"Coding is to Programming, what typing is to writing" -- Leslie Lamport.

Microsoft Research: GenAI can inhibit critical engagement with work and can potentially lead to long-term overreliance on the tool and diminished skill for independent problem-solving.

Microsoft: *sells GenAI aggressively into the Education 365 packages*

Hao-Ping (Hank) Lee and others, ‘The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking: Self-Reported Reductions in Cognitive Effort and Confidence Effects From a Survey of Knowledge Workers’ (ACM CHI 2025). https://advait.org/files/lee_2025_ai_critical_thinking_survey.pdf

Remember Aaron♥️

Fuck #Meta

Unsealed court documents from February 5th, 2024, in Kadrey v. Meta show Meta (formerly Facebook) illegally torrented 81.7TB of data from "shadow libraries" such as Anna's Archive, Z-Library, and LibGen to train Meta artificial intelligence.

Highlights include:
- A senior AI research at Meta says, "I don't think we should use pirated material. I really need to draw a line there."

- Another AI researcher says, "using pirated material should be beyond our ethical threshold" ... "SciHub, ResearchGate, LibGen are basically like PirateBay or something like that, they are distributing content that is protectec by copyright and they're infringing it".

- In January 2023, Mark Zuckerberg attends a meeting which is heavily redacted in court documents. However, he says "we need to this move this stuff forward" and "we need to find a way to unblock all of this".

- Fast forward to April, 2023, Meta employees discuss using a VPN to conceal Meta IP address ranges when torrenting data. Meta employees also discuss the need to involve lawyers if something goes astray. The unredacted court records show a Meta employee saying, "torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn't feel right 😂".

I think there's a general need for education regarding influence operations (and my focus is on those by Russia) here on the fediverse.

1) No, Russia isn't just pushing right-wing agendas/topics. The _stated_ purpose, from 1997 IIRC, is to sow division in the west. That means that there's roughly an equal chance that a raging leftwing lunatic is on Russia's payroll as your average Tate-Musk-Trump-Orban-Fico fanatic.

2) "Doomism" is a goal. The more we are complaining on how bad things are - the more successful they are. A great way to counter these influence operations is to talk about how _good_ things are. Because there's plenty of awesomeness in our society (I'm not from the US - that's a global perspective) to share.

3) These operations are _long term_. The troll factories aren't just newly created accounts spamming out the same message everywhere. That online magazine that has published for 10 years could be a sleeper influence operation. A person _living in Germany_ spending time online just as anybody else could too.

4) You're getting influenced. Basic psychology says you cannot avoid it (the anchoring effect). The only thing you can do is to be aware of it, and actively working against the very goals of the influence operations.

Remember what those were now again?

#InfluenceOperations #Russia #MAGA #Politics

for a reason:
https://european-alternatives.eu
@european_alternatives

Now this is what I call proper IDE experience!

As you can see, debugging #Ghidra works like a charm in IDEA, and the configuration is 15 lines of XML without hardcoded paths*:

https://github.com/radareorg/ghidra-r2web/blob/master/GhidraR2Web/.idea/runConfigurations/RunGhidra.xml

* You have to set a single Path Variable in your IDEA instance to specify the location of your Ghidra installation

In the next livestream tonight, we’ll hexplore more advanced hash collisions tricks.
https://www.youtube.com/live/fCNx2cO0Q98?si=xln4a4n_5BJ9wR5c

The moment Estonia disconnected its power grid from Russia has been shared online. A historic step toward energy independence.

Why is Carbon being developed when Google already has Go

https://builtin.com/software-engineering-perspectives/google-carbon

Discussions: https://discu.eu/q/https://builtin.com/software-engineering-perspectives/google-carbon

#golang #programming

Project: mpengine-x64-pdb 1.1.24090.11
File: mpengine.dll
Address: 75a8f937c

_update_driver_config_for_pmu_counters

SVG:
dark https://tmr232.github.io/function-graph-overview/render/?graph=https%3A%2F%2Fraw.githubusercontent.com%2Fv-p-b%2Fghidra-function-graph-datasets%2Frefs%2Fheads%2Fmain%2F%2Fmpengine-x64-pdb%2F75a8f937c.json&colors=dark
light https://tmr232.github.io/function-graph-overview/render/?graph=https%3A%2F%2Fraw.githubusercontent.com%2Fv-p-b%2Fghidra-function-graph-datasets%2Frefs%2Fheads%2Fmain%2F%2Fmpengine-x64-pdb%2F75a8f937c.json&colors=light

The Path of a Packet Through the Linux Kernel

https://www.net.in.tum.de/fileadmin/TUM/NET/NET-2024-04-1/NET-2024-04-1_16.pdf

https://sfstandard.com/2025/02/08/aaron-swartz-marble-statue-unveiled-internet-archive/

New Blog Post: Fully Dynamically Linked Rust Binary: An Experiment

https://www.kxxt.dev/blog/fully-dynamically-linked-rust-binary/

#Rust

Wired has been killing it lately on covering what may well be the biggest security breach this country has ever seen. They obtained an email sent by an intelligence team within the U.S. Treasury Department that referred to Musk's actions to unilaterally slash and burn government agencies as "the single greatest insider threat risk" they have ever faced.

"There is ongoing litigation, congressional legislation, and widespread protests relating to DOGE’s access to Treasury and the Bureau of the Fiscal Service,” the email reads, per the tech-focused outlet. "If DOGE members have any access to payment systems, we recommend suspending that access immediately and conducting a comprehensive review of all actions they may have taken on these systems."

"There is reporting at other federal agencies indicating that DOGE members have performed unauthorized changes and locked civil servants out of the sensitive systems they gained access to,” the ‘Recommendations’ portion of the email continues. “We further recommend that DOGE members be placed under insider threat monitoring and alerting after their access to payment systems is revoked. Continued access to any payment systems by DOGE members, even “read only,” likely poses the single greatest insider threat risk the Bureau of the Fiscal Service has ever faced.”

https://www.wired.com/story/treasury-bfs-doge-insider-threat

https://archive.ph/q26im

Meanwhile, The Washington Post reports the warning came from a Treasury threat center run by the govt contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. The Post reports that late Friday, Booz Allen said it had “removed” a subcontractor who wrote the warning and would seek to retract or amend it. “The draft report was prepared by a subcontractor to Booz Allen and contained unauthorized personal opinions that are not factual or consistent with our standards,” company spokesperson Jessica Klenk said. Booz Allen won more than $1 billion in multiyear U.S. government contracts last year.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/02/07/doge-treasury-payments-system-warning/

https://archive.ph/lJ3oi

It seems my Java debugging struggles are in part explained by the fact that in VSCode breakpoints can't be configured to pause all threads (it's always threads, right?):

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-java-debug/issues/722

I also have to manually dig up the paused thread, there I can find the locals but still don't have visual indication about where exactly my code is paused...

How much of the time/energy/money in tech is consumed solving problems that are created by the business plan?

Example: I'm reading an article on performance monitoring for Web and I can't stop my brain from saying outrageous shit like, "If you didn't ship metric tons of javascript and only used HTML and CSS then you wouldn't need to run all this expensive infrastructure to tell you that your app performs like shit." Which is not what anyone, anywhere, seems to want to hear.

Truth being unhelpful is also unhelpful.

I got to debug an existing #Ghidra extension from VSCode by:
- Copying .vscode/ template directory to the original (Eclipse-based) repo
- Fill in the path of my Ghidra installation in build.gradle (this can be pbbly done more elegantly by setting the env)
- Renaming the .classpath file produced by Eclipse, as it confuses VSCode
- Manually loading the plugin from Code Browser's File/Configure menu

The debugging experince is unfortunately shit so far, I can't even see which breakpoint is hit - I'll keep on reading VSCode tutorials...

The first lesson of using #Ghidra's generated VSCode project is that I'm a VSCode n00b :P Lessons so far:

1) You'll need the Extension Pack for Java (from MS, not Oracle's crap!)
2) Ghidra launch configurations are available under the "bug with play button" sidebar icon
+1) Directory/workspace names are not necessarily valid Java package names, but Ghidra generates the code and the fs structure anyway

Now I'm trying to figure out why the sample code is not actually loaded to Ghidra when debugging...