Leftovers

• El País ☛ US library hands out potatoes and rice as SNAP cuts leave families hungry

  “There is more hunger now than during the COVID pandemic. There are fewer jobs, food costs more, everyone is feeling it,” says Gina Plata-Nino, director of SNAP Policy and Advocacy at the Food Research & Action Center (FRAC).

• Matt Wedel ☛ My adventures with Tri-bear-atops

  That advice landed closer than I expected — my brother Ryan and his family surprised me with it for my birthday! Not a recreation, not “inspired by”, they just went back to the museum and bought the OG Tri-bear-atops and socked it away for a month. A special shout-out to my nephew Eli, who bought the Triceratops mask with his own money, and who (in classic older brother fashion) assures me that his siblings Jewel and Isaac had nothing to do with it.

• Josh Lospinoso ☛ The Rule That Actually Runs

  A transcript is a strange kind of evidence.

  It looks official because it has brackets and timestamps, but mostly it is residue: speech pressed flat enough to be searched. The hesitation disappears. The room disappears. The tone is approximated by punctuation. What remains is a public coordinate where a sentence can be inspected after the conditions that produced it have gone missing.

• Michał Sapka ☛ Attention Test - The Godfather Trilogy

  I wanted to put my regained attention span to a test: can I, once again, watch complex films? All three Godfather films, played night after night looked like the perfect choice.

  Those are the most famous films of all time, often called crowning achievement of the form. Long (between 3 and 3,5 hours long each), slow, masterfully done. I fully agree with that assessment for the first two movies.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ World's largest scorpion identified, roamed Earth 415 million years ago

    The 3.3-foot-long Praearcturus gigas scorpion now joins the ranks of Earth’s ferocious prehistoric beasts, boasting pincers 6.2 inches long. As it roamed the Earth over 400 million years ago, researchers sought to understand the factors that allowed this prehistoric predator to grow to such an astonishing size.

  • Wired ☛ The Moons of Uranus May Hold the Key to Finding Missing Planets

    A recent article published in Icarus analyzed 122 possible scenarios of such instability to assess how the satellite systems of the "left behind" planets would have reacted. The researchers concluded that it would be extremely difficult to explain the current characteristics of Uranus' moons without some episode of violent instability. And that type of instability only appears in models where more giant planets existed than we see today.

  • Computational Complexity ☛ Computational Complexity: Humans Solve Erdos Problem!!

    10) I suggest two futures:

    ONE: While this human-generated (or human-assisted) result is impressive, it will be a rare occurrence. This result was actually a counterexample. The needed math was known. The result was interesting. This is a perfect storm that we might not see again for a while.

    TWO: Paul Erdős lived in an earlier time before AI helped us do math. Without the help of AI (or even computers really) he made conjectures, solved some of them with thinking, collaborated with others (before email! before Zoom!) who also used thinking. Does the recent resolution of the sum-product conjecture mean we are going back to that time? A time when people actually had to think? For some that is a dream, for others a nightmare.

• Career/Education

  • Brent A Yorgey ☛ To my students

    • Don't believe self-serving lies about technologies being "inevitable" or "here to stay". You don't have to just go along with the dominant narrative. You can make deliberate choices and help others to do the same.

    • Be intentional about deciding your own moral and ethical boundaries up front. Don't settle for the lie of compromising your principles "just for now" until you can find something better.

    • Cultivate your ability to think deeply. Do whatever it takes to carve out distraction-free bubbles for yourself in both space and time. This might mean saying no to technologies or patterns of working that others say are critical or inevitable.

    [...]

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • The Nation ☛ What a Week in the Hospital Showed Me About Our Broken Healthcare System

    When I mentioned all of this to other friends, the stories erupted from both sides of the patient-physician divide. Some of them mirrored mine, but many friends were dealing with more serious conditions like cancer, or juggling multiple diagnoses, requiring dozens of specialists. But every “patient” friend with ongoing complex medical issues was managing their own care or had an advocate in a spouse or partner to do the work, which was an extra part-time or full-time job for many.

  • Science Alert ☛ Huge Psilocybin Dose Has Incredible Effect on Elderly Dementia Patient

    The paper, written by neuroscientists in Brazil, is unfortunately light on some of the details.

    But it suggests there were meaningful improvements in the patient's cognitive and physical functions, lasting for several weeks after her doses.

  • Jeff Kaufman ☛ SecureBio Detection is Hiring Software Engineers

    We're processing >50B read pairs of wastewater and nasal swab data each week (more than anyone else!) and will be more than doubling this in the next year. At the same time, we need to bring our end to end time down from ~12hr to ~2hr (massively parallel problem, should be possible to get <1hr).

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • Jason Becker ☛ I do miss a less locked down work environment

    At least they don't make me use Windows. I'd probably quit.

  • Don Marti ☛ Massachusetts vs. the scam economy

    The Big Tech companies don’t exactly “sell…data to the highest bidders.” What happens inside a big platform when a small business runs an ad is an auction: the legitimate ad must bid for impressions against other ads—and the Big Tech companies add extra bidders to drive up the price. And the price has to keep going up. Companies that already dominate a market that’s growing at single-digit rates have to keep taking a bigger piece of the action from every sale in order to sustain their own startup-like, double-digit growth rates. The result is an online scam crisis that benefits only Big Tech and the scammers.

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

    • Latvia ☛ Pre-election period starts in Latvia with a wary eye on AI influence / Article

      During this period, campaigners, the media and other involved parties must comply with strict rules on pre-election campaigning, the Corruption Prevention and Combating Bureau (KNAB) said in a reminder.

      Most political forces have named their leaders for the Saeima elections this Autumn. Political content will appear in the information space more often, and KNAB will monitor will be the use of resources and hidden advertising - parties will have to clearly indicate when and where they use paid-for political advertising.

    • Semafor Inc ☛ AI customer service is not ready for prime time

      But it struggled to recognize my voice and lagged significantly — due to network issues, the ElevenLabs team told me. When talking to a voice model to order merchandise, it had trouble finding my account under “Rachyl,” as it recognized me verbalizing my name as the more typical spelling of “Rachel.”

    • Silicon Angle ☛ AI agent web traffic has surpassed that of humans, lending weight to the 'dead internet' theory

      Some clarification is needed as to what Prince actually means when he talks about AI agent traffic. Standard bots, such as search engine crawlers and website performance tools, eclipsed human internet traffic more than a decade ago. It’s believed that those earlier bots likely exceeded human traffic on most smaller websites even longer ago, and the result was that many of those sites exceeded their web hosting limits much faster than their owners had anticipated.

    • Android Police ☛ Gemini lied to me about my hobby, and that showed me what its real problem is

      And then something happened: I found out Gemini had been lying to me.

    • Robin Sloan ☛ The bigger story

      In fact, I think it’s all the same big story: punch cards and plug­gable tubes, lap­tops and LLMs. Under­standing that you are inside of it — acknowledging the dense, con­tin­uous con­nec­tions in both directions, back in time and for­ward too — is both ener­gizing and, in a way, soothing.

    • Nicolas Magand ☛ Software will never feel the same

      Yes, you’ve guessed it, this is a post about A.I. and software development.

      As much as I love good software — especially on the Mac — and trying out applications that may end up part of my digital routine, I think what I love the most is appreciating what is seemingly called “the craft”.

    • Luigi Mozzillo ☛ Damn, work

      A dear friend of mine is no longer working. She was laid off last May 2025 and hasn’t been able to find a new job for a year. A whole year without work. She was a copywriter. Today, her job is done by an LLM. Bad, but sufficient for the vast majority of clients of mediocre communications agencies in Italy.

    • Jay Little ☛ How to Become a Big Tech Exile

      So with all that being said the first step to becoming a big tech exile is to reject this notion that you must build dependencies on services offered by big tech in order to compete much less succeed in tech.

      The second step is to reject AI as a subsequent follow up to this. Why would one reject AI? Well I’ll throw out a list of reasons real quick as a primer, how about that?

  • Social Control Media

    • El País ☛ ‘Enshittification’ reaches social media: ‘For Zuckerberg and Musk, your ‘friends’ are a burden. They just want you to see ads’

      In his book, he studies the cases of Facebook, Amazon, Twitter (now X) and Apple products from the perspective that doctors use to study pathogens: he “explore[s] the epidemiology of enshittification.” Doctorow establishes four phases to this: [...]

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Ricardo Mendes ☛ A Node on the Web

      You can’t “reset your algorithm” by watching 2 min shorts of nature or music or whatever. It’s an urban myth.

      You can’t pray the algorithm to obtain a change, it’s a delusion.

• Defence/Aggression

  • RFERL ☛ Russia Uses Economic Chokehold To Counter Armenia's Westward Tilt

    Official statements have spoken of health and safety concerns, but the Kremlin has made its real motives absolutely clear.

    Armenians go to the polls on June 7 in parliamentary elections in which the country's basic foreign policy orientation is at stake. While Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian has pulled the country toward the United States and the European Union, Russia has responded with multiple moves aimed at halting the Westward shift.

  • NL Times ☛ Court sentences woman to 7 years for son’s recruitment as Islamic State child soldier

    K. is the first person in the Netherlands convicted for complicity in the recruitment and use of child soldiers.

  • Medievalists.net ☛ 15 Medieval Warrior Women Who Led Armies and Defended Kingdoms

    Women rarely served as ordinary soldiers during the Middle Ages, but there were notable exceptions. Medieval chronicles, letters, and other sources reveal women commanding armies, leading sieges, defending fortresses, and rallying troops in times of war. Some became famous in their own lifetimes, while others have been remembered through legend and folklore. Here are fifteen medieval warrior women whose stories continue to fascinate historians today.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Sweden mulls prison for young teens as violent crime rises

    But in its battle against rising gang violence and organized crime, Sweden wants to toughen its legal tool set. Parliament has already approved a measure allowing 15- to 17-year-olds convicted of serious crimes to serve prison sentences in specially adapted juvenile units.

  • Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Finland wraps probe into cable damage in Estonia's economic waters

    Four individuals are suspected in the case, three of whom remain under travel restrictions. Prosecutors will now decide whether to bring charges.

    The Fitburg was also reportedly carrying sanctioned goods, though Finnish Customs later said it would not launch a separate probe into sanctions violations.

  • The Atlantic ☛ The J6 [insurrectionist] now working at the Pentagon

    Part of the reason government jobs are so coveted is that many careers in public service are rewarded with stability, pensions, and other benefits. These positions can come with immense responsibility—and although it’s unclear what Irizarry’s motivations are for taking this particular role, his hiring is part of a concerning trend. He isn’t the first January 6 defendant to hold a position in the Trump administration: Jared Wise, who was caught on tape encouraging insurrectionists to “kill” Capitol Police officers, was until recently an employee of the Department of Justice. He resigned because he believed that he couldn’t “fully expose the abuses by the FBI and DOJ against J6 defendants” from within the federal government. A former FBI agent himself, Wise was hired specifically for the DOJ’s Weaponization Working Group, which was formed to investigate supposed abuses of prosecutorial power during the Biden administration. (My colleague Quinta Jurecic has argued that the project has unintentionally thrown light on the Trump administration’s own abuses.)

  • Sightline Media Group ☛ Pentagon must divulge cost of Iran war under House proposal

    The measure, which has bipartisan support, was added as an amendment to the House version of the fiscal 2027 National Defense Authorization Act, a massive defense funding and policy bill. After more than 14 hours of debate, the committee sent the bill to the full House, where it’s expected to go to the floor for a vote in July.

  • Robert Reich ☛ The Coming Revival of America

    He and his regime are still dangerous as hell, of course. But the American public is catching on. His polls are in the cellar; they continue to fall.

    It’s as if the nation has been through basic training in democracy, a stress test in civics, a crash course in the importance of having a decent and good government.

• Environment

  • The Independent UK ☛ Popular fishing lake forced to close after all its fish die

    “Recent drought conditions, combined with water releases from the dam, have resulted in a major fish kill affecting approximately 100% of the fish population within the lake,” the San Carlos Recreation and Wildlife Department said.

  • Futurism ☛ AI Will Consume as Much Water as a Billion People By 2030, UN Report Estimates

    The report, released this week, found that the environmental cost of AI is being “systematically mismeasured” because current assessments focus on the carbon emissions from training large language models while overlooking the tech’s broader water and land footprint. The water footprint comes from cooling and powering the data centers, and the land footprint comes from the energy infrastructure and supply chains that go into building and running them.

  • United Nations University ☛ The Environmental Cost of Artificial Intelligence: Carbon, Water, and Land Footprints | United Nations University

    The report moves beyond a carbon-only lens by quantifying the carbon, water, and land footprints associated with the electricity used to train, deploy, and operate AI systems at scale. Its central finding is that AI’s environmental costs depend not only on how much electricity is used, but also on where that electricity is generated and which energy sources power it. Every kilowatt-hour used by AI carries carbon, water, and land implications, and these footprints do not always move in the same direction: low-carbon electricity is not automatically low-water or low-land. The report also shows that AI’s footprint is shaped by both major infrastructure trends, including the rapid growth of data centers, and everyday use patterns, including model choice, output length, modality, and the growing use of text, image, and video generation.

  • United Nations University ☛ Rising Emissions, Depleting Water and Vanishing Land—UN Scientists: AI Is Threatening Natural Resources for Billions | United Nations University

    By 2030, the global data centres powering artificial intelligence are projected to consume 945 terawatt-hours of electricity. This is nearly triple the combined annual electricity use of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nigeria—countries collectively home to more than 650 million people. Their associated water footprint will equal the basic annual domestic water needs of all 1.3 billion people in Sub-Saharan Africa, and their land footprint will exceed 14,500 square kilometers, roughly twice the Jakarta metropolitan area, home to more than 32 million people.

  • TruthOut ☛ Trump’s Controversial Sale of Arctic Drilling Rights Draws Almost No Interest

    The tract for which HEX bid $1.7 million is the same one that drew the only oil company bid in the first ANWR lease sale held on Jan. 6, 2021. In that sale, Regenerate Energy, a subsidiary of Australia-based 88 Energy Ltd., bid $770,000. At the time, the company said it bid on the lease because it was close to a prospect called Yukon that it was exploring on adjacent state land. Regenerate Energy relinquished the lease in 2022.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Meta putting up tents across the US to house AI servers, like ‘a scene out of the movie Mad Max’ — structures take three months to build and use jet engines for power

    Another factor that allowed Meta to bring its data centers online at a much faster pace is its use of “behind-the-meter” power, in which the company installed its own turbines to produce power on-site rather than relying on grid power. This is similar to what Musk did with his Memphis Supercluster, which he initially powered with portable power generators. However, Meta’s turbines would be a permanent feature on the Ohio site, as it’s designed to run independently of the power grid.

    [...]

    This combination of seemingly temporary structures and jet engines strapped to the ground is certainly an interesting combination. As one reporter said, “It’s like a scene out of the movie Mad Max.”

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Joel Chrono ☛ A couple of bike commutes

      Today I used my bike as a tool and not just for excercise or hobby!

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Digital Camera World ☛ I gave a cheap compact camera to my 6-year-old. What he said struck me to my core

      If you want to stop and take in nature, bring a kid on your hike – your speed will slow to a crawl, but you’ll spend more time noticing and appreciating the things you would have just walked by before.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Techdirt ☛ Former Cop Arrested For Not Being Sufficiently Reverential Of Charlie Kirk’s Corpse Scores $835K Lawsuit Settlement

    The most charitable reading of this quote suggests that Kirk has embraced Thomas Jefferson — “”The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants” — but decided the “patriots” and/or “tyrants” must be, occasionally, innocent people, including elementary school students.

    The least charitable reading is this: Charlie Kirk doesn’t care how many of your kids are killed so long as he (and his fellow debate me bro grifters) still have access to firearms. And as for the “second amendment protects the other God-given rights), get the fuck out of here. The last time any of these God, Guns, and Gadsden flag motherfuckers ever went after the government, they did it to fully embrace tyranny while attempting to destroy democracy.

    So, when someone says something pointed to say about Charlie Kirk’s live-by-the-gun, die-by-the-gun philosophy, they’re in the right (as in “correct,” rather than being part of the “right”).

  • CS Monitor ☛ Will Armenia reelect a leader seeking peace with rival Azerbaijan?

    Now, Mr. Pashinyan is trying not just to realize peace, but to dramatically – and controversially – shift the foreign policy that has guided the Maryland-sized nation of 3 million since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. He is seeking a thaw with historic enemies Azerbaijan and Turkey while also reducing Armenia’s dependence on its traditional ally Russia, by building new links to the European Union and the United States.

  • Semafor Inc ☛ India ‘cockroach’ party attracts discontented youth

    The Cockroach Janta Party was started by a recent Boston University graduate after India’s chief justice compared young unemployed Indians to cockroaches.

  • TruthOut ☛ What I’ve Learned From 25 Years of Covering the Global War on Terror

    As my version of TomDispatch ends (and Nick Turse’s launches), I find myself at my advanced age (with my friends beginning to die around me) in a world I simply could never have imagined. Don’t even get me started on artificial intelligence, which, as Bernie Sanders has pointed out, could someday “replace humans in controlling the planet”! Unreligious as I may be, I’m with the Pope on AI — though perhaps even more so. My own feeling is that no genuine intelligence could have been senseless enough to create such an obvious nightmare to come.

  • Michael Green ☛ xAIr Supply - by Michael W. Green

    I wish it were that simple. We’re increasingly seeing behaviors that suggest more sophisticated parties are now playing along — with leverage. For example, look at the behavior between NVDA and its 2x levered ETF variant. The shares outstanding for NVDU, the Direxion 2x levered NVDA ETF (one of a surging number of levered single-stock ETFs classified as “active”), have begun tracking inversely to NVDA share price, a notable change from 2023-2024: [...]

  • Jeff Kaufman ☛ Coming Around To Political Donations

    Five years ago I read a post on the EA Forum arguing that "election campaign contributions might be a way in which you can have a substantial impact as a small donor". It struck me as weird but plausible: a combination that you see a lot of on the Forum.

  • Idiomdrottning ☛ The Right Wing

    But you know the right wing has one idea: rich get richer.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Ricardo Mendes ☛ The Brexit Bus Was Only the Beginning

      A red bus promised that leaving the European Union would free up £350 million a week for the NHS. The claim was repeatedly challenged, repeatedly debunked, and yet it worked. Not because it was true, but because it was emotionally satisfying.

      Ten years later, the argument is no longer about whether Brexit delivered what was promised. The economic consequences are still debated, but something arguably more important happened: a lesson was learned.

      The lesson was that political narratives no longer needed to be true.

      They only needed to spread.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Meduza ☛ Russia’s media regulator is now allegedly DDoS‑attacking VPNs, not just blocking them

    Amnezia VPN users have been experiencing connection problems since late May, the service’s developers said. Certain server locations became unavailable, and the app itself became unstable. The developers attributed the outages to “an unprecedented DDoS attack amid the targeted blocking of a large array of Amnezia VPN IP addresses.”

  • Homo Ludditus ☛ One can’t ask Chinese chatbots literally anything about China!

    Post-output self-censorship is a well-known “feature” of all Chinese chatbots, but today I encountered it in a double way, so to speak.

    I came across this article on Al Jazeera: Why is Chinese President Xi Jinping visiting North Korea now? So I thought I could ask Qwen if I understood it correctly.

    I tried to formulate my prompt in a way that wouldn’t offend too much the Chinese sensibilities.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ A year after ICE raided L.A.'s Fashion District, a couple fight to save their dress shops

    Saturdays were once the busiest days, and Joel’s two shops would each sell 50 dresses or more. Now they might sell 10 each. Leonor went from selling 20 dresses a week to around three, maybe more on good days.

    The raids also affected small businesses orbiting around quinceañeras: makers of embossed invitations, sellers of tiaras and crowns, choreographers, caterers, florists and more.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Giving Rights to Robots Is a Bad Idea

    The rich have long used the fiction of “corporate personhood” to amass privileges while protecting themselves from accountability for their misdeeds. Now tech bros and venture capitalists want to further distort the concept of a person to include robots.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Canada Needs to Rebuild Public Telecoms

    A century ago, farmers in the Prairie Provinces fought to treat communications infrastructure as a public necessity instead of a private luxury. A new analysis of the historical data proves they were right to do so: public telecoms build better networks.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Digital Music News ☛ Ireland's Tickets.ie Abruptly Shuts Down After 22 Years

    Back to the shutdown’s abrupt nature, it was only late last month that Tickets.ie was penning social posts about forthcoming events.

  • Copyrights

    • Tedium ☛ Adobe’s CREATOR Act: A Can Of AI-Flavored Worms

      Can you legally protect an artistic style? Not currently, but an Adobe-backed bill, a seeming reaction to AI, is pitching the idea. Personally, I see a bunch of blurred lines.