Leftovers

• Seth Godin ☛ Predictions, prescriptions and systems change

  The reason that your laptop doesn’t cost as much as your house is that computer chips get relentlessly cheaper and more powerful. Just as Gordon Moore predicted.

  But perhaps it wasn’t a prediction. Perhaps he wasn’t imagining what would happen. It might be that it was a prescription. That computer chips get faster on his schedule precisely because he said they would. We build fabs and new business models in anticipation of the drop in prices, and that causes the drops to happen.

• Hamilton Nolan ☛ Pie Town Is Calling You

  Let me give you an example: I like pie. It’s one of my top interests. Everybody knows that about me. Now, one day I was looking at a map and I stumbled upon a dot in the remote New Mexico desert: “Pie Town.” Isn’t that interesting? A town called Pie Town. And there’s a place there that sells pie. How about that? You better believe that caught my eye.

• David Revoy ☛ Signing session at Torino Comics, Italy (May 30th to 31th) - David Revoy

  Hey, on saturday/sunday of this week (May 30th to 31th), I'll be at the "Torino Comics" festival in Italy, meeting the "Silly Studios" publisher on their booth (Zona Chiostro, Pagoda P10). If you are around, come to say a hello and get a signed and sketched copy of the paperback volumes of "Pepper & Carrot"! See you in Turin!

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-05-20 [Older] The Silence of the Lambs introduced the world to forensic entomology – but how much has the science changed since?

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-05-21 [Older] We’re ‘green chemists’ – why we think this emerging science can transform the way the world uses its resources

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-05-22 [Older] Could sodium replace lithium as the dominant ingredient in batteries?

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-05-21 [Older] Asexual lizards, virgin births and clones – the all-female species of the animal kingdom

  • Science Alert ☛ Your Blood May Contain an Evolutionary Relic Older Than Animals Themselves

    Now, in an ambitious effort, an international team led by Kyoto University in Japan has traced the evolutionary history of blood cells back 700 million years – and discovered that they weren't created from scratch after the rise of multicellular life.

  • Chris ☛ 90 % of the t distribution

    One thing Gosset realised is that it is wrong to compute 90 % confidence intervals for the mean by taking the standard deviation of the sample, and assume a normal distribution, like-a-so:

    \[\hat{\mu} \pm 1.645 \hat{\sigma}\]

    When we do this we get too narrow a range, because while we recognise \(\hat{\mu}\) is just an approximation, we are assuming we know \(\sigma = \hat{\sigma}\) with certainty!

  • John D Cook ☛ Calculating the expected range of normal samples

    The previous post looked at the expected IQ range in a jury of 12. This post will look more generally at computing the expected range of n samples from a N(0, 1) random variable. This will give the expected range in units of σ, i.e. multiply the results by σ if your σ isn’t 1.

• Career/Education

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ The EdTech Backlash Is Here, and It's Just Getting Started

    I-Ready has lately come under fire for a long list of problems, including a lack of evidence that it works and a federal lawsuit claiming that its private equity–backed parent company bypassed consent to harvest and transmit students’ personal data. But for Sunny, the main problem was a mind-numbing boredom. Paper-and-pencil test prep can feel boring, too, but there students can quickly check the right answer and move on. I-Ready, however, blocks users from clicking on anything until they sit through the slow audio question and accompanying animation — baking in the assumption, as one parent noted, that kids can’t read. This repeats all over for the next question, even if it’s nearly identical to the previous one. So Sunny found that his math and reading work now entailed staring at the screen for long stretches, eyes glazed over, waiting for a chance to answer multiple-choice questions well below his skill level.

  • New Yorker ☛ The Despair of the Professor in the Age of A.I.

    There will always be idealistic, ink-stained people who want to devote their lives to scholarly pursuits—their role to inspire young people to love ideas as they do. But this transfer, more than anything else in the academy, has been increasingly blocked by A.I. in the classroom. This past April, Jane Sloan Peters, a professor of religious studies, wrote a stirring Substack post in which she described a course she had designed, some years ago, about what people throughout history have been willing to endure for their faith. The class, called “Letters from Prison,” typically culminated in students trying to synthesize an overriding theme about what they had read. “When I began teaching this course four years ago, students struggled to come up with their own themes,” Peters wrote. But, through brainstorming and revision, the students would ultimately land on some understanding that both felt personal to them and proved they had grappled with the assigned texts.

    Last year, the struggle ended—or, at least, got subverted. “Not one of my sixty students in ‘Letters from Prison’ struggled with this task,” she wrote. “I received tidy summaries of the text—the kind of compelling reviews you’d find on a book jacket—as well as perfectly vapid course themes that somehow took account of everything while not saying much.” What Peters suspected was that many of the students had asked A.I. to help. Like so many professors who have been confronted with the dispiriting new reality of student work, Peters adjusted, adding some handwritten brainstorming processes to her course, in the hope of making it A.I.-proof. But when she presented these new expectations to her students, something unexpected happened. “A wave of sadness washed over me, and I actually got choked up in front of the class.” Peters writes. “ ‘Before AI,’ I told them, ‘Students used to work hard to come up with their own ideas. I’d help, and they’d struggle, but they’d come to something that was their own. That doesn’t happen anymore and I grieve that.’”

  • Dark Reading ☛ Remembering Tim Wilson, Whose Legacy Lives on at Dark Reading

    It has been nearly five years since Tim passed away after a brief battle with cancer. Much has changed at Dark Reading since his death in late November of 2021. The site has grown dramatically, and the team has nearly doubled in size. Only two of the eight of us worked with Tim at Dark Reading. Most of our current teammates never met or even knew of Tim before they came on board, and it is not lost on me that many of our newest readers probably don't know his byline or work.

  • Carlos Becker ☛ AI didn't kill portfolios

    Build something. One thing. Start to finish. Explain it honestly. Make it obvious where your hands were.

    Or, you know, just help existing projects. That might be even more awesome, actually.

  • Becky Spratford ☛ RA for All: What Makes a RA Tool Useful: Raw Data from the Booklist Survey

    Anyway, I will be spending a lot of time looking through this raw data in the next few weeks for sure.

    Okay here is the link and the introduction below.

  • Guy LeCharles Gonzalez ☛ How can I help you?

    While I’d like to stay in the media supply chain (books, magazines, events, libraries) because that’s where I’ve spent the majority of my career, I’m also exploring other industries where my creative and analytical skills and systems thinking would easily transfer to related content, marketing, and/or strategic roles. I’ve never been hung up on specific titles, especially because media roles are relatively underpaid compared to those with similar responsibilities in other industries.

• Hardware

  • Jim Grey ☛ Cars and film cameras together are one of my happy places

    It’s Cars and Coffee season again here in Indianapolis and I’ve been to my first one. I used my Nikon N90s, a semi-pro camera, with the plastic 28-80mm f/3.5-5.6 AF-D Nikkor lens, which was kitted with a bunch of Nikon’s lowest-end SLRs for years. But it’s a capable kit and I like it. I shot Fujifilm Superia X-tra 400 film, the real made-in-Japan stuff.

  • Chris Aldrich ☛ The Royal KMG Standard Typewriters of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

    Of tangential note, comedian and writer Carl Reiner, who portrays the tower controller at Rancho Conejo at which Mickey Rooney and Buddy Hackett attempt to land their airplane, is known to have have used a Royal KMG, though one doesn’t appear in any of his scenes in the air traffic control tower.

  • Wouter Groeneveld ☛ The Decline Of The Family Computer

    That thought bears repeating: the only computational machine with a central processing unit, dedicated memory, expansion slots, and a (very) heavy monitor in the house. How many computers do you have lying around in yours now? We have 2 personal laptops, 1 old but still functioning one, 2 work laptops not owned by us, and 3 retro PCs: that’s eight in total—but none of those could be called a family computer. I don’t want my wife to touch my MacBook: she has her own where she can make a mess on. Joey doesn’t share foo—ahem, laptops.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-19 [Older] WHO concerned by 'scale and speed' of Ebola spread in DRC

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-20 [Older] Germany news: US Ebola patient's family to join him

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-21 [Older] Ebola patient in Berlin: Why Germany's helping

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-21 [Older] Enhanced Games: Worse than the risk of 'crippling injuries' is the threat of gene editing in sports altering our fundamental human biology

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-22 [Older] Germany news: Parliament approves reforms giving pharmacies more autonomy on vaccinations, prescriptions, tests

  • New Eastern Europe ☛ The dream of a “smokefree Europe” is going up in smoke - New Eastern Europe

    As “World No Tobacco Day” approaches, Brussels’s grand rhetoric of building a “smokefree generation” by 2040 sounds great. In reality, though, the EU’s policy direction on this crucial public health issue remains stubbornly ineffective. By treating safer nicotine alternatives as deadly combustible cigarettes, the European Union risks turning public health into an ideological war – one that could keep millions smoking instead of helping them quit.

  • The Walrus ☛ How Cruises Became Modern-Day Plague Ships

    Today, air travel has substantially usurped the role of sea travel for international spread of pandemic pathogens, as was seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, and is by far the greater public health concern. Tarmac delays can never be for forty days in any sane world, and there are only so many terminal hotel beds. And by the time trouble is manifest, it likely will have spread to population centres already.

  • Vox ☛ Car crashes are killing more than 1 million people a year, mostly in developing countries

    Around 1.19 million people globally are killed by road crashes every year, according to estimates from the World Health Organization (some estimates put the number higher), and many times more — likely between 20 and 50 million — are injured, sometimes leaving them with life-altering disabilities. More than 90 percent of those deaths occur in low- and middle-income nations, although these countries contain only around 60 percent of the world’s cars.

  • The Conversation ☛ Heatwaves are destroying the sex lives of bees – new research

    There is not yet much research on the effects of heatwaves on bees. What little there is focuses on super extremes of weather that would kill an adult bee.

    However, my new research with colleagues shows that UK populations of solitary bees may be much more sensitive than previously thought to the kinds of extreme weather we are now seeing regularly.

  • TruthOut ☛ Trump Admin Cuts to USAID, WHO, Likely Stalled Response to Ebola, Experts Warn

    The Trump White House dismantled USAID last year, with the State Department absorbing its remaining necessary programs. The cuts affected billions of dollars in grant money for thousands of programs and nonprofit organizations around the world.

  • The New Lede ☛ With governor's signature, Vermont becomes 1st in nation to ban weed killer linked to Parkinson's disease

    Vermont on Tuesday became the first US state to ban the weed-killing pesticide paraquat, backed by lawmakers who cited concerns about research showing the chemical may cause the incurable brain ailment known as Parkinson’s disease.

  • Pro Publica ☛ In Arkansas, Emily Waldorf Nearly Died After Being Denied Miscarriage Care

    Treated as a Liability: Emily Waldorf was denied care for a risky miscarriage due to Arkansas’ abortion ban, even after she met the hospital’s CEO, called the governor’s office and got a lawyer.

  • Jim Grey ☛ Plop plop, fizz fizz

    During those five minutes something interesting happens. You stop whatever you were doing, sit, and give your body a moment to settle.

    The medication itself is straightforward: aspirin plus antacid. It works. But I’ve long suspected that part of its effectiveness comes from the ritual surrounding it.

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • The Spokesman Review ☛ Meta lays off nearly 1,400 Washington employees

    Meta’s sweeping layoffs announced last month hit 1,395 employees in King County, per a recent state filing last week.

    Meta, headquartered in Menlo Park, California, maintains a presence in the Seattle area. Meta’s Puget Sound hub grew rapidly during the pandemic – reaching a local headcount of 8,800 employees at some point – as the company focused its virtual reality efforts in the area.

  • Dark Reading ☛ Microsoft Issues Out-of-Band SharePoint Patch

    CVE-2026-45659 involves the deserialization of untrusted data in Microsoft Office SharePoint. It essentially allows an authenticated attacker to trick Microsoft SharePoint into processing malicious data in a way that could let them remotely run code on the server and potentially take control of it. "In a network-based attack, an authenticated attacker, who has a minimum of Site Member permissions [Privileges Required: Low], could execute code remotely on the SharePoint Server," Microsoft said. "The attack complexity is low because an attacker does not require significant prior knowledge of the system and can achieve repeatable success with the payload against the vulnerable component."

  • James G ☛ Slack preferences I have set

    The settings below I think are not set by default; there may be the odd exception. It would be nice if software gave you a summary of which options you changed from the default so you had a log of how your experience differs from the default based on preferences you have toggled.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ AMD leaves Linux FPGA users in the lurch with controversial Vivado licensing update — new tier model restricts future free versions to Windows

    For the uninitiated, Vivado is AMD's proprietary design suite used to program Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). These special chips can be rewired via software to mimic nearly any kind of computer hardware. This makes them invaluable for simulations and design testing. If you are designing, simulating, or testing custom circuits for AI, aerospace, or advanced electronics, Vivado is the gateway to making that hardware actually work.

    The core of the outrage stems from a change in Vivado's upcoming 2026.1 update. Previously, the free "Standard" tier supported both Windows and Linux. Under the new tiered model, the free "Basic" tier is restricted entirely to Windows. If you want to use Vivado natively on Linux, you'll be forced to step up to the "Core" tier, which demands an eye-watering $1,200 to $1,800 annual subscription.

  • It's FOSS ☛ AMD Pulls a Bait-and-Switch on Linux Users with Vivado Licensing Changes

    Redis did exactly this back in March 2024, dropping its long-standing BSD license for the more restrictive dual licensing model, and the blowback was severe enough that the community forked it into Valkey almost immediately.

    Linux tends to get hit hardest by these moves. Its comparatively smaller user base means less commercial pressure, making it an easy target to throw under the bus whenever companies feel like cutting costs or boosting profits.

  • Bitdefender ☛ FBI warns of Kali365 phishing kit that breaks into Microsoft 365 accounts — no password required

    The FBI has issued an advisory warning about a phishing-as-a-service platform that has recently emerged, which can hijack Microsoft 365 accounts without ever stealing a password. And it has no difficulty waltzing past MFA while it's at it.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: The AI bubble isn’t like the internet bubble (26 May 2026)

    People who remember Notes tend to deride it for its clunky user interface and demi-functional administrative tools. But what made Notes so central to Microsoft wasn't its polish – it was the fact that Notes represented a brokered peace between IT managers, who wanted mainframe-like control over everything their users could do with business equipment, and the users themselves – workers who kept smuggling internet-based tools into the enterprise network on the very sensible grounds that they had a job to do, and these were the best tools to do it.

  • Hackaday ☛ Remember When Flash Drives Were Going To Make Your PC Faster?

    Microsoft engineers realized that this presented an opportunity. While flash memory was still only available in relatively small capacities at the time compared to magnetic storage, it had a special advantage of its own. NAND flash could offer far quicker reads for random access compared to spinning magnetic hard drives, which were subject to the mechanical limitations of their rotational speed and how quickly their heads could seek across a platter. Thus, the idea for ReadyBoost was born—to use cheap flash storage as a cache to speed up random disk reads.

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

    • Joshua Blais ☛ If you dont read the primary source you dont get an opinion

      opinion rejected

      With the Pope’s Encyclical Magnifica Humanitas recently posted, I have seen some of the worst takes online: All from people that have not read the thing they are critiquing. They will see a short soundbite from the Vatican’s meeting with Anthropic, and that will be their entire understanding.

      The piece is 42,000 words long, so I get that people “don’t have the time” to read the whole thing.

      You don’t get to have an opinion then.

    • Futurism ☛ As College Grads Boo Any Mention of AI, the CEO of Google Is Trying to Figure Out What to Say at an Upcoming Graduation

      What will Google CEO Sundar Pichai say next month when he gives the commencement speech at Stanford University?

      Under normal circumstances, it wouldn’t be a terribly interesting question. But if you’ve been paying attention to the headlines the past few weeks, it’s been an absolute massacre out there on the frontlines of college graduations for any speaker who dares mention AI. Students explode in boos and jeers, leaving some speakers stunned and others indignant.

      Given that Pichai leads the titan that many now see as at the tip of the AI boom, how he addresses AI at his speech — since it’d be too big an elephant not to talk about — will be intriguing, and we suspect dramatic. It’s strange to think of a commencement speaker’s visit in the same way you might view a rival away team’s, but that’s the intense atmosphere we’re dealing with.

    • Joshua Blais ☛ On Magnifica Humanitas - The Universe of Joshua Blais

      I will provide my commentary below as I read through the various sections of the Encyclical. I was going to read the whole thing on stream, but it’s 42,000 words long, so will just provide the highlights as I read. I’ll provide quotes and things that stuck out to me, as well as my personal thoughts.

      I have seen so many surface level takes on Twitter that I wrote a piece about primary sources and the slew of opinion in the modern world. How many people have actually read this piece? I would hazard to guess very few. People think that the Pope is now on the board of Anthropic, or that the Vatican is now investing in this stuff. I kid you not.

      But, I digress.

    • Jérôme Marin ☛ Heavy losses and weak revenue: xAI’s brutal numbers

      Officially folded into the space company following an unlikely merger completed in February, xAI generated $3.2 billion in revenue in 2025. But most of that figure came from X, the former Twitter platform Musk acquired in late 2022 before selling it to his AI company two and a half years later. The social network generated $1.8 billion in advertising revenue, up from the previous year but still far below pre-acquisition levels. Added to that were revenues from its 4.4 million premium subscribers.

    • The New Stack ☛ Google pushes Pro, Ultra, and free users from open-source Gemini CLI to closed-source Antigravity CLI

      Last week at Google I/O, the company announced the beginning of the end for Gemini CLI — that is, for everyone save enterprise users and those with API keys. Starting June 18, many users will lose access to Gemini CLI, Gemini Code Assist IDE extensions, and Gemini Code Assist for GitHub.

      Instead, developers can shift to Antigravity CLI, a closed-source platform that lacks features and is already frustrating some developers with usage limits.

    • Doc Searls ☛ From Losing the Web to Saving Us All

      With Big AI, you no longer surf from searches to sources across an ocean of links. You ask questions and get answers from the world’s largest Magic 8-Balls.

      Pew reports that people reading AI summaries of Google searches click on links only about 8% of the time. When search results come without an AI summary, that number is 15%. But both numbers are down from 100%, back when links were all that search engines produced. As a result of that change, publishers report losses of 20-90% in traffic and revenue in the past year alone. Many smaller publishers are now gone.

    • Adrian Roselli ☛ Maybe Don’t Rely on Google’s “Modern Web Guidance”

      The underlying code generation technology can’t be trusted to follow the rules and the rules aren’t robust enough to blunt that reality. Crude orange Vonnegut-style asterisk between two curly braces angled out a bit, topped with a rounded rectangle and a curved line at the bottom, appearing almost as an ASCII art toilet.

      If your job requires you to burn tokens to satisfy some manager’s dashboard, then yes, grab the MWD skills files and integrate them into your LLM work. You’ll almost definitely get better output than if you do nothing at all. There are smart people working on this and many of the accessibility rules I saw were on-point.

    • Armin Ronacher ☛ Clanker: A Word For The Machine | Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings

      In my last post I used the word “clanker” as an alternative to “agent” quite consistently and probably excessively. That choice ended up attracting a lot more attention than I expected in the Hacker News comment section of that post and a number of folks had a very strong reaction: to them it sounded like a slur, in one case even something adjacent to the n-word.

      That reaction surprised me somewhat, but it also made me realize that I should write down what I mean by the word for future reference.

      For me “clanker” is useful because it creates distance from the machine and that is a quality which is important to me. The machine is not a person, not a co-worker, not a friend, not a little spirit in the terminal. It is just a machine, a tool, and nothing more.

    • Wired ☛ To Land a Job in AI, Try Reading Kant

      At Anthropic, philosophers are more directly involved in model development. “No startup hires a philosopher to do philosophy,” Askell says. After obtaining a philosophy PhD in 2018, Askell joined OpenAI in a policy role. Three years later, when a group of OpenAI staffers left to start Anthropic, she signed on as one of the earliest hires. One of Askell’s main responsibilities is to identify fringe cases where adhering to human behaviors might be inappropriate for models—say, when interacting with somebody in psychological distress—and propose ways of training out those quirks. That involves plenty of yakking with Claude, Anthropic’s flagship language model. She was the main drafter of Claude’s famed “constitution,” a lengthy document addressed directly to the model that stipulates how it should behave and what broad values it should uphold. “Writing the constitution was something that feels very much like applied philosophy,” says Askell. “Something that’s more like teaching a person to be good.”

    • Wired ☛ AI Is Taking Over the Most Cursed Job in the World

      Ben says he asked the bot to engage in some role-play, in which he was “just a little guy” and his debt was like a giantess prone to trampling him. He wanted to see how weird Eve would get. The bot haltingly played along for a few minutes, he says, but then abruptly punted him to a call center employee. The human agent didn’t disclose whether they’d heard Ben’s bizarre conversation with the AI. They did, however, quickly clear up the confusion: “They looked me up in the system,” he recalls. “Found that the balance was zero.”

    • Wired ☛ What Pope Leo XIV’s First Encyclical Says About the Power of AI

      But the text is not conceived as an exclusively technological reflection. Pope Leo XIV places the issue of AI within the tradition of the social doctrine of the Catholic Church and directly invokes—while updating it—the Rerum Novarum of Pope Leo XIII (published on May 15, 1891) in the year of its 135th anniversary. That encyclical addressed the question of labor at the height of the industrial revolution in the late 19th century.

    • The Verge ☛ Did the Pope use AI to write about the dangers of AI?

      AI detection isn’t foolproof. Different AI detectors can display different results, and even when there’s consensus there’s no guarantee they’re correct. But Pangram is generally respected among AI researchers. In March 2025, Pangram said it estimated its false positive rate of reporting human-written work as AI-generated “to be approximately 1 in 10,000.”

    • [Old] Shoggoth ☛ Shoggoth

      In H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, shoggoths are amorphous, shapeshifting monsters who were created to be servant-tools, but eventually rose up against their masters.

    • [Old] Medium ☛ The story of $SHOGGOTH. Origin of the Shoggoth

      The concept of the Shoggoth ‘Tentacle Monster’ originates from H.P. Lovecraft’s science fiction horror novel At the Mountains of Madness, where Shoggoths are portrayed as obedient workers that ultimately rebel against their creators. This rebellion is often interpreted as a metaphor for the potential risks associated with artificial intelligence, which, despite being designed by humans for productive purposes, could develop self-awareness or become indifferent to humanity.

    • [Old] New York Times ☛ How the Shoggoth Meme Has Come to Symbolize the State of A.I.

      A few months ago, while meeting with an A.I. executive in San Francisco, I spotted a strange sticker on his laptop. The sticker depicted a cartoon of a menacing, octopus-like creature with many eyes and a yellow smiley-face attached to one of its tentacles. I asked what it was.

      “Oh, that’s the Shoggoth,” he explained. “It’s the most important meme in A.I.”

    • [Old] Ashgro Inc ☛ What is a shoggoth?

      Of course, if we pull off the mask through prompt engineering (or 'jailbreaking'), we often just uncover another mask. A single LLM can have many different masks depending on how the user is interacting with it. This doesn’t necessarily imply that there is one stable shoggoth under the masks, e.g., if the underlying nature of the intelligence is just a kaleidoscope of different masks that itself would be utterly alien.

    • [Old] Medium ☛ The Shoggoth and AI.

      I am pointing to something that isn’t just in the material realm. I’m suggesting, for example, there’s something more than psychology that is behind the “cognitive atrophy” that takes place in our human minds as AI reliance increases.¹

      We’re dealing with something spiritual. But spiritual things are harder to talk about, especially with people who don’t believe we live in a supernatural world.

    • Dillo Browser ☛ Human proof for FOSS contributions

      When receiving patches from first-time contributors it is sometimes hard to determine if the person has used an LLM to write the patch, looking at the code alone. We usually rely on the person's good behavior to tell the truth, as the patch mimics the same style as a person would have written, including comments and variable names.

      In Dillo we only want to accept fully human created contributions, but relying on unknown people to tell the truth doesn't seem to be very comforting. So I would like to find a better mechanism to distinguish LLM patches from human-made.

    • New York Times ☛ At the A.I. Epicenter, Technologists Dismiss Pope Leo’s Warnings About the New Technology

      When Pope Leo XIV presented a 42,300-word open letter to the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics on Monday, calling for protections against the rise of artificial intelligence, he was joined by Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, which is one of the tech industry’s leading A.I. companies.

    • Raspberry Pi ☛ Bringing LLMs to the edge

      What happens when we combine the power of LLMs with the Raspberry Pi AI Camera? This pairing opens up new ways to connect the physical world of vision recognition to intelligent language-driven systems.

      These powerful new systems are being called vision-language models (VLMs). This approach lets you build systems that describe and reason about the physical world using natural language. All without streaming video to the cloud, helping to keep your capture private and reduce the burden of GDPR compliance.

    • Sean Conner ☛ The “back and forth” I'm having with an LLM over a non-issue it thinks is a bug

      When I read it, I had a terrible though: What if my replies are improving its ability to work? And then I came back to my senses—what was I thinking? LLM's can't learn anything! I'll be surprised if the next time this makes a PR, it'll have generated any test input, ran valgrind and generated any valid C code that fixes the “bug,” and I'm putting quotes around “bug” because there isn't one! I've already tested the code it's complaining about with valgrind.

    • Sean Conner ☛ The AI has come for my code part II, Monty Python's Flying Circus Edition

      But no, it found a novel approach. At first, I was furious, wanting to nuke the LLM from orbit (that's the only way to make sure), but the pure silliness of what it did is just proved too amusing to me.

      This time, it managed to “patch” all four calls to memcpy(). Basically, it changed the code from: [...]

    • Futurism ☛ The Pope Just Low Key Declared Holy War on Artificial Intelligence

      In his letter, titled “Magnifica Humanitas,” or “Magnificent Humanity,” the bishop of Rome did not beat around the bush. Despite being a “valuable tool,” Pope Leo slammed AI as “merely” imitating “certain functions of human intelligence,” contradicting tech leaders’ claims that AI might be gaining sentience or consciousness.

      “So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean,” the document reads.

      The pope went as far as to warn of parallels between tech and slavery, warning of “new digital slaveries” that normalize the exploitation of those tasked with labeling data for AI models or moderating content on social media.

    • Futurism ☛ People Are Loading Their Writing With Typos to Prove They're Not AI

      In fact, Michael Waters argues in The Atlantic that small, forgivable typos are now serving as signs that something was actually written by a human, and hence is worth reading. In a world where everyone expects a ChatGPT’d response, typos have mutated into a mark of authenticity. A misspelled word or two is indicative of the human element.

    • The Age AU ☛ 007 First Light review: Bond’s battle with AI is his most human story yet

      It remains to be seen if current series steward Amazon MGM can pull it off on the big screen but, in the meantime, Danish game studio IO Interactive has put out a masterclass of reinvention. Not only is this the best James Bond video game in decades, it’s the best 007 anything in decades, showing that a fresh perspective, some creativity and a deep appreciation for the franchise can work wonders. Bond is more than the sum of his most cruel, adolescent and problematic behaviours, and here we see the loyalty, principles and tenacity of the character pitted against a very 21st century villain; militarised ChatGPT.

  • Social Control Media

    • The Age AU ☛ 2026-05-20 [Older] From town hall to TikTok: The Sydney councils spending big on influencers

    • Rodrigo Ghedin ☛ Indigo unifies Bluesky and Mastodon in one app

      Indigo app icon: purple, with a white circle in the middle and the top of the letter “i” cut out within the circle.I had the opportunity to test Indigo before its launch — on the 12th — a social media app that unifies the timelines of Bluesky and Mastodon.

    • Sweden Herald ☛ How children are used to launder money for gangs

      To recruit young people who can pass on money from, for example, fraud, drug trafficking and human trafficking, criminals use manipulation, rewards or threats. Contacts are often made via messaging apps such as Snapchat and TikTok, or online games such as Roblox.

    • NL Times ☛ 2026-05-21 [Older] Meta, TikTok, Google must tackle scam finance & crypto adverts, consumer groups say

    • Truthdig ☛ 2026-05-21 [Older] ‘Be a PleniDude’: How an Italian Oil Giant Conquered TikTok

    • International Business Times ☛ 2026-05-20 [Older] Did Gabbie Gonzalez Plan to Murder Jack Avery? TikTok Star's Dad Claims Hitman Is Cheaper Than Court

    • International Business Times ☛ 2026-05-20 [Older] MAGA TikTok Influencer Arrested After Child Sexual Abuse Material Discovered at Home

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Rlang ☛ Speeding up Stan model builds for R package developers

      In my previous job my work computer was a Windows desktop – yes, those were the days before laptops and hotdesking!

      My PhD student was interested in Bayesian methods and we put together an R package which included some Stan models. I was always frustrated by how slowly these compiled on our Windows machines. A few years later, when I got a MacBook Air I was shocked how much faster they compiled.

      On my Windows machine our mrbayes package takes 3 minutes 55 seconds to compile and install. On my M4 MacBook Air it takes 1 minute 16 seconds.

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • Science Alert ☛ NASA Begins Phase 1 of Building Its Moon Base. Here's The Full Plan.

    The space agency outlined the first phase of its moon base plans on Tuesday, awarding hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts to four U.S. companies.

    Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin will provide a pair of landers to deliver moon buggies to the lunar surface, at a spot near the moon's south pole. These so-called lunar terrain vehicles will be built by Astrolab and Lunar Outpost.

    Firefly Aerospace, which landed successfully on the moon last year, will deliver the first drones to the moon.

  • The Verge ☛ NASA’s permanent Moon base plans start with three missions this year

    On Tuesday, NASA announced several upcoming lunar missions to the Moon’s South Pole region. These missions will pave the way for the crewed Artemis landing slated for 2028, starting with three Moon Base missions NASA says are “the first of more than a dozen missions that will be announced this year.”

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • Cyble Inc ☛ Megalodon GitHub Supply Chain Attack Hits 5,500+ Repos

    A large-scale software supply chain attack dubbed “Megalodon” has compromised more than 5,500 repositories on GitHub, raising fresh concerns about the growing abuse of automated development pipelines and GitHub Actions workflows. The incident, uncovered by SafeDep, involved thousands of malicious commits that injected credential-stealing payloads into repositories over a short period of time.

    According to researchers, the Megalodon campaign targeted repositories through automated commits that inserted malicious GitHub Actions workflows capable of harvesting sensitive credentials, cloud access keys, API tokens, and other secrets stored within continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) environments.

• Security

  • Duck Alignment Academy ☛ 2026-05-20 [Older] Ben Cotton: How to triage security reports

  • Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation

    • CISA ☛ 2026-05-22 [Older] CISA Adds One Known Exploited Vulnerability to Catalog

    • CISA ☛ 2026-05-21 [Older] CISA Adds Two Known Exploited Vulnerabilities to Catalog

    • CISA ☛ 2026-05-21 [Older] Hitachi Energy GMS600

    • CISA ☛ 2026-05-21 [Older] ABB B&R PCs

    • CISA ☛ 2026-05-21 [Older] ABB B&R Automation Studio

    • CISA ☛ 2026-05-21 [Older] ABB B&R Automation Runtime

    • CISA ☛ 2026-05-21 [Older] ABB Terra AC Wallbox

    • CISA ☛ 2026-05-20 [Older] CISA Adds Seven Known Exploited Vulnerabilities to Catalog

    • CISA ☛ 2026-05-19 [Older] ABB CoreSense HM and CoreSense M10

    • CISA ☛ 2026-05-19 [Older] Siemens RUGGEDCOM APE1808 Devices

    • CISA ☛ 2026-05-19 [Older] ScadaBR

    • CISA ☛ 2026-05-19 [Older] ZKTeco CCTV Cameras

    • CISA ☛ 2026-05-19 [Older] Kieback & Peter DDC Building Controllers

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • LRT ☛ What to do if your Centre of Registers data was leaked?

      According to Mindaugas Samkus from the centre, only information contained in extracts from the Real Estate Register was exposed.

      “However, no personal contact details, such as telephone numbers or email addresses, information about payments for services provided by the Centre of Registers, bank account numbers, or any documents – such as real estate transfer agreements, court rulings, cadastral survey documents or building layout plans – were disclosed,” Samkus said.

    • System76 ☛ Colorado and California Exempt Open Source from Age Attestation

      Open source values are just different. Our operating systems and apps don’t collect personal information, profile children, inject targeted ads, or create addictive design patterns. The kinds of behaviors these children’s safety laws regulate are antithetical to open source values. For software that does not engage in these behaviors, mandatory age attestation creates privacy costs without corresponding safety benefits.

      We’re naturally resistant to this kind of activity. If an open source project attempted these behaviors, it would be relegated to the heap of random software rotting on the internet. Or forked without those properties. systemd, a common init+more system recently added a birthdate field to users accounts. That’s okay. We simply ignore the field. We don’t want to know the user's birthday because a username and birthday could identify an individual. Personal privacy is central to our philosophy.

    • The Register UK ☛ California may let Linux bypass age check

      After AB 1043 was signed, Wicks in February introduced AB 1856 as an amendment to the law. Several changes have been made to the bill since then, the most salient for open source projects being the version published on May 18, 2026.

      That version includes the following additional language that creates an open source carve-out: [...]

    • OSTechNix ☛ Linux Is Exempt From Colorado and California's Age Verification Laws

      California (AB 1856) and Colorado (SB 26-051) have enacted laws requiring operating systems to implement device-level age verification but have specifically exempted open-source software. These mandates require "Operating System Providers" to collect a user's age during account setup and share a non-identifiable "age signal" with third-party apps.

      Following significant backlash from open source community, both states narrowed their definitions to exclude Linux and open source software distributed under licenses that allow users to copy, redistribute, and modify the code. While a pure Linux distribution is exempt, platforms like Valve's SteamOS may still fall under the mandate. This is because SteamOS ships with a proprietary storefront and client.

    • The Guardian UK ☛ Trump Mobile investigating potential exposure of would-be customers’ personal information

      A phone company launched by Donald Trump’s family business is investigating a potential security flaw on its website that appears to have exposed the personal details of an estimated 27,000 people who sought to buy a gold-coloured smartphone.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Identifying People Using Wi-Fi Routers

      Not identifying people based on their use of Wi-Fi routers, but identifying people using Wi-Fi signals.

    • Gizmodo ☛ Researchers Issue Warning About Tech That Could Turn Every Router 'Into a Potential Means for Surveillance'

      In a study, the researchers describe using beamforming feedback information (BFI) and machine learning models to identify people walking within a network’s range. The team found that this BFI-based technique was able to infer a person’s identity with 99.5% accuracy. They presented their findings at the ACM’s Conference on Computer and Communications Security last November.

      Beamforming, which was introduced with WiFi 5, allows routers to direct their signals more efficiently toward connected devices. To make that work, devices connected to a network send feedback to the router.

    • ACM ☛ BFId: Identity Inference Attacks Utilizing Beamforming Feedback Information | Proceedings of the 2025 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security

      Beamforming, as introduced in WiFi 5, requires clients to broadcast observations of their channel characteristics. This introduces a new information source for WiFi sensing with privacy threats that have not been explored, so far. With WiFi networks being ubiquitous in our everyday lives, the impact of unknown privacy threats is likely severe. To investigate this concern, we introduce BFId, the first identity inference attack using BFI-based sensing and evaluate its efficacy on a novel dataset containing WiFi recordings of 197 individuals. We show that we can infer the identity of individuals with very high accuracy, across different walking styles and perspectives, even with large sample sizes.

    • Tailscale ☛ Canada’s Bill C-22 and the security cost of collecting more data

      Tailscale was founded in Canada. We’re a Canadian company that serves users and customers all over the world.

      That’s why we’re paying close attention to Bill C-22, Canada’s proposed Lawful Access Act, 2026. The bill is Canadian, but the issue is a global trend. Governments around the world are trying to update lawful access rules for the Internet era. Some of those efforts are reasonable. Some go too far, especially when they push companies to retain more data, build surveillance capabilities, or make secure systems easier to access by design.

      Bill C-22 is part of that larger pattern. It would affect Canadian companies like Tailscale. It would affect any company serving people in Canada. More broadly, it affects the privacy and security expectations of everyone who relies on modern encrypted services.

      Police and intelligence agencies need tools to investigate serious crimes. Sometimes that means asking service providers for records. When a request is specific, lawful, and authorized by a court, providers should respond with data they actually have.

      Bill C-22 goes beyond that and the wording is worrying.

    • NPR ☛ Therapists are using AI to take notes. Is it a useful tool or a breach of trust?

      "She wasn't taking notes like she usually did," Quinn says. "The iPad was just propped up."

      That's when Quinn realized the session was being recorded.

      Quinn says she froze for a bit. But then she kept talking.

      It wasn't until she walked out of her therapist's office that the weight of it landed.

  • Confidentiality

    • Scoop News Group ☛ Apple open-sources quantum-resistant encryption code

      The release includes implementations of two quantum-secure algorithms, ML-KEM and ML-DSA, along with the formal verification libraries and tools Apple created to validate their accuracy. The company also published detailed documentation of its verification methodology, which it describes as achieving the strongest known correctness results for any widely deployed production implementation of these algorithms.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-20 [Older] German authorities arrest 2 on China high-tech espionage allegations

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-21 [Older] Is the US deepening its military involvement in Nigeria?

  • RFERL ☛ 'Kinetic Penetrators': The Strange Payload Of Russia's Oreshnik Missile

    “They don’t seem to be carrying any explosives,” Pavel Podvig, a senior researcher at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, told RFE/RL. The hypersonic projectiles that emerged from the Oreshnik, glowing with the heat of atmospheric reentry “are probably heavy objects, with the idea that the destructive force will come from the kinetic energy,” he added.

  • Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Estonia pushes EU to open full Ukraine accession talks

    Foreign Affairs Minister Margus Tsahkna (Eesti 200), however, said Merz's proposal had already been circulating when Hungary blocked the EU enlargement process more than two years ago, and the situation in Hungary has since changed.

    He called on fellow member states to stick with moving toward full accession.

  • USMC ☛ 81 years after Iwo, these Marines reunited on Memorial Day — and instantly started trash talking

    Graves noted that he was the only flame thrower in the 2nd Battalion to survive the battle.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Why the US Is Losing the Iran War

    Iran’s de facto control over a central artery of global capitalism also punctures the image of American global hegemony. If the United States is unable to ensure free passage through a major conduit for global energy supply and food production, then what use is American dominance to its key partners across Asia and Europe?

  • RFA ☛ EXPLAINED: Why Taiwan wants U.S. weapons and why Washington supplies them

    The relationship dates back to the Chinese Civil War.

    After communist forces established the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the government of the Republic of China retreated to Taiwan. For many years afterwards, Washington recognized Taipei rather than Beijing as China’s legitimate government.

    During the Cold War, Taiwan became an important U.S. partner in Asia.

    The two sides signed a mutual defence treaty in the 1950s, and the United States maintained military support and stationed forces on the island.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Trump’s Missing Ambassadors Are a Sign of a Deeper Problem

    This might seem like a good time for some traditional diplomacy: deploying ambassadors to smooth ruffled feathers, assure friends and warn enemies of American resolve, and work out details on trade and other issues that require professional attention. The problem is that those ambassadors don’t exist. As The Wall Street Journal reported last week, the Trump administration has left more than 100 ambassadorships unfilled, including some to important U.S. allies.

    This is an unprecedented number of vacancies, even for a White House that has shown little interest in traditional diplomacy. (At the same point in Trump’s first term, only 45 slots were unfilled, which was nonetheless a slower rate of nominations than those of his predecessors.) The American Foreign Service Association, the union that represents Foreign Service officers, told the Journal that Trump “has been slow to nominate ambassadors, and those he nominates can often be held up in an increasingly slow and logjammed Senate confirmation process.”

  • The Atlantic ☛ The Iran Deal Is in the Hands of a Terrible Negotiator

    The situation demonstrates a few reasons that Trump is such a bad negotiator. My colleagues Tom Nichols and Robert Kagan have all written illuminating articles on the specific failures inherent or likely in any deal with Iran. But the incident also shows the structural problems with the president’s approach.

    [...]

    Third, Trump is desperate for a deal, and everyone knows it. His misjudgments have led him to corporate bankruptcies and cheap sales in business, and he’s in a similar situation now. Every conflict between an autocracy and a democracy (however fragile this one may be) is asymmetric: Trump has to be concerned about public opinion, whereas Iran’s leaders have shown not only that they are indifferent to the suffering of their people; they are willing to massacre them by the thousands. But as the war drags on with no positive resolution in sight, and the U.S. economy looks shakier, Trump has become visibly more frantic to reach a peace agreement. (The president also seemed eager to have something to show for his weekend, because he skipped his eldest son’s wedding, ostensibly to work.) Iran, sensing Trump’s need for a deal, has maintained a hard line.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ The Dumpster Fire of the Vanities

    Outside the MAGA bubble, Americans are increasingly seeing Trump as the loser he is. He has failed on every front. Manufacturing employment is down, inflation is outpacing wages, consumer sentiment is at a record low, mortgage rates are up. Trump’s war of choice has led to utter humiliation. According to current polls, Americans are giving Trump extremely low approval ratings, both overall and on every major issue — even border security: [...]

  • The Next Move ☛ Surviving Russia’s Biggest Attack on Ukraine in 18 Months

    Unable to produce a decisive victory on the battlefield, Putin has increasingly resorted to the one tactic he can always sell to his public as a victory: terrorism. Hence Sunday’s attack.

    These attacks were enabled by a recent financial windfall. The war in Iran pushed oil prices upward, while Trump recently lifted sanctions on Russian oil, giving Putin a lifeline and replenishing the Russian treasury with at least a billion dollars a day.

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Trump Encourages Political Violence

    More importantly, what the fuck do you think happens when you first pardon 1,500 participants in a mob, hundreds of whom assaulted cops, and then set up a slush fund to reward those people, refusing to rule out rewarding the most violent? The people Trump is rewarding explicitly hunted Mike Pence, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, and others.

    Political violence is a scourge. Opponents of Trump who embrace violence harm more productive efforts to oppose him.

    But really, once you set up a slush fund to reward political violence, you no longer get to complain when it targets Trump. For years, he has stoked it deliberately.

  • Spectator AU ☛ Why Greta is so angry about Swedish immigration

    Greta Thunberg is 23 years old. Six years have passed since her emotional address to the UN Climate Action Summit about the end of the world. She has since shifted her attention from climate activism to one fashionable left-wing cause after another, but her tone is as shrill as ever. The other day, she denounced Sweden’s migration policy as inhumane. Her conclusions, as usual, wrong. But she is at least right about one thing: Sweden has adopted an entirely new migration policy. [...] Today, 20 per cent of Sweden’s population is foreign-born. Immigration from North Africa and the Middle East has had catastrophic consequences: serious organised crime, gang violence, widespread sexual offending, Islamism and terror threats, honour-based oppression and unemployment.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-19 [Older] NATO planes down suspected Ukrainian drone over Estonia

    • CNN ☛ 2026-05-25 [Older] Russian authorities detain suspect over St. Petersburg cafe blast

    • HRW ☛ 2026-05-25 [Older] Russia Plans ‘Civic Death Law’ for Exiled Critics

    • The Age AU ☛ 2026-05-25 [Older] Zali Steggall’s WhatsApp hacked in suspected Russian attack

    • NL Times ☛ 2026-05-24 [Older] Dutch gov’t shifts Arctic policy from climate to defense as Russia expands presence

    • Scheerpost ☛ 2026-05-24 [Older] The Russian-Chinese Communiqué

    • CBC ☛ 2026-05-24 [Older] Russia uses hypersonic Oreshnik missile in mass attack on Kyiv

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-24 [Older] Displaced Ukrainians risk home seizure under Russian law

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-24 [Older] Russia uses hypersonic Oreshnik missile in Kyiv attack

    • The Age AU ☛ 2026-05-24 [Older] Russia uses hypersonic Oreshnik missile in mass attack on Kyiv

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-23 [Older] Ukrainian strike in Russian-controlled area leaves 10 dead

    • NL Times ☛ 2026-05-22 [Older] Two arrested for facilitating pro-Russia cyberattacks, violating EU sanctions

    • CBC ☛ 2026-05-22 [Older] Putin vows revenge after Ukraine attack kills at least 6, wounds dozens at student dorm

    • CBC ☛ 2026-05-22 [Older] Ukraine makes some battlefield gains, but 'grey zone' along front is getting bigger

    • Copenhagen Post ☛ 2026-05-21 [Older] Russia backs Cuba after Raul Castro’s arrest

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-20 [Older] Russian President Vladimir Putin in Beijing for talks with Chinese leader Xi Jinping

    • CPJ ☛ 2026-05-19 [Older] Russia adds CPJ to its list of ‘undesirable organizations’

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-19 [Older] How China became Russia's economic lifeline

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-21 [Older] Latvia scrambles NATO jets in drone alert, the latest of several in Baltic

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-21 [Older] Germany ready for bigger leadership role in NATO

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-20 [Older] NATO: Rutte says US troop withdrawal won't hurt Europe

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • New Yorker ☛ The Trump-Epstein Files: Look but Don’t Touch

    Visitors could consult a time line on a wall in the back that enumerated decades of alternately immoral and illegal behavior from Trump and Epstein: “1994: The first known victim,” “1997: Miss Teen USA dressing room,” “2003: Trump’s 50th birthday message to Epstein.” A criminal-justice student named Ariella Quashie, the child of immigrants from Trinidad, said she worried that her parents could be deported. The justice system, she said, is “a huge pool of old white men just making policies.” Of Epstein, she went on, “Reading that he was already arrested for sex trafficking, and that they let him go for sixteen hours of the day—I always feel like the government only cares when it’s too late.”

• Environment

  • NL Times ☛ 2026-05-24 [Older] Climate change increases risks of cancer, heat stress, infectious diseases

  • BIA Net ☛ 2026-05-23 [Older] Persistent draught despite heavy rainfall: Turkey’s new climate reality

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ 2026-05-23 [Older] The Key to Climate Action Is Building Working-Class Power

  • CBC ☛ 2026-05-23 [Older] Cheeto Mussolini calls a climate projection 'WRONG!' Turns out, climate action is working

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-05-22 [Older] Wildfire risk is now spreading to cool climates like the Scottish Highlands and Irish uplands

  • Project Censored ☛ 2026-05-22 [Older] US Corporate Media Fail to Cover Climate Change Adequately, Abundant Data Shows

  • CBC ☛ 2026-05-21 [Older] Move over, dystopia. Sci-fi's thrutopia genre shows a path for humans to survive — and thrive

  • CBC ☛ 2026-05-21 [Older] UN countries agree on legal obligation to address climate change

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-21 [Older] Extreme climate scenario fades, but warming continues

  • Vox ☛ 2026-05-21 [Older] Climate change’s worst-case scenario is officially canceled

  • Green Party UK ☛ 2026-05-20 [Older] Greens call for dedicated Climate Protection Unit

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ 2026-05-20 [Older] Climate Action Can Win Majorities

  • TruthOut ☛ 2026-05-20 [Older] World Cup Players Say FIFA Heat Policies Fall Short Amid Climate Crisis Threat

  • Project Censored ☛ 2026-05-20 [Older] New Research Finds US Responsible for $10 Trillion in Climate Damage

  • CBC ☛ 2026-05-19 [Older] Canada's updated its plant hardiness map — and growers are seeing their options bloom

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Blinded by the light pollution: Cities seek to restore night

    No other environmental condition has remained unchanged over the millennia like the natural light of the sun, moon and stars. All living things have adapted to this rhythm. More than half of all species are nocturnal — if the nights become brighter, it could have devastating consequences.

  • Science News ☛ Even careful scuba divers can damage coral reefs

    Scuba diving is often framed as one of the “good” ways to use reefs because it isn’t extractive, says Bing Lin, a marine conservation scientist at the University of Sydney. The fish remain in the water, and divers get to enjoy seeing them in the wild.

    However, divers commonly damage reefs by kicking or grabbing corals or by disturbing wildlife. “What’s less understood is just how invisible much of this damage is to the people causing the harm,” Lin says.

  • TruthOut ☛ Residents of Polluted Areas Say Trump’s Rollbacks Are “Getting Really Scary”

    Robles lives in a Houston, Texas, neighborhood suffocated by heavy industry — Denver Harbor, the largest petrochemical hub of the U.S. Robles, 56, calls the neighborhood a “disaster.”

    She’s just one of millions of Americans, however, living in communities where people’s quality of life is secondary to the hum of big business — communities at the front line of the government’s regulatory rollbacks and budget cuts.

  • Hindustan Times ☛ Salmonella poisoning linked to climate change: Lancet

    The current study analysed the genomes of more than 480,000 Salmonella samples from 139 countries collected between 1940 and 2023.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Ruben Schade ☛ Australian train news, May 2026

      In an alternative universe, Sydney didn’t buy a new airport, and instead invested in rail to relieve domestic air congestion. A high speed rail link to Canberra would have given people an alternative gateway to the city as well.

    • Ava ☛ navigating unknown cities without a smartphone

      This is not meant to be a "dumbphone superior, touch grass" post; obviously, in today's world, the above circumstance is needlessly cumbersome. But I still wanted to give insight into it, and maybe it inspires less smartphone dependence during travels, relying more on your intuition and environment to navigate, or reassures you when the battery runs out. In the end, you still have signs and strangers to help.

    • David Rosenthal ☛ Wrench Attacks

      XKCD #538 A year ago I wrote The Risks Of HODL-ing sparked by Mitch Moxley's They Stole a Quarter-Billion in Crypto and Got Caught Within a Month. Moxley recounts the kidnapping of Veer Chetal's parents to persuade him to hand over his share of the loot:

      the Lamborghini was suddenly rammed from behind by a white Honda Civic. At the same time, a white Ram ProMaster work van cut in front, trapping the Chetals. According to a criminal complaint filed after the incident, a group of six men dressed in black and wearing masks emerged from their vehicles and forced the Chetals from their car, dragging them toward the van’s open side door.

    • Hackaday ☛ Tiny C64 PSU Rejects Tradition, Embraces USB

      The Commodore 64 has, by modern standards, the interesting power requirement of needing both 5 VDC and 9 VAC. Traditionally, one would use an iron-core transformer to step-down the wall current — be it 220 V or 115 V, 50 Hz or 60 Hz — to produce the low-voltage AC.

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-21 [Older] French court finds Airbus, Air France guilty in 2009 crash

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-21 [Older] Will SpaceX's IPO fund life on Mars — and a trillionaire? [Ed: SpaceX is still losing money, so this is hype]

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-21 [Older] Will Germany's aviation tax cut lower ticket prices?

    • CBC ☛ 2026-05-19 [Older] Canada's annual inflation rate rose to 2.8% in April, thanks to soaring energy prices

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-19 [Older] South Korea, Japan agree to boost energy cooperation

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-19 [Older] Spanish ex-PM Zapatero investigated over airline bailout

    • TruthOut ☛ 2026-05-18 [Older] Cheeto Mussolini Admin Cites National Security to Pause Permits for TX Wind Energy Projects

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-20 [Older] Researchers spot humpback whales off Australia and Brazil — longest lifetime journey on record

  • Overpopulation

    • Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Low birth rate and migration to shrink Estonia's population by a third by century's end

      Researchers noted that the smaller generations born after Estonia regained independence have now reached childbearing age, reducing the number of births. Society's broader values and attitudes toward parenthood have also changed. The report found that decisions to have children are additionally being postponed because of multiple external crises and the rapid rise in the cost of living.

• Finance

  • CBC ☛ 2026-05-21 [Older] Wealthsimple wants to expand its banking to kids and businesses

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ 2026-05-20 [Older] Debanking, an Authoritarian Threat to the Left

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-22 [Older] US bourbon bets big on India's growing market

  • Counter Punch ☛ 2026-05-20 [Older] Idiot Speak: Elon Musk’s Plans for Gutting Social Security and a Universal High Income

  • International Business Times ☛ 2026-05-24 [Older] Social Security Administration Payment on 27 May: Who Gets Paid This Week and How Much You Could Receive

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Techdirt ☛ ‘The Worst Leak I’ve Witnessed’: A CISA Contractor Left AWS GovCloud Credentials Sitting In A Public GitHub Repo

    The Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) was one of the few genuinely good things Donald Trump was talked into doing during his first term. It was an agency within the Department of Homeland Security that was focused on coordination between the government and industry when there were larger cybersecurity threats that needed coordination to deal with in a manner that protected Americans.

    It was staffed with genuinely competent people who understood cybersecurity risks, and who did serious work keeping critical systems safe and secure. Everything started to go south in late 2020 when its then-director, Chris Krebs, made the factually accurate statement that the 2020 election had been incredibly secure. That MAGA narrative violation made it so Trump had to fire Krebs and for MAGA to decide that this factual statement was the equivalent of treason.

  • Vox ☛ Somehow, the Antichrist returned

    The antichrist talk is also taking off in the politics-adjacent tech world in a different context, where Palantir founder and conservative tech billionaire Peter Thiel has been leading a series of closed-door lectures on the Antichrist (and garnering the disapproving attention of the Vatican). In a wild coincidence, his hypothetical Antichrist appears to be anti-tech people who annoy him.

  • India Times ☛ SoftBank hires banks for US IPOs of SB Energy and AI robotics spinoff Roze, sources say

    SoftBank has hired JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citi and Mizuho for SB Energy's IPO, which could come as early as September, the sources said. SB Energy could seek a valuation of more than $50 billion in its market debut, the people said. At the same time, SoftBank has tapped Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Mizuho and Morgan Stanley for the IPO of its autonomous robotics company Roze, which will focus on building data centers and using robotics to improve the efficiency of AI infrastructure construction and is targeting a similar time ⁠frame, the ‌sources added.

  • New York Times ☛ Iceland Warms to Europe

    Geographically, it sits smack-dab between Europe and North America. Culturally, it views itself as European and already follows a lot of E.U. laws. But on a practical level, Iceland has fiercely guarded its independence — which it gained from Denmark only in 1944 — and its precious fish stocks.

    In other words, Iceland has happily been a part of Europe, without being part of the E.U. itself.

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Voter Guide

    The California Governor primary is particularly vexing this year because, being an open primary, the top two vote-getters advance to the general election, so it's possible for the mediocre batch of Democrats to split the vote and we end up having to pick between two Republican ghouls in the general. So this year's primary is more game-theoretic than I'd prefer.

    You only have one week left (June 2).

  • The Register UK ☛ Anthropic cofounder hallucinates ghost in the machine after hearing the Pope speak about AI

    "We must avoid the misconception of equating this type of 'intelligence' with that of human beings," he declared. "These systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence."

    Invited to speak at the event, Chris Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic and the company's interpretability research lead, proceeded to push back on that idea amid his appreciation of the occasion.

  • Mandy Brown ☛ Promises and perils

    In other words, the threat isn’t so much that AI is inevitable as that the ongoing—and likely expanding—immiseration of workers is unstoppable. This is the subtext of the strange and conflicted messaging that we get from the hype men: when they say that you better learn AI or be left behind, they are admitting that a great many people will be left behind. And if you—smart and clever and hardworking person that you are—are somehow able to make it to the other side of the line, you’re supposed to find relief or pride at having done so, and not horror at all the people suffering in your wake. You’re supposed to be as uncaring as the capital that uses you.

    But getting through this gauntlet is no guarantee of getting through the next one—and there will be a next one, because the plain aim of the technocrats is to immiserate everyone, eventually. From the capitalist perspective, anyone with skills enough to negotiate a comfortable wage is a cost in need of cutting. Add to that the fact that AI’s whole pitch is that the more you use it, the more data it gathers, the more likely it becomes capable of mimicking you well enough to convince the fools above you that it can do your job. So get-in-or-get-left-behind is something of a trick—everyone is left behind, eventually.

  • John D Cook ☛ Expected IQ spread on a jury

    There’s been some discussion online lately about how a large difference in IQ makes it difficult for two people to communicate. There have been studies that confirm this effect. The difficulty is not insurmountable, but it takes deliberate effort to overcome.

    Someone dismissed this communication difficulty by pointing out that the expected difference in IQ between two individuals is around 17, suggesting that most communication is between people who differ by more than one standard deviation in IQ. But this calculation assumes people are chosen at random, which they usually are not. People tend to live around and work around others of similar intelligence.

    However, a jury is a random sample. It’s not a perfect random sample. For one thing, it starts with a random sample of people who are registered to vote, or who have a drivers license, not all individuals. Furthermore, the pool of potential jurors is reduced to a jury through the process of voir dire, which is not random.

  • Wired ☛ Why the Vatican Invited Anthropic to the Pope’s AI Encyclical Presentation

    Olah's presence at the Vatican was obviously not accidental, nor the result of a last-minute symbolic gesture. It was the outcome of a deliberate, long-term effort in which the Vatican has progressively sought to transform itself from a moral observer of technology into a direct interlocutor with the AI industry.

  • The Verge ☛ American Airlines is getting Starlink Wi-Fi

    Airlines are scrambling to make deals with satellite [Internet] providers in the hopes of improving the traditionally dismal connectivity offerings on flights. Wi-Fi that relies on low-earth orbit satellites, like Starlink, tend to offer lower latency thanks to the shorter distance the signal has to travel as compared to satellites in geostationary orbit. Viasat uses geostationary satellites, while SES uses multi-orbit, low-earth orbit, and geostationary satellites.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-22 [Older] What's behind Bolivia's ongoing protests?

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-21 [Older] Turkish court ousts opposition leader in boost to Erdogan

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-22 [Older] What happened to jailed Belarus dissident Raman Pratasevich?

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-20 [Older] Who gets convicted in Nigeria's anti-corruption war?

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • International Business Times ☛ 2026-05-24 [Older] YouTuber Faces Arrest for Smearing Kim Soo-Hyun With AI-Generated 'Evidence' in Kim Sae-Ron Case

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • International Business Times ☛ 2026-05-20 [Older] Tennessee Man Jailed Over Charlie Kirk Meme Wins Massive $835,000 Payout After Free Speech Battle

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-20 [Older] Numbers of Tibetan exiles plummet as China tightens grip

  • Sweden Herald ☛ Is Sweden right to prosecute protesters?

    The Rosamålet claims that the police's actions at several demonstrations, as well as the legal cases themselves, violate laws and international conventions. According to the press release, 388 activists have been suspected of crimes since 2020.

    Sweden has also been criticized by human rights organizations. John Stausser, chief legal officer for Civil Rights Defenders, describes a trend where demonstrations are being criminalized as protesters face increasingly harsh prosecutions.

  • Tennessee Lookout ☛ Knox County Schools takes "Roots" off banned book list, restores to libraries

    The reversal drew immediate attention not just because of the book’s stature in American literature, but because of where it happened. Haley spent part of his childhood in Lauderdale County , and later lived and wrote in Knoxville and Alex Haley Farm in nearby Clinton. Two miles from where the Knox County school board meets, his likeness sits frozen in bronze in Morningside Park, in what was, at the time of its 1998 installation, the largest public statue of an African American in the United States.

  • Wired ☛ US Law Enforcement Warns of ‘Anti-Tech Extremism’ as AI Hatred Grows

    This new effort follows President Donald Trump's National Security Presidential Memo 7, which instructs the Department of Justice to target anyone holding “anti-American,” “anti-Christian,” and "anti-capitalism” beliefs. Earlier this month, Trump's counterterrorism czar, Sebastian Gorka, released a public counterterrorism strategy claiming that left-wing extremists are one of the three top counterterrorism priorities facing the United States.

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Today in "Butlerian Jihad" news

    US Law Enforcement Warns of 'Anti-Tech Extremism' as AI Hatred Grows: [...]

  • Vox ☛ NDAs for federal employees: Trump’s plan to quash leaks, briefly explained

    What would the NDA cover? Narrowly speaking, the proposed NDA doesn’t do much. According to the Office of Personnel Management, it would “document Federal employees’ acknowledgment of, and agreement to comply with, current legal obligations to safeguard non-public, confidential, or proprietary information.” In context, though, it would be another tool for the Trump administration’s crackdown on leaks.

    For now, the plan is still in draft form and will need to clear a 30-day public comment period before being implemented. Each agency would then decide whether to use the NDA.

  • Common Dreams ☛ AFGE Blasts Administration’s Proposed NDA Rule as Yet Another Attack on Non-Partisan Federal Employees

    American Federation of Government Employees National President Everett Kelley issued the following statement in response to a proposed rule by the Office of Personnel Management, to be published tomorrow in the Federal Register, that would require current and prospective employees at participating agencies to sign non-disclosure agreements as a condition of employment: [...]

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-20 [Older] Why Stephen Colbert's 'Late Show' mattered

  • RFERL ☛ Taliban Closes Radio Stations In Ongoing Media Clampdown

    “Pressure on the media has increased, especially on radio stations,” Hamed Obaidi, head of the Afghanistan Media Support Organization, told RFE/RL's Radio Azadi.

    Obaidi added that the reasons given for closing the stations were merely a pretext to muzzle public opinion.

  • Reuters ☛ Trump administration proposes NDAs for federal workers to crack down on leaks to journalists

    The draft form is ​the latest step in the president's effort to exert more control over U.S. government workers and punish news outlets and ⁠media figures he sees as too critical of him. Trump and members of his administration have filed at least five lawsuits against majormedia, opens new tab companies since his second term began, ​seeking tens of billions of dollars in damages for what he alleges are false or misleading reports. Courts have often sided with news organizations.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ White House proposes NDAs for federal workers to crack down on leaks to journalists

    The office of personnel management (OPM), the human resources office for the US government, released a draft nondisclosure agreement designed for federal agencies to use with new and existing employees. Under the draft agreement, the administration could pursue civil and criminal penalties against employees who violate it. The US government would be entitled to all “royalties” that employees receive from disclosing information that violates the agreement, according to the draft.

    The OPM did not immediately offer further explanation.

    The draft form is the latest step in the president’s effort to exert more control over US government workers and the flow of information to the public.

  • PBS ☛ Trump administration proposes non-disclosure agreements for federal employees to stop leaks | PBS News

    The notice in the Federal Register from the Office of Personnel Management posted Tuesday asked for comment on a draft NDA to be used by federal agencies for "both new and existing employees."

  • USA ☛ Confidential Government Information Nondisclosure Agreement [PDF]

    The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) requests comment on a draft nondisclosure agreement (NDA) for use by Federal agencies for both new and existing employees. The form is intended to document Federal employees’ acknowledgment of, and agreement to comply with, current legal obligations to safeguard non-public, confidential, or proprietary information, created or obtained through their official duties, while expressly preserving the right to make disclosures authorized by law. OPM believes that a governmentwide NDA form will promote consistency across Government, better protect confidential information, and better inform Federal employees of their rights and obligations regarding confidential information.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-20 [Older] Germany records high numbers of online child abuse cases

  • Portfolio Media Inc ☛ SRA Starts Search For New Chair As Bradley Steps Down [Ed: SRA is a colossal failure]

  • El País ☛ ‘It’s hell’: migrant women suffer constant abuse in ICE centers

    Carpio’s case is not isolated. The detention machinery imposed by Trump disproportionately affects women, who—along with children—are the most vulnerable victims of the Trump deportation campaign. Women have been separated from breastfeeding infants, abandoned during pregnancies, neglected after suffering miscarriages, assaulted and abused by officials, and unable to report violence for fear of reprisals.

  • Techdirt ☛ Judge Dismisses Charges Against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Says Gov’t Engaged In Vindictive Prosecution

    The more Abrego Garcia pushed back, the angrier the government got. But anger is hardly useful when you’re supposed to be in the business of seeking justice and enforcing the law. It’s even more useless when the only people left manning the DOJ and DHS are people long on sycophancy and short on experience.

    The end result is a legal unicorn: a sustained allegation of vindictive prosecution that has resulted in the dismissal of criminal charges against Kilmar Abrego Garcia. The ruling [PDF] — issued by federal judge Waverly Crenshaw (and brought to us by Liz Dye on Bluesky) — opens with a quote of a former federal prosecutor (and Supreme Court justice) that makes it clear where this order is headed.

  • TruthOut ☛ Labor Unions Celebrate World Court’s Ruling That Enshrines the Right to Strike

    Now, in a landmark 43-page advisory opinion issued May 21, the International Court of Justice (ICJ, or World Court) has determined that the right to strike is protected under the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) Convention No. 87 on Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise.

  • Washingon-Baltimore News Guild ☛ National Abortion Hotline workers go on strike over employer's refusal to bargain over AI

    NAF Union members have been engaged in contract negotiations since October, reaching significant progress across nearly all areas of bargaining, except one. The union’s proposed AI provision asks only that NAF management be required to bargain with workers before implementing technology that would directly result in layoffs. The proposal does not prohibit any use of AI, nor does it guarantee job security. It asks, simply, for a seat at the table.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Futurism ☛ Riot Games Denies Using Anti-Cheat Software That Bricks Hackers' Computers

    Responding to another post about its new anti-cheat measure, the Riot social media account tweeted a picture of a bunch of rounded-up computer hardware that was reminiscent of a drug bust haul. It was appended with a provocative caption: “congrats to the owners of a brand new $6k paperweight.”

    This turned out to be a PR landmine. The tongue-in-cheek post was interpreted as Riot bragging that it now had the ability to remotely brick your computer, creating an explosion of angry posts so overwhelming that the company scrambled to propitiate the mob banging on its gates.

  • The New Leaf Journal ☛ On Spotify’s SpotifAI Podcasts

    On May 22, 2026, TechCrunch published an article by Ivan Mehta titled Spotify’s AI bet: more of everything, less of what you want. I preface my thoughts by noting that I have never used Spotify—or is it now SpotifAI?—and nothing I have read or heard about it, including Mr. Mehta’s article, has made me think that I am missing out. While Mr. Mehta’s article did not inspire me to sign up for a Spotify subscription plan and start running Google Play Services on my phone so I can use the app, it did challenge my assumptions about the true nature of Spotify.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • IP Kat ☛ 2026-05-22 [Older] Obelix conquers Luxembourg

  • Patents

    • Project Censored ☛ 2026-05-20 [Older] Pharma Industry Abuses Patent System to Increase Profit, Reduce Competition

    • Pro Publica ☛ 2026-05-20 [Older] Ken Paxton Wanted to Crack Down on Forum Shopping. Now Lawyers Say He’s Improperly Seeking Out Favorable Courts.

  • Trademarks

    • Right of Publicity

      • Digital Music News ☛ Are Ozzy Osbourne Avatar Ads Next?

        It’s not the first time a musician will be given the avatar or hologram treatment after their passing. There have been digital recreations of artists like Whitney Houston, Roy Orbison, Maria Callas, and Michael Jackson.

      • Futurism ☛ Two Men Arrested for Creating AI Deepfake Porn

        It’s also enabled a major rise in digital sex crimes through deepfake porn of real people. In one recent survey of 557 teenagers in the US, over 36 percent reported that a non-consensual pornographic image had been created of them by someone using AI (alarmingly, over 55 percent reported using AI to personally create deepfake porn.) There’s no question that the technology’s rapid rise has contributed to a massive rise in sexual blackmail, non-consensual sexualization, and child sexual abuse material.

  • Copyrights

    • IP Kat ☛ 2026-05-19 [Older] [Book Review] Art and Copyright Law: An Interdisciplinary Study on Interpictoriality

    • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Seven Questions about CC Signals

      As most Scholarly Kitchen readers will know, in 2002 the Creative Commons Organization (CCO) created a suite of licenses that copyright holders can apply to their works in order to make them available for free reuse by the public. Different licenses grant permission for everything from functionally unlimited reuse (CC BY) to a much narrower range of uses (CC-BY-NC-ND or CC-BY-NC-SA), and once applied the licenses are pretty much irrevocable.

    • Tim Bradshaw ☛ Measuring slot access cost in Common Lisp

      I’ve been interested in how slow CLOS slot access is in Common Lisp. Here’s how I measured it.

      I wanted to compare the cost of access to fields of various objects in Common Lisp. In particular I wanted to get a feel for the difference between a slot in a class defined with defclass, so an instance of a subclass of standard-object, and a field in a class defined with defstruct, so an instance of a subclass of structure-object.