Leftovers

• Andrew Nesbitt ☛ 100 Posts

  I’ve also made a couple overview pages that collect posts on specific topics: Package Management and Git. If you want to see everything I’ve written about either of those, those are good places to start.

  Some of my favorites and popular posts for anyone who hasn’t gone back through the archives: [...]

• Science

  • Computational Complexity ☛ Computational Complexity: How does AI do on Baseball-Brothers-Pitchers

    In my graduate Ramsey Theory class I taught Kruskal's tree theorem (KTT) which was proven by Joe Kruskal in his PhD thesis in 1960. (Should that be in a graduate Ramsey Theory class? There are not enough people teaching such a course to get a debate going.) A simpler proof was discovered (invented?) by Nash-Williams in 1963.

    The theorem is that the set of trees under the homeomorphism ordering is a well quasi order.

    But this blog post is not about well quasi orderings. It's about baseball brothers and AI.

• Career/Education

  • Jeff Bridgforth ☛ Still here

    As I read Geoff’s article, it gave me a moment to pause. I am still here. I am still a front-end developer (even though my title is UX Developer). I am still here. And I don’t say that like a grump older person who has been in the role for a long time with a sense that I am stuck or that I am not thrilled about it.

  • Adam Silver ☛ Why designing in code makes you a better designer

    It put words to my experience as a front-end developer.

    His argument was simple:

    The web is a material. Like wood, it has a grain. You can work with it or fight against it.

• Hardware

  • The Drone Girl ☛ FPV Drone Therapy: Antigravity A1 Helps Hospitalized Kids

    But David Parker, founder of WishPlay — a humanitarian organization using VR for therapeutic purposes— found one great answer. WishPlay launched in 2017 with early explorations using mobile phones and niche tech like Google Cardboard, and has grown to use untethered headsets including Google Daydream and Samsung Gear. Given his roughly decade of experience working with hospitalized children who can’t leave their beds, he knew all too well of their wish to fly, escape and feel free. Enter FPV drone therapy.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Reel to reel tape machines

    And then it hit me. Reel to reel tape machines. Around, and around, and around. On a 7-inch reel, to another 7-inch reel. Or maybe 10-inch. Or something more portable. Mesmerising. High fidelity. A complex piece of kit blending engineering and art.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ Some People Keep Razor-Sharp Minds Into Their 80s and Beyond. A New Study Reveals Their Secrets

    Now, a new analysis of 38 human brains supports the idea that adults do, indeed, birth neurons—and that replenishing these cells might help preserve certain cognitive functions. In a study published February 25 in the journal Nature, adults ages 80 and older with outstanding memory—dubbed “super-agers”—had twice as many new neurons in their hippocampi, a brain region crucial for memory, as older adults with normal memory for their age, and two and a half times as many as people with Alzheimer’s disease.

  • BoingBoing ☛ A third of hospital aerosol samples tested positive for SARS-CoV-2

    The study also found that detection of the virus was more common in the emergency department than in the ICU — of the samples that tested positive, 80% were collected in the ED and 20% in the ICU. And within the Emergency Department, "hot spots" with more virus concentration included the acute-care area (9 of 13 samples collected there were positive), the public waiting room (half of those samples were positive) and a walkway area (where only one sample was collected, and it was positive).

• Proprietary

  • Quartz ☛ AI isn't taking people's jobs. Here's what's really happening

    They're losing them to money spent on chips and data centers

  • Engadget ☛ Hyper Light Drifter studio workers form union after rounds of layoffs

    Workers at Heart Machine, the independent studio behind Hyper Light Drifter and Solar Ash, have formed a union with Communications Workers of America (CWA) Local 9003. The wall-to-wall unit covers all 13 frontline employees at the studio, which voluntarily recognized the union in February after a supermajority of eligible workers voted for the measure.

    The organizing effort follows a rough stretch at Heart Machine, after the studio laid off employees in November 2024, then announced in October 2025 that it would end development on its early access title Hyper Light Breaker and cut further staff.

    "I decided to get involved in organizing my studio because I've seen so many peers in the industry stand up to protect the craft we all care so deeply about. Watching that momentum grow made me realize that if we love this work, we have to protect it, especially now," said Steph Aligbe, a gameplay tools engineer at the studio.

  • WCCF Tech ☛ Battlefield 6 Development Studios Reportedly Hit by Layoffs As Part of A ‘Realignment’ Process

    Publisher EA has laid off an unknown number of developers from across Battlefield 6 development studios, including Criterion, DICE, and Motive Studios, according to a new report from IGN. These layoffs appear absolutely unjustified by the game's sales performance, as the sixth entry in the series was among the best-selling AAA PC and console games of 2025 and the best-selling game in the United States.

  • EA Makes Layoffs Across All Battlefield Studios in ‘Realignment’ Bid

    It has just been revealed that Electronic Arts is making a slew of layoffs across the Battlefield Studios group of teams, moving to ‘realign’ the space as the live-service release of Battlefield 6 continues to evolve. It has been reported that employees across Criterion, DICE, Ripple Effect, and Motive are impacted.

    This revelation came courtesy of IGN, which confirmed that an unknown number of developers have been hit by the layoffs, but it seems to be impacting several teams across the various offices that make up the Battlefield Studios group.

  • Microsoft CEO addresses fears Xbox is “being sunsetted” amid changes [Ed: They have ALREADY sunset the brand, AND the console]

    Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has responded to worrying claims about Xbox’s future, with some rumors suggesting that recent changes at the company are setting them up to “sunset” the brand.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Guest Post - The Perils of Using Generative AI to Perform Research Tasks: Editors’ and Publishers’ Viewpoints

      In our opinion, the use of GenAI for research is highly problematic for many reasons. First, GenAI hallucinates, i.e., it creates outputs that may seem plausible yet are manifestly and materially inaccurate. Second, GenAI is trained with data that is inherently biased, notably internet-derived sources. Thirdly, reliance on GenAI may lead to what we call scholarly deskilling, or the progressive inability to undertake such tasks as writing a research paper without GenAI’s help. GenAI may also influence the essential intellectual contributions (ideas, creativity) central to a paper that we might otherwise imagine to be the sole preserve of human beings. Fourthly, in our own experience, we realized that many scholars (especially junior scholars) currently using GenAI are either unaware of or complacent about these issues, and, more importantly, not all are aware of how these systems actually operate. One consequence of these problems is a torrent of GenAI-themed and influenced research that is minimally valuable to society.

    • US Navy Times ☛ Anthropic sues Trump administration seeking to undo ‘supply chain risk’ designation

      Anthropic filed two separate lawsuits Monday, one in California federal court and another in the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., each challenging different aspects of the Pentagon’s actions against the company.

    • 404 Media ☛ How to Talk to Someone Experiencing 'AI Psychosis'

      “He sent me some of the code, and none of it made sense, none of it ran correctly. Or if it did run, it didn't do anything,” David told me. David and his friend’s names have been changed in this story to protect their privacy. “So I'm like, ‘What is this? Can you give me more context about this?’ And Michael’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, I've been messing around with ChatGPT a lot.’”

    • Hackaday ☛ Ask Hackaday: What Will An LLM Be Good For In The Plateau Of Productivity?

      We are living amid a wave of AI slop and unreasonable hype so it’s an easy win to dunk on LLMs, but as the whole thing climbs towards the peak of inflated expectations on the Gartner hype cycle perhaps it’s time to look forward. The current AI hype is inevitably going to crash and burn, but what comes afterwards? The long tail of the plateau of productivity will contain those applications in which LLMs are a success, but what will they be? We have yet to hack together a working crystal ball, but perhaps it’s still time to gaze into the future.

    • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Today in scrapers

      Honestly one of the most offensive things about these AI scraper bots is how bad at their jobs they are. Look at these 404s from the last 6 hours and despair: [...]

    • James Randall ☛ Training a Neural Network in 16-bit Fixed Point on a 1982 BBC Micro

      In my previous post on neural networks we went through the basic concepts and simple mathematics involved in training and running a neural network. It’s so simple that it gave me an idea: could I run this on an 8-bit micro. Namely a BBC Micro.

      I don’t think its really foreshadowing to say that yes, you can run a neural network on a BBC Micro, and below behold: [...]

    • Andrei Ciobanu ☛ Shortcuts

      By natural design, humans are inherently lazy. Mother Nature programmed us not to waste energy on anything that isn’t vital to our survival. While there are exceptions and nuances, for most of us, sitting on a couch and consuming cheap entertainment simply “feels right.” The inner primate is happy; biology considers this a win. The brain evolved a cynical reward system, dopamine, to make us feel good when we find a shortcut. In the natural world, a shortcut means survival. In our world, the shortcut is more complex, but the biological mechanism is identical.

    • Vishnu Haridas ☛ You MUST Review AI-generated Code

      In 2016, the golden rule of programming was "don't blindly copy-paste code from StackOverflow". Well, it's 2026, and the rule requires an obvious update: "don't blindly copy-paste code from AI".

      AI-assisted development provides great value, there's no doubt about that. But your AI tool can quickly turn from a PhD-level developer to a kindergarten-level monkey, without you even noticing. If you miss this tipping point, disaster awaits.

    • Lorin Hochstein ☛ Grow fast and overload things

      The general vibes I see online is that the AI companies have not been doing particularly well in the reliability department. Both OpenAI and Anthropic publish reliability statistics on their status pages. Now, I’m not a fan of using the nines as a meaningful indicator of reliability, but since I don’t have access to any other signals about reliability for these two companies, they’ll have to do for the purposes of this blog post.

    • Hōrōshi バガボンド ☛ Your LLM Doesn't Write Correct Code. It Writes Plausible Code.

      SQLite takes 0.09 ms. An LLM-generated Rust rewrite takes 1,815.43 ms.

      It’s not a misplaced comma! The rewrite is 20,171 times slower on one of the most basic database operations.

      [...]

      In the 1980 Turing Award lecture Tony Hoare said: “There are two ways of constructing a software design: one way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.” This LLM-generated code falls into the second category. The reimplementation is 576,000 lines of Rust (measured via scc, counting code only, without comments or blanks). That is 3.7x more code than SQLite. And yet it still misses the is_ipk check that handles the selection of the correct search operation.

  • Social Control Media

    • The Kyiv Independent ☛ Russian [attackers] target [sic] Signal, WhatsApp in global cyber campaign

      "Russian state [attackers] are engaged in a large-scale global cyber campaign to gain access to Signal and WhatsApp accounts belonging to dignitaries, military personnel and civil servants," the Netherlands' General Intelligence and Security Service (AIVD) said in a statement.

    • India Times ☛ Russia-backed [attackers] breach Signal, WhatsApp accounts of officials, journalists, Netherlands warns

      "Targets and victims of the campaign include Dutch government employees" and journalists, the agencies said.

      The chat apps offering end-to-end encryption are popular with government officials for sharing confidential ⁠or classified ‌information, making them "the ideal place for malicious actors to try to capture sensitive information," they said.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Kyiv Independent ☛ Russia forged new cyber weapons to attack Ukraine. Now they're going international

      "They thought it was just a malfunction of the device because the plant was still producing power, they just couldn't get the remote connection," Marcin Dudek, head of CERT Polska, Poland's national cybersecurity authority, told the Kyiv Independent. "But we got the information that something was happening from the operator, who's monitoring all the plants."

      Only once the operators stabilized the grid did the Polish cyber authorities get the breathing space to ask who exactly attacked their solar grid. A subsequent investigation by CERT-PL found that the attacker had also gotten into the systems of a major combined heat and power plant, where it had spent most of 2025 wiping firmware.

    • Security Week ☛ ClickFix Attack Uses Windows Terminal to Evade Detection

      What sets the new campaign apart, however, is the fact that victims are instructed to open Windows Terminal directly, instead of relying on the Windows Run dialog.

    • Scoop News Group ☛ We've seen ransomware cost American lives. Here's what it will actually take to stop it.

      As former leaders of FBI and CISA cyber units, we’ve seen cybercrime ripple through communities – disrupting critical services, destroying jobs, and sometimes costing lives. Today’s ransomware numbers tell a stark story. The Department of Homeland Security reported more than 5,600 publicly-disclosed ransomware attacks worldwide in 2024, nearly half of them in the United States. The FBI found that ransomware incidents increased nearly nine percent year over year, with almost half targeting critical infrastructure. Attacks on these organizations pose the greatest threat to national security and public safety.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Security Week ☛ Internet Infrastructure TLD .arpa Abused in Phishing Attacks

      As part of the newly uncovered campaign, however, a threat actor has been abusing DNS record management controls of certain providers to add IP address records for .arpa domains and serve phishing content to victims.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Michael Geist ☛ The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 260: What the Government Didn’t Want You To Hear About Bill C-4 And Its Weak Political Party Privacy Rules

      Last spring, the government quietly inserted provisions that exempt political parties from the application of privacy protections in Bill C-4, an “affordability measures” bill. The government barely acknowledged the provision in its study of the bill at the House of Commons and refused to even hear witnesses on the issue. The Senate didn’t play along however. It conducted hearings on the privacy rules and the Senators didn’t like what they heard, amending the bill by including a sunset clause on the privacy provisions that gives that the government three years to come up with something better. The bill heads back to the House of Commons, where the government can either accept the change and have the bill pass or reject the change and send it back again to the Senate.

    • [Old] Hōrōshi バガボンド ☛ OpSec 101 - Part I

      Operations Security - short OpSec - can mean lots of different things depending on the context of the "operation" you're looking at. In a more general sense, OpSec describes the process of identifying whether your actions and information can be observed or obtained by external actors, which can use this information to exploit or hack your "operation".

      But OpSec doesn't stop there! Identifying potential attack vectors is only one part of securing your business. The next, at least equally important part, is the selection and execution of measurements to mitigate the possibilities of getting exploited or leaking critical information in the first place.

    • [Old] Hōrōshi バガボンド ☛ OpSec 101 - Part II

      Recently, a discussion about VPN usage sparked quite some debate, with developers and privacy enthusiasts debating their effectiveness and necessity. I'm not trying to "dunk" on this or anything. There are good arguments for both sides in it. Like most privacy tools, VPNs come with their own set of tradeoffs. There will always be pros and cons for using a VPN. Ultimately, your choice should depend on your personal threat model and privacy requirements.

      Since the thread highlighted several misconceptions about VPN usage, I'd like to share my perspective to help you make an informed decision.

  • Confidentiality

    • Hackaday ☛ Secure Communication, Buried In A News App

      Cryptography is a funny thing. Supposedly, if you do the right kind of maths to a message, you can send it off to somebody else, and as long as they’re the only one that knows a secret little thing, nobody else will be able to read it. We have all sorts of apps for this, too, that are specifically built for privately messaging other people.

      Only… sometimes just having such an app is enough to get you in trouble. Even just the garbled message itself could be proof against you, even if your adversary can’t read it. Enter The Guardian. The UK-based media outlet has deployed a rather creative and secure way of accepting private tips and information, one which seeks to provide heavy cover for those writing in with the hottest scoops.

    • Akamai ☛ Post-Quantum Cryptography Beyond TLS: Remain Quantum Safe

      Throughout our series of blog posts on post-quantum cryptography (PQC), we have focused almost exclusively on the Transport Layer Security (TLS) ecosystem in an HTTP context. Addressing the “harvest now, decrypt later” threat in the CDN context was an obvious high priority for Akamai, and we are pleased to have delivered PQC in our TLS 1.3 handshakes for both client-to-Akamai and Akamai-to-origin connections.

      Over the coming weeks, these features are being rolled out everywhere as on-by-default for all Enhanced TLS customers.

      Although this is in line with the rest of the industry's prioritizations, the quantum threat affects all areas of cryptography, not just TLS. In this blog post, we'll explore some of the other protocols and services that will warrant our attention when it comes to making them quantum safe.

    • Bryce Kerley ☛ WebPKI and You

      The public key infrastructure of the web, commonly referred to as WebPKI, has to work in some difficult scenarios. Someone who’s never touched a trackpad relies on their ability to buy a new computer at the store, put it on the wifi at DEF CON, and connect to their bank’s website to kick off a wire transfer to buy a house with it. The way this user’s bank, the First Example Bank of Money, proves that they’re the bank is complicated.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Independent UK ☛ Social media ban for under-16s rejected after Commons vote

    MPs have rejected a proposed ban on social media for under-16s despite earlier backing from peers and campaigners including actor Hugh Grant.

  • BBC ☛ Indonesia to ban social media and other online platforms for under 16s

    Meutya Hafid, the country's communications and digital affairs minister, announced that accounts for under 16s on "high risk" platforms would be deactivated from 28 March.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Indonesia to ban social media for children under 16

    Meutya Hafid said in a statement to media said that she signed a government regulation that will mean children under the age of 16 can no longer have accounts on high-risk digital platforms, including YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, Roblox and Bigo Live, a popular livestreaming site. With a population of about 285 million, the fourth-highest in the world, the south-east Asian nation represents a significant market for social networks.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Indonesia to ban social media for under-16s, minister says

    Indonesia will bar users under 16 from accessing major social media platforms under a new regulation, Communication Minister Meutya Hafid said.

    The restrictions will apply to "high-risk" platforms, including YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, Bigo Live, and Roblox. The restrictions are set to roll out gradually, starting later this month.

  • Engadget ☛ Indonesia announces a social media ban for anyone under 16

    Following in the footsteps of Australia, Indonesia will be the latest country to limit social media usage for children under 16. Meutya Hafid, Indonesia's communication and digital affairs minister, announced that a new government regulation will require "high-risk" platforms to delete any accounts from Indonesia that are under 16, starting on March 28.

  • TechCrunch ☛ Indonesia outlines plan to limit under-16s' access to social media | TechCrunch

    Indonesia’s communication and digital ministry said on Friday that it would delay children’s access to social media platforms: Children 13 or older will be able to use platforms the country deems “lower-risk,” while “higher-risk” platforms will be only open to users above 16 years old.

    Platforms deemed “higher-risk” include YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, Bigo Live, and Roblox, the country’s Minister of Communication and Digital Affairs Meutya Hafid said in a video posted to Instagram.

  • France24 ☛ Two men charged with ISIS-inspired terror after nail bomb thrown at NY protest

    "This is being investigated as an act of ISIS-inspired terrorism," NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said, using another name for the Islamic State group.

  • Maine Morning Star ☛ Breaking with Democrats, Maine attorney general urges court to oppose ranked-choice voting expansion

    But Maine Senate President Mattie Daughtry (D-Cumberland) and House Speaker Ryan Fecteau (D-District 132) said the proposed expansion does conform with the Maine Constitution, and instead argued that the 2017 ruling is not binding and that the bill has a heavy presumption of constitutionality in court.

  • Ken Klippenstein ☛ Document: Homeland Security Warns of Iranian “Fatwa”

    Iran, however, is not the only country framing the Iran war in religious terms. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is invoking God as being on the American side, while claiming that Iran is “hell-bent on prophetic Islamist delusions.”

    Leaders of the right-wing Christian [sic] community in America, meanwhile, have overtly tied the Iran war to end times theology.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Peter Thiel and Jeffrey Epstein Had a Yearslong Relationship

    A decade later, Thiel is more entwined in the Middle East than he is in most other regions of the world. Thiel’s firm, Palantir, has a strategic partnership with the Israel Ministry of Defense to supply its artificial intelligence tools and other technology to the Israeli military, used throughout the Gaza genocide for its indiscriminate bombing campaign. Thiel has personally dismissed ethical concerns about the partnership, saying that his “bias is to defer to Israel” and that its military is “broadly in the right.” As the United States and Israel wage war on Iran, Palantir is now providing one of the AI tools being used by the Pentagon for the war effort, which kicked off with the mass slaughter of Iranian schoolchildren.

    The germ of Palantir’s involvement in the region may well have had its origins with Epstein, according to documents released earlier this year by the Department of Justice. Emails show Epstein connected Thiel with another friend, former Israeli defense minister and prime minister Ehud Barak, on account of their mutual interest in leveraging the tech sector for national security.

  • Carole Cadwalladr ☛ The Broligarchy's First World War?

    I’m writing these words, after a gap of silence, because the last thing I wanted to do is to add to the noise. And I can’t presume to try and help make sense of what’s happening in the world for anyone else when I can’t understand it myself. And I don’t see how anybody can. The chaos we are living through is the equivalent of cognitive assault. Our extra-sensory information landscape engages our frontal lobes in the busyness of mental processing from which no meaning comes.

    Three weeks ago, the news cycle stopped briefly on a subject that for a brief moment was shocking even in spite of this algorithmic numbing. The dazzling glare of public exposure shone a light on a global network of rich and powerful men, many of them household names, who had participated in, or turned a blind eye to, an international trafficking operation involving hundreds of women and girls. For the briefest of moments, it felt like a sharp blast of daylight had been shone on one of the darkest corners of our world. There was no path to justice or accountability for the victims of Jeffrey Epstein, but there was some small comfort in that at least, finally, it couldn’t be ignored.

• Environment

  • Alabama Reflector ☛ Temporarily banning data centers draws more interest from state, local officials

    While no states have successfully enacted a moratorium, several cities and counties have banned new data center projects over the past year. In August, St. Charles, Missouri, became one of the first cities in the nation to ban data center construction for a year.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Study warns Colombia could lose one-fifth of cocoa land by 2050

    "Recent events, such as the cold wave with global implications that affected northern Colombia and caused major flooding in lowland areas of the Caribbean region and other Andean zones, show how climate change and climate variability are already generating real impacts," said Carlos Eduardo González, researcher at AGROSAVIA and one of the study's lead authors.

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ Robotic dolphin cleans oil spills with sea urchin-inspired filter

    Engineers at RMIT University in Australia have built a small robotic “Electronic Dolphin” designed to vacuum oil from the surface of water using a filter inspired by sea urchins.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • International Business Times ☛ Epstein Boasted of Personally Lobbying Congress to Defund Cold Fusion Research, Federal Files Show

      The emails, filed under federal exhibit numbers EFTA02437662, EFTA00740161, and EFTA00740600 show a 2009 exchange between Epstein and Al Seckel — a perceptual scientist, TED speaker, and board member of Milken's Knowledge Universe. The correspondence took place approximately one year after Epstein's June 2008 guilty plea to soliciting a minor in Florida.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Omicron Limited ☛ Raccoons solve puzzles for the fun of it, new study finds

      UBC researchers Hannah Griebling and Dr. Sarah Benson-Amram found raccoons continued solving puzzles long after retrieving the only food reward available. This behavior reflects intrinsic motivation rather than hunger and is described as "information foraging," because no additional food was given for continuing.

  • Overpopulation

    • BoingBoing ☛ Forget about gas prices and start worrying about water

      Hundreds of desalination plants line the Persian Gulf coast, each within range of Iranian missiles or drones. Without them, major cities couldn't sustain their populations. In Kuwait, about 90 percent of drinking water comes from desalination. In Oman, it's 86 percent. In Saudi Arabia, about 70 percent.

• Finance

  • FSF ☛ March 15 is the deadline to apply for LibreLocal funding

    Locally organized meetups are a great way for free software community members to meet each other. if you are not familiar with free software, it's also an opportunity for you to learn more. The FSF is happy to support you in your organizing efforts. Tell us about your LibreLocal meetup so we can help get the word out about your meetup to other free software supporters near you. We will also be happy to have an available FSF staff member join your event virtually, or if possible, even in person!

  • Dan MacKinlay ☛ Hacking financial regulation for community mutual aid — The Dan MacKinlay stable of variably-well-consider’d enterprises

    The question: if a group of 50 people wanted to pool money, invest it in ETFs and catastrophe bonds, and provide mutual aid to members in hard times—what legal structure would they use in Australia, and could AI agents compress the compliance costs enough to make it viable?

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Earthly ☛ The compliance tax: what it actually costs to ship software to the U.S. government

    Government buying is shifting. Federal customers increasingly want products and outcomes, not development teams on retainer. Companies that serve the DoW — whether they build defense technology or deliver consulting at scale — face a shared mandate: ship faster, deliver consistently, and prove compliance continuously rather than retroactively.

    This is compounded by a structural shift across the industry. Many defense-focused companies are transitioning from pure services and forward-deployed engineering toward productized, repeatable offerings built on shared platforms. That transition changes everything about compliance. A prototype built in 48 hours for a single customer doesn’t need an ATO. A product that ships to multiple government customers across classification levels does — and the compliance burden arrives all at once.

  • Earthly ☛ The SDLC compliance surface: what federal frameworks actually require from your build pipeline

    EO 14028 / NIST SSDF (SP 800-218) maps most directly to SDLC practices — its 42 tasks describe pipeline security, supply chain integrity, and SBOM requirements almost verbatim.

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ Capitalists Implicitly Expect Us to Save Them From Themselves

    Here is the simple point I want to make today: The class of people telling us that government will step in to prevent the worst economic outcomes of our era is the same class of people who are working to prevent the government from doing so! Citadel, for example, is owned by hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin, one of the biggest Republican donors in America. One of the biggest donors to Donald Trump’s Super PAC is the president of OpenAI. Not only is the AI industry money flooding into the midterm elections mostly going to Republicans, but even the bipartisan spending is designed to head off regulation of the AI industry by Democratic states and national officials. (Even Dario Amodei himself, the left-most outlier, can only bring himself to call for the rather mild actions of progressive taxation and “a resurgence of private philanthropy” to head off disaster, rather than confiscatory wealth taxes and state ownership.) All in all, the political spending of those who profit the most from the AI industry is geared to ensuring that those crucial “regulatory and fiscal policy shifts that offset the worst-case outcomes” never happen.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • MIT Technology Review ☛ How AI is turning the Iran conflict into theater

      Much of the spotlight on AI and the Iran conflict has rightfully been on the role that models like Claude might be playing in helping the US military make decisions about where to strike. But these intelligence dashboards and the ecosystem surrounding them reflect a new role that AI is playing in wartime: mediating information, often for the worse.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The Moscow Times ☛ Mobile Internet Outages Hit St. Petersburg After Days of Disruptions in Moscow

    The disruptions coincided with a warning from Leningrad region Governor Alexander Drozdenko about a potential drone threat and a possible “reduction in mobile internet speeds.” More than 500 residents of the surrounding region also reported connectivity problems.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Why Is There No Antiwar Movement in the US?

    Why then has there been so little collective protest against the US-Israel offensive? Answering this question is not easy. What follows are seven hypotheses rather than definitive conclusions. But exploring why we’re lacking an antiwar movement today can help us move to actually start building one. And for the sake of Iranians, the Middle East, and working people in the United States, we’d better do so as soon as possible.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • The Dissenter ☛ ICE Detains & Silences Another Spanish-Language Reporter

    In a habeas petition that asked the United States Court for the Middle District of Tennessee to intervene, Rodriguez’s attorneys continued, “In response, ICE has summarily detained her in a warrantless arrest and has denied her release even though she has done everything possible to comply with immigration law.”

    The detention of Rodriguez comes months after a similar case where ICE retaliated against Spanish-language reporter Mario Guevara, who was deported to El Salvador.

  • CPJ ☛ Belarus sentences journalist Pavel Dabravolski to 9 years on treason charges 

    Dabravolski had worked with the independent news agency BelaPAN before the KGB, the country’s security service, declared it an “extremist group” in November 2021, Pozirk reported. According to Viasna, Dabravolski is a former journalist with Naviny.by, a news website affiliated with BelaPAN. He had previously worked for both Belarusian and foreign media, including the independent Ukrainian news outlet New Voice of Ukraine, according to the Belarusian Association of Journalists (BAJ), an exiled advocacy and trade group.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Billionaires are a danger to themselves and (especially) us

    Gates was a prep-school kid, so it's weird for him to have forceful views about a public education system he never experienced. In reality, it's not so much that Gates has forceful views about schools – rather, he has forceful views about teachers' unions, which he wishes to see abolished. Gates is one of America's most vicious union-busters: [...]

  • BoingBoing ☛ Minneapolis cartoonist storms out of retirement for ICE

    Sack had retired from the Star Tribune and the newspaper had eventually eliminated its staff cartoonist position, so he now has a Substack newsletter, the successful "The Art of Sack," in which readers can get his cartoons.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Digital Music News ☛ 27 States Double Down on Live Nation Suit Post-DOJ Settlement

  Several of those states’ attorneys general confirmed as much today, shortly after Live Nation and the DOJ reached a trial-ending agreement. As we broke down, said agreement contains significant concessions – the promoter will offload multiple amphitheaters and open Ticketmaster to competitors, to name a couple – that will take some time to materialize.

  Rather than awaiting the changes, nearly 30 states are doubling down with plans to keep on seeking relief. Admittedly, this doesn’t quite come as a surprise; lawmakers and officials on both sides of the aisle were decidedly vocal in criticizing Live Nation ahead of the trial.

• Rolling Stone ☛ Amy Klobuchar: Live Nation Settlement Shows 'Disrespect for Fans'

  Speaking hours after the surprise deal was announced, the Minnesota senator expressed her frustration with both the terms of the deal and how it was reached. Specifically, she cited the unexpected ouster of the DOJ’s antitrust head, Gail Slater — who appeared eager to pursue the Live Nation case — one month before the trial began.

  “Every single sign points to a backroom deal,” Klobuchar says, “made without the knowledge of antitrust lawyers, and made against the wishes of people that were trying to do the right thing and then were forced to leave. And certainly made against the wishes of fans.”

• Rolling Stone ☛ Live Nation, Ticketmaster Settle Antitrust Lawsuit With Government

  The deal was reached just one week after the case went to trial in New York City, with a justice department official sharing some details of the tentative deal during a call with reporters Monday. The deal will not force Live Nation and Ticketmaster — which merged in 2010 — to be broken up. But the live-entertainment giant will reportedly face a fine of approximately $300 million and be forced to implement several changes to its business.

• Patents

  • The Conversation ☛ The story of the first telephone call – nine words that changed the world

    But Bell was not the only one to have the idea. The American electrical engineer Elisha Grey was working along similar lines, and both men submitted patent caveats – a notice of their intention to submit a full application – within an hour of each other on February 14 1876. There followed some frantic communication between Bell in Boston and his agent in Washington DC to make sure the applications did not overlap.

    Bell’s patent (US174465A) was finally issued on March 7. Three days later, he made history when he spoke those nine simple words. Grey abandoned his patent caveat, and his future attempts to contest Bell’s patent failed in court.

• Copyrights

  • CopyrightLately ☛ Thaler Is Dead. Now for the AI Copyright Questions That Actually Matter.

    The result was a ruling much narrower than this week’s hot takes suggested. The D.C. Circuit held that copyright law requires a human author—but was careful to add that the human-authorship requirement doesn’t automatically disqualify works made “by or with the assistance of artificial intelligence.” It just means the author has to be human, not AI itself.

• Gemini* and Gopher

  • Personal/Opinions

    • psytrance party

      While dancing, my hand landed right on her butt, fully open.

      I'm so sorry, I said.

      She turned to me, seemed unsure of what I said and replied,

      Yes I am sorry my butt is really wet.

      She wanted me to touch her, although we've never met or talk.

      It was quite the night. I don't think I was really prepared for that. I had a really good time, dancing and meeting new people. I was probably way too politically correct in my approach, but I also didn't want to think about flirting or making out with anyone. I just wanted to dance and get high.

  • Technology and Free Software

    • Is this a way of doing AI ethically?

      It was very interesting to see how Corridor Crew [1] used AI (Artificial Intelligence) to actually solve a work flow issue they had with green screens [2]—they still had a lot of work to clean up composited footage. They then worked to train an AI to do that tedious work for them. I don't find an issue what-so-ever with how they did it—they generated their own training data (so they avoided the whole scale “stealing” of copyright material) on their own equipment (so conceivably they avoided any environmental impact not only by avoiding a small town's worth of electricity but also by narrowly restricting the training data to what they absolutely needed) and once it worked, they are releasing the tool for use by anyone (so avoiding the whole rent-seeking issues by the major AI players).