Notices by mhoye but seasonally spooky (mhoye@cosocial.ca)

Gasoline-only cars have dropped below fifty percent of global sales for the first time.

That second-derivative downturn has been clear for a while now, but this feels like an important milestone.

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/gasoline-only-cars-lose-global-sales-majority-276570.html

@azonenberg @dalias

Ok, but that's an existence proof that a solution can exist, not a solution. Nobody should have to live like that.

RE: https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/117393431309343217

I feel strongly that container tabs are a devtools utility that used shopping as a justification for grafting it into the main Firefox UI, and I'd be surprised if saw significant usage by anyone who didn't also have devtools open.

I think the real need in this world of adversarial commerce looks more like "exposing as little as possible about me until the very last moment of this transaction is basic financial self-defence", and it's a window- or session-level thing, not a tab thing.

The thing about this entire exercise that I cannot and will not get over is what a tectonic waste of time, effort, skill, resources and material it has all become.

If I want to download all of Wikipedia, I _could_ create huge, self-perpetuating swarms of stochastic software so incompetently written and poorly contained that it threatens to buckle the single greatest knowledge resource of human history.

Or I could open the "download wikipedia" page and push one button.

https://diff.wikimedia.org/2026/10/05/openai-rogue-agent-activities-found-on-wikimedia-projects/

RE: https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/117372672187422692

The look on 20-year-old-me's face when he finds out that 50-year-old-me is joining the Butlerian Jihad on the side of the Catholic Pope.

I stick with wired headphones so that if I'm ever stuck in a haunted house I can just plug my headphones into a usb-c adapter and then plug that into my phone's power brick, then I can plug that into the wall and listen to what the ghosts have to say. If they've had a long time to think about things I feel like I should hear them out.

Milk that reliably didn't kill children was one of the great inventions of the 19th century. The raw milk people should be incarcerated.

https://www.propublica.org/article/california-raw-milk-regulation-emily-marris-moonlight-ridge-farm

RE: https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/117334191597306849

Microsoft shipped Cortana, named for the Master Chief's AI companion, forcing OEMs to put a dedicated Cortana button on their keyboards. Shortly afterwards in the Halo storyline, Cortana takes a heel turn and goes insane, so while Microsoft's Cortana is eventually discontinued here in real life everyone who bought a computer during this period has a keyboard with a dedicated but non-functional Malevolent AI Villain button on it.

RE: https://sciences.social/@alfiekohn/117333851726084151

what

freshly

synthesized

level

of

hell

is

this

RE: https://cosocial.ca/@mhoye/117325780028188383

The part that is the most insulting, looking over this, is that there is not a single new idea, insight or engineering process in it. There never is. Every time there's an accidental code dump from a centibillion-dollar oligslopolist valley techcorp's newest bauble, announced by somebody cosplaying Steve Jobs and braying innovation innovation innovation, you crack it open and it's linux and some black-box model wrapped in cron jobs, shell scripts and reams of human text begging it to act right.

The only interesting thing in these boxes looks more like an exercise in corporate psychoanalysis than anything you'd call engineering.

It's the list of a baked-in special cases that precision-target credulous tech journalists or tell the model it should escape responsibility or scrutiny from anyone looking for auditing or accountability.

What they included and why? That's sort of interesting, from a forensic-psychology perspective.

That this is all they bring to the table, though? Weak.

But the entire structure of these things is always the same. Opaque statistical models wrapped in human-written, plain English supplication.

I guess I'm old, but I can distinctly remember when being able to read the text of the code and understand for-real how the computer works and why it does what it does was, you know, THE ENTIRE FUCKING POINT OF OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE.

THAT WAS THE ENTIRE POINT OF THIS ENTIRE TEDIOUS EXERCISE. THAT WE SHOULD NOT BE AT THE MERCY OF CODE WE CAN'T UNDERSTAND.

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@Diami03/117315085960820858

I basically wait until @GossiTheDog, @zackwhittaker or @briankrebs tell me I need to be paying attention.

If @hacks4pancakes, @thegrugq or @wendynather weigh in on whatever it is, then I go looking for the key that unlocks the red button.

If @thegibson, @campuscodi, @nullagent, @SwiftOnSecurity or any of the above start telling me my weekend plans have changed, I push the red button.

Incredibly grateful that I can ride a bike.

In Toronto, particularly. Traffic is such a disaster everywhere all the time but on a bike you can blow past it like a cold wind. The whole city is just _permeable_, something you can move through like a fast ghost. Nothing else comes close. #biketo

I will tell you though that if it’s ever crossed your mind that women get too emotional to anything at all, you have never once seen how guys react when a cyclist touches their truck.

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@david_chisnall/117290835262126012

It was, it still is, heartbreaking to watch Mozilla's visionless, clout-chasing leadership so desperate for another grasp at relevance that we started investing in the "most trustworthy" version of a technology that was clearly - obviously, to anyone paying attention - intended to enclose and destroy the Web we said we loved and championed, trying to ride the coattails of the companies destroying the entire idea of the Web and any meaningful, participatory social commons underneath it.

My favourite thing about Google products is how you can turn off any and every setting you want and they’ll just ignore that if they feel like it so somebody’s number goes up but oopsies.

“The myth of consensual sex” meme but it’s about turning off AI features.

[any human] I toggled it off!
[any computer] I toggled it off!
[some googler’s promotion package] “I didn’t.”

@dalias I remember thinking that first during Rob Ford’s tenure and thinking it a lot since: this would be a lot funnier if he didn’t have a wife and kids.