Leftovers

• Hackaday ☛ Ask Hackaday: What Ever Happened To The Hero Nerd?

  It’s not a stretch to say that films such as these helped put many of us on a path towards science and technology. For those with an interest in more cerebral pursuits, seeing a scientist or an engineer save the day was hugely influential. How many engineers got their start watching Scotty frantically eke just a bit more power out of the Enterprise?

  But as we recently discussed some of these classic movies behind the scenes here at Hackaday, it struck us that all of the best examples we could come up with were now 20, 30, or even 40 years old. That’s not to say there aren’t a few contemporary standouts, but they mostly seem to be biopics or other historical dramatizations which don’t quite scratch the same itch. Even so, none of them appear to have had the cultural impact necessary to stand the test of time in the same way their predecessors have.

  So where have all of Hollywood’s heroic nerds gone, and what does it mean for future generations if these niche role models are no longer represented?

• Sal ☛ Reworking my remote notes and blogging rig

  Now I can treat the Mac Mini like a regular ol’ personal computer. I can put it to sleep, power it down, and not worry about exposing it to the public [Internet]. Tailscale was a good solution to that last problem, but I’m happy to not have to think about it anymore.

• Ned Batchelder ☛ Cultural factoids of the day: 64

  Perhaps because 64 is a power of two, and a square and a cube, but also for other reasons, it pops up in lots of places. Here are some of the things I’ve associated it with over the years: [...]

• Kenneth Reitz ☛ Music Theory, Asterisk

  There is a silent asterisk after the words music theory. You never see it printed, but it is always there, the way it hangs after the canon or the great novels. When someone says music theory they mean one specific thing, and we have quietly agreed not to say the specific part out loud. Western. Tonal. Roughly 1700 to 1900. Twelve equal-tempered keys. Two staves. Mostly European, mostly men, mostly gone. All of it is real and most of it is beautiful and I have spent my life inside it. It is also one theory, of one music, from one place, paused at one moment, wearing the name of the whole.

  The asterisk is where the rest of the world's music went.

• Michał Sapka ☛ No more RSS

  This matches a wider tendency in how I start to use the web. I want my usage of The Internet to be as conscious of an act as possible. No algorithm, no spam, no "Orange Site", and now no RSS. If I land on some text, it was my active decision.

• Computational Complexity ☛ Computational Complexity: The Tech of Silk Road

  The Silk Road harkens to a time where, for the most part, people, goods and information travelled along the same routes at the same speed. Large cargo still moves fastest by ship, people by airplanes and information via wires and satellite nearly instantaneously.

  When we think of technological disruption we think of the industrial revolution or even what's happening today, but the Silk Road reminds us that disruption has always been a part of the world's history, for bad and for good.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ Europe's first superconducting X-ray spectrometer uses 248 sensors

    It relies on a 248-sensor detector array that can detect X-ray photons far more efficiently than conventional X-ray emission spectroscopy (XES) and resonant inelastic X-ray scattering (RIXS) systems. Its photon detection efficiency is 100 to 1,000 times higher than that of traditional wavelength-dispersive X-ray emission spectrometers.

• Career/Education

  • Coalition for Networked Information ☛ Registration Open For Designing Libraries Conference

    We’re pleased to announce that registration is open for the 13th Designing Libraries for the 21st Century Conference, to be held at University of Pittsburgh on October 18-20, 2026. CNI, along with the NC State University Libraries and Tom Hickerson, Conference Founder, are please to be the sponsors of this event, hosted by University of Pittsburgh. Sessions on a wide variety of topics will be offered, along with a lightning round, tours, and two preconferences, one on Building and Maintaining Your Project’s Momentum During Leadership Transitions and one on Post-Occupancy Evaluation: Did Our Library Space Actually Work?

  • Kenneth Reitz ☛ Focus on Family More Than Code

    Let me be plain, because this is the part I cannot make funny. I gave years to a download counter that I am not getting back, and the people I gave them away from were the ones I say I love most. I have written the long version of that reckoning elsewhere. The house I live in matters more than the code I ship. I could not have written that sentence at twenty-five. It is the truest one I have now.

    The center of gravity has to move. The code is supposed to serve the life. I had it backwards for years: the life kept getting scheduled into the gaps around the code, on the way to something more important, which was always more code.

  • Guy LeCharles Gonzalez ☛ ALA 2026 and the "Occasional Journalist"

    I’ll be putting on my “occasional journalist” hat again next week, working with the excellent Words & Money team to help cover the ALA 2026 Annual Conference in Chicago!

    I’m still working on my overall schedule, but I’ve already picked out a few highlights that I’m planning to get to: [...]

  • David Pogue ☛ My Spelling-Bee Trauma: The First 50 Years

    Clearly, the answer is no. At 13, the spelling bee was the biggest thing that had ever happened to me. At 13, failing so publicly felt like the end of the world.

    But as life got bigger, the catastrophe grew smaller. And on its 50th anniversary, I try to see it for what it was: a slip of the lip, but a prelude to a life of wonderful things.

  • United Heroes ☛ jr conlin's ink stained banana » Leaving Mozilla

    After more than 15 years, I will be leaving Mozilla on July 21. Friday, June 12th will be my last “real” day, as I am planning on using my 200+ hours of vacation backlog. I've had the honor of working with some of you, and others have no idea who I am, but you might have a sticker of mine.

    While I have mostly enjoyed my time here, there are a few things I wish to say upon my departure: [...]

    Right, so that's the note I sent when I left. Now I get to talk about all the things that bothered the hell out of me.

• Hardware

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ New "electronic nose" uses 16 sensors to detect food spoilage

    The device contains 16 microscopic gas sensors, each designed to respond differently to airborne chemical compounds. Together, the sensors create distinct response patterns when exposed to different foods.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Don Marti ☛ Only the Polytron…

    Regularly eating high-sugar foods in the middle of the day wasn’t always a thing, and people were probably better off. Some cultural changes, involving advertising, helped normalize the snacking habit. Now Mars is going whole hog for surveillance advertising—which means that machine learning systems will “learn” to candymax the people at risk for eating disorders for a quick revenue hit, while pulling back on reinforcing the cultural acceptance. Mars may be opening up an opportunity for cultural imprinting of an alternate habit.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Dutch children are unusually happy and healthy. Is it because of this walking ritual?

    I shouldn’t have been surprised that the rain didn’t stop the Dutch kids. All day it had been thunderstorming, and the forecast didn’t look so great for the evening. And yet at 5pm, hundreds of kids started arriving – many by bike – with their parents to Amsterdam’s Westerpark, a beloved city park that caters to a more residential area of the capital. Today, it functions as a starting point: volunteers coordinate registration, and groups of children gather, decked out in raincoats and eager to embark on either a 5km or a 10km excursion around the surrounding neighbourhoods.

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • [Old] AppleInsider ☛ Apple left Time Capsule behind but a GitHub project tries to fix it

    As of April 1, 2026, The project is more of a proof of concept than a finished tool. The README outlines a manual process with several steps, like cross-compilation for a NetBSD-derived system and low-level network configuration.

    There's no packaged installer or automated workflow available, which is a problem that may or may not get solved. The platform it runs on makes long-term development tough. Time Capsule uses a customized, NetBSD-derived system without official tooling or support.

  • Stephen Hackett ☛ Goodbye, Time Capsule

    It also did not take long before folks started cracking the things open and putting larger hard drives in them, which is a type of tinkering I truly miss in our modern age.

  • Peter Hofmann ☛ What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

    I liked the UIs of the entire era from 3.0 to 2000, really. I'm mostly using Windows 2000 as an example here because it runs so well in QEMU/KVM and that allows me to easily take screenshots.

    Some of the following will sound absolutely trivial, but I think it's worth pointing out.

  • The Verge ☛ Tim Cook confirms price hikes are coming for iPhones, iPads, and Macs

    Cook doesn’t say when Apple plans on raising prices or which products will be affected. The company has already stopped selling the Mac Studio with 512GB of RAM in March and later raised the starting price of the Mac Mini to $799 after dropping the cheaper $599 option from its lineup. Analyst Tim Culpan also suggested that Apple could discontinue the base configuration of the MacBook Neo, while keeping the $699 model with 512GB of storage.

  • Matt Birchler ☛ Tim Cook announces price increases coming soon(ish)

    Yet here we are. 18 months later, and Tim Cook is voluntarily sharing in an interview that some combination of Apple products are going to see price increases due to the financial realities of 2026. All that groveling, all the presentations of gifts to the king, and Apple is going to be increasing prices just like every other company that didn’t do those things.

  • Dedoimedo ☛ Windows 11 25H2 - I'm so happy to not be using this

    Ever since I purchased myself a Macbook Pro, a big stone has lifted off me chest. While I already did have significant usability with Linux, until that point, I still carried a little bit of doubt in me heart. The reasons were varied, from consistency to quality to backward compatibility to availability of "official" software that sometimes intrudes into a person's life. I couldn't truly have these guarantees with Linux. But with this new machine, I was able to cover the gap left by my choice to stop using Windows for anything meaningful or serious.

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

    • Futurism ☛ OpenAI Is Taking the "Crack Cocaine" Approach to Pricing

      According to audited financial figures obtained by AI skeptic Ed Zitron, who shared them with The Financial Times, the net loss attributed to the ChatGPT maker soared from $5 billion in 2024 to a stunning $39 billion in 2025.

    • Futurism ☛ Microsoft's Copilot AI Caught Letting [Crackers] Steal Your 2FA Codes Through a Single Click

      The researchers used an exploit called a parameter-to-prompt (P2P) injection, which is closely related to more conventional prompt injection methods, which are attacks that involve manipulating an LLM by crafting deceptive text inputs that override the bot’s original instructions.

    • The Atlantic ☛ Doctors Are Worried About AI. They Use It Anyway.

      “I get a little bit queasy about how some of these results might be used,” Adam Rodman, a lead author on the study, said at a press conference just ahead of its publication in the journal Science. The work had amounted to an academic exercise, he told reporters; as thorough as it may have been, it did not prove that ChatGPT or any other AI tool was ready to become a standard part of medical practice. His caution was in line with that of other experts, yet as Rodman knew, most people will ignore the warning. AI has already wormed its way into the U.S. health-care system, evidence and safeguards be damned.

    • Techdirt ☛ Apparently The Real Reason Anthropic’s Models Are Offline: A Six-Year-Old Trump Grudge

      First off, Krebs wasn’t “just fired.” Krebs was fired (somewhat famously) all the way back in 2020, and not because he’s some sort of “radical Democrat,” but because he pointed out that the 2020 election was shown to have been quite secure. And since that ruined Trump’s big lie that he had really won the election, he had to fire Krebs (whom he had hired in the first place).

      So… it appears that the Trump admin shut down the most advanced versions of Anthropic’s AI tools not because they posed a serious risk… but because Anthropic asked someone to review the supposed threat, and that person got a shout-out from someone Trump hates for once telling the truth about election cybersecurity.

      As promised, this story just keeps getting stupider.

    • TruthOut ☛ Trump Admin Admits to Using Grok to Bomb Iran In Federal Lawsuit Backing Musk

      The information came to light when the Department of Justice (DOJ) intervened in a federal environmental lawsuit filed by the NAACP against Musk’s data center in Mississippi. The DOJ argued that the judge should dismiss the lawsuit because the data center is vital to issues of national security — and admitted that xAI’s Grok Gov Model, owned by Musk, has been used to conduct U.S. military operations in Iran.

      In a court filing, the DOJ claimed that the NAACP’s attempt to stop Musk’s company from running natural gas turbines in Mississippi “threatens American national, economic, and energy security” as the AI company “supports the Department of War’s military operations.”

    • Crooked Timber ☛ On The Governance of LLMs, and The University (of Chicago)

      I could stop here. But I promised a second externality as noted by Ammon. And this is a more important social externality: the users of a new technology will feel more confident. And, let’s stipulate, their confidence is not misplaced. Like Carlo’s ‘off-loaders’ they get more important things done in less time. Unfortunately, human nature being what it is, it will encourage boasting and self-aggrandizement. And, even if this self-satisfaction were fully merited, as Ammon recognizes this is a dynamic that predictably generates social instability. Not the least because off-loading boasters refuse to be bothered by the real challenges new technology introduces. The ethos of a polity may change for the worse with new technology—and it doesn’t take much imagination to discern that Ammon is worried about new idols and new modes. This may be inevitable, and some communities are willing to pay the price.

      Now, Carlo treats the university as a site of skill-transference, and in which Claude is one tool of many. And this is no surprise, because if you return to the press release of Alivisatos’ statement, you will see that the key word in it is ‘tool’ which is repeated over and over. Tools are used. And that’s how President Alivisatos sells his message.

    • David Morrison ☛ Stop accusing people of cheating with LLMs

      And look, I get it. AI sucks. The hype is exhausting. There are real, serious, extremely troubling implications with the technology. The rhetoric from the “other side” is over-the-top, overblown, and seems to “demand a response”. But if your response is to shame and make fun of [Internet] bystanders, you can GTFO.

    • [Old] Sumner Evans ☛ Forget MCP, Write CLI Apps

      I think it’s fairly clear that the main reason that CLIs are so LLM-friendly is that CLIs are text-based, and thus there are no wasted tokens from mode transformations. As we enter the age of LLM-assisted software engineering, I think it is going to be essential for developer tooling to be CLI-native. As someone has invested a lot of time learning to use the command line as much as I can for my computing, this is quite vindicating.

      It is also quite vindicating for the UNIX philosophy which states (in part) that “programs should expect their output to be the input to another, as yet unknown, program” and that “programs should be written to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface”. It turns out that CLI applications which followed the UNIX philosophy ended up being the most immune replacement in the AI revolution.

  • Social Control Media

    • Cyble Inc ☛ Telegram Ban In India Ahead Of NEET Re-Exam Explained

      The temporary Telegram Ban in India has been imposed under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000. The restriction is limited to a defined period covering the examination day and its immediate aftermath.

      In addition to restricting access to the platform, authorities have directed Telegram to disable its Telegram Message Editing Feature in India until June 30, 2026. The NTA stated that the feature has been misused in the past to create misleading claims of Paper Leak incidents after examinations had already taken place.

    • Edrith ☛ Social Media Ban: Responses to 10 common objections

      To put my cards on the table, I believe smartphones in general, and social media in particular, have been a deeply harmful societal innovation, at the ‘hey, let’s put lead in petrol’ scale of innovation. Their affects appear to include contributing to declining mental health, collapsing attention spans, bullying and general unhappiness, as well as contributing to broader crises such as falls in literacy, loneliness, fertility collapse and political polarisation. In some cases this is due to direct harms caused by use; in others, it is because the addictive nature crowds out other, healthier activities such as outdoor play or in-person socialising with others. For some of these, we increasingly have causal as well as correlational evidence; for others, it is simply highly indicative, when one looks at the trend lines across very many different countries going south at the same time.1

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Tech for Bad ☛ Tech For Bad

      Using publicly available information, sourced from UN transparency portals, reports, evaluations, job notices and other documents this research report provides an overview of the partnership the UN World Food Programme continue to hold with military and surveillance tech firm Palantir.

      In addition to the contravention of UN principles, guidelines and processes this partnership represents, the research finds that at a time when Palantir face widespread pushback, WFP are instead growing, scaling and “investing heavily” in their enterprise data platform provided by Palantir Foundry.

      The scope of data ingested into the platform, dubbed “the cornerstone of the WFP data ecosystem” and “WFP´s central data engine” is expanding, and now includes: [...]

    • Privacy International ☛ World Food Programme expand Palantir partnership

      The report also alerts civil society that organisations partnering with the WFP might have their data integrated into Palantir’s Foundry without their informed consent.

    • Techdirt ☛ FISA 702 Surveillance Authority Expires Because Donald Trump Tried To Tie It To A Voting Bill He Couldn’t Pass

      Section 702 was one of the surveillance programs Ed Snowden exposed in 2013 — and even after the exposure, the NSA has continued abusing it to spy on Americans.

      It’s the tool that lets the NSA collect communications to and from foreign “targets” — including any American on the other end of those communications, who the NSA is technically not supposed to surveil. It used to be worse. It used to include any communications “about” those targets (which made it very broad) but that was stripped out a few years ago, thankfully. Still, a ton of communications are collected under this program, including communications by and to Americans. The NSA then keeps all those communications, and so-called “backdoor searches” allowed the FBI to query those communications, meaning that even though the NSA has no authority to spy on Americans, the tool is used all the time to spy on Americans.

    • Techdirt ☛ Internet Age-Gates Are A Growing Global Threat

      The [Internet] is an essential resource for young people and adults to access information, explore community, and find themselves—both inside countries and across continents. Yet governments around the world continue to introduce and implement legislation requiring all online users to verify their ages before accessing the digital space. In some cases, politicians are going further, putting forth proposals to ban social media for younger users.

    • Citizen Lab ☛ How Freedom Tech Is Pushing Back Against Digital Authoritarianism

      Senior legal advisor Siena Anstis and senior researcher John Scott-Railton spoke with Forbes about the lagging legal safeguards that allow spyware to proliferate.

    • Dark Reading ☛ UK Social Media Ban for Minors Has Privacy Experts Worried

      Verifying age online is a hard problem. Such bans raise the sticky technology question of how to determine a user's age while protecting their privacy, says Jillian Kossman, chief operating officer of IDScan.net, an identify-fraud prevention firm.

    • Phil Gyford ☛ Heading in the wrong direction (Phil Gyford’s website)

      The ban sounds ineffective, imposes restrictions on everyone (providing ID to use social media), and largely lets the big social media companies off the hook for what happens on their services.

    • Michael Geist ☛ Gary Anandasangaree’s Vic Toews Moment Shows the Government Has Lost Its Way on Lawful Access

      Anandsangaree’s remark may not be quite as incendiary as Toews’s, but it runs from precisely the same playbook. Critics of his bill have included privacy commissioners, security experts, and privacy advocates. They do not side with criminals, but rather have concerns about the legislative choices the government is making in Bill C-22. These choices deserve to be fully debated with the shared goal of equipping law enforcement with the necessary tools to address criminal activity while preserving privacy and security. Getting that balance right takes time, and the government’s top priority should not be to get the bill through the House within the next three days, but rather to ensure that it works with all parties to craft a balanced bill that can pass Charter scrutiny. To do that, Anandansangaree and the government should withdraw the motion to cut off debate, stop with the character assassinations, and commit to taking the time to get Bill C-22 right.

    • Site36 ☛ 18% more searches in Europe's largest criminal database: Automated licence plate scans and passenger data drive numbers up

      In the Schengen Information System, the number of searches conducted by member state authorities, Europol and Frontex rose in 2025 to nearly 17.8 billion. At the same time, the number of person-related alerts has doubled since 2022, approaching the 2 million mark. Surveillance alerts under Article 36 are also on the rise.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Meduza ☛ A Russian warship fired warning shots at an elderly British couple near the Isle of Wight. Now the couple says the UK is trying to hush it up.

    The incident took place in international waters just under 40 kilometers (about 25 miles) from the Isle of Wight. Aboard the 12-meter (about 40-foot) yacht Bright Future was an elderly couple — Jane and Alan Kelvey, ages 69 and 71. They told the BBC and The Telegraph that they had done nothing wrong and that the Russian ship’s response was excessive.

    According to the Kelveys, when the yacht drew near the Russian vessel, it sounded five blasts, after which the couple “immediately” altered course by two degrees to signal to the warship that they had seen it. That didn’t help.

  • Spectator AU ☛ Islamism, the Muslim Brotherhood and the limits of Labour’s resolve

    Sections of the security system regards non-violent Islamists as “credible” bulwarks against the violent Islamists of al Qaeda and Isis; the best-known public exponent of this view was Bob Lambert, previously a leading light of the Metropolitan Police’s old Muslim Contact Unit, who was admired in his heyday at the highest levels of Thames House. Certainly, engagement with those non-violent Islamists comes at a price – but many in the Deep State regard that as a price worth paying. In the words of one security official, they constitute a kind of “Islamic Sinn Fein”, who can then persuade the putative hard men and women of violent Islamism not to take a walk on the wild side.

  • New York Times ☛ Finland Lifts a Nuclear Weapons Ban, Eyeing an Uncertain World

    The Nordic country, which shares an 830-mile border with Russia, said the move would strengthen the NATO alliance, which it joined three years ago.

  • Maine Morning Star ☛ Local election officials reel over 'logistical nightmare' of Trump's vote-by-mail order

    But Democratic states and voting rights groups argue the executive order — and the accompanying proposed rule — represent an illegal overreach by Trump because states administer elections under the U.S. Constitution. Trump and his Republican allies say the restrictions are necessary for election security and to combat noncitizen voting, which occurs extremely rarely.

  • Techdirt ☛ Military Official Admits Boat Strike May Have Murdered Human Trafficking Victims

    The War Powers Act was written specifically to prevent presidents from doing what they have done pretty much since its passage: engage in foreign military actions without seeking approval from Congress. If we were actually engaged in declared wars, these drone strikes would still be problematic, but possibly supported by law. But since every president has routed around this act, the killings of people in foreign lands and foreign waters looks a lot more like murder than the justifiable defense of the nation against foreign threats.

  • Ken Klippenstein ☛ Why Military Was at the UFC White House Event

    About a dozen different military organizations participated, bestowing faux dignity (and real harm by eroding the taboo against military involvement in public life). The military has no real mission or obligation here. So why did the brass play along?

    They were, you see, just following orders.

    The lack of media attention to the military presence was baffling to me. It’s not like they were hard to miss. Here’s a list I made of all the military personnel involved in the event: [...]

  • The Moscow Times ☛ Russian Frigate Reportedly Fired ‘Warning Shots’ at British Yacht in Channel

    When asked about the warning shots, a British Defense Ministry spokesperson said, "We are investigating reports of an incident in the Channel."

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Futurism ☛ Tesla Allegedly Showed Cooked Data to Get Full Self-Driving Approved

    Independent researchers who saw the underlying data behind that claim say the numbers are wildly misleading, because they assume that every vehicle on the road would be replaced by a Tesla in FSD mode, semi trucks and motorcycles included.

  • Reuters ☛ Exclusive: Tesla presented misleading ‘Full Self-Driving’ safety data to European regulators

    The Reuters examination also found Tesla exaggerates the technology’s safety by comparing a rate of crashes in FSD-piloted Teslas that triggered airbag deployments to a U.S. crash rate for all vehicles that includes far less-severe accidents. The ‌company also compares ⁠its cars to the average U.S. vehicle – which is much older than the average Tesla. That distorts the results because automakers have gradually introduced new safety features that reduce crashes.

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ AI Use by the US Government

    Scanning this list, many readers may find many causes for alarm. It represents a transfer of decision processes from human to machine on a massive scale over matters of individual freedom, public health and well-being, nuclear reactor safety and more.

    Consider these examples. The Health and Human Services’ (HHS) office of administration for children and families hired the world’s “scariest AI company,” Palantir—notorious for its work on behalf of the military, the CIA and ICE—to scan all grant applications to flag those not ideologically aligned with the administration’s dictates. The Federal Bureau of Prisons is developing an AI system to assess the “potential for misconduct for newly admitted inmates,” routing people into high-security confinement before they have actually done anything wrong in their custody. These read like programs fit for a Philip K Dick or George Orwell novel.

    [...]

    The disclosures carry minimal information, and lack the context necessary to understand their purpose and approach. The descriptions are typically just a sentence, and rarely more than a paragraph.

    And while the process theoretically involves some form of public consultation, in reality there is generally none. It would take an eagle-eyed citizen to even come across this disclosure. Unless you read FedScoop regularly, or watch the OMB’s federal chief information officer’s GitHub account, you probably missed it.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ AI use by the US government is ballooning. And the lack of transparency is troubling

    Disclosure of AI use cases could be a means to build public confidence and trust, but only if paired with consistent, meaningful public consultation. Washington DC and California are actively engaging the public to determine where and how it’s appropriate to use AI in government processes, or for government to regulate AI use in society.

  • Mother Jones ☛ ICE Accidentally Just Revealed How Much its New Contract With Peter Thiel’s Palantir Is Worth

    Immigrations and Customs Enforcement renewed its contract with the software company Palantir, according to new government documents made public on Monday, and it could be worth some $49 million over the next three years.

    But that number isn’t intentionally public.

• Environment

  • Scoop News Group ☛ EPA piloting AI on ‘everything,’ but experts still needed for highest levels

    “Something we tell our staff quite regularly is if you’re not an expert in the subject matter you’re using AI for, you probably shouldn’t be using AI because it can be very convincingly wrong,” he said. “If you’re not an expert at that, validating those outputs is very hard.”

  • Wired ☛ West Antarctica Is Missing Way Too Much Ice

    That event contributed to UN advisers pushing the species up two categories to “endangered” on its international threatened species list earlier this year.

    Dr. Peter Fretwell, a scientist at the British Antarctic Survey who has been documenting the penguin’s decline, said the current loss of sea ice in the region was “a serious problem for penguins, especially emperors.”

    “Sea ice is forming too late and breaking up too early. It leads to reduced breeding success and longer trips to molting grounds.”

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Hackaday ☛ Solid-State Batteries Take To The Sky

      The main contributing factor of these batteries’ improved energy densities is the ability to use a solid lithium anode, which has much higher energy density than the graphite-based anodes in modern liquid electrolyte batteries. Solid state batteries also have improved safety, since the solid electrolyte is generally not flammable and the battery itself is less prone to thermal runaway. The tests in this aircraft, a modified motorized glider, bear this out as well. With a standard lithium ion pack the team was able to harness 250 Wh/kg and with their new solid state battery they managed 410 Wh/kg, which let them fly the craft up to 24,000 feet (7,315 m) with the help of some wing-mounted solar panels.

    • Jakub Steiner ☛ Things That Last

      But the bike. The bike I ride every year on that trip, the one leaning against the wall in the shed right now — it still feels like my "new bike". I replaced the tires and brake pads last year and the thing screams. It is such a joy to ride. It feels current, alive, like something I just picked out. Until a friend sent me a photo his Google Photos app reminded him of. A very young version of myself is sitting on that exact bike. Fifteen years ago. Nothing has aged except me. Bikes just don't age like we do.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Futurism ☛ SpaceX Stock Has Now Started to Fall

    In its SEC filings, SpaceX also admitted that Musk’s plan to place one million enormous data centers in Earth’s orbit may not be economically feasible, let alone physically possible, casting a long shadow over the now-trillionaire‘s infamously overambitious aspirations.

  • I Cringely ☛ ARM Never Made a Chip. Dolby Never Built a Speaker.

    There’s a lot of excited arithmetic going around about artificial intelligence. A trillion-dollar valuation here, a hundred-billion-dollar funding round there, the price of a model quoted like the budget of a moon mission. I’ve been writing this column long enough — since the Reagan administration, if you want to make me feel old about it — to have learned one durable thing about computing: the number everybody is staring at is almost never where the money ends up.

    Let me tell you about two companies that figured that out early.

  • Dr Molly Tov ☛ "character" is just knowing yourself

    I've posited before that the true "official religion" of the United States is neoliberal economics. Everything else is subordinate to it, including what we think of as "religion." This religion is devoid of fasts, meditation, prayer, and any of the other trappings associated with "religion," because knowing the self is anathema to constant economic growth through manic consumption. To feed our god Economy, we must dispense with ourselves.

    "Character" is just knowing ourselves - but we built a society that will collapse if too many of us know ourselves. Is it any wonder that depression and anxiety run rampant in mainstream US society? In the country that just invented the trillionaire, most of us are destitute in every sense of the word.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: The (real) dead economy theory (17 Jun 2026)

    Here's a fun fact about Elon Musk: in 2020, his (nominal) net worth was $20b, and today it's $1t (nominally). But that's not the fun fact; this is: everything he's done since 2020 was a flop.

    As John Quiggin writes, the pre-2020 Musk was the Musk of Tesla, batteries and Starlink. The post-2020 Musk is the Musk of Starship, robotaxis, Cybertrucks and Twitter – a string of commercial flops and assets that literally exploded. I would add that post-2020 Musk created the world's hungriest money-furnace, an automated child-porn production tool called "XAI": [...]

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • European Commission ☛ Targeted consultation: draft guidelines on trusted flaggers under the Digital Services Act (DSA)

    The Commission seeks feedback from stakeholders with relevant experience and expertise on its draft guidelines on trusted flaggers. Text "Digital Services Act" inside a white triangle inside a white triangle against a blue background.

    The objective of this targeted consultation is to offer relevant stakeholders the opportunity to share their insights and contribute to the guidelines on trusted flaggers. The deadline for submitting input was extended to July 10.

  • Remedia Europe ☛ Brussels is finishing its censorship machine: Europe has until June 26 to say No - Brussels Signal

    The first defect is the privatisation of censorship. The DSA censors no one directly; that is its genius and its alibi. Instead, it tells platforms that once they have “actual knowledge” of illegal content they lose their liability shield, and it arms the Commission with fines on the largest platforms of up to six per cent of worldwide annual turnover. No rational company litigates the nuances of lawful speech under such a threat. It deletes on doubt. The state’s hands remain clean while the dirty work is done by terms and conditions — and over blocking of perfectly legal speech becomes not a bug but the business model of compliance. No one disputes that genuinely illegal content — terrorist propaganda, child sexual abuse material — must come down, and fast. The question is what else comes down with it.

    The second defect is the rule of vagueness. Articles 34 and 35 of the DSA oblige the largest platforms to assess and mitigate “systemic risks”, including “negative effects on civic discourse and electoral processes”. No statute defines these phrases. No court has delimited them. The same European Commission that interprets them also enforces them — prosecutor, judge and legislator in one office. In any Member State, a speech regime built on such clauses would be struck down as unconstitutional; in Brussels it is called good governance.

    The third defect is the trusted flagger itself. The DSA demands that these privileged informers be independent of platforms — but says not a word about independence from governments. Recital 61 spells out the consequence: law enforcement [Internet] referral units and Europol may themselves be flaggers. A ministry thus acquires a priority lane for removal requests that bypasses the safeguards attached to formal orders under Article 9 — no order citing a reviewable legal basis, no information on redress, no notification of the speaker. And the status is awarded, suspended and revoked by a state organ.

  • European Commission ☛ Draft Commission guidelines on trusted flaggers

    As regards the reporting requirements applicable to trusted flaggers and DSCs, the guidelines also explain what type of information the Commission considers that trusted flaggers should include in their reports on notices submitted. They also explain what type of information DSCs should communicate to the Commission when they award the status of trusted flagger to an entity.

    The Commission has also launched a targeted consultation, giving relevant stakeholders the opportunity to share their insights and contribute to the guidelines on trusted flaggers.

  • Techdirt ☛ You Have Less Than A Week To Tell The FCC That Carr’s Censorial Attack On ABC Is Nonsense

    Karl and I have detailed much of the history of how we got here. For many years, Carr has presented himself as a true defender of free speech and the First Amendment, but his actions made clear long ago that he only meant when Democrats were in the White House. During the first Trump administration, Trump demanded that his FCC support his plan to wreck Section 230 and enable greater censorship online. When one of the three GOP FCC commissioners — staunch Republican Mike O’Rielly — made a few tepid comments about how the FCC shouldn’t be in the business of messing with 230, Trump pulled his renomination. Carr, however, made it clear he’d be Trump’s little censorial lapdog.

  • Meduza ☛ ‘You Are Not Alone’ campaign for Russian political prisoners raises record funds

    Over three years, the fundraiser has raised tens of millions of rubles for Russian political prisoners and their families. For the first three years, it was held on a single day — June 12, Russia Day. In 2026, the event ran for a full week, from June 8 through June 14.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Greece ☛ ‘60 Minutes’ in crisis under Trump

    In 1995, he discovered Jeffrey Wigand, the first high-ranking whistleblower from within the tobacco industry to expose the methods used to make cigarettes more addictive. The explosive report became the subject of a confrontation with CBS News management and the network’s ownership, leading later on to Bergman’s resignation in 1998. The episode is the subject of Michael Mann’s gripping film “The Insider,” with Al Pacino portraying Bergman.

    These days, “60 Minutes” is going through the deepest crisis in its 58-year history. In recent weeks, executive producer Tanya Simon was dismissed and replaced by Nick Bilton, a technology journalist with no experience in broadcast news, while the contracts of two prominent correspondents were not renewed.

    On June 2, following a contentious meeting during which Scott Pelley, a “60 Minutes” correspondent and anchor with 37 years at the show, accused Bari Weiss, the new editor-in-chief of CBS News, of among other things “murdering” the program, he was also fired. Pelley subsequently publicly accused Weiss of improper interference in the content of broadcasts in order to make them less critical of the Trump administration.

  • Futurism ☛ Elon Musk Fantasizes About Killing Journalists

    We all know Musk’s opinions on journalists by now. Buying Twitter and turning it into X was his way of giving a giant middle finger to the elite media class. Since then, he’s been accused of suppressing journalists on his platform, including by shadowbanning and suspending them. To combat the “woke” mainstream media, he’s instead promoted independently sourced “citizen journalism,” and upholds his AI chatbot Grok as a more reliable arbiter of the news. (For an idea of what Musk’s ideal of “citizen journalism” looks like: the winner of X’s article contest earlier this year was a user who described himself as a literal Nazi, receiving $1 million.)

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Futurism ☛ Ohio Police Fire Robocop for Helping Make Zero Arrests and Failing to Issue a Single Ticket

    The oversized-traffic-cone-if-it-swallowed-a-giant-egg shaped machine is a K5 autonomous security robot built by Knightscope, a California-based firm. At a little over five feet in height and weighing some 400 pounds, it has no limbs to speak of and rolls around on two wheels, leading to comparisons to the Daleks from the “Doctor Who” franchise.

  • Columbus Ohio ☛ Dublin axes pilot program, returns robot cop to Knightscope

    The Dublin Police Department retired its robot cop, named "DubBot," on May 12 after less than a year patrolling a city parking garage, according to a Dublin police spokesperson.

    The city decided to end DubBot's pilot program after it determined the robot wasn't meeting its operational needs, Dublin police spokesperson Robyn Gray said. It has since been returned to technology company Knightscope, its California-based creator.

  • Court House News ☛ Unhoused Colorado man sues Wheat Ridge police officers who killed his dog

    On Aug. 31, 2025, Richardson celebrated his birthday with Boss, camping in a secluded area of Wheat Ridge near I-70. In the morning, Richardson tied Boss up with a 20-foot-long bright green cable and rode into town to buy dog food, not knowing Wheat Ridge police were in the area to execute a warrant for someone else.

    When Wheat Ridge police officer Leigh Kern met Boss outside the tent, he fired three shots at the dog. According to Richardson in the complaint, the dog “was not barking or growling aggressively” and had merely walked to the end of his leash.

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ Minneapolis Is The Way

    I just got back from Labor Notes. It’s the biggest conference of the grassroots, activist wing of the labor movement. Thousands of union members who are fired up to make the world a better place. It’s a thing that will make you feel hopeful.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ The web belongs to the machines now

    Automated bot traffic recently surpassed human traffic on the [Internet] for the first time in history – 57.5% versus 42.5% in early June, per data from Cloudflare Radar. Even Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, admitted on X that he was caught off guard by how quickly the tipping point arrived.

    What some called the “dead [Internet]” theory – that much of online activity is made up of bots, data scrapers and AI directives rather than real people – is no longer a theory.

  • EFF ☛ The Free and Open Web Is Under Attack at the IETF

    However reasonable these fears may be, the answer is not to change the IETF standards from neutral protocols that encourage openness to restrictive requirements designed to monetize [Internet] access.

    The worst of these proposed standards would give websites far greater ability to automatically block legitimate, lawful scraping and crawling. For example, the AI Preferences working group is working on proposals to give publishers a way to express “preference signals” against crawling web data for AI-related purposes, including to train models, generate outputs, and help users search the web. These preference signals would be expressed through robots.txt and could potentially become legally binding in some jurisdictions.

  • [Old] The Irregulators ☛ Book of Broken Promises – The IRREGULATORS

    America’s households and businesses have been charged at least nine times for broadband/fiber optic services, including the wiring of schools, libraries, and hospitals — about $4000-$7000 per household, and the total is way over ½ trillion dollars by 2016. You can thank just a few companies: AT&T, Verizon and Centurylink, who control the state-based utilities, along with the cable companies, Comcast and now-Spectrum et al. And this is the low number.

    More importantly, Verizon, AT&T and CenturyLink control the state telecommunications utilities, such as Verizon NY or AT&T-California, a fact that has been erased. And the copper wires, as well as most of the fiber optic wires, are part of these state utilities, including those used for FiOS or the wires to the cell sites, or all of the other ‘business data services’.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Digital Music News ☛ FM Radio is Being Nixed From New Vehicles, Too

    The first new cars not to ship with even a basic FM radio include entry-level versions of the Tesla Model 3 and Model Y, but the new Rivian R2 also omits it. Instead, the R2 offers the Rivian Digital Radio, which is powered by iHeartRadio. That service combines digital radio with the ability to tune into FM and AM stations, so presumably Rivian’s solution will do the same. But iHeartRadio requires cell coverage—meaning that a typical R2 owner looking to head out into the wilderness in their SUV will not have [Internet] access and therefore will not have radio. The R2 also supports Apple Music, Audible, Spotify, Tidal, and TuneIn—all services that require [Internet] access, either in the form of the Connect+ package or a personal WiFi hotspot.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • The Register UK ☛ Brit competition cops order Google to make search rankings less mysterious

    The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has imposed two new conduct requirements for Google's search services, to improve transparency and fairness in result rankings and allowing users to port their search data to third parties.

    The requirements follow the CMA's actions in early June that let publishers opt out of having their work appear in AI Overviews, while requiring attribution and clear links to sources. "More activity is expected over the summer," the regulator warned.

  • Copyrights

    • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Academic Freedom for the Win; Open Access Mandate in Germany Declared Unconstitutional

      While SPR is styled as a “right,” it is actually a limitation on rights. Under copyright law, an author has the right to post her work, license her work non-exclusively, or license her work exclusively for defined purposes (note that German law differs from US law in that authors may never fully divest themselves of copyright. In practice, an exclusive license corresponds to a US law transfer of rights). SPR limits the last right. While one could argue that, given the economics of journal publishing (in which authors are typically not paid), SPR benefits the authors, it is worth analyzing this further. First, imagine that for any other content, the state limited your freedom to contract such that you could not safely grant exclusive rights. It would be hard to get a book published or film made under those circumstances. While many journal publishers allow some archiving of accepted manuscripts, SPR removes discretion and limits choice.

    • Digital Music News ☛ Are AI Music Platforms Actively Training on Copyrighted Works?

      The presence of hits from commercially prominent acts won’t come as a surprise; roughly 300 Beatles tracks are in each of the two biggest datasets, as are hundreds of songs apiece from Taylor Swift, ABBA, Snoop Dogg, and Michael Jackson, to name a few.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Music Publishers Truncated Musk's 'DMCA Plague' Tweet to Back Piracy Case, X Tells Court

      Elon Musk's X Corp has filed a motion to dismiss the multi-million dollar music piracy lawsuit, which was recently amended following the Cox Supreme Court ruling. X says the new complaint is partly based on a tweet that was pulled out of context. It argues that even the full version falls short of what the Supreme Court's demanding inducement standard requires.

      xIn a complaint filed at a Nashville federal court in 2023, Universal Music, Sony Music, EMI and others, accused X Corp of “breeding” mass copyright infringement.

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

      • we forget to breathe

        you're holding parts of me
        so delicate 
        I forget to breathe 
        
        
        I sit with my fears 
        and focus
        on one thought
        

    • Technology and Free Software

      • Open Source, and Programmer's Reference Documentation

        I've always proactively pushed fixes I found to open source projects, if nothing else as a backup method in case I lose them myself.

        For anything bigger than this, my latest favourite license was the EUPL, which is pretty much the same as the AGPL3. However, given that the legal system disregards copyright for LLM training I'm now treating anything I publish (including this gemlog) as equivalent to public domain no matter my preferences. So if you don't want whatever you produce to be copyright-washed to increase wealth concentration in the bourgeoisie, better keep it confidential (or trade secret if for work). Binary releases may make a comeback.