Leftovers

• University of Michigan ☛ Music at Michigan needs an all night revival

  Zach Bryan’s concert raised a broader question: Why does live music at the University of Michigan feel so out of reach?

• Tom's Hardware ☛ Wikipedia officially blacklists all links to Archive Today over bizarre DDOS attack and manipulated archives — website operator caught tweaking their own archive

  The original reason for the attack was a 2023 post where Patokallio dug into how Archive Today operates, and in the process tried figuring out the identify of the site's operator(s). Said person or persons took umbrage to the post after nearly three years, and allegedly decided to add code to Archive Today and its aliases, opening Patokallio's site in the background in an attempt to overwhelm/DDOS the blog.

• Bix Frankonis ☛ ‘Spitting In The Wind Comes Back At You Twice As Hard’

  Leon posted to counter a somewhat ahistorical contention by Khürt that the IndieWeb “was built around what we are for, not what we are against”. Leon is having sort of none of Khürt’s decontextualization, or at least very little of it.

• Elliot C Smith ☛ Reflection on revamping our sales process

  When I started this process we had six pipelines in our CRM, we now just have the one. We were using pipelines to segment customers which, while not an unreasonable plan, led to six different setups that were very hard to compare.

  In reality we weren't selling in six different ways. Our from from lead through to meeting, trial and close were similar for each. Some took longer and they had different close rates but that isn't a good reason to split them up.

• Science

  • Omicron Limited ☛ 5,000-year-old bureaucracy: Over 7,000 prehistoric seal impressions uncovered in western Iran

    Some of the earliest states arose from the development of administrative institutions whose task was to manage economic and social affairs. Such early bureaucratic institutions have been identified in the Fars highlands of Iran and the lowlands of Susiana since at least the late fifth and early fourth millennia.

  • Wired ☛ How to View the ‘Blood Moon’ Total Lunar Eclipse on March 3

    The total lunar eclipse will occur on March 3. It will be clearly visible in North and Central America, while in Central and South Asia it will only be partially visible. It will not be visible in Europe or Africa.

  • Ken Koon Wong ☛ Assessing TEM, CTX-M, and KPC-2 With Molecular Docking and Molecular Dynamic Simulation

    This time, we will get protein sequence of interest and use AlphaFold Server to predict our protein and generate pdb, and instead of relying on known coordinates of the protein, let’s use DiffDock to screen the best docking site, then use that for MD simulation. We will write some instructions on DiffDock, how to install and run it. But we will leave off the MD simulation part, we can refer to here. But I will run a good chunk of code to assess our results so that at least I don’t have to copy and paste multiple times to assess RMSD, RMSF, hydrogen bonds, gyration, and distance. We will also have some cool visuals! Let’s test this out!

• Career/Education

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Why your brain has to work harder in an open-plan office than private offices

    In a recently published study, researchers at a Spanish university fitted 26 people, aged in their mid-20s to mid-60s, with wireless electroencephalogram (EEG) headsets. EEG testing can measure how hard the brain is working by tracking electrical activity through sensors on the scalp.

  • University of Michigan ☛ Whitmer signs classroom cell phone ban

    “We know that when students put their phones down, their grades go up,” Whitmer said. “These bills will help keep kids focused in the classroom and break their growing dependency on screens and social media. We could all benefit from looking up at the world instead of down at our phones.”

• Hardware

  • University of Toronto ☛ PDUs can fail (eventually) and some things related to this

    Early last Tuesday there was a widespread power outage at work, which took out power to our machine rooms for about four hours. Most things came back up when the power was restored, but not everything. One of the things that had happened was that one of our rack PDUs had failed. Fixing this took a surprising amount of work.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • El País ☛ Beatriz Martínez, psychiatrist: ‘In a few years, letting children be glued to screens will be seen in the same light as dipping their pacifier in alcohol’

    A. It terrifies me when I see infants in their strollers looking at videos or games on cell phones. Then there is the issue of access to social media; at 16 we can’t be saying: “Well, now you can do whatever you want.” The idea is that they develop critical thinking regarding what they will find on the internet – from artificial intelligence to fake news to deepfakes. More than ever, they will need to question what they see.

    Q. Some studies show that the earlier the use of networks begins, the worse a child’s mental health.

    A. Yes. We know that those who had a smartphone with free access to internet content before the age of 15 have worse mental health indicators. And, also, serious indicators. We are not only talking about anxiety or depression; we’re talking suicidal thoughts and attempts at suicide as well as self-harm.

  • Futurism ☛ AI Is Destroying Grocery Supply Chains

    In a bygone age, food went from farm and orchard straight to the general store — the only middleman being a clerk whose storefront served as an easy rallying point for consumers. Today, the supply chain is like a spider web of contractors and wholesalers, where every shipment is insured based on risk algorithms and tracked by transportation management systems.

  • UK ☛ Use of AI in the UK Food System

    The challenges of AI use discussed are primarily around the labour market and algorithmic bias. Horizon scanning also revealed a limited interest in exploring the challenges of the use of AI in the food system, although did represent more engagement with these topics than found in the academic literature. Emerging conversations focussed primarily on the impact of AI on the labour market, or on concerns about algorithmic bias.

  • US Navy Times ☛ Danish military evacuates US submariner who needed urgent medical care off Greenland

    The Danish Joint Arctic Command, on its Facebook page, said the crew member was evacuated on Saturday, some 7 nautical miles, or about 8 miles, off Nuuk — the capital of the vast, ice-covered territory — and transferred to a hospital in the city.

  • Greg Morris ☛ What Boston Will Cost Me

    I’m not going to stop running any time soon, I’m just trying to be honest about what it costs and who’s paying for it, because the running community rarely talks about that part. The discipline, the grit, the early mornings: all real. The partner doing everything else while you’re out chasing a personal best: equally real, and they deserve more than a thank you in an Instagram caption.

  • Seth Godin ☛ Brown rice and status

    White rice takes more work to prepare for sale and leaves behind the vitamin-rich bran. We need to harvest more brown rice to make a single serving of white.

    The origin of milling rice has to do with storage. Brown rice goes rancid much sooner, particularly in warm climates. As a result, white rice is more reliable–you’re not going to serve a bad batch.

  • Gannett ☛ Herbicide declared defense priority. What to know about glyphosate

    Trump ordered U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brook Rollins, in consultation with the U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, to ensure no orders, rules or regulations place "the corporate viability of any domestic producer of elemental phosphorus or glyphosate-based herbicides at risk."

    The move comes as several states debate whether manufacturers of the widely used chemical, like Bayer’s Monsanto, which markets its glyphosate-based herbicide as Roundup, should be protected from legal action over claims linking it to cancer.

    [...]

    At the same time, the German-based company has convinced the U.S. Supreme Court to hear an appeal that would sharply limit its liability in the lawsuits.

    The top court's decision to rule on the matter came after the Trump administration supported Bayer's view that federal glyphosate regulation, which is mainly in Bayer's favor, should take precedence over state laws invoked by the plaintiffs.

  • The New Lede ☛ Trump enrages MAHA with order granting "immunity" to glyphosate pesticide production - The New Lede

    The move by the White House comes as Roundup maker Bayer is struggling under the weight of tens of thousands of lawsuits alleging the company’s glyphosate herbicides cause cancer and the company failed to warn farmers and other users of the risks. The company, which inherited the litigation when it bought Monsanto in 2018, has already paid out billions of dollars in settlements and jury verdicts and said this week it was proposing to pay $7.25 billion in a class action settlement to try to head off future lawsuits.

    Bayer has said that if it cannot find relief from the litigation it may stop making glyphosate herbicides for the US agricultural market.

    “This executive order reads like it was drafted in a chemical company boardroom,” said Vani Hari, a food activist, author and one of the grass roots leaders of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) coalition. “Calling it ‘national defense’ while expanding protections for toxic products is a dangerous misdirection. Real national security is protecting American families, farmers, and children.”

  • American Chemical Society ☛ Feb. 20 Policy Watch: Trump orders more glyphosate and phosphorus production

    The executive order also cites the Defense Production Act’s liability shield for companies producing the materials and goods in question. That provision says, “No person shall be held liable for damages or penalties for any act or failure to act resulting directly or indirectly from . . . compliance.”

  • Gannett ☛ Herbicide declared defense priority. What to know about glyphosate

    At the same time, the German-based company has convinced the U.S. Supreme Court to hear an appeal that would sharply limit its liability in the lawsuits.

    The top court's decision to rule on the matter came after the Trump administration supported Bayer's view that federal glyphosate regulation, which is mainly in Bayer's favor, should take precedence over state laws invoked by the plaintiffs.

• Proprietary

  • Greg Morris ☛ I Rent My Entire Life

    Not in a minimalist sense. In a practical one. What would survive if I stopped paying for everything tomorrow?

    My photos live in iCloud. My passwords are in Apple’s keychain. My music is rented from Apple Music, my films from streaming services that rotate their catalogues without asking. The apps I rely on for work charge monthly or yearly, and the moment I stop paying, the features vanish. My blog runs on a server I rent. My domain is renewed annually. My writing app, my podcast app, my meditation app, even the tools I use to store insurance documents for my family, all of them require ongoing payment to keep existing in my life. My subscription creep list from a few years ago has only grown since.

  • Michał Woźniak ☛ Entirely Foreseeable AWS Outages

    According to Financial Times, Amazon Web Services experienced at least two minor outages in the final few months of last year, all caused by their internal “AI” tooling malfunctions. The article quoted one senior AWS employee describing them as “entirely foreseeable”.

    Amazon is going hard on slop generators. LLMs are extremely complex systems. And complexity creates real risk. I recently wrote about how the real danger of LLM-based tools is less about “autonomous” attacks, and more about introducing massive additional complexity, and thus additional risk, into existing systems.

    These outages are a great example of exactly that.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Akseli Lahtinen ☛ Leave me behind

      I will be here, working on things until your slophype settles down and you can think rationally again.

    • Computational Complexity ☛ Computational Complexity: ChatGPT gets an easy math problem wrong (I got it right). How is that possible?

      ChatGPT gets an easy math problem wrong (I got it right). How is that possible? A commenter on this post asked for me (or anyone) to solve the problem without AI: [...]

    • The Cyber Show ☛ The new meaning of ~robots.txt~

      Deterrence is a highly effective defence move. Convincing the enemy that it isn't worth the risk of encroaching is a very different prospect to letting them in and then inflicting punishment. Autonomous systems to identify, aggressively engage with, fight-off or destroy invasive bots seem analogous to having a guard dog. Such a system should be able to "bark" or fire a warning shot.

      Hereafter robots.txt takes on a new meaning.

      A clearly written robots.txt proclaiming that a site contains defensive countermeasures against "AI" crawlers seems the minimum bar for gentlemanly and sportsman-like rules of engagement. Crawlers that ignore such warnings are thereafter fair game, the "gloves are off" with respect to how much lethality a trespassing agent may expect to meet.

    • Uwe Friedrichsen ☛ You are not left behind

      I thought about this question for a bit. Do we really need to pick up all that daily changing and evolving AI and agentic stuff to not be “left behind?”

      The short answer I came up with is:

      "No, you are not left behind if you do not immediately pick up everything AI and agentic."

      "However, ignoring it is not an option either."

  • Social Control Media

    • Mark Hysted ☛ trying ActivityPub

      Going to have a go at utilising ActivityPub on this blog, it now becomes part of the fediverse.

    • L D Stephens ☛ Life before social media

      While I was laying down to take a nap today (yes I take a nap every afternoon) I started thinking about what a fucking shit show social media is and how in my opinion it is destroying society.

      Social media as we know it today started in 2003 with MySpace and was then overtaken by Facebook and has progressed to what we have today. I was born in 1945, which means I lived the first 58 years of my life without social media. At 81 now, I've had a front-row seat to watch what it's done to society over the past two decades. My introduction to personal computers was in the mid-1980's. I had a Compaq portable that was my work computer and a Commodore 64 that I bought and used at home. I've always been fascinated with computers and considered tinkering with them a hobby that I still enjoy to this day.

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • Wired ☛ NASA Delays Launch of Artemis II Lunar Mission Once Again

    NASA has once again postponed the launch of Artemis II, the crewed lunar flyby mission, setting a new launch window for April. Although March 6 had been tentatively planned as the launch date, the US space agency revealed that a problem with the rocket has caused further delay.

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ Helium system fault forces NASA to delay Artemis crewed moon mission

    The latest issue, NASA reported, is something to do with the Artemis II rocket launch vehicle’s helium flow system. This gas is used in the rockets to keep their fuel tanks pressurized so that propellant can flow properly during operation.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Futurism ☛ Cities Are Shredding Their AI Surveillance Contracts en Masse

      On the surface, license plate readers might seem passive, a non-issue unless you’re up to no good. Yet as DeFlock notes, they come with many hidden dangers to ordinary residents. License plate readers create detailed records of your location history, which have led to wrongful arrests, racial profiling, and stalking by police officers.

    • The Verge ☛ America desperately needs new privacy laws

      These concerns weren’t just cheap talk in Washington. In 1974, Congress passed the Privacy Act, which set some of the first rules aimed at computerized records systems — limiting when government agencies could share information and outlining what access individuals should have. Over the course of the 20th century, the Privacy Act was joined by more privacy rules for fields including healthcare, websites for children, electronic communications, and even video cassette rentals. But over the past couple of decades, amid an explosion in digital surveillance by governments and private companies, Congress has repeatedly failed to keep up.

    • [Old] GNU ☛ Many Governments Encourage Schools to Let Companies Snoop on Students

      The recommendations Human Rights Watch makes follow the usual approach of regulating the use of data once collected. This is fundamentally inadequate; personal data, once collected, will surely be misused.

      The only approach that makes it possible to end massive surveillance starts with demanding that the software be free. Then users will be able to modify the software to avoid giving real data to companies.

    • Neritam ☛ Many Governments Encourage Schools to Let Companies Snoop on Students

      The researchers were thorough and checked for various snooping methods, including fingerprinting of devices to identify users. The targets of the investigation were not limited to programs and sites specifically “for education;” they included, for instance, Zoom and Microsoft Teams.

• Defence/Aggression

  • TruthOut ☛ Palestinian Women Arrested to Bait Their Relatives Israel Labels as “Wanted”

    This practice falls under the category of collective punishment, which is prohibited under international law.

  • Spectator AU ☛ ISIS brides, Gaza visas, and the IRGC

    To welcome back its adherents, along with children born and raised within this ideological furnace, is to take a calculated risk that ordinary Australians should not be willing to accept.

    This risk is far from hypothetical.

• Environment

  • Digital Camera World ☛ Underwater camera films shark in Antarctic Ocean, thought to be a world first

    In a world that’s full of cameras on the surface, it’s easy to forget that humans have explored just 5% of Earth’s oceans. As the Minderoo-UWA’s name suggests, it is committed to exploring some of the deepest areas of the ocean – which is why the camera was positioned off the South Shetland Islands, where the encounter happened.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Futurism ☛ Barrage of Emails From AI Politics Platform Defeats Clean Air Initiative

      So far, reality has demonstrated the exact opposite. Not only are electrical demands of data centers supercharging our carbon emissions, but the technology itself is now being used to actively resist climate regulations.

    • Hackaday ☛ Why Chains Are Still Better For Bicycles Than Belts

      Despite this type of chain drive tracing its roots all the way back to Leonardo da Vinci, they actually offer many advantages over the fancy carbon-fiber-reinforced polyurethane belt. Although with the Pinion gearbox the inability to use a derailleur gearing system is no big deal, [Tristan] found that the ‘zero maintenance’ part of the belt was not true for less hospitable roads

    • SlashGear ☛ Goodbye Paper Vehicle Titles – This US State Is Making Digital Mandatory

      The Illinois General Assembly first approved the ELT program all the way back in 2000, but outdated technology prevented a full implementation. When Giannoulias took office in 2023, he set out to update that technology and, in 2024, finally got the program up and running. Now, all Driver's Services Facilities in Illinois – as well as every financial institution that processes five or more liens annually – will be required to switch over to this new digital system by July 1, 2026.

    • Gray Local Media ☛ Illinois to go paperless with vehicle titles

      The Secretary of State’s Office says through the ELT system, lien and title records are transmitted directly and securely to its office and maintained electronically until the lien is satisfied.

      Once a loan is paid off, banks, credit unions and dealers can release the title immediately. Leaders say this benefits consumers as they won’t need to fill out paperwork, make in-person visits, and allows for faster sales, trade-ins or re-financing.

      The system also looks to prevent “title washing” and fraudulent lien releases, protecting consumers and financial institutions.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Institute for Policy Studies ☛ Richest 15 U.S. centi-billionaires see wealth surge 33 percent to $3.2 trillion

    Based on an Institute for Policy Studies analysis of data from the Forbes real time billionaire list from 2025, there are 935 billionaires in the United States with combined wealth totaling $8.1 trillion.

  • Simon Willison ☛ London Stock Exchange: Raspberry Pi Holdings plc

    Striking graph illustrating stock in the UK Raspberry Pi holding company spiking on Tuesday: [...]

  • [Old] Scraps from the Loft ☛ George Carlin: Dumb Americans (2006) - Full Transcript - Scraps from the loft

    But there’s a reason. There’s a reason. There’s a reason for this. There’s a reason that education sucks. And it’s the same reason that it will never ever. Ever be fixed. It’s never going to get any better. Don’t look for it. Be happy with what you got. BECAUSE THE OWNERS OF THIS COUNTRY DON’T WANT THAT. I’m talking about the real owners now. The real owners. The big, wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians… they’re irrelevant. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. YOU DON’T. YOU HAVE NO CHOICE. YOU HAVE OWNERS. THEY OWN YOU. THEY OWN *EVERYTHING*! They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, and city halls. They got the judges in their back pocket. And they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear!

    THEY’VE GOT YOU BY THE BALLS! They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed. Well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interest. That’s right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want OBEDIENT WORKERS. OBEDIENT WORKERS. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits. The end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.

  • [Old] Goodreads LLC (Amazon) ☛ Quote by George Carlin: “But there’s a reason. There’s a reason. There’s...”

    [...] They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you, sooner or later, 'cause they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. And by the way, it's the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. [...]

  • [Old] Public Seminar ☛ It’s a Big Club, and You Ain’t in It: George Carlin as Social and Political Theorist

    “It’s called ‘the American Dream’ because you have to be asleep to believe it.” This is why Carlin interrupted Shelley Winters: his problem with The United States of America goes to the roots, and is not a matter of cosmetic improvement, as liberals tend to think. Carlin’s take on American History is far closer to that of Howard Zinn than the “vital center” historians’ consensus that the Founding Fathers were humane geniuses, with minor internal disagreements, who created “the indispensable nation”. A better take on the American republic is, as Carlin put it, that it was founded on double standards: e.g., “a bunch of slave owners who wanted to be free”. The “double-standards” trope is pure Zinn; and even if you can fault Zinn’s narrative for being one-dimensional, it is hard to dispute that about that one dimension Zinn was substantially right.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Omicron Limited ☛ The algorithmic feed on X could be shifting political views toward conservatism

      Social media has become a central source [sic] of political news[sic] for many people, prompting concerns about misinformation, polarization and the influence of algorithms (which select and order content in personalized feeds). Previous large-scale experiments, including a collaboration with Meta, found little evidence that switching off the algorithm and reverting to a chronological feed altered users' political attitudes. However, those studies could not determine whether early algorithmic exposure had already shaped political views.

    • Greg Morris ☛ AI Is The New Middleman

      Notifications already told you what you needed to know. A headline arrived, you read it or you didn’t, and the words were the ones the journalist had written. Apple looked at that perfectly functional system and decided it needed an AI layer on top, not because users were struggling with notifications, but because Apple Intelligence needed a visible use case to justify its existence. The feature shipped, it broke almost immediately, and rather than removing it Apple treated the whole thing as a design problem to iterate on. The assumption was never questioned: that inserting AI between you and your information is inherently a good idea that just needs refinement.

      This is the pattern everywhere now.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Meduza ☛ Moscow’s Gulag museum forced Russians to confront their own history. The Kremlin has decided that era is over. A new ‘Museum of Memory’ has one villain: the Nazis.

    The new entity will take over the building where the Gulag History Museum operated until it was forced to suspend operations in November 2024, officially over fire-safety violations. Natalya Kalashnikova, a veteran of both Russia’s energy sector and its war in Ukraine, will lead the new museum. The old institution’s collections will be consigned to storage. The new genocide exhibition will reportedly draw on archives from the ”No Statute of Limitations” project, which has already reached Russian classrooms, where schools have organized students into staged commemorations, sometimes making them kneel for the Nazis’ victims.

  • Dan Sinker ☛ On Joy and Resistance

    That there have been two high-profile examples of this kind of radicalizing joy on the largest possible stages in less than a month feels like a balm for the relentless shit we have been living under as ICE has destroyed our communities. It is a reminder that even right now, even as the fight rages on, there is time for joy, there is time for art, there is time to celebrate difference and self, and to insist that you too can be free.

    Because they want you to forget that.

    There is a reason why the administration has cracked down on the arts and humanities alongside its brutal assault on migrants. It knows that art is dangerous, that knowledge leads to asking questions, and that those questions don't always lead where they want you to go.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • The Independent UK ☛ Violent arrests of high school students protesting ICE shook a Pennsylvania town. Now officials are investigating

    More than 300 students at Woodbridge Senior High School were recently suspended after joining protests with other schools in Virginia.

    Similar scenes have played out in schools from Maryland to Oklahoma and Utah.

    Accounts differ of what led to the confrontations between students and police in Bucks County.

    A widely circulated video of the clashes shows a man in plainclothes putting a girl in a chokehold.

  • TruthOut ☛ The Black Anti-Fascist Tradition Recognized Fascism Didn’t Begin in Europe

    Thinking about the reality of anti-Black fascism led me to the indispensable work of Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill V. Mullen. When it comes to documenting anti-Black fascism, they trace a longer arc with respect to the rise of fascism; they show just how European fascists drew from early U.S. laws for their own specific fascist formations, and how the U.S. functioned as the very hub of fascist discourse and practice. Given this rich history and its importance for how to strategize moving forward, I conducted this exclusive interview with Jeanelle K. Hope, who is an independent scholar and a lecturer at the University of California-Washington Center.

  • Kelly Hayes ☛ “We Belong to Each Other Now”: Lessons from Minneapolis

    Official narratives can be deceiving, and that is especially true in this political moment. The Department of Homeland Security has declared that fewer than 500 federal immigration agents are currently deployed in Minnesota, after announcing that its monthslong assault on Minneapolis and surrounding areas, dubbed Operation Metro Surge, was coming to an end. But as Francis, an organizer with the rapid response group Defend the 612 told me, “500 is, without a doubt, still a surge.” Francis pointed out that the first “surge” Minneapolis saw in December was an influx of 150 agents. A force numbering in the hundreds — several times larger than that initial deployment — is not a retreat. It is a tremendous enforcement footprint in a single metropolitan area, and a force capable of inflicting mass terror, carrying out targeted abductions, and sustaining a climate of fear.

    This is how authoritarian governance works: when backlash makes extremity costly, the state dials it down just enough to shift the narrative, and what remains is recast as normal. When I spoke recently with members of Defend the 612, a rapid response network in South Minneapolis, this tension framed their reflections on what officials are calling an ending.

  • Rebecca Solnit ☛ Welcoming the Stranger and Fighting the Power: A Roundup

    – Here's one of the best things I've read in the New York Times in a long time (gift link): an account of participating in the defense of Minneapolis against ICE as joyful, in prose that is itself a joy to read.

  • Casey Kreer ☛ Accessibility Is Civil Rights. AI Must Stop Shipping Barriers.

    This is not a minor bug trend. It is a systematic civil-rights failure that has now found its way into software as a whole, through lightning-fast adoption of AI systems that are trained on over 20 years of institutional barriers.

  • Casey Kreer ☛ WebAccessBench: Digital Accessibility Reliability in LLM-Generated Web Interfaces

    The practical implication is urgent and political, not merely technical. If AI-generated interfaces are deployed at scale without rigorous accessibility safeguards, exclusion will be industrialized: people with disabilities will face compounded barriers to education, healthcare, employment, public services, finance, and democratic participation. Accessibility defects in generated code do not stay in a prototyping stage; they replicate across products, organizations, and future training data, turning preventable design failures into systemic discrimination. This is why accessibility review cannot be optional, and why responsibility must extend beyond individual developers to model vendors, platform operators, regulators, and public institutions.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Patents

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Language barriers slow down the international diffusion of knowledge, study finds

    "Language barriers and translation costs are persistent obstacles to communication and have particularly pronounced economic impacts in technical domains," wrote Kyle Higham and Sadao Nagaoka in their paper. "We provide causal evidence on the effects of language barriers on the speed and extent of knowledge diffusion by exploiting a change in US patent policy that resulted in earlier disclosure of English-language technical knowledge from Japan."

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ ProtonVPN Fights French Pirate Site Blockades, But Court Rejects Overblocking Fears

    ProtonVPN has fought back hard against a pirate site blocking request in France, but without result. In two separate cases, the Paris Judicial Court rejected the company's arguments, including violations of the EU's Open Internet Regulation, technical complications, and overblocking concerns. While this is a disappointing outcome for the VPN provider, it likely won't be the last legal battle.

  • Simon Willison ☛ The Claude C Compiler: What It Reveals About the Future of Software

    The project also leads to deep open questions about how agentic engineering interacts with licensing and IP for both open source and proprietary code:

    "If AI systems trained on decades of publicly available code can reproduce familiar structures, patterns, and even specific implementations, where exactly is the boundary between learning and copying?"