Andrew Cowie

The first rule of Soviet Russia is that when they deny something is going to happen, it's going to happen. Unless you deny that you're going to deny it. In which case you're not going to do whatever you said you weren't going to do, and instead are going to do it because you said you wouldn't.

Meet our Solar System's newest dwarf planet candidate: 2026 ED138! Orbiting past Pluto, scientists found it in NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory data from earlier this year. Early analysis suggests it's ~600–1500 km across, one of the largest found past Neptune!🔭🧪 🔗: rubinobservatory.org/news/rubin-f...

Eventually, it was decided to proceed woth the work required to deal with the One Ring Problem unofficially, as the need was pressing. It was noted wryly by all, however, that on successful completion it was reported as "magnificent work by the Council of Elrond" in internal comms.

Starlinked /ˈstɑːlɪŋkt/ adjective Held back, restricted, slowed down or controlled by someone you were paying to support you. Usage: “We were making good progress, then we got Starlinked.”

That’s the sucking chest wound in the Republic and every other proposal is just a band aid.

Vulnerability xkcd.com/3314/

You enter the room. There is a [RCE] in front of you. The robed and cowled [Security Researcher] stands in front of the altar, chanting [/ˌsiː viː ˈiː/]. Do you cast [ineffectual corporate Cyber Security Policy] at them, attempt to kill the messenger by [blame Open Source], or [rebuild everything]?

the fact that an intermediate CA in India that sells only into the Indian market, when compromised, can generate TLS certs for literally any website on the internet, that feels like a major trust boundary problem

"Ukrainians who have offered democracies a beacon of light in a world where the forces of authoritarian evil dim our hopes for a better future. The Ukrainians have given us more than we could ever repay." On Trump's "Ukraine has given us nothing" statement. mickryan.substack.com/p/what-has-u...

I have questions. Who washes their pet in a coin-operated washing machine? Admittedly the dog would probably love it, but can you imagine what a cat would have to say during the spin cycle?

A phone app (with mandatory account creation too!) to use the guest laundry in a hotel is one of the most unnecessary, solution-looking-for-a-problem, borderline dystopian things ever invented. 1/3

My kid wrote his first computer program today. I'm so proud. "Hello World", of course. I'm actually pretty torn, though. How does one teach programming in the AI era? The act of coding has certainly changed, but I've decided to just teach computing and how computers work, whatever interests him.

Nothing makes me want to move permanently to the woods more than receiving endless 10-paragraph e-mails made entirely of sentences like "You have built a framework that is both intimately grounded in your own research and universally applicable."

Pompeii is a UNESCO world heritage site not because it was remarkable in its prime, but because it survived to our era untouched: one moment, preserved for all time. But future generations won't know what OUR world was like unless we do the same. This is why we MUST bury Toronto with a volcano

This is awesome: a terminal font in the style used by computers in WarGames (1983). mw.rat.bz/wgterm/ Mainframes deserve mainframe fonts!

Today I learned that YouTube has an internal category for useless content called `brainrot`. They also noted that most AI generated slop ends up being tagged this way. They still serve it to people, but aren't you reassured that they know they're doing it?

This is a candidate for best sign of the year. In an era of demagogues, false profits, and mafia dons running countries, clear messaging and simple truths are priceless.

PM 🇨🇦 Mark Carney's speeches in Strasbourg and Toronto have gained considerable attention, but the real juice are his "Forward Guidance" videos. youtu.be/eYAwioM3RQI Worth watching. Reminds me that the quip "Canadian identity is merely the assertion that you're not American" goes back a long time.

The ability of a cutting-edge model to move laterally is getting extraordinary.

You know there's something special about the Universe because yesterday it let you make a release! only to find mere hours later that your release has a bug in it.

Russian admiral talking to Gerasimov. "So, you get them all to line up, in full view of the enemy, and have them march to a certain death by drone?" "Da. Exactly" "Get my ship captains on the phone. We have a new strategy!"

I think this is pretty serious: for several months the UNOOSA (UN Office of Outer Space Affairs) has not been making public new sat registrations apparently because of an IT policy issue. A month or two I could accept, but at this point it's a failure of the international space governance regime

We know the Devil exists because He created Continuous Integration and fixing CI is Hell. GitHub Actions are like the Fifth Circle of Hell, "wrath". Or maybe Seventh, because oh yeah baby, "violence". The sinner is doomed to re-run the same Workflow again, and again. And again.

Ornith 1.0: full spectrum of open weights coding models from 9B to 397B The largest appears to rival Opus 4.7-4.8 All fine tuned from Gemma 4 and Qwen 3.5 but no, the cool part is how they made it… 👇 deep-reinforce.com/ornith_1_0.h...

A Russian air defense missile blows up a fuel tank at the Moscow Oil Refinery following a failed attempt to shoot down a Ukrainian drone.

@shashj.bsky.social my compliments for the choice to re-air, if that's the term, your interview with Sir Alex Younger. Watching again I was struck by his clarity of language and commitment over a lifetime of service. People such as he spend their lives in the shadows and are rarely recognised.

Good preliminary analysis from Scott Manley about the Blue Origin test failure and loss of launch site youtu.be/aaR6yEE-Myo

Asking the Attorney General's office this morning about this outrageous information - they intentionally delayed publishing FOI documents until 1 minute before our Estimates hearing in February commenced so we couldn't ask them about the documents released.

In today's episode of cool-things-I-have-hallucinated-that-should-exist-but don't, we have "cryptobiological" links used to secure transfer of information. I'm trying to figure out what the biology part is. DNA coding? Pheromone sampling? Or maybe it's just "human enters passphrase". #cryptography

Three months from now the average voter is lined up at a gas station waiting for their ration and still getting headline alerts on their phone about YUGE FREE MONEY CHECK HITTING BANK ACCOUNTS SOON where if you actually click the link it's an AI summary about a town in Iceland enacting a UBI program

Well they did say this was going to keep happening. #linux security embargo broken so meet Ditry Frag github.com/V4bel/dirtyf... You had an entire week since the last one, don't complain.

Trump surprised Gulf allies by announcing “Project Freedom”, the officials said, angering leadership in Saudi Arabia. In response, the Kingdom informed the U.S. it would not allow the U.S. military to fly aircraft from Prince Sultan Airbase or fly through Saudi airspace to support the effort.

GCU Whoopsie Doodles @cultureshipnames.bsky.social