Leftovers

• Smithsonian Magazine ☛ Attributed to Banksy, a New Statue of a Suited Man, Blinded by a Flag and Walking Off a Ledge, Appeared in Central London

  “Personally, I think what’s rather clever about it is he’s got the proportions perfectly right for the space,” says Philip Mould, a London-based art dealer whose gallery is near the statue, in an Instagram video of his own. “I also rather like it when art, which is often forgotten, can be controversial, can be stimulating in this way.”

• James G ☛ Log in, sign in

  In my first draft of the page, I used “sign in” in the document title and “log in” on the document. I did this primarily because both terms are so similar and they happened to come to mind as I was writing each section. But then I realised that using two terms to convey the same thing was not necessary – why use two terms when one will do?

• James G ☛ My words, not my content

  Hence, I try to avoid “content” and use “my words.” I may slip up every now and again, but words matter. “words” or “pictures” mean something more because they are specific: they encapsulate art, stories, lenses.

• SusamPal ☛ Touch Typing Number Keys

  In fact, both the old and the new muscle memories now coexist and I can switch between them at will without much trouble. It is remarkable how the brain can store conflicting muscle memories so effortlessly. So far, I am finding this new way of typing 1 and 2 more comfortable than either of the two popular methods I described above. I will continue typing this way for the rest of this month and see how it feels.

• Science

  • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Shaping Our Collective Voice Through Advocacy — SSP Pulse Check Report

    Looking at the aggregate responses, there is a strong consensus around engaging policymakers with a collective voice, which receives the highest weighted average (3.65) on a scale where 4 is critically important, and 1 is low importance. This stands out as a clear priority, indicating broad alignment that coordinated messaging is most critical where policy decisions directly shape the research publishing environment.

  • MIT Technology Review ☛ Trump's mass firing just dealt another blow to American science

    The NSF has been without a director since April 2025, when former director Sethuraman Panchanathan stepped down in the wake of DOGE [sic]-led funding cuts and mass firings. Trump’s nominee for the role is Jim O’Neill, an investor and longevity enthusiast who does not have a science background.

    It’s hard to predict exactly how things will shake out for science. But it’s not looking great.

    The NSF was established in 1950 to “promote the progress of science,” among other goals. It has served as a major source of support for research and education since then. In 2024, the agency spent $9.39 billion—a substantial figure but only 0.1% of all federal spending.

  • Philip Zucker ☛ Lifting and Lowering Functions with The Dump Calculus

    I’ve been trying to think about how to make a nameless de bruijn-y e-graph and that has led me down a road to consider some interesting functional combinators for lifting and lowering functions.

    These are an interesting set of combinators to kind of “first orderize” nearly trivial functional manipulations. By baking in the lifting with special support, I hope to get a nice, simple, efficient egraph that supports binders and alpha equivalence.

  • John D Cook ☛ Three kinds of derivative applied to the ReLU (ramp) function

    When a function is not differentiable in the classical sense there are multiple ways to compute a generalized derivative. This post will look at three generalizations of the classical derivative, each applied to the ReLU (rectified linear unit) function. The ReLU function is a commonly used activation function for neural networks. It’s also called the ramp function for obvious reasons. [...]

  • John D Cook ☛ Approximating even functions by powers of cosine

    A couple days ago I wrote a post about turning a trick into a technique, finding another use for a clever way to construct simple, accurate approximations. I used as my example approximating the Bessel function J(x) with (1 + cos(x))/2. I learned via a helpful comment on Mathstodon that my approximation was the first-order part of a more general series [...]

  • Haskell ☛ Monad tutorials timeline

    “All told, a monad in X is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors of X, with product × replaced by composition of endofunctors and unit set by the identity endofunctor.”

• Career/Education

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Dolls beat screens for building children's social skills, study finds

    Most parents recognize that play matters. But there's less agreement on what kind of play is best. Should children be guided towards activities designed to build specific skills, like sports for coordination, or construction for math and engineering? Or should the child's own interests lead the way, regardless of perceived educational value?

  • American Library Association ☛ ALA, SHLB partners disappointed with FCC decision to impose new E-Rate bidding portal | ALA

    The vote came despite broad opposition from libraries, schools, service providers and education leaders. In the weeks leading up to the vote, ALA joined more than 80 organizations in sending a sign-on letter to the FCC urging the agency not to proceed with the portal and participated in a series of meetings with senior FCC officials. The coalition argued that the proposed portal is overly burdensome and could ultimately deter libraries, schools and service providers from participating in the nation's largest federal educational technology program. The coalition's concerns include potential conflicts between the portal's framework and existing state and local procurement requirements, the costs of creating and managing the portal, and the risk of undermining ongoing efforts to streamline the E-Rate program.

  • Dr Molly Tov ☛ that hot librarian content you crave, part 3: shelf ranges

    My library shelves are organized by genre. There about 14 subdivisions. Within each subdivision, books are arranged alphabetically by author's last name.

    Each shelf has a tag indicating its range (which authors, alphabetically, are on each shelf). The ranges use the last three letters of the authors' last names, since that's what is also on the spine label.

  • HaikuOS ☛ Haiku to mentor 3 students in Google Summer of Code 2026

    For many years now, Haiku is a regular participant in the Google Summer of Code program, which offers paid mentorship to people willing to work full time on Haiku for a few months. Google handles the payments, while mentors from our developer team handle the onboarding of the new contributors and guide them through the project.

• Hardware

  • USMC ☛ Marine Corps fields 3,500 first-person view attack drones

    First-person view drones allow operators to watch a live feed through either goggles or a screen that provide visuals from the drone’s vantage point. Many weigh several pounds, can carry explosives and travel close to 100 mph.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Pirate RPG game is secretly looting your SSD lifespan — new Windrose patch promises smoother sailing and addresses excessive disk writing

    Windrose, an early access PvE survival game made by Kraken Express, has come under scrutiny for consuming an abnormal amount of disk I/O during gameplay that will scare even the best SSDs. Multiple users have reported this issue in forum posts, and at least one YouTuber, Pixel Operative, has complained about it, revealing that the game can write up to 108 GB per hour to your SSD due to optimization issues in how it saves data. The new patch has substantially decreased the disk usage.

  • Digital Camera World ☛ In an AI era, one of the most influential companies is actually this camera brand with its old-school instant film and retro compact cameras

    Fujifilm may be best known for its viral retro compact camera, the Fujifilm X100VI, but that’s not the product that the TIME analysis focuses on. Instead, it’s Instax that TIME discusses in the award.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • The Atlantic ☛ The Secret to Success Is ‘Monotasking’

    The reason such practices are important is that sustained focus is highly unnatural for human beings. Our brains evolved to be extremely distractible, to attend to any novel sights and sounds in our vicinity. Unsurprisingly, research has found that people instantly become more creative when distractions are removed. The science writer Annie Murphy Paul explains in her book, The Extended Mind: “It was only when we found ourselves compelled to concentrate in a sustained way on abstract concepts that we needed to sequester ourselves in order to think. To attend for hours at a time to words, numbers, and other symbolic content is a tall order for our brains.”

    And these days, we’re struggling. Gloria Mark is a psychologist at UC Irvine who studies what, exactly, workers in a knowledge economy do all day. Early in her career, she shadowed office workers with a stopwatch and logged all of their activity. Mark and her co-author found that the typical worker switched tasks about every three minutes, on average. For the title of the resulting paper, in 2004, she used a quote from one of her subjects: “Constant, Constant, Multi-tasking Craziness.”

  • The New Lede ☛ No safe bets - Supreme Court glyphosate case seen too close to call

    Monday’s Supreme Court hearing over a federal law governing pesticide regulations left observers largely unsure how the court will rule in the case involving the former Monsanto company and the herbicide glyphosate, with many seeing the ultimate decision as too close to call.

  • Hackaday ☛ Compact Calendar Display Reduces Phone Dependency

    The device is based around an off-the-shelf Waveshare ESP32 board which packs in a small 8×8 RGB LED matrix on one side. It’s a neat way to get an LED project up and running quickly, but [Paul] noted that it didn’t look that great out of the box. He had to experiment with some different solutions for diffusing the light, eventually wrapping the board in a 3D printed housing with a black grid to separate the light output from each LED to make a clear pixelated display.

• Proprietary

  • Scoop News Group ☛ cPanel's authentication bypass bug is being exploited in the wild, CISA warns

    A severe authentication bypass vulnerability in cPanel, one of the most widely deployed web hosting control panel platforms on the internet, is being actively exploited in the wild, according to security researchers and hosting providers.

  • Rodrigo Ghedin ☛ I endured the Apple Watch for four months

    I’d been thinking for some time — probably since day one — about the benefits of the data gathered and features versus the drawbacks of having a clunky device strapped to my wrist 24 hours a day. Then, some discomfort where the watch touched my skin turned into a mild burn during a normal session of weight training and elliptical exercise. That was the last straw.

  • Lee Peterson ☛ The iPads biggest problem is still the software

    For years iPad hardware felt leagues ahead of its software but with iPadOS 26 it felt like it was rabidly catching up but after my second attempt at using it I’m sorry to say that I’m returning the iPad again, because of it’s software.

  • So-Called 'Artificial Intelligence' ('AI') / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ Gen Z Is Turning Against AI in an Incredible Way

      “AI cannot coexist with education — it can only degrade it,” reads a recent, scathing editorial titled “Penn has an AI problem,” published by the University of Pennsylvania’s student newspaper last month. “As technology advances and workers are replaced by machines, schools are some of the only places we have left to explore and wrestle with human thought.”

    • Futurism ☛ New England Journal of Medicine Retracts Paper Because Photo of Patient's Insides Was Garbled by AI

      However, what appears to be a metric measuring tape above the tissues in the photo raises immediate red flags, with the numbers along the scale following a nonsensical sequence — a classic hallmark of the use of an unsophisticated AI image generator.

    • Omicron Limited ☛ A leading journal finds that AI is flooding academic publishing with lower quality work

      The authors didn't pull their punches about what they are seeing: "AI language models, combined with strong publish-or-perish incentives, are pushing our field to produce more rather than better research."

      This leading journal in the social sciences receives papers from authors at major universities, non-native English-speaking institutions, and research teams worldwide. Concerned by the impact of AI on the quality of submissions, the journal's AI task force, which is composed of some of its editors, conducted a sweeping review of its content.

    • The Record ☛ Senate Judiciary advances bill that would bar minors from interacting with AI companions

      The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday advanced a bill that would bar artificial intelligence companies from letting children use AI companions.

      The bill, known as the GUARD Act, also requires that AI chatbots advise users of all ages that they are not human and lack professional credentials. It also makes it a crime for AI companions to knowingly ask kids for sexual content or to produce it.

      The legislation, introduced by lead sponsor Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), was marked up by the committee in a unanimous bipartisan vote.

    • Scoop News Group ☛ Everyone’s building AI agents. Almost nobody’s ready for what they do to identity.

      Not long ago, you could sit at your desk, glance at the sticky note on your monitor for your username and password, type them in, and grab a cup of coffee while your browser opened a doorway to the rest of the world. Every layer of security that followed — passwords, security questions, biometric scans, two-factor authentication — grew out of a single bedrock assumption: a person was on the other end. Advertisement

      AI agents break that assumption from two directions at the same time. Legitimate agents need credentials to act like a human. OpenAI’s Operator navigates websites on your behalf. Google’s Gemini can plan your next family vacation while you sleep. Visa recently unveiled Intelligence Commerce Connect, a platform that lets AI agents do the shopping for consumers. These aren’t demos or hot takes from a tech conference floor. They’re shipping products that act on behalf of real people—and to do that, they need your identity.

    • Macworld ☛ The RAM crunch leaves Apple with the same tough questions as everyone else

      AI servers are gobbling up the entire world's chip supply, and even Apple can't easily manage their way out of it.

    • Robin Sloan ☛ Tone control, part 2

      I am not an LLM superuser — in the sense that I am not locked in all day, mar­shaling My Dutiful Minions; I have no minions — but I do ask ques­tions from time to time, mostly technical, and I have done so con­sis­tently for a couple of years now, so nat­u­rally I have noticed changes in the way the models respond.

      I have to say that I really do not like Claude’s voice lately: [...]

    • James Randall ☛ GitHub CoPilot and Real Scrutiny | James Randall

      But these changes shift the model in two key directions:

      1. Individual developers could be generating bills of hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars each. You can get some insight into how usage based billing lands by using Claude Code with AWS Bedrock - the bill you get, in comparison to a Max subscription, can be 5x plus based on my experience.

      2. The pricing is effectively no longer fixed. It varies per developer and with usage and it’s nigh on impossible to predict how many tokens an AI will use to fulfill a request: heck ask the same AI the same question and you can end up with really quite different token usage.

    • Derek Kędziora ☛ Design fads

      And so here I am in the height of the AI frenzy realising that my computer is less useful and power than it was ten years ago.

    • Jacob Harris ☛ Why I Don’t Vibe Code

      There has been a lot of discussion online lately about vibe coding and and how Large Language Models (LLMs) will revolutionize the field of software development. Every new model will launch us into realms of pure productivity, shipping software at the speed of thought and removing all the friction and overhead of product development. Or something like that.

      Maybe. I’ll have to take your word for it. I don’t vibe code.

      If it’s working for you, great! I’m not really here to argue the merits or flaws of LLMs at depth here in this piece, but it’s just never clicked for me personally. This page is a “brief” accounting of various reasons why.

  • Social Control Media

    • EFF ☛ A Bridge to Somewhere: How to Link Your Mastodon, Bluesky, or Other Federated Accounts

      Bridging and managing your posts so they’re viewable outside a singular source is part of the broader philosophy of POSSE, short for Post Own Site Syndicate Elsewhere (sometimes its Post Own Site, Share Everywhere). Instead of managing several accounts across different services, you post once to one primary site (which might be your personal website, or just one social media account), then set it up so it automatically publishes everywhere else. This way, it doesn’t matter where you or your audience is, and they're not walled off by account registration requirements.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Register UK ☛ Who needs ghost train scares when Windows is such a fright?

      Well, you can see for yourself. Not content with the ghostly image, Windows has added to the horror with a "Memory could not be read" error in explorer.exe. The cause could be anything. Some failing hardware. A driver having a bad day (the memory address might mean drivers are involved). Or just some shoddy code somewhere. Whatever the cause, it's likely more frightening for an IT professional, having to deal with the inevitable helpdesk request, than anything that might jump from the shadows on a ghost train.

    • Security Week ☛ FBI Warns of Surge in Hacker-Enabled Cargo Theft

      The agency has described a typical attack scenario. It begins with an email sent to a shipping broker. These emails often look like routine business requests or complaints, but they contain links pointing to malicious websites set up to serve malware and remote access tools that give the attackers complete control over the targeted company’s internal systems.

    • Gizmodo ☛ A Ransomware Negotiator Pleads Guilty to Being a Double Agent

      Citing court records, the DOJ said in a press release this week that Martino abused his role to collaborate with operators of BlackCat/ALPHV ransomware to attack and extort various companies and organizations across the U.S. in 2023.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Techdirt ☛ Palantir Workers Are Finally Noticing The Skulls On Their Caps

      Two weeks ago, we wrote about Palantir going mask-off for fascism, specifically about CEO Alex Karp’s company posting a 22-point manifesto that included some genuinely ugly stuff about how “certain cultures” are “regressive and harmful” and how pluralism is a “shallow temptation.” I argued that this kind of public ideological positioning was both morally bankrupt and strategically suicidal. The moral bankruptcy part should be obvious (if it’s not, go do some soul-searching). But doing so at a time when American-style fascism is historically unpopular basically everywhere, including within the US, just seems like you’ve bet on the losing team at a time when it’s clear they have no chance of coming back to win.

      That’s quite a decision for the company, given that Palantir is supposed to be in the business of using technology to predict how strategic decisions will play out.

    • Michael Geist ☛ Going Through the Motions: How Parliament Is Shutting Down Study and Debate on Political Party Privacy

      Bill C-25, the Strong and Free Elections Act, which I wrote about last month when it was first introduced, includes a political party privacy framework that falls well short of what Canadians should expect, with no purpose limitation, no consent requirement, no right of access or correction, no retention limits, and no role for the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. The bill layers on incremental improvements drawn from the earlier Bill C-65, such as security safeguards, breach notification to affected individuals, and contractual protections for transfers, while leaving critical gaps in place. The provisions are notable structured as policy-based requirements rather than direct statutory obligations, which means that enforcement depends on a party first adopting a policy and then breaching its own policy, an inversion of how privacy law operates everywhere else in the country. Since the bill was introduced, the House second-reading debate and the committee study schedule signal that the political parties have little interest in revisiting it.

    • Ben Werdmuller ☛ Claude Opus can now identify an author from their writing

      Kelsey Piper plugged in 125 words from an unpublished essay and asked Opus 4.7 to identify the author. It listed her as the most likely answer.

      I was skeptical, so I did the same: a few paragraphs from an essay, which I plugged into an account that isn’t connected to me. Here’s what Claude said: [...]

    • Low Level Fun ☛ The Tiny UDP Cannon: An Android VPN Bypass

      On Android 16, a regular app with no special permissions can leak the user’s real IP, even with “Always-On VPN” + “Block connections without VPN” turned on. Those two settings are supposed to be the hard guarantee that nothing leaves the device outside the tunnel. They don’t hold here.

      The trick is that the app doesn’t send the packet itself. It hands the bytes and a destination to system_server (UID 1000, exempt from VPN routing), then exits. A moment later system_server opens a UDP socket on the physical Wi-Fi interface and fires those bytes at the destination. The VPN never sees them. The destination sees your real public IP. Lockdown filters app UIDs, not system ones, so the packet walks straight past the gate the user explicitly locked.

      I reported this through the Android VRP. Apparently, it is not in their threat model. I assume there are many users rely on the VPN promise and would want to know about this, and optionally can apply the mitigation at the bottom of this page.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Yle ☛ Blue-and-Black movement, counter-demonstrators march in Tampere

    Tampere saw rival May Day demonstrations on Friday, as the 'Tampere without Nazis' collective and the Blue-and-Black Movement both took to the streets.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Iran's Uranium Stockpile Grew After Trump Pulled Out of Nuclear Deal

    The nation now has 11 tons of enriched uranium after barely having any while the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was in place, The New York Times reports

  • Semafor Inc ☛ Sahel, Mali crisis will trigger new migration to Europe

    Mali’s Moscow-backed military government is fighting for its survival after a coordinated jihadist and Tuareg assault killed the defense minister and forced Russian mercenaries to retreat from the north. It raises fears that instability could trigger a new wave of migration to Europe and accelerate a security collapse across the Sahel.

  • The Nation ☛ The Rise of the Vichy Scientists

    But a question has lingered in my mind for months now: Why would scientific institutions be cozying up to the very people who want to pull them all down? Why do they insist on whitewashing what is happening, helping the perpetrators burnish their credentials?

    Steve Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown, wrote about the complicity of another set of scholarly actors—the members of legal academia—in a January blog post about the “dual state.” Even though it didn’t focus on the sciences, it still applies to the world I work in.

  • Vox ☛ Iran war: What China is learning from the US-Iran conflict, explained

    “China’s watching this war very closely,” James Palmer, deputy editor of Foreign Policy and author of its China Brief newsletter, tells Today, Explained co-host Noel King.

    Palmer talked with Noel about the lessons China is drawing from America’s military performance in Iran, why Trump’s treatment of US allies could prove costly in any future conflict in the Pacific, and why — despite all of that — China is still pushing hard for a ceasefire.

    Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. [...]

  • NPR ☛ Several states — and the LA public schools — are setting limits on screen time

    Byock started talking to fellow parents and formed Schools Beyond Screens, an advocacy group with thousands of parents, beginning in Los Angeles but eventually expanding around the United States. She says whenever she talks to parents, they all have the same question: "This is an emergency — what can we do about it?"

    Last week, after months of petitions and demonstrations, the school board of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) voted unanimously to limit screen time for all grade levels, beginning in the fall, with a particular focus on eliminating it entirely for elementary-age students.

  • CS Monitor ☛ A war in Europe drags on, and Africans pay the price

    And so, without telling anyone the specifics, Mr. Ndung’u signed up. From there, he says, things moved “unnaturally” fast. He was sent to the capital, Nairobi, then quickly put on a plane to Moscow.

    “All I knew is I was going to join a military,” he says. “I had no idea there was a war between Russia and Ukraine.”

  • Air Force Times ☛ US withdrawing 5,000 troops from Germany, US officials say

    The Pentagon said the withdrawal was expected to be completed over the next six to 12 months. Germany is home to some 35,000 active-duty U.S. military personnel, more than anywhere else in Europe.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • EFF ☛ Open Records Laws Reveal ALPRs’ Sprawling Surveillance. Now States Want to Block What the Public Sees.

    No thanks. Public records and public scrutiny of ALPR programs have shown that people are harmed by these systems and that retained ALPR data violates people’s privacy. In this moment, lawmakers should not be completely cutting off access to public records that document the abuses perpetuated by ALPRs.

  • Task And Purpose ☛ Military insiders may be betting on troops frequently

    Researchers studying betting patterns on the Polymarket prediction site found that nearly 52% of “longshot” bets placed on recent U.S. military actions were correct and paid off handsomely to unknown bettors. Similar bets on “political” topics have about a 14% success rate on the site, the team said. That success rate, researchers say, suggests that insiders were behind at least some of the bets.

    Overall, bettors on the site have bet nearly $2 billion on military actions during the Iran War.

  • Anti Corruption Data Collective ☛ Insider Risks in Polymarket Political Markets [PDF]

    In recent months, political prediction markets on Polymarket have come under growing scrutiny as well-timed bets on high-profile events, particularly related to the US–Iran conflict, have raised concerns about insider trading. Media reporting and policymakers have tended to focus on specific cases where traders placed large, low-probability bets shortly before major geopolitical announcements or military actions, generating substantial profits and prompting calls for investigation.

    The Anti-Corruption Data Collective (ACDC) undertook an analysis of all settled markets on Polymarket to move beyond individual cases and assess whether these instances reflect broader structural risks.

    Rather than a few suspicious bets on headline-making events, our analysis suggests that certain categories of political prediction markets, especially those tied to military activity, display signs of asymmetric information and potential insider trading. Because activity on Polymarket is published openly but pseudonymously on the blockchain, high frequency traders can identify this possible insider activity and take advantage of it to increase their profits.

  • TruthOut ☛ Admin Uses Records Policy to Jail Scientist While Being Sued for Records Abuses

    The statements ignore, however, that Trump and his administration are under fire for their own alleged record-keeping violations. Earlier this month, the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) dubiously declared in a memo that the Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional and does not apply to Trump. The law, passed by Congress after Watergate, says that communications by the president and vice president are property of the U.S.

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ What if Greedo Didn't Shoot First?

    What would happen if you shot first … and missed?

    In the wake of Cole Allen’s alleged attempt to shoot the President and his top aides, the government has not substantiated a claim they made in the complaint: that before Secret Service Officer VG raised his gun and shot in the direction of Allen, but missed, five times, Allen shot him in the chest (but he was not harmed, because he was wearing a bullet proof vest).

    I’ve put excerpts and links to four key documents below; emphases are my own.

• Environment

  • Common Dreams ☛ Keystone Light Tar Sands Pipeline: Same Problems, Different Name

    “No matter what you call the project, the environmental concerns that animated the fight over Keystone XL are no less acute today. Keystone Light will threaten water supplies and exacerbate climate change. This is the moment to get off the oil roller coaster, not double down on the dirtiest oil on the planet.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Trump’s attempt to crush clean energy progress not going to plan, experts say

    While this was just one month, it follows a record 2025 for renewable energy. The pipeline of new power coming online in the US is overwhelmingly green this year, too, with 93% of all electricity capacity added in 2026 set to come from solar, wind and batteries. Just 7% will come from the fossil fuels that are dangerously overheating our world.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Futurism ☛ Eric Trump's [Cryptocurrency] Company Is Falling Into Total Disaster

      The grift is in danger.

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ At L.A. County General, a salvage operation for the bicycles patients leave behind

      The 94-year-old edifice, looming majestically over Boyle Heights, stopped taking patients nearly two decades ago. But the adjacent new county General, formerly Los Angeles County+USC Medical Center, had used its empty rooms to manage a side effect of its mission to serve all who appear at its door: patients often arrive on bicycles or wheelchairs, and leave without them. Whether they exit on foot, by ride-hail, in a family car or body bag, is unrecorded.

      The hospital simply put identifying stickers on the bicycles and entombed them far from public view. That practice came to an end last year when work began to gut the old monolith in preparation for it conversion to housing as the centerpiece of a health-themed redevelopment of the 42-acre Eastside campus.

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ Waymos, robotaxis can now be ticketed by California police. But how?

      A slew of statewide autonomous vehicle regulations based on Assembly Bill 1777 will go into effect July 1 — including a process for law enforcement to issue a “notice of AV noncompliance,” the California Department of Motor Vehicles announced Tuesday.

      Here’s how this new law will work, and what other rules self-driving vehicle manufacturers will soon have to follow: [...]

    • Interesting Engineering ☛ US university's research reactor to generate power in a first

      The 2-3 kW output from the reactor will be used to power a high-performance GPU node to that will execute a live artificial intelligence (AI) workload.

      The recent surge in AI applications has increased demand for data centers in the future. With high-performance GPUs also consuming significant energy, electricity demand is expected to double by the end of this decade.

    • Dark Reading ☛ 76% of All [Cryptocurrency] Stolen in 2026 Is Now in North Korea

      [Cryptocurrency] theft is rampant because it's easy. The system, bereft of institutional safeguards by design, requires that individual participants secure their own assets — a task for which most are not particularly well-suited. The result: entire national GDPs worth of financial theft every year. Even just in 2025, in the US alone, including only known and reported cases, the FBI found that Americans lost more than $11 billion in [cryptocurrency]-focused scams run by cybercriminals such as gangsters in Southeast Asia.

    • Hackaday ☛ Magnetic Induction Heats Water

      Producing hot water off-grid is a surprisingly energy-intensive activity, and although it looks simple on its surface it can get quite complicated especially when used in large scale for something like providing hot water for an entire home. When using combustion to heat the water there needs to be proper venting as well as control of the fuel, and even storage of the hot water needs to be meticulous to avoid certain pathogens. [Greenhill Forge] has built an off-grid solution for heating hot water that doesn’t necessarily rely on any combustion, though, provided he can find something to spin his custom electric machine.

    • Kev Quirk ☛ My Fear of Flying

      Like Nathan, I think it's a loss of control. Yes yes, I know, I'm far more likely to hurt myself on my motorbikes, or in a car crash. But the difference is, if I have an accident in the car, or on a bike, I'm somewhat in control and there's a fair chance (especially in the car) that I will come out of it with only minor injuries.

  • Overpopulation

    • Daily Hive ☛ How Metro Vancouver aims to cut per-person water use by 17%

      Meanwhile, the region’s population growth is expected to grow to 3.5 million by 2035 and to over four million by 2050, increasing overall demand for drinking water.

      “These conditions heighten the importance of managing drinking water use wisely, making the most of existing infrastructure capacity, and planning carefully for future investments,” reads the report.

    • Global News CA ☛ Metro Vancouver moves to strict water restrictions on May 1, Stage 3 expected in June - BC

      The organization says that the early stringent restrictions are due to a lower snowpack, but the construction of a new water supply tunnel underneath Stanley Park, which replaces a water main built in the 1930s, is keeping the pipe offline until late June or early July.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Why UAE's OPEC exit is a blow to Saudi Arabia

    OPEC, the global cartel of oil-producing nations, operates a quota system that limits how much oil each member can produce.

  • Deseret Media ☛ Pentagon reaches agreements with top AI companies, but not Anthropic

    SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, Nvidia, Reflection, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, ​several of which already work with the Pentagon, will be ⁠integrated into its secret and top-secret network environments, providing more military access to their products for use on sensitive topics, the ‌Pentagon said in a statement. The ‌lesser-known Reflection AI, which raised $2 billion in October, is backed by 1789 Capital, a venture capital firm in ⁠which Donald Trump Jr. is a partner and investor.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Report Links Piracy to Drugs, Weapons, and the Mafia; Calls for U.S. Site-Blocking

    The most pivotal study appeared in 2009, when a RAND report linked film piracy, organized crime, and terrorism. This movie industry-funded report was not without critique, as it blurred the line between counterfeiting and piracy, while evidence for structural crime connections was missing.

    Nonetheless, the RAND study introduced case studies that have been cited ever since. This includes the Barakat Network in the Tri-Border Area, D-Company in India, and the Provisional IRA in Northern Ireland, which all reappeared in a new study this week.

  • Pivot to AI ☛ OpenAI to Microsoft: It’s not me, it’s you

    But the big news is:

    "Microsoft remains OpenAI’s primary cloud partner, and OpenAI products will ship first on Azure, unless Microsoft cannot and chooses not to support the necessary capabilities."

    Now that’s a sentence full of questions. Why would Microsoft even accept this? They’re freeing OpenAI from the old deal and they’re not really getting anything back for that.

  • [Old] Jacob Harris ☛ DOGE Track

    This is another project that was born out of anger.

    As I write this in late October 2025, we are now 9 months into the second Trump presidency. It’s been hard keeping track of all that has been damaged and destroyed within the federal government. Emboldened by Musk and the absence of oversight, the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) went rampaging through agencies to subvert their security, cancel contracts, fire staff and siphon up confidential data into large data warehouses. Some of this was motivated by Silicon Valley’s empty libertarian platitudes about disruption and efficiency. Much of this was to be the point of the spear for Russell Vought’s plan to subvert the Constitution.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • TruthOut ☛ I’m a Survivor Imprisoned in Texas. I’m Only Allowed to Watch Fox News.

      What we are fed is not information. It is a carefully constructed unreality designed to ensure that survivors never fully name what happened to them, or to women more broadly, or to the system that put us here. Fox News’ framing of the Epstein files, which routinely minimizes Trump’s relationship to the pedophile, is what women in this building receive as truth.

    • Digital Camera World ☛ With AI taking over phone cameras, are we witnessing the death of truth?

      Has the launch of the Samsung Galaxy S26 and its siblings reignited the debate over the "death of truth" in photography?

      Computational photography has been the standard for well over a decade, but the S26’s new suite of features joins other phone manufacturers in shifting the needle uncomfortably towards artificial photography, where the phone essentially "imagines" details that were never there.

    • Paul Krugman ☛ Who Are You Gonna Believe, Trump or Your Lying Eyes?

      What’s striking about these efforts to create an alternate reality [sic] isn’t merely the fact that politicians are lying. It’s the fact that they’re lying about a subject in which the truth is more or less literally in everyone’s face every day. Lies about, say, immigrant crime are difficult for ordinary Americans to check. But gas prices are displayed on giant signs all around America — and drivers face a reality check on fuel costs every time they fill their tanks.

      Why, then, do Republicans believe that these lies will work for them politically?

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • EFF ☛ Utah’s New Law Targeting VPNs Goes Into Effect Next Week

    Next week, on May 6, 2026, Utah will become, to EFF’s knowledge, the first state in the nation to target the use of VPNs to avoid legally mandated age-verification gates. While advocates in states like Wisconsin successfully forced the removal of similar provisions due to constitutional and technical concerns, Utah is proceeding with a mandate that threatens to significantly undermine digital privacy rights.

  • JURIST ☛ UN rights experts urge Algeria to quash trial of poet

    Amnesty International also criticized the decision of the Algiers Court of Appeals to uphold his conviction on charges of “glorifying terrorism,” “offending public bodies,” and “inciting an unarmed gathering,” arguing that these charges stem solely from his expression of opinion through social media posts and poetry. Amnesty International called for his immediate and unconditional release and for all charges against him to be dropped on the grounds that they arise solely from the exercise of his human rights.

  • MIT Technology Review ☛ A new US phone network for Christians aims to block porn and gender-related content

    The network, which is currently being tested ahead of its May 5 launch date, will be run by Radiant Mobile, a newly launched mobile virtual network operator (MVNO). These operators don’t own cell towers but buy bandwidth from the big providers (in this case, T-Mobile) and sell to specific demographics (President Trump announced his own MVNO last year called Trump Mobile; CREDOMobile sends donations to progressive causes).

  • Wired ☛ The Chinese Government Just Got the World’s Largest Digital Rights Conference Canceled

    Access Now, the group that organizes RightsCon, says Zambian officials asked it to exclude Taiwanese participants if it wanted the event to proceed as planned.

  • RightsCon ☛ A statement to our community about why RightsCon 2026 will not take place in Zambia | RightsCon Summit Series

    On April 27, one day after a government press release endorsed RightsCon, we received a phone call from MoTS about an urgent issue and were told that diplomats from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) were putting pressure on the Government of Zambia because Taiwanese civil society participants were planning to join us in person. This development was extremely concerning and we immediately pushed back. Next, we opened up lines of communication with our Taiwanese participants, as is our practice when there is a potential risk for a specific community. While we needed more information, we continued to feel confident this was something we could address with the government.

    Shortly after this call, we received reports of immigration officers telling participants as they arrived that RightsCon had been cancelled. These developments were taking place on the eve of a public holiday in Zambia and despite persistent outreach to our government contacts throughout the evening and next day, we heard nothing until an informal, cryptic call from a trusted senior official at MoTS, who told us on Tuesday, April 28 that he had been asked to share that RightsCon would be cancelled or postponed. He faltered on where the decision was coming from or why. We pressed for clarification and pushed back, prompting the MoTS official to request our program and participant list. Once again, we shared publicly available information, which they had been given in prior meetings, but received no further response – informal or otherwise.

  • Semafor Inc ☛ Zambia cancels digital rights summit over China Taiwan tension

    The disruption also forced UNESCO to significantly scale back its World Press Freedom Day conference, which had been scheduled alongside RightsCon in Lusaka. Under a “last minute information” notice, the agency said its flagship press freedom prize ceremony would instead be moved to its Paris headquarters and held at a later date.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Law Society Gazette ☛ SRA set for new status to help whistleblowers [Ed: They would be foolish to trust SRA, the wolf in sheep's clothing]

    The Solicitors Regulation Authority is poised to be granted a new designation that should make it easier for solicitors to blow the whistle on wrongdoing. The regulator expects to be added as a ‘prescribed person’ under the Public Interest Disclosure Act, giving employees a safer alternative to making disclosures to the press or on social media.

    Applying to join the prescribed persons list is part of a wider effort to root out unethical behaviour as well as give in-house lawyers an option to report wrongdoing in their workplace, Naomi Nicholson, senior regulatory executive at the SRA, said. ‘We really hope it will increase confidence that wrongdoing can be safely reported,’ she told a Westminster Legal Policy Forum on ethics yesterday.

  • CS Monitor ☛ Immigrants pulled out of their naturalization ceremonies are now suing

    The plaintiffs argue that the delay violates federal immigration law, which requires that USCIS make a final decision on naturalization applications within 120 days. The administration has also violated the Fifth Amendment, the lawsuit says, by basing naturalization decisions on national origin, as well as federal statutes that require government decisions “within a reasonable amount of time.” The plaintiffs are asking the court to either make a decision on their applications or compel the government to do so.

  • Thomas Günther ☛ AI replacing accessibility · Medienbäcker Thomas Günther

    Well, it does. Only three of the ten most recent releases mention accessibility at all while AI completely took over.

    I really hope this isn’t where we’re heading as an industry. Accessibility isn’t a buzzword or a trend. I’d argue it’s even a pretty good indicator of quality in an era of vibe-coded slop.

  • We Distribute ☛ The Seven Deadly Fediverse UX Sins: A Redemption Report Card

    Last summer, Tim delivered a two-part online sermon on the Seven Deadly UX Sins plaguing the Fediverse: first the diagnosis, then the path to redemption. Sean wrote his own set of solutions. It was the kind of tough love we felt the Open Social Web desperately needed: unflinching about problems, genuinely hopeful about fixes.

    It kicked off a lot of great and constructive discussions.

    But redemption requires actual work. Good words alone aren’t enough.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • ARRL ☛ FCC Approves Limited Emergency Use of 70 cm Band by AST SpaceMobile Satellites Outside the US

    On April 21, 2026, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) granted AST SpaceMobile limited authorization when not over the United States to use five 50-kHz channels in the 430–440 MHz secondary amateur band for emergency Telemetry, Tracking, and Control (TT&C) operations for its planned satellite constellation (DA-26-391 Docket No. 25-201). The authorization applies only for communication with five specified earth stations, each located well outside of the United States and for which the foreign administration with jurisdiction also must separately authorize the communications.

  • The Register UK ☛ ICANN opens applications for new gTLDs

    In 1985, the five gTLDs recommended by Postel and Reynolds became available, along with .net.

    In the years that followed, a lot of convoluted internet governance history saw ICANN created and given responsibility for managing the DNS root zone. As the first dotcom boom raged in the early 2000s, ICANN decided the world needed more gTLDs and delivered .biz, .info, .name, and .pro.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ FCC tightens KYC rules for telecoms, closes loophole for banned foreign services

    Commissioners unanimously passed a measure to strengthen telecom companies’ “Know Your Customer” requirements for verifying callers’ identities. Among the potential solutions being considered are requiring telecoms to verify a customer’s name, address, government ID and alternative phone numbers prior to enabling their service.

    In a statement ahead of the vote, FCC Chair Brendan Carr said that under current rules some telecoms “do the bare minimum” to verify callers and have “become complicit in illegal robocalling schemes.”

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Techdirt ☛ Online DRM Or A Bug: Sony’s Silence Adds To Recent PS Update Confusion

    That is, at the time of this writing, the most that Sony has said about whatever the hell is going on here. As a result, all kinds of people, big and small within the gaming community, are losing their shit over this new “online DRM requirement” for existing consoles that previously didn’t have it. Oh, and it’s a requirement that Sony mocked Microsoft for trying to require way back in 2013 before the backlash.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Court House News ☛ DOJ takes aim at Google's access to rival data during monopoly remedy stage

    In a joint status report, the parties asked U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta to quickly address the extent to which Google is entitled to view information submitted by competitors to a three-member Technical Committee responsible for overseeing the remedy process.

  • Seth Godin ☛ “The most exciting mobile trend is full Qwerty keyboards”

    They thought they made little boxes with batteries, but they actually made a network and gave their IT customers a story.

  • Trademarks

    • Right of Publicity

      • MinnPost ☛ ‘Nudification’ apps: Minnesota passes the nation’s first ban

        This blend means the tools are easy for kids to use; the independent media organization Indicator has tracked 23 cases of deepfake abuse targeting school communities in the United States since 2023.

        Federal attempts to create a civil right of action for survivors of nonconsensual deepfakes have stalled in Congress. The DEFIANCE Act has yet to make it to the House floor, though it has been passed by the Senate twice. Last year’s Take It Down Act made it a federal crime to disseminate nonconsensual intimate images, regardless of provenance, but does not allow survivors to sue for damages.

        Minnesota House File 1606 would allow survivors to sue the owners of nudification apps for damages and empower the state attorney general to collect fines of $500,000 per violation.

      • Android Police ☛ Spotify fights back against AI slop with new Verified badge

        It feels like Spotify is drowning in AI-generated "slop" artists at the moment, as people use AI tools to create new bands and solo performers to create enormous amounts of soulless songs in order to make a profit. You might be okay with that, but it makes many people feel uncomfortable.

        The sheer amount of them has made them hard to avoid though, as only research and a good amount of guessing could really identify which artists were AI and which were just obscure.

  • Copyrights

    • The Atlantic ☛ The Secret Weapon Against AI Dominance

      More than 90 lawsuits have been filed by creators against AI companies for copyright infringement. Authors, musicians, visual artists, and news publishers have all accused firms such as OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic of using their copyrighted works to train AI models without permission. (The Atlantic is involved in one such lawsuit, against the AI firm Cohere.) These cases are frequently framed as the defining fight over the future of creative labor and the entertainment industry as a whole. As one of these lawsuits put it, artists are seeking to end “infringement of their rights before their professions are eliminated by a computer program powered entirely by their hard work.”