Leftovers

• Career/Education

  • Uğur Erdem Seyfi ☛ The Key to Organization Is Not Disorganizing in the First Place

    Some people think having an organized environment is the result of frequent organizing. My personal journey of becoming more organized actually makes me question this belief. Yes, we can organize things at fixed intervals. However, in practice, I find it too difficult to make this effectively work. To me, the fixed intervals approach associates organizing with costs. You now have a new chore to remember when the time comes. You also keep letting disorder build up until it’s time to clean. So the work sucks more when the time comes and you become more likely to say things like “I’m so tired from work right now, I should rest and put this off.”

  • Robert Birming ☛ Stay curious

    No matter what your interests are, no matter what your life situation looks like, it’s possible to stay curious. These days we even have the whole World Wide Web at our fingertips. There’s no excuse not to stay curious.

  • Alvaro Montoro ☛ "Your Profile Doesn't Match the Role" and Other Interview Horror Stories

    Five real interview stories I personally went through in my (still going) career. From bizarre brainteasers to lightning-fast rejections or unexpected "manager" duties, each stranger than the last.

• Hardware

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Ukraine reveals jammer-resistant Kamikaze strike drones — 31-mile range ordinance promises ’a new level of enemy destruction far behind the front lines’

    After the successful field tests, Brave1 is now going to move to the combat testing phase. It is then hoped to “accelerate the mass deployment of strike drones on the battlefield.” This should be more easily achieved if it is indeed true that the Brave1 kamikaze drones are “affordable to manufacture and ready for scaling.”

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Jason Becker ☛ I do believe the number of headphones Jasper says I need

    I don’t think you need IEMs– but I do have a pair of audiologist custom fit ear plugs, which I require for hearing protection at concerts and when playing with the band. If you ever see live performed music, wear earplugs. And if you do it all the time or perform, spend the money to get proper, custom fitted ear plugs. Your future self with thank you.

  • Jan Lukas Else ☛ A bike ride to reset - Jan-Lukas Else

    After a tough last weekend, a little cold, and bad weather, I was really exhausted and not in the best mood this week. But I knew the weather would be great on Friday, so I planned a bike tour. A 47-kilometer round trip north where there aren’t many hills.

• Proprietary

  • International Business Times ☛ The Software Behind Europe's Check-In Chaos — What Is Muse, and Why It Matters?

    The disruption was traced to Muse, a passenger processing system developed by Collins Aerospace, a subsidiary of US defence and aviation giant RTX.

  • Guy LeCharles Gonzalez ☛ Medium Thoughts, after Medium Day

    It’s probably a pretty good indicator of who Medium’s current audience is — committed bloggers and aspiring thought leaders, with some sessions suggesting the usual grifters are in the mix, too — but hints of its full potential were also visible.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ Fed Boss Concerned About AI's Effect on Job Market

      Whether or not AI is actually taking those jobs is another question. Real-world performance of the software remains dreadful, leading to a number of automation disasters — in fact, data shows that AI rollouts is now plummeting across major companies. There's also ample reason to believe that businesses executives are using AI as cover for otherwise typical outsourcing and downsizing strategies.

      In short, AI automation is a huge grey area caught between hyped up tech PR on the one hand and an objectively dismal job market on the other.

    • Jacobin Magazine ☛ The AI Revolution Might Be Running Out of Steam

      Despite massive investment and grand promises, AI companies are struggling to deliver returns. The bubble may be deflating, but like the dot-com crash, the aftermath could consolidate power in the hands of tech giants.

    • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft insists Copilot+ PCs are 'empowering the future'

      Letting the neural processing unit inside a Surface Laptop make the user's eyeballs appear to look into a camera during a video call might have a certain appeal – to some – but it's hardly a vital use for the technology. If it weren't for the impending end of support for many versions of Windows 10 and the stringent hardware compatibility requirements of Windows 11, it's unlikely that large numbers of users would go anywhere near an AI PC.

    • India Times ☛ ChatGPT's teen suicide controversy: Everything that has happened so far

      On Tuesday, Raine’s parents testified before Congress about their son’s death, while a lawsuit filed last month against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, has intensified pressure on the company. The case is being seen as a serious warning about the influence of AI on vulnerable users, especially minors.

    • Futurism ☛ ChatGPT Is Blowing Up Marriages as Spouses Use AI to Attack Their Partners

      "What was happening, unbeknownst to me at the time, was she was dredging up all of these things that we had previously worked on, and putting it into ChatGPT," he said.

      As his wife leaned on the tech as a confidante-meets-journal-meets-therapist, he says, it started to serve as a sycophantic "feedback loop" that depicted him only as the villain.

      "I could see ChatGPT responses compounding," he said, "and then [my wife] responding to the things ChatGPT was saying back, and further and further and further spinning."

  • Social Control Media

    • NPR ☛ Social media is shattering America's understanding of Charlie Kirk's death

      That gap is being widened by social media. More than half of U.S. adults now get their news sometimes or often from social media platforms, and those platforms are fragmenting how Americans view what's happening.

    • Neritam ☛ How Facebook Algorithms Promote Hate and Toxic Content

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • Gray Local Media ☛ ‘Barreling toward insolvency’: Court filing provides more details on JXN Water’s financial straits

    Henifin went on to say that he’s heard the city is interested in privatizing the water system, something he would support, citing the ongoing “financial crisis.”

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • EDRI ☛ ProtectNotSurveil coalition raises alarm about EU’s Frontex expansion plans

      The European Union has increased Frontex’s competences for the past 20 years in the areas of border control and deportations. Its budget has also increased from 6 to 922 million euros. The last reform adopted in 2019 granted the agency increased autonomy, operational capacity, surveillance equipment and personnel. According to experts, this brought Frontex “closer than ever to its original conception of a fully-fledged European border police”.

    • EDRI ☛ Consultation response to the European Commission’s call for evidence on a new Europol regulation

      The European Commission launched a call for evidence to gather views on the reform of Europol’s mandate. Europol is the EU law enforcement cooperation agency. EDRi along with Resist Europol coalition members submitted a response to the consultation, sharing their concerns about this renewed expansion of powers, despite Europol’s numerous issues around opacity and lack of accountability.

    • The Register UK ☛ Britain jumps into bed with Palantir in £1.5B defense pact

      The UK has struck a defense deal with US spy-tech biz Palantir, which the government says will unlock £1.5 billion ($2 billion) of investment in Britain.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Abraham Lincoln Knew Violence Must Be Addressed at the Root

    What makes today’s calls for reconciliation and pleas for recognition of everyone’s humanity so formulaic, even feckless, is that they are severed from any sort of action or social awareness. At best, they rest on a studied inattention to the underlying social and economic roots of the problem. At this point, the politicians who speak this way sound like the very abolitionists who were rightly derided as crackpot utopians for their naive belief that moral suasion, without state action, could somehow win the day against slavery.

    The difference is that those abolitionists had no power. Many of these politicians do.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ What Can We Do With the Right’s Delight in Pain?

    Right-wing authoritarianism lures people away from the promise of democracy, peace, and equality toward destructive violence by offering one key appeal: pleasure in harming other people.

  • Tracy Durnell ☛ No one is coming to save us

    It is going to be up to us to save us. And it’ll be easier with all of us than trying to go it alone.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Miscalculation

    The evidence of their miscalculation is mounting across multiple fronts. The National Corn Growers Association reports that 46% of U.S. farmers believe the country is on the brink of agricultural economic crisis, with corn margins showing losses of $161 per acre. These supposedly core MAGA supporters are discovering that deportation policies create severe labor shortages threatening entire harvests, while cash receipts for crop farms have declined by $71 billion over the past three years.

  • Chris O'Donnnell ☛ Proudly Antifa

    I'm proudly Antifa. As was my grandfather who was injured in a Kamikaze attack on the USS Santee on October 25, 1944 during the Battle of Leyte Gulf.

    If you aren't anti-fascist you are pro-fascist. That is not an opinion, that is literally how the concepts of pro and anti work.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Pivot to AI ☛ Albania’s AI minister speaks! And turns out to be an actor

    The video is not AI-rendered. It’s Albanian film actor Anila Bisha in front of a green screen.

• Environment

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ Wildfire Smoke Will Likely Kill Thousands More Americans Each Year

    As our planet continues to warm, the number of Americans who die each year from wildfire smoke could rise from 40,000 today to 71,000 in 2050, finds a recent study.

  • The Register UK ☛ Zuck has the power! Meta applies to sell excess electricity

    This week, Atem Energy LLC, a subsidiary of Zuckercorp, filed an application with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission requesting permission to sell energy, capacity, and other ancillary services at market-based rates.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Futurism ☛ Man and Two Kids Burned Alive in Tesla Crash

      There are a lot of unknowns surrounding the horrific September 7 accident, which was reported by German outlets Bild and 20 Minuten, and flagged in English by People magazine, but CEO Elon Musk's electric vehicle has already been under heavy scrutiny for reports of Teslas trapping kids inside and for fatal accidents involving its self-driving tech system and Cybertruck.

      The accident in question, which occurred in the town of Schwerte, happened when the driver of the Tesla attempted to pass a caravan of vehicles and then, mysteriously, swerved off the road.

• Finance

  • Mediocregopher ☛ So You Think Your Options Are Worth Something…

    You just got a job! They're going to pay you! Congrats!

    Maybe as part of your offer they threw in a little something, some employee stock options, to sweeten the deal. "Well, I'll just ignore those for now, maybe they'll be worth something one day", you say to yourself.

    This is for you. Yes, those options may indeed be worth something one day. Probably they won't. But even if they are, the road to the money is longer than it seems, and filled with speedbumps that you won't see coming. I'm writing this so you can navigate the road with as much foresight as possible, because from what I've seen these things aren't well documented.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Register UK ☛ $100k employer payment now conditions H-1B entry

    The "Restriction on entry of certain nonimmigrant workers" proclamation accuses companies of abusing the existing visa program by hiring H-1B staff while laying off domestic workers and, in some cases, having staff train their replacements. It restricts the entry of H-1B workers unless the employer pays $100,000 with the petition, and directs the Secretary of Homeland Security to restrict decisions on petitions for beneficiaries outside the US if the payment isn’t made, with exemptions possible. The policy takes effect on September 21, and lasts 12 months unless extended.

  • The Verge ☛ Amazon, Google, and Microsoft tell H-1B employees to rush back to the US

    H-1B visa holders may not be allowed back into the country after midnight without a $100,000 payment.

  • Hindustan Times ☛ Microsoft's advisory to employees after Trump's H-1B visa move: 'Return by tomorrow...'

    At the same time, JPMorgan’s outside immigration counsel has also advised H-1B visa holders to remain in the United States and avoid international travel until further guidance, reported Reuters citing an email.

  • India Times ☛ Microsoft recommends H-1B, H-4 visa holders to return to US by tomorrow

    Microsoft: H-1B visa holders should stay in the US for the foreseeable future — email seen by Reuters

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Techdirt ☛ How MAGA Killed Foreign Influence Research, But Now Demands Social Media Stop Foreign Influence Campaigns

      It’s fascinating how quickly the tune changes when the shoe’s on the other foot. For years, we’ve been treated to endless screaming about how any effort to identify and counter foreign manipulation on social media was “censorship” and a violation of Americans’ free speech rights. The same crowd that turned researchers into pariahs and shut down entire government offices dedicated to studying foreign influence operations are now… demanding that social media platforms identify foreign accounts?

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • US News And World Report ☛ In Battles Over Free Speech, Comedians Are Often Center Stage

    In all the stunning things about ABC’s swift removal of Jimmy Kimmel, its longtime late-night host and Oscars-hosting face of the network, perhaps the least surprising was that a comedian was again at the center of a battle over free speech

  • Emory University ☛ Emory fires professor for social media posts in wake of Kirk assassination

    Emory University School of Medicine terminated a non-clinical faculty member due to posts they made on social media, according to Assistant Vice President of University Communications Laura Diamond. The University could not provide further comment on the termination as it is a personnel matter, according to Diamond.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Yes, Private Employers Can Violate Your Free Speech Rights

    Whatever one thinks about the threat to free speech from the Right versus the Left — and I hope I’ve got a solid enough record of years of scholarship and public writing and activism on this issue that no one will doubt where I stand on that question — the specific argument that private employers cannot pose a threat to freedom of speech merely because they are not state actors, has always been bad news for anyone on the Left, particularly anyone with a knowledge of the history of private-sector political repression.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ HK man handed 1-year probation order over Tiananmen crackdown graffiti

    The court heard that on the morning of June 4, police on patrol found the numbers “6436” were spray-painted in black on three spots near the Supreme Industrial Building in Fo Tan.

  • RFA ☛ A Chinese international student and activist goes missing during a trip home

    A Chinese international student and activist has gone missing during a trip to China to visit family. Rights and advocacy groups are saying it’s the latest case of transnational repression.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • The Dissenter ☛ Pentagon: Publish Only What We Approve, Or Be Banned

    The Pentagon will revoke access to reporters who publish any information that Secretary Pete Hegseth and other United States military officials have not approved for release.

  • Computers Are Bad ☛ T-carrier

    Still, T1 involved a healthy life as an important "common denominator" in internet connectivity. As a regulated telephone service, it was expensive, but available pretty much anywhere. It also provided a very high standard for reliability and latency, beyond many of the last-mile media we use today.

  • NPR ☛ Defense Secretary Hegseth requires new 'pledge' for reporters at the Pentagon

    The Pentagon says those who fail to obey the new policy will lose their press credentials, cutting off access to the headquarters of the largest department in the U.S. Government.

  • ANF News ☛ Journalist faces investigation after reporting on a forced prostitution ring in Şırnak

    The threats against Durgut began after the publication of a detailed report in which she reported on a 25-member group that had come under investigation by the authorities in 2013 on charges of “establishing an organization for the purpose of engaging in and facilitating prostitution”. The suspects were accused of forced prostitution, human trafficking, and sexual exploitation of minors, among other things.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • JURIST ☛ UN experts urge states to stop criminalizing civil society and peaceful assembly

    In a joint declaration, experts stressed that the foundational pillars of democracy–namely freedom of assembly and association–must be protected and not treated as threats to public order and national security. They emphasized the importance of these rights to foster participation and holding power to account and prevent a deepening mistrust and the undermining of social cohesion.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Techdirt ☛ You Don’t Own What You Buy: New Lawsuit Dings Amazon For Misleading Video ‘Purchases’

    The problem is particularly bad when it comes to digital rentals. In streaming video, you often have the option to “rent” or “buy” a video. But the latter is misleading given you don’t really “own” the purchase; you’re given a license — subject to the whims of an amoral, giant corporation — that can be revoked or changed by profit-seeking executives with an eye on enshittification.

    That recently appears to have gotten Amazon in trouble via a new lawsuit that alleges that Amazon is misleading consumers by misrepresenting the word “buy.” From the lawsuit: [...]

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• CBC ☛ U.S. regulator sues Ticketmaster and Live Nation, alleging illegal resale tactics

  The FTC said Live Nation and its subsidiary, Ticketmaster, have deceived artists and consumers by advertising lower ticket prices than what consumers must pay and falsely claiming to impose strict limits on the number of tickets consumers can buy for an event.

• Trademarks

  • Right of Publicity

    • Futurism ☛ Pope Horrified by Catholic Plan to Create AI Version of Him for the Masses

      If anybody is thinking of making an AI version of the Catholic pope, please don't.

      That's the message from the newly-minted Holy Father himself, Pope Leo XIV, who emphatically slapped down the idea of a digital simulacra masquerading as himself.

• Copyrights

  • Consumer Law & Policy Blog ☛ Prepared Food Photos Finally Pays for Its Misconduct - CLP Blog

    Since that last blog post, Prepared Food Photos continued to delay the litigation, first through dragged out mediation about which it was never serious, then moving to dismiss the suit while paying only taxable costs, which we successfully opposed on the ground dismissal would deprive Pool World of its entitlement to seek an award of attorney fees. After that motion was denied, Prepared Food Photos stalled on document discovery seeking to show that most of the subscription agreements were entered to settle claims of past infringement. After our motion to compel that discovery was granted, Prepared Food Photos produced financial records that were heavily redacted. The unredacted documents had to be compelled by a motion to enforce the earlier discovery order. Then, on the eve of depositions, they had to be cancelled. the first time because Prepared Food Photos represented that its main witness had had a family crisis that prevented her from traveling, and the second time, three months later, on the ground that its president had been hospitalized. Somehow, there was always a reason why Pool World could not cross-examine PFP’s witnesses.

  • Techdirt ☛ Copyright Troll Backfires: Has To Pay Up To Get Out Of Its Lawsuit Of Lies

    The short version: a copyright troll that has been shaking down small businesses for years with fraudulent claims about its licensing fees just had to pay its own target to make a lawsuit go away. And in the process, Levy has potentially opened the door for hundreds of previous victims to sue for fraud. It’s beautiful. And that’s not even revealing all of the juicy bits.