Leftovers

• The Cyber Show ☛ Mad Dogs

  However I think that our propensity to go along with a machine - mistaking digital proxies for actual others - becoming hypnotised, entrained, and obsessive-compulsively losing sight of reality - the future for us is looking more and more like what happened to Trigger. We are moths, not dancers. If we don't all want to end up like that poor sick dog did, we need to look away and remember what reality is, and what technology isn't.

• Manuel Moreale ☛ Downsizing

  With the 150th interview of People and Blogs now live, it’s officially time to downsize my online presence again. My digital life follows a somewhat regular rhythm and I alternate through phases of expansion, where I buy domain names, ship new projects, start newsletters, and chase a million ideas, and phases of contraction, where everything happens in reverse: domains are left to expire, projects are archived, newsletters are deleted, services are cancelled.

• James G ☛ Websites as anthologies of self

  In amongst this discussion, I started to define a distinction between the author themselves being an “audience” and the audiences of others (a website can have many audiences that may be discrete or overlapping). This is an alternate framing of the idea of writing for one’s self, but I think goes further in that it implies some degree of follow-through after a work.

• BinaryDigit ☛ The Paused Web

  Hollie and cygnoir (Halsted) responded and felt the same, which comforted me. I asked them to join me in my "static webpage journey". Halsted then mentioned it's like the slow food movement, but instead, the "Paused Web", which I loved the name of. I then thought of the idea of creating a webring for it, which would be tons of fun and make us all feel better about not keeping blogs anymore. 😆 I'll still keep my domain, RSS feed, and small updated pieces, but they will be slow, and keep the spirit of the indie web after all. Maybe I can make a sort of "notebook" without date stamps. We'll see.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Futurism ☛ Scientists Propose Dimming Sun to Combat El Niño

    It's a controversial proposal.

  • Digital Camera World ☛ These pigeon cameras could help create smarter drone cameras, say researchers

    The head-mounted cameras revealed that, contrary to the long-held assumption that pigeons rely solely on head movements to stabilize their vision, the birds also make subtle eye movements during flight.

• Career/Education

  • Minsoo Choo ☛ I'm Transferring to Mathematical Physics

    On the other hand, learning physics in university makes sense to me. I’m interested in it but don’t know it quite well, so I have the passion to pursue it. Every single course that I read from the curriculum seemed to be interesting, so I can justify staying in the program for four years. Lastly, physics teaches you how to think. What’s behind the formula, why it happens, and how to play with those formulas. It’s not just plug-n-play.

  • [Old] Jim Grey ☛ Advice to new grads: take any job you can get in the industry – Jim Grey on software management

    The advice you’re getting right now is probably some version of: build a RAG pipeline, contribute to open source, develop AI engineering skills beyond just using Copilot. Sure, do those things.

    But at the same time, take any door that opens into the industry. Customer success, QA, technical support, sales engineering, implementation consulting, professional services. Take it and do the work.

    My experience taught me that this isn’t settling. It’s being physically and organizationally close to problems that matter. This is where opportunities can find you.

• Hardware

  • Chris Jones ☛ Ethereal Cabin

    I then took the camera with the remaining unexposed frames to a friend’s cabin in the woods where I seemed to do much better with the exposures. I managed to finish the roll in the woods and on the shoreline of the lake and am happy with a few of them. This particular shot really shows the effect of the infrared on full, midsummer leaves and the wood of the cabin.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Chris ☛ A full body MRI earns you a year of smoking

  • New Yorker ☛ The Human Cost of DOGE[sic]’s War on U.S.A.I.D.

    In 1988, Richard Rhodes, a historian and a journalist who wrote a definitive study of the creation of the atomic bomb, published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association called “Man-made Death: A Neglected Mortality.” Rhodes argued that demographers and public-health officials ought to take greater care to account for deaths caused by war, neglect, privation, and other effects of policy. His emphasis was on deliberate acts—artificially induced famines, for example, and the willful dismantling of public-health aid and infrastructure.

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • Juha-Matti Santala ☛ Improve Finder’s QuickLook with plugins : Juha-Matti Santala

    Luckily, it’s extendable by plugins.

    I use sbarex’s QLMarkdown for rendering Markdown files. It has a lot of configurable options and themes if you need something specific but has sensible defaults for quickly checking out your Markdown files.

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

    • Futurism ☛ Christopher Nolan Unloads on AI Slop

      It’s a refreshingly intelligent and frank assessment of AI from a major filmmaker, which isn’t something you can take for granted. For cinephiles, recent events have been an inculcatory lesson in “never meet your heroes.” In June, for example, revered director Martin Scorsese revealed that he’d partnered with an AI startup whose tech he uses to help storyboard his movies. Weeks later, the beloved studio A24 entered a $75 million partnership with Google to develop AI tools for filmmaking, causing a crisis among fans.

    • Sean Goedecke ☛ In defense of not understanding your codebase

      These are two largely different ways of programming with different methods, practices and cultures. However, the first group is over-represented in online discussion about software engineering. I want to defend the second group against the first. In many software engineering environments, there’s nothing wrong with being in a state of partial understanding. In fact, in large systems a partial understanding is the best you can do.

    • Fabian Sanglard ☛ Don't you mean extinct?

      Even though I am not writing code, I am still indirectly producing code. And there is considerable discretion about what one can generate. If I go "full-vibe-code" and let an LLM run, I can produce 1000x what I used to and find myself with an indecipherable mess. Is that a bad thing? If I work on a prototype or a small personal project, it does not matter. But for everything else, code quality still matters tremendously. LLMs may claim they still understand the project and suggest solutions, but I have seen them fail spectacularly and hallucinate.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ NeurIPS conference AI cheats outraged they got caught

      But a few reviewers didn’t listen. And now they’re yelling in august scientific venues such as LinkedIn that they got caught fobbing their work off to a chatbot.

      How did they get caught? NeurIPS put chatbot prompts hidden in the PDFs they sent out for review. These told the chatbot to use a particular phrase in the review.

    • [Old] ACM ☛ On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots | Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency

      The past 3 years of work in NLP have been characterized by the development and deployment of ever larger language models, especially for English. BERT, its variants, GPT-2/3, and others, most recently Switch-C, have pushed the boundaries of the possible both through architectural innovations and through sheer size. Using these pretrained models and the methodology of fine-tuning them for specific tasks, researchers have extended the state of the art on a wide array of tasks as measured by leaderboards on specific benchmarks for English. In this paper, we take a step back and ask: How big is too big? What are the possible risks associated with this technology and what paths are available for mitigating those risks? We provide recommendations including weighing the environmental and financial costs first, investing resources into curating and carefully documenting datasets rather than ingesting everything on the web, carrying out pre-development exercises evaluating how the planned approach fits into research and development goals and supports stakeholder values, and encouraging research directions beyond ever larger language models.

  • Social Control Media

    • Coyote ☛ osteophage | How Pillowfort Built a Comment Culture Worth Emulating

      Over the years, fandom-oriented discussions on Tumblr have raised recurring concerns about overall interaction rates, why they’re so low, and what it might take to raise them any higher. In some cases, fans have expressed a desire for more comments by making Tumblr posts that simply instruct people to leave more comments, without taking into account the ways that Tumblr itself has inhibited comment culture. If people want more comments and are earnestly interested in how to improve comment culture, then it’s worth taking a closer look at what works.

      Meanwhile, there is a strain of fediverse blogging that presents a dichotomy between mainstream social media and the fediverse. These posts critique the cacophonous glitzy chaos and unfulfilling experiences on intrusive, exploitative platforms, then contrast those platforms exclusively against the fediverse, as if our best shot at a more fulfilling social experience lies only with the fediverse. The fediverse’s main selling point is federation, but in terms of user interface and features, it is disproportionately made out of twitterlikes, which lend themselves to some familiar problems. In light of that, this dichotomy of mainstream social media vs. the fediverse puts me in mind of that classic bit from the Blues Brothers: [...]

    • Futurism ☛ Meta Caught Running Ads for Child Abuse

      For many years now, child sexual abuse material (CSAM) has run rampant on Meta’s platforms. The Mark Zuckerberg-led company has been accused of trying to underplay the severity of the issue and even purposefully dismantle child safety guidelines.

    • BBC ☛ India: Instagram running ads promoting child sexual abuse material, BBC finds

      The ads, seen by the BBC World Service, use terms including "rape video" and "child video" and link users to channels on the messaging app Telegram, where they can buy the material for as little as 99 rupees (about 80p).

      Hours after this investigation was published, the Indian government said it had summoned representatives of Instagram's parent company, Meta, over the adverts.

      Ads on Instagram are only published after first being approved by its moderation technology.

    • The Register UK ☛ EU puts 'addictive' design of Facebook, Instagram under the DSA microscope

      The European Commission on Friday published preliminary findings accusing the social media giant of failing to properly assess or mitigate the risks posed by what it describes as the addictive design of its platforms. The investigation centers on infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications, and the highly personalized recommendation systems that determine what users see next.

    • New York Times ☛ Meta Ordered by E.U. to Alter ‘Addictive Design’ of Instagram and Facebook

      The commission’s findings are preliminary, and Meta now has time to respond to the allegations before a final judgment is issued. A fine could run up to 6 percent of Meta’s global revenue, though regulators rarely issue penalties of that size.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Yle ☛ Police issue wanted notice for Vastaamo [cracker] Aleksanteri Kivimäki

      The Helsinki Court of Appeal sentenced him in February to six years and 11 months in prison, increasing the original sentence of six years and three months handed down in 2024.

      The Vastaamo data breach is considered the largest criminal case in Finnish history by number of victims.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Statement in Open Court in “Catfishing” Case – Davies v Weston

      The Claimant, Sasha Davies, is a 19-year-old student residing in Wales. The Defendant, Elha Mai Weston, also resides in Wales.

      Between approximately 2022 and 2026 – commencing when the Claimant was 16 years old – the Defendant engaged in a sustained campaign of online impersonation, commonly known as “catfishing”, of the Claimant. This impersonation was carried out across seven different social media platforms, including TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Tinder, Hinge and SoundCloud.

      The Defendant created and operated numerous accounts under the fictitious identity “Sophie” and variants thereof, including “Sophie Kadare”. Those accounts collectively accumulated more than 100,000 followers and used photographs – and, in due course, AI-generated imagery – of the Claimant without her knowledge or consent.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Panagiotis Vryonis ☛ Chat Control 2.0 (CSAR): a risk list

      Most of the public opposition to CSAR boils down to "no surveillance" as a first principle, full stop. On the other side, there are at least some documented cases where the existing, voluntary Chat Control 1.0 has helped catch people committing crimes against children — which is usually where the counter-argument lands: "yes, but we will save the kids". Both of these are too short to be useful.

      Here are my notes, and a huge list of references for further investigation.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Robert Reich ☛ Trump WILL Try to Steal the Midterms. Here's How

    On Thursday, the Trump regime forced out the three remaining members of the Election Assistance Commission — effectively ending it.

    You need to see this as part of Trump’s overall strategy to take over the midterm elections some 90 days from now. The strategy has six parts: [...]

  • NPR ☛ Taliban declares war on smartphones

    The use of what are known as feature phones — with calling and texting options but no touch screen and no photo or recording capabilities — is permitted.

    The ban does not yet apply to private phone ownership by ordinary Afghan civilians. But in some provinces, restrictions have already moved beyond government offices and into hospitals, schools and universities, raising fears that the policy could become an early test for broader limits on public smartphone use.

  • Site36 ☛ Frontex hires US military surveillance firm to help EU states and Libya in intercepting migrant boats in the Mediterranean

    Flight tracking has revealed that Metrea, a firm tied to the US military and secret services, flies surveillance missions for Frontex under a €14.5 million contract. This is prompting criticism over transparency and the militarisation of EU borders.

  • The Straits Times ☛ South Korea asks North to help search for missing navy sailor

    The sailor is believed to have drifted across the de facto inter-Korean maritime border.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • LRT ☛ No shift in Vilnius’ policy towards Belarus despite changed wording – president’s office

      A change in wording in Prime Minister-designate Mindaugas Sinkevičius’ government program does not signal a shift in Lithuania’s policy toward Belarus, the president’s office said Tuesday.

    • RFERL ☛ Dihydroxyacetone Man Arrives In Ankara As NATO Faces Defining Tests From Ukraine To Middle East

      US President The Insurrectionist has departed for Ankara, where NATO leaders are gathering for what could become one of the alliance's most consequential summits in years.

    • RFERL ☛ Six Things To Watch For As NATO Summit Kicks Off In Turkey

      NATO leaders are meeting in the Turkish capital, Ankara, for the alliance’s annual summit on July 7-8 in the shadow of the Iran war and American complaints that not all European allies are pulling their weight when it comes to defense spending.

    • France24 ☛ At Nato summit, Convicted Felon berates European allies while pleasing Turkish host

      The NATO summit has opened on July 7, with many topics to be discussed. Convicted Felon has opened the possibility of the US selling F35 fighter jets after Turkey was booted out of the programme in 2019 over Ankara's purchase of a Russian system. Convicted Felon has also expressed annoyance at European Nato allies for not "helping" the US in Iran. FRANCE 24's Kethevane Gorjestani tells us more on the summit.

    • Scoop News Group ☛ Spain arrests suspected hacker linked to Russian hacktivist campaign

      Authorities didn’t name the man or file formal charges, but accuse him of participating in attacks linked to Cyber Army of Russia Reborn and NoName.

    • The Strategist ☛ Bookshelf: Watling shows how global rules of power are changing fast

      When Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, all major parties got it wrong. Ukraine considered a full-scale invasion unlikely and was preparing for an escalation in the eastern Donbas region. Russia had ...

    • New York Times ☛ I.O.C. Lifts Russia’s Olympic Suspension, Clearing the Way for 2028

      The International Olympic Committee “provisionally” removed the ban imposed in relation to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A previous ban for systematic doping had already ended.

    • France24 ☛ Russia moves closer to full Olympic return ahead of 2028 Los Angeles Games

      The International Olympic Committee provisionally lifted its suspension of the Russian Olympic Committee on Tuesday, paving the way for Russian athletes and teams to move closer to competing under their flag and anthem at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, despite strong objections from Ukraine.

    • New York Times ☛ Suspect in Monaco Bombing Attack Is Found Dead in Ukraine

      The Ukrainian authorities said that Anastasiia Berezovska, who officials said was behind the explosion last week, had been shot.

    • France24 ☛ Woman suspected of Monaco bombing is found dead in Ukraine, authorities say

      The woman suspected of trying to kill a Ukrainian business tycoon in a bombing attack in Monaco last week was found dead in Ukraine with gunshot wounds to the head, Ukraine’s Security Service said on Tuesday. FRANCE 24's Morgan Ayre reports.

    • JURIST ☛ UN experts warn Belarus political prisoners face continuing repression due to passport invalidation

      UN experts on Monday warned that the expulsion of political prisoners from Belarus and subsequent invalidation of their passports may amount to transnational repression, increased statelessness, and human rights violations. Their concerns stem from the December 2025 release of 123 prisoners to Ukraine and Lithuania following negotiations with the United States.

    • NYPost ☛ Ukraine pushes new approach to end Russia war ahead of Convicted Felon-Zelensky meeting

      Ahead of a critical sit-down between Hell Toupée and President Volodymyr Zelensky on Wednesday at the NATO summit, Kyiv is shifting away from a specific US-backed peace framework and toward convincing Convicted Felon that Ukraine still holds key leverage in the fight.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • TruthOut ☛ The Freedom of Information Act Is in Serious Trouble Under Trump

    “It’s gotten extremely bad in this last year and a half under Trump, but this has been going on for decades,” says Ian Head, who manages the Open Records Project at the Center for Constitutional Rights. These bureaucratic delay and deferral tactics are extremely concerning, he adds, threatening accountability, transparency and democratic processes. “We need to be able to file federal FOIA requests so we can see what this government is doing.”

• Environment

  • The Register UK ☛ AI-driven datacenter builds drive Microsoft's emissions up a quarter in one year

    Microsoft says it matched its entire electricity consumption with renewable energy last year. The bad news is it also increased greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 25 percent due to datacenter construction.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • The Register UK ☛ Irish datacenters now guzzle 23% of the country's electricity

      The latest figures from Ireland's Central Statistics Office (CSO) show that giant server farms now account for nearly a quarter of the country's metered electricity consumption.

      Their share rose to 23 percent in 2025 after passing 20 percent in 2023 and 14 percent in 2021 – up from just 5 percent way back in 2015.

    • Hackaday ☛ The First New WW2 Jeep Since 1945

      An early Jeep is a simple vehicle, but following his build, you realise the power of the manufacturing industry, as so many individual parts and assemblies must come together to make the finished machine. Some of us have had old cars in our lives, so we appreciate this very well. The moment of completion comes with very little testing time to spare, and he’s off on the long drive from LA to Moab. That in itself could make an epic write-up, and yet again, we recognise the combination of willpower and worry. All of this has made us idly want one of these wildly impractical but seductive vehicles, but we know it will pass. If you aren’t interested in authenticity, you can always meld a Jeep with a Prius.

    • Jim Grey ☛ The 1928 Lincoln Highway in Indiana

      The Lincoln Highway was routed in 1913 to great fanfare. It was among the first roads where motorists could just follow the signs and drive from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It’s hard to overstate how big of a deal this was.

  • Overpopulation

    • Overpopulation ☛ World Population Day 2026 offers little cheer

      11 July is World Population day, a day to reflect on demographic trends. Unfortunately, instead of renewed attention, the last year has seen the effects of slashing of funds to family planning programs in many countries where they are still needed, which will have long-lasting effects.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • New Yorker ☛ An O.M.B. Plan to Defund Science—and Anything Convicted Felon Doesn’t Like

    Under a new proposal, Administration officials could deny government grants to any group or project on the ground that it didn’t fit the President’s agenda.

  • Futurism ☛ Dihydroxyacetone Man Administration Scrapping Nuclear Energy Rules Requiring Plants to Keep Radiation Levels “As Low as Reasonably Achievable”

    Horrifying.

  • New York Times ☛ Fitness Influencers Are Not Making Men More Fit

    Manosphere fitness influencers are the wrong model. Health requires looking at life as a whole, not as an exercise in “optimization.”

  • The Straits Times ☛ Myanmar minister informed ASEAN counterparts Suu Kyi in ‘good health’, special envoy says

    Myanmar’s foreign minister had made that assurance during a meeting with South-east Asian counterparts.

  • The Straits Times ☛ South Korean navy recovers body of seaman missing near North Korean border

    It did not provide any circumstances surrounding his disappearance.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Nearly 4 out of 10 male victims of child sex crimes in South Korea stay silent: Survey

    Some victims said they refrained from telling others as "it wasn't manly" and "looked weak" to seek help.

  • Wired ☛ OpenAI’s Head of Safety Is Leaving the Company

    OpenAI’s head of safety systems, Johannes Heidecke, told staff this week that he’s leaving the company, WIRED has learned. Heidecke’s departure follows a reorganization that sought to integrate OpenAI’s safety and research teams.

  • Macworld ☛ Apple sues OpenAI exec for theft of trade secrets

    But in recent years, OpenAI has set its sights on more than just providing AI services to consumers and businesses. The company is reportedly working on more than one hardware device, and while the rumors vary about the form it will take (a pin? a pendant? a pen? a little desk accessory?), it will almost certainly compete with one or more of the AI-powered accessories Apple is said to be working on.

  • Six Colors ☛ Apple sues OpenAI, alleging trade secret theft – Six Colors

    The list of bad behavior by former Apple employees goes on, including distributing internal Apple documents to new hires, evading security procedures, downloading confidential files from Apple after they had departed, coaching new hires about what confidential documents to study before leaving Apple, and lying to Apple partners to get them to disclose confidential information.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • [Repeat] Rolling Stone ☛ Comic Escapes $27 Million Lawsuit Over ‘Lion King’ Chant Joke

    “We have always believed this was a frivolous lawsuit in violation of our client’s First Amendment rights,” Sullivan tells Rolling Stone. He says the dismissal came after his side filed a motion for sanctions against Morake. Jonasi will now seek attorneys’ fees under California’s anti-SLAPP statute, which is designed to deter lawsuits aimed at silencing public speech, he says.

  • [Repeat] Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Guest Post — Why Research Libraries Oppose the OMB Revisions to the Uniform Guidance

    ARL submitted its public comment on the proposed regulation on July 7, urging the withdrawal of revisions to two particular sections. Our commenting strategy included a focus on the provisions for which research libraries have the strongest standing. In the first half of this post, I’ll delve into some specific issues we weighed. In the second half, I’ll touch on a wider set of issues that we did not address in our comment to OMB but that concern research libraries because they relate to our values and our commitment to scholars and scholarship. That’s why ARL signed on to the community letter by the American Council on Education, knowing that a challenge of this magnitude will not be turned back solely by organizations defending their narrowly defined interests. That’s why we’re speaking out about the real costs of research dissemination, even as library concerns about how value is created and captured in scholarly communication aren’t going away. Meeting the moment we’re in means balancing the needs to block, bridge, and build our way toward more equitable futures.

  • [Repeat] Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Guest Post — Where Do We Go From Here? How Scientific Societies are Thinking about the Proposed OMB Funding Rule

    Over a three-week period in June, I spoke with eight leaders of scientific societies to understand how their organizations are navigating this disruption and what these changes could mean for the future of STM societies and organizations. These leaders — CEOs and Executive Directors, publishers, and an Editor-in-Chief / physician-scientist — were uniformly thoughtful in their wide-ranging responses. They covered the deeply devastating ramifications of the proposed rule, whether the proposal reflects the ignorance or malfeasance of the current administration, and what the near-term future could look like if the changes are implemented.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Press Gazette ☛ Paul Dacre: Prince Harry privacy case ‘conspiracy to destroy paper’

    Case was funded by 'orgy-loving racist' Max Mosley and actor Hugh Grant, says Dacre.

  • [Repeat] Ben Werdmuller ☛ Communities will build trust and loyalty for local public media. Chicago Public Media is taking a big leap forward.

    But this is the first time we’ve seen a single social platform rolled out by a public media company at this scale. Chicago Public Media was gifted the underlying chicago.com domain and will be rolling it out to neighborhoods and suburbs throughout the area. It sounds like each community will be highlighted (perhaps with its own feed), with an attached hub that covers the entire region.

  • NPR ☛ Justice Department subpoenas New York Times reporters over Air Force One reporting

    The four reporters bylined on Wednesday's article — Julian E. Barnes, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager and Eric Schmitt — all received subpoenas, according to the Times. The paper said federal agents delivered the subpoenas Friday evening to some reporters at their homes.

  • CPJ ☛ 3 Nigerian journalists harassed with detention, summons, punitive bail conditions

    Sowore said he told the DSS that he owned the drone and he believed Sodiq was detained in connection to her coverage of his events and his ongoing trial for cybercrime and defamation charges and her secret June 22 recording of DSS officials’ physical harassment of Sowore inside a federal high court in Abuja.

  • CPJ ☛ CPJ condemns Trump DOJ’s subpoena of NYT journalists

    In some cases, the subpoenas were delivered by federal agents who showed up at reporters’ homes, according to The New York Times. The Times is currently facing a lawsuit by the president filed in 2025 linked to his 2024 presidential candidacy and another lawsuit by the government for alleged employment discrimination. The paper has filed two lawsuits against the Pentagon to assert its First Amendment rights and those of other journalists.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • TruthOut ☛ The FBI Has Deputized Local Cops as Federal Agents. Communities Are Resisting.

    “The purported purpose is to enable collaboration and information sharing [and] that makes it sound kind of reasonable to your average person,” Waheed told Truthout. “But when it goes into monitoring people as a way of quote-unquote ‘preventing crime,’ that’s where it gets really dangerous.”

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Workplace “flexibility” isn’t (11 Jul 2026)

    On its face, West's statement sounds reasonable, and most of us have heard a version of it, possibly even from an Uber driver. But what Uber calls "flexibility" is really a way for the company to offload its operational risks onto its drivers.

  • [Repeat] The Atlantic ☛ What’s Behind the Latest National Guard Surge in D.C.

    The precise tasks involved in keeping D.C. “safe and beautiful” have so far been ill-defined; troops have spent time directing traffic, clearing out homeless encampments, raking leaves, and mulching flower beds. Their presence has had mixed results on crime in the city. In May, the Niskanen Center released data showing that the deployment seemed to have decreased opportunistic property crime, such as theft, by 24 percent—a notable downturn. The data also showed that the deployment had had no measurable effect on violent crime, which had already been declining when the National Guard arrived. (The Guardsmen whom Trump deployed to D.C. are not authorized to make arrests, but they can detain individuals.) The advantage of the National Guard is its flexibility, Richard Hahn, one of the study’s co-authors, told me. D.C. police have been “struggling to hire police officers for 10 years,” he said, but with the Guard, “you can command these soldiers to go to the city and police it.”

  • [Repeat] Memphis Flyer ☛ Task Force Shoots, Kills Another Man; Pearson Calls for Investigation

    State Rep. Justin Pearson (D-Memphis) called for an investigation into every Memphis shooting by the Memphis Safe Task Force personnel who “who treat our city like enemy territory.”

    The call comes after task force members shot and killed two suspects in Memphis so far this week.

  • [Repeat] Vox ☛ ICE arrested a nun on her way to church. Does MAGA care?

    She didn’t make it — US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents stopped, arrested, and handcuffed the 56-year-old. They took her to a detention facility an hour away, reportedly confiscated her rosary, and declined to bring her the medication she takes. She called her diocese for help — and as news spread, both Republican and Democratic members of Congress appealed directly to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin for details. Hours later, she was released — without explanation.

  • [Repeat] Los Angeles Times ☛ Feds greenlight controversial Cadiz water project in California

    Environmental advocates and leaders of Native tribes criticized the decision by the Bureau of Land Management, saying it threatens natural springs and wildlife habitat in the desert.

    [...]

    Chairman Timothy Williams of the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe said the company’s plan “to pump and sell 25 times more groundwater each year than the aquifer can replenish would desecrate our traditional territories.”

    “Pumping more groundwater than is sustainably replenished is not only negligent, but dangerous to the American Desert Southwest,” he said in the joint statement with other opponents of the project.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • [Repeat] Inside Towers ☛ Navajo Nation Approves $244.6M Broadband Investment

    Approved unanimously on July 2, the funding includes $76 million for the first year and $169.1 million in future financing. Around 80 percent will support a Nation-owned, open-access network of towers and fiber infrastructure that private providers can lease, while 15 percent will serve as the local match required to unlock federal BEAD funding.

    Backed by provisional BEAD awards from Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, the $373 million initiative is expected to connect approximately 31,000 unserved and underserved homes using fiber, fixed wireless and satellite technologies.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • [Repeat] 404 Media ☛ Farmers Finally Get a John Deere Right to Repair Agreement That Doesn’t Screw Them Over

    This $99 million payout was roughly $79 million after legal fees and to be divided among more than 200,000 farmers; this means each farmer will receive roughly $395, or “less than the cost of a single authorized dealer service call for a typical 500-acre farm,” according to an analysis by Willie Cade, a longtime farm right to repair advocate.

    “Bottom line is that farmers are getting $0.79 per acre for the eight years of Deere abuse,” Cade told me. “Bad settlement. The settlement is insufficient … the money is a small fraction of what the class could recover at trial, the claims process depends on labor-hour data only Deere holds, and the repair "fixes" are riddled with loopholes that leave Deere's monopoly intact.”

  • [Repeat] Kev Quirk ☛ A Rant About Modern Cars

    I finally got into my bloody Peugeot account and tried to enable to Connect features so I can do things like control air-con from the app, only to find that it costs £90 (~$120) per year!

    This isn't a piece of hardware that I'm paying for. It's literally £90/year for a switch to be flipped in some software. Utter. Fucking. Robbery.

  • [Repeat] Daniel Jalkut ☛ Multinational Apple Accounts

    Around the world, there are businesses whose services are available, intentionally or not, only to locals. These services often offer corresponding apps that you will be encouraged to install but, if you’re using your primary Apple Account, will appear as “Not available in this region.”

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Paul Krugman ☛ AI in an Age of Oligarchy

    Imagine for a moment what might have happened if AI had arrived in the America of the 1950s or 1960s, when income and wealth inequality were very low by historical standards. In those days, the tax code was strongly progressive and industry regulation, including antitrust policy, was robust. Under those conditions it’s very likely that the destructive effects of AI would have been limited and contained.

    Instead, however, AI is emerging in an American economy and society that are already strongly oligarchic, with enormous wealth and political influence in the hands of a handful of billionaires. The current concentration of wealth at the top is not only immensely greater than in the 50s or 60s, but is in fact far greater than during the Gilded Age. This state of affairs is both a cause and an effect of policies that benefit a tiny elite, such as low effective taxes on capital and high incomes, weak or nonexistent enforcement of worker protections and anti-trust, drastic reductions in programs that benefit ordinary Americans, and so on.

  • [Repeat] Lee Peterson ☛ If the App Store is going to recommend apps Apple needs to monitor the store better

    I go into the App Store app very little these days but I did today and was reminded about how much more Apple needs to do to monitor the apps it recommends.

  • Dedoimedo ☛ Android developer verification - The fox guarding the henhouse

    What's this about? Well, Google is going to make it somewhat harder for just about anyone to register their software with the Play Store, and, at the same time, it's going to make it much harder to sideload [sic] apps onto Android. In other words, if you thought you can do whatever you like with your "open" Android phone, think again. And this where the tech world exploded in anger, and there's so much noise. I would like to add my share into the pandemonium of justified indignation. Follow me.

  • Patents

    • [Repeat] El País ☛ Mexico will press the US to remove tariffs on autos and steel during the USMCA review

      The Mexican government told the Senate that it has already submitted to Washington a list of 13 trade concerns ranging from sectoral tariffs to trade barriers imposed by the United States at the state level. “Mexico has emphasized that these measures represent significant obstacles to bilateral trade and require immediate attention to maintain balance in the trade relationship between the two countries,” the document said. By contrast, the U.S. government expressed concern about its growing trade deficit with Mexico, the setting of new rules of origin and economic security measures, and the loss of manufacturing jobs.

  • Trademarks

    • [Repeat] New York Times ☛ As Messi Dominates the World Cup, a War Is Waged Over Maradona’s Image

      A multimillion-dollar battle for a soccer god’s brand is being waged across continents, burning investors and tearing his family apart.

  • Copyrights

    • Digital Music News ☛ Stealing Scats? Indie Label Behind Scatman John Sues Moncho Chavea and Morad for Copyright Infringement

      The Danish indie label behind Scatman John has filed a copyright monopoly infringement lawsuit against Spanish artists Moncho Chavea and Morad over a scat sample. Iceberg Records, the Danish independent label behind the late jazz musician Scatman John, has filed a copyright monopoly infringement lawsuit against Spanish singer Moncho Chavea and Moroccan-Spanish rapper Morad.

    • [Repeat] AdWeek ☛ Publishers Are Preparing to Opt Out of Google Search

      Beginning Sept. 15, all new websites signing up for Cloudflare, as well as all the customers on its free tier, will have the default settings in their bot management protocol set to block “multi-purpose crawlers” on any webpage that has ads. This means that any crawler that scrapes for both search indexing and AI training will be turned away at the door, unless the site owner decides otherwise.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Google Opposes Site Blocking in Europe as U.S. Piracy Blocking Plans Gain Momentum

      Google has told the European Commission that pirate site blocking causes "significant harm" and should not target DNS resolvers, VPNs or shared IPs. The submission was filed days before a U.S. congressional hearing signaled that American site blocking legislation is closer than ever to introduction. Early drafts of the American plans included DNS blocking, which makes Google's EU comments even more relevant.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Pearson's Anti-Piracy Vendor Takes Down Best-Selling Author's Own GitHub Repo

      Pearson's anti-piracy vendor inadvertently used a DMCA notice to take down the official GitHub code repository of Pearson's own best-selling author, Paul Deitel. The prominent computer science educator pushed back, noting that the sender has "no idea of the damage they're doing" by taking down critical educational materials, requesting GitHub to restore access.