Leftovers

• Pete Brown ☛ Typing, writing long-hand, and distractions

  I tend to find the whole “distraction free” business to be a bit of a boondoggle. If I’m going to get distracted, then it’s going to happen regardless of whether my writing app is in fullscreen mode or focus mode or whatever.

• Westenberg ☛ Don't Become a Connoisseur.

  In fact, I've started to believe that developing "refined taste" is one of the most reliable ways to make yourself worse off.

  Let me explain.

• Ben Congdon ☛ Book Review: Antimemetics

  Nadia Asparouhova’s Antimemetics is, itself, antimemetic. I devoured this book in a few sittings on the bus to work, but if I had to describe it, I really only have a few conceptual handles that I could grasp onto: [...]

• Connor Tumbleson ☛ Kabob's

  One thing I quickly learned in this journey is the more things you mix on one skewer the harder it is. Unfortunately some of my first few skewers mixed chicken and beef which was a grand ole mistake due to the massive difference in cooking time. Pictured above was a hectic creation for a larger dinner party that had the following: [...]

• Sandy Maguire ☛ Struggling Towards an Algebraic Theory of Music

  For the last few months, I’ve been trying to come up with a nice, denotational basis for what music is. But I’m running out of steam on the project, so I thought I’d write what I’ve figured out, and what I’ve tried but doesn’t work. Hopefully this will inspire someone to come tell me what I’m being stupid about and help get the whole process unstuck.

• Science

  • New Yorker ☛ Olga Tokarczuk Recommends Visionary Science Fiction

    The Nobel-winning author, whose newest book is out this week, discusses work by a few of her favorite writers.

  • Futurism ☛ Scientists Impressed by “Fire Amoeba” That Can Survive Incredible Temperatures

    This tiny critter is basically almost indestructible.

  • Daniël de Kok ☛ Dish Activation

    Dish (Daniël’s Swish-like activation, 2022) is an activation function that has a shape similar to GELU, Swish and Mish. However, it does not use any elementary functions like exp or erf, making it much faster to compute on most hardware. The function is: [...]

• Career/Education

  • Tracy Durnell ☛ On revisiting a foundational text

    I’ve been re-reading Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics with the intention of writing about it for the November IndieWeb book club, but I couldn’t think of anything to say about it in time. Then I mentioned this to a friend, and in chatting with them realized I do have thoughts, just not what I was expecting.

  • Terence Eden ☛ All the books I’ve read this year

    In total, I read 64 books. I strictly alternate between fact and fiction otherwise my brain gets confused. I try to maintain an even gender ratio and I like old books as well as new books. I mostly buy eBooks from Kobo now that Amazon has restricted their DRM. I also visit the library for the exceedingly rare times I need a paper book. I'm a member of NetGalley which allows me to receive advance review copies from some authors.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The 21st Century is a New Dark Age

    I mean, what would a modern intellectual Dark Age look like? If you had to imagine it, you might imagine institutions of higher learning being reduced into cultural disrepute, charlatans substituting for thought-leadership, selling validation of prejudices in exchange for a buck. It might look like the democratic populaces thinking so lowly of the intellectual class that they install reality TV show stars into the highest offices of public trust.

    People think the cultural forces that led us here, will simply go away once Donald Trump is gone? Are you mad? My dear fellow friends of intellectual arts, hear me now: you are living from inside a new Dark Age.

  • Annie Mueller ☛ All feelings mean something but it might be something dumb

    What we learn as children programs us in certain ways. These programs run subconsciously. They determine our default emotional responses to everything and the meaning we derive from those responses and the behaviors we enact based on the meanings we derive.

  • Brendan Gregg ☛ Leaving Intel

    I've resigned from Intel and accepted a new opportunity. If you are an Intel employee, you might have seen my fairly long email that summarized what I did in my 3.5 years. Much of this is public: [...]

• Hardware

  • Robin Sloan ☛ Classics

    Here is a big dif­fer­ence between the classic car and the classic phone, though, and a damning one: 70 years later, I can still fire up the Thun­der­bird and drive it around town. No phone will useful — usable — in twenty years, to say nothing of 70.

• Proprietary

  • Chris Ferris ☛ re:Invent 2025 recap

    pre:Invent also started late this year. We really didn’t start to see any interesting announcements till mid-November. In previous years, I’ve seen pre:Invent start in early October. The number of keynote announcements was pretty disappointing, too; a few things were thrown in as a “shot clock” at the end of a GenAI-laden keynote.

    I’m shocked that laying off tens of thousands of people and replacing them with GenAI has slowed innovation.

    Once again, I’ve categorized the announcements into a handful of categories focused on the ones that matter most for security practitioners and cloud governance folks: [...]

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • François Marier: Learning a new programming language with an LLM

      I started learning Go this year. First, I picked a Perl project I wanted to rewrite, got a good book and ignored Hey Hi (AI) tools since I thought they would do nothing but interfere with learning. Eventually though, I decided to experiment a bit and ended up finding a few ways to use Hey Hi (AI) assistants effectively even when learning something new.

    • Futurism ☛ AI Surveillance Startup Caught Using Sweatshop Workers to Monitor US Residents

      It isn’t clear where all the Flock annotation footage came from, but screenshots included in the documents for data annotators showed license plates from New York, Florida, New Jersey, Michigan, and California.

      Flock joins the ranks of other fast-moving AI companies that have resorted to low-paid international labor to bring their product to market. Amazon’s cashier-free “just walk out” stores, for example, were really just gig workers watching American shoppers from India. The AI startup Engineer.ai, which purported to make developing code for apps “as easy as ordering a pizza,” was found out to be selling passing human-written code as AI generated.

    • Semafor Inc ☛ AI critics funded AI coverage at top newsrooms

      OpenAI’s representatives pointed out that Tarbell, which has also supported reporting at Bloomberg, Time, The Verge, and The Los Angeles Times, is funded in part by one of the groups mentioned in the story, the Future of Life Institute, which is dedicated to warning about AI risks. The news organization quietly appended a disclosure to the piece noting the connection.

    • Kyle E Mitchell ☛ LLMs Make Legal Advice Lossy

      cheap chatbot summaries take important choices away

      With many-megapixel cameras in our pockets and networks so fast that streaming hiccups piss off pre-teens, it’s easy to forget how frail digital imagery used to be. When storage cost real money and the Internet was slow, we took photos at much lower resolution. Then we used formats like JPEG to strip detail in clever ways that preserved overall impressions, for the sake of speedy sharing. But if you zoomed in on an image, or even just looked closer, you’d often find blurry blobs, jagged edges, and cryptic artifacts where nuance should have been. Such were the losses of so-called lossy compression.

    • Gergely Nagy ☛ Surviving the Crawlers

      Previously, I wrote about why you probably shouldn’t block AI bots from your website, and in there, hinted at bots being easy to identify, despite all appearances to the contrary. I did not elaborate then, but I will now. I will show you how you can become a Malicious Actor too, in some cases only using tools you already have, without installing anything else.

      In short, we’ll reimplement the essence of iocaine in a way that can be expressed in a Caddyfile, or within an nginx config. Because I’m more familiar with the former, that’s the example I will show - but it should be adaptable to other webservers and reverse proxies.

      But containing the threat is just part of the solution. When a big wave comes, we may need to reach for more blunt tools, and prevent the crawlers from reaching us in the first place. We’ll have to don the aforementioned trenchcoat, and understand the problem first.

  • Social Control Media

    • Simone Silvestroni ☛ Noise

      It feels like noise, it is noise. I can't relate to it anymore. It's not a proper conversation, there's no breath, no space, everything in those feeds is ephemeral by nature. Too fast. It just disappears, like a collective onset of dementia. Impossible to actually search, impossible to track anything after a while, it's all lost, there's no tether.

    • Ruben Schade ☛ Another social media break

      I had a bit of a blogging and social media break when I went to Vietnam. The former I missed dearly, the latter I’m becoming accustomed to. It’s interesting; the urge to check it every second of the day has dissipated. In the most cliché way possible, I’m realising just how many mental CPU cycles it was taking up.

• Cheating

  • Krebs On Security ☛ Drones to Diplomas: How Russia’s Largest Private University is Linked to a $25M Essay Mill

    A sprawling academic cheating network turbocharged by Google Ads that has generated nearly $25 million in revenue has curious ties to a Kremlin-connected oligarch whose Russian university builds drones for Russia’s war against Ukraine.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Kansas Reflector ☛ Privacy concerns linger in reproductive health care despite HIPAA lawsuit’s dismissal

      The federal HIPAA law is meant to protect patient information generally, especially when that information travels between providers. It contains exceptions for information that can be disclosed to investigators, who can subpoena records from other states.

    • Doc Searls ☛ How to Civilize Digital Life

      The Right to Privacy is a brief written by Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren and published in the Harvard Law Review in 1890. It has not been improved upon since, because what it says is so damn obvious and simple: that the right to privacy is “the right to be let alone.”

      Those six words are well understood by everyone in the natural world, and have been for the history of civilized life. Hell, probably before that as well. But they are alien in the digital world.

    • [Old] Matej Kovacic ☛ How I discovered a hidden microphone on a Chinese NanoKVM

      And then I discovered something even more alarming - a tiny built-in microphone that isn’t clearly mentioned in the official documentation. It’s a miniature SMD component, measuring just 2 x 1 mm, yet capable of recording surprisingly high-quality audio.

      What’s even more concerning is that all the necessary recording tools are already installed on the device! By simply connecting via SSH (remember, the device initially used default passwords!), I was able to start recording audio using the amixer and arecord tools. Once recorded, the audio file could be easily copied to another computer. With a little extra effort, it would even be possible to stream the audio over a network, allowing an attacker to eavesdrop in real time.

• Defence/Aggression

  • JURIST ☛ Rights group condemns armed groups’ increased abuses targeting Indigenous communities in Colombia

    Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Friday stated that armed groups in Colombia’s southern state of Putumayo have committed gross human rights violations against innocent civilians, with the abuses disproportionately affecting Indigenous communities.

  • France24 ☛ Hamas says it will hand over weapons to a Palestinian authority 'if the occupation ends'

    Palestinian militant group Hamas said Saturday it was ready to give up its arms to a future Palestinian authority "if the occupation ends". Israel has killed more than 360 Palestinians in the devastated Gaza Strip since the latest ceasefire came into effect on October 10, health officials say.

  • RTL ☛ 165 still in captivity: 100 kidnapped Nigerian schoolchildren released: UN source, presidency

    In late November 315 students and staff were kidnapped from St. Mary’s co-educational boarding school in north-central Niger state, as the country buckled under a wave of mass abductions reminiscent of the infamous 2014 Boko Haram abduction of schoolgirls in Chibok.

    Some 50 escaped shortly afterward, leaving 265 thought to be in captivity

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Nigeria: 100 abducted schoolchildren released — reports

    The children were among 315 pupils and staff who were kidnapped from a Catholic boarding school in late November. The fate of another 165 students and staff thought to still be in captivity is unclear.

  • ANF News ☛ ISIS attacks SDF position in Deir ez-Zor

    ISIS cells in the eastern countryside of Deir ez-Zor have intensified their attacks on the positions of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). ISIS mercenaries attacked a military position affiliated of the SDF in the town of Al-Bahra yesterday evening. No casualties were reported in the hit-and-run attack, and the perpetrators took advantage of the darkness to flee the area.

  • Michigan Advance ☛ Far-right extremists have been organizing online since before the internet. AI is the next frontier • Michigan Advance

    Computers, which entered the mass market in 1977, promised to help resolve these problems. In 1981, Matt Koehl, head of the National Socialist White People’s Party in the United States, solicited donations to “Help the Party Enter The Computer Age.” The American neo-Nazi Harold Covington begged for a printer, scanner and “serious PC” that could run WordPerfect word processing software. “Our multifarious enemies already possess this technology,” he noted, referring to Jews and government officials.

    Soon, far-right extremists figured out how to connect their computers to one another. They did so by using online bulletin board systems, or BBSes, a precursor to the internet. A BBS was hosted on a personal computer, and other computers could dial in to the BBS using a modem and a terminal software program, allowing users to exchange messages, documents and software.

  • US Navy Times ☛ Soon no Pearl Harbor survivors will be alive

    But today only 12 are still alive — all centenarians — and this year none were able to make the pilgrimage to Hawaii to mark the event Sunday.

  • Nick Heer ☛ The European Commission Should Not Be on X in the First Place

    Which, by the way, is why the European Commission should not be doing anything on X in the first place. Bier has stumbled into doing them a favour. The world’s richest man does not need anyone else’s advertising money for his incendiary website, and the Commission should not be rewarding it with attention. Let it rot.

  • The Verge ☛ X cuts off the European Commission’s ad account after being fined €120 million | The Verge

    The seemingly retaliatory revocation of the European Commission’s ad account is unlikely to materially change things for either X or the EU. If, as Bier claims, the Commission has not used its ad account since 2021, holding it hostage is unlikely to give X any leverage. And, while it can appeal the decision, X is currently still on the hook for the sizable fine. Plus, it must provide details for how it plans to address the “deceptive” use of verified checkmarks in the next 60 days, or face additional penalties.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • teleSUR ☛ Trump’s First 9 Months: ICE Arrested 75,000 With No Criminal Record

    Those 75,000 detainees without a criminal history between January 20 and October 15 represent more than a third of the total 220,000 detainees in the immigration operations carried out by the Trump administration and supposedly aimed at the most violent criminals.

• Environment

  • Science Alert ☛ Grim Signals of Future Antimicrobial Resistance Found Lurking in Sewage

    "The research shows that we have a latent reservoir of antimicrobial resistance that is far more widespread around the world than we had expected," says first author Hannah-Marie Martiny, a bioinformatician at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). This may be because selection and competition seem to play a larger role in the development of these resistance genes than dispersal, the researchers found.

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ Scientists find new species thriving 13,123 feet below water surface

    According to Thomas Dahlgren, a marine biologist at the University of Gothenburg and one of the project’s lead researchers, the global push for a green transition is intensifying demand for critical metals that are currently in short supply. He explains that many of these metals exist in significant quantities on the deep-sea floor, yet there has been little clarity on how they could be responsibly extracted or what consequences such activity might have for the environment.

  • Wired ☛ Why Tehran Is Running Out of Water

    During the summer of 2025, Iran experienced an exceptional heat wave, with daytime temperatures across several regions, including Tehran, approaching 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) and forcing the temporary closure of public offices and banks. During this period, major reservoirs supplying the Tehran region reached record-low levels, and water supply systems came under acute strain. By early November, the reservoir behind Amir Kabir Dam, a main source of drinking water for Tehran, had dropped to about 8 percent of its capacity. The present crisis reflects not only this summer’s extreme heat but also several consecutive years of reduced precipitation and ongoing drought conditions across Iran. As a result, the capital of Iran is now facing a potential “Day Zero” when taps could run dry.

  • France24 ☛ Deadly floods claim over 900 lives in Indonesia as survivors struggle to obtain aid

    The death toll from cyclone-driven floods and landslides across three Indonesian provinces on Sumatra rose to 908 people on Saturday, with over 400 listed as missing, government data showed. The disaster has also claimed around 200 lives in southern Thailand and Malaysia. Indonesia’s environment ministry has suspended operations at mining and hydropower firms blamed for worsening the floods through deforestation.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • The Independent UK ☛ Over 200,000 power banks sold on Amazon recalled over fire risks

      Only power banks with the serial numbers 000G21, 000H21, 000I21 and 000L21, are included in the recall.

    • LRT ☛ Renewed railway museum opens in Lithuania’s Šiauliai

      The history of railways in Šiauliai began in 1871, when the railway station was built and the first train arrived in the city.

    • Nebraska Examiner ☛ Texas becomes the first state to buy bitcoin as more states eye cryptocurrencies

      While other states, including Michigan and Wisconsin, have made pension fund investments in cryptocurrency, Texas became the first to invest state dollars, according to The Dallas Morning News.

    • Malay Mail ☛ Mystery electricity spike in Balik Pulau leads police to hidden bitcoin mine | Malay Mail

      Police arrested an elderly man and seized 30 bitcoin mining machines in a raid on several premises around Jalan Air Putih, here yesterday that were operating through illegal electrical connections.

    • Semafor Inc ☛ India faces mass air travel crisis

      Budget airline IndiGo, which commands 65% of the domestic market and is typically known for punctuality, canceled thousands of flights over the last several days due to a pilot shortage stemming from new rules that limit pilots’ work hours.

    • Yury Molodtsov ☛ The AI Price Hike

      Companies are bundling AI and raising software prices because they don’t have a choice.

• Finance

  • The Straits Times ☛ Malaysian PM Anwar to cut costs for small businesses after poor Sabah state polls

    He also doubled government funds to expedite tax refunds to small businesses.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Futurism ☛ Political Operatives Say AI Is Poised to Upend the Two-Party System

    So far, the Independent Center has identified 40 House seats that don’t fit a hyper-partisan profile, theoretically allowing an independent candidate to challenge the typical Democrat-Republican paradigm. By Spring, NPR reports, the organization is gunning to have 10 candidates established, with a goal of winning at least five.

  • NPR ☛ ‘Embrace the spoiler.’ How AI is driving bid to elect independents

    The goal is to elect a handful of independent candidates to the House of Representatives in 2026, using AI to identify districts where independents could succeed and uncover diamond in the rough candidates.

    In a time when control of the House balances on a knife's edge, winning even a handful of seats could deny either party from getting a majority and upend the way the House currently operates.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Paramount was poised to buy Warner Bros. Discovery. What went wrong?

    Paramount’s $30-per-share bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, backed by tech billionaire Larry Ellison, lost Friday when Netflix swooped in with a competing $82.7-billion deal.

    Analysts and multiple auction insiders told The Times several factors complicated the process, including Paramount’s low-ball offers and hubris.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Apple's chief chip architect for the last decade has reportedly talked to CEO Tim Cook about leaving

    As Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports, Apple is entering one of the most turbulent periods of Tim Cook's era, as several senior leaders and advanced engineers exit the company. This upheaval raises questions about the company's organizational sustainability amid the inflection points that artificial intelligence brings to usage models and to actual devices on both hardware and software levels. Perhaps this is most disturbing for Apple, given its vertical integration. Yet, there is no official information that Sroiji is leaving at the time of writing.

  • Parker Ortolani ☛ Take a Risk Apple, Give Tony the Job

    In October I wrote a piece titled “10 Qualities the 8th CEO of Apple Should Have.” I didn’t mention any names then, but I was really thinking about a specific person. That person was Tony Fadell and today we learned from The Information that he is actually interested in the job. However unlikely you may think this move would be, it’s certainly worth exploring further.

  • Nicolas Fränkel ☛ Yet another Rust ownership tutorial

    One of the most important concepts to master in Rust is ownership and borrowing. Tons and tons of articles are solely dedicated to this narrow subject. This one tries to explain the concept with examples. I hope it helps you.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Great Specialization of Civilizations

    This is not a world with an ideology.

    It is a world with roles—assigned by inertia, necessity, and the terminal weakness of nations that have forgotten how to justify themselves morally.

    It is specialization without civilization.

    Functionalism without meaning.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Mafia Believed in a Leviathan. American Moguls Believe They Are Leviathan

    Sam Harris’s podcast — that merry geopolitical pyromaniac — laying out the fractures of the world order like a man describing weather systems made of steel and bone. As he spoke, the polemic began writing itself in my mind. I was literally laughing under my breath. The ironies were too ripe.

    The mafia — that ancient confederation of thieves and killers — has a stronger moral operating system than the American business aristocracy now presiding over our decline.

  • Alexandru Scvorțov ☛ A multi-type table in Rust

    Let’s write a type-safe table in Rust where the values can be of different types. This could be used as a cache sitting in front of a web server, as storage for entities in a game world, or as a config map.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Futurism ☛ AI Is Incredibly Good at Changing Voters' Minds, New Research Finds — With an Incredible Caveat

      While one in 25 might not sound like a ton, it shakes out to four percent of the study’s total population. That’s actually quite impressive, and according to WaPo, is more effective than the typical TV campaign ad.

      However, there’s one incredible catch to all of this: voters were swayed just the same by false information as they were by factual info.

    • Futurism ☛ Travel Influencer Caught Using AI to Make It Seem Like Minorities Are Terrorizing London

      Yet as the social media account Right Wing Cope observed, the same frame in the video bears little resemblance to the one in the preview. As it turns out, both the store signs are in English, and the menacing biker was actually a smiling Black guy — a sure sign of an image doctored with generative AI.

    • Task And Purpose ☛ Navy stands up its first information warfare squadron

      The activation of the new unit is the latest in several moves by the different military branches this year to reorganize and prioritize information and electronic warfare. Earlier this year the Army shuttered 1st Information Operations Command, which was part of U.S. Army Cyber Command, after more than two decades. It has instead started to activate new Theater Information Advantage Detachments, new units meant to wage war in the battlefields of public affairs and information operations, with a specific focus on tackling disinformation. It also started new electromagnetic warfare companies, with the first of its kind being stood up in the Georgia National Guard.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • RFERL ☛ Russian Prison Service Appears To Claim Journalist Nika Novak Still Held In Penal Colony

    But according to the claim from the account linked to Novak’s close acquaintances, the Russian Federal Penitentiary Service has confirmed that she remains in the same penal colony, although RFE/RL has not been able to independently verify this information.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ The Web Runs On Tolerance

    He makes great points about the fault-tolerant nature of web technology, but I’d also add that the web is inherently inclusive at a conceptual level too: the whole point of the thing is to allow anyone to publish. That means a plurality of publishers from a plurality of backgrounds. “This is for everyone,” Tim Berners-Lee famously said, and he meant it.

  • Associated Press ☛ Russia restricts FaceTime, its latest step in controlling online communications

    Russian authorities said Thursday they have imposed restrictions on Apple’s video calling service FaceTime, the latest step in an effort to tighten control over the [Internet] and communications online.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • France24 ☛ Hollywood unions alarmed by Netflix's $72 billion Warner Bros deal

    Hollywood unions and theatre owners sounded the alarm on Friday over Netflix's proposed $72 billion takeover of Warner Bros Discovery, warning the deal would cut jobs, concentrate power and reduce theatrical movie releases if the deal passes regulatory review. Details and analysis with Michael Wayne, assistant professor at the department of Media and Communication at Erasmus University.

  • New York Times ☛ Angst Turns to Anger in Hollywood as DRM spreader Netflix Hooks Warner Bros.

    Much of the entertainment capital fears that Netflix’s deal will lead to more job losses and theater closings and fewer boundary-pushing movies.

  • New York Times ☛ What to Know About Netflix’s $83 Billion Deal for Warner Bros. Discovery

    The cash-and-stock deal would give the world’s largest paid streaming service expansive power over theater owners and entertainment-industry unions.

  • Kerrick Long ☛ Humble Bundle Abandons History of DRM Free Media

    For over a decade, Humble Bundle has offered DRM-free media for a great price, while also supporting charity. Even years later, I can’t get their “jingle” out of my head: [...]

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Bypass Amazon Fire TV Stick Piracy Ban and See What Happens Next

    After enjoying years of relative freedom to do whatever they liked with their Amazon Fire TV Sticks, last month users were informed that apps linked to piracy would be blocked, banned, or even deleted moving forward. With alerts now appearing on users' devices relating to one app in particular, it transpires that bypassing Amazon's restrictions is really easy, at least for now. The bigger question being asked right now is this: what happens when you do?