@cdarwin@c.im2026-06-29 06:12:54
NASA is racing to save an aging telescope from falling back to Earth with a daring rescue mission.
The $30 million salvage operation gets underway as soon as this week with the planned launch of a robotic lifesaver.
NASA hired startup
Katalyst Space Technologies
to boost the Swift Observatory to a higher orbit
where it can continue hunting for some of the universe’s biggest explosions.
A three-armed spacecraft built by Katalyst will chase after Swift once …
@catsalad@infosec.exchange2026-05-29 18:09:13
I should buy a boa– i mean, meow!
@detondev@social.linux.pizza2026-07-29 19:00:23
Range of Embodiable LARP (RoEL) --- within a certain radius around your original face, and the most deeply ingrained elements of your socialization, what you sell yourself as can not only overwhelmingly be percieved as authentic, but become natural with enough time and commitment.
Tupac was a zesty theatre kid acting gangster, viewing it as the best way to raise the consiousness of a wider black community at the time, till he eventually *became* a genuine gangster beyond appearance. H…
@metacurity@infosec.exchange2026-05-27 10:45:48
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is recruiting around 100 full-stack engineers and cybersecurity professionals, as well as managers to oversee its tech shop.
https://federalnewsnetwork.com/hiring-ret…
@hex@kolektiva.social2026-05-29 22:15:58
I tried to write something up to talk about an idea, but it didn't quite work. I have a lot more I need to put into it. But I want to get an idea out, and, after talking with a person who pointed out some of the flaws in what I wrote, I think I can maybe write down the kernel of the idea here.
An acquaintance of mine did a deep dive on Operational Art and wrote his thesis (which prompted an earlier set of posts and an article I wrote for my professional-ish blog) on the intersection of the OODA loop and critical philosophy. I've been spending a lot of time thinking about Kilcullen's Three Pillars model (after watching Andrewism's wonderful video) and Beer's VSM. The TL;DR of it is that there's a much better insurgency model. Of course, the insurgency model also works for a bunch of other things, because cybernetics lets you do all kinds of cool abstraction like that.
So as I was reading the essay of a comrade the other day, that model popped back into my head and I'm going to try to share what I can of it.
When colonizers came to the Salish region, they saw what they believed to be an untouched wilderness. They failed to see the ways in which Salish people tended the land. Indigenous fire practices were common on the northwest coast, and the suppression of those practices remains a problem. There is an interrelationship between an environment and the systems within it. Systems, like people, animals, and cultures, adapt to the environment. In doing so, those systems will also change the environment.
Social technology was invisible, so colonizers defaulted to either some kind of Rousseauvian or Malthusian model of these people. They were not, for the colonizers, people who had developed advanced social technologies to live in harmony with their world. They were, rather, people in "a state of nature."
The European influenced left continues to draw this Rousseauvian model, which continues through a lot of Anarchist revolutionary thought. European anarchists were heavily influenced by observations and theories around the behavior of indigenous people. The remnants of this thought still exist in the idea that the system must only be destroyed for us to be free.
This is the same obliviousness to social technology, that social technology actually exists, often informs both early colonizers and modern radicals.
It is through this obliviousness that we fail to recognize how capitalism is a social technology that is managed into existence and maintained, and how changes in the environment can threaten institutions that have become over-adapted to a specific version of that environment.
We can extend Kilcullen's metaphor of a "conflict ecosystem" through cybernetics into a much more rich model, populated by viable systems. The ecosystem itself has a fitness function, which drives adaptation within the environment. But all actors in the environment also affect it. Some try to manage the environment. Revolutions are often over who manages a social ecosystem, over who controls the social technology and what it does.
Once we see this dynamic at play, calls of "riot" and "revolution" make a whole lot less sense. Rather, the question becomes, "how do we change the ecosystem in such a way that it cannot be 'managed' at all?"
Graeber/Wengrow talked about Turtle Island indigenous social technologies in Dawn of Everything, such as the system of moieties and clans described in the book. So I have a good reading list as I think through this model, but I hope the "ecosystem" model is helpful (if not completely fleshed out).
I'd be interested in any critiques or thoughts to help develop this idea more.
@AccordionBruce@Mastodon.social2026-07-30 00:35:13
“The day may not be far off when everyone will be walking around playing his or her own private radio station on a Walkman.”
From Steve Otfinoski’s Golden Age of Novelty Songs (2000)
Talking about #WeirdAl and the struggle to find universal songs to parody
Published exactly the year before the iPod was released — barely misaligned futurism
Right on the cusp of dramatic c…
@Techmeme@techhub.social2026-05-27 11:10:50
Demis Hassabis says he still broadly expects AGI around 2030, though he now sees 2029 as a possibility, and 2026's "agentic era" is a "bit like a practice run" (Ina Fried/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/05/26/deepmind-ceo-demis-hassabis
…
@netzschleuder@social.skewed.de2026-05-29 01:00:05
topology: Internet AS graph (2004)
An integrated snapshot of the structure of the Internet at the level of Autonomous Systems (ASs), reconstructed from multiple sources, including the RouteViews and RIPE BGP trace collectors, route servers, looking glasses, and the Internet Routing Registry databases. This snapshot was created around October 2004.
This network has 34761 nodes and 171403 edges.
Tags: Technological, Communication, Unweighted, Multigraph, Timestamps
@cyrevolt@mastodon.social2026-04-30 07:51:23
What a lovely writeup on the #OS wars in the 80ies, their legacy and corporate politics background:
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/aftermath-of-the-kernel-wars/
@cdarwin@c.im2026-07-25 18:25:15
Age verification (or age-gating) laws generally require online services to check, estimate, or verify all users’ ages
—often through invasive tools like ID checks, biometric scans, or other dubious “age estimation” methods
—before granting them access to certain online content or services.
Governments in the U.S. and around the world are increasingly adopting these restrictive measures in the name of protecting children online.
But in practice, these systems create dan…
