Nick Cotter

Last Week on My Mac: Losing confidence What was the key to successfully learning to drive, ride a bike, or speak a foreign language? Confidence, and it’s every bit as important in computing, and in macOS.

A catalogue of errors

One of my abiding impressions of Brexit is the way it slammed doors of opportunity in the faces of young people several rungs below Boris Johnson’s countless children on the ladders of privilege & advantage.

The fact of the matter is that the world has surely never seen the like of such a factory-like, superficial type of criticism - where every word is an arrow directed against someone's person, where a year's work is dismissed in three lines, where every phrase betrays a lack of the most elementary education, where no other purpose is maintained other than to incite laughter and to insult others, where often not even the semblance of objectivity is paid its due.

Social media, eh? Actually from a pamphlet published in Berlin, in around 1828.

A sneaky error to detect. We only discovered it on our platform because a user had a dashboard that was wall to wall YouTube videos.

Make last stand here.

Airbus issues major A320 recall, threatening global flight disruption Europe's Airbus said on Friday it was ordering immediate repairs to 6,000 of its widely used A320 family of jets in a sweeping recall affecting more than half the global fleet, threatening upheaval du...

A “single-event upset” is implicated in this too

🤓 Man, this is some very cool stuff from NASA!

It visualizes one month of aerosol particles moving throughout Earth's system (from August 2024).
Green=Sulfate
Red=Carbon
Purple=Dust
Cyan=Sea Salt

[Keen readers will note the pun above😉]

Norway may break up with Europe's power grid over soaring energy prices | Euractiv Oslo, and Norwegian voters, are growing impatient with backing up Europe's energy transition

Norway may break up with Europe's power grid over soaring energy prices

Four pictures of a ridiculous tuxedo baby who had no idea how pampered he was about to be. Look at his silly little face, he's got no clue about anything

5 years ago today, Pandemic Year. It had been a month since I opened my "side project" (lol) cat rescue in the spare room of my flat in London.

I saw an ad for a male kitten with "balance & walking problems" who urgently needed a home. And so it began. HAPPY SMOL PAUL DAY!

CULTURAL DEATH IN THE AGE OF THE EXCESSIVE CHOICE There was a time when culture gestured outward toward shared experience, toward the new, toward some horizon of possibility. Now, it stares inward, fragmented, homogenized, and devoid of collective…

A slot machine for the soul

Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea. There is a rush for AI companies to team up with space launch/satellite companies to build datacenters in space. TL;DR: It's not going to work.

Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea.

A 34-year secret shrouded in shame paved the way to teach children about the horrors of our past For 34 years Madeleine Walsh lived with her secret in shame... Now she wants schoolchildren to learn about the horrors of Ireland’s past, writes Aoife Kelleher

A 34-year secret shrouded in shame paved the way to teach children about the horrors of our past

www.irishtimes.com/life-style/p...

Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out OpenAI is now internally testing 'ads' inside ChatGPT that could redefine the web economy.

Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out

A crucial system of ocean currents may be on course to collapse. This country just declared it a national security threat | CNN Without warm currents from the South Atlantic, Iceland would be much icier and stormier. Now, those currents are at risk of collapse and the country is preparing for this “existential threat.”

A crucial system of ocean currents may be on course to collapse. This country just declared it a national security threat | CNN

Loads of posts on Newskies by different accounts called Yuri with anime avatars, all saying "so fkin refreshing to be off that trash elon app 🤣"

What the hell is this garbage?
@bsky.app @safety.bsky.app

Imgur Geo-Blocked the UK, So I Geo-Unblocked My Entire Network Imgur started blocking UK users. Rather than installing a VPN on every device, I set up a network-wide proxy that tunnels Imgur traffic through a VPN automatically.

Imgur Geo-Blocked the UK, So I Geo-Unblocked My Entire Network :: The Tymscar Blog

250MWh 'Sand Battery' to start construction in Finland, for both heating and ancillary services Polar Night Energy and Lahti Energia have partnered for a project using 'Sand Battery' technology for a district heating network in Finland.

250MWh 'Sand Battery' to start construction in Finland, for both heating and ancillary services - Energy-Storage.News

Apply fine-grained access control with Bedrock AgentCore Gateway interceptors | Amazon Web Services We are launching a new feature: gateway interceptors for Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Gateway. This powerful new capability provides fine-grained security, dynamic access control, and flexible schema…

“The act-on-behalf model requires the gateway to extract execution context from…requests, generate new scoped authorization tokens for each downstream target, and inject…headers while maintaining the user’s identity context…without exposing overly privileged credentials to downstream services.”

Nano Banana can be prompt engineered for extremely nuanced AI image generation Max Woolf provides an exceptional deep dive into Google's Nano Banana aka Gemini 2.5 Flash Image model, still the best available image manipulation LLM tool three months after its initial …

Nano Banana can be prompt engineered for extremely nuanced AI image generation

Python is not a great language for data science. Part 1: The experience It may be a good language for data science, but it’s not a great one.

Python is not a great language for data science. Part 1: The experience

Google Antigravity Exfiltrates Data An indirect prompt injection in an implementation blog can manipulate Antigravity to invoke a malicious browser subagent in order to steal credentials and sensitive code from a user’s IDE.

“An indirect prompt injection in an implementation blog can manipulate Antigravity to invoke a malicious browser subagent in order to steal credentials and sensitive code from a user’s IDE.”

A black cat sits on a black box on a windowsill and judges the photographer regarding the condensation on the window.

#CatsOfBlueSky

We should all be using dependency cooldowns Nov 21, 2025 Tags: oss, security

We should all be using dependency cooldowns

LLM APIs are a Synchronization Problem Maybe the LLM message APIs should be rethought as a synchronization problem.

LLM APIs are a Synchronization Problem | Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings

Agent Design Is Still Hard My Agent abstractions keep breaking somewhere I don’t expect.

Agent Design Is Still Hard | Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings

A first blush, I was wondering what the business case looks like - surely a clever strategic advantage play, some audacious winner-takes-all bet...

But, alas, it increasingly looks like the whole financial plan is "The Singularity is near. Amen !"

Tom Forsyth (@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place) Attached: 1 image Recent discussion about the perils of doors in gamedev reminded me of a bug caused by a door in a game you may have heard of called "Half Life 2". Are you sitting comfortably? Then…

Half Life 2 bug found decades later via numeric precision changes over time.

Just to be clear, I didn’t come from up there and climb down.

Thorium-uranium Conversion Makes Breakthrough In early November, the experimental operation of a 2-megawatt liquid-fuel thorium-based molten salt reactor (TMSR), led by the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences…

Thorium-uranium Conversion Makes Breakthrough

“It's like generating electricity by flowing 'nuclear fuel' through 'high-temperature salt',”

Secret Service traced swatting threats against officials. They found 300 servers capable of crippling New York’s cell system | CNN A Secret Service unit set out to unmask the layers of burner phones, changing phone numbers and SIM cards that were swatting American officials. It ended with the largest seizure of SIM servers and…

Secret Service traced swatting threats against officials. They found 300 servers capable of crippling New York’s cell system | CNN