Leftovers

• Westenberg ☛ You Don't Have to Monetize The Things You Love

  The questions always orbit around the same gravity well: how can this hobby be optimized, monetized, and transformed into content?

  It’s like they can’t understand why I’d invest time and money into something that won’t “lead anywhere.”

  But that’s exactly the point.

• Science

  • The Washington Post ☛ Commercial probe moon landing is among wave of missions

    The Firefly and Intuitive Machines missions get funding from NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Program, which has a maximum contract value of $2.6 billion among numerous companies. Ispace, a publicly traded company, has a contract with the Luxembourg Space Agency.

  • Kevin Kelly ☛ The Technium: The Self-Domesticated Ape

    What’s distinctive about humans is that homo sapiens domesticated themselves. We are self-domesticated apes. Anthropologist Brian Hare characterizes recent human evolution (Late Pleistocene) as “Survival of the Friendliest”, arguing that in our self-domestication we favored prosociality – the tendency to be friendly, cooperative, and empathetic. We chose the most cooperative, the least aggressive, the less bullying types, and that trust in others resulted in greater prosperity, which in turn spread neoteny genes, and other domestication traits, into our populations.

  • Fabian Beuke ☛ beuke.org

    In string theory, a D-Brane (short for Dirichlet membrane) is an extended object – essentially a membrane-like surface – within the higher-dimensional space of the theory on which open strings can end. The “D” reflects the Dirichlet boundary condition that the string’s endpoints satisfy, a concept named after the mathematician J. P. G. Lejeune Dirichlet. In simple terms, a D-brane is a region in space where the endpoints of an open string are anchored or pinned down, rather than freely moving through space. This idea emerged when physicists realized that the ends of open strings weren’t just floating in space – it was as if they were tied to something, a surface or object that wasn’t originally part of early string theory. D-Branes were introduced to provide those “anchor” surfaces, and it turned out that these objects were not only possible but necessary for a consistent theory. In fact, when Joseph Polchinski and collaborators formalized D-branes around 1989, they discovered that D-branes are an intrinsic feature of string theory rather than an optional add-on. They carry energy and can even produce gravitational effects like ordinary mass. D-branes are typically classified by their spatial dimensionality: for example, a D0-brane is like a point particle, a D1-brane is a one-dimensional filament (a “D-string”), a D2-brane is a two-dimensional sheet or membrane, and so on. In superstring theories (which live in 10 spacetime dimensions), D-branes can have up to 9 spatial dimensions (plus time), while in the simpler 26-dimensional bosonic string theory one can have even higher-dimensional D25-branes filling space. The key insight is that open strings must end on D-branes: the brane provides the “home” for string endpoints. This was a revolutionary realization that launched what’s known as the second superstring revolution in the mid-1990s, reshaping our understanding of string theory’s ingredients.

• Career/Education

  • David J Rogers ☛ Writers with No Desire to Publish

    The senior editor of a literary journal asked a writer friend of mine to submit a piece for a future issue, but my friend who thanked the editor for the compliment has no interest in submitting anything to that magazine or any other. I’ll call her Kathy because that’s the name she wishes she brown silhouette against gold background of a woman working at a computerhad, but doesn’t. It is a highly-regarded journal and would enhance any serious writer’s reputation to appear in it. That journal had published other pieces of Kathy’s in the past during her particularly prolific period when work poured out of her and was in demand by editors and readers. Some of her books were being published at the time, and many of her articles appearing in magazines were achieving record readership scores.

• Hardware

  • Luke Harris ☛ Tubes

    Now that I’m convinced the difference is real and perceptible, and passively enjoyable, the question remains: is the effect worth the hassle and recurring expense?

    Absolutely not. I like the effect, I like the glow of the tubes, and I like the perspective that the warmup time makes sitting down to listen to music more intentional. But when these tubes eventually burn out I likely won’t replace them. We’ll see.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Science Alert ☛ This Much Weekly Exercise Can Slash Your Dementia Risk by 41 Percent

    A team led by researchers from Johns Hopkins University in the US found that up to 35 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical exercise every week is associated with a 41 percent drop in dementia risk, compared to those who didn't exercise at all.

• Proprietary

  • Lou Plummer ☛ The Process of Leaving Gmail

    As I have been writing about lately, we are in the process of detangling ourselves from big tech. Both of us have used Gmail for many years, and now we want to stop. It's going to be a long process. I studied this a bit and knew what I was getting myself into. There are some things I can share that will make this process easier for anyone who undertakes it.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI)

    • Futurism ☛ Microsoft Is Suing People Who Did Bad Things With Its AI

      In the post, Microsoft breaks the individuals making up Storm-2139 into three tiers: "creators, providers, and users," who together comprise a dark marketplace hinging on the jailbreaking and modification of Microsoft's AI tools to create unlawful or destructive material.

    • Mark-Jason Dominus ☛ Claude chokes on graph theory

      Having had some pleasant surprises from Claude, I thought I'd see if it could do math. It couldn't. Apparently some LLMs can sometimes solve Math Olympiad problems, but Claude didn't come close.

    • Simon Willison ☛ Hallucinations in code are the least dangerous form of LLM mistakes

      Hallucinations in code are the least harmful hallucinations you can encounter from a model.

      The real risk from using LLMs for code is that they’ll make mistakes that aren’t instantly caught by the language compiler or interpreter. And these happen all the time!

    • Simon Willison ☛ Notes from my Accessibility and Gen AI podcast appearence

      I was a guest on the most recent episode of the Accessibility + Gen AI Podcast, hosted by Eamon McErlean and Joe Devon. We had a really fun, wide-ranging conversation about a host of different topics. I’ve extracted a few choice quotes from the transcript.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ What the floods of AI scraper bots look like in 2025

      For the moment, LWN is optimizing how to serve their already very lightweight site more efficiently. But “everybody wants their own special model, and governments show no interest in impeding them in any way. It is a net-wide problem, and it is increasingly unsustainable.”

  • Social Control Media

    • Rolling Stone ☛ Wedding Registry Drama: Big Day Content Rules TikTok

      TikTok’s algorithm can’t be discounted in this shame cycle. The app’s proprietary technology uses data about how long a person is scrolling, what they like, share, save, comment on, and stop to watch to curate content on their for-you-pages. So if you’re planning a wedding, or even trying to figure out what to wear when you attend one, chances are a fair amount of content related to weddings will pop up on your feed. But while Maddox says that wedding shame will absolutely continue to be big on TikTok, it doesn’t have to end with people being chased off the app.

    • Logikal Solutions ☛ Why Reddit Sucks

      I try to stay off social media because social media is human poison. From time to time I will go to Reddit for technical discussions. You would think that, given Reddit’s income, they would hire actual developers and have a physical QA test team, wouldn’t you? Guess not. In case you cannot see the featured image

• Security

  • PCLinuxOS Magazine ☛ ICYMI: Security Vulnerabilities Found In Multiple Tunneling Protocols

    The phishing-as-a-service kit from Sneaky Log creates fake authentication pages to farm account information, including two-factor security codes, according to an article from TechRepublic. Security researchers at French firm Sekoia detected a new phishing-as-a-service kit targeting Microsoft 365 accounts in December 2024, the company announced on Jan. 16. The kit, called Sneaky 2FA, was distributed through Telegram by the threat actor service Sneaky Log. It is associated with about 100 domains and has been active since at least October 2024. Sneaky 2FA is an adversary-in-the-middle attack, meaning it intercepts information sent between two devices: in this case, a device with Microsoft 365 and a phishing server. Sneaky 2FA falls under the class of business email compromise attacks.

    [...]

    Security researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology and Ruhr University Bochum discovered two side-channel vulnerabilities in devices with Apple name-brand chips from 2021 or later that could expose sensitive information to attackers, according to an article from TechRepublic. Specifically, the vulnerabilities known as SLAP and FLOP skim credit card information, locations, and other personal data. Data can be gathered from sites like iCloud Calendar, Google Maps, and Proton Mail via Safari and Chrome. As of late January, Apple is aware of the vulnerabilities. “Based on our analysis, we do not believe this issue poses an immediate risk to our users,” an Apple representative told ArsTechnica. According to the researchers, Apple plans to release a patch at an undisclosed time. The researchers have not found evidence of threat actors using these vulnerabilities.

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Terence Eden ☛ Towards a test-suite for TOTP codes

      Because I'm a massive nerd, I actually try to read specification documents. As I've ranted ad nauseam about the current TOTP0 spec being irresponsibly obsolete.

      The three major implementations of the spec - Google, Apple, and Yubico - all subtly disagree on how it should be implemented. Every other MFA app has their own idiosyncratic variants. The official RFC is infuriatingly vague. That's no good for a security specification. Multiple implementations are great, multiple interpretations are not.

      So I've built a nascent test suite - you can use it to see if your favourite app can correctly implement the TOTP standard.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • PCLinuxOS Magazine ☛ When Platforms & The Government Unite, Remember What's Private & What Isn't

      For years now, there has been some concern about the coziness between technology companies and the government. Whether a company complies with casual government requests for data, requires a warrant, or even fights overly-broad warrants has been a canary in the digital coal mine during an era where companies may know more about you than your best friends and families. For example, in 2022, law enforcement served a warrant to Facebook for the messages of a 17-year-old girl — messages that were later used as evidence in a criminal trial that the teenager had received an abortion. In 2023, after a four-year wait since announcing its plans, Facebook encrypted its messaging system so that the company no longer had access to the content of those communications.

    • GreyCoder ☛ Using Surfshark VPN's Split Tunneling Feature

      Surfshark’s Bypasser lets users pick apps or websites that can skip the VPN. This feature is great for protecting your online activities. It allows certain trusted services direct access to the internet.

  • Confidentiality

    • GreyCoder ☛ Surfshark Camouflage Mode: How to Blend Your VPN Traffic into the Background

      The technology counteracts Deep Packet Inspection (DPI). This is a method used by ISPs and governments to spot VPN usage. Your VPN encrypts your activities, but it still leaves metadata. You can find this metadata using Deep Packet Inspection. Camouflage Mode creates special algorithms to hide these VPN signatures.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Moscow Times ☛ Tanker Suspected of Damaging Baltic Cables Allowed to Leave Finland

    An oil tanker believed to belong to Russia's "shadow fleet" and suspected of sabotaging undersea Baltic cables has been allowed to leave Finland's waters, where it has been held since December, Finnish police said Sunday.

    The Eagle S, which is registered in the Cook Islands, is suspected of intentionally dragging its anchor dozens of kilometres along the Baltic seabed, damaging an electrical cable and four telecommunications cables on Dec. 25.

  • Greece ☛ We no longer have a ‘West,’ but do we have a ‘Europe’?

    Following Donald Trump’s surprise phone call with Vladimir Putin, we may no longer have a “West,” in the sense of a stable political and military alliance. We live in a defining moment. Our leaders scramble to make sense of what President Trump means. His messages appear chaotic. He has spoken of Canada becoming the 51st state and of America taking possession of the Panama Canal, Greenland and Gaza. Some advocate staying calm and hoping dialogue will bring a return to a more sensible path. But Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference last week opened a window on to the “alt-right”-inspired thinking at the heart of the White House and it should scare every capital in Europe.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Yury Molodtsov ☛ Why People Leak to the Media

    Meta recently fired 20 employees for leaking confidential information. The company has become notorious for employees spilling details from all-hands meetings—a problem Google also faces. Apple, by contrast, keeps a tighter lid on things, though it’s not immune: a year ago, a former iOS engineer was sued for leaking to The Wall Street Journal and The Information.

    So why do people—especially those with cushy, high-paying tech jobs—risk it all to leak to the media? It comes down to three main motives: ego, disagreement with company decisions, and controlled leaks orchestrated by the company itself.

• Environment

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ 'Like someone put a blanket over the ocean': Kelp could be among fires' casualties

    These forests of fast-growing brown algae provide food and habitat for hundreds of marine species and absorb greenhouse gases, but are also highly sensitive to changes in their environment.

  • EcoWatch ☛ Trump’s NOAA Firings Could Be ‘Dangerously Risky’ to Americans’ Well-Being, Experts Warn

    In many cases, fired employees had years of tenure working with the agencies, but they were on probationary status because they had been working as contractors and had only recently become federal employees.

    Andrew Hazelton, a physical scientist with the National Weather Service (NWS), is a veteran of NOAA Hurricane Hunters missions, during which he flew through dangerous storms to collect data for improved forecasting.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Futurism ☛ Scientists Find Evidence of Vehicles From Tens of Thousands of Years Ago

      Uncannily preserved in the sands of New Mexico, archaeologists have discovered the oldest evidence yet of a vehicle used by humans: drag marks, along with footprints, left in the ground that have been dated to 22,000 years ago.

    • Silicon Angle ☛ Trump announces US strategic cryptocurrency reserve featuring bitcoin and Ethereum

      The reference to the Biden administration refers to various actions taken, mostly by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, against cryptocurrency companies during Biden’s term. During the election campaign, President Trump had promised cryptocurrency fans a much friendlier regulatory regime that would embrace digital assets and even create a “strategic reserve” of bitcoin.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ HP says 90% of products for the U.S. will be made outside of China by October

    Leading PC makers have been shifting their production away from China for several years already, and now that the Trump administration is imposing prohibitive tariffs on imports from China, they are not caught completely off guard. HP will continue to shift production to other regions, and by the end of its fiscal year, 90% of its products for North America will be made outside of China. Dell also expects its diversified supply chain to lower the impact of tariffs but will have to pass the extra costs to end users if it cannot mitigate them.

  • Mark-Jason Dominus ☛ Jonathan Chait

    I looked around a little to see if Jonathan Chait had written an essay titled “I was wrong, I was so, so wrong, I just couldn't have been wronger” but I didn't find one and I also didn't find any recent essays that said anything like “here's why I think this new essay is more reliable than that embarrassing Trump one I wrote for The New Yorker in 2016.”

    I don't understand how Chait still has a job after writing this essay. Why isn't he selling shoes? How does a writer come back from this? Isn't there some charitable society for the protection for the public that could pay to have someone follow Chait around, quoting out loud from this essay, as a warning to everyone he meets for the rest of his life?

  • The Walrus ☛ Sorry Not Sorry: The Art of Saying Nothing in Apology Statements

    From corporate scandals to celebrity missteps, public contrition has lost all meaning

  • Futurism ☛ You Can See When Elon Musk Actually Sleeps by Analyzing His Tweets, and It's Terrifying

    While the average person tends to sleep approximately when the Sun is down, Musk's hours don't follow conventional patterns. The alleged insomniac appears, per the shrinking blank spaces in that Economist tweet chart, to mostly sleep between 3 and 10 am — on that days that he actually stops tweeting and gets to sleep at all.

  • New York Times ☛ How Elon Musk Uses Internet Slang to Marshal His Army of Online Fans

    Now, 15 years later, in the fast churn of [Internet] culture, DOGE [sic] is considered very old. But try telling that to Elon Musk, who has co-opted “DOGE” for the name of his effort to gut the machinery of the federal government — more formally, the Department of Government Efficiency.

    It is one of dozens of old-[Internet] ephemera that are baked into his everyday vocabulary. A brief scroll through Mr. Musk’s X feed reveals a menagerie of aging memes and lingo — dad jokes for the very online. They include: [...]

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Mike Brock ☛ Not Even Wrong

      In an era of unprecedented access to information, we find ourselves grappling with a paradox: the proliferation of knowledge has not led to greater clarity, but to a fog of confusion where truth itself seems increasingly elusive. This isn't just a matter of competing facts or differing opinions. We're witnessing the emergence of narratives and beliefs so fundamentally disconnected from reality that they exist in a realm beyond true or false—they're “not even wrong.”

      To understand this crisis, we must first grapple with the foundations of how we conceptualize truth itself. Western thought has long been dominated by two intertwined pillars: foundationalism and essentialism. Foundationalism posits that all knowledge must ultimately rest on unquestionable, self-evident truths. Essentialism holds that things have fixed, inherent natures that define them. Together, these ideas have shaped our understanding of truth as something absolute, objective, and discoverable.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The Walrus ☛ Book Banning in Canada Is Quiet, Systemic, and More Effective than Ever

    It’s time to revive and sharpen those arguments. Book censorship is on the rise. We’ve all seen the news stories—the frequent headlines about book banning in schools or public libraries, about the takeover of school boards, about novels that are no longer teachable on university campuses, publishers pulling or issuing bowdlerized editions of suddenly controversial classics, authors who face cancellation. Not all these phenomena constitute “banning” per se, but they all fall under what we might call the new “censorship consensus,” in which books are called upon to justify their existence through demonstrations of their moral value.

  • TruthOut ☛ What Would It Look Like If Librarians Ran the Government Instead of These Fools?

    These are just three of the many library workers who have recently run for elected office, seeking to have a more direct say in the policies that govern their work. They say their experience as librarians gives them insights into what communities most need, while the skills that make them good at their jobs — a capacity for deep listening and a discerning eye for the truth — translate well in politics. And they say more librarians should throw their hats in the ring.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • PCLinuxOS Magazine ☛ Google Is On The Wrong Side Of History

    Google continues to show us why it chose to abandon its old motto of “Don’t Be Evil,” as it becomes more and more enmeshed with the military-industrial complex. Most recently, Google has removed four key points from its AI principles. Specifically, it previously read that the company would not pursue AI applications involving (1) weapons, (2) surveillance, (3) technologies that “cause or are likely to cause overall harm,” and (4) technologies whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.

  • Adriaan Roselli ☛ Be Wary of Accessibility Guarantees from Anyone

    TL;DR: anyone promising you that a total solution to digital accessibility is coming, and they are the ones bringing it, may be lying.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Connor Tumbleson ☛ Watching your Frontier bill slowly rise.

    As February 2025 hit I saw my monthly bill from Frontier had gone up - this time moving from $89.99/month to $99.99/month. I was curious what my Frontier bill was when I first started with them and mainly outraged that every so often my bill increased with no change to my service.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Copyrights

  • PCLinuxOS Magazine ☛ On The Precipice: The Battle Between [LLMs] & Copyright

    The launch of ChatGPT and other deep learning quickly led to a flurry of lawsuits against model developers. Legal theories vary, but most are rooted in copyright: plaintiffs argue that use of their works to train the models was infringement; developers counter that their training is fair use. Meanwhile, developers are making as many licensing deals as possible to stave off future litigation, and it’s a sound bet that the existing litigation is an elaborate scramble for leverage in settlement negotiations.

  • PCLinuxOS Magazine ☛ Copyright Is A Civil Liberties Nightmare

    If you’ve got lawyers and a copyright, the law gives you tremendous power to silence speech you don’t like. Copyright’s statutory damages can be as high as $150,000 per work infringed, even if no actual harm is done. This makes it far too dangerous to rely on the limitations and exceptions to fair use, as you may face a financial death sentence if a court decides you got it wrong. Most would-be speakers back down in the face of such risks, no matter now legitimate their use. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act provides an incentive for platforms to remove content on your say-so, without a judge ever reviewing your papers. The special procedures and damages available to copyright owners make it one of the most appealing mechanisms for removing unwanted speech from the internet.