Widely covered MIT paper saying AI boosts worker productivity is, in fact, complete bullshit it turns out.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mit-says-it-no-longer-stands-behind-students-ai-research-paper-11434092?st=sF3Wvo&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Detecting malicious Unicode in #curl

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/05/16/detecting-malicious-unicode/

In my 27ish years of working in tech, I've seen a lot of "best practices", shiny tech and those who chase/hype them come and go, but there's been one deep truth that has persisted:

There's a world of difference between a generalized solution that is best for all contexts and one that is *usable* in a majority (or over-hyped minority!) of them. The former is extremely rare, while the latter is ubiquitous.

Yet we waste a tremendous amount of time and money trying to shoehorn these "solutions" into our work, when we could just solve for what's best in one context: The one we're working in.

The imbalance between hype (the promise of big gains for "little pain") and engineering (optimizing trade-offs to minimize it) in this industry while never great, seems worse than ever these days.

However, when these bubbles burst (and they will... just like the previous ones) it will be those who prioritize understanding over expediency, who hone their ability to find and deliver optimal solutions--IOW the engineers--who will still be standing, regardless of role or job title.

Because it isn't about programming or even "being technical" its about whether or not you want to learn and grow, or simply extract and gtfo.

Regardless, the time to choose is now--when the bubbles are growing, not when they pop and reality comes crashing back to the fore--which one you want to be.

And to be clear, I respect your decision either way--a tech career is a complex thing after all--but I look forward to working with the engineers amongst you afterwards! 😃

#tech #technology

Hundreds of thousands of Computers won't be able to upgrade to Windows 11, but that shouldn't make them eWaste.

Kudos to the @kde team for this amazing initiative!

https://endof10.org/

What looked like a bit of background noise turned out to be a DDoS attack against the ScummVM website.

Anubis truly saved the day. Read the full story here:

https://fabulous.systems/posts/2025/05/anubis-saved-our-websites-from-a-ddos-attack/

#sysops #devops #webdev

I know people like to make fun of niche operating systems, but for the five years I was at Microsoft I used Windows (10 then 11) as my daily driver. It’s much less stable than a professional OS, but it does kind-of work. I wouldn’t say it’s ready for the desktop. The UI is inconsistent and changes randomly between releases, a load of common software is basically useable only in a VM, it lags and freezes periodically (unlike an OS designed for interactive use, random drivers run a load of things directly in interrupt handlers, so you get latency spikes that you wouldn’t see in a more mainstream desktop OS) and the update process can hose the system, so it’s mostly of interest to people who like tinkering with their machines than people who actually want to get work done. Oh and a load of random bits of the OS have ads, but that’s what you get from a free ad-supported system instead of one developed by an active open-source community.

I don’t think I’d recommend anyone use it as their daily driver or in a work setting, but it’s not totally unusable. It’s not at the level of maturity than you’d expect from, say, Linux or FreeBSD, especially not for client workloads. If you do have to use it, I recommend that you install FreeBSD in a Hyper-V VM for real work. That’s what I did and it works quite well.

Since about 2 weeks, https://wiki.scummvm.org is subject to a DDoS attack where tens of thousands of IP addresses that disguise as legitimate browsers abuse the dynamic pages like version history and the search function, severely impacting performance and stability.

While I was able to somewhat mitigate it by improving the server configuration, I now implemented the perfect solution.

Say hello to Anubis. No worries, you'll get the bot challenge only once a week.