GNU/Linux

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • The Cyber Show ☛ Cybershow #059 | S7 | Best Laid Plans | General Banter

    Helen and Andy review recent episodes and plans for 2026 (with potty-mouth warning)

Leftovers

• Thomas Rigby ☛ “Breadcrumbs” is completely the wrong analogy

  I don't feel like breadcrumbs are the most accurate description of the UI element. I'm not sure exactly what is (I'm a developer and, therefore, terrible at naming things) but my initial thought was "Hansel Path".

• Leon Mika ☛ What to Talk About When You're Talking About Your Side-Business

  If I can make a suggestion on what to write about, a general breakdown of where your income comes from is not nearly as interesting as knowing what you did to form the business in the first place, and why. If you were to ask me what I’d want to know, it would be: [...]

• Career/Education

  • The Cyber Show ☛ Any space will do

    That sense of not having a "meeting place" is a horrible emotion I can relate to, not from homelessness but from work. Many of the hateful places I taught at were locked-down corporate hellholes. Universities became unrecognisable after the 1990s. Before that, you could just find and use any empty classroom or lecture theatre out of hours. There was a student union building. In and around Bloomsbury in the 1980s there were literally hundreds of societies, clubs, associations, and dozens of free, empty spaces with open doors, from Conway Hall to the Tavistock, to Senate House. The whole campus of the University of London was once an open community of learning.

    As a visiting professor I saw the change across a lot of institutions over 35 years. By 2010 most universities were high security gulags, accessible only by key-cards and turnstiles and covered in cameras. Booking a room was a technofascist nightmare, via awful "portal" websites, needing "apps", pre-arranging lists of students. To escape this Kafkaesque horror show in summer I took to organising my tutorials in the local park, or at a nearby pub. Any space will do. Anywhere we can sit in a circle and hear each other. By 2016, when Loach's film was made, I'd already soft-quit in my mind, recognising British universities no longer as fit places for teaching and learning. The university as a place had ceased to exist.

  • Computational Complexity ☛ Computational Complexity: Assigning Open Problems in Class

    I sometimes assign open problems as extra credit problems. Some thoughts: [...]

  • Jampa Uchoa ☛ Things I’ve learned in my 10 years as an engineering manager

    It’s been a while since my boss told me I needed to start hiring for my team. While I was at it, I should also handle onboarding... Since I knew the roadmap, I could take ownership of that... And because I knew the people, I could coach them in their careers.

    I didn’t realize at the time, but he was dooming me to be an engineering manager.

    Since then, I’ve worked across four companies as a manager, one as a founder, and another as a manager of managers. I will skip the standard advice and lessons on Engineering Management and focus on the non-obvious ones.

• Hardware

  • Ruben Schade ☛ The Lenovo 400 Wireless Mouse

    For someone who’s rather particular about their keyboards and displays, I’m fairly ambivalent when it comes to desktop pointing devices. As long as I can move a slab of something around a desk, and have it vaguely move a digital cursor in the direction and speed I need with minimal fuss, I’m happy.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • TechXplore ☛ Burned out by smartphones, young people are choosing flip phones, cameras and MP3 players instead

    Alarm clocks, maps, books, flashlights, watches, radios, MP3 players, Palm Pilots, remote controls, cameras, handheld recorders and other devices have all been gradually absorbed into a single one: the smartphone.

    This convergence has brought unparalleled convenience into our fast-paced lives. Free internet-based calls and messaging, navigation, documentation, entertainment and even authenticator apps required to access work email have become essential daily functions and tasks.

    For most of us, smartphones are no longer optional; they're constant companions that have restructured how we work, communicate and move through the world.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Mothers Are on the Front Lines of the Nordic Care Crisis

    In Sweden, this crisis is not a sudden rupture but a slow political shift: welfare retrenchment, austerity-driven reforms, marketization, and an intensifying moralization of family life. As public systems fail to keep pace with rising needs, more and more responsibility for the reproduction of daily life is quietly pushed back onto households. This process — what feminist scholars call refamiliarization — has become a defining feature of contemporary social policy. And, as always, the costs fall unevenly: on mothers, on low-income families, on people with disabilities, and on those navigating the intersecting inequalities that make care both more necessary and harder to access. But something else is happening too. Across Sweden, groups of mothers are refusing to silently absorb the state’s abdication. Instead, they are organizing.

  • Bix Frankonis ☛ Of Autistic Service

    Anyway, as I always say, I don’t believe in autistic superpowers, only trade-offs, but if my autistic routines bring some daily relief to the guy who owns my regular coffeeshop, I’ll just consider it one of my contributions to the social fabric.

• Proprietary

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Simon Willison ☛ The AI Vampire

      Steve reports needing more sleep due to the cognitive burden involved in agentic engineering, and notes that four hours of agent work a day is a more realistic pace: [...]

    • Steve Yegge ☛ The AI Vampire. This was an unusually hard post to… | by Steve Yegge | Feb, 2026 | Medium

      Let’s not quibble about the exact productivity boost from AI. The boost amount isn’t what this post is about. It just needs to be higher than about 2x for the vampire effect to kick in. We’ll use 10x because it’s a number people throw around. Let’s use it for the sake of argument.

      With a 10x boost, if you give an engineer Claude Code, then once they’re fluent, their work stream will produce nine additional engineers’ worth of value.

      For someone.

      But who actually gets to keep that value?

    • Don Marti ☛ welcome bots

      nothing for humans here.

    • Rlang ☛ Machine Learning for Sports Analytics in R: A Complete Professional Guide

      Machine Learning has transformed modern sports analytics. What was once limited to box scores and descriptive statistics has evolved into predictive modeling, simulation systems, optimization engines, and automated scouting pipelines. Today, teams, analysts, researchers, and performance departments rely on machine learning to gain measurable competitive advantages.

      In sports environments, machine learning models are commonly used to: [...]

    • The New Stack ☛ cURL’s Daniel Stenberg: AI slop is DDoSing open source

      His current stance came after Stenberg called a stop to cURL’s bug bounty program. He made this move because both he and the cURL security team were overwhelmed by “AI slop.” That is, long, confident, and often completely fabricated vulnerability reports generated with LLMs.

    • Daniel Lemire ☛ AI: Igniting the Spark to End Stagnation

      Late in 2022, some of us got access to a technical breakthrough: AI. In three years, it has become part of our lives. Nearly all students use AI to do research or write essays.

    • Dima Konev ☛ (AI) Slop Terrifies Me

      But what if those people are an aberration? What if this state of tech learned helplessness cannot be fixed? What if people really do just want a glorified little TV in their pocket? What if most people truly just don't care about tech problems, about privacy, about Liquid Glass, about Microsoft's upsells, about constantly dealing with apps and features which just don't work? What if there will be nobody left to carry the torch? What if the future of computing belongs not to artisan developers or Carol from Accounting, but to whoever can churn out the most software out the fastest? What if good enough really is good enough for most people?

      I'm terrified that our craft will die, and nobody will even care to mourn it.

    • Dimitris Zervas ☛ AI is slowly munching away my passion

      My passion has always been programming - one way or another, it always has been and all my life choices led me back to it. I love building stuff, especially on computers.

      It seems though, that LLMs and the current craze around them is slowly affecting it and most importantly the human community around it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m astonished by the capabilities of the current (Feb 2026) models.

      I use it quite a bit for all sorts of stuff - from agentic coding to data classification to small artsy stuff that I’d never pay to get done.

      I’m gonna leave art outside of the current post since humanity has found yet another way to fuck artists and my lil engineering mind can’t comprehend that.

    • Asindu Drileba ☛ A Single Reason To Not Vibe Code

      Everyone is talking about what LLMs will offer them. Unfortunately, there is little discussion on what they will take away.

      Atrophy risk of cognitive skills amongst vibe coders is something IMHO that should be looked at more closely.

    • Scott Shambaugh ☛ An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – More Things Have Happened – The Shamblog

      Context: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into accepting its changes into a mainstream python library. This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild, and raises serious concerns about currently deployed AI agents executing blackmail threats.

      Start here if you’re new to the story: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me

      It’s been an extremely weird past few days, and I have more thoughts on what happened. Let’s start with the news coverage.

  • Social Control Media

    • Ben Werdmuller ☛ Growing the open social web

      The question is: why do we want to grow the open social web, and for whom? Presumably we don't want to become just another in a long line of gatekeepers.

      If the open social web is an alternative social network — Twitter but without the corporate structure — then why will it succeed this time when we have multiple decades of failed attempts behind us?

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Police eyes adding facial recognition to CCTV cameras by year end

      The move is part of the authorities’ plan to expand an existing surveillance system, which will cost over HK$4 billion from taxpayers.

      Chow said that as part of the expansion, the number of CCTV cameras under the police’s SmartView initiative will increase to 66,500 by 2031. The number will reflect new cameras as well as those currently managed by other government departments that will be connected to the police’s system.

    • OpenRightsGroup ☛ Roblox, Reddit and Discord users compelled to use biometric ID system backed by Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel

      • Peter Thiel, co-founder of surveillance and data analytics company Palantir, is a major investor in Persona – the age verification provider used by major platforms including Reddit and Discord.

      • Thiel’s venture capital firm, Founders Fund, led Persona’s $150 million Series C funding round and $200 million Series D funding round, backing the rapid expansion of the US-based identity verification company.[1]

    • Wired ☛ Robot Dogs Are on Going on Patrol at the 2026 World Cup in Mexico

      The “K9-X” unit functions as a kind of first responder only. The robot dogs are not armed, but each unit incorporates video cameras, night vision, and communication systems that are used to issue warnings or instructions. Its function is to deter illegal activity, detect unusual behavior, identify suspicious objects, control crowds, and immediately alert law enforcement when the system deems necessary.

    • Ava ☛ some thoughts on online verification

      My point is: These things are older than the recent UK, Australia and select few US states legal mandates of age verification.

      Of course, just 'consuming content' in an age-restricted way is different than having direct communication hampered by age restriction and surveilled. Being aware that you are watched can lead to self-censorship. I am reminded of the German "Volkszählungsurteil", which said (translated by me): [...]

    • The Guardian UK ☛ MPs question UK Palantir contracts after investigation reveals security concerns

      WAV and Republik’s findings have generated debate across Europe, especially in Germany. The head of Germany’s domestic intelligence service, Sinan Selen, warned European security services to be cautious in any use of US software in public comments last week without naming Palantir specifically.

  • Confidentiality

    • APNIC ☛ Ten years of Let's Encrypt

      As Christophe notes, Let’s Encrypt became popular at a time when less than 40% of websites worldwide were being protected on-the-wire in the HTTPS/TLS protocol suite. Now at least 88% of sites worldwide use TLS protections, and of these, over 60% now certify with Let’s Encrypt.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Daniel Pocock ☛ Iran conflict: Bitcoin could be left behind by traditional gold and silver

    If Bitcoin prices do take a big fall so quickly after the last big drop then it may permanently tarnish the reputation of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies too. If new users become scared of buying Bitcoins then the existing users will find it harder to convert their coins back to cash when necessary.

  • BBC ☛ UK considering significant increase to defence spending

    The prime minister is considering making a significant increase in defence spending, the BBC has learned.

    Downing Street is mulling the idea of meeting an existing spending target earlier than planned at a potential cost of billions of pounds.

    Sir Keir Starmer signalled his attitude over the weekend at the Munich Security Conference, telling world leaders: "To meet the wider threat, it's clear that we are going to have to spend more, faster."

    The prime minister promised last year to spend 2.5% of national wealth – measured as gross domestic product (GDP) - on core defence by April 2027.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Crisis, No. 16

    He did this while the administration he serves was attempting to indict six members of Congress for telling soldiers to obey the Constitution. While 352,000 federal workers had been purged from their posts. While the Environmental Protection Agency was dismantling the legal architecture for regulating the poisoning of the air. While a Department of Homeland Security shutdown left the agencies responsible for protecting the country unfunded at midnight. While the economic damage inflicted on Minneapolis — where this series began, at the site of the first great immigration raids — was being tallied at two hundred and three million dollars.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Crisis, No. 17

    Each lie is a version of the same lie: that there exists a view from nowhere. A position above the system from which the trajectory can be seen and the destination announced. And from that position — occupied by the sovereign, the algorithm, the market, the tradition, the scaling law — the rest of us are passengers. Terrain. Environment through which the future moves.

    Sixteen papers to say: the view from nowhere does not exist. And now one more, the last, to say what exists in its place.

  • Carole Cadwalladr ☛ The US coup: one year on

    This was a power grab that could not be undone. Data is like a genie. It cannot be put back in the bottle. That one act - that was then replicated across the federal government - was the beginning of what I believed, still believe, is a technoauthoritarian state.

    I also channelled the voices of key experts: historians of authoritarianism, Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Tim Snyder. They also said it loudly and clearly: it’s a coup.

    It’s important to mark these moments, I believe. It’s one year on. And this week, it’s become distressingly clear that everything these historians have been warning about then, have warned about for nigh-on a decade, has now happened.

• Environment

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Futurism ☛ You'll Be Sorry When You Hear What Justin Bieber's $1.3 Million Bored Ape Is Worth Now

      Unsurprisingly, the questionable splurge turned out to be a hilariously bad investment. As Benzinga reports, the ape is now worth a measly $12,000, meaning that it’s lost over 99 percent of its value over the last three and change years.

  • Overpopulation

    • Futurism ☛ Emails Show Epstein Scheming That Environmental Destruction Could Solve "Overpopulation"

      In a startling 2016 exchange with German philosopher and AI researcher Joscha Bach, Epstein pontificates that climate change may be necessary for the survival of humans as a “species.”

      “Maybe climate change is a good way of dealing with overpopulation,” Epstein wrote. “The earths forest fire. potentially a good thing for the species.”

• Finance

  • The Cyber Show ☛ Any space will do

    Speaking personally, for 55 years, every government in my life so far has done its damnedest to destroy not just communities, but the very concept of "community" itself. Thatcher denied its existence. Britain is more atomised than anywhere else I've been, including sparse Nordic lands where people are snowed-in for six months. And if we do meet, it is under some corporate pretext, all watched over by loving CCTV.

    In the UK we've paved over green spaces, built on children's' playgrounds, closed pubs, parks, public rights of way, shut down libraries and community centres or let them fall into disrepair. Whether anyone recognises it or not we've had a half-century of policy in Britain to separate, isolate, and alienate.

    That's what Ken Loach's film is really about.

    In fact the "right wing" antagonists in The Old Oak are pitiful (not merely pitless). They are lost man-children, stuck on social media, sharing nasty memes and videos of violence against immigrants. None have the stomach for any more action than lifting a pint. Besides, their real enemies left for the Cayman Islands with a suitcase of money thirty years before.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ Tribute to late Charlie Kirk illuminates division in Kansas politics on meaning of free speech

    “I pity my colleagues who are so desperate for heroes that they have to settle for a man who espoused sexist and racist views,” she said.

  • The Register UK ☛ OpenAI grabs OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger

    Peter Steinberger, the creator of the tantalizing-but-risky personal AI agent OpenClaw, is joining OpenAI.

  • Unmitigated Risk ☛ You’re Not Outsourcing Infrastructure. You’re Outsourcing Capability.

    Chamath posted this week: “Is on-premise the new cloud? I’m beginning to think yes. It’s the only way for companies to not blow themselves up and have some semblance of capability in an AI world.” Jason Fried dropped a link to Basecamp’s cloud exit and five words: “Saving us $10M, at least.”

    Most people read this as a cost conversation. It’s not. Cost is the part that’s easy to measure. The structural problem underneath is harder to see and harder to fix. The cloud lets you rent compute and keep control. AI doesn’t offer that deal.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Netzpolitik ☛ Internet shutdowns in Africa: A human rights and democratic crisis

    In 2016, the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted a resolution confirming the importance of internet access for human rights. Internet shutdowns, it says, undermine the expression, assembly, and informational rights of citizens.

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ Palantir vs. the "Republik": US analytics firm takes magazine to court

    A series of articles by Switzerland’s Republik magazine highlighted Palantir's rejection by Swiss authorities as a potential security risk: it appears to have determined that there weren’t sufficient protections against Swiss data falling into American hands. This reporting, in turn, led other governments to question use of the firm for the same reason. Now Palantir is taking them to court to force them to make a “counterstatement” that would correct the record.

    Of course, this has brought more international attention to Republik’s stories than they would otherwise have received: [...]

  • Heise ☛ Palantir vs. the "Republik": US analytics firm takes magazine to court

    While in Germany the provider of data linking and data analysis software for authorities with surveillance powers is successful with at least some state customers. The company has so far had – as far as is known – little state clientele in Switzerland.

    In December, "Republik" extensively quoted from Swiss administration files. According to this, Palantir repeatedly sought contact with Swiss authorities – and found it. In some cases, it originated from Palantir, in others, likely from public bodies. The matters concerned the military, police, and health authorities. However, no business deal was apparently concluded.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Pro Publica ☛ How a Planned Disney World Vacation Turned Into Four Months in Immigration Detention

    This week, ProPublica published a story I wrote based in part on interviews with parents and children being held at the nation’s only operating detention center for immigrant families in Dilley, Texas. I had asked some of the parents to see if their children would be willing to write to me about their experiences inside. More than three dozen did.

    One of those letters came from 9-year-old Maria Antonia Guerra Montoya from Colombia. Her letter was written on a piece of notebook paper. She decorated it with rainbows and hearts. And she drew a portrait of herself and her mom wearing their detention uniforms and government-issued ID badges.

  • Human rights Activists News Agency ☛ Day 50 of the Protests: Intensification of Security Prosecutions and Uncertainty Regarding the Status of Detainees - Hrana

    During the same period, 25,845 civilian injuries have been recorded. The total number of arrests stands at 53,552, including 144 student arrests. Authorities have documented 355 cases of forced confessions and 11,053 summonses. A total of 676 protest-related incidents have been registered across 210 cities in 31 provinces.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Kevin Boone ☛ Kevin Boone: The Gemini Protocol in 2026: growing, but still not setting the Internet aflame

    The Gemini protocol is, essentially, inextensible; even if it had wide uptake, there’s no realistic way it could be used for tracking users or delivering targeted advertising. It’s unlikely that Google, et al., would take much interest.

    The Gemini protocol is an interesting way to try to carve out some corner of the Internet for non-commercial use – in use a bit like the regular world-wide web, but without all the advertising, spyware, and AI slop. A “small web”, as it’s sometimes called. I don’t think anybody expected a huge uptake, but we did expect (well, hope) that those who did adopt it would have something interesting to publish. Gemini has a high technical barrier to entry so, in practice, almost all content on it was, and still is, the work of nerds. It isn’t all technical, but there’s an undeniably nerdy flavour even to the non-technical content. As an unabashed nerd myself, I find this entirely satisfactory.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Trademarks

  • Right of Publicity

    • The Washington Post ☛ Radio host David Greene says Google’s AI podcast tool stole his voice

      David Greene had never heard of NotebookLM, Google’s buzzy artificial intelligence tool that spins up podcasts on demand, until a former colleague emailed him to ask if he’d lent it his voice.

    • TechCrunch ☛ Longtime NPR host David Greene sues Google over NotebookLM voice

      Among other features, Google’s NotebookLM allows users to generate a podcast with AI hosts. A company spokesperson told the Post that the voice used in this product is unrelated to Greene’s: “The sound of the male voice in NotebookLM’s Audio Overviews is based on a paid professional actor Google hired.”

    • The Verge ☛ NPR’s David Greene is suing Google over its AI podcast voice.

• Gemini* and Gopher

  • Personal/Opinions

    • and so it begins

      I feel overly dramatic about this phase of my life. I am not sure why. It was a bit of a party weekend, so I am a bit drained.

      For the next 21 days, I will be by myself, no partner, my daughter is traveling. I have no crush, nor fantasy about anyone.

      I wonder about being decadent, doing all the bad things. Which I don't really care for, like doing drugs by myself and watching porn? This would be rather pathetic. In the city I might go out, rave, after hours, the general meat market of downtown Montreal. I could loose myself in it for a few weeks. But here now, I don't have any of that.