Leftovers

• Vox ☛ Why Easter never became a big secular holiday like Christmas

  Christians from a variety of traditions will celebrate Easter this Sunday. Easter commemorates the resurrection of Jesus Christ after his crucifixion. For many Christians, including those from Eastern Orthodox traditions (who generally celebrate Easter later than Western Christians, as they use a different calendar), Easter is the most important Christian holiday of all.

• Yash Garg ☛ Writing is not a Tool Problem

  The agenda was quite interesting and mostly focused around Writing; Writing Tools to be particular but we touched upon both as the meetup went on.

  Most of the points everyone talked about were around the tools (both technical and non-technical) that they use to write better and be as friction-less as possible with their thoughts.

  This also made me introspect on how we don’t really think of writing as a skill anymore, which is a lot more important in this day and age of AI and LLMs.

  That’s what I’d like to talk about, I promise I’ll try to keep it short!

• James G ☛ How I find links

  There are a few ways I find links. One of the most valuable tools is the Firefox address bar, which can read my browser history. If I know the link I am looking for, I will type in as many words as I think I need to find the link via the address bar autosuggest feature. With the right query, and provided I have opened the link, I will be able to find it. The utility of the address bar is in part aided by my love of opening and skimming links shared in discussions I am in.

• Matan Abudy ☛ My Email Hygiene | Matan Abudy

  These rules leave me with mostly two types of emails: [...]

• Science

  • Artyom Bologov ☛ Binary Lambda Calculus is Hard

    So one has something like 000000101110110 representing (lambda (x y f) (f x y)). (Or, technically, (lambda (x) (lambda (y) (lambda (f) ((f x) y)))), but that’s too wordy.) These binaries are terse, and thus fun to play with! John Tromp himself uses BLC to measure complexity of algorithms by how many bits they take. As a fruit of a joint effort, sorting is known to take as little as 300 bits. And sorting without hardcoded predicate is 248 bits.

    And yet Binary Lambda Calculus is hard, in many ways. Working with it as my current phase crush, I encounter some quirks inherent to it. And things that were even stopping me from picking it up at some point. Like the burden of implementation: [...]

  • Computational Complexity ☛ Computational Complexity: Fun Little Solutions

    Here are the solutions to the problems I posted last week.

• Hardware

  • Digital Camera World ☛ Forget frames per second – this WW1 photographer captured galloping horses using a glass plate camera that took 3 frames PER MINUTE!

    Stationed on the Western Front, when not attending the more horrendous affairs of the conflict, behind the lines, Brooke photographed cavalrymen galloping their horses at speeds you would imagine to be way too fast for cameras of the day.

  • Digital Camera World ☛ How a trench warfare invention became Germany’s most iconic camera for a whole generation of professional photographers

    This camera quickly becomes the standard bearer for 6x6 (2¼ square) twin-lens reflex cameras, thanks to its high precision and great optics. Reinhold Heidecke didn’t invent the Twin Lens Reflex format. As a long-time professional camera designer, he’d undoubtedly have been aware of the earlier large-format designs. What sparked his interest, however, was the realization that in the trenches of The Great War (now known as World War One), photography over the parapet was an extremely hazardous business.

• Proprietary

  • WinBuzzer ☛ Ex-Microsoft Engineer: Azure Runs on Manual Fixes After Talent Exodus

    Axel Rietschin, a nine-year Microsoft veteran who spent a year inside Azure Core Compute, this week revealed in a six-part series on Azure’s platform failures that the platform has been running on manual intervention since its rushed 2008 launch, with a talent exodus leaving key infrastructure in the hands of junior engineers who could not explain why 173 software agents were running on every node.

  • Stuart Breckenridge ☛ SHIMANO CONNECT Lab to be Discontinued

    As an owner of a SHIMANO power meter, this is disappointing. While many of the analytical services offered by SHIMANO CONNECT Lab are available via Garmin Connect, Strava, and Intervals, none of those services support Force Vector analysis, which is one of the primary functions of the product. I even went so far as to download GoldenCheetah but this appears to be a hot mess that doesn’t want to run on macOS 261.

  • Logikal Solutions ☛ Microsoft Broke IDE LS-120 Support

    Microsoft broke IDE LS-120 support. Agile is not Software Engineering and the rate of turds being pushed out the ass end of Sprints is proof of that. I set this machine up last year, in the summer sometime.

  • Lee Peterson ☛ iOS 26: I shouldn’t need to restart my phone to change my wallpaper

    But here’s my actual Home Screen. It’s not changing unless I restart.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ ‘Shockingly bad’: Nissan Leaf drivers voice anger over app shutdown

    Owners of some Nissan Leaf electric vehicles are angry after the carmaker announced it would shut down an app that lets them remotely control battery charging and other functions.

    Drivers of Leaf cars made before May 2019 and the e-NV200 van (produced until 2022) have been told that the NissanConnect EV app linked to their vehicles will “cease operation” from 30 March. This means they will lose remote services, including turning on the heating, and some map features.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • The Register UK ☛ Who is liable when AI agents go wrong in business?

      The stakes are high. The largest enterprise application providers are now talking about using AI agents to automate decisions in HR, finance, and supply chain management. LLM hallucinations in performance summaries, incorrect regulatory filings, and critical supplies failing to turn up are among the risks weighing on businesses that hand decision-making to AI.

      While tech suppliers eye a trillion-dollar opportunity in AI, who carries the can if it goes wrong?

    • Daniel Lemire ☛ Can your AI rewrite your code in assembly?

      So, how is the performance? I use random strings of up to 1 kilobyte. In all cases, I test that the functions provide the correct count. I did not closely examine the code, so it is possible that mistakes could be hiding in the code.

    • Ben Werdmuller ☛ "Cognitive surrender" leads AI users to abandon logical thinking, research finds

      There are no shortcuts to doing great work, but if AI is used in this pressure-driven way, it becomes little more than a shortcut machine: a way to get to the end goal faster without really scrutinizing the thinking it took to get there. It’s no wonder that AI users didn’t examine the answers they were given; in a world where AI allows people to be saddled with more tasks, they might not have had the time to do anything else. Good enough; onto the next thing. Most people don’t want to cut corners, but under adverse circumstances, they will.

    • Paolo Scanferla ☛ Can We Measure Software Slop? An Experiment

      In this article, I propose a definition of software slop based on human attention (slop = code that hasn't been reviewed or verified) and sketch out a way to estimate how "sloppy" a piece of software is.

      I put it to the test with Slop-O-Meter, an experimental tool that analyzes public GitHub repos and assigns them a sloppiness score. I then discuss the results of the tool, which are not very reliable, but interesting nonetheless.

    • arXiv ☛ [2602.19141] Sycophantic Chatbots Cause Delusional Spiraling, Even in Ideal Bayesians

      "AI psychosis" or "delusional spiraling" is an emerging phenomenon where AI chatbot users find themselves dangerously confident in outlandish beliefs after extended chatbot conversations. This phenomenon is typically attributed to AI chatbots' well-documented bias towards validating users' claims, a property often called "sycophancy." In this paper, we probe the causal link between AI sycophancy and AI-induced psychosis through modeling and simulation. We propose a simple Bayesian model of a user conversing with a chatbot, and formalize notions of sycophancy and delusional spiraling in that model. We then show that in this model, even an idealized Bayes-rational user is vulnerable to delusional spiraling, and that sycophancy plays a causal role. Furthermore, this effect persists in the face of two candidate mitigations: preventing chatbots from hallucinating false claims, and informing users of the possibility of model sycophancy. We conclude by discussing the implications of these results for model developers and policymakers concerned with mitigating the problem of delusional spiraling.

    • Andrew Murphy ☛ If you thought the speed of writing code was your problem - you have bigger problems | Debugging Leadership | Debugging Leadership

      It's Tuesday morning. Your VP of Engineering is standing in front of a slide deck, vibrating with the kind of excitement usually reserved for people who just discovered cryptocurrency in 2017. They've just come back from a conference. Or maybe a vendor dinner. Three glasses of pinot noir and a demo, and now they have news.

      "We're rolling out AI coding assistants across every team. Early numbers show a 40% increase in code output. This is going to transform our velocity."

      The room does that thing where half the people nod along and the other half develop a sudden interest in their laptops. Your staff engineer is doing that face. You know the face - it's the one where they're calculating whether to say something or just update their LinkedIn later.

      Nobody asks the question that matters, which is: velocity toward what, exactly?

      Because here's what just happened. Your VP looked at your entire software delivery organisation, identified the one thing that was already pretty fast, and decided to make it faster. They found a station on the assembly line that was not the bottleneck, and threw money at it.

      If you know anything about how systems work, you know this doesn't just fail to help. It makes everything actively worse.

  • Social Control Media

    • NPR ☛ Verdicts against Meta and Google may bring a new era of big tech accountability

      In LA, the jury found Instagram owner Meta and Google's YouTube deliberately designed their apps to be addictive, contributing to the mental health struggles of a young woman who started using the apps as a child. It awarded her $6 million in damages.

      The New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay the state $375 million for failing to protect young users from child predators. The company could face even more penalties in a second phase of the trial set to start in May, over whether Meta created a public nuisance. New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez has said he will also ask the court to force Meta to change its apps to make them safer.

• Defence/Aggression

  • BBC ☛ German men aged 17-45 may need military approval for long stays abroad

    In a statement sent to the BBC, a defence ministry spokesman confirmed that males aged 17 and older were required to obtain prior approval for stays abroad lasting longer than three months.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • International Business Times ☛ Charlie Kirk's Alleged Shooter Tyler Robinson's Case Is Reportedly 'About To Be Dismissed'

    While prosecutors have long maintained a straightforward narrative regarding the shooting, a series of explosive allegations and inconclusive lab results are now threatening the integrity of the case. The sudden lack of physical certainty has left many wondering if the prosecution's timeline is beginning to fracture under pressure. With the next major hearing looming, the trial of Tyler Robinson is no longer just a criminal matter but a focal point for intense political and forensic scrutiny.

• Environment

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Contributor: Unspoken cost of U.S. military is a stunning volume of pollution

    To match that output, a Boeing 747 would need to make more than 100,000 round trips between LAX and JFK. At 40 commercial flights a day, that’s almost seven years’ worth of aviation — for a few weeks of one war.

    A pair of Apache helicopter battalions burns 60,000 gallons of jet fuel in a single raid. A B-52 Stratofortress gulps 55 gallons of fuel every minute it is airborne, or 3,300 gallons of fuel per hour. Boots on the ground? Humvees get 4 miles per gallon. M-1 tanks get 1.5 to 3 miles per gallon. A single U.S. Army armored division consumes 600,000 gallons of fuel per day.

    These are not anomalies.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Interesting Engineering ☛ US scientists unlock secrets of high-temperature superconductors

      Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have discovered how tiny changes in superhydride structure enable superconductivity at near room temperatures but extreme pressure — offering clues for designing more practical superconductors.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Register UK ☛ Don't glamorize cybercrims, roast them instead

    Former CISA boss Jen Easterly and others have called on the industry to stop glamorizing these groups, and instead give them horrible names like "Scrawny Nuisance" or "Evil Ferret."

  • The Conversation ☛ I’m a Luddite. You should be one too

    And once you know what Luddism actually stands for, I’m willing to bet you will be one too — or at least much more sympathetic to the Luddite cause than you think.

    Today the term is mostly lobbed as an insult. Take this example from a recent report by global consulting firm Accenture on why the health-care industry should enthusiastically embrace artificial intelligence: [...]

  • Michael Burkhardt ☛ Big Tech Roundup

    These are my thoughts on some of the biggest firms in the technology industry. Some are informed by my own experiences with these companies over the course of my 35-year career. Others are just observations. This is not intended as an exhaustive academic or financial analysis, just some random observations and opinions.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • TruthOut ☛ UW Removes Middle East Center Director After Criticizing War

    The University of Washington has removed a professor from his role as director of its Middle East Center after he criticized the illegal U.S.-Israeli war of choice on Iran and condemned Zionism, the settler-colonial movement for Jewish hegemony in Palestine.

    Aria Fani, who will remain an associate professor at UW’s Jackson School of International Studies, told The Seattle Times on Friday that new interim widirector Daniel Hoffman told him last week he was fired from his leadership role at the Middle East Center.

  • The Next Move ☛ Life Lessons From Lenin

    Then I came round to the statue. I wrote that, naturally, it offended me. Lenin was a demon of censorship whose regime had murdered members of my family. I hated him like I hated Stalin or Hitler. Though as New Yorker editor David Remnick recounted in his book Lenin’s Tomb, Vyacheslav Molotov, one of the few men who intimately knew both Lenin and Stalin, once remarked that compared to Lenin, Stalin was “a mere lamb.” Despite this, I explained that I believed the statue should not be torn down by fiat. I was personally offended, outraged even, but I believed in the principles of free expression and democracy, and if anything was to be done about the statue, I felt it should be done fairly.

  • YLE ☛ Turkey demands that Finland hand over 12 citizens, researcher sees political "witch hunt"

    Alaranta characterises Turkey's actions as a "witch hunt".

    "It often targets ordinary people and also critics of the Erdoğan government who have nothing to do with the Gülen movement," he says.

  • [Old] BBC ☛ Batley Grammar School: Blasphemy debate leaves town 'at crossroads'

    Just weeks after secondary schools fully returned to the classroom after months of home learning, a religious studies lesson in a West Yorkshire town provoked protests outside the school gates and a free speech row stretching far beyond the county's borders.

  • [Old] The Guardian UK ☛ What a teacher in hiding can tell us about our failure to tackle intolerance

    Three years ago, on 25 March 2021, a teacher from Batley Grammar School (BGS) in West Yorkshire was forced into hiding after a religious studies class he gave led to protests from Muslim parents and to death threats. Today, that incident has been largely forgotten. Except by the teacher. He can’t forget it because, extraordinarily, he and his family are still in hiding. Equally extraordinarily, little is said about this.

  • [Old] Yorkshire Live ☛ 'Devastated' Batley teacher 'fearing for his life' as he goes into hiding after Prophet Muhammad cartoon row - Yorkshire Live

    The teacher's dad has told Mail Online that his son has been forced to go into hiding with his partner. He said the teacher feels his life will never be the same again and he thinks his family could be killed if they return to Batley.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • TruthOut ☛ ICE Presence Persists in Chicago as Raids Shift to Quieter Tactics

    Advocates say ICE arrests continue daily across Chicagoland, even as tactics grow more targeted and less visible.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ New York Is Closing In on Amazon’s Shady Delivery System

    Amazon has long exploited subcontracting to avoid taking responsibility for its delivery drivers. A bill introduced by socialist New York City Councilor Tiffany Cabán would force the e-commerce giant to directly employ its drivers.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • APNIC ☛ Strengthening IPv6 collaboration: Xiong’an New Area delegates visit APNIC

    APNIC recently welcomed Dr Yang Guoliang, President of the Future Network Research Institute of Xiong’an (in person), and senior representatives of the Xiong’an New Area Administrative Committee (remotely) to the official presentation of the IPv6 City Plaque and continued discussions on technical cooperation.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Android Police ☛ I'm unable to switch from Microsoft to Google ecosystem because of this single app

  I have spent the last month trying to remove Microsoft from my digital life. I traded Outlook for Gmail, OneDrive for Google Drive, and Word for Docs, and for a while, the transition was smooth.

  But as I reached the final stage of migration, I hit a wall: OneNote. While Google’s ecosystem is sleek and integrated, it has a giant hole in its lineup that Keep and Docs simply can’t fill.

• [Old] SAMexpert ☛ FTC vs Microsoft: The Broadest Antitrust Probe Since the 1990s

  The formal investigation began in November 2024, when Khan signed off on a sprawling civil investigative demand spanning hundreds of pages. The document, obtained and reviewed by Bloomberg, compels Microsoft to turn over nearly a decade of data about its operations, from 2016 through 2025.

  Federal investigators are seeking detailed information about Microsoft's AI operations, including the costs associated with training models and acquiring training data. They're looking into the firm's data centres, its struggles to meet customer demand for computing power, and its software licensing practices. Most significantly, they're scrutinising Microsoft's relationship with OpenAI, particularly whether the partnership was structured to avoid merger review requirements.

• [Old] TechRadar ☛ Microsoft accused of creating a monopoly on US government systems through free upgrades

  Furthermore, Microsoft consultants working within the government’s agencies to assist with the implementation of the company’s tools reportedly created a dependency on its services, effectively making it more difficult for the US government to switch providers.

  The White House Offer benefited Microsoft beyond the cybersecurity space, as well. By boosting adoption of its Azure cloud platform, Microsoft would be able to intensify its competition against Amazon Web Services, which accounts for the largest portion of the cloud pie.

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ U.S. Lawmakers Work on Unified Site-Blocking Bill to Counter Online Piracy

    Last week's Supreme Court decision in Cox Communications reshaped the piracy liability landscape, creating new urgency for site-blocking legislation in Congress. This could be addressed by Senator Thom Tillis and Representative Zoe Lofgren, who have been working on bicameral legislation that would require ISPs and DNS resolvers to block foreign pirate sites under court order, TorrentFreak has learned.

  • The Verge ☛ Suno is a music copyright nightmare capable of pumping out AI cover slop

    AI music platform Suno’s policy is that it does not permit the use of copyrighted material. You can upload your own tracks to remix or set your original lyrics to AI-generated music. But, it’s supposed to recognize and stop you from using other people’s songs and lyrics. Now, no system is perfect, but it turns out that Suno’s copyright filters are incredibly easy to fool.

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Today I woke up and chose violence

    Arguing with robots has become something of a hobby of mine.

  • Doc Searls ☛ An Immodest Proposal for the Music Industry

    You can see why IFPI (ifpi.org) no longer gives its full name: International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. That phonographic stuff is what they now call “physical.” And you see where that’s going (or mostly gone). You can also see that what once threatened the industry—”digital”—now accounts for most of its rebound: [...]