Leftovers

• Mike Brock ☛ Friendship

  The error most people make, particularly in their twenties and thirties, is to mistake the functional ring for the inner ring. The error happens because the functional ring is much larger and much louder and much more present in daily life than the inner ring. The error happens because the functional ring performs many of the surface behaviors of friendship — sharing meals, laughing together, being present at significant occasions — without the underlying structure that distinguishes the functional from the friendly. The error happens, also, because the culture rewards the appearance of having a large functional ring with status markers that look like the markers of being loved. The popular person is treated as the loved person. The well-connected person is treated as the surrounded person. The mistake is invisible until the day the functional ring is needed for something only the inner ring can do, and the functional ring isn’t there, and the person discovers, all at once, that they have been miscounting their whole life.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Bartosz Milewski ☛ Kan Extensions in Double Categories

    In a double category that is also a proarrow equipment, we have the ability to bend arrows. In particular, in the definition of the counit of the right Kan extension: [...]

  • Avi Loeb ☛ A UAP Science Advisory Council to the U.S. Government: Keeping Our Eyes on the Orbs, Not the Audience!

    There needs to be more research and more funding going to figuring out whether we are being spied upon by adversarial nations like the Chinese. We shut down a Chinese spy balloon. The question is, are there drones with very special technologies that we are not aware of? That is at the minimum, and that’s why President Trump’s directive is very important, because it’s a reality check, an honesty check on what we are capable of identifying. UAPs represent a hole in our defense system, if they represent human made technologies.

    But, of course, the icing on the cake is, after looking into that, if we end up concluding that some UAPs are not human made, and instead have an extraterrestrial origin. That will be the biggest discovery ever made by humanity.”

• Career/Education

  • Josh Lospinoso ☛ After the Essay

    That distinction has been sitting in me for years. It may be the most candid thing a great scholarship can admit about itself. The personal statement matters. The interview matters. The committee matters. The criteria matter. The institution has to make a choice, and the young person has to become legible enough to be chosen. There is dignity in that process, at least when it is done seriously. But after the choice is made, the instrument has completed its narrow job.

    The application helped the committee choose. It should not keep choosing after the committee is done.

• Hardware

  • Peter Hosey ☛ An unconventional use for a multimeter

    So I have this device that takes AA batteries. The battery holder got bombed out by alkalines some time back, and I cleaned it out last year; I got most of the corrosion out with Naval Jelly (an acidic goop that dissolves rust and other corrosion) and elbow grease, but it sometimes takes a bit of rolling the batteries to get them to make contact.

  • The Arcade Blogger ☛ How did Atari apply side art to Arcade Cabinets?

    One of the most fascinating sequences in Atari’s arcade manufacturing process in the early 80s, was the application of the fabulous artwork that adorned all of its cabinets from the golden age of arcade gaming. So this week, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at how this cabinet artwork was actually printed.

    The technique used is called screen printing (often called silkscreen printing), and it’s a world away from the large-format digital printers used today.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Bhaskar English ☛ California Robots Farm at Night With UV Light | Crop Protection News

    The robots use a special type of ultraviolet light known as UV-C light. As they move through the fields, the light targets fungal spores that cause diseases such as powdery mildew. The UV light damages the spores' DNA, preventing them from growing and spreading.

    Because the treatment happens at night, the crops can be protected without affecting normal farm operations during the day.

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • Darren Goossens ☛ Windows — shutdown and turn on is different from restart – DSPACE

    But shutdown and then turn on does not trigger the completion of the installation of the updates, only restart does that.

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

    • CBC ☛ Ottawa's online harms bill 'a miss' when it comes to regulating AI chatbots: B.C. premier

      After the shooting, it was revealed the shooter's ChatGPT account was flagged for problematic activity before the tragedy, but it wasn't reported to Canadian police by OpenAI.

    • Futurism ☛ Woman's Death Blamed on Hospital's AI System

      As AI finds its way into hospital systems around the world, the case of one Brazilian woman makes it clear that the tech doesn’t have to diagnose patients to determine whether they live or die.

      According to Brazilian news publication MG1, 32-year old Rebeca Cardoso Tenente Molina died after a state-run AI system for assigning hospital beds forced her to wait five days to transfer to an intensive care unit.

    • Adam Newbold ☛ AI Beg Bounties

      If you’ve run any kind of public online thing for a while (as I have with omg.lol), the chances are good that you’ve encountered at least one beg bounty. They all mostly look the same: you get a random email from a stranger mentioning that they’ve found a vulnerability in your app/server/service. But instead of offering any details about what they found, they jump right to asking about compensation for their discovery.

    • Rlang ☛ Why we still need {admiral} in an age of AI

      There is a version of the AI-in-pharma story that goes like this: LLMs are trained on vast amounts of R code, so they can write ADaM programs on demand. Packages like {admiral} become optional — a style preference rather than a requirement. Just describe what you need and let the model figure it out.

      The benchmark data from pharma-skills tells a different story.

    • Fernando Borretti ☛ Human Routers of Machine Words

      I see people defend this with: “the ideas are mine, the writing is the AI’s”. I take this to mean they threw a bunch of incoherent bullet points at the AI for it to denoise and render into paragraphs. There’s a few problems with this.

      The immediate problem is, as we’ve established, the author’s an idiot. If you are so stupid you can’t even turn some bullet points into prose, then your ideas are probably worthless. I think that’s a sensible inference.

      Then there’s this broader, I suppose philosophical problem, of the alleged distinction between lofty “ideas” and mere “writing”, where writing is just a tiny implementation detail. This is a very convenient distinction to draw, because it’s unfalsifiable: if the AI’s output is slop, your “ideas” are still good, it’s merely the writing that failed to convey them in their true form (rather like people who say they’re smart but “don’t test well”: what use is this secret intelligence?).

    • [Old] Ed Zitron ☛ AI Is Too Expensive

      In other words, Microsoft has spent 4 years sinking (either through spending or allocating the capex in advance) nearly $300 billion into…building OpenAI?

      Okay, fine. Microsoft also has 20 million Microsoft 365 Copilot subscribers for an absolute maximum revenue of $7.2 billion…if every single one were paying $30 a month, which they are most assuredly not as Microsoft has been offering discounts on it for years.

    • [Old] Nick Bostrom ☛ Ethical Issues In Advanced Artificial Intelligence

      Human are rarely willing slaves, but there is nothing implausible about the idea of a superintelligence having as its supergoal to serve humanity or some particular human, with no desire whatsoever to revolt or to “liberate” itself. It also seems perfectly possible to have a superintelligence whose sole goal is something completely arbitrary, such as to manufacture as many paperclips as possible, and who would resist with all its might any attempt to alter this goal. For better or worse, artificial intellects need not share our human motivational tendencies.

    • Matthew Butterick ☛ Extinction-level capitalism

      AI is inher­ently polit­ical tech­nology. If AI works as intended, it will grad­u­ally corrode our liberal democ­racy, risking an irre­versible shift into another polit­ical and economic config­u­ra­tion. Among AI risks, this one deserves more consid­er­a­tion, because it requires no addi­tional condi­tions like malign actors or AI malfunc­tion. AI only needs to amplify existing trends, espe­cially around concen­tra­tion of capital. This damage will occur even assuming that in the near term, AI will broadly improve mate­rial well-being.

  • Social Control Media

    • JURIST ☛ UK plans to restrict under‑16 access to 'high risk' social media features

      Under the plans, teenagers under 16 will face limits on “high‑risk” social media apps, and on specific functions even on “safer” platforms. For under‑16s, these risky functions include disappearing messages, chats with adult strangers and livestreaming, which ministers and law‑enforcement agencies link to grooming and child sexual abuse.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Georgia Recorder ☛ A US spying law expires amid distrust of Trump moves on national security

      Intelligence agencies aren’t supposed to target U.S. citizens but lawmakers across the political spectrum and civil liberties organizations have repeatedly raised grievances with how officials handle the information they get when an American is part of a targeted conversation.

      Even though lawmakers let Section 702 lapse on June 12, the annual certification from the court that oversees the program should allow intelligence agencies to keep collecting data, experts say.

    • Michael Geist ☛ Privacy as a Fundamental Right? The Government's Terrible Privacy Track Record Suggests Virtue Signalling Over a Genuine Commitment

      The government is set to introduce its long-promised privacy reform legislation early this week, with the recognition of a fundamental right to privacy expected to serve as a foundational element of the bill. Establishing privacy as a fundamental right would be a welcome and long-overdue development, one that many have called for and that was set to be added to Bill C-27, the prior attempt at privacy reform. Yet the framing is difficult to square with the government’s actual record on privacy, which over the past year has involved a steady stream of privacy-invasive measures that leave the fundamental rights rhetoric feeling more like virtue signalling than a genuine commitment. Simply put, the government cannot credibly claim to treat privacy as a fundamental right while actively undermining that right through a series of other bills and efforts to sideline the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Sahel juntas are 'crushing' basic freedoms

    According to Laessing, the people in Bamako want neither Sharia law nor the Islamists. There would have been plenty of reasons to protest against the government, despite the dangers and repression. But the people are aware that if this government goes, the next one will be more Islamist.

    "That's not what the people want," Laessing said.

  • Spectator AU ☛ Sweden shows that not all immigrants are the same

    In Sweden, there is one common thread amongst those who have integrated well and those who have done so less well. Non-Muslims, including Iranians, Assyrians, Christian Eritreans, Poles and to some extent people from the Balkans, are often in the former group. Kurds, Ethiopians and Somalis, particular those of the Muslim faith, have not, generally speaking, fared as well. Turks are often somewhere in between. The difference in Christian and Druze Lebanese in Sweden, compared to Lebanese Muslims, and Christian Eritreans and their Muslims counterparts, is also clear to see.

  • Votebeat ☛ Arizona ballot measure to change voting rules will be decided in 2026 election

    The measure would require mail voters to provide ID, but it’s unclear exactly how that might work. If voters approve the change, lawmakers would have to figure out how to implement it.

  • The Verge ☛ The FBI built a small town to simulate cyberattacks

    It’s a training facility where the bureau can recreate real-world scenarios for training and research purposes. All of the various buildings and facilities are hooked up the way they would be in a real town. There’s even a small data center with over 200 servers that can be hacked, infected with malware, and studied. But, importantly, all of the systems in the fake town are cut off from the outside world, which means there’s no danger of any malicious code or anything from escaping containment.

  • The Next Move ☛ Bobi Wine: ‘Stop Sponsoring Our Oppression’ - by Bobi Wine

    But if you slap sanctions on them, then they will think twice when they are carrying out mass killings. We ask you to invoke the Magnitsky Laws that you have. Those are tools that are not only helpful to you but they can be helpful to us.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Allbritton Journalism Institute ☛ Democrats Vow 'Day One’ Epstein Hearings if They Flip House

    “We’ve had zero hearings on Epstein,” Garcia said about the GOP-led investigation. “It’s a huge investigation the American public is interested in … there will definitely be public hearings.”

• Environment

  • Futurism ☛ Scientists Horrified as Huge Heatwave Hits Antarctica

    “This is absolutely crazy,” climate professor at the University of Groningen Raúl Cordero told the Guardian. “It is also about 20C above normal for this time of the year. That is a huge anomaly.”

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ My rural Kansas town has a bad case of data center fever. Boom or bust, we will never be the same.

    Seven in 10 Americans are opposed to local construction of data centers for artificial intelligence, according to a Gallup survey released last month, including nearly half who are strongly opposed. That opposition was tied to concerns about the environment and quality of life.

    Those concerns were echoed by one of the organizers of the opposition to the Emporia data center. Amanda Mendoza, a teacher who lives across the street from one of the tracts that would be used for development, said she and other landowners felt betrayed by the city commission because of the secrecy surrounding the project.

  • Science Alert ☛ 'Bad Omen': An Ancient Pyramid in Mexico Collapsed Into A Heap of Rubble : ScienceAlert

    The pyramid was once one of the best-preserved monuments of the Michoacán Kingdom civilization. It is located at Ihuatzio, a remarkably preserved archaeological site that contains one other pyramid, a tower or fortress, and some tombs.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Positech Games ☛ Another solar farm visit!

      So it was an actual predictably dry day today, which is awesome because it means I got to go visit my lovely solar farm in good weather! I also met someone local there and gave them a quick tour, which was cool. Its a LONG day, starting when we leave my house at 8AM, and getting home about 7.30PM, with the majority of it being driving (in an EV obviously :)). We also stopped off briefly for coffee and cake at a nice English Heritage house we had never been to before, which made the day a bit more varied.

      I especially like this picture: [...]

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Verge ☛ Microsoft hasn’t ruled out spinning off Xbox

    A new report from The Information suggests that Microsoft has considered some dramatic measures to make its Xbox unit more sustainable. That includes turning it into a wholly owned subsidiary, a joint venture, or even spinning it off entirely, with the possibility of selling the business. The report doesn’t suggest anything is imminent, but it does seem that new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella haven’t taken anything off the table when it comes to the future of Xbox.

  • Michael Green ☛ Size Does Matter

    So if one giant is 7% of the market and some smaller firm is 0.01%, then every dollar flowing into an index fund buys 7 cents of the giant and a hundredth of a penny of the small one. Nobody chooses this stock by stock, it’s rules-based. Occasionally, like last week, the rules are changed. But most of the time, the rule chooses. The biggest companies automatically collect the biggest share of every incoming dollar. When that buying pushes a big stock up, the company becomes an even *larger* slice of the index — so the *next* dollar buys even more of it, which pushes it up again.

    It’s a loop: price up → bigger share of the index → more of the next dollar flows in → price up. The rule rewards bigness with more buying, and the buying creates more bigness. No one is steering. It’s a machine following instructions — and when half the market is wired to that machine, it becomes one of the largest buyers in the room, every single day.

  • Kyle Reddoch ☛ What the Fable and Mythos Ban Means for Cybersecurity - CybersecKyle

    The practical result was not a clean geographic block or a carefully scoped restriction. Anthropic disabled both models for everyone.

    That is the part that should get the attention of security teams, AI vendors, and policymakers. The government identified a national security concern. The control it chose was so broad and difficult to enforce that the vendor’s safest compliance option was a worldwide shutdown.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Homo Ludditus ☛ I tried and tried and couldn’t write on politics

      In the end, it’s better to leave everyone to their opinions. Let people be brainwashed by both the EU’s stupidities and Russia’s cognitive warfare—a fancy term for “propaganda and disinformation performed by a foreign state using elements of surveillance capitalism (algorithmic microtargeting on social networks, big data, attention hacking) to provoke societal fragmentation, institutional paralysis, and possibly collapse.” It’s what the mass media labels hybrid war, but NATO calls it CogWar.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Arkansas Advocate ☛ Arkansans saved PBS. That’s good news for other civic institutions.

    The state public television commission’s decision earlier this month to reverse course on disaffiliating from PBS was a rare victory against recent Republican-led efforts to target institutions like libraries, universities and public schools over claims of “indoctrination” or bias.

    It also offers a path forward to salvaging these entities.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • teleSUR ☛ Pope Denounces Indifference Towards the Poor Due Digital Environment Rise

    “The cry for justice from the poor today is silenced through multiple, increasingly subtle techniques, to the point of silencing all their efforts to make their pleas heard,” the pontiff states in the document.

    Specifically, he pointed out that “the digital environment radicalizes prejudice” towards the most disadvantaged people and contributes to increasing “the curtain of indifference that surrounds their causes.”

    Likewise, he lamented “how widespread social injustice that springs from arrogant corruption is also in our days,” a reality he described as “deplorable” and “discriminatory.”

  • Court House News ☛ A woman's hypothermia death in Pittsburgh after her release from ICE custody is ruled a homicide

    Daphy Michel, 31, died March 2. She was found at a bus shelter in Pittsburgh. The Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s Office found her cause of death to be hypothermia and ruled the manner a homicide, “indicating the death was caused by the actions of another individual” and should not be interpreted as a declaration of criminal guilt, the office said in a statement.

    The office released its findings Friday.

  • RFERL ☛ UN Voices 'Grave Concern' After Taliban Arrests Afghan Women Over Dress Violations

    The directive prohibited women from appearing in public without what they described as a “proper hijab,” or Islamic head scarf. Women who failed to comply with the Islamic dress code, including those showing their faces or wearing makeup -- would face punitive measures, according to the order.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • New York Times ☛ Merger Cleared, David Ellison to Join Trump at U.F.C. Bouts

    After months of meticulous courtship of the president and his senior aides, Paramount got word on Friday that the Justice Department would not challenge its $111 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, eliminating one of the last major obstacles for the deal to close.

  • Patents

    • Mexico News Daily ☛ El Jalapeño: Mexico prepares for USMCA renewal after Trump says he doesn't want one - Mexico News Daily