FeedLand likes for oevasquez

AI slop is killing online communities

Thu, 07 May 2026 21:20:47 GMT

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Mozilla says 271 vulnerabilities found by Mythos have "almost no false positives"

Thu, 07 May 2026 21:20:37 GMT

The disbelief was palpable when Mozilla’s CTO last month declared that AI-assisted vulnerability detection meant “zero-days are numbered” and “defenders finally have a chance to win, decisively.” After all, it looked like part of an all-too-familiar pattern: Cherry-pick a handful of impressive AI-achieved results, leave out any of the fine print that might paint a more nuanced picture, and let the hype train roll on.

Mindful of the skepticism, Mozilla on Thursday provided a behind-the-scenes look into its use of Anthropic Mythos—an AI model for identifying software vulnerabilities—to ferret out 271 Firefox security flaws over two months. In a post, Mozilla engineers said the finally ready-for-prime-time breakthrough they achieved was primarily the result of two things: (1) improvement in the models themselves and (2) Mozilla’s development of a custom “harness” that supported Mythos as it analyzed Firefox source code.

"Almost no false positives"

The engineers said their earlier brushes with AI-assisted vulnerability detection were fraught with “unwanted slop.” Typically, someone would prompt a model to analyze a block of code. The model would then produce plausible-reading bug reports, and often at unprecedented scales. Invariably, however, when human developers further investigated, they’d find a large percentage of the details had been hallucinated. The humans would then need to invest significant work handling the vulnerability reports the old-fashioned way.

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Thu, 07 May 2026 21:20:18 GMT

I'm still listening to the OpenAI case, off and on as I work. It's fascinating. I do wish there were courtroom sketches, though! So much money flowing through this trial — we just learned that the expert witness for Elon Musk is making 6 figures for his time — yet no one can hire an artist?

Claude just astounded me

Thu, 07 May 2026 21:19:50 GMT

I say to Claude: btw, i would have been surprised if it was broken, that feature went in very quickly and i use it a fair amount. one of the two big pages in feedland is the Feed List page. here's a screen shot. maybe you can figure out what everything does??

Example of a Feed LIst page in FeedLand.

Claude retorts

Disclosure triangle — expands the row to show more about that feed (recent items, description, full URL).
Blue checkbox (checked) — subscription state. Checked = you're subscribed. Click to subscribe/unsubscribe.
Row number — just positional, 1..14 for this result set.
Feed title — clickable, opens the feed's own page (the other "big page" you mentioned).
Small tag icon next to the title — opens a categories editor for that subscription, lets you tag the feed into categories.
When column — last update time, with adaptive granularity: minutes for very recent ("21 mins", "26 mins"), day-of-week for the past few days ("Fri", "Tue", "Thu"), month+day after that ("Nov 22", "Mar 29"), and presumably full date for old stuff.
Ct column — subscriber count for the feed. Every row shows 2 because feedland.social is small. Worth noting: this is the same
ct that the SQL we just touched uses for
order by ct desc — the column visible in the UI is the sort key.
Green circle "i" — info popup, probably feed metadata (URL, description, last build, maybe owner).

Claude is very very smart. And I guess I got the right answers. A lot of work went into the design

The only thing it didn't guess correctly about is what the other "big page" is. It's not the Feed Info page, it's the news page, a timeline or river.

Done for the day, my last words to Claude were -- FeedLand is an important product and we're going to do right by it.

Daily Deal: Linux/UNIX Certification Training Bundle

Sat, 18 Oct 2025 02:48:20 GMT

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Ace Frehley Has Died

Sat, 18 Oct 2025 02:47:00 GMT

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Bad Bunny lives rent-free in conservatives’ minds

Sat, 18 Oct 2025 02:41:18 GMT

Good lord, right-wingers, get a grip. It’s unhealthy to expend this much energy being sad about a Super Bowl halftime performer.

Yes, they’re still freaking out about Bad Bunny. So much so that they’ve done the most hilariously impotent lib-coded thing imaginable: created a Change.org petition.

“The Super Bowl halftime show should unite our country, honor American culture, and remain family-friendly, not be turned into a political stunt. Bad Bunny represents none of these values; his drag performances and style are the opposite of what families expect on football’s biggest stage,” the petition reads.

Bad Bunny will be performing at the 2026 Super Bowl halftime show.

Have any of these people seen a Super Bowl halftime show in the last 25 years? We’ve had the likes of Kendrick Lamar, Usher, Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Shakira, Beyoncé, and Prince. In fact, you have to go back to 2003 to find a country artist, and that was Shania Twain, who has at least dabbled in pop music.

You’ll note that conservatives are not suggesting that Twain return—because she loves drag and nonbinary and trans artists.

The anger over the Puerto Rican rapper is really just straight-up racism thinly—very thinly—disguised as some vague yearning for America’s lost glory. But really, the right is just furious that it might have to hear Spanish songs. And how dare conservatives be forced to watch a foreign performer—oh, wait … they keep forgetting that Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory.

And the signers of this petition really have no qualms whatsoever about posting the most bigoted comments.

“The Super Bowl used to feel like America — strong, grounded, united. Now it feels like we’re forgetting the people who built that unity with their bare hands. This isn’t about music. It’s about memory. About a country that once stood tall, proud, and grateful — and the fear that we might not anymore,” one comment said.

“The people who built that unity with their bare hands”? What does that even mean?

Another signer wrote, “American sports speak the language we understand.”

Okay, that one is both racist and incoherent.

Or how about, “Most Americans speak English… no race hate intended but it’s the truth. I don’t even really know who he is. Bring country music back to football! Stop listening to Jay z all the dang time.”

You know that any time you see a qualifier like “no race hate intended,” what follows is guaranteed to be racist as fuck.

“George Strait is a much better choice than that thing that has no idea if he wants to be a guy or a chick,” someone else wrote.

Sure, let’s throw some homophobia into the mix!

The only reason conservatives are fixated on Strait in particular is that President Donald Trump named him a Kennedy Center honoree earlier this year. There isn’t some organic groundswell of demand going on here.

Usher performs during the Super Bowl halftime show in 2024.

Also, it’s just embarrassing to stack up Strait’s numbers against Bad Bunny. In 2024, Bad Bunny’s songs were streamed 11.5 billion times. He was also the most played artist on Spotify from 2020 to 2022, and he’s the No. 1 Latin artist on Billboard’s recap of the last 25 years. And his latest album, “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS,” hit No. 1 earlier this year.

To be fair, the 73-year-old Strait does have a greatest hits album still kicking around the Billboard 200 … at number 119.

Meanwhile, House Speaker Mike Johnson, definitely a man with a keen grasp of modern culture, thinks Lee Greenwood should play the Super Bowl. Yes, the man who has literally only one song everyone knows, “God Bless the USA,” which came out in 1984. The dude is 82 years old—no one is clamoring for Greenwood.

But there’s something else going on here besides just the abject racism. Conservatives are incensed that they can’t capture the culture. They control all three branches of government and they’re terrorizing the country, but they still can’t force us to listen to whatever fifth-rate has-been who’s attached themselves to Trump.

The NFL isn’t going to get rid of Bad Bunny, especially not because of a petition that’s earned a paltry 30,000 signatures.

As a point of comparison that would certainly infuriate the signers of this petition, the Justice for George Floyd petition received 19 million signatures, a petition to designate the KKK a terrorist organization got more than 3 million, and a petition to cancel student debt got 800,000. Hell, even a petition to make actor LeVar Burton the host of “Jeopardy” netted 296,000 signatures.

Conservatives will have to content themselves with the Turning Point USA alternate halftime show, which now has a website but no performers. Lara Trump has stepped forward and offered to perform, despite literally never being asked. She’s sure to be a huge draw, what with her most recent single getting about 2,800 streams on Spotify.

If fortune smiles on us, perhaps Turning Point will get Creed to headline, as they’ve threatened. Then we could hope for a repeat of his 2001 halftime show, a truly unhinged experience complete with shirtless men on aerial silks and the worst lip syncing you’ve ever seen.

x YouTube Video

The idea of Creed as the family-friendly alternative to Bad Bunny is especially comical. The band’s lead singer, Scott Stapp … okay, we’re gonna need a list here:

He started a fistfight with members of the band 311.

He made a sex tape with Kid Rock and four women, for which he had to sue to prevent it from being sold. But it’s okay because, for Christians like Stapp, getting blow jobs from groupies isn’t actually sex.

He got arrested for public intoxication roughly 24 hours after getting married.

He was charged with felony domestic assault, which was later dropped to a misdemeanor.

He jumped off of a hotel balcony in Miami during a drug binge, falling 40 feet and breaking his skull, hip, and nose.

Now that’s family-friendly, right?

In contrast, literally the only dirt you can dig up on Bad Bunny is that his ex-girlfriend sued him in 2023 for including a recording of her saying, “Bad Bunny, baby,” on two songs, for which she demanded $40 million.

There's nothing that right-wingers can do to change the fact that Bad Bunny is going to perform at the Super Bowl. He’s going to sing in Spanish. He might wear a dress. He might kiss a dude. But no matter what he does, he will be reflective of the United States—a polyglot country of immigrants and a glorious mashup of cultures.

George Strait could never.

NeXT Computer Offices

Sat, 18 Oct 2025 02:40:57 GMT

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Hans Koenigsmann, who investigated all of SpaceX’s rocket failures, is going to space

Mon, 13 Oct 2025 18:52:27 GMT

Hans Koenigsmann is one of SpaceX's earliest, longest-tenured, and most-revered employees.

When Elon Musk started the company in 2002, he was joined by two other "founding" employees, Tom Mueller in propulsion and Chris Thompson in structures. Koenigsmann was the next hire, brought on to develop avionics for the Falcon 1 rocket.

Koenigsmann remained at the company for two decades before leaving SpaceX in late 2021. During that time, he transitioned from avionics to lead mission assurance and safety while also spearheading every major failure investigation of the Falcon 9 rocket. He was a beloved leader and mentor for his employees within the company's demanding culture.

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Mon, 13 Oct 2025 18:47:24 GMT

John Gruber blogging about the end of Apple’s Clips:

Edits, Meta’s new-this-year video editing app for mobile, has a clear use case: it’s meant for editing videos destined for Meta’s popular social media networks. Clips had no clear target destination. It could have, but never did.

Thu, 18 Sep 2025 16:42:48 GMT

Disney stock down 1.1% at 11:38AM Eastern. Not a big drop, so a big media company doesn't depend much on the first amendment, according to shareholders.

Thu, 18 Sep 2025 13:09:54 GMT

Meta’s Ray-Ban Display glasses really are impressive. I’m not going to support Meta with a purchase, but I do appreciate the work that went into them. Nice live demos too, even if a couple failed. Ben Thompson:

They are an excellent explanation as to why Apple now fully pre-records their product announcements, but it’s the risk of demo fails happening that makes them so compelling.

From The Archives

Mon, 15 Sep 2025 02:45:58 GMT

I was thinking about this post this morning and then I saw someone reference it on Bluesky. It’s from July 2016 (“This Is Not the Natural State of Things“) and notes that not only is the world of the last 80 years not permanent or unchangeable. It’s not even the natural state of things. The world we all grew up in, from the late 1940s to some point in the last decade, was the product of very conscious and deliberate decisions made largely in the United States but also in the capitals of Europe. For all its many imperfections and discontents it was a period of prosperity and security essentially unrivaled in history.

How older parents divorce affects their adult children

Mon, 15 Sep 2025 01:22:46 GMT

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Lisp in 2025

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 23:08:23 GMT

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Fri, 12 Sep 2025 15:01:29 GMT

I did a podcast interview yesterday with Nathan Wrigley at WP Tavern. I had a great time, and learned a lot. It's interesting that while I am not a member of the WordPress community, there is a big intersection between that community and one I do belong to -- the web. WordPress was founded on the principles and idealism of the web. It's baked in. So it might be the largest community of users, not exclusively developers, who have the same values as the web, which are very very powerful values. I'm rediscovering them and it's wonderful. It means I can plug your app into my server and they work first time. It's the just works part that makes it the web. It makes you suck in your breath and go, I'm there now. One interesting thing that came up was the subject of altruism, which is something I reject re myself. It doesn't work if what I do is altruism, because we all must be somewhat committed to the success of our competitors, because if we don't we are locking people in. It's so important that users have freedom of movement. If they don't things stagnate like our 19 years of Twitter. I'm going to be Nathan's show again, and again if he'll have me, to check in on the progress of my humble project to create a new layer, combining WordPress and all the other good stuff that isn't hooked up to it yet. I could not have hoped for a better introduction to The Land of WordPress.

Inflation Rises to 2.9% Annually

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 15:39:10 GMT

Wall Street Journal: “Thursday’s report showed consumer prices rose 2.9% in the 12 months through August—speeding up from 2.7% in July, and matching the expectations of economists.”

“The rate is above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target. Even so, traders are confident the Fed will cut interest rates next week in response to a weakening labor market.”

It's really simple

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 15:39:00 GMT

Reminder: Sept 18, one week from today, is the 3rd anniversary of the 20th anniversary of the release of RSS 2.0. I often forget to mark that day. It's not an event that's marked by others very often, but in my humble opinion, it deserves more respect than it gets.

Around the time of the 20th anniversary I decided to swing back and see what more we could do with RSS. It had been sitting there basically going nowhere for most of those 20 years. I want to be clear, there were good and useful products created and supported, but there was none of the innovation that would have happened if it hadn't been so severely injured by Google and the many VC-backed startups hacking away at it.

A format like RSS has to be loved. And if you make it too complicated or vague, with too much political shuffling of the deck what you get is ActivityPub. That's what RSS would have become if it went down the path the tech industry wanted to take it down. We have a perfect artifact to look at. An A-B comparison. Couldn't be more stark. And, after almost 23 years, RSS is still simple.

Anyway, around the 20th anniversary, in the leadup to it, I decided if no one else was going to invest in RSS, I would, and let's see what comes of it.

The result was FeedLand which is fundamentally different from all the other feed readers in that its subscription model is patterned after the twitter-like social media apps. Everyone's subscription list is public. I can look at your list and you can look at mine. You can also put categories on the feeds you subscribe to and route them to other servers doing other things, through the magic of the web. And get this -- you can even subscribe to a category of my subscriptions. Lots of power there, but still it's simple.

FeedLand is the perfect back-end for a twitter-like system, for the feeds part. And for the words, the perfect back-end is WordPress. I only discovered that about 1.5 years ago. And I had to see what it looks like. No more tiny little text boxes, WordLand is a real editor that supports the basic writing features of the web. How do I know? Because it saves its data in Markdown. That has come to be the defining format for the text-based web. One which has been totally ignored by the twitter-like systems. Markdown is like MP3. If you're mixing sound into feeds you use MP3 of course. It's there for you to use. As was Markdown. If you're mixing text you're mixing Markdown.

So while everyone was dancing on Twitter's dumpster fire of a social network I decided to build on something much bigger. The web. RSS and Markdown. WordPress and FeedLand.

The name Really Simple Syndication is supposed to make you smile, while most techie formats make you want to pull your hair out. RSS reads pretty well even if you know nothing about feeds and XML. I wish the browser people hadn't insisted on masking it with ugly CSS style sheets. I like lifting the hood of a car to see what's there even though I don't know what many of the things in there do. I learn by doing it.

RSS isn't ugly, it's brilliant, and shouldn't be fear-inducing, hence the promise: it's really simple.

Open Carry Is Legal on College Campuses in Utah

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 15:38:11 GMT

“It is legal to openly carry a gun on Utah’s public university and college campuses with very few exceptions,” the Salt Lake Tribune reports.

“It’s unknown if the shooter who fatally fired on conservative commentator Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University in Orem on Wednesday afternoon was openly carrying or had a concealed weapon, but both are technically allowed.”

Quote of the Day

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 15:36:16 GMT

“Instead of the angry finger-pointing, can we just for one day agree that it is horrible and monstrous to shoot another human?”

— Jimmy Kimmel, quoted by Deadline.

Are We Too Far Gone?

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 15:35:49 GMT

Andrew Egger: “I don’t know what we can do to avoid this fate. All I know is what I can do. And what I can do starts with the acknowledgment that, while Charlie Kirk may have been an ideological opponent, he wasn’t my enemy. My enemy—an enemy I share with many who would call themselves my enemy—is the person who shot him, and anyone else who would reach for violence as a means to a political end.”

“Charlie Kirk’s political project was controversial and provocative in its aims. But in its approach, it was simple and fundamentally laudable: He went where the people were and evangelized to them. His signature “prove me wrong” debates were always a little silly—arguments between halting college students and a professional pundit backstopped by a sympathetic crowd aren’t exactly fair fights. But they also reflected an intrinsically liberal, American view of how politics is done: by convincing people from the ground up.”