Chris Palmer

Music for life, software safety engineering for a living, for now. https://noncombatant.org/

Web: https://noncombatant.org
Signal: fugueish.87

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npub12nla74m2alnr6u58k59edfma8ftj5skkpdf8auy47v2mt3hd96dsfp6dft

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[email protected]

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nprofile1qqs9fl7l2a4wle3aw2rm2zuk5a7n54e2gttqk5n77z2lx9d4cmkjaxcpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsm078vh

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relay.damus.io

nos.lol

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npub12nla74m2alnr6u58k59edfma8ftj5skkpdf8auy47v2mt3hd96dsfp6dft

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Last Notes

2026-09-24 00:28:41 GMT

"A certain AI researcher said of recent AI hacking incidents: “AI agents … took actions that would be considered as crimes if a human took them”—seemingly taking it as axiomatic that these were not human-controlled activities and therefore cannot qualify as crimes. But they were and they do. ... So let’s call this narrative what it is: an attempt to thwart the rule of law."
https://matthewbutterick.com/chron/drop-dead.html

2026-09-20 15:15:12 GMT

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How do you pronounce “xor”?

2026-09-19 03:44:08 GMT

Choose your fighter:

2026-09-15 17:45:49 GMT

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cheap!

2026-09-15 17:37:11 GMT

RE: https://social.s31bz.com/@s31bz/117275995786158041
Rebranding Brain as “the eco-friendly chatbot”
#note16wt…6xtr

2026-09-09 17:52:38 GMT

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@cR0w/117241961119105876
CVE-2026-0310 means that, in 2026, the product parses XML from the network as root, and and suffers from the most straightforwardly fixable class of memory unsafety. Depending on the details, they also might not be using exploit mitigations.
That's just a long way of saying "Decommission your deployments of products from this vendor."
#note1mrr…jdwk

2026-09-01 00:00:50 GMT

RE: https://tacobelllabs.net/@selectric/117191768374424478
Use whatever password manager comes with your platform. It’s the kind of software that works best when embedded into the platform itself. https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/passmgrs.html
#note1awq…90ax

2026-08-23 05:29:18 GMT

RE: https://wandering.shop/@fugueish/117137397950819041
Definitive answer to the oldest question in the Star Wars legendarium:
#note1dun…q6s6

2026-08-22 05:00:46 GMT

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Did Luke Skywalker pee in the bacta tank?

2026-08-22 04:53:40 GMT

OH: "We're planning a hyperspace route to Potatoland"

2026-08-21 00:42:10 GMT

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@nmott/117108218793305138
Not only is secure usability very hard in its own right, poor security- and non-security-related UX breaks the now very tenuous narrative that even top-tier software is trustworthy at all. Even if your product is perfectly fine, the shittiness of the ecosystem affects everything!
#note1gr3…y8gw

2026-08-19 15:01:33 GMT

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What gaps in existing CFAA, IP, and financial crimes laws do you see? To me, it’s an enforcement problem: fascists aren’t going to prosecute their friends. The problem for the human race to solve together is fascism; after that, this stuff is just regular crime.

2026-08-19 14:40:44 GMT

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“We” don’t have to do anything. The people who work at the AI companies have to stop being negligent. They are failing to use well-understood safeguards while doing something dangerous, plain and simple. The answer is, at least in some cases, prosecution under existing laws.

2026-08-14 20:27:53 GMT

On X poisoning:
"Do you think that in the second quarter of the 21st century, reporters walk the Earth, observing concrete reality and assembling truth from scratch? We don’t have the resources for that. Just like everyone else, journalists look at their phones — but then they call two guys at think tanks funded by weapons contractors to confirm."
https://www.northsouthnotes.org/p/the-vibe-shift-was-a-leveraged-buyout

2026-08-13 18:17:00 GMT

https://stockroom.wandering.shop/media_attachments/files/117/089/562/338/252/506/original/16d769951902b77d.jpg

2026-08-12 03:00:10 GMT

GNU’s Not Unix
COW Obviates Windows
ANT’s Not Tenex
FISH is ITSS’ Subsystem Host
CAT Ain’t TOPS-10
PIG Isn’t Genera
VERVET Essentially Reimplements VMS-Era Technology
ORANGUTAN Replicates AIX, NT, GECOS, Unix, TOPS-20, And NeXTSTEP
OPOSSUM Provides an Operating System Substantially Unlike MULTICS

2026-08-11 06:19:48 GMT

RE: https://mastodon.social/@mrmacintosh/117075193323529726
A hacker's hacker. 🫡
#note14re…ctyl

2026-08-08 03:45:33 GMT

Which model of Cat™️ did you order?

2026-08-03 18:10:20 GMT

Le Restaurant Des Robots Rêveurs, par @npub1hhs…rl5g https://bsky.app/profile/gillossen.bsky.social/post/3ms4cwtnnwc2z

2026-07-31 23:06:48 GMT

RE: https://lgbtqia.space/@alice/117015581911370375
This is a crime, and Hugging Face are not the only ones intentionally doing it.
See e.g. https://www.404media.co/a16z-backed-ai-site-civitai-is-mostly-porn-despite-claiming-otherwise/
"...Civitai, a platform for sharing AI image generation models that has been instrumental in the production of AI generated non-consensual porn, Civitai has consistently argued that the amount of adult content on the site has been overstated. But new research shows that, if anything, the amount of adult content on Civitai has been underestimated."

2026-07-30 15:51:34 GMT

RE: https://flipboard.com/@404media/404-media-qvt3vv94z/-/a-PlrpjcjwS62vtJZr1DPjAg%3Aa%3A4082434389-%2F0
Technically, the little X on the tab is part of your browser’s UI. But yes, it is very effective
#note14jn…6j08

2026-07-30 06:55:55 GMT

“This looks like a real crisis of faith. No, it doesn’t point to a U.S. recession, partly because so much of the AI investment boom has gone to imported equipment (hence KOSPI). But it does feel like the end of the early euphoria, of the triumph of hype over experience.”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/when-the-chips-are-down

2026-07-22 21:17:59 GMT

I have blocked all of Hetzner’s IPv4 and v6 prefixes. `iptables` is a pathway to abilities some consider… unnatural

2026-07-22 20:32:43 GMT

“That’s just a bunch of bumpy lumps!” the frumpy, grumpy chump harrumphed.

2026-07-19 20:04:13 GMT

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That’s a choice. Google executives knowingly chose to make their flagship cash-cow product, and the entire web ecosystem, worse. They presumably had reasons.
They also chose to increase their system’s energy usage by 50% (and growing), even for the same revenue. It used to be that Search was incredibly efficient (yes, really). Not anymore. They presumably had reasons.

2026-07-19 19:59:49 GMT

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ME: Google Search used to be incredibly accurate and useful. Not only that, there were massive positive externalities!
THE KIDS: Sure, grandpa. Let’s get you to bed

2026-07-19 18:48:52 GMT

The open web is being further ruined. Basic privacy protections are at odds with anti-bot/anti-scam protections and at odds with (naturally) surveillance and ads.
This is a choice that we are making as a society.
"Increasingly we’re being presented with a choice that is no choice at all: get rid of all your precautions and let us get our hooks in, or we’ll shut you out of the internet, bit by bit."
https://flaminghydra.com/403-forbidden/

2026-07-19 06:33:35 GMT

My “member of a cat cult” t-shirt has a lot of people asking questions already answered by my shirt
https://stockroom.wandering.shop/media_attachments/files/116/945/237/536/883/045/original/62b6e4526638dd5a.jpeg

2026-07-16 02:56:04 GMT

"And the answer is that you make foundational investments in systemic prevention of entire classes of vulnerabilities, even at the expense of having marginally high latency to fixing individual vulnerabilities. While in the very short run this can be painful, on longer time scales, it’s essential. ...like any good engineering project you should structure you work towards incremental deliverables that add value, not one giant big-bang that won’t materialize for forever."
https://alexgaynor.net/2026/jul/15/you-cant-bugfix-your-way-out-of-the-vulnpocalypse/

2026-06-27 23:54:04 GMT

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Preferred Name @ Org

2026-06-27 22:24:01 GMT

RE: https://mastodon.online/@mullvadnet/116822244689326681
It is with heavy hearts that we must inform you the (civil) libertarian-to-fascist pipeline remains incredibly short and well-greased
#note1kzh…5ljx

2026-06-21 04:37:20 GMT

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snorcculents!!

2026-06-21 01:38:47 GMT

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Absolutely unhinged UX, across the board
I can only assume there are academic UX studies plumbing its depths, along the lines of this classic banger https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/2509578.2509584

2026-06-18 22:03:33 GMT

Why zorbulate when you can crombulize? I’ve never gotten a clear answer on that

2026-06-05 03:37:12 GMT

If your website doesn’t load in under 3 seconds* on an expensive phone in The Software Town, you did it wrong. Yes, this means every social media company and every newspaper are doing it wrong. I said what I said
*The true quality bar is 0.5 seconds, but I’m feeling unreasonably generous today

2026-06-02 03:55:28 GMT

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the greatest animal in the history of the universe, how good would you say cats are?

2026-05-31 17:03:33 GMT

“Albert Camus broke with Jean-Paul Sartre and the French left over the most concrete political question there is: can the people alive today be treated as acceptable casualties in the pursuit of a better future?2
[…] Any system of thought that subordinates living people to a hypothetical future has already committed the foundational moral error. Once you accept that logic, there is no limiting principle.”
https://www.owenmcgrann.com/p/the-dead-economy-theory

2026-05-31 04:30:52 GMT

Should you pass a kidney stone?

2026-05-14 16:35:33 GMT

Did you know…?
In the 18th century, C programmers often confused `ſprintf` and `fprintf`

2026-05-13 23:14:37 GMT

Yambic pentameter:
A sweet potato pie is good to eat

2026-05-08 04:23:12 GMT

Wait — Darmok and Jalad were at Tanagra? Holy shit

2025-11-25 22:31:04 GMT

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https://stockroom.wandering.shop/media_attachments/files/115/612/702/029/962/753/original/51f5caaf5ece9c85.mp4

2025-10-16 03:18:47 GMT

Next time someone says that "public wifi" is uniquely risky, just send them this (or the output of `traceroute`, but I digress)
https://infosec.exchange/@vinoth/115370719768176795

2025-10-14 03:11:49 GMT

Tomorrow's nonsense word will be:
B L I M P O R P
Or, for those of you in Commonwealth countries,
B L I M P O U R P

2025-08-25 01:46:40 GMT

"In March, for the first time, fossil fuels generated less than half the electricity in the U.S. In California, at one point on May 25th, renewables were producing a record hundred and fifty-eight per cent of the state’s power demand. Over the course of the entire day, they produced eighty-two per cent of the power in California, which, this spring, surpassed Japan to become the world’s fourth-largest economy."
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/46-billion-years-on-the-sun-is-having-a-moment

2025-04-17 05:33:51 GMT

Woke up to uBlock Origin Lite being turned off by Chrome, because uBOL increased the permissions it requests. (Chrome does this for all extensions that increase their declared permissions, and that is good.)
The point of uBOL is that it needs bare-minimum, safe permissions only; but now, it was asking for full control over all web pages. You should borderline never grant that level of permission to a browser extension.
But! You can fix it. Here's how

2025-02-07 05:41:06 GMT

"The point of cognitive automation is NOT to enhance thinking. The point of it is to avoid thinking in the first place. That’s the job it does. You won’t notice when the censorship kicks in." — @npub1hr7…jxyc
https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2025/poisoning-for-propaganda/

2024-10-09 18:26:19 GMT

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Amazing and shocking: https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/two-nobel-prizes-for-ai-and-two-paths

2024-10-09 05:59:37 GMT

I don't know who needs to hear this*, but AI is not physics
*I do. It's the Nobel committee

2024-09-18 17:40:17 GMT

This is a deep embarrassment for the tech industry. I got into software from the starting point of linguistics. I love language, and I loved the idea of lil language boxes with blinky lights. This feeling is grief — seeing the greatest corpora in the world, polluted.
https://github.com/rspeer/wordfreq/blob/master/SUNSET.md

2024-08-30 16:44:50 GMT

Alex Gaynor on the intersection of memory safety and sandboxing: https://alexgaynor.net/2024/aug/30/impact-of-memory-safety-on-sandboxing/

2024-08-29 16:53:00 GMT

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Go's C-like disregard for the value of clear semantics and a meaningful type system has always bothered me.
> If u.Host doesn't contain a valid numeric port, Port returns an empty string.
So they go to the trouble of parsing, and then throw away the information gained. Glorious

2024-08-24 03:31:34 GMT

The government needs to adopt modern risk management and abandon checkbox compliance. AV hugely increases the amount of soft, privileged attack surface on a system, and is rarely — if ever — engineered to modern standards. In addition, it complicates rather than eases platform security engineering (insert beer, receive war stories).
There are damn good reasons modern platforms simply don't allow, or need, AV.
https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/08/oh-your-cybersecurity-researchers-wont-use-antivirus-tools-heres-a-federal-lawsuit/

2024-08-01 19:12:57 GMT

An obviously abuse-affording feature afforded abuse in the obvious way. https://infosec.exchange/@briankrebs/112887890911515501
Time is a flat circle: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/what-happened-firefox-send