WTF-Beta

@Daniel said:

Steelcase $$$

When purchased new.

I buy used; it saves tons of money.

@Big_Al said:

Has anyone noticed how many diners are owned and run by Greeks?

Lots of restaurants owned by Greeks around here, including a tapas restaurant here in my town. Well, it was a tapas bar for many years but recently the Greek owners closed it and it re-opened as a...wait for it...Greek restaurant! Real Greek food, that is, not Greek diner food.

https://whatnow.com/chicago/restaurants/arlington-heights-la-tasca-tapas-will-soon-become-parea-greek-kitchen/

@Daniel said:

@steve-miller I meant to ask if you can recommend office chairs. I want something strong and ergonomic. I don't want Amazon Basics. Maybe $400 give or take?

Steelcase, at a used office furniture warehouse. Indestructible and can be repaired. I bought one at the Habitat for Humanity Re-Store near me. Think I paid $30 for it.

We also have a Herman Miller Aeron chair that my friend Pat left behind when she moved out of state. It's great, too. Harder to find on the cheapo market (and they're pricey when new), but you might score one on FB Marketplace, Offer Up, or craigslist.

Some old, some new.

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-optical-illusion-ever

How a USB-connected speaker can infect a PC without ever being touched

Seller of the Sound Blaster Katana V2X doesn’t consider the behavior a vulnerability.

https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/06/highly-reviewed-speaker-can-be-hacked-over-the-air-to-infect-connected-devices/

Customer service chatbots have one job: get the user what they’re asking for without bothering a human. Meta’s new AI support assistant took that brief a little too seriously. Over the past few months, attackers have been opening support chats, telling the bot they were locked out of Instagram accounts they didn’t own, and walking away with the keys.

Over the weekend, Meta pushed an emergency patch after Instagram accounts belonging to the Obama White House (now dormant), beauty retailer Sephora, and a senior US Space Force official were taken over and briefly defaced with pro-Iranian imagery. Security researcher and former Meta employee Jane Manchun Wong was also hit.

How the trick worked

The attack was simple. Attackers worked out where the account owner lived (there are lists of account owners’ home cities online, or they could just research the target). Then they used a VPN to match the target account’s geographic region, which avoided raising flags with Instagram’s security systems.

Then they started a normal password reset and opened the support chat. They asked the AI bot providing support to change the email address on the account, and it did exactly that, sending a one-time code straight to the attacker’s inbox.

To do this, the chatbot appears to have been wired into Meta’s account management systems with permission to make account changes, but without being taught how to verify it was talking to the real account owner. Security people have a name for that: “confused deputy.” The term has been around since the 1980s.

In fairness to the confused bot, attackers were successful even if the enhanced security was triggered. They would apparently create video deepfakes of their targets using images that were harvested from—you guessed it—Instagram.

https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/ai/2026/06/metas-ai-support-bot-happily-handed-instagram-accounts-to-hackers

@beelady That second one looks like it's right up my alley! Thanks!

@Axtremus

I scanned a few pages just to get a feel for what's in that bill. Very interesting and a good reference. Thanks for posting it!

They need a lot of water. Many of them are being built in drought-stricken areas.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/08/datacenter-ai-drought-water

Over a century ago, the German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler conducted what became a classic experiment. He suspended a banana to keep it just out of reach of a chimpanzee, placing a pile of boxes and crates nearby. The chimp soon stacked up the boxes, climbed them and grabbed the treat.

This was evidence, Köhler believed, of spontaneous problem solving by the chimpanzee; no training was required. It was the kind of thing that humans do all the time.

Since Köhler's early work, researchers have conducted similar experiments involving an out-of-reach reward and an object to stand upon in birds and elephants. And both have solved the problem successfully.

Olli Loukola, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Turku in Finland wondered whether bumblebees — short-lived creatures with miniscule brains — might be capable of the same task. And in a paper recently published in the journal Science, he and his colleagues present evidence that they are.

https://www.npr.org/2026/06/07/nx-s1-5846947/bumblebees-problem-solving-research

Here's a novel one.

https://chicago.craigslist.org/wcl/for/d/melrose-park-vintage-secret-sentry-safe/7924969648.html

My Lithuanian mom had an oven in the basement that she used during the summer. But it was just an oven,; there was no kitchen setup with tables and other workspace.

Very inviting home. I think my favorite part is the barn! My idea of the ideal living space.

And of course the gardens.

I've always wanted a summerhouse/gazebo. I guess a gazebo is the open style?

I actually looked into building one from this company that we first encountered up in Wisconsin. One of the enclosed ones rather than the open style. Octagonal is sweet but rectangular is easier to furnish.

https://www.gggazebos.com/our-gazebos

State trooper saves kitten.

https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/wisconsin-trooper-has-a-new-pawtner-a-kitten-he-saved-from-the-side-of-the-road/

Our adopt a stray story...this was decades ago...

We thought we heard something in our garage but it was a week before we saw a young cat flash by and jump up into the soffit. I suited up with long sleeves and gloves and retrieved him. He was scruffy, skinny, and a little beat up; he must have tusseled with one of the neighborhood outdoor cats. And he was terrified, though he seemed to trust me, and even more so, Mr wtg. We ended up keeping him and named him Moose. He lived a long and happy life with us and his canine buddies.

Explainer:

https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/a-moonlit-earth-as-seen-from-artemis-ii/

The traffic is one reason we're not keen to see them move here; we live in the burbs because we aren't fans of crowds. And the disruption in terms of infrastructure improvements will be a nightmare.

Mostly, though, we don't want our taxes to go up just to make the Halases and the McCaskeys richer.

You may very well be right @rontuner

But hope springs eternal here in beautiful Arlington Heights!

All's quiet on the western front.

Last night. Five people looking at the person in the hole, who apparently drew the short straw:

Photo gallery of Sagrada Familia from AP.

https://apnews.com/photo-gallery/sagrada-familia-gaudi-barcelona-aae21510cd85f7a79df324a2e8cb8eae

On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics.

A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”

The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of Donald Trump’s own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No, we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!

This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.

The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on February 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”

https://thedispatch.com/article/trump-iran-strait-of-hormuz-boxed-in/