Ben Cotton (he/him)

I’m sure this has been said a thousand times before- but gone are the days of small or unknown companies being able to get by without a security program. It’s so much easier to hit everyone and anyone with AI tooling.

everyone's talking about Marissa's AI chatbot app. I'm not here to talk about that www.404media.co/marissa-maye...

When you buy a book that is physically in our bookshop, you're choosing something we curated with actual human feelings, experience, and intuition, & not just something fed to you by an algorithm. Sincerely, The woman who spent the entire day looking at book catalogs with my dog.

It’s hard to decide what part of this story on Marissa Mayer’s new startup is most loathsome, but this “women need a wife or, in other words, a digital servant” construction makes me want to flip over an actual table www.nytimes.com/2026/10/25/s...

If you can't come up with three things that make your 10 year old special without asking an AI assistant, you have no business raising children.

Saw "Wicker" tonight. It's silly and horny and an incredibly well-told story.

This is going to be a fun #WorldSeries to watch.

Old and busted: Space Marines New hotness: Woke Marines

Things that are now left-coded in the US: - looking out for your neighbors - knowing about sports - drinking beer - THE US MARINES

If my life depended on remembering if GitHub-flavored Markdown used `---` or `===` for table headers, I'd be a goner.

The school district is having a parents' night about AI. I may need to clear my calendar.

It’s easy to forget how important trust is. It’s essential in building software, & community. Trust is something that takes a long time to build & can be lost in an instance. No one wants your product if they can’t trust you, people won’t work with you if you can’t be trusted. This is a team sport.

Cybersecurity professionals out here sending 4 to each other and laughing like an elementary schooler who just said 67

web developer: oh hey you guys are back early infra: four's haunted web developer: what? infra: *loading a pistol and getting back on the computer* four's haunted

I don't want to hear any whining about fixing certs from the information security types today. you chose to join the techno-priest caste, now shut up and perform the rites of exorcism

shitposts aside, this one is serious, my loves: if you’re just waking up and you have any service online running PHP 5.4 to latest, you need to take it down RIGHT NOW and don’t put it back online until after it’s patched absolutely catastrophic vulnerability dropped in the middle of the night

Can we normalize ThinkPad laptops?

As I sit here shredding checkbook registers from 2009, I realize that my record-keeping is too good to ever turn to a life of crime.

The biggest political issue of our time is "I don't want to live in a society" and I don't know how we fix that.

If you play "what gives bad men ideas" you're going to have to ban everything from the Bible to Tolkien and it will do fuckall to improve the situation. Let's talk about what gives bad men power, and take that away.

If you had a ticket to Grace Hopper and have not cancelled your plans to go to San Francisco, go to @github.com's LinkedIn right now if you'd like to attend GitHub Universe for free ❤️

The downside to moving files off my desktop-cum-server to a NAS is that my Backblaze bill has jumped from like $0.23/day to $0.39/day until the retention cleanup happens.

Nothing guarantees spilling something in the oven like doing a cleaning cycle earlier in the day.

One unexpected side effect of getting up a new NAS is that it prompted me to finally save all of the charity donation receipts that I've had starred in my inbox all year.

If your values can’t help you choose between two things you care about, they aren’t really values. And if you want to know what a team actually values, follow the money: who gets hired, promoted, paid. /by Kieran Snyder buff.ly/SR3s0y2

STOP LETTING JD VANCE MEET POPES

TFW you accidentally send the kids to bed a hour early and they don't notice. No regrets.

I've been using this external keyboard with a Mac for the last 2.5 years and now I'm using it with a Linux laptop and the muscle memory is taking a little bit of unlearning.

@swiftiemir.bsky.social: I don't like sour things. Me: Except me. Mir: You're not sour, you're bitter. She's not wrong.

Man, where can I get one of those awesome jerseys?

Had my first selinux "issue" in years. Needed to set httpd_use_nfs to true.

What's next? Being nice to my printer? Because that will never happen.

I think a White Sox/Brewers World Series would be a lot of fun.

That's not true. I was injured by one in 2000 or so.

“No Way To Prevent This,” Says Only Ballpark Where This Regularly Happens

Lest you think I am good at relaxing, today is my first day of funemployment and there are 40 tasks on Todoist. 🤷

olfconference.org/2026-call-fo...

Fellas, is it gay to be around girls?