William Chambers

❗️ Microsoft VP wants us to stop hating on them for suspending the WireGuard and other developer accounts: "iT's LiTeRaLLy PaPeRwOrK." Bro. Also Microsoft: "There are no appeals available, we have closed your application."

Costco founder Jim Sinegal said the top-selling product in Japan is Downy Fabric Softener. The retailer didn’t understand why. Started tracking it in the warehouse. Saw Japanese customers open the bottle, take a whiff and say, “This smells like America.”

@ikazombie Not nitpicking on this particular issue, but as a foreign Japan lover, I want the real, authentic experience. Not a theme park invented by people who know even less than I do. I imagine it is frustrating, but it comes from a place of love of Japan at least.

海外スタジオが作った日本が舞台のゲーム、日本人が「うわ、日本だ～！」とはしゃいでる横で海外勢が「こんなのが日本だなんてバカげてるよ」みたいなダメ出ししてるの、マジでよく分からん

WireGuard has some big updates ready to go on Windows, our first on the platform in nearly 4 years. We've done some nice modernizations and improvements, fixed bugs, added features, updated the toolchain, and more. But our release is currently blocked by @Microsoft. The recent thread on Hacker News encouraged me to write this up, rather than just grumbling to myself privately about it as I have the last two weeks. I logged in to get the WireGuardNT driver signed -- a necessary step for driver authors -- and was greeted by this vague message that the account has been suspended. Looking further into it, it seems like they instituted an identity verification policy, didn't notify me about it, and then I guess they suspended accounts who didn't do the verification. So of course I did the ID card verification immediately, but now an appeal is necessary. The appeals process requires filing a support ticket, but filing a support ticket requires a non-suspended account... Catch-22, eventually resolved by filing one through Azure and getting it rerouted to the right department. That was two weeks ago. Now they've told me there's a 60 day appeal review period. Wish us luck! It's a little crazy, because what if there was some critical ring 0 RCE vuln that was being exploited in the wild and that needed to be patched immediately? (Just hypothetical; there isn't.) In that case, telling users "sorry, you've got to wait 60 days" would be sort of bad. And users of WireGuard for Windows are also Microsoft Windows users, so I can't see how this is good for Microsoft either. I think it must just be a case of bureaucracy gone slightly off the rails. Happens. If any Microsofters are able to make this take not-sixty-days, please do get in touch.

Your cells age faster when you’re around people who stress you out. NYU tested this. They collected spit from 2,345 people, read the age of their DNA, and matched it against who those people spend time with. For every difficult person in someone’s life, their body aged about 9 months faster. The paper came out in PNAS (one of the top science journals in the world) this February and was led by NYU sociologist Byungkyu Lee. His team surveyed people across Indiana, ages 18 to 103, and asked them to map out their entire social circle. Then came the real question: does anyone in your life often cause you problems or make things harder? They called these people “hasslers.” About 30% of people had at least one. Roughly 10% had two or more. The team also collected saliva and used it to measure “biological age,” which is basically how old your body is on the inside. A stressed-out 40-year-old might have the body of a 45-year-old. A healthy 40-year-old might have the body of a 37-year-old. For each additional hassler, people aged 1.5% faster per year and carried about 9 extra months of physical wear on their cells. The researchers compared this to smoking and found the hassler effect was about 13 to 17% as strong. One difficult person in your life does roughly one-sixth the damage of a daily cigarette habit. Three hasslers and your body is about two and a half years older than someone the same age with none. Family did the most damage. Parents, siblings, and children who regularly caused stress showed the strongest connection to faster aging across every measurement the team ran. Lee thinks it’s because you can slowly stop talking to a stressful coworker or neighbor. Family is different. You see them at holidays, share obligations, carry decades of baggage. You can’t just block your mom’s number without consequences. Spouses were the one exception, though. Difficult partners didn’t speed up aging. The researchers think marriages blend fights with real affection and daily closeness, and that mix may cancel out the stress. People already under pressure got hit harder. Women reported more hasslers than men. So did daily smokers, people in worse health, and anyone who had a rough childhood. The stress lands heaviest on the people who can least handle it. When someone keeps causing you problems, your body keeps pumping out cortisol (that’s your stress hormone, the chemical your body dumps into your bloodstream when it thinks you’re in danger). Do that over and over for months and it drives up inflammation, grinds down your immune system, and speeds up the kind of wear that ages you from the inside. Scientists have understood this stress-to-aging pipeline for decades. This study just measured it through your relationships instead of your job or your income. One thing to keep in mind: this study found a pattern, not proof. Lee himself said “we do not know whether hasslers actually cause people to age.” It’s possible that people already aging faster just get crankier and end up in more fights, which would flip the cause and effect entirely. But the pattern held up even when the team accounted for smoking, health conditions, childhood trauma, and job type. The real takeaway goes deeper than “cut out toxic people.” The most damaging relationships are often the ones you can’t easily walk away from. Setting real boundaries with family and putting more energy into the people who actually recharge you might be one of the smartest health decisions you can make.

こういう秘密基地は憧れる

And this is why SPT exists. 😅

while my vendetta is much less personal, I feel about software the way this guy feels about guardrails

Tonight in Providence, a panel of "community leaders" will gather to discuss who gets to decide what art belongs on private walls. They invited Ian Gaudreau — the artist who painted Iryna Zarutska. They called it a conversation. It isn't. Ian painted a portrait of a murdered 23-year-old refugee out of nothing but compassion. He said from day one his only goal was to return her humanity. He watched his work get pressured off a private wall by a mayor who had zero legal authority to touch it. And now the same community that destroyed him wants him to sit on a stage and defend himself in front of a room they control, with panelists they chose, and questions they wrote. That's not a forum. That's a tribunal. Look at the questions they're planning to ask tonight: "Where do we draw the line between freedom of expression and propaganda — and who gets to decide?" "What responsibility do artists have to the community their work impacts?" "How does art shape which stories receive attention — and who gets left out?" These aren't open questions. They're loaded charges. Dressed up as dialogue. Ian — if you're reading this — you don't owe them a defense. You painted a woman who died alone on a train while strangers watched. You gave her a face. You gave her dignity. That's not propaganda. That's humanity. To Rhode Island — watch what happens tonight. Watch who controls the microphone. Watch whose questions get answered and whose get dismissed. Because this is exactly what the suppression of free expression looks like in 2026. Not a government order. Not a law. Just a room full of the right people deciding which stories are allowed to be told. The First Amendment doesn't require a panel's permission. I stand with Ian. Completely and without apology.

@BrainlyCre47 One of my favorites! You'll love Erased too if you haven't seen it yet

The best time travelling anime of all time, incredible from start to finish with such a gripping story. Steins;Gate is an anime YOU have to watch if you're a fan of anime. It will never leave my top 10 🥹

Microsoft shut down the main developer's account for VeraCrypt with no warning or reason. This stops him from signing the files needed for new Windows versions of the free encryption software. He has tried to contact Microsoft but got no reply.

😭

Your eyes can only see the moon in gray. It's actually covered in color, blues and oranges and pinks, all from different metals sitting in the rock. You just need a camera and some patience to pull them out. These photos are called "mineral moons." A photographer points a telescope at the moon, takes hundreds or thousands of pictures, stacks them on top of each other to clean up the image, then slowly turns up the color intensity in editing software. The colors that show up were always there. Too faint for your eyes to catch on their own. Each color is a different metal. The blue areas have a lot of titanium in them. The orange and brown zones have more iron. The pinkish-red patches around the edges are the oldest parts of the moon's crust, full of aluminum and calcium. That deep blue region on the left side is called the Sea of Tranquility. Apollo 11 landed right there in July 1969. When Armstrong and Aldrin brought back 47 pounds of rock from that blue titanium zone, scientists cracked the samples open and found three minerals that had never been seen on Earth before. They named one "armalcolite" after the three astronauts (Arm-Al-Col: Armstrong, Aldrin, Collins). They named another "tranquillityite" after the landing site itself. For 40 years, tranquillityite was known as "the moon's own mineral" because nobody could find it here. Then in 2011, a geologist in Western Australia spotted a speck of it inside a billion-year-old rock. Andrew McCarthy, a photographer in Sacramento, once stacked 150,000 separate pictures of the moon to build one color map. Each splash of blue or orange in these images is a real metal deposit on a surface that's been getting hit by space rocks for 3.5 billion years. The moon was never gray. We just couldn't see it.

HB stands for Hard Black. And the pencil you’ve been calling a “lead pencil” your whole life has never had a single atom of lead in it. The “lead” is graphite, which is pure carbon, the exact same element as diamond. The H measures hardness (from the clay mixed into the core), the B measures blackness (from the graphite). More clay makes the line lighter and harder. More graphite makes it darker and softer. Your standard #2 school pencil sits right at HB, dead center of a scale that goes from 9H (barely leaves a mark, scratchy as hell) to 9B (so soft it smudges if you look at it wrong). In the 1560s, a storm in Borrowdale, England ripped up a tree and exposed a huge chunk of pure graphite sitting in the dirt underneath. Nobody knew what graphite was. They thought it was some kind of lead, called it “plumbago” (Latin for lead ore), and the name just never got corrected. The German word for pencil, Bleistift, translates to “lead pen.” The Arabic word means the same thing. Over 460 years of the wrong name. That Borrowdale deposit is still the only large-scale deposit of solid, pure graphite ever found anywhere on Earth. The British Crown seized the mines because graphite could line cannonball molds, which made it a military resource. Between harvests they flooded the entire mine to stop theft. For a stretch, if you wanted graphite for pencils, you had to smuggle it out of England. When Britain and France went to war in the 1790s, Britain’s naval blockade cut France off from the world’s only graphite source. A French officer named Nicolas-Jacques Conté figured out that if you grind low-quality graphite into powder, mix it with clay, and bake it in a kiln (a high-temperature oven), you get a usable pencil core. Change the ratio and you control the hardness. That was 1795. Every pencil made anywhere on the planet today still uses that exact process, 231 years later. There’s no global standard for what HB actually means either. A Japanese HB pencil writes noticeably darker than a German one because Japanese consumers prefer softer, darker strokes. Two pencils with the same grade from different countries will leave completely different marks on paper. Before rubber erasers existed, people fixed pencil mistakes with bread crumbs. Actual bread. French chemists figured out a plant gum (now called rubber) worked better, and in 1858 Hymen Lipman patented the first pencil with an eraser stuck on the end. Teachers pushed back. They worried built-in erasers would make students sloppy. John Steinbeck burned through 60 pencils a day while writing, and his novel East of Eden alone took more than 300.

It is unfortunate that the UN Security Council has once again failed to demonstrate effectiveness and act decisively in the face of such a global threat as the Iranian regime's blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. No one should be allowed to block such globally significant sea lanes or undermine the security of dozens of nations through terrorist attacks against the freedom of navigation. We faced a similar challenge in the Black Sea when the Russians attempted to block our ports and civilian shipping—Russia was trying to suffocate our economy. And we found a way to solve that problem through decisive action, not inaction. Now, we see a similar problem on a global scale. The Strait of Hormuz must remain open to all vessels that sustain vital economy lifelines and maintain normal international trade. Countries in the region have spoken clearly on this, and we support the aspirations of the people of the Middle East and the Gulf for peace. Peace and security in this region directly impact stability, market predictability, and the cost of living in every single country. Such problems and this war must not be prolonged. The world needs a functional UNSC that acts more decisively to resolve acute security challenges of global magnitude.

綺麗な色してるだろ。 廃駅なんだぜ、これ。

As someone who knows very little about modern Egypt, this is an awesome setting I would love to see explored more.

@yano_gamedev For that price? Yes, but for gods sake be sure to pitch heavy on the short/polish area or reviews will bomb it to hell. I'd be pretty interested to see what you could put together actually, seems like a fun concept!

Would you guys be interested in a micro monster tamer experience? something like: 5-6 hour story, 30-50 monsters, 4-6 "gym leaders", hyper fixation on polish, game feel, story and characters, and available for super cheap (like sub $5) really curious what you guys think!

I really think that the public's understanding of how data centers physically interact with their communities is bordering on a low level mass delusion. The actual numbers and impact just do not at all bear out how people feel about them.

GoldenEye 007 - Silo (live studio jam) youtu.be/ggHAGAuDd0c?si… via @YouTube