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• Post #4479968

  This from Scott Aaronson was good: "Just like the more AI does, the less patience I have for arguing with anonymous blog commenters who treat any benefits from AI as some weird future hypothetical that it’s my job to prove, so it is with quantum advantage. Scalable fault-tolerance is still in the future, actual usefulness is still a question, but pending some breakthrough in complexity theory, the reality of quantum advantage is no longer a live question." (in response to Qedma and I...

• Post #4458081

  @lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org exactly. I explained to one of my high school aged kids yesterday that knowing how to find answers is far more valuable than knowing any particular answers.

• Post #4457419

  RE: https://mastodon.social/@simple_sabotage/117063452233590726 Or do it well, and include a bunch of unverified generative AI output

• Post #4456441

  @muddle@infosec.exchange this was an outstanding reference, thanks for surfacing it

• Post #4456385

  RE: https://mastodon.social/@Daojoan/117062681829551245 This is what came up in conversation here a day or two ago: the real value of primary and secondary education is an learning how to learn, how to think, and how to ask good questions. You might get more specialized information at university, but those three core skills are the ones that matter the most over the course of your life.

• Post #4456316

  @Daojoan@mastodon.social ‘s Costco Theory of Internet is now available as a browser extension: https://knockoff.co/

• Post #4406683

  RE: https://mas.to/@PicardTips/117044798588657312 Corollary: everything is a tradeoff. (Rule 3)

• Post #4390381

  RE: https://digipres.club/@foone/117038826379369323 This entire Foone thread is the hardest I have nodded at something in a long time

• Post #4216218

  Talking to a friend who was remembering his time living in the East Bay like 25 years ago, and he said “Walnut Creek” and even now I mentally append “… ftp.cdrom.com”

• Post #4206302

  Second best thing about vacation: not hearing anything about AI or basically any news Best thing about vacation: setting aside all responsibility that isn’t “what shall we eat today?” and “which trail should we walk this morning?” Worst thing about vacation: having people ask me “what are we doing next?” and then griping about whatever it is that I say in response.

• Post #4205702

  Tycho on Amazon (as a sidebar in a recent post) is very telling; customer obsession (the legendary first LP) has been almost entirely replaced with customer extraction. “When I was trying to set the family up with the newest David Tennant version of Macbeth, which you should absolutely watch, I saw that Masters of the Universe was included with Prime. And it is, but with commercials, and you can buy a subscription for your subscription to take the ads away. I understand this is old news but vir...

• Post #4152933

  When you’re dropping new exploits and everybody wants a piece #infosec #diving #alttext

• Post #4117772

  #silentsunday

• Post #4090625

  /cc @dailyHotWheels@mastodon.world https://bird.makeup/users/rainmaker1973/statuses/2080854300100575520

• Post #4056935

  RE: https://mastodon.social/@GeePawHill/116973617281661471 Threads of encouragement need boosting more than any other kind

• Post #4056797

  @q@glauca.space turns out the least efficient solution to traveling salesman problem is not NP-hard 😂

• Post #4056319

  Gratitude is the antidote to so much of what we struggle with as people, but it does not come naturally to most of us. I have found that the intentional practice of explicitly acknowledging and recounting the things I am thankful for has profound health benefits (mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical) that I experience nowhere else. https://infosec.exchange/@darkuncle/111455819559532422

• Post #4043743

  RE: https://mastodon.art/@mobydick/116970778557609430 Melville has never felt more relevant

• Post #4042203

  Reflecting this morning on the fact that the vast majority of reality operates on a scale that is either too quick or too slow, or too small or too large, for us to perceive. If we could see things as they truly are, it would be more than we could take in.

• Post #4022350

  RE: https://mastodon.world/@dailyHotWheels/116965874372243715 I HAVE THIS ONE!!

• Post #4005544

  wow. Even Amazon CTO Werner Vogels is saying what I opined on here a couple of weeks ago: that the rise of AI is going to swing the pendulum away from the increased specialization we have seen the past couple of decades in tech, and back towards valuing generalists and systems thinkers again. (Werner is a very smart guy and one of the people whose opinion on tech I value highly.) https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/aws/werner-vogels-amazon-cto-predictions-2026

• Post #4004729

  One of my favorite things about Fedi is running across people who have been doing Internet stuff far longer than even I have, including some names I have respected for decades

• Post #4004564

  Rusty Nail: not as good as a Godfather. And neither of them are as good as a paper plane (but they're easier to make).

• Post #4003444

  RE: https://infosec.exchange/@wendynather/116959722944579401 Attention, Internet denizens: read on for a thread full of your elders talking about data center shenanigans from the olden days. Emergency Power Off buttons have not always been easy to locate …

• Post #3996501

  If customers have no right to refunds on tariffs that Nintendo voluntarily passed through to them, then Nintendo has no right to tariff refunds from the government in the first place. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/nintendo-customers-have-no-legal-right-to-tariff-refunds-company-tells-judge/

• Post #3995791

  RE: https://mastodon.social/@andrewnez/116957927924774721 In which command-line stuff is hard, especially when your program is directly executing arguments passed in from untrusted sources.

• Post #3990253

  RE: https://mastodon.social/@Julf/116958505996319541 the staggering lack of self-awareness in seeking to avoid the output of *your own product* because it's harmful to doing reliable things, so that you can keep building that product, just boggles the mind. (Put another way: "goose not valued", but in this case the goose is human reasoning and thinking and the creative process; the output (books) is a consequence of the human mind that produced it. Attempting to indirectly reprod...

• Post #3990002

  Researchers detected atmosphere on a rocky exoplanet in the habitable zone of another star (48 light-years away) for the first time. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy4kdd1e0ejo #space

• Post #3989795

  This from Stanford's Mauritz Kop (founder of their Center for Responsible Quantum Technology) on the array of #quantum-related challenges the world is facing, and the US government's largely disjointed (though recently improving) approach was pretty good: https://warontherocks.com/cogs-of-war/before-q-day-the-race-to-quantum-first/ 1/2

• Post #3978956

  I wonder if @alice@lgbtqia.space has a pick for this one https://bird.makeup/users/rainmaker1973/statuses/2079336801190244644