Leftovers

• Career/Education

  • International Business Times ☛ 'First Three Words of the US Constitution?': The Question Oklahoma Teacher Applicants Must Answer and More

    Responses among teacher applicants and unions have been mixed. Supporters argue that the exam sets a necessary standard, ensuring that all teachers, regardless of their subject area, share a common understanding of civic literacy.

  • Michel Alexandre Salim ☛ Hello from Europe!

    Looking forward to being able to make FrOSCon and Kernel Recipes next year! And probably even a future GUADEC and DebConf.

  • Neil Selwyn ☛ Thinking differently – rather than dismissively – about AI and education – Critical Studies of EDUCATION & TECHNOLOGY

    Yet perhaps the most disheartening aspect of the recent push for AI is how it devalues and debases the status of schools, teachers, students and everyone else involved in education. Any insistence that current forms of AI can improve education is an insistence that we accept a hollowed-out version of education that is routine, formulaic and utterly mindless. Seen in these terms, then, good teachers and students are those who always maximise their time, diligently respond to feedback and can be nudged to make correct decisions. Good education is simply a matter of repeatedly and efficiently doing the same things ‘at scale’. This is a robotic version of education that appeals to managerialists, consultants and tech-bros with little experience and/or interest in the unavoidable messiness of schools and classrooms. Much of the enthusiasm for ‘transforming education through AI’ is rooted in thinly-veiled contempt for the forms of education that we currently have. As Anthony Moser (2025) put it, “the makers of AI aren’t damned by their failures, they’re damned by their goals”.

• Hardware

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ TSMC’s foundry dominance hits new heights as global revenues smash records — 14.6% QoQ jump sees growth for Samsung, but TSMC's market share climbs to 70.2%

    The second quarter of 2025 was a windfall for the world’s chipmakers, with international foundry revenue climbing 14.6% to an unprecedented $41.7 billion.

    But the real story is Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, which seized a staggering 70% market share on the back of soaring demand for AI accelerators, smartphones, and next-gen PCs.

  • Daniel Lemire ☛ Processors are getting wider

    So, how do we go faster? Modern processors can execute multiple instructions simultaneously. It is sometimes called superscalar execution. Most processors can handle 4 instructions per cycle or more. A recent Apple processor can easily sustain over 8 instructions per cycle.

    However, the number of instructions executed depends on the instructions themselves. There are inexpensive instructions (like additions) and more costly ones (like integer division). The less costly the instructions, the more can be executed per cycle.

• Proprietary

  • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft cloud customers hit by messed-up migration

    An alarmed Register reader got in touch after receiving warnings from Azure's automated systems that they had significantly exceeded their budgets, and a glance at Microsoft's support forums indicates their issue was not isolated.

  • Lee Peterson ☛ Is larger text even tested at Apple?

    I’ve been using larger text on my iPhone since the iPhone 11 and to this day there are still bugs I see that baffle me.

  • Bitdefender ☛ [Cracker] suspected of trying to cheat his way into university is arrested in Spain

    Spain's Séneca platform, which is commonly used by teachers, students, and their families to manage grades, is said to have now had its security tightened up as a result of the incident.

  • Howard Oakley ☛ How large is that file?

    At first sight, this might seem a simple question to answer. Allow me to demonstrate that it’s more complex, has changed over time, and still hasn’t been resolved.

  • Financial Express ☛ After Indian origin Microsoft employee’s sudden death, young techie sets $3 million retirement goal: Here’s why [Ed: Working to death for Microsoft]

    Money can buy fame and comfort, but not happiness. The age-old proverb has once again been proven right by a 33-year-old technology professional in the US, who has cited the recent death of another 35-year-old professional as his reason to take an early retirement. The techie shared his take on social media, with a plan to take early retirement from the professional space with a net worth of $3 million.

  • Microsoft appoints Australian, New Zealand managing director [Ed: The real news is, Microsoft lost a MD

    Microsoft has appointed Jane Livesey as its new managing director for Australia and New Zealand, following the departure of Steven Worrall to Telstra.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • The Register UK ☛ AI web crawlers are destroying websites in their never-ending hunger for any and all content [Ed: SJVN keeps missing the point that this publisher takes money to promote this very bubble that's destroying the Web]

    • Zimbabwe ☛ OpenAI o1 Tried to Copy Itself, and Denied It 99% of the Time

      Back in May, we covered strange behaviours from AI systems: refusing shutdown, cheating at chess, and even threatening to blackmail humans.

      At the time, much of the data came from isolated safety tests and leaked research. Now, OpenAI, Apollo Research, and Palisade Research have released detailed findings, and the numbers confirm these behaviours are real, measurable, and not limited to a single company’s models.

    • India Times ☛ 'Fueling sexism': AI 'bikini interview' videos flood internet

      The videos are strikingly lifelike, featuring bikini-clad women conducting street interviews and eliciting lewd comments -- but they are entirely fake, generated by AI tools increasingly used to flood social media with sexist content. The fabricated clips were so lifelike that some users in the comments questioned whether the featured women were real.

    • The Conversation ☛ ChatGPT only talks in cliches – here’s why that’s a threat to human creativity

      But is this really what human conversation sounds like? Our new study shows that while ChatGPT plausibly imitates dialogue, it does so in a way that is stereotypical rather than unique.

    • Locus Magazine ☛ Commentary: Cory Doctorow: Reverse Centaurs – Locus Online

      But the mystery vanishes as soon as you learn about the social arrange­ments around the AI usage.

      I recently installed some AI software on my laptop: an open source model called Whisper that can transcribe audio files. I installed it be­cause I was writing an article and I wanted to cite something I’d heard an expert say on a podcast. I couldn’t remember which expert, nor even which podcast. So I downloaded Whisper, threw 30 or 40 hours’ worth of podcasts I’d recently listened to at it, and then, a couple hours later, searched the text until I found the episode, along with timecode for the relevant passage. I was able to call up the audio and review it and match it to the transcript, correct a few small errors, and paste it into my essay.

    • Seth Godin ☛ Walk away or dance

      Whether you dance or walk away, the goal is the same: create real value for the people who need it. Do work that matters for people who care.

      If we’re going to make a difference, we’ll need to bring labor to the work. The emotional labor of judgment, insight and risk.

    • Cendyne Naga ☛ What about the web developers?

      If a small business cannot safely self-host Wordpress – which they cannot – why should they try to self-host generated code? Vibe coding tends to produce a Next.js app, which isn't trivial to deploy and operate on your own infrastructure.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Fake freelance journalism with AI — until you’re busted

      You won’t find any of those stories online right now — because “Margaux Blanchard” appears to be a pen name for someone who thought they’d fake a career in freelance journalism. With AI!

      Journalism has long suffered fakes and plagiarists who built themselves a career on a throne of lies — until they were busted. AI lets the frauds go faster.

    • Krebs On Security ☛ The Ongoing Fallout from a Breach at AI Chatbot Maker Salesloft

      The recent mass-theft of authentication tokens from Salesloft, whose AI chatbot is used by a broad swath of corporate America to convert customer interaction into Salesforce leads, has left many companies racing to invalidate the stolen credentials before hackers can exploit them. Now Google warns the breach goes far beyond access to Salesforce data, noting the hackers responsible also stole valid authentication tokens for hundreds of online services that customers can integrate with Salesloft, including Slack, Google Workspace, Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, and OpenAI.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Register UK ☛ DDoSing is big and getting bigger – let's kill it off

      Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) is a profoundly unsexy cybercrime, and that's a big problem. Headlines are full of ransomware, data breaches, or the latest exploit. DDoS, where a site or service is poleaxed by a packet tsunami, is just background noise. Now and again, security agencies put out a press release because they've taken down one of the botnets that propagate DDoS attacks, but that's been going on for decades without much effect.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Technocratic Liberal Establishment and the Perils of the Analytical Frame

    Not once, but twice. And the second time, after everything we learned about his authoritarian intentions, his systematic corruption, his open contempt for democratic norms. The same expert class that assured us institutions would hold, that checks and balances would constrain him, that “adults in the room” would prevent constitutional catastrophe, now watches in bewildered horror as he deploys military forces against American cities, uses the FBI to raid political opponents, and systematically dismantles democratic governance while maintaining the fiction of legal process.

    This isn’t just a political failure. It’s an epistemological crisis that reveals something fundamental about how the technocratic liberal establishment understands reality itself. They’ve become trapped in what I call “the analytical frame”—a mode of thinking that treats complex social and political realities as problems to be solved through expert analysis rather than ongoing tensions to be navigated through democratic engagement.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Trump's Military Moves Increase Risk of Civil Conflict

    Trump is using the military to beta-test an American police state. And he is going about it in a way that could stoke conflict between military units of Republican- and Democratic-governed states, says Ret. Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who spoke to reporters on a conference call, Tuesday. “That’s the scariest thing about what we’re watching right now.”

  • Michael Geist ☛ Grocery Shopping While Jewish

    In my family, it was always the “kosher Loblaws.” Featuring Ottawa’s only large kosher food section, the Loblaws location at College Square in the west end of the city is our destination several times per week for everything from groceries, to prescription refills, to challah bread for Shabbat. My Globe and Mail opinion piece published this weekend notes that as the only such store in Ottawa, it serves as both a place to see familiar faces and a reminder of the small size of the Jewish community here.

  • NYPost ☛ Kristi Noem accuses CBS of ‘shamefully’ editing her interview on Kilmar Abrego Garcia to ‘whitewash’ MS-13 gang affiliation

    Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem went on a tirade against CBS News on Sunday over allegations the network edited her interview about alleged MS-13 gang member Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an illegal migrant that theDihydroxyacetone Man administration deported to El Salvador earlier this year.

  • France24 ☛ China summit a symbol of a world aiming to 'make itself America-proof', expert says

    Speaking with FRANCE 24's Sharon Gaffney, Robert Manning, Distinguished Fellow at the Global Foresight Hub and China Programme at the Stimson Centre, says that this year's summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization has become symbolic of a world that aims to 'make itself America-proof, both in terms of new trade arrangements and new security arrangements'.

  • JURIST ☛ EU requests US to reverse visa ban on Palestinian officials

    The European Union (EU) urged the US government on Saturday to reverse its decision to block members of the Palestinian Authority (PA) from obtaining visas.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Indonesian groups call off protests on Sept 1 citing heightened security

    The protests began in Jakarta a week ago, and have spread nationwide, escalating in size and intensity.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Indonesia tightens security after deadly protests

    Police have set up checkpoints across the capital Jakarta.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • France24 ☛ ‘Europe’s overlooked power plant’: Why Poland is leaning toward the Baltic Sea

      Poland, long considered a central European country, is starting to look north toward its Nordic and Baltic neighbors. The shift is driven by energy and security concerns, with the Baltic Sea representing a potential green industry centre, according to an expert.

    • LRT ☛ Lithuania seeks €8bn in EU loans for defence and border security

      Lithuania is seeking up to €8 billion in loans from the European Union’s new defence financing programme to strengthen its military and border protection, President Gitanas Nausėda said Monday.

    • LRT ☛ Are Baltics vulnerable to Iberian-like electric blackout?

      A massive power outage that left much of Spain and Portugal without electricity for about 10 hours this spring is fuelling renewed debate in Lithuania over energy security and resilience.

• Environment

  • Science Alert ☛ Common Pesticide Linked to Widespread Brain Abnormalities in Children

    Progressively higher prenatal exposure to chlorpyrifos was associated with incrementally greater deviations in brain structure, function, and metabolism in children and teens, the researchers found, along with poorer measures of motor speed and motor programming.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ For the first time in 40 Years, Panama's deep and cold ocean waters fail to emerge

    The natural phenomenon of upwelling, which occurs annually in the Gulf of Panama, failed for the first time on record in 2025. A study led by scientists from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) indicates that the weakening of the trade winds was the cause of this event. This finding highlights the climate's impact on fundamental oceanic processes and the coastal communities that depend on them.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Julia Programming Language ☛ Satellite Power Analysis: A Fast, Composable, High-Fidelity Approach

      Designing reliable satellite power systems requires accurately predicting how much power solar panels will generate as the spacecraft moves through its orbit. This is a complex challenge because solar power availability depends on both the satellite’s orbital dynamics and the behavior of the solar panel itself. To build a realistic power budget, engineers must combine orbital analysis (determining sunlight exposure, eclipse periods, and panel orientation relative to the sun) with a detailed solar panel model (capturing how voltage, current, and efficiency vary under changing conditions). Without integrating these two aspects, power predictions risk being overly simplistic and missing critical mission constraints.

      Traditional workflows for this type of analysis are often fragmented, with separate tools for orbital mechanics and electrical system modeling. This separation forces manual data transfers, custom scripts, and difficulty scaling models as new components are added. A unified modeling environment that couples orbital analysis with solar panel and power electronics simulation offers a faster, high-fidelity, and mission-relevant way to design and validate spacecraft power systems.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Semafor Inc ☛ Kenya hires former Trump official to lobby US

    Nairobi signed an agreement with Continental Strategy — the lobbying firm founded by Carlos Trujillo, a former US ambassador to the Organization of American States, and a close ally of US President Donald Trump — for a monthly retainer of $175,000 plus expenses, the Nairobi-based outlet reported.

  • The New Stack ☛ XSLT Debate Leads to Bigger Questions of Web Governance

    Security issues and web compatibility are pulling in different directions, as Google and Firefox discuss dropping XSLT support from browsers.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • US News And World Report ☛ In Chicago, Thousands Protest Against Threat of ICE, National Guard Deployment

    The march was one of roughly 1,000 "Workers over Billionaires" protests across the country on the U.S. Labor Day holiday. But Chicago's demonstration had a decidedly more pointed tone as residents bristled against Trump's promise to target Chicago next in a deployment similar to those under way in Los Angeles and Washington D.C., two other Democrat-run cities.

  • The Nation ☛ “There Are No Illegal Strikes—Only Unsuccessful Ones”: A Conversation With Sara Nelson

    Representing some 55,000 members at 20 airlines, Sara Nelson valiantly defends her people. Back in 2019, she used the threat of a strike to ground air traffic to help end an extended government shutdown. During the pandemic, she won a $54 billion Covid-relief package for her industry. Nelson is in her third term as the international president of the Association of Flight Attendants and widely regarded as one of the most lionhearted leaders in the labor movement. When Bernie Sanders launched his Fight the Oligarchy tour earlier this year, she joined. When United Auto Workers leader Shawn Fain floated talk of a general strike, she chimed in. A former flight attendant herself, Nelson knows how to leverage worker power, and her strategies are exactly what the labor movement needs in 2025.

  • The Nation ☛ “They Will Attack Every Organized Worker in America”

    Representing 820,000 workers in the federal government and the government of the District of Columbia, AFGE is battling to protect not just the jobs of its members, but services for the great mass of Americans whose health, safety and security are under threat from a privatization-scheming president and his Republican Congress.

    As Labor Day approached, The Nation spoke with Kelley—an Army veteran and Baptist preacher who worked for decades at an Anniston, Alabama, Army depot, before becoming the president of his union and a national vice president of the AFL-CIO—about how workers are struggling to survive Trump’s war on the working class. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

  • New York Times ☛ Dihydroxyacetone Man Orders Have Stripped Nearly Half a Million Federal Workers of Union Rights

    The president, who has targeted collective bargaining contracts for nearly one million government employees, has said their functions touch on national security.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Sandwich Guy Redux: In Your Fascist Face | Opinion

    In the now-famous "assault with a deli weapon," Sean Dunn, a 37-year-old decorated Afghanistan veteran and former trial attorney and foreign affairs specialist with the DOJ, got up in the face of one masked, armed, burly goon among many in D.C., yelled, “Fuck you! You fucking fascists! Why are you here?" and hurled his wrapped sandwich, reportedly salami, at said goon's bullet-proof-vested chest before sprinting away. About 30 federal agents, with little else to do, chased down, handcuffed and arrested him. He was quickly released, but the next day, in the well-worn name of totalitarian pageantry, the DOJ recorded dozens of stormtroopers swarming his apartment, guns drawn Bin-Laden-like, to re-arrest him and charge him with felony assault for what U.S. Attorney Boxwine Pirro called "a serious crime," but definitely not like the Jan. 6 now-pardoned rioters who assaulted over 140 cops.

  • Mandy Brown ☛ Exit strategy

    Gorz is writing long before AI hypemen started to promise the elimination of millions of jobs, but automation has always been the aim of capitalism, since the first steam-powered looms displaced experienced weavers and installed children in their place. Now, that automation is coming for “knowledge” work—for work that was hailed as somehow exempt from the degradation and alienation of all other work, but whose hailing was only ever a thin and shabby cover.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Trump VA Union Busting Is Another Step Toward Privatizing Veteran Care

    In reality, the administration has waged an all-out assault on the welfare of the men and women who served the nation. The latest blow, appropriately coming ahead of Labor Day, all but entirely strips VA employees of their ability to organize as a workforce.

    On August 6, the VA terminated most of its collective bargaining agreements with major unions, gutting protections for nearly 370,000 employees in one stroke. The agency framed the move as a way to “shift resources” back to veterans. The VA announced last week that it shifted a whole $39M “back to veterans.” In other words, the VA is spending a dollar to save a penny. The supposed savings aren’t even enough to employ five doctors full-time over the course of their careers.

  • NPR ☛ How Trump is decimating federal employee unions one step at a time

    But last month, the administration sent agencies updated guidance, telling them they could go ahead with terminating most union contracts — just not those with the National Treasury Employees Union, due to ongoing litigation. To date, nine agencies have canceled contracts, according to the American Federation of Government Employees.

    In late August, a judge on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals called for a vote on whether the case should be reheard en banc, by a panel of 11 judges. That vote could happen this month.

    "I have hope that this will be reversed," says Fornnarino, while acknowledging that for now, their union protections are gone.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Digital Music News ☛ Music Streaming Prices to Rise Every 12-24 Months, Report Claims

    Running with the idea, direct comparisons between video- and music-streaming revenue are a big part of the report and the predictions therein.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Copyrights

  • Mexico News Daily ☛ Mexico says works created by AI cannot be granted copyright

  • 404 Media ☛ How OnlyFans Piracy Is Ruining the Internet for Everyone

    Innocent sites are being delisted from Google because of copyright takedown requests against rampant OnlyFans piracy.