Simon @spoltier@qoto.org

As people are discussing the issues witth DDoS attacks and attribution, I’m reminded of how the US Government blamed Russia for a DDoS attack against one of their neighbors, which is more accurately (though very indirectly) blamed on me.

Many years ago I complained in an IRC channel about a small website that ripped off the design of one of my sites. A somewhat shady member of that channel happened to control a sizable botnet (with primarily RU IPs). Yep. You see where this is going. (To be clear, I was venting, and didn’t ask him or anyone else to do anything.)

He thought it would be funny to get a little revenge on my behalf. He aimed his entire botnet at that website, and hit the network with so much traffic that it didn’t take down the target server, instead it saturated the core network gear for the country’s main ISP, knocking most of the country offline for several hours.

By pure coincidence, said small Eastern European country was holding national elections the day I complained about the website, something I didn’t discover until years later.

Even the US Government, with all their resources, can’t always tell the difference between a state-backed attack and a teenager “having fun” with a botnet.

Sometimes, when you're a psychologist saying psychology kind of things about workplaces, people say well you don't know about the real world. You don't understand! How I think about the workplace is not based on a textbook. It's based on the way I've lived and what I've seen and what people have done for me and what I've done for them, failures and successes and small and large braveries and so many small and large indignities.

Here's the table of contents for my lengthy new piece on how I use LLMs to help me write code https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/11/using-llms-for-code/

making slides for my talk on independent research is going really well, thanks for asking

wanna feel old?

🌱✨ This spring, EPFL chaplain Alexandre Mayor is urging members of the School community to go on a consumer detox and experience the joy that comes from embracing degrowth as a path to personal discovery.

#Degrowth #ConsumerDetox #MindfulLiving

Read more 👉 : https://go.epfl.ch/2k0-en

https://madeometer.com/

Thanks to the Danes for this nice gem of a website. Also: WTF?! I thought this is European.

#notesArt #mastoArt #art #illustration

Interested in gpt-4.5, don’t want the hefty price and yet wish to test theory of mind reasoning? We got you covered, robustly I might add https://bit.ly/43iwmxo

I received a small grant from the Cosmos Institute to work on an interactive platform for interpretabillity research, focusing on mechanisms that have relevance to both deep learning and cognitive science. As an initial step, variablescope.org will showcase the results of an experiment on variable binding in Transformers led with Yiwei Wu and Atticus Geiger. I'll have more to share soon!

Why does psychology matter for technological innovation? What perspective can we have on science in this moment? What's a research architect?!

I got to explore these questions along with chat about my future research agenda with Redmonk's Kelly Fitzpatrick!

Listen to the full thing here: https://redmonk.com/blog/2025/03/03/psychology-technical-innovation-and-why-we-need-science-with-dr-cat-hicks/

I like using guide dogs as an analogy for how assistive technology users are used to working with unreliable tools!

in that book will be a chapter about how pure "cognition" approaches to education, human learning and human achievement have ALL PRETTY MUCH FAILED TO BE PREDICTIVELY AND INTERVENTION TARGET VALUABLE for the OUTCOMES WE CARE ABOUT and SHOULDN'T SET THE STANDARD FOR WORKPLACES even when we have a population of people who will only accept "human stuff" being said about them if you make it COMPUTATIONAL SOUNDING

Heute werde ich einen Eierlikör-Berliner vertilgen!

Mögt ihr Eierlikör-Berliner?

Es läge mir sehr am Herzen, wenn ihr die Umfrage teilt, für mehr Reichweite. Es ist ein Thema, das uns alle angeht! 🫶🏻

"This project demonstrates how the frequency data from the Great Britain electrical grid contains embedded information about carbon intensity. By using Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) to decompose 1D time series frequency data into its constituent frequencies, we can extract features that allow us to predict carbon intensity with high accuracy."

https://github.com/JamesTwallin/GridSeis

You know a really handy cognitive trick for being less wrong? Training yourself to ask not just "can x lead to y" but "how much of the time does x fail to lead to y"

Seems simple but will save you a world of grief I truly believe

Easy example is with the whole lone wolf programmer thing. "Ok, maybe SOMETIMES lone-wolf-behavior leads to [brilliant output], but how much of the time does it lead to [crap] instead?"

We spoke with Prof. Cindy Harnett about new and different sensors and actuators, primarily designed for soft robotics and fabricated with relatively low cost materials.
Join us here: https://embedded.fm/episodes/495

Here's an excerpt from the show:

#softrobotics #robotics #sensors #prof #engineering #embedded #electronics #electrical