Leftovers

• Mike Rockwell ☛ Tech Is Not Boring

  A handful of years ago I found excitement in Apple, iOS apps, and the surrounding ecosystem. But now I’m paying attention to Linux, self-hosting, and companies like Framework.

• Justin Vollmer ☛ Ending My Weekly Notes

  After over a year of weekly notes, I’ve decided to place the series on indefinite hiatus. I’ve struggled to keep up with it over the past 2-3 months, as my time has been consumed by projects I’m not ready to write about (work and personal).

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Computational Complexity ☛ Computational Complexity: Scott Aaronson wins Trevisan Award? Prize? Medal? Statue?

    The Trevisan Award is in memory of Luca Trevisan and recognizes expository work in Theoretical Computer Science. It is given out by the ACM. The ACM announcement of Scott's award is here. Scott blogged about winning it here.

• Career/Education

  • ACM ☛ In Memoriam: Peter G. Neumann (1932-2026)

    For seven decades, Neumann chronicled how computer systems fail and patiently advocated for the principles that make them fail less often.

  • Nathan Upchurch ☛ Re: What Would You Do if You Didn't Have to Work?

    In response to this recent post by gary online: I am absolutely not someone who derives their worth or identity by what they do to earn a crust. If I didn’t have to work, I’d lead a richness of life that would put to shame both the wastrels[1] of inherited stolen means who live by the labor of others, and the wealthy denizens of the c-suite who earn their exorbitant salaries by becoming professional whip-crackers for the former. Here are a few things I’d like to do.

  • Kevin Kelly ☛ The Technium: Your Most Improbable Life

    Your life’s goal should be to become the most improbable person you can be. Your path, your character, your life, should be the most unlikely, the most unexpected, the least predictable version you can make. Improbable lives have fewer competitors, more unique rewards, and are harder to replace with AIs, since AIs run on the predictable. This is true whether you favor traditional humanist directions or work on a frontier.

• Hardware

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ Boston Dynamics reveals how Atlas lifts 100-pound industrial loads

    In a newly released technical blog, the robotics company showed Atlas rotating its torso 180 degrees, squatting to pick up a mini-fridge, and carrying it across a lab floor while adjusting to shifting weight inside the object. The company said the behavior was developed within weeks of Atlas’ public debut earlier this year.

    The latest demo marks a shift from choreographed robot movements toward adaptable industrial behaviors designed for factories, warehouses, and construction sites. Boston Dynamics said Atlas is being developed as a “general purpose tool for physical work.”

  • The Drone Girl ☛ I finally watched the Hong Kong Disneyland Momentous drone show. Here's your complete guide

    Momentous is Hong Kong Disneyland’s nighttime spectacular. Technically, the show runs 28 minutes and layers eight multimedia elements simultaneously: drones, large-scale 3D projection mapping, illuminated water projections, choreographed water fountains, flames, lasers, theatrical lighting, and pyrotechnics. Though, drones really only appear for the first 10-ish minutes.

  • Jim Grey ☛ 50mm f/1.8 Canon FD

    Canon made the 50mm f/1.8 FD lens in several versions across its manual-focus era, beginning in 1971 with the “chrome nose” breech-lock version, progressing through the SC (Spectral Coating) breech-lock version in 1973, and ending with the New FD bayonet-mount version introduced in 1979. All versions share the same six-element, four-group optical formula. Having owned and shot all three versions, I can’t tell the difference in output among them. Buy whichever one you find.

  • David Oks ☛ Why Japanese companies do so many different things

    Since 1988, in a once-obscure corner of the company called the “advanced ceramics division,” Toto has been producing a very particular component called the electrostatic chuck, or the “e-chuck.” The e-chuck is a sort of high-precision ceramic plate, about the size of a steering wheel, that uses electrostatic force to hold a silicon wafer perfectly flat and thermally stable while memory chips are etched into it with bombardments of plasma. Making these components is extraordinarily difficult, since the ceramic body needs to have near-zero particle generation and be polished to submicron flatness: and this means that there are only a few companies in the world that are capable of manufacturing e-chucks reliably. Almost all of them—Shinko Electric, NGK, Toto, Kyocera, Sumitomo Osaka Cement, Niterra—are based in Japan.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • RTL ☛ As bee population collapses, US apiarists fear research cuts

    But the group -- and beekeepers across the country -- face a new challenge: The government's closure of a key research facility, home to the nation's oldest bee lab that has been at the vanguard of research into bee ills for over a century.

    Funkhouser, a veteran commercial beekeeper, should have around 1,200 hives under his care. This year, he's sitting on less than 200.

  • Alcides Fonseca ☛ UK's NHS just got called to the principal's office

    In Portugal, I do not see a push towards open-source. There are a few exceptions but, in general, Portugal is lacking in developing in the open. I would love to spend time fixing bugs in the software I have to use.

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • The Register UK ☛ F-35 software delays leave UK buying time with US glide bombs

    This capability should have been delivered by now through the Block 4 software update from F-35 prime contractor Lockheed Martin, but this has met with a series of delays. It is now expected in 2031, five years behind schedule.

  • Rui Carmo ☛ Apple Papercuts

    I know this blog has strayed a fair distance from its Mac-centric origins, but I’ve been keeping a mental list of all the things that are broken, missing or inexplicably neglected in Apple’s software, and it’s gotten long enough that writing it down feels like a public service1.

    This isn’t about Liquid Glass or grand design failures–those are well documented elsewhere. This is about the small stuff. The papercuts that, individually, you learn to live with, and collectively make you wonder whether anyone at Apple actually uses their software.

  • Lee Peterson ☛ Trying to switch away from US tech (again)

    I’m starting again, making the switch to non US tech is an end goal of mine but I’ve struggled in the past. Here’s my starting point, all on iPad and iPhone.

  • Jim Nielsen ☛ Something’s Rotten in the State of macOS Icon Design

    It’s fast becoming the case that if you put any Mac app’s icons in reverse, it looks like the portfolio of someone getting really, really good at icon design.

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

    • Engadget ☛ LinkedIn Doesn't Want Your AI Slop Anymore

      LinkedIn isn't sharing a lot of detail about how it's defining or detecting AI slop, but says that its engineers collaborated with its in-house editorial team to identify "patterns in how members engage, recognizing what adds perspective, context, or expertise versus what simply repeats existing ideas without contributing anything new." When identified by LinkedIn, these posts will no longer appear in other users' recommendations, though they'll still be viewable to a person's direct connections and followers.

      While undeniably welcome news, LinkedIn is also trying to walk a fine line here. The platform offers a bunch of its own generative AI tools, including a big "rewrite with AI" button in its post composer. Even as it's cracking down on AI slop, the Microsoft-owned company is careful to say that "AI-assisted" content is still welcome so long as it contains original ideas or encourages "meaningful conversation."

    • Futurism ☛ AI CEOs Baffled by Hatred of Their Technology

      Whereas AI CEOs tend to operate in between the extremes of AI-fueled utopia and total AI apocalypse, the public is living in the reality of current consumer-facing AI tools’ ability and impact. It’s hard to sell people on a future AI-powered paradise when the everyday reality instead feels dystopian.

    • Futurism ☛ Sports Illustrated Just Deleted Every Article by One of Its Writers After Accusation of AI Plagiarism

      Last week, the sports news site Sportico published an article featuring an original analysis of parlay bets made via the prediction market Kalshi. Two days later, on May 15, Sports Illustrated published an article — titled “Who is really winning on Kalshi parlays according to the data” — that regurgitated the same figures, without ever attributing the analysis to Sportico, as would be the normal and ethical thing to do.

    • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Filter, Not Funnel: What Zero-click Means for Brand and Engagement

      The crocodile effect (where appearance in AI search results rise while actual clicks drop) is very real, with some publishers reporting drops of up to 30% in web traffic in recent months. At the same time, there’s been evidence that users who click through from AI tools can have up to 30% higher engagement rates. So what if this shift is less about losing traffic and more about filtering it? What if the audience arriving at your site has been pre-qualified by the discovery mechanism itself? How does that change the way we think about our brand?

      The researchers who click through from an AI response to a journal article were likely always going to click through to the version of record. They want to validate their sources. They understand what peer review means and they care about where research comes from. In other words, the audience that zero-click search is routing to your site is the high-intent, high-trust audience that every publisher should be building for anyway. This doesn’t make the traffic loss inconsequential — there are real downstream implications for discoverability and communicating the value of subscriptions — but it does argue for shifting the question from “how do we get traffic back?” to “how do we serve this filtered audience exceptionally well?”

    • The Atlantic ☛ AI Has Broken Containment

      The path here was not the inevitable result of some technological, scientific, or economic law. Nor is continuing down it. To the extent we are already living in the AI future, it is the result of a series of calculated decisions by the biggest tech firms and their investors. Silicon Valley has spent ungodly sums on AI and data centers: Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Google alone have already spent more on data centers since the launch of ChatGPT than the federal government spent to build the entire interstate highway system. Those expenditures are set to grow, even as consensus opinions on whether all this spending constitutes an economic bubble fluctuate every few months. Meanwhile, AI companies have been hard at work partnering with local and federal government agencies, major colleges and research universities, Fortune 500 companies, and media organizations to weave their products into everyday life.

      All of this spending and all of these partnerships were set in motion years before the technology was actually capable or reliable enough for widespread usage. Now these same companies are barreling forward to consummate their technological revolution. For everyone else, the AI future is beginning to feel less like something you participate in and more like something that happens to you.

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ Inside the AI compute crunch driving Google researchers to quit

      AI researchers sometimes feel as if they are losing out on computing power to paying customers, the people said. Google’s search and cloud computing units are also jockeying to use the company’s chips, known as tensor-processing units, or TPUs. Within the AI lab Google DeepMind, access to computing power influences the projects that researchers pursue, the leaders they align themselves with and the pace at which they work.

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ AI has invaded the L.A. mayor's race. Some fear it's just the beginning

      Pratt’s fan-generated AI election campaign videos have been praised and mocked, but heavily shared. And some see them as a harbinger of how artificial intelligence could reshape political messaging across the country.

      His supporters are far from the first to create AI-generated ads. But political experts say it’s remarkable the degree to which they have used new technology to churn out a stream of outlandish, hyper-cinematic memes, creating buzz around his campaign and his message.

      Some warn, however, that as the technology becomes more sophisticated, it will become harder for many people to distinguish between AI and real videos.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos — 'deal with it' one speaker fires back as students heckle positive pitches for AI's role

      Schmidt’s get-on-board messaging clearly didn’t resonate with the audience at the University of Arizona. Other speakers, including Gloria Caulfield, a VP for a major property development company, suggested that AI was "the next industrial revolution" during her speech at the University of Central Florida, and was promptly jeered. Meanwhile, music executive Scott Borchetta at Middle Tennessee State University suggested AI was "rewriting production as we sit here" and told his audience to "deal with it" as they jeered him in response.

    • The Register UK ☛ Surprise AI bills leave AWS and Google Cloud users aghast

      This week's episode of the Kettle focuses on two such stories that The Register published this week, one concerning Google and another involving AWS. In both cases, cloud customers using AI incurred massive bills without any prior notification from their provider and not a lot of help to resolve the matter with any sense of urgency.

    • The Register UK ☛ 'Big AI' is subverting regulations just like tobacco and oil firms

      Researchers at the University of Edinburgh, Trinity College Dublin, Delft University of Technology, and Carnegie Mellon University claim they identified patterns of "corporate capture" by which regulations and public bodies come to act in the interest of industry rather than the citizens they are meant to protect.

      Their paper, “Big AI’s Regulatory Capture: Mapping Industry Interference and Government Complicity,” details various mechanisms of capture and how these work.

    • arXiv ☛ [2605.06806] Big AI's Regulatory Capture: Mapping Industry Interference and Government Complicity

      Over the past decade, the AI industry has come to exert an unprecedented economic, political and societal power and influence. It is therefore critical that we comprehend the extent and depth of pervasive and multifaceted capture of AI regulation by corporate actors in order to contend and challenge it. In this paper, we first develop a taxonomy of mechanisms enabling capture to provide a comprehensive understanding of the problem. Grounded in design science research (DSR) methodologies and extensive scoping review of existing literature and media reports, our taxonomy of capture consists of 27 mechanisms across five categories. We then develop an annotation template incorporating our taxonomy, and manually annotate and analyse 100 news articles. The purpose behind this analysis is twofold: validate our taxonomy and provide a novel quantification of capture mechanisms and dominant narratives. Our analysis identifies 249 instances of capture mechanisms, often co-occurring with narratives that rationalise such capture. We find that the most recurring categories of mechanisms are Discourse & Epistemic Influence, concerning narrative framing, and Elusion of law, related to violations and contentious interpretations of antitrust, privacy, copyright and labour laws. We further find that Regulation stifles innovation, Red tape and National Interest are the most frequently invoked narratives used to rationalise capture. We emphasize the extent and breadth of regulatory capture by coalescing forces -- Big AI and governments -- as something policy makers and the public ought to treat as an emergency. Finally, we put forward key lessons learned from other industries along with transferable tactics for uncovering, resisting and challenging Big AI capture as well as in envisioning counter narratives.

    • OSTechNix ☛ Linux Kernel 7.1 RC4 Released: Torvalds Slams "Pointless" AI Bug Reports

      In the Linux 7.1-rc4 announcement mail, Linus Torvalds noted that these reports have made the kernel security mailing list almost impossible to manage.

      "Some of the documentation updates might be worth highlighting: the continued flood of AI reports has basically made the security list almost entirely unmanageable, with enormous duplication due to different people finding the same things with the same tools."

    • OS News ☛ OpenBSD and slopcode: raindrop to a torrent?

      Still, in the back of my mind, I always had a trump card: if all else fails, we’ll always have OpenBSD. Its project leader Theo de Raadt is deeply principled, every OpenBSD user and contributor I know hates “AI” deeply, and the project routinely sticks to their principles even when it’s difficult or inconvenient. Yes, this makes OpenBSD not the most ideal desktop operating system, but I’d rather use that than something that embraces the multitude of ethical, environmental, quality, and legal concerns regarding “AI” code completely.

      Imagine my surprise, then, to discover that OpenBSD already contains slopcode in its base installation, with the project’s leaders and developers remaining oddly silent about it. My friend and OSNews regular Morgan posted this on Fedi a few days ago: [...]

    • Marty Day ☛ Can AI Run A Radio Station? No. But The Results are FASCINATING

      This experiment is both fascinating and darkly funny.

      Some of the highlights…

      One station making dark connections between songs and historical tragedy…

    • Jeroen Sangers ☛ You never learned to delegate. AI just made it obvious.

      When you delegate to a person, they fill in the gaps. They read the context, ask questions, assume what you probably meant. They patch your incomplete instructions with their experience and goodwill. Decades of working with people have trained you to rely on this buffer. You learned to delegate just well enough that a capable human could save you from yourself.

      So you never had to confront the actual quality of your instructions. The person you delegated to quietly filled in what was missing, and the work got done. You assumed you were a decent delegator. You probably were not. Neither am I.

    • Fernando Borretti ☛ Human Bottlenecks

      The general template is: if only I could wire up the right prompts and the right tools in the right harness, I could have an agent that would boost my productivity 10x, or fix my problems with therapy, or make me more social, or more knowledgeable. This was, curiously, the ambition of a lot of early computing pioneers: Augmenting Human Intellect, Man-Computer Symbiosis. Engelbart’s lab was called the Augmentation Research Center! And more recently, people used to complain about how everyone has the Library of Alexandria in their pocket, and yet, we are not all genius polymaths.

      And these ideas are perennial because they never seem to happen. It’s like the Solow paradox on an individual level. Why? I think there are two reasons: first, most people lack what Andy Matuschak calls a “serious context of use” (AI doesn’t move the needle because there’s no needle to move); second, most people are bottlenecked by internal factors where AI (or anything external, for that matter) can’t move the needle.

    • Brad Frost ☛ Grief in the AI Age

      These five stages of grief come with a lot of caveats. Grief isn’t a linear process. Every single day, we might feel depressed, angry, in denial, bargaining, or we might be in a state of acceptance. This isn’t a linear step-by-step process that everyone goes through cleanly or on a uniform timeline. It’s a useful tool to help us reflect on how we feel.

    • Rakulang ☛ 2026.20 Slangification

      The https://slangify.org site was made as a way to illustrate the benefits of Raku as a DSL tool.

  • Social Control Media

    • Cyble Inc ☛ Energy Drink Videos Raise Health Concerns, Dubai Police Says

      Dubai Police has issued a public warning about the growing spread of viral energy drink videos on social media platforms that encourage excessive consumption, particularly among children and teenagers. Authorities said many of these videos are designed solely to attract views and engagement while ignoring the serious health risks linked to overconsumption of energy drinks.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Security Week ☛ 7-Eleven Data Breach Confirmed After ShinyHunters Ransom Demand

      7-Eleven, the world’s largest convenience store chain, has confirmed suffering a data breach after the notorious ShinyHunters [cracker] group claimed to have stolen information from its systems.

    • APNIC ☛ DDoS in Indonesia: What has changed?

      Operators often feel the impact of DDoS but may not recognize the role their own networks play when vulnerable services are left exposed. Benchmarking helps identify how a network compares with peers across the region and where improvements are needed.

    • PC World ☛ Unpatched Windows zero-day from 2020 gives [crackers] full system access

      Microsoft supposedly patched CVE-2020-17103 in 2020, but a new proof-of-concept exploit shows the vulnerability is still [crackable].

    • Security Week ☛ Researcher Drops MiniPlasma Windows Exploit for Unpatched 2020 CVE

      The researcher says the original proof-of-concept (PoC) code released by Project Zero researchers works without changes, noting that either the vulnerability was never resolved or the patches were rolled back.

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • Robert Reich ☛ Has Trump's Republican Party Become a Criminal Enterprise?

    Trump has also purged state legislators who have refused to do his bidding, such as the seven Indiana Republicans who refused to redistrict the state as Trump demanded they do, and who Trump insured were defeated in their recent primaries.

    The message is clear to every current or aspiring Republican politician: Be a toady to Trump, or you’re out.

  • Sweden Herald ☛ Rent shock awaits - museums threatened with closure

    They write in their budget documents for 2027–2029 that if this happens, funding will be "eroded" and "staff cuts will become necessary" unless they receive an additional 35 million kronor per year.

    To cut costs, the plan is to terminate the leases for the Mediterranean Museum and the East Asian Museum next year. The museums will then close, and it is unclear whether they will be revived.

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • The Register UK ☛ Shai-Hulud copycat hits another npm package

    The poisoned package, chalk-tempalte, masquerades as an extension for the popular JavaScript terminal string styling library Chalk. It now contains a clone of Shai-Hulud, which TeamPCP published last week on GitHub after poisoning more than 170 npm packages with the credential-stealing malware as part of the ongoing supply chain attacks targeting open source dev tools.

  • Krebs On Security ☛ CISA Admin Leaked AWS GovCloud Keys on Github

    On May 15, KrebsOnSecurity heard from Guillaume Valadon, a researcher with the security firm GitGuardian. Valadon’s company constantly scans public code repositories at GitHub and elsewhere for exposed secrets, automatically alerting the offending accounts of any apparent sensitive data exposures. Valadon said he reached out because the owner in this case wasn’t responding and the information exposed was highly sensitive.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • India Times ☛ Elon Musk’s xAI promised staff $420 for their tax returns, hasn’t paid

      Two months after handing off their personal financial data, the bonus still hadn’t arrived, the chats show. Some staffers who have asked about the payment have been told that the manager in charge of the program is no longer working there, people familiar with the matter said. A spokesperson for xAI did not respond to a request for comment.

    • Futurism ☛ Parents Explode in Fury at School's Plan to Constantly Film Their Children to Train AI

      A planned University of Washington study would’ve had preschool teachers wear cameras to record first-person footage of everything in the classroom, including the young children they were instructing, and use that footage to train AI models. If a parent was uncomfortable with all that, they had to manually opt-out — meaning that unless the researchers were given a formal no, a parent’s child would’ve been automatically opted into the experiment.

    • The Atlantic ☛ A Surveillance ‘Cat-and-Mouse’ Game With AI

      Defeating these algorithms may require a different countersurveillance approach altogether. Finn Brunton, a historian at UC Davis and the co-author of Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest, told me that one of the best ways is to identify the data that a device is trying to collect, and then supply it with a junk version. The Berlin-based artist Adam Harvey used this strategy when he developed makeup and clothing that frustrate facial-recognition algorithms. Daniel Howe and Helen Nissenbaum did something similar with a browser plug-in called TrackMeNot: Rather than concealing a user’s Google searches, the extension continually runs its own randomized decoy queries in the background, so that whatever a user actually searched for becomes lost in a sea of false leads.

    • California ☛ California legislators take on surveillance pricing, joining backlash

      A law advancing in the California Assembly makes it illegal to set prices with algorithms. Three other states have passed such bans in the last month.

    • PC World ☛ Google quietly cuts free storage to 5GB without a phone number

      For years now, Google has provided users with 15 GB of online storage free of charge. But that era seems to be ending. Going forward, you’ll only get 15 GB of free storage if you give Google your phone number—and this is for your Google account, meaning it affects Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Photos.

    • PC World ☛ ChatGPT can access your bank accounts now. Here's why I'm not ready

      But the idea of ChatGPT getting access to your bank accounts raises an immediate concern: Could it drain your accounts with one bad prompt or hallucination? On this point, we can relax. Even after granting access to your accounts, ChatGPT can only look at balances, transactions, investments, and debts; it can’t actually change anything, nor can it see your full account numbers.

  • Confidentiality

    • Six Colors ☛ FileVault keys can’t be escrowed in iCloud anymore

      If you’ve enabled FileVault before macOS 26 Tahoe and used the option to escrow your key in iCloud, as of 26.4, you’ll be forced to migrate to a new, better, more secure method. Jason Snell just noted this update in his post about refreshed security. I wrote last September about how Tahoe shifted to storing the last-ditch account Recovery Key in Passwords starting with macOS 26.

      In that column, I explained, “Your previous choices are preserved. If you wrote the key down or used iCloud escrow, this remains in place.” This is no longer the case! That article remains accurate and provides all the background and insight you need on using FileVault and the role of the Recovery Key.

      However, when faced with the upgrade, you may appreciate a few tips and some advice.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Kyiv Independent ☛ US again grants Russia oil sanctions waiver despite Treasury chief's pledges not to

    This marks the third time Washington has granted Moscow a sanctions waiver amid volatility on global oil markets triggered by the U.S. war against Iran.

  • RFERL ☛ US Extends Russian Oil Waiver As Bessent Urges Tougher Iran Sanctions

    “US Treasury is issuing a temporary 30-day general license to provide the most vulnerable nations with the ability to temporarily access Russian oil currently stranded at sea,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a post on X.

  • Project Censored ☛ Brazilian TikToks Banned in US, Resulting in Censored ICE Criticism

    Elk and his colleagues discovered that new TikTok regulations under the Trump Administration prohibited videos made by Brazilian users from being viewed in the United States. This effectively censored global perspectives critical of ICE. Elk wrote, “Brasil is the largest democracy that we have left in the Americas. … At a time when the United States is isolating itself from the rest of the world, it’s more important that activists from Brasil and the United States be able to connect on TikTok, but they currently can’t.”

• Environment

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Activists challenge 160MW Cape Town data centre project

    As technology firms race to scale up computing power across the globe, they face local opposition from communities worried about issues such as rising power bills, water stress, noise and pollution.

    “There is simply not enough information for a decision on a project of this scale, with no substantive detail on water use, emissions, electricity demand, diesel generators, air pollution, noise or even the buildings themselves,” said Rosa Curling, co-executive director at Foxglove.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ How much worse could western wildfires get? New modeling changes projections

    Many recent studies have connected higher vapor pressure deficit (VPD)—a measure of atmospheric dryness—to more area burned in previous fires. VPD increases as the temperature rises, so models that rely on it generally predict an increase in wildfire activity as the climate warms.

    In an article published in AGU Advances, Yu Cheng and colleagues raise questions about the role VPD plays in modeling wildfire, suggesting that VPD is a poor measure of fuel dryness at larger scales and overestimates potential burned areas under significant warming conditions. Instead, researchers suggest soil moisture could be a more reliable indicator of fuel dryness and lead to more moderate projections of wildfire increases.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ China says 'world's first' offshore wind-powered underwater data center has entered full operation, houses 2,000 servers — 24 megawatt subsea AI facility uses ocean water for passive cooling and offshore wind for power

    The 24 MW facility houses nearly 2,000 servers (including GPU clusters from China Telecom and LinkWise), and is expected to process artificial intelligence, big data annotation, and 5G infrastructure workloads. Unlike conventional land-based data centers that rely heavily on industrial chillers and large HVAC systems to remove waste heat, the Shanghai UDC uses the surrounding seawater as a massive passive heat sink. The servers are sealed inside pressure-resistant subsea modules deployed roughly 35 meters beneath the surface, where stable ocean temperatures continuously absorb heat generated by the computing hardware.

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ Living near a data center in Phoenix? Your neighborhood may be getting hotter

    A new study from Arizona State University is the first to directly measure air temperatures both upwind and downwind of data centers in real time, and what researchers found warrants attention from city planners. Heat discharged by data centers is raising air temperatures in surrounding neighborhoods by an average of 1.3 to 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit — and in some cases, by as much as 4 degrees Fahrenheit. The effect was detectable up to a third of a mile, roughly five city blocks, from the facilities’ perimeters.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Estonia's overland hydrogen pipeline plan gets Baltic Sea competitor

      On March 23 of this year, the government initiated a special national planning process to identify the most suitable corridor for a hydrogen pipeline crossing mainland Estonia. According to Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications (MKM) project manager Monika Korolkov, the process is still in its very early stages, with meetings currently underway with local municipalities to introduce the project and hydrogen technology.

    • Nevada Current ☛ While people struggle to get by, Congress works to coddle [cryptocurrency]

      The digital currency industry has high hopes for legislation that does two things: It declares the cryptocurrency industry needn’t adhere to reporting and transparency requirements that apply to other legitimate investments, because c’mon it’s [cryptocurrency], yippeee! And at the same time, it declares [cryptocurrency] a totally legitimate investment for everyone and anyone, so jump in, everybody!

    • Raspberry Pi ☛ OVCS: Raspberry Pi–powered electric car

      The electric vehicle (EV) revolution is just about here. With EV charging points found nearly everywhere, and more established car manufacturers introducing electric variants of existing models — or entirely new ones — a petrol-free future seems closer than ever. Of course, as a reader of this blog, you will be aware of how technology companies can be, and won’t be surprised to know that these manufacturers are using a lot of proprietary tech in their vehicles.

    • APNIC ☛ Are data centres moving to DC power?

      We’ve recently explored the societal level trade-offs involved in building data centres to run Artificial Intelligence (AI) workloads. A big part of that discussion related to the power required to run these giant rack farms of computers. The topic was explored in an IEEE article on the use of direct current (DC) in data centres, and robustly discussed on Hacker News.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Deccan Chronicle ☛ Elephant Herd Halts Traffic on Bhakarapeta Ghat Road

      The elephants reportedly wandered onto the roadway in search of food, leaving motorists stranded and triggering panic among commuters on the busy ghat stretch. Forest officials suspended vehicular movement and monitored the herd until it gradually returned to the forest area.

  • Overpopulation

    • Derek Thompson ☛ The Global Fertility Crisis Is Worse Than You Probably Think

      Others blame a kind of 21st century weltschmerz—a world sadness about the state of the world and our uncertain future in it. A long essay in the New York Times by Anna Louie Sussman, entitled “Why So Few Babies? We Might Have Overlooked the Biggest Reason of All,” an excerpt from her forthcoming book Inconceivable, argued that we have “overlooked” the pervasive sense of existential uncertainty among young adults. Between climate change, rising housing costs, political instability, AI, inflation chaos, doomscrolling, and declining social trust, today’s generation is too anxious about the future to make the irreversible commitment of having a child.

      So who is right? Is this about phones and technology, or is it a reflection of modern anxiety about the world? Or, perhaps, both?

• Finance

  • Chris Enns ☛ Moving Life as a Lemon to Patreon

    Another reason I want to try using Patreon is it gives me the flexibility to do things like members-only live streams for showing what I am working on, or to do training / course type content for paid supporters.

    The email newsletter will always be available for free.

  • [Old] Jacob Moody ☛ Complications of funding an open source operating system

    I spend a decent chunk of my time working with 9front, and while it is far from being a house name the community is largely self sufficient and has lived on comfortably for over ten years. In the time that 9front has been around there have been plenty of open source projects created and reach funding in a state less mature than I feel 9front is now. I say that to not express some sort of frustration but it has lead to some discussions I had with some of the other maintainers over where we could go (if anywhere) from our current position. Part of this discussion was looking around at the success of other projects and evaluating our options, to which I've organized the possibilities in to rougly three catagories: [...]

  • Seattle Times ☛ Starbucks lays off hundreds at Seattle HQ

  • Layoffs: Israeli AI Startup AI21 Labs To Cut Over 60% of Workforce and Shift Focus to Agent Optimisation

    Israeli tech firm AI21 Labs is cutting over 60 per cent of its workforce, reducing staff to 70 following collapsed acquisition talks with Nebius. The company is halting standalone AI model sales to focus entirely on its Maestro agent optimisation platform, securing millions in new commercial contracts with Nebius and Wix.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Votebeat ☛ Polls: Americans are worried about 2026 midterm elections

    Several polls in recent months have asked about people’s confidence in the election, the likelihood of voter fraud, and how — if at all — election laws should be changed. Their responses defy easy categorization: Many are concerned about fraud and support efforts to weed it out, but they’re also worried about voter disenfranchisement and oppose federal intervention in elections.

  • Reuters ☛ Exclusive: Meta lays out details of May 20 restructuring in internal document

    The Facebook owner is planning to lay off 10% of its employees on Wednesday, with additional deep cuts slated to come later this year, Reuters reported previously.

    In the memo, which was seen by Reuters, Meta Chief People Officer Janelle Gale told employees the company ​plans to move 7,000 employees to new initiatives related to AI workflows and to eliminate managerial roles.

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Elon Musk's war on OpenAI ends in crushing defeat

    In a unanimous verdict, the jury in Oakland, California federal court said Musk had brought his case too late. The jury deliberated less than two hours.

    The trial had widely been seen as a critical moment for the future of OpenAI and AI generally, both in how it should be used and who should benefit from it.

  • CBC ☛ California jury in Elon Musk lawsuit unanimously sides with OpenAI

    A U.S. jury on Monday ruled against Elon Musk in his lawsuit against OpenAI, finding the artificial intelligence company not liable to the world's richest person for having ‌allegedly strayed from its original mission to benefit humanity.

    In a unanimous verdict, the jury in a federal courthouse in Oakland, California said Musk had brought his case too late. The jury deliberated less than two hours.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Elon Musk Loses Lawsuit Against OpenAI, Sam Altman

    The tech billionaire missed statute of limitations deadlines on claims that OpenAI — which Musk co-founded as a nonprofit — breached its charitable duties and unjustly enriched its founders

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Jury throws out Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI after less than two hours of deliberation — Unanimous vote that Musk filed the lawsuit too late

    A federal jury in Oakland, California, on Monday unanimously rejected every claim in Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI, CEO Scam Altman, co-founder Greg Brockman, and Microsoft. The nine-member jury found that Musk filed too late, with all claims barred by the statute of limitations. Deliberations began at 8:30 a.m. Pacific and ended at 10:23 a.m. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers immediately accepted the verdict as her own.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Elon Musk Gets a Reality Check

    OpenAI swept the legal argument. But in another sense, basically everybody involved in Musk v. Altman came away looking petty, short-sighted, deceptive, or ignorant. During the dozens of hours I spent in the courtroom, sometimes lining up as early as 5 a.m. to secure a seat, there wasn’t much substance to be found. Frankly, at the end of it all, everyone had good reason to be annoyed.

  • MIT Technology Review ☛ Here’s why Elon Musk lost his suit against OpenAI

    In 2017, two years after OpenAI was founded, Musk and the other cofounders tried to create a for-profit subsidiary to raise enough capital to build artificial general intelligence—powerful AI that can compete with humans on most cognitive tasks. They fought a bitter power battle over who would get to control the entity. Musk also proposed merging OpenAI with his electric-car company, Tesla.

    During the trial, OpenAI’s lawyers pressed Musk on these discussions, suggesting that Musk knew in 2017 about Altman and Brockman’s plans to pivot the company—even participating in such plans—and had reason to sue then.

  • Wired ☛ Elon Musk Loses Landmark Lawsuit Against OpenAI

    The nine-member panel took only two hours to return a verdict in favor of OpenAI on Monday, which the judge quickly adopted as her own final decision.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ A Tale of Thucydides

    So by abandoning Biden’s efforts and pursuing what he considers the art of the deal, Trump has in effect traded a serious effort to keep America competitive in advanced technology game for a hill of soybeans — and a small hill at that.

    I could go on, but you get the point. The global scene right now isn’t dominated by a conflict between a rising and a declining superpower, because the declining power is led by a man who has no idea what makes great powers great, is easily distracted by trivia, is focused on self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement, and fantasizes about himself as Jesus. If you want classical analogies, think of America right now as the Roman Empire under Caligula, although Caligula didn’t do anything like as much damage …

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The Nation ☛ Trillion-Dollar Tech Bandits Are Finally Facing Justice

    These verdicts should have widespread implications for the tech industry. The social-media-addiction verdict in California will be followed by thousands of lawsuits from similarly situated plaintiffs, including suits that have already been filed in federal court in other states. Both verdicts represent monumental progress in the decades-long struggle to hold Big Tech accountable for harming children and teenagers. These cases will open up debate about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, or CDA, which for decades has prevented Americans from seeking redress for the damages done by corporate tech behemoths.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Zambia's media freedom under scrutiny ahead of 2026 election

    Opposition parties and media freedom groups say unequal access to public media remains one of the biggest concerns ahead of the elections.

    "It has always been like that to a certain extent; it is even worse now," opposition National Democratic Party leader Saboi Imboela told DW, arguing state-owned media gives more coverage to the ruling party, while opposition voices largely rely on private outlets.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Contributor: Ensure that California's journalism fund supports key players

    California is beginning to address the crisis facing local journalism by distributing nearly $20 million this year to local news organizations. But the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development is about to fumble the opportunity by having the government pick winners and losers — with journalists being the losers.

    Local news has suffered from declining revenue for years, all while tech giants such as Google have used the outlets’ content without compensation to generate enormous revenue. California’s efforts to reverse this trend began with legislation that would have compensated publishers for their losses based on how many reporters they employ. It sailed through the California Assembly and the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2024 before being halted when the governor’s office made a deal directly with Google.

  • Stanford University ☛ Journalism professionals call for the media to evolve

    Green said Civic News has found that about 15% of Americans are civically active, and that members of this group have a higher demand for news than the average person. On this basis, she argued it is important to target the 15% because they act as “trusted messengers” who disseminate information to the rest of their communities.

    “If you target everybody, you will reach nobody,” she said.

  • Karl Bode ☛ Brunchlord Patty Cake

    Corporate business and political journalism is increasingly being devoured by artifice, helping to normalize corrupt and terrible men.

    [...]

    This style of journalism, called "both sides" reporting or the "view from nowhere," is a trademark of our declining corporate press. It buries the truth in favor of an faux-objectivity in order to avoid offending advertisers, readers (ad viewers), sources, or media ownership (almost always conservative white men).

    The result is pseudo-journalistic artifice designed to look like useful reporting. It's function is to sell ads (which it doesn't even do very well), coddle power, normalize corrupt corporatism, and provide a fake sense of understanding to MBAs who don't want to think too deeply about the ethics of their personal pursuit of wealth.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • CPJ ☛ CPJ urges European Commission to not invite the Taliban to Brussels

    The Committee to Protect Journalists on Monday called on the European Commission to scrap reported plans to invite the Taliban to Brussels. According to media reports, the technical talks would focus on the return of rejected asylum seekers and Afghans convicted of crimes.

  • Marisa Kabas ☛ From Selma to Montgomery, Alabama marches for civil rights once again

    Drive from Birmingham to Selma on Alabama’s Highway 22 and you’ll certainly pass Selma Roots, a family-owned “purchase with a purpose” mission thrift store on Citizens Parkway. A subtle curve puts you on Broad Street and brings you to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, site of the Bloody Sunday event that put Selma on the map for civil rights.