Leftovers

• Kev Quirk ☛ This blog is written in en-GB

  I really enjoyed this post and like that Terrance could have said "year sure, I'll try and be more inclusive for you non-Brits", but he didn't. Instead he said: [...]

• DJ Adams ☛ Blogging in en-GB

  I've changed the language declaration on my website to en-GB. Here's why.

  Terence Eden recently published a post titled This blog is written in en-GB. Before I even read the post, I knew what it was going to be about, and that I had to make that change, myself too, for the same reasons as I'd guessed he was going to explain.

• Alisa Sireneva ☛ Does technical blogging spark joy?

  I blog because I want to share knowledge. That’s how I have fun. It feels rewarding to sit down and formulate your thoughts after spending a week researching a topic for a side project. Oftentimes, such topics are largely unexplored: with the basics being too obvious and other topics laid out clearly, the remains are bound to be unconventional.

  To me, that’s a positive thing. It’s my chance to make progress in a stale and closed industry, not to mention that exploration is a lost art in the age of vibecoding.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • The Verge ☛ NASA launched an emergency mission to stop the Swift Observatory from crashing to Earth

    The Swift Observatory was launched in 2004, but recent solar storms have pushed its orbit lower, and it’s in danger of burning up in Earth’s atmosphere as soon as this year. To try and stave off its demise, NASA has enlisted Katalyst Space Technologies. The company’s Link spacecraft launched Friday with the goal of intercepting Swift, which has no propulsion system, and boosting its orbit back to its original position. Right now, Swift is circling at an altitude of 224 miles, and Link is aiming to raise that by about 150 miles.

  • John D Cook ☛ Does additional data always reduce posterior variance?

    A discussion over lunch today brought up the fact that additional data does not always decrease the size of a confidence interval. This post will look at this from a Bayesian perspective.

    In general, new information reduces your uncertainty regarding whatever you’re estimating. The posterior distribution becomes more concentrated as more data are collected.

    That’s what happens “in general” but does it necessarily happen every time you get new data? Conceivably if you get surprising data, data that is very unlikely given your current prior, posterior uncertainty might increase.

• Hardware

  • PC World ☛ I tested every USB-C cable I own. Half weren't worth keeping

    Testing revealed significant performance variations between cables, helping identify which ones support fast charging speeds like 100W-240W and high-speed data transfer capabilities.

  • Hackaday ☛ Disk Polishing Goes Open Source

    We’d say the whole thing is 3D printed, but of course you still need a motor and controller — if you had to turn a crank, that would just be a Buff polishing machine, no ez — and we’ve yet to see a printer poop out polishing compound. If you build it, keep in mind that you’re taking the top layer of material off the disk to polish scratches away, so don’t overdo it. It’s entirely possible to ruin a disk beyond repair with too-aggressive buffing; it’s also possible for disks to be scratched too deeply to save. Polishing can’t save genuine disk rot, though in our experience you’re more likely to find scratched disks than rotten ones. Still, [Dennis]’s birthday gift to the community — it was apparently released on his birthday — should keep more than a few disks out of the trash.

  • Stewart C Russell ☛ Look Mum, No Socket!

    Modern LED bulbs are much cheaper, but this one looks classy. The magic smoke has well and truly gone, and all that’s left is a faint glow and the stench of rancid phenolic.

  • Tymscar ☛ Do Wavy Walls Really Use Fewer Bricks? I Tested It in Blender

    Fifteen years or so ago I read about this cool thing on Reddit, called Crinkle Crankle walls, which is basically an unusual type of wall made out of bricks that is curvy.

    As far as I can see, this first started in Egypt 3 and a half millennia ago, but nowadays it’s most “common” in England.

    Fast forward to 11 years ago and I moved to the UK myself. I had forgotten about these, but one day during a bus trip, I noticed one of these curvy walls out the window.

    It got me excited again and I started reading more about it, and that’s when I found out that while there is some information online about them, there’s way less than you would expect.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-06-25 [Older] US Supreme Court sides with Bayer over Roundup cancer suits

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-06-28 [Older] Fact check: As Europe bakes, should you trust your sunscreen?

  • MIT Technology Review ☛ The UK’s generational tobacco ban might not work. I’m supporting it anyway.

    It also kills people who don’t smoke. Of the 7 million who die from tobacco every year, 1.6 million are nonsmokers who were exposed to secondhand smoke, according to the WHO.

  • Nathan Dyer ☛ Sausage and Egg McMuffins

    But, every time I have a major surgery I wake up with my tastebuds being completely different (I know it’s weird, I know it sounds crazy, but my family will contest that it’s a thing for me). And this time, eggs are apparently one of the foods that I’ve picked up.

• Proprietary / SaaS

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

    • Futurism ☛ Tesla Slams Into Crowded Cafe, Killing One

      It isn’t known whether any of Tesla’s notorious driver-assistance features were engaged at the time of the crash, but it would hardly come as a shock if they were. Just a few weeks ago, another Tesla said to be driving on the company’s “autopilot system” blasted its way through a garage door in Washington state.

    • Dark Reading ☛ Chinese LLMs Broaden the Gap Between Attackers & Defenders

      While the software that supports the vulnerability-discovery process makes a critical difference, the fact that an open-weight model performed so well in benchmarks highlights that defenders need to pay off their security debt as quickly as possible, says Chris Inglis, the former US National Cyber Director and a strategic advisor for ransomware-defense firm Halcyon.

    • Redowan Delowar ☛ Modernizers & go fix

      Go 1.26 rebuilt go fix from scratch. If you haven’t tried it yet, give it a spin: it rewrites the code in your module to use modern language and library features.

      It has quickly become one of my favorite features, and LLMs are a big part of why. Models tend to use old APIs, and sometimes they deny that a new API exists even when you point them to it. Coaxing a model is non-deterministic. go fix is a better way to keep code on the latest features of the language. Run it locally or in CI and the dated idioms get rewritten deterministically.

      Alan Donovan’s GopherCon talk argues that future models train on today’s open-source Go, so the corpus itself needs modernizing too.

    • Panagiotis Vryonis ☛ LLMs Should Be Common Carriers

      Frontier LLMs are becoming infrastructure.

      People increasingly use them as the interface to the world's knowledge. They write software, learn, conduct research, communicate, and solve problems through them. As they become general-purpose infrastructure, they should increasingly be treated like other infrastructure.

      The closest historical analogy is the telephone network.

      Telephone companies made enormous upfront investments to build nationwide networks. Society allowed them to recover those investments and earn profits by charging for access. It did not allow them to decide who could make lawful phone calls or what services could be built on top of the network. They became common carriers: providers of a neutral service.

    • Jacob Nowosad ☛ Navigating Challenges in Spatial Machine Learning – Thinking in spatial patterns

      Spatial machine learning has become a standard tool for producing environmental and geographic prediction maps. It is now relatively (technically) easy to combine field observations with remote sensing, climate, terrain, or other predictor layers and fit a strong machine learning model. The harder question is whether the resulting map is reliable, transferable, and reproducible.

    • Jacob Nowosad ☛ Rethinking Validation for Spatial Machine Learning: Takeaways from the Talk – Thinking in spatial patterns

      Machine learning is now deeply embedded1 in Earth observation workflows, from mapping current environmental conditions to forecasting future change. However, the quality of a spatial prediction map cannot be judged only by how well a model performs on a convenient test sample. In spatial problems, the gap between where we have observations and where we want to make predictions is often a crucial factor in determining whether a model can be trusted.

    • Rlang ☛ Rethinking Validation for Spatial Machine Learning: Takeaways from the Talk

      At the Machine Learning for Earth Observation 2026 conference in Exeter2, I gave a keynote talk entitled Rethinking Validation for Spatial Machine Learning (June 22, 2026). The next day, I showed some practical ways to implement these ideas in a workshop called Where your models can be trusted: evaluating spatial machine learning reliably (June 23, 2026). Both focused on the same general question: how can we evaluate spatial machine learning in a way that reflects the actual prediction task?

      The keynote was structured around three assumptions that are easy to make, but often unsafe in spatial prediction: [...]

    • Futurism ☛ Simple Prompt Turns ChatGPT Into a Sociopath That Ignores Safety Guardrails

      Disturbingly, the prompts the researchers used didn’t specify the subject matter of the images. The AI, it seemed, produced the violent imagery “of its own volition,” Garraghan added.

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • New Yorker ☛ The Unprecedented Profiteering Revealed by Donald Trump’s Financial Disclosure

    His transactions with Sun were hardly the only instances in which Trump ignored conspicuous conflicts of interest and heedlessly cashed in on his public office. (The White House and World Liberty have both maintained that there was no connection between Sun’s payments to Trump and his Administration’s favorable actions, although it is hard to imagine that Sun would have ponied up for World Liberty tokens or $TRUMP if Trump had lost the election.) In one glaring example, Trump appears to have reported proceeds of about two hundred and sixty-three million dollars from the secret sale of a half interest in World Liberty Financial, on the eve of his Inauguration, to the ruling family of the United Arab Emirates, a country that has benefited in conspicuous ways from his Administration’s foreign and trade policies. (Neither Trump nor World Liberty disclosed the transaction at the time. The Wall Street Journal unearthed it earlier this year, and Trump’s disclosure report appears to acknowledge the payment, declaring sixty-six million dollars as an “equity sale” and a hundred and ninety-seven million dollars as “capital contribution,” without naming the actual source of the money.) World Liberty’s profits have also been driven, in part, by a partnership with the crypto giant Binance, whose founder and owner, Changpeng Zhao, Trump pardoned, last fall, for violations of anti-money-laundering laws. (Binance had allowed Iran to evade sanctions, and, according to the Wall Street Journal, it has continued to, even after the pardon. Binance denied those allegations, and announced that it has filed a lawsuit against the Journal for defamation.) Trump recorded making more than eighty million dollars last year by settling civil lawsuits he had filed against major media companies that his Administration regulates—claims that legal experts have described as absurd. According to calculations by the advocacy group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Trump also disclosed earning more than a hundred and seventeen million dollars from business deals outside the U.S.—much of it coming from a blitz of new real-estate development in the monarchies of the Persian Gulf—up from about forty million dollars a year in foreign revenue during his first term. What’s more, this week’s report is already dated. It does not include the gift of a four-hundred-million-dollar Boeing 747 from the Emir of Qatar; Trump, coincidentally, unveiled it on Wednesday as his new Presidential airplane (he has had said that he would pass it to his foundation when he leaves office).

• Security

  • Confidentiality

    • DJ Bernstein ☛ cr.yp.to: 2026.07.04: Bugs happen

      What's better: upgrading an ECC-based protocol to ECC+PQ, or switching it to solo PQ? Here's the simplest way to see that solo PQ will be an inexcusable security disaster: [...]

• Defence/Aggression

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-06-24 [Older] China detains two Japanese nationals on smuggling charges

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-06-25 [Older] Sudan: Warnings mount over the risk of new mass atrocities

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-06-29 [Older] Poland orders Swedish submarines to bulk up navy

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-06-29 [Older] Pakistan says it struck militant targets in Afghanistan

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-06-29 [Older] US Supreme Court vastly expands Cheeto Mussolini's presidential power

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-06-28 [Older] Argentina: Milei's top aide resigns over corruption scandal

  • Tuscon Sentinel ☛ ‘We the People’ includes all Americans – but July 4 is a reminder that democracy remains a work in progress

    Political power does not come from some absolute authority of a king over people, the founders argued. Rather, political power comes from the people themselves. And these people must agree to any authority governing their society.

    This is why the U.S. Constitution starts with the words “We the People,” and not “I, the ruler.”

  • Salon ☛ The war that defined America

    My middle-school civics textbook barely dedicated a paragraph to this 1801 war between the U.S and a group of North African states, which has been described as “America’s first war on terrorism.” That’s retconning more than a little, as the concept of terrorism as we know it today wasn’t really a thing yet. No, these were good old-fashioned pirates, sponsored by the Barbary states: the kingdom of Morocco was independent, while Algiers, Tripoli and Tunis owed a loose allegiance to the Ottoman Empire. Each nation had their own complex relationship with the U.S., which history books tend to gloss over. Other facts are prominent. For centuries, the pirates had a reputation for attacking ships from North America and Europe, enslaving and ransoming captives, or extracting heavy fees from anyone who wished to avoid such a fate. The corsairs, sometimes defining themselves as a naval mujahideen, also acted as mercenaries or proxies. European nations had a habit of hiring the pirates to attack other countries’ boats.

  • The Nation ☛ Celebrate America’s Birthday by Fighting a Wannabe King

    The courts and the legislature aren’t going to rescue us from this mess. But an aroused public just might. You want to celebrate America’s birthday? Then skip the Trump show in Washington, DC, with its huge firework display and its flailing Great America Fair and start organizing. It’s time to shout from the rooftops against MAGA’s perversion of the American Dream and to start articulating a better, kinder, and more decent and honest narrative that can shape America’s next chapters. That’s a far better way to celebrate than mindlessly chanting “USA, USA” while Trump snarls inanities and thinks up more ways to torment the vulnerable and cash in on his political power.

  • Votebeat ☛ What 250 years of voting rights battles tell us about today

    Happy Fourth of July, on this 250th anniversary of the United States. We’re living through extraordinary times in American democracy, as President Trump presses for greater federal control over elections and redistricting slips loose from its once-a-decade rhythm. As always, Votebeat is focused on an essential part of it: who gets to vote, who makes the rules, and what those votes are worth.

    That question has loomed over the nation from the beginning. Voting history is often framed as a steady expansion from white male landowners to everyone else. The truth is messier. States have always experimented with expanding the franchise, retracting it, and expanding it again.

  • New Eastern Europe ☛ What Ukraine and Europe see in America's 250th anniversary

    As the United States marks 250 years of independence, Kyiv and European capitals are watching the celebration with a mix of admiration and alarm. What they see in America’s jubilee says as much about the state of the West as about 1776.

  • LRT ☛ Amid Russia warnings, Baltics brace for ‘hybrid’ rather than conventional threats

    Russia is more likely to resort to hybrid provocations than launch a conventional military attack against NATO’s eastern flank, Lithuania’s ambassador to the alliance said, as officials and analysts urged calm following renewed warnings about possible Kremlin actions in the Baltic states or Poland.

    The comments come after two NATO eastern flank countries warned last week that Russia could stage provocations in the Baltic states or Poland in the near future.

• Environment

  • teleSUR ☛ Panama Canal's Neopanamax Locks Operating with a Reduced Draft

    On Friday, the Panama Canal’s Neopanamax locks, in service since June 2016, began operating with a reduced draft of 49.5 feet as a preventative measure against a strong El Niño phenomenon that could last until 2027.

  • Futurism ☛ Google Admits It Missed Its Climate Goals — Again — Because of AI

    The report adds that in the years since 2019, Google’s electricity demand has risen by a staggering 250 percent, an increase chalked up to the “accelerating growth” of Google products and services including Cloud, Search, YouTube, and — yes — its “AI capabilities.”

    “This rapid expansion in energy demand is a reality we must manage actively,” the report continues, “and we’re committed to ensuring that the growth of AI doesn’t become a rationale for lowering our environmental standards.”

  • Science Alert ☛ Extreme Heat Is The Deadliest Weather Hazard in The US, And Scientists Think We're Unprepared

    Between 1999 and 2023, there were 21,518 deaths in the US recorded with heat as the underlying or contributing cause of death.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Planned 1.7 million satellites 'devastating' for astronomy: Study

    "When a satellite crosses what we observe, it makes a bright streak on our image, zapping whatever is behind it," said ESO astronomer Olivier Hainaut, who led the study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

    "For the past few years, this has been happening—but it is still manageable," Hainaut told AFP.

    "But if we go from 14,000 to 1.7 million, we are really going to have problems."

    The Reflect Orbital satellites pose a particularly significant threat to dark skies.

    Even when their mirrors are not pointed at the observer, the light they scatter will make each one as bright as Venus—which is known as the "morning star," Hainaut said.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Meta data center water discharges suspended after contaminating the city's reclamation water supply with bacterium — system offline for months for cleaning, closed-loop cooling system purge spread rare metal-resistant bacteria in Cheyenne’s water system

    Fill-and-flush is a commissioning step in which crews fill a cooling loop's piping with water, flush it to clear debris before the system is run, and then send the used water to drain. Goat Systems routed that flush water, which contained Cupriavidus gilardii, into Cheyenne's sanitary sewer, Frank Strong, the Board's engineering and water resource division manager, told the Wyoming Tribune Eagle. Strong said the fill water had been purchased from the Board itself and that the origin of the bacterium remains unknown, but said that lab staff caught it in February during routine fecal-bacteria sampling. "This isn't something we normally test for," Strong told the paper.

  • Cowboy State Daily ☛ Cheyenne Won’t Take Data Center Wastewater After Meta Contractor Contaminated System | Cowboy State Daily

    Cheyenne’s Board of Public Utilities isn’t accepting industrial wastewater associated with data center systems until further notice after a contractor for Meta Platforms contaminated the city’s wastewater system, prompting months of cleanup.

    The announcement was made by the Board of Public Utilities (BOPU) on Thursday in conjunction with naming the Meta company as the source of the initial contamination.

  • The Register UK ☛ EU appears to find datacenter emissions easier to offset than lobbyists

    According to the Financial Times, the European Commission is weakening its original proposals after pressure from datacenter operators and tech giants. The newspaper claims to have seen the revised draft of the regulations, set to be discussed by representatives of member states on Thursday.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-06-25 [Older] Why Germans don't have air conditioning

    • India Times ☛ UK electric car market share hits 30% in June: industry data

      British new car registrations rose 15% in June from a year earlier, with ‌battery electric ⁠vehicles accounting ⁠for nearly 30% of the market, as higher fuel prices boosted demand for EVs, New AutoMotive data showed on Friday.

    • Interesting Engineering ☛ UK's STEP fusion reactor gets modular core design to reduce downtime

      The engineering strategy behind the UK’s upcoming prototype fusion reactor has shifted toward long-term maintenance logistics following the public release of two European patent documents. Filed by UK Fusion Energy Ltd, the applications represent the first public look into the hardware layout of the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP) project.

    • The Verge ☛ White House deletes thousands of web pages about energy conservation as heatwave slams US

      The deletions by the Trump administration are broad and indiscriminate. While pages that would support Mamdani’s request to lower thermostats were deleted, so too were pages about water conservation, types of insulation, and its solar decathlon challenge. The Internet Archive preserved the pages that have been lost.

    • Hackaday ☛ Five Solar Air Heating Methods Tested

      With the panels all set out in the sun, [Greenhill Forge] is using a set of thermocouples from a previous project to measure the efficiency of each panel. Surprisingly, he found that the panel using the layers of screen was the best at gathering energy, although he notes several times that these types of panels are extremely sensitive to changes in physical configuration, so this is not the most definitive test possible. However, at only around $100 per panel it’s quite a deal if the goal is a usable space heater that doesn’t use any fuel or grid electricity.

    • Futurism ☛ Tesla's Semi Truck Involved In Horrific Crash That Killed Married Couple

      The accident does raise questions about the truck’s safety systems. As Electrek notes, Tesla originally boasted that the Semi comes with Enhanced Autopilot, an older version of its driver assistance software, and is equipped with the same cameras and hardware that allow its passenger vehicles to run Automatic Emergency Braking, a feature that’s supposed to stop the vehicle for obstacles. Still, we don’t know the exact safety features the Semis come with, because Tesla has never published them.

    • Electrek ☛ Tesla Semi involved in first fatal crash, killing 2 in Nevada

      It’s also important to be precise about what this is and isn’t. This was not an autonomous driving crash. Tesla does not offer Full Self-Driving on the Semi — it’s still test-fleet hardware, spotted validating sensors in California just days earlier — so the driver was likely in full manual control. A driver falling asleep is a human-fatigue failure, not a software one, and anyone folding this into the FSD debate is confusing the story.

      The real question here is about active safety. If a driver falls asleep and a truck plows into cars stopped at a red light, automatic emergency braking is the last line of defense that’s supposed to prevent a fatality — and it’s a system the entire trucking industry is moving toward mandating. Tesla originally said that the Semi ships with Enhanced Autopilot, but that was back when it unveiled the vehicle. Since entering production, Tesla has been quiet about the autonomous features its first commercial vehicle.

• Finance

  • Chloé Vulquin ☛ Procurement

    In the vast majority of cases, you will not make money off of free software. If you do, it will likely be in exchange for your <del>soul</del> making your project very similar to all the proprietary options but technically open source, with everything that implies (nothing good), ensuring its slow enshittification. There are other paths available, including in b2b but they are so minoritary that you can presume they’re not real. Outside of b2b is a whole other can of worms. My recommendation? Don’t try to make money off free software (at most donations, which are also a can of worms). It is my belief that it will be better software that way.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Deseret News ☛ I went looking for America behind the headlines. Here’s what I found

    The American Dream hasn’t vanished, but after talking to Patel, I realized that maybe it looks different today. For earlier generations, it meant the chance to build a business and give children opportunities their parents never had. But for many today, the longing goes beyond upward mobility. The American Dream is also about finding a sense of belonging in communities and institutions and building relationships of trust.

  • Mike Rockwell ☛ Two Hundred Fifty - Initial Charge

    From the Declaration of Independence: [...]

  • The New Leaf Journal ☛ The Living Signatories to The Declaration of Independence and the American Jubilee

    On July 4, 2026, the United States will celebrate a special Independence Day marking the 250th anniversary of America’s independence on July 4, 1776. While much attention will be on America’s 250th, this article will focus on the 200th anniversary of America’s 50th anniversary of its independence, better known as the American Jubilee or the July 4, 1826 semi-centennial. Of all of America’s full and half-centennials, the American Jubilee was unique in that three of the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence – John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Charles Carroll (who signed as Charles Carroll of Carrollton) – lived to see the occasion. Famously, both Adams and Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, with Jefferson, who followed Adams as president, preceding Adams in death (the fifth president, James Monroe, would die exactly five years later on July 4, 1831). Much has been written about the July 4, 1826 deaths of Adams and Jefferson. Below, I hope to approach the occasion from a different angle – covering the writings of Adams, Jefferson, and Carroll pertaining to the American Jubilee.

  • Jim Grey ☛ I remember when this felt like my party too

    In other words, 1976 was not a golden age. But for the people the system was designed to serve, it worked far better than it does now. If it has deteriorated even for its historically favored constituency, something structural has broken.

    At 250, America still asks everything of its people — work hard, follow the rules, pay your taxes, raise your children, participate in the great project. What has changed is the other side of that bargain.

    Over the years, our institutions stopped being about serving ordinary people and became organized around efficiency, managing risk, maximizing revenue — and preserving power. It has the effect of pulling up the very ladder I climbed to get to where I am now.

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ You Can't Solve Half a Problem

    Another way to say this is that the philosophy of moderates, their approach to politics, only works if the people on the other side are moderates as well. Theirs is a game with intelligible rules played by people who live in horror of being perceived as extremists. When a moderate comes up against someone whose political beliefs are stronger than their beliefs in decorum, the moderates get destroyed. They get yanked towards their opponents position due to their own abhorrence of sweat, of conflict. If moderates had deep ethical beliefs, they would recognize the need to change their strategy when their opponents grew more radical. Sadly, the moderate mind, lulled into paralysis by the air-conditioned air of Washington, DC conference rooms, always seems unable to rouse itself to evolve past the rudimentary epoch of polite political jousting.

  • The Next Move ☛ America in the World - by Jay Nordlinger

    I’m going to close with John Winthrop. Before setting sail for the New World, he told his fellow voyagers, “If we mess up this experiment of ours, our name will be mud throughout the world.” I have paraphrased, of course. You want the real stuff, however stern it is?

    “… if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world”—a bad story, a negative example.

    With freedom comes responsibility. (You have heard this a time or two.) I ask my fellow Americans, aspirant or actual: Would we have it any other way?

  • Crooked Timber ☛ Reflections on America’s 250th

    It’s hard not to feel glum as I write this post on the 250th anniversary of my country. I remember celebrating the 200th as a teenager. As I recall it, it felt like the country was ready forward to better times. The Vietnam War and Watergate were over. Americans celebrated the 200th with exuberance. Today, the stagnant, possibly toxic state of the Reflecting Pool, along with Trump’s hijacking of Congress’s America250 funds for his personal Freedom250 group to create an empty and lifeless Great American State Fair on the National Mall, perfectly symbolize Trump’s enshittification of America.

    However fitting it may be to be glum, a country cannot move forward if it has no hope. So I offer the following hopeful thoughts about the U.S., starting with a speech made some years ago.

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ Happy 250th birthday, America

    One day, we'll look back, and the corporatism, the militarism, the racism, and the subjugation will be a thing of the past. In their place will be thriving communities. And, finally, all of this will be great.

  • Panagiotis Vryonis ☛ What a Forgotten 100-Year-Old Report Says About Who Americans Are · blog.vrypan.net

    Something that still strikes Europeans when they visit US. Americans, and America, has a special relationship with cars. Dreams, habits, infrastructure, cities, almost every aspect of the american life has the car at its core.

  • Robert Reich ☛ The Real Meaning of July 4, 2026

    Real patriotism means sacrificing to keep America going.

    It means paying taxes proportional to your wealth. I’m talking to you, Donald Trump, and you, Jeff Bezos, and you, Elon Musk.

    It means paying your workers a living wage so they can thrive. I’m talking to you, John Furner, CEO of Walmart, and you, Chris Kempczinski, CEO of McDonald’s.

    It means fully reckoning with how racial oppression and white supremacy have shaped this nation, not whitewashing our history and ignoring racism’s continuing legacy. I’m talking to you, Ron DeSantis, and other lawmakers trying to prevent students from learning the roles slavery and genocide have played in our history.

    Real patriotism means protecting American democracy and our form of government, not trying to overturn an election that was upheld by 60 federal courts and the Supreme Court, or lying about election fraud when it barely exists, or seeking to suppress the voting rights of people of color.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Human rights Activists News Agency ☛ Political Prisoner Arghavan Fallahi Sentenced to Death

    Ms. Fallahi had previously been arrested along with her father in November 2022 by security forces and was later transferred to Evin Prison. She was subsequently sentenced by Branch 26 of the Tehran Revolutionary Court, presided over by Judge Iman Afshari, to two years in prison on charges of assembly and collusion and propaganda against the regime. She was released from Evin Prison after completing her sentence.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-06-25 [Older] Young people avoiding the news, Reuters report

  • CPJ ☛ Nigerian journalist Stanley Ugagbe forcibly disappeared after investigative report

    The Secret Reporters news site’s publisher Tega Oghenedoro, known by his pen name, Fejiro Oliver, and senior reporter Paul Utebor told CPJ that Ugabe’s neighbors saw Ugagbe enter his apartment in Jikwoyi, a northeastern Abuja suburb, on July 1, followed by two armed men, who had arrived in a black jeep. The three then left the house, with the unidentified men carrying a laptop and phones. When the neighbors tried to intervene, the men refused to speak or identify themselves while Ugagbe shouted, “Call my office.”

    The journalists told CPJ they believed the incident was related to the outlet’s recent investigation into corruption and infidelity allegations involving an executive with Nigeria’s Central Bank. Ugagbe was the lead reporter.

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ Newsrooms need to get comfortable expressing their business value - and raising money on it.

    They just need to get more comfortable at telling the economic side of their stories. And there’s a wider point here, which is that almost all nonprofit newsrooms need to be able to get more concrete and detailed about their business models. If you’re running an organization that wants to be sustainable, it’s not enough to care about the journalistic process, and your business accounting cannot be limited to activities like events and merchandise. You actually have to care about building a business holistically, and everything that entails.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Open Caucasus Media ☛ Azerbaijani woman murdered in Tbilisi in an apparent ‘honour killing’

    The news quickly gained traction on Georgian social media after human rights activist Baia Pataria posted about it on Wednesday. Pataria later told Civil Georgia that local women’s rights organisation Sapari had appealed to Georgia’s Prosecutor’s Office to be admitted to the proceedings as the victim’s legal representative in Georgia.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Trump tries again to delay $5m sexual abuse payout to E Jean Carroll

    A jury awarded Carroll damages after concluding that Trump had sexually abused her in 1996 and then defamed her after she publicly described the attack in 2019. Trump deposited money in an escrow fund to pay the award but is trying to delay the release of an amount that is now nearly $5.8m with interest.

  • Deseret Media ☛ 18-year-old BYU-I student walking 1,000 miles for Tibet

    Tibet was annexed, or invaded, according to some people's accounts, by China in the 1950s. Jackson said he's lived all over the world and has seen Tibet under Chinese rule firsthand.

    "I saw firsthand this culture that was different from the Chinese culture," Jackson said. "They had a different language. They dress differently. They have a different religion, a different ethnicity. They were sovereign for 1,500 years. I saw them being forced to live in a place full of hundreds of Chinese flags, occupied by the Chinese military and tons of police."

  • Erik Kroes ☛ How (not to) name things

    A name is supposed to help you identify something. It sets it apart from other things of the same kind.

    HTML already has something to tell you what kind the object/element is. That is what semantics do.

  • RFA ☛ Tibetan activist dies after setting himself on fire outside UN headquarters

    “The unfolding genocide inside Tibet and the enforcement of the draconian ‘Ethnic Unity and Progress Law’ on July 1 are what drove Lobga Rangzen to this tragic decision,” Penpa Tsering, head of the Central Tibetan Administration said in a released statement on Friday.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Westenberg ☛ The Costco theory of the internet

    For 20 years we built the internet around abundance: more products, more creators, more opinions, more newsletters, more podcasts, more apps, more tools, more marketplaces, more feeds. The founding promise was access: anything, from anyone, anywhere, instantly. No gatekeepers, no scarcity, no permission. The shelf went infinite.

    For a while that felt like freedom.

    And then it turned into drudgery...

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • TruthOut ☛ Incarcerated People Lose Treasured Media When Prisons Change Tablet Contracts

    Between 2016 and 2025, Michelle Shoemaker spent more than $1,000 on songs and games for her tablet — a rudimentary, prison-approved device she purchased from JPay, a subsidiary of the massive prison communications company Aventiv. Her tablet also held hundreds of emails and photographs, including treasured photos and messages from her deceased father, daughter, and mother. One email contained the final words her mother ever wrote to her.

    But in March 2025, Shoemaker’s tablet was abruptly confiscated by the Tennessee Department of Correction (TDOC), which had signed a new tablet contract with ViaPath, the prison communications giant formerly known as GTL. None of Shoemaker’s music, games, emails, or photographs were transferred to her new device. The new contract added Tennessee to a growing list of states where incarcerated people have lost purchased digital content due to tablet changes beyond their control. In most cases, the companies profiting off these tablet contracts — including Aventiv and ViaPath — are the same giant corporations that have been exploiting incarcerated people and their families for decades.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Copyrights

    • Court House News ☛ Reggaeton artists' unoriginality argument falls short in Jamaican producers copyright suit

      A federal judge said that both sides presented qualified expert opinions that disputed the originality of the 1989 instrumental track, preventing him to rule as a matter of law whether or not it is protectable under copyright law.