Leftovers

• Matt Birchler ☛ Nothing in your workflow is permenent

  Without turning this into a 1,000+ word post, I'll just sum it up this way: [...]

• Cynthia Dunlop ☛ Matt Butcher on Technical Blogging - Write that blog!

  Welcome to our latest attempt to <del>not-so-</del>gently nudge you to write more! Following up on writethat.blog and Writing for Developers: Blogs That Get Read, we’re sharing the perspectives of expert tech bloggers: why they write, how they tackle writing challenges, and their lessons learned. This time, let’s hear from Matt Butcher.

  Matt is co-founder and CEO of Fermyon (for serverless WebAssembly). With a Ph.D. in philosophy, he’s as comfortable with Baudrillard as with bytecode. He's even guilty of an illustrated series introducing Kubernetes to children (parental advisory warning). All that results in a fantastic combination for a unique blogging style!

• Coalition for Networked Information ☛ Announcing a Festschrift in Honor of Clifford Lynch

  At its 2025 Spring Membership Meeting, held April 7-8 in Milwaukee, WI, the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) announced the forthcoming publication of a Festschrift in honor of retiring CNI Executive Director Clifford Lynch:

  Joan K. Lippincott, ed. “Networking Networks: A Festschrift Honoring Clifford Lynch, Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information, 1997-2025.” Supplement to portal: Libraries and the Academy 25, no. 2 (July 2025).

• David Rosenthal ☛ Cliff Lynch's festschrift

  Vicky and I were invited to contribute to a festschrift celebrating Cliff Lynch's retirement from the Coalition for Networked Information. We decided to focus on his role in the long-running controversy over how digital information was to be preserved for the long haul.

  Below the fold is our contribution, before it was copy-edited for portal: Libraries and the Academy.

• Joel Chrono ☛ Blogging expectations

  Unlike both of them, I have never really thought about quitting my blog, I do not feel tired or like it’s worthless or anything, I don’t really have a problem with writing often or rarely, I just write when I remember to do it, sometimes daily, other times barely.

• Lou Plummer ☛ Admiration Society

  I've always enjoyed reading a good biography. Taking a deep dive into the life of an interesting person is a fun way to learn, not only about them, but also about the times they lived in. Aside from books, just picking up facts about various people is a natural inclination for me. I'm blessed with the ability to remember facts, which makes me good at Trivial Pursuit and impressing myself while watching Jeopardy, if nothing else. Occasionally, when I discover a particularly admirable person, I feel cheated for having lived so long without having had the opportunity to know about them previously.

• Science

  • Futurism ☛ Incoming Head of NASA Defies Elon Musk on Order to Abandon Moon Program

    Perhaps most notably, Isaacman used the appearance to reiterate his commitment to continue to lead the space agency's long-established Artemis program to return astronauts to the surface of the Moon in his opening remarks — while simultaneously prioritizing "sending American astronauts to Mars" as well.

• Career/Education

  • Brandon ☛ Getting Screamed At

    One of my breaking points last year came after being screamed and yelled at several times during a single shift. I was sitting there stewing when I suddenly realized that there are people who don't have to deal with this. I came home and asked my wife the last time someone seriously screamed or yelled at her, not just raised their voice a little, but instead went completely nuts. She said it had been years. For me it was at least once a week, if not several times a week occurrence.

• Hardware

  • Tedium ☛ Stock Ticker History: The Rainstorm That Changed Information Forever

    Today in Tedium: Right now, the stock market is having a rough one. And nothing I write will fix that. (Looks longingly at 401(k).) But one thing I can write about is a machination of how the stock market has traditionally worked. In an age when data streams out of our financial systems by the nanosecond, it’s fascinating to consider how stock data flowed in the pre-computer era. And it was all thanks to an object called ticker tape. For roughly a century, it was highly prevalent in certain segments of life, particularly if you worked in the financial industry. And while signs of its influence are everywhere, especially if you turn on cable news, it’s worth talking about the original invention, and the guy inspired by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Today’s Tedium talks ticker tape. — Ernie @ Tedium

  • [Repeat] Tom's Hardware ☛ Trump tariffs will hit consoles, monitors, and laptops hardest — U.S. imports 66% or more from China

    Even if these companies want to build factories in the U.S. to avoid tariffs, it will take some time to set up manufacturing bases and supply chains. So, the average American consumer will have to endure higher prices in the meantime. And local manufacturing does not mean that the SRPs of these products will return to pre-tariff levels, especially if they need to import components and raw materials. (And labor is more expensive in the U.S., further driving up costs.)

    At the moment, some companies, such as Framework and Razer are pausing sales to assess how they will deal with the situation. Apple, on the other hand, flew in five planeloads of inventory before the cutoff — increasing its pre-tariff inventory to several months, which will allow it to wait out the ongoing chaos without increasing prices. However, most companies aren't able to do this, and it's likely we'll soon see prices rise across the board, especially for products that do not have substitutes that are built in the U.S.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ The Commodore 65 [sic] and MEGA65

    Recently I made the shockingly fortuitous purchase of a Commodore 116, the widely-panned and limited release member of the Commodore 264 family that has since become a collectors item and impossible to find. While it’s one of the rarer Commodore machines from the time period, there are others that make it look as common as muck. These are the pre-production, demo, prototype, or engineering samples that were either modified substantially before release (such as the Commodore 264), or were never released at all (such as the Commodore 364).

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Walking on two legs may explain human musicality and language, argues research

    Together with Dean Falk, professor of anthropology at Florida State University, Larsson has published a study in the journal Current Anthropology discussing how the transition to walking on two legs rather than four is likely to not just have changed the way humans move—but also the way we think and communicate.

  • Matt Webb ☛ tl;dr I ran a marathon at the weekend and it was hard

    I was going to say “my first marathon” - which it was, my first I mean - but that makes it sound like there are going to be many, which uh I don’t intend so much. Let’s see.

    I expected a marathon to be hard. It was harder than I expected in a super interesting way.

  • Lou Plummer ☛ I'll Take Lots of Little Pleasures over A Few Big Ones

    In my drinking days, I tried 20-year-old single malts and expensive French red wine, but honestly, I was just chasing a feeling, not a taste. All that money was wasted. Few things in life taste as good as an ice-cold Coke when I am really thirsty. I played high school football in the bad old days, when the coaches thought that depriving you of water for three hours in hot August sunshine built character. The intense thirst we'd build up during those practices was one of the most miserable feelings I ever had. I've run out of water while hiking too when an expected source for refilling my bottles turned out to be dry. The relief at finally finding a small trickle of a spring just before sunset is something I still remember years later.

  • Techdirt ☛ The White House’s Cuts To Scientific Research Will Cut Short American Lives

    However, the scientific work driving these medical advances and breakthroughs is in jeopardy. Federal agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation are terminating hundreds of active research grants under the current administration’s direction. The administration has also proposed a dramatic reduction in federal support of the critical infrastructure that keeps labs open and running. Numerous scientists and health professionals have noted that changes will have far-reaching, harmful outcomes for the health and well-being of the American people.

  • Task And Purpose ☛ These vets say the PACT Act left them behind

    On Tuesday, Crete joined other veteran advocates at a roundtable on Capitol Hill to discuss toxic exposures from their service that are not covered under the Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics Act, known as the PACT Act.

    Passed in 2022, the PACT Act deemed certain illnesses and cancers as service-related for those exposed to burn pits during Iraq and Afghanistan deployments and for Vietnam War veterans with Agent Orange-related chemicals. However, while the PACT Act covers some instances of toxic exposure at domestic military bases, there are gaps, and some veterans are warning Congress that they’re slipping through the cracks.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Why we need to teach digital literacy in schools

    Such intense exposure has obvious problems, such as taking time away from other beneficial activities like sport or socializing in person. It also has negative health impacts, ranging from short-sightedness, headaches and musculoskeletal disorders to shorter attention spans and delays in the development of children's problem solving and communication skills.

    Beyond the impact of social media on young people's mental health, the ubiquity of screens is prompting many families and teachers to wonder whether education without technology, or at least with less screen time, would be better.

• Proprietary

  • YLE ☛ Stock prices rise in Helsinki; trading sites crash due to heavy traffic

    Meanwhile the Nordnet stock brokerage service said that its website and app platform had been overloaded due to the volume of trading. The company said in a social media post that access to some of its service might be limited. It advised investors to contact brokers directly by phone. Around 11:30am Finnish time, Nordnet reported that its online services and app were working normally again.

  • The Register UK ☛ New update to AmigaOS released

    Belgian software house Hyperion Entertainment has released Update 3 for AmigaOS 3.2, the version of the classic operating system it launched in 2021. The update targets Amigas with 680x0 processors, including systems enhanced with PiStorm accelerator boards.

  • Simon Willison ☛ LLM pricing calculator (updated)

    I updated my LLM pricing calculator this morning (Claude transcript) to show the prices of various hosted models in a sorted table, defaulting to lowest price first.

  • [Old] Jamie Zawinski ☛ XScreenSaver: a collection of free screen savers for X11, MacOS, iOS and Android, but not Windows.

    Sometimes people ask me why there is no Windows port of XScreenSaver. The reason is that Microsoft killed my company, and I hold a personal grudge. They are a company with vicious, predatory, anti-competitive business practices, and always have been. They also happen to make terrible products, and always have. I do not use any Microsoft products, and neither should you.

  • Cyble Inc ☛ 'Highly Sensitive' Data At Risk In U.S. Treasury Email Breach

    The OCC regulates all national banks and federal savings associations as well as federal branches and agencies of foreign banks, making a breach of the independent financial agency potentially significant.

    The official statement said the OCC first became aware of the incident on Feb. 11, 2025, when the agency “learned of unusual interactions between a system administrative account in its office automation environment and OCC user mailboxes.”

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI)

    • Techdirt ☛ AI Crawlers Are Harming Wikimedia, Bringing Open Source Sites To Their Knees, And Putting The Open Web At Risk

      Wikimedia’s analysis shows that 65% of this resource-consuming traffic is coming from bots, whereas the overall pageviews from bots are about 35% of the total. As the Diff news story notes, this is becoming a widespread problem not just for Wikimedia, but across the Internet. Some companies are responding with lawsuits, but for another important class of sites this is not a practical option.

    • MacRumors ☛ Report Reveals Internal Chaos Behind Apple's Siri Failure

      Apple apparently weighed up multiple options for the backend of ‌Apple Intelligence‌. One initial idea was to build both small and large language models, dubbed "Mini Mouse" and "Mighty Mouse," to run locally on iPhones and in the cloud, respectively. ‌Siri‌'s leadership then decided to go in a different direction and build a single large language model to handle all requests via the cloud, before a series of further technical pivots. The indecision and repeated changes in direction reportedly frustrated engineers and prompted some members of staff to leave Apple.

    • Drew Breunig ☛ The Dynamic Between Domain Experts & Developers Has Shifted | Drew Breunig

      Recently, I’ve noticed the AI era is a bit different. The balance of power has shifted. Builders need domain experts as much as they need them.

      You can no longer simply copy an app model with a few improvements or obsess over user feedback as you sharpen your prototype towards product-market fit.

      To build a differentiated AI product you need training data and examples curated by a domain expert.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ a16z raising fresh $20b to keep the AI bubble pumping

      PitchBook says a16z is talking up its links to the Trump administration to try to recruit investors — the pitch is to get on the inside of the trading! This may imply a less than robustly and strictly rule-of-law investment environment.

      The economic roots of the AI bubble are that nothing works and everything feels like a bit of a scam. This has consequences at scale.

    • Reuters ☛ Exclusive: Andreessen Horowitz seeks to raise $20 billion megafund amid global interest in US AI startups

      If successfully raised, the new megafund would be surpassed only by SoftBank's (9984.T), opens new tab two Vision funds, a massive experiment by deploying unprecedented amounts of capital into the tech sector, which has yielded mixed results. SoftBank Vision Fund 1, launched in 2017, was a record-breaking $100 billion fund, while its successor, Vision Fund 2, manages about $56 billion from SoftBank's balance sheet. Another Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Sequoia Capital, has over $56 billion in assets under management across multiple funds, with its evergreen fund growing to $19.6 billion this year, according to filings.

  • Social Control Media

    • New Yorker ☛ Social Media Is Getting Better by Falling Apart

      The very idea of social media—that we should all be broadcasting online the minutiae of our lives for public consumption—has come to seem slightly absurd. Social media as we once knew it has fractured. But deconstruction can be a healthy process. New possibilities are emerging everywhere, disrupting the old monoculture and offering different ways of being online. Some people talk with A.I. chatbots on Character.ai more regularly than they speak with their human pals, and Reddit has been reinvigorated as an avowedly human community. Friends congregate on text-message threads more often than Facebook.

    • The Guardian UK ☛ ‘Do you want to show strength here?’: Russia’s ads recruiting Chinese mercenaries

      Zelenskyy demanded answers from Beijing, accusing it of turning a blind eye to Russia’s recruitment of its citizens. Russia is known to have used or attempted to recruit foreign mercenaries or soldiers – including from North Korea, Syria and Libya – during the conflict. He said Russia was recruiting Chinese fighters through ads on Chinese social media platforms such as Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, and that Beijing was aware of it.

      Numerous recruitment clips are easily found on Chinese social media. All of them emphasise the pay on offer, ranging from 60,000 to 200,000 RMB (£6,000 to £21,000) as a sign-on bonus and monthly salaries of about 18,000 RMB (£1,900).

    • The Moscow Times ☛ Zelensky Accuses Moscow of Dragging Beijing Into Ukraine War Amid Chinese Recruitment Claims

      “It is clear how they recruit them. One of the schemes is through social media, in particular TikTok and other Chinese social networks, where Russians distribute commercials,” Zelensky said. “Beijing is aware of this.”

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Register UK ☛ Senate hears Meta dangled US data in bid to enter China

      Facebook's former director of global public policy told a Senate committee that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was willing to do almost anything to get the social network into China - including, she alleged, offering up Americans' data.

    • The Verge ☛ Microsoft is about to launch Recall for real this time

      The company did release a preview of Recall in November to Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel for Qualcomm Copilot Plus PCs and made a preview available to Intel- and AMD-powered Copilot Plus PC shortly after. And after a couple weeks of testing, my colleague Tom Warren said that Recall is “creepy, clever, and compelling.”

    • New York Times ☛ How Musk and Trump Are Working to Consolidate Government Data About You

      The federal government knows your mother’s maiden name and your bank account number. The student debt you hold. Your disability status. The company that employs you and the wages you earn there. And that’s just a start.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Axios ☛ Exclusive: House Democrats probe Elon Musk's conflicts of interest with NASA

    House Democrats Monday launched an investigation into potential conflicts of interest between NASA and Elon Musk, who has inserted himself into the federal government under President Trump.

  • Task And Purpose ☛ Army cuts 20,000 paid parachutist positions in airborne reshuffle

    “We have tens of thousands of soldiers who are on airborne status and getting paid to be on airborne status that’s ballooned over time and not realistic to combat,” said Col. Dave Butler, a spokesperson for the Army. “Admin personnel at a division level, even in an airborne division, probably aren’t going to jump into combat.”

    However, all soldiers can still go to airborne school.

    “You’re in a parachutist position, you just won’t jump and you won’t get paid jumping because you’re not jumping,” Anderson said. “At some point, you may be transferred to an alpha or bravo battery or back and forth, and so you can come in and out of there. That’s just simply an administrative task of going to basic airborne refresher, and then you’re back on jump status.”

  • Sightline Media Group ☛ Army to recode 20,000 parachutist jobs in major airborne restructuring

    The Army will recode nearly 20,000 paid parachutist positions in a major restructuring of its airborne forces aimed at improving readiness, service officials said.

  • USMC ☛ Handheld counter-drone devices headed to deploying Marine units

    Deploying dismounted Marine units will soon field handheld counter-drone system prototypes as the service also bulks up their drone protection on fixed bases.

    Those systems, paired with an increased emphasis on air defense training for all Marines, are part of how the Corps is getting after the drone threat.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Pro-Palestinian Stanford protesters face felony charges linked to building takeover, vandalism

    “Dissent is American. Vandalism is criminal,” said Santa Clara County Dist. Atty. Jeff Rosen. “There is a bright line between making a point and committing a crime. Unfortunately, these defendants crossed the line into criminality when they broke into those offices, barricaded themselves inside and started a calculated plan of destruction.”

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ Reimagining Democracy

    Personally, I was most interested, at each of the three workshops, in how political systems fail. As a security technologist, I study how complex systems are subverted—hacked, in my parlance—for the benefit of a few at the expense of the many. Think of tax loopholes, or tricks to avoid government regulation. These hacks are common today, and AI tools will make them easier to find—and even to design—in the future. I would want any government system to be resistant to trickery. Or, to put it another way: I want the interests of each individual to align with the interests of the group at every level. We have never had a system of government with this property, but—in a time of existential risks such as climate change—it is important that we develop one.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Time is running out to stop Iran’s crude nuclear bomb

    The Obama administration struck a multinational deal in 2015 to limit Iran’s nuclear production in return for sanctions relief, an agreement Mr Trump unilaterally pulled America out of in his first term.

  • Deccan Chronicle ☛ Taliban morality enforcers arrest men for having the wrong hairstyle or skipping mosque, UN says

    The Vice and Virtue Ministry published laws last August covering many aspects everyday life in Afghanistan, including public transport, music, shaving and celebrations. Most notably, the ministry issued a ban on women’s voices and bare faces in public.

  • Air Force Times ☛ Air Force F-35A ‘Frankenjet’ returns to the skies

    The office concocted the “Frankenjet” — which features the nose of the AF-27 grafted onto the AF-211 — to maximize taxpayer dollars and resurrect an extra operational aircraft, a release from the office said.

  • DomainTools ☛ How Russian Disinformation Campaigns Exploit Domain Registrars and AI

    Daniel emphasizes that while domain registrars face razor-thin margins and high volumes, this makes proactive moderation difficult. The solution may lie more in transparency and public awareness than in relying on takedown mechanisms.

  • [Repeat] The Cyber Show ☛ We Love USA

    Since the kinetic military supremacy of the US is beyond dispute, and the disapproval of the world is not with US military but a small number of anti-democratic usurpers, we consider the ways that British and European friends can come more directly to the aid of people who need our support.

    A serious question now arises; What is the European and UK strategy to remove the Trump government? How will we aid protest, influence, cyber operations and other non-violent action against a regime run amok? We want to see legitimate democratic government restored. We also need to affect political change to make ourselves safer. Today as tyranny grips America let's pledge to return those "hands across the Atlantic".

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • YLE ☛ Shadow economy on the rise as Finnish authorities uncover record number of financial crimes

    Authorities have detected a growing number of complex criminal cases that may involve money laundering, worker exploitation, identity theft and social security fraud as well as failure to pay pension, unemployment and accident insurance fees.

  • Techdirt ☛ The Data Shows Trump’s ‘Radical Leftist Judge’ Claims Are Pure MAGA Delusion & Projection

    The flood of judicial rulings against Trump isn’t coming from some shadowy cabal of leftist judges — it’s coming from Trump’s own unprecedented wave of executive actions while Congress sits idle. Law professor Steve Vladeck, who has been studying jurisdiction shopping extensively, recently analyzed the data and found that “the cause of this unprecedented flurry of judicial activity is neither the judges nor the courts; it’s the policies they’re reviewing.”

  • US News And World Report ☛ Former Facebook Executive Tells Senate Committee Company Undermined US National Security With China

    Her book “Careless People,” an explosive insider account of her time at the social media giant, sold 60,000 copies in its first week and reached the top 10 on Amazon’s best-seller list amid efforts by Meta to discredit the work and stop her from talking about her experiences at the company. Meta used a “campaign of threats and intimidation” to silence the former executive, said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, during the hearing.

    Wynn-Williams served as director of global public policy at Facebook, now Meta, from 2011 until she was fired in 2017.

    “Throughout those seven years, I saw Meta executives repeatedly undermine U.S. national security and betray American values. They did these things in secret to win favor with Beijing and build an 18 billion dollar business in China,” she said in her prepared remarks.

  • [Repeat] Silicon Angle ☛ Trump orders DOJ to investigate pair who disputed his allegation of election fraud

    President Donald Trump today ratcheted up his efforts to go after his critics, telling the Justice Department to investigate well-respected cybersecurity expert Chris Krebs, former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency or CISA, as well as a whistleblower, “Anonymous” author Miles Taylor.

• Environment

  • University of Michigan ☛ The cost of your convenience: AI and the climate crisis

    AI requires immense amounts of energy to both be trained and run. In a prime example, training the OpenAI GPT-3 system consumed the same amount of energy needed to power 130 American homes for an entire year, placing strain on resources that were already lacking. Unsurprisingly, most of this energy is not sourced from renewable sources like wind or solar. The majority currently comes from natural gas extraction, though many tech companies have promised a shift towards more renewable resources.

  • Truthdig ☛ Built (Not) To Last - Truthdig

    The Trump administration rescinded requirements to rebuild flooded areas stronger. Which opens the door to it happening again. And again.

  • MIT Technology Review ☛ Why the climate promises of AI sound a lot like carbon offsets

    So far, these facilities, which generally run around the clock, are substantially powered through natural-gas turbines, which produce significant levels of planet-warming emissions. Electricity demands are rising so fast that developers are proposing to build new gas plants and convert retired coal plants to supply the buzzy industry.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Renewable Energy World ☛ 'States are not powerless' against federal clean energy pushback. It's community solar's time to shine

      Perhaps overlooked in the debates over transmission line right-of-ways and lengthening lead times for critical power equipment (turbines, transformers, switchgears, etc.), a quicker-to-implement solution is quickly gaining traction across the country: community solar.

      Unlike large-scale generation projects that can take a decade or more to build, community solar projects are typically online in 12 to 18 months, powered by private capital, built in the communities they serve, and designed to use existing distribution infrastructure, including farmland, rooftops, and underused industrial sites. Community solar lowers electricity bills for renters, small businesses, and low-to-moderate-income households while providing grid resilience benefits that put off costly reconductoring.

    • Vintage Everyday ☛ How NOT to Drive in Toronto

      When cars first appeared in Toronto in the early 1900s, there were few regulations and very limited driver education. Most drivers had no formal training—they just bought a car and hit the road. Predictably, accidents became more common as more people tried to figure out how to drive in real time.

    • Mike Brock ☛ Clear Thinking v. Bitcoin Cult

      I should be clear: I've worked on Bitcoin in my previous job. I'm quite fond of it as a technology. I don't think a world where Bitcoin is the only currency is either desirable or achievable, but I do see its genuine utility and value. The problem isn't Bitcoin itself—it's the cult that has formed around it.

    • J Pieper ☛ Current mode commutation calibration in moteus

      Way back in 2019, I documented the approach moteus has used for encoder commutation calibration ever since. In principle, it commands a fixed voltage that is swept through a range of electrical angles. Assuming the voltage is large enough, this will drag the rotor around with it similar to if the motor was a stepper motor. While that is happening, the commutation encoder reading is recorded over time, so that a mapping can be made between commutation encoder and the electrical angle of the motor. When combined with the old dead time compensation technique, it resulted in relatively sinusoidal current waveforms and thus smooth motion of the rotor and a smooth mapping.

    • [Repat] MIT Technology Review ☛ Tariffs are bad news for batteries

      These tariffs could be particularly rough on the battery industry. China dominates the entire supply chain and is subject to monster tariff rates, and even US battery makers won’t escape the effects.

      First, in case you need it, a super-quick refresher: Tariffs are taxes charged on goods that are imported (in this case, into the US). If I’m a US company selling bracelets, and I typically buy my beads and string from another country, I’ll now be paying the US government an additional percentage of what those goods cost to import. Under Trump’s plan, that might be 10%, 20%, or upwards of 50%, depending on the country sending them to me.

    • Security Week ☛ Nissan Leaf [Breached] for Remote Spying, Physical Takeover

      The research was conducted by PCAutomotive, a company that offers penetration testing and threat intelligence services for the automotive and financial services industries. The Nissan Leaf [cracking] was detailed last week at Black Hat Asia 2025.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ Nature Isn’t Binary: Discovering the World’s First Intersex Southern Right Whale

    • Vox ☛ A drug that treats seizures and anxiety is leaking into the environment and affecting fish.

      Our bodies don’t absorb 100 percent of the drugs we ingest, so traces of them end up in the toilet. And because sewage treatment plants usually can’t filter them all out, those compounds ultimately end up where treated sewage is released — in rivers, lakes, and coastal habitats.

      This means that fish and other aquatic critters that live in these environments are, for better or worse, exposed to our meds. Basically, fish are on drugs — our drugs.

    • Omicron Limited ☛ European birds with narrow climate tolerance face population declines

      For species inhabiting a similar area of geographic space, those able to tolerate a wider range of climate conditions are less likely to experience population declines, and are more likely to be increasing, compared to those with narrower climatic preferences.

  • Overpopulation

    • CS Monitor ☛ Tech-savvy farmer gets young Nigerians excited about agriculture

      Promoting soilless farming among young people is crucial. Nigeria has the second-highest number of people facing food insecurity, behind only Congo, and the average age of its farmers is 53 years old. Soilless farming is especially important as urbanization has reduced the amount of arable land in Nigeria. It also has the potential to support a shift away from oil as the country’s leading industry.

• Finance

  • Digi Day ☛ After leaving Substack, writers are making more money elsewhere

    Across the board, writers such as Marisa Kabas, Luke O’Neil, Jonathan M. Katz and Ryan Broderick — all of whom exited Substack in early 2024 following the publication of an open letter in December 2023 decrying the presence of politically extreme voices on the platform — told Digiday that they are receiving a higher share of subscription revenue after making the switch from Substack to rival newsletter services such as Ghost and Beehiiv.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Register UK ☛ OpenAI hits back at Elon Musk with countersuit

    Rather than a serious acquisition bid, OpenAI claims Musk's move was a "sham" designed "to interfere with OpenAI's contemplated corporate restructuring." Musk is no longer involved in OpenAI, and runs a rival artificial intelligence outfit, xAI, among other businesses.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Time of Monsters

    This creates a dangerous feedback loop: economic pain leads not to policy reconsideration but to doubling down, which triggers more retaliation, which creates more pain, which further reinforces the narrative of victimhood. The worse things get, the more justified extreme measures seem.

    I'm not describing some novel insight. This pattern appears repeatedly throughout history when nationalist economic policies fail. The Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930 didn't lead to acknowledgment that protectionism deepened the Depression—instead, they reinforced isolationist tendencies and blame of foreign powers. Similarly, economic hardships in 1930s Germany weren't interpreted as policy failures but as evidence of foreign persecution and the need for more aggressive action, stemming from the contingencies placed upon Germany in the Treaty of Versailles. Most people do not understand these nuances and details. It’s very frustrating, really.

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ This is Europe's shot to emerge from Silicon Valley's shadow

    Never let a good crisis go to waste is an adage Europe could use now. As it stares down the barrel of a loaded gun from Donald Trump, the region could seize an opportunity if lawmakers and regulators move quickly to bolster its tech sector, a critical growth driver.

    With key services from America like cloud computing and artificial intelligence potentially becoming more expensive, Europe’s homegrown tech industry can reap an immediate advantage. Trump may complain loudly about how the US has been a victim of global trade, but the biggest beneficiaries of the booming AI business have been American. Now so-called hyperscalers – Amazon.com, Microsoft and Google – could suffer from Trump’s tariff plans as the steel, aluminium and copper they need to build vast data centres will become costlier.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Newsmax defamed Dominion Voting Systems, judge rules

    Right-wing cable channel Newsmax defamed Dominion Voting Systems by falsely reporting that the company was involved in rigging the 2020 presidential election, a Delaware judge ruled Wednesday.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Vox ☛ Donald Trump is trying to criminalize telling the truth about 2020

      He’s trying to criminalize telling the truth about 2020.

    • 404 Media ☛ Facebook Pushes Its Llama 4 AI Model to the Right, Wants to Present “Both Sides”

      Meta’s Llama 4 model is worried about left leaning bias in the data, and wants to be more like Elon Musk’s Grok.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • EFF ☛ Congress Takes Another Step Toward Enabling Broad Internet Censorship

    This bill mandates a notice-and-takedown system that threatens free expression, user privacy, and due process, without meaningfully addressing the problem it claims to solve. The “takedown” provision applies to a much broader category of content—potentially any images involving intimate or sexual content at all—than the narrower NCII definitions found elsewhere in the bill. The bill contains no protections against frivolous or bad-faith takedown requests. Lawful content—including satire, journalism, and political speech—could be wrongly censored.

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Trump's Latest Weaponization Is about Historic Loyalty Oaths as Much as Current Ones

    It seems Trump has an unlimited appetite for stripping people of security clearances they don’t hold. Or perhaps Trump’s handlers have figured out these EOs will provide an endless supply of dopamine hits that make the care and feeding of a malignant narcissist easier.

    I want to add something to the flood of commentary about this abuse of power.

  • [Repeat] RFERL ☛ Russia Frees Woman Jailed For Donating $51 To Ukraine In US Prisoner Swap

    A 33-year-old former ballet dancer, Karelina moved to the United States in 2015, married a US citizen, and received US citizenship in 2021.

  • Techdirt ☛ Federal Judge Tells Colorado School District To Return ‘Challenged’ Books To Its Libraries

    The decision [PDF] runs 45 pages and takes care to point out everywhere the school board went wrong, ranging from its baseless, self-serving claims that damning email conversations were “hearsay” to misrepresenting the standards for obtaining preliminary injunctions. Oh, and there’s also the thing where the school board tries to pretend determining what books can be in libraries is “government speech” that can’t be held to First Amendment standards.

    That last argument simply doesn’t work. A library carrying a copy of Mein Kampf wouldn’t be assumed to be representative of the views of the government funding the library. And yet, that’s what the government (in the form of the school district) attempts to claim here in hopes of securing its censorship.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • The Moscow Times ☛ Prosecutors Request Nearly 6-Year Jail Sentences for Journalists Accused of Navalny-Linked ‘Extremism’

    The journalists are accused of “collecting material, preparing and editing videos” for Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) and the NavalnyLIVE YouTube channel.

    Their trial, which opened in October, is being held behind closed doors at the request of prosecutors.

  • [Repeat] Press Gazette ☛ Trump's threat to global media: Publishers should be alarmed

    Speaking via video call from the US last week, Wilkinson said: “I am really surprised about the lack of alarm in news media.”

    He had earlier outlined his concerns in a blog for INMA which warned: “The global ecosystem in which news media companies operate has changed to favour big tech companies, the guardrails for AI have been lowered, and the principles on which journalism are based have come unhinged.”

  • BIA Net ☛ Investigative journalists Timur Soykan, Murat Ağırel detained over blackmail allegations

    Both journalists are known for their investigative reporting on corruption and other illicit activities and have worked together for years on a television program.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Attacks on journalists double in Germany, report says

    In the report, RSF warns that "reporters are experiencing increasing hostility toward the press and a narrowed understanding of press freedom."

  • Techdirt ☛ Trump Loyalist Judge Smacks Down Trump Admin Over Blocking The AP

    He isn’t just a Trump-appointed judge (he is), but he’s one of the Trumpiest judges on the bench, who has repeatedly ruled in ways supportive of Trump. When Trump tried to divert billions of dollars to his stupid Mexican wall project, Congress sued to block him, and McFadden ruled that Congress lacked standing (later overturned). In other words, if anyone was going to rule in favor of the White House here, it was likely Judge McFadden. Instead, he finds for the AP, and rather easily too. He notes, obviously, that the White House has the power to block access, but if it is opening up sessions to the media, it can’t block access on the basis of the media org’s expression: [...]

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Futurism ☛ Harvard Professor Quietly Gives His Lab Workers His Entire Salary Every Year

    Though Liu's generous efforts are commendable, a professor handing out his salary isn't exactly a replicable model. Despite the huge workload and specialized training required, lab technician jobs are notoriously low-paid, high-stress gigs, where benefits are scarce. This has led to an industry-wide staffing shortage, especially in medical labs.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Non-Tenure-Track Faculty Are Striking at Wellesley College

    For the past two weeks, non-tenure-track faculty at Wellesley College in Massachusetts have been on strike to fight for a first contract. Jacobin spoke to two members of the organizing committee who say the college is refusing to bargain in good faith.

  • Democracy for the Arab World Now ☛ Iraq, U.S., Israel, Russia: Secure Release of Unjustly Detained Scholar Elizabeth Tsurkov

    Tsurkov, a doctoral student in the Politics Department at Princeton University in New Jersey, was conducting field research on Shia movements in Iraq when she was kidnapped in the Karrada neighborhood of Baghdad. In November 2024, she appeared—under duress—in a video aired on the Iraqi network Al Rabiaa TV asking for action to secure her release.

  • The Register UK ☛ Tech CEO: 4-day work week didn't hurt or help productivity

    "We piloted the four-day week in 2020 and after a successful pilot, which included gathering feedback from our staff, we decided to implement it in January 2021, so we're now four years on from adopting full time," he tells The Register.

    "During our original pilot we saw no decline in productivity (I wouldn't say we had any gain). However, the feedback was super positive and staff liked the extra day off and felt they had a much better work-life balance.

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ When We Take The Streets

    There’s a lot of different roles and ways to participate in a protest. I’ve been to dozens across three continent, usually in the role of journalist. But I’ve also protested, and even helped with organizing a few events. This will be a few lessons learned about attending and understanding protests. It is focused on American protests. In a practical sense what makes a protest American is American police and American laws. However, local laws on assemblies vary, as do local police cultures. If you don’t know how these factors work where you will be protesting, ask a local.

    There are different roles for people at a protest, and they require different equipment and preparation.

  • RFA ☛ Tibetan exile govt seeks probe into death of Tibetan Buddhist abbot in Vietnam

    The Tibetan government-in-exile called Tuesday for an independent investigation into the death of an influential Tibetan Buddhist leader said to have died in Vietnam, where he was reportedly in hiding from the Chinese government.

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ Synthetic Voices Shed Light on the Deep-Rooted Gender Biases Embedded in our Tech

    While Nass acknowledged sexist biases about voices—that people take male voices “more seriously” than female voices, for example—he ascribed these biases to “learned social behaviors and assumptions,” stating as fact that “each culture defines canonical behaviors for females and males.” He demonstrated his bias when he stated that even machine-like voices trigger “the brain’s obsessive focus on gender.” Stereotyping, Nass argued, was a cognitive shortcut to reduce information overload. While finding gender stereotypes “regrettable” and even describing them as “pernicious,” he concluded that they were evolutionarily ingrained and nevertheless justified their use in voice interfaces, aligning with business interests that capitalized on existing biases.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Inside Towers ☛ LPTV Owner Asks FCC to Allow Using 5G Broadcast to Datacast

    HC2 says its proposal is limited to LPTV stations, historically used as a testbed for broadcast service. “Limiting 5G Broadcast eligibility to LPTV stations will mitigate any impact on the rollout of ATSC 3.0 by full power and Class A TV stations,” asserts HC2 in its petition.

    5G Broadcast is a worldwide standard within the ultra-high frequency band used by most LPTV stations, notes HC2. The 3rd Generation Partnership Project has approved the UHF spectrum band from 470 MHz-698 MHz (i.e., including UHF television channels 14-36 in the Unites States) as new Band 108 in the 5G terrestrial broadcast bands.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Nathaniel Daught ☛ Is Facebook punishing mobile web users?

    Facebook seems to be using targeted feature removal to punish mobile web users for not installing the app. Nothing really shocks me with how Meta and other tech companies use dark pattern UX to manipulate their users, but I'm a bit dumfounded by this.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: The most remarkable thing about antitrust (that no one talks about)

  The antitrust surge under Biden was and is a truly remarkable thing: a sustained, organized, effective government policy that supported the interests of the majority of people against the interests of a tiny cohort of ultra-wealthy wreckers and looters. According to political scientists, that antitrust surge should have been impossible. In 2014, a pair of political scientists from Northwestern and Princeton published their landmark study, "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens":

  https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/jnd260/cab/CAB2012%20-%20Page1.pdf

  The paper analyzes 1,779 US policy fights from 1981 to 2002, and conclude that the US only does things that regular people want if those are also things that rich people want: [...]

• Copyrights

  • Digital Music News ☛ YouTube Tests AI Instrumentals Tool, Shorts Soundtrack Matching

    As for Shorts soundtrack matching, the capability, as its name suggests, aims “to help creators reduce editing complexity when trying to sync their clips to the beat,” per the video.

  • WikiMedia ☛ How crawlers impact the operations of the Wikimedia projects

    Since January 2024, we have seen the bandwidth used for downloading multimedia content grow by 50%. This increase is not coming from human readers, but largely from automated programs that scrape the Wikimedia Commons image catalog of openly licensed images to feed images to AI models. Our infrastructure is built to sustain sudden traffic spikes from humans during high-interest events, but the amount of traffic generated by scraper bots is unprecedented and presents growing risks and costs.