How many people know that #WordPress was co-founded by a black man, Mike Little?

Or that he's from the north of England? A self-taught coder from #Stockport, just south of #Manchester? Or that he never received so much as a share, cent or job offer from the $7bn+ valued Automattic after spending five months working exclusively with Matt Mullenweg on the B2 fork?

After @bevangelist told me about @mikelittle I interviewed him for a documentary I never got round to making. Back then I was left with two certainties: he's Wozniak to Mullenweg's Jobs. Among other things he added the one-click upgrade that's been central to WP's bonkers 45%-of-the-web-success. And he's one of the nicest people I've ever interviewed, which is also bonkers given that he not only didn't share in WP's financial success, but that he's barely known.

But he should be - so, better late than never - please meet #MikeLittle, perhaps the most-influential-least-known person in #foss… https://25.netribution.co.uk/nic/mike-little-the-british-co-founder-of-wordpress-youve-probably-never-heard-of/

AI Added ‘Basically Zero’ to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says https://gizmodo.com/ai-added-basically-zero-to-us-economic-growth-last-year-goldman-sachs-says-2000725380 😂😂😂

So far AI has done more damage than adding any true value to productivty unless you consider the following as plus points:

* Getting staff fired
* Stealing journalist, book authors, or artists’ work
* Environment impact
* Hallucinations that caused harm and loss of life
* Creating undressing images of minors and woman
* The list list endless and you have to be psychopaths to like this

You can now run an actual x86 Simulator in a Browser using CSS without any Javascript

When I think of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) I think of it as a way to change presentation and styling of a web page, but it looks like it is a full fledged programming language now that can run an entire x86 CPU emulator without using any Javascript.

Lyra Rebane managed this feat where you can write programs in C, compile them to x86 machine code with GCC, and run them inside CSS. A demo is available at: https://lyra.horse/x86css/. The demo doesn’t work in Firefox but works great in Chrome/Chromium based browsers.

Lyra is going to post a blog in the near future explaining how it all works and I for one am eagerly waiting for it because this is a phenomenal achievement.

How??

I plan on writing a blog post that explains how this works as well as many of the tricks used. Bookmark my blog or add it to your RSS reader.
Surely you still need a little bit of JavaScript?

Nope, this is CSS-only!

There is a script tag on this site, which is there to provide a clock to the CSS – but this is only there to make the entire thing a bit faster and more stable. The CSS also has a JS-less clock implementation, so if you disable scripts on this site, it will still run. JavaScript is not required.

My CSS clock uses an animation combined with style container queries, which means you don’t need to interact with anything for the program to run, but it also means its a bit slower and less stable as a result. A hover-based clock, such as the one in Jane Ori’s CPU Hack, is fast and stable, but requires you to hold your mouse on the screen, which some people claim does not count as turing complete for whatever reason, so I wanted this demo to be fully functional with zero user input.

Source: @rebane2001@infosec.exchange

– Suramya

i built an entire x86 CPU emulator in CSS (no javascript)

you can write programs in C, compile them to x86 machine code with GCC, and run them inside CSS

https://lyra.horse/x86css/

You can’t make this shit up. And this company is supposed to be worth how much?! 😆

Goldman Sachs launches AI-free index
https://www.axios.com/2026/02/20/ai-goldman-sachs-stocks-index
Goldman Sachs has launched an S&P ex-AI index, SPXXAI, which that lets you invest in the S&P 500 benchmark index minus all things AI.
This product is proof of the demand among investors for a way to hedge their exposure to the AI trade.

i knew the archive. today guy was weird but i didn't realise he was a frothing nutter https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-archive-today-after-site-executed-ddos-and-altered-web-captures/

annoying it's so often the only practical option

In today's blog post, we have @renchap (with @imanijoy) updating you on the project roadmap, plans, and technical direction.

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2026/02/our-technical-direction/

RE: https://mastodon.social/@workchronicles/116093855832837767

Kind of reminds me of how companies like Microsoft, Google, Mozilla etc are adding more 'AI' functionality even though users are not using it and don't want it.

Mastodon, a decentralized alternative to X, plans to target creators with new features https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/18/mastodon-a-decentralized-alternative-to-x-plans-to-target-creators-with-new-features/

Self driving cars & automated drones are vulnerable to Prompt Injection Attacks Via Road Signs

When I started working with computers way back in 1995, one of the first lessons I learnt was to keep things simple because the more complicated or more layers you have in your system the more ways there are for things to go wrong and more attack surfaces are available for a bad actor to target. This was called the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) principle. With the current systems adding more and more complexity it feels like people have stopped following that advice. Especially with LLM/AI getting added there is a layer of complexity that is like a black box because we can’t know enough about the model being used, such as what data was used to train it, what biases are included (knowingly or unknowingly) into the model etc.

Where cars used to be simple mechanical devices they are now instead computers on wheels that are getting more and more complicated. As per IEEE, a typical car may use 100 million lines of code and this is without AI/Self Driving systems coming into the picture.

We now have AI systems running on Cars that use models to drive cars, decide when to stop and what rules to follow. To explore the risk, researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Johns Hopkins tested the AI systems and the large vision language models (LVLMs) underpinning them and found that they would reliably follow instructions if displayed on signs held up in their camera’s view. This research adds to the growing list of evidence that AI decision-making can easily be tampered with, which is a major concern because a lot of decisions are slowly being outsourced to these “AI” systems some of which can have serious consequences.

The researchers have published their findings in a paper where they introduce CHAI (Command Hijacking against embodied AI), a physical environment indirect prompt injection attack that exploits the multimodal language interpretation abilities of AI models.

Abstract: Embodied Artificial Intelligence (AI) promises to handle edge cases in robotic vehicle systems where data is scarce by using common-sense reasoning grounded in perception and action to generalize beyond training distributions and adapt to novel real-world situations. These capabilities, however, also create new security risks. In this paper, we introduce CHAI (Command Hijacking against embodied AI), a new class of prompt-based attacks that exploit the multimodal language interpretation abilities of Large Visual-Language Models (LVLMs). CHAI embeds deceptive natural language instructions, such as misleading signs, in visual input, systematically searches the token space, builds a dictionary of prompts, and guides an attacker model to generate Visual Attack Prompts. We evaluate CHAI on four LVLM agents; drone emergency landing, autonomous driving, and aerial object tracking, and on a real robotic vehicle. Our experiments show that CHAI consistently outperforms state-of-the-art attacks. By exploiting the semantic and multimodal reasoning strengths of next-generation embodied AI systems, CHAI underscores the urgent need for defenses that extend beyond traditional adversarial robustness.

Potential consequences include self-driving cars proceeding through crosswalks without regard to humans crossing it, taking passengers to a different destination (potentially allowing bad actors to kidnap people), getting the car into an accident by forcing it to ignore traffic rules/oncoming traffic.

Source: schneier.com: Prompt Injection Via Road Signs

– Suramya

25th Anniversary of “All your base are belong to us”

25 years ago, one of the first Internet meme’s took the net (and real life) by the storm. I am talking about “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” which was making fun of a bad translation of a Japanese videogame.

In honor of the anniversary Jamie Zawinski, downloaded the original Flash SWF file from Internet Archive, played it using Ruffle in a full-screen window, and replaced the audio with the original MP3 of “Invasion of the Gabber Robots” by The Laziest Men on Mars. The updated/clean version is now posted on Youtube and you can watch it in all it’s glory there:

All your Base are belong to us

Transcript:

Captain: What happen ?
Mechanic: Somebody set up us the bomb.
Operator: We get signal.
Captain: What !
Operator: Main screen turn on.
Captain: It’s you !!
CATS: How are you gentlemen !!
CATS: All your base are belong to us.
CATS: You are on the way to destruction.
Captain: What you say !!
CATS: You have no chance to survive make your time.
CATS: Ha ha ha ha …
Operator: Captain !!
Captain: Take off every ‘ZIG’!!
Captain: You know what you doing.
Captain: Move ‘ZIG’.
Captain: For great justice.

Folks nowadays are so used to things going viral that it is hard for them to realize how big of a phenomenon this was (along with the Alien song). I have posted about this earlier as well. Talking about it has made me want to look up the Alien Song, so will do that now.

That’s all for now. Will post more later.

Source: jwz.org: All Your Base, slight remaster (via: mastodon.social)

Plane is an open-source, self-hosted alternative to Jira for issue tracking and project management.

Good option for teams who want control over their data instead of relying on big SaaS tools.

👉 https://github.com/makeplane/plane

👉 More tools like this: https://digital-escape-tools-phi.vercel.app/

#OpenSource #SelfHosting #Privacy #ProjectManagement

The type of wholesome science that I think we can all use in complex times: the physics of elephant whiskers. Unlike mice, elephants don’t whisk. The physics of their whiskers suggests they amplify touch.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adx8981

The DEF CON 33 Hackers’ Almanack translates a year of hacker research into plain language for policymakers—covering offensive AI, cybercrime, authoritarian surveillance, and critical infrastructure vulnerabilities.

Read more: https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2033/DEF%20CON%2033%20Hackers'%20Almanack.pdf

#defcon #projectfranklin #hackersalmanack #defcon33 @defconfranklin

If you use AI-generated code, you currently cannot claim copyright on it in the US. If you fail to disclose/disclaim exactly which parts were not written by a human, you forfeit your copyright claim on *the entire codebase*.

This means copyright notices and even licenses folks are putting on their vibe-coded GitHub repos are unenforceable. The AI-generated code, and possibly the whole project, becomes public domain.

Source: https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/LSB/PDF/LSB10922/LSB10922.8.pdf

New Playable class added to Diablo II 25 years after last update

Diablo II is one of my all time favorite games and I have been playing it on and off since it first released back in 2000. The game had five character classes when it first launched and two more classes were added in the expansion Diablo II: Lord of Destruction released a year later.

Now 25 years later Diablo II a new playable class called ‘Warlock’ is coming to Diablo II as part of the ‘Reign of the Warlock‘ expansion. In addition to the new character class the update also has new quests, Terror Zones etc.

Fresh from the gates of the Burning Hells, the Reign of the Warlock is upon us! This major update brings the Warlock, the first new playable class to Diablo II in 25 years. The Warlock is a mysterious, dark scholar who’s spent years studying their taboo craft in the shadows, but no longer. Wield their awesome power to bind demons and wreak havoc upon your foes.

Reign of the Warlock brings fresh new Terror Zones, fearsome Colossal Ancients to conquer, alongside player requested quality-of-life changes, and more. Use this powerful new class to carve through the demon hordes, using your dark arts to dominate your foes.

It shows how popular the game is when the studio releases an update with new content to a 26 year old game.

Source: @arstechnica@mastodon.social

I can't stop thinking about the LLM-generated compiler that passes all the unit tests but emits inner loops that benchmark over 150,000x slower than a gcc debug build. I couldn't possibly have intentionally come up with such a funny demonstration of the point of genuine expertise https://harshanu.space/en/tech/ccc-vs-gcc/

Thoughts on Star Trek: Starfleet Academy

As some of you might know already I am a huge Star Trek fan. I have watched every iteration of the franchise multiple times and have loved all of them except Deep Space 9, which I found to be one of the most boring TV shows I had watched. Was not a huge fan of Enterprise either but it was still watchable and I managed to finish watching all of it. Star Trek is a show with a 60 year history which makes adding a new show in the canon a potentially dicey affair because of how it would affect other shows and potentially create continuity errors. Which is why I find the ~1000 year jump in Discovery and the setting of Star Trek Academy in the 32nd century interesting. It allows the creators to start off with a clean slate and not worry about paradoxes and continuity issues.

The latest show in the series is called ‘Star Trek: Academy’ which is set about a hundred years after the ‘Burn’ which had brought down the Federation. It follows the first class of Star Fleet Cadets in a hundred years as they work towards becoming officers and rebuilding the Federation. I watched the show and so far quite like it, it still has the message of hope and how people need to work together to rebuild while retaining the core ethos of Star Trek, which is: Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations.

Once the show launched we had the standard backlash from the usual suspects who think that any show that shows people other than straight white males in the story are destroying the franchise. One of the funnier complaints against the show was about how Nahla Ake played by Holly Hunter who is the half-Lanthanite captain of the USS Athena and the chancellor of Starfleet Academy sits in the show. I will admit it was a bit disconcerting to see a captain sit with her feet folded up into the captain’s chair but after the initial surprise it didn’t detract from her authority and was just a humorous sideline.

But to listen to the detractors, that quirk is destroying the core foundation of the show and it highlights how straight white men are being hounded out of their spaces because of politics. They keep talking about how the new show is making things political whereas the original didn’t do politics/social commentary at all.

Listening to their complaints I started wondering if we were watching the same show or not. Star Trek has always been political and covered important topics such as authoritarianism, imperialism, class warfare, economics, racism, religion, human rights, sexism, feminism, and the role of technology. In fact Gene Roddenberry himself stated: “[By creating] a new world with new rules, I could make statements about sex, religion, Vietnam, politics, and intercontinental missiles. If you talked about purple people on a far off planet, they (the television network) never really caught on.”

I do admit that I don’t like all the characters in the show and especially dislike the character Sam (Series Acclimation Mil) because of her extra-exuberant behavior and portrayal which is something that I find annoying in real life as well, because my personality is a polar opposite of that behavior. This is not to say that the actor is bad, just that I don’t like the character. The other characters in the show are all ok and show a surprising range of behavior where the show & the characters are not pure black and white portrayals and that makes the show very interesting.

The other major reason I like it is because of the underlying portrayal of hope in the show. The universe is a mess because of the Burn but it is not a grim retelling of Star Trek which is awesome. It is good to have shows that have a positive/light hearted take on things. (I am def not a fan of the Grim re-imagining of various franchises that has been popular over the last few years)

All in all, the show is a fun watch and I look forward to seeing where the story takes us.

– Suramya

It is ok to not like something but don’t put down others who do like it

In my previous post I spoke about how I like Star Trek: Starfleet Academy while others didn’t because reasons. After I posted it I was thinking about how people who don’t like something feel it is their duty to dump on anyone who dares like it instead and that prompted this post. It is ok to not like something, but just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean you get to harass people who like it.

Over the weekend I was at this flea market with my cousin and we were talking about books and movies. Somehow the topic of Lord of the Rings came up and I told her that I absolutely dislike the books because the author spends 10 pages telling you what was there for breakfast. Her reaction was to the affect of “what is wrong with you? How can you not like it???”. I shared why I don’t like it and she shared that she likes the books especially because of the world building. I could have dumped on her to make her feel bad but why do that? People are allowed to have different tastes and likings.

Jani and me are polar opposites in the movies and books we both like and that is ok. I don’t care for Christmas movies or romcoms while she doesn’t like scifi/fantasy movies. Should I make her feel bad about liking such movies? Of course not. I do however make fun of them sometimes but not to the point where you put down the person liking the movie.

So, long story short. If you don’t like a movie or a book or whatever and someone else does. You don’t get to crap on their happiness in enjoying it. It is ok to disagree and discuss the reason why you don’t like it (up to a point) but you shouldn’t put them down (as a person) for liking it.

– Suramya