Leftovers

• CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Itch scratching (25 Sep 2026)

  I've fully retrained my fingers to type Win-E rather than alt-tab when I want to get at a graphic filesystem and every time I do, I get the tiniest little pleasant jolt of pleasure. I scratched my own itch!

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Andrew Helwer ☛ Can we have reachability properties in TLA⁺? -

    This made me think. A while back I was reading Lamport’s new book, A Science of Concurrent Programs, and was doing pretty well until getting completely shut down by section 5.1, Possibility and Accuracy. The section talks about this exact topic, expressing possibility/reachability properties in TLA⁺. I could not wrap my head around it, to the point I thought there were major errors in the text. Hillel’s post spurred me to revisit it1, and I am happy to say I now basically understand it and will try to explain it in a way that makes sense to me. If you’d rather have it explained to you by Lamport directly, read section 5.1 of the above textbook or Lamport’s October 1998 paper Proving Possibility Properties.

    We will go over two questions: [...]

  • Medievalists.net ☛ How Do You Preserve a Viking Ship for 1,000 More Years?

    A new Danish research project is examining how Viking ships can be preserved for generations to come while reducing the considerable amount of energy museums use to protect ancient wooden vessels.

• Career/Education

  • Crooked Timber ☛ How to run the ivory tower?

    A bit of context: Dutch universities are publicly funded, and while finances are currently tight, the situation is far less disastrous than what it seems like in some other places, e.g. in the UK. But there is a lot of political pressure to move in directions that are “useful for society,” for example to generate more graduates for fields that have employee shortages (as if universities could so easily convince young people which field to enter…), and to focus on technological and medical innovation. Many funding streams are tied to societal problems (defined politically), and there is also a growing expectation that universities should collaborate more with the military in the future, to meet NATO goals. At the same time, there are lots of expectation on scholars to also do outreach, collaborate with businesses, and somehow make “impact”. And there is a general sense, undergirded by employee surveys, that work pressure is too high, because academics are asked to do everything at once.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Pro Publica ☛ I Posed as a Problem Gambler. DraftKings Made Me a VIP.

    Recklessness Rewarded: I blew $1,800 in one night by chasing my losses with bigger bets, a classic sign of problem gambling. The next day, DraftKings invited me to audition for its VIP program.

  • Hindustan Times ☛ Sea buckthorn: Ladakh’s wonder berry is all set to undergo systematic cultivation

    “We are into the process of starting proper cultivation of sea buckthorn. For post-harvest processing, the ministry of micro, small & medium enterprises (MSME) is providing technological upgradation and funds to entrepreneurs, who want to upgrade their technology,” said Gupta.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Agrivoltaics: Boosting crops growing under solar panels

    Letting sheep roam under solar panels is just one of many forms of a burgeoning strategy called agrivoltaics, where crops grow or livestock graze in tandem with renewable energy infrastructure.

    It's not only of potential benefit for the animals, which get additional shade. The panels can also protect crops from the elements as well as divert water to them, creating cooler, damper conditions that even boost yields.

• Proprietary / Vendor Lock-in / Malware

  • HT Digital Streams Ltd ☛ Microsoft Xbox layoffs: Halo Cinematic Director fired days after promotion — ‘Pretty wild’ [Ed: Microsoft should not promote people whom it knows a day later would be sacked]

    The gaming industry's turbulent phase continues to impact long-standing employees. In a stark example of corporate unpredictability, Josh Daniels, a cinematic director at Halo Studios, lost his job just days after receiving a promotion.

    Daniels was among the 268 employees affected by the latest round of layoffs at Microsoft's Xbox division.

  • Luke Davis ☛ choosing web fonts by file size

    with some of my work focusing on web performance, i’ve grown attached to certain optimisations in areas like web font management. sadly, a lot of the best fonts are the biggest for various reasons and on my own site, i’ve flitted between using pure “web safe fonts” and using third-party web fonts for headings (and sometimes the body text too).

    i’m currently using 2 web fonts on the site: [...]

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

    • Terence Tao ☛ A value-based approach to mathematics | What's new

      Improper usage of AI offloads thinking, understanding and learning, thus mortgaging future mathematical development. Students and researchers may not experience the growth that comes from failing and struggling with a problem, and may become risk-averse and engage more with the AI than each other. We have already seen a burst in the number of arXiv postings and problems being solved by AI. If AI is used to indiscriminately solve open problems without mathematicians being deeply involved, it may not produce much societal value from the process or even the product. AI companies have built their tools using the freely shared work and expertise of generations of mathematicians, yet seem to have very little concern for this possibility. They are concerned with their valuation and do so at the cost of trampling on the very community norms that led to the free flow of ideas on which they are built.

    • Matt Webb ☛ A new prayer for the fruit fly connectome

      Long story short, the connectome is now available for free download, you can get a simulator of the different types of neurons, it caught the imagination of the internet, over September there has been all kinds of wild nonsense (impressive nonsense!).

    • Zach Leatherman ☛ “AI, make the website good”—zachleat.com

      With these seismic changes, I will continue to make the argument that craft defined as caring about the quality of output (independent of the tools used to generate the output) is more important than ever. Caring about what you ship will always have real-world value to visitors/consumers/users real people.

  • Social Control Media

    • France24 ☛ EU vows to pursue €120 million fine on X after US backs Musk's court challenge

      The European Union on Friday said it will pursue a €120 million fine against the X social network after the US Justice Department said it supported the efforts of X owner Elon Musk to have the case annulled. The bloc fined the platform in 2025 for breaching EU online transparency rules, notably with its pay-to-play blue "verification" checkmark.

    • [Old] Adam Tinworth ☛ Does Meta have the “stink of death” about it?

      Facebook is in no danger of shutting down – but unless something changes at the top of Meta, irrelevance feels like its long-term fate. A “me, too” AI product will not save it. And, frankly, given how toxic it has become, that might be a good thing.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Cory Dransfeldt ☛ Become worthless (to tech companies)

      Tech companies and their executives have, broadly, moved to align themselves with investors and adopted a posture of, often, disdain or outright hostility towards their users and employees. If tech companies don't value you, why provide value to them? If they back political positions hostile to your interests, why not return that hostility?

      I'm not arguing for boycotts, I know that people are bound to different platforms for different, compelling reasons. What I am arguing for is that, given the opportunity, you try and reduce the value they can extract from you. That's very often your data, but it can also be a direct financial relationship.

    • Fabricati Diem ☛ Deshittification Part 3: The Cold-Boot Consent Trap in Three Acts

      Getting past the app store gatekeeper felt like a victory, but the real battle was just beginning.

      Modern Smart TVs are no longer passive display devices. They are ad-delivery platforms, Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) surveillance nodes and data-broker endpoints stationed directly in living rooms. When a user attempts to reclaim network sovereignty by blocking telemetry, WebOS does not gracefully degrade. Instead, it deploys an active and stateful “Kill Switch” targeting third-party streaming applications.

      This write-up uses three reproducible experiments with network captures and time-synced screenshots to examine WebOS. It breaks down how the OS weaponizes its TCP/IP stack against Netflix and explains why this conditional sabotage most likely violates GDPR Article 7(4).

  • Confidentiality

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Novel attack slashes computing power needed to crack textbook RSA cryptography — attacks within state-actor reach, could target Apple and Cloudflare privacy services

      The attack only works against the textbook (or "raw") variant of RSA, which isn't widely used for commonplace computing like website certificates and remote access, but is nevertheless present in services like Cloudflare Privacy Pass, iCloud Private Relay, and Private Cloud Compute. Equipment and services using PKCS #11, like many smart cards, USB security tokens, code-signing pipelines, hardware security (HSM) and trusted platform (TPM) modules also use this variation. But fulfilling the attack conditions is much easier said than done.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Russia bombs Ukrainian data centers in latest escalation — 100,000 households lose connectivity as firms migrate data abroad, Zelensky says ‘ordinary life is simply a target’

    Data centers are considered critical infrastructure as modern society increasingly relies on online services. Because of this, they’re now considered strategic targets in a conflict. While government-owned data processing sites have historically been one of the first targets in military operations, Iran’s response to the U.S.’s bombing campaign in March marked one of the first instances where commercial civilian data center infrastructure was deliberately targeted. This included drone and missile attacks on AWS Middle East regional data centers in Dubai and Bahrain. It also directly threatened the offices of Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Google, and 14 other American tech companies in the region, as well as OpenAI’s Stargate AI data center in Abu Dhabi.+

  • Crooked Timber ☛ NY Times should look across the East River, not across the Atlantic

    Other successes have turned sour for the far right. Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, a successor to various neo-fascist parties, won elections in 2022 and has held together since then. But the government hasn’t delivered much of the far-right agenda, beyond stunts like a recently announced ban on burqas in schools. The Finns Party’s participation in a right-wing government (in Finland, obviously) has seen a big loss of popularity.

    Europe isn’t out of the woods yet. A victory for the National Rally in the French election next year would pose some significant problems. But compared to the defeats listed above, the fact that the German AfD might form the government of a small German state is not a big problem.

  • The Walrus ☛ The Billionaires Are Winning

    Succession, like the best satire, trades in biting truth. The show is directly inspired by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, a defining force in modern American politics. Jeff Bezos controls not only global package delivery but also one of the country’s most storied newspapers. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, bought Twitter, a social media platform with over half a billion users at its height, and degraded it, worsening internet discourse ever since. Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg was recently called the ruler of “history’s largest nonterritorial empire,” spanning every network you use to talk with the family and friends you don’t have time to see anymore.

    In his final Oval Office address in January 2025, President Joe Biden warned about American oligarchs and “the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of very few ultrawealthy people” that could threaten democracy and basic rights. Days later, Donald Trump, a man with his own ten-digit net worth, succeeded him, and many of those same oligarchs attended the inauguration. Succession demonstrates that you can, indeed, write this stuff.

  • CBC ☛ Justice Department under Trump asks EU to scrap $137M US fine for Elon Musk's X

    European Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier said Friday that it is the EU's "sovereign right" to draft legislation aimed at protecting its citizens.

  • India Times ☛ First US trial against TikTok to test claims platform fueled teen mental health crisis

    An Alabama jury will hear the state's claims that TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance made the platform addictive to young users and misled consumers about its safety, in the first case against the company to reach trial in the sweeping litigation over social media's impact on teen wellbeing.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ TikTok agrees to settle with Alabama state over teen safety

    The settlement involves TikTok adding several child safety measures to its platform including time limits and increased parental control. It is similar to a recent settlement competitor Meta had reached.

  • BBC ☛ TikTok to pay $100m, limit daily child usage in Alabama settlement

    The changes will only apply in Alabama. It marks the platform's first settlement with a US state.

  • ABC ☛ TikTok settles Alabama lawsuit for at least $100M, will implement safety features

    Through the settlement, TikTok will make several platform-level changes for teen users in Alabama, including the option for teens to select a non-personalized content feed.

  • RTL ☛ As more suits pend: TikTok agrees to teen limits in US settlement following Meta

    Under the settlement, TikTok will send $100 million to Alabama and could possibly pay up to $300 million in total if other states accept similar agreements.

    Alabama's suit was the latest in a wave of litigation targeting social media companies across the United States over the harm their apps allegedly cause young users.

  • The Kyiv Independent ☛ Finland, Sweden launch first joint intercept of Russian jets over Gulf of Finland

    The Finnish Air Force says the enhanced cooperation now allows joint identification missions and Quick Reaction Alert (QRA) fighters to operate from each other’s air bases.

  • The Kyiv Independent ☛ 'No longer hybrid' — As Russian sabotage grows bolder, Europe lacks red lines

    Russia is no longer only meddling in elections or hacking networks: Germany found explosives-laden drones at its Leipzig Airport in an apparent Moscow-backed sabotage plot. Russian drone incursions in NATO airspace are now common. And a Russian warship shot flares at a Danish military helicopter.

  • Meduza ☛ EU defense agency says Europe is rearming too slowly to be ready to defend against Russia by 2030

    EU leaders commissioned the report last year to assess progress in strengthening Europe’s defenses. Amid concerns about Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and Donald Trump’s calls for Europe to take on more responsibility for its own security, they set a goal of making Europe ready to defend itself by 2030.

  • Bhaskar English ☛ Ban Smartphones in Schools & Restrict Social Media for Kids | Policy Demand

    The report examined age-based restrictions on digital media in more than 40 countries and compared smartphone policies in schools across 110 countries. It argued that protecting children online can no longer depend on voluntary measures by technology platforms and should instead become a legal responsibility of governments.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Digital Camera World ☛ “I want my picture to hurt you.” Now 90, renowned Vietnam War photographer Don McCullin shares why he wants to create photos to lose sleep over – and why he hates his most famous photograph

    McCullin says he has covered nearly every major global conflict during his decades-long career, including being wounded by a mortar in Cambodia – where he continued to take photos from the back of a truck.

• Environment

  • The Revelator ☛ Climate Policy Has a Sacrifice Problem. My Clinical Trials Kept Solving It by Accident.

    When we looked into it, we found that the greenhouse gas emissions embedded in participants’ diets had fallen by more than half. The energy required to produce that food dropped nearly as much. Nobody had set out to produce that effect — these were people managing a brutal, lifelong disease. The climate benefit came along for the ride. I might have filed that under coincidence. Then it happened again, in a larger trial of 244 overweight adults randomized to a low-fat vegan diet or no change, followed for 16 weeks. Once more the emissions embedded in participants’ food fell by about half, driven mostly by less meat, with dairy and eggs close behind — roughly what you’d save each day by leaving a gasoline car parked instead of driving it four miles. The third time, we sharpened the comparison, still for health reasons: a low-fat vegan diet against the Mediterranean diet, the pattern nutritionists and environmentalists alike celebrate as the responsible choice for both body and planet. If anything was going to match the vegan diet’s footprint, surely it was this one. It didn’t. The Mediterranean diet cut diet-related emissions by about 20%, a real improvement, its green reputation earned. The

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Protesilaos Stavrou ☛ Comments on Dao, pattern, and the simple life

    These are comments I wrote to a friend in the summer of 2022. They were reading Lao Zi’s Dao De Jing (Tao Te Ching is an alternative spelling) at the time in the hope of making sense of their own life’s woes. This friend is of East Asian background, while I am Greek by blood and, as you may have noticed the more important part, by mindset.

    These comments do not have any private information, nor do they mention anything specific about my friend. I just discovered them by doing something unrelated in the folder where my private notes are stored. So I decided to make this public.

    At the time of that exchange I did not have a copy of Dao De Jing and was thus reading from a website whose links are provided below. I cannot comment on the accuracy of the translation, though this is not important to me, anyway. By quoting some existing work, I am simply finding a reason to rephrase what I think. I am not appealing to anybody’s authority, I am not hiding behind the genius of another even though I do recognise it, nor am I speaking in the name of some school of thought. I am neither its communicator nor its apologist.

  • [Old] Internet Archive ☛ Open Malaysia: A Memo to Patrick Durusau

    If this unethical behaviour by Microsoft was not sufficiently despicable, they did the unthinkable by involving politics in what should have been a technical evaluation of the standard by writing to the head of the Malaysian standards organization and getting its business partners to engage in a negative letter writing campaign to indicate lack of support of ODF in the Malaysian market. Every single negative letter on ODF received by the Malaysian standards organization was written either by Microsoft, or a Microsoft business partner or a Microsoft affiliated organization (Initiative for Software Choice and IASA).

  • Ken Klippenstein ☛ Trump Announces New “AI Force”

    Almost immediately, the AI shark tank started circling, eager to shape the president’s musings into something concrete, something that would benefit — them.

    It’s a Washington playbook and a kind of Rorschach test: the movers and shakers, the experts and the moguls telling you what the president “meant,” what an AI Force should be, whether it’s needed, and if it’s not, what’s needed instead. It’s a trillion-dollar Christmas wishlist you’re paying for but have no say in the contents, which will dictate the future of AI.

  • San Francisco, California ☛ Drama Masks: There's a flesh-eating alien plant inside the queer theater!

    You know how this very column has illustrated that Lurie’s administration wants to turn SF into Manhattan? You know how we’ve said their idea of “a thriving San Francisco” is one that appeals not to artists, performers, or independent businesses, but soulless corporate interests? This is what we mean. The DNA Lounge is not only one of the few indie performance venues still around in SF (particularly, in the SoMA/Tenderloin area), it’s one of the few–if not the last–concert venues that hasn’t been assimilated into the TicketMaster/LiveNation mega-monster. It’s a genuine San Francisco original that constantly finds itself at war with the very SF politicians who should be defending it.

  • Daniel Miller ☛ The Cuck Internet Theory

    …If we’re cucked, as I argue, then the solution is to see the algogarchic [algorithmic + oligarchic] project not as productive or future-facing at all, but as extractive, a vast magnet pulling money, agency, and meaning out of real life situations. And the question to ask is how to reverse that magnet’s polarity so technology is not taking the world away from you, but giving it to you…

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ A Union Feud Shouldn’t Sink California’s Billionaire Tax

    The result of all of these changes, enacted by H. R. 1, or the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, will be to throw states across the country into health and budget crises as their Medicaid funding falls off a cliff, with some of the worst effects of the bill conveniently placed after the midterm elections. There is one state, however, that could avoid that fate, should Proposition 40, or the California Billionaire Tax, pass this November.

  • Dan Q ☛ Styling :visited links using hue-rotation

    That's a 30° clockwise hue rotation coupled with a 15% reduction in saturation. Why those numbers? Because that transformation is approximately equivalent to the difference between the "traditional" HTML link colors #0000ee and #551a8b for unvisited and visited links, respectively. It's an homage!

  • Christiano Anderson ☛ A colour palette journey

    I’ve decided to try something new, not because I don’t like Solarized, but just to try and adapt my eyes to different themes. I’ve tried Nord Theme for a while, it’s great and nice, but I found Catppuccin Mocha to be the right replacement for Solarized.

  • RFA ☛ Tibetan activists protest Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Washington visit — in photos

    Tibetans gathered near the Chinese embassy in Washington on Thursday to protest Chinese President Xi Jinping as he arrived on the South Lawn of the White House to meet with U.S. President Trump.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Adam Tinworth ☛ The Fragility of Online Journalism

    Earlier on, I discovered that the Next Conference site, which I contributed to for over 14 years, was now redirecting to the homepage of Accenture in Germany. Given that the site only stopped publishing back in April, when a strategic change of direction led to the cancelling of this year’s event, that was much sooner than I expected. My work isn’t lost – I have multiple back-ups of my writing there over the decade or so I worked with them, over 1000 posts, in all – but it is gone from the web.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Hackaday ☛ The Least Annoying Of All Evils

    Doing the same thing for the Raspberry Pi isn’t as easy. You never know what, if any, peripherals are connected, so you can’t guarantee that there’s a screen to alert you or even necessarily a keyboard on which you could acknowledge. We’re reminded of a similar situation with FTDI USB-to-serial converter chips ages ago. Their driver software simply refused to work with counterfeit versions of their chips. Hackers were up in arms, largely because we couldn’t know if the parts were genuine at purchase time, and the counterfeits were widely distributed even by reliable resellers.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Patents

    • Software Patents

      • Tom's Hardware ☛ Nvidia patents AI chatbot to streamline PC game optimization — could one day help developers better optimize their games with requests made in plain English

        However, it's important to remember that companies like Nvidia apply for countless patents every year. Not all of those patents turn into shipping products or features, and there is no guarantee that this one will ever see the light of day. That being said, it does seem similar to G-Assist, a chatbot-like tool that allows gamers to get AI-powered assistance for their GeForce RTX PC. Nvidia has also sought to bring its AI chops to bear on other aspects of gaming, not least DLSS 5 and its multiple AI modes for different levels of detail — whether gamers want it or not.