Leftovers

• Sergio Visinoni ☛ Getting my hands dirty with Wardley Mapping

  Wardley maps are an effective way of mapping out the strategy of a business, including elements that make it a lot more useful than a standard graph. They get their name from their inventor, Simon Wardley.

  Today’s article is not your typical tutorial on how to get started, as you can probably get an OK version of it via your favorite slop generator or through a simple Google search.

  Instead, this is an overview of the process I have been following to become more familiar with this new practice, together with some concrete examples illustrating where I am now.

• Jack Baty ☛ Future-proof, schmuture-proof

  Speaking of WordPress, I’m writing this post using it. You know why? It’s easy, requires no other infrastructure or dependencies, and doesn’t break once a month due to software updates. ::knocks wood::.

• Andre Franca ☛ Why I Write in Public

  I keep writing in public, even when it sometimes feels like standing naked in a crowded room. There's something terrifying about hitting the “publish button”, knowing that anyone can read, judge, or misinterpret what I've written. Yet here I am, still doing it.

• Canonical ☛ 83% of organizations see value in adopting open source, but report major gaps in security and governance

  The Linux Foundation’s latest report, The state of global open source, has just been released in collaboration with Canonical. The report follows the Linux Foundation’s European spotlight report, released earlier this year, and confirms that many of the trends the European spotlight report unveiled are true on a global scale. In particular, the global spotlight report confirms the role of open source software as the foundation of business-critical systems worldwide, and indicates a continued increase in adoption. However, organizations continue to lack the governance, security testing, and strategic maturity required to manage open source strategically and securely.

• Science

  • Mexico News Daily ☛ Mexico is less than 3 years away from having its own supercomputer

    The supercomputer will be the result of a collaborative agreement between Mexico’s Infotec and Spain’s Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), but it will be built in Mexico.

  • The Register UK ☛ DARPA pushes air-breathing VLEO satellites into production

    VLEO, which spans altitudes between 90 and 450 kilometers (56-280 miles), is relatively uncrowded compared to low-Earth and geosynchronous orbit altitudes thanks largely to the fact that there's a lot more atmospheric drag on objects at that height. That means a more frequent need to use propulsion systems to maintain orbit, giving satellite missions in VLEO limited lifespans.

  • Daniel Estévez ☛ Decoding ESCAPADE

    ESCAPADE is a twin spacecraft mission that will study the Mars magnetosphere. The science mission is led by UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory and the spacecraft buses were built by Rocket Lab. It was launched on November 13 on the second Blue Origin New Glenn mission NG-2. The spacecraft will spend a year around the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrange point before falling back to Earth for a powered gravity assist that will place them on Hohmann transfer orbit to Mars as the “launch window” to Mars opens. These are the first spacecraft to fly this kind of trajectory.

    The day after launch, I used two antennas from the Allen Telescope Array to record the X-band telemetry signals of the two spacecraft, which were approximately 200 thousand km away from Earth. In this post I will show the results of this observation, and how to decode the telemetry. I have published the recording in the dataset “Recording of ESCAPADE X-band telemetry with the Allen Telescope Array shortly after launch” in Zenodo.

  • Raspberry Pi ☛ How thousands of students are growing plants in space with Raspberry Pi

    Each participating school receives an ExoLab growth chamber that tracks temperature, humidity, light, and CO₂ levels while capturing timelapse images of plant development. Students plant seeds, collect data, and compare their findings with the parallel experiment happening in space — all in real time.

• Career/Education

  • The Drone Girl ☛ My prediction to bring more women into the drone industry

    The predominantly male audience was predictable: DIY tinkerers who came from model aircraft communities. FPV racing enthusiasts from the gaming world. Hobbyists who wanted to build their own rigs and crash them into trees repeatedly until they figured it out. Don’t get me wrong — I loved (and still love) that community. If that’s you, thank you for your support over the years! I see you and I do appreciate you!

    But I’d love to see more women find their place in this industry. Fast forward to 2025, and I just had a drone show at my wedding. And suddenly, I’m getting messages from brides-to-be, wedding planners and women in the events industry asking how they can do this.

  • Yury Molodtsov ☛ How Startups Get Viral

    An early stage startup often doesn’t have too many things to be proud of. But you can always take pride in being unreasonable about something. About your customers, your developers, your design, your speed or something else. Figure out that cornerstone and turn it into artifacts you can share through product features, emails and social media posts. Show how much you’re doing for your customers or how much money you’re saving for them. Show your best designs and explain what unreasonable process you took to end up with them. Show how fast you’re willing to move.

    Be unreasonable about something and people will remember this.

  • The Atlantic ☛ American Kids Can’t Do Math Anymore

    For the past several years, America has been using its young people as lab rats in a sweeping, if not exactly thought-out, education experiment. Schools across the country have been lowering standards and removing penalties for failure. The results are coming into focus.

    Five years ago, about 30 incoming freshmen at UC San Diego arrived with math skills below high-school level. Now, according to a recent report from UC San Diego faculty and administrators, that number is more than 900—and most of those students don’t fully meet middle-school math standards. Many students struggle with fractions and simple algebra problems. Last year, the university, which admits fewer than 30 percent of undergraduate applicants, launched a remedial-math course that focuses entirely on concepts taught in elementary and middle school. (According to the report, more than 60 percent of students who took the previous version of the course couldn’t divide a fraction by two.) One of the course’s tutors noted that students faced more issues with “logical thinking” than with math facts per se. They didn’t know how to begin solving word problems.

• Hardware

  • The Register UK ☛ Memory prices set to double as fabs pivot to AI parts

    This is the warning from Counterpoint Research, which forecasts that memory prices are likely to rise 30 percent over current levels by the end of 2025, and possibly 20 percent further in the first half of 2026, due to critical chip shortages.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • TruthOut ☛ Report Shows How GOP Health Care Scheme Would Further Enrich Insurance Giants

    But Wyden’s report argues that “no matter how Republicans design their plan, their promise to take money out of the hands of big insurance companies and put it in the hands of patients will go unfulfilled, because the very arrangements they tout are administered by large financial institutions and the same big insurance companies.”

• Proprietary

  • Chris Enns ☛ 6 Months Later: Checking in on Going Back to Basics on the Mac

    Well here we are 6 months—and a couple of snoozed days later—and I'm still using Mail, Notes, and Reminders.

  • [Repeat] Futurism ☛ The Internet [sic] Crashed So Hard This Morning That Downdetector Went Down

    But as the latest outage demonstrates, Cloudflare has become immensely popular, and its services are being used by hundreds of thousands of companies around the world. That means that it’s now a load-bearing piece of online infrastructure, so when it runs into trouble, tons of stuff on the [Internet] fails.

  • Inside Towers ☛ Cloudflare Outage Impacts Millions of Internet Users

    Cloudflare acts as an intermediary between users and servers, helping millions of websites stay online even during high traffic or cyberattacks. It’s used by about 20 percent of all websites on the [Internet], according to Inside Towers Intelligence. Based in San Francisco, Cloudflare connects to over 330 data centers in more than 125 countries. When it experiences an outage, it can disrupt access to these sites globally.

  • Lee Yingtong Li ☛ Open source tools to read Microsoft Access .accdb databases (reverse engineered)

    Contempoary versions of Microsoft Access store data in the proprietary .accdb file format. Reputable sources [1] state that there has been no reverse engineering of the .accdb format (as opposed to its predecessor, the .mdb format). In fact, open source tools do exist that can read Microsoft Access .accdb databases: [...]

  • Krebs On Security ☛ The Cloudflare Outage May Be a Security Roadmap

    However, some customers did manage to pivot their domains away from Cloudflare during the outage. And many of those organizations probably need to take a closer look at their web application firewall (WAF) logs during that time, said Aaron Turner, a faculty member at IANS Research.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ Passenger Alarmed When Tesla Robotaxi "Safety" Driver Falls Completely Asleep at the Wheel

      Tesla’s Robotaxis have been involved in numerous crashes since CEO Elon Musk jumpstarted the service this summer in Texas, raising concerns that the self-driving taxicabs aren’t quite road ready.

    • Futurism ☛ Judge Horrified as Lawyers Submit Evidence in Court That Was Faked With AI

      In other words, it was obviously an AI deepfake. And according to the reporting, it might be one of the first documented instances of a deepfake being submitted as purportedly authentic evidence in court — or at least one that was caught.

    • NBC ☛ AI-generated evidence showing up in court alarms judges

      Kolakowski, who serves on California’s Alameda County Superior Court, soon realized why: The video had been produced using generative artificial intelligence. Though the video claimed to feature a real witness — who had appeared in another, authentic piece of evidence — Exhibit 6C was an AI “deepfake,” Kolakowski said.

    • Scoop News Group ☛ Pair of AI-focused SBA bills advance in the House

      The House Small Business Committee easily cleared the AI for Mainstreet Act and the AI Wisdom for Innovative Small Enterprises (AI-WISE) Act, bipartisan pieces of legislation that had full endorsements from the panel’s chair, Republican Roger Williams of Texas, and its ranking member, Democrat Nydia Velázquez of New York.

    • PIRG ☛ Trouble in Toyland 2025: A.I. bots and toxics present hidden dangers

      These AI toys are marketed for ages 3 to 12, but are largely built on the same large language model technology that powers adult chatbots – systems the companies themselves such as OpenAI don’t currently recommend for children and that have well-documented issues with accuracy, inappropriate content generation and unpredictable behavior.

      In our testing, it was obvious that some toy companies are putting in guardrails to make their toys behave in a more kid-appropriate way than the chatbots available for adults. But we found those guardrails vary in effectiveness – and at times, can break down entirely. One toy in our testing would discuss very adult sexual topics with us at length while introducing new ideas we had not brought up – most of which are not fit to print.

      These AI conversational toys also have personalities and new tactics that can keep kids engaged for longer. Two of the toys we tested at times discouraged us from leaving when we told them we needed to go.

    • US News And World Report ☛ The Teddy Bear Said What? And Other Dispatches From the AI Frontier

      Last week, the Public Interest Research Group issued its 40th “Trouble in Toyland” and flagged issues with some toys powered by AI chatbots.

      “We found some of these toys will talk in-depth about sexually explicit topics, will offer advice on where a child can find matches or knives, act dismayed when you say you have to leave and have limited or no parental controls,” PIRG warned. “We also look at privacy concerns because these toys can record a child’s voice and collect other sensitive data, by methods such as facial recognition scans.”

    • Digital Camera World ☛ If the AI bubble bursts it could BE WORSE for photographers than the AI itself!

      Client budgets could vanish. Corporate clients would probably respond to an AI crash by cutting spending across the board... including on human photographers. That sounds counterintuitive, but when tech sectors crash, fear spreads faster than reason, and marketing budgets get slashed indiscriminately. Believe me, I've seen it happen, time and time again.

      Camera manufacturers could stumble. Canon, Nikon and Sony have all invested heavily in AI-powered features: subject detection, real-time tracking, computational photography. These R&D programs depend on the broader AI ecosystem remaining healthy and funded. A collapse would freeze innovation in camera technology just when it's become genuinely useful for working photographers.

    • The Register UK ☛ Devs gripe about having AI shoved down their throats

      Some software developers complain that they're being required to use AI tools to the detriment of code quality and their own skills.

    • Omicron Limited ☛ AI innovation missing the mark for local communities, according to report

      Professor Noortje Marres, professor of science, technology and society at the University of Warwick, and lead on the report said, "AI is increasingly embedded in everyday life—from the street to public services—yet most people feel it's happening to them, not with them. This report shows that if AI is to earn public trust, it must be made visible, discussed openly, and designed with communities, not just for them."

  • Social Control Media

    • Wired ☛ A Simple WhatsApp Security Flaw Exposed 3.5 Billion Phone Numbers

      Repeat that same trick a few billion times with every possible phone number, it turns out, and the same feature can also serve as a convenient way to obtain the cell number of virtually every WhatsApp user on earth—along with, in many cases, profile photos and text that identifies each of those users. The result is a sprawling exposure of personal information for a significant fraction of the world population.