Leftovers

• Sal ☛ Change your car's air filters yourself

  I just started doing this recently, and I’m kicking myself for not starting earlier!

• Ruben Schade ☛ A retail dark pattern worked on me

  Wouldn’t you know it, but the very next day the page refreshed, and they claimed to have restocked with “100+” new items of that exact SKU. On a weekend. Sure.

• Kev Quirk ☛ Use the Bloody Shift Key!

  Now, I’m no grammar gremlin - goodness knows that my own grammar is far from perfect, and I have absolutely no problem if there’s an errant comma here and there in one’s writing. I could even forgive you if you were one of those lunatics that does CAPS ON types uppercase letter CAPS OFF. At least you’re using uppercase. But to remove all uppercase letters with reckless abandon? Nope. Absolutely not.

• University of Toronto ☛ People cannot "just pay attention" to (boring, routine) things

  One of the core, foundational results from human factors research, research into human vision, the psychology of perceptions, and other related fields, is that human brains are a mess of heuristics and have far more limited capabilities than we think (and they lie to us all the time). Anyone who takes up photography as a hobby has probably experienced this (I certainly did); you can take plenty of photographs where you literally didn't notice some element in the picture at the time but only saw it after the fact while reviewing the photograph.

• CBarrete ☛ One sentence per line

  A few months back, I started writing one sentence per line in my text documents (mostly Markdown). This was inspired by reading the following articles: [...]

• [Old] Nick Groenen ☛ One sentence per line

  When writing source documentation in a format such as Markdown, reStructuredText or AsciiDoc, I recommend you place every sentence on its own line and don’t use fixed-column word-wrapping.

• [Old] Jeff Kreeftmeijer ☛ One sentence per line

  In text-based formats like Markdown, AsciiDoc or Org, write one sentence per line.

  Doing so has many advantages. When writing, having each sentence on a single line allows for easily swapping lines around, or splitting and joining paragraphs. While editing, a line per sentence makes it easy to spot repetition and keep track of line lengths. While publishing—to HTML, for example—the line feeds are automatically taken out to produce readable paragraphs.1

• Science

  • Hackaday ☛ Calculating The Capacitance And ESR Specifications For The Output Capacitor In Your Switching-Mode Power Supply

    When our circuit calls for an electrolytic capacitor the equivalent series resistance (ESR) becomes relevant and we need to take it into account. The ESR is so predominant that in our calculations for the minimum capacitance to mitigate ripple we can ignore the capacitance and use the ESR only as it is the feature which dominates. [Dr Ali] goes into detail for both examples using ceramic capacitors and electrolytic capacitors. Armed with the minimum capacitance (in Farads) and maximum ESR (in Ohms) you can then go shopping to find a capacitor which meets the requirements.

  • Groot Koerkamp ☛ Quotes from "The Evolution of Mathematical Software"

    These are some nice quotes from “The Evolution of Mathematical Software”, Turing Lecture by the 2021 Turing Award winner Jack J. Dongarra, which talks about algorithm and software development in the context of ever improving hardware.

• Career/Education

  • Martin Chang ☛ A Hacker's Guide for Surviving Volatile Careers Financially

    This is a strange post for a blog focused on computers and hacking, but I work in startups, and they are known to fail unexpectedly. Generic advice is not helpful, and paid advisors often have no idea about startup funding cycles or the problems that areise when your income is in a different currency then living expenses -- I had to pay $120 for that lesson. This has forced me to examine my own finances and ensure I will be okay even if my job disappears tomorrow and I have no income for a year or more. It turns out personal finance is a fun optimization problem to solve. I want to share what I have learned, and my time will be well spent if this post helps even one reader.

  • Manuel Moreale ☛ Thoughts On People and Blogs

    As I mentioned to the supporters on Ko-fi a week ago, I am currently considering the possibility of pausing the series at the end of this third year, with the last interview going live on August 28th. There are a few reasons for this.

  • Kev Quirk ☛ When Was I Happiest?

    But the simplicity of my life a decade ago made me so much happier. I don’t wish I’d stayed there, though. Life moves on. We mature, we progress, we change. And I’m happy those things have happened to me, and continue to happen to me.

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ "What Is Going to Happen?"

    The Trump administration, and the Republican Party in general, has attacked America’s educational system from top to bottom. It has systematically tried to restrict what can be taught in public schools in red states. It has, where possible, overruled fact with religion. It has gone after individual teachers and their unions. It has defunded prestigious universities, and used government funding as a hammer to bully universities into adopting highly politicized codes of conduct, including drastic restrictions on free speech in the classroom. From kindergartens all the way up to grad schools, it is engaged in a project of trying to change what is taught to students in a way that suits right wing sensibilities.

  • Caimito Agile Life ☛ Why We've Tried to Replace Developers Every Decade Since 1969

    Every decade brings new promises: this time, we'll finally make software development simple enough that we won't need so many developers. From COBOL to AI, the pattern repeats. Business leaders grow frustrated with slow delivery and high costs. Developers feel misunderstood and undervalued. Understanding why this cycle persists for fifty years reveals what both sides need to know about the nature of software work.

• Hardware

  • Mikael Hansson ☛ Keychron K8 Max Review

    I recently spent some money on a mechanical keyboard, and thought I’d share some thoughts on it. I’m not a professional reviewer, nobody’s paying me to write, and nobody’s sending me free stuff. I also don’t usually spend extraordinary amounts of money on gear, so this is a subjective review of a single product, and the comparisons are to other products that are available to me.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Amit Gawande ☛ While I Wait

    My interest in social media soon dwindled, and so did my ritual. I read more. RSS feed. Read-later service. I soon realised these are not ideal for short breaks. The fitting short posts are interspersed among the meaningful long ones. The triaging needs attention, and hence, it doesn't stick.

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2026-01-06 [Older] Food Insecurity, Financial Struggles Increase Children's Risk of Long COVID

• Proprietary

  • Make Tech Easier ☛ 2026-01-10 [Older] Protect Yourself From the macOS Flaw that Bypasses Apple Privacy Controls

  • The Verge ☛ Microsoft’s first Windows 11 update of 2026 stopped some computers from shutting down

    The security patch was stopping some systems from shutting down or hibernating properly, and also preventing some users from logging in via remote desktop. The impact of the shutdown bug was limited to machines still running Windows 11 23H2, and only those running either the Enterprise of IoT editions. Still, this is just the latest buggy update that has forced Microsoft to issue an out-of-band update, something that used to be pretty rare, but seems to be becoming increasingly common.

  • Jason Velazquez ☛ The Computational Web and the Old AI Switcharoo

    Yet, the average note-taking app charges ten bucks per month in perpetuity. It stores my writings in proprietary file formats that lock me into the app. In exchange, I get access to compute located 300 miles away, storage I don't need, and sync-and-share capabilities that I already pay for. Now, I can also expect a 20% hike on all my subscriptions for BETA-level AI solutions desperately searching for a problem to solve.

    Welcome to the Computational Web.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ AI Completely Failing to Boost Productivity, Says Top Analyst

      He pointed to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics showing how between 1947 to 1973 — before the advent of PCS — productivity improved by 2.7 percent annually, but only 2.1 percent between 1990 and 2001, once PCs had hit the mainstream.

      “So despite all those PCs, it was a lot lower,” Gownder said. “And [from] 2007 to 2019 it was 1.5 percent.”

    • Futurism ☛ Mother of Elon Musk's Child Sues xAI Over Grok Abuse

      The damage is hitting close to home for Musk. Ashley St. Clair, a conservative influencer who had a child with Musk, is now suing xAI, accusing it of allowing users to generate lewd pictures of her.

      “She lives in fear that nude and sexual images of herself, including of her as a child, will continue to be created by xAI and that she will not be safe from the people who consume these images,” reads a legal filing quoted by the Wall Street Journal.

    • SANS ☛ "How many states are there in the United States?" - SANS ISC

      This is recon to find open LLMs. Not necessarily to exploit them, but to use them.

    • The Verge ☛ Under Musk, the Grok disaster was inevitable

      Journalist Kat Tenbarge wrote about how she first started seeing sexually explicit deepfakes go viral on Grok in June 2023. Those images obviously weren’t created by Grok — it didn’t even have the ability to generate images until August 2024 — but X’s response to the concerns was varied. Even last January, Grok was inciting controversy for AI-generated images. And this past August, Grok’s “spicy” video-generation mode created nude deepfakes of Taylor Swift without even being asked. Experts have told The Verge since September that the company takes a whack-a-mole approach to safety and guardrails — and that it’s difficult enough to keep an AI system on the straight and narrow when you design it with safety in mind from the beginning, let alone if you’re going back to fix baked-in problems. Now, it seems that approach has blown up in xAI’s face.

    • Paris Buttfield-Addison ☛ State of Play: How Australian States Are (Not) Governing AI

      The Commonwealth government attracts most attention for its AI policies. State and territory governments are also deploying AI systems in education, health, policing, transport, and social services.

      Each state governs AI differently. Some are ahead of the Commonwealth. Others barely engage with it. None do it well.

    • Armin Ronacher ☛ Agent Psychosis: Are We Going Insane? | Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings

      Many of us got hit by the agent coding addiction. It feels good, we barely sleep, we build amazing things. Every once in a while that interaction involves other humans, and all of a sudden we get a reality check that maybe we overdid it. The most obvious example of this is the massive degradation of quality of issue reports and pull requests. As a maintainer many PRs now look like an insult to one’s time, but when one pushes back, the other person does not see what they did wrong. They thought they helped and contributed and get agitated when you close it down.

      But it’s way worse than that. I see people develop parasocial relationships with their AIs, get heavily addicted to it, and create communities where people reinforce highly unhealthy behavior. How did we get here and what does it do to us?

      I will preface this post by saying that I don’t want to call anyone out in particular, and I think I sometimes feel tendencies that I see as negative, in myself as well. I too, have thrown some vibeslop up to other people’s repositories.

    • Tldraw ☛ Stay away from my trash!

      More recently, we started getting PRs that were better-formed but still so far off-base that I knew something had changed. These were pull requests that claimed to solve a problem we didn't have or fix a bug that didn't exist. Each was claiming to close an issue.

      A glance at the linked issue confirmed the problem: one of my own AI scripts, a Claude Code /issue command, was giving bad directions.

  • Social Control Media

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2026-01-09 [Older] Democratic US Senators Demand Apple, Google Take X and Grok off App Stores Over Sexual Images

    • US Senate ☛ 2026-01-11 [Older] U.S. Senators Ask Cook and Pichai to Remove X and Grok From App Store and Play Store

    • International Business Times ☛ 'Our Children Matter': British Mum Suing TikTok Over Wrongful Death Shares Update After First Hearing

      Ellen Roome and three other parents, Liam Walsh, Lisa Kenevan, and Dominic, flew to the United States for a TikTok hearing. The group is suing TikTok over wrongful death after losing their children.

      Following her appearance at the initial legal proceedings, Roome took to social media to communicate directly [sic] with those supporting her campaign. In a detailed Facebook post, she described the experience as an essential yet harrowing step in her quest for justice.

    • Manuel Moreale ☛ Web, Social Networks, Social Web

      Did you spot the shift? We started with “our internet had truly been an open place”, and now we’re trying to take back control of social media. I don’t know about you, but to me, the internet ≠ social media. Wild take, I know.

• Security

  • Tao Security Blog ☛ 2026-01-08 [Older] Happy 23rd Birthday TaoSecurity Blog

  • 2026-01-07 [Older] Foomuuri: Lack of Client Authorization and Input Verification allow Control over Firewall Configuration (CVE-2025-67603, CVE-2025-67858)

  • 2026-01-06 [Older] Cyber Counterintelligence (CCI): Resecurity releases data on John Erin Binns (IRDev)

  • 2026-01-05 [Older] Threat actors insisted that Resecurity’s honeypot was real data. We found no evidence that it was.

  • CTV News ☛ 2026-01-05 [Older] Ca: Leduc County target of Christmas Day cybersecurity attack

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • New Statesman ☛ Labour's great digital ID fumble

      In mid-November, I found myself in a committee room in parliament – one of the older ones in the Palace of Westminster, bedecked with dusty portraits, the wallpaper a frenetic riot of red and green. The ancient décor stood in stark contrast to the futuristic topic under discussion: MPs on the Home Affairs Select Committee were grilling experts on the potential – and potential consequences – of a digital ID system. A representative from TechUK, the industry body for the British digital sector, was explaining how digital verification schemes are already widespread in the financial services industry, as users of online banking will be aware. “What are they on about?” muttered a woman sitting at the back. She was wearing a visitor pass, and I watched her grow increasingly agitated as the session progressed, clenching her fists and biting her lip.

  • Confidentiality

    • 2026-01-08 [Older] Methodist Homes of Alabama and Northwest Florida is notifying residents and employees of its second data breach in seven months.

    • 2026-01-07 [Older] NordVPN Hack Claim Firmly Refuted by NordVPN

    • 2026-01-09 [Older] NZ: Manage My Health breach: 50% of affected patients contacted

    • USDOJ ☛ 2026-01-09 [Older] Illinois Man Charged in Snapchat Hacking Investigation

    • 2026-01-06 [Older] HIPAA Compliance and Breach Communications: Helpful Tips for SMBs

    • 2026-01-08 [Older] EEOC experienced security incident involving an Opexus employee’s ‘unauthorized’ access, email says

    • 2026-01-06 [Older] Desjardins data breach: Quebec suspect arrested in Spain

    • Coin Desk ☛ 2026-01-07 [Older] Crypto wallet firm Ledger faces customer data breach through payment processor Global-e

• Defence/Aggression

  • International Business Times ☛ 2026-01-08 [Older] UK Experts Warn Young Adults of Potential Conscription as Global Security Threats Escalate

  • Court House News ☛ The billionaire tax

    A proposed ballot measure in California will impose a one-time wealth tax on billionaires. For some reason, billionaires don't like this.

  • Times Media Limited ☛ Doctors declare effects of child phone use a public health emergency

    We see the damage from harmful online content and excessive screen time every day, the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges has told ministers

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2026-01-08 [Older] Zelenskiy Says US Security Guarantees Document Set to Be Finalised With Cheeto Mussolini

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Michigan Advance ☛ ‘We’re just not going to do FOIA’: Michigan transparency effort stalls

    For years, both Democrats and Republicans in Michigan have advocated expanding FOIA to include the two branches of government, but no deal has been reached.

    Currently, two bills aiming to expand Michigan’s FOIA laws (Senate Bills 1 and 2) are sitting in the House’s Governmental Operations Committee awaiting discussion. However, Michigan Speaker of the House Matt Hall stated that he wasn’t interested in putting the bills on the agenda.

    “We’re just not going to do FOIA,” Hall told reporters during a Nov. 6 press conference.

  • Stephen Hackett ☛ Memphis Press Turning Blind Eye to Grok's Creation of Sexual Deepfakes of Adult and Children - 512 Pixels

    At the end of December, stories began to break about Grok being used by X users to generate non-consensual sexual imagery of people, including children.

    I’ve been writing about xAI for over a year, as the company has built two massive data centers here in my hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. There have been concerns about the natural gas turbines powering the data centers and the amount of water xAI was using to keep its hardware cool.

  • US Senate ☛ Letter to Deutsche Bank from US Senate [PDF]

    Given that rapidly evolving situation and the Administration’s failure to provide clarity on its plans for Venezuela’s oil and the funds raised from oil sales, we write to you to seek answers to the following questions. Please provide answers no later than January 29, 2026: [...]

• Environment

  • Counter Punch ☛ 2026-01-12 [Older] The Next Frontier of Climate Accountability: Making Big Food Pay Its Ecological Bill

  • HRW ☛ 2026-01-12 [Older] US Retreat from Global Climate Cooperation Threatens Rights

  • The Age AU ☛ 2026-01-11 [Older] Confidential advice undercooked climate change to Howard government

  • CBC ☛ 2026-01-09 [Older] 3 missing amid bushfires, 'catastrophic' conditions in Australia

  • University of Michigan ☛ 2026-01-09 [Older] ‘Dimanche’ blends puppetry and miming to spread climate change awareness

  • Scheerpost ☛ 2026-01-08 [Older] Cheeto Mussolini Abandonment of Global Treaties, Including Landmark Climate Deal, ‘Threatens All Life on Earth’

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-08 [Older] The impact of US withdrawal from global climate pacts

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2026-01-08 [Older] Cheeto Mussolini Withdrawal From Bedrock UN Climate Treaty Raises Legal Questions

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2026-01-08 [Older] US Exit of Key UN Climate Treaty Criticized as Self-Sabotage

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ 2026-01-06 [Older] Capitalists Want You to Stop Worrying About Climate Change

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Futurism ☛ Government Tells Tesla That This Is Definitely the Last Time It Can Blow Off Deadline to Turn In Data On Why FSD Is Constantly Ignoring Traffic Laws

      The investigation, launched last October, covers nearly three million Tesla vehicles installed with the automaker’s misleadingly named “Full Self-Driving” mode — which is in reality only partially self-driving — after receiving nearly 60 reports of the software violating traffic laws. Fourteen of these incidents involved crashes, totaling 23 injuries. In six of the crashes, the driving software “approached an intersection with a red traffic signal, continued to travel into the intersection against the red light and was subsequently involved in a crash with other motor vehicles in the intersection,” according to an NHTSA complaint.

    • Hackaday ☛ A Guide To Using Triacs For Switching AC

      The key to switching an AC load is bi-directional conductivity. A normal transistor or diode can only conduct in one direction, so if you try to switch an AC load with one of these you’ll end up with what essentially amounts to a bad rectifier. Triacs do have a “gate” analogous to the base of a bipolar junction transistor, but the gate will trigger the triac when current flows in either direction as well. The amount of current needed to trigger the triac does depend on the state of the switched waveform, so it can be more complex to configure than a relay or transistor in some situations.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • India Times ☛ Why Elon Musk is seeking up to $134 billion from OpenAI, Microsoft in 'wrongful gains'

    OpenAI gained between $65.5 billion and $109.4 billion from the billionaire entrepreneur's contributions when he was co-founding OpenAI from 2015, while ‌Microsoft gained ‌between $13.3 billion and $25.1 billion, Musk said in the federal court filing ahead of his trial against ‌the two companies.

  • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft hiring energy strategists for Asian datacenters

    The software giant last week advertised for three “Senior Energy Program Managers” – two in Australia and another in Singapore – who will be “responsible for strategizing and executing “end-to-end” plans for Microsoft’s energy requirement for a specific geographical market within the APAC region.”

  • Wired ☛ Thinking Machines Cofounder’s Office Relationship Preceded His Termination

    Leaders at Mira Murati’s startup believe Barret Zoph engaged in an incident of “serious misconduct.” The details are now coming to light.

  • The Verge ☛ Coinbase pulls its support of the Senate CLARITY Act

    And [cryptocurrency], which had spent decades navigating a regulatory gray zone, would finally have a set of rules to work off of — maybe not perfect rules, but hard rules. “[We] don’t want to be in a place where, with the change of every administration, what you can and can’t do with software, or what you can and can’t publish, changes,” Connor Brown, the Head of Strategy for the Bitcoin Policy Institute, told The Verge.

    Last Wednesday, just before midnight, everything fell apart.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Seth Godin ☛ Fake news and trust

      Celebrity gossip, fortune-telling and superstitions are the original forms of fake news, but now it’s increasingly widespread. In every field from science to world affairs, it’s troubling to see. People who are familiar with reality can’t understand why it’s popular–in a low-trust world, why would people engage with made-up noise disguised as information?

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The Guardian UK ☛ CBS finally airs 60 Minutes segment on Venezuelan prisoners sent to Cecot in El Salvador

    The segment, reported by Sharyn Alfonsi, was supposed to air on 21 December but was pulled by editor in chief Bari Weiss

  • RTL ☛ 'Masking' violent crackdown: Limited [Internet] briefly returns in Iran after protest blackout

    The rallies subsided after the crackdown that rights groups have called a “massacre” carried out by security forces under the cover of a communications blackout that started on January 8.

    Monitor Netblocks said late Sunday that “traffic levels have fallen after a brief, heavily filtered restoration of select Google and messaging services in Iran”.

  • Human rights Activists News Agency ☛ Day Twenty-Two of the Protests: The Scale of the Killings Grows as the Internet Shutdown Continues

    On the twenty-second day of nationwide protests in Iran, amid the continued widespread [Internet] shutdown and reports of limited and unstable connections in some areas, the wave of arrests continued in various cities. At the same time, senior government officials intensified their threatening rhetoric in response to external pressure. According to verified case-based statistics as of the end of this day, 3,919 people have been killed, while 8,949 additional deaths are still under investigation by HRANA. Additionally, 2,109 people have been severely injured, and the number of confirmed detainees has reached 24,669. Alongside these developments, numerous reports have emerged of increased pressure on families, difficulties in handing over the bodies of those killed, and the continuation of a heavy security atmosphere in some regions.

  • The Verge ☛ Disney deleted a Thread because people kept putting anti-fascist quotes from its movies in the replies

    Apparently, Disney either couldn’t handle the anti-fascist messaging of its own movies or was too afraid of pissing off the powers that be, because it quickly deleted the post. Thankfully, one resourceful Threads user recorded it for posterity, reminding us that yes, the human world is, in fact, a mess.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • RFERL ☛ US-Iran Tensions High As Tehran Revives Hostile Rhetoric, Threats Of New Crackdown

    Meanwhile, Iranian judiciary spokesman Asghar Jahangir suggested that executions may still be conducted.

    "A series of actions have been identified as mohareb, which is among the most severe Islamic punishments," he told a news conference on January 18.

  • University of Michigan ☛ Tradwives and stay-at-home girlfriends deserve wages

    The formalized conception of waged domestic labor dates back to the 1970s, when the grassroots International Feminist Collective began organizing to demand wages and recognition for housework. Dubbed the International Wages for Housework Campaign, these feminists asserted that the government should be providing salaries to the people — mostly women — performing unpaid domestic labor. This stance affirms the idea that domestic labor, though often undervalued, is nevertheless labor. A devaluation of housework comes from a history that associates housekeeping with unskilled labor often performed by women and people of Color.

  • Robert Reich ☛ Sunday thought: It’s time again for good trouble

    I’m old enough to remember when Martin Luther King Jr.’s mission seemed impossible. Just as the mission you and I must now engage in — defeating Trumpism and creating a new and better America out of the rubble and chaos he is wreaking — may seem impossible at this moment.

  • The New Stack ☛ Repair Advocates Name CES 2026’s Most Anticonsumer Tech

    “It strikes me that CES is more marketing hype than ever before,” said Gay Gordon-Byrne, the executive director of the Repair Association, at the Consumer Electronics Show 2026. “Many products are being announced that do not yet exist — so most basic consumer questions cannot be asked or answered.”

    “Right to Repair laws are in effect in 11 states, so it surprises me that OEMs do not even mention repairability,” he said.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Undeadly ☛ (Open) Widevine support added to the chromium port

    Note, however, the caveat in the pkg-readme file: [...]

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Copyrights

  • IP Kat ☛ 2026-01-07 [Older] Permission to appeal granted in Getty Images v Stability copyright claim

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Storm Chasers Sue Meta for Ignoring Repeat Infringements of Popular Accounts

    For independent creators documenting the world's most extreme weather, the real disaster isn't the storm; it's the aftermath on social media. A coalition of professional storm chasers has sued Meta for systematic copyright infringement. The complaint alleges that Meta systematically ignores takedown notices, siphoning billions of views into an advertising machine that purportedly values "popular" infringers over the original creators.