Category Archives: News

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Overdose Offsets: Why Every Bag of Fentanyl I Sell Is Net Life-Positive

Posted on 2026-10-14 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: This whole page is full of _delightful_ parodies of pseudointellectual tech bro shit, it's good.
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A Book That Will Never Be Read

Posted on 2026-10-13 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Academic publication is an empty prestige game built from layers of perverse incentives, and that's why I'm in an instructional career track. AI slop isn't really that different from the P-hacked, fake reference, recycled section micro-incremental trash that came before, it's just slightly faster to generate.
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Classic real-time strategy game Total Annihilation is 30 years old—and everyone is remixing it

Posted on 2026-10-12 by pappp

Source: Boing Boing

Article note: Oh yeah, I'm old. I've always liked TA, I still play (usually BAR lately, Spring with one of the TA-like packs before that, mostly just against bots) with some regularity. Haven't had a chance to poke at Nanolathe. TA:K was sadly mediocre, SupCom was pretty good, but there is something about the classic TA formula that just scratches an itch for me.
Screenshot: Nanolathe

Nanolathe is the latest example of a fascinating subgenre of real-time strategy game: Chris Taylor's 1997 hit Total Annihation but with something more. Nanolathe offers an open source MIT-licensed 2.5D RTS engine reimplementing the original plus three decades of the quality-of-life tweaks: a perfect access point for anyone who played it way back when but might now be intimidated by Beyond All Reason's sprawling 150-player Götterdämmerungs. — Read the rest

The post Classic real-time strategy game Total Annihilation is 30 years old—and everyone is remixing it appeared first on Boing Boing.

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French supermarkets suffer fridge shutdown after ‘unprecedented’ cyberattack

Posted on 2026-10-12 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Oh look, the internet of shit, doing what it does. This happened at US military commissaries not long ago, and there was *speculation* about whether it was mismanagement or a hack. Folks are way, way too comfortable plugging shit directly into the internet.
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OpenAI “rogue” agent activities found on Wikimedia projects

Posted on 2026-10-05 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Criminal Negligence. "Oops, we connected devices we trained then prompted to do antisocial shit to the public internet, and they DID" is in the same category as "Oops, we piled rebar onto a flatbed and didn't tie it down, and it came flying off the back and crushed some people." Don't let those skeezy fuckers attribute intention to the tools they built, for fearmongering OR for liability avoidance.
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I can’t tell who’s teaching who anymore

Posted on 2026-09-30 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Yup. I was thoroughly trained to produce proper (read "pretentious") academic writing, and now if I do it, folks tend to assume I'm meat-proxying slop... and I can't blame them. Maybe it will kill some of the goofy conventions of that writing style, it richly deserves it.
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Memory Companies Have Destroyed the Consumer Market

Posted on 2026-09-29 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: It's gonna be real interesting in the likely event that several of the AI companies the memory manufacturers have signed LTAs with are insolvent (or are desperately trying to pull out because they don't have the facilities to install and/or power new capacity) by the time the agreement concludes. A lot of what is being manufactured under those agreements is HBM or other not-easy-to-resell-to-consumers parts.
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postmarketOS Rebrand: Nura

Posted on 2026-09-27 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: I'm usually skeptical of project rebranding, but postmarketOS was typographically (little-little-big? No spaces or punctuation?), semantically (is it only for discontinued old stuff?), and legally (descriptive -> not eligible for trademark) weird, so maybe this is a reasonable choice.
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Apple Copland D11E4 Booting in the Browser

Posted on 2026-09-21 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Getting Copland to run (on hardware, or emulation) is a _nightmare_, in part because the extant code is super broken. I guess DingusPPC has the necessary cycle-accurate behavior for one (or more) of the supported targets AND handles debug behavior well enough to deal with constantly dropping into the debugger.
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Photon-Emission-Guided Laser Fault Injection Enables RP2350 Secure Debug

Posted on 2026-09-18 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Neeeeeat. It's a physically invasive and destructive attack that requires a quarter million dollars of equipment to locate and modify a register in the silicon, but the fact that the RPi folks are encouraging this kind of research into what you can actually protect in a re-programmable IC is very cool.
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