I envy those who can just write about topics that they already know. For some reason I always have to make or learn something new for me to get inspired enough to write about it... But there are so many things that I now think are trivial that I am absolutely sure that others would find useful.

@liamcollod It's fixed now!

@liamcollod thanks for the tip! I'll adjust it!

It makes me irrationally angry to see how AI is thinking through a problem and it's just wrong on a core assumption and sometimes there's absolutely no way to convince it. It will gaslight me into thinking it moved on. It didn't move on. It will go right back to the wrong line of thinking two prompts later.

Am I late to the game with Pantheon? I'm just now watching this animated series on netflix and it's quite a smart show. I'm on episode 5 right now and loving every moment. I appreciate the attention to detail when they mention real problems and theory. For example, the Dining philosophers problem is mentioned and is fairly accurately described.

Everything is not normal. I do normal things despite that fact. Normal things are the reward; they are the achievement.

@marsevilspirit yeah, that's a great way to do it (and I do it too). The only issue I have with that is the lack of discover-ability. It's amazing once you've built up a list of sources you want to follow but how do you find quality content in the first place?

Hot take: expertise should be valued.

Be warned, this is an incomplete thought.

The main issue I see with news, social media and any content platform is that the way feeds are curated give an enormous power to the entity doing the curation. You can completely miss out on a creator that you’ve subscribed to on YouTube because Google thinks you just don’t want to see them anymore. News sites will bias to show you the most sensational headlines. Social media will bias towards what gets the most clicks.

Mastodon is one of the few platforms that seems to give enough access to be able to filter and sort your own content in the way you want…. But this still seems like a hard problem to solve for everyone. Not everyone will want to put in the work it takes to curate a follower list that will give them the right amount of depressing news articles (so you know what’s going on in the world) with content that’s more kind to your mental health. And even fewer people will want to run custom tooling that consumes a firehose of data and filters for high quality content. These are hard problems.

Here are some things that help: newsletters, personal blogs, link sharing networks, follower lists.

I wish it were easier to get a more complete overview of an article or piece of news. The fragmented architecture of the Internet is amazing for scaling but it also makes it very hard to track all of the commentary and critique. But do note… I don’t care what everyone says on every topic. But if there’s someone who has written several peer reviewed papers on a specific topic mentioned in an article, I want to see them. I want to hear them. I want experts to be promoted again, not just generic talking heads.

Heyo! Scrolls volume nineteen is out! There's all the usual awesome #IndieWeb, #Fediverse and #Infosec / #Cybersecurity goodness inside. Check it out!

https://shellsharks.com/scrolls/scroll/2025-06-27

The usual shoutout to everyone who's content and things-shared made it into this week's issue. Y'all make scrolling my feeds the joy that it is each week! 📜

@SJHoodlet @daemon_nova @sudorandom @axxuy @fyr @32x33 @adam @sainthood @MissConstrue @arunkumargovinda @abnv @b3s @cyd @ross @eclecticpassions @nelhage @jaz @tchambers @takimakou @kellay @tinimalina @exocomics

@cachondo @BarrJess you can get yourself a blue box to compensate for your lack of whistling skills 😂

Man, now I have too many ideas for little retro hack games. I have my second idea already done, but I'm cooking on the third one. I plan on dropping the second one next week when I'm done with my vacation 😊

@g0rb @2600 I'm going to admit that I actually hadn't even heard of @2600 before this venture and now I'm going through the backlog of podcast episodes and considering how many issues of the magazine to get.

Thanks to this community, I've learned so much from this!

Some of the threads under my post are an absolute gold mine of interesting stories and anecdotes, some that seem like they have never really been told in a phreaking or hacking history documentary.

@Steveb yeah, I think that was possible. That's actually what dialing on the rotary phones were actually doing. But that's just dialing a number in an unorthodox way. As I understand it, it doesn't give you anything special and phreaking was unique because it legitimately gave you free long distance calls since, as well as some other abilities, later on.

@jgeorge do it and let me know if it works!

@ossobuffo some recorders (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recorder_(musical_instrument)) can make the 2600 Hz sound. I've read that this "instrument" was used successfully to trigger the signal detection. I can only imagine what it might have looked like to see a grown man play a recorder, terribly, to a payphone 😆

@gilester45 This is going to be a party trick that will only be impressive at very specific kinds of parties. 😆

I do have a followup for my little phreak game that I will drop when I am back from vacation. It will require less physical effort but oddly may be more frustrating.

@bobthomson70 @sudorandom
for podcast fans, anti-fascist + every wednesday:
https://www.2600.com/offthehook/

@sudorandom Hence 2600 magazine, which everyone who is interested, and can afford to should get a subscription for I think as we need to support these remaining print mags if we can IMHO

https://www.2600.com/