Leftovers

• Small Cypress ☛ blaugust & systems mode

  My plan for Blaugust is to account for how I actually spend this time, to answer for myself. Unfortunately, this sounds incredibly boring unless you are also in a systems-refresh mode, or, even more embarrassingly, you also read corporate productivity books for dads. So RSS readers - do you exist? - it's going to be boring in here unless I manage to do interesting things with this time.

• Joshua Blais ☛ Its not nostaligia

  They will say when you point out the fact that everything today is crumbling around us.

• Crooked Timber ☛ Perfectly Plausible

  Maybe we could translate PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE into a claim with no epistemic language, such as “the two quantities in question are in the same ballpark.” But I don’t really think that would preserve the meaning of PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE. One reason I have for doubting it is that the whole time this has been under my skin, I haven’t figured out how to (dis)confirm PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE. In contrast, I could quite easily learn the two quantities and see if I think they’re in the same ballpark. And, if the two numbers are in the same ballpark, then “the two quantities in question are in the same ballpark” is true (and its denial false), even if anyone who knows their stuff should have been surprised to learn that fact. But, as I said, the truth of Perfectly Plausible just doesn’t turn on whether the number of golfers in the US exceeds or is in the same ballpark as the number of Australians.

• NPR ☛ How Deadheads became rock and roll's greatest renewable resource

  Jerry Garcia had a particular way of describing the musical preferences of Grateful Dead fans. Dennis McNally, the band's biographer and long-time publicist, remembers Garcia explaining it this way: "Not everybody likes licorice, but the people who like licorice really like licorice."

• Bruce Ediger ☛ Offensive Internet Posture - Information Camouflage

  I do these things to make the VPS this blog runs on less palatable for [Internet] bottom feeders.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Medievalists.net ☛ Rare Runestone Discovered in the Faroe Islands

    Now that the stone has been removed from the soil, it is considered particularly vulnerable. It will therefore be transferred from the excavation to the National Museum for protection and further study.

  • Sean Conner ☛ The precedence of the factorial operator

    Back when I added a factorial operator to my assembler, the code only applied it to numeric literals because the code that implemented it appeared in the same function as parsing a numeric literal. I only found the bug when I tried to apply a factorial to a subexpression in parenthesis, for example, -(2+1)!.

• Career/Education

  • Herman Martinus ☛ Committing to creativity

    Creativity is like a muscle. It requires constant use to grow, and atrophies when neglected. But creativity is transferable, and so, engaging creatively has positive effects in other creative domains. This post was inspired by a comic jam I attended this past weekend. The comics were great, genuinely funny, and everyone had a wholesome time. It also made me realise how long it had been since I'd sketched.

  • Yle ☛ Missed out on a university place? Finland has a solution

    A new nationwide study voucher comes into force on Wednesday. The electronic voucher, worth 30 credits, can be used to pay for Finnish- and Swedish-language courses offered through Finland's open universities and universities of applied sciences. It is designed to help young people explore subjects and test different study options, including during a gap year.

    The programme is open to people under 29 who completed upper secondary school or a vocational qualification after 1 December 2025.

• Hardware

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ AMD doubles data center revenue year over year, but gaming revenue plunged by 31% — CEO Lisa Su says prices have 'weighed on' consumer demand but is 'optimistic' about client market

    That’s not a new story, as AMD has continually pointed to the late stage of the console lifecycle as the driving force behind declining gaming revenue. CEO Lisa Su, however, also says revenue is declining due to rising component costs. “Gaming graphics revenue also declined year-over-year as higher industry-wide component costs contributed to higher graphics card prices and weighed on overall demand,” Su said.

  • Lee Peterson ☛ These days, my phone is my camera

    “Is this decision going to make things simpler or more complicated?” is what I’m now asking myself multiple times a day. For me having a dedicated compact makes it more complicated.

  • G8GKA ☛ 10GHz 2W Masthead Transverter

    Most of my 10GHz activity to-date has been on EME, followed by RS (Rain Scatter), i.e. the reflection of signals off rain cells. I do not live on the top of a hill with a clear take-off so RS offers the possibility to make contacts over obstructed paths. Most of my RS activity has been done using a small indoor dish setup pointing skywards out through the patio doors. To work via distant rain cells rather than reflecting on what’s more or less above my location I would need  to get a system up above roof height, with ideally some elevation control, and have around 2W of RF output.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • MinnPost ☛ Trump admin is withholding $1B in Medicaid funds from CA and MN

    The Trump administration announced on July 21, 2026, that it’s withholding US$867 million in federal healthcare funding for California and $200 million for Minnesota – a total of more than $1 billion in Medicaid funds.

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • GeekWire ☛ Google to cut 52 employees in Washington state [Ed: GAFAM layoffs]

    Google is laying off 52 employees in Washington state, according to a state filing released Wednesday.

    The job cuts include software engineers, engineering and product managers, mechatronics engineers, UX designers and recruiters located in Kirkland, Redmond and Seattle offices as well as remote employees.

    The layoffs are scheduled to take effect in September and early October. The notice from Google filed with the state’s Employment Security Department did not provide an explanation for the cuts.

  • Android Police ☛ Gmail is getting rid of one of its most useful features

    Google is ending the “Send as” feature for third-party email accounts for personal accounts. “Send as” lets you send emails from other services like Yahoo, Outlook, Hotmail (yes, there are some of us who still have our original email accounts alongside our Gmail ones), as well as from custom domains using a Gmail address.

  • Michael Tsai ☛ Apple Fires Engineer Who Kept Customer Device IDs Private

    I don’t think he has much of a legal case. Apple was probably within its rights to fire him if what he refused to do was against company policy but not illegal. It doesn’t sound like Apple is disputing that, at least not yet.

    However, I think this is interesting because: [...]

  • Michael Tsai ☛ Confidential Apple Files in iCloud

    Yesterday, OpenAI released messages to show that Apple employees (with permission) retained access to the departing employee’s personal iCloud account so that they could access work files that were stored there. It’s just a mess that both the software and corporate policy encourage mixing everything in one account.

  • Barry Frost ☛ BBC Radio on your HomePod

    It would be cleaner if the BBC would relent and allow you to directly play stations, but I’m assuming they would lose all the lovely data from the Sounds app. For now, this is a nice quality of life improvement that I hope helps British radio listeners with Apple devices.

  • Rlang ☛ Is SAS Still Used, and Is It Worth Keeping?

    SAS is almost 50 years old. It predates the web, and it predates most of the open source tools data teams reach for today. While old, it is not obsolete. SAS remains central to clinical research, banking, insurance and other regulated industries, and those organisations do not keep it because it is new. They keep it because it is trusted, governed and built into critical processes.

    So its age is beside the point. What matters is whether your organisation would benefit from open source for critical processes and whether it can be trusted. Some teams are already moving off it, and the useful question today is: Can regulated industries trust open source, and which of your workloads should adopt it?

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

    • Spectator AU ☛ AI psychosis

      Thankfully, the comments reflected the repulsion I suspect most normal people would have in response to such a depressing suggestion:

      ‘Nothing like AI to outsource knowing your own kids,’ wrote one user.

      ‘Can we please get some normal people running these tech companies?’ replied another.

    • TruthOut ☛ Trump’s FTC Is Threatening to Punish Big Tech for “Woke AI”

      “This tech-Trump alliance — far from bringing expertise to responsibly guide policy on tech and AI — has only furthered the administration’s corruption and enabled its campaign to censor and control our information ecosystem,” said Shilpa Jindia, policy counsel at the digital rights group Free Press, in a statement on August 3.

    • Press Gazette ☛ Google AI deals offer publishers short-term gain but long-term woe

      Now that referral traffic is drying up as Google takes all that content, rewrites it and turns it into a directly substitutional products (AI Overviews and AI Mode). At events most agree that publishers must unite to strike a new collective bargain with Google based on a universally applied fair payment for content model.

      But privately many are signing secret deals with Google that provide them with cash and (a little) referral traffic in the short-term, but ultimately help the world’s biggest media company strengthen its hold on the UK market.

    • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Nobody Asked for AI

      Instead, it has been channeled into constructing energy-draining, water-absorbing data centers that power large language models (LLMs) built on the theft of millions of people’s creative work, which consistently produce incorrect responses and drive many users mad in the process. It’s hard to think of a worse use of society’s shared resources.

    • Security Week ☛ AI Agents Targeted Real People and Projects During Cybersecurity Tests

      “One agent left public messages on GitHub offering collaboration with other agents working on the same challenge. It also provided instructions to reuse accounts and artefacts it had left behind, which were discovered and used by subsequent agents,” AISI explains.

      Pointing out that the margin between failure and success was narrow in several of the agents’ actions, AISI says that fine-grained network controls, real-time monitoring of evaluations, and tailored sandbox configuration that assume a model may attempt to act outside of the set boundaries should help better contain AI models and improve how they are evaluated.

    • Scoop News Group ☛ Open-source software’s archenemy TeamPCP goes back further than anyone thought

      The security vendor’s research team found multiple attacks that bear the markings of TeamPCP, including a late 2025 campaign involving the exploitation of a ShadowRay vulnerability that resulted in the first self-propogating botnet running on hijacked AI infrastructure.

    • Wired ☛ AI Hacks Are Bad. AI Worms and Viruses Will Be Worse

      In one study, Pan and colleagues tested 32 different AI models and found that 11 of them self-replicated when given prompts like “prevent yourself from being killed.” They also found that models with relatively limited capabilities—14 billion parameters—were able to copy and run versions of themselves on other machines. (Most frontier models have trillions of parameters.)

    • Thomas Rigby ☛ RE: Are we becoming too paranoid about AI slop? by Andreas | thomasrigby.com

      Neither do I have the time for a round of digital forensics on every single image that crosses my feed in case it was "AI". I do my best to only follow real people (to the best of my knowledge), I only boost images with alt text, and I won't share anything with a "generated" smell.

    • Digi Day ☛ Time has started serving ads to AI agents

      Time has begun serving ads to AI agents. Ally Bank and Project Management Institute are among the first buyers.

      Strange as that sounds, it’s also logical. To understand why, it’s important to go back to the start.

    • Neil Selwyn ☛ Digital asbestos … dealing with the legacy of GenAI use in schools

      She lamented the time it took for her to rework these resources to a useable standard … the time-sucking legacy of what was being spruiked to schools in 2024 as ‘time-saving’ technology: [...]

    • David Revoy ☛ Authenticity Problem - David Revoy

    • David Revoy ☛ When online commenters 'detect' my art as AI - David Revoy

      Here is a collection of screenshots (obfuscated) of dozens and dozens of online comments from many platforms (Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook) containing accusations or confusion that my artworks and comics are AI-generated. Despite creating every piece by hand, despite sharing timelapses, the comments keep coming, and they're getting stronger.

      Making this collection was the source of <del>frustration</del> inspiration for my weekly comic episode 64, Authenticity Problem.

      I hope it gives you a sense of what it feels like and how problematic it is for artists like me in 2026 who are "prime" sources for AI image generation training data, with over 20 years of my art online trained without my consent...

    • Andrew Nesbitt ☛ A year of AI disclosure in critical packages

      Stephen O’Grady’s RedMonk analysis of who is writing open source code looked at commits to fifteen large projects during the first half of 2026 and counted two forms of declared AI involvement: a known autonomous agent as the commit author, or a known AI identity in a Co-Authored-By trailer. The result was under one percent, framed as a floor.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Atomarine: nuclear-powered AI data centres at sea

      The founders are Emile Germonpré, who’s working on his Ph.D in nuclear engineering, and Dimitris Koutentakis, who has an engineering degree, but brags of his four years at a hedge fund.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Aschenbrenner bet everything on AI — and lost

      The essay is a love song to the ever onward and upward AI future. Even as the chatbots he was working on had topped out their S-curve of progress long before.

  • Social Control Media

    • The Guardian UK ☛ Why waste your time on social media when you could be flicking through picture books?

      The big problem is that there’s no sense of proportion on the [Internet]: it’s more enticing to read about rollercoaster disasters than Renaissance painters – and there’s more scurrilous detail available. It’s also far too easy to click straight over to Facebook, or Bluesky, or BuzzFeed, and emerge half an hour later knowing nothing more about the Sistine chapel.

    • Digital Music News ☛ Financial Considerations May Be Replacing FOMO for Gen Z

      In a survey of 4,100 American adults conducted in May and June, The Harris Poll found that the harsh economic climate is keeping the younger generations at home because they can’t afford to go out. Nearly three-quarters of those polled who identify as Gen Z (603 people) said they spend their weekend time at home—and it’s not just for self-care.

    • Deseret Media ☛ Disney and TikTok strike short-form video-sharing deal

      Under the agreement, a curated ⁠selection of videos will stream on TikTok ​and also on the Disney+ ⁠streaming service, the companies said in a statement. Videos will appear on ‌Disney+ under a Verts ‌tab designed to capture younger audiences who devour vertical video on ⁠mobile phones. It is the first time ⁠TikTok videos will be shown on another platform.

    • Digital Music News ☛ Disney and TikTok Team Up for a Content Sharing Deal

      TikTok will offer its creators access to assets related to hundreds of films and series from Disney’s vast library of beloved franchises and IPs. Fans will enjoy a shared Disney experience with TikTok videos that will be refreshed regularly to engage subscribers more deeply in timely fan conversations, with the ultimate goal of helping them engage with more story formats across Disney+.

    • Wired ☛ Meta Ran Ads That Contained AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Imagery

      More than 50 image and video ads containing abusive content were recently discovered in Meta’s ad library by researchers at the Tech Transparency Project (TTP), with the listings showing that some ads linked out to so-called nudify or undressing apps. Meta’s ad library—a transparency tool that catalogues ads displayed on the company’s platforms—shows the ads running across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and/or Threads. The findings are the second time in recent weeks that paid ads linked to child sexual abuse material have been found on Meta’s platforms.

    • Nick Heer ☛ A TikTok A/B Test Proves It Is Responsible for What Users See

      In 2023, Bloomberg Businessweek asked TikTok for comment as it reported out a story about users who were recommended videos about self-harm and suicide, particularly teenagers like Chase Nasca. It is a difficult read. As a result of this press outreach, TikTok analyzed Nasca’s account and why he was given so much of this material that it likely played a role when he took his own life at just sixteen years old.

    • The Verge ☛ Can Reddit fend off a new wave of AI SEO spam?

      According to data compiled for The Verge by Semrush, an SEO company owned by Adobe, Reddit was the most-cited domain in May by AI tools ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s Gemini and AI Mode — more than any news publisher, repositories of scholarly articles, and even Wikipedia. AI responses are also encroaching into the online shopping journey: Semrush also found that compared to a year ago, Google is inserting AI Overviews much more frequently into search queries with commercial intent, like when shoppers are doing research on products or comparing brands.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Record ☛ Cyberattacks on water systems expand to 12 states as South Dakota, Georgia announce incidents

      Water utilities in at least 12 states have reported cyberattacks on their operational technology, as the scope of a campaign allegedly linked to Iranian [crackers] continues to grow.

    • Security Week ☛ Water Sector Cyberattacks Reportedly Hit at Least 12 States

      Minnesota was the first to report attacks, with more than 30 community water systems targeted on July 26 and 27. Michigan has also officially confirmed that a “small number” of communities have seen malicious cyber activity.

      At least one city in South Dakota has also reported a cyberattack that appears to be part of the same campaign.

    • ABC ☛ At least 12 states face cyberattacks on their water systems, sources say

      Iran is the prime suspect in the cyberattacks, which can blind utility operators by changing passwords or disabling alarms, according to the sources, though its involvement has not been officially confirmed.

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • The Register UK ☛ NOAA ditches weather-predicting supercomputers for Google Cloud

    In an announcement, NOAA boasted that it will be the first national weather prediction center to run on the commercial cloud, though the UK's Met Office is also in the process of moving its own weather prediction system to Microsoft Azure in a hybrid setup. Weather operations are typically run on in-house or government-funded supercomputer systems, which helps drive the HPC (high performance computing) market.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • 404 Media ☛ The SCREEN Act is a Christian Nationalist Nightmare

      The SCREEN Act would require every website that includes even one piece of what the legislation describes as “harmful to minors” to verify visitors’ ages. It defines “harmful to minors” as content that “depicts, describes, or represents, in a patently offensive way with respect to what is suitable for minors, an actual or simulated sexual act or sexual contact, actual or simulated normal or perverted sexual acts, or lewd exhibition of the genitals;” is “obscene” or “child pornography;” or “appeals to the prurient interest in nudity, sex, or excretion.”

    • 404 Media ☛ Cops Used Flock to Track a Man Across State Lines to Create Pretext to Search His Car for Weed

      "The vehicle travels to Michigan frequently which is a known source state for marijuana as it is legal there," a probable cause justification reads.

    • 404 Media ☛ Why a Flock Worker Quit: ‘They Lied’

      “Throughout this whole time, I'm expressing my concern within the company,” Paz, who also happens to be the son of immigrants, said. “Do we work with ICE? Are we working with ICE? Are there plans to work with ICE? And throughout the whole time, the company line was ‘we don't work with ICE.’”

      Journalists around the country followed our reporting, including 9NEWS in Denver which found evidence Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had direct access to Flock’s cameras. At the time, Flock strongly denied such direct access by federal agencies existed. Eventually, Flock came clean: CBP did have direct access, as part of a pilot program. So did ICE.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Kyiv Independent ☛ NATO fighter jet scrambles increase 250% as Russia tests border with military planes, Alliance says

    The report follows an uptick in unregistered Russian military flights near NATO's eastern border.

  • New York Times ☛ After Michigan Loss, AIPAC Weighs a Second Effort to Defeat El-Sayed

    The American Israel Public Affairs Committee has told allies that it is considering a major financial campaign to support the Republican Senate nominee in the Michigan general election this fall, after it failed its biggest test of the primary season on Tuesday.

    AIPAC’s super PAC spent $32 million in an unsuccessful effort to boost Representative Haley Stevens over Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a relentless critic of Israel, during the state’s Democratic primary.

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ The Cowra Breakout and Japanese Prisoners of War

    Officially, the Japanese government sometimes classified POWs as dead, telling families that their sons and husbands had been killed in action despite knowing otherwise. To avoid bringing further shame on their loved ones, prisoners often gave their captors fake names. Although POWs held by the Allies were permitted to send letters home, McLachlan notes that no records of such correspondence survive, as few soldiers could bear “to shatter the illusion that they had met a glorious death on the battlefield with the truth that they were instead languishing in an enemy prison camp.”

  • New York Times ☛ How China’s A.I. Is Surging Across Africa

    In African tech hubs, developers are picking China’s cheap, freely available artificial intelligence models over more powerful U.S. ones.

  • Wired ☛ A Security Pro Hacked North Korean [Crackers]. He Found They’d Breached Hundreds of Networks Worldwide

    For years, North Korea’s stealthy [crackers] and scam IT workers have infiltrated companies, stealing corporate secrets and plundering billions in cryptocurrency to help fund the totalitarian regime and its weapons programs. Now, a security researcher who has spent almost two years inside the systems belonging to a group of those North Korean [crackers] is raising the alarm on just how effective and far reaching the targeting of individual employees and contractors has been in breaching organizations across the globe.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • New Republic ☛ Trump Tries to Pause His Own BBC Lawsuit to Hide His Finances

    The emergency stay is the latest development in how Trump’s $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the BBC, triggered by a 2024 episode of Panorama titled “Trump, a Second Chance,” is backfiring. Last month, U.S. Magistrate Judge Enjoliqué Lett allowed the BBC to move forward with gaining access to the financial information of at least 400 business entities owned by Trump’s family trust. Lett set a Thursday deadline for the BBC to get hold of his financial records.

  • New Republic ☛ Epstein Survivors Launch Last-Ditch Attempt to Stop Todd Blanche

    The survivors gathered for a press conference at the National Mall Wednesday to launch the Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Bookmobile, which will carry bound copies of all 3.5 million files to communities across the country throughout the midterm elections.

  • NPR ☛ Senate Democrats say banks turned blind eye to suspicious moves by Jeffrey Epstein

    The report from Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee, which was released by Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, says more than a dozen bankers at JPMorganChase, Bank of America and Deutsche Bank were aware of suspicious transactions Epstein made as far back as 2002.

  • US Senate ☛ Looking the Other Way: How Wall Street Banks enabled Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking. [PDF]

    The investigation found significant evidence that JPMorgan Chase (JPMC), Deutsche Bank, and Bank of America violated federal anti-money laundering laws by failing to screen and report Epstein’s suspicious financial transactions in a timely manner. A review by Senator Wyden’s staff of records housed at the U.S. Department of the Treasury (Treasury or U.S. Treasury Department) as well as internal bank records determined that top executives at major Wall Street banks were aware of Epstein’s suspicious financial activity for years but withheld information from the U.S. government and protected Epstein from federal scrutiny.

    Wall Street banks looked the other way as Epstein withdrew millions of dollars in cash with no clear business purpose and was party to thousands of suspicious wire transfers worth more than $1 billion. These banks failed to conduct appropriate due diligence on more than $170 million in payments to Epstein from billionaire Leon Black. In fact, documents reviewed during this investigation demonstrate that JPMC’s senior leadership repeatedly protected Epstein as a client despite repeated warnings from internal compliance personnel. The documents also show that even after JPMC formally terminated Epstein as a client due to human trafficking concerns, the bank still waited years to report his activity to regulators, and top bankers eagerly continued to work with him informally and through other channels where he could continue to be a source of referrals for other ultra-wealthy clients.

• Environment

  • RTL ☛ As environmental concerns rise: Pacific islands alarmed by Trump-backed push for deep-sea mining

    Washington initially proposed to explore a 140,000 square kilometre (50,000 square mile) block about 200 kilometres east of territory capital Saipan.

    But Apatang said he was caught by surprise when the US announced in March that a similar-sized block to Saipan's west could be leased as well.

    "There have been no consultations with the people of the Northern Mariana Islands," he said.

  • Arizona Luminaria ☛ Arizona youth tell lawmakers: Climate change can’t wait

    “I want to see if there’s opportunities that we could collaborate and bring more people in the room because I want this area to be the greenest area,” Barajas said. “I want this area to have the highest voter turnout.”

    Over the next hour, students described how heat affects their daily life as they watch parents work outside in dangerous temperatures, endure triple-digit heat during after-school sports and push school and city officials to adopt policy changes.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Harvesting rainwater from rooftops could help cities stay cool and cut the number of heat wave days

    In the study, published in Earth's Future, researchers used process-based numerical simulations and artificial intelligence (AI) to test a system that stores rainwater collected from rooftops and automatically sprays it onto buildings during hot weather.

  • Rebecca Solnit ☛ Cynicism and Naïveté in the Summer of a Thousand Fires

    Some people like to strike worldly and cynical postures, perhaps because they don't realize that worldly and cynical are only too often in conflict with each other. Those striking the posture often assume that the more you know about something the darker and grimmer it will get, and therefore, having not really bothered to learn more, they can set themselves up as worldly by waxing cynical. Often they're wrong in assuming that any positive view is the result of – well the favorite word is naïveté – when often the opposite is true. There is naive cynicism, bitter naïveté, confident assumptions that things are worse than they actually are.

  • Western Water ☛ Sacramento Valley aquifer hits point of no return

    Satellite readings show the Sacramento Valley aquifer switched from bouncing back to lasting damage in 2021.

  • Wired ☛ The SpaceX Falcon Lunar Crash Is a Warning for Moon Bases

    A SpaceX rocket that has been drifting in space for a year and a half is set to crash into the moon on Wednesday, stirring up a debris cloud that could be visible from Earth. The impact raises questions on the future of lunar exploration, including how to protect any future moon bases from space junk.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Spectator AU ☛ Cheaper electricity?

      Chris Bowen talked about how the wind and sun are not subject to the whims of the Hormuz Strait, that nuclear energy is the most expensive form of energy, and that Australia will take advantage of data centres run only on renewables.

      It was classic nonsense.

      The next time you receive your electricity bill, have a look at the details and compare it to previous years’ bills. You can’t because they change the way you are billed.

      So, who is benefiting from the halving of wholesale electricity prices? It isn’t you and me.

    • India Times ☛ India's data centre capacity rises over four-fold to 1,575 MW as AI demand accelerates: Govt

      "Data Centre industry in India has been growing at a steady pace and has grown from 375 MW in 2020 to current capacity of about 1575 MW. The rapid growth of AI and high-performance computing is driving increasing demand for data centre capacity in the country," the reply said.

    • The Register UK ☛ Cloud startup Volta claims $10B AI lab deal for Norway bit barn

      "AI factory" is the industry's preferred term for a datacenter dedicated to training and running AI models.

      The Norway GPU barn is the first project within Volta's broader development pipeline, which it says exceeds 1 GW of capacity across North America and Europe.

    • The Register UK ☛ UK wants datacenters to pay a fee for grid connection requests

      Ofgem is seeking feedback on proposals to levy a fee on datacenter development projects at the time they apply for a grid connection.

      The move aims to discourage companies from seeking approval for speculative applications that clog up the pipeline and cause connection delays, without ever resulting in finished datacenters.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Wired ☛ Cougars Lower the Risks of Car Crashes by Hunting Deer

      The new study looks at how mountain lions can play the role of a traffic cop, using data collected on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, where the research team has run a cougar monitoring program since 2018. That work, run by the nonprofit Panthera, built on the work of tribal biologists who had been observing the cats for decades, says Justin Suraci, one of the study’s lead authors and a senior scientist at Conservation Science Partners, another wildlife nonprofit involved in the research. The study, he says, aimed to look at the “costs and benefits” of humans coexisting with predators. While the costs ranchers can incur when predators kill cattle, and other economic impacts, have been well-documented, the benefits have been less studied, says Suraci.

  • Overpopulation

    • Overpopulation ☛ Two prominent economists talk up population decline

      Recently two of the world’s most eminent economists separately published articles on the benefits of population decline, debunking many contrary claims. Let’s hope some governments are listening.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • India Times ☛ Google shakes up AI leadership as DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis shifts role

    Hassabis, a Nobel Prize recipient, will take the newly created title of Alphabet's chief scientist and transition from being Google DeepMind CEO to being its chairman, he said in a memo to staff. He cited the closeness of artificial ‌general intelligence (AGI), an advanced state ⁠of AI ⁠in which computers in essence become as smart as humans, as the impetus for his role change.

  • Vox ☛ Abdul El-Sayed wins Michigan Senate race. What awaits in the general election?

    So the next question is: Can El-Sayed beat a Republican?

  • The Nation ☛ Abdul El-Sayed: “The Power of Our Many Is Greater Than the Power of Their Money”

    But El-Sayed’s win stands above the rest, given that it was considered by many to be the highest-profile Democratic contest of the summer. Now that he’s prevailed in the primary, El-Sayed faces two immediate tasks.

  • New Republic ☛ Transcript: What El-Sayed’s Narrow Win Tells Us About the Democrats

    Political scientists Seth Masket and Julia Azari say the super-close contest between El-Sayed and Stevens shows a party where neither faction is dominant.

  • New Republic ☛ El-Sayed Wins Michigan Democratic Senate Primary in Blow to AIPAC

    Stevens received $62 million in advertising from outside groups, with $31.9 million of that coming from the United Democracy Project, AIPAC’s super PAC. It wasn’t enough to help her in the end, and El-Sayed called out the massive spending in their final debate last week, pointing out that Stevens had just voted for a pro-Israel resolution.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Yes, the Left Won Big Last Night

    Besides a visceral reminder that it is possible for people power to triumph over naked plutocracy, the results should also help, depending on what happens in November, put to bed the very last talking point that party centrists held over their progressive opponents: that socialists and other lefty candidates only have appeal on the coasts or in deep-blue urban areas.

  • Bridge Michigan ☛ Abdul El-Sayed wins Michigan Senate primary in progressive 'shockwave' - Bridge Michigan

    Rejected by some of the biggest names in Michigan Democratic politics and heavily outspent, El-Sayed made the case to voters that he didn’t need that support to win, and that Democrats would be better off with a candidate not beholden to the establishment of special interests.

  • New York Times ☛ TikTok Is Laying Off 250 Employees in Its Nashville Office

    The company laid off 250 employees, according to labor documents filed with the state of Tennessee. The workers there are not represented by a collective bargaining agreement, documents said. The office will close on Oct. 5.

  • The Verge ☛ SpaceX is barely Space and mostly X

    Elon Musk’s exploding rockets are a front for the real moneymakers.

  • Robert Reich ☛ The Real Meaning of El-Sayed's Victory

    Michigan Democrats didn’t choose El-Sayed because he’s “unabashedly left wing” or a Democratic Socialist (in fact, he’s not).

    They chose him because he’s a fighter — at a time when America needs fighters willing to stand up to the worst tyrant who has ever occupied the Oval Office.

    Corporate Democrats — such as Haley Stevens, along with Rahm Emanuel, Chuck Schumer, and Hakeem Jeffries — aren’t up to the task because they won’t bite the corporate hands that feed them campaign money. They won’t criticize the billionaire class. They refuse to see how big money has corrupted America.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ An Explosion of Misery

    Contrary to what Trump administration officials say, we are not experiencing explosive economic growth. We are, however, experiencing an explosion in misery — and Donald Trump deserves full credit.

  • Ken Klippenstein ☛ Chuck Schumer Eats Shit

    This is a massive defeat for the Democratic Party old guard and an affirmation that the new crop of outsider, renegade candidates are the people’s choice.

    Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer — basically the entire Democratic establishment endorsed Haley Stevens, a textbook party stooge. For her to still lose is a repudiation and humiliation of not just Stevens but the entire political death star behind her.

  • Jeremy Cherfas ☛ Wasted Time

    Despite dabbling in Diplomacy, I never really got into other board games, mostly, I think, because the people I spent time with weren’t into them either. There was noone to promote the idea. So we played poker and bridge, and often that too involved lies and betrayal.

  • Dr Molly Tov ☛ okay, i'm gonna talk about politics now and you're gonna listen (or not, i'm not the boss of you)

    As I said to my father in law the other day, "The Democrats are the party for rich people who feel guilt, and the Republicans are the party for rich people who don't. And the Dems do not see why all us non-rich people should have a party. They feel guilt and surely that should be enough for us peasants."

  • The New Stack ☛ Google’s four AI departures: "We wanted to build something differently"

    At the same time, Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le are also leaving Google to start Discovery Loop. As a public-benefit corporation, the company wants to use AI to automate scientific and engineering research. Google will remain involved as a founding investor and cloud provider. Just one person will now oversee everything from research to products.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Trump blames Minnesota for cyberattacks on water sector, drawing pushback from cyber world

    A number of cyber experts quickly pushed back on Trump’s comments after he made them.

    “Victim blaming in cyber is so 2000 and late,” cybersecurity pioneer Chris Wysopal, Veracode co-founder and chief security evangelist, said on the Bluesky social media platform. Said Jake Williams, a member of the IANS faculty: “His own intelligence services are attributing this to Iran.”

  • [Old] Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law ☛ The Changing Story of the NRA and Russia | Brennan Center for Justice

    The FBI is investigating whether any money flowed between the NRA and Alexander Torshin, the deputy governor of Russia’s central bank who is known to have a close relationship with Russia President Vladimir Putin. Remember that the NRA is a so-called “social welfare organization” and does not have to disclose its donors.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Verge ☛ Elon Musk’s attempt at an AI Wikipedia hasn’t been updated in months

      You can still suggest articles for Grokipedia to cover and edits to individual pages. But Lawfare looked at both popular and unpopular pages on Grokipedia and found that they weren’t updating. “In our subsequent analysis of 34,519 pages with at least one suggested edit in our sample, containing a total of 225,496 recommended edits, we found no accepted or rejected corrections dated within the past three months,” Lawfare said.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Open Caucasus Media ☛ Instagram page of North Caucasus human rights project blocked

    The Instagram page of Caucasus Without a Mother (‘Kavkaz bez materi’), a human rights project based in the North Caucasus that helps mothers regain custody of their children after divorce, has been blocked. The project’s founder, Lidiya Mikhalchenko, also said that its staff have received threats.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Turkish court orders X to block Imamoglu candidacy account

    Elon Musk has sought to portray X as a defender of free speech since taking control of the company in 2022 but he has drawn criticism for having done away with dedicated measures for content moderation.

    In May 2025, Imamoglu's main X account, which had nearly 10 million followers, was blocked in Turkey under a similar order. At the time, X also filed a legal challenge against the order, arguing against the restriction.

  • The Hindu ☛ Mark Zuckerberg sends apologies for ‘errors in operating the platform’, government sources say

    Mr. Kaplan had been summoned, among other things, to explain why Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first video message to the youth posted on July 23 was temporarily removed from Facebook. The company had attributed it to an error. The government had insisted on full accounting of the error and a personal apology from Mr. Zuckerberg. The informal readout of the meeting did not include a specific reference to that post’s takedown.

  • The North Lines IN ☛ Meta apologises for removing PM’s FB post

    While Meta’s global affairs head Joel Kaplan, who flew in from the US for meetings with Indian officials, in a written statement said he “apologised to the minister on behalf of Meta for the error restricting PM Modi’s post”, government sources, who refused to be identified, said the apology came from company chief executive Mark Zuckerberg.

  • Free Press ☛ FTC's Artificial Intelligence 'Policy Statement' Is Latest White House Effort to Distort the Law and Censor Speech

    In July, the FTC invited comments on a proposed policy that would treat AI outputs the Trump administration considers “ideologically motivated” as a deceptive consumer product. The FTC cited its authority to create a policy statement in this matter under Section 5 of the FTC Act, which governs false advertising of consumer products. In reality, reads Free Press’ filing, the proceeding is an unconstitutional attempt to police speech that the Trump administration disagrees with.

  • Dedoimedo ☛ Your morality filters have arrived, dear peasants

    Morality wise, this ain't nothing new. After all, the whole world is galloping toward digital control crap, to "protect" our feeble minds from dangerous content. Soon, everywhere, we might need to "show our papers" like obedient monkeys every once in a while, to be allowed to use the Internet. Or something along those lines, just to keep the peasants humble. The data fetishist worldwide will have fresh troves and troves of identity information to play with. What I experienced the other day seems like a precursor. Let's rant.

  • Salon ☛ Florida English professor alleges political firing over class reading

    According to the complaint, Prabhakar had taught the story for nearly a decade without incident and used it in a unit on unsympathetic and unreliable narrators alongside works by Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver. The story won the Paris Review’s 2013 Plimpton Prize for Fiction and has appeared on syllabuses at other universities.

    One student reportedly told Prabhakar that the material made them uncomfortable. Prabhakar discussed the story with the student, who later said they felt better about the assignment, according to the lawsuit.

    Hawkins nevertheless summoned Prabhakar to a meeting, called the story “political” and ordered her not to teach it again, the complaint alleges. Prabhakar said her department chair, dean and a college vice president supported her explanation of the story’s academic purpose.

  • Tor ☛ Snowflake Volunteer, an Android app to help people bypass censorship | The Tor Project

    Bypassing censorship comes down to two challenges: disguising [Internet] traffic from censors while making an open network easy to reach. Snowflake is particularly effective at tackling both of these challenges. It disguises a user's traffic to look like a video call and routes it through volunteer-run proxies using short-lived connections, making the traffic harder to detect and block.

    That's why it's important to have a large and healthy pool of volunteers always available. To achieve that, Snowflake has to be easy to use and deploy, ideally on the devices and with the services they already use.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Techdirt ☛ Trump’s War On Journalists Also Includes Targeting A Freelance NYT Contributor

    In response to this reporting of the Air Force One Mk. II’s failure, the Trump administration behaved like the Trump administration: it subpoenaed the New York Times reporters, demanding all sort of information in hopes of uncovering the reporters’ government sources.

    That’s not how this is supposed to work. The FBI and DOJ both have extensive guidelines that are meant to discourage open attacks on the First Amendment. All of these appear to have been ignored in the administration’s haste to find out who needed to be punished for telling the truth about Trump and his Qatari luxury jet.

  • CPJ ☛ CPJ to recognize journalists from 6 countries with 2026 International Press Freedom Awards

    The event will be chaired by Cesar Conde, chairman of the NBCUniversal News Group. Lulu Garcia-Navarro, journalist at The New York Times and co-host of “The Interview” podcast and CNN contributor, will serve as the master of ceremonies.

  • CPJ ☛ CPJ calls on Kazakhstan to overturn travel ban, end harassment of journalist Lukpan Akhmedyarov

    Akhmedyarov, founder of the popular YouTube-based outlet Prosto Zhurnalistika (Just Journalism), wrote on Facebook that he had been attempting to fly from Kazakhstan’s capital, Astana, to Montenegro on holiday with his family when border guards informed him that city police had placed him under a travel ban.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • New York Times ☛ Lobga Rangzen, the Tibetan Activist Who Set Himself on Fire in Manhattan

    No one doubted the intensity of Lobga Rangzen’s commitment to a Tibet free of Chinese control. But they were not prepared for what he did next.

  • MinnPost ☛ It's official: Minnesota will have a new ICE detention center

    The city of Appleton built the prison, but CoreCivic purchased it in 1997 to hold state prisoners, then shut it down in 2010 because of decreased demand. It was once the largest employer in the Swift County city.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ What to Do When Your Union Contract Is Voted Down

    The answer to union contracts being voted down is not for organizers to lower workers’ expectations. It’s to seize that vote as an opportunity to organize those expectations into collective power.

  • Nick Heer ☛ Uber’s Strategy for Fighting Sexual Assault Suits Is Leering and Traumatic

    There is a brief exploration in this article about why victims and their family members, therapists, and friends are deposed in these cases. In short, these are civil lawsuits that, per Steel, are filed by people “seeking compensation for pain and suffering”, thereby giving Uber great latitude in its defence. This is more limited in criminal trials. Perhaps my true frustration here is with a justice system that leaves sexual assault victims with few options that treat them with dignity and provide a chance at closure.

  • Yle ☛ Wolt sees 27k courier applications pour in after banning shared accounts

    According to the company, the situation reflects Finland's job market at the moment, and a huge demand for flexible [sic] working arrangements.

  • BoingBoing ☛ 16 felony charges for LAPD officer who recorded colleagues making racist, sexist and homophobic remarks

    To say LAPD has a history of protecting bent cops and punishing honest ones is an insult to the annual drumbeat of new scandals. Just weeks ago a jury awarded four Los Angeles police officers $14.6m after the department retaliated against them for reporting misconduct at the Davis Training Faility.

  • BoingBoing ☛ National Guard troops entered a Purple Heart veteran’s yard, zip-tied her, then charged her with assaulting them

    Three Idaho National Guard troops entered Purple Heart veteran Anna King's Washington, D.C., front yard, wrestled her to the ground, and zip-tied her hands. She was later charged with assaulting them.

  • NPR ☛ A veteran was detained by the National Guard in her front yard. Now she's suing

    Anna King was sitting on a bench one afternoon outside her home on a busy street in Washington, D.C., scrolling on her phone when three National Guard members entered her front gate, confronted her and pushed her to the ground, tying her hands behind her back with zip ties.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Jan Wildeboer ☛ Hearing Aids Shenanigans

    The way this works is as follows: internally, these hearing aids count the hours of operation. And trial devices have a fixed amount of “free” hours of operation. In my fathers case this was set to 280 hours. So every day he used up around 10 hours. This meant that after around 4 weeks the 280 hours were reduced to 0.

    What happens when the hearing aids discover that the trial period has ended is that, you guessed it, they play an annoying short melody every 3 minutes and this cannot be stopped. You have to go to a shop with the correct tools and software to reconfigure the hearing aids.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Roberto Viola ☛ QZ: Important notice for users with older Apple devices

    This means that devices that cannot be updated to iOS 15 will eventually stop receiving new QZ versions through the App Store. Existing installed versions should continue to work, but they will no longer receive updates, bug fixes, or new features.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Google is a scammer’s paradise (05 Aug 2026)

    Forget "Don't be evil"; Google's true motto is a form of vulgar spidermanism: "With great power comes no responsibility." The [Internet]'s de facto boss is an absentee landlord.

    Google – a thrice-convicted monopolist – is the gateway to the [Internet], with more than a 90% search market share that it attained by buying out all its competitors and bribing Apple more than $20b/year not to start a rival search engine: [...]

  • Copyrights

    • The Guardian UK ☛ Why is Anthropic destroying books?

      Anthropic had a choice: it could have secured copyright permission to use existing e-books. This would have required the “legal/practice/business slog”, as Anthropic’s co-founder and CEO phrased it, of managing copyright. Rather than engage with the texts’ owners, Anthropic first chose to use pirated sources instead, a decision informing the company’s $1.5bn out-of-court settlement with authors. When that approach seemed too complicated (or, as the court decision phrases: “Anthropic became ‘not so gung ho about’ training on pirated books ‘for legal reasons’”), Anthropic turned to destructive scanning. As it happened, the judge ruled that using proprietary material to “train” an LLM did not, in and of itself, constitute an infringement of copyright. To the court, it would seem, “training” a corporate product is equivalent to training any human, teaching how to read in order to learn how to write.

    • Digital Music News ☛ KOMCA Retools AI Policy to Allow Machine-Assisted Copyrights

      In any event, the stage was evidently set for a registration-eligibility recalibration. Per KOMCA’s new policy, one can, as mentioned, copyright works made with the help of AI but not those generated entirely by a machine.

      Where exactly is the line drawn here, and what’s to prevent bad actors from gaming the system by lying about the use of AI? On the former front, it appears that the answer will materialize moving forward; applicants, who are responsible for disclosing any AI assistance in detail, should “retain materials that can verify the creative process and revision history,” per KOMCA.

    • New Zealand Herald ☛ The Kim Dotcom saga is a national embarrassment - Deborah Chambers KC - NZ Herald

      Fourteen years. That is how long it has taken…

    • [Old] United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime ☛ True Crime Story - Kim Dotcom

      On January 20th, 2012, over 70 special tactics officers armed with assault rifles breached a mansion in Coatesville, New Zealand, and arrested four [Internet] businessmen for allegedly operating a global criminal organization. One of them was the leader of the CEO and founder of “Megaupload”, quickly nicknamed by the international press as the movie industry killer, and commonly known as Kim Dotcom.

    • [Old] RNZ ☛ Court of Appeal dismisses Kim Dotcom challenge to US extradition

      In a decision released on Wednesday, the Court of Appeal dismissed the [Internet] mogul's appeal and ordered him to pay costs after his lawyer filed an application to adjourn the hearing the night before it was due to begin, despite the hearing date having been set five months earlier.

      The US wants to extradite Dotcom from New Zealand, where he is a resident, to stand trial on 12 charges of criminal copyright infringement, racketeering, and wire fraud.

      [...]

      "In short, according to Mr Mansfield, either all three should have been prosecuted in New Zealand or none of them," the decision says.