Powderhorn

So, for reasons I can't explain, that was the template name in the byline box at my school paper. I got roped into this fiasco on my third piece.

Three stories meant you shedded your "contributing writer" title and got "The Daily" instead.

I'm well aware of Revenge of the Nerds, so no need to head there. It's funny how these things work ... you think shit's gone wrong, and then ....

The correction that ran the next day crediting me was of small solace, given the fuckup I was about to do in sports (seriously, people, don't put me in sports).

I'd not recommend running "My Leaking Heart" over a feature on a soccer player who, well, yeah, had a heart condition in which his heart leaks. I was 19 and stupid. The sports ed told me to just put something there and he'd circle back.

It. Never. Fucking. Works. That. Way.

"My Leaking Heart" ran. All-you-can-eat crow ensued. In my defense, a few days into ever working at a newspaper, the story came over with a hed of "Braveheart." I may have been 48 hours into journalism, but I told the sports ed I wasn't running it. (insert growing up with The Economist here), so he said, "just throw something on there, and I'll fix it at the end of the night.

Dummy text it a disastrous idea outside of lorem ipsum and xyxyxy.

If you want to hone in on ascenders, fine. Typographically, that's an absurd metric as a daily issue.

Back in the late '90s, a weird thing transpired at my school paper.

I was a couple of weeks into my role as a designer, but by then, of course, my editor and I were essentially living together. Never underestimate just how turbocharged skills get when you're trying to outdo the person you're fucking. (We seriously wallpapered the bedroom with layouts once we formally got a place together.)

One other thing to point out is there was an unusual situation in the power dynamic above me. It turned out my girlfriend's best friend was ... the editor-in-chief.

He took a liking to me upon seeing his "Cheesy Poof" happy.

The third leg of the stool arrived about a week later. I won't say his name, but his mailbox tag ended up with a handwritten "Simply Irresistible" note on it that I had no part in. (He'd later be my best man at my first wedding.)

At this point in time, we had to drive the pasted-up flats to a printer in downtown Seattle. This had been -- up to that point -- a mere drop-off.

The "we" should inform what comes next.

The design desk, consisting of me, her and him, inadvertently got thrown into not just production but administration.

I was in the editor's office, and for some reason I don't remember, just ahead of him needing to drive the flats, he mentioned being hungry and brought up Kozy Shack pudding. I asked if that was really what he wanted, and he said, "No, I need more. Something Beefy. A Beefy House."

And that was the night all three of us got in the Daily car (a piece of shit Ford that later inspired the inside joke "SPARE!"), went down to the printer, and then went to a 24-hour joint on Denny that now appears to be closed.

Beefy House was born. There ended up being many Beefy Heis (the editor's plural), including Beth's, The Hurricane and Denny's in a pinch.

The sort of absurdity one can only do in college ensued. We had the editor (well versed in Robert's Rules of Order) dining nightly with the production editor and two people less than a month into the industry.

In time, Beefy House became an amalgamation of a joke and actually doing things under the guise of a joke. We had quorum rules and everything after bitching about something that had happened at the paper that day.

With a quorum (not always guaranteed, as we roped in the copy chief) and majority vote, items passed by Beefy House went to the publisher.

(I'm pretty sure that's how I landed on his radar -- a decade later, he'd drive me two hours to an interview.)

Such a weird set of circumstances to lead me into the field.

Also, I miss being able to go out nightly on journalism wages.

In a recent interview with Israel’s i24 News, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu openly declared his support for the vision of “Greater Israel.” Asked by interviewer Sharon Gal if he subscribes to this controversial idea, Netanyahu responded without hesitation: “Absolutely.”

While the U.S. mainstream media has largely ignored the comment, the Israeli leader’s statement immediately drew condemnation from a coalition of Arab and Muslim states. For those unfamiliar with the term, it may seem like political jargon.

But in reality, Netanyahu’s words represent a dangerous watershed moment. To understand why, it is necessary to trace the history and meaning of “Greater Israel.”

The phrase “Greater Israel” gained political currency after Israel’s territorial conquests in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. But its ideological roots lie in the Revisionist Zionism of the early 20th century.

Proton is beginning to shift its physical infrastructure out of Switzerland, fearing a fresh bout of government snooping baked into the country's updated surveillance laws.

The company has confirmed that Lumo, its newly launched AI chatbot positioned as a privacy-friendly ChatGPT rival, is the first to move. Servers for the product are now being housed in Germany, with Norway also in the frame for future operations. This comes amid serious grumbling about amendments to the country’s existing surveillance ordinance, which would force VPNs and messaging apps to identify users and store their data for up to six months.

Proton has been vocal about its opposition since May. In a statement roton’s head of anti-abuse and account security Eamonn Maguire said: “Because of legal uncertainty around Swiss government proposals to introduce mass surveillance, proposals that have been outlawed in the EU, Proton is moving most of its physical infrastructure out of Switzerland. Lumo will be the first product to move."

Well, fuck. "You can keep your Nazi gold to yourself, but we need your LLM interactions."

Recently, OpenAI ChatGPT users were shocked – shocked, I tell you! – to discover that their searches were appearing in Google search. You morons! What do you think AI chatbots are doing? Doing all your homework for free or a mere $20 a month? I think not!

When you ask an AI chatbot for an answer, whether it's about the role of tariffs in decreasing prices (spoiler: tariffs increase them,); whether your girlfriend is really that into you; or, my particular favorite, "How to Use a Microwave Without Summoning Satan," OpenAI records your questions. And, until recently, Google kept the records for anyone who is search savvy to find them.

It's not like OpenAI didn't tell you that if you shared your queries with other people or saved them for later use, it wasn't copying them down and making them potentially searchable. The company explicitly said this was happening.

The warning read: "When users clicked 'Share,' they were given the option to 'Make this chat discoverable.' Under that, in smaller text, was the explanation that you were allowing it to be 'shown in web searches'."

Well, of course.

A now-patched flaw in popular AI model runner Ollama allows drive-by attacks in which a miscreant uses a malicious website to remotely target people's personal computers, spy on their local chats, and even control the models the victim's app talks to, in extreme cases by serving poisoned models.

GitLab's Security Operations senior manager Chris Moberly found and reported the flaw in Ollama Desktop v0.10.0 to the project's maintainers on July 31. According to Moberly, the team fixed the issue within hours and released the patched software in v0.10.1 — so make sure you've applied the update because Moberly on Tuesday published a technical writeup about the attack along with proof-of-concept exploit code.

"Exploiting this in the wild would be trivial," Moberly told The Register. "There is a little bit of work to build the proper attack infrastructure and to get the interception service working, but it's something an LLM could write pretty easily."

This makes me less enthusiastic about local models. I mean, nothing on the internet is inherently secure and the patch came quickly, but local LLMs being hackable in the first place opens a new can of worms.

Daniel Rothman works on the top floor of the building that houses the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, a big concrete domino that overlooks the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Rothman is a mathematician interested in the behaviour of complex systems, and in the Earth he has found a worthy subject. Specifically, Rothman studies the behaviour of the planet’s carbon cycle deep in the Earth’s past, especially in those rare times it was pushed over a threshold and spun out of control, regaining its equilibrium only after hundreds of thousands of years. Seeing as it’s all carbon-based life here on Earth, these extreme disruptions to the carbon cycle express themselves as, and are better known as, “mass extinctions”.

Worryingly, in the past few decades geologists have discovered that many, if not most, of the mass extinctions of Earth history – including the very worst ever by far – were caused not by asteroids as they had expected, but by continent-spanning volcanic eruptions that injected catastrophic amounts of CO2 into the air and oceans.

Put enough CO2 into the system all at once, and push the life-sustaining carbon cycle far enough out of equilibrium, and it might escape into a sort of planetary failure mode, where processes intrinsic to the Earth itself take over, acting as positive feedback to release dramatically more carbon into the system. This subsequent release of carbon would send the planet off on a devastating 100-millennia excursion before regaining its composure. And it wouldn’t matter if CO2 were higher or lower than it is today, or whether the Earth was warmer or cooler as a result. It’s the rate of change in CO2 that gets you to Armageddon.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

As I sit here, in a friend's garage in front of a fan to escape 100F plus humidity, I have a lot of time to think.

Which is good, because that fan only does so much.

But, I mean the sheer improbability of all of this, where a rent hike led me to live in a van and ... well, I knew some forms of counterculture, but damn, burners are like ravers who say "yeah, I think we need more alcohol and fire."

I have a couple of friends locally, but they're not really the hiring type. And after a decade here, I feel zero connection to the city ... an economically disadvantageous divorce led to moving in with my boss (remember, kids, journalism stereotypes are there for a reason), and from there, wilderness.

I've been here 10 years, and if I pissed off my friend, I wouldn't even know how to get home.

Making it more difficult for the elderly to vote will certainly help the GOP (apparently, a sarcasm tag is needed, as that's their most loyal base). This is a dog catching a car in action.

I lived in Oregon off and on from 2003 to 2015, and I was Reuters' boots-on-the-ground guy at a county elections office in 2012 for updating tabulations via app.

For those unfamiliar with Oregon voting, there are no polling stations. Several weeks before the election, the secretary of State sent out a voter's guide. Candidates could provide a summary (though -- oddly -- many chose not to) of qualifications and goals, whereas anyone could buy space for either side of an initiative, with a nonpartisan summary of both social and economic effects opening the conversation.

A few weeks later, the ballot arrived in the mail. With nearly a month to review things, it could easily be done in bite-sized pieces ... city council tonight, school board tomorrow, initiatives that only got more absurd next week.

Without the need for any outside media, every single voter in Oregon could be armed with enough information to make rational decisions and seal them in so that voting itself was just an exercise of filling in the bubbles when the ballot arrived.

This sort of arrangement absolutely does not work for Trump, as he relies on bombast and making sure no one has accurate data.

The GOP is mask off and aware their policies can't win elections. Which is a big reason that the Big Disastrous Bill pushes some of the most devastating effects past the 2026 election.

Donald Trump on Monday announced that lawyers are drafting an executive order to eliminate mail-in voting, days after Vladimir Putin told him US elections were rigged because of postal ballots.

In a White House meeting alongside Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Trump said: “We’re going to start with an executive order that’s being written right now by the best lawyers in the country to end mail in ballots because they’re corrupt.”

The push follows Trump’s meeting with Putin in Alaska on Friday, when the Russian president allegedly told him that the 2020 election “was rigged because you have mail-in voting”, according to Trump’s subsequent interview with Sean Hannity.

Trump falsely claimed that late former president Jimmy Carter opposed mail-in voting, saying: “Even Jimmy Carter with this commission, they set it up. He said, the one thing about mail in voting, you will never have an honest election if you have mail in it.”

I don't remember if Oregon used business-reply mail for the outer envelope, but I was never more than two miles from a drop box, and, well, it felt more like "voting" if I had to leave the house.

There were so many safeguards in place (as I said, I observed the tabulation one year) that fraud being more likely from mail-in voting than hackable machines is comically tone deaf.

An interesting look at chirality and possible outcomes of mucking about too much with life itself.

As most any American who lived through the 1979-81 Iranian hostage crisis is likely to recall, 52 American embassy staffers were held prisoner by the Iranian government for a total of 444 days. It was a catastrophic foreign-policy failure that ultimately ended Jimmy Carter’s presidency.

What is not at all well known is that during much of that 14-month ordeal, the American government could find no trace of one of the hostages — and believed him to be dead. His name was Michael Metrinko.

“Not dead,” Metrinko quipped recently, “although there were times when maybe I wished I was.”

Now in his late 70s, the gregarious, acid-tongued Metrinko spent much of his decades-long Foreign Service career bouncing from one Middle East hotspot to another. Until the American withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, he’d spent much of the preceding 15 years advising American military officials there. “I think I worked with 19 different generals,” Metrinko said, “but at this point I’d be hard-pressed to tell you which one was the stupidest.”

The Trump administration has targeted Brazil with steep US tariffs of 50%. Coffee shops in the heart of New York are bracing for impact.

When the Trump administration announced another wave of sweeping tariffs, particularly on Brazil, Stone Street Cafe’s managing partner was first confused. Then came fear. A cafe already runs on slim margins and extra costs passed on from tariffs could risk everything.

“If these tariffs are long term, it will put our business in jeopardy,” Antony Garrigues, managing partner of Stone Street Cafe, said. “In New York City, the operating costs are already so high, and these tariffs will make everything much more expensive.

“In the end, if people cannot afford our coffee, and we do not have a profit margin, we will not make it.”