The 84 Series
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Claire Keane

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The 84 Series
imagine if you will, a fairly dry survival crafting game in which you live in a bunker and must periodically venture out to scavenge food, set up turrets for attacking monsters, etc
now, your computer inside the bunker has a game-inside-a-game on it which is a charming farming sim of undeniably greater quality and scope than the survival game you're playing. therefore, the object of the game becomes to keep your bunker secure so you can play the farming game more.
now, once you achieve the highest rating in the farming game, a secret shop inside it unlocks, and one of the novelty items you can purchase is a game console, giving you access to games-inside-a-game-inside-a-game. most of the games for it are typical mobile shovelware, but one of them is a highly polished, extremely brutal precision platformer with amazing level design and production values exceeding that of the survival game and farming sim combined.
it is only at this point that the purpose of this entire contrivance becomes clear: to create the most deranged speedrun community the world has ever seen.
Fantastic idea
Article about it here.
what’s important to note and missing from the “headline” tweet is that they simultaneously constructed additional good public transit to the public transit already in the city (bus rapid transit, train stations). Just removing highway alone isn’t going to make traffic better, the bigger part of the story is that they improved public transportation. And the current mayor wants to do more - cyclist lanes and reinstate a tram system
“Because the truth is, tech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem. What’s wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasn’t successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. What’s wrong is that he’s trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product that’s designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn’t that you haven’t told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.”
— The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech
Lawmakers push DoD to tighten smartphone controls after adversaries exploited commercial tracking data
Unfortunately, the US government seems to be taking the view "we need to restrict what our personnel can do more" and "we need to set up our devices differently" than the actual real answer which is to fucking stop ubiquitous non-consensual data harvesting. This is a problem for military sure but it is also a major issue for civilians. Literally since day 1 this has been an issue for everyone.
Maybe the EU will be smarter and regulate this shit.
Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.
But... Stochastic Parrots.
Ownership meant a physical copy. Now you own nothing and can't find what you want across multiple streaming platforms.
Bring back headphones that plug in. Bring back expandable memory. Bring back owning media.
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I think this is just a trend everywhere but I've been very frustrated this week by how much admin work is being outsourced to me as the patient/customer.
My orthodontist tells me I can make an appointment with the surgeon. I call the surgeon. They tell me I need a new referral. I call the orthodontist. They do a referral. I call the surgeon. Referral didn't come through. They tell me about their special unique system we have to use. I call the ortho again and walk them through the referral. I call the surgeon. They say the referral was missing some details so they have to do it again. I call the ortho.
The insurance company calls me about repair shops. I give them the name of the repair shop which I already gave them yesterday. They say they're not in their system but I can use them, but I have to call the repair shop to ask them to contact the insurance company. I call the repair shop and they say the insurance company is supposed to email them.
I feel like at a certain point these constant fetch quests become unreasonable?? Is it too much to expect these groups to communicate with each other instead of making me run back and forth between them???
Made this post and then the new property manager (who started on Monday and only finally emailed us today because I sent a vaguely professionally hostile email to her boss because I hadn't heard anything and was not convinced she existed) asked for a list of open action items which her predecessor should have had but apparently wasn't keeping track of, which I learned when I met her boss and provided her with the list of open action items, which I guess tragically died in a fire in the last 2 weeks since she was sitting at my kitchen table, being menaced by the skull. How many people's jobs am I doing now
The phrase arrived in my head so completely formed and concrete that I couldn’t believe it wasn’t already established in the lexicon, but at
It has a name!!!
Hold on for dear life
My next book is The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, out next month. Pre-order it now, including as a DRM-free audiobook or ebook, at my Kickstarter, and help me continue to prove that DRM-free isn't just the right way to reach an audience, it's also the best way to reach them.
From the earliest days of technopolitics, the role of technology in resisting authoritarianism was unclear. On the one hand, there's the indisputable fact that modern cryptography, properly implemented, can deliver a degree of privacy that is proof against all technological attacks.
That is to say, if you pull out your distraction rectangle, fire up the camera, and tap the shutter button, in the ensuing eyeblink instant the image you've captured will be scrambled so thoroughly that it could never be unscrambled without the secret key unlocked by your passphrase or biometrics. Even if every hydrogen atom in the universe were converted into a computer, and even if all those computers spent all the time between now and the end of the universe trying to guess what the key was, we would run out of universe and time long before we ran out of possible keys.
What's more, this extremely robust form of scrambling and descrambling can be combined with other techniques to block tampering with the encrypted data, and to allow parties to reliably identify who scrambled the data and also to restrict who may unscramble it. These remarkable technological facts have inspired many excited debates about what they mean for our politics, most notably among a group of people who called themselves "cypherpunks":
https://web.archive.org/web/20151102012232/https://www.wired.com/1993/02/crypto-rebels/
One cypherpunk faction believed that modern cryptography could enable a kind of technological secession: by allowing ordinary people to communicate, transact and collaborate without the possibility of state interception or control, crypto could make states themselves obsolete.
But another faction pointed out that no amount of mathematics could help you if an agent of the state – or a criminal the state failed to protect you from – tortured you until you revealed the secret passphrase needed to unlock your secrets. This was (ironically) called "rubber hose cryptanalysis" (as in "Tell me your passphrase or I'll hit you with this rubber hose again"). Later, this became known as a "wrench attack" after a famous XKCD comic about $1m worth of security technology being defeated by hitting someone with a $5 wrench until they divulged the password:
https://xkcd.com/538/
Once you stipulate to the problem of wrench attacks and rubber-hose cryptanalysis, it becomes apparent that your cryptography is only as good as your physical defenses. What's more, the most effective physical defenses we have come from a strong rule of law, because even the thickest safe door benefits from the threat of prison for anyone who breaks into the safe, and the most effective tool for preventing a cop from hitting you with a rubber hose is the existence of a judge who can send that cop to prison for abusing your civil rights.
But what do you do if you already live under tyranny? The rule of law is a great defense, but cryptography alone can't bring about the rule of law. What is the role of technology in this foundational struggle?
My technopolitics faction – the faction associated with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where I've worked for a quarter-century – has an answer: the role of encryption is to provide a measure of privacy and security that is best used to organize political struggles to demand the rule of law and respect for human rights. Encryption isn't proof against rubber hoses, but it is effective against many other forms of state repression, and it can provide a technical edge for those engaged in a political struggle.
Another faction – the faction most associated with bitcoin and subsequent cryptocurrency projects – rejects the role of the state altogether, and seeks to replace states (and state-regulated institutions like courts and banks) with mathematics. Rather than asking courts to interpret contracts, we can put our trust in self-executing "smart contracts," and rather than asking banks to safeguard our financial integrity, we can use cryptographic software to ensure that money only moves when the person it belongs to tells it to.
This has many problems. Smart contracts are slow, expensive, and unreliable. The number of people who understand contracts is small, the number of people who understand the software that embodies smart contracts is likewise small, and the Venn intersection of the two is more of a sphincter. What's more, there is irreducible ambiguity in all but the simplest of contracts, which means that even a "self-executing" contract ends up relying on a human adjudicator (an "oracle") who can be bribed or intimidated into cheating:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/14/externalities/#dshr
And when it comes to transactions, crypto proves to be unwieldy, expensive and complex, so that nearly all crypto users end up directing an intermediary (like Coinbase) to hold and move their cryptographic assets for them. The upshot is that cryptocurrency mostly replaces banks – imperfect, but heavily regulated and insured – with unregulated tech platforms with murky ownership and often defective security procedures, who may or may not be insured (or even locatable) in the event of a collapse or a breach. Consequently, cryptocurrency has become a scam magnet of unprecedented and unstoppable power, and hardly a day goes by without people being ripped off in the most ghastly ways imaginable:
https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/
For bitcoin maxis and other anti-state cypherpunks, this is just a skill issue. Anyone who doesn't understand how to manage their own keys and turns to a platform to hold and move their crypto is getting what they deserve. As the maxim goes, "Not your keys, not your wallet," which is cypherpunkspeak for "caveat emptor."
That's where the wrench attacks come in. Because if you are in possession of keys that can be used to irreversibly and instantaneously steal large sums of money and move it to jurisdictions where the perpetrators are beyond any legal or physical recourse (e.g. North Korea), then there is a massive incentive for your adversaries to kidnap you and hit you with a wrench or a rubber hose.
That's precisely what's going on. People with substantial cryptocurrency holdings face grave personal danger, and the physical attacks on their person grow bolder, more violent, and more sadistic by the day:
https://github.com/jlopp/physical-bitcoin-attacks/blob/master/README.md
As crypto critic David Rosenthal writes, this problem is even worse than it seems at first blush:
https://blog.dshr.org/2026/05/wrench-attacks.html
For one thing, cryptocurrencies depend on "public ledgers" that indelibly, publicly record every transaction in the network. Cryptocurrency is nothing without these ledgers, and they have to be immutable and public to work. This is very bad news for anyone who relies on anonymity as their defense against physical attacks.
That's because "reidentification attacks" (where an anonymous person in a dataset is positively identified) get easier to perform over time. You might be represented in a database of hospital prescribing activities by a random number, and that number might be hard to associate with your real identity…at first. But with every subsequent release of data – whether in the form of an anonymized data-set or a breach – it gets easier to cross-reference the facts associated with your record with other facts from other records, such that a detailed, identifying picture of you emerges one fact at a time.
Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.
But... Stochastic Parrots.
An EFF analysis of millions of searches of Flock Safety automated license plate reader (ALPR) data by police has uncovered a troubling patte
Google says it’s no different than checking IDs at the airport.
This is just another form of censorship, control of what we can/can't see and engage with, and another means of getting our private information.
Alternative forks of AOSP (Android Open-Source Project) which are not maintained by Google and will not be affected by this:
LineageOS (I use this one)
Graphene OS
Functionally they are virtually identical to stock Android. Android began as an open-source project, and these versions are built off of that.
Fuck Google.
"This week I discovered the same pattern, executed by Google. Google Chrome is reaching into users' machines and writing a 4 GB on-device AI model file to disk without asking."
Google Chrome is downloading a 4 GB Gemini Nano model onto users' machines without consent, with no opt-in, no opt-out short of enterprise t
pretty sure I did the chrome//flags thing a while ago, but also i switched to firefox, which is not without the occasional bullshit, but is vastly less bullshitty than chrome. This is why I treat genai "features" like the invasive blackberry bushes they are: cut, root, burn, and vigilantly watch for new shoots to uproot. I'm 54 years old and the world got by fine without genai for most of my lifetime.
tags via@KKglinka #psa#having read the article#it's not clickbait#chrome is reaching#across all chromium browsers#to link a prepatory structure#this malware packet#will therefore occur#with all chromium browsers#it has nothing to do#with the actual ai interface#instead chrome is either#using your personal computer#as part of a cloud server#the way bitcoin malware works#or it's recording your own#actions on the computer#with a continuously active#background module#either way#that's malware#a 4gig trojan virus
The only ways to make the deletion stick are to disable Chrome's Al features through chrome://flags or enterprise policy tooling that home users do not generally have, or to uninstall Chrome entirely
...
Adding the file took zero clicks. Removing it requires (a) discovering the file exists, (b) understanding what it is, (c) navigating into a hidden user profile path, (d) deleting it (and on Windows, also clearing the read-only attribute first), and (e) accepting that Chrome will silently re-download it on next eligible window unless the user also navigates chrome://flags, enterprise policy, or platform-specific configuration tooling to disable the underlying Chrome Al feature. None of those steps is documented in the place a normal user looks - none of them is even hinted at in default Chrome.
Lmao we have to fucking destroy this company are you fucking kidding me with this shit
Google is transforming Search from a list of links into an AI-powered experience filled with conversational answers, autonomous agents, and
Remember that xkcd about how Google searches are shit now? What if we made them even worse for no reason?
I will vote for any candidate who promises to go scorched fucking earth on every tech company. Break every single one of them up into companies based around a single product and then split those in thirds. Weaponize existing antitrust laws to the hilt and pass the most draconian versions of them ever seen on this planet. Nationalize google search specifically. Pass consumer privacy protections strict enough to kill the data harvesting industry for good. Make all of these fuckers go bankrupt for this rent-seeking shit
Scientists in Germany have demonstrated a startling new form of surveillance: identifying people using nothing more than ordinary WiFi signa
Shopping isn’t politics
My next book is The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, out next month. Pre-order it now, including as a DRM-free audiobook or ebook, at my Kickstarter, and help me continue to prove that DRM-free isn't just the right way to reach an audience, it's also the best way to reach them.
I've written before about the futility of "voting with your wallet." Billionaires love it when you try to vote with your wallet, because while billionaires only represent 0.00004% of the population, their wallets are 100,000 times larger than average, which means that when we vote with wallets, a billionaire's vote counts 100,000 times more than yours:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/13/consumption-choices/
The idea of voting with your wallet is fundamentally antiprogressive, and not only because wallet-voting favors the wealthy. The ideological basis for voting with your wallet is the belief that politics are slow and unresponsive, while markets dynamically optimize for human wellbeing. By voting with your wallet, you are supposedly injecting information about your preferences and dispreferences into a vast, distributed computer we call "the market," which uses "demand signals" to decide how we live our lives.
This belief is incompatible with the idea of politics – that is, the idea that our lives can be shaped by representative democracy, deliberation, and/or solidarity. It's a nihilistic view that insists that the only nice things we can have are the things that "the market" chooses for us. If "the market" doesn't decide to swap out fossil fuels for cleantech, then that's that – any attempt to draw down our carbon emissions through regulation will only "distort the market." If you're roasting in a drought, drowning in a flood, or being incinerated by a wildfire, your only move is to go shopping and hope that by buying a Tesla, you will emit a "demand signal" that "tips the market equilibrium" to "not killing you and everyone you love."
Shopping isn't politics. Politics are politics, and shopping is shopping.
You have to love open source/community projects/small tech more than you hate big tech.
I’m blindsided by authors using ai in their works. how can readers and writers tell if the writing is ai generated?
I’m gonna assume writers know whether or not their own works are ai because they either write them themselves or have ai write for them.
but as for readers (or writers who read other writers’ works), no, you can’t tell unless the writer themself says their works are ai generated. anything else is witch hunt, speculations and possibly wrongful accusations — all of which harm the writing community as much as ai does, if not more.
so if at any point you think an untagged work is ai and if that bothers you, quietly click away. but you can never know for sure based on vibes. because everything ai writes, a human writer does. that’s what ai was trained on and what it was trained to mimic.
I’ve already talked more about this here, here, here. and more on my other blog @writingdose here and here.
You can notice certain telltale signs in some of the writing, such as short sentence stacking and usage of "not x not y but z" structures. But you have to be familiar with AI writing styles to be able to notice that.
I’ve been writing “not x, not y, but z” way before gen ai became a thing. I’ve read works that have “not x, not y, but z” in them, and I’ve read those works way before gen ai became a thing. I’ve also been using em dash way before gen ai became a thing, and I’ve seen em dash used in so many written works way before gen ai became a thing. I know for a fact some human writers actually prefer short sentence stacking too.
every “ai telltale” is something humans write before, otherwise ai wouldn’t have been able to mimic it in the first place. because it needs human-made works to mimic on.
when I say ai witch hunt, speculations and accusations harm the writing community as much as ai does, if not more, “not x, not y, but z” and em dash are one of the main things I’m talking about.
As I saw someone say recently, when you start declaring "obvious tells," from punctuation to sentence styles, to be proof of AI, what you're actually spotting is trace amounts of the original source material.