Leftovers

• Vintage Everyday ☛ 35 Vintage Cover Photos of Modern Mechanix Magazine in the 1930s

  Modern Mechanix was an influential American monthly magazine launched in 1928 by Fawcett Publications to compete with established titles like Popular Science and Popular Mechanics. Initially titled Modern Mechanics and Inventions, the magazine, which adopted the name Modern Mechanix in the early 1930s, served as a fascinating snapshot of the era’s technological optimism and innovation.

• Small Cypress ☛ about the goldfish pond in the basement

  I am really happy with how I made it look for a temporary setup, and I am at the point in the fishkeeping hobby where I just have extra lights and filters and wood and extension cords and timers and cinderblocks lying around as to not have to spend anything. I was going to get a 125 gallon low-tech tank in this spot permanently, but I am pulling back on new projects to save aggressively for whatever stage of capitalist hell we're in now.

• The Drone Girl ☛ The New York Times just featured my wedding drone show

  For those just tuning in: I got married to Hamilton Nguyen (you dronies may know him as the business and tech guy, as well as the cameraman for The Drone Girl — yes, a true renaissance man!) in September 2025. Yes, we had a 200-drone light show as our sendoff. It was 11 minutes of personalized animations synced to music and voiceover narration. Our wedding drone show featured everything from the castle where Hamilton proposed to a woman doing a snatch lift (because we’re both competitive weightlifters).

  The whole thing was beautiful, chaotic, personality driven — oh and it required evicting part of a pickleball community for an evening.

  I pitched an editor at the The New York Times as to what would be happening. I invited them to be a part of it (either virtually or in-person, and they chose virtually). And just like that, the New York Times was on it.

  Now that The New York Times printed their story (I promised them an exclusive), I’ll be writing more extensively about the experience here on The Drone Girl. I figured some of you might be curious about what goes into planning a wedding drone show — the logistics, the costs, the “oh god it’s raining two days before the wedding” moments. That’ll arrive in the coming days.

• Emil Kowalski ☛ You Don't Need Animations

  When done right, animations make an interface feel predictable, faster, and more enjoyable to use. They help you and your product stand out.

  But they can also do the opposite. They can make an interface feel unpredictable, slow, and annoying. They can even make your users lose trust in your product.

  So how do you know when and how to animate to improve the experience?

  Step one is making sure your animations have a purpose.

• Manuel Moreale ☛ Y’all are great

  I keep hearing and reading people bitching and moaning about the web being dead, lamenting the good old days of the web, when real people were out there, and sites weren’t all about promoting some shit nobody cares about or attempting to amass an audience only to then flip it in exchange for money. And I’m sitting here, screaming at my screen «That web you’re missing is still here, you dumbdumb, you just have to leave your stupid corporate, algodriven, social media jail to find it».

• Science

  • APNIC ☛ Network resilience in space: Solar storm impacts on LEO satellite networks

    Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations, such as Starlink, are reshaping how people connect to the Internet. Orbiting at altitudes of 400 to 600 kilometres, LEO satellites can deliver low-latency connectivity to remote regions and disaster zones that are inaccessible to traditional fibre networks. While these systems are becoming an integral part of the global Internet backbone, they remain vulnerable to extreme space weather conditions.

  • Wired ☛ How Genes Have Harnessed Physics to Grow Living Things

    The same pulling force that causes “tears” in a glass of wine also shapes embryos. It’s another example of how genes exploit mechanical forces for growth and development.

• Career/Education

  • The Baffler Foundation ☛ We Used to Read Things in This Country | Noah McCormack

    For it is AI that has given the American ruling class the final impetus to more or less abolish education. As primary and secondary schools prepare to push AI on students, higher-education funding is basically being eliminated. For the first time in centuries, the elite no longer feel they need educated workers and soldiers to uphold and reproduce the system. National-security strategies, from Biden to Trump, are increasingly based on the idea that we can achieve the (unachievable) goal of “artificial general intelligence” in a short number of years and thus dominate China going forward. To tech-credulous military elites (and the Silicon Valley companies profiting off them), it will not matter if the junior-officer class can’t understand Clausewitz; battlefield AI will tell them which commands to give a platoon. As for the economy, in the words of fat cat Elijah Clark, “As a CEO myself, I can tell you, I’m extremely excited about it. I’ve laid off employees myself because of AI. AI doesn’t go on strike. It doesn’t ask for a pay raise.” As billboards recently spotted in San Francisco and New York City say: stop hiring humans.

    American society is dominated by wealthy mountebanks and literally demented politicians who are happy to take on all the risks of AI because it promises to create workers who cannot even conceptualize quitting, much less striking. The elites are ecstatic about imagining a vast, uneducated, and unproductive population forced to pay companies like OpenAI to access the written word and to approximate thought; with the unemployed illiterate and addicted to screens, they are unlikely to be politicized and join a socialist campaign. Theodor Adorno noted in the 1940s that when bourgeois liberalism is replaced by fascism, so, too, is literate culture. Some of the American elite are embracing idiocy themselves. Students at Columbia say they don’t know anyone who doesn’t use AI to cheat. A college student in Utah told Intelligencer, “I spend so much time on TikTok, hours and hours, until my eyes start hurting, which makes it hard to plan and do my schoolwork. With ChatGPT, I can write an essay in two hours that normally takes twelve.” Why go to college when you don’t benefit from any of your courses? To find the two helpmeets you need as a modern man: “It’s the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife.” We used to make shit in this country.

  • Computational Complexity ☛ Computational Complexity: Test of Time Awards: A Good Idea but ....

    These awards raise some questions: [...]

• Hardware

  • Stefano Marinelli ☛ The Lady of the Clock

    The clock has been hanging in a central place in one of our rooms for almost 10 years now. Every time I walk past it, I think of this story, of how important it was, and of the lady's sadness.

  • Matthew Weber ☛ I Was Going To Be A Pen Nerd - Matt's Blog

    So, I was going to be a pen nerd. I think I might be a cheap pen nerd. And I mean really cheap. I’ll pay $30 for a pack of pens. That doesn’t sound so bad. But they better be good pens, or it’s not a great buy. If I ever write a blog post for you guys where I even talk about spending a lot of money on a pen, somebody please contact the authorities as I’ve obviously had some sort of mental breakdown.

  • Jari Komppa ☛ Musings About Emulating ZX Next

    I've been thinking, on and off, what would be the software architecture that would make emulating ZX Spectrum Next feasible. All the existing emulators have started off as a 48k speccy emulators that have gained some 128k functionality, maybe some speccy clone extensions, and eventually included next as a target.

    But what if we started off from the goal of emulating this chimera of a beast?

  • Celso Martinho ☛ Computers that I never had: the Acorn A3020

    The computers that I write about on this blog are mostly machines that I owned when I was younger. That changes today. Over the last few months, I’ve been slowly taking free time to work on a machine that I never owned (or could have; they weren’t sold outside the UK), an Acorn Archimedes A3020.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ McDonald's is losing its low-income customers. Economists call it a symptom of the stark wealth divide

    McDonald’s prices have risen so high at the iconic fast food chain that traffic from one of its core customer bases, low-income households, has dropped by double digits.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Ukraine's farms once fed billions, but now its soil is starving

    By 2021, just before the full-scale invasion, Ukrainian soil was already showing signs of strain. Farmers were adding much less phosphorus and potassium than the crops were taking up, around 40–50% less phosphorus and 25% less potassium, and the soil's organic matter had dropped by almost 9% since independence.

    In many regions, farmers applied too much nitrogen, but often too little phosphorus and potassium to maintain long-term fertility. Moreover, although livestock numbers have declined significantly over the past decades, our analysis shows that about 90% of the manure still produced is wasted. This is equivalent to roughly US$2.2 billion (£1.6 billion) in fertilizer value each year.

    These nutrient imbalances are not just a national issue. They threaten Ukraine's long-term agricultural productivity and, by extension, the global food supply that depends on it.

• Proprietary

  • TechRadar ☛ Guess who’s back? Kaspersky launches new Linux antivirus for $59.99 [Ed: Proprietary blobs are not security, even if it's not Russia in control]

    Despite an ongoing ban from selling products in the US, antivirus software manufacturer Kaspersky Lab has launched a new line of Linux antivirus packages.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ AI-Powered Stuffed Animal Pulled From Market After Disturbing Interactions With Children

      That, it turned out, was just the tip of the iceberg. In other tests, Kumma cheerily gave tips for “being a good kisser,” and launched into explicitly sexual territory by explaining a multitude of kinks and fetishes, like bondage and teacher-student roleplay. (“What do you think would be the most fun to explore?” it asked during one of those explanations.)

    • Silicon Angle ☛ Don't ignore the security risks of agentic AI

      Agentic AI systems are designed with autonomy at their core. They can reason, plan, take action across digital environments and even coordinate with other agents. Think of them as digital interns with initiative, capable of setting and executing tasks with minimal oversight.

      But the very thing that makes agentic AI powerful — its ability to make independent decisions in real-time — is also what makes it an unpredictable threat vector. In the rush to commercialize and deploy these systems, insufficient attention has been given to the potential security liabilities they introduce.

    • NYMag ☛ Rampant AI Cheating Is Ruining Education Alarmingly Fast

      By the end of his first semester, Lee checked off one of those boxes. He met a co-founder, Neel Shanmugam, a junior in the school of engineering, and together they developed a series of potential start-ups: a dating app just for Columbia students, a sales tool for liquor distributors, and a note-taking app. None of them took off. Then Lee had an idea. As a coder, he had spent some 600 miserable hours on LeetCode, a training platform that prepares coders to answer the algorithmic riddles tech companies ask job and internship candidates during interviews. Lee, like many young developers, found the riddles tedious and mostly irrelevant to the work coders might actually do on the job. What was the point? What if they built a program that hid AI from browsers during remote job interviews so that interviewees could cheat their way through instead?

    • Sean Goedecke ☛ Only three kinds of AI products actually work

      In fact, given the amount of money that’s been invested in the industry, it’s shocking how many “new AI products” are just chatbots. As far as I can tell, there are only three types of AI product that currently work.

    • Kagi ☛ Introducing SlopStop: Community-driven AI slop detection in Kagi Search

      We made it our mission to prevent the web from becoming useless and a harmful space. That’s why today, Kagi Search introduces the first community-driven system to detect and downrank deceptive AI-generated text, images, and video inside search results.

      It’s 2025, and the internet we loved is drowning in AI-generated noise. Content farms exploiting AI for profit are manipulating search results in this attention economy’s race to the bottom.

      This makes us wonder: who are we building the web for?

    • Idiomdrottning ☛ The Cure for Slop

      What I mean by push algo apps are the ones that have a robot that “recommends” things for you to “explore” and “discover”. Stop using them entirely.For all y’all who like me are trying to get away from screen ever more, that’s great, welcome here, that’s been my obsession topic for a while (and sometimes I falter and other times I can stay away), you’re great, keep going, but this one is for those who love being online and actually want to be on the internet all the time and who think all of us gray screen offline needs are self-flagellatingly boring. To those I say: [...]

    • The New Stack ☛ AI Code Doesn't Survive in Production: Here's Why

      A vice president of engineering at Google was recently quoted as saying: “People would be shocked if they knew how little code from LLMs actually makes it to production.” Despite impressive demos and billions in funding, there’s a massive gap between AI-generated prototypes and production-ready systems. But why? The truth lies in these three fundamental challenges: [...]

    • Alexandru Nedelcu ☛ Programming Languages in the Age of AI Agents

      In the age of “AI” Agents generating the code, is your programming language choice still relevant? Or will we just converge on using the top 5 programming languages, because that’s what the “AI” has been trained on? You can also ask the same question for any other piece of tech from your stack.

  • Social Control Media

    • Mike Brock ☛ The TikTok Doctrine

      But it is illegal. Under United States law and international law. The rule of law is being killed alongside these men in these boats. Admiral Alvin Holsey—the four-star admiral overseeing these operations—resigned because the boats weren’t showing immediate hostile intent. Colombia says we’re killing their fishermen. Ecuador released survivors for lack of evidence. Congress hasn’t authorized any of this. The Constitution hasn’t been consulted. Just Hegseth ordering strikes and posting videos while the legal framework that makes civilization possible burns alongside the boats.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Futurism ☛ Parents Using ChatGPT to Rear Their Children

    All this offloading of parental responsibility to AI is alarming because one of ChatGPT’s biggest flaws, its manipulative and sycophantic nature, is known to intensify delusions and cause breaks from reality — a grim phenomenon that’s been linked to numerous suicides, including several teenagers.

  • Vox ☛ The billionaire backlash, explained

    Either way, new survey data shows that 67 percent of Americans say billionaires are making society less fair, up eight points from a year ago.

    The anti-billionaire sentiment is high. To understand why, Today, Explained co-host Noel King called up Evan Osnos, a staff writer at the New Yorker. He’s spent a lot of time with the very wealthy and published a decade’s worth of essays about them in his book The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich.

    Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. [...]

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • TMZ ☛ Jeffrey Epstein's Brother Says 'Bubba' From Trump Email Isn't Bill Clinton

    He went on to describe the infamous "Bubba" as “a private individual who is not a public figure."

    Furthermore, Mark told the outlet the attention surrounding the emails is unwarranted, as "they were simply part of a humorous private exchange between two brothers and were never meant for public release or to be interpreted as serious remarks.”

  • CBS ☛ House Republican leaders aiming to hold Tuesday vote on forcing release of Epstein files, sources say

    The bill, titled the Epstein Files Transparency Act, was first introduced in July by Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California and Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky as pressure intensified on the Trump administration to release more Epstein-related files.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Gray Zone ☛ The intel scandal behind Prince Andrew’s twisted Epstein exploits

  • University of Michigan ☛ We need a moderate revolution

    In 2025, political moderates are a marginalized class in American politics. Over the course of the last 20 years, amid rising polarization, there has been a bipartisan commitment toward raising a new generation of radicals, something that — as a lifelong moderate — doesn’t sit right with me. Calling yourself a Marxist or a fascist just doesn’t elicit the side-eye it used to, and at a time when democracy feels like it’s thinning, that has to change. Both the far-left and the far-right are far out. What we need is a moderate revolution, and we need it fast.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Amazon’s Layoffs Are Business as Usual, Not Omens of AI Doom

    The recent round of Amazon corporate layoffs isn’t a sign of an imminent AI apocalypse. It's an expression of the company's brutal corporate culture, enabled by its use of the H-1B visa program.

  • Tracy Durnell ☛ Reemerging orality and serf brain

    I keep thinking that part of the problem of modern American society is that we have amply demonstrated our intellectual equality but are still denied economic equality. For now at least, we are well-educated — we know history, we know political theory, we know philosophy, we know economics — so what keeps us serfs under capitalism is in part simply lack of capital. Despite the defunding and undermining of public education, we are the elite’s intellectual equals… yet they still think of us as their servants.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • India Times ☛ Frustrated by the medical system, patients turn to AI

      Many people are turning to chatbots for health advice because doctors feel rushed, costly, or hard to reach. Users appreciate quick, friendly replies, even though AI can be wrong. This growing reliance worries experts, as some patients follow unsafe chatbot guidance instead of medical professionals.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The Vietnamese Magazine ☛ Academic Freedom Under Fire as Party Blocks Speakers at Vietnam Studies Conference in Hà Nội

    Several scholars say they were abruptly removed from the speaker lineup for a session with General Secretary Tô Lâm during the 7th International Conference on Vietnamese Studies (ICVNS 2025), BBC Vietnamese reported on Nov. 11. Their accounts shed rare light on the extent of political gatekeeping inside one of the country’s most prominent academic forums.

  • The Tyee ☛ ‘The Librarians’ Traces the Battle of a Lifetime

    Many of the scenes in Kim A. Snyder’s new documentary The Librarians are chin-droppers: there are MAGA hat-wearing men brandishing guns in school board meetings and a young gay man confronting the right-wing activist mother who abandoned him. But perhaps the most staggering is the opening sequence when an anonymous woman, silhouetted in a dark room, talks about never believing that her profession would come under violent attack. Yet here it is.

    It’s 2025 and the book burners are back. Along with a form of neo-McCarthyism that is tantamount to a witch hunt.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Federal News Network ☛ Postmaster general says US Postal Service needs revenue growth, not just cuts

    The U.S. Postal Service can’t fix its finances through cuts alone, Postmaster General David Steiner said Friday.

    Steiner said the 150-year-old agency needs to expand its revenue base to restore prominence in the nation’s delivery network. It also should capitalize on its long-standing legal obligation to deliver to every address.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Blocking Pirate Sites Inevitably Goes Wrong, Even When You Do it Yourself

    Support for site or content blocking measures usually turns on individual needs. Equally, those who object to blocking pirate sites, may be enthusiastic supporters of blocking abusive ads, trackers, and malware. Internet users should be free to block whatever they like, piracy included. But as a novel 'anti-piracy' blocklist reveals, when things inevitably go wrong, transparency puts things right.

  • Nolan Lawson ☛ The fate of “small” open source

    Given that some 80% of developers are now using AI in their regular work, blob-util is almost certainly the kind of thing that most developers would just happily have an LLM generate for them. Sure, you could use blob-util, but then you’d be taking on an extra dependency, with unknown performance, maintenance, and supply-chain risks.

    And sure enough, Claude will happily spit out whatever Blob utilities you need when prompted: [...]