Leftovers

• Simon Willison ☛ Dark mode

  The site defaults to picking up the user's preferences, but there's also a toggle in the footer which switches between auto, forced-light and forced-dark. Here's an animated demo: [...]

• Mike Brock ☛ The NFTC Awards for Epistemic Excellence

  It is a noble calling, and so my hat goes off to all of you. Whether I name you here today or not, if this is your calling, then all I have to say is: thank you, for what you do.

  I am going to start with three awards today. Just three. But I will give out more of these awards in the future. There are literally dozens of people I’d like to recognize, but I can’t do that in one sitting!

• Andre Franca ☛ Johnny Decimal System

  I discovered the Johnny Decimal System a short while ago, thanks to a great write-up I stumbled across by Kristof Zerbe. The title "Emerging from the Abyss" resonated to me, as my digital life has always been a "Where did I put that?", split across local and cloud drives, and random folders.

• Science

  • Science News ☛ Neandertals mastered fire-making tools 400,000 years ago

    In 2021, they had “the first proper breakthrough,” Ashton says. He spotted reddened clay in a long-overlooked area. “I thought, ‘I’m sure that looks like heated or burnt sediment.’”

    Geochemical analysis suggested the sediment had been heated multiple times to more than 700 degrees Celsius. A geologic survey showed that iron pyrite is extraordinarily rare locally, suggesting it was transported to the area.

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ Sixty Years Ago, When Instruments Were Played in Space for the First Time, It Was ‘Jingle Bells’ All the Way

    Gemini was designed as the “Bridge to the Moon,” connecting the preceding Mercury program, which was the United States’ first human spaceflight program, and Apollo, which would put a man on the moon. According to Margolis, the Gemini program had to prove that NASA could safely send more people to space for longer periods of time, execute complicated spacecraft maneuvers and demonstrate a spacewalk. Achieving all this meant that NASA could eventually send people to the moon.

  • Jacob Nowosad ☛ Elephant(s) in the room: Graph neural networks, embeddings, and foundation models in spatial data science – Thinking in spatial patterns

    This presentation covered three interconnected deep learning concepts appearing in spatial data science work.

    Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are a deep learning architecture that represents spatial data as graphs: nodes are spatial units (pixels, regions, locations) and edges are relationships (proximity, similarity, connectivity). Nodes aggregate information from neighbors through message passing, similar to spatial lag models. Common types include Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs), Graph Attention Networks (GATs), GraphSAGE, and Graph Isomorphism Networks (GINs).

  • Computational Complexity ☛ Computational Complexity: Learning the Mathematical Process

    The Internet has considerable text and video on how to solve math competition problems that machine learning systems can train on. On the other hand, mathematical research papers usually have little more than theorems and proofs. Maybe some intuition. Rarely do papers go into the thinking process and the false steps that one takes until one finds the proof. For some problems I've spent weeks proving a theorem but only the last day's work gets written up.

• Career/Education

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Almost 60% of pupils accidentally stumble on unverified Holocaust content on social media

    The research draws on four major national studies carried out by the Center since 2008, involving more than 3,000 teachers and 12,000 students, making it the most sustained empirical research program of its kind anywhere in the world.

    It highlights persistent structural pressures on schools that make high-quality Holocaust education harder to deliver. While the Holocaust has been a named topic in the National Curriculum for history since 1991, the Center notes that the rapid growth of multi-academy trusts means most schools are no longer legally required to follow that curriculum.

  • Joshua Blais ☛ Reading in a Distracted World

    Start with a page now. Go pick up a book that’s been collecting dust. Build a system that makes reading easier and remove the distractions that make it an afterthought.

    Read that which excites you, and you start to find that you are getting excited about reading itself.

  • Becky Spratford ☛ RA for All: Revisiting My Most Popular Guest Post of 2025: Library Staff Are Not Superheroes: by Robin Bradford

    As we creep closer to the end of the year, I like to look back on the most popular posts on the blog, highlighting what you found the most connect with.

    Before I share a specific post, I want to thank you all for staying with me all these years. I had over 1.41 million views in 2025 (still counting).

    Today I have 2025's most popular post written by someone other than me. Itt was by Robin Bradford, originally posted on January 13, 2025 here and below.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Robert Reich ☛ What my doctor told me, and what I said back

    That’s okay. I’m going to continue writing this Substack to you every day, and sending you the videos I do with my young associates, and maybe even write another book or do another movie.

    It’s the least I can do. We’re in a national emergency. It’s my small way of fortifying you for what you’re going through. And thanking you for your activism.

• Proprietary

  • Thunderbird ☛ VIDEO: Exchange Email Support

    Welcome to the last Community Office Hours of 2025! In this edition, Heather and Monica welcome Sr. Software Engineer Brendan Abolivier and Software Engineer Eleanor Dicharry from the Desktop Team. We’re discussing the recent Exchange Web Services Support for email that just landed in Thunderbird Monthly Release 145. Learn how the team landed this feature and discover future plans for Calendar and Contact support, as well as Graph Hey Hi (AI) in the blog, video, and podcast below.

    Community Office Hours will be back in 2026. Thank you so much for joining us for these sneak peeks into how we make, improve, and expand Thunderbird! As always, if you have any ideas for future office hours topics, let us know in the comments!

    [...]

    Exchange is the server-side product that hosts Microsoft’s e-mail, address book, and calendar services. Exchange powers both Microsoft services in the cloud on Microsoft 365 as well as on premises servers run by organizations.

    This is the first protocol we’ve added in over 20 years. We have an older code base that was in survival mode for a long time, and knowing the code well enough to improve on it is a challenge. So we had to understand how everything fit together first. The good news is this entire process will make adding future protocols, like JMAP and Graph, which will ultimately replace Exchange, go much faster.

  • The Register UK ☛ Russian hackers debut simple ransomware service

    According to Walter, the gang slunk back into the shadowy digital underground for most of 2025 after Telegram banned it multiple times. However, CyberVolk returned in August with a new ransomware-as-a-service operation.

  • The Register UK ☛ Salt Typhoon pair attended Cisco cyber school, expert claims

    Both Yu and Qiu are co-owners of Beijing Huanyu Tianqiong, one of the Chinese tech companies that international security advisories specify as being fronts for Salt Typhoon activity.

  • Cory Dransfeldt ☛ Using Calibri on .gov sites

    The US government is run by petty morons that are threatened by a font. But because the web is the web, you can at least force .gov sites to render all text using Calibri.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ OpenAI Sued for Causing Murder-Suicide

      A new lawsuit against OpenAI alleges that ChatGPT stoked a troubled man’s paranoid delusions, leading him to murder his elderly mother and then kill himself.

    • Federal News Network ☛ AI executive order could deepen trust crisis, not solve it

      An EO that punishes states for attempting to introduce trust and oversight into the ecosystem will actually have the inverse intended effect. A KPMG study from Spring 2025 showed that 59% of Americans surveyed simply do not trust AI systems. This sentiment has been registered in similar studies, which translates to a majority of Americans distrusting AI systems, or at the very least, remaining skeptical.

    • Scoop News Group ☛ New cybersecurity guidance paves the way for AI in critical infrastructure 

      A central contribution of this guidance is its clear distinction between safety and security in the AI era. Protecting the integrity and availability of systems is not the same as preventing physical harm, and AI complicates this relationship in ways many CISOs are now expected to navigate. The guidance recognizes that AI’s non-deterministic nature can lead to unpredictable behaviors or hallucinations. This is why it draws an explicit line: “AI such as LLMs almost certainly should not be used to make safety decisions for OT environments.”

    • 404 Media ☛ Disney Invests $1 Billion in the AI Slopification of Its Brand

      After the hype of the launch, OpenAI added an “opt-in” policy to Sora that was meant to prevent users from violating the rights of copyright holders. It’s trivial to break this policy however, and circumvent the guardrails preventing a user from making a lewd Mickey Mouse cartoon or episode of The Simpsons. The original sin of Sora and other AI systems is that the training data is full of copyrighted material and the models cannot be retrained without great cost, if at all.

      If you can’t beat the slop, become the slop.

    • The Verge ☛ Disney wants to drag you into the gen AI slop

      That might genuinely be how Iger thinks getting into bed with OpenAI will play out, but when you take an honest look at what Sora AI is and how Disney’s past experiments with generative AI have gone, it’s clear that this is all going to end very, very stupidly.

    • The Register UK ☛ Disney, OpenAI sign video, image generation licensing deal

      Amid controversy over its ability to generate content with copyrighted characters, OpenAI has struck a three-year deal with Disney to license more than 200 Disney, Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars characters for use in Sora videos and ChatGPT Images.

    • Nick Heer ☛ Generative Clickbait, Brought to You by Google and Meta

      This, obviously, does not meaningfully challenge Maiberg’s reporting, as it is Instagram generating these page titles specifically for Google whether users like it or not. This is just distracting nonsense. I wonder if being a dishonest asshole is a job description for Meta’s communications department.

    • Manton Reece ☛ Reverse centaurs

      In a way, Cory’s focus is as much about how big companies treat employees as it is about AI. Companies that only care about money will use AI to justify layoffs. But the strength of AI is letting humans do their jobs better, not getting rid of them, and not turning them into soulless, blind followers of the machine.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Department of Defense goes to war by AI chatbot

      I got a tip yesterday from an anonymous US army officer that the US government was about to break new ground in authoritarian dumbassery. The officer had logged into his work computer in the morning, and got a popup: [...]

    • The Register UK ☛ AI superintelligence is a Silicon Valley fantasy, Ai2 researcher says

      You want artificial general intelligence (AGI)? Current-day processors aren't powerful enough to make it happen and our ability to scale up may soon be coming to an end, argues well-known researcher Tim Dettmers.

      "The thinking around AGI and superintelligence is not just optimistic, but fundamentally flawed," the Allen Institute research scientist and Carnegie Mellon University assistant professor writes in a recent blog post. Dettmers defines AGI as an intelligence that can do all things humans can do, including economically meaningful physical tasks.

      The problem, he explains, is that most of the discussion around AGI is philosophical. But, at the end of the day, it has to run on something. And while many would like to believe that GPUs are still getting faster and more capable, Dettmers predicts that we're rapidly approaching a wall.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Privacy International ☛ The Trump Administration wants your DNA and social media | Privacy International

      Yesterday the Trump Administration announced a proposed change in policy for travellers to the U.S. It applies to the powers of data collection by the Customs and Border Police (CBP).

      If the proposed changes are adopted after the 60-day consultation, then millions of travellers to the U.S. will be forced to use a U.S. government mobile phone app, submit their social media from the last five years and email addresses used in the last ten years, including of family members. They’re also proposing the collection of DNA.

    • EDRI ☛ Moving past 'Chat Control': solutions that protect kids and privacy

      Proponents of the law lament that attention has been taken away from protecting children. Both of these things are true. A high number of expert analyses have found that the Commission’s proposal relies on a fundamentally flawed understanding of technology, would likely amount to unlawful mass surveillance under EU human rights law and may even harm those it seeks to protect.

      It has taken significant resources to contest these serious flaws of the proposal, as well as to undertake the vital democratic exercise of holding the European Commission to account for repeated breaches of their duties, several confirmed counts of maladministration, and a formal admonishment for an illegal ad-targeting campaign.

    • EDRI ☛ How Danes je nov dan helped stop dangerous spyware in Slovenia

      Danes je nov dan identified the amendments as a violation of constitutional rights as these tools cause unrestricted invasions of privacy, abuse of personal data, loss of dignity, threats to safety, and freedoms of expression, assembly, and association. One of the primary concerns was the indiscriminate nature of the proposed tools. The harm caused is uncontrollable and often affects not only the alleged target, but also everyone who is in the vicinity of an IMSI catcher or infected device, or who interacts with such devices. Therefore, the organisation warned that damage caused by such equipment cannot be contained, meaning that rights would be violated for a wide circle of people, including children, family members, colleagues, and anyone who happened to be near a target, as such becoming collateral damage of this type of surveillance.

    • Tech Policy Press ☛ The EU’s Digital Omnibus Must Be Rejected by Lawmakers. Here is Why.

      Last month, the European Commission released the Digital Omnibus. Some early media coverage, including commentary arguing that both the Commission and civil society misunderstand the package, frames the debate around competitiveness and burdens. But this lens misses what the proposal actually does. Key parts of the text weaken the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the ePrivacy framework, two laws that anchor fundamental rights across Europe and the rest of the EU digital rulebook.

      A leaked draft circulated before publication revealed attempts to dangerously rewrite these laws. Public criticism forced the Commission to roll back some of these elements. The final text appears to avoid the most extreme ideas, but it still embeds structural weakening. Some observers present this as a pragmatic recalibration. That framing ignores the broader deregulatory momentum shaping the proposal and the political context in which it has been introduced. Removing the worst ideas does not fix the larger problems, which have to do with both substance and process. To top it all off, the Omnibus was launched alongside the opening of the Digital Fitness Check, leaving room for amending any law with a digital component.

      EDRi and civil society across Europe oppose the Digital Omnibus and its rollback of data protection and privacy. Here is why.

    • OpenRightsGroup ☛ Joint Briefing: Petition Debate on Repealing the Online Safety Act

      Over 550,000 people have petitioned Parliament to repeal the Online Safety Act (OSA), making it one of the largest public expressions of concern about a UK digital law in recent history. A petition to reform the Act would likely have attracted even more support. While it may seem unusual for so many people to challenge a law framed around “online safety,” this briefing explains what those concerns actually are.

      These concerns have hit a nerve. Parliament needs to ensure the OSA works without unfairly restricting people’s day to day activities. The balance needs adjusting, and some clear changes could resolve some of the problems, and reduce the arguments for a wholesale rollback.

      We highlight how the Act affects freedom of expression and access to information, and how its requirements risk undermining the ability of small, non-profit, and public-interest websites to operate. This document focuses specifically on these free-expression impacts, rather than the broader range of issues raised by the Act.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Atlantic Council ☛ Russia’s insistence on a defenseless Ukraine betrays Putin’s true intentions

    Analysts estimate that it could take years for Russia to occupy the area by force, and would likely cost the Kremlin hundreds of thousands of additional casualties. Beyond the fortress belt, the way would be open for further sweeping Russian advances into central Ukraine and toward Kyiv itself. This vital role in Ukraine’s overall defense explains why Putin is prepared to reduce his demands elsewhere but remains so eager for Kyiv to hand over this particular territory without a fight.

  • JURIST ☛ Austria approves school headscarf ban for girls under 14

    Austrian lawmakers on Thursday voted by a large majority to approve a law banning headscarves in schools for girls under 14, a move that is now facing criticism from experts and human rights groups. The only party to oppose it was the opposition Green Party, which argued that the law is unconstitutional.

  • Sightline Media Group ☛ Why Hitler declared war on the United States

    The reality is that war with the United States had been included in Hitler’s agenda for years, that he had deferred hostilities only because he wanted to begin them at a time, and under circumstances, of his own choosing, and that the Japanese attack fitted his requirements precisely. It had been an assumption of Hitler’s since the 1920s that Germany would at some point fight the United States.

  • The Nation ☛ The Maine Lawsuit That Could Save Democracy From Big Money

    Fifteen years after the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to dark money and unchecked spending with Citizens United, the Maine initiative has exposed a tension in the movement for clean elections: should advocates pursue state and local reforms, or bet on a high-stakes legal battle that could radically rewrite the rules of campaign finance nationwide?

  • Omicron Limited ☛ The social media ban is just the start of Australia's forthcoming restrictions—and teens have legitimate concerns

    While families grapple with the social media ban, Australia is about to dial up the volume on increased measures to further regulate the internet through the impending industry codes. These will eventually be implemented across services including search engines, social media messaging services, online games, app distributors, equipment manufacturers and suppliers (smartphones, tablets and so on) and AI chatbots and companions.

    Over the Christmas break we'll start to see hosting services (and ISPs/search engines) that deliver sexual content including pornography, alongside material categorized as promoting eating disorders and self-harm, start to impose various restrictions, including increased age checks.

  • Pete Brown ☛ Broad coalitions mean we’re not gonna agree on everything.

    Like it or not, we are going to need a pretty broad coalition to pry Trump and his cast of bootlickers and crooks out of power. If it takes getting a bunch of otherwise objectionable legislators from Indiana on board, I’m prett okay with that.

  • Michael Geist ☛ The Catch-22 of Canadian Digital Sovereignty

    My latest Globe and Mail op-ed begins by noting that digital sovereignty has emerged as the watchword driving Canada’s digital policy agenda, as the government seeks to position the country as a global leader in artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies. The increased emphasis on digital policy is welcome given the years of neglect or failed strategies that yielded little more than court challenges, trade disputes and blocked news links. Yet the focus on infrastructure spending as the key catalyst for addressing digital sovereignty risks is misplaced and unlikely to safeguard against lost autonomy and control.

  • FAIR ☛ Media Opinion on DC Shooter Avoided Reality That Violence Abroad Can Come Home

    Opinion writing about last month’s National Guard shooting in Washington, DC, serves as the latest example of US corporate media’s role in whitewashing US foreign policy.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Insight Hungary ☛ Trump denies offering Orban $20bn ‘financial shield’

      Hungary’s foreign minister, Peter Szijjártó, has tried to clarify Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán after Donald Trump publicly denied offering the Hungarian leader a financial “shield.” In an interview with Politico, the former US president said, “No, I didn’t promise him, but he certainly asked for it,” contradicting Orbán’s earlier statement that Budapest could access up to $20bn under an agreement with Washington. Orbán, who faces a tough election next year, had said that Hungary could receive a financial shield following his meeting with Trump in November.

      Szijjártó said on Tuesday that “no agreement was in fact reached on any $20 billion, just as no one had claimed,” insisting instead that Orbán and Trump had agreed only to begin talks on “a new type of financial cooperation” that could provide some form of protection. Orbán’s government, grappling with a third year of stagnation, has introduced tax cuts, wage increases and food vouchers to bolster domestic support, while presenting potential US backing as proof that Hungary can secure alternatives to frozen EU funds, which remain blocked amid a long-running rule-of-law dispute.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Emirati CEO Asked Jeffrey Epstein for Elon Musk Connection

    Two years before hosting a meeting with Elon Musk in Dubai, Emirati logistics CEO Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem asked Jeffrey Epstein to connect him with the Tesla head, newly released emails show. It’s not the only time Musk has come up in the Epstein files.

• Environment

  • The Drone Girl ☛ Meteomatics and why landing on moving ships matters

    The U.S. Navy just completed a demonstration of Meteomatics’ Meteodrones, successfully launching and recovering automated weather drones from moving vessels in the Mississippi Sound. The trials, conducted as part of the Advanced Naval Technology Exercise (ANTX) near Gulfport, mark a significant step forward in filling a critical gap in atmospheric observation over open ocean.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • CS Monitor ☛ Stablecoins are the low-risk type of [cryptocurrency]. But they aren’t risk-free for economy.

      The risk posed by stablecoins is that if for whatever reason their value falters, investors may cash out, causing a larger collapse in which the companies sell off their holdings, including their Treasury bills. If the stablecoin sector keeps growing larger, a downturn in that sector could trigger a sharp fall in the value of U.S. debt.

    • Jacobin Magazine ☛ The Data Center Boom Could Trigger Blackouts

      Last week, the monitor overseeing PJM filed a complaint with the nation’s top electric utility regulator, warning of unreliable service for its sixty-five million customers across the Midwest and mid-Atlantic. Monitoring Analytics asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to pause connecting larger artificial intelligence–powering data centers to its grid until PJM can ensure “reliable, economic, and environmentally acceptable” service and guarantee that the growing data center energy burden won’t produce unnecessary blackouts.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ Shade Equity: To Understand the Problem — and the Solutions — Look to Tucson

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Straits Times ☛ Forbes ranks Japan PM Takaichi 3rd on list of world’s most powerful women [Ed: Forbes also gets bribes to "rank" things]

    Ms Tan Su Shan of banking group DBS Bank also made the list.

  • EFF ☛ Thousands Tell the Patent Office: Don’t Hide Bad Patents From Review

    A massive wave of public comments just told the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO): don’t shut the public out of patent review.

    EFF submitted its own formal comment opposing the USPTO’s proposed rules, and more than 4,000 supporters added their voices—an extraordinary response for a technical, fast-moving rulemaking. We comprised more than one-third of the 11,442 comments submitted. The message is unmistakable: the public wants a meaningful way to challenge bad patents, and the USPTO should not take that away.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Chinese government wades into Dutch chipmaker dispute — presses Netherlands to resolve Nexperia saga as supply concerns grow

    China has called on the Netherlands to move quickly to resolve the dispute surrounding Nexperia, the Dutch semiconductor manufacturer owned by China’s Wingtech, after months of supervision measures and a retaliatory export freeze disrupted shipments of basic components used across the automotive and electronics industries.

  • [Old] The Onion ☛ Anti-Spam Legislation Opposed By Powerful Penis-Enlargement Lobby - The Onion

    Efforts to pass legislation restricting Internet “spam”—unsolicited mass e-mails usually for advertising purposes—are meeting with strong resistance from the nation’s powerful penis-enlargement lobby.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Instacart reaches into your pocket and lops a third off your dollars

    There's a whole greedflation-denial cottage industry that insists that rising prices are either the result of unknowable, untameable and mysterious economic forces, or they're the result of workers having too much money and too many jobs.

    The one thing we're absolutely not allowed to talk about is the fact that CEOs keep going on earnings calls to announce that they are hiking prices way ahead of any increase in their costs, and blaming inflation: [...]

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Northwestern University ☛ When federal might meets local resistance

    A palpable tension mixed with anticipation filled Chicago-area newsrooms this fall when journalists found themselves suddenly pressed into the service of covering the White House’s immigration enforcement surge. Local journalists worked around the clock to cover community responses to a militarized and sometimes violent presence in neighborhoods in and around the city.

  • Roosevelt Institute ☛ The Political Economy of the US Media System: Excavating the Roots of the Present Crisis

    Multiple crises confront our information and communication systems today, including oligarchic media ownership, the collapse of local journalism, and state threats to media companies. But these are symptomatic of deeper structural pathologies that have long been in the making. Decades of neoliberal thinking about the proper relationships between government, media institutions, the market, and the broader public led to repeated policy failures that have been disastrous for our democracy, as current events so glaringly demonstrate. To begin working toward a new regulatory paradigm and a new public interest–oriented media system, we must make media policy and structural media reform central to a broader pro-democracy movement. But first, we must understand how we arrived at a point where our core media systems and infrastructures are failing democracy so profoundly.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • [Repeat] Futurism ☛ Police Admit They're Using ChatGPT to Generate "Sketches" of Suspects

    “We’re now in a day and age where if we post a pencil drawing, most people are not going to acknowledge it,” the sketch artist admitted. Basically, the Goodyear PD believes that local residents, especially the younger crowd, are much more likely to interact with a hyper-realistic AI rendering.

  • Techdirt ☛ ChatGPT Is Pitching In To Help Federal Officers Misrepresent Confrontations With Protesters

    Contained in the 200+ page opinion [PDF] is a small footnote that points to an inanimate co-conspirator to the litany of lies served up by federal law enforcement in defense of its unconstitutional actions: [...]

  • Kelly Hayes ☛ How We’ve Resisted ICE: Street Lessons From Chicago

    “The best way to respond to fear and intimidation tactics is to show we’re not afraid. We’re going to keep showing up. We’re going to keep speaking out,” says musician Jocelyn Walsh, who is facing federal charges for protesting ICE activity in the Chicagoland area. In this episode of Movement Memos, I talk with Walsh and Chicago organizers Gabe Gonzalez and Rey Wences about what activists have learned from months of raids, repression, and escalating authoritarian violence.

  • Daphne Preston-Kendal ☛ crumbles.blog: Make the font bigger

    Along those lines, quite a while ago I made an unfunny remark on Mastodon about the tendency of some widely-respected computer scientists to use a certain font in their presentations; just recently, prompted by referring to that post for the nth time – so much for jokes getting funnier by repetition – I decided to look into why they do this, even though that particular font is widely disliked. The answer turned out to be pretty much that they don’t care, and they wish people would focus on the content instead of the font. Fair enough.

    Except someone also mentioned that that particular font might be good to use because it’s allegedly easier to read for dyslexic people.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Ordered to absolutely not deport man to Guatemala ICE does it anyway

    Pablo Pablo had been living in the U.S. since 2012, complying with every rule ICE handed him. He even showed up for regular check-ins. His reward? A surprise detention, a one-way flight to danger, and a middle finger from the agency charged with upholding the law. A federal judge called it "blatant lawlessness." ICE smiled.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Becky Spratford ☛ RA for All: Trending: Libraries Are Refocusing on Physical Media

    I am going to take a little detour from writing about the best books of the year to begin looking at a very big trend of 2025-- the return of physical media.

    With the increasing cost and consolidation of streaming services many people are figuring out what we libraries already knew-- when you stream things you not only do you not own them, but also you can lose access to them either when you stop subscribing or if they just decide to remove your access.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Copyrights

  • Futurism ☛ King Gizzard Responds to Being Impersonated by AI on Spotify

    Next, something extremely dark happened: an impostor created a band on Spotify with the extremely similar band name of “King Lizard Wizard” and used AI to generate songs with the same titles as actual King Gizzard songs that ripped off their entire lyrics and sound, accumulating tens of thousands of streams while remaining on the streaming service for weeks without detection.