Leftovers

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • LabX Media Group ☛ Are Awards Essential for Scientific Success?

    Scientific awards, whether for fellowships or for prestigious Lasker, Nobel, or Breakthrough prizes, are highly visible markers of success in science. But how much do awards really matter? Are they an important measure of professional success, a useful career boost, or simply one piece of a much larger picture? We asked The Scientist’s readers to share their perspectives.

  • Bartosz Milewski ☛ Yoneda Lemma in Double Categories

    Working with double categories can be aptly summarized in a meme: Talk to me about sets without mentioning sets. We don’t talk about hom-sets, we talk about horizontal units. Secretly, we are visualizing horizontal arrows as profunctors, and the unit of profunctor composition is a hom-functor.

• Career/Education

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Americans Are Turning Against School Vouchers

    Ten percent.

    That’s how many Arizonans support that state’s Wild West voucher scheme. If the figure seems surprising given the ardency of the sales pitch for “education freedom,” its source should send your eyebrows skyward. This bleak view of Arizona public opinion about the state’s $1-billion-plus Education Savings Account (ESA) program comes not from voucher haters but from their superfans: the American Federation for Children (AFC), the deep-pocketed and highly influential school-choice lobbying firm started by Betsy DeVos.

• Hardware

  • Doug Brown ☛ Fixing an NZXT Signal 4K30 part 2: the green/pink video bug

    Last year, I repaired an NZXT Signal 4K30 USB capture device that I bought on eBay for cheap. It was completely dead, and the cause turned out to be a bad solder joint on an inductor, which prevented power from getting to a crucial part of the board.

    After I fixed it, I tried using it to capture signals from a bunch of different HDMI source devices to make sure it worked correctly. As I said in my last post about it: [...]

  • But she's a girl... ☛ The one true keyboard layout

    Keyboard layouts are baffling. Of course, lots of things in computing (and life) are baffling, but keyboard layouts seem to confound me in unique and brain-straining ways. I need to be clear about what I mean by ‘keyboard layouts’ here, as I have used (and will continue to use) that term in other ways in this blog. Today’s subject concerns the layout that your computer uses to determine which symbols are associated with particular single keypresses, with or without modifiers. So, for example, what character should be output if the 2 key is pressed with Shift? This is distinct from the other kind of keyboard layout that I have messed about with and written about here where we are deciding how the physical keys on any given keyboard are laid out. This determines which physical key outputs 2. That’s about as far as I understand it even now, so experts among you may be tutting and rolling your eyes as you read this. Sorry.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Salon ☛ How soybeans took over the American diet – without anyone noticing

    Most people don’t think of themselves as soybean consumers. Few sit down to a plate of soybeans, but soy is hiding in plain sight throughout the American diet. Soybean oil appears in salad dressings, mayonnaise, baked goods, infant formula, snacks and fried foods; soy lecithin emulsifies chocolate and bread; and soy protein fortifies energy bars, breakfast cereals and canned soup.

  • Salon ☛ Ectopic pregnancy deaths have nearly doubled. It’s worse in states with abortion bans

    ProPublica’s analysis of CDC data found that almost 200 women died after an ectopic pregnancy from 2020 to 2025

• Proprietary / Vendor Lock-in / Malware

  • Eliseo Martelli ☛ iMacs Old Enough to Drive

    Yesterday, Francesco and I brought home two 2008 iMacs, the ones with the Core 2 Duo processors. One comes straight from a local radio station, while the other is from the desk of a graphic design studio. These machines inevitably show their age but I think they are still charming.

    The real dilemma now is figuring out how to give mine a meaningful second life. I have four main options on the table: [...]

  • Auberon Lópeberon López ☛ The Deathray

    In the compute shader an infinite busy loop copies the same vector over and over again in a buffer. The vertex shader depends on the same data buffer the compute shader is operating on. Because the compute shader is busy looping, the vertex shader can't move forward.

    This spills over into other processes wanting to use the GPU, namely the WindowServer. As a result of our WebGPU pileup, the WindowServer becomes unresponsive as well. This doesn't always manifest the same way. Sometimes I can still move the mouse, sometimes not. Sometimes I get the beachball, and sometimes magenta junk shows up on part of the screen. I'm not sure what leads to the different behavior!

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

    • Futurism ☛ College Students Using AI to Cheat Are Going to Absurd Lengths to Avoid Detection

      Danielle Carr, a historian and anthropologist at UCLA, thinks that professors relying on surveilling and detection methods to weed out cheating will only keep them stuck in a game of cat and mouse. AI cheating, she told the magazine, isn’t “a technical problem that has a technical fix.”

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Bernie Sanders proposes 20 year prison sentence for AI devs who plow ahead with Artificial Superintelligence plans — penalty on par with illegally developing rogue nuclear weapons

      Senators Bernie Sanders and Greg Cezar have announced their Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act. Seeking to pause advanced AI development, the legislation’s stick is pretty severe. Penalties facing entities/developers who violate the pauses and prohibitions in the bill could face up to 20 years in prison. That’s a sentence on a par with someone found guilty of designing a rogue nuclear weapon.

    • Chris Ferris ☛ Jurassic Agents

      They were testing the fences for weaknesses, systematically. They remember. That is a better description of what happened inside Artifactory than anything in the CVE writeups.

  • Social Control Media

    • BoingBoing ☛ Watching humanity fail the sea lions of La Jolla Cove in real time

      My social media feed is full of videos of jerk after jerk unable to follow instructions, stay behind a rope barrier, or avoid the wild animal. This year seems to be reaching new heights, but the harassment is years old. Who are the holdouts? Even the chairperson of the Seal Society allows for "cones and signs" as some sort of solution; however, that does not seem to be working in real time. Perhaps the cones will be brighter?

    • Times Of San Diego ☛ Should La Jolla Cove close to protect sea lions?

      LaCava said officials are considering a middle ground between verbal warnings from city employees and federal prosecution.

      “Yelling at people apparently is not enough, even with the megaphone,” LaCava said. “How can we give our park rangers some kind of civil citation?”

      Federal law provides a mechanism to designate state officers to enforce the Marine Mammal Protection Act, but makes no mention of city employees having the authority to enforce the federal law. Whether that authority could be extended to San Diego park rangers — and what form such enforcement would take — remains a question for NOAA and the city.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • El País ☛ People are using AI for personal questions almost twice as often as for work-related queries

      Around 38% of people living in Spain regularly use generative artificial intelligence (AI). This is according to a survey on information and communication technologies in households, conducted by the country’s National Statistics Institute (INE). However, a closer look at how these tools are employed reveals that their primary use is domestic — specifically, for personal inquiries — with 30% of users stating that they use AI for this purpose. This figure is nearly double the percentage of those who use it regularly at work (18%, according to the INE and Eurostat), or for educational and training purposes (16.2%).

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ Juveniles riding in Waymo arrested after police find a 'ghost gun'

      This wasn’t the first time Waymo has tattled on alleged troublemakers. In July, Waymo contacted the San Mateo Police Department after two teens were found drinking alcohol and shooting toy guns in the back of a car, authorities said at the time.

    • CS Monitor ☛ The secret ballot has been an article of faith in U.S. elections. That's being tested in Georgia.

      There's a flaw in Georgia’s voting equipment that can allow voters to be matched to their ballots after they’ve been cast.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Waymo robotaxi calls cops on riders handling loaded AR-style ghost gun — Waymo alerted San Francisco police, then juvenile riders were stopped and arrested

      From our understanding of the Waymo in-cabin camera monitoring procedure, humans may review footage when something is flagged by the in-car sensors. That may be how the source report can say that the AR was loaded, or that was a later discovery from the police stop that somehow got attributed to the Waymo phoning home.

    • The Verge ☛ Waymo pulls over, calls cops on riders with a ghost gun

      Two people were arrested in San Fransico while riding around in a Waymo robotaxi after the cab pulled over and called the cops on them. The riders were juveniles in possession of a loaded AR-style ghost gun and were taken to a juvenile hall. While the police report did not specify who was operating the autonomous car, Waymo later confirmed it was one of its vehicles to the Los Angeles Times.

      A spokesperson told the LA Times that a “violation of our terms of service involving a firearm” was detected. At which point the car pulled over and alerted the authorities.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Independent UK ☛ A Muslim region in the southern Philippines votes in its first elections

    A Muslim autonomous region in the southern Philippines is holding its first parliamentary elections

• Environment

  • Wired ☛ AI Agents Are Thirsty for Power

    “What on earth are they building all of these data centers for?” an exasperated friend asked me recently.

    They’re not the only one asking: We got several similar questions on our recent data center livestream. It’s a really reasonable thing to wonder about. After all, if AI is already making all these breakthroughs, why are tech companies taking on billions of dollars of debt and constructing some of the biggest power plants in the world to build even more data centers?

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Christian Cleberg ☛ Nowhere, Specifically

      These spaces are built to move people through them, accounting for the nonstop movement of crowds. Take the crowds out of the picture and suddenly the room is useless. The airport terminal without people is a room without a purpose. When you stumble upon one of these rooms, this is where you encounter that uneasy feeling.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Digital Camera World ☛ "For three years, I had tried many times to get a decent photo of this species, but I hadn't yet succeeded. What you see before you is a dream fulfilled" – Young wildlife photographer scoops top youth prize in major bird photography competition

      Juan's striking image of a Canada Warbler perched above a delicate spiderweb has now been named the Youth winner in the 2026 Audubon Photography Awards.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Naomi Klein: ‘Extreme wealth has a deranging effect. It turns you into a supremacist’

    End Times Fascism describes the world we’re in, where the components of authoritarianism are modelled everywhere you look: anarcho-libertarian economics in Argentina, the destruction of a free press in Russia, the erosion of democratic institutions in Hungary (until Viktor Orbán was deposed), “anti-immigrant neofascism” in Italy, the weaponisation of trans identity by Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Islamophobia in Modi’s India. But this is fascism with a difference. Its proponents are actively willing an apocalypse, or a wave of interconnected apocalypses brought forth by climate change and financial chaos, to hasten us towards a post-democratic world in which only a rich few survive to prosper.

  • The Record ☛ Thorough reorganization at NSA will create five 'mission centers,' including cyber and AI

    In place of existing directorates, the largest electronic spy agency in the world will be recast into five “mission centers” devoted to China, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, combat support and global intelligence, these people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told Recorded Future News.

  • Ricardo Mendes ☛ A Node on the Web

    And I think this is the part Americans haven’t fully reckoned with yet.

    The United States hasn’t lost its military power. It hasn’t stopped being one of the largest economies on Earth. It hasn’t magically ceased to matter.

    What it is losing is something much harder to rebuild: trust.

  • Dr Molly Tov ☛ in which i love food and hate capitalism

    I approached the "change your diet" advice the way US culture teaches us: as a wholly individual project. Good health, dietarily, is about making healthy personal choices, that's all. It's about discipline and what you put in your mouth. It's that simple!

    It is not that simple.

  • Crooked Timber ☛ The US is not a serious country

    In any serious country, a massively expensive policy of this kind would have been analysed in detail by now, with estimates of the immediate effect on inflation and interest rates and the flow-on to the economy as a whole. Combined with the budgetary costs and price effects of the Iran War, it seems likely to add at least a couple of percentage points to US inflation, giving the Fed a choice between abandoning its inflation-targeting regime or raising interest rates enough to risk a recession.

  • Bryan Cantrill ☛ The contagion of fear

    What 27-year-old Coxon is an expert on — if accidentally — is the contagion of fear. We cannot expect the public to understand the inner workings of all technology (that was the fallacy of my 18-year-old self!): technology is too broad, too deep, and too core to all of our lives to expect everyone to understand everything; we must — at some level — trust domain experts. When those domain experts sow fear, it is the fear that takes root, propagating much more readily than any evidence that may follow it. (As Jonathan Swift famously quipped over three centuries ago, "Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it".) In this regard, Coxon is more vector than index case: it is indisputable that the fears of extinction risk are widespread and Coxon himself likely has these fears because he has heard them from someone else. Unfortunately, as the fear takes hold, the sheer number of frightened experts becomes its own kind of evidence, with contrary voices drowned out by the din of an apparent consensus.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ We Rely on Cleaners’ Work, So Cleaners Should Be Paid More

    Cleaning work is often called low-skilled, perhaps because it’s usually done by low-waged women. In an interview, a cleaner in the European Parliament and a hospital cleaner explain why their work should be more valued and better paid.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Techdirt ☛ Microsoft Slaps Hours Limits On Xbox Game Pass Cloud Gaming

    But for the next tier of enshittification, there’s… Xbox’s Game Pass service. If you thought the devaluing of the service the last go around was shitty, wait until you get a load of Microsoft’s plan to slap an hours limit for its cloud gaming onto those same subscriptions.