Leftovers

• Matt Birchler ☛ Alright, let’s try out comments

  It’s probably been a decade since I’ve had comments on this site. I generally don’t like the idea of paying for a blog where I host comments I don’t write. That’s doubly true when it’s comments that are hurtful - why am I paying good money to host that?

• Louie Mantia ☛ 2nd Japanniversary

  It’s now been two complete years since I moved to Tokyo. Looking back at the last year, some things have changed a lot, some things just a tiny bit. Others, not at all.

• Seth Godin ☛ Worthless noise isn’t information

  If you’re not getting one of these things, then the data is simply noise. A distraction that wastes our time and confuses us.

• Science

  • SusamPal ☛ Fields and Their Two Ideals

    A field has exactly two ideals: the zero ideal, which contains only the additive identity, and the whole field itself. These are known as trivial ideals. Further, if a unital commutative ring, with distinct additive and multiplicative identities, has no ideals other than the trivial ones, then it must be a field. These two facts are elegant in their symmetry and simplicity. In this article, we will explore why these facts are true.

  • Rlang ☛ Self-intersecting Quadrilateral

    However, a polygon may intersect itself. A five-sided star is one example, where the sides are connected to alternating vertices.

    A quarilateral may also intersect itself. In the following diagram, the original quadrilateral has points A (0,0), B (4,0), C (3,3), D (1,4). The self-intersecting quadrilateral is formed from the original quadrilateral by shifting point D from (1,4) to (2, -2), so side CD crosses AB).

  • Science Alert ☛ Giant Megalodon's Prey Finally Revealed, And It's Not What We Thought

    One way to determine the diet of someone who has been dead a long time is to look at isotopes in their teeth. An isotope of an element is an atom that deviates from the norm in the number of neutrons it has in its nucleus, and the ratios of these isotopes vary according to several factors, one of which is diet.

  • Julia Language Blog Aggregator ☛ How chaotic is chaos? How some AI for Science / SciML papers are overstating accuracy claims

    Just how chaotic are chaotic systems? Many of you may have heard of “the butterfly effect” but don’t quite know the mathematics behind such systems. What I want to demonstrate is the “sensitive dependence to initial conditions” property of chaotic systems and just how sensitive these systems are. The reason this has come up is that I have seen some AI papers claiming to be able to predict the timeseries of a chaotic system (many more can be found online too, just highlighting a few random ones). What I want to bring to the forefront is an examination of what is really being claimed: just how hard is it to actually forecast a chaotic system? And if they aren’t doing that, what have they done instead?

• Career/Education

  • Ignacio Brasca ☛ Meaning

    Now, every time I wake up I think about all those people who happened to be in meetings, chats, calls, or offices who are now solely dust in my memory. Literally, they don’t even have shape in my memories and I can’t remember their faces, but somehow, at a point in time, they were my entire world.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ The Economic Consequences of Destroying Harvard

    The most important aspect of this campaign of intimidation and disruption is, of course, the attack on freedom of thought. I hope that nobody actually believes the MAGA line that universities are indoctrinating their students in wokeness, DEI, Marxism, whatever. The real complaint, obviously, is that these institutions aren’t indoctrinating their students — that they are exposing young people to a variety of ideas and encouraging them to think for themselves, when they should be preaching right-wing dogma and obedience to whatever The Leader says they should believe.

    Given this terrifying reality of the Trumpian war on learning, indeed on scientific thought itself, it may seem crass to examine the economic consequences of the attacks on higher education. Yet it’s important to understand that these consequences will also be disastrous – both for the current economy and for the economy’s long-term future.

• Hardware

  • Joel Chrono ☛ New desk and keyboard

    I had the chance to get a new desk, and a mechanical keyboard while we are at it, so now I got a new setup! Very productive stuff.

  • The Register UK ☛ China spawns an x86 supercomputing monster, via AMD

    Chipmaker Hygon, which recently teased a 128-core, 512-thread CPU, merges with server-maker Sugon

  • Deccan Chronicle ☛ Nvidia To Launch Cheaper Blackwell AI Chip For China: Report

    The GPU or graphics processing unit will be part of Nvidia's latest generation Blackwell-architecture AI processors and is expected to be priced between $6,500 and $8,000, well below the $10,000-$12,000 the H20 sold for, according to two of the sources.

  • HowTo Geek ☛ Crucial's Latest SSDs Go Up To a Whopping 8TB

    Micron Technology, the parent company of Crucial, took to Computex 2025 to unveil its latest offerings in the SSD space: the Crucial T710 PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD and the Crucial X10 Portable SSD. The T710 is a PCIe Gen 5 SSD, which means that sequential read speeds can reach up to 14,900 MB/s, and sequential write speeds can up to 13,800 MB/s. These numbers are in line with what we've seen from other Gen 5 SSDs, but they never fail to impress nonetheless. Random read and write speeds are listed at 2.2 million and 2.3 million IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second), respectively.

  • The Register UK ☛ Lenovo caught out by Trump's on-again off-again tariffs

    Yang said Lenovo's plans worked when the Trump administration announced universal ten percent tariffs, but not so much when the 25 percent tariff on goods from Mexico and Canada was announced in March and "implemented so suddenly that we didn't even have time to prepare.

• Proprietary

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Firing people for AI is not going so well

      Business owners hate employees more than anything. Unfortunately, AI’s not very good at doing human jobs. We noted last month how chatbots hadn’t knocked down wages or hours in any occupation.

      Orgvue surveyed 1,000 executives. 39% of them had fired employees for AI — but of those 39%, over half (55%) regretted it. The AI boosters are crippling their own businesses.

    • Futurism ☛ AI Is Replacing Women's Jobs Specifically

      Thanks to AI, the number of young college grads entering the workforce hit an all-time low, full-time salary jobs are becoming gigified, and lying on resumes is now the norm as the job search becomes a nightmarish hell.

    • Axios ☛ ChatGPT confounds colleges and high schools

      High schools and colleges are stuck in limbo: Use of generative AI to cut corners and cheat is rampant, but there’s no clear consensus on how to fight back.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ AI resorts to robot blackmail! — because Anthropic asked for a story of robot blackmail

      The researchers told Claude 4 to role-play being replaced. So it wrote a story of attempting to blackmail the engineer responsible over an extramarital affair!

      How did it come up with such a specific response? They told it the precise story to write: [...]

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Wired ☛ A Starter Guide to Protecting Your Data From Hackers and Corporations

      Other quick and relatively straightforward changes you can make are to use privacy-friendly browsers and search engines and to use a password manager (the one on your phone or browser is better than nothing at all) and create unique passwords for each service you use.

• Defence/Aggression

  • New Yorker ☛ Alba de Céspedes’s Broadcasts Against Fascism

    During the Second World War, the Italian writer took to the radio, urging resistance to the pressures of tyranny.

  • The Local SE ☛ Swedish government pushes forward with bid to revoke gang [sic] criminals' citizenship

    The committee, made up of members of all eight parties, proposed that the absolute right Swedish citizens have to retain their citizenship should be limited to allow the citizenship of dual citizens to be revoked in three situations: [...]

  • La Prensa Latina ☛ Daesh terrorists arrested near Syrian capital

    The Daesh group escalated its terrorist actions since the beginning of this year, carrying out 77 operations since the beginning of 2025, including armed attacks, targeted assassinations and bombings.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Nazi slogans trigger scandal at German school

    A report of an antisemitic incident in a high school coincided with the arrest of teenage rightwing extremists last week. Are deeply right-wing extremist views are resonating with more and more young people?

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Estonia eschews phone bans in schools and takes leap into AI

    While many schools in England have banned smartphones, in Estonia – regarded as the new European education powerhouse – students are regularly asked to use their devices in class, and from September they will be given their own AI accounts.

  • The Walrus ☛ The Taliban Are Turning Boys’ Schools into Jihadist Training Grounds

    The Taliban’s school curriculum is essentially a tool for radicalization, says Mirwais Balkhi, who served as Afghanistan’s acting education minister from 2018 to 2020. Now based in the US, Balkhi is editor-in-chief of the University of Afghanistan’s Journal of Diplomacy and International Studies and a member of Princeton University’s Afghanistan Policy Lab.

    While private schools, which typically cost between $90 and $200 in annual tuition, retain limited control over their affairs, public schools are required to follow a Taliban-imposed curriculum. In high school, any surviving subjects, such as the sciences, are being warped to reflect the Taliban doctrine. (A spokesperson for the Ministry of Education was unavailable for comment.)

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Four Russians suspected of supporting IS on trial in Germany

    The charges against the four defendants, all Russian nationals, are serious. Appearing at the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court in Hamburg on Monday, they will be facing accusations of being members of a foreign criminal organization and of supporting a foreign terrorist organization. More specifically, they are alleged to have used social networks to collect donations for the extremist "Islamic State" group(IS), said to be a total of €174,000 ($198,000).

  • The Georgia Recorder ☛ Eight decades after dying in Pearl Harbor attack, Georgia-born sailor gets Arlington farewell

    More than 80 years after he died in the attack on Pearl Harbor, John Connolly was finally laid to rest – not as an unknown in a mass grave, but as a naval officer in Arlington National Cemetery.

  • NL Times ☛ Don't give kids under 14 a smartphone, over 1,400 doctors and experts urge

    Over 1,400 doctors, scientists, and experts have signed an open letter calling on the government to put an age limit on smartphones and social media. Children should not get a smartphone before they are 14 and should be banned from using social media until they are 16, they said.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • [Old] BSDly ☛ That grumpy BSD guy: Predicting developments in real world conflict from patterns of failed logins

    Is it possible to glean useful information about international developments or even predict real world attacks from the activity that we record in the logs of Internet-facing systems?

• Environment

  • TruthOut ☛ I’m Facing Prison for My Climate Activism. Here’s Why.x

    It was the summer of 2024, the hottest year ever recorded. We were trying to send a message to the British government: it must sign the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty and make an immediate plan to transition away from oil, gas and coal to prevent further global heating, climate breakdown, and eventual societal collapse.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Idiomdrottning ☛ The extrinsic problems of AI

      First, given how energy is undercosted and has catastrophic climate externalities, any new invention that uses energy is problematic. (And the dataset gathering part not only leaks poison to the climate, it also offloads costs to innocent server admins getting scraped. No matter how “undercosted” energy is, that all adds up when you’re being robbed. I personally haven’t had any problems with being scraped and I consent to it esp for the CC-marked posts, but I’ve been hearing how these issues have been more and more overwhelming and disruptive and taxing on my fellow admins.)

• Finance

  • Volvo’s $1.9B shake-up: HR and R&D jobs wiped out in layoffs

    Volvo Cars is set for a significant round of layoffs, affecting 3,000 mostly white-collar employees, in a bold restructuring move aimed at curbing costs and reviving investor confidence. The Swedish automaker confirmed that departments including human resources, research and development (R&D), and communications will face major reductions, with the bulk of redundancies set to occur at its Gothenburg headquarters.

    This decision, first reported by Reuters and detailed in a company press release, comes as Volvo Cars battles high operational costs, sluggish demand for electric vehicles, and escalating trade tensions, particularly with the United States. The layoffs represent approximately 15% of Volvo’s office-based workforce, signalling a deep internal overhaul.

  • Free Press Journal ☛ Volvo To Cut 3,000 Jobs, Major Layoffs Amid Profit Protection Drive

    Swedish carmaker Volvo Car AB has announced a major cost-cutting move to protect its profits. The company will cut 3,000 jobs, which is about 7 per cent of its global workforce.

    Out of these, 1,000 are external consultants. Volvo currently has around 43,800 employees, more than half of whom are based in Sweden.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Who Broke the Internet, Part IV

    The thesis of the series is the same as the thesis of enshittification: that the internet turned into a pile of shit because named people, in living memory, made policies that were broadly "enshittogenic" because they insulated businesses that tormented their end users and business customers from any consequences for their cheating:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydVmzg_SJLw

    Moreover, these people were warned at the time about the certain consequences of their policies, and they ignored and dismissed both expert feedback and public opinion. These people never faced consequences or any accountability for their actions, as tech criticism focused (understandably and deservedly) on the businesses that took advantage of the enshittogenic policies and enshittified, without any understanding that these firms were turning into piles of shit because of policies that reward them for doing so.

  • Don Marti ☛ the coming de-enshittification boom

    David Gerard has a pretty good summary of today’s Internet business situation, in In 2025, venture capital can’t pretend everything is fine any more. "This year, the investors are all-in on AI. Crypto’s still dead, quantum isn’t taking off—AI’s the last game in the casino." And the Big AI companies are having trouble making anything useful even for stuff like customer support where corporate decision-makers are already willing to tolerate low quality. So far, generative AI does have two winning use cases: slop and scams. Widely available generative AI tools are able to generate content that’s similar enough to real content to be plausible, but different enough that it can beat the algorithms used for detecting infringement and fraud. The AI/crime mess is most obvious at the Big Tech companies.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Big Tech Wants to Become Its Own Bank

    To the dismay of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, the law currently prevents Big Tech companies from opening banks. But if Congress passes the GENIUS Act, tech firms may start issuing private currencies and forcing us to use them.

  • Thomas Rigby ☛ European Alternatives

    Search for the service you want to replace and an alternative run by a European company shows up. The UI is intuitive, the experience pleasant. While not as comprehensive as alternative.to it's easier to use.

  • The Register UK ☛ TeleMessage security SNAFU worsens

    Evidence of an attack on administration officials appeared last week on leak site Distributed Denial of Secrets, hosted an archive of messages that included details of over 60 government workers, a White House staffer, and members of the Secret.

  • Reuters ☛ Exclusive: Hacker who breached communications app used by Trump aide stole data from across US government

    Reuters identified more than 60 unique government users of the messaging platform TeleMessage in a cache ofleaked data, opens new tab provided by Distributed Denial of Secrets, a U.S. nonprofit whose stated mission is to archive hacked and leaked documents in the public interest. The trove included material from disaster responders, customs officials, several U.S. diplomatic staffers, at least one White House staffer and members of the Secret Service. The messages reviewed by Reuters covered a roughly day-long period of time ending on May 4, and many of them were fragmentary.

  • 404 Media ☛ The CIA Secretly Ran a Star Wars Fan Site

    The site looks like an ordinary Star Wars fan website from around 2010. But starwarsweb.net was actually a tool built by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to covertly communicate with its informants in other countries, according to an amateur security researcher. The site was part of a network of CIA sites that were first discovered by Iranian authorities more than ten years ago before leading to a wave of deaths of CIA sources in China in the early 2010s.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • RTL ☛ Bot-driven attacks?: Misinformation casts shadow on US-China trade truce

      From false claims of Americans panic-buying Chinese goods to bot-driven attacks on US brands, a tide of misinformation is casting a shadow over a temporary trade truce between Washington and Beijing.

      The world's two biggest economies agreed earlier this month to pause reciprocal tariffs for 90 days, a surprise de-escalation in their bitter trade war following high-level talks in Geneva.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Meduza ☛ ‘I’m tired of living in hell’ Appealing to Putin for relief from pollution and unsafe housing, Russians find themselves under investigation instead

    Across the country, Russians frustrated by factory emissions, dilapidated housing, and pollution are turning to the president for help. After their complaints to prosecutors, local officials, and police go unanswered, they record public video appeals to Vladimir Putin — hoping someone in power will finally listen. But instead of holding polluters and officials accountable, the Russian authorities go after the people who speak out — summoning them for questioning, fining them, and pressing criminal charges. The independent Okno project looked into just what happens when ordinary Russians go public with their grievances. Meduza shares an abridged English-language version of their findings.

  • El País ☛ On the front lines of Harvard’s resistance to Trump: ‘The first thing authoritarians do is attack universities’

    The ban on admitting foreign students, suspended by a judge, foreshadows a long battle between the university and the government. The future of higher education in the US depends on its ability to withstand these attacks

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • TruthOut ☛ Pete Hegseth Tightens Reins on Journalists Covering the Pentagon

    The Pentagon Press Association (PPA), which represents journalists covering the U.S. military, said in a statement that Hegseth’s memo “appears to be a direct attack on the freedom of the press and America’s right to know what the military is doing.”

    Kevin Baron, a founding officer of the PPA, said he is “angry and frustrated — but not surprised — that MAGA propaganda-loving conspiracy theorists like SecDef Hegseth and his team have dropped this JDAM-sized attack on the press.”

    “It’s un-American,” Baron added. “It’s dangerous.”

  • Cost Rica ☛ El Salvador Journalists Warn of Rising Repression Under Bukele Government

    The main journalists’ association in El Salvador denounced on Sunday the increase in “persecution” against media outlets and human rights defenders by the government of Nayib Bukele, accusing it of creating a climate of “fear” in the country. The complaint comes amid strong criticism from international organizations, which also accuse Bukele, an ally of U.S. President Donald Trump, of accelerating repression against his opponents following the recent arrests of lawyers and activists.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • ACLU ☛ A Quiet Threat to Veterans’ Civil Rights

    Prior to the VJRA, veterans had no way of challenging their benefits decisions; they simply had to accept the VA’s determination -- erroneous or not. When Congress passed the VJRA, it gave veterans access to a formal system of judicial review. Now, however, the government is trying to weaponize that system to deny veterans justice.

  • Sydney Morning Herald ☛ US border issues: How being denied entry to the US can cause problems in other countries

    A denial of entry has repercussions. “The US, Canada, Australia, the UK and New Zealand share the information collected by their immigration departments,” says Gourley. So when she applied for a working holiday visa for Canada under the International Experience Canada program, she was alarmed when one of the questions on the application asked: “Have you ever been refused a visa or permit, denied entry to, or ordered to leave Canada or any other country/territory?”

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • [Old] Phil Archer ☛ Quitting Starlink

    Thanks to National broadband, I have a 4G modem hooked up to an exterior antenna pointing at a mast that's in our line of sight giving over 100 MB/s download and 40 MB/s upload. That download speed is half as good as I got with Starlink, but the upload speed is 5 times better. Best of all, we are no longer paying money to Elon Musk, surely one of the most reprehensible people on the planet.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Russell Graves ☛ Epub Printing for Prison Mail

    I’ve talked before about the art of slicing and dicing PDFs with some handy tools, and here, the starting point is an ebook - I’m mostly using epub, but mobi is a perfectly fine starting point too. You’ll need something that’s DRM free for this process, and that’s beyond the scope of this post.

    You’ll need calibre and texlive-extra-utils installed, so go ahead and install those per your normal method. For anyone sane, sudo apt -y install calibre texlive-extra-utils ought to get you what you need.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Copyrights

  • Digital Music News ☛ Former Meta Exec: It’s ‘Not Reasonable’ for Artists to Opt Out of AI [Ed: It is not "AI", it is slop; not the same thing at all; the latter is just a form of plagiarism, not intelligence]

    When asked whether artists should be able to withhold their content from tech companies and their AI models, Clegg admitted he understood the artists’ motivation. “On the one hand, yeah, I think it seems to be as a matter of natural justice, to say to people that they should be able to opt out of having their creativity, their products, what they’ve worked on indefinitely modeled. That seems to me to be not unreasonable to opt out.”

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Cloudflare CEO: Football Piracy Blocks Will Claim Lives; "I Pray No One Dies"

    Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince issued a stark warning over LaLiga's ISP blocking campaign. The blockades deny access to less than 150 pirate sites and reportedly render millions of innocent websites unavailable. Prince said he "prays no one dies," after revealing Spanish citizens are being denied access to critical resources. Mass blocking of Cloudflare continued on Sunday, despite a clear indication from Prince that his company has always been willing to cooperate.

  • ESI Media Inc ☛ Marathon plagiarism controversy explained: The full story

    Artist ANTIREAL claimed that Bungie had stolen her designs and used assets during Marathon’s alpha phase of the game.