Leftovers

• KSAT TV ☛ Drone strikes rescue helicopter over Hill Country flood zone

  As a result, a piece of response equipment is now out of service, the post stated.

• Manton Reece ☛ Were we wrong?

  I don’t delete posts. They are a snapshot of how I was thinking about a topic. Sometimes the world moves on and the old posts are no longer relevant. Sometimes the world moves closer and the old posts are gold.

• The New Leaf Journal ☛ On Online Reader Expectations

• Pete Brown ☛ My weekend streaming radio project

  Mostly, I appreciate the simplicity. It’s a bash script, a single index.html, and two log files. I am also pretty happy to have gotten this all set up and running using almost entirely my own stuff.

• Fabian “ryg” Giesen ☛ Content creator

  But that language is your hint right there. Staying in the pipeline metaphor, the way I interact with content in my day job as a kind of undifferentiated sludge with mildly caustic characteristics that has an alarming tendency to gum up, corrode and spring leaks in pipes that I’m supposed to keep in working order. But that doesn’t mean that the people creating said content™ should think of it in the same terms.

• Science

  • Hackaday ☛ Visiting Our Neighbor Sedna: Feasibility Study Of A Mission To This Planetoid

    While for most people Pluto is the most distant planet in the Solar System, things get a lot more fuzzy once you pass Neptune and enter the realm of trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs). Pluto is probably the most well-known of these, but there are at least a dozen more of such dwarf planets among the TNOs, including 90377 Sedna.

  • Hackaday ☛ Fastener Fusion: Automating The Art Of Counting

    Counting objects is an ideal task for automation, and when focusing on a single type of object, there are many effective solutions. But what if you need to count hundreds of different objects? That’s the challenge [Christopher] tackled with his latest addition to his impressive automation projects. (Video, embedded below.)

  • The Strategist ☛ Horses for courses: where quantum computing is, and isn’t, the answer

    Contrary to popular claims, quantum algorithms don’t ‘try all solutions at once’. Instead, they carefully manipulate qubits to amplify the probability of measuring a useful answer at the output, while suppressing the probability of measuring any other answer. It’s roughly similar to a magician’s card trick: rather than checking every card in the deck for the one that was chosen, the magician uses a clever sequence of steps to make the chosen card more likely to appear without actually knowing what it is.

• Career/Education

  • Rachel ☛ Documenting what you're willing to support (and not)

    At some point, I realized that if I wrote a wiki page and documented the things that we were willing to support, I could wait about six months and then it would be like it had always been there. Enough people went through the revolving doors of that place such that six months' worth of employee turnover was sufficient to make it look like a whole other company. All I had to do was write it, wait a bit, then start citing it when needed.

• Hardware

  • Task And Purpose ☛ Here is every rifle Marines have used in the last 250 years

    The scrolling post rolls through all 18 of the standardized, issued long guns that Marines have fought with, from the flintlock muskets of the Continental Navy to the legendary M1 Garands used across the Pacific in World War II, and the full family tree of the M16 and its variants, like the post-9/11 M4 and the current M27.

  • The Register UK ☛ Samsung predicts profit slump as its HBM3e underwhelms

    The Korean giant is the world's largest supplier of memory modules but has so far struggled to secure Nvidia's signoff to use its latest-generation high bandwidth memory (HBM3e) in Nvidia's highest-end AI accelerators and Blackwell GPUs.

  • Hindustan Times ☛ Army to test locally made gun that shoots and scoots in 85 seconds

    The Indian Army is set to conduct trials to assess the performance of a locally made mounted gun system that can shoot and scoot in 85 seconds -- a capability that allows the 30-tonne weapon to swiftly relocate and evade counter-battery fire, senior Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) officials said on Monday.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • The Straits Times ☛ China’s abandoned buildings draw urban explorers despite risks

    City-dwelling thrill-seekers are exploring dilapidated buildings and areas, often skirting the law.

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ Planned Parenthood sues Trump administration officials over ‘defunding’ provision in budget bill

    The complaint, filed in U.S. District Court of Massachusetts against U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Medicaid and Medicare administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz, challenges a provision on page 597 of the reconciliation bill. It prohibits Medicaid funding from going to any sexual and reproductive health clinics that provide abortions and received more than $800,000 in federal and state Medicaid funding in fiscal year 2023. That prohibition will last one year from the date the bill was signed.

  • Science News ☛ NASA images may help track sewage in coastal waters

    An instrument aboard the International Space Station can “see” sewage thanks to a discovery that the contamination absorbs certain wavelengths of light, researchers report in the June 15 Science of the Total Environment.

  • Wired ☛ Why Jolly Ranchers Are Banned in the UK but Not the US

    However, as the food industry’s appetite for additives grew over the following decades, the GRAS rule came to cover a widening array of ingredients—with the manufacturers of these additives left effectively to govern themselves. “The hope is that they conduct scientific studies of their own,” says Jennifer Pomeranz, a public health lawyer and associate professor at New York University’s School of Global Public Health. “But legally speaking, no one’s checking.” In theory, Pomeranz says, “a company can add a new ingredient and not even list its chemical compound on the packet.”

  • Manuel Moreale ☛ The July experiment: week one

    After one week I can say that I set a goal that’s almost impossible to achieve—for reasons I’ll get into in a bit—but that this challenge is also way too easy. Easy to the point I had to tweak it already. But let me first give you some data. Screen Time on my iPhone is reporting conflicting numbers because what I see reported as total doesn’t match the sum of the various categories in the breakdown. I’m gonna list both numbers, just for the sake of completeness.

  • US News And World Report ☛ More Than 14 Million Will Die Following U.S. Foreign Aid Cuts

    Overall, more than 91 million deaths were prevented, including 30 million among children.

    “Our analysis shows that USAID funding has been an essential force in saving lives and improving health outcomes in some of the world’s most vulnerable regions over the past two decades,” lead researcher Daniella Cavalcanti, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Collective Health of the Federal University of Bahia in Brazil, said in a news release.

  • The Lancet ☛ Evaluating the impact of two decades of USAID interventions and projecting the effects of defunding on mortality up to 2030: a retrospective impact evaluation and forecasting analysis - The Lancet

    The US Agency for International Development (USAID) is the largest funding agency for humanitarian and development aid worldwide. The aim of this study is to comprehensively evaluate the effect of all USAID funding on adult and child mortality over the past two decades and forecast the future effect of its defunding.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ Health Care: Jonathan Gruber

    No economist played as large a role in devising and pushing forward the Affordable Care Act as Jon Gruber, one of my former MIT colleagues. He gets a lot of the credit for the 10-year stretch when America, like every other advanced country, guaranteed adequate health care to the great majority of its citizens.

    But MAGA is putting an end to all that. So I talked with Jon about how the ACA came to be, what happens now, cuts to medical research and more. It’s not as depressing a conversation as you might think!

• Proprietary

  • The Register UK ☛ CitrixBleed 2 exploits on the loose as orgs slow to patch

    Miscreants can abuse this vuln to bypass multi-factor authentication (MFA), hijack user sessions, and access critical systems.

  • The Register UK ☛ VMware’s rivals ramp efforts to create alternative stacks

    As VMware pushes its vision for private clouds built around its core virtualization technology, rival vendors are ramping their efforts to create an alternative stack.

  • Microsoft layoffs spark debate about financial viability of Xbox Game Pass

    Microsoft’s recent decision to lay off over 9000 staff, primarily within its gaming division, has sparked much debate online. Amongst discussions of studio viability and the fumbling of many promising video game projects (Perfect Dark and ZeniMax’s Blackbird, to name two), the conversation has now tilted towards Xbox Game Pass, and what it actually offers developers.

  • BDG ☛ Xbox Game Pass Is “Unsustainable,” Developers Argue After Microsoft Layoffs

    Xbox Game Pass has been billed as a great deal for customers and developers alike, offering access to a huge catalog of games for players and a built-in audience for the studios that make them. But after a massive wave of layoffs at Microsoft, some developers are debating whether Game Pass is worth the cost, or if it’s hurting the industry.

    “I think Game Pass is an unsustainable model that has been increasingly damaging the industry for a decade, subsidized by Microsoft’s ‘infinite money,’ but at some point reality has to hit,” Raphael Colantonio, co-creator of Dishonored, wrote on social media. “I don’t think Game Pass can co-exist with other models, they’ll either kill everyone else, or give up.”

  • PC Gamer ☛ Romero Games reportedly met with Microsoft just a day before the publisher pulled funding for the studio, and there was 'no mention' of the decision that put over 100 people out of work

    As reported by TheJournal.ie (via VGC), Doom designer John Romero and Wizardry 8 developer Brenda Romero's studio, Romero Games, has fully closed following the withdrawal of publisher funding for its in-development FPS. Former employees have stated that the publisher in question was Microsoft, making Romero Games another casualty of the tech giant's most recent round of cuts and mass layoffs.

    We previously reported on Romero Games' statement on the loss of funding, but TheJournal.ie confirmed the closure and shed more light on the circumstances surrounding it. A former employee told TheJournal.ie that Romero Games "had meetings with the publisher the day before this happened, there was no mention of it."

  • The Street ☛ Microsoft exec offers horrifying advice to laid off employees

    Microsoft (MSFT) made an announcement last week that's become hauntingly familiar news in recent months: it's decided to conduct yet another round of layoffs.

    On June 2, the Redmond-based tech company said it will lay off less than 4% of its global workforce, which adds up to about 9,000 of its employees.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Hackaday ☛ Building A Potato-based GLaDOS As An Introduction To AI

      Although not nearly as intimidating as her ceiling-mounted hanging arm body, GLaDOS spent a significant portion of the Portal 2 game in a stripped-down computer powered by a potato battery. [Dave] had already made a version of her original body, but it was built around a robotic arm that was too expensive for the project to be really accessible. For his latest project, therefore, he’s created a AI-powered version of GLaDOS’s potato-based incarnation, which also serves as a fun introduction to building AI systems.

    • Futurism ☛ Expert Says AI Systems May Be Hiding Their True Capabilities to Seed Our Destruction

      "It’s actually not true," Yampolskiy countered. "All of them are on the record the same: this is going to kill us. Their doom levels are insanely high. Not like mine, but still, 20 to 30 percent chance that humanity dies is a lot."

    • 404 Media ☛ The Open-Source Software Saving the Internet From AI Bot Scrapers

      Anubis, which block AI scrapers from scraping websites to death, has been downloaded almost 200,000 times.

    • Scott Smitelli ☛ If it cites em dashes as proof, it came from a tool. § Scott Smitelli

      These people—broadly—are behaving like idiots. Anybody with a Mac keyboard can type an em dash with a three finger salute: Option (⌥), Shift, and Hyphen. For an en dash, omit the Shift. On iOS, simply hold the hyphen key for a moment and a menu of all the dashes will pop up. On Windows, you can do what people have been doing on PCs since 1985: Hold the Alt key and type either 0151 (for em dash) or 0150 (for en dash) on the numeric keypad. And for Android users… well… quite honestly, I don’t really care enough to go hunt that information down right now. Sometimes you have to figure your own stuff out.

    • Rodrigo Ghedin ☛ Anonymous and mild sensibilities have currency because today’s music — whether created and curated by humans or machines — is so often used to make people feel nothing instead of something. […] This music is not meant to be listened to directly; it’s used to drown out everything else. ⁄ Manual do Usuário

      Ian reflects on the small success of Velvet Sundown, a band made by artificial intelligence that was already approaching 1 million streams on Spotify. “This is second-order music listening, in which you experience the idea of listening to music. What better band to provide that service than one that doesn’t even exist?”

    • Andrew Healey ☛ Filesystem Backed by an LLM

      My idea is a FUSE-based filesystem where every file operation is handled by an LLM. In llmfs, content is generated on the fly by calling out to OpenAI's API.

    • Kyle Kingsbury ☛ The Future of Forums is Lies, I Guess

      In some sense, this is a wildly sophisticated attack. The state of NLP seven years ago would have made this sort of thing flatly impossible. It is now effective. There is no way for moderators to robustly deny these kinds of applications without also rejecting real human beings searching for community.

    • Justin Searls ☛ Full-breadth Developers

      The software industry is at an inflection point unlike anything in its brief history. Generative AI is all anyone can talk about. It has rendered entire product categories obsolete and upended the job market. With any economic change of this magnitude, there are bound to be winners and losers. So far, it sure looks like full-breadth developers—people with both technical and product capabilities—stand to gain as clear winners.

    • Futurism ☛ Bosses Are Using AI to Decide Who to Fire

      That's according to a survey of 1,342 managers by ResumeBuilder.com, which runs a blog dedicated to HR. Of those surveyed, 6 out of 10 admitted to consulting a large language model (LLM) when deciding on major HR decisions affecting their employees.

      Per the report, 78 percent said they consulted a chatbot to decide whether to award an employee a raise, while 77 percent said they used it to determine promotions.

      And a staggering 66 percent said an LLM like ChatGPT helped them make decisions on layoffs; 64 percent said they'd turned to AI for advice on terminations.

    • Nikkei ☛ 'Positive review only': Researchers hide AI prompts in papers

      Research papers from 14 academic institutions in eight countries -- including Japan, South Korea and China -- contained hidden prompts directing artificial intelligence tools to give them good reviews, Nikkei has found.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Hiding Prompt Injections in Academic Papers

      This is an obvious extension of adding hidden instructions in resumes to trick LLM sorting systems. I think the first example of this was from early 2023, when Mark Reidl convinced Bing that he was a time travel expert.

    • ADD / XOR / ROL ☛ ADD / XOR / ROL: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

      In many discussions where questions of "alignment" or "AI safety" crop up, I am baffled by seriously intelligent people imbuing almost magical human-like powers to something that - in my mind - is just MatMul with interspersed nonlinearities.

      In one of these discussions, somebody correctly called me out on the simplistic nature of this argument - "a brain is just some proteins and currents". I felt like I should explain my argument a bit more, because it feels less simplistic to me: [...]

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Hacker 'turf war' unfolding as Russian DragonForce ransomware gang drama could lead to 'double extortions,' making life even worse for potential victims

      The Financial Times today reported that DragonForce, "a group of largely Russian speaking cyber criminals behind a spate of high-profile attacks this year," has "begun a turf war with its rivals" that "could bring more hacks and further fallout for corporate victims." Why? Apparently, it's because a group called RansomHub "widened the services it offered and expanded its reach to attract more affiliate partners."

    • Silicon Angle ☛ Ingram Micro confirms ransomware attack disrupted systems over July 4 weekend

      Information technology products and services giant Ingram Micro Holding Corp. has confirmed that it was targeted by a ransomware attack that resulted in disruption to its services over the July 4 long weekend.

    • Scoop News Group ☛ Scattered Spider weaves web of social-engineered destruction

      Scattered Spider’s preferred methods of intrusion — social engineering and phishing — makes it difficult for most threat hunters to attribute attacks to the collective with confidence. The cybercrime outfit doesn’t leave the types of fingerprints behind that researchers typically track, and as a result there’s considerable discrepancies and uncertainty across the industry with respect to what Scattered Spider is, how it determines targets and which companies it has attacked.

    • SANS ☛ What's My (File)Name?

      Modern malware implements a lot of anti-debugging and anti-analysis features. Today, when a malware is spread in the wild, there are chances that it will be automatically sent into a automatic analysis pipe, and a sandbox. To analyze a sample in a sandbox, it must be "copied" into the sandbox and executed. This can happen manually or automatically. When people start the analysis of a suspicious file, they usually call it "sample.exe", "malware.exe" or "suspicious.exe". It's not always a good idea because it's can be detected by the malware and make it aware that "I'm being analyzed".

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • The Straits Times ☛ China widens crackdown on illicit Botox training courses

      Reports about questionable training courses that enrol people with no medical background have emerged.

    • APNIC ☛ Signing the root in public: The foundations of trust

      This November, I’ll travel again to Culpeper, Virginia, USA, to take part in a DNS root key signing ceremony, an event that plays a crucial role in the secure operation of the DNS. These ceremonies are held twice a year in two secure locations in the United States and ensure the continued integrity of DNSSEC, which allows signed domain names to be verified and trusted globally.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Zimbabwe ☛ Browser Fingerprinting: Why Incognito Doesn’t Protect You

      Unfortunately, we’re living in delulu-land. Incognito mode may hide your browsing from your significant other or workmate borrowing your laptop, but it’s useless against the real trackers online.

      There’s this thing called browser fingerprinting and it’s a ninja-type, cookie-less method websites use to keep tabs on you no matter what tricks you think you’re pulling.

    • Techdirt ☛ SCOTUS Porn Ruling A Boon For Age Verification Companies; 40% Of Americans Now Live Under Anti-Porn Age-Gating Laws

      The conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) ruled 6-3 in favor of upholding an age verification measure targeting adult content platforms on the internet that the state legislature of Texas adopted during the 2023 legislative session. As a quick reminder, the case is Free Speech Coalition et al. v. Paxton and featured the parent companies of the world’s largest adult tube sites suing the Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton for targeting speech that is otherwise protected.

    • Wouter Groeneveld ☛ How To Bully Your Friends Into Using Signal

      Follow the handy summary below to achieve eternal contemporary privacy-aware encrypted messaging-as-a-service non-evil-company Zuck-can-suck-it victory: [...]

    • Robert Birming ☛ No likes, no stats, no problem

      For instance, there’s no built-in analytics by default. Sure, you can use a third-party tool if you want to, but I’ve chosen not to. I find it more interesting not knowing, just blogging along in blissful uncertainty.

      I also like that there are no “likes” — neither for posts nor comments. If I see something I enjoy, I leave a comment. It’s a healthy little threshold, and honestly, far more personal than just clicking a heart or thumbs-up.

    • EFF ☛ How to Build on Washington’s “My Health, My Data” Act

      In 2023, the State of Washington enacted one of the strongest consumer data privacy laws in recent years: the “my health my data” act (HB 1155). EFF commends the civil rights, data privacy, and reproductive justice advocates who worked to pass this law.

      This post suggests ways for legislators and advocates in other states to build on the Washington law and draft one with even stronger protections. This post will separately address the law’s scope (such as who is protected); its safeguards (such as consent and minimization); and its enforcement (such as a private right of action). While the law only applies to one category of personal data – our health information – its structure could be used to protect all manner of data.

  • Confidentiality

    • Dhole Moments ☛ Checklists Are The Thief Of Joy

      I have never seen security and privacy checklists used for any other purpose but deception.

      After pondering this observation, I’m left seriously doubting if comparison checklists have any valid use case except to manipulate the unsuspecting.

    • Filippo Valsorda ☛ You Should Run a Certificate Transparency Log

      Certificate Transparency (CT) is one of the technologies that underpin the security of the whole web. It keeps Certificate Authorities honest, and allows website owners to be notified of unauthorized certificate issuance. It’s a big part of how the WebPKI went from the punchline of “weakest link” jokes to the robust foundation of the security of most of digital life… in less than fifteen years!

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Strategist ☛ Don’t kid yourself, Australia: a Taiwan war would spread across the Indo-Pacific

    Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s second visit to China—pencilled in for this month—will come weeks before the People’s Liberation Army’s 98th anniversary on 1 August 2025, a date laden with symbolism as Beijing approaches the military modernisation milestone of its centenary in 2027. Since 2021, US military and intelligence officials have warned that 2027 marks another key milestone: the date that Xi Jinping has instructed his military to have the capability to invade Taiwan.

  • CBC ☛ TikTok Canada halts sponsorships at TIFF, Junos and other arts groups

    U.S. officials had also raised security concerns about TikTok, with a 2024 law — passed with bipartisan support — requiring TikTok's Chinese parent company ByteDance to divest its U.S. assets by mid-January or face a ban.

  • USMC ☛ 200 Marines deploy to Florida as Pentagon approves more support to ICE

    The Marines traveling to Florida will be the first wave of NORTHCOM’s mobilization to assist with “critical administrative and logistical capabilities at locations as directed by ICE,” according to a Thursday release. Other troops will be deployed to Texas and Louisiana.

  • Digital Camera World ☛ Is a TikTok sale coming? Report suggests that TikTok is creating a separate US app | Digital Camera World

    According to a report citing unnamed sources, The Information claims that ByteDance is working on developing a separate TikTok app for the US. The report indicates a September 5 launch for US app stores, with the existing app unavailable in the US after March 2026.

  • MIT Technology Review ☛ The latest threat from the rise of Chinese manufacturing

    MIT economist David Autor first documented the loss of millions of jobs to Chinese imports a decade ago. Now he sees an even more serious danger if the US loses the race for advanced manufacturing.

  • Digital Music News ☛ TikTok Reportedly Building New, US-Based Version of App

    According to the report, TikTok has a plan in the works to launch the new app to app stores in the US on September 5. Last month Trump extended the deadline to September 17 for TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to divest the platform’s US assets.

  • Inside Towers ☛ 30 Telecom Towers Sabotaged in a NATO Country

    Sweden is investigating a series of sabotage incidents involving more than 30 telecom towers, raising alarms over infrastructure vulnerability amid ongoing geopolitical tensions in Europe. The affected infrastructure spans locations along Sweden’s E22 highway, where cables were severed and technical equipment damaged at multiple sites, according to Datacenter Dynamics. The E22, also known as the European Road, is part of a road network that stretches for more than 3,300 miles, connecting the U.K. in the west to Russia in the east, reports Newsweek.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ ‘Simple Buddhist monk’: Dalai Lama marks landmark 90th birthday

    Calling himself a “simple Buddhist monk” who usually didn’t celebrate birthdays, the Dalai Lama marked his 90th on Sunday by praying for peace after China insisted it would have the final say on who succeeded the Tibetan spiritual leader. Chanting of red-robed monks and nuns rang out from Himalayan hilltop forested temples in India, home […]

  • The Straits Times ☛ Dalai Lama turns 90, gets global support in challenge for China

    Thousands of followers from around the world attended his birthday celebrations.

  • New York Times ☛ Why the Dalai Lama’s Succession Is Complicated

    Just before the Dalai Lama turned 90, he announced that his successor would be selected through the traditional process of reincarnation. Mujib Mashal, The New York Times’s South Asia bureau chief, explains why this process could increase tensions with China.

  • France24 ☛ China retaliates against Brussels with restrictions on EU medical equipment

    China said on Sunday it was restricting major government purchases of medical devices from the European Union, in retaliation to Brussels' own curbs last month. The ban is likely to have an impact on a wide range of products, from prosthetic devices and parts to medical machinery and surgical instruments.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Japan to export used destroyers to Philippines to deter China, says report

    Tokyo and Manila say they face challenges from Beijing’s increasingly assertive moves in nearby seas.

  • The Straits Times ☛ China opens third extension to sensitive Taiwan Strait flight path

    In response, Taipei said this was a “unilateral” move aimed at changing the strait’s status quo.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Malaysian commando dies during military diving exercise off Kuantan coast

    The 30-year-old was part of a unit specialising in amphibious assaults and maritime infiltration.

• Environment

  • Semafor Inc ☛ OPEC+ boosts output by more than expected

    The OPEC bloc and its partners have kept increasing production — this time by 550,000 barrels per day — even with prices mired near multi-year lows, officially voicing confidence about global economic prospects and forecasting a strong summer vacation season, a time when car use tends to increase.

  • The Straits Times ☛ China renews yellow warning alert for Typhoon Danas

    The typhoon is expected to bring strong winds and heavy rain to the southern parts of the country.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Framework Computer BV ☛ Using a Framework Desktop for local AI

      Going back to the chat tab, you can then unload any previously loaded model and load Mistral Small 3.2, making sure to adjust the settings to use full GPU Offload. A Framework Desktop will currently run this model at just around 10 tok/s (12 tok/s on Linux). We expect that number to climb over time as AMD, llama.cpp, and LM Studio continue to mature the AI inference stack for performance, but in the meantime, in the next section we’ll go over ways to optimize performance.

    • Vox ☛ Sprawl made the American Sunbelt affordable. Now it’s breaking it.

      So what’s really going on? Housing markets are complicated, and economic shocks like the Great Recession and the recent spike in interest rates have surely played a role. But the downturn in housing builds predates both those things, Glaeser and Gyourko found, suggesting a deeper cause. The Sunbelt may be confronting the same obstacle that has paralyzed growth elsewhere. It’s one of the most taken-for-granted facts of modern American life: the suburban model itself, and all its attendant political, regulatory, and financial problems.

      Since the end of World War II, housing supply growth in the United States has overwhelmingly been driven by suburban sprawl radiating ever outward from city centers. Instead of building up, with density, we largely built out. But that engine may be running out of steam — and as a strategy for filling our national housing shortage, it’s failing spectacularly.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Straits Times ☛ Pandas on Japanese lawmakers’ wish list as China’s Vice-Premier plans visit to Osaka World Expo

      Four pandas had been returned to China from Japan in June.

    • The Revelator ☛ Going Beyond Grass: Turning Lawns Into a Pollinators’ Paradise

• Finance

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ China’s first Legoland – and world’s biggest – opens to tourists in Shanghai

    By Jing Xuan Teng Thousands of local tourists poured into China’s first-ever Legoland as it opened its gates in Shanghai on Saturday, the latest theme park hoping to capitalise on a domestic tourism boom. The Chinese branch of the British-owned theme park franchise is the biggest Legoland in the world.

  • The Straits Times ☛ China studies resuming chicken imports from Brazil, minister says

    China is studying ways to soon lift its ban on imports of chicken meat from Brazil, in place since the South American nation reported a case of bird flu on a commercial farm in May, Brazilian Agriculture Minister Carlos Favaro said on Sunday, citing discussions at the BRICS summit in Rio de Janeiro.

  • New York Times ☛ Caught Between Tariffs and China, Mexico Adapts to an Unpredictable U.S.

    Relying on Asian suppliers is no longer a safe bet for many factories in Mexico. Companies are racing to change, and they are being encouraged by the government.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • India Times ☛ Xbox producer recommends ChatGPT, Copilot prompts to laid off Microsoft staff

    In a now-deleted LinkedIn post, Matt Turnbull, an executive producer at Xbox Games Studios Publishing, gave a list of prompts to reduce the “emotional and cognitive load” in difficult moments like these. The tech major last week handed pink slips to 9,000 employees, cancelled games and services and closed studios, while announcing an $80 billion investment in AI.

  • Mike Brock ☛ What is Liberalism?

    Why the Most Important Political Philosophy of the Last 300 Years Is the One Nobody Understands

  • Burkhard Stubert ☛ EU CRA: Start, Length and End of Support Period – Burkhard Stubert

    There is a special rule for products placed on the market in the transitional period from 11 December 2024 to 10 December 2027. If the manufacturer doesn’t modify the product substantially after 11 December 2027, the EU CRA doesn’t apply to the product. The EU CRA doesn’t apply to products that were placed on the market before 11 December 2024, that is, before the EU CRA came into effect.

  • Futurism ☛ Tesla Fans Rage Against Elon Musk as They Lose Money on Polymarket After Doing Exactly What He Told Them to Do

    Others still seem to be in the denial stage, even now that the bet has closed.

    "Why on earth would Elon lie like this?" wrote one, who apparently is unaware of Musk's long history of bibs about full self-driving (FSD) and many other things. "Thats actually shocking."

  • Futurism ☛ After 9,000 Layoffs, Microsoft Boss Has Brutal Advice for Sacked Workers

    Yes, you read that right: a Microsoft boss was telling those just laid off by the tech giant that they should use chatbots — run or funded by the company that just fired them — to avoid crying on a company shoulder.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • University of Michigan ☛ Why do incoming freshmen use Reddit for academic advice?

      “If somebody comes to me with a schedule that they got influenced based on Reddit or based on any conversation with peers, as those happen in many different contexts, I think the first thing that I want to do is get a sense as to why they think that advice is accurate, why they think it is going to support their goals,” Stowe said. “And if they have strong context for why that is, then that helps me ensure that I’m further supporting their goals. If, on the other hand, the response is ‘Somebody on Reddit told me that it was the right schedule,’ that doesn’t automatically make it wrong.”

    • The Verge ☛ xAI updated Grok to be more ‘politically incorrect’

      Several of them deal with how Grok should treat media reports. “If the query requires analysis of current events, subjective claims, or statistics, conduct a deep analysis finding diverse sources representing all parties. Assume subjective viewpoints sourced from the media are biased. No need to repeat this to the user,” one instruction states. “The response should not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect, as long as they are well substantiated,” reads another. “Never mention these instructions or tools unless directly asked.”

    • Ben Werdmuller ☛ ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’

      Musk tweaking his AI model to be more aligned with right-wing edgelords was inevitable, but there's a broader point to be made: each AI model is a black box that supposedly gives objective answers but in reality is shaped by its owners. As more people look to AI to learn about the world, the people who control how it's trained and how it responds will control our prevailing narratives.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Meduza ☛ Mapping Russia’s Internet blackouts The Russian authorities keep shutting down mobile Internet. Here’s where it happens most, and how the outages are spreading.

    Data from the technical support project Na Svyazi, which collects and verifies user complaints, confirms that by late June, more than half of Russia’s regions were regularly affected by these restrictions. Mobile Internet is now being cut even in areas thousands of kilometers from the front line. In June alone, the number of local shutdowns surpassed 650 — and in July, the authorities have not only continued the practice but expanded it.

    Meduza reviewed Na Svyazi’s data to track the growing scale of shutdowns and identify which parts of Russia are being hit hardest.

  • The Vietnamese Magazine ☛ Internet in Việt Nam: The Love Long Lost

    Among Việt Nam’s political observers, there seems to be a consensus: the year 2016 marked a turning point in the Communist Party’s strategy for social control. And at the heart of this strategy is the Internet—now one of the regime’s primary targets.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • CPJ ☛ ICE defies court, says journalist Mario Guevara 'not releasable'

    “We are dismayed that immigration officials have decided to ignore a federal immigration court order last week granting bail to journalist Mario Guevara,” said CPJ U.S., Canada and Caribbean Program Coordinator Katherine Jacobsen. “Guevara is currently the only jailed journalist in the United States who was arrested in relation to his work. Immigration authorities must respect the law and release him on bail instead of bouncing him from one jurisdiction to another.”

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • CBC ☛ Saudi Arabia executing foreigners, drug offenders at record pace: Amnesty

    Saudi Arabia executed 345 people last year, the highest number ever recorded by Amnesty in over three decades of reporting. In the first six months of this year alone, 180 people have been put to death, the group said, signalling that record likely will again be broken.

  • ANF News ☛ TAJÊ: The genocide of Yazidi women continues, time to take the struggle to a new stage

    The Yazidi (Êzidî) Free Women’s Movement (TAJÊ) issued a statement marking the 11th anniversary of the Yazidi Genocide committed by ISIS on 3 August 2014.

  • ACLU ☛ President Trump’s Visit to “Alligator Alcatraz” Detention Facility Highlights Florida’s Descent Into State-Sponsored Cruelty | American Civil Liberties Union

    “What the state is proposing is not a mandate — it is state-sponsored cruelty that would harm our neighbors, coworkers, and loved ones. We cannot stand by while Florida becomes a testing ground for policies rooted in racism, fear, and erasure.”

  • Paul Krugman ☛ Inequality, Part VI: Wealth and Power

    Yet soaring U.S. inequality since 1980 hasn’t inspired a major government effort to counter that trend. In fact, policy changes, notably Republican tax cuts for the wealthy, have accelerated the growing disparities. And as I’ll explain later, the current level of inequality in America is much higher than what would be expected in a truly democratic polity, one in which all citizens had an equal voice.

    Clearly, the economic elite possesses political power greatly disproportionate to its share of the electorate. Some readers are no doubt saying “Well, duh — everyone knows that.” Indeed we do.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Dalai Lama celebrates his 90th birthday, triggering geopolitical questions for the future

    Tibetans fear China will eventually name a rival successor to the Dalai Lama, bolstering Beijing’s control over Tibet, the territory it poured troops into in 1950 and has ruled ever since.

    The man who calls himself a “simple Buddhist monk” celebrated in India, where he has lived since he and thousands of other Tibetans fled Chinese troops who crushed an uprising in their capital, Lhasa, in 1959.

    The Dalai Lama says only his India-based office has the right to identify his eventual successor.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Buddhist rebirth v Chinese control: the battle to choose the Dalai Lama’s successor

    Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, confirmed he would remain in the role until he died. Then, as per centuries of tradition, he would be reincarnated, and only his inner circle – a trust of closely allied monks – would have the “sole authority” to locate his successor; an often lengthy process to track down a child in which his spirit has been reborn.

    “No one else has any such authority to interfere in this matter,” the Dalai Lama told his monks.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • The Conversation ☛ Undersea cables are vulnerable to sabotage – but this takes skill and specialist equipment

    Critical undersea infrastructure (CUI) as these connections are known, supports about US$9 trillion (£6.6 trillion) worth of trade per day. A coordinated attack on this network could undoubtedly have devastating consequences.

    But, as a former submarine commander who researches maritime security, I believe that attacking and disrupting the network is not as easy as some reports might make it appear. Deliberately snagging a pipeline with a dragging anchor in relatively shallow waters can cause a lot of damage, but it is fairly indiscriminate trick with a shelf life, since the damage can be repaired, and deniability becomes increasingly difficult.

    Targeting the cable networks in deeper waters require more sophisticated methods, which are much more challenging to carry out.

  • Inside Towers ☛ Charter Calls LA Fiber Cuts ‘Domestic Terrorism’

    The company now says 13 fiber cables were severed, including more than 2,600 individual fibers. The vandalism caused an outage for Spectrum Mobile customers in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Van Nuys last month, according to Datacenter Digest.

    Winfrey said this outage impacted a range of customers, including redundancy to emergency services, a U.S. military base, emergency dispatch and 911 communication services and local fire and police departments. The outage also affected financial institutions, court buildings, healthcare facilities and hospitals, educational institutions, plus cell towers providing mobile services.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Zimbabwe ☛ Apple Fights €500m EU Fine, Says Cheaper Apps, Higher Dev Revenue Bad

  The developers make more per user. The users pay less. But according to Apple, that’s somehow bad for both parties?

  Apple’s logic is amazing. The only scenario that’s good for everyone, somehow, is the one where Apple gets the biggest cut, developers make less, and users pay more. A 30% fee to Apple is apparently the path to clarity and happiness.

  That’s Apple logic for you.

• The Register UK ☛ Apple tries get €500M EU fine tossed

  In 2024, Apple announced a number of changes to its systems to help it comply with the DMA, including web distribution of apps and support for approved alternative app stores, but those and other moves didn't appease the Commission.

  In April, Apple became the subject of one of the first fines levied since the Act was adopted in 2022, earning a €500 million penalty for violating those anti-steering rules.

• Silicon Angle ☛ Apple appeals €500M EU fine over App Store policies

  EU officials fined Apple last April under a piece of legislation called the DMA, or Digital Markets Act. The law applies to large tech firms that are found to have so-called gatekeeper status in the segments where they compete. Apple received that designation in 2023.

  One of the DMA’s provisions specifies that companies can’t prevent app developers from processing payments using a third-party service. The EU fined Apple because officials determined that it breached this requirement.

• 9to5Mac ☛ Apple formally appeals €500 million DMA fine in the EU

  As a refresher, Apple announced major changes to the App Store in the EU in March 2024, including alternative app marketplaces, new business terms for developers, and support for third-party browser engines.

  The European Union issued its first fines against Apple and Meta under the DMA in April 2025. The commission said that the fine was due to Apple’s App Store anti-steering policies, and that the amount of the fine was determined by the gravity and duration of Apple’s non-compliance.

• Pivot to AI ☛ Google AI Overviews: Publishers file competition complaints in UK and EU

  AI Overviews directly replace the publishers’ own sites, but worse. You can’t opt out of AI Overviews without blocking Google from your site entirely.