Leftovers

• Web Performance Calendar ☛ The Anatomy of a Web Performance Report - Web Performance Calendar

  In the performance community, we spend a lot of time talking about tools, metrics, budgets, thresholds, regressions, and dashboards. But at the end of the day, the real challenge is not collecting data, it is making sense of it.

  • A great report does not overwhelm.
  • A great report tells a story.

• Johnny Decimal ☛ 22.00.0171 Configuration management

  To reinforce point 1: there are no exceptions. Everything that I touch or do MUST be documented in my JDex. This might not be practical or helpful; I'm not committing to do this for all of time. But let's find out.

• Science

  • Rlang ☛ True Stories from the (Data) Battlefield – Part 1: Communicating About Data

    The data professions (data science, analysis, engineering, etc.) are highly technical fields, and much online discussion (in particular, on this blog!), conference presentations and classes focus on technical aspects of data work or on the results of data analyses. These discussions are necessary for teaching important aspects of the data trade, but they often ignore the fact that data and analytics work takes place in an interpersonal and organizational context.

    In this blog post, the first of a series, we’ll present a selection of non-technical but common issues that data professionals face in organizations. We will offer a diagnosis of “why” such problems arise and present some potential solutions.

• Career/Education

  • James Stanley ☛ Student loan deductions

    If they had just taken £1 more off me at the time I paid it off I wouldn't have noticed and it wouldn't matter, but now I have an unwarranted bill from HMRC for thousands of pounds of student loan repayment, to go towards repaying my 67p balance.

  • Ankur Sethi ☛ My first online shopping experience, at the tender age of twelve

    The C Adventure only covered the very basics of C: variables, conditionals, loops, and functions. It didn’t cover structs, pointers, macros, splitting programs into multiple files, build systems, or anything else that would allow me to build the kind of real-world programs I wanted to build. But that didn’t matter. The universe had heard my plea. I finally knew what C was. I could even write a bit of it! They were simple programs that ran in the terminal, but at the time I felt drunk with power. I was one step closer to building Age of Empires.

    I could do anything with a computer, anything at all. The only limit was myself.

    But The C Adventure wasn’t enough. If I wanted to build games, there was a lot more I’d need to learn: reading and writing files, connecting to the internet, opening windows, rendering 3D graphics, playing sound, writing game AI, and who knew what else. But once again, I didn’t know where to find more learning resources.

  • NBC ☛ LA Parents say school-issued iPads and Chromebooks cause chaos

    District officials tell schools that students should use i-Ready for only 45 minutes per week in each subject. However, Maria Nichols, president of the Associated Administrators of Los Angeles, the principals’ union, said the district will “pester” her members to show improvement in reports. The result, she said, is that it’s now normal to walk into a classroom and see all the students staring at devices with headphones on and no direct teaching or conversation occurring.

  • Amber Settle ☛ It’s not always about me

    It also caused me to reflect on something that has been happening over the past 5 years. It used to be that a good portion of the students in the first Python programming course would follow me into the second Python programming course. I could reliably count on having between a third and half of the class with me in the subsequent course. Over time that has stopped happening. I just checked, and there 5 out of 21 students who were in my first class this Fall and are registered for the second class with me in Winter. This shift happened about the same time my Rate My Professor ratings took a plunge as disgruntled students took out their frustrations there. I started believing that students were simply less happy with me as an instructor, hence their desire to take the second class with someone else. But this quarter shows that the picture is more complex than that. The Fall quarter students were very happy, and yet less than a quarter of them are taking the second class with me in the Winter. I have to admit that the registration phenomenon may in fact not be about me as an instructor. And that is a very good thing to learn.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Alin Panaitiu ☛ Developing a food-safe finish for my wooden spoons and cups

    You know what they say in the world of products: fast, cheap, good; pick two

    Which is very similar to my experience when trying to find the most suitable wood finish for my hand carved wooden spoons and coffee cups.

• Proprietary

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Tim Bray ☛ After the Bubble

      The GenAI bubble is going to pop. Everyone knows that. To me, the urgent and interesting questions are how widespread the damage will be and what the hangover will feel like. On that basis, I was going to post a link on Mastodon to Paul Krugman’s Talking With Paul Kedrosky. It’s great, but while I was reading it I thought “This is going to be Greek to people who haven’t been watching the bubble details.” So consider this a preface to the Krugman-Kedrosky piece. If you already know about the GPU-fragility and SPV-voodoo issues, just skip this and go read that.

    • Ben Congdon ☛ Embodied Cognition and the "Tokenverse"

      One of the common criticisms of modern AI systems is that they aren’t sufficiently embodied. The idea being there’s some inherent quality of being an agent embedded inside a body in the physical world which cannot be attained by a token-predicting LLM, regardless of how intelligent an agent becomes.

      To address the validity of this criticism, we need to have a philosophically rich understanding of what embodiment is and what it gets us in terms of cognitive capacities.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ LA Unified School District forces unfiltered AI on kids

      The class was told to design a book cover for Pippi Longstocking. Not using pencils and paper — no, this is the AI era! So this was an exercise to teach the kids how to prompt an image generator.

      The kids were using Adobe for Education. This calls itself “the creative resource for K–12 and Higher Education” and it includes the Adobe Express AI image generator.

      Adobe even has a gallery of kids’ work with Adobe Express! You and I might wonder how on earth prompting an AI slop bot is supposed to teach kids anything.

    • The Telegraph UK ☛ The ‘first 100 per cent AI-generated TV show’ is 100 per cent pig swill

      But, my, is it boring. The stakes are non-existent, because the characters are non-existent; there is no humour or wit; the story, such as it is, amounts to watching a series of backsides sprint through jungles or, one for The Crystal Maze fans, “the industrial zone”. Where AI should be able to have an advantage is in the sort of enormous, exciting set-piece that real-life reality TV shows could not touch. But even when things explode, or someone is mauled by a polar bear, it looks cheap and lacks any kind of interest. Yes, a man fights a polar bear and, somehow, it is the most boring thing I have watched all year.

    • Rolling Stone ☛ AI Songs Should Be Labeled Says Country Songwriter Breland

      “People should know whether what they’re listening to is a human voice or not. You should be required to say that,” Breland says in a new interview on Rolling Stone’s Nashville Now podcast.

      He’s worried that human artists are being erased by the technology, which uses vast environmental resources to operate.

  • Social Control Media

    • Alex Chan ☛ The Internet forgets, but I don’t want to

      Social media is fragile, and it can disappear quickly. Sites get sold, shut down or blocked. People close their accounts or flee the Internet. Posts get deleted, censored or lost by platforms that don’t care about permanence. We live in an era of abundant technology and storage, but the everyday record of our lives is disappearing before our eyes.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Jon Seager ☛ Addressing Linux's Missing PKI Infrastructure

      Earlier this year, LWN featured an excellent article titled “Linux’s missing CRL infrastructure”. The article highlighted a number of key issues surrounding traditional Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), but critically noted how even the available measures are effectively ignored by the majority of system-level software on Linux.

      One of the motivators for the discussion is that the Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) will cease to be supported by Let’s Encrypt. The remaining alternative is to use Certificate Revocation Lists (CRLs), yet there is little or no support for managing (or even querying) these lists in most Linux system utilities.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Bitdefender ☛ Privacy concerns raised as Grok AI found to be a stalker's best friend

      According to their investigation, ten of Grok's responses returned accurate, current home addresses.

      A further seven of Grok's responses produced out-of-date but previously correct addresses, and four returned workplace addresses.

      In addition, Grok would frequently volunteer unrequested information such as phone numbers, email addresses, employment details, and even the names and addresses of family members, including children.

  • Confidentiality

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Substitution Cipher Based on The Voynich Manuscript

      Here’s a fun paper: “The Naibbe cipher: a substitution cipher that encrypts Latin and Italian as Voynich Manuscript-like ciphertext“: [...]

• Environment

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ Conservation’s Hot Topics of 2026: From Artificial Intelligence to Mirror Molecules

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Tor ☛ Fighting for Internet Freedom: Ramon's Story from Cuba | The Tor Project

    In our ongoing fight for internet freedom, it's important to remember who we're fighting for. That’s why in this blog post, we’re highlighting a story submitted by a Tor user and how Tor helps them circumvent government censorship.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Right-wingers branded danger to children

    A former Royal Marine has been banned from working with children after he protested against illegal migrants, The Telegraph can disclose.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Site36 ☛ Modern border surveillance: Frontex’s techno-racist vision becomes sharper

  • Unsupervised Learning ☛ The Bubble is Labor

    In other words, the only reason the current labor market (and our economy that's based on it) exist at all is because there's a group of founders/owners who need lots of help producing their goods and services.

    They are not required by anyone to hire me or you to help them if they don't need that help. And the exact moment they can do the work themselves, they will, and not a second after.

  • Anil Dash ☛ What about “Nothing about us without us?”

    What’s striking to me now, listening to that conversation six years later, is how little has changed from the perspective of the technology world, but also how much my own lived experience has come to reflect so much of what I learned in those conversations.

    Each of them was the "us" in the conversation, using their own personal experience, and the experience of other disabled people that they were in community with, to offer specific and personal insights that the creators of these technologies did not have. And whether it was for reasons of crass commercial opportunism — here's some money you could be making! — or simply because it was the right thing to do morally, it's obvious that the people making these technologies could benefit by honoring the principle of centering these users of their products.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ I pretended to be a man on LinkedIn and my engagement went through the roof

    So why, last week, did I post a photo of myself with a curly black moustache growing out of my face to thousands of followers on social media? Because it turns out pretending to be male might be the best way to make yourself heard on LinkedIn.

    I first heard of women being “downrated” by the social network’s algorithm early in November. LinkedIn serves up a mixture of posts to all users: some from people you follow or are connected with, and others that LinkedIn thinks you might enjoy, aiming to keep your clicks lingering on its site.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Seth Godin ☛ Understanding carriage

  Carriage is the term for the method that books, movies, TV shows and other media get from the producers to the public. It’s about who controls user access to the medium.

  Until recently, bookstores were a largely open system. Any publisher had a chance to get any book into any bookstore, sometimes with prime placement and promotion.

• Jamie Zawinski ☛ Today in Email Hegemony

  Here are the 2025 top ten domains from orders placed on the DNA Lounge store. Remember this the next time someone uses email as an example of a federation success story.

• Reuters ☛ Apple faces multimillion-euro Dutch antitrust damages claims after EU's top court ruling

  The foundations argue that the fees charged by Apple for third-party apps on the App Store are excessive, hurt users and are consistent with an unlawful abuse of a dominant position. App developers using Apple's in-app payment system are charged commissions of up to 30%. Apple has said that a Dutch court does not have jurisdiction as the alleged harmful event did not occur in the Netherlands. The CJEU dismissed its arguments, saying that the App Store in question is designed specifically for the Dutch market and uses Dutch to offer apps for sale to users who have an Apple ID associated with the Netherlands, regardless of where they are based.

• MacRumors ☛ Apple Can't Escape Dutch App Store Antitrust Lawsuit, EU Court Rules

  Apple could ultimately have to pay up to an estimated 637 million euros to address the damage suffered by 14 million iPhone and iPad users in the Netherlands.

  The lawsuit dates back to 2022, when two Dutch consumer foundations (Right to Consumer Justice and ‌App Store‌ Claims) accused Apple of abusing its dominant market position and charging developers excessive fees. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Dutch ‌iPhone‌ and ‌iPad‌ users, and it claimed that Apple's 30 percent commission inflated prices for apps and in-app purchases.