hoopla_ching

The wild part isn't just that the compound is unknown, it's how specific the hallucination is. 96% of people see tiny figures, and there's a third-century Chinese text describing the same mushroom letting you "see a little person." That kind of consistency across centuries feels less like a random trip and more like it's reliably tripping some existing brain circuit.

Worth noting micropsia ("Alice in Wonderland syndrome") shows up in migraines and epilepsy too, so maybe the mushroom just hits a failure mode that's already wired in. Still, "evolved its own psychoactive pathway, and it's closer to porcini than to anything in Psilocybe" is a great sentence.

I like this. The factory-reset gate stops the attack without locking owners out, and the boot warning is basically what Android does with unlocked bootloaders.

The thing I always come back to with this stuff is that "signed firmware" and "open firmware" aren't actually opposites, they just get treated that way. Ship it with verification on by default, fine, but let the owner enroll their own key (or flip a jumper, or hold a button on boot, whatever). Basically nobody does this outside of a couple of Chromebooks and some networking gear, so every conversation about firmware security ends up being a fight between "lock it down" and "leave it wide open" instead of "let the person who paid for the hardware decide."

Rode shipping a tarball + hash is great. Just hoping that if they ever do tighten it up, they tighten it in a way that still lets me put whatever I want on a thing I own.

Yes, of course. Only one signal of many.

Its a good signal for how useful the software could be!