Leftovers

• Seth Godin ☛ Living in ghost cities

  But I’m not writing about cities here. It’s a useful metaphor for software, online networks and the tools we use to do our jobs and live our digital lives.

• Cryptography.doc OÜ ☛ Algorithmic Sabotage Debrief

  I wanted to respond to some of that feedback, both the supportive and the critical. That said, I don't plan to spend nearly as much time editing this as I normally would, so you an expect a more casual tone.

• Andre Franca ☛ Same Blog, New Domain

  It's been a while since I've shared some behind-the-scenes updates here, and today I have an important one. After much thought and preparation, I've decided to move this website from abf.li to a new home at afranca.com.br

• Annie Mueller ☛ Who’s in charge here anyway

  If you just memorize and obey the rules of the system — any system — you’re not running the system. The system’s running you.

• Science

  • Terence Eden ☛ Political Experiments

    The experiment was a success. Not because it reduced his case-load and allowed a tech company to profit from misery. But because it taught him (and others) the limitations of technology. It shows exactly what doesn't work. If a person can't understand where the boundaries are, they'll never learn how to successfully master anything.

• Career/Education

  • Arduino ☛ Arduino heads to Embedded World North America 2025 – join us at booth #5061

    We’ll be co-exhibiting at booth #5061 with Edge Impulse and Foundries.io, our “sister companies” within the Qualcomm Technologies family. The event is our first time joining forces on the same show floor, and a great opportunity to see how our ecosystems can work together to support innovation at every level – from edge AI to connected infrastructure to secure operating systems.

• Hardware

  • Jon Udell ☛ Release the Kraken!

    As amazing as these miniatures are, I might not have made the visit just to see them. The tractor beam that pulled me in was the special exhibit of Ray Harryhausen’s orginal animatronic models and drawings. Here’s the Kraken from Clash of the Titans.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Pete Brown ☛ The few days a year when anyone cares about the changing of the clocks

    I have mostly been of the opinion that I do not really care all that much about it being dark in the morning (I’m going to be groggy from being awake earlier than I would prefer anyway, so who cares whether or not it’s light out?) and would rather have the extra light in the evening, and so the change back to Standard time has always felt like a disappointment. This year, though, I am kind of liking the light in the morning and I don’t mind the sun setting earlier. Maybe it’s something like what Reeves says about “it brings the night closer.”

  • Idiomdrottning ☛ Being an unplug weirdo to not be a FOSS weirdo

    Maybe I won’t ever be able to sustainably capture the “offline mindset” in my day-to-day and I’ll always just succumb to procrastination and temptation but I dunno. Gonna keep pushing on just a little bit longer.

• Proprietary

  • CRN ☛ Amazon Layoffs Hit Managers, Software Engineers, Scientists And Recruiters

    From senior program managers and principal designers to applied scientists and software engineers, Amazon’s 14,000 layoff round is affecting employees across the board at the $720 billion tech giant.

    CRN reviewed dozens of LinkedIn posts by recently fired Amazon employees as well as the company’s recent filings with the Washington Employment Security Department, which showed over 2,300 layoffs being conducted inside the tech giant’s home state of Washington.

    “After more than 7 incredible years at Amazon—across 3 countries, launching new businesses, and building high-performing teams—I was recently impacted by the company’s latest layoffs,” said a now former Amazon Senior Program and Operations Manager on LinkedIn.

  • 10 major companies that just announced massive layoffs

    The job market right now is about as welcoming as a porcupine at a balloon party. While economists have been throwing around that “no hire, no fire” phrase like it’s some kind of comfort, the reality is that pink slips are flying faster than conspiracy theories on your uncle’s Facebook feed.

    Between Trump’s tariff tantrum, AI’s relentless march forward, and companies suddenly discovering they have “too many layers” (a polite way of saying “we hired too many people during the pandemic”), workers across America are scanning job boards with the same anxiety they reserve for checking their 401(k) during a market crash.

  • The Verge ☛ I tested 30 smart locks, and these are the best

    I install each lock on one of four exterior doors and use it daily for at least a week. I evaluate the ease of installation and setup, including adding codes and registering biometrics such as fingerprints, faces, or palms. I connect the locks to various smart home platforms and test integrations through automations and routines. I assess all control methods offered — physical keys, codes, biometrics, Home Key, and auto-lock/unlock — checking for speed and reliability. I test remote features like app control, code sharing, and platform integrations.Design, aesthetics, and how the lock pairs with devices like video doorbells are also considered. I test accessories like external keypads and any unique features offered. For battery life, I estimate the duration based on performance during my testing window and conduct long-term testing on top picks.

  • Tim Bray ☛ Bye, Google Search

    The problem · Well, I mean, Google is definitely Part Of The Problem in advertising, surveillance, and Internet search. But the problem I’m talking about is that it just couldn’t find my pages, even when I knew they were here and knew words that should find them.

    Either it dropped the entries from the index or dropped a bunch of search terms. Don’t know and don’t care now. ongoing is my outboard memory and I search it all the freaking time. This failure mode was making me crazy.

  • Ayer ☛ Google Just Suspended My Company's Google Cloud Account for the Third Time

    On each of the last two Fridays, Google has suspended SSLMate's Google Cloud access without notification, having previously suspended it in 2024 without notification. But this isn't just another cautionary tale about using Google Cloud Platform; it's also a story about usable security and how Google's capriciousness is forcing me to choose between weakening security or reducing usability.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • 404 Media ☛ arXiv Changes Rules After Getting Spammed With AI-Generated 'Research' Papers

      Because of an onslaught of AI-generated research [sic], specifically in the computer science (CS) section, arXiv is going to limit which papers can be published. “In the past few years, arXiv has been flooded with papers,” arXiv said in a press release. “Generative AI / large language models have added to this flood by making papers—especially papers not introducing new research results—fast and easy to write.”

    • 404 Media ☛ Kodak Quietly Begins Directly Selling Kodak Gold and Ultramax Film Again

      Kodak quietly acknowledged Monday that it will begin selling two famous types of film stock—Kodak Gold 200 and Kodak Ultramax 400—directly to retailers and distributors in the U.S., another indication that the historic company is taking back control over how people buy its film.

    • Sean Goedecke ☛ Is it worrying that 95% of AI enterprise projects fail?

      In July of this year, MIT NANDA released a report called The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025. The report spends most of its time giving advice about how to run enterprises AI projects, but the item that got everybody talking was its headline stat: 95% of organizations are getting zero return from their AI projects.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ MIT releases, then quietly removes, nonsense AI cybersecurity paper

      Safe Security — the customer for this paper — have spent since April touting the paper around as solid science from MIT you can totally rely on. It turns out the paper’s got a few problems.

      The estimable Kevin Beaumont noted the paper’s problems in a thread on Mastodon last Wednesday, and in a blog post today: [...]

    • Pavel Zolotarevskiy ☛ you don't need anubis

      But here’s the thing: Anubis doesn’t work. Well, alright, it does - it can be a good DDoS protection solution, especially for people who don’t want to use Cloudflare. But it seems like most users of Anubis don’t need DDoS protection - only protection agaist agressive LLM scrapers. And if that’s your only usecase, you probably don’t need Anubis.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Register UK ☛ Palantir CEO celebrates one cash culture to rule them all

      The company, named for an Elvish video conferencing system hacked by the evil Sauron in The Lord of the Rings, reported $1.2 billion in revenue for the quarter, a 63 percent increase from a year earlier.

    • The Register UK ☛ Xi Jinping jokes about backdoors in Xiaomi smartphones

      Backdoors, however, are no laughing matter. Xi surely knows that one reason liberal democracies have shunned China’s top telecoms firms Huawei and ZTE is fears that their devices allow Beijing to snoop on users.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Faction They Could No Longer Control

    Dinesh D’Souza calling Tucker Carlson’s platforming of white nationalist Nick Fuentes a “shitshow” isn’t the discovery of racism in Republican ranks. It’s the discovery that the racist faction Republicans have tolerated for votes is no longer under their control.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Meduza ☛ Russia charges woman who adopted Mariupol teenager with child trafficking. Yes, you read that right. Also, Belgium eases Russian asset unfreezing while stalling Europe’s ‘reparations loan.’ — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Russian clients living in the E.U. struggle to regain banking access after fintech company Revolut freezes accounts — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Russia’s city of shadows Alexey Titarenko’s photos use long exposure to capture the ‘infernal’ atmosphere of 1990s St. Petersburg — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Will Russia invade the E.U.? Meduza’s military analysts answer readers’ biggest questions about the war — Meduza

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • University of Toronto ☛ My GPS bike computer is less distracting than the non-computer option

    I have a GPS bike computer primarily for following pre-planned routes, because it became a better supported option than our old paper cue sheets. One of the benefits of switching to from paper cue sheets to a GPS unit was better supported route following, but after I made the switch, I found that it was also less distracting than using paper cue sheets. On the surface this might sound paradoxical, since people often say that computer screens are more distracting. It's true that a GPS bike computer has a lot that you can look at, but for route following, a GPS bike computer also has features that let me not pay attention to it.

  • Computational Complexity ☛ Computational Complexity: Did Euclid exist? Is it okay to quote people that did not exist?

    The following excerpt from Abrahim Ladha's comment on Lance's post about AI and intro theory caught my attention: [...]

• Environment

  • The Revelator ☛ Studies: Extreme Weather Fueled by Climate Change Is Adding to Bird Declines

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Gabriel ☛ It doesn’t matter how I slice it...

    Again, I can’t point out the reason why, I mean, the more I think about it, I think it’s 75% boredom and 25% ecosystem lock-in. I do not care about their political spending and lobbying, at least not as much. Everybody does it, and we should stop holding these multimillion-dollar companies to any high standards whatsoever. There is no lesser evil; there is just evil.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • André Machado ☛ Grokpedia and the Betrayal of Open Knowledge

      Grokpedia positions itself as the future of reference media by promising instant answers synthesized by proprietary models. The system borrows its technical bravado from Grok, the chatbot introduced by xAI in November 2023, which Wikipedia documents as drawing on a constant feed of posts from X and additional training corpora. Rather than supplying citations that readers can examine, the platform delivers sealed responses that carry the tone of certainty without offering supporting evidence.

      This approach treats knowledge as a product curated by a private lab instead of as a living commons. Every response filters through data pipelines that outsiders cannot audit, transforming learning into passive consumption. When conclusions arrive as opaque text blocks, the reader is left with no reliable path to challenge errors, supply nuance, or restore neglected history.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Becky Spratford ☛ RA for All: In Praise of Librarians in Dangerous Times vis LitHub

    I have been staving off some of the despair of everything that is happening with the joy of Spooky Season, but now that the spotlight is off Horror, what has been a feeling of doom itching at the back of my skull, has come back to the forefront.

    Look, I know one essay by Sarah Weinman is not going to change what is going on, but to have an author of her renown and respect write this very public essay about the hard work we are all doing (including real talk about the horrors of AI) is helping me start this week off right.

    I am passing it on hoping it helps you as well.

  • Literary Hub ☛ Literary Hub » In Praise of Librarians in Dangerous Times

    This is as precarious a moment as I’ve experienced in my own lifetime. Book bans accelerating at a pace that beggars belief. The unjust firing of Dr. Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress. The onrush to embrace generative AI without considering the consequences. And just yesterday, a terrible Supreme Court ruling that threatens to upend what books are taught in schools and available in their libraries.

    It is a lot to absorb, but librarians have had so much practice at being buffers between vulnerable visitors and the might of an overreaching government, at state and at federal level. We saw this after the September 11 attacks when the Patriot Act gave carte blanche to the government to obtain patrons’ library records, and librarians stepped up to hold the tide, often at great personal peril.

    And we’re seeing it again today.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Inside Towers ☛ New Submarine Cable Rules Effective This Month

    The Report and Order adopts new rules to streamline submarine cable application review, protect submarine cables against national security risks from foreign adversaries, and incentivize cable buildout. FCC officials say submarine cable systems carry roughly 99 percent of global internet traffic. There are 90 FCC-licensed cable systems and, as of December 2022, cable landing licensees reported more than 5.3 million Gbps of available capacity and 6.8 million Gbps in planned capacity for 2025.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Android Police ☛ Google pulled the plug on Nest Thermostats, but you can now bring them back to life

    Google provided plenty of advanced warning, but that doesn't mean it didn't hurt any less when Google discontinued support for its older Nest thermostats. While over a decade of support is pretty good, you still don't expect something like a smart thermostat to lose its connected functionality during its lifetime.

    This is especially the case when things are running smoothly and barely any maintenance is required. However, that's what 1st and 2nd generation Nest Thermostat users experienced, losing the ability to control their thermostats using the app. Luckily, it looks like someone is taking control here, offering a way to bring devices back online.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Nick Heer ☛ Apple Recreated the App Store on the Web with No Way to Download or Buy Apps

  You could argue this makes sense because, as Voorhees points out, it is not really a “store” so much as it is a catalogue: [...]

• MacStories Inc ☛ Apple Recreated the App Store on the Web with No Way to Download or Buy Apps

  Sure, you can always share an app to yourself on a device where you can buy it. But shouldn’t the point of a web store be to allow you to make purchases when you’re not on an Apple device or, for example, to buy a Mac app on your iPhone and have it waiting for you when you return to your Mac? I’ve literally checked the site multiple times because I can’t believe Apple built a storefront but left out the commerce part.