The opposite of mass-destroying books to feed AI is this 1-minute video 📽️ of Charlotte Wainwright restoring and saving old/ancient books ...

(Definitely worth a watch)

https://www.wainwrightbookbinding.com/

#bookstodon #books

Hell is other people's Makefiles

James Gosling, creator of Java, asked by Navin Reddy whether he codes with AI (somewhat cleaned up from the transcript):

"NR And do you use AI to do that?

JG: I have played with AI tools and I mostly find them to be really annoying. I mean, the thing is that I know how to write software. Um, and every time I've used an AI tool, I I look at the software that it generates and for the most part it's just awful. And I care about how evolvable a piece of software is, how reliable it is, you know, how testable it is. And I have yet to find a coding system that works for me cuz it just all you know it all feels like a really great demo, just not ready for prime time.

NR: So do you think there will be a day when AI can reach there?

JG: Oh maybe, kind of, but why? I mean you know in the spectrum of
problems in the so in software engineering, coding has never really been a big problem. The places where there are problems are in like testing. How do you know that this piece of software actually does what you need it to do? That's a really really difficult
problem. That's a problem that is unpleasant. It burns a lot of a lot of time. And you you know, everything I've seen about AI tools just is that they just make hard problem worse. And the the easy problem, yeah, marginally better. But also the easy problem is also the enjoyable problem. So I view AI in part as stealing the fun and making the torture worse. And you know, people go, "Well, you
know, I wrote up this little Swift iPhone app. Doesn't that count?" And it's like, "I don't care, right? I mean, small toy apps like that are are nothing. I mean, I'm, you know, software doesn't get interesting until it's got like until it's like millions of lines, right? You know, until you're doing something like, you know, operating FedEx, right? Right. You know, and you know, some, you know, a place like FedEx, you know, they've got hundreds of thousands of llines of code, probably actually probably millions of lines of code and, you know, 100 000 engineers. I mean, it's a really complicated thing to run a business like Uber or FedEx or UPS or a bank. And building software suites like that
is is where there's difficulty, you know, glossing up, you know, a Swift app to take a survey. Okay, that's fine. But that's not a problem.

NR: That's right. So when you're building a give it business where you have as you mentioned million lines of code and then we have entire team I mean teams of team who is working together to get the one thing that's where it excels

JG: where what excels?

NR: the human

JG: oh yeah I mean when when it when things get complicated you need people. I have not seen a scrap of evidence that the AI coding tools, you know, if if you wanted to build the
next FedEx and you were just going to vibe code the next FedEx, I think you'd be in trouble.

NR: Yeah. Yeah. You never know when you have security flaw and getting hacked.

JG: Yeah. Yeah. O when when your AI tools decide, you know, the best way to be profitable is to steal money from all
your customers. Because you know then people have tried to to to do
experiments like have AI just run a
single vending machine as a business
or do security penetration experiments
inside inside a company and then you
discover that all hell breaks loose, right? Um these these things are a very,
very long way from being deployable at scale with a decent amount of faith that things will work out."

https://youtu.be/LxhZhOOYKTM?t=513

#AI #Java #SoftwareDevelopment #SoftwareEngineering

CVE ID: CVE-2026-85046
Vendor: Google
Product: Chromium V8
Date Added: 2026-09-04
CVE URL: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-85046

RE//verse 2027 Call for Speakers goes LIVE today at 12 PM ET! If you’ve got research worth sharing, we want to hear it. Submit your talk and join us in Orlando this March: https://sessionize.com/reverse-2027

woohoo, just pushed an update to the zphinx* server to build with #zig v0.16 - due to the #iocalypse this is quite a substantial patch: https://rad.ctrlc.hu/nodes/rad.ctrlc.hu/rad:z2Rncctq4pLrY1Kp7NgQkcejBsiza/commits/86d8dc72f391cbedd9994a76fa67e29b3f631b22

but quite worth it, as i got rid of a lot of posixisms/linuxisms (not all though) so making it portable should be easier.

next up the klutshnik** server.

* wtf zphinx: https://sphinx.pm
** wtf klutshnik: https://klutshnik.info

🎤 “I’m Mr. Mercury” — By Frank Styles at Wembley Park in London, England 🇬🇧

Freddie Mercury Is Still Everywhere (13 Photos): https://streetartutopia.com/2026/09/04/freddie-mercury-is-still-everywhere-12-photos/

No X11 required. A terminal #UI for managing #QEMU/KVM #virtual machines, built for headless #servers and #SSH sessions. #oSC26 https://youtu.be/tdgskVjglEA

aiohttp is downloaded 600M+ times a month. Its maintainers just recapped a year of security work, including the 10 issues (8 CVEs) we reported through Patch the Planet.

Every fix shipped days later in 3.14.1. https://aio-libs.org/news/2026/security-at-aio-libs/

Please be careful with those illegal passwords everyone! Courtesy of a Supermicro IPMI interface.

#password #supermicro #bmc #ipmi #illegalpassword

With the recent increase in Russian sabotage in Europe, this post is again relevant. Our society is not robust, many things fail out of their own accord. And then prove hard to repair. We are NOT ready for any kind of conflict, and everyone should get on that: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/cyber-security-pre-war-reality-check/

"This is a Unix system, I know this."

[ minutes later ]

"Oh, uh, so, I guess killall on Solaris is pretty different actually."

[ credits ]

AI/Agentic attacks have made headlines recently, but agents are highly "suggestible", allowing us to easily detect (or derail) them.

Our new "Agent Provocateur" deploys in minutes & works.

Read more here, including how to ask agents for reverse shells https://blog.thinkst.com/2026/09/getting-agents-to-tell-on-themselves.html

Functional PCB art from the 60s. It's likely a 3 decade count from 0 to 999. I assume it was for lab equipment but I'm not sure. I only know it's made in France, likely by someone who worked at Intertechnique.

Apologies for the hasty pictures, there will be better ones once the board is installed in a museum (spoiler alert?).

#electronics #pcbart