Gavin Brown

.TO, the ccTLD for #Tonga, enabled an #RDAP server! deployment.rdap.org

The patches are usually made of organic amino acid crystals…

Truly extraordinary Google AI results. Amazing.

Bill and Ted’s Existential Adventure

Knowing that someone online is a child makes that child a target. It makes them *more* vulnerable, not less. It gives predators targets. It lets marketers manipulate.

Looks like he's having a lovely time!

Google’s AI Is Destroying Search, the Internet, and Your Brain Google’s AI Overview, which is easy to fool into stating nonsense as fact, is stopping people from finding and supporting small businesses and credible sources.

Google's AI summaries are
- killing traffic to legitimate sites
- producing summaries that can be wrong
- in the long run probably making you a dumbass

www.404media.co/googles-ai-i...

Love how he prepared for this journey these past months. Beautiful final show, embraced what was happening. Went out like the true searcher he was.

This is absurd.

The red supergiant Betelgeuse is the bright feature in this image.

But that darker blue splotch is a *companion star* that's just been discovered—and it orbits so close to Betelgeuse that it's inside the larger star's outer atmosphere.

Join the rdaptastic – RDAP Lookup beta Available on iOS

I‘m looking for testers for my new #SwiftUI app on #TestFlight!

It’s called rdaptastic – an #RDAP lookup tool designed to make querying domain data simple. Right now, it only supports domains, and there’s still a lot evolving. Early feedback would mean a lot! ✨

testflight.apple.com/join/4nQ59YyR

#RDAP base URLs for three ccTLDs were added to the DNS bootstrap registry yesterday!

.cm for #Cameroon
.tw and .台灣 (.xn--kpry57d) for #Taiwan

More data at deployment.rdap.org

Bearsted CC est: 1749

My son's cricket club is older than your country.

A section of the bayeux Tappestry with the king's subjects sining 'boom boom boom, let me here you say bayeux' and the king replying 'bayeux'

I made this a couple of years ago, but it's super relevant just now

One day in 1982, Michael Tomczyk, who had led the project to develop the Commodore 64, found himself sitting in Jack Tramiel’s office. Tomcyzk had just returned from a trade show in Hanover, Germany. During the course of their conversation, Tomczyk mentioned how impressed he’d been with the Autobahn highway network on the way there. "I built that road," Tramiel told him matter-of-factly. “Jack went on to explain that during World War II as a teenager he had been selected to work on the road gangs,” Tomczyk remembered. “He said that it was one way to survive, because they had to feed the people that did that kind of hard labor, or they wouldn't work. ‘We built good roads,’ he said.” Tramiel had never hidden the horrors in his past. He was proud that he had helped build a better future through Commodore and Atari. However, the longer he lived, the more concerned he became that people would forget what that future had cost. And that which is forgotten can be repeated. "You know," Tramiel said once, "it's hard to believe it really happened. But it can happen again. In America. Americans like to make rules, and that scares me. If you have too many rules you get locked in a system. It's the system that says this one dies and that one doesn't, not the people. That's why I don't hate the German people. Individuals, yes. Rules, yes. But not all Germans.

The latest in my history of home computers is live. Covers the era of Commodore, Atari and Jack Tramiel.

He was a brutal manager. But also an Auschwitz survivor, and that shaped him, and his legit drive to build a better world.

This warning from him hit home, right now.

every.to/the-crazy-on...

[Redacted Username] Sadly, I know. The Vatican sits on stolen land w stolen treasures. 💬 1 ♡ 🔁 … [Gray Redacted Username] · 16m what? the vatican certainly has stolen treasures, but in what possible sense is it stolen land? The church has been there for longer than any current government has existed! 💬 1 ♡ 🔁 … [Redacted Username] + Follow Considering the land belonged to the Pagans and that they were subjugated into Catholicism, I believe the land was ceded by conquest. July 9, 2025 at 1:51 PM 💬 ♡ 🔁 …

have someone in my mentions [apparently seriously] arguing that the vatican is on rightfully pagan land stolen by conquest

FAST COMPANY Article: While retirement typically occurs, after completing a career and saving and investing for it, a new trend is emerging among Gen Z career professionals called "micro-retirement." Micro- retirements involve taking a one to two- week break from work every 12 to 18 months. Gen Z is using micro-retirement to avoid burnout, find greater fulfillment in their work, and enhance their overall well-being. However, it's not just Gen-Z:

'Vacations.'

The word is 'vacations.'

Same

The rise of Whatever This was originally titled “I miss when computers were fun”. But in the course of writing it, I discovered that there is a reason computers became less fun, a dark thread woven through a number of eve...

"The state of the art [of "AI"] is to ask the computer nicely to do something, add a disclaimer saying it’s not your problem if the computer is racist, and then charge for access."

eev.ee/blog/2025/07...

You MUST listen to RFC 2119 It turns out you can just pay people to do things.

RFC 2119, read in the most over the top, passive-aggressive way possible

ericwbailey.website/published/yo...

(scroll to the bottom)

I imagined the Chatsubo in 1984. 41 years later I opened its door. Neuromancer is in production.

To sum up: if you think Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower set up the liberal international order for no reason, because they were overwhelmed by charity (or war-mongering), you're a fool.

They set it up because they'd just got done punching Nazis and were facing Stalin.

It was all load-bearing.

Fun idea for thought experiment from conversation at UCL AI for data intensive science conference: train LLM only on physics papers from before, say, 1920. See what it predicts for new theory. Could this be done? Might be more useful than arguing about if AI will ‘do’ physics in next 2-3 years.

Places where millions of people live are becoming increasingly unliveable. People will have to move #NomadCentury

Port 43 (RDAP) activé pour le registre du suriname.

Le registre du suriname (.sr) vient d'activer son serveur RDAP (le protocole remplaçant whois) : github.com/glefait/tlds...

ping @gavinbrown.xyz

I Fought in Ukraine and Here’s Why FPV Drones Kind of Suck – War on the Rocks

Such a crucially important essay that, honestly, I’ve kinda been waiting for.
Read, read, read!
#drones

warontherocks.com/2025/06/i-fo...

Amusingly, the process involved buying a copy of the Wall Street Journal "at a local store", and extracting the trading volumes of a set of predetermined stocks, which are then hashed to generate a key.

how "xn--" was chosen as the prefix for A-labels: web.archive.org/web/20100427... (via the dns-operations mailing list)

Current status:

github.com/nic-at/epp-v...

fixing other

github.com/Punktum-dk/e...

people's

www.rfc-editor.org/errata/eid8480

EPP extensions!

Chicken ghosts vm.tiktok.com/ZNdUatRNX/

Haircuts are a form of surgery.