Leftovers

• Roy Tang ☛ Who Knows That You Blog

  I am not shy about having a blog. I'm not big on self-promotion, but if someone asks IRL I will gladly give the link. And back when I was still active on Facebook where many of my IRL friends, colleagues and relatives are I would often share links to my blog posts. Some would commend me on my writing or comment on Facebook about the contents, but that is largely the scale of engagement I could expect. Almost nobody would bother to click through to other posts or browse the site or subscribe to RSS feeds or visit the site again unless I shared a link again. Sadly, "browsing the web" outside of their social media silos isn't really a thing of interest for most people like it is for many people who enjoy blogs. They won't bother seeking out or interacting with content that's not pushed into their algorithmic social media feeds.

• John J Hoare ☛ Brevity. – Dirty Feed

  15k words, and there needed to be more. I needed to pull back just a little and give more context for a wider audience, and I abjectly failed to do so. If I had, maybe those pieces might have been really successful, not just successful by the standards of this site.3

  Brevity can be important. But it’s equally as easy to simply not write enough.

• Science

  • John D Cook ☛ Unified config files

    One thing I do is remap keys so that the same key does the same thing everywhere, to the extent that’s practical. This requires remapping keys. In particular, I want the key functionality, not the key name, to be the same across operating systems. For example, the Command key on a Mac does what the Control key does on Windows and Linux. I have my machines set up so the key in the lower left corner, whatever you call it, does things like copy, paste, and cut.

  • Key Material ☛ Learning, but with Errors

    Me: “Fine, I’ll explain it, against my will. I am just going to note here that I am basically forced into this and derive no joy whatsoever from explaining lattice cryptography.”

    So after having done that a few times, I figured I should put some of it into a more scalable, written form.

    Prerequisites: A bit of Modular Arithmetic and a bit of Linear Algebra.

• Career/Education

  • Matt Wedel ☛ The Lego Natural History Museum, and the question of scale

    For my birthday this year, my wife bought me the newish Lego kit Natural History Museum 10326. (Well: actually she bought me a Chinese knock-off for 1/3 the price, but that’s not the point.) It’s a lovely kit and I had a great time building it.

  • Nat Bennett ☛ Is feedback really a gift?

    Instead, feedback in the improv class is fine. Good, even. I'm a little disappointed when I only get told what I did well in a scene, and jealous of the people who get told what to change.

    The feedback is stuff like [...]

  • Martin Fowler ☛ Mythical Man Month

    In the early 1960s, Fred Brooks managed the development of IBM's System/360 computer systems. After it was done he penned his thoughts in the book The Mythical Man-Month which became one of the most influential books on software development after its publication in 1975. Reading it in 2026, we'll find some of it outdated, but it also retains many lessons that are still relevant today.

    The book contains Brooks's law: “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.” The issue here is communication, as the number of people grows, the number of communication paths between those people grows exponentially. Unless these paths are skillfully designed, then work quickly falls apart.

    Perhaps my most enduring lesson from this book is the importance of conceptual integrity [...]

  • Computational Complexity ☛ When do we know someone has died

    And too often a theoretical computer scientist passes away but the news never reaches us and we don't remember them. It's always sad when someone passes, but it is a good opportunity to remember how they helped shape our field. But we need your help to know when someone has passed away. So if you know someone in our community has passed away, please let us know, and how you know, so that we can know we know.

• Hardware

  • Ruben Schade ☛ A hypothetical NetBSD Cyberdeck

    But here’s the thing. Even if I didn’t need, want, or even have the capacity for another old, used, or hacked-on computer in my life, one could pontificate on what another machine could be. What it could do. How it would work. What it would even look like. Hypothetically, you understand. In theory.

    This gets us to Cyberdecks, a word my Vim spell checker insists must be a reference to X-rated cyber activities, but that I assure you refers to those portable computers people assemble themselves to achieve a specific aesthetic. No spell checker, I don’t mean anaesthetic. Welcome to Rubenerd, where good spell checkers go to dye.

  • Kevin Wammer ☛ These PC cases are gorgeous

    They are stupidly expensive, especially once you add shipping realities, taxes, a new PSU, a new motherboard, and probably a new cooler. But they are absolutely gorgeous. And they both fit a 4090, so I guess that means I am saving money since I could reuse the GPU?

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Paul Krugman ☛ MAGA Will Kill Many Americans

    Let’s back up for a minute. Most Americans appear to be unaware of the fact that life expectancy in the United States is substantially lower than in other advanced countries; we’re on a par with poorer nations in Europe like Albania. Surely even fewer people know that this wasn’t always true. In the early 1980s Americans lived about as long as citizens of other rich nations. Now we die substantially earlier: [...]

    [...]

    What changed in the 1980s? The obvious answer is politics: The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 heralded a sharp U.S. turn to the right. And there is a strong correlation between right-wing politics and increased mortality — stronger than many of the statistical associations that guide public health policy.

  • Arduino ☛ Students build a lactose intolerance breath tester with Arduino® Nano™ board

    Lactose intolerance isn’t a disease – it’s a condition caused by a deficiency of lactase, the enzyme that breaks down lactose into glucose and galactose in the small intestine. When lactase is absent or insufficient, undigested lactose reaches the colon, where gut bacteria ferment it and produce gases, including hydrogen (H2). That hydrogen passes into the bloodstream and is eventually exhaled through the lungs.

    This is the principle behind the hydrogen breath test, a diagnostic method used in clinical settings: measuring the concentration of hydrogen in exhaled breath after ingesting lactose can help to detect malabsorption. The project team saw this as a perfect intersection of biochemistry, physics, and electronics – and decided to build it.

• Proprietary

  • MindsEye Dev Lays Off More Staff Days After ‘New DLC’ Drops

    Build a Rocket Boy, the troubled developer behind MindsEye, one of the most monumental gaming flops of all time, has reportedly made more layoffs amid an ongoing downturn. In recent days, the team pushed out the Blacklisted ‘DLC’, a new in-game mission that was supposed to be a cryptic uncovering of those trying to sabotage BARB and MindsEye.

    Per reports, this is the third wave of redundancies for BARB, which recently suggested a resurgence was in the books for MindsEye, one of the worst-rated games ever made. It has been claimed that up to 170 employees have been impacted, which leaves BARB teetering dangerously on the edge of boasting a skeleton crew.

  • David L Farquhar ☛ Adobe's subscription model

    Before May 2013 there was always question about whether you actually owned software after you paid for it. But before May 6, 2013, you certainly had more control. That was the day Adobe switched to a subscription-only model for its creative software. Other companies followed suit, notably Microsoft with its office suite.

  • So-Called 'Artificial Intelligence' ('AI') / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Noah Petherbridge ☛ How I use A.I. as a Software Engineer

      In 2008 I was building web apps using Perl and old-school JavaScript (jQuery), and as my career progressed, I learned many other languages and frameworks, from Python to Go, Angular to Vue.js, I have used Amazon AWS and Google Cloud Platform, and outside of my day job I have always had many side projects and apps I built myself, and deployed them on my own servers and managed the complete end-to-end process all on my own.

      Even while I was still in high school, I had written and launched many websites, custom blogs and forums, and even a MySpace clone, so by the time I was ready to enter the workforce at 20 years old, I already knew the full stack: back-end, front-end, deployment and systems administration.

      All of that is to set the context of where I was coming from before A.I. came about.

    • Michael Tsai ☛ Software Brain

      Maybe the closest analog is social media, where people love to talk about how bad it is and yet continue right on using it. In both cases, there’s the sense that abstinence is not really an option because you’ll be left behind, and meanwhile the technology is providing real utility.

    • Martin Fowler ☛ Fragments: May 5

      In case you haven’t noticed, those last two fragments resonate. Apple isn’t playing the cloud AI model game, they are saving a huge amount of money, and if local models end up being the future, they’ll be looking rather wise. Van den Ende’s post led me to a podcast by Nate B Jones that argues that Apple is replaying a fifty-year old strategy here. All those years ago anyone who used a computer bought time on a mainframe, the Apple II put far less capable compute into the home and small office. From there came spreadsheets, desktop publishing, and the modern home computer - things that weren’t possible using mainframes.

      He sees the rise of John Ternus as CEO isn’t merely a switch to a known insider successor - but a bet that the future of AI is sophisticated hardware in the home, office, and pocket. If Open Source models are Good Enough, then why spend money sending tokens - containing your sensitive data - to the AI megacorps?

    • Garrit Franke ☛ Don't trust large context windows

      This matters because coding agents will happily walk you straight into the dumb zone. A modern agent burns through tokens fast. A few file reads, a long debug session, a sprawling test run, and you're at 100k before lunch. Meanwhile vendors keep advertising windows of 200k, 1M, even 2M, as if those numbers represented a usable working set. They don't. Studies like RULER and Chroma's report on context rot show that effective context is a fraction of the advertised number, and that performance degrades gradually as you fill the window.

    • Fabrizio Ferri Benedetti ☛ Most vibe-coded tools are not for you

      A consequence of the LLM age is that everybody can build their own tools, for their own use cases, however niche they may be. That’s not the problem: A specialized tool built for ten people can be outstanding. The problem is when a tool is built for an audience of one and then promoted as something greater. Most of the tools created through LLMs on a whim are fire-and-forget, temporary artifacts generated to unceremoniously flatten some bump on a carpet of code. They’re a parade of patches, but patches are not products.

    • Derek Thompson ☛ The Big Question Lurking Beneath the AI Debate

      If the superintelligence argument is correct, AI-by-AI could rapidly develop terrifying capabilities that strain our economy, our laws, and even our systems of governance. The geopolitical consequences would be enormous: Whatever country first crossed the self-improvement threshold might gain a durable advantage, not just in economic terms, but in global power. It would race ahead of their adversaries, powered by a force capable of improving itself in a way that has no precedent in history. Cars changed the world, after all. But they did not transform themselves into fighter jets and coronaviruses.

    • David Oks ☛ Why language models are so weird

      So what had started as a curio became an annoyance. The goblin obsession had to be curbed. So by the time that OpenAI released GPT-5.5, it had added a system prompt to its Codex programming harness, instructing the model to “never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user’s query.” A few days later, someone noticed the line on GitHub; people started wondering why OpenAI’s models seemed so interested in goblins; and OpenAI decided to explain the whole affair with an interesting blog post called “Where the goblins came from.”

    • Daniel Andrlik ☛ Influential ChatGPT for education study retracted

      Ars Technica reports that an article touting the effectiveness of ChatGPT in education has been retracted by the original publisher due to questionable methodology.

    • Andreas ☛ LLMs are not conscious | Anagogistis

      I think this is the wrong conclusion to draw from a fluent conversation. LLMs can produce text about consciousness, emotion, memory, death, selfhood, and inner life very convincingly. But producing the language of inner experience is not the same as having inner experience.

  • Social Control Media

    • Timothy Chambers ☛ This from #FindOutMedia is really important. …

      This is the model to keep an eye on. Everyone else with a core media and podcast following: watch and learn from their early work.

    • Roman Zipp ☛ How to delete your Tweets, Retweets and Likes from X/Twitter (2026)

      I have left Twitter a while ago now because it became a huge sh*tshow and it looks like a lot are currently doing the same.

      I built myself a little browser script to delete my public data from Twitter so they can't make any more money of it. This script only removes your publicly posted stuff like Tweets, Replies, Likes but also Bookmarks. It will not delete your profile or messages.

• Security

  • CISA

    • CISA ☛ 2026-05-01 [Older] CISA Adds One Known Exploited Vulnerability to Catalog

    • CISA ☛ 2026-04-30 [Older] CISA Adds One Known Exploited Vulnerability to Catalog

    • CISA ☛ 2026-04-30 [Older] ABB System 800xA, Symphony Plus IEC 61850

    • CISA ☛ 2026-04-30 [Older] ABB PCM600

    • CISA ☛ 2026-04-30 [Older] ABB Edgenius Management Portal

    • CISA ☛ 2026-04-30 [Older] ABB Ability OPTIMAX

    • CISA ☛ 2026-04-30 [Older] ABB AWIN Gateways

    • CISA ☛ 2026-04-30 [Older] ABB Ability Symphony Plus Engineering

    • CISA ☛ 2026-04-28 [Older] CISA Adds Two Known Exploited Vulnerabilities to Catalog

    • CISA ☛ 2026-04-28 [Older] NSA GRASSMARLIN

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Nick Heer ☛ U.K. Age Verification on iOS 26.4 Appears to Be Passed to Websites, Not Just Apps

      Frustratingly, there is no explanation as to how Aylo’s websites are getting information from this iOS 26.4 API, the documentation for which is only for native apps. I may have missed something obvious, but the only mention I could find of this capability is in a February AppleInsider article. Also I could not find a way to trigger this verification step, even after changing my iPhone’s region, so I cannot test whether it is being passed through an HTTP header — which I presume it is — or another method.

    • Nick Heer ☛ Lawful-Access Bill Could Threaten Encryption, Deter Investment, Chamber of Commerce Warns

      Under the previous parliamentary session, the Consumer Privacy Protection Act was halted after 136 committee meetings. The current Canadian government is still arguing for updates to the Privacy Act, even as it pushes this hostile bill, but it has not resumed efforts to pass the CPPA.

    • Michael Geist ☛ Wilful Blindness?: How the Lawful Access Charter Statement Skips Bill C-22's Most Constitutionally Vulnerable Provisions

      The wilful blindness is particularly problematic in the case of mandated metadata collection for up to a year. This includes transmission data such as date, time, duration, and type of communication, the identifiers of the devices involved, and information identifying the device’s location. This is the architecture of a national surveillance database that covers virtually every Canadian, with data retention for up to a year regardless of whether any user is suspected of wrongdoing. Despite the obvious concerns and Supreme Court of Canada jurisprudence, such as Spencer and Bykovets, that recognize the informational privacy interests in identifying online activity, the Charter Statement is silent on the issue.

    • Don Marti ☛ what if auction-based advertising is just bad?

      So maybe tracking-based advertising is what’s bad?

      Tracking has a bunch of negative externalities, but the tracking is there in order to enable personalization, and the reasons we have personalization are [...]

    • Android Headlines ☛ A Security Researcher Decompiled The White House App, & What They Found Is Pretty Alarming

      But that’s just the start; now the nightmare begins. To start, the app has a full GPS tracking pipeline compiled in. Essentially, it’s set to poll your location every 4.5 minutes in the foreground, and 9.5 minutes in the background. It’s syncing latitude, longitude, accuracy, and timestamp data to OneSignal’s servers. These location permissions aren’t declared in the AndroidManifest, but they are hardcoded as runtime requests in the OneSignal SDK. Some have noted that the tracking only kicks in if the developer enables it server-side and the user grants permission, but it is there, ready to go.

    • The Guardian UK ☛ Mickey Mouse is watching you: Disneyland deploys facial recognition

      Guests can decide to opt out of lanes equipped with the technology, according to the company.

      The software’s introduction comes at a moment when facial recognition technology is embroiled in a national debate about privacy concerns and surveillance.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Hackaday ☛ You’ve Seen The Chip Shortage And The Memory Shortage, Now Prepare For The PCB Shortage

    It’s nice to hide away in our little corner of the internet and talk tech, safely away from the turmoil of world events. Sometimes though, geopolitics intrude even into our space, and Reuters are here reporting on a new concern that will probably affect many Hackaday readers. Conflict in the Gulf of Arabia, and in particular raids on Saudi petrochemical plants, is threatening PCB production far away in China.

  • Reuters ☛ Iran war disrupts the circuit board supply chain, raises costs for tech firms

    Iran struck Saudi Arabia's Jubail petrochemical complex in early April, ​forcing a halt in production of high-purity polyphenylene ether (PPE) resin — a critical base material used to ⁠manufacture PCB laminates. SABIC, which accounts for approximately 70% of the world's high-purity PPE supply and operates in the Jubail complex on ​the Gulf coast, has been unable to resume output, severely tightening the availability of the material worldwide, according to one source. Shipping ​in and out of the Gulf has also been severely disrupted by the war.

  • Robert Reich ☛ Sergey Brin Is Making the Case for Why We Need a Wealth Tax

    But wait.

    The problem is that political power is a zero-sum game. The more political power is concentrated in a few hands, the less political power in everyone else’s hands.

    It’s almost impossible to separate wealth from power, because the wealthy turn their fortunes into campaign contributions to politicians who will change laws to their liking and stop laws they’d detest — such as higher taxes on the super-wealthy. The wealthy also finance public relations campaigns and think-tanks to persuade the public of the wisdom of their positions.

  • The Daily Beast ☛ Pope Fires Back With Blistering Truth After Trump Meltdown

    Without responding to Trump’s comments directly, Leo said: “I have already spoken from the first moment ‘Peace be with you.’ The mission of the Church is to preach the Gospel, to preach peace. If anyone wants to criticize me for proclaiming the Gospel, let them do so truthfully.

    “The Church has spoken out against all nuclear weapons for years, so there is no doubt about that,” he added.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-26 [Older] Germany news: Söder calls for compulsory military service

• Environment

  • Robert Bryce ☛ Rage Against The Data Center

    It’s short because the videos below are powerful examples of the raging backlash against Big Tech, an issue I began writing about last December, in “The Data Center Backlash Is Global.”

    Since then, the opposition to Big Tech, AI, and data centers has grown faster than I ever imagined. I have been covering land-use conflicts over alt-energy projects for 16 years. In that time, I’ve interviewed dozens of people all over the world about their opposition to solar, wind, and battery projects. I’ve documented hundreds of examples of rejections or restrictions on alt-energy projects in the Renewable Rejection Database.

    But the rage against data centers is different.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-28 [Older] What Renault's new EV reveals about the global auto industry

    • Hackaday ☛ Why Opposed Piston Internal Combustion Engines Are Great

      Despite these many advantages, opposed-piston engines have mostly led a quiet life in industrial and military applications, including tanks, submarines and airplanes. This is where the video also sees their continued use, but as a 2021 article in Autoweek suggests, we might be seeing more of these engines in everywhere from trucks to cars as well. Even if it’s only in hybrid cars where it would be in a generator role, there are many reasons why this ICE design would fit right into certain roles.

    • Joel Chrono ☛ Looking for a bike

      For a couple weeks now, I had the itch to get into cycling again. Not as a sport or a hobby, but as a tool, to commute and go to places nearby.

    • BoingBoing ☛ His brother's hamster is charging his phone now

      A hamster runs in bursts, while a phone wants steady voltage — that's the engineering problem. Flamethrower's rig handles it with a Texas Instruments BQ25570 energy-harvester chip, the same family of parts used in solar and wind setups. The chip cold-starts at 330 millivolts and uses maximum power point tracking to feed whatever the rodent is doing into a salvaged lithium-ion cell. The motor came from a broken broom. The 40 cells came from an electric scooter his brother had taken to a repair shop because the battery was "broken." Every cell, Flamethrower says, was fine.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-28 [Older] 'Marine unicorns' aren't loving Arctic noise

  • Overpopulation

    • [Old] Sweet Juniper ☛ Feral Houses

      I've seen "feral" used to describe dogs, cats, even goats. But I have wondered if it couldn't also be used to describe certain houses in Detroit. Abandoned houses are really no big deal here. Some estimate that there are as many as 10,000 abandoned structures at any given time, and that seems conservative. But for a few beautiful months during the summer, some of these houses become "feral" in every sense: they disappear behind ivy or the untended shrubs and trees planted generations ago to decorate their yards. The wood that framed the rooms gets crushed by trees rooted still in the earth. The burnt lime, sand, gravel, and plaster slowly erode into dust, encouraged by ivy spreading tentacles in its endless search for more sunlight.

• Finance

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-04 [Older] Why Saudi Arabia is withdrawing from sport

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-30 [Older] Saudi Arabia's public fund to withdraw LIV Golf funding

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-30 [Older] Why UAE's OPEC exit is a blow to Saudi Arabia

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The New Stack ☛ Why the Linux Foundation adopted MCP, with Jim Zemlin and Mazin Gilbert [Ed: Zemlin buys puff pieces from sites that he is paying and he's promoting the Ponzi scheme of slop (follow the money)]

    And at the recent MCP Dev Summit in New York City, The New Stack sat down with Jim Zemlin, CEO of the Linux Foundation, and Mazin Gilbert, the new executive director of the new AAIF. As it happened, our chat with Zemlin and Gilbert came at the perfect time: directly on the heels of the AAIF’s executive director stepping into the role.

  • Derek Sivers ☛ Geography is four-dimensional

    When someone speaks of a place, you have to ask, “When?” Geography is four-dimensional. You can’t know a place - only a place as it was at a time. Where is bound to when. Unless you are in a place right now, you can only speak of it in past-tense.

    I was born in America, but the last year I lived there, George Bush was president. So I’m not from the current place, though it has the same name.

  • Protesilaos Stavrou ☛ On the coming economic crisis

    Even if the planet is awash with natural resources that can, in principle, render Middle Eastern oil surplus to requirements, the damage has already happened (and continues to worsen). It takes time to reorganise supply chains to whatever new normal. The transition cannot be pain-free.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-28 [Older] Japan looks to woo allies with new weapons deals

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-28 [Older] Jimmy Kimmel says Melania Cheeto Mussolini joke not 'call to assassination'

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-28 [Older] King Charles to address joint meeting of US Congress

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • BIA Net ☛ 2026-04-28 [Older] Press freedom groups call on Turkey to abolish ‘disinformation law’

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Ken Klippenstein ☛ Insane Pre-Crime Strategy Unveiled for Leftist “Extremists"

    The White House declared war on the American people today, labeling its political opponents as terrorists, including “Left-wing extremists.” The new label also claims that there are “deepening alliances” between “the far-left and Islamists” — or pro-Palestinian protesters.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • BIA Net ☛ 2026-04-30 [Older] Turkey falls to 163rd in RSF press freedom index

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • HRW ☛ 2026-04-28 [Older] Saudi Arabia: Halt Imminent Executions of Ethiopian Migrants

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-28 [Older] 'Only yes means yes' rape definition backed by EU lawmakers

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Jérôme Marin ☛ Netflix’s U-turn on theatrical releases

    Netflix calls it a one-off. But it’s hard not to see the early signs of a major strategic shift. Scheduled for release next February, Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew will get a wide theatrical rollout across many countries. It’s a first for a feature film financed by the US streaming giant. Another notable change: the film will only be added to the platform’s catalog 49 days later, an unprecedented delay.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Numeric Citizen ☛ Come On Apple, Take It!

    Manton Reece is struggling with Apple’s efforts to publish Inkwell on the App Store. He shared some details about his recent difficult experience, and I hope he will reveal more once the app is available.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: In praise of vultures (06 May 2026)

    One of my bedrock beliefs is that capitalists really hate capitalism. They may name their beloved institutes after the likes of Adam Smith, but they ignore everything Smith had to say about the necessity of competition to keep markets from turning into monopolies: [...]

  • Patents

    • 2026-04-30 [Older] Hikma v. Amarin at the Supreme Court: The Parties’ Opening Briefs – Part II

  • Trademarks

    • IP Kat ☛ 2026-04-29 [Older] Mirror, mirror on the wall — Who is the most distinctive of them all?

  • Copyrights/Arts

    • Off Guardian ☛ 2026-05-02 [Older] How believable is Banksy?

    • IP Kat ☛ 2026-04-30 [Older] The Claude Code leak that spurred 8,100 DMCA takedown notices [Ed: Because only they can steal; they respect other people's... never mind]