fiat_lux 🆕 🏠

Relocated from: @fiat_lux@lemmy.world ⛓️‍💥(04-2026)

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Cake day: April 24th, 2026

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  • It never occurred to me that their faces would have a kind of hard ridge-like border. I always sort of assumed it was the feathers making it appear that way. Today I learned two things, barn owl dimorphism and face shape.

    But what strange and sweet little gremlins. I wish I could touch one of those babies, but I’m sure they’re so soft I’d never be able to stop.




  • It’s almost certainly a slop article, but to its credit, it did accurately cite the numbers from the official Anthropic flowchart image. (Also, just to be clear, this is an Indian “#1 cybersecurity news” company doing an SEO piggyback off the orange site, not the orange site itself).

    However, Anthropic’s numbers in their official post do not match their own flowchart, despite being presented together. My assumption is they made the image, post, and yet another fucking dashboard earlier, then failed to keep them all in sync when someone revised the numbers up or down.

    The dashboard timestamp claims it’s showing the latest numbers as of 2026-05-22 10:27 PT (T17:27Z) with values that match the numbers in the image. The post created timestamp gives 2026-05-20 T14:07:48Z, and it was later updated at 2026-05-22 T20:37:40Z. I’m guessing that update was to swap the image, and the fact that some of the values are also quoted in the text was completely overlooked. Or vice versa.

    It’s the kind of attention to detail I’ve come to expect from Anthropic.


  • My cat is long since departed but she had a few quirks I very fondly remember.

    Whenever she was excited, usually (but not always) about dinner, her tail would be in the shape of a question mark and it would rapidly vibrate as she walked up to you.

    Whenever I came home, she would watch me through the window, then run to the door and dramatically flop in front of me. This was the cue that I should position my foot so here back feet could push against it as leverage while I slapped her hard ass just above her tail like she was a bongo.

    Her way of waking you up for breakfast was to stand right on your chest, put her nose almost on your lips, close enough for the finest of her whiskers to tickle you as she purred as loudly as possible.

    When she slept she would make grumbling noises as she turned over or repositioned. Sometimes it sounded like she was a tired old man finally getting comfortable after a long day. Sometimes it was more like the sound of someone stretching as they yawn, but with their mouth closed. Sometimes it was more of a grunt, as though she were inconvenienced by gravity. You’d randomly hear it from under whatever blanket she was hiding under.

    When she wanted to remind you that you were hers, she’d walk up to your leg, headbutt it, but then stand on your foot with her back feet while leaning against you, with her tail curled around your leg. It didn’t count if she wasn’t standing on you, she’d reposition until it was right.

    I miss her a lot, but I’m grateful I had so many years with her. You could often hear her purring clear across the room. Sometimes I would rest my ear against her chest while I petted her, just to flood my senses with only purring and soft fur. I can still hear it.


  • we must realistically ask ourselves who holds this power today and how they use it…

    Edging dangerously close to self-reflection there, but quickly pivoted.

    Technological power thus takes on an unprecedented, predominantly “private” aspect, which makes it even more challenging to discern, govern and direct such power toward the common good… The narrative shows how the city is reborn, not through the initiative of one man, but through the shared responsibility of all…

    A timely reminder that the Vatican Bank were fighting lawsuits as late as 2010 where they argue they were justified to use filthy lucre from the WW2 fascists they trafficked, because Communists are dangerous. Such dedication to rebuilding demolished cities and the common good.

    The Church does not claim to assume the functions belonging to the State. On the contrary, she esteems those who serve the common good, and she firmly acknowledges the responsibility that civil institutions hold within society.

    Doesn’t claim to assume the functions belonging to the State, while being a literal ethnostate, with a bank distributing official Euros, which argues they’re immune from prosecution under the US Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.

    Fuck right off. The Vatican has just found a new group of fascists willing to fill their coffers as payment for shelter.

    From the pope’s first address to the college of Cardinals: “In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution"

    Here we see how the treasury of social teaching manifests. The Church is a laundromat, specializing in whitewashing. I can’t even get past the first full chapter of this shit.


  • I honestly can’t think of anywhere else they can go with it. They need:

    • something with a binary pass/fail to claim solid numbers at all
    • something where copy paste is a viable strategy
    • sufficient public training data from which to derive that copy paste strategy, and,
    • scary enough consequences to frame any success as impact.

    Code security review is probably the only way you can realistically achieve all four. But they’re not even coming close. Not even with access to “partner” black box repositories coupled with under-resourced open source packages.

    And they know they’re not succeeding, because they wouldn’t bury that 530 high+ sev number deep in the middle of the press release if they thought it were impressive.

    Luckily for them, the slop “news” blogs will parrot numbers like 10k, and their only strength - model collapse as a marketing strategy - can handwave the rest of that owl.



  • In the latest episode of “behold the power of Mythos” from The Hacker News - Claude Mythos AI Finds 10,000 High-Severity Flaws in Widely Used Software

    I distilled it so you don’t have to.

    Of these vulnerabilities, 6,202 have been classified as high- or critical-severity flaws impacting more than 1,000 open-source projects.

    That 10,000 count didn’t even survive until paragraph 3.

    Subsequent analysis of these [6202] vulnerability candidates has identified that 1,726 are valid true positives.

    Ah fuck. 1726. But wait, a bad infographic has entered the ring!

    23,019 potential vulnerability candidates

    Ok now we’re talking.

    1,900 Reviewed by external security firms

    Wait, what? Why those? Why only those?

    1726 confirmed positive

    You couldn’t even cherry pick the valid ones?

    467 reported to maintainers

    Where did the other 1259 go? Maybe this other part of the flowchart will go better…

    1,129 reported direct to maintainers by Anthropic, at their request (May contain false positives)

    1129 + 467 = 1596 total reported to maintainers

    Most of them just spammed at open source maintainers. Right. Maybe Anthropic’s media release has the goods!

    1,752 of those high- or critical-rated vulnerabilities have now been carefully assessed by one of six independent security research firms, or in a small number of cases by ourselves

    Slightly lower than the 1900, but ok, whatever.

    Of these, 90.6% (1,587) have proved to be valid true positives, and 62.4% (1,094) were confirmed as either high- or critical-severity

    1587 is lower than the infographic’s 1726 confirmed positives… But 10% of 10000 high sev is still something, right?

    On maintainers’ request, we sometimes disclose bugs directly, without further assessment. We’ve now reported 1,129 such unvetted bugs, of which Mythos Preview estimated that 175 were high- or critical-severity.

    I’m sure those maintainers enjoyed that 16% high+ sec rate based on Mythos’ own estimations. But wasn’t that 1129 the bulk of your reports?

    We estimate that we’ve disclosed 530 high- or critical-severity bugs to maintainers so far. There are a further 827 confirmed vulnerabilities (estimated as high- or critical-severity in the same manner) that we’re aiming to disclose as quickly as possible.

    530 is only a third of the reports you made to maintainers…

    65 of those have been given public advisories

    The infographic says 88.

    I’d ask if they were massaging their financials like they massaged 65 advisories, but we know they are.

    23,019 potential vulnerability candidates of all severities, 65 advisories. If you printed the code out and drunkenly threw darts at it you’d probably hit the same level of accuracy.


  • Let’s not bury that image content.

    23,019 potential vulnerability candidates -> 1,900 Reviewed by external security firms -> 1726 confirmed positive -> 467 reported to maintainers

    Why only review 1900? How were these chosen? Were the 1259 that were not reported to maintainers just duplicates or were they even valid?

    23,019 potential vulnerability candidates -> 1,129 reported direct to maintainers by Anthropic, at their request (May contain false positives)

    They just spammed the maintainers with these without reviewing them?

    1129 + 467 = 1596 total reported to maintainers -> 1451 acknowledged by maintainers

    Does acknowledged mean they said they received the report or does it mean they validated the report? Because it looks a lot like “received”, when accounting for that prior 1259 gap and the fact the bulk of them weren’t reviewed prior to sending.

    Subsequent analysis of these vulnerability candidates has identified that 1,726 are valid true positives. As many as 1,094 flaws are assessed to be either high- or critical-severity.

    But that 1726 was reduced to 467 come reporting time. Which makes that 17% hit rate possibly… 4.7%?

    MYTHOS IS TOO POWERFUL TO RELEASE /s



  • I had one that was far far less than 10€, I inherited it from my housemate who moved. It was literally the cheapest possible electric kettle you could buy. It was ugly but I decided to keep it until it died, because why add to the world’s waste?

    It never died.

    10+ years later I replaced it because I inherited a nicer looking one from my grandmother’s house. It’s maybe the second cheapest kettle around, so not a substantial difference beyond appearance.

    I put the old one out on the street with a little sign that said “free! I still work, I’m just ugly”. Someone took it within the hour.

    My parents have had multiple kettles that were much more expensive die on them. In my opinion, you’re better off ensuring its plugged into a decent power strip with surge protection instead of spending the money on the kettle itself. I’m pretty sure all my parents kettles died because of that.


  • Coverage flags contract line items that reference medical-waste management and incinerators, but journalists and analysts repeatedly note that medical-waste incineration is not the same as human cremation and that the “crematorium” framing escalates the claim beyond documented facts [2].

    “Repeatedly”, but only one citation, from a list of story titles for the The Thom Hartmann Radio & TV Program with no actual story. Just someone using Chatgpt in the comments because there was no story. Brilliant.

    Several reputable outlets covering the broader story — and analysts cited therein — warned against treating the crematorium narrative as factual without clearer documentary proof [2] [3].

    At least there’s two links! But one is the same link from before. And the other is a PBS interview with a Washington Post reporter that at no point mentions anything to do with medical waste, incinerators or crematoriums, let alone warns anyone about factual framing.

    Factually is an AI-powered research tool that helps people find reliable answers.

    Uh-huh.

    It’s a truly insidious variety of the slop machine. This is arguably one of the worst use cases possible for an LLM.







  • Strong disagree. Prevalent literary tropes are always worth dissecting, because they reveal a lot about the cultures that construct them, and provide us with insights into how to be better people.

    In this case, the quantity of black lightning heroes may indicate that non-white skin color is / was perceived as such a defining feature of the character, beyond any potential personality facets, that any other power simply wasn’t considered.

    If nearly every white comic hero were The Hulk, it would also be shit, and worth raising questions about.