168,452 karma · joined June 14, 2011
Formerly: teaching at Stanford and programming+newsing at ProPublica.
Blog: http://www.danwin.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/dancow
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/dnguyen; my proof: https://keybase.io/dnguyen/sigs/69iS-DQno44YqjgaowUD_Zze660k3fojXZmHob-bgxA ]
(ofc this is a risk with the Wayback Machine, who also has a policy for honoring takedown request. But the Internet Archive's board and executives are known people with reputations)
> In a statement, the FEC said that, "at this time, the FEC’s electronic filing system is currently offline and our IT staff are actively working to restore service." The FEC, which tracks the spending of candidates and political committees, said that users could still search the website for past reports. It declined further comment on the outage.
> The hacking attempts come a week before the midterm elections, which will determine whether President Donald Trump's Republicans maintain their majorities in Congress for the next two years.
> The FEC does not play a role in administering US elections and the outage should have no effect on voters' ability to cast ballots.
Just to reiterate that last graf of the excerpt: The FEC's site is where people file and search for federal campaign finance reports. It does not touch voting (which is managed at the state and county/city levels).
https://www.apple.com/mac/compare/?modelList=MacBook-Neo-A18...
Summary: a lawsuit [0] was filed this week by the Chinese parents of an Amazon engineer who died in February 2026, blaming OpenAI for how GPT-4o assisted their daughter in devising a deadly prescription regimen for her epilepsy medication.
[0] https://schenklawfirm.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/wan-v-o...
Reminds me of a decade ago, when a pentester essentially got access to all the keys to the kingdom of Instagram because Instagram had installed an admin panel that re-used a hardcoded Rails token from a public github repo.
https://www.securityweek.com/cve-and-nvd-a-weak-and-fracture...
[0] https://www.securityweek.com/mitre-signals-potential-cve-pro...
> On October 14, 2026 (UTC), an external attacker gained unauthorized access to Zeabur's internal systems and some customer services. We began our emergency response as soon as we detected the unusual activity. We have confirmed that this incident affected a broader scope than the incident in late August...Having another security incident in such a short time has let down the people who trusted us. Protecting your services and data is our responsibility, and we have fallen short.
Devastating news for fellow elder millennial gamers. That was one of the most interesting game universes conceived in the past 2 decades.
I suppose I wrongly infer "deterministic" from "opinionated". But this approach still doesn't particularly opinionated other than "AI agents are sophisticated and reliable enough nowadays to build a stable Rust app from Markdown instructions"
https://www.science.org/content/article/your-heartbeat-quiet...
Editor’s note, 16 September, 3:05 p.m.: Although no specific errors in this story have so far been identified, we have removed it after determining the author was impersonating the identity of an established science journalist, both with the News editors at Science and with sources in the story. Furthermore, two of the quotes provided by the author have since been found in previously published stories by other writers.
Not sure if Linkedin has a login-wall, here's the first grafs:
(author: Caroline Williams)
The person who was impersonating me managed to get an article published in Science, under my by-line. And they got paid for it!
I've seen the pitches (bad), and the email chain between editors who weren't all that impressed, but googled me and decide to take a punt. When the article came in it was dry, clunky and badly written, but after several rounds of editing they managed to get it into a publishable state. It went online in June and was up until yesterday when it became clear they (and I) had been scammed.
The whole thing makes me feel sick. I know from my work as an editor that the reputational damage is real. Had I pitched a story to them afterwards they would very understandably have said "Hell no!". Who has the time to do someone else's job? They tried "me", "I" didn't deliver, so no thank you.
I have no idea how many more editors out there have me on their 'do not commission' list because of this person's actions. There may also be several scientists who will not want to talk to me because they've had a bad experience with the fake one.
More broadly, if this is a wider scam (and based on what others have told me, I think it is), it is potentially a serious issue for science journalism and journalism in general. And I'm not sure what we can do about that.
Excerpt:
Two San Francisco police officers thought they had spotted a stolen car one night in July 2024. After stopping the vehicle, they smashed in a window, dragged out the driver and then tackled, pepper sprayed and handcuffed him.
They had the wrong man.
The officers had typed the car’s license plate number incorrectly into their patrol car’s computer system.
A city agency that investigates complaints against the police said on Tuesday that the officers had used “excessive force” during the mistaken arrest of Matthew Ludwig, the driver. They violated multiple policies, the agency said in a report, including spraying him at close range and drawing a firearm without cause.
Despite the case of mistaken identity, prosecutors spent over a year seeking to convict Mr. Ludwig for reckless driving and resisting arrest. Fourteen months after the traffic stop, he was found dead in Kentucky, of an apparent suicide…
According to the complaint, the officers realized only after Mr. Ludwig was handcuffed that they had entered the license plate number incorrectly. But they proceeded to arrest him anyway.
The public defender’s office said that Mr. Ludwig could not afford the impound fee necessary to recover his car and that the city had sold it at auction. Prosecutors then charged him with reckless driving and resisting arrest.
Furthermore there are plenty of examples of the Trump administration contracting for millions/billions of dollars with companies that aren’t at the top of their game. Are Intel’s fabs best in class because the U.S. bought 10% equity? Are Trump hotels and resorts the best in class because the government expenses for its employees to stay there?
The userbase for software in the early 2000 was built for a much, much smaller audience than it is today. And I'm not sure the huge improvements in testing/debugging and general software development would totally mitigate that, in the same way modern military defense systems is still way behind modern offensive weaponry.
Non-paywall: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/13/style/backyard-baseball-v...
Bad news #1:
I have an autoimmune disease. My stomach is eating itself.
Bad news #2:
2–5% of people have this, too. Likely more, because it hides.
Good news:
I'm going to try and solve it. Will share all.
As a kid, I ate sugar cereal, drank sugary soda, and gobbled down fast food. I had a few healthy years in my early 20s but then became a young father of three and began building a business.
Juggling that stress and grind, I let my health slip and gained 40 lbs. Within a few years I’d fallen into a deep, chronic depression.
Somewhere in that timeline, my body began developing an autoimmune process affecting my thyroid and then my stomach lining.
It’s called Autoimmune Gastritis (AIG).
My hypothyroidism got diagnosed when I was 21 years old with a routine blood draw. That enabled me to begin proactive management, supplementing levothyroxine and Armour Thyroid. They are the hormones my body should be producing on its own but wasn’t.
By taking these pills daily, my body was able to operate as though my thyroid was functioning properly. What I didn’t know was that something else was going on inside my body: my stomach had begun attacking itself. But there was no routine test to find out and I didn’t have any symptoms.
I just discovered it in May. I'm unsure how long I've had it. AIG causes irreversible damage: nutritional deficiency, anemia, and over a long horizon, elevated cancer risk. When AIG is discovered today, standard medical care concedes defeat, stating that nothing can be done except managing the condition, no matter how awful or lethal the effects.
Looking back over the past few years, I can now see the early signals we were picking up in measurement but hadn’t connected the dots. For 11 years, I’ve had low ferritin, without anemia. We continually tried to raise my iron levels with food and supplementation but nothing would work.
We chased the obvious solutions first. A plant-based diet means all my iron is the hard-to-absorb, non-heme kind. Hard training, sauna, and hyperbaric oxygen all raise the body's demand for iron. But none of them explained the core failure: despite me taking iron orally, trialing every formulation, and using every timing trick, none of the iron would stick.
What I didn’t fully appreciate until recently is how many stones my previous providers had left unturned. The low ferritin kept getting explained away but not fixed.