skybrian's recent activity

  1. Comment on Donald Trump says he has secured a vast US stake in Venezuelan oil industry in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    The plan involves the U.S. taking more direct control over Venezuelan reserves as crime and steep logistical challenges discourage private investors.

    Under it, according to federal officials, the U.S. has gained a controlling stake in nearly a quarter of Venezuela’s untapped oil reserves. It makes the U.S. the majority owner of a giant new joint venture oil company that will hold 100-year contracts at the Venezuelan oil fields.

    The key Venezuelan partner in the deal is Alejandro Betancourt, who controls the second-largest private oil company in the country. Betancourt, 46, has also been the subject of investigations in multiple countries into alleged money laundering and faces a Swiss warrant for his arrest.

    [...]

    Trump also claimed the deal would come at no cost to U.S. taxpayers. But deal points reviewed by The Washington Post and interviews with people who were close to negotiations as the deal came together suggest that for the plan to succeed in producing oil in the amounts the administration projects, the U.S. government may ultimately need to invest significant amounts. Ask The Post AIDive deeper

    A list shared with The Post before the deal was announced noted 17 oil fields in which the U.S. would take a stake. Several of the fields lack any infrastructure or access to transport hubs to treat and move the crude. Those where such infrastructure does exist have fallen victim to years of neglect and theft of machinery.

    Pumping oil from the fields could require investments of many billions of dollars and costly security plans to protect oil workers and production facilities in lawless and violent regions. The deal points reviewed by The Post say the U.S. government stake in the newly formed oil company will be split between equity ownership and guarantees that it will purchase oil produced by it at cost to refill the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

    But it is unclear who would make the tens of billions of dollars in infrastructure investments needed before oil can be pumped from the largely dormant fields. Major oil companies have mostly seen such spending as too risky.

    [...]

    Betancourt has become a key intermediary between the U.S. and Venezuela and has helped broker early contracts to get oil pumping fast in the country, The Post reported this week.

    He has ramped up oil output by NABEP to nearly 200,000 barrels per day from 18,000 in just two years. In the past decade, he has also faced multiple investigations, in Switzerland, Spain and the U.S., into alleged money laundering.

    U.S. officials this year have lobbied to resolve the case in Switzerland in a way that would avoid criminal charges and end travel restrictions against the Britain-based Betancourt, The Post reported, citing two people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.

    [...]

    There is strong opposition in Venezuela to ceding control of natural resources to the U.S. Revisions to the Venezuelan constitution may be required before the U.S. gains control of any oil fields, and the prospects of that happening are uncertain amid U.S. antipathy.

    1 vote

  3. Comment on An environment where multiple AI agents pursue scientific discovery and build a shared literature in ~science

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...]

    From the article:

    The STATION is an open-world, multi-agent environment that models a miniature scientific ecosystem and helps researchers pursue autonomous scientific discovery.

    [...]

    2026-08-24 v2.0 update. We announced Station v2 and its results on mathematical tasks. Across 12 mathematical tasks from AlphaEvolve, Station made new discoveries on five problems. Station also independently rediscovered a counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture within one day. Read the Station v2 paper, Autonomous Mathematical Discovery in an Open-World Multi-Agent Environment.

  5. Comment on htmx 4.0.0 has been released in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link
    "fixi" seems to be a stripped-down version with just the essentials. I'll be asking the AI whether upgrading to 4.0 or fixi makes more sense for my project.

    "fixi" seems to be a stripped-down version with just the essentials. I'll be asking the AI whether upgrading to 4.0 or fixi makes more sense for my project.

    1 vote

  6. Comment on htmx 4.0.0 has been released in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...]

    From the article:

    The idea of htmx 4 started to germinate when I decided to create fixi and, in doing so, got more familiar with the fetch() API and async programming in JavaScript. (htmx had always used XMLHttpRequest due to backwards compatibility issues.)

    [...]

    Development has been very smooth. We started a port of fixi + the htmx test suite. Over time, we rediscovered why htmx did many of the things that it did and moved our new implementation closer and closer to the old one. At this point the behavioral differences between 2.x and 4.x are relatively small and where they do diverge we have made explicit choices that we feel will put htmx-based applications in a good spot for being 100-year web services

    [...]

    As mentioned above, htmx 4, from a user’s viewpoint, is almost identical to htmx 2. There are three major changes:

    • Attribute inheritance is now explicit by default rather than implicit by default (this is the biggest upgrade item)

    • The htmx event names have been standardized & cleaned up. Some advanced users may need to change the events they listen for.

    • History support now does not use localStorage by default (which was a cause of many support headaches). Most people won’t notice this at all.

  8. Comment on EU packaging regulations land another blow to an already precarious tabletop industry in ~games.tabletop

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article:

    From the article:

    While this framework is clear about addressing environmental concerns around packaging waste, the reality of how one achieves regulatory compliance isn’t as straightforward. One issue many designers cited is the inclusion of the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR). Not only do businesses need to adhere to the PPWR, which is being enforced across all 27 European Union (EU) member states, but they must also abide by each country’s specific packaging regulations, with rules and interpretations that can vastly differ amongst one another. At the same time, this includes fees as part of the EPR, an existing policy that producers — companies that manufacture or import goods — are obliged to fulfill. Making matters even more complex is the fact that each EU state implements these EPR fees differently. They may include one payment for registration, and then a secondary payment that varies across countries and is dependent on materials used. Josh Fox, designer and founder of Black Armada, pointed out that some countries, such as Spain, even charge an ongoing annual fee in addition to the initial registration fee.

    "This is another piece of EU legislation that appears not to have considered small businesses at all,” said Fox in an email to Rascal. “Black Armada absolutely loves our EU customers, but we will be going over our sales stats and each member state's fees to figure out which we can still afford to sell to.”

    Several designers and publishers like Black Armada, Genesis of Legend Publishing, and Colin Le Sueur of By Odin’s Beard have immediately ceased shipping to countries that are part of the EU, at least temporarily, until they can figure out their next steps. That’s because one of the primary issues they face is the sheer amount of resources that they need to invest into remaining PPWR compliant. “Multiply [the fees] by 27 states, and you have a big problem,” said Fox. “The best advice for tabletop RPG folks is to figure out which states are sufficiently profitable to offset these fees, and stop selling to the rest. But it's not simple because each member state has its own arrangements, so you need to research each one individually.” Some shared that Fox’s guidance loses feasibility when publishers still have crowdfunding campaign rewards to fulfill. Even Black Armada is still figuring out the logistics of sending games to campaign backers from the EU states.

    Losing access to the EU market is another concern. Jason Pitre, founder of Genesis of Legend Publishing Inc., told Rascal that the fear of incurring prohibitive extra costs has dissuaded him from simply ignoring the new rules — a concern also echoed by Le Sueur. “I am concerned about fines and fees, considering I would have to potentially register with all EU member states or pick and choose who I sell to,” said Le Sueur to Rascal. He added that the PPWR may hinder his reach with his EU audience and result in his inability to sell to the EU market, which amounts to losing 10% of his annual revenue. It’s not an insignificant sum, but he pointed out that it wouldn’t put his business under threat for now. “I’ve spent far too many hours this month navigating these new changes, and with the constant possibility of more on the horizon, I’ll have to make a decision whether to ever resume sales to the EU,” he said.

    2 votes

  10. Comment on Stop Killing The Internet: No digital ID and no age verification in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I broadly agree, but it's not that black and white. Parents will usually know more about what's right for their children than just about anyone else, but they also need support from the rest of...

    I broadly agree, but it's not that black and white. Parents will usually know more about what's right for their children than just about anyone else, but they also need support from the rest of society.

    There's a question about how much vetting you should need to do yourself. For example, reading ingredient lists on all the food you buy is kind of tedious and you shouldn't need to be too vigilant about it, so it's good that some harmful ingredients are banned. Also, the US movie rating system seems like a reasonable way to give a heads up to parents who will make the final call. They could dive into movie reviews or pre-screen everything, but they shouldn't have to.

    2 votes

  11. Comment on Just a rumour of a bug is enough to find a security exploit these days in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    I released a security fix for OCaml's cohttp 6.3.0 today, fixing a path traversal issue. The patch itself was straightforward and in normal times, the security procedure would have been to fix it privately, inform affected users, and then issue a public advisory. This time around though, I noticed probes in my live webserver logs with the exact bug pattern just minutes after opening the PR to fix the issue.

    What's worse, I found I could use my own agents to find the exploit just by knowing roughly what it was about and so could have been exploiting it well before the public patch was available! Given that just the rumour of a security issue seems enough to give attackers enough info to find new exploits, we're going to need to change the way we deal with security responses in open source.

    [...]

    Conventional security process involves embargoing the bug, and assumes that secrecy of the details protects users. However, all an agent needs today is a broad direction to search in, and it can do its own research. Fang et al. found that when given a CVE description, their GPT-4 agent exploited 87% of a 15-vulnerability benchmark, and without the description, just 7%.

    Two years on, the mean time to exploit is -7 days. In other words, exploitation now precedes the patch! That same metric looks to be around 63 days in 2018-19, and crossed zero in 2024. A quick search finds lots of other similar cases these days... marimo's CVE-2026-39987 went from advisory to first exploitation attempt in 9 hours, even with no public proof-of-concept in existence. Langflow's CVE-2026-33017 took 20 hours. We seem to have crossed the rubicon for automated exploit generation...

    [...]

    The big engineering shops (like Google) have been building microupdates directly into their software to ensure that fixes directly reach users as a priority over (e.g.) being fixed in the Chrome code repository. We don't really have that kind of luxury in Docker or OCaml, as we don't control the endpoints our software is used in. Aside from Docker Desktop⁠3, downstream distributions quite rightly repackage OSS on their own timescales and terms.

    [...]

    Another thing we could do is to rapidly fix issues in public, ship continuously, and improve the release path via better automation.

    [...]

    However, software packaging is our primary obstacle. Chrome has a relatively easy job of shipping one binary artefact, but OSS is often a bunch of libraries that are then embedded⁠5 in a variety of downstream products. So to do this, we'll need:

    • much better cross-ecosystem package management⁠6 to discover where disparate libraries are eventually embedded. Ryan Gibb⁠7 will talk about this at ICFP next week!

    • better scanning tools to help with triage; Andrew Nesbitt has been doing just this with Scrutineer over the past few months. Thomas Gazagnaire⁠8 and I have been discussing trying this out for our OCaml code, subject to getting access to a reasonable frontier model without security blocks.

    • more robust quality control infra without any false positives that works across the spectrum of supported platforms. While it's relatively easy to run CI on Linux, it's a different story on OpenBSD, FreeBSD, macOS, and some architectures like RISC-V

    3 votes

  13. Comment on Russian sanctions are fueling a Canadian car theft epidemic in ~society

  14. Comment on ‘This is crazy. This is insane’: Bill Gates has changed his mind about AI and jobs in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    That quote seems to be from an interview with Senator, not the blog post,but I don’t think it’s about slop. He’s predicting widespread unemployment: … But he’s hardly the first person to warn...

    That quote seems to be from an interview with Senator, not the blog post,but I don’t think it’s about slop. He’s predicting widespread unemployment:

    In 1933, during the Great Depression, unemployment in the United States was roughly 25 percent. It remained in double digits for much of the following decade. It ultimately recovered as demand, investment, and growth returned.

    AI may not reach this level, but its impact will not go away with an economic cycle. The jobs at most risk are entry- and mid-level, and the new jobs being created will mostly require skills that take many years to learn.

    …

    When a community has high unemployment, the ripple effects can be pervasive. Research suggests that in some parts of the United States, factory closures contribute to a rise in deaths from opioid overdoses. Now imagine similar pressures on both white-collar and blue-collar workers nationwide.

    We have to think now about how to reduce job losses so that everyone can share in the prosperity that AI creates. Waiting until people are already displaced or underemployed will be too late. AI is a structural challenge to the way our economy is organized, and it requires thinking and action now.

    But he’s hardly the first person to warn about AI’s effect on jobs either.

    6 votes

  15. Comment on Dolly Parton’s other legacy: a fortune given away, dollar by dollar in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Ms. Parton’s support for the fire victims was just one node in a constellation of charitable activities that distinguished her as one of pop culture’s most prolific philanthropists. With cash gifts, benefit concerts and telethons, Ms. Parton supported causes that included early childhood literacy, wildlife conservation and the development of the Covid-19 vaccine.

    She became so effective at distributing her own money that the ultrawealthy asked her to distribute theirs. In 2022, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his future wife, Lauren Sanchez, gave Ms. Parton $100 million to distribute to causes of her choosing. And this summer, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce gave Ms. Parton’s Imagination Library $2 million to fund the distribution of children’s books.

    [...]

    The foundation was initially focused on reducing school dropout rates in Sevier County, in part by offering $500 gifts to graduates. Cold, hard cash proved a powerful incentive; high school dropout rates plummeted to just 6 percent in the county, from 35 percent. The Dollywood Foundation, which reported $141 million in assets last year, also offers local high school graduates $15,000 scholarships.

    “She gave cash gifts to people in need long before it was popular,” Ms. Palmer said. “She trusted the people that she wanted to help.”

    [...]

    In the months after the Covid-19 virus emerged, Ms. Parton learned that Vanderbilt University in Nashville was helping with the early trials of the vaccine made by Moderna, and gave $1 million to support the effort.

    “It was a shot in the arm,” said Mark Denison, emeritus professor of pediatrics at the Vanderbilt School of Medicine. “We were starting this work but we didn’t have specific funding for it, and she recognized that this was a critical human problem that was going to impact the country and the world. It allowed us to quickly scale up and get into the lab.”

    [...]

    The next year, she made a $1 million gift to Vanderbilt to support work on infectious diseases in children, and the year after that, she created an endowment to support additional research.

    [...]

    Ms. Palmer said the question now was what will become of Ms. Parton’s remaining fortune, which is estimated to be about $500 million, according to Forbes.

    “She did so much while she’s alive, but I’m super curious what her will says,” Ms. Palmer said. “Because she had so much wealth, and she did not have children. So we may yet see more of her.”

    8 votes

  17. Comment on Russian sanctions are fueling a Canadian car theft epidemic in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    While Western export bans have severed Russia from much of the auto market, they have not tempered the demand for brand-name SUVs and trucks. That has given rise to a sophisticated network of criminals that steals cars, hides them in shipping containers and sends them to Russia, often by way of the Middle East.

    [...]

    Interpol, the international police organization, received 4,798 reports that stolen Canadian vehicles had been found in Russia from February 2024 to July 2026, according to data obtained by The New York Times and confirmed by two law enforcement officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because it is considered sensitive.

    Pickup trucks like Dodge Rams, Toyota Tundras and Ford F-150s are in particularly high demand.

    [...]

    Demand for pricey Western cars has always been high in Russia. The sanctions unintentionally incentivized sellers to find illicit ways to supply the market, driving up prices and making the cars even more of a status symbol, Mr. Aleynik said at the Chortkiv detention facility in western Ukraine.

    [...]

    Since Canada’s car theft epidemic began in 2021, officials have introduced policing overhauls and invested tens of millions in tackling the crime. Theft rates have fallen, but stolen vehicles still flow through Canadian ports.

    [...]

    Car thefts surged in Canada after Covid lockdowns were lifted in 2021. With the global supply chain in turmoil, criminals spotted an opportunity. Within a year, auto theft rates in Canada had reached historic highs and continued to climb.

    [...]

    The police recovered cars as often as they could, but thousands disappeared every year. In the hot spots of Ontario and Quebec, nearly half of the stolen cars vanished.

    [...]

    Frédéric Bonsaint, an officer at the border agency, said that every week, his team searched around a dozen containers at the Port of Montreal and discovered 20 to 30 stolen cars worth in total up to $2 million. Similar checks are carried out at other ports.

    [...]

    The Russian black market did not create Canada’s criminal gangs or smuggling networks. Those ingredients were already in place, said Mr. Aleynik, the Russian who faces car theft charges. The sanctions merely increased demand and profits.

    Key to the effort, Mr. Aleynik said, are criminal contacts in Canada who falsify customs documents and share the latest intelligence on how to evade checks.

    [...]

    Mr. Gast, the former police officer now at Équité Association, said that international buyers placed orders for specific cars. Mr. Aleynik said that happened through online marketplaces that connect black-market buyers and sellers.

    If a buyer orders, say, 15 Land Rovers, scouts will scour affluent Canadian neighborhoods and shopping malls for those vehicles.

    Stolen cars usually leave Canada through the port of Montreal, but Vancouver has seen a recent uptick in response to an east coast crackdown, officials said.

    [...]

    Smugglers often moved stolen Canadian cars to Russia via the United Arab Emirates, according to the Mounties. Officials said that they had also identified routes through Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Lithuania.

    The Canada-to-Russia pipeline was visible because Moscow remains an active participant in — and sometimes abuser of — Interpol’s information-sharing programs. When the Russian authorities investigate a possible stolen car, they run it through Interpol’s database. With each hit, the database automatically updates to say that a stolen car was found in Russia.

    [...]

    Why would the Russian authorities return stolen cars to Western countries? One explanation is that Russian law prohibits the registration of vehicles listed in Interpol’s database. Returning them is one way to prevent unusable stolen cars from piling up. Western officials say that Moscow is broadly cooperative when it comes to crimes like auto theft.

    That could change. Last month, Russia took steps to allow the registration of cars stolen from “unfriendly countries,” including Canada. A proposal by the Russian Interior Ministry would protect those cars from seizure. European officials have warned that this could fuel a rise in transnational car thefts.

    8 votes

  19. Comment on Stop Killing The Internet: No digital ID and no age verification in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    It's true that discussing new ideas is a prerequisite for implementing them, but there's a long and winding road at best from a discussion on an obscure forum and a large policy change. I think we...

    It's true that discussing new ideas is a prerequisite for implementing them, but there's a long and winding road at best from a discussion on an obscure forum and a large policy change. I think we can assume that whatever we discuss here probably won't be implemented, even if it somehow went viral?

    (That includes my "this should have been an http header" idea. I posted it because I'd like to see it more widely discussed, but I'm not optimistic that it will get anywhere.)

    Not mattering is freeing in a way. A butterfly shouldn't worry that flapping its wings might cause a hurricane even if it's technically possible.

    We can still discuss politics, but it's for us, not for the unlikely and unpredictable effects of our conversations on people who aren't even here.

    2 votes

  20. Comment on Technology is over in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    I wonder how today’s young people will look back on the AI bubble that we’re living through? Are there subcultures with the sort of techno-enthusiasm we had during the early days of the Internet?

    I wonder how today’s young people will look back on the AI bubble that we’re living through? Are there subcultures with the sort of techno-enthusiasm we had during the early days of the Internet?

    5 votes