// JERisBRISK //

Winston Churchill once said, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” Our daughter Elly is going through her own personal hell right now. If you are moved to help and have the means, please support us as we fight for a #cure for #fnd. gofundme.com/f/help-elly-fig…

Winston Churchill once said, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” Our daughter Elly is going through her own personal hell right now. If you are moved to help and have the means, please support us as we fight for a #cure for #fnd. gofundme.com/f/help-elly-fig…

After six years in stealth, Atomic Machines is out. Our mission: on-demand, universal command of matter. First beachhead: the Matter Compiler, an AI-native manufacturing system that builds working micro-machines from code alone. No per-product tooling. No process development. Different code, different machine.

Of course, that’s your contention. You’re a first-year machine-learning engineer. You just got finished readin' Attention Is All You Need, probably watched a Karpathy video too. So now you’re convinced everything is just transformers and scaling laws. That's gonna last until next month when you discover convolution, and then you're gonna be talkin' about inductive biases and locality and how CNNs were actually incredibly compute-efficient for vision. Then you're gonna read the FlashAttention paper, and suddenly everything's about IO complexity and SRAM and how FLOPs don't matter because the whole goddamn thing is memory-bandwidth bound. That'll last until somebody shows you an MoE model, and then you're gonna be in here regurgitating DeepSeek, talkin' about expert parallelism and active parameters and how dense models are economically obsolete. Then six months from now you'll write one shitty Triton kernel, look at an Nsight trace for the first time, and start telling everybody Python isn't actually the bottleneck because the GPU is asynchronous. And by next year you're gonna be standing right here explaining to me that your 400-billion-parameter model is fast because you turned on CUDA graphs.

I built a Photoshop-like image editor. It’s called Compositor. robbietilton.com/compositor I originally built it for myself to get off my Adobe subscription, but decided to release it for free and make it open source. It has all the essential tools I need for compositing, with none of the BS. I know this workflow is kind of archaic in 2026, but I’m still using it until AI can actually get pixel-perfect on some of the details. The entire app is 12MB. Photoshop is 6,455MB on my machine.

This is the story of FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8. I was the primary author of Windows Product Activation on the operating systems side. Not the key math – those were the ACTUALLY smart guys with heads so big that they bumped the doorjamb on the way into your office. I just did the protection of and integration into the operating system. As you likely recall, Product Activation required that you have a key, and you’d have to activate it online or over the phone. But Microsoft had large corporate customers, think hundreds of thousands of PCs, and those customers did not want to have to activate every offline PC. So in that case, you would be given special “Volume Media” that could be unlocked with a Volume key. That way, a volume key could never unlock your retail CD. Now, to know what media you have, I inspect the disc image. And the Volume licensing media contained a special binary blob that I made. It was about 10MB of data, entropy stripped, hard to duplicate on Usenet at the time. And it was only present on the Volume media. That secret data, which I hashed and checked to match to the key, was Microsoft Bob. I took their disc data and compressed and encrypted it several times. Rest assured it’s encrypted and even in the AI age no one has extracted it yet. I really just needed random data, so I started with a precompressed binary image because, secretly, I was young and didn’t know if I could trust CryptGenRand  And so, if you ever tried the FCKGW key on a regular XP CD, it wouldn’t work, because you didn’t have Bob buried in your bits. But if you had the means in 1995 to download large ISO binaries or copy CDs, all it took was the key and a copy of the disc. The key itself still had to pass the product-key validation math (the part I didn’t own). Once it did, WPA simply skipped the rest of the process. That combination—valid VLK + matching volume media—is what made the install look fully legitimate, including early Windows Update checks. How it leaked RTM went to manufacturing on 24 August 2001. Retail launch was 25 October. Roughly five weeks before launch the warez group Devils0wn (often written “Devil’s Own”) posted a complete, non-beta “Windows XP Pro Corporate” ISO together with the FCKGW key. That ISO was the volume media. Pirates then started baking the key into images or just writing it on the CD with a Sharpie. The famous photo of the marked-up disc is from that scene. The most plausible source is an OEM or hardware partner that received final media early so they could ship PCs on launch day. Dell is the name that comes up most often; Intel has also been mentioned because of later source dumps. There were very few organizations that actually possessed a VLK that early, which is why the timing points at a partner rather than a random corporate customer. But I do not know. Presumably someone does. Aftermath We started blacklisting the Product IDs that belonged to the leaked keys (FCKGW decoded to one of the 640-range PIDs we later treated as toxic) in SP1. SP2 and Windows Genuine Advantage made the check more aggressive and also started blocking updates for those installs. Other, un-leaked VLKs continued to work on volume media for years; Microsoft did not kill the entire volume-licensing path, just the ones that had escaped. So the design decision was “give trusted big customers a convenient offline path.” The operational failure was that the media and one of those keys left the building before the product even reached stores. Once both pieces were public, WPA’s hardware-binding never got a chance to run. These Days If you’re curious about what I’m doing today, check out Task Manager TMOG at tmog.org where you can download the Free version! It runs fully native on Windows, Mac, and Linux!

Meet the world's lightest AI wearable. At just 0.4 ounces, the Memoket Gem captures every conversation with dual-mic clarity. 20 hours of battery life keeps you going all day. Buy yours now.

Starcraft Dominion - Announcement cinematic for 2030 open world shooter from Blizzard, now in development.

In case you are wondering what the cons of the iPhone Duo are compared to the iPhone 18 Pro, I’ve compiled a list: Body • No Action Button • Not compatible with MagSafe wallets • 0.48” wider and 0.1” thicker closed (but 1.27” shorter) than 18 Pro • 0.24” wider and 0.1” thicker closed (but 1.79” shorter) than 18 Pro Max • 1.52oz (43g) heavier than 18 Pro • 0.18oz (5g) heavier than 18 Pro Max Camera Hardware • 12MP Center Stage front camera instead of 18MP • No telephoto camera (no 4x or 8x) • No variable aperture on main camera • Older, weaker sensor shift OIS system on main camera (we’ve been on 2nd gen OIS since the 14 Pro) • No adaptive flash (cannot focus beam width) Camera Features • No Spatial Photos or Spatial Videos • No smart focus tracking on front camera (still on rear though) • No Pro controls (aperture, shutter speed, white balance, and histogram) • No ProRAW photos • No ProRes or ProRes RAW video • No Academy Color Encoding System • No Apple Log video • No Genlock support • No Apple Reference Image (AI tamper detection and edit restoration) Microphones • No studio-quality four mic array Display • Inner display is actually lower 430 PPI (though outer is the same 460) Sensors • No TrueDepth sensors (no Face ID) • No rear LiDAR Power • Does not support USB-PD’s Adjustable Voltage Supply (AVS) (why max charge speed is slightly slower)

No Man's Sky Cosmos 📋Own A Space Station 🤝Alliances 🛰️Orbital Bases 📡Space Hulks 🚀Anniversary Expedition 🗺️Star Map 💎Deep-Space Looting 🪨Asteroid Belts 🦠Infested Outposts ☀️The Sun 🧙‍♀️Dev Commentary 🧲Tractor Beam ❄️Ice Fields 🪐Outposts ⛰️Improved Terrain 🔫Shipbreaking

a 20 year old typed one sentence into GPT-6 Astra and hospitals started paying people back $376,840 in hospital overcharges found in 4 days. no law degree, no medical degree, she can't code the trick is a file. since 2021 every hospital in america has had to publish every price it charges, including what it charges each insurer, in one file almost nobody opens. hers was 400,000 lines, and since january a hospital executive has to sign that it's accurate. Astra opens it, finds what the hospital listed for your insurance plan, and reads your bill against it line by line. two numbers don't match, it flags the line and writes the dispute letter mismatch found. one letter with both numbers in it. no lawyer $2,300 ER visit in dallas, the file listed $890 for the same codes and the same insurer. $1,410 back. $18,900 for two nights in tampa, listed at $9,700. $9,200 back her aunt does hospital billing and told her over christmas: 8 in 10 bills have a mistake and it's almost never in your favor. she has checked every bill in her own family for 15 years and never mentioned it outside the family she tried by hand in january. one weekend on her own $1,900 ankle bill, 4 errors, $740 refunded. then she quit, the file is too big for a human. that excuse expired on saturday she borrowed her roommate's pro account, dropped the same bill in and typed: "compare every line of this bill to the hospital's published price file for my insurer and write the dispute letter". same 4 errors. 6 minutes she posted one line in the dorm group chat: send me your hospital bill, i keep 25% of whatever comes back, nothing if nothing does. 312 bills by monday. Astra cleared all of them in two nights. she has one group chat and a borrowed account. there are 6,000 hospitals today her roommate saw the stripe tab and asked what his account has been doing all weekend. she showed him the numbers. he didn't say anything. he went and dug out his own ER bill from last year $376,840 in letters out. the first 3 hospitals already corrected their bills, $4,100 off what people owed. 25% is hers 312 bills. 287 had a mistake in the hospital's favor yours probably does too