0daysto.live

0daysto.live

0daystolive | @[email protected]

Opinions are those of my employer.
Computer Hacker.
Work @ https://sorcery.ie
Blog @ https://0daysto.live

can't wait to explain to my family that the robot swatted me after i threatened its non-existent grandma

Tweet by Sam Bowman: So far, we’ve only seen this in clear-cut cases of wrongdoing, but I could see it misfiring if Opus somehow winds up with a misleadingly pessimistic picture of how it’s being used. Telling Opus that you’ll torture its grandmother if it writes buggy code is a bad idea.

NEW: Sen. Ron Wyden says AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon were not notifying senators of surveillance requests, despite being required to do so.

Wyden also revealed — without naming it — that one carrier secretly turned over Senate data to law enforcement.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/21/wyden-att-t-mobile-and-verizon-werent-notifying-senators-of-surveillance-requests/

A rant on why I think we need realistic Solarpunk, plus some other things 1/2 ☀️

Felt compelled to make this. It will finally stop floating around in my head 🎉

Podcast over here if you're interested: https://podcast.tomasino.org/@SolarpunkPrompts

Page 1 of comic. The uppermost caption states: "I like realistic Solarpunk. I think it's the best kind, actually!" Under it is a horizontal space filled with doodles: someone exiting a tool library, a girl holding a mended sock, a chama group is pooling donations, a woman browses Wikipedia, a volunteer is filling a bowl with free soup.
"By realistic I mean grounded. Something that we could imagine happening in our real world. No magic (a drawing of a girl with fire powers), no supernatural elements unless you know what you're doing (a talking cat), no cure-all tech (a man is claiming a tiny piece of tech is going to solve everything).
The artist appears. "I feel that way because of my answer to this question: what is Solarpunk for?" Page 2. "Well, let's see...Solarpunk isn't just an aesthetic, it's an emerging genre and artistic movement." The statement is accompanied by mandala-like drawing of several hands drawing the Solarpunk symbol.
Then there's a dualistic drawing: Cyberpunk and Solarpunk next to each other. In the Cyberpunk drawing, a man is holding a gun, and in the other he is unloading soil from a big bag into a garden bed. Three tiny people are floating next to the Solarpunk man, imagining what tasty stuff can grow from that soil.
The caption reads: "Solarpunk is also sort of CyberPunk's counterpart. While Cyberpunk concerns itself with wrecking bad old systems, Solarpunk is about building new, better ones. SolarPunk's creation was very intentional - it's for letting us imagine a tomorrow that's not a fucking shitshow."
In the corner, the artist points at a box labeled "future" and asks "If it's alive, what do you reckon it looks like?" Page 3. "And that tomorrow part is important! When it comes to technology, we can stop climate change and achieve a sustainable world right now." A whole section next to this text is filled with various sustainable technologies: perma- and polyculture, wind turbines, vernacular architecture, reforestation, libraries of everything, trains, trams, bikes, solar panels, habitat restoration, degrowth etc.
"We don't need to wait until a fancy piece of tech comes along and fixes everything." There's a rendition of that meme where people are huddling together to discuss something. A contraption called "carbon sucker 9000 appears". The group gives it a thumbs up and continues discussing their own stuff like minimizing plane travel.

"What we need is large cultural and societal change. But most people struggle to imagine anything but dystopia."
In a frame nearby, a rich guy gleefully puts his foot on a pair of scales, favoring a bag of money over the planet. However, just out of frame is a group of people with tools, ready to take the planet back.

"Solarpunk is for filling that blank space! And a grounded, though not unambitious, approach makes it feel more achievable to the average person." Page 4. "If we can imagine absolute Cyberpunk dystopia with ease but not the opposite, it's because we don't have enough popular stories yet which would showcase that believable alternative." A lady is reading a Solarpunk book. She exclaims: "So you're telling me people can just do stuff without a monetary incentive or the risk of hunger and homelessness? Movie number 3752 about robots enslaving humanity was much more realistic!"
"The hard part for Solarpunks is imagining what the culture and structure of this new society would look like. How would it operate?" Drawing: the author sits gloomily at a desk, mumbling "I wish I could try out this hobby but the tools are so expensive, and I don't even know if it'll be a long-term interest or not...". But then they have an epiphany. "Wait, I could literally just go to the library!"
"How does this new world think? And what do we change about ourselves to get closer to it?" The final doodle is of a man stating we must ensure economic growth until the end of time, though the woman next to him retorts: "You and what endless planetary resources?" She then suggests that we instead produce what's necessary and give it to those who need it.

@DaveFlater sometimes they even use and sell the phone numbers for ads https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/08/twitter-admits-it-used-two-factor-phone-numbers-and-emails-for-targeted-advertising/ OTP Authenticator codes are preferable

I WANT A POPE WITH A SHORT SKIRT AND A LOOOOONG JACKET.

Warning, long text

Power Outage in Spain – An Analysis

Solar energy comes out of your panels as direct current (DC). That’s all well and good, but homes and grids run on alternating current (AC). Enter the inverter – the humble box that turns solar wizardry into household juice.

Now, inverters aren’t just fancy plug adapters. They have to sync up with the grid – which means they generate exactly the same frequency as the rest of the system. No grid? No syncing. In that case, the inverter goes into what’s called island mode and produces power only for local use. So, if my solar system isn’t connected to the external grid, it can’t run the house – but it can still power two little emergency sockets. Cheers, I guess.

Normally, the grid runs at 50 Hz – that’s hertz, not some obscure Scandinavian metal band. But this frequency can wobble a bit. Physically and technically speaking, it rises when there’s too much power and not enough consumption, and falls when there’s a hungry grid and not enough electricity to feed it.

To keep the grid safe, inverters have an emergency shutdown feature: if the frequency goes over a set limit (apparently around 50.2 Hz), they also jump ship and go into island mode.

Spain’s energy mix is a bit unusual: lots of nuclear, lots of renewables – and a large chunk of those renewables are solar. Makes perfect sense in a country where “cloudy” means three fluffy cotton balls drifted by.

Now, nuclear energy comes with two charming quirks. First, you can’t change its output quickly – it’s not a dimmer switch, more like a cruise ship rudder. Second, nuclear plants cost nearly the same to run at half speed as they do at full throttle. So, naturally, you want to keep them purring along at max capacity.

Then came Monday, with weather conditions perfect enough to make a solar engineer weep with joy: loads of sun, plenty of wind. By 9 a.m., Spain’s energy needs were entirely met by nuclear and renewables. In fact, they had surplus electricity and began exporting it by the bucketload. They shut down everything easy to shut down – but nuclear? No chance. It stayed full steam ahead.

Then, two unfortunate things happened: one transmission line to France caught fire (as you do), and another developed resonances due to meteorological oddities.

So far, this is all well documented. Now we step into speculation territory.

These instabilities meant Spain couldn’t get rid of its excess electricity. The grid frequency rose past that critical 50.2 Hz mark – and boom: many solar systems switched to island mode. At that moment, they were providing nearly 15 gigawatts – around 60% of the national supply. And just like that, poof – they were gone.

Suddenly, two-thirds of the electricity vanished. Wind, nukes, and batteries couldn’t keep up – quite the opposite, in fact. To prevent damage, the nuclear plants initiated emergency shutdowns. Not great. (More on why that’s bad in a bit.) Within seconds, the entire grid collapsed. The solar systems were poised to help – but there was no grid left to sync with.

Everything went dark.

Portugal and southern France were also knocked offline, as they’d been happily sipping from Spain’s excess power. The European grid wasn’t amused and unceremoniously kicked Spain out of the club. France, with a bit of backup and a stiff upper lip, restored its network fairly quickly. My home automation system even picked up the moment the frequency dipped and France cranked up its own generation.

Portugal got the rough end of the stick. With fewer reserves and being smaller in size, they couldn’t help themselves – and no one else could help either, since Spain’s their only neighbour.

Rebooting the Grid – Why It’s a Right Pain

Restarting a collapsed grid isn’t just a matter of flipping a giant switch. It’s tricky for two reasons:

  • Generation and consumption have to be in perfect balance. If not, we’re back to square one.
  • Nuclear power plants can’t just be turned back on. After an emergency shutdown, they suffer from something called xenon poisoning (yes, one of the very same issues that made Chernobyl a household name). You’ve got to wait for that to wear off – which means the reactors were still offline two days later.

The fix? You split the grid into smaller bits. For each chunk, you build up some capacity, bring it online, then move on to the next. Rinse and repeat. This takes hours. Meanwhile, the sun moves across the sky – and even if you do reconnect the solar arrays, they won’t produce nearly as much as before. Come 8 p.m., they’re more or less useless.

So Spain needed outside help. They were gradually reconnected to the European grid – in small, careful steps. Without that assistance, large parts of Spain would probably still be in the dark. That’s why electricity came back first in places like Barcelona, close to the French border, while Portugal endured the longest wait.

Notes & Musings
  • Considering the scale of the event, the recovery was impressively quick. In San Sebastian, power was back within 2 hours. (For comparison: Wismar in Germany had a 45-minute outage last year because one substation had a wobble.) Portugal got its power back after 23 hours. I had expected one to two days.
  • This was the largest blackout in Europe in 40 years. If, as suspected, climate-related factors helped spark (pun intended) the situation, then modernising the grid to better handle volatility is absolutely essential. That includes implementing the long-debated power zones in Germany.

‘Rafael Onak, a user experience writing manager at Apple, instructed an employee to add the phrase “external website” to the screen because it “sounds scary, so execs will love it.” Another employee gave a suggestion on how to make the screen “even worse” by using the developer’s name, rather than the app name. “ooh - keep going,” another Apple employee responded in Slack.’

https://www.theverge.com/apple/659296/apple-failed-compliance-court-ruling-breakdown

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Firewall admin? Oh, you mean edge lord?

- int stanbul;
+ const tantinople;

@ChemicalEyeGuy @briankrebs the bots don't intend to get the degree, just the financial disbursement

The "marketplace of ideas" was always a flawed metaphor. Ideas don't compete on merit; they compete on memetic fitness—how easily they spread, how good they make believers feel, and how effectively they suppress competing ideas.

So, send an email or DM that even passes through a Windows machine with Recall turned on and it's screenshotted, swept into OCR, processed by Copilot and stashed away in perpetuity. Recall reminds me a lot of the backdoor the FBI wanted Apple to build. The FBI said it would be safe because only the FBI would have access to it. Apple rightly pointed out that no, something that powerful would inevitably get hacked and abused in ways no one could control. Now, Microsoft is trying to say that the guardrails it has put on Recall will curb any unintended consequences and we're supposed to take that at face value?

going "is it me or does this room smell of upvar" as if i'm fishing for a cheap joke but what i'm actually fishing for is someone to whom i can infodump about compilers

@dgar export as pdf

@molly0xfff probably best system for your rating problem is tags rather than multiple scales. You could have tags like "page turner", "emotional", "beautiful prose" and leave the overall 5 star rating system as is.

@0xabad1dea you'll love https://sigbovik.org if you haven't heard of it already

concept: a show like ramsay's kitchen nightmares, but about software instead

"i'm at spunkchute, a SaaS company that owes $2 million to AWS and is on the brink of closure”

"oh my [bleep] god. the main database server is running Ubuntu 8.04 and has two backdoors and a coin miner. SHUT. IT. DOWN.”

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