Leftovers

• Kev Quirk ☛ Would You Like to Write to Me?

  I really enjoy writing. Not typing - writing. With a fountain pen on good quality paper. I find the whole process cathartic; putting pen to paper demands far more use of my grey matter than hammering away at a keyboard.

• Chris Maiorana ☛ M-x and the future of Emacs

  Computing is about choice, especially in our open source communities. That will never change. I don’t know how future developments will affect Emacs, no one does. But I don’t see how it could change much for those who choose to use it over newer and flashier options.

  It’s easy to see how a coding agent could nullify a text editor for a segment of users, but that would be applicable to all text editors—not just Emacs.

• University of Toronto ☛ My small wish for terminal programs (and other programs)

  Approximately none of these programs have a simple setting to invert themselves to a light theme. Instead, you get to go through all of their colour settings trying to set them correctly. It's often not as simple as foreground and background, because you also have to change cursor colour and cursor text colour and other yak shaving. My experience so far is that different terminal programs have different collections of settings and the interactions of what I need to set aren't always clear, making it more frustrating.

• Career/Education

  • The Atlantic ☛ Should We Ban AI for Kids?

    Long before he became famous as the author of The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt was a social psychologist whose work revolutionized the field. In this episode of The Permanent Questions, taped in front of a live audience at last month’s Atlantic Festival, David Brooks talks with Haidt about his biggest lessons from 40 years of studying human nature. David and Haidt discuss the role of the emotions in moral decision making, how to design a system that produces less loathsome elites, and why AI is “the neutron bomb for education.”

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ Upgrading A Benchtop Laser For Megawatt Power

    A Q-switch is an optical attenuator; when placed in the laser cavity, it keeps the cavity from reaching resonance. This greatly limits stimulated emission, allowing energy to build up in the chamber as the gain medium becomes increasingly saturated. Eventually, at some energy level, the Q-switch suddenly stops blocking light, and the cavity lases in a very short, powerful pulse. The Q-switch doesn’t increase the energy in a laser shot, but it does release it much more quickly. In this case, [Les] used chromium-doped yttrium aluminum garnet crystals as the Q-switch and compared performance across several different crystals.

  • Martijn Braam ☛ Reverse engineering the Variax guitar

    The Variax guitars are an "old" series of modelling guitars from Line6. The early models don't even feature any magnetic pickups since all the sound comes from piezo pickups in the bridge. The guitar actually has a piezo pickup for every string which gives it the ability to do good pitch-shifting and modelling. At least a lot better than the modellers I've used.

• Proprietary / Vendor Lock-in / Malware

  • Peter Hofmann ☛ DOS: Determining system uptime

    For next Advent of Code, I'm loosely planning to use some old Windows, probably NT4 (I wanted to go with 2000 first, but that's a bit slow on my old box, and 95/98 are a bit unstable; NT4 might hit the sweet spot?). What was missing in my toolchest for that OS was a small program to print the system's uptime -- just like uptime on Unix. The only way I knew was to do net statistics server | more and then do the math in your head, but that's a bit cumbersome.

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

    • Futurism ☛ AI Is Creating "Doom Loops" All Over the Economy

      The closer you look, the more you see doom loops everywhere. Journalists, for example, used to publish work under the assumption that online platforms would drive readership to them. But now, tools like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini simply summarize their articles without sending readers to their sites, sparking a crisis that seems poised to wipe out the independent media.

      Similar stories are playing out across other industries, from music to filmmaking. Writ large, many are concerned that AI will eventually be strong enough to wipe out huge numbers of jobs, creating a situation in which unemployed consumers won’t have the funds to support the economy.

    • Silicon Angle ☛ Scam Altman says people need to accept 'some bad things' are going to happen if they want AI

      In an interview published in Politico’s Decoded newsletter today, Altman (pictured) said he agrees with Amodei about the need for AI to be regulated, but differs in terms of how heavy-handed that regulation should be. “I think there’s a lot of daylight [between us],” he said. “I disagree, but I understand the perspective of people who are like, ‘this technology is going to get so powerful, and it’s so dangerous, that a single lab in San Francisco should have it and make sure nothing bad happens, and kind of figure out how to dole out the benefits’.”

    • Nicolas Magand ☛ Lazy websites – The Jolly Teapot

      As recently as last summer, I added a new bookmark folder in Safari called “A.I. Slop”. It’s not a folder for articles I suspect to be A.I.-generated; it’s mostly about how the websites look. Some of them are actually good, fun, and useful sites. They just happen to look like every other website designed with A.I. (Claude Design, if my CSS palate identifies it correctly).

    • Jonas Schäfer ☛ We lost the war on quality

      I work at a company doing things with computers, so of course there have been run-ins with AI at my dayjob, too. Due to the usual NDAs which go alongside working in technology, I cannot talk much about this publicly. So far, I have been spared of having to use LLMs for work. My employer puts a great deal of focus on digital sovereignty and sustainability, which makes the use of LLMs problematic, to say the least.

      Nontheless, one thing I can talk in more detail about is what I opened this article with: my NextCloud problem.

    • Christian Hofstede-Kuhn ☛ Self-Hosted AI: Qwen 3.8 on a Rented Blackwell at 150 Tokens per Second

      My current setup: Qwen 3.8 27B on a rented NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell at RunPod, started with one command, answering at around 150 tokens per second, and torn down again when I am done. The screenshot above is from a running pod. It wrote a haiku about the GPU shortage while occupying one of the GPUs in question.

  • Social Control Media

    • TechCrunch ☛ Reddit is killing RSS feeds and ending public API access because of AI bots

      Amid a number of updates for moderators and developers announced Wednesday, comes bad news for supporters of a more open web: Reddit is ending support for RSS feeds.

      Reddit says RSS has now become a “common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse,” which is why it’s made the decision to wind down RSS feeds on its platform.

    • Kev Quirk ☛ Privacy and Webmentions

      To my mind, a public post on an open platform like Mastodon is precisely that: public. The Fediverse is decentralised by design. When you reply to someone, your message doesn't remain isolated on your home instance; it federates across countless independent servers. Pulling a public reply onto kevquirk.com via a Webmention bridge is conceptually no different from fosstodon.org relaying a reply originally posted on mastodon.social.

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Congress Must Investigate War Profiteers Once Again

    If the promises of these weapons salesmen are to be believed, the US war with Iran should already be over. The enormousness of the Pentagon’s budget, on paper, means that any conflict the United States enters should be a decidedly short and lopsided affair. Yet Iran has not crumbled against an onslaught that one analyst calculated has cost the United States $72 billion and counting. What has all this spending accomplished?

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Fabricati Diem ☛ Deshittification Part 4: The Factory Reset Consent Trap

      In Part 1 of this series, I laid out the foundational OpenBSD and Unbound architecture used to reclaim network sovereignty from an LG Smart TV. In Part 2, we saw how the OS holds the App Store hostage. In Part 3, I documented a stateful TCP kill switch that actively terminates Netflix streams if telemetry is blocked.

      But a lingering question remained: What happens at the absolute beginning? What does a Smart TV do before it has any user profile, before it has cached any settings, and crucially, before it has ever shown the user a privacy policy?

• Defence/Aggression

  • CBC ☛ Kids and young adults are addicted to screens. New research argues it may be a public health concern

    "My son understands that he's addicted," said Chrysanthou, the Toronto-based board chair of the advocacy group Children First Canada. She says he's asked her for help to stop using his digital device so much, but the minute she turns her back, he's reaching for it again.

    Her son is like millions of other kids around the world whose physical and mental well-being are at risk because of excess screen time, according to a new series of research papers published Sunday by medical journal The Lancet.

  • University of Michigan ☛ UMich’s Los Alamos partnership threatens research enterprise

    For at least a year, the University of Michigan’s administration has been trying to convince a skeptical public that its plan to build a $1.25 billion [data center] computing facility with Los Alamos National Laboratory is a win for science and for the region. Officials tout the potential for cancer cures, clean energy and hundreds of jobs. Yet, LANL’s primary mission is maintaining and modernizing the nuclear stockpile. While Los Alamos officials have confirmed that the facility will conduct nuclear weapons research, U-M officials have sought to downplay that fact.

  • International Business Times ☛ UK Greens Vote 'Zionism Is Racism' Despite Revolt From 4 of 5 MPs as Israel Bans Polanski

    The resolution, titled 'Zionism is racism', describes Zionism as an 'ethnonationalist political project' and says it should be treated like other forms of racism under the party's anti-racism policies.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ US Army unit deploys drone assembled completely in-house, uses 3D-printed 'Dragoon Bombs' with ball bearing shrapnel — device has a range of up to 12 miles and can be configured for anti-personnel and anti-light-armor missions

    The U.S. Army’s 2nd Cavalry Regiment (2CR), based in Bavaria, Germany, has successfully launched an attack drone it claims is the first the unit has built and flown. According to Stars and Stripes, the soldiers of 2CR, also called Dragoons, used an Orqa MRM2-10 drone that they assembled and fitted with an electronic safety and arming device attached to a 3D-printed casing called “Dragoon bombs.” The explosives in the bomb could also be modified, such as adding ball bearings to target enemy personnel or using a shaped charge to defeat light armor. You can see the drone in action in the video embedded below.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Salon ☛ I grew up next door to Ted Kaczynski

    Some of it is true. His code name was Lawful, and Ted did want to prove that he couldn’t be defeated. There was a camera rolling, electrodes measuring heart and respiratory rates. The experiments were designed to break down a subject’s ideals and measure the stress response. They were unethical and cruel — especially for a 16-year-old who placed such importance on identity and intellect.

• Environment

  • [Old] Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research ☛ Deforestation lowers threshold for Amazon degradation to below 2°C warming — Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research

    Around two-thirds of the Amazon rainforest could shift into degraded forest or savannah-like ecosystems at 1.5-1.9°C of global warming if deforestation increases to roughly 22-28 percent of the Amazon, according to a new study led by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), published in Nature. Without additional deforestation, by contrast, such large-scale changes would likely occur only at much higher warming levels of around 3.7–4°C.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Leon Mika ☛ A Day In Wellington

      It’s time to reveal the secret of why I’m in Wellington. A little while ago, a YouTuber I watch that specialises in Victorian railway videos released one on Wellington’s rail lines1. It looked like an interesting thing to see which, apart from just needing a bit of a break, is the reason why I decided to cross the Tasman. Today was meant to be the first line to tour. Alas, the best laid plans…

• Finance

  • Ruben Schade ☛ The end of card surcharges in Australia

    Until last week, it was common in Australia for a card surcharge to be added to retail transactions. This was declared on the POS terminal with a sticker, usually in the form of a percentage. The Reserve Bank has now outlawed the practice for payment systems under its remit. This is great news!

  • Simon Willison ☛ We’re going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything

    The service I most want to see this from is AWS. I’ve heard plenty of stories from people who refuse to use AWS for personal projects out of (justified) fear that a runaway service might bankrupt them. I’ve also heard stories from people who didn’t anticipate this and ended up seriously burned.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ AI spending now dwarfs the railway and dot-com booms

    Cumulative spending globally on data centres alone could top US$30-trillion by 2050, according to a projection by PwC, almost matching the value of outstanding US treasuries. It “dwarfs” what was spent in the railway or dot-com booms, even after adjusting for inflation, PwC said.

  • Wired ☛ Rural Data Centers Are in for a Big Federal Tax Break

    But experts warn that the results for rural communities could be mixed.

    “Right now, the only requirement to get the benefits is capital investment,” says Emily Kraschel, a tax policy analyst at the Searchlight Institute, a public policy think tank. “However, that doesn't guarantee that that money is necessarily creating jobs or creating a local economic boost. You'd be more sure of that with a more traditional factory that requires lots of workers. But with a data center, that assumption goes a little wonky.”

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Ricardo Mendes ☛ Israel cannot edit its crimes out of history

    Calling for filmmakers to hang because they expose your country’s violence is barbaric. A minister branding them traitors helps create a climate in which persecution can pass for patriotism. The message reaches every journalist, artist and witness: speak, and you too could become a target.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Copyrights

    • CopyrightLately ☛ Everyone Won the Ross Fair Use Appeal. Except Ross.

      The Third Circuit filed its opinion in Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence under seal on Tuesday, presumably to give the Westlaw headnotes at the center of the case time to clear national security review. The ruling was unsealed Wednesday afternoon, after neither side asked for any redactions, thereby ending one of the shorter-lived security emergencies in federal appellate history.

      Within 48 hours, pretty much anyone with a PR team or a social media account had found a way to claim victory.