Leftovers

• Robert Birming ☛ Bad blog posts

  They are all very different, but they also have one thing in common: the posts have personality.

  It's not about good or bad, it's about sharing a personal take on life. It's about putting a digital human touch out into the world. A way for me, the reader, to get a glimpse into your universe.

• Jim Grey ☛ How a blog finds its people

  But the traffic wasn’t the real thing. It was that people started leaving comments — genuine responses, pushback, and extensions of my ideas. I made a practice of replying to every first-level comment. It wasn’t a growth strategy; it just seemed like the right thing to do when someone took the time to engage. That practice, more than anything else, is what built the community that exists here now.

  People return to places where they feel seen.

• Herman Martinus ☛ Active recall | Herman's blog

  The interesting part is that I don't really read my notes or journal. The act of writing is the important bit.

• Dan Q ☛ I want my friends to have blogs too

  I don’t expect this repost to encourage any of my IRL friends to dust off their old blogs (or start new ones). But I can dream!

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Hackaday ☛ Questions Remain About Tense Moment Aboard ISS

    NASA has provided an update on what happened, but it arguably leaves more questions than answers. Usually, crews go to their Safe Haven because some bit of space junk has wandered to close to the orbiting complex, but this time it was because Russian cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikayev were getting ready to start cutting into the walls of the PrK transfer tunnel in an effort to address its persistent air leak.

• Career/Education

  • Daniel Lemire ☛ Sovereign

    Countries like Canada and the UK will have to realize that it is industry and know-how first. Build stuff and the wealth will follow. Stop the virtue signaling. Stop the credentialism. Build.

  • India Times ☛ Sweden to ban mobile phones in schools— Full list of countries who have done so

    Officials say the decision follows concerns about declining reading and writing skills among students. Joar Forsell, chairperson of the Swedish parliament's education committee, said authorities have seen a drop in literacy levels, especially among younger children.

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • Business Insider ☛ Salesforce lays off employees in a new round of cuts

    Salesforce laid off more employees in a new round of cuts, according to people familiar with the matter and a regulatory notice in California.

  • The Business Journals ☛ Expeditors International cuts 230 jobs as Seattle-area layoffs mount

    Nearly a third of the layoffs are centered in downtown Seattle, marking the company's first major round of job cuts in recent memory.

  • Microsoft cuts hundreds of Azure jobs in China as another step in its global restructuring

    Microsoft is laying off hundreds of employees in its Azure cloud division in China, marking the latest step in the company's ongoing restructuring efforts as it navigates increasingly complex regulatory environments in both the US and China.

  • Hackaday ☛ The Winners Of The 2025 Obfuscated C Code Contest

    The IOCCC judges entries among a range of categories, as it can be hard to otherwise quantify what is the ‘best’ entry, with ground rules limiting what the entry can entail. Generally as long as your code adheres to the C11 standard with a source size of 4,993 bytes or less and final binary size of under 2,503, is accompanied by a GNU-style Makefile and doesn’t turn a judge’s computer into a raging inferno — it should qualify.

  • Forestwalk Labs Inc ☛ Surprise! Pay $1000

    Now typically, when you try a SaaS product for free without a credit card, and you hit the limit, you get cut off. Also known as “disruption to your service”. Instead, we were invoiced $1000, which was immediately overdue.

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

    • Chris ☛ LLMs and almost good code

      tl;dr: My new prior is that top-of-the-line llms working on easy tasks generate code that is maybe 10 % more complicated than necessary. I also think we accept this complexity too easily, because it comes from code that is right here, right now, solving an immediate problem. This may have consequences for maintenance in the long term.

    • I Cringely ☛ GenAI is Fluent in Everything, but Faithful in Nothing

      This is why these systems “hallucinate,” a word I dislike because it implies a malfunction. There is no malfunction. A model that invents a court case that never happened — complete with a docket number, plausible parties, and a tidy holding — is not broken. It is doing exactly what it was built to do: produce the most plausible continuation. A fake citation is plausible. It looks like the thousands of real ones the model has read. The machine has no way to prefer the real one, because it has no idea that “real” is a category. It isn’t lying, either. Lying requires knowing the truth and choosing against it, and the machine has never once been in a position to know.

    • I Cringely ☛ Two Brains

      I’m not going to hand you the engineering. How we strip the facts out of a language model, how we store and find the verified ones, how we check the finished answer against its source — that’s patent-pending, and it stays in the lab. Showing you the blueprint is a different thing from showing you the building, and I’m only doing the second. But over the next two columns I’ll lay out the rest of why this matters: why a machine built this way is not just more honest but radically cheaper to run — cheap enough to embarrass the whole data-center arms race — and what it would mean to license honesty the way a certain company in Cambridge once licensed a chip design that ended up inside nearly every phone on earth without anyone noticing it was there.

    • Himanshu Anand ☛ Defender playbook for the LLM era

      So far this series has been caffeinated me, telling everyone that the sky is falling. The 90 day window is dead. Score bugs by collisions. I turned five patches into exploits in 30 minutes while an LLM did the actual work and I mostly drank coffee.

      One question that remains was : “what do I actually do?”

    • Dan Q ☛ AI is not a person

      A useful reminder for the next time you’re tempted to personify or humanise an LLM.

      LLMs are statistical tools. There are some things that the statistics of language can be good at, especially on average: stuff like summarisation, sentiment analysis, pattern identification, and checking for internal consistency.

      But they’re just maths. They’re not a person.

  • Social Control Media

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-06-05 [Older] What are Europe's alternatives to Instagram, TikTok and X?

    • International Business Times ☛ 2026-06-05 [Older] Scammers Are Listing Homes They Don't Own on TikTok — And Renters Are Falling for It

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • Niko Kultalahti ☛ Niko Kultalahti - OK, self-hosted Forgejo instance set up. Time to …

    OK, self-hosted Forgejo instance set up. Time to start migrate some repositories off from Github.

• Security

  • CISA

    • CISA ☛ 2026-06-05 [Older] CISA Adds One Known Exploited Vulnerability to Catalog

    • CISA ☛ 2026-06-04 [Older] NAVTOR NavBox

    • CISA ☛ 2026-06-04 [Older] Hitachi Energy ITT600 Explorer

    • CISA ☛ 2026-06-04 [Older] B&R PPT30 Operating System

    • CISA ☛ 2026-06-04 [Older] Hitachi Energy RTU500

    • CISA ☛ 2026-06-04 [Older] Hitachi Energy MACH HiDraw

    • CISA ☛ 2026-06-03 [Older] CISA Adds One Known Exploited Vulnerability to Catalog

    • CISA ☛ 2026-06-02 [Older] CISA Adds Two Known Exploited Vulnerabilities to Catalog

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Michael Geist ☛ Everything You Wanted to Know About a Kids' Social Media Ban (But Were Rightly Afraid to Ask): A FAQ on Age Verification and Mandated ID for Everyone

      The government is expected to table the Digital Safety Act on Wednesday with reports that it will include a ban on social media for those under 16, framed as a “temporary” measure that platforms can exit once a new digital regulator certifies their safety standards. I have been writing about these issues, from the original Online Harms Act to mandated age verification and website blocking and now the kids’ ban, for several years. This FAQ gathers the analysis in one place, with links throughout to the longer pieces for anyone who wants to go deeper. The key takeaway is that a kids’ social media ban is an ineffective and harmful policy that raises privacy concerns for tens of millions of Canadians through mandated age verification requirements. The policy fails to address the underlying concerns with social media and the prospect of a “temporary” ban makes little sense since the requirement might be reversible, but the data collection and regulatory infrastructure are permanent.

    • Michael Geist ☛ Bill C-22’s Clause-by-Clause Problem: The Government Includes Agencies Seeking Lawful Access Powers But Blocks the Privacy Commissioner’s Return

      The House of Commons public safety committee started its clause-by-clause review of Bill C-22 last week, the stage at which the lawful access bill’s actual statutory language is settled and the privacy safeguards are either written in or left out. The witnesses the committee included said a lot about the government’s commitment to addressing privacy concerns and to ensuring a balanced bill. Clause-by-clause reviews typically include departmental officials as witnesses, who provide support to the committee by answering technical questions. Years ago, officials were viewed as non-partisan, but today officials invariably defend the government’s position and subtly (or not so subtly) argue against amendments. Including non-departmental witnesses is very rare since they have already had the chance to make their case to the committee. Yet the RCMP and CSIS, the agencies that have lobbied for these powers and will wield them, were on hand last week to guide members through the Bill C-22 amendments. Those witnesses will be unlikely to support potential privacy-focused amendments. Even more astonishing, efforts to include Philippe Dufresne, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, whose recommendations several of the amendments under consideration are drawn from, were rejected by Liberal MPs on the committee.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Reuters ☛ Sweden prepares prisons for 13-year-old gang [sic] killers

    Police estimate there are 17,500 active gang [sic] members and 50,000 associates. Gangs use social media to recruit teenagers, and in some cases children as young as 11, to commit murders and bombings across the Nordics.

    UNDER-15S FACED MURDER OR ATTEMPTED MURDER CHARGES

    Under a proposed new law, the age of criminal responsibility will be lowered to 13 from 15 — below that of most European countries — and minors convicted of the most serious crimes will be locked up in special prisons. One will take girls.

    "We have an emergency," Justice Minister Gunnar Strommer said ​in April.

  • NPR ☛ Sweden set to ban mobile phones in schools

    Long championed as a leader in adopting digital technology, Sweden is set to ban mobile phones in schools beginning in the fall for the next academic year as part of a broad, international reversal on the use of screens in classrooms.

  • Yle ☛ Russia deflects drones into Finland for 'gratifying effect', expert warns

    Giles said he expects Moscow to continue GPS jamming because there has been no clear deterrent or cost for the behaviour.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-06-06 [Older] Hunger in Oleshky: Ukraine asks for evacuation

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-06-06 [Older] Ukraine hits St. Petersburg again after Putin rejects talks

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-06-05 [Older] Ukraine: Marine drone explodes in Romanian port

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-06-03 [Older] Ukraine drones hit Saint Petersburg as economic forum starts

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-06-08 [Older] UK, Germany, France back ceasefire talks between Ukraine and Russia

    • CBC ☛ 2026-06-07 [Older] Russian drone hit nuclear-fuel storage facility near Chornobyl, Ukraine says

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-06-07 [Older] Armenia goes to polls, with Russia and EU looking on

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-06-07 [Older] Armenia, once Russia's reliable ally, considers an EU future

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-06-07 [Older] Ukraine: Russian drone hits nuclear-fuel storage facility

    • Copenhagen Post ☛ 2026-06-06 [Older] Zelenskyy: Russia chooses war again

    • NL Times ☛ 2026-06-06 [Older] Number of Russian-owned companies in Netherlands drops from 80 to 25 following sanctions

    • CBC ☛ 2026-06-06 [Older] As Armenia heads to the polls, Russia warns against electing 'pro-European forces'

    • CPJ ☛ 2026-06-05 [Older] Journalist Aleksey Seregin detained in Russia’s Mari El Republic

    • CPJ ☛ 2026-06-05 [Older] Russian drone injures Ukrainian journalist Olha Kalinovska near front line

    • CPJ ☛ 2026-06-05 [Older] Russian journalist Maria Ponomarenko sentenced to third prison term

    • Jacobin Magazine ☛ 2026-06-05 [Older] When the Orthodox Church Was Red

    • HRW ☛ 2026-06-05 [Older] Russia: Rights Group OVD-Info Designated ‘Extremist’

    • NL Times ☛ 2026-06-04 [Older] Netherlands joins call to curb Russian tourist travel to Europe

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-06-04 [Older] Germans at Russia's SPIEF: Who's really there?

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-06-03 [Older] Armenia's election offers a choice between Russia and EU

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-06-03 [Older] Saudi Arabia and Russia draw closer amid OPEC upheaval

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-06-03 [Older] Taliban and Russia cozy up to each other — why?

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-06-03 [Older] Tanzania's president visits Russia amid frayed Western ties

    • TruthOut ☛ 2026-06-02 [Older] Russia Taking Advantage of Shortage of US Interceptor Missiles to Attack Ukraine

    • Truthdig ☛ 2026-06-02 [Older] Playing With Fire: The Shadowy US ‘Kill Chain’ in Russia

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Molly White ☛ I’m launching Tech Influence Watch as AI follows crypto into politics

    Most voters don’t know that crypto and AI companies have spent more than $400 million this cycle to buy Congress. Let’s make that spending visible.

• Environment

  • Energy/Transportation

    • CBC ☛ 2026-06-07 [Older] The FIFA World Cup is brought to you by Saudi oil. These fans and players want to stop it

    • Hackaday ☛ The Secret Wattcycle LFP Battery Downgrade

      With these LFP batteries generally coming in fully opaque plastic cases, it’s really hard to tell what the internals look like without either going medieval on them or using less intrusive methods such as an X-ray machine. In this case less capable braided cables were replaced with regular cables that in a test showed a much higher voltage drop compared to the braided type.

    • Mark Litwintschik ☛ Optimal Seating on the Airbus A380

      One of the paper's authors, Inzaghi Moniaga appears to have graduated from UBC last month and now works on the Amazon Alexa team in Vancouver, Canada.

      In this post, I'll run the solver and analyse its results.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Verge ☛ Congress just gave Trump another $70 billion for mass deportations

    The house voted 214 to 212 in favor of the reconciliation bill Tuesday, following the Senate’s 52-47 vote last Friday morning. The vote fell largely along party lines. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) was the only Senate Republican to vote against it. Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI), initially voted against the bill — meaning it would have failed — but changed his vote after huddling with House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) and Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-OK), according to The Hill. No Democrats voted in favor of the funding bill, which was done through a budget reconciliation process to avoid a Democratic filibuster.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ Money and Machismo are Undermining America

    Why was the United States so unprepared for the Iranian drone threat, despite the obvious successes of Ukrainian drones against Russia? Well, as investigative reporters delve into the story, I would urge them to follow the money.

    America has a huge, highly profitable defense industry, dedicated to a suite of technologies that are rapidly being rendered obsolete, as $4 million Patriot missiles, that take years to build, are being used to shoot down $35,000 Shahed drones that can be manufactured in months.

  • Kelly Hayes ☛ The Heist State

    If this sounds like it should be illegal, it almost is. New government employees are typically barred for one year from working on contracts that would benefit their former employers—an already inadequate buffer that was waived for Venturella, who worked for ICE for 22 years before working at GEO Group in various capacities for over a decade, and who reportedly continued as a paid GEO consultant until less than two weeks before returning to ICE. As Elizabeth Warren highlighted in an open letter to Venturella on May 27, the new acting director’s appointment also comes amid reports that he used DHS personnel and resources “for personal or political favors.” A cartoon caricature of revolving door politics, Venturella’s appointment reeks of corruption, but it hardly feels out of place on the current landscape.

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ An AI-Funded Sovereign Wealth Fund Is Dangerous

    I am just as freaked out about AI as Bernie, and for the same reasons. The actions (or inaction) that the federal government takes in the near future on AI regulation will be of great consequence to the political economy of America and the world. Bernie is trying to set a marker for a left wing, humanistic approach to these issues. The left does in fact need at least some policies to rally around, lest we all holler frantically about how dangerous AI is while the real decisions are made elsewhere.

    But I can spot a few potential pitfalls in the approach that Bernie is advocating. In the spirit of advancing the discourse, let me touch on them briefly. First,

  • Andrew Nesbitt ☛ Forms of Open Source Government

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • TruthOut ☛ 2026-06-07 [Older] As Anti-LGBTQ Censorship Expands, These Cities Have Cancelled Pride This Year

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • CPJ ☛ 2026-06-04 [Older] CPJ joins 15 other organizations urging Turkey to release reporter İsmail Arı

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Robert Reich ☛ Inequality Isn't Just Unfair. It's Dangerous!

    In the 1990s, most Americans’ wealth grew at about the same pace. But after 2010, the top 0.1 percent pulled ahead of the rest of the 1 percent, and everyone else.

    2010. Remember that year, because I want to come back to it.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • David Rosenthal ☛ Library of Congress Storage Architecture Meeting 2026

    Once again I attended most of the library of Congress' Designing Storage Architectures workshop remotely. I apologize for the delay in posting this; domestic duties have kept me very busy recently. Below the fold notes on the talks that caught my attention, based on my now somewhat memory and the slide decks for the talks from the Library of Congress website.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Patents

    • [Old] Tim Bray ☛ Giving Up On Patents

      I particularly like that last piece, even though it’s too long. While we all might agree that, in theory, it’d be good to introduce legal structures that provide incentives for inventors, the evidence is in, and it’s clear that the current structure fails to achieve that while imposing horrendous costs and inefficiencies.

      And here are a few words for the huge community of legal professionals who make their living pursuing patent law: You’re actively damaging society. Look in the mirror and find something better to do.