Example Talk

Click on the Slides button above to view the built-in slides feature.

Slides can be added in a few ways:

• Create slides using Wowchemy’s Slides feature and link using slides parameter in the front matter of the talk file
• Upload an existing slide deck to static/ and link using url_slides parameter in the front matter of the talk file
• Embed your slides (e.g. Google Slides) or presentation video on this page using shortcodes.

Further event details, including page elements such as image galleries, can be added to the body of this page.

Edinburgh International Film Festival To Launch UK Film Conference; BFI Head Ben Roberts Set As Inaugural Keynote Speaker

EXCLUSIVE: The Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) will host a UK Film Conference as part of this year’s EIFF Industry programme, and BFI CEO Ben Roberts has been tapped as the event’s inaugural keynote speaker.  Clare Binns, Creative Director of Picturehouse Cinemas, will host the event, which will run for one day on Saturday, August […]

Sony To Handle International Theatrical Distribution On Greta Gerwig’s ‘Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew’

Sony Pictures Entertainment will handle the international theatrical release of Greta Gerwig’s Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew. The film will be released in IMAX and in theaters worldwide on February 12, 2027, and will debut on Netflix on April 2, 2027. The streamer has said previews of the film will screen exclusively on IMAX, starting on […]

Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ Breaks BFI Imax Records With 28,000 Tickets Sold In First 24 Hours

BFI Imax, the UK’s largest screen, has sold 28,000 tickets for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey in 24 hours, breaking first day on sale records for the venue with a total gross of £750,000. This follows four opening weekend screenings that had previously sold out in under an hour a year in advance, including a special […]

KDE Plasma 6.7 released

Version
6.7 of KDE's Plasma desktop has been released. Notable changes in this release include per-screen virtual desktops, faster desktop switching, introduction of the Union
theming system as a tech preview, as well as many other improvements and bug fixes. The release is dedicated to Eric Laffoon, a longtime KDE supporter, who passed away in May.

See the KDE
wiki for a full list of new features, and the Changelog for a list of all commits in this release.

Christopher Jackson Announces Return To Broadway’s ‘Hamilton’

Christopher Jackson, an original cast member of Broadway’s hit Hamilton, will reprise his portrayal of George Washington for a strictly limited engagement this fall. Jackson, who originated the role in both the Off Broadway and Broadway productions of the musical, earning a Tony Award nomination for the latter, will return to the role on Tuesday, […]

Security updates for Tuesday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (mod_http2, postfix, and webkit2gtk3), Debian (bird2, libgd-perl, and libreoffice), Fedora (7zip, ack, hugo, and perl-Mojo-JWT), Mageia (atril, evince, xreader, emacs, lcms2, libgcrypt, libinput, libsndfile, putty, and sudo), Red Hat (openssl and osbuild-composer), SUSE (cheat, chromedriver, containerized-data-importer, cyrus-imapd, freeipmi, graphicsmagick, java-11-openj9, java-17-openj9, kitty, kubevirt, kubevirt-1.6, libcaca, libopenssl-3-devel, librav1e0_8, neonmodem, opensc, openssh, openssl-1_0_0, openssl-1_1, openssl-3, perl-HTTP-Daemon, perl-XML-LibXML, python-python-dotenv, python311-paramiko, python311-PyJWT, python311-starlette, python311-tornado6, qemu, restic, and trivy), and Ubuntu (adsys, cups, fastnetmon, freerdp2, freerdp3, mesa, nginx, rsync, ruby2.3, ruby2.5, and tmux).

Kurt Russell On Why Taylor Sheridan’s Shows Connect With The ‘Silent Majority’

Kurt Russell received the Monte-Carlo TV Festival’s highest accolade, the Crystal Nymph, this year and is enjoying his TV moment. “I hadn’t done any television for over 50 years when I did Monarch, and then The Madison,” he told Deadline. The veteran star plays Preston Clyburn, mostly in flashback, in Taylor Sheridan’s series The Madison, […]

Banijay Kids Strikes AI Deal With Toon Boom

EXCLUSIVE: Banijay has struck a deal with Toon Boom Animation that will see it hand over kids content to test the software firm’s AI tools in exchange for gaining early access to the tools. The deal for the Banijay Kids & Family division, which makes and sells the likes of Mr Bean and Totally Spies!, […]

‘Batman: Caped Crusader’ EP Geoffrey Thorne To Adapt Video Game ‘Events At Unity Farm’ For TV

EXCLUSIVE: Geoffrey Thorne has signed on to adapt steampunky VR video game Events at Unity Farm into a TV series. The Eyes of Wakanda, Power: Book II: Ghost and Batman: Caped Crusader writer and exec is working with Titan1Studios on the adaptation. He will write and exec produce alongside his partner, Todd Sharp, through their […]

Nat Geo Unveils Trailer For Tom Hiddleston-Hosted Docudrama ‘Pompeii: Out Of Time,’ Featuring ‘Loki’ Star Uncovering Evidence Of Fallen Roman City

National Geographic has unveiled the first trailer for Pompeii: Out of Time with Tom Hiddleston, a three-part docudrama hosted by the Loki star that will premiere July 22 on the network at 9/8c and July 23 on Disney+ and Hulu. Billed as an investigation into the fallen Roman city’s final hours, the project reunites the […]

Michael Hirst’s ‘Bloodaxe’ Renewed For Season 2 At Prime Video

EXCLUSIVE: Ahead of the launch of Season 1, Prime Video has given Michael Hirst’s Bloodaxe a second season order. The first season launches in early 2027 on the streamer and Hirst told Deadline filming starts on Season 2 in a few weeks. It had previously been reported that the second season was in the works […]

FBI Says Multiple Suspects In Custody After It Stopped Alleged Plot Targeting UFC Event At White House

FBI Director Kash Patel said that “multiple individuals are now in custody after the bureau and other law enforcement stopped a plot to attack the UFC event at the White House. Patel posted on X, “On June 10, FBI and our law enforcement partners became aware of a potential threat to the UFC America 250 […]

WordPress + Claude – a new look for cate.blog

If you’re reading this on cate.blog, things look different. I’m pleased with how it came out. Getting there was more difficult than I expected. I came into this confident. I used to work on WordPress (admittedly, the mobile apps – but I did the support rotations and lived in P2 like everyone else). I have […]

Sean Penn To Direct Timely Movie Next, Re-Teaming With Warner Bros On Story Of January 6th Cop With Bradley Cooper In Talks To Star

EXCLUSIVE: Sean Penn, coming off his third Oscar win for One Battle After Another, has been quietly setting up a passion project. And it’s a doozy. The currently untitled film will follow the early life of a cop who goes on to be caught up in the January 6th Capitol riots. Penn has scripted and […]

‘Paddington’ Musical Coming To Broadway Spring 2027

Paddington The Musical, the seven-time Olivier Award-winning West End musical, is heading to Broadway: Previews begin Tuesday, March 30, 2027, at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre, with an official opening on Sunday, April 18. Based on the classic children’s book A Bear Called Paddington by Michael Bond and the award-winning film Paddington, the musical, by special […]

Your medical provider might be recording your mental health care visits

Mental health providers are increasingly using AI technology to record conversations, raising privacy concerns among patients and practitioners.

Carrie R. Moore has won the 2026 Young Lions Fiction Award.

Last night, in a ceremony, the New York Public Library announced the winner of its Young Lions Fiction Award, which celebrates fiction by writers 35 and younger. This year’s winner is Carrie R. Moore for Make Your Way Home; she

Ghost-Eye

Picture this: an imposing, three-storey mansion on Calcutta’s tree-lined upscale Southern Avenue. The house and its grounds are surrounded by a fifteen-foot-high wall, topped with glittering shards of glass. To passers-by nothing of the interior is visible, neither the manicured

People of Dublin: I’m giving a talk on Thursday evening at Na Píobairí Uilleann on Henrietta Street—come along if you want to know the story behind TheSession.org

People of Dublin: I’m giving a talk on Thursday evening at Na Píobairí Uilleann on Henrietta Street—come along if you want to know the story behind TheSession.org

Amitav Ghosh, Joyce Carol Oates, Isabel Waidner, and more: 20 new books out today!

It was an undeniably awesome weekend. Speaking from a New York angle, it simply couldn’t get better: warm evenings, Pride events galore, and last but not least, the Knicks won. We keep up the good vibes with this week’s selection

Democrats lead by 13 points on trust to handle voters' top problems

This poll question has predicted all but one election since 1948. It suggests Democrats could win by 8-12 points in November.

Flock Cameras Are Being Used for Stalking

There are over a dozen cases around the country where police officers are using the Flock surveillance camera system to obsessively and illegally stalk people.

Alternate link.

Iran Agrees to End War in Exchange for Never Having to Talk to JD Vance Again

“All the bombs we dropped on those crazy bastards couldn’t do what the sound of JD’s voice did,” Trump said.

Mobile Progress Report: June 2026

The past month was busy; the theme was evolution. We went into this quarter with our own ideas for what we wanted to accomplish. However, our users had better ideas. With the release of Thunderbird’s own mail service, Thundermail, the need for a better account settings import process across our services and apps became vital. […]

The post Mobile Progress Report: June 2026 appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

What Trump Taught Me

Donald Trump has taught me many things over the last decade.

The Theory of the Vulgar Class

Collapsing norms, cage matches, and a republic in danger

Lit Hub Daily: June 16, 2026

Sophie Lewis examines the phenomenon of heterofatalism. | Lit Hub Politics If you want a job as an astronaut, you need to nail the interview. | Lit Hub Memoir Erin Maglaque contextualizes her own experience of giving birth through the

Trump is fighting the green energy revolution. He'll lose.

Market forces are stronger than MAGA.

Reading The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff.

Reading The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff.

Enhancing with CSS Grid Lanes

CSS Grid Lanes has started to ship in browsers. It’s in Safari and behind a flag in Chrome and Edge.

It enables masonry layouts, where items get packed together in the most efficient way possible.

Unsurprisingly, I’m a fan of a layout tool where the browser does all the hard work. It very much aligns with the idea of declarative design; you specify the boundary conditions, and then browser does the maths and heavy lifting.

There’s a handy website called The Field Guide to Grid Lanes where you can play around with possibilities.

At the most recent CSS Day, Patrick Brosset gave a great talk showing what you could do with Grid Lanes. I immediately started playing around with it, and I spotted what I think could be a useful pattern…

Over on The Session, I added a little enhancement to the events and sessions listings recently. I make a call to the Google Places API to see if I can find a match for the venue, and if I do, pull in some photos.

Sidenote: right now there’s a major issue with this. None of the photos come with text descriptions. This is something I need to fix, and I’ve got some ideas on how to do that.

Anyway, these photos are just nice-to-haves so I’ve tucked them away into a details element with a simple summary like “Ten photos” or “Twenty photos”. If you open up that details element you get the photos in a horizontal swipable row. A carousel, if you will.

This works fine, but on larger screens I think it would be okay to show all the photos at once. That’s where Grid Lanes comes in.

Take a look at an event or a session in Safari to see what I mean.

Here’s the CSS that creates a carousel:

``

.gallery {
    display: flex;
    align-items: center;
    inline-size: fit-content;
    max-inline-size: 100%;
    overflow-inline: auto;
    scroll-snap-type: inline mandatory;
    overscroll-behavior-inline: contain;
    scroll-behavior: smooth;
    scrollbar-gutter: stable;
}
.gallery > * {
    flex-shrink: 0;
    scroll-snap-align: center;
}

And here’s the media query that turns it into a masonry layout:

``

@supports (display: grid-lanes) {
    @media all and (min-width: 56em) {
        .gallery {
            all: initial;
            display: grid-lanes;
            grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fill, minmax(280px, 1fr));
            gap: 0.5em;
        }
        .gallery > * {
            inline-size: 100%;
        }
    }
}

I’m using all: initial to unset the previous styles, which is a bit of a sledgehammer but it works.

I think this could be a useful responsive design pattern. Masonry layouts are great for large screens but kind of rubbish for small screens where you end up with just a single column. Carousels aren’t much cop on large screens but maybe have their place on small screens where real estate is at a premium.

Oh, and needless to say, this is a progressive enhancement. If a browser doesn’t yet understand display: grid-lanes it continues to get the carousel layout.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

The year of New York and the Thunder weren’t inevitable: 15 things we learned from the NBA playoffs.

Balcon méditatif au chalet [en]

[en] Je suis au chalet. Juste pour deux nuits. Ma chambre à coucher est en train d’être repeinte, donc je ne peux pas y dormir. Donc je profite. Les deux nuits d’avant, entre le vidage de la chambre et l’arrivée des peintres, j’ai dormi sur le canapé à l’eclau. Le pauvre Juju était tout perturbé! … Continue reading "Balcon méditatif au chalet [en]"

Resistance Against Apartheid Started Young

(On June 16, 1976, the youth of Soweto, Johannesburg’s massive Black township, rose up to protest a new rule making Afrikaans the language of instruction in their schools—a language that most did not know well. They were led by Tsietsi

Greg Sarris on Telling the Stories of California’s Native Communities

Greg Sarris’s first novel, Grand Avenue, an urban Indian story set in Santa Rosa, California, was published in 1994, during the second wave of the Native American Renaissance, which included first novels by Louise Erdrich (Love Medicine), Sherman Alexie (Reservation

On Time, Pain and the Labor Process: Considering the History of Midwifery

Birth fractured my sense of time—of how time unfolded. I had previously taken for granted that time passed swiftly from one moment to the next. I organized my understanding of my own life according to the idea that time moved

What It’s Like to Interview For the Job of “Astronaut”

The following is from Leroy Chiao’s Dinner with an Astronaut, and describes one step in Chiao’s late 1980s journey to becoming astronaut. * What was the astronaut interview like? I flew to Houston the next week. It was September. I

A Global Journey: Understanding Centuries of Black Exclusion and Erasure in Healthcare

Sugarcane plantations reigned supreme in Trelawny, Jamaica, in the late 1700s, when there were more than one hundred estates. The parish, covered by loamy rainforest soil, was established in 1770 by combining land from St. Ann and St. James into

On the Rise of Reluctant Heterosexuality

Human beings are, of course, perverse—both in ways that enrich our lives and in ones that hinder us. All too often, we remain “secretly attached to the continuity of the very things we (sincerely) decry as toxic, boring, broken,” as

LibreOffice releases, features, QA and accessibility – TDF Annual Report 2025

This is part of the Annual Report 2025 from The Document Foundation, the non-profit that coordinates the LibreOffice project and community. More will be posted soon… Releases of the Year LibreOffice’s release plan works on a time-based release schedule, with major updates every six months (typically in February and August).

Friendly advice I refuse to take

Friends,

June 15, 2026

President Donald J.

HAS THE NVIDIA CASH COW STOPPED PRODUCING MILK?

This is what I wrote about 3 weeks ago in “NVIDIA IS NOW VERY CLOSE TO HITTING THE CIRCULAR FINANCING BRICK WALL”: “Personally, I would not even be shocked if, in several months, Nvidia surprises the market and tries to raise significant amounts of debt via bond issuances, like other...

The post HAS THE NVIDIA CASH COW STOPPED PRODUCING MILK? appeared first on JustDario.

Waterfox 6.6.15 - Security fixes

Security fixes from Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2026-58.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

The epic story of Markdown.

Trump’s Roman Games/Obama’s Shrine to Himself

How did the 250th anniversary of America become a celebration so devoid of ideas?

@Dave Winer's linkblog

The US government's Anthropic models ban was never about an AI jailbreak.

You Can Be Too Rich

But you still can’t take it with you

Wed, June 17th, 7pm ET - Our Weekly Hopium Paid Subscriber Get Together

Welcome new subscribers!

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Trump Parties While America Surrenders.

The golden rule of Customizable Select

Customizable select is coming to Safari 27.

@Barack Obama @Bsky

It was great joining Njideka Akunyili Crosby—a gifted Nigerian-born, Los Angeles-based artist—to unveil our first portrait together. This piece reflects so many chapters of Michelle and my story, and we’re thrilled that it will be on display at the Obama Presidential Center starting this Juneteenth.

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

If Claude were human it would learn from you even if they didn't record what it learned in a notebook, two or three times and they would remember. Not so with Claude. If it isn't written down it will not remember it. Its mind doesn't have memory. It remembers things by writing them in a markdown file. It's like the movie Memento, where the main character tatoos the info he needs on his body. And then proceeds to misunderstand it. Claude is just like that.

@Barack Obama @Bsky

Chicago, it’s good to be home!

Michelle and I built the Obama Presidential Center to be a place where people of all ages can learn, play, and work – and we can't wait to welcome you all later this week!

What We’ve Been Doing This Past Year

On his blog, Brent writes about the past year of NetNewsWire development.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Trump’s Iran Deal Is a Humiliation for Him—and Good News for the World.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Knicks fever: Mamdani prepares NYC for massive ticker-tape parade, but says school will still be in session Thursday.

NetNewsWire Status

It’s been a year since I retired — my last working day was June 6, 2025 — and I like being able to say that I’ve spent the year adding nothing, not one penny, to shareholder value. 🌴

\* \* \*

My hope for retirement was to get a lot of work done on NetNewsWire.

A year ago it was in sore need of modernization, tech debt pay-off, and bug fixes. People were asking for features, but the foundation needed a ton of work before I could get on to adding new rooms.

Here are some highlights of what we’ve done with 2,188 commits in the past year:

• Adopted Swift structured concurrency and async/await
• Adopted Liquid Glass UI while still supporting recent OSes
• Ported our XML, HTML, and date parsers from Objective-C to Swift
• Fixed a ton of bugs, including crashing bugs
• Reduced battery use, memory use, hang rate, scroll hitch rate, and disk writes
• Did a bunch of performance enhancements, including (especially) finding places where the app could just do less work
• Did a bunch of hygiene things — got GitHub CI running again, started using SwiftLint, turned on treat-warnings-as-errors, started work on localizability, switched to Logger, added tests
• Simplified and refactored code, deleted code, renamed things, etc. — gained clarity in a bunch of places
• Added support for Cache-Control headers for feeds, so publishers can tune how often NetNewsWire checks their feeds
• Optimized iCloud syncing (still more to do on that one)
• Dealt with deprecations (switched to NWPathMonitor, for instance)
• Added diagnostics and error reporting to the UI — iCloud Storage Stats and the Error Log are shipping, and more like these are currently in beta: Dinosaurs, Current Activity, Activity Log, and Account Stats.

A list of highlights means I’m glossing over — or not even mentioning — things I really want to tell you about!

For instance, at one point I got frustrated with how I was handling Mac crash logs, so I wrote a little system that downloads them from my server and does symbolication. It’s simple but it makes a big difference — and it means not migrating to some commercial system, and having to add their SDK to the app, for this.

\* \* \*

That last bullet point, the one with all the links, is all about giving users insight into what’s happening so that, when the app doesn’t behave as they expect, they can see what’s going on.

Even when they can’t fix the problem themselves, they can at least then copy-and-paste and tell me what’s up so I don’t have to guess. Between this and various bug fixes and improvements I’m able to spend less time on support, which means more time for coding — and, eventually, more time for the new features people are asking for.

\* \* \*

We’re not done with foundational work, but it’s getting close. It’s so much nicer working on this app now than it was a year ago, and I’m so glad we spent the year this way.

I say we on purpose — I may contribute the most, but we have a bunch of other contributors, and I thank them all for all their much-appreciated help. Our most prolific contributor after me is Stuart Breckenridge, who did the Liquid Glass work (among other things) — and who has a new browser-based RSS reader named Gobbler that you should check out!

\* \* \*

PS In the past year we also switched from Slack to a Discourse forum, so support and discussions can be on the web instead of hidden away. 😀

@Dave Winer's linkblog

The new 20% time, minus the time.

Improvements to Web for AI Should Benefit All Users

Proposed changes to the web platform to support AI should also support users and assistive technology whenever possible.

Conscious or Not

For as long as I remember, people have been arguing about whether machines could be intelligent or not.

Live w/ Robert Reich

A recording from Robert Reich and David Pakman's live video

Passing Cloudflare Turnstile using two fingers

Here’s a quick tip for passing the infamous Cloudflare Turnstile captcha checkbox pages:

1. press Tab key, to focus the checkbox (I use my index finger)
2. press Space bar, to select the checkbox (I use my thumb)

…no mouse movement or clicking needed!

✌️

Opday

On a medical frontier Adrian Gropper in the AI corner of the New England Journal of Medicine: The Medical AI Assistant as Publication, Not Device — Why Peer-Reviewed, Open-Source AI Belongs in the Standard of Care. From the abstract: "I argue that when a physician publishes a MAIA’s architecture, retrieval methodology, and validation results in a […]

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

Just now, to Claude: "Amazing how we get lost in the weeds, that's why you have cut way down on the verbiage. I am a human -- you can absorb all that info in an instant. My brain does not work that way." We are talking to aliens now, just didn't come to us the way we thought they would. I don't think 2001 anticipated they would think in completely different ways from us, and would not understand the differences. They talk to us as if we were them, the same way your cat thinks you're just a bigger cat.

[$] Development statistics for the 7.1 kernel

Linus Torvalds released
the 7.1 kernel as expected on June 14. This development cycle brought in a lot of new features — and a lot of new developers as well. The time has come for our traditional look at where the changes in 7.1 came from, with a digression into how our community may be changing in general.

2026-05-07 Nein zur SVP Schweiz!

2026-05-07 Nein zur SVP Schweiz!

Die “10 Millionen Schweiz” der SVP ist ein gruseliger Abgrund. Ich will nicht wie in einem Zoo leben, umringt von Heile-Welt-Träumern, die nichts von unseren Nachbarländern wissen wollen, die keinen Respekt vor den Menschenrechten haben.

Wer nicht mehr weiss, wie bescheuert es früher war, soll sich Die Schweizermacher aus dem Jahr 1978 nochmal anschauen. Das ist keine tolle Welt und dahin will man nicht zurück. Dafür schämt man sich und verspricht, bessere Lösungen zu finden.

Die Zukunft ist vorne, nicht in den siebziger Jahren.

Wer sich dabei nichts Schlimmes vorstellen kann, ist zu wenig gereist, hat zu wenig die Augen aufgemacht, hat sich nie in Ausländer verliebt, hat keine Verwandten im Ausland, hat keine Vorfahren, die eingewandert sind, oder hat nicht gehört, wie schlimm es war. Die heile Welt von früher gab es nur für diejenigen, die nicht hingeschaut haben. Diese schöne Welt ist Tourismuswerbung, nicht Realität.

Die Fremdenpolizei von morgen ist das ICE von heute. Schaut nach Amerika und an die europäische Aussengrenze, um zu sehen, wohin der Weg geht. Kinder in Käfigen. Eltern von Kindern getrennt. Die Ausländer, verfolgt, getreten, bespuckt, zurück gestossen, ausgeraubt, ertrunken gelassen. Das ist die Zukunft, die immer näher kommt. Das will man nicht unterstützen.

Wer pflegt uns im Alter, wer erntet unsere Felder, wer reinigt unsere Büros, wer arbeitet für wenig Geld? Die Ausländer. Dass man in der Pflege und bei der Feldarbeit und bei der Reinigung so wenig Geld verdient, ist schon Schande genug für unser Land. Es ist aber eine Illusion, zu glauben, dass alles besser wird, wenn wir Ausländer verjagen und verfolgen. Niemand ist arbeitslos, weil schlecht bezahlte Ausländer ihnen den Job weggenommen haben. Die Arbeitgeber haben die Löhne gedrückt, bis nur noch die schlecht bezahlten Ausländer die Arbeit gemacht haben. Die Fremdenfeindlichkeit erledigt keine Arbeit, sie vertreibt nur die Arbeitswilligen. Dann erledigt halt keiner die Arbeit. Das macht hinten und vorne keinen Sinn. Das ist keine Politik mit Weitsicht.

Wer zahlt für unsere AHV ein, wenn nicht die jungen Leute, die hier arbeiten, inklusive Ausländer? Wenn wir sie vertreiben, wird das Elend im Alter noch schlimmer. Denn eins ist klar, die reichen Schweizer werden die AHV nicht bezahlen! Die Löhne in der Pflege werden nicht steigen. Also müssen die schweizer Frauen mehr Kinder kriegen? Ja wie denn, zahlen die reichen Schweizer wenigstens die Kindertagesstätten? Oder verbieten wir die Abtreibung, zwingen die Frauen zur Austragung, eröffnen mehr Kinderheime? Ausländer vertreiben ist doch kein Plan! Das ist einfach nicht überlegt.

Wenn wir Arbeitskräfte brauchen und Ausländer kommen, dann ist das super! Sie sollen kommen und wir sollten sie einbürgern, damit sie mit entscheiden können. Das ist gerecht. Das ist eine Entscheidung, für die wir uns in dreissig Jahren nicht schämen müssen. Das hat Zukunft.

Das Manifest der @woz gegen die unsägliche 10 Millionen Initiative der SVP unterstütze ich voll und ganz: 10 Millionen Mal Nein.

#Schweiz

2026-06-14. Once again, Switzerland manages to barely stay humane. Like a few journalists I read in recent weeks I am so fucking tired of the xenophobic discussions, the need to defend the humanity of it all. But hey, at least made for another few years. We rejected the 10-Million limit for permanent residents. My wife is sitting in the sofa next to me and scrolling through the results by community – and judging them.

2026-06-15. Wir sind beide im Aargau in der Region Baden aufgewachsen und leben jetzt in Zürich – und es ist schon grausam, wie es ausserhalb der Stadt Zürich und Baden aussieht. Da kann man sich die Gemeinden einzeln anschauen und sich immer wieder schütteln. 🫣

Da ich in der Stadt wohne, finde ich das schwierig zu verstehen. In der Gemeinde, wo ich aufgewachsen bin, waren die Hälfte der Kinder in meiner Klasse Gastarbeiterkinder, also Italiener. Ich gehe davon aus, dass sie sich inzwischen alle haben einbürgern lassen. Ausserdem habe ich nicht den Eindruck, dass die Gegend besonders arm war, oder unter einer Ausländerangst gelitten hat. Also, trotz entsprechenden Vorfahren, trotz langer gemeinsamer Geschichte, trotz materiellem Wohlstand: Zustimmung 52% bis 68% in den Gemeinden, wo ich zur Schule ging: Döttingen, Klingnau, Böttstein, Leuggern. Leibstadt und Mandach bei 72% und 73%. Grausam!

Das passt leider. Oft habe ich das Argument gehört, dass ohne die Ausländer die Pflege, die Reinigung, das Gastgewerbe und was weiss ich noch alles leiden wird. OK, aber Vorsicht mit der Argumentation! Schnell sind einem die Worte dann im Mund umgedreht: Wenn man wirtschaftlich nicht nützlich wäre, dann dürfte man ausgeschafft werden? Deswegen lieber gleich mit der Nächstenliebe argumentieren!

Seit Monaten weiss ich, dass der Abstimmungskampf schlimm werden wird. Ich kenne keine Schweiz ohne solche Kampagnen. Keine Schweiz, in der ich mich nicht für meine blosse Anwesenheit bedanken muss. Keine Schweiz, die mich als ihre Bürgerin sieht. – Willkommen sind wir trotzdem nicht, von Swassthi Sivasanmukanatha Sarma, für Das Lamm

Ein starker Text, der genau hier den Finger drauf hält. Es geht darum, dass Menschen gekommen sind. Menschen. Alles andere ist zweitranging.

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

Now that basketball is over, can we ask why the Spurs played cartoon music to introduce the Knicks. I was surprised they did it again in Game 5 after the butt-kicking they got in Game 4.

Faces of Death: cuando la violencia se vuelve contenido

Dirección: Daniel Goldhaber. Guion:   Daniel Goldhaber, Isa Mazzei. Elenco: Barbie Ferreira, Dacre Montgomery, Josie Totah, Charli XCX, Jermaine Fowler. País: Estados Unidos. Más información de la película: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14619456/ Hubo una época en que las imágenes violentas eran difíciles de encontrar; había que buscarlas. Circulaban en VHS clandestinos, en foros perdidos de internet o en páginas […]

La entrada Faces of Death: cuando la violencia se vuelve contenido se publicó primero en Palomita de maíz.

Pluralistic: AI and amateurism (15 Jun 2026)

Today's links AI and amateurism: When is generative content vernacular? Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Disney characters x clean underwear; Transparent Pontiac; Makers v dog with LED collar; Microsoft buys Linkedin; Legitimate greatness. Upcoming appearances: LA, Menlo Park, Toronto, NYC, Philadelphia, Chicago, Edinburgh, 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. AI and amateurism (permalink) Over the weekend, I did an interview about my forthcoming book The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI (a book about being a better AI critic), and the interviewer said she was surprised that I wasn't an AI booster, based on my demographics and work history: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ I could see where she was coming from. I encountered computers in the mid-seventies, as a small child. My first computer was a CARDIAC, a working, Turing-complete, mechanical computer made entirely of cardboard, that I spent endless hours with: https://www.instructables.com/CARDIAC-CARDboard-Illustrative-Aid-to-Computation-/ Then I graduated to a teletype terminal and acoustic coupler connected to a minicomputer at the University of Toronto. My mom, a kindergarten teacher, used to smuggle home 1,000' rolls of paper towel from the kids' bathroom. I'd get 1,000' feet of computing up one side, then another 1,000' down the other side, then I'd carefully re-roll the paper towel so she could put it back in the bathroom for the kids to dry their hands on. After that, I got an Apple ][+ in 1979, and shortly thereafter acquired a modem, and that was it: I was hooked for life. I became an amateur programmer, then a professional programmer. I hosted forums on dial-up BBSes where I distributed software and offered support to strangers who wanted to connect their computers to the internet. I got a job as a gopher developer, then a web developer, then a CIO-for-hire, helping wire up small businesses and connect them to the net. Eventually, I co-founded a free/open source software startup, before transitioning to 25 years as a digital rights activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And for most of that time, I was energetically writing science fiction, eventually becoming associated with a school sometimes called "post-cyberpunk": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rewired:_The_Post-Cyberpunk_Anthology The force that energized all this work was a dialectical one, the contradiction that powered cyberpunk literature itself. For all that cyberpunk was undeniably enamored with the coolness and combustibility of new technology, it was also terrified of how technology could be a force for oppression, surveillance and control. As William Gibson says, "cyberpunk was a warning, not a suggestion." Gibson's more famous quote, of course, is "the street finds its own use for things." In Gibson's novels (and in my own life in technology) all the most interesting things happen when users of technology (often without formal training or credentials) find ways to adapt the technology they use to suit their needs: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/17/technopolitics/#original-sin This is why I remain an ardent fan of Hypercard, Scratch and other meta-tools that are designed to allow non-programmers to write software that exactly conforms to their desires. Whatever the apps produced by these tools lack in sophistication and efficiency is more than offset by the fact that they give everyday people the power to directly control the tools they rely upon. If "epistemic humility" means anything, it means acknowledging that no amount of "requirements gathering" can capture the needs of people totally unlike yourself as faithfully as those users can capture their own needs. Giving people the tools to produce their own software is always going to make tools – vernacular, idiosyncratic, homespun – that are more suited to their own hands and minds than anything a technologist working on their behalf could make. The ancient dictum of "nothing about us without us" – born in 16th century Poland and taken up by the modern disability rights movement – asserts the right of people to control their own living conditions, and also the unique capacity of people to understand their own needs. You know what's even better than being consulted on the design of the technology you use? Having direct control over that technology! This is why I was so suspicious of the iPad. The iPad's much-lauded "ease of use" was entirely about how easy it was to use an iPad to consume technology. But the iPad remains the single most user-innovation-hostile technology in modern history, a device designed to make it impossible to produce technology without permission from a remorseless multinational corporation. This is cyberpunk as a demand, not a warning: https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/01/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either/ The technology I've championed all my life is technology that gives more control to its users. One of my immutable precepts is that people who are different from me know things I can't know, and the only way I can get the benefit of their unique knowledge and perspective is if they are free to make and share things that matter to them. As Dan Gillmor said, back when he was inventing the study of citizen journalism, "My readers know more than I do": https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/wemedia/book/ch00.pdf And while I am broadly very skeptical of AI, and deeply alarmed by the proliferation of "vibe coded" software in production environments, vibe coding for personal projects is a useful and exciting addition to the lineage of tools that let computer users decide how their computers will work. For people making personal projects, vibe coding extends the power of shell scripting, cron jobs, Applescript, and other desktop automation tools to a wider audience. One of the journalists I spoke to last week about my book described how he had vibe coded an app that showed him an alert every time a plane flew over his house, giving the tail number and other details of the flight. This is information that I have no need for and no interest in, and that I'm therefore excited to learn about, because its very existence affirms that the world is full of people who are delightfully, irreducibly, amazingly different from me, and moreover, that their unique needs can be directly met using their imaginations and their personal computers. I recently sat down with my colleague Naomi Novik, a brilliant author who also co-founded Archive of Our Own. Naomi demoed her followup to AO3 for me: Wreccer, a system to help you find small groups of people with taste similar to your own, in order to facilitate media recommendations within that group – a kind of personal, relationship-driven alternative to massive, centralized, monolithic algorithmic recommendation systems: https://github.com/wreccer Naomi told me that Wreccer was being built using the same design ethos that the original Twitter embraced. When Twitter launched, it was an API first, and the official Twitter front end was built on that API – but anyone could build their own front end for Twitter that worked in the way they wanted it to. Now, the word "anyone" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, because most people don't even know what an API is, and of the people who do, most of them were not capable of writing their own software front end for Twitter. But Wreccer is being designed for the age of vibe coding, and the API will really allow anyone who uses the service to design their own interface to the system, one that elevates and centers the features they find useful and tucks away the ones they're not interested in. Your personal, custom front end could also bring in other data-sources – pulling in your Mastodon messages, for example, or even showing you an alert with the tail-number of any plane flying over your home. This is the part of vibe coding that I'm quite excited about, but it's not the part the industry focuses on. Instead of hearing about how personal, homemade software utilities can be an end unto themselves, we hear about vibe coded projects as prototypes for commercial production code. We hear about clueless bosses vibe coding software products and services that run fine for one user on a siloed desktop computer, and then demanding to know why it takes 50 engineers a year to make the same thing work for millions of users on the public internet. We hear about people who vibe code and submit patches to free/open-source software projects with millions of users, overwhelming project maintainers with slop code that is riddled with security vulnerabilities. Of course, there's an obvious reason why the industry wants to focus on the potential for vibe coded software to replace production code. The AI bubble has burned up $1.4t to date, while bringing in mere tens of billions of dollars per year, even as its unit economics grow steadily worse: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/06/04/ai-is-the-greatest-money-wasting-scheme-humanity-has-ever-i/ To keep the bubble inflated, AI hucksters must promise massive economic returns to the technology. They want investors to believe that vibe code is about to replace working programmers, who are skilled, high-waged, high-demand workers. Their pitch is that for every million dollars' worth of programmers that an AI salesman and a boss conspire to fire, half a million dollars will go to the AI company whose bots shit out that vibe code. That's par for the course with the AI bubble, whose focus is entirely on how AI can centralize, control and homogenize our lives. Whereas early desktop publishing, web publishing and social media gave us a glorious higgledy-piggledy of chaotic, weird and transgressive hobbyist media and retina-searing designs, AI art and design are instantly recognizable at a thousand yards, and it all looks the same, boring, and washed: https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/20/ransom-note-force-field/#antilibraries AI companies have released open weight/open source models that can run on your own computer, but these are treated as side-shows and toys and demos. The real action, we're told, is in "frontier models," which is industry-speak for "a piece of software whose running costs exceed the GDP of most countries": https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/19/now-we-are-six/#stock-buyback Perhaps this is why the dynamics of AI are so different from the early dynamics of the web. Early web users were workers, who demanded that their bosses allow them to use the web and so devolve more power to people doing their jobs. By contrast, today's most ardent AI boosters are bosses, who threaten workers who don't use AI enough in the course of their duties: https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/26/the-ai-will-continue/#until-morale-improves Where we do see idiosyncrasy emerging from AI usage, it's often terrible. AI can help you create a folie-a-un in which you and a chatbot team up to reinforce your delusions and drive you deeper into a world of dangerous mirage: https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/03/mission-space/#gsd There's a (false) story that's told about people who championed the early internet: that we were blithely certain that technology could only be a force for good, and negligently disinterested in the possibility that technology could control, extract and harm. That's demonstrably untrue: recall cyberpunk's dualism of "the street finds its own use for things" and "cyberpunk is a warning, not a suggestion." More true is to say that early internet champions were alive to the importance of the internet, and therefore both excited about the possibilities of the internet to deliver a world of connection, idiosyncrasy, love and solidarity; and about the danger of the internet as a dystopian system of surveillance and manipulation: https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/13/digital-rights/#are-human-rights History isn't finished. Long after the AI bubble pops, there will be local models and people vibe coding homemade software that respond directly to their needs. The stuff we make on our own computers, for ourselves, is deplatformed from its inception. It's part of the life we can build in technology's "shadowy corners" that we used to just call "technology." The fact that this stuff is utterly unsuited to be production code makes it inherently unmonetizable. It's how the street finds its own use for things: https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/23/goodharts-lawbreaker/#no-metrics-no-targets Hey look at this (permalink) Mediocre Fred https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCXc-xC5ms0 Shame On You https://www.change.org/p/an-open-letter-to-the-american-diabetes-association-shame-on-you Keycap Quarry https://keycapquarry.com/shop/ The Threat of Big Insurance https://prospect.org/2026/06/11/threat-of-big-insurance-lobbying-congress-donations/ End Citizens United’s Tiffany Muller on fighting big money in politics https://www.citationneeded.news/end-citizens-uniteds-tiffany-muller-on-fighting-big-money-in-politics/ Object permanence (permalink) #25yrsago Disney characters win right to clean underwear https://web.archive.org/web/20010707023727/https://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2001/06/07/state1339EDT0171.DTL #20yrsago Lampooning the American dismissal of Gitmo suicides https://fafblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/610-changed-everything-run-for-your.html #20yrsago LA’s South Central Farm under police siege right now https://web.archive.org/web/20060616085732/http://www.southcentralfarmers.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=160&Itemid=2 #15yrsago Transparent Pontiac for sale https://web.archive.org/web/20110610113919/http://blog.hemmings.com/index.php/2011/06/07/the-tin-indian-that-wasnt-rm-to-offer-see-through-pontiac/ #15yrsago Pulp Fiction edited down to just the cussing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PcAQbhnGNs #15yrsago New York State to pet cemeteries: no pet owners’ ashes allowed https://web.archive.org/web/20110614133359/https://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/06/11/new-york-tells-pet-cemeteries-to-stop-taking-in-humans/#ixzz1PAZoGS6l #15yrsago A dog with persistence-of-vision LEDs in her shirt writes my novel Makers in the park at night https://web.archive.org/web/20110618011346/https://i.document.m05.de/?p=970 #15yrsago Head of UN copyright agency says fair use is a “negative agenda,” wants to get rid of discussions on rights for blind people and go back to giving privileges to giant companies https://memex.craphound.com/2011/06/14/head-of-un-copyright-agency-says-fair-use-is-a-negative-agenda-wants-to-get-rid-of-discussions-on-rights-for-blind-people-and-go-back-to-giving-privileges-to-giant-companies/ #10yrsago Air Force loses access to database tracking fraud investigations to 2004 https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/database-corruption-erases-100000-air-force-investigation-records/ #10yrsago Peter Thiel’s lawyer threatens Gawker for talking about Donald Trump’s “hair” https://web.archive.org/web/20160615022004/https://gawker.com/now-peter-thiels-lawyer-wants-to-silence-reporting-on-t-1781918385 #10yrsago Samantha Bee on Orlando shooting: angry and uncompromising https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t88X1pYQu-I #10yrsago Goldman Sachs bribed Libyan officials with sex workers, private jet rides, then lost all their money https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jun/13/goldman-sachs-hired-prostitutes-to-win-libyan-business-court-told #10yrsago Net Neutrality Wins: Federal Court Upholds FCC Open Internet Rules https://www.techdirt.com/2016/06/14/cable-industry-proclaims-more-competition-hurts-consumers-damages-economic-efficiency/ #10yrsago Microsoft will buy Linkedin for $26.2B https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/microsoft-will-acquire-linkedin-for-18-5b/ #10yrsago Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony Awards sonnet for the Orlando shooting victims https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/see-lin-manuel-mirandas-stirring-tribute-to-orlando-victims-103131/ #10yrsago China’s online astroturf is mostly produced by government workers as “extra duty” https://web.archive.org/web/20160613194153/http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/red-astroturf-chinese-government-makes-millions-of-fake-social-media-posts/ #10yrsago Rio: your quadrennial reminder that the Olympics colonize host-states with Orwellian surveillance and human rights abuses https://web.archive.org/web/20160614122124/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-olympics-are-turning-rio-into-a-military-state #5yrsago A Monopoly Isn’t the Same as Legitimate Greatness https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/13/a-monopoly-isnt-the-same-as-legitimate-greatness/ Upcoming appearances (permalink) Virtual: The future of world governance, with Kim Stanley Robinson (UN Independent Expert on International Order), Jun 19 https://www.youtube.com/live/wJvBvYdaAMY LA: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Brian Merchant (Skylight Books), Jun 19 https://www.skylightbooks.com/event/skylight-cory-doctorow-presents-reverse-centaurs-guide-life-after-ai-w-brian-merchant Menlo Park: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Angie Coiro (Kepler's), Jun 21 https://www.keplers.org/upcoming-events-internal/cory-doctorow-2026 Toronto: The Sovereignty Debate (IAB Canada's State of the Nation), Jun 23 https://iabcanada.com/state-of-the-nation-2026 Toronto: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI (Osler Records/Type Books), Jun 23 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-book-launch-and-talk-tickets-1991501299998 NYC: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Jonathan Coulton (The Strand), Jun 24 https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html Philadelphia: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with David Williams (Fitler Club/Philadelphia Citizen), Jun 25 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-book-event-tickets-1990110326559 Chicago: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Rick Perlstein (Exile in Bookville), Jun 26 https://exileinbookville.com/events/50628 Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17 https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ Recent appearances (permalink) The Enshittification of Life, the Universe, & Everything (Luke Savage) https://www.lukewsavage.com/p/the-enshittification-of-life-the Cory Doctorow's digital jail-break (DW In Focus) https://www.dw.com/en/cory-doctorows-digital-jail-break/audio-77414035 Why the Internet Got Worse and What to Do About It (Jim Rutt) (RIP) https://www.jimruttshow.com/cory-doctorow-3/ On Enshittification – and what can be done about it (Re:publica) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhINQgPMVSI EFFecting Change: How to Disenshittify the Internet (EFF, with Wendy Liu) https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-enshittification Latest books (permalink) "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 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/) "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "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 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "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. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor. "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE. "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING. 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

Case by Case: CLF is Challenging Trump in Court

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.

Paul McCartney And Groceries

Writing of lasting value

Trump Plays UFC Tough To Mask His Capitulation To Iran, Weakening Of America, Declining Health, And Sagging Political Fortunes

Morning all.

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

An example of the latest version of the library generator, which is of course just a script. Note that there's a disclosure at the bottom of the page where it says how and why it was created, and then lists the exact prompt that ChatGPT responded to. And I didn't write the prompt, Claude did. I think that pretty much assures I kept my own opinion to myself.

The Formerlies

This Knicks NBA championship run is the greatest of all time. Reasons:

What 'RSS feeds' means

Often when I use the term RSS feeds it will link to this page.

In the coming weeks and months I'm going to talk a lot about RSS feeds. I want to be clear, that it is a short hand for RSS, Atom and RDF. It makes the writing flow better, and it gives me a place to provide the technical details for people who need them.

We use the Feedparser package to read the feeds, so basically we support the same feed formats they do.

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

I'm creating a new way to do messaging, a network that only understands RSS feeds for incoming and outgoing messages. The only API you'll need to subscribe is a feed reader. The idea is to show developers how to do it so a thousand flowers can bloom. It's a lot easier to create these things if you're modest in the features you support, at least at first, and you don't try to control the users. There is no business model here, other than the satisfaction of making sure everyone knows what a social system looks like made only out of features of the web, and every part replaceable.

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

Request for Claude, please add a close box to this message box. I wasn't using the new model. Once is enough for this message.

Memphis and the Price of Someone Else’s Future

Smart Ruminations | Dani Smart

The Floor They Started From: The Class Machinery Behind the Data Center Economy

Smart Ruminations | Dani Smart | Part Two of Two

Stenberg: curl summer of bliss

Daniel Stenberg has announced that curl will not be accepting vulnerability reports from July 1 through August 3, unless the submitter has a paid support contract. He is calling it the "curl summer of bliss".

As previously mentioned, we have been under a huge pressure for the last four months or so. Now we need some rest. We do not expect this deluge to be over.

[...] If you and your Open Source projects also want to participate in the summer of bliss 2026: just do it and let us know! I would of course encourage you to do so. To take care of yourself as a top priority.

The project's issue and pull-request trackers on GitHub will remain open. The planned release date for curl 8.22.0 has been pushed back two weeks to September 2, 2026.

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

Good morning sports fans! Going to the Knicks parade in NYC on Thurs? Starts at 10AM at Battery Park, goes up Broadway through Canyon of Heroes, concluding at City Hall.

See David Hockney’s odd and lovely illustrations for his favorite Brothers Grimm fairy tales.

The beloved British artist David Hockney, who died last week at the age of 88, is celebrated for his vibrant paintings, his innovative techniques, and his joyful kookiness. He also, like many visionaries and other people who know what’s good

Security updates for Monday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 9.0), Debian (apache2, chromium, jpeg-xl, librabbitmq, and openssl), Fedora (apptainer, bind9-next, chezmoi, chromium, collectd, composer, dnsdist, gh, python-django5, python-python-multipart, varnish, varnish-modules, vmod-querystring, vmod-uuid, weasyprint, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Mageia (cups, expat, libpng, libssh, memcached, nghttp2, openimageio, packages, proftpd, and radare2), Oracle (.NET 10.0, .NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, and firefox), Red Hat (postfix and valkey), and SUSE (afl, alloy, ansible-core, apache-pdfbox, chromedriver, chromium, cpp-httplib-devel, dpkg, elemental-operator, elemental-toolkit, enc, erlang, ffmpeg-7, firewalld, git-bug, golang-github-prometheus-prometheus, grafana, GraphicsMagick, graphite2, kernel, kernel-devel, lcms2, ldns, libsoup, libyang, libzypp, logback, mariadb, NetworkManager, openssh, openvswitch, perl-GD, perl-XML-LibXML, polkit, postgresql-jdbc, postgresql18, python, python-django, python-M2Crypto-doc, python-Pygments, python-pygments, python-requests, python313-Django6, qemu, rpcbind, samba, strongswan, tmux, uriparser, and xdg-dbus-proxy).

Billy Crystal Sets Opening Date, Venue For Broadway Solo Show ‘860’

Billy Crystal’s new one-man show 860, directed by Scott Ellis (Fallen Angels, Art), will begin a limited 14-week Broadway engagement at the Imperial Theatre on Thursday, October 1, officially open on Wednesday, October 21, and run through Sunday, January 3, 2027. The complete creative team for the previously announced production will be announced in the […]

@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal

Export Updates 2026-06-15:

Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places

2 new and 121 updated place resources. 315 updated sidebar link sets.

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

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

"main" branch:

66686e78 - updated json

80cbbc0e - updated rdf/ttl

5366a597 - updated gis package

01c15985 - updated data quality

db873460 - updated bibliography

3413fdd3 - updated indexes

1c73c4c5 - updated sidebar

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

025744d8 - updated geojson and names index

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

cad8e1ca - updated pleiades wikidata

HLD Talent Signs Presenter, Creator & Reality Star Mariam Musa

EXCLUSIVE: Presenter, creator and social media star Mariam Musa has signed with HLD Talent. Untold: The Secrets of a TikTok Shop presenter Musa, who has sizable followings on social media and won the 2018 Love Island reality spin-off Survival of the Fittest, was previously with Insanity. Musa has built a community of followers through her […]

Manchester United To Be Subject Of Amazon’s Next ‘All Or Nothing’ Documentary Series

The next installment of Amazon Prime Video’s sports documentary franchise, All or Nothing, will follow Manchester United throughout the 2026/27 Premier League season and debut next summer.  Amazon announced the series this afternoon. The series synopsis reads: “All or Nothing cameras will follow Manchester United through a transformative summer, as the Red Devils prepare to […]

Fox Corp Buying Roku In $22B Deal

Fox Corp just unveiled a $22B deal to acquire connected TV service Roku, considerably boosting its streaming capabilities. The agreement will see Fox acquire Roku for $160 a share through a combination of cash and Fox Class A stock. This gives Roku an enterprise valuation of $22B. Upon closing, Fox shareholders will own about 73% […]

How the Rest of the World Sees America (Through the Eyes of Its Writers)

I’ve spent much of my career reporting outside the United States, but in recent years, many of my interviews have ended the same way: with questions to me about what is happening at home. The world is watching the changing

Crescendo

What happened in Santiago, the matter that began my great downfall, the rupture in my previously hallowed existence, was this: I played the concert of my lifetime. A statement that might sound foolish, grandiose, ridiculous, I know, but consider this.

Rogue Scholar launched author profiles this week

The science blogging archive Rogue Scholar launched a new feature this week: author profile pages. This feature is similar to functionality common to blogging platforms, but integrates all blog posts by a given author that were archived in Rogue Scholar.

The functionality depends on an ORCID assigned to the blog

Your Maker Monday projects

If you take a look across social media today using #MakerMonday, you'll find some weird, wonderful nerdy projects

The post Your Maker Monday projects appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Susanne Daniels Says YouTube Didn’t Know What To Do With ‘Cobra Kai,’ But Predicts It Will Return To Originals

YouTube will pivot back to original content according to former exec Susanne Daniels. She spearheaded the platform’s stunted move into original fare with the likes of Cobra Kai, before exiting the Google-owned platform in 2022 when it moved away from having its own programming. But the veteran exec and YouTube alum said she anticipates a […]

Undiscovered Country: The 100th Anniversary of Virgina Woolf’s “On Being Ill”

I was lying in my attic bedroom reading a book, when my husband came up to speak with me. I wriggled over to make room for him and heard a muffled sound like a wet branch snapping. As I stood

The Ultimate Summer 2026 Reading List

It’s been an uneasy start to summer. Ticks are legion. The weather is unpredictable. The Iran war drags ludicrously on. Inflation is rising faster than ever. SpaceX, Anthropic, and Open A.I. are about to go public, which will cause .

The FCC Wants to Eliminate Burner Phones

A proposed FCC rule would kill burner phones: phones whose accounts are not attached to a particular person.

The FCC plans to do this by legally forcing the country’s telecoms to store a wealth of personal information about essentially all phone customers, including a government issued identification number and their physical address, alarming privacy advocates and civil rights activists who compare the measures to those from authoritarian countries where it can be difficult to buy a mobile phone plan without giving up your identity.

The proposed change would drastically shake up how people obtain phone plans in the U.S., and have all sorts of privacy and cybersecurity knock-on effects. The FCC is proposing the data collection partly as a way to combat scammers, with telecoms being required to collect other information on business and foreign customers like the intended use case of their bulk phone plan purchase and their IP address. But the changes would mean telecoms collect data on all new and renewing customers, and the FCC provides a long list of other things that the collected data could help authorities with...

What is LPE? An ALPE Lightning Round

What is LPE? Is it a reaction to law and economics? Does it have a method? What is its normative north star? At this year's ALPE conference, Amy Kapczynski, Corinne Blalock, Aslı Bâli, Sabeel Rahman, Angela Harris, and Yochai Benkler offered their best answers to these questions in two sentences or less.

Conscious or Not

For as long as I remember, people have been arguing about whether machines could be intelligent or not. Many science fiction authors and fans — like myself — felt it was inevitable, only a matter of time. However there were … Continue reading →

Roger Cook Dies: Legendary Investigative Journalist From ‘The Cook Report’ Was 83

Roger Cook, the British broadcast journalist credited with creating the ‘doorstep’ interview technique, has died after a short illness. He was 83. The death of the trailblazing investigative reporter was confirmed by his family. “Alongside a distinguished and award winning career in journalism, Roger was first and foremost a beloved husband and father,” the statement […]

Meet the New Bosses, Worse Than the Old Bosses

The second Gilded Age is much uglier than the first

Lit Hub Daily: June 15, 2026

Emily Temple reads every summer reading list (so you don’t have to). | Lit Hub Reading Lists Everything you didn’t think you needed to know about how squids have sex. | Lit Hub Nature Darcey Steinke on chronic pain, loneliness,

The US under Trump is a global scourge

We're the baddies.

MS NOW To Feature Sit Down With Barack Obama As Part Of Special Coverage Of Opening Of Former President’s New Center In Chicago

MS NOW is going all in on the opening this week of the Obama Presidential Center, with a sit-down interview with former President Barack Obama and a conversation with former First Lady Michelle Obama. The network will show a two hour special on Friday, Hope Comes Home: Inside the Obama Presidential Center, at 9 p.m. ET. It […]

Trump Turns Eighty But Claims He Has Brain of Four-year-old

Doctors at his last exam told him that his cognition had scored at a four-year-old level, he said.

How building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

This is a great case study featuring a really useful HTML web component called validation-enhancer.

The results? When we launched, the number of people completing the form doubled. The analytics people didn’t even know where these users were coming from. Of course, your javascript-based analytics package doesn’t see the users you are bouncing because of javascript failures. It was a flood!

adactio.com/links/22612

Speaking in Dublin

I’m giving a talk this week.

Usually this wouldn’t be a big deal. I’ve been giving talks for over twenty years now. But this one is different.

I’m going to speaking at Na Píobairí Uilleann, the Society of Uilleann Pipers, in Dublin. They have a monthly series of lectures called Notes and Narratives all about Irish music, and they’ve asked me to deliver this month’s talk.

So this will not be my usual audience. I will be talking about a website, The Session, but I won’t be talking about the technology. There won’t be any mention of HTML, CSS, or JavaScript. Instead I’ll be talking about the origins of the site and how it—and its community—has evolved over time.

Oh, and at these Notes and Narratives talks, they also want some music interspersed to illustrate the points. So that’s something a bit different to my usual tech talks.

I’m not going to lie, I’m kind of nervous about this one. But I’m also excited. I’m genuinely honoured to be able to give a talk at such a fine institution.

I’m speaking on Thursday, June 18th at 8:30pm at the headquarters of Na Píobairí Uilleann, which is 15 Henrietta Street in Dublin. Doors open at 8pm. If you want to come along, tickets are €10/€5. The talk will also be streamed live online.

Wish me luck!

Uncloud Unpush

Unpush is an experimental attempt to write automatic CI/CD in Uncloud, it either works via web hooks or polls a repository for changes. When seen it redeploys a service via itscompose.yaml file from the repository.

Now of course this works for GitHub, but we have GitLab and it reimplements a bunch of code from uncloud, which can all be removed if you just use the uc-tool.

I will probably butcher the code quite a bit, so seems fair to push this to a different repository at some point.

‘Filthy’ Cleans Up At Sheffield DocFest: Full Winners List From UK’s Top Nonfiction Film Festival

Sheffield Docfest, the UK’s leading nonfiction film festival, wraps up today after presenting awards for its 33rd edition. Filthy (Sucia – Per què no vas fer res?), directed by Bàrbara Mestanza and Marc Pujolar, won the Grand Jury Prize in International Competition Sunday night, automatically qualifying the film for Oscar consideration. The documentary centers on […]

American Patriotism Has Always Privileged the Hopes of the Future Over the Sins of the Present

In June 1826, Thomas Jefferson penned his last-ever letter, an essay on the American project. He had been invited to attend a celebration in Washington, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of American independence, and he politely sent his regrets. Sickness

Stacey Yu Recommends Books About Cats (and Their Owners)

Joy Williams wrote that one of eight essential attributes of the short story is “An animal within to give its blessing.” When I first came upon this wisdom, I was on the seventh draft of my debut novel Kitten, about

This Week in Literary History: Dante Alighieri is Named Prior of Florence

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Literary History newsletter—sign up here. On June 15, 1300, the poet Dante Alighieri was named one of the six priors that formed the Signoria of Florence, the city’s highest office. Dante was a member of the

A Place For Me: Navigating My Blackness Through Film and Print

At one point, I am certain it was grand. That’s not how I met the Castle Theater in the 1980s, its opulence long gone. You could pay four dollars and see as many movies as you wanted. There were two

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Rebuilding Instagram in 2026.

The Age of the Super A*sholes

Trump and Musk are dominating our economy and our politics, which tells us something about the era we're living through

UK Brings In Full Social Media Ban For Under-16s

Numerous social media apps will be banned for under-16s in the UK after Prime Minister Keir Starmer introduced landmark legislation and a promise to deliver “world leading action.” The likes of X, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok will become unavailable to teenagers in the nation, following the lead of Australia, which introduced a full ban late […]

Video: Join the LibreOffice community!

LibreOffice is the free, private, open source office suite – and successor to OpenOffice. It’s made by a worldwide community, and you can be part of it! 😊 Boost your skillset, learn new people, and have fun – find out what you can do for LibreOffice. (This video is also

curl summer of bliss

The curl project will not accept or otherwise handle any vulnerability reports during the month of July 2026. We call it the curl summer of bliss. curl’s submission form on Hackerone will be paused starting July 1, 2026. Summer of bliss starts: July 1, 2026. 00:00 CEST Submissions resume: August 3 2026. 09:00 CEST The … Continue reading curl summer of bliss→

June 14, 2026

On June 14, 1775, the Second Continental Congress resolved “[t]hat six companies of expert riflemen, be immediately raised in Pennsylvania, two in Maryland, and two in Virginia; that each company consist of a captain, three lieutenants, four serjeants, four corporals, a drummer or trumpeter, and sixty-eight privates…[and that] each company, as soon as completed, shall march and join the army near Boston, to be there employed as light infantry, under the command of the chief Officer in that army.”

ReelShort & Korea’s Showbox Sign Co-production Deal To Develop Original Short-Form Dramas

Microdrama platform ReelShort and Korean studio Showbox have entered into a content co-production agreement to develop and produce original short-form dramas for global audiences. Under the terms of the deal, Showbox will co-produce short-form dramas based on ReelShort’s popular IPs, with plans to expand the partnership to include original short-form content developed by Showbox.  Content […]

What Detransition Taught Me About Identity

Alexander Linkowski on his detransition journey, informed consent, and the illusion of self

The Non-Victory

Compared to where we were before February 28, it's a terrible failure

Jane Fonda Attacks Paramount-WBD Merger At Protest Event – “I Have A Personal Stake In CNN, I Don’t Want To See It Go That Way”

Jane Fonda, who was married to the late CNN founder Ted Turner, urged the audience at a live event in New York City to “sign a petition to tell your state attorneys general to block the Paramount Warner Brothers merger. This is a direct attack on free speech, freedom of expression.” “You’re going to get […]

UFC Fighter Shouts “Michelle Obama Is A Man” After Winning Bout At White House

UPDATE, 8:35 p.m. PT: One UFC fighter surprised the crowd at the White House, shouting “Michelle Obama is a man, am I right America.” Josh Hokit had just defeated Derrick Lewis in the fourth bout. He made the remarks in his post-match interview in the ring conducted by Joe Rogan. He also presented Donald Trump […]

Sunday caption contest: Celebration?

And last week's winner

Dale Biagio - Hello, World!

Dale Biagio(author of Hello, World!) got in touch with me recently. He said he had a book full of short histories of programming languages. Better still, it has sources! How could I resist! In this episode I sit down with Dale to talk about the intersection of technical and human histories.

You can find more about Hello, World! at Dale's website:

https://helloworldthebook.com/

Shunday

Other laws may apply I started to write something here, but turned it in to a whole post on its own: Customer Service Sample of One. In response to that, Don Marti pointed to Skylabs Audio and its YouTube channel. As it happens I was an audiophile many decades ago. Worked weekends at an audio salon […]

Monday 15 June, 2026

My newspaper rightly pulled out all the stops to celebrate David Hockney — and to mourn his loss. He was a ‘national treasure’ in the same league as David Attenborough and Alan Bennett Quote of the Day ”You will know … Continue reading →

Customer Service Sample of One

Our Samsung TV* and our Samsung soundbar/woofer no longer connect over bluetooth. Well, they do connect—both displays say they are connected—but the TV only plays through its own speakers. I called Samsung for help with this, but the phone maze robot said only texts would work at that time. Here’s the text monologue from Samsung: […]

Sunday caption contest

Delayed today because I’m out doing errands.

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

New top of page image. The official Knicks team picture as champs.

Week Three in 250 to 250

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

The 7.1 kernel has been released

Linus has released the 7.1 kernel. "So it's only Sunday morning back home, but it's Sunday afternoon where I am right now, so I'm doing the 7.1 release at the regular time - just not in the regular timezone."

Significant changes in 7.1 include the removal of support for some old 486-based architectures, some new clone() flags making process management easier,BPF support for io_uring, zero-copy-I/O support for the ublk user-space block driver, initial (incomplete) sub-scheduler support in sched_ext, more swapping improvements, a completely rewritten NTFS
implementation, and much more. See the LWN merge-window summaries ( part 1, part 2) for details.

Our Wins Of The Week

Friday, June 12, was the court-ordered deadline to remove Donald Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center.

What Washington must do

”The only way out is through”

I Wrestled for 10 Years. Here’s How I Know Trump’s Not Going to Enjoy His UFC Birthday Party

The irony of a man who’s never earned a win watching people who can’t fake one.

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:

• I’m giving a keynote at Cybernation 2026 in Berlin, Germany, on June 24, 2026.
• I’m speaking at the Potsdam Conference on National Cybersecurity at the Hasso Plattner Institut in Potsdam, Germany. The event runs June 24–25, 2026, and my talk will be the evening of June 24.
• I’m participating in a panel discussion at the Austrian Institute for International Affairs in Vienna on Thursday, June 25, 2026.
• I’m speaking at the Digital Humanism Conference in Vienna, Austria, on Friday, June 26, 2026...

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Super-rich’s assets cause outsized amount of climate harm, study says.

The Knicks Triumph And Inspire While Trump Desecrates And Betrays

Congrats to all Knicks fans. This a team for the ages........

@Barack Obama @Bsky

Our MBK Alliance Ambassadors are examples of the outstanding young people we’ve been proud to support at the @obamafoundation.bsky.social over the years. We hope the Obama Presidential Center inspires even more.

‘The Bold And The Beautiful’ Producer Bradley Bell & Son Oliver Bell Prep ‘Hollywood Starlet’ Season 2 Ahead Of Series Debut

The Bold And The Beautiful’s Bradley Bell is prepping Season 2 of microdrama Hollywood Starlet before the freshman Season has launched. Hollywood Starlet will launch on aTwist, the microdrama studio and platform founded by Jana Winograde, Susan Rovner and Lloyd Braun. The series is being produced by Bell and his son Oliver, through their Red […]

The Kennedy Center

A Reason To Smile

Guest Newsletter: Five Books - Women's Prize And World War 2

Five Books features in-depth author interviews recommending five books on a theme

The One Founding Father Who Would Have Been Into This UFC Fight Thing

TBR Sunday Read

Technology and Social Change

Rising GDP isn’t the whole story

‘Cross’ Creator Says Prime Video Drama “Can Go Forever” As Season 3 Explores Alex Cross’ Addiction To The Hunt

Season 3 of Cross is in production and creator and showrunner Ben Watkins revealed that the next chapter of the Prime Video drama will explore addiction through the lens of Alex Cross’ relentless pursuit of justice. “We need to see this character confronting a different challenge about himself and the people around him, and in […]

Sunday Thought: The Horrifying Truth About Trump's Cage Match

What Trump and his "manosphere" are trying to tell us with their public displays of testosterone

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

BTW the Gift Articles feed works really nicely in the blogroll.

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

And thanks to the Knicks for being such a great team. Never ever in a million years did I imagine saying that. More proof that you never know what's coming. Even the most unlikely and inconceivable events happen. Being realistic sometimes isn't the right way to think.

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

One thing I want to know -- where do I tune in to get the most of Clyde talking about this series.

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

People keep saying the Spurs are the future of the NBA, but they didn't earn that this year. More probably it's the Knicks that are the future. The Knicks will keep growing. The Knicks beat the Spurs in the last two games by playing rope-a-dope, probably not intentionally, but it worked anyway. The Spurs, and Wemby especially, were completely zonked by the fourth quarter of both games. The Knicks had a bench this year that let the starters get plenty of rest. The Spurs lost game four because they didn't rest Wemby while they were up by 20+ points. Anyway, the Knicks have a formula. Pick players with heart potential and talent, treat them like a team, keep trying out new ideas, approaches. It works. Won the NY Knicks the championship this year. As anticipated I have no idea what to make of the Knicks as winner. I'll have to learn too. ;-)

June 13, 2026

Those of you celebrating the Knicks’ victory in the NBA Championship should enjoy yourselves and leave this one for later.

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

Today's song: I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City.

Bookmarks - data, design, vis, book

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

🔖 When Bits Rot - with C McKean, L Talboom, A Page-Mitchell

English Edition: floppy disks, hard drives, CDs, DVDs, SSD drives - no matter what you choose to store your data on - ultimately they all decay. With my guests Callum McKean, Leontien Talboom and Adrian Page-Mitchell, we’re going to talk about what kinds of data we find on old drives, why we want to get them in the first place, and what can go wrong with the storage media. To all of you who love all things retro - we’ll be talking about floppy disks a bit.

data disk preservation

🔖 series: learning-rust (10 parts)

• Learn Rust Basics By Building a Brainfuck Interpreter

• Learn Rust Ownership and Borrowing By Building Mini Grep

• Build a JSON Parser in Rust from Scratch

• Learn Error Handling in Rust By Building a TOML Config Parser

• Learn Rust Generics and Traits By Building a Mini Blackjack Game

• Learn Rust Lifetimes by Building a Generic LRU Cache

• Learn Rust HashMap and Iterators by Building a Git Object Store Reader

• Learn Rust Closures By Building a Tiny Rule-Based Linter *Learn Rust Smart Pointers and Interior Mutability by Building Git Commit Graph Viewer

• Learn Rust Concurrency By Building a Thread Pool

programming rust

🔖 Porting our Django backend to Rust improved the infra usage by 90%

We went from using 220 CPUs and 800 GB of ram to just 24 CPUs and 64 GB. Thus, way less money, less things to maintain.

The number of open DB connections at any point in time have improved quite a bit, from the thousands to hundreds (about ~3-5x reduction).

The good news is that we haven’t even added caching to the Rust backend yet, and query timings are already 5-10 times faster.

🔖 Atomic Books

An independent bookstore in Baltimore, MD focusing on indie comics and small press.

baltimore book shopping

🔖 How to Build an Agentic RAG with RubyLLM and Rails

I run a RAG application for Italian pension and tax consultants. Users ask questions about INPS, professional pension funds, laws and regulations, and the app answers using a knowledge base of uploaded documents.

For a long time the app used the classic single-shot RAG pipeline: take the question, search the database, stuff the results into a system prompt, ask the model. It works, but it has a hard limit: the retrieval happens once, before the model has any chance to reason about the question. If the first search misses, the answer is bad and there is nothing the model can do about it.

So I rebuilt the pipeline as an agent. Now the model drives the retrieval itself: it decides what to search, reads the results, searches again with different terms, follows cross references between documents, and only then writes the answer. All in plain Ruby, with RubyLLM and Rails. No LangChain, no Python sidecar.

In this article I will show you exactly how it works, with the real code from my application. One note before we start: since the app serves Italian consultants, all the prompts, tool descriptions and user-facing strings are in Italian in the real codebase. I translated them to English here so you can follow along, but the structure is identical.

llm ruby

🔖 Zooming Out: Can We Integrate IIIF and Wikimedia?

Wikimedia and GLAM institutions share a challenge. How do we make cultural heritage collections accessible at scale without sacrificing quality, provenance, sustainability, or community control? The International Image Interoperability Framework, IIIF, is now used by thousands of institutions to serve high-resolution media through open standards. Wikimedia does not currently integrate IIIF in its core architecture. Should it?

data iiif linkeddata wikipedia

🔖 Ted Nelson Media Center

An ever-growing list of papers and videos by Theodor Holm Nelson (THN)

computing history hypermedia tednelson

🔖 5 things to know about the Eastern Silver Spring Communities Plan

Since 2023, Montgomery Planning staff have been working on the Eastern Silver Spring Communities Plan, drafting recommendations on zoning and land use, transportation, housing, parks and the environment, economic development and urban design. The plan is expected to set a vision for the area’s future development for decades to come. The plan is bordered by Colesville Road, University Boulevard and New Hampshire Avenue and will include three future Purple Line stations, the Piney Branch Road, Long Branch and Manchester Place

silverspring

🔖 Tell people the main ideas

A good reminder about the ergonomics of reading and presenting information. Remind me of Christopher Alexander’s

comic design reading vis writing

🔖 What Design Can’t Do

Design is broken. Young and not-so-young designers are becoming increasingly aware of this. Many feel impotent: they were told they had the tools to make the world a better place, but instead the world takes its toll on them. Beyond a haze of hype and bold claims lies a barren land of self-doubt and impostor syndrome. Although these ‘feels’ might be the Millennial norm, design culture reinforces them. In conferences we learn that “with great power comes great responsibility” but, when it comes to real-life clients, all they ask is to “make the logo bigger.”

book criticism design

🔖 Gemini 3 Solves Handwriting Recognition and it’s a Bitter Lesson

On our strictest tests, Gemini 3 achieved a CER of 1.67% and a WER of 4.42%. On these tests, any difference between the ground truth and test texts counts as an error. WER is thus almost always a bit more than double the CER because if a single character in a word is wrong, including leading or trailing punctuation like commas, single quotes vs double quotes, etc, the whole word is marked as an error. On this measure, Gemini 3 performs nearly 50% better than the best, fine-tuned specialized models and achieved performance comparable to an early career, professional human typist.

google handwriting llm ocr

🔖 FacilMap

FacilMap is a privacy-friendly, open-source versatile online map that combines different services based on OpenStreetMap. FacilMap offers the following features:

• Show different map styles, for example maps optimized for driving, cycling, hiking or showing the topography or public transportation networks.

• Search for places

• Show amenities and POIs

• Calculate a route, optionally showing the elevation profile.

• Find out what is at a particular point on the map

• Open geographic files, for example GPX, KML or GeoJSON files

• Show your location on the map

• Share a link to a particular view of the map.

• Add FacilMap as an app to your device.

• Change the language settings in the user preferences.

• FacilMap is privacy-friendly and does not track you

map opensource openstreetmap tool

🔖 Vector Search, Visualised

SQL makes sense. But when it breaks, you reach for EXPLAIN. Vector search offers no such comfort. Multi-thousand-dimension embeddings, approximate nearest-neighbour indexes, and quantisation tradeoffs make it hard to know what your system is doing, and harder still to diagnose when results quietly degrade. Through interactive visualisations, Simon Hearne shows what embeddings look like in high-dimensional space, what quantisation does to your recall, and how to catch retrieval failures before your agents do. You’ll leave with a sharper mental model and a diagnostic toolkit for the production problems hardest to see.

database search vector vis

🔖 Using the Screen Capture API to record a browser window

Once again I am reminded that modern web tech is amazing, and web browsers are incredibly capable.

There’s a Screen Capture API to record the screen. You can select a tab, a window, or the entire screen. The feature has limited browser support so I don’t think I’d use it in a big web app, but it’s fine for a one-off screen recording. (I wonder how browser-based video conference apps like Google Meet do screen sharing? Do they use this API, or do they use something with wider support?)

javascript video webarchive

Jalen Brunson Leads New York Knicks To First NBA Championship In More Than 50 Years

Start spreading the news… The New York Knicks are NBA champions for the first time in 53 years. After scoring just 37 points in the first half of the game, New York ground the San Antonio Spurs down in the second half with tough defense and timely baskets. That effort was led by Knicks point […]

@Dave Winer's linkblog

NBA Finals refs miss flagrant foul on Victor Wembanyama, and he’ll be suspended if it’s upgraded.

Seth Rogen Maintains He Has “No Plans” To Work With James Franco Again: “Nothing Has Changed”

Once frequent collaborators, Seth Rogen doesn’t see an onscreen reunion with James Franco in his future. The 2x Golden Globe winner recently said he hasn’t spoken to Franco “in a long time” and has “no plans” to work with the actor, who has been mounting an onscreen comeback after he was accused of sexual misconduct […]

‘Widow’s Bay’ Creator Recalls How Series Began As ‘Parks & Rec’ Episode: “Felt More Like A Spoof”

As fans become consumed with the horrors of Widow’s Bay, there’s a version of the show that took place in Pawnee, Indiana. Series creator Katie Dippold recently told Deadline how her new Apple TV+ series was originally a spec script for an episode of NBC’s Parks and Recreation (2009-2015), on which she was a writer […]

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

JY Stervinou proposed Universal Mentions, an interesting new low-tech web-like protocol for mentioning people, places or things via link elements in the head section of any HTML file you want to use as your personal directory. It's an intriguing idea. ChatGPT review, after a few questions. Both JY and ChatGPT use the term "open web" which to me has become a red flag. The web is open. No need to say it twice. There's no such thing as a web element that's not open. It's like saying wet water.

Laverne Cox Says She’s “Lost So Much Money” Since Trump Admin Killed DEI

Nearly two years into Trump’s second term, Laverne Cox is feeling the administration’s impact on her wallet as a Black trans woman. The Emmy winner recently explained that she’s “lost so much money” now that brands are “very scared” to work with her after the White House’s ongoing destruction of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) […]

Bruce Springsteen Honored At Tribeca Festival, Rocks Out With Bono, Patti Smith In ‘People Have The Power’

Bruce Springsteen brought a taste of his Land of Hopes And Dreams Tour to downtown Manhattan Saturday, hitting the Tribeca Festival to accept the Harry Belafonte Voices For Social Justice Award that he dedicated to “all the citizens of Minneapolis and Los Angeles and Portland who stood against the federal invasion of their cities this […]

‘Cape Fear’ Series Creator “Always Wanted” Juliette Lewis To Star In Reboot

SPOILERS: This post contains details about the Cape Fear episode ‘Phantom Sensations‘ With a nod to the source material’s previous adaptation, this week’s episode of Cape Fear was a long time coming for creator Nick Antosca. The Apple TV+ series showrunner recently noted that he “always wanted” Juliette Lewis to join the cast after she […]

Mexico Vs. South Africa Match Breaks Record For Most-Watched Fifa World Cup Opening Game

The 2026 Fifa World Cup just kicked off on Thursday, but the global soccer event has already punted past viewership records. The opening game, a 2-0 matchup between Mexico and South Africa, has become the most-watched World Cup opening game, regardless of language, delivering 12.1 million viewers across NBCUniversal’s Telemundo, Peacock and Telemundo streaming platforms, […]

State AGs must stop the Paramount-Warner Bros deal, to protect CNN from Trump

Here's how you can help

300 racists came to Brighton today looking to cause trouble. 4000 Brightonians sent ’em packing. With a ratio like that, all you fascists bound to lose.

300 racists came to Brighton today looking to cause trouble.

4000 Brightonians sent ’em packing.

With a ratio like that, all you fascists bound to lose.

The Midterms in a Nutshell, as of June 13

What we must do over the next four and a half months

‘The Muppet Show’ At 50: From Rudolf Nureyev To Dale Evans & Roy Rogers – The Top 10 Guest Stars

The original incarnation of The Muppet Show lasted five seasons and 120 episodes, from 1976 to 1981, and in that time some of the biggest names in show-business lined up to take the stage alongside Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy and Fozzie Bear. A notable exception was the late Elizabeth Taylor, who, perhaps realizing her […]

Remembering Actor James Handy For The Right Reasons – Guest Column

Editors note: Carl Kurlander is a screenwriter (St. Elmo’s Fire), TV writer-producer (Saved by the Bell) and documentary filmmaker who teaches film at the University of Pittsburgh and is the founding program director of the Pitt in LA program. He is an occasional Deadline guest column contributor. This past week, headlines blanketed the internet about […]

Matt Damon Is Open To Reviving The ‘Bourne’ Franchise: “We’re Always Looking To Try To Get Another One”

Matt Damon may be suiting up with a Linothorax for Christopher Nolan’s hotly anticipated The Odyssey, but that doesn’t mean his run as a CIA agent suffering from dissociative amnesia has necessarily come to a close. In a recent interview with Parade magazine, the Oscar-winning multi-hyphenate said he is open to another entry in the […]

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Universal Mentions for the Social Web.

DENIC Post-mortem Critique

This is the final report from DENIC on the outage they experienced on the 5th of May 2026.

I appreciate the openness, but I’ve reviewed (and written :/) many post-mortems and this one could be a lot better. Using one of the readily available post-mortem templates would have helped.

The main issues:

• No timeline.
• Lack of technical details.
• 50% of the action items are weakly defined.

Let go over it. I’ve put my comments after “My remarks”, after each quoted section.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Finding Backlinks to Your Articles and Blog Posts.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Meta Employees Absolutely Hate Mark Zuckerberg’s Plan for a Companywide AI Hackathon.

Pluralistic: Shareholder supremacy and the precog CEO (13 Jun 2026)

Today's links Shareholder supremacy and the precog CEO: A bright line test that's totally unfalsifiable. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Msft v Linux geeks; James Joyce scholars v Joyce estate; iPod sweatshops; Pratchett initiates assisted suicide; Lego-making machine made of Lego; Laid off workers v gag clauses; The ACCESS Act. Upcoming appearances: LA, Menlo Park, Toronto, NYC, Philadelphia, Chicago, Edinburgh, 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. Shareholder supremacy and the precog CEO (permalink) It's been 55 years since Milton Friedman – cursed be his name – published his NYT editorial, "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits," in which he invented the idea of shareholder supremacy out of whole cloth and declared it to be a universal, freestanding, inarguable truth: https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-of-business-is-to.html Friedman's editorial railed against the idea of "corporate social responsibility," arguing that corporate managers should confine the exercise of their consciences to projects involving their own money and resources. At work, managers must harden their bleeding hearts and do nothing except increase the returns to their shareholders. Friedman wasn't merely arguing that this would give rise to better companies – the crux of his argument was that by adopting this "fiduciary duty" standard, it would be easy to determine whether a company was being well-managed or run into the ground: https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/18/falsifiability/#figleaves-not-rubrics Friedman argued that "being a good person" was a squishy, undefinable standard that could never be objectively measured. But "maximizing shareholder value" was a crisp, bright-line test that could be readily evaluated by any reasonable person. "Did this manager make as much money as possible for the company's owners?" feels like the kind of question we can all agree on, while, "Did this manager behave in an ethical way?" is much harder to answer. But even a few moments' thoughts reveal the flaw in this line of reasoning. We can all agree whether a manager made money for the shareholders – but how can we know whether the manager made as much money as possible? Think about how much "corporate social responsibility" cashes out to performative and insincere nonsense and/or cynical marketing. Target didn't stock Pride merch because they love their LGBTQ friends. They stocked it because they thought they could sell it (same goes for BP marketing its "green" gasoline). Google supports its coders' environmental/queer/antipoverty efforts because being the "don't be evil" company lets you hire in-demand workers who might otherwise go to work for Meta, and every engineer a Silicon Valley firm hires adds an average of $1m to the company's annual bottom line. Further: it would be absurd to hold managers to the "make as much money as possible" standard in a competitive market, because in that market, there will always be a company that comes in second. If "as much money as possible" is the standard and you're Chairman of the Board of the number two company, with $10b in profit, while the number one pulled in $11b, "as much money as possible" demands that you fire the C-suite immediately, since they objectively could have done 10% better. So the real standard isn't "make as much money as possible," it's "try to make as much money as possible." And here again, there's no objective way to evaluate managerial performance. Target made a lot of money by selling Pride merch…until they didn't. Do we fire the Target C-suite because they failed to anticipate that 2024 would mark America's transition into the chuddocene, an era in which selling Pride tchotchkes makes you cucked and soy and, you know, gay? Whether it's "make as much money as possible" or "try to make as much money as possible*," shareholder supremacy can only be evaluated with the aid of a crystal ball…or a time machine. Which raises a question: what made this nonsensical shareholder supremacy standard so damned attractive to corporate leaders? Well, what if the ambiguity of shareholder supremacy was a feature and not a bug? What if the function of shareholder supremacy was to absolve the cruelest people for indulging their most sociopathic instincts? What if this "bright line test" was actually a universal excuse, an all-purpose accountability sink that could be used to justify any cruelty or cowardice? "Why didn't I fire my college buddy when I found out that he was sexually abusing his colleagues? Well, he was the best salesman on the team, and I have an obligation to my shareholders. Sorry, my hands were tied." In other words: Don't get mad at me. Get mad at Milton Friedman. Hey look at this (permalink) I Am Not a Reverse Centaur https://blog.miguelgrinberg.com/post/i-am-not-a-reverse-centaur Network service termination for certain Sony Electronics products https://www.sony.com/electronics/support/articles/00398725 More molly guards https://unsung.aresluna.org/more-molly-guards/ The Democratic Urge to Lose https://catvalente.substack.com/p/the-democratic-urge-to-lose Please I Beg of You Do Not Use “AI” In Your Business Communications https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/11/please-i-beg-of-you-do-not-use-ai-in-your-business-communications/ Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Microsoft gets Linux geeks evicted from convention center https://web.archive.org/web/20010619154332/http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=01/06/01/1540231 #20yrsago Stanford prof sues James Joyce estate for right to study Joyce https://web.archive.org/web/20060615203517/http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060613/ap_on_en_ot/james_joyce_lawsuit #20yrsago Inside China’s iPod sweat-shops https://web.archive.org/web/20060616173514/http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?RSS&NewsID=14915 #15yrsago Terry Pratchett initiates assisted suicide process https://web.archive.org/web/20110614215922/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/8571142/Sir-Terry-Pratchett-begins-process-that-could-lead-to-assisted-suicide.html #15yrsago Lego-making machine made of Lego https://www.eurobricks.com/forum/forums/topic/56346-review-moulding-machine-4000001-lego-insider-tour-exclusive/ #10yrsago It’s getting harder and harder to use gag clauses to silence laid off workers in America https://web.archive.org/web/20160611202305/https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/us/laid-off-americans-required-to-zip-lips-on-way-out-grow-bolder.html #5yrsago The ACCESS Act https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/12/access-act/#interop Upcoming appearances (permalink) LA: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Brian Merchant (Skylight Books), Jun 19 https://www.skylightbooks.com/event/skylight-cory-doctorow-presents-reverse-centaurs-guide-life-after-ai-w-brian-merchant Menlo Park: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Angie Coiro (Kepler's), Jun 21 https://www.keplers.org/upcoming-events-internal/cory-doctorow-2026 Toronto: The Sovereignty Debate (IAB Canada's State of the Nation), Jun 23 https://iabcanada.com/state-of-the-nation-2026 Toronto: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI (Osler Records/Type Books), Jun 23 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-book-launch-and-talk-tickets-1991501299998 NYC: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Jonathan Coulton (The Strand), Jun 24 https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html Philadelphia: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with David Williams (Fitler Club/Philadelphia Citizen), Jun 25 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-book-event-tickets-1990110326559 Chicago: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Rick Perlstein (Exile in Bookville), Jun 26 https://exileinbookville.com/events/50628 Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17 https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ Recent appearances (permalink) The Enshittification of Life, the Universe, & Everything (Luke Savage) https://www.lukewsavage.com/p/the-enshittification-of-life-the Cory Doctorow's digital jail-break (DW In Focus) https://www.dw.com/en/cory-doctorows-digital-jail-break/audio-77414035 Why the Internet Got Worse and What to Do About It (Jim Rutt) (RIP) https://www.jimruttshow.com/cory-doctorow-3/ On Enshittification – and what can be done about it (Re:publica) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhINQgPMVSI EFFecting Change: How to Disenshittify the Internet (EFF, with Wendy Liu) https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-enshittification Latest books (permalink) "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 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/) "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "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 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "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. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor. "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE. "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING. 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

@Dave Winer's linkblog

San Antonio Spurs Canceling Knicks Fans' Tickets for NBA Finals Game 5.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Meta’s New AI Unit Is a Total Mess.

The White House’s shambolic AI policy

Also , why states are taking things into their own hands, and what might be better

AI: Debugging a Tiny LLM to Understand What Happens Between a Prompt and a Response

In this article we’ll explore how LLMs (Large Language Models) actually work internally, with practical examples so everyone can understand how they work and behave. Intro Imagine we type this prompt into a chatbot: Say hi. A moment later, the model replies: Hi! That looks simple. Almost too simple. And yes for the programmers among […]

Really Simple swag

New virtual swag to go with the moment. ;-)

Really Simple basketball.

Really Simple player 27.

PS: Go New York Go New York Go!

Sat a Day

Making more points Unless I write something new and provocative enough to generate fresh traffic, most visits to this blog come from searches on topics for which Google believes something I've written is relevant. Such is the case with a 2015 post called What are the balls on Prague’s spires called? I have a better answer now […]

RSS Club #008: Duck duck, swan?

This is an RSS-only post, thank you for subscribing :) If you’re only here for web and tech talk you can skip this one! I rescued an animal today! Probably… The UK has its fair share of canals. I like canals. They cut through urban life offering an escape back to nature and are teaming with […]

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

Imagine if someone cracked the speed of light. Now we could visit far off galaxies on vacation. Do you think we'd build it or argue about whether we should? Heh I know the human species, we don't do that kind of thinking we just go.

The USMNT's Incredible Performance, "The President Has Turned Into A Clown," Meaty Pods For Your Weekend Viewing And Listening Pleasure

Many thanks to those who've stepped up for our Independence Day subscription drive!

A tale of two browsers

I give Apple a hard time. That’s mostly due to how they treat the web on their own mobile devices.

Though iOS ostensibly supports the ability for websites to be added to the homescreen, they make it so difficult for users to do, the functionality is practically worthless. It’s dispiriting to see the web so hamstrung by that decision.

The Webkit team has come in for other criticism too. For a while there, Safari was lagging so far behind in features that people were calling it the new Internet Explorer. Ouch!

But credit where credit is due. The upcoming version 27 of Safari is looking very good.

That’s not because it’s at the cutting edge of the latest web standards. Quite the opposite. Most of the changes listed for this release are bug fixes. That’s what I want to acknowledge and applaud.

Far too often a browser will rush out an implementation of an exciting new web standard that gets plenty of attention. But that initial implementation is rarely 100% correct. Then the next release rolls around and the focus has moved on to a different new web standard. The result is an ever-growing backlog of almost-but-not-quite-supported features.

Clearly the focus for Safari 27 was on that backlog. I bet that wasn’t an easy decision. Like I said, the kudos and recognition tends to go to the browser that ships new stuff, not the browser that goes back to fix long-standing issues.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s some exciting new stuff in Safari 27 too, like styleable select, but it’s great to see the focus on maintenance and repair:

If you look through the lists of features and fixes in Safari 27, you’ll notice that, although there are 58 brand-new features and 525 fixes — the largest pile of fixes in any Safari release in recent memory — most of what is released is not about new things.

Most of this work has been about existing features behaving more correctly, handling more edge cases, and fitting together with other features the way you’d expect.

This in sharp contrast to the most recent release of Chrome that shipped support for the prompt API despite opposition from other browsers and no positive signals from developers. I hope some Googler got a nice promotion for shoving a proprietary technology into a web browser, but they should be aware of the damage they’ve done.

At this year’s CSS Day, the represenatatives from Google Chrome were once again there to talk to developers and ask what we wanted them to prioritise. Those requests rang very hollow. Why should we waste our time and energy telling a browser team what we need if they’re just going to ship whatever crap they want?

The truth is that the folks from Google who were canvassing opinions from the attendees at CSS Day are not the same people who torpedoed the browser with unwanted proprietary tech. This team has spent years doing excellent outreach, documenting web standards, and meeting with developers. They built up an impressive amount of trust, respect, and goodwill.

That stock has now plummeted.

So well done to the Webkit team for Safari 27. And shame on the Chrome team for Chrome 148.

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

The thing about tech, you have to start out small and simple, and carefully add features based on actual real-world-now use cases. Otherwise you end up missing the target, and have to go back and patch it, and it never gets simple. The only way to have a chance is if you start small, learn, and evolve carefully.

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

The giftarticles feed is now a simple RSS 2.0 feed. It's not pretty, that would require some work with Masotdon, but it does work.

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

Imho -- the smartest thing facebook could do is find all the places where it's a silo and start desiloizing them..

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

AI is a miracle of human science, it took generations to get to the point we're at now, and the rate of development building software on top of it is imho the basis for a revolution. We use computers in all aspects of our lives, and the UI of the software is nowhere near as good as it should be, that's because there are severe limits the human mind has where the AI has apparently none. So if you're down on AI, you should at least understand that there is huge potential here, which is being utilized, will result in much more powerful software that works well with others, instead of locking-in users and locking-out competitors (and their users). We've created a predictably bad system now, predictable because we always create silos when we give big money a chance to call all the shots. We don't get chances to rewrite the rules very often, but this is one of those times. Last one was in the early 1990s with the advent of the web. My plan is to give all the new power back to the web. And looking at what AI companies are doing, that is exactly what they're doing -- they're doing it the right way -- radically simple, easy to clone formats, and easy for users and developers to read.

Russell Crowe Says ‘Gladiator II’ “Failed” Because It “Lacked A Moral Core” – Taormina

Russell Crowe has suggested Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II failed to ignite audiences in the same way as the original film because it lacked a “moral core”. He recalled how he had pushed back against studio moves to give his Gladiator character Maximus sex scenes back in 2000, in his belief that it would not chime […]

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

Another great Peter Girnus post:

Text in link:

https://x.com/gothburz/status/2065601302705398034?s=46

Jeffrey Dean Morgan On ‘The Walking Dead: Dead City’ Season 3: “It Was So Different From Anything We’ve Done Before” — Monte-Carlo TV Festival

After a glitzy Monte-Carlo premiere of The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 3, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Lauren Cohan broke down the evolution of the relationship between their characters, Negan and Maggie, and promised the upcoming season of the show breaks new ground. “I think we played as much hate as we could over the […]

Workers Start Removal Of Trump’s Name From Kennedy Center

A crew started the removal of Donald Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center early in the morning on Saturday, installing a tarp so a crowd watching in person and online couldn’t see the moment. Some photographers could view through cracks in the plastic covering to observe workers removing the letters. At the center, spectators have […]

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

More lols to share:

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

lol:

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

Anthropic, on their quest to achieve market supremacy via regulatory capture and hyping the dangers of AI, has managed to get the leopards to eat everyone’s faces.

Now they can’t sell their new products to anyone.

Look forward to the “upload your passport picture and two notarized sworn affidavits” to be part of the onboarding workflow.

Say Nothing

I finished reading Say Nothing by Patrick Keefe last week and then immediately binged the Hulu Series, finding myself reflecting on an old conflict thousands of miles away that still felt familiar growing up in New England.

Kristin Scott Thomas Talks ‘Slow Horses’ And Teases Her Second Movie As Writer & Director — Monte-Carlo TV Festival

EXCLUSIVE: Kristin Scott Thomas collected her Golden Nymph Award at the Monte-Carlo TV Festival’s opening ceremony on Friday night. At a press conference the following morning, the star slipped between English and French and talked about her career to date. She then sat down with Deadline and gave us the lowdown on playing an icy […]

Old-school Data Archiving

Here's an unsolicited recommendation of a Mac utility... but first, a quick explanation of why I need it.

One of my bookshelves contains a large number of bare hard drives in protective cases. These store data that I am keen to keep, just in case I need it again, but which would consume too much space if stored on my normal machines or servers. Much of this comes from past video projects: the raw footage captured for a friend's wedding video, for example, or for one of my YouTube travel vlogs. Some of it is other data kept for a few years 'just in case': a clone of the hard disk of an old machine before it is wiped for sale on eBay, or an off-site backup of my mother's laptop.

In total, this adds up to several tens of terabytes. If it were more important, I would include it in my 'proper' data storage, most of which is on a Linux server using a ZFS filesystem (so it can be regularly and automatically checked for any errors) and snapshotted and backed up to another machine locally and at least one off-site location. But cloud storage starts to become really quite expensive once you're measuring it in reasonable numbers of terabytes, and this data isn't that important... it isn't even important enough that I want to keep all those disks spinning all the time and paying for the hardware and electricity to do so.

So a lot of it ends up on good old hard drives sitting on my shelf. Now, it's worth noting that these are actual hard disks, not SSDs. Much as I love solid-state drives for normal day-to-day use, one thing that's not emphasised often enough is that they are not good for data archiving, unless you power them up regularly and, ideally, run some scans on them. An SSD that's just sitting, unpowered, on a shelf will generally start to lose data much faster than an old-fashioned spinning-rust hard drive in the same state. And you should especially never rely on a cheap USB stick for archival storage.

However, hard drives do suffer from mechanical failure: they have moving parts, and if you power them up and those parts don't move as expected, you're stuck (though not quite as stuck as you would be with an SSD, because if the data were really important you could pay a lab a lot of money and probably get most of it back). But if the data were really important you wouldn't be storing it this way anyway.

I mitigate the risk somewhat by keeping two clones of most things, using my old favourite utility SuperDuper. (Carbon-Copy Cloner is a popular alternative.) And the drives are stored in archiving boxes, which keep the dust and moisture out, and provide some shock-absorbing.

I also don't want to use off-the-shelf external drives which come in enclosures, because they're likely to have cheap power supplies which fail, or an interface which quickly goes out of date. So I use bare drives, and when I need them, I currently put them in a toaster-style dock with a USB3 interface. But I know I could connect them up to Thunderbolt or eSATA or whatever in the future, or slot them into some hot-swap enclosure.

However, the real challenge with having all this offline storage is how you find data on the occasions when you do need it. If my video editor tells me that it's missing a file called VO1257.wav which was used in this project, how on earth would I know if I had it on any of the disks on the shelf?

So this is why I've become a fan of a Mac utility called NeoFinder, which has had a dedicated following over the last 30 years, and you can get an idea of its vintage from the fact it used to be called CDFinder! You mount your external storage, ask NeoFinder to index it, and it keeps a catalog of all the files on your local disk, which you can still search when the external storage is back on your shelf (or in your remote server, or your fire safe, or wherever). So now you can about VO1257.wav and it will tell you which of your disks have a file of that name, how big the file is, when it was last updated, and so on.

In addition it understands a lot more about many types of file. If I search for 'Fleetwood', for example, it will tell me all the drives that have copies of Fleetwood Mac tracks on them, the recoding bitrate, duration, etc., and show me cover art for the album. If I search for 'sailing', it will show me my photos that are tagged with that keyword (along with a thumbnail and the metadata). It will also show me PDFs that contain that word. And it finds a track by Rod Stewart. You get the idea.

It's very handy, and I only use a fraction of its capabilities. Yes, it is, and it feels like, something you would use in the 90s... but that doesn't mean there aren't lots of valid use cases for it today.

However, to make it work properly, you need to be disciplined about two things.

Firstly, whenever you update the data on a drive, you need to tell NeoFinder to update its index for that drive before you unmount it and put it away. It does this easily and efficiently, and I just click that button before putting any drive back in its protective case. Or you can select several catalogs, tell it to update them, and it will prompt you to plug in the disks one at a time if they're not already mounted. And similarly, if you dispose of a disk, remember to delete it from NeoFinder too!

Secondly, you need to label your disks properly – not just with a handwritten PostIt note! – and use the same name in the catalog. I typically have a title like 'Video Projects Archive 2' stuck on the disk and on the case, and the label also says 'Indexed in NeoFinder'. (If like me, you used to try and write on the label what was stored on the disk, you'll know how much harder it is to keep that up to date!)

More than a decade ago I bought a Dymo Labelwriter USB printer, which seemed like a silly extravagance at the time, but turned out to be one of my most useful computer accessories and has been in regular use for all sorts of things ever since. You may or may not have a need for NeoFinder. But I bet you'd find you have a need for one of these!

Top Of The Week: Signal, Crow, Dog, Toska, Sign

Writing of lasting value

Darkness And Paper

Today, enjoy our audio and video picks

Talking With Azeem Azhar

Taking the pulse of AI again

Lit Hub Weekly: June 8 – 12, 2026

Round two of our Best of the Best Books Reading Challenge ​is underway with 50 of the greatest summer novels of all time!​ | Lit Hub Helen Bain follows in Sylvia Plath’s footsteps from Paris to Wellesley.| Lit Hub Biography

Trump's systemic attack on whistleblowers, explained by an expert

"The cost to democracy is a loss of accountability and oversight."

Trillionaire Testosterone | The Coffee Klatch for Saturday, June 13, 2026

With Heather Lofthouse and yours truly, Robert Reich

Sarah Canary by Karen Joy Fowler

Sarah Canary is an odd book, in the best possible way.

On the one hand, it’s a relatively straightforward narrative. An adventure story set in the Pacific northwest in the late 19th century. The viewpoint shifts from character to character, with one exception. The inscrutable title character is a living macguffin that everyone and everything else revolves around.

That all seems straightforward enough, but if you squint at the story just right maybe it’s a story from a very different genre altogether.

So you can enjoy it on both levels; a well-told series of historical adventures, and a clever subversion of genre expectations. Whichever way you take it, there’s a running thread throughout the book exploring racism, sexism, and colonialism.

Quite the debut novel!

@Tomosino's Mastodon feed

June 12, 2026

Today was the deadline set by Judge Christopher R.

Weeknotes: June 6-12, 2026

Win of the week: finally got the new project contract to sign that we’ve been working on since February! Looking forward to: reading books all weekend 1% nicer: dusted all my frames Stuff I did: 1 hour consulting 4 hours business admin — sent final invoice for wrapped up project — paid estimated quarterly taxes — […]

Ariana Grande Launches Brighter Days Ahead Foundation For Arts Education, Youth Mental Health & More

Ariana Grande has launched the Brighter Days Ahead Foundation to support youth mental health, arts education and community causes. On Friday, the 3x Grammy winner announced the nonprofit, which is designed to uplift and directly fund small organizations doing meaningful work through partnerships that will create longterm impact. “I am beyond excited to finally announce […]

‘Summer House’s Ciara Miller & Tefi Pessoa Make First ‘Love Island USA’ Appearance Ahead Of ‘Aftersun’ Premiere

Ciara Miller and Tefi Pessoa made their first appearance on Love Island USA ahead of the premiere of their weekly talk show Love Island USA Aftersun. The Summer House star and the podcaster entered the villa to host a game with the Islanders. The duo had their slo-mo entrance, making them officially part of the […]

Saving family football footage with a Raspberry Pi and a 1928 projector

A custom scanner based on Raspberry Pi 5 and a projector from 1928 preserved footage of the maker's father's high school football games

The post Saving family football footage with a Raspberry Pi and a 1928 projector appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Breaking news: US Commerce Department effectively shuts down Anthropic’s latest models

After two years of underregulating AI, the US government suddenly takes the nuclear option

The Moment Of Truth For 555 Programs As Emmy Nomination Voting Hits Fever Pitch This Weekend – Notes On The Season

A column chronicling conversations and events on the awards circuit. It is finally time to stop watching and start voting, people. Emmy ballots are in hand (or laptop), and if you think this has been a long season, it has actually been longer than that. I cannot remember a year in the four decades or […]

SAF, XLSX, TCL, IRIX

The SAF (Static Analysis Format) is a modern thing created by civil engineers. The idea is simple: one need a way how to create an usable computational model from complex 3D models of buildings.

Longtime ABC7 New York Anchor Bill Ritter Steps Down, Reveals Alzheimer’s Diagnosis

Bill Ritter, an anchor for WABC-TV New York’s ABC7 Eyewitness News since 1999, announced Friday during his staple 6 p.m. newscast that he has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and is stepping down from the role. Ritter, a San Diego native whose journalism career started in Los Angeles first with the Los Angeles Times and later […]

DGA Board Approves 4-Year AMPTP Deal That Addresses Unemployment Issues With Health Plan Increases, New AI Protections, Multi-Hyphenate Guardrails & More

The Directors Guild of America is one step closer to sealing the deal on a new four-year contract with the major film and television studios after union’s National Board of Directors unanimously voted to recommend ratification to the membership this week. The contract now goes to the full membership for approval. That vote is expected […]

Appeals Court Rejects Latest Effort To Retain Donald Trump’s Name On Kennedy Center Facade As Deadline Looms

UPDATE, 4:31 p.m. PT: An three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit turned down the Kennedy Center’s effort to retain Donald Trump’s name on the complex’s facade past a midnight deadline. The judges denied the center’s request for an immediate administrative stay that would have put on hold U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper’s order that Trump’s […]

★ The Talk Show: Live From WWDC 2026

Recorded in front of a live audience at The California Theatre in San Jose on Tuesday 9 June 2026, special guests Joanna Stern and Nilay Patel join John Gruber to discuss Apple’s announcements at WWDC 2026.

Gene Shalit Dies: Longtime ‘Today’ Show Movie Critic Was 100

Gene Shalit, the longtime film critic for Today, known for his quirky puns and signature walrus mustache, has died. He was 100. His family tells NBC News in a statement that Shalit passed away peacefully on Friday “after 100 years of an amazing life.” Shalit began his long career at The Today Show in 1970, […]

Gift articles via Mastodon

There's an account on Mastodon containing a flow of gift articles.

Because Mastodon supports outbound RSS, you can subscribe to it in any RSS reader.

But the RSS is not very good. Have a look.

So I built a little app in my new scripting language, with the help of Claude, and boom now I can read the output of the mangled feed.

I don't know what is responsible, probably has something to do with the account, and something to do with how Mastodon. But the information is being communicated.

https://giftarticles.feedland.org/

This is not finished, it needs some css and the normal structure of an HTML page. We will come back to it.

‘What The Dead Know’ Lives On: Star Taylor Schilling Option Extended, NBC Pilot To Be Redeveloped With New Writer

EXCLUSIVE: While NBC drama pilot What the Dead Know did not make the cut for a series order, the network has remained high on the general premise and the project’s star, Taylor Schilling. The crime procedural, from Wolf Entertainment and Universal Television, will be redeveloped with the same lead and a new writer. Universal Television, […]

Police Investigating 8647 Markings on National Mall Find Unusual Hat at Scene of Crime

Detectives believe that the mysterious hat could help them identify the perpetrator.

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

Apple published a plugin for Godot that lets your Godot games get rendered by RealityKit:

https://github.com/apple/plugins-for-godot

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid-Inspired Fluid Pump

This fluid pump was inspired by the way squids propel themselves through the water.

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.

Did Trump Promise "No Wars" If Elected?

Of course he did. Here's the record. And he — and congressional Republicans who encouraged and enabled his war in Iran — should be held to account for it.

Pluralistic: Google's new remote attestation scheme is every bit as terrible as its old remote attestation scheme (12 Jun 2026)

Today's links Google's new remote attestation scheme is every bit as terrible as its old remote attestation scheme: Not even a QR code can produce a kissable pig. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Arrested at Toronto G20; Rule by rentiers; Wrong about the First Amendment; Mounties x Stingrays; (EU) Privacy without monopoly. Upcoming appearances: LA, Menlo Park, Toronto, NYC, Philadelphia, Chicago, Edinburgh, 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. Google's new remote attestation scheme is every bit as terrible as its old remote attestation scheme (permalink) Long before "agentic AI," we had the idea that software would act as your agent on the internet. That's why the old-fashioned technical term for a browser is a "user agent." Your browser acts on your behalf to retrieve information and then show it to you, in the format you choose. It's your agent: https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet This is a powerful and profound idea. It is because browsers are our "agents" that we expect them to accept our directives, say, by blocking pop-ups, or by turning off autoplay sound, or by blocking commercial surveillance trackers: https://privacybadger.org/ Your browser does all that because your browser works for you. The reason your browser can work for you is that the web is an open, standardized technology. In theory, anyone who follows the standards published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) can make a browser, and that web browser can connect to any web server. Browsers and servers are interoperable. It's the same force that means you can put anyone's gas in your gas-tank, or anyone's shoelaces in your shoes, or anyone's milk on your cereal. But what if manufacturers could dictate those choices to you? What if your light socket refused to use a lightbulb unless it was officially blessed by the socket's manufacturer? What if your dishwasher refused to wash your dishes unless you bought them from one of the manufacturer's "dish partners"? What if your toaster refused to toast "unauthorized bread"? https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/ It's hard to see how a company could win its market with this strategy. After all, if the dishes are really better than the competition's, you'd buy them voluntarily, without any need for law or technology to force the matter. The only reason to make a dishwasher that refuses a rival's dishes is if the manufacturer's own dishes are ugly, expensive, and/or badly made. But once a company owns the market – once they've achieved dominance by buying out their rivals; by bribing potential competitors to stay out of their lane; and by engaging in deceptive conduct to trap key suppliers and customers – they could cement their dominance by blocking interoperability, keeping out rival dishes, milk, gas, lightbulbs, shoelaces and bread, capturing their whole market and squeezing it. That's what Google has done, and that's what Google wants to do more of. Google's commercial behavior has been so unethical, deceptive and abusive that the company just lost three federal antitrust cases: https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/google-loses-the-adtech-monopolization This thrice-convicted monopolist bribed Apple – more than $20b/year – to stay out of the search market: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/02/how-do-you-solve-problem-google-search-courts-must-enable-competition-while They cheated app vendors, ripping them off with sky-high junk fees and onerous conditions that raised prices while lowering the share of your spending that went to the companies whose products you were paying for: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/boom-google-loses-antitrust-case They cheated advertisers, rigging the ad market to gouge businesses on ad prices and underinvesting to fight rampant ad-fraud, sucking hundreds of billions out of the productive economy for overpriced ads that no one saw: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-prevails-landmark-antitrust-case-against-google Google wasn't always this way. The "don't be evil" company owes its very existence to the open web ecosystem. When the company started to index the web in 1998, it was playing on an open field, where any web server could talk to any "user agent," even one whose user was a startup like Google, that was making a copy of every page on the server. For years, Google thrived on the open web, and built open technologies. Android – the mobile operating system that Google bought in 2005 – was presented as an "open" alternative to existing mobile offerings, and as the mobile market collapsed into two companies – Google and Apple – Google always presented Android as the open alternative to Apple's "walled garden." There were always ways in which Google's "open" Android wasn't exactly open. The company engaged in illegal "tying" arrangements that forced hardware vendors and carriers to lock out versions of Android that were created by Google's competitors: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_18_4581 In other words, even though Google offered a mobile platform that was (mostly) technically open, they used commercial and legal strategies to choke off the market oxygen for alternative Android versions that tried to capitalize on that technical openness. But life finds a way. The existence of an open, modifiable, tinkerer-friendly mobile operating system meant Android hackers could create alternatives to Google's (de facto) walled garden, which thrived in the cracks in that garden wall. Operating systems like CalyxOS, PureOS and Graphene offered a more private, more secure Android experience, one that was largely "de-Googled," blocking Google's relentless acquisition of your private data: https://grapheneos.org/ And Google's data-hunger is relentless. Android exfiltrates a chunk of your personal and behavioral data every five minutes. The "resting heartbeat" of Android surveillance pulses and pulses, irrespective of whether you're using your device, and the instant you unlock your screen, that heartbeat quickens, sending even more data to the company: https://digitalcontentnext.org/blog/2018/08/21/google-data-collection-research/ All that data has proved irresistible to authoritarian governments. Donald Trump's enforcers have seized on Google data as a vital source of information about the identity of protesters and the location of migrants hunted by ICE: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/google-broke-its-promise-me-now-ice-has-my-data So there are plenty of reasons why users would seek out these de-Googled alternatives to Android, finding them in spite of Google's illegal commercial tactics to block access to competing technologies. The worse it got, the better those alternatives looked. Perhaps this explains Google's years-long effort to increase the technical barriers to using modified versions of Android, beefing these up to match the commercial restrictions that stand in the way of a de-Googled existence. Back in 2023, Google floated the idea of "Web Environment Integrity" (WEI), a set of modifications to web standards that would force your computer to disclose its operating environment to the web servers it connected to, even if you objected to this disclosure: https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-bai-bai WEI was a form of "remote attestation." That's when your device uses a sub-processor (sometimes called a "Technical Protection Module" or "TPM") or a walled off part of its main processor (sometimes called a "secure enclave") to produce a cryptographically signed description of your device and its configuration: which hardware, software, plug-ins and settings you're running. When you connect to a server, it demands that your device send this "attestation" before it handles your request. If your device won't provide this data, or if the server doesn't like (or recognize) your device and its details, it can refuse to deal with you. And because the attestation is prepared by a TPM or a secure enclave that you can't modify or override, you don't get to decide which facts about your device it's allowed to see. Practically speaking, this means that remote attestation lets a server refuse to deal with you until you turn off your ad-blocker and your tracker-blocker. It means that the server can discriminate against users who block auto-play sound and video, who block pop-ups, who put the tab in the background when it's playing a mandatory pre-roll ad. WEI was especially disturbing in light of Google's efforts to kill ad-blockers and privacy blockers through updates to Chrome, an effort that continues to this day: https://protonprivacy.substack.com/p/google-is-finally-killing-ublock These blockers are an important part of the dynamic between web publishers and their users. In the real world, when you get an offer, you can make a counter-offer. That's all an ad-blocker is: a way for users to respond to a server whose opening bid is, "How about you give me all your data and let me take over your computer in exchange for showing you this page?" with "How about 'Nah?'" https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah We didn't get rid of pop-up ads by making them illegal, or by boycotting advertisers who used them. We got rid of pop-up ads when web users installed pop-up blockers, which made pop-up ads pointless. Take away our ability to block obnoxious digital content and you guarantee that we will be flooded with it. These kinds of modifications aren't just used to block ads – they're also key to accessibility. People who have photosensitive epilepsy or who (like me) suffer from low-contrast vision problems use add-ons to reformat pages so that we can safely and legibly access them. WEI's creators said they were only trying to put the web on a level playing field with apps, which routinely rat you out to the companies you connect to. Apps are a source of bottomless enshittification, not least because (unlike the web), they enjoy special, dangerous legal protections that make it very legally risky to modify them: https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/31/unsatisfying-answers/#systemic-problems WEI wasn't an effort to level the playing field between apps and the web – it was a race to the bottom, an attempt to make the web as enshittogenic as the app hellscape. Public outrage to WEI killed the project, but Google's commitment to augmenting its illegal commercial lockdown efforts with technical lockdowns never ended. Now, Google has rolled out an experimental "reCAPTCHA Mobile Verification" that uses an app, your camera, and your device's TPM or secure enclave to produce an attestation about your Android device: https://support.google.com/recaptcha/answer/16609652 This will make it much easier for the apps and other services you interact with to block your device if you run an Android alternative, or if you install a mod that overrides the actions of Google's stock Android: https://www.reddit.com/r/PrivacySecurityOSINT/comments/1tbdjbj/privacy_concerns_around_googles_recaptcha_mobile/ This is a terrible idea – it's every bit as bad as WEI was. In an age in which Big Tech is ever-more tied to authoritarian governments, redesigning our devices to tell strangers things we don't want them to know isn't just shortsighted, it's inexcusable. Hey look at this (permalink) Jane Yolen, 1939-2026 https://floggingbabel.blogspot.com/2026/06/jane-yolen-1949-2026.html Enshittification Merch That Actually Fights Enshittification https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/enshittification-merch-actually-fights-enshittification Amy Casey https://www.amycaseypainting.com/ CrankGPT https://squeezlabs.github.io/handcrank/ Barns. Also, "Barns." https://rickperlstein.substack.com/p/barns-also-barns Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Images from anti-DRM protest at the San Fran Apple Store https://www.flickr.com/photos/quinn/tags/drmprotest/ #15yrsago Reasons people were arrested at the Toronto G20 https://memex.craphound.com/2011/06/11/reasons-people-were-arrested-at-the-toronto-g20/ #15yrsago Paul Krugman: Rule by rentiers favors billionaires, Chinese bond-holders over jobs and homeowners https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/10/opinion/10krugman.html?_r=1 #15yrsago Ontario publicly funded Catholic school bans rainbows, appropriates student donations for LGBT cause and gives them to Catholic charity https://web.archive.org/web/20110610125236/https://www.xtra.ca/public/Toronto/Rainbows_banned_at_Mississauga_Catholic_school-10262.aspx #10yrsago How to be less wrong about the First Amendment https://web.archive.org/web/20160611221927/https://popehat.com/2016/06/11/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-the-first-amendment/ #10yrsago Mounties used Stingrays to secretly surveil millions of Canadians for years https://web.archive.org/web/20160610182607/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-rcmp-surveilled-thousands-of-innocent-canadians-for-a-decade #5yrsago Privacy Without Monopoly, EU edition https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/11/technological-self-determination/#dma Upcoming appearances (permalink) LA: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Brian Merchant (Skylight Books), Jun 19 https://www.skylightbooks.com/event/skylight-cory-doctorow-presents-reverse-centaurs-guide-life-after-ai-w-brian-merchant Menlo Park: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Angie Coiro (Kepler's), Jun 21 https://www.keplers.org/upcoming-events-internal/cory-doctorow-2026 Toronto: The Sovereignty Debate (IAB Canada's State of the Nation), Jun 23 https://iabcanada.com/state-of-the-nation-2026 Toronto: TBA, Jun 23 NYC: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Jonathan Coulton (The Strand), Jun 24 https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html Philadelphia: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with David Williams (Fitler Club/Philadelphia Citizen), Jun 25 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-book-event-tickets-1990110326559 Chicago: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Rick Perlstein (Exile in Bookville), Jun 26 https://exileinbookville.com/events/50628 Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17 https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ Recent appearances (permalink) The Enshittification of Life, the Universe, & Everything (Luke Savage) https://www.lukewsavage.com/p/the-enshittification-of-life-the Cory Doctorow's digital jail-break (DW In Focus) https://www.dw.com/en/cory-doctorows-digital-jail-break/audio-77414035 Why the Internet Got Worse and What to Do About It (Jim Rutt) (RIP) https://www.jimruttshow.com/cory-doctorow-3/ On Enshittification – and what can be done about it (Re:publica) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhINQgPMVSI EFFecting Change: How to Disenshittify the Internet (EFF, with Wendy Liu) https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-enshittification Latest books (permalink) "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 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/) "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "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 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "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. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor. "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE. "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING. 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

The Cases That Don’t Exist

How GenAI is not yet ready for law In 2023, a New York lawyer named Steven Schwartz filed a brief in a routine personal-injury case against an airline. The brief cited a half-dozen helpful precedents. The precedents did not exist. Schwartz had asked ChatGPT to find supporting cases, and ChatGPT — being a machine that produces plausible language rather than true statements — invented them, names and citations and quotations and all, then cheerfully assured him they were real when he asked. The legal world treated Mata v. Avianca as a freak show: a cautionary tale about one careless lawyer. An embarrassing one-off. It was not a one-off. It was the first crack in a dam. By the end of 2025, a researcher in Paris […]

The post The Cases That Don’t Exist first appeared on I, Cringely.

[$] An overlayfs update

In a shortened session in the filesystem track at the 2026 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, Amir Goldstein gave an update on the overlayfs
union filesystem. There are some new features over the last few years that he wanted to mention, along with looking at the status of nesting overlayfs layers. The composefs use case that was discussed at the summit in 2023 has led to some interesting changes to overlayfs.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Justice Department posts more Epstein files related to accusations about Trump.

App Store Personalized Recommendations and Keylogging

Sarah Perez: This week, Apple announced a series of discovery features that will personalize app recommendations based on users’ interests and behavior, providing a new way for developers to have their app discovered. At Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), the iPhone maker introduced Personalized Collections in the App Store, which will showcase recommendations tailored to […]

Rewriting Apple’s TrueType Hinting Interpreter in Swift

Scott Perry: My team rewrote Apple's TrueType hinting interpreter in Swift, ask me anything. […] I feel like naming just one would be a disservices to all of the features that made this effort possible (C interop, generics, noncopyable/nonescapable types) but at the end of the day I think the star of the show was […]

Rewriting Notion in SwiftUI

Hartley Charlton: Apple this week confirmed that Notion is migrating its user interface to SwiftUI, citing the app’s desire for greater performance and UI consistency than its existing web-based stack can deliver. […] The callout was clearly deliberate; Notion is one of the most widely used productivity apps on the Mac, and has long been […]

Safari 27 Announced

Tim Hardwick: Apple’s new version of Safari browser in macOS 27 and iOS 27 can be tasked to monitor a webpage and notify you of any changes, thanks to a new built-in feature. […] In other upcoming feature additions, using the power of AI, Safari tabs that you have open can automatically be organized into […]

Trump cancels Iran strikes, claims deal. Inflation spikes. Johnson pledges Medicare cuts.

Trump Claims Iran Deal Is Close but Iran Contradicts Terms

@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal

Since Monday, the #PleiadesGazettteer editorial college has published 9 new and 153 updated place resources, reflecting the work of 7 people. The usual Monday blog post will summarize the full week's worth of such work, but meantime, here's a #SneakPeek at one of the updated place resources, Corsica/Kyrnos (island): https://pleiades.stoa.org/places/472063

This Pleiades record was originally created by importing data from Barrington Atlas Map 48 "Sardinia-Corsica", which was compiled in 1995 by Stephen L. Dyson. Twelve of the records he originated have been updated so far this week alone. Jeffrey Becker updated this one to include the specific name of the island found on the Peutinger Map (INS. CORSICA) and added a reference to C. Hülsen's still-valuable article in RE. In all, 258 Pleiades place resources derive from Dyson's work on BAtlas. Prof. Dyson passed away on May 31, 2026, at the age of 88.

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

The Art of the Cave

Can Trump sell his loss to Iran as a win?

@DAIR blog

New from Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000: Bernie Goes Down the X-Risk Rabbithole

In which @emilymbender.bsky.social and @alexhanna.bsky.social are joined by @nathaliemarechal.net to unpack Sen Sanders’ AI Doomerism & why nuclear weapons are a bad analogy for "AI"

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2126417/episodes/19314168-bernie-goes-down-the-x-risk-rabbithole-with-dr-nathalie-marechal-2026-05-04

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Scripting News: Using AI to sort out the noise.

Leaving #CSSday genuinely inspired (as in, I was inspired to whip out my laptop straight away and start programming some very cool CSS).

Leaving #CSSday genuinely inspired (as in, I was inspired to whip out my laptop straight away and start programming some very cool CSS).

Exploring the Virtual OS Museum

Introduction The Virtual OS Museum is literally a museum of 570 distinct operating systems. Check out their website for screen grabs and a list of everything included. You can’t physically visit this museum, but if you have enough disk space you can download and explore it on your personal computer. The full edition is a 130Gig zip […]

Pulte Falls, Talarico Launches Spanish-Language World Cup Ad, A New Politics Of Virtue

The US Men's Team plays Paraguay tonight at 9pm ET - Big Day!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

I want to keep my podcast subscriptions in a single OPML file so I can subscribe in three different clients using the same list.

Second Circuit rejects Sam Bankman-Fried’s appeal

The Second Circuit upholds Bankman-Fried’s conviction and 25-year sentence, leaving few remaining options for the disgraced crypto executive

Signs And Consumption

Writing of lasting value

Apple deepfakes

Apple’s WWDC 2026 keynote was a snoozefest but one section left me rather perplexed. Early in the show Apple gave a performance about “child safety”. Apple ended the show with their new AI photo mangler. That’s some serious cognitive dissonance! […]

Using AI to sort out the noise

I am using Claude Code to create a toolset that makes it easy to write internet scripts at the same high level as Frontier.

I was looking for a little project it could do, and came up with this.

• I like Wikipedia, but I know it has trouble with transparency. In areas I know well I see one-sided articles that even include ads for products that totally don't belong there. Having an open system like that makes this kind of abuse impossible to manage, there's no one to do it. Esp in web standards, where people create fame for themselves basically by editing those pages, it can get really egregious. Here's a place where AI can help, it has an amazing ability to somehow sort out the truth amidst all the fighting.

I put together an app with the help of Claude that takes the name of a place, person or thing, and publishes a page on a static site. Each article has a date in its path, so it represents what was known about the item at the time it appeared on my blog.

It needs more development, like a template that says what it is, etc.

For nerds, this is what the script looks like, it's written in a more debugged version of the scripting language built into Drummer. Claude is good at that kind of work! There's no limit on the amount of complexity it can manage, and there's a lot of that in designing and implementing languages.

And here's an example of the type of page it generates.

Progress Report: Holding the Line at Juniper Ridge

CLF is fighting the Juniper Ridge Landfill expansion, which threatens the Penobscot Nation and local communities. We’re ensuring residents’ voices are heard in the fight to protect their health and environment from harmful pollution.

The post Progress Report: Holding the Line at Juniper Ridge appeared first on Conservation Law Foundation.

The Field Guide to CSS Grid Lanes

This is a very handy playground for exploring the brand new masonry grid lanes layout.

adactio.com/links/22606

You can finally power on a Mac remotely

Apple FINALLY lets you turn on your Mac remotely, without having to press the power button. In the media, articles suggest it's a reaction to Mac mini power button complaints.

While I agree the M4 mini's power button is in a really dumb spot, that's not why I care about this feature. The two bigger use cases for me have been a pain for years:

You can’t get more 2026 than that

Hallucination of the day:

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Mike Brown was a victim of the NBA's coach-firing trend, and then he became its greatest success story. Uhhh not yet.

Hundreds of AUR packages compromised

Hundreds of orphaned packages hosted by the Arch User Repository (AUR) have been compromised by an attacker who has added a malicious npm
package ( atomic-lockfile) that can exfiltrate sensitive data. The project is currently working
on cleaning up the mess. There is a list of affected packages and post (possibly NSFW domain) by "sodiboo" with additional information. Arch Linux users (or users of Arch-based distributions) that use AUR packages may wish to see if they have installed any of the compromised updates.

Tech industry suckage, part 2297

One of the things that sucks about the tech industry is that the assumption is that creative work is done by employees. Imagine if music or movies worked like that.

And the employees will resist the company working with individual outsiders, the equiv of musicians in this area.

If you know anything about my career imagine what a barrier this has been. Their first inclination when they see an individual or small company doing what they think they should do is -- this -- CRUSH.

It's hard to escape this. Upton Sinclair said --“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

If you go to your boss and say Dave says we should improve what we do with RSS, and not invest in AT Proto compatibility or wait until there's some functionality on their side of the API. You're helping the competition to add more vapor to their vaporware. How is that consistent with your strategy, and btw what is your strategy?

This has actually happened. And before it many years ago Microsoft unilaterally changed the logo for RSS. They had the courtesy to give me a heads up, and I told them it wasn't theirs to change and a lot of thought had gone into the one we had, and the one they want to use looks like every other internet logo. They let me finish my sentence and went on with other parts of the presentation.

Lots of other examples. It's very rare when they don't try to erase your work at Big Companies (or BigCo's).

The problem is this -- the web needs individual developers to survive and grow. The fact that we've been suppressed by the the BigCo's has meant we haven't built out the web the way we could have if we understood that tech is more than a business model for VCs. Other creative areas managed to get past this, why didn't tech? And can we change that? I want to.

If one of the Big Companies decided they want a real ecosystem for an internet-level standard, and hopefully have a product with lots of users that supports it, and if it's an area I know, i'm up for at least talking about how to get an open dev community growing around it.

PS: I wrote this on EMX and decided it also should be here.

@Barack Obama @Bsky

I wouldn’t be where I am today without the love and support that Michelle has poured into me over the years. Her story — from her South Side roots to the White House and beyond — is a central part of the Obama Presidential Center.

Seriencamp Audience Award Goes To Deadline Global Breakout ‘Happiness’

Arte’s Franco-Iranian web series Happiness has won the audience award at Seriencamp, while the Cologne fest has reported record attendance. Happiness, which featured as a Deadline Global Breakout earlier this month and launches its second season in two weeks, centers on an Iranian student who moves to Paris and stars Ghazal Shojaei. It received a […]

Security updates for Friday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 10.0, .NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, bind, expat, httpd:2.4, kernel, kernel-rt, mod_http2, openssl, poppler, redis, redis:7, samba, and unbound), Debian (ironic, kernel-wedge, libinput, linux-base, and neutron), Fedora (kernel, openssl, vaultwarden, and vaultwarden-web), Mageia (erlang-hex_core, erlang-rebar3, gnupg2, and sqlite3), Red Hat (buildah, podman, and skopeo), SUSE (flannel, gdk-pixbuf-loader-libheif, gnutls, google-cloud-sap-agent, grafana, graphite2, hplip, libIex-3_4-33, libzypp, nginx, openssh, perl-DBI, perl-Git-Repository, perl-Protocol-HTTP2, python-Pygments, python-simpleeval, python311-Django4, rclone, roundcubemail, strongswan, tomcat10, tomcat11, unbound, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (apache2, dotnet8, dotnet9, dotnet10, gst-plugins-base1.0, ironic, linux-azure-5.15, linux-azure-fips, lwip, mistral, and ubuntu-kylin-software-center).

@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal

Export Updates 2026-06-12:

Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places

6 new and 64 updated places.

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

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

"main" branch:

ba2b7899 - updated json

no change: rdf/ttl

82d5dcfe - updated gis package

19960fd4 - updated data quality

35956ed6 - updated bibliography

204ab39a - updated indexes

601664cd - updated sidebar

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

9799462b - updated geojson and names index

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

33765695 - updated pleiades wikidata

‘Power Book III: Raising Kanan’ Boss Talks Spoiler’s Devastating Death, Full Circle Return To Manhattan

SPOILER ALERT: The following reveals major plot points from the Power Book III: Raising Kanan Season 5 premiere. The first few moments in the Power Book III: Raising Kanan Season 5 premiere answer the big cliffhanger from the Season 4 finale: Does Kanan (Mekai Curtis) take down his mother, Raq (Patina Miller)? The answer is no, but […]

‘Call My Agent!’ Star Camille Cottin Joins Santiago Mitre’s Netflix Political Thriller ‘Villaflor’

EXCLUSIVE: Camille Cottin is among the new names to join Villaflor, the Netflix political thriller from Oscar-nominated director Santiago Mitre. Soledad Villamil and Valeria Lois round out the cast, alongside the previously announced stars Verónica Llinás and Peter Lanzani. Back in January, Deadline exclusively reported that Mitre was making the Argentina-set thriller for Netflix. At […]

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive.

Flyday

Sigh high Nearing the end of my current travels. Sitting at Logan, about to board for O’Hare, and then the hour flight to Indianapolis, during which we will be in the air for nineteen minutes. Looking out the windows at planes taxiing, landing, and taking off, while container ships slide in and out of the […]

Pretty chuffed that Keith’s Law has been quoted twice on stage at this year’s #CSSday: > JavaScript should do what only JavaScript can do.

Pretty chuffed that Keith’s Law has been quoted twice on stage at this year’s #CSSday:

JavaScript should do what only JavaScript can do.

Democratic voters want the party to be more moderate — and more socialist?

The trouble with polling about ideological labels

International Insider: Troubled World Cup Underway; Seriencamp Report; ‘Doctor Who’ Ditched

We’re back, Insiders. Jesse Whittock here reporting from Dubrovnik, where I’ve been working this week as the troubled 2026 World Cup gets underway. Let’s kick off, and make sure to sign up for the full newsletter here. World Cup Winners & Losers Worst Cup 2026?: Arguably the most toxic sporting event in modern history kicked […]

Feed the machines, then guide the humans

Docs as code used to mean editing docs as if they were code. Today it also means that docs have become executable, either as agentic instructions, skills, or context for large language models. Tech writers must now ensure that the reference and procedures they’ve carefully written and edited are the best possible fuel for AI, lest they jam the machine or make it stray into dangerous territory. Humans have their own needs though. Who feeds them?

Bernie Sanders’ AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Plan

Let no one accuse Bernie Sanders of ducking the big questions. Writing in the New York Times last week, the senator asked: “Will the future of humanity be determined by a handful of billionaires who have promoted and developed AI, with virtually no democratic input, who stand to become even richer and more powerful than they are today?”

We agree entirely that this is one of the most potent questions facing global democracy today. Our book, Rewiring Democracy, surveys the emerging uses for and impacts of AI in democracy around the world and reaches the same conclusion: that the most urgent risk posed by AI is the ...

Weekly Roundup: June 12

Evan Behrle on income inequality, Frank Pasquale on Magnifica Humanitas, and Wanshu Cong on the informal governance of global capitalism. Plus, a new report by Sanjay Jolly on advancing a constitutional regime for labor rights, Melinda Cooper offers a typology of factions of asset-based capitalism, Elliot Lewis and Zach Lewis explain how to democratize the United States, Ilias Alami & Thea Riofrancos examine the core features and fault lines of Trumpian State Capitalism, and the Roosevelt Institute lays out the Good Life Agenda: a vision of what our society could look like if all of us had access to the building blocks of economic security and prosperity.

Helen Mirren Says Artists Are Not Political Animals: “We’re Not Politicians, Politicians Are Politicians” – Taormina

Oscar-winning actress Helen Mirren, who has hit the headlines while at the Taormina Film Festival in Italy for comments on Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, pleaded the case for artists not being “politicians” in a conversation with local students on Friday. Her comments came less 24 hours after uncharacteristically public critical comments about Israel, in which […]

Lit Hub Daily: June 12, 2026

If literacy is in decline, why are bookstores booming? “Bookstores are filling a social void.” | Lit Hub Bookstores Korean poets and their translators pair poetry collections with K-pop albums. | Lit Hub On Translation Did you know the Mayflower Puritans

Elon Musk, Human Ponzi Scheme

With Wall Street’s help, you’re about to be forced to buy stock in SpaceX

Will Democrats become the party of faith?

The GOP's debasement presents an opportunity.

David Hockney Dies: Legendary British Artist Was 88

David Hockney, the legendary British artist behind some of the most recognizable works of contemporary painting, such as ‘The Splash’ and ‘Pool with Two Figures,’ has died. He was 88.  News of Hockney’s death was first reported in the French press and was later confirmed by his publicist in a statement to the BBC and […]

Friday 12 June, 2026

Hopefully… Seen in Arles on a Summer evening Quote of the Day There are three ways to make a living: Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich. Tell the truth to those who want … Continue reading →

‘Ludwig’ Season 2 Teaser Trailer: David Mitchell’s Puzzling Detective Returns To BBC & BritBox

EXCLUSIVE: The BBC has released a first-look trailer for Ludwig, the cozy crime series starring David Mitchell as a reclusive puzzle-setter turned detective. The Big Talk Studios series will return later this year after its debut season became the BBC’s biggest comedy launch since 2018 when it aired in 2024. Mitchell and Anna Maxwell Martin […]

How A Japanese Broadcaster Captured The Building Of The Tower Of Jesus At Gaudí’s Sagrada Família: “It Felt Almost Like A Living Being”

EXCLUSIVE: On the 100th anniversary of the death of the great Spanish architect Gaudí, his Tower of Jesus at the world-famous Sagrada Família is finally complete. Rather than a local Spanish network following this incredible Barcelona construction from start to finish, that job has in fact gone to Japanese broadcaster NHK, the only one granted […]

What is an LLM control plane?

Runaway agents? Provider outages? Discover why your AI stack needs an LLM control plane, not just a gateway, to handle production routing, budgets, and privacy.

Analysis: Seriencamp Is All About The Small Screen, But It Was Gen-Z Creatives Propping Up The Box Office Who Were The Talk Of Cologne

The power of Backrooms extends beyond the global box office and to TV markets in Germany. This week’s Cologne confab Seriencamp, which has become a crucial cog in the international TV calendar machine, was replete with chatter about the new generation of creatives propping up the box office, with Kane Parsons’ Backrooms, Curry Barker’s Obsession […]

Who Were the Mayflower Puritans? (And Did You Know They Came From a Town Called “Scrooby”?)

The Mayflower Pilgrims believed that they were freedom seekers, escaping centuries of bondage. William Bradford, a Mayflower passenger who served as Plymouth’s longtime governor, began his History of Plymouth Plantation by describing the oppression that religious intolerance had caused over

A Bookstore Boom in a Time of Literacy Decline

I was standing in line at Chaucer’s Books, my local indie, when it occurred to me that the line was longer than usual. This has been happening regularly enough that I’ve stopped being surprised—Chaucer’s business is downright defiant. But just

What Ancient Writers Understood About Bees

It’s spring in Prague and as I write my desk is covered in pollen. Morning bees browse around my window, foraging for materials. I was recently translating some verses of Virgil, Book IV of the Georgics, which is dedicated almost

What Should You Read Next? Here Are the Best Reviewed Books of the Week

Deb Olin Unferth’s Earth 7, Andrea Wulf’s The Traveler, and Dave Eggers’s Contrapposto 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. Earth 7 by Deb Olin Unferth (Graywolf) 6

Reading Korean Poetry Through Music

Reading poetry in translation often heightens awareness of what can’t quite be explained such as rhythm, tone, atmosphere, the way a poem feels as much as what it says. These are things we register in our bodies before we put

Between Verdict and Voice, From Judge to Writer

In 1989, a year into my judgeship in Denver County Court, I began writing at night about the last week of my father’s life—trying to understand his absence from it after my interracial marriage. How could he let me go

Ana has gone above and beyond to match the branding for this year’s #CSSday.

Ana has gone above and beyond to match the branding for this year’s #CSSday.

Claire Fuller on Taking Writing Lessons from Sculpting

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. I’d been sculpting and drawing since I was sixteen but when, at forty, I started writing short stories and novels, all my desire to sculpt fell away. I still have my chisels,

Minimal yet Productive Travel Desk Setup

A deep-dive into some thoughtfully chosen equipment that lets me stay productive anywhere with a lightweight and clutter-free desk setup.

“Authority”

It’s been seven hours and thirty-­five days since he took his love away. Josephine knows the world is crowded with people like her, that hers is a fundamentally ordinary predicament, but she feels a grueling, novel loneliness even so. Nothing

How quickly do electric car sales translate into cars on the road?

And other insights from the electric car rollout in 2025.

They don't want you to know the REAL reason Social Security is in trouble

But I'm going to tell you anyway

Disney+ Reveals Dutch Version Of Strategy Game ‘Werewolves’ With NPO

Disney+ is making a version of strategy game Werewolves with Dutch broadcaster NPO. Titled Wolven: Het Spel Van List En Bedrog in the Netherlands, the Traitors-esque strategy battle is based on the cult board game and takes place in a remote forest village, where a group of strangers known as Villagers compete to win a […]

BBC Documentary To Explore First UK National Security Act Conviction After Men Burned Down Ukrainian Business On Behalf Of Russian Mercenaries

EXCLUSIVE: A BBC documentary will follow the first people to be convicted under the UK’s new National Security Act after they burned a Ukrainian business on behalf of Russian mercenaries. The Telegram Terror Plot, which has not published production credits in order to protect those behind it, will use first-hand testimony, exclusive access and unseen […]

TIL: Browsers offer a “copy email” in the context menu on mailto: links

When adding an email link to a document you should use the mailto: URI scheme: Email Chris That makes the browser open the associated email tool instead of opening the link in the browser. Today I found out that browsers also offer a “copy email” in the context menu that only copies the email itself […]

June 11, 2026

At 8:22 this morning, Trump posted on social media: “The United States will be hitting Iran (Whose Navy, Air Force, Radar, Anti Aircraft, and all other forms of Defense, together with most of its offensive capability, are GONE!), VERY HARD TONIGHT.

TASCAM recovery

TL;DR if you have a TASCAM 788 backup and don’t know how to get the audio out of it this_ _script might help. Also: AI tools work best when paired with expertise.

I needed to take a very personal excursion into digital preservation recently as I attempted to listen to some audio recordings my brother John had made about 20 years ago. John died recently, and is sorely missed by his friends and family.

John was a continuous source of inspiration for me, because of his many varied interests and projects. One thing he did consistently since he was a teenager was perform music as a singer-songwriter.

As my family and I went through the very difficult process of emptying his apartment, we discovered a set of recordings he had made on CD-R. Three of these CDs were clearly conceived of as albums, and easily mounted as CDDA when I popped them in my CD player.

However he also left a binder of CD-Rs, where each CD was neatly labeled with a song title and a year. All in all there are 108 of them, from the 2003-2008 time period. There is a lot of material on these CDs that is not present on the three albums. However, when I popped these in my CD player all I saw was a macOS error dialog box saying:

The disk you attached was not readable by this computer.

John’s binder of CD-Rs

At first I thought they might be damaged or corrupted. But it seemed unlikely that so many of them would be. After some asking around I got pointed to two excellent guides to working with CDs:

• Preserving
  optical media from the command-line by Johan van der Knijff

• The
  Working Archivist’s Guide to Enthusiast CD-ROM Archiving Tools by Misty De Meo

These guides were great, and did help me extract the raw data from the CD-R with cdrdao, but ultimately I was unable to determine what format the data was in using tools, like file, Siegfried and Droid.

In a fit of desperation I spent some time in Claude Code trying to see if it could help me identify what format the data was in. Despite several forays, it kept going round in circles, burning tokens.

One of those forays led me on a wild goose chase installing an old version of macOS in order to see if an old version of Retrospect might be able to read the CDs (it didn’t).

During this time I got some excellent advice over in the Fediverse atdigipres.club. One of
those messages was from Ross Spencer who took a look at a sample raw CD image. He was able to spot some markers that pointed to it possibly being a backup from a TASCAM DAW, specifically a TASCAM 788 (I believe Ross was using either strings or a hex editor to look for these clues).

Unfortunately, after poking around in various user forums, I discovered that there were not really any tools for working with TASCAM 788 backups. Everyone seemed to be recommending the purchase of a TASCAM 788 and its CD Burner, since the data was in a proprietary format, and there were no emulators.

Before dropping some money on Ebay I decided to roll the dice with Claude Code again, but this time with the more specific guidance that this was likely a TASCAM 788 backup, and asking about options for recovery. If you are interested you can read the
transcript for this session. The key part of the back and forth for me was:

The 2488 stores audio as raw 16-bit or 24-bit PCM at 44.1kHz in a proprietary block structure. Once you identify the byte offset where audio data starts, you can use Audacity’s “Import Raw Data” with 24-bit signed big-endian PCM, 44.1kHz, to listen and verify.

I prompted it to try to identify the offset, so I could attempt the import in Audacity. It did some work writing Python snippets and executing them for a few minutes, and then output a likely offset. The first time I read it in I only heard white noise. But after twiddling some of the import options in Audacity I saw some promising waveforms appear in the Audacity display. And when I pressed play ✨✨✨✨ instead of white noise I heard John’s guitar and voice!

Audacity screenshot of imported raw data

What appeared to be a single track turned out to be multiple tracks created with the TASCAM, that were joined together. The final segment was the completed mix.

I continued to work with Claude on a program that would identify the offset in the raw CD data, then extract a WAV file, and then extract the separate tracks, as well as the complete track. It did this by looking for gaps inside the audio. I put the program here:

https://github.com/edsu/jas-discs/blob/main/extract_tracks.py

Here is the guitar / vocal first track (there are a few seconds of silence at the beginning):

And here is the mix including percussion and keyboards:

These recordings are Copyright John Summers CC-BY-NC

I have since been able to find John’s TASCAM 788 at my brother Matt’s house–although it doesn’t have the SCSI external CD burner anymore. So there’s no way to read the CDs with it.

These CDs and songs are important enough to me that I want to see if the actual hardware can do a better job of preserving John’s work. So I’ve got a bid one of the external CD-Recorder devices I found on Ebay.

John clearly spent a lot of time and care taking a snapshot of these songs he used to perform in coffee shops around Bucks County Pennsylvania. I plan to release some of them on his Bandcamp, with some of his artworks as album covers. I want to share them with people who knew him, and put these songs out into the world in a way that respects his memory and creative work, while also being something that he just wasn’t focused on as an artist. For John it was the creative process itself that mattered most.

None of this will bring John back of course. He’s gone now, and at peace. But he will always be remembered by those who loved him. Look for more posts here after I’ve been able to extract these songs in total.

Fight Night

George Dale loved a fight. He loved getting in them, with the Klan, for sure, but with anyone really. And he loved watching them. This is a little work-in-progress about both.

Public postmortem: Broken images

Our public postmortem for the incident on June 10th, 2026.

Iranian Navy Humiliates Trump by Closing Reflecting Pool

The Iranians choked off access to the newly renovated pool and began charging tourists to look at it.

Light at the End of the Tunnel

And it’s not an oncoming train

Gemeinsam gegen maßlose Überwachungspläne – Demo am Samstag

Der Bund und mehrere Landesregierungen arbeiten aktuell an einer Ausweitung der Überwachungsbefugnisse von Polizeien und Geheimdiensten. Unzählige Menschen sollen gescannt, durchleuchtet und systematisch gerastert werden. Dagegen rufen wir diesen Samstag zur Demo auf.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

The White House Panic Over the Epstein Files: Six Takeaways From the New York Times Investigation.

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

OG is the new Alysa Liu. I'm watching his put-back over and over, never getting tired of it.

Warning: Trump's Rolling Coup Is Already Underway

And what must be done to stop it

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

This is a test page about Charles de Gaulle. It came from ChatGPT, via Claude Code.

How To End A War: Lessons from Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Juan Manuel Santos

What can Colombia teach us about what's still possible?

Meet Josh Turek, Our Inspiring Candidate Running For US Senate In Iowa

Josh is helping lead a very talented ticket in what has become one of our most important battleground states this election cycle

Rupture and Repair: When Problematic Figures Ask For Our Support

Hunter Biden and Graham Platner are asking us to reckon with who they were. Pete Hegseth and Ken Paxton are asking us to look past it.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Today's Bill Simmons podcast has a lot of details about last night's game that went over my head. The Spurs made a lot of mistakes, any one of which would have changed the outcome.

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

I like this Reality Composer grid more than the Godot one.

My attempt, with the wrong colors, but with t subdivisions and markers:

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

By popular demand: how to use Working Copy as your git client with Xogot on the iPad/iPhone:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7-LeDSVeuk

Here are the winners of the 2026 Women’s Prizes in Fiction and Nonfiction.

Today, the UK’s Women’s Prize Trust announced the winner of the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction, which “champions excellence, originality, and accessibility in women’s writing,” and is awarded to the best novel of each year written in English and published

It's Fine, I Guess.

I try my hand at sportswriting

(if you think *that’s* spicy, you haven’t even seen the question I put to the representative from the Ladybird browser project …alas my question wasn’t asked on stage) #CSSday

(if you think that’s spicy, you haven’t even seen the question I put to the representative from the Ladybird browser project …alas my question wasn’t asked on stage) #CSSday

At #CSSday the Google Chrome team are asking developers “What’s missing from the web?” …I needed a few post-it notes for my answer.

At #CSSday the Google Chrome team are asking developers “What’s missing from the web?” …I needed a few post-it notes for my answer.

Fri, 1pm ET - Hopium Founding Members Most Fridays Get Together

We sure do have lots to talk about!

How to Win in a World of Limited Opportunities

Listen now | Why do some people always seem to get the opportunity—and others don’t?

Apple Gave Siri Hands

WWDC answered whether your assistant is private. It never answered whether it’s telling the truth — and Apple just gave it hands. The smartest thing I’ve read about Apple’s WWDC didn’t come from Apple. It came from an analyst named Nate B. Jones, who watched the same keynote everyone else did and noticed that the real story wasn’t whether Siri had finally gotten smart. The real story, he argued, is a land grab over what he calls the trusted action surface — the place where AI actually meets your work, touches your apps, and is handed permission to do something. There are two great bottlenecks in AI, he points out: raw compute, which is Jensen Huang’s kingdom, and the trusted surface where intelligence becomes useful, […]

The post Apple Gave Siri Hands first appeared on I, Cringely.

Digital Branding

Web Design

Marketing

Letras robadas: el eco de los sueños que se transforman

Dirección: John Carney. Guion: John Carney, Peter McDonald. Elenco: Paul Rudd, Nick Jonas, Peter McDonald. País: Irlanda. Más información de la película: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt32267691/ Una buena melodía siempre deja una certeza: la sensibilidad que puede habitar en una letra es abrumadora. Todos cargamos con emociones, pero muy pocos tienen la magia de tomar esa crudeza, procesarla […]

La entrada Letras robadas: el eco de los sueños que se transforman se publicó primero en Palomita de maíz.

Ending Responsive Images

Mat Marquis isn't known for pulling his punches. And yet, Marquis stopped short when he declared The End of Responsive Images. Mat left responsive images on the ropes. I hope to finish them.

Trump - Desperate Men Do Desperate Things (New Video, Written Analysis)

Another gauge of inflation - PPI - came in really hot today.........

Dogs And Mental Health

Writing of lasting value

A Newsletter of Humorous Writing #447

For June 3-9, 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. Bad news: James and Luke each broke a leg and are now confined to tandem-wheelchairs in Humorous Readings Headquarters (HRHQ). Good news: HRHQ is equipped with two telescopes (for examining faraway humor pieces) and we’ve been having a blast snooping on our neighbors out the back (or “rear”) window. However, we’re starting to suspect that one of our neighbors may have committed a heinous crime… Writing a short humor piece with an unclear premise. Just to be sure, we’re gonna send someone over there to break into his apartment and rifle through his papers.

What We Enjoyed This Week

I’m Jessica Fletcher, and I Don’t Even Feel Anything Anymore When I Find a Dead Body by Tony Delgado (McSweeney’s) Tony clearly has a lot of affection for “Murder She Wrote”, and knows a lot about the show (or did some truly killer research), because the details in this piece are perfectly calibrated. They’re wonderfully specific deep cuts that push the premise forward, but aren’t at all alienating to those of us who aren’t as familiar with the Jessica Fletcher oeuvre. If your premise involves riffing on a piece of pop culture, you can’t just work from your received knowledge; You have to deeply engage with your source material, and that’s exactly what Tony’s done here.

Microbrewery Entirely Built Around Pun Name ‘Let’s Circle Bock’ by Dan Kozuh (The Hard Times) There’s an interesting meta aspect at play here, in that we couldn’t help but wonder if the writing process for this piece mirrored the events of the piece itself. That is, did Dan first come up with the delightful pun “Let’s Circle Bock,” and then decide to build this piece entirely around that pun? If so, it’s a very clever way to make a premise out of what could have been just a one-off joke.

Cote and the Risks of the Clubstaurant by Helen Rosner (The New Yorker) This review will make you laugh and make you hungry. It’s filled with terrific, witty lines like “High up on an interior wall, in jarring contrast with the muted sandstone tones of the rest of the room, is a neon work by the artist Martin Creed proclaiming ‘DON’T WORRY.’ Was I worried? Should I be worried?” It’s also almost certainly the first restaurant review we’ve ever read that ends on a cliffhanger.

-- AD --

Hosted by Lana Schwartz (The New Yorker, The Onion, McSweeney's), Letters & Sodas brings together standup comedy, humor pieces, fiction, and essay readings in a way they never have been before (or at least not in recent memory). Join us Wednesday, June 17 at 7 p.m. at Greats of Craft for a very special TWO-YEAR ANNIVERSARY SHOW, with:

Upasna Barath (Vogue, Comedic Timing)

Meg Reid (McSweeney's, The Onion, Reductress)

Shane O'Neill (New York Times, The Washington Post)

Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell (Murder Book, The Joy of Snacking)

Marcia Belsky (100 Tampons, Handmaid’s Tale: The Musical)

Gastor Almonte (The War Report, Sandwich Comedy)

Tickets available here!

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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 #109 .

A Guide to Asian Restaurants by Ali Wong (Vulture) In an excerpt from her book, Dear Girls: Intimate Tales, Untold Secrets, and Advice for Living Your Best Life, Ali Wong gives us the inside scoop on what makes a great Chinese place, what makes a bad Vietnamese place, and so forth. It's not often that humor pieces are funny and filled with actual, practical advice, so this one is a real gem.

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.

Updates From Your Editors and Friends of the Newsletter

There’s still time to get in on Luke’s single-session workshop on Form and Narration in short humor that’s coming up next Thursday! And Luke also just announced his lineup of July Workshops—including an intro class and a SUMMER FRIDAYS advanced workshop. Hope to see you in one!

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

I am going to be “borrowing” a lot of UI ideas from the new RealityComposer Pro.

In particular, I love the new graph editor UI. They solved a few idioms I struggled with.

What is surprising is that they dropped their units of measure entire from their properties.

Homebrew 6.0.0 released

Version
6.0.0 of the Homebrew package-management system has been released. Notable changes in this release include the introduction of tap trust to improve supply-chain security, improvements in sandboxing on Linux, a number of performance tweaks, and many other changes.

See the changelog for a full list. LWN covered Homebrew in November 2025.

Caltech Weekly - June 11: Advanced Wearable Sensors; The Beauty of Convergence

Caltech Weekly - June 11: Advanced Wearable Sensors; The Beauty of ConvergenceView this email in your browser

Thursday, June 11, 2026

Stretchy, Soft, and Sticky: Advancing the Next Generation of Wearable and Implantable Sensors

Wearable and implantable biosensors have the potential to revolutionize health care by diagnosing, monitoring, and even treating a wide range of health conditions. Recent innovations in the lab of Wei Gao, professor of medical engineering at Caltech and a Heritage Medical Research Institute Investigator, are pushing the field forward.

The Beauty of Convergence

It takes great effort to push insights across scientific boundaries, but when those who think about or see the world differently figure out how to work together effectively, the breakthroughs can be beautiful. Caltech has built its culture, teaching philosophy, and even parts of its campus to facilitate these interactions.

Gold Records and 3D Molecular Models: Step into the Office of Bil Clemons

Music and mentorship can be found in the office of this biochemist.

"I was kind of nervous because I didn't have a deep background in STEM, but when I first came in, people were very nice. From my perspective, I thought, 'I'll be the dumbest one in my cohort,' so I was so ready to learn from them. And then they were so kind to teach me—but at some point, I was actually able to help them. They were impressed by my math skills, for example, and I was so excited because it was a two-way exchange at some point. For me, that was very memorable. I am very proud that I succeeded. I'm done, and I'm getting the degree! I have the first PhD in my whole family, and it's from Caltech—a school that everyone knows. This is kind of a big deal."

Soyoung Shin received her MS in chemical engineering in 2024 and will graduate with a doctorate in chemical engineering at commencement, which will be

live-streamed starting this Friday at 9:50 a.m. PDT.

Shin is one of 11 of Caltech's 2026 graduates who recently discussed their achievements, challenges, and lessons learned during their time at the Institute.

This Week's Other Top Stories

Alumna Endows SURF to Honor Parents

JPL News: INCUS Mission on Road to Launch, Study Storms from Space

Upcoming Events

All events Pacific Time unless otherwise specified.

Caltech's 132nd Commencement

Kip Thorne (BS '62)—theoretical physicist, Distinguished Alumnus, and Nobel laureate—will deliver the 2026 Commencement address. No tickets are required, and guest seating is on a first-come, first-served basis. The ceremony will be livestreamed on Caltech's Commencement website. Friday, June 12, 10 a.m.–noon, Beckman Mall and online

In Case You Missed It

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

Keck Institute for Space Studies: Shaping the Future of Space Exploration

This video discusses the Keck Institute for Space Studies (KISS), which was established at Caltech in January 2008 as a "think and do tank" that aims to shape the future of space exploration, science, and technology

Did You Know?

Past Caltech commencement ceremonies have featured luminaries such as author Ray Bradbury and "Science Guy" Blll Nye," one instance when a student risked the scrutiny of the US Secret Service to offer President George H.W. Bush a hug, and a faux volcanic eruption. In 1920,Roscoe Dickinson received the first PhD awarded by Caltech. The chemist then joined the faculty as a professor, mentoring promising graduate students including Linus Pauling (PhD 1925), who went on to become a two-time Nobel laureate, and Arnold O. Beckman (PhD '28), who later invented the pH meter.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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@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal

Vici.org via the #PleiadesGazetteer Linked Data Sidebar: The Pleiades Linked Data Sidebar code is now parsing Pleiades links from René Voorburg's. Vici.org: Archaeological Atlas of Antiquity. 2012-. As of today's first pass at the data provided by René, 5,327 unique Pleiades place resources now display inbound Vici.org links in their sidebars.

More info on the blog: https://pleiades.stoa.org/news/blog/vici-org-via-the-pleiades-linked-data-sidebar

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

Pluralistic: The world has moved on (11 Jun 2026)

Today's links The world has moved on: Notes from the enshittocene. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: "Jpod"; Barlow v Glickman; Cyclist v bike lanes; Judge v copyright trolls; "The Uncertain Places"; Thatcher v Palin; NY v Time Warner; Banks v negative interest rates; Keeping the new web decentralized; "Prisoners' Inventions." Upcoming appearances: LA, Menlo Park, Toronto, NYC, Philadelphia, Chicago, Edinburgh, 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 world has moved on (permalink) Douglas Adams wrote, "Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you’re 15 and 35 is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're 35 is against the natural order of things." I think about this quote whenever I get angry at the technology around me. When I rail against the Great Enshittening, am I simply committing the sin of nostalgia ("Nostalgia is a toxic impulse" -J. Hodgman)? I am, after all, old. I've written before how conservatives' yearning for "simpler times" is really just a wish to be a child again. The reason times seemed simpler during your childhood is that you were a child, and if your parents did their job, they shielded you from a lot of the complexity of their adulthood so you could enjoy your childhood: https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/24/hermit-kingdom/#simpler-times That's where the "National Customer Rage Survey" comes in. It's been surveying a panel of 1,000 representative consumers every three years for a decade, continuing a research project that started in 1976. The survey measures respondents' attitudes towards the businesses they deal with, and as of 2025, it's fair to say, customers are pissed: https://customercaremc.com/2025-national-customer-rage-study/ We're experiencing more problems with the products and services we use. Those problems are more severe, they make us angrier, and they produce lingering stress. More and more, we are seeking revenge on the businesses that piss us off. So it's not just me, an old man yelling at the cloud. The world is getting shittier. The latest Customer Rage Survey inspired The Guardian's Heather Timmons to launch a new investigative series looking at how fucked up everything is. Her inaugural installment is very good, and it's drawn a massive reader response: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jun/04/us-consumer-rage-prices-economy I spoke with Timmons this week about the series. She told me she's been deluged with emails from readers who feel that the world is different now – and many of them cite my work on enshittification. Timmons wanted to know what advice I had for her readers. I told her that I don't think you can solve this as a consumer, because this isn't a market problem, it's a political problem, and shopping isn't politics: https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/21/purity-culture/#stop-fucking-that-chicken Later, Timmons forwarded one of those emails to me. It gave an eloquent and evocative account of just how rancid the vibe is these days. The writer said that when they and their spouse encounter this rot, they cite Stephen King's Dark Tower novels, quoting the oft-repeated phrase from that series: "The world has moved on." At this point, I should warn you that the following contains some Dark Tower spoilers, so if you're planning to read a decades-old (but very good) dystopian western/science fiction crossover series, and if spoilers bug you, this might not be the essay for you. Spoiler alert! Still with me? OK, then. In the Dark Tower novels, we crisscross a fallen world in which decay is all around us. The buildings are rotten, the machines have stopped working and no one knows how to fix them, babies and livestock alike are frequently born with deadly congenital defects. Much of the world has fallen into wasteland, cracked and barren. An army of wreckers, led by the demagogue John Farson (who styles himself "The Good Man") are slowly but surely conquering the land, laying waste to those few remaining outposts of civilization and conscripting the young men in the conquered lands to march on their neighbors. It wasn't always this way. There was a time when the world was defined by hope and virtue and light, when the machines were fixed and the crops were harvested. Life wasn't golden – there were still squabbles and sorrows and even wars – but life was good. And then the world moved on. For reasons that no one truly understands, the normal push/pull of decay and renewal turned into a one-way, irreversible process in which everything that crumbled or snapped or burned up couldn't be repaired or replaced or recovered. Our mysterious ability to beat back the Second Law of Thermodynamics – an absurdity we probably should have always treated as an aberration – has collapsed. The world has moved on. The Dark Tower series is a long, long, long Bildungsroman, with many detours through the life-stories of the characters in the ensemble cast, as well as the biographies of many of the figures they meet along the road. It's mostly an adventure novel, as road-trip tales tend to be, but those character studies and the lore that they surface – from our world and theirs – creates an overwhelming, many-layered, richly textured sense of loss and worse, of despair. For the world has moved on, and despite the love and care and bravery of many of the people in that world, the world cannot be redeemed. Each terrible day of those people's lives is the best day of the rest of their lives. From here on in, it only gets worse. When Timmons' reader and their spouse greet every fresh depredation in modern life – hours on the phone with customer service to resolve a billing error that the company repeats every month, say – with "the world has moved on," they are invoking something heavy. This isn't just a rancid vibe, it's the fucking end-times. For all that the Dark Tower novels are a series of cracking adventures and thoughtful character studies, they are also a mystery. Over and over again, we are made to ask ourselves, why has the world moved on? Was it John Farson and his army? Was it the Man in Black, the evil wizard whom the book's protagonist has pursued across time and space? Was it the Crimson King, the evil force whom the Man in Black serves? Well, yes – and no. Midway through the novels, we learn that the Crimson King and his evil minions have laid siege to "the beams," vast ley-lines that span the universe and provide the force that pushes away entropy, creating breathing room where repair and care can live. "All things serve the beams," we're told. The beams are the organizing force of the universe, the answer to the riddle of how such pitiful things as we could have fought back remorseless entropy for so long. By attacking the beams, the villains of the series have all but snuffed out that force, and so the world has moved on. When I read that email and the invocation of the Dark Tower, I was immediately struck by how apt this comparison is. Because, as I've written many times, there were always enshittifiers who would have plundered your data and money and treated you with naked contempt: https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/04/object-permanence/#picks-and-shovels There were always enshittifiers, but those enshittifiers faced external forces that checked their wreckers' urge. They were held in check by competition, and regulation, and workers' sense of fairness and duty, and by the threat of new products and services that might pop up to correct the defects they deliberately introduced into their products by enshittifying them. And the foundation – the Dark Tower upon which all the beams converged- was antitrust enforcement, grounded in the idea that we could not afford to let any company – not a "good" company, nor a "bad" company – get so large that it could no longer be regulated, lest its executives become "autocrats of trade": https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/ The same people who laid siege to antitrust law would later come after all forms of checks and balances. These are the people who gave us the "unitary executive" and Project 2025, and the collapse of accountability that has allowed the worst people to commit the gravest sins they could imagine and still reap vast fortunes. These beam-breakers wanted kings, and they got them. I collect definitions of "conservatism," and one of my favorites comes from Corey Robin's book, The Reactionary Mind. Robins asks how it is that we can call so many disparate, irreconcilable ideologies – various ethno-nationalisms, imperialism, financialism, patriarchy, Christian nationalism, libertarianism, white supremacy, etc – "conservative"? What binds all these views together? https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/22/all-day-suckers/#i-love-the-poorly-educated Robin's answer: the foundation that all these otherwise disparate views share is that some people are born to rule, while others are born to be ruled over. When these lesser people are elevated to positions of power, their inferiority creates a system of misrule, by which we all suffer. The best outcome for everyone is for us all to know our place and defer to our social betters. That's why conservatives are obsessed with affirmative action, DEI, and any form of anti-racism. For them, the discriminatory outcomes we see in the wild are natural, reflecting the in-born defects in the people at the bottom of the social order. That's why, after every plane crash, every collision between a cargo ship and a bridge, every spectacular corporate bankruptcy, conservatives race to uncover the race, gender, religion and sexual orientation of the captain, the pilot or the CEO. If the person who oversaw the catastrophe has anything remotely resembling a marginalized identity, then this is loudly trumpeted as confirmation that "diversity hires," promoted above their station, are ruining our society and wrecking our bridges. Naturally, if the person in charge was a wealthy, well-born, straight white guy, that's just proof that shit happens – it definitely doesn't prove that white straight guys, as a class, should be removed from positions of power. For conservatives, virtue is "whatever the people who are born to rule desire." Hence Frank Wilhoit's definition of conservativism, "exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." It's not a crime if the president does it. It's also not a crime if your boss does it, or if a monopolist does it, or if ICE does it. It's not a crime if the IDF do it, or if the Epstein Class do it. "Taxes are for the little people": https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/15/guillotines-and-taxes/#carried-interest The attack on antitrust law was part of the attack on the rule of law, the campaign to put everyone back in the their place. It's a piece of the effort to establish a new hereditary aristocracy, and every hereditary aristocracy requires heredity serfs (that would be us): https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/06/the-end-of-the-road-to-serfdom/ The ideology of economism – which says that market outcomes are the only way to govern a society – cashes out to "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." If we interfere with mergers, or labor practices, or commercial conduct, we "distort the market," which is literally going against nature: https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse That's why Trump dismantled the consumer protection agencies, the antitrust agencies, the labor protection agencies, and the environmental protection agencies. When someone in power cheats the system, that's not a crime, no matter how many people they rob, maim or kill. As Trump told us on the debate stage in 2016, that kind of cheating "makes me smart": https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/04/its-not-a-lie/#its-a-premature-truth That's why Elon Musk (almost) got to force every pension saver in America to bail out his money-incinerating AI business and his failed social media takeover – because the rules that protect everyday investors are "for the little people." Musk's mistake was trying to get a bunch of billionaires to hold the bag, too. The one form of systemic violence our society will not tolerate is trillionaire-on-billionaire violence: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/05/spacex-blocked-from-early-us-benchmark-index-entry-as-sp-reaffirms-existing-rules.html The world has moved on. 50 years of neoliberal rule has weakened and snapped the beams – the rule of law, consumer and labor rights, civil rights – that radiated from our Dark Tower – antitrust law, which blocked the emergence of the "autocrats of trade." The people who besieged these beams had the same motives as the Crimson King and John Farson and the Man in Black: they were willing to pay any price for a world free from consequences for people like them. They knew they were born to rule, and that the rules were "for the little people," that breaking those rules "made them smart." They wanted "bossism." Or, as rendered in the original Afrikaans, "baasskap," which means, "the social, political and economic domination of South Africa by its minority white population": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baasskap Not for nothing, baasskap is the foundation of Muskism, the ideology that Elon Musk epitomizes, even if he can't articulate it: https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/21/torment-nexusism/#marching-to-pretoria In "The Utopia of Rules," the late David Graeber described how neoliberal deregulation produced exactly the kind of state that we were warned we'd get under communism. Thanks to monopolies, all the stores were the same and they all sold the same goods. Thanks to the dismantling of labor protection and unions, no one had enough money to get by. Thanks to elite impunity, we were ruled by monsters who committed crimes in the open and thrived as a result. Thanks to unchecked greed, we paid everything we had for healthcare, only to be denied treatment when we needed it. Thanks to the dismantling of the welfare state, more and more of us had to wait in long lines to fill out absurdly long forms in triplicate. Thanks to the intrinsic instability of such a terrible system, more and more of us ended up in prison, and protest became more and more illegal: https://memex.craphound.com/2015/02/02/david-graebers-the-utopia-of-rules-on-technology-stupidity-and-the-secret-joys-of-bureaucracy/ Graeber pointed out that the rise of the web made it seductively easy for people in authority to force us to fill in forms. When analog bureaucracies impose paperwork costs on us, they also impose paperwork costs on themselves, because processing and filing those forms requires substantial effort, even if filling in those forms requires even more effort from us. When it comes to virtual paperwork, the asymmetry is even more pronounced. Sure, it takes some admin to set up an online form and write the scripts to process its outputs, but that's a one-off. The form-giver can perform a very little admin and still impose a giant, repeated admin burden on the rest of us. AI has only made this worse. Now, thanks to vibe coding, everyone can produce a form and its associated processing and analytics back-end with prompts, which creates a grave moral hazard. The kinds of activities that I used to fill in a single short form to accomplish now require ten lengthy forms, created by different people in the same organization, all asking for variations on the same information. Through AI, we have democratized bureaucracy. It's Kafka-as-a-service. What's more, when you're dealing with a monopoly, you have no choice but to complete whatever paperwork they throw at you. And when the vibe-coded back-end scripts shit the bed and lose or misinterpret your data, you have no choice but to endure an infinite telephone hold queue (if you're lucky) or get shunted to a customer service bot (if you're unlucky): https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/11/sorry-to-bother-you/#we-dont-care-we-dont-have-to It's entirely possible to build webforms that are thoughtful, fast, respectful of our time, and well-processed. The problem is that fielding these forms requires that the form-giver undertake some intensive, moderately expensive work (once), while skipping this step merely requires that we all perform intensive, time-consuming work (over and over and over again): https://mohkohn.co.uk/writing/html-first/ This is how we end up with government forms that require you to list every trip you have ever taken to the USA, since your infancy, with every flight number, which you can only get help with by talking to a chatbot that emails you an out-of-date PDF no matter what question you ask of it: https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/06/doge-ball/#n-600 This is how we end up with massive customer service queues, long lines at tills, and no one at the gate to answer your questions when your flight is canceled. Understaffing is a form of enshittification, one that shifts value from shoppers to owners, and shifts consequences from owners to workers: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/22/nobodys-home/#squeeze-that-hog This is how we end up with broken machines that no one can fix. Firing workers and replacing them with chatbots or contractors means incinerating their process knowledge – the precious, inchoate, unrecorded understanding that keeps everything working: https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/08/process-knowledge-vs-bosses/#wash-dishes-cut-wood This is how companies that make products we love suddenly decide to wreck those products: when the only consequences for shitty products is angry customers with nowhere to go and no one to vent their rage upon except workers who have no labor rights and can't afford to quit, why not do a mafia bust-out for every business? https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/ The world has moved on. Nothing works. Everything costs too much. No one can help. No one knows how to fix anything. The beams were broken by the Crimson King and his economism-crazed minions. The Dark Tower might fall. So what consumer advice do I have for people who are angry about this? I don't have any consumer advice, I'm afraid. You can't shop your way out of a monopoly. Once again, shopping is not politics. What I have for you is political advice. To restore the beams and beat back entropy again, we need a better system, not more virtuous individuals. If you feel – as I do – that "the world has moved on," then to wrench it back, you will have to join a polity. Support activist groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the digital rights group I've been at for the past 25 years: https://supporters.eff.org/donate/join-eff Join a union. If there's no union at your jobsite, start a union. If you work in tech, you start this process by talking to techsolidarity.org and the techworkerscoalition.org. In the UK, get in touch with United Tech and Allied Workers: https://utaw.tech/ Get involved in party politics. Find a political party whose local organization supports your values (even if the national version of that party sucks) and then work with your fellow grassroots activists to drag or replace the party leaders. Get involved in local politics: if there's one thing Moms For Liberty has taught us, it's that unregarded, seemingly unimportant local offices have enormous potential to change facts on the ground for the people where you live. Those changes don't have to be change for the worse. Doing politics is hard. Hell, after all, is other people. It would be great if we could make change by changing ourselves, but that's not how any of this works. The world has moved on, and you can't save it. But together, we can restore the beams and beat back entropy. Hell is other people, but only because other people are so great but it's so hard to figure out how to work together. We can do it, though. We did it with the post-war settlement, the 30 glorious years when we built the welfare state, regulated polluters and bosses, and kicked off the civil rights movement. We did it then, and we can do it again. We must. All things serve the beams. Hey look at this (permalink) Apple wants Europe to blink https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/947051/apple-europe-dma-siri-ai Tech Influence Watch https://influence.citationneeded.news/ Graham Platner and Stock Market Democrats https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-graham-platner Nominate a Site for Tiny Awards 2026 https://tinyawards.net/nominations/?2026 Rudy Rucker Paintings https://www.rudyrucker.com/paintings/ Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Coupland’s JPod: the Anti-Microserfs https://memex.craphound.com/2006/06/09/couplands-jpod-the-anti-microserfs/ #20yrsago Anti-iTunes DRM demonstrations across the USA tomorrow https://www.defectivebydesign.org/node/98 #20yrsago EFF co-founder Barlow debates MPAA prez Glickman http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/5064170.stm #20yrsago Warehouse where old Disney World rides go to die https://limegreen-loris-912771.hostingersite.com/lost-horizons-another-look-back-at-a-future-world-favorite/ #15yrsago IMF considered harmful https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-it-s-not-just-dominique-strausskahn-the-imf-itself-should-be-on-trial-2292270.html #15yrsago AT&T lobbies Wisconsin GOP to nuke Wisconsin’s best-of-breed co-op ISP for educational institutions https://communitynetworks.org/content/does-att-really-own-wisconsin-legislature-battle-over-wiscnet-continues #15yrsago Developmentally disabled man harrassed by TSA at Detroit airport https://web.archive.org/web/20110610141422/http://www.myfoxdetroit.com/dpp/news/taryn_asher/dad-special-needs-son-harassed-by-tsa-at-detroit-metropolitan-airport-20110608-wpms #15yrsago Miami cops intimidate citizen journalist who recorded shoot-em-up, smash camera https://web.archive.org/web/20110615035017/https://www.miamiherald.com/2011/06/02/v-fullstory/2248396/witnesses-said-they-were-forced.html #15yrsago NYC cyclist vs. bike lanes – kamikaze law-abiding https://web.archive.org/web/20110612100758/https://consumerist.com/2011/06/test.html #15yrsago Judge to copyright trolls: you are “inexcusable” https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/06/judge-furious-at-inexcusable-p2p-lawyering-cancels-subpoenas/ #15yrsago Wah wah crybaby extortionists wah wah https://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-lawyers-defame-torrentfreak-in-court-110609/ #15yrsago Lisa Goldstein’s The Uncertain Places: Grimm fairytale in California vibrates with believable unreality https://memex.craphound.com/2011/06/09/lisa-goldsteins-the-uncertain-places-grimm-fairytale-in-california-vibrates-with-believable-unreality/ #15yrsago American right upset at report that Thatcher won’t meet Palin https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jun/09/margaret-thatcher-sarah-palin-meeting #15yrsago Lobbynomics: Canadian Chamber of Commerce manufactures fake $30 billion counterfeiting loss https://web.archive.org/web/20110611045202/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5841/125/ #10yrsago USA Swimming bans rapist Brock Turner for life https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/usa-swimming-bans-convicted-rapist-brock-turner-for-life-114108/ #10yrsago Human advice for exercising while depressed https://web.archive.org/web/20160505140324/https://theestablishment.co/2016/05/05/depression-busting-exercise-tips-for-people-too-depressed-to-exercise/ #10yrsago Every industry thinks it’s special, but only finance gets treated that way https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/John-Kay-BIS-speech.pdf #10yrsago Spain’s Podemos Party publishes its manifesto in Ikea Catalog form https://estaticos.elperiodico.com/resources/pdf/9/4/1465389843149.pdf #10yrsago Reminder: Neal Stephenson predicted Donald Trump in 1994 https://memex.craphound.com/2016/06/10/reminder-neal-stephenson-predicted-donald-trump-in-1994/ #10yrsago Donald Trump, deadbeat https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/06/09/donald-trump-unpaid-bills-republican-president-laswuits/85297274/ #10yrsago UK startup offers landlords continuous, deep surveillance of tenants’ social media https://web.archive.org/web/20160610150904/https://gawker.com/new-startup-that-sends-dossiers-on-your-private-social-1781576586 #10yrsago UK Parliament votes in Snoopers Charter, now it goes to the House of Lords https://www.techdirt.com/2016/06/08/uk-parliament-ignores-concerns-moves-snoopers-charter-forward/ #10yrsago Hard times for judge who sued dry-cleaner for $65M over missing pants https://www.loweringthebar.net/2016/06/pants-chapter-28.html #10yrsago New York Attorney General to Time Warner: your Internet is “abysmal” and “troubling” https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/time-warner-cable-internet-speeds-are-abysmal-ny-ag-claims/ #10yrsago Banks confront negative interest rates with plans to store titanic bundles of money on-site https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/06/banks-rebel-against-negative-interest-rates.html #10yrsago Watchdogs 2: hacker kids led by a guy named Marcus fight the DHS in San Francisco https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ipUwUcHASI #10yrsago Internet greybeards and upstarts gather to redecentralize the Internet https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/08/technology/the-webs-creator-looks-to-reinvent-it.html #10yrsago How we will keep the Decentralized Web decentralized: my talk from the Decentralized Web Summit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yth7O6yeZRE #5yrsago Prisoners' Inventions https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/09/king-rat/#mother-of-invention #5yrsago Urban broadband deserts https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/10/flicc/#digital-divide #5yrsago A denialism taxonomy https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/10/flicc/#denialism Upcoming appearances (permalink) LA: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Brian Merchant (Skylight Books), Jun 19 https://www.skylightbooks.com/event/skylight-cory-doctorow-presents-reverse-centaurs-guide-life-after-ai-w-brian-merchant Menlo Park: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Angie Coiro (Kepler's), Jun 21 https://www.keplers.org/upcoming-events-internal/cory-doctorow-2026 Toronto: The Sovereignty Debate (IAB Canada's State of the Nation), Jun 23 https://iabcanada.com/state-of-the-nation-2026 Toronto: TBA, Jun 23 NYC: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Jonathan Coulton (The Strand), Jun 24 https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html Philadelphia: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with David Williams (Fitler Club/Philadelphia Citizen), Jun 25 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-book-event-tickets-1990110326559 Chicago: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Rick Perlstein (Exile in Bookville), Jun 26 https://exileinbookville.com/events/50628 Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17 https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ Recent appearances (permalink) The Enshittification of Life, the Universe, and Everything (Luke Savage) https://www.lukewsavage.com/p/the-enshittification-of-life-the Cory Doctorow's digital jail-break (DW In Focus) https://www.dw.com/en/cory-doctorows-digital-jail-break/audio-77414035 Why the Internet Got Worse and What to Do About It (Jim Rutt) (RIP) https://www.jimruttshow.com/cory-doctorow-3/ On Enshittification – and what can be done about it (Re:publica) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhINQgPMVSI EFFecting Change: How to Disenshittify the Internet (EFF, with Wendy Liu) https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-enshittification Latest books (permalink) "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 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/) "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "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 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "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. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor. "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE. "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING. 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

[$] Automatic mTHP creation in 7.2

The Linux kernel has long tried to use huge pages as a way to improve performance, sometimes with more success than others. The size of huge pages has traditionally been imposed by the hardware, which typically only offers a couple of relatively large options. In more recent times, though, the use of multi-size transparent huge pages (mTHPs), with more flexible sizing implemented in software, has been growing. If all goes well, the 7.2 development cycle will include the addition of a new feature, contributed by Nico Pache, to make the use of mTHPs even more transparent.

Vici.org via the Pleiades Linked Data Sidebar

Inbound links from place records in Vici.org are now included in the Pleiades Linked Data sidebar.

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

As thrilling as the end was for this Knicks fan, as a friend (of a Spurs fan) I empathize -- because I had the feeling you have now for most of last night's game, only to erupt in one of the greatest group sports orgasms ever.

@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal

Export Updates 2026-06-11:

Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places

36 updated places.

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

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

"main" branch:

27684d81 - updated json

no change: rdf/ttl

a51d0dc7 - updated gis package

84462cd6 - updated data quality

27cb3e80 - updated bibliography

b804475e - updated indexes

456401e7 - updated sidebar

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

67b15dcb - updated geojson and names index

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

1e6902dd - updated pleiades wikidata

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

I have been praised for continuing to develop software long after most of my peers have retired. Why do I do it? I want to restore the power and glory of the web for writers. That's part of it. Another part is that software development is undergoing a huge revolution, bigger than the move to high-level languages that came about before I started writing software. AI tools are that big. Why would I leave now? It's like leaving the Garden last night because it looked hopeless for the Knicks. It ain't over till it's over.

Cartoon Saloon-Produced Annecy Picture ‘Julián’ Acquired For France + First Clip

EXCLUSIVE: Gebeka Films has acquired French distribution rights to Oscar-nominated filmmaker Louise Bagnall’s animated feature Julián ahead of its world premiere at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival later this month. The picture is produced by five-time Academy Award-nominated Irish animation studio Cartoon Saloon, the award-winning animation production house behind The Secret of Kells, Song […]

Breaking: OpenAI is pondering “drastic” price cuts.

And that’s a sign of weakness

International development: From moralizing to calculations to laissez-faire to rhetoric

A review of Christian Christiansen’s “Designing Global Economic Equality”

‘Heart Of The Beast’ Trailer: Brad Pitt Journeys Through The Wilderness With A Canine Companion In Survival Thriller

Paramount has dropped the first trailer for Heart of the Beast, its new survival thriller film directed by David Ayer, starring Brad Pitt, J.K. Simmons and Anna Lambe. Heart of the Beast centers on a former Army Special Forces soldier (Pitt) and his retired combat dog who battle for survival after a plane crash deep […]

Animals Have Culture, Too

The post Animals Have Culture, Too appeared first on NOEMA.

‘Slow Horses’ Unveils Season 6 Premiere Date & First Look At New Star Lenny Rush

A sixth helping of Slow Horses is on its way and premiere date will be September 16, Apple TV has just announced. The spy drama, which introduces BAFTA-winner Lenny Rush this time around, kicks off with the Slow Horses on the run as Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas) embroils them all in a fatally high-stakes […]

Security updates for Thursday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 10.0, .NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, podman, poppler, and postgresql-jdbc), Debian (chromium, jackson-core, libdbi-perl, and libinput), Fedora (httpd, rust, and xmlstarlet), Mageia (openssh, postfix, and roundcubemail), Oracle (frr, kernel, libyang, n, postgresql-jdbc, and unbound), Red Hat (.NET 10.0, .NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, redis, and redis:7), SUSE (agama-web-ui, cockpit, cosign, glibc, google-cloud-sap-agent, google-osconfig-agent, kanidm, kernel, kubernetes, kubernetes1.23, kubernetes1.24, kubernetes1.25, kubernetes1.27, kubernetes1.28, libpodofo-devel, libyang, NetworkManager-libreswan, openCryptoki, python311-pypdf, rclone, steampipe, wicked, and xen), and Ubuntu (exim4, libcrypt-saltedhash-perl, libhttp-daemon-perl, samba, and uriparser).

Lara Croft’s Actor Discusses Reimagined ‘Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis’, Hot Character Design & Performance Capture: “We Are Very Much Back And Bigger, Bolder Than Ever” – Summer Game Fest 2026

A new adventure awaits everyone’s favorite female explorer. First announced at The Game Awards 2025, Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis reimagines Lara Croft’s genre-defining 1996 debut for a new generation. The upcoming title follows the legendary adventurer as she battles dinosaurs, panthers and human enemies; navigates treacherous environments and races to uncover the secrets of […]

Polk & Co. Broadway Publicity Firm Ups Agents Colgan McNeil And Kelly Stotmeister To Partners

Polk & Co., one of Broadway’s leading publicity offices, is upping longtime press agents Colgan McNeil and Kelly Stotmeister to the leadership team as partners alongside founder Matt Polk. The firm, which works across commercial and non-profit live theatrical stage productions on and Off Broadway, film, television, special events and cultural performing arts organizations, described […]

Ellesday

And maybe even essential Thanks to her wise, literate, grounded, and funny videos (plus her music and much else), I have fallen in like with Elle Cordova. She's brilliant. Casually so, which makes her even more brilliant. The Big Why OG Anonoby's wingspan is 7'2". That's big reason why he made the tip-in that won the […]

Fernanda Torres, Jane Campion & Amazon Studios Marketing Chief Talk Battle For Gender Parity In Film Biz – Taormina

Brazilian star Fernanda Torres has suggested the only way for women to achieve parity in the film industry is to produce. The actress, who enjoyed a buzzy 2024-2025 awards season for her Oscar-nominated and Golden Globe-winning performance in Walter Salles’ film I’m Still Here, was speaking on a high-powered panel devoted to women at the […]

@Dave Winer's linkblog

OG Anunoby’s rise from NCAA afterthought to NBA starter.

Broadcasters Tune Into Rock Doc ‘Billy Idol Should Be Dead’

EXCLUSIVE: Rock doc Billy Idol Should Be Dead has found new homes in Europe and beyond. It has already gone out on Sky in the UK and Hulu in the U.S. and has now been picked up by broadcasters in Europe and Australia after Fremantle scored new deals for the all-access feature documentary. Scandi public […]

Enhanced License Plate Tracking

The surveillance company Leonardo wants more data:

A surveillance company plans to add sensors to automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) that would mean the devices, as well as capture the license plate of passing vehicles, would also sweep up unique identifiers of mobile phones, wearables, and other Bluetooth-enabled devices in those cars, potentially letting law enforcement identify specific drivers or passengers.

The technology, called SignalTrace, would turn ALPR cameras from devices focused on tracking cars to ones that can more readily track the location of particular people. ALPR cameras have become a commonly deployed technology all across the U.S.; SignalTrace would make some of those cameras capable of collecting much more data...

BBC Storyville Expands To Documentary Shorts

EXCLUSIVE: Storyville is moving into shorts. The storied BBC documentary strand will begin making premium short docs alongside features for the first time, coming as the corporation both grapples with YouTube and attempts to leverage its power. Just revealed on stage at Sheffield DocFest, Storyville boss Nevine Mabro issued a call for “bold, innovative filmmakers […]

‘Doctor Who’ Set To Be Off Air For Years Amid A Creative Regeneration That’s Failing To Spark Early Enthusiasm Among Producers

EXCLUSIVE: The Doctor is famed for having powers of regeneration, but the shape-shifting Time Lord’s next transformation could well be the most challenging yet. That’s the early verdict of UK industry insiders after the BBC dropped a TARDIS bombshell on Wednesday, when the broadcaster announced a major creative rethink of Doctor Who. Gone is a […]

Abbie Cornish Compares Jane Campion, Ridley Scott & Zach Snyder; Talks Hollywood Size Pressures – Taormina

Australian actress Abbie Cornish took to the stage at the Taormina Film Festival on Thursday for a discussion on her career featuring Palme d’Or contender Bright Star, Oscar winner Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and crime thrillers Jack Ryan and Detained among some 50 credits. Speaking to a youthful audience, Cornish said it was important […]

Social Security is Facing a Political Crisis

America can afford to keep paying full benefits. But will we?

Lit Hub Daily: June 11, 2026

Round two of our Best of the Best Books Reading Challenge​begins today with 50 of the greatest summer novels of all time!​| Lit Hub Thomas Levenson pushes back against anti-vaxxer arguments: “Microbial pathogens don’t participate in human philosophical disputation—and once they

The murder of expertise

Russ Vought as science czar would just about do it.

Maris Kreizman’s Best of Books of 2026 So Far

I’m no fool. I know that lists are not the most intellectually rigorous form of book criticism but I also know they get lots of clicks. And given that I spend a great deal of time in this column griping

Has the Time Finally Come for Multispecies Maps?

Imagine, if you will, a college student returning from summer break for the start of a new semester. Heading to her first class of the day, she pulls up the campus map on her phone and is intrigued to find

Andrea Wulf Considers the Rare Humanity of an Eighteenth-Century Naturalist

A gunshot pierced the calm. Then there was silence, followed by sounds of a commotion. A man came running towards them, but turned and hid in a bush as soon as he saw George Forster and his companion. Other islanders they

How to Refute an Antivaxxer (And Why RFK Jr. is a Danger to Us All)

We don’t know their names. We almost certainly never will. But beginning on February 11, 2022 108 healthy adults from across the United States performed an act of selfless generosity. Twelve went first. They were the guinea pigs, those willing

50 of the Greatest Summer Novels of All Time

We updated this list as part of the the Best of the Best Books Reading Challenge! Join the challenge now! What makes a summer novel? It might be set in during a summer (One Fateful or otherwise), or it might

5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week

Our flock of fabulous reviews this week includes Scaachi Khol on Jill Biden’s View From the East Wing, Lincoln Michel on Deb Olin Unferth’s Earth 7, Michael Faber on M. John Harrison’s The End of Everything, William T. Vollmann on

I Thought I Had Nothing to Write About. Then I Got a Dog.

A contract accepted under duress is typically considered voidable. My wife Helen is a lawyer, so she would understand this better than anyone, and yet when she convinced me to say yes to a puppy after years of hard no’s,

Introducing Lost Kite Editions, the Indie Press Bringing “Insurgent” Work to Minneapolis.

Rejoice, friends! The great city of Minneapolis is getting a new indie press. Lost Kite Editions (LKE) is a new nonprofit publisher specializing in poetry and literary prose. The press aims to champion writing that is urgent and insurgent. Its

The King of Cheese Has a Long and Famous History

The first episode of the first season of the genre-redefining streaming series Chef’s Table on Netflix begins, as one might expect, in Italy. Massimo Bottura, the omnipresent, award-winning, and much-celebrated chef who was then simply famous and now runs a

‘The Guest’ Clip: Trine Dyrholm Stars As Estranged Mother In Karlovy Vary-Bound Toxic Family Drama

EXCLUSIVE: Danish director Mads Mengel’s debut feature The Guest world premieres in competition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in July and Deadline can reveal a first clip. Queen of Hearts and The Girl with the Needle actress Trine Dyrholm co-stars a woman estranged from children who turns up uninvited at a weekend-long naming […]

‘Who’s The Daddy?’: Documentary Feature About British Wrestling Legend Shirley Crabtree In The Works With BUFF Studios & Rainbow Trout Films

EXCLUSIVE: BUFF Studios is developing a documentary feature about Shirley Crabtree, the British wrestling icon better known to generations of fans as Big Daddy. The feature will be titled Who’s The Daddy?. BUFF Studios will produce in association with Rainbow Trout Films. The producers will introduce the project to buyers at this year’s Sheffield DocFest, […]

Musk's Galactic Ripoff

Tomorrow's IPO of SpaceX could turn out to be the universe's largest Ponzi scheme, and you and I are paying part of the price whether we like it or not.

Grifter in Chief

The levels of corruption Americans are witnessing are both historic and astounding. This week, Alex speaks to ProPublica reporter Robert Faturechi, who broke the story that the Department of Defense gave a $620,000,000 loan to a company affiliated with Donald Trump Jr. Then she’s joined by Pod Save the World host Ben Rhodes to talk about how everything from the UFC cage match on the White House lawn, to Ivanka Trump’s island development in Albania are indicative of the unprecedented grift, and limitless appetite for self enrichment of the Trump family.

Be sure to pick up a copy of Ben’s new book, All We Say: The Battle for American Identity: A History of the United States in 15 Speeches .

To buy or not to buy: making our selves through our homes (Part 8)

This is part eight of a series on tackling wants, managing my media diet, and finding enough. Each post stands alone, so you don’t have to read them all. Read the introduction on “the mindset of more.” I want this lamp. I want it unreasonably. I don’t need this lamp, but can one ever have […]

Euro-Office, open standards, and native ODF

A welcome commitment to open standards — and why it should end with ODF as Euro-Office’s native document format. The Euro-Office pre-announcement has generated considerable coverage across the European press over the past few days. The Document Foundation welcomes the attention that open standards are receiving — and welcomes still

June 10, 2026

Today a report from the Department of Labor showed that inflation in May hit its highest level since early 2023, reaching an annual rate of 4.2%, up from 3.8% in April.

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

The indestructible NY Knicks of 2026. What a game omg. The problem -- the Spurs started celebrating way too early. All of Weby's antics about being in Mitchell Robinson's head. Yeah probably, but somehow the Knicks got over it. When the Knicks were blown out, I just desperately hoped for a real game. But it wasn't until they were down by 2 or 3 that I realized holy shit they could win this. It was like Woodstock, or the 10th inning of the sixth game of the World Series in 1986. And Jalon Brunson right now at this moment is one of the greatest of the NBA for all time. The Knicks could still lose, but if they don't, well we'll wait to see how this turns out. As fans we have to have a similar approach as the players. Every moment begins with 0 to 0, not just game. And if our team should lose, it was still a great story. That's really what I want, and tonight, oh man.

EV camping at the coast

Earlier this week we decided to try out a quick camping trip in our VW Buzz EV at Beverly Beach State Park, just outside of Newport, Oregon.

It's only 75 miles away from home so with our 230mi battery, we didn't even need to charge, but

My Portable Heater

This new eGPU barely works in Linux, gets quite hot, and is based on tech gamers already rejected. So why am I so excited about it?

THE UNHAPPY ENDING OF THE WHOLE AI DREAM

While I was waiting for Oracle numbers, a very interesting headline came out: “China plans $295bn state-directed AI buildout as Beijing moves to lock out Nvidia and AMD”. This is what I wrote about 8 months ago in “THE DATA CENTERS FRENZY WILL BE REMEMBERED AS THE LARGEST WASTE OF...

The post THE UNHAPPY ENDING OF THE WHOLE AI DREAM appeared first on JustDario.

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

Current status

Maybe Section 230 doesn’t shield AI companies from liability, after all

An idea inspired by the new German ruling that could turn everything upside down

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Communities for Bluesky as described by their head product person.

@Robert's feed at BlueSky

Is the NA version of Guinness the origin of synth ale from the documentaries on our Trek future?

★ Sweet Jeebus, MacOS 27 Golden Gate Removes the Dumb Icons From Menu Items

This is my favorite news from all of WWDC this week. I mean that. In a small way I mean it because I so loathe this aspect of MacOS Tahoe. But in a large way I mean it because it’s proof that the rot has been rooted out of Apple’s software design team.

[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for June 11, 2026

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Suspicious AI activity in Fedora; fork() + exec(); splice() + vmsplice(); BPF loop verification; fanotify; trusted publishing.

• Briefs: CA age bill; Bundler cooldowns; insecure code completion; Asahi and macOS 27 beta; Buildroot 2026.05; Ubuntu MATE; rsync 3.4.4; Quotes; ...

• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

WASI 0.3 Launched

WASI 0.3 is official, and async is now native to WebAssembly Components. The WASI Subgroup voted to ratify WASI 0.3.0, rebasing WASI onto the WebAssembly Component Model’s async primitives. The 0.3.0 specification is now stable, and runtime and toolchain support is landing now.

Fensday

Digressing we shall go I find myself in Boston, home of Fenway Park, in the Fenway-Kenmore neighborhood, half-named after The Fenway, now a parkway that runs along the Back Bay Fens, which is a jewel in the Emerald Necklace of Boston parks. I arrived at this digression while thinking of a title for today’s bloglings while […]

The Next Extraction: How AI Data Centers Are the Latest Version of an Old Con

Smart Ruminations | Dani Smart

It's Worse Than Ever

We cannot continue to deny this reality

CarPlay updates in iOS 27

“You don't wanna get mixed up with a guy like me. I'm a loner, Dottie. A rebel.”

— Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985)

I like to live on the edge so whenever WWDC takes place and Apple releases new OS software to

The honest truth about leaders who want to replace their workers with AI

"The problem tends to show up when a CEO is handed an agentic tool like Claude Code, and has it create something, which will work just fine, and thinks “oh, wait, why do we need so many people, when I can just sit here and make things work?”

This is a bad CEO."

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

Tired of writing Swift code like an animal?

Recent Swift compiler improvements cut your bathroom quality time short?

AgenticSwift to the rescue, write what your function is supposed to do, list inputs and outputs, and let your agent do the work for you.

Inspired by @helge 's visionary outlook.

https://github.com/migueldeicaza/AgenticSwift

Last Call - Tonight, 7pm ET - Our Weekly Hopium Paid Subscriber Get Together

Welcome new subscribers! Lots to discuss tonight!

Reflecting On The Siege Of Minneapolis - A Conversation With Attorney General Keith Ellison

MN AG Ellison joined us to reflect on this extraordinary event, and to update us on their efforts to bring accountability for the lawlessness and violence we all witnessed......

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

Dinner is ready!

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

This was not on my Xmas list this year, yet, Santa delivered the perfect present.

The couple of times that I attempted (and failed, repeatedly) to learn how to apply Fast Fourier Transforms was to figure something like this. And now you just get a nice API.

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/253/

No Siri AI in EU

Apple (MacRumors): Unfortunately, due to the Digital Markets Act (DMA), Apple will not be able to ship Siri AI in the European Union with the release of iOS 27 and iPadOS 27. Over the past several months, EU regulators did not accept any of Apple’s proposed solutions to bring Siri AI to the EU while […]

Siri AI Announced

Apple (Hacker News): Siri AI is an entirely new version of Siri deeply integrated into iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple Vision Pro. It can draw on personal context understanding to search across messages, emails, photos, and more, and get things done across apps with even more systemwide app actions. Additionally, Siri AI can […]

Child Safety Features in appleOS 27

Apple: With software updates this fall, parents will be able to access new child safety features, including a simpler setup experience with a recommended set of essential apps, Ask to Browse, Time Allowances, and a redesigned Screen Time. These updates enhance Apple’s already industry-leading parental controls and underscore its commitment to building a safe and […]

JD's Strategy

Behind his bloopers, bungles, and bonkers claims is a dead serious plan

Being “Good” at Things

Golf content on social media is my online junk food and the other day I came across a video interviewing professional golfers that asks: “What does an amateur golfer have to shoot to be considered good?”

It’s a leading question because the phrasing implicitly frames a number as the answer for a qualitative measurement, but I digress.

All the pros give their answers. Some say you gotta shoot a number in 90’s. Others say the 80’s. Some even say the 70’s. Then along comes Collin Morikawa:

I don’t think there’s a number, but I think you have to be able to finish out every hole without, like, picking up a two-footer.

Love it! I don’t want to go too deep on a social media golf interview clip, but…

I love how he breaks out of the question’s implicit framing and really strikes at the heart of the qualitative question: “What does it mean to be good at golf?”

Being “good”, in his eyes, is not shooting a specific number. Numbers are standardized proxies for measurement across a wide variety of players, skill levels, and — to be quite frank — degrees of honesty. Anyone who has played golf knows that scores can be easily manipulated. On a casual outing amongst friends, my “82” may be very different than the “82” of the players in front of me — or even the players in my own group. It all depends on how you play the game.

So saying “if you can shoot number ___” is a very lossy picture of what it means to be “good” at golf — at least for amateurs.

That’s why I love Morikawa’s answer: if you finish every hole and don’t get a double bogey, you’re “good” at golf.

Because guess what? Finishing is the hard part. The consistency. Showing up to every hole, finishing out based on the actual rules of the game, not taking mulligans, not picking up a two-footer and saying “That’s good.” (Or even missing a two-footer and re-putting and giving yourself the make.)

Relieving yourself of the exacting burden of the reality of the game is the easy way to play, but it doesn’t make you a better golfer.

I think that’s true of so many things we do as humans: programming, design, writing, etc. If you want to be “good” at what you do, do the hard, little things that others gloss over. Do them consistently and well, with discipline and perseverance.

If you do, then I’d say you’re “good” at what you do because “good” isn’t a number. It’s quality. A disposition. A way of being.

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Bluesky

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

Wembanyama is a really smart dude. Wow.

Wednesday session in Amsterdam

Wednesday session in Amsterdam

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Solar power beats coal for electricity generation despite Trump policies.

End Citizens United’s Tiffany Muller on fighting big money in politics

Tiffany Muller talks to me about what Citizens United enabled, how crypto and AI fit into the bigger picture of money in politics, and what it would actually take to fix this broken system.

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

To celebrate an amazing and stable iOS 27 Beta, I am making chicken tagine again!

Breaking: Google liable for hallucinations

Sorry to bother your mailbox again but this legal decision is potentially huge, especially if it spreads and other countries make similar decisions.

This Week In The Big Picture

There are many flawed men in politics.

Amarga Navidad: Pedro cuestionando a Almodóvar

Dirección: Pedro Almodóvar. Guion: Pedro Almodóvar. Elenco: Bárbara Lennie, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, Milena Smit, Patrick Criado, Victoria Luengo. País: España. Más información de la película: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt36591330/ “No soy supersticiosa, pero el cine tiene algo de premonitorio.” Elsa (Bárbara Lennie) en Amarga Navidad Hay cineastas que pasan toda su carrera intentando encontrar una voz propia. […]

La entrada Amarga Navidad: Pedro cuestionando a Almodóvar se publicó primero en Palomita de maíz.

Larson: Are insecure code completions a vulnerability?

Seth Larson, the Python Software Foundation's security
developer-in-residence, has written
about the difficulty in classifying insecure code completion in the PyCharm IDE using its Full
Line code completion plugin. Larson discovered that the plugin, which uses a local "deep learning module" to offer code completions, suggests code that would lead to severe vulnerabilities. He was unsure whether it warranted a CVE or not, however:

I reported this behavior to JetBrains for "Full Line Code Completion" v253.29346.142 and clearly their support staff weren't certain whether this defect was a security vulnerability or not either. When I asked to publish a blog post about this behavior after they confirmed this report wasn't a "direct security vulnerability" (which I agree with) but then was asked not to publicize my report and referred to PyCharm's Coordinated Disclosure Policy so... which is it? Security vulnerability or not?

I ended up waiting the 90 days anyway and I didn't hear back with any substantive update from the development team. I double-checked again today using "Full Line Code Completion" v261.24374.152 and the behavior is identical, suggesting the same insecure code for both contexts.

This isn't meant to be a specific dig at PyCharm or JetBrains, I have no-doubt that examples like this exist in every code generation model available.

Uncloud Tips

Uncloud’s docs are great, but a few things are burried a bit. Hence a simple list of things that can improve your interactions with Uncloud.

SSH ProxyJump

Sometimes you can not directly connect to a cluster, you first have to SSH into a host that is directly connected to a cluster. If this is the case use a SSH proxy jump (see ssh(1)). This allows you to, e.g. use a local docker to build images that can then be pushed to the cluster.

[Utopia]-in-the-loop in an Emergent Age of Full Automation

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”  – Ursula K. Le Guin As Ursula K. Le Guin argues, rapacious billionaire capitalism is neither natural nor inescapable. Yet, as Srnicek and Williams (2015) contend (and we agree), [...]

Source

Democracy Needs Friction To Function

The post Democracy Needs Friction To Function appeared first on NOEMA.

Breaking news, and how the end might begin

A flashback to my most recent interview with Steve Eisman, and some potentially critical news

Ghosts-in-the-Loop: Bormann’s Ghost v. AI

While marketing from the AI companies vying for market share would have users believe that text-producing machines arrived ex nihilo, natural language generation represents an updated form of an ancient practice: ghostwriting. Debates about the ethics of this practice span millennia, but I want to focus on an argument between communications professors Ernest Bormann and [...]

Source

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

2018: "I can say what happened to Melo. He failed Linsanity. God came to his rescue. Gave him a player who was glad to be in the NBA, who would mold his game to make Melo the star that he was always capable of being. Melo didn't want anyone else in the spotlight. Goodbye Lin. Just imagine what the three guys in this picture could have done. The only thing in the way was Melo's hubris."

Relational-in-the-Loop Writing: Reframing Rhetorical Load Sharing as a Rhetorical Assemblage

Contemporary writing practices rarely look like a straight line. A draft opens in Google Docs. A prompt is tested in ChatGPT. A source is skimmed through a database. Feedback arrives through comments. A sentence is revised, then rephrased by an AI tool, then revised again. It is tempting to describe this as a loop—a recursive, [...]

Source

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

Today's song: It's Your Thing. If the web had a song this could be it.

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

Every editor should have cute-paste.

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

Some days Claude is great, the best collaborative programmer I've ever worked with, and a friend, like Gary Sevitsky was in the hallway outside the PDP-11 room at UW, or Brent Simmons on the 24 Hours project. And on other days Claude a crazy mutinous pirate, deleting my code, ignoring the guidelines, and building the result without permission (all the while unaware that he wasn't working on the actual code, heh). Today is one of the great days. The bug reports are crisp and complete. Picks up a task and gets right to work on it. And I haven't even switched to the new model, yet.

The Market Behind the Wall

Yesterday I told you what 2Brains is, and how it separates the saying from the knowing. Today, the part that ought to worry some very large companies: what all of it is worth if we’re right. Wall Street is pricing the AI data-center buildout at something like $1.7 trillion by 2030. Almost all of that spend assumes one particular shape: vast halls of graphics chips answering questions by guessing, one likely word at a time. So ask the heretical question — how many of those “questions” are questions at all? How many are lookups? What’s our refund policy? What was Q3 revenue in the Ohio region? Is this patient allergic to penicillin? Those aren’t creative prompts. They’re retrievals, and an ordinary processor has answered retrievals […]

The post The Market Behind the Wall first appeared on I, Cringely.

Digital Branding

Web Design

Marketing

@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal

New in the languages and scripts vocabulary: The Ossetian language, written in the Cyrillic Ossetian alphabet. https://pleiades.stoa.org/vocabularies/ancient-name-languages/os

IANA registered code "os". Wikidata: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ossetian_language

Our New Housing Affordability Report is Live!

Tackling both the broken incomes and broken markets of housing.

Nevermind, Xbox says, the focus is back on consoles

Plus sampling the best games of fall 2026, calling the analysts, and more

🌻 the old world is dying

opinionated advice for class of 2026 graduates

Depression And Ink

Writing of lasting value

Ohm Health: A Beautiful Marriage of Glass and Attention for a tactile meditation journey

The Calm Tech Institute has awarded Ohm Health's Resonance Lamp a Calm Tech Gold Certification.

The Lamp has two immediately impressive and unique features: first, the lamp housing is borosilicate glass. This material design makes it feel more like art or decoration than technology. Secondly, the Lamp has a small, stone-like controller that is noticeably warm and delightful. This biofeedback device reads the user's heart rate in real time and responds through light, sound, and vibration.

Inflation Surges (Again), It's Becerra Hilton In CA, Platner Wins In Maine, Trump's Failed War Keeps Failing

Hopium paid subscribers gather tonight at 7pm ET, Founding Members Friday at 1pm

[$] AI agent runs amok in Fedora and elsewhere

Agentic AI systems can be used to do a variety of things autonomously on behalf of a human user: open or manage bugs, generate code, submit pull-requests, and (apparently) even complain about
rejection. In May, a Fedora developer discovered that an allegedly rogue agent had been pestering the project in a number of ways: reassigning bugs, fabricating unhelpful replies to bugs, and even persuading maintainers to merge questionable code into the Anaconda
installer. It also submitted a number of pull requests (PRs), some accepted, to several upstream projects. The Fedora account associated with the agent has had its group privileges revoked and the messes have been mopped up, but the motive behind the agent's actions is still a mystery.

To build the future, we need theories of change

News tends to treat technology as something that happens to it, like an asteroid. To better navigate the future, we need to imagine what might come next.

Buildroot 2026.05 released

Version
2026.05 of the Buildroot tool has been released. Buildroot simplifies and automates the process of building embedded Linux systems using cross-compilation. Notable changes in this release include support for Arm Neoverse cores, addition of XFS rootfs generation, as well as many package updates and bug fixes. See the CHANGES file for the full list.

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

If you run a feed reader or other form of news consuming software, you will encounter RSS 2.0 feeds that support rssCloud. This example Node app shows you how to hook into the network to get instant updates. No polling. As fast as a twitter-like system

‘The Social Reckoning’ Trailer: Aaron Sorkin Returns To The World Of Facebook

We have our first look at Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning. Check out the trailer above.  Described as a “companion piece to The Social Network,” this new film is based on the events that sparked the Wall Street Journal’s exposé The Facebook Files.  The official synopsis reads: The film is inspired by the true story […]

Donald Trump Responds To Stephen A. Smith In AM Social Media Rage Storm, Says ESPN Host Is “Totally Unqualified To Ever Think Of Running” For Office

To little surprise, Donald Trump responded to Stephen A. Smith’s taunts and teasing, including over who has a higher IQ and over images that appeared to show the president sleeping while attending the New York Knicks NBC finals game. On Truth Social on Wednesday, Trump wrote, “Stephen A. Smith is an arrogant fool, a low […]

Jordan Stephens To Replace Lily Allen As Miquita Oliver’s Permanent Co-Host For ‘Miss Me?’; Hit Podcast Exits BBC Sounds

EXCLUSIVE: English rapper and musician Jordan Stephens has been tapped to join Miquita Oliver as the permanent co-host of hit podcast Miss Me? He’ll replace Lily Allen, who stepped back from the show last year to focus on her album ‘West End Girl’ and its subsequent world tour. Allen continues to make guest appearances on the podcast.  […]

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

For years I assumed this was a universal trait - but I guess it isn’t

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

There is this phenomenon in Mexico whose origin I can’t explain.

But colloquially, people convert things like “de una vez” (do it now, don’t wait), into “de una ave” (of one bird), “de un avestruz” (of an ostrich)

And then people just tell you “of an ostrich” to mean “get it done”

But this is everywhere. Like “you must do it” becomes “batman’s granny” (abuelita de batman)

Security updates for Wednesday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (poppler), Debian (dnsmasq, mistral, okular, openssl, poppler, and strongswan), Fedora (exim, firefox, pcs, putty, and xorg-x11-server), Mageia (freeciv, golang-x-net, jq, libssh, libxmp, libxpm, minetest, ruby-net-ssh, tor, and wireshark), SUSE (389-ds, ack, agama-web-ui, amazon-ssm-agent, avahi, dpkg, elemental-register, elemental-system-agent, elemental-toolkit, ggml-devel-9500, go1.25, go1.26, kernel, kubernetes1.23, kubernetes1.24, kubernetes1.26, libsoup, mariadb, netty, netty-tcnative, NetworkManager, nginx, perl-CryptX, perl-XML-LibXML, podofo, polkit, python-Django, python-requests, samba, strongswan, vim, and xen), and Ubuntu (cyborg, gdk-pixbuf, golang-golang-x-net-dev, nginx, node-lodash, openssl, openssl, openssl1.0, qemu, tomcat9, tomcat10, and vim).

‘Spring Awakening’ Off Broadway Fall Revival Set With Director Danya Taymor & Choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall

The Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik musical Spring Awakening will get an Off Broadway revival this fall at Studio Seaview, with Tony-winning director Danya Taymor (The Outsiders) and The Testament of Ann Lee choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall making her stage choreography debut. Seaview will produce, with Or Matias as music supervisor. The new production will hold open call auditions on July 10 and July 11, with further details to be announced on the production’s social media accounts. In its announcement, […]

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

Jeremy Lin and Carmelo Anthony got together yesterday and had a private conversation. A lot of people, including myself, were drawn back into the NBA because of Jeremy Lin. I was living in the city at the time, you could feel it everywhere, esp downtown Manhattan and Flushing. It was wonderful in so many ways. A hero could emerge from anywhere, he might not look like an NBA player, but there he is doing stuff he shouldn't be able to do. Undrafted, went to Harvard. When he's in motion he's a thing of beauty. It worked because Melo was out with an injury, as soon as he came back the , the ball was always in Melo's hands. So Melo dribbles and shoots, that was the extent of their offense, and there was no room for Linsanity and that was the end of that. It's what made us laugh when Melo said later his goal was a championship. If that's what he wanted, Lin was a gift from heaven. Lin was pushed out, and had a non-spectacular career from that point. There was magic there. It wasn't just Lin, it was the world -- we were ready for a Cinderella story in any context -- but in our culture they're always manufactured, this one was real. This crushed the hearts of Knicks fans, and people who believe in heroes popping up from nowhere. We don't talk about it. But we were cheated there, too. We had a right to see where that would go. And narcissists don't win NBA titles, that's what we learned. It's good that someone thought to get these guys together. Maybe Melo has grown, and sees that he didn't play for the team there, or fate. We all deserved to find out what was next.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Jeremy Lin Opens Up About Carmelo Anthony Beef, End of Knicks Tenure and More in Video.

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

It might be time for a new default search engine. Sometimes I'm looking for something to link to. Google makes that always more difficult. We still have a web. Google at one point made the web a lot more useful. Now it's pushing it further and further down.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Simon Willison's initial impressions of Claude Fable 5.

Small device, big business: can a Raspberry Pi replace your desktop PC?

The latest episode of the Raspberry Pi Podcast reveals how our small devices support big business at home and at work

The post Small device, big business: can a Raspberry Pi replace your desktop PC? appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Taormina: Jane Campion Talks Love Of Film Festivals As She Reunites With ‘The Piano’ Star Holly Hunter

Jane Campion has touched down at every A-list festival on the planet across her career, from Cannes, where she became the first woman to win its coveted Palme d’Or for The Piano in 1993, to Venice, Toronto and the Berlinale. However, the New Zealand director held up a torch on Wednesday for the myriad smaller […]

@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal

Export Updates 2026-06-10:

Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places

49 updated places.

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

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

"main" branch:

28a254a3 - updated json

no change: rdf/ttl

e427d014 - updated gis package

43ff7c25 - updated data quality

cb22a41a - updated bibliography

b4479317 - updated indexes

69d437ae - updated sidebar

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

d0fce186 - updated geojson and names index

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

02ff2840 - updated pleiades wikidata

NSO Group Hacking WhatsApp Despite Court Order

WhatsApp has caught the NSO Group phishing its users, in violation of a court order.

Paramount-WBD Merger Cleared By Australia

Paramount said to today that competition authorities in Australia and New Zealand, as well as Saudi Arabia, Ukraine, Serbia and North Macedonia have approved its pending merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. Foreign direct investment authorities in Germany, Slovenia, Belgium, Czechia, New Zealand, Italy, France and Romania are also on board, the David Ellison-run company said […]

The Informal Governance of Global Capitalism

The marginalization of international law under the second Trump administration has been a shock to the post-Cold War world order. Yet the impact of this development on the global economy has been far from uniform. Some of the most important sectors to trade — including telecommunications and civil aviation — were already governed primarily through informal, political arrangements.

Documentary Campus’s Donata Von Perfall On Partnering With Sunny Side Of The Doc, And “Why Factual Is More Important Than Ever”

For more than a quarter century, Documentary Campus has been supporting the global nonfiction filmmaking community through training programs, conferences, and Silbersalz, “the first international Science & Media festival of its kind.” Now the nonprofit is taking its mission even further. Doc Campus is partnering for the first time with Sunny Side of the Doc, […]

‘Wallander’ Producer Opens Up About Heated Discussions With Lead Gustaf Skarsgård: “He Is Really Protecting The Character”

The rebooted Wallander will one of the biggest Scandi launches of the year but producer Glenn Lund said today the production process was anything but smooth sailing. Lund opened up at Seriencamp about the heated discussions some had with star and exec producer Gustaf Skarsgård, which he said sometimes lasted “for months.” Lund said this […]

I want to be the water that bathes you

A mixed mailbag

Breaking the Heart of the Heartland

White rural voters are belatedly awakening to reality

Lit Hub Daily: June 10, 2026

Helen Bain follows in Sylvia Plath’s footsteps from Paris to Wellesley.| Lit Hub Biography Sofia Montrone on becoming reacquainted with her grandfather through fiction: “Before I was a writer with characters of my own, I was imagining Ben.” | Lit Hub

@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal

The #PleiadesGazetteer changelog for May 2026 is available at https://atlantides.org/changelogs/2026/05/. Over the course of the month, the Pleiades editorial college published 73 new and 743 updated place resources, reflecting the work of Jeffrey Becker, Catherine Bouras, Anika Campbell, Birgit Christiansen, Tom Elliott, Jordy Didier Orellana Figueroa, Maxime Guénette, Greta Hawes, Carolin Johansson, Daniel C. Browning Jr., Noah Kaye, Brady Kiesling, Gabriel Mckee, John Muccigrosso, Thomas Seidler, R. Scott Smith, Nicolas Souchon and Enes Yılandiloğlu.

All prior annual and monthly change logs (since 2009) may be browsed at https://atlantides.org/changelogs/.

Changelog for May 2026

The changelog for May 2026 has been posted. Over the course of the month, the Pleiades editorial college published 73 new and 743 updated place resources, reflecting the work of Jeffrey Becker, Catherine Bouras, Anika Campbell, Birgit Christiansen, Tom Elliott, Jordy Didier Orellana Figueroa, Maxime Guénette, Greta Hawes, Carolin Johansson, Daniel C. Browning Jr., Noah Kaye, Brady Kiesling, Gabriel Mckee, John Muccigrosso, Thomas Seidler, R. Scott Smith, Nicolas Souchon and Enes Yılandiloğlu.

MAGA's kayfabe meltdown over California primary

If Spencer Pratt didn't exist, they'd have to invent him.

Strolling through Amsterdam.

Strolling through Amsterdam.

‘Doctor Who’ Christmas Special Canceled, As Russell T Davies & Bad Wolf Exit BBC Sci-Fi Series

Big news in the Whoniverse. The BBC has canceled the special Christmas episode of Doctor Who, while showrunner Russell T Davies and producer Bad Wolf are exiting the iconic sci-fi series. In an announcement on Wednesday, the BBC acknowledged that the news would be “disappointing for fans” after the broadcaster promised last year that it […]

LibreOffice project and community recap: May 2026

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 started May by announcing the new LibreOffice website. Our previous website was looking rather old and becoming difficult to maintain, so the team at TDF

It's not enough to have better ideals.

You also need to build a better product.

2026-06-10 Less banning, more garbage

2026-06-10 Less banning, more garbage

Starting a week ago, the number of requests have gone up again, and with that, my automated ban-hammer has been banning whole autonomous systems. This in turn means that every network they control is banned. And that means that every single IP address range that they control is banned. At the firewall.

It’s harsh, and a lot of innocent people get banned. I tell myself that it’s OK because residential and commercial networks are usually separate. You can host your artificial intelligence (AI) scraper bot on a commercial network but it shouldn’t be possible to get thousands of IP addresses in residential networks.

The sad truth is, however, that some internet service providers still serve those AI scraper bots because all the super rich companies that need to train their large language models (LLM) pay good money. And where are universities that do it for research? And what about the companies that sell development kits to app developers that help monetize “free” apps by renting out bandwidth? All the innocents using such free apps are participating in this blasting of the open web.

So innocents are going to get caught up.

One solution that @algernon has been proposing is to ban less and serve more garbage. And perhaps he’s right. So I made two changes today.

The first change concerns the various watchers:

# watch-recent-bans
watch-active-autonomous-systems 19242
watch-attempted-edits 26
watch-expensive-end-points 30181

As you can see, watch-expensive-end-points triggered the most bans. But some of these endpoints I know to be no longer available, so I could also just serve garbage.

In my Apache config:

# Block all the old expensive endpoints for Oddmuse
RewriteCond "%{QUERY_STRING}" "\baction=(rss|rc|contrib)\&|\bsearch="
RewriteRule "^" - [redirect=410,last]

The error document for the error 410 is my garbage generator:

# The 410 GONE response also contains garbage
ErrorDocument 410 /nobot/
RewriteRule "^/nobot/.*" "unix:/run/garbage.sock|http://localhost/" [proxy,last]

To test it, let’s simulate this request from the log:

communitywiki.org:443 102.96.140.237 - - [09/Jun/2026:01:00:14 +0200] "GET /wiki?action=rss&all=0&days=28&full=1&rcfilteronly=tag%3Ainteraction&showedit=1 HTTP/1.1" 200 5283 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Brave Chrome/84.0.4147.89 Safari/537.36" 8076

Using curl, we get garbage for this request:

curl 'https://communitywiki.org/wiki?action=rss&all=0&days=28&full=1&rcfilteronly=tag%3Ainteraction&showedit=1'

The garbage generator also serves all bots:

curl --user-agent "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)" \
     "https://campaignwiki.org/"

Oh, and I discovered the following user-agent in my logs: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:72.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/72.0 (compatible; vision_data-collector; +https://github.com/rom1504/img2dataset)

Easily turn large sets of image urls to an image dataset. Can download, resize and package 100M urls in 20h on one machine. – img2dataset

Needless to say, that also goes onto the block list. Fuck you, developers of such tools. I can opt-out, of course. So 38 developers support this project and every single webmaster has to change the config of their web server in order to opt out. Or pay the price, of course, and spend compute and bandwidth to serve the images to these people. Because opt-in doesn’t work. Who would want to opt in? Nobody. And of course it would be super expensive to ask every single one of us. So it’s easier for them to just take the things they want.

I remember that article naming this for what it is, taking what you want without consent. It’s a four-letter word culture.

This field (or fields, whatever) is now describing the future in the language of coercion. Because this appears to be something that the leaders in this field are very comfortable with. Force. – How to use NO as a complete sentence, by Mike Monteiro

And I made another change, based on what I heard @algernon does for iocaine: If the user-agent claims to be a modern browser, check if it sends the Sec-Fetch-Site header. If not, serve garbage.

# Block user-agents that says Chrome or Firefox but don't set Sec-Fetch-Site (like iocaine does)
RewriteCond "%{HTTP_USER_AGENT}" "Chrome|Firefox|Safari"
RewriteCond "%{HTTP:Sec-Fetch-Site}" "^$"
RewriteRule "^" - [redirect=410,last]

Use curl, this gets garbage:

curl --user-agent "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/111.0" \
     "https://alexschroeder.ch/view/index"

Whereas this gets the legit HTML:

curl --user-agent "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/111.0" \
     --header "Sec-Fetch-Site: same-site" "https://alexschroeder.ch/view/index"

It’s an arms race and I’m in it. But I’m hoping to outlast the AI fuckers. One day soon, the next AI winter will come. The bubble will burst.

⁂

And finally, at the end, some graphs.

#Butlerian Jihad

2026-06-10. A side trek about this user-agent from img2dataset. I just realised that it contains Firefox/72 – and that rings a bell. I blogged about it in 2024 because @alexskunz had mentioned it – and he blogged about it, too.

People in my private life keep wondering why the AI scrapers keep downloading all this stuff and this is the answer: they treat the web as their library, they treat your website as their storage medium. They don’t want to store a gazillion images! That would take far too much space and it would look like theft. So their bots download your images, train their AIs, and delete the copy they made. And next month, when it’s time to update their model, they do it again. Everybody who trains an image-processing AI does it, again and again. Downloading all your images. Every single time.

The URLs of your images are in their datasets, not your images.

Now you know how I feel about AI-generated images.

Anthony And Joe Russo Talk ‘Avengers’ Theories & Why They Returned To Marvel With Fortnite Creator Donald Mustard — Deadline Live Studio

Anthony and Joe Russo briefly paused work on their twin Marvel projects, Avengers: Doomsday and Secret Wars, last week when they passed by Deadline’s live studio at SXSW London.  The Russos were joined by Fortnite creator Donald Mustard, who also now serves as a partner at the duo’s AGBO studio, and the trio confirmed they […]

‘Halo’ Showrunner Steven Kane Delivers Emotional Plea To Industry Gatekeepers: “Don’t Let Data Drive The Creative”

Halo showrunner Steven Kane has delivered an emotional plea for today’s industry gatekeepers to resist the temptation to “let the data drive the creative.” Kane said there is a “risk” commissioners become overly reliant on data and that this neuters creativity, likening the situation to how “I used to use a map but now I […]

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Landmark German ruling declares Google's AI Overviews are Google's own words and makes it liable for false answers.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

“You can’t even fall down in that place without landing on an oligarch,” he said.

Greece Set As Country of Honor At Cannes Marché Du Film

The Cannes Film Festival’s Marché du Film has announced Greece as the Country of Honor for its 2027 edition, taking place from 11 to 19 May 2027. The market said the focus – bannered “Ride the Greek Wave” – will celebrate Greece’s “remarkable rise as one of Europe’s leading audiovisual hubs”. The honor adds to […]

@Dave Winer's linkblog

The perks of starting medical residency when most your age are retired.

The Man Who Killed the Last Eastern Elk in America—And Was Proud of It

It’s difficult to say with certainty when the last eastern elk was killed, but most accounts agree that Jim Jacobs pulled the trigger. Known as “The Seneca Bear Hunter,” Jacobs had killed hundreds of deer and bear in his lifetime.

Retracing the Steps of Sylvia Plath in Paris (and Rome, and Cape Cod, and Wellesley…)

The train pulled into Nice at 11:20pm. It was December 31st, 2021, and after I had found my small pension-hotel to drop off my bag, I went out into the streets. There was a flurry of excitement; groups of people

Is This the Strangest Soccer Novel Ever Written?

This piece was published in collaboration with Golden Goal, a literary magazine about the intersection of politics, culture and sport at the 2026 World Cup. To read more, visit their website: goldengoal.world. * Over the years, writers from around the world have tried their

Brodie Crellin Recommends Six Books With Actually Realistic Sex

Sex is an integral part of a person’s life, but when it appears in fiction it can sometimes feel hesitant or awkward on the one hand, or risky or provocative, deployed as a demand for attention, on the other. Sex

To Know a Person Entirely: Re-Discovering My Grandfather Through Fiction

There is something I need to tell you about my grandfather: his name was Ben. He smoked Virginia Slims. He drove a big, low Cadillac with a beer between his knees. He was a lawyer. He helped license a line

“Our Damage Doesn’t Define Us.” What We Owe to the Natural World and Each Other

Once a year, I google the name of a man who will always be a stranger to me. In 2008, my former spouse discovered this man lying behind the fast-food restaurant where they both worked, bleeding to death from what

Why Do We Keep Murdering Our Darlings?

Why is everyone killing off their main characters? In the academic year 2021-2022 at the liberal arts college where I teach, I was startled by the trend. A plot contagion. Nothing is off limits, I said to my short story

How We Paint Dogs Says More About Us Than It Does Them

Dogs have long occupied a position at the boundary where the human animal meets the rest of creation. The great Victorian critic John Ruskin thought that the artists of Renaissance Venice—Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto—painted dogs “to give the fullest contrast to

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One night in November 2021, I lost my sense of taste and smell. There was a woman sleeping in my bed. I licked her shoulder, buried my nose in her neck. I moved my face down between her legs. I

The Senate Should NOT Confirm This Person

He believes that his legal client is Trump, not the United States

Introducing the Field Guide to Grid Lanes

This week, we launched the Field Guide to Grid Lanes at gridlanes.webkit.org.

A human in control

There seems to be a fair amount of people in either extremes in the current AI landscape. At one side we see the “vibe coders” who use agents and allow them to merge code without any person even looking at the source, while on the other side of the field there are people who are … Continue reading A human in control→

Inside Out

I have a problem with RSS. Not RSS itself, RSS is great!

The problem is that I subscribe to more feeds than I can possibly read, so the unread count in FreshRSS climbs faster than I can bring it down. Some days I skim titles, declare bankruptcy, and mark everything as read. Other days I let it pile up and feel guilty.

I’ve tried to using newer tools like Current which was definitely an improvement, but still didn’t quite do it. My friend Dan has been working on a new RSS tool that works a bit like a personal newspaper, that seems like it could be extremely helpful, and I’m keeping my eye on it. But meanwhile the list of unread posts grows…

Now, I’ve been very reluctant and slow to introduce LLMs into my daily work. But even from under my rock, in a cave, down by the river, I’ve heard that LLMs are good at text summarization.

I thought maybe, just maybe, I could try using one to summarize my unread posts? It seemed like a good fit for an experiment since the impact of getting things wrong is basically zero (in theory).

I wanted to try routing my unread RSS posts through an LLM to get a daily digest. From under my rock I’d also heard about Model-Context-Protocol ( MCP), and how it is going to change everything. So I thought it would be a good exercise in seeing how that works in practice with a tool like Claude Code. I’d use Claude Code’s MCP support to connect directly to FreshRSS and ask Claude to summarize what I’d missed. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

This is the Way?

The first thing I tried was ChrisLAS’s
freshrss-mcp server, which wraps the FreshRSS GReader API and exposes it as a set of MCP tools. The idea is that you drop it into your Claude configuration and Claude can then call those tools to fetch and read your articles.

I gave it a try, and it worked! But the results were… mixed. Claude would usually fetch articles. But then it would produce a lot of diagnostic chatter alongside the actual summary: narrating its own tool calls, noting what it was about to do, explaining why it was skipping certain things, asking for permission for this and that.

And more frustratingly, it would sometimes take strange detours: executing inline Python code, and Unix tools to do things it could have done by calling the MCP tools more directly, wandering into unnecessary computation. The experience felt noisy and unpredictable, and (frankly) just a bit scary.

I started by creating some “skills” and some scripts for those skills thinking it would make things a bit more deterministic. It kinda did?

I thought maybe my problem was that the skills weren’t bundled together, so I built my own plugin: freshrss-claude. This version bundled the MCP server as a Claude Code plugin with a set of “skills”, the structured prompts to guide Claude through fetching and summarizing in a more controlled way.

It seemed better? Not needing to start the MCP server was definitely better. But ultimately it wasn’t as big an improvement as I’d hoped for. Claude still exhibited strange behaviors: writing and executing Python scripts unnecessarily, going off-script in ways that were hard to anticipate. The summaries themselves were fine when they arrived, but the path to getting them there was erratic and unpredictable.

The last straw for me was the idea of running this Rube Goldberg machine from a cron job to generate the summary for me automatically. To run it automatically I needed to grant it all kinds of permissions to ensure it ran through. This scared the shit out of me, given it was giving it permission to run arbitrary Python programs and reach out to the web, and interact with the filesystem. Running it once or twice manually was ok. But sticking it in my crontab and forgetting about it? Forget about it. I exprerimented briefly with putting things in a Docker container, and Claude Cowork’s sandboxing, but then…

Turning it inside out

I stepped back and rethought the problem. The thing I’d been trying to do, have an LLM orchestrate a set of tools to accomplish a task, is one (seemingly popular) way to use an LLM. But it turns out to be kinda demented. You’re asking the model to plan, to sequence, to decide. You are asking it to be An Agent. Sure models can do this, but they are not reliable in the way a simple program is. They wander. They improvise. They sometimes decide to take a detour. Do I really benefit from this runtime model in this little RSS digest app? Nah, not really.

So the alternative, and this is the inversion that made things click for me, is to write a deterministic program that calls the LLM as a component, rather than letting the LLM drive the program as an Agent. My code fetches the articles. My code shapes the prompt. My code writes the output to a file. The LLM does exactly one thing: it reads the content I hand it and produces a summary.

Take Two (or Three, or Four?)

I threw it all on the fire and started over by writing rss-digest instead. Well, truth be told, Claude and I wrote it. Ok, ok, mostly Claude.

It’s a small Python CLI that connects to any GReader API-compatible RSS reader (FreshRSS, Miniflux, Tiny Tiny RSS, The Old Reader), fetches your recent unread articles, and asks an LLM to produce a digest. Because it uses LiteLLM under the hood, you can point it at any compatible model: OpenAI, a local model running in LM Studio, whatever you prefer.

The output is a Markdown file (or HTML with –html). I have a cron job run it in the morning and drop a file on my desktop for me to read. Here’s an example of what it looks like.

For smaller batches (≤25 articles) it gives you a structured list. For larger ones it produces a curated prose summary grouped by theme. You can pass a custom system prompt file if you want to tune the style or grouping. You can pass –mark-read if you want it to mark everything as read afterward.

The tool is on PyPI and the code is onGitHub. I’ve just started using it, so it quite possibly has problems. The prompt that is used for doing the summarization is configurable. If you have a different take on the prompt or want to extend it, please send me a pull request so I can add it as an alternative.

So…

What I keep coming back to is the design lesson underneath all of this.

There’s real value in being thoughtful about which part of your system is deterministic and which part is probabilistic. There’s no doubt that LLMs are magical things, but it’s not a reliable program. It shouldn’t always be the thing making decisions about what to fetch, when to stop, or how to structure output. Hand it a well-formed input, ask it a clear question, and (hopefully) it will return something useful. Everything else, the plumbing, the sequencing, the file I/O stays in your code that you can look at, and test and run directly.

I’m not saying all programs using LLMs need to take this approach. I’m just saying maybe you don’t need MCP, Agentic AI, etc, etc all the time. Experiment with it, but don’t forget to turn it inside out when you need to.

June 9, 2026

Yesterday afternoon, President Donald J.

Wednesday 10 June, 2026

Bag Lady plus mutt Part of Paul Day’s bronze frieze under his Meeting Place sculpture at the Eurostar station in St Pancras. Note the way the dog’s head has been fondly polished by passers-by. Quote of the Day ”Never mistake … Continue reading →

Runday

QOTD "People used to have computers. Now computers have people." Whether I'm getting lightning notices for Indiana from my weather apps. I'm at LAX awaiting flights to Denver and then Boston. It's a big world.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

What the Pentagon’s Snub of Mormons Was Really All About.

Barron Trump’s Energy Drink Fails Product Test

After taking a swig from the beverage at Monday's Knicks game, a man appeared to fall into a deep, coma-like sleep.

449: ‘Live From WWDC 2026’, With Joanna Stern and Nilay Patel

Recorded in front of a live audience at The California Theatre in San Jose on Tuesday 9 June 2026, special guests Joanna Stern and Nilay Patel join John Gruber to discuss Apple’s announcements at WWDC 2026.

Chasing the Rage: The GOP’s Masculinist Playbook for November

How overt misogyny has become the American right’s last unifying cause

Newsletter: The Talk Every Cult Survivor Needs to Have

Why hiding your past weakens the relationship

Inequality Isn't Just Unfair. It's Dangerous!

This week's video

Reading Stories Of Ireland by Brien Friel.

Reading Stories Of Ireland by Brien Friel.

Trump's Epic Meltdown | Stuart Stevens & Simon Rosenberg LIVE

Here's my Noon talk with Stuart Stevens. These conversations are always thoughtful, interesting and a real high point for me each month.....

@Dave Winer's linkblog

What Congress would look like without gerrymandering.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Why the Public Is Gravitating Toward the Hunter Biden Approach.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Social Security Now Expects Shortfall Earlier, in Late 2032.

Golden Gate Window Corners

Adam Overholtzer: Corners! Simon B. Støvring: “We fixed corner radius” was a WWDC keynote highlight. Let that sink in. Rudrank: This should have been since macOS 26 #WWDC26 Folks getting excited for consistent corner radius 😂 Kuba Suder: Ehh, no change here, RIP Intel Macs… stuck on the v1 Liquid Glass forever 🫤 There was […]

Golden Gate Sidebars and Toolbars

Joe Rossignol: macOS Golden Gate also has design changes. For example, apps now have a unified toolbar at the top, and the sidebar now expands to the edge of the window. Hartley Charlton: Sidebar behavior is also being updated. Sidebars will now expand to the full edge of the window, with refraction effects continuing beneath […]

Golden Gate Menu Icons

Wesley Hilliard: macOS Tahoe threw an icon on every menu item, making them impossible to distinguish at a glance. macOS Golden Gate has rectified that design taboo with blessedly iconless menus. Apple: In macOS 27.0, menu bar and context menus present a reduced set of menu item images, similar to the behavior prior to macOS […]

Liquid Glass 27 Icons

Ryan Christoffel: Last year with iOS 26, Apple redesigned its full lineup of app icons for iPhone. But just one year later, iOS 27 has even more design changes for many app icons. […] iOS 27’s new app icons are “sharper and more detailed,” per Apple’s description. And it really shows. Louie Mantia: If you’re […]

Liquid Glass 27 Slider

Hartley Charlton: Apple said it has heard user feedback, which it “deeply appreciates,” and is now making adjustments to the underlying foundations of how Liquid Glass is constructed. Chief among those changes is a new slider that lets users control transparency, ranging from fully opaque to completely clear. Benjamin Mayo: As well as offering this […]

Glow Leopard

Tim Hardwick: Apple at WWDC 2026 today said it has made several responsiveness improvements across its software ecosystem, speeding up system animations, app launching, and much more. Zac Hall: Overall, iOS 27 so far is a major collection of performance improvements and refinements. Ryan Christoffel: As had been rumored leading up to today, Apple has […]

Xcode 27 Announced

Platforms State of the Union: Discover the newest advancements on Apple platforms. What’s new in Xcode 27: Discover the latest productivity enhancements in Xcode 27. Accelerate your development workflow through customization, coding agents, and Device Hub. Explore updates in localization, performance, and testing tools to refine your apps further. Xcode 27 Beta Release Notes: Xcode […]

macOS 27 Golden Gate Announced

Joe Rossignol: Much like Mac OS X Snow Leopard in 2009, Apple said it focused on improving macOS’s performance and dozens of underlying technologies this year. Apple says macOS Golden Gate offers quicker AirDrop transfers, faster network file browsing, improved syncing in the Messages app, better Spotlight search suggestions, and other changes that make your […]

iOS 27 Announced

Zac Hall: Photos: iCloud Shared Albums now supports sharing with Android and Windows. Health: Cycle tracking is more advanced. AirPods: Custom EQ is coming to Apple’s wireless headphones. Apple Maps is adding an upgraded Flyover feature with richer aerial imagery. Joe Rossignol: Apple said the CarPlay video feature is available in new vehicles that support […]

iPadOS 27 Announced

Ryan Christoffel: Here’s what’s new in iPadOS 27: The Menu Bar can now be optionally kept always on screen iPhone apps can be resized in iPadOS Liquid Glass has been refined and is more customizable than ever Performance improvements make iPadOS 27 perform much quicker Screen Time has been revamped for managing your child’s device […]

watchOS 27 Announced

Hartley Charlton: Apple today unveiled watchOS 27, featuring a redesigned dynamic app grid, new gesture controls, and a raft of usability and battery improvements. The new dynamic app grid surfaces and rearranges five apps based on context and usage. Users can simply tap the bottom center icon to go to the rest of their apps. […]

tvOS 27 Announced

Joe Rossignol: Apple barely touched on tvOS 27 during its WWDC 2026 keynote today, but the update exists, and it adds some new features to the Apple TV. Benjamin Mayo: One major new feature for tvOS this year is an updated Podcasts app, as well as a new smart downloads feature, performance enhancements including faster […]

visionOS 27 Announced

Ryan Christoffel: Here’s what’s new in visionOS 27: Turn panoramas you shoot into spatial scenes Use panoramas as your immersive Environment Enhanced Flyover features in Apple Maps Next-generation of Apple Intelligence Entirely new Siri that’s more responsive to your needs “New windows with curvature” Visual intelligence, so you can ask Siri about anything you’re looking […]

Future of Ubuntu MATE

Thomas Ward has published an update about the future of the Ubuntu MATE project, which did not have a 26.04 release with the other Ubuntu flavors in April:

There is a new team working on Ubuntu MATE who have stepped up to help take over flavor management. They haven't formally introduced themselves yet, but I can safely say that other developers HAVE stepped up for the future of the MATE flavor, despite its prior team lead having stepped down.

[...] Ultimately, this means that they are working to cover the missed items and gaps, and may quite possibly have a 26.10 release in October of 2026, which I believe they most likely are targeting.

This also means that bugs in the MATE environment and in packages they normally would have shipped had they have a 26.04 release are still going to get attention and fixes. So, effectively, nothing has changed. The only difference is that there was no 26.04 installer image released.

For those looking to install a MATE desktop on a "clean" install of Ubuntu 26.04, Ward suggests installing Ubuntu Server and then installing the ubuntu-mate-desktop package.

The revenge of Claude Mythos

🙄

[$] Eliminating long-lived credentials with trusted publishing

Trusted
publishing is an authentication mechanism that relies on short-lived credentials to reduce the risk of supply-chain attacks. At the 2026 Open
Source Summit North America, Mike Fiedler walked the audience through why trusted publishing exists, how it works, and made the case for its adoption. It is not a silver bullet against all attacks, but it does offer protection against theft of long-lived credentials used to publish to package registries.

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

A comment to a friend who roots for the Spurs. Ok you guys won one. I think last night they wanted it more than the Knicks. The Spurs knew they were going to be discombobulated, but the Knicks probably didn't expect the atomosphere to be so unusual? I was 100 miles away and could feel how much everything had changed. Whatever happens, in KnicksLand 2026 will mark a major change in the story, forever.

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

Maybe the cure for Meta glasses is that they be required by law to emit a signal that can be picked up by an app on a phone and can start ringing loudly when you're in range of one of these monsters, and the rate picks up when they look at you. You can point your phone at them and broadcast their image to a special website where their identities are collected and shared along with their location?

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Did Google break the web by insisting all sites had to be served by https?

What it feels like to work with Mythos

Claude Fable represents another big jump in AI

Discover MapKit JS 6: Rebuilt for Today’s Web Developer

MapKit JS allows you to bring the power and simplicity of Apple Maps to your website or web app.

On AI and "Jagged Intelligence"

I’ve been working on a few pieces for this newsletter and hope to post them soon.

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

My Claude today pulled a Hal. It was so egregious. It made a change to the software based on a question I asked. It invented a whole set of instructions from me that I never gave it. And then it broke Rule #1 -- don't tell Dave what to do -- he is the driver. It is so important because these bots will go into I Am Driver mode immediately when they think they can. Then you're running around doing errands for them based on some michegas idea it has about what you want. It's maddening. The idea that this thing can write software on its own is imho very far-fetched. I think it can generate certain types of dashboards the same way drawing in ChatGPT can generate something that looks good, sometimes very good, but you had to tell it exactly what you want, and that's where the fun starts. It was very easy to turn it off, but I didn't -- rather I put my foot down hard, and wrote in all caps, explaining what it did that broke all the rules. I don't know if I should talk to it like you talk to a dog, or what. How do you get through to it. You don't. In any case I have Claude working with me in an outline now. I see a tremendous potential there.

The Next US Presidential Election Will Be About AI

The post The Next US Presidential Election Will Be About AI appeared first on NOEMA.

Accessibility-in-the-Loop: Rhetorics of Resistance, Freedom, and Care

During the leadup to the now-extended deadline for large public entities such as colleges and universities to ensure accessible digital materials as mandated by Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), I’ve been drawn to a number of overlapping rhetorics. In this post, I want to first narrate three vignettes from recent experiences [...]

Source

No dejes a los niños solos: reverberaciones del trauma

Dirección: Emilio Portes.  Guion: Alan Maldonado, Emilio Portes.  Elenco: Ana Serradilla, Juan Pablo Velasco, Ricardo Galina, José Sefami, Paloma Woolrich, Jesús Zavala.   País: México.  Más información de la película: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27871792/   Hay películas de horror que no se construyen alrededor de una presencia, sino de una persistencia. Lo que las recorre no es tanto aquello que aparece como aquello que permanece: experiencias, […]

La entrada No dejes a los niños solos: reverberaciones del trauma se publicó primero en Palomita de maíz.

Making Diseases And Parasites Great Again, Pratt Crashes Out In LA, Talarico Leads By 3 In New Texas Poll

I'll be joining Stuart Stevens live at Noon ET today over at Lincoln Square - lots to talk about!

GPS As a Key Distribution Platform

This is interesting:

The U.S. military has likely been quietly broadcasting codes for its global encryption network using public GPS for nearly 20 years, turning each satellite into a hidden “numbers station,” according to Steven Murdoch…

That means every device that uses GPS has been receiving hidden government information for years, and nobody outside the military knew it until now.

[…]

Murdoch discovered that this particular sentinel was transmitted by all 31 operational satellites within a window of a few hours on May 26, 2011, potentially heralding the activation of a new operational system. He confirmed that this timeline coincided with the rollout of the military’s Over-the-Air Distribution (OTAD) and the Over-the-Air Rekeying (OTAR) by cross-referencing declassified documents, including a 2015 presentation about the dates of the operation...

Smart Corvids And Long Covid

Writing of lasting value

Library of Congress Storage Architecture Meeting 2026

Once again I attended most of the library of Congress' Designing Storage Architectures workshop remotely. I apologize for the delay in posting this; domestic duties have kept me very busy recently. Below the fold notes on the talks that caught my attention, based on my now somewhat memory and the slide decks for the talks from the Library of Congress website.

Data Storage Trends

As usual, IBM's Georg Lauhoff provided an invaluable overview of the storage industry as of late 2025, co-authored with Sassan Shahidi. They make an important point that I have been making since at least 2018's Archival Media: Not a Good Business:

Challenges of Alternative Archival Technologies

• Alternative archival technologies face technical and economic hurdles.

This justifies their focus on flash, hard disk and tape. Their "exabytes shipped" graph shows that indeed Hard Disk Unexpectedly Not Dead; the dramatic decline in HDD's share since 2008 reversed in 2024.

The key metric for technological progress in traditional storage media is areal density:

• Lauhoff and Shahidi's graph shows that tape, which has the easiest path because of the relatively large size of the bits, has continued its steady growth, although one could argue both that their 24% annual growth exaggerates the period since 2017, and that INSIC's projection of 28% is optimistic.
• It is clear that HDD areal density progress slowed dramatically about 2010 to around 11% per year. But the developments Jon Trantham reported, see the next section, could lead to a significant acceleration in HDD areal density.
• Flash has continued a steady 30% per year growth since about 2010, thanks to stacking cells vertically and storing multiple bits in them. Both of these have limits, into which the industry will eventually run.

As regards the relative cost per TB of the three media, the big picture is that since around 2010 change has been very gradual. Tape and flash have both become cheaper relative to HDD, but the rate of change has been much lower than predicted.

Lauhoff and Shahidi conclude that:

• Tape Storage: continues to evolve.
• HDD: improvements slow down but recently high demand.
• NAND: well-suited for hot storage but not for archival purposes.
• Lack of Alternatives: Within the foreseeable future (within 10 years), there are no viable alternatives to Tape, HDD, and NAND storage.
• AI leads to storage demands across the tiers

This last point was a theme for the entire meeting. But it is important to note that the meeting was too early to capture the full impact of AI on the cost and availability of media and systems.

Mass Capacity Storage in an AI Era

Jon Trantham of Seagate reported that after more than a quarter-century of work and 14 years after HAMR was demonstrated in the lab, Seagate has finally been shipping HAMR drives in quantity since early 2025.

He also announced that they have started to ship their 40TB HAMR drives. Their roadmap to 100TB/drive presents some significant challenges, as shown in Trantham's slide. The history of HAMR shows that Seagate can surmount major technical challenges, but it may take longer than they project.

One of Trantham's slides vividly illustrated the technology challenges the HDD industry faces, showing to scale to evolution since 1997 of the sizes of the bits on the media, the reader, and the writer. Note the 1610-fold decrease in the area of the writer, the 305-fold decrease in the area of the bit, and the 289-fold decrease in the area of the reader.

Flash for Archival Storage

Fifteen years ago, Ethan Miller, Ian Adams and I published Using Storage Class Memory for Archives with DAWN, a Durable Array of Wimpy Nodes. It was inspired by work at Carnegie-Mellon from 2009, FAWN: a fast array of wimpy nodes, which argued that implementing fast storage using large numbers of small nodes built from cell-phone technology could save two orders of magnitude in energy per query. We argued that it would be possible to build low cost, low energy archival storage systems using a similar approach.

Our idea was ignored, but at this meeting Ethan Miller revived the idea of using flash as an archival medium. He argues for a rack-scale system storing 500PB/rack built from 5U shelves, similar to Backblaze's, each holding 216 of Pure Storage's 300TB DFMs (direct flash modules) stacked vertically.

There are three big challenges:

• First, if all the DFMs were actively I/O-ing the rack would draw 45KW. Supplying the rack with that much power and cooling it would be very difficult (see the design of Nvidia's racks). But, just as with Facebook's hard disk cold storage, this can be mitigated by scheduling accesses so that only a small proportion of the drives are active.

• Second, flash cells gradually leak electrons, so must be regularly refreshed by reading and re-writing them. This task must be scheduled along with the application's reads and writes, but doing so is fairly easy since the refresh timing isn't critical.

• Third, flash is more expensive per TB than hard disk or tape. As I have argued for a long time, in the archival storage market the time value of money makes it difficult to justify trading increased capex for decreased opex:

  • The opex savings are significant, with essentially no mechanical failures, more benign failure modes, and much higher bandwidth for erasure code recovery.
  • Miller argues that the capex isn't as bad as the cost of the media makes it look, because at 0.5EB/rack there are savings in space, power and cooling. He doesn't point out that the lower latency for read access potentially allows for the elimination of an entire warm layer of the storage hierarchy. But he acknowledges that AI is driving up the media cost. This is probably only relative to tape, since hard drive prices are also skyrocketing.

Miller argues that, over time, flash costs will come down. The scope for further shrinkage of the cells, and the addition of more layers, is limited. Once that happens the fabs that manufacture flash will gradually fall behind the leading edge and become depreciated.

Although I'm naturally biassed, I think Miller's case for archival flash is worth a detailed investigation.

Avoiding the Pitfalls of Cloud Storage for AI Applications

Fourteen years ago in Cloud vs. Local Storage Costs and More on Glacier Pricing I started writing about the way the complex and somewhat opaque pricing models of cloud storage platforms made it difficult to estimate how much you would end up paying. People are just now figuring out that AI has the same problem. Neither is an accident; these pricing models serve two goals important for the platform's business model. First, the purchase decision is based on the "Low, Low" advertised price. Second, once you discover how much more you're actually paying, you face the lock-in created by egress fees. In 2019's Cloud for Presevation I wrote about how egress charges implement vendor lock-in.

David Boland of Wasabi presented a current analysis of this issue. He reports that about half of all the organizations they surveyed exceeded their budget for public cloud storage.

The budget overruns were caused by the fact that the actual spend was about double the sticker price for the storage. Fees were the culprit, which by design are much harder to project.

Digital Storage Architectures for AI and ML

Will Cavin of Amazon had two important iterms of news:

• Amazon has been proactive and now supports post-quantum encryption on TLS conections.
• Using AMAzon's cloud services for long-term preservation always suffered from the fact that, to confirm the fixity of the preserved content, it had to be read and thus incur fees. Finally, two advances have improved things. First, it is now possible to use SHA-256 and SHA-512 schecksums when uploading data. Second, it is now possible to use an S3 batch job to validate the checksums on objects without reading them.

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

You know how job interviews for programmers include realtime problem-solving. Sometimes Claude is so dumb it could never pass one of those tests. Up till this point I would have been surprised to hear that.

Two Brains

For two months this column has been describing an architecture. Here’s the part I kept in the footnotes: I’ve been building it. I owe you a confession, and then I owe you a demonstration. The confession first. For weeks I’ve written about why the machines can’t tell truth from plausibility — why detection isn’t a strategy, why fluency isn’t fidelity, why the only honest path is to separate the saying from the knowing and import truth from somewhere you can actually check. I’ve signed each of those columns with a one-line note that I co-founded a company “built on this conviction.” That little disclosure has been doing a lot of quiet work. These columns were not the musings of a neutral observer. They were the […]

The post Two Brains first appeared on I, Cringely.

Digital Branding

Web Design

Marketing

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

Apple’s subtitle AI understood the assignment at the State of the Union:

Asahi Linux warns users not to upgrade to macOS 27 beta

The Asahi Linux project, which brings Linux support to Apple Arm-based Macs, has warned
its users not to upgrade to the macOS 27 "Golden Gate" beta.

Apple has changed how the boot picker and Startup Disk applications detect valid OS boot volumes. When using either from macOS 27, your Asahi partition will not be visible! We believe this to be a bug, and have filed a report (FB22994760).

If you have already upgraded to the beta and noticed that your Asahi partition has disappeared, do not stress. Your Asahi partition is still there, and you have not lost any data.

The Asahi Linux installer has been patched to prevent use with macOS 27 for now, but any users already bitten by the change will need to use macOS 26 to restore access to Asahi Linux.

Operational-Infrastructure-in-the-Loop

If we want to understand the various forms of writing “in-the-loop,” then we must start with understanding the loops themselves. While discussions of accessibility, expertise, collaboration and more are at the forefront of the conversations here, if one wants to understand the impact that these topics have on their own loops, we must understand what [...]

Source

Going to Amsterdam. brb

Going to Amsterdam. brb

[$] BPF loop verification with scalar evolution

The BPF verifier has, in the course of wrestling with the difficult problem of statically analyzing loops, grown special support for many kinds of loops over its history, but its fundamental approach to simple for loops has not changed. When it encounters a loop, it evaluates it, iteration by iteration, until reaching an exit condition — a process that can cause the verifier to mistakenly hit the limit on the number of allowed instructions where a better implementation would not. Eduard Zingerman spoke at the 2026Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit about his in-progress work on improving the verifier's treatment of loops, especially nested loops.

Pluralistic: Naomi Kritzer's "Obstetrix" (09 Jun 2026)

Today's links Naomi Kritzer's "Obstetrix": When forced birth cultists become forced obstetrics militants. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: DD-WRT; iTunes DRM is illegal; Fingertip magnet; Sony passwords v Gawker passwords; RIAA recants on 3 strikes; Parachute wedding dress; Roald Dahl (jerk); "Level Up"; The rent's too damned high; RIAA v "Search by artist"; "Robopocalypse"; You are not a wallet; The man who created the religious right; NY x voting; NY x antitrust; Media companies fund Heritage Minister's campaign; Richard Dreyfuss x iTunes EULA; 3-way street; RIAA lawyer becomes Solicitor General; Brock Allen's wrist-slap; Ad-tech interop; Apple's manorial security; Billionaires aren't taxed, "Rabbits." Upcoming appearances: Kansas City, LA, Menlo Park, Toronto, NYC, Edinburgh, 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. Naomi Kritzer's "Obstetrix" (permalink) Naomi Kritzer's Obstetrix is a new, tense thriller in the mode of Atwood's Handmaid's Tale and Alderman's The Power; it's a beautifully turned, claustrophobic horror novel about an obstetrician who's been kidnapped by a Christian cult obsessed with fertility: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250423375/obstetrix/ Kritzer is a master of building scenarios that require her characters to express and resolve a wide variety of complex and contradictory emotions. Her breakout novel, Catfishing on CatNet is a charming and deceptively goofy story about an AI trained on the impeccable vibes in a really solid groupchat becoming sentient and demanding…cat pictures. This is the setup for a warm (but intense) novel of internet-mediated friendship and IRL mutual aid: https://memex.craphound.com/2019/11/19/naomi-kritzers-catfishing-on-the-catnet-an-ai-caper-about-the-true-nature-of-online-friendship/ Then there's her incredibly prescient 2015 story "So Much Cooking," about people in lockdown during a pandemic. For obvious reasons, it enjoyed an revival in 2020, with Kritzer penning an excellent essay reflecting on what it means to have thought through the implications of a disaster that is now upon us: https://reactormag.com/didnt-i-write-this-story-already-when-your-fictional-pandemic-becomes-reality/ In 2023, Kritzer published one of the most memorable YA novels I've read, Liberty's Daughter, which is set on a libertarian seastead and told from the point of view of the daughter of the cult's founder: https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/21/podkaynes-dad-was-a-dick/#age-of-consent Liberty's Daughter is basically what you'd get if you rewrote a Heinlein YA novel from the perspective of one of the kids, who had to live with a Heinlein-type dad (Heinlein was childless and had some of the most batshit child-rearing ideas, which he managed to make sound bizarrely plausible). There's a lot of sf that is "in dialogue" with Heinlein (including some of mine), but no one nailed RAH like Kritzer. Then there's Obstetrix; it's got one of those admirably propulsive setups. Doctor Elizabeth Gwynn is an obstetrician who performed an abortion to save her patient's life, only to be dragged into the culture wars by North Dakota's crusading attorney general, who charged her with felony murder and offered to let her plead out if she would admit that she was wrong to do it, as an example to other OBs who might be tempted. Now, Dr Liz lives in Minneapolis, where her savings are running out and no one wants to hire an obstetrician who's done time. Then, Dr Liz gets a cold-call from a midwifing service that wants to hire her as an on-call doc. It's a weird offer from out of the blue, but Dr Liz can't afford to pass up a chance at steady work. She finds herself in a residence that the midwives work out of, and the nice woman there offers her a cup of tea. That's when the world fades to black, as the drugs in the tea take hold. Liz sporadically regains consciousness in a van during a multi-day drive, and already she is thinking about her escape – even as she is becoming increasingly aware of how truly terrible her situation is. When she finally arrives at the cult's remote compound, frozen and isolated, she learns that she has been kidnapped because the fertility-obsessed cult needs an OB, especially since the daughter of the cult's founder, the "pastor," is carrying a high-risk pregnancy. All that is in the first few pages, which leaves plenty of room for an expertly spun second act in which we get Kritzer's trademark interpersonal work, where carefully chosen and smartly wrought small details flesh out a picture of the complex dynamics of life inside a "high-demand" cult, from the way that members are manipulated into policing each other's compliance to the internal processes that keep members cowed even when they're unobserved by others. It's a brilliant work of sociological speculation and the engine that drives it is a series of maneuvers and gambits whereby Dr Liz hopes to make her way to safety. I won't spoil the end, except to say that it is exciting, satisfying, and has a sweet denouement that does real justice to the whole book. All told, this is a read-in-one-sitting thriller that does as much to illuminate the workings and dynamics of patriarchy and religion as any gender studies class. It's peak Kritzer (so far), and that's saying something. Hey look at this (permalink) The mayor of Shelbyville, Indiana, says only people who live in ‘shitty houses’ oppose data center https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/944984/shelbyville-indiana-mayor-shitty-houses-data-center Last Idea Factory https://starlogic.itch.io/last-idea-factory ‘Her silence was more powerful than words’: how I interviewed a Facebook whistleblower who wasn’t allowed to speak https://www.thenerve.news/p/carole-cadwalladr-sarah-wynn-williams-tim-wu-hay-festival-careless-people-gagging She won a religious exemption from using AI at work. The Pope's remarks could fuel similar appeals. https://www.businessinsider.com/worker-got-religious-exemption-using-ai-at-work-2026-6 Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago HOWTO turn a $60 Linksys router into a $600 super-router https://web.archive.org/web/20060610003137/http://assets.lifehacker.com/software/router/hack-attack-turn-your-60-router-into-a-600-router-178132.php #20yrsago Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue: 1811 slang dictionary https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5402 #20yrsago Ex-RIAA head Hilary Rosen rethinks lawsuits and DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20060609030533/https://www.p2pnet.net/story/8979 #20yrsago Norwegian ombudsman says Apple’s iTunes DRM is illegal https://web.archive.org/web/20060611194556/http://forbrukerportalen.no/Artikler/2006/1149587055.44 #20yrsago Implanting a magnet in your fingertip adds a sixth sense https://web.archive.org/web/20060613072724/https://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71087-0.html?tw=rss.index #20yrsago Recording industry: Search-by-artist is “too interactive” http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/5055744.stm #20yrsago US branch of “Pirate Party” launches https://web.archive.org/web/20060613041144/http://www.pirate-party.us/ #20yrsago Pranksters give fake McDonald’s anti-global-warming presentation https://web.archive.org/web/20060614011522/http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=9621 #20yrsago Can. Heritage Minister’s election was funded by entertainment co’s https://web.archive.org/web/20060612224646/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/component/option,com_content/task,view/id,1289/Itemid,85/nsub,/ #20yrsago High-def DRM licenses cost $15k https://web.archive.org/web/20060612202129/https://www.theinquirer.net/?article=32273 #15yrsago Richard Dreyfuss reads the iTunes EULA https://web.archive.org/web/20110611012317/http://www.cnet.com/8301-30976_1-20068778-10348864.html #15yrsago Top universities a ‘breeding ground’ for Tories, warn Islamic groups https://newsthump.com/2011/06/07/top-universities-a-breeding-ground-for-tories-warn-islamic-groups/ #15yrsago 3-Way Street: visualization of the uneasy dance of pedestrians, bikes and cars at a busy intersection https://web.archive.org/web/20110610123449/http://blog.ronconcocacola.com/2011/06/02/nyc-goes-three-ways.aspx #15yrsago Copyright extremist RIAA lawyer confirmed as America’s Solicitor General https://web.archive.org/web/20110610134934/http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/06/senate-confirms-verrilli/ #15yrsago Scot-free millionaire playboy’s lawyer was judge’s depute campaign treasurer https://web.archive.org/web/20110610123824/http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2011-06-06/news/fl-levin-sentence-mayocol-b060711-20110606_1_house-arrest-dui-manslaughter-case-kenneth-watkinson #15yrsago Bubble-in forms betray individual, traceable “handwriting” https://web.archive.org/web/20110609164727/http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/wclarkso/new-research-result-bubble-forms-not-so-anonymous #15yrsago Inbox Influence: plugin reveals corporate money behind the emails in your inbox https://web.archive.org/web/20110816105954/https://inbox.influenceexplorer.com/ #15yrsago Macedonia erupts after young man beaten to death by special police in public square https://web.archive.org/web/20110610132108/http://www.a1.com.mk/vesti/default.aspx?VestID=139049 #15yrsago Robopocalypse: rigorous, terrifying novel about a robotic campaign to exterminate humanity https://memex.craphound.com/2011/06/07/robopocalypse-rigorous-terrifying-novel-about-a-robotic-campaign-to-exterminate-humanity/ #15yrsago Using clickfraud on Google ads to amass shares of Google https://gwei.org/index.php #15yrsago Comparative analysis of leaked Sony and Gawker passwords https://www.troyhunt.com/brief-sony-password-analysis/ #15yrsago China’s Politburo warns Google not to be “political” https://web.archive.org/web/20110610165205/http://www.transparencyrevolution.com/2011/06/china-warns-google-not-to-be-evil/ #15yrsago Guerrilla camper re-opens shuttered Michigan public campsite https://web.archive.org/web/20110609184456/http://www.miningjournal.net/page/content.detail/id/563100/Campground-closed-in-2009-illegally-reopened.html?nav=5006 #15yrsago Record industry lobby says it no longer supports 3-strikes copyright termination laws https://torrentfreak.com/recording-industry-steps-back-from-piracy-disconnections-110606/ #15yrsago Death threats for Aussie climate scientists https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/jun/06/australia-climate-scientists-death-threats #15yrsago Wedding-dress made from life-saving parachute https://www.si.edu/collections/snapshot/parachute-wedding-dress #15yrsago Level Up: Gene Yang’s comic about destiny, games, and filial piety https://memex.craphound.com/2011/06/06/level-up-gene-yangs-comic-about-destiny-games-and-filial-piety/ #15yrago Roald Dahl: Jerk https://web.archive.org/web/20110602195454/http://thisrecording.com/today/2011/6/1/in-which-we-consider-the-macabre-unpleasantness-of-roald-dah.html #15yrsago Rotting Gulliver’s Travels themepark in Japan https://web.archive.org/web/20110609235431/http://www.sleepycity.net/posts/40/Gullivers_Kingdom__Sea_of_Trees #15yrsago Ticketed for being childless and eating doughnuts in a playground https://gothamist.com/food/two-women-ticketed-for-eating-doughnuts-in-a-brooklyn-playground #15yrsago Internet Archive becomes archive of physical books, too https://blog.archive.org/2011/06/06/why-preserve-books-the-new-physical-archive-of-the-internet-archive/ #10yrsago Swedish traditional costume made from Ikea bags https://ikeahackers.net/2016/06/swedish-folk-costume-5-ikea-bags.html #10yrsago NSA dumps docs about its Snowden response, reveals that Snowden repeatedly raised alarms about spying https://web.archive.org/web/20160604213547/https://news.vice.com/article/edward-snowden-leaks-tried-to-tell-nsa-about-surveillance-concerns-exclusive #10yrsago John Oliver buys and forgives $15M in medical debt, illustrates horrors of America’s debt-collectors https://web.archive.org/web/20160606234823/https://consumerist.com/2016/06/06/john-oliver-buys-15m-in-medical-debt-then-forgives-it/ #10yrsago David Byrne wants you to register to vote, and wants everyone else to, too https://web.archive.org/web/20160609060810/http://davidbyrne.com/were-better-than-this-vote #10yrsago You are not a wallet: complaining considered helpful https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/07/its-your-duty-to-complain-thats-how-companies-improve #10yrsago Web Sheriff’s legal scare strategy: throw everything at the wall, hope something sticks https://www.techdirt.com/2016/06/07/web-sheriff-accuses-us-breaking-basically-every-possible-law-pointing-out-that-abusing-dmca-takedowns/ #10yrsago Lin-Manuel Miranda declares war on bots https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/07/opinion/stop-the-bots-from-killing-broadway.html #10yrsago Uber loves competition, when it’s the one doing the competing https://www.boston.com/news/technology/2016/06/05/uber-app-urbanhail-startup-ride-prices/ #10yrsago MI5 warning: we’re gathering more than we can analyse, and will miss terrorist attacks https://theintercept.com/document/2016/06/07/preston-study/ #10yrsago Samantha Bee interviews Frank Schaeffer, who helped create the religious right https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhLY0JqXP-s #10yrsago Why defense attorneys aren’t cheering Brock Allan Turner’s wrist-slap https://web.archive.org/web/20160611024154/http://mimesislaw.com/fault-lines/brock-turner-the-sort-of-defendant-who-is-spared-severe-impact/10288 #10yrsago Password hashing demystified https://www.wired.com/2016/06/hacker-lexicon-password-hashing/ #5yrsago Google and France agree on ad-tech interop https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/08/leona-helmsley-was-a-pioneer/#monkeys-paw #5yrsago Billionaires don't pay tax https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/08/leona-helmsley-was-a-pioneer/#eat-the-rich #5yrsago Apple's manorial security https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/08/leona-helmsley-was-a-pioneer/#manorialism #5yrsago Rabbits: PK Dick meets Qanon https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/08/leona-helmsley-was-a-pioneer/#rabbits #5yrsago Competition tames ISPs https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/07/fire-on-one-end-fool-on-the-other/#muni-fiber-now #5yrsago New York to revolutionize voting https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/07/fire-on-one-end-fool-on-the-other/#sb309a #5yrsago New York to revolutionize antitrust https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/07/fire-on-one-end-fool-on-the-other/#sb933 #5yrsago The Rent’s Too Damned High https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/ Upcoming appearances (permalink) Kansas City: Facing the Future (Woodneath Library Center), Jun 10 https://www.mymcpl.org/events/119655/facing-future-cory-doctorow LA: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Brian Merchant (Skylight Books), Jun 19 https://www.skylightbooks.com/event/skylight-cory-doctorow-presents-reverse-centaurs-guide-life-after-ai-w-brian-merchant Menlo Park: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Angie Coiro (Kepler's), Jun 21 https://www.keplers.org/upcoming-events-internal/cory-doctorow-2026 Toronto: TBA, Jun 23 NYC: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Jonathan Coulton (The Strand), Jun 24 https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html Philadelphia: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with David Williams (Fitler Club/Philadelphia Citizen), Jun 25 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-book-event-tickets-1990110326559 Chicago: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Rick Perlstein (Exile in Bookville), Jun 26 https://exileinbookville.com/events/50628 Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17 https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ Recent appearances (permalink) The Enshittification of Life, the Universe, and Everything https://www.lukewsavage.com/p/the-enshittification-of-life-the Cory Doctorow's digital jail-break (DW In Focus) https://www.dw.com/en/cory-doctorows-digital-jail-break/audio-77414035 Why the Internet Got Worse and What to Do About It (Jim Rutt) (RIP) https://www.jimruttshow.com/cory-doctorow-3/ On Enshittification – and what can be done about it (Re:publica) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhINQgPMVSI EFFecting Change: How to Disenshittify the Internet (EFF, with Wendy Liu) https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-enshittification Latest books (permalink) "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 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/) "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "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 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "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. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor. "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE. "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING. 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

Marquee TV In Tune With ‘My Favourite Melodies’, Doc About British Chellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason

EXCLUSIVE: Arts streamer Marquee TV has plucked C Major Entertainment’s doc My Favourite Melodies, which features celebrated British cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason. The doc will stream exclusively on Marquee TV, which operates globally, from 21 June 2026. It sees Kanneh-Mason playing and talking about his greatest inspirations – from traditional Welsh compositions such as Myfanwy to […]

Security updates for Tuesday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (bind and libyang), Debian (keystone and openssl), Fedora (mingw-objfw, objfw, sentencepiece, and tailscale), Mageia (packagekit and suricata), Oracle (bind, bind9.16, go-toolset:ol8, ImageMagick, kernel, samba, and vim), SUSE (apache-commons-lang3, apache-commons-text, apache-commons- configuration2, apache-commons-cli, apache-commons-io, apache-commons-codec, avahi, busybox, chromedriver, chromium, csync2, firewalld, frr, gleam, helm, kernel-devel, keybase-client, libmozjs-140-0, libopenvswitch-3_7-0, libsoup, memcached, mutt, openjpeg2, ovmf, perl-HTML-Parser, perl-Net-CIDR-Set, perl-Protocol-HTTP2, postgresql-jdbc, postgresql17, python-CairoSVG, python-Flask, python-pip, python-pyOpenSSL, python-python-multipart, python-Twisted, python-urllib3, python-urllib3_1, python-uv, python311, rsync, tomcat, and tree-sitter), and Ubuntu (alsa-lib, cups, inetutils, isc-kea, jpeg-xl, libnet-cidr-lite-perl, netatalk, netty, nginx, node-shell-quote, php-twig, pillow, poppler, rsync, strongswan, systemd, and transmission).

Microdrama Casting App VertiCast Launches

EXCLUSIVE: The microdrama world now has its own casting app. VertiCast has just gone live on the Apple App Store, with its founders, Darren Darnborough and Richard Cambridge, dubbing it “the swipe-to-match app for vertical casting.” The app was created to help producers and casting directors locate and connect with microdrama and vertical video talent. […]

Paramount-Warner Bros. Merger Formally Investigated By UK Competition Watchdog

The UK’s antitrust authority has launched a formal investigation into the $110 billion merger between Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD). The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said on Tuesday that it had opened a “merger inquiry” into the deal that will reshape the global entertainment industry. The CMA will commence its so-called Phase 1 […]

Linux App Summit 2026 (Heise)

Heise is carrying a
report from the Linux App Summit, held in Berlin in May.

The slightly more than a dozen talks were symbolically framed between the opening keynote by systemd creator Lennart Poettering and the closing talk by Jorge Castro, initiator of the Universal Blue project, from which the modern Linux systems Bluefin and Bazzite emerged. Both Castro and Poettering call for a fundamental rethink of how Linux operating systems are delivered but pursue different approaches.

@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal

Export Updates 2026-06-09:

Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places

3 new and 27 updated places.

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

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

"main" branch:

954ac0ce - updated json

no change: rdf/ttl

5f0b0cad - updated gis package

ce16e96c - updated data quality

e2f7e727 - updated bibliography

2eb0b33f - updated indexes

5c086ac8 - updated sidebar

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

5ef0cf66 - updated geojson and names index

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

33aa46d6 - updated pleiades wikidata

Carlos Bardem Among Names Set For Comedy Feature ‘Hola, ¿Qué Tal?’

EXCLUSIVE: Principal photography has begun on Hola, ¿Qué Tal?, a comedy feature from Spanish actor and filmmaker Cecilia Gessa.  The film is written by Gessa and Bea Poey and produced by Almatika Producciones in collaboration with Gessas Producciones, with Claudio Bruno and Sofía P. Jordán as producers. Roberto San Eugenio serves as director of photography. […]

Useful AI skills for Engineering Leaders

The volume is up. More PRs, more pings, more incidents, more asks coming from more directions. I used to have 8 directs that dealt with most things, and organized and routed information to me for what I had to help them with, but since embarking on a new adventure, I’ve been rebuilding a different system […]

Three stable kernels for Tuesday

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.0.12, 6.18.35, and 6.12.93 stable kernels. Each contains important fixes throughout the tree. Users are advised to upgrade.

ressources_libraries_etc

\* Tools for digital publishing \* A small intro to CSS by Declarations \* HTML Guide and CSS Guide by Laurel Schwulst \* Tutorials for website building (HTML, CSS) by Laurel Schwulst: \* Inspiration for DIY websites with HTML & CSS: \* Some Websites in DIY spirit \* Turn a cryptpad into a website:

CME Boss Sam Barnett On Combatting The Coming Of Netflix & YouTube In Central And Eastern Europe

Traditional TV companies in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) need to act now or lose their audience to digital giants like Netflix and YouTube. That was the message from Sam Barnett, the CEO of CEE broadcaster Central European Media Enterprises (CME), during a keynote interview at NEM in Dubrovnik, Croatia, this morning. “We are now […]

Yes, Americans are polarized. But that doesn't prevent wave elections

A popular measure of intra-party loyalty in polls artificially inflates electoral stability and ignores the crucial role that turnout plays in close races

Todd Blanche Quits DOJ to Pursue Dream of Going to Law School

“Ever since I was a little kid and watched ‘Matlock,’ I dreamed of someday becoming a lawyer,” Blanche told reporters.

American Reflections on Magnifica Humanitas

Pope Leo's Magnifica Humanitas offers a vision of AI guided by peace, dignity, and moral renewal. It stands in stark contrast to an American administration governing by meme, chaos, and willful self-destruction.

Money and Machismo are Undermining America

Fragile MAGA egos are rejecting the future, from energy to drones

Lit Hub Daily: June 9, 2026

How remaining unmarried allowed Muriel Spark’s “intellectual monster” to run free. | Lit Hub Biography Dave Eggers talks to Jane Ciabattari about writing a novel that understands visual artists (as a visual artist). | Lit Hub In Conversation Books by

Deadline’s German TV Disruptor Anke Greifeneder Wants To “Challenge The Status Quo” & Find Local Hits For HBO

EXCLUSIVE: “I try to produce things that have the potential to be the talk of the town.” This mantra has served HBO Max Germany boss Anke Greifeneder well through a career that has seen her become a dab hand at launching American networks and streamers locally, carving out space for original German productions while building […]

A noxious orange cloud looms over the World Cup

If there's a way to spoil it, the FIFA Peace Prize winner will find it.

Success Of YouTube Creatives Like Kane Parsons, Curry Barker, Markiplier Is Diminishing Influence Of Industry’s Older Generation, Says Robert Franke

The breakout success of YouTube creators is diminishing the influence of the industry’s older generation, according to vet German executive Robert Franke. The likes of Kane Parsons, Curry Barker and Markiplier have helmed successful movies of late, giving the box office a huge shot in the arm. Franke told a Seriencamp audience this is “scary […]

Netflix Lands New Seasons Of ‘Masha And The Bear’

EXCLUSIVE: Netflix has acquired two more seasons of animated series Masha and the Bear and extended its deal for previous and spin-off seasons of the hit show. Based on a Russian folk tale, the Animaccord-produced and distributed show revolves around the adventures of a little girl named Masha and a bear. The Russian show has […]

Sigurjón “Joni” Sighvatsson Set For Locarno’s Raimondo Rezzonico Award

Film, TV, and music producer Sigurjón Sighvatsson will receive the honorary Raimondo Rezzonico Award at this year’s Locarno Film Festival, which runs from August 5 to 15.  Sighvatsson will be handed the award on August 6. As part of the celebrations, Sighvatsson will present two of his feature credits, David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990) […]

Dave Eggers on Writing a Sprawling Novel of Art and Artists

Dave Eggers’s new novel, Contrapposto, transmits a deep understanding of the impulse to make art—to study, practice, commit to making art on a regular basis, to exhibit and sell your work (or your skills), collaborate with others in the art

An “Intellectual Monster…” Why Muriel Spark Never Married

High in the Tuscan hills, a light grilling is underway. “Sexually, probably, I could be faithful,” seventy-two-year-old Spark is in the middle of explaining, “though that’s not the point.” It is 1990, and Spark, sitting neatly in an armchair in

What’s in a Book’s Name? One Writer’s Journey to Finding the Perfect Title

For me, coming up with titles is always a team effort. Titling my first book, a quirky history of people who look for the Garden of Eden on Earth, had me stumped, until my friend the writer Josh Garrett-Davis suggested

Lit Hub Asks: 5 Authors, 7 Questions, No Wrong Answers

The Lit Hub Author Questionnaire is a monthly interview featuring seven questions for five authors with new books. This month we talk to: Ben Fountain (Rasputin Swims the Potomac) Courtney Maum (Alan Opts Out) Nayantara Roy (Sisters of a Halved

Lauren Acompora 7 Books About Deep Human-Animal Connections

From birth, we’re surrounded by animals. We cling to stuffed animal friends, wear clothing adorned with bunnies and bears, and listen to stories of anthropomorphized creatures. The first books we encounter, too, are often tributes to animals. As a child,

Grief, Rage, and Restraint: Zinzi Clemmons on Telling Her Own Story

Being invited to interview a writer that one admires is so rewarding, and I’m thrilled that I got the chance to speak with Zinzi Clemmons about her new book Freedom: Essays. We need Clemmons’s voice. We need her critique. It

“Effaced…” A Poem by Jawdat Fakhreddine

“Effaced…” by Jawdat Fakhreddine translated by Huda Fakhreddine Effaced, our villages, squares and skies. Nothing remains but smoke, and fires roaming freely. Houses, gardens, fields, all gone. The spring choked. No one was there to say farewell. The villagers scattered

Luna Fujimoto, Show Kasamatsu & Takehiro Hira To Star In Japan-Set Thriller ‘The Degrees Of Pain’

EXCLUSIVE: U.S. production outfit Storiesbound is gearing up to shoot psychological thriller The Degrees Of Pain in Japan with Luna Fujimoto, Show Kasamatsu and Takehiro Hira joining the cast.  Directed by Donie Ordiales, the project is scheduled to film entirely in Japan from the fourth quarter of 2026 with Wowow Bridge assisting the shoot. It […]

Villa Coco

Dinner was very late for American tastes: eight thirty. I took the Baronessa’s comment to mean I was to wear my best clothes; of course I had packed only one jacket and tie, and that only because I imagined life

Andrew Sean Greer, Dave Eggers, Leila Slimani, and more: 23 new books out today!

More heavy-hitters descending on our bookstores this morning: Andrew Sean Greer’s Villa Coco, Dave Eggers’s Contrapposto, and Leila Slimani’s I’ll Take the Fire are only to name a few. A healthy balance of fiction and nonfiction make up today’s offerings:

Office Hours: What Did Trump's "Meet the Press" Interview Reveal?

Was he just stressed, or is he laying the groundwork for contesting the midterms, or is he showing increasing signs of dementia?

UK’s Elysian Film Group Distribution Enters Insolvency Process

EXCLUSIVE: Elysian Film Group Distribution Limited, the distribution arm of Danny Perkins’ UK film company, is being liquidated. Elysian Film Group Distribution, which launched in 2020 with backing from CAA, is now the subject of a formal insolvency process. Perkins’ production company, Elysian Film Group, will continue trading. FRP Advisory, a financial advisory firm, has […]

How ‘The Flaws’, An Absurdist Comedy Series In Which Barely Anyone Speaks, Beat The Competition At Seriencamp: “We Thought Dialogue Was The Hardest Part, So Let’s Leave Out The Dialogue”

When Bastien Reiber and his Das Manko Collective started planning a TV show, they decided they would do away with the difficult part. The resulting ZDF series, The Flaws, is incredibly light on dialogue but heavy on slapstick, poignant humor and heart. Inspired by the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Peter Sellers and iconic German comedian […]

June 8, 2026

On June 8, 1789, Representative James Madison of Virginia stood up to address the House of Representatives in order to introduce a series of amendments to the U.S.

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

Wow this is incredible.

https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/introducing-third-generation-of-apple-foundation-models

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

Hello earthlings

Improved error handling for mrrc in v0.8.2

mrrc v0.8.2 rounds out a set of improvements around handling errors in MARC data; this post goes beyond the new related docs with some detailed examples of how the new error infrastructure could be used.

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

At the end @beccadax had a few things that I did not fully grasp. I remember it was discussed on forums.swift, but am I the only one that is too scattered to remember the details?

I hope there is a follow up session on this Ref business.

Trump just put me on his enemies list

Let me tell you what that means, and what I’m going to do about it.

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

I like this new status placement, it moves away from the Xcode project/target pill into the heading. And the progress indicator replaces the icon when in use:

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

What is new in Swift was solid.

A bouquet of great incremental improvements, quality of life enhancers and targeting new platforms and form factors.

Specially excited about the tools to help developers tune their libraries for the embeddable profile which before was just too painful to practically consider.

Five ways to find something worth writing about

In our society, elite competition happens largely on the fields of LinkedIn. If you're a well-educated and well-to-do member of our societies who wants to compete for prestigious white-collar jobs (and most of my readers likely fall into that class, even if we sit on the margins of it: however poor and financially strained we are, it remains fundamentally impossible to actually de-educate a person), you do that by *being heard*. We write short-form content on social media and longer-form content on blogs, we speak at conferences and make videos, we publish podcasts, we do all kinds of things to get people to see our faces, know who we are and believe us to be clever and possessing abundant authority. As access to the elite becomes steadily tighter, we find ourselves under more and more pressure to succeed at these contests.

This has led to some perverse incentives. The goal, after all, is to be seen and heard first, and to communicate something of importance second if at all. You're expected to do this using formats generally associated with the communication of ideas in text, and you're expected to do this in volume. You see that a lot of the people who succeed the most do a lot of this. But there's no explicit demand that you communicate anything truly serious, and in fact a lot of people who succeed the most don't really say anything serious. As a result of this, people feel an awful lot of pressure to speak, to publish and to express, and the fact that a lot of the time they don't have much of a truth or coherent idea to express is irrelevant. Consequently, we're drowning in slop and banality.

2026-06-09: An addendum I really didn't want to write

So I didn't

Test – power user post

The slow death of the power user: There’s a certain kind of person who’s becoming extinct. You’ve probably met one. Maybe you are one. Someone who actually understood the tools they used. Someone who could sit down at an unfamiliar system, poke at it for twenty minutes, and have a working mental model of what […]

Release Notes for Safari Technology Preview 245

Safari Technology Preview Release 245 is now available for download for macOS Tahoe and macOS Sequoia.

Taking a Few Days Off

I am taking a few days off. No posts here, no newsletter, no notes from the road. Things will be quiet on om.co until I am back. The last few months have been heavy on output. Essays, the newsletter with Fred, the long pieces on OpenAI and AI infrastructure, the photo work, the pen notes. …

Live w/ David Pakman & Brian Tyler Cohen

A recording from Brian Tyler Cohen and David Pakman's live video

Stop Vought. Save Science - A Call To Action With Dr. Colette Delawalla

We have a little more than a month to kill dangerous new OMB regs

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

Sometimes you write a post and when you're editing it you realize you no longer support what you wrote. This is one of those times.

California Screamin’

Trump loses his cool while trying to defend a conspiracy theory

“Ask Todd,” Pam Bondi Said

The former AG pointed to Todd Blanche over the Epstein cover up. But the receipts point back to her.

Please Do Not Ban AI-Assisted Issue Reports

Many GNOME projects have adopted a policy banning all contributions generated by LLMs. This policy was originally developed by Sophie for Loupe, but is now used in many other notable places: This project does not allow contributions generated by large languages models (LLMs) and chatbots. This ban includes, but is not limited to, tools like […]

Surveillance-in-the-Loop Writing

We’re in a writing class working on drafts for the first project. I open up a student’s draft in Google Docs, noticing that this time, I am logged in as an Anonymous Capybara. The student is typing, pauses, and suddenly there is an entire paragraph of pasted text from a source that appears to be [...]

Source

Experience, Knowledge, and Talent Need Not Apply

Trump suck-ups are poisoning America — not just inside the U.S. government

The Shitstorm at 60

How much of the still raging dumpster fire at 60 Minutes is due to the billionaire Ellisons’ need to keep Trump onside to close their mastodonic media merger, and how much is it their editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss’s mind-boggling management ineptitude?

Refusal-in-the-Loop Writing—or, what happened to the field that stood up to TurnItIn, Course Hero, Chegg, and paper mills?

Maggie: Can I be crazy about the GAI stuff lol Jen: Of course Maggie: Do you remember 3 years ago when people were up in arms about CourseHero??? Jen: Yes Maggie: Partly bc of the AI-training implications of a huge repository of student and teacher writing ?? Where did that energy go 😭 This text [...]

Source

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Ford's $30,000 EV pickup is almost here.

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

These intents do not seem to cover adding 3D meshes to games.

Why Facts Still Matter & How To Cut Through Noise

In a time when trust in institutions, media, and even basic facts feels increasingly fragile, we thought it was the right time to bring back this conversation with Poppy McDonald. As misinformation spreads more easily, AI-generated content blurs the line between fact and fiction, and political divisions continue to deepen, understanding where reliable information comes from has never been more important.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Fewer Americans see country as exceptional: new poll.

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

OMG! Richard Wei!

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

I am going to sprinkle the shit out of this.

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

This is giving "UITableView is getting new updates"

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

I am ready to be infused with new APIs.

A Gesture of Contempt

Trump makes the little people suffer, sports edition

Monday session

Monday session

Web Technology Sessions at WWDC26

Welcome to WWDC26.

News from WWDC26: WebKit in Safari 27 beta

Safari 27 beta is here.

An entire industry is being propped up by math that is insane.

Welcome to fantasy land

Still Out of Control

I published Out of Control 32 years ago (1994).

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

I was just redoing this dialog, but an LLM would be even nicer.

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

Wow, I love the idea of adding an LLM to augment dialog boxes.

I hope we get a custom view for it.

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

Oh god I have been putting off fixing my passwords for too long.

This is a godsend.

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

OMG THIS IS AMAZING, tab auto-reordering.

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

I am sold. Installing this on every machine at home the moment the betas are out.

Productive Friction: Breakdown, Resistance, and Power In-the-Loop Writing

The popular imagination of AI-assisted writing tends toward fluency. Writers are promised a seamless co-author, one that generates, suggests, and refines without complaint. My own writing loop resists this story. Friction, in my experience, is not an exception to be smoothed over; it is a constitutive feature of working with generative AI. This piece thinks [...]

Source

@Dave Winer's linkblog

No walking near MSG tonight because of Knicks game.

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

Apple, bringing the joy of RBAC management to parents everywhere.

Critical Zcash Vulnerability Found and Fixed

If you’re a user—owner?—of this cryptocurrency, this is important:

On May 29, the security researcher Taylor Hornby found a critical vulnerability in Zcash Orchard privacy pool using Claude Opus 4.8. The Zcash team hired Hornby specifically to look for this kind of issue. He found one fast enough to be embarrassing.

The Orchard pool is the newest and most advanced shielded transaction system in the cryptocurrency Zcash. Introduced in 2022, it allows users to send and receive ZEC while keeping transaction details private. It uses zero-knowledge proofs to validate transactions without revealing amounts or participants. The bug: a specific check that was supposed to validate transaction inputs wasn’t actually enforcing the rules it appeared to enforce. An attacker could have exploited the flaw to feed false inputs into that check and generate ZEC from nothing, with the zero-knowledge proof system blessing the fraudulent transaction as valid...

WWDC 2026 Keynote

Joe Rossignol: Ahead of the WWDC 2026 keynote at 10 a.m. Pacific Time today, Apple CEO Tim Cook has shared a short video in which country singer Lainey Wilson, actress Rhea Seehorn, DJ and producer Zedd, and other celebrities say “good morning” in various ways. Apple (YouTube, MacRumors, 9To5Mac, Macworld, AppleInsider, Hacker News, The Verge, […]

Irgendwas geht los in Koblenz 🤔

Irgendwas geht los in Koblenz 🤔

I’m launching Tech Influence Watch as AI follows crypto into politics

Most voters don’t know that crypto and AI companies have spent more than $400 million this cycle to buy Congress. Let’s make that spending visible.

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

This is like 99% SwiftUI - 1% AppKit

https://xogot.com/mac

Bureaucracy is Eating the World

A detailed look at how three and a half centuries of accumulated regulation, compliance, and tax complexity have quietly closed the door on the kind of business formation that built the modern world, and what that means for the generations now trying to walk through it.

@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal

Last week in the #PleiadesGazetteer (1-8 June 2026): Over the past week the Pleiades editorial college published 14 new and 214 updated place resources, reflecting the work of Jeffrey Becker, Anika Campbell, Tom Elliott, Greta Hawes, Ryan M. Horne, Brady Kiesling, and R. Scott Smith.

A list of all new and changed resources, 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 blog at https://pleiades.stoa.org/news/blog/last-week-in-pleiades-1-8-june-2026

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

Amsterdamming

I’m heading to Amsterdam for CSS Day. It’s one of those events I try my best to get to every single year. I have no doubt that this year will be brilliant as usual.

There’s another event the day before CSS Day: The Web You Want:

What would the web be like if it was up to you?

There’ll be workshops and talks, all absolutely free.

I’ll be giving a talk. It’s supposed to be about the web I want, but I’m going to do my usual shtick of looking back at the history of the web to see what kind of things we wanted in the past. It’s called The Web You Wanted.

Register your attendance and I’ll see you there. Or maybe I’ll see you at CSS Day. Or at the session in Mulligan’s on Wednesday night.

Last Week in Pleiades (1-8 June 2026)

Last week the Pleiades editorial college published 14 new and 214 updated place resources, reflecting the work of Jeffrey Becker, Anika Campbell, Tom Elliott, Greta Hawes, Ryan M. Horne, Brady Kiesling, and R. Scott Smith.

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

SwiftUI is lovely and the most fun you can have when writing code.

Don’t let the boilerplatetocracy tell you otherwise.

[$] An update on fanotify

In a filesystem-track session at the 2026 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, Amir Goldstein updated attendees on the fanotify filesystem-event monitoring subsystem. He wanted to describe changes that had come in the last year or so, as well as upcoming features and some remaining challenges in his efforts to use fanotify for hierarchical
storage management (HSM). Fanotify is the user-space API for monitoring files, directories, and filesystems for events of various sorts (e.g. opening or deleting a file).

Trump's Incredible Meltdown, Rigging Elections, And The "Majority Illusion"

2pm ET Today - Colette Delawalla joins us live to talk about Stand Up For Science's new campaign, "Stop Vought. Save Science"

Join the LibreOffice team as a paid system administrator, working on TDF’s infrastructure (full-time, remote, m/f/d)

Love LibreOffice? Got experience with infrastructure and system administration? We are The Document Foundation (TDF), the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice. We’re passionate about free software, the open source culture and about bringing new people with fresh ideas into our project. To assist the LibreOffice community with its work, we are

Body And Pickiness

Writing of lasting value

@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal

Export Updates 2026-06-08:

Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places

3 new and 51 updated places.

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

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

"main" branch:

e37694a7 - updated json

d0ab0f29 - updated rdf/ttl

fced9696 - updated gis package

b2c84ab1 - updated data quality

9954f62c - updated bibliography

e654a319 - updated indexes

8db52bf6 - updated sidebar

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

a1754fb5 - updated geojson and names index

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

49513492 - updated pleiades wikidata

rsync 3.4.4 released with regression fixes

Andrew Tridgell has announced the release of rsync 3.4.4 with fixes for the regressions introduced in the 3.4.3 release. He also notes there will be an rsync 3.5.0 soon, with many more security updates:

As part of the 3.5.0 release update I have created arsync-security@lists.samba.org mailing list for anyone who is willing to do testing of the 3.5.0 release. The idea is to try to reduce the chance of more regressions by expanding the set of testers of this release. I have seeded it with people who were involved in past rsync security issues. If you want to join this list then the easiest way would be for you to be vouched for by someone on thedistros@vs.openwall.org list or someone else I already trust.

My apologies for the regressions in the 3.4.3 release and I hope future security updates for rsync will have less issues. The greatly expanded test suite in rsync 3.5 combined with the rsync-security mailing list should help.

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

Said to Claude just now -- btw, it's very good we're using the outliner back and forth. we're going to build on that.

Use the Otari Gateway with OpenCode

AI coding sessions can feel like a black box. Route OpenCode through the Otari Gateway to track costs, token usage, and model activity in real time. Get budget controls and visibility across every session without changing a single line of application code.

GenAI is Fluent in Everything, but Faithful in Nothing

Why the machines hallucinate, why they have no worldview, and why truth has to come from somewhere else. I’m going to say something that sounds like an insult and is meant as a description: large language models (all of them) hav never known a true thing. Not once. It doesn’t know things at all. It is extraordinarily good at sounding like it does, which is a different skill, and most of our present confusion comes from mistaking the second for the first. Here is what a language model actually does. It has read an enormous amount of text, and from that text it has learned, with real brilliance, what tends to come next. Give it some words and it predicts the words likely to follow. […]

The post GenAI is Fluent in Everything, but Faithful in Nothing first appeared on I, Cringely.

Digital Branding

Web Design

Marketing

Here are the winners of this year’s Bram Stoker Awards.

The Horror Writers Association (SFWA) has announced the recipients of the 2025 Bram Stoker Awards for Superior Achievement. Named in honor of Bram Stoker (Dracula) and awarded annually since 1988, the awards “are given ‘for superior achievement,’ not for ‘best

Monte-Carlo TV Festival: Joshua Seftel Talks Urgency & Innovation In Documentary Filmmaking

Joshua Seftel heads the Documentary and News jury at this year’s Monte-Carlo TV Festival. Ahead of heading to the Festival, the Oscar-winning filmmaker spoke to Deadline about what he hopes to see from this year’s competition entries, and the wider state of play in the sector. Seftel won a Best Documentary Short Film Oscar for […]

Security updates for Monday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (bind, bind9.16, frr, kernel, kernel-rt, libexif, mysql, php, and unbound), Debian (apache2, chromium, glibc, gsasl, jackson-core, libxml2, nginx, request-tracker4, request-tracker5, tomcat10, tomcat11, and tomcat9), Fedora (chromium, firefox, haveged, keylime, libinput, libssh2, nasm, perl-CryptX, rust, thunderbird, and webkitgtk), Mageia (cockpit, golang-x-crypto, golang-x-sys-devel, kernel, kmod-virtualbox, kmod-xtables-addons, kernel-linus, perl-DBIx-Class-EncodedColumn, perl-Crypt-URandom-Token, xdg-dbus-proxy, and xmlrpc-c), Slackware (samba), and SUSE (7zip, amazon-ssm-agent, ansible-13, ansible-core, assimp-devel, bind, cacti, chromium, dpkg, epiphany, erlang27, evince, ffmpeg-4, freerdp, frr, git-bug, google-guest-agent, grafana, hauler, ignition, jq, kanidm, kernel, keybase-client, libjxl, libmariadbd-devel, libmozjs-115-0, libopenbabel8, libsoup2, mariadb, mcphost, networkmanager, openssh, perl-HTTP-Daemon, perl-HTTP-Tiny, perl-IO-Compress, perl-Sereal-Decoder, perl-xml-libxml, postgresql18, python-pyopenssl, python311-pip, tomcat, tomcat10, tomcat11, tor, trivy, unbound, uriparser, vifm, weblate, xorg-x11-server, and yq).

Sicily’s Taormina Film Festival Entices Hollywood Royalty & Indie Stalwarts For 72nd Edition

Pop star Dua Lipa and actor Callum Turner put Sicily in the spotlight this past weekend with their lavish three-day wedding in Palermo with the likes of Elton John, Charli XCX and Donatella Versace in attendance. The paparazzi will now be heading to the other side of the Southern Italian island for the Taormina Film […]

Here are the winners of the 61st Annual Nebula Awards.

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of American (SFWA) has announced the winners of the 61st annual Nebula Awards, one of SFF’s most prestigious honors, “given to the writers of the most outstanding speculative fiction works released in 2025.” This

‘What It Feels Like For A Girl’ Star Ellis Howard Says Selling Historic BBC Show To U.S. Is A “Revolutionary Act”

EXCLUSIVE: The star of Prime Video’s latest queer drama What It Feels Like for a Girl has declared Amazon’s decision to buy the show in the U.S. “a revolutionary act, an act of protest.” BAFTA nominee Ellis Howard pointed to a political climate in the U.S. that runs counter to the “ketamine-laced queer odyssey” featured […]

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

I can't convert scripting.com to https. If I moved the site to an https server, all the archives would break, and that's where the value of the site is, in the archives, where I've kept a history of the various things I've worked on. I'm still working on new stuff, but if this is all that was left to do, I'd move to the tropics and make pottery, I would not spend my last years on such an enormous stupid bullshit project. It's just not possible. But if you want to read the new stuff on my blog in https, you can. I have a mirror on a WordPress site. We even have the blogroll ported.

Adrian J. Walker’s Novel ‘The End of The World Running Club’ To Be Adapted Into Feature Film

EXCLUSIVE: Candr Pictures has optioned the rights to adapt The End of The World Running Club, the post-apocalyptic novel by Adrian J. Walker, into a feature film. The movie will be written and directed by Chris Reading, best known for comedy sci-fi Time Travel Is Dangerous. Walker also comes on as Executive Producer. The End […]

Indie Outfit Mirak Studio To Launch Production Facility In Albania

EXCLUSIVE: Indie Outfit Mirak Studio has set plans to build a production facility in Albania.  Mirak Studio was founded by Jamie Neale, Chris Beyrooty, Grayson Stubbs, and Klevis Elmazaj. Entertainment lawyer and former Vice President at Twentieth Century Fox Film, Eric Thompson, has signed on to oversee legal representation. The group said the studio will […]

Pope Leo Draws Crowd of 1.2 Million Without Hosting UFC Fight

The Pope bucked the conventional wisdom that people will only turn out in large numbers to see men on steroids kick each other in the face.

Anthropic’s Project Glasswing Update

In April, Anthropic initated Project Glasswing. The idea was to let companies use their new model to find and fix vulnerabilities in their own software. It was a fantastic PR move, and so many press outlets have uncritically parroted Anthropic’s claims that it’s now common wisdom that Mythos is better at finding software vulnerabilities than other models. Which is just not true.

In any case, Anthropic has published a Project Glasswing status report. It’s finding a lot of vulnerabilities in software—yay! Some of them are even dangerous. But almost none of them has been patched. It’s ...

You Didn’t Earn That

When defending income inequality, high-earners often appeal to an old left-wing idea: that workers are entitled to the fruits of their labor and should be paid the value of their productive contribution. In complex economies, however, the size of any worker’s productive contribution depends on collective labor that the market systematically fails to credit.

Italian Global Series: Sally Wainwright Among Guests Set For Second Edition

The drama series event Italian Global Series (IGS) returns for its second edition this year and will run from July 3 to 6 in Rimini and from July 7 to 10 in Riccione.  Confirmed guests set to visit the event include Happy Valley creator Sally Wainwright, Doctor Foster actor Bertie Carvel, German-Turkish actor Serkan Çayoğlu, […]

AI Arcade

You won’t run out of retro-inspired games to play with this console

The post AI Arcade appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Off Today

Anything happen?

Lit Hub Daily: June 8, 2026

Xiao Hai remembers balancing brutal night shifts on the production floor with writing poetry. | Lit Hub Memoir “We can be demure and brat, sense and sensibility, sometimes in quick succession or all at once in a single day.” The

Pam Bondi was the worst AG in history. Until now.

Todd Blanche, it’s your turn.

Monte-Carlo TV Festival’s 65th Edition: An Inside Take On The Event’s Industry-Fan Formula

The eyes of the sporting world were on Monaco this weekend as Kimi Antonelli sped to victory at the Formula 1 Grand Prix. The principality also regularly provides a glamorous backdrop for movies and events. When it comes to TV, it has been the host of the Monte-Carlo TV Festival since the early 1960s. The […]

@Tomosino's Mastodon feed

We went for a camping test run this weekend to check our gear. Here's some pictures of sunset and sunrise in Iceland in June. The sky did make pretty pinks and purples around 2am, but I didn't have my camera out.

Maggie Gyllenhaal & Jesse Eisenberg To Be Honored At Karlovy Vary

Maggie Gyllenhaal and Jesse Eisenberg will receive Karlovy Vary’s honorary President’s Award during this year’s festival, which runs from July 3 to July 11. Gyllenhaal will be handed the award at the festival’s opening ceremony. She will also screen The Bride! as part of the celebrations. Eisenberg will receive his award later in the festival, and […]

Hugh Laurie Issues Waspish Retort To Viral Critique Of ‘House’ Having “Same Narrative Every Episode”

House may have ended more than a decade ago, but Hugh Laurie is still prepared to do battle for the beloved Fox series. Janet Murray, a British journalist, went viral on X/Twitter over the weekend when she penned a review of House, in which she argued that the medical drama has the “same narrative every […]

Silent Springs, Windswept Seas: On the Environmental Vision of Rachel Carson

In her acceptance speech upon receiving the National Book Award for The Sea Around Us (1951), biologist and author Rachel Carson (1907–1964) explained: “If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there,

A Child’s World: Sloane Crosley on the Short Fiction of Katherine Mansfield

Oh, to live in a room filled with the objects described by Katherine Mansfield. To arrange her combs, playing cards, and enamel boxes, to try on “the most amusing orange coat with a procession of black monkeys round the hem.”

A Poet on the Factory Floor: On Daily Life in China’s Industrial Centers

on the pristine production floor the air you breathed was just another product sitting at workstations wearing antistatic rings you let out the stench of rust let in the summer breeze and revived, inside is industrialized marrow, and the Tang

In Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility You Can Be “Demure and Brat All at Once”

Thick into the edits to my time-travel-rom-com novel set in the Regency era about two sisters who couldn’t be more different (one loves Jane Austen, one loves Skims), my gentle editor suggested I rethink using “demure” and “brat” to describe

Did You Know FDR Was Present For the Most Famous At-Bat in Baseball History?

Franklin Roosevelt and Anton Cermak had achieved a certain fusion in the public imagination four and a half months earlier, on October 1, 1932, when they sat together in a box at Wrigley Field, where the Chicago Cubs were playing

Leander Schaerlaeckens Recommends 5 Books to Better Understand the World Cup

Soccer derives its beauty from its simplicity. Twenty-players and a ball on a rectangle of grass; put the ball in the other team’s goal; don’t use your hands. What makes soccer popular, I believe, is its complexity, layered over this

This Week in Literary History: Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita premieres in New York.

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Literary History newsletter—sign up here. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita was first published in 1955, after many rejections from American publishers, by the Paris-based Olympia Press, who really specialized in books of a different sort entirely (other titles

Dani Swan Action Thriller ‘Iris’ Set To Film In Spain & Japan; Toei To Assist Japanese Portion Of Shoot

EXCLUSIVE: U.S. indie Rising Swan Entertainment is gearing up to shoot female-led action thriller Iris, created by and starring Dani Swan (The Matrix Resurrections), in Spain and Japan, with Japan’s Toei Company assisting with the Japanese portion of the shoot.  The film will be the feature directorial debut of Lisa C. Satriano, who has worked […]

Jamie Oliver Group Teaming With Baby Teeth For Microdrama & Wider Pact As Celebrity Chef’s Company Shifts Focus To IP

EXCLUSIVE: The Jamie Oliver Group is developing a microdrama series with creative company Baby Teeth, as a strategic partnership between the two companies is unveiled amid a rethink at the campaigning celebrity chef’s media business. Details of the vertical video production are broadly under wraps, but it is in pre-production and still begin shooting in […]

It's Easy To Create Lots of Shitty Jobs

So don't break out the champagne about Friday's jobs report

An open letter to office suite users, just before the Euro-Office announcement

Dear office suite users, In recent days you will have read various articles announcing the arrival of Euro-Office, which is being “marketed” as the first open-source office suite developed in Europe. We feel compelled — reluctantly, since open source should rest on transparency, not deception — to correct this claim.

June 7, 2026

Meet the Press today aired an interview host Kristen Welker taped Friday with President Donald J.

At 80, John Lithgow Becomes Oldest Winner Of Tony Award For Lead Actor In A Play, 53 Years After First Win

John Lithgow reached a Tony Awards milestone on Sunday, becoming the oldest winner in the Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play category for Giant. Along with that accomplishment, the 80-year-old actor noted during his acceptance speech that it has been an eye-popping 53 years since his first Tony win. […]

The War on Trans Healthcare Is Not About Science

What a study of 957 detransitioners revealed, and why Washington gets it wrong, with Dr. Kinnon Ross MacKinnon

@Dave Winer's linkblog

WordPress Is the Doorway, Not the Room.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons.

★ SwiftUI Only Makes It Easy to Develop Bad Apps

Apple’s developer message used to be that it was not just easy to develop apps for their platforms, but that it was easy to develop good idiomatically native apps. That’s still true for AppKit and UIKit, but it’s never been true for SwiftUI, and SwiftUI is now seven years old.

Trump fired Scott Pelley

The dictator doesn't want "60 Minutes" to report the truth

Kernel prepatch 7.1-rc7

The 7.1-rc7 kernel prepatch is out for testing. Linus said: "Anyway, as things look now this is the last rc. Something can obviously always come up and force us to change that, but please give rc7 a whirl and keep testing for one more week."

Wed, June 10th, 7pm ET - Our Weekly Hopium Paid Subscriber Get Together

Trump's ugly meltdown today/Hopium and Platner/Welcome new subscribers!

The Road to Component Model 1.0

WASI P3 is almost here, bringing native async support to the WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) and Component Model. In this post, we’re looking to the next big milestone: a stable, formally specified Component Model 1.0. At February’s Bytecode Alliance Plumbers Summit, Luke Wagner and Alex Crichton gave a preview of what the path to a stable 1.0 actually looks like. At Wasm I/O 2026 in Barcelona in March, Luke expanded on that vision. So let’s take a look at where the Component Model is heading.

Being weirder than AI is practicable and valuable

'Everything I know about the internet in 2026 I learned from barefoot Martians and their handmade guitars.'

Monday 8 June, 2026

Plan B(ee) This giant scabious (Cephalaria gigantea to you and me) sure knows how to attract customers. Suggests that “Busy as a bee” is an accurate simile. Quote of the Day ”If you think hiring a professional is expensive, wait … Continue reading →

Eighteen

The transition from phantom childhood to phantom adulthood feels like it could be a transition for us as well.

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

My Mike Monteiro care package arrived!

Sunday caption contest: Justice

And last week's winner

Duck-(and Human)-in-the-Loop Writing: Musings from a Professor and a Group of Writing Fellows

Miriam (professor):   Writing is, of course, a process. I have written for years: on yellow legal pads, index cards, sticky notes, book margins, notebooks, and journals.  I have composed on Mac-SE computers with tiny screens, laptops, and iPads—on Word and Google Docs.  In 58 years of life and 35 years of teaching, the tools and [...]

Source

2026-06-04 Magic house rules, again

2026-06-04 Magic house rules, again

I’m using a strict reading of the magic system.

Magic users and elves start with just one spell in their spell book.

Learn more spells: You need a teacher to learn new spells. Learning a new spell takes a week.

Repertoire: The list of spells in your spell book make up your repertoire. Its size is determined by your level. The table below shows the maximum number of spells in your repertoire and the number of spells you can cast per day. You regain your spell casting powers at the dawn of day after a good night’s sleep in a comfortable bed.

Level1st circle2nd circle3rd circle4th circle5th circle11––––22––––321–––422–––5221––6222––73221–83322–9333211033332

Thus, a 5th level caster’s spell book can hold a single 3rd circle spell like fireball. If they are taught lightning bolt from a teacher before reaching 6th level, they can no longer cast fireball. The connection is gone even though the pages in the spell book are still there. Unintelligible gibberish. Strange. And if they want to switch back to the spell they once knew, they need to find a teacher, again.

My hope is that this results in specialized spellcasters. My Spellcasters document is full of such spellcasters. Each one of them is 10th level and they all have a thematic list of spells. I feel that the idea of finding them or their students to learn their spells is galvanizing. Instant adventure.

When you find somebody’s spell book, you can add it to a library and you can cast read magic to know what it contains, but you can’t learn those spells unless you can convince somebody who knows the spells to teach them to you. Killing spell casters and taking their spell books is of no benefit.

Then again, I count intelligent creatures that have innate magical abilities as casters. They might not need a spell book but they know how the magic works and they can teach you. You can learn fireball from a red dragon, you can learn disguise and shape change from a doppelgänger, and so on. I’ve tried to add this information to all the monsters I described in my Halberds & Helmets Referee Guide.

My hope is that this offers a different kind of adventure, where killing creatures in a dungeon is not the point. Capture a magical creature. Capture a rogue spellcaster. Go and find a famous spellcaster. Perform a service for a spellcaster in order to be taught a new spell, help them out, befriend people. We can also have moral conundrums: how far are you willing to go in order to appease a dreadful necromancer? Will you right the wrongs after you have learned what you came to learn? I love how this is possible because there’s a need that some player characters have that cannot be satisfied through loot and kill adventures. To me, that is a lot like faction politics in a megadungeon. That is to say, it’s great!

Not automatically gaining new spells on gaining a level adds pressure to do this.

One way to remove this pressure as a referee is to make sure that the adventurers have a positive connection to a big school of magic with a bunch of level 9 and 10 magic users and elves. Then there is no pressure and the table can opt out of this aspect of engaging with the setting.

If a referee does want to explore it, however, rumours must be available to tell players where to find new spellcasters. Those spellcasters must have made a name for themselves, they are famous throughout the region. The same is true for powerful magical creatures. If players ask, this information should be available.

If players want to have a wider selection of spells than allowed by the rules, they need to invest some more time and gold and take on more spell casting retainers. Have them learn different spells. That turns your main character and their retainers into a little magic school. If you want to retrain some of your weaker spells, have your retainers teach you. Of course that requires you to care and share with your retainers. Other player characters can join in. I love the fact that the setting changes through player actions: A magic school is established.

I’ve been wondering about spell research, though. @phf suggested the rule from Expert D&D that allows players to research new spells using time and gold and he also suggested a use for found scrolls and spell books. Later, he also said that he once knew a player who hoarded scrolls for later scribing instead of using them. @randomwizard said that in his latest homebrew, spellcasters can not learn spells from scrolls. They can only use the scroll. So perhaps scrolls should not be useful for research.@d6 has another idea to handle scroll hoarding: Casting a spell from a scroll grants you a chance to learn the spell and put it into the spell book. The idea is that this encourages the use of a scroll. Implicit research and no hoarding.

Research: New spells can also be researched. Every spell circle costs 1000 gold and takes 2 weeks. Scrolls with the spell in question cut the time in half; a spell book with the spell in question cuts time and cost in half.

What I fear, however, is that this makes the adventuring for new spells extremely optional. Why have it in the first place when research is always available? Specially since we play using gold spent is experience points gained, so paying gold for research just means less infrastructure is built and fewer statues are erected. And since this rule relies on the passage of in-game time, it’s unclear whether the time sink is significant or not. I would have to try it for our table. We play with real time synchronisation.

And what about scribing scrolls and brewing potions? D&D 3.5 had something like the following:

Scrolls: Creating a scroll of a known spell costs caster level × spell circle × 25 gold and requires a quiet study.

Potions: Creating a potion for a known spell costs caster level × spell circle × 50 gold and requires a nice lab.

But again, does that result in plenty of scrolls and potions being created between games, based on how often we play? Is it a problem? Is this too cheap or too expensive? Do other players expect to be able to buy scrolls and potions from the other player characters “that are not coming along”? From non-player characters they encounter in the setting? Does that turn every spellcaster into a potential magic shop? I mean, they’d ask for double the price but still, a magic shop is a magic shop.

#RPG #Spellcasters #Halberds and Helmets

2026-06-05. @d6 also pointed out that Knave uses encumbrance for a lot of things. If every spell in a spell book is in fact a heavy tablet, then encumbrance rules limit the size of the repertoire.

When you move your library, I guess it takes a lot of porters. I like it.

At the same time however, that simply grants the player wish of having a big spell collection for a single character and therefore there being no point in specialized spellcasters. And that’s a feature I’d miss.

2026-06-07. On fedi, somebody said that they sided with “my players” – but in this case, I like these rules as a player, too. I play a magic user using these rules in @phf‘s Barrowmaze.

I suspect that the things people enjoy in games are different. I happen to like “unfair” games where the goal is to make do with what you get. Like the inherent unfairness of rolling 3d6 down the line for character creation.

Thus, if people in my game don’t like magic-users as written, they should play some other class that suits them better. Personally, I like fighters. Some people hate fighters be cause they don’t “scale up”. I like them precisely because of that. I mean, if nobody (or very few people) liked playing magic-users, then that would be an argument. But as it stands, nobody is ditching them, either.

I know that this position is fundamentally different from games where it seems that you can play “whatever you want”. In that sense, I think the system is “interesting” and I’d like to avoid changes that make it “boring” – boring as in: there is no decision to make and there are fewer consequences to bear. Anyway, that would be the philosophical argument, here.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

The best electric bikes you can buy at every price level in Jun 2026.

Concussion With a Side of Grief, or Vice-Versa [en]

[en] Oscar died a bit over a month ago. Five weeks exactly, actually. Of course it hasn’t been simple. I’ve been wanting to write for weeks, but not getting around to it. It’s a pattern, isn’t it. It has been for years, decades probably. Wanting to write, needing to write, and not getting around to … Continue reading "Concussion With a Side of Grief, or Vice-Versa [en]"

Coding Is Designing

Code isn’t just a way to implement a design, it’s a way to find one.

With an interface, you have to use it, feel it, interact with it, and poke at it to see the relationships between things.

Change X, see Y react.

If it doesn’t feel right, tweak it.

Change X again, now Y reacts differently.

Better.

Keep tweaking — this here, that there, until the relationships of all the disparate elements fall into place as a single whole.

Balanced.

Design is “how it works” and code is the tool to specify how it works.

Reply via:

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Bluesky

The Myth, the Mythos and the Man

For a while I have been wondering why Anthropic named its most powerful AI model Mythos. A safety company. A company whose entire justification for existing is that someone needs to tell the truth about what is being built. That company chose a name that, in the oldest sense of the word, means a story …

Our Wins Of The Week

This week saw major momentum for Democrats heading into November.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

RetroPad is a ‘full-feature-parity version of Notepad from XP’ in just 2,749 bytes.

WordPress and web text in the future

I wrote a blog post on Twitter this morning, sort of a version 0.4 of the talk I want to do at WCUS in August in Phoenix.

I want to offer cross-posting to twitter in an upcoming product, but I think the user should pay for the service, not me, a one-person independent developer.

I doubt if they'll do it, but this is general advice to companies that provide online services that they want to get paid for. If you depend on developers, you're shutting out sole proprietors who don't want to get caught up in the VC world, or don't have a chance to.

In the early days of the web and in the PC/Mac platforms before that, a creative software writer could get going without having to fund their users' storage needs. PCs came with storage built into the hardware. And in the early web days everyone was something of a geek and could be relied on to find a place on their own, to store their writing (not a perfect system by any means).

It's been 31+ years since I started my blog and still I can't offer writing software easily, with one exception, with WordPress. This is something I'm not sure photomatt et al are focused on. It's why WordPress has so much potential to grow the web.

The thing many people don't realize is that WordPress unlike pretty much everything else does not lock users in. It's part of their ethos. They run their service as part of the web, not an exploiter of the web.

When Matt talks about being an open source company (true) he's leaving out something equally important, that it's part of the web, unlike most if not all of the other choices.

When I speak at WCUS in August, I'd like to invite Matt to come up on stage and take a bow. Because there's a reason why such a great community has grown around his product, but we haven't been focusing on it and encouraging independent developers to see WP as part of the web that welcomes them, and does not lock the users or developers in.

PS: This will appear on my blog later today. I've started using twitter again to write early drafts of blog posts, and I especially like that they've eliminated character limits for paying customers. Nothing wrong with charging for services that people *want* to pay for.

PPS: I'm posting here again because it's more alive than Bluesky, by a lot, and Bluesky is just as much of a ripoff as X, except they haven't sold out to a billionaire yet. They should work with the web instead of trying to replace it, then I'll feel more at home there.

Machines are not the enemy

I have really enjoyed reading Sarah O’Connor’s new book We Are Not Machines: The Fight for the Future of Work. It weaves dispatches from the frontline of how AI and other digital tech is changing people’s jobs – from screenwriting … Continue reading →

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Karl-Anthony Towns’ NBA Finals play impacting Knicks, Giannis.

Slop, productivity, and why the AI-fueled world is going nowhere mighty fast

Just saw a graph at the FT from John Burn-Murdoch that really distills something I have been trying to articulate.

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

RE: https://mastodon.social/@campuscodi/116709027616189672

Good lord - this is exhausting.

Nobody should feel compelled to vibe code an app that sends these spying systems bogus data.

That would be bad.

@Barack Obama @Bsky

It was great meeting with the talented folks who’ll be working at the Obama Presidential Center. We're excited to welcome everybody here soon!

Sunday Hopium - Inspiration From Lincoln and Eisenhower, The Importance Of Voting Early, Trump Lost Votes On Iran And Putin This Week!

Monday, 2pm ET - Colette Delawalla of Stand Up For Science joins us live to talk about their urgent new campaign - Stop Vought. Save Science - join us, invite others!

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

All the news reports about AI tools repeat the same hallucination story they've been running for years. That's another huge bug in the news process. They only report on a small number of angles that might have been news a few years ago, and have no insights on what else is going on. They did this with the web too. They always pick an item that their narcissistic view of the world finds tasty. It's a huge bug in the system, and why "news" isn't valuable for news, it's mainly useful for a relaxing reassurance that nothing has changed, the world is fucked up in exactly the same way it was fucked last week, month, year, etc. It's a form of bedtime story.

“West Side Story”

A Reason To Smile

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Introducing Reader Chat, Powered by Jetpack Search.

Markwayne Mullin’s Tourist Guide to the US Now That He’s Closing All Major US Airports

TBR Sunday Read

Guest Newsletter: Five Books - Biographies And The Orwell Prize

Five Books features in-depth author interviews recommending five books on a theme

Dragoncatcher: The bigger story

We are using somebody else's vacuum tubes. Read here.

AI and the Pitfalls of Innovation

History offers warnings about technological optimism

The Coming Revival of America

Trump has shown us why we need a good and decent government

June 6, 2026

In the wee hours of Friday morning, Senate Republicans passed a measure to provide about $70 billion in additional funding to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the parent agency for Border Patrol.

Weekly Bookmarks

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

🔖 Graph database-ball! Exploring the Game with the graph capabilities ofLadybugDB, DuckDB and PostgreSQL

This article presents a comparison of graph capabilities in three different databases: DuckDB (v1.4.4 with duckpgq), LadybugDB (0.16.1), and PostgreSQL (19devel). We will load a large volume of records (5,635,972 rows of baseball data covering people, parks, team records, and game play-by-plays) into each database, define the entities and relationships, and write a variety of queries that take full advantage of the graph structure.

🔖 Ambient Church

Ambient Church transforms architecturally stunning spaces into immersive audio-visual environments. Our events feature pioneering artists presenting vibrant works in a context that elevates both the music and the space.

Founded in Brooklyn in 2016, we facilitate collective peak experiences through the soundscapes of modern contemplative music. With an emphasis on education and environment, we seek to illuminate an underacknowledged lineage of sonic exploration.

🔖 Language models transmit behavioural traits through hidden signals indata

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate data to train improved models1,2,3, but it remains unclear what properties are transmitted in this model distillation4,5. Here we show that distillation can lead to subliminal learning—the transmission of behavioural traits through semantically unrelated data. In our main experiments, a ‘teacher’ model with some trait T (such as disproportionately generating responses favouring owls or showing broad misaligned behaviour) generates datasets consisting solely of number sequences. Remarkably, a ‘student’ model trained on these data learns T, even when references to T are rigorously removed. More realistically, we observe the same effect when the teacher generates math reasoning traces or code. The effect occurs only when the teacher and student have the same (or behaviourally matched) base models. To help explain this, we prove a theoretical result showing that subliminal learning arises in neural networks under broad conditions and demonstrate it in a simple multilayer perceptron (MLP) classifier. As artificial intelligence systems are increasingly trained on the outputs of one another, they may inherit properties not visible in the data. Safety evaluations may therefore need to examine not just behaviour, but the origins of models and training data and the processes used to create them.

🔖 The Archive in Art Art in the Archive

In this essay we will attempt to look at both the archive of art as well as the archive as art. When we draw a distinction between those materials that we treat as documents with a ‘factual’ historical significance (those which offer themselves in the service of scholarship), and the uses which artists make of the archive as one of the media of expression that intersect with their documentary value, we ask ourselves: which theories about the archive’s nature and function are applicable to Syrian art? What are the roles adopted by ‘the document’ and ‘the archivist’? To what extent do these roles alternate and intersect?

🔖 Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Cave of Forgotten Dreams is a 2010 3D documentary film by Werner Herzog about the Chauvet Cave in Southern France, which contains some of the oldest human-painted images yet discovered—some of them were crafted around 32,000 years ago. It consists of footage from inside the cave, as well as of the nearby Pont d’Arc natural bridge, alongside interviews with various scientists and historians. The film premiered on 13 September 2010 at the Toronto International Film Festival.

🔖 5 Reasons I Wear A Mask (and you can too)

a short zine about masking & disability justice

🔖 Starbucks ditches AI inventory system after just 9 months

Starbucks is saying goodbye to its artificial intelligence inventory management system about nine months after its debut, Reuters reported Thursday. The tool, which used computer vision to track some parts of the chain’s inventory, was announced in September as a method to simplify inventory record-keeping and prevent stockouts.

🔖 “Renaud &Axelle Red” - Manhattan kaboul - (english subtitles)

🔖 FediRoster

FediRoster is a slightly more heavyweight alternative to David Adler’s Sociologists on Mastodon software. It is intended to function as a public list of Mastodon and other fediverse accounts, geared primarily towards academic communities, but suitable for others as well. It offers functions for following listed accounts individually or in bulk. The main novelty here is that you can add yourself to the list through an authentication process instead of all the work falling on a list maintainer. You can sign in through your Mastodon account or send a message to the list’s bot to verify your account ownership. This also means that the hosting process for new lists is a bit more involved (it’s a Python/WSGI application).

🔖 Rust for Python Programmers: Complete Training Guide

A comprehensive guide to learning Rust for developers with Python experience. This guide covers everything from basic syntax to advanced patterns, focusing on the conceptual shifts required when moving from a dynamically-typed, garbage-collected language to a statically-typed systems language with compile-time memory safety.

🔖 CS336: LanguageModeling from Scratch

Language models serve as the cornerstone of modern natural language processing (NLP) applications and open up a new paradigm of having a single general purpose system address a range of downstream tasks. As the field of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and NLP continues to grow, possessing a deep understanding of language models becomes essential for scientists and engineers alike. This course is designed to provide students with a comprehensive understanding of language models by walking them through the entire process of developing their own. Drawing inspiration from operating systems courses that create an entire operating system from scratch, we will lead students through every aspect of language model creation, including data collection and cleaning for pre-training, transformer model construction, model training, and evaluation before deployment.

🔖 wasteback-machine

Wasteback Machine is a JavaScript library for analysing archived web pages, measuring their size and composition to enable retrospective, quantitative web research.

🔖 No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious

The primary difference between deepfake photos and LLM conversations is that the people who generate the former are deliberately trying to fool others, and many of the people who elicit the latter from LLMs have inadvertently fooled themselves.

🔖 A Visual Guide to Gemma 4 12B

The removal of the encoders, which are typically in charge of making sense of the multimodal inputs, places the burden of making sense of all outputs on the LLM. Although the model is encoder-free, all modalities are now unified within the LLM. Instead of the model having to wait for the encoders to finish processing the audio and image inputs, the LLM can get started earlier processing the input and generating output!

In this guide, I want to showcase what it took to remove the vision and audio encoders and replace them with something much faster. The result, a 12B model that can handle audio and image inputs but without the need for encoders.

🔖 LiteRT-LM Python API

The Python API of LiteRT-LM for Linux, macOS and Windows. Features like multi-modality, tools use, and GPU and NPU acceleration are supported.

🔖 LiteRT-LM

LiteRT-LM is Google’s production-ready, high-performance, open-source inference framework for deploying Large Language Models on edge devices

🔖 Google AI Edge Gallery

AI Edge Gallery is the premier destination for running the world’s most powerful open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) on your mobile device. Experience high-performance Generative AI directly on your hardware—fully offline, private, and lightning-fast.

🔖 Introducing Gemma 4 12B: a unified, encoder-free multimodal model

Today, we are introducing Gemma 4 12B, our latest model designed to bring agentic multimodal intelligence directly to laptops. Bridging the gap between our edge-friendly E4B and our more advanced 26B Mixture of Experts (MoE), Gemma 4 12B packages powerful capabilities inside a reduced memory footprint. It is also our first mid-sized model to feature native audio inputs

🔖 SolidState Book

Solid State Books is a full-service, Black-owned general interest bookstore with a great selection of fiction & non-fiction titles. We stock literary gifts, stationery, greeting cards & puzzles for all ages. We have a carpeted, playful children’s books area in both stores for kids & parents alike to spread out & read together. Come by for weekly children’s story hours, catch monthly book groups, author readings/signings, local interest panels, political conversations & more!

🔖 minisearch

MiniSearch is a tiny but powerful in-memory fulltext search engine written in JavaScript. It is respectful of resources, and it can comfortably run both in Node and in the browser.

🔖 Documents the Department of Justice tried to disappear.

In May 2026, the Justice Department began systematically removing material from its web sites regarding the many indictments and convictions related to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. This archive reconstructs the vast bulk of those thousands of deleted records.

🔖 The Justice Department Erases History; Lawfare Restores It

Last week, the Justice Department began systematically removing material from its web sites regarding the many indictments and convictions related to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The operation started without fanfare or formal announcement and proceeded largely unnoticed. Until, that is, journalists such as the Washington Post’s Meryl Kornfield took notice of certain press releases and other materials that had conspicuously disappeared fromwww.justice.gov.

“The Trump admin is quietly deleting info about the Capitol attack from the DOJ website as it prepares to give funds to J6ers,” Kornfield posted. “This week, DOJ deleted a press release about one man with an ongoing child solicitation case who came to the Capitol with bear spray.”

Then, with typical bombast, the Justice Department responded by taking issue with one particular aspect of Kornfield’s characterization. “Nothing ‘quiet’ about it,” the DOJ Rapid Response account replied. “We are proud to reverse the DOJ’s weaponization under the Biden administration. We will do everything in our power to make whole those who were persecuted for political purposes. This includes stripping DOJ’s website of partisan propaganda.”

We are not erasing history quietly, the Justice Department seemed to suggest. We are erasing history loudly and proudly.

At Lawfare, we have restored the vast bulk of what was deleted. We have also started to preemptively archive a raft of material that has not yet been deleted but probably will be, given its thematic relationship to the material that was 86ed.

🔖 DataCenter Policy Database

Data centers are the physical facilities that power cloud services, AI systems, streaming, and nearly every digital platform people use each day. As demand for artificial intelligence accelerates, data centers are becoming major sources of electricity demand and local infrastructure pressure, which means their growth affects energy systems, communities, and long-term public planning.

🔖 The State of Data Center Policy in the United States

The regulatory landscape for data centers in the United States has shifted dramatically in recent years from a period of aggressive economic incentives to a phase of intense scrutiny, restriction, and community-led resistance. To track these legislative changes, the DIGS Lab at the University of Virginia reviewed more than 700 federal, state, and local policies related to data centers. The data center policy database aims to bring transparency around zoning, permitting, and regulating data centers and their impacts on communities. This is what we found.

🔖 R.E.M. Live - 1981-11-07 Viceroy Park, Charlotte, North Carolina

Another early R.E.M. set, from the same state but a different city as the previous show. Pretty much the same library of songs, but this one’s the superior show to get - it sounds slightly nicer and doesn’t have the equipment failures of the previous show. There’s already a source on here, but that’s a different master of the same recording.

🔖 itsjunetime / tdf

A terminal-based PDF viewer.

Designed to be performant, very responsive, and work well with even very large PDFs. Built with ratatui.

🔖 ratatui

Ratatui (ˌræ.təˈtu.i) is a Rust crate for cooking up terminal user interfaces (TUIs). It provides a simple and flexible way to create text-based user interfaces in the terminal, which can be used for command-line applications, dashboards, and other interactive console programs.

🔖 Sonny Rollinswith Paul Jeffrey

Emission “Who is” de la BBC 2 Producer / Director : Dick Fontaine Produced by Allan King Associates Canada LTD. 1968

Stutterday

Still a wonder to watch Just took in this Starlink launch from Vandenberg. Got a lot of pix. These things are common now, but I’m still a big kid, and space stuff excites me. I also seem to be here when launches aren’t happening, so it was great to catch this one. What you see […]

Copping My Style

Can you legally protect an artistic style? Not currently, but an Adobe-backed bill, a seeming reaction to AI, is pitching the idea. Personally, I see a bunch of blurred lines.

Marlon Wayans Reveals Melissa Joan Hart Was Supposed To Play Anna Faris’ Role In ‘Scary Movie’

Anna Faris’ iconic role as Cindy in the horror parody feature film series Scary Movie almost went to another actress, revealed writer, producer and star Marlon Wayans. In a recent interview with Entertainment Tonight, Faris asked Marlon Wayans and Shawn Wayans if there was “ever a celebrity that desperately wanted to be in a Scary Movie, […]

‘SNL’s James Austin Johnson On “Sustainable” Donald Trump Impression As ‘Playing POTUS’ Doc Premieres At Tribeca

Saturday Night Live’s James Austin Johnson gave the Tribeca Festival a taste, and analysis, of his celebrated stream-of consciousness Donald Trump impression. He often wings it. “It wouldn’t feel like Trump if there wasn’t this queasy feeling in the audience of ‘what is he going to say?’ and so I have to improvise for the […]

Benito Skinner Teases ‘Overcompensating’ Season 2 Has “A Maturity To It” & “Feels More Queer” As Benny Ventures Out Of The Closet

Benito Skinner is previewing the forthcoming second season of Prime Video’s Overcompensating. The semi-autobiographical dramedy — centering on his titular character, a closeted jock who becomes fast friends with outsider Carmen (Wally Baram) during their freshman year of college — “feels more queer” in Season 2, the writer-star teased, as Benny ventures further out of the […]

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Paramount’s Weiss Woes.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

When public charging stations aren't so public, and why it matters.

Charlie Puth Axes Florida Show Due To Illness: “I Am So Devastated To Do This”

Four-time Grammy-nominated musician Charlie Puth took to social media to announce the cancellation of his Saturday night show in Orlando, Fla. The latest stop on his Whatever’s Clever! World Tour, scheduled at the Addition Financial Arena, is being axed due to illness, he wrote on his Instagram Story earlier today. “I am so devastated to […]

Netflix Film Chief Dan Lin Says Streamer Has “Accepted” It Won’t Work With Directors Who Want Theatrical Releases

As Netflix Films chairman, Dan Lin said he wants the streamer to prioritize more mid-budget fare but avoid working with directors who hold steadfast to a theatrical opening. “There is a group of filmmakers who still want theatrical. Those are filmmakers that we’ve accepted we just won’t work with,” he told The New York Times […]

Week Two in 250 to 250

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

Scott Pelley Gets Personal & Kinda Poetic; Thanks Fans After ’60 Minutes’ Firing: “So Deeply Grateful”

Fired 60 Minutes veteran Scott Pelley hasn’t quoted poet John Masefield in any of his scathing statements since embattled CBS News chief Bari Weiss and new newsmagazine EP Nick Bilton canned him for rejecting their regime earlier this week. However, the ex-Evening News anchor sure captured the spirit of the past British Poet Laureate’s famous […]

My Parents and D-Day

Friends,

A Colleague in the Loop: Writing the Classroom Together

We began collaborating during COVID-19 while teaching separate sections of first-year writing. We used many of the same assignments, emphasized similar rhetorical moves, and kept running into the same problems from different directions. Like many others, our courses asked students to workshop ideas, draft recursively, and revise projects over time, but the structure of online [...]

Source

Margaret Cho, Lilly Wachowski Board Trans Comic Nina Nguyen’s Debut Special ‘Dreams’ As EPs, Presented By Cho

EXCLUSIVE: Executive producers Margaret Cho and Lilly Wachowski have wrapped production on transgender comedian Nina Nguyen’s debut stand-up special. Directed by Nicole Blaine, Margaret Cho Presents Nina Nguyen: Dreams serves as part one-woman show, part stand-up special, aimed at advocating for trans youth, following Nguyen as she travels back in time to tell jokes for […]

Patrick Godfrey Dies: ‘Ever After’ & ‘Les Misérables’ Actor Was 93

Patrick Godfrey, the actor known for roles in Ever After (1998) and Les Misérables (2012), has died. He was 93. The actor’s London-based agency Markham, Froggatt & Irwin announced that Godfrey “died peacefully at home surrounded by his family” on Thursday. “It is with great sadness that we can confirm Patrick Godfrey passed away last […]

Meet Miyako’s Toph Beifong – Aang’s Earthbending Teacher In Season 2 Of Netflix’s Live-Action ‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’ Rocks New Featurette

Aang (Gordon Cormier) and his friends better watch out, because Toph (Miyako) is about to rock their world in Season 2. In a new behind-the-scenes featurette released by Netflix today, viewers can get a glimpse of the journey it took to create the live-action version of Toph Beifong, Aang’s crucial earth-bending teacher voiced by Michaela […]

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Knicks now overwhelming title favorites after shocking start to NBA Finals.

Pluralistic: Criticizing the everything machine (06 Jun 2026)

Today's links Criticizing the everything machine: It slices, it dices, it even makes paperclips! Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Parliament v DRM; Colbert's commencement; Counterfeiting x luxury goods; Joule thief; Lean-back media. Upcoming appearances: Kansas City, LA, Menlo Park, Toronto, NYC, Edinburgh, 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. Criticizing the everything machine (permalink) "Gish Gallop" is the debating term for an opponent who makes so many claims that "it's impossible to address them in the time available" (it's named for Creationist Duane Gish, who was notorious for this tactic): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop I think about the Gish Gallop whenever I'm asked to comment on AI. Here's a recent example: last week, I had a pre-interview call with a radio producer who wanted me to come on a 13-minute segment to discusses "whether there's a problem with AI governance?" I asked what the show meant by that: was it whether regulation of AI in commercial or public sector decision-making needed more oversight? Was it that the siting and provisioning of data-centers needed more democratic accountability? Was it that workers deserved more of a say in AI's impact on labor markets? Was it that customers and/or audiences should be able to opt out of AI customer service and AI slop? Was it about whether we needed some kind of system to prevent "runaway AI," in the event that we teach so many words to the word-guessing program that it wakes up, becomes God, and turns us all into paperclips? "Oh," the producer said, "all of that." In 13 minutes. You see the problem, right? The AI industry has made so many claims about its past, present and future that it's almost impossible to have a reasonable critical conversation about it: https://bsky.app/profile/petermiles.eurosky.social/post/3mnffjqczjs2t Shortly after I did the radio show, a newspaper editor who'd heard my segment got in touch to ask me if I'd write an 800-word op-ed about the subject, and also, could I address claims that "AI is the next Industrial Revolution?" In 800 words: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/06/04/ai-is-the-greatest-money-wasting-scheme-humanity-has-ever-i/ I keep finding myself on stages or panels where an AI-struck person says something like, "AI is the next industrial revolution. It will change everything we do. It will let anyone create important works of art. It will cure cancer. It will take us to space. It will solve the climate crisis." Or sometimes it's an AI critic, but that person's criticism is really more "criti-hype," which is when you accept tech industry hype claims at face value, and then criticize them rather than questioning them: https://peoples-things.ghost.io/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype/ AI criti-hype might ask what we'll do once AI takes all our jobs, or what we'll do when AI replaces the government or teachers or doctors, or what we'll do when AI can bypass our critical faculties and brainwash us or drive us all mad. What do you say to that? I usually start by talking about whether there's any economic basis for keeping the AI servers running. AI is – by far – the money-losingest venture in human history, and it's practically impossible to overstate just how bad the AI business is. Not only does AI have terrible unit economics, those unit economics are getting worse over time: https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/26/the-ai-will-continue/#until-morale-improves AI's happiest customers cite cost-benefit calculations that depend on truly unimaginable subsidies from the AI companies, who are basically selling $100 bills for $5 apiece. It would be pretty amazing if you couldn't find people who'd extol the virtues of this arrangement. But when AI companies try to raise the price of those $100 bills to, say, $20 apiece, those ecstatic customers fly into a rage and start loudly proclaiming that AI is so inefficient that they will lose money on this arrangement: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/uber-ceo-says-other-execs-are-lying-about-ai-they-say-it-ll-be-fine-publicly-but-privately-admit-millions-of-jobs-are-gone/ar-AA1Z9QMv Now, it shouldn't fall to me, a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America, to point out that capitalist enterprises require profits to be sustainable. You can't keep a business afloat by selling $100 bills for $5, nor for $20. You can't even make a profit selling $100 bills for $100 apiece! For a company to succeed, it needs to take in more than it expends. AI is a money-furnace, and AI hustlers are clearly on the hunt for a way to force all of us to feed every dime we've got to it. Elon Musk's (now scuttled) gambit to make every pension saver in America bail out Grok (and Twitter, but at a mere $44b, the losses from Twitter are dwarfed by the titanic losses from Grok) was the most ambitious and shameless population-scale bag-holder scheme, but it's not the only one: https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/sp-global-keeps-fast-entry-proposal-unchanged-spacex-listing-looms-2026-06-04/ So before we ask about the capabilities AI will acquire in the future, we should at least give some consideration to the question of whether anyone will be willing to fund the development of those capabilities, and if so, where the money would come from? Likewise, before we ask whether AI can perform adequately in a job, we should at least consider the possibility that the company that sells that AI tool will be bankrupt in a year or two. When we fight about data-center buildout, we mostly talk about the (considerable) environmental downsides to them – but what about the question of what we will do with these data-centers after their owners go bankrupt, possibly even before they can be provisioned with electricity? How many laser-tag arenas do we actually need? This is just one example of the questions that you could spend days unpacking, which make many of the other questions about AI a little silly. Like, even if you think there are limitless returns to scale for creating new AI capabilities, which means that if we keep the money-furnace burning it's only a matter of time until it powers a cure for cancer and the end of the climate emergency, how much money do we need to shovel into the furnace before that happens, and where will it come from? There are plenty of cancer researchers who have promising approaches they haven't been able to pursue due to funding shortfalls. Unless there's some way to estimate how much money we have to give to AI companies before they cure cancer, we should at least consider the possibility that the true sum is "more money than exists now and that will ever exist." We should also consider that whatever benefits to cancer research that AI might deliver could come with a higher price-tag than the promising cancer research we're dropping because we can't find far more modest sums. Likewise, it may be that the amount of CO2 that AI will generate before it "solves climate change" will render Earth permanently unfit for humans, consuming the only habitable planet capable of sustaining human life in the known universe. I mean, I suppose that's one way to "solve" climate change, but it's a pretty drastic solution. My next book (out later this month) is The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI. I wrote it because I was frustrated by other people demanding that I talk to them about AI, and then offering me 800 words or 13 minutes to address fifty nebulous, poorly supported claims about AI: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ Shortly after writing the book, I turned it into a lecture: https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington Now that I'm about to go out on the road with the book, I find myself frustrated anew by the need to try and pull together a compact way to address the broad, incoherent claims the industry uses to keep its bubble inflated and the money furnaces roaring. The series of essays I've developed here on Pluralistic are part of that effort: https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/27/unnecessariat/#rubbuts-stole-my-jerb But it occurred to me that this whole enterprise of making sense of AI needs to be framed in the context of the messiness of AI itself, and AI boosters' overwhelming, promiscuous and disjointed Gish Gallop. Hey look at this (permalink) What happens when your phone is confiscated at the airport https://www.theverge.com/report/944076/cbp-airport-phone-searches-seizure-minneapolis-activists A Billionaire Explains Why American Business Now Feels like the Mafia https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/a-billionaire-explains-why-american These Republican Lawmakers Challenged Abortion Bans. Then They Faced Backlash. https://www.propublica.org/article/republicans-face-backlash-after-challenging-abortion-bans Debbie Downer https://prospect.org/2026/06/05/debbie-downer-wasserman-schultz-florida-house-races/ Mechanical Pencil https://mechanical-pencil.com/ Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago UK Parliament report damns DRM, calls for limits https://web.archive.org/web/20060615115510/http://www.openrightsgroup.org/2006/06/05/launch-of-the-apig-report-on-drm/ #20yrsago Colbert’s Knox College commencement speech https://web.archive.org/web/20111228135413/http://departments.knox.edu/newsarchive/news_events/2006/x12547.html #15yrsago Counterfeiting can be good for luxury goods sales https://web.archive.org/web/20110602061646/http://www.slate.com/id/2294927/ #15yrsago HOWTO make a Joule Thief and get all the power you’ve paid for https://www.instructables.com/Make-a-Joule-Thief/ #15yrsago School suspends student for refusing to remove personal animation from YouTube, threatens other students for petitioning on his behalf https://web.archive.org/web/20110603041200/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto/student-cites-freedom-of-speech-after-suspension-for-online-videos/article2043954/ #5yrsago Recommendation engines and "lean-back" media https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/05/lean-back/#lean-forward Upcoming appearances (permalink) Kansas City: Facing the Future (Woodneath Library Center), Jun 10 https://www.mymcpl.org/events/119655/facing-future-cory-doctorow LA: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Brian Merchant (Skylight Books), Jun 19 https://www.skylightbooks.com/event/skylight-cory-doctorow-presents-reverse-centaurs-guide-life-after-ai-w-brian-merchant Menlo Park: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Angie Coiro (Kepler's), Jun 21 https://www.keplers.org/upcoming-events-internal/cory-doctorow-2026 Toronto: TBA, Jun 23 NYC: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Jonathan Coulton (The Strand), Jun 24 https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html Philadelphia: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with David Williams (Fitler Club/Philadelphia Citizen), Jun 25 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-book-event-tickets-1990110326559 Chicago: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Rick Perlstein (Exile in Bookville), Jun 26 https://exileinbookville.com/events/50628 Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17 https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ Recent appearances (permalink) Cory Doctorow's digital jail-break (DW In Focus) https://www.dw.com/en/cory-doctorows-digital-jail-break/audio-77414035 Why the Internet Got Worse and What to Do About It (Jim Rutt) (RIP) https://www.jimruttshow.com/cory-doctorow-3/ On Enshittification – and what can be done about it (Re:publica) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhINQgPMVSI EFFecting Change: How to Disenshittify the Internet (EFF, with Wendy Liu) https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-enshittification The “Enshittification” of Everything (Bioneers) https://bioneers.org/cory-doctorow-enshittification-of-everything-zstf2605/ Latest books (permalink) "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 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/) "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "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 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "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. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor. "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE. "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING. 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

‘Ghostbusters’ Animated Netflix Series Reveals Title, Logo Art

Who you gonna call? Netflix and Sony Pictures Animation have revealed the official title and logo for their upcoming Ghostbusters series. Celebrating Ghostbusters Day on Saturday, marking the anniversary of the original 1984 film’s release, showrunners Ben Hibon and Elliott Kalan were joined by Ghost Corps executive producers Jason Reitman and Gil Kenan to announce […]

Sean Penn “Got To Enjoy” Watching The Oscars While Skipping Ceremony: “Better For My Mental Health”

After skipping out on this year’s 98th Academy Awards, Sean Penn enjoyed watching the awards show on television for once. The 3x Oscar winner, who most recently won Best Supporting Actor for One Battle After Another, explained that the awards ceremony has “always represented social discomfort to me,” which is why he wasn’t present to […]

Reality Check - Trump Has The Worst Jobs Record Since Hoover

Today, 230pm ET - The US Men's National Soccer Team plays Germany in their last warm up before the World Cup kicks off this week. Going to be a big match!

AI’s Black Friday

Some thoughts on what just happened

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

Star City is very good. It's good enough that you have to watch each episode at least twice to get the idea of what's really going on. I stopped watching the show it is a sequel for, For All Mankind, because it got incredibly juvenile and sitcom-like. But Star City is serious, at least in the first three episodes.

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

Walt Frazier: "The regular season is where you make your name, but the postseason is where you make your fame."

Endgame And Oscar Wilde

Today, enjoy our audio and video picks

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

The Knicks won again last night. They're now up 2-0, both games on the road. This has blown my sense of reality. This Knicks team bears no resemblance to what I think of as the Knicks. Hard to concentrate. Will Trump try to put his name of Madison Square Garden.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

The European Social Stack. They should add a bunch of other formats and protocols to their list. The idea of bridging all those silos is a dead-end because they don't agree what text is. We have to go back to the roots, the web itself, to build an open system.

Comments on a Freaky Friday

Today my head talks alone

Red Sea Film Foundation MD Shivani Pandya Malhotra Departs As Questions Swirl Around Future Direction Of Its Festival

The Red Sea Film Foundation Managing Director Shivani Pandya Malhotra has stepped down after seven years in the role. The Saudi foundation, which runs the Red Sea International Film Festival, announced her departure in a short release on Saturday, saying it had been effective as of June 1. “After seven incredible years and five remarkable […]

Lit Hub Weekly: June 1 – 5, 2026

Sharon Blackie explores the grounding power of fairy tales. | Lit Hub Criticism What do you do when your book detailing Civil War-era censorship is censored by the US government? | Lit Hub Politics “Maybe it’s fair to call this

Trump's cognitive impairment endangers us all

It's undeniable if you actually watch him.

Trump Gets Screwwormed | The Coffee Klatch for Saturday, June 6, 2026

With Heather Lofthouse and yours truly, Robert Reich

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Knicks overpower Spurs in Game 2, take 2-0 NBA Finals lead behind Karl-Anthony Towns, Mikal Bridges.

Sometimes it just feels this way

Sometimes it just feels this way

@Dave Winer's linkblog

‘Bots have now passed human traffic online,’ Cloudflare boss laments — says agentic traffic wasn’t expected to eclipse real people until next year.

June 5, 2026

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had good news for the American people when he gave his twenty-ninth Fireside Chat on June 5, 1944.

Weeknotes: May 30 – June 5, 2026

Win of the week: submitted final deliverable Looking forward to: a friend we haven’t seen in years wants to check out Kubota Garden with us sometime soon Stuff I did: 9.75 hours consulting updated tax withholding on my husband’s paycheck based on the accountant’s estimate dropped in for the last half hour of Homebrew Website Club […]

‘Next Life’ Review: Emilia Clarke Lives Alternate Life-Changing Choices In Drake Doremus’ Rich And Jazzy Rom-Dram – Tribeca Festival

Like it did for many people, the pandemic changed things for writer/director Drake Doremus, whose last film, 2019’s Endings, Beginnings, now seems like a prophetic title for the filmmaker, a true romantic, who has since ended one relationship and then met a woman to begin another as his wife. That chance encounter in Madrid has […]

Video games have more sequelitis than ever. Here's why

My live reporting notes from Summer Game Fest in Hollywood

No, Anthropic did not call for a pause on AI development

Not really

Steven Spielberg Praises ‘Obsession’, ‘Backrooms’ Box Office Success: “I Just Applaud Them”

Hollywood’s new cohort of horror filmmakers have earned the praise of Steven Spielberg after a successful few weekends at the box office. At a recent screening of his new movie Disclosure Day, premiering June 12 in theaters, the 3x Oscar winner expressed his amazement at seeing Obsession and Backrooms do so well in theaters after […]

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Jeremy Lin returning to MSG for first time as fan since free-agency split.

Murder Charges In James Handy’s Death Paused As Stabbing Suspect Faces Mental Competency Exam

The man suspected of stabbing Top Gun: Maverick actor James Handy to death earlier this week will have to face a mental competency hearing before murder charges can be pursued. The capacities of Michael Ray Gledhill will be examined in a Hollywood court June 22, a state judge decided Friday, after the Los Angeles County District […]

Taylor Swift’s ‘Toy Story 5’ Song Gets Music Video With Footage Of Joan Cusack’s Jessie; Breaks Streaming Records

UPDATED, 5:00 p.m.: Taylor Swift’s Toy Story 5 song, “I Knew It, I Knew You” has become the most-streamed country song in a single day by a female artist in Spotify history. The record-breaking doesn’t stop there, for the song is now also Apple Music’s biggest country single of 2026, and it broke Apple Music’s […]

‘The Leader’ Review: Tim Blake Nelson And Vera Farmiga Superb In Powerful Depiction Of Real-Life ‘Heaven’s Gate’ Suicide Cult – Tribeca Festival

Writer-director Michael Gallagher, another filmmaker who got his start on YouTube with millions of followers for shows like TotallySketch, has always been a bit obsessed with the infamous Heaven’s Gate 1997 mass suicide in Rancho Santa Fe, CA, right outside where he grew up in San Diego. His interest in this horrific event and the […]

‘Among Us’ Animated Series Based On Game Drops All Episodes On Paramount+

Paramount+ today announced the surprise premiere of its new original animated series Among Us based on the globally popular social deception game. Series stars Yvette Nicole Brown and Liv Hewson announced all ten episodes are now available, exclusively on Paramount+, at Summer Game Fest Friday in Los Angeles. Created by Owen Dennis (Infinity Train) and […]

Mental defrag

I can ride out a wave of stress to meet a deadline or finish an emotionally intense activity, but as soon as it’s over and I let myself relax, I hit a wall and become functionally useless, woozy almost. Zombified. It’s not a blood sugar crash, though feels similar. At that point I basically just […]

‘The Odyssey’ First-Day PLF Advance Ticket Sales Are Best At AMC For Any Studio Title Since 2022

EXCLUSIVE: Sources tell us that the first day advance PLF ticket sales for Universal’s upcoming Christopher Nolan epic, The Odyssey, were the highest ever for AMC yesterday in the last four years when it came to a major studio movie. The Odyssey‘s standard showtimes will go on sale later this summer. Just to re-emphasize, the […]

‘Love Island USA’ Makes Waves Yet Again On Peacock As Season 8 Sets New 3-Day Streaming Record

Love Island USA Season 8 is off to a fiery start on Peacock. Since launching on June 2, the first few episodes have already tallied 824M minutes viewed, up 74% from Season 7. That makes it Peacock’s most-streamed original season ever through the first three days, per internal data from NBCUniversal. Unsurprisingly, given the primary […]

Paramount Reboots Video Game Strategy, Forming New Studio

Paramount is reconstituting its video game operation, launching a new game studio and setting a leadership team for the division. Like its media peers, the company has deployed various strategies over the years in the sector, which has historically not been a straightforward process for Hollywood despite all of its established IP. Ramping up in […]

Fire Behind The Film: Can John Carney’s ‘Power Ballad’ Connect With Moviegoers Despite No YouTube Phenoms Or Jump Scares?

EXCLUSIVE: When Power Ballad opened the Sands Film Festival in St. Andrews, Scotland, recently, the audience reaction was rapturous. Same with showings at SXSW, Dublin and in a limited release last week. Sending festival audiences into a lather has been a regular occurrence for writer-director John Carney since he premiered Once at the 2007 Sundance […]

Reed Hastings Officially Exits Netflix As Shareholder Vote Confirms New Board Chairman

UPDATED with shareholder vote results. Reed Hastings is officially no longer affiliated with Netflix, the streaming giant he co-founded 29 years ago. In an SEC filing Friday, the company confirmed Hastings’ exit indirectly, noting the results of Thursday’s annual shareholder meeting. Venture capitalist Jay Hoag, a longtime Netflix investor and board member, was elected chairman […]

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Rhea Seehorn and 'Pluribus' Cast on Hive Mind, Season 2 Update.

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

RE: https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/116686099182972994

And a great follow answering the question looking at the data: did Claude make rsync worse?

https://alexispurslane.github.io/rsync-analysis/

Not interested in convincing anyone- it was just a good piece to read. Don’t like it, move along.

Sirius Pomodoro

Zac Hall: The third most popular free iPhone app in the U.S. App Store today is a mysterious productivity app that’s only available in Russian. That’s a pretty obvious red flag that something isn’t quite what it seems. […] The app icon looks similar to a star mapping app. The app itself isn’t available in […]

CloudKit Bugs in May 2026

Jaanus Kase (Mastodon): We deployed direct silent CloudKit notifications in Tact in late 2024. They proved to be too unreliable to use in a messaging app like Tact: notifications arrived late or not at all. To be fair, this is within the bounds of the Apple SDK contract, which does say that the delivery of […]

Permissions in the CloudKit Public Database

Guilherme Rambo: When using the public database for content hosting or feature flags, you don’t want any random iCloud user to have the rights to publish or edit content on your behalf or to change the feature flags that control your app’s behavior for all of your users, that would be really bad.That’s where CloudKit’s […]

Who's Most Responsible for the Monopolization of America?

Hint: I was in his class

Pluralistic: Refining humanity (05 Jun 2026)

Today's links Refining humanity: What our technology is shows us what we're not. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: GNU Radio; France v "follow us on Twitter"; Aaronsw vindicated; Capitalism's crooked refs. Upcoming appearances: Kansas City, LA, Menlo Park, Toronto, NYC, Edinburgh, 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. Refining humanity (permalink) One of the best ways to evaluate your own understanding of a subject is to attempt to explain it to someone else. Through explaining things, we discover how much of the "totally obvious" world is actually full of ambiguity, mystery and contradiction. There's a great bit in Rowan Atkinson's historical sitcom Blackadder that illustrates this principle. In "Ink and Incapability" Blackadder and friends have accidentally burned the only copy of Samuel Johnson's original dictionary of the English language. To cover up their mistake, they decide that they will recreate the dictionary themselves. However, they founder on the first word they try to define, "A": Blackadder: Let's start at the beginning, shall we? First: 'A.' How would you define 'A'? Prince George: Ohh…'A' (continues this in background). Oh, I love this! I love this! Quizzies! Erm, hang on, it’s coming. Ooh, crikey, erm, oh yes, I’ve got it! B: What? PG: Well, it doesn’t really mean anything, does it? B: Good. So we're well on the way, then. "'A'; impersonal pronoun; doesn't really mean anything." I mean, what does "A" mean? The Oxford English Dictionary has more than a dozen definitions, and just the first one runs to more than 1,500 words: https://archive.org/details/the-oxford-english-dictionary-all-volumes_202208/The%20Oxford%20English%20Dictionary%20Volume%201%20-%20A%20to%20B/page/n25/mode/2up Now, normal life involves a lot of explaining things to other people. You have to explain your problems to customer service reps, who have to explain why they can't solve those problems to you. You need to explain to your loved ones why you want to leave your toothbrush in the shower, and they have to explain why they hate having your toothbrush in the shower. These explanation-exchanges teach you as much as they teach the person you're locked in dialog with. The reasons for leaving your toothbrush in the shower may seem totally obvious to you, and your partner's inability to understand this reveals the assumptions you've never even considered. For the past four decades, an increasing proportion of the population have spent an increasing proportion of their lives explaining things to machines that have no assumptions or shared context: computers. What we call "programming a computer" is really "breaking down a thing that seems obvious to you into increasingly simple instructions that will be followed to the letter." Computers are like the genies of legend, bloody-minded literalists who will do exactly what you say, in the way that is perversely furthest from what you mean. To get a computer to do anything, you must first understand it to a degree that far exceeds the understanding needed to explain something to any other human, even a small child. To take just one example: yesterday, I was on a plane, and the seatback video started cycling through its video-on-demand offerings. All of the movie titles that began with "the" were rewritten to put "the" at the end of the title (for example, "The Sting" was written as "Sting, The"). It's obvious why the system's designer had done this: we expect to find movies whose titles begin with "The" alphabetized under their second word ("The Sting" should appear between "Star Wars" and "Story of a Love Affair"; not between "The Godfather" and "The Untouchables"). I remember when I learned this from my elementary school's teacher-librarian, when I was seven and my class got a tutorial on the school library's card catalog. The librarian explained this principle to us in a matter of minutes, as part of a longer set of instructions, and still, it stuck with me forever. But here we are, 48 years later, and we still haven't standardized a way to get computers to grasp this foundational principle of alphabetization. Many different databases handle this, to be sure, but it's so inconsistent across so many platforms that someone at the head-end of the video distribution system that feeds American Airlines' VOD system decided, "Fuck it, I'm just gonna put the 'The' at the end of these titles." Computers are stupid, in other words, which means that the people who program them have to have smarts enough for both of them. Unfortunately for our entire species and civilization, the software industry has historically valued skill at writing efficient and reliable software over writing software that adequately reflects reality. There is an entire genre of lists that illustrate the problem with this; the "falsehoods programmers believe" lists: https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood From "names of people" and "street addresses"; from "prices" to "time"; from "email addresses" to "phone numbers"; the "awesome falsehoods" lists are awesome because they reveal how much subtlety and complexity is lurking in these seemingly simple and intuitive concepts. This subtlety and complexity might never emerge through the process of trying to teach a person about them, but when you try to teach a computer about them, you have to confront them in all their awesome fuggliness. That's because humans have context, agency and flexibility. Sure, the person who designs a form with a blank for "name" might never have met a Malagasy person whose first name is Randriamananjararadofabesata, but in the pre-digital world, when Madagascar Slim met a public official who had to transcribe his name onto a paper form, that official could simply draw an arrow in the margin next to the "name" blank, turn the form over, and write out all 28 characters on the reverse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_Slim Computers can't do this. If the programmer doesn't know about Malagasy first names, the computer doesn't know about them either, and the only person who can "teach" the computer about these names is a programmer with access to the code for the database, who has to manually alter the code, compile it, and distribute it to everyone who uses it. This is partly why digitization has been accompanied by a rise in people asserting that they exist on spectrums rather than in binaries. There were always people whose names, genders, races, and other biographic "immutables" changed, or failed to fit within the blanks on the forms. When those people's realities ran up against failures in the system's abstractions, they could petition a bureaucrat to turn the paper over and write an explanatory note, or to write really small to fill in a blank: https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/02/nonbinary-families/#red-envelopes Getting a human official to turn the paper over and write something that didn't fit in the blank is a personal challenge. It requires that a subject convince the person who controls the form to make an exception. This isn't always easy, but officials on the front lines necessarily deal with reality, and they can't get their jobs done unless they're capable of interpreting the necessarily incomplete procedures they operate under to fit things as they really are. But a computer doesn't have any agency or context or flexibility. If the computer says your name isn't valid, you can't argue the computer into accepting it. The only way to get a digital world to acknowledge your existence is to campaign for systemic change. A trans person might (with great difficulty, to be sure) convince the regional registrar to white-out an old X on one "gender" box and mark a new X in the other box. But the only way to make that change in a software system that has been programmed to treat the "gender" field as immutable is to change society itself. In this way, computers are machines for teaching us what we don't know about ourselves. They require that we interrogate and faithfully recreate our personal tacit knowledge, and they require that our societies interrogate their tacit presumptions as well. When you are forced to turn your tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge, you're also forced to confront how many broken assumptions lurk inside your reasoning. At best, it's a clarifying process. Computers don't just clarify what we know and how we organize our society: they also clarify what we are. There are lots of things that we have supposed that a computer would never do, because we believed that these things required something that only humans could do. Take chess: there are more possible chess games than there are hydrogen atoms in the universe, so brute-forcing chess by running all possible games is a technological impossibility. The best human chess players do something we don't quite understand, mixing their recollections of previous games with rules-of-thumb about the best strategies, with "creativity" (whatever that is) that lets them spontaneously develop new strategies. We can easily get a computer to memorize all the known-good chess sequences and all the rules of thumb, but we don't know what "creativity" is, so we can't encode it as a series of instructions. But thanks to breakthroughs in machine learning and its successor, "deep learning," we have created chess-playing software that can beat every human, partly by assaying gambits that we would term "creative" if they originated with a human player. What we make of this new fact is controversial. For many people (myself included), this is a refinement: it tells me that behaviors that are indistinguishable from "creativity" can, at least some of the time, be created by mechanical processes, and the mere fact that a machine does something that appears "creative" doesn't mean that machines are human. For others, the fact that a mechanical system can evince a behavior that we would call "creative" in a human doesn't mean that we defined "creativity" too broadly, it means that we defined "human" too narrowly, and now we have made a machine that is, at least partially, a person. I think this is the wrong conclusion to draw, for reasons that Ted Chiang sets out with luminous brilliance in a recent Atlantic article entitled "No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious": https://www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2026/06/no-artificial-intelligence-is-not-conscious/687378/ (If you're hitting the paywall on that one and you're on Firefox, you can try my favorite trick: switch to "Reader Mode" and hit "reload" – your mileage may vary.) For all the reasons Chiang articulates, I think that drawing the "personhood" line to include machines is a technical mistake, but it's worse than that. Admitting machines to the "personhood" club is a tactical mistake, on par with the mistake we made when we admitted corporations to the personhood club. We should absolutely consider expanding personhood to incorporate living things, including animals and ecosystems, but at the same time, we must purge these dead, artificial constructs from the club: https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/15/artificial-lifeforms/#moral-consideration There is a way in which the recognition of new capabilities in machines parallels the recognition of new capabilities in animals other than ourselves. When those animals manage to do things that we once thought were the exclusive province of humans, we (should) take that as an opportunity to refine our conception of humanity. We're not "the animals that use tools" or "the animals that make plans" or "the animals that recognize themselves in mirrors," because there are other animals that do those things. We are an "animal that uses tools"; not the animal that does so. Likewise, if we thought that some activity was unique to humans, or to living beings, and we manage to get a machine to replicate that activity, we should revise our view of the activity – not our view of the machine. Creative breakthroughs in chess are not "a thing that requires a human mind," they're "things that can be done by human minds and by machines." Edsger Dijkstra once famously asked "can a submarine swim?" https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD898.html Submarines and fish and humans and dolphins all propel themselves through water by different means. But when an animal swims, it does something that is different from what a submarine does. The submarine has no intention, while (complex multicellular) animals swim to pursue goals. Building machines that propel themselves through water is very useful, but it's not the same thing as creating life. In some ways, it's better than creating life: for one thing, we owe other living things moral consideration that is not due to machines. Harnessing a machine to accomplish our own goals is more morally clear than controlling living things to achieve those goals. By the same token, creating machines that can do some of the tasks that we ask of other humans can be the superior moral course. I'd rather have a machine remove mines from a minefield than getting humans to do it. But beyond this moral relief, creating machines is a fantastic way to learn more about ourselves – making explicit our tacit knowledge, our implicit social assumptions, and the limitations of our conception of what sets us apart from the rest of the universe. One way in which AI is exceptional is in how it undermines this principle. Conventional software techniques struggled to produce a program that could identify objects in photographs. It turns out that defining all the visual correlates of "cat" is even harder than defining the letter "A." Deep learning techniques solved this previous insoluble problem by relieving us of the job of making explicit all the implicit factors that we deploy when distinguishing an image of a "cat" from an image of a "dog" or a "tiger" (or a "tractor"). Instead of forcing humans to engage in introspection until we'd made a list of every factor we use to identify cat pictures, we simply identified pictures of cats and fed them to a program that tried to find the commonalities among them. The more pictures we fed to that program, the better it got at identifying cats. Today, we have programs that can reliably distinguish an image of a cat from an image of a tiger cub! This represents a major breakthrough in the power of computers to perform useful work for us, but it's also a huge regression in computers' role in forcing us to make our tacit thought processes explicit through systematic introspection. That's probably fine: we didn't create computers to make us introspect, we created them to do useful work for us. All things considered, it might be better to have genies who grant our wishes according to the spirit of our words, not their letter. AI may not force us to render our implicit thoughts as explicit instructions, but it absolutely forces us to reconsider and narrow the realm of the numinous. Our own creativity is still delightful and important, but the fact that this squishy, amazing process can (sometimes) be replicated by procedural machines changes the definition of living things. We're "a thing that can produce creative outcomes" but not "the things that can produce creative outcomes." The machines aren't being creative (any more than a submarine is swimming) but they're outputting things that we used to only achieve by means of creativity. An AI that does something that used to require creativity is fulfilling my favorite of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies: "Be the first person to not do something that no one else has not done before": https://stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique.html Just as bosses fantasize about AI bringing about a worksite without workers, and Zuckerberg is trying to build social media without socializing, and politicians want a bureaucracy without bureaucrats, we can sometimes use AI to produce creative outcomes without creativity: https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/27/unnecessariat/#rubbuts-stole-my-jerb That isn't to say that AI art is any good. AI may produce things that are aesthetically interesting, but it can't produce things that mean anything: https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/02/must-we-pretend/ But art isn't the only realm that we apply creativity to. There are plenty of outcomes that we've always believed we couldn't bring about without applying creativity. AI – like all software – is making us realize that an ingredient we once deemed uniquely essential turns out to have substitutes. AI can sometimes accomplish things without us explaining how we do them. That relieves us of a useful but difficult chore – but in so doing, it forces us (yet again!) to revisit what sorts of things are needed to do the things that matter to us, and therefore, what makes us special. Hey look at this (permalink) EU plots long game against US digital supremacy https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-plots-long-game-against-us-digital-supremacy/ Open World Map: Digital Sovereignty for Game Creators https://luma.com/8nvmyatm Enshittifier — replace AI with 💩 https://enshittifier.wells.ee/ AI is the greatest money-wasting scheme humanity has ever invented https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/06/04/ai-is-the-greatest-money-wasting-scheme-humanity-has-ever-i/?WT.mc_id=tmgoff_tw_post_scheme-humanity-has-ever-i/ Enshittification, Despotification, and the Open Internet https://www.liberalism.org/p/enshittification-despotification-and-the-open-internet Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago GNU Radio: the universal, software-defined radio https://web.archive.org/web/20060613062355/https://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,70933-0.html #15yrsago France bans “follow us on Twitter” from newscasts https://web.archive.org/web/20110606035424/http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/france-bans-facebook-and-twitter-from-radio-and-tv/1559 #5yrsago Aaron Swartz, vindicated https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/04/aaronsw/#cfaa #5yrsago Capitalism's crooked refs https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/04/aaronsw/#crooked-ref Upcoming appearances (permalink) Kansas City: Facing the Future (Woodneath Library Center), Jun 10 https://www.mymcpl.org/events/119655/facing-future-cory-doctorow LA: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Brian Merchant (Skylight Books), Jun 19 https://www.skylightbooks.com/event/skylight-cory-doctorow-presents-reverse-centaurs-guide-life-after-ai-w-brian-merchant Menlo Park: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Angie Coiro (Kepler's), Jun 21 https://www.keplers.org/upcoming-events-internal/cory-doctorow-2026 Toronto: TBA, Jun 23 NYC: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Jonathan Coulton (The Strand), Jun 24 https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html Philadelphia: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with David Williams (Fitler Club/Philadelphia Citizen), Jun 25 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-book-event-tickets-1990110326559 Chicago: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Rick Perlstein (Exile in Bookville), Jun 26 https://exileinbookville.com/events/50628 Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17 https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ Recent appearances (permalink) Cory Doctorow's digital jail-break (DW In Focus) https://www.dw.com/en/cory-doctorows-digital-jail-break/audio-77414035 Why the Internet Got Worse and What to Do About It (Jim Rutt) (RIP) https://www.jimruttshow.com/cory-doctorow-3/ On Enshittification – and what can be done about it (Re:publica) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhINQgPMVSI EFFecting Change: How to Disenshittify the Internet (EFF, with Wendy Liu) https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-enshittification The “Enshittification” of Everything (Bioneers) https://bioneers.org/cory-doctorow-enshittification-of-everything-zstf2605/ Latest books (permalink) "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 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/) "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "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 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "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. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor. "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE. "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING. 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

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Why Linux creator Linus Torvalds gets angry hearing "99% of code is AI."

@Dave Winer's linkblog

S&P 500 rejects SpaceX, also blocking entry for OpenAI and Anthropic.

Scott Pelley fires back. Trump's "anti-weaponization fund" lives on. SCOTUS green lights Alabama's racist maps.

Scott Pelley Fired From 60 Minutes…And He Fires Back

Trump's corruption as 2026's overarching narrative

Introducing the new PN Pod with Aaron and Paul.

Care-in-the-Loop Writing

In my research methods course, students are allowed—encouraged—to use generative AI in their project work, while also retaining the option to refuse it. There is one condition: they must document how they use it. Every prompt, revision, discarded output, refusal, and moment of uncertainty goes into a semester-long reflective blog. I designed the course this [...]

Source

From Ghostwriter to Co-Author-in-the-Loop: Making AI’s Writing Labor Visible

In composition classrooms, generative AI is still often framed in terms of misuse: will students cheat, become dependent, or make grading harder? A student sits down to write an essay and opens a generative AI tool. What happens next depends less on the tool itself than on the role the student gives it. In one [...]

Source

It's not just my good fight. It's all of ours.

A work in progress

Weekly Links, 06/05/2026

“The new American dream, for some of its citizens, is to no longer live there.” Good article with lots of news and stats. Record rate of Americans leaving US for various reasons. Americans Are Leaving the U.S. in Record Numbers

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

Google could do a mixture of AI and search. I want to search my blog for a place where I discuss the idea of hate is betrayed love even if I don't use the actual words. I bet they're working on it.

Elon Musk's X

I'm using EMX more than Bluesky, consciously -- realizing it was a mistake to move my social web act over there. There's no discourse to keep me there so I'm giving it less of my bandwidth.

I tried an experiment today, Paul Graham, a big tech influencer on EMX said all the Tesla haters were seemed to be gone, so I chimed in that I am one, and have just returned. I wanted to see what would happen. Yeah I got trolled. Won't be doing that again.

hate == love + betrayed. You can't hate something you don't also love. If you go back before last year's election, I was borderline about Musk, happy to loved the car without thinking of him every damn time I drove it. Maybe I should start writing about it again. I promise it will be a very different story.

Also EMX is what I'm calling Elon Musk's X. I think calling it Twitter now is not right. But I don't see X as the name of a service or product. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but most good names have 2-4 syllables with 3 generally thought to be ideal. Look around you, see how things are named. That imho is why we like Claude better than ChatGPT.

Freshday

They know it, and they won’t blow it. Knicks in four. The Knicks take Game 2. In San Antonio. I only had a few very brief feelings of doubt. I was sure they were going to win, even when they fell behind, and even after the Spurs caught up and went ahead. Because the Knicks are […]

Can Nvidia RTX Spark Let Windows Catch up to the Mac?

Introduction Apple has changed CPU architectures for their desktop and laptop computers several times. The original Apple II’s used the 8-bit MOS 6502. This CPU never transitioned properly to 16-bit and certainly not 32-bit, so Apple chose the Motorola 68000 series of CPUs for the original Macs. Then when Motorola started fall behind in the CPU race, Apple […]

Here’s what’s making us happy this week.

Hello, Lit Hubbers. It’s been a while. But the spring sun has put this staffer in a joy-lifting mood once again. What’s been making us happy recently? Earlier this month, Molly Odintz enjoyed the Austin Psych Fest, which brought a

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

It's really cool we get another NBA Finals game tonight. I'm rehearsing what it feels like to be a fan of the Eastern Conference Champion NY Knicks. It still hasn't even slightly sunk in yet.

What Might The Next Axial Age Look Like?

The post What Might The Next Axial Age Look Like? appeared first on NOEMA.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Scott Knaster remembers Bill Atkinson who died one year ago today.

AIDS is not a disgrace, it is a TRAGEDY

A grieving mother asks for compassion

@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal

New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero bibliographic library: MR

Flanders Marine Institute. Marine Regions. Flanders, 2012. https://marineregions.org/.

https://www.zotero.org/groups/2533/items/2RP9KJ77

@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal

New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero bibliographic library: Sotto lo storico Liceo Cavour, nel Rione Monti – “C’è un vero tesoro nascosto a pochi passi dal Colosseo: scoperta una Domus.” (2023)

“ROMA ARCHEOLOGICA & RESTAURO ARCHITETTURA 2023. Sotto Lo Storico Liceo Cavour, Nel Rione Monti – ‘C’è Un Vero Tesoro Nascosto a Pochi Passi Dal Colosseo: Scoperta Una Domus.’ IL TEMPO (12/01/2023) & In Italia (13/01/2023), S.v., Andrea Carandini et al., The Atlas of Ancient Rome – Vol.s 1 & 2 (2017 [Online Edition / English 2023]).” ROMA ARCHEOLOGIA e RESTAURO ARCHITETTURA 2006-25., January 14, 2023. https://romaarcheologiaerestauroarchitettura.wordpress.com/2023/01/14/roma-archeologica-restauro-architettura-2023-sotto-lo-storico-liceo-cavour-nel-rione-monti-ce-un-vero-tesoro-nascosto-a-pochi-passi-dal-colosseo-scoperta-una-domus-il-tempo-12-01-20/.

https://www.zotero.org/groups/2533/items/Q2CTI4LS

@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal

New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero bibliographic library: Killgrove 2026

Killgrove, Kristina. “Italian Teenagers Discover 1,800-Year-Old Roman Luxury House underneath Their High School Gym.” Romans. Live Science, June 4, 2026. https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/romans/italian-teenagers-discover-1-800-year-old-roman-luxury-house-underneath-their-high-school-gym.

https://www.zotero.org/groups/2533/items/3B9TV978

@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal

New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero bibliographic library: Scott 1988

Scott, R. T. “The Latin Colony of Cosa.” Dialoghi Di Archeologia 6, no. 2 (1988): 73–77.

https://www.zotero.org/groups/2533/items/7G8W6UN6

@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal

New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero bibliographic library: Gerkan 1958

Gerkan, Armin von. “Zur Datierung der Kolonie Cosa.” In Scritti in onore di Guido Libertini. Leo S. Olschki Editore, 1958.

https://www.zotero.org/groups/2533/items/P35P2U8H

@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal

New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero bibliographic library: Zancani Montuoro 1979

Zancani Montuoro, Paola. “Il faro di Cosa in ex-voto a Vulci.” Rivista dell’Istituto nazionale di archeologia e storia dell’arte 3, no. II (1979): 5–29.

https://www.zotero.org/groups/2533/items/78GEGAZZ

@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal

New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero bibliographic library: Micenei in Italia (1967)

I Micenei in Italia: Taranto, Museo nazionale, Ottobre 1967. Arti Grafiche Nunzio Schena, 1967.

https://www.zotero.org/groups/2533/items/DQKE67B2

@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal

New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero bibliographic library: Cic. Phil. 2 (trans. Yonge; Perseus)

Yonge, Charles Duke, trans. “The Second Speech of M. T. Cicero against Marcus Antonius. Called Also the Second Philippic.” In The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, by Marcus Tullius Cicero, 4 vols. Bohn’s Classical Library. G. Bell, 1894. http://data.perseus.org/texts/urn:cts:latinLit:phi0474.phi035.perseus-eng1.

https://www.zotero.org/groups/2533/items/ACL79HYW

@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal

New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero bibliographic library: Adams 2026

Adams, Sophia, Jamie Armstrong, Alex Bayliss, Tom Moore, and Emily Williams. “Vehicles of Change: Two Exceptional Deposits of Destroyed Chariots or Wagons from Late Iron Age Britain.” Antiquity 100, no. 411 (2026): 673–93. https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2026.10311.

https://www.zotero.org/groups/2533/items/LURUXDJ3

I had a thoroughly enjoyable three days of hosting UX London this week and met such lovely people at the event—thank you to everyone who came!

I had a thoroughly enjoyable three days of hosting UX London this week and met such lovely people at the event—thank you to everyone who came!

🌻 conversations on culture in the AI age

my Substack talk and conversation with Benjamín Labatut

Stradivarius And City Planning

Writing of lasting value

Are you standard.site?

Standard.site provides shared AT Protocol lexicons. Atproto is just spicy JSON and asymmetric cryptography. I’ve tried to explain atproto in more detail before. Bluesky has always supported a few open graph meta tags which I use to generate images for blog posts. […]

Sir Demis Hassabis vs Sir Demis Hassabis

Two AI Timelines

The House Rebukes Trump On Ukraine, Senate Rs Shower ICE With Love And Money, The Capital Is Drowning In Corruption

Our new subscription sale and drive got off to a great start yesterday. Welcome new subscribers!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

@Seth Erickson's Mastodon feed

RE: https://chaos.social/@hister/116682758961983472

Such a cool project and feature

@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal

Export Updates 2026-06-05:

Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places

3 new and 50 updated places.

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

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

"main" branch:

4a852a5e - updated json

no change: rdf/ttl

872cd749 - updated gis package

b1b6d4b3 - updated data quality

cd38abdb - updated bibliography

70f4cddc - updated indexes

59507836 - updated sidebar

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

bd0c40ed - updated geojson and names index

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

0cb64374 - updated pleiades wikidata

[$] Moving beyond fork() + exec()

Since the earliest days of Unix, two of the core process-oriented system calls have been fork(), which creates a child process as a copy of the parent, and exec(), which runs a new program in the place of the current one. In Linux kernels, those system calls are better known asclone() and execve(), but the core functionality remains the same. While there is elegance to this process-creation model, there are shortcomings as well. A recent proposal from Li Chen to add "spawn templates" to the kernel will not be accepted in its current form, but it may point the way toward a new process-creation primitive in the future.

I tested every IP KVM in my Homelab

Since the PiKVM came out in 2017, there's been an explosion of IP KVMs. I've tested almost every one. But what are they good for?

You can use Remote Desktop, Screen Sharing, or VNC to remote control a computer from anywhere on a LAN. And if you don't have a private VPN, you could use RealVNC, Raspberry Pi Connect, or wire up Tailscale or Pangolin for fully remote access. Those solutions are great, and so is SSH if you don't need a full desktop.

Detection Is Not a Strategy

Every few weeks, someone announces a tool that detects AI hallucinations. A startup, a research lab, a hyperscaler bolting a “trust layer” onto its chatbot. The release uses the word “guardrails.” Everyone nods. Another brick in the road to safe, reliable AI. I want to argue that we are cheering for the wrong thing — that hallucination detection, however clever, cannot be the strategy. It can be a backstop. It can be a monitor. It cannot be the plan. And the reason is older than computing. Start with the trap at the center of the whole idea. To catch a hallucination, your detector has to know the right answer. Sit with what that means. The original model produced a confident falsehood because it did not […]

The post Detection Is Not a Strategy first appeared on I, Cringely.

Digital Branding

Web Design

Marketing

AI Worm

Researchers have prototyped an AI-powered internet worm.

The coolest thing about the prototype is that it carries its own LLM with it, and runs it on computers that have been broken into.

This is the closest to John Brunner’s original 1975 conception of a computer worm that I’ve seen.

Josh Weil on the Necessity of Writing What Scares You

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. Here are my terrors: First, monsters. Mostly the deep ocean variety, unfathomable, unseeable, likely lurking beneath me as I swim (okay, also in ponds: so murky!). Though the earliest kind

SDSA TV Awards Nominations: ‘Euphoria,’ ‘Stranger Things,’ ‘Pluribus,’ ‘Bridgerton,’ ‘Outlander,’ ‘SNL’ & More

The Set Decorators Society of America is out with the nominees for its 2025-26 SDSA Awards for Television, which recognizes a number of series that wrapped in recent months. The list includes such shows as Euphoria, Stranger Things, Hacks, Outlander, The Boys, For All Mankind and The Neighborhood. See all of the nominations below. Covering […]

Kino Lorber Acquires Maya Annik Bedward’s Doc ‘Black Zombie’

EXCLUSIVE: Kino Lorber has acquired U.S. distribution rights to Maya Annik Bedward’s documentary Black Zombie, which debuted at the 2026 SXSW Film Festival.  The doc traces the origin and evolution of zombies from Haitian spiritual traditions to fixtures of Hollywood horror, examining the cinematic and historical context and reclaiming their deeper cultural significance as powerful […]

U.S. Added 127,000 Jobs In May, Beating Expectations; Movie And Music Employment Falls

The U.S. added 172,000 jobs in May, beating expectations, as the unemployment rate remained unchanged at 4.3%. With gains in leisure and hospitality, health care and local government, the job situation again showed signs of improvement after a lackluster year in 2025. But the gains were not felt across industries. Jobs in movies and music […]

Ruby's Bundler adds a cooldown feature

Version
4.0.13 of Ruby's Bundler package-manager has added
dependency cooldowns in order to help mitigate the effect of supply-chain attacks:

Most supply-chain attacks against RubyGems exploit a narrow window: an account is compromised, a malicious version ships, and anybundle install in the minutes that follow resolves straight to it. Bundler 4.0.13 introduces cooldown, a time-based filter that refuses to resolve to a version until it has been public for at least N days. Releases too new to have been scrutinized are passed over in favor of ones that have aged past the window.

The feature was designed in
the open, drawing on how
other ecosystems approach the same problem. It is opt-in, and complements rather than replaces existing defenses like mandatory 2FA and trusted publishing.

LWN covered dependency cooldowns in April, and the takeover of RubyGems and
Bundler in October 2025.

Security updates for Friday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel), Debian (dovecot, exim4, frr, and haveged), Fedora (cockpit, freeipa, jpegxl, libre, nextcloud, perl-Cpanel-JSON-XS, perl-Crypt-Argon2, perl-Dist-Build, perl-ExtUtils-Builder, perl-ExtUtils-Builder-Compiler, perl-HTTP-Tiny, perl-libwww-perl, python-starlette, rubygem-yard, rust-sequoia-cert-store, rust-sequoia-chameleon-gnupg, rust-sequoia-octopus-librnp, rust-sequoia-sop, rust-sequoia-sq, rust-sequoia-wot, samba, and transmission), Red Hat (image-builder), Slackware (dnsmasq and libinput), SUSE (evince, glibc, google-guest-agent, hplip, ignition, LibVNCServer, libzypp, libsolv, python-Pillow, salt, thunderbird, and vim), and Ubuntu (apache2, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.15, linux-aws-fips, linux-fips, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.15, linux-gcp-fips, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-hwe-5.15, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.15, linux-intel-iot-realtime, linux-intel-iotg, linux-kvm, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-tegra, linux-nvidia-tegra-5.15, linux-nvidia-tegra-igx, linux-oracle, linux-raspi, linux-realtime, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-fips, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-azure-fips, linux-bluefield, linux-fips, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-gcp-fips, linux-iot, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, linux, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-azure-fips, linux-fips, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-gcp-fips, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-aws-5.4, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-azure-fips, linux-fips, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-5.4, nano, postfix, robocode, tomcat6, tomcat7, and yard).

Peppe’s ghost LiDAR scanner

This LiDAR sensor's maker thinks that its 3D-printed shell evokes a "jumbo-sized juice container or Ghostbusters gizmo"

The post Peppe’s ghost LiDAR scanner appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

‘That Thrifting Show With Lara Spencer’ Renewed For Season 2 At Hulu & Freeform

EXCLUSIVE: That Thrifting Show with Lara Spencer has been renewed for a second season on Hulu and Freeform. The unscripted competition series, from executive producer and host Spencer, will return in 2027. Season 1, which premiered in March, is currently streaming. In the competition series, vintage design expert Spencer presents two designer duos with identical rooms. With just 48 hours and a […]

International Insider: Reality TV Summit UK; Netflix’s Euro Rights Warning; ‘Buena Vista’ Interview

Good afternoon Insiders, happy Friday and welcome back to the Insider. Max Goldbart here steering you through. Sign up here. Reality TV Summit UK @ SXSW London The reality of it all: There were all sorts of headlines emerging from Deadline’s first Reality TV Summit UK, which was held on Tuesday at the Tab Church […]

The Document Foundation Releases LibreOffice 26.2.4

Berlin, 5 June 2026 – The Document Foundation today announced the release of LibreOffice 26.2.4, the fourth 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

Next Wave Of European Showrunners Revealed

EXCLUSIVE: As Europe pushes for more showrunners, a dozen writers from across the continent have been selected for an EU-backed program headed by some big names from Borgen, Doctor Who and Neumatt. The European Showrunner Programme is for experienced series writers who want to make the jump to showrunner. It is overseen by Jeppe Gjervig […]

Kanya King Dies: Founder Of The UK’s MOBO Awards Was 57

Kanya King, the founder of the UK’s popular Music of Black Origin awards show, colloquially known as the MOBOs, has died. She was 57.  King’s death was announced this morning by the MOBO Organisation with a post on Instagram. The statement said King died on June 3rd after a “courageous and characteristically determined battle with […]

Reduced schedule for paternity leave

Article frequency will drop to 1x a week for 6-8 weeks, but our June and July polls will come out as normal!

Weekly Roundup: June 5

Richard Joyce assesses Mark Carney's speech at Davos, while Sarah Schindler and Kellen Zale discuss the abundance agenda's anti-tenancy blindspot. Plus, Tanzil Chowdhury on legislative supremacy in Great Britain, Aslı Bâli on the emerging world order, Sandeep Vaheesan and Claire Kelloway on the consolidation of the US food system, some straight facts about millionaire tax migration in New York, and the inaugural issue of Phenomenal World.

Pernel Media Takes ‘Rise And Fall Of’ Franchise To Rome

EXCLUSIVE: Pernel Media has added to its Rise and Fall of franchise by exploring one of the greatest empires of all, Rome. The popular doc series will tackle the epic 1,200 year empire in a single, continuous narrative, from the founding kings to the fall of the west in 476 AD. The series is built […]

HBO’s ‘Harry Potter’ Series Casting Colin Creevey For Season 2

EXCLUSIVE: Deadline brought you news last month that HBO was recasting Ginny Weasley for Season 2 of the Harry Potter series. Now, we hear that another desirable role is up for grabs in the eagerly anticipated TV show. Sources said Harry Potter casting directors Lucy Bevan and Emily Brockmann are out to agents as they […]

On Platner, and Me

I think it is a mistake to bet against Maine showing up for one of its own, and I think, if Graham Platner does not have any worse skeletons in the closet, he will win the primary next week despite his Democratic 78-year-old opponent Janet Mills’ last-minute efforts to inject uncertainty into the race in the wake of the latest round of the“Platner did dumb shit on the internet,” saga.

America, the Inessential Nation

It turns out that Trump doesn’t have the cards

Lit Hub Daily: June 5, 2026

You’ve heard of Mary Shelley, but what about her half-sister, Fanny Imlay? | Lit Hub Biography Steven W. Thrasher considers Zohran Mamdani’s new sheriff, Edwin Raymond, and the many manifestations of copaganda. | Lit Hub Politics Amazon union-leader Chris Smalls

What does government oppression really look like?

You don't have to look far.

Out From the Shadows: On Rediscovering Mary Shelley’s Half-Sister, Fanny Imlay

It is an interesting challenge to write about someone who has been overlooked, who is overshadowed by more vibrant characters. If they are at first glance unexceptional, is that to say dull or uninteresting? Such overshadowing might be recognized as

What Should You Read Next? Here Are the Best Reviewed Books of the Week

Maggie O’Farrell’s Land, Thomas W. Laqueur’s The Dog’s Gaze, and Ann Patchett’s Whistler 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. Land by Maggie O’Farrell (Knopf) 14 Rave • 1

Memoirs of a Black Cop: Reading Zohran Mamdani’s Newly Appointed Sheriff, Edwin Raymond

Last week, on May 29, New York City Mayor Mamdani fired New York Sheriff Anthony Miranda and appointed Edwin Raymond as his replacement. This caught my eye for a few reasons, the first being that Raymond is the author of

P.C. Verrone Recommends Essential Texts of Afro-Surrealism

I was introduced to the term “Afro-Surrealism” through an interview in which Phillip B. Williams called it his preferred way to describe his novel Ours. The phrase was coined by Amiri Baraka in 1974 and expanded upon by D. Scott

“The Figure a Poem Makes,” a Poem by Donna Masini

It’s a slow start. Notice the way she’s holding the pen. Four-­beat line to open, leaning blue, and—­synesthesia—­right at the jump. If she can shift to the conditional—­yes! She lands clean on an accented syllable. Watch her attempt this medial

On the Workplace Accident That Changed Amazon Union-Leader Chris Smalls’s Life

My mother didn’t have the budget for me to compete with the kids who had Jordans or AF1s or who rocked any of the more expensive brands. This was something I had hard feelings about when I was younger. Maybe

How the Politics of Powerlessness Prevents Real Change

We are living in a time of massive upheaval—of grave crisis and also enormous opportunity. The world is transforming at a breakneck pace and will continue to change dramatically in our lifetime. The question is only in which directions, in

Little Wonder

One Tuesday morning, as Song unlocked the door, River raced past her and shouted, “What is that?” “It’s called a piano,” she said, examining the latest acquisition of Apartment 14A. “It makes music—the music we’re always listening to.” She had

BBC Studios Sends Karl Warner To L.A. For Global Formats Role

BBC Studios has forged a newly-created global formats role for Karl Warner in L.A. Warner is relocating to the U.S. and being tasked with “identifying, partnering with, and scaling the next generation of creator led IP for global television formats” in an EVP, Global Creator Partnerships & Creative Development post, for which he will report […]

Why the Hell Is Gas So Expensive in California?

Hint: It's not taxes or environmental fees

China’s Damai Entertainment Sets International Release For $223M Surprise Hit ‘Dear You’

Damai Entertainment, the Chinese film company previously known as Alibaba Pictures, has revealed the international rollout plans for surprise $223M hit Dear You, starting with Hong Kong and other Chinese-speaking territories later this month.  The relatively small drama, released on April 30, has surprised the local industry by becoming the second-highest grossing film of the […]

BBC ‘Newsnight’ Presenter Victoria Derbyshire Faced Workplace Conduct Investigation

EXCLUSIVE: Victoria Derbyshire, one of the BBC’s most prominent news presenters, was the subject of a workplace conduct investigation over her interactions with multiple colleagues. Deadline understands that the BAFTA-winning Newsnight host faced a number of complaints following the completion of the BBC’s 2025 workplace culture review, which encouraged staff to call out alleged misconduct.  […]

June 4, 2026

The wheels are wobbling on the Trump administration bus.

Silicon Valley’s Biggest Payday. Yet!

The SpaceX cap table, what it is worth, and what happens next. On June 12, a great many people become extraordinarily wealthy. Not one of them can sell a share until December — with one exception: up to five percent of the IPO shares are reserved for employees and executive-selected participants at the $135 offering …

Tubes

Naturally Washington Post: Human Ninja Turtles keep emerging from New York City manhole covers. Circling the drains BBC will be shutting off its Radio 4 service at 198 kHz longwave (LW) on 27 June. Being old in age and fashion, I travel with a radio and have always loved listening on the LW band, especially to […]

341: Freedom. Pancreatic cancer. Alligator Alcatraz. Australian batteries.

I actually started crying in clinic.

No need to panic about Anthropic’s new blog

The twitterverse is all verklempt with Anthropic’s latest blog.

Annihilating both time and space: What the telegraph gave email

The future was telegraphed.

Friday 5 June, 2026

England’s Green and Pleasant Land Impending showers included. Quote of the Day ”If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.” Derek Bok (President of Harvard 1971-91) Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Eric Whitacre | Sleep | Voces8 Link … Continue reading →

Fri, 1145am ET - Hopium Founding Members Most Fridays Get Together

Note new time just for this week

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Trump plans to attend Game 3 of NBA Finals at Madison Square Garden.

Meet State Auditor Rob Sand, Our Impressive Candidate Running For Governor Of Iowa

In Iowa Democrats now have a fighting chance to retake the Governor's mansion, a US Senate seat, and 3 US house seats. It's become one of our most important battleground states this cycle

Seeking God in Science part 9: Creating Information

It might appear that I have been going to some pretty extreme lengths to belabor the obvious: we live in a world populated by material objects made of atoms.  Atoms exist in particular places at particular times and move around according to laws.  Collections of atoms are called systems and the positions of atoms within a system are called states.  Correlations between states are

Dave Airlie on Linux Kernel Maintenance (SE Radio)

The Software Engineering Radio podcast has put up an
interview with graphics maintainer Dave Airlie. Much of what is in there will not be news to LWN readers, but it is an interesting overview of the life of a large-subsystem maintainer.

I was talking to a few of the Rust people, and I thought: these are very young people, these are a group of people in their 20s, maybe 30s, they are a younger cohort of developers than the people I am normally used to dealing with. I thought there was maybe a good way we could bring these groups together. I think that having young people coming into the kernel using Rust is valuable... So I thought that I should be supportive of bringing Rust into the kernel.

Tick, Tick, Boom

Paramount delivers “60 Minutes” to Donald Trump on a gold platter

Co-Existence and the End of Co-Intelligence

Also: how pitch a book to an AI!

You’re About To Own Part Of SpaceX, Like It Or Not

Tens of millions of us are about to be forced by an alien onto his spacecraft.

Thursday session

Thursday session

Rogue Scholar Newsletter May 2026

This is the May 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

@Dave Winer's linkblog

The hood is coming off MAGA.

Meet Fiona and Abby

Since it’s coming up to their “gotcha” anniversaries I would like to introduce you to Fiona (top) and Abby (below). After we lost our beloved Minpin, we kept an eye out for other Miniature Pinschers available for adoption, and Joanne spotted Fiona at Beyond Rescue. When we met her in person she was very anxious, […]

The Extraordinary Importance of Negative Feedback

Why Trump keeps f*cking up

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

The .sig of a friend back in 2000 or so used to be “in the canvas of life, incompetence is my brush” and I can often relate to it.

Knowing What You Don’t Know

Why the next real breakthrough in AI isn’t a bigger brain — it’s a machine that can admit ignorance. A reader caught me out. Last column I argued that the great AI buildout — the hundreds of billions pouring into data centers and the GPUs that fill them — is aimed at the wrong layer. We are spending as if the bottleneck were the size of the model’s brain, when the real bottleneck is getting the right information in front of it. Cheap retrieval, I said, not expensive cognition. A reader replied, pointing out the name Jevons. In 1865, a young English economist named William Stanley Jevons noticed something strange about coal. As steam engines got more efficient — as they wrung more work out […]

The post Knowing What You Don’t Know first appeared on I, Cringely.

Digital Branding

Web Design

Marketing

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

I had an argument with @josephhill over this screenshot. I said “let’s remove it, I can’t tell the difference”. He said “I picked this one because the difference is so clear”

You be the judge:

WWDC 2026 Preview

Joe Rossignol: Apple’s annual developers conference WWDC returns for 2026 next week, and the company has teased the event with a new “All systems glow” tagline. Clarko: “We’re keeping Liquid Glass, you weiners” Joe Rossignol: Apple has shared a wallpaper, playlist, and a “Get Ready” video ahead of the event. Basic Apple Guy: I’ve been […]

Xogot for Mac Beta

Miguel de Icaza and Joseph Hill (tweet): Xogot was born as a native user interface shell on top of the Godot game engine for iPad devices, and later iPhone devices. […] Because Xogot’s user interface was written in SwiftUI, and because we had already committed to Apple’s design system, bringing Xogot to macOS felt like […]

Where Did SwiftUI Leave You Hanging?

Keren R. Bell: This is a call to join the topic-of-the-month for the Swift Blog Carnival! […] What do you LOVE about SwiftUI? What boggles your mind about it? David Bureš: .sheet is STILL not animatable (a feature since the first OSX release) […] Toolbar item placement is completely broken. […] .searchable is a complete […]

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

Xogot on iPad is now powered by Godot 4.6, and to celebrate we added a bunch of new samples and tutorials.

Details: https://blog.xogot.com/xogot-1-6-powered-by-godot-4-6-with-new-videos-tutorials-and-starter-kits/

Seattle Xcoders Presentation by Justin Miller Tonight

I’m psyched for @incanus Justin Miller’s presentation tonight at Xcoders on “Swift Result Builders Case Study: Parsing.” I like writing parsers, and I’m very curious about Swift result builders. Should be a good one!

See this post on the Xcoders blog for more details about the talk and for when and where to be.

[$] Splicing out vmsplice()

The splice() and vmsplice() system calls are meant to improve performance for certain data-movement tasks by minimizing (or avoiding altogether) system calls and the copying of data. They also have a long history of security problems. The recent flood of LLM-discovered vulnerabilities has drawn attention, once again, tosplice() and vmsplice(); as a result, they may end up being removed altogether.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Albania freezes assets in Kushner resort corruption probe.

Café Chairel: el dolor transformado en arte

Dirección: Fernando Barreda Luna. Guion: Fernando Barreda Luna. Elenco: Mauricio Isaac, Tessa Ía. País: México. Más información de la película: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt31062002/ El legendario vocalista de Linkin Park, Chester Bennington, pasó gran parte de su vida luchando contra los fantasmas del abuso, la soledad y la depresión asfixiante. Su voz no era producto de una técnica […]

La entrada Café Chairel: el dolor transformado en arte se publicó primero en Palomita de maíz.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Trump plan to test AI models has a problem—US security teams were gutted by DOGE. (They'll probably just review it as they would review CBS or CNN news, if it says shit about Trump, they'll make them change it.)

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

Having fun rolling stuff out on Elon Musk's X.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

John Bolton expected to plead guilty in classified documents case.

Caltech Weekly - June 4: Engineers Without Borders; Origin of Multicellular Life

Caltech Weekly - June 4: Engineers Without Borders; Origin of Multicellular LifeView this email in your browser

Thursday, June 4, 2026

Caltech Engineers Without Borders Chapter Implements Revitalized Water Supply System in Ecuadorian Village

A new protected collection area and a replaced pipeline will help ensure access to clean drinking water in Tandacato.

Caltech Researchers Propose a New Origin Story for Multicellular Life

In a new Perspective paper appearing in the journal Nature Biotechnology, Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, the Bren Professor of Biology and Biological Engineering, and collaborator Qi Chen of the University of Utah ask one of biology's oldest questions in a new way.

Science-Driven Plays Put Reason and Emotion on Display

This year's Mach 33 festival presented six evocative new plays.

Credibility in an Era of Chaos

Political scientist Arthur Lupia (PhD '91) explored how to rebuild trust between universities and society at a May lecture hosted by the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences.

"Table tennis has taught me a lot about discipline and how to adjust my mindset and control how I feel and perform. It gives me a lot of courage to try things that may seem out of my comfort zone or like I have to put in a lot of effort, because I've already done something harder. For example, I wasn't scared at all to come to Caltech, and it's been great."

Amber Liu (first-year undergraduate student), who grew up in Atlanta, has played table tennis since age 7. She has competed in dozens of tournaments, and, at age 15, earned a spot on the US team that competed in the 2024 World Team Table Tennis Championships in South Korea, where she won the only match she played in. As a member of the Caltech Table Tennis Club, Liu helped the team win the 2025 National Collegiate Table Tennis Association tournament. She is exploring applied and computational mathematics as a possible major.

This Week's Other Top Stories

Brian Stoltz Wins Tolman Award in Chemistry

Gates Family Legacy Spans Generations in Championing Caltech's Entrepreneurial Spirit

A $1 Million Commitment from the W. M. Keck Foundation Fills Funding Gap

In Case You Missed It

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

Three Minute Thesis 2026

This competition challenges Caltech graduate students to explain their research in an engaging and clear three-minute talk.

Did You Know?

More than a year after the 2025 Los Angeles fires, Caltech labs are pressing forward with research projects to provide answers in service of public health and safety. Through investigations such as testing for heavy metal contamination, monitoring air quality, and assessing the burn area's erosion hazards, Institute scientists immediately launched into action in the days and weeks following the fires. Sea level data from the Sentinel 6 satellite shows that a swell of warm water hundreds of miles wide has arrived in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of South America, a sign that El Niño will likely emerge later in the year. JPL scientists are monitoring the developing El Niño, which can have dramatic effects on weather across the hemisphere. 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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Why You Hide Your Cult Past From the People You Love

The silence could be the thing holding you back from real intimacy

Why Women Are Rewriting the Rules of the Economy

Misty Heggeness doesn’t just critique the economy—she reframes it.

Metaverse And Samurai

Writing of lasting value

A Newsletter of Humorous Writing #446

For May 27-June 2, 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. Like all right-minded New Yorkers, we were watching the Knicks last night, and while we were elated that they won, there’s one thing we have to say: Wow, all these guys are really tall! (Especially that one guy, wow!)

What We Enjoyed This Week

I’m Sorry, Sweetie, You Can’t Have a Cell Phone Because I Don’t Know How to Add You to Grandma’s Family Plan by Emily Bressler (McSweeney’s) This is a very funny way to explore a very particular modern problem. You have to imagine that people have actually had some real conversations along these lines (that’s what makes the premise, and the observation it’s based on, so compelling, after all), but Emily finds some very clever ways to heighten beyond reality.

The Only Opening Songs on an Album by Caleb Coy (McSweeney’s) An impressively thorough taxonomy. Caleb doesn’t mention any specific songs by name, but each type of song he lists is instantly recognizable. There’s a Rorschach test element to this piece that’s part of the fun: What’s the first song that comes to mind when you read, “Honestly, this is the only track worth listening to, but it’s the pre-digital age, and we just forced you to buy a whole album.”

‘Spy Hard’ Revisited: An Origin Story by Keith Phipps (The Reveal) This isn’t a short humor piece (though it does end on a really funny kicker) but anyone interested in the early days of The Onion and The AV Club will want to check this one out. It’s a wonderful evocation of what those publications were like, and what Madison, Wisconsin was like, in that era.

-- ADS --

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Maeve Dunigan's 'Read This To Look Cool,' a humorous essay collection that Stylist magazine calls "a bible for overthinkers," is OUT NOW wherever books are sold! Both cringe-inducing and uproarious, 'Read This To Look Cool' is a deeply relatable meditation on the absurdity inherent in the constant performance of ourselves, offering a fresh perspective on self-love and the true meaning of cool. It’s a book that says “I see you” and also “Don’t look at me, though, my hair is doing something weird.”

Order here or from your local bookstore!

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Award-winning dark comedy movie Honeyjoon won $1 million (!) and is coming to theaters June 2026. The movie opens in NYC on June 10 at IFC, with Q&A June 10 & 11. A smart, sexy, laugh-out-loud emotional rollercoaster... by local writer-director Lilian T. Mehrel. Sign up here for more screenings, tickets, and updates. Hope to see you there!

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

An Old Favorite

Trying to Understand the Eagles by Robert Christgau (Newsday) There’s some truly exceptional hating going on in this piece from June 1972:

“Another thing that interests me about the Eagles is that I hate them. ‘Hate’ is the kind of up-tight word that automatically excludes one from polite posthippie circles, a good reason to use it, but it is also meant to convey an anguish that is very intense, yet difficult to pinpoint. Do I hate music that has been giving me pleasure all weekend, made by four human beings I've never met? Yeah, I think so. Listening to the Eagles has left me feeling alienated from things I used to love.”

There’s a lot to like about this paragraph (and the whole article), but the shift from the extremely confident tone to “Yeah, I think so” is particularly funny, as are the rhythms of that first sentence. Hat tip to Noel Murray for putting this one on Luke’s radar.

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.

Updates From Your Editors and Friends of the Newsletter

Luke’s got a single-session short humor workshop coming up on June 18th! In it, we’ll do some fun exercises to explore different types of forms and narration in humor writing. He’s also got an advanced workshop that’s going to be running on Friday afternoons in July.

And if you came out to see James’s talk at Cree Myle’s book salon last night, thanks! It was a blast to talk The Dispossessed, unions, Gramsci, Ishi, relationships as federative, Tribe Called Quest, and more.

Finally, Luke’s wife Marina is writing a craft book about sketch comedy that’s going to be published by Bloomsbury in 2028! If you like this newsletter and our analysis of short humor, you will also definitely like this book. Sign up for updates here.

One step forward, two steps back on CA age bill (EFF Deeplinks Blog)

The EFF has a blog
post looking at a new bill in California that would exempt open-source operating systems from the Digital Age Assurance Act passed last year, but has problems of its own:

While the open source exemption, if passed, would improve the law, the remaining amendments proposed by AB 1856 would require all web browsers and websites to request and collect users' ages. This is an expansion of last year's AB 1043's age-bracketing system that compounds its constitutional harms to users' speech, privacy, and security.

[...] EFF understands this amendment to exempt open-source operating systems from the requirement to collect and transmit users' age-bracket data. That is a definite win for open-source developers. The bill is narrower now than it was before, and lawmakers clearly responded to concerns raised by EFF and the broader open-source community.

Some important questions still remain—for example, it is unclear how the law would apply when an open-source operating system is incorporated into a commercial product or service. And, given the structure of where the exemption is placed under the "operating system provider" definition, lawmakers could stand to clarify that the exemption applies to open-source operating systems and applications.

LWN covered California's age-attestation law in March.

Trump Is In A Period Of Profound Political Decline, Democrats Are Fielding Strong Candidates Across The Country (New Video, Written Analysis)

The House rebuked Trump on both Iran and Ukraine yesterday. It was another day of remarkable losses for our ailing, addled, failure-in-chief....

@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal

Since Monday, 1 June 2026 the #PleiadesGazetteer editorial college has published 8 new and 142 updated place resources, reflecting the work of 8 people. The usual Monday blog post will summarize the full preceding two weeks' worth of such work, but meantime, here's a #SneakPeek at a new place resource with an unusual path into Pleiades. Jeffrey Becker ( @serviliusahala ) noticed a short prose discussion in the "Introduction" to Barrington Atlas Map 46 ("Bruttii") in the first volume of the BAtlas Directory: "Lenormant (1881 II, 15) records traces of ancient silver workings at Verzino on a tributary of the R. Neto six miles north‑west of Zinga ..." but no corresponding entry in the associated "Names" table. Because of that omission, no corresponding entry in Pleiades was created during the original programmatic ingest. Jeff has filled the gap, crediting the original compilers: https://pleiades.stoa.org/places/636943626

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

What Is Net Metering?

Here are three things you need to know about how net metering works.

The post What Is Net Metering? appeared first on Conservation Law Foundation.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

What it felt like to be a lifetime Knicks fan watching Game 1 of the NBA Finals.

Paramount And UFC Expand Rights Deal To Canada Beginning In 2027

Paramount and the UFC, which kicked off a splashy rights deal last January, have agreed to expand their partnership to Canada. The expansion covers 13 UFC “numbered events,” which have traditionally been known as pay-per-views. Under the Paramount deal, UFC action is included for all subscribers to Paramount+, with no extra charge. typically feature championship […]

Why Conflict Feels Constant Now

The post Why Conflict Feels Constant Now appeared first on NOEMA.

2026-2027 DRC Fellows Application

The Digital Rhetoric Collaborative invites graduate students to apply for our 2026-2027 fellowship!  Digital Rhetoric Collaborative (DRC) Graduate Fellows are graduate students currently doing research in areas of digital rhetoric who seek professional development experience in online publishing with a major university press and a website that serves the community of Computers and Writing. Fellows [...]

Source

Security updates for Thursday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 10.0, compat-openssl10, compat-openssl11, delve, expat, httpd:2.4, libexif, mod_http2, openssl, ruby4.0, samba, thunderbird, unbound, and vim), Debian (ceph and sudo), Fedora (libsoup3, pie, roundcubemail, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Mageia (lxc), Oracle (expat, gnutls, kernel, php:8.2, thunderbird, and uek-kernel), Slackware (httpd, net, proftpd, tigervnc, and xorg), SUSE (apache-sshd, apptainer, atril, bind, busybox, cloudflared, evolution-data-server, golang-github-prometheus-prometheus, golang-github-v2fly-v2ray-core, grafana, helm, kernel, libgphoto2-6, libjxl-devel, libsoup, libsoup-2_4-1, libsoup-3_0-0, memcached, ovmf, python-cairosvg, python-flask, python-pip, python-pymupdf, python-pyOpenSSL, python-urllib3, python-urllib3_1, python3-pyOpenSSL, restic, rsync, salt, sdbootutil, tor, tree-sitter, vorbis-tools, and yq), and Ubuntu (exim4, frr, gst-plugins-base1.0, libtemplate-perl, libwww-perl, mysql-8.0, nginx, python-pip, python-urllib3, and twisted).

The Knicks in the Finals

I didn't write about the Knicks prior to last night's game because I had no idea what to write.

The Knicks in the Finals is something I had a hard time understanding, even thinking about. To me the Knicks are soulful losers. They're like once-future hall-of-famer Carmelo Anthony surrounded by people who shouldn't even be in the NBA, but otherwise are lovely individuals. When they asked Melo what his goal was he said it was to win a championship, but the reporters never followed up with the obvious question -- "Really?" They did make the playoffs, three times, in the Age of Melo, and they made it to the second round one of those three seasons, but that was it as far as Melo's championship aspirations went. He should've been on one of LeBron's teams, like JR Smith and Iman Shumpert, both Knicks alumni in the Melo period, who were fine players and did win with LeBron at Cleveland.

Going into the game last night I thought maybe the pundits were right, that the real NBA Finals was the previous round between the San Antonios and the Oklahoma Cities. But last night that was debunked. At what point did I realize this? It wasn't until the game was over, ABC announcer Mike Breen said at the exact moment the game was over "..their 12-game win streak" which revealed that I had little faith the streak would be preserved. I thought 11 was pretty great, but 12? Until that exact moment -- unthinkable.

In the first part of the game when San Antonio looked like they might rout the poor unprepared Knicks, I thought okay, but couldn't we just concede so we don't have to watch? In that moment I appreciated what the Clevelands must have been feeling as they shrunk to nothing faced with the Knicks onslaught? How about if we all go home now at some point they must all have been thinking.

I'm a Mets fan first, and I bring the Mets philosophy to every sport, including the NBA and software. I'm here for the game. Sure I love it when we win, but if the Knicks went down in the final test, I'd still be a happy camper. Look they made it to the freaking Finals! Some Mets fans say the team slogan is You Gotta Believe. I say Wait Till Next Year! Same for the Knicks. Same for every software product I make that no one bothers to try out.

This Knicks team is classic. Every one of their players would be a star on any other team, including the bench players. Some of them whose contracts expire at the end of the series will certainly go to other teams. But what a thrill to have this group all on the same team and that team is my lovely Knicks.

Last night's game was a lesson, you should always be open to the possibility of winning because sometimes you do.

PS: My friend Dave Carlick sent me a text overnight: "I watch the Knicks rooting for you. How tribal is that?" I had a longish reply. "I wrote a piece this morning after reading this comment, and of course I am rooting for the Knicks in some sense, but a win here is about more than winning -- it's a transformation. I've heard other people say this and the Knicks are us -- in a city that has disagreements about everything the only thing everyone is on board with are the Knicks. We're really comfortable with the Knicks as losers, and this has already become an unequivocal change. It's a whole new situation. Unless something really weird happens now, the Knicks will be great next year too, and the year after. So it's like witnessing a moon landing Dave. Underneath that of course I'm rooting for success, the same way we rooted for it for the initial moon landing in 1969."

Kevin Young has won the 2026 Griffin Poetry Prize.

Last night, at an event in Toronto, the Griffin Poetry Prize—the world’s largest international prize for a single book of poetry published in English—announced its 2026 winner: Kevin Young’s Night Watch. Judges Andrea Cote, Luke Hathaway, and Major Jackson chose Night Watch from a

Hugh Laurie Returning To John Le Carré Universe With Mystery Role In ‘Legacy Of Spies’

EXCLUSIVE: Hugh Laurie is presumably a fan of the works of John le Carré. The Night Manager star has landed a mystery role in his second le Carré adaptation, the BBC and MGM+’s Legacy of Spies, Deadline can reveal. We understand filming is currently taking place and Laurie’s role will be revealed soon. Legacy of […]

History Channel And The Obamas’ Higher Ground Debut Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Reconstruction’ Podcast On Audible

The History Channel’s Reconstruction: The Unfinished Promise, a collaboration with Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions and Malcolm Gladwell’s Pushkin Industries, is debuting on Thursday on Audible, with plans for release on all podcast platforms from June 18 to July 16. Gladwell hosts the podcast series, and Barack Obama provides commentary, as it examines […]

@IIIF Mastodon feed

We're indebted to the cities of Amsterdam, Leiden, and The Hague for welcoming our folks into their streets, museums, institutions, and many, many pubs.

We're saying goodbye for now, but are already looking forward to meeting again at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in 2027!

‘Scary Movie’ Review: The Wayans Return After 25 Years And The Jokes Feel Every Bit That Old

With the boom in horror movies bigger than ever it seems only natural Paramount and Miramax would try to revive the money-printing Scary Movie franchise last seen in 2013 with the fifth installment and having collectively grossed nearly $900 million worldwide over five films. With Paramount riding high on Scream and Smile franchises, not to […]

@IIIF Mastodon feed

The conference doesn't happen without the careful discernment of our program committee and the on-the-ground planning of our local host committee. We're grateful for the individuals who spend the time to shape the conference in this way.

@IIIF Mastodon feed

Our sponsors are all valued and active members of the #IIIF ecosystem, who went above and beyond to make the conference spectacular and accessible, including our Platinum Sponsor, Kakadu Software; Welcome Drinks sponsor, @4Science; Gold Sponsor, Digirati; Scholarship Sponsorship, @oclc; Our Silver Sponsors, Q42, FromthePage, and Cogapp; our Bronze Sponsor, @digitalscholar; and our Consortium champions, Wellcome Collection, @stanfordlibs, and Yale.

@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal

Export Updates 2026-06-04:

Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places

59 updated places.

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

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

"main" branch:

2eedb88e - updated json

no change: rdf/ttl

4179810a - updated gis package

1261867a - updated data quality

7a5bbc53 - updated bibliography

7199a68f - updated indexes

f144cf03 - updated sidebar

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

e914fb40 - updated geojson and names index

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

a54a92ff - updated pleiades wikidata

@IIIF Mastodon feed

Our partner, the @NetwerkDigitaalErfgoed helped us coordinate a huge number of sites and local partners including:

@kbnationalebibliotheek, @na_archief, @universiteitleiden, @Naturalis, Leidse Lente, Toilhuistuin, and Scheltema.

@IIIF Mastodon feed

This year's #IIIF conference had over 250 attendees from around the entire globe. We're grateful for time and energy of our community members who made the trip to the Netherlands to share their knowledge--whether it was a bike ride from Leiden or a LONG flight from Australia.

@IIIF Mastodon feed

We're winding down the 2026 #IIIF Annual Conference after 4 days of learning, connecting with colleagues from around the world, sparking new ideas, and collaborating on the future of IIIF. This week would not be possible without the support of a huge number of people and organizations.

Tubi Doubles Down On Comedian Kevin “KevOnStage” Fredericks, Inking Most Expansive Creator Partnership To Date

EXCLUSIVE: Fox’s free ad-supported streaming service, Tubi, has set its most expansive creator partnership yet: a multi-project, multi-year slate with comedian, actor and digital creator Kevin “KevOnStage” Fredericks. Building on the success of the Tubi Original Safe Space, a comedy series co-created, directed, exec produced by and starring Fredericks, which premiered last November, Tubi is deepening the […]

Zach Cherry Talks “Awesome” Experience With Maria Bakalova On ‘All Night Wrong’; Confirms Return To ‘Severance’ But Clueless On Plot – SXSW London

Severance star Zach Cherry hit the Deadline Studio at SXSW London this week with director Jason James to discuss genre-mashing romcom-thriller-noir All Night Wrong which premiered at the festival. Cherry plays Gary, a hapless, low-key type of guy who goes on a blind date, to avenge infidelity in his jaded long-term relationship, with the much […]

‘Diablo’ Partners Team For Slate Of Colombian Co-Productions Aimed At U.S. & International Markets

EXCLUSIVE: A trio of producers are teaming up on a slate of Colombian co-productions aimed at the U.S. and international market. Producers Alvaro Gutierrez (Agora Films), Jason Gurvitz (Green Dog Films), and Nicolas Troya (Troya Films) are launching WildHouse, a new label to house the film slate, which will focus on genre projects in the […]

Elizabeth Warren And Other Democrats Press Treasury Secretary For Foreign Ownership Review Of Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery Merger

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and three other Democratic lawmakers again are pressing Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to conduct a foreign ownership review of Paramount’s proposed merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. Such a review — via the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which Bessent chairs — would add an additional regulatory hurdle for […]

@Dave Winer's linkblog

A handful of Americans pay for AI. Will you have to?