Leftovers

• Variety ☛ Con Pederson Dead: '2001: A Space Odyssey' Effects Supervisor Was 91 

  Pederson was a fixture in the field of science fiction filmmaking, particularly thanks to his involvement on Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” in 1968. Alongside three other special effects supervisors including Douglas Trumbull, Wally Veevers and Tom Howard, Pederson’s work led the director to his Oscar win for best visual effects in 1969. On set, Pederson ran the “war room,” where the VFX shots were planned, scheduled, tracked and evaluated. For each shot, anywhere from eight to ten elements were added to the original camera negative, an intricate process that took months.

• Sean Conner ☛ A small update on my spam situation

  So it was a few days ago I finally got around to deleting my old registrar email address. And guess what? That “majority of spam” sent to my old registrar address was over 90% of the spam that got through the greylisting daemon. My email has been very quiet since.

• Marijke Luttekes ☛ Create that blog

  Waiting for that perfect blog platform before you publish your thoughts to the world? Unsure whether you even should publish articles? This article is for you.

• Manton Reece ☛ Indie Microblogging epigraphs

  My book has about 65 short chapters. Each chapter has a quote at the beginning. I thought it would be fun to gather all of these together in a blog post, so here they are. (They aren’t in book order.)

• Andrew Nesbitt ☛ The Nine Levels of JavaScript Dependency Hell

  I have walked the circles of JavaScript dependency hell. I watched the developers solve each problem, only to create the next. Come, I will show you what I have seen.

• Maury ☛ You should start a blog

  Writing something down forces you to fully understand it. When the idea is on paper, you can see all the missing assumptions and leaps in logic. It’s common to start writing, do some research and find out that your original point was wrong.

  This is a good thing.

• Chris Aldrich ☛ Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten Method One Pager (1968)

  While doing some research about Luhmann’s numbering system’s antecedents, I recently came across a “one pager” (typescript) written by Luhmann himself in the form of some lecture notes from 1968 that folks may appreciate.

• Science

  • Tim Bray ☛ Regexp Lessons

    I’m just landing a chonky PR in Quamina whose effect is to enable the + and * regexp features. As in my last chapter, this is a disorderly war story not an essay, and probably not of general interest. But as I said then, the people who care about coercing finite automata into doing useful things at scale are My People (there are dozens of us).

  • [Old] Remy Wang ☛ Generic Join Algorithms

    This post introduces the basics of the worst-case optimal Generic Join algorithm.

• Career/Education

  • Unmitigated Risk ☛ Intuition Comes Last

    This took me a long time to understand, in part because the people giving me that advice were not wrong about their experience. What differs is not the presence of intuition, but when it becomes available.

  • Anil Dash ☛ How the hell are you supposed to have a career in tech in 2026?

    The number one question I get from my friends, acquaintances, and mentees in the technology industry these days is, by far, variations on the basic theme of, “what the hell are we supposed to do now?”

    There have been mass layoffs that leave more tech workers than ever looking for new roles in the worst market we’ve ever seen. Many of the most talented, thoughtful and experienced people in the industry are feeling worried, confused, and ungrounded in a field that no longer looks familiar.

  • Alexandra Wolfe ☛ My Mother the Runaway

    Why? Well, for the obvious, but also, because, at the time, the military were desperately recruiting as many young women as they could into the services. And, like many, my mum knew she wanted a better life. A different life, and one that gave her opportunities. She left to join the WAAFs and trained as an MT driver. Her first posting was to the outer most reaches of Scotland, to Stornoway in the Outer Hebrides. She served as a driver for the aircrew of squadrons patrolling the North Atlantic for U-boats, flying Avro Ansons under Costal Command.

  • Hazel Weakly ☛ Observations of Leadership (Part Two)

    Hey again! Welcome back to part two of me reflecting on the past few quarters and writing down my answers to John Cutler and Tom Kerwin’s questions on how leaders navigate uncertainty and ambiguity. If you’re lost, part one is here. I started writing my reflections to this a while ago (almost two years now!) and decided that I actually wanted to separate out every edition of this by a few years. That’s how long it takes for feedback cycles to truly hit at my level, anyway, and it’s a good excuse to practice self reflection. I’ve also grown to enjoy seeing how my thinking matures over the years, and this is a natural way to do that.

  • [Old] Hazel Weakly ☛ Observations of Leadership (Part One)

    I read this post from John Cutler and Tom Kerwin recently on how leaders navigate uncertainty and ambiguity and it intrigued me. I decided to give my shot at answering these as a writing exercise and as an opportunity for self reflection. The past few quarters have seen a lot of change for me, and haven’t taken the time I need to reflect as much as I would otherwise wish; this seems like as good of an opportunity as any. For each of these, I’m going to copy in the interview question and then answer it very similarly to how I would answer it during an interview (but without any of the time or brevity constraints). I’m actually quite curious to see what other people have to say about my answers, and what answers others have of their own.

    As a brief bit of background, I’m going to be referring to my current job quite a bit, but how I’m doing so is probably going to be a bit confusing because it’s been a very unusual journey. Here’s the very shortened timeline: [...]

• Hardware

  • The Verge ☛ Dell is eating humble pie and bringing back the XPS brand | The Verge

    The XPS 14 and 16 are launching in select configurations on January 6th, with entry-level and higher-end configs coming in February. For now, the XPS 14 at launch starts at $2,049 and the XPS 16 at $2,199.99. If you’re growing increasingly Windows-averse, Dell says an XPS 14 running Ubuntu 24.04 will come “later this year.”

  • Digital Camera World ☛ You can buy a necklace that holds an SD card: Genius idea or total gimmick?

    Imagery is thin on the ground, but I can only assume that the item of jewelry either opens up like a locket or you simply slot the SD card inside. And while this might seem extremely far removed from traditional jewelry, it kind of reminds me of a modern-day locket. People often placed photos or tiny paintings of loved ones inside lockets – I suppose you could fill your SD card with digital imagery of loved ones, too.

  • Jeff Geerling ☛ Raspberry Pi is cheaper than a Mini PC again (that's not good)

    Today, because of the wonderful RAM shortages1, the Mini PC is the same price as a fully kitted-out Raspberry Pi 5.

    And that stinks.

    Both of these systems have gone up in price, just the Pi a little less than the mini PCs.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Intel launches Core Ultra Series 3 at CES with Arc B390, teases new "handheld gaming platform" | GamingOnLinux

    Intel have done their CES 2026 presentation and if you're going to be in the market for CPU and GPU power together, they might have something for you. With the release of the Core Ultra Series 3 (Panther Lake) along with the new Arc B390 graphics at the top-end, we're looking at some pretty powerful stuff.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • The Register UK ☛ OpenAI sees big opportunity in US health queries

    About sixty percent of American adults have turned to AI like ChatGPT for health or healthcare in the past three months. Instead of seeing that as an indictment of the state of US healthcare, OpenAI sees an opportunity to shape policy.

• Proprietary

  • Microsoft (MSFT) Eyes Major January Layoffs as AI Costs Rise [Ed: But of course! What else? Microsoft cannot grow when the debt is surging so fast.]

    The cuts are expected to take place in the third week of January. Reports from workers point to Azure cloud teams, the Xbox gaming unit, and global sales as key areas of focus. So far, Microsoft has not confirmed the plan. This move would follow a difficult 2025. During that year, Microsoft cut more than 15,000 jobs across several rounds. Those actions came even as revenue and profit stayed strong.

  • Rodrigo Ghedin ☛ 2025 has been a disaster for Windows 11

    Zac Bowden wrote a long article stating that Windows fans (the author's definition) have been sold a “disastrous 2025 for Windows 11.” I haven't used Windows in many years and have barely touched version 11, so I read it with extra attention.

    Anyway, I'm sure you can guess the most obvious problem with Windows 11 in 2025: [...]

  • Andre Franca ☛ The SaaS Takeover

    Some days I imagined the time when I could actually buy software. Pay once, install it, use it for years, done. It looks like every tool wants to live in my credit card, and even the simplest app insists on a monthly relationship. That didn’t happen by accident. I mean, the world didn’t wake up one day and decide SaaS was more elegant. It took shape as a practical solution, and over time it became the model users were expected to accept.

  • The New Stack ☛ Why Cloud Optimization Is an Engineering Problem

    Trying to control cloud spending after you get the bill never works. The solution is shifting optimization left into design and deployment.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ Elon Musk After His Grok AI Did Disgusting Things to Literal Children: "Way Funnier"

      It’s worth noting that these apologies and avowals of fixing the issue are almost certainly complete hokum from Grok. The fact that it’s freely generating such morally reprehensible — not to mention likely illegal — images indicates that it’s at heart designed to be highly compliant to virtually any request; in this case, the expression of contrition was responding to a prompt asking it to “write a heartfelt apology note.”

    • NDTV ☛ Elon Musk's Grok Faces Global Backlash Over Sexualised Images

      Elon Musk's AI tool Grok faced growing international backlash Monday for generating sexualized deepfakes of women and minors, with the European Union joining the condemnation and Britain warning of an investigation.

    • 404 Media ☛ Grok's AI CSAM Shitshow

      We are experiencing world events like the kidnapping of Maduro through the lens of the most depraved AI you can imagine.

    • Computational Complexity ☛ Computational Complexity: AI and Research Papers

      Technology has changed research distribution since the invention of paper, and the printing press, typewriters, journals and conferences have all had dramatic effects. But we've already seen such dramatic changes just within my research career from authors doing their own formatting (TeX/LaTeX), instant distribution of papers (email/web) and collaborative writing (email/shared repositories/Overleaf).

      How AI affects research writing follows a trend not unlike other AI applications.

  • Social Control Media

    • Vox ☛ Is the [Internet] getting worse?

      “There were fewer mega platforms — by which I mean these huge sites that became the whole [Internet] for people. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, places where you go and you can spend hours without ever leaving that particular website,” he said.

      So what caused this shift in the [Internet]? And was the change inevitable? Read tells us on the latest episode of Explain It to Me. Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

    • The Record ☛ EU looking ‘very seriously’ at taking action against X over Grok

      The move follows outcry last week when Grok responded to a user’s prompt to remove clothing from an image of a 14-year-old actress, amid a surge of similar activity in which the tool was used to “undress” images of women and pose them in bikinis.

      In the midday media briefing on Monday, the European Commission’s spokesperson for technology, Thomas Regnier, told journalists the commission was “very seriously looking into this matter.”

    • The Cyber Show ☛ Always crashing in the same car: Bad technology as a preventable social harm.

      Why is digital technology so often a cultist, hive-minded mass hysteria that knowingly disregards grave harms? The 'excuse' that "nobody knew about the harms" simply doesn't hold-up. I was certainly not alone 10 years ago and while writing Digital Vegan discovered allied minds like Sherry Turkle, Cal Newport, Shoshana Zuboff, Nicholas Carr and so on. Why did it take us a decade to even begin awakening a critical re-examination of mass technologies?

      The claim that the "tech industry is powerful", while true, is not sufficient to explain fearful and self-deceiving behaviours. Today we can hear similar voices resisting any grown-up and impartial discussion of "AI", and still suspicion against more refined, cautious people not "embracing" technologies of domination, control and stupification.

      Now that we are ready to admit the evidence around social media use, and governments are enacting legislation, it's also a good time to rethink why we are so resistant to technological self-examination. This would be timely, before we sleepwalk into the next wave of damaging "AI". For someone out there, there is an enormous research opportunity to investigate technological conformity and recalcitrance to reflection.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Record ☛ Russian hackers target European hospitality industry with ‘blue screen of death’ malware

      “The psychological manipulation, combined with the abuse of trusted system binaries like `MSBuild.exe`, allows the infection to establish a foothold deep within the victim’s system before traditional defenses can react,” the researchers said.

      “The technical complexity of the infection chain reveals a clear intent to evade detection and maintain long-term persistence.”

    • The Record ☛ Cyberattack forces British high school to close

      In an email to parents and carers, the school said the cyberattack “has taken down the school IT system,” leaving staff without access “to any digital services including telephones / emails / servers and the school’s management system.”

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Six Colors ☛ Messages craves cloud syncing, even when you don’t want it

      Before iCloud for Messages, Apple generally synced messages among devices that were logged into the same iCloud account and were awake, among other parameters. If one was turned off or lacked an Internet connection, the sync might never happen, leaving an incomplete record across your communications.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Kyiv Independent ☛ Slavoj Zizek: Welcome to the age of corridors

    In this momentous announcement, largely ignored by our big media, "opening" stands for its exact opposite: Odesa is Ukraine's main port through which most of its export (grain, sunflowers, etc.) gets out, and to "open" a corridor to Odesa means that all ships leaving Odesa and going there will have to pass through this corridor tightly controlled by Russia and enabling it to reject the passage or to seize them.

    Since this corridor will pass through international waters, its imposition amounts to a pure exercise of power, violating international laws.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Hegseth’s Appalling Vengeance Campaign

    One indicator of a polity’s health is whether a citizen can be punished merely for telling the truth about the law. The signs for American democracy are not good.

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ Pentagon will try to penalize Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly for illegal orders video

    Kelly wrote in a social media post that he planned to challenge Hegseth’s attempt to alter his retirement rank and pay, arguing it’s an attempt to punish him for challenging the Trump administration.

    “My rank and retirement are things that I earned through my service and sacrifice for this country. I got shot at. I missed holidays and birthdays. I commanded a space shuttle mission while my wife Gabby recovered from a gunshot wound to the head– all while proudly wearing the American flag on my shoulder,” Kelly wrote. “Generations of servicemembers have made these same patriotic sacrifices for this country, earning the respect, appreciation, and rank they deserve.”

    Kelly added that Hegseth’s goal with the process is to “send the message to every single retired servicemember that if they say something he or Donald Trump doesn’t like, they will come after them the same way. It’s outrageous and it is wrong. There is nothing more un-American than that.”

  • YLE ☛ Finland's 13k new conscripts prepare for life without their phones

    Some of them seem to enjoy the limits on access to social media, according to Österlund.

    "After a while, newcomers often notice that sometimes it's good to be without their cell phones. You don't have to fiddle with your phone every 15 minutes," Österlund said.

  • Semafor Inc ☛ Zambia accepts mining taxes in yuan

    Chinese mining firms in Zambia have started paying royalties and taxes in yuan, as the currency gains ground on the continent. The Zambian authorities are the first in Africa to confirm they are accepting mining-tax payments in renminbi, Bloomberg reported.

  • The Nation ☛ Pete Hegseth Moves Against Senator Mark Kelly

    Kelly shot back at Hegseth quickly Monday morning on X, citing his 25 years in the Navy, 39 combat missions and four missions to space “to defend the Constitution, including the First Amendment rights of every American to speak out. I never expected that the President of the United States and the Secretary of Defense would attack me for doing exactly that.”

  • OpenRightsGroup ☛ Digital Sovereignty Briefing on the Cybersecurity Bill

    The Cybersecurity and Resilience Bill’s second reading is scheduled for 6 January. The Bill aims to make “provision … about the security and resilience of network and information systems used or relied on in connection with the carrying on of essential activities.”

    The obvious question is: how, in a world of dependence on US big tech vendors, from Amazon, Google and Microsoft, through to Palantir, can the UK government ensure the “security and resilience of essential activities”?

  • The Register UK ☛ EU vows to stand firm as US steps up attacks on tech regs

    In the last five years, the world's richest trading bloc has introduced the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which regulates digital platforms, and the Digital Services Act (DSA), designed to curb illegal content. Since President Donald Trump's return to power in 2025, the US has become more vocal in its criticism of EU tech regulation.

  • The Register UK ☛ Free Starlink in Venezuela? Read the fine print

    There's just one big problem with Elon Musk's latest generous humanitarian offer: Starlink isn't available in Venezuela.

  • The Next Move ☛ Mark Kelly: 'I Am Not Going To Back Down'

    Today, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a letter of censure against Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, threatening the retired Navy captain with a reduction in pension and a demotion.

    At issue is a video in which Kelly and five other members of Congress with military backgrounds reminded service members that they can refuse illegal orders. The defense secretary’s move is the latest step in a campaign against Kelly that has seen President Donald Trump threaten the senator and his colleagues with capital punishment.

  • Robert OCallahan ☛ Why Trump Is An Antichrist

    Galatians 5:22-23 teaches that the fruit of the Spirit is “love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control”. These are not characteristics that spring to mind when one thinks of Donald Trump. Yet what makes him exceptional is how openly he celebrates their opposites — hate, anger, contempt, unkindness, and unbridled, unrelenting conflict.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ NATO could end if US takes over Greenland — Danish PM

    "If the United States decides to attack another NATO country, then everything would stop — that includes NATO and therefore post-World War II security," Frederiksen said.

  • The Gray Zone ☛ Behind the DOJ’s politicized indictment of Maduro: a CIA-created ‘network’ and coerced star witness

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Marisa Kabas ☛ Call Trump's power grab in Venezuela what it is

    Corporate media must recognize they're being openly lied to—and report accordingly.

    [...]

    “So many in media are ill-equipped to interview officials about what’s happening because they begin with the presumption of legitimacy and don’t know enough about history or U.S. foreign policy to foment intelligent pushback and hold officials accountable,” journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones posted Sunday on Bluesky. She continued, “The questions begin with WILL regime change be successful, not how is it legal or ethical to orchestrate a coup and who are we to decide when leadership must go and who are we to believe we have rights to a sovereign nation’s resources.”

• Environment

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ U.S. electricity grid stretches thin as data centers rush to turn on onsite generators — Meta, xAI, and other tech giants race to solve AI's insatiable power appetite

    Elon Musk was the first to use gas turbine generators to power a data center at this scale and duration at xAI’s Memphis Supercluster. In 2024, the AI startup signed a 50-MW deal with the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which only became operational months after.

    Aside from the delay, this is nowhere near enough of the 155MW that the 100,000 H100 GPUs running on the site require. There was also a 150-MW substation under construction on the site, which also required additional setup. Waiting for these power sources to come online would have negated Musk’s historic 19-day setup of an AI data center, so he turned to VoltaGrid to deliver the power he needed to run the Colossus site.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ Eagles, Wolves, and Whales: Announcing the 2025 Wildlife MVPs

• Finance

  • GNU Taler ☛ GNU Taler

    Mikolai Gütschow and signum gave a talk at the 39th Chaos Communication Congress (39C3) in Hamburg, Germany, where they reported on their good experiences with offering GNU Taler as a local payment system at LugCamp 2024 and Datenspuren 2024 and 2025.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Register UK ☛ ServiceNow snags Microsoft vet to run legal amid M&A spree

    Nowbar spent 28 years at Microsoft, where he was most recently chief legal officer, and oversaw complex M&A deals like the company’s $69 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard as well as the dawn of Microsoft’s involvement with AI.

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ Telegram Hosting World's Largest Darknet Market

    Wired is reporting on Chinese darknet markets on Telegram.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: A world without people

    To be a billionaire is to be a solipsist – to secretly believe that (most) other people don't really exist – otherwise, how could you live with the knowledge that your farcical wealth and power springs from the agony you have inflicted on whole populations?

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • New York Times ☛ A.I. Images of Maduro Spread Rapidly, Despite Safeguards

      The images were fake — the likely product of artificial intelligence tools — in what experts said is one of the first times that A.I. imagery has depicted prominent figures while a historical moment was rapidly unfolding.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Meduza ☛ A dark chapter In 2025, Russia’s book industry faced raids, bans, and self-censorship. The year ahead could be even worse.

    Last year was arguably the worst one yet for Russia’s publishing industry. Bookstores were raided; independent publishing houses were shuttered; publishers pulled beloved novels from sale; and an increasing number of books came out in censored form. While the book business has long been one of the riskiest in the country, the degree of pressure on the industry was still striking — and it’s only growing more intense. At Meduza’s request, literary critic Alex Mesropov takes stock of how the Kremlin reshaped the Russian book industry in 2025.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Techdirt ☛ Remaining CBS Journalists Pen Letter To David Ellison Politely Asking Him To Stop Destroying What’s Left Of Journalism

    By now it’s pretty clear that right wing, billionaire, Trump ally Larry Ellison bought CBS to convert what was left of the news division into lazy agitprop that blows smoke up the ass of wealth and power. Leading the charge is CBS News boss Bari Weiss, an unqualified contrarian Substack troll who recently vividly demonstrated her purpose by killing a story critical of the administration’s concentration camps.

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ The Public Good, Not Patriotism

    Who does a journalist work for? You work for your editor, sure, and you work for your employer, but more importantly, you work for your readers. Even more than that, you work for the public. You work in service of the belief that everyone deserves to know about the things that affect their life. You work for the good of humanity.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Nikita Prokopov ☛ It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons

    Fast forward to 2025. Apple releases macOS Tahoe. Main attraction? Adding unpleasant, distracting, illegible, messy, cluttered, confusing, frustrating icons (their words, not mine!) to every menu item: [...]

  • Artyom Bologov ☛ Easy (Horizontal Scrollbar) Fixes for Your Blog CSS

    So it often happens that I find some blog post. A fun one. A freaky one. A profound one. A critical (in the sense of Critical Science, not everyday criticism!)

    And then I see my arch nemesis: The Horizontal Scrollbar. Creeping in when no one sees, on smallest screen widths. (I have an iPhone SE and a small 13-inch laptop with x2 UI scaling.) Making the website interaction much less pretty than it might’ve been.

    So I took up a torch and decided to write this up for y’all. None of us can’t know everything about making blog posts more accessible to small viewports. So let’s share the knowledge. Here are three (and a half) of my life-hacks for small viewport adaptation, matching the three most problematic HTML elements: [...]

  • Adrian Roselli ☛ How I Evaluate an ACR (VPAT®)

    ACRs are Accessibility Conformance Reports, which are the output of a VPAT, or Voluntary Product Accessibility Template maintained by ITIC, or the Information Technology Industry Council (which is why VPAT often has a ® symbol hanging off it). An organization may fill out the template to indicate how or if its offering conforms to WCAG, Section 508, EN 301 549, or all three.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • APNIC ☛ An interview with the creators of ipv4.games

    A couple of months ago, we published a story about a game where players compete to claim the most IPv4 space and secure the bragging rights that come from being at the top of the leaderboard. At the time of writing, the current all-time leader has claimed over 28 million addresses (daily, weekly, and monthly leader spots are also up for grabs).

    Gamifying the IPv4 address space seemed to reflect a very specific set of skills and interests. Rather than speculate about the people behind it, we asked the project’s creator, Clay Loam, and its maintainer, Justine Tunney, if they would be open to an interview. They kindly agreed.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Open Web Advocacy ☛ How Apple’s Key Tactic Could Prevent Japan’s Smartphone Act from Improving Browser Competition - Open Web Advocacy

  TL;DR: Japan’s new Smartphone act requires that Apple allow browser vendors to use their own engines in Japan. However, Apple looks set to use the same tactic it has used in the EU to avoid complying with the same provision of the Digital Markets Act for the last twenty-one months. Namely, Apple demands that browser vendors lose all their existing Japanese users and produce a brand new browser, rather than simply updating their existing users. Apple will also not allow browser vendors to use their own engine on iPadOS and other iOS variants.

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Anna's Archive Loses .Org Domain After Surprise Suspension

    Popular shadow library Anna's Archive has lost control over its main domain name. Annas-archive.org was suspended and put on serverHold status, which is an action that's typically taken by the domain name registry. The site's operator doesn't believe that the actions are related to its recently announced Spotify backup and stresses that the site remains accessible through alternative domains.