Nicola Romanò @nicolaromano@qoto.org

so it cost anthropic $20k to find this openbsd crash bug which amounts to putting a negative integer in a tcp field where a negative integer was not expected by the c code which does some cavalier int cast bullshit, ie. a vuln which is totally fuzzable, and quite certainly would have been found by the fuzzers of the 2010s had anyone cared to burn that much compute on fuzzing openbsd.

The difference today is not that anybody suddenly cares about investing that much in openbsd (is the build server still a donated machine running in Theo's basement?), but that openbsd's reputation for security makes it really good marketing if you can find a bug, any bug, it doesn't matter; and that marketing value is what makes it worth spending $20k on fuzzing.

#JoyScrolling #ArtemisII #HiddenFigures #CelebrateScience #CelebrateWomenScientists #KatherineJohnson

Lui et son équipe de douze salariés vont quitter les lieux. Motif ? Ce restaurateur bio et végane, dont la cuisine était accueillie à l’hôtel Babel à Paris, a refusé de retirer un sticker « Free Palestine ».

Lire l'article ➡️ https://l.reporterre.net/bt4

Learned via the @R4DSCommunity Slack chat today that radian is no longer actively developed! @eitsupi's arf is recommended in the README now! https://github.com/randy3k/radian

NGL, while I greatly enjoy arf, I deeply appreciate radian and hate to see a good option disappear.

#RStats

We have a new paper out! Named "The hierarchical morphotope classification: A theory-driven framework for large-scale analysis of built form”, it provides an overview of the method we used to build our Urban Taxonomy dataset.

https://authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S0264-2751(26)00279-9

Morphology often hits scalability limits. This method is able to break those as shown by classifying over 90 million buildings (in the paper, we have 150 million + now).

1/n

We have a cover! Excited to be part of this. The publisher site for the book is https://www.routledge.com/Bayesian-Workflow/Gelman-Vehtari-McElreath-Simpson-Margossian-Yao-Kennedy-Gabry-Burkner-Modrak-Barajas/p/book/9780367490140

Note that a PDF will be freely downloadable once the book is out!

My therapist said I need to find things to keep me busy, so I created the @cdnspace Artemis II dashboard.

I reverse-engineered the Unity Engine powering the NASA AROW visualization and found an absolute treasure trove of data to display.

Little did I expect that it's now being seen by anywhere from 200 to 600 people at any given time with 130,000 people having looked at it in the last 24 hours. People are even building projects around my API.

Yesterday, I received a message on LinkedIn from someone working in Mission Control in Houston... and they're using my dashboard! He even sent me a photo, but I can't share it until after the crew has splashed down.

Mind blown, and an absolute pick-me-up. The best part? It's being served from my basement.

https://artemis.cdnspace.ca/

#artemis #artemis2 #artemisII #nasa #csa

A lot can happen in 57 years.

In 1969 the corrupt President Nixon was president, the U.S. could not afford universal healthcare but did find the money to go to the moon while waging a war in Vietnam.

In 2026 the corrupt President Trump is president, the U.S. still cannot afford universal healthcare but does find the money to go to the moon while waging a war in Iran.

A widely circulated Latin phrase is Vegezius’s "Si vis pacem para bellum" — if you want peace, prepare for war. However, I believe this expression does not do justice to the Roman world, which was well aware of the miseries of war. In fact, Tacitus, in Agricola, records this phrase, which is likely the one worth remembering: "Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant" — to plunder, slaughter, and steal, they call this empire, and where they make a desert, they call it peace.

#history #language #books

A bit of whimsy for today.... the gradient horse art project (draw a horse and set it in motion) https://gradient.horse/

Great blog by Pat Thompson on academic writing:

▶️ https://patthomson.net/2026/03/08/getting-comfortable-with-being-uncomfortable/

"Academic writing is a form of thinking. It’s not the transcription of thoughts already completed, but a process of thinking itself. One of the ways we make writing harder than it needs to be is by writing as though our argument has arrived fully formed, rather than being wrestled into shape over several drafts."

This is why you *need* to write yourself, even and especially when writing is hard!

#AcademicChatter #PhD

I still can't even that my now nearly 80 year old mom has been on Fedora on a thinkpad e520 (2011) for a decade and it all just works.

I checked her laptop just now and it's fully up to date on fedora 43, so she's done like 20 version upgrades autonomously too. The battery has degraded a little but the whole thing still works fine and she's very happy with it.

This is how things should be, this is peak computing tbh.

#Fedora #Linux

I can't remember if I posted this rant already. Somewhere someone is teaching all science students to use the stupidest slide.

The slide says: