• Leftovers

  • Wouter Groeneveld ☛ Another Triumph For Blogging

    In 2021, my Canadian friend Peter Rukavina sent me a sample of his letterpress printing work that also acted as the official membership card of The Pen & Pencil Club of Prince Edward Island where he lives. These virtual fountain pen chats during COVID had me stay up very late but it was all worth it. I met Peter through other blogger friends present in another weird random Zoom call I jumped into on a whim that turned out to be first Dutch Obsidian knowledge sharing meetup. Virtual friends of friends are obviously also my virtual friends. In other words, it was a true Triumph For Blogging!

    Since then, almost five years have passed, but in true blogging fashion, we’ve kept up with each other’s lives through RSS and email. When Peter blogged that he was coming to Belgium—to Liège to be exact, which is only half an hour from where we live—it’s as if the blogging gods decided it was time we finally met in person.

    So we did: [...]

  • Ashur Cabrera ☛ “What have you tried?”

    Every single time I’d have to stop and think back through the steps I’d already taken and why, what worked and what didn’t, etc. I’d type them into the chat window, or rattle them off to him in person, and then we’d start working through whatever malady ailed me at that moment.

  • Science

    • Hackaday ☛ Tracing Olfactory Receptor Mapping Between The Nose And Brain

      As it turns out, the mapping between OSNs and ORs isn’t performed by a random selection process, but instead creates a receptor map that’s closely matched between the nasal epithelium and the brain. What has complicated answering this question up till now is that the nasal epithelium isn’t a flat surface, but a convoluted labyrinth that maximizes surface area to smell better.

    • John D Cook ☛ The linear algebra of bit twiddling

      The theorems of linear algebra generally hold independent of the field of scalars. Typically the field is ℝ or ℂ, but most of basic linear algebra works the same over every field [1]. In particular, we can do linear algebra over a finite field, and we’re interested in the most finite of finite fields GF(2), the field with just two elements, 0 and 1.

    • John D Cook ☛ Reverse engineering Mersenne Twister with Linear Algebra

      The Mersenne Twister (MT) is a random number generator with good statistical properties but bad cryptographic properties. In buzzwords, it’s a PRNG but not a CSPRNG.

      This post will show how the internal state of a MT generator can be recovered from its output. We’ll do this using linear algebra. The bit twiddling approach is more common and more efficient, but the linear algebra approach is conceptually simpler.

    • [Old] Connor Boyle ☛ Fast Fourier Transforms Part 1: Cooley-Tukey

      I’m planning to write a series of posts about fast Fourier transform algorithms. This first post covers the Cooley-Tukey algorithm, which is the original and most well-known FFT algorithm.

    • [Old] Connor Boyle ☛ Fast Fourier Transforms Part 2: Cyclic Convolution | Connor Boyle

      One of the most useful applications of the fast Fourier transform is in efficiently calculating cyclic convolutions. Paradoxically, cyclic convolutions can also be used to help efficiently calculate discrete Fourier transforms. This post will show the former; I will explain the latter point in future blog posts.

    • Connor Boyle ☛ Fast Fourier Transforms Part 3: Bluestein’s Algorithm

      The Cooley-Tukey algorithm works very well when the input sequence’s length is a product of (mostly or entirely) small prime factors, which it can use to “break down” the problem. However, it provides little speedup once those small prime factors (if any exist) are exhausted. In particular, for prime input lengths, Cooley-Tukey provides no speedup at all, degrading to \(O(\lvert x \rvert^2)\) time complexity. In order to guarantee \(O(\lvert x \rvert \log \lvert x \rvert )\) time complexity regardless of what prime factors the length has, we will need another algorithm, such as Bluestein’s algorithm.

    • Techdirt ☛ Trump Does An RFK Jr.: Fires Entire 22 Member Board Of The National Science Foundation

      The post is filled with commentary from the board members and others pointing out that this leaves America with a gaping hole of leadership from a scientific advisory standpoint. The NSB advises both the Executive and Legislative branches. Trump has also nominated Jim O’Neill, an investor, to be the next Director of NSF. There is speculation that this move was done as a way to clear the field for O’Neill to replace them with hand-picked members that will further his tech bro agenda. He also already works for the federal government as Kennedy’s Deputy Secretary of HHS.

      But maybe the explanation for the timing here is much more simple: Trump may have caught wind of a forthcoming NSB report about America falling behind in scientific research.

  • Career/Education

    • Omicron Limited ☛ Do we absorb information better on paper, rather than screens? It depends on the screen

      To address these questions, it's worth remembering that, although reading might appear to be an easy task, this impression is false. Reading is arguably the most difficult task one must learn—one that requires years of formal education and practice to master. In contrast to spoken language, it is a skill we are not biologically predisposed to learn.

  • Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

    • Medievalists.net ☛ Did Medieval People Drink Water?

      Medieval people are often said to have avoided drinking water altogether, relying instead on ale and wine. But medieval texts, city records, and religious writings reveal that people across the Middle Ages regularly drank water — as long as it came from a good source.

    • Cédric Bonhomme ☛ Alcohol-Free, and It's Actually Pretty Easy

      I won’t pretend I had a dramatic relationship with alcohol. I didn’t. A glass of wine with dinner, a beer on the terrace in summer, nothing that would worry anyone. But over time I noticed how often I was reaching for a drink without really wanting one. Out of habit. Out of routine. Because it was Friday, because the day had been long, or simply because the bottle was there. That bothered me more than the alcohol itself.

    • The Zambian Observer ☛ Young Black Streamer Breaks Guinness World Record, Completes 12,412 Pull-Ups in 24 Hours

      That competition pushed him into serious, structured training. He gradually increased his workload, starting with smaller sets like 12 reps and building over time. His training later included high-volume sessions with hundreds of pull-ups completed in timed intervals after regular workouts, eventually reaching around 2,400 reps in peak training days.

  • Proprietary

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

      • The Verge ☛ The creator of Roomba is back with a furry robot companion

        Primary communication will be through expression and body language, aided by a camera-based vision system and microphone array. With 23 degrees of freedom, the robot can move its head, neck, ears, eyes, and eyebrows, and walk at a slow human pace, but it can’t grip things or climb stairs. Its four legs provide stability, which should help with concerns around the robot falling and damaging property or injuring people.

      • Futurism ☛ Amazon Admits Its Flagship AI Coding Tool Isn't Good Enough for Its Own Workers to Use

        Half a year later, Amazon is singing a dramatically different tune. As Business Insider reports, Amazon is officially throwing in the towel, succumbing to growing calls among employees for access to OpenAI’s Codex and Anthropic’s Claude.

      • Futurism ☛ Man Who Invented Roomba Moves Into Household Demon Market

        Colin Angle, the inventor of the iconic Roomba automated vacuum, is back with another robot that hangs around the house. This time it’s not a roaming vacuum cleaner, though, but a furry — and eerily lifelike, if not creepy — companion called a “Familiar.” With a name of such supernatural connotations, and with its uncanny appearance, it’s hard not to see it as a demonic mockery of an actual flesh and blood pet, superficially cute as it may be.

      • Futurism ☛ Vibe Coded Apps Are Spilling Users' Personal Information Directly Into the Maw of Greedy Hackers

        The firm examined thousands of web apps created with the vibe coding platforms Lovable, Replit, Base44, and Netlify. What it found was, to put it lightly, not good: 5,000 of them had “virtually no security or authentication of any kind,” and a full 40 percent exposed users’ sensitive data, from medical and financial info to corporate documents and logs of ostensibly private chatbot conversations.

      • Futurism ☛ Residents Furious After Their Town Board Rejected an OpenAI Data Center, But a Billionaire Developer Forced It Through Anyway

        Residents in Saline Township, Michigan, however, thought they had avoided the drama after their township board and planning commission both voted to decline a 21 million square foot data center in their backyard. It was exactly what Saline’s 2,883-some residents wanted. Unfortunately for them, the data center developer soon sued the tiny township, Fortune reported, which was ultimately bullied into accepting the $16 billion development.

        Back in September, Saline’s planning commission rejected the request to rezone 575 acres of farmland for the data center, proposed by the company Related Digital, a subsidiary of a real estate conglomerate owned by billionaire Steven Roth (who’s been in the news lately for other reasons.)

      • The Nation ☛ Teaching Poetry in the Age of AI

        Even a few years ago, this would have seemed like a dumb point to make. Of course writing is written by humans. How else would it exist? But today, as AI programs capable of generating and refining text proliferate and advance, it feels like a suddenly urgent and precarious notion. The fact is that much of the language that surrounds us right now comes not from humans but from LLMs. I cannot overstate how much this disturbs me. Is there an essential, ontological difference between AI-generated and human-generated language? Poetry helps us see that there is.

      • The Guardian UK ☛ Bosses say AI boosts productivity – workers say they’re drowning in ‘workslop’

        Workslop is an unintended consequence of the AI boom. It’s what happens when employees use AI to quickly generate work that seems polished – at least superficially – but is in fact so flawed or inaccurate that it needs to be heavily corrected, cleaned up or even completely redone after it’s passed on to colleagues.

      • [Old] ITSG Global ☛ Why 77% of employees' productivity is down due to AI and what can you do about it?

        AI entered today’s workforce promising great productivity gains and efficiency. However, there’s a major roadblock on the way to success - the disconnect between leadership expectations and employee experiences. While 96% of C-suite leaders expect AI to boost overall productivity (Upwork Research Institute), a staggering 77% of employees report decreased productivity and increased workload due to AI implementation. This paradox raises important questions about the true impact of AI on workplace productivity and employee well-being.

      • [Old] University of California, Berkeley ☛ Seven Myths about AI and Productivity: What the Evidence Really Says

        A May 2025 meta-analysis of 28 experiments involving 8,214 participants (Holzner et al., 2025) detected no significant creativity gap between generative AI and humans working independently. Humans augmented by generative AI did achieve modestly higher novelty scores, but this came at a substantial cost: dramatic declines in idea diversity. Both humans and models converge on statistically “likely” answers, creating a homogenization effect that undermines the variety essential for robust innovation.

      • Shrivu Shankar ☛ How AI Productivity Fails

        AI removes the friction that used to force planning. Without something pushing back on bad abstractions, the upfront thinking gets skipped silently. You ship systems you can’t debug or extend, full of blanks AI quietly filled in. Outline first: headers, structure, audience, plan, principles, what-done-looks-like, then let AI fill it in. Review shifts up the stack: outcome-vs-plan instead of line-by-line. The interrogation belongs inside planning: spawn subagent critics to red-team the plan before you let anything generate against it. The easy review at the end is only easy because the hard review at the start was good. If you find it taxing to review your own AI generated output, you didn’t shift left.

      • Nick Heer ☛ Ed Zitron Is Not an A.I. Skeptic

        There are real criticisms of what generative A.I. does: problems with its output, like its repetition of stereotypes or bugs in code. There are criticisms for what it does to our world, like its energy and water consumption, and what it does to society, like how easy it is to generate junk articles and videos. The societal pushback is also notable, and its unethical foundations continue to be a ripe source of pain. But, as Piper writes in the second footnote, Zitron’s articles are “a superficiality of analysis” despite the voluminous output. Like a lot of conspiracy thinking, they are rooted in fact but have a stricter adherence to supporting an existing narrative.

      • Eric Bailey ☛ Evolved antennas, LLM-generated code, and a potential antifuture

        Some evolved antenna practices also create a series of designs in parallel. They then pit the outputs against each other as a final layer of proving out efficacy.

        This process mimics natural selection. Here, mutations that are beneficial to surviving in an environment are passed through generations. It also creates absolutely wild, alien outputs: [...]

      • Anže Pečar ☛ Letting Claude Upgrade My Raspberry Pi

        I’ve done many system upgrades over the years and they are always a pain. On paper, this was probably one of the worst upgrades I’ve done. In practice, it felt like a breeze because I never had to look up any of the things that went wrong.

        Yes, there is a chance the OS is in an inconsistent state and something might blow up at some point later. And yes, Claude could have even set up a backdoor, since I didn’t verify all the commands that it ran. 🤷‍♂️

  • Privatisation/Privateering

    • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Bolivia’s Social Movements Mobilize Against Privatization

      Marching for over twenty days from the tropics into freezing high-altitude terrain, many wearing nothing more substantial on their feet than plastic sandals, land workers and indigenous representatives arrived in the capital of La Paz this week to defend their territories. They were met by the miners’ union, the Federación Sindical de Trabajadores Mineros de Bolivia (FSTMB), and highland representatives from the peasant union, the Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia (CSUTCB), in a loud welcome rally of solidarity on Monday.

  • Security

    • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

      • Security Week ☛ Over 500 Organizations Hit in Years-Long Phishing Campaign

        Over the course of four years, more than 2,000 user credentials across over 500 organizations in the aviation and travel, critical infrastructure, energy, financial, government, logistics, public administration, and technology sectors were stolen as part of the campaign.

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • Tom's Hardware ☛ Fears grow that age verification coming to VPNs as a British research firm labels them a 'loophole' — one app developer saw downloads surge by 1,800% in just the first month after the UK's Online Safety Act took effect

        The European Parliamentary Research Service (EPRS) published a briefing paper this week describing VPN use as "a loophole in the legislation that needs closing," as governments across Europe and the U.S. expand laws requiring platforms to verify users' ages before granting access to adult content.

      • Reuters ☛ Exclusive: Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training data

        Meta (META.O), opens new tab is installing new tracking software on U.S.-based employees’ computers to capture mouse movements, clicks and ​keystrokes for use in training its artificial intelligence models, part of a broad initiative to build AI agents that can perform work tasks autonomously, the company told staffers in ‌internal memos seen by Reuters. The tool, called Model Capability Initiative (MCI), will run on work-related apps and websites and will also take occasional snapshots of the content on employees’ screens, according to one of the memos, posted by a staff AI research scientist on Tuesday in a channel for the company's model-building Meta SuperIntelligence Labs team.

      • The New Stack ☛ Claude can now follow users across Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint

        Anthropic says Claude can now reference emails alongside spreadsheets, presentations, and documents within the same conversation thread.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • TruthOut ☛ We Must Resist the Collapse of Conscience in the Age of Trump

      Donald Trump did not create this moral vacuum. He seized it, refined it, and weaponized it. For decades, neoliberal rule has hollowed out the social state, normalized staggering inequality, elevated billionaires to the status of civic arbiters, and schooled generations to believe that self-interest is the highest virtue. Public goods were dismantled or sold off, civic responsibility withered, and citizens were reduced to consumers, detached from any shared sense of fate. In such a landscape, empathy is no longer a public good but a private burden, something to be shed in the relentless pursuit of profit, power, and spectacle. As Zygmunt Bauman notes in Modernity and the Holocaust, gangster capitalism as a form of fascist politics thrives on “moral sleeping pills” and “the dead silence of unconcern.”

    • Jacobin Magazine ☛ This Billionaire Is Calling Taxes Soviet Oppression

      The danger facing the United States is not that California will become the Soviet Union because one of the richest men on earth is asked to pay more tax. The danger is that America is drifting toward something far more familiar from Russia’s recent history: an authoritarian oligarchy in which vast private fortunes coexist with weakened democratic institutions and a corrupt political leader who rewards wealthy loyalists and punishes dissenters.

      There are several other telling flaws in his logic. Brin casts himself as defending freedom from the overreach of the state. But a tax proposal debated and voted on by citizens is not authoritarianism. It is democracy. Brin is free to argue against it, criticize its design, or warn about its unintended consequences. But when one of the richest people on earth spends tens of millions to stop voters from imposing even modest obligations on extreme wealth, the real threat to freedom begins to look rather different. It is not “socialism,” as he claims, but an example of how in America today, wealth can bend democratic decision-making before the public has even spoken.

    • Mike Brock ☛ The Clean World Our Hands Can Make

      My piece on the China-Iran proxy operation reads, to a certain register of left commentary, as a piece of cold-war propaganda dressed in liberal vocabulary. They think they’re hearing “imperialist propaganda.” The author, this reading holds, must be either naive about American imperial conduct or strategically aligned with American imperial interests in a way that compromises his stated commitment to anti-authoritarianism. The diagnosis the Dispatch offers — that Beijing is conducting Cold War strategy through Iran as proxy — is treated as suspect because the diagnosis serves the rhetorical purposes of American hawks, and the suspicion that the author is unwittingly serving those purposes is the diagnostic move the reader is performing on the writer.

    • Mike Brock ☛ A New Cold War

      The second observation is the leverage Beijing currently possesses to end the war.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • The Zambian Observer ☛ Bill Maher rips Trump over Epstein’s alleged suicide note

      Late-night host Bill Maher took a sharp dig at President Donald Trump Friday night as he continues to face an onslaught of attacks from the president, a dig that suggested the language in Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged suicide note bore a striking resemblance to Trump’s own writing style.

  • Environment

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ Data centers: Tech boom with downsides

      This is why data centers in Germany are classified as part of the country's critical infrastructure and afforded special protection. In March 2026, the federal government published a new national Data Center Strategy, illustrating how significant they are. It plans to double Germany's data center capacity by 2030 and will also aim to reduce its dependence on non-European providers.

    • Omicron Limited ☛ No trees, no fans: surviving extreme heat in India's salt pans

      The same dry heat that makes life punishing also makes the desert ideal for salt production—Gujarat produces roughly three-quarters of India's total salt output.

      "We work in staggered timing... doing our work in early mornings and after sunset," said 42-year-old Babulal Narayan, who rakes the salt as brine water dries in shallow pools.

    • Energy/Transportation

      • Deutsche Welle ☛ The weaponization of shipping channels

        But there are other issues of concern besides piracy and regional conflict. In November last year, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) warned of this new danger.

        Even non-state actors are now in a position to serious disrupt the flow of global trade, the think tank said, citing attacks by the Houthi militia in the Red Sea. Many shipping companies now avoid passing through the Suez Canal, taking the longer route around the Cape of Good Hope instead, which significantly impacts supply chains and prices.

      • Derek Kędziora ☛ Solar power in Amsterdam: the numbers

        I’m in the market for a home battery, because it is soon going to be less profitable to sell electricity back to the grid in the Netherlands. I decided to crunch some numbers and think others may find my general conclusions interesting.

      • Connor Tumbleson ☛ Recent Power Outages

        I found 6 outages which tells the story of my recent experience. It used to be quite a rare sight to lose power especially since there have been many hurricanes between these dates. We take the November 2022 outage which set the stage for going 974 days without a single power interruption! This is pretty crazy because if we list all the hurricanes between those days - it seems like Temple Terrace power was pretty stable.

    • Wildlife/Nature

      • Deseret Media ☛ Woman visits all 511 parks in Salt Lake County, then catalogs them for online guide

        What started as a personal exploration project for the Salt Lake woman eventually turned into a searchable online parks map designed to help people find everything from playgrounds and splash pads to pickleball courts and dog parks.

  • Finance

    • SRA seeks 29% funding increase ‘to move from reactive to proactive regulation’ [Ed: As long as it is governed by those it was meant to regulate, no added budget will solve how rotten the SRA is]

      The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) has proposed a £50 increase in individual practising fees, taking the annual fee to £240. Compensation fund contributions are expected to be set at £120 for an individual solicitor and £3,600 for an SRA-regulated firm.

      Individual combined fees, which cover the practising certificate fee and compensation fund contribution, would rise from £260 to £360. Individuals contribute 40% of the SRA’s funding requirement, with the remaining 60% received from SRA-regulated firms and calculated according to turnover.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Europe Day ☛ Europe Day 2026 | Euroopa päev

    • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Setback for Microsoft's Africa cloud ambitions

      In May 2024, Microsoft partnered with UAE-based AI firm G42 to invest US$1-billion in a data centre in Kenya as part of its efforts to expand cloud computing services in East Africa. The project was announced during Kenyan President William Ruto’s state visit to Washington under the Joe Biden administration.

    • RTL ☛ Nearing final stages: Microsoft boss to testify on his role in OpenAI's founding

      On Monday, Musk's lawyers are expected to try to convince the jury that Microsoft, by investing in OpenAI in 2019, knew it was helping divert a nonprofit foundation from its original purpose.

    • CBC ☛ Mafalda, the beloved Argentine cartoon, brings her anti-war, anti-soup attitudes to Montreal

      As yet another 20th-century dictatorship began to grip Argentina, political exiles disseminated the comics abroad, and it took off. By the time a military junta formed government in 1976, Quino had already stopped drawing Mafalda and had left the country.

      According to Cosse, Quino was able to pick up on movements, like feminism and a disaffected youth, that were still sort of emerging during the nine years that Mafalda ran.

    • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

      • The Strategist ☛ A Nobel economist models how AI rots the information environment

        In a September 2025 report, Nobel [sic] Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and his Columbia University colleague Maxim Ventura-Bolet use economic modelling to show why the information environment is deteriorating and explain why AI will make it worse unless governments intervene.

        Their main conclusion is that without regulation, markets will systematically produce more disinformation and less truth, and AI will compound the problem. Today’s disinformation challenge cannot be solved by asking people to behave better online; it can only be solved by fixing the incentive structures that produce it.

        If, like me, you don’t have a Nobel [sic] prize in economic modelling, here’s the simplified version of how the rot is happening.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • The Zambian Observer ☛ Inmates Punished for Speaking Out About Ghislaine Maxwell’s Cushy Prison Treatment

      Women locked up alongside Ghislaine Maxwell at a federal prison camp in Texas are coming forward with a story the Trump administration clearly did not want told. Multiple former inmates say they faced direct retaliation after speaking publicly about the preferential treatment Maxwell has been receiving behind bars, including being screamed at by the prison warden and transferred to higher-security facilities.

  • Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

    • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ What Ombudsman’s animal cruelty report misses

      But while the report has identified some of the government’s major failures, it also reveals a deeper problem: Hong Kong’s approach to animal welfare remains fundamentally reactive rather than preventive, with most suggestions focusing on punishment, not prevention.

      Worse still, the report overlooks many of the structural and everyday forms of animal plight that are normalised across the city. This article, then, intends to address these blind spots.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • APNIC ☛ RIR Governance Document Version 2: Status Report May 2026 now available

      The Status Report May 2026 is now available. This version continues to track progress on updating the RIR Governance Document, providing transparency on issues under discussion, areas where drafting is underway, and topics that remain in progress as the NRO NC works towards the final draft of the document.

      We encourage interested parties to review the Status Report and continue to monitor progress ahead of the publication of the final draft, which will advance to the RIRs and ICANN for approval and adoption.

      We sincerely thank everyone who has shared their insights and appreciate the time, thought, and effort contributed by participants.

  • Monopolies/Monopsonies

    • Digital Music News ☛ Live Nation Antitrust Penalties Could Arrive in 2027: Court Order

      Time will, of course, tell where the cards fall here; the next hearing in the states’ antitrust battle is scheduled for July 30th. More immediately, it seems safe to say that the market isn’t particularly concerned about the situation; Live Nation shares finished the week at roughly $163 a pop, up over 21% from early May 2025.

Image source: A cold bottle of beer and a cold glass of beer.