Luigi Mangione, who was arrested and charged with murder in the shooting death of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, once belonged to a group of Ivy League gamers who played assassins, a member of the group told NBC News.

In the game, called "Among Us," some players are secretly assigned to be killers in space who perform other tasks while trying to avoid suspicion from other players.

Alejandro Romero, who attended the University of Pennsylvania with Mangione and was a member of the same Discord group, said he was shocked when news broke on social media that Mangione had been taken into police custody.

"I just found it extremely ironic that, you know, we were in this game and there could actually be a true killer among us," he said.

"As soon as his photo and name popped up on X, my friend texted me asking if I knew him, and then either I was calling some 10 friends or they were calling me," Romero added. "I didn't speak to anybody today who wasn't already aware of what had happened."

Mangione, 26, was arrested Monday morning in a McDonald's restaurant in Altoona, Pennsylvania, after an employee spotted him.

Police found a firearm, believed to have been 3D-printed, and a handwritten document on Mangione "that speaks to both his motivation and mindset," New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said at a news conference.

He was also carrying fake identification and a passport, authorities said.

In New York, Mangione was charged with murder, possession of a loaded firearm, possession of a forged instrument and criminal possession of a weapon, according to court documents.

Authorities in Pennsylvania charged Mangione with carrying firearms without a license, forgery, tampering with records or identification, possessing instruments of crime and providing false identification to police.

In a statement on X on Monday night, a member of the Mangione family said they are "shocked and devastated by Luigi's arrest."

"We offer our prayers to the family of Brian Thompson and we ask people to pray for all involved," wrote Nino Mangione, a Republican member of the Maryland House of Delegates.

Romero, who said he has not spoken to or seen Mangione since 2020, described him as a typical college student who did not stand out to him.

"He just fit a mold," Romero said. "He just seemed like any other normal frat dude that you could see at a frat party."

His final year in college was cut short when the pandemic hit. Students were forced off campus in their last semester and did not return for commencement.

The Discord group was one way to stay connected, Romero said, but members began to go their separate ways as they got full-time jobs or embarked on long trips.

During some of those years, Mangione left behind a digital footprint that included reviewing "Industrial Society and Its Future," also known as the "Unabomber Manifesto" by Ted Kaczynski, on Goodreads, a platform for book reviews and recommendations. It served as the ideological reasoning for Kaczynski's yearslong mail bomb campaign that killed three people and injured 23 others.

Mangione became significantly more active on X in 2021 after five years not posting or reposting content, according to a review of his account.

Asked about the change in Mangione's online persona, Romero said that question is circulating among his friend group.

"I feel like people are unsure how to label him," he said. "I'm personally struggling to understand how this all fits."

3d ago

New study reveals differences between 'Demon Slayer' bamboo muzzle and actual bamboo

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AernaLingus [any] @hexbear.net 3d ago

article lead image generated with ChatGPT

Not only do I hate the AI slop on principle, but it actually undermines the point the paper made. In the anime (and I presume the manga), it's exactly as described: there's a long section in the middle, and two short sections with nodes on the outermost part of the muzzle:

But in the slop picture, instead of nodes, there are grooves cut into the short outside sections, which obviously could be done with a real piece of bamboo cut to size (and it's asymmetrical, and it appears to be free-floating instead of tied with cloth). If you didn't already know what the muzzle looked like, the picture would be super confusing. It's literally better not to include any image at all if you don't think there's a fair use case than to use one that actively confuses the reader.

AI slop aside (which isn't the fault of the original paper's authors): fun little paper! I know I'll be looking at bamboo in animation with a more critical eye from now on.

3d ago

Vibecoders are a fucking nightmare

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AernaLingus [any] @hexbear.net 3d ago

I would push back a bit on "as few lines as possible" for two reasons:

Modern compilers coupled with extended instruction sets have gotten so good that premature optimization can often make things less performant than just writing straightforward code and letting the compiler do its thing—empirical testing is a must. However, what you said is absolutely true when talking about programming in assembly and much more true when talking about old compilers (which is what programmers were dealing with in the time period you're talking about).
Readability is important for maintainability, so even if some convoluted one-liner is more performant, it may not be worth the maintenance headache unless it makes a significant impact on performance (certainly the case for something like Quake III's famous fast square root!).

That said, I totally agree with the overall thrust of your comment—I love reading old assembly code and seeing how the programmers of yore were able to do so much with so little, and that spirit seems to have been completely lost in the quest for More Product. It'll be interesting to see if the coming DRAM shortage will have any impact on that; my guess is no, but I'd love to be pleasantly surprised.

You might be interested in a talk I posted a while back that traces the history of object-oriented programming and how it all went wrong as well as this post about eschewing game engines. And I'm guessing you might be familiar, but Kaze Emanuar does some fascinating videos about squeezing every last bit of performance out of the N64, sparing no technical details. Oh, also this blog post from Dan Luu about web bloat. Okay, I'll stop with the links, but it's a topic near and dear to my heart.

4d ago

Nintendo has sued people for almost nothing. Surely they won't let this slide?

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AernaLingus [any] @hexbear.net 4d ago

The style is from a spin-off game that just came out yesterday, Pokopia

6d ago

FOSS theft as a service

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AernaLingus [any] @hexbear.net 6d ago

Yup, it's satire.

6d ago

FOSS theft as a service

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AernaLingus [any] @hexbear.net 6d ago

Just to be clear, the reason this reads like satire is that it is satire. If you click around, you'll notice that a lot of the links don't work, and at the bottom of the blog post there's some fine print:

This essay is adapted from remarks delivered at FOSDEM 2026 in Brussels, Belgium. A recording of the full presentation is available upon request to customers with active liberation contracts.
MalusCorp International Holdings Ltd. is not responsible for any moral implications, existential crises, or late-night guilt spirals resulting from the use of our services. The MalusCorp-0 License is provided "as is," much like the open source software it replaces, except that we charge for it.

As you can imagine, the kind of person who gives a talk at FOSDEM is not the kind of person who would make this kind of service for real. Here's FOSDEM's blurb about Mike Nolan, the guy who is listed as MalusCorp's CEO and also the one who gave said FOSDEM talk:

Mike Nolan is a software architect and social scientist researching the political economy of technology. Recent papers include the impacts of layoffs on open source communities. He also acts as the director of the Federation of Humanitarian Technologists.
He is the former Associate Director of Open@RIT and is currently working with UNDP Nature and Climate. His work experience stems from tech companies such as Amazon and GIPHY to large humanitarian organizations such as the International Rescue Committee and UNICEF.

So yeah, not a ghoul. But like all good satire, the intent of the website is to make you think about the implications of its premise, and I think it's very effective at that.

Haven't watched the talk yet, but here's the link:

https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/SUVS7G-lets_end_open_source_together_with_this_one_simple_trick/

edit: big time AI slop warning on the talk—not done watching it, and the content seems solid, but for some godforsaken reason instead of just using static slides like normal human beings the presentation is filled with these 5 second AI slop clips that loop while they're talking and it's super distracting, so I'm basically just staring at the subs.

edit 2: after having watched that talk, you're probably better off just reading the blog post to avoid the AI slop cognitohazards and save yourself some time. The talk has a lot more detail about the history of copyright, but I think the most important idea not present in the blog is that the judges who made the original copyright rulings lived in a world where copying the ideas (but not the exact content) of a work required a lot more labor, and if they instead lived in a world where an LLM could spit out a reworded version of something in a few seconds they may have ruled differently. But regardless, the law that flows from those interpretations is the current law of the land.

1w ago

Leaving Google has actively improved my life

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AernaLingus [any] @hexbear.net 1w ago

By getting off Google and using a mix of search engines and independent sites, you are forced to make an initial conscious decision when you want to find something. You need to think not only “how do I find out this knowledge?” But “where can I find it?”
That’s a fun and fulfilling decision to make. You might still end up searching (on Brave or DuckDuckGo or Kagi or wherever, not Google), but you also may find yourself going directly to IMDB or Wikipedia or Reddit or your local news org or who knows where.
Taking Google out of things has brought me back to the yesteryears of “surfing the web” instead of just “Googling.”
It’s better.

I haven't made much of a concerted effort to degoogle, but I have been defaulting to a Google search less and less and instead going directly to where the information is. The easy stuff is setting up custom search engines: Wikipedia (and other independent wikis), dictionary sites, databases like Discogs and MusicBrainz, and so on. Not only does it cut Google out, it's actually faster and more reliable—Google's just an annoying middleman much of the time. In Firefox, at least, you can even set up search completion if the search engine supports it, so it'll probably be an even better experience than Google because it won't be shoving irrelevant stuff in as suggestions.

But in addition to that, I'm trying to lean on my bookmarks more. So if I'm looking for information about Pokémon mechanics like EVs or catch rate, I know The Cave of Dragonflies has me covered. If I want media criticism, I go straight to FAIR. The longer you take this approach, the more sites you'll build up, and on the personal web side of things you can often discover them via webrings/affiliate badges.

I also recommend pairing this with setting up an RSS reader so you can create curated/ non-algorithmic feeds of news and blog posts and the like. I use a pretty basic FOSS Android app called Read You, but there are fancier self-hosted setups which allow for syncing with other devices and such. One nice thing about RSS feeds is that they allow you to keep up with sites or people that put put high quality stuff infrequently without any real effort.

And hey, if you check out your bookmarks, you'll sometimes find pleasant surprises like the delightfully 90s web homepage that Bulbapedia has set up for Pokémon's 30th anniversary.

1w ago

[cw: sexual harassment] Phil Spencer and Me

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AernaLingus [any] @hexbear.net 1w ago

May want to clarify the title for people just scrolling by, since it makes it seem like Phil Spencer was a perpetrator of sexual harassment which is basically the opposite of what happened. He offered the victim a new position after she was forced out of her job for not playing along, although it's not clear how much he knew about what went down.

1w ago

Guess the country/continent/colony/polity by its name in my conlang: names beginning with A

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AernaLingus [any] @hexbear.net 1w ago

spoiler

Ughhhh, I should know better

I know what an endonym is, gosh darnit, but I think my excitement at recognizing alemania overrode the hint.

Given how close "Akrotiri u Dekeliya" is to the English name, you probably just don't know what the place is.

...yup, still no idea even after that description. Ditto for Aksá.

2w ago

Guess the country/continent/colony/polity by its name in my conlang: names beginning with A

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AernaLingus [any] @hexbear.net 2w ago

Without looking anything up, here's what I've got (only two required any knowledge beyond "what English name does this look like"):

spoiler

2w ago

ͫ̂͏̨̯̲̭͞t̵̡̠̘̙̮̥̯̰̮̘̣̭̰͓̖̗̄͋̆͗̊ͮ̏̑ͯ̈̉͞i̓͏͙̬̝ͫ̂͏̨̯̲̭͞t̵̡̠̘̙̮̥̯̰̄͋ͩ̃͛̊̒̄͞҉̖͚̪͙l̷̤̯̞͖̠͈̥̻̗̣͚̺ͦ̈ͬ̀̏̀̕e̒ͦ̇̈҉͙͓̳

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AernaLingus [any] @hexbear.net 2w ago

Link to bleat

2w ago

The porn industry is ignoring an important demographic: asexuals

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AernaLingus [any] @hexbear.net 2w ago

James Gunn did it (still NSFW, but not porn NSFW)

2w ago

An x86 Emulator Implemented in CSS (no JavaScript)

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AernaLingus [any] @hexbear.net 2w ago

As soon as I saw the title I went, "Oh, this is Lyra, isn't it?" Look forward to the full writeup!

2w ago

"It's heart wrenchingly sweet"

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AernaLingus [any] @hexbear.net 2w ago

Will we look like bigots to our kids because we don’t recognize their robot love?

Always glad to have an excuse to post the Krazam sketch.

2w ago

Probably not good that the American public is expressing relief at getting to salivate over a mass-produced genius child from a CIA asset's personal breeding project in the midst of the Epstein files

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AernaLingus [any] @hexbear.net 2w ago

Yeah, I've watched a few interviews with her and she hasn't really dwelt on her father's history when people have brought it up, nor has she brought it up unprompted. I'm sure she's got some brainworms, but she certainly doesn't strike me as an anti-China crusader.

Also, since literally no one is talking about her actual figure skating: please, check out her Olympic free skate^[I think that link will be geoblocked outside of the States, but I'm sure you can find it on YouTube from your local broadcaster]! Has to be the most joyful skating program I've ever seen; she seems to be someone who has genuinely found happiness in skating after rejecting the grueling training of her childhood, coming back to the sport on her own terms, and focusing on enjoying herself and expressing herself rather than on results (which I know sounds like corny athlete PR speak, but if you listen to her and watch her you'll see that it's from the heart). I think she's going to be an inspiration for people from within and without the figure skating world.