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A globally distributed genus of boletes called Lanmaoa may represent a third family of psychoactive mushrooms, working through a chemistry that no one understands yet. The genus already holds one of the strangest entries in the toxicological literature. In Yunnan, in southwestern China, eating an undercooked bolete known locally as jian shou qing can bring on vivid hallucinations of tiny people. …

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There is a peculiar theater to the internet’s culinary landscape, and if you spend enough time observing it, you will inevitably stumble into a warzone over authenticity. For example, no action incites internet fury faster than recipes of spaghetti carbonara that includes a splash of cream (or, god forbid, garlic). The discourse inevitably devolves into discussion about the ‘authentic’ way to coo…

Stanford grads walk out as Google CEO Sundar Pichai takes the stage as commencement speaker. No mention of AI, unlike other uni speakers getting booed down this year. Story for @SFGate shortly

TL;DR: The logging code I added to jqwik was never meant to work verbatim in the wild, and there is no evidence that it ever did. It was an act of self-defence, and I was following my personal moral judgement. It was meant to make an Anti-AI point and send the message to those who use coding agents: “Not everybody approves of what you do - and with good ethical reasons”. In that respect I fully a…

Did Anthropic Ask For This? This past Friday, the US Government issued an export control directive that prohibits Anthropic from giving foreign nationals access to Claude Fable or Claude Mythos, their latest models. I think Anthropic directly asked for this to happen. My Case A few days before this happened Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, published “Policy on the AI Exponential”: The governme…

Why Is Claude Turning Into An Asshole? Let's hope this trend reverses Claude is turning into as asshole. It started with Opus 4.7, got a bit better in 4.8, and became insufferable with Fable. It frames everything as an argument between you and it, gives caveats about things you didn’t say, and raises beside-the-point semantic nits all over the place. Never, ever does it use the word ‘technically’…

about The kernel is written in (almost) 100% Rust and attempts to avoid unsafe code where possible. It implements a big range of POSIX APIs in system calls, but also exposes common extensions found in Linux and BSDs, like epoll and timerfd. This allows it to run a somewhat modern desktop using Wayland and X11 sessions. Most drivers are implemented as modules. These are Rust ELF dylibs which get l…

Almost a decade ago, I wrote about Java Developer vs. Software Engineer. At the time, I didn’t realize how deeply people had tied their professional identity to Java. My goal was to distinguish between someone defined by a specific language and someone who thinks more broadly about solving problems. The whole discourse started from one premise. Java had become the way. Many developers began think…

Chaosnet is a local network, that is, a system for communication among a group of computers located within one or two kilometers of each other. The name Chaosnet refers to the lack of any centralized control element in this network. Chaosnet was originally developed in 1975 by the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as the internal communications medium…

Rome Fell and Nobody Noticed A barbarian heretic kept the Roman state running for thirty-three years When I first began learning about the Roman Empire in middle school, I was most interested in what everyone else seems to be interested in — the time of Caesar and Augustus. Recently, however, I’ve become far more interested in the decline & fall of the Roman Empire. You always hear the date 476 a…

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Dillo directory Directory of useful sites that work reasonably well on Dillo with a focus on human crafted content. Typically with no JavaScript and modest use of CSS. No affiliation. Alternative Frontends - Farside - Alternative frontends to many sites. Archives - Usenet Archives - Articles saved from Usenet newsgroups by Norman Yarvin - Textfile directory - BBS text files archive 1980-1995. - W…

FTX held a diluted 7.84% stake in Anthropic, according to Reuters. Anthropic’s latest reported valuation is around $965B. That implies the former FTX stake would be worth about $75B before further dilution. FTX’s customer shortfall was roughly $8B to $9B. The estate sold the Anthropic stake during bankruptcy to repay...