one of the main problems with computers nowadays is that they got rid of the turbo button

fun fact I learned while investigating this; the order of files you get in a tarball when telling GNU tar to archive a directory is undefined by default! I guess this made sense in the 1980s but it is a hell of a thing to discover in a tool that you use regularly

(we no longer publish tarballs to fennel-lang.org but we still have to deal with old files from years ago)

yesterday I started reviewing the #fennel downloads we have been publishing on https://fennel-lang.org for the past six years; these have all been signed, so I wrote a quick script to double-check the signatures

what I found was that six of the files did not have their signatures check out, which could be explained by either tampering or manual error

the six files were:

• fennel-1.0.0-arm32
• fennel-1.0.0-windows32.exe
• fennel-1.0.0-x86_64
• fennel-1.3.0-arm32
• fennel-1.3.0-windows32.exe
• fennel-1.3.0.tar.gz

all but the last are binaries, and as such difficult to meaningfully determine the difference between the published version and what I get when I rebuild today

but the tarball only failed verification because the files were in a different order, which makes me lean strongly towards thinking it's due to manual error

however, I will investigate further to eliminate the possibility of foul play

https://lists.sr.ht/~technomancy/fennel/%3C877boaxlkl.fsf@asthra%3E

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2026/06/02/introducing-microsoft-scout-your-always-on-personal-agent/

bold of them to name their latest product after the main character from Severance but granted it does seem fitting

any other day I would find it extremely amusing how bad Caddy's documentation is for answering the very simple question of "so who's accessing my server anyway?" but today I'm just not in the mood to laugh

on top of my laptop dying today, it looks like the LLM hellscrapers are hitting my site harder than they've ever hit before

I've temporarily shut down the Fennel trac server while I try to figure out why iocaine hasn't been able to repel this attack

I powered it all the way down yesterday for the first time since last summer, and since then it's mostly forgotten how to boot from either USB, SSD, or NVMe

I have gotten two successful bootups out of 50 or so attempts, but only when the cover is off and the keyboard is unscrewed; as soon as I put it back together it goes back to failing

not too bad considering the motherboard is from 2016 and the rest of it is from 2009 but it's a bummer to lose it

looking like it might be the end of the line for my thinkpad fanfic x210

@stefano @ParadeGrotesque honestly hearing that LLMs are bad at it is making me more and more tempted to try BSD

(if only it supported my wifi)

ok so this has to exist but it's basically impossible to search for; does anyone know of a fictional work that's written in the form of a spreadsheet?

all the hits for "fictional spreadsheet" are about using a spreadsheet to plan your novel but what about putting your story in a spreadsheet and the spreadsheet is the story?

glad to see @liberachat clarifying their policy around LLMs in bots

while they're not banned altogether, channels that have LLM-powered bots are required to clearly disclose this to everyone joining

also really appreciated this angle:

Additionally, we’re going to codify the assumption that an LLM is capable of taking any action permitted by the bot/client whenever prompting occurs, regardless of what the prompt says. This reflects a growing corpus of real-world examples of AI assistants disobeying prompts and deleting important information. One of the practical consequences of this is that AI assistants, agents, and other LLM-driven autonomous clients will be effectively banned from Libera, as the assumption means we must also assume that they may spuriously join channels without permission.

https://libera.chat/news/bot-policy-update

ok but where should I poop then??

did a spicy pillow removal procedure on the kiddo's thinkpad last night

probably still needs a URL but it's a start

a few weeks ago I replayed Eliza, a visual novel about someone who used to work at a tech company developing a "next-generation AI" product who gets burned out and disappears for a few years and then returns

in the game Eliza is a supposedly-advanced therapy system where a human "proxy" reads lines off a headset that are generated by this software; sometimes patients do feel better after their sessions due to a kind of placebo effect of talking thru their problems and having someone appear to listen, but for anything nontrivial its advice is unhelpful and patronizing

the debug logs scroll by in your headset when you're facilitating sessions and one subtle gag is you can see its "sentiment analysis" is just "did they say one of these positive/negative words?" ignoring context

today some code from Claude was leaked and it turns out that despite having a very advanced language model, they are just ... basically doing the exact same thing; does the input contain one of these phrases? if so it's negative!

current personal laptop has this on the lid from the opening of Johnny Mnemonic: https://hey.hagelb.org/fileserver/01G4Z3A1V3F77HEWC8RMZ4EWDD/attachment/original/01HQ9NX3R7ZGJM7Y7DA03CTF46.jpg

want to use the same label maker to put something on the laptop for my new job

do I go with:

A) "Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

B) "Ad blocking is killing surveillance industry profits. Install ublock origin so you can help!" [link to ubo]

C) "You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere."

so, should I become a BSD weirdo?

https://io.mwl.io/@mwl/116217661148955521

taco cat

now that I've upgraded to gotosocial 0.21 I'll be muting accounts on mastodon.social that I don't already follow

I get it that account migration is a pain but please consider finding a better instance!

Inspired by a discussion elsewhere:

I've been on the Internet since 1987, started a career building the commercial Internet in 1995, and have spent the last 25 years writing books about how to build foundational Internet infrastructure. I've consulted for and worked with any number of dot-coms, and the one lesson I've gotten over and over again?

The Internet's business model is betrayal.

We have no smart lights. No voice assistants. No Alexa or Siri. No video doorbell. Our thermostat and appliances constantly complain about their lack of Internet. None of this stuff is safe.

The Internet tech I do use? A desktop PC. Email on my phone is for travel only: airplane tickets, hotel reservations, hockey and concert tix. Location on my phone? Nope, we use a dedicated non-networked GPS in the car. The microphones are off.

How can a light bulb betray me? I don't know. I do know that the vendors have put a LOT of thought into it, though, and I can't out-think all of them.