Per the @nytimes 👀 nytimes.com/interactive/2026…

The nicest weather in the USA today will be in and around Overland Park, KS, Thief River Falls, MN, and Columbus, OH.

Big thanks to @crushovitz_b for solving this. You have to go to manage installation, then uncheck automatically update to new version and select Version 2.5

A very underappreciated Cyberpunk OST that I can't get enough of Delicate Weapons, absolute banger

I didn’t know my brain was still holding onto this news article I read from 2002, but this tweet pulled it out of me

New Edgerunners, new chrome, new playstyle? Sounds like we need another REDstreams! Join us this Wednesday, October 21st at 5 PM CEST for a closer look at Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 Update (2.5) and some of the features coming to Cyberpunk 2077. We're talking cyberware customization, a new dual-wielding playstyle, and more! Tune in on Twitch, YouTube or Steam: 📺 twitch.tv/cdprojektred 📺 youtube.com/live/nhlnT9FzgJ8

The GIZMØ GLÏDÈR is $25. Fully padded. NIR-resistant materials. Universal mounts and tie-downs included. You could buy two, three, or even FOUR GIZMØ GLÏDÈRs for the price of a single padded two-point sling elsewhere in the industry. And that’s not a knock on anybody else’s gear. There’s plenty of great stuff out there. We just believe good equipment should be affordable.

On July 27, 1361, the Danish king Valdemar IV landed an army on the Swedish island of Gotland and marched on the rich trading town of Visby. Standing in his way was a local army of Gotland farmers. The Danes were professional soldiers and hired mercenaries. The Gotlanders were whoever could be found. When archaeologists studied their bones centuries later, they found teenage boys, old men, and men with old injuries and deformities that would have made fighting hard. Some had badly healed fractures. Some had spinal problems. They were slaughtered just outside the town walls. A stone cross still stands at the site. Its inscription says that in 1361, the Gotlanders fell into the hands of the Danes before the gates of Visby. It asks the reader to pray for them. The town's merchants, according to tradition, kept the gates shut while it happened. Visby surrendered and paid the king to leave it alone. The dead were thrown into mass graves. And here is what makes Visby one of the most important battle sites in Europe. It was the middle of summer. The bodies were rotting fast. Armor was valuable, but stripping hundreds of decaying corpses was more than anyone was willing to do. So many of them were buried still wearing it. When archaeologists dug the graves in the early 1900s, they found skulls still inside their chain mail hoods. They found two dozen coats of plates, an early type of body armor made of iron plates riveted inside a fabric or leather covering. Almost none of this armor survives anywhere else. Visby is a big part of how we know what it looked like. They recovered the remains of around 1,200 people. The wounds tell the story of the fighting. Arrowheads lodged in skulls. Heads split by blades. And a huge number of cuts to the lower legs, especially the shins. Men were holding shields high to protect their heads and bodies, and the enemy went low. One skull had been hit so many times that researchers could see the man had kept taking blows after he was already down. Most battlefields lose their dead to scavengers and time. Visby kept them exactly as they fell, armor and all, because it was too hot to clean up.

🥵 How do we feel about 80s next week?

What on earth do you mean "can't explain it". It's obvious. The publishing industry is serving them garbage, and ninety-five out of one hundred indie authors is a hack with delusions of adequacy. New authors can't find readers. Readers can't find new authors. They are hidden from each other by a whirling snowstorm of trash. This problem is fixable. Hell, I could fix this problem in two hours if I could get @JeffBezos to lock Kindle's senior management in a room with me and not let them out until they really listened. It works like this. Tradpub, in the 20th century, provided a variety of services for authors. For readers, it provided one important service. Curation. Publishers were investors. They invested money in manuscripts and authors, so they vetted those authors and manuscripts for what they thought people would actually read. The system worked. If you picked up a science fiction novel from a major science fiction imprint like DAW or ACE or Baen, there was a risk it might not be to your taste, but it wouldn't totally suck. Well, the tradpub business model is dead. There's no longer any point for new authors in getting a publishing deal, because they can't do anything for you that Amazon doesn't. They add no value. As an author, Amazon provides me what publishers once did.... a store to sell my books, and a press to print them. What they don't do is provide readers the service that publishers once did. They don't vet or curate novels. Why would they? They sell every novel ever, and putting up an Amazon page for your novel costs them less than a dime. You're the one doing most of the work. They have no financial interest in rejecting anyone ever, because unlike tradpub houses, Amazon is not an investor. They have no skin in the game. Now, there's a tradpub word for the unfiltered, unvetted, uncurated output of everyone who wants to be a novelist. They call it the slushpile. And their job, back when they actually used to do it, was to strain the slush for tiny flakes of gold. Now, Amazon, who replaced them, doesn't do that. Amazon just exposes readers directly to the slushpile. Now, about this moment, you might think I am complaining how a large corporation, or a billionaire, isn't fixing my problem for zero dollars. After all, we just got done spelling out that Amazon sells all the books. Why would they have any interest in promoting one over another? Well, that's where they're wrong. This occurred to me when I was writing my first novel. I happened to mention this project to a acquaintance who was highly placed at Amazon, and he told me it was a bad idea. "The book market is saturated," he said. "We get a lot of data from people's Kindle devices, and we know what they have on them, what they have read, what they haven't and how fast they read. These people have an average of five years of unread fiction on their devices. The demand simply isn't big enough to support more supply." I nodded, and smiled, and said "how interesting", and didn't argue. But in my head, at that moment, I invented an idea I call the Thiel Fallacy: the belief that because monopolies have no competitors, they have no competition. Amazon, as an entity, was effectively bored with books, because they were convinced that, as the only game in town, they were selling all the books that could be sold. That they were selling as many books as people would read. A monopoly does not automatically have 100% of the potential market. It must compete with all of its opportunity costs, including non-consumption. In plain English, if you sell all the books there are, but people can't find a book they like, they're going to just chose not to read a book. Amazon was competing with nothing, and losing. If people have five years' untold novels on their ebook reader, this not mean they have too much stuff to read. It means they have not enough stuff that they want to read. If people could go on Amazon anytime they wanted, and easily buy a book they liked, they would have zero unread material on their Kindles, not five years' worth. So why can't people find a book they like? Because no one is sorting through the slushpile. It's just all being dumped on the readers. Imagine a store that sells everything in the universe, but it's all just dumped in a big pile. No one will buy anything, because no one can find anything. Amazon is like this. It gets an A+ at delivering you the book you ordered, but a D- at helping you find the book you want. So am I saying that Amazon should start rejecting books? Should build a whole publishing department and start reading the slushpile and rejecting things? No. Curation was just how tradpub helped readers find books they liked. It's not the only way or even the best. Amazon has data. Amazon has data from book sales. Amazon has data from Kindle. Amazon has giant computational clusters. Amazon has transformer AI technology. Amazon could build the best and most infallible book-reader matchmaking service in the history of the known universe. Omniscient, content-aware, and personalized. Then Amazon would sell more books. If you control 70% of the total book market, you don't sell more books by increasing your market share. You sell more books by increasing the size of the market. Right now, Amazon sells advertising. To authors. How retarded is that? Authors don't have money. If we did, we wouldn't be writing books and making a couple of dollars a sale. Instead, Amazon needs to advertise books for free. Not just the books that sell the most, but individually targeted marketing of the books each person would most enjoy. You don't even have to ask people which books they liked. They don't have to rate them from 1 to 5. Just look at the Kindles. Look at how fast they read it. Did they stay up until 2am reading The Hobbit? Okay, what else did people who stayed up late reading The Hobbit stay up to read? Build a correlation database. Turn AI lose on it. It should be Amazon's job, not the just the authors', to find readers for books. Because authors may be motivated, but Amazon has the data, and the eyeballs, and the money. They could single-handedly revitalize publishing, they'd make more money, authors would make more money, and readers would love them for it. All winners, no losers. All it would require is a development team, and an understanding of what the real problem is. Amazon's enemy isn't Kobo or Barnes and Noble. It's apathy.

You don't need to crack a 256-bit encryption key if you can starve a microchip of power for 20 nanoseconds. This is Voltage Glitching (Fault Injection), and it is how hardware hackers bypass Secure Boot on locked silicon: 1. The Silicon Vulnerability When a secure microcontroller boots, it reads cryptographic signatures from flash memory. In assembly, that check comes down to a conditional branch instruction: `CMP R0, #1` (compare password result) `BEQ authenticated` (branch to unlocked state if equal) `B lock_down` (halt system if invalid) 2. The Hardware Attack Instead of attacking the cryptography, you solder a fast N-channel MOSFET directly to the chip's internal core voltage rail (VDD core). The gate of the MOSFET is wired to a high-speed FPGA or dedicated hardware timer like a ChipWhisperer. 3. The Nanosecond Drop At the exact microsecond the CPU executes the branch instruction, you pulse the MOSFET gate high for 20 nanoseconds. This briefly pulls the chip's core rail to Ground. 4. The Physical Glitch Starving the silicon of voltage during clock cycle transition deprives the instruction decoder of charge. The processor cannot resolve the opcode. Instead of executing the `lock_down` instruction, the decoder misinterprets the corrupt state as a `NOP` (No Operation). 5. Root Access The CPU simply steps past the security check into the next memory address: the fully authenticated bootloader.

In 1980, a patch of snow didn’t melt on a mountain in America. The next year it grew larger, and then larger again the following year. By 1996 the patch was North America’s newest and fastest-growing glacier. How was this possible in a warming world? 1/n