Dominic Mitchell

Dominic Mitchell

@dom.happygiraffe.net

he/him. Hacker-at-large. Occasional Brightonian. Googler. @happygiraffe@mastodonapp.uk https://happygiraffe.net/ DMs unavailable due to OSA, sorry

332 followers800 following724 posts

Dominic Mitchell reposted

Jan Rosenow
@janrosenow.bsky.social

Solar has overtaken nuclear. A decade ago it supplied 1% of the world's power. In 2025 it met three quarters of global demand growth. Almost nobody saw it coming. I spoke to Jocelyn Timperley at BBC Future about why. www.bbc.co.uk/future/artic...

bbc.co.uk'It's offensively cheap': How solar power is quietly becoming bigger than nuclearAfter defying projections, solar's dramatic growth means it is overtaking nuclear as a global power source. Here are seven reasons for solar's success, and where it might go from here.

Dominic Mitchell reposted

Dorian Lynskey
@dorianlynskey.bsky.social

The replies are an extraordinary catalogue of things that have objectively improved. If we didn't have the climate crisis and the far right authoritarians and the tech barons overshadowing everything I'd be whistling every day

Michael Druker 🇨🇦@mdruker.app

Social media loves talking about how everything is getting worse. But what’s something that you’ve seen get _better_ in your lifetime?

Dominic Mitchell
@dom.happygiraffe.net

As AI forces me to move up the stack, I get to review crappy written docs instead of (slightly less) crappy looking code. The generated words are so bland my eyes glaze over. It makes everything take so bloody long.

Dominic Mitchell
@dom.happygiraffe.net

“ever the pragmatist, he joined the Communist party because it demanded only one night a week of his time instead of the three or four the Trotskyist Socialist Workers required.”

Dominic Mitchell reposted

Jason Koebler
@jasonkoebler.bsky.social

wrote about "Black October," the PHP vulnerability, and the AI-fueled dread and panic I'm seeing among almost all of the cybersecurity experts I've ever known. I think people w/ LLMs are brute forcing software the same way they brute forced social media w/ slop www.404media.co/php2shell-bl...

404media.coAI Is Changing Everything About Hacking. No One Knows What Happens Next'Black October:' The PHP vulnerabilities and a series of other hacks and bugs have cybersecurity experts freaking out and unsure what happens next.

Dominic Mitchell reposted

Rob Manuel
@robmanuel.b3ta.com

Replying to @robmanuel.b3ta.com

No YOU lost your mind spending six months hand drawing 81 Jokes For The ZX81 because the title popped into your head one day and you thought the title so absurdly irresistible as a personal challenge that you pivoted your entire life to making a niche as fuck book. spelk.press/gb/products/...

spelk.press81 Jokes for the ZX81Rob Manuel (creator of Fesshole and co-founder of B3ta.com) set himself an absurd task. Write 81 jokes for the ZX81, illustrate them himself and use only the ZX

Dominic Mitchell reposted

Rob Manuel
@robmanuel.b3ta.com

Replying to @robmanuel.b3ta.com

If you enjoyed this, I put the same humour and retro computing obsessions into my new book "81 Jokes For The ZX81". Do pre-order it, out early December in time for Christmas. An ideal gift for you or your ZX81 loving partner. I've put so much love into this. Order now: spelk.press/gb/products/...

Dominic Mitchell reposted

garth marenghi's chart place
@tef.bsky.social

web developer: oh hey you guys are back early infra: four's haunted web developer: what? infra: *loading a pistol and getting back on the computer* four's haunted

Dominic Mitchell reposted

Filippo Valsorda
@filippo.abyssdomain.expert

Anthropic found the origin of the NIST elliptic curve seeds: they were generated with drand48()! No one was seriously worried, but this should put some FUD to rest, completing the NIST ECC rehabilitation arc… just in time to be retired in favor of PQ. Also, we raised $36 Ki for ISRG. Yay!

words.filippo.ioThe NIST Elliptic Curves Seeds Bounty Has Been ClaimedWe now know how the seeds of the NIST elliptic curves were generated: they’re not the hash of some saucy sentence, but the output of drand48() seeded with the time, which was indeed in 1997–98.
Dominic Mitchell
@dom.happygiraffe.net

Transmetropolitan is colliding with our reality faster than I had thought. Get your anti-cancer trait now, and hit up those Carcinoma Angels…

Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com

"AI researchers are taking up smoking because they expect AI to cure cancer, says Palantir CTO"

businessinsider.comAI researchers are taking up smoking because they expect AI to cure cancer, says Palantir CTOSome AI believers expect the technology to make smoking-related health risks like cancer a thing of the past, Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar said.

Dominic Mitchell reposted

Filippo Valsorda
@filippo.abyssdomain.expert

Publishing “Cryptographic Right Answers” for developers is a tradition by now. Colin Percival started in 2009, Thomas Ptacek followed up in 2015, and then Latacora carried on in 2018 and 2024. I put together a list updated for the renewed urgency of migrating to post-quantum algorithms.

words.filippo.io(Post-Quantum) Cryptographic Right AnswersIn the tradition started by Colin Percival and Thomas Ptacek, a set of “Cryptographic Right Answers” updated for the accelerated post-quantum transition timeline.
Dominic Mitchell
@dom.happygiraffe.net

I went to look up Bazel, as blaze (inside Google) still gets this wrong. Good news — Bazel uses UTF-8 by default!

Henri Sivonen@hsivonen.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy

Python shipped https://peps.python.org/pep-0686/ just now in late 2026 to make the implicit text file io encoding UTF-8 on Windows, too. The PEP says Java did this in 2022 and Ruby in 2020, both of which seem unreasonably late.

peps.python.orgPEP 686 – Make UTF-8 mode default | peps.python.orgThis PEP proposes enabling UTF-8 mode by default.
Dominic Mitchell
@dom.happygiraffe.net

Just absolutely incredible how much munitions are still lying around. “The last person to die from an unexploded bomb dropped in world war two probably hasn’t been born yet,”

theguardian.com‘It could knock a whole street down’: the art of defusing a second world war bombThe long read: On 14 January this year, army and navy squads faced an unprecedented challenge: one bomb on a Plymouth building site, another floating on a dredger in Exmouth. That afternoon, the clock...
Dominic Mitchell
@dom.happygiraffe.net

A great discussion of a hugely important topic. One of my favourite tech talks in Google was about the first cable we participated in laying. Oh, and if you get a chance, visit the telegraph museum in Cornwall.

This post is unavailable.

Dominic Mitchell reposted

Paul Byrne
@theplanetaryguy.com

This will never stop blowing my mind. A 12-year sequence of real telescope images of a star 133 lightyears away. And around it, four planets slowly orbiting. Four real exoplanets, each more massive than Jupiter, imaged as they move around their host star.

Dominic Mitchell
@dom.happygiraffe.net

... wombling free

Tube Mapper- Luke Agbaimoni@tubemapper.bsky.social

From Chiswick Park to China As I waited for my train, planes kept crossing the sky above the station tower. So, I waited for a British Airways flight to pass the Underground roundel. Perfectly matching the red, blue and white of the tube logo.

Dominic Mitchell reposted

Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

I've published detailed notes and an annotated transcript to accompany the video of the keynote I gave at @wearedevelopers.bsky.social World Congress North America in San Jose on Friday - here's my rundown of everything that's happened with LLMs in 2026 so far simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/27/...

simonwillison.net2026 in LLMs (so far)On Friday I gave the closing keynote at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America in San Jose. I tied together the key trends from the past year into a chronological …

Dominic Mitchell reposted

Surprised Eel Historian, PhD
@greenleejw.bsky.social

Friends! It's the feast day of St. Hildegard of Bingen, an abbess, polymath, mystic, & eel truth-teller. Medieval thinkers agreed that eels reproduce asexually. But Hildegard suggested that eels mate at sea, where we can't watch. No one listened to her. But she was right! 1/2 🗃️🧪

Dominic Mitchell reposted

Chris Swan
@cpswan.net

This is the best articulation of what LLMs are doing to programming and security that I've seen

halvarflake.bsky.social@halvarflake.bsky.social

I gave a talk at Bluehat Singapore today. The slides are here: thomasdullien.github.io/about/slides...

Dominic Mitchell reposted

Ben Schwarz
@benschwarz.bsky.social

Qatar Airways was voted the world’s best airline in 2025. Its booking site ranks 79th out of 111. Cathay Pacific, five stars, ranks dead last. I spent a while digging into why airline websites are so slow, and what the fast ones (Ryanair, Frontier) do differently. calibreapp.com/blog/airline...