Leftovers

• Jonathan Dowland ☛ Lavalamps (things that spark joy)

  At some point in the late 90s, my brother and I somehow had 6 lavalamps between us. I'm not sure what happened to them (and the gallery of photos I had of them has long disappeared from my site.)

• Deutsche Welle ☛ Oktoberfest 2025 opens with traditional keg-tapping

  Munich Mayor Dieter Reiter gave the Oktoberfest in the Bavarian capital its traditional launch on Saturday, opening a barrel of beer and marking it with the time-honored phrase "O'zapft is!" (Bavarian for "It is tapped").

• Jason Kottke ☛ A Clock: An Online Remake of Christian Marclay’s The Clock

  Christian Marclay debuted his 24-hour film The Clock 15 years ago. The film is made up of thousands of clips from movies and TV shows that show timepieces or otherwise make reference to the time of day. I’ve seen chunks of it in a few museums & galleries and it’s wonderful.

• Ruben Schade ☛ 10,000 blog posts

  I reached the 20th anniversary of the blog last December, but 10,000 feels like a bigger milestone. I think?

• Lee Peterson ☛ Renewing my domain

  It’s great to have something I like after trying and changing since 2008 in various forms.

• Jim Nielsen ☛ Anti-*: The Things We Do But Not All The Way

  I was reading Chase McCoy’s article “Antibuildings” where he cites Wikipedia’s entry on the term “Antilibrary” which points to another entry about the Japanese concept of Tsundoku, all of which deal with this idea of things we do with intention but that never make it to fruition.

• Science

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Science journalists as brokers of trust

    The picture that emerges is far more fragmented and nuanced—and, above all, strongly context-dependent—than the common narrative would suggest. The journalists described themselves as being in constant negotiation with their audiences, calling themselves "knowledge brokers."

    They also stressed that, in today's science journalism, fact-checking and accuracy must be coupled with political, social, and emotional dimensions and with audience expectations, and they highlighted the need for new co-creative media formats.

• Career/Education

  • Computational Complexity ☛ We can find more papers on the web than we used to. Are we reading them?

    Step 3 can be a problem. I have many website of papers that I never got around to reading. The key for me is to strike while the iron is hot that is, SOON after assembling the papers READ them.

  • Robert Birming ☛ Publish, don’t polish

    But getting the questions in advance is also a nightmare for someone like me. I just want to get things out, then forget about them and move on. Never to look back.

• Proprietary

  • Lee Peterson ☛ Turns out all I needed was an operating system I can’t use to stop me buying a new iPhone

    For years I’ve bought a new iPhone every year or so, since the iPhone 3G I’ve always gotten the new one or the one after. I think the longest I went was iPhone 11 to iPhone 13 Mini. Now, I’m still on on an iPhone 15 Pro until I don’t know when and all it took was Apple releasing iOS 26.

  • Pieter-Jan Briers ☛ DXGI debugging: Microsoft put me on a list

    Microsoft put me on a list, that ships with every Windows install. And this list actually broke my game. Achievement unlocked!

  • Howard Oakley ☛ A brief history of threads and threading

    The original 128K Mac from 1984 came with a single Motorola 68000 processor running at 8 MHz that could only run one app at a time. Yet today’s Macs come with multiple CPU cores that can comfortably run several substantial apps simultaneously, while running a Time Machine backup and other tasks in the background. This brief history outlines the journey between them.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Interesting Engineering ☛ Swedish firm operates Level 4 self-driving electric truck in Europe

      Its safety-validated demonstration, achieved at Port of Antwerp-Bruges, was permitted under the Belgian regulatory framework.

    • Chris Hannah ☛ My Favourite Use Case for AI

      I don't use AI that much when programming. For me, I prefer it to complete little side quests for me than to get involved in my main work.

    • Daniel Lemire ☛ Hard work is a virtue

      But if you just sit there and mindlessly babysit a large language model, where are your new skills going to come from? Where are your deep insights going to come from?

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ Contributor: The [Internet] made us stupid. AI promises to make it worse

      One researcher looked into the “future of critical thinking” in an LLM-saturated environment and found “significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool usage and critical thinking abilities.” The breakdown of critical thinking was due to the obvious factor of the increase in “cognitive offloading” that apps like ChatGPT afford. Instead of staying fit doing hard work, the brain “muscle” atrophies as it allows the machine to carry the load. There were echoes of Carr in the conclusion to the study, which noted that AI dependency can “diminish users’ engagement in deep, reflective thinking processes.” Younger people were found to be particularly vulnerable, exhibiting “lower critical thinking scores compared to older participants.” Kids, teens and young adults, in other words, are the most endangered by the technology. (Think about that, you adults who are making money off peddling and proselytizing tech — you are hurting children.)

    • Dark Reading ☛ ChatGPT 'ShadowLeak' Allows Hackers to Steal Emails

      Researchers at Radware realized the issue earlier this spring, when they figured out a way of stealing anything they wanted from Gmail users who integrate ChatGPT. Not only was their trick devilishly simple, but it left no trace on an end user's network — not even an iota of the suspicious Web traffic typical of data exfiltration attacks. As such, the user had no way of detecting the attack, let alone stopping it.

    • Terence Eden ☛ LLMs are still surprisingly bad at some simple tasks

      This is a pretty simple question to answer. Take two lists and compare them. I know this question is possible to answer because I went through the lists two years ago. Answering the question was a little tedious and subject to my tired human eyes making no mistakes. So surely this is the sort of thing which an LLM excels at, right?

      Wrong!

      Here's how the three big beasts fared.

  • Social Control Media

    • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Kenya’s Gen Z Protest Movement Is Preparing to Govern

      In this conversation, they discuss Sungu’s personal path to politics, the failure of Kenya’s elite-led independence project, the broken promises of the 2010 constitution, and why the post-2022 period has been marked by such sharp disillusionment. They also talk through the class composition of the recent protests, the limits of “Gen Z” as a political category, and what it means to build a left electoral project without falling into the traps of clientelism or cynicism.

    • Tracy Durnell ☛ How aesthetics destroyed privacy and polarized us

      Tech CEOs talk about disrupting markets, but the concept of disruption has been detached from its social meaning: disruptive technologies change us, and our culture.

      Josh Lauer first catalogs how the answering machine transformed our expectations for responsiveness, then steps forward to how the internet intensified the expectations for participation: [...]

    • Atlantic Council ☛ The economic roots of Nepal's uprising—and what it means for the region

      Last week, Nepal became the third South Asian country in three years to see its government collapse under the weight of mass protests. On September 8, after the government banned twenty-six social media platforms, young Nepalis poured into Kathmandu’s streets, furious at what they saw as an attempt to silence criticism. The protests escalated, leaving more than seventy people dead and causing hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of damage. Analysts have rushed to dissect the political intrigue behind the resignation of Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli and the appointment of former Chief Justice Sushila Karki as interim leader.

    • Adam Silver ☛ My response to Hacker News comments

      I read through all the comments on Hacker News and picked my top 5 worth responding to (as each one has a useful design takeaway): [...]

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Register UK ☛ Ransomware attack linked to gold heist at museum

      “Threat actors create spoofed websites often by slightly altering characteristics of legitimate website domains, with the purpose of gathering personally identifiable information entered by a user into the site, including name, home address, phone number, email address, and banking information,” the FBI alert advises. “For example, spoofed website domains may feature alternate spellings of words or use an alternative top-level domain to impersonate a legitimate website.”

    • New York Times ☛ Cyberattack Forces Brussels Airport to Cancel More Flights

      Brussels Airport, which appeared to have been most affected by the disruption, made the decision to cancel the flights, saying it had not been able to confirm that the software used for check-in and boarding systems was “restored and secure.”

    • Court House News ☛ Airport cyberattack disrupts more flights across Europe | Courthouse News Service

      The cyberattack affected software of Collins Aerospace, whose systems help passengers check in, print boarding passes and bag tags, and dispatch their luggage. The U.S.-based company on Saturday cited a “cyber-related disruption” to its software at “select” airports in Europe.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ [Crackers] attack Europe’s automatic flight check-in systems — flight delayed and cancelled after Collins cyberattack

      A cyberattack on Collins Aerospace brought parts of Europe’s airport infrastructure to its knees this weekend, after a backend outage hit the company's cloud-based check-in system and knocked out self-service kiosks across multiple major hubs. The software in question — Collins’ common-use MUSE platform — powers many airports’ passenger processing stacks, allowing airlines to share check-in desks, kiosks, and boarding infrastructure through a single backend. On Saturday, that single point of failure failed.

    • India Times ☛ Airport cyberattack disrupts more flights across Europe

      On Saturday, the aviation and defense technology company said in a statement that it was working to resolve the issue: "The impact is limited to electronic customer check-in and baggage drop and can be mitigated with manual check-in operations."

• Security

  • Confidentiality

    • Nicolas Fränkel ☛ Privacy for subdomains: the problem

      I recently learned about a new way to leak your privacy, and it’s a scary one. Before going further, know that I’m not a network engineer: perhaps if you work in this field, you’ve known it for your whole career, but it’s quite new to me. Let me share my findings, and you can judge for yourself.

      Since the original post was quite lengthy, I have broken it down into two installments: the problem and the solution.

• Defence/Aggression

  • India Times ☛ China's ByteDance will get 1 of 7 board seats for TikTok's US operations, official says

    A U.S.-China agreement on TikTok's U.S. operations includes China's ByteDance choosing one of seven board members for the new entity, with Americans holding the six other seats, a senior White House official said on Saturday.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Trump Might Be Losing His Race Against Time

    Autocracies are headed by one man but require the cooperation of many others. Some collaborators may sincerely share the autocrat’s goals, but opportunists provide a crucial margin of support. In the United States, such people now have to make a difficult calculation: Do the present benefits of submitting to Trump’s will outweigh the future hazards?

  • The Verge ☛ Trump’s H-1B visa fee isn’t just about immigration, it’s about fealty

    In short, it seems like the Secretary of Homeland Security can exempt any person, company, or even an entire industry from the travel restrictions and the $100,000 at their (or more likely, the president’s) discretion. It’s this carveout that betrays a major purpose of the proclamation.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ HK disposes of 1,000-lb WWII-era bomb after 1000s evacuated

    Officers of the Police Explosive Ordnance Disposal Bureau confirmed the bomb was a “cylindrical American aerial bomb from World War II, approximately 150 centimetres in length, weighing about 1,000 pounds and containing 500 pounds of high explosives, posing a significant danger,” according to a Saturday press release.

  • Deccan Chronicle ☛ WWII Bomb Prompts Mass Evacuation in Hong Kong

    Police said the bomb was 1.5 metres in length and weighed about 1,000 pounds (450 kilograms). It was discovered by construction workers in Quarry Bay, a bustling residential and business district on the west side of Hong Kong Island.

  • Vintage Everyday ☛ Portraits of Hannie Schaft, Who Became the Nazi’s Most Wanted Woman in the Netherlands During World War II

    Hannie Schaft (full name: Jannetje Johanna Schaft, September 16, 1920 – April 17, 1945) was a Dutch resistance fighter during World War II whose bravery made her one of the most famous symbols of anti-Nazi resistance in the Netherlands. Known as “the Girl with the Red Hair” (Het meisje met het rode haar), she became a national heroine after the war and remains a powerful figure of courage, sacrifice, and defiance.

  • The Independent UK ☛ German and Swedish fighter jets track Russian plane over Baltic Sea

    Two Swedish Gripen and two German Eurofighter jets were deployed into international airspace to track the Russian IL-20 reconnaissance plane. The aircraft had been flying without providing a flight path or establishing radio contact, according to air force officials from both countries.

  • RFERL ☛ How NATO Is Boosting Eastern Defenses Amid Russian Air Incursions

    While the immediate focus was on Russia drones and geographically on Poland, the operation is multidomain -- meaning land, sea, and air forces are involved -- and is meant to plug gaps from the North Sea to the Black Sea.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Insight Hungary ☛ EU set to unlock €550m for Hungary to secure Russian sanctions

      The European Commission plans to release around €550 million in EU funds to Hungary to prevent Viktor Orbán from vetoing sanctions on Russian energy imports, the Financial Times reported.

      On Friday, EU member states' ambassadors discussed the sanctions package proposed by the Commission, which would ban Russian LNG imports from January 2027. Only eight EU countries currently import Russian LNG: Belgium, France, Greece, the Netherlands, Hungary, Portugal, Spain, and Slovakia.

• Environment

  • Greece ☛ ‘Ditch the car, use public transport,’ consumer group urges

    It is an opportunity, the group said in an announcement, “to reflect on the environmental impact of car use and to promote alternative means of transportation that are friendlier to both the environment and our health.”

  • Omicron Limited ☛ UN chief warns 1.5C warming goal at risk of 'collapsing'

    The climate goals for 2035 of the countries that signed the Paris Agreement, also known as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), were initially expected several months ago.

    However, uncertainties related to geopolitical tensions and trade rivalries have slowed the process.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Joey Hess ☛ A cheap DIY solar fence design

      Solar fencing manufacturers have some good simple designs, but it's hard to buy for a small installation. They are selling to utility scale solar mostly. And those are installed by driving metal beams into the ground, which requires heavy machinery.

      Since I have experience with Ironridge rails for roof mount solar, I decided to adapt that system for a vertical mount. Which is something it was not designed for. I combined the Ironridge hardware with regular parts from the hardware store.

      The cost of mounting solar panels nowadays is often higher than the cost of the panels. I hoped to match the cost, and I nearly did. The solar panels cost $100 each, and the fence cost $110 per solar panel. This fence was significantly cheaper than conventional ground mount arrays that I considered as alternatives, and made a better use of a difficult hillside location.

      I used 7 foot long Ironridge XR-10 rails, which fit 2 solar panels per rail. (Longer rails would need a center post anyway, and the 7 foot long rails have cheaper shipping, since they do not need to be shipped freight.)

  • Overpopulation

    • Connor Tumbleson ☛ People are Everywhere

      If I head to work early - cars everywhere. If I head to trivia after work and head home late at 9pm - cars everywhere. If a Sunday morning creeps past 9am - cars everywhere. Sometimes I just don't understand where everyone is going. Sure I'm just another driver myself, but at 7:50am when I'm rolling into a park for a run and I'm 40 cars deep at a stoplight I'm just curious what everyone else is doing.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Ignacio Brasca ☛ Institutions Have Failed

    Now, while watching All the President’s Men, I realized something I notice often from movies of the ’70s: people were getting shit done, and while they were doing this, the “system” worked. For bad and for good, of course… Inequality wasn’t that bad either way, and it was possible to make your way through life.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Variety ☛ John Oliver Slams Jimmy Kimmel Suspension: Disney Must Say No to Trump

    “But I will say this,” he continued. “If we’ve learned nothing else from this administration’s second term so far, and I don’t think we have, is that giving the bully your lunch money doesn’t make him go away. It just makes him come back hungrier each time. They are never going to stop. They’ve literally said that openly. After Kimmel’s suspension, Trump posted, ‘That leaves Jimmy and Seth, two total losers on fake news NBC. Their ratings are also horrible. Do it, NBC.’ And [FCC chairman Brendan] Carr hinted that ‘The View’ might be next. The fucking ‘View!’ Look, at some point you’re going to have to draw a line. So I’d argue, why not draw it right here? And when they come to you with stupid ridiculous demands, picking fights that you know you could win in court instead of rolling over, why not stand up and use four key words they don’t tend to teach you in business school. Not ‘OK, you’re the boss.’ Not ‘Whatever you say goes.’ But instead, the only phrase that can genuinely make a weak bully go away. And that is, ‘Fuck you, make me.'”

  • New York Times ☛ In Assault on Free Speech, Trump Targets Speech He Hates

    When threatening government action against those who anger him, Mr. Trump can be strikingly transparent about what is driving him. He talks regularly about how journalists, commentators and political actors should not be “allowed” to be so harsh toward him. Having installed a partisan ally to run the F.B.I., he muses openly about which political critics he would like to see investigated.

  • New Yorker ☛ How Donald Trump’s Culture-Wars Playbook Felled Jimmy Kimmel

    The story of Kimmel’s suspension isn’t a straightforward one. Bob Iger, the C.E.O. of Disney, which owns ABC, and Dana Walden, the studio’s TV chief, chose to put the show on ice after two major local-station groups, Nexstar and Sinclair, refused to air it. (Sinclair, a conservative conglomerate, went so far as to demand that the host apologize to Kirk’s family and make a donation to his organization, Turning Point USA.) Kimmel was reportedly prepared to address the furor on air; Disney executives pulled the show instead. Donald Trump, who’d called for ABC to drop Kimmel as far back as 2018, crowed, inaccurately, on Truth Social that it had been “CANCELLED,” and suggested that Kimmel’s fellow late-night hosts Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers should be ousted, too. An emboldened Carr indicated that he would train his sights on ABC’s daytime talk show “The View”—another thorn in Trump’s side—next.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • France24 ☛ Foreign journalists under pressure as Trump plans to slash visas

    With the administration planning to slash correspondent visas and issuing not-so-veiled warnings, foreign journalists find themselves under pressure in the United States.

    Earlier this week, a journalist from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation asked Trump about his business dealings while in office. Trump was visibly irritated.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Chinese citizen journalist Zhang Zhan reportedly sentenced to jail in new case

    In the new case, Zhang Zhan was detained in August 2024 on allegations of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” — a charge routinely used by authorities to suppress dissent.

    Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said the 42-year-old was arrested “following her reporting on human rights abuses by the Chinese regime”.

  • Deseret Media ☛ Trump's Pentagon says press must agree not to disclose sensitive information

    The move was quickly condemned by media organizations, including the New York Times, Reuters, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal. The head of the National Press Club in Washington, which advocates for a free press, said it was a "direct assault" on independent journalism.

  • International Business Times ☛ Reporters Warn of 'Censorship' as Pentagon Threatens to Strip Credentials Over New Restrictions

    The Pentagon, rebranded by Donald Trump's administration as the Department of War, has rolled out sweeping new rules for journalists. Reporters covering the building in Washington must now sign pledges not to publish material without prior clearance, even if the information is unclassified.

    Those who defy the directive risk losing their credentials and being barred from access.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Rolling Stone ☛ ICE Is Deporting People to Africa on Military Flights

    Two American military cargo jets deported people to Africa this month on flights that appear to have had their transponders turned off, obscuring their locations from public flight databases and other nearby aircraft.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ I Came, I Typed, I Downloaded - How a Pirate Librarian Became an FBI Target

    Online piracy is in the midst of an identity crisis. Sites born with one name tend to discard them quite quickly, before adopting a series of others, hoping to stay one step ahead of the law. Site operators, meanwhile, no longer court the gaze of the media, certainly not under their real names while revealing their future piracy plans. In 2010, things were somewhat different; once considered a public good, sharing books today can trigger an FBI investigation.