Leftovers

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-07-22 [Older] Great apes were using touch to reassure and keep the peace six million years before humans evolved – new research

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-07-22 [Older] Storms that built a graveyard: ancient monsoons created a spectacular dinosaur fossil site

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-07-22 [Older] What the sudden demise of the UK’s department of science means for the future of research

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-07-21 [Older] How was the first language formed?

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-07-17 [Older] Geometry, football and the World Cup final

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-07-17 [Older] The Large Hadron Collider is being upgraded so that it can unlock the secrets of the Higgs boson

  • Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ First Finnish opera cruise brings nearly 900 fans to Saaremaa

    Hundreds of opera lovers sailed from Finland to Saaremaa this week aboard the island's first opera cruise, combining sightseeing with a performance of Verdi's "La Traviata."

    The charter cruise from Helsinki marked the first time a dedicated opera-themed voyage has brought audiences directly to Saaremaa Opera Days.

  • Salon ☛ "The Man Will Burn" accidentally shows why people despise Burning Man

    Goodell and the senior members of The Org, as everyone calls the BMP, are the last connection to its late founder Larry Harvey, who died in 2018. Harvey’s dream began with a beach burn in San Francisco in the mid ‘80s. When the crowds grew too big, he and his fellow artists moved the festivities into the Nevada desert. Then, within the last few years, Elon Musk’s brother sailed into the chat on a raft of cash.

    If “The Man Will Burn” has a villain, it is Kimbal Musk, the avatar for all the billionaires who changed Burning Man and the world for the worse after arriving on the scene a few years ago. It helps that he’s dressed as the Worst Guy at the Sex Jamboree, down to his cowboy hat – the modern safarist’s pith helmet.

  • Jim Nielsen ☛ Podcast Notes: Ed Catmull on David Senra

    Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar and former president of Disney Animation, was on the David Senra podcast and I quite enjoyed the interview.

• Career/Education

  • Futurism ☛ Computer Science Enrollment Now Declining Under Dark Cloud of AI

    But in an age when bosses are hellbent on using powerful AI agents to perform the duties of software engineers, that advice is now looking increasingly obsolete, if not outright backfiring. And the youngsters appear to be getting wise to that new reality.

  • Robert Birming ☛ What do you think? – Robert Birming

    Sometimes the most valuable answer is a question, even when we aim it at ourselves:

    "What do you think?"

  • David Bushell ☛ Businessing 101

    Back when I began freelancing I figured I’d set up a limited company eventually. I guess thirteen years later is eventually. I’ve finally got a local accountant working on company registration. Exciting times!

    The final push was this Making Tax Digital thing from GOV.UK. It’s probably not complicated if I cared to look but I’m crawling back to FreeAgent anyway. My home-cooked accounting app served one whole tax year! I will have an accountant do everything now.

  • Daniel Lemire ☛ Does a PhD Pay Off?

    The most significant economic cost of a PhD is not tuition but the years of delayed full-time earnings and career progression. In the tech industry, it is typical to award half a year of experience for each year spent on a PhD. This means that even though the individual starting with a PhD might earn more starting out, they are not necessarily getting a higher lifetime income.

    Benjamin et al. (2025) find that the early-career benefits a PhD can be effectively zero: [...]

• Hardware

  • Tom MacWright ☛ Printing tiny photos for paper journals

    It's a little printer. Exactly the height of an iPhone 16, and about twice its thickness. The photos it prints are small - 2x3 inches. My beloved Field Notes notebooks are 3.5x5.5", so the photos fit really well: any wider and they'd creep too close to the binding of the notebook.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • [Repeat] Futurism ☛ Public Horrified as OpenAI Pushes "Child After Child Into the Grave"

    “It is unconscionable that ‘ChatGPT-assisted suicide’ is becoming a recurring cause of death. a society with a shred of dignity would not allow computers to kill its people,” wrote Matt Bernstein, an influencer known for their activism.

    “Unbelievable that we allow this company to exist,” another fumed.

  • LabX Media Group ☛ Wastewater Sampling Uncovers Community Dietary Patterns

    In a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, researchers at Duke University joined forces with scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to show the utility of their platform, FoodSeqFLOW, to detect real-time population-level dietary patterns.2 At a cost of less than one cent per person, the findings could help public health officials monitor, detect, and respond to nutritional changes more rapidly.

    The research team collected 183 wastewater treatment samples from 21 North Carolina municipalities, in total representing 2.1 million people. They sequenced genes for plant chloroplasts and animal mitochondria to detect dietary information.

  • The Markup ☛ Kaiser nurses say surveillance of them is undermining healthcare – The Markup

    Call center nurses at the health giant said workplace surveillance tools and AI prioritize speed and cost savings over quality and safety.

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • New York Times ☛ Ford Will Use Apple Maps in New Self-Driving System

    But the agreement with Ford goes further by allowing Apple software to play a role in how cars and trucks navigate when they are operating autonomously.

    In another first, Apple and Ford engineers are working together to improve self-driving abilities of cars that will arrive in dealer showrooms next year. Previously, Apple and carmakers tended to work separately. The Apple software will reside in the vehicle, meaning that owners will not need an iPhone to use it.

  • The Record ☛ International alert spotlights Russia-linked attacks on Zimbra webmail

    The campaign, carried out by the advanced persistent threat (APT) group Laundry Bear, targets Zimbra Collaboration Suite’s webmail platform and exploits a vulnerability that was patched in November 2025.

  • Cyble Inc ☛ KARR Security System Flaw: Update KARR Alarm With IPhone

    The KARR Security System is installed by dealerships to secure vehicles on their lots. In many cases, the hardware remains connected even after buyers decline the paid KARR alarm service. Because it is third-party equipment, automakers cannot deliver fixes through their standard software update process.

    Researchers from the University of California, San Diego found that attackers within Bluetooth range could lock or unlock vehicles, disable alarms, activate horns, flash lights, or prevent parked vehicles from starting. However, they confirmed the flaw cannot remotely start a vehicle or control it while driving.

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

    • Semafor Inc ☛ AI fuels a social media marketing scam

      As companies like Meta push increasingly realistic AI-generated videos, the worst parts of social media and AI are converging. In what appears to be a new dropshipping scam flooding Instagram and TikTok, accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers are posting AI-generated videos depicting teens getting bullied for trying to sell Christian apparel alongside links to buy the goods. It’s part of a growing phenomenon of fabricated accounts that are using AI to stoke outrage and then drive sales.

    • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Critics of AI Aren’t Anti-Tech Extremists

      Recent US intelligence documents hype up the threat of “anti-tech violent extremist activity” against data centers. Casting protests as ideologically extreme is a shortcut to silencing critics of AI and removing democratic constraints on Big Tech.

    • 404 Media ☛ A Court Reporter Submitted AI-Generated Errors in Official Court Transcript, Judge Says

      A judge in Indiana warns a court reporter that it's their job to proofread their work, after catching errors likely made by AI transcription [sic] services.

    • Sean Goedecke ☛ LLMs reward expertise

      However, you can’t prompt like Tao on mathematical questions just by following these tips. The key to his technique is actually understanding the mathematics: pulling the relevant idea out of ChatGPT’s multi-paragraph response, suggesting alternate approaches or formulations, and identifying what “looks weird”.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Why AI Needs a “Genie Coefficient”

      There’s often a gap between one person’s request and another’s understanding. Most of the time, we bridge it using general knowledge. For example, if you ask a friend to get you coffee, they’ll pour a cup from the pot or buy one from a coffee shop. They won’t bring you a bag of raw beans or snatch a cup from a stranger and hand it to you. You never specified any of this. You never had to.

    • Robert Reich ☛ The Crash of 2026

      It’s estimated that these five companies combined will account for more than $800 billion in A.I. investments this year. They plan to spend an additional $1.2 trillion in 2027 — more than Trump’s entire military budget request for 2027.

      Where’s all this A.I. money coming from? Some from investors, but much of it is being borrowed.

      One worry is their borrowing is outpacing their profits. Not surprisingly, the bond market has begun to charge premiums for what it considers a heightened risk that they won’t be able to repay.

    • Psychotechnology ☛ Em dashes are fucking amazing - by Sasha Putilin

      I don’t give a shit what the “oh yeah let’s examine this piece of writing with a magnifying glass for any signs of AI” crowd thinks. I don’t give a shit that AI figured out how to produce em dashes before these online troglodytes did. Typing em dashes is not an AGI-complete problem. It’s not that difficult to produce an organic, artisanal, hand-crafted em dash — on Mac, for example, it’s simply Option + Shift + Hyphen.

    • Nat Bennett ☛ Why AI writing is so exhausting

      I rage-deleted Claude from my phone last week. I had to, to save the phone. The tics, man. I would open the app, ask a question, see "earns its keep" or "the honest answer" and have to suppress the urge to shatter the phone on the ground. Deep breaths.

      I'm getting to the point where if I start to even get the sense that what I'm reading is AI-generated, I just... close the tab.

    • Dan MacKinlay ☛ Welcome to cybersec hell

      It begins. Agentic AIs now automate cybercrime faster and better than humans can.

    • Dan MacKinlay ☛ Web search for machines

      An internet search engine for humans returns an HTML page of links, on the reasonable assumption that a human will click a few of them to read. An agent does not click. It would much rather not have to parse the HTML itself, and instead get text that’s already stripped of nonsense, chunked, and ideally carrying enough provenance that the model can say where a claim came from. There is a whole market of vendors selling that AI-facing product now.

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: AI solipsists and AI cynics (24 Jul 2026)

      In service to this bubble, AI companies have suborned regional governments into running roughshod over environmental and planning review in order to build endless acres of data centers, many of which will likely end up casualties of the imminent bubble-pop, never to be switched on or even completed. What an indignity to have your farm or house seized through eminent domain, only to see it razed and replaced by a weed-choked empty field, a lonely foundation slab, or an abandoned empty building that could only ever be repurposed for laser-tag or an ICE concentration-camp: [...]

    • Pivot to AI ☛ AI vendors are destroying rare books to feed the chatbot

      Fine, but what Zoom’s denying is not the claim. The claim is that it’s Anthropic doing the scanning and shredding — and that Zoom is buying the books on their behalf.

      Finally, Emanuel Maiberg from 404 Media has nailed down the story. He got a great interview from a bookseller who spilled the beans. Maiberg’s story, “AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They’re Free of AI Slop,” doesn’t specifically name Zoom Books, but he’s identified other bulk book buyers.

    • The Cyber Show ☛ Robot CEO

      We've been analysing interviews we conducted at Infosec Europe, an event that took place 2nd to 4th of June at ExCeL in London. We see that many of the currents in tech are repeats or continuations of Cold War thinking, particularly arms races, automation and ideological great leaps forward.

      [...]

      Another camp are starting to point out that cybersecurity and "AI" are fundamentally incompatible ideas. Security is the one application for which you cannot employ "AI" because it is not enumerable and legible like a real computer program. Most importantly, security is about something. Traditionally it's about people. It's about safety, protecting jobs, opportunity, dignity, and freedom. Autonomous systems make it about the system, which must be secured from you and your human compassion.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Security Week ☛ Data Breach Confirmed After Australian Energy Giant Origin [Cracked]

      Australia’s Origin Energy Limited has confirmed suffering a data breach, and a [cracker] claims to have accessed the records of millions of customers.

    • Yle ☛ Finnish spy agency issues new warning of Russian cyberattacks – this time via email servers

      Laundry Bear has targeted a wide range of victims, including military industry operators, state administration and other authorities, technology companies and third sector operators, Supo said in a statement.

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • FreeBSD ☛ Action Required: Recent ports history has been rewritten

    On 2026-07-20, a 150MB binary file was committed to the ports tree, causing mirroring to GitHub and possibly other Git forges to fail due to a hard file size limit of 100MB. Additionally, it is unclear if the licensing of the binary permits redistribution in this fashion.

    On 2026-07-21, core@ became aware that mirroring was broken and requested the suspension of pushes to the ports repository while we assessed the situation. Discussions over the following hours among members of gitadm@, clusteradm@, portmgr@, and core@ resulted in a tentative plan to rewrite the repository history to remove the offending file, with the agreed constraint that the resulting state must be reproducible by third parties and must not impose an unreasonable burden on downstream consumers of the ports tree.

    The decision that the resulting state be reproducible by third parties arose from our shared view that we should not demand implicit trust, and that we should make it easy for our users and downstreams to reflect the same values. While `git rebase` can easily remove the offending commits, it imposes a greater audit burden on our community because it rewrites committer names and timestamps. It also affects the downstream communities which have forks of the ports tree. Providing a mechanism to repeat this operation has potential impact that extends far beyond our own community, and we appreciate your understanding and patience as we worked to get this right.

  • OS News ☛ FreeBSD ports frozen after someone commits the entire 150MB Linux Copilot binary

    While FreeBSD’s ports tree is not hosted by GitHub – it’s merely mirrored there – the FreeBSD team believes the community values the GitHub mirror too much, and as such, steps had to be taken to fix this. Ports has not been compromised and users’ systems do not appear to be at risk in any way due to this occurrence, which is good news.

    Curiously, the official announcement makes no mention of which 150MB file, exactly, was committed to ports, but it didn’t take for people long to pinpoint the offending commit (screenshot). It turns out someone committed the entire github-copilot-cli Linux binary to ports, as part of the github-copilot-cli port. This FreeBSD port is effectively a way to easily install and run this tool on FreeBSD using Linuxulator, FreeBSD’s Linux compatibility layer that allows you to run unmodified Linux binaries on FreeBSD.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Africa's most popular phones have a tracking problem

      Researchers have decrypted what Tecno, Infinix and Itel smartphones quietly send home: location, apps and camera activity.

    • Bhaskar English ☛ Instagram Bans Meta Smart Glasses Harassment Videos

      Meta AI smart glasses have recently come under the spotlight after a social media user shared a photo claiming that a Delhi Police officer was wearing the device during the student protests at Jantar Mantar. The post quickly went viral, sparking discussions about surveillance, privacy, and the growing use of wearable AI technology.

    • Futurism ☛ So Many People Are Smashing Flock's Cameras That It's Disguising Them Inside Other Objects

      On Wednesday, an a pro-privacy account called “Orwell Day” shared a video on X-formerly-Twitter of a man discovering a Flock license plate reader embedded inside an otherwise innocent roadside speedometer. Operated by the local Sheriff’s department, the device was cleverly hidden to be undetectable to approaching road and pedestrian traffic.

    • TruthOut ☛ Haley Stevens’s Palantir Consultant Scandal Draws Attention to Her Record on ICE

      Up until this week, House representative and Democratic Senate candidate Haley Stevens’s campaign shared a mutual consultant with far right tech surveillance company Palantir, new reporting reveals, bringing renewed attention to Stevens’s record on ICE as she faces a contentious race against Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan.

    • Wired ☛ For Taylor Swift, Madison Square Garden’s Controversial Cameras Briefly Went Dark

      On the night of July 2, security in and around the Garden was particularly intense. Roughly 130 cops were deployed to the area. New York City officials were preparing to shut down the surrounding blocks to both vehicles and pedestrians the next day for a major, major event.

      July 2 was, of course, the kickoff to Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s wedding celebration, an approximately 100-person rehearsal dinner at Madison Square Garden’s Infosys Theater. And yet, on that extremely sensitive evening, Dolan’s MSG locked nearly all of its security team out of the network of surveillance cameras inside the arena, according to an internal document reviewed by WIRED. The move functionally prevented MSG security from fully operating the venue’s controversial face-recognition program that evening, two sources familiar with the Garden’s operations say.

    • Patrick Breyer ☛ EU governments adopt return of Chat Control 1.0 – Breyer: “The true losers are our children”

      Yesterday, the EU governments re-enacted the suspicionless mass scanning of private communications (“Chat Control 1.0”) with one vote against (Hungary), one abstention (Belgium) and without the approval of the European Parliament (a majority of voting MEPs had voted against the regulation). As a result, US providers like Meta or Google are once again permitted to conduct the controversial, warrantless mass scans of private chats and messages until 3 April 2028.

    • Nick Heer ☛ Kylie Jenner Is Barely Using Her Own Meta Glasses

      Surely a good sign when a celebrity endorses a product they do not really care for. Imagine lending your entire image and your voice to something and then not promoting the hell out of it. Then again, imagine getting paid all that money and then realizing you are not contractually obligated to do so.

  • Confidentiality

    • India Today ☛ CJP protests: India tells GitHub to block Bitchat app, Jack Dorsey leaks notice

      The government has asked GitHub to remove repositories hosting Bitchat, the Bluetooth messaging app developed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. The move comes amid the ongoing Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) protest in Delhi, where Bluetooth-based messaging apps are reportedly being used by protestors to stay connected after the suspension of mobile internet services.

      In a post on X, Dorsey shared screenshots of a notice issued by the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) under the Ministry of Home Affairs. The notice directs GitHub to remove or disable access to three repositories hosting Bitchat, saying the app could be used to bypass internet shutdowns, evade lawful interception and help coordinate unlawful assemblies during public-order situations.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Register UK ☛ Europol flags 4,340 'horrific' URLs linked to The Com

    Europol and its partners' investigators flagged 4,340 “horrific” URLs for removal over several weeks in June and July as part of an ongoing crackdown on The Com (short for community), a loosely knit network of online groups whose young members participate in a range of illicit activities. These range from hacking, swatting, and digital extortion to real-life shootings, stabbings, and other physical violence.

  • The Next Move ☛ The Trump-Hegseth Military

    Over and over, Pete Hegseth has ousted senior and experienced officers from the military—men and women who know our traditions and ethos. The most recent to go was General Chris Donahue. There must be civilian control over the military—but let it be as wise and apolitical as possible.

    A politically charged military is a threat to democratic health.

  • Cyble Inc ☛ India Online Safety Rules Tighten To Protect Children

    The Information Technology Act, 2000, and the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, form the core legal framework governing online safety and intermediary responsibilities in India. The government has also highlighted the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, and recent amendments to the IT Rules as part of its broader approach to digital safety.

  • New Republic ☛ Man Who Killed Minnesota Democratic Rep. Sentenced to Life in Prison

    The man who assassinated former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, has been sentenced to life in prison.

    In addition to killing the Hortmans (and their dog Gilbert), Vance Boelter also shot state Democratic Senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette.

  • Techdirt ☛ Election Commission Says Musk Likely Broke The Law By Paying Voters. Will Anyone Do Anything About It?

    Back during the 2024 Presidential election, he got away with offering $1 million to a “random” (not actually random) voter who would sign his petition in an effort to get out the vote for Donald Trump in Pennsylvania.

  • El País ☛ Early Christian church that survived Muslim rule is found in southeastern Spain

    As the territory was too large for the invaders to assimilate, they reached an agreement with the Visigoths. In April 713, the Pact of Theodomir was signed, allowing for the existence of a kūra — an Islamic administrative territory — in Tudmīr that would remain a Hispano-Roman population under the protection of the emirate and later the caliphate. Christians could continue to worship in exchange for a tax. A new study titled The Early Christian Church of Cerro de la Virgen (Calasparra, Murcia). Coexistence and Taxation in the Kūra of Tudmīr, published in the journal Saldvie, tells of the discovery of a Christian church that maintained its usual religious activity until the 9th century.

• Environment

  • India Times ☛ Trump pledge on data center power supplies draws skepticism

    Consumer advocacy groups and other ​administration critics, however, dismissed the pledge as an empty promise to consumers as Trump tries to balance his support for power-guzzling data centers against public anger over rising utility bills.

  • New Republic ☛ Clip & Save: Trump Says People Are “Begging” to Live Near Data Centers

    Trump made the remarks at an event promoting the White House’s “Ratepayer Protection Pledge,” in which states and companies pledge to keep consumers from paying higher electricity bills due to data centers. The plan has supposedly gotten the support of companies such as Google, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, xAI, OpenAI, and Amazon, who vowed to pay for increased power costs in areas where data centers are built. The pledge is completely voluntary—and unenforceable.

    People who live near data centers complain about the overhaul to their lives, from the drain on water supplies to increased noise and higher utility costs. In most areas where data centers are proposed, local opposition quickly becomes protests that unite the left and the right. The economic benefit that comes with data centers is actually minimal, with most providing only a few dozen on-site jobs. Trump is very much out of touch with how Americans, including many of his supporters, view data centers.

  • Vox ☛ The ticks are winning

    Ticks are taking over the United States. Due to climate change, changing land use, and an explosion in the deer population, ticks have been expanding their territory and infecting more people than ever. They carry pathogens that cause everything from Lyme disease to the red meat allergy-inducing Alpha gal syndrome. In some cases, tick bites can be fatal.

  • Western Water ☛ Water is one of four fronts in Interior's AI push

    That challenge, titled Predicting U.S. Water for EnergyOpens in a new tab., calls for Interior to supply hydrologic data, drought forecasting, reservoir operations science and water reuse research. Hydrologic data is simply information about water: how much of it there is, where it sits and how it moves through rivers, snowpack and the ground below.

    The stated purpose is to improve water management and what the Department describes as energy resilience. Power plants need water. Reservoirs store it. Drought shrinks it. The announcement grouped those pieces together under a single heading.

    Water is one part of a larger list. Three other challenges sit beside it.

  • Overpopulation ☛ Why Project Drawdown should recommend family planning

    The climate researchers at Project Drawdown didn’t always have a blind spot toward population. Their retreat means many concerned activists will remain ignorant of the most effective means to limit greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the change that’s coming.

  • Digital Camera World ☛ Climate change is invisible. These powerful photographs are anything but

    I’m a photographer and a journalist, and as I was looking through the top news photos of this week, I couldn’t help but notice a pattern. Photojournalists are capturing the effects of a warming planet in a way that turns an invisible cause into a very tangible photograph – and it echoes the top photos from last week as wildfire smoke created eerie photographs with an apocalyptic feel.

  • Wired ☛ One of NASA’s Most Important Deep Space Observatories Hit by Spanish Wildfires

    Climate change has now become a problem for the whole solar system. On Friday, wildfires in Spain overran one of three observatories the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration uses to connect with spacecraft, including Voyager 1, the James Webb Space Telescope, and the recently completed Artemis mission around the Moon.

  • Stephen Hackett ☛ A Cautionary Tale

    This CNBC video provides a look at what happens when an AI data center is built in your neighborhood.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • India Times ☛ Chinese battery giant CATL sees profit surge on energy storage demand

      CATL's net profit during the first half of the year was 43 billion yuan ($6.4 billion), the filing to the Shenzhen Stock Exchange showed, as demand for energy storage critical to the AI industry grows.

    • Jim Grey ☛ The 1928 Lincoln Highway in Indiana: Western Indiana

      Once upon a time, US 30 and US 31 were both two-lane highways and they met in Plymouth, in Marshall County. But during the 1960s, both highways were rebuilt as four-lane expressways bypassing Plymouth. Today, old US 30, and therefor the 1928 Lincoln Highway, passes under current US 31 on its way westbound into Plymouth.

    • David Pogue ☛ Why they really check carry-on bags—when the overhead bins are empty

      She also explained why we had to retrieve our bags at baggage claim, rather than planeside. “Easier [for the airline] than bringing them up the jetbridge. All pax [passengers] have to be off the jetbridge prior to boarding the outbound pax, which means you can’t stand there and wait for a bag. Well, you could, but I can’t start boarding until you exit.”

      And there we have it: The smoking gun. For the airline, on-time departure is sacrosanct. Delays can cost gate fees, crew time, and passenger reimbursement (if rebooking or hotel stays are required). Even more important, Rebecca adds, “aircraft are scheduled to operate multiple flights throughout the day. So even a small delay on one flight can create a ripple effect across the network.”

      It’s faster to throw all carry-ons into the cargo hold than to wait for people to stand in the aisle, fiddling around, Tetrising their overhead bags into the bins. So gate agents have an incentive to err—sometimes wildly—on the side of gate-checking bags.

  • Overpopulation

    • El País ☛ Donna Haraway, philosopher: ‘We live in a pro-natalist, anti-child world. Babies should be rare and precious’

      One of the most influential thinkers on technology and feminism, she combines vision with irony, and her writing carries a distinctly punk edge. Faced with rising authoritarianism, she urges people to stand with immigrants: ‘They bear the brunt of all disasters’

    • Science Alert ☛ 'tremendously Grave': The First US City Is on Track to Run Out of Water

      There are multiple issues combining here, perhaps most importantly the arrival of major industrial developments, off the back of the unlocking of vast oil and gas reserves that came with the shale revolution.

      One plastics chemical complex, built in 2022, uses as much water for cooling every day as all the Corpus Christi residents combined.

• Finance

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ 2026-07-21 [Older] Amazon Organizers Should Study the Fight for 15

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Digital Music News ☛ Patreon Lays Off 20% of Staff as Superfan Subscriptions Dive

    Patreon CEO Jack Conte sent a memo to employees on Thursday announcing the layoff of 20% of its workforce, affecting 93 employees. The memo was shared online by the company and asserted that Patreon’s core business remains strong but must respond to market changes and adjust its cost structure to retain stability.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Nvidia and 24 other companies sign open-weights letter as Washington weighs Chinese AI model ban — OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google absent from the list

    The letter asks Washington to avoid what it calls "premature restrictions on downloadable AI models," and comes just four days after the Trump administration was reported to be reviving a push to ban Chinese models — though the document doesn't directly mention China, Moonshot AI, or DeepSeek. Notably missing from the co-signers are OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

  • Michael Tsai ☛ Advertising Cognitive Dissonance

    What a brand stands for can change over time. It’s eventually determined by the products, not the mantras.

  • Angelos Arnis ☛ Identity loss

    Schismogenesis does not produce a resolution. It produces a hard split. The grief belongs to the side of the split that remembers what the practice was supposed to be. The differentiation also belongs to the same side. Something that was blurred for decades, the difference between designing as a civic and critical argument and designing as conversion optimization, is now legible in a way it was not when IDEO could still claim to hold both together. The mourning and the possibility are the same event, seen from different focal points in time. What comes next will be smaller, more deliberate, less institutionally legible, and produced under conditions that are specifically hostile to it. There is clarity in that. And we have a choice to make.

  • ROS Industrial ☛ A New Chapter for ROS-Industrial Americas — ROS-Industrial

    Over the past few months, I've had the privilege of stepping into the role of leading ROS-Industrial Americas. I'm grateful to Matt Robinson for his years of leadership and the strong community he helped build. At our 2026 Annual Meeting, I had the opportunity to share my first impressions and my vision for where we can go next.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Press Gazette ☛ MI5 and police illegally grabbed journalist's call records to find sources

    A journalist whose communications data was unlawfully obtained by MI5 and the police has been awarded £20,000 in damages by a specialist tribunal.

    The Investigatory Powers Tribunal found that the Security Service admitted it breached Article 10 of the Human Rights Act (right to freedom of expression) when it obtained the call records of Northern Ireland-based journalist Vincent Kearney in order to find his confidential sources.

  • CPJ ☛ Philippine journalist Marchel Espina charged with unjust vexation over opinion article

    “The unjust vexation case against journalist Marchel Espina is frivolous, a threat to press freedom, and should be dropped immediately,” said Shawn Crispin, CPJ’s senior Southeast Asia representative. “This is exactly the kind of legal harassment CPJ has documented again and again in the Philippines — vague, spurious charges used to wear down journalists and chill critical reporting. It should stop here and now.”

    Criminal unjust vexation charges, defined under Section 1, Article 287 of the Revised Penal Code, carry a maximum sentence of 30 days and a fine of up to 40,000 Philippine pesos. Espina currently serves as a consultant with WAN-IFRA Women in News, a global media development program.

  • Robert Reich ☛ The Real Reason Trump Subpoenaed The New York Times

    But the actual cost to taxpayers of retrofitting it to “presidential standards” has been between $400 million and $1 billion so far — more than the jet was worth in the first place. And it’s still not there, “security wise.”

    Which brings us to the Times report, which drove Trump nuts. It said he had to fly out of Turkey (where the NATO summit was held) on the old Air Force One instead of his new Qatari-donated jumbo jet because the Qatari jet still didn’t have sufficient security, including antimissile capabilities.

  • CNN ☛ edition.cnn.com/newsletters/reliable-sources-07-11-26-173941

    His claim was immediately undermined by sources and security experts. The New York Times’s headline read: “Security Precaution Led Trump to Use Old Air Force One in Leaving Turkey.”

    There were follow-up stories on Thursday. Trump was left “fuming,” according to CNN’s Kaitlan Collins and Kevin Liptak. They reported today that Trump was “embarrassed and angry in recent days when it became public that the plane was not equipped enough to be flown directly from the NATO summit in Turkey back home.”

    So, this was personal for the president. That’s crucial context for what came next.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • El País ☛ Who are the ‘cockroaches’ behind the mass demonstrations in India, and what do they want?

    Beyond the war of numbers regarding the wounded and detained, to understand the origin of the discontent among young Indians — which has culminated in an explosion of street protests — one must go back to May 3. On that day, reports began circulating that the entrance exams for India’s medical schools — taken by millions of students each year — had been leaked. These suspicions were confirmed by an investigation, forcing the authorities to repeat the exam. But the damage had been done. For a large segment of the country’s youth, it represented confirmation of the corruption within institutions that benefits the children of the elites.

  • New Eastern Europe ☛ “Transformed into memories” – How Estonia’s Setos are navigating a modernizing world, and geopolitics

    The majority of this ethnic group, around 10,000 to 13,000 people, live in Estonia while around 300 reside in Russia. Since the early 1990s, the border between these two states has divided the Setomaa, the traditional Seto homeland. The upshot is that, as hostilities between the two countries have grown, numerous locations with cultural importance and meaning to the Seto have become less accessible over the years. In addition to this border, the group is also facing obstacles from the Estonian government and challenges posed by the modern world.

  • TruthOut ☛ Right-Wing Bill Mill Meeting Centers Voter Suppression, Protecting Data Centers

    One of the most concerning is the Critical Infrastructure Security Act, which would expand ALEC’s 2018 Critical Infrastructure Protection Act to include enhanced penalties for trespassing at data centers and “government facilities” with the intent of damaging property, inflicting bodily harm, “surveillance of nonpublic security measures,” or “another felony.”

  • Robert Reich ☛ The REAL Food Stamp and Medicaid Scandal

    A new Government Accountability Office study, released Wednesday, found that MacDonalds, Walmart, and Amazon — three of America’s largest employers, with billions in profits — are also among the top employers of workers who earn so little they have to rely on food stamps to put food on the table and Medicaid to obtain health coverage.

    Yet according to the latest data, MacDonalds pays its CEO $18.2 million a year, Walmart pays its CEO $27.4 million, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is the second-richest person in America.

  • NPR ☛ Nearly 1 in 4 workers stay in jobs for health insurance, a survey says : NPR

    The survey from West Health-Gallup Center on Healthcare in America finds that approximately 23 million adults are in what the report authors call "job lock." In 2021, 16% of those surveyed were in job lock.

  • WebAIM ☛ WebAIM: The WebAIM Million - The 2026 report on the accessibility of the top 1,000,000 home pages

    Across the one million home pages, 56,114,377 distinct accessibility errors were detected—an average of 56.1 errors per page. The number of detected errors increased 10.1% since the 2025 analysis which found 51 errors/page. "Errors" are WAVE-detected accessibility barriers having notable end user impact, and which have a very high likelihood of being WCAG 2.2 Level A/AA conformance failures.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Nick Heer ☛ Podcasts Are Growing, but That Does Not Necessarily Track for Podcast Apps

    Video podcasting changes that. In its simplest form, it is just a YouTube channel, which means it is siloed and controlled by Google. Spotify also supports video but only in its app. Apple introduced its own take using HLS earlier this year; though it also uses a proprietary format, it is one third-party apps can support. But YouTube is YouTube; it is where people go for video. The walled garden is coming for podcasting.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Patents

    • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ A Brief History of Hold Music, From Early Patents to the Soundtrack of Customer-Service Purgatory

      Regardless of whether the story is apocryphal, what is certain is that Alfred Levy of 5 Manning Road in Glen Cove, New York, filed patent 3,246,082 for a “telephone hold program system” on March 26, 1962. Four years later, on April 12, 1966—60 years ago this year—the patent was granted.

  • Copyrights

    • Creative Commons ☛ Attribution in the Age of AI

      Attribution is the mechanism that lets a piece of knowledge or creativity stay connected to the people who made it possible. When AI systems produce outputs without sources, that connection breaks, making it harder to trust the information, verify accuracy, or give credit. In March, we released Attribution & AI Outputs, an issue brief examining why attribution in AI systems is so often difficult to get right. Authors Jack Hardinges (Creative Commons) and Irina Bejan (OpenMined) take that question further here, and make the case that attribution gaps aren’t an inevitable side effect of how AI works. CC thinks it’s an important next step in this conversation.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ X and Music Publishers Settle Three-Year Copyright Clash After SpaceX IPO

      Three years of litigation that triggered explosive allegations of DMCA "weaponization" and "maximum pain" pressure tactics quietly ended in coordinated settlements. X Corp and several music companies settled the copyright infringement lawsuit and X's antitrust counterstrike, with prejudice. The dismissals come shortly after X Corp.'s new parent company SpaceX went public, identifying the legal battle as a key threat.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Canada's 'Expanded Scope' Blocking Order Targets Existing and Future Pirate Sites

      For the first time, a Canadian site-blocking order can target pirate sites that don't exist yet. The Federal Court has ordered ISPs to block thirteen piracy brands including 123Movies and FMovies, and its catch-all "Expanded Scope" allows Hollywood studios and broadcasters to add unrelated sites later, without having to go back to court.