Leftovers

• Uğur Erdem Seyfi ☛ Before Making It Configurable

  Configurations exist to allow a program to behave differently without modifying its code. You have a program, you configure it, run it, and it behaves accordingly. In a way, they are like function inputs, but at the application level. They tend to reflect and affect how a system works under the hood. This also makes them closely related to the complexity of our applications.

  Thinking this way, I cannot think of configurations as just simple inputs. That is why I wanted to think about this topic a bit more and write down some thoughts.

• Lalit Maganti ☛ Don't answer the first question

  The first version of a question is rarely the real one. Ask why before you answer. Sometimes the answer teaches the user how the tool is meant to be used. Sometimes it tells you the product is hiding the right path. Sometimes it tells you there’s nothing worth building yet. And sometimes it sets you up to build the next big thing once, not twice.

  The technique is simple, but easy to skip because the pull to be responsive is constant, and every quick answer feels productive. Take the small step back anyway. Both sides almost always walk away with more than they came in with.

• Dave Gauer ☛ Ascetic Computing

  What’s interesting is that the word computer does not appear even once. Someone 200 years ago probably would have understood my list, and could comprehend, after a moment of pause, the modern idioms "Fear of Missing Out" and "Shiny Things".

  All three of these principles are challenging, but I think the Shiny Things are my final boss. I’m one of those people who follows the links on Wikipedia and finds themselves with 30 tabs open an hour later. Or who buys supplies for hobbies with the full intention of doing that hobby for the rest of my life. And then…​doesn’t.

• SusamPal ☛ Five Minutes of Prime Time

  I completed writing our list with about half a minute to spare. We turned in our sheets after the timer ran out. The HR folks then evaluated the sheets. The winner was announced. Our team won with all 168 numbers written accurately. We won the cash prize. One of the HR folks asked me later what formula we had used to generate all the prime numbers so accurately. I told them that we had used the ancient formula of looking up a list of prime numbers compiled by someone else and writing it down. We spent the cash prize immediately and ordered pizza and soft drinks for everyone.

• Science

  • Bartosz Milewski ☛ Profunctor Equipment in Haskell | Bartosz Milewski's Programming Cafe

    To make things more palatable for programmers, I decided to provide a toy implementation of some of the equipments in Haskell. The advantage of this encoding is that it can be verified by the compiler, and I still trust the compiler more than I trust the AI.

    A more adequate implementation would require a full-blown dependently typed language, but if we restrict ourselves to just a single category and work only with endo-functors and endo-profunctors, we can get at least some intuitions. If you want to see a more elaborate version, see the proarrows library by Sjoerd Visscher.

    The only 0-cell I’ll be using is the Haskell category of types and functions. For vertical 1-cells I’ll use the standard library implementation of Functor, and for horizontal ones I’ll use Profunctor.

• Career/Education

  • Manuel Moreale ☛ RMF

    This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with RMF, whose blog can be found at baccyflap.com/prs/blog.

  • Fernando Borretti ☛ The Applicability of Spaced Repetition

    Spaced repetition has a natural domain of applicability: information that is systematically organized as an unambiguous key-value mapping with short keys and values. The “Hello, world!” of flashcards is the NATO phonetic alphabet: A → alpha, B → bravo, etc. Similarly, the periodic table can be thought of as defining a collection of mappings: element name ↔ symbol, element name ↔ atomic number, etc. You can just drill these cards and memorize the facts without a prior step of understanding, or building a conceptual model.

    Applying spaced repetition is trivial for this kind of information. That’s why most people who use spaced repetition are either language learners or medical students. In biology the main intuition you need is for “3D shapes bumping around in Brownian motion”, which comes free with your human brain, and afterwards it’s mostly just a lot of facts you have to memorize. Analogously with language: you already have a language center, you just need to drill vocabulary and grammar.

    And the further you go from this domain, the harder it is to apply spaced repetition.

• Hardware

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ AI data centers require 36 times more fiber than designs with standard servers — severe glass shortages push cable lead times out to a full year

    The scale of demand from AI infrastructure dwarfs anything the fiber industry could ever have planned for. Data center fiber demand grew roughly 76% year-on-year in 2025, according to CRU data cited by various industry publications, and the segment is projected to account for 30% of total global fiber demand by 2027. In 2024, that figure was below 5%.

  • Oskar Wickström ☛ Coding on Paper

    As explained in last year’s post, the reason I persist with these monitors is because it makes me energetic and happy. Sunlight, direct or indirect, helps me stay clear and focused during my workday. I find spaces illuminated by natural light beautiful and inspiring.

    I’m not going to recommend that you buy one of these devices. They’re expensive, about $2000, and the experience is quite different from LCD. Even if this looks cool, it seems to me very possible that most people would not like it in practice. With that said, I am happy with it, and I’ll probably keep investing in these tools as they get even better with time.

  • James G ☛ My favourite typewriter

    My favourite typewriter is the one I have: a Royal typewriter, likely decades old, that I found in a charity shop in Edinburgh.

    I remember seeing the typewriter in the shop window. It was the sixth shop I had been to that day with the obsqure [sic] inquiry "do you have any typewriters?" in the back of my mind. I had hope that I would fine one; if I didn't, I would have kept searching. My experience the day prior writing on a public typewriter in a bookshop was too magical. The typewriter was full of intrigue in my mind.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Juha-Matti Santala ☛ Even the dogs have started to notice

    It’s incredible how swift and complete 180 my life has been lately after making some drastic changes to it.

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • Coywolf LLC ☛ 1Password clarifies how they're using AI after users raise concerns

    On April 20, 2026, 1Password shared how they’re using AI to update part of their codebase. Many people expressed immediate concerns about 1Password using AI, given that the app stores passwords and other sensitive data.

    The replies were particularly negative on the fediverse, where the blog post was shared on 1Password’s own Mastodon server. The dominant theme in the replies was a loss of trust in the company, with many people saying they would cancel and switch to a different password manager.

  • Kev Quirk ☛ Is Bitwarden preparing for a sale?

    The fact that Bitwarden is so simple to use, yet so secure, is a testament to how good of a product it really is. So I'd rather not jump ship.

  • Heliomass ☛ Why an iPhone Battery Replacement was Worth It

    I realised my phone was heating up when I did things like watch videos. This heat was probably coming from the battery as it was responding to the phone’s demands for energy, another sign it was failing. I’m now wondering how long it would have been before the battery started to turn into a spicy pillow.

  • Adam Newbold ☛ Automatic Subscription Renewals

    When your year of omg.lol is up and it’s time to renew, I want that to be something that you choose to do, based on your perception of the value of the service now, not from the time you signed up. You should decide whether I’ve earned your continued patronage, and whether the service is even still useful to you or needed, and purchase another year—or not!—accordingly. Defaulting to the assumption that you intend to renew feels presumptuous to me. I don’t like that.

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

    • Futurism ☛ AI Appears to Be Trapping Certain Job Applicants in a Limbo Where They Never Get an Interview for "Reasons" That Are Completely Unfair

      Suspecting Cortex may also be quashing his applications due to his medically necessary leaves of absence, Markey began a months-long quest to get to the bottom of the screening software. After numerous experiments and attempts at reverse-engineering Cortex, the Ivy league student found compelling evidence that the AI tool grades applications with voluntary leaves of absence significantly lower than ones with accurate descriptions of the medical circumstances.

      Of the 82 residency programs Markey applied to, only five confirmed to Wired that they were not using Cortex. This doesn’t mean the rest of them were, and Thalamus denied that it algorithmically scored or ranked any applicants for the 2025-2026 residency cycle. But the smoking guns came when Markey began cold-emailing residency administrators, resulting in 10 excited offers from prestigious hospitals that the AI screening tool had failed to deliver (he’s currently set to start at Columbia University’s psychiatry program at New York Presbyterian Hospital in July.)

    • Futurism ☛ Amazon Employees Forced to Hit Quotas on AI Use, Immediately Start Using it for Everything Except Work

      In an attempt to get more than 80 percent of its developers to use AI every week, Amazon has introduced employee-specific AI usage targets in addition to a broader “token consumption” leaderboard that tracks how much each employee uses AI (in machine learning parlance, tokens refer to basic units of data used by AI models to understand text.)

      But according to staffers interviewed by the FT, employees are gaming the system by increasingly using the mandated AI systems to automate personal tasks, a tactic known as “tokenmaxxing.”

    • The Register UK ☛ AI-generated code is 'pain waiting to happen'

      "If it's not creating bugs en masse today, it's just pain waiting to happen," he said. "The number one question I think we have to be asking developers is, 'Can you explain that code? Have you validated that the code actually fits in the context of the broader system?'"

    • Pivot to AI ☛ arXiv bans academic authors for AI slop papers

      You can still use a chatbot for your text. But if you leave in hallucinated references or chatbot artifacts, you’re out — because it’s smoking-gun evidence you didn’t read the paper your name’s on, and you’re just spamming everyone else’s time.

    • Homo Ludditus ☛ What if I boycotted all Chinese LLMs? ● Ludditus investigates!

      I was hit by censorship in Chinese LLMs ever since my first blog post about chatbots, when DeepSeek deleted its answer about Winnie-the-Pooh, even if I didn’t ask about Xi Jinping!

      Then, Qwen deleted its answer about why any association of Winnie-the-Pooh with Xi Jinping is considered disrespectful in China. Interestingly enough, when the answer (which is never the same!) manages to avoid the inclusion of Xi’s name, the output is not deleted!

      At some point, when Euria, “the free, sovereign AI assistant,” was using Qwen, it also deleted its answer regarding Winnie-the-Pooh!

      Last June, DeepSeek deleted answers about the Advanced Persistent Threat Group 31 (APT31) acting on the behalf of the Chinese government, and about a case involving the Czech Republic.

      The most annoying fact is that Chinese chatbots typically start answering, performing web searches as needed, any they can manage to spit up to a couple of screens before realizing that the answer is “politically sensitive,” which makes them delete their own answer!

    • Ben Congdon ☛ To the Agents: "This place is not a place of honor"

      During a recent codebase audit, a coworker and I discovered an unfortunate set of private APIs my team owns that were being used in creative and unintended ways, outside the official interfaces. Much of the code that introduced these unsanctioned dependencies was AI generated2. This was one more datapoint among many that, especially in large monolith codebases and in large enterprises, coding agents have changed how platform teams need to operate.

      This particular audit exposed two classes of issue of internal API leakage: [...]

    • Privacy International ☛ Collateral Damage: Grok AI and the Human Cost of Generative AI

      The Grok AI EU scandal began in January 2026 after users discovered that the xAI chatbot, Grok, could generate non-consensual sexualised images of real people — including women, celebrities, politicians, and reportedly minors — using ordinary photos posted online.

      The images spread rapidly across X (formerly Twitter), triggering outrage from people, governments and regulators across Europe and beyond.

    • Kabir Acharya ☛ The CTF scene is dead

      As AI tools ramped up in capability, especially when GPT-4 first came out, a significant percentage of medium difficulty CTF challenges started becoming one-shottable, meaning a single prompt from a user could produce the solve and flag. You could paste a cryptography challenge into ChatGPT, come back in 10 minutes, and have the solution. At the time, we did not think too much of it. Hard challenges went mostly untouched, and the time save was not large enough to ruin the competition.

      The issue was never that AI could help. CTF players have always used tools. The issue is when the model does the reasoning, writes the solve, and leaves the human with nothing meaningful to do besides copy the flag.

  • Social Control Media

    • Santa Clara County ☛ COMPLAINT FOR VIOLATIONS OF: A. False Advertising Law [Bus. & Prof. Code, §§ 17500 et seq.]; AND B. Unfair Competition Law [Bus. & Prof. Code, §§ 17200 et seq.] [PDF]

      1. It is no accident that Meta platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, are involved in one third of Internet scams in the U.S. Every day, consumers across the world are exposed to 15 billion scam ads on Meta platforms. These ads deceive consumers, posing serious financial risks; increase costs for legitimate advertisers; and cause a wide range of harms to people and businesses worldwide. Meta assures the public, and promises its users and advertisers, that it is making every effort to protect them from scams. But behind the scenes Meta is actively participating in the creation and targeting of scam ads, snuffing out attempts to combat scam ads, and in fact profiting from the scam ads it claims to be trying to prevent.

    • San José ☛ Santa Clara County sues Meta over alleged scam ads - San José Spotlight

      The lawsuit filed Monday alleges that instead of cracking down on deceptive ads designed to trick users out of their money, Meta has hamstrung its own fraud prevention teams and helped fake companies bypass its filters to enable the tech powerhouse to enjoy an estimated $7 billion in ad revenue from the scams every year.

      “There can be no confusion about it — Meta is on the take,” County Counsel Tony LoPresti said at a Monday news conference announcing the lawsuit. “This case is about accountability — it’s about ensuring that as behemoth tech companies open up new frontiers in our society, they aren’t lawless frontiers. Meta has lied to its users and violated the law for years.”

    • Ars Technica ☛ Why Reddit blocked my daily visit to its mobile website

      There was no way to skip, bypass, or close the overlay. It did not provide any instructions or alternatives for continuing to use the mobile web version. What it did offer was a large button I could press to get the app. If I did so, the overlay told me, I would be able to “search better” and “personalize your feed”—two things I don’t care to do.

    • Futurism ☛ Reddit Intentionally Breaks Its Mobile Website, Demanding Users Download Its App Instead

      Yes, seriously: a newly-implemented popup — which, unlike previous iterations, can no longer be closed — begs users to “get the app to keep using Reddit,” while blocking them from clicking any links or using the site in anyway. On your phone, it basically just turns the entirety of reddit.com into a huge ad for the company’s app.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Register UK ☛ Cloud-managed earbuds sound strange - as a concept, and on a plane

      Divya Soni, a go to market lead, showed me Dell’s cloudy Device Management Console, a tool that lets admins enroll and track the buds, send them new firmware, or do things like turn on active noise cancellation by default across a fleet of earbuds.

    • Ava ☛ privacy is becoming even more of a privilege

      Historically, we are used to seeing the privacy of the rich as something rather physical; they move to gated communities, or land in bumfuck nowhere, to have no neighbors and peace from paparazzi and weird stalkers. They get to have certain media pulled from the shelves when it is not favorable to them. Increasingly, we have seen them remove digital content: Blog posts, Reddit threads, specific images and videos, stats tracking their whereabouts, meetings and flights.

      Unfortunately, the richer you are, the more protection of your data and privacy you can buy. You can see it even now: We need to give up so much information just to travel and pass airport checks, down to social media checks or the EU bartering over sharing biometric data with the US for EU travellers. Meanwhile, Taylor Swift and Elon Musk can restrict the activity of their private jets.

• Defence/Aggression

  • RFERL ☛ Papers, Please: German Military Museum Bars Ukrainians, Russians, And Some Other Nationalities

    A popular military museum in western Germany is turning away nationals of 26 countries that Berlin has deemed pose "specific security risks."

    Entry restrictions at the Bundeswehr Museum of German Defense Technology in Koblenz have been in force for several weeks but news of the unusual rule emerged recently in Ukrainian media after a mother from that country was denied access.

  • ADF ☛ Strike Takes Out Islamic State Camp and Senior Commander

    According to Joint Task Force North-East, Operation Hadin Kai (OPHK), the mission targeted a concealed and fortified ISWAP compound located in the Metele area of Borno State, near the border with Chad. Multiple terrorists were reportedly killed, including al-Minuki and several of his top lieutenants. The Armed Forces of Nigeria Air Force and Army components of Operation Hadin Kai are continuing operations to pursue and neutralize fleeing militants to prevent them from seeking refuge and establishing another base in the region.

  • Task And Purpose ☛ US, Nigeria, kill ISIS second in command in joint operation

    Nigerian President Bola Tinubu said in his own statement that the attack killed al-Minuki and “several of his lieutenants” and that it occurred in the Lake Chad Basin.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Making sense of Trump’s unscheduled sudden midair disassembly of the American empire (16 May 2026)

    For generations, the American empire was the most powerful force on earth, and so we tended to assume that it was the most durable force on earth – surely anything so powerful must also be eternal?

    But power and durability aren't the same thing, as Le Guin reminded us with her oft-quoted maxim that "We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings": [...]

  • European Commission ☛ Commission welcomes the Council of Europe declaration on migration

    The declaration addresses several key topics in the context of migration management, including illegal arrivals, the instrumentalisation of migration, and the return of illegally staying third-country nationals, with the aim of promoting a fair balance between the general public interest and the protection of the individual's fundamental rights. The declaration reiterates that the Convention is a living instrument, which needs to be interpreted in the light of present-day realities to remain applicable in response to novel challenges. This is in line with the Commission's efforts on new approaches to manage migration.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • [Repeat] Press Gazette ☛ Guardian photographer 'exposed to risk' after Farage shares press card picture

    The Guardian, which broke the story on 29 April that Farage has received a secret personal donation from a Thailand-based billionaire, said the photographer showed his NUJ Press Card when asked for identification by Farage, who then took a photo of the card. Reform has said the donation was made to pay for Farage’s security.

    The Guardian said in a statement: “The Guardian is concerned by the recent publication on Nigel Farage’s social media pages of the professional credentials of a photographer working on behalf of the Guardian while he was working lawfully in a public space.

    “Holding public figures to account is the role of a free press.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Simulation Has Collapsed

    The Epstein file. While Trump was sitting on engineered cushions in Beijing on the fourteenth, a few blocks from the cell where Epstein was found dead, in a TriBeCa gallery at 101 Reade Street, a small group of organizers had bound all 3.5 million pages of the released Epstein files into 3,437 numbered volumes, eight tons of paper, on shelves, free of charge, and they called the room The Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room. You can walk in and pull a volume off the shelf and read it. Inside the volumes are the FBI documents the CBC surfaced on the thirteenth establishing that it was Epstein who introduced Trump to Melania. Inside the volumes are the records the Wall Street Journal surfaced showing Trump’s name throughout the files, which DOJ briefed him on, which Trump now claims they did not brief him on, which he simultaneously explains by saying his name was planted by enemies, while admitting on the record that he and Epstein clashed over one of the victims who had worked at Mar-a-Lago. Inside the volumes is the suicide note a federal judge released on May seventh that federal investigators had never reviewed. Inside the volumes is Howard Lutnick caught lying about the year he severed ties with Epstein — claimed 2005, documents show 2012, lunch on the island, the calendar entries are public. The Epstein file is the regime’s deepest staging failure because the Epstein file is not a story the regime can tell at all. It is a story that exists, in eight tons of paper, on shelves, in a room a few blocks from the cell. The Reading Room is the document of what the cushions are hiding. And it is open this week.

    [...]

    They are litigating a tattoo on the chest of a Marine veteran while three million pages of Epstein documents sit on shelves a few blocks from the cell where Epstein died. That is the hierarchy of horror in May 2026, and the apparatus has chosen the tattoo because the apparatus cannot survive the Reading Room. And the asymmetry, once a reader notices it, does not unnotice itself. Which scandal the apparatus has chosen to talk about, and which it has chosen not to. Which body is being litigated, and which is not. The noticing is what spreads. The noticing is what the apparatus cannot stop.

• Environment

  • Vox ☛ Inside the fight over America’s data centers

    Make no mistake: Americans hate data centers.

    A recent poll from Gallup shows 70 percent of Americans oppose a data center in their local area, including 48 percent who are strongly opposed. That 70 percent number is tied to several concerns, environmental questions and quality of life chief among them, and it’s up 18 percent (!) in just two months, when Gallup asked the same question in March.

    Nonetheless, data centers keep going up at a rate that is nothing short of astonishing.

  • Gallup Inc ☛ Americans Oppose AI Data Centers in Their Area

    The data center question parallels the wording Gallup uses to ask about local nuclear power plant construction. In the same March survey, 53% of Americans say they oppose building a nuclear energy plant in their area, far less than the 71% opposed to data center construction. Since Gallup first asked the nuclear power plant question in 2001, the high point in opposition has been 63%.

  • Ag Web ☛ USDA Projects Smallest US Wheat Harvest Since 1972 Due to Plains Drought

    Rising fuel and fertilizer prices due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz have sent grain production costs sharply higher, heaping further stress on the U.S. farm economy already reeling from trade disruptions caused by U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff battles.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • The Scotsman ☛ I cycled the ‘longest, loneliest and loveliest glen’ in Scotland.

      Scotland’s lost lanes come in a few distinct types and this circuit in Highland Perthshire combines three of them: the glen road, the lochside lane and the pass-stormer. At 57 miles, it is of one of the most spectacular (and challenging) routes in Lost Lanes Scotland, a collection of day rides on quiet roads and gravel trails, ranging from 25 to 75 miles. The routes can be ridden in a single day, or knitted together as part of a longer tour. This route, for example, is paired with one from Pitlochry, making them both accessible by train.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ AI data centers trigger massive 'irreversible' 76% electricity price spike in largest US region — federal watchdog demands tech giants pay for their own power infrastructure

      Monitoring Analytics, the federally mandated independent watchdog that keeps an eye on the critical PJM Interconnection that distributes power around the U.S., said in a new report [PDF] that a massive 75.5% increase in power costs in the largest region of the U.S. has been directly caused by data centers, and it also blamed the regional market operator for failing to keep up with the rising demand. The price increases have been steep; wholesale electricity prices went up from $77.78 per MWh in the first quarter of 2025 to $136.53 per MWh in the same period of this year.

    • The Register UK ☛ Datacenters slurping juice help drive 75% jump in PJM power prices

      “The price impacts on customers have been very large and are not reversible,” the report states, but the bad news doesn’t stop there. “The price impacts will be even larger in the near term unless the issues associated with data center load are addressed in a timely manner.”

      Based on the rest of the report, a timely resolution to the datacenter load issue shouldn’t be expected, at least not in a way that’ll benefit locals.

    • Joel Chrono ☛ Buying a bike

      I chose my bike, a Fuji Traverse 1.6, a hybrid bike ideal for city commute and some light dirt paths, I got it used for 432 bucks, and paid an extra 10 bucks to add a kickstand—no installation fee!

      I traveled all the way from the bike shop to my house, about 7.5 kilometers or so, which took me about 25 minutes. It was a great ride with just some down and uphills none of it was a problem at all!

    • University of Toronto ☛ Our servers seem to have surprisingly low power consumption

      One of the reason these numbers surprise me is that many of the idle numbers are lower than my desktops. I have a mental image of servers as not being particularly low power or power efficient, just as they're not particularly quiet, but that seems to be wrong. I suppose it's not too odd that people making 1U servers care about power usage and power density, since that's definitely a concern in general in data centers, it just hadn't really occurred to me before.

    • Andy Wingo ☛ soot, solar, sedimentation, sin, & 'centers

      In late November I got some brave lads to install nineteen solar panels on my roof. Each of these magic rectangles can make up to 500W of power in optimal conditions, but my house faces south, with the roof inclined east and west, so it’s unlikely that I will ever hit the full 9.5 kW of potential power.

  • Overpopulation

    • Western Water ☛ Colorado River rules face major reset

      According to The Arizona Republic,Opens in a new tab. federal water officials are now considering a new approach for managing the shrinking Colorado River that would rely on a 10-year framework with water-sharing rules reviewed every two years instead of locking in one long-term agreement. The shift comes as drought, declining Rocky Mountain snowpack, and ongoing disputes between the Upper Basin and Lower Basin states continue to complicate negotiations over the river’s future. Arizona officials say the shorter review periods could provide flexibility as conditions change, but they also create uncertainty for cities, tribes, farmers, and water agencies that depend heavily on Colorado River supplies. The Lower Basin states of Arizona, California, and Nevada recently submitted a proposal that would conserve more than 3 million acre-feet of water through 2028, an effort Arizona leaders believe could help stabilize deliveries through the Central Arizona Project Canal.

• Finance

  • Chen HuiJing ☛ Building a connect wallet button

    Disconnecting a wallet is more tricky than it seems. This is because EIP-1193 does not define a standard wallet disconnect flow. Connecting an application generally means giving a site permission to read accounts, but removing that permission depends on the wallet implementation. The most reliable method is still having the user revoke the permission from the wallet UI directly.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Register UK ☛ Europe built sovereign clouds to escape US control. Then forgot about the processors

    But most datacenters and qualified cloud operators still rely heavily on Intel or AMD processors. And inside those processors sits a computer beneath the computer: management engines operating at Ring -3, below the operating system, outside the control of host security software, persistent even when the machine appears powered off. Under the US Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act (RISAA) 2024, hardware manufacturers count as "electronic communications service providers" subject to secret government orders.

  • Protesilaos Stavrou ☛ Comment on a Marxist critique of Free Software

    The thrust of the critique is that (i) free software ideology is rooted in anarchism which itself is beholden to capitalist categories and (ii) free software is not fighting commodification of software in an effective way because it is ideologically incapable of opposing commodification as such.

    In the ~15.000-word essay, the author makes references to colonialism, Australian Aboriginals, Tsarist Russia, Proudhon’s and Marx’s comments on property, the bourgeoisie, and many other familiar talking points that will amuse the Marxist faithful. What the author fails to do is give us a concrete idea of what their alternative is. By that, I do not mean that we should convert to Marxism. Rather, to give us a proof of what they have right now and a step-by-step proposal on how to proceed. To put it in software development terms, share the code and send us the patch.

    But there is no such thing. The catch-22 with Marxism is that the world it promises does not truly exist unless everything is Marxist. So we have to contend with lengthy and dense diatribes instead. To this end, the article concludes with the following pompous yet ultimately uninspiring remarks: [...]

  • Ankur Sethi ☛ Land and expand

    Mitchell Hashimoto (founder of HashiCorp, creator of Vagrant and Ghostty) commenting on why software products often lose their core identity and grow irrelevant features: [...]

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • BBC ☛ Kitty Perry and the copyright lessons for seven-year-olds

      The Intellectual [sic] Property [sic] Office - formerly known as the Patent Office - has produced a range of teaching materials for Key Stage 2 in the national curriculum, for seven- to 11-year-olds.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The Dissenter ☛ Project Censored At 50 (And The Media That Can Save Us)

    The media literacy project has documented and analyzed “censored” news as well as “junk food news” and “news abuse” for 50 years. Its director Mickey Huff is hugely supportive of the Dissenter, which is built around covering stories involving press freedom, whistleblowers, and government secrecy that rarely receive regular attention in the establishment press.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Russia’s Antiwar Prisoners Are Outcasts in Their Own Land

    Over four years into Russia’s war in Ukraine, some of the Russians imprisoned in its early days are still in jail. Even people with no previous political activism have been landed with long prison sentences in order to crush dissent.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • [Repeat] Press Gazette ☛ Top libel lawyers 'killed off' legislation to protect public interest reporting

    The Society of Media Lawyers met with both the previous Conservative government in 2024 and the new Labour government last year, and allegedly heavily lobbied via letters to ministers and MPs. The group includes representatives from prominent claimant specialist media law firms like Mishcon de Reya and Carter-Ruck.

    Two lots of reporting this week from the New Statesman, with Democracy for Sale, and The Bureau of Investigative Journalism used Freedom of Information document releases to reveal how the Society of Media Lawyers “aggressively pushed back on anti-SLAPP legislation”.

  • CPJ ☛ Bangladesh tribunal shows journalists Rupa and Babu arrested over 2013 reporting

    Prosecutors allege that Rupa, in a report aired on Ekattor TV after the incident, used statements from “controversial individuals” and spread misleading information that diverted attention from killings during the crackdown. Babu, as managing director of the channel at the time, is accused of overseeing the broadcast as part of what the chief prosecutor described as a “systematic” to conceal the death toll.

  • ANF News ☛ Mohammadi sisters receive the “Courage in Journalism Award”

    Elaheh and Elnaz Mohammadi gained international attention during the “Jin, Jiyan, Azadî” (Woman, Life, Freedom) protests in East Kurdistan and Iran, which erupted after the killing of Kurdish woman Jina Mahsa Amini by Iran’s morality police in September 2022. At the time, Elaheh Mohammadi reported for the newspaper Ham Mihan on Amini’s funeral in her hometown of Saqqiz. Shortly afterward, she was arrested and later sentenced to prison. Her sister Elnaz Mohammadi, who also worked for the same newspaper, was sentenced to several years in prison because of her reporting on the protest movement.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ 67% of journalists report worsening Hong Kong press climate, FCC survey finds

    The 2026 FCC Press Freedom Survey, which received 78 responses from members, found that “67 per cent of respondents said the working environment for them as a journalist had changed for the worse in the last 12 months.”

  • The Walrus ☛ As Newspapers Shutter in Newfoundland, a Student Publication Steps Up

    A student-run paper at a university without a journalism school, the Muse is not built to compete in the marketplace. But with a modern approach to a twenty-first-century problem, it has begun to fill the gap.