Thomas Ptacek @sockpuppet.org · 26/09/2026People are sleeping on Chrome Extensions post-AI. HN is lit for me now. 030
Thomas Ptacek @sockpuppet.org · 26/09/2026My task switcher is like 50% apps I built, that I'm using constantly. My computer is gradually being INVADED and TAKEN OVER by MY OWN SOFTWARE. 010
Thomas Ptacek @sockpuppet.org · 26/09/2026Thank you. Exactly this. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4985...news.ycombinator.comHey, all. I really don't know what to do with a post like this. I'm being sincer... | Hacker News 000
Thomas Ptacek @sockpuppet.org · 25/09/2026Today I'm parting ways with fly.io. It's been a privilege. I'm off to tilt at a big old windmill with Kurt, again. sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/09...sockpuppet.orgWhat Even Is An OS Now?Computers now work the way I thought they did when I was 8. What does computing look like when most applications have an audience of 1-2 people? I'm leaving Fly.io to build a phone for that world. 81117
Thomas Ptacek @sockpuppet.org · 17/09/2026I wrote a thingy. sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/09...sockpuppet.orgHow To Write With An LLMTwo rules keep an LLM from pasteurizing your writing: never take a word it suggests, and never let it encourage you. Then hand it all the tedious work. 0131
Thomas Ptacek @sockpuppet.org · 12/09/2026Here it's worth calling out that the recall effort got overwhelmingly negative feedback on PPOP, from commenters spanning the entire spectrum of Oak Park politics. It was basically just the guy pushing for it plus a zoning reform opponent against... the rest of the Village. 020
Thomas Ptacek @sockpuppet.org · 12/09/2026'twas ever thus! You can follow the archives of the Oak Leaves to see this dynamic working all the way back to the 1940s. Want to see a full-page ad demanding a referendum over the ordinance banning racial discrimination in housing? Oh, sorry, I mean, "forced housing". 030
Thomas Ptacek @sockpuppet.org · 12/09/2026Is that a reasonable ask? That people go to misinformation videos as they pop up and fix them? Maybe a more reasonable ask is that people not do the the misinformation's work for it by boosting it on social media. 100
Thomas Ptacek @sockpuppet.org · 21/08/2026www.susanrigetti.com/mathsusanrigetti.comMath — Susan Rigetti 000
Thomas Ptacek @sockpuppet.org · 21/08/2026I might have an RSS feed now. Let me know if it doesn't work. I vibe-shipped it. 180
Thomas Ptacek @sockpuppet.org · 20/08/2026I wrote a thingy. sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/08...sockpuppet.orgStop Making TUIs 10589
Thomas Ptacek @sockpuppet.org · 26/07/2026It's an open-access site, so anybody can sign up, so there's no way to prevent randos from posting this shit just to troll. But the community has ZERO patience for it. Far less than Bsky. 100
Thomas Ptacek @sockpuppet.org · 26/07/2026There is to a first approximation no "online right" on HN and certainly no wave of faux-academic race realism. We get a race post roughly once every 6 weeks and it's reliably flagged off the site. I monitor this! 110
Thomas Ptacek @sockpuppet.org · 15/06/2026It finally happened. We finally got @lcamtuf to hang out with us for an hour, to discuss bugnarok, a.k.a. bugsment day, f.k.a. the bugpocalypse. securitycryptographywhatever.com/2026/06/14/f...securitycryptographywhatever.comFacing the Vulnpocalypse With lcamtufWe talk to Michał Zalewski (lcamtuf) about the vulnpocalypse and if we even need fuzzers anymore. This episode may be export controlled at a future date. Th... 0151
Thomas Ptacek @sockpuppet.org · 28/05/2026What in the everloving fuck are these people thinking? A fucking car has a 16 year age floor. 3120
Thomas Ptacek @sockpuppet.org · 25/05/2026If I was participating in a cryptography standards group and said something that caused an academic cryptographer to vocally question their support of formal methods, I would immediately take a 3 year sabbatical from computers and go work at Whole Foods or something. 0190
Thomas Ptacek @sockpuppet.org · 25/05/2026So this is perfect. connections.audioconnections.audioAudio Connections 020
Thomas Ptacek @sockpuppet.org · 21/05/2026Blake Colquitt claims Hacker News is hospitable to "race realism" (because of Curtis Yarvin). We share most of an opinion about Yarvin, but he is making up that claim about HN. HN is distinctively INHOSPITABLE to that stuff, far more so than Bsky. www.dontbeasucker.blog/p/the-butter...dontbeasucker.blogThe Butterflies in Your Stomach Are Planning a CoupIt only took 250 years for American elites to forget why they hated monarchy 150
Thomas Ptacek @sockpuppet.org · 21/05/2026People meeting up at around 7PM at Kaiser Tiger on Ogden/Randolph for ChiSec, if you're bored and want to drink with nerds. No RSVPs, just show up. 020
Thomas Ptacek @sockpuppet.org · 21/05/2026Very much enjoying watching nerds attempt to cancel Olga Tokarczuk for acknowledging she used LLMs in her brainstorming process. Nobelslop! 050
Reposted by Thomas Ptacekllimllib @billmill.org · 12/05/2026(good article, I wish I could have clicked on the images to view them full size) I also made a markdown renderer that works exactly like I want, because I was unhappy with glow: github.com/llimllib/mdr...github.comGitHub - llimllib/mdriver: A streaming markdown printerA streaming markdown printer. Contribute to llimllib/mdriver development by creating an account on GitHub. 121
Thomas Ptacek @sockpuppet.org · 12/05/2026I wrote a thing. This is not a love letter to Emacs, which is one of my more toxic and codependent relationships. sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/05...sockpuppet.orgThe Emacsification of Software 3405
Thomas Ptacek @sockpuppet.org · 08/05/2026Oh yeah, no, NTA, this has been a thing for awhile. I didn't realize you could turn off DNSSEC for a whole TLD with it though! 030
Thomas Ptacek @sockpuppet.org · 16/04/2026Oh, ChiSec is tonight, bunch of security nerds hanging around at a bar, Kaiser Tiger on Randolph/Ogden, 7PM. No RSVPs, just show up, look for the table of nerds. Has been pretty well attended lately. 040
Thomas Ptacek @sockpuppet.org · 14/04/2026Alex Gaynor on the "sufficiently smart compiler" of software security, the mythical actually-effective static analyzer: alexgaynor.net/2026/apr/13/...alexgaynor.netIf it could have, why didn't it? · Alex Gaynor 0134
Thomas Ptacek @sockpuppet.org · 11/04/2026(the meaningful bug here, if i understand it right, is much more complicated and interesting, and Filippo can explain it.) 070
Thomas Ptacek @sockpuppet.org · 11/04/2026This is a fucking incredibly great bug. Ask Claude to demonstrate it for you; it'll one-shot it. For ECC signatures (at least), WolfSSL thinks a 1-byte SHA2 hash is just as good as a 32-byte hash. 1532
Thomas Ptacek @sockpuppet.org · 30/03/2026I wrote something: sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/03...sockpuppet.orgVulnerability Research Is Cooked 79639
Thomas Ptacek @sockpuppet.org · 27/03/2026Yeah, so, I'm going to have more to say about this later, but, for now... yeah. securitycryptographywhatever.com/2026/03/25/a...securitycryptographywhatever.comAI Finds Vulns You CanReturning champion Nicholas Carlini comes back to talk about using Claude for vulnerability research, and the current vulnpocalypse. It’s all very high-brow ... 2135
Thomas Ptacek @sockpuppet.org · 25/03/2026I'm particularly proud of that graf. I lived in Evanston earlier in my life, and have been in Oak Park for 20 years. Anybody in Evanston who wants to compare notes with us, I promise, we won't sabotage your efforts to legalize housing just so we can get their first. But we will get there first. 080
Thomas Ptacek @sockpuppet.org · 14/03/2026Extremely psyched about two upcoming SCW guests, one of them this week. We've got very crunch vulnerability research and cryptography stuff coming. 0243
Thomas Ptacek @sockpuppet.org · 10/03/2026Y'all, I've seen some shit, but I've never seen someone want *both* DNSSEC ceremonies *and* the CA/B Forum before. 3140
Thomas Ptacek @sockpuppet.org · 04/03/2026("Current LLMs are better vulnerability researchers than I am.") 040
Thomas Ptacek @sockpuppet.org · 04/03/2026Nicholas Carlini at [un]prompted. If you know Carlini, you know this is a startling claim. 1343
Thomas Ptacek @sockpuppet.org · 28/02/2026None of you are giving me enough credit for not participating on the TLS working group mailing list. You're welcome. Everything I don't do, I don't do it for you. 2262
Thomas Ptacek @sockpuppet.org · 26/02/2026Annals of things people have actually written down for other people to read: "No one trusts NIST. But people do trust the IETF." 050
Thomas Ptacek @sockpuppet.org · 25/02/2026People who hope to apply Daniel Bernstein's rules-lawyering tactics at IETF, which were honed in the DNS WGs (where he was probably in the right), would do well to remember that those tactics have consistently failed. They've merely won him standing to complain about the IETF. 030
Thomas Ptacek @sockpuppet.org · 25/02/2026All this debate about whether MLKEM breaks formal methods results on the TLS protocol, when the answer all along was simply to deploy Additive Cryptography. 150
Thomas Ptacek @sockpuppet.org · 25/02/2026There's only one correct way forward for handling the introduction of MLKEM into TLS, and, indeed, all future tls-wg cryptography debates, and it's this proposal: snkth.com/add-crypto/snkth.comAdditive Cryptography for TLSThis document defines Additive Cryptography for TLS, a transition framework in which algorithms are never replaced and only accreted. Implementations MUST NOT negotiate a single key exchange algorithm... 1202
