Leftovers

• Annie Mueller ☛ Talk about the thing itself

  Look, I love a good sentence diagram (truly). Obviously, context matters. And sure, a big part of studying literature and writing is understanding the forms and rules of the craft.

  But those things form the structure built around the thing itself. The thing itself is reading and writing. The magical thing we do, as humans, of communicating across time and space and culture and lifetime and language via the written word. The structure exists to support and serve the thing itself, not the other way around.

• Rob Knight ☛ How Many Mildliner Colours Are There?

  There are actually 36 colours - there is an secondary version of the Neutral set called "Natural", which is sold in the Japanese market. This set has dusty pink, instead of copper. Dusty pink appears in some other sets (that aren't part of the core seven) so it's much easier to find that one separately, which is exactly what I did to complete my collection[1].

• Science

  • Wired ☛ For-Profit Companies Can’t Easily Replace NOAA’s Weather-Forecasting Prowess

    The forecasts can seem effortless, but behind the scenes, a vast network of satellites, airplanes, radar, computer models, and weather analysts are providing access to the latest data—and warnings when necessary. This data comes from analysts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, known as NOAA, and its National Weather Service.

    Atmospheric scientists Christine Wiedinmyer and Kari Bowen, a former National Weather Service forecaster, explain NOAA’s central role in most US weather forecasts.

• Career/Education

  • Phil Eaton ☛ From web developer to database developer in 10 years

    Last month I completed my first year at EnterpriseDB. I'm on the team that built and maintains pglogical and who, over the years, contributed a good chunk of the logical replication functionality that exists in community Postgres. Most of my work, our work, is in C and Rust with tests in Perl and Python. Our focus these days is a descendant of pglogical called Postgres Distributed which supports replicating DDL, tunable consistency across the cluster, etc.

    This post is about how I got here.

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ How To Find Where A Wire In A Cable Is Broken

    Determining that a cable has a broken conductor is the easy part, but where exactly is the break? In a recent video, [Richard] over at the Learn Electronics Repair channel on YouTube gave two community-suggested methods a shake to track down a break in a proprietary charging cable. The first attempt was to run a mains power detector along the cable to find the spot, but he didn’t have much luck with that.

  • PC World ☛ Why two SSDs are better than one in your Windows PC

    If you’re looking to speed up your PC, you should consider using two SSDs instead of one. One way to do this is to configure the two drives in a RAID 0 array. This allows the read and write speeds of both SSDs to be combined, resulting in impressive benchmark results. Another way is using one SSD for the operating system and the other for applications and games. In this guide, we’ll explain how to effectively use two SSDs to free up bandwidth.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Freedom From Religion Foundation ☛ Watch out: Fanatical RFK Jr. is national health disaster waiting to happen

    We now have not just Trump but also Kennedy, in glorious narcissism, claiming to be on a mission for God. When fanatics (or rulers cynically using religion) claim a direct pipeline to God: Watch out!

    The nation’s public health is now in the hands of a notorious anti-vaccination denier with no medical credentials who Trump has ordered to “go wild” in overseeing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other federal health care agencies. As the Freedom From Religion Foundation warned earlier, Kennedy presents a clear and present danger to public health on many fronts.

  • International Business Times ☛ Supporters Raise Over £241,900 for Alleged CEO Killer Luigi Mangione as Trial Nears

    A group of Mangione's supporters, calling themselves the December 4 Legal Committee, launched a fundraiser on GiveSendGo to finance his legal defence. They describe their initiative as a 'preemptive legal fundraiser' for Mangione, whom they refer to as a political prisoner.

    'We are not here to celebrate violence, but we do believe in the constitutional right of fair legal representation,' reads the fundraiser's description.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Luigi Mangione Makes First Public Statement, Launches Website

    On Friday, Luigi Mangione spoke out for the first time since his arrest, releasing a statement on a new website launched by his legal defense team.

• Proprietary

  • Wired ☛ The Official DOGE Website Launch Was a Security Mess

    New research shows that China’s Salt Typhoon hacking group has expanded its targets list to include universities around the world and at least two more telecoms operating in the US. That brings the total number of US telecommunications networks breached by Salt Typhoon to at least 11.

  • Robin Rendle ☛ trot

    Swift and XCode are incredibly well built and fit so nicely together. Owning the language and the tools means that this ecosystem can do some amazing things that web frameworks and text editors could only dream of. SwiftUI sort of forces you to build everything in small chunks instead of whole screens and I’ve found that I can lean into that and let it guide how I structure the code.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI)

    • Pivot to AI ☛ How AI slop generators started talking about ‘vegetative electron microscopy’

      But there are plenty of low-quality open-access journals that will run any old rubbish if you pay the swingeing page fees. Some of these are published by Elsevier.

      Today’s tell is the phrase “vegetative electron microscopy” — an OCR artifact from scanning a paper with “vegetative” in the first column and “electron microscopy” next to it in the second column and reading it as a single phrase.

      This phrase is meaningless. It’s obvious smoking gun evidence of a faked paper generated to increase an academic’s publication count.

    • NSHipster ☛ Ollama - NSHipster

      Ollama is the easiest way to run large language models on your Mac. You can think of it as “Docker for LLMs” - a way to pull, run, and manage AI models as easily as containers.

    • Declan Chidlow ☛ AI is Stifling Tech Adoption

      I propose that the advent and integration of AI models into the workflows of developers has stifled the adoption of new and potentially superior technologies due to training data cutoffs and system prompt influence.

      I have noticed a bias towards specific technologies in multiple popular models and have noted anecdotally in conversation and online discussion people choosing technology based on how well AI tooling can assist with its usage or implementation.

      While it has long been the case that developers have considered documentation and support availability when choosing software, AI’s influence dramatically amplifies this factor in decision-making, often in ways that aren’t immediately apparent and with undisclosed influence.

    • Futurism ☛ Attorney Pleads for Mercy After Using AI in Court, Where It Made Up Fake Lawsuits

      This is classic AI bullshittery. If a large language model can't come up with a confident answer, it'll make up one instead — usually convincingly, if you're not paying close enough attention, and without dropping the authoritative tone.

      In this case, the defendants found that when they tried to look up some of the lawsuits, most couldn't be found by the names provided. At least one of them was a case fabricated by ChatGPT, and which could only be found on the chatbot. And as it turned out, the provided case number for the fabrication actually belonged to a real lawsuit. Score one, and them some, for the corporate lawyers.

    • Shrivu Shankar ☛ How to Backdoor Large Language Models

      While most of the headlines have focused on infrastructure and inference risks, the embedded ones are much trickier to identify, the least obvious to folks using these open-source models, and to me the most interesting.

  • Social Control Media

    • The Local DK ☛ Why the Danish police are preparing to leave X

      "When it comes to misinformation and changing algorithms, X has developed in a way that makes it clear that we in the police need to own our own communication," he said.

      Rather than moving to another social media platform, the police are exploring independent solutions, partly inspired by the Norwegian model.

• Security

  • Security Week ☛ Meta Paid Out Over $2.3 Million in Bug Bounties in 2024

    Meta received close to 10,000 vulnerability reports and paid out over $2.3 million in bug bounty rewards in 2024.

  • Security Week ☛ SonicWall Firewall Vulnerability Exploited After PoC Publication

    The exploitation of a recent SonicWall vulnerability has started shortly after proof-of-concept (PoC) code was published.

  • Security Week ☛ New backdoored Windows Zero-Day Exploited by Chinese APT: Security Firm

    ClearSky Cyber Security says it has seen a new backdoored Windows zero-day being exploited by a Chinese APT named Mustang Panda. 

  • Security Week ☛ Hackers Exploit Palo Alto Firewall Vulnerability Day After Disclosure

    Attempts to exploit CVE-2024-0108, an authentication bypass vulnerability in Palo Alto firewalls, started one day after disclosure. 

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Register UK ☛ 10 years on after Data and Goliath warned of data collection

      It has been nearly a decade since famed cryptographer and privacy expert Bruce Schneier released the book Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World - an examination of how government agencies and tech giants exploit personal data. Today, his predictions feel eerily accurate.

      At stake, he argued then, was a possibly irreversible loss of privacy, and the archiving of everything. As he wrote, science fiction author Charlie Stross described the situation as the "end of prehistory," in that every facet of our lives would be on a computer somewhere and available to anyone who knew how to find them.

      Since the book was published, we've seen data harvesting continue, particularly for training AI models. The battle to keep even the most basic facts about us private seems all but lost.

      We sat down with Bruce Schneier for an update on his work, and what we can expect in the future.

  • Confidentiality

    • International Business Times ☛ Elon Musk's DOGE Leaks Classified Data about Intelligence Agencies on Its New Website, Leaving Spies Scrambling

      "Really, the question is: Where did they get this information and what are they doing with it?"

      After months of campaigning alongside President Donald Trump during the election, Tesla billionaire Elon Musk was appointed to lead the Department [sic] of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

      Since taking charge, Musk has formed a team primarily comprising young people—three of whom are reportedly still in college—to take on high-level engineering roles and implement cost-cutting measures.

    • BuzzFeed Inc ☛ Elon Musk’s DOGE Posts Classified Data On Its New Website

      “DOGE just posted secret NOFORN info on their website about [intelligence community] headcount, so currently people are scrambling to check if their info has been accessed,” said one Defense Intelligence Agency employee, who requested anonymity to avoid retaliation from senior leaders.

      NOFORN stands for “Not Releasable to Foreign Nationals,” meaning information in this category can’t be shared with any foreign governments, international organizations or foreign nationals without specific authorization.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Earth is already shooting through the 1.5°C global warming limit, two major studies show

    Earth is crossing the threshold of 1.5°C of global warming, according to two major global studies which together suggest the planet's climate has likely entered a frightening new phase.

  • Michigan Advance ☛ Detroit rally pushes back against Trump efforts to dismantle climate and health protections

    More than 200 people rallied in Detroit during Saturday’s “Climate Can’t Wait” rally.

    The event was designed to “push back on [Trump administration] attempts to dismantle climate and health protections,” organizers said in a pre-event press release.

  • Futurism ☛ Government Fires Specialists Without Realizing They Were in Charge of Nuclear Bombs, Then Panics and Tries to Rehire Them

    The NNSA is a little-known group charged with building, designing, and organizing the US Nuclear arsenal — at one time the largest in the world, now said to be a close second to Russia. It's the kind of agency you hope not to read about in the news.

    The whole "nuclear" part evidently wasn't enough to deter Musk and his DOGE boys from sending between 300 and 400 nuclear arms personnel to the bread line in a confusing flurry of termination emails on Wednesday.

  • US News And World Report ☛ UK Tracks Russian Ships Carrying Ammunition From Syria

    Russia has been evacuating its military assets from Syria since Assad's overthrow, the ministry said, describing it as a "blow to (Moscow's) ambitions in the Middle East".

  • The Record ☛ Sweden’s PM on suspected cable sabotage: ‘We don’t believe random things suddenly happen quite often’

    “The Baltic Sea is obviously under threat,” said Kristersson. “I think Mette [Frederiksen, the Prime Minister of Denmark] put it in a good way, saying that we are obviously not at war, but obviously not at peace either,” he added, reiterating a point made earlier by his fellow panelist.

    Reports citing anonymous intelligence officials have suggested Western authorities are assessing the spate of cable breakages in the Baltic Sea to be accidents rather than acts of sabotage, although experts outside of those agencies have argued such assessments are flawed.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Britons arrested in Iran named as husband and wife on round the world motorbike trip

    Iran currently holds several European nationals in detention. Western governments have repeatedly accused the Islamic Republic of taking dual and foreign nationals hostage for the sole purpose of using them in prisoner swaps or as bargaining chips in international negotiations.

  • RFERL ☛ Can Israel Destroy Iran's Nuclear Program?

    The Islamic republic insists that its nuclear program is peaceful and that it has no intention to develop a bomb.

    But it is now enriching uranium to 60 percent purity, which is close to weapons-grade levels and far above the 3.67 percent limit under the nuclear accord. As of October 2024, Iran has just over 182 kilograms of uranium enriched to up to 60 percent. Around 42 kilograms are needed to produce one bomb, meaning Tehran has enough to make four bombs.

  • teleSUR ☛ Seventy Civilians Killed by a Group Linked to Islamic State in DR Congo

    At least 70 civilian bodies killed by the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a rebel group with diffuse links to the Islamic State (IS), have been discovered in the north-east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

  • Futurism ☛ Trump Enacts Mass Firings at Group That Maintains Nuclear Bombs

    According to a DOE official — who, like the NNSA employee, NPR didn't name to protect their identity — the Office of Personnel Management suggested that superiors should tell the axed workers that they were being fired for "performance reasons." The Energy Department chose not to use that excuse, the DOE worker said, because many of those on the chopping block had performed well during their time at the agency.

  • RFERL ☛ IAEA Warns About Iran's Accelerated Uranium Production

    IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi said on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference that Tehran is increasing its monthly production of 60 percent enriched uranium by almost sevenfold.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Police reissue Isis terrorist's mugshot after she complains she was not wearing a niqab

    Michelle Heeley KC, prosecuting, told the court that Jami made plans to take her family to Afghanistan to fight for the Islamic State in Khorasan (ISK).

  • New Eastern Europe ☛ “We rolled out a red carpet for a war of aggression”

    Well, that’s a good way to ask a question. A war in Ukraine or a war in Russia? Because I think that he’s prepared to have war in Ukraine for ten years, but I’m not entirely sure that he’s prepared to have a war in Russia for ten years. Things that we are seeing now like destroyed industry, imagine ten times that. No factory is safe. Nothing is safe, every industry is under threat. Ukraine is able to hit every legitimate target.

  • The Independent UK ☛ DOGE impersonators storm San Francisco city hall demanding sensitive documents

    The city employees refused to help them and called law enforcement. The three men fled the scene before the sheriff's deputies arrived.

  • CBS ☛ 3 men claiming to be from DOGE show up at San Francisco City Hall, demand records - CBS San Francisco

    In response, the employees refused their requests and called sheriff's deputies. The men had left City Hall before deputies arrived.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Techdirt ☛ Police Union Still Insists NY Misconduct Records Are Secret Despite Court Decisions Saying Otherwise

    When you’re playing with house money, playing one losing hand after another isn’t a sign of tenacity. It’s just a way of signaling you can’t be trusted with the house’s money.

    That’s why appeal after appeal from government entities don’t tend to indicate that they’re in the right. It just means they don’t care how much money they spend because it’s not coming from their own pockets.

    The same principle applies to police unions. The money they use to litigate comes from the officers they’re supposed to be serving. At some point, you’d think they would experience some fleeting shame against lighting their contributors’ money on fire repeatedly, but the sad fact is that most cops represented by New York’s Police Benevolent Association (PBA) are more than happy to keep burning their own money if it means there’s even the most remote chance their past misdeeds won’t come back to haunt them.

  • The Washington Post ☛ Musk accused Reuters of “social deception.” The deception was his.

    The contract was real, but the Orwellian phrase Musk seized on to suggest a shadowy conspiracy wasn’t what it seems. A slightly closer look would have revealed that the contract, signed during President Donald Trump’s first term, was for help defending against cyberattacks — that is, combating deception, not fueling it. And it went to a separate division of the company, not the news agency.

• Environment

  • Science Alert ☛ Lung Cancer Is Rising in Non-Smokers, And This Could Be Why

    The international team behind the research found that rates of lung cancer in this group of people could be tied to increasing levels of pollution and the subsequent damage to health, with east Asia, particularly China, the worst affected.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ How electricity became a hot global commodity

      Over the next three years, global electricity consumption is set to rise by an “unprecedented” 3 500TWh, according to a report by the International Energy Agency. That’s an addition each year of more than Japan’s annual electricity consumption.

      The roughly 4% annual growth in that period is the fastest such rate in years, underscoring the growing importance of electricity to the world’s overall energy needs.

    • The Register UK ☛ IEA: World faces 'unprecedented' spike in electricity demand

      The IEA's report examines the current state of the electricity market and how it's likely to change between 2025 and 2027, forecasting that the world is going to need an additional 3,500 terawatt-hours of energy generation to meet rising demand over the next three years. That, the IEA noted, is the equivalent of adding more electricity consumption than Japan, per year, between now and 2027.

      To put that into further perspective, Japan is the fifth largest consumer of electricity in the world, eating up more than 1,000 TWh of electricity per year. That's a lot of juice to add to global energy generation in a mere three years, and most of that is going to be in emerging markets, the IEA said.

    • Positech Games ☛ Another solar generation payment AND double home battery!

      A few days ago I got the latest invoice/statement showing how much I was paid for the solar farm, generation in January. The grand total is…

  • Overpopulation

    • The Hindu ☛ Ground water extraction: three Kerala blocks continue in ‘critical’ list

      Blocks where extraction exceeds the annual replenished ground water recharge are categorised as ‘over-exploited.’ Kerala has none in this category. Blocks are listed as ‘critical’ if the stage of groundwater extraction is between 90%-100%. As mentioned above, Kerala has three in this category. If the extraction is between 70%-90%, the blocks are deemed ‘semi-critical.’ The State has 29 blocks in this category. Kerala has 120 blocks in the ‘Safe’ list where the stage of ground water extraction is less than 70%.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • India Times ☛ Meta plans major investment into AI-powered humanoid robots

    Meta is investing in AI-powered humanoid robots, focusing on household tasks and AI infrastructure for third-party manufacturers. Led by Marc Whitten, the initiative aims to advance robotics using Meta’s AI and AR/VR expertise.

  • India Times ☛ Wipro hires Accenture executive Amit Kumar as global head for Consulting

    Wipro appointed Accenture’s Amit Kumar as global head of Wipro Consulting. Reporting to CEO Srini Pallia, he’ll drive AI-powered growth. This marks a rare external hire amid internal promotions and leadership exits under former CEO Thierry Delaporte.

  • Kevin Boone ☛ So how worried should I be?

    That a software provider can be held liable without fault is causing conniptions in the software industry, because it’s exceptionally difficult to be sure that every software element, particularly in the open-source world, is completely secure. We need our disclaimers, the software vendors claim, because ensuring software quality is just so darned difficult. It’s particularly troublesome when we use so much open-source software, whose provenance and quality is uncertain.

    It’s important to understand that, as the EU Regulation is a statutory provision, no disclaimer, however bold the typeface it’s presented in, will shift the burden of liability from the supplier to the user. These new provisions apply in addition to the existing law of liability.

  • Mike Brock ☛ What the Hell Happened to Me (and to Silicon Valley)

    What troubles me is how seamlessly the industry shifted from disrupting power to consolidating it. I still admire the entrepreneurial spirit that defined Silicon Valley’s earlier era—that drive to build, to solve problems, to reshape markets through innovation. But something profound has changed. The industry that once prided itself on “moving fast and breaking things” now seems primarily interested in accumulating power and breaking democracy. Or is in the main, suddenly indifferent to it after November of last year.

    The transformation has been subtle but comprehensive. Where we once saw scrappy startups challenging established players, we now watch tech giants work to capture the machinery of state power itself. The entrepreneurial drive hasn’t disappeared so much as mutated.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Cambodia prime minister’s Facebook (Farcebook) ad spending tops $1.5 million, Meta data reveals [Ed: Faking popularity]

      The spending dating back to 2022 promoted his posts to users of the site, which is popular among Cambodians.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Vietnamese author may face prison for political posts on Facebook

    If found guilty of ‘abusing democratic freedoms’ Truong Huy San could be jailed for 7 years.

  • Vox ☛ Trump’s Kennedy Center takeover is an act of petty revenge

    Yet this kind of move is characteristic of Trump, with his instinct for making moves that are technically legal but that other presidents would avoid out of a sense of shame or decorum — and the notoriously thin skin that makes him so vindictive to anyone who has ever insulted him.

  • EFF ☛ Alaa Abd El Fattah's Mother, Laila Soueif, Calls on UK Government to Help as She Continues Hunger Strike

    Alaa should have been released on September 29, after serving his five-year sentence for sharing a Facebook post about a death in police custody, but Egyptian authorities have continued his imprisonment in contravention of the country’s own Criminal Procedure Code.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ Attempt to eviscerate Kansas student newspaper funding sets sinister example

    The KU student newspaper has a long history of clashes with student government, for the same reason that regular news media have a long history of clashes with government. Politicians don’t like scrutiny. They do respond to public shaming, however, which is why the KU Student Senate’s finance council quickly reversed course once reporters started calling attention to the move.

    But I’m concerned because of the message it sends at a particularly perilous time for the news media. Sure, outlets have been buffeted by business shocks and readers migrating to new platforms. But they also now face national, state and local governments all too willing to violate the First Amendment in punishing or shaming them.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • JURIST ☛ Civil rights group sues Meta over racially discriminatory college marketing ad claims

    The organization Equal Rights Center (ERC) filed a lawsuit against Meta on Tuesday alleging that it unlawfully discriminated against Black Facebook (Farcebook) and Instagram users by disproportionately advertising for-profit colleges and universities to Black users, while marketing public colleges and universities to white users.

  • Newsweek ☛ Men Face $1,000 Fine if They 'Discharge Semen' Under New Bill - Newsweek

    The bill has been proposed by State Representatives Anita Somani and Tristan Rader, who wrote it to point out what they see as the absurdity of rules that control women's bodies but do not control men's. It has not been formally introduced to the House Floor yet.

    Per Somani and Rader, men would face a $1,000 first offense, $5,000 second offense, and $10,000 subsequent offense fine to "discharge semen or genetic material without intent to fertilize an embryo."

  • El País ☛ Anisa Yousaf, survivor of a forced marriage: ‘Parents should give their daughters freedom of choice’

    Anisa refused to become an economic instrument and to give up her dreams of love. Her father then subjected her to psychological and physical abuse that almost cost her her life. She managed to escape and asked for help from Acesop, a Barcelona-based organization that helps women who are victims of a practice that is still common in rural communities in India and Pakistan. So-called “honor crimes” claim the lives of 500 women every year.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Trump and Musk Lay Off 1,000 Veterans Affairs Staffers in Mass Cuts

    Then Elon Musk, an unelected billionaire with no ties to the military, fires you. Everything you built, gone in an instant, at the whim of someone who has nothing to do with your service, your sacrifice, or your career.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Jamie Zawinski ☛ "Your personal information is very important to us.", part four

  My app "is likely to become less discoverable" and "a warning is likely to be shown", you see.

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Google's Piracy Purge: 3.5 Billion DMCA Takedown Notices in a Year

    bayFifteen years ago, Google processed 250,000 takedown notices in an entire year. Today, it only needs 36 minutes to reach the same number.

    Despite several attempts to make piracy less visible in its search engine, the problem isn’t going away. On the contrary, takedown notices continue to increase at a rapid pace.