Leftovers

• Nicolas Fränkel ☛ 2025 in retrospective

  From the beginning, the focus of this blog has been technical, very rarely organizational. I broke this unwritten rule once in 2015. I began writing retrospectives in 2023 on the year that had passed. Let’s continue the tradition, but with a wider scope than before. The situation warrants it.

• Kevin Kelly ☛ The Technium: How Will the Miracle Happen Today?

  As in my hitchhiking days, I began my days on the road in Asia and elsewhere with the recurring question “how will the miracle happen today?” After a lifetime of relying on such benevolence I have developed a theory of what happens in these moments and it goes like this.

• David Yates ☛ Dash it all

  But most online articles about the difference between these three marks give a US-centric explanation that omits any mention of the spaced en dash. If you ignore it, you get to live in a simple world where unspaced hyphens are used to join words, unspaced en dashes denote ranges (1–10, December 2025–January 2026) and unspaced em dashes join clauses and phrases. Unfortunately, that world is imaginary, and real differences in typographical conventions mean that the terms “em dash” and “en dash” cannot be used to refer unambiguously to the dash punctuation mark – we must make a distinction here between the punctuation mark (dash) and its differing presentations (optionally spaced em dash versus spaced en dash).

• Connor Tumbleson ☛ A Year of Blogging (2025)

  As 2018 ended I had successfully blogged every week for the entire year as a new years resolution. Of course now 2025 has ended, but my 2018 resolution has not - welcome to my favorite posts from 2025.

• Andre Franca ☛ Why Everyone Is Reacting

  Where did the fucking creativity go?

• Science

  • Remy Wang ☛ 4 Ways to Improve A Perfect Join Algorithm

    Based on Database Theory in Action: Yannakakis's Algorithm to appear at ICDT 2026

    Last time I covered one of my favorite results from database theory: Yannakakis's algorithm for acyclic joins. The algorithm is very simple, yet achieves instance-optimality on a large class of queries, meaning it's basically perfect as far as asymptotic complexity goes. So why doesn't every database implement it? The main reason is that the algorithm is actually not very fast in practice. To be exact, it's usually 2-3x slower than hash join. Let's look at an example to understand this. Consider the natural join: [...]

• Career/Education

  • Vintage Everyday ☛ J.K. Rowling Writing Harry Potter at a Café in Scotland, 1998

    Despite facing repeated rejection from twelve different publishers, Rowling persevered. When Bloomsbury finally accepted her manuscript, it marked the beginning of a literary phenomenon. From those humble café beginnings, the Harry Potter series would grow into one of the most successful and influential franchises in modern literary history, a testament to persistence, vision, and unyielding dedication.

  • Matt Wedel ☛ Three Four quotes about doing good work

    None of these were intended by their creators to be about research; even Marie Curie’s line was about her education. But each of them touched a nerve for me. Also, since they’re not explicitly about research, you may find them applicable to other areas of life as well, whether you’re a researcher or not.

  • Matt Birchler ☛ Don't fall in love with the product, fall in love with the problem

    If you aren't fortunate enough to have a monopoly, you need to solve people's problems, and as a product or design person, you need to be obsessed with advocating for those users and solving their problems. You can consider business needs as well, of course, but if you ever lose focus on being the advocate for your customers, you're down a bad road.

  • Evan Hahn ☛ Notes from "On Writing Well"

    I’ve been trying to improve my writing so I read On Writing Well by William Zinsser.

    My main takeaways: [...]

  • [Old] Evan Hahn ☛ Takeaways from The Economist's style guide book

    I’ve been trying to improve my writing so I read Writing with Style, the Economist’s style guide book.

    Here were my main takeaways: [...]

• Hardware

  • Logikal Solutions ☛ The Viciously Sad State of NAS Disk

    Like many of you, I was duped into buying WD RED disks when I originally set up my F4-210 NAS. Western Digital marketed WD RED as the pinnacle of NAS storage drives. Since you are reading this post you probably know what is coming.

    This is kind of an all around failure. You know how there are drive lights on the front?

  • Kevin Boone ☛ Kevin Boone: They don’t make ’em like that any more: filament fairy lights

    Whether the loss of the conventional “twelve days of Christmas” bothers you or not, we should all be concerned about the loss of another great Christmas tradition: decorating our houses with filament fairy lights that mostly don’t work.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • RTL ☛ To tackle childhood obesity: UK starts ban on junk food ads on daytime TV and online

    The ban -- targeting ads for products high in fat, salt or sugar -- is expected to remove up to 7.2 billion calories from children’s diets each year, according to the health ministry.

• Proprietary

  • [Repeat] Rlang ☛ Running Around: an R package to analyse Garmin running data

    In my previous post, I shared my annual running stats which were generated in R using summary data from Garmin Connect. The code I use to generate these summaries was beginning to get a bit unwieldy, so I have now rebased it into a package.

    GarminCSVr – is an R package to look at running data using the activity summaries that can be downloaded from the Garmin Connect website. This post is to show what the package can do.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Irish Examiner ☛ Children being 'bombarded' online by 'AI girlfriend' porn apps

      Children are being “bombarded” online by so-called AI girlfriend porn apps, which are “grooming” boys to perpetrate sexual violence and girls to accept such behaviour.

    • Futurism ☛ AI Godfather Warns That It's Starting to Show Signs of Self-Preservation

      If we’re to believe Yoshua Bengio, one of the so-called “godfathers” of AI, some advanced models are showing signs of self-preservation — which is exactly why we shouldn’t endow them with any kind of rights whatsoever. Because if we do, he says, they may run away with that autonomy and turn on us before we have a chance to pull the plug. Then it’s curtains for this whole “humankind” experiment.

    • Anton Zhiyanov ☛ Fear is not advocacy

      The job of an advocate is to spark interest, not to reproach people or instill FOMO. And yet that's exactly what AI advocates do.

      What a weird way to advocate.

    • BoingBoing ☛ How Musk's decisions led to Grok generating CSAM

      Then X gave Grok image-editing capabilities anyway. An "Edit Image" button now lets any user alter photos using text prompts without the original poster's consent. By June 2025, Grok was spawning sexual harassment trends. By July, users weaponized it to publish rape fantasies about women on the platform. And by January 2026, it was generating nude edits of children.

  • Social Control Media

    • US News And World Report ☛ Paris Court to Rule in Case Involving Alleged Cyberbullying of Brigitte Macron

      The defendants, eight men and two women aged 41 to 65, are accused of posting “numerous malicious comments” falsely claiming that President Emmanuel Macron ’s wife was born a man and linking the 24-year age gap with her husband to pedophilia. Some of the posts were viewed tens of thousands of times.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • [Old] European Council ☛ Interinstitutional File: 2022/0155 (COD) [PDF]

      Delegations will find in the Annex the four-column table of the above-mentioned proposal, containing the initial positions of the institutions.

    • [Old] European Commission ☛ Commission presents Roadmap for effective and lawful access to data for law enforcement

      The Roadmap focuses on six key areas: [...]

    • TechRadar ☛ The EU prepares ground for wider data retention – and VPN providers are among the targets

      The EU Council shares preliminary views on new data retention framework

      VPN services, messaging apps, and cloud storage are among the targets

      A legislative proposal is expected at the end of the first half of 2026

      [...]

      "The likely outcome is that legitimate providers withdraw from the EU market, pushing users toward unaccountable and unsecured offshore alternatives that are more likely to misuse data," she added, stressing the need for lawmakers to strike the right balance between law enforcement and fundamental rights, particularly privacy.

      While the final legislation is still being drafted and ProtectEU's future is uncertain, as it stands, European governments appear determined to grant law enforcement ever more access to our data, regardless of the technical or privacy contradictions.

    • The Register UK ☛ Trump admin lifts sanctions on Predator-linked spyware execs

      Predator has all the usual features of a commercial spyware product. It allows users to perform espionage-related activities on infected devices, including device tracking, surveillance, data theft, and the like.

      Predator has remained available through the Intellexa spyware consortium despite US sanctions imposed in 2024 on Intellexa-linked entities and executives. In its first round of sanctions in March 2024, the Biden-era Treasury Department described Intellexa as a "significant threat to … national security."

    • James Stanley ☛ Against Gift Aid

      If you walk into a typical museum in the UK and ask to buy tickets, they'll usually ask you to pay with Gift Aid. You'll be reminded that it won't cost you anything and it will mean more money for the museum. This is a trap. It will cost you something, you'll get no benefit, and they don't tell you how much trouble it will be until after you agree.

      What it costs you is several minutes of hassle and invasion of privacy as step-by-step you hand over your name, address, phone number, and email address.

  • Confidentiality

    • Dhole Moments ☛ Everything You Need to Know About Email Encryption in 2026

      This disclosure reignited message board debates about GnuPG, OpenPGP, and related topics. I’m not going to reiterate the many problems with PGP or what you should use instead.

      Instead, I want to explain why cryptographers and security engineers that work on cryptography have largely abandoned any efforts to make “encrypted email” happen.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Greek aviation disrupted by radio communication issues

    Air traffic controllers used alternative frequencies to allow some flights to take off and land in the afternoon, the president of the controllers' association, Panagiotis Psarros, told ERTNews.

  • Mike Brock ☛ Trump: The Anti-Lincoln

    Lincoln’s logic was always this: the constitutional framework faces existential threat from secession, and extraordinary measures to preserve it are justified—within constitutional bounds and subject to eventual constitutional accountability.

    The key word is preserve. Lincoln expanded executive power to save the framework that makes constitutional government possible. Secession would have destroyed the Union. No Union, no Constitution. No Constitution, no self-government. The emergency power served constitutional continuation.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • NPR ☛ Trump tried to bury evidence of the Jan. 6 [insurrection]. NPR's archive preserves the facts

    NPR's Jan. 6 archive brings together reporting, video, documents and testimony to show what really happened during the Capitol riot. Explore the timeline, cases and evidence behind the attack.

  • The Dissenter ☛ 'Cover-Up': The Complicity Of The Press In US Violence

    “Cover-Up,” directed by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, takes Hersh’s work over the last half century and examines what Poitras describes as the “long history of cycles of impunity, of mass atrocities that are committed and nobody is held accountable.”

• Environment

  • SBS ☛ Australians set to swelter across four states

    Severe heatwave warnings have been issued for large parts of the country, with temperatures forecast to top 40C in at least four states in the coming days.

  • TruthOut ☛ Fracking Industry Executives Are Salivating Over the AI Data Center Boom

    “The demand for power and for AI is like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

    These words were uttered during an October earnings call, not by a wide-eyed tech executive, but by Jeff Miller, the CEO of Halliburton, one of the world’s biggest oilfield services corporations.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Michael Green ☛ Is Bitcoin a "Post-Scarcity" Asset?

      But Matt hits on an important theme in this post, defending billionaires, even as he betrays his alignment with them (one does not simply “think” about billionaire positivity while on vacation in Maine). It’s possible to reform the system without targeting the individuals. In fact, as I’ve noted in many responses to comments, as “good” as retribution may feel temporarily, it’s a societal trap: [...]

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Open Web Advocacy ☛ Open Web Advocacy 2025 in Review - Open Web Advocacy

    TL;DR: A lot happened in 2025 for browsers and web apps with new investigations, laws, and court cases across the EU, Japan, the US, Australia, and the UK. OWA continues to play a key role in pushing for fair and effective browser and web app competition on all platforms. Apple is now barred from blocking third-party browser engines on iOS in 28 countries, soon likely 30. However, it continues to resist real competition. Learn what is happening worldwide and how you can help!

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Games

    • GamingOnLinux ☛ 2025 Steam Awards winners have been revealed | GamingOnLinux

      The time is here - you helped to pick the nominations and then you voted for your favourites. The 2025 Steam Awards winners have now been revealed.

Monopolies/Monopsonies