Leftovers

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Futurism ☛ Patients Are Skipping Going to the Doctor Because AI "Receptionists" Can't Understanding What They're Saying

    Frustration may be an understatement. One patient who couldn’t be arsed to negotiate with a malfunctioning AI complained to Healthwatch, via The Guardian: “I could never get it to understand me,” saying that “I ended up just hanging up and not bothering to try and book an appointment.”

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ California nearly achieved universal healthcare. Now, millions are losing coverage

    California nearly reached universal coverage, with a record 95% insured, but budget cuts and federal rules now threaten to double the uninsured rate by 2030, stripping coverage from 2.2 million residents.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Musty computer? Use UV

    I read on a few forums that UV was effective at killing mould spores, so I disassembled the case and put the various components out on the balcony for some Australian sun. My intention was to leave them out there for a few days, but after one day of such treatment, the smell was… gone. I mean, obliterated. The power supply for the machine remains out there, as it copped the most funk, but the rest of the case and all the components smell of absolutely nothing whatsoever.

  • Jerry Tuttle ☛ Online College Math Teacher: Does state life expectancy correlate with political party voting?

    I'm not predicting elections, and I'm not making a claim of causality. There are many reasons why two states differ in life expectancies - differences in average income, availability of medical care, occupations with differing job hazards, etc. I'm just asking whether these two measurable state‑level quantities move together.

• Proprietary / Vendor Lock-in / Malware

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

    • Futurism ☛ AI-Generated Children's Stories Contain Bizarre Patterns

      It’s not the only slop targeted at children that tends to follow a formula. There’s a whole world of “educational” AI slop on YouTube, with many of the surreal videos following the same format of teaching kids about the alphabet and animals.

    • Futurism ☛ The Results of Middle and High School Students Using AI Are Extremely Ominous

      But were they really learning, or were they using AI as a crutch to breeze through the assignments? This is where the findings get ominous: the AI-using students earned scores on monthly exams that were 20 percent lower than their classmates who didn’t use the tech.

    • Security Week ☛ Encrypted Prompts Bypass AI Safety Guardrails in Grok and Gemini

      Researchers at Adversa AI discovered a new attack technique and named it Cryptographic Context Injection. They reported their findings to xAI on June 3, 2026, and attempted to coordinate disclosure on August 4 and August 10. At the time of writing, they had received no response.

    • The Verge ☛ Over 1 million people have clicked LinkedIn’s AI slop button

      LinkedIn actually announced a “Seems like AI slop” button on July 30th, and the company says that a lot of people have already used it. According to a Thursday post from chief product officer Hari Srinivasan, “over a million people” have clicked on the button, which is accessible from the three dots menu on a post.

  • Social Control Media

    • The Guardian UK ☛ ‘They’re thinking about the likes’: deadly TikTok motorway trend horrifies Ireland

      The destination is irrelevant, for this is a show – an exhibition of audacity, lawlessness and recklessness that draws viewers to TikTok and other social media platforms with the possibility of chases by police and dramatic crashes.

    • JURIST ☛ Meta disputes claims of deliberately addicting minors as landmark social media trial begins

      The case, In re: Social Media Adolscent Addiction/Personal Injury Products Litigation, is a consolidated multi-district litigation (MDL) under 28 USC 1407. The lawsuit combines claims brought by a coalition of State Attorneys General who sued Meta in 2023. The trial will hear consumer protection claims brought by California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey, along with federal claims brought by 29 states under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA). The states argue that Meta violated consumer protection laws by implementing platform features such as infinite scrolling and autoplay which are specifically designed to maximize the amount of time that young users spend on the platforms. The initial complaint filed by Massachusetts notes:

      "[Meta] has intentionally designed its flagship social media platforms, especially Instagram, to be addictive to youth, preying upon young people’s unique psychological vulnerabilities and overcoming their ability to decide how much time they spend on Meta’s platforms."

    • The Verge ☛ TikTok will pay $400 million to settle DOJ child privacy lawsuit

      TikTok is set to pay $300 million right away and will pay a further $100 million “upon entry of an order vacating a prior consent decree entered against TikTok’s predecessor, Musical.ly,” the DOJ says in a press release. The settlement is “one of the largest recoveries ever obtained in a COPPA case.”

    • Kyle Reddoch ☛ How MacStories Handled Its Return to X

      I understand why MacStories returned to X. My concern is how the decision was handled and communicated to its team, members, and wider community.

    • Manuel Moreale ☛ On values, morals, and doing business

      I caught wind of the news that MacStories is back posting on X, the “everything platform”, and that seems to have caused some backlash. I am not a reader of MacStories (because tools are tools and I don’t read about new computers the same way I don’t read about new washing machines) and I’m also not on X. So why do I even care about this news? Well, the short answer is that I don’t. But after the move (I guess because of the backlash?) Federico Viticci, MacStories’ Founder, posted what he called “An Explanation” conveniently, not on MacStories’ homepage and not even on the site at all.

      You should go read the whole thing if you’re curious, but there are a couple of things here and there that caught my attention. The first interesting thing is the attempt to separate Elon and his morals from X.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Federal News Network ☛ A surprising source is helping uncover compromised government websites

      Federal agencies work hard to secure their online presence, but some website compromises are being uncovered through an unlikely source. We'll dig into what those discoveries reveal about the challenge of keeping track of sprawling government web infrastructure.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Futurism ☛ Flock Is Quietly Selling Powerful Drones That Scan License Plates From the Sky

      The EFF also warned that the drones can easily “capture footage from areas typically inaccessible to a casual patrol officer — backyards, roofs, through windows — at distances that leave subjects of surveillance completely unaware of the spy in the sky.”

    • Futurism ☛ Grand Jury Declines to Indict Man Caught on Camera Destroying Flock Pole

      The prosecution’s case seemed iron-clad: according to Cincinnati’s Local12, police identified Morelock using surveillance footage from multiple nearby cameras, combined with info gleamed from a credit card and a customer rewards account. Despite the evidence against him, the jury declined to indict Morelock, resulting in all charges being dropped.

    • Task And Purpose ☛ Sailors and Marines advised to hide military ties on social media

      In an Aug. 19 notice to members of the Department of the Navy, Acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao said that hostile actors are carrying out a “coordinated, multi-domain campaign” that includes direct attacks, harassment operations, and the release of personal information. Cao cited an “evolving threat landscape” since the start of the Iran war in February.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Nation ☛ American Democracy Has Been Killed

    Many Americans want, indeed, need this not to be true. They need to tell their children that American democracy is strong. And by that they mean not only effective but safe from people like me. They need to be able to say that we have not failed to preserve for ourselves and our progeny that which was entrusted to us by previous generations.

    But my children cannot afford for me to tell them this lie. I cannot leave them unprepared for the reconstruction effort that lies ahead if I wish for them to pass to their children anything that looks, feels, or sounds like a democracy.

  • Sightline Media Group ☛ US Army to end experimental drone battalion in Europe

    In November 2025, U.S. Army Europe and Africa, in collaboration with the Department of the Army and U.S. European Command, charged the unit with learning from dedicated drone forces, including those fielded by Ukraine, and feeding those lessons back to the Army to support the Pentagon’s push for U.S. drone dominance.

    The official, who spoke on background, said in a statement that after the massive, multinational Exercise Saber Junction in August and September, the battalion will return to its airborne infantry mission.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Carole Cadwalladr ☛ The Jason Arday Reckoning

    Jason Arday wasn’t the first person to have been hounded by the UK press and he won’t be last.

    We know that more certainly than ever by the response since his death from large parts of the British media class. I’ve been gobsmacked by the lack of humanity, by the knee-jerk defensiveness, by the silence from the senior leaders of these organisations. Are we just going to cover this up and move on? Really?

• Environment

  • Vox ☛ Data centers are being built across the US — and Americans are fed up. It’s shaking up the 2026 elections.

    In one image, this is why politicians are screaming at anyone who will listen that they loathe these data centers just as much as you do and want to stop Big Tech from building any more. It is a stunning turnaround: The percentage of Americans who “strongly oppose” a data center being constructed in their area has more than doubled in a single year.

  • Sang-Ki Lee ☛ A 330-Year Record of Ships’ Logbooks Reveal Strong Interplay Between the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and East Atlantic (EA) patterns

    This research utilizes historical wind observations from the English Channel to reconstruct a 330-year record of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and East Atlantic (EA) patterns. By analyzing data from 1685 to 2014, the authors demonstrate that the EA pattern significantly modifies the climatic effects of the NAO, particularly influencing European precipitation and temperature distribution. The study reveals that nearly half of the winters over the last three centuries were dominated by the EA, which often obscures traditional NAO signals in regions like Greenland and the Mediterranean. Furthermore, these combined atmospheric records allow for a detailed reconstruction of the North Atlantic jet stream’s speed and latitudinal shifts. The findings suggest that understanding the joint interaction of these two systems is essential for accurately interpreting past climate variability and improving future projections. Ultimately, this long-term perspective shows that shifts in atmospheric action centers are recurrent natural phenomena rather than modern anomalies.

  • Dr Molly Tov ☛ i am the lorax and i speak for the trees. the trees say "why don't you call?"

    I have spent much of my life despairing at how to explain my love of, and connection to, wild places. I joined the environmental law club in law school only to be heartbroken at how many people were in it for capitalist land management reasons, not for conservation ones. How even the classmates interested in working for the Interior Department saw land as a commodity to be used, not a living thing to be protected or even cooperated with.

    I couldn't articulate that heartbreak for decades, though - not until my recent hikes. It's because I see wild places as vast, interconnected, vibrant neighborhoods of beings living in community with one another - and becoming stronger for the competition they do create.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Joe Crawford ☛ ArtLung: handgun: discussed; handgun: lost ~ 22 Aug 2026

      I suspect that the “gun” naming stemmed from the fact that longboards, 12 feet long, originally made to ride massive waves at places like Hawaii’s pipeline, were often referred to as “guns.” Seek out the documentary Riding Giants to learn more about that part of surf culture.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Jasper Tandy ☛ Butterflies at the One Garden

      We love a butterfly farm in this house. Well, Tabitha and I do. Charlotte does not like crawlies (they're not creepy). I'm aware that choosing a picture of a fly from this is a bit stupid, but the lines in its eye are so satisfying. I've never been super into macro, but I recently discovered that my 35mm lens focusses quite close so I've been dabbling. After these I think I'm ready to go a bit further, but I have budget constraints! I quite like saving these days though. It's super satisfying making a chunky purchase after waiting for it for a bit. Wish I'd learned that when I was younger.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Futurism ☛ Leaked Memo Shows Republicans Are Terrified of the Backlash Against AI Data Centers

    The memo addresses the Democratic campaign to unseat Ohio Senator Jon Husted, who filled the hole left when JD Vance ascended to the Vice Presidency. It warns in stark terms that the Democratic Party has made data centers the pivotal issue of this election — and that if the tactic proves successful in defeating Husted, a wave of similar anti-data center campaigns would follow.

    “If he loses and data centers get the blame, politicians across the country will take notice — and they will not go near the next one,” the memo exclaims. “This has become a sleeper issue for the entire election cycle.”

  • New York Times ☛ Anthropic Could Aim to Raise $100 Billion in Blockbuster I.P.O.

    In recent discussions with potential investors, Anthropic’s bankers said the San Francisco company could seek to raise more than $100 billion in its initial public offering, two people with knowledge of the conversations said. The offering could also value the company at $2 trillion, said the people, who were not authorized to speak publicly about confidential conversations.

  • Sean Goedecke ☛ You should never be angry at work

    I try not to give a lot of prescriptive advice about working in tech companies. There are many ways to be successful, and every company works differently. If you’re shipping projects and your management chain is happy, it doesn’t really matter how you’ve accomplished it. However, there’s one thing that I do think is solid advice: you should never be angry at work.

  • Semafor Inc ☛ Stripe agrees to acquire OpenRouter for $8 billion

    With a deal, OpenRouter’s business could be destined for commoditization, and that’s actually kind of the point. If model routing becomes a matter of finding the cheapest one that meets a customer’s requirements for quality, speed, and reliability, OpenRouter now has an advantage. Under Stripe, it can focus on customer relationships rather than on maximizing the margin on each individual API call. And Stripe can afford to let routing become low-margin, because it can monetize everything surrounding it: billing, tax, fraud, stablecoin settlement, treasury, and possibly even financing.

  • TechCrunch ☛ Stripe will reportedly acquire AI gateway startup OpenRouter for $7B+

    OpenRouter helps customers select different AI models to perform different tasks, depending on their specific needs and budget. The company announced in May that it had raised a $113 million Series B, at a reported $1.3 billion valuation. (Investors include Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Menlo Ventures, and Alphabet’s CapitalG.)

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Framework Needs the Enemy

    These two guys was Mamdani and Hasan Piker at the time he said it. It has since expanded. The Michigan Democratic Party held its Senate primary on August 5, and a physician and public-health advocate named Abdul El-Sayed defeated a moderate representative to become the Democratic nominee in a swing state — overcoming, per Al Jazeera’s tally, more than sixty million dollars in mostly pro-Israel outside spending against him. El-Sayed is Muslim. A note for the record before I go further: El-Sayed is not a democratic socialist, though the ideological label has been attached to him from several directions since his primary win. He has said plainly and repeatedly, in debate, on CNN, in the New Yorker, and elsewhere, I am not a socialist. I am a capitalist who understands how capitalism works, rooting the phrase in Adam Smith’s original argument that monopoly, not government regulation, is the greatest threat to a functioning market economy. He describes himself as a democratic capitalist. This is not the label that would change Harris’s mind about him. Harris’s objection to El-Sayed is not really about economic ideology and would probably survive the DSA label falling off cleanly. The socialist label is a background frame the piece I am writing has to get right; it is not what Harris’s complaint actually rests on. What Harris finds terrifying about El-Sayed is the same thing he finds sinister about Mamdani, and it is not the tax code. So Harris’s category has, since then, had a second name to fit inside it, and the category is not the one about economics.

  • Armin Ronacher ☛ Fast and Hard Code

    Which in turn means that people can, and do, choose based on the marketing of languages much more. As a long-term Rust programmer I found it quite fascinating to see people now ship Rust code who previously might not have chosen it. I attribute at least one part of this to two recent vibe shifts: there is a lot more talk about wanting fast software, and about LLMs being exceptional at optimizing code without regressing behavior.

  • Eli Bendersky ☛ Concurrent Servers: Part 7 - Rust

    Several years have passed since the previous parts were published. I've recently went over them to make sure the information presented is still relevant and all the code samples build and run using modern toolchains. I strongly recommend reviewing the previous parts before reading this one.

    This post assumes a basic familiarity with the Rust programming language. It will only explain Rust constructs when we encounter code that wouldn't appear in an introductory book or tutorial.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Meduza ☛ A Moscow court sentences exiled comedian Semyon Slepakov (in absentia) to 400 hours of community service over a song mocking Putin as an ‘eternal little president’

    A Moscow court sentences exiled comedian Semyon Slepakov (in absentia) to 400 hours of community service over a song mocking Putin as an ‘eternal little president’

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Salon ☛ Hegseth fires "Stars and Stripes" journalists, deepens Pentagon press crackdown

    “Stars and Stripes,” however, occupies a unique place in American journalism.

    The publication traces its history to the Civil War and has continuously served U.S. military communities since World War II. Although partly funded by the Defense Department, Congress has protected its editorial independence, allowing its journalists to report on the military without functioning as a Pentagon public relations operation.

    That independence has increasingly collided with Hegseth’s vision for the paper.

  • TruthOut ☛ Journalists Fired From Military Newspaper for Asserting Editorial Independence

    Korte said she was “informed that the Department of Defense is firing me for insubordination after I told a CBS reporter that I work for Stars and Stripes — not the Pentagon, not any administration, and not any policy maker.”

  • Allbritton Journalism Institute ☛ Pentagon Purges Leaders at Military Newspaper Stars & Stripes

    Max Lederer, publisher of Stars and Stripes, as well as the newspaper’s editor-in-chief, Erik Slavin, and a reporter, Lara Korte, were all fired on Friday for insubordination.

    The publication is partially funded by the federal government but operates independently from Pentagon leadership.

  • Robert Reich ☛ He Really IS Stark-Raving Mad

    It’s bad enough for a sitting president to file defamation lawsuits against news organizations like the BBC and The New York Times, as Trump has done. It’s utterly absurd for him to file a defamation lawsuit against a research organization that’s come up with an analysis and conclusion he dislikes.

    If this lawsuit ever reaches a federal court — and I hope it does — the court should not only throw it out but impose a fine on Trump for filing such a completely frivolous complaint.

    Second, for a president of the United States to employ a personal lawyer to make such a legal threat takes Trump’s rage to a new and bizarre level.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • El País ☛ The business of hunger in ICE centers: Migrants spend thousands of dollars to avoid eating ‘dog food’

    “Many people lost even more weight,” says the Central American migrant, describing an ordeal he attributes to what he calls deplorable food. His complaint is echoed at similar facilities across the country. To stave off hunger in the face of the “terrible” meals they are served, migrants often have no choice but to spend thousands of dollars on instant noodles, sardines, tortillas, chips, cookies and soft drinks from the facility’s commissary, where prices are exorbitant. Even then, they struggle to meet their nutritional needs: they lose weight and, in some cases, fall ill.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • SQ Magazine ☛ Polymarket Enters Live Sports With Data and Streaming

    Streaming already has a much bigger place in American viewing habits than it did even a few years ago. In May 2025, streaming accounted for 44.8% of total US television viewing, compared with 20.1% for broadcast and 24.1% for cable. That gives sports companies a very different starting point when they think about where live coverage belongs.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Matt Birchler ☛ Walmart is the last major US company to add Tap to Pay

    Sure, Apple Pay will work, but so will Google Pay and Samsung Pay, other niche digital wallets, as well as just tapping your plastic card to the reader. This is because what Walmart is specifically implementing is Tap to Pay, a long-time industry standard that Apple, Google, and a few other companies package up in their own proprietary ways (they get a tiny fraction of the transaction if you choose to play that way).

  • Seth Godin ☛ The Amazon tax

    Who ends up paying the more than $50 billion a year spent on these ads? It’s not the sellers. Sellers can’t make heartfelt donations for long. It’s you. By making the marketing of products significantly less efficient, Amazon’s theft makes products more expensive or sucks the energy out of the development of new products.

    It leads to two perverse side effects. First, producers realize that if brand reputation matters less than a budget for clicks, they will shift to shoddy and cheap versions of their products so they have a bigger budget for clicks. And second, Amazon (and Google before it) have an incentive to make their organic search results worse–giving producers more incentive to buy more ads.

  • Patents

    • RTL ☛ Canada's Carney stands up to Trump, despite risks

      That triggered 50-percent US tariffs impacting some $20 billion worth of goods, from hockey sticks to cement, effective Saturday.

    • The Walrus ☛ Mark Carney: Why I Rejected Trump’s Trade Deal

      We’ve been under no illusions. We recognized, from the start, that America has changed. Early last year, I observed that the decades-long process of steadily increasing integration between our economies was over. Our government understood before many that America would transform all of its commercial relationships, that it would put a series of tariffs on its closest allies, and use economic integration as a weapon. We recognize that sometimes its signature was written in pencil.

    • The Atlantic ☛ Why the U.S.-Canada Trade Talks Fell Apart

      Yes, Trump can hurt Canada more than Canada can hurt Trump. That part of Trump’s thinking is true. But wars are not decided only by the question Who can inflict more pain? Wars are also decided by the question Who can endure more pain? Trump’s failure to accept this truth is why he lost the Iran war—and why he is losing his trade wars.