jwz

It's on its back, baking in the hot sun, but you're not helping, Leon. Why is that?

Also, all the headlines say variants of "Waymo halts service during massive S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams" but what they fail to mention is that it took nearly six hours of these traffic jams before Waymo finally decided that the press they were getting was bad enough that they should do the most obvious thing in the world.

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I threw together an XScreenSaver module that is API-compatible with Shadertoy. My thought was that this would be a good way to pull in a bunch of new savers, since the cool kids don't write C any more, they just write GLSL. There are some problems with that plan, though:

• The default license on Shadertoy is CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 and the vast majority of uploads there use that, but since that prohibits commercial use (the "NC" part) it is not an open source license, is not compatible with the MIT/BSD license used by the rest of XScreenSaver, and is probably also incompatible with the licensing terms of every OS distro. So I can't include those.

• There's no way to search on Shadertoy and filter by license terms, to find ones that might be compatible.

• There's no way to email the author of a shader, because email is for old people.

• This is where someone's going to suggest, "Instead of including the code with XScreenSaver, why not instead have the end user enter the URL and have the saver download it from the site in realtime and then run that", and while I hate that idea for other reasons that should be obvious, it doesn't matter because Shadertoy has their Clownflare proxy configured to specifically make that sort of thing damn near impossible. I'm not getting into a countermeasures-escalation fight over this.

• Possibly that would be less bad if the XScreenSaver end user had a Shadertoy account and was logged in, but "you have to create an account before you can run this screen saver" is so stupid that I hope we can just never speak of that idea again. No, just no.

Anyway, all that being said:

I would like to see your favorite Shadertoy links that would make good screen savers.

• Prefer ones that do not require large static assets, e.g., big images as input;
• Prefer open source licenses, but even if not, I'll take a look;
• Audio input and output are not an option.

Previously.

It has come to my attention that the artwork for the original mozilla.org "dinosaur" logo is not widely available online. So, here it is.

As I explained in some detail in my 2016 article "They Live and the secret history of the Mozilla logo", I commissioned this artwork from Shepard Fairey to use as the branding of the newly-founded mozilla.org and our open source release of the Netscape source code, which eventually became Firefox. This happened in March 1998.

• I am 100% certain that we (Netscape) purchased the artwork outright.

• I am 99% certain that some time in 1998 or 1999, the artwork was open sourced under the terms of the then-new Netscape Public License.

However, I find that I can't actually prove either of these things. Can you?

I see this document that was on the Mozilla.org web site in 2005 that asserts that, though the rest of the web site is CC BY-SA 2.0, the red dinosaur is trademarked.

I don't believe that's true. I think that's lawyerly overreach. I believe the dinosaur had already been released and could not be clawed back in this way.

But what do I know. Anyway, here are all of the original vector images. Come at me.

These are the first batch of drawings that Shepard did for us. The original files were PostScript, but I have converted them to PDF and PNG for modern sensibilities:

PS, PDF. PS, PDF. PS, PDF.

You probably didn't know the dinosaur had legs!

Here's the artwork for the CD we gave away at the first anniversary party in 1999.

Ai, PDF.

And here are some "Netscape Now!"-style banners that some other division inside Netscape commissioned a different design firm to make, shortly thereafter. (Why they didn't just get Shepard to do it, I don't know.) Some of these were once hosted on mozilla.org.

Round two:

(If you don't see a whole bunch of wide banner anim-GIFs above, turn off your ad blocker on this site! Yes, it tripped me up too.)

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Let's have a slow clap for the corporate tools who still have to show up at work and try to spin their bankruptcy fire-sale as Line Goes Up:

Roomba maker iRobot has filed for bankruptcy and will be taken over by its Chinese supplier after the company that popularized the robot vacuum cleaner fell under the weight of competition from cheaper rivals.

"Today's announcement marks a pivotal milestone in securing iRobot's long-term future," said Gary Cohen, iRobot's chief executive. "The transaction will strengthen our financial position and will help deliver continuity for our consumers, customers and partners."

I guess their pivot to being an arms dealer didn't work out, huh.

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Michael Swanwick:

John Varley died two days ago on December 10, 2025. A great many will mourn him as a science fiction writer whose work they enjoyed. But this misses his moment.

In the mid-1970s, Varley exploded into science fiction like a phoenix. His "Eight Worlds" stories were set in a future where hyper-powerful aliens have killed everyone on Earth as a threat to its whales and porpoises and humanity survives everywhere else in the Solar System. Despite this bleak background, the stories were bright and inventive. People change gender on a whim. Wealthy and glorious cities turn to shacks and hovels when their holographic fronts are turned off at night. People bank their memories so that, upon death, they can be restarted with new memories. He wrote so many major stories per year that, in a resurrection of an old pulp-days practice, some had to be published under a pseudonym.

We were all dazzled. His work was full of impressive new ideas. And, outside of the Eight Worlds sequence, he wrote things like "In the Hall of the Martian Kings," which resurrected the possibility of intelligent life on Mars after the Mariner probes had apparently disproved that. Or "Air Raid," which made air travel terrifying again. [...]

Long, long ago, when I was yet unpublished, I found myself talking with Isaac Asimov at I forget which convention, when John Varley cruised by, trailed by enthusiastic fans. Asimov gazed sadly after him and said, "Look at him. A decade ago, everybody was asking, 'Who is John Varley?' A decade from now, everybody will be asking, 'Who is Isaac Asimov?'"

And that was John Varley's moment.

There are a lot of books and authors that I loved as a kid that, in hindsight, are not as good as I remembered. But John Varley is not one of those; he remains one of my favorite authors. I read Overdrawn at the Memory Bank in a second-hand "Best SF of the year" compilation when I was 10 years old and my head exploded. I read everything of his I could get my hands on after that. His vision of the future wasn't just robots and spaceships but it was optimistic and romantic about what we could become in a way I hadn't seen before.

I am sad to report that almost all of his work appears to be out of print! The pickings on bookshop.org are slim. When evangelizing him to people I always recommend The John Varley Reader as a great place to start. That one is widely available on eBay. So go buy that. Go. Do it now.

Which reminds me that one time in the 90s I loaned a friend my copy of the already-out-of-print-even-then Blue Champagne and they immediately lost it. I was so mad. This was before Amazon and eBay, but I eventually found some early online bookstore and ordered myself a new copy. When it arrived it turned out to be a signed first edition! So I was less mad then.

His Eight Worlds stories from the 70s and 80s are my favorites. Decades later, he returned to them with Steel Beach, which is his riff on Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but slaps Heinlein around almost as much as Verhoeven did in Starship Troopers.

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WordPress corporate tools out here salivating over the prospect of a Spicy Autocomplete Slop Firehose being so tightly coupled to WordPress core that there's no hope in hell of getting rid of it:

AI as a WordPress Fundamental:

The funny thing about this mental experiment is that your average WordPress user doesn't know what a database is, much less the fundamental role it plays within WordPress. It's taken for granted. Of course posts save, comments can be made, and settings are stored. Why wouldn't they? [...]

Yes, "imagine that". "What if." What if, from the end-user to the plugin developer, they could take for granted that there's an AI model accessible to me by virtue of being in WordPress? What kinds of things would people use it for? What amazing things would people create that are built on the reliable presence of a capable LLM? [...]

Imagine if every single developer was empowered with AI capabilities without having to handle the complexities of AI integration. What if the developer just did something like

$$image = Ai_Client::prompt( 'Create an image that beautifully reflects this post content' ) ->with_text($post_content) ->generate_image();

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I thought it was just me.

NEW HAVEN, CT -- Shedding new light on a previously undocumented effect of loneliness, a team of psychologists at Yale University found that at least 80% of Americans lack the social connections necessary to pull off a heist.

"When it comes to putting together a crew with the skills needed for a bank job or a jewel heist, a majority of Americans reported knowing just one or two guys, tops," said lead researcher Jane Iannitello, adding that only 20% had any safecrackers in their lives, a mere 16% knew any hacker prodigies with a rebellious streak, and fewer than 5% had access to Taiwanese acrobats doubling as masters of disguise.

"As they spend more and more time on social media, people just aren't going out to underground boxing rings, art auctions, or other settings where they are likely to meet a fast-talking charismatic type who pulls them into a daring heist. They often lose touch with their demolition experts after childhood, and though people may be eager for a big money payday that could mean walking away from the life for good, they are too afraid to put themselves out there for fear of rejection. Even in cases where they have a crew big enough for a heist, lonely Americans are often left feeling stranded due to a lack of getaway drivers, which forces them to brandish firearms at total strangers and demand that they drive, just drive."

While researchers cautioned the trend is likely to continue, they went on to state that some of the negative effects could be mitigated by reaching out to therapists with a plan, a keycard, and nothing to lose.

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Since yesterday my server has again been getting absolutely obliterated by AI scrapers. This time, though, load is below 1, but I'm getting up to 10 requests a second and all of my Apache workers are in state "R". "apachectl restart" fixes it... for a while. And fail2ban is banning IPs full-tilt.

What levers do I have to pull on this? E.g. maybe it would be sensible to drop connections if they stay in "R" for more than a couple seconds?

This 12 year old post suggests some sysctl.conf changes, but I have no idea whether those suggestions are sensible today. My current settings for those are the defaults:

net.ipv4.tcp_fin_timeout = 60 net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range = 32768 60999 net.core.somaxconn = 4096 net.core.netdev_max_backlog = 1000

In httpd.conf, some vhosts have "Timeout 240" because I really do have some CGIs that take that long to run, and you can't make exceptions on a per-URL basis.

I have reqtimeout_module loaded, with the default settings, which I believe are:

handshake=0 header=20-40,MinRate=500 body=20,MinRate=500

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Compatible with All Anuses. For 7.9" to 12.9".

Cool!!!...cute, compact and effective!!! Thumbs-up design!!! Use it as anus clamp at home, rectum holder at the office for fashion and youth feel.

The unique and cute appearance can be used as a gift for your family and friends during the Christmas season, Thanksgiving, Mother's Day, etc.

Stability. Practicality. Stretchability. Viewing Angle.

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