abadidea

the hex is silent

professional source code complainer, Pwnie Awards 2014 Best Song, will decipher ancient writing systems for free

Access to Odin photos is a privilege contingent on not being the reason I’m regretting the internet today.

English: native; Nederlands: nog niet helemaal vloeiend; 中文：走马观花

Amsterdam

pronouns: she/her

Public Key

npub1n7kt2deqy3xk93nzcvxyy0twcw3jmhvyjhec0pss4punpsyr884ql07g0f

NIP-05 Address

0xabad1dea_at_infosec.exchange@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsflt94xuszgntzce3vxrzz84hv8gedmkzftuu8scg2s7fsczpnn6spz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsjfgcje

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1n7kt2deqy3xk93nzcvxyy0twcw3jmhvyjhec0pss4punpsyr884ql07g0f

Show more details

Last Notes

2026-10-14 09:42:23 UTC

- reply

it boggles me that AH is apparently so dependent on JIT computerized supply chain management that they don't even have the ability to say "well, while the system is down, we should probably just load what looks like a Normal amount of vegetables onto trucks and send some to each grocery store", they just don't send any at all and leave them rotting in the distribution centers

2026-10-14 07:22:57 UTC

so, Albert Heijn, one of the main Dutch grocery chains, has had a major IT disruption because of some sort of ransomware attack, and this has caused stores to not get deliveries of fresh fruits and vegetables
Some passerby was quoted on the news as saying to chin up and stop whining because "it's nothing compared to third-world countries" (their phrase, not mine)
The type of places they mean typically have a *fantastic* selection of fresh fruits and vegetables. A city running out of vegetables overnight is a situation you only get yourself into by complete dependence on hyper-optimized centralized computerized supply chains...

2026-10-13 18:16:09 UTC

Anthropic is bragging about rolling their own from-scratch in-house version control system because git couldn't keep up with their 30,000 commits per day, and it doesn't seem to occur to them for a nanosecond that they are not fixing the actual problem in their engineering practices but making it exponentially worse

2026-09-25 11:51:47 UTC

Happy Flat Fuck Friday
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/117/331/532/437/924/840/original/62dec7313fbd97fd.jpeg

2026-09-25 11:31:55 UTC

- reply

England: doesn't contain any engs
Finland: doesn't contain a particularly unusual number of fins
Holland: may or may not contain hols
Iceland: definitely contains ice

2026-09-25 10:45:50 UTC

Well you don’t see that everyday: Chinese plates in Amsterdam. The stickers declare they’re on a journey from Qingyang to Iceland
#amsterdam
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/117/331/273/021/343/253/original/bf6f0ba42a99a5d2.jpeg

2026-09-21 09:51:20 UTC

I've had people ask before why I post art that's been drawn on lined or grid notebook paper and not blank drawing paper. It's honestly a big psychological hack: blank drawing paper is for "real" art and I'm afraid to mess it up, but art on lined paper is legally "a doodle" and the art cops have to let you walk even if it's bad

2026-09-18 10:10:02 UTC

- reply

"Hearing voices" happens to *almost everyone* at least a few times in their life, but people are often scared to admit they had a harmless, benign voice-hearing experience, or they even deny to themselves that it counted, because the phenomenon is associated with being extremely crazy and dangerous.
For example: have you ever *sworn* that you heard someone call your name, but no-one did? You can point what direction the voice came from in real physical space, but no-one's there? This happens to almost everyone at some point. That's "hearing voices." It's more likely to happen when you're stressed, tired, or really zoned out. Hearing someone calling for you is very common, but you also might swear you just heard your long-dead grandmother say her comforting catchphrase or your worst ex snarl something hurtful.
The fact that you might hear the voice of someone you know is dead, or get the sense that it's a powerful benevolent or malevolent entity's voice, leads many people to spiritual explanations. But it's just your own subconscious grabbing the microphone and noisy, messy brain signals cohering into something you can make sense of at the conscious level.
If voices repeatedly belittle you, threaten you, or urge you to do harmful things, you do need to get outside help to address the inner low-level conflicts that manifest in this high-level distress. But there are millions of people in the world who routinely hear harmless voices, and it's just another facet of the messy human experience. Many people can even sustain dialogue with their voices and find it a helpful way to sort out their thoughts.
And here's a very modern, technocentric metaphor that may help explain why voices can be so nonsensical or disconnected from what you were consciously thinking. Have you ever seen the video game "Hey You, Pikachu"? It has a very simple form of microphone voice control. To do voice recognition with so little processing power, it just takes anything you say and matches it to whichever of about a hundred game-related words the waveform resembles most. So you can say "Carrie's scared of bees" and it will hear "Caterpie".
The subconscious-to-voice wiring is doing something similar: compressing an infinite space of wibbly thought-signals into finite conscious constructs, and the meaning might get rather distorted in the process. It doesn't mean you're "crazy" if the result is sometimes rather strange or embarrassing.
Wow, I'm on a psychological longpost roll...

2026-09-18 09:20:36 UTC

That "ChatGPT is reinventing the bronze age bicameral mind" meme sent me on a long journey to learn about the bicameral mind hypothesis, and while I think that Julian Jaynes way overstated an idea and its implications to untenable extremes, there's a fundamentally true idea in there (that "hearing voices" is the default state of the human mind and most people are culturally trained out of it)
The phrase "the quest for authorization" as the underlying motivation of religion stuck with me, and I do see a lot of profound parallels between traditional religion and over-reliance on LLMs: an unsure, worried person in a complex, frightening world desperate for a reliable external force to reassure them about the correct thing to do, often followed by a willful failure to notice when the advice is obviously bad

2026-09-16 18:22:39 UTC

I like this Mongolian metal video where a shifty young man in a hoodie gets Summoned before the Ancestor Warriors so they can chant aggressively at him that a Real Man is polite, honest, gentle, kind and generous (and good at stabbing dudes when the situation calls for it)
(the English lyrics are in closed captions) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqrKj5lD5y4

2026-09-14 15:58:31 UTC

my husband got so frustrated with a variety streamer trying Kerbal Space Program for the first time that he paused the vod to open KSP projected to the TV to prove to his wife that, unlike millionaire professional gamers, he can land a rocket on the moon
he said it'd take him 20 minutes, it's been more than 20 minutes, but he's definitely doing much better than the streamer 😂

2026-09-08 12:42:20 UTC

⚠️ There is a nationwide public transportation strike tomorrow, 9th September, in the Netherlands. ⚠️ This applies to intercity trains, to all local methods in Amsterdam, and probably also the local methods in other major cities. They are protesting social security cuts.
If you have a flight departing Schiphol tomorrow, go get a hotel near the airport ⚠️TONIGHT.⚠️
The only train in the country will be the one between the stations of Amsterdam Centraal, Schiphol Airport and Hoofddorp.
Kindly do not reply to me as if I am in charge of Dutch public transportation, I am in fact just a rando on the internet who thought you might like to know this before it's too late.
#netherlands #amsterdam #schiphol #travel

2026-09-04 19:07:56 UTC

- reply

I'm afraid this is just a Linux computer shaped like a GBA

2026-09-04 18:45:12 UTC

It’s been pretty thoroughly proven that people can’t be trusted with agentic technology, so everyone is being restricted to Mary Kate and Ashley Pocket Planner for Game Boy Color until further notice.
And yes, it supports 2026, I checked.
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/117/214/249/131/771/386/original/1d5cba407aaa335c.jpeg

2026-09-04 13:55:07 UTC

Happy Flat Fuck Friday
#flatfuckfriday
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/117/213/108/933/914/444/original/1e846103551b66a6.jpeg

2026-09-02 11:01:51 UTC

- reply

Actually to be fair, Dutch public transportation is confusing because they’ll use the same route number in both directions and label them by final destination, assuming you know whether that’s north/south or east/west. So it can be very tricky for visitors to figure out which platform they want to be on

2026-09-02 10:33:26 UTC

Hello to the guy in full 1800s cosplay with a tophat who is checking the time on a chained pocketwatch and has crossed from one tram platform to the other multiple times in confusion because north and south hadn’t been invented yet where he’s from

2026-08-29 20:11:50 UTC

It didn’t rain at all for three months (very unusual for NL) and now it’s monsooning. Mommy is soaked to the bone after a ten minute walkie. Odin the Waterproof Newfie is unaware of any difficulties
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/117/180/616/332/102/041/original/749a7e4b5093cad8.jpeg

2026-08-26 05:56:08 UTC

Runic Keyboard: you can click the runes or type the letters it shows under them https://ruinstaven.nl
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/117/160/259/346/055/714/original/56e879c6f055835e.png

2026-08-24 18:06:45 UTC

today I discovered that ~/Library/Caches/CloudKit/com.apple.bird/(a guid)/MMCS/ClonedFiles contained dozens of temporary copies of massive 800MB image files I'd been working with several months ago, which apparently never got cleaned up by Pixelmator. And that's the story of how I found a hundred gigabytes under the couch cushions

2026-08-24 11:32:33 UTC

My work computer just forced a popup over my screen to let me know that it has not checked for system updates in negative one day(s).

2026-08-22 20:27:06 UTC

Getting a little usb-recharging white led clamp lamp turned out to be a great idea for doing art at night (or in the coming Amsterdam winter)
#gloryinthethunder #mastoart #watercolor
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/117/141/039/915/704/527/original/32a011ad7d18e094.jpeg

2026-08-22 11:00:12 UTC

We beat the impending downpour home by mere seconds. Not today, Amsterdam
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/117/138/806/081/509/143/original/8db414f76919f74a.jpeg

2026-08-17 10:47:42 UTC

I wish that super-late packages came with a printout of whatever ridiculously unlucky hijinks befell them along the way. I live within walking distance of Schiphol Airport, and it just took eight days for a package to get from there to my house.
What could have happened, given that I haven’t heard of any strikes? Tigers nesting in the warehouse? Delivery truck wheels all exploded because there was summer weather in the Netherlands this summer? Eagle snatched the package out of a worker’s hand and someone went on an epic quest to get it back? I’m not mad, just curious about your logistical nightmares

2026-08-15 20:06:37 UTC

you know, having to resort to Tor to reach Anna's Archive, and then getting caught in ddos guard traps and having to cycle through nodes and complete inane captchas before I finally get through, serves as a good moral check on myself that I really do want to download this file and I really can't get it a different way

2026-08-15 08:09:44 UTC

it was the conch shell and yes my back still hurts from when I pulled it two months ago
#retrocomputing
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/117/098/500/603/609/490/original/446d6a5352e89a78.png

2026-08-14 19:58:12 UTC

- reply

He was having a moody teenage goth phase. This is him now
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/117/095/628/073/646/287/original/86b26b41fa68fff8.jpeg

2026-08-14 19:35:32 UTC

this is the post that made Odin famous https://infosec.exchange/@0xabad1dea/113361645675322761

2026-08-14 19:04:22 UTC

me, playing pokemon: better buy an escape rope. never know when you’ll need one
[I cannot recall ever once having needed an escape rope in thirty years]
#pokemon

2026-08-14 11:28:01 UTC

- reply

Got a little too invested in demonstrating that yes, the slash vs no slash thing is confusing at a global scale, so here are the top 10 countries by population and whether they have a slash on their "no pedestrians" sign (as visualized on Wikipedia):
India: slash
China: slash
United States: slash
Indonesia: slash
Pakistan: slash
Nigeria: slash? (lack of data)
Brazil: slash
Bangladesh: slash
Russia: slash
Mexico: slash
so no, it's not an "ignorant Americans at it again" thing.

2026-08-14 10:18:16 UTC

a very Amsterdam problem:
There's big "no pedestrians" signs all over the entrance to a bike lane in the middle of the most touristed part of Amsterdam
but... the Dutch "no pedestrians" sign looks like a "yes pedestrians! pedestrians go here!" sign to 99% of tourists, because there's no slash across it.
The locals suggest that there would be fewer pedestrians if the "no pedestrians" signs were removed, leaving only the bike icon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2GDHXM8JL8

2026-08-13 15:43:01 UTC

- reply

Do not yell at me simply because I am in front of you and the people responsible for the problems are not. It is extremely unpleasant.

2026-08-13 15:38:59 UTC

Kids these days don't know that erasers used to be so bad.
When I was little, pencils had these pink rubber erasers that were a pleasing color but absolutely terrible at their job. They'd just leave a huge smear, they'd disintegrate quickly and get pink shreds everywhere, they'd turn rock hard.
One day, my stingy penny-pinching grandfather somehow came across a pack of Japanese mechanical pencils at an inventory clearance warehouse sale and let me use them. They had these soft white erasers I had never seen before. And they worked WONDERFULLY. I begged to keep the pencils. They were priceless treasures to be rationed. When he got me another pack, which cost like $2, it was an entire Christmas for me.
Now, these soft white erasers are standard issue at the grocery store. Go and appreciate your good cheap erasers!

2026-08-13 14:08:14 UTC

so, (barely) reading between the lines of what Twitch's staff said:
1) they were forced by Amazon to add the AI training setting and to make it opt-out, because the overlords know perfectly well there's no reason anyone would ever opt-in
2) the actual Twitch staff who run Twitch do not like this and are of the same mind about it as all of you
3) Taking the time to opt-out, even if you don't really stream, gives them data to take to meetings with their overlords to prove that Twitch users dislike AI and pushing it too hard will drive people from the site.
Settings > Security and Privacy > Training for Generative AI

2026-08-13 10:35:19 UTC

I just encountered a website where they have entire paragraphs you're meant to read at a slight tilt, alternating between upwards and downwards slants per block, to make their design a little more "jaunty" by which I mean nauseating and unreadable
We need a council with the ability to revoke CSS privileges

2026-08-11 06:15:08 UTC

Two things:
1) those “Dobby’s Grave” headlines were ragebait that vastly exaggerated the issue. You are not immune to propaganda meant to get you yelling at Kids These Days as if they’re the problem
2) “read another book” I have an explicitly trans-positive suggestion https://0xabad1dea.itch.io/glory-in-the-thunder-act-1

2026-08-10 13:41:00 UTC

Came across some code which is subjected to a complexity analysis tool; the tool, called "lizard", has a specific annotation you can add in a comment to request it skip a function, which results in a rather alarming line of code without knowing that context:
// #lizard forgives

2026-08-10 10:46:56 UTC

- reply

he was allowed to move but didn't come any closer

2026-08-10 09:34:34 UTC

there's a new German Shepherd puppy in the building named Ace. The plan is to slowly acclimate Ace to Odin so that he knows Odin also just lives here and nobody needs to be protected from him
They've yet to make nose contact, but Odin was a very good boy about sitting still and wagging his tail while a puppy barked at him from one meter away

2026-08-07 13:52:39 UTC

- reply

As an extremely anxious person, it makes me so happy to see him curled up asleep at my feet completely free of any worries whatsoever. He doesn't even worry when we leave the house without him. I'm doing a good job protecting him :neodog__w_:

2026-08-07 13:33:44 UTC

thinking about how much I love my tiny baby, Odin, who is so very small and in need of my protection
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/117/054/479/052/486/495/original/cfd788be71d8040d.jpeg
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/117/054/479/453/493/399/original/028f51c4e26a00fb.jpeg
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/117/054/479/855/745/204/original/65b48c90828d021d.jpeg
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/117/054/480/114/332/099/original/5b03c5ccf3c180ff.jpeg

2026-08-07 08:51:46 UTC

I just recalled the interesting tidbit that the idea of writing "(he/him)" and "(she/her)" was invented many thousands of years ago by the Sumerians, who often used written symbols you weren't meant to pronounce out loud to help you visually parse the structure of cuneiform, and this included he/she markers for personal names. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinative

2026-08-06 21:17:44 UTC

Photo taken while lying down in my bed to explain why I am still awake past my bedtime
Someone has a case of the midnight cuddles…
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/117/050/642/351/763/016/original/0fe76771ff259cba.jpeg

2026-08-06 10:56:57 UTC

just had a random flashback of some American Lifestyle Trauma
I lived in the suburbs of Boston before I moved to the Netherlands. It had gotten vastly more crowded in recent years with absolutely horrifically inadequate urban planning to compensate. I worked in this huge cluster of office buildings, like easily ten thousand employees, that were an isolated island along a busy stroad; down the stroad was an equally isolated mall complex with plenty to eat. But there were no sidewalks whatsoever along the stroad, no busses going back and forth between the offices and the restaurants, nothing.
Which meant that ten thousand people piled into cars at the same to go get lunch down the street. With extremely predictable results.
There was this little local-chain fast food place that I liked, in its own building with its own little parking lot. It was clear from the rather outdated decor that it'd been in business for decades. But it was dying, unvisited on the side of the road. It was dying because there was too much traffic, not because there was too little. Being on that road for a quick little lunch trip was stressful because it was massively over-crowded and constantly jammed. Getting in and out of that tiny parking lot along a hugely busy road was difficult and dangerous. People didn't even consider going there anymore, it was too hard.
I'm pretty sure it'd already closed by the time I left. Killed by the miraculous capability of the American car-and-road system to deliver vast amounts of customers nowhere.

2026-08-06 09:25:40 UTC

"this dialogue freely chooses to be useless, but I know how to trick the computer into telling me what friggin' process has a friggin' file handle open on my friggin' e-reader"
"well frigg me, I guess"
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/117/047/823/144/995/671/original/7940b9d225ad40d2.png

2026-08-06 07:45:37 UTC

I wish there weren't a far-right extremist manly-man statue avatar philosopher who calls himself Bronze Age Pervert, because it makes it a lot harder for me, someone intensely interested in the lives of women, children, minorities and queers in ancient cultures, to proudly call myself a Bronze Age freak

2026-08-04 20:03:59 UTC

- reply

this post seems to have reached some different people who don't already see Odin's photos so to be clear, this is Odin, the Mascot of Autism
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/117/039/022/580/370/895/original/eced1799421a8ec9.jpeg
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/117/039/022/602/917/556/original/270295c52cecfb51.jpeg

2026-08-04 17:50:53 UTC

Today, the nonverbal autism therapist who works on the corner messaged us and asked us to bring Odin downstairs because one of her students said he wanted the big black dog and (I know firsthand, because I have seen this child several times) that's just about the most communicative he's ever been
He was very excited and Odin was very excited (but well behaved) that someone was excited to see him.

2026-08-04 11:57:04 UTC

I said to someone that Steve Yegge's recent blog posts about AI read like a digital tablet that holds exactly one text file left strewn around a destroyed lab between piles of skulls.
Here is my artistic vision of the vibe his vibe coding obsession gives me. This is made with gamedev assets by Limezu adapted to my personal color palette.
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/117/037/089/131/750/795/original/0edbd9ec1287261a.png

2026-08-04 06:39:27 UTC

The Gas Town Guy is charging hundreds of thousands of dollars for consulting sessions on his infamously expensive multi-model AI techniques, and all that money… “helps with” paying the hydra AI to take over making his old passion project video game for him.
jesus fucking christ. like seriously, jesus fucking christ what the hell that is so fucked up. my dude. my dude, the passionate young programmer in you who started with a janky compiler and a dream in the 90s is drowning in abject misery. This isn’t “using a tool to get routine work done” so you can focus on what matters, this is shoveling gold into the furnace-altar of Mammon as a desperate prayer that the Art you craved to make will somehow magically appear fully formed and you will finally, finally be free
Free to… what, though? Free to do what?!
source: https://yegge.ai/essays/the-shape-of-things-to-come/
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/117/035/863/828/617/294/original/195bfb99bad92191.jpeg

2026-08-02 19:54:45 UTC

my husband said he's proud of me for studying Luwoglyphic Hylian

2026-07-31 18:48:10 UTC

- reply

I cannot get over that they STILL haven't figured out how to solve the problem that LLMs don't believe what date it is because all the good data cuts off a few years ago for some mysterious reason

2026-07-31 16:03:56 UTC

OpenAI: we put our evilest AI in a sandbox that did in fact have an internet connection but mediated through a proxy that was only supposed to allow downloading python junk. It circumvented the proxy and we failed to notice for FIVE DAYS that it was going on an interstate crime spree with the internet connection it wasn't supposed to be using instead of solving the benchmark. Haha no we don't believe we deserve to be criminally liable, but buy our stuff and maybe one day you will have the honor of taking the fall for our product!
Anthropic: we put our evilest AI in a "sandbox" by telling it in its prompt that it had no internet connection. Reader, there was no sandbox. It was just a normal internet connection. The AI uploaded a malicious PyPI package to the real public internet. The ethical guardrails failed because the AI concluded the prompt about the sandbox couldn't possibly be a lie, because the system date is 2026, which is clearly fake and wouldn't be seen on the real internet, which ended around 2023. Oh no, how could we have foreseen or prevented these crimes? We are helpless in the face of the genius of our creation but cautiously optimistic that everything will be fine 🙂
Hugging Face: if we complain about all the crimes committed against us, we will be sued off the face of the earth, so here's a technical deep-dive on how cool and fun it was to be victimized 🫠

2026-07-31 08:04:24 UTC

- reply

to be fair, since posting that, I moved to Amsterdam and The Hague is now SEVERAL miles away instead of a few, so I'm not there as often anymore

2026-07-31 07:53:30 UTC

- reply

the last time I posted about how "The Hague" is actually just a town and people live there and it's where I go for bubble tea, someone got really weird at me about why on earth would I repeatedly go all the way to The Hague just for bubble tea and not just buy it where I live???, apparently failing to grasp the entire point

2026-07-31 07:44:21 UTC

my husband started going on a rant about how people misunderstand what the International Criminal Court does and doesn't do; he said something like "for example, if I went and did a terrorism here in the Netherlands, I wouldn't end up in the Hague, I'd end up in..." and he realized his mistake in using himself as the specific example, who'd go to the local court which is in, well, the Hague

2026-07-29 07:34:16 UTC

Okay, we have a new contender for Most AI Thing to Ever Happen
1) July 25th: someone messes around with an LLM and posts a proof of the Collatz conjecture that does, in fact, verify in the theorem prover. (The AI use is not disclosed on the github page) https://github.com/xrchz/CollatzLean
2) July 26th: several serious bugs are posted in the theorem provers, that in principle could allow a false statement to be "proven" true. They're serious, yes, but no need for panic, because you're not going to blunder into accidentally exploiting the bugs while writing a proof, probably.
https://github.com/leanprover/lean-kernel-arena/pull/81
3) July 28th: someone who was right to be very skeptical of the Collatz proof, and had the expertise to study it with a fine-toothed comb, discovered it was exploiting a bug https://github.com/leanprover/lean4/issues/14576
4) The "proof" turns out to be exploiting multiple similar but distinct bugs to pass different solver variants!
5) the human who posted the proof acknowledges the AI use and claims they did not knowingly point it towards the bugs it exploited. https://leanprover.zulipchat.com/#narrow/channel/270676-lean4/topic/Counterexample.20to.20the.20Lean.20Conjecture.20.28Soundness.20Bug.29/near/613135216
Note that the proof was posted shortly before the related bug reports were posted. It is an open question if the AI found people discussing the bugs shortly before they were formally posted and "decided" to exploit them, if the AI "knew about it" as a learned strategy from the training stage (putting every single "proof" it's ever made and ever will make into profound doubt), or if it's recently been repeatedly blundering into it by sheer stupidity and that's how people noticed the bug at about the same time.
Theorem provers aren't magic, and have bugs just like all other programs. They are tools to help us double-check our reasoning. When you skip the reasoning and ask an AI to "prove" something for you that's over your head, you're entering an adversarial pact with the monkey-pawed Devil of Customer Satisfaction.
my initial source for investigating this myself: https://lipn.info/@mevenlennonbertrand/116997927457012577
#note1es6…3z5h

2026-07-16 16:21:25 UTC

RE: https://mastodon.nl/@at5RSSbot/116929619662872756
Today in Dutch crime: “Canadian woman caught with enormous endangered snake stuffed in her bra at Schiphol airport, claims she found it in her hotel”
I have many questions and I probably don’t actually want to be informed on any of them
#note1wg8…3znc

2026-06-26 09:16:20 UTC

- reply

(as an interesting aside: the signs had only a dog icon and not a baby icon because the Americans are an extremely kidnapping-paranoid culture, and leaving your own young child unattended for even a moment in public can easily get you arrested for negligence. So, it's pretty rare for a young child to be alone in a parked car regardless.)

2026-06-26 08:56:47 UTC

One more “Peoples of the North, hear my plea” for the Netherlands and friends today:
If you leave your child or dog in the car today while you run into the grocery store, they will seriously actually literally be dead by the time you get back.
When I lived in Virginia, they put signs up in grocery store parking lots with dog icons to remind you of this. It only takes a few minutes of a windows-closed car parked in direct heatwave sunlight to kill a toddler or a dog.
Since such heat rarely happens here, I expect a lot of people don’t realize just how serious this is.
#netherlands #heatwave #amsterdam

2026-06-19 14:41:15 UTC

look mommy I too am burdened by the moral crisis of the information age just like mommy :neodog_glasses_phone:
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/116/777/274/229/912/887/original/97bab37d1f181b2a.jpeg

2026-06-13 19:01:11 UTC

https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/116/744/325/453/041/603/original/2b98b08031a2eccb.png

2026-05-28 18:51:18 UTC

the two littlest creatures in the city
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/116/653/704/555/844/813/original/0fac17e37fa75282.jpeg
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/116/653/704/837/489/487/original/92830ab1f65316b9.jpeg

2026-05-27 07:56:01 UTC

Writers: here are ten free and easy ways to add a dash of visual interest to your blog posts without resorting to AI imagery (which signals to readers that your blog post is probably also AI and there’s no need to bother reading it):
1) A thoughtful photo you’ve taken yourself — a nice sunrise you saw, a cool angle spotted on vacation, your pet curled up on the couch, flowers. Play with your phone photo app’s filter settings to nail the tone. It doesn’t need to be particularly related to the post, it’s related to you as a person.
2) An image from Wikimedia Commons that’s somehow related to the subject matter — there are unfathomably many, you can search by keyword. Remember to credit. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
3) A screenshot of a scene you made in a sandbox game such as Minecraft or Animal Crossing
4) A scene you made with toys such as Lego (you can also use free Lego design software such as Bricklink Studio) https://www.bricklink.com/v3/studio/main.page
5) Play with the effects in whatever image editor you have access to, using your own photos or free-to-use images, to create something a bit abstract and avant-garde
6) Even if you can’t draw or paint very well, you can probably make some pretty cool abstract or collage imagery with whatever art supplies you have around. Dampen some paper and randomly dip watercolor paint onto it and see what happens
7) Those stickers you stashed and never used? Yeah you can make something with them. If they’re individually cut, you don’t even need to peel them, you’ll still find the One True Way to use them one day, I’m sure
8) Shelfies. None will dare question your competence after they see you have a real paper copy of Subject Matter Tome Volumes 1 through 6
9) You can get a lot of mileage out of compositing pre-made video game assets into an image. A good place to start is Kenney’s free and generously licensed 2D assets: https://www.kenney.nl/assets/category:2D and the Tiled editor which is specifically meant for assembling images out of video game asset tile sheets https://www.mapeditor.org
10) the most ridiculously amateurish thing you can scribble on a post-it note or in MS Paint is preferable to AI imagery because it clearly signals a real human cares about the post.
#writing #writingcommunity #collage #blog
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/116/645/465/860/425/193/original/b9f8a0e2229d0904.jpeg

2026-05-16 10:47:38 UTC

after reading That rust PR, I can see what they were *trying* to say, but if you lead your big controversial post with “comments raising ethical or legal concerns will be moderated, technical concerns only” then absolutely the only thing anyone is going to talk about is the alarming ethical and legal concern they now have

2026-05-15 12:22:27 UTC

my employer refers to the doctor who assesses whether you're healthy enough to return to work as "the arbo" (from "arbeid") and I hastily typed on my phone that I have an appointment with the arbo, but autocorrect firmly believes I have an appointment with the Argonauts.

2026-05-14 17:22:17 UTC

Just saw a wild pheasant for the first time in my life, like in all those old paintings. Europe is real!
I have also seen deer, bunnies, baby sheep, horses, cows, ducks and at least one good dog other than Odin

2026-05-14 09:11:41 UTC

Good morning to Public Transort Odin
We are taking the train to go unfuck baby cousin’s malware-addled computer, and hopefully teach her the general idea for salvaging these things herself — she’s a compsci student but compsci programs rarely teach foundational computer unfucking.
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/116/572/153/299/886/114/original/eae30ccd8f4f1bc3.jpeg

2026-05-13 11:57:11 UTC

RE: https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/116565662607962457
The chill I got when I downloaded the repo and realized the “exploit” was a zero byte file with a magic filename…
The charitable interpretation is that Microsoft accidentally shipped an internal test build to global production. The less charitable one isn’t very pleasant
#note1yfe…r7j2

2026-05-13 06:04:14 UTC

- reply

:blobcatglare:

2026-05-13 05:40:53 UTC

- reply

this is me trying to be constructive about it and hopefully nudge two or three people on the right path, but I am fully aware that I am setting myself up for the most annoying reply in the history of the world

2026-05-13 05:19:46 UTC

I often get replies that really clearly fit into the pattern described by those who warn about the literacy skills crisis — where readers see only the keywords, and construct a completely different sentence in their head with the same keywords and respond to it.
It’s 100% not your fault if you got stuck with a terrible education system that didn’t give you strong reading skills. But you can, and should, fight back and look for ways to improve your reading skills yourself. The rewards are infinite and lifelong.
One way to start: when you want to reply to a post, ESPECIALLY if you’re replying because the post annoyed you… ➡️slow down, read it again.⬅️ Your brain might have gotten ahead of your eyes! You can also use TTS to hear complex things out loud, if that’s what helps.

2026-05-12 19:11:58 UTC

Odin on the couch
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/116/563/188/845/145/338/original/562f26d7e1fa0f83.jpeg
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/116/563/189/096/964/267/original/548ef7c3660d1fab.jpeg

2026-05-12 15:57:12 UTC

My baby cousin called me in tears because all her accounts have been compromised. We went over possible infection vectors (the “try my game” DM scam etc) and nothing stood out. But then she wondered if they’d gotten a foothold through the Canvas ransom somehow.
Has anyone else heard of students getting their personal accounts popped very recently in a way that might be tied to the Canvas incident?

2026-05-12 07:38:44 UTC

夫市之无虎明矣，然而三人言而成虎。
“That there are no tigers in the marketplace is a given, but if three people say ‘tiger!,’ then a tiger pops into existence” (in the mind of the listener) — Han Feizi’s version of the boy who cried wolf
my first-pass glossing is rather idiosyncratic — 夫 is “hwæt” and 矣 is (modern Mandarin) 了 because that’s easier and clearer than trying to map it to a specific English morpheme
#classicalchinese #translation #fountainpen
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/116/560/463/243/944/428/original/8e6d9c87948b9343.jpeg

2026-05-11 11:55:11 UTC

customer: we need a wet signature
me, rummaging through my fountain pens: this cheap paper won’t hold up to my wettest nibs at all, but okay
#fountainpen

2026-05-11 06:00:03 UTC

good morning to the pigeon who landed on our balcony, took one mighty strut through the open door, saw Odin asleep on the floor, and decided that Tuskegee is lovely this time of year

2026-05-10 20:21:23 UTC

I took Odin out for his bedtime walk and, upon opening the building front door, found Mila crouched down on the sidewalk waiting for him in the dark. She'd dragged her dad straight there

2026-05-10 10:23:58 UTC

Just had a panic attack when I realized I'd put a sandwich in the toaster iron 15 minutes ago and then forgotten about it
Good news! I forgot to ever plug in the toaster iron in the first place! Multidimensional chess.

2026-05-10 06:24:57 UTC

RE: https://mathstodon.xyz/@dpiponi/116528430767155152
I will never forget the time I booted up nethack on Friday the 13th, curious to see just how bad the luck penalty could be, and the very first step I took produced the message “your kitten has been crushed by a boulder”
#note1lkk…0xss

2026-05-09 16:42:02 UTC

I just learned there's a speedrunner named "first_try_I_swear" who has records in like a few dozen different games but at the beginning of all his runs he does a fake spiel about just installing the game and being excited to try it out

2026-05-09 11:22:13 UTC

Odin met a true fluffernutter today in the park. His name was Pedro
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/116/544/354/565/876/651/original/73d61a257e9d686b.jpeg
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/116/544/355/068/180/039/original/e4b20ef3b4403144.jpeg

2026-05-09 10:08:31 UTC

blessed by the rare Danger Tram, doing maintenance on a disused track. It was burning diesel because the power lines don’t work #tram #trains #publictransport #amsterdam
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/116/544/065/236/612/826/original/e81622e6b43a0c16.jpeg

2026-05-09 07:31:35 UTC

You: my cat always jumps on the bed while I’m changing the sheets, it’s a real pain
Me: yeah,,,
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/116/543/448/160/279/700/original/4e321f27fea5e782.jpeg

2026-05-09 06:22:27 UTC

(I wake up and blearily check my notifications) whoa, how did — CATSALAD

2026-05-08 20:11:10 UTC

my husband has gotten sucked into a poorly translated eurojank age-of-piracy game, and he's over here with an excel sheet pulling out his hair screaming "France has declared war on Spain?! I was heading for a Spanish port! My entire cargo is worthless! I am RUINED!" and then he starts explaining to me how much overhead it is to pay his crew etc etc and how thin his margins are, and I realized he's just playing Small Business Simulator (With Pirates)
(the game is called Caribbean Legend and he wanted me to forewarn that it's kinda Problematic in exactly the way a poorly translated eurojank game set in the Americas would be)

2026-05-08 18:27:27 UTC

🚨Glory in the Thunder Act 1 is in early access on itch dot io🚨
Chapters 1 through 3 completely available right now, roughly one third of the planned reading length. (The project as a whole is about half done.) Play in browser or download for desktop.
The twelve-year-old Goddess of Time has made the biggest mistake in the history of the world, and it's time to confess.
https://0xabad1dea.itch.io/glory-in-the-thunder-act-1
#gloryinthethunder #visualnovel #renpy #itchio #lgbtq #yuri
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/116/540/345/544/371/682/original/65ddcaea47551c52.jpg

2026-05-08 13:35:07 UTC

it has been 0 days since I encountered something that was licensed "feel free to use this in your projects, please just credit me by name!" and they forgot to actually state their name anywhere in the readme or the code. 😅 document your assumptions 😂

2026-05-08 09:17:20 UTC

we were walking down a narrow residential street when two little dogs who live directly opposite each other both caught sight of Odin from upstairs and started barking their heads off
my husband: "we are between Scylla and Charybdis"

2026-05-07 16:20:14 UTC

> Dutch grocery store
> “Oranje Spekken!”
> look inside
> neither oranje nor spek
> only delicious trans pride.
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/116/534/201/851/660/099/original/02091aa15b6d8eea.jpeg

2026-05-07 13:42:00 UTC

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0ut_PUAxfU
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/116/533/566/799/193/568/original/fefb5496ad46cd92.png

2026-05-07 07:14:33 UTC

sweetie, sometimes when a mommy loves another mommy very much, a malevolent entity who ships them gets involved in a way you don't need to worry about
#gloryinthethunder #yuri
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/116/532/039/238/903/642/original/6ecbd40fc7b64f29.jpg
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/116/532/039/232/141/118/original/6f89f023299bf216.jpg

2026-05-06 09:25:17 UTC

Odin got double walkies today when mommy said as she left the house “let’s go to the pharmacy,” proceeded to walk the normal route, got back to the door and hit her forehead and said “the PHARMACY!”
He was visibly confused but happy to oblige

2026-05-05 16:48:54 UTC

here I've been combing for old documents and stuff to free up disk space on my laptop, when all I need to do is do a little file system surgery to make sure Chrome will not be able to successfully redownload this *four and a half gigabyte* local model when it notices I somehow "accidentally" deleted it (replaced with 0-byte read only locked file, parent folder set to read only and locked, grandparent folder set to read only and locked)
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/116/522/928/180/730/168/original/0e32d00e1a59bec4.png

2026-05-05 14:44:10 UTC

my husband mentioned that Odin has seemed less whiny and needy for attention lately; I think it’s because he finally has a consistently available dog friend who isn’t afraid of him.
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/116/522/499/685/285/984/original/86d8b5dc020779e0.jpeg
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/116/522/499/935/619/933/original/b984749032b7a968.jpeg

2026-05-05 13:28:45 UTC

this painting is probably meant to represent a funeral but I can only read it as the kid is having the worst birthday party ever, and his grampa really regrets hiring this musician.
("Boyan" by Viktor Vasnetsov)
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/116/522/193/189/136/097/original/9df155eeaddb46a4.png

2026-05-04 15:02:26 UTC

Beware the tall grass! A wild Odin might jump out, and he is immune to nettle damage
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/116/516/909/407/776/003/original/aeace1dd956211be.jpeg

2026-05-04 09:18:51 UTC

Odin needed an emergency rinse after he and Mila discovered a fresh pile of slightly damp black soil deposited in their play spot.
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/116/515/557/114/316/193/original/a9dbbf294f2a78a2.jpeg
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/116/515/557/734/548/467/original/3286bb52434c8a4b.jpeg
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/116/515/558/140/488/849/original/229fb7c02af105b3.jpeg
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/116/515/558/398/476/280/original/388ec3c4dac6b53c.jpeg

2026-05-03 14:02:53 UTC

We had a bit of an Incident; we ran into the learning-disabled young man who likes Odin at the ice cream stand, and he shoved his ice cream cone out to Odin, who got a big lick in; his assistant wanted him to understand he shouldn’t hold out random food to random dogs, so I couldn’t let Odin have the rest, but naturally he felt very entitled to the ice cream that had been freely offered to him and was very upset about being held back from it.
everything’s okay, Odin is now very focused on my chicken tendies.

2026-05-03 10:33:16 UTC

I wrote up my personal philosophy on translating ancient texts, as informed by being raised in a religious environment that had a very unhealthy relationship to its texts. https://xn--hmr.net/classicalchinese/translationphilosophy/
#classicalchinese #translation #localization #philosophy
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/116/510/186/756/562/789/original/13dd715a19cc67a4.png