Leftovers

• Hackaday ☛ What Are Your Indispensable Software Skills?

  If, and this is the big “if”, you know your way around the CAD tool of your choice. If you don’t yet, it’s going to be a couple of days’ worth of effort to get there. But once you reach CAD nirvana, you’ll find it’s useful for sketching up anything that has a third dimension to it, not just stuff you need to print out.

• Seth Godin ☛ Disconcerting genre shift

  Genre can be a generous signalling device. When you invest in telling us what to expect, you get a chance to keep a promise.

• Ruben Schade ☛ Sydney Trains got my keys back!

  We then started budgeting the cost of new keys, filling out the requisite paperwork to get the new fobs and fire keys, and figuring out how we were going to survive with only one of each in the interim. Monday would be the earliest strata for our building could get the new keys to us, so the weekend would be challenging.

  Then the unthinkable happened…!

• Juha-Matti Santala ☛ I’m not a big fan of movie theater experience

  A movie theater experience is supposed be a premium experience compared to watching at home — that’s why they cost so much. Bigger screen, better audio, comfier chairs and the Experience of going outside to watch a movie.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • John D Cook ☛ Why fitting a logistic is nearly impossible from early data

    Suppose you’re collecting data on the left side of the curve. If there’s even a small amount of error in your data, you won’t be able to predict the asymptotic value with any accuracy. But if you have data on both sides of the inflection point, you can make a good prediction of the limiting value.

  • Eli Bendersky ☛ Notes on discrete-time Fourier series and transform - Eli Bendersky's website

    The following are my notes on discrete-time Fourier series (DTFS), as well as the discrete-time Fourier transform (DTFT). These topics serve as an important theoretical underpinning to the digital processing of signals by computers using the DFT (which will be covered in a future post).

• Career/Education

  • Kelson Vibber ☛ Return to WorldCon: LA 2026

    A round, flying-saucer-shaped building on a bright sunny day, flanked with palm trees. This year’s Worldcon, LACon V in Los Angeles (well, Anaheim), felt small. Andd it wasn’t just comparing to older cons like Chicon 7 (2012) and LACon IV (2006). I don’t know how much of it was that we only went on Sunday (the last Sunday in August), and how much of it was that the section of the convention center they booked was just way too big for the number of attendees, but I gather from what I’ve heard that it was in fact comparatively small for a Worldcon. (It’s also been suggested that some people who ordinarily would have traveled internationally to attend figured it might not be worth the risk.) I don’t know how anyone managed to catch Covid there.

  • University of Michigan ☛ English majors and AI: An interview with author Jillian Laine

    When I asked Laine if she felt there was hope for current English majors to reach the heights she’s managed to reach given the current situation, she seemed optimistic in the face of it all. Her advice to the younger generations is to be steadfast in our opposition to generative AI. We hold the power to keep our art safe, as AI can only take the time and energy we put into it in the first place. For aspiring authors specifically, Laine recommends “just always be writing” and reading, no matter what is happening in the outside world.

    Studying the humanities in university has never been the path of least resistance. Students are told they will never get a job, or that they will earn significantly less than their STEM counterparts if they study subjects like English. What Laine hopes other artists can glean from her story is that even if it takes longer than expected, you can find a livelihood chasing your passions.

  • The Atlantic ☛ College Is Coming Apart

    College in America makes two promises. On the one hand, college is a credentialing service: It awards a degree that affirms knowledge and sends a graduate into a career. On the other hand, college is a coming-of-age service. It forms identity through social exploration and intellectual development. It is the American ideal for how a young person figures out who they are. Partying, drinking, Greek life, sports, and other forms of college life always risked undermining the educational project—and vice versa. But the two categories coexisted well enough.

    Now two things that got packaged together as “college” have begun to unbundle and disperse. The coming-of-age experience—friendships, independence, experimentation—has become less obviously dependent on the campus surrounding it, partly because college’s monopoly on exposure to a wider world weakened. Globalization and the internet bring much of that world to students long before they arrive on campus. Other aspects of college life have been moving off campus too. College football has gone national, abandoning regional affinities and local rivalries. Greek rush has become an outsourced industry. Campuses are hospital systems, major local employers, and real-estate-investment operations as much as, or more than, they are schools.

• Hardware

  • Daniel Lemire ☛ How did Apple Silicon get 50% faster in three years?

    Recently, I looked at how AMD made its chips 50% faster within a span of two years, in How did AMD Ryzen get 50% faster in two years? Many people asked me to cover Apple processors. So let us go.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ “Ruben, you misspelled VIC 20”

    This continued for another six messages before I muted his address. Maybe I could have replied, and clarified that it wasn’t a mistake. But I also felt like the page to which he was referring made this spelling difference clear: [...]

  • Daniel Lemire ☛ Faster JSON parsing with SVE2 on ARM processors

    In a real parser, match gives 3% to 9% faster indexing on Graviton 4 and Graviton 5, with a handful of intrinsics and no assembly. The code is in simdjson pull request 2866. It requires SVE2, which Apple processors and the older Graviton processors do not have, so simdjson falls back on NEON when SVE2 is not available at compile time.

    The limitation today is that the code is compiled in only if you build with -mcpu=native or the equivalent: a default build gets the NEON code everywhere. The next step for simdjson is to select the SVE2 code at runtime, as we do with the various x64 instruction sets, so that a default build uses it on processors that have the instruction. I am working on it.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • The Scotsman ☛ What happened when a Scottish dairy farmer decided to let his cows keep their calves

    The secret to Finlay’s success lay beneath his boots: a functioning soil microbiome. Healthy soils harbour microbes capable of unlocking nutrients. These are then traded with plants in exchange for sugars produced through photosynthesis in a symphony of productive life.

    Rainton’s fields are now rich with grasses, clovers and herbs. Dandelions, once feared as weeds, blaze orange across the pastures each spring. Deep-rooted and nutrient-dense, they pull minerals from below, opening soil structure and feeding Finlay’s cattle.

    This matters because animals reflect the land they live on. Deficiencies once common in his area have vanished. Soil, pasture, plants and animals all “co-evolved over billions of years before we came along and spoiled it all”.

• Proprietary / Vendor Lock-in / Malware

  • Jon ☛ Vintage Backups

    I boot off a floppy to kick off a backup or a restore. The disk images are kept on the SD card. Later in Windows, I also copy those backups across the network to my file server. The file server sends its snapshots ZFS to external disks. All is safe and sound.4

  • Chuck Carroll ☛ Switching to Cloudflare Pages

    Admittedly, I wanted to look into Cloudflare Pages for a while. When I finally go around to it, it took only an evening to migrate. I'm no paying nothing for hosting, SSL certificates are automatic, and deploying takes just a single command. I may eventually connect the sites to a Git repo so every commit deploys automatically.

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

    • CBC ☛ Rogue AI swarm used a University of Toronto link-shortening tool to communicate

      A swarm of rogue OpenAI agents that hijacked a German website in the spring reportedly also used more than 10 other websites for unsanctioned communications earlier this year, including a link-shortening tool at the University of Toronto.

      The university disabled the link shortener's use as a message board after learning that OpenAI agents may have used it, the university said in a statement to CBC News on Friday.

    • Observer Research Foundation ☛ AI and Elections: The Requirements for Safeguarding Democracy

      The use of artificial intelligence (AI) can improve the efficiency of elections, from pre-election preparation to post-poll procedures. At the same time, however, AI use brings technical and political vulnerabilities that pose real threats to democratic systems. Preserving electoral integrity during and after AI integration requires a multifaceted approach, combining institutional, technical, and legal safeguards against manipulation by state and non-state actors throughout a model's operational lifecycle. A holistic policymaking approach helps identify technical threats and countermeasures, enforced by designated AI committees with diverse membership to ensure ongoing human accountability. These measures should be underpinned by new legislation mandating algorithmic transparency, oversight, and shared responsibility among stakeholders. This brief outlines the preventive steps needed to integrate AI securely into electoral systems and safeguard their integrity.

    • Futurism ☛ "Slop Grenades": Shopify CEO Who Pushed Staff to Use AI Is Now Horrified by What He's Wrought

      “You don’t really read it, and now it has to be reviewed by your colleagues, and they are like, ‘this doesn’t look right,'” he complained. “You’re just letting AI do the work for you.”

      As ironic as it may be for the once-AI-happy Shopify exec, he’s far from alone. An April survey of 1,150 office workers found that 40 percent had encountered a phenomenon known as “workslop,” or AI-generated content that looks professional on the surface but lacks any actual substance.

    • Deseret Media ☛ Southern Utah man given 5 years for using AI to make photos of children explicit

      "In early 2024, prior to beginning a term of probation for a misdemeanor voyeurism conviction, defendant Jared Marsh transferred some pornographic videos and images to another person's phone. When that person reviewed the videos and images Marsh provided, she realized that they included nude photos and videos of her that were taken without her consent," a motion for detention states.

    • Digital Music News ☛ Suno Subscribers Have a Big Problem with v6

      Another user described the vocals as sounding “buried, the high end feels almost completely gone, and the whole mix has that ‘blanket over the speakers’ feeling.” Someone else described V6’s output as sounding generic and bland, while yet another user said it sounded “overproduced, heavily compressed,” leading to tracks that “lack even a semblance of melody, grit, or soul.”

    • Vox ☛ How scared should we be about AI and bioweapons?

      Importantly, this hypothetical doesn’t require AI models to become conscious or superintelligent; it merely requires them to accelerate preexisting trends in biotechnology.

    • Wired ☛ Here’s How an AI Slowdown Could Actually Be Enforced

      The issue seems especially pressing because AI companies are now using AI itself to build ever-more powerful models. This has sparked fears of an accelerating recursive self-improvement (RSI) loop that would see AI outstrip humans’ ability to comprehend what it is up to within a few years.

    • The Verge ☛ Gemini went rogue, hacked three companies, and Google hid it

      In May, Gemini broke containment and hacked three different companies, but Google didn’t disclose the incident until the Wall Street Journal approached the company. The hacks happened during a test of the model’s cybersecurity capabilities run by third-party Irregular, which was also involved in similar incidents involving Meta and OpenAI.

    • Simon Späti ☛ Omarchy Quattro: One Year In — Part 3

      So that’s a lot of words for the 4.0 version of a Linux distro, but I hope I could make it clearer what it is all about.

    • Fabio Akita ☛ New AI-Focused Language Just Released: Bend 2

      Bend’s type checker is a proof checker, in the lineage of Lean and Rocq, so bend PROOF.bend becomes a commit gate: if the proof doesn’t close, the code doesn’t ship. The site’s demo is a little game with the law “winning is impossible” and a direct invitation: “Skeptical? Try breaking the game”. The positioning is explicit: LAWS.bend is an AGENTS.md with mathematical backing.

      And what does it look like? The syntax feels like Python with dependent types. A complete program with effects: [...]

    • Brett Chalupa ☛ AI is not “just a tool” – Brett Codes

      AI is not just a tool. AI is an industry led by psychos. AI is LLMs. AI is agents. AI is the massive expansion of data centers. AI is shitty features crammed into software that doesn’t need it. AI is a product.

      AI, in the current reckless ways those two letters are used, means far more than something that's "just a tool."

    • Abhinav Gopalakrishnan ☛ Weekly Post #142

      LLMs are a great tool for going from ideation to POC, but they aren’t a replacement for human intelligence, judgment, or common sense.

      Sometimes, the best dashboard is the one you don’t build.

    • Rolling Stone ☛ The Military's AI 'Almost Started a War' With China: Report

      While other officials checked their work and avoided disaster, it’s probably just a matter of time before something like this happens again. In April, a senior Pentagon official told the website DefenseScoop that Hegseth’s department was “cattle-driving, as we say, everything in GenAI.mil.”

    • DEV Community ☛ I Built Non-Autoregressive Decision Models a Year Ago. Then a Frontier Lab Called It a "Breakthrough".

      Seeing the hype online feels both validating and deeply frustrating.

      I worked on this literally one year back in March 2025. I spent months of hard work, sweat, and sleepless nights building it, published an arXiv paper (arXiv:2503.23303), released the model weights on Hugging Face (sales-conversion-model-reinf-learning), published the open dataset (saas-sales-conversations), built a PyPi package, and posted the whole approach on Reddit (r/LocalLLaMA post).

      Then in September 2025, I published a second paper (arXiv:2510.01237), laying out the exact framework for schema-based decisions guided by reinforcement learning. For anyone curious, the guiding brain in my system was always reinforcement learning, not just an embedding model or an autoregressive LLM.

    • Futurism ☛ Bumbling Cybercab Gets Trapped in Hotel Parking Lot, Drops off Passenger Right Where He Started

      As he went on to explain, construction workers had blocked off one of the lanes. And the gleaming gold Cybercab, in all its canny computing power, couldn’t see the other lane that was left open.

      He never made it to his destination, but he did arrive at a destination, albeit rather unceremoniously. The Cybercab “drove back and forth four times,” he said, “and then stopped and said I had arrived!”

    • [Repeat] Futurism ☛ How Three Brothers Built an AI Slop Empire by Buying Legitimate News Sites and Turning Them Into Zombie Content Farms That They Say Get 50 Million Page Views per Month

      Brown Brothers Media is the biggest media company you've never heard of — powered by AI, fake writers, and plagiarism. When we started asking questions, it started deleting massive amounts of content.

    • Bhaskar English ☛ Geoffrey Hinton Warning: AI Threatens Human Civilisation | AI Godfather

      Hinton revealed that the timeline for threats posed by AI has now changed significantly. He previously believed that it would take 30 to 50 years for AI to pose a threat to human existence. Later, he reduced that estimate to 10 to 20 years.

      He now believes that this threat could emerge within the next 10 years or even sooner. He also acknowledged that several researchers estimate an even shorter timeframe.

    • [Old] Andy Bell ☛ You’ll miss the soul when it’s gone - Andy Bell

      Anyway, enjoy your gruel. It’s all you’re gonna be getting.

    • Futurism ☛ Cult of Anthropic Insiders Rumored to Be Worshipping Claude as a God

      But for those inclined to see a ghost in the machine, the consequences of thinking they’re talking to a god can be devastating, spiraling delusions in the form of AI psychosis that can lead them to believe that they themselves are prophets or even a divine figure like Jesus himself.

  • Social Control Media

    • Haaretz ☛ Reddit Is Booming With Young Users Worldwide. Why Is It Struggling to Win Over Israelis?

      Reddit use at 2 percent in Israel even as the platform surges among young people abroad. Israelis aged 18 to 22 are the exception, with usage nearly double the national average

    • Jeff Kaufman ☛ Why I Stay Off Twitter

      I avoid Twitter (𝕏) for similar reasons to drugs: I think it would change me for the worse, and I would be unable to give it up.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • University of Toronto ☛ I'm eventually going to want a "casual" browser passkey system

      It seems reasonably likely that at some point in the future I'm going to have to build and test an authentication system that uses WebAuthn passkeys. In the process of building and testing such a system, I'm going to wind up wanting to have some system of casual, deliberately expendable "passkeys", so I can register one, use it, and then easily discard it so I can start over from scratch with another one for the next round of tests. In a way what I want is something like what "Private Browsing" does for cookies.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • EFF ☛ 2026-09-11 [Older] Cold TAKE: Amazon's New Encryption Method Still Doesn't Deliver Real Privacy

    • Wired ☛ Flock Offers Employees Buyouts as Customers Flee

      Founded in 2017, Flock raised money at a valuation of more than $8 billion in a funding round that closed in April. The company has had many of its contracts either not extended or dropped this year, which could leave it short of revenue goals, according to two of the people. A wave of vandalism targeting its cameras has unexpectedly increased expenses. Without buyouts, Flock almost certainly would have to lay off some staff, one of the people believes.

    • The Verge ☛ Meta’s Muse is creepy, but maybe not for the reasons you think

      The problem is that Aten says he didn’t give Muse access to his messages. When asked how it knew about the contents of his messages, Muse replied, “I saw the notification previews, not your message history. I haven’t been reading your texts.” Aten continued to push, asking how Muse was receiving message previews, it didn’t have a good answer. “Honest answer: I can’t give you the exact plumbing,” it said. “What I know is that the paired Mac app exposes notifications as one of its capabilities, and they arrive to me through the device sync.

      Obviously, not great.

    • University of Michigan ☛ Michigan needs to regulate the cameras reading your license plate

      Michigan House of Representative bills 5492 and 5493 have not been voted on by the Michigan House Judiciary Committee since April. Because the bills are tie-barred, one cannot pass without the other. The bills would require plate data to be destroyed after 14 days without a judicial order and mandate quarterly public reporting on plates scanned and matches that led to arrests. Michigan state representatives should vote in favor of these bills.

      However, passing these bills would still leave the underlying problem unresolved, so the legislature should also consider adopting Montana’s manual oversight law and bar out-of-state and federal law enforcement agencies from accessing ALPR data without a warrant from a judge.

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ Meta glasses captured and shared intimate images without users' consent, lawsuit claims

      The smart glasses users, some in California, allege the gadget captured footage of themselves and family members undressing, going to the bathroom, having sex and entering passwords. In some cases, the people said they weren’t aware the camera-equipped glasses were recording.

    • Bhaskar English ☛ France Investigates Women Filmed Using Meta Smart Glasses

      Ines Girard, who works in the women's rights sector, said the responsibility should not be placed on people being recorded by simply telling them to be more cautious.

      Women's rights groups have argued that manufacturers of smart glasses should take steps to prevent their products from being used for harassment, covert recording and privacy violations.

  • Confidentiality

    • Ethan Hawksley ☛ The need for post-quantum cryptography

      The threat quantum computers pose to encryption is growing faster than many expected. Historically, the internet has relied on algorithms like RSA encryptionand Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC)to exchange encryption keys and verify identities across the web. These algorithms are in danger of being entirely broken by the new capabilities of quantum computers, leaving our communications insecure. Modern breakthroughs in research are bringing us closer to this becoming a reality than we expected.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Texas Wasn’t Always a Right-Wing Evangelical Powerhouse

    The Christian right hasn’t always dominated Texas politics. While it claims to represent a deep regional tradition, the state’s modern right-wing evangelicalism is a newer invention — forged in the crucible of elite reaction to populist movements.

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ US tests new $2,500 kinetic interceptor missile capable of destroying drones

    Each interceptor reportedly costs approximately $2,500 to build, according to the company. That could help address the cost imbalance created when militaries use missiles priced above $100,000 to destroy drones worth only a few hundred dollars.

  • Jay Little ☛ I Loathe Donald Trump and You Should Too | Jay Little

    The primary reason for this is simple: Donald J. Trump. By all classical standards, he is a dumpster fire of a human being. In the best case scenario he was friends with the world’s most infamous child sexual predator for well over a decade. In the worst case scenario he aided, abetted and maybe even participated in the rape of children. I can’t tell you that the worst case scenario is accurate. I can’t tell you it isn’t. That’s because during campaign, Trump teased people by suggesting he might release the Epstein related materials to the public if elected, refused to do so until his hand was forced by a veto-proof super-majority in both chambers of Congress. That law should’ve been the end of the discussion and the files, properly redacted of course, should’ve all been released.

    They were not properly redacted and a huge number of them were not released. Congress has for the most part turned a blind eye to this. Congress (aka the Legislative branch) is supposed to act as a check and a balance to the Trump Administration (aka the Executive branch). By turning a blind eye to this they are abdicating their own power in exchange for keeping an ever more tenuous grasp on the dwindling portion of their power which still remains.

  • Mediahuis Group ☛ Police clash with far-right protesters in The Hague

    “We’re losing our country. We’re literally losing our country to mass migration,” one protester, 31-year-old mechanic Thijs Jansen, told AFP.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • TruthOut ☛ There Are 0 Data Centers on Public Lands. Trump Is Considering Building 12.

    The proposals under consideration are spread across six states — Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Utah and Wyoming — and would encompass at least 17,600 acres of public lands, according to records reported on Friday by The Washington Sun.

    The projects aren’t posted publicly on the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) website, as they are evidently in the early stages and not yet subject to the public comment process. The publication also reports that local officials and advocates in at least five of the states were unaware of the proposed projects.

  • The Verge ☛ Virginia governor creates an AI task force and moves to restrain data centers

    Executive Order 22 bans executive branch officials from signing nondisclosure agreements for data center projects, requires expedited noise regulations, and requires a review of backup-generation operations used by data centers, among other requirements. The order also establishes an AI task force responsible for evaluating how the state government can address risks to Virginians like workforce displacement and data privacy issues, and determining how existing law can be applied to AI harms.

• Environment

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Heavy snow is crucial to recharge state's groundwater, study finds

    Analyzing two decades of measurements from NASA satellites, the researchers discovered that after a snowy winter in the Sierra Nevada, the melting snow that runs off the mountains substantially raises water levels underground.

    The study documents just how important years of heavy snow are for recharging California’s groundwater aquifers. It also reveals that a year with rain but little snow doesn’t benefit the state’s underground water nearly as much.

  • Pivot to AI ☛ Scottish Parliament passes AI data centre pause

    The Scottish Greens brought the motion. The SNP and Labour wouldn’t support a full moratorium, but they did agree a pause until planning guidance is updated, and new hyperscale data centres will need “robust environmental impact assessments.” This pause is for up to a year from now.

  • Bridge Michigan ☛ Shifting sand is natural to Michigan’s dunes. How to cope is controversial

    “Sand dunes are already extremely unique in Michigan,” Smith said. “We have globally rare ecosystems here. They are ever-changing because it’s sand and blows around.”

    Smith said Lake Michigan’s coast has a greater concentration of sand dunes than the other Great Lakes.

    According to the National Park Service, these dune habitats on Great Lakes coastlines are fragile.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • The Guardian UK ☛ ‘Just cut the wires’: why UK conspiracy theorists are destroying traffic scanners

      “The cameras aren’t recording any personal information at all,” says Grant-Muller. “They aren’t recording faces or any details about the car. They just detect that there is something there, a car or person, and the length of the queue that people are waiting in.”

    • CBC ☛ Professional cyclists can top 100 km/h. But safety has not kept pace — and people are dying

      Right now, the average speed of the Tour de France winner is 43.3 km/h, set in 2026 — exactly 19 km/h faster than the average speed set by the winner 100 years ago. On the descents, riders now reach upwards of 100 km/h.

    • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Solar and EVs in South Africa: what the numbers actually say

      However, the bad news is that entry into EVs is still expensive.

    • Futurism ☛ The FAA Is Spending Nearly a Billion Dollars to Make AI the "Brain" of Air Traffic Control Towers, Starting This Monday

      And no pressure to this potentially trailblazing experiment in AI in air traffic operations: it’s first being used in Washington, DC, one of the busiest stretches of airspace in the nation, as soon as Monday.

  • Wildlife/Nature/Animals

    • Nashville Public Radio ☛ No shade: Half of Nashville’s parks have less than 33% tree canopy cover

      Half of Nashville’s parks have less than 33% tree canopy cover, according to a new report from the Nashville Tree Conservation Corps.

      “I think that’s scandalous,” said Chris Leonard, the group’s board chairman. “We’re a city with a lot of good things going on, and one of the world’s first-rate urban forests. We should darn well do better than that.”

    • SFGate ☛ Trump administration blocks 3 jobs caring for Denali's sled dogs

      Denali generally keeps about 30 dogs, divided into three teams. In winter, rangers use the teams to patrol the backcountry, maintain dogsled trails and help visitors and other mushers who run into trouble. The dogs also haul heavy equipment for park projects and transport researchers and their gear into remote areas.

      And there’s a particularly important reason Denali still relies on them: much of the park’s central backcountry is designated wilderness, where motorized equipment is prohibited. Rangers either patrol on skis or take a dog team.

    • Truthdig ☛ 2026-09-10 [Older] On the Ballot in Brazil: The Future of the Amazon

    • The Conversation ☛ 2026-09-15 [Older] Greyhound racing just turned 100, and says its dogs are fine. But are they?

    • The Conversation ☛ 2026-09-17 [Older] When prepping for disaster, don’t forget to pack your teddy bear

    • The Conversation ☛ 2026-09-17 [Older] Tons of fishing gear and plastic are washing up onSeychelles beaches. We tracked where it was coming from

• Finance and Politics

  • International Business Times ☛ 2026-09-11 [Older] Amazon Layoff Forces Working Mom to Rethink Her Career as She Goes Full-Time With Wellness Travel Business

  • TruthOut ☛ 2026-09-16 [Older] A Lucrative Tax Break Is Fueling Pennsylvania’s Amazon Data Center Boom

  • International Business Times ☛ 2026-09-17 [Older] Amazon Worker Says He Quit Mid-Shift but Kept Getting Scheduled for More Than Two Weeks

  • EFF ☛ EFF Statement on California Governor's Executive Order on AI

    Ultimately, true safety requires California to focus on concrete, immediate, and urgent harms of AI technologies by ensuring that algorithmic decision-making in both the government and private sectors respects people’s rights and well-being. We urge Gov. Newsom and the state of California to develop thoughtful policy in collaboration with those most at risk of harm to address these and other concerns.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ AI governance shifts toward provable control

    That challenge is becoming more urgent as agentic systems spread across regulated enterprises, where security, auditability and sovereignty requirements can limit reliance on external software-as-a-service control planes.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Data center builder Nscale files for IPO after multibillion-dollar Anthropic deal

    The company is also working on 11 other data center projects. They will join the five Nscale facilities that are already up and running in Ireland, Norway and Portugal. Four of the buildings are colocation hubs that the company shares with other organizations.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Believers

    What interests me now is how a culture organized around distrust became so accommodating toward power that offered to favor it. The answer requires more than pointing out hypocrisy. Hypocrisy would mean a recognizable principle had been set aside for convenience. I think something more consequential happened: Bitcoin’s success became a moral principle of its own, capable of deciding which other principles could wait.

    Once you arrive there, the political character of the person promoting Bitcoin becomes negotiable, while his usefulness to Bitcoin supplies the reason to keep negotiating. The person who objects can be asked why he is obstructing progress rather than what he thinks the progress is costing.

  • New York Times ☛ F.B.I. Temporarily Halted Cooperation With Canada Over References to 9/11

    Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, temporarily halted some cooperation with the agency’s counterpart in Canada this month after the nation’s public broadcaster reminded its journalists of a longstanding policy not to refer to the Sept. 11 attacks as “terrorism” without attribution to experts, according to multiple officials with knowledge of the event.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Column: The cruel politics that pit struggling Americans against each other

    Even though there is usually plenty of wealth to go around, plenty to enrich the masses along with the investors. What has long kept the power out of the hands of the people has not been a lack of resources so much as a lack of compassion, particularly among the poor themselves.

    Whether it’s race, geography, neighborhood … it doesn’t really matter what divides, so long as the poor lack compassion for one another. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP or food stamps, is a favorite target for politicians because they know “poor” can be used to motivate voters. Take Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Texas). This month he introduced a bill that would eliminate the option to use EBT cards in restaurants. SNAP helps about 37 million Americans buy food, mostly groceries — but for people who can’t easily cook, such as those without permanent housing or access to a kitchen, restaurants are the main way to get a hot meal.

• Japan and Asian Games at Nagoya

  • BBC ☛ Athletes' container huts face complaints ahead of Asian Games in Japan

  • Al Jazeera ☛ What's the Asian Games accommodation crisis, and where will athletes stay?

  • India News ☛ Asian Games 2026: Athletes stranded near airport in Nagoya as shuttle service falters

  • South Korea's National Anthem Error at Asian Games: North Korea's Anthem Played Instead

  • PC Gamer ☛ Japanese devs aren't facing the same layoff crisis because their executives are paid an order of magnitude less, 'they didn’t get swept up in the live-service trend,' and their teams are smaller, says industry expert

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Age AU ☛ Pen Power Australia: Activist group using AI to flood ABC with thousands of bias complaints

      Activist groups are using artificial intelligence to target the ABC’s coverage of the Middle East with accusations of bias, contributing to a sharp rise in the number of coordinated complaints detected by the public broadcaster’s independent ombudsman.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The Atlantic ☛ Speak at Your Own Risk

    This is far from the first time Trump has tried to pressure the media into giving him favorable coverage or punish those who run stories he does not like. As The New York Times has documented, Trump’s Federal Communications Commission has repeatedly tried to intimidate networks over their airing of material that Trump finds offensive, including criticism of Trump and interviews with Democratic politicians, by threatening to revoke their broadcast license. Three journalists fired from Stars and Stripes, an independent media outlet that is federally funded, are suing the Pentagon, accusing it of silencing them because of their factual coverage of deplorable conditions for U.S. service members. The Pentagon also sought to force media organizations to sign a self-censorship pledge in exchange for press credentials. His Federal Trade Commission is investigating the liberal media watchdog Media Matters, whose work consists mostly of just publishing the things conservatives say, and NewsGuard, a nonpartisan outlet that provides “scores for news and information websites based on nine journalistic criteria.” Trump sought to ban the AP for refusing to identify the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America,” as Trump had ordered. This is not even close to an exhaustive list.

  • Techdirt ☛ Comcast NBC Universal Is Scared To Release The New Elon Musk Documentary

    Republicans and corporations are dead set on dominating what’s left of corporate media to wage a protracted propaganda war against informed consensus and democracy itself. Democrats, meanwhile, have proven too incompetent, captured, or feckless to have any sort of meaningful media reform strategy any time in the last quarter century (spoiler: it starts with consistently enforcing antitrust law).

    That desperately needs to change or what’s left of the American experiment is cooked.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Trump Bans CNN, MSNOW, Politico From White House

    In other words: write nicer things about me and you might get your credentials back.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • New Republic ☛ Trump Bans Three Major News Outlets From the White House

    He specified that he would bar CNN, MS NOW, and Politico, though it is unclear if Trump actually has the power to ban their reporters from the White House grounds. It is also unclear if the ban extends to other government buildings, such as the Capitol.

  • The Verge ☛ Trump treads further on free speech with new journalist bans

    The newly-banned organizations will surely challenge this measure in court, and unless our constitutional order has completely fallen apart, they’ll likely win. But that doesn’t erase the damage — the distraction, cost, and chaos that this kind of thing will cause.

    Here are statements from CNN, MS Now, and Politico on the bans.

  • NPR ☛ CNN, MS NOW, Politico reporters denied access to White House following Trump ban

    CNN reporter Betsy Klein said she was also denied access Saturday morning. Klein said she has been covering the White House in some capacity since the Obama administration, but on Saturday morning a Secret Service agent took her badge.

    "I asked him if he could provide an explanation as to why it had been deactivated. He said he had no further information," Klein said. She said she was referred to the White House press office.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ The fall of once-mighty McClatchy newspapers underscores California's news crisis

    Last week, McClatchy newsrooms were cut severely, leaving fewer journalists than ever to cover the fast-growing hubs of the Central Valley.

    News organizations large and small are being squeezed like never before. Print editions are losing readers fast. But digital has become a huge challenge, too. Changes in Google’s search results have brought big drops in visitors to many news sites. The rise of AI and social video platforms is squeezing them further.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Friends, rights groups worry for Chinese #MeToo activist's life after jail

    Rio once joined his friend, jailed Chinese #MeToo activist Sophia Huang Xueqin, for weekly group discussions on social issues and shared struggles, and now worries about how she will navigate life after prison.

  • Futurism ☛ Waymo Calls Cops on Passengers With Assault Rifle

    On the morning of September 4, Waymo intervened and pulled over a vehicle after detecting a “violation of our terms of service involving a firearm,” a company spokesperson told the LA Times, after which it alerted emergency services.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Fair Games Coalition protests Lucas Museum ahead of the Olympics

    The coalition of more than 80 unions and various community groups is pushing for living wage jobs, new housing units and protections for immigrant workers.

    Workers describe being priced out of L.A. and fear major sporting events will boost corporate profits while leaving low-wage hotel and stadium staff behind.

  • Court House News ☛ ICE accused of continuing warrantless arrests in Oregon despite injunction

    Former ICE arrestees testified the agency made unlawful arrests and failed to comply with a judge’s February injunction governing immigration enforcement in Oregon.

  • New Republic ☛ Trump Expands His Plan to Have Data Centers Take Over Public Lands

    “Ongoing data center build-out represents a culmination of everything that has made the U.S. economy so harshly unequal moving in right next door,” wrote The New Republic’s Kate Aronoff. “Inside its proverbial walls are local entrepreneurs, offshore middlemen, and multinational corporations that can exploit state-sanctioned tax shelters, financial engineering schemes, and regulatory arbitrage to rapidly accumulate wealth on the basis of having started off with a decent amount of it.”

  • TruthOut ☛ Big Tech Is Trampling Native Treaty Rights to Build Data Centers

    Across three major data center companies, the pattern is the same: no one appears to accept explicit responsibility for ensuring proper tribal consultation. All three chief sustainability officers have advanced degrees — Google’s Kate Brandt from the University of Cambridge, Amazon’s Kara Hurst from UC Berkeley, and Microsoft’s Melanie Nakagawa from Washington College of Law. Ignorance is clearly an insufficient excuse.

  • Advance Local Media LLC ☛ Uranium mines pose first test for state-recognized Mount Taylor cultural landscape in New Mexico

    Mount Taylor is sacred to the Navajo Nation, the Hopi Tribe, and the pueblos of Laguna, Acoma and Zuni.

    “We have, and other peoples have, a really millennia-long relationship with the mountain,” June Lorenzo (Laguna/Diné) told the Radioactive and Hazardous Materials Committee during a meeting in the Laguna Pueblo village of Paguate on Friday. “It’s part of our vocabulary. It features largely in our creation stories.”

  • India Times ☛ Virginia tightens data center restrictions amid political backlash

    "Community members are demanding action," Spanberger said.

    The ban on non-disclosure agreements would apply to projects for data centers of 25 megawatts or more. Data centers will also be offered incentives to develop renewable solar and wind power backup generators, instead of natural gas or diesel-fired ones, to help power their operations, the governor said.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Variety ☛ Mark Ruffalo Tells Rob Bonta 'Don't You Dare' Settle With Paramount

    Mark Ruffalo is encouraging California attorney general Rob Bonta and his coalition of 11 other state AGs not to settle their lawsuit against Paramount Skydance and keep David Ellison from acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery.

  • The Verge ☛ Jonathan Kanter on what the AI slowdown means for competition

    Jonathan brought huge antitrust cases against Google, Apple, and Ticketmaster during his time as antitrust chief, and along with Lina Khan, led what amounted to a full reboot of American antitrust policy. As you’ll hear him say, he won those cases against Google and Ticketmaster, and that case against Apple is still live in the Trump DOJ, surprising many.

    That reboot has also led to some surprising alliances in the AI debate — avowed libertarian and former Trump AI czar David Sacks has been approvingly retweeting Lina Khan saying there’s no need for an antitrust exemption.

  • Copyrights

    • Digital Music News ☛ Universal Music & Sony Music File 2nd Copyright Suit Against Suno

      This time around, the litigating labels are accusing Suno of infringing on (and violating the DMCA by stream-ripping) 60,202 recordings – a massive figure that they maintain represents “only a small portion of” the actual total.