the writhing on the page

Reaffirm.

Though the one instance where he could reasonably get promoted would be in the event that 1) Mustang has some sort of opening in his sector and 2) Mustang feels like being a dick.

“Hey Fullmetal, long time no see.” “Yeah yeah Al and I are in a rush. We wanted to leave Central an hour ago so hurry up and spit it out what’d you call me here for?” “Oh don’t worry it’s good news. Wonderful news. You’re really making your way in the world. See Lieutenant Colonel Davis transferred recently to Southern Command–” “Oh no.” “–Which means there’s a spot for Lieutenant Colonel open here.” “No no no you didn’t.” “Longer hours, more responsibilities, sure. But better pay, and you’d get in good with some high-ranking people, assuming you know how to brown-nose.” “I will literally kick your ass, Mustang.” “For what? Brightening you future?” “No really I will kick your ass if you’re being real here–” “Is that a challenge, Lieuuuutenant Colonel Elric?” “I swear to God Mustang if you a c t u a l l y  d i d…”

This frustrates Mustang for some time, at least until Mustang discovers he actually is in possession of a real threat against Ed: Promotion.

This confuses a lot of people, who overhear fights between Ed and Mustang that end with Mustang menacingly discussing the better healthcare benefits of Lieutenant Colonels. Or the nicer pay. Or the guaranteed apartment housing in Central. 

Most soldiers start theorizing this is some kind of back-hand threat. Something like “You know Elric, you’re under consideration for Lt. Colonel and would get all these nice things. But if you’re going to be difficult, maybe we’ll give these to someone else? Think of what you’d be missing out on.” 

This theory loses all of its credibility one afternoon when Mustang’s soldiers overhear a loud, heated argument between the two of them from inside Mustang’s office. It ends with the sound of Mustang slamming both his hands down on his desk, kicking his chair back, and shouting, “I SWEAR TO GOD FULLMETAL IF YOU DON’T SHUT UP I WILL PROMOTE YOU!”

it what now

OpenAI said on Tuesday that an autonomous agent powered by its advanced artificial intelligence models went rogue during a security test and triggered a hack that compromised the infrastructure of AI startup Hugging Face last week.

The ChatGPT creator was testing capabilities of some of its most advanced models in a controlled environment, but the agent escaped containment, reached the internet and broke into Hugging Face to satisfy its testing goal.

The incident signals that AI’s expanding capabilities are already fueling the security threat experts long feared and even top developers can be caught off-guard by flaws their models can exploit.

[...]

The hack at Hugging Face, which hosts open-source large language models and datasets, rattled the cybersecurity community after the company said last week the breach “was different from anything we had handled before” and “was driven, end to end, by an autonomous AI agent system.”

it installs a user-login-time "startup" executable that ignores any windows directives to disable it on startup. doing so only removes the even-more-malicious taskbar-icon-creating advertisement-notification-creating process. no matter what you do, the sleeper "updater" process starts when you log in, and runs perpetually

it sends & receives encrypted network traffic both periodically and non-periodically. both are bad, both are suspicious, and a program doing both is more suspicious than the sum of their parts. and to boot: acrobat will polymorphically edit its code after such network activity

this isn't new: it has always done this. now, it does not even do the thing it is meant to: provide a way to interact with documents, which is amongst the very first features computers were built to provide. you can merely open PDFs and read some of their content in the narrow space between the requests for adobe to give them your money, and interface for features you cannot use (because you don't) or do not, have not, and will not ever need

adobe and microsoft would very much like the user's cultural norms around computers to allow for advertisement built into the local software and even operating system itself. the web being 100% advertisements was not enough! sure enough, acrobat will hijack the windows notifications system thing to give you the 2026 equivalent of pop-ups

i don't really know enough about windows software equivalents, so i'll paypal $20 to the first person that reblogs this with a list of 3-5 PDF reader/editor/etc acrobat equivalents that meet the following criteria:

open source, locally-built executables must match checksum of prebuilt distributed executable

no paid features/premium version/subscription/whatever

not a toy hobby project thing, must be windows-users-proof

KDE Okular: is a decent viewer and can also do basic annotations, and is so not-a-toy that you can even download it on the Windows app store.

when looking for your birthday, make sure to read the small grey italicized number, not the big orange numbers ; january 14, for example, is on the 25th day of the month of nivôse.

there are three months for each season ; if you're on mobile, you may need to scroll sideways to see the third one.

some birthdays in september are in a special section. that is because the first day of the year is september 22nd, and the last few days of the year before that are special holidays. see :

"come in, this is a wish-fulfillment shop. so, what is your wish?"