Leftovers

• Small Cypress ☛ a fish and other things

  My last betta, Mr. Opal, passed away last week after over a year with a massive tumor and two with me. He was some a reject galaxy plakat betta, cellophane baby pink with flashy white scales and little streaks of chocolate brown on his fins. He was in an overflow tank full of plants in my LFS in Florida with the rest of his spawn for a couple bucks. As soon as I saw him I set up a tank and came back for him the next week.

• Farnam Street Media Inc ☛ Irrational Dedication

  That hotel didn’t have to exist. Every single thing we see, someone had to will it into existence against the entropy of the universe and the indifference of everyone else. That’s what the entire built world is.

• Robert Birming ☛ The "just one more" trap

  No matter how many books, podcasts, videos, or talks we consume, the truth remains the same: in the end, we have to find out for ourselves what works best.

• Juha-Matti Santala ☛ Blaugust 2025 retrospective: Surprising Rainbow Diamond Award

  In general, I’m real glad I took part again and that I found the inspiration to write daily. I found a ton of new blogs from first-time Blaugustans and made new friends along the way.

  Starting next week, I’m back to my regular Wednesday schedule with occasional extras on other days.

• Science

  • Ken Koon Wong ☛ Learning The Basics of Phylogenetic Analysis

    After that last hands-on experience on Bioconductor, we will continue our journey in phylogenetic analysis. I’ve always been intrigued in how biologists piece these phylogenetic tree together and I want to know the big idea of how this is done. We’ll again be using Bioconductor. Let’s go!

  • Graydon2 ☛ graydon2 | snuffle / salsa / chacha

    A couple years back I had occasion to read in slightly more detail than I had before about the state of the art in cryptographically secure PRNGs (CSPRNGs). These are PRNGs we trust to have additional properties beyond the speed and randomness requirements of normal ones -- inability for an attacker to reveal internal state, mainly, so you can use them to generate secrets.

    If you look, you'll find a lot of people recommending something based on one of Dan Bernstein's algorithms: Salsa20 or ChaCha (or even more obscurely "Snuffle"). All the algorithms we're discussing here are very similar in design, and vary only in minor details of interest only to cryptographers.

• Career/Education

  • LRT ☛ ’Me, a teacher? No way!’ How unexpected words sparked a journey towards a calling

    “When a teacher told me in the seventh grade that I would become a teacher, I just laughed: ‘Me, a teacher? No way!’ Yet here I am, now in my third year of standing in front of a class, teaching physics and math, and I know I am exactly where I belong,” says Paulina Jacynė, a teacher at Kaunas Martynas Mažvydas Progymnasium.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ America’s education crisis threatens to unravel a superpower

    “Even if it’s only half as bad as those test scores suggest, it’s unbelievably terrible. It’s hard to overstate how bad it is,” says Nat Malkus, the deputy director of education studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

    America is losing its brain power and it is jeopardising its place on the world stage.

    Once the world’s education superpower, the US is slipping down global rankings. With this decline comes a massive threat to productivity, economic growth and America’s national security.

• Hardware

  • Kevin Boone ☛ A failed experiment in laptop cooling

    This article is about my attempt to improve the cooling on my Lenovo P53, by making a custom cooling stand with three extra fans. This attempt failed – it didn’t provide any extra cooling at all. I’m writing about it here, in the hope that I can stop other folks making the same mistakes that I made. I learned a lot, and I now have a much clearer idea why the reported results for proprietary cooling stands are so variable. But I don’t have a cooler laptop.

• Proprietary

  • The Newsprint ☛ The Sunday Edition — 08.31.25

    The transition from Microsoft OneDrive to Google Drive has been seamless, apart from the length of time it took to upload all our documentation. My early research suggested a 14-hour wait time to upload about 700 GB of data. That meant I started at the end of a workday with the expectation everything would be uploaded by the start of the next working day.

    Oh, how wrong I was.

    It took about four full days for everything to upload, meaning I had to come up with a few workarounds for staff to save their files and documentation. It all worked out in the end, but I was surprised by how big of a miss my time estimate has been.

    The Microsoft Exchange to Google Gmail transition will be the biggest and most difficult transition of the bunch, so I will be patient and make sure all my ducks are in a row. I’ll report back when the transition is done.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • France24 ☛ Summer of AI psychosis: stories of tragic chatbot interactions multiply

      Stein-Erik Soelberg killed his mother and himself in Connecticut earlier this month, with the Wall Street Journal reporting that ChatGPT fuelled his irrational fears about her. Meanwhile a couple in California has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI after the suicide of their son, accusing ChatGPT of helping him do it. In this week's Tech 24, we explore what's behind the increase in tragic stories that's accompanied the boom in people talking to AI chatbots.

    • Futurism ☛ J. Crew Is in Hot Water After Its “Vintage” Ad Turned Out to Be Faked Using AI

      But as style blog Blackbird Spyplane first spotted, upon closer inspection the images are absolutely littered with signs of AI slop. The errors range from small oddities — misaligned stripes on a rugby shirt, for instance — to more blatant errors, like one man's foot facing backwards and another's hands melting into the handlebars of his bike.

    • The Verge ☛ Chatbots can be manipulated through flattery and peer pressure

      Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania deployed tactics described by psychology professor Robert Cialdini in Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion to convince OpenAI’s GPT-4o Mini to complete requests it would normally refuse. That included calling the user a jerk and giving instructions for how to synthesize lidocaine. The study focused on seven different techniques of persuasion: authority, commitment, liking, reciprocity, scarcity, social proof, and unity, which provide “linguistic routes to yes.”

    • Pivot to AI ☛ 31% of employees are ‘sabotaging’ your corporate AI strategy!

      I don’t trust the numbers or sampling for this survey, because they actively went looking for generative AI users. This is a push poll to market Writer.

      Here’s what Writer describes as “sabotage”: [...]

  • Social Control Media

    • Gannett ☛ Republican leader’s call to civil war shows extent of South Dakota’s conspiracy infection

      Surely, these theories sprang from the cities where the friction of daily life in such confined quarters led people to believe the oddest things. Out here on the prairie, where there’s plenty of room to roam, we seemed immune to those ideas. We seemed safe from conspiracy theories.

      Those days are over, if they ever existed.

• Security

  • Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation

    • [Old] Tom's Hardware ☛ The dream of a Raspberry Pi laptop becomes a reality — ArgonOne Up Review

      The ArgonOne Up doesn’t use any old Raspberry Pi; it uses the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 (CM5), and that means we have a laptop that we can easily upgrade by removing the CM5 and swapping in a new one. Perhaps someday, even a CM6 will work. We also have an M.2 slot for PCIe-based storage or an AI accelerator. Or if you are Jeff Geerling, a PCIe breakout for a GPU.

      I’ve been given access to a pre-production unit, on which this review is based. There are some areas where my unit will differ from others. The finish may be a little different, and the shipping software should be more finalized. I’ll point things out as I go through the review.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Futurism ☛ Woman Goes to Get Brazilian Wax, Alarmed to Notice Waxer Is Wearing Meta’s Video Recording Glasses

      "After that I kind of shut down, and I could not stop thinking, 'could this girl be filming me right now?'" the influencer recounted. "I literally could not stop thinking about it the whole entire time."

      Visibly perturbed, Navarro asked her followers for advice on what to do, and many urged her to contact lawyers and EWC headquarters. In a followup, the young woman said that she emailed the waxing chain and was given only a "generic" response — and when EWC sent her a customer satisfaction survey, she again expressed her distress at the situation.

    • The Washington Post ☛ Porn sites that ignore age-check laws are getting a flood of traffic

      The age-verification laws rapidly expanding across the United States and United Kingdom are bringing with them some surprising downsides, including bursts of traffic to seedy parts of the web.

    • BoingBoing ☛ Facebook app tricking users into letting it scan and "retain" all the photos on their phones

      In no uncertain terms, add Picaro, you're "giving Meta the right to access and retain your camera roll images."

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Marisa Kabas ☛ Officer repeatedly seen on camera in DC crackdown shows Trump agents' impunity

    As Trump seeks to expand the powers of his many federal law enforcement agencies to other cities like Chicago and New York, the unbridled violence committed on his behalf will continue to flourish. Officer O’Hanlon isn’t unique in his behavior; the only thing that sets him apart is that he got caught on camera. And if the history of the Trump regime is any indicator, he may even be rewarded for it.

• Environment

  • Dave DeGraw ☛ Three Days in the Wilderness

    Life isn’t a checklist, man. I don’t have a goal. I literally had a dream about what was west of Delta and needed to find out. That’s it. I saw a lot of amazing things. I had some great thoughts. I’ll remember the experience for the rest of my life. It was just me, only me. I can’t share someone else’s memory and opinion about the trip because there wasn’t anyone there. That solitude is so incredibly freeing.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Norway’s electricity crisis is about to hit Britain

    Reservoir levels in southern Norway are now well below the 20-year average and heading towards 20-year lows. This is hugely concerning. Norway has almost no pumping capability which means that once the water has been used, it will not be replaced until it rains or the snow melts.

    The south of Norway is the main region of tension. This is where the interconnectors to Britain and Germany land, and where the population is highest.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Crooked Timber ☛ The crash of 2026: a fiction

    Looking at the facts, there’s no reasonable conclusion except that US democracy is done for. But rather than face facts, I’m turning to fiction. So, here’s a story about the collapse of Trumpism, crony capitalism and the AI/crypto bubble. Fiction is a relatively unfamilar mode of writing for me, so critique (on style and structure rather than plausibility) is most welcome.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Finland phasing out swastikas on military unit flags

    Finland began using the swastika in its Air Force insignia years before the Nazis appropriated the symbol, and continued to use it after Hitler's regime was ashes. It dropped the swastika from its Air Force logo in 2020, but after joining NATO in 2023, things got a bit awkward with its new military allies when certain unit flags flew. And so the last of them are being phased out.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Banned! The 20 books they didn’t want you to read

    The phenomenon has accelerated in recent years. The machinery of school censorship in the US has also become significantly more corporate. According to the American Library Association’s analysis of its 2024 data, “the majority of book censorship attempts are now originating from organised movements. Pressure groups and government entities that include elected officials, board members and administrators initiated 72% of demands to censor books in school and public libraries.” Between 2001 and 2020, such groups challenged an average of 46 titles per year. Last year, they challenged 4,190 titles in 12 months.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • US News And World Report ☛ PBS, NPR Stations Struggle With Trump-Fueled Government Funding Cuts

    Many launched emergency fund drives and are heartened by the response. The national NPR and PBS networks are reducing expected dues payments, and a philanthropic effort focused on the hardest-hit stations is taking shape. No stations have shut down, but job and programming cuts are already beginning.

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ Can newsrooms become social platforms?

    There’s a lot to unpack here. I’ll break this down into the following questions:

    • Will newsrooms embrace audiences as part of the story?
    • Can newsrooms become social platforms themselves?
    • Can social platform models survive AI?

    These questions are particularly interesting to me. Beyond leading newsroom technology at places like ProPublica and The 19th, I spent decades building open source social networking systems that organizations could white label and incorporate into their own communities and brands. Elgg was used by governments, Ivy League universities, social movements, and NGOs. And I’m active in the communities behind the new generation of protocol-driven social media platforms like Bluesky and Mastodon, in part as a board member of A New Social.

    Let’s dig into it.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • International Business Times ☛ 'Women Are No Longer Safe': Critics Blame Surge in Migrant Crime Across Europe

    It is the nightmare no government dares to fully admit: women are no longer safe in Europe. The numbers are staggering, the crimes horrifying, yet silence continues to prevail in high offices. When the facts are laid bare, the headline sadly writes itself.

  • International Business Times ☛ What Happened to Europe? Britons Beg Trump for Help Amid Anger Over Migrant Crime and Far-Left Policies

    Official figures show reported rape offences in Britain have surged by 438% since 2013, according to Home Office data.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ A Private Company Fighting Online Piracy Can't Act With Impunity

    The issue of pirate IPTV overblocking by LaLiga was raised in Congress this week for a second time. Political party ERC called for urgent intervention by the Spanish state. "A private company cannot act with impunity and indiscriminately in defense of its business," said spokesperson Gabriel Rufián. Not only does LaLiga take issue with the terminology, its position remains unchanged. Because it's a "supervised judicial procedure with very restrictive safeguarding criteria," there is no overblocking. At least not of anything important, LaLiga says.