filled with people and historically people in large groups have been kind of shit. You can blame the specific shape of nonsense on some external factors but the nonsense itself predates those factors by decades, centuries, or millennia depending on which facet of the nonsense you're looking at.

@dalias I suspect to some extent that just won't matter -- everyone in the middle east seems to hate each other and have for a couple of millennia, with the current large power players not really making any difference there. It would mean less money and therefore somewhat smaller explosive toys, but as we've seen with modern drones I'm not sure that would matter either.

We wouldn't have to care as much, though. *That* would be awesome.

I suspect one of the unintended consequences of the current shooting in the middle east is a massive push for most of the world to shift to wind and solar for their electricity generation needs, even moreso than had been underway. The more of your energy generation that's *not* dependent on a regular flow of anything (aside from electrons) the more insulated you are from geopolitical bullshit.

@cwebber Ah, right! Current MBAs make artisanal, handcrafted bad decisions, while VibeMBAs modernize and automate the Bad Decision Industry™️, allowing us to scale up production of Bad Decisions in ways heretofore only ever dreamt of by Deloitte VPs during speedball benders.

@cwebber Objection! The statement "even more bad decisions" implies that regular MBAs have fewer bad decisions and [citation needed]!

@cwebber ...I'm trying to think what the practical differences between a VibeMBA and a real MBA are and frankly I'm coming up blank.

@soatok good thing this code doesn’t have to operate in an adversarial environment. Something unfortunate could happen.

@soatok Wait, so the entire input validation scheme is "don't call it wrong?"

That's... well, that's a choice you can make, I guess.

Oh, wait, it's *$450K* he burned, he was just *expecting* to burn $50k.

🤦

Seriously, people, if you're ever thinking to yourself "I can afford to burn a half million dollars with a whoops" ping me, I can hook you up with a bunch of charities, so not only is the result *not* stupid but you can get a tax break too.

The referenced substack is... I can't even, it's just insane. That's $50k in real actual money that could've funded the local food bank, homeless shelter, any one of a bunch of charities, or hell just boosted the economy of Bali for a bit with a stupidly indulgent vacation.

But no. Dude had his bot set it on fire. And he's not even *special* in this, these guys are doing it on the regular.

JFC, I think it would've been better if he'd blown the cash on actual *coke*.

https://mathstodon.xyz/@mjd/116139000994759902

@geichel ah. Yes. You could say that neither I nor @cwebber have worked on large, complex systems, or worked on significant pieces of infrastructure, or handled production level code and thus are not well equipped to judge. That is indeed a thing you could say.

@cwebber What's telling, I think, is that all these people go on about how much they're doing and how great AI is to help them build more *but there's no actual demonstrable stuff being done.* I mean, if AI was some kind of Nx multiplier you'd think we'd be getting N times more actual functionality out of software but mostly it seems like the N multiplier only applies to blog posts about how AI multiplies their programming.

@soatok once again I’m reminded that you should never implement your own crypto. When you’re in a situation where you must implement crypto you always should assume you’re an idiot, that you will get things wrong, and plan the protocol to be able to shut off the versions where you screwed up. Then find people who can tell you how you screwed things up and believe what they say.

@cwebber Don't worry, we're generally skipping the whole "AI agent soliciting funds" era and moving straight into the "AI agents run crypto pump'n'dump schemes and automatically exploit *other* AI agents bugs to buy pumped crypto" era. Fraud as a Service has arrived and in its own twisted way is glorious.

@weekend_editor @cstross @Green_Footballs If they think letting disease rip through the population to "evolve" us... I assume they've forgotten smallpox, measles, tetanus, and a host of other diseases which have been killing us for millennia but we still haven't developed any meaningful resistance to.

All news orgs should note the number of times someone appears in the Epstein files just like they note representative/senator status. Every news story should have something like “Elon Musk (34,345 Epstein) said some random stupid thing about space yesterday” for the foreseeable future.

Solar panels last longer than expected -- after 30+ years some panels still generate 80% of their original power. At least in the study area (which was Switzerland) panels made in the 80s and 90s had a degradation rate of about 0.25%/year, which is frankly not all that much.

Solar panels. They're just a really good energy investment.

https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2025/el/d4el00040d