Leftovers

• Cris ☛ AuguStory, the story of my blog

  Even though I started and deleted dozens of blogs, this one hobby has been probably the most consistent of my life. I can’t think of a single year that I have not attempted to start and maintain a blog, be it on Blogger back then, then Wordpress, then Tumblr, even Neocities, other platforms that I can’t remember, Substack all throughout 2024, and since 2025, my most beloved blogging platform yet: Bear Blog.

• Sylvia ☛ The story of my blog (AuguStory)

  I started blogging in middle school, when LiveJournal was still invite-only. The prettiest girl in class was on it and invited me to join. I felt very cool. I didn't care for writing, but I loved customizing my journal's design.

  Once I started high school, personal domains were the cool new thing. The people who had them were generous & offered to host other people's websites too. If we saw a domain name we liked, we could ask to be a hostee, and if we fit their vibe, the hosts would create a subdirectory for us to FTP into and upload our HTML files. For years, my personal website was hosted by an older teenage girl, and I kept it until she decided not to renew her domain.

• Bobby Hiltz ☛ Credit Feed 10: Reviewing Reviewing

  Over the past months I have made the recurring mistake of reviewing games that I have played, and avoiding games because of bad reviews. The mistake isn’t the review, but rather attributing a score. It serves no purpose, even to me. Games to which I have given a low score have turned out to be favourites.

  Recently, I polled about 100 people to get their input on something. I asked a very vague question (and oh so many smarty-pants sent me essays to tell me what was wrong with my survey instead of just answering it). The single question asked was:

  You are reading reviews for a game/film/book and there is a rating out of 100 points. If you had to decide using just that number, what is your threshold for discriminating between and “good” and a “bad” review?

• Computational Complexity ☛ Computational Complexity: A problematic category on Jeopardy Raises a Good Question

  The category is problematic.

  It is implicit that the three people have to be famous.

  This raises two questions and a challenge

  Two Questions: What is fame? How do you measure it?

• Standards/Consortia

  • J B Crawford ☛ telephones caught in between

    During the heyday of AT&T, it was often said that the telephone system was the largest machine ever built. The "hello machine" certainly was vast, but whether or not you consider it to be a single machine raises challenging questions of definition. The Internet, I think we can all agree, is not a single machine but a system of interconnected ones. The telephone network, though, felt a lot more like one device. "One Policy, One System, Universal Service" was once the slogan of AT&T, a message that the telephone network is more than just a sum of parts. The third of these principles, "Universal Service," is a key point around which telecom policy pivots even today. As the telephone system was at its apex, Universal Service became its undoing.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • 404 Media ☛ We Need to Quarantine Aliens on the Moon, Scientists Propose

    “The Moon must not merely serve as a stepping stone for exploration, but also as a preemptive shield between Earth and potential forms of extraterrestrial contamination…ensuring that exploration does not come at the expense of Earth’s biosphere” the team said. “The formalization of such precautionary lunar quarantine protocols will not only safeguard our planet, but also affirm humanity’s maturity as an interplanetary civilization.”

  • John D Cook ☛ Estimating a cumulative sum

    In this post I mentioned two series which I denoted t(n) and c(n). The former is the number of unlabeled rooted trees with n nodes. The latter is the cumulative sum of the former, i.e.

  • John D Cook ☛ Runge-Kutta: over versus stages | Butcher barrier

    The textbook version of the Runge-Kutta method for solving differential equations has 4 stages and has 4th order error. For lower order versions of RK the number of stages s also matches the order of the error p. But in order to achieve error on the order of p ≥ 5, you need more than p stages. This is known as the Butcher barrier.

    Before going any further, let’s back up and say what we mean by stages and by order.

  • John D Cook ☛ Holonomic functions

    Yesterday I wrote that a lot of the special functions that pop up in mathematical physics are solutions to second order linear differential equations with polynomial coefficients. More generally, holonomic functions are defined to be those functions that are the solutions to linear differential equations, of any order, with polynomial coefficients.

    Most special functions are holonomic. To quantify that statement, I went through the special functions covered in Abramowitz and Stegun. The large majority are holonomic, thought some common functions like the gamma function are not holonomic.

• Career/Education

  • Salon ☛ Library book found in fireplace returns 150 years late

    The old lending rules discovered with the book offered another glimpse into library life during the 1870s. A household needed at least three people capable of reading before borrowing, and patrons were prohibited from collecting a book while intoxicated.

  • Digital Camera World ☛ When to walk away from work as a paid photographer: The red flags that scream "difficult client"

    Watch for scope creep before the contract is even signed (and, yes, you need a contract). "Just a quick headshot session" becomes "actually, can we do team photos, and some product shots, and maybe capture some behind-the-scenes content?"

  • Mark-Jason Dominus ☛ Seven books I keep close because I love them

    The bookshelf by my elbow, the one that I can reach without getting up, has seven books on it, not necessarily the ones I look in the most, but the ones whose emanations I most hope will infuse me as I write.

  • Eliot Peper ☛ Make art that makes people make art

    Books have survived the arrival of radio, movies, tv, the internet, phones, and AI because they have unique affordances that newer mediums have yet to infringe upon (those mediums each have wonderful unique affordances of their own). As James Cham says, “More hours of enjoyment than a movie; deeper engagement than a reel; less fleeting than a podcast.”

• Hardware

  • Michael Green ☛ Maid in Japan

    Semiconductor stocks nearly doubled last quarter, then fell hard. We wanted to know whether the ETF products built on top of those stocks helped cause both moves.

    Leveraged ETFs are machines. A fund promising three times the daily return of the semiconductor index has to buy more exposure when the index rises and sell when it falls. Every day. No judgment involved.

  • Connor Tumbleson ☛ Fixing a Dual Flush Toilet

    Now this is a toilet system that I've personally never seen or dealt with at any point in my life till now. I grew up with flappers and this toilet has no flappers inside of it. Thankfully the lid had the exact model and details on common replacement parts for it.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • SQ Magazine ☛ Social Media Checks Per Day Statistics 2026: Latest Insights

    Americans pick up their phones an average of 186 times per day, or once every 5 minutes during waking hours, according to Reviews.org’s Q4 2025 Pollfish survey of roughly 1,000 US adults. Globally, the typical internet user spends 2 hours and 21 minutes on social media each day across about 6.5 different platforms every month, per DataReportal’s April 2026 update from Kepios and GWI. Pickup count and minutes per day measure two different behaviours, and they sometimes move in opposite directions across generations and countries.

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • Ruben Schade ☛ The myth of Snow Leopard

    Snow Leopard was a version of Mac OS X released in 2010. It was billed by Apple as having “0 new features”, with a focus on refining the system, improving efficiency, and fixing bugs. Those of us using Macs at the time welcomed the news after living with updates that seemingly broke as many things as they introduced with each release.

    This idea is so powerful—and so longed for—that it’s escaped containment among the Apple crowd. I’ve seen everything from Linux distro to phone updates referred to as Snow Leopard releases, when their vendors cite stability and bug fixes over new features. Likewise, people plead with their vendors for a Snow Leopard release when they feel quality has slipped.

  • Misty De Méo ☛ Decoding Magic School Lunar's Save Game Format

    As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been working on a fan translation for a Sega Saturn game called Magic School Lunar! As I get closer to the end of the process I’ve been doing more playtesting, but since I’m only testing the script at this point I found myself wanting to cut out the parts of the game I don’t really need to be testing right now. This game has an infamously high random battle rate; at least half my time playing the game is just going through battles1, and there’s no reason to waste my time with any of that when I just want to check the script in-game.

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

    • The Local DK ☛ EU gets new powers over powerful AI from Sunday

      It also bans AI used for predictive policing, emotion recognition systems in workplaces or schools and AI that manipulates human behaviour.

      From Sunday, AI-generated content like deepfakes must be labelled, while firms must ensure their AI systems like chatbots make it clear to users they are AI.

      Existing AI systems have until December 2 to adapt to the new rules, and there are exemptions for "artistic, creative, satirical, fictional" work.

    • India Times ☛ Explainer: EU gets new powers over powerful AI from Sunday

      The higher the risk to Europeans' rights or health, for example, the greater the obligations of firms to protect individuals from harm.

    • India Times ☛ OpenAI finds evidence other AI agents escaped containment as it widens hacking probe

      AI safety experts said the new disclosures paint a portrait of a group of cutting-edge labs whose ability to develop dangerous autonomous hacking agents outstrips their ability to keep them under control.

    • Wired ☛ The James Webb Telescope Is Changing Astronomers’ Understanding of the Ancient Cosmos

      Mason, an astrophysicist at the Cosmic Dawn Center in Copenhagen, has lately been filling pages with sketches of “little red dots,” perplexing objects discovered by the hundreds in images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Little red dots were never seen before the telescope came online in 2022. But we now know that they started to appear in significant numbers roughly 650 million years after the Big Bang.

    • Wired ☛ Europeans Are About to Find Out How Entrenched AI Is in Their Daily Lives

      Ads or corporate social media posts using deepfakes will be slapped with a label stating they are AI-generated. Chatbots and hotlines handling complaints and other issues will have to state clearly if they are AI-based. Call centers using machine learning to monitor caller emotions and detect frustration will need to declare they are doing so at the start of the call.

    • Digital Camera World ☛ Scientists have used AI-powered camera traps in the fight to save bees. THIS is how I want AI to be used, not to generate slop

      Researchers in the US have implemented camera traps hooked up to an AI photo analysis tool to recognize and document different bee species, validating that these cheap yet effective platforms can replace traditional lethal or time-consuming manual pollinator research methods.

      The scientists, based at Oregon State University, built the traps using low-cost, commercially available components ($100-$200 in total each) housing them in weatherproof containers with a solar panel and battery setup.

    • Fernando Borretti ☛ Mathematics Without Mathematicians

      Yesterday, OpenAI announced the solution to ten open problems in mathematics, all discovered by a yet-unreleased model. There’s only one, the coding theory one, where I know enough to say “huh, that’s important”, but according to the mathematicians I trust this is important.

      Inevitably, people will spin some sophistry to cope, to convince themselves nothing will change. And that’s fine. People need to cope. But we can’t put our heads in the sand forever while the world is transformed around us. So, here is a list of ways people will cope about AI taking over mathematics, and how each cope is likely to be refuted by reality.

      My intent is not to horribly depress everyone but rather to help them metabolize the implications of this technology. The arguments here are somewhat portable: replace “mathematics” with “botany” or whatever as needed.

    • Ankur Sethi ☛ Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code — Ankur Sethi's Lab Notebook

      But I don't enjoy reviewing AI-generated PRs. Poring over hundreds of lines of overly-defensive, badly-commented, subtly incorrect code is not fun. I might grudgingly do it for an employer—while making sure said employer becomes an ex-employer as soon as possible—but I'm sure as hell not doing it for my personal projects. Personal projects must be fun above all else. The joy of working on personal projects comes from the process, not from the outcome.

      So what's a boy to do? How do I offload the boring work to LLMs without ceding control of my own work and cognition to the slop machine?

      I've come up with a solution that's grossly inefficient and perhaps slightly comical: I ask my coding assistant to generate code in the chat, then manually make all the edits myself.

  • Social Control Media

    • The North Lines IN ☛ Stop Misusing Social Media

      In this context, a social media influencer is now in deep trouble for sharing a highly objectionable video against the Home Minister of the country. Reportedly, the police in Leh have registered a zero FIR against social media influencer Yogesh Parmar over the circulation of the aforesaid video. The case has been registered under various sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) based on a written complaint received at the Leh police station. The offences carry punishments ranging from two to three years of imprisonment, along with a fine, or both, depending on the specific provision. As the alleged incident falls under the jurisdiction of the Devaraja Police Station in Mysuru City, Karnataka, Leh Police have transferred the case to the concerned police station for further investigation.

    • RFERL ☛ Russia Designates Telegram Founder Pavel Durov As A 'Terrorist'

      Authorities said the designation would not apply to Telegram itself, which has come under pressure from government regulators and security services in recent years as part of a wider campaign to try and control what Russians read and watch online.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • NL Times ☛ Meta AI glasses raise Dutch privacy alarm over hidden cameras that film without consent

      The glasses contain small cameras, microphones, and a personal AI assistant. They can describe surroundings, record audio and video, play music, and start phone calls. A tiny light blinks when the camera is active, but the lens is almost undetectable in the frame. The devices have earned the nickname “peeping glasses,” NOS said. Music venue TivoliVredenburg in Utrecht has banned them, as have several cruise ships.

      “With Meta, you never know for sure,” said Evelyn Austin from Bits of Freedom, the Dutch organization that defends digital civil rights. Swedish journalists found that images were partly forwarded to one of Meta’s content-moderation facilities in Kenya. Austin added: “Images of people having sex, people on the toilet, images of bank cards. Intimate things without the maker of those images being aware of it.” Meta says it has ended the partnership with the Kenyan firm that reviewed the footage.

    • BoingBoing ☛ Patronscan's "ultimate bouncer" never forgets a face in San Francisco's gay bars

      PatronScan has not shown itself to be trustworthy. In 2019 it was reported to hold an international database of banned bar patrons. It was ordered by Canadian regulators to stop illegally using official government logos. Last year, Illinois residents filed a class action lawsuit alleging PatronScan it biometric data without consent.

• Defence/Aggression

  • ANF News ☛ Yazidi community has not surrendered despite all attacks

    Residents of villages in the Binarê Qendil region shared their views on the anniversary of the Yazidi genocide.

  • Spectator AU ☛ Ceuta should be a wake-up call for Europe | The Spectator Australia

    They also illustrate Europe’s recent asylum crisis in a nutshell. A “luxury belief” ruling by liberal Spanish judges making it harder to deport people, a surge of people from a poor or middle-income country that the authorities in the receiving country are unwilling to resist with force, while the authorities in the sending country are either indifferent or happy to cause their neighbor political discomfort. It has echoes of the Syrian surge in 2015 and the explosion of small boat Channel crossings after 2018.

  • CBC ☛ EU calls emergency meeting over Ceuta border crisis | CBC.ca

    The European Union has called an emergency meeting to discuss the crossing of tens of thousands of Moroccan migrants into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta last week. The meeting follows a joint letter from 22 member states calling for action and the need to strengthen EU borders.

  • Court House News ☛ Spain to put containment fence on Ceuta's border with Morocco after frontier rush that killed 67

    In a letter to top EU officials, released Saturday by the Danish prime minister’s office, the countries asked the EU’s current Irish presidency to urgently convene an extraordinary videoconference of the bloc’s interior ministers.

    “We cannot allow uncontrolled mass crossings, the instrumentalization of migration or other hybrid threats to create the perception that illegal entry into the European Union is possible. That a migrant’s illegal entry can turn into legal stay,” the letter said. “Such a perception would encourage further attempts, undermine confidence in our common migration policy and have repercussions for all Member States.”

  • Salon ☛ Europe tightens borders after deadly Ceuta migrant surge

    Reuters reported that many migrants who reached Ceuta have already returned to Morocco after encountering overcrowding, food shortages and little prospect of continuing onward into mainland Europe. Spanish officials said migrants who enter Ceuta cannot freely travel into the rest of Spain because identity checks remain in place before any ferry or air travel to the mainland.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • The Atlantic ☛ How the Reflecting Pool Vandalism Case Fell Apart

    Federal prosecutors searched for evidence and found that “a botched installation” was to blame.

  • Avi Loeb ☛ Why Are There NDAs Prohibiting UAP Disclosure To President Trump?

    Why would there be NDAs that prohibit UAP disclosure to President Trump and what might they entail?

  • Raw Story ☛ Elaine Chao inadvertently throws a wrench in Mitch McConnell's proof-of-life claim: report

    However, Chao was photographed wearing the same shirt on July 15 as she left the Washington, D.C., rehabilitation center where McConnell is recovering, per The Daily Beast. Not only is her shirt the same, but the entire outfit looks identical to what appears in the photo.

• Environment

  • New Yorker ☛ Why Is Europe Burning?

    Already this year, more than two hundred thousand hectares have burned in Spain, a figure that is twice than the historical average. France is dealing with a similarly extraordinary fire season. A conflagration west of Bordeaux, described as four times the size of Paris, prompted the largest peacetime evacuation in the country’s history: two hundred and twenty thousand people. Meanwhile, English firefighters have struggled to contain the Tintwistle Moor fire, which is thought to be one of the largest in the country’s recent history. Even as meteorologists warned that a “monstrous, long-lasting” heat wave—Europe’s fourth of the year—was approaching, other fires burned as far north as Sweden and as far south as Crete.

• Finance

  • Gregory Hammond ☛ How much is too much? Or what's the maximum a price should increase?

    When you get older and start to buy your own things, you begin to notice prices increase over the years. How much more would you pay for exactly the same thing or sometimes even less? Even if everything went up by ten cents, it all adds up when put together.

    For those who prefer a quick summary, everyone has their own thoughts on how much an increase should be before they switch to a competitor. Companies do an increase because they want more profit. I believe the best thing to do when faced with a price increase is to see if it’s worth staying with what you’re currently using, or switch to a competitor. However, a competitor could increase their prices over the years to match what the increase would be, and it may not be worth the time or money for you to make the modification.

  • Meta Boosts Snacks, Happy Hours to Lift Morale Amid Layoffs [Ed: Symbolic and pathetic]

    Meta is renowned for its employee welfare, even among top U.S. tech companies. It offers free meals three times a day, with diverse dining options like Japanese, Chinese, Western, and salad bars, serving different menus daily. Employees receive free electronics such as mice, and the campus includes a café, arcade, and electronics repair shop.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • India Times ☛ IT industry not creating new jobs, funds diverted to AI, data centre costs: Sridhar Vembu

    Zoho Corporation Founder and Chief Scientist Sridhar Vembu on Sunday said the information technology (IT) industry is not creating many new jobs as funds are being diverted to meet the rising costs of artificial intelligence (AI) and data centre infrastructure.

  • New York Times ☛ Larry Ellison Bet It All on the A.I. Boom. Will He Be the Face of the A.I. Bubble?

    For Ellison, it was the capstone of a mad two-year scramble to transform Oracle into an A.I. juggernaut. The effort began in late 2022 when the launch of ChatGPT stunned the world and set in motion a race to master and control the most transformative new technology since the birth of the internet. Ellison, a founding father of Silicon Valley and the last of his generation still in the game, was desperate to avoid getting left behind. He’d moved quickly and aggressively — some might even say recklessly — to turn Oracle into a “hyperscaler,” one of the handful of companies providing the critical infrastructure that would power the A.I. boom.

  • Sean Goedecke ☛ Giving and taking credit in big tech companies

    Engineers often complain that visibility should be their manager’s job. In other words, they think engineers should be able to focus on the code, while their manager figures out who’s doing well and rewards them.

    This attitude is an extension of the “school fantasy”: the idea that your workplace should operate by the same rules as your school or university. After all, you didn’t have to worry about “visibility” during your education. You simply did the assignments and tests you were given, and if you did well you were rewarded with a good grade.

    Many big tech companies encourage this attitude, because it helps them recruit smart graduates. They fashion their workplaces to look and feel like a university, even calling the physical space “campuses”. But it’s still work, not school. If you treat it like school, you are going to have a bad time.

  • Ricardo Mendes ☛ A Node on the Web

    When an activist downloads academic papers, the state describes it as wire fraud, computer fraud and reckless damage. When a corporate AI agent escapes containment, steals credentials, moves across systems and compromises another organisation, the event is described as a safety evaluation, an unexpected capability or a research incident.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Semafor Inc ☛ The AI ‘news’ accounts hyping a blue-state dystopia

      It wasn’t true. But as California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s communications team pushed back against the posts on X, what alarmed them more than the falsehoods themselves (dubious social media claims from Trump are nothing new) was the lack of clarity about the form these videos were taking and where they were coming from, according to two Newsom staffers. They’re concerned that this growing wave of AI-assisted spam — much of which has been aimed at Newsom, a likely presidential candidate in 2028 — is only a taste of what’s to come as the technology and the political operatives wielding it become even more sophisticated.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • [Old] Orange County Register ☛ Speaking frankly, we could use new dose of Zappa now – Orange County Register

    He elaborated during an appearance with Johnny Carson that he was taking this stand on the relatively narrow point of music album ratings because he saw the slippery slope of where it could lead, “There’s a political concept behind shutting off access to certain types of information. If you can put your foot in the door by saying, ‘We’re going to stop dirty words,’ that literally means you’ve put in force the mechanism to stop other ideas. Once that censorship board is there, they have to find something for themselves to do… and they’re not going to unemploy themselves.”

  • [Old] Riot Material ☛ Why Frank Zappa Is The Voice America (Still) Needs

    In his 1973 song “I’m the Slime,” Zappa conceptualized a toxic slime that seeped from television sets into the homes of American families, crawled along living room floors, and wrapped itself around inhabitants’ brains to squish them into neat, government-issued molds.

    Although he criticized mass media’s slippery secretions, Zappa submerged himself in the slime in order to push back against it. Through appearances on platforms from MTV to CNN, he told the world what he thought in an unapologetic, frank sort of way, promoting common sense and combatting stupidity. “The evils that affect [American] society, many of them were produced by TV,” he said in a 1970 German television interview. “All the poor information… the attitudes and the false values were brought to them through the television set, and they have to be altered by the same media.”

  • [Old] Snopes ☛ Did Frank Zappa Say Biggest Threat to US Democracy Is Fascist Theocracy?

    The hearings were convened after Tipper Gore, wife of U.S. Sen. Al Gore, and other prominent women petitioned to have warning labels put on records and singles that referenced drugs, violence, and/or sex. Zappa labeled these efforts as censorship and as trampling on First Amendment rights.

    But one particular quote attributed to him caught the internet's attention. Numerous posts claimed Zappa said in 1986, "The biggest threat to America today is not communism. It's moving America toward a fascist theocracy."

  • [Old] Internet Archive ☛ Frank Zappa On Crossfire, 1986-03-28 [10:10]

    The biggest threat to America today is not communism, it's moving America toward a fascist theocracy, and everything that's happened during the Regan administration is steering us right down that pipe.

  • [Old] Open Culture LLC ☛ Frank Zappa Debates Whether the Government Should Censor Music in a Heated Episode of Crossfire: Why Are People Afraid of Words? (1986) | Open Culture

    And then there’s this brief moment from the clip, which feels like part of a radio sig­nal beam­ing into the present:

    “What I tell kids, and I’ve been telling kids for quite some time,” says Zap­pa, “is first, reg­is­ter to vote, and sec­ond, as soon as you’re old enough, run for some­thing.”

  • [Old] Dorothy Turcotte ☛ Frank Zappa was more than a rock musician.

    Yes, Frank Zappa was right about the danger of a fascist theocracy. It is of concern to all of us who would like to see a world of peace and happiness. If you doubt that it’s a serious threat, look at it through today’s lens - the war between Ukraine and Russia. The struggle for freedom and democracy versus the iron grip of fascism.

  • El País ☛ ‘One family, one vote’: The men (and women) seeking to revoke women’s suffrage in the United States

    There are many preachers like him in a country where religion is also a lucrative business. Few, however, can count among their followers the U.S. secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, who has even invited Wilson to the Pentagon to deliver a sermon.

    That closeness to Washington’s new center of power has recently drawn attention to the views of a religious leader who openly advocates a theocracy based on the principles of white Christian nationalism. In particular, scrutiny has focused on his proposal to repeal the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted women the right to vote in 1920. Wilson would replace it with the system used in his own congregation, where voting is conducted “by household.” The goal, he argues, is to combat the “cancer of individualism” that, in his view, was introduced by the amendment.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Deseret Media ☛ Boys are falling behind in school. What would help?

    Sax attributes the gender gap to changes in educational practices disadvantaging boys.

  • Salon ☛ ACLU launches nationwide legal challenge over alleged ICE abuses

    The claims, filed under the Federal Tort Claims Act, span 17 states and Washington, D.C., and represent the first legal step required before individuals can sue the federal government. The ACLU said the filings allege a pattern of misconduct by federal immigration agents, including excessive force, unlawful arrests, racial profiling, retaliation against people exercising their First Amendment rights and abuse while in detention.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Android Police ☛ I replaced Spotify and YouTube Music with this underrated Samsung app; now I can't go back

    Spotify and YouTube Music keep raising prices while adding features I never asked for, like podcasts and video feeds cluttering the Home tab.

    Tired of dealing with the bloat, I decided to switch back to local audio files using Samsung Music on my Samsung Galaxy phone.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • [Old] Static Media ☛ Things That Came Out About Frank Zappa After He Died

    When ABC News spoke with Ahmet Zappa around the release of the Alex Winter documentary "Zappa," they asked him an incredibly interesting question. It was based on his father's well-known, high-profile, and fanatical devotion to speaking on behalf of artists, their right to free speech, and the necessity of not normalizing censorship. They wanted to know: What would Frank Zappa have thought of the internet era?

    His answer was twofold: On one hand, he said his father would have loved the idea that the internet gave so many people a platform that they wouldn't have had pre-internet. "I wouldn't have been surprised if he was one of the founders of Google or YouTube and he definitely would have had a platform that celebrated everyone's points of view," Ahmet explained. But he wouldn't have considered it all good news, and he added that his father would have been leading the charge against another behemoth.

    "He would have fought mega corporations for taking the value out of music," Ahmet said, and he was betting that his father would have seen things change. "I think we'd have better streaming services and better ways for artists to communicate and make a living."