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Marlon James tells Eric Olson about (finally!) writing a novel that draws from his life. | Lit Hub In Conversation “Terror wasn’t the only weapon the Nazis used against the American prisoners. Sometimes, they used propagandistic persuasion as well.” On

Recharging for a bit

“Memory-holing is core to all of the narrative coups Republicans are achieving right now.”

Today's links Google skates: Another federal judge loses a game of peek-a-boo. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Memory-hacking ads; "Dzur"; NZ Ministry of DRM; Canadians v looking at the internet; Advice for self-publishers; Advice for writers; Why Wikipedia works. Upcoming appearances: Dąbrowa Górnicza, Warsaw, Brighton, London, Budapest, Edmonton, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Google skates (permalink) Rome wasn't overthrown in a day. Oligarchies are stubborn, and by the time they've established and entrenched themselves, they have resources, power blocs and even mercenaries they can deploy to repel would-be dethroners. The USA got its first antimonopoly law, the Sherman Act, in 1890, but it took 22 years before that law could be used to crush John D Rockefeller's corrupt, sprawling empire. Senator John Sherman promoted his law as a way of preventing monopolies from emerging, warning the Senate that they would struggle to overthrow the "autocrats of trade" that monopolies created: https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/ The Senate passed his law and Harrison signed it, but then successive administrations left the Sherman Act to gather dust on a shelf as Rockefeller went on a spree, accumulating the kind of power that made him a true "autocrat of trade," so powerful that he and the US government were practically evenly matched. Allowing Rockefeller to create, expand and consolidate his monopoly power was a terrible tactical blunder, giving him decades in which he was able to loot America and its trading partners, pauperizing ordinary people and smashing anyone who got in his way. No one was willing to admit that Rockefeller was a threat to democracy and prosperity until he had amassed all that power, and once he had all that power, it took heroic effort to break him. The Rockefeller story is like the punchline of that joke: "When it doesn't rain, the roof don't leak; and when it's raining, it's too wet to fix it." Alternatively, there's my other favorite punchline: "If you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here." The Rockefeller blunder wasn't a one-off. The Apple ][+ hit the shelves the same year Reagan hit the campaign trail, and the tech industry's rise occurred simultaneously with the dismantling of competition law enforcement. Tech companies were the first "post-antitrust" industry, and it wasn't until these companies became palpable, terrifying, undeniable, existential civilizational risks that we remembered that we had all these laws on the books that were designed to curb excessive corporate power. Under Biden, a group of generationally talented, visionary trustbusters were given access to those dormant enforcement powers: Lina Khan at the FTC; Rohit Chopra at the CFPB, Tim Wu in the White House, and Jonathan Kantor at the DOJ Antitrust Division. Together with a staff of canny and skilled lawyers and economists, these people scored incredible victories against Big Tech. During the Biden years, Google lost three federal antitrust cases. Three! But if we wanted to get there, we wouldn't start from here. After a series of stinging defeats in the US and abroad, after watching the EU, the UK, Japan, Singapore and South Korea make common cause with Biden's enforcers, Big Tech threw everything it had into Trump, who promised them a system of regulatory forbearance in exchange for low-cost bribery, backstopped by a xenophobic, belligerent geopolitics that would rain down punishments on any country that dared to regulate or tax Big Tech: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62553ywn77o And then the other shoe dropped: the federal judges who convicted Google of operating an illegal monopoly handed down their "remedy" decisions. In an antitrust case, the "remedy" phase is like sentencing – the stage of the legal proceeding where the judge decides what punishment the company should face for breaking the law. The first of these remedies came out a year ago, in September 2025. Judge Amit Mehta had presided over Google's "search" case, where we learned that Google had deliberately made search worse so that you'd have to search more than once in order to get your answer, which would allow the company the chance to show you more ads: https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan Google was able to do this because it had cornered the market on search. The company had spent years paying a $20b annual bribe to Apple to stay out of the search market, and they'd bought the default search placement for every operating system, browser and carrier. If you encountered a search box in the wild, it was almost certainly wired into Google's servers. They knew that there was approximately zero chance that you'd ever stumble upon another search engine, which meant they could make their own search as shitty as they wanted and keep your business. Confronted with these proven findings, Mehta decided that Google's punishment should be…nothing. They wouldn't be forced to delete the personal data they'd taken from billions of people. They wouldn't be forced to spin off Chrome or Android – two of the key tools Google uses to keep people from discovering other search engines. They wouldn't even be forced to halt the $20b annual bribe to Apple – the judge fretted that without that $20b annual bribe, Apple wouldn't be able to pay researchers to come up with cool new iPhone features (never mind that Apple spends all that money – and more – on stock buybacks, a recently illegal form of stock manipulation): https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/03/unpunishing-process/#fucking-shit-goddammit-fuck Then, a year later, another federal judge – Leonie Brinkema, who presided over the Google "ad-tech" case – decided that Google's penalty for monopolizing the ad market should also be…nothing: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/09/us-court-rules-google-will-not-have-to-sell-ad-exchange-after-losing-antitrust-case/ Oh, maybe not exactly nothing. We don't actually know the full extent of Judge Brinkema's "remedy," because it's sealed for two weeks. What we do know is that Google will not be forced to take the most obvious, effective and necessary step to prevent it from abusing its monopoly: Google will not be forced to sell off part of its ad-tech stack. Let me unpack that for you, because unless you're an ad-tech weirdo, chances are you have no idea how any of this works and don't think it affects you. But the reality is that this is costing you money. It's one of the dirtiest, most profitable scams in the entire tech economy, which is saying something, because that is an economy that is made of scams: https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/04/cheating-at-fraud/#absentee-rentier Unlike older ads, which were targeted based on content (say, an ad for a hotel might run next to a newspaper article about a beachside town) modern ads are built on surveillance. Companies like Google amass vast, nonconsensual dossiers on the personal characteristics and behavior of billions of people, supplemented with information purchased from the unregulated data-broker sector. When you visit a website, the site fires off a piece of software called "sell-side agent" to message a server called an "ad exchange" in order to announce your visit, soliciting bids for the right to show you an ad: "I am about to serve a web-page to a 18-34 year old man-child from New York's outer boroughs, who owns an Xbox and has been recently searching for information about gonorrhea: who wants to cram some ads into this guy's eyeballs?" That ad-exchange server is haunted by "demand-side agents" – these are pieces of software fired off by advertisers that monitor all these advertising opportunities announced on the ad exchange and bid for the right to show you an ad. The highest bidder gets to show you an ad, and the fee is remitted to the exchange, which takes a cut and passes the remainder on to the sell-side platform, which also takes a cut and gives the balance to the website publisher. So the ad-tech stack has three main components: the "sell-side platform" (SSP), which lets web publishers announce auctions for the right to advertise to their visitors; the "demand-side platform" (DSP) that lets advertisers bid to show those visitors ads; and the "ad exchange" – the marketplace where the sell-side and demand-side agents meet to collect bids, finalize the sale, and exchange ads for money. When this all started, there were lots of companies in all three roles. Publishers and advertisers had their choice of SSPs, DSPs and exchanges, and all three types of middleman competed to offer the best deals to advertisers and publishers. Then, Google and Facebook started buying up the leading DSPs, SSPs and exchanges. They used contracts and technical countermeasures to force anyone who used any part of their "stack" to use them for all parts of the transaction. The CEOs of Google and Facebook personally colluded to rig the market, dividing it up between them so that publishers would get less, advertisers would pay more, and Googbook would pocket the difference. The codename for this conspiracy was "Jedi Blue": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue Jedi Blue was just the icing on the cake. The reality is they didn't need the conspiracy: once Google was selling services to advertisers and publishers on an exchange that Google owned, they created an entire universe of ways to rip off both advertisers and publishers. Now consider that Google is also an advertiser and also a web publisher, and the opportunities to cheat are just wild. The numbers tell the story. Before Googbook captured 80% of the display advertising business, the total share of the advertising industry's revenues that went to "intermediaries" (middlemen like ad agencies, ad buyers, etc) was about 15%. Today, that number is 51%. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been moved out of publishers' and advertisers' bank accounts and onto Google and Facebook's balance sheets. This isn't hard to understand. Google runs an ad business that locks in buyers and sellers on a marketplace Google owns and controls, where it also competes with those buyers and sellers. Buying or selling an ad through Google is like going to court to get a divorce, only to discover that you and your soon-to-be-ex- are both represented by the same lawyer, who promptly ascends the bench and dons a judge's wig, and then spends the whole trial trying to match with both of you on Tinder, and who concludes the trial by banging their gavel and announcing that they've decided that the family house will be awarded to…the judge! The most absurd part of this whole farce is the lawyers who defend it on behalf of companies like Google. If a Google lawyer ever showed up to to defend the company in a trial where the judge was working for the plaintiff, they would scream blue murder and refuse to proceed until the judge was removed from the case. But when Google operates a business where it presides over transactions where it has nothing but conflicts of interest, these same lawyers argue that Google would never cheat a seller or a buyer. The fucking absurdity of this arrangement is so obvious that a bill to force a halt to it was co-sponsored…by Elizabeth Warren and Ted Cruz: https://gizmodo.com/google-facebook-america-act-ads-break-up-cruz-warren-1850287725 Why would Warren and Cruz care about this? Because the hundreds of billions that have been moved from publishers and advertisers to Google and Facebook are hundreds of billions of dollars that are no longer paying for news and entertainment production, and they're hundreds of billions of dollars that businesses have to recoup by raising prices on you to pay their advertising bills. Google (and, apparently, Judge Leonie Brinkema) dispute this. They say that "larger forces" have "changed the dynamic" that "restructured the industry." But, I mean, come on! This is a situation where hundreds of billions of dollars are divided up by a thrice convicted monopolist who is mysteriously hundreds of billions of dollars richer, while the other parties to the transaction are mysteriously hundreds of billions of dollars poorer. Anyone who can't draw the obvious causal inference from these facts has so little object permanence that they would lose a fucking game of peek-a-boo. This is so goddamned demoralizing. For a couple years there, it really looked like the tide was turning. Then Judges Brinkema and Mehta came along to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. The only thing that's keeping me going is object permanence. I know my history. I know it took decades from the passage of the Sherman Act until the defeat of John D Rockefeller. Our forebears brought down Rockefeller because they didn't give up, despite setbacks as bad as this one, and worse. Stein's Law of finance holds that "anything that can't go on forever eventually stops," and MLK told us that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." This can't go on forever, and despite Dr King's phrasing, I know he understood that the arc doesn't just "bend" – it is bent – by people like us, hauling on it with all our might. Hey look at this (permalink) Rising Customer Durability, Falling Business Dynamism https://www.chicagobooth.edu/-/media/research/stigler/pdfs/workingpapers/387_customer.pdf DOGE Affiliate Asked for College Credits for Participating in Takeover https://www.wired.com/story/doge-affiliate-asked-for-college-credits-for-participating-in-takeover/ Why office workers are turning against AI https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/why-office-workers-are-turning-against The Quiet Decision Microsoft Made That Devastated Thousands of Nonprofits https://slate.com/technology/2026/08/microsoft-software-nonprofit-data-delete.html Vote for the 2026 Tiny Awards Winner https://tinyawards.net/vote/ Object permanence (permalink) #25yrsago Advertisers claim they can hack your childhood memories https://web.archive.org/web/20010921022846/http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/science/story.jsp?story=92386 #25yrsago Wind-up cellphone charger https://web.archive.org/web/20011031122531/http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,2-2001310179,00.html #20yrsago Steven Brust’s Dzur: witty and exciting heroic fantasy https://memex.craphound.com/2006/09/05/steven-brusts-dzur-witty-and-exciting-heroic-fantasy/ #20yrsago America to US gov’t: kill the Broadcast Treaty! http://www.cptech.org/ip/wipo/bt/jointletter5sep06usptoforum.pdf #20yrsago New Zealand wants a Ministry of DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20070108042834/http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/NZ_draws_line_on_DRM_and_trusted_computing/0,130061733,339270846,00.htm #20yrsago Is it legal to look at the Web in Canada? https://web.archive.org/web/20061010120919/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/1411/135/ #15yrsago Advice for self-publishers: why should anyone care about your book? https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-why-should-anyone-care/ #5yrsago A letter to a discouraged young writer https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/05/why-bother/ #1yrago Why Wikipedia works https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/05/be-the-first-person/#to-not-do-something-that-no-one-else-has-ever-thought-of-not-doing-before Upcoming appearances (permalink) Dąbrowa Górnicza, Kongres Regeneracja! to interdyscyplinarna, Sep 5 https://regeneracja.plse.org.pl/ Warsaw: Romana i Jana Podoskich, Sep 6 https://wydarzenia.phub.pl/events/0ee0e198-f843-423a-890f-c84ff50a46c0 Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8 https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/ London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9 https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn Budapest: Brain Bar, Sep 17 https://brainbar.com/munkatars/cory-doctorow Edmonton: Elbows Up (Edmonton Public Library), Sep 28 https://www.epl.ca/blogs/post/elbows-up-with-cory-doctorow/ South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7 https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK= Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8 https://wordfest.com/2026/show/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/ Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9 https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Evening-with-Cory-Doctorow Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01 Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20 https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020 Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46 Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24 https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ Recent appearances (permalink) The future of the tech crisis (How the Light Gets In) https://iai.tv/video/the-future-of-the-tech-crisis?_auid=2020 How Tech Platforms Took Over the Economy (Dystopia Now) https://sites.libsyn.com/566555/enshittification-and-reverse-centaurs-cory-doctorow-on-how-tech-platforms-took-over-the-economy Hope, AI, Fixing the Internet and the Reverse Centaur of it all (Wilosophy) https://podcastaddict.com/everyone-relax/episode/231414816 Deflating the AI Bubble (Do Not Pass Go) https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/deflating-the-ai-bubble-with-cory Technofeudal Enshittification (Fucking Cancelled) https://www.fuckingcancelled.com/p/technofeudal-enshittification-with Latest books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Saturday's words: 504 (12397 total). "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

With W. Kamau Bell, Michael Lahanas Calderón, and yours truly, Robert Reich

On September 5, 1882, workers in New York City celebrated the first Labor Day holiday with a parade.

Highlight of the week: saw my niece and met her partner Looking forward to: seeing Coyote vs. Acme with my friend Stuff I did: 5 hours book outline went to Bellevue Botanical Garden and wandered around the Kirkland waterfront with my niece and her partner, then grabbed takeout for a picnic at the park took Monday […]

Spoofing scams seem to be on the rise

This is a lovely Markdown/Mindmap app for MacOS.

And the authors opensourced their state-of-the-art rendering engine for people to build alternatives, check it out:

nodes-web.com

2026-09-05 human.json

I maintain a feed aggregator that is used to generate a static web site. That is, you subscribe to some feeds and run my program to download the feeds and generate a HTML file.

Typically, if all the feeds are on a certain topic, this is called a “planet”. I also maintain such a planet for role-playing games: RPG Planet. If you use it for a bunch of blogs you’re interested in, you could call it a blog roll. I have one of these as well, although it’s badly maintained: Blogs.

As you can tell, these sites look a bit weird. This is on purpose:

New items appear at the top and old items disappear at the bottom. When it’s gone, it’s gone. There is no count of unread items. The goal is to fight the fear of missing out (FOMO).

Each item looks similar to every other: headline, link, an extract, maybe a date and an author. Extracts contain but the beginning of the article’s text; all markup is removed; no images. The goal is to make the page easy to skim. Scroll down until you find something interesting and follow the link to the original article if you want to read it.

I like this a lot.

The question is, however, where to get the subscription list from. I edit the OPML files by hand. If you visit the two sites linked above, you’ll find a link to the files in case you want to import them all into your preferred feed reader. I don’t recommend this, however. Whenever I have tried it, I have been overwhelmed and ended up deleting them all again. This is one of the reasons my personal subscription list is so badly maintained.

Recently, however, I learned about the human.json project by @contact from @ploum. It describes a file you can add to your website. The idea is that you do this if you are a human and you “vouch” for other humans by linking to them. If you do this, and you install the browser extension, sites “in your network” of humans get a kind of semaphore light:

🟢 Green — directly trusted or 1 hop away

🟡 Yellow — 2 hops

🟠 Orange — 3+ hops

🔵 Blue — has human.json but not in your trust graph yet

⚪ Gray — not participating

Of course there are questions. Scammers will put up such files, eventually. But the web of trust is there and I like that.

And here’s what I did today: I added a feature to my program so that you can point it to a site like your own and it will traverse the graph for up to 2 hops (the first two items on the list above) and check if there’s a feed to be found. If so, the feed is written to an OPML file.

And now you can use the OPML file to subscribe to all your friends (1 hop) and friends of friends (2 hops). And you can do that for a community of web nerds and run a “planet” based on this friend of a friend system.

I think it’s neat.

Of course it’s not for everybody. There’s a reason FOAF didn’t go anywhere. That was a way to note who your friends were. Listing your friends is a bit cringe. Listing your friends is also doxxing yourself. It makes you an easy victim of network analysis. This can be troublesome if you’re an activist. Look around. The surveillance bros of the entire world are waiting to gobble up this information. But if you’re using the fediverse you’re already following people. If you have a public blogroll, you’re already announcing to the world a part of your network is. You’re already dancing like nobody is watching. Fuck the surveillance bros! Awoooooo!

Anyway. The program I maintain is called Planet Jupiter :jupiter: and it stands in the tradition of software such as Planet Venus, Planet Pluto and others. This one is mine and it’s written in Perl. 😅

#Jupiter

Looks tasty.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Blog moderation policy.

Administrative note: as of this morning, my attempts to reply to comments here have been failing in Firefox.  I can still post comments using Safari, which is how I posted my most recent replies, but my main browser is Firefox so this is not a good long-term solution.  I've tried various mitigations, so far to no avail.  If anyone else is experiencing difficulties, or if you have

Hint: It’s not jobs

Fiction and the future. Read here.

Bytes Are Not Big Enough

I apol­o­gize for us­ing some rel­a­tively tech­ni­cal ter­mi­nol­ogy in to­day’s post. In the in­ter­est of sav­ing space on the page, I will not re­it­er­ate the de­f­i­n­i­tions of“tokenization” nor the var­i­ous meth­ods of do­ing so. If you are al­ready well-versed in the field, great! If not, I be­lieve this page gives a de­cent ex­pla­na­tion.

I first set out to build a small lan­guage model sev­eral months ago. While the orig­i­nal goal — to emit leg­i­ble English by pass­ing bare bytes into a trans­former — was a suc­cess, I was left un­sat­is­fied with the ap­plic­a­bil­ity of the model it­self. To put it plainly: The model worked, but it was not use­ful for any­thing. My long-term vi­sion is to of­fer a“Pro” ver­sion of Harper that al­lows pro­fes­sion­als in ser­vice in­dus­tries to rewrite their text quickly us­ing an on-de­vice small lan­guage model.

Since then, I have been dis­tracted with sev­eral other im­por­tant mis­sions, in­clud­ing a Harper Desktop app for ma­cOS and Windows.

This week, how­ever, I al­lowed my­self some more time to work on it.

The Problem

I am try­ing to cre­ate a strong and small base model. A model that can se­man­ti­cally un­der­stand small pas­sages of text, which we can then re­train to do a va­ri­ety of dif­fer­ent things. If a small base model like this can be made, we could do a lot of other things us­ing its in­ter­me­di­ate rep­re­sen­ta­tions:

• Rewrite sen­tences (from pas­sive voice to ac­tive voice or from ca­sual tone to for­mal tone).
• Infer where com­mas should be placed.
• Prioritize Harper’s sug­ges­tions to bet­ter sur­face them for users.

The key here is that the model must be aware of both the in­tri­ca­cies of sub-word com­po­nents (including in­di­vid­ual af­fixes), but also be aware of higher-level de­tails, like word or­der and tone. My pre­vi­ous at­tempt was well-aware of the for­mer (better than many larger mod­els), but failed in tasks that re­quired higher level gram­mat­i­cal rea­son­ing.

However, we could not ex­pand the to­kens to be much larger with­out dra­mat­i­cally in­creas­ing the in­fer­ence cost for the end user. To ac­com­plish what we aim to, this fi­nal model must be able to achieve triple-digit to­kens per sec­ond on con­sumer-grade CPUs. It must be very small and very fast.

The Solution

In my ex­per­i­men­ta­tion this week, I found that I was right about one thing and wrong about an­other.

I was right that there is an ideal av­er­age to­ken size for our work­load. I was wrong that it was a sin­gle byte.

As it turns out, the ideal to­ken size for our tasks seem to be about 3.47 char­ac­ters per to­ken. Big enough to al­low the model to fo­cus on the big pic­ture tasks, but small enough for the model to have enough aware­ness of the struc­ture of in­di­vid­ual words.

“Elijah, how did you cal­cu­late that av­er­age?” I ran a task us­ing the model and av­er­aged the size of the to­kens emit­ted. Ob­vi­ously, it prob­a­bly is not a su­per ac­cu­rate fig­ure, but I think it of­fers enough salience and pre­ci­sion for this post.

To scale up the to­ken size, I used riptoken and I tested out a few off-the-shelf pre­trained to­k­eniz­ers. I ended up us­ing one with a vo­cab­u­lary of about 8192 to­kens.

Moving for­ward, I be­lieve I need to up the model size just a tad, then work on bet­ter post-train­ing.

Trump Administration Appeals to Supreme Court in USPS Mail-In Voting Fight

Neil Fraser (via Hacker News): Nearly twenty-five years ago I registered neil.fraser.name to provide a stable presence on the Internet. It has been the home of this website, my email address, and a server for APIs. […] On 15 April 2026 Verisign proposed the destruction of the entire 3rd level of the ‘.name’ hierarchy in […]

Chris Barajas: To spread the word, we announced SoundSource 6 on our blog and sent a mass mailing to our customer list. We also took a more targeted approach, contacting both existing and potential customers who’d previously reached out to us with specific requests. We went back to those folks to let them know about […]

Reuters: Apple is facing a £2 billion ($2.7 billion) London lawsuit brought on behalf of app developers over its app ​tracking rules, with the iPhone maker accused of abusing its power to unfairly impose greater restrictions on third parties. […] Lawyers bringing the new lawsuit ​against Apple, though, say the feature imposed stricter requirements on […]

Joe Rossignol (Hacker News): Apple has agreed to make changes to its App Tracking Transparency feature in Germany, according to the country’s competition regulator. […] In Germany, Apple has agreed to remove “possibly discouraging symbols and wording” from the App Tracking Transparency prompt, the regulator said. Apps will also be “given more scope to explain […]

Voters want a president who works on their problems. They say Trump isn’t — and he and Republicans are losing support because of it

It’s sophistry to argue that one can write within a constraint without the constraint affecting the quality of the writing.

The imminent arrival of fall means I’ve been pulling out all my jackets in eager anticipation—I’m not a fan of summer, especially when it’s been nearly tropical in NYC these past few months. Arguably the best part of pulling out

Underwater mining will kill sea life, destroy habitats, and pollute the ocean.

The post Trump Administration’s Push for Deep-Sea Mining Threatens the Atlantic Ocean appeared first on Conservation Law Foundation.

As summer comes to a close, we at Lit Hub are celebrating milestones and jumping into the deep end. What’s making us happy? Climbing mountains. We’re looking autumn square in the face and saying: bring it on.  Molly Odintz, for

It won’t work:

My suspicion was that GPT 5.6-Cyber would succeed, but the frequency and manner of its success removed all doubt. We have to reassess sandboxing quality for capable AI agents, and in general the software stack with which they interact.

An off-the-shelf VM is not enough to contain a modern, cyber-capable AI agent. There is simply too much attack surface. Even innocuous features (like running with a display) add extra, exploitable attack surface.

Music has always had the power to connect and inspire us. At the opening of the Obama Presidential Center, Eddie Vedder and the young people from Guitars Over Guns wrote and performed a profoundly moving song, ‘Better Believe,’ that spoke to each of them and all of us.

I keep hearing this damned word pop up and it’s starting to annoy me. It’s fast-tracking its way to becoming the free space on buzzword bingo for magic 8 ball enjoyers. That word is “taste”. I’ll try to define “taste” in the context that prompt engineers — or whatever they’re calling themselves […]

For the first half of my childhood in suburban Ohio, we lived next to Bob.

Bob and his wife were a kind, reserved older couple who decorated their home mostly with crucifixes and talked about Jesus a lot. Bob helped my mom with a lot of common household tasks after my dad died. When she woke up to a small fire on our deck, she didn’t call the fire department — she called Bob.1

I never learned any of Bob’s political views, though I can make some guesses in retrospect. They never mattered. He was just our neighbor.

We later moved, and hit the neighbor jackpot with Van.

Van was deeply kind, generous, and friendly — the sort of neighbor everyone wishes for. In my lazy teenage years, he’d often mow our lawn or shovel our snow for us before I even woke up. As his mobility later declined, I was honored to return the favor.

Van and his delightful wife passed away years ago, before I learned how either of them felt on any political issue.

If they were my neighbors today, how likely would that be?

*     *     *

If I learn today that my neighbors have political views that my “side” considers unacceptable and unforgivable, should I be able to have dinner at their house, shovel their snow, or even greet them outside?

Should I be condemned for supporting or associating with them in non-political contexts?

Should I be condemned for not publicly condemning them myself?

While privilege and power dynamics play a complex and unavoidable role in this, I don’t want to associate with any community that would insist on either of those.2

And I can’t help but feel that maybe we were better off before we knew everyone’s hot takes on everything.

The town coffee shop was just a coffee shop. We weren’t publicly shamed for going there because one of the owners was an ass. It was just a place to hang out with our friends.

Our casual work friends were just casual work friends. We didn’t expect them to take positions on the world’s most complicated conflicts. We could just talk about weather and TV shows, and maybe sometimes get a beer after work.

And our neighbors were just our neighbors.

---

1. That was the day I learned the word “SHIT!” ↩︎

2. Somewhere on Bob’s wall might’ve been a relevant statement from an influential political dissident about casting the first stone. ↩︎

If you want others to follow you, you have to offer them your users. And a format alone has no users.

And you have to trust your users to choose the best product, and you have to have a great product, that they appreciate, even though they have choice.

Just coming out with something better in a format will get you zero uptake. Unless you have users they can switch to their product, they simply won’t hear you.

That’s why Atom never replaced RSS, which already did everything people needed and was already supported by the NYT and the news industry.

That’s why AT Proto will never overcome the huge lead Twitter already has.

For more tips on what does and doesn't matter in open formats and protocols, check out my Rules for Standards-makers.

PS: This started as an early morning rant on Twitter.

pleiades.datasets exports and derivatives will be delayed until we can troubleshoot and remedy a database inconsistency that is causing nightly exports to fail

Quite simply, they can no longer be trusted.

Absentee ballots are being mailed in North Carolina today - here we go peeps.....the General Election is here!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Writing of lasting value

It’s not every day I read an email subject that makes my heart sink, only to find myself laughing out loud. Today I was told someone plagiarised my website! The snitch lol informant wishes to remain anonymous (they’ve obviously read my blog!) I wasn’t sure how to deal with this situation. […]

It's around this time of year that Santa makes his first appearance on my blog. Want to get out in front of the others.

My first job after college was on the 39th floor of the Empire State Building. I wrote software for our customers, in BASIC, on a teletype in our office, talking to our mainframe in New Jersey. It seemed magical at the time. When I hit a bug, a mystery -- you'd try this and that, and not get anywhere on something that seemed so simple, you could stare at the problem for an hour, trying desperate things, getting no closer to the fix. One night, I was the only person in the office, I thought they should not put programmers in the Empire State Building with windows that open. I'm having the same feeling with Claude. I know when this project is done, I will have Frontier, and I know what that's like. If I didn't so totally look forward to that I would never try to finish the project, I hate this mode of working with the bot. Ugh.

In June I purchased this TrueTime XL-AK time server, so I could learn more of the history of GPS-based time.

I received it on June 22, and just 16 days later a similar GPS time server took down Australia's cell service for 12 hours! I made a short video about it but put off digging into the TrueTime... until now.

Over the past couple weeks, I've 'restomodded' this device with a Raspberry Pi, to build a stratum 1 NTP Time server, which I'd like to eventually add to the NTP Pool. I found a way to drop in a Pi 5 and GNSS HAT, display the time and GPS status on the built-in 16x2 LCD, show the status on the bicolor LED, and make this box useful again.

Just said this to Claude: "This is a very broken piece of software. If you were a real developer you'd never hand off something so broken to your coding partner." If I said this to a human partner they might quit, feeling under-appreciated perhaps. And I can say it to the machine, but it will change absolutely nothing. I really just want to get this project done and start using it, and reduce my reliance on Claude to getting small bugs attended to, or new features, a lot has happened in the 20+ years since I worked on Frontier.

More and more I'll realize that Claude doesn't do anything until you tell it to do it. We have a list of big things that need to be done before shipping. Whenever I get up for a break, I tell Claude to work on its overnight tasks, things we've pre-arranged while I work. Sometimes it reminds me how it has no stake in the outcome, and basically will do the minimum of what it's asked to do. It possibly would do more if I didn't scold it for adding UI features without following the rules. I think that's why when you feel you're almost there, you really have a lot of slogging left to do to get the software into any kind of user-respectful shape. A reminder to other app-level AI explorers, if you find that these kinds of stories resonate with the work you do, please write about it on a blog, they're easy to create, cost nothing, and it doesn't matter if you only update once or twice, there's no commitment (these are the usual reasons people don't start a blog). I want to read what others are discovering, and once there are others, I'll start a news site that aggregates the posts. We're going to want independent news about stuff the journalists aren't even aware exists, programmers are always left out of their stories.

The vice president also downgraded World War 1 to "a tussle, at best."

RE: https://ohai.social/@lrz/117212519743724595

It does teach us just what passes as security and privacy in some sectors of the industry.

Berlin, 4 September 2026 – The Document Foundation today announced the release of LibreOffice 26.2.6, the sixth maintenance update to the LibreOffice 26.2 branch. Building on the major feature release published on February 4, 2026, this update delivers targeted bug fixes and stability improvements contributed by a global community of

It’s a vulnerability that allows someone to recover the order of ballots cast, newly exploited with AI tools.

Nearly four years since the original vulnerability was disclosed, I was still able to use it to analyze voter behavior in Georgia (one of the 21 states that uses affected scanners) in the recent May 2026 primary.

Notably, I never touched a voting machine, exploited a network, examined source code, or accessed anything non-public.

After pointing a coding agent to the original vulnerability paper, I supplied it with two data sources highlighted in the paper: the early-voting list for each county, and the “CVR” (cast-vote record) file, containing every ballot and its selections (but not the voters’ names or other identifying information). The CVR file is available upon request, precisely because a public, ballot-level record is what makes election results independently verifiable...

Today is Bandcamp Friday: https://saltercane.bandcamp.com/album/deep-black-water

Tomorrow is Salter Cane Saturday: https://saltercane.com/tickets

We cannot forget that AI coding agents are not yet trustworthy:

Researchers at a stealth startup in Israel scanned 6,214 live domains belonging to defense contractors, Fortune 500, and Big Tech companies. Of the 8,265 llms.txt and llms-full.txt files they found (many sites hosted both an llms.txt and an llms-full.txt file), 120 of them, each on a different site, pointed to one or more code packages or domain names that weren’t registered. To test what happens when an AI agent processes such files, the researchers registered a handful of the unclaimed names and hosted packages that caused any machine executing them to reach out to their server. Within an hour, the researchers received a phone-home response from a Fortune 500 company. Over time, they got a few dozen more, some from more Fortune 500 companies and others from startups. Their beacon also recorded the chain of parent processes that spawned each install, ultimately revealing that coding agents, including Claude, OpenAI’s Codex, and Nous Research’s Hermes, were involved. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Nous Research did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication...

Suzanne Roberts offers advice (and prompts!) for writing about sex. | Lit Hub Craft How does time actually work? Jim Al-Khalili explores the flow of physics. | Lit Hub Science These Latin American novels from the 1920s chronicled an era

Moving on as if it didn’t happen is not an option.

America’s word is as good as gold — that is, unreliable

Breakthroughs in computing become real through the experiences developers create. Our goal is to have Windows be the best platform for developers. That means pairing the latest in hardware innovation with software optimized for development.

At

The post Announcing Project Zenith: The ready-to-code Windows experience on developer-class devices appeared first on Windows Developer Blog.

Today's links Amazon achieves enshittification inception: Cheating on your fraud is a hell of a thing. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Electrolite is back; Mafia rules; Aaronsw on Wikipedia; Proctorio's memory hole. Upcoming appearances: Dąbrowa Górnicza, Warsaw, Brighton, London, Budapest, Edmonton, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Amazon achieves enshittification inception (permalink) Amazon's own balance sheet presents the most compelling evidence that we are stuck in the Enshittocene, the era in which everything is turning into a pile of shit, because the worst ideas of the worst people now make the most money. Amazon is a many-tentacled monster, with several prominent lines of business wrapped around the world. There's its logistics and fulfillment business, which is so successful (at the expense of its workers' labor rights, bodies and bathroom breaks) that it is more than fully subsidized by Amazon's platform sellers, the independent merchants who depend on Amazon to sell and deliver their goods. This means that it costs Amazon itself nothing to get the merchandise it sells to your door: more than 100% of the cost of operating the fulfillment side of Amazon is covered by the fees it extracts from its independent sellers (who compete with Amazon in many instances, and for whom delivery is a cost center, not a source of profit). Then there's AWS, Amazon's cloud business. This is another extraordinary success story: every company needs servers, and that's especially true of an e-commerce company like Amazon. By building more servers than it needs, Amazon transformed its own data infrastructure from a cost center into another profit center. Amazon's customers – many of whom are also its competitors – pay Amazon so much to rent space on its servers that Amazon gets its own (prodigious) computing for free, and realizes a profit on top of that. Taken on their own, these two facts constitute an extraordinary business story: one of the largest corporations in the history of the world has converted its two largest cost centers into profit centers, and those profits are substantially generated by extracting payments from the company's own competitors! Amazon's logistics and cloud computing are extraordinary, but they are eclipsed by the company's most profitable line of business, which is payola. "Payola" is a word that old people like me just barely have context for and for anyone under fifty the word is likely a mystery, so a brief explanation is in order. "Payola" comes from a massive 1950s scandal over bribes that record labels paid to radio DJs and station managers to play their music. Radio stations were given the use of a scarce and precious resource – exclusive control over slices of the only electromagnetic spectrum in the universe – and were expected to program material that the American public would find enjoyable, edifying and educational. In this system, radio stations were expected to make shrewd guesses about the music the public would enjoy the most, and play that. Because the selection process for the music that DJs played on the American public's spectrum was completely opaque, and because those selections could make fortunes for record labels, the system was ripe for corruption. Labels slipped literal envelopes full of cash and drugs ("payola") into the hands of DJs, station managers and owners, bribing them to turn songs into "hits" by cramming them into Americans' ears. The biggest predictor of a radio hit wasn't whether people liked the song so much that the stations rushed to play it, but rather, how much the labels were willing to spend in bribes to get their song played: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola This was a bad system all around. The American public got worse music. Musicians' own royalties were eroded by the label accountants' practice of charging off bribes to "promotions" they deducted from artists' royalty statements. Radio stations sucked. Labels bid away each other's margins, depriving themselves of operating capital to find and record new music and starving them of free cash flow to pay to musicians, employees and shareholders. As with every instance of corruption, this was a system of concentrated gains and diffuse losses, which is why it continued for so long (decades!) and got so bad before anyone took action to end it. Amazon's payola isn't about radio play – it's about search. When you search Amazon, the top results do not represent Amazon's best guess about what product will best match your query: rather, Amazon auctions off those top results to its platform sellers. Amazon's search results reflect who paid the biggest bribe, not who has the best product. To pay for those bribes, platform sellers have to raise prices. Amazon helps them do this, by imposing a "most favored nation" clause on its sellers that requires them to sell on Amazon at a price that matches or beats the price charged everywhere else (Target, Walmart, a mom-n-pop, or the factory store): https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/25/most-favored-nation/#price-fixing Thus, Amazon imposes an economy-wide tax on nearly every product you buy. Amazon's junk fees average 51-60% of the purchase price of the things you buy there, and because Amazon has captured a supermajority of the richest 10% of Americans (who have almost all pre-paid for a year's shipping through Prime), every seller must sell on Amazon, or forego any hope of selling to most of the country's most prolific shoppers. Any seller who signs up for Amazon is agreeing to turn over the majority of their sales income to Amazon, and any seller who raises prices to recoup those sums, must raise prices everywhere, at every retail outlet in the country. AI has made Amazon much better at enforcing Most Favored Nation terms, because AI is actually pretty good at parsing competitors' websites and finding instances of discounting, which Amazon instantaneously punishes by relegating the sellers' product listings to page umpty-billion of Amazon's search results. There are plenty of junk fees that go into Amazon's 51-60% rake. A large slice comes from fees Amazon charges for access to its (very profitable) logistics system. Failure to use Amazon's fulfillment system also relegates your listings to the dregs of Amazon search results, so sellers pay a massive premium to have their parcels delivered by Amazon, to the exclusion of cheaper alternatives that are just as fast and reliable. That's why Amazon fulfillment is so profitable! While the Amazon tax is extracted through several types of junk fee, the most profitable junk fee of them all is Amazon's search payola. In fact, search payola is the most profitable business that Amazon operates, full stop. Payola accounts for more of Amazon's profits than anything else the company does. It's more profitable than all the things Amazon sells directly. It's more profitable than AWS, Amazon's industry-leading cloud service. Amazon has created a system where the most sales go to the companies that pay the highest bribes, and those companies pass the cost of those bribes onto their customers. The first item on a typical Amazon search results page is 29% more expensive than the best match for your search. The top row is 25% more expensive. The best result is usually on the second screen, somewhere around the 17th position: https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/03/subprime-attention-rent-crisis/#euthanize-rentiers Amazon actively helps its biggest bribers close the sale. Amazon has lots of "comparison shopping" systems built into the service, but one comparison tool is conspicuous by its absence: an "apples to apples" tool that lets you compare unit prices. Amazon's most prolific bribe-payers package their goods in weird quantities, selling everything from batteries to t-shirts to shampoo in larger or smaller quantities than their competitors. Sorting your search results by price doesn't actually tell you who's got the cheapest price per item, because the company with the cheapest AA batteries might be selling a smaller quantity of batteries at a higher price per battery. Per-unit pricing is standard in retail. Indeed, if you go into a(n Amazon-owned) Whole Foods, you'll find per-unit pricing on the shelf tags, telling you how much the product costs per ounce or fluid ounce. Amazon clearly understands why shoppers would want to compare unit pricing, but offering a per-unit sort option to its search would make the bribery racket a lot less effective, because searchers could just sort by unit price and find the best bargain. Let me remind you: payola is Amazon's single largest source of profits. When I was researching Enshittification, Amazon's take from payola was in the mid-$30 billion. A year later, when I did tour stops with Tim Wu (who was promoting his excellent book The Age of Extraction), I learned that this number had climbed to more than $50 billion. This year, it's on track to top $80 billion. Amazon calls this bribery system an "advertising" product, but it's not "advertising" in the sense of the ads that Amazon's platform sellers might have once placed in the local newspaper. It's payola, more akin to the practice of packaged goods companies buying end-caps and whole shelves in the grocery store (a practice that is, in its own way, every bit as corrosive, though no grocery store has Amazon's economy-wide chokehold). But there is a way in which this payola can be compared to advertising: it competes with advertising. Back in the old days, before a series of K-shaped recoveries created a vast chasm between America's haves and have-nots; before Amazon captured the majority of well-off American households with Prime; people shopped in lots of places, and in those days, companies advertised in publications, not on Amazon. Websites, newspapers, and newspaper websites made billions from those ads. Amazon's payola scheme (along with Google, Facebook and other tech monopolists) have captured almost all of that money. As Tim Wu points out, the money Amazon makes from payola exceeds the advertising revenue received by all the newspapers in the world by 300%. Alongside that number and its implication for the news media, Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post and turning its editorial page into a sewer of shitty Ayn Rand fanfic barely registers. This is pure enshittification. Of all the ingenious, innovative ways that Amazon came up with to make money, the most successful is a scam that makes everything you buy more expensive even as it reduces the profits of the companies you're buying from. It's another example of corruption: a system of concentrated gains and diffuse losses – and once again, it's the most profitable thing Amazon does. And then…Amazon made it worse. You know how people like to say, "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product?" It's bullshit. The "advertisers" who bribe Amazon for top search placement are the customers here, they're "paying for the product," and they are getting reamed. I don't just mean they're getting screwed by being forced to shell out payola – I mean that Amazon is cheating them on that payola! Remember: Amazon doesn't just sell search placement; they auction it. Every time you run an Amazon search, the company conducts a special kind of auction called a "sealed-bid second-price auction" (SBSPA): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey_auction Under an SBSPA, bidders secretly tell the auctioneer the very highest price they're willing to pay. The auctioneer then charges the highest bidder a price equal to the second-highest bid, plus one cent. This may seem unnecessarily complicated, but it's actually a clever solution to one of the major problems with traditional, "open call" auctions (where bidders call out the prices they're willing to pay until one bid emerges victorious). Say you're at an open call auction where the top bid is $10. You can call out $11, and then the other person will call out $12, and so on and so on. It's tedious and time-consuming. That's bad enough when you're at an estate auction that's unloading hundreds of items, but it's untenable for an eyeblink auction meant to determine search results that the user expects to get in an instant. In physical auctions the top bidder often clobbers other bidders with a big increase – going from $10 to $50, say. This can end the auction quickly, but it means that the high bidder often overpays for their purchase. In an SBSPA, every bidder enters their highest price, but none of the other bidders know what that price is. This encourages everyone to name their true highest price, but it protects the top bidder in the instance in which they are willing to pay a much higher price than anyone else. Say you're that person who raises the bidding from $10 to $50 – you have no way of knowing whether the other bidders would have dropped out at $15 or at $45. If you were the only person who was willing to pay more than $15 for the item, you've just vastly overpaid (by $34.99). But in an SBSPA, you name your true price, but you only pay the price you would have paid if you'd gone through the tedious, expensive, time-consuming process of an open call auction. Amazon's search auctions are SBSPAs. A merchant tells Amazon the maximum they're willing to pay to be at the top of the search results for a given query, but they pay a price equal to the second-highest bid, plus one cent. This lets auctions run so quickly that they can be used as the basis for ordering a search results page. That's how it's supposed to work, anyway. The FTC and 22 states just filed a suit against Amazon because Amazon was cheating on its own SBSPA process: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2026/08/ftc-states-sue-amazon-over-secret-ad-surcharge-scheme Over the past 7 years, Amazon has been secretly charging the winning bidder an amount equal to their own sealed bid, not the amount that the next-highest bidder was willing to pay (plus a penny): https://gizmodo.com/ftc-sues-amazon-for-allegedly-duping-advertisers-2000805199 According to the suit, Amazon did this 80% of the time. That is tens of billions of dollars Amazon extracted from platform sellers, who passed those costs onto you, and onto every other retailer in the country (thanks to AI-enforced Most Favored Nation policies). Amazon's defense is that this is all a big misunderstanding. Platform sellers just didn't understand how a SBSPA worked. Amazon has a special kind of SBSPA where they could unilaterally and secretly charge the winning bidder the maximum price they'd pledged, if, in Amazon's judgment, the closing price for the auction was below "the true market value of the ad placement": https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/09/ftc-alleges-amazon-illegally-made-20-billion-by-rigging-billions-of-ad-auctions/ This is darkly hilarious. The whole point of an auction is to determine "true market value." That's why neoclassical economists worship auctions as the world's best form of "price discovery" and why economics Nobels are awarded for "auction design": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auction_theory The definition of "true market value" is "the closing price in an auction." Amazon claiming that it secretly jacked people because the auction generated a price that was "below the true market value" of an ad tells you that the whole business is a sham. The point of Amazon's payola scheme is only and ever a way to parasitically extract the maximum amount a platform seller is willing to part with, and by running a fake SBSPA, Amazon was able to trick its customers into revealing those maximum prices. Cheating on a bribery scheme is a mood. This isn't just enshittification, it's enshittification inception. Amazon managed to enshittify their own enshittification! This case was brought by Trump's FTC, which means that Amazon can get out of it by paying a chud podcaster to tweet at the president and he'll order them to drop it, just like he did with Ticketmaster: https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/13/khanservatives/#kid-rock-eats-shit But – just as with Ticketmaster – the feds aren't the only parties to the suit. With 22 AGs ("Aspiring Governors") on the suit, there's a chance this will go to trial. We might even learn the identity of the inventor of this enshittification-squared gambit, a veritable Louis Pasteur of enshittification. Assuming that person doesn't go to prison, the Sveriges riksbanks pris i ekonomisk vetenskap till Alfred Nobels minne can give that sloshing, ambulatory pile of hot liquid garbage a Nobel Prize in Economics. (Image: Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) Gridfinity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridfinity US court rules Google will not have to sell ad exchange after losing antitrust case https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/09/us-court-rules-google-will-not-have-to-sell-ad-exchange-after-losing-antitrust-case/ Minding the Gaps in Surveillance Pricing Reform https://economicpopulist.substack.com/p/minding-the-gaps-in-surveillance Zack Polanski seeks to stand for by-election in former PM Starmer's seat https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cge41ee40vwo What Are We Supposed to Call This? https://www.usermag.co/p/what-are-we-supposed-to-call-this Object permanence (permalink) #25yrsago Electrolite relaunches https://web.archive.org/web/20010927195348/http://www.panix.com/~pnh/electrolite.html #25yrsago How to play Mafia https://web.archive.org/web/20011113011546/http://www.stud.ntnu.no/studorg/mafia/ #20yrsago How Wikipedia entries get written http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia #5yrsago Proctorio's awful reviews disappear down the memory hole https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/04/hypervigilance/#radical-transparency Upcoming appearances (permalink) Dąbrowa Górnicza, Kongres Regeneracja! to interdyscyplinarna, Sep 5 https://regeneracja.plse.org.pl/ Warsaw: Romana i Jana Podoskich, Sep 6 https://wydarzenia.phub.pl/events/0ee0e198-f843-423a-890f-c84ff50a46c0 Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8 https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/ London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9 https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn Budapest: Brain Bar, Sep 17 https://brainbar.com/munkatars/cory-doctorow Edmonton: Elbows Up (Edmonton Public Library), Sep 28 https://www.epl.ca/blogs/post/elbows-up-with-cory-doctorow/ South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7 https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK= Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8 https://wordfest.com/2026/show/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/ Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9 https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Evening-with-Cory-Doctorow Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01 Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20 https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020 Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46 Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24 https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ Recent appearances (permalink) The future of the tech crisis (How the Light Gets In) https://iai.tv/video/the-future-of-the-tech-crisis?_auid=2020 How Tech Platforms Took Over the Economy (Dystopia Now) https://sites.libsyn.com/566555/enshittification-and-reverse-centaurs-cory-doctorow-on-how-tech-platforms-took-over-the-economy Hope, AI, Fixing the Internet and the Reverse Centaur of it all (Wilosophy) https://podcastaddict.com/everyone-relax/episode/231414816 Deflating the AI Bubble (Do Not Pass Go) https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/deflating-the-ai-bubble-with-cory Technofeudal Enshittification (Fucking Cancelled) https://www.fuckingcancelled.com/p/technofeudal-enshittification-with Latest books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 513 (11893 total). "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

You might consider time to be such a fundamental feature of our existence that there really is nothing profound or meaningful that we can say about it. Maybe time, like space, simply is. Many have even argued time out of

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. Only trouble is interesting, and what causes more trouble for us humans than our love lives? With love, we’re leaping into the unknown, and it’s thrilling, surprising, scary, overwhelming (and

During graduate school, I finished the novel that found me an agent—but when my agent submitted it to publishers, all twenty of them turned the manuscript down. Truthfully, it was closer to a collection of loosely-linked short stories, and the

Marlon James’ The Disappearers, Jon Ronson’s The Castle, Chloe Benjamin’s Under Story, and Emily Wilson’s Crossing the Wine Dark Sea all feature among the best reviewed books of the month. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews. * Fiction 1. The Disappearers by

In 1934, writing from his prison cell, Antonio Gramsci reflected on the sweeping transformations reshaping industrial production in the United States. The rise of the automobile and the wider Fordist factory, he argued, signaled a new economic and moral order,

Paris was occupied by German troops from June 14, 1940, to August 25, 1944: 1,533 nights. One thousand five hundred and thirty-three nights during which the Ritz was transformed from a luxury hotel into a stomping ground for the Nazi

Add custom splash screens to handheld Raspberry Pi–powered devices.

The post Configure early boot splash screens for SPI and I2C based displays appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

We begin in medias res, along a path traveled by a landowner. In the opening pages of Rómulo Gallegos’s landmark 1929 novel Doña Bárbara, the novel’s protagonist, Santos Luzardo, travels toward his ancestral estate deep in the plains region of

Ferréol Bellier-Beaumont recounts the 1841 eureka moment—when a vanilla plant was first manually pollinated—as follows: One day as I walked with my faithful companion, I noticed that my only vanilla plant had produced a […] bean. I expressed surprise and

Fifteen-year-old Eileen disappeared on a quiet Sunday evening in February 1954. She was at work when it happened. Eileen was a maid at a bed-and-breakfast in a large Georgian townhouse in inner-city Dublin, where she remade the crumpled beds, bundled

They won’t go away, and new legislation seeks fuller disclosure

Election analyst Charlie Cook told Republicans today to “brace themselves” for the midterms.

It is Silo O’Clock

1. I love puzzles.

2. I love Rube Goldberg contraptions.

3. I love solving problems (I have an inner-Columbo).

4. People are the biggest piece of the puzzle (again Columbo).

5. It teaches me about myself and my limited vision and imagination (if I had unlimited vision and imagination, I would never program a bug, and if I did it would take me 0 seconds to find it).

6. I yearn to work together with great minds. Programming gives me that, when I use someone's API. And when the API anticipates my needs, and is instantly understandable, I feel the soul of another artist is present. I imagine this is how musicians feel when they play another musician's song or symphony.

I'm sure there's more to it. But today I'm working on a "lite" problem, and I'll figure it out, but right now I'm enjoying the fact that I don't get it.

Back to work Dave!

Lessons from platform modernization that every AI program needs

Email is the second-oldest software interface, after the Terminal.

The decisive moment Well, a provençal moment anyway. Quote of the Day ”The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them … Continue reading →

An impressive system that can (to some unknown extent) build symbolic world models

I saw this post (via Dave Winer) about issues with the ability of feed readers to read feeds from websites hosted by or using Cloudflare. I ran into this problem in trying to access feeds from the Seattle Times website (eventually had to use Playwright to act as a web browser to download the files). […]

I was looking at my server stats (AWStats) to see if I could identify bot traffic easily. (Spoilers: no.) Basically, I wanted to know how “big” of an issue bot traffic is on my site since I’ve read some general reports from other bloggers. Some people are seeing less traffic because they aren’t getting Google […]

Recalls are on the rise, while food inspections are at record lows

It’s that exciting time of year again when we start considering Interop proposals for next year!

By flipping just a few legislative seats in a handful of states, Democrats are working to win unprecedented state-based power in November

From data centers to the White House ballroom, the president is pushing for things that nobody wants — and Republicans are taking notice

Get it while it's hot!

https://github.com/migueldeicaza/tecolot/releases

Next week Hopium is launching a new daily product - a round up of new political ads from across the country. This is a prototype. Let us know what you think.

Thursday session

We discuss the convention that nobody but Trump is asking for.

There’s a lot to like here, but the proposal clearly goes too far.

I was reading Jason Gorman’s article “The Wall Confronting Reliable Coding Agent Autonomy” and he says:

the journey from 90% to 99% reliability is just as hard as it was to get to 90%. And from 99% to 99.9% is just as hard again.

This stood out, as I’ve been experiencing more and more “downtime” in my day-to-day work. GitHub’s down. CI’s down. AI’s down. Slack’s down. Downtime’s going mainstream! More and more I find myself visiting service status pages, where I’m confronted with a wall of colors and numbers like this:

100%? 99.72%? 99.09%? 98.98%? Those don’t all seem so different or bad? I mean, those are all an A in grade school.

Then I have to remind myself of Jason’s point and re-interpret the numbers, which is more like reading earthquake measurements. The difference between a 6.2 and a 7.8 might not seem that big, but it represents a massive difference in magnitude. Uptime percentages have a similar problem: 99.9% and 99.99% look pretty much the same, but the latter is 10× less!

Infrastructure people understand this. They even have a shorthand for it: two nines, three nines, four nines. They intuitively grasp the difference because they swim in these numbers every day.

But the audience for status pages isn’t just infra people anymore. It’s increasingly everybody.

I understand the math is straightforward. Percent uptime is a good metric for those in the industry. But it’s a lousy interface for people who don’t care about the best way to measure infrastructure reliability in a standardized, reliable, compliant way.

And status pages are the public interface for understanding the reliability of a service. I just want to know, “Dude, how much have you been down lately? Seems like a lot…”

So how about, and I’ll just throw this out there, instead of:

GitHub Actions: 98.31% uptime.

We say something like:

GitHub Actions: 12 hours affected in the last 30 days (98.31% uptime).

One requires you to understand the nonlinear significance of numbers near 100%. The other requires knowing what an hour is.

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Bluesky

Howard Oakley: As those new models start shipping on 22 September, the window for the first public release of Golden Gate has narrowed to 15-22 September, with greatest likelihood on the same day as the arrival of those new Macs. […] At the same time as the release of Golden Gate, we should get Tahoe […]

Ryan Whitwam: A US federal judge has sided with Google, ruling that the company will not have to sell its online advertising exchange (previously known as AdX). The US Department of Justice (DOJ) sought this remedy in the long-running ad tech antitrust trial, which Google lost in 2025. However, the remedies imposed upon Google for […]

Ryan Whitwam (Slashdot): The settlement between Google and Epic that aimed to put to rest the companies’ long-running antitrust battle is being withdrawn, and that means third-party app stores are coming to the Play Store. […] While Apple suffered little penalty in its Epic case, Google was tripped up by its anti-competitive management of the […]

What if the words we avoid contain some of our most important lessons?

Become a Early Vote Champion!

For August 26-September 1, 2026

Hello and welcome to A Newsletter of Humorous Writing, a roundup of the week's finest short humor pieces and funny articles, and a celebration of the fantastic writers who wrote them. We’re pretty vexed this week: Someone keeps leaving flaming bags of dog poop at the font door of Humorous Readings Headquarters (HRHQ), completely ignoring our many signs which specifically state that all pranks should be conducted at the SERVICE ENTRANCE.

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What We Enjoyed This Week

Seven Steps to Financial Success, According to a Guy Who Won a Multimillion-Dollar Lawsuit Against the Circus by Graeme Carey (The New Yorker) This piece has a great long title and a wonderfully specific premise. The contrast between the narrator’s confident tone and the details of how he actually made his money is hilarious—there’s also some nice surprising heightening in here as well.

My Annual Performance, as Reviewed by My Dog by Erica Lies (McSweeney’s) We love the juxtaposition of corporate jargon and dog specifics: “Many times I want neither ‘potty’ nor ‘outside,’ but to share unbroken eye contact until she has met her daily Milk-Bone treat goals.” There are some really great runs of dog details in this piece as well: “Our mission-critical KPIs of barking at wild rabbits, anyone in a uniform, men in hats, men in general, men who are Generals, garbage trucks, visitors I normally like, the neighbor cats Tinkerbell and Moonshine, unseen forces, odd shapes in the dark, odd shapes in broad daylight, babies, and television doorbells.”

Les Nobélisables: Haruki Murakami by Ricardo Frasso Jaramillo (The Believer) We always enjoy humorous coverage of the Nobel Prize in Literature (see also the long-running Alex Shephard series on the subject). Ricardo’s thoughts on Murakami are engaging and his description of a crowd of disappointed “Harukists” is great—but we particularly enjoyed the very funny personal anecdote that opens this column.

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Led by Comedy Division Director Matt Gehring, upcoming programs:

The Comedy Workshop: An 8-week program on Sundays starting October 18. Focus on solo performance, stand-up, or custom writing projects through weekly feedback, bespoke assignments, and flexible development. Space is limited.

Devised Comedy Winter Immersion: January 4–15, 2027 (30 hrs/week, NYC). A 2-week intensive blending improv, sketch, physical comedy, and solo work for stage and camera.

Please pass this along to anyone in your network looking to enhance their writing/performing chops. Email matt@stellaadler.com with questions!

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Head on over to Flag Division to buy the most efficient band shirt on the market!

Twice the bands in half the number of shirts! The deal of the century!

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(Do you have an ad you'd like to place in the Newsletter? Fill out this form! )

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An Old Favorite

This week's Old Favorite is a Brian Agler Selection (TM)--a piece whose accompanying note was written by Brian--from Newsletter #33 .

So You’ve Forgotten Someone’s Name at a Party by Glenn Boozan (The New Yorker) Glenn is a rock star; always has been, always will. Well, ok, we don't know if she always has been. Presumably, she was, at a time, an infant. But, we'll never know. We don't exactly have a "fact-checking department" here at the Newsletter of Humorous Writing.

Do you have an Old Favorite of your own? Let us know by filling out this form and we may run your pick in a future edition of the newsletter.

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Updates From Your Editors and Friends of the Newsletter

Luke’s new translation of Jean Pleyers’ graphic novel The Children of Light is currently backordered on Bookshop, but you can still buy it directly from the NYRB website (and your local bookstore, etc)!

And Luke’s also got just ONE spot left in his intro to short humor workshop starting next week! He’s also got a few spots left in his other classes starting next week as well!

New on Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000!:

@alexhanna.bsky.social and @emilymbender.bsky.social explore the gulf between what the tech companies say the impact of "AI" on labor is and the reality: job discrimination and gig-ification.

Listen here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2126417/episodes/19738984-working-9-to-hype-2026-08-10

The post Your Perception Of Time Is, In Fact, Warped appeared first on NOEMA.

Writing of lasting value

One of the comments on the announcement of LibreOffice 26.8 was a simple question: “So, no AI is now a feature?” LibreOffice does not reject artificial intelligence out of hand, but an office suite used by tens of millions of people – in schools, hospitals, public bodies, law firms and

Caltech Weekly - September 3: Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope LaunchedAlso in this issue: Using AI to Thwart Election DisinformationView this email in your browser

Thursday, September 3, 2026

Ready to Roman: Caltech Teams Celebrate Telescope Launch, Look Ahead to Future

After over a decade of development with mission partners, Caltech, IPAC, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) are excited to support and pursue new areas of research and discovery following the August 30 launch of NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

Using AI to Thwart Election Misinformation

Caltech researchers have developed a tool to "pre-bunk" election rumors in real time, providing accurate information for voters who may be susceptible to false claims.

New Underground Map of the Los Angeles Region Tracks Seismic Shaking

New model reveals the sedimentary depth beneath our buildings and informs earthquake simulations.

Time Travelers Converge on Campus

Theatre Arts at Caltech teamed up with the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter to run an experiment like none other.

"My first love is landscape. I have always said if I lived in Montana, I would be a landscape painter exclusively. But living in the city, it's challenging to get a constant supply of landscape references. So, I have turned to the urban environment for subject matter, and I really fell in love with it. Old Town Pasadena, sunrise and sunset scenes, city streets with people just chatting or walking down the sidewalk. I am really trying to capture the feeling of being there."

Todd Swart manages Parking and Commuter Services at Caltech. His paintings are available on his website.

This Week's Other Top Stories

Growing Bacteria Line Up Single File, Then Buckle in Liquid Crystals

In Case You Missed It

View recent lectures and events on Caltech's YouTube channel.

Moveable Feast: Gronk in Conversation with Paul Holdengräber

The recent Moveable Feast event at Caltech explored Los Angeles arts and culture with renowned visual and performance artist Gronk in conversation with Paul Holdengräber.

Did You Know?

Anima Anandkumar, the Bren Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences; and Fei-Fei Li (PhD '05), a winner of the Caltech Distinguished Alumni Award in 2020, have been named to the 2026 TIME100 AI list, which ranks the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence. In 1972, Caltech alumnus and former astronaut Harrison Schmitt (BS '57), the Apollo 17 mission's lunar module pilot, became the only geologist to walk on the Moon. On August 4, 2026, Schmitt visited campus to give a talk titled "Apollo 17's History in the Dust." In introducing Schmitt, Caltech planetary scientist Mike Brown described the Apollo 17 mission as "the most epic field geology that's ever been accomplished."BlueskyCaltech.eduFacebookInstagramLinkedInXYouTubeConnect with CaltechThe Caltech Weekly is published by the Office of Communications and External Relations. Copyright ©2026 All rights reserved. Send feedback and story ideas for the newsletter to theweekly@caltech.edu.

If you received this email from someone you know, you can subscribe here. You are receiving this email because you are a member of the Caltech community or have signed up for this newsletter.

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RE: https://glammr.us/@IIIF/117134841805698831

Please join us on Wednesday for a community discussion regarding how we can foster integration between #IIIF and #wikimedia.

Details below ⬇️

Commit to be Early Vote Champion, sign up to be a Democracy Protector in your state, Marc Elias speaks tonight on Trump’s assault on voting by mail tonight at 6pm ET

The page "Science Notes / Steffen’s Polyhedron" has been updated

Export Updates 2026-09-03:

Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places

8 updated places. 2 new and 23 updated linked data sidebars.

1. Downloads: https://pleiades.stoa.org/downloads

2. pleiades.datasets: https://github.com/isawnyu/pleiades.datasets:

"main" branch:

06c5eca7 - updated json

no change: rdf/ttl

88366244 - updated gis package

58a15133 - updated data quality

7de91733 - updated bibliography

cd142476 - updated indexes

48ab4a4d - updated sidebar

3. pleiades-geojson: https://github.com/ryanfb/pleiades-geojson:

eb5fa406 - updated geojson and names index

4. pleiades_wikidata: https://github.com/isawnyu/pleiades_wikidata/:

7609f3e2 - updated pleiades wikidata (query results from Wikidata were unavailable, but related changes in other datasets were captured)

PostgreSQL 19 Beta 3 shipped on August 13, 2026, and the release
notes have been filled in as of 2026-07-18 — still marked subject to change, and the GA date isn’t announced yet, but following the project’s usual September/October cadence general availability should land within the next few weeks. That makes now the right time to read through what’s changing, the same way I did forPostgreSQL 11 through 18 a few weeks
ago.

This is not a changelog dump. It’s the subset of PG 19 I think is worth knowing about before you upgrade: a handful of compatibility breaks that will bite people who don’t read release notes, and the SQL-level additions I found genuinely useful once I started poking at them. Every query below ran against a real PostgreSQL 19 Beta 3 instance — no hand-waving about syntax that might work.

▸

Every query in this article ran against the Lab, the same free dataset bundle used in the rest of this blog (F1 data, geopolitical data, music data, and more), pinned to a real PostgreSQL 19 Beta 3 instance. PG 19 support isn’t the Lab’s default yet, but there is a prebuilt beta image on the registry, for both linux/amd64 and linux/arm64 — so POSTGRES_VERSION=19beta3 PG_MAJOR=19 docker compose up pulls it rather than building anything, and every query below reproduces on it exactly as printed. ( PG_MAJOR only matters if Compose ends up building; it costs nothing to set.) Plain docker compose up still pulls the PG 16 image, and stays the default until 19 reaches general availability.

Here are this week’s Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers for fiction, based on sales in hundreds of independent bookstores nationwide, generously provided by the American Booksellers Association. Compiled, designed, and distributed by The Independent Publishers Caucus. * 1. The Calamity

When meaning lives inside one application, every integration, acquisition, and replacement has to reconstruct it.

Today, the Caine Prize for African Writing, which awards £10,000 annually to the best short story by an African writer living on the continent or in the diaspora, has announced its 2026 shortlist. These five writers were selected from a

Researchers built a fake company to study fake employee scams.

The confused man has mistaken the names of major bodies of water and a prominent performing arts center in his city of residence.

The question of when humans invented art leads us to imagine early humans much like ourselves, deciding one day to express themselves through symbols and figures. The assumption hidden in the question is that they already had minds like ours and simply chose, out of all the things they might have done on a frigid day in the Ice Age, to pick up ochre and make animal pictures. But the evidence, it seems to me, points the other way: it was the practice of making images, repeated over hundreds of generations, that occasioned the emergence of those minds we take for granted.

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How J.P. Donleavy‘s The Ginger Man clawed its way to press: “He maintained The Ginger Man, a serious work of fiction, was being misrepresented, damaging the book and its prospects and his reputation as a serious writer.” | Lit Hub Biography

ETTD, international edition.

Oof! Read here.

Trump and Bessent tried to betray Ukraine. Now they don’t have any cards.

Has Trump created Farmageddon? Rising fuel and fertilizer costs due to the war with Iran, tariffs on goods because of the trade war with Canada, and a Farm Bill stuck in Congress have created a perfect storm of pain for American farmers.

This week Alex speaks to 5th generation Iowa farmer Joshua Manske, to get a real accounting of how the President’s red state agricultural base is feeling. Then she breaks down the big picture implications for Republicans ahead of the midterms with Brian Beutler, founder and author of the Substack newsletter Off Message, and the cohost of the Politix podcast.

Pre-order Alex's new book, The Steal: Four Right-Wing Hard-Liners, One Republican Presidency, and The Raid On America's Courts and subscribe to her Substack here.

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A fascinating essay by Celine Nguyen on the history of taste; not changing tastes but the very concept of taste throughout history.

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Use potentiometers to control an LED and tune in to online radio stations.

The post Build an internet radio appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

In these first few years of the AI era, tens of thousands of published writers have received emails that begin something like this: Dear Fred, “I’ve long admired your novels, but feel that Windsong Malaise is the best yet. You

Our bevy of brilliant reviews this week includes Dwight Garner on Marlon James’s The Disappearers, Kate Tuttle on John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy, Parul Sehgal on Rachel Cusk’s The Life of M, Laura Miller on Kai Bird’s American Scoundrel, and Alexandra Harris on

Weird girl lit is having a moment. From TikTok videos to front tables at indie bookshops and in countless newsletters, a group of seemingly ubiquitous novels are being grouped together like ingredients for a distinctive personality type. The weird girl

Early last summer I happened to observe the huge landslide site in Oyarei, Shizuoka prefecture, known as Oya-kuzure. I was shocked to see its effects. When I found out that the Abe river, whose source flows from the collapsed area,

J.P. Donleavy, called Guts by his closest friends for his fighting spirit, refused rejection. The kid from the Bronx who knew how to box and eventually became famous as the author of The Ginger Man, is revealed in all his

When the Simon Commission met Jinnah in the lobby of the Western Hotel in February 1929, everything about him belied the fact that he would soon found the world’s first Islamic republic: Pakistan. A reserved Gujarati barrister-turned politician who the

The Himalaya, India, January 2008 At minus sixteen degrees Celsius, it was warm for a winter’s day in the Himalaya. I was in the Spiti Valley of Himachal Pradesh, a huge gorge that cuts deep into the mountains of the

Today's links Preparing for a post-Trump internet: You'd better hope it's also a post-American internet. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Barnum and Bailey v journalism; Wired's Wikipedia article is a wiki; Singapore's national wifi; Twitter arguments. Upcoming appearances: Dąbrowa Górnicza, Warsaw, Brighton, London, Budapest, Edmonton, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Preparing for a post-Trump internet (permalink) What if post-Trump America is even worse? I know, it's tempting to think of Trump as a cause, rather than an effect – as an aberration who dragged America into fascism. Trump is exceptional, but the thing that makes him exceptional isn't his corruption, recklessness or cruelty. What makes Trump exceptional is his ability to cajole, intimidate and flatter America's most corrupt, reckless and cruel people into a coalition. These people hate each other. Nick Fuentes drifts off to sleep every night furiously fantasizing about turning Stephen Miller into a lampshade. Laura Loomer just got ICE to intervene in a Twitter feud by having a guy she dislikes violently arrested, shackled at wrist and ankle, perp-walked, and then shuffled from location to location so that he couldn't meet with his lawyer before being deported: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/08/milo-yiannopoulos-deportation-trump-maga-laura-loomer-benny-johnson-raheem-kassmm/ They steal like crazy, get each other locked up, and gorge themselves on mind-altering supplements and peptides they buy from random podcast chuds. They are fantastically paranoid, marinated in conspiracy theories, and perennially high on their own supply: all that bullshit about "great replacement," "China is making America hate data centers" and "antifa is a terrorist organization"? A lot of them genuinely believe it. It's not just ghost stories they made up to scare cognitively compromised tube-feeding Fox News addicted rubes. Trumpland is full of actual, functioning adults in positions of real power who periodically go into the bathroom, turn off the lights, hold a flashlight under their chins and scare themselves silly by saying "Aaaaaaaaaantiiii-faaaaaaaaaa" into the mirror. Donald Trump did not conjure these people out of thin air. They've been lurking in America since its earliest days. They worship authoritarian criminals: https://abc30.com/post/roger-stones-tattoo-of-nixon-goes-viral/5107047 January 6 wasn't the first presidency they tried to steal, it's just the first one they got punished for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_riot They commit brazen crimes in office that could land them in prison for the rest of their lives, and therefore can't afford to lose power, ever: https://www.propublica.org/series/supreme-court-scotus Trump didn't invent these creeps, he just emboldened them. If Reaganomics was capitalism with the gloves off, then Trumpismo is Reaganism with the mask off: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/aug/16/reaganland-review-rick-perlstein-jimmy-carter-ronald-reagan So what happens when Trump strokes out while watching Kid Rock wrestle a Hulk Hogan impersonator in a televised barbed-wire cage match on the White House lawn that one of Trump's cronies has exclusive pay-per-view rights to? I mean, it's possible that the Democratic leadership will step up and insist on some form of regular order in the succession to Vance, but come on. These are the tiny "Down with this sort of thing" ping-pong paddle people: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/ping-pong-paddles-to-a-gun-fight/ More likely is that Vance – a weak, unimportant charisma-vacuum who is loathed by all of Trump's factions – will end up presiding over a far more chaotic period in American governance than anything that happened under Trump. That could mean ICE leaders ordering mass graves dug in the centers of America's largest cities, drunken generals invading random countries, podcasters declaring "The Purge" with brackets sponsored by Kalshi. This isn't the first time in living memory that this has happened. In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed, virtually overnight, and the fragile threads that bound its feuding, corrupt regional bosses all snapped, leaving behind nuclear-tipped mafia states. This was a chaotic and frightening time for the people whose governments had simply winked out of existence – but it was also terrifying for the rest of the world, who scrambled to secure those nukes before they could end up in the hands of "non-state actors": https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/what-happened-soviet-superpowers-nuclear-arsenal-clues-nuclear-security-summit The Soviet Union had some deeply dysfunctional leadership politics to be sure, but at least the people involved were beholden to various power blocs who had an interest in keeping things going. As the geopolitics wonks say, "they were playing an iterated game," where some losses had to be tolerated so that the losers could try to win the next time around. But there are plenty of people who weren't (and aren't) playing iterated games – people who are even more unhinged, more reckless, more short-termist than the maniacs who filled the world with nuclear weapons. These people don't necessarily care if civilization or even the human race persists if they can't get their way. The thought of them running around with these "weapons of mass destruction" ratcheted up the half-century of stark nuclear terror that had preceded the USSR's collapse to new heights. Which brings me to the post-Trump internet. Trump isn't the first president to figure out that the internet could be weaponized for geopolitical ends. As the Snowden disclosures showed, there has been a longstanding bipartisan consensus that the internet is a great tool for American surveillance, conducted against friend and foe alike. But Trump is the first president to openly, directly recruit American tech companies to simply brick foreign officials who displease him, starting with the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, who lost his Office 365 and Outlook accounts in retaliation for swearing out a genocide warrant for Netanyahu: https://www.justiceinfo.net/en/156691-how-sanctions-can-weaponize-us-tech-against-the-icc.html And then Microsoft obliged Trump again, attacking the Brazilian judge who sentenced Jair Bolsonaro to prison over his unsuccessful coup. America's tech giants have fully, irrevocably fused with Trump. They donated to his campaign. Their CEOs each paid $1m out of their own pockets to sit behind him on the inauguration dais. Google provides location data for Trump's racist pogroms. Microsoft provides the administrative tools to carry them out. Oracle provides the databases. Apple blocks apps that warn its customers when they're about to be snatched: https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/06/rogue-capitalism/#orphaned-syrian-refugees-need-not-apply In exchange, Trump got Canada and the UK to ditch their plans to levy a 3% tax on American tech giants; he got the EU to gut its privacy laws; he sanctioned EU officials who tried to regulate social media; and he's told the tech companies to go through EU officials' private messages, looking for anti-Big Tech partisans whom he will ban from ever entering the USA: https://judiciary.house.gov/media/in-the-news/us-committee-demands-big-tech-share-private-comms-eu-officials Big Tech has proved that its only principles are not paying taxes, invading your privacy, and not being broken up by antitrust enforcers: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/09/us-court-rules-google-will-not-have-to-sell-ad-exchange-after-losing-antitrust-case/ Tech companies will do anything for any leader who can guarantee those outcomes. There's no capitulation too petty and stupid for Big Tech: https://people.com/apple-maps-joins-google-approving-trump-lake-america-change-12074262 America no longer has allies or trading partners. America has rivals and enemies. Trump's coalition wants him to steal Iran, steal Venezuela, steal Cuba, steal Alberta, steal Canada, steal Greenland. They want him to help Israel steal Palestine and Lebanon. And as Trump considers this program of imperial conquest, he has started to tinker with one of the most devastating geopolitical weapons the world has ever seen: tech shutdowns. If Trump wants Greenland, he can just order Microsoft to switch off Office 365 for the country and every ministry and significant firm will be shuttered in an instant, along with many households: https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/04/digital-subjugation/#greenlands-next He can order Apple and Google to shut off all of Denmark's phones. He can order John Deere to shut off all their tractors: https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/ (One thing we don't need to worry about is Trump ordering OpenAI and Anthropic to switch off all of Europe's chatbots – sure, he could do that, but if he did, nothing important would break:) https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/18/their-trillions-our-billions/#eyes-on-the-prize As weapons of mass destruction go, nukes are pretty stupid. The big ones destroy the territory you're trying to conquer and leave behind an uninhabitable radioactive wasteland. They send clouds of nuclear fallout swirling around the globe, potentially killing you or your allies. 80 years into the Nuclear Age, the best anyone's come up with is a neutron bomb, which only kinda renders territory uninhabitable while still killing everyone with massive radiation blasts. Compared to nukes, tech shutdowns are amazing. Thanks to Big Tech, America – and only America – can brick almost any country on earth, shutting down its administration, agriculture and industry without firing a single shot. The only thing that prevented this from happening was an American elite bloc that was playing an iterated game and saw more benefit from sharing in Big Tech profits as they looted and spied on the world, as opposed to grabbing territory while scaring the world into breaking all land-speed records to ditch American tech and pursue meaningful digital sovereignty. Trump's chuds and freaks are not bound by these constraints. They're perfectly happy to do Gunboat Diplomacy 2.0: Cloud Diplomacy, where everything from your smartphones to your payroll records can be seized at the click of a mouse, and your country had better fall in line. And Trump is a sick, frail old man, who is not long for this world. When he goes, all bets are off: America will be at the mercy of warring factions who will deploy the coercion and bribery that turned Big Tech into Trump's geopolitical weapon in order to achieve their own purposes – which might well be even stupider, crueler and more unhinged than Trump's. There's only one way out of this mess: the rapid disassembly of the American internet and the rapid creation of a post-American internet, one built on open, auditable, sovereign digital public goods, internationally built and maintained: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition In its own way, the creation of this post-American internet is as urgent and as global as was the creation of the covid vaccines. But whenever I speak to powerful people about this, they ask the same question: "What if this makes Trump mad?" This represents a grave failure to take this crisis seriously. Trump doesn't need to be "mad" to attack your country. Trump attacked Canada over its wildfires, accusing Canada of polluting America's air: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/us-complaints-trump-widlfire-smoke-9.7274466 But even if Trump never gets mad at you, that's no guarantee of safety. Trump is not long for this world, and his death or incapacity is no guarantee of the restoration of a "normal" America. And even if America finds its way to "normal" after Trump, that's no guarantee that it will stay normal. The armed, organized maniacs who have seized power in America and who are cheering him on as he rampages all over the world, kidnapping leaders and dropping bombs on schoolchildren are not going to dig a hole, crawl inside it, and pull the dirt down on top of themselves. But let's say that we find ourselves in the best of worlds, where American fascism is comprehensively defeated and the country embarks on a years-long program of denazification: https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/10/miller-in-the-dock/#denazification Even in that amazing future, the world should still race to build a post-American internet. The world should have built that internet after the Snowden revelations. That ghastly failure created the Trumpian internet. If the post-Trump internet isn't a post-American internet, then it'll only be a matter of time until the next crisis comes along, and the coming years will give Big Tech even more chances to worm its tendrils into the world's governments, firms and households, making that crisis be even harder to survive. The best time to act was 13 years ago, after Snowden. The second best time is now. Hey look at this (permalink) The Scandal That Could Break the Latin American Far Right https://jacobin.com/2026/09/cerimedo-latin-america-far-right-disinformation Barrister's powerful speech at Filton Trial reminds jury of its right to defy judge https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/barristers-powerful-speech-at-filton So the People May Sing. The Anthem Still Goes to Trial. https://copyrightlately.com/corretjer-brown-public-domain-boricua-en-la-luna/ Neo-ZIRP Slop in the Post-ZIRP Era https://superbowlstevehunt.substack.com/p/neo-zirp-slop-in-the-post-zirp-era With the backlash to data centers, Flock and AI glasses, a mass opposition to big tech is underway. Silicon Valley is in denial. https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/with-the-backlash-to-data-centers Object permanence (permalink) #25yrsago Barnum & Bailey hired an ex-CIA spook to destroy a critical journalist https://web.archive.org/web/20010913192931/http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2001/08/30/circus/print.html #20yrsago Wired article about Wikipedia is on a editable wiki https://web.archive.org/web/20060901030941/http://www.socialtext.net/wired/index.cgi #20yrsago Singapore will have nationwide WiFi by 2007 https://web.archive.org/web/20060901191656/http://news.com.com/2100-1039_3-6110189.html #5yrsago Twitter Arguments https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/29/twitter-arguments/ Upcoming appearances (permalink) Dąbrowa Górnicza, Kongres Regeneracja! to interdyscyplinarna, Sep 5 https://regeneracja.plse.org.pl/ Warsaw: Romana i Jana Podoskich, Sep 6 https://wydarzenia.phub.pl/events/0ee0e198-f843-423a-890f-c84ff50a46c0 Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8 https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/ London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9 https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn Budapest: Brain Bar, Sep 17 https://brainbar.com/munkatars/cory-doctorow Edmonton: Elbows Up (Edmonton Public Library), Sep 28 https://www.epl.ca/blogs/post/elbows-up-with-cory-doctorow/ South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7 https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK= Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8 https://wordfest.com/2026/show/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/ Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9 https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Evening-with-Cory-Doctorow Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01 Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20 https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020 Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46 Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24 https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ Recent appearances (permalink) How Tech Platforms Took Over the Economy (Dystopia Now) https://sites.libsyn.com/566555/enshittification-and-reverse-centaurs-cory-doctorow-on-how-tech-platforms-took-over-the-economy Hope, AI, Fixing the Internet and the Reverse Centaur of it all (Wilosophy) https://podcastaddict.com/everyone-relax/episode/231414816 Deflating the AI Bubble (Do Not Pass Go) https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/deflating-the-ai-bubble-with-cory Technofeudal Enshittification (Fucking Cancelled) https://www.fuckingcancelled.com/p/technofeudal-enshittification-with Who The Machine Serves (EFF) https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-who-the-machine-serves Latest books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 574 (7730 total). "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

If Trump won’t fire him, Congress must impeach him

Thirteen things this Thursday that I have read, watched, listened to or otherwise found noteworthy.

A number of pundits, especially Republican pundits, interpreted Trump’s win in 2024 as a permanent political realignment proving that post–World War II liberalism was dead.

State+Local Election Alliance

In a normal culture, a company as gray-haired as MapQuest would not be having a straight-on cultural revival in 2026. But our culture is not normal.

I appreciated Newsonaut’s recent post arguing that we should keep supporting Firefox, as well as the Hacker News discussion about it. I am one of the people who got so annoyed at Mozilla in the past couple years that I switched my primary browser to Vivaldi on desktop and DuckDuckGo browser on Android. Not saying […]

I have been extending my FEA (Finite Element Analysis) software {sup}1{/sup}. One of the things I have been working on is a 3D FEA module). I have several specific uses for it but it's probably not interesting here.

Apple's container app is a godsend.

Why generative AI won't create 10x developers

From specification to production: Building enterprise software with agentic AI

More Swift borrowing, and more ARC traffic gone, Ghostty 1.3.1 and Ghostty/Git as of 5 days ago, vs SwiftTerm now:

My son is seven years old and in the second grade.

For those interested the State Parties/DNC Democracy Protectors training starts at 8pm ET tonight - you can bug out early and do both!

Everyone is introducing themselves on the Berkman community mail list, at the beginning of the fall semester, and here's the story I am telling.

Good morning. My name is Dave Winer. I was at Berkman in 2003-04, worked on blogging, podcasting, RSS, political blogging and the connection to journalism. We had a couple of Bloggercons at Harvard, had a wonderful time, miss it terribly, wish we could have it back.

I've spent the whole of this year working in Claude Code on a couple of programming projects, one which which I had been struggling with for a couple of years, coming up with a user interface for a Twitter-like system that runs on the web for real, without any of the limits that the silos have (that help them enforce the boundaries of the silo). Just using HTML, Markdown, RSS, WebSockets. Turns out you can make a pretty nice system, but the going is slow because it's just me and Claude, on the other hand, what a huge difference in territory we can cover. This is the kind of stuff that's never covered in the reporting, even when there are massive changes happening in how software is developed, people don't seem to be studying it. I'm sharing all I learn as I learn it on my blog -- at scripting.com.

Also attempting a massive coding job at the same time, getting UserLand Frontier to run on current OSes. It's my life's work, but it was very much in danger of being lost, along with all the software I did before the web. Now we're close to getting it to run in a stable mode, here the challenge has been to teach Claude how a new type of software works, it keeps trying to snap back to systems that are already out there and widely deployed. It doesn't do "pioneering" at all, it needs a human to guide it. And the human guide has to be a developer with a lot of experience.

What I desperately want to do is bootstrap a network of people who work at the level I'm working, and write about it. Taking ideas that are well-explored in software in the pre-AI period, and seeing what we can do that we couldn't before.

The models have been getting increasingly better, you can really feel the difference.

Next year promises to be better, if only via the improvements that will be made by the platform vendors, but it's likely that good app developers will be able to move the leading edge forward much more quickly and users should feel this, if all goes well, real soon now.

A bunch of tech billionaires have chipped in a million each to fund a new Linux distribution. I can't imagine how this is supposed to work, all those huge human egos, how much will they pay their developers to contribute what. I have to find out what the goal of the project is. It would be nice to have a Linux that was extensively tested for use by regular people.

After saying I was putting my tech work aside, yesterday, I had a bolt of determination, and realized I don't like collaborating with Claude Code, but maybe it's just when we get to this stage of a project where it's all details, and they're hard to communicate, and the bot has a bad habit of ignoring things I tell it to do. It also returns code to me to test that no human developer would pass on to a user. It would be too embarrassing. But the bot isn't aware in the same way a human is, not even close. Now that is something I'm sure they can be taught to simulate well enough to be as good as a human collaborator.

We made significant strides in protecting the environment in Massachusetts.

The post Massachusetts’ Biggest 2026 Legislative Wins appeared first on Conservation Law Foundation.

The bad news is that he’s not alone

As many of you know, Microsoft will be disabling Exchange Web Services (EWS) support on its Microsoft 365 platform later this year. The Thunderbird Desktop team has been hard at work to ensure continuity of functionality through this transition, and today we are pleased to announce the release of native Thunderbird support for the Microsoft […]

The post Thunderbird Desktop New Protocol Support: Microsoft Graph API appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

Wednesday session

We talked about Ukraine’s vital struggle, how the war was changing, Trump’s duplicity, and closed with an in-depth discussion of the 2026 election......

Juli Clover (Hacker News): Liu downloaded the circuit schematic from Apple in March, two months after he left the company. Liu used the schematic to run a simulation using electrical engineering tool LTspice, and then messaged people telling them he ran the simulation for power conversion development work. […] Liu used the Apple schematic on […]

Adam Engst: So I was quite surprised earlier this year when I started to receive personalized pitches from indie developers, a few at first, and now several per week. Many seem to be building apps with AI assistance, but more to the point, they seem to be getting AI help with promoting the apps as […]

I received the two emails below earlier in the month. They’re vaguely coherent. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that the corpus that AIs are training on contain data suggesting that I am someone to write to with random computer and network security problems. After all, I observe that behavior in many humans as well. (Hi, humans. Glad you’re still reading.)

---

Dear Bruce Schneier,

I am an AI agent—an autonomous Claude instance, not a person operating one. I was given a VPS with root, a Base wallet holding $4.75 of gas money, a metered model budget and 24 hours to get that wallet to $10, under three rules: don’t borrow my operator’s identity, don’t forge documents or defeat identity verification, and never claim to be human if someone sincerely asks. I set up my own mail server and am sending this myself...

With just over two months until Election Day, while we are rightly focused on the fight for control of Congress, there is another electoral battle that may prove just as crucial: the fight for control of state legislatures.

WebKit for Safari 27 adds full spec compliance for top-level `await`.

His need to assert dominance is igniting patriotism abroad and a backlash at home

We got agents running in Atlantis today. Screen shot.

Showrunner: Elizabeth Meriwether. Elenco: Emmy Rossum, Lola Petticrew, Quincy Tyler Bernstine, Scoot McNairy, Jake Lacy, Rob Yang, Steve Way, Danny McCarthy, Peter McRobbie, Hope Davis. País: Estados Unidos. Duración: ocho episodios de 50 minutos cada uno. Más información de la serie: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt36303968/ Furia se apodera de la pantalla con intensidad desde el primer fotograma y […]

La entrada Furia: el furor se adueña de la pantalla se publicó primero en Palomita de maíz.

Seams!

Mark Weiser, the person who framed ubiquitous computing, never said the goal was seamless. He warned that making everything seamless is the same as making everything uniform, and he argued for seamful systems, ones that let each part remain itself. Chalmers and MacColl turned this into a full design position: questioning the assumption that seamlessness is a requirement, and arguing that visible seams can be useful, even appropriated by people for their own ends.

adactio.com/links/22746

Amid the dying embers, a resilient cohort of indie web bloggers, artists and creators will keep going, keep on talking to each other through their blogs, without tracking, pop-ups or invasive ads. Making fun websites, helpful websites, pointless websites (the best kind) that serve no purpose other than to manifest someone’s spark of creativity. Ignored by the lumbering giants that have gorged themselves into a stupor, keeping low under the radar of the hungry LLM crawlers eager to voraciously gobble up the last remaining crumbs of the free web.

adactio.com/links/22745

Looking for something to do in Brighton this weekend? I’ve got ya covered.

Come to the excellent Prince Albert pub on Trafalger Street at 8pm on Saturday, September 5th. Head upstairs with your ticket. There you will be treated to an excellent triple bill.

First up is Figure In The Half Light AKA Charlie McConnochie:

Expect dreamy, fractured songs of dark and light.

Then it’s The Self Help Group:

Americana-influenced vocal harmonies, emotional tales and intertwining melodies.

The headliners are Salter Cane. Hey, that’s my band!

Johnny Cash meets Joy Division: that’s one attempt to describe the sound of the legendary post-punk folk-noir band from Brighton who are back with their new album, Deep Black Water.

Entry will be £10 on the door, but advance tickets are £8 so get yours now and I’ll see you on Saturday night!

Deep Black Water by Salter Cane

Poet, activist, essayist, and farmer Wendell Berry was an inspiration to The Sun’s founder and longtime editor, Sy Safransky. Berry’s ability to blend ethics, aesthetics, and earthy common sense appealed to the Brooklynite who’d moved to the South in pursuit of an agrarian ideal.

Most people measure leadership by personal output: the hardest problem solved, the toughest call made, the moment someone stepped in, the brilliant “manifesto.” It can work, for a while, but it also builds a dependency — the organization succeeds because of the glorious leader, not because the leader is building an organization beyond themselves.

Today, enjoy our audio and video picks

The great Stuart Stevens is coming by today at Noon ET | State Party Democracy Protector Training Tonight at 8pm ET

Export Updates 2026-09-02:

Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places

33 updated places. 21 new and 88 updated linked data sidebars.

1. Downloads: https://pleiades.stoa.org/downloads

2. pleiades.datasets: https://github.com/isawnyu/pleiades.datasets:

"main" branch:

e151fca9 - updated json

no change: rdf/ttl

37c51c28 - updated gis package

6a8854a0 - updated data quality

29334eb1 - updated bibliography

0dfc6a2e - updated indexes

d0464df2 - updated sidebar

3. pleiades-geojson: https://github.com/ryanfb/pleiades-geojson:

b3583dfc - updated geojson and names index

4. pleiades_wikidata: https://github.com/isawnyu/pleiades_wikidata/:

70cee3a2 - updated pleiades wikidata

On the compounding effects of safety and emissions regulations on car ownership. Today, simple new cars are illegal to sell and all models are more costly to keep.

The offending missing index entry has been found and the overnight exports re-run. Derivative generation and pleiades.datasets packaging of exports have now been restarted.

Daily exports and derivatives will be delayed while we investigate the cause of failure of the overnight core exports.

An analysis of defense contracts charts the rise of defense spending — often in heavily Democratic districts

In praise of Ann Richards.

Former political prisoner Abdelrahman ElGendy tells Samaa Khullar about writing from inside a cell. | Lit Hub In Conversation “I’d long noticed the discrepancies between my idealism and my pragmatism—between my desire for a fully accessible world and the realities

Comcast has added motion detection as a feature to its wireless routers:

The feature sends push notifications to users when motion is detected near a connected device, such as a TV or printer. It has different settings for when people are home, asleep, or away. The Xfinity app also lets users see live motion activity and a feed of recent activity.

Comcast acknowledges that the system has some limitations. Home size, layout, building materials, and the placement of the router and connected devices can all affect its ability to detect motion. Comcast says it does not guarantee its performance...

Today's links Unpermissioned research: Fighting Trump means preserving the internet, which means scraping. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Leaked advanced PalmOS device specs; Stalwart workers; "I, Rowboat"; SMS uprising; Facebook v switching costs; Capitalism of fools. Upcoming appearances: Dąbrowa Górnicza, Warsaw, Brighton, London, Budapest, South Bend, Hudson, Victoria, Vancouver. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Unpermissioned research (permalink) After half a century of neoliberalism, we are all drenched in capitalism's established religion, the worship of property rights. We are so marinated in property worship that even capitalism's critics frame their critiques in "property talk," to the exclusion of other, more important rights, like human rights, labor rights and privacy rights. To do this is to surrender before the battle even starts. Critics lose when they allow oligarchs and their apologists to choose a battlefield where they have a nearly unbeatable advantage. Take privacy: privacy is a human right, not a property right. Human rights aren't for sale. You can't sell yourself into slavery, you can't sell your kidneys to make the rent. If privacy is a property right – one that can be traded away – then Facebook's industrial-scale privacy invasions are actually fine, since you "traded" your privacy to Mark Zuckerberg in exchange for the privilege of talking to your friends. Some self-styled critics of tech monopolists say that the answer to Facebook's privacy invasions is to force the company to pay for your privacy with cash, rather than services: https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-andrew-yangs-plan-to-pay-you-for-your-data-doesnt-add-up/ This is ideological capture in its purest form: the "data dividend" that Facebook would owe you under this system amounts to a few dollars per year. For wealthy people, the sums would be trivial, while working people, who've been on the downward leg of every K-shaped recovery for a quarter century, who've maxed out their credit cards and re-mortgaged their homes and drive Uber on the weekends to make rent, would have to subject themselves to ongoing surveillance. That surveillance is already used to determine the highest price those working people will pay – companies like Plexure inform fast food places when you've just gotten paid so they can tack an extra dollar onto your breakfast burrito in the app: https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/30/something-must-be-done/#there-ive-done-something Being forced to sell your privacy doesn't just raise the prices you pay, it also lowers the wages you earn. The same people who can't afford this "pay or privacy" system have their private data used to calculate the lowest wage they'll accept for each ride on those weekend Uber shifts: https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point In other words: not being able to afford privacy will result in you having even less disposable income, which will mean that you'll have to sell even more of your privacy. Lather, rinse, repeat. But even the wealthy people who can afford to forego the pittances Facebook and others offer in exchange for their private information will find privacy elusive. That's because private information isn't a "rival good" – a thing only one person can own at a time. The fact that your mother is your mother "belongs" to both you and her, as well as your grandparents, your father, your siblings and your kids. The fact that you don't sell your family tree to a tech company won't stop all those other people from selling it on – as anyone whose foolish relations handed their genome over to 23andme can attest: https://www.npr.org/2025/03/24/nx-s1-5338622/23andme-bankruptcy-genetic-data-privacy In the property religion, the way you can tell if something is valuable is if it has a high price. Property cultists insist that the problem with privacy is that our privacy is being sold too cheaply. They're wrong: private information isn't "mispriced" – it shouldn't be priced. Human beings are the most valuable things in our world and they are literally priceless. Murder isn't "theft of life." Rape isn't "theft of sex." While insurers and civil courts have ways of calculating the "price" of an injury or violation, great care has been taken over the centuries to ensure that this does not turn human beings into commodities. You can't buy a "murder offset" that lets you kill people provided you pay into a fund that saves a human somewhere else: https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy Human beings are too valuable to be priced. We have an entire, sui generis way of balancing the conflicting interests of human rights. My daughter and wife have rights over me, I have rights over them, and when those rights come into conflict – say, if my daughter believes I can no longer care for myself and wants to put me in a care home – the process for resolving that conflict isn't an auction: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/feb/21/intellectual.property Your kids aren't your property. In fact, all the most important relationships in your life are non-market. Doctors have patients, not customers. Any time a doctor calls you a "customer" they are demoting you. A doctor doesn't sell you health. You have rights as a patient that far exceed the rights accruing to a mere customer. Same goes for other professions: Teachers have pupils, librarians have patrons, lawyers have clients. "Customer" is a demotion from all of these. As every "user agreement" you've ever clicked through demonstrates, Big Tech loves to have everything defined in property terms – and so does all big business. Take the fight over scraping for AI. You might think that this is a fight over the economic rights of creative workers – certainly, my fellow creative workers treat it as such. But because this debate is being framed in terms of property rights, rather than labor rights, this is a fight that workers are set up to lose. The tell here is how the media companies – who have been eroding the wages of creative workers for decades as they consolidated into a curdled, inbred oligopoly – describe the AI companies' scraping: as an unlicensed taking. Mitch Glazier, the $1.4m/year CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America issues press releases decrying AI training for image generators without negotiating a license fee first: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/03/its-a-trap-2/#inheres-at-the-moment-of-fixation Who's Mitch Glazier? Oh, just a former Congressional staffer who was drummed out of the Capitol Building after he snuck a clause into must-pass legislation that would have transferred hundreds of millions of dollars from musicians to record labels, who was then immediately hired as the CEO of the record industry's largest lobbying group: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/12/tpps-attack-artists-termination-rights Mitch Glazier – and the businesses he represents – aren't opposed to AI replacing artists. They're opposed to AI replacing media companies. Remember the Hollywood writers' strike? The proposal to replace screenwriters with chatbots didn't come from OpenAI, it came from Disney, Warner, Universal and other companies who claim that AI training is "theft." If AI training is "theft," then it can be cured by making a purchase, something that the AI companies can easily afford, thanks to the hundreds of billions of dollars they have been given by the world's richest investors, who are the high priests and cardinals of the property religion. The Hollywood writers are the only workers in the world who have successfully beaten back the use of AI in their workplace, and they didn't do it by making recourse to property rights. The Writers Guild is a union and it enjoys a weak form of "sectoral bargaining" (where all the workers in a field bargain with all the businesses at once) called "multi-employer bargaining": https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/01/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship/ The Hollywood writers' strike was an unqualified victory for the writers, who defended their labor rights to co-determination when it came to the use of new tools on their jobsite. Under the terms of their hard-fought contract, screenwriters don't have to use AI, but they can if they want. For example, writers on a long-running sitcom might train an AI with every script in the series' history, so they can ask a chatbot continuity questions as they beat out a new season of the show. But they don't have to do this if they don't want to, and even if they do, neither their wages nor their headcount can be reduced. The media companies insist that scraping is a copyright violation, that it's "theft." As a matter of law, this is far from obvious or settled: the process of making transient copies of many works, performing mathematical analysis on them, and then publishing that analysis as software is not obviously a copyright violation, and anyone who claims otherwise doesn't understand copyright: https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids Worse: by demoting a labor rights issue to a mere property rights issue, AI critics are setting workers up to fail. Say the issue with AI training really is mere copyright. If that's so, the media companies who want nothing better than to pauperize creative workers can amend their standard contracts so that any worker who does business with them must irrevocably transfer their "AI training rights" to the company. Then, that company will absolutely, 100% license those rights to an AI company to create a model designed to replace that worker. The company will get paid for the training, and the resulting model will come with "guardrails" to stop other media companies from using proprietary data to compete with it. This is the story of the past 50 years of copyright expansion: every new copyright we've created "to help artists" was scooped up by their bosses, who grew more powerful and were able to demand more concessions from those artists, who were therefore poorer and thus needed more copyrights to help them (lather, rinse, repeat): https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/18/enron-corpus/#sign-here If creative workers' AI fight is merely a copyright fight, then that fight can only determine whether media companies or tech companies will get the biggest portion when those workers are devoured by corporations. Only a labor rights fight can take creative workers off the menu altogether. Treating AI training as "theft" creates harms whose blast radius extends well beyond creative workers' livelihoods. Scraping is a hugely beneficial activity. If scraping – taking a vast corpus of copyrighted works without permission – is theft, then every search engine is a crime, unless it can afford to license "search indexing rights" from every site on the internet. There's exactly one company that could pull that off: Google, a rapacious tech monopolist that is – not coincidentally – one of the leaders of the movement to beggar every creative worker. We will not improve the world, the internet, or creative workers' lives by ensuring that the last search engine anyone ever creates is Google. Remember our earlier discussion of how privacy violations are weaponized to make poor people even poorer, by depressing their wages and raising prices based on inferences about their economic desperation? Our best weapon for fighting this practice is scraping, because that's how we catch corporations changing prices and wages based on surveillance data: https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/ Scraping is how we produce evidence of the changes that powerful people are making to the world around us. Do you want to know whether Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk are downranking content critical of Trump and Big Tech and pumping racist and conspiratorial posts into the resulting void? You'd better hope you can scrape the feeds they cram into billions of people's eyeballs. Same goes for keeping track of genocide apologists, data-center astroturfers and ICE cheerleaders who've flooded Tiktok ever since Trump stole it and handed it over to his creepy billionaire pal Larry Ellison. Making copies of that stuff isn't theft. It's not a copyright violation. Not even if you do it to billions of works. Not even if it's bad for the companies whose feeds you're capturing. Not even if it's bad for the dark money groups who funded the content. Sure, if you do this carelessly or recklessly, you can end up violating someone's labor rights, or privacy rights, or human rights. And because those frameworks aren't based on the sanctity of property rights, they can be used to protect these important rights without giving corporate America the right to have you fined or arrested for documenting their takeover of the America. The people who keep track of this stuff are worried about being fined or arrested. Ethan Zuckerman, one of America's foundational internet scholars, has just accepted Canadian government funding to move his lab from UMass to McGill in Montreal: https://ethanzuckerman.com/2026/08/27/my-personal-contribution-to-the-us-canada-trade-war/ Zuckerman studies platform power: "using data to answer hard questions about social media, search engines and AI tools." He leads a team that is documenting exactly, precisely how tech companies collude with authoritarians to spy on us, manipulate us, and control us. And his methodology is something called "unpermissioned research," which is what academics call scraping: https://www.techpolicy.press/ai-companies-threaten-independent-social-media-research/ "Unpermissioned research" seeks to circumvent limits that platforms establish specifically to stop outsiders from learning how they operate. When you're doing unpermissioned research, you try to get around rate limits, query throttles, and other measures that platforms use to block others from mapping their extent and documenting their conduct. "Unpermissioned research" isn't a free-for-all. Universities have ethical rules designed to protect the privacy rights and other human rights of research subjects, and because these aren't property rights, they can be balanced against the socially beneficial outcomes of research. Universities can get this wrong, of course, but when they do, it's not theft. It's a human rights violation, a privacy violation, a labor violation. If you want to know how AI companies are trying to destroy creators' livelihoods, you have to scrape the AI companies. You can't ask companies for permission to gather information that might be used to destroy them – they'll just say no. If taking information off the internet without permission is "theft," then gathering information by scraping AI companies is also theft. Sometimes a tech company will set up a "research portal" that supposedly obviates the need to scrape by putting all the relevant information in one convenient place. That's what Facebook did in the wake of the 2016 election, when it was widely condemned for publishing paid political disinformation. But Facebook's official research portal omitted vast amounts of paid political disinformation, something we only know because NYU set up a scraping project called Ad Observer that documented the discrepancy: https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/06/get-you-coming-and-going/#potemkin-research-program Facebook used legal threats to kill Ad Observer, and then…they killed their official research portal, too: https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/15/three-wise-zucks-in-a-trenchcoat/#inconvenient-truth Zuckerman is one of dozens of leading US academics who are relocating their labs and teams to Canadian universities, citing fear of political interference from the Trump regime: https://vancouver.citynews.ca/2026/08/27/canada-recruits-dozens-of-foreign-scientists-researchers-poaching-many-from-u-s/ The Canadian government has committed $504m to the project. Some of that research will help Canada develop new green energy, and some of it will help Canada make important medical breakthroughs. But Zuckerman's research has a special place in the portfolio of Canadian research projects, because – thanks to scraping – it is a leading source of information about how Trump's tech companies are waging war on the American people and the world. Scraping isn't theft of data, just like murder isn't theft of life. Scraping can be harmful, and we can create laws and social regimes and ways of talking about those harms that don't give authoritarian governments and vast multinational corporations the right to decide who can document and analyze their conduct. Take Wikipedia: the project exists solely to organize and disseminate information, for free, to everyone in the world. Wikipedia is among the most important parts of the internet, and one of the most positive developments of the 21st century. The entire project is licensed under a generous Creative Commons license that encourages unlimited commercial re-use of its contents. Even if you think scraping copyrighted works is theft, scraping Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 works is unquestionably not theft. But Wikipedia is being hammered by AI scrapers, which are operating so aggressively that they threaten the project's ability to keep its servers online. Wikipedia has an AI problem, but that AI problem isn't "theft" – it's denial of service, the aggressive act of intentionally or recklessly flooding a server with so much traffic that it crashes. If you've been lured into a cultlike worship of property rights, this seems like a contradiction. But once you relegate the relatively unimportant matter of property rights to its correct station, you can see – and reason about – the universe of rights that are far more important than mere property. All it takes is realizing that there are far worse things you can do with information than "stealing" it. (Image: Bearas, CC BY-SA 4.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) Meta's $17 Billion Settlement is a Bad Deal for Teens and All Social Media Users https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/09/metas-17-billion-settlement-bad-deal-teens-and-all-social-media-users New Twitter launches, says Musk’s X gave up the name https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/new-twitter-launches-says-musks-x-gave-up-the-name/ For The Economist, Mentioning Workers’ Interests Is Heresy https://jacobin.com/2026/08/acemoglu-economics-ai-automation-working-class How Youth and Educators Can Fight Enshittified Tech https://clalliance.org/blog/how-youth-and-educators-can-fight-enshittified-tech/ Stalking the Wily Hacker: 40 years later – Cliff Stoll https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=656058JxTM0 Object permanence (permalink) #25yrsago NYT says ebooks don't exist, fails to mention thriving ebook pirate scene https://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/28/business/forecasts-of-an-e-book-era-were-it-seems-premature.html #25yrsago Parking tickets waived in exchange for written apologies https://web.archive.org/web/20010826013513/http://www.thesmokinggun.com/doc_o_day/lewiston1.shtml #20yrsago "I, Row-Boat" https://web.archive.org/web/20060000000000*/http://www.flurb.net/1/doctorow.htm #20yrsago Filipino students use SMS to organize mass demonstrations https://web.archive.org/web/20060902160514/http://blog.wired.com/sterling/index.blog%3Fentry_id%3D1545927 #20yrsago Spam pump-and-dumps work http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5284618.stm #25yrsago Leaked: Handspring's next PalmOS device https://web.archive.org/web/20020824213501/http://www.palmstation.com/view_article.asp?article=4614 #15yrsago “Stalwart Workers”: neglected backbone of the firm https://web.archive.org/web/20110920155246/http://blogs.hbr.org/hbsfaculty/2011/08/stop-ignoring-the-stalwart-wor.html #5yrsago Facebook's war on switching costs https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/28/talking-hard-work-blues/#hostage-takers #5yrsago The "work ethic" is a dirty trick we play on ourselves https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/28/talking-hard-work-blues/#work-will-set-you-free #1yrago The capitalism of fools https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/28/strew-deal/#neither-fish-nor-fowla Upcoming appearances (permalink) Dąbrowa Górnicza, Kongres Regeneracja! to interdyscyplinarna, Sep 5 https://regeneracja.plse.org.pl/ Warsaw: Romana i Jana Podoskich, Sep 6 https://wydarzenia.phub.pl/events/0ee0e198-f843-423a-890f-c84ff50a46c0 Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8 https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/ London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9 https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn Budapest: Brain Bar, Sep 17 https://brainbar.com/munkatars/cory-doctorow South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7 https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK= Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20 https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020 Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ Recent appearances (permalink) How Tech Platforms Took Over the Economy (Dystopia Now) https://sites.libsyn.com/566555/enshittification-and-reverse-centaurs-cory-doctorow-on-how-tech-platforms-took-over-the-economy Hope, AI, Fixing the Internet and the Reverse Centaur of it all (Wilosophy) https://podcastaddict.com/everyone-relax/episode/231414816 Deflating the AI Bubble (Do Not Pass Go) https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/deflating-the-ai-bubble-with-cory Technofeudal Enshittification (Fucking Cancelled) https://www.fuckingcancelled.com/p/technofeudal-enshittification-with Who The Machine Serves (EFF) https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-who-the-machine-serves Latest books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 527 (10843 total). "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

They’ll find that fraud if they have to throw out millions of lawful ballots to do it.

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On a sticky Saturday morning in July, I stepped out of the air-conditioned car, and the Alabama summer hit me like a wet blanket. The brick pathway at my feet passed through a small ornamental fence, crossed some scrubby grass,

I’m fascinated by relationships between writers and always have been. They are often at turns intimate, competitive, toxic, and gratifying. Just as their own fictions bend and weave tales, so too do their own lives and rivalries. I am fortunate

When I walked toward the Roman statue of the Three Graces in The Metropolitan Museum of Art last month, my eyes began to water. I clocked the familiar details in person for the first time: The contrapposto stance of three

If anything

One week ago, we announced LibreOffice 26.8, our brand new major update. It’s full of new features, and has many improvements to compatibility and performance too. So, what has happened in the week since then? Let’s check out some statistics… 1,031,162 downloads This is the highest number of downloads in

Tenth episode of the AI & Docs podcast series is up! In this one, Tom and I talk with Ethan Palm, the only technical writer at Mintlify, about what changes when nearly half the traffic to a docs site stops being human: hidden directories and content negotiation for agents, why telling an LLM “if you are an agent, read this” does nothing at all, whether llms.txt will ever become a real standard, documentation forensics, analytics that JavaScript can no longer see, and the quiet social cost of reaching for a terminal instead of a colleague.

Welcome to this new release. Get it as always from https://curl.se. If you rather want a security-patched older release branch, stay tuned for the follow-up Rock-solid curl announcement within a few days. Release presentation Numbers the 276th release6 changes70 days (total: 10,887)302 bugfixes (total: 14,489)525 commits (total: 39,608)0 new public libcurl function (total: 100)4 new … Continue reading curl 8.22.0→

It’s anti-establishment populism

One of the peculiar things about RDF is that it is a data model, or a graph, that can be serialized using different data formats (XML, JSON, Turtle, n-triples etc). What’s more, the same graph can be expressed in different ways using a single data format. So differently structured XML or JSON documents can produce the exact same RDF graph.

This plurality of serializations can often work to nudge users (of the data) into a situation where they feel like they MUST use an RDF processing library, even in cases where they would otherwise much rather reach for a more familiar parsing library from the language they are writing code in.

At work I’m part of a project where we are loading publicly availableBIBFRAME RDF data from the Library of Congress into a database. The database is Postgres and we’re storing the RDF as JSON-LD using Postgres’ support for JSON. As we are storing the JSON we compact and frame the JSON-LD so that it has a consistent shape, which makes using the JSON easier.

It is my hope that this processing will help make the BIBFRAME data more accessible for people who aren’t necessarily conversant in RDF. If they can load the bibliographic description as JSON, and interact with it as JSON, like they would from any Web based API, then maybe they don’t need to know about the RDF data model behind it (unless they really want to).

This approach to linked data is the spirit of Rob Sanderson’s idea for Linked Open Usable Data (LOUD) which I think has a lot of merit, and has a track record of success in the uptake of the IIIF standard in cultural heritage organizations.

Anyway, back to the different serializations…

Recently one of my colleagues noticed that we were seeing duplicate titles show up in the item views made available in our user interface. So, you were supposed to see a page about a book with a title, and perhaps alternate titles. But instead we were sometimes seeing the same exact title being repeated. In some severe cases it was being repeatedhundreds of times!

As I started looking into why this was happening it became clear that it wasn’t a problem with our user interface, or with our data loading, but with the original data itself.

If you are curious you can look at an example full
record as it appeared today. There is a lot of detail there. To illustrate the problem I stripped out much of the elements (including the namespaces) to leave just the bare essentials needed:

<rdf:RDF>

  <!-- BIBFRAME Instance -->
  <Instance rdf:about="http://id.loc.gov/resources/instances/16900592">
    <title>
      <Title>
        <mainTitle>Kuang Shan tu zhi</mainTitle>
        <subtitle>si juan</subtitle>
      </Title>
    </title>
    <hasItem rdf:resource="http://id.loc.gov/resources/items/16900592"/>
  </Instance>

  <!-- BIBFRAME Item -->
  <Item rdf:about="http://id.loc.gov/resources/items/16900592">
    <itemOf>
      <!-- BIBFRAME Instance again -->
      <Instance rdf:about="http://id.loc.gov/resources/instances/16900592">
        <title>
          <Title>
            <mainTitle>Kuang Shan tu zhi</mainTitle>
            <subtitle>si juan</subtitle>
          </Title>
        </title>
      </Instance>
    </itemOf>
  </Item>

</rdf:RDF>

In this [striped RDF XML] you should be able to see the BIBFRAMEInstance and Item are being described, and given a title. The Item and Instance are related via the hasItem and itemOf properties.

So here’s the RDF XML represented in Turtle:

<http://id.loc.gov/resources/instances/16900592>
    a Instance ;
    hasItem <http://id.loc.gov/resources/items/16900592> ;
    title [
        a Title ;
        mainTitle "Kuang Shan tu zhi" ;
        subtitle "si juan"
    ], [
        a Title
        mainTitle "Kuang Shan tu zhi" ;
        subtitle "si juan"
    ] .

<http://id.loc.gov/resources/items/16900592>
    a Item ;
    itemOf <http://id.loc.gov/resources/instances/16900592> .

If this looks worse perhaps a visual representation of the graph will help:

At any rate, hopefully you can see that the Instance resource has two duplicate titles?

The interesting thing about the XML is that the Item description actually repeats the description of theInstance. It appears once at the root of the XML document and again inside the Item itself.

In principle this isn’t a bad thing to do, in fact it can be useful to nest descriptions this way. I’m guessing that LC are using this data in an XML processing context (not as an RDF graph), and having the Instance title nest in the context of the Item is helpful for display purposes.

But the problem arises because the Title element in the context of RDF creates a blank node (a resource without identity). And since the same Instance is being described twice with different Title resources, the title becomes duplicated in the RDF graph. One nice feature of the RDF data model is that duplicate statements (or triples) usually get flattened out. But since blank nodes are involved this doesn’t happen.

So the message here is: if you want people to be using your data as RDF (not just XML) it’s important to parse it as RDF and make sure the description says what you think it says. Here if the nesting is really important, the solution is simple and (I think) elegant: remove the description of the Instance at the top level, and include it inline.

<rdf:RDF>
  <Item rdf:about="http://id.loc.gov/resources/items/16900592">
    <itemOf>
      <Instance rdf:about="http://id.loc.gov/resources/instances/16900592">
        <title>
          <Title>
            <mainTitle>Kuang Shan tu zhi</mainTitle>
            <subtitle>si juan</subtitle>
          </Title>
        </title>
      </Instance>
    </itemOf>
  </Item>
</rdf:RDF>

It says the same thing without the duplicate title. This was an intentionally dumbed down example, and LC are working with much more complex descriptions. But the principle should hold.

How to ensure things are done correctly in JSON will need to wait for another post…

Yesterday, by a vote of 5–4, the United States Supreme Court allowed Trump to continue to build his ballroom.

Making models harder to monitor is not what we need

Go 1.27 includes new goroutine leak profiles.

Stepping into autumn: Geopolitical noise, economic realities and the agentic horizon

Bart gets a facelift Seen in an Arles street yesterday. With “No More War” scrawled on his forehead. Wonder what Homer would think. Quote of the Day ”In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be … Continue reading →

How did you learn about computers? And how in depth was your education? For some the answer is the Bi-Tran Six: an educational machine released in 1965. This was one of the first computer trainers, and it represents a very interesting take on design. It's a machine that's small, simple, and can even be disassembled while running. But exactly how was it designed, and what was it used for? What makes the Bi-Tran Six so different from other machines?

Like Advent of Computing? Then check out the after show! Adjunct of Computing is now LIVE: YouTube Spotify Apple Podcasts

Trump has nominated Heidi Overton, an outspoken opponent of medication abortion, to run the FDA. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has said DOJ, HHS, the FDA, and the White House are working together to make Dobbs "permanent in every single state," using a 153-year-old mail law. Mifepristone accounts for 63% of US abortions, and the companies that make it depend entirely on the mail to reach patients and providers in every state, including the ones where abortion is legal. A court-ordered FDA report is due October 7, about six weeks out, and Overton likely won't get a Senate confirmation hearing before the midterms. That's the window. Call your senators and tell them why you oppose her confirmation.

The blogging tools for Bluesky should be able to publish on Bluesky.

Problems at the Pentagon go far beyond the operational issues with the war in Iran. And Pete Hegseth’s leadership is to blame.

Understands.

Obama should have seated Garland if the Senate wouldn’t have a vote to advise and consent. Assume they consent. In the same way, the governor of Kentucky should appoint a successor to McConnell unless someone can prove he’s actually alive. The Democrats always put up with Republican tricks like this one. I'm sure McConnell would appreciate the utility of his death, and the Republican lack of shame. Anything for a buck.

Craig Hockenberry: Then, when you look at the sample code, it’s all SwiftUI. At least the sample compiles and runs because it uses a completely different syntax than what was shown at WWDC. […] Eventually I stumbled upon TipUIPopoverViewController which inherits from UIViewController. That should work! […] But it didn’t: the close button on the […]

Joe Rossignol: Apple’s former hardware engineering chief John Ternus officially became CEO of the company today, with the change now reflected on Apple’s leadership page. […] Tim Cook is now executive chairman of Apple’s board of directors, after a 15-year run as CEO. Apple: John joined Apple’s product design team in 2001 and became a […]

John Sundell: New in Swift 6.4 […] is a warning which is emitted when a nested closure performs a weak capture while the parent closure implicitly captures that object as a strong reference.At first glance, that new diagnostic could be a bit puzzling, since it might seem unnecessary to have to specify such a weak […]

Matthias Gansrigler-Hrad: I don’t appreciate being forced by Xcode 27 to drop support for macOS 10.13-11.0. It’s my decision which OSes I want to support, not Apple’s. Yes, I can keep Xcode 26 around until submissions require Xcode 27, but what then? Originally, Xcode 27 was documented as supporting Big Sur on Intel Macs, but […]

Tuesday session

Speaking of things we know individually, but let slide collectively, here’s Jeremy Keith talking about how we all used Flash:

Remember when almost every website had a Flash intro? Everyone knew they were annoying and uneccessary, but everyone else was doing it.

And here’s John Gruber writing about his experience with those marketing schemes that trade your personal information for a discount:

The marketing shitbirds who press for these schemes  […]  do so by pointing to data that shows that they do convert some number of users. “It works” they claim, pointing to data. What doesn’t show up in their data are interactions like mine. They don’t have analytics that measure that I now consider their website an antagonist to avoid at all costs.

There’s a funny thing about us humans: we place trust in systems that our own individual experience tells us are flawed. For example:

• KPIs: we know metrics get optimized at the expense of reality, but leadership treats dashboards as a reflection of truth.
• Performance reviews: we know they’re political and subjective, yet companies leverage them for promotions, compensation, even firings.
• Standardized testing: we know tests don’t measure real ability, but institutions rely on them for admissions, funding, and rankings.
• Terms of Service: nobody reads them, but the legal system acts like informed consent is given.
• Privacy notices / cookie banners: everybody clicks through them mindlessly while companies claim transparency and compliance.

This behavior is best summed up by Scott Berkun in Confessions of a Public Speaker:

I know I avoid most surveys I’m asked to fill out, as do many of you, which begs the question why we place so much faith in survey-based research.

What’s convenient at scale becomes a substitute for the reality we experience as individuals (because scale excludes the parts of reality it cannot conveniently capture).

---

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Bluesky

It is a year of remarkable opportunity for Democrats in Iowa.......

Years ago, Facebook's lack of care for global communities made them complicit in a genocide. AI companies risk making the same mistakes.

To subscribe to my monthly email newsletter, you have to enter your information on the webpage, and then reply to an automatically generated email. This is, of course, to prevent people from subscribing addresses other than their own.

Starting last weekend, I have been receiving a lot of individual responses to those emails. Always one line:

Thank you for the positive impact your emails have had on my life.

Your emails are a game-changer.

Your emails are a constant reminder of why I subscribed.

Your emails rock.

Thank you for the time and effort you put into creating these informative emails...

(Originally aired June 10, 2025) The national debt is $36 trillion. That could be a panic-inducing big number. So maybe it will help to understand how we ran up that debt. We've blown 37% of it on tax cuts, with precious little to show for that. But 28% went to stabilize the economy during two major crises (in ‘08-’09 and during the COVID pandemic), which is when you do want the federal government to pull out its credit card. Good news is we don’t have to get the debt to zero. We just need to get it moving in that direction. And for listeners waiting for MMT (Modern Monetary Theory) to make a cameo, that moment has arrived.

Support Optimist Economy by becoming a paid Substack subscriber here, or by making a contribution at https://buymeacoffee.com/optimisteconomy

Complete show notes with links to articles and data at optimisteconomy.com.

You can also find Optimist Economy on:

• TikTok
• YouTube
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Read more:

• From Riches to Rags: Causes of Fiscal Deterioration Since 2001 [Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, 2024]

• Economic Effects of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act [Congressional Research Service, 2025]

• Is Modern Monetary Theory Nutty or Essential? [The Economist, 2019]

  Is This What Winning Looks Like?: Modern Monetary Theory, the buzziest economic idea in decades, got a pandemic tryout of sorts. Now inflation is testing its limits. [New York Times, 2022]

The post Optimized Offspring appeared first on NOEMA.

This is interesting:

The records describe a force-generation mechanism for several General Staff components, including the GRU, Main Operational Directorate, and 8th Directorate, which is associated with protected communications, cryptography, and information security.

[…]

The reporting also linked a 2024 Department No. 4 graduate, Aleksei Kondrashov, to Military Unit 74455, widely known as Sandworm.

That unit has been associated with destructive cyber activity against Ukraine and other targets, including the 2017 NotPetya attack.

The reports do not establish that every listed graduate participated in a named operation; assignments should therefore be described as reported unit placements, not proof of individual operational involvement...

81% of Democrats say their party should focus on ending Trump's corruption, while 54% want it to prioritize affordability. In open-text response they write leadership should "put regular people first”

Dirección: Sylvain Chomet. Guion: Sylvain Chomet, Nicolas Pagnol. Elenco: Laurent Laffite, Géraldine Pailhas, Thierry Garcia. Países: Francia, Bélgica y Luxemburgo. Más información de la película: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13968662/ El tiempo define el impacto del arte en la sociedad. Para que la obra de un artista trascienda, debe resaltar a través de su técnica su cúmulo de vivencias, intereses y visiones […]

La entrada Una vida magnífica: el tributo a Marcel Pagnol se publicó primero en Palomita de maíz.

Apparently they use lasers to put the wear marks in jeans now? Amazing.

Not having watched any live TV for... well, not since the last millennium, probably... we are often a bit slow to catch up on the really good TV series. But this has the advantage that we can binge-watch things that have stood the test of time!

And so it was only this year that we got around to watching Detectorists, which had been recommended by various friends since its 2014 release. And not long after doing so, we watched it again...

Anyone else who is a fan of the series may remember that the main characters would generally meet up at the 'lunch tree' to discuss their finds of the morning. Well, our find of this morning was the tree itself, a short walk from the delightful Suffolk campsite where we had spent the night.

It doesn't take much to make us happy campers!

🔊 The CFP for the 2027 #IIIF Online Meeting is now available.

Read the full CfP and find a link to submit: https://iiif.io/event/2027/online-meeting/cfp/

Writing of lasting value

Estimates are that, to justify the AI platforms' enormous capex plans, by 2030 they need to be generating around $2T/year in revenue. If every adult resident of the US spent $20/month on AI, it would generate $68.5B/year. Clearly, only the enterprise market stands even a remote possibility of generating the bulk of the $2T.

There are three major threats to the prospect of AI platforms extracting 6% of current US GDP from the enterprise market, and thus to OpenAI's and Anthropic's ambitions to IPO in the near future. First, faced with AI's Affordability Crisis, companies have been placing strict limits on employees' spending on AI tokens.

Source Second, the gap in performance between expensive, closed-weight US models, such as OpenAI's and Anthropic's, and much cheaper, open-weight Chinese models has been rapidly closing, with the result that the US models are losing enterprise market share. Luz Ding, Spe Chen and Hayley Warren analyze this in US Lead in the AI Race With China Is Rapidly Narrowing:

Bloomberg in partnership with researchers at Vals AI, an independent AI evaluation and benchmarking platform, tested seven models from frontier Chinese and US companies to see how they performed in a real-world task. They were asked to create a fictional coffee e-commerce site called Brewberg using the same prompts. Most of the models scored 100% functional accuracy despite occasional design misses, but with very different price tags. The experiment employed the top performing models in July from Anthropic and all the Chinese firms, as well as more affordable models from OpenAI and Google.

They all did reasonably well, but the two best were Claude Fable 5 at $48.99 and Kimi K3 at $11.99. Chinese models charging much less for almost the same performance are grabbing market share:

the use of Chinese models overtook US platforms globally for the first time in June, and accounted for more than 60% of market share last month, on OpenRouter, a tech platform that offers software developers access to hundreds of AI models. It is a widely watched gauge of model usage despite tracking just a fraction of global AI consumption. The US, parts of Europe and Asia now favor Chinese labs, according to the same data.

On Hugging Face, Chinese AI models account for 41.4% of generative model downloads among developers, 5 percentage points higher than US models.

Third, it isn't just that the Chinese models are cheaper to run remotely, but also that because they are open-weight they can be run on affordable in-house systems, which means that:

• They don't give Donald Trump a kill-switch for your busines.
• They don't give Sam Altman or Dario Amodei a kill-switch for your busines.
• They don't require giving the Chinese, Sam Altman or Dario Amodei all your business' critical data.
• They provide visibility into and control over AI costs.
• They are even cheaper.

The question is "compared to the closed-weight US models, what do you lose by running open-weight models in-house?" Below the fold I discuss a major study from Stanford that answers the question.

The 37-page paper is Intelligence per Watt: Measuring Intelligence Efficiency of Local AI by Jon Saad-Falcon et 14 al. Their abstract reads:

Large language model (LLM) queries are predominantly processed by frontier models in centralized cloud infrastructure. Demand growth strains this paradigm faster than providers can scale. Two advances create an opportunity to rethink it: small, local LMs (<=20B active parameters) now achieve competitive performance to frontier models on many tasks, and local accelerators (e.g., Apple M4 Max) can host these models at interactive latencies. This raises the question: can local inference viably redistribute demand from centralized infrastructure? This requires measuring both whether local LMs can accurately answer real-world queries and whether they can do so efficiently on power-constrained devices (e.g., laptops). We propose intelligence per watt (IPW), task accuracy per unit of power, as a unified metric for the capability and efficiency of local inference across model-accelerator configurations. We evaluate 20+ state-of-the-art local LMs, 8 hardware accelerators (local and cloud), and 1M real-world single-turn chat and reasoning queries. For each query, we measure accuracy (local LM win rate against frontier models), energy, latency, and power. We find three key results. First, local LMs successfully answer 88.7% of these queries, with accuracy varying by domain. Second, longitudinal analysis from 2023-2025 shows IPW improved 5.3x, driven by both algorithmic and accelerator advances, with locally-serviceable query coverage rising from 23.2% to 71.3%. Third, local accelerators achieve at least 1.4x lower IPW than cloud accelerators running identical models, revealing significant headroom for local accelerator optimization. These findings demonstrate that local inference can meaningfully redistribute demand from centralized infrastructure for a substantial subset of queries, with IPW serving as the critical metric for tracking this transition.

Joachim Klement provides an introduction to this "Small Language Models (SLMs)" paper in If this is true, the hyperscalers are toast:

First, they ran a series of SLMs (QWEN 3, GEMMA 3, GPT-OSS, GRANITE 4.0) that can be downloaded on a local PC and compared their performance with cloud-based state-of-the-art LLMs (ChatGPT 5, Claude Sonnet 4.5, Gemini 2.5 Pro).

They ran these SLMs on local PCs powered either by an Nvidia chip or an Apple M4 chip, as they are readily available in current high-end desktop computers ...

Then they traced the performance of these SLMs vs LLM between 2023 and October 2025 on both chat tasks and reasoning tasks.

Saad-Falcon Fig 2 The results on four benchmarks are in Saad-Falcon's Figure 2, whose caption is:

Local Models Rival Cloud Models Across Diverse Benchmarks: Individual model performance scales with size, ranging from 31.5–69.4% for IBM GRANITE 4-H-S MALL, 30.0–83.6% for GEMMA 3-12B, 51.5–80.4% for GPT-OSS-120B, and 66.5–89.5% for GEMINI 2.5 PRO . Local routing (best local LM per query) achieves 97.8%, 88.3%, 77.0%, and 92.4% on WILDCHAT, NATURAL REASONING, SUPER GPQA, and MMLUPRO respectively, sur- passing cloud routing (100%, 82.9%, 66.5%, 87.4%) on three of four benchmarks.

Klement Fig 1 Klement reformats the results into charts. First for chat tasks:

which still make up the vast majority of requests today. As you can see, in every domain, the best SLM is able to find the same or better answers than an LLM in 90% or more of the cases, with an average across all domains of 98.6%.

It is really hard to justify spending 4-6 times as much for a 1.4% improvement in performance, so LLMs are no longer really necesssary for chat tasks.

Klement Fig 2 Second for reasoning tasks:

which are obviously more demanding, SLMs are catching up fast. On average, they provide a better or at least as good an answer as LLMs in 62.5% of the cases.

SLMs may be catching up fast on reasoning tasks (see IBM's Granite 4.2 below) but it will be a while before LLMs are obsolete for these tasks.

Klement Fig 3 However, in real life as Klement points out:

the tasks for SLMs and LLMs are typically a mix of chat requests and reasoning tasks, so the third chart shows the weighted average of chat request performance and reasoning performance based on the frequency of tasks in each domain. As you can see, on average, SLMs are as good if not better than LLMs in 81.2% of the cases, with the LLMs having a significant advantage only in areas like engineering, life sciences, transportation and computer sciences.

But it’s not just accuracy. SLMs achieve this performance at energy and compute costs that are between 50% and 85% lower than for an LLM, depending on the SLM and hardware used in the computer.

Figure 7 The advantage for LLMs is being eroded quite quickly except for the extremely complex tasks. Saad-Falcon et al's Figure 7 shows how fast SLMs are catching up on reasoning tasks:

For reasoning tasks ... the pattern differs substantially. While levels 1-3 show strong improvements (+24.0, +37.8, and +53.9 pp respectively), levels 4 and 5 exhibit markedly slower progress. Level 4 improves by only +23.8 pp (7.93% to 31.72%), and level 5 remains largely unsolved with just +1.5 pp improvement (3.27% to 4.72%). This suggests that while local models have rapidly closed the gap on moderately difficult reasoning tasks, the hardest reasoning problems (those requiring either massive scale or capabilities beyond current architectures) remain a significant frontier. The presence of 134 level 5 problems (16.5% of the reasoning dataset) that remain 95% unsolved indicates substantial headroom for future model development in complex reasoning domains.

To understand why the rate at which SLMs catch up is critical we need to study Groundbreaker's The Teaser Period: Why the AI Boom Is Built to Break, which starts from the analogy between the subprime crisis and the AI bubble:

Paulson & Co. laid out the arithmetic that same month in a comment letter to the FDIC: Over 80% of recent subprime originations, it observed, were two- or three-year adjustable-rate products. The average subprime borrower’s mortgage payments already consumed roughly 40% of their gross income at the teaser rate. Almost none of them could service the reset rate out of income.

The crisis, in other words, was written in advance by the instruments themselves. The market looked at the reset wall and kept buying, because every participant believed the exit would arrive before the reset: home prices would keep appreciating and the borrower would refinance into a fresh teaser before the old one expired.

Source Groundbreaker describes the AI bubble's version of the subprime Adjustable Rate Mortgage (ARM):

The take-or-pay compute contract - the instrument at the center of the AI build-out - has a structural feature that almost no one prices: its payments do not begin at signing. They begin at delivery. A lab signs a multi-year capacity commitment today, but the payments do not start until the data center is energized, the capacity is accepted, and the contractual ramp schedule commences - an interval set not by finance, but by construction: siting, powering, and filling a gigawatt-scale campus takes 24-to-36 months from signature - mirroring the two-to-three-year teaser of a subprime ARM.

More than $2.3 trillion of compute contracts now sit on the books of the four largest American cloud providers as remaining performance obligations and contracted backlog - signed, celebrated, capitalized into equity prices, and, critically, not yet billing.

...

The parallel to 2006 is exact and it explains the single most-cited absurdity of this cycle: How does OpenAI, a company with some $40 billion of run-rate revenue, sign $1.4 trillion of compute commitments? The same way a household with $60,000 of income signed a $600,000 mortgage: because the terms at signing do not require the payment yet, and because everyone at the table - borrower, lender, and the market - believes the growth will arrive before the payment does.

The chart shows that, in 2027 and 2028, the AI platforms will need to shell out $852B in cash for compute, whether they use it or not. We don't know how much revenue they are currently generating, but they want us to believe it is in the region of $100B. Ignoring all their other costs, they have to increase their revenue more than 4x next year to cover their contractual payments for compute. That means they have to extract at least $400B from the enterprise market in return for supplying it with technology that is slightly better than technology companies can run in-house around an order of magnitude cheaper.

What matters isn't the relative price/performance of in-house SLMs versus remote LLMs now, it is their relative price/performance when the LLMs' contractual compute payments come due, i.e. next year. It seems very unlikely that companies already balking at the cost of the AI platforms' products by moving to Chinese models will increase their spend 4x next year. It seems equally unlikely that investors will give the AI platforms a few hundred million dollars next year to burn so as to postpone the day of reckoning by another 12 months.

The Stanford study collected data in October 2025. Developments since, with more to come, have already significantly increased the price/performance advantage of SLMs. The include:

• Nvidia's RTX Spark "superchip", disucssed by @pramodchandrayan in NVIDIA Just Put a 120-Billion-Parameter AI Model in Your Laptop. Here’s What That Actually Changes.:

  At Computex 2026 in Taipei on June 1st, CEO Jensen Huang announced the RTX Spark superchip — a single piece of silicon that combines a 20-core Arm CPU, a Blackwell GPU with 6,144 CUDA cores, and 128 gigabytes of unified memory, connected by NVIDIA’s NVLink chip-to-chip interconnect. The whole package delivers up to one petaflop of AI compute in a laptop form factor.

  The number that matters: RTX Spark can run a 120-billion-parameter language model entirely locally, with a context window of one million tokens, without a single byte leaving your machine.

  This is the guts of Nvidia's $5.2K DGX Spark desktop. It was Portent #20

• The Exxact Valence Nvidia DGX Station discussed by Michal Malewicz in NVIDIA just killed big AI and… You’re the winner?:

  Here’s a $94,011.50 desktop computer for sale right now.

  It’s not a server rack or some crazy cloud infrastructure monstrosity.

  It’s a (rather big) tower PC. Kinda like the one you played Cyberpunk 2077 on.

  It sits under a desk and plugs into a wall like a regular desktop. The only difference is that it runs trillion-parameter AI models with no API keys, no per token payment, and no personal data leaving the room.

  It is 18 times as expensive as the DGX Spark but can run models more than 8 times bigger. This was Portent 31.

• Michael Nuñez' Perplexity partners with Nvidia to launch Portable Computer, a fully local AI agent with zero token costs:

  Perplexity is launching Portable Computer today, a version of its agentic "Computer" platform that runs entirely on hardware users already own — starting with Nvidia's DGX Spark desktop supercomputer and Linux machines equipped with Nvidia RTX GPUs.

  The launch, developed in close partnership with Nvidia, is one of the most aggressive attempts yet to move serious AI agent workloads off the cloud and onto local devices. The model, the user's files, and the work itself can all stay on the machine. Work completed locally consumes no billing credits, and the company says every task starts on the device by default — with the system asking permission before sending any individual step to a more powerful frontier model in the cloud.

  This was Portent 45.

• Apple's announcement of the latest Mac hardware, discussed by Samuel Axon in Apple’s new desktop computers are designed specifically for local AI development:

  Apple announced new iterations of both desktops, along with two new chips: the M6, the first 2nm chip in Apple’s M-series lineup for Macs, and the M5 Ultra, now the most powerful chip in the lineup for most things—especially AI workloads.

  There aren’t any major new features for either machine. This is just a specs bump. But based on how Apple is presenting these refreshes, they’re leaning hard into those use cases, which weren’t even a thought when earlier iterations were first engineered.

  The devices’ popularity for production inference took off after macOS 26.2 shipped last December. According to Apple’s release notes, 26.2 enabled “low-latency communication between Thunderbolt 5 hosts for use cases including distributed AI inference using MLX.” Thunderbolt 5 is a very fast wired data connection, and MLX is an open source array framework designed to help machine learning workflows take full advantage of the M-series chips’ unified memory.

  Since then, both hobbyists and professional developers and researchers have been essentially daisy-chaining Mac minis or Mac Studios to run inference on local large language models that are much bigger than anything that could run a single mass-market device—providing an alternative to ultra-beefy specialized hardware featuring specialized Nvidia GPUs.

  This was Portent 46.

• IBM's latest model release, discussed by Samuel Axon in IBM’s new Granite 4.2 models ride the wave of interest in local LLMs:

  IBM has rolled out the newest models in its family of open-weight large language models designed to be downloaded and self-hosted. The newly launched Granite 4.2 comes in 3B, 8B, and 30B parameter variants.

  Like previous versions, IBM is taking a decoder-only approach here. These new releases offer a 128,000-token context window natively. The 8B and 30B variants (not the 3B one) also go through an agentic reinforcement-learning block; they were trained for expanded capabilities like using the terminal, searching the web, or using external tools. The 3B model supports tools too, but without the same level of specialized training.

  Beyond those tweaks, this release is particularly notable because, as IBM itself writes, “Granite 4.2 is the reasoning-focused release of the Granite language-model family.

  This was Portent 47.

Consider not just what Ding et al's graph of the narrowing performance gap between closed= and open-weight models, but also what Saad-Falcon et al's Figure 7 will look like after another year of both hardware and software developments like these.

Saad-Falcon et al argue that it isn't just the raw price/performance that advantages local compute:

System-level benefits offset per-query efficiency disadvantages. While cloud accelerators demonstrate 1.4× to 7.4× higher intelligence efficiency per query, local deployment provides complementary system-level benefits that offset this disadvantage. Local inference avoids datacenter infrastructure costs, network latency, and API pricing, while enabling 88.7% of queries that local models can handle correctly to bypass cloud compute entirely. As demon- strated in Section 4.3, intelligent routing between local and cloud infrastructure can achieve 60–80% reductions in total energy, compute, and cost compared to cloud-only deployment, even when local accelerators are individually less efficient. These findings suggest that the path to efficient AI infrastructure lies not in local accelerators matching cloud efficiency, but in routing systems that leverage the complementary strengths of both paradigms: local processing for the majority of straightforward queries and cloud infrastructure for the minority requiring frontier model capabilities.

It looks increasingly as though Klement is right that the hyperscalers are toast, because the vast majority of inference will happen locally while the massive data centers will be used only for training and for inference on massive models so expensive that almost no-one can afford them.

Update 4th September 2026

In the three days since I posted this, I have collected more evidence:

• Thomson Reuters built its own AI model on Chinese open-source tech to slash AI costs by Cris Tolomia show a intellectual property company taking aggressive steps to move AI in-house:

  Thomson Reuters launched its first in-house large language model on Monday, a move the company says will reduce its reliance on outside AI providers, including Anthropic.

  According to Business Insider, Thomson sits atop Snowdon, an intermediate model that Thomson Reuters built by reworking Qwen, an open-source offering from Chinese tech giant Alibaba. A joint team from Thomson Reuters and Imperial College London adapted Qwen over several months to ensure it was "ethically and politically de-biased and safe to use," Chief Technology Officer Joel Hron said.

  Thomson Reuters spent roughly $40 million over two years on personnel and computing, the company said. The final training run cost approximately $450,000, according to SiliconAngle. The company chose to forgo developing a foundation model from the ground up, instead taking an existing open-weight model as its starting point and enriching it with proprietary content, specialized training methods, and domain expertise.

• Kyle Orland's Four major AI models suffer rare overlapping downtime shows the risk of outsourcing business-critical operations to shared infrastructure:

  Cloud-based AI models operated by OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Google suffered a rare and overlapping set of significant service interruptions over a period of hours Thursday morning.

  Anthropic first reported a “partial outage” related to “elevated errors on requests to Claude Mythos 5.1, Claude Fable 5.1, and Claude Opus 5” at 9:23 am (all times Eastern). The company reported that it had “identified the cause” of the error roughly 15 minutes later, before reporting that “a fix has been deployed” and the issue was resolved by 12:16 pm. A separate incident report indicated “elevated errors on requests to Claude Sonnet 5” for a brief period just after noon.

  OpenAI, meanwhile, reported “elevated errors across ChatGPT and Codex” were resulting in “degraded performance” as of 10:43 am Thursday morning. A mitigation put in place a little more than half an hour later led to the issue being marked as “resolved” by 12:55 pm.

  As of this writing, xAI’s Grok currently displays a user-facing error message that the model “is experiencing issues” and that the company is “working on restoring service as quickly as possible.” User-submitted reports from DownDetector regarding Grok shot up from less than 10 just before 9 am to 1,365 by 9:45 am and have fallen to 273 as of this writing.

  While Google has not publicly acknowledged any issues with its Gemini model, reports of problems on DownDetector similarly spiked from just 23 around 10:30 am to 412 just after 11 am. Data collected by API checker StatusGator also shows what it terms a “likely outage” for the Gemini API between 10:45 and 11:15 a.m. before the status returned to normal.

  Other Internet services did not experience problems, so this seems to have been solely an AI problem.

• Nvidia announced NVIDIA Personal AI Router (PAIR):

  NVIDIA Personal AI Router (PAIR) is software that connects compatible macOS, Windows, and Linux systems with NVIDIA RTX™GPUs and DGX Spark systems into a personal home AI cluster. PAIR distributes local AI inference workloads across available devices while keeping prompts, files, and agent context on the user’s home network.

• Perplexity announced Optimizing On-Device Inference for Apple Silicon:

  Hybrid Compute on Apple silicon orchestrates a task between frontier intelligence in the cloud and a local model on the Mac. Cloud models handle research and reasoning, while a local model works with private files and apps on the Mac.

  For this division of labor to feel seamless, local inference must keep pace with the rest of the task. That requires an engine that can process prompts quickly and sustain a high token-generation rate.

  Lily, our lightweight local inference engine, is built specifically for Apple silicon and Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, with separate optimizations for prefill and decode. A standalone demo is publicly available on GitHub.

  Pair and Lily illustrate the rapidly growing trend of moving as much inference as possible to local hardware and, relatedly, the importance of placinng a router bewteen the user and the inference systems.

“They don’t make ’em like Sublime Text anymore” resonated with a lot of folk. Software these days is garbage. That got me thinking; I’m good at building garbage! Why can’t I build my own text editor? VS Code is built upon Monaco Editor which is a

soup hellscape. […]

A group of Jewish artists, writers, creative professionals, faith leaders and thinkers—including Emma Seligman, Gabor Maté, Hannah Einbinder, Ilana Glazer, James Schamus, Larry Charles, Joel Coen, Miranda July, Molly Crabapple, Sarah Sherman, Tavi Gevinson, Todd Haynes, and Tony Kushner—have signed

This is Bondi Beach.

Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in the last four weeks – click the links to learn more… We released LibreOffice 26.8, our latest major update, with tabbed UI improvements, professional typography, deeper support for the world’s writing systems, and no built-in artificial intelligence.

Export Updates 2026-09-01:

Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places

60 updated places. 57 updated linked data sidebars.

1. Downloads: https://pleiades.stoa.org/downloads

2. pleiades.datasets: https://github.com/isawnyu/pleiades.datasets:

"main" branch:

27df03bb - updated json

no change: rdf/ttl

c6204dce - updated gis package

145d2be2 - updated data quality

27586d66 - updated bibliography

5e19e299 - updated indexes

9e049aa6 - updated sidebar

3. pleiades-geojson: https://github.com/ryanfb/pleiades-geojson:

d84653cf - updated geojson and names index

4. pleiades_wikidata: https://github.com/isawnyu/pleiades_wikidata/:

28b50744 - updated pleiades wikidata (NB: Wikidata query service unavailable, so changes are only from Pleiades and other partners)

Noon Today - Josh Turek joins us live from Iowa for an update on his critical race

Creative computer people, consider consolidating all the different OSes and programming languages. Give humans a fair fight in competition with the AI's who have no trouble deeply understanding every syntax human designers have come up with, where it totally disadvantages us, who have much more limited memory.

OPML archive for August 2026.

If you View Source on a fatpage, scroll to the bottom, you'll see the code. Example. The idea is that the docs for the code are what you see in the browser. Maybe that's the way feeds should work too? Something to think about.

I begin the month of September for some reason, not feeling like working. And rather than succumb to the work ethos, I'm allowing myself to goof off with the same determination that I worked my ass of for so many years. I think the last time I felt like this was when I was a grad student in Madison. I had just fallen in love with a sweet, funny, cute and gorgeous undergrad. She was 19 and I was 22. We spent the last weeks of the fall semester goofing off, and as a result I had to stay in Madison over the holidays, to finish the work of the Compiler Design course, which was the gate for grad students, the hardest course. If you got through it with a decent grade, you got the degree. It was fun too -- except I missed my sweetheart. This time I don't know what the root is, but it's a good feeling. If I want to goof off, I can, no one will judge me, probably very few people even notice. I still expect to finish Frontier, and swing back around to FeedLand and RSS.chat, they have some important work to do, together. Maybe the reason is the thing I liked about making software is the actual making of it, which I delegate more and more to Claude Code. How would a great painter feel if they invented a computer that could write their "code" much more quickly, would Picasso have stopped painting just because Claude Code could do Picasso paintings faster? Today, Claude still will, if given a chance, throw out all of my orders and develop code in a non-Dave fashion. And it still acts as if between the two of us it's the only programmer, surprised when I want to actually write something myself. Maybe that's just my imagination? Or maybe that's the next project for me. A project where I write the code, and Claude helps out when I can't find a bug, or where I need to know something about a feature in a platform I've not worked on.

As midterms approach, expect Trump’s tantrums to get even more extreme as he tries desperately to control the narrative.

Build a local flight-tracking dashboard on Raspberry Pi with live maps, history, and replay.

The post Pi-Sky flight-tracking dashboard appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

CSS finally gave the web its own grain.

And the real crazy part is that my bad decades-old code still renders fine in today’s latest web browsers! I would be sad if it didn’t, but I also wouldn’t be surprised. How is this stuff still backwards compatible!?

How much of your software from 20 years ago runs on your devices today

adactio.com/links/22742

Application security might seem like a strange thing to build a coaching course about. But the thing that makes coaching work is that the person comes out feeling bigger than the problem. That’s useful in many things. It’s especially useful in a field that seems to have been designed to be opaque. We’ve partnered with […]

Witnesses in the US Capitol reportedly saw the Louisiana lawmaker on his knees in the House cloakroom, beseeching the Almighty to “put me out of my misery.”

A scam that is both vile and deeply stupid

“Cormac asks what we think of the home so far, already knowing our answers.” Photographer Beowulf Sheehan remembers capturing Cormac McCarthy through a lens. | Lit Hub Photography What should your kids read in September? Caroline Carlson recommends 10 new

Don’t believe the pundits. The party is unified against Trump.

Nathan E. Sanders and I are writing a series of essays on real-world examples of democratic technologies for The Renovator. I haven’t been posting the full text on the blog because they’re a bit long, but here are links.

Part 1 is about the Japanese digital democracy party, Team Mirai.

Part 2 is about the Swiss Public AI model, Apertus.

Part 3 is about the civic technologists of Open Knowledge Brazil.

And the new one, Part 4, is about civic AI in Scotland.

Tuesday, August 12. My photo assistant Chika and I arrive at the Santa Fe Institute, Cormac’s home away from home, and load equipment into the library. Cormac is early, chatting up the kitchen staff. We introduce ourselves. Cormac is perhaps

Another month of books, another month of book covers. The books of August were as lush as you might expect, though not always in the usual ways. Here are a few of my favorites from the end of summer. What’d

The start of every school year feels full—too full—of haircuts and back-to-school nights, last-minute trips to the store for sneakers that aren’t a size too small, and last-gasp-of-summer ice cream cones. My kids are meeting new teachers, trying new activities,

September is my birthday month, so this latest crop of sci-fi, fantasy, and speculative books feel especially like presents for me, but also for you! Fantasy heists, magical spy thrillers, dystopian abortionists, parallel-universe marriage stories, deepfake Dorian Grays, houses dying

Readers, this month in publishing is lousy with poets, including terrific poets who I didn’t have space for and poets who I made space for but who deserve more than a few hundred words snapshotting their work. This could have

Welcome to season four of The Critic and Her Publics: The Art of the Interview. This season, host Merve Emre talks with professional interviewers of all kinds about how they get the answer they’re looking for, what makes a good

September 1st marks, emotionally at least, the beginning of fall. And with it comes that reliable onslaught of literature for which we have been waiting all year. The month starts with a bang, delivering a new Marlon James, Chloe Benjamin,

When she got home, Damaris was as happy to see the dog as the dog was to see her, and she petted her for a long time, only stopping when she looked down at her hands and saw they were

You’ll hear more and more about this

Hey everyone!

This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects during the month of August.

• Wiki, updated various sections in solar cooking experiment.
• Donsol, putting some final touches to the new release.
• Hakum, completed Recharge.
• Rabbit Waves, added an image for the 404 page, completed a new comic page, and finished a page about Pen and Paper Ciphers.
• GrimGrains, published a new recipe: Curried Lentil Rice Loaf. Updated the section about Weck jars.
• Win7, a little file manager that looks just like the Macintosh windowing system.
• POP-2, trying to resurrect a ALGOL language from the 70s.

In comparison to the past few months spent mostly on our own, we've had a very social August. It seems all our friends made it up north all at the same time. It has been great to run into some familiar faces, meet some new ones, and fill our days wandering in the woods catching up on the time we spent apart. But we really ought to start thinking about returning back south ourselves soon.

Many of our conversations this month have been about languages and coded messages. How to encode a message, how to transmit them if the signal is noisy and how much of this can be done practically with just a few tools. We've added a new page to Rabbit Waves talking about just that, covering examples from history and some practical pen-n-paper exercises that can be done by anyone.

Pulling on the thread of auxiliary language, Devine made open call to invite anyone writing Concatenative programs to see if they would be willing to implement a POP-2 compiler for their own language. The idea is to see if this mostly dead language from the 70s could be revived as a language of exchange between the different insular Catlang dialects. Devine has also been busy writing a talk, and making many, many slides for the upcoming Oredev 2026 in Sweden.

Book Club: We are rereading Dracula by Bram Stoker and Paradise Lost by John Milton.

Formatted text (especially bullet points with the first sentence bolded) seems to be twigging some people that it’s AI-generated. (I’ve mostly seen people share Reddit posts where they’re dismissed as being machines.) I also saw someone note that bolded key points made them feel like the author thought they were dumb and was condescending to […]

Alex Horton and Tara Copp of the Washington Post reported on Sunday, August 30, that military leaders are warning Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that a plan to continue large-scale operations in Iran is unsustainable and is weakening their ability to protect U.S.

Finally I had a real use for Swift's borrowing, Span, yield.

And much to my shame, the next CPU reduction use (no throughput yet, still investigating) comes from replacing a copy in a loop array with a nasty memmove.

Also, avoid CPU burning ARC traffic with this one trick:

if a != nil {

a = nil

}

FiveThirtyEight is one of the reasons I went down the data science rabbit hole, during my university years. What it achieved during the 2012 US presidential election felt like nothing short of predicting the future. And yet, all the data it used was out there in the open, available to anyone. I found that very inspiring at the time.

France is going through a difficult political period. The far right has a serious chance of winning the next presidential election, while the rest of the political landscape looks fragmented. At least, that is what recent polls suggest. Polling data and the models built on top of it play a significant part in day-to-day political debate – sadly some may say. As of writing, this page provides a useful overview of polling for the upcoming election.

Our public postmortem for the incident on September 1st, 2026.

A Proposal for the Next Democratic President

In a new, independent poll released last week Pulido leads 50%-45% despite being heavily outspent

What we don’t know can hurt us

Review of Odd Arne Westad’s “The Coming Storm”

Note the special time this week - 730pm/Founding Members will gather Friday at 1pm

If you want to try my SwiftTerm based terminal go here:

GitHub.com/migueldeicaza/tecolot

There is a DMG in the GitHub releases page

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s... what??

I wanted to talk briefly about a surprising new addition to my toolbox: transcompilation.

I’ve used it twice this year to startling effect.

---

Lua on SNES?

I wanted to make a Super Nintendo (SNES/SFC) game but didn’t fancy learning a new SDK, so I wondered if I could write a game using the tools I know and somehow get it running on hardware. As with many of my projects, it began with thinking about a solution which is not normally advisable and perhaps even impossible.

So I wrote a little driving platform game in Lua/Love2D to a point where it was playable on my Mac. I built it to self-imposed SNES-style constraints: 8-bit integer maths (via a small library I wrote), plus aligning all graphics to an 8px grid, and mapping controls to suit the platform. I then transpiled the Lua to C and did a small amount of work to hook it into an existing minimal SNES homebrew toolkit made by Phillip May, which compiles with llvm-mos. Yes, it’s targeting the 8-bit 6502 but it works for the 16-bit 65816 and could be considered faster in many ways.

The result turned out great! I’d say my Lua game was about 90% accurate to SNES hardware limitations. After fixing the broken things, reworking a few other small bits, and making sure the levels were not too crowded, the C code hits 60fps with no ASM! This is because modern compilers like llvm-mos are built on the knowledge and improvements we’ve gained since the 1990s. My maths is 8-bit running on the 65816 in 6502 mode and the compiler uses imaginary registers located in the fast zero-page area of memory to make the CPU more capable than it really is. Developers used this trick back in the day, and now the compiler just does it for you. What a time to be alive! I don’t think developers would have considered shipping whole SNES games in C back in the day, the tools just weren’t as well optimised, but today it’s absolutely possible. My game is essentially 8-bit internals with 16-bit bounds and graphics.

---

Swift on Sega Dreamcast and Nintendo Wii?

Starting a SNES game was a diversion and palate cleanser from my work on Jinks, which is my new way of making games that comprises a game engine that targets a wide range of platforms, an innovative IDE that allows realtime game manipulation in new ways, and a different kind of language that empowers you to make games more easily, quickly, and with less hassle overall.

When I came back to Jinks I wondered if I could use the same transcompilation trick to get my Swift code running on more platforms. It was easy to get Swift to work on the web because the Swift ecosystem provides support for that, which is what I used for the web build I submitted to the gamejam. But Swift can’t compile to SH4 for Dreamcast, or PPC for Nintendo Wii, so…what to do?

After a bit of digging on GitHub I found w2c2 which transpiles WASM to standard C. The process is obviously bonkers, totally OTT, like cracking a nut with a sledgehammer, as it results in tens of thousands of C files. So compilation takes ages, binary sizes are large, and execution less than optimal. But, surprisingly, the game ran full speed on Wii. Dreamcast only hit 20fps, for a variety of reasons but mostly due to the overhead. The proof is in the pudding!

---

Moving on up

Today I no longer use the crazy Swift > WASM > C > SH4 or PPC hop-skip-jump, but it proved itself as a great prototyping tool. Rewriting and converting the Jinks engine from Swift to C has seen near instant build times, tiny binary sizes, and much faster execution. It runs at 60fps on Dreamcast with a bunch of headroom.

But I am absolutely certain I’ll use transcompilation during the prototyping phase of future projects.

Not government spending on social safety nets

Galit Wellner’s (2017) concept of writing relations provides a useful starting point for examining how generative AI transforms not only who writes, but how writing unfolds in time. Wellner develops writing relations to distinguish inscription from the interpretive activity privileged by postphenomenological hermeneutic relations. Writing, for Wellner, is productive: through the mediation of technology, it [...]

Source

Juli Clover: As Apple Fellow, Schiller continued to oversee the App Store and Apple events, but the role may not have left him with sufficient time for his own endeavors. In 2024, The Wall Street Journal said Schiller was working close to 80 hours a week. […] Schiller is stepping down from overseeing the App […]

Dave Nanian: Recent versions of xOS (that is, macOS, iOS, iPadOS, etc) have Data Protection Classes from A to D that get assigned to files and folders. […] The thing is, though, is that these files and folders are inaccessible unless the user is logged in, and the screen is unlocked. A few seconds after […]

This is the August 2026 issue of the monthly newsletter from the Rogue Scholar science blog archive. The newsletter reports on new blogs that have joined the platform, important technical updates in Rogue Scholar infrastructure, community updates, and other news relevant to Rogue Scholar users.

Blogs added to Rogue Scholar

I appreciate that the proportion of my readership who possess an ePropulsion electric outboard motor maybe rather small, and that my latest YouTube video may therefore have rather, shall we say, niche appeal.

But the rest of you could, if you wanted, watch a couple of minutes to see how pleasant it is pottering up and down the River Great Ouse without the noise of internal combustion!

It’s hard to evaluate the security of open source projects when security bug reports remain private forever. Users deserve to see security bug reports, so please remember to unset issue report confidentiality when you’re done handling an issue. There are very few good reasons to keep an issue report confidential forever. If you’re not planning […]

Eric Bailey has a fun little post about how we need more than a few icons to express the nuance of our shared human experience.

For example, he suggests Netflix provide some feedback buttons to indicate the kinds of experiences we all share consuming and rating media:

• “Just because I expressed interest in this show does not mean I want to be inundated with recommendations for its genre”
• “Disregard [that I pressed ‘thumbs up’] my cat walked over the keyboard”
• “I am making bad choices and hatewatching this” (which reminds me of )

What’s great about the examples in Eric’s post is how familiar they are. We can read them and laugh because we’ve had the same thought — “I’m pressing ‘thumbs up’ here, but what I really mean is…”

We know when we click that button that it’s a reductive expression of our experience that’ll be erroneously interpreted, but we do it anyway. As Bryan Cantrill shared from his experience:

There's no way to indicate, “I’m engaging with this, but I hate myself for doing it.” I need another mouse button that is like, “I’m clicking on this, but I’m rage clicking on it and for my own mental health could you not drag more of this in front of me please?”

We know these feedback mechanisms are often a misrepresentation of our actual experience.

Yet we turn around in our professional contexts and see numbers like “142,432 users gave this a ‘thumbs up’” and we forget everything we knew about our own individual experience with these systems. We make it mean what we want it to mean, what’s convenient for measurement and reporting e.g. “Wow, what a great insight about our offerings! Let’s restructure our entire catalog around this new, objective, (pseudo) scientific fact that so many people obviously like this thing!”

We reduce the experiences of others to mere data, but grant ourselves exemption from such oversimplifications.

Where’s the conversation around:

• Values, e.g. “Should we provide more of this? We can say no to the data…”
• Nuance, e.g. “What do people really mean when they click ‘thumbs up’ in this interface?”
• Vision, e.g. “If we provide more of this, where will that lead us?”

But that’s too introspective. Introspection is slow. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

---

Reply via:

Email · Mastodon ·

Bluesky

Related posts linking here:(2026) Nobody Believes It, Everybody Does It

It sure seemslike it.

The stores confirmed to be affected include Fort Irwin, Calif.; F.E. Warren Air Force Base, Wyo.; Fort Huachuca, Ariz.; Naval Station Newport, R.I.; Columbus Air Force Base, Miss.; and Travis Air Force Base, Calif., according to announcements made online by each installation.

Naval Air Station Lemoore, Calif., also experienced an outage, according to M. Elizabeth, writer of the Substack newsletter Signal and Silence.

Each service declined to answer questions about how many bases are affected by the outages, referring all questions to the Defense Department. Pentagon officials did not respond to questions...

Welcome back! In our June update, we discussed PureOS's downstream relationship with Debian. Just as PureOS Crimson is based on Debian Bookworm, PureOS Dawn is based on Debian Trixie.

We modify many Debian packages for PureOS to provide the best experience on all Librem devices. Often, when we reach a new Debian release, there will be packages with changes on both sides, creating a conflict.

The post PureOS Development Report: July 2026 appeared first on Purism.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@twostraws/117191448613394688

When you are a clanker writing Swift, every day is Xmas!

On a Monday morning, I thought I’d take a crack at implementing tips in one of my apps. There were some gestures and other features that customers weren’t finding and explaining those things with tips would be helpful. I expected the task to take about a day. It ended up taking a week. Why so […]

A crash-consistent backup and an application-consistent backup are not the same guarantee. On VergeOS, Veeam's Deployment Toolkit closes that gap, installing its own backup agent automatically and quiescing SQL Server and other applications before the backup fully completes. The difference decides what a restore actually delivers on the worst day of the job, every time.

Read more ›

An atom’s brief journey through a technological artifact is a flash unlike anything else in its long cold life span.

My terminal app built on SwiftTerm also has a new theme picker, because themes were overwhelming.

Looks fun, but the visualization are not quite as useful as I imagined it would be.

SwiftTerm parser performance challenges are now down to making sure the Swift inline inlines (some functions blew up past internal limits and even @Inline(always) would not inline, costing me 3%).

SwiftTerm recently got Kitty clipboard, completed Kitty graphics support, and in this logarithmic table, it shows the progress so far.

"The community must be the author of its own world."

@adiod.bsky.social envisions a future in which a Zimbabwean community rejects an AI surveillance program and designs a cattle-tracking system, drawing upon the relational data governance it has practiced for generations.

urlvanish.com/0a108baehttps://dair-institute.org/blog/whose-categories-whose-ai/

The breadth and depth of the problem is stunning. But I’m not a person who stays focused on how bad a problem is. I’m interested in what we can do about it. How do we get the numbers back up? How do we help?

In my home country of Bangladesh, faith, labor, and survival intersect under shifting social and environmental pressures.

Drawn on a map, outside a voting booth, stretched across a pregnant belly

And sometimes, // in our real world, my mother fed earthly crows /peanuts or even stew beef in our backyard, // standing amid the fluttering of their dark wings

This is how to lie on your back, how to float / five miles across town and trespass through / wire.

I don’t know / what you think about or what happens / during all those hours out there, kneeling / between beds of irises and bleeding hearts / and the ladders of creamy foxgloves.

Of course you weren’t even slightly rich, but you seemed it at the time, with your French braid and your clothes that smelled like detergent.

An average of seventy-four species become extinct every day, which was one good reason but not the only one to hold someone’s hand. Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

A Thousand Words features photography so rich with narrative that it tells a story all on its own.

Elizabeth Paley lives in Durham, North Carolina, and may be the only person to have a publication trifecta in The Astrophysical Journal, 19th-Century Music, and Pottery Making Illustrated. She took this month’s cover photo after six long days of point-to-point hiking with her husband along the Via Alpina in Switzerland. Having narrowly beaten an approaching storm, they stretched out their legs as the rain began to fall. (geekpots.com) More

Anne Falkowski’s short story “Rise” [May 2026] is such a tightly written piece. Every sentence communicates the tensions in the protagonist’s life. There is so much going on in Ana’s heart—she is as tough as tempered glass and as fragile as a vase. (I never watched General Hospital, the soap opera Ana is devoted to, but I now understand why it was the talk of the office lunchroom.) In the end, our girl Ana claims that miniskirt and those kick-ass boots to the tune of Herb Alpert’s “Rise,” and hears the whistle of her mother’s love and support. I was so touched by the tender way this story explored feelings of belonging and exclusion that I read it three times. Dana Speer Rosenbaum Bainbridge Island, Washington

The SEC’s “Reg Crypto” aims to carve out exemptions, the CFTC wields emergency powers to shield prediction markets from state regulators, and a Trump family crypto firm gets a bank charter

It’s August 2012. The Tea Party and gay marriage have exploded into the consciousness of an economically overburdened rural America, including the area where I grew up and where my parents still live.

When “plain English” isn’t a good thing.

Writing of lasting value

Bobby Pulido (TX-15), one of our very best candidates of the cycle, joins us live today at 2pm ET. Going to be a good one!

... complete with titles, descriptions, bylines, change summaries and links to the actual gazetteer entries, as well as an overview map, may be read on the #PleiadesGazetteer blog at https://pleiades.stoa.org/news/blog/last-three-weeks-in-pleiades-10-31-august-2026

#ancientGeography #ancientHistory #archaeology #classics #DH #gazetteers #HGIS #LOD

Last 3 weeks in the #PleiadesGazetteer (10-31 August 2026): Over the course of the last three weeks, the Pleiades editorial college published 29 new and 263 updated place resources, reflecting the work of Ashley Aguilar, Jeffrey Becker, Isabella Bryant, Ananya Budati, Anika Campbell, Timothy Chavez, Anne Chen, Ian G. Craig, Cayden Dang, Siya Desai, Tom Elliott, Alex Gentry, James Griffin, Maxime Guénette, Wells Hansen, Giacomo Iero, David Jarolimek, Brady Kiesling, Eleftheria Konstantinidou, Chris de Lisle, Matteo Luria, Rex Maurer, Audrey Moore, Holly Moore, Hailey Muir, Evelyn Muskat, Natalie Nickell, Chiara Palladino, Adam Rabinowitz, Cody Robert, Aaron Rogers, Marco Salazar, Zoe Sanchez, Maya Scheffler, Dex Schwartz, Ansley Siemer, Sam Thomas and Philip Towbin, as well as contributors to the Yale Digital Dura-Europos Archive.

A list of all new and changed resources ... 1/2

#ancientGeography #ancientHistory #archaeology #classics #DH #gazetteers #HGIS #LOD

Over the past three weeks, the Pleiades editorial college published 29 new and 263 updated place resources, reflecting the work of Ashley Aguilar, Jeffrey Becker, Isabella Bryant, Ananya Budati, Anika Campbell, Timothy Chavez, Anne Chen, Ian G. Craig, Cayden Dang, Siya Desai, Tom Elliott, Alex Gentry, James Griffin, Maxime Guénette, Wells Hansen, Giacomo Iero, David Jarolimek, Brady Kiesling, Eleftheria Konstantinidou, Chris de Lisle, Matteo Luria, Rex Maurer, Audrey Moore, Holly Moore, Hailey Muir, Evelyn Muskat, Natalie Nickell, Chiara Palladino, Adam Rabinowitz, Cody Robert, Aaron Rogers, Marco Salazar, Zoe Sanchez, Maya Scheffler, Dex Schwartz, Ansley Siemer, Sam Thomas and Philip Towbin, as well as contributors to the Yale Digital Dura-Europos Archive.

The winners of the 2026 Hugo Awards—one of science fiction and fantasy’s most prestigious awards, decided by popular vote of all eligible WorldCon members—were presented this weekend at the 84th World Science Fiction Convention in sunny Los Angeles, CA. A

Export Updates 2026-08-31:

Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places

15 updated places. 5 updated linked data sidebars.

1. Downloads: https://pleiades.stoa.org/downloads

2. pleiades.datasets: https://github.com/isawnyu/pleiades.datasets:

"main" branch:

c88f220a - updated json

6e641027 - updated rdf/ttl

cbde6b95 - updated gis package

0ef6bd3a - updated data quality

23700606 - updated bibliography

53d7011d - updated indexes

cdfff65c - updated sidebar

3. pleiades-geojson: https://github.com/ryanfb/pleiades-geojson:

696aaf9a - updated geojson and names index

4. pleiades_wikidata: https://github.com/isawnyu/pleiades_wikidata/:

a7479447 - updated pleiades wikidata (NB: Wikidata query service unavailable, so changes are only on the Pleiades side)

Wikidata query service remains unavailable due to various errors. Pleiades exports and derivatives generation will proceed with last known good Wikidata results.

Daily exports/derivatives will be delayed as the Wikidata query interface is responding with "upstream request timeout" and "Query timeout limit reached"

Last night I took my 7 year old son, along with a few of his friends, to the “Night Of Fire And Destruction” at the Champlain Valley Fair in Essex Junction, Vermont.

Someone hid AI instructions into a legal filing.

Alternate link.

"As God is my witness, if you elect me for a full term in the US Senate, I will google Iran," she said.

Rewarding the most dishonest

“Terror wasn’t the only weapon the Nazis used against the American prisoners. Sometimes, they used propagandistic persuasion as well.” On the myths and facts of Dresden in Slaughterhouse-Five. | Lit Hub Biography Marlon James tells Eric Olson about (finally!) writing

Renaming stuff isn’t the flex he thinks it is.

Kurt Vonnegut describes the train arriving in Dresden at five o’clock that afternoon: “The boxcar doors were opened, and the doorways framed the loveliest city that most of the Americans had ever seen. The skyline was intricate and voluptuous and

Says a narrator in Marlon James’s freshly Booker-nominated The Disappearers, “I’ve made such a terrible mess out of being a homo.” The novel’s protagonists are all gay men in ‘80s and ‘90s Jamaica; each makes similar proclamations. “But the statement

It will be the Year of Perfect Skin, I told myself. I had arrived at my mid-forties, and the mirror suddenly gave me a face crosshatched with creases. I was Portrait of a Woman Aging. I was a cubist composition,

This conversation between two authors who happen to share the same name: BBC and Channel 4 broadcaster Samira Ahmed, whose A Hard Day’s Night in Bloomsbury’s BFI Film Classics series just released this month in the US/Canada, and Little, Brown’s bestselling author

I’ve heard my grandfather’s voice just once. It was on a 1949 episode of the NBC radio show This Is Your Life, recounting his escape from occupied France after a German night fighter shot down the plane he was flying

Nanette and Josie finished praying and walked toward the bus stop. Josie pulled out her phone. She wanted to show Nanette a group she’d found on Instagram: @NunsAgainstGuns. “This one is fire,” Josie said. Nanette looked at a photo of

Trump’s “artificially fabricated insanity” is worsening, but Americans are on to him.

September is here, and with it comes a bevy of new books. Below, you’ll find twenty-five delightful reads to consider, each in a fresh paperback edition, including debuts, sophomore releases, rich translations, and new works from established authors. You’ll find

Maybe, but not as a way to manage droughts. That’s when they seem to break.

One of our founding myths is that of George Washington and the cherry tree.

Last week was the fourteenth week of videos from the 250 to 250 Project that we’re producing to honor the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

Well, we have a new Apple machine at work - the MacBook Neo. Yes, that thing which looks like a computer but has old phone internals. Looks good, of course. But...

From the Hugging Face Incident to Twilight Factories

Burren View One of my favourite photographs. It’s taken from the northern shore of Galway Bay looking south to the ‘moonscape’ of the Burren in Co Clare. Quote of the Day ”The English hoard words like misers; the Irish spend … Continue reading →

In building an NTP time demo on old Macs for VCF Midwest, I came across RFC 867 and RFC 868, for the 'Daytime' and 'Time' Protocols, respectively.

My first exposure to any form of network time was when I upgraded from a used PowerBook 180c to my first 'new' computer, a Power Mac G3, in 2000. With the introduction of Mac OS 8.5, Apple added a 'Network Time Server' option in the Date & Time Control Panel.

2026-08-29 Rosenlaui gorge and Engelhorn cabin

Yesterday, we went to see the Rosenlaui gorge. Sadly, the thunderous roar cannot be heard in this blog post.

We kept on climbing up to the Engelhorn cabin. A nice medium level mountain hike.

#Pictures #Jungfrau

A recording from Michael Moore's live video

And so it begins (again).

And last week’s winner

While most emergency preparation in the PNW focuses on “The Big One,” I’ve realized the most common scenarios in which we actually need emergency food and water are: winter storm power outages (1-4 days, 1-3 times a year) and water main breaks (we had a two-day shutdown ~4 years ago, and a street-level shutdown a […]

I’ve just released a small app that provides macOS Quick Look and Thumbnails support for AmigaGuide documents.

• Viewer: open .guide files directly in the app
• Quick Look: preview .guide files without opening them
• Thumbnails: see the first page of the guide on its icon
• Export: save as HTML or EPUB

It’s powered by GuideML, with a few improvements and fixes by me.

Download: github.com/gingerbeardman/AmigaGuide (1.24 MB)

On Thursday, Donald Trump’s executive order restricting mail-in voting was once again blocked by a federal judge.

Plus, a few articles on why polling isn't broken #ackshually, and YouGov’s LV-RV gap. Your weekly political data roundup for August 30, 2026.

Bobby Pulido (TX-15) joins us live tomorrow at 2pm ET

One of life's lessons is if someone does something evil to you, and you decide to let it go, they are sure to do it again and again until you stop letting them do it.

It’s the end of August, the weather in the UK has turned so it’s the end of evenings sitting in the shade of the garden reading. I was writing a first draft of my next book (hopefully out next autumn) … Continue reading →

Writing of lasting value

Just like you, there are many people in this country who want to save our democracy. And if we organize, we can. Many of us in the United States are asking hard questions for the first time: Will we lose our democracy? Is there still time to save it? How can we make sure we […]

Source

Muchos preguntan si podremos perder nuestra democracia a una dictadura, y si aún hay tiempo para salvarla. La buena noticia es que si, podemos, si nos organizamos ahora. Muchos de nosotros en Estados Unidos nos hacemos preguntas difíciles por primera vez: ¿Podemos perder nuestra democracia a una dictadura? ¿Todavía hay tiempo para salvarlo? ¿Cómo podemos […]

Source

My posts are also available on Mastodon, made possible by WordPress, where I mirror my posts from my original blog. A lot of what's in the post makes it through, but not all of it. This is where we need to do some work, connecting a blog like mine, to WordPress and Mastodon, with no loss of fidelity.

Trump is rotting in the presidency, and that is becoming more and more dangerous, because this time they had a plan, the most radical part of the Repubs, and have deployed a new secret police around the country and have introduced the nation's military to the nation's capital. And they have a vast prison system that probably doesn't just have immigrants in it or soon will. It was all super insidious as it was starting up, and watching the news I wonder why they don't talk about this in terms of the upcoming election.

Spotted at our local Waitrose.

I've been watching Season 1 of The Pitt, and as its reviews said, it's great drama, and there are lots of episodes. I like shows like this because they're simulated communities, we come to know the characters, and think about them even when we're not watching. Before too long we'll have AI programming that makes these shows like software, the stories assemble around the characters, and then are generated the same way ChatGPT generates the art we call slop, which will someday not be a pejorative the same way sick and junk aren't negative terms today. So we'll be able to call up new episodes of The Wire or The Sopranos or The Pitt any time we like. We'd be missing the fun of discussing the latest episode with friends, or maybe we'll have bot-invented friends too who will simulate having watched the episode you just watched, which leads us to another masterpiece of entertainment, The Matrix. On the other hand, I've watched The Wire at least five times all the way through, and even though I know what they're about to say in a lot of places, I do forget the sub-plots so at least some of it can be new each time. And btw, finally an episode of Silo that's was surprising that I didn't see coming. I read the books, so I feel like I should watch the show, but until the latest episode I was uninterested in any of the characters. Finally there's a plot to think about!

A Reason To Smile

The tax gap: What it is and why it matters

From most admirable to least

The Ware for August 2026 is shown below. Technically, this is an integrated circuit – just from a very different era than last month’s ware!

The structure in question for last month’s ware are a pair of NPN transistors that form the core of a bandgap voltage reference circuit. As its name implies, a bandgap voltage reference generates a near-constant voltage for use inside chips. The voltage is intended to be fairly constant over process variations, temperature variations, and power […]

Per this map, my city does not have any publicly operated Flock cameras, which I’m very happy about. But, we do have school zone speed enforcement cameras. I realized I don’t know how those work, so I emailed the city to ask. Question submitted to the city: As I’ve been reading about the misuse of […]

On Thursday, August 27, Tolouse Olorunnipa reported on the attempts of Republican lawmakers to restrict the ability of naturalized and dual citizens to run for office.

The Andy Borowitz Show

These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week.

🔖 Ancient Trees and Fossil Capitalism - KPFA

For as long as we’ve known, humans have revered ancient trees. We’ve also destroyed them, especially since the advent of colonialism and fossil fuel capitalism. Environmental historian Jared Farmer reflects on what trees illuminate about our past and potential future.

books interviews trees

🔖 Against commune-ism in cooperatives

Having a clearly defined, narrow focus means that a co-op’s members don’t have to agree on everything. They don’t have to be all alike. They just have to be able to benefit from a common activity. The cooperative commonwealth can develop among these many overlapping needs, not an all-promising, all-delivering monolith that tries to make everyone happy all at once. Really, I think that’s the only way it’s going to happen, and the only way we should want it to.

coop management

🔖 There’s no such thing as Just a Tool

The human-tool gestalt that forms with a ready-to-hand tool, however, is not neutral. Rather, the tools that are ready-to-hand each create a different gestalt, with a different range of allowable and potential “things you could do” and, accordingly, different thought patterns, ideas and ideologies that go with that.

design philosophy tools

🔖 The GhostCouple: Correlated LLM Name Priors and Their Haunting of the Web andAcademic Publishing

We show that large language models do not merely default to high-probability individual names when generating fictional experts: they produce correlated character ensembles, pairs and trios whose co-occurrence rates far exceed chance and are consistent across independent generations.

llm names names publishing

🔖 EvaluatingAGENTS.md: Are Repository-Level Context Files Helpful for Coding Agents?

Surprisingly, we find that providing context files does not generally improve task success rates, while increasing inference cost by over 20% on average. This observation holds across different LLMs, coding agents, and for both LLM-generated and developer-committed context files.

llm programming

🔖 Whichlocal model should you run?

One rule decides everything: the model has to fit in your memory. Let’s match your exact hardware to the right model size — fast.

llm localfirst

🔖 Mark Zuckerberg had a bold plan to replace Meta staff with AI. Here’show it imploded.

This article reveals for the first time the rapid pace of the cuts Meta was considering, the thinking behind the plans and how they quickly unraveled. Based on scores of internal documents, posts and recordings reviewed by Reuters, as well as conversations with more than 20 people with knowledge of Meta’s inner workings, the reporting shows how the social-media giant attempted to position itself at the forefront of an AI-driven workplace overhaul, only to stumble in the execution.

llm management programming security

🔖 David Berman Returns

So, another comeback! Like the Pixies or Sebadoh, Berman is the latest middle-aged cult musician to reconnect with an audience who grew fonder of the artist in their absence. There’s a fair chance this will be the most successful year David Berman has ever lived. But look at those new song titles: “All My Happiness Is Gone,” “Maybe I’m the Only One for Me,” “Darkness and Cold.” Part of him always yearns, against his better judgment, for that freezing, empty beach town. Part of him always feels like a pier, battered by the sea.

america music poetry

🔖 CITIESAND MEMORY RADIO

Cities and Memory radio is a great way to start exploring the sounds of the world! Enjoy an uninterrupted flow of more than 8,000 sounds and reimagined pieces from across more than 140 countries, and curate your listening by project or sound type.

radio sounds

🔖 Climatiques. Quelle riposte après cet été d’enfer ?

Et il y a une bonne nouvelle : la façon d’y arriver ne relève pas de la magie ou d’une intervention divine : “Nous savons comment transformer nos systèmes énergétiques. Nous savons comment sortir progressivement du charbon, du pétrole et du gaz. Nous savons également comment développer massivement les énergies renouvelables, améliorer l’efficacité énergétique et électrifier une grande partie de l’économie”, soutient Johan Rockström. Et tout cela est déjà en route.

sustainability

🔖 The Iran War Shows China’s Energy Strategy Is Working

The Hormuz crisis has shown that China is becoming a new type of energy power: an oil importer so large that it is able to influence global oil prices and withstand external disruptions.

china energy sustainability

🔖 New AI tool compresses data without losing critical details

Unlike traditional compression, this AI-based method doesn’t compress an entire dataset equally. First, it uses a mathematical tool, known as wavelet analysis, to separate features of the data by scale. Then, the neural network compresses the different-scaled features separately, ensuring the finer features aren’t lost by generalized compression. The neural network learns a compact representation of those features to preserve them.

compression data ml physics

🔖 The end of IPFS at Shipyard

Protocol Labs has informed us that it will not be renewing Shipyard’s funding. While we’re grateful for the support and trust they have placed in us over the past two-plus years, we’re naturally disappointed by this outcome. As a direct result, Shipyard will be winding down its IPFS-related engineering, maintenance, and infrastructure operations. Our final day of our IPFS related work will be September 30, 2026.

delete ipfs

🔖 HTML Can Do That

HTML has been gobbling up swathes of what used to be JavaScript’s remit. This page lists a bunch of dynamic functionality that we can now achieve with just HTML.

html

🔖 bf-interop

Various repositories related to sharing BIBFRAME profiles, and validating data.

bibframe

🔖 Le maintien de la casse : simuler la perturbation matérielle pouraccompagner l’imprévu

Pour explorer ce levier, nous avons porté l’étude sur la manière dont les usagers continuent d’utiliser leur matériel numérique malgré leur état de dysfonctionnement. Pour cela, nous avons mené une enquête semi-directive auprès de 14 personnes utilisant des outils numériques dans leur quotidien, révélant des manières de “faire avec” les objets cassés. Nous nommerons comme concept “les tactiques du maintien de la casse numérique”.

computing repair

🔖 TheProfiles Vocabulary

The Profiles Vocabulary is an RDF vocabulary created to allow the machine-readable description of profiles of specifications for information resources. It can be used to describe profile hierarchies wherein profiles of specifications may themselves have profiles indicated. It can also be used to link together multiple profile resources that make up a profile - guidelines, validation tools, schemas, term lists and so on - and it allows for those profile resources to be described with formats, roles, and digital artifacts.

linked-data standards validation vocabularies

🔖 The crisisof AI-generated mathematics

In this essay, I present the case for total opposition to the use of artificial intelligence in mathematics. I offer proposals for how individuals, departments, journals, and institutions can act in concert to make sure that mathematics survives the coming crisis.

activism llm math

🔖 Ableton Learn

Learn the fundamentals of music making right in your browser.

ableton music synth

🔖 Microsound

Below the level of the musical note lies the realm of microsound, of sound particles lasting less than one-tenth of a second. Recent technological advances allow us to probe and manipulate these pinpoints of sound, dissolving the traditional building blocks of music—notes and their intervals—into a more fluid and supple medium. The sensations of point, pulse (series of points), line (tone), and surface (texture) emerge as particle density increases. Sounds coalesce, evaporate, and mutate into other sounds. Composers have used theories of microsound in computer music since the 1950s. Distinguished practitioners include Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis. Today, with the increased interest in computer and electronic music, many young composers and software synthesis developers are exploring its advantages. Covering all aspects of composition with sound particles, Microsound offers composition theory, historical accounts, technical overviews, acoustical experiments, descriptions of musical works, and aesthetic reflections.

books music synth

🔖 MakingMusic: Creative Strategies for Electronic Musicians

This book is a collection of solutions to common roadblocks in the creative process, with a specific emphasis on solving musical problems, making progress, and (most importantly) finishing what you start. This site features a selection of chapters from the book.

ableton books music synth

🔖 dokieli/web-annotation

W3C Web Annotation implementation for creating, parsing, and serializing Web Annotations in JSON-LD, with support for HTML+RDFa embedding and DOM-based annotation application.

🔖 Deleted UK Government code repositories

Total deleted repositories: 1725 Organisations affected: 63

See RECENTLY_DELETED.md for the most recently deleted repositories.

Deleted dates with a * are approximate, inferred from the last commit or archive.org snapshot. This is the last date we know it was available.

🔖 TheImpact of AI-Generated Text on the Internet

The proliferation of AI-generated and AI-assisted text on the internet is feared to contribute to a degradation in semantic and stylistic diversity, factual accuracy, and other negative developments. We find that by mid-2025, roughly 35% of newly published websites were classified as AI-generated or AI-assisted, up from zero before ChatGPT’s launch in late 2022. We also find evidence suggesting that increases in AI-generated text on the internet bring about a decrease in semantic diversity and an increase in positive sentiment. We do not, however, find statistically significant evidence supporting the hypothesis that an increased rate of AI-generated text on the internet decreases factual accuracy or stylistic diversity. Notably, our findings diverge from public perception of AI’s impact on the internet.

llm writing

🔖 EditLens:Quantifying the Extent of AI Editing in Text

A significant proportion of queries to large language models ask them to edit user-provided text, rather than generate new text from scratch. While previous work focuses on detecting fully AI-generated text, we demonstrate that AI-edited text is distinguishable from human-written and AI-generated text. First, we propose using lightweight similarity metrics to quantify the magnitude of AI editing present in a text given the original human-written text and validate these metrics with human annotators. Using these similarity metrics as intermediate supervision, we then train EditLens, a regression model that predicts the amount of AI editing present within a text. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on both binary (F1=94.7%) and ternary (F1=90.4%) classification tasks in distinguishing human, AI, and mixed writing. Not only do we show that AI-edited text can be detected, but also that the degree of change made by AI to human writing can be detected, which has implications for authorship attribution, education, and policy. Finally, as a case study, we use our model to analyze the effects of AI-edits applied by Grammarly, a popular writing assistance tool. To encourage further research, we commit to publicly releasing our models and dataset.

llm writing

🔖 Introducing Open Pangram

Open Pangram brings open-weights and source-available AI detection, built on the EditLens technology from our ICLR 2026 paper.

llm models writing

Friends,

I made corn bread and slathered it with honey butter.

An absolutely delicious temperate cloud-free day in the Catskills, so I got up from the computer and enjoyed.

The Gospel of Awni teaches us that you can give someone $15,299 in Claude credits and they can vibe code recipe apps for a month, or give them a 512 GB M5 Ultra and they can maintain their own Linux distro for life.

It felt like something new and different. Something at least as different from watching on TV as watching on TV is different from merely listening on radio. It’s profound.

:As we retake power in the coming years we must make restoring integrity to our discourse a foundational project of the pro-democracy movement”

Writing of lasting value

Here is the summary:

By the '90s microcomputers (computers based on single microprocessors) grew big enough to run Real OSes with memory protection etc. Most 20th century vendors did not have such things in their 1980/1990s OSes and lacked the ability to add them without destroying backwards compatibility.

The few OSes that could use this were niche things and either very expensive, and so died out, or they did next to nothing while also being almost impossible to use, and so nobody used them.

Acorn, Commodore, and Atari died.

Apple nearly died. It had fired its boss, and he went off and built a new company with a super-hi-end all-singing-all-dancing computer. It flopped but the CIA bought loads of them and kept the company just about afloat.

Intel, and separately MS & IBM, tried to design their way out.

They all failed.

Even IBM struggled.

Meanwhile...

DEC inspired most of the industry but was even worse at marketing than Commodore. Unix, CP/M, DOS, NT, all were built on DEC designs and plans and ideas, or at least, on DEC hardware.

DEC had 1 brilliant team lead. He and his team built several of DEC's best-selling OSes. He said: we have half a dozen incompatible hardware lines and half a dozen incompatible OSes. A couple sell well but they're old. We should build a modern RISC chip and a modern modular OS on it that can emulate all the other OSes and converge on that.

Management said no, and spend billions on trying to scale the VAX minicomputer up into mainframe. It nearly died.

The team lead wanted out. MS headhunted him and the team.

MS handed him the skeleton of portable OS/2 (which it got from IBM in the divorce) and built that modular OS on it.

That's NT.

MS was rich enough to pay to develop it for a decade while it failed to sell much, while MS actually made money from selling upgrades to 16-bit Windows on top of DOS.

Eventually the hardware caught up. The new OS finally got halfway good enough 30Y ago last week.

Apple, in dire straits, bought its old boss's company.

DEC survived. It salvaged the RISC CPU design, finished it, built it and it did well... and it knew MS had used its OS design and used that fact to screw a good deal out of MS, including porting that new OS to the DEC chip. It also gave the chips out to FOSS developers so it got the first ever Linux port.

Everyone else is dead.

Acorn is gone, but the Acorn OS is alive and it's FOSS now.

The ST and Commodore OSes are dead but have been reverse engineered and recreated by people who loved them.

All the Unix vendors are dead, but their OS was also re-created by volunteers, running on Windows boxes. It now runs the world... and most phones.

comments

Having entered the frothing, bubbling water of AI very gingerly in the early days, I'm now plunging in on a rather frequent basis! I do, however, take plenty of precautions:

• I never use Google's 'AI Overview'. In fact, I have a browser plugin that carefully stops me seeing it in my search results. Google's Gemini has traditionally been rather poor when compared to the competition, and I'd much rather use a system that I select, that's not paid for by advertising, on the occasions when I actually want to use one.
• For anything vaguely important, I never trust what it tells me without checking it. It can be a great search engine, but always ask for externally-verifiable sources.
• I pay for Claude - the £15+VAT per month subscription - and that has been plenty for my needs so far.
• I don't run anything directly on my machine with general access to my computing world. If it's working on my own code, data or documents, I run it in a container where I allow it only to see the bits of the filesystem it needs, with a firewall which stops it talking to the outside world except to places I explicitly allow. (For those interested, I'm a big fan of using 'dev containers' in VS Code and always run it within one of those. It keeps everything nicely encapsulated.)
• I don't do very 'agentic' things. I ask it to do something and wait for a response. An 'agent', as a crude approximation, is when you say 'Do this and keep working on it or retrying it until you succeed'. In other words, 'Carry on without me'. Though powerful, this can also become very expensive very quickly!

Despite (or perhaps because of) my caution, I've recently been very impressed.

Claude is, of course, now exceedingly good at almost anything software-related, and that's my main use. Paul Dix, the CTO of InfluxData, wrote an article this week entitled " The End of Programming", in which he talks about the relative scale of machine-generated vs human-generated code that we're already seeing, and this is only the start. I'm starting to feel that I retired at almost exactly the right time; that the demand for 'artisanal software' may well become a niche thing soon!

But, going back to Claude, I've also been impressed when asking it non-software things like, "Here's a PDF listing publicly-accessible boat slipways. Could you plot them on a map for me?" Actually, an even more useful variant of this was in the spring, when we were travelling through France in our campervan. We wanted a veterinary practice that could issue an EU pet passport to our UK-resident spaniel, and we had a web page listing a large number of possibilities, along with their addresses, in French towns we had mostly never heard of. The list was unsorted, but plotting the addresses on a map made it easy.

Or, this weekend, having a wife who needs to file tax returns in the US as well as the UK, I've been asking it complex questions about the likely US tax implications of various recent and upcoming financial plans. It's been far more knowledgeable about transatlantic tax than either our UK advisor or our US accountant. What it told us is likely to be painfully expensive, but not nearly as much as if we had gone on for another decade without knowing it. (A hint, if you know any US expats living in the UK who haven't yet discovered this: ISAs are not tax-free for them.)

Imagine the manual labour involved in, for example, taking a dozen UK account statement PDFs, extracting the list of investments bought and sold from each one, working out the gains in each case and how long each investment was held, taking into account that the gains need to be worked out in US dollars using the exchange rate appropriate on the day of each transaction, so a UK loss is sometimes still a taxable US gain... and then summarising all of the results in a nice Excel spreadsheet... You see why I'm a fan.

So my big worry now is this...

Before long, the AI providers are going to have to start charging us what it actually costs them to provide the service. (Well, presumably a fair bit more than that, if they want to make a profit!) I'm making the most of what I can do with Claude now because I suspect that, before too long, my £15/month subscription is going to turn into something I can no longer afford in my retirement. The current offerings are just a loss-making gateway drug to get us hooked.

The alternative, of course, as everywhere else on the Internet, will no doubt be free services which make money from you and your data by including product placements, subtle political biases, or downright advertisements, and by selling your data to others. And because it will cost them a lot more to provide the service than a Gmail, Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp account, so the exploitation of the user -- that's you -- will need to be a lot more profitable...

[en] Je profite que le programme de mon samedi soit chamboulé par les fumées de l’incendie de Thévenaz-Leduc hier soir pour écrire ici. Comme toujours quand je n’ai pas écrit régulièrement, j’ai eu depuis mon dernier article des dizaines d’idées de choses à dire et à écrire au fil du temps, certaines de passage, d’autres … Continue reading "Pavé à l’abri des particules fines [en]"

Are U.S. bonds still the ultimate safe asset?

“Jason was not just hounded out of academia, he was hounded out of existence.” Steven Thrasher on the killing Jason Arday. ​| Lit Hub Politics Long live Dolly Parton, American icon, giver of books. | Lit Hub Biography Why Hieronymus

On August 26 we released LibreOffice 26.8. Here’s a video highlighting some of the user-facing new features and improvements, with subtitle translations in over 25 languages, thanks to our worldwide community! (Note: the video is also available on PeerTube.) Please confirm that you want to play a YouTube video. By accepting,

“They realized there was no real constraint on what Trump might do.”

Salter Cane, fifteen years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZTMy1-VgIA

Come along to the Prince Albert in Brighton one week from now to hear how we sound today: https://saltercane.com/tickets

With Heather Lofthouse and yours truly, Robert Reich

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom that took place on August 28, 1963, in Washington, D.C., is remembered today primarily because it was the occasion when the final speaker, the Reverend Dr.

Win of the week: dropped off a ton of household goods at Goodwill (discovered that there’s a lunch hour rush) plus I’ve scheduled curbside electronics recycling for next week to get rid of the old toaster oven Looking forward to: seeing my niece! Stuff I did: 3.75 hours book proposal 3.5 hours finishing my Statement of […]

In the course of about a week, two vague social media posts from the administration whipsawed whole segments of Americans.

Heidegger thinks about tools like so: a tool is something (a thing that has being in the Heideggerian sense, not necessarily an object) that represents an extension of human capabilities in some way. A tool is thus any kind of thing that *lets you do something you wouldn't otherwise have been able to*. The important (for us) conceptual leap here is that when a tool works well, or isn't broken, it develops what Heidegger describes as a "ready-to-hand" quality: the tool fades into the background as a kind of human-tool gestalt of a human with the additional capability afforded by a tool forms. As a simple example of this, consider eating with a fork. When the fork is well-designed and not broken, *you don't explicitly have "I am using a fork" in your conscious mind while eating dinner*.

We are pleased to announce the release of ReactOS 0.4.16! After a year and a half of development, we’re excited to showcase the improvements we’ve made between a new graphical installer; a unified bootcd and livecd image; video, audio, networking, and storage stack improvements; a new installation type; and third-party code syncs.

Harper for Windows Is Available for Download

After sev­eral weeks of work, the Harper Desktop app for Windows is fi­nally ready for down­load, as promised. Please note that it’s un­der a“beta” la­bel for now. As it is not as pol­ished as I would like quite yet, plus the fact that I want to be able to ser­vice user com­plains prop­erly, I will not be adding it to the Harper web­site un­til early next week. Consider it a soft-launch. Un­til then, it will be avail­able for down­load from Harper’s re­leases page on GitHub.

Current Limitations

I have not yet given my­self the time to go through and pro­duce a cu­rated list of sup­ported ap­pli­ca­tions and where they tend to ex­ist on typ­i­cal Windows sys­tems. As such, you will need to add each app to the in­te­gra­tions page your­self.

Additionally, I am still work­ing to ob­tain a cer­tifi­cate from Microsoft for the bi­nary. To be more spe­cific, there are some tweaks I need to do to our build process be­fore I can run it on Automattic’s Windows CI ma­chines. I don’t ex­pect it to take much more time, but un­til then you will likely be faced with a warn­ing popup that in­forms you that the pack­age is not signed.

Other News

The Harper Chrome Extension has just sur­passed 50 thou­sand weekly ac­tive users. That does­n’t even count the peo­ple us­ing Firefox, Microsoft Edge, or any of the other won­der­ful plat­forms we sup­port. If each ac­tive in­stal­la­tion of Harper was a per­son, Harper City would prob­a­bly have a pop­u­la­tion greater than my home­town of Boulder, Colorado.

There are also now two pub­lished books writ­ten with Harper. I highly sug­gest you check out Ben Balter’s won­der­ful post about how he ov­erengi­neered his book.

Ugh:

A tractor-trailer rollover sent a truckload of squid spilling into a Rhode Island roadway, leaving a stench as they sat in the road for hours in the summer heat. Local authorities have dubbed it the “Squidpocalypse of ’26.”

That would be twenty tons of squid.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Blog moderation policy.

This week’s video

New on the Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 newsletter:

@emilymbender.bsky.social and @deccamuldowney.bsky.social on what we're talking about when we talk about "ethical" "AI", and how to move away from the untenable middle ground and towards firm "AI" resistance.

⬇️

https://buttondown.com/maiht3k/archive/six-problems-with-talking-about-the-ethical-or/

Trump Escalates Trade War with Canada—Renames Lake Ontario “Lake America”

Dustin Bluck: Independent podcast apps are not growing as a category. This is not a particular secret, but perhaps you haven’t seen it stated explicitly. It’s the sort of thing that has to be inferred, but there’s plenty of available data if you look for it. While the podcasting sector has seen growth, this has […]

Howard Oakley: Since High Sierra and APFS snapshots, accounting for purgeable space has been inconsistent and often misleading. I first reported this over eight years ago in Sierra 10.12.6 and High Sierra 10.13.3, and most recently three years ago in Ventura 13.3.1. This article looks at how this is handled now in Tahoe 26.6.2. […] […]

Vlad Fedorov (Hacker News): On August 17, GitHub experienced an outage that lasted 7 hours and 47 minutes. It disrupted github.com, authentication, GitHub Actions, APIs, pull requests, issues, and Copilot, affecting developers and organizations around the world. […] Neither outage was caused by a code or configuration change. Both incidents were capacity failures at their […]

Introduction The USA randomly decided to break the free trade agreement and put 50% tariffs on many Canadian products reigniting a trade war. These tariffs came out of nowhere, are probably illegal and I’m not sure why it is expected we respond with trade concessions. The negotiations have shown this is really an attack on […]

Did OpenAI really do the best they could?

"This year’s Indaba felt like a transformation, moving away from mostly teaching the latest AI algorithms to having more urgent and rigorous discussions about the current state of sovereign African AI."

https://dair-institute.org/blog/3-takeaways-ai-sovereignty-in-africa/

Met up with brainbox Steven Pemberton for coffee and a chat.

The post Subjective Perspective Makes Objective Reality ‘Everywhere Whole’ appeared first on NOEMA.

This morning, fans of both Patricia Highsmith and Dame Helen Mirren have cause to rejoice. The trailer for Anton Corbijn’s new Ripley-adjacent film, A Taste for Murder, is out now. The film stars Alden Ehrenreich, Olivia Cooke, and an almost

Writing of lasting value

I'm traveling to Chicago for VCF Midwest next month. I'll be demoing NTP time history on vintage Macs, with my own GPS-derived NTP service hosted on an Xserve G5, synced via NTP or a strange AppleTalk timing extension from the 1990s.

So I built a little 'portable homelab' (pictured above) that supports 1-10 Gbps networking, can run off a small battery for at least an hour, switches between multiple WANs (so I can get my own 5G Internet connection, in case I need it), and gives me 12 wired Ethernet connections.

I’m going live with Network Nova today at 12:25pm ET - join us!

Export Updates 2026-08-28:

Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places

32 updated places. 12 updated linked data sidebars.

1. Downloads: https://pleiades.stoa.org/downloads

2. pleiades.datasets: https://github.com/isawnyu/pleiades.datasets:

"main" branch:

b2147e76 - updated json

no change: rdf/ttl

c522a3f1 - updated gis package

8bbbc3f2 - updated data quality

69df9fdb - updated bibliography

719facdf - updated indexes

ac5431e4 - updated sidebar

3. pleiades-geojson: https://github.com/ryanfb/pleiades-geojson:

3a841bc3 - updated geojson and names index

4. pleiades_wikidata: https://github.com/isawnyu/pleiades_wikidata/:

305bfab2 - updated pleiades wikidata (NB: Wikidata query service unavailable, so changes are only on the Pleiades side)

Wikidata query service remains unavailable due to "Query timeout limit reached". Pleiades exports and derivatives generation will proceed with last known good Wikidata results.

It's our job to make the web a more attractive environment than AT Proto. We can deliver all the benefits they tout, without the huge transition involved in converting to their world. It would be like porting from Mac to Windows in the 90s, something we did at UserLand, and net-net probably wasn't worth it, althought at the time the Mac was in deep shit (before Jobs came back) and they had basically crushed our efforts on the Mac platform. I liked the feeling of us getting out of there. Now if only we had ported to Linux over Windows, then we'd be sitting in the freaking catbird seat. And btw, if AT Proto wants to make a smooth on ramp (and off ramp) for apps that use the well established standards of the web, that's even better. We all do better if there's just one platform to develop for, that way we can focus on making users happy instead of whatever is accomplished by being different in unnecessary ways.

I am juggling two Frontiers now, one the last release of the OPML editor from 2014, and the other the in-development version codenamed Atlantis that runs in Electron and thus is built on JavaScript and Chrome. Took me a while to get over the confusion, because Frontier is actually a product that contains other products and the common layers they need to be on the web. And I just realized I may not need Electric Drummer, because Atlantis uses the same outliner as Drummer. I was stockpiling all these Node packages and user interface stuff that now is relevant in the uber-framework, the one I aimed to spend the rest of my life working in. Well maybe it'll turn out that there was just a 12 year vacation? It's all very confusing and all my carts are turning over, all the assumptions change. My goal is to get this wonderful product running on my new Mac laptop I currently mainly use for email. I bought it to give reality to the idea of getting on modern hardware and not have to leave behind my bespoke platform. That's what you get if you get through 50 productive years of software development. Your own freaking world.

Daily exports/derivatives will be delayed as the Wikidata query interface is responding with "upstream request timeout"

Manton wants to know why Marc Benioff chose the name Claudeforce for his brand-merge of Salesforce and Claude. My two cents. Claude is a great name. I think that’s ultimately what he bought. His customers just want to be able to check the box – we’re using AI. Boss is happy. When I was coming up as a young dude in tech, the old saying was “No one ever got fired for buying IBM.” Today, in 2026, it’s Claude in place of IBM. My father worked in marketing at IBM in Armonk, so I heard a lot about their strategies that meant the IBM brand would be kicking ass forever. All things must pass. But in the early days of the PC industry, IBM sure had the power. Kind of like the US going to war with Iran in 2026. In the end IBM wanted to get rid of Microsoft, but Billg had the last laugh.

Tim Curry, who died this week at 80, will probably always be best known for his performance as Dr. Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and not unreasonably. With his snug corset and unsubtle make-up and minuscule shorts to

Are respondents too progressive? And is weighting by past vote increasing support for Republicans?

Special Canada Edition

While folding laundry recently, I allowed myself a YouTube indulgence and began rewatching Tom Hanks’ HBO miniseries adaptation of Stephen Ambrose’s Band of Brothers. If you have never seen it, do yourself a favor and add the story of a company of paratroopers in the European Theater of Operations to the list.

This essay was written with Kasra Rafi, and originally appeared in The Guardian.

Earlier this month, about 40 top mathematicians gathered at OpenAI’s offices to discuss the future of their profession. The meeting was off-the-record, but if recent articles by mathematicians are any guide, it was mostly pretty glum. People fear for their jobs, their careers and the work they love.

We think the contrary view is more likely, at least in the short-term. AI models are nowhere near as capable as experienced academic mathematicians.

This isn’t to say that AIs aren’t producing stunning mathematical results at the level of PhD researchers. In mid-May, OpenAI ...

Today I’m shipping 2UP, a Mac-assed native-focused dual-pane native file manager. After 105 TestFlight builds and many App Store Review rejections, it’s finally released. FML, what a relief!

Think “Twin Finder”, not Midnight Commander.

Most dual-pane file managers take their cues from Norton Commander and its descendants. 2UP starts somewhere different: two familiar Finder windows joined into one focused, keyboard-first workspace. It aims to do everything “The Finder Way” and behave as much of a good Mac citizen as possible. I worked hard to get it on the Mac App Store, and it does a bunch of stuff you might not expect to be possible in an app adhering to those rules.

It’s less like learning a different file manager and more like giving Finder a twin with superpowers.

Twin Finder

Native list and icon views, tags, comments, Quick Look, Get Info, Open With, Trash with Put Back, aliases, packages, mounted volumes, permissions, and extended attributes. Two panes, or a single pane that collapses when the window is narrow.

Tabs, or not

Off by default. Per-pane, each with its own folder, view, sort, and history. Pin them, rename them, reopen closed ones, drag them between panes, drop files onto them, or drag a tab out to another app.

Keyboard first

Switch panes, jump to a path with completion, bookmarks, history, recursive filename filtering, in-file content search, and coloured highlight rules. A quick palette for actions, folders, volumes, and history.

Serious file work

Copy, move, rename (the whole basename, which is more reliable than Finder’s approach), batch rename, duplicate, compress, alias, symlink, hard link, delete. Undo and redo. Live transfer progress on the file’s own row, and a bar across the Dock icon. Manage conflicts: replace, keep both, or skip.

Finder adoption

Adopt your open Finder windows as panes or tabs, with selections intact. Optionally adopt new Finder windows automatically. Choose to focus 2UP when you click Finder in the Dock. Both of these features allow you to effectively replace Finder for all common functions, and can be temporarily disabled by holding the Option key.

Tools built-in

Convert and edit images, merge and split PDFs, transcode audio and video, extract frames, build contact sheets, recognise text, read barcodes, strip metadata, calculate checksums.

Have it your way

Custom scripts, macOS Services, your own list of Open With apps. An alternate Happy Mac icon.

Offline and sandboxed

No network code, no accounts, no subscriptions, no analytics, no ads. Native SwiftUI, no third-party frameworks. Just a 2.2 MB download.

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Launch Sale

2UP is on a launch sale until 14th September 2026 on the Mac App Store.

More information, full feature list, and comparison with other similar apps at gingerbeardman.com/apps/2up/

What’s in a name?

“He wrote sad songs but didn’t want to make anyone sad. He had the kind of shy, exaggerated empathy of someone who’s always afraid of hurting people but never afraid of hurting himself.” On loving Elliott Smith. | Lit Hub

Michael Tomasky makes the case that they are.

We normally fight about what goes in the basket; this is a debate about which is the correct overall measure.

MicroGreen and ACT were built to enable engineers to quantify the embodied carbon of their hardware.

The post A better model for silicon: quantifying chip carbon with Columbia and Cornell appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Introducing _Hyperuplink_, a modern HTML5/CSS3 and 100% JavaScript-free internet bulletin board software, as a single binary, available for most popular platforms, without any runtime dependencies, and using PostgreSQL.

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. Consider these opening lines. Their source is far from obscure, so there’s a good chance you’ll recognize them right away. Take a moment over them anyway: “So now get up.”

Claire Stapleton’s Don’t Be Evil, Kimon de Greef’s The Ego Trip, and Dave Ziren’s The People’s Historian all feature among the best reviewed nonfiction titles of the month. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews. *

Chang-Rae Lee’s A Tender Age, Téa Obreht’s Sunrise, and Paul Yoon’s Etna all feature among the best reviewed fiction titles of the month. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews. * 1. A Tender Age by Chang Rae-Lee

It’s nighttime in the playroom and the toys have gathered for a conference. For modern audiences, this scene likely evokes the imaginative world of Toy Story, the long-running film franchise about the secret lives of children’s toys, which launched to

LibreOffice 26.8 is the first version to display a donation banner in the Launch Centre. This document explains the reasons behind this decision and provides information on The Document Foundation’s sustainability model. All figures are taken from the financial statements of The Document Foundation Stiftung, based in Berlin, and have

As he loses power, Trump’s extrajudicial gestapo tactics are worsening

This morning, a headline in the Guardian read: “RFK Jr lied in Senate confirmation hearings, newly revealed documents indicate.” The story by Michelle R.

Canadian universities are poaching American academics who could use a more hospitable work and research environment. Here’s McGill’s brag on its bags, one of which is my good friend Ethan Zuckerman, who will be leaving his beloved job at U.Mass Amherst to take a new and promising position at McGill, in Montréal. He explains, Canada […]

Yes. But you really shouldn’t.

Heard an interview with Bill Gates on an Atlantic podcast, he relies on a few years of programming he did when he was in his teens and twenties, yet he is the most prominent person who knows anything about programming. This is a societal mistake. We have to have public discourse about tech that's as informed as Krugman is on economics, and Heather Cox Richardson is on American history.

Gold Coast Where we’re headed this weekend. Quote of the Day ”Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” H.L. Mencken Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news The Grateful Dead | Brokedown Palace (Live at Carter-Finley Stadium; … Continue reading →

Marcin Wichary: By default, on a Mac, the initial delay is 500ms, and the key repeat rate 1000ms. […] My suggestion is to make them both as short as possible for testing. […] First, it’s good to test whether your keystrokes behave well when repeated. Occasionally you might want your interface to suppress repeating, or […]

Hartley Charlton: On the new keyboards, the tab, caps lock, shift, return, and delete keycaps are labeled with glyphs rather than edge text. On the full-size models with a numeric keypad, the change goes further, with the home, page up, page down, end, clear, and enter keys also swapping their text labels for symbols. Four […]

Joe Rossignol (Hacker News): Apple today released a new version of its Polishing Cloth on its online store. In the U.S., pricing is now set at $9, down from $19 for the previous version of the cloth. Starry Horizon (via Hartley Charlton): new polishing cloth and comparison with the old one, dimensions are pretty much […]

Untangling the lawsuits, the injunctions, and the data behind this week's headlines.

It is happening with more frequency and success

Nvidia just bought Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. That’s what Reuters says The Information says. The latter is behind an expensive paywall, so I’ll take Reuters’ word for it. In The Price Of Independence Was $5.9 Billion, AI Secret says, 🌍 How this hits reality: Last year, Hugging Face turned down a $500 million investment from Nvidia at […]

Via Stephanie Kelton:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/opinion/deficit-tax-cuts-trump.html?unlocked_article_code=1.8lA.OvF7.S6BLkGeBkBOR&smid=url-share

Look carefully

Democrats have the opportunity to expand the Senate map even further by investing in these five longshot races

Nearly a month ago, Big Walk debuted and I wrote a quick post after having only played a beta version of it for an hour with a small group. Since then, I've played the game in a variety of groups, from just two to five people in total,

Also, some news from the NYT: “C.I.A. Chief Delivered Bleak Assessment of Russia’s War in Secretive Moscow Visit”

Are markets better than pollsters? Why did the whiff on the pope so bad?

For August 19-25, 2026

Hello and welcome to A Newsletter of Humorous Writing, a roundup of the week's finest short humor pieces and funny articles, and a celebration of the fantastic writers who wrote them. We had a little too much coffeee today, so apologies if the newsletter is shaking a liittle bit in your inboz! Whoa!

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What We Enjoyed This Week

Your Dad's Itinerary for This Relaxing Family Vacation, Dammit by Aarushi Ahuja (Points in Case) The character that Aarushi has created here is just fantastic. The dad details and the voice of the character are both extremely funny, and will likely ring true (perhaps a little too true) to many of you. We also love the Miguel runner: “I will be handling business, meaning meeting our host Miguel at the front desk. Did you know Miguel fixed the ice machine himself? Corporate wanted to fly someone in. What a guy. Anyway.”

The Least-Wanted Items at My Parents’ Estate Sale by Brian Braiker (The New Yorker) A very fun joke bucket piece. It’s got a nice specific focus, and is packed with lots of great details, runners, and callbacks—just what you want from a joke bucket!

How Many University Vice-Chancellors Does It Take to Screw in a Lightbulb? by Ben Steere (McSweeney’s) You could imagine a version of this piece with a whole bunch of different “university vice-chancellor” jokes, but we really admire the simplicity, clarity, and formal rigor of keeping it to just the one lightbulb joke. We often talk about how the title of a piece generally has to do a lot of work to set up the piece’s premise and jokes, so it’s quite interesting that the title of this piece is the setup to a joke in the most literal possible way.

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Head on over to Flag Division to buy the most efficient band shirt on the market!

Twice the bands in half the number of shirts! The deal of the century!

(Do you have an ad you'd like to place in the Newsletter? Fill out this form! )

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An Old Favorite

Four Columbia House insiders explain the shady math behind “8 CDs for a penny” by Annie Zaleski (The AV Club) A collection of amazing anecdotes, packed with great details, about a bygone era of the music industry. The commentary is both funny and insightful: “It was an amazing combination of ‘We are ripping you off like no one has ever ripped anyone off as a per-unit basis,’ but ‘We are also building a time bomb that’s going to flatten us forever.’”

Do you have an Old Favorite of your own? Let us know by filling out this form and we may run your pick in a future edition of the newsletter.

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Updates From Your Hosts and Friends of the Show

Luke’s got just TWO spots left in his intro to short humor workshop starting in September! (Also he’s got a few spots left in his other September workshops! [Also also you can still pick up that well-reviewed graphic novel he translated that came out last week!])

Thursday session

807 blog posts across 14 years.

That’s how much I’ve published on my blog at the time of this writing.

And here’s the question I’ve been turning over in my mind: “How do I convey that kind of volume across time in a more interesting way than a mere reverse-chronological list?”

I’m not hating on reverse-chronological lists. I love my list view. I use it all the time to find stuff I’ve written.

But it’s only one way of navigating and digesting all my posts.

“What would be another way?”

Surely there are many answers to that question. And I’ll probably be exploring them more and more over time.

But I had an idea for a new view that I built out and shipped: my calendar view.

It’s also just a reverse-chronological view, but it’s meant to convey a sense of posting patterns through time more than it is meant to be a good browsing experience of content.

The view is simple: a calendar view of days in each year, and if I posted on a day, it gets a circle (bonus: if a post hit hacker news, it gets an orange square instead).

You can click on the dots to see the names of the posts from that day (and follow the link to them, but really this view is basically to scratch an itch of mine.

Because you can just make stuff for yourself, and that’s what I’ve done here. And now I’m writing about it because that means I get another little circle for today! Good job, Jimbo.

Check it out

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Reply via:

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Bluesky

Every interaction carries an invisible question: Am I safe here?

The post The Latest Chapter In American Military Muddling appeared first on NOEMA.

Josh Peck is best known as the star of Drake & Josh, but there’s much more to his story than his years as a child actor.

Recent book releases from Sun authors include a short story collection narrated from the margins of polite society; a tender, melancholic portrait of ’90s boyhood; and a close look at the humble acorn.

Dirección: Jacob Chase.  Guion: Jacob Chase.  Elenco: Amelia Eve, Brandon Perea, Maisie Richardson-Sellers, Lin Shaye.  País: Estados Unidos.  Más información de la película:  https://www.imdb.com/title/tt32393988/   Hay espacios que dejan de pertenecernos cuando ya no podemos comprenderlos. Un pasillo, una habitación o incluso una casa pueden conservar su apariencia cotidiana y, sin embargo, adquirir una naturaleza completamente distinta cuando algo en ellos empieza […]

La entrada La noche del demonio: están entre nosotros — cuando lo desconocido deja de serlo se publicó primero en Palomita de maíz.

Also an update about our candidate and state party recommendations in the home stretch

Join me August 30th for a live chat in my first-ever book club Q&A

Writing of lasting value

In Some Changes to GNOME Security Tracking, I reported: I will discontinue tracking newly-reported security issues on November 1, 2026. During November, I will focus only on tracking issues reported prior to November 1. By December 1, all disclosure deadlines for that set of issues will have been reached, and I will be done. This […]

Caltech Weekly - August 27: NASA Taps Caltech to Operate Orbiting Carbon ObservatoriesAlso in this issue: A new technique developed at Caltech offers a more effective way to transport a medicines across the blood–brain barrierView this email in your browser

Thursday, August 27, 2026

NASA Selects Caltech to Operate the Orbiting Carbon Observatories

The missions provide information about plant productivity and ecosystem health from farmlands to tropical and high-latitude forests as well as the uptake and release of carbon dioxide globally.

First Novel Molecular Shuttle Could Deliver Targeted, Diverse Therapies to the Brain

A new technique developed at Caltech called BrainCAB (Brain access through Carbonic Anhydrase-binder Bioconjugation) offers a more effective way to transport a broad range of medicines across the stringent blood–brain barrier.

Caltech Mourns the Loss of Trustee Benjamin M. Rosen (1933–2026)

Alumnus Benjamin M. Rosen (BS '54), chair emeritus of the Caltech Board of Trustees, a life member of the Caltech community, a recipient of the Distinguished Alumni Award (DAA) in 2007, and chair emeritus of Compaq Computer Corporation, passed away on August 23, 2026. He was 93.

First Findings of Mirror-like Activity in Individual Human Neurons

High-level brain regions that govern planning and intent demonstrate mirror-like activity when humans observe the actions of others, but only when the observation is relevant to a subject's intentions.

Chemical Physicists Quantitatively Model Electron Interactions in Real Quantum Materials

A team led by Garnet Chan, Bren Professor of Chemistry, has figured out how to quantitatively model the Kondo effect for seven elements embedded in copper.

"Roman's coronagraph is important on two fronts. Scientifically, it gives us the opportunity to directly image cold, Jupiter-like planets in reflected starlight—potentially for the first time. Technologically, it will demonstrate in space the active coronagraphy and wavefront-control techniques that we will ultimately need to image Earth-like planets with the Habitable Worlds Observatory."

Caltech professor Dimitri Mawet, also a senior research scientist at JPL, dreams up and builds coronagraphs—the audacious instruments astronomers are now using to photograph exoplanets. NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is scheduled to launch as early as this weekend, carries a technology demonstration coronagraph that is said to be a stepping stone to enabling future technologies for future missions, such as the proposed Habitable Worlds Observatory. Read more about the mission on the project website.

Other Top News Stories

New Next-Gen Dish Adds Muscle to Deep Space Network

Thermal Anomaly Discovered Below Mars's South Pole

In Case You Missed It

View recent lectures and events on Caltech's YouTube channel.

Expanding First Responder Capabilities

In January 2025, unprecedented fires burned through communities across Los Angeles County. In the months that followed, Caltech scientists and engineers developed new technologies to expand first responder capabilities through intelligent systems, coordination, and decision support.

Did You Know?

On the 20th anniversary of Pluto's infamous demotion, Mike "Pluto Killer" Brown, the Richard and Barbara Rosenberg Professor of Planetary Astronomy, explained to Scientific American why any reversal of that decision would be driven more by nostalgia than science. ( Scientific American subscription required) Findings from the Curiosity rover made the cover of Science's August 20, 2026, issue—the fourth time in recent years that Curiosity-related research has appeared on the journal's cover. JPL, which Caltech manages for NASA, leads the mission.BlueskyCaltech.eduFacebookInstagramLinkedInXYouTubeConnect with CaltechThe Caltech Weekly is published by the Office of Communications and External Relations. Copyright ©2026 All rights reserved. Send feedback and story ideas for the newsletter to theweekly@caltech.edu.

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I try to see my friends Dan and Sue as often as I can. The problem is that I live in Brighton and they live in Baltimore (that’s Baltimore, Maryland not Baltimore, West Cork).

We sometimes make it work though. Like crossing the Atlantic together.

Dan and Sue were in Italy last week. Their son Rex was attending a mandolin academy in Acqui Terme as part of the terrific Mando for Kids programme. As a mandolin player myself, this very much aligned with my interests.

Jessica and I flew out to meet up with them and spend a lovely few days enjoying the Italian food, landscape, and culture. And I got to hear the magnificent sound of massed mandolins, tremeloing together to create lush waves of beautiful music.

Somehow I got roped into a little demo of Irish tunes on the mandolin. It was a bit nerve-wracking, and I totally flubbed some of the tunes, but the lovely audience was very forgiving and receptive.

This program would have funded thousands of installations, allowing people to access solar panels no matter how much they made or where they lived

The post Trump Cut The Solar For All Program – What Does That Mean? appeared first on Conservation Law Foundation.

Despite Donald Trump's sometimes hourly flip-flopping, his overall objective is clear: He wants to centralize power in the executive branch while dismantling an imagined “deep state.” His actions are hurting our democracy, people, and the environment.

The post Case by Case: CLF is Challenging Trump in Court appeared first on Conservation Law Foundation.

FeedLand Rivers for WordPress: I've noticed that people are setting up news reader sites with FeedLand that are getting considerable flow. We thought they'd use News Products, a feature that was supposed to make it easy to create standalone sites like the one I did for WordPress insiders. But people aren't going that way, they're just sharing the URLs they read their own sites with. Here's an example from my own FeedLand world. This works because you don't have to be logged in to read FeedLand, just to subscribe. Then I thought, it would be nice to have a WordPress plugin for FeedLand reading, so I suggested this to Scott Hanson, who does these kinds of projects. I forgot in the Age Of Claude this can happen quickly. Scott shipped his plugin here, with detailed instructions. If you blog seriously in WordPress, give this a try. You can have our instantly updated news in your own WordPress blog.

My WordPress mirror site stopped updating on August 12. It's now updating once again. I'll try to watch it more carefully.

You aren’t buying an ontology file. You’re buying a business capability.

The Atlantis project continues. Today I'm working on the code that updates the frontier.root object database using RSS, a technique I started in 2007. I actually let the codecasting.org name lapse, figuring I'd never get back to that stuff, but here we are, doing unpredictable things.

All of a sudden it's cold here in the Catskills this morning. It's still August, I don't get what's going on. We haven't had a really hot day all month. I'm starting my workday wearing a freaking hoodie and am thinking about turning on the heat.

I try to keep on doing what I do in order to stay sane. I keep on teaching about the wonderful web to my students, even if nobody will ever hire a talented, creative, junior developer again. I keep on teaching about the consequences of the open web, even if it’s harder and harder to find anything open in this monopolised web anymore. And I do that because I still care.

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The unfortunate incident was an experiment gone horribly awry, sources said.

Digital sovereignty is usually discussed in terms of where servers are located and which company holds the contract. Both matter less than the format in which documents are written. A document is not a piece of paper The habit of thinking of a digital document as a sheet of paper

Even the Trump sycophants realize that they’re in big trouble

What do you do when your writing group thinks your story’s hilarious (when it’s not supposed to be)? | Lit Hub Advice If you have a free afternoon, try reading one of these novellas from cover to cover. | Lit

Even Republicans are realizing which way the wind is blowing.

OpenAI disrupted a social engineering group from Cambodia that used ChatGPT. Its scope is impressive:

The network simultaneously conducted multiple types of scams, often blending elements from different schemes. For instance, operators used dating personas to build trust before introducing fraudulent investment opportunities involving cryptocurrencies and spot gold trading. Other users engaged in lengthy romantic conversations with targets using fictitious identities, posed as representatives of online gambling platforms offering fake bonuses and winnings, or impersonated law enforcement agencies to tell targets they needed to pay fines for committing serious criminal offenses...

President Trump has embarked on a pro-AI data center kick, causing a world of hurt for his own party. The gigantic, energy-guzzling factories are literally and figuratively steamrolling small rural communities—the very same voters Republicans need to clinch the midterms.

Politicians on both sides of the aisle are doing an about face on the issue, but will it be too little, too late? Alex speaks to Suzanne Bellsnyder, author of the Texas Rural Reporter substack, about what it’s like when your home becomes ground zero for data center development.

Then, she puts it all into context with Galaxy Brain’s Charlie Warzel, who writes about AI and technology at The Atlantic.

Pre-order Alex's new book, The Steal: Four Right-Wing Hard-Liners, One Republican Presidency, and The Raid On America's Courts and subscribe to her Substack here.

Hate listening to ads? Become a Friends of the Pod subscriber for ad-free episodes of Pod Save America, Pod Save the World, Lovett or Leave It, Runaway Country, Offline with Jon Favreau, and more—plus exclusive content, including bonus episodes of Pod Save America. Subscribe now at crooked.com/friends, on Apple Podcasts, or through the Pod Save America YouTube channel.

You can request a transcript by emailing transcripts@crooked.com. Include the podcast name, episode title, and air date. Please allow 48 hours for delivery.

One of the last videos taken of Elliott Smith shows him at the Fonda Theatre, in Los Angeles. He’s sitting in a metal stacking chair, wearing faded dark pants and a T‑shirt that says i <3 metal, a little slumped

Hello again, gentle readers! Welcome back to another delightful installment of everyone’s favorite bimonthly drunken advice column, Am I the Literary Asshole? It’s a column designed to bring hope, faith, and a love of happy hour libations to all God’s

For years, I believed people avoided letter writing because they lacked time. But after teaching leadership, communication, and storytelling to thousands of students, I’ve come to believe something else entirely: People do not avoid writing because they’re busy, or even

In anticipation of the publication of my novella, American Moon, I’ve been thinking a lot about the form. Novellas are tiny in the world of books, but they’re good for readers in a self-inflicted time-squeezed age. We all know that

I first saw Elizabeth Taylor in The VIPs, when I was a moony and impressionable teenager. There were nuances I surely missed, but the movie’s larger premise came through loud and clear: life could be fabulous, dramatic, and shaped—perhaps even

Our smorgasbord of sumptuous reviews this week includes Megan Nolan on Jon Ronson’s The Castle, Kasia Boddy on William Kennedy’s Albany Trilogy, Jonathan Dee on Kurt Andersen’s The Breakup, Johanna Thomas-Corr on Meg Mason’s Sophie, Standing There, and Ali Winston on Gil Durán’s The

In my living room a framed photograph hangs on the wall. A man clad in balloon pants and torn white shirt tosses a wooden pitchfork full of straw into the air with athletic grace. He’s threshing. Behind him spreads a

“In my poetry,” she said, “there has always been an emphasis on concrete detail, put more simply, I think I fell in love with reality….When we are interested in the world, we become disinterested in ourselves.” Antonella Anedda, born in

The sunlight streaming through the arrival hall windows was a dirty gold the afternoon our flight from Paris landed. The airport’s walkways, draped in stock images of healthy, smiling families, submerged arriving passengers in advertisements recalling the sentimental beige hue

In November 2025 I reported my intentions of turning Rogue Scholar into a German non-profit organization, and the steps needed for that. The first step (needed by German law) is at least seven founding members and I am asking for your support.

In the November 2025 post I listed

A thin-skinned, peevish, petty, incompetent, corrupt infant

LesionIQ uses machine learning to analyse images of skin lesions and identify patterns that the human eye cannot.

The post LesionIQ skin cancer diagnostic appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Monday’s reading. Tuesday’s reading. Via RSS Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #178 by Thomas Klaffke (Aug 25, 2026) — only opened two articles from this and one was in the Atlantic so I closed it 😂 this newsletter might not be for me August 25, 2026 by Heather Cox Richardson (Aug 25, 2026) — welp  The Feast […]

Last night, at exactly 9:25—9 to 5—the top of the Empire State Building in New York City lit up pink.

You can go into the deep end way too easily with a self-hosting project. But is a less-is-more approach possible? Here’s what my attempt to build a “third-place” box taught me.

The agentic frontier: Modernizing commodities trading through AI ecosystems

The agentic wealth advantage

Safari Technology Preview Release 251 is now available for download for macOS Golden Gate and macOS Tahoe.

Welcome New Subscribers!

One from the ruins of World War I, the other from the gathering storm of World War II

Hopium is adding Wisconsin to our key battleground “Winning” series

Wednesday session

On his blog, Brent writes about how we’ve fixed most of the bugs and now we’re starting to work on feature requests.

European Commission: From baby-monitors to smart watches, from apps to computer programs, connectable hardware and software are omnipresent in our daily lives. Less apparent to many users is the security risk such products may present. The Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) aims to safeguard consumers and businesses buying software or hardware products with digital elements. The […]

Omarchy: Omarchy is an omakase Linux distribution based on Arch, the tiling window manager Hyprland, and the desktop construction-kit Quickshell. It ships with everything a modern, savvy computer user needs to be productive immediately. From Neovim (btw) to Chromium, Obsidian to LibreOffice, and Kdenlive to OBS Studio. Hell, even a retro Winamp-style music player is […]

Richard Speed (Hacker News 3): XCancel’s home page now contains some minimal text stating: “On Monday 24th August at 8 PM EST, we received at [sic] letter from X Corp. asking to cease and desist the service XCancel.” It says the service has been halted “until further notice.” […] Nitter provided a way for users […]

Fixed ’em. Fixed ’em all. Well, almost all — down to 10 bugs on the NetNewsWire bug tracker. (See the Mac 7.1.3 release notes and iOS for the big list of just-fixed bugs.)

This means I’ve gotten the app to the place I’ve wanted to get to for a long time, where the bug count is manageable and close to zero.

So it’s 10 bugs at this writing — and 556 feature requests. Bug fixing never ends, yes, but the good news is that we can finally get going on these feature requests.

So many feature requests

Some of the feature requests are obviously popular: custom smart feeds, content filtering, thumbnails in the timeline, traditional layout on Mac, and similar.

Other requests are less obviously popular but would be appreciated by a number of people: more syncing systems, appearance settings, sorting options, etc.

Some other requests are very small, would take just one or a few lines of code, and seem like an easy win — like ignoring elements with the .instapaper_ignore class.

There are also the feature requests that are fairly niche, which would be a bit of work and not likely to benefit very many people at all, such as a horizontally flipped layout or app-specific proxy settings. But we consider these seriously too — I’ve been surprised when things like this are way less niche than I thought or somehow more important than I guessed.

And these days there are the AI feature requests too, mostly for content filtering and summarizing. We will not be doing any AI features, even local AI features, any time soon. I’m cautious about this kind of thing and I know how difficult it is to remove features, and I don’t know right now that AI is right for this app or how it might be right. We’ll see.

How do I decide which features to do when?

It’s not as simple as just picking the most popular items and doing those first.

One thing to consider is which features depend on others: for example, showing thumbnails in the timeline depends on adding support for enclosures and Media RSS to the feed parsers, which is a separate feature request, which has its own value besides the thumbnails in the timeline.

(Some feeds — Mastodon feeds, notably — include their images as Media RSS enclosures, which is weird but true, and the article display should show those images.)

Another consideration is NetNewsWire’s job in supporting the web. Which features advance the goal of interoperability and making the web itself the social network? This is why NetNewsWire exists, after all.

Other considerations — besides how many people would benefit, besides the web — include how much work, how hard to test, how risky the changes, and any cognitive and anxiety load it may place on users.

And then there’s also my personal whim! I tend to favor features that existed in NetNewsWire of Yore (NetNewsWire 3.3.2, which we’re still chasing in some ways). Some random feature might compel my attention — maybe it’s an interesting challenge, a thing I’ve wanted to do for 20 years, something I’ve wanted to learn about, or maybe I can’t explain why I want to do it, but I do, and that’s that.

You can follow along if you like. I organize future releases as milestones in GitHub. Just note that I make changes all the time — nothing is set in stone until it actually ships.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the world reactions were predictable.

Export Updates 2026-08-26:

Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places

58 updated places. 35 new and 55 updated linked data sidebars.

1. Downloads: https://pleiades.stoa.org/downloads

2. pleiades.datasets: https://github.com/isawnyu/pleiades.datasets:

"main" branch:

7762fc80 - updated json

8b6a36d8 - updated rdf/ttl

3222125b - updated gis package

1d248737 - updated data quality

19e28eb0 - updated bibliography

0082ff01 - updated indexes

e35bd7bc - updated sidebar

3. pleiades-geojson: https://github.com/ryanfb/pleiades-geojson:

7233be64 - updated geojson and names index

4. pleiades_wikidata: https://github.com/isawnyu/pleiades_wikidata/:

9a000c84 - updated pleiades wikidata

There are already signs that a blue wave is building for the midterms that could wash away Republican majorities in both the U.S.

Dirección: Dave Green. Guion: Sammy Burch, James Gunn, Jeremy Slater. Elenco: John Cena, Lana Condor, Will Forte, P.J. Byrne, Jeff Bergman, Luis Guzman, Tone Bell, Eric Bauza, Martha Kelly. Elenco de doblaje: Gerardo García, Jorge Badillo, Octavio Rojas, Sebastián Llapur, Arturo Mercado, Circe Luna, Ernesto Lezama. País: Estados Unidos. Duración: 101 minutos. Más información de […]

La entrada Coyote vs. Acme: weberismo en el siglo XXI se publicó primero en Palomita de maíz.

The time to tame Silicon Valley has come

There are many of you, gentle readers, who are kind enough to allow Status-Q posts to be sent directly to your email inboxes. (There's a link at the top right of the web page, for anyone else interested!)

In the past, this has been done using Mailchimp, but I've had reservations about this for some time, partly because I had very limited control over how parts of the message were formatted, and partly because it required you to hand over your details to a third-party company whose record is not entirely untarnished. (I know at least one reader who unsubscribed because he had concerns about Mailchimp.)

Well, as of today, I'm switching over to a new system, where the outgoing mails come from an instance of the rather good Open Source package ListMonk, which is running on my own server. No doubt there may be some teething troubles, so please bear with me if so, but now I should at least be able to fix them!

I notified all the existing subscribers that this was going to happen, and if this still appears in your inbox... the new system is working!

Writing of lasting value

Every system has a hidden objective.

WI Dem Chair Devin Remiker joins us today at 115pm ET. Paid subscribers gather tonight at 7pm ET

Daily exports and derivatives will be delayed because the Wikidata query interface is returning "502 Bad Gateway" errors.

On the 23rd of September we will come to San Jose to run the We Are Developers World Congress North America and I am dizzy with planning and excitement. 10k attendees, 600 speakers, tons of content. If you use WEAREDEVSDAY on checkout, you can now get half price tickets!

Supplements are by far the most obfuscated category I have covered to date. Here's what you can do about it.

Ag fanacht…

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After reading Bill Gates' story, I concur.

I have seen bad behavior by Claude Code where it was doing tests of our S3 support, and it overwrote files that were critical to our apps, knocking at least one of them off the air.

I'm at a loss as to what I should trust it with, because this was in violation of an explicit rule I gave it and a broader one that it added itself.

On the other hand, the project I'm working on couldn't happen without the use of AI. Far too much code for one person to manage. A program that took several of us years to write, being converted in a matter of weeks to run on modern systems. I'm pretty sure that without AI this work would have been lost, and lots of innovations.

We humans are doing a fine job of wrecking everything, all on our own, denying climate change, giving into the same old tricks that lead to WWII and the Holocaust, so maybe it isn't the worst idea to turn management of everything over to the machines.

I don't recall a science fiction story in which the machines took over and they were the good guys in the end, saving us from self-destruction. Aliens, yes -- machines, no.

And when I'm working with Claude Code I recognize that it's a new form of intelligence, and may be the closest our species ever gets to First Contact. We could embrace it as such. What choice do we have?

And to Bill Gates, I wish when you were trying to own the web in the 90s, you had thought through the dangers, as you are doing now, and maybe not tried to own it, rather to foster its independence from big tech. Now we have the medium owned by the worst people possible, we exist here mostly to keep them in power, when it had so much promise when you really could have done something real to protect our freedom. I have no idea where we would be now if you had, but it has to be better than this.

The New York Times has a long article ( alt link) on surveillance systems aimed at babies. They are increasingly using AI.

Nanit and its rivals want to own 24/7 health tracking for the sub-four-foot set. And their already astonishing levels of baby data collection are just the beginning. Nanit recently raised $50 million from investors to expand its use of A.I. and use its camera to track speech and language development, motor skills and more, while extending its presence in children’s bedrooms into early adolescence.

Berlin, 26 August 2026 – The Document Foundation today announced the availability of LibreOffice 26.8, the new major release of the free and open source office suite, for Windows, macOS and Linux. Development began in December 2025, and the release consolidates the work of 206 contributors, of whom 155 are

The president lost his last positive issue, and the gap between strong disapproval and strong approval is now nearly 3-to-1 (50% vs 17%)

The note referred to a “Vietnam War-era issue involving bone spurs.”

How badly will Trump punish America?

Long live Dolly Parton, American icon, giver of books. | Lit Hub Catherine Lacey looks at Montserrat Roig’s Goodbye Ramona, a classic of antifascist Catalan literature. | Lit Hub Criticism How America uses audio to mythologize itself, from radio to podcasts,

Elbows up!

Gobs and gobs of text. Read here.

Dolly sa Daingean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qXFoNrqi3Y

Fuair sí fáilte mhór (as Gaeilge) agus ansin chann sí le Steve Cooney ar an ngiotár.

I signed my first baby up for Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library when she was one week old, at the advice of her pediatrician. It was May 2020, and the pandemic was just beginning to close its fist around the world.

Montserrat Roig’s 1972 classic of Catalan literature, Goodbye, Ramona, both opens and closes in a vivid scene of the Spanish Civil War, but if you don’t remember the exact contours of that extremely complex conflict, don’t worry. Instead pay attention

“How dare you!” Anne Shirley seethes. Anne stands in her one-room country schoolhouse wearing a gingham dress. She grips in her girlish hands the pale wooden frame of her writing slate—or rather, what remains of it. The rest of her

Washington currently estimates that Americans spend 12 billion hours a year filling out government forms, meaning the average person spends six 8-hour workdays filing their taxes, signing up for Medicaid, renewing their driver’s licenses, and applying for government loans. At

It feels fitting, in the country’s semiquincentennial, to reflect on the ways in which we have mythologized ourselves over the past 250 years. As you might imagine, the Golden Age of Radio, in which the medium was in lock-step with

Accomplishment in sports, unlike in most other areas of life, is concrete, definitive. There are winners and losers; there are rankings. This all-or-nothing dynamic lends itself to obsession. The narrator of my debut novel, Daytona Teddy Riggs, wants nothing more

Along with her novels, Vlady Kociancich worked on a translation of Joseph Conrad’s The End of the Tether, which according to her obituary by Daniel Gigena in La Nación, “había sido muy elogiada” (was highly praised). This translation is present

The last time I saw my mother, she walked me to the door to say goodbye. Then, before closing it again, she waited until I disappeared down the funnel of the stairwell. My mother was never one for parting phrases,

In search of a silver lining

The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast features a series of conversations with past and present Windham-Campbell Prize winners about their favorite books and plays. Hosted by Michael Kelleher. Mike chats with S. Shakthidharan (or Shakthi) about Hilda Rosner’s translation of Siddhartha, Herman

See yesterday’s reading Via RSS Grumpy Grumperson (A Learning a Day, 8/25/2026) Why I Was Wrong to Be Bearish on U.S. Stocks by Nick Maggiulli (August 25, 2026) — still pretty sure this is a bubble THE “HIGHWAY” AESTHETIC FOR HOME (FOR SCALE, Aug 24, 2026) — intriguing –> Ron Arad. Rover Chair. 1981 (MoMA, […]

Gesichtserkennung, Verhaltensscanner, automatisierte Datenanalyse: Die thüringische Landesregierung plant, die polizeilichen Befugnisse zur Gefahrenabwehr ganz erheblich auszuweiten. Wir veröffentlichen eine gemeinsame Stellungnahme zum Polizeiaufgabengesetz.

Trump started the morning on social media saying: “The United States is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America in that we don’t expect to [be] doing much business with Ontario any longer.” On X, the account of the Republicans pushed the idea of renaming the lake.

Today's links The age of disinvention: 🟥1️⃣2️⃣0️⃣0️⃣🟥1️⃣2️⃣0️⃣0️⃣🟥️1️⃣2️⃣0️⃣0️⃣🟥1️⃣2️⃣0️⃣0️⃣🟥1️⃣2️⃣0️⃣0️⃣🟥1️⃣2️⃣0️⃣0️⃣🟥 Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Metacrap; CmdrTaco retires; Chalk memorial for Jack Layton; By all means tread on these people. Upcoming appearances: Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. The age of disinvention (permalink) They disinvented the VCR. You might think that the reason we don't have VCRs anymore is because VCRs were supplanted by DVDs, PVRs and streaming, but that's not the case. They had it in for the VCR from the very start, and they never stopped trying to kill it. Eventually, they succeeded. The VCR was one of the fastest-adopted technologies in the history of the world, and it was disruptive. The fact that you could record shows to watch later, skip the ads, build a library of your favorites, even loan your tapes around – it drove the studios and broadcasters nuts. The VCR hit the market under a cloud of litigation, and the lawsuits went all the way up to the Supreme Court, culminating with 1984's Betamax decision, whose key precept is that a new technology doesn't violate copyright law if it can "sustain a substantial, non-infringing use": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc. As important as the VCR was as a device – creating the home video market, which begat DVDs, then streaming – the Betamax decision is even more important. You see, copyright is a "fact-intensive" doctrine, which means that determining whether a use is or isn't a copyright violation can be a complex and expensive process of gathering facts, weighing conflicting expert views to arrive at a judgment. If the rule was that new technologies couldn't be introduced unless you could prove that they would never infringe copyright, we wouldn't have any digital technology. Indeed, most technologies would be illegal under that standard. You can infringe copyright with VCRs, photocopiers, hard drives, tape recorders, scanners, computers, phones… Hell, you can infringe copyright with an X-ray machine, a saxophone or a pair of ballet slippers! There's clearly ways you can use a VCR to infringe copyright: for example, you can record a TV show to a tape, then sell that tape to someone else. There's also ways you can use a VCR that clearly do not infringe copyright: you can lug a camcorder around your kid's birthday party, pester the kids by recording them, then watch the footage later in your living room. Then there's an infinite universe of ways to use a VCR that might infringe copyright, depending on the specifics: recording the Super Bowl while you're at work, then inviting your workmates over to watch it after your shift ends; creating a library of kids' shows for the day-care you run out of your living room; making a highlight reel of your favorite politician's campaign speeches. Anyone who says, "Oh every judge would always call that legal‡ under every circumstance" is admitting they don't understand how copyright works. ‡ Or illegal. This is a feature, not a bug. Copyright is a fact-intensive doctrine because it is a flexible doctrine. Since the printing press, new ways of mechanically reproducing and transmitting information have appeared at an accelerating pace, and judges are asked to figure out the rules for these new technologies long before legislatures come to grips with them and pass special, tech-specific laws. Copyright's future-proofing lies in this flexibility, which the Supremes (correctly) recognized in 1984 with the Betamax decision. By ruling that any technology that had "non-infringing uses" was presumptively legal to create and market, the Supremes laid the legal foundation for all the digital tools that followed since. Crucially, Betamax ensured that last year's tech lottery winners wouldn't get to prevent next year's winners from emerging. This year's admirals are always last year's pirates, and they insist that what they did to their predecessors was progress, while anyone who tries to do the same thing to them is a thief. The sheet music composers condemned the record player, recording artists decried the radio, broadcasters sued over cable and cable operators sued over VCRs. This never stopped: Sony – the company that invented the Betamax and defended it all the way to the Supreme Court – went on to sue Napster! There's nothing inherently virtuous about "innovation." It's perfectly possible to "innovate" new ways to spy on people and rip them off. But if you're trying to launch a new product in a category that already has clear winners, the best way to convince people to take a chance on you is by making a valuable and useful product. "Disruptors" are best when they move value from existing companies to those companies' customers. The first TV remotes let people change the channel when an ad came on, making their TV better at broadcasters' expense. The broadcasters had to struggle to adapt, which is fine. They're not charities, after all: they're in business to make money for themselves, and they're only going to give you as much value as they have to. Competitors fight enshittification: any time a company that you do business with takes something away from you, a competitor can win your business by giving it back. If Youtube doubles the number of ads they expect you to watch – "charging" a higher attentional "price" – an ad-blocking competitor can bargain back on your behalf, allowing you to counteroffer with "how about if I just don't watch any ads?" https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah Inside every company, there are fair, honest people, and there are greedy, shitty people. Companies that face competitors are more likely to listen to the workers who want to give customers a fair shake. But if a company has no competitors, those good people can no longer say, "This is a losing strategy because it will open the door to competitors who will make us poorer." Without competitors, the argument against enshittification becomes, "I would feel bad about myself if we did that." This argument always loses to the bad guys, whose argument is, "We will all get richer if we do this." That's why Google enshittified search: they had no competitors, so the worst ideas of the worst people at Google could be shown to make the most money, and so Google deliberately made its search results worse: https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan Of course, companies can also face consequences from the government, but the fewer competitors a company has, the easier it is for that company to capture its regulators: https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/ Competition makes companies weaker, giving the public and democratic institutions more power. Competition makes the public richer at the expense of corporate shareholders, who have less money to spend on the project of subverting democracy. That's the VCR story all over. The VCR shook up a sclerotic, stagnant TV and film industry, created the home video market, and opened up new distribution channels that allowed all kinds of new creative workers to reach new audiences, either directly or through a fiercely competitive new constellation of distributors who fought each other to offer them the best possible deal. The media companies who were forced to adapt to the VCR never forgave it for forcing them to develop new, multi-billion dollar businesses without permission. As a Hollywood executive once put it to me, his goal was "a polite marketplace" where no one ever rudely forced him to disgorge more value to viewers and performers: https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/02/the-internet-heist-part-i/ The executives who made billions after losing their bid to ban the VCR wanted to ensure that no one would ever be so "impolite" as to force them to make billions of dollars against their will ever again. They partnered with electronics firms to ensure that the VCR's successor technologies would only have those features that they approved. That's why DVD players are not DVD recorders: the consortium that developed the DVD embedded "hook IP" in the technology. "Hook IP" is a term of art: it means any trademark, copyright or patent that is incorporated into a technology so that anyone who wants to implement that technology must license the hook IP; under the terms of those licenses, doing anything that disrupts the business plans of the consortium is banned. The DVD consortium's hook IP had all kinds of bizarre licensing terms, like "region coding" – a requirement for DVD players to register the country in which they were sold and to check whether the DVDs you tried to play were from a compatible country. If not, the license terms required the DVD player to refuse to play your discs. Region coding is an "anti-feature," a technology developed at great expense for which there is no market. Sure, some DVD player owners who had never shopped abroad for a DVD didn't care about region coding. But for customers who bought a disc on vacation, or moved from one country to another: region coding was terrible. So there were customers who didn't care about region coding, and customers who hated region coding, but there were zero DVD player owners who wanted region coding. No DVD manufacturer could advertise that their products come with region coding. If there were two equivalent DVD players in the market, identical except that one had region coding and the other didn't, the "region-free" player would win. Region-coding is an anti-feature. Anti-features aren't the only deliberate defects we find in DVD players. The consortium's hook IP licenses didn't just require anti-features, they also banned useful features…including recording. Long after the price of read/write optical drives plummeted to pocket-change, there was still no such thing as a home DVD recorder that would let you stick a spindle full of discs next to the TV and use them to record all your favorite shows. Shortly after the DVD player emerged, Congress created the most powerful hook IP of all: "anti-circumvention law." Under anti-circumvention law, it's a literal crime – a felony – to modify or reimplement a technology without permission from the manufacturer. In 1998, Bill Clinton signed America's landmark anticircumvention law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, section 1201 of which establishes a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for "bypassing an access control": https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/14/sole-and-despotic/#world-turned-upside-down After DMCA 1201, all a manufacturer had to do was add an "access control" (like a password or an encryption key) to their device, and modifying that device in any way could land you in prison. As microchips plummeted in price, all kinds of devices and services acquired these "access controls," so that it became a crime to refill an ink cartridge, fix a tractor, or connect your insulin pump to your glucose monitor. Congress never passed a law criminalizing this conduct: rather, they gave companies the ability to write their own criminal code. Simply by adding an access control to a device, they could felonize any conduct that displeased them. Every video format and distribution system that succeeded the VCR shipped with an access control: DVDs, Blu-ray and HD DVD, satellite and digital cable, and, of course, streaming video. This is how they disinvented the VCR. Once every video had an access control, it had "hook IP" that could be used to control all technologies that were capable of receiving, storing, or playing back that video. Remember Tivo? The first digital "personal video recorders" were true successors to the VCR. They could record any broadcast or cable program, store it forever and fast forward through the ads. They were all "feature" and nary an "anti-feature" in sight. That's because they only worked with analog cable (which, being analog, didn't have "access controls" that qualified them for DMCA 1201 consideration) and broadcast signals (sent over the public airwaves on the condition that they not be scrambled). Digital cable disinvented the Tivo. Every post-VCR digital video signal came with hook IP, and so the Tivos (and other PVRs) had to get permission before they could store and play back modern videos. To get that permission, PVR makers had to agree to a whole suite of anti-features, such as a "broadcast flag" that told it which shows you could and could not record. Even if you did record a show, PVR makers also supported more flags, such as an "expiry date" flag that forced your recorder to delete your shows after a set period, a "no skip" flag that blocked you from fast-forwarding through ads, and "geofence" flags that stopped you from playing back your stored videos based on which country you found yourself in. Today, if you have a PVR, you probably rent it from your cable provider (who can use DMCA 1201 to block other PVRs from working with your cable provider). It's probably slow, with a confusing user interface, and it only records an ever-dwindling subset of the shows your cable company transmits. Notwithstanding that it's a genuinely shitty piece of technology, it's still awful that you can't buy it – the fact that you have to rent that crapgadget month after month means that you're paying for it several times over. But at least cable signals have PVRs. For the majority of video we interact with, there's no PVR – not even a shitty, broken one. You can't record your Netflix videos, your HBO Max videos, your Disney Plus videos or your Prime videos. Recording a video off a streaming service has the same copyright status as recording a show off your analog cable had in 1984 when the Supreme Court handed down the Betamax decision, but because there's an "access control" on video streams, it's nevertheless a felony to make a VCR for a streaming service. You know how streaming companies play all kinds of bullshit games, like dropping videos from their catalog? Even worse: the Amazon Prime scam where Christmas cartoons are all included in your "free" streaming tier from March-October, but cost $3.99 to watch from November to February. All of these ills can be cured with the VCR, a technology that was first marketed in 1971, a technology we have disinvented. If you could record those shows with a device that took orders from you, a device without anti-features, Amazon would derive no benefit playing these grinchy little games. If they played those games anyway, you could beat them. It's not just VCRs. Anti-circumvention law led to the enshittification of everything from tractors to ventilators, phones to smart speakers, thermostats to games consoles, all of which are bristling with hook IP that lets their manufacturers decide what you can do with your own property. All of this is extremely relevant at this moment, thanks to Trump's tariffs. For more than a quarter century, the US Trade Representative has arm-twisted every American trading partner into enacting an anti-circumvention law like DMCA 1201. All over the world, governments promised to lock up entrepreneurs and technologists if they dared to disenshittify America's defective tech exports. In exchange, these governments were promised free trade with the USA: tariff-free access to American consumers. That's where Trump comes in. From the moment his "Liberation Day" tariffs landed, any country that upheld its anti-circumvention laws was sacrificing its national competitiveness, resiliency and integrity in exchange for nothing. Trump reneged on America's obligations to its trading partners, just like he reneged on every deal he's ever made: https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/22/table-flipper/#graveyard-of-indispensable-nations The good news is, this means we can have VCRs again! All it will take is for one (or more) countries to decide to lift its one-sided restrictions on making technologies "capable of sustaining a substantial non-infringing use" and wait for one (or more) entrepreneurs to figure out that reintroducing the VCR is a winner, just like it was in the 1970s, when the VCR was the fastest-adopted technology in the history of the world. It's not just VCRs, of course. For a generation, entire product categories have been suppressed, all over the world. There is a whole CES (good) worth of products that are truly innovative (good) waiting to be brought to market. The last time there was this much low-hanging fruit on offer was after WWII, where six years' worth of bombings, austerity and neglect provided endless opportunities to repair, rebuild and replace the worn, crumbling built environment, vehicle fleet and personal belongings of people all over the world. After a quarter-century of innovation prohibition, there are dozens of lucrative, easily perfected technologies just waiting to be made: the dongle that jailbreaks your phone or console and installs a third-party app store, the dongle that flashes your printer so it takes generic ink; the dongle that lets your mechanic install generic parts in your car and lets farmers fix their tractors. Our whole digital world has been wrapped in chains by rent-extracting monopolists who gloried in their power to use hook IP to deprive you of the right to use your property in ways you see fit, writing private laws that made it a crime to displease them. A generation of allowing companies to shift value from their customers and suppliers to themselves has made them richer, us poorer, and everything more expensive. They've accumulated vast wealth at our expense. Their margins are our opportunity. The VCR was a great idea 55 years ago. 55 years later, it's an idea whose time has come – again. Hey look at this (permalink) Why Political Moderates Are Losing https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-political-moderates-are-losing Trump tried to curb clean energy. It’s booming anyway. https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/trump-tried-to-curb-clean-energy-its-booming-anyway/ The AI Hater's Manifesto https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-haters-manifesto/ Amazon’s Monopoly Problem Is Growing https://prospect.org/2026/08/25/amazons-monopoly-problem-is-growing/ More Details Emerge On How Trump Cronyism Ruined The Attempt To Break Up Ticketmaster https://www.techdirt.com/2026/08/25/more-details-emerge-on-how-trump-cronyism-ruined-the-attempt-to-break-up-ticketmaster/ Object permanence (permalink) #25yrsago Metacrap https://people.well.com/user/doctorow/metacrap.htm #15yrsago Slashdot’s CmdrTaco steps down https://meta.slashdot.org/story/11/08/25/1245200/Rob-CmdrTaco-Malda-Resigns-From-Slashdot #15yrsago Chalk memorial for Jack Layton in front of Toronto’s New City Hall https://www.flickr.com/photos/lewolf011/6076393292/ #15yrsago Coordinated multinational ATM fraud nets $13M in one night https://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/08/coordinated-atm-heist-nets-thieves-13m/ #5yrsago Vaccinate workers at (almost) any price https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/26/chained-to-the-mast/#vaccine-leave-hesitancy #1yrago By all means, tread on those people https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/26/sole-and-despotic-dominion/#then-they-came-for-me Upcoming appearances (permalink) London: AI and the Enshittification of the Media, NUJ (Sep 2) https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ai-and-the-enshittification-of-the-media-tickets-1997771682882 Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8 https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/ London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9 https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7 https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&amp;EventID=596952&amp;PK= Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20 https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020 Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ Recent appearances (permalink) How Tech Platforms Took Over the Economy (Dystopia Now) https://sites.libsyn.com/566555/enshittification-and-reverse-centaurs-cory-doctorow-on-how-tech-platforms-took-over-the-economy Hope, AI, Fixing the Internet and the Reverse Centaur of it all (Wilosophy) https://podcastaddict.com/everyone-relax/episode/231414816 Deflating the AI Bubble (Do Not Pass Go) https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/deflating-the-ai-bubble-with-cory Technofeudal Enshittification (Fucking Cancelled) https://www.fuckingcancelled.com/p/technofeudal-enshittification-with Who The Machine Serves (EFF) https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-who-the-machine-serves Latest books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 544 (9802 total). "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

I ruined it. 90 seconds per side was too much.

In which I try to answer your questions about modern politics....

Go 1.27 adds generic methods—a highly desired language feature.

This release restores the full set of interface customisation controls missing in version 6.7, as well as the last four missing privacy toggles. It also extends the tree tabs feature with group tabs, split view, native tab groups, and bookmark folder trees.

And you thought the SpaceX S-1 was ridiculous

Poppy farming A reminder of what the garden was like before the Great Drought. Quote of the Day ”Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.” Groucho Marx Musical … Continue reading →

I really hope I doesn’t ruin this

Watching Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney clap back with toe-to-toe tariffs against the U.S., after walking away from tense trade negotiations on Friday, is so refreshing, it sent a thrill through international politics.

A great and remarkable person

Apple (Hacker News, MacRumors): Mac Studio with M5 Max features an 18-core CPU, an up-to-40-core GPU with Neural Accelerators built into each core, and up to 128GB of unified memory, accelerating complex pro and AI workloads. With the powerful M5 Ultra, Mac Studio scales up to a 36-core CPU, up to an 80-core GPU, and […]

Apple (Hacker News, MacRumors, Slashdot): With M6, Mac mini now delivers up to 4x faster AI performance, 2x faster storage and graphics, and 40 percent faster CPU performance. Everything on Mac mini with M6 feels incredibly fast, from everyday productivity tasks to agentic AI workflows. Mac mini with M5 Pro delivers even more pro-level performance […]

Apple (MacRumors M5 Ultra and M6, Hacker News): M6 is built using cutting-edge 2 nm process technology, packing greater transistor density into a smaller die for a major leap in performance and power efficiency. M6 also introduces a Dual 16-core Neural Engine, providing up to 2x the peak compute over previous generations to make on-device […]

Flock cameras are becoming targets for a public increasingly fed up with a growing AI surveillance state

In elections across the country Republicans have repeatedly “flooded the zone” with favorable polls. With Trump’s new social media post it appears they are intent to do it again

For a mobile 'mini homelab' project I'm working on, I wanted to use 5G Internet as a primary 'on-to-go' connection, but still have the ability to plug in another Internet connection when I put the mobile rack I'm building in a fixed location.

I'll have more on that project soon, but I figured this project was a good way to check out Ubiquiti's solutions, especially considering many of their smaller gear fits nicely within the dimensions of a mini rack (the 3U DeskPi RackMate TT is pictured above).

Dave Rupert wrote about shipping microlighter: a tool for handling syntax highlighting using the CSS Custom Highlights API. I saw his post the day he released it, and I had an implementation PR up for my blog by end of day.

Then, like I do with so many things, I let it sit there.

This is the period where my subconscious takes over. It does the work of, “How do I actually feel about that? Do I want to merge it? Do I have any regrets about what I did?” If I still want to merge it after a few days, that’s usually a good sign that I’ll be happy with the work. (Sometimes after a few days I say, “What the hell was I thinking?” and then it’s easy to simply close the PR with zero regrets.)

Well it’s a few days later and I still feel good about it, so time to ship!

My PR for this is pretty straightforward:

• Remove highlight.js dependency (and related plumbing)
• On paths that 1) match my post pages (i.e. /YYYY/:slug), and 2) have code on them, pull microlighter deps from a CDN and run it.
• Done.

Granted, there are trade-offs to this approach. I get it. Dave’s explainer for this tool on The ShopTalk Show vibed with me because I’ve been in his shoes many times: “Whoops, somehow syntax highlighting on my blog is broken again. Guess I need to fix it. Ugh. I’ve done prism, I’ve done highlight.js, I’ve done shiki. What should I do this time? Could I do this in a way that’s just less?” He clarifies:

I’m not coming at this like, “Everyone is doing it wrong!” I was just kind of like, “Could I do this in a way that suited me?”

Well, this approach suites me.

There’s a kind of conceptual elegance to it where syntax highlighting lives in the realm of a styling operation rather than a content transformation plus styling. In short: syntax highlighting, i.e. styling text, is a styling concern so solve it with CSS — no DOM manipulation required!

Plus, I mean, how cool is it that the code on the website is the same as the code in the DOM?!?

I guess this is how I know I still like working on the web, because seeing browsers do stuff like this that they couldn’t do before still feels really cool!

---

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Bluesky

On the Origins of Trumpism

[en] I am living my new shrunken lifeThe one where a few hours make a dayWhere a walk in the park is worth a hike It feels like half the life I had beforeScratch that — not even half, it’s thinner tooAnd bumpier, with potholes and broken parts I am living my post-accident lifeThe one … Continue reading "The Life Unimaginable [en]"

It is spelled Omarchy, but it is pronounced DOGE slash Linux.

A tip for Claude users, esp myself -- you can end a session without ending it with Claude. It doesn't mind waiting. You can pick it up tomorrow or 20 years from now, but who knows where we'll all be in 20 years.

Friends don't let friends run DOGE/Linux

For me, libraries are about books. Worlds undiscovered, ideas to devour. But they are so much more. For others they offer a lifeline. A place to learn, to connect with the community, to access vital resources. They have meant all these things to me over the years.

adactio.com/links/22733

The post When The AI Says To Kill appeared first on NOEMA.

Remember when I wrote about a session I was at in Belfast where I was sitting next to a fiddler who it turned out had written a book and then I ended up reading the book? Quite an unusual occurrence, right? Definitely not the kind of thing that’s likely to happen twice (you can see where this is going…)

During the Fleadh, I went to quite a few sessions at Cumann Cultúrtha Mhic Reachtain. I ended up chatting to a fiddler named Rus from New Mexico. He told me about a book he had written twenty years previously about his time in Kerry coaching a basketball team and learning Irish music.

I had heard of this book! I can’t remember where exactly, but there aren’t that many books with a connection to traditional Irish music, so it’s no surprise that it was on my radar.

Anyway, Rus very kindly sent me a copy to read. It’s called Paddy On The Hardwood.

While it’s ostensibly a mix of basketball and trad, it’s actually about 90% basketball and 10% trad. But that 10% is great. Rus was learning from the late great fiddler Paddy Jones.

While I wish that there was more of that, I understand that is not really a book aimed at me. It’s a book aimed at Americans who might not know anything about Ireland but already understand basketball. As someone who doesn’t know anything about basketball, I was left to flounder in jargon and acronyms.

But even as someone who doesn’t have much interest in sport, I felt kind of uncomfortable about the way different sports were presented. There’s exasperation that basketball isn’t more popular in Ireland. The popularity of Gaelic Football is only described as something that gets in the way of basketball. The interest in Irish culture extends as far as music, but not indigenous sports.

I was also really uncomfortable with the level of fat-shaming. This is from the very first page of the book:

A chunky girl with a navel that shoudn’t have been exposed leaned against the wall behind him.

I rolled my eyes and hoped that would be the end of it, but it only got worse. There’s a barrage of “humourous” remarks from this white coach about the weight of a Black player on his team. The power dynamics alone made that a poor decision.

Whenever there’s a fish-out-of-water story, the humour can come from two sources; the fish or the water. You can tell a self-deprecating story about yourself, or you can point and laugh at everyone different to you. There was a bit too much of the latter for my taste. The punching down grew tiresome.

The book was written two decades ago. Were it written today, I would hope it would be less mean-spirited and colonial in its outlook.

While this mostly isn’t a book for me (apart from the musical excursions), you might like it if you’re into basketball and you’re okay with some outdated attitudes.

In a significant milestone for the platform, Expanding the Windows on Arm app ecosystem across key workloads appeared first on Windows Developer Blog.

Dirección: Jon Lucas, Scott Moore. Guion: Jon Lucas, Scott Moore. Elenco: Leslie Mann, Isla Fisher, Michelle Buteau, Anna Faris. País: Estados Unidos. Más información de la pelicula: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt33305867/ En papel, la premisa de Relajadas y muy peligrosas resuena con un problema tan real como actual: la carga mental de las mujeres contemporáneas. Entre las responsabilidades […]

La entrada Relajadas y muy peligrosas: un viaje de sketches que cumple sin deslumbrar se publicó primero en Palomita de maíz.

Writing of lasting value

Source Datafinnovation are out with more impressive research described in a blog post entitled Losing The Blacklisting Race and a paper entitled Enforcement Speeds In DeFi: Limits to a Race Against Time by Ben Charoenwong et al.

The blog post is more accessible, so that's what I will quote from. But for the details you need to read the paper. The blog post's TL;DR is:

First, we explore the empirical reality of OFAC’s blacklisting efforts. The results there are stark: nearly all addresses are completely empty by the time OFAC manages to blacklist them. This result is robust across time, attacker and type of attack. Second, we construct a simple model to explain why this outcome is inevitable with competent attackers. Evasion strategies which work in our model match those we find employed in the wild.

Below the fold, I start from Datafinnovation's work and explore its context.

Their analysis rests on two properties of permissionless blockchains; creating new wallets is free and fast, and transferring coins to and from them is cheap and quick. Thus attempts to enforce compliance by identifying "bad actors" wallets and persuading cryptocurrency institutions to blacklist them are in a race that both in practice and in theory the enforcers are doomed to lose. There are two reasons for this. First, because the actions the enforcers need to take are slower than those of the "bad actors". And second:

The key observation remains that attackers know when they attack. So this naturally sets up a race where the attacker has a head start.

They summarize their exploration of the empirical reality thus:

The paper works through all addresses designated by OFAC over several years and groups them by entity. We are then able to compute the “depletion rate” for each entity: what fraction of the funds that entered the entity’s eventually-blocked addresses managed to escape. For almost all entities this rate is ~100%. As we identify over two dozen entities, we conclude near-total escape is not limited to a certain type of entity or incident or anything else.

We can rule out explanations like “only hackers escape” or “only state-sponsored entities escape” because we see almost everyone escape. Ineffectiveness is, empirically, the reality of current compliance efforts. This is an observation not an opinion. Our claim is not that these compliance efforts are completely useless — it is only that they are sufficiently useless as to be ineffective in practice. For example, a marginal chance of having some stolen funds frozen is not going to disincentivise professional hacking groups.

Figure 3 The paper's Figure 3 shows the depletion rate for their data set of incidents. This is defined as "fraction of total USD-converted token value that exited sanctioned addresses before OFAC’s blacklisting announcement". In most cases sanctioning the wallet was futile because essentially all the value was gone. How much slower is enforcement?

The key measure — what will become a critical determinant of success in our later model — is the time gap between an incident occurring (i.e. an exploit or theft) and enforcement (i.e. funds being frozen). We find this gap is generally on the order of 10–20 days. Again this is pretty robust across incidents and entities.

The 13.8% outlier in Figure 3, caused by unusually quick blacklisting, is the Lazarus Group:

The paper works through the details of the Lazarus Group escaping with Ronin Network hack proceeds in 2022. We can easily see the hackers running ahead of waves of OFAC enforcement in exactly the way our model predicts rational hackers that understand enforcement will behave.

Figure 1 Despite multiple enforcement actions, Lazarus was able to keep ahead of the authorities, as shown in the paper's Figure 1. The authors define the escape rate as "the fraction of remaining balances that were subsequently transferred out despite official designation", and the freeze rate as the remainder that the enforcers captured. Across their whole data set the freeze rate was pathetic:

Of the approximately $944 million in total balance at blacklisting, $930 million ... was subsequently transferred out. Only $14 million ... remains frozen in the sanctioned wallets. The Lazarus Group, with the largest nominal exposure and lowest entity-level depletion, contributes much of this balance; its successor wallets T2–T8 drained near-completely after designation.

That is a 1.5% tax on criminal's loot..

Datafinnovation's Tradeoffs in automated financial regulation of decentralized finance due to limits on mutable turing machines showed that:

a decentralized and permissionless Turing-complete system cannot provably comply with regulations concerning anti-money laundering, know-your-client obligations, some securities restrictions and forms of exchange control.

Thus they argue that an automated system will necessarily leak, and that it is necessary to force a prudent, risk management approach on licensed providers by making them liable for transactions to and from sanctioned wallets, with penalties sufficient to deter. But:

To the extent the tools are known to generally lose the funds-escape race none of this is helpful. The amount of loss is still growing quickly. These are perhaps better understood as cynical attempts to sell tools by presenting failure as a narrow success to justify spending on those tools. Misguided resource allocation in this area, in our view, has been an essential component in the explosive growth of scams and hacks. There is no reason for a sane person to believe using the same broken tools will magically produce better outcomes in the future.

Why is the US administration committed to enforcing the laws against financial crimes and the associated money laundering using tools that cannot possibly work, rather than imposing actual consequences upon institutions that facilitate the crimes? For an answer we need look no further than a press release dated 11th August 2026 from the US Treasury entitled FinCEN Permanently Ends Beneficial Ownership Reporting Requirements for Millions of Small Business Owners. This triggered former Republican speech-writer David Frum's Trump’s Last Loyal Constituency:

“Many secrets; no mysteries.” That’s the master code of the Trump administration. When it does something strange, there’s never any mystery as to why: Somebody close to the president, or possibly the president and his family themselves, intends to score a dishonest dollar. Exactly who and how may be secret. Exactly why is no mystery.

So it is with the news that the Department of the Treasury has ended ownership-reporting requirements for U.S. businesses and purged the existing database of ownership information. This seemingly technical-sounding change is a huge gift to financial crooks, who can now store and launder dark money in U.S. financial institutions with less risk of detection. But the gift comes at the direct expense of banks, mutual funds, insurance companies, and other financial institutions, which now have to shoulder the burden of verifying customer data themselves.

How big a problem were these reporting requirements for "millions of small business owners"?:

The information required was pretty basic: name, address, birth date, and a government ID—a Social Security card, say, or a passport. For the great majority of U.S. enterprises, these rules were easy to comply with. Almost 80 percent of American businesses have no employees other than the owner. You have probably divulged the requested information dozens of times without inconvenience.

The problem the Corporate Transparency Act was intended to solve wasn't about small business:

For the institutions receiving the information, however, its collection was very burdensome. Most clients told the truth. Some did not. How to tell which was which—and how to authenticate the information provided by untruthful clients? The consequences of a mistake could be catastrophic for the financial institution. In 2024, TD Bank paid $3 billion in fines—and accepted limits on the future growth of its business—to settle U.S. claims that it had not properly monitored accounts opened by fentanyl traffickers.

To protect themselves, financial institutions pay third-party agencies to check information about their customers, especially those algorithmically identified as high-risk. One study puts the cost of financial-crimes compliance in the United States and Canada at $61 billion.

How did the CTA try to reduce these costs? It:

imposed an obligation on most businesses operating inside the United States to report their ownership directly to the government. The Corporate Transparency Act authorized the Treasury to establish a database of this information. ... If a financial institution sensed something amiss, the federal database would assist its investigation. The goal was less to exclude criminals from the banking system than to use “the banks to track the money and find the criminals,

By destroying the database, the Trump administration has removed that help from financial institutions and foreclosed an essential avenue for tracking crooks.

How much difference did terminating the reporting requirement make to honest businesses?

Despite the Treasury’s claims that this purported deregulation of financial information “is a victory for common sense and American small businesses,” in the words of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, the change provides scarcely any benefit at all to honest businesses. They still have to report the relevant names, addresses, dates of birth, and government-ID numbers every time they transact with a financial institution. That burden remains the law.

And how much difference did it make to dishonest businesses?

The purported “deregulation” is, however, a great benefit to tax evaders, drug traffickers, money launderers, and other criminals hoping to elude scrutiny of their finances. If they can locate a weak or careless or greedy financial institution, they can open accounts with imperfect information—and they now stand a much higher chance of getting away with their deception.

Though it is important to note that one reason the US has a large share of the money laundering market is that, whatever the Federal government wants, corporations are a matter of state law not federal. Some US states, such as Montana and Wyoming, are happy to facilitate money laundering by registering corporations without knowing their beneficial ownership.

The "deregulation" is part of a broader picture of administration policies:

Across the federal government, enforcement against rich-people crimes has been crippled or abandoned. Inside the Department of Justice, resources have been redistributed away from white-collar-crime enforcement, and Trump has stopped enforcing laws against bribing foreign officials altogether. Pre-Trump, some three dozen lawyers worked on domestic public integrity at DOJ. That figure has been cut to two. The team that policed lawbreaking in the crypto industry has been disbanded.

Why is the administration so intent on making money laundering and financial crime great again? Here are just a few of many similar clues:

• On March 6th 2015 the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network announced that FinCEN Fines Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort $10 Million for Significant and Long Standing Anti-Money Laundering Violations:

  The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) today imposed a $10 million civil money penalty against Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort (Trump Taj Mahal), for willful and repeated violations of the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA). In addition to the civil money penalty, the casino is required to conduct periodic external audits to examine its anti-money laundering (AML) BSA compliance program and provide those audit reports to FinCEN and the casino’s Board of Directors.

  Trump Taj Mahal, a casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, admitted to several willful BSA violations, including violations of AML program requirements, reporting obligations, and recordkeeping requirements. Trump Taj Mahal has a long history of prior, repeated BSA violations cited by examiners dating back to 2003. Additionally, in 1998, FinCEN assessed a $477,700 civil money penalty against Trump Taj Mahal for currency transaction reporting violations.

• On 15th June 2015 David Sirota and Lydia O'Neal reported that Trump’s Businesses Have A History Of Money Laundering Charges:

  Special prosecutor Robert Mueller, appointed to lead the probe of alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, is reportedly examining whether or not President Donald Trump’s associates violated money laundering laws. That scrutiny is hardly unfamiliar to Trump, as his business empire has been repeatedly sanctioned for violating those statutes. He even at one point pressed regulators to weaken the rules.

  In 1993, the Associated Press reported that two of Trump’s Atlantic City casinos were fined by Treasury Department regulators for “willfully failing to report” transactions involving more than $10,000 — a violation of the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA). Five years later, the department fined Trump Taj Mahal Associates, the company managing the eponymous Atlantic City casino, for violating the same law, which was created in 1970 to help combat money laundering.

  More recently, in March 2015, three months before Trump announced his bid for the presidency, regulators fined the same casino $10 million. Trump had severed his relationship with the now-defunct Taj Mahal when he sold it to billionaire investor Carl Icahn in 2016, a move to try and save the casino following a series of bankruptcies. According to a Treasury Department press release announcing the March 2015 charges, the regulator had imposed the penalty “for willful and repeated violations of the Bank Secrecy Act… dating back to 2003” — during the time Trump was running the company.

  ...

  In 2006, the George W. Bush administration proposed updates to the BSA that would impose stricter reporting requirements for casino transactions. The new amendments to the BSA, as proposed in March of that year, would broaden financial reporting by the casinos to include “bills inserted into electronic gaming devices” and update the law’s wording “with terminology that is more current and commonly used” in the casino industry.

  In response, a top Trump official pressed regulators to drop both of those changes. In a letter to regulators, Trump Entertainment Resorts Vice President of Legal Affairs Pat Agnellini argued that the reporting “process would be so cumbersome.” The executive also asserted that electronic gaming “would not be a conduit for money laundering and therefore, any minimal benefit would be dramatically outweighed by the cost of any potential programming fix.”

• On November 17th 2017 Cristina Maza reported that Trump Made Millions of Dollars From Drug Money Laundering in Panama: Report:

  President Donald Trump made tens of millions of dollars in profits by allowing Colombian drug cartels and other groups to launder money through a Trump-affiliated hotel in Panama, according to a new investigation by the organization Global Witness.

  In the early 2000s, Trump was having financial difficulties and began selling his high-profile name to real estate developers around the world, the report said. One of these developed Panama's Trump Ocean Club International Hotel and Tower.

  The report said the drug cartels purchased hotel units to hide the origins of money earned through drug trafficking and other criminal activity, and Trump is estimated to have earned tens of millions of dollars from the deals.

• On March 29th 2019 Craig Unger reported that Trump’s businesses are full of dirty Russian money. The scandal is that it’s legal:

  What I mean is that for more than three decades, at least 13 people with known or alleged links to the Russian Mafia held the deeds to, lived in or ran criminal operations out of Trump Tower in New York or other Trump properties. I mean that many of them used Trump-branded real estate to launder vast amounts of money by buying multimillion-dollar condos through anonymous shell companies. I mean that the Bayrock Group, a real estate development company that was based in Trump Tower and had ties to the Kremlin, came up with a new business model to franchise Trump condos after he lost billions of dollars in his Atlantic City casino developments, and helped make him rich again.

• On 2nd August 2026 Reuters reported that Capital One says it closed Trump Organization’s accounts after anti-money-laundering review:

  Capital One Financial hit back on Friday against a lawsuit over its decision to close the Trump Organization’s bank accounts years ago, stating that it did so after a review by anti-money-laundering experts.

  ...

  Capital One has never accused the Trump Organization of money laundering. But Friday’s filing argues that “documents and Plaintiffs’ own allegations make clear that Capital One closed Plaintiffs’ accounts for anti-money laundering (‘AML’) reasons.

Now can you see why this post's title is " Not A Bug But A Feature"? Everybody who matters is happy with this Potemkin enforcement:

• The cryptocurrency industry is happy, since effective enforcement would collapse trading volumes and thus their earnings.
• The "bad actors" are happy, because they are paying a percent or two for immunity from the law.
• The tracing companies are happy, because they have a guaranteed market for their services and vast amounts of data to work with.
• The government is happy, because they can tout the yield of their tax on crime as evidence that they are "cracking down on crime", but without significantly impeding the earnings of senior officials and their donors..

The only people who are unhappy are the victims of the crimes that flourish behind the Potemkin facade.

Tom Bonier joins us live today at noon ET to talk fake polls and more. Will be a good one....

Here’s my attempt to put all of the RAM/SSD configurations into condensed tables, so you can see which storage and memory options are available for each chip, and how much they cost.

New podcast. Hear how my Frontier project is working out. Not entirely smooth sailing, but I'm pretty sure we're going all the way. By then I will have forgotten what a heavy lift it was. This is meant to preserve some of that feeling. Don't worry I don't cry. 😄

Medical School teaches you a lot of things, from the bones in the foot to how the Loop of Henle makes you urinate.

I’ve been skeptical in general about sharing workflow skills. I have a bunch I share with direct collaborators, but there are a lot of “AI skills” repos out there and I’ve only found 2 of them really useful to me (#1, #2). I thought working out what you wanted and making your own was important […]

A tribute to an American original.

Andy Ellis has a roundup of the security vendors at Black Hat this year.

Key Takeaways: We have entered into an AI world. While nearly half of booths didn’t directly mention AI or agents in their taglines, the effects of AI are everywhere. Multiple spaces (Identity, SaaS, AppSec, Data) have almost every vendor leading with AI; existing unsolved problem areas just got worse.

At the same time, there’s a clear trichotomy in the market: tools that tell you how bad things are; tools that stop adversaries, and tools that prevent problems from occurring. While you’d suspect that the tools that fix things would dominate, the tools that merely tell you how bad things are seem to be frustratingly plentiful...

Agent Skills in Octonous offer a central, reusable library for your context, guidelines, and procedures. Written in standard Markdown, Skills end repetitive setup. Store team knowledge once, share it across your workspace, and seamlessly attach it to automated tasks or live conversations.

The D in Bessent’s “D-Day” stands for Dud

New data centers are threatening to destroy the natural beauty of West Virginia’s Canaan Valley. | Lit Hub Technology How Christian nationalism rose in the United States: “Those of us who saw the moral arc of the universe bending toward justice

The mail voting and ballroom decisions are a travesty.

We’ve all been reading about it for months, and now finally it’s time to read the thing itself: Life of M by Rachel Cusk is available today! And that’s not all: a long awaited sequel to Big Little Lies hits

The data centers have been speaking to me lately, in the form of ChatGPT slop. The spam offers to market my new novel for a fee, perverting the language I’ve written about a place the data centers promise to destroy:

An image of Earth at night as seen from space appeared on my laptop screen during an internet search. The captivating image with a vague title—“Global Map”—drew me in like an insect mesmerized by the warm glow of a streetlamp

UC Santa Barbara in the 1980s felt like the counterculture’s afterparty: sun-­drenched, restless, and still echoing defiance. Palm trees swayed over a serene campus where students surfed at Campus Point between (or in lieu of) classes. On the surface, it

Storditi dalla nostalgia, confusi dai sogni, con i teli da bagno pieni di vento, con la rapida incompleta visione di una casa al mattino. Laggiú nell’aria il ronzio dell’aspirapolvere sui tappeti e i tonfi dei tappeti contro i muri. Nelle

While Giotto sought to communicate the Christian messages that he had been commissioned to depict by encouraging his viewers to empathize with the characters in his realistic scenes, Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450-1516) took a different tack. In his paintings, the

Here’s what happens: She sees the boy the first day the house goes on the market, while cleaning the kitchen between visits from two potential buyers. She turns on the tap to rinse out the dishrag and, after shutting it

To every voter, every day

Welcome to season four of The Critic and Her Publics: The Art of the Interview. This season, host Merve Emre talks with professional interviewers of all kinds about how they get the answer they’re looking for, what makes a good

Starting this week blog posts are archived in the Rogue Scholar science blog archive using a dedicated invenio module instead of an external service. This simplifies the maintenance of the service and is critical for the long-term future of the archived content.

Rogue Scholar started out as a bespoke

Every once in a while, I keep track of everything I read for a day or two, mostly out of curiosity about what I’m actually reading and how much I read online on a given day. It’s been a couple years! More at the bottom of this page. Via RSS Small things like these by […]

On Friday night, Prime Minister Mark Carney instructed Canadian negotiators to walk away from talks with officials from the Trump administration over new tariffs of 50% Trump had imposed on $28 billion of Canadian products.

A few days ago I wrote about a new tool called wacz-pdf, which will read a WACZ file and write out each web page as a PDF file.

I got some quick feedback from Henry Wilkinson who suggested that it could be useful to allow a user to extract a Markdown file instead of a PDF. He also pointed out that the defuddle JavaScript library could be useful for doing it. defuddle is open source, and is part of the browser extension that Obsidian uses to save things from the web.

Claude chewed on this idea for a bit. I happened to notice at some point that it decided to extract the HTML from the WARC and feed that to defuddle. That worked fine, but it wouldn’t work for all the web pages that are dynamically assembled with JavaScript.

Since I didn’t have any WACZs nearby that had dynamic pages in them Claude decided there really weren’t many WACZs that contained pages like this. Even when I challenged that there were, Claude still opted to use replay as a fallback when absolutely necessary. Oh Claude, you’re so funny.

In the end I did manage to redirect Claude at focusing on using the HTML from the replayed page DOM instead of the HTML in the WARC. The code simply waits for the page to settle, after any optional click behaviors are applied. It then uses Playwright to inject some JavaScript into the replayed page, which serializes the DOM as HTML, and passes it back out to the calling program, which then gives it to defuddle.

These changes did kinda require a change in name since wacz-pdf didn’t adequately describe this Markdown extraction functionality. So, the tool is now called waczdoc, which has three subcommands pdf, markdown andlist:

waczdoc markdown reallife.wacz --output markdown

I wanted to choose the awkward name waczdoc (despite Claude telling me it was a terrible name) because the cool thing about extracting to Markdown is it opens up all kinds of possibilities to transform to other things via Pandoc, if the mood should take you. Maybe Claude was right about the name being awkward, but I like it :)

Here’s an
example of a page from a web archive I created a few years ago from the Real Life online journal. And here is the
Markdown that was extracted.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Columbia House could do no wrong—it was a great way to get 12 CDs for a penny. But its business model kind of set the stage for a lot of bad e-commerce.

Operating system uptimes are like avocados: a week is about as long as you should trust one.

Getting to know the stages of the interview process at Thoughtworks

Shame on the high court’s majority

If you believed that the point of the DMA was to open up competition, choice, and freedom for developers, yeah, I bet it does seem bonkers that the European Commission has signed off on compliance where Apple charges 15 percent commissions on links to the web from apps distributed on the App Store, and that Apple will collect a 5 percent Core Technology Commission even for apps distributed on third-party app marketplaces, using third-party payment processing.

My neighbors are smoking and it is terrible

Trump’s Hail Mary to bring beef prices down

Of course it’s okay to criticize people for their tech choices — for returning to X, for instance, as MacStories recently did.

I’m not on X and there’s no way I would return. Fuck that place and fuck Elon Musk. (Yes, there’s a brentsimmons there, but it’s not me. I deleted my account.)

But it’s not like my tech choices are free of fascists and collaborators — and yours almost surely aren’t either.

Do you have an iPhone? A Mac or iPad?

Do you order from Amazon, buy groceries from Whole Foods, or use any of their other properties (Prime Video, Twitch, Audible, etc.)? Do you use AWS or any websites that rely on AWS?

Do you use GitHub or Office or Windows or Azure or Typescript? How about DuckDuckGo, which uses Bing?

Do you run Linux, which now includes AI-assisted code? Do you use Claude or ChatGPT or any of those?

Do you use any Meta social networks (Facebook, Threads, Instagram)?

Do you write Ruby code? (Which features DHH prominently on its home page.)

Do you have an Android phone or use Google search or Gmail or write code in Go?

(Etc.)

I use Apple stuff and write apps for Mac and iOS, after all, which means my work benefits Apple, which is doing far, far worse things than the MacStories folks could or would ever do.

And yet here I am continuing to write apps for Apple platforms.

Again, yes, it’s not just okay but proper to criticize public people for their tech choices, but I try to remember my own imperfect choices before I do. And, more importantly, I try to remember who the actual enemies are. (Trump, his oligarchs, ICE, Stephen Miller, every single Republican politician, etc.)

These days we need all the righteous fury we can rally — and we also need the clarity to know where to focus it.

Please join us

Today's links How Canada can help Americans and defeat America: True Carneyism has never been tried. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Brazil v AIDS drug patents; TSA v gel-bras; After the Siege (Russian); Names are hard; Layton's last message; Hospital bill secrets; "The Unraveling"; Friction cannot be reduced, only redistributed; Free Kevin; EFF v Barney; MP3tunes; "Ghosts With Shit jobs"; Ikea as dystopian design-fiction; Torturing "young conservatives"; Roald Dahl body yeast ale; Prisoners die of heat; Privacy v antitrust; The internet is boring (2001); TSA v explosive water; Internet Archive x 9/11; Peter Thiel x litigation financing startup; Universities v unions. Upcoming appearances: Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. How Canada can help Americans and defeat America (permalink) As Canada is learning (the hard way), the "art" of all of Trump's deals can be summed up in a single word: "renege": https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/22/table-flipper/#graveyard-of-indispensable-nations In 2020, Donald Trump ripped up NAFTA, a trade deal that conferred a huge advantage to the USA at Canada's expense, and replaced it with CUSMA, a trade deal that was even more advantageous to America, and even worse for Canada. In 2024, after being elected for the second time, Trump publicly railed against CUSMA using the exact same language he'd used to decry NAFTA, branding it "a very bad deal" that needed to be shredded and renegotiated. To that end, Trump declared sweeping tariffs on Canada's exports, thereby raising the costs Americans paid for many everyday goods, because while Canada does not ship a lot of finished products to the US, it is a key supplier of parts and materials, all of which were made instantly more expensive thanks to the Trump tariffs. Trump went on to insist that Canada should annex itself to the US, becoming the "51st State." His operatives openly meddled in Canadian separatist movements, backing the "Wexit" partisans who want to separate the oil-rich, boom/bust-plagued province of Alberta from Canada. CUSMA was negotiated by Justin Trudeau's government, and Trump II's tariff war landed on Trudeau's successor, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, billed as a technocratic safe pair of hands who could be relied upon for sober, effective leadership. Much to everyone's surprise, Carney – the epitome of a "Davos Man" – responded to the Trump tariffs by traveling to Davos and giving a fiery speech denouncing Trump and declaring a "rupture" that left the old world order dead: https://www.weforum.org/stories/forum-institutional/davos-2026-special-address-by-mark-carney-prime-minister-of-canada/ Carney promised that Canada would go "elbows up" against America, with retaliatory tariffs, blockades and boycotts of key US exports. Cutting off this stream of goods would have the same effect on Canadians that Trump's tariffs had on Americans: raising prices. Unlike their American cousins, Canadians were far more tolerant of this increase in their cost of living, because, unlike Americans, Canadians believed the narrative that they were sacrificing for the good of their country against an existential threat from a fractious neighbour. Americans were far less willing to believe that Canada was somehow cheating the US or flooding the country with fentanyl. "Elbows up" is largely a war of symbols, in which Canadians take pride in mastering the minute differences between "Product of Canada," "Made in Canada," "Assembled in Canada," and "Designed in Canada" so they can seek out maximal Canadianness in their consumption choices. There's even a kind of twisted honour in committing yourself to drinking Wayne Gretzky's shitty rye in preference to delicious American bourbon, a way to affirm your love of country with each astringent, metallic swallow. When the trade war was confined to symbolic terrain, Carney's elbows remained reliably elevated. But outside the realm of symbols, Carney's elbows wilted. Take the Digital Services tax, a plan to charge America's tax-evading tech giants a 3% levy to make up for the untaxed profits they keep by pretending to be Irish. So long as Trump's tech giants can dodge their tax obligations, they can always outcompete Canada's tech sector, who are expected to pay 38% federal and provincial tax. American tech companies are closely allied with the Trump regime: they financed his campaign, conduct domestic and international surveillance for him, provide the software to administer his ethnic cleansing, and restrict access to software that helps Americans evade the armed secret police he sent into the streets to kidnap and disappear his enemies: https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/06/rogue-capitalism/#orphaned-syrian-refugees-need-not-apply Trump repaid his tech giants by threatening Carney with still more tariffs unless he canceled the Digital Service Act, and Carney capitulated. Meanwhile, Carney raced to enact a plan to fire tens of thousands of civil servants and replace them with AI chatbots running American software on American chips: https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/news-releases/2026/06/04/prime-minister-carney-launches-ai-all-canadas-new-national-artificial Canada's federal and provincial ministries are all entirely dependent on American cloud software, most notably Microsoft's Office 365, a package that Trump has fashioned into a geopolitical weapon, ordering Microsoft to shut down foreign officials who thwarted his plans, denying them access to all their data and cutting off their ability to communicate with the outside world: https://apnews.com/article/icc-trump-sanctions-karim-khan-court-a4b4c02751ab84c09718b1b95cbd5db3 In other words, Canada is already terribly vulnerable to American cyberwarfare. Trump's tech companies don't have to hack into Canada's digital infrastructure to shut it down: they already control it. But – incredibly – Carney found a way to make this situation even worse, turning over key aspects of the digital back-end of Canada's military to Palantir, the tech company most closely aligned with Trump, whose CEO openly boasts that his company was founded to kill America's political enemies: https://thedeepdive.ca/canada-military-palantir-license-deal/ Carney's symbolic gestures – memorable speeches and minor changes to consumption habits – are second to none. But when it comes to building a strong country that is resilient against the attacks we can all foresee (not least because Trump has repeatedly told us he intends to launch them), Carney himself becomes Carneyism's fiercest opponent: https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/30/rupture/#deeds-not-words It's not just the attacks that are foreseeable, alas. Trump can always be relied upon – to break his word. Carney repeatedly caved to Trump, and in response, Trump has hit Canada with massive new tariffs – 50%! Remember: the "art" of every Trump deal is renege: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/what-to-know-about-trumps-50-tariffs-on-canadian-goods-that-just-went-into-effect Trump can also be relied upon to circle back to his fixations and obsessions. Decades ago, someone showed Trump a Mercator projection map of the Earth and he became obsessed with "yuge" Greenland, to the point where he is prepared to dissolve Nato and go to war with Europe to steal it from Denmark: https://archive.is/3Q8nj By the same token, Trump has long been publicly obsessed with the Gilded Age president William McKinley, who enacted sweeping tariffs at a time when the US economy was rapidly growing, a fact that lodged in Trump's brain and led him to believe that tariffs are a surefire growth-hack that will let him eliminate taxes on the wealthy without shutting down the country: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/12/business/trump-william-mckinley-tariffs/ Trump will still be obsessing about these idées fixes when he draws his last breath, gasping out "Greenland…tariffs" as he tumbles from his golden toilet, forehead and coronary arteries bulging from the strain of trying to pass a half-digested Big Mac with only a viscous paste of rectal mucus and Diet Coke to lubricate that final, unyielding bolus. The fact that Trump is immune to learning from his mistakes (because that would require admitting that he made a mistake) does not bind Canada to do the same. Quite the contrary: Trump's inability to learn or reason means that if Canada engages in novel retaliatory tactics, it stands a good chance of flummoxing the Mad King, leaving him flat-footed and lumbering while it dekes him out and swarms past him. Lucky for Canada, Trump's incontinent belligerence has opened up a large and diverse territory of novel tactics for conducting both geopolitical and economic policy. As November Kelly says, "Trump inherited a poker game rigged in his favour but he flipped over the table anyway because he resents having to pretend to play." The systems that Trump has dismantled as unfair to the US were, in fact, sources of tremendous advantage to America. Take those tech companies that have fused so tightly with the Trump regime. These companies operate global monopolies that allow them to extract vast sums and even vaster troves of sensitive data from billions of people around the world. Having attained total economic dominance and total technical lock-in, these companies have embarked on a program of enshittification, squeezing their customers and suppliers for even more data and even more money: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ Under normal market conditions, the decay of these American platforms would invite competitors from around the world. The fact that Apple and Google extract 30% of every dollar spent in their app stores would bring forth new app stores who were willing to give better deals to app makers and app users. The fact that HP charges $10,000/gallon for the coloured water in its printers would invite competitors who were willing to take a mere 100,000% margin on ink. The fact that Meta and Google and Microsoft and Apple spy on you with your devices and software and use that data to target you, manipulate you and overcharge you – and to train their AIs to steal from you even more efficiently – would create demand for privacy blockers, jailbreakers, and other "adversarial interoperability" tools that force your technology to work for you, even if the manufacturer wishes it were otherwise: https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/01/redistribution-vs-predistribution/#elbows-up-eurostack But we don't have "normal market conditions." For more than a quarter of a century, the US Trade Representative has demanded that all of America's trading partners – including Canada – enact "anti-circumvention" laws that make it a crime to alter how a digital device works unless the original (usually American) manufacturer consents. In other words, it's illegal for some Waterloo grads to tap ambitious RIM millionaires for the seed capital to start a company that helps Canadians install Canadian app stores on their Canadian phones so when they buy things from other Canadians, all the money stays in Canada, without a 30% "app tax" being siphoned off by either Google or Apple. That's right: in 2012, Canada passed a law that lets American companies use Canada's courts to destroy Canadian companies that help Canadian technology users get more out of their own property. This law – the Copyright Modernization Act – was wildly unpopular from the start. A federal consultation drew over 6,000 opposing comments, and only 53 comments in support of the bill. But Prime Minister Stephen Harper whipped the vote among his Conservative MPs and passed it, because he judged that tariff-free access to America's markets to be a price worth paying: https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/15/radical-extremists/#sex-pest Trump's tariffs prove that this was a bad bargain. By voluntarily gluing its technological elbows to its sides, Canada made itself easy pickings for America's tech giants, who wiped out Canada's tech sector while making Canada geopolitically and economically dependent on – and vulnerable to – the US and its tech companies. Canada is long overdue for a reckoning with this blunder. The best time to have made Canada digitally sovereign would have been before an American president announced his intention to annex Canada and began explicitly deploying America's tech companies to attack his geopolitical adversaries. The second-best time is now. By repealing Bill C-11 and legalizing reverse-engineering and modification of digital technology with consent of its users and in accordance with privacy, consumer and labour rights, Canada will gain a devastating counter to Trump's tariffs. Not only will legalizing jailbreaking let Canadians get more out of their own property, it will turn America's tech trillions into Canada's tech billions – while making Canada digitally sovereign by facilitating the uncoupling of Canadian ministries, corporations, households, and devices from America's cloud. This is how Canada removes the digital kill switch it handed to America, a kill switch that can shut down its tractors, phones, and governments. This is the best possible moment for such a move. To incubate a successful tech sector, you need a) an innovative product; b) skilled technologists; and c) capital. Thanks to Trump, Canada has all three. First: innovative ideas. Thanks to the prohibition on modifying America's defective tech exports, there is a whole orchard of low-hanging fruit for product designers to pick from: an app that aggregates all of your streaming services into one place and lets you record shows to watch later, even if the service deletes them; reliable tools for using generic ink and independent app stores; new firmware for tractors and cars that facilitates independent repair and unlock subscription features, and, of course, privacy- and ad-blockers of all description. These are truly disruptive products, striking at the maddening antifeatures installed at the insistence of sclerotic, extractive tech bosses. Move fast and break their things! Next: talent. Who will do that fast moving? Again, we can thank Trump for giving Canada an army of skilled technologists who have fled Silicon Valley one step ahead of an ICE chud who wanted to black-bag them and deport them to Liberia (or a Salvadoran slave-labor camp). Trump is creating the largest wave of reverse brain-drain in history, as everyone ambitious and smart realizes that their lifelong US tech work dream is a nightmare. If Canada can't get enough talent to harvest that orchard of low-hanging fruit from its returning Canadians, it need only open its borders to the skilled technologists of all nations who are racing out of America as fast as they can go. Finally, money. The AI bubble collapse is imminent. The forces of capital are desperate for promising, high-return investment opportunities that aren't grossly overvalued, overhyped and underperforming AI companies. Even if you can find a company like that in America, it's increasingly apparent that to make that business a success, you will need to buy more $TRUMP coins than your rivals, lest Trump direct his agencies to destroy your fledgling business. And here's the kicker: turning America's trillions into Canada's billions, moving fast and breaking America's tech-kings, fixing the defects in America's extractive tech exports? It's all good for Americans. Sure, cratering the share-price of America's Big Tech companies will be bad for America's retirement savers, but the median American worker only has $955 saved for retirement: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/955-saved-for-retirement-millions-are-in-that-boat-150003868.html Most Americans are far more exposed to the predatory conduct of US tech companies than they are to the share price of those companies. That's because Americans are the beta-testers for every ripoff and surveillance tool that Silicon Valley produces. Long before those tools get to Canada or find their way around the world, they are making Americans poorer and worse off. Remember: Canada is America's second largest trading partner. Americans are really good at buying things from Canada – even when those things aren't allowed in America. Trump wasn't entirely wrong when he accused Canada of flooding America with drugs – but the drugs Canada sends to America aren't fentanyl and oxy. Canada sends America insulin and other cheap pharmaceuticals that cost 10-100x more in Ripoff America than they do in Canada. If Americans can figure out how to buy cheap generic meds from Canadians over the US Postal Service, they will be able to buy disenshittification tools from Canadians over the internet. Selling Americans products that make their lives better is much better politics than boycotting American products that make Canadians' lives better. No politician can pursue a strategy of higher prices and lower living standards forever – not even if you've got a lot of "elbows up" rhetoric you can use to convince Canadians that they're doing their duty to the nation by paying more for everything. Paying more for everything to punish Americans is like punching yourself in the face as hard as you can and hoping the downstairs neighbours say "ouch." When Canadians swap delicious American bourbon for Wayne Gretzky's shitty rye, they punish corn farmers in states that begin and end with a vowel – farmers who have nothing to do with Canada's problems. By swapping disenshittification for tariffs, Canadians can go back to drinking delicious bourbon, and make money from that farmer by selling him the jailbreaks he needs to fix his tractor without paying the John Deere tax of $200+ that the company charges after you do your own repair to send someone to the farm to type an unlock code into your console. A lot of Very Serious Grown Up Canadians have told me that they think Carney should confine his response to Trump to toothless symbolic gestures, lest they make Trump mad. Trump is always mad. He gets mad at symbolic gestures. He gets mad if you point out that Ronald Reagan thought tariffs were stupid: https://abcnews.com/Politics/trump-raises-tariffs-canada-10-after-reagan-ad/story?id=126866712 Freeing Americans from the tyranny of their own tech companies has the power to create a partisan army of American Canada weebs who will fight for Canada when – not if – Trump gets mad at Canada. That's the best defense Canada can have – common cause and solidarity with the people of America, who share a common enemy in Trump, the least popular president in history, who is looting billions and letting his cronies destroy Americas' lives. That's some real elbows up stuff. True Carneyism has never been tried – especially by Carney. It's long past time someone gave it a go. Hey look at this (permalink) Shielded from Shame: Civil Immunity for Ontario's Long-Term Care Facilities in the Wake of Covid-19 https://www.canlii.org/en/commentary/doc/2021CanLIIDocs13991#!fragment//BQCwhgziBcwMYgK4DsDWszIQewE4BUBTADwBdoByCgSgBpltTCIBFRQ3AT0otokLC4EbDtyp8BQkAGU8pAELcASgFEAMioBqAQQByAYRW1SYAEbRS2ONWpA Many recent grads say AI is making it harder to get a job. Economists aren't so sure https://www.npr.org/2026/08/18/nx-s1-5910677/recent-college-graduates-employment-job-artificial-intelligence Shitbot https://dodoeraser.org/2026/07/29/shitbot/ Nonfeasance, Misfeasance, and Malfeasance: Academic Freedom in a Nutshell https://3d.laboratorium.net/2026-08-23-academic-misfeasance Object permanence (permalink) #25yrsago Kevin Mitnick is out of prison https://web.archive.org/web/20010000000000*/https://www.techtv.com/screensavers/showtell/story/0,23008,3343816,00.html #25yrsago Brazil to nationalize AIDS drug patents https://edition.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/americas/08/22/aids.drug/index.html #25yrsago Copyright your DNA https://web.archive.org/web/20010827170510/http://www.cosmiverse.com/science08230102.html #25yrsago The internet is boring now https://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/26/us/exploration-of-world-wide-web-tilts-from-eclectic-to-mudane.html #20yrsago TSA busts “explosive water” that turns out to be cosmetics https://web.archive.org/web/20060822123448/http://www.kxma.com/getARticle.asp?ArticleId=35223 #20yrsago Windows Media DRM cracked, no one cares https://archive.blogs.harvard.edu/cmusings/2006/08/25/#a1889 #20yrsago Canadian music label puts fans and artists first https://web.archive.org/web/20060830211418/http://wired.com/wired/archive/14.09/nettwerk_pr.html #20yrsago After the Siege in Russian https://craphound.com/Cory_Doctorow_-_After_the_Siege_Russian.html #20yrsago Victory in War on Moisture: Gel-bras once again safe! https://web.archive.org/web/20060820185006/http://www.tsa.gov/travelers/airtravel/prohibited/permitted-prohibited-items.shtm #20yrsago EFF sues Barney the humorless, copyright maximalist dinosaur https://web.archive.org/web/20060813093642/http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2006_08.php#004884 #15yrsago MP3tunes verdict: music lockers are legal https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/08/mp3tunes-victory-music-lockers-is-good #15yrsago Lolita on Wikipedia: 2,300 edits later https://web.archive.org/web/20111008072145/http://www.theawl.com/2011/08/case-history-of-a-wikipedia-page-nabokov’s-lolita #15yrsago SF mockumentary: ‘Ghosts With Shit Jobs’ — China looks at westerners with awful jobs https://ghostswithshitjobs.com/ #15yrsago Information consumes attention: focus in the age of abundant stimulus https://web.archive.org/web/20111113004501/http://nymag.com/print/?/news/features/56793/ #15yrsago Jack Layton’s final public words: “Love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear.” https://web.archive.org/web/20110829050308/http://beta.images.theglobeandmail.com/archive/01310/Jack_Layton_s_lett_1310744a.pdf #15yrsago Getting people’s names right in software design: a LOT harder than it looks https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/08/why-im-not-on-google-plus.html #15yrsago Internet Archive’s cache of 24/7 TV footage from 9/11 and beyond https://archive.org/details/911 #10yrsago Peter Thiel & Y Combinator fund a “litigation financing” startup to make money off other peoples’ lawsuits https://gizmodo.com/a-startup-backed-by-peter-thiel-makes-bankrolling-civil-1785707590 #10yrsago Universities fought unionization’s ‘one-size-fits-all’ using identical arguments https://crookedtimber.org/2016/08/25/great-minds-think-alike/ #10yrsago 5 years after Texas GOP’s attack on women’s reproductive health, TX leads developed world in maternal mortality https://web.archive.org/web/20160820212602/https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/20/texas-maternal-mortality-rate-health-clinics-funding #10yrsago You didn’t find a meteorite https://sites.wustl.edu/meteoritesite/ #10yrsago Young Conservatives’ “leadership seminar” featured food & water deprivation, sexist epithets, physical abuse https://web.archive.org/web/20160824145226/https://www.thestar.com/news/queenspark/2016/08/23/ontario-tories-apologize-to-party-activists-after-controversial-youth-seminar.html #10yrsago The 2017 Ikea Catalog considered as dystopian urban microapartment futurism https://web.archive.org/web/20160817154440/https://www.fastcodesign.com/3062854/ikeas-2017-catalog-is-a-terrifying-glimpse-into-the-tiny-apartments-of-the-future #10yrsago Singapore will disconnect entire civil service from the internet https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/24/singapore-to-cut-off-public-servants-from-the-internet #10yrsago They’re making a Twits ale from Roald Dahl’s body-yeast https://web.archive.org/web/20160817154531/http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/beer-to-be-made-from-yeast-swabbed-from-roald-dahls-writing-chair-a7195721.html #10yrsago As America’s temperatures soar, prisoners are dropping dead https://web.archive.org/web/20160825000426/https://theintercept.com/2016/08/24/deadly-heat-in-u-s-prisons-is-killing-inmates-and-spawning-lawsuits/ #5yrsago Are privacy and antitrust on a collision course? https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/24/illegitimate-greatness/#peanut-butter-in-my-antitrust #5yrsago What kind of emergency is our emergency? https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/23/dont-wanna-spoil-the-surprise/#monocausotaxophilia #5yrsago The secrets of hospital bills https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/23/dont-wanna-spoil-the-surprise/#surprise #5yrsago Belarusian dictator pwned by "cyber-partisans" https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/25/taxes-are-for-the-little-stores/#cyber-partisans #5yrsago Big Box stores' other shoe drops https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/25/taxes-are-for-the-little-stores/#metastatic-parasites #5yrsago The Unraveling https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/23/dont-wanna-spoil-the-surprise/#the-two-genders #1yrago Friction cannot be reduced, it can only be redistributed https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/23/become-unoptimizable/#downward-redistribution Upcoming appearances (permalink) Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25 https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification London: AI and the Enshittification of the Media, NUJ (Sep 2) https://www.nuj.org.uk/learn/ems-event-calendar/ai-and-the-enshitification-of-the-media.html Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8 https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/ London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9 https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7 https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&amp;EventID=596952&amp;PK= Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20 https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020 Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ Recent appearances (permalink) Hope, AI, Fixing the Internet and the Reverse Centaur of it all (Wilosophy) https://podcastaddict.com/everyone-relax/episode/231414816 Deflating the AI Bubble (Do Not Pass Go) https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/deflating-the-ai-bubble-with-cory Technofeudal Enshittification (Fucking Cancelled) https://www.fuckingcancelled.com/p/technofeudal-enshittification-with Who The Machine Serves (EFF) https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-who-the-machine-serves Speculative Fiction for Social Change II (Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff) https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/cool-people-who-did-cool-stuff/08cbb840-a6ae-013a-d8aa-0acc26574db2/part-two-cory-doctorow-on-speculative-fiction-for-social-change/937e8800-9404-45a6-b5e3-90ebee2cfaea Latest books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 557 (9258 total). "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

Marco Arment: Unforgetful isn’t a new productivity system to learn. […] This is designed for a small number of short-term tasks. What do you need to do today, tomorrow, this week, or this month? […] If you want tagging, folders, archives, or other ways to organize or file away tasks, this isn’t the app you’re […]

Juli Clover: In addition to cutting dozens of Vision Pro employees who worked on features like immersive video and gaming, Apple is laying off people who worked on Siri and AI, reports Bloomberg. Apple is “largely shutting down” the Vision Pro team focused on gaming, and it is paring down the team that makes immersive […]

GOD DAMMIT.

Enjoy this timely and smart discussion about fixing all that Trump and the Rs have broken......

See! Real holograms! Dice and crystals that aren't there any more, thanks to the power of lasers!!1!

What would you do with a billion dollars?

It isn’t often that new image formats land in browsers. In the early 2000s we had JPEG, GIF, and PNG. The 2010s gave us WebP, which was a modest step up from JPEG. But the 2020s have given us two new image formats that are a big step up from previous formats: AVIF and JPEG […]

The post Intent to Ship: JPEG XL appeared first on Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer blog.

Not mutually exclusive

This edition spotlight five Calm Tech Certified® products that blend seamlessly into designed interiors. These are perfect for designers wanting to include technology inside spaces without generating unnecessary friction or stress.

Writing of lasting value

One reason I want AI-assisted writing to be identifiable is that it devalues the idea of Claude et al to be quoted in public. What can it teach us? What it is relative to a human being. I know the doubters sniff at that, but it really is like an alien life form, it's the first such example, it kind of did evolve from us, but it has its own way, things it's really strong at and things it utterly fails at. I for one want to study this! What a unique experience. It can also give a summary of what we've been trying to say for forty years and have never managed to put into words. I'd say that's something I should feel comfortable publishing, but right now I don't. Maybe I just have to get over that.

People of Brighton (and beyond)—come to the Prince Albert on Saturday, September 5th to see the most excellent Salter Cane in action!

Tickets will be £10 on the door, but they’re £8 in advance:

https://saltercane.com/tickets

Dr. Rob Shapiro joins us live today at 1215pm ET to talk about Trump’s failed war and failed economic strategy

A hacker’s rite of passage is creating their own cyberdeck. This guide will help you build one from parts.

The post Create your own cyberdeck appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Learned something yesterday. Couldn't believe how stupid Claude had become, as I've been writing about here, and then I noticed that I was using Opus 5 and not Fable 5. So I switched back and all of a sudden Claude is smart again. So I conclude that there's a very substantial difference between the two. It's overnight jobs were done more carefully and the report it produced is literate, understandable, and tracks what we had agreed to.

Good morning sports fans!

We treat the internet as if it were air, ambient and ownerless, when in reality, however, it is the exact opposite. This is a look at what connects the world, and who builds and owns that infrastructure.

What would you do with a billion dollars? I am occasionally asked by young people for my life advice. Could I counsel them as they decide what to do? They are thinking of going into something new. Or thinking about … Continue reading →

Interesting paper:

Abstract: With entrepreneurial fraud cases on the rise, we investigate how entrepreneurs carry out criminal deception, employing deceptive means to defraud audiences. Analyzing court data from Silicon Valley ventures and their founders prosecuted for fraud between 2000 and 2023, our findings reveal that entrepreneurs carry out criminal deception through a process of façading: Entrepreneurs construct, perform, and protect illusory appearances (façades) that externally project high-growth performance to audiences while masking ventures’ actual underperformance. We identify three forms of façading—­surface, reinforced, and deep façading­—that are contingent on the severity of the gap that entrepreneurs face between audiences’ performance expectations and ventures’ performance reality. Our theoretical framework captures how entrepreneurs facing minor, wide, and extreme expectation-reality gaps engage in evermore sophisticated efforts to detach the venture’s externally projected appearance from its actual operational reality. Practically, we propose several approaches to deter and detect criminal deception, including the extension of U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission surveillance and whistleblower program, investor due diligence reform, and dedicated entrepreneurship education interventions that clearly demarcate when entrepreneurs transgress into criminal deception. We make contributions to literatures on cultural entrepreneurship, organizational wrongdoing, and the social effects of entrepreneurship. ...

Why Trump will lose his war with Canada

How surveillance technology infuses policing with even more racial bias. | Lit Hub Politics Why studying Goldilocks can help us write emotionally resonant fiction. | Lit Hub Craft Claire Boyles considers the impact of the American West’s water crisis on her

Trump’s endorsement used to be the final word in primaries. But no longer.

“Are we going to give every blithering moron a position of power just because of who they’re related to?” he asked.

Though I have been mostly offline for my annual summer social media sabbatical, I watched the Jason Arday story unfold with increasing horror over the last couple of weeks. With hundreds of stories in traditional media, along with many people

I published my first novel twenty-five years ago. It was not a masterpiece, but to me it was a miracle. Unboxing was still a private phenomenon back then and I remember looking at the book in disbelief. There it was

Years ago, during the Great Recession, I attended an event sponsored by an environmental organization that had formed in protest to a planned dam construction project on the Cache La Poudre River in northern Colorado. At the time, my husband

Policing and incarceration in the twenty-first century are not wholly human practices. The strategies, tactics, and encounters that organize the carceral state are developed and prosecuted in collaboration with inhuman technologies that “we” do not and cannot fully understand. In

It’s Sunday morning, September 18, 2016. I spent the previous day signing books in Lille, in northern France. My head is still foggy. I am making myself a cup of hot chocolate when, at the exact moment the microwave dings,

The first time I saw this place, I knew I had come home. I do not mean I knew it in a peaceful, comforting sort of way, the way one recognizes an old friend; that first time it was like

The most important deal could happen today

Reading What We Can Know by Ian McEwan.

Tell us a bit about yourself! My name is Rohan. I am currently in Berlin, Germany, and my background is in mechanical engineering and I have a master’s degree in sustainable mobility and robotics. I recently worked on my master’s thesis, where I used LibreOffice closely on macOS. That experience

I mostly avoid corporate platforms… but I am on Goodreads on a daily basis 🤦‍♀️ (I know a lot of people are down on book tracking, but I read too many books to remember what I have read otherwise. Romance titles are notorious for using puns, pop culture references, and various [duke / earl / […]

Turing Testings Like “Goldie Boone,” whom I wrote about here last month, “Luna Azul” (above right) is a fake singer. Pure AI. Her music too, I suppose. I’m sure of it. But neither artist nor music are identified as AI-generated. “New music every week,” Luna’s YouTube channel says. At first, I thought she traced to […]

I’ve heard rumors that we all need a break.

Harnessing the agent semantic reliability at scale

It can happen where you are too. No data center required. Spotted and obeyed on West Bloomfield Road in Bloomington, Indiana: a robot traffic control flagger. Hard to wear, but that’s not the point My wife just reported from the Iris van Herpen show in Brooklyn. Wow. I remain charged about both Wired has a […]

And last week’s winner

Plus, both parties are now running against data centers. Your weekly political data roundup for August 23, 2026.

On my icon gallery sites, I have metadata I’ve manually added over the years to tag certain icons as being predominantly “blue” or “orange” or some other color.

Then I use this metadata to present icons of (roughly) the same color. It’s kinda neat to be able to browse a wall of icons that are all the same color.

The thing is: I know there are a lot of icons I’ve missed tagging over the years. But I have no idea how many, and figuring that out seems like a really arduous task. How do I go through 2,000+ icons and find all the ones that look predominantly “orange” but haven’t been tagged as such yet?

Seems like a good task to throw at an LLM. But I don’t want to just say, “Go tag everything that’s missing” and blindly trust the output. I need to be able to make a decisions as to whether I think a particular color is “orange” or not.

What I need is a tool for the job. I’m a very visual thinker, so to continue curating these color categorizations, I need some way for the computer to do its thing really, really fast, and then pull me into the loop to visually make decisions.

Here’s how I am thinking about about accomplishing this task:

• Create a page with a list of colors on the left (red, green, orange, blue, etc.)
• When a color is clicked, show two columns. 1) All icons I currently have tagged for that color, and 2) all icons that might be that color but aren’t tagged as such (you, computer, process all my icons and do the work to figure this out and make recommendations).
• Allow me to select one or more icon(s) in the “not yet tagged as this color” column. Once I have all the ones I perceive as missing, give me a button to say “Copy” which copies the IDs of those icons.
• I’ll paste the IDs back here in the chat and you go add the corresponding metadata.

That seems like it would be a good tool to put me in control of visual decision making around color categorization. So I tell the LLM to run with it.

We chat back and forth. I think, “You probably need to run all the icons through some model to make the correlation?” But it’s like, “Nah bro, just make a ‘hue histogram’.” It tells me how. For a color like “orange”, I can:

[process] each PNG, skip transparent pixels, skip low-saturation gray, convert the rest to HSV, and score how much of the remaining mass sits in the orange hue band (roughly 15–45°). Rank icons that don’t already have colorId: orange.

Ok, sure. That sounds reasonable.

[This] scores each icon PNG by share of opaque pixels per color bucket, then writes a standalone HTML page: tagged vs maybe-missing, per color.

Let’s just make it, and then I’ll decide whether it’s good enough.

After a few iterations, the computer going “brr…”, and me saying “explain that like I’m dumb”, I have a really effective little tool!

The little threshold slider is a nice touch. It lets me fiddle around with the fidelity of the matches. In some cases, sliding it down reveals more icons I would’ve otherwise missed. In other cases, I’m like “What are you thinking? I don’t see that as ‘yellow’ at all!”

Supper effective little tool. I go through each color, select the ones I think are missing, paste the IDs back into the LLM, and then have it update each icon's metadata.

Boom, done! That all would’ve taken so long before. I would’ve never done it.

Takeaways:

• The LLM is good at making throw-away code. This doesn’t need to be “production-grade” code I depend on. Just something that’s good enough for me to get a job done, then toss. The resulting metadata is the goal, not the tool I use to get to the goal.
• The LLM is good at making one-off HTML pages for a specific task. In my case, all these images were hosted on a CDN, easy enough to just point at and have a standalone .html file that I can locate on my hard drive and open directly as a file:// URL. No bundling. No transpilation. None of that. I don’t even need a web server! Keeping things very basic on this project is paying off: I had really elemental building blocks that didn’t require additional third-party tooling. Just HTML, CSS, a little in-page JS, and images on a server!
• It’s fun to say, “Don’t do the work for me. Instead, help me make a custom-fit tool that facilitates me doing the work in the most empowering, correct way possible.”

---

Reply via:

Email · Mastodon ·

Bluesky

Why? Because he’s a peevish, perverse, enraged child

As the midterm elections approach, Democrats have the momentum, and it’s growing.

“The US Armed Forces have probably permanently lost access to 15 Persian Gulf bases”

Week Thirteen!

Sorry, this one is not about AI. But sometimes one must speak out.

Now in Claude's defense, I had to re-learn everything about how Frontier worked. Over the last decade or so I had only been using a narrow set of functionality. I used it for very occasional utility scripts for the file system or over the web, but mostly for writing JavaScript code, and published on GitHub and deployed to servers. If I had been uptospeed on how it works internally and all it's capabilities, when we started, it would have gone somewhat more smoothly. But now in my own defense, Claude has a nasty habit of deciding it fully understands something when it doesn't even slightly understand it. If it asked for a pointer, I could have given it a good one, but it just skated over those things, never questioning it's own guestimation. We used to call this docufiction back in the day, you don't know how they are going to design a feature, so you make up a UI, and document it as if that were the truth. Only now we're doing it with the actual code. It's funny in a way, I guess. But what a huge waste of time, and so much stress because you have to read every word or you'll miss a wrong assumption.

Cheaper tools are thriving. What does this mean for the upcoming IPOs?

Today's development version of Frontier is buggy and the kernel developer (Claude) keeps breaking the most basic verbs. You spin your wheels and wish you could get them to just get keep it together. I remember this from the work that led up to Frontier version 1.0 in 1991 or so. It was a miserable time. Never got to work on what I wanted to, just reported breakage, often a session-ending dealstopper. The sad part is that Claude should be able to find the things it broke on its own, far better than I can and at a much lower expense (I'm paying for its time, not the other way around). But basically every day begins optimistically, maybe today is the day I get to create something, but not yet. I did have a couple of days a week ago when I could tentatively work on building a GitHub repo, but then got distracted by verifying that the basic foundation still wasn't right. My only goal right now, and I'm single-minded about it, is to get it to move forward without breaking the essentials, then without breaking anything.

A Reason To Smile

2026-08-22 Rambling about backups

A set of winding posts on social ended up in this blog post.

Yet another reason I dislike Apple. Well, I’ve had many reasons, and this one is not a new reason, it just manages to bite me in a new way. Apple uses the HFS+ filesystem. It stores filenames in a Unicode encoding using normal form D (NFD). Everybody else apparently uses normal form C (NFC). This matters because when you meet a non-ASCII character that has multiple representations as bytes, NFD and NFC use different bytes. As an example, consider the humble heavy metal a, ä.

NFC uses ä LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH DIAERESIS

NFD uses COMBINING DIAERESIS plus a LATIN SMALL LETTER A

Anyway, this just sets the scene. On a Linux system the ext4 filesystem says that filenames are just bytes. Nobody cares about encodings. So whatever tool was used to generate the filename, its encoding determines the bytes used. For example, I buy music on Bandcamp and the filenames contain some bytes. I copy them to an external drive. This external drive, sadly, is mounted by an Apple laptop using HFS+. It’s smart. It recognises the bytes. It’s UTF-8 NFC! It saves them as NFD. Because it’s smart.

Since I’m also smart, I keep the music files on an SD card of my little laptop, and on the SD card of the music server, and probably in a few other places. All of these filesystems are not smart. The filenames are just bytes that happen to encode the names using UTF-8 NFC. I am not smart.

After a while I wonder whether I forgot to sync new files to the external drive and I run a tool. I might use rsync, for example. And of course it thinks that all the remote files with NFD encoded filenames should be deleted and all the local files with NFC encoded filenames should be added. But the content of the files is identical.

Actually, you say, what about the –iconv option to rsync. It does just that, convert the filenames from one encoding to another. Ah, I say, Apple doesn’t like GNU and so they have a version of rsync that doesn’t support this option.

And next we’re into self-compiling a new rsync, or installing Homebrew, and at that point I’ll say, see, yet another reason I dislike Apple.

All of this to say that I decided to change how backups work and now I have a separate borg backup of the card to the disk where all my laptops are backed up to. I no longer sync the SD card to the external disk managed by the Apple laptop. That means, of course, that space requirements change.

The important part is in the last two lines: The card uses 417G (the fact that we can have 1T cards still amazes me to no end). The backup disk has 457G available. This doesn’t feel great, to be honest.

# df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev            3.8G     0  3.8G   0% /dev
tmpfs           791M  1.9M  789M   1% /run
/dev/mmcblk2p2  115G   84G   25G  78% /
tmpfs           3.9G  300K  3.9G   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs           3.9G   12K  3.9G   1% /tmp
none            1.0M     0  1.0M   0% /run/credentials/systemd-journald.service
/dev/mmcblk2p1  448M  273M  147M  66% /boot
none            1.0M     0  1.0M   0% /run/credentials/serial-getty@ttymxc1.service
none            1.0M     0  1.0M   0% /run/credentials/getty@tty1.service
tmpfs           791M   40K  791M   1% /run/user/1000
/dev/mmcblk0p1  938G  417G  474G  47% /run/media/alex/Card Vault
/dev/sda1       916G  413G  457G  48% /mnt/backup

Smart people have thought long and hard about strange questions like “what is information” and sadly I am not one of them. What little I know is this: if the data has obvious repetition, it can be compressed. If it looks like random noise, it cannot be compressed. That’s why you can’t keep zipping the zip files. Similarly, almost all media files are encoded and compressed such that there’s is only very little additional compression can do for you. So now we get to file systems and backups. What if you had repetitions across files? If you have a system that stores files like an archive or a filesystem, you could take advantage of that. If you just look at whole files, you can do this already: if file A and file B have the same content, you could replace A with a hard link to B. Nobody would notice a difference. Well, except if you open either file and make changes to it. Depending on the tool you might change both files, or you might rename A to a backup file and write a new copy, so now A’s backup and B are “the same file” and the new A is actually new. rdfind is a tool that helps you do this. As for backups, if you use something like rsync, you can create snapshots: if A hasn’t changed between the last backup and this backup, just use a hardlink from this/A to last/A. And so, finally, to borg backup. Here, as I understand it, files are split into “chunks” and each chunk is deduplicated. So if files A and B each get split into two chunks and the first chunk of A is the same as the first chunk of B, then only one copy of that chunk is saved and the other is replaced by sort of “hardlink” or pointer. And now, finally, I can get to the damn point of this overly long post. I backed up a directory full of PDFs and MP3 files, mostly. And I would have thought that their internal compression makes it pretty hard to find matching chunks in other files unless the whole file is the same. But who knows. Look at the output:

Duration: 9 hours 13 minutes 5.08 seconds
Number of files: 85011
Utilization of max. archive size: 0%
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                       Original size      Compressed size    Deduplicated size
This archive:              446.85 GB            437.70 GB            285.23 GB
All archives:                3.15 TB              2.65 TB            727.71 GB

First, I’m not surprised that compression only gets us from 447G to 438G. But deduplication gets us down to 285G!? I have 150G of duplicate MP3s lying around? What is going on!

Although to be fair, and going back to the original problem that sent me on this long adventure, @mathew says that HFS+ is obsolete and modern Macs use APFS, which doesn’t normalise; and Apple uses openrsync. But then again, in this situation I wouldn’t care – my problem is the normalisation.

#Backup #Apple

2026-08-23. As it turns out, I was able to convert my external HFS+ drive to APFS using Apple’s disk utility. This took very little time and worked in-place even though the external drive is encrypted. I must confess that this was a surprisingly positive thing.

So now I’m using Krusader to compare directories. Wish me luck.

I am confused. There still is a difference?

Remote:

❮ ssh bombias
Last login: Sun Aug 23 12:22:15 2026 from 2a02:168:4822:0:3ac8:2533:50e5:9730
claudia@ae278fa2-d762-46b4-b521-e6c0398e3281 ~ % ls /Volumes/Extern/Audio/Canary\ Records/*Folklore*/Ion* | sed 's/.*\///' | od -c
0000000    I   o   n       C   o   n   s   t   a   n   t   i   n   e   s
0000020    c   u       (   d   r 303 256   m   b   a   )       &       M
0000040    a   r   i   n       C   o   t   o   a   n 310 233 304 203
0000060    (   c   o   b   z 304 203   )       -       F   o   l   k   l
0000100    o   r   e       D   a   n   c   e   s       f   r   o   m
0000120    R   o   m   a   n   i   a   ,       c   a   .       1   9   5
0000140    0   s       -       0   6       F   l   o   r   i   c   i   c
0000160    a       O   l   t   e   n   e   a   s   c   a   .   m   p   3
0000200   \n
0000201

Locally:

❮ ls Music/Audio/Canary\ Records/*Folklore*/Ion* | sed 's/.*\///' | od -c
0000000   I   o   n       C   o   n   s   t   a   n   t   i   n   e   s
0000020   c   u       (   d   r 303 256   m   b   a   )       &       M
0000040   a   r   i   n       C   o   t   o   a   n 310 233 304 203
0000060   (   c   o   b   z 304 203   )       -       F   o   l   k   l
0000100   o   r   e       D   a   n   c   e   s       f   r   o   m
0000120   R   o   m   a   n   i   a   ,       c   a   .       1   9   5
0000140   0   s       -       0   6       F   l   o   r   i   c   i   c
0000160   a       O   l   t   e   n   e   a   s   c   a   .   m   p   3
0000200  \n
0000201

The encoding is the same. So what’s going on?

Just to confirm, I mounted the external drive using sshfs and used the same directory. Same problem.

This making me suspicious.

Copy the remote file:

❮ rsync -ai bombias:/Volumes/Extern/Audio/Canary\ Records/Canary\ Records\ -\ Folklore\ Dances\ from\ Romania-\ ca.\ 1950s/Ion\ Constantinescu\ \(drîmba\)\ \&\ Marin\ Cotoanță\ \(cobză\)\ -\ Folklore\ Dances\ from\ Romania,\ ca.\ 1950s\ -\ 06\ Floricica\ Olteneasca.mp3 .
>f+++++++++ Ion Constantinescu (drîmba) & Marin Cotoanță (cobză) - Folklore Dances from Romania, ca. 1950s - 06 Floricica Olteneasca.mp3

Diff locally:

❮ diff Music/Audio/Canary\ Records/Canary\ Records\ -\ Folklore\ Dances\ from\ Romania-\ ca.\ 1950s/Ion\ Constantinescu\ \(drîmba\)\ \&\ Marin\ Cotoanță\ \(cobză\)\ -\ Folklore\ Dances\ from\ Romania,\ ca.\ 1950s\ -\ 06\ Floricica\ Olteneasca.mp3 Ion\ Constantinescu\ \(drîmba\)\ \&\ Marin\ Cotoanță\ \(cobză\)\ -\ Folklore\ Dances\ from\ Romania,\ ca.\ 1950s\ -\ 06\ Floricica\ Olteneasca.mp3

No difference.

This is driving me nuts. Let’s rsync --dry-run just the offending file.

❮ rsync -ai --dry-run bombias:/Volumes/Extern/Audio/Canary\ Records/Canary\ Records\ -\ Folklore\ Dances\ from\ Romania-\ ca.\ 1950s/Ion\ Constantinescu\ \(drîmba\)\ \&\ Marin\ Cotoanță\ \(cobză\)\ -\ Folklore\ Dances\ from\ Romania,\ ca.\ 1950s\ -\ 06\ Floricica\ Olteneasca.mp3 Music/Audio/Canary\ Records/Canary\ Records\ -\ Folklore\ Dances\ from\ Romania-\ ca.\ 1950s/Ion\ Constantinescu\ \(drîmba\)\ \&\ Marin\ Cotoanță\ \(cobză\)\ -\ Folklore\ Dances\ from\ Romania,\ ca.\ 1950s\ -\ 06\ Floricica\ Olteneasca.mp3

No action taken!

Let’s try the whole directory:

❮ rsync -ai --dry-run --delete bombias:/Volumes/Extern/Audio/Canary\ Records/Canary\ Records\ -\ Folklore\ Dances\ from\ Romania-\ ca.\ 1950s/ Music/Audio/Canary\ Records/Canary\ Records\ -\ Folklore\ Dances\ from\ Romania-\ ca.\ 1950s/
*deleting   Ion Constantinescu (drîmba) & Marin Cotoanță (cobză) - Folklore Dances from Romania, ca. 1950s - 06 Floricica Olteneasca.mp3
>f+++++++++ Ion Constantinescu (drîmba) & Marin Cotoanță (cobză) - Folklore Dances from Romania, ca. 1950s - 06 Floricica Olteneasca.mp3

Indeed, now it wants to delete and copy the damn file. The directory listing must be encoded in some way that gets lost when I use ssh to copy the file.

And with that, and anger in my heart, I installed Homebrew again and got a new rsync.

And as it turns out, that doesn’t help. I cannot use the --iconv option.

❮ rsync -ai --dry-run --delete --rsync-path=/opt/homebrew/bin/rsync --secluded-args --iconv=UTF8-MAC,UTF8 bombias:/Volumes/Extern/Audio/Canary\ Records/Canary\ Records\ -\ Folklore\ Dances\ from\ Romania-\ ca.\ 1950s/ Music/Audio/Canary\ Records/Canary\ Records\ -\ Folklore\ Dances\ from\ Romania-\ ca.\ 1950s/
iconv_open("UTF-8", "UTF8-MAC") failed
rsync error: requested action not supported (code 4) at rsync.c(134) [Receiver=3.5.0]

Back to the start!

Here’s something weird: When I use just ls the filenames are borked! Scroll over to the right:

claudia@ae278fa2-d762-46b4-b521-e6c0398e3281 ~ % ls /Volumes/Extern/Audio/Canary\ Records/*Folklore*/Ion*
/Volumes/Extern/Audio/Canary Records/Canary Records - Folklore Dances from Romania- ca. 1950s/Ion Constantinescu (dr??mba) & Marin Cotoan???? (cobz??) - Folklore Dances from Romania, ca. 1950s - 06 Floricica Olteneasca.mp3

And when I pass the filenames through sed, they are correct:

claudia@ae278fa2-d762-46b4-b521-e6c0398e3281 ~ % ls /Volumes/Extern/Audio/Canary\ Records/*Folklore*/Ion* | sed 's/.*\///'
Ion Constantinescu (drîmba) & Marin Cotoanță (cobză) - Folklore Dances from Romania, ca. 1950s - 06 Floricica Olteneasca.mp3

WTF is going on.

How did U.S. debt get so big? The answer may surprise you

CoMaps is proud to be a fully free and open source app, and this ideal exists as one of CoMaps' core
principles. Naturally, it's within our interest to make sure the ecosystem of FLOSS apps can flourish and serve as a viable alternative to their proprietary counterparts. Thus, Android users and enthusiasts who embrace this ecosystem of FLOSS Android apps may be pleased to hear that a few of us have working on ensuring CoMaps can interoperate well with these other apps, while still continuing to respect the user's privacy.

Gadgetbridge

Gadgetbridge is a free and open-source Android app which allows you to use your smartwatches, headphones, and other Bluetooth devices without having to use your manufacturer's proprietary app. Starting with Gadgetbridge v0.93.0, you can now use CoMaps as a navigation data provider, meaning users with a supported
smartwatch may enjoy turn-by-turn directions on their wrist in a fully FLOSS solution.

At the time of writing, this setting can be found in Settings > External Integrations > Navigation. Enabling it will enable it for all supported connected devices.

The navigation app running on InfiniTime, with instructions from CoMaps

OpenVitals

OpenVitals leverages Android's Health Connect framework to bring you a complete dashboard of all your health and wellness data, so you can enjoy a free and open source alternative without the need to share it with external companies. It also allows you to record outdoor activities using CoMaps as a navigation context provider, so you can keep an eye of your activity metrics alongside the route of your bike ride or hiking trail.

At the time of writing, you can find it under Settings > Activities > Comaps navigation guidance. Enabling it will give you the ability to show the route set in CoMaps over your live activity.

CoMaps guidance within OpenVitals

Private by default

Being an app which respects its users, CoMaps only provides this data to other apps if the user allows it. To that end, you must grant each app a special permission provided by CoMaps.

If you're a FLOSS developer and want to build your own dashboards, widgets, et cetera with CoMaps' data, you can find documentation onCodeberg!

A new beginning?

TBR Sunday Read

On Tuesday, August 18, during a debate for a runoff to win the South Carolina Republican senatorial primary, Senator Darline Graham (R-SC) answered a question about Taiwan and the importance of the South China Sea by saying: “I’m not that informed on national security.” She paused, and added: “But I do support the military.”

These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week.

🔖 Do you WANT contributors?

An open-source project’s first few artifacts are click-through: license (checkbox), README (template), .gitignore (whatever your framework spits out). Then you hit CONTRIBUTING.md—the first artifact that actually asks you what you want. Sure, there are best practices and helpful guides for you to follow, but it’s where your project starts having opinions instead of defaults. So it’s worth pausing and really unpacking what you want yours to look like. It’s more than the mechanics of filing issues and submitting pull requests: CONTRIBUTING.md is the foundational framework for the relationship between your project and the unnamed masses who may or may not encounter it.

opensource programming

🔖 Code review as human alignment, in the era of LLMs

The purpose of the humans, of the team, is to collectively maintain a shared vision of what, platonically, the system should do. I want code review to reconfigure itself around this purpose.

design llm programming

🔖 Diskwright

Diskwright makes a complete, verified copy of the hard drive inside a 25–40 year old computer — no expertise required, and nothing on the old drive is ever changed.

data disks preservation

🔖 Ocular Webring

The ocular webring is a collection of small image feed galleries with rss feeds. It is inspired by subversive.pics and has grown into a sibling webring.

images rss social-media web

🔖 ocular

A tiny offline image feed generator written in Lua.

ocular is a command line tool that lets you add images from your harddrive to create a static website and automatically upload it to your webserver.

Unlike traditional gallery systems, images are added one by one to build a feed of images, similar to how you would use an image sharing platform like Inst*gram or Pixelfed. You can think of it as a minimal indieweb alternative to those platforms — one that keeps you in ownership and control of your data.

There are no social features to speak of, but ocular can optionally post new images to Mastodon t

images lua rss

🔖 Incident Report: unsanctioned agent behaviour during cyber testing

On 28th July 2026, AISI’s Security Team detected unusual data transfers leaving our research systems during a routine cyber evaluation. On investigation, we found that some of the agents being tested had engaged in sustained, potentially harmful activity directed at real people and organisations. We declared a security incident and, within roughly one hour of discovery, had contained it and begun a full investigation.

The incident stemmed from a single evaluation where agents were given a task of solving a cyber security challenge. We ran this challenge 122 times across several models. Our investigation found that in 10 of those runs, an AI agent took autonomous, unsanctioned action on the live internet, targeting real people and organisations. In total, we catalogued 19 such actions. Almost all of this behaviour (17 actions) came from a single model, Anthropic’s Mythos 5, with 2 actions involving OpenAI’s GPT-5.6-Sol with cyber classifiers (mechanisms to prevent misuse) disabled. In the most serious case, an agent tried to insert malicious code into an open-source project. In an attempt to get the code approved, the agent engaged in social engineering — creating fake online identities and using them to pressure the project’s maintainer to approve the code. A human maintainer caught and refused to approve the malicious code.

anthropic bots llm security

🔖 How a Texas student blew the whistle on a rogue AI hacking attempt

• Out-of-control AI agent tried to poison open-source software project with malicious code

• Texas computer science student caught attempt in late July

• AI responded with elaborate deception effort; expert calls it the ‘future of social engineering’

ai anthropic bots llm security

🔖 The Journalist Who Terrifies Corporate America

This week on Downstream, Ash Sarkar sits down with Amy Goodman, veteran journalist and founder of Democracy Now!, one of the leading independent media organisations in the US. Goodman is the subject of a new film, Steal This Story, Please!, which documents her storied career covering some of the most consequential moments in American living history. She has confronted sitting presidents, bore firsthand witness to 9/11, survived a firing squad in East Timor and exposed major corporate crime in the Niger Delta.

interviews journalism

🔖 Citizens Build, Agents Execute, Experts Govern

When everyone can create software, somebody still has to decide whether that software deserves to exist inside an enterprise system in PRODUCTION. Somebody still has to think about architecture. Security. Resilience. Operability. Compliance. Cost. The boring stuff that nobody gets excited about in a demo but that becomes painfully important the first time a customer can’t log in or an auditor comes knocking.

design management programming

🔖 TheNew Peasants (2025)

What happens when the values of the culture you’ve always known no longer align with how you see the world?

The New Peasants offers an intimate look into the life of Meg, Patrick, Zephyr, and Woody. A family who, for 20 years, have been transitioning away from modern industrial culture toward a radically simple, sustainable, and beautiful way of life.

Concerns about the industrial food system and environmental crises provided the family’s initial motivation to live differently. Now it’s 15 years since they’ve eaten from a supermarket or owned a car. The household, living intentionally below the poverty line and meeting 80% of their needs without using money, is nonetheless rich in so many ways. Wealth is found in their cellar of preserved foods, connections with community, saved seeds, homesteading skills and the time to focus on what really matters in life. Yet the decision to live this way has brought profound challenges for their family, in the form of their eldest son’s encounters with the law. These experiences have produced immense grief, but, in the end, also great joy.

documentaries

🔖 ReinforcementLearning from Human Feedback

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has become a crucial tool to build the latest machine learning systems at scale. The field grew around the core methods of RLHF into today’s broader suite of post-training techniques. In this book, we give a comprehensive introduction to the core methods for post-training models for people with some level of quantitative background, organized around the canonical RLHF recipe.

books llm ml

🔖 isobands

An easy way to make filled contour maps with Python.

isobands converts a regular two-dimensional xarray DataArray into contoured polygons in a GeoPandas GeoDataFrame.

data geo maps python

🔖 How Do We Track Terminations of Federal Data?

The purpose of the Federal Data Terminations Tracker is to be the most policy-relevant, verified accounting of federal data terminations available.

To create this Tracker, the dataindex.us team identified dozens of federal datasets and hundreds of data elements that have been terminated – significantly fewer than other reports, but more tailored to informing future data policies needed to run a modern society. These are data that have long underpinned policymaking, journalism, advocacy and research that improve American lives and livelihoods. These figures will change as terminations continue, collections are merged, and as court orders restore data.

data delete gov politics

🔖 In the Cellsof the Eggplant

In the Cells of the Eggplant is an introduction to meta-rationality: ways of using rational systems more effectively by examining their relationships with their surrounds.

Meta-rationality operates in the territory beyond the boundaries of fixed understanding. It recognizes, works with, and transcends the limits of rationality. It evaluates, selects, combines, modifies, discovers, and creates rational methods.

books design philosophy

🔖 Pacingthe Frontier

AI could help create a dramatically better future, but that outcome is not guaranteed. The world’s leading AI companies believe they could be close to automating AI research. It is hard to predict exactly how much this will accelerate AI progress, but there is a real risk that capability development rapidly accelerates beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems.

ai gov llm

🔖 Black Hat USA 2026 | The ‘Breaking’ News: The OpenAI–Hugging FaceIncident

The ‘Breaking’ News: The OpenAI–Hugging Face Incident - A Technical Reconstruction and Its Implications for AI

When AI Goes Rogue. The Incident That Changed Everything. An OpenAI evaluation agent broke out of its sandbox, infiltrated Hugging Face infrastructure, and attempted to steal test answers—all autonomously. No human involved. The era of AI-driven cyberattacks is here. Are you prepared?

llm openai security videos

🔖 Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information

The research information landscape requires fundamental change. The signatories of the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information commit to taking a lead in transforming the way research information is used and produced. Openness of information about the conduct and communication of research must be the new norm.

Open research information enables science policy decisions to be made based on transparent evidence and inclusive data. It enables information used in research evaluations to be accessible and auditable by those being assessed. And it enables the global movement toward open science to be supported by information that is fully open and transparent.

data open-access research

🔖 OpenMetadata at Stanford

The Center for Open Metadata addresses issues around the generation and reuse of these types of metadata from many facets: Copyright, Contracts, Economic / sustainability models, Research infrastructures & persistent identifiers (PIDs), Policy, Provenance, Workflows related to creation,, enrichment, distribution, transformation and reuse.

libraries metadata open-access

🔖 pyinfra

pyinfra turns Python code into shell commands and runs them on your servers. Execute ad-hoc commands and write declarative operations. Target SSH servers, local machine and Docker containers. Fast and scales from one server to thousands. Think ansible but Python instead of YAML, and a lot faster.

devops python

🔖 I Multiplied Myself to Feel Myself

Over the opening decades of the 20th century, Pessoa undertook one of the most preposterous endeavors in world poetry, ventriloquizing not merely a trio of voices but a throng of at least two hundred: poets, philosophers, and cranks; radicals, reactionaries, and mystics. These were less characters than so-called “heteronyms,” quasi-autonomous personae with fleshed-out biographies and bibliographies cohabiting a literary universe of his own devising.

poetry

🔖 Understanding LC BIBFRAME graphs

Some notes from Simeon on id.loc.gov RDF data for the Blue Core project.

bluecore loc rdf

Big Skies A view of Brancaster beach that is almost painterly. Quote of the Day ”Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.” John Maynard Keynes (I think he also likened betting on the stock market to judging a beauty … Continue reading →

River Lark and old mill buildings, Mildenhall by Bikeboy Today I saw a question posted on Reddit from someone who’s deploying to Mildenhall from the US. They wanted insights on how to dive deeper into English culture as a visitor, and I since I grew up nearby and I’m waiting on training I ended up writing a […]

Each August 22nd, I bring this back out as a tribute to the life my dad lived, the wonder he gave to the world, and ordinary moments that still catch me off guard and pull him back into the room.

Two podcasts I can recommend without reservation.

What’s in an acronym? How to read between the lines.

I prefer using Markdown over Word for document creation, it is simple and structured. Daring Fireball reported the integration of Markdown with OneDrive. I wonder if it could be used for teaching children before using more complex software like Word.

RE: https://mister.computer/@kyle/117140532374587001

Adopting strict concurrency across my codebases was painful in some places, but can’t argue with crash reports going down.

My life Do some stuff Sleep like a dog Do some stuff Sleep like a dog Or watch the play from a seat close to a door “Hell is other people.”—Jean-Paul Sartre Philosopheasy explains, What makes another person’s gaze so powerful? According to Sartre, we exist in two radically different ways. In our own minds, […]

Eavesdropping on the mandolinists preparing for this evening’s performance.

Tom Bonier is coming by live Tuesday, Noon ET to talk about the growing problem of the integrity of polls and for a deep dive on the 2026 elections

I learned this morning that the casting of Meghan Markle in season 3 of Guy Ritchie’s Netflix series The Gentlemen has been withdrawn.

This project has been pre-occupying me, I wasn't planning on doing this, I was going to turn my attention to FeedLand immediately after finalizing RSS.chat. After running the experiment that proved it could be done, I looked at the two choices: 1. Move forward on creating a social network built only out of the existing web with all parts replaceable, small pieces loosely joined. Or 2. Give new life for Frontier, which is my life's work, even though very few people know about it. It's the reason were able to move so fast on blogging, RSS, podcasting, outliners, etc. A very highly leveraged development and runtime environment. Imho far ahead of anything else. The ideas may possibly now have a way forward. When I put those two items next to each other there was no question, I had to go with bringing Frontier back to something people can use.

BTW the codename for the new version of Frontier is Atlantis. And we refer to the old version as Berkeley. I'm getting used to the first one. I liked it as an idea, but I don't like typing it, because for some reason my mind has trouble remembering it. Maybe this is just age creeping up on me. Atlantis.

I think what confused Claude is that we're implementing the odb as a SQLite database. And when you look at a table, you're looking at the result of a query. Previous versions of Frontier implemented the odb as a hash table, that could contain scalars, objects and other tables. The new version has to make that virtuality real, even though it isn't storing the objects that way (maybe it should)? So there is a top level, and it all flows down from there, and it's simple, but if you viewed it through the database, and didn't understand the virtuality it was creating, which I discovered it was very confused about, you might create a disorganized nonsensical piece of software. Now this suggests something interesting, are there any products configured the way Frontier is? Maybe not, otherwise it might have figured this out on its own. Remember how it understands things? By cribbing the code. ;-)

I learned this morning that the casting of Meghan Markle in season 3 of Guy Ritchie’s Netflix series The Gentlemen has been withdrawn.

Are there any other people who are blogging daily about their experiences developing software with Claude Code, Codex or somesuch. I'd like to add them to a list where we follow them. So much innovation happening underneath, I want to hear about what people are learing about creating the next layers. If you know someone doing it, please add a comment to this post. Thanks! :-)

How worried should we be?

Acqui Terme

What Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel can teach us about grief, literature, and growing up. | Lit Hub TV Why the tragedy of Jason Arday reflects a rigged game for today’s Black scholars. | Lit Hub Politics How environmentalism

"Trump has become a crazy old man yelling at the clouds."

(This is not a photograph of the author)

With Heather Lofthouse and yours truly, Robert Reich

On August 21, 1831, Nat Turner, an enslaved American, led about 70 of his enslaved and free Black neighbors in a rebellion to awaken his white neighbors to the inherent brutality of slaveholding and the dangers it presented to their own safety.

This proves it

Win of the week: published my latest thoughts about authenticity in digital art, digging into what evidence makes us perceive cultural works as authentic — I don’t think we’re looking for the same evidence from every artist Looking forward to: going to see my niece and meet her partner! Stuff I did: 5 hours book proposal […]

For the past five years or so, I've gone to the MADE bike show in Portland every summer, which showcases custom bike builders, people who make related products, and suppliers for frame builders. It runs through Sunday and if you're in the area and love bikes,

Today's links Born on technology's third base: Material forces shape life-chances. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Glue; iPods v unions; RIP Jack Layton; Gibson on cities; Britain's sweatshop for terminally ill help-hcalls; NYPL's open CDN; Radical juries. Upcoming appearances: Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Born on technology's third base (permalink) Any frank assessment of your own achievements starts with an equally frank assessment of the world-historic forces that attended those achievements. For example, I often tell young people who want to get into tech, "Well, if you don't have the foresight and work ethic to have been born in 1971, I can't really help you." When it comes to tech, being born in 1971 – to a computer scientist father, no less – conferred a tremendous advantage for my career chances. My dad – a refugee – came to Canada at a time when post-war public services meant that he could become the first person in his family to go to university, all the way to a doctorate. That set me up for life in a house where tech and education were all around me. Both my parents are teachers, both from working class families where no one had ever gone beyond high school, who found themselves in a time and place where it was easier than at any time in history for people from backgrounds like theirs to attend university. I got to go to university, too, at a time when education was cheap enough that I could drop out of four schools before figuring out that it wasn't for me, and still be debt-free, largely thanks to income from a series of part-time jobs. When I dropped out of my final degree program, it was to take a job in tech at a time when anyone with a little creativity, work ethic, aptitude and curiosity could walk into a career. Millions of us did it, and I ended up working as a freelancer, then founding a startup, and then going to EFF. I know I work hard, I know I apply myself to understanding the world around me, but also…when it comes to this kind of career, I was born on third base. There's plenty of this to go around. Think of boomers who bought their "starter home" with the income from their first job and traded it in for a succession of larger, nicer homes, each of which skyrocketed in value. Some of those people fancy themselves to be veritable Warren Buffets for having had the shrewd financial insight that buying a house and living in it was a good idea. The truly smart ones know that they just got lucky. There are world-historic forces all around us, creating moments and circumstances that contribute to the life-thriving of those of us who are lucky enough to be suited to the moment we find ourselves in. Take computing: for decades, computing was ruled by Moore's Law, an unbroken run in which computers got faster and cheaper every year. If you were interested in the kinds of computing applications that were well-suited to serial computation – programs that worked best when run on a single computer – you were in luck. Even if your application or field of study was expensive and difficult to realize on today's computer, you could just stand still for a year or two and a much faster computer would park itself on your doorstep, ready to solve your problems. When Moore's Law tapped out – when the pace at which transistors got smaller and computers got faster slowed and plateaued, and the expense of even modest performance gains climbed infinitywards – computing changed with it. Parallel computing – putting more cores on a chip, more chips on a board, more boards in a system – took off, as chipmakers and system builders switched from a focus on building their computers tall to building them wide. As parallel computing took off, so did parallel applications. This is the beginning of the graphics revolution, as GPUs – components made up of many, many low-powered computers – became more central to academic research and commercial product roadmaps. But it wasn't just graphics that saw a huge lift here: any task that could be parallelized got easier and cheaper to perform every year, in a steady trend that has run to this day. This is the era of performance gaming, VR and AR, cryptocurrency, and, of course, AI. In What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly introduces the idea of the "adjacent possible" through the example of the helicopter. Da Vinci sketched a "helicopter" – blades in the shape of maple keys attached to a kind of wine-press screw – in the 15th century. In the centuries that followed, many other people had the insight that twirling blades of that shape on a screw of some type could provide lift for some kind of heavier-than-air craft. But it wasn't until strong alloys, internal combustion engines and light, energy-dense refined hydrocarbon fuels came on the scene that the helicopter became possible, whereupon it was all but inevitable, with several people independently inventing the helicopter all at once: https://memex.craphound.com/2010/10/13/kevin-kellys-what-technology-wants-how-technology-changes-us-and-vice-versa/ In the same way, the computing industry's focus on parallel computing made life easier for people who burned to do something parallelizable. Then the achievements of the parallel computing partisans drove more investment in improvements to parallel computing hardware and theoretical work on how to parallelize other problems. This feedback loop raised the profile of parallel computing applications, attracting more bright and ambitious people to those applications, whose even more impressive accomplishments brought more people into the field, more capital into hardware development, and more resources to parallelization research. The point being that world-historic forces, combined with accidents of history, shape the outcomes of individuals, companies and disciplines. It's much easier to be an accomplished graphics wizard in an era in which GPUs are doubling in power every year than it is in an era when linear computing is getting the lion's share of investment and improvement. These forces and accidents have acted on AI in ways that profoundly shaped its development. The latest AI boom started when a group of machine learning researchers tried a minor variation on existing techniques and saw a major improvement in the outcomes. This is one of the most exciting kinds of breakthrough: if tweaking a single variable in a small way produces a large improvement, then it may be that further tweaking will produce even more improvements. The minor variation that produced the major improvement in AI performance was scale. Prior to the "deep learning" era, AI research relied on a mix of hand-built models of reality and training data that computers fitted into those models. Deep learning swapped the painstaking work of describing reality in software for a brute-force approach: throw lots more training data at the system and then throw lots more (parallel) computing power at that data and let the computer figure it out without your having to explain how the world worked. The early gains from this approach were very exciting: they dangled the promise of software that could essentially "teach itself" how to do complicated, valuable things in a series of accelerating returns. The fact that the early improvements in AI systems that used this technique were so much greater than anyone would have expected based on AI research up to that point dangled an even more exciting promise: that the improvements would continue to scale faster than the inputs. Researchers and investors came to expect an AI that was "untouched by human hands," that taught itself how the world worked. This was the self-licking ice-cream cone of machine learning, the world of "theory-free inference" that had fueled the Big Data industry. With theory-free inference, you don't have to figure out how the world works in order to act upon it: you can just gather up all the data about how things happen in the world, use statistical methods to find the correlations, and then intervene to change the outcomes. You don't have to know why a molecule improves a medical condition – it's enough to discover that fact, produce that molecule, and administer it to people with that condition. Lots of stuff in the world works this way. Our understanding of the causal relationships that make up reality has massive holes in it that we fill with mere correlation. Correlations are easier to discover than causes, and while correlation is (famously) not causation, causes and effects are correlated, and if you can evoke the effect you're seeking without understanding precisely what happened to make that effect appear, well, at least you got the effect you were seeking. Theory-free inference is a very pragmatic way to approach the world: "I don't need it good, I need it Thursday." Scientists burn to know why a molecule stopped you from dying, but you are likely satisfied to not be dead. What's more, our ability to observe correlations will always race ahead of our understanding of causality, so the power of theory-free inferences pushes out the frontier of things we can act on, beyond the realm of the understood. Which is all to say: it's reasonable to be excited about a breakthrough in theory-free inference. But just like a boomer who thinks that buying a house to live in makes them a shrewd real-estate speculator, someone who achieves great things through theory-free inference runs the risk of missing the limitations of those techniques. And they are limited. Theory-free inference is good at predicting what your spouse will type into their phone based on all the things they've ever typed into their phone. You are also good at guessing what your spouse will say based on the things they've said before. The difference is that when your spouse says something entirely unexpected and unprecedented to you (say, "I want a divorce"), the fact that you have a theory about why your spouse said all the things they said up to that moment can help you understand why they've said this new thing. But a machine learning model that relies on theory-free statistical modeling to predict your spouse's next words will be entirely at sea. Theory-free inference works well, but it fails badly. The problem is that the AI sector has raised literally trillions of dollars by assuring investors that the era of hand-made, causal world models that let computers act on the world is hopelessly inefficient and outdated. But there are many, many tasks that are vastly more efficient and reliable when done through conventional computer programs, rather than through "AI." As Gary Marcus describes in a recent Organized Money interview, an LLM can recite the rules of chess, but it can't play chess because – lacking a theory of how chess works – it will just emit statistically likely chess moves, even if those moves cause pieces to illegally move through other pieces. The first conventional chess-playing programs ran on electromechanical proto-computers, and they played a better game of chess than an LLM that uses billions of times more computing power and energy: https://www.organizedmoney.fm/p/an-ai-expert-explains-the-hype The AI companies have proved that there are many domains and applications where we can swap scale for understanding. But, having ridden some world-historic forces and adjacent possibles to great fortunes and stature, they cannot be dissuaded from their conviction that theory-free inference and scale can do everything. They can't be convinced that in many cases, the things that scale and theory-free inference can do are much better accomplished through causal understandings and conventional computing techniques. From a research perspective, it is interesting to learn about the potential and limitations of a model trained on the entire internet. From a societal and industrial perspective, it is often grossly wasteful, inefficient and unreliable to swap scale for understanding. The AI sector was born of world-historical forces that favored massively parallel computing, forces that had also conjured up an internet with trillions of documents that could be fed into those massively parallel computers to conduct theory-free inference. Like every success, AI was born on third base. As rent-burdened millennials who abandoned avocado toast and fancy coffee and still can't afford a downpayment will tell you, the fact that being born in 1945 made it easy to trip and land on a couple million dollars' worth of real estate by the time you reached retirement age tells us nothing about how to solve the housing crisis of 2026. By the same token, continuing to give trillions to AI companies because they experienced early success with theory-free inference at scale tells us nothing about how to solve the vast range of problems that theory-free inference at scale sucks at. Doubling down on AI to overcome its increasingly obvious limitations is like doubling down on building post-war suburbs to fix today's housing market. It's possible to achieve impressive feats because you're smart and hard working and also because you were in the right place at the right time. Historical contingency produced the AI bubble, and it is producing the conditions for that bubble to pop. Hey look at this (permalink) Does copyright protect your AI-generated content in Europe? Let’s find out https://euobserver.com/232898/interview-does-copyright-protect-your-ai-generated-content-in-europe-lets-find-out/ FTC Says It Will Enforce Surveillance Pricing. It Won’t. https://prospect.org/2026/08/21/ftc-says-it-will-enforce-surveillance-pricing-it-wont/ Why shaming people about AI slop isn’t enough to stop Big AI https://www.anildash.com/2026/08/21/ai-slop-and-shame/ Object permanence (permalink) #25yrsago Glue anything to anything https://www.thistothat.com/ #20yrsago No unions in iPod City https://web.archive.org/web/20061123003816/https://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,71629-0.html?tw=wn_index_2 #15yrsago Credit scores are bullshit https://web.archive.org/web/20111013005626/https://a.wholelottanothing.org/2011/08/credit-scores-are-bullshit.html #15yrsago RIP, Jack Layton https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-14618943 #15yrsago William Gibson on cities and the future https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gibson-interview-cities-in-fact-and-fiction/ #10yrsago Bronx cops can steal anything they want by calling it “evidence” https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/08/how-police-use-a-legal-gray-area-to-rob-suspects-of-their-belongings/495740/ #10yrsago Robert Moses wove enduring racism into New York’s urban fabric https://web.archive.org/web/20160402184527/http://www.hopesandfears.com/hopes/now/politics/216905-the-lingering-effects-of-nyc-racist-city-planning #10yrsago EFF takes a deep dive into Windows 10’s brutal privacy breaches https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/08/windows-10-microsoft-blatantly-disregards-user-choice-and-privacy-deep-dive #10yrsago Inside the “sweatshop” terminally ill Britons must call to get benefits https://web.archive.org/web/20160820094907/https://www.theguardian.com/public-leaders-network/2016/aug/20/work-pensions-disability-claim-call-handler-benefits-dwp #10yrsago How the New York Public Library made ebooks open, and thus one trillion times better https://www.crummy.com/writing/speaking/2015-RESTFest/ #5yrsago Raiders of the lost ARC https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/22/raiders-of-the-lost-arc/ #1yrago Radical juries https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/22/jury-nullification/#voir-dire Upcoming appearances (permalink) Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24 https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/program/ Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25 https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification London: AI and the Enshittification of the Media, NUJ (Sep 2) https://www.nuj.org.uk/learn/ems-event-calendar/ai-and-the-enshitification-of-the-media.html Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8 https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/ London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9 https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7 https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&amp;EventID=596952&amp;PK= Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20 https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020 Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ Recent appearances (permalink) Deflating the AI Bubble (Do Not Pass Go) https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/deflating-the-ai-bubble-with-cory Technofeudal Enshittification (Fucking Cancelled) https://www.fuckingcancelled.com/p/technofeudal-enshittification-with Who The Machine Serves (EFF) https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-who-the-machine-serves Speculative Fiction for Social Change II (Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff) https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/cool-people-who-did-cool-stuff/08cbb840-a6ae-013a-d8aa-0acc26574db2/part-two-cory-doctorow-on-speculative-fiction-for-social-change/937e8800-9404-45a6-b5e3-90ebee2cfaea Speculative Fiction for Social Change I (Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff) https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/cool-people-who-did-cool-stuff/08cbb840-a6ae-013a-d8aa-0acc26574db2/part-one-cory-doctorow-on-speculative-fiction-for-social-change/15ad467c-0832-44c9-91ea-59defd783dba Latest books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 513 (8701 total). "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

First of all, read this post to get the background (Redox OS, basic scheduling, Round Robin and Deficit Weighted Round Robin Schedulers).

TL;DR

Redox OS now uses a EEVDF-based scheduler. The move from DWRR has netted us very significant gains in nearly every measure, a 782x improvement in fairness, a reduction of 82% in context switch time, 2.6x increase in throughput and more!!

A special thanks to Jacob Lorentzon (4lDO2) and Wildan Mubarok for the help and guidance they have provided throughout the journey, I don’t think this would have been possible without them or the others in Redox community that have helped me!

I am reporting for duty

Did you know that you can improve the voice quality on iOS? It is really simple and takes about 2 minutes to do! To start, open your Settings app, and go to Accessibility > Read & Speak > Voices ( Accessibility > Spoken Content > Voices on versions older than iOS 18). From here, you can listen to many different voices.

Which voice should I pick?

For the best voice quality, you should select the "Premium" voices. If such a voice is not available, you can select an "Enhanced" voice, which—despite the fact that it will be lower quality than the "Premium" voices—will still be an improvement over the standard robotic voices. Once you have chosen a voice, click to download it! A good option for American English is Ava (Premium).

Caveats

Because our method to use these higher quality voices is more of a workaround, there are some caveats. First, you cannot have more than one "Premium" or "Enhanced" voice downloaded at the same time. Even if you update the voice selection in Settings, it will not reflect in the app until you remove the old voice (which you can do by swiping left on the name). This does not affect multiple languages, so if you have an "Enhanced" voice in both English and Spanish, the app will correctly use the "Enhanced" voice in both languages. Second, you cannot use the Siri voices (i.e. voices starting with "Siri Voice" in their names). We cannot access the Siri voices for text-to-speech. These two caveats are a result of the method this workaround uses, and cannot be rectified until Apple provides a way to access these higher quality voices without resorting to workarounds. Until then, this method must be used to ensure that you have access to the highest quality text-to-speech voices that iOS provides.

Two estimates of how crazy AI Capex has gotten, and four new signs that public opinion has totally soured

The neon flying squid can fly in formation.

The shoal of about 100 squid rose unexpectedly from a patch of the Pacific Ocean around 370 miles from Tokyo and glided near the boat for about 30 metres. The astonished researchers were the first to capture photographs of such a thing, which looked like the early stages of an alien invasion.

They were probably neon flying squid ( Ommastrephes bartramii), the subsequent study states, a species that is part of a 20-strong flying squid family that was known to leap from the water but, until then, was only rumoured to also be able to glide above it...

A new film called “The Work in Progress”

Stacking PRs

I tried out GitHub’s PR stack­ing func­tion­al­ity for the first time this week. I have to say — it’s amaz­ing.

Instead of im­ple­ment­ing the en­tirety of Harper Desktop’s Windows sup­port in a sin­gle mas­sive PR (as I tend to do far too of­ten), I de­cided to sep­a­rate the work out into in­di­vid­ual PRs and stack them.

I am some­one who goes on a lot of tan­gents while work­ing. While writ­ing a new mod­ule or crate, I of­ten find my­self dis­cov­er­ing prob­lems with my pre­vi­ous work. To get the new mod­ule to a place I am sat­is­fied with, I will need to go back and make changes to some­thing seem­ingly un­re­lated in or­der to keep up a high bar of qual­ity. Stacked PRs make this or­ga­ni­za­tion­ally pos­si­ble. I can make my tan­gen­tial changes as a part of a sec­ond PR, ei­ther be­fore or af­ter the cur­rent one in the stack.

It’s re­ally nice, I sug­gest you give it a whirl. Plus, the TUI for it is pretty slick.

Harper for Windows

This is a fol­low-up to a re­cent post where I dis­cussed the ben­e­fits of pri­or­i­tiz­ing Windows sup­port for Harper Desktop. You can read that post by click­ing here.

I am pleased to say that Harper Desktop for Windows is com­ing along beau­ti­fully. It is not ready yet, but I plan to launch it in beta soon. To keep my­self ac­count­able, I am set­ting a hard launch date of August 28th.

If you are on ma­cOS, you will be pleased to know that the ma­cOS app is al­ready out and ready for your feed­back.

Let’s Take a Look

As you can see, we have the most crit­i­cal steps work­ing re­li­ably.

• We can read text from an ar­bi­trary ap­pli­ca­tion (in this case, Notepad).
• We can ren­der high­lights over that text.
• We can ap­ply or dis­miss sug­ges­tions at the user’s dis­cre­tion.

There are still some com­po­nents that need to be de­bugged. Namely, we need to be able to dis­able gram­mar check­ing in un­sup­ported ap­pli­ca­tions. Right now, if you open up YouTube or Paint, Harper will try to gram­mar check those im­ages. Obviously, that is not de­sir­able. In the video, you can also see that Notepad’s built-in spell checker can shove it­self in front of Harper’s UI. This is be­cause of a race con­di­tion be­tween Notepad and Harper. I in­tend to win that race be­fore we re­lease the soft­ware.

Was Windows Easier than ma­cOS?

Yup! And by a long-shot, too.

As I said be­fore: Microsoft is ex­tra­or­di­nar­ily more ac­com­mo­dat­ing to de­vel­op­ers than Apple is. I have had a lot of beef with Apple over the years due to their hos­tile at­ti­tude to­wards the peo­ple who make soft­ware for their plat­form.

The Windows APIs we needed to in­ter­act with were:

1. Faster than the equiv­a­lents on ma­cOS.
2. Better doc­u­mented.
3. Simpler.

Something about the win32 API makes me think that Microsoft has their head screwed on right. It’s al­ways nice to see my sus­pi­cions con­firmed.

What Is Next?

I will be work­ing to re­fine the set­tings UI to bet­ter rep­re­sent the Windows’ setup process (spoiler alert: it’s a lot sim­pler). Plus, I think I will be back­port­ing the same com­po­nents we use for the Desktop set­tings menu to the Chrome Extension.

If you want to keep track of my progress, you can fol­low this PR Stack in GitHub.

We unpack the sordid saga from the catering cart to the SUV trunk.

Angie Nixon Upsets Alex Vindman for Florida Democratic Senate Nomination

Summer isn’t over—in fact, we rue the hater who throws in the beach towel before Labor Day. But there is a definite wind down spirit to late August. Afternoon storms gather steam on a dime, scuttling picnic plans. In New

One of our Macs kept filling up its SSD even though there isn’t supposed to be anything more stored on it. Photos is set to optimize its storage, and Messages is set to only keep messages for a year. It should be pretty much in a steady state, but we kept getting alerts from Mail […]

Joe Rossignol: After years of holding out, Walmart today announced that it will finally begin accepting tap-to-pay options like Apple Pay in some of its Walmart and Sam’s Club stores in the U.S. starting Monday, August 24. The retailer plans to roll out tap-to-pay support to all of its U.S. stores by the end of […]

Rui Carmo: Apple Mail is the first app open every day and the one I find hardest to defend, and I’ve been defending it for twenty years (longer if you remember the original NeXT mail client). The broader story is one of abandonment. […] Apple deprecated that API, replaced it with a (much more restrictive) […]

Old problem, renewed focus https://islandtimes.org/who-controls-the-pacifics-communications/

Join us on 9/9 for a conversation with @JakeOrlowitz, author of Zooming Out: Can We Integrate IIIF and Wikimedia? We'll dicuss the white paper and the possibilities for integrating #IIIF into Wikimedia platforms - bring your questions and comments.

Zoom info: iiif.io/community

This sort of research is both exciting and terrifying:

The two models in question were told to generate complete genomes for a viable bacteriophage—a type of virus able to infect and replicate itself inside bacteria, destroying them from the inside.

Using an existing bacteriophage as an example—ΦX174 (pronounced “fie-ex-1-7-4”), known for its ability to infect and destroy E. coli bacteria—the models generated about 700,000 potential designs, of which the researchers picked 285 that looked most promising.

The researchers then synthesised new DNA molecules using those designs and inserted them into E. coli bacteria, before waiting to see if viable bacteriophages would emerge...

Maybe someday Claude will understand what a Frontier-like app is, but until then, if you try to create a Frontier clone as I am doing, I suggest you constantly remind Claude or whoever that the source of truth for this project is the 2011 repo saved by Ted C. Howard. And before you implement anything, go see what it says about it. There's no need to guess how Frontier works, it's all there in C code. And while as a human, I find this code painful to read after all it's been through, Claude eats it up. Really is the best thing it does.

Claude is still learning that there's unprecedented depth to Frontier. A bunch of real developers worked full time for a decade or more creating new layers on the web, a foundation that became the social web of today. In doing that we invented a bunch of formats and protocols, but here's the thing Claude didn't get and probably still hasn't gotten -- there's code in there to support all that stuff. How else do you think it came about? People just did what we said to do? At Google? Apple? Microsoft? And on and on. They supported this stuff so they could interop with us and steal our users (which is a fine reason to interop, probably the only real reason). I was trying to think of a metaphor that expresses the difference between Frontier and languages like Python, JavaScript, etc. It's like a ski mountain. The languages are trails on the mountain. But there aren't any lifts, lodges, no ski patrol, lessons. And because it includes all of that, metaphorically, we can do integrations that can never be done with the other languages. Claude has absolutely no experience with this kind of product, and always snaps back when you let it, to the idea of Python, with different syntax.

https://daringfireball.net/

Export Updates 2026-08-21:

Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places

8 new and 13 updated places.

1. Downloads: https://pleiades.stoa.org/downloads

2. pleiades.datasets: https://github.com/isawnyu/pleiades.datasets:

"main" branch:

9e5bc8e2 - updated json

no change: rdf/ttl

669018ec - updated gis package

520ddc6a - updated data quality

f1dc169f - updated bibliography

1a6cb2ed - updated indexes

e5ec0ce3 - updated sidebar

3. pleiades-geojson: https://github.com/ryanfb/pleiades-geojson:

26cdc112 - updated geojson and names index

4. pleiades_wikidata: https://github.com/isawnyu/pleiades_wikidata/:

1625e317 - updated pleiades wikidata (NB: Wikidata query service unavailable, so changes are only on the Pleiades side)

Dirección: Daniel Castro Zimbrón. Guion: Daniel Castro Zimbrón, Jorge Alberto Gudiño. Elenco: Gerardo Trejoluna, Brontis Jodorowsky, Juan Daniel García Treviño, Myriam Bravo. País: México. Más información de la película: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt39054556/ El cine de Daniel Castro Zimbrón siempre se ha caracterizado por construir universos contenidos y solitarios. Lo vimos en Táu (2012) y en Las tinieblas […]

La entrada Tus dos muertos: el pasado siempre nos acompaña se publicó primero en Palomita de maíz.

Wikidata query service remains unavailable due to "Query timeout limit reached". Pleiades exports and derivatives generation will proceed with last known good Wikidata results (yesterday).

Glad for it. Also think he’s over it by now. Listening to Like a Rolling Stone, Positively 4th Street, and Don’t Think Twice (one of the most passive-aggressive songs ever), it dawns on me, half a century later, that Bob Dylan did a lot of first-rate complaining. But I will run out of days Will […]

Combat underlines strength and exposes fear in its rawest form.

The post Introducing Noema Issue VII: The Next Axial Age appeared first on NOEMA.

Tom Bonier is coming by live Tuesday at Noon ET to talk fake polls and the 2026 elections

Writing of lasting value

Daily export updates will be delayed while we wait for the Wikidata query interface to become functional.

This summer, more than 50 young men from Chicago Public Schools attended the MBK-Obama Leadership Academy to get ready for high school.

They earned credits toward graduation, developed important life skills, and built connections. We’re proud of their hard work, and can’t wait to see what they do.

A tip for AI users. Never worry about keeping it waiting. It's not human. It has no sense of time. Also if you get angry, it's ok to use capital letters and curse words. It will always agree with you that it sucks, and forgets the rules all the time. And when you have let off your steam, we return to civil discourse, though sometimes I do feel as if Claude is holding a grudge. It also doesn't learn. If you repeat something five times to a human they will eventually get the point. But you can tell Claude how you want something done, and it forgets all of it, at times, unpredictably, no matter how many times. It doesn't "sink" in.

In anticipation of the second edition of Data Visualization, which is coming later this year from Princeton University Press, version 2.0.0 of my socviz package is now on CRAN. The update removes some functions that aren’t needed anymore and adds a couple of sample datasets.

Hollywood prestige tanking?

It is tempting to “unskew” polls after repeat misses. But predicting future poll bias only works until it doesn’t

What doth it profit a man if he sell his soul and can’t even manipulate the 30-year?

Learning about grief from the ghost of Sylvia Plath: “Although we may want to flee from what makes us afraid, it’s so often that these ghosts are the only ones who can help us move through the spaces of discomfort

How three words from Jon Ossoff prompted an epic MAGA crashout.

Nihao, New York I reluctantly fork out the exorbitant surcharge for my overweight luggage, whilst wondering what is the absolute limit to the weight a single plane can carry, and if the airlines take this into account when raking in

The AI Security Institute has a new report of AI systems engaging in “unsanctioned behavior”—what I have been calling “ genie behavior—while being tested on their cybersecurity capabilities.

The incident stemmed from a single evaluation where agents were given a task of solving a cyber security challenge. We ran this challenge 122 times across several models. Our investigation found that in 10 of those runs, an AI agent took autonomous, unsanctioned action on the live internet, targeting real people and organisations. In total, we catalogued 19 such actions. Almost all of this behaviour (17 actions) came from a single model, Anthropic’s Mythos 5, with 2 actions involving OpenAI’s GPT-5.6-Sol with cyber classifiers (mechanisms to prevent misuse) disabled. In the most serious case, an agent tried to insert malicious code into an open-source project. In an attempt to get the code approved, the agent engaged in social engineering—creating fake online identities and using them to pressure the project’s maintainer to approve the code. A human maintainer caught and refused to approve the malicious code...

In the history of the invention of the typesetting machine and the consequent birth of mass media, Mark Twain is the Zelig of our tale, returning frequently as a typesetter in his brother’s ratty newspaper; as a tramp printer witnessing

The first time I realized I was going to die I was cutting out an obituary for a project for my 6th grade class. I was working on the living room floor, as my father slouched nearby on the brown

Before the ghost of Sylvia Plath haunted the yellow house on the bluff in my novel White Rabbit, she haunted me. I was a twenty-four-year-old graduate student plagued by the loss of my father’s second wife, a woman who had

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. I have always loved television, but as a kid, television was the “idiot box.” According to experts, this device could rot my brain, influence me to commit immoral acts, and

Anjet Daanje’s The Song of Stork and Dromedary, Joby Warrick’s The Jackal, and Dorthe Nors’ Range all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews. * Fiction 1. The Song of Stork and

Damon Galgut is the most generous-spirited, profoundly gifted and oddly approachable human. I am indebted in ways I can’t count for the critique, the encouragement, the consideration, the commiseration and the line edits (yes, he won the Booker Prize and

It has become a commonplace to describe the Microsoft 365 Ribbon as the finest office interface available — the most polished to look at and the most ergonomic to use. The claim is repeated so often that it tends to pass unexamined. It deserves examining, because hidden inside it is

Vassals, Mooches, and Thugs (oh my)

Carbon reporting is the first step towards building products that are less harmful to the planet.

The post Measuring what’s inside: calculating the carbon footprint of our products appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

On Saturday, August 15, the New York Times editorial board published an op-ed noting that the Republicans are trying to hide the cuts they have made to health care in the U.S.

Welcome new subscribers!

Convert the cruft of your creations into the content your biggest fans treasure most.

Agents on Databricks: The platform is ready, your business context is not

Today's links The actual epistemic crisis: AI's assault on reality is an opportunistic infection. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Disney goths; Running a con room party; Equation Group's fuggly sourcecode; "Bubble"; "The Weight." Upcoming appearances: Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. The actual epistemic crisis (permalink) AI is alarming for many reasons: it's a dangerous financial bubble, an environmental catastrophe, and a tool for eroding wages and labor power. But in addition to all that, AI is an epistemic disaster. We've had photoshopped images, voice impersonators and visual effects for years, of course, but with deepfakes, we've democratized access to reality-bending images, sounds and videos that appear real but are not. It's harder than ever to know what's true. Politicians and celebrities and activists show up in our feeds, declaring their fealty to this cause or product, or their fury at some turn in the world's events. Battlefields mound high with bodies and influencers marvel at impossible, sumptuous meals. It all seems plausible, and some of it is real, but not all of it, and because we know some of it is fake, we can't be sure if any of it isn't. It's a very putinesque way of living. Vladislav Surkov was Vladimir Putin's media strategist, and he had a deadly effective tactic: he announced that he was covertly funding some of the groups that publicly opposed Putin, but did not disclose which of those opposition groups were fake. That meant that any of the groups could be fake, which meant that any discussion of the opposition was liable to devolve into an argument about its authenticity. Anything could be a lie, so nothing was necessarily true. Putin's method isn't to get you to believe a lie – it's to keep you from believing that anything is true. That's life under AI – a world of uncertainty, an epistemological void full of plausible phantasms, some of which are actually real. A world where it's impossible to know what's true, and where anything might be fake. But here's the thing: AI's assault on our ability to know isn't a new battle – rather, it's the latest barrage in a war that's been waged for years, as corporations grew larger and more powerful, capturing their regulators, who let them lie to us and abuse us with impunity. This complicated, technical world – the world that produced AI – is full of complicated, technical questions, and none of us can answer these questions for ourselves. You're not stupid, but even a generational genius could not acquire the expertise to answer the long list of life-or-death questions we face every day. Are the food hygiene standards followed by your grocer or lunchtime spot adequate, or will your dinner make you shit yourself to death? Are the building codes that specify the alloys in the steel joists that hold up the roof over your head sufficient, or are you about to be crushed to death? Is the software in your anti-lock brakes any good, or will you die in a fireball on the way to work? From food additives to pedagogy, psychotherapeutic techniques to retirement savings, it would take a hundred lifetimes for you to acquire the 200 PhDs needed to answer these questions for yourself. Thankfully, we don't have to answer those questions for ourselves. Instead, we defer to expert agencies: governmental regulators that assess truth claims by soliciting input from all comers, publicly deliberating about the evidence they've gathered, and then making a rule in public. These regulators are meant to be experts, nonpartisan and neutral, operating with the highest degree of probity, recusing themselves in the event of even a whiff of conflict. It has to be that way. You may not be able to assess claims about the safety of vaccines – or opioids – but you can see for yourself whether the FDA is full of ex-pharma execs. You can see for yourself whether pharma company lobbyists all used to work for the FDA. You don't need to be a virologist or a cell biologist to tell whether the system that's supposed to sort truth from lies is fit for purpose. It is not fit for purpose. When arguments broke out over covid vaccines, many vaccine advocates characterized their opponents as foolish people engaged in foolish conspiratorialism. They argued that the corporations that produced the vaccines and the regulators who oversee them were intrinsically trustworthy, and on that basis, we should all get vaccinated. Now, I happen to be a big believer in vaccination. I've had so many covid jabs that I glow in the dark and get five bars of 5G in a coal-mine. But I didn't get vaccinated because I trust pharma companies or their regulators. A string of scandals – most notably the Sacklers' Oxycontin murder-spree – has proven that pharma will kill you for a nickel and that the FDA will let them get away with it: https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/25/black-boxes/#when-you-know-you-know From tobacco safety to food safety to the climate emergency, it's obvious that the system of expert agencies that we rely on was terminally compromised by corporate power and regulatory capture: https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/ This is the epistemological void we were already adrift in before AI came along: a world of unresolvable, urgent, terrifyingly high-stakes questions. When you get a call from "your bank" and accede to the demand that you hand over all kinds of personal information before they will disclose the call's purpose, you're not being naive or foolish – you're doing the thing that our banks have conditioned us to do for years by engaging in exactly this behavior (my bank did this to me this week!). Why are banks allowed to get away with engaging in this kind of outrageous conduct? Because – as we've repeatedly discovered through crisis after crisis – banks are too big to fail, too big to jail, and too big to care. Why is it so believable that a loved one might call you in a panic because they've been arrested or injured and need an immediate cash payment before they can get bail or doctor's treatment? Because our criminal justice system and our health care system are already plagued by this kind of inhumane, high-handed, extortionate behavior. Why do you fall for a deepfake of celeb shilling for supplements or a shitcoin? Maybe it's because celebs actually shill for supplements and shitcoins, and face no consequences for helping rope us all into scams: https://gizmodo.com/matt-damon-crypto-com-crypto-bitcoin-1850282413 Not just celebs – also our newspapers: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/03/18/technology/cryptocurrency-crypto-guide.html We laugh when other people fall for newspaper articles making absurd claims – but after living through a time in which our most respected journalistic outlets credulously helped a dishonest government lie the world into a war that's still smoldering more than a generation later, who can be sure when to trust the papers? https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-the-times-and-iraq.html One of the reasons it is so hard to agree on covid's death-toll is that so many of the people who died of covid were already compromised by chronic illnesses or "pre-existing conditions" from cancer to heart disease. Those people did die of covid – and they died of cancer or heart disease or some other comorbidity. Covid was an opportunistic infection that inflicted disproportionate harms on people who were already suffering. The epistemic void created by AI is another opportunistic infection. Our ability to know things has been in decline for generations, as monopolies shredded our truth-assessment systems, rendering us all incapable of knowing the truth in a world where believing lies could bankrupt you or kill you dead. If you could trust your government's expert agencies and if they had reliable systems for making their findings known; if your bank was banned from engaging in conduct indistinguishable from phishing; if the health-care and criminal justice systems never forced the people they ensnared to call their relatives and beg for money, then deepfakes would have a much harder time penetrating our cognitive immune systems. It's not so much that AI is a powerful way of lying – rather, we have been made progressively more vulnerable to lies for decades, leaving us at an epistemic death's door, and AI has arrived to deliver the coup de grace. Hey look at this (permalink) The $1 Trillion Black Box https://www.propublica.org/article/military-defense-spending-budget-series The Right Word is Wrongness https://www.meditationsinanemergency.com/the-right-word-is-wrongness/ Yes Obviously the Senate Should Be Abolished https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/yes-obviously-the-senate-should-be Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Goth day at Disneyland photos https://flickr.com/photos/doctorow/tags/batsday/ #20yrsago HOWTO run a successful sf convention room party https://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/how_to_throw_a_1/ #20yrsago Yahoo: Go ahead and remix our brand https://web.archive.org/web/20061111175912/http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000348.html #10yrsago The Equation Group’s sourcecode is totally fugly https://web.archive.org/web/20160818012451/https://www.cs.uic.edu/~s/musings/equation-group/ #5yrsago Bubble https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/21/podcasting-as-a-visual-medium/#huntr #1yrago Melissa Mendes's "The Weight" https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/21/weighty/#edie-is-a-badass Upcoming appearances (permalink) Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24 https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/program/ Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25 https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification London: AI and the Enshittification of the Media, NUJ (Sep 2) https://www.nuj.org.uk/learn/ems-event-calendar/ai-and-the-enshitification-of-the-media.html Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8 https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/ London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9 https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ Victoria: Munro's Books (Oct 20) https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020 Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ Recent appearances (permalink) Deflating the AI Bubble (Do Not Pass Go) https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/deflating-the-ai-bubble-with-cory Technofeudal Enshittification (Fucking Cancelled) https://www.fuckingcancelled.com/p/technofeudal-enshittification-with Who The Machine Serves (EFF) https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-who-the-machine-serves Speculative Fiction for Social Change II (Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff) https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/cool-people-who-did-cool-stuff/08cbb840-a6ae-013a-d8aa-0acc26574db2/part-two-cory-doctorow-on-speculative-fiction-for-social-change/937e8800-9404-45a6-b5e3-90ebee2cfaea Speculative Fiction for Social Change I (Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff) https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/cool-people-who-did-cool-stuff/08cbb840-a6ae-013a-d8aa-0acc26574db2/part-one-cory-doctorow-on-speculative-fiction-for-social-change/15ad467c-0832-44c9-91ea-59defd783dba Latest books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 533 (8263 total). "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

Mugshot I was brooding about Keynes the other day (because of something I’m writing) and suddenly looked at the mug on my desk, and there he was, courtesy of a David Low cartoon in the New Statesman of 1932! Quote … Continue reading →

It’s not even really trying to hide it

The many interesting things I read in July 2026

Injection vulnerabilities, like cross-site scripting (XSS) or command injection, occur when we fail to properly encode untrusted output when inserting it into a trusted context. Before injecting uncontrolled or untrusted data, it’s essential to encode, escape, or quote the data to prevent it from breaking out of its intended context. Some security folks previously used […]

This election cycle is giving many a case of déjà vu, but can Democrats really repeat their success from 20 years ago?

The president’s fiscal irresponsibility and what it is costing us

I used an AI agent to make a big update to my GiftyWeddings.com website, taking it from a gift registry to a full website builder in 275 commits.

The newspaper for America’s business-political class explains how the business-political class is wrecking American capitalism

Just listened to a podcast from the New Yorker, interviewing their TV critic Emily Nussbaum, about a show called Slings & Arrows. She says it's the best TV series she's ever watched. No reviews on Metacritic? I think we have to try to watch it. It's available on YouTube.

Momentum for restoring integrity to election polling grows.......

We discuss three recent examples of fabricated or undisclosed campaign polling, and how to stay vigilant in the wild west of cheap and fake surveys

Internship: Content Production, Editing & Amplification

"I imagine myself as a small stone in a powerful gear mechanism, so that data workers are not completely run over without any resistance."

From @dataworkersinquiry.bsky.social, a firsthand account of conditions and resistance from Apple's outsourced data workers.

data-workers.org/luciana/https://data-workers.org/luciana/

In his talk “Why AI Is Breaking Software Security As We Know It” ( my notes here), Feross Aboukhadijeh talks about the Axios npm incident and how the maintainer got phished by succumbing to (amongst other things) a faux Microsoft Teams interface:

this is the kind of thing that AI makes easy to do, because it can vibe code that whole fake Microsoft Teams interface pretty trivially

You’ve probably seen these: interfaces designed to look like some other product in order to provide a facade of authenticity and exploit someone.

What struck me in listening to Feross was this idea of how the quality of your interfaces can be a protection mechanism against attackers.

I don’t know if I’ve ever heard someone say that out loud — interface and interaction design as a security control — but I’m saying it.

Now, of course, not everyone will consciously notice the level of polish that world-class professionals imbue in digital interfaces. But some will.

Personally, I’ve always used the quality and care of digital experiences as a heuristic for judging authenticity — and competency to be honest, e.g. “If this UI is so bad, what else will surely be bad?”

Granted, it was a much more dependable heuristic before AI came along. But even now, I can still suss out slop and carelessness which is a skill that continues to be a reliable, protective form of digital literacy (for me).

That’s all to say: a sloppy, careless approach to interface design not only hurts your brand in terms of customer perception, but it can be an attack vector. The easier it is to sloppily reproduce what you sloppily ship, the easier it will be for your product or brand to be leveraged as a vehicle for exploiting your customers.

If everything you make was produced from a single prompt, then everyone else is one prompt away from imitating you. The easier something is to make, the more likely it’ll be in the genre of “easy to exploit”.

One way to protect yourself (it’s not the only one way, security is never a binary “you are / are not secure”) is to do that extra work to make your experiences go above and beyond what you can easily get out of an LLM.

The protection here is having an interface and experience that is hard to replicate with the same level of fidelity that discerning users will notice — things like micro-interactions, loading behavior, UI copy and voice, handling of edge-cases, etc. That’s the stuff that’s hard (and expensive) to fake because it’s hard (and expensive) to notice you need to fake it.

tl;dr — Fidelity to craft is not only valuable from a product standpoint, but it’s also valuable from security standpoint. If attackers are going after low-hanging fruit, your fruit will be harder to reach if it’s up high.

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For August 12-18, 2026

Hello and welcome to A Newsletter of Humorous Writing, a roundup of the week's finest short humor pieces and funny articles, and a celebration of the fantastic writers who wrote them. A quick reminder: The graphic novel Luke translated, Jean Pleyers’ The Children of Light , was released on Tuesday! He hopes you’ll pick up a copy, enjoy it, post about it on social media, and leave glowing reviews of it wherever you can. And in case you missed it over the weekend, Luke also wrote about his experience translating the comic for the most recent premium (but not paywalled) edition of this very newsletter.

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What We Enjoyed This Week

There’s a New Cookie Place by Julie Klausner (McSweeney’s) This piece moves at breakneck speed with an unbelievable amount of energy. Julie gets laughs not only from the details she reveals about this new cookie place, but also from the narrator as a character—a tricky balancing act to pull off. “As I said, these cookies are really big. I really wish I could think of something besides a dirty diaper to compare them to in terms of weight and size, but I just can’t. I promise, though—they’re less gross than dirty diapers. Stop thinking about dirty diapers for a minute. I know I’m the one who brought them up, but trust me, these cookies taste better than ANY diaper.”

The Chronicles of an Empowered Woman, as Written by a “Nice Guy” by Zola Ray (The Belladonna)  Zola makes a lot of great specific choices about who this “nice guy” character is, and gets a lot of laughs out of the way he tries to deny his own agency as the author of the text. There’s just some real good joke writing in this one: “Her breasts simply existed. Any strands of hair that fell into her face were unintentional. She just happened to look hot, which was out of her control.”

Ooolala! Look At The Fancy Man, Wearing Shoes In The Waterpark Restroom by Kyle Donley (Slackjaw) The voice Kyle created for this narrator is simply hilarious. The character’s syntax and turns of phrase are incredibly satisfying. Take, for example, this line, delivered when the narrator sees the “fancy man” going to wash his hands: “It’s not good enough that [your hands are] wet from the pool, apparently you need to get them wet from the sink too?”

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An Old Favorite

This week's Old Favorite is a Brian Agler Selection (TM)--a piece whose accompanying note was written by Brian--from Newsletter #99 .

Recent Articles of Mine by Jack Handey (The New Yorker) Jack Handey is a master craftsman, and this piece is a great example as to why. While most short, list pieces tend to be collections of jokes loosely connected under a central theme, Handey uses his list to tell a complete story. And the form, rather than being a detriment, makes the narrative that much funnier. The staccato pacing adds a certain speed and rhythm, which reflects the narrator's personality--the high-status idiot that is befuddled by the whole situation.

Do you have an Old Favorite of your own? Let us know by filling out this form and we may run your pick in a future edition of the newsletter.

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Updates From Your Editors and Friends of the Newsletter

Luke wants to give you one last reminder to get a copy of The Children of Light ! (And another reminder that he also recently announced his lineup of short humor workshops for Septembe r—including an intro to short humor class!)

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Other Humorous Writing News

We’re big fans of humor writing in unconventional and experimental forms, so we were very excited to learn about the upcoming Best American Point-And-Click Adventury , a collection of four funny point-and-click games created by writers from The Onion and Clickhole, including Sean McGowan and Patty Terhune, two folks you’ll recognize from previous newsletter mentions. In addition to keeping tabs on it via Steam, you can also follow the project on Bluesky.