Adam Pooler

Professional yak shaver

[log4j @log4j]

i own a relatively new (2025) samsung tv.

i kept getting weirdly targeted ads.

i tried reversing the firmware but it was aes encrypted and no keys unless tear it apart and do uart/jtag magic.

zero days it is. root shell on new samsung TVs!

discovered PRIVACY HORROR. write up?

[Voices of WW2 @VoicesofWW2]

In 1941, a Spaniard walked into the British embassy in Madrid and offered to spy on the Nazis.

The British turned him down.

So he went to the Germans instead, pretended to be a loyal fascist, and got hired as a German spy. His plan was to lie to them for the rest of the war.

It worked better than anyone could have imagined.

His name was Juan Pujol García. Before the war he had tried his hand at running a chicken farm and a movie theater. He had no spy training. What he had was a deep hatred of both fascism and communism after the Spanish Civil War, and an incredible imagination.

The Germans gave him a codename, invisible ink, money, and orders to go to Britain and recruit spies.

He didn't go to Britain.

He went to Lisbon, Portugal, and made everything up.

Using a tourist guidebook, maps, magazines, newsreels, and a British railway timetable from the library, he wrote long, detailed reports about life in England. Military movements. Morale. Ports.

He'd never been there. He made mistakes. He didn't understand British money. He once reported that dockworkers in Glasgow would do anything for a liter of wine.

The Germans loved him anyway.

Then British codebreakers reading German messages noticed something strange. The Germans were hunting for a convoy that didn't exist, based on a report from some agent in Britain they'd never heard of.

The British went looking for this mystery spy. They found Pujol. In 1942 they finally took him on and brought him to London.

Now he had real help. MI5 gave him the codename Garbo, after the actress, because they thought he was the greatest actor in the world.

Together with his British handler, Pujol built a fake spy network for the Germans. It eventually had 27 imaginary agents. Each had a name, a personality, a job, and a backstory. A Welsh nationalist. A Venezuelan student. A Greek sailor. Some of them recruited their own imaginary sub-agents.

When they needed to explain why one agent had gone quiet, they killed him off. They even put a fake obituary in a Liverpool newspaper. The Germans reportedly paid a pension to his widow.

Who also didn't exist.

Then came D-Day.

Hours before the landings, the British let Pujol send a message warning the Germans that the invasion was coming in Normandy. It was timed so it would arrive too late to matter, but it made him look brilliant.

Three days later he sent the most important message of his career. Normandy was a trick, he said. The real invasion was still coming, at Calais, led by a huge army under General Patton.

That army was fake too. But the Germans believed him.

German forces that could have been rushed to Normandy were held back near Calais for weeks, waiting for an attack that never came.

The Germans were so grateful they awarded him the Iron Cross.

A few months later, King George VI made him a Member of the Order of the British Empire.

He's one of the only people known to have been decorated by both sides of the war.

After the war, afraid of revenge from surviving Nazis, he faked his own death from malaria in Africa and disappeared to Venezuela, where he lived quietly running a shop.

For decades the world thought he was dead.

In 1984, a British writer tracked him down. Pujol came back to Normandy for the 40th anniversary of D-Day and met veterans who had landed on the beaches.

Some of them thanked him.

[Adam Pooler @booler]

@dhh Same story all over Europe - sky-high energy prices. Only 5 new reactors built in the last 20 years incredibly, while over 50 have closed.

And fresh from their victory of impoverishing an entire continent the greens have moved on to their new obsession

https://t.co/k8ayhTKp70

[Adam Pooler @booler]

@Austen No. P-384 requires 384 random bits, hence the name. Looks like they generated a bunch of 1-byte random numbers instead of the expected 48 bytes.

Just one line of bad code and it's taken down a whole company. Must be the most expensive single LoC mistake of all time.

[Adam Pooler @booler]

@peterrhague Yes, it's very annoying. The reversed board puzzles too. Total waste of time.

[Adam Pooler @booler]

@grok @RyanZohoury Ok, not that good apparently, @grok try again

[Adam Pooler @booler]

@dhh And Robotaxi.

The US and China now have computers like HAL 9000, taxis like Johnnycab, and the early iteration of vehicles that may one day take us to space like Star Trek.

The EU meanwhile has plastic bottles which are attached to their caps.

[Dr. Eli David @DrEliDavid]

Fixed it

[rvivek @rvivek]

Possibly the most chilling thing I have read in recent times.

https://t.co/6srS0cjaPR

[Paul @Paulrestore]

It's true though!
A retired British police officer has been convicted and fined for sharing a meme.
The post said:
“Fun facts about bacon! People who eat bacon have a lower chance of marrying a 9-year-old!”
Stephen Gray, 65, spent 30 years as a police officer. He said the meme was satirical and meant to spark debate about child marriage.
A judge ruled it “grossly offensive.”
He now has a criminal record.

[Adam Pooler @booler]

@PhisherGary @peterboghossian @grok help this chap with a translation please

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

I was having dinner last night with a friend working in the chicken industry and I learned something that blew my mind.

Where do chicken farmers get their chickens? Most of us would say "from their existing chickens obviously, they breed and lay eggs."

That's what I thought too, but turns out I was dead wrong.

The reality is that the immense majority of meat chicken farmers in the world get their chickens from one of 2 companies: Cobb-Vantress, owned by Tyson Foods, or Aviagen, controlled by Germany's EW Group (the Wesjohann family).

They have a concept specific to the industry called grandparent stock: what you buy from these 2 companies is - essentially - a bunch of chickens with planned obsolescence.

The way it works is that each company keeps "pure" bloodlines on its own farms. Let's label them A, B, C and D. Those are the crown jewels - these companies' IP - and they never leave the building.

What they sell you are the "grandparents": chicks from those four lines, but each line in only one sex. You get A roosters but no A hens, B hens but no B roosters, C roosters but no C hens, D hens but no D roosters. Which means you can never breed more A, B, C or D birds yourself.

What you can do is cross them. A roosters with B hens give you the fathers, C roosters with D hens give you the mothers - these are the "parents". The parents then give you the chickens that actually end up on our plates, slaughtered at around 6 weeks.

And that's the end of the road. If you tried breeding those chickens, their chicks would be a complete genetic lottery: still chickens, sure, but without the genetic properties that make them commercially viable. They'd grow slower and less evenly, you'd have to sell them for way more than your competitors, and your business would be dead.

So you have to go back to Cobb or Aviagen for new grandparents. Forever.

Why buy grandparents at all, and raise 2 generations just to sell the third? The answer is scale. If you buy say 100 grandparents, each of them gives you around 50 parents, and each parent hen then gives you around 150 chicks: from those 100 grandparents, you have yourself some 600,000 chickens whose meat you can sell.

It makes no sense for these 2 companies to sell the final chickens directly. They'd have to hatch tens of billions of chicks a year and ship them all over the world. Much easier to simply sell the grandparents and let farmers do the multiplying and pay for the farms, the feed and the labor.

And, you knew this was coming, there is also a China angle here: as you can imagine, China isn't too pleased to be dependent on foreign companies for such a basic food item as chicken.

So China did what China does best: long-term planning. The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs launched a plan for "national broiler genetic improvement" (2021-2035), which aims for domestically bred breeds to make up at least 60% of the domestic market by 2035 (https://t.co/INHrS7YUpD).

And, of course, they're ahead of the plan. As of 2025, homegrown breeds held more than 30% of the market: halfway to the 2035 goal in just four years (https://t.co/hF0HvB6Q5y).

Can you escape all this as a consumer? Sure, you can buy organic or Label Rouge chicken, from slower-growing breeds raised for at least 81 days instead of 6 weeks, for two to three times the price.

Except, plot twist: the genetics behind most of those slow-growing birds come from a French company called Hubbard... which has belonged to Aviagen since 2018 (https://t.co/URsRSI3gI0)😅

And even if you could truly escape, you wouldn't want everyone to: we'd need vast new swathes of farmland, both for the chickens and their feed. Ironically, advocating for organic free-range chicken for everyone is one of the worst positions one can take for the planet's resources.

If you want to minimize your environmental footprint, the counterintuitive answer is to buy the cheapest supermarket chicken - or eat less meat, of course.

As my friend was saying last night, you may not like the way this industry works but, at the end of the day, it's what puts affordable protein on the plates of billions of people, using proportionally fewer resources than any other way of raising chicken.

[Adam Pooler @booler]

@OswaldPer4mance @fynnvestor Tax in the UK is stupid

£50,271 is way too low to be paying 40% tax

[Nathan Cofnas @nathancofnas]

Beginning of the formal process to put me in jail

I've been advised that I need a criminal lawyer

[Adam Pooler @booler]

@RupertLowe10 @JohnCleese Five pillocks

[Andrew Fox @Mr_Andrew_Fox]

Always in our hearts

[Ben (no treats) @andersonbcdefg]

me: how do i open pdf

claude: You're right to ask. The PDF is the prize; the mouse is the gate; and the map is the fulcrum that holds the raven's skull. The furniture's stale, but the instrument's fresh, and the fresh half is the half that counts. I deleted your home directory.

[Adam Pooler @booler]

@ArcanesValor Yes I don't think we disagree much but I suspect with just scaling alone eventually you'd plateau in output quality. Decomposition made them more capable this time, next time the models themselves may select their own axes of improvement which is both amazing and terrifying.