Leftovers

• Yordi Verkroost ☛ Do Fewer Things

  Matt D'Avella has been an antidote to hustle culture for years now. He preaches something different from the “get‑rich‑quick” guys you see all over the internet, overflowing your life with false truths, fake news, and outright dangerous propositions. The only way to learn from those people is to listen to their message and then do the exact opposite of what they preach.

• Ruben Schade ☛ Comfort viewing

  That sounds true, but the article doesn’t draw the obvious connection. People keep going back to the classics today precisely because new movies and TV are so uninspired. Why not go back to the source when so much new stuff is just reboots?

• Robert Birming ☛ The silent applause

  But that’s not quite what I want to bring to the discussion. I agree with Manu’s advice about linking and commenting, and I practice it too, yet my thoughts on logliness (from the ancient Latin loglinus) wander elsewhere.

• Manuel Moreale ☛ Blogs don’t need to be so lonely

  I can’t stop smiling because we already have this. It’s what people used to call the blogosphere. There are already potentially millions of people out there, posting together, without much oversight or coordination between them. I have interviewed one hundred and six of them for People and Blogs (which, btw, is a collaborative blogging project) and there are almost a thousand collected on the blogroll.

• Kushaiah Felisilda ☛ 2025-W36

  Turns out taking a creative break isn’t always refreshing. Sometimes it just reminds you why you started creating in the first place. September feels like a good month to get back to it.

• Ted Unangst ☛ the boy who cried wolf

• Science

  • The Scotsman ☛ Can Scotland make the computing quantum leap?

    For those of us who are not quantum computing professors or rocket scientists, it can be difficult to get your head around this emerging technology, but thankfully there was an actual professor on hand to provide an idiot’s guide.

  • [Old] The Express Tribune ☛ Zara Dar's STEM lectures on Pornhub outperform YouTube in earnings

    In a viral post, Dar shared that YouTube typically generates more views, but Pornhub pays nearly three times the revenue per million views.

    "People may not know this, but I publish the same STEM videos on both YouTube and Pornhub," she wrote, explaining that Pornhub pays $1,000 per million views, compared to YouTube's $340. She shared a screenshot comparing the videos on both platforms, titled “What is a Neural Network?”

• Career/Education

  • Futurism ☛ CEO Who Created AI Startup to Cheat on Homework Complains That AI Is Destroying Education

    When one poster challenged Lee on whether he himself had contributed to the destruction of education in the US, the CEO had little to offer by way of alternatives, or really any vision for the future. Instead, he simply reasoned that there's a "system that is much better than traditional education that will much better serve the people of today."

    In other words, Lee's perfectly content on destroying traditional education — a system which can trace its evolution back to the philosophers of ancient Greece — to make a buck. Just don't bother asking him what should take its place.

  • Michigan Advance ☛ Trump campaigned on closing the Education Department. Reality is more difficult.

    But after a dizzying array of cuts and changes in the months since Trump took office looking to dismantle the agency, the GOP-controlled Congress — the only body that can abolish the 45-year-old department it created — is throwing up roadblocks to elimination.

  • Herman Õunapuu ☛ The unreasonable effectiveness of the pancake rule

    Being chronically late to meetings sucks.

    Not only is it very rude, but you’re signalling that you don’t value your coworkers’ time.

    However, I’ve picked up a technique that works unreasonably well within a team.1

    If you are late to the first meeting of the day three times within a quarter, then you will have to make pancakes for the whole team.

• Hardware

  • Michael Stapelberg ☛ Bye Intel, hi AMD! I’m done after 2 dead Intels

    The Intel 285K CPU in my high-end 2025 Linux PC died again! 😡 Notably, this was the replacement CPU for the original 285K that died in March, and after reading through the reviews of Intel CPUs on my electronics store of choice, many of which (!) mention CPU replacements, I am getting the impression that Intel’s current CPUs just are not stable 😞. Therefore, I am giving up on Intel for the coming years and have bought an AMD Ryzen 9950X3D CPU instead.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Futurism ☛ A Chemical in Plastic Is Wreaking Havoc on Unborn Children, Scientists Warn

    Her concern: the chemicals known as phthalates, which make plastics stronger and more flexible but also act as a hormone disruptor that has been linked to everything from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and asthma to obesity and premature birth, among countless other health issues.

    Unlike per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances or PFAS, another widespread and terrifying class of contaminants referred to as "forever chemicals" due to their longevity, some scientists have taken to calling phthalates "everywhere chemicals," because they dissipate quickly but are nonetheless constantly contaminating basically everyone on the planet thanks to massive plastic overconsumption.

  • Seth Godin ☛ False scarcity | Seth's Blog

    Often, the things we want the most aren’t directly related to the things we need.

  • Jeroen Sangers ☛ Jeroen Sangers ◦ brain tags - Reduce mobile phone use to improve your life satisfaction, well-being, and health

• Proprietary

  • Stephen Hackett ☛ macOS Screenshot Library

    While sometimes it can be hard to see from single release to single release, Apple has steadily been refining the Aqua user interface since first introducing it.

    Of course, there have been highs and lows. Pin stripes and Brushed Metal and Linen and Rich Corinthian Leather. Transparency and Vibrancy. At times, Apple had led the way into new design trends, and at other times, they have fallen behind the rest of the industry.

  • Basic Apple Guy ☛ macOS Icon History

    With macOS 26, Apple has announced a dramatically new look to their UI: Liquid Glass. Solid material icon elements give way to softer, shinier, glassier icons. The rounded rectangle became slightly more rounded, and Apple eliminated the ability for icon elements to extend beyond the icon rectangle (as seen in the current icons for GarageBand, Photo Booth, Dictionary, etc.).

    With this release being one of the most dramatic visual overhauls of macOS's design, I wanted to begin a collection chronicling the evolution of the system icons over the years. I've been rolling these out on social media over the past week and will continue to add to and update this collection slowly over the summer. Enjoy!

  • Lee Peterson ☛ Tim Cook, how low will you go?

    I’ve completely lost faith in Apple over the last year, they are no different to Meta at this point from a company perspective. They no longer line up with the way I believe you should treat other humans.

    At this point we all have to make a personal choice, I’m not saying throw out all of your Apple gear. I’m saying before fawning over the new gear next week, take a step back. Have a think about if you want to put your money and support into a company that supports the current US regime, doesn’t stand up for you, doesn’t line up with your beliefs and gives trophies for bad behaviour.

  • Howard Oakley ☛ A brief history of Adobe’s apps

    Few other companies have had as much influence on the Mac and its success as Adobe. Founded just over a year before Apple launched the Mac, its original mission was to develop and market its new PostScript page description language, originally designed and written by Adobe’s co-founders, John Warnock (1940-2023) and Charles Geschke (1939-2021). Steve Jobs (1955-2011) was an early enthusiast who shared their vision. After an unsuccessful bid to buy Adobe, Apple bought a 19% stake in it and paid in advance for a five-year licence for PostScript. When Apple introduced its first PostScript laser printer, the LaserWriter, in March 1985 the partnership launched the Desktop Publishing (DTP) revolution.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ Experts Concerned AI Is Going to Start a Nuclear War

      Worst of all, they say, is that this is still happening while we still don't quite understand how AI works — and as testing shows that in wargaming exercises, it tends to escalate conflicts to apocalyptic levels that humans would have cooled down.

      "It’s almost like the AI understands escalation, but not de-escalation," Stanford's Jacquelyn Schneider, the director of the university's Hoover Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative who has tested AI systems' response to military wargaming, told Politico in a sobering new story. "We don’t really know why that is."

    • The Atlantic ☛ Are We in an AI Bubble?

      In the study, published in July, the think tank Model Evaluation & Threat Research randomly assigned a group of experienced software developers to perform coding tasks with or without AI tools. It was the most rigorous test to date of how AI would perform in the real world. Because coding is one of the skills that existing models have largely mastered, just about everyone involved expected AI to generate huge productivity gains. In a pre-experiment survey of experts, the mean prediction was that AI would speed developers’ work by nearly 40 percent. Afterward, the study participants estimated that AI had made them 20 percent faster.

      But when the METR team looked at the employees’ actual work output, they found that the developers had completed tasks 20 percent slower when using AI than when working without it. The researchers were stunned. “No one expected that outcome,” Nate Rush, one of the authors of the study, told me. “We didn’t even really consider a slowdown as a possibility.”

    • Wired ☛ Psychological Tricks Can Get AI to Break the Rules

      Before you start to think this is a breakthrough in clever LLM jailbreaking technology, though, remember that there are plenty of more direct jailbreaking techniques that have proven more reliable in getting LLMs to ignore their system prompts. And the researchers warn that these simulated persuasion effects might not end up repeating across "prompt phrasing, ongoing improvements in AI (including modalities like audio and video), and types of objectionable requests." In fact, a pilot study testing the full GPT-4o model showed a much more measured effect across the tested persuasion techniques, the researchers write.

    • Robin Sloan ☛ Knowledge and memory

      The other day, I asked Claude how to do some­thing using a par­tic­ular Ruby library, and it hal­lu­ci­nated three nonex­is­tent methods in a row. We can ask “why do lan­guage models do this?” but/and we can also ask, “why doesn’t Robin do this?”

      I think it’s because I don’t only know things: I remember learning them. My knowl­edge is sedimentary, and I can “feel” the posi­tion and solidity of dif­ferent facts and ideas in that mass. I can feel, too, the airy dis­con­nect of a guess.

    • [Repeat] Ruben Schade ☛ Robodebt, and Australia’s largest ever class action

      Baked into the Robodebt pie of electronic hubris were a series of base assumptions about a victim’s income, which were extrapolated over an entire year. The difference could then be calculated, and social security recipients could be billed.

      If you spotted the issue when I said “assumption”, congratulations! You’re smarter than an Australian government department. The numbers the system spat out were complete tosh; and they didn’t even have access to a gen-“AI” tool they could ascribe blame for “hallucinating” figures. But its victims were all too real, and even the proceeds from the largest class action suit in Australia’s history came too late to save some of them.

    • Martin Chang ☛ Distrust of AI coding agents (Google Jules) - Martin's website/blog thingy

      Jules did some bold changes. Such as

      • Disabling HTML minimization
      • Remove ETag handling
      • Remove Content Security Policy
      • Increasing the threads available to the Gemini side of the server. Disregarding if that impacts the HTTP side under load

      It's arguable if SHA256 as ETag is a performance problem. Sure SHA256 is not fast (that'd be the BLAKE2/3 family of algorithms). But deleting CSP along with it is more then problematic. I fear inexperienced developers would actually see some performance improvement in the cold path, did not see what happens to the hot path and let this through.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ The AI scraper bots are hammering Pivot to AI again — please test

      Pivot to AI lives on a small and cheap virtual server at Hetzner (who are great). The site’s been slowing badly of late. If you guessed it’s our AI bot friends, you are correct!

      I put some fixes in place in June. And those worked — until recently. I won’t say what I‘ve done, but I put some new fixes in.

    • The Register UK ☛ Snake eating tail: Google’s AI Overviews cites web pages written by AI, study says

      Welcome to the age of ouroboros. Google’s AI Overviews (AIOs), which now often appear at the top of organic search results, are drawing around 10 percent of their sources from documents written by ... other AIs, according to a recent report.

      Originality.ai, a company that makes AI detection software, recently studied 29,000 different Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) Google queries, those that cover life-changing topics such as health, financial, legal, or political topics. The company then evaluated the AIOs that appeared at the top of the page, the links they cited, and the first 100 organic search results for each query.

      [...]

      When we asked Google for its response, the company told us that it takes issue with the accuracy of Originality.ai’s AI detector itself.

      “This is a flawed study relying on partial data and unreliable technology,” a spokesperson said. “AI detectors have not proven their effectiveness at detecting AI generated content – in fact, many have demonstrated they are error-prone. As in Search more broadly, the links that are included in AI Overviews are dynamic and change based on the information that is most relevant, helpful, and timely for a given search.”

  • Social Control Media

    • BIA Net ☛ Turkey restricts social media amid police blockade on opposition party

      Following the police blockade of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) office in İstanbul late yesterday, social media platforms across the country experienced bandwidth throttling, effectively rendering them inaccessible.

    • International Business Times ☛ Philies Karen' Identity Revealed? Wrong Woman Goes Viral For Snatching Ball From Boy During Friday's Game

      As clips circulated online, viewers dubbed the woman 'Phillies Karen' and attempted to uncover her identity. Within hours, several women were wrongly accused.

• Defence/Aggression

  • YLE ☛ Russians still moving to Finland despite border closure

    Despite the closure of the eastern border, Russians continue to be able to move to Finland for work and study, reports Finnish news agency STT.

  • Politico LLC ☛ The AI Doomsday Machine Is Closer to Reality Than You Think

    “The AI is trained on the corpus of what scholarly written work there already is about the strategy of war,” says Schneider. “And the vast majority of that work looks at escalation — there is definitely a bias toward it. There aren’t as many case studies on why war didn’t break out — the Cuban Missile Crisis is one of the few examples. The LLMs are mimicking these core themes.” Schneider adds that researchers have not yet figured out why this occurs other than “the de-escalation part is harder to study because it means studying an event — war, in other words — that didn’t happen. Non-events are harder to study than events.”

  • Common Dreams ☛ The Smell of Fascism: What the Absolute Flying​ Fuck | Opinion

    Wildly flailing in a job he is utterly unfit for and so eager to deflect from the looming, damning Epstein files he'll do pretty much anything even kill us, the old, bored, crumbling, makeup-caked cretin now defiling the White House randomly decided it was time to "send a message of strength" to an unlistening world by changing the longtime name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War. "We won the first World War, we won the second World War, we won everything before that and in between," he babbled, "and then we decided to go wokey and we changed the name to Department of Defense." Umm. Ok. So now he's changing it back except Congress would need to approve the change so not really.

  • India Times ☛ ETtech Explainer: Why Nepal banned Instagram, X, YouTube and other social media platforms

    Nepal has imposed a nationwide ban on 26 social media and messaging platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), WhatsApp, YouTube, Reddit and LinkedIn. The action follows the platforms’ failure to register with Nepal’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology within seven days of an August 25 directive.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Simon Willison ☛ The SIFT method

    This framework really resonates with me: it formally captures and improves on a bunch of informal techniques I've tried to apply in my own work.

• Environment

  • Energy/Transportation

    • CBC ☛ These homes generate power for the grid — and residents don't worry about blackouts

      The battery charges from solar panels on the roof of the three-bedroom home she shares with her husband, Daniel, and five-year-old daughter, Ida. That allows the family to use stored solar power to run the dishwasher and laundry, even after the sun goes down, and to earn a credit of up to $60 per month on their electricity bill in the summer.

• Finance

  • David ☛ Paying for the indie/small-web

    Just because you don't hand over any of your hard-earned cash, doesn't technically mean it is free. People have given a huge amount of their time to make your life more pleasant.

    Time is valuable. There's a cost associated with it. It may not be an actual value, but someone has generously given up part of their life to deliver something to you.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • APNIC ☛ Your elected leaders: Taiji Kimura, Routing Security SIG Acting Chair

    As the Acting Chair of the Routing Security Special Interest Group (SIG), Taiji Kimura, Senior Expert at the Japan Network Information Center (JPNIC), brings two decades of technical insight and community engagement to one of the Internet community’s most urgent challenges: Securing global routing infrastructure.

    Taiji’s interest in routing security runs deep. Since 2003, he has been a regular participant at APNIC meetings, actively contributing to discussions on RPKI and promoting technical collaboration among National Internet Registries (NIRs). With a Master’s degree from the Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), he couples academic grounding with real-world operational experience.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Hot Mic and the Monsters

    “I wasn’t sure what number you wanted to go with,” Zuckerberg whispered to Trump after announcing that Meta would invest $600 billion in American AI infrastructure—a figure so astronomically absurd that it would require borrowing more than twice the company’s total book value. The CEO of a publicly traded company just admitted on live microphone that he fabricates financial projections based on whatever pleases the Dear Leader, securities law and shareholder responsibilities be damned.

    This isn’t business negotiation. This is a courtier asking his king what lies he’d prefer to hear, then delivering them with practiced servility to a public they view as sheep requiring management rather than citizens deserving truth.

  • The Independent UK ☛ Postal traffic to US sank 80% after Trump administration ended exemption on low-value parcels

    Eighty-eight postal operators have told the UPU that they have suspended some or all postal services to the United States until a solution is implemented with regard to U.S.-bound parcels valued at $800 or less, which had been the cutoff for imported goods to escape customs charges.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Mike Brock ☛ How Reactionaries Weaponize Tragedy: The Anatomy of Propaganda

      Within hours, the tragedy had been weaponized into evidence that “the left” controls media narratives to suppress stories that don't serve their political agenda.

      This is how reactionary propaganda works: it takes genuine grievances—real tragedies, legitimate concerns, obvious failures—and transforms them into ammunition for predetermined political conclusions. The tragedy becomes secondary to the meta-narrative about who's covering what and why.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Robin Rendle ☛ Poverty, By America

    "Poverty isn't simply the condition of not having enough money. It's the condition of not having enough choice and being taken advantage of because of that."

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Trump’s Plan for a National Guard ‘Quick Reaction Force’ Is Dangerous

    First, the National Guard is not a police force. It’s a military organization that mostly serves under the authority of state governors. Guard troops aren’t trained to put down protests, police streets, or arrest people for open container violations. It also isn’t what they signed up for.

    Second, in the United States, we have a long and important history of keeping the military out of domestic policing. Cops and soldiers have two fundamentally different missions. Cops are asked to keep the peace while protecting our rights. Soldiers are asked to kill the soldiers of enemy countries. That the military would be commonly used for domestic policing was among the Founders’ biggest fears. It’s a big part of why we have the Second, Third, and Fourth Amendments.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • The Register UK ☛ Red Sea submarine cable outage slows Microsoft cloud

    Junior cloud Linode has also warned of “network congestion and latency due to multiple faults in the undersea cables that are part of the optimal routes out of the data centers.”

  • Deccan Chronicle ☛ Undersea Cables Cut in Red Sea, Disrupts Internet Access Asia, Mideast

    NetBlocks, which monitors internet access, said “a series of subsea cable outages in the Red Sea has degraded internet connectivity in multiple countries,” which it said included India and Pakistan. It blamed “failures affecting the SMW4 and IMEWE cable systems near Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.”

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• JURIST ☛ EU fines Google $3.46B for antitrust violations

  The case marks the fourth time Brussels has sanctioned Google in an antitrust matter since 2017. Google has 60 days to present compliance measures, and the Commission has warned that structural remedies, including possible divestment of part of its ad-tech business, may be required. The Commission stressed that Google had already been penalized for violations in earlier cases, which contributed to the increased size of the fine.

• Trademarks

  • Right of Publicity

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ German woman sues Google over nude pictures and sex videos

      A German woman filed a suit against the US search engine Google after failing to get it to remove intimate pictures of her that were spread online. HateAid, a German non-profit, hopes that it will be a landmark case.

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Dynamic Pirate Site Blocking Injunctions and the Transparency Illusion

    When a major rightsholder obtains a site blocking order to counter rampant piracy, transparency is not always guaranteed. More often than not, the public isn't routinely updated. Draft legislation in the U.S. would see initial blocking orders published in the spirit of transparency. As a recent order obtained in India by DAZN illustrates, the true scale can only be appreciated by observing what comes next.