FeedCity

A decade ago, I settled on iozone for disk benchmarking on all my systems. Tools like fio ('Flexible IO' tester) are a little more capable for raw disk performance testing, and other tools test network-scale filesystems better, but iozone gives me an easy overview of real-world disk performance across hard drives and SSDs, and runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux (and a smattering of other OSes).

It's been around since 1991, and is still updated today—in fact, the two latest updates (version 509 and 510) contain patches I sent in to get iozone to compile on Apple Silicon Macs running newer releases of macOS.

The pressure Daniel Stenberg on the unprecedented level of pressure the curl team are facing right now thanks to the deluge of (credible) AI-assisted security issues being reported. The rate of incoming security reports is 4-5 times higher than it was in 2024 and double the...

(Yes, but.)

OR: hit me with your Honda

Microsoft Copilot Cowork Exfiltrates Files The biggest challenge in designing agentic systems continues to be preventing them from enabling attackers to exfiltrate data. In this case Microsoft Copilot Cowork (yes, that's a real product name) was allowing agents to send email...

A lot of the emails I get from founders are now written in a hard-hitting journalistic style. I know they're written by AI, because no founder ever wrote this way before. And once you realize something is written by AI, it's hard not to ignore it.

I have never knowingly finished reading an email signed by a human but written by AI. It feels like being lied to, and who would stand for that?

[...] It makes me think less of the author. It means they can't write well unaided (or feel they can't), and that they're trying to trick me.

It's not impressive to use AI to write stuff for you; any teenager can do that.

— Paul Graham

Tags: writing, ai-misuse, paul-graham, generative-ai, ai, llms

California Brown Pelican, Snowy Egret, California Sea Lion, Harbor Seal, in San Mateo County, CA, US We took our new folding kayak out in the harbor and saw sea lions and harbor seals chilling on the docks.

Why Hy3?

Why is the birth rate declining in every country on Earth?

Today's links The AI bubble isn't like the internet bubble: No one had to force-feed the web to workers. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Website graveyard; Anti-librarian witch-hunt; Denmark v Marmite; The unnecessariat. Upcoming appearances: Londo...

I use Apple devices very often. Overall, I like macOS. Certainly more than Windows. One of the things I find extremely useful is a command I discovered not too long ago: pbcopy. pbcopy can be used to copy to the clipboard whatever it receives from standard input. For exampl...

I cannot believe I'm saying this, but getting the literal Pope to canonize your product's specific technical limitations as a spiritual treatise is the single greatest act of vendor lobbying I have ever seen.

— Corey Quinn, on Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah's influence on Magnifica Humanitas

Tags: ai-ethics, corey-quinn, anthropic, ai

Dropped this morning by the Vatican: Magnifica Humanitas of His Holiness Pope Leo XIV on Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. This is a very interesting document. It's some of the clearest writing I've seen on the ethics of integrating AI int...

Today, we welcome the 45th government onboarded to Have I Been Pwned’s free gov service: Bhutan. The Bhutan Computer Incident Response Team, BtCIRT, now has access to monitor Bhutanese government domains against the data in HIBP. As Bhutan’s national CIRT, BtCIRT is responsible for consuming threat

In my last post I used the word “clanker1” as an alternative to “agent” quite consistently and probably excessively. That choice ended up attracting a lot more attention than I expected in the Hacker News comment section of that post and a number of folks had a very strong ...

William Sealy Gosset was great. He improved beer at Guinness by using the statistics that existed at the time. Not happy with that, he invented new statistics to brew even better beer. The things he invented are used all over the place now, but Guinness wanted to keep him a secret weapon, so they made him publish his results under the fake name Student.

One thing Gosset realised is that it is wrong to compute 90 % confidence intervals for the mean by taking the standard deviation of the sample, and assume a normal distribution, like-a-so:

\[\hat{\mu} \pm 1.645 \hat{\sigma}\]

(Continue reading the full article on the web.)

Algorithmic and optimization playtime

High end NVIDIA cards, and the server and power needed to run them, cost a lot of money, especially if you plan to reach enough VRAM to run massive models. The alternative, so far, has been Apple hardware, or the DGX Spark that, even if severely limited because of memory band...

Authorities in the Netherlands have arrested the co-owners of two related Internet hosting companies for operating IT infrastructure used by Russia to carry out cyberattacks, influence operations and disinformation campaigns inside the European Union. The two men were the focus of a 2025 KrebsOnSecurity story about how their hosting companies had assumed control over the technical infrastructure of Stark Industries Solutions, an Internet service provider sanctioned last year by the EU as a frequent staging ground for cyber mischief from Russia's intelligence agencies.

Thank you Dr. Zizmor