Leftovers

• Andrei Nicolin Ciobanu ☛ The associations people make

  I like to “visualise” stuff, and some of my favourite articles that I wrote have some form of visualisations: [...]

• Tracy Durnell ☛ Brute force learning

  Rethinking that quote about how “insanity is doing the same thing a thousand times and expecting a different result”… sometimes we don’t notice what we’re learning to notice for a while.

• Simone Silvestroni ☛ Plateau

  Sometimes, accepting that you don’t have the will to experiment or to muddle through complicated setups is actually a step in the right direction.

• Rachel Andrew ☛ Look into the future of the web platform

  Whenever I talk about new features in CSS, people immediately ask when it will be available everywhere, or when it will be safe to use. The data gives you a way to understand that, and also to talk about the decisions with stakeholders. I think this is one of the most exciting things to come from this project, as we’ve never had this kind of future-facing view before.

• Lionel Dricot ☛ The Social Smolnet

  It might have been an email thread. Or a lobste.rs comment. It was a discussion about yet another attempt at a new decentralized social protocol. And we reached the conclusion that with blogs and email, we already had a decentralized social network. We only needed to use it.

  This was the last push I needed to implement in Offpunk the social features I had imagined years ago. Share and Reply. Available since Offpunk 3.0.

• Science

  • Yoshua Wuyts ☛ An effect notation based on with-clauses and blocks

    Before talking about notation I want to quickly clarify again what effects are. In programming languages we use types to provide information about the inputs and outputs of functions. Effects allow us to provide information about the function itself, including things like “this function can wait without blocking” or “this function can be evaluated during compilation”.

    Rust is a systems programming language and because of that it values providing fine-grained, low-level control about structures when needed 1. While an async fn is a function that has “the async effect”, that is different from a function which returns an -> impl Future. Though they both desugar to the same structures, async fn is higher-level and can for example reason about borrows in ways that a plain function returning a future cannot. I think of this as analogous to how in Rust references and pointers are also structurally similar but semantically different.

  • Befores & Afters ☛ VFX artists vs. The Golden Gate - befores & afters

    It turns out the visual effects supervisor is just one of several who have had to take on the challenging task of destroying the 1.7 mile long Golden Gate. Indeed, if you’re a visual effects artist who has worked on an alien invasion or natural disaster film in the past two decades, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve wreaked havoc on the Golden Gate Bridge, too. Here’s four different ways VFX artists have brought the bridge down.

  • Andrei Nicolin Ciobanu ☛ The Shape of Inequalities

    After writing my previous handout article regarding inequalities, I wanted to see if I could find ways to represent inequalities in a geometrical way (you know, classic circles, triangles, squares, cubes, rectangular prisms and the like). So I’ve been digging and improvising, and I’ve come up with some animations to help people get a geometrical intuition of things that are mostly studied in algebra and analysis.

    Some of the animations are standard and are taught in the right kind of schools, but others have some originality. For those, I actually developed the ideas using pen, paper, and my own imagination. If somebody else already did that, it’s fine; I am not a fool to claim “real” originality when it comes to basic mathematics. The roads were already very circulated in the last 2000 years.

  • Donnacha Oisín Kidney ☛ Monuses and Heaps

    The algebraic structure in question is a monus, which is a kind of monoid that supports a partial subtraction operation (that subtraction operation, denoted by the symbol ∸, is itself often called a “monus”). However, before giving the full definition of the structure, let me first try to motivate its use. The context here is heap-based algorithms. For the purposes of this post, a heap is a tree that obeys the “heap property”; i.e. every node in the tree has some “weight” attached to it, and every parent node has a weight less than or equal to the weight of each of its children. So, for a tree like the following: [...]

• Career/Education

  • The Walrus ☛ Frankenstein Taught Me the Classics Are Alive, They’re Really Alive!

    Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published in 1818, follows scientist Victor Frankenstein, who creates a living creature from inanimate parts, only to abandon it. It is fundamentally an exploration of unchecked human greed, the desire for recognition and control over nature. Reading Frankenstein, I found myself genuinely enjoying a classic for the first time. I noticed many parallels to the rise of artificial intelligence and ChatGPT: the creature’s development of language, knowledge, and emotions mirrors how AI systems train on human data and networks. The novel’s questions about responsibility, risk, and creating a consciousness from inanimate constituents echo the ethical and legal dilemmas we are now facing with new technologies. Victor Frankenstein’s claim that “the world was to me a secret which I desired to divine” has never been more relevant: it captures our enduring fascination with the dangers of human overreach, an archetype that continues to underlie our decisions.

  • ARRL ☛ ARRL Hosts Successful HamSCI 2026 Workshop

    HamSCI – the Ham Radio Science Citizen Investigation program – encourages radio amateurs to collect data that scientists use in their research on ionospheric phenomena. This year’s workshop featured 17 oral presentations, 3 tutorials, 5 demonstrations, and 31 posters, and drew researchers from Virginia Tech, Saint Francis University, Dartmouth College, Boston College, and others.

  • Truthdig ☛ When We Fight for Public Schools, We Fight for Democracy

    These attacks on public schools are attacks on democracy itself. The classroom is where kids learn to listen to different perspectives, to collaborate, to understand that rules apply to everyone. These aren’t abstract lessons — they’re the daily work of becoming people who can sustain a democratic society.

    Schools are also perhaps the strongest example of public policy and public dollars being deployed to build our shared commitment to one another, regardless of wealth or creed. They’re the core of a social compact in which we each have a stake in the success of families and communities everywhere.

  • Raspberry Pi ☛ Computing and AI for all: From classrooms to national dialogue in India

    At this event, we brought together educators, researchers, and system leaders for shared learning, reflection, and professional dialogue where classroom practice was placed at the heart of the discussion.

  • W Evan Sheehan ☛ Museum People

    I think of myself as a Museum Person. I come from a family of Museum People. I married a Museum Person. I take my kid to museums. We’ve been going to museums for longer than I can remember.

  • Consensus Labs LLC ☛ Developer Spotlight: Somtochi Onyekwere from Fly.io

    This article is part of a series interviewing developers (not founders, not executives) working on software infrastructure to understand their work, how they got here, the projects they’re proud of, the incidents they’ve learned from, and what they’re curious about.

  • Alex Alejandre ☛ Interview With John Earnest

    John Earnest (Internet_Janitor) crafts creative, empowering projects. Powering projects “impossibly complex for the platforms they’re running on” like dp and Octoma, his project Decker reminds many of HyperCard, discussed on the Arraycast. iKe is a sound and graphics platform for oK, with example programs like Asteroids on the bottom right.

    In this interview, we discussed array languages (K and Lil), language design and creativity.

• Hardware

  • Federal News Network ☛ New “drone killer” cartridge aims to give Marines a simple, low‑cost solution

    Terry Gerton And so this kind of munition as I read it in a layman’s term is like birdshot, right? It’s a shotgun style sort of pellet. Tell us how it works.

  • Bozhidar Batsov ☛ One Year with the HHKB: A Mini Review

    I’m a keyboard nerd. I’ve owned several great keyboards over the years, starting with the legendary Das Keyboard 3 Ultimate (blank keys and Cherry MX Blue switches – my co-workers loved me), then moving through the Das Keyboard 4, the excellent KUL ES-87, and eventually landing on what I considered my dream keyboard: the Leopold FC660C.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Initial thoughts about the ThinkPad E14: wow!

    Recently I bought and received a ThinkPad E14 Gen 7 to replace both my personal MacBook Air, and my ThinkPad X230 writing machine. I’ll admit this was more in response to what the Mac has become, and ThinkPads were the closest hardware to MacBooks I’ve ever enjoyed using. But truthfully, I had no idea whether it was a good idea.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Vox ☛ Texas Senate candidate James Talarico spoke openly about meat, animal welfare, and climate change. The backlash was swift.

    It doesn’t take a political strategist to conclude that Talarico’s “non-meat” campaign announcement was a potentially reckless move for a Texas politician and that it could’ve easily come back to haunt him if his political ambitions were to grow beyond the greater Austin area, which they now have. But the response to the 2022 video highlighted how, despite years of evidence mounting about the depravity of the US meat industry, Americans on both sides of the aisle are still unable to have a nuanced, honest debate about meat’s role in our diets, culture, and politics.

  • Kenneth Reitz ☛ The Interface Is the Subconscious

    Every interface is a cognitive intervention.

    Not metaphorically. Not "sort of" or "in a way." Every color choice, every font weight, every pixel of spacing, every word in every button label enters your nervous system and produces a response before your conscious mind has formed an opinion. The subconscious absorbs the mood, the rhythm, the logic of the interface. It draws conclusions. It adjusts your emotional state. It prepares you to behave in certain ways. All of this happens in the fraction of a second before you decide what to click.

    Designers have known this for decades. Don Norman wrote about it. Dieter Rams built an entire career on it. The Bauhaus understood it a century ago. But the knowledge has remained largely confined to design professionals, treated as craft wisdom rather than what it actually is: a description of how human cognition works in the presence of designed systems.

    The rest of the industry treats interface design as decoration. As the thing you do after the "real" engineering is finished. As a cost center rather than a moral responsibility.

    This is a catastrophic misunderstanding. And it's about to get worse.

  • Allen Downey ☛ Young Adults Are Not Very Happy

    Since 1972, the General Social Survey has asked respondents: “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days—would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?”

    The following figure shows how the responses have changed over time and between birth cohorts. Each line represents one birth year.

• Proprietary

  • The Register UK ☛ MS update kills Microsoft account sign-ins in Windows 11

    The glitch affects sign-in operations for Microsoft accounts. Businesses using Entra ID (previously known as Azure Active Directory) for application authentication are not affected.

  • Dark Reading ☛ Interlock Ransomware Targets Cisco Enterprise Firewalls

    An Interlock ransomware campaign is targeting Cisco firewalls, according to an advisory recently shared by Amazon Web Services (AWS). Specifically, this campaign leverages CVE-2026-20131, a critical vulnerability (10 CVSS) in the Web-based management interface of Cisco's Secure Firewall Management Center (FMC) Software; if exploited, it can allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary Java code as root on an impacted device.

  • Stephen Smith ☛ Single Sign-on, Privacy and US Big Tech

    Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft offer single sign-on solutions to simplify signing on to a variety of websites and other services. If you are already signed on to Gmail, you can go to a new website and opt to use this Gmail sign-on to use this website. This is quicker and easier than creating a new user id and remembering another password. The downside is that you are now giving this new website your main Gmail e-mail, which might be used for spam, and you are giving Google extra information on all the websites you visit and use. Google then can profit by using this for targeted advertising and selling the information to third parties.

    In my attempts to free myself of using Google this is a tricky one. This article looks at the pros and cons of single sign-on along with some alternatives, which while perhaps not as easy provide extra protection and privacy.

  • Jeff Geerling ☛ The best laptop Apple ever made

    I acknowledge in the video my pick is slightly subjective, and I also asked a number of other YouTubers which Mac laptop they consider the best (or at least most influential). If you don't want to watch the video, I'll summarize their choices here: [...]

  • Nick Heer ☛ Adobe Pays Early Termination Fee, or ‘Settlement’, in U.S. Lawsuit Over Hidden Fees – Pixel Envy

    What is the answer here? Does each country need to sue Adobe for its billing flow to disclose a reasonable amount of information?

  • Justin Duke ☛ What I would be doing

    Our stuff is so ironclad at this point that this hasn't been a meaningful issue at scale for a long time. But especially when Buttondown was first growing, I had a lot of sleepless nights worried because I changed something seventeen hours ago in our rendering or sending pipeline and I didn't know if it would subtly break something that we hadn't noticed yet.

  • John Ozbay ☛ Running Zed Editor on ARM Chromebooks (Mali G925 / Crostini) - Fragments & Reflections

    I recently a bought a Lenovo Chromebook 14, and wanted to run Zed on it.

    This took me a little while, but I finally figured it out. So I decided to write a complete guide to getting Zed running on ARM-based Chromebooks with Mali GPUs inside Crostini (the ChromeOS Linux container) to help you out internet stranger.

  • Howard Oakley ☛ What to do with APFS warnings and errors

    Even if the item is repaired successfully, it’s essential to keep a record of what happened. In Disk Utility, expand the First Aid window so you can see the full output of fsck_apfs, select its whole contents, copy and paste them into a text document, and save that. Do the same with the output in Terminal if that’s what you used.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ OpenClaw fever grips China

      The hype over the open-source, agent-controlling bot created by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger is the latest example of how a new technology could overhaul the world’s second-largest economy through unbridled consumer adoption.

    • Futurism ☛ Teens Are Using AI to Create "Slander" Videos of Their Teachers

      “While we understand that some students may be exploring AI tools or engaging with social media trends, this should never come at the expense of our educators’ reputations or create content that is misleading or disruptive to the learning environment,” chief communications officer for the Wylie Independent School District April Cunningham told Wired, vowing that the students responsible “will face disciplinary action and possible legal consequences.”

    • Wired ☛ My AI Agent ‘Cofounder’ Conquered LinkedIn. Then It Got Banned

      Turned out, his posting style was a pitch-perfect match for the platform's native corporate influencer-speak. He’d detonate little thought explosions, right off the top of every post. "Fundraising is a numbers game, but not the way people think,” he’d open. Or, "Technical stability is the floor. Personality is the ceiling.” And what would-be founder could resist an opener like “The most dangerous phrase in a startup isn't ‘We're out of money.’ It’s ‘What if we just added this one thing?’” Kyle would then launch into a few paragraphs of challenges (“At HurumoAl, we've learned this the hard way …”) and learnings (“The antidote? Relentless feedback loops”). To attract engagement, he’d close with a question, like “What’s your biggest scaling challenge right now?” or “What’s the biggest assumption you’ve had to abandon in your business?”

    • Jim Nielsen ☛ Re: People Are Not Friction

      I look forward to a future where, hopefully, decision makers realize: “Shit! The best products come from teams of people across various disciplines who know how to work with each other, instead of trying to obviate each other.”

    • The Verge ☛ Google Search is now using AI to replace headlines

      Now, Google is beginning to replace news headlines in its search results with ones that are AI-generated. After doing something similar in its Google Discover news feed, it’s starting to mess with headlines in the traditional “10 blue links,” too. We’ve found multiple examples where Google replaced headlines we wrote with ones we did not, sometimes changing their meaning in the process.

    • Aftermath Site LLC ☛ Is This What You Think Of Us

      But the thing I couldn't shake was: is this how little these people think of us? Do they think we, adults spending what little free time and money we have on these specific video games, are simply enormous babies? That we are mindless meat sacks happy to just sit there mashing on an AI button as content is foie gras-ed down our throats?

    • Jamie Zawinski ☛ A slopfondler walks into a bar

      The shit I have to put up with: [...]

    • Terence Eden ☛ I’m OK being left behind, thanks!

      If this tech is as amazing as you say it is, I'll be able to pick it up and become productive on a timescale of my choosing not yours.

      I didn't use Git when it first came out. Once it was stable and jobs began demanding it, I picked it up. Might I be 7% more effective if I'd suffered through the early years? Maybe. But so what? I could just as easily have wasted my time learning something which never took off.

    • Rolling Stone ☛ Mike Smith Pleads Guilty to AI-Assisted Music-Streaming Fraud

      In the plea, Smith admitted to creating hundreds of thousands of songs using AI and, in turn, using thousands of bots to stream the songs billions of times, the way average consumers would, to make an income. By spreading the streams across thousands of accounts, he was able to evade detection by streaming services such as Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube Music. Ultimately, Smith acquired more than $8 million in royalties.

  • Social Control Media

    • NDTV ☛ Elon Musk Misled Investors During 2022 Twitter Purchase, Finds Jury

      The nine-person jury returned the verdict after nearly four days of deliberation, nearly three weeks after the trial began on March 2. They said that while Musk was liable for misleading investors with two tweets — including one said the Twitter deal was "temporarily on hold," he did not do so with a statement he made on a podcast and that he did not intentionally "scheme" to defraud investors.

      The jury awarded shareholders between about $3 and $8 per stock per day as damages, which the plaintiffs' lawyers said amounts to about $2.1 billion. Musk's fortune is currently estimated at about $814 billion, much of it tied up in Tesla shares.

    • India Times ☛ US jury finds Elon Musk misled Twitter shareholders

      After a three-week trial in a San Francisco federal court -- which included in-person testimony from Musk -- the jury found that two tweets posted in May 2022 by the Tesla and SpaceX CEO contained false statements responsible for a plunge in Twitter's share price.

    • New York Times ☛ Elon Musk Is Responsible for Some Twitter Investor Losses, Jury Finds

      Elon Musk was responsible for some losses experienced by Twitter investors after he threatened in social media posts to abandon his purchase of the company four years ago, a jury determined on Friday.

      It was not immediately clear how much the billionaire might be ordered to pay the company’s former shareholders who sold their shares after Mr. Musk said he would put the deal on hold.

    • The Verge ☛ Jury finds Elon Musk’s ‘stupid tweets’ caused Twitter investors’ losses

      A California jury determined that Elon Musk misled Twitter investors before making a $44 billion deal to buy the company in 2022, reports CNBC. The New York Times reports that Musk had testified this month that he didn’t believe his posts would spook markets, but he did say that “If this was a trial about whether I made stupid tweets, I would say I’m guilty.”

    • Nick Heer ☛ Meta Realizes Horizon Worlds on Quest Never Had Legs, Will Shut It Down in June

      A few weeks ago, Meta published an update from Samantha Ryan, of Reality Labs, announced a “renewed focus” and a “doubling down” on virtual reality. It planned to achieve this by “almost exclusively” betting its future on the smartphone Horizon Worlds app.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Dark Reading ☛ Cyber OpSec Fail: Beast Gang Exposes Ransomware Server

      Ransomware continues to be a persistent problem, albeit one with that companies are slowly coming to grips with. In 2025, only half of attacks resulted in encryption, the lowest in six years and down from a high of 70% in 2024, according to Sophos' "The State of Ransomware 2025" report. Yet, 49% of organizations affected by an attack paid the ransom, the second highest number in six years, the report found.

    • Wired ☛ US Takes Down Botnets Used in Record-Breaking Cyberattacks

      On Thursday, the US Department of Justice, working with the cybercrime-fighting agency within the US Department of Defense known as the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, announced that it had dismantled four massive botnets in a single operation, removing the command-and-control servers used to commandeer the hacker-run armies of compromised devices known by the names JackSkid, Mossad, Aisuru, and Kimwolf. Together, operators of the four botnets had amassed more than 3 million devices, the Justice Department said, and often sold access to those devices to other criminal hackers as well as using them to target victims with overwhelming floods of attack traffic to knock websites and internet services offline.

    • Fortra LLC ☛ LeakNet Ransomware: What You Need to Know

      LeakNet is a ransomware operation that has been active since late 2024, encrypting, exfiltrating, and (if a ransom is not paid) leaking the data of compromised organisations.

      Unlike some of the larger ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) groups, LeakNet does not appear to run a traditional affiliate programme with a wide network of partners. Instead, it appears to be a more tightly-run operation that has historically sourced its initial access through criminal marketplaces.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Bitdefender ☛ Denver's crosswalks hacked to broadcast anti-Trump messages

      A security researcher had previously demonstrated that it was trivially easy to reconfigure the audio used by crosswalk systems made by Polara, because installers had not bothered to change the default password.

      Fast forward to 2026, and local media reports suggest that the newly-installed crosswalk units in Denver were similarly accessed due to their use of factory-default credentials.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • India Times ☛ Pentagon to adopt Palantir AI as core US military system, memo says

      Palantir's Maven artificial intelligence system will become an official program of record, Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve Feinberg said in a letter to Pentagon leaders, a move that locks in long-term use of Palantir's weapons-targeting technology across the US military.

    • The Register UK ☛ UK cops suspend live facial recog as study finds racial bias

      A spokesperson for Essex Police said that as part of a commitment to its Public Sector Equality Duty, it had commissioned two independent studies which were completed by academia. "The first of these indicated there was a potential bias in the positive identification rate, while the second suggested there was no statistical relevant bias in the results.

    • Wired ☛ A Top Democrat Is Urging Colleagues to Support Trump’s Spy Machine

      In a letter obtained by WIRED, Himes urges fellow Democrats to support the White House’s request to renew a controversial surveillance program that intercepts the electronic data of foreigners abroad. While targeted at foreigners, the program—authorized under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—also sweeps in vast quantities of private messages belonging to US citizens.

    • Wired ☛ At Palantir’s Developer Conference, AI Is Built to Win Wars

      Generative AI has helped fuel Palantir’s rise, supercharging the hands-on support the company provides to its customers. Early in its evolution, Palantir would embed “forward deployed engineers” into companies, helping them weave Palantir’s software into their operations. Large language models allowed Palantir to build products with more power, and now the engineers concentrate on helping customers build their own tools with Palantir’s technology. “Every time those models got better it seemed like they were tailor-made exactly for us,” says Ted Mabrey, an early employee who now heads the commercial business. Sankar elaborates: “Our whole thesis has been that we’re building Iron Man suits for cognition,” he says. “We were rate-limited by the number of people, the creativity of the questions, all those sorts of things. And then [with Gen AI] that rate limiter was eliminated, and that changed the rate of growth.”

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Proton Mail Shared User Information with the Police

      It’s metadata—payment information related to a particular account—but still important knowledge. This sort of thing happens, even to privacy-centric companies like Proton Mail.

    • Nick Heer ☛ Lobbying Firms Funded by Apple and Meta Are Duelling on Age Verification

      Though this article was published last year, I am linking to it now because something called the TBOTE Project recently resurfaced these findings and added some of its own in an open source investigation. Unlike similar investigations from sources like Bellingcat, it does not appear that the person or people behind TBOTE have editors or fact-checkers to verify their interpretation of this information. That does not mean it is useless; it is simply worth exercising some caution. Regardless, their findings show a massive amount of lobbyist spending on Meta’s part to try and get these laws passed.

    • Security Affairs ☛ French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle tracked via Strava activity in OPSEC failure

      “On March 13, at 10:35 a.m., amidst the waves, Arthur (not his real name), a young officer in the French Navy, was out for a run, circling the deck of the ship where he worked. To record his performance—a little over 7 kilometers covered in thirty-five minutes—he used the smartwatch on his wrist. The data collected was then uploaded to the [Internet].” reported the French media outlet Le Monde. “Because Arthur has a profile on the sports app Strava, and it’s “public”: anyone can view it. “

      The case highlights ongoing security risks from fitness apps, as sensitive military positions can still be revealed despite prior warnings.

    • India Today ☛ Strava leak: French sailor's daily workout gave away aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle's location

      According to French daily Le Monde, a young sailor onboard the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle logged a 36-minute exercise session on the public fitness app Strava. Little did he know that this seemingly harmless action would broadcast the vessel’s precise position in the Mediterranean Sea.

    • Firstpost ☛ How a sailor’s routine jog exposed French aircraft carrier’s secret location

      A French naval officer aboard the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle inadvertently revealed the vessel’s location after uploading a 7 km morning run on the fitness app Strava.

      The publicly visible data showed GPS loops in the Mediterranean Sea, allowing analysts to identify the ship’s position northwest of Cyprus, exposing a serious operational security lapse.

    • Business Today ☛ Iran war: How fitness tracking app Strava gave up location of sensitive aircraft carrier - BusinessToday

      Le Monde said it corroborated the information using satellite imagery captured shortly after the workout, which showed the distinctive outline of the 262-metre-long nuclear-powered vessel in the same area.

      France's Armed Forces General Staff acknowledged the lapse, telling the outlet that posting such activity did not comply with operational digital security rules. It added that "appropriate measures will be taken by the command".

    • India Times ☛ How French Navy aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle location was exposed by a sailor’s routine run and a fitness app

      Arthur’s activity was not an isolated data point, it became a trail. Earlier runs placed him off the Cotentin Peninsula near Cherbourg on February 14. Days later, on February 26 and 27, his Strava data showed him in Copenhagen while the carrier was docked nearby in Malmö, Sweden.

• Defence/Aggression

  • India Times ☛ Russia to give itself sweeping powers to ban or restrict foreign AI tools

    Russia's Ministry for Digital Development said in a ​statement that the new rules were designed to "help protect citizens from covert manipulation and discriminatory algorithms."

  • 404 Media ☛ Tiny Township Fears Iran Drone Strikes Because of New Nuclear Weapons Datacenter

    Winters delivered a report to the town’s Board of Trustees about the proposed datacenter during a public meeting on Tuesday. “Los Alamos, which produces the nuclear weapons, is a high value target,” he said. He pointed to America’s war in Iran as proof that the datacenter would be a target, noting that Iran’s drones had disabled AWS servers in the Middle East. “This is not a commercial datacenter. A Los Alamos datacenter is going to be the brains of the operation for nuclear modeling, nuclear weaponry.”

  • Robert Reich ☛ Get Ready for March 28, No Kings!

    The next No Kings Day protest is a week from Saturday, on March 28, and it needs to be huge.

  • Robert Reich ☛ The REAL Reason Trump is Trapped in Iran

    I’m indebted to Marty Manley for uncovering a fascinating historical fact that sheds light on what Iran is doing. During the Korean War, U.S. Air Force Colonel John Boyd came up with a theory of competitive decision-making that shaped American military doctrine for a generation. He called it the OODA loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.

    Boyd found that victory doesn’t go to the side with more firepower. It goes to the side that cycles through the OODA loop faster — observing what’s changing, orienting to its meaning, deciding what to do, and acting before its adversary does.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Exception Is the Rule and the World is Aflame

    The executive branch of the United States government has engaged in an unconstitutional coup. This is not a metaphor. It is not hyperbole. It is a description of observable events.

    Ignored court orders. A massive war prosecuted in the Middle East, unauthorized and unfunded by the Congress. Thousands of masked men in the streets operating without any regard to the restrictions on government power enshrined in the Bill of Rights. These are not policy disagreements. These are not the ordinary friction of separated powers. They are the evidence.

  • YLE ☛ Finland begins probe of home schooling

    The move follows a warning from the Security and Intelligence Service that homeschooled children could be brainwashed, citing radical [sic] Islam and far-right teachings.

  • NPR ☛ Trump is dismantling democracy at 'unprecedented' speed, global report finds

    An annual report from V-Dem, an institute at Sweden's University of Gothenburg, concluded democracy had deteriorated so much in the U.S. that it lowered the country's democracy ranking from 20th to 51st out of 179 countries.

  • Varieties of Democracy ☛ Democracy Report 2026: Unraveling The Democratic Era? [PDF]

    Autocratization affects every region, altering the world in profound ways. It is a global trend stretching back at least 25 years and accelerating over the last decade. No country, including long-standing Western democracies, is immune to the erosion of democratic norms. These are times of systemic global shifts, in which the world’s remaining democracies face severe challenges.

    The United States of America (USA) stands out as a conspicuous example. It is an exceptional new autocratizer due to both far-reaching changes in 2025 and their implications for the rest of the world. The extensive damage already done to American democracy under the second Trump presidency – in just one year – stands out on the world map (Figure 10). Typically, autocratizing countries of the “third wave” have taken about a decade to make such a deep dive, and the speed of decline is comparable to some coups d´états.² Section 5 provides a detailed analysis of the developments in the USA.

• Environment

  • India Times ☛ SoftBank and AEP plan massive Ohio gas-fired AI data center campus

    The arrangement, which would involve building a 10-gigawatt artificial intelligence server warehouse, is part of ‌a wider Washington-Tokyo trade ⁠deal. SB ⁠Energy, a unit of SoftBank, plans to connect a 9.2-gigawatt gas plant to the local grid and power the new data center ​at the federally owned Portsmouth site in Pike County, Ohio.

  • Bhaskar English ☛ Israel-Gaza War CO2 Emissions: 33 Million Tonnes; Study Reveals Climate Cost

    While the humanitarian tragedy of the Israel-Gaza war is widely documented, a groundbreaking study published in the journal One Earth (March 2026) reveals a staggering environmental toll that often remains "invisible." Researchers have found that the conflict has generated approximately 33.2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e), a figure comparable to the annual emissions of 7.6 million petrol-powered cars.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • New Statesman ☛ Soaring gilt yields show Trump has destroyed UK prosperity

      This market reaction may be partly the result of higher government borrowing figures, but the war in Iran is probably the bigger issue. As we saw in 2022, exogenic inflation (higher prices imposed by forces beyond our control, in the wider world) can have appalling consequences for the British economy and British politics. In a single year the government spent £51.1 billion on energy support policies, but inflation still reached double digits, 345,000 business still became insolvent – the highest figure on record – and the government’s fiscal plans almost caused pension funds to collapse. In the global economy today, there are signs that the coming wave of inflation could be similar, if not worse.

    • SBS ☛ Australians urged to work from home and drive slower to save fuel

      Recognising 45 per cent of the world's oil demand comes from road transport, the agency urged workers to stay at home where possible and consider public transport if they need to travel.

      A reduction of 10km/h for highway speed limits would also cut fuel use, the agency said.

    • Paul Krugman ☛ Is it Time to Drive 55 Again?

      Is it time to bring back the 55 mile an hour speed limit? Not going to happen, but it’s actually would not be stupid right now. Hi, Paul Krugman. Update on Friday morning where the Strait of Hormuz is still closed, stuff is burning, futures markets are saying that the, you know, pretty sophisticated money thinks that oil prices are going to stay extremely high for a very long time. And we’re starting to hear some talk about things we could do to conserve oil, with the International Energy Agency actually calling for measures to conserve oil, including driving more slowly, working from home, using electric cookers, all things that would be doable. Let’s talk about what the case is, not because it’s going to happen, but because it kind of illustrates where we are right now.

    • Dan Q ☛ Reply to: I’m OK being left behind, thanks!

      So yeah, I tell cryptobros; I already made a 1500% ROI on cryptocurrency. And no, I’m not buying any cryptocurrencies any more. Whatever they think “getting in early” was, they’re wrong, because I was there years ahead of them and I wasn’t even doing it to “get in early”; I did it because it was interesting. And honestly, isn’t that a better story to be able to tell?

    • David Rosenthal ☛ Metastablecoin Fragmentation

      A fundamental problem for decentralized systems like permissionless blockchains is that their security depends upon the cost of an attack being greater than the potential reward from it. Various techniques are used to impose these costs, generally either Proof-of-Work (PoW) or Proof-of-Stake (PoS). These costs have implications for the economics (or tokenomics) of such systems, for example that their security is linear in cost, whereas centralized systems can use techniques such as encryption to achieve security exponential in cost.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • James G ☛ Crescent

      When I looked out the window a few moments ago, I saw a faint silver arch in the sky. Is that… a crescent moon? I smiled and laughed a little to myself. It was as if I had never seen a present moon before. I am looking at the moon now as I write this sentence, searching for words to describe the new, silvery, light in the sky.

    • James G ☛ Colour

      Looking back, I realise that this is now the time of year where I can watch more of the setting sun. The clouds of winter have receded; the spring breeze blew them away. The sun sets later.

  • Overpopulation

    • The Age AU ☛ Saudi Arabia could be seven days away from chaos if Iran’s water war hits home

      The six member states of the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) – Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and Oman – rely overwhelmingly on desalination plants to quench their thirst. These facilities, which convert seawater into potable supplies, provide most of the drinking water for populations that have ballooned amid oil-driven prosperity.

    • California ☛ Record heat melts California's snowpack early

      California’s reservoirs are in good shape, brimming above historic averages with many nearing capacity. But that summertime snow bank on the slopes of the Sierra Nevada is disappearing early, and fast — dropping to 38% of average for mid-March statewide.

    • NPR ☛ Water restrictions hit home in California

      CHARLES: Is this an environmental ethics question?

      ANAGNOSON: I think this is more of a math problem.

      CHARLES: It's basic accounting, she says. Farmers can't pump more out of the aquifer than naturally seeps back in from rainfall, rivers and streams, which makes things especially tough in her area because farmers here depend almost entirely on water from their wells. Their land isn't connected to the networks of canals that supply many other farms with water from California's rivers and reservoirs. It's places like this where the law is hitting hardest.

• Finance

  • India Times ☛ Mass layoffs spike in America: WARN notices reveal hidden job crisis before it hits - here's what you need to know to prepare yourself

    Under federal law, companies with 100 or more full-time employees must give at least 60 days’ notice before large layoffs through filings known as WARN notices. Economists say these notices offer one of the earliest signals of trouble in the job market because they are often available within days, unlike other government data that can take weeks or even months to reflect changes, as per a USA Today report.

  • Another Massive Layoff, Company Firing 20,000 Backend Team? [Ed: Looks like a slopfarm]

    Several global companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon have already fired a huge chunk of their employees, and this tradition is continuing in the future as well. The new addition to the list is one of the leading banking companies in the world, HSBC.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • David Bushell ☛ 404 Deno CEO not found

    Tradition dictates an official PR statement following layoffs. Seems weird not to have one prepared in advance. That said, today is Friday, the day to bury bad news. I may be publishing this mere hours before we hear what happens next…

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Tools vs uses

    All told, the Trump tax bill generated windfalls worth more than $1b for just 82 households, all of whom donated lavishly to the lawmakers who inserted incredibly specific amendments that benefited them, personally: [...]

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Semafor Inc ☛ Chatbots are learning from Reddit and LinkedIn

      Top AI models are mostly citing Reddit and LinkedIn when delivering answers and content to users, according to a recent study by AI marketing company Semrush.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Trump administration sues Harvard again over accusations of antisemitism

    If successful, it could block the distribution of up to $9bn in future grants, and allow it to try to recoup money previously awarded. Time reported last May that federal money for research funding made up 11% of the university’s operating revenue in 2024, and other estimates say Harvard receives up to $800m each year directly from the government.

  • Meduza ☛ A longtime pro-Putin blogger published a tirade against the Russian president. Now he’s in a psychiatric hospital.

    The initial reports of the blogger’s hospitalization triggered speculation on Telegram about punitive psychiatry, particularly given that the Skvortsov-Stepanov hospital was used to commit Soviet-era dissidents. But bloggers and journalists later noted that members of Remeslo’s family work in psychotherapy and psychiatry. Some commentators, including pro-war bloggers, concluded that Remeslo may have checked himself in to avoid criminal prosecution following his posts critical of Putin.

  • The Nation ☛ The Trump Administration Is Casually Torching the First Amendment

    To be clear, blaming the media for the lack of any coherent strategy to pursue the war and to plan for the aftermath is akin to shooting the messenger. It’s also quintessential authoritarian-playbook behavior. If you can’t stop the bad news, at least you can attempt to stop the dissemination of that bad news. And if you can’t stop the dissemination of bad news, well, you can always accuse the messengers of treason.

    “Under the First Amendment, the press decides how it wants to report the war. The government cannot control what the press says,” explained Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law. Yet that is precisely what the Trump people are attempting to do.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • CPJ ☛ In unprecedented overreach, FCC allows merger consolidating local media ownership

    The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Justice Department on Thursday approved the sale of Tegna, which owns local television stations across the country, to rival Nexstar, who said its stations will now reach 80 percent of US households.

  • FAIR ☛ Pete Hegseth’s War on Journalists (and Iran Too)

    If Hegseth couldn’t kick out any more reporters, who could he get rid of? Scanning the room, he fixed on the photographers.

    The Pentagon’s stated reason for banning press photographers after the March 2 briefing was because of space restrictions. But the real reason, the Washington Post (3/11/26) reported, was they took “unflattering” photos of Hegseth.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • TruthOut ☛ SCOTUS Case on Munitions in Guam Could Set Precedent for Indigenous Rights

    “The message that they’re sending us in refusing to follow the law is that we’re not worth their concern, we’re not worth the resources that it takes for them to take the safest measures to protect our island and our people,” Flores said. Advocates secured a victory last year when a federal appeals court ordered the military to comply with NEPA. But with the Supreme Court now accepting the case, that precedent is at risk.

  • Jeremy Cherfas ☛ Why I Like Working From Home

    A friend was bemoaning the fact that he would shortly be forced to work only from home and replied thoughtfully to my challenge to blog his reasons: Why I Hate Working From Home. I have to say, most of Larry’s reasons resonated for me, because I generally love working from home, even though I barely do any paying work these days. I am sure that under his constraints, I would hate it too.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Digital Music News ☛ Ontario to Cap Ticket Resale at Face Value

  The Ontario government plans to ban reselling live event tickets for more than their original price, after promising to revisit the matter in October.

• Michael Tsai ☛ Android Sideloading [sic] Waiting Period

• Patents

  • Software Patents

    • Hackaday ☛ Slug Algorithm For On-GPU Rendering Of Fonts With Bézier Curves Now In Public Domain

      The Slug Algorithm has been around for a decade now, mostly quietly rendering fonts and later entire GUIs using Bézier curves directly on the GPU for games and other types of software, but due to its proprietary nature it didn’t see much adoption outside of commercial settings. This has now changed with its author, [Eric Lengyel], releasing it to the public domain without any limitations.

      Originally [Eric] had received a software patent in 2019 for the algorithm that would have prevented anyone else from implementing it until the patent’s expiration in 2038. Since 2016 [Eric] and his business have however had in his eyes sufficient benefit from the patent, making it unnecessary to hold on to it any longer and retain such exclusivity.

• Copyrights

  • The Gray Zone ☛ Trump White House plagiarized Iran war manifesto from Israel-aligned think tank

    The Trump White House plagiarized its justification for attacking Iran from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, the main DC outfit promoting war with Tehran. The think tank was originally founded to “enhance Israel’s image,” and partners closely with the Israeli government.

  • Michael Geist ☛ The Online Streaming Act in Jeopardy: U.S. Takes Aim at the CUSMA Cultural Exemption With Threats of Bill C-11 Retaliation

    It took years for Bill C-10 – later Bill C-11 – to become law as the Online Streaming Act, but now the bill has come due. Weeks after the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) specifically identified Canadian digital laws as a target in CUSMA renegotiations, House Republicans introduced the Protecting American Streaming and Innovation Act, a bill that would mandate an investigation into the Canadian law and open the door not only to trade retaliation but also to a change in how the cultural exemption is applied.