Leftovers

• Jacobin Magazine ☛ With Chuck Norris, the Meme Was the Message

  It is tempting to remember all this as innocent, and in a sense it was: a comic mockery and celebration of strength and masculine invulnerability. Norris memes were not written by Pentagon contractors or engagement farmers in a content bunker. They were just jokes passed around by bored people amusing one another. But you can see something more sinister in them too: an early lesson in memetic power. The AI-generated slop that now saturates right-wing social media, including from Donald Trump himself — Trump as Roman emperor, Iran crushed beneath a digital boot, the endless parade of hypermasculine fantasy imagery — often feels like a weaponized descendant of “Chuck Norris Facts.”

• Vintage Everyday ☛ Vintage Covers of Fantastic Novels Magazine

  Launched in 1940 as a companion to Famous Fantastic Mysteries, it specialized in reviving classic “lost world” adventures and imaginative romances that had long been out of print. What truly set the magazine apart was its breathtaking visual identity, featuring the iconic, ethereal cover art of Virgil Finlay and Lawrence Stevens, it transformed each issue into a collector’s masterpiece.

• Science

  • El País ☛ Marc Abrahams, founder of the satirical Ig Nobel Prizes: ‘Scientists in the US are very angry. People are waking up’

    The awards are moving to Switzerland, because their founder believes he can no longer guarantee the laureates’ safety in the United States

• Career/Education

  • StokeonTrentLive ☛ 'I have a masters degree but have 500 job rejections - now I'm on benefits'

    A university graduate with a master's degree says he has been turned down for 500 jobs. Theo dal Pozzo, 23, has described the hunt as "demoralising". He graduated with a first-class postgraduate degree in computer science, specialising in machine learning, from the University of Exeter in 2024.

  • APNIC ☛ Strengthening network security and visibility through APNIC products and tools

    To support this, APNIC Academy is hosting an upcoming webinar to help strengthen your network security with APNIC products and tools. The session will help Members and the wider community make better use of routing security tools, services, and related information.

  • Ish Sookun ☛ MSCC March Meetup: Enterprise Architecture & 12-Factor PHP Infrastructure

    The MSCC March meetup at Klanik, IconÉbène brought 22 attendees together for two talks: Ajmal Saifudeen on Enterprise Architecture and why developers should care, and Ish Sookun on applying the 12-Factor methodology to modern PHP infrastructure with Laravel, followed by an open discussion.

  • Fabrizio Ferri Benedetti ☛ In the team of the future, roles are verbs, not nouns

    If someone asked me to set up a team in charge of software documentation, I would not hire for specific roles or cookie-cut job descriptions. Professions tied to knowledge buckets are bound to shrink or disappear. Instead, I would hire people that could move freely between four quadrants, each defined by the proximity to a focus pole and its skills. The poles in this team setup would be the following: Product Vision, Knowledge Design, Engineering Depth, and Delivery Strategy.

  • Paulette Koronkevich ☛ Humanity in CS & PL, now more than ever

    Computer science, as a field and profession and technology, has become increasingly anti-human, and is accelerating an anti-human sentiment at super-sonic speeds with generative AI. This is a call for desperately bringing back the humanity in computer science, but mostly is a reflection of all the humanity that has brought me to this point.

    This post isn't coming up with any new synthesis, evidence, or theories on the trends in computer science. It's not a logical argument. It's just been ten years since I've started my journey in computer science, and now more than ever, I want to reflect.

• Hardware

  • The Verge ☛ The secret story of the vocoder, the military tech that changed music

    The vocoder was never supposed to be a revolution in music. It wasn’t supposed to be anything in music, really. Its development began a century ago, when an engineer at Bell Labs was looking for a simpler way to send phone calls across copper telephone lines. The engineer, Homer Dudley, built some pretty neat technology that could both capture and synthesize the human voice.

  • Old VCR ☛ Refurb weekend double header: Alpha Micro AM-1000E and AM-1200

    I've mentioned previously my great affection for Alpha Microsystems hardware, which are rather obscure computers nowadays, but back in the 1980s and 1990s were fairly sophisticated 68000-based multiuser systems that turned up in all kinds of vertical markets. For example, my first Alpha Micro (an Eagle 300) came from a party supplies store, my Eagle 450 was in a 9-1-1 emergency dispatch centre, and I've seen or heard of them running in medical and veterinary offices, churches, and even funeral homes. In fact, I know for a fact many of these blue-collar computers are still out there quietly doing their jobs in back offices and small businesses to this day. They're probably most technically notable for AMOS, their highly efficient real-memory preemptively multitasked operating system, and the fact they are (as far as I can tell) the only 68K-based machines to effectively run little-endian.

  • Mike Rockwell ☛ Nirav Patel Compares the MacBook Neo and Framework 12

    If I was looking for a laptop in the MacBook Neo’s price range, the Framework 12 would be what I was comparing it against. From a pricing standpoint, the Neo comes out on top, but the Framework has the potential for a much longer lifespan.

  • Bunnie Huang ☛ BIO: The Bao I/O Coprocessor

    BIO is the I/O co-processor in the Baochip-1x, a mostly open source 22nm SoC I helped design. You can read more about the Baochip-1x’s background here, or pick up an evaluation board at Crowd Supply.

    In this post, I’ll talk about the origins of the BIO, starting by working through a detailed study of the Raspberry Pi PIO as a reference, before diving into the architecture of the BIO. I’ll then work through three programming examples of the BIO, two in assembly and one in C. If all you’re interested in is how to use the BIO, you can skip the background details and go around halfway down the post to the section titled “Design of the BIO”, or go right into the code examples.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • The Strategist ☛ Australia needs a food security impact assessment

    It’s clear from debates around the upcoming National Food Security Strategy that industry understands our vulnerability to disruption, given our concentrated processing capacity, reliance on imported inputs, tight labour markets and just-in-time logistics. These pressures are amplified by strategic contest, climate volatility and geo-economic fragmentation. Linking its agricultural sector to its defence apparatus last month, the United States is already treating its food system as a hard-power asset. Australia must apply the same pragmatism to its policy machinery, tailored to our own strategic circumstances.

  • Techdirt ☛ A Model For HHS: New Mexico Measles Outbreak Was Curtailed With Mass Vaccination Campaign

    Or, gee, I don’t know, how about it being a model for the federal fucking agency with a charter that centers on keeping Americans healthy and combating infectious diseases? Why is this left to the states to figure out? States can be laboratories for democracy all we like, but infectious diseases don’t respect state borders.

  • David Bushell ☛ RSS Club #006: Burnout

    Thing is though, I actually do get “thank you” emails for my stance against AI. There are a lot of developers who aren’t in a position to speak their mind. I don’t blame anyone for staying quiet when their job is on the line. I’m lucky I am my own boss.

    I’ve always blogged primarily for myself. That’s the secret to blogging I think. Regardless, after so many years I have the power to reach a significant audience. I feel somewhat obliged to do something with that. I’m just not sure I’m venting my frustrations in the right way. Maybe I am burning out and it’s affecting my judgement?

• Proprietary

  • BoingBoing ☛ FedRAMP reviewer called Microsoft's federal cloud "a pile of shit"

    FedRAMP spent 480 hours and 18 technical deep dives evaluating GCC High's security over three years. Microsoft refused to provide detailed data flow diagrams showing its encryption practices, calling the request a "rock fetching exercise." Two independent assessors, Coalfire and Kratos, back-channeled to FedRAMP that they couldn't get the full picture either. Reviewers concluded they had a "lack of confidence in assessing the system's overall security posture." FedRAMP gave up in October 2023.

  • Daniel Stenberg ☛ NTLM and SMB go opt-in

    NTLM broke with the HTTP paradigm: it is made to authenticate the connection instead of the request, which is what HTTP authentication is supposed to do and what all the other methods do. This might sound like a tiny and insignificant detail, but it has a major impact in all HTTP implementations everywhere. Indirectly it is also the cause for quite a few security related issues in HTTP code, because NTLM needs many special exceptions and extra unique treatments.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ Analyst Warns Against Using Microsoft's Copilot AI on Friday Afternoons

      Dennis Xu, a research analyst at the firm Gartner, went as far as to suggest that companies using Copilot should ban it on Friday afternoons, because by that late juncture in the week, workers might be too checked out to double check its work.

    • New Yorker ☛ How Bad Is Plagiarism, Really?

      One of the knottiest problems in this vexing new field of endeavor concerns the relationship between A.I. and plagiarism. It could be argued that the two are nearly identical, given that artificial intelligence scrapes up immeasurably vast amounts of online data, like those trawlers that scour the seabed for shrimp and flatfish with weighted nets, and to hell with the natural habitat. A chatbot is not (or not yet) an individual, and therefore bears no moral responsibility, but to lay hold of what it delivers, and to pass it off as one’s own work, could be construed as handling stolen goods. That, at any rate, is a viewpoint that prevails at some of the sturdier colleges in the United States. The most robust that I have come across is San José State University, where the advice offered by the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library is admirably clear: “It doesn’t matter which AI program/software you use. Using any of these to write your papers is considered a form of plagiarism.”

    • Digital Music News ☛ Fraud Concerns Remain Despite Mike Smith Streaming Case's End

      Additionally, the 54-year-old, having reaped millions in ill-gotten royalties by directing billions of bot plays to his AI uploads, agreed to pay nearly $8.1 million. With that, the presiding judge is set to sentence the streaming fraudster on July 29th.

    • The Verge ☛ AI influencer awards season is upon us | The Verge

      To enter, you must develop your AI influencer on OpenArt’s platform and submit it at www.AIpersonality.ai. You’ll be asked for social media handles across TikTok, X, YouTube, and Instagram, as well as the story behind the character, your motivations for creating it, and details of any brand work.

    • Android Police ☛ Google Search 'experiment' uses AI to rewrite news headlines

      One of the publication's articles appeared in Search with the following headline: 'Cheat on everything' AI tool. If you hadn't read the article before, you'd think this is an endorsement of the tool. Meanwhile, the original headline read: "I used the 'cheat on everything' AI tool and it didn’t help me cheat on anything," which is basically the opposite of what the writer intended to convey (via 9to5Google).

      Evidently, this can become problematic quickly, particularly as users rely on search engines to find accurate, up-to-date information on current events. The Verge heard back from Google spokespersons about this particular change, who described the experiment's scope as "narrow" and added that a wider launch hasn't been approved yet.

    • Rishi Baldawa ☛ AI Mandates Manufacture Noise

      If you look past these closed loop oscillations at the top and start paying closer attention to what is happening on the ground, you’ll see a different reality. Take the example of what kinds of AI usage patterns come up. Often on the same team, but sometimes even in the same person.

      It’s a nuanced conversation but broadly, I see three types of users across various conversations on the topic: [...]

    • Nolan Lawson ☛ The diminished art of coding

      I don’t think coding is dead as an art form, and I do think that the “new” craftsmanship will have its own masters, its own styles, its own expressiveness. Heck, maybe I’ll be surprised and there will be an artist-in-residence somewhere wielding agent orchestrators like a paintbrush! But I kind of doubt it. If you’re not knitting, then you’re making clothes on an assembly line, and if the clothes are disposable, then it’s just fast-fashion. There’s artistry there, perhaps, but the end product is much less interesting artistically because there’s less of the human touch to it.

      In my view, we’re firmly in the fast-fashion era of coding: software is vibe-coded, used up, thrown away, vibe-coded again. This is not a fully bad thing, and I’m sure many non-coders especially are giddy at the superpowers they’ve acquired. But as coders, we shouldn’t lose sight of what we’ve lost, and we should seek to make up for it with new sources of artistic sustenance.

    • TechTea ☛ Generative AI (as it currently stands) is an Evil Technology

      This article has been bouncing in my brain for a long time, but Michal’s post about the subject motivated me to look at my drafts folder and finish this one. Also, the company I work for is starting an AI push, thus I’m extra agitated with the tech. For those who don’t pay attention this might sound like hyperbole, but after everything I’ve seen, heard, and experienced this article doesn’t even scratch the surface of why I disdain the tech and the companies that are profiting off it.

    • Connor Tumbleson ☛ The odd new spam on GitHub

      Sure enough I stumble upon another issue and this time the user/script just injected the spam links directly into words of the LLM text. This time the advertisements are for Labcorp which I recognize as a massive company. So now I'm even more curious - does that company engage with a scummy advertisement agency that results in some real scummy behavior in order to grow search standing? Or is the connection unrelated, either I move on to the next.

    • Dan MacKinlay ☛ Community sovereign AI compute

      Here I want to talk about a specific asset that a small collective might want to own: a computer that can do intellectual work for us.

      By which I mean: a machine that can run something like the class of AI models that currently power the tools many of us are starting to depend on for work—coding assistants, research tools, document drafters, agentic workflows. The kind of thing that, right now, we rent by the token from a company in San Francisco, or increasingly, from a company in Hangzhou.

    • Gigi ☛ Caring about Sloppypasta

      Here’s what LLMs can’t do, and unless we give them bodies (and true pain, and real suffering, and proper death) it’s a thing they’ll never be able to do: care. And that’s also the reason why people hate Sloppypasta: it’s done without care.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Task And Purpose ☛ French sailor reveals flagship’s location via fitness app

      The deployment was publicly announced and aircraft carriers are not the hardest things to track, but this did reveal close to its exact location in near-real time. Le Monde used satellite imagery to locate the ship, specifically via the info from the sailor’s Strava post. So, on March 13, the Charles de Gaulle was noted as being roughly 100 kilometers south of Turkey and west of Cyprus.

    • Site36 ☛ AI predictive policing models: Dutch police and Frontex test concept of "digital twins"

      The Dutch municipality of Heerlen is using €5 million in funding from the European Union to build an AI-supported system designed to predict crime and disturbances of public order. The project, launched last year, is called “Pulse-Twin”. An initial version is expected to be completed later this year and will then be tested until spring 2028.

    • Ben Werdmuller ☛ Ageless Linux

      The site maintains a list of age verification laws they are violating, as well as states that have proposed laws that they would violate. It’s sobering: these aren’t just the usual suspects (although that would be bad enough in itself, of course). California has a pending law that will take effect in 2027. New York and Illinois have laws under discussion.

    • Cyryl Płotnicki ☛ Predicting home electricity usage based on historical patterns in Home Assistant

      I use Home Assistant for automation, so the solution described uses Home Assistant's sensor configuration and database layout, however the overall idea should be more widely applicable.

      I've been trying to minimise what we pay for electricity at home, by optimising the times at which e.g. house battery charges or water heats up. To do that it's useful to be able to predict future load. Why does this help ? Imagine a situation where you want to decide if to charge battery from grid, and by how much. If current battery charge will fully cover your predicted load until e.g. sun comes up and gives you solar you're golden, but if not it might make sense to charge from the grid.

• Defence/Aggression

  • teleSUR ☛ Shocking Peter Thiel Antichrist Lectures: 4 Secret Sessions Spark Vatican Fury

    Peter Thiel Antichrist lectures in Rome ignite controversy as Vatican adviser Paolo Benanti labels ideas heretical, warning of technocratic threats to democracy.

  • The Nation ☛ Robert Mueller Never Should Have Been a Liberal Hero

    For most of his life, Robert Mueller was a pillar of bipartisan comity, an institutionalist respected by both major US political parties, but in the last decade, he became emblematic of polarized politics. Liberals lionized Mueller as a patriotic public servant who bravely tried to defend the rule of law, while MAGA maligned him as part of a “deep state” conspiracy to destroy Donald Trump. Mueller, who died on Monday at age 81, had been FBI director from 2001 to 2013 but is more famous for being the special prosecutor who oversaw from 2017 to 2019 the investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign in 2016 and the Russian government.

  • Robert Reich ☛ Sunday thought: America Belongs to US

    But let me remind you — just as I remind myself — that tyranny cannot succeed where people refuse to submit to it.

    Six days from now, next Saturday, on the third No Kings Day, we will proclaim our refusal to submit. We will march against this vile regime in larger numbers than have ever protested in America.

  • Mike Brock ☛ Are We Really Going to Do This?

    Are we really going to celebrate the 250th anniversary of our independence with these people in power?

    Is that really what we are going to do, America?

    Because I want you to sit with that question for a moment. Not rhetorically. Sit with it. July 4th, 2026 is coming. The bunting will go up. The fireworks will be purchased. The speeches will be written. And somewhere, in some official capacity, the people who started an unauthorized war, who ignored court orders, who sent masked men into the streets without regard for the Bill of Rights, who bent the machinery of the federal government toward the personal and financial interests of a criminal demagogue — those people will stand at a podium and invoke the Founders.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Ballad of the Black Pill

    When you take the black pill, you are not opting out of this arrangement. You are free-riding on it while pretending you have transcended it. You are consuming the fruits of the civilization you have decided is too corrupt to defend, while telling yourself that your refusal to engage is a form of integrity rather than a form of cowardice dressed in philosophical clothing.

  • The Next Move ☛ They Took Risks for Freedom. We’re Celebrating Them.

    Every year, the Renew Democracy Initiative, which publishes The Next Move, celebrates people who have taken risks for freedom at our Heroes of Democracy Gala. We believe that spotlighting powerful role models who made personal sacrifices and risked their lives and livelihoods can motivate others to take up the cause of liberty.

    With the United States celebrating two and a half centuries of independence, we’re excited to announce four honorees who will inspire us to strengthen and protect American democracy and freedom around the world for the next 250 years. We hope you will join us on Friday, April 17 in New York City as we celebrate these Heroes of Democracy: [...]

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • The Gray Zone ☛ Paul Mason instigated GCHQ targeting of The Grayzone’s Kit Klarenberg, leaks reveal

    Leaked material reviewed by The Grayzone reveals failed ‘journalist’ Paul Mason conspired with GCHQ to monitor and attack this journalist and other critics. What did the British intelligence agency do with the sensitive information he secretly provided?

• Environment

  • The Scotsman ☛ The environmental questions around Scotland's AI data centre revolution

    Concerns around energy and water use of wave of new hyperscale facilities under development

  • The Strategist ☛ It’s time for Australia to step off the gas

    In our proposed model, the government would use its forecasts of domestic supply and domestic demand to work out how much extra gas is required for the coming year. In 2029 (the year supply gaps first appear), only 3 petajoules will be needed to avoid shortages. In 2032, it’s more like 50 petajoules.

  • The Register UK ☛ Australia to datacenter operators: BYO energy or stay home

    The expectations also call on datacenter operators to prioritise Australia’s national interest, use water sustainably and responsibly, invest in local skills and jobs, and do all that while strengthening the nation’s “research, innovation and local capability.”

  • Paul Krugman ☛ How to Burn Less Oil

    And in the longer run, we’re now having an object lesson in the strategic risks of depending so much on oil — risks that add to the already compelling environmental case for moving away from fossil fuels in general.

    But how hard will it be to reduce our dependence on the black stuff? Can the world economy prosper while burning much less oil than it has in the past?

  • Energy/Transportation

    • El País ☛ Without fuel, but pedaling on: The new bicycle boom in Cuba

      “Every time there’s a crisis in this country, the first thing to go is fuel. Then, everything gets really expensive… so, it’s better to ride a bike. It’s cheaper, faster and, besides that, you get exercise.” He recalls that, before the 1990s, there were Russian bicycles. Then, when the Special Period began, Chinese bicycles started arriving. “This was a country filled with bicycles.”

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Howard Oakley ☛ Natural history paintings of Bruno Liljefors 2

      During the 1880s Bruno Liljefors excelled as a wildlife artist, and was appointed head of the art school in Gothenburg, Sweden, in succession to Carl Larsson. But his personal life was in turmoil, and the 1890s were barren years when he often ran short of money.

    • Chuck Grimmett ☛ Spring Peepers

      We mostly spotted them on sticks and small logs, and in the leaf litter along the edge of the vernal pools.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ How Elon Musk's Hyperloop sucked up billions and delivered nothing

    In 2013, PayPal mafia don and head of Tesla and SpaceX Elon Musk got caught up in the libertarian opposition to California’s overdue, over-budget and under-delivering high-speed rail project.

  • Silcon Republic ☛ Commission says EU Inc will be in place by end of 2026

    “At the heart of this proposal is one simple principle that says, ‘once only’. Companies will provide their information to public authority, the data one time only, and that information will then be shared automatically between relevant administrations, from business registers to taxes to social security … and this information will be stored and easily accessible in a new EU Business register for EU Inc companies.”

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • TruthOut ☛ Deepfakes and AI Misinformation Reshape How War Is Seen Online

      Deepfakes are synthetic media edited or generated using Artificial Intelligence (AI). According to the New York Times, a “cascade of A.I. fakes about war with Iran” have proliferated across social media since the United States (U.S.) and Israel reignited military actions with Iran on February 28, 2026. Indeed, the digital landscape is increasingly saturated with synthetic fabrications, as false videos of boisterous celebrations, frantic airport evacuations, devastating bombings, and graphic casualties flood users’ feeds in a relentless stream of misinformation.

    • New York Times ☛ Polymarket Says It Deals in Truth, but Its Social Feeds Are Filled With Falsehoods

      Yet on Polymarket’s social media feeds, truth is often slippery. A New York Times review of hundreds of Polymarket’s posts on X, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram found a pattern of its accounts sharing false and misleading information.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Semafor Inc ☛ Vox Media tried to sell its podcasts, and itself

    The most widely-circulated option Vox Media offered was around its podcast network. In November, Axios reported that the digital media company’s board had discussed spinning off the podcast business; the company subsequently sent an investor deck for the audio and video business out to investors and similarly positioned digital media companies. But the company’s previously unreported alternative proposals, marketed by the media investment bank Liontree, suggested that Vox Media was looking for a much broader transformation, if not an outright sale.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • University of Michigan ☛ UMich could purchase Concordia University’s Ann Arbor campus

    The possibility of the University acquiring more land in Ann Arbor has sparked discussion, as it already owns about nine percent of the city.

    In an email to The Daily, Taubman graduate student Jade Prange, a member of the Oglala Sioux tribe, wrote she believes that if the University decides to expand their campus on land traditionally belonging to Indigenous tribes — which includes all of Ann Arbor — it should use the land to benefit Indigenous people.

  • In Court this week: Dentons lines up against SRA in Court of Appeal

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Gregory Hammond ☛ My love hate relationship with music and music streaming

    My relationship with music and music streaming is complicated. No, I don’t mean on the real life relationship sort of way, but I guess a sort of transactional relationship. On one hand, I enjoy listening to music and supporting bands. However on the other hand, I wish a number of things were changed not only to better support the lesser-known artists, but also the current trend of music.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Copyrights

  • CopyrightLately ☛ This Little Piggy Went to Trial (And Got Just $200 and No Fees)

    A stock photo company sued for copyright infringement over a single image of raw pork chops, took the case all the way to trial, won $200, then asked for $69,000 in attorney’s fees. It went poorly.