FoxQuirk 🦊 @quirk@computerfairi.es

Spyhide had victims all over the world, including in the United States, tens of thousands with no knowledge their phones were spying on them.

After @maia uncovered the secretive Spyhide operation, the Iranian developers rebranded as Oospy in a last-minute attempt to save the spyware operation. The spyware makers used PayPal accounts to make money from paying customers. PayPal was notified, those accounts were shut down, and Oospy dropped offline — for good.

"Won't it be amazing what tech we'll have in the future?"

It's amazing what tech we have NOW. It's just all unaffordable, inequitable, locked behind a never-ending subscription, built to fail, and/or data mining and advertising disguised as a product.

The tech isn't the problem, and the next round of advancements isn't going to free us.

Important discovery related to LongCovid: Fragments of SARS-CoV-2 virus can reassemble into "zombie" complexes (XenoAMP-dsDNA) and induce a major and sustained immune response, affecting healthy, uninfected cells, not seen with common cold coronaviruses

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2300644120

I gotta say doing a victory lap around the rink with her gold medal trailing the pride flag is like pro level display of pride. That's what it's for. Also that must've taken incredible nerve!

Modern work:

you get a message in Slack with a link to the Confluence doc to prep for the meeting on Zoom, where you take notes in Notion, and track project progress on Monday and then update the Trello and you get to the end of the week and instead of doing fucking anything you've just moved bits of information around in 17 different databases and each one costs $15 a month per user...

I respect screaming babies on airplanes because they're the only ones providing honest feedback about the overall air travel experience

my teachers used to say they were preparing us for jobs that didn't exist yet, and in hindsight they were probably hoping for "nuclear nano space-robot technician" and not "person who makes a small amount of money putting enormous amounts of personal information on the internet"

Apple Vision Pro vs Meta Quest: head-to-head comparison

Number of 3.5mm headphone jacks:

Apple Vision Pro: 0 Meta Quest (2019): 2

The Meta Quest (2019) wins the specs fight by a landslide.

biblically accurate angel investor

A few times I have told the anecdote that the singly most baffling thing I ever saw in a code review — not the most insecure, just the most “how could a real programmer have written this? how could this ever make sense?” thing — was simply a C++ variable “number_of_trucks” … declared as float. Unambiguously referring to real physical trucks in a fleet.

Reader, it’s been over ten years and I am blowing the gods damn whistle. I had edited that story to protect the guilty: the variable was named number_of_planes. It was shipped by a company whose name begins with “B” and rhymes with “GOING out of business.”

(holding glass of coke zero) girl breakfast

periodic reminder that it is EXTREMELY cool that safe rust supports mutable reference iterators, because it involves implicitly encoding a compiler-validated proof that every element in your collection is yielded at most once, even when yielding from both ends

https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&edition=2021&gist=7b27bacf16f707dbff3c9e944db5af8f

The “wide Lightning” connector on the Vision Pro battery pack was just a mini-boss. Cue the boss music…

Software engineer: really when you get down to it computers spend most of their time just rendering text

Lay person: oh I guess that must mean it's real easy to render text since that's all computers do, right?

Software engineer: haha no it's impossible actually

Me: I bought an elephant for your room.

Them: Thanks!

Me: Don’t mention it.

😭 Trying to post a screencast of #Mastodon being broken, and Mastodon refused to let me upload the video because it claims that it's 1000fps.