Leftovers

• RTL ☛ Aragh sagi: Raisin moonshine banned in Iran enjoys resurgence in New York

  Three Iranian men pressed rehydrated raisins at an artisan distillery just outside New York, thousands of miles from their war-struck homeland.

  They were carefully producing aragh sagi, a traditional spirit banned by the clerical authorities along with all alcohol following the 1979 Islamic revolution.

  Despite its outlaw moonshine status, the drink is still made clandestinely and consumed inside Iran.

• Vintage Everyday ☛ 56 Amazing Photographs Capture Everyday Life in Ohio in 1938

  One of his most famous series from this period is a “Saturday Afternoon” in London, Ohio, where he photographed locals socializing, window shopping, and gathered around parked cars on the main thoroughfare. He documented the bustle of a typical Saturday afternoon, including men in overalls talking on street corners and shoppers outside local storefronts.

• The New Leaf Journal ☛ Some Benefits of Blogging and Writing Online

  The New Leaf Journal celebrated its sixth birthday on April 27, 2026. To celebrate our website’s sixth birthday, I decided to undertake writing a series of six articles on wisdom I have accumulated from running and writing for NLJ. I will begin this series on the sixth anniversary of the publication of the first NLJ article published under my name: The benefits of blogging (or writing online).

• Juha-Matti Santala ☛ I tell about my blog to anyone willing to listen

  I’m completely the opposite. I tell everybody about my blog if they are willing to listen. And the fun part is that people tell me they read my blog. Latest this Tuesday I told my colleagues about my blog when we had a discussion about blogs.

  It’s happened more than a few times that someone comes to talk to me in a pub or bar and tells me they enjoy reading my blog. I love it!

• Dave Gauer ☛ Text files as a user interface

  Update: After some feedback, I’m realizing that I need to do a better job of explaining what I get out of this method versus other methods. I’m finding it’s slightly nuanced and difficult to get across, so perhaps in the form of a list: [...]

• University of Toronto ☛ How backups work depends on the goals of the people setting them up

  A lot of people were horrified, but I had some sympathies with the SaaS provider. An important thing about backups is how backups work depends on what you're trying to recover from, and for certain sorts of disasters and recoveries, this decision is perfectly sensible. For a SaaS company, they also depend on customer support needs and what customers are going to want, and the decision can also make sense from that perspective.

• Bobby Hiltz ☛ Blogging in 2026

  Just over three years ago, I wrote a post about blogging. In hindsight, that was a pretty “OK” post. Blogging, and blogging about blogging, has continued to thrive since then.

  Blogging has strengthened its legitimacy as both a hobby and a source of revenue. It has never been easier to blog: true in the 90s, true three years ago, true today. Careers can begin on blogs, or be a natural evolution of an established career. Or, you can just do it for yourself.

• Artyom Bologov ☛ My Blog Principles

  So over my (relatively) long blogging journey I’ve accumulated some crust of principles. Ensuring that what I’m doing is kind and useful to people. This led to some decisions. Including ones that make my own blog maintenance slightly harder. But I’m ready to suffer if this brings something good to others. Here are things I formulated that must be true for my blog: [...]

• Amit Patel ☛ Academic citations

  Although my site isn’t designed to fit into the academic world, occasionally an academic paper will cite one of my pages. Everyone uses a different format. That got me wondering if there are is a proper way to cite a web article. The first place I checked was Distill.pub. It’s a site I greatly admire, and it’s also a real journal with amazing people. They would’ve given a lot of thought to this. At the bottom of each article they give both a text citation format and a BibTeX format: [...]

• SusamPal ☛ Apr '26 Notes

  That was the first thing I spent time on this month. The second was revisiting some elementary results in group theory concerning cosets. I have found cosets to be an extremely useful concept that plays a central role in many areas of mathematics, including coding theory, Galois theory, field extensions and graph theory. In fact, Biggs's proof of Tutte's theorem discussed above also relies substantially on the theory of cosets. Since these results are relatively elementary and easier to write up, they are included in this set of notes.

  Apart from mathematics, I also spent part of my spare time improving my new web project named Wander Console. These notes include some updates about this tool.

• [Old] Cat Scraps ☛ Mapping the Blogosphere

  It all started when Mr Prismatic Wasteland posted a picture on Discord of a TTRPG blog edge graph someone had made years ago on /tg/. When the folks started wishing for an updated version, I thought: I already follow a lot of blogs via RSS—maybe I could use that data to create something similar.

  A few weeks later, I'm crawling back out of the rabbit hole with an interactive map of the TTRPG blogverse, and I'd like to show you what I found.

• Dan Q ☛ rejecting convenience

  I’m seeing an growing movement in indieweb, revivalist, and adjacent circles that express RNotté’s sentiment: that the endless (and highly-marketable) quest for increased convenience in our lives has gained us free time, but we’ve lost something along the way.

  What we’ve lost varies from case to case, but includes freedom (from lock-in to subscription services), creative satisfaction (from convenient “artistic” expression), privacy (from becoming the product, packaged-up by big-data advertising-funded tools), and social interactions (from so much of “social” media).

• Science

  • Vox ☛ FDA’s approval of Otarmeni, the first gene therapy for hereditary deafness

    The first was a change in delivery. Gene therapies use engineered viruses to deliver restorative genes to a patient’s cells. The therapy used on Gelsinger was carried by an adenovirus, which are highly immunogenic, meaning the human immune system recognizes them and reacts violently. It was that immune reaction that killed Gelsinger.

    In the aftermath, the field increasingly turned to adeno-associated viruses (AAV), which are smaller, more tolerable, and capable of slipping a payload into the right cells without setting off a five-alarm immune reaction. AAV vectors are now the workhorse of in vivo gene therapy, including in Otarmeni.

  • Hackaday ☛ Debugging A Stopped Foucault Pendulum’s Electronics

    This particular Foucault pendulum is one of many that were created by the California Academy of Sciences, with hundreds of them installed throughout the US and possibly elsewhere. That said, since a pendulum of any description will never be a perpetual motion device, the electromagnet installed near the top of the installation has to carefully add some kinetic energy back that was lost due to friction as the pendulum moves around.

  • Victor Zverovich ☛ Every float on one page

    In my previous post about Żmij, a high-performance binary-to-decimal floating-point conversion library, I drew a small diagram of a rounding interval around a single floating-point value. That worked well enough for the local picture, but it doesn’t say much about the global one. Where do the irregular intervals at powers of two come from? What does the subnormal range actually look like? And how do the binades (the $[2^e, 2^{e+1})$ slices of the real line on which all FP numbers share an exponent) fit together?

    So I tried to draw that instead: the entire set of representable numbers, laid out so the interesting structure is visible at a glance.

  • Groot Koerkamp ☛ Quickheap: the fastest comparison-based heap? · CuriousCoding

    As a quick recap, for the purposes of this post, a priority queue (wikipedia) is a data structure that supports the following two operations:

    Push (insert)
    Add a value \(x\) to the data structure.
    Pop (extract min)
    Remove and return the smallest value \(x\) in the data structure.

    Other possible operations include find min (peek), delete, and decrement key, but we will not consider these.

  • Eli Bendersky ☛ Scaling, stretching and shifting sinusoids - Eli Bendersky's website

    This is a brief and simple [1] explanation of how to adjust the standard sinusoid to change its amplitude, frequency and phase shift. More precisely, given the general function: [...]

  • John D Cook ☛ Turning a trick into a technique

    I wanted to see if I could get anything interesting by turning the trick in the previous post into a technique. The trick created a high-order approximation by subtracting a multiple one even function from another. Even functions only have even-order terms, and by using the right multiple you can cancel out the second-order term as well.

    For an example, I’d like to approximate the Bessel function J0(x) by the better known cosine function. Both are even functions. [...]

• Career/Education

  • CS Monitor ☛ Student loan payments to rise for millions

    The SAVE plan arrived in 2023 as millions of student borrowers were emerging from a three-year pause in payments during the pandemic. It was meant to chip away at the now more than $1.8 trillion in total student debt held by borrowers across the country by tying payments to income. The plan lowered payments to $0 for many of the lowest earners – preventing unpaid interest from accumulating and offering earlier loan forgiveness. But many critics charged that American taxpayers were being saddled with debt. Republican-governed states challenged the executive action and ultimately the courts stopped it because Congress had not approved it.

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ Pushing As Many Pixels As Possible To A CRT: Interlaced 4K

    Apparently, in spite of what the manual says, getting the screen to absorb the 2880×2160 interlaced signal wasn’t the hard part, but generating it was. NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards are absolutely unable to create an interlaced signal, but Intel integrated GPUs are– if you get the right combo of chip and old driver. Sadly, the video doesn’t list exactly what he used. Of course an iGPU isn’t going to give you a very good gaming experience at this high resolution, so [Found Tech] has his games do their rendering on the discrete card before piping that over to the iGPU for display on the CRT.

  • Nathan Dyer ☛ My FOSS Mobile Setup in 2026

    I’ve been actively working to move away from proprietary software and big tech as much as possible. I use FOSS every day for all my desktop computing needs, and have done for the better part of two decades, but I never made the same effort when it came to mobile. Why is it that when I walk away from my laptop I stick a computer filled with proprietary software in my pocket without batting an eye?

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Yle ☛ "Many countries are watching" — Finland eyes UK youth smoking ban

    In Finland, ten percent of people aged 20–64 smoke daily, according to the public health authority. In Bulgaria, 36 percent of those over 15 smoke, compared with just six percent in Sweden. Iceland does even better, at five percent.

    Smoking among Finnish young people has declined markedly since the turn of the millennium.

  • CBC ☛ Why saunas are becoming a hot new place to party

    In Calgary, Offline Wellness Club takes a more low-key approach. What started as a run club has grown into a broader community focused on rest and recovery.

    "Our intention was to build a space that people can leave their phones in their lockers, leave their phones at home and just take an hour and disconnect," said Nina Hill, the club's co-founder.

  • The New Lede ☛ US judge calls proposed Bayer Roundup settlement a “filthy” deal

    The proposed $7.25 billion deal, which Bayer and a group of plaintiffs’ attorneys unveiled in February, appears “mind-boggling,” “legally problematic,” plagued with “major problems,” and was filed in a secretive and hasty manner that amounted to a “filthy” deal, US Judge Vince Chhabria said in a hearing over the proposed agreement.

• Proprietary

  • Nick Heer ☛ Adobe’s ‘Modern’ User Interface Is Just Webpages

    If you do a little poking around in Adobe’s application bundles, a key reason for the jankiness of these user interfaces becomes apparent: it is because they are little webpages. These dialog boxes are HTML files that reference a chunky CSS file and oodles of JavaScript, and appear to be built with React.

    This is loathsome.

  • Kyle Reddoch ☛ I Think Apple Finally Made a School Laptop That Makes Sense

    The MacBook Neo is not the most powerful Mac, and that is exactly why it feels so right for students and teens. The price, battery life, portability, and everyday practicality make it one of Apple’s smartest laptop moves in years.

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

    • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Schreiber suspends home affairs officials over fake AI references

      The department has appointed two independent law firms – one to manage the disciplinary process and one to review every policy document it has produced since 30 November 2022, the day OpenAI’s ChatGPT was released to the public. Home affairs has also committed to designing AI checks and declarations into its internal approval processes.

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ New Oscars rules: No AI actors, human-written scripts only

      Under the updated guidelines, only roles "demonstrably performed by humans with their consent" will be eligible for acting awards, effectively excluding AI-generated performers, according to the Academy.

    • Spectator AU ☛ Data centres are eating the economy

      One small retail company, recently rebranded as an AI business and soared 800 per cent on the announcement, reminiscent of the dot-com boom, when simply appending ‘.com’ to your name was enough to double a share price. We know how that ended.

      AI is now not only a market bubble, but a core anchor propping up the entire US economy. The US government will have no choice but to backstop it once the inevitable AI bubble pops.

    • India Times ☛ Reddit rallies as AI‑driven ad growth fuels strong revenue outlook

      Its ad platform uses AI to improve campaign creation and management through ⁠features including an AI copywriter for Reddit-specific advertisements and an automatic creative asset cropper that optimises images for various ad placements.

      Its vast content library has also become a prized asset as AI companies hunt for data to train their large language models, the technology behind chatbots such as ChatGPT.

    • Futurism ☛ Claude Deleted a Company's Entire Database, Illustrating a Danger Every CEO Should Be Aware of

      Crane detailed the catastrophe in a lengthy post on X. His account heavily relies on the AI’s self-diagnosis on what went wrong, meaning it’s not wholly reliable. But as he tells it, things went off the rails when Cursor, running Anthropic’s flagship Claude Opus 4.6 model, was handling a “routine task.” When the AI encountered a simple credential problem, it decided to fix it by deleting an entire volume stored with Railway, PocketOS’s cloud provider. The volume, ill-fatedly, contained the company’s production database.

    • [Repeat] Evan Hahn ☛ Offline command line translation with TranslateGemma + Ollama

      I wrote a simple script that translates text at the command line, completely offline. Here’s an example of how it works on my computer: [...]

    • The New Stack ☛ Inside OpenSearch's bid to become the default AI data layer

      Most production AI search applications use both. Hybrid search combines dense semantic recall with sparse neural precision, and both field types are built around that pattern in mind. Most teams, in my experience, get more mileage out of understanding when each one earns its place in the pipeline than from picking a winner.

    • Tony Sundharam ☛ Agentic Coding is Burning Me Out

      Doing tasks manually naturally builds up the context required for the decisions involved later because you have time to process everything along the way and construct your mental model of the project's structure. Working with LLMs means you cold start more often than not since the code just appears in front of you (like relying on the tattoos from Memento to understand what's going on).

      The process of managing agentic workflows turns programming into a string of variable psychological rewards (dare I say, gacha or slot machine mechanics?) followed by cognitive fatigue instead of the deep, focused intellectual labor that initially brought a lot of developers into this industry.

    • Libera Chat ☛ Bot/LLM policy update

      Between this and growing concerns over how LLMs are used on Libera.Chat, we believe our policy is overdue for an update. Previously, we released a set of guidelines for LLM usage on Libera.Chat. These guidelines are, as the name suggests, not binding, save for a clarification that training LLMs on messages is considered logging. Unfortunately, there have been enough incidents involving LLM operators not taking responsibility for their bots that staff now believe that the guidelines are insufficient.

      As this will be a major update to our policy with major implications for how some people use the network, we are providing advance notice with this post. What follows is a high-level overview of what we’re planning to add to Libera.Chat’s policy on 2026-05-30. We are still workshopping these additions, so please keep in mind that everything below is subject to change.

    • Blender ☛ Upcoming Blender Development Fund and AI Policies

      Blender is a tool for artists and creators, it’s made by humans for humans. No generative AI functionality is currently available or planned to be integrated in Blender.

    • Wired ☛ Elon Musk Seemingly Admits xAI Has Used OpenAI’s Models to Train Its Own

      While testifying on Thursday in federal court, Elon Musk seemed to indicate that his AI lab may have used OpenAI’s models to train xAI’s own. He touched upon the topic while sitting on the witness stand answering cross-examination questions from an OpenAI attorney amid his ongoing legal battle against the ChatGPT-maker.

      This is the exchange, as best as WIRED could capture it: [...]

    • NPR ☛ AI music is flooding streaming platforms. But listeners like it less and less

      The study compared attitudes towards AI use in music creation from May to November of 2025. It found that overall interest dropped from -13% to -20% during that time period.

    • Endnotes ☛ Pie thieves

      Seven trillion dollars is an insane amount of revenue. To put it in perspective, in 2025, Meta ($200b), Alphabet ($114b), Apple ($416b), and Microsoft ($281b) combined took in $1.23 trillion in revenue, whereas to break even, generative AI investments would have to make $2 trillion just in 2029.

      But let's play along for a second. Let's say they pull it off and generate $7 trillion in revenue. Where would it come from? Under what scenario are American corporations going to suddenly pay AI companies $2 trillion a year for their services?

      There are two options.

    • Michael Taggart ☛ I used AI. It worked. I hated it.

      My actual day job, the one that puts food on the table for my family, has metamorphosed into an "AI security expert" role, in which I am not only responsible for testing AI-enabled applications, but I am also expected to be an expert in their operation. I hope, perhaps naively, that standing between these applications and deployment, I can do whatever is possible to make them safer—and to say "no" as loudly as I can to ideas that are too dangerous for production. I can't do any of this without using and knowing these tools intimately.

      I nevertheless recognize the societal and environmental harms posed by these tools. I want them to unexist. I even recognize the cognitive hazards to which I expose myself in their use (more on that later). I do not want to use them. And yet, I must understand them. If that damns me in your eyes, so be it.

      That suffices, I hope, for the self-flagellation component of our proceedings.

  • Social Control Media

    • The Verge ☛ Meta’s historic loss in court could cost a lot more than $375 million

      Beginning Monday, attorneys for Meta and New Mexico will return to a Santa Fe courthouse for a three-week public nuisance trial, where they’ll argue over the changes the AG wants the judge to order Meta make to Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Those changes include adding age verification for New Mexico users, prohibiting end-to-end encryption for users under 18 and capping their use to 90 hours per month, limiting engagement-boosting features like infinite scroll and autoplay, and requiring Meta to detect 99 percent of new child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

    • Sven Luijten ☛ Yes, I do watch back those videos I take at concerts

      This might start to sound "old man yells at cloud", but what I don't understand is people recording with/for fleeting stories or Snapchat. Those videos are gone within 24 hours! There's no way to re-live that moment unless you go digging in the settings (in Instagram's case, not sure about Snapchat).

    • NPR ☛ Taking a look at looksmaxxing — and what parents should know

      The executive director of the Clay Center for Young Healthy Minds at Massachusetts General Hospital says there's a long and well-known history of how faddish and harmful beauty trends have changed the lives of young women.

      "But it has been going on with young men for about a decade, and it has been increasing considerably during this last decade," he says.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Canonical under sustained DDoS attack as Ubuntu 26 releases — Iranian group 313 Team claims responsibility

      The most obvious result is that Canonical's, er, canonical Ubuntu download and update mirrors worldwide are sluggish or down entirely, as is the main website. The attack extends to Launchpad, the Snap store, Canonical SSO, and other related services. Thankfully, there are no reports of security compromises affecting package repositories or ISO images, so whichever download spot you find should be safe.

    • The Register UK ☛ Pro-Iran group turns Ubuntu DDoS into shakedown

      The service disruption at Ubuntu means users cannot download any versions of its distros through the usual channels, nor can they log into their Canonical accounts.

      Canonical promised to provide regular updates when it has new information to share.

• Pseudo-Open Source

  • I Do Not Recommend Bitwarden

    If you decide to self-host Bitwarden, however, you will relatively quickly find yourself in what I would describe as enterprise software hell. The standard Bitwarden server deployment is a heavy-weight C# backend that ships with MSSQL Express and won’t work with more Linux-native databases like PostgreSQL or MariaDB. Depending on the size of the deployment and the requirements with regard to high availability, you might want to utilize Kubernetes, which in turn adds additional overhead and complexity.

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • The Register UK ☛ Artemis III aims for 'late 2027' for Earth orbit demo

    While Isaacman did not spell it out, there is a good chance the late 2027 target is driven by SpaceX's and Blue Origin's needs. Under the original plan, Artemis III was the landing mission, but it became painfully clear last year that SpaceX was unable to get the lunar version of its Starship vehicle ready in time. It has yet to demonstrate it can get a Starship into orbit, let alone show off the Starship-to-Starship fuel transfer required for a lunar mission.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • The Atlantic ☛ Deepfakes Are Coming for Your Bank Account

      This was all unsettling in its own right. But the most realistic deepfakes I was able to create did not involve politicians or celebrities. They mostly did not depict people at all. With little effort, I was able to create more than 100 fraudulent images, including prescriptions for opioids and ADHD medication, bank alerts, social-media posts, fake IDs, and passports.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Ludlow Institute ☛ The Surveillance Accountability Fixes This - by NBTV Media

      There’s a new bill in the House that Ludlow Institute helped work on called the Surveillance Accountability Act. It does something that sounds almost absurdly simple:

      It says that if the government wants to search your life, it needs a warrant. And if it doesn’t get one, you can hold it accountable.

      That’s it. That’s the bill.

    • Tony Sundharam ☛ No, I Won't Download Your App. The Web Version is A-OK.

      ...their darn apps to consume content and off their web versions.

      Whether it's the obvious social media apps or something as basic as parking, the app is the priority and the site the red-headed stepchild. And they aren't too subtle in the push either. It might be a modal covering half the web version with links to the App Store, an immediate popup after a bit of scrolling, or a header screaming “the app is 10x better,” but it's always there and it's always grating.

      Let's not even go into the cases where the app is the only option to access the service. A minor annoyance for ordering food, but a major hassle when it's a public service or utility.

    • The Telegraph UK ☛ Marriage Diaries: My wife is obsessed with posting our lives on social media

      But what I object to most is losing our privacy. Where we go on holiday – and when – is posted. I’m sure our kids’ school uniforms have popped up on her stories, the dates of their birthdays, and where they play sports. My complaint that this is a security risk is met with derision.

      I know my wife would love me to join her in producing some content, but, frankly, I’d rather be cancelled.

    • [Old] Nathan Dyer ☛ Age Gates | Nathan Dyer

      A new bill, called the “Parents Decide Act,” has been introduced in the House that would require operating system vendors to verify the age of all its users. Lots of people more qualified than me have already had a ton to say about this topic. I might suggest this blog post from technically-good.ca, which isn’t so much about this bill as its Canadian counterpart, but which makes many great points about why age gating is such a bad idea.

      Setting aside the surveillance aspects, the data siphoning, the impact to digital sovereignty efforts, and other countless downsides, I want to focus specifically on the impact I think it could have on the well-being and future prospects for young people.

  • Confidentiality

    • Federal News Network ☛ DoD strikes deals with major tech firms to deploy AI on classified networks

      SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Reflection will integrate their AI capabilities into the department’s Impact Level 6 and Impact Level 7 network environments. IL6 is used for the storage and processing of information classified up to the secret level, while IL7 supports highly restricted data.

      Following the initial announcement Friday morning, DoD said that Oracle has also “agreed to join the list of AI companies,” bringing the total number of participating companies to eight.

• Defence/Aggression

  • CS Monitor ☛ What we’ve learned from Nepali POWs in Ukraine

    What once appeared to be isolated cases has since become a pattern. According to Nepal’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, at least 118 Nepali nationals have been killed while serving in the Russian army and 132 remain missing – and about a dozen are now prisoners of war in Ukraine.

    Their testimonies – emerging through official interrogations, media releases, and letters – offer a rare window into how foreign nationals are being drawn into the conflict.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ US Navy signs deal with AI firm for training underwater drones to detect mines in Strait of Hormuz — $100 million would allow drone minesweepers to update their detection algorithms in days instead of months

    The Pentagon has increasingly been turning towards AI to bolster its capabilities, with the Department of War announcing deals with seven AI tech companies — namely SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, Nvidia, Reflection, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services — to deploy LLMs across its classified networks. These tools are designed to sift through large volumes of data and identify patterns that are simply impossible for people to process in such a short time, thereby speeding up data analysis and decision-making. DARPA, its independent research arm, has also called for proposals to develop the next-generation deep-sea underwater drone that can be built quickly.

  • Robert Reich ☛ The Real Reason Trump Doesn't Want Congress To Vote on War Powers

    But there’s an easier and more straightforward reason.

    Trump’s war is so unpopular that Republican members of Congress don’t want to have to go on record as voting in favor of it. With midterm elections in six months, they know their votes in favor of Trump’s war could be held over their heads — especially if the war drags on, or if gas prices continue to rise because Iran is blocking the Strait of Hormuz, or both.

    They’ve let the White House know that forcing them to vote on the war will hurt their chances of maintaining control of Congress.

  • NPR ☛ Nationwide May Day protests pick up mantle of 'No Kings'

    Thousands of people have turned out for May Day demonstrations across the country on Friday, with organizers calling for a boycott of work, school and shopping to protest the Trump administration's policies — and what activists describe as a billionaire takeover of government.

• Environment

  • CBC ☛ Lake Huron's 'fish city' is a sign of trouble at nuclear plant, says Ontario First Nation

    But Saugeen Ojibway Nation (SON) is challenging that narrative of fish crowding in the warm-water outflow of Bruce Nuclear Generating Station — saying the site functions instead as a "fish trap."

    The First Nation points to the deaths of up to five million gizzard shad there in 2025 — a tally recorded by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) in a Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission regulatory report.

  • Futurism ☛ Scientists Say They've Figured Out What Causes "Ghosts"

    Infrasound is the term for sound at frequencies below 20 Hz. While this falls outside a human’s typical range of hearing, some research shows that we can subconsciously detect sound waves at these low frequencies.

  • Michigan Advance ☛ How do we adapt Michigan’s dams to climate change?

    The record-high rainfall for some parts of northern Michigan — combined with melt from March’s above-average snow — pushed infrastructure to the brink across the region in Cheboygan, Bellaire and other cities.

    For some, the flooding was a reminder of our vulnerabilities in the face of extreme weather, which is expected to worsen as our climate continues to shift.

  • Western Water ☛ Western drought holds as snowpack fades

    Out West, the story is more complicated. Periodic showers and cooler weather have brought short-term improvements, but they have not changed the broader outlook. The water supply picture remains strained as the region moves deeper into spring.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Deseret Media ☛ Route 66 is turning 100. Here's where you can celebrate it this year

      Spanning nearly 2,500 miles of the American West, the "Mother Road" is the quintessential road trip, linking Chicago to Santa Monica, California, by way of both big cities and small towns, natural scenic views and quirky roadside attractions. It's been featured in everything from hit songs and classic novels to animated films, and it remains a popular tourist attraction today.

      And this year, the road is turning 100.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Enthusiast creates Peltier thermoelectric cooler from scratch — impressive rig uses two 360mm AIOs, homemade DC controllers, and a custom loop

      Peltier liquid cooling has always been exotic and niche, but only CPU coolers have adopted the technology, leading to the question of whether or not GPUs can benefit from this cooling solution as well. TrashBench on YouTube answered that question in a recent video, putting an RTX 4060 and RTX 3070 to the test using a homemade Peltier liquid cooling system using AIOs, a custom loop, and homemade DC controllers. Sadly, testing revealed that despite having thermoelectric properties, the results were underwhelming.

    • New York Times ☛ A Cyclist on the English Landscape

      A year ago, as a travel photographer grounded by the pandemic, I started bringing a camera and tripod with me on my morning bicycle rides, shooting them as though they were magazine assignments.

      It started out as just something to do — a challenge to try to see the familiar through fresh eyes. Soon it blossomed into a celebration of traveling at home.

    • Mike Brock ☛ The First Domino

      The CEO, Dave Davis, named the cause of the failure in plain language. “Everybody burning cash — we just had a smaller pile to start with.” The cash burn is from the doubling of jet fuel prices. The doubling of jet fuel prices is from the global supply contraction that followed the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz is from the war Donald Trump started against Iran without congressional authorization, in violation of the War Powers Act, in violation of the Constitution, against the advice of his own military leadership, and which he has now apparently lost, at the cost of American blood and treasure and the cost of American leadership in a region the United States has spent eighty years stabilizing.

      Spirit was the first airline to fall. Davis was explicit about the rest. “They’re not that far behind us in the race.” The other low-cost carriers are now standing in the same fuel-price line Spirit was standing in. They have larger piles of cash. The piles are still finite. The fuel prices are still doubled. The math does what math does.

    • Jan-Lukas Else ☛ My longest single-day bike ride

      In the end, I rode 136 km, 60 of which on the return trip were almost entirely against a 10 km/h headwind. I drank quite a bit, but I ate far too little. The return trip in particular, especially once I was already a good distance out of Celle, was physically, but also mentally, very difficult at times.

  • Overpopulation

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ California and other states tout new Colorado River water-saving plan

      The plan calls for reducing California’s use of Colorado River water by about 13% in 2027 and 2028. Arizona and Nevada agreed to larger cutbacks.

      Managers of various water agencies still need to negotiate the specifics of how the water cuts will be divided between cities and farming areas.

    • Western Water ☛ Phoenix outlines plan for long-term water security

      Phoenix does not depend on just one source of water. Instead, it pulls from the Salt and Verde rivers, the Colorado River, and underground groundwater supplies. This mix has helped the city stay stable even during dry years.

      City officials said this approach did not happen overnight. It reflects decades of planning, investment, and careful management.

    • Wired ☛ This Summer, the American Water Crisis Becomes Real

      Concerns over water access are poised to consume summer in the US, as crises in Corpus Christi and across the Colorado River threaten to boil over.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ How widespread is global fatigue with the US?

    "That's where the US were really innovative," says Frank Mehring, professor for American Studies at the Radboud University, Nijmengen. "They realized that arts and culture can help convince people to do the right thing, and that films, photography and exhibitions can provide a new perspective that moves away from solely focusing on your own country to actually finding a new role within Europe. And that was also the beginning of a new perspective on the US."

    In 1963, pro-American sentiment in West Germany peaked at over 80% — not least thanks to the popularity of the young US president at the time, John F. Kennedy.

  • Nick Heer ☛ The Proxy Battle Over A.I. Policy Is Brewing

    Also, you will note that, instead of citing academics or subject matter experts, Moynihan favourably quotes the executive director of Build America [sic] AI [sic]. But Moynihan does not note the group’s funding sources nor explain anything more about it.

  • Mike Brock ☛ No, Government Should Not Be Pro-Business

    It is entirely inappropriate for a government to be pro-business. The entire notion of a pro-business government is corrupt in the first instance. Business is a thing that happens inside government. It is the thing made possible by the laws and norms a government establishes. The purpose of a government in a republic is to represent the interests of the people. Whether those interests involve business is up for debate inside the republic’s institutions. If so-called libertarians think that is statism or socialism, they have stopped knowing what the words mean.

    I want to slow down on that opening, because I think the people who will reflexively reject it will reject it for reasons they have not examined, and the unexamined reasons are the entire problem.

  • Atharva Raykar ☛ notes on giving compliments

    I grew up not being great at giving compliments. This was because I often saw grown-ups around me deploy compliments in a fake, ritualistic way. This made me overcorrect by holding back my appreciation for other people's gifts as some kind of misguided rebellion against fake compliments.

    There are many good reasons to compliment people. The most important reason is that it's important information transmission. I've found it hard to discern how good my choices are. Well-crafted compliments from friends and family have helped me make better choices.

  • Wired ☛ Some Musk v. Altman Jurors Don't Like Elon Musk

    “The reality is that many people don’t like him,” Gonzalez Rogers told the courtroom. She added that she believed Americans with negative feelings about Musk could still have integrity for the judicial process and decide the case fairly. The jury will help establish the core facts regarding whether Scam Altman and other defendants improperly steered OpenAI's nonprofit venture away from its original mission, potentially violating the law in the process. But their verdict will be advisory—Gonzalez Rogers will have the final call.

  • The Verge ☛ The craziest part of Musk v. Altman happened while the jury was out of the room

    Gonzalez Rogers then asked who’d passed the note, and all the lawyers just sat there like guilty children. Finally, the guy responsible said he’d passed it, but he didn’t write it; a junior lawyer did. Who wrote it? More silence. Finally Toberoff — hardly a junior lawyer — stood up and took responsibility. Why had he done it? “I thought it was appropriate.”

    “Sounds like you wanted to open the door, then,” Gonzalez Rogers said. We adjourned while she said she’d consider what to do with this testimony. She will probably rule on it tomorrow.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • RFERL ☛ Iranian Nobel Laureate Narges Mohammadi 'On Brink Of Death'

    Following her arrest, she was given a new prison sentence of 7 ½ years, and is being held in Zanjan prison, some 330 kilometers west of the capital, Tehran.

  • The Zambian Observer ☛ Zambia: World’s Larvest Summit on Human Rights, Technology Effectively Canceled

    A civil society activist involved in the RightsCon organizing committee in Lusaka told Human Rights Watch that the postponement came after the Chinese government had expressed displeasure to Zambian authorities about invited participants from Taiwan. A Zambian media outlet similarly reported that Zambian authorities were uncomfortable with the participation of “Taiwanese delegates who would potentially speak against China at a venue donated by the Chinese government.”

    The Mulungushi Conference Center, which was to host the summit, was refurbished in 2020 with funding from the Chinese government at a reported cost of US$60 million. Zambian authorities at the time described the support as a “gift from […] China” with “no strings attached.” Human Rights Watch could not independently verify that China had a role in the government’s decision. Human Rights Watch requested comment from the Zambian government and the Chinese Embassy in Lusaka but did not receive an immediate response.

  • The Independent UK ☛ Joe Rogan responds to Trump administration indicting James Comey over ‘86 47’ seashell image: ‘That is nuts’

    Speaking on his podcast Friday, Rogan argued that prosecuting an ambiguous post risks expanding how the legal system defines threats, potentially undermining First Amendment protections.

    Comey has been charged by a federal grand jury in North Carolina with two counts related to alleged threats against President Donald Trump. The case stems from a 2025 Instagram post showing seashells arranged to read “86 47.” Prosecutors say “86” can mean “get rid of” or “eliminate,” as it does in restaurant slang, and argue it could be interpreted as referring to Trump, the 47th president. Comey previously said he viewed the message as political rather than threatening and maintained his innocence in court on Wednesday.

  • Meduza ☛ Report: ICE detains Russian Buddhist lama who spoke out against war in Ukraine, deportation possible

    No further details about the circumstances of his detention have been made available.

    After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began, Bazarov spoke out openly against the war. “Buddha said: you cannot kill even a mosquito, even a bedbug. Every living creature is sacred. All the more so — [you cannot kill] a person,” People of Baikal quoted the lama as saying.

  • Democracy for the Arab World Now ☛ DAWN Statement on Bahrain and Kuwait’s Revocation of Citizenship and Crackdown on Free Expression

    "Bahrain and Kuwait are using the war as cover to crush what remains of civic space in their countries," said Omar Shakir, Executive Director at DAWN. "Stripping people of citizenship, detaining journalists, and criminalizing online speech are not measures of stability; they are signs of governments terrified of their own publics."

  • 404 Media ☛ China Pressure Canceled World’s Largest Digital Human Rights Conference

    On Wednesday, guests and speakers from across the planet headed to Zambia to attend RightsCon, the largest digital human rights conference in the world. Zambian immigration officials turned away early arrivals, saying the conference had been cancelled. The African country’s government posted a vague message on Facebook saying the conference had been postponed. By the end of the day, event organizers Access Now officially cancelled the conference and told participants not to go to Africa.

    RightsCon is a large conference that takes years to plan and hosts thousands of people. It requires a high level of coordination between Access Now and the host country and it’s odd to cancel something this logistically complicated five days before it begins. On Friday, Access Now revealed details about what happened in a blog post. WIRED earlier reported on the Chinese pressure.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Estonia falls to 3rd place on World Press Freedom Index 2026

    "Even though journalists face physical and online threats that encourage self-censorship, they benefit from a protective legal and political environment," the index said.

    The only countries to score higher were Norway (92.72), which has held the top spot for 10 years, and the Netherlands (88.92), which was in third place in last year's ranking.

  • The Walrus ☛ If Killing Journalists Is a War Crime, Why Isn’t Anyone Stopping It?

    Journalists are broadly treated as civilians under international law and international humanitarian law. Targeting them militarily is a war crime. Despite outcry from organizations such as the United Nations and the CPJ, no one has been held responsible for journalists’ killings.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Futurism ☛ Chinese Court Rules That a Worker Cannot Be Replaced by AI

    Last week, according to the state-run Xinhua News Agency, a Chinese court ruled that companies can’t use AI as an excuse to fire workers. The case involved a quality assurance supervisor, identified only by his surname Zhou, who was hired in 2022 to oversee a tech company’s AI output. When his bosses tried to replace him with a large language model (LLM) in 2025, they offered him a demotion with a 40 percent pay cut.

    Unsurprisingly, Zhou refused — so the company fired him, offering a severance package worth around $45,000. Unhappy with the rather paltry payout, Zhou contested the severance offer through a government arbitration panel.

  • TruthOut ☛ The Unions We Need Will Be Built by Workers, Not Labor Officials

    In Unions of Our Own, longtime labor organizer Daniel Gross suggests the type of power that can challenge the ruling class may emerge when workers themselves — not union officials — design and refine unions that meet their needs. The new book introduces an accessible step-by-step union model framework to help workers take on the task of building unions that actually work for them, informed by decades of Gross’s own organizing experience — including as a founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World Starbucks Workers Union in 2004 — and countless conversations with other worker-organizers. Bringing together insights that have achieved victories going back over a century, the union model framework is being used by a growing community of workers in diverse industries.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ How Massachusetts Teachers Transformed Their Union

    Jacobin columnist Chris Brooks spoke with Page about what it takes to successfully drive a reform agenda, how high-participation bargaining changes both outcomes and consciousness, and why taxing the rich has become central to rebuilding working-class power.

  • Kevin Underhill ☛ Six-Month Sentence in Bee-Assault Case

    It seems like only yesterday that a Massachusetts beekeeper was charged with seven felonies for opening a bee box, but in fact it was October 19, 2022. And while the proceedings took much longer than I would have expected, based on prior research I’m not too surprised that they resulted in some jail time. See “Are Honeybees ‘Dangerous Weapons’?” (Oct. 21, 2022). According to reports, the beekeeper in question was sentenced this week to six months in jail.

  • Wired ☛ This Indigenous Language Survived Russian Occupation. Can It Survive YouTube?

    What they found is that Kyrgyz-language searches for popular kid interests such as cartoons, fairy tales, and mermaids often did not yield content in Kyrgyz. Even after watching 10 children's videos featuring Kyrgyz speech to demonstrate a strong desire for it, the simulated users received fewer Kyrgyz-language recommendations for what to watch next than, surprisingly, bots showing no language preference at all. The findings show YouTube prioritizes Russian-language content over Kyrgyz-language videos, especially when searching or browsing children’s topics, according to the researchers.

    “Kyrgyz children are algorithmically constructed as audiences for Russian content,” Nel Escher, a coauthor who is a postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley, said during a presentation at the school last week. “There is no good way to be a Kyrgyz-speaking kid on YouTube.”

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Howard Oakley ☛ Virtualisation on Apple silicon Macs is different

    Before Apple silicon Macs, you’ve been able to run different versions of macOS, Linux or Windows in third-party virtualisers, such as those from VMware and Parallels. Those products enable a virtual machine running a different operating system to be hosted in macOS, both running code for Intel processors. As part of its engineering preparations for the switch to using Arm processors, Apple decided that the only practical way to support virtualisation on its new Mac hardware was to build it into macOS. This was to enable older versions of macOS, and other operating systems including Linux and Windows for Arm, to run in virtual machines.

    This is quite different from the more challenging problem of running operating systems for different processors, such as Intel, on Apple silicon Macs. Although Intel apps can have their code translated by Rosetta 2, that doesn’t work for operating systems, which need a software emulator, a feature left for the likes of UTM.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Capitalism Was Built on the Ruins of the Commons

    This conversation between Peter Linebaugh and Daniel Denvir was recorded for the Jacobin Radio podcast The Dig over the course of two episodes, edited and condensed here for brevity and clarity. In it, Linebaugh ranges across centuries and continents to argue that the commons is not an archaic curiosity but the suppressed foundation of modern life, and that its recovery is inseparable from any serious challenge to capitalism.

  • Robert Reich ☛ For May Day: The System We Need

    Sound radical? Maybe it is. But shareholder capitalism doesn’t work — as illustrated by the Warner Bros. Discovery fiasco. Unless radical changes are made, that fiasco is just a taste of what’s to come. If Artificial Intelligence isn’t to destroy capitalism and obliterate democracy, we’re going to have to come up with something that does work, and soon.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: The prehistory of the Democratic Nuremberg Caucus (02 May 2026)

    Under the Correcting Lapsed Enforcement in Antitrust Norms for Mergers (CLEAN Mergers) Act, any company that was acquired in a deal worth $10b or more will have to break up with its merger partner if it turns out that these mergers were "politically influenced." "Politically influenced" sums up every major merger under the Trump II regime:

    https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/13/khanservatives/#kid-rock-eats-shit

    You could be forgiven for assuming that this is just about reining in Wall Street greed, but that it isn't an especially political maneuver. That's not true: antitrust is the most consequentially political regulation (with the possible exception of regulations on elections). Every fascist power defeated in WWII relied on the backing of their national monopolists to take, hold and wield power. That's why the Marshall Plan technocrats who rewrote the laws of Europe, South Korea and Japan made sure to copy over US antitrust law onto those statute-books (that's also why the tech antitrust cases brought in Europe could be re-run in South Korea and Japan – their laws are all substantively similar, because they were harmonized with US antitrust in the 1950s): [...]

  • Trademarks

    • Right of Publicity

      • El País ☛ ‘They’re using my images to sell products’: Influencers angry with Instagram over the new feature

        The social network has implemented a ‘Shop the Look’ tool, still in the testing phase, that suggests products linked to the image of content creators (who were never notified and are not being paid)

      • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ 'Clearly me': Chinese AI drama accused of stealing faces

        The 26-year-old is one of two people who told AFP their likenesses were cast without consent in the AI-generated show “The Peach Blossom Hairpin”, which ran on Hongguo, a major microdrama app owned by TikTok parent company ByteDance.