Friendship is when two people agree to never actually do lunch

Two patreon puzzles from @nervous_jessica and @nervous_jesse

Yes the Jupiter one is actually completed, it's mapped onto a cube so that it's edgeless and can be assembled in many ways, this was just how mine happened to come out

except our girl's makeup

Wrote a little blogpost about Slidgram (XMPP<->Telegram transport for XMPP server) installation in the NetBSD

https://eugene-andrienko.com/it/2025/09/20/slidgram-netbsd-install-howto.html

#NetBSD #XMPP #Prosody #Telegram

I reached 10,000 blog posts today.

Not sure what to think, or how best to celebrate, so I wrote whatever this was. Coffee!

https://rubenerd.com/10000-blog-posts/

Are you planning on attending a protest soon? Your smartphone can be an essential tool, but it's also a huge risk to your privacy, security, and safety. If you decide to bring one along, you need to keep yourself protected:

(🔥 hot tip: this advice is still great even if you aren't hitting the streets!)

https://www.privacyguides.org/articles/2025/01/23/activists-guide-securing-your-smartphone/

#Privacy #Security #PeacefulProtest #Protest #Guide #NoKings #NoKingsDay #Activism #ActivistSecurity #Cybersecurity #Article #PrivacyGuides

Silent Sunday.

#SilentSunday

Silent Sunday.

#SilentSunday

Fred Brown, sand artist re-created Banksy’s censored art on the beach in Scarborough, UK 🇬🇧
Simply amazing!

#Banksy #SandArt #UnitedKingdom #Resist #England #MastoArt #NoCensorship

Messaging platforms' coolness factor:

WhatsCrapp, FartBook Massager, et. al. <
RCS, iMessage <
SMS/MMS <
Signal <
Matrix <
XMPP, DeltaChat, ordinary email <
IRC <
[FT8]/JS8Call <
[Hellschreiber] <
[RTTY] <
[-.-. .--]

“You failed to consider…”

Actually, I didn’t.

I succeeded in considering it.

And I considered it stupid.

This is a story of how ZDNet got blocked from my news list.

Absolute bullshit. The term "click bait" doesn't cover it. It's total bullshit. ZDNet knows it's bullshit but decided making people anxious about their passkeys was no big deal and ran with it anyway.

This is not acceptable. It takes significant cognitive load to filter information, even on a good day. Throwing these "you must act" headlines into the mix is grossly abusive. ZDNet is dead to me now.

#ZDnet #Passkeys

@evgandr

This is my solution: https://polymaths.social/@rl_dane/statuses/01K5C63Y0WYNV4A1X3QM0K98RJ

George Monbiot. Essential reading. Just, maybe don't read this today if you're already feeling the darkness of the world right now.

"Such people are now so dominant that they no longer even have to make sense."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/sep/20/journalist-40-years-forces-profession-power

image with no description

That's what my screen reader says when it encounters a picture or screenshot of text with no alt text.
Just wasn't sure if some of you knew that.

Thanks for the reminder to cancel Disney+. As my wacky Jethro Tull loving high school history teacher used to say, "you gotta hit 'em in the pocketbook". That was his primary take from all of U.S. History. And he's right. So let's really hit them where it hurts: the money.

Sleepy. #cats #OrangeCats #CatsOfMastodon

Current state of tech: the most interesting thing about a device seems to be what its back looks like 🤷

You see them, don't you? Posing on the covers of magazines, hailed as visionaries, architects of the new economy. You think you're looking at a titan of industry. You're not. You're looking at a script kiddie who found his parent's root password to the global economy.

He doesn't know how the machine works. He has no idea. The founder, the grandparent, the one who built it all from scrap and nerve and sixty-hour weeks? They had to know the machine. They had to lay the wiring, fix the bugs, understand the physics of the thing because their own skin was on the line. The power they earned resided in them, a result of discipline, of sleepless nights spent wondering if the whole damned thing would compile.

But the heir… the heir inherits a shell with full privileges. He doesn't write the code, he just runs the script. A script named lawyers.sh. A script named accountants.py. A script named public_relations.rb. He doesn't understand the intricate dance of supply chains or the brittle dependencies of a local economy. He just sees a user interface with a single button labeled "disrupt".

So he pushes it. Just to see what happens.

He doesn't want to build, he wants the notoriety of having built. He brute forces reality with a cheat code of inherited capital. He calls it "creative destruction", but he understands the "destruction" part about as well as a teenager with a copy of Metasploit understands the architecture of the network he's just brought to its knees.

And the consequences are the same. The script kiddie launches a DDoS attack and takes a hospital's website offline for a day. He feels a flicker of power, then gets bored and moves on, leaving others to fix the damage. The billionaire heir runs his script, "optimises" a factory out of existence to bump a stock price, and guts a town of its livelihood. He feels a flicker of validation, then gets on his jet and moves on, leaving entire communities to fix the damage.

Neither of them feels a shred of responsibility, because they never went through the discipline of learning the system they're attacking. They have no concept of the collateral damage because, to them, it's not a living, breathing system. It's just a puzzle box to be cracked for points.

Don't ever mistake them for innovators. They're not. They're the result of a security flaw - a privilege escalation vulnerability in the source code of society - and they're finding out what happens when they run every exploit they have, all at once, on the machine we happen to live inside of. Eventually it breaks.

(inspired by Ian Malcolm's speech about "inherited wealth" in Jurassic Park - I've inverted the metaphor)