Leftovers

• The Atlantic ☛ I Am Begging You to Read Terry Pratchett

  Pratchett’s work is a hectic jumble, rich and rewarding, endlessly varied and surprising. Writing this article has prompted me to revisit Moving Pictures, a book in which the invention of cinema threatens the fabric of reality. It was written in 1990, but its lessons are equally applicable to the modern internet, with its AI deepfakes, Russian-backed propaganda, and paid political influencers. New generations of readers deserve to learn of the book, even if Moving Pictures never becomes a movie.

• Pivot to AI ☛ Pivot to AI hits the road! Here’s the posting schedule

  Current plan is no Pivot to AI for 8–12 June. I should be back Monday 15 June. Cross fingers!

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Computational Complexity ☛ Computational Complexity: Two Erdős Problems on Points in the Plane and AI

    In a 1946 paper in the American Mathematical Monthly, Paul Erdős posed the Erdős Distinct Distance Problem and the Erdős Unit Distance Problem.

• Career/Education

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-14 [Older] Foreign student fee hikes in France trigger backlash

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-14 [Older] How international student tuition fees vary across Europe

  • Seth Godin ☛ The real AI

    To quote the great Steve Wozniak, “Actual Intelligence.” The kind we’re born with and can develop if we choose. It’s worth more now than ever before. Alas, it’s rarely taught in school.

  • James G ☛ Joining the IndieWeb Zine Pop Up

    On Saturday I joined an IndieWeb pop up about zines, hosted by Morgan. The meetup was about both zines and the intersection of zines and personal websites – the affordances of each medium, how the mediums compare, where the mediums intersect, and more. I helped take notes (notes available on the community wiki) and, looking back, I realise it was hard to keep up with all the discussion: there was so much to explore!

  • SusamPal ☛ Childhood Computing

    Since I had so little time with an actual computer, most of my Logo programming happened with pen and paper at home. I would 'test' my programs by tracing the results on graph paper. Eventually, I would get about thirty minutes of actual computer time in the lab to run them for real. One particular Logo program I still remember very well drew a house with animated dashed lines, where the dashes moved around the outline of the house. Everyone around me loved it, copied it and tweaked it to alter the details and add their own little touches. That must have been my first 'free and open source software'. The 'licence' was 'do whatever you want but show me if you make any interesting modifications'. The distribution system was entirely analogue: classmates copied the code into their notebooks with pencils, then went back to their machines in the lab and typed it back into the computer.

• Hardware

  • David L Farquhar ☛ Kaypro II launched May 20, 1982 - The Silicon Underground

    On May 20, 1982, Kaypro shipped its very successful Kaypro II computer, a portable computer that ran CP/M and its associated software. Its main innovation was bundling a selection of popular software with the computer and selling the bundle for less than the combined suggested retail price of the software.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-14 [Older] Japan: Saving elderly people from 'lonely deaths'

  • The Age AU ☛ 2026-05-19 [Older] What to know about the new Ebola outbreak that quietly raged for weeks

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-18 [Older] Ebola in Africa: Why it's a constant threat

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-15 [Older] Ebola outbreak confirmed in DR Congo, Uganda: African health agency

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • Xbox Reportedly Settles Final Legal Challenge Tied to the Activision Blizzard Takeover

    Microsoft has settled the final major legal challenge stemming from its Activision Blizzard acquisition, agreeing to pay $250 million to Swedish pension fund AP7 – also known as Sjunde AP-Fonden – to end a class action lawsuit first filed in 2022, as reported by Game File. The settlement closes the book on nearly four-and-a-half years of legal battles tied to what remains the largest acquisition in gaming history.

  • Vox Media ☛ The legal fallout of Xbox's acquisition of Activision Blizzard is finally over

    Nearly four-and-a-half years after the acquisition was first announced, Microsoft has finally settled the last remaining legal challenge to its acquisition of Activision Blizzard.

    Game File reported on May 22 that Microsoft had reached a $250 million settlement with AP7, a Swedish pension fund also known as Sjunde AP-Fonden, which had filed a class action lawsuit against Microsoft in 2022. If AP7 had won its lawsuit, Microsoft would've had to pay an additional 30 cents per share to those who owned Activision stock between Jan. 2022 and Oct. 2023. Ultimately, AP7 settled, although it stated in official documentation that "Microsoft is entering into this Stipulation solely to avoid the burden, expense, and distraction of continued litigation."

  • Court House News ☛ Texas AG claims Discord serves as 'hunting ground' for child predators

    In a complaint filed in Collin County District Court, Paxton claims that despite marketing itself as safe, Discord has design features that enable predation, including private servers, reliance on unpaid volunteers for server moderation and safety features that require users to opt-in.

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

    • Deseret Media ☛ Utah mom says chatbot tried to turn her daughter against her

      Morrow said reading the full log of messages between her daughter and the chatbot was a wake‑up call.

      "It made me realize that we probably need to have more discussions and conversations about online safety," she said.

    • James Stanley ☛ How to make a hyperlink

      I am driven to write this post because of repeated disappointing experiences where coding agents seemingly don't know how to make hyperlinks. It occurred to me that this may just be a sign of the times, and maybe many younger human developers don't know how to make hyperlinks either.

    • Hugo Daniel ☛ Lost in the middle

      None of my previous projects make much sense to me anymore. Neither does this blog in its current format of tech posts. Things have changed, I am not going to pivot, but definitely going to move things around a bit.

    • Armin Ronacher ☛ Building Pi With Pi | Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings

      The most frustrating failure mode right now is that people submit issues that are not in their own voice. They contain an observed problem somewhere, but it has been thrown into a clanker and the clanker reworded it and made a huge mess of it. Typically, it was prompted so badly that the conclusions produced are more often than not inaccurate but always full of confidence. The result is complete guesswork on root causes, fake-minimal repros, suggested implementation strategies, analogies to adjacent but often the wrong code, and long lists of error classes that might or might not matter.

      That is worse than no diagnosis.

    • The New Stack ☛ Who's monitoring the agents?

      The uncomfortable reality is that a lot of teams deploying multi-agent systems today are operating them with less visibility than they had for microservices 10 years ago. They’re trusting outputs without fully understanding the path that produced them.

      That works for a demo. It doesn’t hold up when these systems start touching real data, real users, and real money.

    • No One's Happy ☛ The AI Bubble — No One's Happy

      Three people denying something in twenty-four hours is unnecessary unless the thing they are denying is the plan. She has since been excluded from key financial meetings, her absence described as “notable and awkward.” [2] The person who said the quiet part out loud was not corrected. She was sidelined.

    • Joshua Blais ☛ My bank started vibecoding

      Upon getting a hold of a human being, I verify the account and then sit back to have her check the info, only to say “nothing to worry about, it was a ‘system update’ on our end.”

      So, you sent out an urgent email to God knows how many clients, wasting not only our time, but your call center people’s time. Insanity.

• Security

  • 2026-05-12 [Older] Homeland Security wants to know about the Instructure breach; we still want to know about the Navigate360 breach

  • 2026-05-13 [Older] UK: Regulator fines water company almost £1m for cybersecurity failures

  • NL Times ☛ 2026-05-13 [Older] NL: Dutch watchdog says healthcare lab failed data security rules before cyberattack affecting 850,000

  • NL Times ☛ 2026-05-14 [Older] Dutch banks accelerate cybersecurity efforts after ECB warning on AI risks [Ed: Just because of slop hype?]

  • NL Times ☛ 2026-05-13 [Older] ECB warns banks about cyberattacks using Antrophic's Mythos AI model [Ed: FUD and hype driving decisions]

  • Slashdot ☛ 2026-05-16 [Older] Linux Kernel Outlines What Qualifies As A Security Bug, Responsible AI Use

  • Slashdot ☛ 2026-05-18 [Older] Linus Torvalds: AI-Detected Bug Reports Make Kernel Security List 'Almost Entirely Unmanageable'

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Andrew Nesbitt ☛ Signing is for the bad days

      Where the signing did help in those cases was in working out what had happened, fast and with certainty. PyPI’s own write-up of Ultralytics is explicit that the Sigstore transparency log is what let them establish the first malicious wheels came from the real workflow rather than a stolen API token, which is what pointed the investigation at the build cache. The second round of bad releases, pushed with an old API token that had never been revoked, had no attestations at all, and the absence was itself a signal. That’s worth having, and it’s also clearly less than “the bad publish was prevented”, which is the strongest argument I know for having more than one of these layers in place at once.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Ava ☛ beware of EU-washing

      I see news like the Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution backing away from using Palantir and using a software solution from France instead. I’m supposed to feel happy reading this, and admittedly I did not yet dig into ArgonOS deeply - but all I can think of as a first reaction is “I don’t want an EU version of Palantir.”

    • Michael Geist ☛ Tech Exodus: Why Bill C-22's Privacy and Security Risks Will Drive Digital Services Out of the Country

      The Act’s definition of “electronic service provider” captures any service involving the creation, recording, storage, processing, transmission, or reception of information, provided either to persons in Canada or by an entity carrying on business activities in Canada. The breadth intentionally covers far more than just telecom companies and Internet providers, extending to platforms, messaging applications, VPN services, and device manufacturers. Every ESP is subject to a general assistance obligation under section 7 and to a secrecy obligation that bars disclosure of the existence of requests. Moreover, the broader set of obligations for core providers, including mandated metadata retention and technical capabilities requirements subject to an inadequately defined exception for “systemic vulnerabilities,” can also be applied to ESPs under the direction of the Minister. When VPNs or messaging services express fears that the law could capture them, it is based on a straightforward reading of Bill C-22.

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-14 [Older] German intelligence offices snub US-based Palantir software

  • Confidentiality

    • 2026-05-18 [Older] Chairman Cassidy, Tuberville Seek Answers on Canvas Cybersecurity Incident, Calls for More Safeguards to Protect Students

    • University of Toronto ☛ An idea: user level WireGuard for UDP based encryption and authentication

      In some environments, you want to connect programs together with mutual authentication and encryption of their traffic (so each end can trust the other and the traffic is immune to easy eavesdropping). If the programs are talking to each other over TCP, there's a well developed solution for this in the form of mutual TLS (mTLS) (although you'll probably get to enjoy the fun of running your own private Certificate Authority). But if you're using UDP, things are less clear. When this came up recently in a Fediverse discussion I was a peripheral part of, it occurred to me that we already have an existing, well regarded, UDP-based mechanism for authentication and encryption in the form of WireGuard.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Kyiv Independent ☛ Finland's Stubb could represent Europe in Ukraine peace talks if asked, he says

    Foreign Minister Andrii Sibiha told Politico in an interview published May 11 that Ukraine has asked Europe to help with the process of an airport ceasefire.

    "We probably need a new role of Europe in our peace efforts," Sybiha said on the sidelines of an EU foreign ministers summit in Brussels.

  • JURIST ☛ Meta settles first lawsuit over harm to children’s mental health

    Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, has settled its first national case with a school district over harm to children’s mental health. The terms of the settlement with Breathitt County School District in eastern Kentucky are confidential. However, the district initially sought over $60 million to cover the costs of treating the injuries caused by Meta’s products and to pay for a ​15-year mental health program. The school district also asked the court to order Meta to reduce the addictive features of its products.

    Breathitt accused Meta of designing their platforms to addict children, causing anxiety, depression, and self-harm. Co-defendants Snap, YouTube, and TikTok settled their parts of the case earlier this month.

  • The Age AU ☛ 2026-05-16 [Older] New hate speech laws ban second extremist group

  • EFF ☛ 2026-05-12 [Older] EFF Launches New Offline Campaign for Saudi Wikipedian Osama Khalid

  • Defence Web ☛ 2026-05-11 [Older] Drones take centre stage in US military exercises in Africa

  • International Business Times ☛ 2026-05-12 [Older] 10 Photos of Eileen Wang: Shock as California Mayor Admits To Being an Agent for China

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Ava ☛ summary trust issues

    Many of these notify me of new releases and briefly summarize them before linking to them. While I use the summaries to judge how relevant it is to my specific interests or needs, I can never just let that be it. I can't even just read a longer article by someone else who has read the entire original document and is diving a little deeper into it while still being shorter than the original. I have to read the original myself.

    I just don't fully trust summaries or coverage by others. I need to confirm myself whether the conclusions are true, it was correctly interpreted, nothing was taken out of context, exaggerated or left out. I don't want to miss out on any additional info or new knowledge the other person did not think was worth sharing or was outside the scope of the summary. It also feels wrong for me to reference anything I haven't read fully myself, when you would clearly expect me to, or are led to believe that I did.

• Environment

  • Arkansas Advocate ☛ Arkansas’ data center fights boil down to trust and transparency

    Pulaski County has become the latest front in the war over data centers, with opponents stepping up pressure for a moratorium on new data centers so local-level restrictions can be considered. It’s a debate that’s playing out across the country, as more communities are pushing back against the facilities, citing concerns about water use, utility rates and other quality-of-life issues.

  • Michigan Advance ☛ Americans overwhelmingly oppose data centers. Women most of all.

    More than two-thirds of adults oppose the construction of the massive and costly complexes used to power artificial intelligence, with a majority saying they’d prefer to have a nuclear power plant in their backyard instead. While women and men overwhelmingly expressed opposition, women did so more intensely. Out of 1,000 adults surveyed, 55 percent of women said they strongly oppose data centers, compared to 43 percent of men. In fact, men were more likely to favor data centers, citing their economic benefits and job opportunities.

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ China’s coal waste could become next critical metal resource: Report

    A new report explains that China should consider turning coal waste (like fly ash) into a valuable resource for critical metals like germanium, aluminum, lithium, and gallium. By combining its large supply of coal (and waste) and industrial prowess, this could prove a game-changer for the nation.

  • Jeff Kaufman ☛ Taxing Small Cars To Improve MPG

    Overall, this regulatory structure taxes manufacturers more for making small low vehicles, the kind that are easiest to make fuel efficient. Here's where I would write that this is counterproductive and we should stop, except we sort of already did. In 2025 the penalty for non-compliance was set to $0 as part of the OBBBA. This means in some sense manufacturers are free to make small cars and trucks with achievable mileage. Except the rest of the structure is still there, complete with the distorted incentives, and ready to be reinstated by a future government.

  • Idiomdrottning ☛ Time-discounting shenanigans

    You’ve correctly compounded the opportunity cost. One of the flaws in this is that you haven’t compounded the catastrophe cost. If you think you can buy a piano for $10000 in 2126 or a pack of gum for 50¢ then.

    If a stitch in time saves nine, you can’t just compound the one stitch.

    Clean water and breathable air are priceless.

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-05-18 [Older] The Pennine hills are full of holes – here’s how they’re helping fight climate change

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-18 [Older] Germany news: 2030 climate goals in danger, experts warn

  • Vox ☛ 2026-05-18 [Older] Photos reveal strange sea creatures that scientists have never seen before

  • Scheerpost ☛ 2026-05-17 [Older] Climate Change Breeds Disease; Public Health Cuts Help It Spread

  • Counter Punch ☛ 2026-05-17 [Older] Alternative Climate Summit Seeks More Action on Global Warming

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-13 [Older] Why men are less worried than women about climate change

  • Truthdig ☛ 2026-05-13 [Older] The Elections That Turned Climate Into a Defining Political Fault Line

  • Copenhagen Post ☛ 2026-05-12 [Older] More pigs and less CO2 capture hurt climate goals

  • Vox ☛ 2026-05-11 [Older] Why the American Southeast is becoming a new hotspot for wildfires

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-17 [Older] German transport minister promotes green hydrogen in Japan

    • CBC ☛ E-bike battery fires are a hazard across Canada. These companies are pitching solutions

      Fires and explosions from lithium batteries for e-bikes and e-scooters have led to millions in damage from Nanaimo, B.C., to Moncton, N.B., — and even deaths.

      Fire chiefs have voiced concerns and e-bikes face bans in some buildings and transit. Now companies have launched a solution in Canada that they say could have added benefits to the growing numbers of e-bike users seeking an affordable, convenient transportation option.

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-18 [Older] Kenya fuel protests turn deadly amid Iran war disruptions

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-14 [Older] Cuba's power grid 'critical' as US blocks fuel shipments

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-14 [Older] Honda reports first loss since 1957 as it waters down EV strategy, but shares rise on 2026 forecasts

    • NL Times ☛ 2026-05-18 [Older] 279 flights delayed at Schiphol as security queues, border checks disrupt operations

    • The Local SE ☛ 2026-05-13 [Older] Sweden's government announces 17.5 billion kronor energy crisis package

    • Bridge Michigan ☛ 2026-05-12 [Older] House votes to nix Michigan’s 100% clean energy goal, but it’s DOA in Senate

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-17 [Older] Escaped tiger injures one near Leipzig — report

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-14 [Older] Lab-grown Tyrannosaurus leather: More chicken than dinosaur?

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-14 [Older] Dead whale spotted off the coast of Denmark

    • CBC ☛ What centuries-old whaler logs can tell us about why bowheads struggle today

      Estimates put bowhead populations at a minimum of 50,000 before commercial whaling took off in the 18th century, dwindling down to as little as 3,000 in the 1920s.

      But these words show more than just the routine business of hunting. From surviving logbooks, the researchers were able to create maps that offer clues about why bowheads survive where they do today.

    • CBC ☛ 2026-05-12 [Older] 3 B.C. residents receive national honours for courage, bravery after 2022 bear attack

    • CBC ☛ 2026-05-12 [Older] 'Raining down ash': Fast-moving wildfire continues to rage near Whitecourt, Alta.

• Finance

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-18 [Older] Germany's crisis-hit chemical industry seeks revival

  • The Age AU ☛ 2026-05-13 [Older] The checklist that proves you’re ready to retire

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ 2026-05-13 [Older] Cheeto Mussolini Wants Wall Street to Manage Your Retirement

  • BIA Net ☛ 2026-05-12 [Older] Pensioner poverty in Turkey: 9 out of 10 say need to work to stay afloat

  • BIA Net ☛ 2026-05-13 [Older] Turkey, Armenia set to resume direct trade

  • BIA Net ☛ 2026-05-13 [Older] Average household size in Turkey drops as single-person homes rise

  • BIA Net ☛ 2026-05-13 [Older] Turkey posts highest current account deficit in three years in March

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Literary Hub ☛ Literary Hub » Maybe Don’t Talk to the New York Times About Zohran Mamdani

    Beneath its humdrum requests, every email said more or less the same thing: Can you explain how reading certain things can turn a person into a socialist—and, possibly, a terrorist-sympathizing antisemite? It’s a storied gambit of the right at its most grimly predictable. “People read Foucault,” the redoubtable David Brooks once wrote, in an actual column that I’ve all but committed to memory, “and develop an alienated view of the world.” God, did I love this. An “alienated view of the world”! Not by, like, trying to pay rent or having an insurance claim denied—no, no, it was probably the Foucault you read in 2003. Anyway, it was clearly time to get the elaborate machinery of manufactured bewilderment and sour indignation up and running again.

  • Benedict Evans ☛ Predicting AI job exposure

    I think there are three things to point to in this chart. The first is that technology was not the only variable: changes in regulation produced new accounting requirements that led to a one-off surge in CPA hiring (this is why economists say ceteris paribus). Second, within the automation conversation itself there is the Jevons paradox, which is really applied price elasticity: if you make it cheaper to do something, do you do the same for less money (or resources, or employees), or more for the same money, or does a new ROI mean you do more for more money? If a DCF takes a week and then it takes 30 seconds, you probably do more DCFs. ‘Exposure to automation’ might mean more work, not less.

    But then, the more important story is that if you automate something that used to be expensive and time-consuming and it becomes cheap and quick, that probably unlocks other things. 
If analysis becomes cheap and easy, you do much more analysis, and mostly that’s also a different kind of analysis. Accountants today aren’t doing exactly the same work that they did in 1970 or 1980 ‘but more’ - they’re still called ‘accountants’ but the job is different. New technology often starts out being used for ‘the old thing but more’, but it rarely ends up like that.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-14 [Older] 'Regime change': Hungary's Magyar exposes Orban's decadence

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The Next Move ☛ A Ukrainian Political Prisoner in Soviet Times

    In 1976, Petro Ruban made a wood carving in the shape of a book. On the book’s cover was the Statue of Liberty, along with the words “200 Years.” Ruban intended the carving to be a gift to the American people on the occasion of their bicentennial. He had worked eight months on it.

    The Soviet authorities, however, confiscated the carving. In short order, they confiscated the wood-carver, too. That is, they threw him into prison—again.

    Ruban was not only a wood-carver, he was also a Soviet human-rights activist. More specifically, he was a Ukrainian human-rights activist. Ruban was a nationalist, believing in independence for Ukraine. This made him doubly intolerable to the Soviet state.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-18 [Older] 'Atlas of Civil Society' downgrades Germany

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • David L Farquhar ☛ Microsoft Antitrust case of 1998

    On June 7, 2000, the District Court ordered a breakup of Microsoft as its remedy, splitting its operating system business from the rest of its software business. Microsoft immediately appealed.

    On June 28, 2001, the Circuit Court overturned the rulings, including the holding that Microsoft should be broken up, but did not overturn the findings of fact. The case went back to the District Court, this time under Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly.

    But ultimately it didn’t matter. The Department of Justice started the case under President Bill Clinton, a Democrat and a professed liberal. In November 2000, George W. Bush, a Republican and a professed conservative, was elected president. Bush’s Justice Department was less interested in breaking up a monopoly than Clinton’s had been. On September 6, 2001, the Department of Justice announced it was no longer seeking to break up Microsoft and would seek a lesser penalty. Microsoft had run out the clock.

  • Patents

    • IP Kat ☛ 2026-05-18 [Older] AI in the patent industry: The risks of AI shadow use [Ed: They mean slop, it should be dealt with as an aberration, which is what it is]

    • IP Kat ☛ 2026-05-14 [Older] WIPO survey: Sequence search for PATENTSCOPE

    • 2026-05-12 [Older] Enviro Tech Chemical Services, Inc. v. Safe Foods Corp. (Fed. Cir. 2026)

  • Copyrights

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Premier League Wants Domain Registrar Tucows to Unmask Sports Streaming Pirates

      The Premier League has requested a DMCA subpoena in an attempt to unmask the operators of 25 pirate sports streaming sites. The domain names were registered through Tucows, which is asked to hand over all personal details of the operators. Interestingly, the football league's own evidence shows the pirate streams are sourced from Amazon and Google.