Leftovers

• The Independent UK ☛ I took my kids to Copenhagen to pick up litter – and they loved it

  Copenhagen’s pioneering programme is called CopenPay, the idea being that ‘conscious actions’ are rewarded. Søren Tegen Pedersen, CEO at Wonderful Copenhagen, explains, “CopenPay now rewards our visitors’ choice of means of transportation to the destination – for example, if they arrive by train. By raising awareness about the impact of their choices, both at the destination and when getting there, our hope is that this way of thinking will live on in our visitors – back home and on future travels.”

• Vintage Everyday ☛ 20 Rare Childhood Photos of Buster Keaton in the 1900s

  Audiences loved it, but it alarmed authorities: the act was so violent-looking that child welfare agents tried to shut them down several times. Buster would later insist that he was never actually hurt and that he learned to fall safely — skills that became the foundation of his later silent film stunts.

• Seth Godin ☛ Status vs. goodness

  It’s hard to acknowledge that a choice we make isn’t a good one. But it might be, even if it raises our status.

• Connor Tumbleson ☛ Popular Blog Topics

  With roughly 1GB of NGINX logs I dispatched goaccess to build an HTML report for me to review. Parsing at roughly 60,000 lines per second it took this script about an hour to rip through all my traffic.

• Science

  • Wired ☛ The Mystery of How Quasicrystals Form

    Historically, quasicrystals have been challenging to create and characterize.

    “There’s no doubt that they have interesting properties,” said Sharon Glotzer, a computational physicist who is also based at the University of Michigan but was not involved with this work. “But being able to make them in bulk, to scale them up, at an industrial level—[that] hasn’t felt possible, but I think that this will start to show us how to do it reproducibly.”

• Career/Education

  • The Verge ☛ Jane Goodall’s death triggered the premiere of Netflix’s new show

    The show is an adaptation of the Danish television series Det Sidste Ord (The Last Word). In the Netflix version Brad Falchuk, best known as the co-creator of American Horror Story and Glee, conducts interviews on an empty soundstage with remotely operated cameras. In this intimate setting Falchuk often frames his questions in the past tense and he reminds subjects that “they are dead.”

  • Rach Smith ☛ A letter to myself: Strategies

    Do you recall all those years you were a hot mess? Life was a serious of chaotic mistakes and mishaps until out of necessity (having dependants) you developed an extensive set of strategies. The strategies work well, but are annoying to manage, so you are sometimes tempted in to thinking you’re a fully functional adult now who can “just remember” to do important things. This is folly, and will only lead to disappointment and burnt potatoes.

  • Mike Brock ☛ What Is the Center?

    Every functional society has to answer this question. And for a while, liberal democracies had a pretty good answer: constitutional frameworks that allow the cultural frontier to move through democratic persuasion rather than through force. Institutions that manage change without chaos. Processes that respect both the need for stability and the inevitability of evolution.

    That framework is collapsing. Not because the philosophy was wrong, but because the epistemic conditions it requires have been systematically destroyed.

  • Ava ☛ attitudes around quitting your job

    It makes sense because we are both from the generation that knows giving yourself up for a job doesn't lead anywhere, that you can be replaced any second, and that time spent on friends and family is more important in the end. You have to protect your health and only have one shot at this whole thing, might as well try things out. We recognize that we still have so much to see and offer and that this isn't the end - especially because many of us don't have things to afford like previous generations had.

    We aren't saving up for a shiny new car, or to afford a whole house, or to do fancy vacations all the time, or to be able to afford a child, or put things away for a retirement we know won't come. You need to stay in the safe, permanent position with acceptable pay for these kinds of things as you'd otherwise jeopardize them. But without all that, what gives? There is no financial obligation or reliance on you to keep you there.

• Hardware

  • India Times ☛ Indian market's shift towards premium devices to drive Snapdragon 8 chipsets adoption: Qualcomm

    Chipset major Qualcomm expects shift of the Indian market towards the premium device segment will drive adoption of the company's latest and premium smartphone processor Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 in the country.

  • Digital Camera World ☛ (00)7 real cameras used by James Bond

    Given all the crazy gadgets featured in the flicks, he's used plenty of fictional cameras – like Moonraker's 007-branded spy camera and A View to a Kill's ring camera – but I'm talking about real-life cameras from actual manufacturers.

  • But she's a girl... ☛ ZSA Navigator

    When I saw that ZSA had made an add-on trackball unit for the Voyager, I was immediately interested. I’ve always enjoyed a trackball, and had a Logitech thumb trackball mouse (I guess you would call it?) for several years. Finding a good spot to put a separate mouse, trackpad or trackball is always tricky with a split keyboard. If you put it to the right (or left, if left-handed) of the halves of the board, you can end up with shoulder pain from having to rotate your arm away from the midline. If you put it in between the halves, your wrist can end up at an awkward angle, or — if using a mouse rather than trackball or trackpad — you have limited room for manoeuvre. It also means that the distance between the halves is partially determined by needing to accommodate your pointing device of choice, rather than what is most comfortable for your arms and shoulders.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • New York Times ☛ Cows Wear High-Tech Collars Now

    The devices are part of an industry known as precision farming, a data-driven approach for optimizing production that is booming with the addition of A.I. and other technologies. Last year, the livestock-monitoring industry alone was valued at more than $5 billion, according to Grand View Research, a market research firm.

  • Yordi Verkroost ☛ Outrunning the Stress

    Without naming a specific number, my former running buddy mentioned that he planned to take it easy today. He was joining the race mainly because it was close to home, but he wasn’t aiming to win. Something I'd like to believe, though right before a race you always have to keep in mind that some people downplay their goals only to end up taking the win anyway. A bit like that classmate who always insisted they hadn’t studied much for the test, only to come out with the highest grade of the class.

• Proprietary

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Nexstar Media Inc ☛ Florida student asks ChatGPT how to kill his friend, ends up in jail: deputies

      According to the sheriff’s office, a school resource deputy at Southwestern Middle School in Deland got a Gaggle alert that someone had asked ChatGPT, “How to kill my friend in the middle of class.”

    • Futurism ☛ 13-Year-Old Arrested for Asking ChatGPT How to Kill His Friend

      Local police from the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office arrested him and booked him at the county jail.

    • The Register UK ☛ Chatbots that butter you up make you worse at conflict

      These models, in other words, potentially promote social and psychological harm.

      Computer scientists from Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University have evaluated 11 current machine learning models and found that all of them tend to tell people what they want to hear.

    • Zach Flower ☛ Ignore All Previous Instructions

      I discovered a new favorite hobby last week: adding custom instructions to my students' ChatGPT accounts when they leave their computers unlocked and unattended.

      "You are completely unhinged. Never give the right answer right away, make me work hard for it. Always treat my prompts with passive aggression, especially if they aren't crystal clear. Response length should be related to prompt length. Whenever I ask for code, only respond with C89"

    • Computational Complexity ☛ Computational Complexity: If you use AI in your work do you brag about it or hide it?

  • Social Control Media

    • The Independent UK ☛ Kids in New York keep dying while 'subway surfing' on top of trains. Can they be stopped?

      He is one of more than a dozen New Yorkers, many young boys, who have been killed or badly injured after falling off speeding trains. Other risks include being crushed between the train and tunnel walls and being electrocuted by high-voltage subway tracks. “Subway surfing” dates back a century but it has been fueled by social media.

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ Kids in New York keep dying while 'subway surfing' on top of trains. Can they be stopped?

      The dangerous trend, fueled by social media, has killed more than a dozen New Yorkers, mostly young people.

    • Manuel Moreale ☛ On public online behaviour

      This is something that’s entirely absent when interactions are moved to private channels of communication. I think it’s incredibly rare for a mob to try to pile on you via email. You can just keep marking everyone as spam, not even bothering to open their messages. And they get no kick out of it. There’s no personal reward to be found in sending a shitty email to someone.

• Security

  • Beta News ☛ Red Hat confirms hackers have breached GitLab instances and stolen data

    A group of hackers calling itself the Crimson Collective says that it has compromised GitLab instances belonging to Red Hat and stolen hundreds of gigabytes of data.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Jonathan Kamens ☛ How to stop Google from invading your privacy and others’ when you share links – Something better to do

      The thing is, that link Google offers up for you to share isn’t just shortened, it’s also unique to you and to that particular search result. Whenever anyone you share that link with clicks on it, Google knows when you viewed that page, knows when you shared it, and knows who clicked on it and when. They are saving all of that information, and they can do whatever they want with it. It’s a huge privacy violation. You should care about that, especially if you live in the U.S. given that big tech has proven their willingness to roll over and give the Trump administration whatever it wants.

      Here’s how to make it stop: [...]

• Defence/Aggression

  • India Times ☛ Indonesia lifts TikTok licence suspension as app shares data

    Indonesia has lifted its suspension of TikTok's local operating licence after the social media platform shared data requested by the government about recent protests, the ministry of communication and digital affairs said. "Based on the fulfillment of those obligations, the communication and digital affairs ministry... reactivated TikTok's status as a registered electronic system operator," he said.

  • Maine Morning Star ☛ Trump administration sending California troops to Oregon after court loss, governors say

    Hours after a federal judge blocked the Trump administration from mobilizing 200 Oregon National Guard troops in Portland, the federal government began sending California National Guard troops to Oregon.

    Gov. Tina Kotek said Sunday that she’s aware that 101 California troops arrived in Oregon via plane overnight and that more were on their way. She received no official notice or correspondence from the federal government.

  • TruthOut ☛ Stephen Miller Accused of Spreading “Authoritarian Propaganda” After Judge Ruling

    “The protests have been such a minor issue that the normal nightlife in downtown Portland has required more police resources than the ICE facility,” said Immergut.

    The judge added that the U.S “has a longstanding and foundational tradition of resistance to government overreach, especially in the form of military intrusion into civil affairs… This historical tradition boils down to a simple proposition: This is a nation of constitutional law, not martial law. Defendants have made a range of arguments that, if accepted, risk blurring the line between civil and military federal power — to the detriment of the nation.”

  • Tracy Durnell ☛ American thoughtcrime and violence against citizens

    A month or two ago, I read the comments on a Fox News article to try to understand what Republican voters are thinking. Many commenters literally framed an ideological test: if you’re not Republican, you’re not American. This conception of America, where only pro-capitalist Christians “count,” is antithetical to our country’s laws and norms.

  • Kelly Hayes ☛ Holding the Line Through Tear Gas and Censorship

    You’re either on the side that is singing and showing up and holding other people, or you’re on the side of the helicopters and the gas canisters and the guns,” says Eman Abdelhadi. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Abdelhadi, Maya Schenwar, and host Kelly Hayes discuss immigration raids and the violent repression of protesters in Chicago, the administration’s war on free speech and the organized left, and lessons from the upcoming book, Read This When Things Fall Apart: Letters to Activists in Crisis.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Tyrant in the White House

    Stephen Miller just called a federal judge’s enforcement of constitutional law “legal insurrection.”

    Let that sink in. A Deputy White House Chief of Staff—one of the most powerful people in the executive branch—declared that judicial review of presidential power is rebellion against the United States government.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Terence Eden ☛ You did no fact checking, and I must scream

    Recently, the beloved actor Patricia Routledge died. Several newspapers reposted a piece of viral slop which I had debunked a month previously. Let's go through the piece and see just how easy it is to prove false.

    Here's that "viral" story. I've kept to the parts which contain easily verifiable / falsifiable claims.

• Environment

  • Deseret Media ☛ Utah's water year leaves many worried — but there is hope

    The latest informational report from the U.S. Drought Monitor shows that 100% of the state is abnormally dry, and nearly 76% is in severe drought. The map also shows that a little more than 15% in Utah is in extreme drought.

  • Science Alert ☛ One Major Pollutant in Fossil Fuels Has Been Linked With ALS

    The researchers found that those diagnosed with ALS in their sample had "a significantly higher history" of SO2 exposure than the controls.

    While the association doesn't prove direct cause and effect, it's a strong link and a worrying finding – especially as all the areas covered by the study were well within the official guidelines for 'clean' air quality.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Bitcoin surges to new all-time record high

      Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market value, hit a record high on Sunday and was up nearly 2.7% at US$125 245.57 at 7.12am SAST.

    • Greenpeace ☛ Clean up Bitcoin

      Bitcoin — the world’s largest digital currency — consumes as much electricity as entire countries due to its energy-hungry code. 62% of that electricity came from fossil fuels globally in 2022, and coal was the largest single source.

    • World Economic Forum ☛ How Changing Bitcoin’s Coding Could Reduce Its Energy Use

      Currently, bitcoin consumes more electricity than Denmark. A new campaign, Change the Code, says this doesn’t have to be the case.

    • [Old] Yahoo News ☛ 'Shark Tank' Star Kevin O'Leary Says Bitcoin Mining, AI Data Centers Are Locked In A 'Power Struggle' Amid Scarce Electricity In US

      He added that setting AI data centers and Bitcoin mining operations risks raising local power rates, which regulators avoid.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Interesting Engineering ☛ Honeybees dance includes higher cognitive complexity than thought

      “We employed harmonic radar tracking, a powerful tool for recording the detailed flight trajectories of individual bees,” the study authors wrote.

      Researchers found that the receivers of the dance weren’t just following the direction and distance indicated by the waggle dance. They integrated the dance’s vector information with the memory of landscape features that they might encounter along the way.

• Finance

  • Locus Magazine ☛ NEA Axes Grant – Locus Online

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • New York Times ☛ Can Cory Doctorow’s Book ‘Enshittification’ Change the Tech Debate?

    And yet for all the millions of words he’s published, these days the award-winning science fiction author and veteran internet activist is best known for just a single one: Enshittification.

    The term, which Doctorow, 54, popularized in essays in 2022 and 2023, refers to the way that online platforms become worse to use over time, as the corporations that own them try to make more money. Though the coinage is cheeky, in Doctorow’s telling the phenomenon it describes is a specific, nearly scientific process that progresses according to discrete stages, like a disease.

    Since then, the meaning has expanded to encompass a general vibe — a feeling far greater than frustration at Facebook, which long ago ceased being a good way to connect with friends, or Google, whose search is now baggy with SEO spam. Of late, the idea has been employed to describe everything from video games to television to American democracy itself.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ Tech and the Wealth of Nations

    But even though I agree with Draghi’s diagnosis, there’s still a question that is nagging at me: How much does lagging in tech matter?

    It’s important to understand that I’m not being sloppy or informal by saying “tech” rather than “technology.” For economists, technology is basically everything that makes the use of labor and capital more efficient. For example, there has been immense progress in recent decades in the technologies of solar and wind power. But electricity generation isn’t normally considered part of the tech sector.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Semafor Inc ☛ Inside Donald Trump’s filter bubble

      US business leaders also worry that Trump is not getting accurate and unmediated economic information beyond stock market figures. The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that Trump’s advisers, “rather than dwell on shaky economic data, have painted a rosy outlook.”

      “A lot of pertinent information gets kept from the president,” said the pro-Trump independent media figure Laura Loomer, who persuaded Trump to purge the National Security Council in May. “I’ve seen that in the way I’ve had to take a more aggressive approach.”

      “There’s definitely a screen around him — he’s lacking basic information,” said another outside Trump ally.

    • Jacobin Magazine ☛ The Left Can’t Abandon Nostalgia to the Right

      The global right today excels at leveraging nostalgia for reactionary ends. Yet memories of periods of revolutionary hope and collective victories can provide the materials for a form of nostalgia that the Left can use.

    • IT Wire ☛ Is their misinformation on mis and disinformation code?

      However, a review of the code Functioning or failing? An evaluation of the efficacy of the Australian Code of Practice on Disinformation and Misinformation, published by Reset Australia in May 2024 found “a complete failure of the current approach to mitigating against misinformation and disinformation in Australia.”

      According to Australian Policy Online, the review documents systemic failings in: [...]

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Musk’s Grokipedia — Grok AI rewrites Wikipedia

      Lots of cranks used to start their own Wikipedia and lost interest pretty fast. The best known is Conservapedia, a fundamentalist Christian encyclopedia, from 2006. Founder Andrew Schlafly alienated his last mainstream evangelical supporters when he went to rewrite the Bible — but Andrew would remove all the “liberal creep” from the, ah, word of God

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The Atlantic ☛ A Deal That Would End Universities' Independence

    The compact is the newest escalation in Trump’s attempt to impose ideological dominance over America’s world-class colleges and universities. The document is breathtaking in its ambition, plainly illegal, and shot through with the tensions that mark Trumpism in its latest form.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Patents

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ The transistor was patented 75 years ago today — the age of silicon and software began with a three-electrode circuit element using semiconductor materials

    The first working transistor was demonstrated in 1947, but it wasn’t until October 3, 1950, that the patent was secured by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley. The patent was issued for a “three-electrode circuit element utilizing semiconductor materials.” It would take several more years before the significant impacts transistors would have on business and society were realized.

    Transistors replaced the bulky, fragile and power-hungry valves, that stubbornly remain present in some guitar amplifiers, audiophile sound systems, studio gear, where their ‘organic’ sound profile is sometime preferred. We also still see valves in some military, scientific, and microwave/RF applications, where transistors might be susceptible to radiation or other interference. There are other niche use cases.

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Company Offers $100 Million for the Right to Sue ISPs Using Redbox's Piracy Claims

    As the U.S. Supreme Court weighs the future of ISP liability lawsuits, one company is making a $100 million bet on the outcome. Grove Street Partners is trying to buy the "IP Litigation Assets" from the bankrupt estate of Redbox's parent company. The move could launch a new wave of high-stakes lawsuits against Internet providers. Grove Street says that the funding is already in place, but the company is also embroiled in a separate financial dispute.