Thomas Ptacek
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Thomas Ptacek
@sockpuppet.org
Full of passionate intensity.
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Reposted by Thomas Ptacek
I think even calling it Chess is being charitable; many days I think it's closer to the board game Concentration.
February 5, 2026 at 8:13 PM
Of all the possible LLM applications to be skeptical about, vulnerability research seems like it has to be the dumbest. Of course it works. If you think it can't, I'll assume you've never once billed an hour looking for vulnerabilities.
February 5, 2026 at 7:34 PM
JAMC sounds absolutely nothing like Echo & The Bunnymen. That is all.
January 30, 2026 at 12:06 AM
Peak vertical video food content. I am officially wearing an onion around my belt. It is the fashion of my time.
January 29, 2026 at 9:48 PM
Just recorded the premiere episode of Season VIII of Security Cryptography & W/evs, this time with Alex Gaynor and Paul Kehrer, who have a momentous announcement about pyca/cryptography and OpenSSL.
January 28, 2026 at 3:37 AM
This is a perfect piece of technical writing. alexharri.com/blog/ascii-r...
ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering
A look at how I used shape vectors to achieve sharp, high-quality ASCII rendering.
alexharri.com
January 17, 2026 at 6:07 PM
Quick reminder that ChiSec is tonight, it's at Kaiser Tiger now (on Ogden in West Loop), starts at 7PM, no RSVPs just show up, I'll probably make it by around 8PM.
January 15, 2026 at 11:02 PM
I wrote a thing. fly.io/blog/design-...
The Design & Implementation of Sprites
So that we may educate as well as horrify: the internals of our new Sprites execution platform.
fly.io
January 15, 2026 at 3:58 PM
Final SCW of 2025! We had Matt Bernhard on to talk about cryptographic voting systems, in the wake of the IACR election. (Everybody I voted for in the new election won! Woo!)
December 31, 2025 at 5:10 AM
Rust people should be embarrassed by the people trying to argue that Rust is the only truly memory-safe mainstream language. Far and away the cringiest RESF trope.
December 26, 2025 at 7:04 PM
They should use Vince Guaraldi's instrumenal Joe Cool diagnostically. If you can hear it and not at some point grin, something's clearly wrong.
December 13, 2025 at 7:26 AM
Quick reminder that ChiSec is tonight at 7PM. It's at Kaiser Tiger, at Randolph and Ogden (just down the street from where Twisted Spoke was).
November 20, 2025 at 9:31 PM
No he didn't. He said other bad shit, which isn't reported here because it's not as exciting as the made-up shit. Shun accounts that do this.
JD Vance calls ibuprofen "useless medication" and implies it's not "necessary, safe and effective."
November 13, 2025 at 4:22 PM
Three dumb ideas that recur constantly in discussions among nerds about intelligence:

(1) IQ tests are illegal in hiring.
(2) There exist national average IQ numbers.
(3) Intelligence research is suppressed.
November 9, 2025 at 11:24 PM
I wrote a thing, about a project you should knock out when you get 45 minutes free. fly.io/blog/everyon...
You Should Write An Agent
They're like riding a bike: easy, and you don't get it until you try.
fly.io
November 6, 2025 at 8:55 PM
@oakparknerd.bsky.social Mask off for Stopeck, I guess.
October 2, 2025 at 2:57 AM
Have you moved to the district yet?
It’s official: AIPAC is trying to buy my election to keep me out of Congress.

Apparently, I’m a “dangerous detractor”... by believing Palestinians (like myself and my family) deserve basic human rights.

But we’re not going to let AIPAC win.
September 30, 2025 at 12:44 AM
Simon calls out this Dan Abramov comment about how ATproto is qualitatively different from ActivityPub. Maybe he's right. But I look at ActivityPub/Mastodon as a midpoint between blog/RSS and Twitter, and I don't remember the blogosphere being ineffective.

simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/27/...
A quote from Dan Abramov
Conceptually, Mastodon is a bunch of copies of the same webapp emailing each other. There is no realtime global aggregation across the network so it can only offer a fragmented …
simonwillison.net
September 29, 2025 at 12:41 AM
New Neko is fine. Good. The music has gotten more interesting. This is better than the last album with all the cigarettes on it. Still not clear how you can ever outdo Fox Confessor.
September 27, 2025 at 11:56 PM
Claude Can (Sometimes) Prove It
www.galois.com
September 20, 2025 at 12:54 PM
Good Morning Spider is an underrated album.
September 17, 2025 at 9:49 PM
New frontiers in carnitas-making. Today: took the fat cap/skin off in a whole sheet, sliced that into big cubes, rendered it for a couple hours, tried not to eat all of that, then browned the shoulder in the fat, cubed up, threw the skin in, and braised it off. I've been doing the fat cap all wrong!
September 13, 2025 at 11:52 PM
What the FUCK, Microsoft?
September 11, 2025 at 8:55 PM
Current status at Apple SEAR:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GJS...
Oogie Boogie bug/uncovered version
YouTube video by kiddodeathsoul667
www.youtube.com
September 9, 2025 at 6:54 PM
I am unreasonably excited about this.

go.dev/blog/jsonv2-...
A new experimental Go API for JSON - The Go Programming Language
Go 1.25 introduces experimental support for encoding/json/jsontext and encoding/json/v2 packages.
go.dev
September 9, 2025 at 6:04 PM