steelframe

Totally. I don't even know why we're still talking about that obscene glob of bloatware. Now excuse me while I get back to hacking up some Lisp in ed on my 80x25 text console.

I think this is a great example of temporarily effective "security through obscurity." It's also a trick that will only continue to work so long as it doesn't get adopted too widely.

This event was pretty chilling for me because I just took the Renfe line from Seville to Madrid a couple of weeks ago while visiting Spain. I generally like to think that I have a pretty good instinct on relative risks and make reasonable decisions based on that. This time around, between the incident earlier this year and this most recent incident, depending on how you interpret and apply the statistics (of course that's always up for healthy debate), it looks like it would have actually been safer driving between Seville and Madrid. That's a pretty low bar in terms of safety!

I set my favorite agent on the task (Opus 5.5 in the Kagi Assistant), and given the two rail crashes in Spain this year, these are the stats it came up with for "chances of dying" via various modes of transportation between Seville and Madrid:

* EU high-speed rail, long-run average: ~1 in 36 million

* This rail line, counting both 2026 crashes: ~1 in 400,000 to 1.2 million (prior to the most recent crash it was 1–3 million; now ~2.5× higher)

* Flying with a European airline: ~1 in 80 million

* Driving: ~1 in 1 million or worse

Of course this is hindsight. Heightened awareness of risks, higher propensity to overreact to anomalies or alarms, procedural changes, and so forth in the wake of this second crash might push high-speed rail in Spain to be higher than the European average in the future.

I switched entirely over to Asahi Linux on my M1 Macbook Air and installed a third-party 55Wh battery, as the original battery had fallen below 80% capacity. That machine is good to go for another 5 years.

There are no features or performance characteristics of any of the subsequent M[2-6] Macbook Air or Pro models that I care about. I'm not really sold on running models on the hardware I have right in front of me. So long as I can rent an RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell at about half a buck per hour through a European provider, I'm fine using that with Qwen3.8-27B UD-Q4_K_M for the few things I consider more privacy-sensitive.

What if the company has provided the harness, tool execution environment, MCP servers, and LLM provider subscription for the employee to use? What if the company has provided a set of skills and other prompt context that could lead to undesirable behavior in certain unforeseen circumstances? What if the permission prompt the user sees 30 dozen times a day looks like, "OK to execute this random shell script?"

Accountability really is hard in this new world.

No need to involve dang in this. He's had nothing to do with these price hikes.

Wow, you're right. The DMCA happened while I was out of the country doing something very not-tech-scene related, so I completely missed that it passed way the heck back then.

I suppose my point still stands if you are willing to stretch back to Usenet, BBSs, etc. as an inflection point in mass copyright infringement.

When it comes to copyright, I am not so optimistic. When the AI bubble bursts, the usual corporate interests will resurface with a vengeance.

So long as there's big money interests around copyright, I assure you it will not die. And all the predictions about the knives coming out after the AI bubble pops are spot on.

It took a while for the DMCA to happen after Napster. But it indeed happened, and we all know the saying about history repeating itself.

I just use my area code followed by 867-5309. It's quick, non-confrontational, and completely lost on whatever generation is currently manning the register.

I have been using the alias feature for years now with Fastmail. Deleting an alias is hands-down the quickest and most convenient way to unsubscribe from whatever drivel a company ends up sending my way care of their slimey marketing vendor.

Bummer that you got shadow banned.

Now many of us will get to learn how to find meaning in a life where your time is worth about $2-4/hour, which is the reality for about 2 billion people today.