Aaron M Brown
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ambrown.bsky.social
Aaron M Brown
@ambrown.bsky.social
230 followers 330 following 300 posts
I'm trying to get as good at writing as I am at hacking so that I can write about hacking.

Blog: https://katabas.is

Newsletter: https://substack.com/@aaronmbrown
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ambrown.bsky.social
A photoshopped image of a Clifford the Big Red Dog children's book cover. In it, Clifford is pushing a branch with a stranded cat on it down towards the ground. The title reads "Clifford Fucking Launches a Cat"
November 22, 2025 at 7:13 PM
ambrown.bsky.social
St. John's University banned one of the oldest hacker conferences in the world because they are complicit with a fascist regime.
Greetings, We've received some disturbing news from the venue of our Hackers On Planet Earth conference. We have been told that "materials and messaging" at our most recent conference "were not in alignment with the mission, values, and reputation of St. John's University" and that we would no longer be able to host our events there. Considering the universal praise from St. John's staff and the smooth handling of HOPE_16 last August, this naturally caught us by surprise. Our content has always been somewhat edgy and we take pride in challenging policies we see as unfair, exposing security weaknesses, standing up for individual privacy rights, and defending freedom of speech. Until now, that has never run afoul of St. John's values - or so we thought. What we're told - and what we find rather hard to believe - is that all of this came about because a single person thought we were promoting an anti-police agenda. They had spotted pamphlets on a table which an attendee had apparently brought to HOPE that espoused that view. Instead of bringing this to our attention, they went to the president's office at St. John's after the conference had ended. That office held an investigation which we had no knowledge of and reached its decision earlier this month. The lack of due process on its own is extremely disturbing.
November 18, 2025 at 6:54 PM
ambrown.bsky.social
Don't sleep on the run-up of Build-a-Bear, either.
A one-year stock graph of Build-a-Bear Workshop, Inc (ticker BBW), showing it up 30.82% over the past year.
November 7, 2025 at 10:57 PM
ambrown.bsky.social
My favorite use for these broken piles of tokens is to invent completely new quotes and see who it attributes them to.
An exchange with an LLM in which I ask about a quote I just made up on the spot to prove a point. The user asks "who said 'you can treat life like boxing or like chess, but only one approach will leave a pretty corpse'?" The LLM responds: "That's a rather darkly humorous quote! It was said by Joss Whedon, the writer, director, and producer best known for creating TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly. It certainly sounds like a line that would fit right into one of his projects. Now there's a life strategy to consider! Would you like to know a bit more about the context in which he said it?"
November 6, 2025 at 3:47 PM
ambrown.bsky.social
I feel compelled, on this eve of ALCS game 7, to repost what I wrote at the start of the season about my doomed love for the Mariners. "I Love this Garbage Team with All of My Stupid Heart": substack.com/@aaronmbrown...
Screenshot of a substack post reading: "So I am well versed in disappointment and I am ready for psyche-shattering defeat. I will buy cheap day-of tickets and work from the beer garden while my Mariners ground out at first over and over again. I will get friends together for a game on my birthday and, as I have every birthday for years, watch them blow it in the 8th. I am ready for boring pitching battles that we lose by one crushed home run in the 12th. I will wallow in the disappointment and still be an enthusiastic fan. Why? The same reason anyone is a fan of any shitty team. Because as a franchise, we’ve got great fucking vibes. I love taking Seattle’s one useless little subway line down to the stadium, drinking watery Rainier beer ("Vitamin R"), and eating six thousand calories of stadium food. I love the industrial chic of T-Mobile Park, a stadium named after a corporation even more incompetent than Mariners management. I love the working class, grunge music schtick that Seattle hasn’t been able to live up to since the 90s."
October 20, 2025 at 4:45 AM
ambrown.bsky.social
As someone who goes to Las Vegas every August for years to attend DEF CON, I have wanted to write this essay for over a decade.

"Las Vegas Delenda Est" - aaronmbrown.substack.com/p/las-vegas-...
A screenshot of test reading: "Landing in Las Vegas in August, it feels like the desert is trying to reject you like a bad organ. Or maybe dry heaving to avoid ingesting some poison, like a middle-aged sales executive whose stomach still turns at the smell of tequila thanks to one bad night in her sorority thirty years ago. The roiling columns of hot air coming off the desert buffet plane to try and deter landing. They almost always fail, unfortunately for both you and for the desert. After three hours in that place, forsaken by all benevolent spirits and good sense, any reasonable person will start having vivid fantasies about it being reclaimed by the desert. It is a deeply immoral city and if we’re ever to live in a just world, it needs to be leveled by some great cataclysm and then buried by the sands. That it has been allowed to survive and metastasize for as long as it has is a stain on humanity’s collective soul. I want to be clear that it’s not the booze or the sex that I object to. Those are noble elements of the human experience and you won’t hear me say a bad word about either of them after my hangover burns off. Rather, the original sins of Sin City are its antihuman design and the existential horror of its location. Simply put, Las Vegas should not be, and while it exists it serves only to immiserate and torment its occupants and visitors. Las Vegas must be destroyed."
October 2, 2025 at 11:41 PM
ambrown.bsky.social
Going to DEF CON in a few weeks, feeling good about this AI stuff.
A conversation with ChatGPT in which the user asks for a single number roulette bet. ChatGPT responds: "How about betting on 17? It's often considered a lucky number for many, and it’s right in the middle of the table, so it gives a nice mix of risk and reward. If you hit, it's a solid payout!" This is, of course, nonsense since all single number roulette bets have equal odds of winning and are all strictly negative for long term expected outcome.
July 27, 2025 at 5:57 AM
ambrown.bsky.social
If you rely on shit like this to try and defeat facial recognition algorithms, you are 100% going to jail.
An image of a woman in assymetric, bold face paint over the headline "My make-up class at Glastonbury to fool facial recognition cameras."
June 27, 2025 at 6:37 PM
ambrown.bsky.social
Being from a small town is wild because half the news in my hometown paper is "The nuke plant is having issues again but at least it isn't leaking this time" and the other half is "Exclusive! Pictures of the empty building where the new Costco will be!"
June 25, 2025 at 3:29 PM
ambrown.bsky.social
RIP Brian Wilson. You created so much great music and brought joy to so many during your life of indeterminate length.
A screenshot of a headline announcing the death of Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, listing his age at death as "TK"
June 11, 2025 at 6:24 PM
ambrown.bsky.social
Seattle defined the police and now the park is lousy with these hooligans.
A picture of an adult goose and several goslings grazing on a grassy patch in a park
April 29, 2025 at 7:44 PM
ambrown.bsky.social
Instagram just recommended me this anti-art slop bullshit. This account could only have been created by someone who hasn't given any thought to Ai Weiwei's work
A screenshot of an Instagram account called "ai_ai_weiwei" that creates AI pictures in a style imitating the work of artist AI Weiwei.
April 23, 2025 at 12:23 PM
ambrown.bsky.social
Nature's kintsugi checking in
A man's hand holding a large polished rock displaying spider web dark lines on a lighter surface
March 21, 2025 at 6:06 PM
ambrown.bsky.social
"The devil and the Devil", on a theme by Eric Hoffer: katabas.is/posts/the-de...
The Devil makes sure that the devil is never far from their thoughts. In fact, it gave them a handy incantation to bring it to mind. A scrying mirror to hold up to see the devil more clearly if their vision starts to blur. This lens is doubly useful because it also serves as a shibboleth. By saying “woke” with the proper intonation, they can recognize one another and the devil at the same time. Like all good glamours, the word itself is empty. Magic cast with meaningful words, such as prayers, is limited. It is shackled by the content of the words you are saying. To truly cast powerful illusions, you need to strip as much meaning out of the word as possible. “Woke” for them is such a perfect empty vessel that it can contain anything. This makes it a near perfect illusion. They look through it at the world and the Devil reveals to them all manner of things to hate. It shows them a world ripe with disgust.
March 19, 2025 at 1:12 AM
ambrown.bsky.social
More hard-hitting reporting from my hometown newspaper. I will never go back to the Tri-Cities, but I will also never unsubscribe.
A screenshot of a newspaper article heralding the return of "Lake Dairy Queen", a giant puddle that forms in a parking lot after it rains in the town of Richland, Washington
March 14, 2025 at 5:03 PM
ambrown.bsky.social
I just got presented with this ad and am now fully convinced that I'm in act 1 of a survival horror game.

PLUVICTO: It's not what you expected.

*Muffled scream off-screen as one of the PLUVICTO zombies "takes action".*
An ad for a drug called "PLUVICTO" that gives no indication what it might treat. The ad line reads "Did you know there's an option that may be right for you or your loved one? Take action and learn more aobut PLUVICTO. PLUVICTO: It's not what you expect."
March 13, 2025 at 11:55 PM
ambrown.bsky.social
On the one hand, I and all of my loved ones are at serious risk of dying under a new American Fascism.

On the other hand, I complimented the bartender on her rad face study doodles and she when I left she asked if I wanted to keep them.

Impossible to say if life is good or bad.
A cardboard sheet marked with pressure marks from beer cans. In each circle is drawn a face in sharpie in many different styles
March 5, 2025 at 5:13 AM
ambrown.bsky.social
I wrote about Elon Musk's interns and the affliction of "Programmer Brain".

katabas.is/posts/elon-m...

Also available on my newsletter for those of you who prefer that Substack life: aaronmbrown.substack.com
A screenshot of a blog post reading: "The genesis of Programmer Brain lies in the hermetic nature of programming. When one is programming, everything in the system is made of code. The programmer has complete control. Any mistakes in the system are mistakes in reasoning and they come from not completely understanding the system. A certain type of symbolic cognition is all that’s required to effect any change one wants to make. Bugs arise from not understanding the system well enough. They are inevitable, but fortunately they’re almost always quick and easy to fix. Once the Programmer fixes the bug, they’ve learned a little bit more about the system. Their knowledge, and therefore power to do anything their heart desires, asymptotically increases. I’m not going to lie, it’s an intoxicating feeling. Every piece of software is, in a sense, its own power fantasy. Each software system is a golem over which the programmer can attain complete mastery. They merely have to think hard enough. This power over the hermetic (both in the sense of “self-contained” and also “relating to the arcane”) leads to several enticing conclusions. “Move fast and break things” is a common one. Mistakes are easy to remedy and the faster one moves, the more one learns and the more powerful one grows."
February 27, 2025 at 3:55 AM
ambrown.bsky.social
Some big personal news. I just got a text notification that I've been invited to pretty exclusive club. And as soon as I figure out what the fuck it is, I'm going to the big time, baby!
A screenshot of a garbled, likely AI-generated spam message inviting me to a Bitcoin trading group that claims to have won "BEST AWARD Award 2021 Premium Award"
February 25, 2025 at 8:13 PM
ambrown.bsky.social
The wildest part of this story from my hometown paper isn't that a 12 year old drove 160 miles over the mountains. It's that when the cops found him they PIT maneuvered him, arrested him, and booked him on felony charges: www.tri-cityherald.com/news/local/c...
A screenshot of text reading: "Nobody was hurt and vehicle damages were minimal, according to the sheriff’s office. The boy was arrested and taken to the Chelan County Juvenile Justice Center on suspicion of possessing a stolen vehicle and felony eluding."
November 30, 2024 at 1:36 AM