Leftovers

• Andre Franca ☛ Your Content Should Be Easy to Find

  The small web thrives on links, visibility, and reuse. Hiding content (even unintentionally) in favor of aesthetic choices may please you, but it weakens discoverability and discourages return visits, regardless of the quality of what’s being published.

• Don Marti ☛ I got in LWN

  I went back and checked other links from LWN to this blog and other places. I am trying to get rid of twitter dot com links, because news among other reasons.

• David Rosenthal ☛ Meta: Post #1000

  This is the one thousandth post to this blog in the 212 months since the first post. That is an average of 4.7 posts per month, or just over one per week, which is my long-term goal for the roughly half my time that isn't taken up with grand-parenting.

• Ethan Zuckerman ☛ Listening to All the Music

  One of my favorite reference sites is the AllMusic Guide, the brainchild of Michael Erlewine, an astrologer, musician and archivist who wanted to create an archive of every recording “since Enrico Caruso gave the industry its first big boost”. The guide launched as a 1200 page book at CD-ROM in 1992, moved onto the Gopher text-based information service in 1994 and onto the web shortly after. It’s been bought and sold by tons of internet players, but it remains a vital and active reference work, useful on its own or integrated into music players like Spotify, where its artist bios appear.

• Jasper Tandy ☛ Jasper is blogging: This got shared on Mastodon, I think, but I don't know by whom. It got my mind all in knots about...

  But do it yourself, and for yourself, on a platform you own if you can. It doesn't need a pretty design, or some complex coding; I just think it's important that it's yours. There's a simple but pure joy in making things, even if they suck. Not everyone's going to like what you make, or agree with you, and that's why it's so important that you are one of your biggest fans. Nobody looks at my daily photo grid more than I do. I made all of that, and it feels so good. Obviously it feels good when other people tell me they like it too, but not hearing that doesn't discourage me.

• Rebecca Williams ☛ Welcome to Tech Shadow Work

  Tech Shadow Work is a concept I have been thinking about ever since I saw this meme. Inspired by Carl Jung's idea of shadow work, I am launching this newsletter to create a space to explore the darker, often unspoken societal beliefs and forces steering technology and tech policy development. Technology, in and of itself, rarely creates wholly new problems. More often, it formalizes, accelerates, or disguises harms that someone with power benefits from and seeks to maintain.

• The New Leaf Journal ☛ Our Most-Visited Articles of 2025

  I set as a threshold a number of recorded page visits an article needed in order to be included in our year end ranking. 79 articles made the threshold in 2024, and I added two additional articles for a list of 81. In 2025, 109 articles hit that same threshold, and I deemed an additional three articles to have made it for a total of 112. We will go through all of the articles, in reverse order, below.

• [Old] Martin Hähne ☛ Where To Go From Here

  At the moment all my projects live on Github. Github is Microsoft and Microsoft is not exactly EU-based. Github has also become a symbol for "AI" hate.[6]

  I am not as much motivated to leave Github behind, but I kind of am motivated to see what else is out there and use less Big-Tech stuff.

• Martin Hähne ☛ Another Try (at Self Hosting)

  I'm in the middle of moving my things off of Cloudflare and on to a VPS with OVHCloud. OVH is a European (French to be precise) Hosting company that offers everything I need and is maybe not as problematic as Cloudflare. I wrote about this recently Where To Go From Here.

• [Old] Martin Hähne ☛ Rough Roadmap Of Moving The Blog

  I am not updating the blog as much, because the few brain cycles I have left for doing "blog things" are spent moving the blog off of Cloudflare and onto OVHCloud (previously). But I thought I create a little post noting down how I hope this can go, although, as we all know: Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.

• [Old] Martin Hähne ☛ The Move Of The Blog Is Happening Now

  I will now try to go-live with the self-hosted blog version. I expect some small amount of downtime when the dns cutover happens, but I don't expect any problems otherwise. The VPS is relatively big. So even if instead of the usual 5 people now 500 people happen to look at the new site, that should still be totally fine, just as it was before.

• [Old] Martin Hähne ☛ Zero Downtime Deploys, At Last

  This is just a short note to document how my current blog is deployed with zero downtime. When I moved my blog from Cloudflare to my own server and Coolify I was somewhat dismayed to learn that Coolify can't do zero downtime (rolling release, blue/green) deployments using docker-compose files. Which is a pity because that is a great little format to configure a set of services and their relationship to each other.

• Science

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ This Is the Only Museum Dedicated to Weather Artifacts in America. It May Shut Down Due to Funding Shortages

    The nonprofit museum, which first opened in 2016, is based in Norman, Oklahoma. The town is also home to the federal National Weather Center, where scientists track and research atmospheric conditions and forecasts nationwide, and the University of Oklahoma’s Norman campus hosts a leading meteorology program. Each fall, thousands of guests travel to Norman to attend the National Weather Festival, which is free and open to the public.

  • The Register UK ☛ Historic NASA test towers face their final countdown

    With less than a month to go until NASA attempts to send astronauts around the Moon, the agency is demolishing facilities that got it there the first time around.

  • Dan MacKinlay ☛ Multivariate information decomposition — The Dan MacKinlay stable of variably-well-consider’d enterprises

    Williams and Beer (2010) introduced partial information decomposition (PID) as a way to split the mutual information that a set of sources has about a target into non‑negative “atoms” corresponding to redundant, unique, and synergistic information. Their framework has become a standard reference point, but their specific redundancy measure has been heavily critiqued. There are now many alternative proposals and generalizations.

• Career/Education

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Writing vs AI

    Here's the thing about every successful writing workshop I've been in: they don't necessarily make writing enjoyable (indeed, they can be painful), but they make it profoundly satisfying. When you repeatedly sit down with the same writers, week after week, to think about what went wrong with their work, and how they can fix it, and to hear the same about your work, something changes in how you relate to your work. You come to understand how to transform big, inchoate ideas into structured narratives and arguments, sure – but you also learn to recognize when the structure that emerges teaches you something about those big, inchoate ideas that was there all along, but not visible to you.

  • Daniel Lemire ☛ What I Got Wrong About “Hard Work” in My 20s

    When I was younger, in my 20s, I assumed that everyone was working “hard,” meaning a solid 35 hours of work a week. Especially, say, university professors and professional engineers. I’d feel terribly guilty when I would be messing around, playing video games on a workday.

    Today I realize that most people become very adept at avoiding actual work. And the people you think are working really hard are often just very good at focusing on what is externally visible. They show up to the right meetings but unashamedly avoid the hard work.

    [...]

    And the effect compounds. The difference between someone who has honed their skills for 20 years and someone who has merely showed up to the right meetings becomes enormous. And so, we end up with huge competency gaps between people who are in their 30s, 40s, 50s. It becomes night and day.

  • Bert Hubert ☛ AWS and Microsoft are selling much more than cloud services

    Compare this to someone over at a large corporation selecting hardware based on my “go ahead, pick anything!” advice. They’d be left holding the bag if anything disappoints. This is not good for you at a corporate place.

    So we learned, and the proper way of doing this was to ask what kind of servers/hardware the corporation typically used, and then explicitly bless one of their options. Also, make sure you select some honking hardware so things will come out right. Corporate workers are willing to trade (corporate) money as protection for not getting blamed later on.

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ 47 lessons

    Every year, for my birthday, I collect my thoughts. This year I want to share some things I’ve learned: one lesson for each year I've been around. You might agree or disagree with them; maybe a bit of both. But they’re ideas I’ve picked up that, at the very least, are insights into how I think. Maybe they’ll be useful to you, too.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Science News ☛ New dietary guidelines flip the food pyramid

    American dietary guidelines have gotten an overhaul. The Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Agriculture unveiled a new food pyramid on January 7. The guidelines put meat and full-fat dairy, olive oil and vegetables at the broad top of an inverted triangle. While grains and fruits fell to the bottom.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Engineers create water-saving sand layer to improve plant resilience during drought

    To support this effort, researchers at Texas A&M University have developed an innovative solution by chemically modifying sand into a highly hydrophobic material. When injected into soil just below the roots, the modified sand forms a hydrophobic layer that prevents the soil from draining quickly.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ We’re Thinking About Addiction Entirely Wrong

    One of the dominant ways of thinking about addiction is as a disease. While there is evidence for this approach, it often leads to a dismissal of addiction’s social causes, rooted in alienation and purposelessness.

  • Jeroen Sangers ☛ Jeroen Sangers ◦ brain tags - Mobile notifications cause significant distraction and performance reduction due to prolonged mind-wandering

    The reason these short notifications have such a big impact lies in what happens in our minds afterward. A notification triggers a series of thoughts unrelated to what you are doing. You start to wonder who sent a message, what’s in it, if it’s important… in short, your thoughts wander. This phenomenon, also known as ‘mind wandering’, lasts much longer than the notification itself. Even after the sound is gone, those thoughts linger in your head, and your performance continues to decline.

  • [Old] Vox ☛ Why WHO’s statement on cancer and aspartame — yes, the stuff in Diet Coke — is worth hearing out

    Interestingly, many of the scientists who disputed the Ramazzini Institute’s findings were funded by industry interests that profit from aspartame’s consumption: the American Beverage Association; Ajinomoto, an aspartame supplier; and the Calorie Control Council, to name just a few.

  • [Old] Vice Media Group ☛ Why Did the FDA Ever Approve Fake Sugar?

    Gross’s findings, along with pressure from other scientists, resulted in a public board of inquiry in early 1980 consisting of three independent scientists who reviewed the data and voted to withhold approval because they “did not believe Searle’s studies conclusively showed aspartame did not cause brain tumors.”

    At the time, Donald Rumsfeld was the CEO of Searle. He was also on the transition team for Ronald Reagan, who was inaugurated in 1981. After the inauguration, Searle re-applied to the FDA for approval, at which point Reagan fired the FDA commissioner and replaced him with Arthur Hayes Hull, Jr., who re-approved aspartame for dry products.

  • [Old] The Guardian UK ☛ MP calls for ban on 'unsafe' sweetener

    The Liberal Democrat MP Roger Williams said in an adjournment debate in the Commons that there was "compelling and reliable evidence for this carcinogenic substance to be banned from the UK food and drinks market altogether". In licensing aspartame for use, regulators around the world had failed in their main task of protecting the public, he told MPs.

    Mr Williams highlighted new concerns about the additive's safety, raised by a recent Italian study that linked it to cancer in rats. He said the history of aspartame's licensing put "regulators and politicians to shame", with the likes of Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary and former head of Searle, the company that discovered the sweetener, "calling in his markers" to get it approved.

• Proprietary

  • Futurism ☛ "Microslop": Infuriating Video Sums Up How Microsoft Is Ruining Windows With AI

    He was joined by dozens of netizens who jeered the misfiring feature using a tough-but-fair new pejorative: “Microslop.”

  • Cyble Inc ☛ Crimson Collective Claims To Disconnect Brightspeed Users

    Asked by The Cyber Express how the group was able to do this, a Crimson Collective spokesperson replied, “we were able to do this with the access we had on their infrastructure,” suggesting that the extent of the claimed breach may go beyond customer data access.

  • Barry Hess ☛ Problems Transferring from an Old to New Playstation 5

    My PS5 is going to travel to college with one of my daughters, so I picked up a lightly-used one to replace it. Some points of reference if you ever are doing this and have trouble transferring data between the systems on your network.

  • Matt Stein ☛ Replacing Logi Options

    I was just minding my own business this week, not thinking about my simmering annoyance with Logi Options+, not wondering once again why a person would ever need an AI prompt builder for their mouse, blissfully unaware that the already-annoying software depends on cloud service in order for the peripheral to function.

  • Defence Web ☛ The rise of cyber security in modern warfare

    The only reason Stuxnet was discovered was because it accidentally spread beyond the Iranian nuclear facility. One of the more notable bits related to Stuxnet is that PLCs are commonly air gapped (i.e. disconnected from external networks, especially the internet) as a hard defensive mechanism. Stuxnet was coded to spread via USB and it would spread to the computers controlling the PLCs via this mechanism. The fundamental take-away from this attack is that even highly secured areas are hard to detect and defend successfully 100% of the time.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Michał Woźniak ☛ AI will compromise your cybersecurity posture

      Yes, “AI” will compromise your information security posture. No, not through some mythical self-aware galaxy-brain entity magically cracking your passwords in seconds or “autonomously” exploiting new vulnerabilities.

    • Techdirt ☛ Journalistic Malpractice: No LLM Ever ‘Admits’ To Anything, And Reporting Otherwise Is A Lie

      Grok did no such thing. Grok cannot apologize. Grok is not a human. Grok has no sense of what is happening. Grok just generates content. If you ask it to generate an apology, it will. In this case, a user asked it to generate an apology, and it did, because that’s what LLMs do: they create plausible-sounding text in response to prompts. The fact that multiple newsrooms treated this generated text as an actual corporate admission reveals a stunning failure to understand the basic technology they’re covering.

      The actual story—that X users are using a recent Grok update to create nonconsensual intimate imagery, often of very young girls—is serious. But the media turned it into a clown show by anthropomorphizing a chatbot.

    • Quanta Magazine ☛ Distinct AI Models Seem To Converge On How They Encode Reality

      Researchers investigate such questions by peering inside AI systems and studying how they represent scenes and sentences. A growing body of research has found that different AI models can develop similar representations, even if they’re trained using different datasets or entirely different data types. What’s more, a few studies have suggested that those representations are growing more similar as models grow more capable. In a 2024 paper, four AI researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology argued that these hints of convergence are no fluke. Their idea, dubbed the Platonic representation hypothesis, has inspired a lively debate among researchers and a slew of follow-up work.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ US voters hate AI — and politicians are noticing

      Despite the overwhelming marketing push in all the media all the time, it turns out normal people still think AI … sucks.

      A Gallup poll in September showed 80% of Americans want AI to be more regulated as a priority. A full 97% think the US needs AI regulation.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Most venture capital deals are now AI

      The US stock market rests on a few huge companies that are all-in on AI, and the economy is only technically not in recession because of big dollar numbers attached to huge data centre deals that will never happen. The whole US economy is a bet on AI working out and the bubble never popping.

      Venture capital turns out to work the same way now. They’re just putting their whole bag on red and spinning the wheel: [...]

    • David Revoy ☛ An Act of Resistance - David Revoy

    • Jim Nielsen ☛ The AI Security Shakedown

      It appears AI is simultaneously the problem and the solution.

      It’s a great business to be in, if you think about it. You sell a tool for security exploits and you sell the self-same tool for protection against said exploits. Everybody wins!

    • Daniel Hooper ☛ An Experienced C Programmer Tries AI Agents

      I’ve been programming in C for 25 years and have not yet found AI useful for writing code. I use LLMs as a Google replacement, but that’s it. AI autocomplete (aka Cursor) annoyed me because it broke my flow to read every autocomplete suggestion. I don’t need help typing in code, but I wouldn’t mind speeding up project-wide edits and analysis.

      In recent months, a new generation of “AI Code agents” debuted that seemed like they had the potential to be useful. Specifically: Claude Code with Opus 4.5 and Codex with gpt-5.2-codex high. Code agents have 3 important traits: [...]

    • Robert Greiner ☛ The 1% Error That Ruins Everything

      In 2025, 42% of companies abandoned most of their AI initiatives - up from just 17% the year before. The culprit wasn’t bad implementation or insufficient data. It was math: a 99% accurate AI agent performing 50 sequential steps succeeds only 60% of the time, and most enterprise workflows require far more than 50 decisions. The industry has been optimizing the wrong variable.

      Executives didn’t cancel those programs because the UX was clunky – or that there were too many em-dashes. They canceled them because the systems quietly failed in production, over and over, in ways no one could predict or fix. When it came time to show return on investment, there was nothing to show.

    • Michał Woźniak ☛ AI will compromise your cybersecurity posture

      Yes, “AI” will compromise your information security posture. No, not through some mythical self-aware galaxy-brain entity magically cracking your passwords in seconds or “autonomously” exploiting new vulnerabilities.

      It’s way more mundane.

      When immensely complex, poorly-understood systems get hurriedly integrated into your toolset and workflow, or deployed in your infrastructure, what inevitably follows is leaks, compromises, downtime, and a whole lot of grief.

    • Stephen Hackett ☛ Grok Gleefully Makes Heinous Content, but Does Anyone With the Power to Change It Actually Care? - 512 Pixels

      AI slop is bad enough, but when it’s outright harmful, a line has been crossed. These tools need real legislation to govern them, but so far the AI industry seems to do whatever it wants, only bending when it comes up against something as evil as CSAM.

      It’s clear that legal systems around the world are not prepared for this. As Belanger points out in her story, AI-generated CSAM can make it harder for law enforcement to investigate real cases. And as for the non-CSAM, nonconsensual sexual images? Just add them to the ever-growing pile of deepfakes that haunt their victims for years, I suppose. Just don’t blame xAI — this is the users’ fault, remember?

  • Social Control Media

    • Rolling Stone ☛ Piper Rockelle Joined OnlyFans. Here's Why

      This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

      What made you decide to join OnlyFans? I knew that it was going to get a lot of hate and stuff like that, but it was something I was always talking about. And I feel like my life has all just really led me in the right direction. This direction looked very clear and open and only had very good benefits from it. No matter what people say or try to tell me what to do, not to do, it was just ultimately something I just really wanted to test the waters. If it failed, I was willing to know that I failed. But I wanted to stay on the internet, and I wanted to make money, and it was a perfect little plan. I’m so happy I made the decision.

    • BoingBoing ☛ Grok creates non-consensual porn as regulators circle

      The European Commission called the content "appalling" and "disgusting." India's IT ministry ordered X to restrict Grok from generating obscene, pornographic, or pedophilic content within 72 hours or risk losing safe harbor protections. French prosecutors added reports to an existing investigation into X, with potential penalties of two years in prison and €60,000 fines. The National Center for Sexual Exploitation is calling for DOJ and FTC investigations in the U.S.

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • Torrent Freak ☛ GitHub Restores Repo of GTA Mod 'Multi Theft Auto' After Take-Two Fails to Sue

    Multi Theft Auto (MTA), one of the longest-running and best known modding projects in gaming history, has officially returned to GitHub. The official repository disappeared last month following a takedown notice allegedly sent by Rockstar Games' parent company, Take-Two Interactive, which alleged that the GTA project shared "leaked source code."

  • 404 Media ☛ Github Banned a Ton of Adult Game Developers and Won’t Explain Why

    Developers I spoke to said the community estimated around 80 to 90 repositories containing the work of 40 to 50 people went down recently, with many becoming inaccessible around late November and early December. Many of the affected accounts are part of the modding community for games made by the now-defunct Japanese video game studio Illusion, which made popular games with varying degrees of erotic content. One of the accounts Github banned contained the work of more than 30 contributors in more than 40 repositories, according to members of the modding community that I spoke to.

• Security

  • TLP: Polkit Authentication Bypass in Profiles Daemon in Version 1.9.0 (CVE-2025-67859)

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • EFF ☛ ICE Is Going on a Surveillance Shopping Spree

      U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has a new budget under the current administration, and they are going on a surveillance tech shopping spree. Standing at $28.7 billion dollars for the year 2025 (nearly triple their 2024 budget) and at least another $56.25 billion over the next three years, ICE's budget would be the envy of many national militaries around the world. Indeed, this budget would put ICE as the 14th most well-funded military in the world, right between Ukraine and Israel.

  • Confidentiality

    • Dhole Moments ☛ Practical Collision Attack Against Long Key IDs in PGP - Dhole Moments

      In response to the GPG.Fail attacks, a Hacker News user made this claim about the 64-bit “Long Key IDs” used by OpenPGP and GnuPG, while responding to an answer I gave to someone else’s question: [...]

• Defence/Aggression

  • Atlantic Council ☛ Trump’s quest for Greenland could be NATO’s darkest hour

    A collapse of NATO over Greenland would be contrary to US national interests as defined in the Trump administration’s own recently published National Security Strategy.

  • Defence Web ☛ Why Islamic State attacks are surging in DR Congo  - DefenceWeb

    Formed in 1996 from a coalition of Ugandan militant groups seeking to overthrow Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni’s government, the group’s alignment towards radical Islam was gradual. Although it referred to an “Islamic polity” in the mid-90s, it avoided overt Islamic rhetoric for years. While its leader, Jamil Mukulu claimed to have personally received training from Osama bin Laden during his time in Sudan, the group would not fully embrace radical [sic] Islam until long-time deputy Musa Seka Baluku pledged allegiance to IS in 2019.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Does Congress Even Exist Anymore?

    Representative Seth Moulton is a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, but he learned about the U.S. military’s middle-of-the-night capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro the same way many Americans did: A friend who saw the news on the [Internet] texted him.

  • Court House News ☛ TikTok accuses Nebraska of public record violations

    Nebraska sued TikTok in May 2024 claiming TikTok marketed itself as “family friendly” and “safe” when it actually contributed to a mental health crisis by pushing content that glorifies sex, drugs, eating disorders and suicide ideation to young users. The case remains ongoing in Lancaster County District Court in the state capital city of Lincoln, where Monday’s suit was filed.

  • Common Dreams ☛ January 6th Five Years On: Our Democracy Crisis Persists

    "On January 6th five years ago, a sitting U.S. president incited violence against our nation in a shameless attempt to overturn a democratically-held election. This day must live forever in our memory, so that we continue to seek accountability for the perpetrators and work tirelessly to safeguard our democracy from future lawlessness.

  • Dark Reading ☛ Cyberattacks Likely Part of Military Operation in Venezuela

    "Our telemetry from Caracas on the night of the operation doesn't expose or indicate the use of any specific cyber capability," he clarifies. "Timings and geolocation match up closely with the kinetic force of the operation, which usually means that the explosions caused the telecommunications failures rather than the other way round."

  • Chris Amico ☛ Memories of Jan. 6, 2021

    Five years ago today, a mob stormed the US Capitol trying to stop Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 election.

    I remember watching it happen in real time, on PBS NewsHour’s YouTube stream.

  • The Next Move ☛ A Conversation With a Former US Ambassador to Venezuela

    My guest in this new podcast is Otto Reich, “a veteran foreign-policy hand and an old friend of mine.” I have quoted my introduction.

    That introduction continues as follows: [...]

  • BoingBoing ☛ Mike Johnson won’t hang a plaque honoring the cops who defended Congress

    The plaque is not symbolic. It is not optional. It was created by an act of Congress, signed into law in March 2022, completed, and ready for installation by March 2023. According to testimony, it has spent the last two years sitting in a Capitol basement, stored near a mini-fridge and old lockers, awaiting Johnson's approval. His office says installing it is "not implementable," a phrase that is vague, bureaucratic, and revealing all at once.

• Environment

  • Renewable Energy World ☛ EPA funding salvaged in US Congress spending bill

    The spending package would fund several federal agencies and scientific bodies, including the EPA, departments of Interior and Energy and the National Science Foundation through Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ The Emperor’s New Oil Wealth

    As Torsten Slok of Apollo, who recently made this point, notes, “Much of the oil is extra-heavy, which has low recovery and a high cost to produce.” This suggests that Venezuela’s claims to have immense usable oil reserves were politically motivated hype.

    This view is supported by the fact that the huge increase in Venezuela’s reported oil reserves wasn’t followed by a surge in production. On the contrary, Venezuelan oil production soon plunged: [...]

  • FAIR ☛ ‘Is It Worth Running a Race Where the Prize Is Some Dystopian Future?’: CounterSpin interview with Mitch Jones on AI vs. environment

    Janine Jackson interviewed Food and Water Watch’s Mitch Jones about artificial intelligence versus the environment for the December 19, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Muxup ☛ Per-query energy consumption of LLMs

      How much energy is consumed when querying an LLM? We're largely in the dark when it comes to proprietary models, but for open weight models that anyone can host on readily available, albeit eye-wateringly expensive, hardware this is something that can be measured and reported, right? In fact, given other people are doing the hard work of setting up and running benchmarks across all kinds of different hardware and software configurations for common open weight models, can we just re-use that to get a reasonable figure in terms of Watt-hours (Wh) per query?

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ Species to Watch in 2026

  • Overpopulation

    • United Nations Environment Programme ☛ Global Environment Outlook 7: A future we choose – Why investing in Earth now can lead to a trillion-dollar benefit for all

      The Global Environment Outlook, Seventh Edition: A Future We Choose, the product of 287 multi-disciplinary scientists from 82 countries, is the most comprehensive scientific assessment of the global environment ever carried out. The report calls on all actors to acknowledge the urgency of the global environmental crises, build on progress made in recent decades, and collaborate in the co-design and implementation of integrated policies, strategies and actions to deliver a better future for all.

    • UN ☛ Global Environment Outlook 7 | UNEP - UN Environment Programme

      The report finds that investing in a stable climate, healthy nature and land, and a pollution-free planet can deliver trillions of dollars each year in additional global GDP, avoid millions of deaths, and lift hundreds of millions of people out of hunger and poverty in the coming decades.

      Following current development pathways will bring catastrophic climate change, devastation to nature and biodiversity, debilitating land degradation and desertification, and lingering deadly pollution – all at a huge cost to people, planet and economies.

    • Overpopulation ☛ Major UN report highlights overpopulation and overconsumption, need for profound transformation

      In the GEO-7 foreword, UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen cautions,

      “Humanity now faces perhaps the biggest choice it will ever make: continue down the road to a future devastated by climate change, dwindling nature, degraded land, and polluted air, land and water, or change direction to secure a healthy planet, healthy people and prosperity for all.”

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Rlang ☛ rOpenSci Code of Conduct Annual Review

    rOpenSci’s activities and spaces are supported by a Code of Conduct that applies to all people participating in the rOpenSci community, including rOpenSci staff and leadership. It applies to all modes of interaction including GitHub project repositories, the rOpenSci discussion forum, Slack, Community Calls, Co-working and social sessions, training and mentoring sessions, and in person at rOpenSci-hosted events, including affiliated social gatherings. Our Code of Conduct is developed and enforced by a committee including rOpenSci staff and an independent community member.

  • Crooked Timber ☛ Changing beliefs, moving house – suggestion for a change of metaphor

    Why think about these metaphors? In the last weeks, I’ve been conducting interviews for a project, and I tried to reach out to some people whose wider worldviews are, I guess, rather different from mine – different jobs, different life situations, different politics. While I interviewed them on a specific topic and we had good conversations on that, I could not help thinking about what it would take for them to move closer to my worldview on certain controversial issues, or for me to theirs. The idea that you’d somehow “trade ideas” and that’s it, deal done, is completely ridiculous in such contexts. Ideas are tied up with social relations, lifestyles, cultural habits, even the very spaces in which one moves. Of course, nothing is deterministic here, and yet, the purely cognitive approach suggested by the metaphor of a “marketplace of ideas” seems very, very wrong.

  • Jérôme Marin ☛ US threatens Europe over tech regulation

    From threats to the first concrete retaliation. Fiercely opposed to Europe’s digital regulations, Washington crossed a new line in late December by directly targeting former European commissioner Thierry Breton, who has now been barred from entering the United States. But Teresa Ribera is adamant: Brussels will not yield to American pressure. “We are not going to roll back our regulation simply because they don’t like it,” the European Commission’s executive vice-president in charge of competition told the Financial Times.

    By sanctioning Google and then X, formerly Twitter, Brussels has shown in recent months that it has no intention of backing down. But 2026 is shaping up to be even more explosive than last year. Three years after the Digital Services Act (DSA) came into force and two years after the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the time for negotiations aimed at voluntary compliance is over. The era of penalties has begun: fines that could reach into the billions of euros, and potentially daily penalties as well.

  • Rodrigo Ghedin ☛ Dell and Microsoft, marketing geniuses

    Maybe it's late capitalism, maybe it's a side effect of new drugs circulating among the bigwigs of the world's most powerful companies. Or maybe it's just plain stupidity. The fact is that the practice is spreading, and fast.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Meduza ☛ ‘Batons, stun guns — the full package’: Riot police raid Moscow punk concert and search attendees’ phones for anti-war content — Meduza

  • BoingBoing ☛ Professor fired for Kirk headline gets $500K and job back

    Michael shared a factual headline from a news outlet. He didn't celebrate anything or add commentary. The university fired him anyway, apparently responding to political pressure rather than any policy violation, then had to pay half a million dollars when it turned out that tenured professors have contractual rights that don't disappear because a senator got mad online.

  • Mediaite ☛ Professor Reinstated After Being Fired For Charlie Kirk Post

    “Charlie Kirk says gun deaths are ‘unfortunately’ worth it to keep 2nd Amendment,” read the headline of an article Michael shared. He did not add any additional comment on it.

  • Nexstar Media Group Inc ☛ APSU to pay professor fired for Charlie Kirk post $500k

    The developments at APSU follow the filing of a federal lawsuit by a former state employee who was fired over comments made about Kirk. A Metro Communications employee was placed on leave in September 2026. A Nashville Fire Department employee was placed on administrative leave last year as well. A Williamson County Schools employee was suspended and later resigned.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Press Gazette ☛ Up to 80 journalists strike in Scotland over STV job cuts

    They are set to be replaced with a single bulletin covering both licence areas held by STV.

    STV Central is currently produced in Glasgow while STV North runs in Aberdeen, with the latter set to be cut.

  • CPJ ☛ At least 14 journalists detained during presidential inauguration in Venezuela

    On January 5, 13 journalists and media workers affiliated with international media outlets and news agencies, and one working for a national outlet, were detained while covering the inauguration, according to information documented by Venezuela’s National Union of Press Workers. Thirteen of those detained were later released without being formally presented before judicial authorities, while one journalist was deported, the union reported.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • RFERL ☛ Activists In Iran Call For Internal Change, Not Foreign Intervention, As Protests Rage On

    According to Mahmoudian, protesters are no longer calling for reforms to the clerically dominated political system but are demanding fundamental change.

    "What needs to change now is the Islamic republic itself, and it has to change from the ground up," he said.

  • The Atlantic ☛ ICE Shooting in Minneapolis Deepens Immigration Rift

    It’s not clear how Renee Nicole Good’s SUV ended up in the street between ICE vehicles—and many other details of what preceded the shooting remain unknown. In the video recordings, two ICE officers approach the 37-year-old’s car, and one attempts to open her driver’s-side door. She backs up and starts to pull away. It is in this sequence that controversy will undoubtedly flourish. A third officer, standing in front of the SUV, draws his weapon. As Good accelerates, one of the videos appears to show the vehicle clipping him. The officer shoots into her windshield and then at close range through the driver’s-side window. Good’s vehicle careens into a parked car.

  • Utah News Dispatch ☛ Why Utah still can’t confront violence against women

    Fourth, people underestimate the scale of the problem. The UNDP highlights that even highly informed young people often don’t know basic facts about gender‑based violence or global campaigns to address it. This is true in Utah. When people don’t see the scope, they don’t feel urgency. This lack of awareness is reinforced by the fact that gender‑based violence is chronically under‑measured, making the true scale difficult for the public to grasp. A 2025 scholarly review on the topic found that inconsistent data collection and narrow definitions of gender‑based violence lead to widespread underestimation of its prevalence, especially in institutional and community settings. Without accurate data, communities underestimate both the magnitude and the urgency of the crisis.

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Time to Ask if Stephen Miller Has Authorized Assault and Murder of Peaceful ICE Observers

    But later in the day, a DHS officer shot and killed an ICE observer, Renee Good, in Minneapolis. Both the Star Tribune and MPR have a running threads of developments.

  • Kelly Hayes ☛ The Cost of Staying Human

    Tonight, I was honored to speak at a vigil for Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother who was shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis earlier today. Over 200 people gathered in Winnemac Park on Chicago’s North Side. Many of those in attendance are part of ICE Watch and Rapid Response efforts in the area. It was cold, and the planning was last-minute, but in this moment, many of us felt a profound need to be together. The event was organized by the Ward 40+ Community Response Team and was one of several held across Chicagoland tonight.

    I have been asked to publish my remarks from the event. You can find them below.

  • Marisa Kabas ☛ The hell of being a ‘Kavanaugh stop’ victim

    I had the privilege of speaking to Nick and his wife Kathy (whose name has also been changed) via video call a few times in recent days to hear the full story of the terror inflicted upon their family. With the help of a generous translator, I was able to get a rare direct account of what happens when federal agents decide on a whim that they want to upend your life because you have brown skin—and the miracle of leaving custody.

    This is Nick’s story, as told to me: [...]

  • Rodrigo Ghedin ☛ Tech CEOs: Workers MUST be present in the office. The job simply cannot be done remotely. Also tech CEOs: Most workers can be replaced by AI. Hosted remotely.

  • BoingBoing ☛ “You can’t kill us all, Nazis”: shouted after ICE killed an observer in Minneapolis

    The sentence shouted in resistance was not a threat. It was a refusal. A refusal to accept the rewriting of events, the minimization of a life lost, or the idea that Americans will unilaterally surrender to fascism.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Rodrigo Ghedin ☛ People who use a Logitech mouse on macOS spent a few hours… ⁄ Manual do Usuário

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Molly White ☛ The year of technoligarchy

  2025 was the year of technoligarchy. The tech industry’s political investments paid off spectacularly as Trump returned to the White House with a Republican trifecta. Some technology executives secured Cabinet and other advisory roles, and far more were regularly invited to policy- and lawmaking conversations to write their own rules with little concern beyond expanding their power and profit. The installation of tech oligarchs into positions of political power was part of a broader dismantling of institutional checks — enabled by a Supreme Court that granted the presidency sweeping immunity and a Congress that declined to exercise its oversight powers — in a year that also saw mass immigration raids, military deployments to US cities, and extrajudicial killings of supposed drug traffickers in the Caribbean.