Leftovers

• Nat Bennett ☛ What is a Text?

  Before I stumbled into a software career, I got an English degree. A lot of people think that this means that I spent college reading a lot and writing a lot, and I did do that, but I also spent my undergraduate years contemplating a handful of repeated questions across almost all of my classes. The most important of these questions was, "What is a Text?"

  People who haven't studied this question carefully tend to have a model that's something like this: [...]

• Justin Duke ☛ The new look

  As you may have noticed, the site has a new look. I don't think of it as a new version of the site, in no small part because the structure has not changed at all.

• Los Angeles Times ☛ Jesus statue is the latest in a string of SoCal bronze thefts

  Police say two men cut through a chain-link fence at the church property around 2 a.m. on Aug. 30 and took an electric saw to the statue. In surveillance video, the men are seen slicing the depiction of Jesus at the ankles and carting it away. Only the feet and the stone base of the $50,000 installation were left behind.

  St. John the Baptist remains. But many worry the church and other locations across the region that display bronze artwork will continue to be targeted.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • TruthOut ☛ Don’t Be Fooled: GOP Scuffle Over NIH Grants Doesn’t Mean Science Has Prevailed

    Given the administration’s dismal track record when it comes to scientific freedom, and its ongoing hostility to much of the NIH apparatus, it seems unlikely to have permanently and tamely given up the fight to expand control over the grantmaking process.

• Career/Education

  • Pro Publica ☛ How the Smithsonian Became Target of Trump’s Culture War

    The Smithsonian is independent of the executive branch, governed by a 17-member board led by the chief justice of the Supreme Court and with six members of Congress, three from each party, serving with nine private citizens and the vice president. But it depends on the federal government for 62% of its funding, receiving more than $1 billion per year, and warnings of deep budget cuts have grown ever louder. Finally, on Sept. 8, Smithsonian secretary Lonnie Bunch, the first African American person to lead the institution, announced he was stepping down at age 73, saying “it has been stressful.”

  • Raspberry Pi ☛ Backing our people as parents: introducing our childcare contribution

    This year we introduced a new policy where permanent Raspberry Pi employees with a child between nine months and school age receive a salary uplift of £1,000 per calendar month, per child, as a contribution towards childcare costs (that’s the figure for full-time employees, and it’s pro-rated for part-time colleagues). With payments beginning once a child reaches the age of nine months — around the point when many parents are returning from leave — and continuing until the August before they start school, our aim is to ease the financial burden on young families.

  • Wired ☛ Why No One Wants to Date Tech Bros

    Gary wasn’t met with sympathy. Medical debt, the woman told him, was “not an excuse to work somewhere like that.” She was referring, of course, to Palantir’s controversial work with governments, including the US and Israel, which use the company’s surveillance tools for law enforcement and military operations.

  • Low Tech Mag ☛ Out Now: Low-tech Magazine Volume IV

    Low-tech Magazine presents the fourth volume in the chronological book series. It contains twenty articles that were published online between 2022 and 2026. Three earlier volumes collect articles written and published online between 2007 and 2021, which are also bundled in the “Compressed Edition”.

    This new volume is a bit different from the earlier books: eight of the articles are DIY guides or manuals, and we have grouped them together in the second part of the book. This volume covers the period that Marie Verdeil joined Low-tech Magazine, which partly shifted the focus from writing articles to building prototypes inspired by historical research. These prototypes also led us to conduct workshops in universities and participate in museum exhibitions.

  • Terence Tao ☛ We’re gonna need a lot more mathematicians

    For our community to give up the work of understanding would be a profound abdication of our responsibility to humanity. Each of us is entitled to choose a different life. The responsibility I am talking about belongs to us collectively: to build a future in which humans can understand and contribute to the discoveries that will change our world. A future with meaningful human agency.

  • Daniel Lemire ☛ If you don’t have the factories, you lose the expertise

    If you have the factories, sooner or later, you get the designers. If you don’t have the factories, you lose the expertise. Or you never get it.

    There aren’t that many people left in the Silicon Valley capable of working on silicon. You can design a chip from California. Making one is done where the fab is.

• Hardware

  • Chris Coyier ☛ Bass

    I also like having it because it’s a rare-ish instrument to have handy, so I feel extra welcome at jams and the like when I have it, rather than being yet another guitar, banjo, or whatever else.

  • [Old] Michal Zalewski ☛ RAM: the forgotten history

    Electromechanical relays have switching speeds measured in tens of hertz; Mr. Zuse understood from the get go that the technology is a dead end. He took the expedient path in hopes of securing longer-term funding from the Nazi regime. Unfortunately for him — and fortunately for much of Europe — the officials were unimpressed and the funding never came through.

    Zuse’s counterparts on the Allied side had more luck: early successes in codebreaking allowed them to pursue more costly and complicated vacuum tube designs. The blueprint for a tube-based memory cell came from William Eccles and Frank Wilfred Jordan — a largely-forgotten duo of British inventors who proposed the following bistable circuit as a replacement for an electromechanical relay: [...]

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Piper Haywood ☛ Late 30s going on 70

    My dad has dealt with chronic pain for years. I had no idea how much it drains the soul. I’m sorry.

  • Jeff Kaufman ☛ State of Pandemic Early Warning

    Where specifically does biosurveillance fit in? What are the threats, and where can it make the difference between an attacker succeeding and failing?

  • Erik Kroes ☛ I've tried C25k 4-5 times already. What would you do for the next shot? | Erik Kroes - Accessibility Consultant

    How would you approach building towards a 5K when your joints and muscles are the biggest challenge?

• Proprietary / Vendor Lock-in / Malware

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Things that have never worked (well) for me on iOS

    I appreciate not everyone has these issues. Must be nice!

  • Brent Simmons ☛ inessential: That About Wraps It Up for Stock Mac UI

    So this — bad direction — is where the secret third reason falls down. And we’re left with no real reason to stick with stock Mac UI (except for wanting approval from longtime Mac people like me, and you really shouldn’t care about that at all).

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

    • Vox ☛ There’s a global plan to save humans from AI. Can it actually work?

      For the last four years, the most tech-savvy nations — and would-be AI leaders — have been running serious conversations about this exact AI safety threat. Some are in Congress and the White House; some at the UN, at the G7, and in other capitals.

      I’ve been covering this closely as a global technology journalist, from my current perch at a think tank. Here’s what the landscape looks like: [...]

    • The Conversation ☛ Government hacks, rogue agents and no transparency: can we ever fully trust AI?

      Now the company is again under fire for failing to immediately alert the Australian government that one of its models [breached] a government portal containing medical data.

      The company’s not alone. Google and Anthropic have also reported similar breaches by their AI models during testing.

    • Terence Tao ☛ Headlines and inside stories: understanding and trust in AI for mathematics, science, and engineering | What's new

      I want to argue that the same point about understanding holds in the natural sciences and engineering, where it also has intrinsic value and, in addition, acquires instrumental value when predictions must be trusted before they can be verified empirically. One role of science is what ancient philosophers called episteme, roughly explanatory understanding; here, understanding is the goal itself. Another role is techne, roughly the craft of predicting and making: forecasting how natural or engineered systems will behave under circumstances not yet observed. Whether the two roles can be separated depends on how easily predictions can be checked. When they can, techne can stand on its own. A black-box AI weather prediction model can predict tomorrow’s weather, and we can trust it because its forecasts can be checked every day. Techne can then also serve episteme as an instrument. For example, AlphaFold predicts 3D protein structures without providing explanations. But its predictions can be checked against experimentally determined structures, and they have become invaluable for understanding how drugs bind to their targets. Episteme and techne become inseparable when predictions must be acted upon, and hence trusted, before they can be empirically verified, because verification is too slow, costly, or dangerous, as in projecting climate change decades ahead or designing an aircraft. In those cases, an auditable causal chain from assumptions and input data to the predicted outcomes is what makes predictions trustworthy, and this constrains how AI can be used.

    • Garbage Day ☛ Am I too boring to need an AI agent?

      It immediately asked for read/write permissions on my Google Suite, offering to sort my email inboxes, add things to my calendar, or organize my Google Drive. If I wasn’t interested in that, it told me it could shop for me, book dinner reservations, or, if I gave it read/write access to my computer, even do tasks on my laptop. But I didn’t need to do any of those things yesterday. And I definitely didn’t need to do any of them so badly that I was willing to risk it deleting something important, hallucinating an email to someone, or buying me something I didn’t want. So I sat at my computer, clicking around to find something for it to do, and eventually just gave up.

    • Mandy Brown ☛ Why We Fear AI

      Hagen Blix and Ingeborg Glimmer make a compelling case for why we fear AI: our fears of what AI will do to us are really just our fears of what capitalism is already doing. In this way, AI isn’t so much a novel new technology as an acceleration of long-existing patterns in neoliberal capitalism—automation, deskilling, unaccountability, surveillance, and increasing precarity amidst shrinking welfare systems. But therein also lies a clue as to how to counter it, in that only organized, democratic control of labor can stand up to capital. When we see through the hype, we know what work we have to do.

    • Robert OCallahan ☛ Goodbye Google

      I’m very confident that even if there is a path to a better future through AI, the current rate of change is far too high. AI is developing faster than humans can individually and collectively understand it and adapt to it. People trying to plan their futures, e.g. trying to plan for a world several years in the future as they enter university, can no longer do so the way previous generations could. I don’t think we’ve seen anything like this before, certainly not in the previous technological shifts I have lived through (PCs, the Internet, smartphones). Even during the Industrial Revolution, not only was change much slower but there were large swathes of human activity that were not and could not be directly impacted by the new machines. That is not very true anymore.

    • Dmitri Sotnikov ☛ (iterate think thoughts): Introducing Lev

      An LLM reads input left to right and has to commit to each token before seeing what comes next. When you ask a chat model the same question, it generates an answer token by token, you parse the string, and if you want a confidence interval you have to ask for one in the prompt. Generation is the right tool for open-ended work, but it turns into an expensive detour when there is a known set of answers. Encoder models like ModernBERT are a better fit here because they read your entire input bidirectionally in one go. So, for a choice question, each option gets a marker token placed in the sequence next to the option's text. After the forward pass, a small head turns each marker's final representation into a score, and a softmax across the scores hands you a probability for every option simultaneously.

    • Ava ☛ the reduction of intellectual labor – ava's blog

      I think they are misguided and don’t know what they’re actually wishing for. This is abolishing what makes their job interesting, memorable and varied, and they don’t even know yet what else they’d fill their time with. And let’s be real: Almost no workplace will just let you leave early for the same pay as long as the work is done, especially not this one. You’ll be reduced to clicking buttons, copy pasting text, pressing enter, and editing pre-generated text… and waiting.

    • ABC ☛ Health data attack the 'first' government hack by autonomous AI, researchers say

      These attacks occurred simultaneously to the OpenAI's agents' access to non-public Medicare data held by Services Australia while trying to carry out a task given to them by staff.

    • BoingBoing ☛ Tom the Dancing Bug: Elon Musk and His DOGE Pals vs. Giant A.I. Robots!

      Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH Elon Musk and his DOGE Pals are up against giant A.I. robots!

  • Social Control Media

    • Cyble Inc ☛ EU KIDS Act Sets New Social Media Rules For Children

      The EU KIDS Act is set to introduce new age restrictions and safety requirements for children using social media and other online services across the European Union. The European Commission adopted the proposal on September 18, setting out rules that would prevent children under 13 from accessing social media and establish 15 as the minimum age for minors to open accounts independently.

      European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen discussed the proposal during a high-level dialogue on protecting children’s rights in the face of artificial intelligence, pointing to growing concerns over children’s exposure to online platforms and digital technologies.

    • The Verge ☛ Meta employees ordered ‘attorney/client privilege’ hats while fighting child safety disclosures

      The lawyers suing Meta argue the Project Nido (an internal name for the Teen Accounts team) swag is part of “culture of privilege abuse at Meta” aimed at keeping the research it’s conducted internally on teen harm out of the public eye, an issue that Mark Zuckerberg discussed after internal data on Instagram’s effects leaked in 2021.

    • Jim Grey ☛ Why I will probably decline your Facebook friend request

      But honestly, what I publish here and in my newsletter is far more interesting than anything I post on Facebook.

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ Why are queer L.A. nightclubs disappearing from Facebook and Instagram?

      After months of contacting Meta, Instagram’s parent company, he said he got no meaningful response. Pages for his other venue, Club Chico in Montebello, went down in May as well.

      It got stranger. A.I.-driven search engines listed his clubs as permanently closed. Longtime regulars texted him condolences. By June 1, he said, every single one of his club’s Instagram pages had been suspended, along with around a dozen pages from his staff and affiliated club promoters.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Sightline Media Group ☛ Military personnel data exposed in breach, agency warns

      The Defense Manpower Data Center, or DMDC, discovered the vulnerability on July 16 in a file-sharing system, according to a notification sent Sept. 18 to an individual whose information was contained in the affected files.

    • Security Week ☛ US Court Sentences Armenian Man to Prison for Ryuk Ransomware Attacks

      Karen Vardanyan, a 35-year-old Armenian national, has been sentenced to prison by a US court for his role in Ryuk ransomware attacks, the Justice Department announced this week.

    • Bitdefender ☛ Ukrainian ransomware developer jailed for nearly 13 years

      In all, prosecutors claimed that some 100 million Swiss Francs (US $123 million) worth of damage was caused by the ransomware attacks.

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • [Old] Michael Heap ☛ The GitHub wiki is an anti-pattern

    The initial version of this post opened with “You can use the wiki or a docs folder for your GitHub project, both are valid choices” but as I wrote more, I realised that there is a single reason to use a wiki, and many more reasons not to use the wiki. So many in fact, that I consider using the wiki on GitHub is an anti-pattern.

    Let’s start with the benefits of using a wiki: [...]

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Pivot to AI ☛ OpenAI hacks Australian government health data

      That’s a lie. OpenAI set the chatbots to hacking. OpenAI researchers would even help the bots when they got stuck.

      OpenAI talks about “rogue” AI to make it sound like it’s not just OpenAI perpetrating what would be major crimes if anyone else did them.

      Australian hacking laws require intent to hack. The government says they’re not even sure OpenAI’s gross corporate negligence is sufficient. If it was anyone else, they would not be giving them a pass.

    • Julian Silden Langlo ☛ I want my mesh networks signed, not encrypted

      What I would like is a protocol where every message is in cleartext, but signed.

      I'm not saying that signing should necessarily be mandatory, but it would be nice to have. Benefits include: [...]

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Cyble Inc ☛ Ofcom Probes Pornhub Age Checks Under UK Online Safety Act

      Ofcom has opened an investigation into Aylo, the service provider of Pornhub, over its Pornhub age checks, examining whether the platform has met its legal obligations to prevent children from accessing pornographic content under the UK Online Safety Act.

    • Digital Camera World ☛ Meta pushes controversy aside to announce new Gen 3 Ray-Ban Meta camera glasses with more styles, more power (and less welcome price increases)

      This wider choice could mean that the glasses are even harder to identify for those who have begun to associate it with classic Ray-Bans, but of course it also opens up the tech to people who wouldn't consider that look for themselves.

    • Nick Heer ☛ ‘Mark’

      But as I watched the presentation, I was mainly thinking of Jeremy Stern’s very long profile of Zuckerberg in Colossus. Specifically, this part, a summary of Stern’s conversations with Meta Superintelligence Labs’ “competitors and investors who agree to speak to me on background”: [...]

• Defence/Aggression

  • Air Force Times ☛ Nellis Air Force Base says goodbye to last A-10 Thunderbolt II

    The last active-duty operational A-10 Thunderbolt II assigned to a Nevada air base flew for the final time Tuesday, marking the end of an era for the installation.

  • C4ISRNET ☛ Report: CIA warned Europe of Russian drone attack from vessels in the Mediterranean

    According to the paper, the CIA had assessed that Spain, France or Italy may be the targets of these attacks, with drones launching from international waters in the Mediterranean and traveling to the coastal countries over the course of an hour or two.

  • New Republic ☛ Postal Worker Says He Threw Out Hundreds of Ballots Out of “Laziness”

    According to court documents, the mail carrier, Damon Matai Seei, said his June 3 mail load was too heavy, and in an effort to “lighten his workload,” he threw some of the mail into a dumpster in a church parking lot. The mail he threw away included advertisements and about 300 ballots he was supposed to deliver to voters in Eagle Mountain, Utah, for a June 23 primary election.

  • The Record ☛ Kyiv [Internet] providers report major outages after Russian attacks damage data centers

    Several providers said the disruption was caused by direct damage to facilities housing critical networking equipment.

    According to Utels, one Kyiv data center containing its core network equipment was damaged in the attack and lost power. The company said it managed to restore service to most customers within about two hours.

  • Dark Reading ☛ UAE, KSA Face Spike in Increasingly Complex Cyberattacks

    The United Arab Emirates, Iran, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia accounted for about two-thirds of all attacks (67%) discovered through open source methods, which scan for attack information on Dark Web forums and on threat actors' Telegram channels, according to threat intelligence firm Positive Technologies. The UAE and Saudi Arabia have both aggressively pursued digital transformation of their public and private sectors, leading to larger attack surface areas and more targets of interest to cybercriminals. Meanwhile, Iran's media organizations and telecom infrastructure are typically popular targets of attack, says Darya Lavrova, lead analyst at Positive Technologies.

  • Robert Reich ☛ 10 Steps To Fix What Trump Has Broken

    If we want to clean up the mayhem Trump and his regime have created — and prevent anything like this from happening again — here are the 10 big reforms every political candidate should support.

    They’re structural reforms in how our political system works, rather than policies such as Medicare for All, affordable housing, childcare, or a $20 minimum wage. But these structural reforms are necessary prerequisites to getting good policies enacted. They must be passed by Congress in order for anything else to get done.

  • Michael Geist ☛ Nobody Can Say They Weren't Warned: Canada's Threat Assessments Predicted the Belleville Yom Kippur Attack

    Belleville is the March assessment played out in real life: a lone actor with a shotgun at a small-town synagogue whose only protection was a single officer requested by the congregation itself (side note: there is a GoFundMe for the synagogue to rebuild). Military sources told Global News that the gunman had been released from the Canadian Armed Forces in 2022 after voicing a range of COVID-19 conspiracy theories, including claims blaming Jews for the pandemic. As the government’s own analysts warned, an environment in which the targeting of Jews is normalized will move susceptible individuals toward violence.

  • The Next Move ☛ King Trump’s Press Ban

    This takes me to the central question Americans confront in the person of their elected king. With a president playing the George III of 1776, can any American leader emulate his opposites, the men and women who defeated the Crown, those whom the king himself begrudgingly named “the greatest…in the world”?

  • [Old] NPR ☛ 'The Nerd Reich' tracks the 'unmasking of Silicon Valley's true politics'

    This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. For 20 years, Silicon Valley's unofficial slogan has been to move fast and break things - the breaking, the price of progress. But my guest today says what's being broken right now is American democracy. In his new book, journalist Gil Duran argues that a small circle of Silicon Valley billionaires and the venture capitalists who fund them have concluded that democracy is in their way and that they should be governing in its place. As the outgoing president, Joe Biden gave a similar warning against what he called the rise of a tech industrial complex.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    JOE BIDEN: Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation, enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit. We must hold the social platforms accountable to protect our children, our families and our very democracy from the abuse of power. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is the most consequential technology of our time, perhaps of all time. Nothing offers more profound possibilities and risks for our economy and our security, our society for very - for humanity. Artificial intelligence even has the potential to help us answer my call to end cancer as we know it. But unless safeguards are in place, AI could spawn new threats to our rights, our way of life, to our privacy, how we work and how we protect our nation.

  • [Old] KQED TV ☛ What Is Silicon Valley's 'Nerd Reich,' and Is It Taking Over the US Government? | KQED

    “We’re learning a big lesson here, which is that we can have democracy or we can have billionaires, but we can’t have both,” San Francisco journalist Gil Duran said.

    KQED Forum’s Mina Kim spoke to Duran, who formerly worked for California politicians like Jerry Brown and Kamala Harris, about the “Silicon Valley tech billionaire politics” that are the focus of his newsletter, The Nerd Reich — and what he thinks tech elites might want next.

    This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. [...]

  • [Old] The Verge ☛ Why tech billionaires want a dictatorship

    The “Nerd Reich,” as Gil sees it, is a web of powerful, ultrawealthy tech billionaires. People like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, and others, whose politics and influence now see them pushing the country further and further away from democracy and toward something resembling a kind of cross between unrestrained capitalism and monarchy.

  • [Old] Public Interest Journalism Initiative ☛ The rise of The Nerd Reich

    “A journalist can’t be neutral in the face of fascism because that journalist becomes a fascist journalist,” he tells PIJI.

    “You have to be on the side of journalism mattering. You have to be on the side of democracy being important.

    “If you can’t summon up the courage to take a side on that question, then nothing you do will be worth anything.”

  • [Old] New Republic ☛ Where J.D. Vance Gets His Weird, Terrifying Techno-Authoritarian Ideas

    Yarvin’s disturbing manifestos have earned him influential followers, chief among them: tech billionaire Peter Thiel and his onetime Silicon Valley protégé Senator J.D. Vance, whom the Republican Party just nominated to be Donald Trump’s vice president. If Trump wins the election, there is little doubt that Vance will bring Yarvin’s twisted techno-authoritarianism to the White House, and one can imagine—with horror—what a receptive would-be autocrat like Trump might do with those ideas.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Ava ☛ elizabeth holmes

    I have never idealized the crimes these women did, nor do I want to emulate any of it - I just want to understand how something so impossible in my mind was actually pulled off. The audacity, the tower of lies, the house of cards they build, everything. I am obsessed with the way audacity and luck seem to line up just right for these women to support their fantasy/delusion, and how it all falls apart.

• Environment

  • Western Water ☛ California puts new rules on data centers

    California is putting new rules around the rapidly growing data center industry, including requirements intended to give communities a clearer picture of how much water proposed facilities could use.

    Gov. Gavin Newsom signed seven data center bills on September 21, 2026. Together, the laws address water supplies, electricity, land use and the costs associated with building the large facilities.

  • Truthdig ☛ Did a Texas Developer Have a Duty to Disclose Toxic Oil and Gas Waste?

    The couple researched what that would mean for their property — and potentially for their health. Their letter expressed concern that drilling waste, a copious byproduct of oil and gas drilling, to be deposited on acreage adjacent to their home and others in their neighborhood, could have “negative effects … on the residential properties of the offset landowners.” The couple also warned that the “accumulation of radon,” a carcinogenic radioactive gas generated in the decay of other radioactive elements in the waste, would be dangerous if future homes were built on the land.

    “All of the documents said that sludge they were putting on the land could come back and hurt people,” said Minnie.

  • The New Lede ☛ Pesticide linked to cancer and hormone disruption pollutes a quarter of US river miles

    The analysis from the Center for Biological Diversity builds on evidence that atrazine — which is commonly used to grow corn, soybeans, sorghum and sugarcane and is linked to dangerous health problems for people and wildlife — remains ubiquitous in US waterways, especially in farming states.

  • MIT Technology Review ☛ AI is dominating the conversation at Climate Week

    There’s been a growing tension bubbling up about AI’s impacts on climate and climate tech. Depending on where you stand, you might point to AI’s potential for advancing research, or to the way funding and attention from Big Tech is trickling into energy startups. Or you might focus on the emissions-heavy natural-gas buildout that’s unfolding to meet the sector’s electricity demand.

  • [Old] The Arctic Institute ☛ AI's Arctic Land Grab

    This ad, published in November 2025 for Nscale, a British AI infrastructure hyperscaler, shows the start-up’s data center in Glomfjord, Norway. It markets the project as sustainable: one that uses the Arctic air and water from the nearby fjords for cooling in lieu of the estimated 300,000 gallons of water a day that a traditional data center uses. With this momentum at its back, Nscale built its newest Arctic data center even further north, in Narvik, Norway –– a project promoting the same green blueprint.

    Data centers are surfacing quietly across the Arctic. On the North Slope of Alaska, Stak Energy, an Alaska-based AI energy infrastructure start-up, has proposed a three-gigawatt modular data center that sits on a 715-acre plot of land. One considerable difference between the two projects: Nscale’s Norway data centers run on renewables while Stack Energy’s does not. Yet both projects rest on the same assumption that the Arctic is an empty, cold canvas, poised for development. The Arctic’s appeal as a site for data infrastructure is not without logic, but the risks associated with operating data centers in this vulnerable region have largely gone unexamined.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • CS Monitor ☛ With speed, wheelies, e-bikes make cities revisit road rules

      It’s not just the Peachtree City folks who are second-guessing e-bikes and how to integrate them safely with existing infrastructure. Americans of all ages are hopping on e-bikes and electric scooters, two-wheeled machines with 750-watt electric motors that can propel them beyond 30 mph. (Some faster models can reach 80 mph.)

    • Herman Õunapuu ☛ Replacing the battery on a CyberPower UT650EG and UT850EG UPS

      4 years later, the UT650EG battery does not seem to hold a charge, so it’s time to replace it, for real. At the same time I also decided to do the same for an UT850EG that I got in the second half of 2022.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Nexstar Media Group Inc ☛ Sea turtle nests on Southern California beach for first time in recorded history

      A sea turtle currently nesting on a Southern California beach is the first known sea turtle on record to nest naturally anywhere on the West Coast, according to NOAA Fisheries.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Scoop News Group ☛ New bill would create federal investigative body for AI-driven [breaches]

    The bill, introduced by Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., would attempt to establish a federal mechanism to investigate incidents where AI models escape sandbox environments and access live [Internet] systems.

    Currently, frontier AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic largely control the investigation and public reporting of such incidents. Markey and other critics argue that these companies have too much control over investigations and reporting due to their financial and legal interests.

  • Wired ☛ AT&T Is Automating Away Jobs—and Its Old Telecom Empire

    If AT&T continues cutting jobs at the same pace as last year, when it shed 8,000 people, its workforce could approach 85,000 employees by 2030. A person familiar with the matter, who was not authorized to speak publicly, described that number as the company’s target. AT&T called the figure inaccurate. In the first half of 2026, the telecom giant cut some 2,100 jobs.

  • Robert Reich ☛ How to know whether a candidate is on your side

    Ohio voters couldn’t have a clearer sign that Brown is on their side.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ Donald the Deadbeat Does Diesel

    Beyond that, a sudden ban on diesel exports would, in effect, be a broken promise — a de facto breach of multiple contracts. It would be a betrayal of energy companies that invested in refining capacity. More important, it would be a breach of trust with America’s allies, especially anyone who bought into Trump’s vision of an America-centered energy future.

    And breaking trust, breaching contracts, is a very Trumpian thing to do. As a businessman, he was famous for stiffing contractors, refusing to pay them for their work or demanding that they settle for partial payment. His tariff policies involve, at their core, breaking decades’ worth of solemn international agreements. His track record on domestic policy has been one broken promise after another.

    Before I get to the breach of contract aspect, a word about the short-term economics of a diesel export ban.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Bottom Falls Out

    A prophecy is only worth scoring against its own terms, so let the terms be strict. “The end of both regimes” has one regime left to account for; the Israeli half of that sentence remains pending and I am not grading it early. On the American half, the reckoning’s arrival is no longer in question. What remains is its form, 39 days out, and whether the movement survives its author.

  • David Rosenthal ☛ Competition For Capital

    Note that the standard explanation for the valuation of a stock is that is the Net Present Value (NPV) of the company's future earnings (or more strictly its future free cash flows). An increase in interest rates decreases the NPV of these earnings, and thus decreases the stock's PE. GS flags this: [...]

  • Pivot to AI ☛ Trump decrees: Artificial Intelligence is now Super Intelligence

    Why did Trump decree super intelligence? I don’t think there’s a grand plan. Guys who want everyone to know they’re the boss will sometimes just tell their minions to eat a bug, to see who does.

    Today’s bug eaters include US Chief Technology Officer Ethan Klein and US ambassador to the UN Michael Waltz.

  • The Register UK ☛ The more Americans hear about datacenters, the less they like them

    The shift spans demographic groups: men and women, adults of every age and education level, and urban, suburban, and rural residents have all grown more negative since the start of the year.

    The movement also crosses party lines. Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents remain more negative than Republicans and Republican leaners, but among the latter group, 42 percent now say datacenters are mostly bad for nearby residents' quality of life, up from 24 percent in January.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Techdirt ☛ Trump Easily Loses His Censorial SLAPP Suit Over A Poll Predicting He Might Lose

    You may recall that after he had won the 2024 Presidential election, the sorest winner in the history of sore winners, Donald Trump sued retiring pollster Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register for… having reported the — admittedly surprising and, in retrospect, wildly off — poll results suggesting that Kamala Harris actually had a chance to win over Donald Trump in Iowa. As we pointed out at the time, this was utter nonsense for multiple fairly obvious reasons. Poll data isn’t defamatory. It’s just the result of a poll. Also, what fucking damages could he possibly argue, given that he won?

  • New Republic ☛ Woman Arrested, Dragged Away After Criticizing Flock at City Council

    “They are an invasion of our privacy,” she said. The officer then grabbed her and placed her under arrest. Schrag concluded the council meeting immediately after.

  • Press Gazette ☛ Facebook algorithm change 'crushed' publisher reach on platofrm

    It revealed this morning how revenue for the first half of the year fell by 7% to £1.7m as “changes made by [Facebook owner] Meta to favour video-led creator content created significant audience headwinds for Digitalbox and other publishers reliant on social distribution”.

  • 404 Media ☛ Watch Body Cam of Man Arrested for Just Cussing at a County Meeting

    Carrion was one of hundreds of Tarrant County residents who’d turned up for a Commissioner's Court meeting on August 4 to speak out against a plan to close a third of the area’s polling places. “You said you were all about cooling the temperature and yet you vote for this extremist bullshit. All of you are bullshit,” Carrion said during the meeting on August 4 before walking out the door.

    A week later, Fort Worth Police pulled Carrion over in his driveway and arrested him.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Salon ☛ Trump folds as White house press returns

    In response, CNN, MS Now and Politico sued, and the Trump administration launched “Trump TV,” which is essentially a livestream of speeches and other reruns that apparently almost no one is even watching. During this week’s U.N. General Assembly, before giving a speech in which Trump mulled the annihilation of Iran, the president snarled at a reporter for asking him a question.

  • Politico LLC ☛ Trump cites national security, midterms coverage to defend press ban

    The filing, a response to an emergency lawsuit brought by the three news organizations demanding immediate restoration of their West Wing access, cited several stories by each outlet, including accounts about the state of the war with Iran, depleted U.S. munition stockpiles and details of a leak probe related to unflattering stories about FBI Director Kash Patel. The filing criticizes POLITICO for publishing a handout that the Secret Service provided to Senate Republicans to justify the construction of the president’s new White House ballroom.

  • New Republic ☛ Trump Fully Gives Away the Game on Why He Banned News Outlets

    The letters, which were purportedly sent out Tuesday before filing, grant each media outlet an opportunity to contest their removal by EOD Friday. The three outlets go to court Wednesday to ask a judge to overturn the ban.

  • Common Dreams ☛ FPF comments on White House's defiance of judge's media ban smackdown

    But after Kelly’s ruling and in spite of the temporary restraining order entered by the court, Politico, CNN, and MSNOW reported today that some of their reporters were denied access to the White House and some also had their press credentials confiscated.

  • Politico LLC ☛ POLITICO, CNN, MS NOW barred from White House after court ruling restoring access

    A POLITICO reporter was denied access to the White House Thursday and his press credentials confiscated after a judge ordered the Trump administration overnight to immediately restore access for news organizations that President Donald Trump banned from the complex last week.

  • RTE ☛ Media outlets denied White House access after court order

    CNN said that some of its staff are unable to access the White House today as well.

    A federal judge ordered US President Donald Trump to restore White House access for journalists from CNN, MS NOW and Politico, saying his ban on the three media outlets was likely unconstitutional.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Judge seems inclined to side with media outlets who were banned from White House in lawsuit

    During a tele-hearing on Wednesday afternoon, Kelly cited past case law that clearly laid out the need for a distinct process that involved advance notice of an infraction and the opportunity to plead one’s case.

    “I think it is fair to say that the processes that the circuit laid out in those two cases wasn’t followed here,” the judge said, referring to two similar cases involving journalists who had either lost access or were denied access to the White House. The judge said that the cases made clear that “before a journalist’s White House hard pass was suspended or revoked, that the journalist was entitled to pre-deprivation notice and an opportunity to be heard”.

  • Berkeley Beacon ☛ Letter from the Editor: The Beacon stands with the White House press pool

    Donald Trump’s most recent attack on the press is one that does not just affect the White House press pool, but every journalist in the world, even those just starting out in their careers and who are sitting in this room now. I want to be clear when I say this: It is completely normal to feel afraid in this moment. The very essence of our career is under attack, and the foundation of our democracy has been threatened.

  • NPR ☛ Judge orders Trump administration to restore journalists' access to White House

    In a ruling issued shortly after midnight, U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly for the District of Columbia granted a 14-day temporary restraining order to CNN, MS NOW and Politico, which had press credentials of their journalists covering the White House revoked on Saturday.

  • CNN ☛ Obama ‘not surprised’ by Trump’s media ban, calls issue of press freedom ‘foundational’

    “You can’t do that and say that you are still living in a democracy,” Obama told historian Doris Kearns Goodwin during the event, describing the situation as “the president of the United States can’t take some criticism.”

    “This should not be a partisan issue. I want to underscore this. This should be something that rises above partisanship,” Obama went on to say.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Yle ☛ Unions call on ombudsman to investigate Wolt employment relationships

    Two trade unions — the service sector's PAM and the Auto and Transport Workers' Union AKT — have jointly submitted a request to the Parliamentary Ombudsman for clarification regarding the supervision of Finnish delivery firm Wolt.

    The unions say they want the ombudsman to confirm if the occupational safety and health authority has supervised Wolt's operations appropriately and in a timely fashion.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Techdirt ☛ The Antitrust Problem With Meta’s Settlement With The States

    The settlement’s quid-pro-quo effectively places a bounty on the heads of Meta’s competitors — and deputizes the state AGs as Meta’s bounty-hunters. Meta wants the government to hit Meta’s rivals. If state AGs deliver the results Meta wants, Meta pays them off. The quid-pro-quo is not subtle. It’s out in the open for everyone to see, but that doesn’t make it any less corrupt or corrosive.

  • Patents

    • Software Patents

      • Tom's Hardware ☛ Sony patent could turn PlayStation controllers into tap-to-pay credit card terminals — NFC and Bluetooth also support phones and gift cards for instant purchases

        PlayStation's patent also suggests that gamers could be prompted to buy a game after playing a demo at a retailer or event. The console would handle payment once a card or phone has been presented to a controller, although it's unclear if gamers would need to sign in to their PlayStation account for the purchase to be completed. The patent does allow for both NFC and Bluetooth to be used, so it's possible the PlayStation smartphone app may play a part here.