Leftovers

• The New Leaf Journal ☛ Adding a carbon.txt File

  I do not remember the specific user agent string which requested our then-non-existent carbon.txt file, but the information sufficed for leading me to the maintainer of the carbon.txt initiative: the Green Web Foundation (hereafter “GWF”). GWF has a stand-alone page explaining the purpose of carbon.txt: [...]

• Nicholas Tietz-Sokolsky ☛ A new system for organizing my writing and projects

  This post isn't a how-to. It's not a prescription for your own organizational system. Rather, let it be an invitation to examine your own systems, and decide whether they're serving you or not.

• Matt Stein ☛ How I Manage Photos

  I’m not a “photographer” as much as a person with cameras that’s fastidious and prone to overthinking. This is where I’m at managing photos in the actual year 2025.

• Manuel Moreale ☛ Double opt-in PSA

  They all require double opt-in. Which means that if you signed up for one of them, you should have received a second email, asking you to click a link to confirm your subscription. Sometimes those land in the spam folder, sometimes they don’t arrive at all. That’s just the unfortunate reality of emails in 2025.

• Eli Mellen ☛ December Adventure

  The December Adventure is low key. The goal is to write a little bit of code every day in December.

  …doesn’t even really have to be code! Let the December Adventure be for all kinds of creative pursuits.

• Abhinav Gopalakrishnan ☛ Weekly Post #101

  My wallet survived black friday unscathed.

• CER ☛ Creating a measure of Critical Reflection and Agency in Computing

  I stopped blogging while I was on sabbatical because I had to focus on finishing the second edition of Learner-Centered Design of Computing Education. And then we came back from sabbatical. I’d heard that it was tough getting back to normal work after sabbatical, and it was. I had it easier than most (e.g., I came back to summer time, and I had a light teaching schedule this Fall). But it was still a transition, so it’s taken me awhile to get back to blogging.

• Ben Congdon ☛ Schedule Recurring Calls With Your Far-Away Friends

  I enjoy conversations, particularly with people I care about. I also have a social circle which is rather geographically dispersed. This, of course, presents the problem of “how do I stay in touch with people?” Facebook et al. haven’t solved this problem in a satisfactory way for me. Discord / private group chats are fine, but don’t feel socially fulfilling in a way that 30 minutes of even infrequent talking often is.

  One solution I stumbled into a few years ago was: Set up recurring 1:1 meetings with distant friends. Yes, like a work 1:1. Yes, with an actual calendar invite with an actual Google Meet link.

  This is something I firmly believe is worth spending weirdness points on with the right set of people.

• Science

  • Bert Hubert ☛ TU Delft lecture: Security of Science

    This is a mostly verbatim transcript of my lecture at the TU Delft VvTP Physics symposium “Security of Science” held on the 20th of November.

• Career/Education

  • Philip Zucker ☛ SAT Etudes 2: Toy DPLL

    Another post about SAT solvers, probably heading towards SMT solvers.

  • Daniel De Laney ☛ More interruptions, not fewer—Daniel De Laney

    Have you ever gotten to the end of a long work day and realized you’re no closer to your goals? I have.

    The problem, counterintuitively, was lack of interruption. Sure, I was doing a lot of stuff. But I never paused to ask whether I was doing the right stuff. Or whether my approach was working. Or if I was spending the right amount of time on it.

  • The New Stack ☛ Teaching a Billion People to Code: How JupyterLite Is Scaling the Impossible

    Picture half a million French high school students learning math and programming in their individual browsers, all running simultaneously from a single server.

• Hardware

  • Dedoimedo ☛ Slimbook Executive report 11 - Many twists and turns

    The eternal tragic hero the likes of those mentioned in Greek mythology reports for duty. That would be me, that is. Once more, I must test my Slimbook Executive, a Linux-only laptop that I use for serious stuff. Or try to use, provided how benevolent the muses of software feel at any given day. Were my experience with the Linux desktop only positive, you would not be reading these articles. But that's not the case.

    The Executive is a beautiful machine, and for a while, it worked impeccably, until bad updates made it bad. Since I've battled a range of silly problems, including power management, session management, keyboard behavior, and then some. They come and go. It's a complex story that involves tons of different components of the Linux ecosystem, with each somewhat to blame for the fiasco. Over the last year or so, I was able to get rid of many of the problems. Most notably, I upgraded the operating system. This report shall tell you whether that bold move helped eradicate the last traces of this annoying affliction. Follow me.

• Proprietary

  • The Verge ☛ Around 500 million PCs are holding off upgrading to Windows 11, says Dell

    I expected millions of consumers to stick with Windows 10 if they couldn’t upgrade due to the hardware requirements, but Microsoft’s decade-old OS is clearly a lot stickier among consumer and commercial PCs than I thought.

  • The Motley Fool ☛ Dell (DELL) Q3 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

    PC Refresh Cycle -- More than 1 billion out of 1.5 billion installed PCs remain either unconverted to Windows 11 or too old, supporting continued upgrade demand; international CSG growth was double digits year-over-year.

  • XDA ☛ People really don't want Windows 11 on their PCs, says Dell

    Well, it seems we've gotten our first glimpse into how the Windows 10 end-of-life date has affected new PC sales, or, rather, how they haven't. The COO of Dell says that people aren't making the jump to the new operating system, and it's worrying news for Microsoft.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Cryptography.doc OÜ ☛ Responsible bot operation

      I've written two articles about poorly behaved web-crawling robots recently, first about a somewhat novel method to distinguish bots from legitimate human traffic ("AI scrapers request commented scripts"), then another unpacking some of the responses to that article ("Algorithmic sabotage debrief"). Having already spent some time outlining the various things an operator can do to earn a sysadmin's malice I figured it might be worthwhile to talk at least briefly about how to operate a bot responsibly.

    • Ava ☛ AI as procrastination and bandaid

      But also, I notice I am most inclined to use it when my mind circles around uncomfortable decisions that aren’t easy on me, that don’t have a definitive, all positive, straightforward answer and are a confusing act of weighing the pros and cons. The outcome of it seems to switch every day depending on my mood.

    • Ben Werdmuller ☛ What Happens After the Hype? Lessons from Mobile Internet’s Long Road to Success

      We’re beginning to see the end of the AI hype cycle, and thank goodness. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t uses for aspects of the technology, but it does mean that some of the hyperbole will diminish as investors and speculators move on to the next thing.

      As Ecrue founder Shomila Malik points out here: [...]

    • Taranis ☛ LLMs are a failure. A new AI winter is coming.

      All transformers have a fundamental limitation, which can not be eliminated by scaling to larger models, more training data or better fine-tuning. It is fundamental to the way that they operate. On each turn of the handle, transformers emit one new token (a token is analogous to a word, but in practice may represest word parts or even complete commonly used small phrases – this is why chatbots don't know how to spell!). In practice, the transformer actually generates a number for every possible output token, with the highest number being chosen in order to determine the token. This token is then fed back, so that the model generates the next token in the sequence. The problem with this approach is that the model will always generate a token, regardless of whether the context has anything to do with its training data. Putting it another way, the model generates tokens on the basis of what 'looks most plausible' as a next token. If this is a bad choice, and gets fed back, the next token will be generated to match that bad choice. And as the handle keeps turning, the model will generate text that looks plausible. Models are very good at this, because this is what they are trained to do. Indeed, it's all they can do. This is the root of the hallucination problem in transformers, and is unsolveable because hallucinating is all that transformers can do.

    • Nature ☛ Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written fully by AI

      What can researchers do if they suspect that their manuscripts have been peer reviewed using artificial intelligence (AI)? Dozens of academics have raised concerns on social media about manuscripts and peer reviews submitted to the organizers of next year’s International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), an annual gathering of specialists in machine learning. Among other things, they flagged hallucinated citations and suspiciously long and vague feedback on their work.

• Defence/Aggression

  • 404 Media ☛ 'Unauthorized' Edit to Ukraine's Frontline Maps Point to Polymarket's War Betting

    According to Polymarket’s ledger, the market resolved without dispute and paid out its winnings. Polymarket did not immediately respond to 404 Media’s request for a comment about the incident.

  • Michael Tsai ☛ What Happened With Threads and the Fediverse

  • Matt Birchler ☛ Here's why Threads fucking sucks and Meta knows it

    If I had to sum up one of Hank's complaints, and my own personal bugaboo about X/Threads, it's that one of the main points of building up an audience online is getting the ability to do something with them. Hank Green makes things that people enjoy, they follow him, and he can let that audience know about things like sales at his store or his latest drive to bring money to good causes. This is good for users who get entertainment, it's good for the social networks who earn ad revenue on the chatter, and it's good for Hank who gets to use his influence. I think platforms like YouTube do this well (as well as Mastodon and blogs, of course), and everything from Threads to X to TikTok actively fight against this. I hate it.

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ Introducing Roundabout

    That community co-design is key, and it makes sense that this is the first step. Communities are human; they can’t be defined by protocols. The protocols should describe real human behavior, not the other way around.

  • Papers Please ☛ USCIS is trying to make a list of all U.S. citizens

    U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), a Federal agency whose mandate is to administer naturalization and derivative citizenship for those not born as U.S. citizens, has been trying — without the public notice required by law for such a database — to construct a national ID registry of all U.S. citizens including natural-born U.S. citizens.

    This process began in April and May of 2025 with a ten-fold expansion of the USCIS “Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements Program” (SAVE) database to add records about hundreds of millions of native-born U.S. citizens to those already in the system about tens of millions of naturalized citizens and immigrants.

    Information about a new category of individuals (native-born U.S. citizens) was added to SAVE from new sources including Social Security and state drivers’ license records.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • The Revelator ☛ Locusts and Landmines Threaten Ukraine’s Farmland

• Environment

  • Windows Central ☛ Nearly 1 billion PCs remain on Windows 10 — Has Windows 11 adoption hit a wall?

    Clarke was referring to all Windows PCs, not just computers made by Dell. The COO did not share exact figures, but some quick math places the number of Windows 10 PCs that have not been updated to Windows 11 to around 1 billion.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Paul Krugman ☛ Trump: Pro-[cryptocurrency] or Pro-crime? - Paul Krugman

      On one side, the Trump administration is sinking small boats that it claims, without evidence, are smuggling drugs — and according to the Washington Post, Pete Hegseth, the self-styled Secretary of War, has personally ordered at least one follow-up strike to kill the survivors. A working group of former JAGs, that is, members of the military’s legal branch, issued a statement declaring that it

    • Mike Brock ☛ Bitcoin is a Lie

      Bitcoin is a lie. Because it claims truths that cannot be. That trust is defect. That property is virtue. That law, shared meaning should not supervene. That “fuck off and leave me alone” is the sacred right of the free person.

      I used to see value. Now I see a void. An emptiness where meaning should be. A reason.

    • Declan Chidlow ☛ Frequently Asked Unicycling Questions

      Unlike many ‘frequently asked questions’ lists, these are genuinely frequently asked questions. I’m borderline guaranteed to be asked at least one of them at least once per ride.

      For better or for worse, one can usually only provide a quick response when zipping past, so here are the complete, unabridged answers to some FAQs.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • FAIR ☛ On Trans Care, WaPo Rejects Experts and Invents ‘More Neutral’ Center

    President Donald Trump, having campaigned heavily on anti-trans fear mongering, issued an executive order within days of taking office that banned federal support for gender-affirming care. That same order commanded the secretary of Health and Human Services to produce a report on “best practices” for the care of trans youth.

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ Banning VPNs

    This is crazy. Lawmakers in several US states are contemplating banning VPNs, because…think of the children!

  • EFF ☛ Lawmakers Want to Ban VPNs—And They Have No Idea What They're Doing

    Remember when you thought age verification laws couldn't get any worse? Well, lawmakers in Wisconsin, Michigan, and beyond are about to blow you away.

    It's unfortunately no longer enough to force websites to check your government-issued ID before you can access certain content, because politicians have now discovered that people are using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to protect their privacy and bypass these invasive laws. Their solution? Entirely ban the use of VPNs.

    Yes, really.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Wired ☛ FTC Removes Posts Critical of Amazon, Microsoft, and AI Companies

    The Trump administration’s Federal Trade Commission has removed four years’ worth of business guidance blogs as of Tuesday morning, including important consumer protection information related to artificial intelligence and the agency’s landmark privacy lawsuits under former chair Lina Khan against companies like Amazon and Microsoft. More than 300 blogs were removed.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  "Dutch prosecutors have claimed that Ryan was killed for having a boyfriend, behaving in a way that was “Western” and had “shamed” her family." ☛ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/11/28/syrian-brothers-honour-killing-teenage-sister-netherlands/ | Source: The Telegraph UK

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Syrian brothers accused of murdering teenage sister over her ‘Western behaviour’

    Dutch prosecutors have claimed that Ryan was killed for having a boyfriend, behaving in a way that was “Western” and had “shamed” her family.

    Her killing has been formally designated as an “honour killing” by the Dutch public prosecution service.

  "Gagged & tied teen thrown into swamp & left to drown ‘by her BROTHERS in Muslim honour killing over Western behaviour’" ☛ https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/37471584/teen-gagged-tied-swamp-drown-brothers-honour-killing/ | Source: The Sun

  • The Sun ☛ Gagged & tied teen thrown into swamp & left to drown ‘by her BROTHERS in Muslim honour killing over Western behaviour’

  • Daily Post ☛ Muslim dad, sons accused of killing daughter over 'Western' lifestyle, refusing to wear headscarf - Daily Post Nigeria

    Prosecutors said a TikTok livestream showing her without a headscarf and wearing makeup was considered an embarrassment to the family and may have been the immediate trigger for the attack.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • NPR ☛ Supreme Court weighs copyright fight between music industry and [Internet] providers

    A coalition of music labels, which represent artists such as Sabrina Carpenter, Givēon, and Doechii, sued Cox alleging that company should be responsible for the copyright violations of [Internet] users that Cox had been warned were serial copyright abusers.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Meta’s new top EU regulator is contractually prohibited from hurting Meta’s feelings

  "Regulatory capture" is one of those concepts that can seem nebulous and abstract. How can you really know when a regulator has failed to protect you because they were in bed with the companies they were supposed to be regulating, and when this is just because they're bad at their job. "Never attribute to malice," etc etc.

• Copyrights

  • Zigtools ☛ Zigbook is Plagiarizing the Zigtools Playground

    A couple weeks ago, a Zig resource called Zigbook was released with a bold claim of “zero AI” and an original “project-based” structure.

    Unfortunately, even a cursory look at the nonsense chapter structure, book content, examples, generic website, or post-backlash issue-disabled repo reveals that the book is wholly LLM slop and the project itself is structured like some sort of sycophantic psy-op, with botted accounts and fake reactions.

    We’re leaving out all direct links to Zigbook to not give them any more SEO traction.