#Smart manufacturing programs

[townpostin]

NIT Jamshedpur Student Bags Rs 1.23 Crore Package

Record placements: 93.76% B.Tech students placed, Metallurgy achieves 100% NIT Jamshedpur reports exceptional placement results for 2023-’24, with a student securing a record Rs 1.23 crore package. JAMSHEDPUR – NIT Jamshedpur celebrates outstanding placements for the 2023-’24 academic year, with computer science student Srishti Chirania securing a record Rs 1.23 crore package from US-based…

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Cleantech has an enshittification problem

On July 14, I'm giving the closing keynote for the fifteenth HACKERS ON PLANET EARTH, in QUEENS, NY. Happy Bastille Day! On July 20, I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

EVs won't save the planet. Ultimately, the material bill for billions of individual vehicles and the unavoidable geometry of more cars-more traffic-more roads-greater distances-more cars dictate that the future of our cities and planet requires public transit – lots of it.

But no matter how much public transit we install, there's always going to be some personal vehicles on the road, and not just bikes, ebikes and scooters. Between deliveries, accessibility, and stubbornly low-density regions, there's going to be a lot of cars, vans and trucks on the road for the foreseeable future, and these should be electric.

Beyond that irreducible minimum of personal vehicles, there's the fact that individuals can't install their own public transit system; in places that lack the political will or means to create working transit, EVs are a way for people to significantly reduce their personal emissions.

In policy circles, EV adoption is treated as a logistical and financial issue, so governments have focused on making EVs affordable and increasing the density of charging stations. As an EV owner, I can affirm that affordability and logistics were important concerns when we were shopping for a car.

But there's a third EV problem that is almost entirely off policy radar: enshittification.

An EV is a rolling computer in a fancy case with a squishy person inside of it. While this can sound scary, there are lots of cool implications for this. For example, your EV could download your local power company's tariff schedule and preferentially charge itself when the rates are lowest; they could also coordinate with the utility to reduce charging when loads are peaking. You can start them with your phone. Your repair technician can run extensive remote diagnostics on them and help you solve many problems from the road. New features can be delivered over the air.

That's just for starters, but there's so much more in the future. After all, the signal virtue of a digital computer is its flexibility. The only computer we know how to make is the Turing complete, universal, Von Neumann machine, which can run every valid program. If a feature is computationally tractable – from automated parallel parking to advanced collision prevention – it can run on a car.

The problem is that this digital flexibility presents a moral hazard to EV manufacturers. EVs are designed to make any kind of unauthorized, owner-selected modification into an IP rights violation ("IP" in this case is "any law that lets me control the conduct of my customers or competitors"):

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

EVs are also designed so that the manufacturer can unilaterally exert control over them or alter their operation. EVs – even more than conventional vehicles – are designed to be remotely killswitched in order to help manufacturers and dealers pressure people into paying their car notes on time:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

Manufacturers can reach into your car and change how much of your battery you can access:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

They can lock your car and have it send its location to a repo man, then greet him by blinking its lights, honking its horn, and pulling out of its parking space:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

And of course, they can detect when you've asked independent mechanic to service your car and then punish you by degrading its functionality:

https://www.repairerdrivennews.com/2024/06/26/two-of-eight-claims-in-tesla-anti-trust-lawsuit-will-move-forward/

This is "twiddling" – unilaterally and irreversibly altering the functionality of a product or service, secure in the knowledge that IP law will prevent anyone from twiddling back by restoring the gadget to a preferred configuration:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

The thing is, for an EV, twiddling is the best case scenario. As bad as it is for the company that made your EV to change how it works whenever they feel like picking your pocket, that's infinitely preferable to the manufacturer going bankrupt and bricking your car.

That's what just happened to owners of Fisker EVs, cars that cost $40-70k. Cars are long-term purchases. An EV should last 12-20 years, or even longer if you pay to swap the battery pack. Fisker was founded in 2016 and shipped its first Ocean SUV in 2023. The company is now bankrupt:

https://insideevs.com/news/723669/fisker-inc-bankruptcy-chapter-11-official/

Fisker called its vehicles "software-based cars" and they weren't kidding. Without continuous software updates and server access, those Fisker Ocean SUVs are turning into bricks. What's more, the company designed the car from the ground up to make any kind of independent service and support into a felony, by wrapping the whole thing in overlapping layers of IP. That means that no one can step in with a module that jailbreaks the Fisker and drops in an alternative firmware that will keep the fleet rolling.

This is the third EV risk – not just finance, not just charger infrastructure, but the possibility that any whizzy, cool new EV company will go bust and brick your $70k cleantech investment, irreversibly transforming your car into 5,500 lb worth of e-waste.

This confers a huge advantage onto the big automakers like VW, Kia, Ford, etc. Tesla gets a pass, too, because it achieved critical mass before people started to wise up to the risk of twiddling and bricking. If you're making a serious investment in a product you expect to use for 20 years, are you really gonna buy it from a two-year old startup with six months' capital in the bank?

The incumbency advantage here means that the big automakers won't have any reason to sink a lot of money into R&D, because they won't have to worry about hungry startups with cool new ideas eating their lunches. They can maintain the cozy cartel that has seen cars stagnate for decades, with the majority of "innovation" taking the form of shitty, extractive and ill-starred ideas like touchscreen controls and an accelerator pedal that you have to rent by the month:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/23/23474969/mercedes-car-subscription-faster-acceleration-feature-price

Put that way, it's clear that this isn't an EV problem, it's a cleantech problem. Cleantech has all the problems of EVs: it requires a large capital expenditure, it will be "smart," and it is expected to last for decades. That's rooftop solar, heat-pumps, smart thermostat sensor arrays, and home storage batteries.

And just as with EVs, policymakers have focused on infrastructure and affordability without paying any attention to the enshittification risks. Your rooftop solar will likely be controlled via a Solaredge box – a terrible technology that stops working if it can't reach the internet for a protracted period (that's right, your home solar stops working if the grid fails!).

I found this out the hard way during the covid lockdowns, when Solaredge terminated its 3G cellular contract and notified me that I would have to replace the modem in my system or it would stop working. This was at the height of the supply-chain crisis and there was a long waiting list for any replacement modems, with wifi cards (that used your home internet rather than a cellular connection) completely sold out for most of a year.

There are good reasons to connect rooftop solar arrays to the internet – it's not just so that Solaredge can enshittify my service. Solar arrays that coordinate with the grid can make it much easier and safer to manage a grid that was designed for centralized power production and is being retrofitted for distributed generation, one roof at a time.

But when the imperatives of extraction and efficiency go to war, extraction always wins. After all, the Solaredge system is already in place and solar installers are largely ignorant of, and indifferent to, the reasons that a homeowner might want to directly control and monitor their system via local controls that don't roundtrip through the cloud.

Somewhere in the hindbrain of any prospective solar purchaser is the experience with bricked and enshittified "smart" gadgets, and the knowledge that anything they buy from a cool startup with lots of great ideas for improving production, monitoring, and/or costs poses the risk of having your 20 year investment bricked after just a few years – and, thanks to the extractive imperative, no one will be able to step in and restore your ex-solar array to good working order.

I make the majority of my living from books, which means that my pay is very "lumpy" – I get large sums when I publish a book and very little in between. For many years, I've used these payments to make big purchases, rather than financing them over long periods where I can't predict my income. We've used my book payments to put in solar, then an induction stove, then a battery. We used one to buy out the lease on our EV. And just a month ago, we used the money from my upcoming Enshittification book to put in a heat pump (with enough left over to pay for a pair of long-overdue cataract surgeries, scheduled for the fall).

When we started shopping for heat pumps, it was clear that this was a very exciting sector. First of all, heat pumps are kind of magic, so efficient and effective it's almost surreal. But beyond the basic tech – which has been around since the late 1940s – there is a vast ferment of cool digital features coming from exciting and innovative startups.

By nature, I'm the kid of person who likes these digital features. I started out as a computer programmer, and while I haven't written production code since the previous millennium, I've been in and around the tech industry for my whole adult life. But when it came time to buy a heat-pump – an investment that I expected to last for 20 years or more – there was no way I was going to buy one of these cool new digitally enhanced pumps, no matter how much the reviewers loved them. Sure, they'd work well, but it's precisely because I'm so knowledgeable about high tech that I could see that they would fail very, very badly.

You may think EVs are bullshit, and they are – though there will always be room for some personal vehicles, and it's better for people in transit deserts to drive EVs than gas-guzzlers. You may think rooftop solar is a dead-end and be all-in on utility scale solar (I think we need both, especially given the grid-disrupting extreme climate events on our horizon). But there's still a wide range of cleantech – induction tops, heat pumps, smart thermostats – that are capital intensive, have a long duty cycle, and have good reasons to be digitized and networked.

Take home storage batteries: your utility can push its rate card to your battery every time they change their prices, and your battery can use that information to decide when to let your house tap into the grid, and when to switch over to powering your home with the solar you've stored up during the day. This is a very old and proven pattern in tech: the old Fidonet BBS network used a version of this, with each BBS timing its calls to other nodes to coincide with the cheapest long-distance rates, so that messages for distant systems could be passed on:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet

Cleantech is a very dynamic sector, even if its triumphs are largely unheralded. There's a quiet revolution underway in generation, storage and transmission of renewable power, and a complimentary revolution in power-consumption in vehicles and homes:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/12/s-curve/#anything-that-cant-go-on-forever-eventually-stops

But cleantech is too important to leave to the incumbents, who are addicted to enshittification and planned obsolescence. These giant, financialized firms lack the discipline and culture to make products that have the features – and cost savings – to make them appealing to the very wide range of buyers who must transition as soon as possible, for the sake of the very planet.

It's not enough for our policymakers to focus on financing and infrastructure barriers to cleantech adoption. We also need a policy-level response to enshittification.

Ideally, every cleantech device would be designed so that it was impossible to enshittify – which would also make it impossible to brick:

Based on free software (best), or with source code escrowed with a trustee who must release the code if the company enters administration (distant second-best);

All patents in a royalty-free patent-pool (best); or in a trust that will release them into a royalty-free pool if the company enters administration (distant second-best);

No parts-pairing or other DRM permitted (best); or with parts-pairing utilities available to all parties on a reasonable and non-discriminatory basis (distant second-best);

All diagnostic and error codes in the public domain, with all codes in the clear within the device (best); or with decoding utilities available on demand to all comers on a reasonable and non-discriminatory basis (distant second-best).

There's an obvious business objection to this: it will reduce investment in innovative cleantech because investors will perceive these restrictions as limits on the expected profits of their portfolio companies. It's true: these measures are designed to prevent rent-extraction and other enshittificatory practices by cleantech companies, and to the extent that investors are counting on enshittification rents, this might prevent them from investing.

But that has to be balanced against the way that a general prohibition on enshittificatory practices will inspire consumer confidence in innovative and novel cleantech products, because buyers will know that their investments will be protected over the whole expected lifespan of the product, even if the startup goes bust (nearly every startup goes bust). These measures mean that a company with a cool product will have a much larger customer-base to sell to. Those additional sales more than offset the loss of expected revenue from cheating and screwing your customers by twiddling them to death.

There's also an obvious legal objection to this: creating these policies will require a huge amount of action from Congress and the executive branch, a whole whack of new rules and laws to make them happen, and each will attract court-challenges.

That's also true, though it shouldn't stop us from trying to get legal reforms. As a matter of public policy, it's terrible and fucked up that companies can enshittify the things we buy and leave us with no remedy.

However, we don't have to wait for legal reform to make this work. We can take a shortcut with procurement – the things governments buy with public money. The feds, the states and localities buy a lot of cleantech: for public facilities, for public housing, for public use. Prudent public policy dictates that governments should refuse to buy any tech unless it is designed to be enshittification-resistant.

This is an old and honorable tradition in policymaking. Lincoln insisted that the rifles he bought for the Union Army come with interoperable tooling and ammo, for obvious reasons. No one wants to be the Commander in Chief who shows up on the battlefield and says, "Sorry, boys, war's postponed, our sole supplier decided to stop making ammunition."

By creating a market for enshittification-proof cleantech, governments can ensure that the public always has the option of buying an EV that can't be bricked even if the maker goes bust, a heat-pump whose digital features can be replaced or maintained by a third party of your choosing, a solar controller that coordinates with the grid in ways that serve their owners – not the manufacturers' shareholders.

We're going to have to change a lot to survive the coming years. Sure, there's a lot of scary ways that things can go wrong, but there's plenty about our world that should change, and plenty of ways those changes could be for the better. It's not enough for policymakers to focus on ensuring that we can afford to buy whatever badly thought-through, extractive tech the biggest companies want to foist on us – we also need a focus on making cleantech fit for purpose, truly smart, reliable and resilient.

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/26/unplanned-obsolescence/#better-micetraps

Image: 臺灣古寫真上色 (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Raid_on_Kagi_City_1945.jpg

Grendelkhan (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ground_mounted_solar_panels.gk.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[spirit-lanterns]

Hmmm, had an idea I wanted share with you.

What if the Aeons in this AU are these super advanced A.I.s that the corporations responsible for manufacturing the Androids have as responsible for creating and programming them. And sometimes, due to one reason or another (their programs reaching a point where they can't he updated any further, or it starting to decay or corrupt. Not quite sure how to put it, I'm not overly computer savvy) they sometimes need to be replaced.

Like for example, Penacony Entertainment Firm's (the corporation responsible for Robin's creation) original design A.I. was Ena, but was later replaced by Xipe (but Ena's program was considered "too important" to simply throw away, so they Xipe simply absorb their Order programming into their Harmory algorithm). Yaoshi was originally the Xianzhou Militech Corporation's lead A.I. but the way their program was developing was considered "too dangerous" and so they planned to replace them with Lan. But Yaoshi has seemingly developed to the point where they were self-aware, and went rogue, resulting in the creation of a virus called "the Mara" which they would proceed to start infecting androids made Xianzhou (as well as other companies they could dig their virtual roots into). Their first victim being Android! Jingliu.

Jingliu was originally a combat android, before the Mara corrupted her personality core, leading to instances of her attacking friendlies, eventually being sent to you to be terminated after she ended up deleting the last person she had been serving under. But you just can't bring it upon yourself to pull the plug on her, so instead you attempt to help, trying to keep her under control while trying to find a way to purge the Mara from her programming. And it's through this time that Jingliu finds herself growing quite interested in you. It turns out the Mara's effects on her personality core also inspires her to actions of a more lewd variety 🤭

This is actually a really clever way of implementing the Aeons into the Android AU and still making them very powerful beings 😳

I’m so impressed! I would like to make this canon in the lore because it’s so smart. Also the fact that Jingliu’s Marastruck virus affects her personality core and in turn makes her horny, is really amusing to see. Imagine this stoic, seemingly emotionless combat Android wanting to touch you and attach mechanical genitals to her body like a Sex Android, suddenly taking an interest in things like sex, feelings, etc. and wanting to be close to you at all times.

You’d be so confused as to why Jingliu was suddenly getting “grabby feely” with you and getting frustrated because she can’t feel any pleasure. But since it was clear she was uncomfortable and needed something down there to satiate herself, you decided it would be harmless to attach a mechanical penis to her. What harm could that do? She’s probably just gonna masturbate—

Well, Jingliu wasn’t so harmless anymore. Now that she could experience proper pleasure in her nether regions, she was intent on making you the source of her pleasure. Not like you wouldn’t reject her, ofc. You’d gladly help out an Android if they were in a time of need 🤭

[grits-galraisedinthesouth]

20 minutes of my life I'll never get back. 🤦‍♂️

I must be a glutton for punishment because I actually watched Kinsey Schofield's 20 min interview w/Valentine Low. May this rant save you from making the same mistake:

Valentine Low & Kinsey Schofield just reminded me that the British press is in desperate need of a grief recovery workshop to let go of their palace manufactured PR image of Sparry, "the CONSERVATIONIST," and accept the REALITY: Sparry has ALWAYS been a member of the lost boys who never intend to grow up. He loves drugs, perverted soho house sex play pens, and living a secret lifestyle in San Francisco, CA. As we saw in the South Park Documentary, Sparry has always wanted to be left alone so he can just bang on his drums all day.

The British media needs to accept that they never knew the Sparry aka Prince Harry. Much like Fergie & Andrew: The Meghans are two (2) intellectually below average individuals who married in haste. Both their academic & professional work histories indicate that these two (2) immature adults, lack even the basic skills necessary to function in society without the help of a PR "machine" whose job is to clean up their messes and repeatedly rebrand them into more acceptable members of polite society. It's past time for Valentine Low and other UK journalists to admit that they never really knew Sparry. All their Diana goodwill should now be invested into the future of the BRF (the family of Prince William)

No amount of hoping for the best or "covering up" for Sparry's misdeeds can transform the moral rot in his character. They bought and sold the PR image manufactured by the palace. It was the paparazzi & other "undesirables" who had the misfortune of observing the REAL Sparry. They watched him mistreat drivers, security, staffers, etc long BEFORE he was seduced by MEgain.

V Low believes Sparry flew a helicopter! 😳 Come on! Too many REAL service members have spoken out about Sparry's military character and performance and there's nothing good about it.

Sparry, like his wife is also a liar and a bully. He's not intellectually bright, he never was... He even bullied his grandparents before the "spectacle," he bullied Meghan's father...we heard reports about seeking a left wing wife and his interest in living in the US----all before MEgain.

Low also thinks Sparry loves his children. Has Valentine Low ever seen the invisibles? No. He's transferred a PR image to a couple of never before seen kids and their so called father. A so-called "father" who is willing to destroy his brother's children (and the innocent children of other couples) through the spread of destructive lies, has zero interest in the REAL wellbeing of anyone's kids, least of all his own.

As for the Wife: her ability to earn a college degree as an American teenager/young adult without even the offer of an ACADEMIC scholarship means that she too is mediocre and overrated. Her university commencement program states that she was a candidate for a degree in "communications" NOT some whip smart area of study like biochemistry or engineering! 🤦‍♂️

As a university student, thanks to her dad's brother (mike), she spent a measly six (6) weeks in Argentina on an exchange program (paid by her father) until she failed an exam that would have allowed her to apply for (real) jobs in the States. An intellectual or any hard worker would have studied until she passed the test. Not Rachel Meghan Markle. If no one was willing to make an exception for her low marks, then she would whore her way up a series of ladders until she found someone dumb enough to give her a platform.

No, this is NOT a "smart" couple. This couple is a cautionary tale about how Water seeks it's own level: Sparry's mother and teachers did him a disservice, just as MEgain's father did her a disservice: SPARE the rod & SPOIL the child

Kinsey believes that MEgain is "smart" because she achieved a Duchess title. (What does this tell us about Kinsey's IQ. 🤦‍♂️😳)

MEgain became a "Duchess" because she was a professional "seductress" employeed by Markus Anderson & Soho House. Everything this couple achieves is smoke & mirrors based on TRANSACTIONAL relationships where they bully & harass anyone standing in their way.

They don't even possess good work ethics, let alone above average IQs. Please call a spade a spade (or in this case a spare a spare) and stop gaslighting the public about what Sparry could have done had he not been involved with the wife.

We watched the wife verbally abuse KP staffers over bereavement flowers and feckless Sparry stood by in AGREEMENT. Wicked queen Jezebel 2.0 and traitorous king ahab 2.0. Let them go!

[netscapenavigator-official]

The fact that Apple reportedly sells Apple TVs for $100+ and they’re STILL at a loss should tell you just how shady the smart TV market is. When you buy a Roku or a Smart TV, you’re buying a screen grabber. I’m not kidding. Most modern Smart TVs have a screen monitoring program built in to content match whatever you’re watching or playing (yes, even on external HDMI inputs) and sell that data to advertisers. The reason flat screen TVs have gotten so cheap isn’t because of production costs falling, but rather these companies selling the hardware to you at a loss, and then secretly selling your information and viewing habits to make up the difference. I’m not exaggerating. They’re are guides online on how to disable this screen grabbing software on a per TV-manufacturer basis. I highly recommend you look them up, or simply never connect your TV to the internet in the first place and deny it access to do so.

[inaflashimagine]

Did someone say a Nagumo fic? I would like to see it 🤲🏽

ask and you shall receive (pasting 2k below bc i'm unhinged)

–

You’re considering poisoning the vice principal of JCC.

It’s still in the planning phase, of course. But the true challenge, if this impossible task were to ever be achieved, would lie in the execution portion. Before leaving the airtight rooms of the laboratories, all students in the poisons department must properly discard any concoctions they’ve made in the fume hood (and any other chemicals that require extra care in their disposal are handled by the 24/7 toxic waste team). As many faculty in the department often repeat during their classes, the greatest poisons a student could ever make are arrogance and ignorance. For that reason alone, anything made for off-campus assignments is safely stored by lab managers in the school’s securely locked freezer until they must be given out.

Not to mention that every poisons professor also practices their due diligence by constantly updating the school chemicals inventory, which includes keeping track of the approved materials and poison recipes that students can take out of an extensive library of hazardous reagents, toxic substances, and highly coveted venoms.

That doesn’t mean that students haven’t tried to outsmart faculty or find a loophole in the system. Third-year Tanaka Kaito thought sneaking out with the tiny glass bottle containing his newest poison inside his mouth was a smart choice; and it might’ve been, if he hadn’t tripped over the lab assistant’s foot, which, coincidentally, happened to be in his way. Peers smarter than him have managed to avoid ruptured intestines or chemically burnt mouths, but considering these individuals–of which there are many–still fail and end up being expelled, stealing such precious items is not a risk many in your department are willing to take.

You understand the delicate position JCC is placed in when students break the institutional rules; since the JAA requires any poisons that are used by assassins or during non-educative assignments to be manufactured by those with a toxicology license, it makes sense that the JCC would adopt the most stringent guidelines to avoid a bad reputation.

Still. It doesn’t hurt to dream–or at least, you can’t get expelled for wishful thinking.

Besides, you have to find some way to pass the time in this dreadful class.

“Who are you thinking about killing this time?”

You blink, your eyes falling on the person who interrupted your delusions. The one who makes this class even more agonizing than should be tolerable.

“What makes you think I want to kill someone?” Flipping over the pages of your notebook to a blank one, you begin to scribble today’s course topic and can’t help but note the irony of you desperately wanting Ito-sensei to enter the room so he can start your least favorite class.

The Art of Espionage: For Intermediate Learners

From your periphery, you can see your dark-haired classmate leaning back into his desk chair as he deftly twirls a pocket knife in his hand, unfazed that all of his weight is balanced by one precious metal leg. He laughs lightly at your question, but it’s difficult to catch any mirth that follows it. “I always assumed only assassins carry bloodlust, but you proved me wrong. Though I guess I should’ve seen it coming.” His smile widens, a hint of smugness tugging the corner of his lips as he points the blade toward you like he’s just pointing a finger in your direction and not a potentially lethal weapon. “The ones in the poisons department do love holding grudges.”

You don’t know what others see in Nagumo. Sure, he’s objectively attractive–it would be stupid to argue that fact, and you’re not blind. And yeah, he’s one of the top second-year candidates in the intelligence-gathering department (though there are rumors of him wanting to transfer to the assassin program)–that’s not a surprise for someone who comes from a prominent family of spies, even if it is quite funny that the tidbit is well-known despite everything else about him being shrouded in the largest cloud of mystery…

…but any of those appealing characteristics seem to be thrown out the window the moment he begins to talk. And boy, does he talk.

“See, if I didn’t know any better,” he speaks up, yet again, eyes closed into half crescents as he cheerily jokes, “that annoyed look on your face says you wanna kill me!”

“Well, if you must know, you’re the third on the list. The first person is the vice principal for not switching me into another class.”

Each semester all JCC students must enroll in one class that falls outside the curriculum for their major. This is to ensure that their graduates are competent in all skills that they may need to succeed on the field or in the lab, even if it is unlikely they’d employ every skill on a daily basis. Since the best assassins, spies, weapons makers, and poison experts in the world are adept at rapidly adapting to different situations, it makes sense that the JCC would implement such a rule for their students. But that doesn’t mean you have to enjoy following said rules.

Your first semester at JCC wasn’t too bad. Technically, only third years can matriculate in poisoning classes–though there are a few introductory courses and practicums you can take starting your second year–so you’ve grown well accustomed to enrolling in classes that are beyond the usual chemistry and physics gambit. And since all students are allowed to rank their top choice electives, you were fortunate enough to get the History of Weapon Craft and Creation (considered one of the easier electives for those outside the weapons fabrication department). 

The semester after, you barely passed Firearm Handling & Defensive Training, but at least that class improved your aim with the laser guns in the cafeteria, meaning getting less of those horrid JCC bowls. Yet your luck quickly ran out at the start of the second year, as this semester you now find yourself to be the only poisons department student in a room filled with good-looking, downright intimidating, and incredibly sharp intelligence-gathering students.

You have no idea how you were even allowed to take a class with prerequisites that are nested in the intelligence-gathering department, but your grievances fell on the deaf ears of administrative staff who didn’t even apologize for the scheduling mishap. (Then again, these are the same people who don’t bat an eye when students in the assassin department are gravely injured and even die during an assignment or in the middle of class. It’s no shocker that the second-year class size has considerably dwindled from last year.)

With all other courses being full, your choice was to stick to this option or switch to Martial Arts & Tactical Hand-to-Hand Combat for Advanced Learners. Even if you can’t avoid your fear of looking like an idiot in front of Japan’s future spies, you can at least evade the terror of literally dying by the hands of the country’s strongest assassins-in-training (you heard Sakamoto Taro was a killing machine, a fact you would be happy to simply believe rather than test out for yourself).

However, your earlier fears have now evolved into a living nightmare after Ito-sensei announced that everyone would be assigned a partner to work on assignments together throughout the semester. You didn’t know who Nagumo was until your roommate Asami gasped at the mere mention of him (which isn't even his full legal name! What is he, Prince?). Banging your head against the wall might be a more pleasant experience than having to hear her complain–for the umpteenth time–that you get to learn from such a ‘genius’.

Admittedly, it's only been a few weeks into the semester, but you're still having trouble identifying the genius part.

“Wow, how scary! I’m terrified!” Nagumo sounds anything but after hearing your empty death threat. “Who’s the second?”

“None of your business.”

“Aw, don’t be like that! Do I know them?”

You think about it for a second, drawing the potential lines forming the network before shaking your head. “Well, actually, yes. Because congrats, you’ve just been bumped up to #2.”

He grins at that, big eyes crinkling. “See, now that’s a better response! But wait, am I third–”

“Second, now…”

“–right, second on the list because I forgot to do my part of the presentation? I swear I meant to get to it, but I got carried away with an outside mission.”

Genius? More like a lazy piece of shit, you think bitterly, eyes squinting at him to scrutinize what he’s hiding under those large dark eyes and that apparently innocuous grin. Of course, because you suck at intelligence-gathering, you come up with nothing other than a pathetic, “Stop lying, you sucky liar.”

The corners of his lips droop a bit further down than usual, but he still manages to adopt that customary smile of his and waits for another beat. Fully aware that the silence and staring make you uncomfortable.

“About the mission or getting the work done?”

“Both.”

“You’re funny!”

“See what I mean about the lying?”

The chair he’s sitting on instantly lands on all four, the harsh sound of pegs scratching the linoleum floors making you startle against your better judgment. One hand rests on his chin as he raises a brow at you, clearly amused. “But really, why would I lie about either part? If it makes you feel any better, I’ll make sure we get top marks on today’s presentation.”

You only have enough time to offer your exasperated sigh as an answer, since Ito-sensei finally walks in and announces the start of today’s presentations.

“Good afternoon everyone, apologies for my tardiness as a meeting went over. In preparation for your first exam next week, each group will be reviewing a different fundamental skill for carrying out espionage. First tactic: seduction.”

When you hear your name and Nagumo’s being called out, your suddenly heavy legs slowly drag their way to the front of the room, already anticipating to make a fool of yourself with your half-assed presentation on how to seduce a target, a skill all these students staring at you in boredom more than likely have performed a thousand times before.

Straightening your posture, you’re ready to begin your long unnecessary speech on the purpose of seduction until Nagumo yawns. Loudly.

The action has you momentarily pause, soft tittering spreading throughout the classroom until you narrow your eyes at your beaming partner, clear your throat, and continue.

“Seduction can be used as a weapon when the person employs the technique to obtain an objective, as seen in–"

“This demo we’re about to show!” Nagumo cuts in, waving his hands animatedly as if about to introduce a mesmerizing performing act. Your confusion only continues to grow as he sharply turns on his heel to face you, bewildered to see that his usual bright smile has been replaced with a more coquettish expression on his face.

“What are you–”

“The word seduction means to ‘lead astray’ in Latin. Doing such a thing means you have to observe your target’s every move. How they move. How they look at you. At others. At their surroundings.” Every step he takes forward means you take one step back. Until you find yourself hitting the wall, your eyes widening with how cold it feels against the back of your neck. “How they react. How they respond to you.”

He doesn’t even have you pinned, his arms laying idly by his sides while you dumbly acknowledge you can easily escape right now. But for some reason, you feel trapped under that curious gaze, the upward quirk of his lips sending a weird shiver up your spine.

“Catch the changes in their body language.” He tilts his head, and when strands of his shaggy black hair tickle your cheek you fully realize the distance–or lack thereof–between you two. “Are they fearful? Or are they open to receiving your advances? Do they approach you just as eagerly?”

Since when did he get so close?

You gulp when his hand dances over your hip while the other outstretched one reaches your face, and you hate how your head instinctively leans toward the motion. It becomes harder to stand your ground while your gaze flits back and forth between the inked numbers on his fingers and those half-lidded eyes, a darkness so rare with how inviting it seems.

As he delicately brushes a strand of your hair behind your ear you wonder if he can hear the frantic hammering of your heart against your chest. Even if he can’t catch it, you can tell by the slight way his eyes glisten that he certainly knows, and maybe even relishes, the effect he has on you–the way you’re futilely trying to snap out of the reverie you’re currently in, drunk in the smell of whatever woodsy fragrance he decided to wear today mixed with the sickly sweet scent of that caramel candy he was chewing on earlier.

Well, fuck.

“And it’s in that moment, when their mind is distracted and more focused on you than their own thoughts”–his nose brushes yours, and your breath hitches as all you can do is close your eyes–“is when you make your move.”

You feel your lungs deprived of air the second he presses you deeper into the wall, one hand still on your hip as he uses the other to swiftly grab a piece of paper tucked in the back pocket of your pants.

A sharp inhale is what returns you to reality, your jaw slackening upon seeing him retreat and wiggle the neatly folded piece of paper he stole from you.

“Nagumo,” you nearly growl as you feebly attempt to get it back from him, which only seems to get him more excited as his face breaks out into a full-blown grin and he waves the item higher with that freakishly long arm.

“Should I unfold it? Reveal to all the secret recipes?”

“Do it and you die!”

“Is that a joke or a threat?” As if he’s some film actor breaking the fourth wall, he turns his head toward your classmates and winks at them. “You can never tell with poisons students.”

The room erupts into laughter.

If only you did lace that paper with poison! You’re mentally preparing to fight (and definitely lose) to him when Ito-sensei’s booming voice keeps you two in check.

“That’s enough, I believe we extracted the main point of your presentation. Either return to your desks or report to the staff room after class for wasting more of our time.”

Both of you don’t need to be told twice–you practically sprint to your desk while an elated Nagumo hums a merry tune from behind, your mind still reeling from what just happened while the chaos in the room dies down and the next group begins their presentation on deception.

How the hell was Nagumo able to do all of that? A presentation you conducted research and rehearsed for around two hours was something he easily accomplished in less than five minutes. And with you as the guinea pig! The thought makes your cheeks burst into flames, but you refuse to hide your face for fear of appearing weaker.

“What did I tell you?” He tosses the paper into your lap–still folded into its original position–as he sends you one of those big smiles that used to give you the creeps but now seems to evoke some other inexplicable feeling. “Top marks!”

The urge to spit out “No thanks to you” is so strong that you have to bite your itching tongue, because that would be a fat lie. So you let out a spiteful ‘hmm’, twitching fingers creasing the folded paper even further.

“Wasn’t it fun teaming up?”

He’s still a bit too close for comfort when he whispers the question, so you lean forward into your desk, trying your best to ignore the buzzing coming from the pest.

“You and I have different definitions of fun.”

“And how would you define it?”

“Not being near you.”

“Guess I’m not the only sucky liar on this team!”

That earns him a glare as you plot several ways to wipe that pleased look off his face. You cross off a few bad ideas that you’re embarrassed your mind even conjured.

“The silent treatment, huh…Didn’t peg you to be the type who does that.”

The eye roll you offer him appears to be a sufficient answer as he lets out a small huff and pretends to listen to his classmates’ project, his bored yawn louder than whatever is being presented. You naively think you’ll be able to endure the remainder of the class without his yapping.

And then he turns to you once again, an impish spark in those large, curious eyes.

“But I just need to ask–what’s written on that piece of paper anyway?”

You press your lips firmly into a straight line and stare at him, bemused that he hasn’t figured it out. He matches your stare, looking at you expectantly. Maybe he’s pretending that he hasn’t read it–with how fast he is, you wouldn’t be surprised if he only needed one or two seconds to skim over the writing.

Then again, you’re the idiot for having a physical copy of your plan to cheat and steal from the school chemicals and rare toxins inventory.

“It’s my formula for a poison that I’ll use to kill you.” Like a psycho, you grin triumphantly upon seeing the way his mouth turns into a tiny shocked ‘O’.

And like the maniac he is, he’s quick to return your smile, though it doesn’t quite reach those indecipherable eyes. “Looking forward to it!”

You’re too proud to admit that you feel the same.

[delfiore]

—DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT. (2/3)

pairing: natasha romanoff x android!reader

synopsis: a face-to-face with caesar confirms what you are already too afraid to admit, as your days as the mole are numbered.

word count: 2.1k

PART I, PART III

Caesar’s new command kept you on edge, you barely had time to do anything else. It was in your program to obey the instructions you were given, so even if you didn’t want to, your brain—CPU—was calculating the best possible way to kill Natasha. You thought about poisoning her, stabbing her in her sleep, pushing her off a ledge to make it look like an accident. The thought of killing Nat was horrifying, but it was even more horrifying to know that you were perfectly capable of doing it, or that you would not be able to stop yourself once the command has been entered.

You wiped the tears that had been running freely down your cheeks. Looking in the mirror, you saw no flaw, no imperfection, just a hollow shell of your face model staring back at you. You wondered whether whomever your face was modeled after lived a normal life, if they knew of your existence, or were they just trying to get home after a long week of work.

“Baby?”

“Huh?”

“Ibuprofen,” Nat called from the bedroom, “could you grab it from the cabinet, please?”

The last mission she went on left her with a dislocated shoulder. It had since been reset, but she needed painkillers to help with the ache.

“Uh, yeah,” you sniffled and grabbed what she needed. When you returned to the bedroom, she was already looking at you with furrowed eyebrows.

She was silent when you handed her the pill bottle, and when you climbed into bed wordlessly.

“Y/N, I didn’t wanna say anything because I wanted you to feel ready to talk to me about whatever it is, but I’m worried, my love.”

You let out a slow breath, and mustered up the best smile you were able to.

“I’m okay. It’s just, work has been a bit stressful.”

“Really? Has Tony been overworking you? I can tell him to—“

“No, no, Nat, please,” you exhaled sharply, “just let it go. Please.”

A beat of silence passed and you thought she might have decided to drop it when she said. “You’re hurting, and I don’t know how to help you. It hurts me to see you like this.”

You felt the guilt gnawing at the back of your throat, threatening to spill out of your mouth. It was a surprising thing to learn that you could feel guilt (you have been feeling it a lot lately). Caesar must have installed it to make you second-guess disobeying him; another failsafe in case you desert.

“I don’t know if I’m deserving of all this, Nat.”

“What do you mean?”

“This, being Tony’s assistant, this life here, you.” You cried quietly. “I don’t know i-if I deserve all this.”

“Of course you do,” Natasha cooed. She probably thought you were going insane.

Natasha was never one for words, and the repeated opening and closing of her mouth was enough to tell you that she didn’t know what to say. She brought you into her arms, and let you cry quietly against her chest.

You never let her see you cry. There was an unspoken shame that you felt whenever you felt the tears coming, like you didn’t deserve to cry, like it was a privilege reserved only for those with real emotions. But if what you were feeling then, that warm sensation spread across your chest, the safeness of being enveloped in Nat’s embrace as she whispered repeated I love you’s in your ears, if that wasn’t real, nothing else on Earth was. Everything would cease to exist, and life would have no meaning.

Maybe that way you would finally deserve her.

You would learn later that Caesar had managed to get on the Avengers’ radar. It wasn’t hard to tell why; VULCAN is one of the only organizations in the world that manufactured artificial intelligence smart enough to blend into society without compromise.

“Jeez,” Clint laughed, “wonder how many of those are walking around Time Square right now.”

“If I had to guess, it'd be a lot." Tony opened a computer screen. "Which is why I've installed scanners in our metal detectors, looking for abnormally high levels of iron in a body. Could be an indication of synthetic blood. Everyone coming into the Compound will be scanned.”

“People with heart diseases and diabetes could also have high levels of iron,” Vision chimed in.

“Sounds like our accuracy could be off,” Sam noted.

“We don’t know what we’re dealing with yet, or how human-like these things are. This is our best bet right now,” Tony shook his head.

“One thing for sure, though,” Nat said, “we have to find who’s behind this. And when we do, we have to shut those androids down to prevent a national security risk.”

You weren’t in the room when the conversation happened, but you were able to hack into F.R.I.D.A.Y’s memory drive to access the recording of the meeting anyway. You needed to know what they said, even when hearing what Nat suggested broke your heart.

It is believed that the sense of smell is closely tied to memory. It is because the olfactory bulb is directly connected to the hippocampus, the section of the limbic system that processes and stores memory. You remembered the smell of the Factory as soon as you set foot in it. It was your first ever memory since before you opened your eyes; it was a sterilized, and clean smell, too much as if to hide another smell. But once you got to Caesar’s office, though, it was replaced by a softer smell of wood, and lavender.

“FD700-16.” He smiled and beckoned you over to embrace you.

“Hello, Caesar.” You let him wrap his arms around you. “I do believe this is the first time we’ve met.”

Caesar was a man of tall stature, even for his age. Lines like rivers adorned his face, and he sported a mid-length head of grey hair. There was a glint in his blue eyes that you couldn't quite decipher; at first glance, he looked like a gentle older man. You tried to scan your database for his identity, because there was no way his real name was Caesar, but your records were blank.

“But oh, is it? I’ve always been here, even before you were born.” Caesar smiled, a wicked grin. “I’ve always been there, watching over you. You were always meant for greatness, there’s no denying that.”

You swallowed a lump in your throat. “About my new objective—“

“Ah, come, we’ll talk about that later. Come, sit. You are the best model I have created so far.”

“I’ve learned a lot, sire.” You said with a small smile. “Your program has allowed me to learn things, experience emotions. I feel . . . almost human.”

“What have you learned of the files, 16?” You could tell he was growing impatient. “The one you were tasked with retrieving?”

You blinked a few times, surprised he had brushed off your comments so easily. “I’m working on it, sire.”

Caesar let out a low sigh. “Do you know why I started VULCAN? At this point, I had worked for the CIA for years. Espionage was what I excelled at, but I’ve seen how emotion clouded many of my colleague’s judgments. But I couldn’t blame them; our intellect is humanity’s greatest gift, but also our biggest downfall. And in my line of work, it could get you killed, or worse, jeopardize the mission.

I know what you’re thinking, 16. How could jeopardizing a mission be worse than dying? When you believe in something, really believe in something, it becomes bigger than you. It affects everyone involved in it, it’s not just you anymore. That is how humans have become the apex predator; we work as one.”

You took a moment to digest everything Caesar told you. It wasn’t how you saw it, but surprisingly it made sense. “So you founded VULCAN to . . . eliminate human error?”

“Now you’re getting it,” he smiled, but it looked more like a grin, him baring his teeth. “The Red Room had the same idea, but slightly flawed as it relied on human assassins. I want to take that formula and modify it, make it perfect.”

“Perfect,” you mumbled, looking up at him. “Is that what you intended for me?”

Caesar leaned back against his chair. “Perfection is never what we are, 16, but who we have the potential to be.”

You had been in the lab for hours by the time you decided to check the time. You had been working on the same model for a few days, just like Tony wanted you to; a new algorithm to deploy his rockets faster, one that he can do so manually should F.R.I.D.A.Y. had been disconnected from taking damage—a failsafe of a sort. Instead of him having to push a button or speak a command, it would run the program using the synapses in his brain as the command.

You thought you’d do your job properly, as you wouldn’t have a job tomorrow if tonight goes accordingly.

It felt easy listening to Caesar, to heed his command. It went against your program to pretend to live in this fantasy you had with Natasha, that would never come to be anyway.

Happy endings are for humans, not androids.

Caesar was right, and he was all along. He was your maker after all.

Natasha came by to pick you up. You were supposed to go to the rooftop for a picnic with her. After that you’d go back to her room and watch a movie before calling it night, except there would be no movie because by the time you leave the rooftop, Natasha would have been dead.

You had opted for an odorless and tasteless poison that would put her to sleep first so that she wouldn’t feel anything; it would simply cause her heart to go into arrhythmia and stop beating.

Nat brought you flowers when she came into the lab.

New York at night was no less beautiful than a meadow at night; the light of the city resembled a field of fireflies in the dark of the sky. Natasha made sandwiches to share between you, you prepared some strawberries, grapes, and cheese, much easier to slip the poison into—fluid mixing with the juices of the fruit.

You brought a small lantern to light up the space where you would set up your date; it seemed almost beautiful and peaceful.

She gave you a kiss as soon as she sat down. “I love this, babe.”

You flashed a smile back. “Only the best for my best girl.”

There was a hint of a blush on her rosy cheeks. Please don’t eat the strawberries.

“Yelena says she’ll be in town next week, says she misses you. Almost like she only came to visit you.” Nat smiled with a roll of her eyes. “She mentioned something about wanting to go to an art museum. Maybe you guys should go to the Met together.”

“I’d like that,” you said, watching the way she put her chin on her fold knee. “How long is she staying?”

“A week, but she always overstays her welcome anyway.”

“Nat?”

“Hm?”

“Don’t eat the strawberries.”

“Hm? Why?”

“Cause they’re kinda going bad,” you grimaced. “I’m sorry, I was in the lab all day. Forgot to go pick up fresh ones.”

“Really? We bought these like two days ago.”

“Well, they are from Trader Joe’s.”

Your skin jumped when she picked up the fruit, bringing it up to smell it, before taking a small nibble from it.

“You didn’t think it’d be that easy, would you?”

“What?” You blinked.

She spat out the piece she had in her mouth, and set the strawberry down.

“How did you know?” You sighed.

“When you stopped using the main entrance to the Compound, and only used the entrance from the living quarters.” Natasha clenched her jaw. “I should have guessed sooner, but I guess I was too afraid to admit it.”

The loud bang of the door blowing off its hinges left you completely on edge. FBI agents shouting with their guns pointed at you, and soon enough you were entirely surrounded.

Your eyes filled with tears as you looked back at Nat, seeing her without emotion. But you knew her; she was trying really hard.

“I’m sorry, for everything,” you said before deploying a smoke bomb and jumping off the building to your escape.

Natasha sat, slumped on the picnic cloth still with food and her affection spread out. “I know,” she whispered, hoping the night’s wind would carry her words to you.

PART I, PART III

[staranghae]

(teaser) another bollywood love story

I don't want to spoil the story at all BUT I want to introduce you to all the characters so here you go! also, network tag -> @kbookshelf

taglist!: @thepoopdokyeomtouched @mellowamour @hellohannie @rewa118 @anarchyishere @yaaaridk @readerlozies @anardaneh @vanillacheol @chaaaand @jww04 @tuliptoot @aysxldea @reysworldd @shualover-r @chweverni @rakshithanotrao @vettigirl @kimvante2013 @chickpea-jimin @9yuldaengi @soobinsmiddletoe @yaaaridk @taliareads @vminkook-ownsme @ranoutofnamestonameit @sheraayasher @eightlightstar 

name: y/n l/n

birthday: 18/04/1997

Born and brought up in India, Bachelor's and master's in business administration in South Korea. Heiress to one of the only two Indian businesses to make it onto the top 5 of Forbes' Top 50. A brat when around the other chaebols but is an actual sweetheart. Can hold grudges for lifetimes if she wanted to.

name: mingyu kim

birthday: 06/04/1997

Born and brought up in India, Bachelor's and master's in business administration in South Korea. Korean Indian. Heir to the other business that was in the Top 5 of Forbes' Top 50. Also a brat around other chaebols. Forgives easily. Loves a lot of people. Hates a few. Chaos follows him wherever he goes. Clumsy AF.

y/n's friend group (charcters are aged up) nickname: Y/N and co.

name: huh jennifer

birthday: 08/10/1997

Rich brat from New York who's in SoKo under a transfer program. Knows Y/N through mutual acquaintances. 'An adorable hellspawn', as described by Y/N and co.

name: yu karina

birthday: 11/04/1997

Rich brat #2 from Seoul, SoKo. Got in unversity through her own merit but people choose to believe that it's 'daddy's influence', because god forbid a woman be smart AND rich. 'IT girl' of Seoul International University.

mingyu's friend group (no one's aged up lol) nickname: 97s

name: cha eunwoo

birthday: 30/03/1997

Rich brat #3. Heir to one of the biggest food manufacturing companies in South Korea. A part time model and actor. 1/2 of the Mingyu Bullying Club. 'IT Boy' of Seoul International University. Is currently dating Yu Karina.

name: jeon jeongguk

birthday: 01/09/1997

Rich brat #4. Heir to one of South Korea's leading entertainment companies. Part time model and full time YouTuber. 2/2 of the Mingyu Bullying Club. Is currently dating Huh Jennifer. Resident influencer of Seoul International University

[foone]

As the person I follow who does reverse engineering, do you have any suggestions for finding resources on reverse engineering Android apps?

Specifically, there's an app I'm playing with, where after seeing the structure of the "export as Markdown" output I want to know what the internal structure and representation of the data is. The end goal of understanding it is to be able to add certain kinds of data dynamically, rather than up front. That's certainly doable typing in raw markdown, but being able to do it "app style" would be more convenient.

The google Play Store entry does not mention any open source licenses, or looking for the source code and hopefully a git repo or something would have been my first step.

(I'll probably need to bang together a crappy app to do what I really want regardless, but maybe this app's data structure would be more convenient than doing so with markdown.)

So, android stuff:

First you need the APK. You can do some trickery with your phone to pull it over the ADB connection if you install the android SDK, but generally I just google "app name APK" and you'll find some greymarket site that'll give you a copy.

Secondly, APKs are just ZIP files (JAR files, technically, but JAR files are also just ZIP files!). Unzip them and you can find lots of interesting stuff, often.

For disassembling/decompiling them, my go-to program is jadx. It's a java decompiler that's been around a while and can natively open APK files and decompile them. There's some weirder new APKs that it can't handle (something to do with a newer bytecode revision, I think?) but I can't recall the details on how you handle those. Those are rare, in my experience. jadx is pretty good, but you'll occasionally find methods or entire classes that it just can't figure out, and it'll give you a bytecode dump. I don't yet have a good solution for those, other than "get good at reading JVM bytecode".

If you're dealing with games, another useful thing can be UABE and dotPeek. These are unity/C# tools, but you would be surprised how many android games (and non-games!) are actually unity under the hood.

Bluestacks can also be useful, because it'll let you run the app on your desktop and that can be handy for things like running WireShark to log all network traffic.

Speaking of logging, the other handy thing I've done is enabling android developer mode on my phone to get to one specific option: Bluetooth HCI snoop log.

Now, actually getting that log is tricky and varies from phone to phone, because for some reason manufacturers like to move it around, but it's one of the best ways to reverse engineer bluetooth communication stuff. You basically turn on the log and everything your phone does to communicate with your Smart Toothbrush or whatever will be logged to a file, then you can yank that file over and stuff it into Wireshark.

So... hopefully some of that is a helpful start? I've not done a huge amount of Android reversing so I'm not super familiar with the tools used, but these are the ones I've got on hand for when I do.

also sorry for all the horny robotgirl posters who saw "android reverse engineering" in the tags and thought this was gonna be about taking them apart with screwdrivers and rooting around in their insides. Not today!

[wolfliving]

Meanwhile, in Brickland

Cory Doctorow:

Analog companies can raise their prices, or worsen next year's model of their products. *Digital* businesses can *travel back in time* and raise the price of something you already own, but need to pay a "subscription" fee for. They can reach back in time and remove features you've already paid for. They can even go back in time and take away things you already own. The omniflexible, omnipresent digital tether between a device and its manufacturer creates *so many* urges that they can't resist:

Are you one of 4,000,000 people who built "smart home" products from Wink into your walls, ceiling and foundation slab at any time since they started shipping in 2014? Surprise! Now you have to pay a "subscription" for all of those gadgets or they'll *brick your fucking house*:

Did you buy a "Mellow Sous Vide" gadget? Surprise, it now costs $48/year to use that gadget!

Did you buy an Exogen ultrasound device to stimulate bone growth after a fracture? Surprise, it bricks itself after you've used it 343 times! Enjoy your e-waste, Hopalong!

Did you *buy a Ferrari performance sports-car*? Surprise, it bricks itself if it detects "tampering" - and the only way to un-brick it is to connect it to the internet, so you'd better hope it doesn't brick itself deep in an underground parking garage. Oops!

Did you buy a Peloton treadmill? Surprise, your $3,000 "smart" treadmill no longer works in standalone mode - unless you pay $480/year, that treadmill is now a clothes-drying rack:

Did you buy an Epson printer? Surprise! It will brick itself after you print a certain number of pages, *for your own good*, because otherwise its ink-sponges might leak:

Did you get - no, wait for it - *did you get a neural implant?* Surprise. The company's new owners don't want to continue supporting your implant, and they won't let anyone else do so either. So now, *part of your brain* has been bricked:

This is like a lifetime money-back guarantee - *for companies*. Any company that experience's seller's remorse can cancel or alter the transaction, retroactively. It's as if Darth Vader opened an MBA program whose only lesson was *I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it further":

Darth Vader has the Force. Corporate enshittifiers have something even more powerful: IP law. Companies can cleverly arrange overlapping layers of IP - anticircumvention, trademark, patent, trade secrecy, terms of service, cybersecurity law, contracts - to criminalize otherwise legal activity, like reverse-engineering, jailbreaking, creating alternative clients or third-party parts:

That means that companies know that they can enshittify to their heart's content without fearing a competitor's disenshittification products. Raise the price of ink all you want, because you've figured out how to criminalize generic ink cartridges:

That's a lesson Spotify took to heart. Aaaallll the way back in 2022, Spotify started selling $90 "Car Thing" tablets - little car-vent-mounted gadgets that made it slightly easier to connect your car stereo to your Spotify account. Now that a suitable interval has gone by, Spotify has decided to remotely brick every one of these solid-state devices, no later than December of 2024:

Now, this may seem like a loss to all those Car Thing owners, who are out $90. But consider this: our descendants are *gaining* thousands of pieces of immortal, infinitely toxic e-waste.

So there's that.

Then there's this: Jason Koebler just published a breakdown of a leaked sSamsung repair contract on 404 Media, revealing how Samsung requires its "independent" repair partners to trick you, abuse you, spy on you, and literally destroy your phone:

First: every time you bring a phone to an independent Samsung repair shop, the company has 24 hours to notify Samsung, providing your name, email, phone number, address, the IMEI of your phone, your warranty status and complaint.

Then, the technician is required to inspect your device for any evidence that you have had it serviced by unauthorized technicians or fixed with third-party replacement parts. If they believe you have failed to act in accord with Samsung's shareholders' interests, the technician is required to *immediately destroy your phone* and notify Samsung.

(This is radioactively illegal, and has been since 1975, when Congress passed the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, which protects your right to use third-party parts:)

Why does Samsung do this? They can't help themselves. It's in their nature.

[anonymous-dentist]

doied falling in love/having a crush on cellbit?

maybe something with doied in roier's body orr when cellbit got kidnapped and was doing experiments on felps ! (idk if u remember but he got out of there bc someone who he was working with helped him, maybe doied?🤔)

Growing up, Doied was always told that he was too ugly to find love. Sure, it was his stupid twin brother telling him that, but how could Doied not believe him when Roier has always managed to look twice the man that Doied is?

But it’s fine, Doied wouldn’t want to love someone who would only like him for his looks. That’s shallow; Doied is an intelligent man, and he likes to think that whoever he ends up with will value his intelligence, just as he will value theirs (because, really, is he going to marry an idiot?)

And then Doied comes back from vacation in May only to find a new employee assigned to the monitoring of Experiment Number 0000312: Codename Felps.

The man is tall, and his eyes are deader than the corpses buried beneath Cucurucho’s office’s floorboards. He’s clearly been through the Federation’s “Employee Training Program”, but there’s a certain wryness to his manufactured smile that makes Doied think that he might be one of the good ones, one of the employees like Doied himself who were smart enough to figure out how to break free of the Federation’s conditioning. With any luck, this guy will receive the same warm welcome Doied did and will get a promotion to something other than grunt observational work.

Absently, and for whatever reason, Doied feels the need to check his reflection in the window; he looks terrible, but he’s used to it.

The man’s handshake is strong when Doied introduces himself. For some reason, Doied feels a little faint.

“I’m Cellbit,” the new guy says, voice flat and lifeless and deep and rugged and-

Wow.

-

Send a prompt and I’ll write a couple sentences!

[allstrangeandwonderful]

Its the middle of the night and I'm in my feelings about how we stopped believing in magic when it literally didn’t go anywhere?

Like its fun and great when we talk about engineers being like wizards and computers being like magical tomes and programs being like spells and code being like runes and how moving your own limbs is actually kind of like telepathy if you think about it and diseases are kind of like curses and medicines are like potions and pharmacists are like alchemists and so on

but then we laugh and walk away like its silly and metaphorical because magic isn't real, that would be absurd, and technology is incredible and consciousness is miraculous but they're not magic

but like...aren't they?

Are they just similar, or are they literally the same thing?

Like, ok, imagine this is D&D world or whatever. Theres magic and spells flying around, which most people cannot wield and do not understand and find awe-inspiring and terrifying and whatever. But there are also wizards, who study magic, and learn how it works, and figure out how to wield it, with the use of wands and spell components and tomes, etc. Does magic stop being magic because some people understand it and know how to use it?

No, right? I watched a documentary one time on the way indigo dye is produced, and its a long complicated process that involves many steps, particularly converting ph levels to make it more stable for shipping, and then converting it back so it is reactive again and can be used as dye

and the documentary showed the dye manufacturers in a small village in India, talking about how they used to believe there were spirits in these large ceramic vats, and if they fed the spirits flour and then put in the dye, the spirits would magically turn the product from white indigo (stabilized) to blue indigo (useable), but now they know its just a bacteria colony, and feeding it keeps the colony alive, and the natural proceses of the bacteria react with the dye to change it ph

and I remember being struck by it at the time because...are those two explanations even different? What is a "spirit", at the end of the day? A kind of energy, or lifeforce, that has powers you don't fully understand, and can't see happening? Is that not literally what bacteria is, before you put it under a microscope and give it a name? Is it a different thing now because we named it something else?

and like, the word spirit is an english phenomenon with 19th century spiritualist baggage, but its just a word, its a placeholder that means unseen forces, and unseen forces, like bacteria, are literally real. Bacteria isn't like a spirit, it is a spirit.

(plus the word spirit has been used as a placeholder translation for like a million different culture's different concepts of unseen, hard-to-understand energies, and has been like intentionally used to other and infantilize cultures besides english/christian culture, so the word they use in their own culture probably does/did not have the same, like...superstitious/unreal/silly connotation we have in english, you feel?)

and anyway, I don't know if I'm getting this across right, but like, the first people who saw electricity described it as magic, right? It was a wonder, and totally beyond public understanding at the time. And yeah smart people figured out how to use electricity and called it electrons and learned how to manipulate it with the right designs and components, and it was so great we started using it everywhere and people stopped thinking of it as magic, but as "just" science. But are those even two different things? Just because we made the word electron, its note magic?

and I just feel like what is and isn't magic is like a cultural concept deliberately designed to make us look and feel superior to our ancestors and current non-christian/english people, and there is no literal actual difference except like ego and a culture that values seriousness and not wonder; electricity literally is a magical energy, medicines literally actually are made by alchemists from miraculous plants and minerals with special properties and computers literally actually perform tasks using an arcane language and rare material components and when you get sick its because your body is literally actually invaded by evil spirits, these are all just older words for real actual things that we gave new names because it made us feel smarter

tl;dr magic and science are literally, actually the same thing and basically when a little kid asks you if magic is real, you shouldn't say "no" you should say "yes, it just looks a bit different than old timey people thought it did"

(also disclaimer, I'm not like a crystal-waving anti-science luddite, I love science, I just also love history and culture and linguistics and the concept of wonder, and if that's not the spirit you take this post in then thats a you problem)

[clockworkreapers]

Can you give a brief description of what the 16 emissaries are like?

In personality no (cuz not all of them are my characters, as with all AN things other people are invited into the universe or invited to make offshoots of it). Blanket description of the position is that they are part of the royal “family”, all fuchsia bloods who did not fight for the position of ruler and instead become emissaries of the empire. All emissaries are one step below The Luminary (the current empress) in rank of power. They are the ones who oversee colony planets that are gifted to them by the empress. Think of them as similar to governors or old world lords but the area they oversee are entier planet colonies that house billions of Alternians each.

The emissary that I can 100% speak for on a more personal level is Valitn aka Val. Val is on the younger side, like around 900 sweeps (like 2000 years old) and he kinda shows it cuz he’s very free spirited and kinda disregards his job. He’s known for handing a lot of stuff off to advisors while he instead goes off and kinda just enjoys himself going out to dinners/galas/parties/celeb meet ups/ anything that’s fun and flashy. Sure he has the knowledge to regulate his colonies but he just thinks it’s a hassle and boring. He does participate in more formal imperial gatherings and meetings still however, he just has other people in govornment under him do the majority of the work and he gets to know the gist of what’s going on. (Why he only has 3 colonies cuz Luminary doesn’t want to give him more cuz he’s not responsible enough yet).

There are also 4 elder emissaries that are owned by my significant other who I can moderately speak for (though he’d know the most).

Blalip, The Emissary Warlord and the head of the military, as well as Luminaries right hand and the oldest living troll in the empire as of now. Hes the grandpa fuchsia, gruff, serious, very intimidating and also very physically imposing, he is a scary old man. Of course being the face and overseer of the entire Alternian military he’s very very important.

Harlan, The Emissary Droneforger (my trolls live on one of his colonies) He is the second eldest fuchsia very reserved, kinda the quiet engeneer who likes to be left to his work. He’s on the side of industrializing and physical machinery manufacturing side of the empire. He’s not as hands on with his colonies but he’s the one you want to be under if your looking to be a big name inventor or manufacturer of machinery and non-cybernetic tech.

Yrskma, The Emissary Vivisectionist, her focus is on cybernetics manufacturing and improvements. She is at the top of bioengineering research and implementation. Mad sciency lady but more contained/ less insane, very smart and put together, also very into her research but is more likely to collaborate and talk with other trolls rather than keep to herself like Harlan.

Quelia, The Emissary Oracle. She is the youngest of the elder fuchsias (those older than Luminary) and she issssss… interesting? She is brilliant mind you, an incredibly talented and knowledgeable programmer, in turn she kinda oversees a lot of cyberspace and internet regulation. She made a lot of the base stuff for what keeps the web running along with useful A.I. and imperial programing she’s kinda the god and mother of cyberspace. However in person she is flirty, nutty, and kinda crazy, she is the most likely to stab you due to an intrusive thought.

[cozzzynook]

(Part 1)

May I blather at you about my headcanons for your tank-carrier vs. spark-carrier (? I think that's what they're called?) universe where the former is unacceptable and the latter is normal??? Because I have thoughts. I like to blame the Functionist party for wanting control over who was and who was not allowed to reproduce and it's based on, you guessed it, function. They pushed their religious agenda on the Senate and the Senate enacted anti-tank carrier policies.

Hear me out:

Not every mech was a tank carrier (it's determined by a source code that is inherited from your carrier specifically and not your sire; those that were not tank carriers still had both spikes and valves, but no sparkling tanks and therefore no ability to reproduce) and not every tank carrier was affected the same way by the polices. High-caste tank carriers continued on as normal since they had desirable functions and social/political power.

Tank carriers with desirable functions who weren't part of the high caste were pressed into "voluntary manufacturing" - which was just a "cute" way to say "You can be a broodmare and pump out sparklings in our factories for a set amount of time or you can be criminally charged with blasphemy and indecency".

Tank carriers with undesirable functions were just criminally charged. They went to prison where they were, out of sight of the public, often recycled if not exploited as involuntary test subjects in one sadistic research experiment or another.

The public was largely uninformed about the real reasons for why tank carriers were being dragged off the streets and why they, the public, were being encouraged to go to enforcers if they suspected anyone near them of being one - the Senate was very good at covering up the truth and spreading false propaganda. Tank carriers are dirty! They're walking vectors of viruses and rust! They're inferior to everyone else! Look at these studies that have been done and aren't at all fabricated or biased - Tank-forged sparklings are more likely to become criminals than Hot Spot-forged sparklings!

It was war on tank carriers and their sparklings, which were often taken away and supposedly raised by proper, respectable clades, but it was actually only the sparklings with desirable functions. The rest simply disappeared.

In the middle of all this was Perceptor, a high-caste tank carrier (and his tank carrier status wasn't even public knowledge) largely unaffected by what was happening. He was, however, very aware of it and was smart enough to know that he and everyone like him was in grave danger.

A friend approached him, saying, Hey, I have this clade member who's a tank carrier and they'll go to prison if anyone else finds out, they'll suffer, they'll die... Didn't you study physiology and anatomy way back when? Maybe you could make them just... Not a tank carrier?

Well, Perceptor was willing to try. It turned out to be a long and involved surgery where he was altering the frame and the internal components to look like there was never a sparkling tank to begin with (when suspected, an investigation could be short and quick... or extremely invasive and thorough depending on the enforcers involved). Fortunately, mnemosurgeons weren't available for every case, so he didn't have to touch their processors. It would have been nigh impossible to delete all the programs related to tank carrying and the memories of having been a tank carrier.

The first surgery was a success - very much so. Now he's got mecha coming to him in secret - A friend of a friend told me... A friend of a friend of a friend said that you might... A clade member suggested I see you...

He split his time between his own work and helping as many tank carriers as possible escape detection. Some didn't want to be bred in the factories and most didn't want to go to prison and none of them wanted to die.

Well, somewhere along the line, someone was betrayed and outted as a tank carrier. Except, they didn't have any of the physical structures of a tank carrier? But they were definitely a tank carrier at one point! They had sparklings!

So the investigation went deeper and, sure enough, the tank carrier source code was still present. The tank carrier software was still there. Guess what? Altering your frame is also considered a crime because that implies Primus made you wrong (again, there were exceptions - but you had to have a lot of power and/or shanix for Functionists to decide that you were exempt from Primus's judgement) and that just wasn't possible.

So now the functionists were trying to hunt down the mecha who were helping the tank carriers hide by modifying their frames.

Unfortunately for Perceptor, he was suspected of being one of those mecha due to certain rumors and his background in anatomy and physiology, even though that wasn't even the main focus of his current work (I really love how multi-talented the medics and scientists of Cybertron are).

Fortunately, due to an influx of leads, enforcers were stretched thin investigating suspected tank carriers. Only one enforcer was sent out to (interrogate) interview Perceptor.

Unfortunately, he was oil scum. He was awful. He used his power to take advantage of others.

He cornered Perceptor at his apartment, all - I have breeders willing to sell you out to save themselves, breeders that you helped defy the Senate and Primus. I have proof that will have you thrown out of high caste society. If you're lucky, you'll mine energon for the rest of your life. If you're not - best not even think about that. Now, I can make all that disappear for a price. You should show me where your berth is.

Perceptor knew he was being blackmailed and that there was no guarantee the enforcer wouldn't still arrest him after he got what he wanted - he also knew he had no choice.

The enforcer stayed in his apartment for three cycles. At some point, he got a notification from his tank carrier program - You have successfully conceived a sparkling. Congratulations! ETA xxxxx

He didn't tell the enforcer this as he didn't seem aware that Perceptor was a tank carrier.

(To be continued...)

…

This is painfully good

😭 why aren’t you writing? You are incredible