µblog 🏳️‍🌈

🔗 Let’s Talk About Why all This OT Stuff is Connected

[OT == Operational Technology]

Take those supermarket refrigerators. Many countries hold supermarkets to regulatory standards for the temperature at which food is kept, and supermarkets don’t staff to have humans check this in real time. So most of it is done through mobile apps or central monitoring, which saves money, ensures regulations are met, and keeps food from spoiling. A thermometer that isn’t connected to anything is only useful when someone is standing in front of it.

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🔗 Texas Monthly: He Was a Suspect in the Yogurt Shop Murders for Thirty Years. He Can’t Forget.

I’ve been pestering Forrest since 1999, after he and three other young men were arrested for allegedly taking part in one of the most notorious mass murders in Texas history—the 1991 slaughter of four teenage girls at an Austin yogurt shop. He wouldn’t talk to me then, even once the charges against him were dropped nine months after they were brought. I wasn’t surprised. Forrest’s life was ruined by the accusations. Most people in Austin believed he was guilty. The police harassed him. The public hated him. Men pulled guns on him, and girlfriends dumped him when they found out about his past. He lost his business. He couldn’t find a job. He stopped trusting almost everyone. He became an outcast in his own city. He withdrew. He drank too much. This went on for decades.

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🔗 ACOUP Teaching Paradox: Hearts of Iron IV Part 1

Bret Devereaux explains exactly why Hearts of Iron IV is the video game version of the Nazi bar.

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🔗📸 Dante Stella: Nikon FA and the root of our madness

In the day, internet was barely beyond dial-up BBSs, and if you want to learn anything about anything, you had to read it in one of the trade rags. To truly understand these magazines, they were about 20% new product announcements copied from press releases; 20% Photokina reports and echoes of Photokina reports; 10% articles on photographers doing interesting things [note: you would later learn in the internet era that some of those interesting things were not so unique], 10% reviews and test data, 5% editorials, and 35% ads from manufacturers or shops on Manhattan that would leave you wondering at the end of a call whether you still had all your fingers. Randomly present would be the occasional arty shot that suggested or exposed a bare breast. I was not yet at an age where that last part seemed as interesting as the machines.

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🔗 The Red, Red Rose

The controversial multi-millionaire Owen Oyston owned Blackpool FC for 32 years before being ousted by the club’s fans. Now, in his 93rd year, he’s looking to take it back.

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Maybe delegating political candidate selection to a semi-senile narcissist was suboptimal.

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🔗🇺🇸 A Stunning Rebuke Of Anti-Trans Politics: Republicans Spent $200 Million Attacking Trans People And Lost Everything

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How come so many reality TV formats originate in the Netherlands?

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🔗 North Korea gets away with $3 billion from Binance

Molly White covers this well, as usual.

Unlike many supposedly “multi-billion dollar” crypto hacks, where the headline figure relies on the notional value of illiquid assets that could never be sold for anywhere near that amount, the majority of these stolen assets were major stablecoins, bitcoin, ethereum, and other fairly liquid tokens.

Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who is legally not allowed to have any active role with the company yet still has remarkable amounts of inside knowledge into its inner workings, posted on Twitter less than an hour after the theft that “User funds are safe!”

Binance later wrote that their “initial investigation suggests that the security incident may involve a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop”, which allowed an attacker to “submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions.”

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Nothing says “leader of my country” like fleeing said country for Florida.

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🔗 Jacob Harris: Why I Don’t Vibe Code

[…] even as the better tooling has diminished accidental complexity, essential complexity still remains. There still is the complicated work of designing our abstractions and systems the right way, one that is elegant, clear and maintainable. And that complexity isn’t going anywhere. This type of work takes skill and experience and wisdom hard-won from system failures past. And, I’m not sure if LLM’s fancy autocomplete approach works so well with this type of complexity, which often isn’t so straightforward to solve.

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It feels like just 6 months ago, my timelines were full of posts about “permacomputing” and resilience in the face of collapse. Now it’s how the future of computing is paying $200 a month to companies to run giant datacenters so you can vibecode photoshop for clicks.

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📺🇦🇺 Colin from Accounts SE03

The show concludes. This season wasn’t as tight as the 2 previous ones, despite the attempts to jack up the awkwardness. Still worth seeing.

I learned from IMDB that the creators / protagonists are a married couple. Another show we have enjoyed is the Swedish Populära problem, also created by an (ex)couple and we believe the shows have at least some thematic similarities.

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Awarding the Peace Prize to a female former ICC judge from South Africa is as if the committee tried to find the polar opposite to Trump in every way.

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🇸🇪 viktigt meddelande till allmänheten: säsong 3 av den australiensiska serien Colin from Accounts (eller ”Två singlar och Colin” som boomerserna på SVT döpt den till) finns nu att streama på SVT Play. Slut på meddelandet.

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