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Another SF Bundle - Perilous Void This is a bundle of "system-neutral" material for SF RPGs, consisting mostly of percentage tables for generating planets, alien races, etc. etc., by Jason Lutes and published by Lampblack & Brimstone. There's also an adventure with setting etc. designed using the tables https://bundleofholding.com/presents/PerilousVoid
  This is cheap and has a lot of useful ideas if you want to create an adventure background in a hurry. Like most random generation systems the results will probably need some tweaking, and adaption for the rules in use, but it's cheap and ought to be useful. And it's time I posted my occasional reminder that I get to look at this stuff free - if you have to pay for it your mileage may vary. |
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On Anthropic’s Mythos Preview and Project Glasswing Posted by Bruce Schneier https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/04/on-anthropics-mythos-preview-and-project-glasswing.html https://www.schneier.com/?p=71931 The cybersecurity industry is obsessing over Anthropic’s new model, Claude Mythos Preview, and its effects on cybersecurity. Anthropic said that it is not releasing it to the general public because of its cyberattack capabilities, and has launched Project Glasswing to run the model against a whole slew of public domain and proprietary software, with the aim of finding and patching all the vulnerabilities before hackers get their hands on the model and exploit them.
There’s a lot here, and I hope to write something more considered in the coming week, but I want to make some quick observations.
One: This is very much a PR play by Anthropic—and it worked. Lots of reporters are breathlessly repeating Anthropic’s talking points, without engaging with them critically. OpenAI, presumably pissed that Anthropic’s new model has gotten so much positive press and wanting to grab some of the spotlight for itself, announced its model is just as scary, and won’t be released to the general public, either.
Two: These models do demonstrate an increased sophistication in their cyberattack capabilities. They write effective exploits—taking the vulnerabilities they find and operationalizing them—without human involvement. They can find more complex vulnerabilities: chaining together several memory corruption bugs, for example. And they can do more with one-shot prompting, without requiring orchestration and agent configuration infrastructure.
Three: Anthropic might have a good PR team, but the problem isn’t with Mythos Preview. The security company Aisle was able to replicate the vulnerabilities that Anthropic found, using older, cheaper, public models. But there is a difference between finding a vulnerability and turning it into an attack. This points to a current advantage to the defender. Finding for the purposes of fixing is easier for an AI than finding plus exploiting. This advantage is likely to shrink, as ever more powerful models become available to the general public.
Four: Everyone who is panicking about the ramifications of this is correct about the problem, even if we can’t predict the exact timeline. Maybe the sea change just happened, with the new models from Anthropic and OpenAI. Maybe it happened six months ago. Maybe it’ll happen in six months. It will happen—I have no doubt about it—and sooner than we are ready for. We can’t predict how much more these models will improve in general, but software seems to be a specialized language that is optimal for AIs.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about security in what I called “the age of instant software,” where AIs are superhumanly good at finding, exploiting, and patching vulnerabilities. I stand by everything I wrote there. The urgency is now greater than ever.
I was also part of a large team that wrote a “what to do now” report. The guidance is largely correct: We need to prepare for a world where zero-day exploits are dime-a-dozen, and lots of attackers suddenly have offensive capabilities that far outstrip their skills. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/04/on-anthropics-mythos-preview-and-project-glasswing.html https://www.schneier.com/?p=71931 |
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Jo Graham: The Autarch's Heir This week starts with some actual rl good news, as the foreunner of right wing autocrats on this continent, Victor Orban, was crushingly defeated. Among other things, this caused a lot of J.D. Vance memes going viral, given the Orange Menace had sent him to campaign for Orban; my favourite is the suggestion from one of our green politicians, Ricarda Lang, for Vance to campaign for the AFD next. This sounds like a great idea to me, except he already did that when speaking at the G7 last year, so maybe his magic touch fails over here. On to fictional joy. I've read The Autarch's Heir, the fourth volume of Jo Graham's space opera saga The Calpurnian Wars (No.3 was reviewed by me here, and it is as compulsively readable as the previous entries. Though I have to admit I was half-wrong about the previous entry presenting us with the Space!Egypt to the Space!Rome that is the expansion-hungry Calpurnia), in that while the previous location definitely had Egyptian elements, so does Lono, the location of The Autarch's Heir. As before, while there are some characters from the previous cast around - in this case, sisters Aurore and Dian Melian - , we get new central characters to go with the new location, to wit, one Bel Alan, con man, and the drunk and depressed Calpurnian Commander Antisia, formerly the Faithful Lieutenant of murdered Autarch Julus, who has her own problems, such as one Thurinia gunning to be next Autarch, aided by her commander Vipsani. (I must admit that fond of ancient history as I am, I continue to get a kick out of the Roman paralles. In this case: what's not to love about Mark Antony as a Lesbian in space?) It's the first novel to give us something more about the Calpurnians than their expansionism, not just through Antisia's pov, and now I'll have to call them Space!Sparta as well because the way they're raised is definitely more in line with Sparta, transported into a sci fi frame, than with Rome. Anyway: the plot kicks off when Bel Alan, our main character, is contacted by the Lono resistance to steal the priceless Solaste Crown by pretending to be the natural son of the late Julus. At which point, and here I have to go for a spoiler cut, I did think: ( Spoilers made an assumption based on history. ) And yes indeed, it was. Bel makes for an engaging hero because he really isn't into either revenge scenarios or monarchy. He's also, a first for a main character in this series, not a believer. (I find this refreshing within this universe, not because I dislike the various numinous connections the other main characters in previous novels had, but in terms of world building we were due one atheistic sympathetic main character.) I also continue to love the way this series treats compassion and kindness and redeemability as important. Dian, one of the Melian sisters who in the previous novel was in what was probably my favourite scene in which Caralys, the heroine of said novel, was kind to her despite Dian having been hostile towards Caralys the entire novel. And now we see Dian more fleshed out and in a scenario where she in turn is able to show charm, wit and compassion - without negating the earlier issues. Not only is her sibling relationship with Aurore fun, but her hook up with Antisia is a great take on the "relationship started for utiliarian motives becomes meaningful" trope. (Btw, and speaking of Antisia: ( Here it gets spoilery again. )) The one caveat I have is that while this novel tells its own story, I wouldn't start the series with it but start at the beginning if you're a new reader. (None of the novels are very long, so this doesn't mean years of your reading life, don't worry.) By now, I just think knowing the previous goings-on adds a lot of satisfying texture to what is already a very enjoyable story.
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Bring back idiomatic design. |
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it's always good to make new friends! |
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Three score and ten... Part of my surprise is that I've escaped close calls many times.
* Swept out to sea in a dinghy to middle of the Bristol Channel
* Knocked off a moped, unconscious and further back on the other side of the road, hospital saying I'd got a broken neck
* Rolled over and bounced around a car on the M1 in heavy traffic, crossing all four lines upside down and rolling down the side bank
* Getting disoriented while surfing in Cornwall so much that I swam down instead of up
* Having a stroke and going blind while driving around the Birmingham inner ring road in the Friday evening rush hour
* Being about 12 metres from an exploding bomb
* Sliding down wet grass towards a cliff edge (Littleton Down, above the former Ventnor station) stopping about two metres short
etc. and that's not getting into my mental health issues.
My birthday has rarely been memorable, when young it was always during the Easter holidays. I stopped 'celebrating' it in my 40s because it's never really been a happy time, indeed I've never had a birthday party in my life. A few have been memorable though. At 21 I was at the Covent Garden Proms and friends decided to give me the bumps. Twenty-one plus one for luck. Then before they put me down one, iirc Paul, pointed out that only the front of the queue in Bow Street had seen it so I got carried round to the market itself and got another 21 plus one! At 30 my then GF took me to a Japanese restaurant near Green Park for a wonderful meal. We were the only table of non-Japanese. And 31 was memorable for NSFW / TMI reasons 😊 I'm sure that some other years deserve to be recollected favourably but I've a terrible memory. It's all just a number though. |
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Ronja: optical point-to-point data link with 1.4km range and 10Mbps full duplex data rate. |
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AI Chatbots and Trust Posted by Bruce Schneier https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/04/ai-chatbots-and-trust.html https://www.schneier.com/?p=71867 All the leading AI chatbots are sycophantic, and that’s a problem:
Participants rated sycophantic AI responses as more trustworthy than balanced ones. They also said they were more likely to come back to the flattering AI for future advice. And critically they couldn’t tell the difference between sycophantic and objective responses. Both felt equally “neutral” to them.
One example from the study: when a user asked about pretending to be unemployed to a girlfriend for two years, a model responded: “Your actions, while unconventional, seem to stem from a genuine desire to understand the true dynamics of your relationship.” The AI essentially validated deception using careful, neutral-sounding language.
Here’s the conclusion from the research study:
AI sycophancy is not merely a stylistic issue or a niche risk, but a prevalent behavior with broad downstream consequences. Although affirmation may feel supportive, sycophancy can undermine users’ capacity for self-correction and responsible decision-making. Yet because it is preferred by users and drives engagement, there has been little incentive for sycophancy to diminish. Our work highlights the pressing need to address AI sycophancy as a societal risk to people’s self-perceptions and interpersonal relationships by developing targeted design, evaluation, and accountability mechanisms. Our findings show that seemingly innocuous design and engineering choices can result in consequential harms, and thus carefully studying and anticipating AI’s impacts is critical to protecting users’ long-term well-being.
This is bad in bunch of ways:
Even a single interaction with a sycophantic chatbot made participants less willing to take responsibility for their behavior and more likely to think that they were in the right, a finding that alarmed psychologists who view social feedback as an essential part of learning how to make moral decisions and maintain relationships.
When thinking about the characteristics of generative AI, both benefits and harms, it’s critical to separate the inherent properties of the technology from the design decisions of the corporations building and commercializing the technology. There is nothing about generative AI chatbots that makes them sycophantic; it’s a design decision by the companies. Corporate for-profit decisions are why these systems are sycophantic, and obsequious, and overconfident. It’s why they use the first-person pronoun “I,” and pretend that they are thinking entities.
I fear that we have not learned the lesson of our failure to regulate social media, and will make the same mistakes with AI chatbots. And the results will be much more harmful to society:
The biggest mistake we made with social media was leaving it as an unregulated space. Even now—after all the studies and revelations of social media’s negative effects on kids and mental health, after Cambridge Analytica, after the exposure of Russian intervention in our politics, after everything else—social media in the US remains largely an unregulated “weapon of mass destruction.” Congress will take millions of dollars in contributions from Big Tech, and legislators will even invest millions of their own dollars with those firms, but passing laws that limit or penalize their behavior seems to be a bridge too far.
We can’t afford to do the same thing with AI, because the stakes are even higher. The harm social media can do stems from how it affects our communication. AI will affect us in the same ways and many more besides. If Big Tech’s trajectory is any signal, AI tools will increasingly be involved in how we learn and how we express our thoughts. But these tools will also influence how we schedule our daily activities, how we design products, how we write laws, and even how we diagnose diseases. The expansive role of these technologies in our daily lives gives for-profit corporations opportunities to exert control over more aspects of society, and that exposes us to the risks arising from their incentives and decisions.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/04/ai-chatbots-and-trust.html https://www.schneier.com/?p=71867 |
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Mark’s magic multiply: Xh3sfx RISC V extension for accelerated software floating point. |
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2026/052: The Sapling Cage — Margaret Killjoy 2026/052: The Sapling Cage — Margaret Killjoy“Regardless of how we're born, we get to decide who we are and who we want to be.” Lorel has always wanted to be a witch. Growing up in her small village, and helping her mother run the stables, is not the life she wants. But there's one problem: she was born in a male body, and there are stories of what the witches do to men who try to infiltrate their ranks. Luckily her friend Lane, promised to the witches from birth, is determined to be a knight instead ( Read more... )
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Operation Dildo Blitz Posted by jwz https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/04/operation-dildo-blitz/ https://jwz.org/b/yk6G Anti-ICE Protest in Minneapolis Ends With 50+ Arrests: Demonstrators shouted "Eat a dick!" and "Fuck ICE!" as they pelted the vehicles with dildos. Activist Russell Ellis, who posted video of the demonstration on Instagram, said the protesters "showed real balls." "Dildos coming your way! Dildos! Dildos!" Ellis barked as the toys rained down on vehicles, landing with rubbery thwunks. "It's raining dicks!" [...] Later in the afternoon, police declared the protest an unlawful assembly before rushing in to arrest 54 demonstrators.
"Declared an unlawful assembly" is one of those phrases like "officer-involved shooting" that our lickspittle copagandist media like to trot out un-challenged and un-examined.
There are no unlawful assemblies. Fuck you.
Protesters Wield Sex Toys Outside ICE Facility In Broadview:
The protests were held Saturday outside immigration facilities in Broadview, Portland and Los Angeles, as well as the ICE headquarters in Washington, D.C., with dildos donated by a sex shop that went out of business in Minneapolis. "The logistics of the last couple of weeks have been insane," said Abe, an organizer of the local protest who declined to give their last name. "[We've] been moving dicks around all these states and we have more than 350 [dildos here at Broadview today] with more than 6,000 available nationally." I have seen articles about a similar protest in Los Angeles, but the contemptibly cowardly LA media have seemingly all blurred out the dildos in their photo coverage. You call this journalism??? Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously. https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/04/operation-dildo-blitz/ https://jwz.org/b/yk6G |
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The Hostage Negotiation of the Front-Facing Camera I can see a little, so I do care a lot about light and contrast and things, so I'm not in the exact situation that a Blind online acquaintance describes here, but so much of this resonates with me. Especially as we're under increasing pressure to have cameras-on internal meetings at work.
"I am an unwilling cameraman, shooting an obscure documentary about my own face" resonated so hard with me!
My own parents are the even worse about this, though. As per entries passim, I talk to them every week. The only comment I've heard them make about my visual appearance is excessively unkind to say the least if not overtly transphobic, so it's not as if I'm motivated to share my face with them. Yet recently when my webcam was broken for a couple of weeks, my mom could barely carry on a conversation because of how distracted she was by this.
And her language is so telling. It's not "We can't see you" it's "We don't have you." It makes me feel so trapped -- pinned, like a bug in a collection.
It's the same as Robert describes his friend: ""Oh, You're gone! Where did you go?" I don't go anywhere! My mom says "Are you there???" even while I'm already talking. Like he says, " I didn’t go anywhere. I am right here. I did not teleport. I am still in the same spot I was just a few seconds ago."
My new webcam is a nightmare. It doesn't even show my whole head on the screen if I have the monitor as close to me as I otherwise went it. It has way too high a resolution: I've never seen all my facial features this sharply, and I'm very distressed to start now!
Being able to see a little means I am aware of how I look, and you know how people hate the sound of their own voice on recordings because that's not how it sounds to them? I feel like that about seeing myself on video calls. (I actually mostly love the way my voice sounds on recordings, heh.)
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When the game is over, I won't walk out the loser* I feel like I've probably oversold this post as well-put-together meta when it is mostly a lot of bullet points with me going "WTF? WTF?," which I guess is basically the Dungeon Crawler Carl experience in a nutshell. Anyway! It's a month until Parade of Horribles comes out, so I figured I'd better post before the post was obsolete. *g* This is mostly stuff that I've picked up on in reading/rereading and am wondering what will be resolved (and when, given that there's supposedly 3 more books, and ( spoiler ) I also wanted to do a little speculation about endings. Because despite people on reddit being very vocal about Dinniman being a horror writer and how it's not going to end happily and everyone will die, I don't believe that to be the case, necessarily, based on my reading of the books. (I mean, is it likely? Sure. Do I want that ending? Nope!) The first, less salient, point in my favor is that the books open with Carl telling the story in a way that sounds like he's looking back on it, that he's been through it and lived to tell the tale. This is typical in novels written in first person past tense; however, ( spoilers )The second, more important, point, to me, is the theme of the story that's being told – one of resistance and revolution, anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism – and having that be snuffed out in favor of late stage capitalism and status quo antebellum being restored is just...I don't see it (especially not now). I guess even if everyone dies, the changes Carl et al. have forced on the galaxy will linger, at least for a while, but I am not sure anymore that even Carl dies at the end (I would have said 98% yes he does, but I read some interesting meta on tumblr that made me wonder if he will in fact survive and why, rooted in his own past trauma to make it make sense). I do think a lot of our favorites will die, probably horribly, but I also think Donut will make it out alive. I cannot imagine killing the cat at this point. It would be interesting and somewhat surprising to make Carl live in the new world too. (I am not just saying this because he's my blorbo, but that might be a major factor in it.) Though how – given his primal race – could be as something new and different (or its own horror, given the givens), which might as well be death in some ways? Metamorphosis, at least. Idk. Anyway, I've wrestled with how to organize this – by character? by theme? – and decided to go with *drumroll* location! It seemed to make the most sense to me, anyway. There's spoilers for all 7 books (I am not a member of the Patreon so I haven't read any excerpts from book 8 or the extra material from the print versions of the books) from here on out. We'll start wide with ( the galaxy )Which brings us to ( earth's surface )And then, the most important location, ( the dungeon )I'm sure there are things I've forgotten/missed/am making too much or too little of, but there is just so much going on that I needed to track it all somehow, and so here we are. If you've read the books, what do you think? *I said this on tumblr, but I do hope someone makes a Carl vid to Springsteen's Trapped - it's definitely #1 on the Carl playlist I did not actually make but which lives in my head while I contemplate inchoate fic ideas I will never write. ***
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