Leftovers

• Yordi Verkroost ☛ A Single Pixel in an 8K Universe

  And here I am, a person who like anybody else is still unsure sometimes. About the smallest things. Here, on this single pixel in an 8K universe that existed long before we arrived and will exist for at least as long after we leave.

• James G ☛ Inventor, dreaming

  Over the last year I have been thinking a lot about the intersection of technology, design, and how we use technology. Learning about the history of art has helped give me a new toolkit through which to look at the world, too. I think I would love to work in a place that lets me ask big-picture questions about the future of technology, and to help design new technologies.

• Science

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-21 [Older] Down to the last drop: Physics answers a kitchen question

  • Unmitigated Risk ☛ We Built It With Slide Rules. Then We Forgot How.

    Most people have forgotten that the Air Force had its own space program before NASA existed. NASA was carved out of NACA in 1958, but the Air Force had been running parallel efforts since the mid-1950s. That generation had grown up on science fiction and wanted to see it happen. When Sputnik launched in October 1957 the country went into a low-grade panic about whether it understood physics well enough to survive, and suddenly the kids who had been dreaming about space since they could read had somewhere to go with it. What followed was one of the rare moments in American history when technical aptitude was a genuine class elevator. The government needed people who understood this stuff badly enough to find them wherever they were.

    He enlisted in his early twenties, aerospace degree in hand. The Air Force space program was what he was aiming at. He ended up working on attitude control thrusters for reconnaissance satellites, the kind that could resolve fine surface detail on Earth from hundreds of miles up. For that mission attitude control wasn’t a secondary problem. It was the central one. A camera that can’t hold still is useless. The thrusters are what made the intelligence possible. The underlying engineering was the same problem he had been teaching himself: oxidizer, fuel, combustion geometry, now controlled to tolerances that left no margin.

  • Computational Complexity ☛ Computational Complexity: Fun Little Problems

    Occasionally I run into what I consider fun problems in complexity, that require just a little bit of out of the box thinking. They require some background in theory, but nothing too deep. Some of these problems have been mentioned before on my blog or social media.

• Career/Education

  • Shrivu Shankar ☛ The Transposed Organization

    Read down any column: the same set of specialists handle that function across every problem. Bob writes the code, Carol does the design, Dave handles ops. A customer reports a bug and it touches five people across four handoffs. Frank, the person closest to the customer, has zero ability to fix the problem. Bob, the person who can fix it, has no direct relationship with the customer.

    Now transpose it. Same grid, but read across any row: the same generalist closes every step of that problem.

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ Self-healing CMOS Imager To Withstand Jupiter’s Radiation Belt

    Ionizing radiation damage from electrons, protons and gamma rays will over time damage a CMOS circuit, through e.g. degrading the oxide layer and damaging the lattice structure. For a space-based camera that’s inside a probe orbiting a planet like Jupiter it’s thus a bit of a bummer if this will massively shorted useful observation time before the sensor has been fully degraded. A potential workaround here is by using thermal energy to anneal the damaged part of a CMOS imager.

  • Ken Shirriff ☛ The rise and fall of IBM's 4 Pi aerospace computers: an illustrated history

    The morning of April 12, 1981, 20 years to the day after Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space, the Space Shuttle thundered into the Florida sky. Commander Young and Pilot Crippen were at the controls as the Shuttle ascended on its first flight. But the launch, like much of the flight, was really under the control of four computers in the avionics bays one deck below the crew. A fifth computer stood ready to take over in case of a catastrophic computer malfunction. These computers, Model AP-101B, were part of IBM's System/4 Pi family.

  • OS/2 Museum ☛ Learn Something Old Every Day, Part XVIII: How Does FPU Detection Work?

    While investigating a bug related to a program using floating-point math on a 386SX system with no FPU, I started pondering how exactly FPU detection works on 286 and newer CPUs. Although math co-processors became standard some 30 years ago, on old PCs they were an uncommon and expensive add-on, and a 66 MHz 486SX2 would still have a usable yet FPU-less processor in the mid-1990s.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Off Guardian ☛ 2026-03-23 [Older] Crude Harvest: Food Security Beyond Oil and Nano-Tech Quick Fixes

  • Sal ☛ Too young to be too old to start skateboarding | Sal's

    I found several common sentiments: that skateboarding gets you out of the house and moving, makes you feel young again, and perhaps due to both of those, can be great for mental health in middle age.

    One guy said, “Don’t just sit on your couch and wait to die.” That struck me. Now, I’m not doing that couch thing — I’m lifting weights, riding my bike, etc. — but I realized I had assumed, half-consciously, that I was too old for something like skateboarding. At my age, I should play it safe and get the exercise that’s typical and appropriate for middle age. Skateboarding was too risky, too ... unnecessary.

  • Chris Hannah ☛ One Week of Keeping an Eye on my Phone Usage

    A week ago I wrote about wanting to cut down on phone usage. I kept that idea in my mind throughout the week, and tried to get an idea of what the problem was.

    Just to give some raw data, my average screen time for the week before last was around 6 hours per day. This past week it's just under 4 and a half hours per day.

• Proprietary

  • Kev Quirk ☛ I Think I've Been Scammed On eBay! - Kev Quirk

    I've asked eBay to step in and help resolve the situation, so we will see what happens. But there's a lot of buyer protection on eBay (and rightly so) but there's very little in the way of seller protection, even though I'm not a business. So I have a feeling they will find in favour of the buyer and I'll be out a few quid.

    Double fucking brilliant.

  • David Oks ☛ Seeing like a spreadsheet

    And their attention to detail paid off. They called the software package they produced “VisiCalc”—the visible calculator—and released it for the Apple II at the end of 1979. And it really was a marvel of software engineering. It was a brilliant fusion of the organizational metaphor of the columnar pad with the interactivity of word processing and the speed of the microprocessor. You could now calculate and recalculate things instantly; you could execute complex formulas programmatically instead of by hand; and things that would have once taken you hours now took you a few minutes. VisiCalc was an extraordinarily powerful tool. And it made the Apple II, which had been a hobbyist device, a useful business machine. Indeed so potent was VisiCalc that the Apple II was sold, as the journalist John Markoff wrote, mainly as a “VisiCalc accessory.” It was the first piece of software so compelling that people bought hardware specifically to run it: the first of the “killer apps.”

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Make Tech Easier ☛ 2026-03-20 [Older] This AI Assistant Makes the Linux Desktop Much Smarter [Ed: Sounds like hype and a recipe for disasters]

  • Social Control Media

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-19 [Older] Social media makes people unhappy — World Happiness Report

    • The Atlantic ☛ The Manosphere Turns on Trump

      About half an hour into Episode 694 of the Flagrant podcast, and after a lively debate over manscaping methods, Andrew Schulz leaned back into the couch and brought the chin-wag to a screeching halt. “Are you guys, like—do you feel existential anxiety about the war?” he asked his co-hosts. Schulz seemed to be feeling some. “Americans can’t fucking afford health care,” he said later. “They don’t care about what’s happening in Iran!” War hawks have been angling for years for this war, he added. With President Trump, “they found a guy stupid enough to do it.”

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-20 [Older] Germany: Police dismantle major cyberattack 'botnets'

• Security

  • International Business Times ☛ 2026-03-19 [Older] Security Alert: 'DarkSword' Hack Puts Older iPhones at Risk, Google Says

  • New Jersey News ☛ 2026-03-23 [Older] Hackers target schools, towns in alarming attacks. Why aren’t more using New Jersey’s MS-ISAC cybersecurity service?

  • 2026-03-20 [Older] Strengthening Cybersecurity in Canada’s Municipal Sector: A Verified Analysis

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Kansas Reflector ☛ Your personal data might set your grocery prices. States aim to crack down.

      One online grocery shopper got charged $3.99 for a box of Wheat Thins, while another — buying from the same store at the same time — got charged $4.89.

      A consumer watchdog detected this price discrepancy during an investigation last September in Seattle. The grocery app Instacart used an artificial intelligence-powered algorithm that charged customers differently for each item by as much as 23%, Consumer Reports and Groundwork Collaborative found. Instacart has since stopped offering grocery retailers the technology.

    • Nicolas Fränkel ☛ One tip for successful OpenTelemetry projects

      Leading your organization to use OpenTelemetry is a challenge. In addition to all the usual project hurdles, you’ll face one of these two situations: convince your teams to use OpenTelemetry, or convince them to move from the telemetry tool they are already using to OpenTelemetry. Most people don’t want to change. You’ll need lots of effort and baby steps. My tip is the following: the fewer the changes, the higher your chances of success.

    • Patreon ☛ Age Verification and Linux distributions

      The most requested feature we have received this month is, without question, a way to search for Linux distributions based on whether they include age verification code. So far there aren't any Linux distributions which include age verification code (and just one flavour of BSD includes age declaration services), but it's probably coming down the pipe in the near future.

      With this in mind, we are adding an option which will allow people to search for age verification style features. To be more precise, we're dividing distributions into five categories: [...]

• Defence/Aggression

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-21 [Older] Racism in Germany widespread, but more subtle than before

  • International Business Times ☛ 2026-03-21 [Older] 'If You Don't Feel Safe, Don't Come Here': Brits Slam Prince Harry Over His Push for Taxpayer-Funded Security

  • The Age AU ☛ 2026-03-22 [Older] Australians know we’re under threat – and underprepared

  • The Local SE ☛ 2026-03-23 [Older] Swedish security police justify stance on citizenship transitional rules

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-19 [Older] Belarus releases 250 political prisoners as part of US deal

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-19 [Older] Chad says 17 killed in Sudanese drone attack

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-20 [Older] Cheeto Mussolini administration sues Harvard over alleged antisemitism

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-20 [Older] US prosecutors investigate whether Colombian President Petro had ties to drug traffickers — reports

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-21 [Older] Czechs plan major rally as MPs mull 'foreign agent' law

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-22 [Older] Sudan: Over 60 killed in strike on hospital, WHO says

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-22 [Older] 'Vulnerable' satellites guide the world — and its wars

  • Deseret Media ☛ Pope Leo XIV rejects claims that God justifies war in Palm Sunday Mass message

    • Pope Leo XIV rejects claims God justifies war during Palm Sunday Mass.

    • He emphasized God as a "King of Peace" who rejects violence and war.

  • Allbritton Journalism Institute ☛ Pope Leo Appears to Rebuke Trump and Hegseth in Palm Sunday Prayer

    “Jesus is the King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war,” Pope Leo said during a Palm Sunday Mass at the Vatican on Sunday. “He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.”

  • TruthOut ☛ Millions Join “No Kings” Protests in One of Largest US Rallies

    Organizers called it “the largest single-day nationwide demonstrations in U.S. history,” with an estimate 8 million people coming out for events in communities and cities nationwide.

    From major cities to rural towns that have never seen mobilizations like this before, protesters made clear that in America, we don’t do kings,“ the No Kings coalition said in a statement.

  • Michigan Advance ☛ No Kings day rallies roll out across the US, with millions said to attend anti-Trump protests • Michigan Advance

    No Kings day national organizers anticipated more than 3,000 demonstrations across the United States, in every congressional district, and worldwide marches were organized on six continents, according to Logan Keith, a No Kings day organizer and national communications coordinator for the advocacy group 50501. Organizers said Saturday night at least 8 million people participated

    No notable instances of violence or conflict with counter-protesters were reported by late Saturday afternoon, though a bomb threat at the Hawaii Capitol disrupted the Honolulu rally, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported.

  • Nevada Current ☛ ICE, Iran, Epstein, economy among issues driving Nevadans to the streets to protest Trump • Nevada Current

    Organizers estimated that about 7,000 Nevadans from Las Vegas to Carson City to Elko joined the millions nationwide participating in more than 3,000 No Kings protests Saturday.

  • Court House News ☛ Minnesota serves as the flagship for nationwide 'No Kings' protests against Trump

    Minnesota is emerging as the focal point of a nationwide wave of “No Kings” demonstrations, with organizers expecting the anti-Trump protests to draw some of the largest crowds seen in the country in years.

  • Alabama Reflector ☛ No Kings rallies draw crowds large, small throughout country

    Organizers said there were more than 3,000 events across the nation expected to draw millions. It came one month after the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran began. The war was among many issues that demonstrators said brought them out, also citing aggressive ICE actions toward immigrants, the rising cost-of-living and attacks on the constitution, and civil and voting rights.

    Here is a look at some of the rallies from across the nation.

  • CS Monitor ☛ ‘No Kings’ protests: Can they turn momentum into change?

    With crowd numbers estimated at several million in more than 3,000 locations, the No Kings Day protests on March 28 – animated by opposition to President Donald Trump – might turn out to be the largest combined single-day protest in U.S. history.

    The movement, which bills itself as “rising against [Mr. Trump’s] authoritarian power grabs,” cites, in part, his administration’s immigration enforcement tactics and the Iran war.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ No Kings Protests Expected to Break Records Amid Iran Backlash

    On Saturday, Americans will once again take to the streets in opposition to the autocratic policies of Trump’s government, and there’s once again plenty of reason to do so. The president has trapped the United States in a growing military quagmire with Iran, creating both a foreign policy disaster and an economic crisis at home. The war comes after ICE agents shot and killed two American citizens in Minneapolis earlier this year, part of an intensifying immigration crackdown that includes documented abuses against migrants and minorities caught in their crosshairs.

    As the nation contends with the effects of the Iran war and Trump sheds the support of large swaths of the coalition that helped propel him back into the White House, organizers at No Kings are hoping to expand their coalition into the president’s own backyard.

  • Star Tribune ☛ Bruce Springsteen says Minneapolis during ICE protest was his most meaningful concert

    Before the tour starts, Springsteen will appear in St. Paul on Saturday, March 28, at the No Kings rally along with singers Joan Baez and Maggie Rogers as well as actor and activist Jane Fonda and others. He will offer his third live performance of “Streets of Minneapolis”; he played it a second time on Monday at the news organization Democracy Now’s 30th anniversary celebration in New York City.

• Environment

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-21 [Older] US: Hawaii hit by historic flooding, more rain coming

  • NativeNews Online ☛ Seminole Nation of Oklahoma Passes Moratorium on Data Centers

    In a landmark unanimous vote, the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma has become one of the first Native American Tribes to enact a complete moratorium on data center development within its jurisdiction.

    On March 7, the Nation’s Tribal Council approved a resolution by a 24-0 vote to “implement a moratorium on the advancement of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology and hyperscale data center development within the Seminole Nation and within tribal lands and territories.” The resolution bars “any inquiries, discussions and/or developments concerning any entity seeking to develop a data center of any size within the Seminole Nation during the moratorium period.”

  • Futurism ☛ Seminole Nation Becomes First Indigenous Group to Ban Planet-Cooking Data Centers From Its Land

    The Seminole Nation of Oklahoma just became the first Indigenous nation to officially ban data center construction from lands under its jurisdiction.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ How Thoreau Challenged America to Live Up To Its Own Ideals

    As Donald Trump goes after Harvard, one of the university’s most famous alums is back in the limelight with a new documentary. Henry David Thoreau, which premieres March 30 on PBS, celebrates America’s apostle of environmentalism, antiwar activism, abolitionism, indigenous rights, and more, whose writings on civil disobedience influenced Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Ewers Brothers Productions’ three-part nonfiction biopic explores how Thoreau, who returned to nature at Walden Pond from 1845 to 1847, interrupted by a fateful night in prison, perpetuated and contributed to the highest aspirations of the American Revolution.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-19 [Older] Germany news: Bus and tram strikes hit several states hard

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-19 [Older] Nuclear's cleanup cost threatens the expansion dream

    • Futurism ☛ OpenAI's Obsession With Data Centers Is Running Into Trouble

      Over a year later, OpenAI has dramatically reined in its ambitions as reality continues to settle in. For one, its astronomical commitments to spending $1.4 trillion before the end of the decade on AI infrastructure was recently more than halved to a still-hefty $600 billion. Meanwhile, panicked executives are looking to cut out any distracting “side quests” to double down on enterprise and coding, two areas potentially capable of generating some desperately-needed revenue.

    • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Uber Backs Bills to Make It Harder to Sue Them for Crashes

      Uber is spending tens of millions on a California ballot measure that could make it harder for riders, pedestrians, and drivers to sue for damages after car crashes. It is part of a broader liability reform campaign the company is funding across the US.

    • IT Wire ☛ iTWire - Why Australia may become the world's most important EV battleground in 2026

      Australia didn’t set out to become a global proving ground for the future of electric vehicles. But in 2026, a war thousands of kilometres away has abruptly accelerated that role. The escalating conflict involving Iran - and the resulting disruption to global oil supply - has turned what was already a competitive EV market into something far more consequential: a real-time experiment in how nations respond when fossil fuel dependence becomes a vulnerability. And Australia is right in the middle of it.

    • Paul Krugman ☛ Is America Suffering from the “Resource Curse”?

      Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are petrostates — nations whose economies are driven by oil and gas. As a result, their politics are deeply shaped by their natural resource wealth. Iran is also a petrostate despite the fact that it exports significant quantities of manufactured goods. It’s a petrostate nonetheless because most of these are goods that make use of its oil and gas, like fertilizers and petrochemicals. The main exception has been Iran’s growing exports of military hardware, especially missiles and drones.

      Russia is also widely considered a petrostate: John McCain famously called it “a gas station masquerading as a country,” although Matt Klein argues that this overstates the case. And critics of the Trump administration often accuse it of trying to convert the U.S. into a petrostate, at an especially inopportune moment. In my recent conversation with David Roberts, he declared that

    • NPR ☛ He wants children's bikes made in the U.S.A. — and tariffs against his rivals

      "The hard, complicated work of welding is being done by robots and the humans are just working with the robots," Riley says. "These four guys are ridiculously productive because they're getting four- or 500 frames a day with four people."

      The steel for those frames comes from a tube mill in Columbus, Indiana, just 20 miles up the road. By keeping its supply chain short, and building and painting bikes in-house, rather than an ocean away, Guardian can adjust quickly to any sudden change in demand.

  • Overpopulation

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-21 [Older] An answer to US drought conditions may be in the toilet

• Finance

  • J B Crawford ☛ telecheck and tyms past

    Retail point-of-sale acceptance of personal checks is the product of an intriguing industry that handles all the challenges of checks at once: a combination of digital payment network, credit reporting firm, insurer, and debt collector known as a check guarantee service. The check guarantee is older than the ATM, and depending on how you squint, check guarantees are quite possibly the first form of real-time, telecommunications-based point of sale payment processing.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-19 [Older] Germany considers windfall tax amid rising fuel prices

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-19 [Older] More families in Southeast Asia sinking into debt

  • 26% of law firms shut over accounting breaches

    Over a quarter of law firms shut down by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) last year were closed for breaching accounting rules.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-20 [Older] Norwegian princess says she was 'manipulated' by Epstein

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-20 [Older] Poland to recognize same-sex marriages from EU states

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-19 [Older] Major rally planned as Czech MPs mull 'foreign agent' law

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-19 [Older] Migrants drown after being dropped by smugglers off Comoros

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-19 [Older] India news: 'Sexually suggestive' song row reaches parliament

  • CNBC ☛ Coca-Cola, Walmart outgoing CEOs cite AI in decisions to step down

    Both CEOs said they believed their companies needed someone with new energy and understanding of AI to helm the companies' futures.

    It's one of the latest insights into how America's corporate leaders are sizing up the AI transition.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-20 [Older] Germany to target pornographic deepfakes amid celebrity case

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-20 [Older] Salman Rushdie on why tyrants fear artists

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Carole Cadwalladr ☛ Journocide

    On Friday, I published a long post about the global assault on the news and the oligarchic capture of news organisations. And I’ve decided to write again today because Israel has targeted and killed three more journalists, this time in Lebanon, adding to at least 260 it’s killed in Gaza.

    There’s a moral responsibility for journalists in the rest of the world to speak up for journalists who are killed, especially when, as in this case, they are killed for being journalists.

    It’s not even a “claim” to say that. The IDF has admitted it, details below. The killing of journalists in a conflict zone is a war crime. But then the line where war crimes begin and end in a series of illegal wars isn’t a line any more, so much as a crayon smeared across a wall by an out-of-control toddler. And the lack of uproar about the systematic targeting of journalists in Gaza and now Lebanon is the dog that didn’t bark.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ We Can’t Income-Tax Ultra-Elites. We Must Tax Their Wealth.

    To tax the richest Americans, we need to go after their wealth, not just their income. Two proposals — one in California, one in Congress — could finally do it. The alternative is an ever-more-powerful billionaire class that threatens democracy itself.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Chicago City Council Just Stabbed Tipped Workers in the Back

    After a blitz by restaurant industry lobbyists, Chicago’s city council voted last week to maintain the subminimum wage for service workers, keeping them stuck in precarity and poverty wages.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Rob Knight ☛ Fix for Disney Plus Error 73

    Today I was met with error code 73 when trying to login to Disney Plus on my Apple TV. Their help article says you're either on a VPN or "Attempting to access Disney+ from a country/region where service is currently unavailable" which I obviously was not.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ The Pirate Bay’s Oldest Torrent Turned 22....

    In an era of instant streaming and expendable pirate sites, The Pirate Bay is somewhat of a relic. The site has weathered more than two decades of legal pressure, and while traffic is a fraction of its peak, it remains online. Even more remarkable, several torrents from March 2004 remain active today, outlasting the very servers they were originally hosted on.

  • Carl Svensson ☛ The Curious Case of Retro Demo Scene Graphics

    The demo scene has a peculiar view on copyright. It roughly boils down to a system of effort - effort in ideas, effort in craft - where the scene polices itself and punishes sceners that steal outright from other sceners. Theft from the outside world, however, is often taken lightly - especially when it comes to graphics.

    Early pixel art on the scene was almost always copied (or, more correctly, plagiarized) from other sources. In particular, fantasy- and science fiction related art was immensely common. Fantasy artists Boris Vallejo and Frank Frazetta, as well as raunchy robot airbrusher Hajime Sorayama, were popular favourites.