Ben West
@westbywest.bsky.social
Scattered minutiae about tech, plants, St. Louis, occasionally all together
This happens to be about the most vivid argument in favor of Net Neutrality you can make
ryan cooper@ryanlcooper.com · 9h ago"Both top-shelf reporting and top officials in the Trump administration, including Trump himself, have said that Musk made this decision on his own. That would be treason. The traditional way to figure out the truth of such a matter is with a trial." prospect.org/2026/10/26/d...
RIP Walter Koenig. The "Nuclear Wessels" scenes from 3 evidently were among his favorite. Such an underrated movie. youtu.be/MdSJFrhb-HM?...
The Nuclear Wessels?
YouTube video by GoranMatejcic
youtu.be
My heart is heavy. Walter Koenig, our Ensign Pavel Chekov, passed away early today. Walter and I met on the bridge of the Enterprise in the 1960s, and we stayed friends for nearly six decades. When Brad and I married in 2008, Walter stood beside us as our best man.
Lula closing this election by saying that no sniveling nepo baby who never worked a day in his life was going to stand there and call him Nine Fingers when he lost his finger WORKING and how dare he insult the workers of Brazil… was about the sickest thing I have ever seen in my life
mathieu gallard@mathieugallard.bsky.social · 22h ago🇧🇷🗳️L'actualisation de la projection des résultats finaux de #ElectoMaps sur désormais plus de 40% des bureaux dépouillés : ➡️Chances de gagner 🔴Lula 97 % ⚫️Flávio 3 % ➡️Résultats finaux 🔴Lula 51,5 % ⚫️Flávio 48,5 %
Lee Miller, doing whatever the f*ck she wants in Hitl*rs apartment in Munich, April 1945. Viva la Lee Miller.
If we discovered that Boeing could shut down Air Force One, or General Dynamics had a remote kill switch for Abrams tanks, it would be a huge scandal. So why is everyone accepting how Elon Musk secretly retained control over the military’s supposedly secure command and control system? …
It can't be stressed enough that this is happening specifically because SOS Denny Hoskins gave unredacted Missouri voter lists to Trump www.columbiamissourian.com/opinion/gues...
Hoskins' secret release of voter data deserves a full judicial examination
In testimony before the Missouri House Budget Committee on Feb. 3, Hoskins properly vowed to reject the administration’s request for personal voter information.
columbiamissourian.com
Ben West@westbywest.bsky.social · 4d agoUnfortunately the gestapo was a couple blocks away from me last month, possibly harassing someone for bullshit "voter fraud." Please be aware they're being REALLY SNEAKY about dragging your neighbors away.
Fun fact: this is Phil Hulse's bar, of #ArmoryDataCenter / Green Street fame. Sunshined emails show him asking Otis Williams in Feb for the small favor of a liquor license stat, and then receiving it a week later. Nevermind Williams isn't the license collector. www.saucemagazine.com/places-2/k9-...
K9 Garden in St. Louis to close Oct. 31 - Sauce Magazine: Intelligent Content For The Food Fascinated
K9 Garden in St. Louis will close Oct. 31, less than a year after opening in the former home of Bar-K in Forest Park Southeast.
saucemagazine.com
Pitching a 66% larger data center 20 miles away from the proposed #ArmoryDataCenter, where they've admitted they have no committed tenants, should be a huge red flag. The Monorail travels from town to town looking for its mark. www.stlpr.org/economy-busi...
St. Louis data center developer proposes similar project for shuttered Alton Steel site
According to a press release, TerraWatt reached a “contingent agreement” to buy the site from Alton Steel Inc. and would close on the property in 2027.
stlpr.org
70 percent of the internet was vulnerable yesterday to very bad security flaws inside a coding language. Turns out, *one volunteer* is mostly responsible for maintaining that code & helping push updates. Yesterday Ondřej Surý saved the internet. So I called him up www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...
The Man Who Saved the Internet Yesterday
Ondřej Surý was a relatively anonymous volunteer working on PHP security. Then the internet exploded.
theatlantic.com
Unfortunately the gestapo was a couple blocks away from me last month, possibly harassing someone for bullshit "voter fraud." Please be aware they're being REALLY SNEAKY about dragging your neighbors away.
It's frankly hilarious how a fatal PHP vulnerability is crashing tech stocks today. Who'da thought PHP could bring down AI?
shitposts aside, this one is serious, my loves: if you’re just waking up and you have any service online running PHP 5.4 to latest, you need to take it down RIGHT NOW and don’t put it back online until after it’s patched absolutely catastrophic vulnerability dropped in the middle of the night
THEY ARE NOT POWERLESS TO STOP HIM! Go back to Washington, stand on the steps of the Capitol and demand Johnson and Thune recall the House and Senate, and impeach him. THIS IS HOW IT IS SUPPOSED TO WORK! THERE IS LITERALLY AN INSTRUCTION MANUAL! (It's called the Constitution.)
Jon Cooper@joncooper-us.bsky.social · 7d agoRepublican lawmakers are incensed about Trump's dismissal of Ukraine — and powerless to stop him. That frustration hit a new peak on Monday as they sought to address Trump’s decision to purchase Russian diesel, waive sanctions on Moscow, and potentially stop sharing intelligence with Ukraine.
A Vantage Data Center in Virginia ran backup diesel generators for 24 hours after its primary power failed. Its permit allowed this, but a neighbor had to flee due to the fumes. The #ArmoryDataCenter will have 52 generators, which obvs would be used during outages too. www.yahoo.com/news/us/arti...
Virginia Data Center Ran Diesel Generators for 24 Hours. Residents Fled Their Homes
Virginia data center diesel generators ran nearly 24 hours during a Code Red alert, leaving neighbors with no regulatory recourse under current state permits.
yahoo.com
CVS is doing this fun thing where it lets you schedule COVID shots at locations where they're out of the vaccine. Seems you have to try calling ahead to make sure they're not wasting your time. Kitties for tax.
If taken, the SPR will be left at 266 million barrels, lower than the *first reported* level back in 1982. Further withdrawals increase risk of damage/collapse, basically obligating the US to spend $$$ on rebuilt or newly built reserves. That's one way to go oil free! oilprice.com/Latest-Energ...
U.S. Offers Another 17 Million SPR Barrels as Fuel Crisis Deepens | OilPrice.com
The United States is putting another 17 million barrels of crude from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve on offer, one day after the IEA accelerated emergency stock releases as governments scramble to ge...
oilprice.com
MO district 158 voters have a wide range of candidates to pick from this year
Throw Momma from the Train for Tax Purposes
STLrainboo👻💀@stlrainbow.bsky.social · 2w agoInherit the Wind for Tax Purposes
Strange letter from STL City asking residents to join Switch Together solar installation buyer's club for $150. Nov 11 deadline seems ridiculous for a large home improvement project, only arrived in the mall today. Sounds nice, but the "exploding offer" is a red flag typical for junk mail.
Seriously, media outlets that should know better insist on granting Trump wholly undeserved agency by pretending like he'll actually follow through on his most outrageous threats. How many parents did their story needlessly terrorize? www.cnn.com/2026/10/15/p...
Trump calls off livestream of Fort Hood shooter’s firing squad execution | CNN Politics
President Donald Trump said Thursday that Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan’s firing squad execution will not be livestreamed, reversing an announcement from the Pentagon last week.
cnn.com
PBS News@pbsnews.org · 2w agoParents are facing the unprecedented challenge of handling the near-certain prospect that children will hear of or see footage of the possible livestreaming of Nidal Malik Hasan's execution by firing squad. https://to.pbs.org/4s9epMc
Your periodic reminder to always assume that full size SUV is going to run the light and T-bone your drivers door. (He missed this time.) Photo for tax.
No, this is bullshit. Both Vance and even Trump have now expressed reservations whether the awful thing will even happen. This sort of assumption of the worst by parties who should know better becomes indistinguishable from anticipatory compliance with tyrants.
PBS News@pbsnews.org · 2w agoParents are facing the unprecedented challenge of handling the near-certain prospect that children will hear of or see footage of the possible livestreaming of Nidal Malik Hasan's execution by firing squad. https://to.pbs.org/4s9epMc
NEW: I wrote about why so many people wanted to believe that Ukrainian airstrikes on a Russian data center reduced troll and bot activity online, even though it's almost certainly not true. Featuring @noupside.bsky.social: www.motherjones.com/politics/202...
Drone strikes didn't take out a Russian bot farm, but we were primed to believe It
A viral rumor illustrates people’s hunger to make sense of the division we see online.
motherjones.com
Please be skeptical about Anthropic's AI-gonna-replicate-everywhere PR. Your tamagotchi can't run a frontier model otherwise only seen in huge data centers. Worms and viruses are already understood forms of malware, just gonna be more of them. www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/20...
Anthropic conjures another threat that doesn't exist yet to stoke fears of AI apocalypse
Self-replicating AI botnets could become feasible on IoT hardware within months, claims the Claude maker, if smaller models get smarter
theregister.com
this is just a worm and people have gone to jail before for creating one. again: they are being allowed to break the law in order to puff their product, and sooner or later people will die because of that. there are *already laws* that cover all this.
RTÉ News@news.rte.ie · 2w agoAnthropic has said its experiments suggested small AI models may be months away from being capable enough to self-replicate on commercial Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, such as smart ovens and off-brand Android TV boxes.
