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2025-05-29

• 12:52 UTC Elon Musk and DOGE promised $2 trillion in savings. In reality, government spending is up – Elon Musk and DOGE promised $2 trillion in savings. In reality, government spending is up Talk about clowns. Instead of delivering $2 trillion of savings, DOGE is instead set to increase overall government spending as a side effect of its brutal cuts. According to a model by the nonpartisan Penn Wharton Budget Model, using weekly Treasury data, spending climbed 6.3% (about $156 billion) since Trump took office, compared with the first four months of 2024 when Joe Biden was president. Many of Musk’s cuts will actually cost, including taxpayer funds going to an army of lawyers from the Department of Justice battling a cascade of court cases against the government’s dismantling that many judges have already said appears to be illegal. Damages from any illegal firings are likely also to be extremely pricey. So is the loss of critically important workers who earn far more than their salaries, or will have to be replaced for critical services by more expensive private-sector employees. Among the most massive costs will be the huge reduction in workers at the Internal Revenue Service, who are worth their weight in gold because of the taxes they collect or ferret out from cheats, the key source of income for the country. Tags: smash-and-grab elon-musk us-politics doge fail government
• 10:57 UTC Weather Strip – Weather Strip A very pretty weather forecast app, for iPhone, iPad and Mac Tags: weather apple apps iphone ipad mac software ux

2025-05-27

• 11:33 UTC LLMs are biased towards “Option B” – LLMs are biased towards "Option B" Lol. "When tasked with choosing between 'Response A' and 'Response B' over numerous trials, LLMs tended to select 'Response B' approximately 60% - 69% of the time" Tags: llms ai bias accuracy

2025-05-23

• 15:42 UTC Remote Prompt Injection in GitLab Duo Leads to Source Code Theft – Remote Prompt Injection in GitLab Duo Leads to Source Code Theft Yet another LLM prompt injection/exfiltration attack. "if your LLM system combines access to private data, exposure to malicious instructions and the ability to exfiltrate information (through tool use or through rendering links and images) you have a nasty security hole." Tags: llms security infosec holes exploits prompt-injection exfiltration gitlab pull-requests

2025-05-22

• 11:10 UTC LLM Observability: How to use Elastic’s LLM integrations in real-world scenarios – LLM Observability: How to use Elastic's LLM integrations in real-world scenarios A set of suggested metrics to monitor LLM integrations, from Elastic Tags: llms product metrics observability elasticsearch

2025-05-21

• 18:57 UTC Model Context Protocol has prompt injection security problems – Model Context Protocol has prompt injection security problems wow, this is (still) terrible. LLM tool developers are not exactly covering themselves in glory Tags: security llms protocols mcp infosec prompt-injection shell-injection xss
• 13:33 UTC MemoryC.com – MemoryC.com Recommended as a local supplier of computer bits that isn't Amazon Tags: hardware shopping components storage hard-disks local

2025-05-20

• 22:50 UTC The “SohoTV” demo, revived! – Back in the 1980s, I wrote quite a few demos on the Commodore 64. One of my favourite hacks from that period was a bit of code which uploaded a routine to the 1541 disk drive -- which itself contained a fully functional 6502 CPU -- and used pulse-width modulation and bit-banging to flash the disk drive light in time to the demo's music. It's not quite Freespin, but I was pretty happy with it. (I should really have been studying for my Leaving Cert at the time. Don't tell my kids.) Anyway.... as I mentioned on Mastodon this weekend -- massive respect to David Golden on ITC Slack, who managed to figure out which one of my Commodore 64 demos from back in the day was the one with this hack -- AND get it working on the VICE emulator! Here's what it looks like running on a real Commodore 64 with a real 1541 disk drive: It's a little slow -- the demo was never ported to run acceptably on an NTSC C64, as I lived in PAL-land and never even got to see one of the NTSC variety -- but for this feature, that actually improves the visibility of the drive light animation. Thankfully the 1541 disk drive didn't have an NTSC/PAL split to worry about. Míle buíochas to David Malone and Dr Dave for getting this running. This is what it looks like, running in the VICE emulator (thanks to David Golden for recording this): Back in 1989 -- 36 years ago! -- I didn't even know this trick was called pulse-width modulation, I just managed to bump into the concept by accident; I didn't have the benefit of Google or Wikipedia to quickly look up details of handy algorithms and wound up reinventing so many wheels along the way. David was responsible for fixing a regression in the VICE PWM emulation. A recent refactor had broken it, but it was a one-liner fix. We then added a little more code to improve the realism of the modulated drive light intensity; human perception sees low levels of light as brighter than they would otherwise be, so low duty cycles need a higher intensity in the emulated form. This blog post explains it reasonably well. By comparison with my clumsy wheel-reinventions in 1989, I was able to dig up an incredibly detailed Wikipedia page on lightness and approximate a simple power curve in a few minutes, so the modern internet still has that going for it. It's really impressive that someone in the VICE team (possibly Spiro Trikaliotis I think?) decided to implement the code to support accurate pulse-width modulation of the 1541 drive light, and indeed emulated the 1541 to such an extent that my hacky uploaded code actually runs correctly on the emulated drive's emulated 6502! Here's the CSDb page for the demo, BTW. (If you want to try out the demo with the 3.10 version of VICE once it's released, or current SVN, note that "Trap Idle" needs to be active for the LED code to work.)
• 09:20 UTC Octopus, solar & e-paper energy dashboards – Interaction Magic – Octopus, solar & e-paper energy dashboards - Interaction Magic This UK product designer developed a really lovely home dashboard for his Octopus Energy subscription and solar panel setup. I'm already copying some of these ideas Tags: solar power energy octopus-energy dashboards home home-assistant
• 09:19 UTC Jetrelay – Jetrelay This is a great little hack: "jetrelay, a pub/sub server compatible with Bluesky’s “jetstream” data feed. Using a few pertinent Linux kernel features, it avoids doing almost any work itself. As a result, it’s highly efficient: it can saturate a 10 Gbps network connection with just 8 CPU cores." Specifically, these are the tricks in question: Trick #1: Bypassing userspace with sendfile(); Trick #2: Handling many clients in parallel with io_uring; Trick #3: Discarding old data with FALLOC_FL_PUNCH_HOLE -- this is a nice way to avoid having to rotate between multiple files, nifty. Tags: sendfile io_uring linux kernel hacks tools jetrelay jetstream firehose bluesky pub-sub

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