title text: It's important for devices to have internet connectivity so the manufacturer can patch remote exploits.

(https://xkcd.com/3109)
(https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/3109)

You MUST listen to RFC 2119.

Eric Bailey: It turns out you can just pay people to do things. I found a voice actor and hired them with the task of "Reading this very dry technical document in the most over-the-top sarcastic, passive-aggressive,...
https://jwz.org/b/ykqi

The joys of AI deciding it has lost hope and nuking your codebase... This is with Cursor (AI code editor) and Gemini 2.5 Pro (an AI "thinking" model - an LLM in other words)

https://medium.com/@sobyx/the-ais-existential-crisis-an-unexpected-journey-with-cursor-and-gemini-2-5-pro-7dd811ba7e5e

Masse Critique juin 2025

https://video.liberta.vip/w/aMBapx1GY2qG4RfGcC3Uko

Merci à toutes et à tous de vous être joint en si grand nombre à cette dernière édition de la #MasseCritique #Montréal vendredi dernier, et ce malgré la pluie!

Raúl nous a préparé une vidéo que vous pourrez retrouver sur PeerTube: https://video.liberta.vip/w/aMBapx1GY2qG4RfGcC3Uko

In my Portable Puzzle Collection, it was recently (a few weeks ago) the 20th birthday of the game "Mines": a reimplementation of Minesweeper which ensures every grid can be solved by reasoning rather than guesswork. The first click in a completely blank grid is guaranteed to be safe, and to open an area of more than one clue, and after that, you can always identify a safe square to open next by thinking about the currently visible clues.

This makes it possible to generate grids with a much higher density of mines than standard randomised Minesweeper, such as the example shown here with 99 mines in only a 16×16 grid. I actually didn't predict that this would be possible when I wrote the grid generator originally: I only expected to be able to play on settings like the standard Windows ones, without those nasty last-minute frustrations. The ability to turn up the density by more than a factor of 2 was a very pleasant surprise – my algorithm was far more effective than I had anticipated!

The odd thing about Mines is: in the past 20 years, this one game has received far more bug reports about insoluble game instances than any other puzzle in my collection. Very likely more than all the other games *put together*.

But not one of those reports has turned out to be a real bug in the grid generation. In cases where they sent a save file or a game ID, I generally played through the game myself to make sure; if they only sent a screenshot, I've always at least pointed out something I could see in the picture. *Everybody* who sent this kind of report turned out to have missed something.

Happy 20th birthday, Mines!

Un nouveau mot dans notre vocabulaire: #veloanxieux

Représente ceux qui ont peur de la velorution en cour 😀

https://www.24heures.ca/2025/06/16/primeau-hamad-et-zambito--quand-nimporte-donne-son-opinion-sur-les-velos-et-les-pistes-cyclables