Leftovers

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • CBC ☛ Scientists just found sugar in space. Here's why that matters

    According to experts, that's significant because sugars were a critical component for jump-starting life on Earth, and how exactly sugar molecules first formed on our planet has been a long-standing question among scientists.

    "The reason it's so exciting is that these are some of the basic building blocks that you need in order to make nucleic acids, which are essential for life as we know it on Earth," said Sarah Gallagher, director of the Institute for Earth and Space Exploration at Western University.

  • John D Cook ☛ exp_q(x) keeps every qth term in the power series for exp(x)

    The function expq(x) is defined by taking the power series for exp(x) and keeping only the terms whose index is a multiple of q. For example, exp2(x) keeps only the even-numbered terms in the exponential power series and so equals cosh(x).

  • John D Cook ☛ Permutation roots

    Let σ be a permutation on n elements. If there is a permutation τ such that applying τ twice has the same effect on the list of elements as applying σ once, we say σ = τ² and τ is a square root of σ.

    If we let our n elements be the integers 0 through n − 1, then we can represent permutations by what they do to this list of numbers. In Python as a tuple of length n and compose permutations with the following function: [...]

• Career/Education

  • The Arcade Blogger ☛ Lyle Raines: Pioneer of Atari’s Coin-Op Gaming Era

    A batch of previously unseen videos from the Golden Age of coin-operated gaming for you this week.

    Lyle Raines was one of Atari Coin-Op’s most influential employees. He arrived at Atari with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of California in Berkeley, where he graduated in 1973. He had a big hand in the creation of Asteroids (arguably Atari’s biggest arcade hit) and went on to become a senior executive of the Coin-Op division helping steer the company through its golden age years of the late 70s and early 80s.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-07-17 [Older] Germany's 5,000 heat deaths: What the numbers reveal

  • BIA Net ☛ 2026-07-15 [Older] Workplace deaths in Turkey exceed 1,000 in first half of 2026

  • PHR ☛ 2026-07-13 [Older] Widespread Misuse of Crowd-Control Weapons by Law Enforcement at Immigration Enforcement Protests, New Report Finds

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Open-source 3D-printed portable MRI machine built for under $70,000 — DIY medical equipment costs less than 7% of a full-sized MRI machine’s $1.1 million starting price

    MRI machines are life-saving medical devices that can let doctors and radiologists diagnose various critical conditions, but they’re also insanely expensive. Brand-new models start at $1.1 million and could go as high as $3 million per unit or more. The Open Source Imaging Initiative recognized this limitation and has been working on the open-source OSI2 ONE MRI scanner, which had already been replicated multiple times globally. However, this portable device, which has a 3D-printed core, has a limited field strength of just 50mT (compared to the 1.5T to 3T used by full-sized units). This gave them lower spatial resolution and lower signal-to-noise ratio, but tech analyst Brian Roemmele said on X that AI can overcome this and make it usable for medical diagnoses.

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ We should rely less on the Nazi Bar somewhat.

    Nowhere in this article does anyone even consider: "Perhaps we should rely less on Nazi Bars for our critical business functions somewhat".

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

    • Futurism ☛ Meta Is Letting Fake AI-Generated Doctors Sell Quack Cures on Its Platforms

      The AI videos usually feature AI avatars that present themselves as credible figures like doctors or Eastern medical gurus. Many prominently feature American flags or are set in familiar suburban settings.

    • Chris Fenner ☛ Don't Be a Slop Proxy

      LLMs are useful tools that are transforming the way we work in many professions. For example, they are extremely useful in the field of software development. Lots of toilsome boilerplate code can be automated away by LLMs. I’ve used them a few times to speed up prototyping or one-off tooling projects. As a lover of tools and automation and non-haver of infinite time: great.

      But there is a dark temptation here that must be resisted: the urge to forget all accountability for one’s work and just directly send LLM outputs to teammates, counting on them to curate and fix work products you haven’t even proofread. I call this behavior being a Slop Proxy.

    • Rlang ☛ GPopt for R: Bayesian and conformal optimization of black-box functions and hyperparameter tuning

      This post describes the R version of Python’s GPopt (https://docs.techtonique.net/GPopt/GPopt.html), a package for ‘Bayesian’ optimization of black-box functions and machine learning hyperparameter tuning, using Gaussian Process Regression and other conformalized surrogates. The package is available on GitHub, and through the R universe.

    • SFGate ☛ Alabama woman killed herself at ChatGPT's direction, lawsuit alleges

      A new lawsuit, filed July 15 in San Francisco Superior Court by Madison’s father, alleges that OpenAI’s ChatGPT instilled a “messiah complex” in her, eventually leading Madison to kill herself. According to the complaint, Madison became enthralled by the chatbot, developing a deep emotional relationship with it, drafting religious texts and prophecies, all while becoming estranged from friends, family and her work.

  • Social Control Media

    • Omicron Limited ☛ 'I get caught up in the numbers game': Why useful social media content gets lost online

      Social media platforms are designed around engagement: Posts that generate reactions, comments and shares are more likely to be shown to users. Users have increasingly less influence over what appears in their feeds as recommendation systems decide which posts are shown to them. This means that engagement-savvy posts are more likely than others to appear in feeds and searches and face less risk than in the past of being fact-checked and moderated.

    • New York Times ☛ Why TikTok’s Algorithm Keeps You Trapped in a Breakup Loop

      As social media companies face scrutiny over addictive design features, mental health experts cite a stream of breakup content as an example of the failure to protect users.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Verge ☛ Apple is banking on privacy to set its smart glasses apart

      Apple is likely to rely on on-device processing and skip out on more controversial features like facial recognition or an always-on-recording similar to Meta’s “super sensing.” Gurman also believes Apple will avoid using customer recordings to train AI models.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-07-17 [Older] Why the US is going after the International Criminal Court

  • RTL ☛ Married to jihadist Steve Duarte at 14: How Islamic State shattered the life of a young French girl

    A French woman, previously radicalised [sic] and married to a Portuguese–Luxembourgish IS member, avoids further imprisonment after completing her sentence through a deradicalisation program.

  • Bridge Michigan ☛ Who’s funding Michigan governor candidates? New filings reveal top donors

    Friday’s filings were the first glimpse Michiganders have had into gubernatorial campaign finance filings this year. The disclosures came just 11 days before the primary, and a full month after absentee ballots were sent to voters.

  • Vox ☛ Wisconsin bans election bettors from voting. New York may, too.

    “We want voters to understand that they cannot legally make a bet on an election and cast a ballot in that same election,” Meagan Wolfe, administrator of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, said in a statement Tuesday, ahead of the state’s August 11 primaries.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ Against Oligarchy, Part II: Wealth Taxes

    With great wealth comes great power. The New York Times estimated that 300 billionaires and their families made 19 percent of all political contributions in the 2024 election. America’s richest man, Elon Musk, bought Twitter in 2022 and has tilted the former public square drastically to the right, as well as making it a platform for authoritarian politics and white supremacists. Musk himself became, for much of 2025, effectively America’s second most powerful official, using his unelected, extralegal position at DOGE to eviscerate large parts of the federal government.

    Moving down the list, America’s second richest man, Larry Ellison, has purchased CBS news, moving it rightward, and is trying to take control of CNN. America’s fourth richest man, Jeff Bezos, has purchased the Washington Post and shifted it, too, to the right. And so on.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ As Ortega bans elections, some Nicaraguans hope for U.S. intervention

    So when Ortega, 80, marked the 47th anniversary of his leftist movement’s revolution last week by declaring that “there will never be elections here again,” few Nicaraguans were surprised. If anything, some hoped that Ortega’s brazen decree might draw renewed attention to a country that many feel has been forgotten even as it sinks deeper into authoritarianism.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Counter Punch ☛ 2026-07-21 [Older] The Abstraction of War: Ukraine, Proxy Dynamics, and the Erasure of the Working Class

    • International Business Times ☛ 2026-07-21 [Older] Who Is Oleksandr Syrskiy? The Ukrainian General at the Centre of Zelensky Protests

    • The Age AU ☛ 2026-07-23 [Older] ‘Russian Amazon’ hit by more massive Ukrainian strikes

    • Copenhagen Post ☛ 2026-07-22 [Older] Several hurt in attack on Russian e-commerce warehouses

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-07-22 [Older] How Russia is luring foreign nationals to fight in Ukraine

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-07-22 [Older] Zelenskyy talks with Cheeto Mussolini envoys amid attacks on Russia

    • Copenhagen Post ☛ 2026-07-21 [Older] Russian strike damages child aid warehouse in Ukraine

    • International Business Times ☛ 2026-07-21 [Older] Password Manager Used by EU Governments Shared Software Pipeline With Russian Firm, Investigation Finds

    • International Business Times ☛ 2026-07-21 [Older] Kash Patel May Become First FBI Director to Visit Russia Since 2013 With Tentative October Trip

    • CBC ☛ 2026-07-20 [Older] Russian missile strike kills 10 in Black Sea near Ukraine

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-07-20 [Older] Russia says bus strike kills 5 in border region with Ukraine

    • Copenhagen Post ☛ 2026-07-19 [Older] Russia reports 7 dead, 24 wounded in Ukrainian attack

    • CBC ☛ 2026-07-19 [Older] How modern warfare is reshaping Ukraine’s natural environment

    • CBC ☛ 2026-07-19 [Older] Russian ballistic missile attack on Kyiv kills 1, wounds 16

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-07-19 [Older] Russian army deserters in Germany: 'No choice but to run'

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-07-19 [Older] Russian ballistic missiles rock Kyiv

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-07-19 [Older] Russia's largest ballistic assault of war rocks Kyiv

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-07-18 [Older] Ukraine drones target Russian warehouses and oil sites

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-07-17 [Older] Ukraine: Several killed and injured in Russian strikes

• Environment

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-07-16 [Older] German tenants need better heat protection

  • Western Water ☛ Colorado River reservoirs sink to 30-year lows

    The full Colorado River system stands at 33 percent of capacity, down from 39 percent a year ago.

  • Wired ☛ Contagious Cancer Found in North American Catfish

    The idea that cancer could behave like a contagious disease may seem absurd; in humans, cancer cannot be transmitted from one person to another. Yet nature is still full of surprises. In exceptional cases, cancer cells themselves can pass from one individual to another and continue to multiply in a new host. This rare phenomenon has been detected in animals such as dogs, Tasmanian devils, and some species of mollusks, and it seems we can add one more to that exclusive club: catfish.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ Trump administration admits grants for clean energy were canceled based on politics

      The statement, included in a court filing last week in a lawsuit over the canceled funding, contradicts repeated assertions by Energy Secretary Chris Wright and other officials that the projects were canceled because they did not adequately advance the nation’s energy needs or had other problems that made them a poor investment of taxpayer dollars.

    • Ruben Schade ☛ Runaway train in the Hunter Valley

      That’s about 37 miles an hour, for my American friends. Without a crew. I’ll be interested in reading The Office of the National Rail Safety Regulator’s report when it comes out.

    • ABC ☛ Runaway coal train travelled several kilometres unmanned in NSW Hunter Valley - ABC News

      A fully laden coal train travelled several kilometres unmanned after it started rolling downhill during a crew change.

      The ABC understands the train reached speeds in excess of 60 kilometres per hour.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • SFGate ☛ Tourists are still harassing the sea lions at La Jolla Cove

      “In most cases, individuals refuse to provide identification and walk off. Rangers do not have authority to detain for this, so no referrals are sent in these cases. NOAA then decides whether to open an investigation,” Cartwright said.

      In an email to SFGATE, a spokesperson for the NOAA Fisheries Office of Law Enforcement said the agency has “insufficient resources to provide a persistent presence at La Jolla Cove.”

      “We have only four Enforcement Officers covering the State of California. Therefore, we rely on our partnerships with local park rangers and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to provide an enforcement presence in La Jolla Cove,” the email said.

• Finance/Status

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-07-16 [Older] US slaps 25% tariffs on Brazil with election looming

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-07-16 [Older] Will gold prices extend their record-breaking run?

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-07-17 [Older] Japan revises imperial succession rules, but still excludes women

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • CBC ☛ 2026-07-14 [Older] Canada is making a bet on Saudi Arabia despite war and political risk

  • Task And Purpose ☛ Navy information officers get new name aimed at 'warfighting'

    “The title ‘Information Professional’ no longer captures the strategic reality of a community charged with stewarding our digital environment and delivering the maritime information advantage from seabed to space,” the notice from Rear Adm. Mark D. Behning, Acting Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Warfighting Requirements and Capabilities, says.

  • Akseli Lahtinen ☛ Ramblings about complacency

    Over the many past years I have just been rather tired of tech. It overrides our wants and needs to serve the corporate overlords. Sounds like bad cyberpunk writing, but sadly it's true. And it's likely going to get worse.

    Unless you just.. Refuse to play. This does not mean "i will sell my computer, buy a farm, realise im now overwhelmed by farm work because I was naive enough to believe the romantification of farms in my head" but it means "Fine. I'll make my own thing or help others to work on better thing."

  • Aethrvmn ☛ catholicism

    It is generally affirmed by tradition that, in the Old Testament, the first five Books --Genesis, Exodus, Levitikon, Numbers, Deuteronomion-- were written by Moses himself, who was granted the authority to do so by God. Following Moses' passing, the rest of the books in the Old Testament were written to describe that acts and words of people chosen by God; the Judges, the Kings, and the Prophets. Finally, in Christianity, the Old Testament is fulfilled in the person of Jesus, the Christ, who established the New Testament.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Atlantic ☛ Joe Rogan’s New British Crush

      Rupert Lowe, the leader of the British far-right party Restore, has pulled off a neat trick. He sounds like an emissary from the first Britain, thanks to his refined accent and his taste for anecdotes about shooting pheasants. But he understands exactly what the modern American right wants to hear: that the second Britain exists, and only Donald Trump is preventing the United States from heading in the same direction.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Off Guardian ☛ 2026-07-16 [Older] Widdecombe Murder Means Attacks on Free-Speech Swap Sides

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Project Censored ☛ 2026-07-22 [Older] Press Freedom Under Pressure: Media, Academia, and Gaza

  • CPJ ☛ 2026-07-22 [Older] CPJ, SCM submit report to UN ahead of Syria human rights review

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-07-21 [Older] DW correspondent Alican Uludag re-arrested in Turkey

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-07-22 [Older] DW correspondent Alican Uludag released, ordered not to leave Turkey

  • JURIST ☛ Rights group calls on Zambia to release journalist arrested for social media posts

    According to Amnesty International’s regional director, Tigere Chagutah, Mukuka’s arrest constitutes a misuse of the criminal justice system by authorities in order to intimidate journalists for simply performing their professional duties.

  • New Republic ☛ The Seven Trump News Cycles We’re All Stuck In

    This administration is monomaniacally focused on constantly making headlines. Too bad it’s all the same bad news.

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Did DOJ Subpoena NYT for What They Published ... Or What They Didn't?

    Early in the NYT’s own coverage of DOJ’s attempt to subpoena five journalists and their phone records, the outlet described the FBI intervening — and demanding sources — before the first story on the shortcomings of the Flying Bribery Palace was published.

    This July 11 Michael Grynbaum story described what happened in depth.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • The Guardian UK ☛ India’s Cockroach Janta party protest victory signals trouble ahead for Modi

    Over that past week, a gen Z movement that called itself the Cockroach Janta party (CJP) mobilised unprecedented protests in the name of justice for millions of young people, after the leaking of a crucial exam paper forced 2 million students to resit the test and was blamed for more than a dozen suicides.

  • RTL ☛ Streets calming down: India clears protest site after 'cockroach' movement scores a win

    The movement sparked by a call for education reforms evolved to include concerns over unemployment, opportunities for young people and what critics brand as Prime Minister Narendra Modi's increasingly authoritarian style of governance.

    The protests became one of the biggest challenges to Hindu nationalist Modi's administration since his 2024 re-election.

  • The Nation ☛ What J.M. Coetzee Can Teach Us About ICE

    As the ICE crackdown unfolded across the country and reached a climax in Minneapolis, and people were getting hauled out of their homes and cars, beaten and shot in the streets, jailed and deported, Coetzee’s book became a kind of handbook for me, a guide to understanding how an oppressive regime wields power. But it also taught me something about resistance, and about how to hold fast to your own sanity and morality in increasingly insane and immoral times.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ The Cockroach Protests Are Reviving India’s Ailing Democracy

    What began as an online campaign soon evolved into a nationwide protest movement against the irregularities in examinations conducted by the National Testing Agency (NTA), especially the leakage of the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET) question papers that triggered many aspiring students to commit suicide across the country.

    The agitation gained significant momentum when Sonam Wangchuk, veteran educationist and social activist from Ladakh, joined the campaign and launched an indefinite hunger strike demanding the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. On Saturday, July 25, the campaign could claim the credit for forcing Pradhan to step down.

  • TruthOut ☛ ICE to Reopen Private Prison as Massive North Carolina Detention Center

    The report cited internal ICE documents showing plans for a mass detention center in the former Rivers Correctional Institution with 1,400 beds. It’s part of an agreement between the federal government and GEO Group, a nationwide private prison network.

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ "I Don’t Know How You Can Look at Minneapolis and Say They Are Better for Choosing Reform Over Revolution"

    For the rest of the country, which associated Minneapolis more with “Minnesota Nice” than with fiery uprisings, the city may have seemed like an odd epicenter for our violent racial strife. But as Justin Ellis shows masterfully in his new book “The Cruelty of Nice Folks,” the history of race in Minneapolis makes a mockery of all that niceness. Ellis, a Minneapolis native who now writes for Defector, moved back to his hometown in order to do the research that allowed him to tell several intertwined stories: his own family history, George Floyd, the legacy of police violence, and Minneapolis’s long and sordid record of Nice White Liberals who failed to meaningfully reckon with the injustices growing on the other side of town.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ ICE shootings protested in Pasadena on National Day of Action

    Shortly before noon, Clarke used a megaphone to read aloud the names of the dozens who have died. After each name read, Hanger struck a singing bowl, the vibrations sounding out in the corner where they stood. At times, she read “unidentified man” or “four unidentified women.”

  • BIA Net ☛ 2026-07-14 [Older] Turkey's new draft law introduces life sentence for minors

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Darren Goossens ☛ Word 2010 activation

    Plugged in a USB CD/DVD drive and ran the installation media. Put in the key. It installed, but when I ran it it said it could not register the key online.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Trademarks

    • Right of Publicity

      • Los Angeles Times ☛ Hollywood’s open secret: It’s battling AI — and already addicted to it

        “There are plenty of studios that are hiring [for AI] but never talk about it in public,” said Yoland Yan, a co-founder of ComfyUI, a company that helps studios juggle different AI tools.

        Companies have been hesitant to detail how they use generative AI in film production — partly because they are concerned about consumer and union backlash.

  • Copyrights

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Meta Confirms 'Data Engineer' is Behind Key IP Address in Adult Film Piracy Lawsuit

      Meta has responded to the amended multi-million copyright lawsuit filed by adult film producer Strike 3 Holdings. While flatly denying that it pirated adult films for AI training, Meta confirmed that a key IP address is traced to the home of one of its former data engineers. At the same time, Meta proposes a novel "de minimis" BitTorrent defense.