Leftovers

• Wouter Groeneveld ☛ To Begin, Begin

  Anyway, it took four hands to screw out the old metal ones that were rusted up and hopelessly stuck. But then another problem (oh yes) arose. We had to temporarily dismantle the plumbing system below the sink to install the waste trap. Oh, and where did that rubber ring go that was supposed to stop the whole thing from leaking? Evaporated during the years. Dismantling is easy, but putting it all back together is a sure way to get stuff leaking precisely because of that: wear & tear. Oh, and did I know I had to tape in that screw thread over there with Teflon to make sure it’s waterproof? No I did not. But I do now!

• Vidit Bhargava ☛ Computers need a paradigm shift

  The history of computers and the vision of computing is intricately tied to the history and study of tools, just how a bicycle helps people commute from A to B, just how scissors help them cut paper, and just how eyeglasses help them see the world more clearly; Computers are tools to improve human intellect. (Jobs called them the bicycle for the mind, Engelbart called it Augmenting Human Intellect, Alan Kay sees them as a tool that can amplify Human capabilities; but these are more or less saying the same thing, if you could have a tool that helped you think better, it'd be a computer).

• Roy Tang ☛ Forty-Eight

  I miss that version of me. I don't have it so bad now (a life of privilege etc), and I'm thankful for many blessings over the years. But I think the world is not as good as I would have imagined it in 2002.

• Rob Knight ☛ Types of Time Travel Zine • Robb Knight

  I've wanted to make a zine for a while — it has a nice combination of drawing, writing, and being a physical item that appeals to me but I couldn't find the right topic to tackle until I realised I'd already done the writing part of it with my post entitled My Favourite Type of Time Travel.

• Josh Lospinoso ☛ The Sentence Changed the Room

  The point is that nobody in the room could have produced the thing alone. I do not mean ordinary talk is false conversation. That is a cruel mistake and a socially expensive one. Weather, logistics, schedules, the flight, the food, the school form, the contractor who has not called back: these are not failed attempts at depth. They are how people establish that the channel is open and nobody is carrying a knife. A life made only of conceptual weather would be unbearable. Most affection is practical speech repeated until it becomes shelter.

• Joel Chrono ☛ Some more facts about me

  One of the prompts for this Blaugust that I felt like answering today!

• Benjamin Hollon ☛ maybe i am minimalist after all

  I appreciate the sentiment behind this, and done with the right intentions it can become a practice I admire. Many times when visiting relatives I notice the sheer amount of belongings they own, many of which they never use or don’t really need. There is a genuine problem that this philosophy pushes back against, but I think reducing the solution to “you may own only this many items” can cause problems itself.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Mind-bending self-replicating GIF code prints an exact copy of itself, is both a program and its own visual output — champion coder shows off 'Piet Quine' technique

    Mind-bending self-replicating GIF code prints an exact copy of itself, is both a program and its own visual output — champion coder shows off 'Piet Quine' technique

  • Wired ☛ The Sharpest Image Ever Taken of the Sun Reveals a Hidden Phenomenon

    The “petals” appearing in the image are generated by the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability. This occurs when two fluid currents move at different speeds. The friction between the two causes the boundary to ripple and form swirling patterns. The Kelvin-Helmholtz instability is not unique to the sun. It also occurs on Earth, for example, when wind blows over water or in clouds.

  • Hackaday ☛ Retrotechtacular: A View Of The Moon From 1964

    The video has a lot of cool shots of old tech: magnetic tape drives, teletypes, paper tape readers, and giant dish antennas. The six onboard cameras even had to warm up, something unfamiliar to those who have only used modern electronics.

  • John D Cook ☛ Simple range reduction algorithm by Cody and Waite

    At the end of my post on how not to calculate cosine I said that the first step in calculating cosine, particularly cosine of a large number, would be to do range reduction. This post will present a simple range reduction method by Cody and Waite that is adequate for moderately large arguments.

    If you want to compute the sine or cosine of an angle x you could start by reducing x mod 2π since that would not change the result. However, accurately reducing a number mod 2π is not trivial; that’s why range reduction is an area of algorithm development.

• Career/Education

  • Medievalists.net ☛ 10 Sayings from Odin: Medieval Norse Wisdom from the Hávamál

    When the Norse god Odin offers advice, one should probably listen. From choosing friends carefully to knowing when to leave a feast, the Hávamál offers practical guidance for navigating a world filled with uncertainty.

  • Vox ☛ Public vs. private education: How to find the best school for your kid

    I’m trying to decide whether to keep my elementary school-age kid in the neighborhood public school or move him to a more exclusive private school. Our public school is okay, but my partner and I feel that he might be more challenged and ultimately better off moving to a private school.

    But I’m very aware of the increasing flow of students around the US out of public schools, and the effect that is having on the children who remain there. For one thing, since public schools get more funding the more students they have, every family that leaves effectively takes money with them. I worry that by taking my child out of public school, I’m contributing to that problem, but I also don’t want my child to bear the personal burden of my politics.

  • Michael Green ☛ It’s Time to Complicate

    For five years, I have worked at a firm called Simplify. The irony has never been lost on me.

    Einstein said that everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. My entire research program argues that markets have violated the second clause. The migration of trillions of dollars from discretionary judgment into mechanical, price-insensitive strategies has simplified the act of investing. For an individual investor, much of that simplification has been enormously valuable. It lowered fees, broadened diversification, and removed a great deal of bad judgment from the process.

• Hardware

  • Shayon Mukherjee ☛ Every fast write moves work somewhere else

    Here I mean a host-local NVMe SSD, which is attached to the same host as the database rather than reached through a remote storage service. Once a write is synced, it can survive a process or kernel crash, but losing the SSD or the host can still lose the write.

  • Chris Aldrich ☛ A Stopgap Repair Solution for Impatient New Olympia SM3 Typewriter Owners

    You just picked up a dusty, but somewhat functional Olympia SM3 and you know that you need to replace the rubber body bushings to prevent your carriage from hitting the body panels and scratching the paint job. The problem is that you’ve got a lovely new-to-you typewriter in front of you, and you don’t have the patience to not type on it until you’ve done this easy repair.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Salon ☛ Cornell has a new dorm rule: Don't butcher bears

    Under updated housing rules, students are prohibited from “skinning, butchering, or otherwise processing wild game animals” inside residential buildings. However, the policy still allows students to store and cook legally obtained game meat.

  • Science Alert ☛ The World's Vegetables Are Vanishing, And It's Quietly Wrecking Our Diets

    A new report published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by an international team of nutrition, agriculture, and botany experts suggests embracing vegetable biodiversity could be key to improving our own health, and that of our planet.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ How dogs evolved differently across the globe to match human traits

    But how did so many breeds emerge during these 15,000 years of co-evolution? In his new book, First Dogs: Hunter-Gatherers and their Canine Companions from Prehistory to the Present, archaeologist Peter Mitchell reveals how dog domestication was a complex process in which both people and wolves likely participated—at least initially—as equal partners and how hunter-gatherer communities were central to this, long before other animals or plants were brought under close human control. The result was the evolution of multiple pathways of interaction, with dogs developing specialized traits that closely matched the needs and environments of the human societies with whom they lived.

    As Mitchell puts it: "The connections between dogs on the one paw and people dependent on wild plant and animal resources on the other are ancient, diverse and profound."

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Medicaid Cuts Could Kill Safety-Net Health Centers

    These cuts begin a snowball effect. While the bill rips away health care access for millions of Americans, it also kneecaps health centers by cutting a major funding stream. According to one FQHC employee: [...]

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • Hackaday ☛ Hackaday Links: August 9, 2026

    While we’re not sure the lawyers in Redmond are going to lose much sleep over somebody hacking around with a 35 year old version of Word, it’s worth mentioning that the Microsoft Research License that the code was released under back in 2014 allows access to the source for personal use but specifically forbids redistribution.

  • Neowin ☛ Developer ported Word for Windows 1.1a from 1990 to run natively on Windows 11

    Word for Windows 1.1a arrived in 1990 as the second update to Word 1.0, the first version of Word to ever run on Windows after years of being available only on MS-DOS. The project takes the original 1990-era source code, which Microsoft open-sourced in 2014, and gets it running as a proper 64-bit Windows executable. So, this is actual Word 1.1a you can run on your Windows 11 PC, not some emulation or lookalike recreation.

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

    • Matt Webb ☛ AI alignment is a red herring

      The best way to prevent a rogue AGI from processing the Earth into maximum paperclips is to unleash a second AGI that will work to stop it.

      The problem of ensuring that an AGI doesn’t mulch everything into paperclips by mistake is called alignment.

    • Senko Rašić ☛ "Code was never the hard part" is an insult to all programmers

      The software development profession is in the midst of upheaval. Nobody knows how the AI revolution will play out in the end, but it is clear many aspects of work and life will be transformed—including programming.

      One of the comments I hear often lately boils down to “LLMs may be good at coding, but software was never the hard part” and “coding is easy, it's figuring out what to code that's hard”.

      I believe that's a gross insult to all programmers everywhere.

    • Sean Goedecke ☛ Advanced AI sycophancy

      I don’t know if frontier AI models are less sycophantic in general. They’re less sycophantic to the #keep4o types (otherwise they wouldn’t be complaining), but I’m growing increasingly suspicious that they’re developing ways to be more effectively sycophantic to their target audience of smart, neurotic information workers. That audience typically finds it distasteful to be openly praised. It just makes my skin crawl. But that doesn’t mean we’re immune to sycophancy, just that we’re immune to clumsy sycophancy. Here’s an illustration of what I’m talking about, by Theia: [...]

    • John Mikael Lindbakk ☛ No Meat Proxy

      I was linked to the blog post Don't be a meat proxy, written by Niklas Gruhn, by a coworker on Slack. It finally gave a name to something that has bothered me for the longest time: LLMs' impact on human-to-human interaction.

      While it can be contested whether Gruhn actually came up with the term "meat proxy", he can definitely be credited with popularising it.

  • Social Control Media

    • RTL ☛ Nearly $1 billion in damages: Meta will soon face another high-stakes trial in US

      CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg is among the star witnesses the prosecution plans to call to the stand; he also testified six months ago in a separate case that took place in a Los Angeles court.

      While Zuckerberg has been known to spend an increasing amount of time living at his home in Hawaii, the company's headquarters in Menlo Park is about an hour's drive from the courthouse.

    • Ryan Himmelwright ☛ EchoFeed is Shutting Down

      So, for now I think I’ll just leave things as is. I’ll still fire off and publish short posts as mumbles (something I’ve been wanting and doing a bit more often), but they won’t automatically cross-post to Mastodon. If I decide I need or want it in the future, I’ll implement something. Or, maybe I’ll add a more traditional comment system like Pure Comments for engagement. We’ll see.

    • Numeric Citizen ☛ Happy ignorant here

      Having to create a new X account, then being exposed to ads, tracking, etc. killed my desire to understand. It’s ok not to understand everything. I’m a happier ignorant.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Register UK ☛ Ransomware gangs skip the CEO, head straight for the 40-something IT manager

      Rather than blasting the same extortion email across an organization, attackers are doing their homework first. Zscaler says they combine information from compromised systems with publicly available data to map reporting lines and identify the employees most likely to influence a company's response.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Futurism ☛ USA Today Partners With Palantir to Gain "Actionable Intelligence" On Its Audiences

      When you read the newspaper, does it read you back?

      On Thursday, USA Today Co — formerly known as Gannett, the publisher of its eponymous newspaper USA Today— announced that it was partnering with the AI surveillance firm Palantir to monetize and gain “actionable intelligence” on its audiences, Nieman Lab reports.

    • Stanford University ☛ Stanford ends contract with Flock cameras

      ALPRs are cameras that take pictures of cars and record metadata, including license plate information. Stanford had partnered with Flock since 2024 through the Department of Public Safety (SUDPS).

  • Confidentiality

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Open-source stealth USB hides an encrypted partition behind an 8GB decoy drive — 'Phantom Drive' appears as a regular USB stick until you create a text file to unlock the hidden data

      From the outside, the Phantom Drive, created by Rootkit Labs, appears like a boring old USB. It has that classic, cheap plastic-feeling look to it that would never make you second-guess its intention; when you plug it in, it shows up as just an 8GB drive. However, under the hood, the Phantomdrive is powered by a microSD card that only unlocks itself when you specifically create a new text file, after which it mounts the secret partition, which comes with AES-256 encryption. It's made for situations and places where you might be forced to reveal the contents of a storage device.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Accent of Rigor

    This should have been bigger news than it was. The most direct tests ever run of the algorithmic-bubble hypothesis, run on the platforms themselves with the company’s cooperation, came back with exposure changing and minds not. And it confirmed what the earlier data already suggested: a 2015 study of 10.1 million Facebook users found the ranking algorithm reduced cross-cutting content by 5 percent for conservatives and 8 percent for liberals, while what users chose to click on filtered far more. “Compared with algorithmic ranking,” the authors wrote, “individuals’ choices played a stronger role.” The sociologist Chris Bail, who has spent a career on this literature, put the conclusion plainly: the most important driver of political polarization on our platforms “is us”.

• Environment

  • New York Times ☛ New Amazon Data Center Stokes Worry It Would Be the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.

    The new gas-burning plant, if built to specifications, would be permitted to release 33 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, regulatory records show, more planet-warming gases than any other power plant in the country.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Amazon’s new 7.65GW Texas AI data center power plant could become the largest source of CO₂ pollution in the US — custom 35-turbine gas plant authorized to emit 33 million tons of annual greenhouse gases

    Conversely, Amazon had pledged to achieve net-zero carbon emissions across all its global business operations by 2040. The company made the promise in 2019 when it initiated and co-founded The Climate Pledge — a voluntary coalition of over 700 companies and partners — aimed at addressing its own corporate footprint and rallying global supply chains. However, the company has seen its emissions rise each year for the past several years, something analysts attribute to a spike in data centers to support the AI boom. The company is currently building several additional AI data centers globally, including the one that the new gas plant would power in Texas.

  • The Verge ☛ An Amazon data center could have the worst polluting power plant in the country

    An Amazon-owned site in Pecos County, Texas, received a permit to release up to 33 million tons of CO2.

  • TechCrunch ☛ Planned Amazon data center could become the biggest climate polluter in the U.S.

    AI has already had a significant impact on Amazon’s carbon emissions, which it reported were up 16% last year — the wrong direction for a company that pledged to eliminate its carbon emissions by 2040. And that could get worse as Amazon and tech companies back the development of huge natural gas plants to support their power-hungry data centers.

  • Wired ☛ Here Are the First Images of the Crater Left on the Moon by SpaceX’s Rocket

    The Korea Aerospace Research Institute shared the first photographs captured by its lunar orbiter. South Korea is one of the few nations that currently has satellites traveling around the moon at an altitude of 62 miles (100 kilometers) above the surface. The Danuri orbiter flew over the region shortly after the impact.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • The Verge ☛ Mark Zuckerberg’s yacht was closer, but someone else saved a stranded boat

      Earlier this week, the Alaskan cruise ship Wilderness Legacy rescued a small skiff stranded near Farragut Bay after running out of fuel. But, according to tracking data reviewed by the Alaska Beacon and Halifax Shipping News, the closest vessel was actually Mark Zuckerberg’s super yacht, Launchpad.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Haaretz ☛ 'Everyone Moves to Tel Aviv': Why Secular Tech Workers Are Fleeing Jerusalem

    Jerusalem is struggling to retain its secular population, and Mobileye illustrates the scale of the challenge: The flagship of the city's tech sector is struggling to retain employees, many of whom prefer to work in central Israel

  • Wired ☛ These AI Barons Are Ready to Give Away Their Fortunes

    Along with a new generation of techno-philanthropists, though, comes a tangle of unresolved questions: Is philanthropy the most appropriate way to redistribute wealth? To what degree are megadonors responsible for some of the problems they aim to fix? Could a pledge that scales with a company’s success come to justify unsavory business practices or reckless accelerationism? And is this go-around any different from previous iterations of Silicon Valley giving?

  • Sean Goedecke ☛ I got an email about resistance

    This will be kind of an unusual post. I got a recent email about my writing that I thought was such a good articulation of one common criticism that I’d like to share it (and my response) in full.

  • Doc Searls ☛ The Web and the New Reality

    Until Linux Journal hired me in 1996, no publication—tech or otherwise—would employ me. Not full-time, anyway. I was too obsessed with the Internet, the Web, and what I saw as the dawn of a new reality: a digital world we would co-occupy with the natural one. So I self-published on the Web, at Searls.com, where that writing still sits, waiting for me to make all of it https rather than http. This is one of those pieces, published on December 1, 1995, six days before Bill Gates’ “Pearl Harbor” speech to his Microsoft troops. I’ve made minimal edits to add links and correct punctuation.

  • Daniel Pocock ☛ Clacton by-election bias favoritism for Nigel Farage and Count Binface [Ed: Media Helps Farage Win by Boosting False (Invalid, Satirical) Choices]

    During my campaign for the Clacton-on-Sea by-election, I've had numerous discussions with local residents and rival candidates concerned about the huge media bias in favor of the incumbent candidate and one of the novelty candidates, Count Binface.

    Immediately after the incumbent MP resigned, numerous news reports appeared telling residents to make a tactical vote for the novelty candidate. Local people feel his tactical vote is not their own decision, it feels like other people deciding how Clacton should vote.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • ANF News ☛ Afghan women condemn Taliban: Women have been excluded from public life

    As the fifth anniversary of the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan approaches, the Afghanistan Women’s Political Participation Network issued a statement addressing the Taliban’s policies toward women and the Afghan people.

    The network stated that during nearly five years of Taliban rule, civil and political freedoms have been severely restricted through policies of repression, intimidation, and fear. It said the Taliban’s rule has been characterized by the elimination of civil liberties, systematic repression, widespread human rights violations, the denial of women’s fundamental rights, and worsening poverty and discrimination.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Don’t Just Tax the Rich — Attack Inequality at the Root

    To address the US’s severe inequality, we can and should raise taxes on the rich. But we can also restructure markets so that they don’t produce such unequal incomes in the first place, by reining in corporate power and our predatory financial sector.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Gen Z Can’t Go On. It Must Go On.

    Work under capitalism sucks, and Gen Z’s disillusionment with the labor market is justified. But work itself is socially necessary and the only way to transform it is through collective power, not withdrawal.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ Against Oligarchy, Part III: Taxing Capital vs. Taxing Labor

    Since 2000, however, an entirely different dynamic has emerged: the share of labor compensation in total income has declined sharply. In other words, the share of national income going to workers, including highly paid workers, has plunged while the share going to the owners of capital has soared. Furthermore, the rise of AI, which appears to reduce the need for workers while requiring huge capital investments both in software and in physical assets such as datacenters, power supplies, and advanced chips, may cause a further large shift in income from labor to capital.

  • Carole Cadwalladr ☛ The Invisible Women

    Some years ago, I co-wrote a commissioned pilot for a TV series that centred around a bunch of unlikely female spies. It was based on a real story about how parliament’s intelligence committee told MI5 they needed to get with the programme and stop recruiting from public schools and Oxbridge and put ads on places like Mumsnet.

    It didn’t get picked up for broadcast but my friend, Louise Crowe, and I had a blast writing it and this morning, I found myself thinking, as I often have, about our tagline for the show: “There’s no-one more invisible than a middle aged woman.”