Leftovers

• [Old] First Monday ☛ When Beggars Become Choosers

  This paper explores the notion of leadership in open source software development projects. This paper departs from the discussion of leadership in Learner and Tiroles working paper "The Simple Economics of Open Source". My paper argues that leaders in open source projects only have indirect means of influence on what co-developers should develop. It is shown that leaders are beggars for help and contributions from co-developers, when the project starts up. But leaders become choosers, if a project becomes successful and attracts the attention of productive co-developers. The paper discusses the source of power of the open source project leaders as well.

• Chris Maiorana ☛ Basic Saxon vs Latinate Construction for Beginners and Obsessives

  I’ve mentioned this a lot to my writers group over the years, so I thought I’d finally write it down. English carries two parallel vocabularies: short, blunt Saxon words inherited from Anglo-Saxon, and longer, softer Latinate words that arrived through French. The choice between them is one of the most basic levers a writer has, and most beginner writers reach for it without knowing they’re doing it.

• Science

  • Wired ☛ NASA’s Curiosity Rover Got Its Drill Stuck on a Rock. Here’s How They Freed It

    This is the first time NASA has encountered a situation like this, and it took nearly a week to resolve.

  • Sean Goedecke ☛ AI datacenters in space do not have a cooling problem

    Of course, you don’t just need radiators to put a datacenter in space. You need a similar quantity of solar panels, the GPUs themselves, and all kinds of other supporting equipment. If a GPU dies in an Earth datacenter, you can go in and swap it out; if it dies in space, you just have to leave it dead and keep going with less capacity.

    It’s still wildly impractical to build AI datacenters in space. But it’s not impossible, and it’s certainly not impossible because of the cooling, which is a relatively minor component of the total mass that would have to be launched into space.

• Career/Education

  • High Country News ☛ Heavy metal is healing teens on the Blackfeet Nation - High Country News

    In response to youth suicides, teachers show students the power of headbanging at Fire in the Mountains festival.

  • Seth Godin ☛ The airplane oath

    The really cool thing is that you don’t need to avoid a possible plane crash to wake up, see what’s going on in your life and take an oath. You can do it simply because it’s May 13th.

  • Neil Selwyn ☛ Digital degrowth and education

    Q. Regarding the diagnosis of the problem, at what point do you think digitalization stopped being merely a tool and became a growth logic that is difficult to question?

  • Juha-Matti Santala ☛ A love letter to our library bus

    Every Friday afternoon, a library bus comes visit our neighbourhood. It’s not an absolute necessity to me as the main library is a short bus ride away but I visit it every other Friday.

    I love a library bus as a concept. A bus full of books, DVDs and CDs comes to my neighbourhood and I can pick up anything I want for free. The regular pace of two weeks between visits gives me a good boundary that leads to me reading more. The limited collection makes it easier to give into the randomness to discover new things.

  • Dieter Plaetinck ☛ Open Source Consulting & Advisory

    I don’t claim to be the world’s expert, but the few startups that worked with me were glad they did, so I decided to launch a consulting business. If this sounds interesting, check out the Consulting/advisory page for more details.

  • Derek Sivers ☛ My life was changed by four sentences in four books

    Last week someone asked why I prefer books. My immediate answer was that I love their quiet, non-commercial nature. No ads. No hype. Just quiet wisdom with deep rewards for a focused mind.

    But today I realized something more profound: Each of my biggest life-changing moments came from a single sentence deep inside a book.

  • Daniel Jalkut ☛ Thirty Years

    Today marks the 30 year anniversary of my becoming a full-time employee of Apple Computer, Inc.

• Hardware

  • 404 Media ☛ War and Data Centers Are Driving Up the Cost of Fiber-Optic Cable

    Spools of cable are critical for internet infrastructure and jam-proof drones but skyrocketing costs are making it hard to field them.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-05 [Older] Why is Amsterdam banning ads for meat?

• Proprietary

  • Michael Taggart ☛ Disclosure: Teachable's CDN Is Stealing From Teachers

    Earlier this year, I made the difficult decision to move on from Teachable as the course platform for The Taggart Institute. I couldn't be happier with the result, but while I was moving, I discovered a serious flaw in Teachable's configuration that allows the theft of intellectual property and the loss of revenue for teachers on the platform. As of this writing, the issue has only been partially addressed.

  • Michael Tsai ☛ OmniOutliner 6.1

    Multiple windows per document is probably my favorite new feature. I have some really big outlines that I don’t want to split up, because I like to be able to search everything at once. It had been unwieldy to flip back and forth to look at different parts of the document, so I had been duplicating the file in order to open another (view-only) copy in a separate window. Now I can just open another window—and it even supports more than two. This is also useful if I want to do a search without losing my current view.

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

    • Raspberry Pi ☛ Search our documentation by meaning, not keywords

      Something you may have heard about is retrieval-augmented generation (RAG for short), which uses a defined set of documentation to answer questions for you in an informed way. In this blog, we are trialling two different RAG-based documentation tools: InKeep and Kapa. Our website is serving two versions of today’s post to visitors at random; if you reload the page, you’ll get the other tool. Why not type a question about something you’d like to do with a Raspberry Pi into the chatbot below and see how it responds?

    • 404 Media ☛ Software Developers Say AI Is Rotting Their Brains

      “We're being told to use [AI] agents for broad changes across our codebase. There's no way to evaluate whether that much code is well-written or secure—especially when hundreds of other programmers in the company are doing the same,” a UX designer at a midsized tech company told me. 404 Media granted all the developers we talked to for this story anonymity because they signed non-disclosure agreements or because they fear retribution from their employers. “We're building a rat's nest of tech debt that will be impossible to untangle when these models become prohibitively expensive (any minute now...).”

    • PC World ☛ I was duped by an AI customer service bot and I hate it

      My interactions with the medical office AI bot didn’t bother me as much as my exchange with “Theo,” the restaurant AI. By giving itself a name but neglecting to disclose that it was a bot, Theo—and by extension the restaurant itself—made me feel like I’d been duped. Did I freak out and cancel my reservation? Well, no. (Mother’s Day brunch is a tough get in New York City.) But the stealth AI chat didn’t give me warm fuzzies about the restaurant either.

    • Rodrigo Ghedin ☛ Android 17, Gemini Intelligence, and Googlebook: My first impressions ⁄ Manual do Usuário

      The idea of agents performing actions in the background seems appealing to companies. I’m not sure I’d use it. First, because it doesn’t take much effort to create an event in the calendar, for example. Second, because agents require a level of trust that I’m not willing to grant to machines.

    • Nat Bennett ☛ Software delivery will continue to be non-linear

      What I think is going on with AI is that what software managers really want is to be able to turn a dial marked "Quality" down and see a gauge marked "Speed" go up. AI agents seem like they could give managers that dial, so they've gotten very excited. I do think that AI offers something closer to that dial than managers have ever had before, but that it still doesn't solve the problem with building that dial, which is that software projects are nonlinear systems with a tendency to collapse into pathological (non-software producing) states.

    • Kelson Vibber ☛ New agents.txt file found on DreamHost

      I host most of my websites on a DreamHost VPS. This morning I discovered that a new file had been added, agents.txt, to the root of each site, on May 7.

      It was easy to confirm that this is a new default file similar to the default robots.txt and favicon.ico DreamHost puts in every new site to get you started. Apparently they retroactively added it to sites that don’t already have one. So it’s a host action, not a hack. That’s good at least.

    • Jamie Zawinski ☛ A slopfondler walks into a bar, redux [Ed: Do not be afraid of slop peddlers, they should instead be afraid of humans. Slop won't replace humans; humans will render the slop obsolete.]

      Once or twice a month some tech industry guy recognizes me at DNA Lounge. It always used to be blah blah Mozilla blah blah Code Rush, whatever... but lately all they want to do is proselytize "AI" at me. This has been 100% of fanboy interactions this year. And then they're shocked when I don't want to hear about their awesome project and in fact I tell them that what they are doing is unethical and harmful.

      It's so weird, like: you sought me out at my place of business and the first thing you do is demonstrate that you haven't read my blog, ever.

    • Dr Molly Tov ☛ this is probably the depression talking

      But: Today, I have a hefty case of "what is the use?" when it comes to our AI future.

      This crap machine has taken over EVERYTHING. I've nearly given up on the Web because there's so little that isn't offensive to look at or read. It's not only that I can't trust information; it's that it's actually painful to behold AI-generated crap.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Google replaces your PC mouse with yelling at Gemini

      A voice interface can be useful. A mandatory voice interface is less useful.

      None of the corporate drones saying this stuff will use it this way themselves. They just think they can sell you on it.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ GitLab announces AI layoffs, stock goes down 9%

      You can translate that, right? He means layoffs. Announcements like this say “AI” to mean layoffs. You always go into your “largest opportunity” with less people, right.

    • Ben Werdmuller ☛ AI may be the new gatekeepers, but human connection is more needed than ever

      For me, the framing of AI’s effects on existing information ecosystems while it establishes a new one was helpful. It’s, frankly, brutal: social networks, other online spaces, and the web itself are getting filled with bots and slop as people compete for engagement and eyeballs. In these spaces, AI-powered harassment, doxxing, and cheap, automated content are becoming more prevalent, while AI models are simultaneously making it easier to extract signal from those same spaces.

  • Social Control Media

    • Manton Reece ☛ Manton Reece - Retiring Micro.one

      I think the experiment has run its course. Today we’ve closed Micro.one to new subscriptions. Existing Micro.one subscriptions are not affected and we will honor the $1 price indefinitely. I want to do more with the Micro.one brand in the future, but when it comes back it will probably be in a different form.

    • Jacky Alciné ☛ Where I'm going with the work I'm leaning into now - Jacky Alciné

      I've begun working with diVine as an opportune overlap: working on video-based social media with the weight of the name that Vine carried: it gave us short form portrait video. It being based on Nostr (and silently supporting ATProto — if you know where to look) made accepting a bit risky: my knowledge of Nostr as a technology, now wider, was initially similar to XMPP. I can talk to the protocol with more confidence now but my eagerness to work on this was the cultural impact Vine had (has!) and how important it is to leverage that as we aim to carve out new social spaces. We cannot moan about the dangers of social media and sit on our very capable hands and do nothing.

    • The Independent Variable ☛ Digg has (sorta) relaunched (again)

      I'm just trying to figure out if these people have absolutely no shame, or if they are embarrassed and do it anyway because they think they can make a buck off of it. [...]

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Billionaire solipsism, dictator solipsism, AI, and the fascist paradigm (13 May 2026)

      The problem (for powerful people) is that other people aren't things; they're people, with stubborn attachments to their own priorities and needs. This is a huge problem for social media bosses, since the force that keeps you stuck to their platforms is your love of your friends, which sucks (for social media bosses), because your friends refuse to organize their interactions with you to "maximize engagement." There is a group of platform users who are dedicated to maximizing your engagement: performers (which is why legacy social media platforms have reduced the quantum of your feed given over to your friends to a bare minimum and swapped in the amateur dramatics of theater kids). But even "influencers" demand treatment as people, not things (which is why legacy social media is squeezing out performers in favor of slop): [...]

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • BoingBoing ☛ Man who stole a coworker's identity for 30 years had his victim jailed

      Woods kept fighting. A detective took up the case in January 2023, DNA evidence confirmed Woods was who he said he was, and Keirans confessed when confronted. He pleaded guilty, and a federal judge sentenced him to 12 years, calling his conduct "unique, unusual, and egregious" and finding he "manipulated the criminal justice system to prosecute an innocent man." On April 23, 2026, the Eighth Circuit affirmed the sentence, noting that Woods "would not have been in a position where he would have been subject to being institutionalized but for [Keirans's] insistence that [Woods] be prosecuted."

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • MIT Technology Review ☛ AI chatbots are giving out people’s real phone numbers

      People report that their personal contact info was surfaced by Google AI—and there’s apparently no easy way to prevent it.

    • HRW ☛ Looking the Other Way: EU Failure to Prevent Surveillance Exports to Rights Violators

      Increasing government use of commercial spyware and other types of surveillance technology poses a significant threat to human rights worldwide. Police and intelligence services in many countries use such technology to target activists, journalists, humanitarians, academics, and other critical voices, undermining democratic institutions, shrinking civic space, violating victims’ privacy and other rights and, in many cases, threatening their physical security.

      The European Union (EU), whose member states are home to many of the companies that develop and export such technologies worldwide, is part of the problem. Despite a regulatory framework designed in part to prevent abuses, the EU currently is doing too little to prevent sales and transfers from its member states to governments with a track record of using such technologies for crackdowns on dissent and other serious rights violations. Particularly for human rights defenders, journalists, and others whose work focuses on exposing abuse, corruption, and other crimes in both the public and private sectors, surveillance technology has been used to compromise their ability to work freely, safely and to protect their sources.

    • Cyble Inc ☛ EU Surveillance Technology Exports Face Scrutiny

      The European Union is facing renewed criticism over its failure to stop the export of surveillance technology to governments accused of human rights violations, according to a new report released by Human Rights Watch. The report claims that despite the EU’s landmark Dual-Use Regulation introduced in 2021, EU surveillance technology tool are still reaching countries where they are allegedly used to target journalists, activists, academics, and other critical voices.

      The 54-page report, titled “Looking the Other Way: EU Failure to Prevent Surveillance Exports to Rights Violators,” raises concerns about weak oversight, limited transparency, and gaps in enforcement within the EU’s surveillance technology export framework.

    • MacRumors ☛ Meta AI App Gets 'Incognito Chat' as OpenAI Faces Lawsuits Over Stored Chat Logs

      Lawsuits against OpenAI have involved chat logs recovered by the plaintiffs, and without those logs, there would be far less evidence for a legal complaint over AI actions and advice.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Democracy for the Arab World Now ☛ Wartime Cultural Erasure in Iran is the Latest Failure of the Rules-Based Order

    Hostilities in the U.S.-Israel war on Iran are currently paused, but the civilian damage caused by the conflict may not be remedied in the foreseeable future. One of the many ways the unprovoked campaign has harmed Iranians is the destruction of the country’s cultural heritage sites during airstrikes that have reportedly cost U.S. taxpayers $25 billion.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-04 [Older] Person shot near Washington Monument, US Secret Service says

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-04 [Older] Pushback in Nigeria over ex-Boko Haram fighter reintegration

• Environment

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Mike Brock ☛ Silicon Valley Needs Your Electricity

      We regret to inform you that nearly 50,000 residents of the Lake Tahoe region are about to lose their power source. NV Energy, the Berkshire Hathaway-owned utility that has supplied wholesale electricity to the area for decades, has informed Liberty Utilities — the small California company that retails the power to those 50,000 households — that it will stop providing service after May 2027. The reason, helpfully provided by NV Energy itself, is that the utility needs the capacity for data centers. Google, Apple, and Microsoft are building or expanding facilities in the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center east of Reno, and the load growth from these projects is, in NV Energy‘s own filings, projected to constitute 75% of major-project demand in Northern Nevada through 2033. Data centers were 22% of Nevada’s electricity in 2024. They are projected to reach 35% by 2030.

    • Robert Lützner ☛ We got a new bike!

      Oh, right the bike chain. Again, just a subtle change from what we had before. The main lock is on the wheel, with a key that only detaches when you close the lock. And then it has this massive lasso chain that you wrap around a bar or tree somewhere and then hook it into the wheel lock. Same as before, but with the crate, I can just throw the chain in and get going, instead of having to fiddle with that little bag we had on our last bike that would fit the chain if you put it in just right, no, not like this, fold it like — DAMMIT WHY IS THIS TAKING SO LONG!?

    • Fortune ☛ Nearly 50,000 Lake Tahoe residents face power loss as utility redirects lines to data centers

      NV Energy, the Nevada utility that has supplied the bulk of Lake Tahoe’s electricity for decades, told Liberty Utilities—the small California company that services the region—that it will stop providing power after May 2027. The reason? NV Energy needs the capacity for data centers. As in: the energy supplier for the Lake Tahoe region is telling the utility company that it has less than a year to find another power source.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-05 [Older] The sea that is vanishing in real time

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Inkscape ☛ Inkscape supports German petition to recognize Open Source volunteers

    Inkscape is driven by volunteers who gift us (all of us, that includes you!) their most valuable resource: their time. If there's something that we can give back to them, it's our appreciation and our support to see them recognized for all their efforts.

    This is why the Inkscape project has joined the group of supporting organizations for the German petition to recognize open source work as volunteering for the common good ("Ehrenamt"). Despite the petition being local to Germany, we believe that strengthening the position of open source contributors there will be beneficial to the open source community as a whole.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Anduril doubles valuation to $61B in new $5B funding round

    The company sells not only hardware products but also software for powering them. Its flagship software product, Lattice, can visualize data from thousands of sensors in a real-time map. Built-in artificial intelligence models analyze the information to generate decision recommendations.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Microsoft's LinkedIn is about to lay off 5% of its staff

    Presently, LinkedIn employs close to 17,500 staff globally, which would put the cull count near 875. Though the specifics of the layoffs have yet to be delineated, the source told Reuters that the headcount blitz is not related artificial intelligence and automated processes. They have, however, been confirmed, as a spokesperson for LinkedIn told various media, “As part of our usual business planning, we’ve implemented organizational changes to position ourselves in the best way possible into the future.”

    The company’s potential cuts come as revenue at LinkedIn, which sells recruiting tools and subscriptions, rose 12% in the just-ended quarter from a year earlier, accelerating growth in 2026, according to Microsoft securities filings.

  • Haaretz ☛ Microsoft Israel Head Exits Amid Scrutiny of IDF Cloud Services Use

    Microsoft says Alon Haimovich is 'stepping down' after reports linked him to an internal probe over the Israeli military's use of Azure cloud services for intelligence gathering, prompting legal concerns in Europe and employee protests in the U.S.

  • Mike Brock ☛ In Defense of Milton Friedman

    I should say at the outset, because the rest of these pages will be a defense, that I am not a Friedmanite. My own intellectual trajectory ran through libertarianism, Austrian economics, and a close brush with Bitcoin maximalism before the return to the roots of the liberal tradition I have been working through these pages, and I differ from Friedman now on substantive questions about the legitimate scope of public expenditure, about the political-economic conditions under which markets serve human flourishing, about the cases in which corrective intervention is appropriate, about the broader political-philosophical questions that the meaning-making liberalism I have been articulating reaches toward. The defense offered here is not an endorsement of his framework. The defense is a recognition that the historical figure has been systematically misrepresented by two factions whose political-cultural infrastructure has invested in the misrepresentation, and that the misrepresentation has been damaging the intellectual culture and the political coalitions that have absorbed it.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Paul Krugman ☛ The Apotheosis of Willful Ignorance

      The so-called experts were completely right.

      Right now inflation is surging; manufacturing employment is down; the Strait of Hormuz remains closed; and Trump is traveling to Beijing as a supplicant, in effect begging China for help getting out of his Iran mess.

      But it would be foolish to expect Trump and his minions to learn anything from their humiliation.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Ken Klippenstein ☛ New Counterterror Strategy Eyes Tucker Carlson

    Two right-wing figures — Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes — have been named by the White House as possible domestic terrorists, according to the Trump administration’s top counterterrorism official.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • CPJ ☛ Taliban raids TOLOnews office in Afghanistan after detaining 2 journalists

    “The Taliban’s detention of Mansoor Niazi and Imran Danish, followed by a sweeping raid on a major independent media organization, underscores the climate of fear facing journalists in Afghanistan,” said CPJ Asia-Pacific Program Coordinator Kunal Majumder. “Taliban authorities must immediately and unconditionally release the detained journalists and ensure the press can operate without interference.”

    Taliban intelligence agents also took control of Niazi’s social media account following his detention and posted messages suggesting he was at home, raising concerns about coercion, reported London-based television station Afghanistan International.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ EU considers running undersea cable under the North Pole to link Europe to Asia — Polar Connect aims to bypass the Strait of Hormuz and Russia by 2030

    Events like these have led some undersea cable operators to look to the Persian Gulf as an alternative, but the war between the U.S. and Iran has thrown that alternative route into turmoil. Meta, which was laying a part of its 2Africa project when the American bombing campaign began, declared force majeure and delayed the project. Furthermore, an IRGC-linked new agency has been calling on Iranian authorities to tax and control undersea cables that go through the Strait of Hormuz.

  • The Verge ☛ The EU wants to make the internet with a submarine cable in the Arctic

    The vast majority of the world’s data — emails, financial transactions, the internet — is carried by fiber optic cables that run along the ocean floor and converge at a few narrow choke points. Periodically, policymakers will release reports noting that this arrangement seems risky, but these routes are the shortest, often in use since the telegraph era, and the system has managed remarkably well. Cables break regularly, and traffic gets rerouted until a repair ship can come and fix the cut. But the war in Iran, coming after several years of disruptions from conflict in Yemen, is spurring governments and companies to consider alternate routes, including one going across the North Pole.

    The current problems began in 2024, when a Houthi missile struck a cargo ship in the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait off the coast of Yemen, causing the vessel to drift for days and drag its anchor across three of the more than a dozen submarine cables crammed into the narrow Red Sea passage.

  • Kev Quirk ☛ Upgrading My Home Internet to Full Fibre

    I thought it would be this incredible difference where my internet would then be rapid, but the truth is, it's complete imperceptible. I remember when I upgraded from a 56k MODEM, to ~2Mbps broadband and it blew my mind. I was thinking this would be the same, but no.

    I do think the increased upload speed is going to come in handy when it comes to things like syncing my private git repos back to my Synology, but aside from that, there's not much in it.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • [Old] CoryDoctorow ☛ How to Fix Cars* By Breaking “Felony Contempt of Business Model”

    There was no market for this product. Anyone who bought a DVD player did so because they didn’t know about this restriction, or because they were indifferent to it. No showroom, no advertisement, no press-release bragged about region-locking.

    Quite the contrary! A proliferation of small electronics manufacturers in the Pacific Rim began to manufacture DVD players that had no region locks, or where the region locking could be easily disabled (say, by keying a secret sequence into the remote). This was advertised, because while customers didn’t value region-locking, they were hungry for its absence. That’s what made it an anti-feature: people wouldn’t pay extra to get region-locking, but they’d actively seek out models that lacked it.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Copyrights

    • Creative Commons ☛ From Signals to Infrastructure: Strengthening the Commons for the AI Era

      When it comes to AI, copyright operates in a landscape that is uneven and often unclear. Because of this, the CC licenses, while still important, are not sufficient to address how content is used in AI systems. You can read more on this here. CC licenses also do not fully capture the range of intentions creators and data holders have in an AI-mediated world.

      Across the web, creators, communities, and institutions are turning to multiple forms of defensive enclosure to restrict access. These include: [...]

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Publishers: Google's Ebook Ad "Ban" Blocked Legitimate Sellers, Not Pirates

      The textbook publishers that sued Google over pirated ebook ads have responded to the company's effort to dismiss their case. The publishers argue that Google's specific ads for pirate books qualify as contributory copyright infringement under the Supreme Court's Cox ruling. Google's ban on ebook ads fits this picture, they say, as it only worked against legitimate sellers.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Broadcaster Loses FIFA World Cup Rights After 20 Years, Citing “Rampant Piracy”

      After more than two decades broadcasting the FIFA World Cup in Malaysia, pay-TV operator Astro has lost the rights to the tournament. The company says that "rampant piracy" reduced the value of the rights, noting that the 2018 and 2022 tournaments were "extensively pirated" in the country. The admission comes amidst licensing challenges in countries such as China and India, which could severely impact pirate demand too.