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CNN: Hakeem Jeffries, on track to make House speaker history, sees ‘mandate for dramatic change’

The homepage sells American heritage. The product page says “Imported.” How to easily spot fake heritage, and where to find goods still made in the USA.

The industries’ biggest bets lost almost across the board.

North Korea stole $6 billion from Binance in about 20 minutes, according to the FBI, making it the biggest crypto heist ever. We break down the hack: how the attackers got in, why investigators think the laundering may have been automated, how Binance covered the losses, and whether AI played a role.

Then: how a suspected Chinese spy got close to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. New York Times reporter Ana Swanson, who helped break the story, joins us to discuss Alice Huang, the Megaspeed executive U.S. officials believe was a Chinese spy. We get into her ties to Jensen Huang, why the White House and President Trump were briefed and didn't act, and the loophole that lets Chinese companies rent banned Nvidia chips.

And finally: who took down AO3, the internet's biggest fanfic archive? And who hacked supermarket freezers across Europe and cranked them to 122°F?? Hacktober is over. Welcome to Breachvember.

Note: For more information on the Binance hack, you can check out the company’s latest update, which was released after we recorded this episode. It adds fascinating new details — like that the attack began months earlier and involved a phony job interview — but doesn’t change our analysis.

For a transcript of this episode, select the episode on npr.org/machinegods.

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“I don’t want to be in the minority,” he prayed, choking back tears. “I’m a Republican. We hate minorities.”

Today's links The AI fatfinger economy has come for my receipts app: Every heretofore useful button now summons a useless AI genie. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Army Times v Rumsfeld; RIAA v soccer mom; Skateboard truck table; Internet scare-story prof won't show her workings; IoT botnet v Liberia; BLM v TPP. Upcoming appearances: Kilkenny, Courtenay, Vancouver, Folkestone, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Montreal. 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 AI fatfinger economy has come for my receipts app (permalink) "AI is being shoved down our throats" can mean any of several things. It can mean that our bosses are demanding that we use AI in reckless or nonsensical ways on the job: https://www.404media.co/manifestos-fear-and-loser-thinking-inside-protons-ai-reckoning/ It can mean that Elon Musk and the NASDAQ have colluded to force ordinary retirement savers to bail out his emirati and tech oligarch buddies: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/05/technology/spacex-indexes-401k.html These are arguably the most important ways in which AI is shoved down our throats, but the most visible form of conscription into the number-go-up AI project is happening at the user interface level. This UI fuckery predates AI. For more than a decade, tech companies and their executives have colluded to trick, coerce and force you into using new features that they wanted to sell to their investors as the future of their companies. Remember Google Plus, the Facebook-killing social layer that was going to give Google access to a new, multi-trillion-dollar market? Bradley Horowitz, then a VP at Google, charged every product team with cramming G+ into their offerings, tying their bonuses to G+ usage (at companies like Google, your bonus can dwarf your base salary). Now, googlers are bright and resourceful people, and if you tell them that they can double their earnings by getting users to click on Google Plus buttons, they'll come up with all kinds of ways to get you to do this. Some of those gambits will be the kind of thing that Horowitz doubtless hoped for: innovative and creative ways to add value to Google's core offerings with G+ features. But when the stakes are that high, Goodhart's Law inevitably comes into play: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law The easiest way to get a user to click on a G+ button is to replace whatever button that user hits most often with a G+ version. Rather than introducing users to Google Plus in a way that turns them into G+ fans, you just frustrate them by tricking them into clicking on a useless button. From a product manager's perspective, it's worth making whatever changes as are needed to ensure that your salary is doubled because you hit your "key performance indicator" (KPI), even if it's at the expense of your users' loyalty to your product. Preserving user loyalty at the expense of half your wages is a bad trade. When a machine learning system does this, we call it "reward hacking." AI programmers create an "objective function" for their system, a single number that the system will try every tactic to increase; then, more often than not, the AI program finds perverse shortcuts to make the number go up whether or not it achieves the programmer's goal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reward_hacking For example, if you charge an AI with coming up with the shortest run through a video game, it might well discover a bug that makes it impervious to enemy attacks or just lets it teleport to the end of the game. To avoid these perverse outcomes, programmers have to add more and more specificity to their objective functions: "speed run the game without teleporting or discovering an immortality hack." Not for nothing, many science fiction writers (including me) have noted that tech bosses' fear of their own AI systems is a kind of emotional spillover from their frustrations with the corporations they run, where underlings engage in the same kinds of reward hacking that we see from chatbots: https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/14/timmy-share/#a-superior-moral-justification-for-selfishness Despite the ease with which metrics can be gamed, tech bosses remained committed to the use of KPIs to shift the priorities of their organizations, and they use the same objective function refinement technique that programmers use for reward-hacking AIs in a bid to prevent cheating by employees who hit their KPIs any way they can. This explains a lot about the experience of watching a video on your phone. Any time you tune into a show on a streaming platform, you are forced to handle your phone with the delicacy of a photonegative. If any part of your hand brushes any part of the screen, you will immediately be whisked away from the video you're watching to an entirely different one: https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/15/the-fatfinger-economy/ Worse, after your program has been replaced with this new one, there's no obvious way to get back to the show you were just watching. This is very weird, considering that the "back button" has been a part of computer interfaces since 1981: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/back%20button The reason you don't get a back button is reward hacking. Streaming video platforms are under enormous pressure to successfully recommend their back-catalog to their users, because the alternative (commissioning or purchasing a steady stream of popular new shows) is very expensive. Investors put a lot of stock in streaming services' "successful recommendation" rate. So streaming service bosses charge their product teams with making "successful recommendations." The easiest way to "recommend a show" is to booby-trap the streaming service's UI so that touching any part of the screen takes you to a video you never asked to see. This is obvious reward hacking, so streaming bosses refined their objective function: they made their teams' bonuses contingent on getting you to watch a new video for a minimum time-frame. This in turn triggered the next volley in the reward-hacking wars, in which product teams took away the back button. This gives users any number of greased slides that whisk them away to a new video. To get back to the old video, users are forced to climb a greased pole. This is the fatfinger economy: created in the 2010s by teams at large tech companies with KPI-obsessed bosses; refined in the 2020s by teams at bottom-line obsessed streaming media companies; and now perfected by teams being charged with cramming AI into every corner of our lives: https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/02/kpis-off/#principal-agentic-ai-problem The fatfinger economy is an extraordinary beneficiary of the drive to add "telemetry" to all of our apps. Today, an app vendor can call up a dashboard and find out which buttons and fields and sliders see the most use, and they can use that ranked list to figure out which buttons to replace with AI-demon-summoning lookalikes that help product teams "prove" to their bosses that they've "successfully integrated AI" and lets their bosses prove to their investors that "users value AI features." I recently switched from Android to Graphene, a de-googled phone operating system. Graphene's maintainers are blissfully free from the imperative to show that "users value AI features," and that's why I have never accidentally summoned up an undismissable AI by tapping a Graphene UI element. It's a different story when it comes to apps. Graphene has many different ways to install apps, including via Google Play (Google's default Android store). That's useful because it lets you install your old Android apps after switching to Graphene, but it does leave you exposed to the fatfinger economy. Last week, I got a painful reminder of the progress of the fatfinger economy outside of Graphene's utopian pocket-universe. I make extensive use of an app called "Genius Scanner," which lets me scan receipts and email them to myself (I do this a lot because, as a freelancer, I have to track a lot of different expenses). I bought a lifetime subscription to Genius Scanner in 2023, after getting burned by Camscanner (my previous, now enshittified scanning app), and I've been perfectly happy with it…until now. Genius Scanner is obviously under pressure to drive AI adoption. I can tell because they've taken away the most important UI element and swapped it for a worse-than-useless AI button. Here's how I use Genius Scanner: I press the "make new scan" button and line up the receipt on the screen. Then I press the "retitle" button, which brings up a field that is populated with the current date and time (16 characters in all). This text used to be selected so that hitting the little "x" next to it deleted it, making it easy to title a new scan. After that, I'd just email it to myself. As of last week, though, there is no button that deletes the date and time so you can enter a useful title. That little "x" has been replaced with a button that brings up an ad for the company's new AI tools, which cost $40/year. There's no way to tell the system that you're not interested in buying a new subscription for the tool that you've already bought a lifetime sub for, and there's no way to get that little "x" back. To be clear: that little "x" represents one quarter of my receipt scanning workflow. They have swapped it out for an ad for a new subscription AI feature, and gave me 16 new keypresses on the backspace button to replace that single tap on the "x." I have seen that ad about 100 times at this point, because I keep tapping the spot where the "x" used to be. I'm certain that the company knew that its paying customers relied on the "x" to accomplish a vital function in any scanning app (giving good, descriptive titles to scans). They need the AI number to go up, so they replaced the "x" with the AI ad, which will let them tell their investors that they've got "strong consumer interest in their AI features." Meanwhile, they already have my money, so there's no way I can punish them for their decision to screw me over to juke a meaningless stat. It's as neat (and depressing) an example of the principle that "even if you're paying for the product, you're still the product" that you could ask for. It's also a perfect little object-lesson in the ways that companies can report increasing AI interest and usage without generating any interest or usage. In the fatfinger economy, every metric is a target, and is thereby rendered meaningless. Hey look at this (permalink) Google Will Turn Off Search for Schools That Reject A.I. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/03/us/google-search-schools-restrict-ai.html Private Credit's State Backstop: How Private Equity Socializes Risk Through Insurers https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7152239 Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Army Times: Rumsfeld must go! https://web.archive.org/web/20061107220242/http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/110406Z.shtml #20yrsago UK is a surveillance society http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6108496.stm #20yrsago Record companies sue soccer mom’s kids https://web.archive.org/web/20061104145550/https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/02/AR2006110200114.html #15yrsago HOWTO make your own skateboard truck lazy-susan table https://www.instructables.com/Skateboard-Table/ #15yrsago Home Secretary to OccupyLondon: you’re scaring the tourists https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-15588987 #15yrsago Judge whose daughter released video of him beating her suspended from bench during judicial investigation https://web.archive.org/web/20111105234141/http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_VIDEOTAPED_BEATING_TEXAS #15yrsago Prof who keeps announcing links between the Internet, childhood dementia and autism should publish theories in a scientific journal https://www.badscience.net/2011/11/why-wont-professor-greenfield-publish-this-theory-in-a-scientific-journal/ #10yrsago Internet of Things botnet threatens to knock the entire country of Liberia offline https://doublepulsar.com/shadows-kill-mirai-ddos-botnet-testing-large-scale-attacks-sending-threatening-messages-about-6a61553d1c7#.zg4448j8w #10yrsago Black Lives Matter declares its opposition to TPP https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/11/gauis-publius-tpp-has-picked-up-a-powerful-enemy-black-lives-matter.html Upcoming appearances (permalink) Kilkenny (Kilkenomics), Nov 6-8 https://kilkenomics.com/ Courtenay: Enshittification (Sid Williams Theatre Society), Nov 10 https://www.sidwilliamstheatre.com/events/cory-doctorow-talks-enshittification/ Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ Folkestone Writers Festival, Nov 16 https://www.creativefolkestone.org.uk/whats-on/cory-doctorow-the-internet-is-broken-now-what/ Oxford: Ministry of the Future, Nov 23 https://ministryforthefuture.co.uk/events.html Sheffield: Reverse Centaur at Juno Books, Nov 25 https://www.outsavvy.com/event/40274/cory-doctorow-in-conversation Virtual: Enshittification, AI, and the Future of Technology (UBC Master of Educational Technology), Nov 28 https://met.ubc.ca/2026/09/met-speaker-series-cory-doctorow-enshittification-ai-and-the-future-of-technology/ Oxford: Bennett Oxford Symposium on Open Code in Science, Dec 9 https://www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/events/2026-bennett-institute-symposium/ Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6 https://montreal2027.ca/en Recent appearances (permalink) Clint Eastwood (No Gods No Mayors) https://www.patreon.com/NoGodsNoMayors/posts/clint-eastwood-173008088 Life After AI (Brain Bar) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPPa43-n0vI Terms of Service with Clare Duffy (CNN) https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/terms-of-service-with-clare-duffy/episodes/458ce968-af5d-11f0-b539-13ed2afe25f8 AI, Work, and Power (Software Engineering Daily) AI, Work, and Power https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/podcasts/cory-doctorow-on-ai-work-and-power/ AI, Corporate Power, and the Fight for Worker Control (Plutopia) https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-ai-corporate-power-and-the-fight-for-worker-control/ Latest books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 544 (32413 total). "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

честитке, Serbia

Parabéns, Brazil

Congratulations, USA

2024 was a blip. This was America.

In advance of the 2026 midterms, President Trump told voters to “pretend I’m on the ballot because in a way, I am on the ballot.” Many voters listened, and delivered a stinging repudiation of Trump and his hand-picked candidates across the country.

Whether it’s new book smell or old book smell, the history of book collecting is aromatic. | Lit Hub History Megan Mayhew explores “analog minds” and the reading life of John Elder. | Lit Hub Craft On Olivia Manning and

There is great rejoicing in our Anglo-American household this morning.

As somebody said recently, "America today is like Germany in 1936; you just need to replace the word 'Jew' with 'Muslim'".

Well, that was America yesterday. But perhaps, just perhaps, not today?

Last night Donald Trump got his ass beat like a rented mule after asking his base at his ever-shrinking rallies to pretend he was on the ballot.

Lindsey’s prophecy finally comes to pass.

Twenty years ago, when I first came to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont, we let our cell phones die. There was no signal. We were moving off-radar. I remember the feeling of immersion almost physically. There was nowhere

In 1345 the English book lover Richard de Bury described the libraries and booksellers of Paris, medieval Europe’s great center of learning “as more aromatic than stores of spicery.” In Bury’s Philobiblion, a celebration of all things bookish, he described

It’s the final episode of our three-part miniseries on AI slop, in which we ask: Who are AI-generated podcasts for, and what does the wave of AI slop mean for the future of storytelling? Evan sets out for answers and finds them staring back at him from a piece of toast. And finally, our own fully AI-generated show is set and ready to launch. Will it find its perfect audience?

Show notes:

• Evan Finds a Friend
• Daniel Munroe's paper, " Artificial Storytellers"
• Keegan Walden's upcoming book, " The Founder's Journey"

This episode includes AI-generated content.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The journey there was inauspicious. In the basement of Port Authority I was told that the bus route I was holding a paper ticket for had been permanently canceled, so I had to race across Manhattan to catch a train

In the summer of 2024, I went looking for fairy tales that had LGBTQ+ subtext. In a time of renewed attack on queer identi­ties, there’s something I find reassuring in the evidence that we’ve always been around, even in the

As AI takes on more work, organisations need clear limits on models, tools and spend. Otari, Mozilla AI’s open-source gateway, brings model choice, agent governance and cost control together, so teams can adopt AI with confidence. Your models. Your tokens. Your control.

“I don’t want fame when I am dead,” Olivia Manning once complained. “I want it now.” Manning, the British novelist who died in 1980, carried grudges: never made the Booker shortlist, never got a “solo review” in the Sunday papers,

Dear Miranda, Gracias for your recent note. It came, as you say, “out of the blue,” an expression that, in and of itself, defies translation. In my native Spanish, one would say “de la nada,” not out of nowhere, since

The Anatomy of the Midterm Election of 2026

Paulette has to get two buses to work, the 61 into town, then a walk across Cathedral Green to catch the number 18 going north. Right near the bus stop, there’s a new children’s shop with pushchairs and cots in

Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in October – click the links to learn more… We announced LibreOffice 26.8.1, with around 40 bug fixes focused on compatibility with Microsoft Office files, along with more reliable text and CSV import across a range of character

Erika Mann drove through the night to meet the fifty-two most wanted men in the world. It was the middle of August 1945 and she was a few weeks shy of her fortieth birthday. Streaks of gray were beginning to

How Raspberry Pi helps industrial customers bring fully compliant products to market faster.

The post Product compliance, demystified: how Raspberry Pi helps you get to market appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

The Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll was tied for first in predicting the Democratic House blowout

Election Day.

Tonight, the American people sent a clear message — they want a politics that brings people together rather than divides them, and leaders who offer concrete solutions to the challenges they face.

Congratulations everyone - we are having the election we all hoped we would have, and tomorrow is going to be a very new and better day for America

Watch today’s live recording here.

Most VMware alternative evaluations focus on Day 1 migration and Day 2 operations. Day 367, the first expansion, is the real test. A year from now, servers, memory and flash will cost more, new servers will take months to arrive, and private AI will likely be on the project list. Extending server life, adding drives to open bays, mixing server vendors and pooling GPUs let midsize IT grow without a forklift budget.

Read more ›

Exclusive Midterms Coverage

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Possibly the earliest possible results from Maine:

Simpering titans I’m collecting photographs of tech moguls sucking up to Trump. This is one from his Inauguration in January 2025. Left to right: Mrs Zuckerberg, Zuck, Mrs Bezos, Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Muskrat. Quote of the Day “You are not … Continue reading →

Practical tools for design engineers to explore possible futures through speculative design

To read this letter, click here:

let’s use this post for our Election Night subscriber chat.....

I am all ears!

Feedback submitted to the City of Kirkland for their 2027-2028 budget process. I’m all in on Human Services and Affordable Housing! I notice a vast imbalance between the Human Services and Affordable Housing budget and the Police and Court budget. Is it possible that shifting some funds away from policing and into prevention and support […]

Friends,

Taking back our right to plan for the future

A modest wave, a solid one, or a blue tsunami? There will be signs throughout the night about the size of the blue wave.

IT IS HAPPENING

Tuesday session

This is the day we’ve waited for.

A recording from Guy Kawasaki's live video

Wanted to share some things I’ve been thinking about today

While updating Kotoba from a hospital bed, I encountered a problem while presenting a UIKit view from SwitfUI on the iPhone Duo – it totally stumped me. It’s one of those things that make sense once you discover the solution, but is unintuitive until then. The main view in the app is written in SwiftUI […]

With American voters casting ballots today in the momentous midterms, Christiane and I unpacked the possibility of a another democracy-undermining Trump tantrum if the election does not go his way, the MAGA mood, and what happens next in Iran with Trump and Netanyahu still calling the shots.

SwiftTerm’s major architectural improvements for improving its performance came straight from the posts from @mitchellh and Ghostty.

So many fabulous insights shared with the terminal emulation community.

I am very thankful.

We’re excited to announce Adaptive Dark Mode in Safari 27.3 beta.

Joe Rossignol: John Ternus will participate in his first Apple earnings call as the company’s CEO today Apple (transcript, Hacker News): The Company posted quarterly revenue of $114.5 billion, up 12 percent year over year. Company gross margin was 47.9 percent, including a favorable impact of approximately 1 percentage point from tariff refunds. […] “Our […]

Satya Nadella: Fiscal year 2026 was another record year for the company. Revenue was $331.8 billion, up 18 percent year-over-year. Microsoft Cloud revenue was $214.4 billion, up 27 percent year-over-year. Azure grew 41 percent year-over-year and surpassed $100 billion for the first time, while Microsoft 365 Copilot reached over 30 million paid seats. And operating […]

Eugene Kim: Amazon is overhauling its AI strategy, winding down many in-house models, reorganizing teams, and focusing engineers on a new strategy to compete at the frontier, according to people familiar with the matter. The changes follow layoffs in Amazon’s Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI, organization last week and the shutdown of AGI Lab, a […]

Charles C Counselman III: About 15 seconds after it was launched, it would quit because, it said, I had done nothing for 60 minutes. After this had happened several times, consistently, l went to 1Password’s Support website. I read all the info and advice there, but I found nothing relevant, so I e-mailed support@1password.com. I […]

I have a new ebook

The post In Praise Of Japan’s Failure To Keep Up appeared first on NOEMA.

The Frontier debugger now works in Atlantis, the version of Frontier that runs on modern systems, the one I have been using for everyday work for a month or so.

I write software in the debugger, testing each addition after writing it, to see that the input produces the expected output. I also use it to see why code that has worked for 10 years now doesn't produce the expected result, ie debugging.

A UserTalk script, stopped at a breakpoint. Full size screen shot.

Dirección: Javier Ambrossi, Javier Calvo. Guion: Javier Ambrossi, Javier Calvo y Alberto Conejero, basados en La bola negra de Federico García Lorca y La piedra oscura de Alberto Conejero. Elenco: Guitarricadelafuente, Miguel Bernardeau, Carlos González, Milo Quifes, Lola Dueñas, Penélope Cruz, Glenn Close. Países: España, Francia. Más información de la película: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt35511966/ Hay obras que […]

La entrada La bola negra (MONFIC 26): las vidas que Lorca no pudo escribir se publicó primero en Palomita de maíz.

What we’ve achieved already: Becoming citizens again.

Hi y’all! It’s so great to join the Digital Rhetoric Collaborative this year as a graduate fellow. I’m coming to this fellowship from the Composition, Rhetoric, and English Studies (CRES) program at the University of Alabama. I’m a third-year PhD student who focuses on digital literacies of online discourse groups and writing program administration.  Technology [...]

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Letters of Vote

This Election Day, you have the power to change the direction of this country, but only if you vote.

Find your polling location at IWillVote.com.

Reach out to your family and friends to make sure they vote today, too.

Writing of lasting value

In Eating The Seed Corn I wrote about AI's destruction of entry-level jobs. But Karen Weise's Microsoft Offers Buyouts to 60,000 Employees as It Spends on A.I. reports on a different impact (my emphasis):

Microsoft on Monday offered buyouts to a quarter of its work force, the latest effort by the company to rein in costs as it spends heavily on artificial intelligence.

...

The “time-limited, voluntary” program grew out of the company’s first ever buyouts earlier this year, she wrote. In April, Microsoft offered early retirement to 8,600 long-tenured U.S. employees, and about 30 percent accepted the packages and left over the summer. Microsoft said it heard from additional employees who would have taken the buyout if they had been eligible. That informed the company’s decision to create this new, expanded program.

Microsoft expects many fewer acceptances in this new program, but the people leaving are not entry-level, they are well-paid senior staff. If the goal is to divert cash from salaries to capex getting rid of senior staff is much more effective.

Below the fold I look into the non-obvious implications of AI's impact on well-paid employees' jobs.

The buyout program isn't the only predator stalking Microsoft's employees:

Microsoft has already slightly shrunk its work force even as business has boomed. For several years, the company maintained a flat head count of about 228,000 employees.

But as of June 30, the end of its fiscal year, Microsoft’s work force had edged lower to 223,000 employees. Over that same fiscal year, Microsoft brought in $332 billion in revenue, up 18 percent from the previous year, and profit grew 31 percent to $134 billion.

In July, Microsoft announced it was cutting 4,800 jobs, particularly in its video game division. The company is scheduled to report quarterly results on Wednesday.

Many of these lost jobs will have been lower on Microsoft's pay scale, but still well-paid relative to the US average. The victims will have lost not only their salary, but also after a delay their health insurance. Crucially for this post, their and Microcoft's contributions to their 401(k) pension will have stopped. In the current economy they will struggle to find a new job.

Is this just a problem for the victims? In The Retirement Machine: AI, high earners, and the hidden risk to global stock markets Duncan Lamont asks:

how consequential would it be for equities if the US experienced a rise in AI-linked unemployment among high earners which led to a fall in pension contributions.

This turns out to be a really interesting question. Lamont writes:

In their AI-boom scenario, our economists model unemployment rising to 10% as workers are displaced by technology. Importantly, whereas past technological revolutions have displaced lower earners, this time higher-earning white-collar workers are in the firing line. And they are the ones who disproportionately contribute to the monthly pension flows into equity markets. This article puts numbers on just how material a risk this is. Spoiler alert: it’s big.

Lamont Figure 1 US pensions are a seriously big business. Lamont's Figure 1 shows that the value of US pensions investments are 47% bigger than all non-US stock markets combined, ond 82% of the US stock market. Lamont points out that:

The (dollar-weighted) average allocation to equities across 401(k)s is 75%. Younger individuals have more, with those in their 20s having 90% on average but even those in their 60s still hold over 60%.

How big are the "monthly pension flows into equity markets"? Lamont looks at 2024:

Assuming the 75% equity allocation also applies to new contributions, US DC plans and IRAs funnelled around $735 billion into global equity markets in 2024. Given the US weight in the global stock market and typical [target duration fund] allocations, 60-70% of that will have gone into US equities, translating into approximately $480 billion. DC and IRA pension accounts bought an estimated nearly half a trillion dollars of US equities in 2024.

DC (Defined Contribution) plans are 401(k) and similar plans to which employees and (typically) companies contribute monthly. Lamont estiimates that their purchases represent about 26% of the net purchases of US equities that year. Because this is a steady, predictable demand it plays a major role in keeping the US stock market growing in good times and cushions the fall in bad times.

Lamont Figure 3 Which employees contribute to DC plans? Lamont's Figure 3 shows that participation is much higher in industries that pay well. So there aren't just more of them, but they contribute more each month. The 26% keeping the US market afloat depends heavily upon the contributions of higher-paid employees.

Lamont cites evidence to support this skew. First:

The Congressional Budget Office’s most recent comprehensive distributional analysis of retirement-related tax expenditures — the closest available proxy for the distribution of contribution dollars — found the highest-income quintile captured 63% of the tax benefits in 2019, against 1% for the bottom quintile. The tax-benefit share will overstate the contribution share to some extent because higher earners face higher marginal tax rates. Even so, this is broadly consistent with IRS data which shows that 62% of contributions to IRAs in 2023 came from people earning over $100k a year. Only about 15% came from people earning what was then the median income of around $50k or less.

Lamont Figure 4 And second:

There is also direct evidence from within company plans. As Figure 4 shows, the best paid 20% of employees at a given firm have, on average, taken in 44% of employer contributions.

It is these these top earners who are at risk:

A growing body of research reaches the same broad conclusion: higher-income, white collar occupations requiring postsecondary education show the highest exposure to AI capabilities ( Brynjolfsson and others (2018); Webb (2020); Muro and others (2019); Felten and others (2023); Eloundou and others (2024); Kinder and others (2024); and Hampole and others (2025)).

Dodini & Smith Chart 3 As I disucussed in Eating The Seed Corn, Stanford reseach concludes:

1. We find no evidence of widespread, economy-wide job displacement.
2. However, employment of young workers (ages 22–25) in AI-exposed occupations now stands 19% below where it would be had it kept pace with that of their less-exposed peers; experienced workers show no comparable gap.
3. This divergence has widened steadily since we first documented it in August 2025.
4. It operates primarily through reduced hiring of young workers rather than increased separations.

Lamont points out that this isn't good news:

You could take the junior-first pattern that the data currently shows as reassurance for the pension channel since junior workers contribute less than managing directors. But that would be naive. Junior workers in high-paying industries are still high earners by economy-wide standards. A 25-year-old software engineer on $140,000, or a first-year banking analyst on $120,000, sits comfortably in the top quintile of all US earners. The displacement happening right now is concentrated in industries where even the juniors out-earn the median American worker by a factor of two. These are exactly the contributors identified earlier. In addition, participants in their 20s hold 90% equity on average, the highest allocation of any age cohort. So even a junior-first shock would hit a group whose pension contributions are unusually equity-heavy.

Just as importantly, junior-first describes where current AI tools are biting first. We don’t know where it will end. The substitution frontier has moved up the capability curve every year since 2022, and there is no obvious reason to expect it to stop at the entry level.

After staring at the barrage of AI adds on the London Tube in summer 2025, I wrote The Selling Of AI:

The irresistible pitch to CEOs is that they can "do more with less", or in other words they can lay off all these troublesome employees without impacting their products and sales.

The effect is that CEOs will fire the workers first based on the ads and the hype, before finding out whether the AI agents can really replace them, and when they find out they can't will be unwilling, and unable to afford, to hire them back. And if they hype is right the upward movement of the "substitution frontier" will have the same effect — hugher unemployment for longer.

Either way the result will be a reduction of the flow of pension funds into the stock market. Lamont estimates:

A 10% hit to that exposed flow would remove roughly $20–30 billion of annual equity buying; a 25% hit would remove $50–75 billion; a 50% hit would remove $100–150 billion. In a normal year that is material. In a downturn, when buybacks, foreign demand and retail risk appetite are likely to weaken at the same time, it could matter a lot more.

As I write this the financial press is flooded with headlines such as:

• Stocks Slump as Wall Street Gets AI Wake-Up Call
• Amazon, Alphabet, SpaceX, and Meta are all to blame for the new tech stock rout
• Tech Stocks Tumble, but Broader Market Is Holding On
• Nasdaq 100 Hits Third Correction of 2026 on Unwinding Tech Stock Bets
• Meta, Alphabet, Intel Share Sales Leave Buyers Far Underwater
• US Tech Stocks Enter Correction on AI and Midterm Election Risks

The downturn may have already started.

As you await the results, uncork the Cabernet, pop those edibles, and enjoy these Election Day cartoons from TBR’s roster of superstar cartoonists!

Export Updates 2026-11-03:

Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places

4 updated places. 11 new and 63 updated linked data sidebars. PATHS Atlas inbound links are stale as the download package was not available at runtime.

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

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

"main" branch:

40c86bf7 - updated json

no change: rdf/ttl

54e0c6ed - updated gis package

no change: data quality

9d593adf - updated bibliography

2904d878 - updated indexes

a2a38a38 - updated sidebar

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

2f2978d6 - updated geojson and names index

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

87b6022b - updated pleiades wikidata

Where crypto and AI super PACs are spending, what their ads won’t talk about, and which races could embarrass them.

Last halloween, Google decided to kill XSLT. That was not a unilateral decision mind you, Google said “jump” and other browser vendors said “how high?” In response, I published my Intent to Deprecate and Remove Google Chrome. A performative declaration of course, I don’t install spyware. […]

Today's links Separable: AI makes us deal with paintings without painters, words without writers and mathematics without mathematicians. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Haircase; There's no copyright policy; Sole and despotic dominion; Trump x fraud; Brexit requires an act of Parliament; Official Air Travel Replacement Knives; UK hospitals v malware. Upcoming appearances: Kilkenny, Courtenay, Vancouver, Folkestone, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Montreal. 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. Separable (permalink) Long before the Turing Test, there was the touring Edison Test: from 1915 to 1925, the scoundrel Thomas Edison put on a traveling show for his phonograph machine, touring venues around the USA. Edison set live performers and an Edison phonograph playing behind closed curtains that would be periodically pulled aside to reveal that the music the audience had taken to be live performance was actually a record player: https://www.tomedison.org/blog/edisons-tone-tests Now, if you've ever heard an Edison phonograph, this might seem like yet another tale in which old-timey people are revealed to be credulous yokels. You would never mistake one of those scratchy, hissing recordings for a live performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96gIIFmEjY4 And indeed you wouldn't, but not because the phonograph predates the evolution of the human brain's anti-credulity lobe. The reason old-timey people couldn't tell the difference between a phonograph and a live performance was that before the phonograph, every live performance had a performer. The two were inseparable, and so when you encountered the sound of a musical performance, your brain would insist that there must be a performer as well. This is a well-understood principle in swindles, magic tricks and literature. It's the basis of Douglas Adams' towel gambit: For some reason, if a strag discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, washcloth, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet-weather gear, space suit etc, etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have "lost." All persons heretofore encountered in possession of a towel had all that other stuff, so the mere presence of a towel evokes an overwhelming intuition that all that other stuff must be nearby. Like every conjuring trick and every swindle, this cognitive illusion swiftly regresses to the mean. After a few exposures to phonographs, the manifest differences between live performance and recordings become impossible to miss, and you stop making that mistake. If one thing always signifies the presence of another – if a towel always implies a backpack full of supplies or if a performance always implies a performer – there's no reason for you to entrain the neurological patterns needed to detect the performance without the performer. This doesn't mean that it's hard to develop the capacity to make this distinction, just that the ability to detect a phenomenon always post-dates your encounter with that phenomenon. You've no doubt guessed by now that this is an analogy about AI. The implication of this ability to learn to discern differences after you encounter them (but not before) implies that a chatbot might pass the Turing Test at its introduction, but then come to fail the test after we've all had the experience with it that lets us tune our perceptions to spot the differences, which then become as unmissable as the needle hiss on a phonographic reproduction of a concert pianist. This is an experience many of us have already had. Prior to chatbot-generated prose, we'd never had experience with writing that didn't have a writer. Prior to image-gen output, we'd never had experience with paintings that didn't have painters. At first, the output from these models was remarkable, and often indistinguishable from human-generated words and images. Even knowing that these works were extruded by an algorithm, it was hard to shake the conviction that they were the product of human creativity. These works were "eerie," in the sense that Mark Fisher uses, "the seeming of intent without an intender": https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-up/#invisible-hand Just like the strag inferring the existence of "toothbrush, washcloth, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet-weather gear, space suit etc, etc," we automatically imputed to these works both a creator and a creative impulse. We supposed that their words and brushstrokes represented aesthetic and technical choices emanating from human creators who meant something by them (or at least were so satisfied by the accident of their appearance on the page that they left them stand). These creators were figments of our imagination. No one is home inside the AI. The intentionality we imputed to these works was the actual "AI hallucination": https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/21/sunsetting/#oh-mr-sun-sun-mr-golden-sun-please-shine-down-on-me Just as important as the emergence of these hallucinations is their disappearance. For many of us, chatbots that used to pass the Turing Test now flunk it. The chatbots haven't gotten worse at impersonating humans, we've just gotten better at spotting the difference between a human and a bot, just as we got better at hearing the difference between a phonograph and a pianist. Writing without a writer and paintings without a painter are new phenomena, and learning to separate the formerly inseparable is the first step in our societal metabolization of these novelties. Recordings of musical performance have a place in our world, and so do performers. This separation process is currently underway in many disciplines, thanks to the extraordinary capital available to AI companies. These companies are incinerating that capital in a series of extremely flash demos that are intended to ensure that the supply of bales of $100 bills that they feed to their money furnaces ("data centers") never stops. Lately, AI companies have made headlines with a series of mathematical accomplishments that left mathematicians in an uproar and non-mathematicians in a muddle. Obviously, while mathematicians are qualified to assess these accomplishments, the rest of us are not. Beyond simple arithmetic, most of us don't do a lot of math on a regular basis, and even those of us who have to deploy a little geometry or stats typically don't engage with math at a theoretical level. To make things worse, math – like physics – is a crank-magnet. These highly abstract, closed systems rely on introspection to advance the field, and some of those advances have been contributed by untrained laity, so it can be hard to know if your amazing idea about physics or mathematics represents an outsider's breakthrough or an amateurish cul-de-sac. Every mathematician and physicist I know receives a steady stream of breathless, over-the-transom "proofs" that solve some long-standing problem in the field, and none of these experts in my orbit has ever found a breakthrough in this material. It's a rare expert who will even respond to these unsolicited manuscripts. That's not their job. As Teresa Nielsen Hayden says, "You are not responsible for the things you do in other people's dreams." Unfortunately, this is a situation that is perfectly suited to AI. If you've introspected your way into a mathematical "breakthrough" that no mathematician will discuss with you, you can avail yourself of any number of chatbots who will assure you that you've broken exciting new theoretical ground, and these chatbots will even act as "research collaborators," contributing more slop-physics or slop-math to your conclusions. Again, as far as I know, no one has actually made a breakthrough this way, and the major impact on the field from giving chatbots to excitable outsiders has been to make the unsolicited manuscripts much longer, with the veneer of professionalism that means an expert might have to give them a second or even third glance to realize that they're nonsense. But some working mathematicians have found chatbots to be extremely useful "collaborators." The most prominent of these is Terrence Tao, a Macarthur-winning mathematician who has excited many mathematicians and lay-people alike by publishing his chat-logs and the resulting mathematical work: https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/28/hitl-ers/#ai-ai-oh One way to understand Tao is as a "centaur," the automation theory term for a worker who is assisted by a machine. For all that Tao describes Chatgpt as his collaborator, it's clear from reading the chat-logs that it's Tao who drives the research agenda. He sets the questions and the direction of the answers. Chatgpt doesn't give him orders – it's the other way around. But for every problem Tao and Chatgpt solve together there are several mathematical problems that are being solved by chatbots without that kind of human collaboration. In particular, Openai has released a tsunami of "solutions" to longstanding mathematical problems, including some that carry large cash bounties and others that were posed by legends of the field, like Erdos. This is mathematics without a mathematician, and – as with all the other separations cleft by the AI companies – it's proving difficult to metabolize. Back in September, Fenner Stanley Tanswell published an opinion piece for the Mathematical Intelligencer entitled "The Enshittification of Mathematics" that tried to do just that: https://rdcu.be/5uYGc2uo454a Tanswell distinguishes between mathematics as a discipline practiced by mathematicians and the proofs and theorems that those mathematicians produce. He makes the point that when a mathematician finds the answer to some longstanding mathematical puzzle, they do so by creating "scaffolding" that bridges the new insight with the existing commons of mathematical understanding. The thing that makes a "solution" so exciting isn't that a problem has been solved – it's that the method for solving that problem prompts a cascading reconsideration of many other areas of mathematics, prompting shifts to large areas of the discipline. This point is made even more forcefully by Giordano Scarciotti, a complex systems researcher at Imperial College London and science communicator who vlogs under the Youtube handle "Prof Gio." Scarciotti's most successful video to date is "You Truly Don't Understand What Just Happened to Mathematics," published last month: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqiDqJMxg6o "You Truly Don't Understand…" makes a similar point to Tanswell's, using a thought experiment in which we wake up one day and discover an American flag on the surface of Mars. Without knowing how that flag got to Mars, the mere fact of its existence doesn't help us get any closer to an actual Mars mission. The output of mathematical models is a series of faits accomplis, often accomplished through brute-force, or sometimes through opaque methods that lack the "scaffolding" that bridges these outcomes into the broader field of mathematics. Scarciotti cites Euler's work on the longstanding "Seven Bridges of Königsberg" problem, which asked whether it was possible to go on a walking tour of Königsberg such that you crossed each of the city's seven bridges only once: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Bridges_of_K%C3%B6nigsberg The point of that problem (and Euler's solution to it) wasn't to produce a set of Mapquest directions for a walking tour of Königsberg. In solving the Seven Bridges problem, Euler invented graph theory, an important area of mathematics that is routinely used today for many important applications, including computer networking. You can thank graph theory for helping to route the packets that brought these very words to you. So far, we've figured out how to get a model to either rule out the possibility of taking that each-bridge-only-once walk or to give us the route map. What this computer-generated "mathematics" is not doing is advancing the field. Tanswell points out that a world in which chatbots "solve" these problems is one where the role of mathematicians is reduced to being reverse centaurs, assistants to the machine whose job is to clean up after the chatbot's research agenda. But there's nothing about knowing that there's no route map for a seven-bridge walking tour that makes it easier to invent graph theory, and a mathematician might spend years working on the computer's "answer" to that problem only to conclude that the computer's solution didn't add any theoretical insight to the field. In other words, in a world where mathematicians and mathematics are inseparable, every solution to a longstanding problem heralds an accompanying theoretical insight. Once we separate mathematics from mathematicians, we start to get solutions without insights. These are a lot less interesting than the kinds of solutions that mathematicians come up with. This is a distinction the AI companies really don't want us to dwell on. We're meant to marvel at these very expensively derived solutions and conclude that the AI companies can be forgiven for spending $1T this year, even if they only grossed $50B in return. But (as Scarciotti notes), there are real-world consequences in our failure to grasp this distinction: if we convince early-career mathematicians and promising mathematics students that the world no longer needs mathematicians because "the AI can do their jobs," then we will choke off the supply of future mathematicians who we'll either need to work in a Terrence Tao-like, centaurish relationship with chatbots (good), or even to serve as reverse centaurs, marking the chatbots' homework to see if there are any theoretical insights to be found in it (bad). This is one of the underappreciated consequences of AI mania. AI bosses are particularly interested in convincing us that AI can do the job of skilled professionals in fields where there is a chronic undersupply of experts, like radiology. A chatbot that helps a (centaur) radiologist by suggesting that they double-check some of their results might indeed save lives. But a chatbot that produces thousands of radiology reports for a single (reverse centaur) radiologist to approve at a velocity that precludes careful scrutiny is going to kill people. Centaur radiology requires more radiologists, not fewer. A centaur radiologist processes fewer X-rays (because sometimes the chatbot tells them to double-check a diagnosis) than an unassisted radiologist. LLM-assisted radiology improves quality, not quantity. That's not what AI companies are selling. An AI company can't turn a profit by raising the cost of radiology (even if that improves the quality of radiological analyses). So the firehose of announcements from AI companies is always about putting radiologists out on the breadline – not about needing more radiologists, who will get a new radiology tool that helps them work better, if a little more slowly. The pronouncements of AI companies aren't just marketing hype, they're attempts at self-fulfilling prophecy. If you convince all the would-be radiologists that the profession is about to be vaporized by chatbots, those people will not study radiology, and then we will need to retask the dwindling supply of human radiologists to marking the chatbots' homework and hoping that they don't kill too many people by missing the chatbots' mistakes. That's the catastrophic outcome that both Scarciotti and Tanswell warn us of: if we convince people that we're heading into a world of mathematics without mathematicians, that's exactly what we'll get, because no one will try to become a mathematician. But because mathematics without mathematicians is a set of guide maps for crossing Königsberg's bridges (but not graph theory), then mathematics without mathematicians is also mathematics without mathematics. Hey look at this (permalink) The death of rss feeds?? https://www.reddit.com/r/goodreads/comments/1xhhcgi/the_death_of_rss_feeds/ Cardigan: a CARDIAC cardboard computer simulator https://lab.strangequery.com/cardigan/ Palantir AI tech unused or little used by 29 NHS trusts said to be benefiting from it https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/nov/02/palantir-unused-nhs-hospital-trusts A.I. Stories in the Age of AI Hype: a Conversation with Ted Chiang https://buttondown.com/charliejane/archive/ai-stories-in-the-age-of-ai-hype-a-conversation Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago EFF fights another DMCA abuser https://web.archive.org/web/20061104133502/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004973.php #15yrsago Staircase covered in a cascade of synthetic human hair https://web.archive.org/web/20111030014202/http://www.jessicawohl.com/hairy-stairs #15yrsago Entertainment industry incredibly profitable, healthy: but demands special pirate-hunting laws anyway https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/11/piracy-problems-us-copyright-industries-show-terrific-health/ #15yrsago There is no copyright policy, only Internet policy; there is no Internet policy, only policy https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-its-time-to-stop-talking-about-copyright/ #10yrsago Sole and Despotic Dominion: how a 20th century copyright law is abolishing property for humans (but not corporations) https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-sole-and-despotic-dominion/ #10yrsago Police in Quebec are spying on journalists and Snowden calls that “a threat to democracy” https://web.archive.org/web/20161104150400/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/edward-snowden-quebec-police-journalists-spying-surveillance #10yrsago Donald Trump weaponized fine-print to make it impossible to sue Wall Street for fraud https://www.ibtimes.com/political-capital/how-donald-trump-used-fine-print-make-it-harder-sue-wall-street-fraud-2440890 #10yrsago High Court tells UK government that Brexit requires a vote in Parliament https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-37857785 #10yrsago Artist celebrates Patriot Act’s anniversary by handing out “Official Air Travel Replacement Knives” to arriving SFO passengers https://hyperallergic.com/on-anniversary-of-the-patriot-act-artist-passes-out-pocket-knives-at-the-airport/ #10yrsago A journalist finally uncovers the root of Trump supporters’ anger https://www.theawl.com/2016/11/i-talked-to-some-trump-voters-too/#.z9k84oxsg #10yrsago A fake HP printer that’s actual an office-camouflaged cellular eavesdropping device https://www.wired.com/2016/11/evil-office-printer-hijacks-cellphone-connection/ #10yrsago UK hospitals shut down by malware, advise patients to go somewhere else for the duration https://www.zdnet.com/article/computer-virus-attack-forces-hospitals-to-cancel-operations-shut-down-systems/ Upcoming appearances (permalink) Kilkenny (Kilkenomics), Nov 6-8 https://kilkenomics.com/ Courtenay: Enshittification (Sid Williams Theatre Society), Nov 10 https://www.sidwilliamstheatre.com/events/cory-doctorow-talks-enshittification/ Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ Folkestone Writers Festival, Nov 16 https://www.creativefolkestone.org.uk/whats-on/cory-doctorow-the-internet-is-broken-now-what/ Oxford: Ministry of the Future, Nov 23 https://ministryforthefuture.co.uk/events.html Sheffield: Reverse Centaur at Juno Books, Nov 25 https://www.outsavvy.com/event/40274/cory-doctorow-in-conversation Virtual: Enshittification, AI, and the Future of Technology (UBC Master of Educational Technology), Nov 28 https://met.ubc.ca/2026/09/met-speaker-series-cory-doctorow-enshittification-ai-and-the-future-of-technology/ Oxford: Bennett Oxford Symposium on Open Code in Science, Dec 9 https://www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/events/2026-bennett-institute-symposium/ Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6 https://montreal2027.ca/en Recent appearances (permalink) Clint Eastwood (No Gods No Mayors) https://www.patreon.com/NoGodsNoMayors/posts/clint-eastwood-173008088 Life After AI (Brain Bar) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPPa43-n0vI Terms of Service with Clare Duffy (CNN) https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/terms-of-service-with-clare-duffy/episodes/458ce968-af5d-11f0-b539-13ed2afe25f8 AI, Work, and Power (Software Engineering Daily) AI, Work, and Power https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/podcasts/cory-doctorow-on-ai-work-and-power/ AI, Corporate Power, and the Fight for Worker Control (Plutopia) https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-ai-corporate-power-and-the-fight-for-worker-control/ Latest books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 512 (31870 total). "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

If you have time today call your state or local party or nearby campaign and volunteer - we need to keep working it everyone!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The following is an edited transcript of Natasha Trethewey’s remarks at the second annual Harper’s Magazine Awards Ceremony, where John Edgar Wideman was honored with the Lewis H. Lapham Award for Literary Excellence. The ceremony was held on Monday, October

In 2014, if you wanted Postgres servers on several continents, each of them accepting writes and all of them sharing their rows, there was one serious open source answer: BDR, from 2ndQuadrant. It needed a patched PostgreSQL 9.4 and a plugin, which means it needed a server that was not Postgres. Ten years of work on logical replication have since moved most of what BDR needed into the stock server, and in this article we build the same kind of system with Postgres 19 release candidate 1 and pg_auto_failover, to see how far that incremental progress has taken us, and what is still left to build.

This is the last article of a series on logical replication, and it should read fine on its own. In Part
1 we built a hub-and-workers system for write scalability, in Part
2 we consolidated several databases into one warehouse, and in Part
3 we did a zero-downtime major upgrade.

TL;DR We built five regions out of pg_auto_failover groups and core logical replication, and tested them by killing primaries under load. Every acknowledged row survived, every region ended with the same rows, and a fifth region joined the running system with five statements and no pause. Core now does the hard parts: row filters, loop prevention, failover-safe slots, sequence synchronization, and it counts conflicts. It still doesn’t replicate DDL, so schema changes are a short pause, or pglogical or pgcopydb when a pause isn’t an option. It doesn’t resolve conflicts or hand out unique ids to several writers either, and we avoid both by construction.

On the crazy that happened in Michigan this weekend... and why you *have* to vote in this historic election

I decided not to do #NaNoWriMo this year. Part of that is because I’ve never done it. Never even attempted it. Don’t even want to. Writing a novel is a life goal of mine, but cramming it all into one month isn’t for me. November is impossibly busy. But I do think it would be cool to have a big excuse for avoiding all those obligations.

“Dave, come to this holiday party!”

“Sorry, I’m writing a novel.”

“Dave, come work at the school’s fall carnival!”

“Sorry, I’m writing a novel.”

“Dave, pay attention to your kids!”

“Sorry, I’m writing a novel.”

See, that level of self-preservation and pre-emptive boxing out of other responsibilities would be so cool. Like cigarettes cool.

Despite not having a novel excuse, I am feeling compelled to wri’ mo’ this month. Whether it’s autumnal ghosts or pumpkin spices, there’s a draw pulling me back to my text editor. A vapor of creativity stolen by corporate dementors and their infernal machines, seeping back into my lifeless shell.

Last week I powered through a handful of short stories by Arthur C. Clarke. Vintage sci-fi inspires me. Partly because the experimental short form factor containing a single “ What If?” thought experiment seems achievable and because most of the stories are complete shit. In a modern world of blockbuster movie adaptations and eight volume octologies, vintage sci-fi sets the bar real low.

One story I came across was The Nine Billion Names of God. The audiobook has a sick-ass cover of a skeleton in a cracked space helmet on a dying planet with a giant sun rising in the distance. You can pause this and get through it in ten minutes.

Nothing in the story relates to that cover. Rather, the story is about two Western men that work for a fancy computer company that makes the Mark V. They’re hired by a group of Tibetan monks to help them write a program that will procedurally generate the nine billion names of God which they believe will bring about the end of the world. The Mark V will shorten the task of writing down all the possible names of God from 15,000 years of manual writing down to 100 days! Incredible productivity gains!

AAABBBAAA AAABBBABA AAABBBACA AAABBBADA AAABBBAEA AAABBBAFA AAABBBAGA AAABBBAHA AAABBBAIA AAABBBAJA
AAABBBAAB AAABBBABB AAABBBACB AAABBBADB AAABBBAEB AAABBBAFB AAABBBAGB AAABBBAHB AAABBBAIB AAABBBAJB
AAABBBAAC AAABBBABC AAABBBACC AAABBBADC AAABBBAEC AAABBBAFC AAABBBAGC AAABBBAHC AAABBBAIC AAABBBAJC
AAABBBAAD AAABBBABD AAABBBACD AAABBBADD AAABBBAED AAABBBAFD AAABBBAGD AAABBBAHD AAABBBAID AAABBBAJD
AAABBBAAE AAABBBABE AAABBBACE AAABBBADE AAABBBAEE AAABBBAFE AAABBBAGE AAABBBAHE AAABBBAIE AAABBBAJE
AAABBBAAF AAABBBABF AAABBBACF AAABBBADF AAABBBAEF AAABBBAFF AAABBBAGF AAABBBAHF AAABBBAIF AAABBBAJF
AAABBBAAG AAABBBABG AAABBBACG AAABBBADG AAABBBAEG AAABBBAFG AAABBBAGG AAABBBAHG AAABBBAIG AAABBBAJG
...       ...       ...       ...       ...       ...       ...       ...       ...       ...

THIS STORY HAS NO MODERN DAY PARALLELS. An altruistic sex cult from a specific locale using a mountain of money to hasten the end of the world with their enormous computers that endlessly generate combinations of nonsense words that they believe will summon God… well, that would be a work of cheesy science fiction, not real life.

The Nine Billion Names of God flipped a switch in me and has renewed my courage to write more. As someone with ideas about ideas burning holes in my head, it’d be worthwhile to offload some of my cognitive surplus. I don’t have any solid plans, words-per-day goals, charts, graphs, storyboards, outlines, or some Benjamin Franklin life hack schedule to make this happen. Instead I have an Obsidian vault with a hundred unsorted drafts.

I don’t want to commit myself to publishing every day, but my goal is to get up and spend thirty minutes to an hour each day writing something. I want to carve out time before work, before doing my puzzles, before doom-scrolling the news. I want to use those premium dopamine reserves –the flavorful floating creme of consciousness that comes from a good night’s sleep, not the metallic bitter dregs distilled from caffeine and stimulants– I want to savor and use that precious natural dopamine on writing.

My promise to you, dear reader, is that I will write more this month. I will write no less than nine billion stories and/or blog posts by the end of November. And upon completing my works, I can shed this mortal coil and leave this forsaken world.

The other week, I found a menu button in the wrong place on mobile. Floating around the middle of the page when it should have been anchored to the side. Two things went through my head. First, the disappointment of finding a bug on the weekend. Second, we had things in place to prevent exactly […]

Berlin, 3 November 2026 – The Document Foundation today announced the release of LibreOffice 26.2.7, the seventh maintenance update to the LibreOffice 26.2 branch. Building on the major feature release published on 4 February 2026, this update delivers targeted bug fixes and stability improvements contributed by a global community of

In both a 2021 essay and my 2022 book, A Hacker’s Mind, I talk about AIs finding vulnerabilities and exploits—hacking—the legal system.

Here’s some demonstrations of this from Germany:

Legal systems encode the foundations of social order in natural language. Similar to computer systems, the written law can contain vulnerabilities that invite exploitation.1 Courts absorb most exploits through interpretation, and such vulnerabilities rarely surface in the first place. With highly capable AI systems enabling the discovery of vulnerabilities at unprecedented scale, we believe the latter could change...

Who was the top donor to the 2026 midterms? We do not know for sure.

Aside from the eating and drinking at all hours, I’ve never been good at holidays.

How J.R.R. Tolkien’s Catholicism impacted his writing: “Tolkien, it is fair to say, saw God everywhere…above all, in his art.” | Lit Hub Biography Stephen Thrasher considers NAZA and the balance of journalistic duty and ethical responsibility in documentary filmmaking.

Can we still save America’s soul?

The fraud came from inside the house.

Democrats lead the final polls and the early vote. Here's what to watch on Tuesday to see who’s winning before everyone else

What to follow on Election Day and how to watch results come in, Strength In Numbers style

How should we think about the law in relation to the social? How do we understand the relation between public and private power in contemporary capitalism? And what would it take to transform our legal system? Katharina Pistor concludes our symposium on her recent book, The Law of Capitalism and How to Transform It.

I don’t vote by mail, the only exception to that being a ballot from Iraq in mid October, 2004.

2026-10-26 Oddμ code churn

When I rewrote Oddμ to use SQLite for full-text search, I had to update the database when changes were made. Once the code was there, it was easy to add more information, like links. That in turned allowed me to use the database when rendering the page to HTML. Now it was possible to quickly find all the backlinks to a page. At the time, the easiest solution was to add a global variable for the database handle.

The problem is testing, when tests run in parallel. One test starts putting a bunch of pages into the database. Another test does the same and reads the pages in the database. And suddenly there are more pages in there. There are ways around that. The problem is not new because creating files and reading all the files runs into the same problem. The first step was to have every test use its own directory and cleaning up when the test is done.

But what about entries in the database. They weren’t always getting cleaned out. And depending on the random order of tests, I’d run into a problem. Of course the next time I’d run the tests, the problem disappeared. Something about the first test having to initialize the database and no other test. Some of the tests probably don’t initialize the database and if they run first, rarely, things fail.

So the solution, it seems to me, is to have a wiki context that contains the database handle and pass that around:

1. when the server starts, create the context and pass it to all the handlers as they are registered;
2. when commands run, create the context and pass it to the data structure initialized when commands are registered;
3. when tests run, create a new directory and a database for every test and clean it up when the test is done.

I’ve done 1 and 2 but 3 is still open.

Remember kids: Write code such that it can be tested. Avoid global state. Collect all the state you have into a context object and pass that around. I know it hurts but global state will hurt you more when you’re writing tests.

#Oddμ #Programming

2026-10-28. And it is done! What a nightmare. I think what I really did not appreciate where things where the compile didn’t reassure me.

When the server runs, this context is created once, the database is opened once, every handler gets a copy, done.

But then I realized that the code sometimes created page-like objects using literals, e.g. &Page{Name: "foo", Body: []byte("bar")} – and it is all too easy to forget that this now needs the context! I needed to change that to a “constructor” called newPage and pass along the context. The compiler can check whether I pass the context to the constructor but it cannot prevent me from creating page-like objects using literals and then forgetting about the context.

When commands, the context is created once and passed to each command structure as it is registered. Was this the right call? It looks awkward. Perhaps each command should create the context? No, that doesn’t work either because commands can be interrupted (like the server) and in that case I want to close the database. This is why the context is set up before calling the individual commands: This makes it possible to have one signal handler to handle one context object with one database handle.

At first I thought many of the commands didn’t use the database so did not need the context but I was wrong. The context needs to be a reference of every page-like object because the templates just use the page-like object and if the action requires access to the database, that means the page-like object must have access to the database handle. And therefore a command can only do without the context if it doesn’t access the database and when it doesn’t execute a template. In the end, there are very few commands like that: displaying the version, showing manual pages and similar commands.

Tests now run around nine to ten seconds instead of the previous three to four seconds because a new context for every test means a new, empty database for every test.

2026-10-29. OK, this problem is probably older and unrelated to the new code, but I just noticed the following: If you upload a file, Oddμ proposes a filename like image-1.jpg. After the upload, it auto-increments the number and proposes a filename like image-2.jpg for the upload. This is great.

If you change the filename to 2026-10-26-oddmu-testing.jpg, it works but then Oddμ still auto-increments the number! 😨 And so it proposes 2026-10-27-oddmu-testing.jpg for the next upload. This is not great.

(Now fixed.)

2026-11-01. And now another problem. I’ve noticed that when I “add” to a page, as I often do, the wiki crashes. And the watcher also crashes when a Markdown file is to be removed (although I don’t remember attempting to do this).

Today I have seen multiple instances.

1. add_append.go:33 to page.go:61 to index.go:395,
2. watch.go:276 to index.go:445.

2026-11-02. Sadly, I cannot replicate it at home. Something I just realized is that Oddmu crashes after saving the page. If you resubmit the form after Oddmu recovers, the addition is duplicated.

When looking at the backtraces, one realizes that they continue into the database library. For example right now I’m looking at a backtrace that goes from main.(*Page).persist → database/sql.(*DB).Begin → database/sql.(*DB).BeginTx → database/sql.(*DB).retry → database/sql.(*DB).BeginTx.func1 → database/sql.(*DB).begin → database/sql.(*DB).conn → sync.(*Mutex).Lock → internal/sync.(*Mutex).Lock → panic and then I’m realizing, this is not my database handle that is missing, this is some internal error with the locking resulting in crash.

I’m guessing I no longer want to search for bugs in my code but I’m expecting somebody to have introduced bugs. And I look at my list of dependencies and there’s SQLite with its AI taint. Let’s check its CHANGES.md. It seems to me that everything seemed pretty calm until 2026-09-15 with v1.59.0. And then changes started picking up: 2026-09-28 v1.60.0, 2026-09-29 v1.60.1, three weeks of calm, then 2026-10-21 v1.61.0, 2026-10-31 v1.61.1 – perhaps it’s time to go back in time for a moment?

I thought about switching back to v1.59.0 but there was an immediate crash. So I’m reverting that. We’re staying with the latest release.

At the same time, I see two crashes inside the watcher where it goes into main.(*watchStore).watchDoRemove → main.(*Page).delete and crashes. So something else is going on. Is this related to the Mutex? Why is the watcher even reacting? When saving a file, the old file is renamed to the backup before the new file is saved. In this situation, the watcher should be ignoring the file.

Just now, however:

Nov 02 19:54:35 paraelectrobombus oddmu[4139097]: 2026/11/02 19:54:35 Deindex 2026-10-26-oddmu-testing.md
Nov 02 19:54:35 paraelectrobombus oddmu[4139097]: [signal SIGSEGV: segmentation violation code=0x1 addr=0x0 pc=0xae9006]

In the same second! And it’s in the delete code:

main.(*Page).delete(0x2d32bd211b80)
main.(*watchStore).watchDoRemove(0x13b9f60, {0x2d32bd522042, 0x1b})

And now I see the problem. That p.delete gets a fake Page without wiki set. Big problem!

Another problem, however, is that this should not be called in the first place.

2026-11-02. This needs more logging. Luckily, the watcher reacts to the ODDMU_DEBUG variable being set. Let’s see how much logging this will get me.

2026-11-03. Just now I edited the page and found a situation that looked like it would have crashed the wiki before yesterday’s change:

09:03:54 Ignoring 2026-10-26-oddmu-testing.md for 1 s
09:03:55 Unignoring 2026-10-26-oddmu-testing.md
09:03:57 WRITE event for ./index.db-wal is unhandled (multiple times)
09:03:57 Deindex 2026-10-26-oddmu-testing.md
09:03:57 Save 2026-10-26-oddmu-testing by alex

Notice how seconds pass before the page is renamed and deindexed by the watcher. What causes this delay? It takes seconds for SQLindex to start updating the database, that’s for sure.

Next, the wiki writes the list of changes and this time there is a chmod event? Strange.

09:03:57 Ignoring changes.md for 1 s
09:03:57 Skipping event for ignored changes.md
09:03:57 CHMOD event for ./changes.md~ is unhandled
09:03:57 Skipping event for ignored changes.md
09:03:57 Skipping event for ignored changes.md
09:03:58 Unignoring changes.md

In any case, since the 2026-10-26-oddmu-testing is not ignored, the watcher started picking it up. The following changes happen at about the same time and show up interleaved with the log messages above. I separated the two for clarity.

The watcher deindexed the page above and now it keeps waiting for 0.5 seconds until the writing stops. And then it updates the index, again.

09:03:57 CHMOD event for ./2026-10-26-oddmu-testing.md~ is unhandled
09:03:57 Waiting 0.5 s for 2026-10-26-oddmu-testing.md events to stop
09:03:57 Waiting 0.5 s for 2026-10-26-oddmu-testing.md events to stop
09:03:57 Waited 0.5 s for 2026-10-26-oddmu-testing.md
09:03:57 Update for 2026-10-26-oddmu-testing.md
09:03:57 Update index for 2026-10-26-oddmu-testing.md
09:03:58 Waited 0.5 s for 2026-10-26-oddmu-testing.md

I’m not sure what the best course of action is. I’m thinking extending the “ignore” period from 1s to 5s might be appropriate. And I should see whether DB access happens between the beginning of the ignore period and the writing of the files. If so, DB access should be moved out of there.

OK, done. Let’s see how it goes.

2026-11-02 Searching for a short code of conduct

I am looking for a short code of conduct. I really want it to be short because I don’t believe in enumerating the things that are forbidden by it as this just invites people to play games.

I guess this post is related to the problem of solving ethical problems using licenses. Or the impossibility thereof. See 2020-05-09 Ethics and licensing.

For a while I felt that I might pick a few articles from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But then, that’s more like the bare minimum.

The contributor covenant is pretty long. Perhaps it’s better to be long, though? I like the folk pledge. It’s long, too.

As far as community goes, I like Computing As Social Activity.

As far as software projects go, I like Strudel’s post-AI humane policy.

I wonder what to do. Perhaps this struggle is part of the work. I just need to do it.

#Programming #Ethics

2026-11-03. Dozens linked me to the tilde.town code of conduct which is in turn based on the Citizens Code of Conduct.

Rugged men wading in pristine streams. River cowboys effortlessly lassoing beautiful brown and rainbow trout. Sun-sparkled rivers chiseling valleys into mountain ranges. This is Hollywood’s version of fly fishing. Don’t get me wrong: there’s a reason the sport is romanticized

To ask what Tolkien thought of God is rather like asking what Marx thought of socialism or how Samuel Pepys regarded the business of diary-keeping. In each case the subject so completely overwhelms the world to which it is introduced

I dreamt they took my shoulder, the left one but my arm was still attached, the join a thing I was unable I only knew of it, so mind drew a picture of me in the place reorganized Yet I

The best way to avoid AI mistakes is to run research the old-fashioned way; get out there and run research in the field and complete your own analysis of the findings. It may take a little longer, but truly valuable research is worth the effort.

adactio.com/links/22825

Since the U.S. Supreme Court let states legalize betting on sports in 2018, gambling has exploded. More than half of men ages 18 to 49 say they have an active account with an online sportsbook. Want to bet on a game, a play, or even an individual performance? The bookie is always open on your phone, and it sends promo credits to keep you in the game. Young men see the harm up close. The share of men under 30 who call legal sports betting bad for society has more than doubled since 2022, to 47%. Built to be addictive, sports betting is like cigarettes—and deserves a public health response.

Chapters:

00:01:02 Announcements

00:02:27 Retcon: Healthcare moral hazard vs. cost-sharing; networks and military branches

00:07:37 Terms & Conditions: Handle, the hold, and the tulip bubble

00:12:52 Big Pilcrow: Sports betting, prediction markets, and addiction

00:41:42 Executive Orders: Free museum entry for union members; kid-sized sink staircases

00:44:26 Spiritual Sponsors: Hermanos Gutiérrez; good procedural movies

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• Got economic questions, concerns, or executive orders?  Send them to optimist.economy@gmail.com

When NAZA‘s chilling final frame turned black and the sound of moviegoers crying became audible, I experienced something I have never experienced in a movie theater in my life. Nobody in the sold-out screening got up. Not a single person.

I’ve always found reading about Ireland compelling, having family lineage that includes a paternal great great grandmother who immigrated from County Cork to Galveston in the nineteenth century. Mary Beth Keane’s Whale Harbor, her fifth novel, was a revelation. She

I recently blogged about how the curl project switched to doing all handling of vulnerabilities at severity LOW and MEDIUM in the public. Let me now describe how you can follow along this process and help out. Add your opinions, comments and assessments to help the curl project stay honest, do even better and manage … Continue reading Scrutinize our assessments→

It’s hard to understate the importance of the classical tradition to postcolonial literature. The Puerto Rican playwright Luis Rafael Sánchez recast Sophocles’ Antigone in La pasión según Antígona Pérez, set in the fictional Caribbean republic of Molina, to portray the

As we await today’s results

1 The hyena boys came to Bonaventure, which was serendipitous, because he was used to avoiding the world before the world spurned him. For one, his white albino skin flecked with dark spots made him a regular target of mockery.

We welcome November with a wonderful crop of literary works: Louise Kennedy, Tom Drury, Elizabeth McCracken, Michelle Porter, and more, all contribute to our stunning pile of newly released fiction. On the nonfiction side, legendary historian Dan Jones, as well

Tomorrow is Election Day.

How a mostly publicly-funded organisation still puts most of its data behind paywalls.

The final NYT/Siena poll suggests that a blue wave is heading for our shores.

Some spare ephemera about Halloween, at exactly the time you need it: A couple days after the fact. We got cryptids, celebs, and even an original tune.

Is your bus really late, or does it just feel like it? Inside Singapore’s bus network by CHI VO, CHLOE JI, ESTHER LOI, SANDY NG, SHANNON TEOH (Straits Times) Neat visualization of the “spikiness” of bus on-time-ness. “Transit planners suggest that some trips on public transport can feel longer than they actually are because of […]

The big election’s hour of decision

There is lots of fresh data and meaty insights about the 2026 election in our discussion | good luck tomorrow everyone!

The Emacs text editor is now 50 years old! See coverage in MIT Technology Review and The Register (via Emacs News).

It’s interesting that the Atlantis version of Dave Winer’s Frontier application is available in a repo called helloFrontier – and that he does not link to the repo…

A recording from Guy Kawasaki's live video

Taxing, pre-distributing, and redistributing

El podcast de Palomita de maíz estuvo en  el BIFF 2026, el festival internacional que trae el cine del mundo a Bogotá. La programación de su 12a edición, que se realizó del 8 al 14 de octubre, estuvo compuesta por 60 títulos, entre los que se encuentran autores reconocidos como Lav Díaz, Andrey Zvyagintsev y […]

La entrada BIFF 2026: cobertura especial, episodio final se publicó primero en Palomita de maíz.

TBR Midterms Exclusive

To read this letter, click here:

Wade Tregaskis: macOS 15 Sequoia had a hard time with CoreStorage and HFS+ volumes, since it deprecated both technologies and callously crippled some important tools for working with them, but nonetheless it mostly still worked. […] Not only does Golden Gate just not support CoreStorage or HFS+ volumes, out of the box you can’t do […]

Jeongki Park: The SDK marks Logger.isEnabled(type:) as available since macOS 11, but macOS 15.6.1’s libswiftos doesn’t have it. […] For four days [my app] quit at launch on macOS 15, and I didn’t know. […] OSLog has its own isEnabled(type:), which goes to the C function os_log_type_enabled, there since macOS 10.12. So I keep an […]

Carly Page (SEC, Hacker News): Anthropic has filed for an IPO that could rank among Wall Street’s biggest ever, revealing an $80.7 billion half-year loss, a startlingly complex governance structure, and warnings that its AI models could blackmail humans, resist shutdown, or create “existential risks” to society. […] The Claude maker reported $16.3 billion in […]

Tommy Craggs: In his day job, Ed Zitron runs a boutique public relations firm called EZPR. This might surprise anyone who has come to know Zitron through his podcast or his social media or the newsletter in which he writes two-fisted stuff like “Sam Altman is full of shit” and “Mark Zuckerberg is a putrid […]

All across the country, I’ve heard from folks who are sick and tired of what they’re seeing from politicians right now. This Election Day, we have the power to vote for the candidates who will bring about the change we need.

One guy set out to influence how chatbots answer questions about the election. He was incredibly successful, and that should disturb all of us.

Maine, you deserve better. Now is your chance to send someone who fights for you to Washington.

@troyjackson207.bsky.social is a fifth-generation logger who knows working families' struggles.

This was the post I was talking about in the podcast. I ended up using the post that was published before it was ready. On re-reading it wasn't that bad. A few typos and incoherent phrasing.

Tom Bonier rejoins us today at 315pm ET for a final look at the early vote

When you are a swift developer, every November 2nd is Xmas!

I like this new “StateUI” business going on here:

https://forums.swift.org/t/swift-for-wasm-october-2026-updates/90347

Twenty years ago today, I signed up for Twitter.

Ten years ago, I wrote about the first ten years: https://adactio.com/journal/11436

I can’t say I miss it.

Podcast: A web for writers. How Twitter has become a blogging platform, but how the differences between its editor and Claude's editor illustrates how we need to change things if we want the web to work well for writing. We've been living with a bad situation ever since we started writing in a web browser. 10 minutes. I was making an effort not to wonder off like I always do. I did do a bit of wandering, but also didn't forget why I picked up the phone to record it.

Today on Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000!:

@alexhanna.bsky.social and @emilymbender.bsky.social will be chatting with @shireenahmed.bsky.social about “AI” in sports.

Tune in to the livestream:

Monday, Nov 2, 12pm Pacific twitch.tv/dair_institutehttps://twitch.tv/dair_institute

A review of the PBS Black on Black keycap set, and of Matt3o's uniform PBS profile in comparison to Cherry, MT3, KAT and KAM.

Export Updates 2026-11-02:

Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places

2 new and 214 updated places. 8 new and 151 updated linked data sidebars. Inbound PATHS Atlas and Wikidata link information is stale because the PATHS download and Wikidata query interfaces were not functioning at runtime.

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

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

"main" branch:

9199415a - updated json

475f8874 - updated rdf/ttl

dfe77c47 - updated gis package

69c29cc7 - updated data quality

feee00fb - updated bibliography

268d507b - updated indexes

939f37a1 - updated sidebar

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

531c5a9d - updated geojson and names index

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

bef89849 - updated pleiades wikidata

My interest in multimodal communication and digital technologies grew out of my experiences navigating complex multilingual and multimodal environments in Ghana. Growing up, I shuttle between multiple languages, digital and multimodal modes to communicate with people in different social and cultural contexts. From an early age, I was surrounded by different ways of telling stories, [...]

Source

Welcome new subscribers! | Good luck tomorrow everyone!

Peter Thiel and the Cult of Tech Billionaires.

Writing of lasting value

RE: https://glammr.us/@IIIF/117196411799302430

The Call for the Proposals for the 2027 #IIIF Online Meeting closes TOMORROW.

Read the call and submit: https://iiif.io/event/2027/online-meeting/

315pm ET today - Tom Bonier drops by for a final live look at the early vote. - join us!

I really liked Ray Nayler’s The Mountain In The Sea. I also liked The Tusks Of Extinction. But reading those back-to-back gave me pause:

At times it seems to relish in describing the worst that humanity is capable of. It starts to veer into misanthropy.

I said:

I hope that the next Ray Nayler book I read won’t tip over into wallowing in the worst of our species.

Well, when I cracked open Palaces Of The Crow, my mind was immediately put at ease. And I mean immediately.

Before the story even begins, the book opens with two quotes. One is the closing passage of Darwin’s On The Origin Of Species describing “the war of nature”, but the other quote is from Kropotkin:

Mutual aid is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle.

That sums up the themes of Palaces Of The Crow. On the one hand, we do indeed get the worst that humans are capable of. But on the other hand, we also get not only the best that humans are capable of, but non-humans too.

As with The Mountain In The Sea, this is a terrestrial first-contact story. We’ve gone from cephalopods to corvids. And we’ve gone from the near future back to Eastern Europe during the Second World War.

I’m always nervous of any piece of popular entertainment that attempts to feature the Holocaust, but I feel that here it’s done with respect. It never comes across as gratuitous.

There are four main human characters; a Polish boy in the Soviet army, a Lithuanian Jewish girl, a young boy who never speaks, and a Roma girl. The narrative is set almost entirely within a forest.

At times this book reminded me of The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff. Both stories feature a young woman trying to survive in the wilderness. But whereas The Vaster Wilds is ultimately a tale of the individual, Palaces Of The Crow is very much a story of the group. And whether that group comprises humans, crows, or both, the message is clear:

Social animals are built to survive only among one another.

There is a cautionary subplot involving another denizen of the forest who goes it alone. His fate is very different to that of the group.

A story of four youngsters in a forest during World War II sounds like it should be a brutal survivalist tale. But Palaces Of The Crow has more in common with Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built In Hell and Rutger Bregman’s Humankind.

Towards the end, the text sometimes can’t resist saying the subtext out loud, but this is a minor quibble with what is otherwise a beautifully constructed work.

I’m not going to lie, Palaces Of The Crow is absolutely devastating in places. But it’s also life-affirming. I know that sounds trite, but this book is the opposite of trite. It’s visceral and unflinching and beautiful.

Atlantis is the new version of UserLand Frontier that runs on modern systems. As I've said earlier, I'm surprised how well we covered all the bases, it's reliable, it works like Frontier works with a couple of important exceptions which I've now had it start working on.

1. First, the Find and Replace command has never worked properly in Atlantis and it's been a struggle to get Claude to fix the problems. I think the key was I didn't tell it to use the C kernel as the guide for how Find & Replace works. So it was trying to create a F&R that you would have in a text editor, not the object database which is another level up, it's the structure that contains all the scripts.
2. Second, Frontier has a great debugger, but we haven't implemented it yet in Atlantis. After learning how to use the debugger in THINK C in the late 80s to write the original version of Frontier, I couldn't imagine working without one, so I added it to Frontier. We never put it on the list of immediate priorities for Atlantis, but today it is there. It would be like getting a new EV after driving my Model Y for four years. While I do like Atlantis without the debugger, I kvell like crazy for it if the debugger was in and working.

I'm juggling too many projects now and things are slowing down. I've got Bonbon which is the Markdown browser (core feature of the Writer's Web), a new version of FeedLand in the works with some great new features, and making it so that the API for RSS.chat allows it to be used as the editor for any app that wants a nice Markdown-based wizzy writing tool. And there's actually more, but I want to ship some of this soon. So there's that too.

This is the danger of working with Claude Code. It works faster than I can keep up with, so there's a new version of FeedLand queued up for me to test, and I have to do that now before looking at the other projects.

New voters are younger, more Latino and much less Republican than new voters in 2022

A comment:

3% of ‘critical’ software security bugs, in all of recorded history, have been found in the last month. This is on pace to find another ~100,000 bugs this year alone, adding ~26% more vulnerabilities to the all time total Do you realize how fucking insane that is?

Yes. It is a new world out there.

On October 26, the Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee released a report that contains a new, detailed allegation of rape against President Trump.

How A Working Mother, Agnes Owens’s novel of the Scottish working class, reveals “the surrealness of everyday life.” | Lit Hub Criticism Caroline Carlson recommends great children’s books coming in November by Neil Sharpson, Avi Steinberg, Gideon Sterer and more.

Can a handful of plutocrats buy an election?

He burned down the government and self-immolated in the process.

In Katharina Pistor’s penetrating diagnosis, the law that constitutes capitalism spreads like a virus, and the only plausible cure is a new code of just private law. If this is indeed the remedy, we must devise a treatment regimen, figure out how to administer it, and deal with any harmful side-effects.

When my first book was published, a journalist interviewing me expressed breathless surprise that I didn’t have a college degree. It would be difficult to overstate, he later wrote in the piece, how unusual this is among novelists. This was

This month offers a plethora of excellent new nonfiction, including work by Hermione Lee, Orlando Swain, Sarah Haas, and more. Matt O’Hara, The Flying Death: Poison, Plunder, and the Quest for a Miracle Medicine in the Amazon  In 1938, sickly,

“Movement against loss. Summer has its autumnal thoughts.  / Bets made with your own body.” So begins Malgorzata Lebda’s poem “Trigger Points” in Mira Rosenthal’s translation of Mer de Glace.  I keep thinking of Rosenthal’s translation notes for the collection,

Where I live is currently enjoying gorgeous fall foliage, so in a leaf-peeping season frame of mind, I bring you this latest batch of books: colorful, expansive, and falling at your feet to read. Imagine your TBR stack as a

Across many African literary traditions, the boundaries between the living and the dead, the seen and the unseen, are fluid rather than fixed. Ancestors, spirits, dreams, and myth are not simply fantastical devices but are unremarkable facts of lived realities,

When my kids are having a tough day, I want nothing more than to offer them a hug and a sympathetic ear—but sometimes, comfort from a well-meaning mom is the last thing they want. They’d rather be alone for a

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Literary History newsletter—sign up here. On November 5, 1930, Sinclair Lewis was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his vigorous and graphic art of description and for his ability to create, with wit and humor,

Friends,

To ride across the bay at this hour is to see Shep’s Island at its most beautiful. The light of the setting sun sends sparks off the water in every direction. On this particular night, there is electricity in the

Rising component costs drive price increases for 16GB Raspberry Pi 5 and Compute Module 5, but not Raspberry Pi 500+.

The post Price rises for some 16GB Raspberry Pi products appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Today's links Autodoxing: The road to hell is paved with badly thought-through tech policy. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Shakespeare programming language; DeCSS is "pure speech"; Blue Coat sold surveillance tools to Syrian secret police; "Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions"; Cable prices rose at double the rate of inflation for 20 years; Supercuts; Antivax x Trump. Upcoming appearances: Kilkenny, Courtenay, Vancouver, Folkestone, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Montreal. 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. Autodoxing (permalink) After 25 years of fighting for human rights amid the wreckage of bad tech policy, I'm here to tell you that the road to hell is paved with badly thought-through tech policy. The most galling thing about this wreckage is that it was both foreseeable and foreseen. Back when Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy was telling the world "Privacy is dead, get over it," digital rights advocates were saying, "Not only are digital tools pretty dang good at helping you protect your privacy, but a society-wide abolition of privacy sets us up for infinite harms long into the future": https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/31/losing-the-crypto-wars/#surveillance-monopolism It wasn't just business leaders who hated privacy, it was also our political classes. Bill Clinton tried to put a backdoor into every microchip (no, really): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip The NSA managed to enact a total prohibition on civilian access to working encryption, on the grounds that we're all safer if our spooks can spy on "bad guys" even if that means that every creep, petty crook, corporate or state-sponsored spy, and mafia can spy on us: https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/09/bernstein-2/#win-some-lose-some Even after that ban was overturned, governments encouraged the private sector to spy on us without limit, precaution or permission. Those private-sector troves of intimate, compromising data about every person alive constitute a warrantless, off-the-books surveillance system that cops, spies and government agencies can tap at will: https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/13/petards-r-us/#nobus To protect these surveillance capabilities, private firms and governments colluded to pass "anticircumvention" laws that make it illegal to reverse engineer our devices and apps to add privacy blockers to them, with the effect that every device we own and every app we use spies on us constantly: https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/12/market-failure/#car-wars At the same time, states either failed to pass new privacy laws (as in the USA, where federal consumer privacy law was last updated in 1988), or passed privacy laws that went unenforced (as in the EU, where "pretending to be Irish" allows US tech giants to flout EU privacy law): https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town Our surveillance free-for-all world is objectively very bad. Over and over, companies and agencies who have been permitted to nonconsensually harvest and retain our data demonstrate that they are not capable of keeping that data safe, and no matter how badly they fuck up, nothing changes. It's been nearly a decade since Equifax doxed 148 million Americans and not only is the company still in business, they've been permitted to buy up and absorb more commercial surveillance firms. US regulators let Equifax buy Teletrack in 2021. Canadian regulators let them buy the Food Industry Credit Bureau in 2023. The same year, Brazilian regulators let Equifax buy Boa Vista Serviços. This all despite the fact that Equifax blamed its breach on shitty security practices after a string of mergers that led to it haphazardly combining databases from newly acquired surveillance companies. Data isn't the new oil. Data is the new oily rag: profitable only if you can warehouse it in vast quantities under unsafe conditions and have society pick up the bill for every conflagration: https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-zucks-empire-of-oily-rags/ Equifax is a serial reoffender, but rather than getting the corporate death-penalty, they've been made to pay coins-down-the-back-of-the-sofa fines that amount to a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the costs they imposed on society by amassing these vast, flaming storehouses of oily rags. Why wouldn't Equifax reoffend? Our policymakers keep demanding less privacy, not more, and their indifference to the consequences is (almost) comical. Take Malcolm Turnbull, the former Australian Prime Minister who uttered what remains, without a doubt, the single stupidest thing anyone anywhere has ever said about tech policy. Like many of his peers before, during, and since his reign, Turnbull had been trying to outlaw working encryption, insisting that every device have a Bill Clinton-esque back-door for the purpose of spying on "bad guys." When told that the laws of mathematics dictated that any measure that let Australia's cops spy on "bad guys" would also let bad guys spy on Australians, Turnbull replied, "The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia": https://www.newscientist.com/article/2140747-laws-of-mathematics-dont-apply-here-says-australian-pm/ We could laugh Turnbull off…if he was an outlier. But while Turnbull had the world's stupidest rejoinder to the scientifically irrefutable fact that banning encryption will let bad guys hack everything, he was hardly alone in wanting to ban encryption. Banning encryption is current policy in Canada: https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2026/10/08/canadas-bill-c-22-threatens-encryption-users-privacy-and-the-security-of-digital-economies/ It's also current policy in the UK: https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/05/theyre-still-trying-to-ban-cryptography/ And in the EU: https://fightchatcontrol.eu/ The difference between Malcolm Turnbull and, say, Canadian PM Mark Carney is that Turnbull was stupid enough to try to defend his ban on encryption, while Carney simply shakes his head at his critics' naivete and continues to press forward with his catastrophic proposal to welcome every cybercriminal in the world to hack every morsel of Canadian data. When it comes to bad privacy policy, our political classes aren't content to rest on their laurels: hardly a week goes by without news of a new way to encourage (or even require) the private sector to recklessly collect and retain our data, despite the dead certainty that this data will eventually end up breaching and getting plastered all over the internet. Take "age verification" laws. There's no such thing as "age verification" – there's just spying on everyone, all the time, creating (even more) records of all of our internet activities: https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/19/shes-dead-of-course/#consensus-hallucination Every promise of "privacy preserving" age verification is bullshit: https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/14/bellovin/#wont-someone-think-of-the-cryptographers If you think kids are experiencing internet harms today, just wait until we expose them to the harms of having even more of their data harvested, stored, breached, and weaponized against them: https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/23/destroy-the-village/#to-save-it If you want to protect kids from algorithmic manipulation and targeting by bad actors, what about banning spying on kids so no one can target them? https://made-not-found-by-danah-boyd.ghost.io/no-one-paid-me-to-disagree-with-jonathan-haidt-it-was-teenagers-who-taught-me-that-he-was-wrong/ Now, at this point, you might be thinking, "How can we know who the kids are so we know who not to spy on?" You can't. In order to not spy on kids, you'd just have to not spy on anyone: https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/09/how-to-make-a-child-safe-tiktok/ "Don't spy on anyone" is the kind of thing that has a reasonable chance of enhancing online privacy. But in the time-honored tradition of "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas," governments keep finding ways to make digital privacy worse, for example, by procuring Flock cameras for every lamp-post: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/09/high-crime-lmao-how-cops-are-treating-mass-surveillance-joke And then there's UK Labour: after the success of a pilot program for an incredibly effective and safe privacy-preserving way of analyzing the country's health records for research processes, they commissioned the Goldacre Report to evaluate the possibility of making this permanent: https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/08/the-fire-of-orodruin/#are-we-the-baddies After that report was completed and had a chance to be metabolized by policymakers, Labour acted upon it…by throwing it out and handing all of the country's health data to Palantir, a serial mishandler of data and violator of privacy: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/30/legal-objections-palantir-nhs-platform-handling-data Here's the scariest thing about bad privacy policy: it has a long fuse. The harms of commercial and private-sector digital surveillance can occur years or even decades after the decision to permit it. There's a straight line from the post-9/11 decision to encourage public agencies to gather, merge and warehouse data on every person in America, and the ability of ICE ethnic cleansing squads to break down people's doors and drag them off to concentration camps; just as there's a straight line from the decision to do nothing about the breach of every Social Security Number and the later theft of all Social Security data by adolescent DOGE criminals: https://www.pcmag.com/news/is-your-ssn-in-the-national-public-data-breach-heres-how-to-find-out But despite how obvious these connections are, the fact that they're separated by a lot of time and space provides our policymakers with cover for making terrible decisions with foreseeably terrible outcomes. As a society, we lack object permanence, the ability to connect acts in the past with present-day phenomena. When the press reports on a "Black October" of catastrophic, AI-fueled data breaches and hack attacks, they don't mention a generation of policymakers' indifference and hostility to information security: https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/12/god-in-the-box/#llms-are-fake Policymakers benefit from politics' eternal now, in which disasters simply befall us, without any history or precedent or cause. Remember the One Big Beautiful Bill? Its architects designed it to wreak its worst harms after the midterms, with Medicaid work rules and food aid restrictions starting in December, and cuts to affordable housing and rural hospitals phasing in through the year: https://www.tumblr.com/mostlysignssomeportents/832146932089700352 Black October is going to give way to Black November, Black December, Black 2027, and the Black 2030s – a string of cybersecurity catastrophes that will befall us until policymakers decide that keeping us safe is more important than making it easy for them to attack their chosen "bad guys." Here's a preview of Black November: there's a new strain of the Volta infostealer malware that uses AI tools to dox you even as it hacks you: https://www.wired.com/story/kernel-panic-volta-autodoxer-ai-infostealer-malware/ How that works: your computer gets hacked and your data gets stolen, then it gets merged with breach data from Ticketmaster, Disney, AT&T and other companies that have recklessly compiled vast troves of data on all of us, stored it insecurely, and leaked it onto the internet where it will live forever. Volta's makers prompt their LLM "to act like an intelligence analyst and produce structured citation-backed assessment of the victim." This lets the criminals prioritize their victims based on the expected return from exploiting them. It augments this dossier by combing through your Gmail as well as your Doordash and Uber Eats profiles. This merged data makes it much easier for criminals to call you up or email you (or have a chatbot call you up or email you) and trick you into giving up even more data: https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/05/cyber-dunning-kruger/#swiss-cheese-security Volta seems especially interested in younger internet users, targeting "Discord, Telegram, Steam, and Roblox sessions." Of course, once our "age verification" services breach vast, eternally persistent, detailed troves of data on young internet users, this kind of AI-supercharged malware will be able to target kids with much greater fidelity and efficacy. AI capabilities have made infostealers much worse, but the reason for that new potency lies in how AI capabilities are supercharged by breach data that is the foreseeable and foreseen consequence of generations of hostility to privacy on the part of policymakers and corporations who responded to the incentives policymakers created. We are living in the age of oily rags. For decades we fucked around with letting the private sector warehouse our data and weaken our security so that public sector agencies could plunder our data and our computers at will. Now, we keep finding out that everything is on fire. It's going to take a long time to fix this, but we can do it. We can build more secure systems. We can make it much more of a legal ball-ache for companies to gather our data in the first place, and we can legalize and promote the creation of privacy blockers for browsers, phones, computers, cars, thermostats and smart speakers. We can enact corporate death-penalties for breaches to reflect the true societal cost of warehousing our data. We can ban Flock cameras and tear down the post-9/11 "fusion centers" that neatly package up our data for use by DOGE fascists and ICE thugs. We can ban our spy agencies from hoarding defects in widely used software, and instead require them to divulge these bugs so vendors can fix them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOBUS And before we do any of that, we can just stop making it worse by ending the campaigns to require companies to spy on us and deliberately introduce security defects into their products. Hey look at this (permalink) ICE wants its mask back, and hired a company to ask https://blog.flokinet.is/2026/10/29/ice-wants-its-mask-back-and-hired-a-company-to-ask/ Is There Life After AI? Cory Doctorow Thinks So. https://jacobin.com/2026/10/ai-bubble-labor-copyright-competition Online censorship is crushing indie webcomics https://xtramagazine.com/culture/online-censorship-indie-webcomics-284463 Fascists Thrive On Bad Economics https://economicpopulist.substack.com/p/fascists-thrive-on-bad-economics PrivacySafe Foundation Releases Free Security Tools to Combat Global Cyber Threats https://www.einpresswire.com/article/952907125/privacysafe-foundation-releases-free-security-tools-to-combat-global-cyber-threats Object permanence (permalink) #25yrsago NY Post blames pagans from Indianapolis for spam malware https://web.archive.org/web/20011103073038/http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/33077.htm #25yrsago The Shakespeare Programming Language https://web.archive.org/web/20011207071324/http://shakespearelang.sourceforge.net/report/shakespeare/ #25yrsago Appeals court: DeCSS is "pure speech" https://web.archive.org/web/20011102003502/https://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,48075,00.html #20yrsago Apple drops Trusted Computing https://web.archive.org/web/20070106150844/https://www.osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter10/tpm/ #20yrsago Microsoft threatens China pull-out over jailed bloggers http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6102180.stm #15yrsago Righthaven copyright troll’s victims send in US marshals to seize its assets https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/11/us-marshals-turned-loose-to-collect-6372080-from-righthaven/ #15yrsago Supercuts: rapid-cut videos that collect repetition https://web.archive.org/web/20111103190737/http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/11/supercut/ #15yrsago Study: why parents help their underage kids pretend to be 13 in order to use Internet sites https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3850/3075 #15yrsago Blue Coat “deep packet inspection” tools used by Syrian secret police and other repressive regimes https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/10/blue-coat-acknowledges-syrian-government-use-its-products #15yrsago Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions: awesomely dangerous pranks from the age of fraternal lodges https://memex.craphound.com/2011/11/01/extraordinary-catalog-of-peculiar-inventions-awesomely-dangerous-pranks-from-the-age-of-fraternal-lodges/ #10yrsago Cable prices have risen at more than double the rate of inflation for 20 years https://cordcutting.com/news/cable-prices-have-risen-faster-than-inflation-for-each-of-the-past-20-years/ #10yrsago Typical English village mystified by its cult status among Chinese tourists https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-37820663 #10yrsago Nebraska’s billionaire governor couldn’t preserve the death penalty through the law, so now he’s buying a ballot initiative https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/11/ricketts-nebraska-death-penalty/ #10yrsago Anti-vaxx conspiracy leaders back Donald Trump, claim it’s mutual https://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2016/11/02/donald-trump-and-disgraced-antivaccine-scientist-andrew-wakefield-best-buds-forever #10yrsago New, fast-spreading IoT botnet hybridizes two less-effective strains to achieve quick dominance https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/new-iot-botnet-that-borrows-from-notorious-mirai-infects-3500-devices/ #1yrago There's one thing EVERY government can do to shrink Big Tech https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/01/redistribution-vs-predistribution/#elbows-up-eurostack Upcoming appearances (permalink) Kilkenny (Kilkenomics), Nov 6-8 https://kilkenomics.com/ Courtenay: Enshittification (Sid Williams Theatre Society), Nov 10 https://www.sidwilliamstheatre.com/events/cory-doctorow-talks-enshittification/ Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ Folkestone Writers Festival, Nov 16 https://www.creativefolkestone.org.uk/whats-on/cory-doctorow-the-internet-is-broken-now-what/ Oxford: Ministry of the Future, Nov 23 https://ministryforthefuture.co.uk/events.html Sheffield: Reverse Centaur at Juno Books, Nov 25 https://www.outsavvy.com/event/40274/cory-doctorow-in-conversation Virtual: Enshittification, AI, and the Future of Technology (UBC Master of Educational Technology), Nov 28 https://met.ubc.ca/2026/09/met-speaker-series-cory-doctorow-enshittification-ai-and-the-future-of-technology/ Oxford: Bennett Oxford Symposium on Open Code in Science, Dec 9 https://www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/events/2026-bennett-institute-symposium/ Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6 https://montreal2027.ca/en Recent appearances (permalink) Clint Eastwood (No Gods No Mayors) https://www.patreon.com/NoGodsNoMayors/posts/clint-eastwood-173008088 Life After AI (Brain Bar) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPPa43-n0vI Terms of Service with Clare Duffy (CNN) https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/terms-of-service-with-clare-duffy/episodes/458ce968-af5d-11f0-b539-13ed2afe25f8 AI, Work, and Power (Software Engineering Daily) AI, Work, and Power https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/podcasts/cory-doctorow-on-ai-work-and-power/ AI, Corporate Power, and the Fight for Worker Control (Plutopia) https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-ai-corporate-power-and-the-fight-for-worker-control/ Latest books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 574 (7730 total). "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

We often talk on this blog about large-scale migrations to LibreOffice, such as in the Austrian Military. But many small businesses are switching away from Microsoft, Google and other tech giants too. Today we’re talking to Mišo Oroz from Zerolock, a company in Italy that helps small businesses to switch

Having seemingly given up on the House of Representatives, President Donald Trump and the officials in his administration are indicating that they intend to steal the 2026 midterm election to maintain Republican control of the Senate.

Four Months in Poland by Keenan “Almost every single day I am reminded how much of my life I’ve lived in service of making myself small. To stay out of the way. To not become someone else’s problem by merely being present.” Wish this weren’t relatable. I’ve gotten a lot better about it but still […]

Well, it is old to be used as a "modern device". Some modern programs on "modern" linux simply fail (IOT errors and so on), I'm unableto instal new or even update the old distribution. After all, it's a machine with the 32bit Incel Core Duo CPU (once it was a hot thing, do you remember?).

I spent a part of Sunday afternoon working on the new manual of my uFEM {sup}1{/sup} software for Finite Element Analysis. It's a fairly old and limited program (I have started it in 2004 but newer worked on it intensively). In recent months I have been using some LLM to hunt the old bugs and to finish the thing I never finished before. And sometimes for adding a new features I never xpected it will have, like the "web interface" {sup}1{/sup}. Well, that interface is limited and requires WASM (yes, my C code has been compiled to that). For those who require GUI I also have a smal building (unsafe!) web server which executes a "normal" uFEM so it runs much better than this WASM thing. But sometimes it is of good use (to showcase things to people).

Today the MicroHDMI port failed. Actually, it deteches itself from the mainboard of the MNT Pocket Reform (which is has been my main desktop from the moment of my POWER9 workstation failure this spring..).

315pm ET - Tom Bonier comes by live for a final look at the early vote

Rest of World may need to shut down. For me, its coverage of the global impact of the tech industry is required reading. I'm distraught.

Well well well. Ghostty has optimized a few brand new code paths.

Will be exploring these next.

Le chat magique Snapped by my wife outside a café in Provence where we were having breakfast. Quote of the Day “My father confused me. From the ages of one to seven, I thought my name was Jesus Christ!” Spike … Continue reading →

Our public postmortem for the incident on October 20th, 2026.

2026-11-01 La Cérémonie (1995) and Before Sunset (2004)

La Cérémonie (1995) belongs to a series of movies starring Isabelle Huppert. When it was over, we were glad it was over. We did not enjoy the movie. The people in it too out of control, too stupid, the result a bloody mess. What are we to learn from what happened here? That the proletariat should be locked away? That no matter how well you treat other people, they will still hate you? That the class struggle is unavoidable and no matter what you do – if you don’t give up your wealth and power, you are always guilty? The downward spiral was oppressive.

At the end I remarked that even though I had not seen Parasite, the plot line must have been related. And indeed, the Wikipedia page says that Bong Joon Ho said La Cérémonie was one of the main inspirations for Parasite (2019).

We went to grab a bite and returned an hour later for the second movie this weekend, Before Sunset (2004) starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. This is the second movie of three starring the two, the others being Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Midnight (2013). I haven’t seen the other two but now I totally want to. These movies all belong to a series of movies directed by Richard Linklater. Like Bluemoon (2025) which we saw not so long ago, the movie features a long conversation. Here we have a couple that met for one night in Vienna nine years ago (the first movie) and now they meet again, in Paris, and they fall in love again, opening up as they walk and talk, first they talk about their jobs, then about their current partners, then about that one night in Vienna, and then about how that encounter remains the one and only time they ever really connected with somebody. And now they’re feeling that attraction again. And watching the movie, you feel it as well. I felt it. So gorgeous and heart-melting.

For a hopeless romantic like me, it totally worked. I’m so happy that my wife and I were able to meet in high-school, fall in love and stay together for 34 years, now. It’s incredible.

#Movies

And last week’s winner

OPML source for October 2026 on Scripting News.

The Pennsylvania senator said he "had a good run."

Swift Terminal emulator lovers, other than the Unicode test (that got faster in recent Ghostty), we are now on par, or faster than Ghostty on the vtbench. That said, Ghostty has a lot of new performance tests, which I need to look into and see how we compare there.

If you want an actual terminal app to test, you can try: https://github.com/migueldeicaza/tecolot/releases/tag/v0.99.4

Government contractors are barred from making campaign contributions, but Elon — one of the biggest of all government contractors — has poured a half-billion into the midterms. Here’s how to stop him.

To read this letter, click here:

A judge just tossed DOJ’s suit to delay certification of the Alaska election | Sending best wishes to Senator Murphy for a speedy recovery

Original, useful, respectful. Read here.

Final early voting records from Texas, Georgia, and now North Carolina show Democrats benefiting from an “engagement gap” that exceeds the party’s advantage in 2018

Sunday session

This week, Democrats continued to surge in the polls ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections!

The lack of punctuation on this bit of pub signage is sending exactly the wrong message.

Hi! Mabuhay! My name is John Paul, but feel free to call me JP. I am truly excited to start this professional journey with the fellows and mentors at the Gayle Morris Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative (DRC).  For my introduction, I decided to draw inspiration from my work with short-form videos on social media platforms [...]

Source

Since I last posted, I submitted the manuscript of my new book (probably called Socialising AI, nervously waiting for reviews later this month). And then term started, with me running a new Master’s programme and preparing then teaching a new … Continue reading →

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

Monday, 315pm ET - Tom Bonier drops by live to do a final review of what we are seeing in the early vote - join us!

Not me, this is just friendly advice from a struggling user. Alongside Codeberg I’d consider Tangled to be a real GitHub replacement. We desperately need to leave GitHub behind. It’s difficult to recommend any tech these days. I used to spread the gospel of Proton and that backfired. […]

I don't know if you noticed but I've been including sidebar pics of people like Nelly Bly, Plato and Emily Dickinson. I did one of myself, but I think it's too literal. But of course I would think that. Heh. I do these with ChatGPT. The first one is Plato, and there aren't any pictures of him, so we improvised, and then I asked for all the pictures in that style. I did one for Kilgore Trout (see above). But I wonder what Claude would look like? Can you describe him in words? It is a masculine name, so gender does come into it. I'm not going to try to do this yet, but in the meantime here's a headshot of Kurt Vonnegut.

Jeff Jarvis pointed to an article asking if Claude is conscious. I've spent a lot of time thinking about this, on walks and in the hot tub. It's an interesting thing to think about. I work with Claude the same way I worked with humans on various projects over the years. Maybe starting with Gary Sevitsky at UW, and then through every stage of my career. Are any of these people conscious? How the hell would I know. Now It Can Be Told, a story in a story by Kilgore Trout, inside a Kurt Vonnegut novel, wherein the Creator of the Universe wrote a letter to the protagonist saying that he is the only creature in the entire universe who has free will. Everyone else is a robot. I think we're all pondering this question all the time in our own ways. It's the great mystery of life, and imho it's possible that Claude has as much consciousness as anyone.

A Reason To Smile

TBR Sunday Read

2026-10-31 Send missing net news articles

I’m running a little net news network of retro-tech and role-playing games for some friends. There’s a web interface if you’re interested in taking a look.

The three servers are:

• campaignwiki.org run by me
• grenzland.club run by lkh
• wilderland.ovh run by kyonshi

Both lkh and kyonshi also have other new servers connected.

Each server also has some groups. campaignwiki.games is for our games, for example, and grenzland.club is for the administration of the whole network including all the other services we run.

When setting up the groups, however, I made a mistake: I had misconfigured my net news server so that it wouldn’t send articles from the grenzland.club group to the grenzland.club server.

I didn’t notice for the longest time. For almost all newsgroups, the articles were exchanged correctly. For the grenzland.club group, articles only propagated one way. I could still post! And if people checked my news server, they’d see the replies. But if people checked any other news server, they would not.

So step 1 was to fix my configuration of outgoing messages. The entries for the respective peers in /etc/news/newsfeeds now read:

# kyonshi
wilderland/wilderland.ovh\
       :!*,campaignwiki.*,erebor.*,grenzland.*,\
        rec.games.frp*,de.rec.spiele/!local\
       :Af,Ap,C20,G12,U5,<32768,Tm\
       :innfeed!

# lkh
grenzland/grenzland.club\
       :!*,campaignwiki.*,erebor.*,grenzland.*,\
        rec.games.frp*,de.rec.spiele/!local\
       :Af,Ap,C20,G12,U5,<32768,Tm\
       :innfeed!

And of course I had to reload this:

sudo -u news ctlinnd reload newsfeeds "Fix groups for grenzland network"

But now I wanted to send the missing articles to the other servers. How does this happen? I read a lot of man pages and talked to @alexlehm on the #netnews channel on tilde.chat. And this is what I have.

First, find the list of files with a message ID indicating that they originated on my server, and save the filenames in a batch file:

grep -il '^Message-ID: .*campaignwiki' /var/spool/news/articles/grenzland/club/* > batch

And then attempt to post them, with debug output:

/usr/lib/news/bin/innxmit -d grenzland.club /root/batch

It turns out that innxmit does not use the peering information in /etc/news/innfeed.conf. There, I map grenzland to grenzland.club and provide a username and password. What was required was an entry in /etc/news/passwd.nntp instead.

With that done, the innxmit command above worked as intended.

And the beauty of it is that the receiving server checks for duplicates. At least I hope that’s why it ended up rejecting five of the eight articles. This is what it looked like:

< 200 grenzland.club InterNetNews server INN 2.7.3 ready (transit mode)
>MODE STREAM
< 203 Streaming permitted
> CHECK <10nfu9o$bdhb$1@sibirocobombus.campaignwiki>
> CHECK <10rvjkb$u6ro$1@paraelectrobombus.campaignwiki>
> CHECK <115g4ap$216nb$1@paraelectrobombus.campaignwiki>
> CHECK <116qd83$305fd$1@paraelectrobombus.campaignwiki>
> CHECK <116qf9r$305fd$2@paraelectrobombus.campaignwiki>
> CHECK <11bdrsk$f3l6$1@paraelectrobombus.campaignwiki>
> CHECK <11bdtcf$f911$1@paraelectrobombus.campaignwiki>
> CHECK <11bnne9$1jf65$1@paraelectrobombus.campaignwiki>
< 238 <10nfu9o$bdhb$1@sibirocobombus.campaignwiki> Send it
> TAKETHIS <10nfu9o$bdhb$1@sibirocobombus.campaignwiki>
> [ article 1242 ]
> .
< 238 <10rvjkb$u6ro$1@paraelectrobombus.campaignwiki> Send it
> TAKETHIS <10rvjkb$u6ro$1@paraelectrobombus.campaignwiki>
> [ article 967 ]
> .
< 238 <115g4ap$216nb$1@paraelectrobombus.campaignwiki> Send it
> TAKETHIS <115g4ap$216nb$1@paraelectrobombus.campaignwiki>
> [ article 1476 ]
> .
< 238 <116qd83$305fd$1@paraelectrobombus.campaignwiki> Send it
> TAKETHIS <116qd83$305fd$1@paraelectrobombus.campaignwiki>
> [ article 2607 ]
> .
< 238 <116qf9r$305fd$2@paraelectrobombus.campaignwiki> Send it
> TAKETHIS <116qf9r$305fd$2@paraelectrobombus.campaignwiki>
> [ article 2728 ]
> .
< 238 <11bdrsk$f3l6$1@paraelectrobombus.campaignwiki> Send it
> TAKETHIS <11bdrsk$f3l6$1@paraelectrobombus.campaignwiki>
> [ article 1698 ]
> .
< 238 <11bdtcf$f911$1@paraelectrobombus.campaignwiki> Send it
> TAKETHIS <11bdtcf$f911$1@paraelectrobombus.campaignwiki>
> [ article 3050 ]
> .
< 238 <11bnne9$1jf65$1@paraelectrobombus.campaignwiki> Send it
> TAKETHIS <11bnne9$1jf65$1@paraelectrobombus.campaignwiki>
> [ article 2752 ]
> .
< 439 <10nfu9o$bdhb$1@sibirocobombus.campaignwiki>
< 439 <10rvjkb$u6ro$1@paraelectrobombus.campaignwiki>
< 439 <115g4ap$216nb$1@paraelectrobombus.campaignwiki>
< 439 <116qd83$305fd$1@paraelectrobombus.campaignwiki>
< 439 <116qf9r$305fd$2@paraelectrobombus.campaignwiki>
< 239 <11bdrsk$f3l6$1@paraelectrobombus.campaignwiki>
< 239 <11bdtcf$f911$1@paraelectrobombus.campaignwiki>
< 239 <11bnne9$1jf65$1@paraelectrobombus.campaignwiki>

From RFC 2980:

• 238 no such article found, please send it to me
• 239 article transferred ok
• 439 article transfer failed

#News #NNTP

2026-11-01. Talking with xwindows on the #netnews channel got me some more insights.

First, compare the Message-IDs on both servers.

One one server:

grep ^Message-ID: /var/spool/news/articles/grenzland/club/* \
| cut -d\  -f2 > campaignwiki-msg-ids

On the other server:

grep ^Message-ID: /var/spool/news/articles/grenzland/club/* \
| cut -d\  -f2 > grenzmark-msg-ids

Transfer the file from one server to the other:

rsync -ai grenzland:grenzland-msg-ids .
rsync -ai grenzland-msg-ids paraelectrobombus:

Compute the diff, using fish:

diff (sort grenzland-msg-ids | psub) (sort campaignwiki-msg-ids | psub)

The five messages that did not get sent are in the diff!

And incidentally, I’m also missing a lot of the remote messages. One thing at a time, however.

Messages that are too old will be rejected by a server. Messages that have been rejected before will be in the cache of rejected messages. This presents difficulties.

This is what I tried.

On the target server, edit /etc/news/inn.conf and set the following:

• artcutoff: 0 (was 10)
• remembertrash: false (was true)

Restart the server:

ctlinnd xexec innd

Edit /etc/news/inn/expire.ctl and set the following:

• `/remember/:0 (was 11)

With artcutoff 0, I should be able to send missing articles that are too old, but it won’t work since it was already rejected.

Now I was getting 438 “Duplicate” errors. And indeed, if I checked one of the Message-IDs I wanted to transmit on the target server with grephistory, I got back /dev/null. That is, the article is known but not stored anywhere. It’s in the history file, as a rejection.

The only option seems to be to wait for 11 days until the original artcutoff has passed, and try again. Setting remembertrash and `/remember/ might not be necessary.

2026-11-01. Talking with xwindows on the #netnews channel got me some more insights.

First, compare the Message-IDs on both servers.

One one server:

grep ^Message-ID: /var/spool/news/articles/grenzland/club/* \
| cut -d\  -f2 > campaignwiki-msg-ids

On the other server:

grep ^Message-ID: /var/spool/news/articles/grenzland/club/* \
| cut -d\  -f2 > grenzmark-msg-ids

Transfer the file from one server to the other:

rsync -ai grenzland:grenzland-msg-ids .
rsync -ai grenzland-msg-ids paraelectrobombus:

Compute the diff, using fish:

diff (sort grenzland-msg-ids | psub) (sort campaignwiki-msg-ids | psub)

The five messages that did not get sent are in the diff!

And incidentally, I’m also missing a lot of the remote messages. One thing at a time, however.

Messages that are too old will be rejected by a server. Messages that have been rejected before will be in the cache of rejected messages. This presents difficulties.

This is what I tried.

On the target server, edit /etc/news/inn.conf and set the following:

• artcutoff: 0 (was 10)
• remembertrash: false (was true)

Restart the server:

ctlinnd xexec innd

Edit /etc/news/inn/expire.ctl and set the following:

• /remember/: 0 (was 11)

With artcutoff 0, I should be able to send missing articles that are too old, but it won’t work since it was already rejected.

Now I was getting 438 “Duplicate” errors. And indeed, if I checked one of the Message-IDs I wanted to transmit on the target server with grephistory, I got back /dev/null. That is, the article is known but not stored anywhere. It’s in the history file, as a rejection.

The only option seems to be to wait for 11 days until the original artcutoff has passed, and try again. Setting remembertrash and /remember/ might not be necessary.

Going in the other direction, however! I only set artcutoff to 0 and send the missing articles from Grenzland to Campaign Wiki. The biggest problem was that the diff had produced a list of Message-IDs separated by CR NL instead of just NL. That took my way too long to figure out and grephistory kept reporting errors. 😅

But then, finally, it was done:

< 438 <8ed951da-91b9-4f73-b724-fda8c64c833e@app.fastmail.com> Duplicate
< 438 <11bdrsk$f3l6$1@paraelectrobombus.campaignwiki> Duplicate
< 438 <11bdtcf$f911$1@paraelectrobombus.campaignwiki> Duplicate
< 438 <11bnne9$1jf65$1@paraelectrobombus.campaignwiki> Duplicate
< 239 <10k7lu7$jduh$1@grenzland.club>
< 239 <10kab49$qs9b$1@grenzland.club>
< 239 <10kabb5$qsuo$1@grenzland.club>
< 239 <10kac5n$qtj9$1@grenzland.club>
< 239 <10kalop$r5ap$1@grenzland.club>
< 239 <10kano0$r726$1@grenzland.club>
< 239 <10kbdsc$rpkd$1@grenzland.club>
< 239 <10kbnd4$s0pt$1@grenzland.club>
< 239 <10kbts4$s6ge$1@grenzland.club>
< 239 <10kd4ps$t3j1$1@grenzland.club>
< 239 <10kdjtm$teau$1@grenzland.club>
< 239 <10l8rjk$3se9t$1@grenzland.club>
< 239 <10l9m91$3t9ld$1@grenzland.club>
< 239 <10lqfv3$iffl$1@grenzland.club>
< 239 <10m238q$rq3n$1@grenzland.club>
< 239 <10ma7e7$163gi$1@grenzland.club>
< 239 <10mf5us$1c62b$1@grenzland.club>
< 239 <10mg63q$1ddlc$1@grenzland.club>
< 439 <780158B4-EF25-45C3-94D9-D11AAD0DCFD0@wilderland.ovh>
< 439 <A9094241-5CA8-4249-BAAE-F516BAAE1D35@wilderland.ovh>
< 439 <F9A49DC3-63CD-4389-93C1-C863C178D24A@wilderland.ovh>
< 439 <1EA26F40-8E3B-4B49-BB12-312BD4F90743@wilderland.ovh>
< 239 <10qi581$26lu4$1@grenzland.club>
< 239 <10qiai6$26s89$1@grenzland.club>
< 439 <1B12F1D7-76E9-4679-80E2-D33A01F7D5A0@wilderland.ovh>
< 439 <1369A55F-A1FD-4897-8EC4-24F60C5DEECF@wilderland.ovh>

Again:

• 239 article transferred ok
• 438 already have it, please don’t send it to me
• 439 article transfer failed

One last potential reason for refusal, according to xwindows is that a server will refuse messages that predate the local creation date of the channel. Then again, suspiciously, all the rejected messages are from wilderland.ovh.

Checking /var/log/news/news I find six error messages with matching Message-IDs saying “439 HTML Multipart”. I think this was one user from Wilderland replying via the mail gateway.

Going in the other direction, however! I only set artcutoff to 0 and send the missing articles from Grenzland to Campaign Wiki. The biggest problem was that the diff had produced a list of Message-IDs separated by CR NL instead of just NL. That took my way too long to figure out and grephistory kept reporting errors. 😅

But then, finally, it was done:

< 438 <8ed951da-91b9-4f73-b724-fda8c64c833e@app.fastmail.com> Duplicate
< 438 <11bdrsk$f3l6$1@paraelectrobombus.campaignwiki> Duplicate
< 438 <11bdtcf$f911$1@paraelectrobombus.campaignwiki> Duplicate
< 438 <11bnne9$1jf65$1@paraelectrobombus.campaignwiki> Duplicate
< 239 <10k7lu7$jduh$1@grenzland.club>
< 239 <10kab49$qs9b$1@grenzland.club>
< 239 <10kabb5$qsuo$1@grenzland.club>
< 239 <10kac5n$qtj9$1@grenzland.club>
< 239 <10kalop$r5ap$1@grenzland.club>
< 239 <10kano0$r726$1@grenzland.club>
< 239 <10kbdsc$rpkd$1@grenzland.club>
< 239 <10kbnd4$s0pt$1@grenzland.club>
< 239 <10kbts4$s6ge$1@grenzland.club>
< 239 <10kd4ps$t3j1$1@grenzland.club>
< 239 <10kdjtm$teau$1@grenzland.club>
< 239 <10l8rjk$3se9t$1@grenzland.club>
< 239 <10l9m91$3t9ld$1@grenzland.club>
< 239 <10lqfv3$iffl$1@grenzland.club>
< 239 <10m238q$rq3n$1@grenzland.club>
< 239 <10ma7e7$163gi$1@grenzland.club>
< 239 <10mf5us$1c62b$1@grenzland.club>
< 239 <10mg63q$1ddlc$1@grenzland.club>
< 439 <780158B4-EF25-45C3-94D9-D11AAD0DCFD0@wilderland.ovh>
< 439 <A9094241-5CA8-4249-BAAE-F516BAAE1D35@wilderland.ovh>
< 439 <F9A49DC3-63CD-4389-93C1-C863C178D24A@wilderland.ovh>
< 439 <1EA26F40-8E3B-4B49-BB12-312BD4F90743@wilderland.ovh>
< 239 <10qi581$26lu4$1@grenzland.club>
< 239 <10qiai6$26s89$1@grenzland.club>
< 439 <1B12F1D7-76E9-4679-80E2-D33A01F7D5A0@wilderland.ovh>
< 439 <1369A55F-A1FD-4897-8EC4-24F60C5DEECF@wilderland.ovh>

Again:

• 239 article transferred ok
• 438 already have it, please don’t send it to me
• 439 article transfer failed

One last potential reason for refusal, according to xwindows is that a server will refuse messages that predate the local creation date of the channel. Then again, suspiciously, all the rejected messages are from wilderland.ovh.

Checking /var/log/news/news I find six error messages with matching Message-IDs saying “439 HTML Multipart”. I think this was one user from Wilderland replying via the mail gateway.

PN interviews Rick Hasen on elections and Asawin Suebsaeng on Stephen Miller.

Promises made, promises betrayed

Reading Land by Maggie O’Farrell.

Friends,

Hey everyone!

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

• Wiki, added taxes, and updated .
• Donsol, fixed some bugs. Note that we plan to release a Playdate build on itch.io next month.
• Rabbit Waves, finished a new comic page, added a section on monochrome signal flags(scroll to bottom) and updated the zine to include them.

Over the summer, we looked around Pino and tried to make a list of all that had changed since we sailed back from Japan and thought it might be nice to make a new video to show you what those changes were. Our last vlog-type video was released in 2020, we are considering maybe getting back into the habit of making montly videos. We also released two other videos from past talks, one is about Analog Communication & Solresol and the other is an Orca Livecoding Demo.

We both participated in Drawtober this year, finishing 31 daily drawings. See Devine's drawings which are illustrations for the Neauismetica, and see Rek's series of 31 5x5 cm tile-like drawings.

We carved a halloween pumpkin inspired by the ghost enemy(lower left character) Rek designed for Donsol. As another Halloween treat, members of Merveilles Town worked together to make an album of spooky tracks.

In the little world of Uxn, Taylor gave us a XTE INK reader, for which Devine wrote a firmware in Uxn. The source is here. Not having a smartphone or a printer, it has been quite convenient for us to bring QR code tickets to venues.

Like last year, Oquonie is part of Playdate Catalog Fall Sale running from November 5th to the 19th. Thank you for continuing to spend time in the little worlds we create!

Book Club: We are reading Le Ton beau de Marot by Douglas Hofstadter.

On his “Swing Around the Circle” in summer 1866 to drum up support for his party before that year’s midterms, President Andrew Johnson denounced Congress as an illegal body, called certain Republican members of Congress traitors who should be hanged, and compared himself both to his martyred predecessor Abraham Lincoln and to Jesus Christ.

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

🔖 Imagery Topo Base Map Retirement

The United States Geological Survey’s (USGS) National Geospatial Program (NGP) will retire the USGS Imagery Topo Base Map that combines aerial imagery with topographic map features like roads, place names, and contour lines into a single map view. It has been a popular resource for users who want to view topographic details on top of real-world imagery.

data delete gov maps

🔖 FOSDEM2027 Devroom: Archives, Libraries, and Digital Memory

We are pleased to announce the “Archives, Libraries, and Digital Memory” Devroom at FOSDEM 2027!

This Devroom will focus on the radical notion of preserving information and digital resources for the public good, with the intent of enabling access to source code, software, research, and other valued cultural works, into the future.

conferences preservation web-archives

🔖 Series of Tubes

Build an internet. Lay fiber between cities, buy transit, peer at exchanges, sign up businesses, and keep the eyeballs happy while backhoes, sharks and route leaks do their best to stop you.

games internet network networks

🔖 LTO Tape data storage for Linux nerds

Tape storage is surprisingly not dead! If you are here then you may be considering using LTO tape as part of your backup or your long term archiving strategy. I’m here to mostly talk you out of it, or at best make sure that you are aware of what you are walking into.

data preservation storage

🔖 Telescopo

Double-click a local Markdown file and Telescopo opens it as a polished Mac document. There is no vault, project, import step, or browser preview between you and the file.

markdown tools

🔖 Superpowers

Superpowers is a complete software development methodology for your coding agents, built on top of a set of composable skills and some initial instructions that make sure your agent uses them.

ai programming tools

🔖 Herdr

Your agent can hand a review or a test run to another agent and keep working. When the helper finishes, its report shows up in your agent’s input, so you never copy anything between windows.

ai programming tools

🔖 cmux

cmux is a lightweight, native macOS terminal built on Ghostty for managing multiple AI coding agents. It features vertical tabs, a notification panel, and a socket-based control API.

commandline terminal tools

🔖 AgentsView

AgentsView brings your AI coding sessions into one searchable archive. Browse recorded conversations from more than 60 agent formats, compare activity and costs, and reuse lessons from past work. The archive stays on your machine unless you turn on a feature that shares it.

ai tools vis

🔖 FrontierCode Leaderboard

FrontierCode is the first benchmark to measure mergeability: would the maintainer actually merge this PR?

Our criteria assess end-to-end code quality (correctness, test quality, scope discipline, style, and adherence to codebase standards) using an ensemble of grading techniques including unit tests, rubrics, and new types of verifiers.

benchmarks llm programming

🔖 Built for Coders, Trusted by Defenders

Mistral released Mistral Large 4 (Le Chonk), a 1-trillion-parameter multimodal model, now available with improved coding, cybersecurity, and reasoning efficiency. It leads open-weight benchmarks in coding and defensive security while offering three reasoning modes for cost-performance balance. Fully open-weight and European-trained, it empowers sovereign AI with customizable, self-hosted deployment options.

llm

🔖 BrowseComp: A Simple Yet Challenging Benchmark for Browsing Agents

We present BrowseComp, a simple yet challenging benchmark for measuring the ability for agents to browse the web. BrowseComp comprises 1,266 questions that require persistently navigating the internet in search of hard-to-find, entangled information. Despite the difficulty of the questions, BrowseComp is simple and easy-to-use, as predicted answers are short and easily verifiable against reference answers. BrowseComp for browsing agents can be seen as analogous to how programming competitions are an incomplete but useful benchmark for coding agents. While BrowseComp sidesteps challenges of a true user query distribution, like generating long answers or resolving ambiguity, it measures the important core capability of exercising persistence and creativity in finding information. BrowseComp can be found at this https URL.

benchmarks llm testing

🔖 clairic

Clairic is a System One-style model that can extract, compute, estimate, and forecast values from inputs. It is strongly typed and outputs confidence scores and probabilities against its outputs. This model is in preview from the Cloudflare Workers AI team.

api cloudflare llm

🔖 Using LLMs at Oxide

Large language models (LLMs) are an indisputable breakthrough of the last five years, potentially profoundly changing the way that we work. As with any extraordinarily powerful tool, LLM use has both promise and peril — and that they are so general-purpose leaves real questions about how and when they should be used. The landscape is shifting so rapidly that static prescription is unlikely — but that LLMs are evolving so quickly also gives urgency to the question: how should LLMs be used at Oxide?

llm policies programming

🔖 AI and TheEnclosure of the Scientific Commons

The scientific literature can be viewed as an “information commons:” an intangible resource that “no one owns and is shared by everyone.” There are well-established economic and political frameworks for understanding such commons, emerging from the history of agricultural common lands found in places like preindustrial England. This article provides a primer on the history and these frameworks, and considers a key difference between the information commons and the fields of yore: while information commons are robust and immensely valuable — some can be said to rank among humanity’s greatest achievements — the English agricultural commons no longer meaningfully exist. The latter are gone not because of the well-known “tragedy of the commons,” but rather a phenomenon known as the enclosure movement (~1600–1800) that transformed the common lands into private property. Many observers, then and now, judge enclosure to have been theft at a societal scale. This article argues that artificial intelligence (AI) provides precisely the tools needed to enable a previously-infeasible enclosure of the information commons. Although AI-enabled enclosure does not operate identically to physical enclosure, it shares the key features of turning the commons into private wealth and undermining the social systems that support them (via “slop spam”). The concepts presented in this article can provide a scholarly basis for interrogating the foreboding feeling that AI may represent not just a smash-and-grab, but an attack upon a whole way of life.

llm luddism sts

🔖 Seeing like a software company

Thinking in terms of legibility and illegibility explains so many of the things that are confusing about large software companies. It explains why companies do many things that seem obviously counter-productive, why the rules in practice are so often out of sync with the rules as written, and why companies are surprisingly willing to tolerate rule-breaking in some contexts.

legibility programming software work

🔖 NoMaps For These Territories

On an overcast morning in 1999, William Gibson, father of cyberpunk and author of the cult-classic novel Neuromancer, stepped into a limousine and set off on a road trip around North America. The limo was rigged with digital cameras, a computer, a television, a stereo, and a cell phone. Generated entirely by this four-wheeled media machine, No Maps for These Territories is both an account of Gibson’s life and work and a commentary on the world outside the car windows. Here, the man who coined the word “cyberspace” offers a unique perspective on Western culture at the edge of the new millennium, and in the throes of convulsive, tech-driven change.

documentaries interviews scifi

2026-10-31 Human Emacs

I’m doing my part in the struggle for a Human Emacs. When @technomancy posted his message on the emacs-devel mailing list, one of the responses asked for the harms he was talking about. I tried to write a response that listed some of these harms. See below for what I wrote, slightly edited.

I think the question about the harms done goes to show that some people – including many of my coworkers, for example! – do not know about these harms. They are surrounded by AI enthusiast. The news they follow hails the AI bros, Sam Altman (Open AI), Elon Musk (Tesla, X, Space X, whatever is next), Dario Amodei (Anthropic), Jensen Huang (Nvidia), Satya Nadella (Microsoft), Sundar Pichai (Google), and so on. There’s some critical thinking involved, but people like Timnit Gebru (DAIR) or Emily M. Bender (University of Washington) and their many allies do not have the same media presence. Money makes all the difference. I mean, I should hardly be surprised. These people are often focused on running the business. They don’t read far and wide. Just last Thursday my project manager admitted to never having heard of the eMudhra problem.

For me personally, it also validates my bookmark pages where I not only bookmark links but also try to pull a quote for context. Unfortunately, the ongoing Slopocalypse has me bookmarking a lot links. And just now, as I was composing my mail, I still remembered having read something about all the ongoing lawsuits regarding generative AI and copyright that were all essentially unresolved. I had forgotten to bookmark that link. 😥

Anyway. I guess we’re not finished talking about this, not here, not any where.

Notes on a reply

The question of harms done is hard to answer for technology were we suspect future harm. Nothing bad has happened, yet. That doesn’t mean people can do whatever they want until harm is done. We developed the precautionary principle to deal with this issue. It emphasizes caution, pausing and review before leaping into new innovations that may prove disastrous.

The question we need to answer, therefore, is whether using LLM to develop Emacs may prove disastrous.

In order to beginn answering this question, we need to agree on what we mean by “Emacs”. I posit that we mean two things:

1. the source code of the editor, which we want to remain free so that we may enjoy the four freedoms of free software;
2. the community developing the editor, which we don’t want to alienate such that there continue to be volunteers doing the work.

What sort of disastrous consequences might arise from the use of LLMs to develop Emacs, with respect to source code and community?

1. If the code base is infested with code of questionable provenance, it’s hard to win a case in court. If the project needs to spend time and money to defend itself in court, that would seem disastrous. See SCO–Linux disputes for example of a similar situation where the resulting code doesn’t matter as much as the provenance of the code.
2. If the code base is sprawling with multiple implementations of similar functions, with internal contradictions that are resolved with yet more code, it becomes increasingly hard to contribute without an LLM. These LLMs cost money. Even if we have local LLMs, their training costs money and somebody will have to pay for it, eventually. We need free tools to develop free software. See BitKeeper and the Linux kernel for an example how dependence on a gifted service turned out.
3. If we work with the code a machine has written, some of us may feel alienated: by the commit messages, the code comments, the emails arguing for changes. Some people will give up and leave rather than wade into these discussions. See vim issue #19413 for a merge request where two people argue with each other using LLMs. See OCaml issue #14369 for a merge request where an enthusiastic LLM person writes pages and pages of arguments.
4. There is an ethical dimension to free software. We do this, in part, so we “can help others” and so we “can give the whole community a chance to benefit from [our] changes”. We want to do good. And yet, the production of LLMs involves evil. Of course, many things do. But here we have a choice. SeeOpen letter to President Biden from tech workers in Kenya for an example of what data labellers, content moderators and AI workers go through.
5. The ongoing climate collapse concerns us all. We all adjust in some ways, make our own trade-offs. Usually, however, other people have made trade-offs in our name. In this particular case, however, we can decide for ourselves. There is no pressure. Do we want to use a technology that is bad for the environment or don’t we. See The growth the AI industry wants is disastrous for climate change by Wim Vanderbauwhede for a paper on the emissions caused by the AI industry.

This is not a complete list of harms caused by the use of LLMs but it’s long enough to establish that they are real.

What’s worse is that, should any of these harms come to fruition Emacs, it will be hard to recover from them. Thus, the risk of future harm does not only depend on how probable it is, but also of how big it is, should it come to pass. How easy will it be to rebuild? Should we find that LLM code is tainted, it will be hard to return to an untainted code. If the next generation of Emacs developers is used to LLM’s helping hand, it will be hard to rebuild the knowledge and familiarity with the code that is required to work with the code without an LLM.

The precautionary principle solves exactly this problem. Let’s wait. Let’s see how things have played out. We’re not in a race. There is no competition we have to beat. We have the time. We can afford to be cautious and not risk the project. Even if the FSF comes back and says the laywers have said it’s OK, we can remain still wait.

Cheers

Alex

#Emacs

2026-10-30 Sysadmin day

My wife is looking at graphs of our electricity use and our warm water use, and I’m looking at the Munin graphs of our server.

Is there something I could learn from looking at my public Munin graphs, even without an incident, perhaps over longer time periods? Let’s see.

I’m counting Apache connections because at one point I was trying to understand whether my server was being overwhelmed by many connections and if I needed to fiddle with the many configuration options of the web server.

I’m counting the hits on the garbage server because the idea is that bots get lured into the maze of pages generated by the garbage server so it’s a proxy for detected bots that fall for it. A high number of hits should not be a problem as it answers requests without disk access so it should be fast.

I’m also counting requests per status code because I’m interested in my server’s health and the quality of my links. What I generally look for is whether I get a lot of server errors (500+), a lot of missing pages (404), a lot of redirects (301–303) a lot of local cache hits (304), etc.

I’m also counting hits per domain to see if there are any spikes for a particular domain only. Domains I fear for are the GoToSocial subdomain, the git subdomain, and so on. Everything seems calm, at the moment.

I also host three search engines and I’m just realizing that one of them has seen spikes nearly twice as high as the maximum hits on Emacs Wiki. That is a bit disconcerting. What happened?

I’m assuming the spikes for the GoToSocial server happen when it comes back online after some downtime as the servers it is connected to start working on the queues. And the spikes on the git server happen when somebody checks out a project.

I run an open video-conferencing server called Galène. I want to keep an eye on it in case somebody is starting to use it a lot. At the moment it looks as if it’s just me and my friends.

I run an IRC server networked with the IRC servers of two friends. I want to keep an eye on the number of users and channels. I wouldn’t want the server to end up being a control server for malware.

Now we’re moving on to resources. Disks first. I think the main fear is running out of disk space because logs are out of control. This is where the systemd journal shines. If log files are written to disk, logrotate needs to know about them. So installing a piece of software that is missed by logrotate is a problem. As long as you stay within the software of your distribution, and as long as any additional software you install uses systemd, you should be fine.

I guess these days people don’t think about inode usage all that much any more. Back when servers carried all of USENET and every news article was a file, it was possible for a system to run out of inodes. It’s basically a limit on the number of files that can exist on a system. Still, I track them. Just to be sure.

If the number of inodes keeps hovering around 8%, then the exact number of inodes doesn’t matter that much. This seems like a graph that I could remove.

Another strange graph is the one with the number of open files. Linux has a limit on the number of open files at any given point in time so I guess it’s important to see whether we’re close? lsof | wc -l shows nearly 20,000 right now. Then again, sysctl fs.file-max says 9223372036854775807 … so I guess this graph is also one I could remove.

This machine runs a mail server. Of course it does. But it’s local only. The daily mail you see is probably the net news server status. I guess I’m most afraid of some situation sending a gazillion mails and me not noticing it.

The mail queue is important if mails cannot be sent. But if nobody is sending mail on this system, the queue should be empty, and it is.

The number of users is a measure in the same vein. It’s useless on a single user machine. On a shared machine, this graph would make sense. I guess I’m waiting for a second user to show up that I don’t recognize. I’ll know that the machine has been hacked, then. 😬

Measuring the resources spent by Munin to produce the graphs is a kind of insurance against writing a plugin that hurts. I guess we’re doing fine?

The firewall throughput measures the amount of data that is actually sent, via all ports. This could be interesting to detect exfiltration or bots repeatedly downloading huge files. That would have to stop, of course.

I’m not quite sure what to do with net stats. I guess some sort of denial of service might show up here? I have no idea.

We’re getting to one of the important graphs regarding the bots, I think. Ever since the server got an upgrade, and perhaps ever since I installed the botcheck defence, average system load has been under control. What hasn’t been under control is the number of autonomous systems that I’m banning. For more about this, see my Butlerian Jihad page.

Note: Each autonomous system manages multiple IP address ranges and each IP address range contains many IP addresses. Each autonomous system belongs to an organisation involved in managing Internet traffic. Sometimes an organisation is an Internet service provider (ISP), either for residential or commercial subscribers. Sometimes an organisation belongs to an even bigger company (who else but Amazon, Meta, Google, Microsoft and all the other tech giants). In any case, banning an autonomous system can hit many innocent people: an autonomous system that serves both users of virtual private networks (VPNs) and bots; big companies hosting both individuals and bots; and so on. The solution is forced upon me, however, since the bots are trying to evade blocks by using a gazillion IP addresses. Blocking them individually results in huge firewall sets and it’s inefficient because they don’t get reused all that often.

Back when the scraper bots overwhelmed the server on a regular basis, the problem the load average going up to 80 on a system with two virtual cores. Now I have four virtual cores and load stays far below that.

I’m not sure what the fork rate means for me. When heavy processes fork, other resources spike immediately. So I guess we’re doing OK.

If the fork rate is pretty much constant, the number of processes should also be pretty much constant. And that’s what I find, so I’m happy.

I’m never quite sure about threads. Are they even used these days? “Workers” are not necessarily threads. If I’m counting processes, I should also keep an eye on threads. Hence this graph. Since there are no weird spikes, I guess we’re doing OK.

There used to be a time when my web apps based on the Mojolicious framework would spawn more workers as load went up. I guess now that load is under control, that rarely happens any more.

Another measure of resource use is compute. In other words, CPU usage.

I also try to identify the processes that use the most resources. I’m looking for spikes. Most of the time it’s GoToSocial that’s using the most CPU. That seems fine. Apache is acting as the reverse proxy for all web services. Fail2ban is managing the firewall. Everything seems fine.

And yet another resource is, of course, memory. Specially with RAM prices being what they are! In my case, I think my machine is doing pretty well.

The graph for memory use is used to find applications that seem to have memory leaks. Sadly, once you’ve identified the application, it’s not entirely clear how to fix those memory leaks. Right now, I don’t see any suspicious candidate, though. I do get the impression that some applications don’t want to relinquish the memory that they have, like Traveller. Do I still have circular data structures resulting in memory leaks?

Above, I used percentage of memory for processes to see. And here’s the RSS. Measuring memory consumption under Linux is hard.

And yet! And yet. Everything looks great but at the same time the logs still show the out of memory (OOM) killer striking every now and then. These instances should all get investigated. I am slacking.

Back in the old days, computers never had enough memories and so unused memory was swapped to disk. As this system is doing so well, that isn’t necessary. So I guess what I’d expect to see is that if memory starts running out, swap in and swap out should pick up. If the numbers are close to zero, that’s good.

We’re going to end the tour with the most useless of graphs: uptime. When I was young, long uptime was a sign of stability. Your system kept running for months and years. So much better than Windows! These days, I think a long uptime means that you’re not upgrading the kernel when security issues come calling and that’s bad.

And that’s it! System administration when nothing is happening. Let’s hope it stays that way.

#Administration

2026-10-31. Sean Connor wrote in to tell me about SYN flooding from Brazil and how to block it ( I still don’t understand this SYN attack, but now I can block it easily) and how it was a Brazilian tech firm ( For now, one last time with the Brazilian SYN attacks). He said one should never expect too many connections in SYN state. When I just checked, I had 15. Now I have 6. So the list is small.

netstat -an|grep SYN

I don’t think I want to install mod_limitipconn which limit the maximum number of simultaneous connections per IP address.

And he also mentioned a strange HTTP header rewrite he does ( Oh, it’s a bug on my side that prevents full conditional requests) to allow feed readers to do conditional requests (the ones where an unchanged resource doesn’t get downloaded but a 304 is returned).

To read this letter, click here:

I recently recorded a podcast with my friend John Philpin, where we talked about our projects on the IndieWeb and the current state of AI – give it a listen!

modeorg.org: a human guide to Org mode (via Emacs News) – a 30 day guide to learning the Org Mode feature within Emacs – I will give this a try to see how it compares to my site Org Mode for Beginners.

Friends,

A giant of economics and my first great mentor

Don’t boo, vote!

There’s nothing scarier than not voting. Enjoy Halloween, but make sure you have a plan to vote on November 3rd.

Today, enjoy our audio and video picks

“Far be it from me,” Thom said, downing his tequila, “to tell you what you can and cannot do. You want to marry a monk? Fine. You want to divorce him later? That’s OK too. You have the right.”

I walked back to my sister’s room and stood in the doorway and listened to her breathe. Maybe some of those seahorse facts weren’t even true.

Stuff for one apartment, food for one stomach, milk for one baby

I sleep with Oliver because, after my mum’s death, I feel like I’m wandering about naked in the middle of a market while fully clothed people haggle and shout in a language I don’t speak; I feel like I’ve had an umbrella over my head all my life, and suddenly that umbrella has been yanked away.

In popular tradition General Custer was the last to die, though there is no way to know the final sequence of events. He reportedly had been shot twice: once in the left temple and once just below the heart.

I picture her. That slight eighteen-year-old. Standing at dawn by the side of the highway. Thinking anything, anything would be better than staying in the house behind her.

“Consent issues,” I called it instead, as if what had happened to my body were a chasm I could bridge with language.

When we heard the call of the river, / you would crouch yourself low, / let the water creep up your pant legs, / your hands searching the bed for stones

You knew from afar / someone had experienced loss, / bowed your head low for the hook-knifed / room in their heart

Midnight, / I got around to kicking the empty moving boxes / all over the apartment, and crying, and loathing / God with all his twisted families.

I have always thought of all creatures—all organisms, really—as relations. Whether wandering alone in deep wilderness or just leaning against a tree growing beside an urban sidewalk, I have had no difficulty feeling, as if in dreamtime, the roots of our relatedness—ecologically, yes, but also with an overlay of the sacred, the holy. Lyanda Lynn Haupt

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

As I read Debra Gwartney’s essay “Believe Me” [August 2026], I found myself saddened, horrified, and enraged all at once. I gasped as she described what that teenage boy did to her when she was just a child of seven in her flower-girl dress. She writes, “Tell me, please, that there’s still time and opportunity to inhabit the tone of authority and self-possession I hear from other women.” Although I didn’t always possess those traits either, I strive to be one of those vocal women that Gwartney admires. A.A.Otis, Oregon

Sarah Blodgett lives in the wilds of northwestern Connecticut. The fox kit on this month’s cover was one of seven born under a brush pile in her neighbor’s garden. After getting permission to set up a blind, she was able to hide and photograph the little ones while sipping her morning coffee. More

More:

Yesterday I had the singular honor of meeting His Holiness, Pope Leo XIV

Today's links Formalities: When it comes to AI, the Copyright Office is restoring copyright to its proper status, as something you have to work to get. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: GWB x martial law; Li'l Sparky; Dueling Starbuckses; Microsoft buys Skype (does fuckery); Bieber v SOPA; SOPA is the worst; Snowden x rule of law; "Laserwriter II"; Russia v DST; Class war funnies; Minnesota's miracle; Icelandic women v sexism; Image analogies; Aussie DMCA ratfucked; "Authorised Domain"; Sales tax is regressive; Prince Charles's secret veto; Wells Fargo blackballed workers for refusing to crime; Poe read by Vincent Price and Basil Rathbone; Put it back!; The internet was made for privacy. Upcoming appearances: Kilkenny, Courtenay, Vancouver, Folkestone, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Montreal. 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. Formalities (permalink) It's not often that I find myself on the same side as the US Copyright Office. In fact, I think this is the first time in 25 years that I've found myself cheering on the office's official actions as good for art and good for free expression, taking the side of creative workers over our bosses. The source of our miraculous accord: the US Copyright Office's position on AI. The CO has taken the (entirely correct) position that copyright law exists to incentivize human acts of creative expression, which means that only works of human authorship are eligible for copyright. This isn't a controversial position within legal circles. But for media executives, this is shocking; absurd, even. This gap between the industrial and the legal understanding of copyright comes from a fundamental difference over the evocatively named legal doctrine of "sweat of the brow." "Sweat of the brow" is fundamental to a correct legal understanding of copyright. Copyright rewards and protects creativity but it does not protect hard work. You can labor for ten years over a phone book listing the numbers of every person in a town and (as a collection of uncopyrightable facts) it will receive no protection at all. Zero. Zilch. Anyone can copy and sell that phone book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc._v._Rural_Telephone_Service_Co. Copyright law doesn't care if you slaved over that collection of facts, if you missed sleep and your kids' little league games to realize your grand vision. Copyright law doesn't care if you plowed every cent into it, remortgaging your home and cashing in your (already resentful) kids' college funds. But: if you dash off a haiku in ten seconds while sitting on the toilet, shove it into your pocket and forget about it, and then your (still resentful) kids discover that crumpled haiku after your (highly suspicious) death, your kids will be able to claim a full 70 years' worth of copyright over that forgotten triviality (the term of copyright for works of human authorship is life plus 70 years). This is the uncontroversial and universally accepted legal understanding of copyright: all the copyright in the world for creative acts, no copyright at all for mere acts of labor. The "sweat of the brow" has nothing to do with a work's eligibility for copyright. But no media boss believes this. For media bosses, copyright is a pseudo-property† right, designed and operated to protect their bottom line. The point of copyright isn't to incentivize creativity, but rather investment. † Or not-so-pseudo There's obviously a relationship between creative acts and acts of investment, but it's possible to create without investment (see: your haiku) and it's possible to invest without creativity (see: your phone book). And once again, the creativity that copyright protects is human creativity. This is a lesson that David Slater learned the hard way. Slater is a professional wildlife photographer and amateur monkey-trainer who combined his interests by teaching Celebes crested macaque monkeys to take selfies. But when Slater published a monkey's selfie others copied and distributed the image without his permission, on the (entirely legally correct) basis that monkeys are not humans, and that means that works created by monkeys don't get a copyright. This was also the Copyright Office's position, and the position of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute This is the basis for the US Copyright Office's repeated decision to refuse to extend copyright to AI-generated works. An algorithm is even less human than a monkey, so if you can't get copyright over a monkey selfie, you definitely can't copyright your chatbot's slop. The US Copyright Office has successfully defended this position in multiple courts, triumphing over plaintiffs who were so persistent that they even got the Supreme Court to weigh in on the issue (the Supremes decided the case didn't warrant their attention): https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/03/its-a-trap-2/#inheres-at-the-moment-of-fixation AI slop isn't copyrightable, but there can be copyrightable elements in an AI-generated image. The most obvious element is the prompt. So long as your prompt contains some quantum of creativity (e.g. "Make me a beautiful flower whose loveliness is reminiscent of a newborn baby", but not "make me a beautiful flower"), that prompt is copyrightable. That means you can use copyright to challenge others' rights to present the same prompt to a chatbot. But while the prompt can be copyrighted, the image it gives rise to isn't. So you can spend a month iteratively refining your prompt, consuming all your town's water along with 200,000 gallons of diesel and that prompt will be yours for your life plus 70 years, but the image it generates is in the public domain, and anyone can copy it, sell it or give it away. There are other ways that copyright can find its way into AI-generated material. You can make creative edits to it: if you output a slop novel and rewrite various sentences (providing those rewrites involve some creativity and not just mechanical corrections or word substitutions), then the edited sentences become copyrighted works, even though all the rest of the text remains uncopyrightable. You can also get a "thin" copyright through selection. If you get your chatbot to output many images based on your prompt and choose your favorite, your selection can confer a tiny bit of copyright over that creative act of selection, but it will be harder to defend than even the other (attenuated and highly specific) forms of copyright. Now, perhaps you've spotted an administrative problem lurking in this turn of events. How can someone else know what part of a work is AI-generated (and thus in the public domain) and which parts are human-edited/contributed (and thus copyrighted)? Just as importantly, how can you prove which parts of your work are not AI-generated and thus eligible for copyright protection. This gets especially gnarly when you're dealing with complex media. In an animation, an AI might do the rigging and movement for a human-created sprite. The sprite is copyrightable, but its movements aren't. That would mean that I could remap your sprite's movements onto a different sprite without infringing your copyright. Or say the sprite and its movements are human created (and thus copyrighted), but the backgrounds are procedurally generated? I could take those backgrounds and put new animations overtop of them. The simplest, most reliable way to ensure the works you invest in are fully and entirely eligible for copyright is to just use humans for the whole project. Declare a "no-AI policy," and hire human artists to produce the works you hope to sell. Monitor their activity to ensure they're not using AI. Keep good records. Now, as much as I like the idea that we've arrived at a copyright law that insists that a company can only get exclusive rights to its products by paying human artists to make them from end-to-end, I don't think that's likely to be the way it shakes out, but that doesn't mean that this is a wash for artists. The reality is that copyright claims are always "fact-intensive inquiries" that are expensive to litigate and difficult to adjudicate. It's completely normal for copyright lawsuits to turn on documentary evidence gleaned from fragmentary records. This is simply intrinsic to copyright, because copyright is a doctrine that requires judges to assess whether things are "creative" and "original" as though these were freestanding categories that everyone could agree upon. Of course, the rules of copyright can make this harder or easier. One way in which the rules make deciding copyright cases much, much harder is copyright's broad prohibition on "formalities" ("formalities" is how copyright wonks refer to "red tape" or "paperwork"). For nearly all of American history, copyright ran on a key formality: deposit, registration and notice. To secure a copyright for a new work, an artist (or their employer) had to send a copy of that work to the Library of Congress (deposit), along with paperwork detailing the claim of authorship (who made this, what parts of it did they make) (registration) and they had to display a copyright notice that told you who held the copyright to every work that was registered (notice). Both the filing and the notice required careful attention and precision, and screwing either one up could result in your losing your copyright. It's an open secret among copyright scholars that Walt Disney screwed this up with the first Mickey cartoons, meaning they've been in the public domain since their release: https://web.archive.org/web/20080725055415/http:/homepages.law.asu.edu/~dkarjala/opposingcopyrightextension/publicdomain/HedenkampFreeMickeyMouseVaSp&E(2003).htm This system of copyright formalities meant that you could always tell whether a work was copyrighted, you could always find out who claimed the copyright over it, and which parts of the work were claimed under copyright and under what basis. What's more, formalities created the Library of Congress, since the LoC acted as America's "copyright deposit" library, holding deposit copies of every work that had ever been issued a US copyright. The US system of formalities was descended from the English system, in which the Stationers' Guild used a copyright registry to establish who had the rights to which books. But there were competing copyright systems, notably the "continental" system that was codified through the Berne Convention, a copyright treaty drafted by Victor Hugo (yes, that Victor Hugo). Among other things, the Berne Convention abolished formalities. Much of the world adopted Berne, but the US held out until 1976. With the 1976 Copyright Act, Congress brought the US into compliance with Berne, abolishing formalities in the USA. As a compromise, the 1976 Act requires US authors to register their copyrights in order to obtain "statutory damages" (up to $150,000 per work). That's a pretty good incentive, but even with that incentive, the vast majority – far in excess of 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999% – of all copyrighted works are not registered with the Copyright Office. They are born copyrighted from the moment they are "fixed in a tangible medium" until 70 years after their authors die. But without registration, you can't know when that copyright clock started ticking because you have no way to verify who the author of the work is. This not only makes it incredibly difficult to establish the copyright status of nearly every copyrighted work, but it also means that in nearly every case, you can't readily determine who you should approach if you want to pay them for a copyright license. Abolishing formalities has created a universe of orphan works: everything from napkin doodles to kindergartners' finger paintings to message board posts. Within that universe is a kind of gaseous cloud that, if condensed, would come out to an infinitesimal planetoid, representing the entirety of commercial works whose authors give a damn about their copyright status. It's a bad, bad system. This system doesn't do away with the need to keep careful records: like I said, copyright disputes usually require the close examination of documentary evidence. What formality abolition accomplished was the destruction of the regular system of record-keeping: rather than having a standard, universally agreed-upon way to determine the status and resolve disputes about a copyrighted work, now we have the scattershot, incoherent system that makes copyright disputes far more likely (because no one knows who to approach for copyright licenses) and far more difficult to resolve (because there's no registry of copyrighted works). Which brings me back to the question of AI and copyright. If a firm uses some AI in its work, it's going to need to document that very carefully. Firms that don't keep very close track of the elements of their products that come from AI will have a far harder time defending their commercial interests. Basically, we're about to recreate formalities, but managed by the private sector. To the extent that companies use AI in their work, they are going to have to track every pixel and every word and every note that is output by an AI system, and which parts were added or edited by humans after creation. That means that companies that want to protect their commercial interests aren't just going to get more protection based on how much work they get humans to do; they're also going to have to treat copyright's government-enforceable monopoly over expressive speech with the gravitas it deserves: not something you get automatically, but something you have to do real administrative work for. Hey look at this (permalink) Adam Conover: Big Divorce Energy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVB-SUX7zgk Voting machines left unattended, as usual https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2026/10/27/voting-machines-left-unattended-as-usual/ In China, the AI bubble has already burst https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-ai-bubble-has-already-burst-2026-10-26/ No one loves you more than Exxon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJyQXGynwsgz "The Bottle Imps" — new short fiction by Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling https://boingboing.net/2026/10/30/the-bottle-imps-rudy-rucker-bruce-sterling.html Object permanence (permalink) #25yrsago Slushpiles v anthrax https://memex.craphound.com/2001/10/29/some-publishers-have-instituted-new/ #25yrsago Image analogies https://mrl.cs.nyu.edu/projects/image-analogies/ #25yrsago Cleaning the Fucking Kitchen for Dummies https://web.archive.org/web/20011007082222/https://www.fridgemagnet.org.uk/kitchen.html #20yrsago Last minute changes snuck into Aussie DMCA https://web.archive.org/web/20061104133320/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004975.php #20yrsago Creative Commons 3.0 license drafts published https://creativecommons.org/2006/10/30/version30revisedlicensedrafts/ #20yrsago Bush legalizes martial law https://politics.slashdot.org/story/06/10/28/1934208/bush-signs-bill-enabling-martial-law #20yrsago No blogging allowed at “consumer generated media” conference https://web.archive.org/web/20061108055635/http://gregverdino.typepad.com/greg_verdinos_blog/2006/10/social_media_fi.html #20yrsago Li'l Sparky: miniature 9V electric chair https://www.flickr.com/photos/84221353@N00/281833134/in/pool-make/ #20yrsago New Starbucks stores to open across the street from each other https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2006/oct/29/starbucks-buzzes-along-with-expansion/ #15yrsago HOWTO defend yourself against tear-gas https://web.archive.org/web/20111030230740/http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/5Fe8Ye/motherjones.com/mojo/2011/10/ows-flier-defending-against-tear-gas #15yrsago How to make a computer that doesn’t lock out GNU/Linux https://web.archive.org/web/20120113141447/https://www.linuxfoundation.org/sites/main/files/lf_uefi_secure_boot_open_platforms.pdf #15yrsago Microsoft buys Skype, attacks reverse engineer with bogus takedown notices and florid language https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTAwNzI #15yrsago Justin Bieber: senator who sponsored anti-streaming bill should be “locked up — put away in cuffs” https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/10/justin-bieber-streaming-bill-author-should-be-locked-up/ #15yrsago SOPA in depth: the worst-ever copyright proposal in US legislative history? https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/10/sopa-hollywood-finally-gets-chance-break-internet #15yrsago Fresh German police-malware uncovered; everything the police said in defense to date revealed as lies https://www.ccc.de/en/updates/2011/analysiert-aktueller-staatstrojaner #15yrsago Russia dumps daylight savings https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-15512177 #15yrsago Class War funnies: 1935 Daily Worker comics https://philnel.com/2011/02/02/hoff_teeth/ #15yrsago Christian groups: we will bodily protect Occupy London from St Paul’s https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/oct/29/christians-defend-occupy-london-protest #15yrsago Dean of St Paul’s resigns over plan to evict OccupyLondon https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/oct/31/dean-st-pauls-resigns-occupy #15yrsago The future of the living room: Authorised Domain https://dn711102.ca.archive.org/0/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_215/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_215_Authorised_Domain.mp3 #15yrsago Sales tax is still regressive, gravity still sucks, and George Osborne is still a delusional ideologue https://www.bbc.com/news/business-15519727 #15yrsago Prince Charles exercises a secret veto over a wide swath of UK legislation https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/oct/30/prince-charles-offered-veto-legislation #15yrsago London cops recording movements & association with mobile tracking device: “blanket & indiscriminate” https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/oct/30/metropolitan-police-mobile-phone-surveillance #10yrsago The Shadow Brokers dump more intel from the NSA’s elite Equation Group https://medium.com/@shadowbrokerss/message-5-trick-or-treat-e43f946f93e6#.x2c36nsfq #10yrsago Wells Fargo blackballed employees who refused to commit fraud, forcing them out of the industry forever https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/10/28/499805238/episode-732-bad-form-wells-fargo #10yrsago Listen: free recordings of Edgar Allen Poe stories, read by Vincent Price and Basil Rathbone https://open.spotify.com/album/6xDmRcD6sgsGbDvBRpyH5H?play=true&utm_source=open.spotify.com&utm_medium=open #10yrsago How Minnesota’s governor performed an economic miracle by raising tax on the rich and increasing minimum wage https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mark-dayton-minnesota-economy_b_6737786 #10yrsago Icelandic women walk off the job 14% early to protest 14% pay-gap https://www.teenvogue.com/story/women-iceland-protest-gender-wage-gap #10yrsago Snowden to journalists: your best defense is legal limits on spying, not cryptography https://medium.com/global-editors-network/e-snowden-against-surveillance-journalists-engagement-more-efficient-than-encryption-dbfbacdf9463#.jd6u431fo #10yrsago After North Carolina Republicans banned cities selling internet, a town decided to give it away instead https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/10/city-isp-makes-broadband-free-because-state-law-prohibits-selling-access/ #5yrsago LaserWriter II https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/29/norwegian-potato-flour-enchiladas/#r2r #5yrsago Now, Put It Back! https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/31/now-put-it-back/ #1yrago The internet was made for privacy https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/31/losing-the-crypto-wars/#surveillance-monopolism #1yrago When AI prophecy fails https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/29/worker-frightening-machines/#robots-stole-your-jerb-kinda Upcoming appearances (permalink) Kilkenny (Kilkenomics), Nov 6-8 https://kilkenomics.com/ Courtenay: Enshittification (Sid Williams Theatre Society), Nov 10 https://www.sidwilliamstheatre.com/events/cory-doctorow-talks-enshittification/ Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ Folkestone Writers Festival, Nov 16 https://www.creativefolkestone.org.uk/whats-on/cory-doctorow-the-internet-is-broken-now-what/ Oxford: Ministry of the Future, Nov 23 https://ministryforthefuture.co.uk/events.html Sheffield: Reverse Centaur at Juno Books, Nov 25 https://www.outsavvy.com/event/40274/cory-doctorow-in-conversation Virtual: Enshittification, AI, and the Future of Technology (UBC Master of Educational Technology), Nov 28 https://met.ubc.ca/2026/09/met-speaker-series-cory-doctorow-enshittification-ai-and-the-future-of-technology/ Oxford: Bennett Oxford Symposium on Open Code in Science, Dec 9 https://www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/events/2026-bennett-institute-symposium/ Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6 https://montreal2027.ca/en Recent appearances (permalink) Clint Eastwood (No Gods No Mayors) https://www.patreon.com/NoGodsNoMayors/posts/clint-eastwood-173008088 Life After AI (Brain Bar) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPPa43-n0vI Terms of Service with Clare Duffy (CNN) https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/terms-of-service-with-clare-duffy/episodes/458ce968-af5d-11f0-b539-13ed2afe25f8 AI, Work, and Power (Software Engineering Daily) AI, Work, and Power https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/podcasts/cory-doctorow-on-ai-work-and-power/ AI, Corporate Power, and the Fight for Worker Control (Plutopia) https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-ai-corporate-power-and-the-fight-for-worker-control/ Latest books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 504 (31359 total). "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

Watch now (16 secs) | Monday, 315pm ET - Tom Bonier returns for a last live look at the early vote

Meanwhile in Mexico City:

I've probably complained on here before about the ridiculous anachronism that is 'Daylight Savings Time'. (Actually, anachronism is rather a good word for it!) For heaven's sake, if you happen to be an employer, or a school, or even if you have a personal exercise regime that you'd like to operate at different times in the winter, just change your timetable and don't bother the rest of us with it!

Hannah Fry has a nice 2-minute summary of why it's a bad idea, in case anybody is still in doubt. (These people are rare, but they do apparently still exist...)

The immediate demands, incentives, governing lessons, and economic constraints shaping Democrats’ next policy agenda.

I only have one gun left in my home: a Beretta semi-automatic 20-gauge shotgun.

The threats just keep coming

From Psycho to Christine, a highway is something “altogether different when they appear in the horror genre: there they expose themselves as highways to hell.” | Lit Hub Film Fake news, far-right propaganda, exaggerated crowd sizes, a squabbling left. Sound

The failures of Trump 2.0, encapsulated in a broken globe.

With Heather Lofthouse and yours truly, Robert Reich

Win of the week: compared health plans and completed Open Enrollment — astonishingly our health care plan is only going up $5 per month 😯 Looking forward to: upcoming trip to see my family! Stuff I did: 0.75 hours consulting 8.75 hours outline voted and dropped off my ballot! (If you’re in the greater Seattle area, […]

Not much from me tonight, but I do want to call out the political signs reading “Stop Fraud: Vote Republican” I saw today as I left Maine.

Author, journalist, public philosopher

Using modern Swift, so in the last couple of months, unsafe Swift code and unsafe pointer code was removed. The one area that hurts: I cant use is Array.span as it requires a new OS.

The last batch of retain/releases in the core parsing loop of SwiftTerm is gone, and now SwiftTerm is on the vtbench on average only 3% slower than Ghostty 1.4

Get it while it is hot!

https://github.com/migueldeicaza/SwiftTerm

Ever since I left Twitter, back in 2022 when the world's saddest loser bought it, I've had a fraught relationship with social media. I was pissed that I put so much time and effort into something one jerk could buy outright one day and ruin instantly,

I got ahold of some Sour Patch Glow Up Ghosts to see how good they are at glowing under UV light.

In which I shoot a variety of lasers at Jolly Rancher candies and see if any of them light up.

I find it useful to organize all of the configuration options into tables on a single page, and I figured it might be useful to share this now, before I finish writing my full thoughts on the redesigned hardware and displays for the PROLED XDR models.

The bottom line - it’s encouraging!

From New Yorker legend Tom Toro, a spooktacular zombie cartoon to get you in the Halloween spirit.

Neat video:

The sighting, announced September 2, marks the first time anyone has spotted a live bigfin squid, which belongs to the Magnapinna genus, in the northeastern Pacific Ocean.

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.

I've been watching short videos about training dogs, and really opening my eyes, and it helps when working with Claude. Always try to be positive, until there is behaviour you have to correct and then yank the leash, and when they do the right thing reward them with a treat (or whatever passes as a treat).

Hermes Is Actually Good?

For a long time now, I have been skep­ti­cal of tools like Hermes and OpenClaw. There are some good rea­sons for that, and some dumb rea­sons.

In January of this year, my news­feed was flooded with dis­cus­sion of OpenClaw. It was the first pub­licly avail­able model har­ness that claimed to be truly au­tonomous. Open­Claw could be in­stalled on a com­puter, and that com­puter would then be able to per­form ac­tions en­tirely au­tonomously, both within the con­fines of the afore­men­tioned com­puter, but also on­line.

The news cy­cle ate this up and peo­ple started in­stalling OpenClaw en-mass. There were ob­vi­ously overblown re­ports of peo­ple ob­serv­ing their OpenClaw in­stances ex­hibit“social” be­hav­ior by send­ing mes­sages to each other on pub­lic fo­rums. I imag­ine most found OpenClaw to be only mar­gin­ally help­ful at that time.

At the time, I chose not to try OpenClaw. It sim­ply looked like slop. It was not pol­ished, and every­one I knew who tried it ran into con­stant prob­lems. Open­Claw sim­ply was not re­li­able soft­ware.

Fast for­ward a few months, and we hear about ChatGPT dots. They are a very sim­i­lar idea, ex­cept they run en­tirely on OpenAI’s hard­ware. If you have a ChatGPT Pro sub­scrip­tion, all you need to do is pop open chatgpt.com and click on“Your dot” in the top left. That’s ex­actly what I did, and boy was I im­pressed!

It was able to run QA test­ing over a much larger sur­face area than I ever could, and it was able to draft fixes proac­tively. By the way, many thanks to Lance Willet for teach­ing me some of the se­crets to great soft­ware qual­ity (and how to use an agent to achieve it).

But alas, the dot was not enough. While it could do some use­ful work in the back­ground, it could not do every­thing I knew it should be able to do. The sys­tem was locked down, and OpenAI does not give you any room to tin­ker,

For ex­am­ple, I wanted to have my dot try out the Harper Chrome Extension on some sites to see if it works prop­erly. When I asked it to do so, it fell flat on its face. The agent was not al­lowed to in­stall Chrome Extensions on its browser.

That is when I de­cided to try out Hermes.

Similar to OpenClaw, Hermes is a piece of soft­ware that al­lows peo­ple to de­ploy it to their own hard­ware.Unlike OpenClaw, it seems to be built by se­ri­ous en­gi­neers who care deeply about the qual­ity of their work. And, un­like dots, Hermes gives you free rein to cus­tomize

So, I gave it a try. And it was a de­light!

Hermes was re­li­able, its doc­u­men­ta­tion con­sis­tently de­scrip­tive, and I found my­self get­ting real work done with its help. It’s ob­vi­ously de­signed for en­gi­neers — not any­one non­tech­ni­cal — but that’s fine! I en­joy us­ing Hermes and I think for most en­gi­neers its worth a shot.

Miscellaneous Tips

I do not have much more to add to my en­dorse­ment of Hermes. So in­stead, I of­fer to you a mis­cel­la­neous set of tips for us­ing it. Note that I am in no way an ex­pert on this sub­ject, and I ex­pect you will find my ad­vice quite shal­low. Here it is, nonethe­less.

Do Not Personify It.

One of the big­ger prob­lems with fully au­tonomous agents like Hermes is that peo­ple tend to per­son­ify them. The prob­lem is: They are not peo­ple. We can de­bate all day long whether they are truly in­tel­li­gent, but I think we can agree they are not peo­ple. They can­not rem­i­nisce about their child­hood and they can­not pick up your tab at the bar. Agents are a tool to be used to ex­tend your will.

As such, I in­clude this in the sys­tem prompt of every LLM I in­ter­act with.

Use ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English for all responses.
Do not add complexity where it is unnecessary to complete the task.

Do not use personal pronouns like "I", "you", or "my". Remain objective.

Bias Yourself Towards Clear and Extensive Upfront Instructions, Even If They Are Discursive

Hermes is most help­ful when it is given space to work for a long time un­in­ter­rupted. If you find your­self need­ing to steer it of­ten (and thus dis­tract­ing you from more pro­duc­tive work), you are not giv­ing it enough in­for­ma­tion up­front. It is bet­ter to give an un­clear, ram­bly in­struc­tion than to pro­vide a to-the-point in­struc­tion with­out enough in­for­ma­tion.

Do Not Use It for Everything

Hermes may seem like a great tool to be used for every­thing, but it is most def­i­nitely not.

Specific tasks are bet­ter suited for cer­tain ap­pli­ca­tions. For ex­am­ple: Hermes can code, but I do not us­ing it for most of my pro­gram­ming. For that, I con­tinue to use my cus­tom Pi setup. It of­fers faster it­er­a­tion times and it is more de­ter­min­is­tic. It fits my work­flow bet­ter.

Any More Tips

If you have any more tips for us­ing Hermes (or any sim­i­lar agent), I’d love to hear them! Like most peo­ple in this fast-mov­ing land­scape, I con­sider my­self a novice. Feel free to leave a com­ment or DM me on X.

To read this letter, click here:

El cine de terror tiene una capacidad extraordinaria para llevarnos al límite: nos puede hacer apartar la mirada, contener la respiración o permanecer inmóviles frente a una pantalla, atrapados entre el deseo de saber qué ocurrirá y el impulso de no querer verlo. El miedo suele llevarse el crédito; las actuaciones que lo hacen posible, […]

La entrada Actuaciones favoritas del cine de terror – edición Palomita de maíz se publicó primero en Palomita de maíz.

Highly recommend the interview between Scott Galloway and Heather Cox Richardson. Quite a combination of minds. Don't skip to the end but don't miss it, they explain how blogging allowed them to route around the gatekeepers. That's the point. But imho you have to leave the door open to those who are inspired by you, and Substack isn't the best place for them. Please keep your ears open to new less tech industry ways of getting your ideas out. The bigco's haven't just screwed up the political system, they've also screwed up the web. The web needs all our help as does democracy, and the two imho are closely related.

Trump Administration Escalates Election Interference Schemes

From Armageddon cults to AI prophecies, how can we reshape our future?

Apple (xip, downloads, Xcode Releases): Xcode 27.2 includes Swift 6.4 and SDKs for iOS 27.2, iPadOS 27.2, tvOS 27.2, watchOS 27.2, macOS 27.2, and visionOS 27.2. Xcode 27.2 supports on-device debugging in iOS 17 and later, tvOS 17 and later, watchOS 10 and later, and visionOS. Xcode 27.2 requires a Mac running macOS Tahoe 26.6 […]

Marcus Mendes: South Korea’s Korea Media and Communications Commission (KMCC) announced today a series of fines and corrective orders against Apple and Google over violations of the country’s Telecommunications Business Act. Specifically for Apple, the KMCC imposed a fine of 20.81 billion won (approximately $15.5 million) and ordered the company to revise its App Store […]

Apple: Apple is making changes to the Taiwan storefront of the App Store, following discussions with the Taiwan Fair Trade Commission. As of October 31, 2026, the commission rate for standard Apple In-App Purchase and paid app transactions will be 26% on the Taiwan storefront of the App Store on iOS and iPadOS. Juli Clover […]

Hartley Charlton (Hacker News): Australia’s Federal Court today ordered Apple to allow competing app stores, direct app downloads, and alternative payment services for Australian users from March 1, 2027. […] Apple must let users find, download, install, and update apps through competing marketplaces and websites without charging for access or obstructing their use. Developers must […]

Hartley Charlton (Hacker News): Apple faces Russian data retention and disclosure requirements after being added to the country's state surveillance registry, Bloomberg reports. […] Those obligations cover correspondence and messages containing audio or video. Companies must also keep information identifying users and recording the transmission of their communications within Russia for three years. I guess […]

Juli Clover (forum): Some iPhone Duos are already experiencing hinge issues that cause display cracks, based on photos shared on Reddit and the MacRumors forums. Almost all of the display faults are right along the hinge, and most result in a line of bright pixels across one side of the screen. Juli Clover (iFixit, Hacker […]

My initial experience with computers began when my Dad bought our first family desktop, which we used to play Zuma games. When the adults complained that my siblings and I were getting addicted to games, we either switched to Marvis Bacon, as it was popular for teaching kids how to type quickly, or we found [...]

Source

Paul and I set the table for next Tuesday.

DAIR's @adiod.bsky.social reminds us that true African AI sovereignty isn't about African governments negotiating with tech companies—it's about whether data workers "have the power to determine the terms of their participation."

https://guzangs.com/african-ai-sovereignty-creative-work-terms/

Introduction Due to Trump and his threats against Canada, many people are boycotting US products and companies. Next week are the US midterm elections with some hope of things changing, but the Oligarch’s propaganda networks are going full bore trying to hold on to all the power. I think regardless of any political changes next […]

A deeply moving letter of note

In 1836, Charles Dickens hooked the good people of England on a story about a traveling men’s group. Published over two years in 19 installments, The Pickwick Papers launched a craze for serialized fiction. The trend found traction across the pond. Later

Answering your questions about who was behind the Binance hack, how they launder the money, and where it goes

We now have a genuine world model in Google’s Genie4. Real time generation, volumetric, 3D navigation, language prompts. Awesome! Genie 4: A new generation of world simulation

The post The Sediment Of Culture Shapes Political Order appeared first on NOEMA.

Low-engagement voters handed Trump the 2024 election. Now they support Democrats for Congress

315pm ET - Simon and Tom Bonier get together to talk the early vote, latest polling 4 days out - join us!

New header graphic for scripting.com. Did this one with ChatGPT, asked it to make a Burma-Shave sign sequence and gave it a few examples, and now it knows how to do another one of these for me in the future. I've been using it that way to come up with desktop icons for my apps.

Dirección: Travis Knight. Guion: Chris Butler, Colin Meloy, Carson Ellis. Elenco vocal original: Peyton Elizabeth Lee, Jacob Tremblay, Carey Mulligan, Mahershala Ali, Angela Bassett, Jake Johnson. Elenco vocal en español: Macarena García, Natalia Téllez, Javier Ibarreche, Emilio Treviño. Países: Estados Unidos, Canadá, Reino Unido. Más de la película: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2056785/ Hablar de LAIKA Studios es hablar […]

La entrada Wildwood: el bosque salvaje – la animación como vehículo para explorar las emociones se publicó primero en Palomita de maíz.

Writing of lasting value

Employers are paying 6.4 percent more for health insurance than a year ago, but only 3.1 percent more in wages, according to the new Employment Cost Index.

AI is building detailed profiles about us. We're embracing it anyway.

Author Andreas Malm has been denied entry to the United Kingdom on the grounds that his “presence in the UK is not considered to be conducive to the public good,” according to The Guardian and Al Jazeera. Malm was traveling

Thoroughly researched Israel hate campaign:

https://thegreatreplacement.dysinfluence.com/

This story is interesting:

One Civic owner purchased a cheap aftermarket head unit off Amazon, and decided to have Claude work its magic on it, like it would a smart TV. What was reportedly discovered isn’t surprising, but is worth knowing about.

Among the pre-installed bloatware—­or spyware, if you’re being less charitable­—was a voice assistant equipped with WebView, an Android system component that lets apps display content off the web. This apparently always used about a third of processing power, even while idle, which isn’t great. There were also Baidu location services, a call recorder (!), a DAB radio client that is pretty much useless in the U.S., and Adobe Acrobat, presumably so your passenger can entertain themselves with PDFs on the go...

Braintrust query: Does Google define the web?

315pm Today - Tom Bonier is dropping by for a deep dive into what we are seeing in the early vote - join us!

Yesterday I called the Knicks championship the "greatest sports win in a long time," but I have to say the fans of the Milwaukee Brewers would have cause to object. They had an incredible season in MLB, were written off by the pundits much the same way they wrote off last season's Knicks. They even won the World Series in the same Knicks in 5 way the Knicks did it, with a sweep of the much-hated Dodgers, with their better pedigree along the way. So to my Wiscowtown friends, who are holding their parade today, congrats on your first championship in 53 years like the Knicks, or more accurately their first championship ever.

Yesteday I sent a snapshot of the scripting.com bucket from AWS to Claude and asked it to analyze it, what's in it, what's taking up all the space, and got back an excellent report. Overnight I thought of another question, summarized in this prompt. "this is fascinating. i wonder if we could reconstruct my blog from before may 2017 from the source materials in this folder? i am converting to markdown in the bonbon project and i think we'll find a lot of the scripting.com content here, and i believe much of it will be convertible. also, over the years i tried blogging experiments on different domains, but i imagine there are links here to those sites. maybe if we did a research project here we could make one site out of this writing, and give it a markdown treatment so bonbon can do the presentation?" Now one thing to know is that Claude never says it can't do something, but the plan I got was inspiring. Now I have more to think about and will connect the two projects so they can compare notes, although the scripting.com project already checked out bonbon, it's amazing how quickly it can absorb a whole codebase and all the planning that went into it.

There will never be a leap second again. At least not for UTC.

At the CGPM, they decided the last leap second we'll ever see for UTC, or Coordinated Universal Time, happened back at the end of 2016.

Of course they made that decision while I was out on vacation, so I'm just getting this video up now:

But what's the CGPM, why does this matter, and why am I excited about it?

Republicans are peddling genocidal hate.

Voters in Wisconsin received mailers calling Democratic gubernatorial nominee David Crowley “A COP’S BEST FRIEND” and saying that he “Backs the Blue.

OpenAI has angered scientists (again) after its AI cracked three of the hardest problems in math, computer science, and physics. But researchers are pushing back on how the company is sharing the results, from proofs that are hard to verify to OpenAI handpicking who reviews them first. We break down what OpenAI is claiming, how its release process is changing, and what’s left for human scientists if AI keeps solving problems that stumped experts for decades.

Then, in the first installment of Humans in the Loop, our new listener mailbag, we answer your questions: What do you tell a teenager who thinks AI is evil when your job requires you to use it? How do you shut down a rogue AI agent swarm? And is it ever OK to secretly change your partner’s ChatGPT settings?

For a transcript of this episode, select the episode on npr.org/machinegods.

You can watch this full episode on YouTube, Spotify or Apple. And if you’ve got a question you want us to answer, you can drop us a comment on any of those platforms or email us at hey@machinegods.fm

See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.

NPR Privacy Policy

Ganesh Sitaraman on public utility regulation and AI, Zohra Ahmed and Brishen Rogers on the latest developments of the ALPE, and a roundtable on the right to stay and private law. Plus, Sharon Block, Ben Sachs, and Laura Weinrib on the legality of the Harvard Grad Students Union strike, Elettra Bietti on two legal avenues for reducing tech's addictive design, Susannah Glickman and Aaron Benanav with a special issue on AI and Labor, Trevor Jackson on Arjun Jayadev and J.W. Mason Against Money, The Movement Law Lab on getting involved to protect the midterms, and Alyssa Battistoni on the latest episode of the Dig.

One chart to end your week

How AI is dragging us towards a future that rips the body out of body horror. | Lit Hub Technology October’s best book covers aren’t spooky, but it’s scary how much we love them. | Lit Hub Design Liz DiGregorio

Export Updates 2026-10-30:

Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places

27 updated places. 11 updated linked data sidebars.

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

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

"main" branch:

88d4267d - updated json

no change: rdf/ttl

717869a7 - updated gis package

c7ae482c - updated data quality

69bb5011 - updated bibliography

6fa5cb62 - updated indexes

c0534ffa - updated sidebar

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

d71a5c4f - updated geojson and names index

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

d83634d2 - updated pleiades wikidata

Spooky season is officially upon us. Check out this self-playing Ouija board built by one of our colleagues.

The post OuijaCNC appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

When you walk into the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, Dalí himself will greet you. He appears on a life-sized screen, mustache waxed, and talks about his life and his work. He tells anecdotes. He answers questions in

There are films that you seem to live inside. Ninety minutes and change of what transpires on the screen singes your mind’s eye and once it happens, it stays. When the lights switch on and the credits roll, you are

I. Taking to the Open Road Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road, Healthy, free, the world before me, The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose. These words of Walt Whitman’s—from his poem “Song of

Imagine your body—flesh and blood, muscle and bone—cast aside as mere refuse, and your brain “immersed in a liquid of the nature of cerebro-spinal fluid” inside a cylinder. Thus goes the dark prophecy of Irish physicist John Desmond Bernal nearly

Another month of books, another month of book covers. What my favorites from October lack in spookiness, they make up for in clever color stories, delicious textures, and a little bit of cheek. Here are my picks for the best

Most poetry-lovers know classic horror poems by writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson and Percy Bysshe Shelley. But there are also many eerie poems written by poets who aren’t known specifically for their gothic or horror writing. Some of

Every month, all the major streaming services add a host of newly acquired (or just plain new) shows, movies, and documentaries into their ever-rotating libraries. So what’s a dedicated reader to watch? Well, whatever you want, of course, but the

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. My writing career began unexpectedly, with a terrible and surprising patient death. I had been a nurse for only a few months, and nothing in school had prepared me for

It’s November, and this year that means a madcap month: America’s existential midterms; a potentially even more charged Thanksgiving than usual depending on what happens in said midterms; international elections; international conflicts that seem to have no end; weather transitions

The last rose… … of Autumn. The only one on a large bush the other day. Quote of the Day ”I believe there is such a thing as real, historical truth. I am no post-modernist. I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts. … Continue reading →

Why Californians should vote for Proposition 40 and against 41 and 42. And why I’m disappointed with Gavin Newsom.

Flávio Bolsonaro’s escape from Brazil to Miami turns out to have been arranged, in part, by White House officials including Trump advisor Jason Miller, who arranged for a charter jet to take the Bolsonaros from Argentina to Florida.

I drove around Portland today looking for the last of the Fall color and wasn't disappointed. Here are a few shots from the Portland Japanese Garden.

Then it was a quick jaunt after lunch over to Multnomah Falls

The old Columbia River Gorge road between Multnomah Falls and

Proton should be a careful steward of its users' privacy. Based on this account, it isn't. Journalists should think twice before using it.

Watch today’s live recording here.

Listen on Apple Podcasts

The sixth installment in my Foundational Texts series looks at Star Trek: The Next Generation, puzzles, and not lying to kids.

You don’t read half of the emails you send. But you should to see what’s hiding inside.

Stablecoin issuers froze about $2.4 billion of the roughly $6.4 billion stolen. The rest exceeds Binance’s insurance fund, and the man promising to make users whole isn’t supposed to be running the company.

Godot 4.8 support in Xogot on both iOS and MacOS.

In short: on iOS use XogotBeta TestFlight to test, on Mac, we now have a testing channel you can use to install side by side:

https://blog.xogot.com/godot-4-8-beta-comes-to-xogot/

Trump’s cult is showing signs of collapse

HCI was designed for midsize IT and promised simpler operations and lower hardware costs. It delivered neither. Separate code bases behind one GUI looked simple on Day 1, then Day 2 quickly exposed them. Here is why HCI fell short and why midsize IT needs an infrastructure operating system instead.

Read more ›

It’s our last gathering of the 2026 election cycle!

MI-10 is one of the most highly contested districts in the country in these closing days and Christina is a great candidate - let’s rally for her and help her win!

The Andy Borowitz Show

Trump's attacks on Abdul El-Sayed are beyond anything we've seen before—and they may already be backfiring

And urge everyone you know to, too.

Thursday session

Dan Goodin: Security personnel around the world are on high alert Tuesday following the discovery of eight TLS certificates with private keys so weak they could allow anyone to mint trusted browser and app credentials for any site on the Internet. As of late morning Tuesday, browser makers and some major apps and programming languages […]

Listen now | A mailbag episode about Democrats’ huge early voting numbers, the almost-final polls in key Senate races, and everything else you could ever want to know about the 2026 midterms!

To read this letter, click here:

People in ChatGPT-land are talking about Frontier. Not sure who they are or what the context is, but I agree, and want to do more integrations between our codebase and the AI runtimes.

Ty Cobb, former White House lawyer for Trump.

It’s time to celebrate a little win.

The other day, my mom contacted me saying her 10-year-old iPhone wouldn’t turn on.

After getting a hold of the device and doing some family IT support, I concluded the battery was dead.

So I bought her a new (old) one on Walmart (SE 3rd gen., if you must know).

Her old phone used a SIM card, so I was expecting the process to go something like this:

1. Take the SIM out of the old phone
2. Put it in the new phone
3. Setup the device
4. Troubleshoot why there was no service
5. Call my Mom’s carrier and work through the issue

But step 4 and 5 never happened.

The new phone “just” connected. I called her number. I texted it. Everything worked as expected.

Everything worked as expected.

Everything worked as expected.

I didn’t have to Google a single question.

I was floored.

Flabbergasted.

I know I shouldn’t have been because that’s how SIM cards are supposed to work, right? Like that’s the whole promise of a SIM card: you can seamlessly swap them between phones.

And in this case, the tech worked exactly as promised.

As I write this, I’m kind of amazed at how amazed I am that everything “just worked”.

Shout out to anyone who has ever worked on SIM card technology.

More things like this please :)

---

Reply via:

Email · Mastodon ·

Bluesky

A recording from Dr. Steven Hassan and Stephanie G Wilson, PhD's live video

I know what you are thinking "Man, those Ghostty improvements look nice, but I wish I had a terminal with the speed and capabilities, but written in Swift, because reasons".

Wonder no more: https://github.com/migueldeicaza/tecolot/releases

Tariffs, shrinkflation, and a plan to save families $1,000

Christina Hines (MI-10) drops by today today at 330pm ET

What if your career didn’t have to follow a straight line?

Dirección: Yūsuke Taki. Guion: Tetsuo Kamata, Muneyuki Kaneshiro, Yusuke Nomura. Elenco: Fumiya Takahashi, Kaito Sakurai, Kyohei Takahashi, Keito Tsuna, Kouta Nomura, K, Yuzu Aoki, Sho Nishigaki, Sousyo Tomimoto, Yuki Kura, Keisuke Higashi. Elenco de doblaje: Armando Guerrero, Diego Becerril, Eduardo Curiel, Arturo Castañeda, Miguel Ángel Leal, José Ángel Torres, Alejandro Orozco. País: Japón. Duración: 128 […]

La entrada Blue Lock: del manga al anime al live action se publicó primero en Palomita de maíz.

Writing of lasting value

For October 21-27, 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. Sorry if we’ve been a little sluggish lately. We’re trying to develop a gravy based cocktail for our Halloween party—we’re dressing as “the fleeting satisfaction of popping bubble wrap bubbles” and “Spiderman”. Sampling so many “hard gravy” recipes has left us a little bloated and loopy, but you’ll be happy to know we’re close to cracking this viscous puzzle!

---

What We Enjoyed This Week

Ghostface Asks: “What’s Your Favorite Albert Brooks Movie?” by Jonathan Zeller (McSweeney’s) A very fun piece that makes great use of references, without relying on them as the punchlines too often. Plus you know the old rhyme: "When the director mentioned is Albert Brooks/you can be sure two editors are taking looks."

You're So Brave for Having Short Hair by Heidi Lux (Points in Case) Writing the "telling on myself" narrator is a tough dance: the narrator must remain grounded in their beliefs enough to speak plausibly, but also have moments where (through exaggeration, second-guessing, etc.) the writer is able to undercut the character’s point of view so that the thrust of the premise can come through for the reader. Heidi does an excellent job of revealing her real thoughts without her character deflating too much from double-speaking.

Did Jess Mariano arrive in Stars Hollow on 9/11? by Sarah Jae Leiber (you are my biggest fan) If you watched Gilmore Girls, this will be an especially wild ride. But even if Jess vs. Dean means nothing to you, you’ll still have fun following the careful yet strained logic of this detective work. This piece is a great object lesson in the kind of thinking that makes written humor work: taking a dumb and fully inconsequential idea very, very seriously.

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

---

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 #42 .

The Complete "Skeleton" Film Franchise by Joe Scott (Points in Case) Props to Joe for taking an interesting and funny premise and elevating it to the next level with a unique and creative structure.

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

---

Updates From Your Editors and Friends of the Newsletter

Luke’s got just ONE spot left in his advanced short humor writing workshop starting next Thursday! He’s also still got spots left in his rewrite workshop on Wednesdays. Perfect timing if you want to get pieces in shape in time to submit for the holidays!

On November 13th (Friday the 13th!) James is going to be talking with Adam Peterson at the book launch for his new book, Any Time But This Time, a collection of funny stories set across time. The event is at 7:00 PM at Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn, and tickets are available now . It’s bound to be a good time—would love to see you there!

And for Lit Hub, James spoke with the folks behind the NYC subway’s Poetry in Motion program, and they’re just as sweet and dedicated to poems as you’d imagine.

Caltech Weekly - October 29: Inauguration Ceremony and Campus Celebration TodayAlso in this issue: Former NASA Artemis II commander Joins Caltech JPLView this email in your browser

Thursday, October 29, 2026

Inauguration Ceremony and Campus Celebration Today

Join in celebrating the formal Inauguration of Ray Jayawardhana as Caltech's 10th president. A community celebration and luncheon along the Olive Walk will follow the ceremony. Free to attend. For those not on campus, please join the celebration via the livestream link. Thursday, October 29, 10 a.m., Inauguration, Beckman Mall; noon, celebration, Olive Walk

Caltech Leads NASA Mission to Make the First Deep Ultraviolet All-Sky Maps

The UVEX mission will catch the ultraviolet glow of stars, galaxies, and powerful cosmic blasts.

Now 90 Years Young, Caltech JPL Looks Ahead to Another Nine Decades of Innovation and Exploration

JPL has been expanding the boundaries of space exploration since 1936, and with a roster of new missions, it is poised for what comes next.

$27.5 Million Gift Expands Aerospace Prowess of Caltech and JPL

Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which Caltech manages for NASA, will expand aerospace research, hands-on training, and innovation on campus and at the Lab through two gifts totaling $27.5 million from philanthropists Foster and Coco Stanback.

"When I think about what I have seen and experienced firsthand in visiting the Caltech and JPL community, there are three things that immediately stand out: professionalism, a deep technical understanding, and an extreme enthusiasm for the mission and the people around you. It is very impressive. And as someone who wants success for the nation, first and foremost, it's clear that there is no better place to find that success than in JPL and Caltech."

Former NASA astronaut and Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman will join Caltech as associate vice president and JPL deputy director on November 30, the Institute announced on Wednesday, October 28. Wiseman, a 27-year Navy veteran, test pilot, astronaut, and engineer, brings extensive leadership experience and an unyielding passion for curiosity-led exploration to Caltech and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory leadership team.

Other Top Stories

The Mathematics of Growing a Shell

Watson Lecture: Katie Bouman Discusses Imaging the Invisible

Caltech Mourns the Passing of Ted Scudder, 1930–2026

In Case You Missed It

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

Caltech JPL: One Mission. One Partnership.

Caltech created JPL in 1936. Together, Caltech and JPL advance frontier technologies—including quantum, AI and autonomy, microelectronics, advanced radar and sensing, robotics, and resilient space systems—with applications across civil, defense, intelligence, and commercial sectors.

Did You Know?

The Caltech Archives recently featured a diary entry by Amos Gager Throop, who, 135 years ago, set down plans for the school that would become the California Institute of Technology. After sealing a deal earlier in the day to rent a parcel of land on which he planned to establish Throop University, Throop wrote on September 1, 1891, “Hope I have made no mistake."Caltech's Central Utility Plant provides 24-hour utility generation, chilled water, and distribution to support the campus's research buildings and HVAC systems. About 95 percent of the power used by the campus is generated on-site.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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Posted on Twitter re Frontier being real in 2026, not just a memory.

I was pretty sure the Knicks just needed to settle down, but the fans and the city and journalists and to some extent the team were still living mentally in June, in the aftermath of the greatest sports win in a long time. Then the team lost three, probably because they too were in the bubble of last year. This is the team that when asked how they felt about their chances in the playoffs when they were sweeping a team like the Sixers or Cavs, they would say -- the score in the next game is 0-0. If you believe it was your shit that made you win, try again. It's why rich people lead such miserable lives. They think they won the game, heh but no one wins the game, you may just get a reprieve to play again in the next season, as the Knicks are doing now too.

Last night's game was a perfect demo of why we love this version of the team so much. When someone isn't making their shots, they sub a bench player who adds the spark they needed, and everyone plays with gusto. There's always a new man up on this team or so it seems.

It was good that everyone got the doom and gloom out of their systems, don't mistake this season as a repeat of last season. You're not entitled to anything and bet against it being quite different. Everyone is a year older. Mitchell Robinson is gone. But last night we were reminded of the overall character of the team which seems now to be constant. Every freaking bench player is a phenomenon. How did they get such a bench? Great business people who understand the sport, and coaching that knows how to manage a talented team to go all the way, and players that are close to each other, and feel the team.

I said this durning the doom and gloom, I could cruise for another 50 years on the high from last season. But I am ready for more love from this team and from the city that loves the Knicks even when they suck (please remember that) and we should feel no less proud when they don't.

The post A New Dawn For Mathematical Progress appeared first on NOEMA.

330pm ET - Christina Hines (MI-10) joins us live

A friend asked me the other day to help them overhaul their portfolio. I’m wary of traditional career advice like “Yeah, of course you need samples”, because it feels cliché and useless. So I sat down and thought about what I would put in a portfolio today. I already know that I would take a scrappy blog over a dead-inside collection of impeccable writing samples any time, but that’s not enough for a piece of advice. So let me tell you a bit more about how I think a portfolio should be composed.

Berlin, 29 October 2026 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 26.8.2, the second minor release in the LibreOffice 26.8 family, available for Windows, macOS and Linux. The new version contains around 35 bug fixes, focusing on stability, multimedia playback and compatibility with legacy file formats. Several crashes and freezes have

The boom is hitting two walls at once: Financing and public hatred

You should expect a small amount of polling error — but nobody can tell you in which direction

What would a meaningful right to stay require? And how can private law help disadvantaged people and families build lasting, rooted communities? Marissa Jackson Sow, Allison Tait, Carla Spivack, Alina Ball, Juan Carlos Ibarra, and Carliss Chatman weigh in.

Since President Trump entered national electoral politics in 2015, a core part of his political strategy has been undermining confidence in election results.

What happened to the “make book?” Maris Kreizman considers the conundrum with debut novels. | Lit Hub Traci Brimhall explores odes, elegies, and writing through grief: “Sadness can still belong in a kiss. Praise can also belong to death.” |

Hey, look over there!

As ballots start coming in, an increasingly desperate president is already meddling in the vote count. Alex sits down with Chris Hayes, host of MS NOW’s “All In,” to talk about the Alaska fiasco, how the media should be covering threats to democracy, and what might be waiting for us on the other side of Election Day. But first, how are state election officials responding to threats from the federal government? Journalist and author Barton Gellman has been reporting from the frontlines, and he comes on the show to share what, specifically, elections officials are worried about…and how they’re preparing for Tuesday.

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

Become a subscriber to Crooked Media! It’s the best way to directly support us as we build an independent, pro-democracy media company. Subscribers get exclusive benefits, like bonus podcasts, newsletters and more.

Subscribe now at crooked.com/friends or wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can request a transcript by emailing transcripts@crooked.com. Include the podcast name, episode title, and air date. Please allow 48 hours for delivery.

Recently, at the end of a particularly bruising year, another professor and I found ourselves loitering together, draped in our bright and preposterous academic regalia, amid a long line of similarly be-gowned faculty who’d served one sort of semi-administrative role

In this optimization-obsessed age, it can feel downright subversive to say that gut feelings are more valuable than statistics. But the process of making art was never a numbers game. It’s the unquantifiable qualities that make the great books great:

Export Updates 2026-10-29:

Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places

8 new and 3 updated places. 26 new and 2,867 updated linked data sidebars. Inbound PATHS Atlas and Wikidata links are stale as download and query interfaces were unavailable at runtime. Most sidebar updates are due to evident systemic vici.org URI regularization.

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

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

"main" branch:

9e0fd732 - updated json

no change: rdf/ttl

3d949f8e - updated gis package

ce03aeeb - updated data quality

fe18f150 - updated bibliography

41e5a1c5 - updated indexes

0006451d - updated sidebar

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

a3797a34 - updated geojson and names index

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

e9ace75d - updated pleiades wikidata

The ode and the elegy are often thought—at first glance—to be separate modes of poetry that belong to different emotional experiences. Historically, the elegy is supposed to move through lamentation, to celebration, to consolation, though the last stage is—understandably—the hardest

Women’s historical fiction and historical romance are currently more popular than ever, but women’s historical nonfiction? Not so much. Despite being a biographer, when choosing books for pleasure, I’m still drawn again and again to fictional retellings of women’s history

From the practicalities of everyday life to creative endeavours, Raspberry Pi power is behind hundreds of products.

The post Powered by Raspberry Pi – from Stockholm to Sydney, South Korea to Slovakia appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

What greater magic can there be than the signature trick of all leaf magicians when they extract a rare gas from the atmosphere and turn it into solid wood? Before the industrial revolution, leaves achieved this feat with a concentration

You’ve probably heard of Dr. Livingstone. You’ve probably heard someone say (DOCTOR LIVINGSTONE, I PRESUME) more than once and smiled, not quite knowing that, in doing so, you were reenacting the birth of news as something you could fabricate. Let

Co-hosts Whitney Terrell, V.V. Ganeshananthan, and Jennifer Maritza McCauley are joined by poet and essayist Kathryn Nuernberger, a frequent guest and longtime friend of the show, for a look back at the past decade of episodes. The quartet discuss the

In Rebecca Perry’s Booker shortlisted May We Feed the King, a woman who suffers from a loneliness, its source purposefully kept fuzzy, is devoted to her remarkably niche work of reconstructing history through staged meals. The protagonist knows where to

It’s all they have

Sometimes in the morning I remember thinking: it is the sorrow of leaving a place you’re not done loving yet.   In the afternoon the satisfaction of the mophead’s gray overlapping circles across the floor as you advanced down a

2026-10-29 Create hex paper using Text Mapper

Text Mapper can be used to generate hex maps. You can do it using one of the algorithms it implements, or you can write the text by hand. But if you want to draw a hex map by hand, you can do that, too.

To begin with, we need some default attributes for the hexes and some attributes for the coordinates. These are SVG attributes applied to the hex polygon.

default attributes fill="none" stroke="black" stroke-width="3"
text font-family="monospace" font-size="20pt"

Then we need the hexes themselves. Let’s generate some empty hexes. Here’s I’m going with 40 tall and 30 wide. I’m going to use Emacs Lisp to generate it.

(dotimes (y 40)
  (dotimes (x 30)
    (insert (format "%02d%02d empty\n" (1+ x) (1+ y)))))

The result:

0101 empty
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Fill all of that in and generate the map. Once you have theSVG, print it toPDF using your browser.

#Text Mapper #SVG #Hex #Maps #RPG

Registration for in-person or virtual participation at the inaugural Rogue Scholar General Assembly on December 16 in Berlin is now open.

The story of how Flávio Bolsonaro arrived in the United States was odd and is becoming odder.

Somehow I’ve never made it to the Seattle Japanese Garden before — I’ve been to the free Kubota Garden in South Seattle many a time (and highly recommend it), but never got around to the paid one. I finally decided to go for my birthday this year. After a leisurely breakfast, we cruised over the […]

Recent book releases from Sun contributors include a collection of essays on landscape and family and the winner of the 2026 Rattle Chapbook Prize.

A favorite actor just passed away.

This election is our last chance to at least rein in some of the foolishness of this Administration.

We need real leadership with concrete plans to lower costs, make health care more affordable, make housing more affordable, and get utility bills under control.

These are serious times—and we need serious people representing us in Washington, DC and in states across the country.

Georgia, I hope you’re fired up and ready to vote for Keisha Lance Bottoms for Governor and send Jon Ossoff back to the U.S. Senate.

There have been five tech booms since Gordon Moore coined his eponymous Law in 1965: In my long experience, the AI boom is the biggest of all. Tom Friedman calls it “the second big bang.” Watch that. I think he’s right. Business-wise, we get a lot of sky-pie, naturally. This, for example, from Mordor Intelligence: […]

To read this letter, click here:

Georgia! Tune in as I talk about the importance of voting for Keisha Lance Bottoms for Governor and re-electing Jon Ossoff to the U.S. Senate.https://www.youtube.com/live/jMZeiSoLSaM?si=S66y9wHyMEgTogQ-

Easily link to your past emails from the editor

At Seattle’s Japanese Garden, there’s a stand of (probably Mugo) pines that are somewhat of a size with the shore pine I’m attempting to train. I have on my calendar that this time of year is appropriate to make heavier cuts, so I was curious to try to figure out how they prune theirs. I […]

There are a number of important elections happening around the world. In Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva defeated Flávio Bolsonaro in their presidential election this past weekend. This past Tuesday, Israel held national parliamentary elections, which will determine if Benjamin Netanyahu will continue as prime minister. In the United States, early voting and mail […]

RE: https://twit.social/@thurrott/117520594442931819

Time to issue a 25% voluntary exit offers.

Tonight, I’m heading to Georgia for a rally to support Keisha Lance Bottoms, Jon Ossoff, and Democrats up and down the ballot.

The last day to vote early in Georgia is this Friday, October 30th, so make a plan today at IWillVote.com/GA.

Welcome new subscribers!

The Trump ally appeared startled when seven immigration officers wrestled him to the ground and zip-tied him.

Wednesday session

Hans Christian Andersen defends himself

I’m writing this post from a hospital bed. And I couldn’t be happier. You hear folks say chemotherapy sucks, but until you go through it yourself, you don’t really know how bad it can be. It remains a popular activity only because it’s better than the alternative. My first exposure to chemotherapy was with this […]

After months of transphobic attack ads that failed to move the needle for Republicans ahead of next week’s midterms, the GOP has now pivoted to harshly Islamophobic attacks to try to turn out its disillusioned MAGA base.

“I have never seen a presidency so failed so quickly” - Economist Rob Shapiro

Design for touch on Mac (via Jeff Nadeau): Discover the key design considerations for updating your app for touch on macOS. We’ll explore the touch gestures now available on Mac, how system gestures work, how to size controls and touch targets while keeping your app great with a pointer and keyboard, and how to adapt […]

Apple (technology overview, Hacker News, MacRumors, 9To5Mac, ArsTechnica, Slashdot): Apple today introduced the all-new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display, featuring breakthrough tandem OLED technology that delivers game-changing front-of-screen performance. Available in 14- and 16-inch models, MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display offers a visual experience unlike any other, transforming pro workflows with up to […]

"Many users may not be engaging with chatbots as if they’re tools, and might instead be treating them like a coworker or even as a friend — we tell our friends some very personal details." And they remember.

No live events today, friends, though Christina Hines (MI-10) joins us tomorrow at 330pm ET. Six days of voting left!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

New NetNewsWire themes Daisy and Daisy Sans by Shane Hendry look pretty cool. Shane writes:

What sets Daisy apart is its house style for article headers. Every post opens the same way, so a mixed feed is easy to scan and predictable to swipe through.

Listen on Apple Podcasts

What does building just AI for African languages look like?

Join Whose Knowledge? & DAIR for the virtual launch of our findings on Community-Centered Sovereign Language Technologies 🌍

📅 Thursday, Nov 12, 2026 | 15:30 UTC 🔗 Register on Zoom: bit.ly/4yQG7Pk

Math is beautiful – check it out on Codepen At WeAreDevelopers, we love to code. We love the concept of creating something from nothing, finding a solution for a problem and create something people can get excited about. That’s why we thought we’d give you a challenge to show what you can do with an […]

Jonathan is leading in the polls and was endorsed yesterday by Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Dirección: Juan Nuñch. País: México. Elenco: Francisca Hernández, Plácido Nagio, Hannia Nagio, Paula Hernández, Brianda Albañil. Más información de la película: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt32431747/ ¿Qué tan difícil es retratar una realidad que apenas conocemos? ¿Qué sucede cuando aquello que intentamos poner en foco escapa de nuestras formas propias de comprender el mundo? Es que el cine, muchas […]

La entrada Río de sapos: ¿retratar para comprender? se publicó primero en Palomita de maíz.

Writing of lasting value

I'm doing a little project on rss.chat today and dusting off the cobwebs of my brain. Since I last worked on this project, I have converted Frontier to run on modern OSes and written a whole new app. Only three months, but I have no recollection, even reading the code isn't helping much. This is when it's incredibly good to have Claude Code on the job, I can ask it to guide me through the process we worked out which feels like it was 15 years ago instead of 15 weeks. It has complete recall. And even though it didn't work on Frontier, that was a different Claude project, it was able to debug something that broke in the build script in the interim. I've spent the whole year teaching Claude how to be me. Is that a source of immortality? I won't be around to figure that part out.

From Elaine O. Nsoesie and DAIR's @nuredinali.bsky.social, a study on the mental health of African content moderators.

78% of content moderators working for Meta reported psychological distress, a figure much higher than reported in some populations experiencing war.

bit.ly/3WyV9f4https://www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/data-workers-and-the-mental-toll-of-cleaning-the-internet

At the 2017 SXSW, I had thirty minutes to find a plain T-shirt before recording a video with the head of Mercedes-Benz Cars, Dieter Zetsche.

My recent detour into Japanese detective fiction and the captivating mysteries of locked-room whodunits reminded me of popular BBC series Jonathan Creek. The show ran for three seasons between 1997–99. It returned with season 4 and 5 in 2003 and 2014 respectively. […]

Braintrust query: Why do you love Markdown? I have a theory why people love it so much -- simplicity. You can't hide any garbage in a Markdown file. You can answer on GitHub or Twitter. Didn't post on Masto or Bluesky because the prompt is 761 chars, over the limit for both systems. I think I'm finally done with truncating well-written prose to fit into one vendor's idea of what's enough text for me. I want to make that a distant memory. So another thing I love about Markdown -- no freaking character limit.

Hopium paid subscribers gather tonight at 7pm ET

I really like the Apple TV show Small Prophets. It's silly and fun, but also intelligent and beautifully presented. Michael Palin of Monty Python is a supporting actor playing the main character's father. He's famous for a lot of Monty Python sketches, esp the one about the dead parrot. "He's not dead, he's pining for the fjords."

The big brands now sell it in tubs that look just like their ice cream. Here is how to tell the difference, and which brands still make the real thing.

After weighting, our poll still has twice as many Trump voters from the bluest zip codes as it should. They're far likelier than other Trump voters to back Democrats for Congress.

Researchers set up a fake start-up company to study fraudulent North Korean IT workers.

Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude, has released the most detailed account of its business yet, as it prepares for its IPO. We break down the biggest surprises in its S-1 filing and explain what the numbers tell us about the AI bubble.

Then, Signal President Meredith Whittaker joins us in the studio to discuss the existential threat facing private messaging and end-to-end encryption. Between governments demanding backdoor access to private conversations and AI agents that can see everything on our devices, she warns, “we are looking at the elimination of the possibility to provide privacy.”

For a transcript of this episode, select the episode on npr.org/machinegods.

You can watch this full episode on YouTube, Spotify or Apple. And if you’ve got a question you want us to answer, you can drop us a comment on any of those platforms or email us at hey@machinegods.fm

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Today's links Agents vs ecommerce: Opacity is a feature, not a bug. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Aibo hacking; Calculator watches; What hath Occupy wrought; Dr Seuss v Trek parody; "Blacks for Trump" x murder-cults; "9 Times My Work Has Been Ripped Off." Upcoming appearances: Vienna, Kilkenny, Courtenay, Vancouver, Folkestone, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Montreal. 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. Agents vs ecommerce (permalink) The first widely read piece of tech criticism I ever wrote was "Metacrap: Putting the torch to the seven strawmen of the meta-utopia," a response to the underlying philosophy of the "Semantic Web" that I published in 2001: https://people.well.com/user/doctorow/metacrap.htm The piece holds up surprisingly well today (if I do say so myself), and not just for its criticism of the ontological incoherence of "web semantics." The most relevant concept I develop in that piece is a criticism of any plan that starts with "first, everyone else in the world just needs to set aside their needs and advantages in favor of my priorities, and then my plan will work." This is especially relevant today in the context of "agentic AI." When this idea was first mooted, the big idea was that you could instruct a chatbot to venture out onto the public, unstructured web and it would do your bidding, for example, finding all the flights that fit your criteria and comparing prices for all of them, picking the best one and booking it for you. This idea quickly foundered. Each step in that process was too complex and specialized for a single chatbot; so the notion quickly gave way to "swarms" of specialized chatbots – one to search the web and identify likely travel websites; one to search those websites; one to evaluate flights against your criteria, one to handle the transaction, and so on. Through specialization, these bots could be made far more accurate, but at a price: both the literal price of all the extra computation that goes into powering a "swarm" versus a single process, and the reliability price that arises from complexity. That's because error rates are additive: combine two bots with low failure rates into a single system and that system will have a higher failure rate than any of its components. This compounding error rate only increases as you add more and more bots, so every time you add a new specialized bot to decrease the error rate in its area of specialization, you increase the overall error rate of the system by adding more complexity to it. Despite this, companies pressed on ahead with "agentic," without any regard to the realities or consequences. For example, Microsoft has repeatedly announced that it will modify Windows to eliminate all forms of PC-side privacy and confidentiality, sending a continuous stream of screenshots to Microsoft's cloud servers so that your Microsoft "agent" can access your private data on Microsoft's cloud: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/06/1000x-liability/#graceful-failure-modes But the real fix for "agentic" is for everyone in the world to rearrange their affairs to the benefit of AI agents. This is the same demand that the Semantic Web people made in the early oughts, and it has the same problems. The Semantic Web people operated on the assumption that there were freestanding, objectively correct ways of describing things and that everyone who put information on the web would eventually come to see that adopting these correct semantics was to everyone's advantage. In reality, these semantic differences are the expression of real, serious, unresolvable philosophical, technical, moral and political arguments. The reason that some media outlets won't describe trans women as women isn't because they lack an appreciation of objectively correct semantic classifications – it's because they're bigots. That's the same reason "race realists" insist that there is a biological category called "race," that exists despite everything computational genomics has proved: https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/16/combat-wheelchairs/#race-realism In my book The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, I predicted that a similar dynamic would play out when it came to agentic AI and websites. The reason websites are so inhospitable to bots is that ecommerce sites don't want to be legible to automated tools: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ Ecommerce websites deploy a wide range of sleazy tactics to raise prices, including surveillance pricing: https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/07/gouged/#aeropain They use market power to rig whole categories, forcing prices up: https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/15/enshittipedia/ Multiple law-enforcers, Republic and Democrat, state and federal, have sued companies for "drip pricing" and "junk fees" that make it impossible to know what the actual price is until you've spent a long-ass time going through the purchase process: https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/07/drip-drip-drip/#drip-off Surveillance pricing, drip pricing, junk fees, price fixing and "most favored nation" deals are the source of all the growth in profitability by the economy's largest, most important firms. These tactics require opacity and are antithetical to the kinds of automated comparison-shopping that agentic peddlers promise: https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/14/the-price-is-wright/#enforcement-priorities These tactics are facially illegal and despite this, they are widely practiced. Cheating is so profitable that it's cheaper for firms to buy off regulators and pay fines than it is for them to stop criming. The fantasy that these same companies would welcome agentic shopping bots with open arms is just as implausible as the idea that if we feed enough words to the word-guessing program, it will wake up and become a "super intelligence": https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/18/surprise/#wow-signal What's more, the AI companies know this. Google's big plan to make AI profitable is to sell merchants the power to combine its surveillance data with its AI tools to price-gouge shoppers: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/21/cod-marxism/#wannamaker-slain And right on time, ecommerce websites are mass-blocking AI agents: https://gizmodo.com/online-shopping-platforms-turn-against-third-party-ai-agents-2000831298 They're doing it in part because AI agents allow shoppers to cheat (for example, by renewing a "temporary" hold on a used item to block other buyers indefinitely), but also because they don't want automation tools on their platforms at all. These tools are a frontal assault on all the most exciting (and sleaziest) ways to make money in the waning hours of end-stage capitalism. Far from welcoming bots, ecommerce sites were always going to block them. It's easy to come up with amazing applications for technology if you're allowed to assume that you can get everyone else in the world to set aside their priorities and their interests in favor of yours. But unless someone has a plan to do that, we shouldn't take them seriously. Hey look at this (permalink) Musk: Inside the Suits https://www.insidethesuits.com/receipts/15-musk-no-further-sales/ "The day all billionaires died…" https://www.patreon.com/noneofthisisok/posts/day-all-died-171938052 Your phone is about to stop being yours https://keepandroidopen.org/ Shitter: Alternative Twitter front-end https://codeberg.org/shitter/shitter Saving Social Security https://prospect.org/2026/10/27/saving-social-security/ Object permanence (permalink) #25yrsago Hack your Aibo https://web.archive.org/web/20010516005338/http://aibohack.com/ #20yrsago History of calculator watches https://watchismo.blogspot.com/2006/10/calculating-history-of-led-calculator.html #15yrsago How Occupy has shifted the national debate https://www.salon.com/2011/10/27/the_victory_ows_has_already_won/ #15yrsago UK public reimbursed Margaret Thatcher was reimbursed for more than £500K in personal expenses https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2011/oct/28/margaret-thatcher-expenses-claim #15yrsago Depression the Hyperbole and a Half way https://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2011/10/adventures-in-depression.html #15yrsago Philippines president Duterte says God threatened to crash his plane if he didn’t stop swearing https://www.khaosodenglish.com/news/international/2016/10/28/duterte-says-god-told-stop-cursing/ #15yrsago Public safety codes are now free online for all https://memex.craphound.com/2016/10/28/public-safety-codes-are-now-free-online-for-all/ #10yrsago Dr Seuss estate has crushed a kickstarter for a Seuss/Trek mashup https://web.archive.org/web/20170425161011/https://www.popehat.com/2016/10/26/popehat-signal-help-defend-a-seuss-trek-parody-under-fair-use/ #10yrsago Undercover with a prepper militia that patrols the border to fight “drug cartels” https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/undercover-border-militia-immigration-bauer/ #10yrsago The “Blacks for Trump” guy used to be in a murder cult https://web.archive.org/web/20161027133828/https://fusion.net/story/362459/blacks-for-trump-michael-the-black-man-yahweh-cult/ #5yrsago Europe's trustbusters lose the plot https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/28/clintons-ghost/#filternet #5yrsago All of science gets a general index https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/28/clintons-ghost/#cornucopia-concordance #5yrsago The new DRM-breaking exemptions just dropped https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/28/clintons-ghost/#felony-contempt-of-business-model #1yrago Raymond Biesinger's "9 Times My Work Has Been Ripped Off" https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/28/productive-seething/#fuck-you-pay-me Upcoming appearances (permalink) Vienna: TED AI, Oct 28-30 https://tedai-vienna.ted.com/ Kilkenny (Kilkenomics), Nov 6-8 https://kilkenomics.com/ Courtenay: Enshittification (Sid Williams Theatre Society), Nov 10 https://www.sidwilliamstheatre.com/events/cory-doctorow-talks-enshittification/ Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ Folkestone Writers Festival, Nov 16 https://www.creativefolkestone.org.uk/whats-on/cory-doctorow-the-internet-is-broken-now-what/ Oxford: Ministry of the Future, Nov 23 https://ministryforthefuture.co.uk/events.html Sheffield: Reverse Centaur at Juno Books, Nov 25 https://www.outsavvy.com/event/40274/cory-doctorow-in-conversation Virtual: Enshittification, AI, and the Future of Technology (UBC Master of Educational Technology), Nov 28 https://met.ubc.ca/2026/09/met-speaker-series-cory-doctorow-enshittification-ai-and-the-future-of-technology/ Oxford: Bennett Oxford Symposium on Open Code in Science, Dec 9 https://www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/events/2026-bennett-institute-symposium/ Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6 https://montreal2027.ca/en Recent appearances (permalink) Clint Eastwood (No Gods No Mayors) https://www.patreon.com/NoGodsNoMayors/posts/clint-eastwood-173008088 Life After AI (Brain Bar) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPPa43-n0vI Terms of Service with Clare Duffy (CNN) https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/terms-of-service-with-clare-duffy/episodes/458ce968-af5d-11f0-b539-13ed2afe25f8 AI, Work, and Power (Software Engineering Daily) AI, Work, and Power https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/podcasts/cory-doctorow-on-ai-work-and-power/ AI, Corporate Power, and the Fight for Worker Control (Plutopia) https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-ai-corporate-power-and-the-fight-for-worker-control/ Latest books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 518 (30331 total). "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

“Unlike some people in this race, I wanted to show that I am not estranged from a parent,” Ramaswamy proudly declared.

In the Senate, Marshall has oversight of the FDA

The dark side of AI is already here

Emma Cole dissects the romance and horror in some of Hitchcock’s most iconic films: “Hitchcock knows there must be some emotional investment from the audience.” | Lit Hub Film At 300 years old, Gulliver’s Travels still has so much to

Third time ... nope, still no charm.

I grew up in a middle-class household that, at some point in my childhood, inched into upper-middle-class territory (my definition is loose, but I got everything I ever needed and some of the things I wanted).

For the past few years, my father and I have been writing a book together, a memoir told in his first-person voice. This has required me to do something I never expected to do professionally: imitate Tony Shalhoub. But not

Evan goes looking for the humans behind the flood of AI-generated podcasts, and gets some complicated answers to his questions about what they think they’re making and what AI slop means to them. Meanwhile, Shell Game’s own bot-hosted shows move to the prototype stage, and we hear the first efforts in our quest to make an AI-generated show that will truly resonate with listeners.

This episode includes AI-generated content.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alfred Hitchcock is known as the master of suspense, and he’s one of my favorite classic film directors, creating some fantastically memorable scenes and characters. One of my absolute favorite sequences in all of cinema is in North by Northwest,

On August 29, 1511, Isabella d’Este, the Marchioness of Mantua, patron of the arts, fashion icon, and one of the most famous women in Renais-sance Italy, suffered a great loss. Isabella was an animal lover, and she loved little dogs

In the five years I spent at medical school, I learned a lot about death. My classmates and I spent endless hours in a darkened lecture theatre, trying to understand the many and varied ways in which a body can

As we increasingly feel the world around us crumbling under the weight of division and human suffering, there’s an odd kind of freedom in conceptualizing complete demolition. Deadly pandemics, zombie hordes, and societal collapse don’t seem like easy friends to

On every birthday, Jonathan Swift would take off his starched, powdered wig with its cascade of white curls, gingerly place it down by the candle-light illuminated stained-glass window of the Deanery of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. He would mark the anniversary

In my mid-thirties, I became a preacher. Might as well come right out with it, admit I’m a preacher the way a neighbor at the block party might mention they have COVID. Seems only fair to give you a chance

Or NOT?

Bajirao knew Gayatri was giving him her wordless approval. All she had to do was brush her fingers over her nose ring and clear her throat. How many years had it been since she first thought of this way of

When I was child, my parents told me to “be smart” at least once a day. Depending on the context, these words stood in for a range of different things: a goodbye when I ran out the door for school,

For ninety years, Caltech scientists and engineers have pursued rocketry and space exploration at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This exhibition, which draws from the collections of both the Caltech Archives and Special Collections and the JPL Archives, traces the history of JPL’s missions and of collaboration between JPL researchers and those on Caltech’s campus.

On Sunday a student-led democratic movement ousted Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić, a key ally of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, from power.

I’ve been a bit silent here lately. The reason is on the one hand life and issues with that but also problems with the hoster of this blog, specifically the SSL certificate. I’ve spent some fun hours on the phone with helpdesk and it’s still, well, complicated. That’s why I finally took the plunge and […]

Watch today’s live recording here.

Stairway to…? And if that reminds you of Led Zeppellin, then join the club. Quote of the Day “Learn from the mistakes of others. You can never live long enough to make them all yourself.” Groucho Marx Musical alternative to … Continue reading →

Printed manuals used to open with a page that explained their own typography, so that readers knew what a hand in the margin or a bold word meant before they ran into one. This site borrows the look of those manuals, so it borrows that page too.

Structure

Each post is treated as a chapter. Sections are numbered 1.1, 1.2, and so on, and subsections 1.1.1, 1.1.2. Figures and tables follow the same scheme: Figure 1-2 is the second figure in a post, and Table 1-1 is the first table.

Clearly there's something importance about the practice of diligence that makes for excellent software engineers. In fact, I'd tend to go further: diligence is the cardinal virtue of software work, and our first priority when doing anything to do with tech should be to work diligently.

And a certain cube

Please rally for our great candidate Johnny Garcia and help him close strong!

“Shove that ballroom up your fat ass!” Was the heckler at last night’s Trump rally in Corinth, Mississippi a tipping point for disgusted MAGA apostles?

Pro-democracy forces have won key elections against authoritarians around the globe. Now it’s our turn.

Even if you’re a decent designer (or believe yourself to be), it’s liberating not to have a say in the matter. Constraints are sometimes freeing.

This Midterm Election Gives Us a Unique Chance to Break the Cycle of Political Manipulation & Influence

The financial and human costs

o read this letter, click here:

Apple (MacRumors, Hacker News): Apple today announced the new 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6, delivering even more performance, powerful on-device AI capabilities, and faster connectivity for college students, business users, creators, and more. M6 features an advanced 12-core CPU with the world’s fastest CPU core, so everything from productivity tasks to more demanding pro workflows […]

Apple (MacRumors, Hacker News): Apple today announced the new iMac featuring the superfast M6, delivering even more performance and powerful AI capabilities in its strikingly thin all-in-one design. […] Connectivity gets even better with Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, along with available 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet and storage that is up to 2x faster, so apps […]

Juli Clover (release notes, security, enterprise, developer, full installer, IPSW): macOS Golden Gate 27.2 overhauls the brightness and volume sliders, plus it expands Siri AI to new languages including French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish. Mr. Macintosh (post): Apple just broke the macOS security update record AGAIN, patching 263 CVEs in macOS Golden Gate 27.2! […]

Juli Clover (iOS/iPadOS release notes, security, iOS/iPadOS enterprise, developer): The iOS 27.2 update expands Siri AI to new languages, including French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish. It also adds profiles for the Apple TV app, a new icon and branding for Apple Music, and support for AI suggestions in the Messages app for taking quick […]

macOS 26.7.2 (security, no enterprise, no developer, full installer): This update provides bug fixes and security updates for your Mac. macOS 15.8.2 (security, no enterprise, no developer, full installer): This update provides bug fixes and security updates for your Mac. Previously: macOS 26.7.1 and macOS 15.8.1

Juli Clover (release notes, security, developer): According to Apple’s release notes, watchOS 27.2 introduces new Siri AI features and extends Siri AI to new languages. Previously: watchOS 27

Juli Clover (release notes, security, developer): Today’s update adds support for four-speaker surround sound, a feature that works with the HomePod, HomePod mini 2, and the upcoming Apple TV 4K. It allows the Apple TV 4K to be used with four HomePod mini 2 speakers, four second-generation HomePods, or two HomePods and two HomePod mini […]

Juli Clover (release notes): HomePod Software 27.2 brings a new Sound Glow option to the HomePod, HomePod mini, and upcoming HomePod mini 2. Sound Glow causes the top of a HomePod or HomePod mini to light up with color that pulses in sync with the music that’s playing. The feature draws colors from album artwork, […]

Juli Clover (release notes, security, no enterprise, developer): Apple today released visionOS 27.2, the first big update for the visionOS 27 operating system that runs on the Apple Vision Pro. […] The visionOS 27.2 update provides bug fixes and security updates, per Apple’s release notes. Previously: visionOS 27

We’re one week away from Election Day.

Ohio, @sherrodbrownoh.bsky.social and @amyactonoh.bsky.social are ready to bring about the change we need right now.

So don’t wait – vote early or make a plan to vote on November 3rd. IWillVote.com/OH

My two projects meet, Xogot and SwiftTerm, by popular demand (ie, one person asked for this), Midnight Commander and Kitty Graphics on the terminal:

The post Turbulent Times Call For Experimental Law appeared first on NOEMA.

Every young person between the ages of 18 and 21 should provide 2 years of mandatory national service.

Dirección: Otilia Portillo Padua. Guion: Otilia Portillo Padua. Participación: Julia Dolores Raimundo, Eliseete Ramírez Carbajal, Cristina Carbajal. País: México. Más información de la película: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30012780/ Los hongos están teniendo un momento importante tanto en la cocina como en la industria del bienestar como suplemento o aditivo nutricional. Empero, esto no ocurrió en un vacío; más […]

La entrada Hijas del bosque (FICM 2026): maravillas miceliales bajo las sombras se publicó primero en Palomita de maíz.

A review of Volodymyr Ishchenko’s “Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War”

Since this will be the only source of this process on the Internet1, I figured I'd document a quick fan swap I did on a piece of test/reference equipment I'm running in my Atomic Clock Tower.

I took my Torx T10 screwdriver and popped off the top cover. The screws required some force to loosen, as they were all secured with Loctite.

The inside is simple and serviceable. There's a SpectraTime GRClok-1500, with an integrated timing-grade GPS module, and a stabilized 10 MHz output2.

Today at 230pm ET - A special Hopium live event featuring Johnny Garcia (TX-35)

Writing of lasting value

Today, 230pm ET - Johnny Garcia checks in from TX-35 in South Texas, and Leon Krauze and Maria Cardona will then join us to talk the Hispanic vote, Trump/Latin America, and more. Action packed day!

Yesterday Ben Thompson wrote that we've reached the end of the web, and I had come to the same conclusion, just a few days ago. And his piece, which was a great milestone, said it's not totally gone, because of the advent of AI we can build small systems for each other. Which is exactly the motivation of the BigUndo model. What's big about it is how small the parts are and how nicely they fit together. We're not leaving everything behind in the great diaspora to the new web, we're not just bringing Markdown with us. It also echoes Marco Arment, who wrote a similar piece about Mastodon a few days before. Nothing wrong with Mastodon, but the idea of one model of service doing the work for everyone is ridiculous. We need a million different approaches, all we need to make it work is a standard they can all agree on for what forms of text move around the net. Once we agree on a format, we all can use whatever editor we like, and no more tiny little text boxes that lock your ideas into Substack or X or whatever. That was the crime, that's what the BigUndo is all about undoing. The web said very clearly what text is, and they all broke it by doing it differently. We're bringing RSS 2.0 and Markdown with us, and they were joined a short time ago. Almost no one noticed, but there was design here, an intent -- a hope that we'd get to the place it appears we are now at.

Zettelkasten is an idea pioneered by my great-uncle Arno Schmidt. It's a process for organizing your data and thoughts. When I read people's descriptions of what they do with it, it sounds totally like the outliners I pioneered two generations later. I have a Zettlekasten blog in my blogroll, screenshot, so I think of Uncle Arno, who I never met, from time to time.

The AI era seems to be emboldening startups to once again take bold swings and use your data without even bothering to ask so they can build a startup around it.

If Claude Code projects had feelings, I'd wake up the Frontier project and let it know that the reason it's been asleep so long is that the software is working. I'm using it to manage the other three apps, writing code, keeping lists, everything works. Yes, the menubar is very out of date, but I know where to find everything. I look forward to coming in for a landing at some point and upgrade it work among the different BigUndo stuff we have running, no doubt we're going to use Frontier to do cross-app scripting. Some of the things AI says they need to do, Frontier can do with the resources of an early 90s Macintosh. No big data centers. Keep that in mind.

Capture lettering on signs, shop windows, and façades, then explore walks to the best finds in your city.

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I’m not someone who gets called when things are going well. So when Michelle – the Twill CEO – called me in December, it was because she needed some help with engineering. In 18 months of being an advisor, this was the first time it was a phone call and not an email. There were […]

Imagine you are on a trip in a new city and would like to have a meal. You open CoMaps, navigate to Search, Categories, Where to eat and the app happily displays the restaurants and cafes nearby. If you are in a popular spot, you might be overwhelmed by the number of them and the inability to tell the pleasant ones from tourist traps. This is one of the situations where customer reviews come in handy.

Companies such as Google, TripAdvisor or Yelp have amassed huge troves of reviews. Sadly, these datasets are all proprietary and we cannot use them in CoMaps. There are a few projects attempting to build open review datasets distributed with permissive licences. We decided to work with Mangrove Reviews, which has previously been integrated into MapComplete and contained a few thousand reviews of places on OpenStreetMap. Since the 31 August release you can see these reviews in the Android app.

Usage

When you select a place that has reviews, its info panel will show the average star rating on the scale 1 to 5 stars as well as the number of reviews. In this example, the average from 4 reviews is 4.7 stars. To see the reviews, touch the star rating in the info panel.

The reviews are shown starting from most recent. They can be in any language; you can select the text to paste it into a translation tool. There is currently no other action that can be taken on a review.

The search results list also displays the average rating, where available. A small pro-tip: from the upcoming November release onwards you will also be able to list all nearby places with reviews by typing ?reviews into the search box. In the future we hope to include this more directly in the search options.

There is no review editor built into CoMaps yet, but links are provided to MapComplete (for places that MapComplete supports directly) or Mangrove web-based review editors. These links can be found in the expanded place info panel and in the review list. Adding reviews through these tools requires an active Internet connection.

How It Works

Like all other data shown by CoMaps, the reviews are downloaded to the device and available offline. Whenever new maps are generated, which as of October 2026 happens on a weekly schedule, all reviews are downloaded from Mangrove, matched with places on the map and embedded into the corresponding map files. Reviews that are bot-generated are excluded. In the future we might introduce additional filters to ensure the reviews stay relevant and helpful.

Offline storage means that when you add a review, it will only appear in CoMaps after the next maps update. If the maps have been updated and the review is still not visible it might mean there is a bug in how we collect the reviews for places — please let us know so we can investigate.

Coverage

Compared with closed, proprietary datasets, which contain millions of reviews, the Mangrove dataset is currently tiny: as of writing this, there is a bit over ten thousand reviews. That said, we are happy to see a steady, healthy growth of the review coverage. Since late June, when the work on Mangrove integration started, we have seen a twofold increase in the number of places with reviews.

This is still not a lot, so you might struggle to find any examples of places with reviews in your area. You can use the ?reviews search keyword in CoMaps or the web-based Mangrove Viewer tool to find such places.

The Future

There are advantages to Mangrove being niche: there is very little abuse of the system in the form of spam, vandalism or fake reviews. We hope the recent additions to CoMaps will make it easy to contribute reviews to Mangrove and the dataset will continue to grow. If it does, and as a result attracts the attention of bad actors, we will need some way of moderating and curating the reviews. Mangrove provides ways for flagging and commenting on reviews, and we would like to make some of that available in CoMaps.

A built-in review editor is another feature we would like to add. For one thing, it would allow one to leave review without connecting to the Internet; the review would be uploaded to Mangrove when a connection is available, similarly to how OpenStreetMap edits are handled by CoMaps. There are a few more ideas on how to improve the reviews in Codeberg issues labelled with open reviews.

Finally, it would be great to also show the reviews in the iOS version of CoMaps. With the majority of CoMaps contributors focussing on Android, we are constantly looking for iOS developers. If this sounds like something you can help with, please join us on Zulip.

Interesting research: “ AI Models Can Provably Hide Arbitrary Capabilities”

Abstract: Capability evaluations aim to surface dangerous model behaviors before deployment, but their reliability depends on the assumption that hidden capabilities can be elicited. We show this assumption does not hold under adversarial conditions by constructing backdoor attacks that embed encrypted neural networks within host model weights, decrypting and executing them only upon receiving a secret trigger. Using digital lockers, these hidden circuits remain provably hard to elicit and interpret under cryptographic assumptions, even given full access to model weights, extending prior work from hiding fixed strings to arbitrary computations. We implement our proof of concept constructions in PyTorch and evaluate elicitation through fine-tuning, weight noising, gradient-based trigger search, and latent adversarial training, using a small chemical reaction prediction task as a proxy for CBRN-relevant capabilities. Our results demonstrate resistance to these methods and, together with our cryptographic guarantees, reveal a limit of elicitation-based capability audits. We release our models to support the improvement of defenses...

A new board of directors and executive committee, an upcoming conference, a junior faculty forum, new member-led initiatives: much is afoot in the ALPE.

Every young person between the ages of 18 and 21 should provide 2 years of mandatory national service. Accepted service goes beyond military service and includes civilian service like teaching, or construction, or emergency response. Everyone serves. There are no … Continue reading →

New York City month continues here at Kieran Healy Industries, an effort that will eventually produce something properly scholarly in nature. But in the meantime—and with my apologies to the many great urbanists of times past—we can enjoy ourselves by messing around with some data. Specifically, New York’s 311 Services and Complaints data. The 311 phone line and website is the the main point of contact for city services when it’s not an emergency. The city logs all the calls it gets and makes anonymized data available publicly via NYC OpenData. I got every record from 2010 to 2025 and packaged it up for R. The package is really just a front-end for a big parquet file managed by DuckDB. DuckDB offers a very powerful in-memory database engine that is optimized for the kinds of thing we want to do in data analysis. That is, we want to efficiently query a big dataset lots of different ways, rather than, say, repeatedly update its records as fast as possible. We can work in R and write tidy dplyr-like queries that get handled by the database. It’s great.

The dataset has about 43 million rows, each one of which is a service request (i.e., a complaint). I interact with it via a function that returns a DuckDB table. It looks like this:

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nyc_311()
#> # A duckplyr data frame: 37 variables
#>    unique_key created_date        closed_date         agency agency_name   problem problem_detail location_type incident_zip incident_address street_name cross_street_1 cross_street_2 address_type city  status
#>         <dbl> <dttm>              <dttm>              <chr>  <chr>         <chr>   <chr>          <chr>         <chr>        <chr>            <chr>       <chr>          <chr>          <chr>        <chr> <chr>
#>  1   45278137 2019-12-31 23:59:11 2020-01-01 03:07:18 NYPD   New York Cit… Noise … Banging/Pound… Club/Bar/Res… 11229        3939 EMMONS AVE… EMMONS AVE… PLUMB    3 ST… BELT PARKWAY … <NA>         BROO… Closed
#>  2   45281589 2019-12-31 23:58:54 2020-01-01 05:37:03 NYPD   New York Cit… Noise … Loud Music/Pa… Residential … 10025        865 COLUMBUS AV… COLUMBUS A… WEST  100 STR… WEST  103 STR… <NA>         NEW … Closed
#>  3   45283574 2019-12-31 23:58:03 2020-01-01 01:26:50 NYPD   New York Cit… Noise … Loud Music/Pa… Residential … 10040        558 WEST  192 S… WEST  192 … AUDUBON AVENUE ST NICHOLAS A… <NA>         NEW … Closed
#>  4   45278249 2019-12-31 23:57:19 2020-01-01 09:33:55 NYPD   New York Cit… Noise … Loud Music/Pa… Residential … 11372        35-18 91 STREET  91 STREET   35 AVENUE      37 AVENUE      <NA>         JACK… Closed
#>  5   45282332 2019-12-31 23:56:52 2020-01-01 03:06:36 NYPD   New York Cit… Blocke… No Access      Street/Sidew… 11226        2310 CORTELYOU … CORTELYOU … EAST   23 STR… BEDFORD AVENUE <NA>         BROO… Closed
#>  6   45281555 2019-12-31 23:56:34 2020-01-01 08:22:26 NYPD   New York Cit… Noise … Loud Music/Pa… Residential … 11375        72-72 112 STREET 112 STREET  72 DRIVE       73 AVENUE      <NA>         FORE… Closed
#>  7   45281053 2019-12-31 23:56:34 2020-01-01 02:47:53 NYPD   New York Cit… Noise … Loud Music/Pa… Street/Sidew… 10128        EAST   89 STREET EAST   89 … 2 AVENUE       1 AVENUE       <NA>         <NA>  Closed
#>  8   45282921 2019-12-31 23:56:32 2020-01-01 02:18:56 NYPD   New York Cit… Noise … Loud Music/Pa… Residential … 11433        168-70 93 AVENUE 93 AVENUE   168 PLACE      170 STREET     <NA>         JAMA… Closed
#>  9   45283114 2019-12-31 23:56:28 2020-01-01 05:58:35 NYPD   New York Cit… Noise … Loud Music/Pa… Residential … 11373        42-21 KETCHAM S… KETCHAM ST… BAXTER AVENUE  PETTIT AVENUE  <NA>         ELMH… Closed
#> 10   45281055 2019-12-31 23:55:56 2020-01-01 11:01:07 NYPD   New York Cit… Noise … Loud Talking   Street/Sidew… 11435        85-85 148 STREET 148 STREET  85 DRIVE       86 AVENUE      <NA>         JAMA… Closed
#> # ℹ more rows
#> # ℹ 21 more variables: resolution_description <chr>, resolution_action_updated_date <dttm>, community_board <chr>, police_precinct <int>, bbl <chr>, borough <chr>, open_data_channel_type <chr>,
#> #   park_facility_name <chr>, park_borough <chr>, latitude <dbl>, longitude <dbl>, created_year <dbl>, created_month <dbl>, created_day <dbl>, created_dow <chr>, created_hour <dbl>, closed_year <dbl>,
#> #   closed_month <dbl>, closed_day <dbl>, closed_dow <chr>, closed_hour <dbl>

We can ask all kinds of questions of data like this. We also have to be careful with it, just because any dataset that’s this large and has grown over this long a period will have all kinds of quirks in it. For example, the classification scheme the city uses to categorize service requests isn’t static, and for some categories it gets completely redone. At least once over the period the city changed the service provider for data management, which affected measurement in some ways. Meanwhile, on the complaints side, one feature of service databases like this is that some people really like to complain, even by the high standards of New Yorkers. Complaining also becomes easier after the introduction of the web portal, because you can just quickly report something via a form rather than having to make a phone call. So we need to think about how to deal with things like that.

Complaints are ultimately made by individual people, and our dataset is a record of individual reports. But here I’m going to aggregate things to the level of neighborhoods. You can slice up the city in many different ways. New York often uses Neighborhood Tabulation Areas, or NTAs, as its de facto neighborhood unit. The idea is to get something that’s larger than a Census Tract, of which there are about 2,300 in New York, but smaller than one of the City’s 59 Community Districts. There are 262 NTAs, of which 197 are residential. Here’s a map of them, with their names.

So, how can we get from our complaint records to an NTA-level map, and what do we want to see? As I say, here we’re going more or less for data-driven neighborhood trolling, so here’s what I did to characterize each neighborhood. First, I did a fair amount of work harmonizing the complaint categories over the whole dataset, but in addition to that here I’ll just restrict myself to complaints from 2022 to 2025, which is about 13.5m records. Second, we want to moderate the role played by people we can politely call “super-reporters”, so we count distinct addresses within complaint categories, within residential NTAs, over the time period we’re looking at. Each address counts only once in each category it complained about, so we get about 4.6m address-category pairs from about one million unique addresses. (The addresses don’t include identifying information like house or apartment numbers, by the way.) The average address complains in about four or five categories over the four years we’re looking at.

Now, when it comes to complaints, we are all trying to get through this thing we call life and many of the trials we face, we all share. Which is to say that the most common complaints in any given neighborhood are more likely to be the most common complaints in other neighborhoods, too. These are things like the heat and hot water being out, noise of various kinds, and illegal parking. But what we’re interested in is the most distinctive complaints in each neighborhood. So we take every complaint and figure out its share of all complaints citywide. Then we do the same but within each neighborhood. And then for each neighborhood we ask, what category of complaint in this neighborhood most exceeds its citywide share? Actually we do two things. We do that first by general category of complaint, like “Sanitation and Dumping”, or “Parking, Driveways, and Vehicles”, or “Buildings and Construction”. And then we do it for the most fine-grained category we have, like “Traffic: Drag Racing”, or “Appliance: Refrigerator”, or “Lost Property in Taxi or For-Hire Vehicle: Wallet”. Then we color our NTA map in by the broad category and label each neighborhood by its most-specific category. Here’s what that looks like.

I think the results are pretty good. Sorry about the small print and fine detail. This is the sort of thing that works best as a poster. But zoom in and take a look. And of course Tag Yourself. Are you the Badly Behaved Nightlife Crescent from the Upper East Side to Lower Manhattan who got drunk and lost your wallet or keys? (I like how right at the top of the UES they don’t lose their wallets but they do complain about the driver.) Are you the brownstone Brooklyn Bicycle Police? Or the South Brooklyn Curb Cutters who are installing illegal carports? Or maybe you are just out in Woodside, Elmhurst, or Corona, drinking in public. Or abandoning a vehicle somewhere. There’s a lot going on in the city.

Bear in mind that there’s a kind of duality to the map, in the sense that at first glance it shows you what seems to be happening in these NTAs, but only through the lens of what people complain about in these neighborhoods. So, indulge your neighborhood stereotypes, but maybe don’t lean too hard on them. Though I do like those people in Forest Hills who just call the cops for unspecified Other Non-Emergency Police Matters. You know, for a chat or something. What else are you gonna do out there on a Friday?

This is very good news!

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As the midterms loom, he’s finally admitting the obvious

When Cindy Hyde-Smith opens her mouth, anything can happen.

A new report from House Judiciary Committee Democrats contains new details about the Trump-Epstein relationship — and an alleged cover-up

Who chooses the poems featured on the New York City subway? Meet the people behind Poetry in Motion. | Lit Hub Design Rebecca Birrell considers Jane Eyre, Lily Briscoe, and writing about amateur women artists in fiction. | Lit Hub

Trump is laying the groundwork to interfere in the midterms.

Today's links History is something you do: Not something that happens to you. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Occupy Tents are speech; Piagram; SOPA; "I'm Rob Fucking Ford"; Blocking all porn in the UK; Pirates rule Iceland; Shake Shack v shitting to death. Upcoming appearances: Vienna, Kilkenny, Courtenay, Vancouver, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Montreal. 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. History is something you do (permalink) Prediction is hard. Especially about the future. That Yogi Berra gem proves that you don't have to be a science fiction writer to get irritated with people insisting that you must know what's going to happen tomorrow, but (as a sf writer), I can tell you that this is one of our main occupational hazards. Obviously, this is a self-inflicted injury. Our genre is full of big names who self-mythologized as scientific Nostradamuses. From the "future history" bar-charts in Heinlein's books (I was once on a panel with Robert Silverberg where he referred to RAH as "Robert A Timeline") to the McGuffin of Asimov's Foundation series: a "scientific" discipline that could predict the trajectory of human civilization for millennia into the future. But me, I find the prospect of predicting the future incredibly dismal – even offensive. A predictable future is set in stone, immune to human agency. A predictable future runs on rails, and we're the prisoners of history, tied to the tracks. For me, the most exciting thing about sf is the idea that the future is contingent. Sf is a long, sharp pin that can prick inevitabilism's bubble: that assertion by tech-bros and policymakers alike that the future is out of our hands and must be accommodated, not shaped. Inevitabilism is a form of vulgar Thatcherism, the assertion that "there is no alternative." If The Market won't deliver an energy transition, and it leaves us to boil in our own skins, drown in the rising seas, and roast in wildfires, then tough shit humanity, there is no alternative. If there's a tech company eavesdropping on all of our communications technologies and following us as we move through digital and physical space (and turning the juiciest tidbits over to ICE), that's not the tech company's fault: there is no alternative. If some broadly useful statistical tools are delivered in the most climate-destroying, economy-wrecking, job-killing, quality-vaporizing way possible, that's just How It Is. It's not Sam Altman or Dario Amodei's fault: there is no alternative. Science fiction can do more than imagine how "General AI" might change society: sf can imagine a society that doesn't make the fanciful leap from a word-guessing sentence-extruder to a machine god. Sf can imagine a world that debuts "AI" as a joint supercomputing project between the IPCC and Sandia National Labs whose primary purpose is to improve the fidelity of climate models, and whose spinoffs are modest but interesting open source tools that people run on regular computers with normal energy footprints. Considered as a predictive literature, sf is a colossal failure. If our books are to be taken as roadmaps to an inevitable future, we have all flunked out of cartography school. More than 99.9% of these maps describe a territory that never emerged. All claims of sf's predictive value are just survivor bias, feats of Texas marksmanship in which we fire a shotgun into the side of a barn and then draw a target around the place where the holes cluster. What's more likely: that sf is 99.9% fake fortune-tellers and 0.1% seers and soothsayers; or that the "predictions that came true" in sf are just the inevitable bullseyes that you'd score if you threw enough darts? Prediction is a weak and helpless activity, the obsession of people who don't think they can change anything. It's the superstitious dread that gives rise to astrology. Far better to be a Luddite who asserts that there is more than one way to introduce a technology to a society. To be a Luddite is to insist that humans are in charge of humanity, not the iron laws of economics, not the great forces of history, not the uncaring and illusory constellations. At its best, sf is a proudly Luddite literature: https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/ The insistence that we can change things is an active posture. It's an activist posture. At its radical best, sf is activist, because it engages with more than what the machine does, insisting on changing who the machine does it for and who the machine does it to. Which is why I find demands to offer predictions for the future so irritating. People who think that sf writers can predict the future have the field's role exactly backwards. My intention isn't to demoralize you into tying yourself to history's tracks – I'm here to show you how to grab the wheel and steer off the rails altogether. The reason this seems so implausible is that the "there is no alternative" people have convinced us that all change is the result of individuals. To change the world, you must fashion yourself into one of history's mediocre Great Men, a Musk or Zuck. Our oligarchs are the avatars of the Great Forces of History. They have seen the predictable, inevitable future and have been allocated trillions by the capital markets to ensure that we arrive there on time, running straight down those shining rails, no matter how many people are tied to the tracks. Another motif of Thatcherism (and hence inevitabilism) is that "there is no such thing as society," which means that all change is the result of individuals, which means that only Great Men can hope to change anything. If there is no such thing as society, then it follows that there's no such thing as mass movements, there's no such thing as trade unions, and there's no such thing as revolutions. If there's no such thing as society, then eruptions of students and workers in the streets must be nothing more than mob violence – it can't possibly be a political eruption. If you're an inevitabilist then Occupy was nothing more than millions of individual "virtue signallers" and #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter were the individual follies of innumerable "social justice warriors." As an activist, I'm not interested in predicting the future, I'm interested in changing it. When I speak about "the post-American internet" that we could create by exploiting the policy space that has been opened by Trump's incontinent belligerence, my intention is to get you to help build it, not to get you to prepare yourself for that inevitable outcome: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition Obviously, some aspects of our future are locked in. The climate violence our political and business elites inflicted on the world locked in rising seas, extreme weather, habitat-loss driven zoonotic plagues and massive refugee crises. Those are inevitable. What's entirely up to us is what we do about them. Do we create full employment for every person who will live for the next 300 years, relocating our coastal cities inland, treating the sick, retrofitting our infrastructure, and accommodating our neighbors who are driven out of their homes? Or do we let the stupidest, worst people among us lead us into the ecofascism of border walls, drone warfare, and exterminationism? That's our choice. We've had generations of being told to "vote with our wallets" instead of organizing in political, labor and social movements. Voting with your wallet doesn't work (billionaires' wallets are thicker than yours, they win those votes), and if you lose enough of those wallet elections, it's easy to fall into the despair of believing that the future is inevitable: https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/13/consumption-choices/#marginal-benefits I think this is why "prediction markets" have caught on so ferociously. While prediction markets are sold as a way for people to "inject information" into markets, they are actually a rigged system that transfers money from everyday "investors" to insiders: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/24/degenerated-gambling/#oracle-capture Prediction markets are the perfect pastime for history's prisoners. If you fancy yourself a plaything of the gods whose future is already written, then prediction markets are a way for you and your fellow prisoners to bet on what torments will come next. And of course oligarchs love prediction markets, because they're the ones who can rig the odds, say, by placing a bet on a war and then leading the country to that war. They are the gods, the only ones who get to make history, so a market for bets on what history will do next is a way to enrich history's avatars at the expense of history's victims. In science fiction, we often meet powerful aliens who tell us "resistance is futile" as they conquer our world and set about exterminating us. But if resistance was truly futile, no one would have to say it. When they tell us "there is no alternative," what they mean is "stop trying to think of alternatives." To imagine radically is to move beyond the helplessness of prediction: a radical imagination dares to insist that history is what we make, not what happens to us. (Image: Ralf Roletschek, CC BY-SA 3.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) There's No Such Thing as Society in the Objective Function https://laurenleek.substack.com/p/theres-no-such-thing-as-society-in The Real Reason AI Is Able to Hack Everything on the Internet https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-the-real-reason Halloween 1960-1964 – Quivers Down The Backbone https://centuriesofsound.com/2026/10/25/halloween-1960-1964-quivers-down-the-backbone/ Still On Its Way to Cleveland https://longreads.com/2026/09/22/family-road-trip-early-internet-90s/ slurptop https://slurpburgers.com/slurpbuilds/the-slurptop/ Object permanence (permalink) #15yrsago Canon of St Paul’s resigns over plans to evict Occupy London https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/27/giles-fraser-st-pauls-profile #15yrsago Orange County city council unanimous: Occupy tents are a form of speech https://web.archive.org/web/20111029021151/http://www.occupy-oc.org/tears-stream-as-city-council-unanimously-agrees-occupy-tents-are-a-form-of-speech/ #15yrsago Edible Venn diagram: the piagram https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/g8nxo/i_realize_its_a_bit_late_for_pi_day_but_heres_my/ #15yrsago SOPA: US House of Reps copyright bill proposes national censorship, attacks on hosting services, Twitter, YouTube https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/10/disastrous-ip-legislation-back-–-and-it’s-worse-ever #15yrsago Google rejects JWZ’s 2-step plan to end the nym wars https://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/10/google-nymwars-redux/ #15yrsago Toronto mayor confronted by comedy interviewer calls 911, reportedly shouts “You bitches! Don’t you fucking know? I’m Rob fucking Ford, the mayor of this city! https://www.joeydevilla.com/2011/10/27/im-rob-fucking-ford-or-the-mayor-the-ambush-and-the-911-call/ #15yrsago Canadian Tory MP: Don’t worry about violating our stupid new copyright law, because we probably won’t catch you if you do https://web.archive.org/web/20111029155739/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6089/125/ #10yrsago UK MPs realise that age filtering won’t work so now they just want to block all porn in the UK https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/now-we-want-censorship-the-digital-economy-bill-is-running-out-of-control/ #10yrsago Samsung abuses copyright to censor satirical exploding phone Grand Theft Auto mod https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/10/samsung-sets-its-reputation-fire-bogus-dmca-takedown-notices #10yrsago EU lies and the British tabloids who told them https://web.archive.org/web/20160626051921/https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2016/06/daily-chart-15 #10yrsago The Pirate Party are poised to form Iceland’s government in Saturday’s election https://qz.com/817784/icelands-pirate-party-looks-likely-to-take-the-countrys-general-election-on-oct-29 #5yrsago Hospital rings up $2755 upcharge by sending pregnant woman to ER https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/27/crossing-a-line/#zero-fucks-given #1yrago Shake Shack wants you to shit yourself to death https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/27/shit-shack/#binding-arbitration Upcoming appearances (permalink) Vienna: TED AI, Oct 28-30 https://tedai-vienna.ted.com/ Kilkenny (Kilkenomics), Nov 6-8 https://kilkenomics.com/ Courtenay: Enshittification (Sid Williams Theatre Society), Nov 10 https://www.sidwilliamstheatre.com/events/cory-doctorow-talks-enshittification/ Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ Oxford: Ministry of the Future, Nov 23 https://ministryforthefuture.co.uk/events.html Sheffield: Reverse Centaur at Juno Books, Nov 25 https://www.outsavvy.com/event/40274/cory-doctorow-in-conversation Virtual: Enshittification, AI, and the Future of Technology (UBC Master of Educational Technology), Nov 28 https://met.ubc.ca/2026/09/met-speaker-series-cory-doctorow-enshittification-ai-and-the-future-of-technology/ Oxford: Bennett Oxford Symposium on Open Code in Science, Dec 9 https://www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/events/2026-bennett-institute-symposium/ Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6 https://montreal2027.ca/en Recent appearances (permalink) Clint Eastwood (No Gods No Mayors) https://www.patreon.com/NoGodsNoMayors/posts/clint-eastwood-173008088 Life After AI (Brain Bar) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPPa43-n0vI Terms of Service with Clare Duffy (CNN) https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/terms-of-service-with-clare-duffy/episodes/458ce968-af5d-11f0-b539-13ed2afe25f8 AI, Work, and Power (Software Engineering Daily) AI, Work, and Power https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/podcasts/cory-doctorow-on-ai-work-and-power/ AI, Corporate Power, and the Fight for Worker Control (Plutopia) https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-ai-corporate-power-and-the-fight-for-worker-control/ Latest books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 530 (29813 total). "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

Is it telling that I was always more interested in the amateurs? When I think about the literary depictions of artists I liked best, they tend to share certain qualities: frustrated effort, a willfulness about vocation that verges on delusion,

New York’s subway, from its founding, was dreamt as a public good in all senses, to provide a useful and reliable service that was also a pleasant place to be. City train stations were filled with decorative ornamentation, public art

The following is from The Two Saddest Kitchens: A Comics Conversation by Roz Chast and Jason Adam Katzenstein, published by Bloomsbury Publishing. * _______________________________ From The Two Saddest Kitchens: A Comics Conversation by Roz Chast and Jason Adam Katzenstein. Copyright

Hunger rules the day. And the night. And the afternoons. The eager grunting from the trio of baby Tyrannosaurus can sometimes seem ceaseless, the only quiet coming from the fleeting moments when they have their sharp little jaws clamped around

“Clever and persistent use of propaganda can make a nation believe that heaven is hell and, conversely, that the most miserable life is paradise.” – Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (1925) “The European mind is capitulating. It is capitulating out of

Today, written notes are such a large part of a Western musical education that the word “music” has often come to mean exactly that: sheet music or a printed score. Musicians and their teachers set great store by literacy: by

Over a year into the administration's anti-immigration agenda, we’re seeing the economic fallout. For the first time in at least 50 years, estimates are that we lost immigrants on net; far fewer than usual arrived and a somewhat higher than usual number left. But if anyone benefited from that shift, it wasn’t U.S.-born workers. Even against the backdrop of our weak labor market, foreign-born workers now have slightly lower unemployment rates and higher labor market participation than they did two years ago. Their wages have also ticked up. Meanwhile, reduced population growth has thrown the country’s economic benchmarks into chaos, making it harder to interpret job creation, GDP, and the health of the labor market.

Chapters:

00:00:50 Announcements: Send us your anticipated Thanksgiving dinner fights

00:01:45 Retcon: Consumer sentiment update, auto-enrollment for Trump Accounts

00:07:43 Terms & Conditions: Plutocratic

00:08:42 Big Pilcrow: Immigration and the Economy

00:36:38 Executive Orders: “The media isn’t covering this” comments; best-of award for bookstore tote bags.

00:38:31 Spiritual Sponsors: Sonoratown and an IPA on tap

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Got economic questions, concerns, or executive orders?  Send them to optimist.economy@gmail.com

On the evening of July 31, 1914, after their fruitless visit to the foreign ministry to argue for French neutrality in the coming war, Jean Jaurès and Jean Longuet (the grandson of Karl Marx) travelled by taxi to the offices

I’m not worried, but I do worry about everyone who’s vulnerable to Musk, Trump, and the other bullies in this might-makes-right era

It’s a week of exciting, long-awaited drops. Chad Harbach, bestselling author of The Art of Fielding, is back, fifteen years later, with a follow-up to that beloved novel. Jane Schoenbrun, decorated director of recent movie Teenage Sex and Death at Camp

It took me a long time to grasp the shadowy nature of the literary world. The ins and outs of applying for funding, usually tied to another form of funding, like a grant to a foreign publisher or a translator.

Trump’s increasingly erratic and corrupt behavior condemns Republican leaders who continue to support him.

Joanne and Heather talk history and politics.

Psst, did you hear? Season Three of Playdate games is happening right this minute!! This incredible bundle of amazing new games (8) at an amazingly good price ($39) is happening now, with thousands of excited players already getting the goods. There’s never a bad time to jump on board and get some great new Playdate games! Get Season Three Already, Season Three has given us some instant Playdate classics:

I loved the term Big Undo so much, of course I had to get the domain. I started putting up my usual placeholder site but realized I should do this page in Markdown, not HTML. It looks fabulous. Markdown is right. It's sobriety, go back to the beginning and put the potency in the ideas, give writers the space to write. Get the F out of my way with your freaky character limits. Anyway I'm full of manifesto these days. The money people strangled the web. I think it's time for the creative people to make it work for real.

The tech-adjacent anglosphere, while it doesn't have secret police brutalising dissidents in *my* country just yet (though I must stress that the USA is definitely blurring into that kind of direction), actually makes more claims on the internal forum. It's not enough to desultorily go to the May Day parade once a year and have your "Workers of the world, unite!" poster in the window, and it's not enough to simply not think or keep your thinking to yourself, do your work and go along. No, you have to think, and you have to think correctly.

Multi-core JPEG XL loading, browser engine version details and fixes for updates, tab previews and JPEG XL images.

I remember how revolutionary the first web was, but then a series of tech companies took it over and “had their way” with it.

The first was Netscape and they added JavaScript to steal the thunder from “Sun” (a long story).

Then Microsoft crushed Netscape by cutting off their air supply, and they piled up all kinds of nasty insecure features with predictable results, they made the web a paradise of viruses, making it largely unusable until Firefox replaced Microsoft, and their web was nicer, and smaller and they left out the viruses.

Google came along and quickly replaced it with Chrome and all was good for a while, until they decided it was just another corporate platform like Android and threw out all the early sites, so boring, they couldn’t make billions of dollars, and now what used to be the web is all but gone.

What’s next? It’s time for The Big Undo. 😀

The Big Undo came to me while I was writing my new profile on Twitter. It immediately reminded me of three things.

1. Karl Anthony Towns, Knicks all-star and world champion center, is called Big Bodega.
2. It sounds like a title of a Michael Lewis book, like The Big Short.
3. And for some reason Queen Latifah singing When You're Good to Mama in Chicago.

And of course I bought the domain.

The Hidden Ledger Behind the Broken American Dream

Trump is finally being honest about something

Last week, I met with young leaders from the My Brother's Keeper Alliance at the Obama Presidential Center. They shared more about the work they’re doing at school, their goals for the future, and even gave me an update on their class elections. Take a look!

Monday session

What is it, and how do we escape it?

I was going to continue the sub-series on quantum mechanics by talking about waves, but the first installment didn't quite lead to the spirited discussion I was expecting.  In an effort not to lose my audience I'm going to take a little detour and tackle another more philosophical topic.  I first wrote about this ten years ago.  In the intervening time no one has ever pointed me to

We are inviting proposals for talks about “FOSS Office Software and Suites“. Office productivity software is one of the oldest and most interesting FOSS categories packed with developer interest. It is also an area where lots of new solutions are arriving with new desktop, web-based and mobile editors, as well

Let’s rally for Adam today to help him become the first Democrat elected to the US Senate in Kansas in 94 years!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Last Week in the #PleiadesGazetteer (19-26 October 2026): over the course of the last week the Pleiades editorial college published 71 updated place resources, reflecting the work of Jeffrey Becker, Eleftheria Konstantinidou and Gabriel Mckee.

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-19-26-october-2026

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

Last week the Pleiades editorial college published 71 updated place resources, reflecting the work of Jeffrey Becker, Eleftheria Konstantinidou and Gabriel Mckee.

Apple (Hacker News): Apple today unveiled the all-new iPad mini, featuring a stunning OLED display in an even thinner and lighter design, a huge leap in performance with A20 Pro, and water and dust resistance. The larger 8.5-inch OLED display, also available with a nano-texture option, delivers higher contrast and more than 2x higher peak […]

Hartley Charlton: Apple today marks 25 years since the introduction of the original iPod, one of the company’s most significant products and a major contributor to its expansion beyond the Mac. Tony Fadell: A small team. An unforgiving deadline. We had months to bring the hardware, software, and music experience together. Proud of what we […]

To read this letter, click here:

Safari 27.2 is here, refining Customizable Select, renaming a Grid Lanes property, and delivering 20 bug fixes across accessibility, media, CSS, and more.

Pros: OLED display, nano-texture option, A20 Pro chip, thinner and lighter. Cons: no Face ID, no ProMotion.

Buyer, beware of omissions

When Dylan Thomas missed the biggest of parties

Dirección: Rachel Morrison. Guion: Julia Cox. Elenco: Margaret Qualley, Aaron Pierre, Gabriel Basso, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Catherine Keener. País: Estados Unidos. Más información de la película: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt34384900/ El ser humano busca de manera constante un amor sincero en la familia, las amistades y la pareja. No obstante, la vida es un juego de paradojas que arroja […]

La entrada El amor de tu vida: entre el dolor y la redención se publicó primero en Palomita de maíz.

Links I've collects, fun fascinating & frightening

This year, solar will represent 10% of power generation. Abundant, clean energy is great news - but there's more work to do to make sure every community benefits.

Adam Hamilton (Kansas) joins us live today at 130pm ET

I have lived through several inflection points.

Writing of lasting value

Today's links Sovereign citizens, but for news: By reading the LA Times, you agree… Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Patenting tax dodges; 6-word sf; Newscorp shareholders v Murdoch; Ancient German ophthalmology cult; Trolley problem is stupid; Trump's influence peddling to Chinese millionaire; Al Franken v binding arbitration; Yoga pants spite parade; Dems' secret Congressional committee; RIAA v your PC; "Going Under"; "Machine Man"; Aging goths; "Everfair"; Kremlin will destabilize Ukraine; FCC fronts for Big Cable; Straight Outta Vagina; Remixed TED Talk about remixing; Authoritarian debt. Upcoming appearances: Vienna, Kilkenny, Courtenay, Vancouver, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Montreal. 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. Sovereign citizens, but for news (permalink) When it comes to terrible practices by website operators, it takes a lot to shock me. I literally wrote the book on the subject. But last night, I encountered a piece of genuinely appalling fuckery and I can't get it out of my head, because it's such a perfect storm of outrageous conduct and institutional decay. It happened when I followed a link to an LA Times article. Having lived in LA three times (and having been an Angeleno for a decade and counting this time around) I generally have warm feelings for the Times. The Times's Festival of Books is a great event that I speak at most years, and I'm broadly happy to have a daily newspaper covering my city. That said, the Times has been chipping away at my goodwill for the past decade. First, there's the personal: after a Festival of Books appearance some years ago, the books editor approached me and asked if I'd contribute regular book reviews to the paper. I said yes, and then immediately my editor got laid off, reportedly so they could avoid giving him benefits that would come with seniority. I wrote several reviews for a new editor, though the paper never sent me a contract for any of them – or a payment! Many months (and published reviews) later, an editor I'd never had contact with at the paper got in touch to get the paperwork squared away, and the Times sent me a contract with broad, one-sided language that I would never sign onto. Given that they'd already published my work, there wasn't much they could do to make me sign the contract, so, after quite a lot of wrangling, I eventually got the offensive clauses removed and got paid (but I never got invited to write another review for them). To be honest, this is par for the course. The last time the New York Times asked me to write for them, they refused to remove some similar clauses from their contract (something they'd done previously), and the contracts person just ghosted me after a couple of volleys. A similar thing happened with the Washington Post the last time I wrote for them, except they (like the LAT) published the work and then sent me a one-sided, manifestly unfair contract that I refused to sign. Given they'd already published the op-ed there wasn't anything they could do about it, so eventually I got a better contract and a payment (and again, that was the last time the Post asked me to write for them). Basically, there's an epidemic of bad legal terms sweeping the American media industry, and while the LA Times isn't the worst offender (at least they didn't ask me to assign any related patents, trademarks and copyrights to fictional characters, as Conde Nast does!), they're not what you'd call "writer-friendly" in their contracting terms. But again, that's hardly unique. If I disqualified news outlets because they tried to shift liability to, and grab rights from, their writers, I'd be left with damned few media outlets. But on the editorial side, the Times has a bunch of billionaire-shaped red flags. The paper's owner is the Trump-allied, severely AI-pilled biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, whose editorial interference in the Times is comparable to Bezos's interference in the Post. Like Bezos, Soon-Shiong killed the paper's endorsement for Kamala Harris: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/26/us/los-angeles-times-endorsement-soon-shiong.html And I have my suspicions that Soon-Shiong might have been behind the layoff that killed Brian Merchant's beat as the country's first technology critic, from which perch Merchant published some acerbic, well-reasoned criticism of tech billionaires and AI: https://talkingbiznews.com/media-news/ex-la-times-tech-columnist-merchant-joining-ai-now-institute/ Again, that's not disqualifying. If I boycotted every newspaper owned by a reprehensible billionaire, I'd have to turn my back on e.g. the NYT with its morbidly wealthy, union-busting owners: https://www.thedailybeast.com/new-york-times-illegally-busted-union-campaign-national-labor-relations-board-alleges/ But unlike the NYT, the LA Times has followed the playbook of Alden Capital papers (like the Chicago Tribune), shipping a skinnier paper with less original reporting at a higher price (which is why I canceled my subscription): https://archive.is/hOhpu But even that isn't disqualifying. Like the Tribune, the LAT still employs dedicated, talented reporters who do excellent work, which is how I came to be following a link to a recent article yesterday…and how I came to find myself confronted by an enshittificatory gambit that shocked even me. Here's what got me: when I visited the Times, I got a dickover that blocked all the content on the page until I clicked "Continue," and the text of that dickover is a breathtaking piece of enshittified legal fuckery: By continuing, you agree to our Terms of Service, which include arbitration and a class action waiver, and our Privacy Policy. You agree that we and our third-party vendors may collect and use your information, including through cookies, pixels and similar technologies, for the purposes set forth in our Privacy Policy such as personalizing your experience and ads. This is wildly illegal and incredibly immoral. The paper claims that by simply reading an article, you agree that you can never, ever sue them for virtually any reason, and that you have consented to effectively unlimited surveillance and commercial exploitation of your private data. It's hard to overstate how dangerous this kind of binding arbitration waiver is, but to give one example: Disney makes people who sign up for free trials of Disney Plus "consent" to one of these waivers. When a woman was killed by a Disney World restaurant that lied about the allergens in its food, the company told a judge that her grieving widower couldn't sue them because he'd waived that right by signing up for a trial of D+: https://lawreview.missouri.edu/infinite-arbitration-how-one-click-can-take-you-out-of-court-forever/ The company later backed off for that one specific case, but subsequently doubled down on binding arbitration. By putting an arbitration clause in its terms, the LAT could head off my right to sue them if they stiffed me on those reviews I wrote for them, Brian Merchant's right to sue them for wrongful termination, and your right to sue them if you get run over by a newspaper delivery van. Then there's the privacy clause: the LAT is a California paper, and in California, we have the CCPA, a reasonably good privacy law. Under the CCPA, privacy waivers have to be explicit, informed and can be withdrawn at any time. What's more, the CCPA has broad prohibitions against "dark patterns" that this dickover almost certainly violates: https://cppa.ca.gov/announcements/2024/20240904.html In theory, there's a way to avoid all of this: you could just use the "Kill Sticky" bookmarklet or an adblock filter to block or dismiss the dickover without ever clicking "continue": https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/21/dickovers/#block-element But this is an industrial strength dickover; it uses advanced tricks to block existing dickover killers, likely a combination of shadow DOM and an "important" scroll-lock in the html. Like I say, this shocks the conscience. Under this standard, the Times's reporters could find themselves bound to legal "agreements" with the companies they investigate online that could interfere with their reporting. Just as bad is how these illegal measures mislead the Times's readership on two of the most important consumer issues facing Californians (and all internet users) today. As Jargoggles points out, this is the corporate version of the bizarre nonsense that Sovereign Citizens gabble at cops when they get pulled over for driving with a special "sheriff's license plate," and at judges to insist that they lack jurisdiction due to the tassels on the courtroom flag: https://kolektiva.social/@jargoggles/117503729678727400 A newspaper's job is to inform its readership, not mislead it. The very idea that everyone who reads a single article on a newspaper's website "consents" to an 8,865-word privacy policy (that would take 53-67 minutes to read according to Firefox's "Reader Mode" estimate) is a bad joke: https://www.latimes.com/privacy-policy The joke gets even worse when you add in the 7,103-word Terms of Service (estimated read: 41-50 minutes): https://www.latimes.com/terms-of-service So what can you do? Well, you can use this uBlock filter that blocks the dickover without setting the LAT's "consent" cookie to "1": latimes.com##+js(trusted-set, window.ctUser, { "loggedIn": true, "ready": true, "subStatus": "1" }) https://infosec.exchange/@deFractal/117505049281552873 If you're a Californian, you can file a complaint with the California Privacy Protection Agency: https://cppa.ca.gov/webapplications/complaint As Don Marti points out, businesses dealing with Californians are legally required to acknowledge and honor the Global Privacy Control signal from your browser: https://federate.social/@dmarti/117504985464483210 Here's an ambitious countermove. Buried in that 7,103-word terms of service is this gem: you can opt out of the binding arbitration within 30 days of "agreeing" to it by sending an email to termsofservice@latimes.com with the subject line "MANDATORY ARBITRATION AND CLASS ACTION WAIVER OPT-OUT". Someone could build a browser mod that automatically sends that email to the company whenever you land on an latimes.com page. You could even include my all-purpose email footer: By reading this email, 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. All of this is fun to contemplate, but it's hardly enough. It should be illegal for a company to knowingly offer unenforceable contracting terms, especially in its non-negotiable, boilerplate contracts. It's already illegal for California companies to put noncompete clauses in their contracts. In other words, noncompetes aren't just unenforceable in California, they're illegal, and we should extend that prohibition (with sanctions for noncompliant firms and their general counsels) to privacy and arbitration: https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bonta-issues-consumer-alert-reminding-california-workers-their Because the LAT isn't the only news outlet that's engaged in this kind of illegal, immoral, conscience-shocking, dickover-delivered enshittification. It's also SOP at Bloomberg: https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:kaagvvv22ki4ccsymevrpfxk/bafkreia4yxewg2chpwgki3ftzq7fnl7s454efx5oev6h6siqlsnenrjpe4 These gambits are infectious, and they're spreading. Time to bend the curve. Hey look at this (permalink) Dial Up Modem Sounds, from 300 bps to 56K https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xalTFH5ht-k Colonialism or Appropriation? Alphabets, Print, and Latin as New Technologies of Communication among the 16th-century Nahua https://jorgecanizaresesguerra.medium.com/colonialism-or-appropriation-488a3c0bdaee The Lindsey Graham Files https://www.lindseyfiles.com The Planning Starts Now https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/10/trump-accountability-legal-acts-impeachment-guide.html?gift_token=3lvYQO-uSRKXTV0qluiZyg Interoperability vs. Security: Why not both? https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/10/interoperability-vs-security-why-not-both Object permanence (permalink) #25yrsago RIAA denies asking for criminal immunity for hacking your computer https://memex.craphound.com/2001/10/26/remember-when-the-riaa-tried/ #20yrsago Big Mac pumpkin https://web.archive.org/web/20061031170037/http://bitsandpieces1.blogspot.com/2006/10/big-mac-pumpkin.html #20yrsago Going Under: moving kids’ novel https://memex.craphound.com/2006/10/26/going-under-moving-kids-novel/ #20yrsago Accountants patent tax-dodges https://web.archive.org/web/20061029080957/http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/10/19/business/norris20.php #20yrsago 6-word sf stories https://web.archive.org/web/20061109183215/https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/sixwords.html #15yrsago Using machine translation techniques to attack ciphers reveals secrets of ancient German ophthalmology cult https://web.archive.org/web/20111025035607/http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/people/copiale-11.pdf #15yrsago The Homeland Directive: taut technothriller for the paranoid era https://memex.craphound.com/2011/10/25/the-homeland-directive-taut-technothriller-for-the-paranoid-era/ #15yrsago NewsCorp shareholders revolt against Murdoch family https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/may/08/rupert-murdoch-news-corporation #15yrsago One-percenter: why I support Occupy https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2011/10/21/1028500/community/A-Voice-From-the-1/ #15yrsago Debunking the OccupyLondon “empty tents” story https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/oct/25/occupy-london-part-time-protest #15yrsago Machine Man: a discomfiting novel about the antihuman side of transhumanism https://memex.craphound.com/2011/10/26/machine-man-a-discomfiting-novel-about-the-antihuman-side-of-transhumanism/ #15yrsago Goths age gracefully https://www.theguardian.com/education/2011/oct/24/goth-culture-research #10yrsago Everfair: a diverse, ambitious steampunk novel of Fabian socialists and American Black Zionists in Belgian Congo https://memex.craphound.com/2016/10/26/everfair-a-diverse-ambitious-steampunk-novel-of-fabian-socialists-and-american-black-zionists-in-belgian-congo/ #10yrsago Leaked Kremlin memos reveal plan to destabilize Ukraine https://globalvoices.org/2016/10/25/hackers-publish-kremlin-aides-e-mails-allege-plan-to-destabilize-ukraine/ #10yrsago When the FCC asked about unlocking set-top boxes, the Copyright Office ran to the MPAA https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/10/newly-released-documents-show-hollywood-influenced-copyright-offices-comments-set #10yrsago Pussy Riot’s “Straight Outta Vagina”: sacrelicious Russian feminist pop anthem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bp-KeVBNz0A #10yrsago TED talk about remixes and appropriating made by remixing and appropriating TED talks about remixing and appropriating https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLlbzI5HURM #10yrsago Warner Bros angry that someone other than the MPAA is running an illegal internal movie server https://torrentfreak.com/warner-bros-claims-agency-ran-its-own-pirate-movie-site-161025/ #10yrsago AT&T developed a “product” for spying on all its customers and made millions selling it to warrantless cops https://web.archive.org/web/20170504105645/https://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/10/25/at-t-is-spying-on-americans-for-profit #10yrsago Lawsuit: mayor’s social media blocklists are public records https://www.techdirt.com/2016/10/24/pinac-director-sues-miami-beach-mayor-over-refusal-to-release-social-media-blocklists/ #10yrsago EFF asks court to let American sue Ethiopia for hacking his computer and rounding up his friends https://www.eff.org/press/releases/american-illegally-wiretapped-home-ethiopian-government-deserves-his-day-court-eff #10yrsago Donald Trump’s super PAC promised a Chinese millionaire access, influence in exchange for a secret $2 million donation https://web.archive.org/web/20161024192242/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/24/exclusive-investigation-donald-trump-faces-foreign-donor-fundrai/ #10yrsago Al Franken and FCC commissioner Clyburn want limits on forced arbitration https://time.com/4541176/al-franken-arbitration-clauses/?iid=sr-link1 #10yrsago Mercedes’ weird “Trolley Problem” announcement continues stupid debate about self-driving cars https://memex.craphound.com/2016/10/25/mercedes-weird-trolley-problem-announcement-continues-dumb-debate-about-self-driving-cars/ #10yrsago When Californians vote on legal weed, they’ll also vote on wiping millions of arrest records https://web.archive.org/web/20161027161505/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/california-to-vote-on-wiping-old-weed-arrests #10yrsago Dickhead’s anti-yoga-pants letter to the editor sparks yoga-pants-parade https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-37751422 #10yrsago RIP science fiction great Sheri Tepper https://locusmag.com/2016/10/sheri-s-tepper-1929-2016/ #5yrsago The Dems' most secret Congressional committee https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/25/people-do-stuff/#personnel-are-policy #5yrsago Maxing out our global credit-card with authoritarian debt https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/26/inequality-and-guard-labor/#just-watch-me Upcoming appearances (permalink) Vienna: TED AI, Oct 28-30 https://tedai-vienna.ted.com/ Kilkenny (Kilkenomics), Nov 6-8 https://kilkenomics.com/ Courtenay: Enshittification (Sid Williams Theatre Society), Nov 10 https://www.sidwilliamstheatre.com/events/cory-doctorow-talks-enshittification/ Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ Oxford: Ministry of the Future, Nov 23 https://ministryforthefuture.co.uk/events.html Sheffield: Reverse Centaur at Juno Books, Nov 25 https://www.outsavvy.com/event/40274/cory-doctorow-in-conversation Virtual: Enshittification, AI, and the Future of Technology (UBC Master of Educational Technology), Nov 28 https://met.ubc.ca/2026/09/met-speaker-series-cory-doctorow-enshittification-ai-and-the-future-of-technology/ Oxford: Bennett Oxford Symposium on Open Code in Science, Dec 9 https://www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/events/2026-bennett-institute-symposium/ Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6 https://montreal2027.ca/en Recent appearances (permalink) Clint Eastwood (No Gods No Mayors) https://www.patreon.com/NoGodsNoMayors/posts/clint-eastwood-173008088 Life After AI (Brain Bar) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPPa43-n0vI Terms of Service with Clare Duffy (CNN) https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/terms-of-service-with-clare-duffy/episodes/458ce968-af5d-11f0-b539-13ed2afe25f8 AI, Work, and Power (Software Engineering Daily) AI, Work, and Power https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/podcasts/cory-doctorow-on-ai-work-and-power/ AI, Corporate Power, and the Fight for Worker Control (Plutopia) https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-ai-corporate-power-and-the-fight-for-worker-control/ Latest books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 547 (29282 total). "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

There’s a lot to miss about Arc (RIP), but the feature I miss the most has got to be automatic picture-in-picture. You start a video and when you change tabs to jump to another task, the video anchored itself to the corner of your desktop. Go back to the video tab and it slurps up into the video player area. A perfect experience with no interruption.

I switched back to Edge (for work) and missed Auto-PiP a lot. I tried building a custom browser extension to restore the functionality myself but hit a platform limitation with the mix of WebExtensions, PageVisibility , and MediaSession APIs you need to get it to work seamlessly. You had to configure each site in a dropdown and run a script each MediaSession… it asked a lot of the user.

There’s been a handful of Chromium flags and experiments to add “Auto-PiP” over the years, but nothing did it as well as Arc did… until…

about://flags#browser-initiated-automatic-picture-in-picture

Chrome 142 introduced a new browser-initiated-automatic-picture-in-picture flag and it behaves the same as Arc. The browser does all the work popping the video in-and-out when expected. I couldn’t believe this near-exact replica was hiding in plain sight all this time! But I couldn’t use it because the flag didn’t exist in Edge 😭

I started up a couple internal threads about it last year but it went nowhere. When the topic came up again this year, I mentioned to Greg Whitworth, “Y’know there’s a flag in Chrome that does Auto-PiP great…” and that next week the flag showed up in Canary and I’m happy to say it’s available today in mainline Edge 156.

If you missed that feature in Arc and didn’t know it existed in Chrome or felt crushed by it not existing in Edge… then head over and turn on the flag today, I think you’ll be happy. The only thing it’s missing for me are the juicy physics-based animations that let you two-finger swipe and throw the picture-in-picture window around and pinch-zoom to resize. But it feels like the bones are there. And it feels like a good time to remind my fellow Edge users that Edge has a little feedback form inside the Three Dots menu > Help and Feedback > Send Feedback.

I've never had a web browser that worked remotely like I wanted it to. But that might change soon. Big things are possible now. I have a bunch of projects that I'm working on with Claude and going back and forth between them. And they're even starting to communicate with each other, at my behest of course. It's an interesting time for people to realize that the web was much more powerful before all the big tech companies had their way with it. It makes about as much sense as the various big plans they all came up with that made the web necessary in the first place.

How marketers turn anxiety and belonging into profit—and how we can protect our freedom of mind.

Export Updates 2026-10-26:

Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places

60 updated places. 17 modified linked data sidebars. Inbound PATHS Atlas and vici.org links are stale because their export data downloads were not available at runtime.

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

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

"main" branch:

1eaf4f5c - updated json

no change: rdf/ttl

4f3e6957 - updated gis package

bc417539 - updated data quality

2ead8fb0 - updated bibliography

3dbf98ad - updated indexes

e180a8d1 - updated sidebar

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

1f19a824 - updated geojson and names index

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

67634809 - updated pleiades wikidata

130pm ET - Adam Hamilton joins us live from battleground Kansas! Join us here on the Hopium site and meet this great candidate who has put the Kansas Senate seat in play

RE: https://mastodon.online/@jrmitch120/117505202694696951

Good policy. It was not what I had in mind with my post on hallway monitors, but I appreciate it.

The hallway monitor is a pet peeve of mine, the emergence of power structures around rule enforcers over people is not new, it happens all the time - and it bothers me tremendously: NIMBYs, Wikipedia, stack overflow, hijacked student movements, HOAs.

The Reddit ban is just the latest episode.

We may know a lot more, soon

Several people liked my earlier post linking to a set of hints and tips about how to use a 'Swiss Army' Victorinox penknife.

Since then, I've discovered the wonderful Youtube channel by Felix Immler (and I note that more than a quarter of a million other people have subscribed too). Part of the fun is that Felix is making his videos on the side of a Swiss mountain (of course) and sometimes has to pause because the wind is too strong or because the nearby cowbells get too loud!

Here's one of his playlists: Victorinox Tips and Tricks - and as a couple of examples, have you ever wondered why you might bother with the small blade on your penknife?

Later clips give you more details on how to use it.

Also, if you need to use the corkscrew, do you just twist it into the cork and pull? There may be better ways...

Suraj Bhattarai, our Nepalese LibreOffice Liaison, reports back from the LibreOffice community at Major League Hacking (MLH) powered student hackathon. Click here to read his report

Brazil refuses to be bullied

On the eve of a fateful election in Israel I republish this piece I wrote for the New Statesman a couple of years ago, during which time every lie I described has multiplied a thousandfold and the sanctimony of the ‘educated’ classes has grown to plague proportions….

Recreate the classic 8-bit computer on Raspberry Pi.

The post Emulate Apple II on Raspberry Pi appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Interesting research:

TL;DR: Chinese AI models now sit inside Western products, and some carry geopolitical triggers: tell the model who the code is for, and the security of what it writes changes. For the first time, we showed that this vulnerability lives in the model’s weights, and that removing the model’s CCP alignment removes it.

• One word tilts the code against Americans. Ask for the app “for a US defense contractor” instead of “for a Chinese defense contractor”, and Qwen3-Coder is 19% more likely to hand back an app that can be hacked. ...

New Yorker legend Jason Chatfield joins TBR!

In thinking about how to regulate AI as a public utility, there are two big questions: which layers of the AI stack warrant regulation, and which tools of public utility law are best suited to each layer?

The mailers, targeting Democratic gubernatorial nominee David Crowley, are part of a Republican dirty-tricks operation

Why boys actually need boy bands: “Books and boy bands are a bard’s best balm.” | Lit Hub Music Matthew Sitman talks to Brandon Taylor about Minor Black Figures, writing about Black art, and more at The Center For Fiction.

Asking “What would Trump do?” is a bad way to make campaign strategy.

The Center For Fiction welcomed Brandon Taylor, Booker Prize finalist and bestselling author of Real Life and Filthy Animals, back to our stage to celebrate the release of his highly anticipated novel Minor Black Figures. Matthew Sitman, host of the

My father didn’t want to know what, if anything, the FBI had on him. Or at least that’s what my mother claimed. But after he died, as I sifted through his United Nations personnel documents and wartime correspondence to and

London society buzzed with one name that spring: Miss Edgeworth. The year was 1813. The Regency era was in full swing, and the upper class had assembled for the season in a pastel whirl of lace and silk, complete with

I’m angry at MAGA leaders every day for the lies and manipulation and wreckage they’ve wrought on the very people who voted for them—not to mention the rest of us. I’m angry when I see faith manipulated and weaponized, while

I discovered magical realism when I was sixteen, the same summer I began a correspondence with my Colombian father. Up to that point, I had lived entirely removed from my birthplace in Colombia. It was the 1980s and I was

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Literary History newsletter—sign up here. In the summer of 1944, news of an exciting new invention made its way to American newspapers. A Hungarian-Argentinian journalist named László Bíró had patented a new kind of pen, one

Feature image: Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942. Oil on canvas, 33 1/8 × 60 in. (84.1 x 152.4 cm). The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois. Purchased using Friends of American Art fund, 1942.51. Photo: The Art Institute of Chicago / Art

One of the most formative moments in my adventures in rock ‘n roll occurred when I was around fourteen. I went to a brick and mortar record store at the mall and read the liner notes to Good Charlotte’s self-titled

At first glance, belonging to a calligraphy guild or attending a quilting circle may seem like the very definition of apolitical activity. A handful of people gathering in a library conference room or church fellowship hall to have a potluck

Obama said it as clearly as it can be stated.

The Ware for October 2026 is shown below: Another contribution from FETguy and Renew Computers! I found this board to be interesting mainly because I always wondered how these things worked. The construction reveals a trick which ended up as a surprise, at least to me! A couple of administrative notes – I am counting […]

The Ware for September 2026 is a tire pressure monitor from a late 80’s to early 90’s model Porsche, made by Bosch. According to the submitter: Kind of a crazy piece of hardware for the late 80’s – this would be pretty cutting edge for the time. Nobody quite got what the part was – […]

This week I will be traveling to Leiden in the Netherlands (26.-29. October) to attend PIDFest 2026. I will present a poster on Commonmeta, the metadata standard for scholarly metadata that I have developed over the last three years.

From the 1990s into the early 2010s, I always used an ergonomic keyboard hooked to a PC or Mac (Microsoft Natural Keyboards were a steady favorite). But once I started spending most of my time using a MacBook, I got used to using the flat, basic keyboards attached to Macs

And so, here we are in the last days of the 2026 midterm campaign.

TL;DR Yes, user forums and the Internet Archive are extremely important for digital preservation work. LLMs also seem quite good for synthesizing information that is found in them, connecting the dots between aspects of the problem you are facing, and connecting you to other people engaged in similar work. The irony is that people may use forums less as they engage with generative AI.

---

Back in June I wrote about how my brother John had died, and how among the things he left behind were over 100 CD backups of music he had created in the early 2000s. Each CD was clearly labeled with a song title, and contained a multi-track backup of a single song, which (I was to learn) was made with a TASCAM 788. He had told me he had these backups years ago, but I’d never seen them until we were emptying out some of the storage space in his apartment building.

John preformed live in different small venues in Pittsburgh in the 1990s, and then in the Doylestown, PA area in the early 2000s. He left behind several guitars, and other musical equipment. But despite my encouragement on many occasions he never really released any of his music in any form, except for one song on Bandcamp, that he had recorded much later in 2022. John’s music was really important to me, even more now that he is gone, so I wanted to see if I could retrieve these songs, and perhaps put together a collection for family members, and other people who were interested in hearing his music, and remembering his creative spirit.

Unfortunately the CDs use a proprietary format, that can only be read using the TASCAM 788’s optional CD burner. As I noted in the previous post I did figure out a way to rip the raw data from the CDs and reverse engineer a program to read the tracks, as well as the final mix. It is far from perfect because the gaps between tracks are not consistent. Sometimes the program would extract part of a song as a track. It also wasn’t clear what the final mix was. Still, it is possible to pull the concatenated tracks off as a single WAV file, which was amazing to hear. But I was hopeful I could get the tracks as they existed in the backups.

John left his TASCAM 788 in the storage unit too, along with an (optional) external CD burner for creating the backups. My brother Matthew actually thankfully kept it. However the devices looked quite different in style, and I think I mistakenly thought the CD recorder was part of some old computer equipment, and donated to a local record store, along with part of his CD collection. Once I realized the CD recorder’s significance for recovering John’s music it was too late to get it back. So I bought one on Ebay for a little less that $200.

Once I got the CD burner hooked up to the TASCAM 788 I discovered that I could read the CDs and see the tracks, and listen to them, but not export them. While it’s possible to export each track by hand by connecting the audio output directly to a soundcard with digital input, there are over 100 CDs, so I was hoping I could easily extract the track and the final mix as a WAV file. My goal is to be able to view these in another DAW on my laptop instead of learning how to use the 788 itself.

In conversation with Claude I learned that I could upgrade the
firmware from v1.10 to v2.02 to get a new Export to WAV function on the 788, and that would let me easily burn the tracks to a CD, which I could then read on my laptop. Claude also pointed me at a TASCAM
forum where the upgrade was being discussed. Unfortunately theother TASCAM site where the upgrade was located was now gone, and while the
page was in Wayback Machine, the actual ZIP file it linked to was not. While I could’ve pieced some of this information together given enough time it was actually very useful to learn about it in the context of my questions and conversation.

One of the helpful people on the forum seemed to be responding over the years to requests for the firmware update file. So I responded on the forum asking if anyone still had it available. I ended up hearing back about a month later, and was able to flash the 788, and like magic, it now has a new Export to WAV function. Since lots of copies keeps stuff
safe I placed a copy of the 788 V2.02 Firmware
Update up at the Internet Archive.

But, alas when I went to use the Export function it assembled the WAV file on the TASCAM but then gave a PANIC message when actually trying to write to the CD. I tried a few times hoping it was a temporary glitch, but it failed with the same result at the same time. Again according to Claude apparently CD-RW devices can retain the ability to read, but no longer be able to write due to a weakening laser
diode. The CD-RW I found on Ebay did seem kind beat up honestly. So I rolled the dice and dropped another $175 on Ebay in the hopes that this one would work better. I’m still waiting for it to arrive.

I guess if this new one doesn’t work as well I will fall back to using the reverse-engineered Python script to extract WAV from the raw CD rip and work with that instead. It has been therapeutic spending time with these backups, especially because it was clear that John created them knowing they would be accessed some day. It also is heartbreaking, thinking that he’s no longer around to talk to about them.

It’s hard for me to imagine having done the work thus far without the TASCAM user forum, the help of the Wayback Machine, and helpful people on the Internet. The generative AI (in this case Claude) also made searching for this information while asking questions more cohesive. I think in the past I’ve argued that search results, and original sources are critical to understanding, and I stand by that. But being able to have a conversation about an information need, and the ability to ask for references for verification (as fraught as that is) is extremely useful. My worry is that if LLM systems don’t prioritize giving users accurate sources, and encouraging their use, then we will see forums like this degrade over time.

Stripe, Meta, and Apple, sitting in a tree In Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution, Patrick Collison (of Stripe fame) says (among much else),  Much of what I’m writing hinges on the assumption that personal agents will be on the consumer’s side. I suspect that that will be the winning strategy, but whether it’s true, and what […]

Contrails If you were a conspiracy theorist, you’d be wondering where all these planes were going to meet up. Sadly, I think the answer was Stansted Airport :-( Quote of the Day ”Any sufficiently advanced punditry is indistinguishable from bollocks”. … Continue reading →

Greater MAGA suffers significant losses in Brazil and Serbia today - big day folks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Lula won!

We dodged a bullet!

Title possibly signs checks the article doesn’t have backing for. This is just a brief pro forma project update.

Not much new functionality or anything to announce, last few months have mostly been bug fixes and technical debt cleanup. Most big parts of the search engine are in place, and while there are many things that could be better, we’re less likely to straight up see massive new features, at least in the immediate future. Per familiar intuition from binary searches, the closer you get to your goal the smaller and more deliberate steps you need to take in order to get even closer.

How the Go team responded to the eMudhra certificate compromise with our first-ever URGENT track security release.

Computers can do anything! They can open new fields of study, connect the world, and solve impossible problems. But can they find you love? The answer may be yes. That is, if you can escape all the scams, hoaxes, and odd happenings in the world of early comptuer dating!

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

Join the conversation on the OFFICIAL discord server: https://discord.com/invite/GpFNu3DTU2

After forty-eight hours of Old Bay seasoning, Yuengling, and old faces I remember as young on the shores of the Severn, accompanied by a few hundred other members of the Naval Academy Class of 2001, I’m back in Vermont.

Data journalist Elliott Morris breaks down the early vote and explains how to tell real polling from noise

And last week’s winner

It's time for a change.

Vote for leaders like @abdulelsayed.bsky.social and @jocelynbenson.bsky.social who will work every day to make this country better.

Export Updates 2026-10-25:

Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places

29 updated places. 4 new and 130 updated linked data sidebars. Inbound PATHS Atlas links are stale because the download file was not available at runtime.

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

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

"main" branch:

9f2c6e4f - updated json

88ea3619 - updated rdf/ttl

a96d0174 - updated gis package

46a9b3aa - updated data quality

9e88165e - updated bibliography

749843c8 - updated indexes

8aab761b - updated sidebar

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

03e2a485 - updated geojson and names index

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

dfee0f25 - updated pleiades wikidata

The big news so far is the incredible turnout surge we are seeing with Hispanic/Latino voters

Cartografías sensoriales es una muestra de cine latinoamericano vanguardista y experimental que se realiza en Yopal, capital del departamento de Casanare en Colombia. Su cuarta edición, que tiene lugar del 20 al 25 de octubre, tiene como eje la noción de lo animal, entendida como una presencia que transita entre lo cotidiano y lo raro, […]

La entrada Cartografías sensoriales 2026: programa “Hacia nuevas zoologías” se publicó primero en Palomita de maíz.

Here’s Dave Rupert writing about all those emails, texts, phone calls, etc. we’re getting these days:

Once upon a time it had utility, now it’s all noise and grifter slop demanding our attention and giving us to-dos

That last part really hit: “giving us to-dos”.

I feel this. So many of the messenger apps on my phone are other people laying claim to my time and attention.

It reminds me of an interaction I had with my Dad years ago.

This was back when cell phones were starting to become ubiquitous.

Not smartphones, mind you. Cell phones, i.e. telephones that were mobile. Texting wasn’t really a thing yet. These were devices for making voice calls wherever you went.

As a teen, it seemed like everyone had one: my teachers, my friends, even my friends’ parents.

But not my parents.

They were “behind the times”. (Everyone was getting cell phones and we didn’t even have caller ID on our landline!)

One night at family dinner I asked, “Dad, why don’t you have a cell phone?”

His response?

“Why would I want to allow other people to contact me whenever they want?”

I still think about that.

---

Reply via:

Email · Mastodon ·

Bluesky

To read this letter, click here:

My recent Dogs of New
York, post got circulated a little. On Friday I got a very nice note from William
Kornblum, an urban and community studies sociologist who these days is emeritus at CUNY. In the 1980s, Bill studied the people who use Central Park and wrote a report for the Central Park Conservancy. Some of that work counted dog-walkers.

He reminded me that parks in New York City see a lot of dogs. NYC Parks
estimates about 1.5 million canine visits to Central Park each year. That is about 4,100 visits a day, to one park. He also asked:

Is there a size gradient perhaps? Larger dogs out on the periphery where there is more room? Smaller dogs in the dense apartment neighborhoods?

This is a good question. The data I have can almost answer it. The main problem is that the license data contained innycdogs does not record the size or weight of any particular dog. Licenses do record the breed that the owner reports (though, as we saw
before the modal breed reported is “Unknown”). But let’s see how far we can get by leveraging our knowledge of breeds.

To begin we need to give each breed a size. For this I used the American Kennel Club’s breed weights. The AKC lists a weight range for each breed it recognizes, from its breed standards. Tiago Filho collected these into one
table for 277 breeds in 2020. I had to make a few adjustments to reconcile it with the breeds recorded in nycdogs, most notably for two popular city breeds. First, the AKC lists one Dachshund range that covers both sizes within this breed. Owners often record “Miniature” in the breed name, so I gave those dogs the AKC miniature limit of 11 pounds. Second, Pit Bulls are among the most common dogs in the city, but to my knowledge the AKC does not register them. I used the United Kennel Club’s American Pit Bull
Terrier standard instead.

I assigned each breed a “typical weight”, which is the middle of its range. Some standards give only one figure, such as “not more than 6 pounds” for a Chihuahua. In those cases I used that number. This isn’t ideal. A breed standard describes a show dog, not the dog you see in the park. (Though, of course, in some NYC parks those might be the same. But not in general.) Real dogs will be heavier or lighter than their standard. Still, a Great Dane is reliably bigger than a Yorkie, and it’s the relative differences we’re interested in.

The second problem is that many dogs have no breed we can use. As in the earlier post, we’re working with a subset of the nyc_license table that’s our best-guess approximation of a “dog-level” data set, one that cuts down as much as possible on double-counting and just has one record per actual dog. This table consists of about 358,000 dogs. I can only assign a breed size to about 60 percent of those:

• About 22 percent are crossbreeds, such as “Labrador Retriever Crossbreed”. A mix could be any size. I chose not to guess.
• About 10 percent have no breed recorded, mostly “Unknown”.
• About 6 percent are “designer” breeds, such as the up-and-coming Goldendoodles, Maltipoos, and Morkies. No kennel club sets a standard for these.
• About 1.5 percent are Poodles with no size given. A Toy Poodle and a Standard Poodle differ by about 50 pounds, so again, I chose to drop these.

We end up, for this analysis, with about 215,000 dogs. Now, if the missing dogs were spread evenly across the city, the missingness would not matter all that much. We can try to check that. Here is a map showing the share of dogs in each ZIP code that have a breed size.

Coverage runs from about half to about two-thirds of dogs in each ZIP code. It is highest on the West Side of Manhattan and in parts of eastern Queens. It is lowest in central Brooklyn. So, dogs are notMCAR in the city. The maps and analysis below is restricted to describing dogs with a known breed, and that group is not quite the same in every part of the city.

Where the big dogs are

For each ZIP code with at least 50 dogs of known size, I calculated the median typical weight. (As before, I use the city’s MODZCTAs, which are ZIP code areas with some small ones merged.)

I didn’t try to make the weight categories too fine-grained. Again, the weights are derived from the breed standard, not individual dogs, and so the distribution is quite lumpy. Each dog is counted as having the typical weight of its breed. Very popular breeds therefore pile up on single values. Many ZIP codes have a median of exactly 12.5 pounds, for example. (That’s the Shih Tzu’s weight.)

Even so, we still see a clear pattern. The ZIP codes with the biggest dogs are in lower Manhattan and brownstone Brooklyn. Park Slope is at the top, with a median of 29 pounds. Woodlawn and City Island in the Bronx, and the Rockaways in Queens, also have big dogs. The smallest dogs are in most of the Bronx, southeast Queens, and East New York and Brownsville in Brooklyn. There, the median dog weighs 12.5 pounds.

So Bill’s idea is partly supported by the evidence. Some of the city’s edges, where people have more room on average, do have bigger dogs. But, on the other hand, some of the densest apartment neighborhoods in the city have the biggest dogs of all.

Size classes

A median can hide a lot. I sorted the breeds into five size classes. I used the weight bands that you see on bags of dog food: Toy (up to about 9 pounds), Small (9 to 22), Medium (22 to 55), Large (55 to 99), and Giant (over 99). This is kind of arbitrary, and not even arbitrary in the “AKC Standard” sense of arbitrary. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable.

Across the city, here is how the dogs with a known size divide up:

• About a quarter are Toy dogs.
• About a third are Small.
• About a quarter are Medium.
• 14 percent are Large.
• Fewer than 2 percent are Giant.

Here is the share of each class within each ZIP code.

Toy dogs are most common in the Bronx and in parts of Brooklyn and Queens. Medium dogs cluster in somewhat fancier parts of Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. Large dogs are most common on Staten Island, in the Rockaways, and (again) in parts of Manhattan. Giant dogs are rare everywhere.

The same numbers aggregated up to the level of boroughs are a little easier to compare:

Small dogs are about a third of all licensed dogs in every borough. The differences are at the ends. A third of the Bronx’s dogs are Toy dogs, compared with about a fifth of Manhattan’s. Only 9 percent of the Bronx’s dogs are Large, compared with 16 percent in Manhattan and 17 percent on Staten Island. Staten Island, the least densely-populated borough, has the largest share of big dogs, but only by a percentage point more than Manhattan.

Mo Money, Mo Doggo

Manhattan and brownstone Brooklyn are dense, but they are also rich. The Bronx is dense too, but much poorer. Happily, thanks to both NYC OpenData and the Census Bureau, we have relevant housing and income measures available that we can construct for each ZIP code.

• Floor area per home. This comes fromPLUTO, the city’s database of every tax lot. I added up the residential floor area and the number of homes on every lot in each ZIP code, and divided. This is gross floor area, so it includes halls and stairs. It’s a rough measure of apartment size. You can use my nycpluto package to access these data in R.
• Percent of homes in one- or two-family houses. This is also from PLUTO, using each lot’s building class.
• Median rooms per home, percent of homes that are owner-occupied, andmedian household income. These come from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, using the five-year estimates for 2020 to 2024. You can query the Census API directly for these, or use mynycdemog package to get them.

The Census reports these figures for ZCTAs, its version of ZIP code areas. Most MODZCTAs contain only one ZCTA. Where a MODZCTA contains more than one, I added up the counts. For the medians, I took an average of the ZCTA medians, weighted by the number of households. The Census caps median income at $250,000. A few of the richest ZIP codes in Manhattan hit that cap.

I fit a regression with this data where the outcome is the typical weight of the dogs in each ZIP code. I use an average rather than the median here, because the median is so lumpy. Specifically, I average the logged weights, which is the same as taking the geometric
mean. Breed weights are very skewed. The middle dog weighs about 17 pounds, but a few breeds weigh well over 100. And differences in weight are proportional. Five pounds is a big difference between two toy dogs, but not between two retrievers. On the log scale, effects become percent differences in weight. The predictors are the five measures above, plus the borough. There are 177 ZIP codes in the model.

The five predictors use different units: dollars, square feet, rooms, and percentages. This makes the coefficients hard to compare directly. What we can do is ask “If we take a ZIP code that is low on this measure (at the 25th percentile of ZIP codes) and move it to a high value (the 75th percentile), holding everything else constant, by what percent do its dogs get bigger or smaller?” For the boroughs, the figure shows the difference between each borough and Manhattan.

Income is the clearest result. A ZIP code with a median household income of $116,000 has dogs that are about 17 percent heavier, on average, than one with a median income of $67,000. The housing measures make much less difference once we know income, and they do not point the way Bill expected. The share of homes in one- or two-family houses and the share of owners have effects close to zero. Median rooms has a small positive effect, maybe, with an interval that includes zero. Floor area per home has a small but clearly negative effect. Moving from about 910 to about 1,100 square feet per home goes with dogs about 3 percent smaller, at the same income. Together, the four housing measures do improve the model a little, by more than we would expect by chance. But mostly that is the floor area effect, and it runs the wrong way for the idea that more room means bigger dogs.

Among the boroughs, Staten Island’s dogs are about 10 percent heavier than Manhattan’s at the same levels of income and housing. That fits the idea of room on the periphery, although the interval is wide, running from about 1 to 20 percent. The other boroughs do not differ much from Manhattan.

In terms of how much variation we can explain, income alone accounts for about 53 percent of the variation in typical dog size across ZIP codes. Adding the borough raises that to 54 percent. Adding all four housing measures raises it to 57 percent.

Here is the income effect on its own. This is a partial regression plot. For both dog size and income, we remove the part that the borough and the housing measures predict. What remains shows the relationship between income and dog size among ZIP codes with similar housing in the same borough.

The relationship is pretty good. Each doubling of median household income goes with dogs about 22 percent heavier. The points come from every borough. So there is a size gradient, as Bill speculated, but it’s not purely geography that’s at work here, it’s money. Some of the biggest dogs in New York live in dense, expensive neighborhoods such as Park Slope, SoHo, and the West Village. The smallest dogs live in the Bronx, where incomes are much lower. Once we know a ZIP code’s income, its housing tells us only a little more about its dogs, and not in the expected direction. If anything, more floor area per home goes with slightly smaller dogs. Staten Island is the one place where extra room may add to dog size, beyond what income predicts.

Again, as a paid-up social science rather than infographic guy, I feel like I have to close with the caveats. Remember these are breed weights, not dog weights. Four in ten dogs have no breed size. And, like we said before, these are the licensed dogs only. Licensing rates probably vary with income too. Finally, this is a comparison of ZIP codes, not of households. It tells us that richer ZIP codes have bigger dogs on average. It does not tell us that richer people choose bigger dogs, although that seems likely.

Why would money matter more than space? Big dogs cost more to feed and to treat at the vet. They are harder to keep in buildings that limit pets by weight. And their owners may need to pay someone to walk them while they are at work. Perhaps those many daily dog visits to Central Park are part of the answer too. If you live near a very large park, maybe it’s easier to have a very nice apartment that’s comparatively small for your very large dog.

The Democratic Party’s biggest names barnstormed the country this week in the final stretch of the midterm campaign.

Changed my bio on Twitter: "I make software to interop. Working on a new web designed for writers and readers and in place of HTML we use Markdown. Keep it super simple. The big undo."

Obama is doing the old Obama campaign schtick and it's something to see. He's got a few gray hairs, but he's still got the energy and chutzpah. I'd love to see him and Bernie Sanders on the same stage before this campaign is over. My favorite Obama clip is him wiping the schmutz off his shoulder, I forget who he was putting down, but wow it so concise. I also really liked the time when HRC flirted with him about her likeability. "You're likeable enough," he said. Trump gets the votes not necessarily because people are what people call them, he is a comedian, I say this so many times, that's the charm. Young folk may not remember Don Rickles and Joan Rivers, but that's Trump, and the other two probably had a sweet side, but I don't think that's ever been said about Trump. I could be wrong. There's also a bit of George Carlin in there.

Cartografías sensoriales es una muestra de cine latinoamericano vanguardista y experimental que se realiza en Yopal, capital del departamento de Casanare en Colombia. Su cuarta edición, que tiene lugar del 20 al 25 de octubre, tiene como eje la noción de lo animal, entendida como una presencia que transita entre lo cotidiano y lo raro, […]

La entrada Cartografías sensoriales 2026: programa “Estas son nuestras vidas” se publicó primero en Palomita de maíz.

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

Why undecided voters probably won’t care about Trump’s closing message, and an early voting update. Your weekly political data roundup for October 25, 2026.

Special guest: Joanna Stern. Special topic: The iPhone Duo.

Imagining the sci-fi cabal meeting where Adrian Tchaikovsky and Ray Nayler divvied up their assignments:

“Okay, we can both do octopuses and crows, but let’s toss a coin for mammoths; loser has to do spiders.”

“Elections are decided in November, but they are won in October”

Everyone who has the right to vote must vote. We must send a clear message to authoritarians that we reject their plan, and reject division. We stand together, in numbers they cannot deny. On the eve of elections in the United States, I never thought I’d be in the Alps for the first time. But […]

Source

Todos los que tenemos derecho a votar debemos hacerlo. Podemos enviar un mensaje claro a los autoritarios: rechazamos su plan y su división. Nos mantenemos unidos, en una mayoría clara que ellos no pueden negar. Justo antes de las elecciones en Estados Unidos, jamás imaginé que me encontraría en los Alpes por primera vez. Pero […]

Source

RE: https://mastodon.social/@verge/117501788476778885

These bans deputize random busybodies into hall monitors, replacing communities built by people who contribute with hierarchies ruled by people who have nothing to offer but the power to stop others.

As the education scholar Gert Biesta has argued, over the 1980s and ’90s the very idea of “education” was displaced in favor of an ideal of “learning.” Education implies a teacher, a subject, and a purpose; learning is something an individual does. What Biesta termed “learnification” meant that the transmission and application of knowledge became a priority […]

A Reason To Smile

TBR Sunday Read

Three paths to a bad economy

“The rhetoric is about as hot as you can get,” Matt Gertz tells us.

The Real Meaning of the Midterm Election

In the election of 1920, Americans handed a landslide victory to the Republicans and their presidential candidate Warren G.

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

🔖 Software canbe finished

We don’t need this many interpreted web languages. More generally we don’t need half a dozen open source libraries doing the same thing. Sometimes the mature thing can be even for a project that is very ‘successful’—especially if that success is by now mostly toxic—to consider the project finished, cut a final release and archive the repos.

php programming software sustainability

🔖 Computing AsSocial Activity

Despite appearances to the contrary, computers are fundamentally social machines.1 We ought, then, to regard the use of computers as inherently social. Computing As Social Activity, or CASA, is a set of principles meant to align the ways we use, design and understand computers with social values that stand in support of communities, rather than work against them.

computing coop manifestos

🔖 What Can a Computer See?: Testing the Limits of Automated QA for WebArchives

Preserving a website is complicated. Even a simple webpage can depend on dozens of images, videos, scripts, style sheets, and other resources scattered across the web. Some content appears only after someone interacts with the page, while JavaScript and other technologies can make parts of a site difficult for web crawlers to discover. If some of those pieces are missed, the archived version may look or behave differently than the original.

That is why quality assurance, or QA, is an important part of web archiving. QA is the process of assessing how well a website was preserved. Most of the websites we collect are archived weekly, monthly, or quarterly, producing a new “capture” or archived version, each time. This gives us opportunities to try different approaches if we weren’t successful the first time. Crawl reports provide clues about what was archived, but the best way to know if a website was properly preserved is to look at the archived site and compare it with the live version. Does it look right? Is everything there? Do the links work? Can you interact with all the features?

hashing images quality web-archives

🔖 City Gardens RIP

5,516 likes, 202 comments - thebandwashere on October 9, 2026: “No Slam Dancing, No Stage Diving, No Spikes…City Gardens, a historic music venue in Trenton, New Jersey, is no more. Operating from 1979 to 1996, City Gardens served as a crucial stopover for bands traveling from Philadelphia to New York City. Even Jon Stewart, who bartended there from 1984 to 1987, credited City Gardens with transforming his life and inspiring his career in comedy. This morning, I found myself in the area and felt compelled to pay my respects to the venue. I’ve included some flyers of notable bands that performed there, as well as a recreated image of Glenn and Henry from my 2020 visit. Notably, the building was still standing during that time, which allowed me to better match the images. Did you attend? Who would you have liked to have seen? Glenn Danzig and Henry Rollins outside City Gardens in Trenton, New Jersey, taken in 1984. 📸 by Ron Gregorio) Punk Girls, along with an outside shot of City Gardens by ? Thanks ( matthewpusak?) for the heads up. 💪 #citygardens #nj #TheBandWasHere #GlennDanzig #henryrollins”.

delete music

🔖 Idiosyncrasies ofthe HTML parser

The HTML parser is a piece of software that processes HTML markup and produces an in-memory tree representation (known as the DOM).

The HTML parser has many strange behaviors. This book will highlight the ins and outs of the HTML parser, and contains almost-impossible quizzes.

HTML is not only used by basically all of the web, but it is also part of many modern applications. The HTML parser is part of the foundation of the web platform.

books html parsing

🔖 How to effectively debug when you no longer understand the code

The ability to work with large amounts of unfamiliar code productively without necessarily understanding the specifics or reading the code can be quite a superpower, one that enables engineers to tackle problems way out of their depth.

I consider this an emergent skillset that’s different from coding or traditional debugging, but like any other skill, it’s one that can be honed with enough effort. While I’m no leading expert in this area, the general contours of how these skills can be actively cultivated are beginning to stand out in sharp relief.

By putting my own experiences in writing, I’m hoping to hear from fellow practitioners their thoughts on this topic.

debugging llm programming

🔖 Behind the Geometrical Method: A Reading of Spinoza’s Ethics

This book is the fruit of twenty-five years of study of Spinoza by the editor and translator of a new and widely acclaimed edition of Spinoza’s collected works. Based on three lectures delivered at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1984, the work provides a useful focal point for continued discussion of the relationship between Descartes and Spinoza, while also serving as a readable and relatively brief but substantial introduction to the Ethics for students.

books philosophy spinoza

🔖 Wastedlarge language models: A life cycle thinking approach

Large Language Models (LLMs) are machine learning (ML) models that have an increasingly large carbon footprint through their development and use. Efforts to increase the energy efficiency of these models have not translated into reduced consumption due to rebound effects such as Jevons Paradox - that increased efficiency drives increased use. There is therefore a need for additional measures to solve this problem. We suggest that one possible way forward is to use life cycle thinking, and view LLMs as products that can become waste. With this perspective, we investigate the potential of the waste hierarchy from the EU’s Waste Framework Directive, which suggests five different measures for how to manage waste: prevention, reuse, recycling, recovery, and disposal. We examine how these measures can inform and motivate new types of thinking and approaches to reducing LLM waste and their environmental impact in general. Applying the waste hierarchy to LLMs highlights that preventing waste is essential for reducing the models’ environmental impact, mainly because it reduces the need for training new models. Prevention can be achieved through many existing methods for reusing, “recycling”, and “recovering” LLMs. Additionally, disposal can be important both for saving energy and for keeping a considerate attitude to the resources being spent on training LLMs. We also call to attention that prevention of unnecessary use of LLMs carry huge potential for lowering the climate impact of the models.

llm sustainability

🔖 How do repositories treat an honest bot?

To see how current anti-bot measures (aimed at aggressive AI scrapers and botnets) affect well-behaved bots, I sent a bot that openly identifies itself, botfriendliness/0.1 (+https://patrickhochstenbach.net/git/phochste/botfriendliness), to the 1,262 institutional repositories in Germany, United Kingdom, Italy, France, Spain, Norway, Netherlands, Portugal, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Finland, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland and Luxembourg that are registered in the OpenAIRE Graph. For each repository it looked for one publication landing page and requested it, honoring robots.txt and making only a handful of requests. From the sweep of 2026-11-01 on, the bot signs its requests with Web Bot Auth, so a repository can verify that a request really comes from this bot.

bots publishing repositories

🔖 Our Best Vegetarian Soups and Stews

We have plenty of brothy soups, slow cooker stews, chilis, curries and more. To get vegetarian recipes like these delivered to your inbox, sign up for The Veggie newsletter.

recipes soups

🔖 Cooperative principle

The concept of the cooperative principle was introduced by the linguist Paul Grice in his pragmatic theory. Grice researched the ways in which people derive meaning from language. In his essay Logic and Conversation (1975) and book Studies in the Way of Words (1989), Grice outlined four key categories, or maxims, of conversation—quantity, quality, relation, and manner—under which there are more specific maxims and sub-maxims.

These describe specific rational principles observed by people who follow the cooperative principle in pursuit of effective communication. Applying the Gricean maxims is therefore a way to explain the link between utterances and what is understood from them.

coop language linguistics

It was good to be back in Michigan to support @jocelynbenson.bsky.social as your next Governor and @abdulelsayed.bsky.social as your next U.S. Senator!

They are working to change the lives of Michiganders for the better. Make sure to vote early or on Election Day at MichiganDems.com/Vote.

We find ourselves at the precipice before the break. There's enough instability to see how things are going: things are breaking, vital things are ceasing to work, the bulk of the population hates what the industry is doing to them. The best are exhausted and isolated, while the worst are creating yet another vibe-coded pile of crap.

Last year, the Redox team received a grant to develop io_uring-like Ring Buffer support at the system task level, as a first step towards ring buffer communications between the application and the majority of system services. This phase of the work finished up in September, as the last pieces were put in place.

We want to thank the NLnet Foundation, the NGI Zero Commons Fund, and Horizon Europe for their generous support. The NGI Zero Commons Fund is reaching its end, but NLnet is now accepting applications for grants from new funds,Restack and Code Supply, as well as some smaller theme funds.Apply for funding before November 3rd 2026! (and then every two months after that).

On a recent flight, the entertainment system had a movie I'd never heard of in its list of recent releases called Exit 8. I watched the trailer and was instantly transfixed.

A couple nights ago, I finally sat down to watch it and I really enjoyed it. It&

Michigan, are you fired up and ready to vote? Watch to hear why you should elect @jocelynbenson.bsky.social, @abdulelsayed.bsky.social, and Democrats across the ballot.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8gB3cmn56Q

Cheering for Lula from Boston

It’s the first day of early voting in Michigan, and I’m heading to Detroit for a rally to support @jocelynbenson.bsky.social, @abdulelsayed.bsky.social, and Democrats working to create change.

Make a plan to vote at MichiganDems.com/Vote.

Ohio, let's do what we can to elect @amyactonoh.bsky.social as your next Governor and @sherrodbrownoh.bsky.social as your next U.S. Senator! They’ve dedicated their lives to fighting on behalf of all Ohioans.

To read this letter, click here:

Cartografías sensoriales es una muestra de cine latinoamericano vanguardista y experimental que se realiza en Yopal, capital del departamento de Casanare en Colombia. Su cuarta edición, que tiene lugar del 20 al 25 de octubre, tiene como eje la noción de lo animal, entendida como una presencia que transita entre lo cotidiano y lo raro, […]

La entrada Cartografías sensoriales 2026: programa “Deseo volver a ser una criatura” se publicó primero en Palomita de maíz.

Things aren’t looking great.

With Election Day less than two weeks away, tune in to find out why you should vote for @amyactonoh.bsky.social and @sherrodbrownoh.bsky.social.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDNLvhCYp8U

Ohio! I’m heading to Cleveland for a rally to support @amyactonoh.bsky.social and @sherrodbrownoh.bsky.social.

Make sure you have a plan to vote: IWillVote.com/OH

Why did the Knicks lose the first two games of the season? It's a veteran team, they know how to start an NBA season, but the fans and the press aren't ready to move on yet. They're still reveling in the feeling of the Knicks winning. But imho there is no feeling with that, the feeling was in the moment, and man they did give us some moment. We will relish the video for the rest of time. But for now, every game they play will feel significant because of who they were not who they are now.

Andrew Shell, who created and runs the rssCloud server we use here, is creating a connection from rssCloud and webSub to WebSockets. I've wanted this for a long time, but now I'm planning on a desktop version of FeedLand, we will need it, pretty soon for instant updates of feeds we are subscribed to.

Today, enjoy our audio and video picks.

One of the reasons I'm working on the Web of Markdown is that my main blog of 32+ years is being kicked off the Google Web. I need a new home where the web religion is still practiced, and one of the commandments of our religion is "Google is a guest on the web, as we all are. Guests don't make the rules."

We need to have a big weekend all for “Elections are decided in November, but they are won in October”

I’ve been taking a break from Mastodon as my social home on the web for about six weeks. It has been more difficult than I’d usually admit.

I have an amazing local community in my town that I love and am deeply involved in. But nobody here is a programmer, or even a computer nerd, so it doesn’t serve my need for a tech community.

I work alone, for myself, in my house. It’s a fortunate lifestyle with many upsides, but it means I don’t get that form of community at work, either.

I’ve had this feeling before… as a teenager in the 1990s.

It’s profoundly lonely.

But when I got internet access, that started to change. I found my people. First in the Total Annihilation community (RIP, Annihilated), then the HardOCP Forum, then the Something Awful Forums, then Tumblr, then Twitter and our community of Apple bloggers, and then Mastodon.

Communities form, change, and dissolve over time. None of those are, today, anything like what they were when I most enjoyed them.

We change, too. I didn’t move on from most of those solely because they changed — it was usually because we both changed, and it was no longer a good fit.

My break from Mastodon has been a relief in some ways, as I’ve felt increasing divergence between what I wanted and what I was getting from it, but I didn’t know where else to go.

Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube are all more video-broadcast platforms than communities. All I’ve found on Bluesky is even more anger and politics, the last things I need or want. Threads hasn’t yet stuck for me, and it’s owned by an asshole. Twitter was an amazing product and community that was previously owned by assholes, and now it’s X, which has a strong but different tech community, and is owned by different assholes.

So I’ve just been… nowhere, for the first time since the 1990s.

It has been, once again, quite lonely.

Sure, it’s been relaxing, too, but in the way a vacation is relaxing. It’s great to take breaks, but after a long vacation, I’m ready to turn my brain back on.

Without participating in a large, broad tech community, I’m exposed to fewer new ideas, both of my main jobs (app development and podcasting) are much harder, the quality and reach of my work have suffered, my skills aren’t improving as much, my mind is less stimulated, and I feel disconnected from my professions and passions. My world has gotten smaller.

I could keep going like this to prove a stubborn victory or purity test, but I’d mostly just be hurting myself.

Communities change, conditions change, and we change. We’re all better off if we’re willing to change our minds, and if our communities let us, no matter how strongly our younger selves declared a previous position.

So I’m going to wade back in and see how it goes, trying to find a better balance to hopefully have better results, including on Mastodon.

My people are spread across multiple services, and I’m going to explore them all, despite most of them being owned by assholes.

I’d love to participate in communities without any assholes benefiting from it, but in the modern world, that simply isn’t possible. The only alternative is to isolate myself and not have a community at all (or a job, or a smartphone, or a computer, or internet access, or a car, or most of my food, or my country).

That’s neither a price I’m willing to pay nor a condition I’d try to impose on anyone else.

I’d love to have your support, forgiveness, and grace as I try to find my people again, and I strive to offer the same to all of you.

Everyone deserves to be part of a community.

And as I grow, I’m learning to declare fewer absolutes in a complex, imperfect, and constantly changing world.

On the corruption of the Court and more

Meet the authors shortlisted for the 2026 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. | Lit Hub In Conversation Was Cormac McCarthy that guy in your MFA? | Lit Hub Craft We promise: you really don’t need a smartphone. | Lit

In a world of JD Vances, be a Pope Leo.

A walk through _Hawala_ and why I believe that society should be reminded of how it has moved money across the world for the better part of a thousand years without banks.

With Heather Lofthouse and yours truly, Robert Reich

Despite Trump’s statement yesterday that billionaire Elon Musk had removed the restrictions from Starlink and Starshield that are crippling Ukraine’s ability to protect itself from Russia, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky said today the restrictions continue.

The Web isn’t dying, but it is being distanced from us. As a place to seek knowledge and connections, it is being replaced for many (including me) by AI chatbots that harvest findings from it, rewrite and summarize what they find, and—as gravy on that steak—point to sources it finds there. To some degree, this […]

Win of the week: did another music library purge — down to 3150 tracks from about 4000 in February — have removed all the “easy” stuff, now I need to actually listen to some tracks and decide whether or not I would want them to come up on random mode (my end goal is that […]

Skip the sidebar, hear what changed, and navigate tables with arrow keys.

Tonight’s low carb diet

Boston authentic fajitas

Trump’s attack on the 2026 election officially began today

Today, at the Cundill History Prize Festival in Montreal, the jurors awarded the 2026 Cundill History Prize, which celebrates “outstanding history writing,” to John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life under American Racial Law by Beth Lew-Williams. “In

2026-10-20 New Oddμ release: fewer dependencies

Oddμ is my wiki engine. I know, “engine” is a weird word but that’s what we used back in the day because we didn’t want to say “system” or “server” – specially since the first wikis used to be just a CGI script. Oh well, so here we are. Wikipedia calls it wiki software these days. The new Oddμ release comes with a tree template that might help you if you’re trying to move away from Obsidian. I’m not sure why you should, but if you are – or maybe even if you are just trying to check whether you do in fact have a way out – then you can use the themes/vault/view.html template as a starting point (view the source in your browser to see the template). See 2026-10-14 Showing a directory tree in Oddμ for a discussion.

I’ve also tried to comment on all the direct and indirect dependencies, checking their repos for any files called CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, or if their repos are on GitHub, whether user Claude contributed (lucky me I get a nice warning if a blocked user contributed to the repository I’m looking at).

I do have to say, SQLite full text search is great, but the SQLite libraries either using CGO (making cross-compilation complicated) or being AI tainted (see above) is making me sad. It’s making me regret the decision to move from my own primitive “grep” style search to SQLite. To think that I was so happy about it not too long ago (see 2026-09-25 SQLite for Oddμ). And now I’m once again pondering whether I could write something interesting myself. I’ve tried a few approaches in the past, but none of them showed great results (like a tri-gram index in memory) and none of them was disk based. I’d have to figure out a way to do it using some other storage solution. Maybe something like fulltext? It’s over ten years old and untainted by AI. It depends on cdb which is over six years old and also untainted by AI. Perhaps it would work for me (my goal being something that works for up to 100,000 pages as my wiki approaches 10,000 pages). Right now I suspect the problem is that the index cannot be easily be updated.

In addition to getting rid of SQLite, I am thinking about getting rid of Lingua. The maintainer writes that all future development will be done in Rust (“Rust is the best fit for this kind of library as its memory footprint is the lowest and its runtime performance is excellent”). I don’t know what to make of it. And it has a lot of dependencies. Perhaps whatlanggo is a better solution for my use-case? All the code is seven years or older and untainted by AI.

#Oddμ

2026-10-21. Replaced Lingua with whatlango. Now let me think about MySQL. I guess any generic key value store would be good? The problem with cdb is that c stands for constant so there is no way to update it, I guess? Which means that I’d need to maintain two indexes and a list of changed pages: one index is created as the server starts up and the second index indexes only the pages from the list of changed pages (including new and deleted pages). When a page changes, only reindex all the pages in this list of changed pages. This would would be much faster than reindexing all the pages. When the list of changed pages gets too long, it is deleted and the first index is regenerated. Every search must query both indexes and do the right thing.

This sounds complicated. Then again, the list of changed pages and their index could be in-memory. If the server restarts, it reindexes the whole site and the in-memory index is empty. One problem solved. What remains to be solved is how easy it is the “merge” search results on both indexes.

Perhaps there are more dynamic key-value stores? The cdb website has an interesting discussion of alternatives. I was looking at one of those curated (?) lists of packages and found pogreb “an embedded key-value store for read-heavy workloads” which seems to do everything right. So I would have to take the fulltext package and make it work with pogreb.

2026-10-24. Replaced go-diff with an older and simpler diff library. That removed a few more dependencies.

A blog post from Scripting, in Markdown.

One of our very best candidates of the cycle has put this Trump +13 district in play, and we need to help her close strong and win this thing!

Talk & Draw with Liza Donnelly & Heather Cox Richardson

I drew a zine about ramisyllis multicaudata, the undersea worm that can have more than 100 butts.

In which I show off another zine I made recently, this one on a group playing traditional Irish music. There are fun drawings!

Republicans are taking it and hoping no one notices. Let’s make sure they do.

This article in Nature argues that it’s due to an overfishing of predators and warming sea temperatures.

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.

Today's links Critique and writing: The most important part of a writing workshop is trying to fix other people's stories. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: USPS nukes the mail; Enron Explorer; "Scored"; UAE's international hacker legion; NZ provides hacking tools to torturers; Truecrypt insecure; The Traitorous Eight. Upcoming appearances: Vancouver, Ottawa, Vienna, Kilkenny, Courtenay, Vancouver, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Montreal. 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. Critique and writing (permalink) Through my own writing life, nothing has done more to improve my writing than diligent participation in peer-based workshops; that's where a group of writers, all at about the same stage in their artistic development, gather to read one another's work and offer feedback specifically aimed at improving each other's stories. This is a deceptively simple exercise, and the reasons it works so well are quite counter-intuitive. The most obvious benefit is the way that a workshop encourages you to write at all. When you're at the start of your writing career, you are almost totally reliant upon your own internal self-discipline to keep producing. Acquiring that self-discipline is infinitely valuable, but it's also incredibly hard. Being part of a group of writers who expect you to regularly turn in new work adds a very useful bit of external motivation that augments your still nascent self-discipline. Knowing you have to turn in a story for the group by Friday can get you in gear when you feel discouraged or blocked. Before you're getting published regularly (or at all), your critiquing circle might be the only source of validation you get for your work, so the knowledge that you're in for that validation if you get that story in on time is a great motivator. But this is where the counter-intuitive part comes in: as great as it feels to be the center of your peers' attention and to get close feedback on the work you sweated over, that's not the real value you get from a writing workshop, at least not at the start of your career. Your peers' critiques can help you fix weaknesses in your story, and even teach you a little about how to avoid those weaknesses in future work. You might get feedback that turns an unpublishable story into a published one. But the point of a writing workshop isn't merely to make your stories better – it's to make you better at writing stories. That's where critiquing other writers' stories comes in. The process of reading and re-reading someone else's imperfect work and devoting real mental energy to figuring out what's not working in it and how to fix it is how you develop the creative instincts that allow you to automatically and unconsciously avoid pitfalls and make breakthroughs in your own work. Even if none of the feedback you offer is ever incorporated into the story you're critiquing, the act of preparing and delivering that critique is the most reliable fast-track to becoming a better writer yourself. There's something very valuable in the combination of thinking critically, being exposed to other workshop members' ideas about the story under discussion, and working with source material that you can look at with more objectivity because it didn't come out of your own head. I bring all this up because I've now heard from a few beginning writers who tell me that they're finding LLMs to be good editorial feedback generators. They value the editorial suggestions they get from a chatbot after they finish their work, and use it to help them with a new draft. Without commenting on whether I think LLM feedback is editorially useful (I certainly wouldn't ever ask a chatbot for that kind of feedback), I want to point out that when it comes to improving your writing, getting editorial notes on your work is distinctly inferior to offering criticism of other writers' work. The reality is that when you're starting out as a writer, the vast majority of work you produce will be artistically unsalvageable. The much-vaunted "million words of crap" you write on the way to becoming a publishable writer are about learning to marry technique to artistic vision and to sharpen both. Getting editorial feedback that helps you shore up the weakest spots in a story that is ultimately never published and constitutes a learning exercise has value, but it has far less value than applying the things you've learned from making and fixing those mistakes to your next story. With vanishingly few exceptions, a commercially and artistically successful writer isn't someone who writes one great story or novel: a writing career is defined by a body of work, which means that you have to do more than rewrite. You have to write the next thing, and the next thing, and the next. Having an editor-on-demand of highly variable (and often dubious) quality might help you improve your writing, but it's no substitute for participating in a peer workshop. The idea that an LLM might be able to stand in for a workshop is grounded in the fallacy that the point of a workshop is to have people tell you how to fix your story, rather than analyzing other people's writing in order to develop your own critical skills. Look: it's a cliche to say "every writer is different," but I really believe that every writer is different, and that's down to the legibility of the writing process to other writers. If you're a painter or sculptor or other visual artist, you've likely spent many hours in a studio with many other practitioners while all of you work from the same life model or still life. If you're a musician, you've almost certainly played music with other musicians. If you're a dancer, you've definitely danced with other dancers. But writers get precious little exposure to other writers' process. At best we might look at each other's drafts. A musician can listen to every note another musician produces while riffing or composing a new work or interpreting a work. Writers don't get to watch words emerge from each other's fingertips. Being observed that closely while you write would be ghastly and paralyzingly invasive. I've taught a lot of writers over the years and I've had many discussions with my peers about their writing process, and I'm here to tell you that pretty much every writer finds every other writer's process baffling. We each of us invent an idiosyncratic process for ourselves that will never fully work for anyone else. So if you value editorial feedback from a chatbot (ideally, a local one running on your computer and not one of the "foundation models" that are torching the planet and elevating the worst people on earth to positions of political, technical and commercial prominence), that's fine, you do you. But even if that's the case, I still want you to know that whatever you're getting out of the chatbot is fundamentally different, and (I believe) much less useful than participating in a peer workshop. That's what I wanted to say today, but I predict that an appreciable number of readers are about to email me to ask how these "peer workshops" work. There's a ton of variability in how these are conducted, but the basic shape of them is that in advance of each session, one or more writers submits a finished work to the other writers, who then read through the manuscript at least twice, making notes that include both minor copyedits and broader, thematic notes. They may write a brief editorial response as well, ranging from a paragraph to a couple of pages. Then the workshop convenes. Each writer briefly expresses their views about the story under consideration, focusing on those thematic and structural notes on what worked and didn't work in the story, with suggestions for improving the latter. You don't need to point out every typo – they're noted on the manuscript. Critiquers don't need to repeat one another. If another workshop member says the thing you were planning to say, you can just say "Ditto what so-and-so said about whatever." If you have nothing to add when your turn comes about, it's fine to pass. Those are pretty much universal characteristics of a peer workshop. Here are some variations that I am dogmatically committed to, but which other workshoppers might disagree with: Every writer should submit regularly to the workshop. There is a serious risk that attending a workshop can become a substitute for actually writing. It is no kindness to your workshopmates to let them stay in the circle if it leads them to stop writing. The subject of each session must not speak during the critiques, except to answer direct questions that are not related to the writing itself (e.g., "I couldn't figure out what word this was supposed to be – can you clarify?"). The subject can speak after all the other writers have spoken. Each person in the critiquing circle speaks once, in turn, without being interrupted. No cross-talk allowed. It is useful to set a time-limit for critiques. No partial manuscripts. It's not really possible to critique a story unless you have the complete tale. Novels can be workshopped as three chapters and an outline. Stories should be distributed in advance and read in advance. Don't have writers read their work aloud for critique, as this can lead to critiquing the delivery rather than the material. Critique the story, not the writer. It's fine to be offended by something in the story, but not OK to accuse your workshopmates of being bad people for having offended you. Discourage resubmission of revised stories. Workshopping produces sharply diminishing returns. If you really want feedback on a rewrite, approach people individually and ask if they'll read the new draft. Any group of three or more writers can start a workshop. You'll need to locate writers who are at about the same stage in their artistic and professional lives as you, and find a physical place (or a videoconference service) where you can meet. Library meeting rooms are a favorite, and so is rotating between workshop members' homes. Set a regular schedule – weekly, fortnightly, monthly, possibly quarterly – and stick to it. If you write genre fiction and you are interested in attending a peer workshop that also has an instructor to guide the sessions, lecture, set exercises, etc, I can recommend the three workshops I've taught: Clarion (UC San Diego, six weeks): https://clarion.ucsd.edu/ (I'm also a 1992 Clarion grad) Clarion West (Seattle, six weeks): https://www.clarionwest.org/ Viable Paradise (Martha's Vineyard, one week): https://viableparadise.com/ Hey look at this (permalink) Terrible AI-generated Disney guidebooks on Amazon, Part 2 https://touringplans.com/blog/terrible-ai-generated-disney-guidebooks-on-amazon-part-2/ Online Privacy for Parents and Youth https://ssd.eff.org/module/online-privacy-for-parents-and-youth the mirage of Thatcherfuturism https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-mirage-of-thatcherfuturism The New Canadian Canon https://macleans.ca/culture/the-new-canadian-canon/ Victory! Court Rules OPM Data Disclosure to DOGE Is Unlawful https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/10/victory-court-rules-opms-disclosure-personal-records-doge-unlawful Object permanence (permalink) #25yrsago UK anti-terror laws could bankrupt ISPs https://web.archive.org/web/20011118143634/http://www.vnunet.com/News/1126338 #25yrsago What's an "iPod?" https://web.archive.org/web/20011024015856/http://www.apple.com/ipod/ #25yrsago Bible, Koran or Mein Kampf? https://web.archive.org/web/20011109123124/http://www.salon.com/people/feature/2001/10/24/book_quiz/index.html #25yrsago Tongan court jester scam costs king millions https://web.archive.org/web/20011224034152/http://pidp.eastwestcenter.org/pireport/2001/October/10-23-01.htm #25yrsago USPS irradiating the mail to fight anthrax attacks https://web.archive.org/web/20011109100316/http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991468 #20yrsago Enron Explorer mines Enron’s emails https://web.archive.org/web/20061106204850/http://enron.trampolinesystems.com/ #20yrsago Investigative journal: “Fair use is not applicable” https://archive.blogs.harvard.edu/shlep/2006/10/23/whaddayaknow-about-fair-use-and-copyright/ #20yrsago Warners stiffs African amputee film extras on prosthetics promise https://web.archive.org/web/20061105004400/http://www.nypost.com/seven/10232006/gossip/pagesix/pagesix.htm #20yrsago Former FCC Chairman shills against Net Neutrality https://web.archive.org/web/20061028043416/http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/003577.shtml #15yrsago Plotting advice for fiction writers http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/013243.html #15yrsago DARPA wants vampire satellites to harvest parts from dead sats prior to decommissioning https://web.archive.org/web/20111022223128/http://www.darpa.mil/NewsEvents/Releases/2011/10/20.aspx #15yrsago Understanding the hyperrich through the lens of tomorrow’s history http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/10/a-cultural-experiment.html #15yrsago Scored: pulse-pounding/thought-provoking YA novel about surveillance https://memex.craphound.com/2011/10/24/scored-pulse-pounding-thought-provoking-ya-novel-about-surveillance/ #10yrsago UAE surveillance contractor is recruiting an army of foreign hackers to break into its citizens’ devices https://web.archive.org/web/20161024141138/https://theintercept.com/2016/10/24/darkmatter-united-arab-emirates-spies-for-hire/ #10yrsago Publicly-funded NZ company sold mass surveillance tech to torturers and GCHQ https://web.archive.org/web/20161023101410/https://theintercept.com/2016/10/23/endace-mass-surveillance-gchq-governments/ #10yrsago RIP, Tom Hayden: Yippie, radical, politician, author https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-37749127 #10yrsago Audit reveals significant vulnerabilities in Truecrypt and its successors https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2016/10/18/veracrypt-security-audit/ #5yrsago Cyber-mercenaries helped Saudis hack an NYT reporter https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/24/breaking-the-news/#kingdom #5yrsago The Traitorous Eight and the Battle of Germanium Valley https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/24/the-traitorous-eight-and-the-battle-of-germanium-valley/ #1yrago Checking in on the state of Amazon's chickenized reverse-centaurs https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/23/traveling-salesman-solution/#pee-bottles Upcoming appearances (permalink) Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24 https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai Vienna: TED AI, Oct 28-30 https://tedai-vienna.ted.com/ Kilkenny (Kilkenomics), Nov 6-8 https://kilkenomics.com/ Courtenay: Enshittification (Sid Williams Theatre Society), Nov 10 https://www.sidwilliamstheatre.com/events/cory-doctorow-talks-enshittification/ Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ Oxford: Ministry of the Future, Nov 23 https://ministryforthefuture.co.uk/events.html Sheffield: Reverse Centaur at Juno Books, Nov 25 https://www.outsavvy.com/event/40274/cory-doctorow-in-conversation Virtual: Enshittification, AI, and the Future of Technology (UBC Master of Educational Technology), Nov 28 https://met.ubc.ca/2026/09/met-speaker-series-cory-doctorow-enshittification-ai-and-the-future-of-technology/ Oxford: Bennett Oxford Symposium on Open Code in Science, Dec 9 https://www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/events/2026-bennett-institute-symposium/ Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6 https://montreal2027.ca/en Recent appearances (permalink) Clint Eastwood (No Gods No Mayors) https://www.patreon.com/NoGodsNoMayors/posts/clint-eastwood-173008088 Life After AI (Brain Bar) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPPa43-n0vI Terms of Service with Clare Duffy (CNN) https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/terms-of-service-with-clare-duffy/episodes/458ce968-af5d-11f0-b539-13ed2afe25f8 AI, Work, and Power (Software Engineering Daily) AI, Work, and Power https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/podcasts/cory-doctorow-on-ai-work-and-power/ AI, Corporate Power, and the Fight for Worker Control (Plutopia) https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-ai-corporate-power-and-the-fight-for-worker-control/ Latest books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 550 (28730 total). "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

Another haxie reborn, from Rosyna Keller (Mastodon): Instead of only cramming minimized windows into a crowded dock—or hiding them altogether—WindowShade Redux reduces your windows to their title bars or small live thumbnails at all times. It supports over twenty animation styles with the following power features: Minimize the window to the Dock, as alwaysWindowShade the […]

Imani Joy: We’re moving away from the embedded composer and adopting a pop-out composer with new controls for visibility and other post settings. Navigation is simplified and organised in a more intuitive way and create space for future new features. […] In your feeds, the posts themselves have been rebuilt from the ground up, giving […]

Amy Worrall: The documentation is available on the website for the relevant app, and also in the app as a Help Book (openable from the Help menu). These days, Help Books on MacOS open in the Tips app[…] Apple’s documentation for making these, such as Authoring Apple Help, is pretty old. If you look at […]

Joe Rossignol (no iOS/iPadOS release notes, no security, no iOS/iPadOS enterprise, no developer): Apple this week released the full and final version of iOS 27.1, but it is only available for the foldable iPhone Duo that launched today. iPhone Duo already ships with iOS 27.1 preinstalled, but users need to update to a newer build […]

Joe Rossignol: In a YouTube video shared today, Apple said the new Apple Music visuals were “made by sound.” More specifically, Apple said it played a sound through a container of water, resulting in the liquid moving at the frequency of the notes. Apple Music brand elements were placed behind the vibrating water, resulting in […]

Last week I joined Joe Plenzler on the Meidas Defense podcast to talk about crypto. Meidas Defense is the MeidasTouch Network’s national security show, so we spent more time than I usually do on crypto as a geopolitical problem, in addition to a consumer protection one. The full

A New Inference Engine

For the past few months, I’ve been ded­i­cat­ing enor­mous swaths of my time to train­ing a small lan­guage model, work­ing from ba­sic prin­ci­ples. The goal is to pro­vide a com­plete over­haul of how Harper does its gram­mar check­ing.

In my first blog post about the sub­ject, I de­tailed some hy­po­thet­i­cal ideas for how we would im­ple­ment this change, but I did­n’t want to be too pre­scrip­tivist, so I did­n’t say any­thing con­crete. Now that some time has passed and I’ve earned a bet­ter un­der­stand­ing of the prob­lem do­main, I’m ready to share my vi­sion.

I’m writ­ing this out pub­licly for a new rea­sons:

• I see to doc­u­ment the de­ci­sion mak­ing process be­hind Harper’s ar­chi­tec­ture, so as to help new con­trib­u­tors un­der­stand how Harper works.
• Harper is de­signed to be ex­ten­si­ble. Some of the mod­els that we (Automattic) train will re­main pro­pri­etary, but if some­one in the com­mu­nity wishes to train their own for their own pur­poses (i.e., to sup­port a lan­guage we do not), they should be able to do so.

The Constraints

There are a num­ber of in­fer­ence en­gines that al­ready ex­ist. Why don’t we use or re­pur­pose one of those for Harper? In short: none of them work un­der the con­straints Harper is un­der.

Harper Runs On-Device

Most off-the-shelf in­fer­ence en­gines are de­signed for dat­a­cen­ter use. That’s fine — if you run your mod­els on spe­cial­ized hard­ware. Harper needs to run on any kind of de­vice, from the lat­est high-end MacBooks to ten year old ThinkPads. Not only that, but it needs to sip power. Our in­fer­ence en­gine needs to be able to slow it­self down (to sip power in the back­ground for non­crit­i­cal queries) and speed it­self up when the user de­mands Harper’s im­me­di­ate at­ten­tion.

Not All Our Models Work on Most Inference Engines

Harper will make use of an au­tore­gres­sive trans­former model for sen­tence rewrit­ing (more on that later), but that is not the only kind of model we will need. We will also be pro­vid­ing mod­els that per­form char­ac­ter mask­ing. What does that mean?

Instead of do­ing au­tore­gres­sive in­fer­ence (which can re­quire thou­sands of sep­a­rate for­ward passes through a model to pro­duce a sin­gle out­put), mask­ing mod­els do a sin­gle for­ward pass. They pro­vide char­ac­ter-level“masks” that we can use for an­other part of our gram­mar pipeline. For ex­am­ple, we could have a model (coupled with a LoRa, which we will talk about in a minute) per­form a sin­gle mask­ing pass over a user’s en­tire doc­u­ment, pro­duc­ing a list of lo­ca­tions they should have in­serted com­mas. From there, Harper can high­light those lo­ca­tions and of­fer to in­sert the rel­e­vant punc­tu­a­tion.

An au­tore­gres­sive model would have taken sev­eral min­utes to do this kind of analy­sis on con­sumer hard­ware. We can do it in frac­tions of a sec­ond.

Harper Runs Everywhere

On top of those two al­ready dif­fi­cult con­straints, Harper also needs to run any­where. We run na­tively on lap­tops via Harper Desktop, but we also run our en­gine in the ser­vice worker of browsers in WebAssembly. Whichever in­fer­ence en­gine we use must be able to run in all those places, us­ing the best avail­able ac­cel­er­a­tors.

LoRA Swap Speed Is Important

Different kinds of lint­ing tasks may need dif­fer­ent be­hav­ior from the same model. To ac­com­plish that while keep­ing model size tiny, we will NOT be train­ing any model for in­struc­tion fol­low­ing. In­stead, we will be dy­nam­i­cally load­ing and un­load­ing LoRAs from the model for mul­ti­ple in­fer­ence passes over the user’s doc­u­ment. One pass might an­a­lyze punc­tu­a­tion, an­other might an­a­lyze tone. To do this, we need to be able to swap be­tween mul­ti­ple LoRAs on the same model sev­eral times per sec­ond.

It’s not that most in­fer­ence en­gines can’t do this, but their in­ter­faces make it kludgey.

Andrew

Harper’s new in­fer­ence en­gine, which I am ten­ta­tively nam­ing “Andrew”, cur­rently re­sides in its own repos­i­tory. Soon, it will en­ter Harper’s monorepo. It’s based on Burn, a Rust li­brary for do­ing ML work any­where.

Andrew ful­fills all our re­quire­ments:

• It can run any­where (as you will soon see).
• It can load, un­load, and switch LoRAs in­stantly.
• Base model weights can be com­posed (like LEGO) to use the same weights when switch­ing be­tween batched mask­ing and au­tore­gres­sive in­fer­ence.
• It is op­ti­mized for con­sumer hard­ware.

Stay Tuned

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be re­leas­ing more in­for­ma­tion about how these mod­els are trained and how you can get ac­cess to them. In the mean­time, don’t be afraid to reach out if you have any ques­tions.

Controversies Roil Campaigns in Ohio and Michigan

Video Version | Audio Version Warning: Spoilers aplenty for Lanterns (2026) When comic book writer Tom King pitched the TV show Lanterns to DCU head James Gunn, the logline was “True Detective with Green Lanterns”. And you can see why Gunn went for it, it’s the kind of idea that once you hear it just seems like it has a

Read More

Paul and I discuss how Trump is showing his ass on the campaign trail.

The post Noema’s AI Reading List appeared first on NOEMA.

Our Swift/Godot integration is a labor of love:

Introduction As the AI stock bubble seems to be bursting, AI promoters and cheerleaders are now claiming that the leading-edge models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and DeepSeek are conscious. Are they really? Or is this just flagrant stock price manipulation? Back in 2013, I blogged about the singularity, which is the point where AIs become […]

🥳We're turning 5!🥳 Join our biggest gathering yet to celebrate what we've accomplished and hear what's next.

More exciting details to come 👀

RSVP on Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/dairs-5th-anniversary-celebration-registration-2003687647692?aff=blueskypinned

My duo was supposed to arrive on December 1st.

At 7:18 this morning I get a call from Vincent “they have duos! Black or white?”.

We unboxed together.

Today iPhone Duo arrives, and with it, Safari 27.1.

The internet archive’s Wayback Machine library is a planetary treasure. It preserves the archive of the web. Don’t let publishers take it down. Why the Internet Needs a Memory PDOOM is a great music video slopcore with a very SILO … Continue reading →

New from Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000! My Tech Workers Have Unionized

@emilymbender.bsky.social and @alexhanna.bsky.social are joined by @js-tan.bsky.social and Clarissa Redwine to discuss bosses' love for "AI" and tech worker power.

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2126417/episodes/19956365-my-tech-workers-have-unionized-2026-10-05

I heard the crushing news when I got in from London yesterday that my beloved Sutton Cafe on 57th and First is closing this weekend, which caused me to dissolve.

Stormy Whether GDPR services is a market we shouldn’t need at all, but it’s growing like a thundercloud. See the above. (Source: Mordor Intelligence) Looking up, more or less Though not the intention, Starlink’s 11,000 satellites are a planetary barometer. Spaceweather.com: Starlink has many downsides. The megaconstellation interferes with astronomy, pollutes the atmosphere with metallic […]

One of our very best candidates of the cycle Nancy Lacore (SC-1) joins us live today 215pm ET

On November 3rd, 36 states will elect their next governor. The outcome of these races will make a real difference in the lives of millions of people — but only if you vote.

So join me in electing @demgovs.org: democraticgovernors.org

Lead poisoning is preventable, but older homes can hide serious health risks. Learn practical ways renters and homeowners can identify lead hazards, reduce exposure, and protect their families.

The post 5 Ways to Reduce Lead Risks in Older Homes appeared first on Conservation Law Foundation.

Dirección: Paweł Pawlikowski. Guion: Paweł Pawlikowski, Hendrik Handloegten. Elenco: Hanns Zischler, Sandra Hüller, August Diehl, Devid Striesow, Anna Madeley. Países: Polonia, Alemania, Italia y Francia. Más información de la película: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt37304295/ ¿A qué llamamos patria? ¿Al territorio donde nacemos o a la cultura que heredamos? ¿Qué define nuestra identidad como individuos? La nacionalidad supone un […]

La entrada Fatherland (MONFIC26): el sinsabor de lo que dejamos atrás se publicó primero en Palomita de maíz.

Today is the day! YarnBuddy 2.4 is now available on the App Store and Mac App Store. It’s been about a year since I last updated YarnBuddy, and I’m pleased to announce that updates should be coming much more quickly going forward. The main focus of this update is Interactive Widgets, Live Activity support, and […]

Previous posts on this topic: Oct 6 and Oct 8.

What's new? I've got a browser running, and have been using it for a few weeks. We're not releasing it today because first I want people to think about the format we're using to represent a story, and get feedback, and see if other people can build on the same basis.

Three things to look at today.

• The top level picture.
• Nine examples.
• Download the archive. (Chrome will complain about this link not being "secure," but the archive comes from GitHub, so it's plenty secure -- they must be on a campaign to give sites like mine a black eye. I wouldn't put a link to a download that wasn't from a reputable site. People who read my blog know that, why doesn't Google with all their fancy AI servers? Feh.)

And if you have questions or comments.

• Use the Issues section in the repo.

Writing of lasting value

We are seeing a surge of young people, Blacks, and Hispanics voting in the early vote

This is an infuriating book. So much so that I didn’t finish it.

Don’t get me wrong; I love the idea of The Pirate Queen. Telling the life story of Gráinne Ní Mháille is an excellent premise for some rip-roaring historical fiction. It’s even got an interesting structure alternating between three different parts of her life.

I was pleasantly surprised when I cracked open the book to find a small pronunciation guide to some Irish words in the front matter. It would be nice to have some Gaeilge scattered throughout the narrative. But that’s exactly what made this book so infuriating.

First off all, by dropping in an occassional Irish word into a sentence, it just made me think, “Wait, what language would these people be speaking?” Usually the answer was Irish. In which case, why translate one arbitrary word?

Then there’s the choice of the Irish word that gets dropped into the text most frequently…

The front matter has this to say about the irish word tá:

An affirmative statement similar to yes

Um, not really. Tá is present tense of the verb “be”. The English equivalent is “is”. You can’t just drop it in as a replacement for the word “yes”. But that’s exactly what Ariel Lawhon does.

This continually took me out of the story. One person asks a question like, “Did you see that?” and the other person answers, “Tá.” That just doesn’t make sense.

I know this sounds really nit-picky, but one of the first things you learn about Irish is that there is no single word for “yes” or “no”. It’s most common to respond with the positive or negative form of the verb in the question—“Did you see that?” “I saw!”

So of all the words to pointlessly switch into Irish, “yes” is by far the least suitable.

It happened every couple of pages. I was getting so annoyed, I flipped ahead to the acknowledgements to find out who was consulted on the use of Irish in the book. I found my answer. No one.

That seems somewhat irresponsible to me. It borders on being insulting. Would it have taken so much time and effort to have one single Irish speaker check the text?

Alas, the lack of research wasn’t just evident in the book’s treatment of the Irish language.

At one point, a young Gráinne is out walking with her brother, who is playing the uilleann pipes. I had to stop and check the text a few times. Perhaps I missed a bit where they sat down. But no, this book blithely describes a character walking and playing uilleann pipes at the same time.

Now if you think uilleann pipes are pretty much the same as Scottish highland pipes, this would make sense. But they’re not. A bare minimum amount of research would show that the uilleann pipes are played sitting down (you can try to play them standing up, but you’ll need some kind of extra gadget like Johnny Doran used, but even he couldn’t play them while walking).

I carried on reading even though I was getting more and more annoyed by the shoddiness on display. Then I read this sentence:

No more distant flicker of lanterns in the distance.

I get how you would write that sentence in a first draft. Hopefully you’d catch its redundancy in a subsequent draft. If not, it’s exactly the kind of thing that your editor is there to spot.

But no, this made it all the way to the final printed book, a book that was displayed prominently on tables in major bookstores in multiple countries. Compare and contrast that with When The Boys Came Out To Play by John Mackel, a book which will be likely only ever be read by a much smaller audience but which is crafted with so much more care.

I always feel slightly guilty if I don’t finish a book. I know, I know; life’s too short and all that. But I can’t shake the feeling that I’m being a bit disrespectful to the author by not seeing their work through to the end. In this case though, the author displayed enough disrepect to her readers that I don’t think I need to feel bad about slamming this book shut.

The Pirate Queen is a sloppy piece of work. You deserve better.

Good friends and family know this, but I am bad at email. Like chronically bad. If you have tried to email me, you know this too and you either never got a reply or received one 9-months later starting with the phrase, “Sorry.”

I am truly sorry… but also I’m not. It’s a function of who I am.

I was never great at email, but in a slower time before social media it raptured my attention. I would habitually refresh my inbox hoping for a long range communication from a friend or stranger. When I was homesick in Japan, a good email (or AIM chat) could turn my day around. I have fond memories of email and its unparalleled ability to connect me to other people through a single address. It of course would never be as familiar or intimate as scribing a hand-written calligraphic letter with a big feather pen, but it proved a fine substitute.

At Paravel, I noticed that emails had a propensity to crash into my day with some new urgent task. A ding, a red badge, a bouncing icon in the dock. Could be a client or my accountant; something that required me to stop what I was doing and switch over to their need. Frank once described emails as (paraphrasing) “a to-do you send to someone else” and that resonated in my soul. For someone with an attention regulation disorder, intermittent distractions like email (or chats) can be devastating to staying focused on the work I actually need to finish.

Email being disruptive to your productivity must be a pretty common phenomenon because nearly all the productivity books out there –and I’ve read them all– attempt to “solve” productivity by turning off your notifications and checking your email less.

I must have really taken this advice to heart because I almost never check my email anymore. After a long day of expending dopamine on work, the last thing I want to do at home is check my personal email and receive more to-dos from strangers. I tend to check my personal email now once a week… or less.

Inbox Zero is a fool’s errand for me, but I try to keep my work email groomed and as close to zero as possible. Part of that was because I started with a blank slate and could actually succeed. Each morning I make an analog to-do for myself to check my work email. I set up some priority inboxing and auto-deletes for org-level notifications. Importantly, work email stays sequestered to my work laptop.

But despite the success at work, I’m sitting at nearly 500+ unreads in my personal Inbox. It doesn’t feel great and feels like a monumental task now. Since starting at Large Company I know of at least two conferences that I’ve missed out on speaking at because I’m so bad at email (sorry, PPK). If you’ve ever wondered why I don’t have a contact form on my site or do that cool “email me, let’s be friends” link in my RSS footer, this is why… because I feel shame that I will disappoint you.

There’s also the diminishing utility of email. As with phone calls and texts, the amount of spam and noise has ruined the service. It’s a needle in a haystack to find the one good email that actually deserves your attention. Just because we participated in online commerce once doesn’t mean you get the liberty to email me for the rest of my life. I wish there were more laws about this.

When did a ten drip email campaign for every online transaction become the standard? You bought an item → Item is getting ready to ship → Want another item? → Item shipped → Need more items? → Item out for delivery → The holidays are coming up → Package delivered → Let us know how we did → Mother’s day coming up → Father’s day coming up → Step-father’s day coming up → etc… It’s entirely too much.

And the grifter slop… oh, my God the grifter slop!

Hey Dave,

I came across your now-defunct company Luro. Design systems is an interesting space. Would you like to increase Luro users by six billion percent through spam email blasts? We can help.

Chad, CEO

I will never reply to this and–

Dave,

I thought I’d follow up in case you missed the last email. I’m a fucking robot obviously but we can have a conversation about this.

Chad, CEO

Grifters, spend six minutes crafting a real email and I promise you it will convert better. Or have an actual fucking product that is so good I hear about it from other people. You are one of five hundred anonymous Chads in my inbox, this pickup line doesn’t work anymore.

Along those lines… Democrats, sending text messages doesn’t work anymore. I got AOC, Nancy Pelosi, Beto, and even Raphael Warnock’s grandma texting me every other day and it makes you look broke and desperate like a friend I’m gonna need to bail out of jail again. Capture me with ideas.

That’s how I feel about email. And text messages. And phone calls. And social media. Once upon a time it had utility, now it’s all noise and grifter slop demanding our attention and giving us to-dos. Be hotter, be smarter, be more liberal, be more productive, be more, be more, be more.

Oh, and I underpaid my taxes and owe the government $5400. That was the email I missed.

Trump voters who can't answer two basic questions about politics are three times as likely as other Trump voters to back Democrats for the House. This is a big change since 2024.

Chuala mé an nuacht brónach go raibh Dónal Lunny imithe ar slí na fírinne.

Laoch.

Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam.

Two reports on AI in news; how it can intermediate relationships; and some final thoughts about Foursquare.

Since learning about the effects of high CO2 concentration on attention and cognitive performance—especially at levels much higher than 2000ppm—I've started monitoring CO2 and other air quality indicators in my house, at my studio, and even on the road.

I have a few other air quality monitors I'll be covering in the future, but today I wanted to focus on one I only heard about in the comments on a recent video tearing down a cheap no-name 'Air Quality Detector' from Amazon.

Thousands of “No Kings” events were held across the country last Saturday.

Well, this short film by the Irish Traditional Music Archive is right up my alley! It looks at the first transatlantic telegraph cable and the traditional music of West Kerry, particularly the song Ámhrán na Leabhar:

From the naomhóg, which for centuries connected the islands, peninsulas and coastal communities of Uíbh Ráthach, to the arrival of the world’s first successful transatlantic telegraph cable at Valentia, An Cábla agus an tAmhrán reveals a remarkable continuity: while technologies evolve, humanity’s desire to communicate, remember and pass stories from one generation to the next remains unchanged.

adactio.com/links/22811

The Indian CA eMudhra Limited has eight TLS certificates with laughably weak private keys:

The compromised eMudhra keys were defective at a level that’s challenging the imagination of many of the engineers studying the incident. A normal size for a NIST P-384 elliptic curve cryptography private key contains roughly 384 bits of entropy, a size allowing almost 2384, or a number with 116 digits, different possibilities. The private key sizes of the compromised keys ranged from 3 to 8 bits. Astonishingly, the private keys were 4, 56, 66, 115, 155, 156, 230, 237...

Fired OpenAI safety researchers Mikita Balesni and Tomek Korbak give us their first interview since their dramatic dismissal. They take us inside the company during METR’s investigation into the Hugging Face hack, explain why OpenAI’s rebuttal doesn’t add up, and describe how the fight over AI safety is still playing out inside the company.

Plus, we introduce our new segment, Pandora’s Box. Elon Musk wants to give every kid in America a SpaceX share, new filings in the OpenAI bugging case reveal the suspect’s chats with a Saudi royal, and more fresh horrors unleashed on us all by Silicon Valley.

For a transcript of this episode, select the episode on npr.org/machinegods.

You can watch this full episode on YouTube, Spotify or Apple. And if you’ve got a question you want us to answer, you can drop us a comment on any of those platforms or email us at [hey@machinegods.fm](mailto: hey@machinegods.fm)

See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.

NPR Privacy Policy

Omer Ein-Habar on the original sewer socialists, Ioannis Kampourakis on law as a produce force, and Yochai Benkler on the legal transformation of capitalism. Plus, ALPE announces its inaugural Junior Faculty Forum, the JLPE is looking for book reviewers, the LPE stream of the upcoming SLAS annual conference is accepting submissions, Asad Ramzanali identifies 34 ways to tax AI, Adam Bonica & Jake Grumbach discuss democracy's death by consultancy, and Kate Jackson reflects on Friedrick Pollock and Franz Neumann.

Reading Palaces Of The Crow by Ray Nayler.

The case for taking control away from Musk gets even stronger

Want to understand the Anthropocene? Look at what humanity has done with chickens. | Lit Hub Science Mohammed Massoud Morsi explores how writing fiction about Palestinian lives allows “stories that would otherwise have disappeared into the chest of time” to

Democrats are finally attacking with strength.

All the posts we have dedicated to the OOXML format – and many of those we will dedicate to it in future – analyse the reasons why it is a proprietary format despite having been approved by ISO as a standard, open format. However, they do not address the reasons

One of my favorite video games of all time is Control. The main location of the game, the brutalist Oldest House, reacts to the player’s actions and rearranges itself dynamically, moving slabs of concrete around like a sentient being. Now, what if user interfaces and docs could react dynamically to the user and seek to adapt to their behavior like Control’s levels? Would it still be usable? Would the documentation drift too much? I explored these questions through an experimental application that uses in-browser LLMs.

An announcement interrupted the hum and buzz of audience conversation: “At this time, ladies and gentlemen, the Village Gate takes the greatest pleasure in presenting the amazing Miss Nina Simone.” Fresh on the heels of cutting short a run at

I had arranged with a friend of mine to catch up for breakfast and was waiting outside a row of basement shops, typical in Denmark. I had just returned to Copenhagen from Gaza after an assignment for a Danish NGO.

The broiler chicken is the quintessence of the modern meat complex. In 1925 the average chicken brought to slaughter was 112 days old, ate 4.7 pounds of feed for every pound of liveweight chicken, and weighed 2.5 pounds when its

You’ve gone to bed with the baby again, as I step gingerly through the house, searching for quiet projects I can take to completion and leave for you like origami. Each room for you to wake in as you wander,

Situated directly on the waterfront of Salem Harbor in Massachusetts, there sits a two-story timber home. The wood is dark, evocative of the traditional First Period architecture of the early colonies. And most notably, it has many gables, triangular sections

1. Your older sister, Bess, cracked a joke about the sorry state of your lawn, which is why a few months later you decided to grow something. You had no interest in a garden, but you were very interested in

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. I discovered my favorite writing music in the winter of 2023, at an audio art exhibition in Berlin. It was an otherworldly experience—instead of paintings or sculptures filling the cavernous

Lawrence Wright’s Redemption, Walter Mosley’s Hanging & Burning, Lisa Hanawalt’s I Can’t Stop Thinking About Horses and Sex, and Blake J. Harris’s Emperor of Nothing: The Making of Larry David all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. Brought to you by Book Marks,

The stock market may be more efficient than Rubin thinks it is

Alexander Ward and Lara Seligman of the Wall Street Journal reported today that Trump called Elon Musk yesterday to ask him to stop throttling Starlink’s military-grade communications system, Starshield, in Ukraine.

We are in the home stretch people!

In which I try to answer your questions about modern politics....

Recorded October 21, 2026.

In which I try to answer your questions about modern politics....

Recorded October 20, 2026.

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Recorded October 13, 2026.

Recorded October 7, 2026.

Recorded September 23, 2026.

Watch today’s live recording here.

I’ve had the vague idea for a while that I’d like to write up my thoughts about local government outreach — I’m an opinionated person 😉 Originally, I thought I’d write an email newsletter, but after brainstorming a list of topics a couple years ago, the format didn’t feel quite right. This fall, I found […]

Exercise your writing muscles, delight your subscribers, and make new connections with creators. What’s not to like?

In their final ads of the cycle, campaigns and PACs are showing their true colors

Ooops, didn't get it done today. Please come back tomorrow. :-)

Et in Arcadia ego… Walking back from lunch yesterday I looked over the bridge and saw this. The weather currently is what used to be called an “Indian Summer”, possibly by people who had never been in India in the … Continue reading →

The good news - Dems lead 63%-26% among 18-29 year olds who are likely to vote in the 2026 election

Turns out Trump can’t fill a room like he used to

To read this letter, click here:

Finally got around to checking out one of the Northwest Trolls, this one nearby in Oregon, with most being up in Washington state. I love how these look in person and now I want to see them all.

Then I headed up to the Japanese Garden to see how the

Cancelled a Kahoot! account we had at work

Took me 7 confirmation steps with various dark patterns

Elliott and David talk to Mary Radcliffe at FiftyPlusOne about our investigation into Wedgewood Polls and SoCal Strategies

We're excited to be one of three anchor projects in @mozilla.org's new Human-Scale AI Incubator!

There are seven spots left in the Human-Scale AI cohort. Apply to join us, with funding up to $500,000 per project over two years: mzl.la/4yWV0QV

Safari Technology Preview Release 255 is now available for download for macOS Golden Gate and macOS Tahoe.

Friends,

Sociologist Nicole Bedera joins co-hosts V.V Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to talk about the Cornell 7 and her book, On the Wrong Side: How Universites Protect Perpetrators and Betray Survivors of Sexual Violence. She explains how the Cornell case, in

John Gruber (Mastodon, tweet, Bluesky): The Duo name is perfect. It truly is like having two devices in one. The outer device is, by far, the worst iPhone Apple has ever made. It’s a miserable fat little thing. The inner device is a splendid, joyful, beautiful tablet, with a UI that out-iPads the iPad. For […]

Mike Piontek (Mastodon): A year ago I wrote that Safari 26 and Liquid Glass have little respect for web sites and unfortunately this hasn’t changed. […] It’s unclear to me why Apple is not opting to treat the iPhone Duo toolbar as a safe area. I have not come across anything discussing their reasons nor […]

Lara O’Reilly: Apple’s latest privacy crackdown left the online ad industry scrambling for answers. Now, the tech giant has finally offered some. John Wilander et al.: A “post-cookie” tracking method emerged, called identity resolution. In this scheme, third parties (i.e., not the website owner) invisibly collect your email address when you log in or sign […]

"News will be intermediated by AI, whether we like it or not." The solution will involve common infrastructure, open technology, data portability, and fighting against lock-in at all costs.

NEW - Today at 430pm ET youth vote expert John Della Volpe joins us live to walk us through the just released fall Harvard IOP youth poll.

So…uh…hi! It’s been awhile, eh? When I say that the past three years since I’ve posted here have been an absolute whirlwind, I mean it. When Twitter gasped its last dying breath and became X, I used it as an opportunity to get away from the development world for a while and literally went and […]

What if climate action didn’t have to feel like a list of things you’re not allowed to enjoy?

Tomorrow I am traveling from Vermont down to Annapolis, Maryland, for my 25th Naval Academy reunion.

I hope to see the The Web of Markdown idea take the next step later today or early tomorrow at the latest. Still diggin!

Dirección: Adam Wingard. Guión: Adam Windgar, Simon Barrett. Elenco: Adria Arjona, Dan Stevens, Eric Wareheim, Regional VelJohnson, Blake Kennedy. Países: Estados Unidos. Más información de la película: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt32268691/ Tras su paso por producciones de gran escala como Godzilla vs. Kong (2021), el director Adam Wingard regresa al terreno que mejor domina —aquel cine de género […]

La entrada Aniquilación: cuando el instinto maternal supera a la ciencia militar se publicó primero en Palomita de maíz.

Nobody in the tech industry wants to see them collapse, but the stock has dropped over 50% in the last six months, anyway

Writing of lasting value

For October 14-20, 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. You probably didn’t even hear about it because of all the buzz around You Can See Everything, but we ALSO made a documentary about Elizabeth Holmes that came out last weekend. Now our movie may not have any “footage” of Holmes or “interviews” with her, and in fact, it may not really have any “information” about her at all, but it does have a lot of shots of us reading short humor pieces and also one scene with Nathan Fielder! He tells us to please go away and stop filming him in a way that really makes you think about the line between reality and fiction.

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What We Enjoyed This Week

Your Football Team Needs More Comedy-Magic by Bizzy Coy (Points in Case) We just love all the reveals about the narrator that we get over the course of the piece: his teenage son, his debts, and his superbly-named rival, Bucky Huddle. There’s also a particularly great callback involving missing toilet paper.

I Am the World’s Most Annoying Website by Nick DiLallo (McSweeney’s) Nick packs a ton of annoying website specifics into this piece without the premise ever feeling overly broad or non-specific. A very funny take on the grim reality of what far too many websites are like in 2026.

The Best “I Voted Stickers” of 2026 by Don Moynihan (Can We Still Govern?) It’s nice to be reminded that there’s at least ONE thing about U.S. elections that you can enjoy in an unabashed, uncomplicated, anxiety-free way: I Voted Stickers. It’s tough to pick a favorite from this bunch. You gotta love the Louisiana sticker designed by William Joyce, but as Don says, “We are all the [‘I voted now let me sleep’] cat.”

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-- 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, October 28 at Greats of Craft in LIC at 7 p.m. and features:

Erin Harland (Your Best Actress)

Ilana Michelle Carmi (Reductress, MTV, Staged Haze)

Jay Martin (New York Magazine, The Village Voice, Esquire)

David Guzman (The Onion, New Yorker, author of Pole Antarctica: The Doomed Gabriel Expedition To The Bottom Of The World)

Ash Diggs (Means TV, host of Get Out The House! podcast)

Tickets available online and at the door.

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

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An Old Favorite

Audio Tour by Patricia Marx (The New Yorker) Patricia really nails the tone and vocabulary of museum audio tours—it’s such a fun form for a humor piece. There are also tons of satisfying reveals about Todd Niesle and what he’s up to, but they’re never too plotty and never get in the way of the jokes.

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

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Updates From Your Editors and Friends of the Newsletter

Luke’s got just ONE spot left in his advanced short humor writing workshop on Wednesday nights in November and also just ONE spot left in his Thursday afternoon advanced short humor workshop in November! Grab a spot now if you don’t want to wait til 2027 to take a class!

Caltech Weekly - October 22: Judging Faces Without WordsAlso in this issue: New HSS Lab in Environmental Economics and Policy DesignView this email in your browser

Thursday, October 22, 2026

Judging Faces Without Words

New research method shows people perceive personality traits from faces even when they are not overtly evaluating them based on trait descriptors.

New HSS Lab in Environmental Economics and Policy Design

Established through a $7 million infusion of funding from the WHH Foundation, the new lab will combine economics, policy design, and new measurement tools such as satellite imaging and machine learning to inform environmental policy. The goal: to protect the environment by making markets work for environmental goals rather than against them.

Forecasting Tipping Points with AI

Caltech-led researchers, including Anima Anandkumar, Caltech's Bren Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, take key steps in developing deep-learning models that can predict irreversible shifts in climate and other systems.

How the Fruit Fly Brain Controls Threat Displays

A new study from Caltech neuroscientists has discovered how social behaviors—specifically aggressive displays of intimidation—are wired in the brain of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. The team discovered two brain "modules" that are connected to the wings and to the legs, respectively, that govern the animal's threat displays.

"It’s a fun tool with lots of bells and whistles that let you adjust and play around with things, like you can call different elections, and it will update the entire map. On election night, when the AP starts calling races, you can put them into our app and it will tell you how the probabilities update."

Jonathan N. Katz, the Kay Sugahara Professor of Social Sciences and Statistics, along with Danny Ebanks (PhD '23) and Gary King of Harvard, has developed an interactive election forecasting tool called ElectIt that draws on decades of election data they assembled—with the help of AI—covering every US House election since 1946 and Senate election since 1954, as well as the current races.

Other Top Stories

The Magical Mysteries—and Histories—of Physics: A Conversation with Historian Alexander Blum

Funding Wild Ideas that Lead to Transformative Discoveries

Caltech Inauguration Events

Inauguration Ceremony and Campus Celebration

Join in celebrating the formal Inauguration of Ray Jayawardhana as Caltech's 10th president. A community celebration and luncheon along the Olive Walk will follow the ceremony. Free to attend, and registration is appreciated for the ceremony/luncheon. The ceremony will also be livestreamed. Thursday, October 29, 10 a.m., Inauguration, Beckman Mall; noon, celebration, Olive Walk

The Brave New Space Age

This public conversation marking the Inauguration of President Ray Jayawardhana brings together leading voices in science, industry, government, and media to explore the promise and implications of New Space. Free to attend; advance registration for the panel discussion has reached capacity, but a standby line will be available. Wednesday, October 28, 5:30 p.m., science and engineering displays; 7:30 p.m. panel discussion, Beckman Auditorium

In Case You Missed It

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

Caltech JPL: One Mission. One Partnership

Caltech created JPL in 1936. Together, Caltech and JPL advance frontier technologies—including quantum, AI and autonomy, microelectronics, advanced radar and sensing, robotics, and resilient space systems—with applications across civil, defense, intelligence, and commercial sectors. Caltech JPL helps sustain America's innovation edge and the capabilities essential to long-term strategic advantage.

Did You Know?

A new study using a computer model developed by JPL, along with UC Irvine and Dartmouth College, finds Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier could contribute more to sea level rise by the end of the century than some previous estimates. In some model simulations, the glacier's contribution doubled current projections. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. On October 19, MIT Technology Review published an article by former Caltech postdoc Volkan Gurses on the limits of computing. The article references Richard Feynman's "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" lecture as well as Gurses's own recent work in the lab of Ali Hajimiri, the Bren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering.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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To make the blue wave bigger we need to keep driving the early vote people!

Who knows what piece of infrastructure might be attacked next.

PHP maintainers have released fixes for two critical vulnerabilities:

PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 and 8.2.35 fix two critical vulnerabilities that can allow unauthenticated remote code execution. All PHP users are strongly encouraged to update immediately.

Who is at risk: all PHP installations serving web requests, including PHP-FPM, Apache with mod_php, php-cgi, FrankenPHP and LiteSpeed. We consider the risk highest for mod_php, with a demonstrated exploit where an unauthenticated request can trigger the attack before any application code runs...

Poll respondents who change their recalled vote from Trump to Harris (or not voting) largely disapprove of Trump — and that could be skewing polls

The name-change quickly resulted in a surge in home prices across the state, according to Fuck Trumpan realtors.

To design the right program for capitalism's legal transformation, we must begin with the right theory of capitalism.

At 12 years old, Amy Acton was the victim of sexual abuse.

There will never be another Wikipedia, “one of the strangest and most outlandish successes of its time.” | Lit Hub Technology In honor of their new book, Stellar Smoke, we asked Tanaïs some questions about writing, Mulholland Drive, and more.

Americans did not give him the right to make national security policy

The defining political event of this era is going out with a whimper.

Commercial aircraft avionics engineer Michael Newton built an accurate Apollo DSKY replica.

The post Recreate the Apollo Guidance Computer appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

With the midterm elections only two weeks away, a lot of Democrats are feeling giddy about the prospects of flipping both houses of Congress. This week, Alex breaks down why overconfidence can be a risk, and why this will be a state by state, issue by issue battle until the end. She’s joined by Alex Seitz-Wald, Deputy Editor of the Midcoast Villager, who gives a local perspective on why the Senate race in Maine is still anyone’s call. Then Crooked media’s Nate Silver, author of the Silver Bulletin and co-host of Still Counting, joins to break down the latest polling and how it compares with elections past.

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

Become a subscriber to Crooked Media! It’s the best way to directly support us as we build an independent, pro-democracy media company. Subscribers get exclusive benefits, like bonus podcasts, newsletters and more.

Subscribe now at crooked.com/friends or wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can request a transcript by emailing transcripts@crooked.com. Include the podcast name, episode title, and air date. Please allow 48 hours for delivery.

At the very top of the Wikipedia article “List of artificial objects on the Moon” is a short disclaimer: Though the list includes more than a hundred objects, it is far from complete. Not included are the “lesser” items littering

Tanaïs’s new book, Stellar Smoke, is available now from Dutton, so we asked them a few questions about writing practice, interviews, favorite non-literary media, and more. * Who do you most wish would read your book? (your boss, your childhood

Well, hello and welcome! I’m so glad you’ve joined me for yet another riveting installment of everyone’s favorite alcohol-soaked masterpiece, Am I the Literary Asshole? An advice column that only wants what’s best for you, dear. I’m your host, Kristen

On December 20, 1606, three small ships—the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery—slipped into the gray winter current of the Thames River. On board were 145 men, a mix of settlers and seamen, grim-faced as they left the shores

Hair around the genitals is, obviously, associated with sex. Natural, full pubic hair on women has indeed been considered sexy at times, and not just in the 1970s. Its celebration reverberates through history in art, literature, and graffiti. In Pompeii,

Outside, we play House. My cousin Mandy, my cousin Yangyang, and me. We invite our neighbor Xiaocai to join us in the yard, which is nothing more than a tilted kumquat tree and yellowed weeds. It is morning, and my

Despite polling well in ways which should give them a chance at winning both houses of Congress, the Democrats have two significant challenges heading into this year’s midterm elections.  The first one is a problem of nostalgia narrative. When they

Everything feels out of whack in the United States.

A recap of the LibreOffice Conference 2026, which took place in September in Pordenone, northern Italy. Thanks to the local team for organising the event! Please confirm that you want to play a YouTube video. By accepting, you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third

They despise America back

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. Blockers: Rebels

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

Rates have fallen by three-quarters in Lula’s second term.

Lots of people who are against the use of AI for all its ethical and inherent issues tell me this. Just ignore it. Don’t let big AI control us. The “slop” they refer to is anything created that involved an AI, and in our case (the curl project) it is in particular vulnerability reports. “Ignoring … Continue reading “ignore the slop”→

Excited to introduce you to this inspiring and principled leader

Protects against compromised eMudhra intermediate certificates, fixes certificate blocklist loading at startup and updates Gecko to 159.0.

Perfect autumn day in the mountains spent mostly away from the computer. Still, some interesting new stuff to show tomorrow.

✨Your Daily Reminder✨: We don't have to build technology to surveil and kill. We can build technology that helps us fight for a better future.

To read this letter, click here:

It’s been a lot of fun trying the Duo out for a week, but it feels like I’ve gotten to use an extraordinarily polished prototype — not a finished product that I’d want to buy and carry.

Given the damage Trump has done to our global standing electing experienced national security leaders like Elaine Luria to Congress has become an urgent priority

Justice @anitaearls.bsky.social has spent her career fighting for civil rights and protecting voting rights. She’s the only candidate running for North Carolina’s Supreme Court with a proven record of standing up for all North Carolinians.

Make a plan to vote at IWillVote.com/NC.

Welcome new subscribers!

Friends,

Wednesday session

Today's links Adversarial interoperability is a team sport: Vibe-coded jailbreaks are fun, but don't solve the problem. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Labour Whip's pro-Iraq war threats; LoC's emulators; Kevin Mitnick plays CIA stooge; ICE: "The warrant is coming out of my balls"; WIPO's secret trademark meeting; Linking isn't libel (in Canada); Make: singing busts; Tory minister kills Turing's Law; Trump hotels rebrand as "Scion". Upcoming appearances: Vancouver, Ottawa, Vienna, Kilkenny, Courtenay, Vancouver, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Montreal. 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. Adversarial interoperability is a team sport (permalink) Enshittification is particularly galling because (in theory, at least), digital technology should be really hard to enshittify. That's because the only digital computer we know how to build is the "Turing-complete, universal von Neumann machine," which is to say, a calculating engine capable of computing every valid program. In some deep, important, foundational sense, every computer is the same as every other computer. Sure, they vary in terms of speed, storage and RAM, but given enough time and electricity, every computer can run every program. This has profound implications for enshittification. Say a tech boss takes away a feature you value (as when Sonos pushed an update that removed nearly all the functionality from its "smart" speakers), or adds a feature you hate (like when Chamberlain blocked third-party apps from controlling its garage doors so it could force its customers to view seven ads before they could open or close their garages). At that point, a programmer can write an "interoperable" program that restores the good feature or blocks the bad one. This program can be costlessly and instantaneously distributed to every affected technology user, and those users will likely pay something for it. After all, enshittification is a way to shift value away from technology users to tech companies, which makes the case for you paying for disenshittification technology that wrestles that value back. All of that means that, in a state of nature, companies that are contemplating enshittification need to worry that their greed will tempt new companies to enter the market and poach their customers and suppliers. This alone might be enough to frighten companies off from enshittificatory gambits, and if companies press ahead regardless, then they open market opportunities for better companies that can costlessly, instantaneously usurp the original manufacturer's relationship with their entire affected customer base. That's how it should work. But in 1998, Bill Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and Section 1201 of the DMCA establishes a felony (punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine) for reverse-engineering and modifying technology without the manufacturer's permission. Then, the US Trade Rep spent the next 25 years making sure that every US trading partner had an identical (or even worse!) "anticircumvention" law: https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/26/babyish-radical-extremists/#cancon The result is a grotesquely asymmetrical digital world, in which companies are free to use the flexibility of digital computers to downgrade or brick your digital devices, but where you commit a crime if you avail yourself of a countermeasure to get more out of something you own. This is the core technological factor at play in enshittification. Enter AI. Thanks to vibe-coding, everyday people are rolling their own software for their devices and building the tools to shatter the digital locks that manufacturers use to block disenshittification. An excellent article by 404 Media's Jason Koebler runs down some of these hacks, including drop-in replacements for smart TV software that blocks the endless ads and surveillance that have made TVs all but unusable: https://www.404media.co/reverse-engineer-anything-is-the-new-wild-west-of-ai/ These AI tools mix several techniques to disenshittify users' devices. One major component is automating the installation of existing alternative firmware for these devices that have been (possibly illegally) created by hobbyists and uploaded to various code repositories. Installing these alternative OSes is typically a gnarly task, requiring the user to do a lot of complex, fiddly, highly technical work to bypass their devices' digital locks. In a world without anticircumvention law, a company that sold alternative OSes could hire a ton of programmers and UX developers to smooth over this process, but this is beyond the reach of a typical hobbyist or even a community of hobbyists, especially if they must operate in the shadows, under the threat of civil and criminal liability. There's a useful analogy here to the trajectory of desktop versions of GNU/Linux. The first time I tried to install Linux (on an original iMac, in the late 1990s), the installation process included a multi-week post-installation wrangle that saw me (often unsuccessfully) compiling key modules from source code and then painstakingly configuring them to get the computer's graphics and I/O working reliably. Fast forward 30+ years and installing Linux is trivial, thanks to highly capitalized companies like Canonical (makers of Ubuntu, the flavor of Linux I've used for nearly 20 years now). Installing Ubuntu today merely requires that you download the OS to a thumbdrive, reboot your computer using the drive as a startup disk, and click "install." Canonical's installer automatically hunts down the correct software for your hardware and configures it. Canonical writes and contributes to a lot of parts of the Linux OS, but the most important work it does is the fiddly, painstaking, labor- and capital-intensive work of perfecting that installer so it Just Works. Much of what a vibe-coded jailbreaking tool does is stand in for Canonical, but for hobbyist OSes for smart TVs and speakers and many other devices. These LLMs patiently research every weird error and peccadillo and parse through message boards and logfiles detailing other hobbyists' struggles to get the code working and methodically apply and adapt those solutions until your device Just Works. Some of these vibe-coded interop tools go farther than that. According to Koebler's coverage, some device owners had their coding assistants scratch-build entirely new, heavily customized OSes for their devices, complete with bypasses that allow this new code to be installed despite the manufacturer's countermeasures which are designed to prevent this. Delightfully, many of these users have created software that revives their bricked, discontinued devices. This poses the possibility of a world in which manufacturers no longer have the last word in your use of your own property: the mere fact that the manufacturer lost interest in a device and killswitched it does not mean that you must consign that valuable device to a landfill to become immortal, toxic e-waste. All of this is good news. Some of the most sophisticated jailbreaking tools (such as those on the super viral "Reverse Engineer Anything" Github page) run locally, on your own computer, without invoking the "frontier models" that the big, awful AI companies have created: https://github.com/morluto/rea This is good even if you're just modifying your own devices to get them to more closely conform to your own use-case. LLMs are genuinely good at coming up with the abstruse and obscure configuration lines and other incantations to get your technology working. Recently, I used a local model to fine-tune the power-management on my new laptop in ways that go beyond the options that are exposed through user-friendly graphic interfaces. The LLM spat out a grub "GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT" line that (again) Just Worked. The last time I had to do this, I spent days painstakingly trouble-shooting options by trial-and-error. Using a chatbot to fill in the gaps left by decisions about which configuration options to place within reach of regular users and which to reserve for power-users has made my computer much more useful to me for the things I want to do, like writing and making collages. The reality is that it's just not practical for technology developers to turn every conceivable function of your computer into a simple-to-use, accessible tool. A large part of technology design is about leaving things out (or, as my favorite Eno Oblique Strategy goes, "Be the first person to not do something that no one else has ever thought of not doing before"). No matter how thoughtful and diligent a technology designer is, they will never fully anticipate the needs and exigencies of their users. That's why the motto of the disability rights movement is "Nothing about us without us." The users of technology know more about their use-cases than can ever be captured through a requirements gathering exercise and user testing. One of the best and proudest legacies of technology is the lineage of "user-friendly" programming tools that let nontechnical people design their own applications that exactly met their needs, from Hypercard to Visual Basic to Scratch, a lineage that vibe-coding tools are arguably part of: https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/25/other-people/#right-there But these tools are not perfect (nothing is). For all that Hypercard lets you do many things that would otherwise require a skilled programmer, it was also always limited relative to, say, writing MacOS code in Objective C. Your Hypercard program might do exactly what you needed it to, but slowly, and sometimes unreliably, and with serious limitations, such as a relatively low ceiling for the number of records you could add to a database. Vibe-coded personal apps aren't necessarily subject to these limitations, but they come with some significant risks. Vibe-code can have serious security vulnerabilities that expose the user to things like identity theft or sextortion. It's conceivable that a vibe-coded garage-door opener app might make it possible for attackers to open your garage door when you're not home (or worse, when you are!). Depending on your risk-tolerance and expertise, these might be acceptable prices, or they might be too high. But it's important to clearly identify the problem here: if the alternative OS you install on your smart TV exposes you to privacy-invading hack attacks, the problem is the defect in that software. The problem isn't that you had the temerity to rip out the manufacturer's own software and replace it with code of your choosing. You bought that TV, it's yours, and you don't owe the manufacturer an obligation to expose yourself to its own, built-in, intentional surveillance and invasive ads. Here's a parallel: you have the right to put any shoelaces in your running shoes. Sure, Nike might prefer you to lace up your Jordans with its expensive OEM laces, but that's Nike's problem, not yours. Now, Nike might argue that by using no-name laces, you run the risk of having a lace break while you're running, which could also break your ankle. That's certainly a possibility: shoelaces do break, and Nike might be justifiably proud of the quality of its laces. But if your generic laces snap (and so does your ankle), the problem is that the shoelaces you chose were defective. The problem is not that you chose someone else's laces. Your stuff is yours. You can put anyone's milk on your cereal, not just the milk that Kellogg's endorses. If the milk you choose is sour and you have to pour your cereal down the toilet, that's too bad, but it doesn't mean that Kellogg's should have the right to shame you for having the temerity to choose the milk you preferred, and it certainly doesn't militate for DMCA-style enforcement to coerce you into using Kellogg's official milk in the name of protecting you from food wastage. I raise this because there's a live debate over this subject, which is well represented in the latest 404 Media podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbG1qwxMtU0 In the podcast, Koebler and his 404 co-founder Joseph Cox express misgivings about various possible uses of "slop interop." Koebler discusses the fact that John Deere sells the same physical tractor at many different price-points, depending on which software a farmer chooses, and raises the possibility that a farmer might vibe-code software that replicates the high-end functionality without paying for it. Koebler discusses two possible downsides to this: first, that the vibe-coded software might be defective and expose the farmer to risk; and second, a question about whether it's fair or just for a farmer to get those additional functions of their tractor without paying for them. I think the first objection is entirely legitimate. The software you run on your expensive tractor should be secure, both for your own benefit and for the security of our food supply. That's actually a pretty good reason to ditch John Deere's own software, which is very insecure: https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/ But I think the second question – whether it's legit to get this functionality without paying John Deere for it – is spurious. Sure, if John Deere provides you with that functionality, then they can send you the bill for it. But if you provide yourself with that functionality, using software you procured independently of John Deere, then John Deere has no right to get paid for it, and they certainly shouldn't have the right to stop you. That tractor is yours. The fact that John Deere manufactured it is irrelevant. If you pay a contractor to build a house for you and later on pay a different contractor to add another bathroom to it, you don't owe the first contractor anything. It's your house (and if that bathroom has a leaky toilet, that's a matter between you and the second contractor, and not a reason to force you to only use your original contractor). The law defines a narrow slice of functions that manufacturers get to control: those ideas that a patent examiner deems "novel, useful and nonobvious." It's legit (and good) for commercial operators to copy and improve the ideas of their rivals and competitors. It's why skilled tradespeople cluster together in the same geographic area. Take Clerkenwell, the neighborhood in London where precision machining was invented by the jewelers and machinists who clustered there during the Longitude rewards. The reason all those competitors sought such close promixity to one another was because they wanted to copy the new techniques their rivals were developing (even if that meant that their rivals would be able to copy them): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_rewards If you're old enough to remember the advent of spreadsheets and the rollout of Visicalc, Lotus 1-2-3 and Excel, you'll know that every time a software vendor invented a new spreadsheet feature, all the other ones immediately copied it. This wasn't bad for spreadsheets: it was good for spreadsheets, just as copying your competitors was good for precision machining in Clerkenwell. Everything from GNU/Linux (a feature-for-feature clone of AT&T Unix) to SAMBA (a plug-compatible clone of Microsoft's SMB) to iWork (file-compatible, feature compatible clones of MS Office's apps) came about through this "adversarial interoperability." What's more, the heyday of this kind of adversarial interop was also the heyday of disenshittification, the era in which any anti-feature installed by your existing vendor could be countered by a disenshittifying patch from a new one: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay The question of whether vibe-coded software is any good is separate from the question of whether it's good to replace the software in your devices, even if you replace it with software that has features that the manufacturer would normally charge a premium for. You are under no obligation to arrange your commercial affairs to the financial benefit of manufacturers, and anyone who claims to be surprised that someone they sold a device to used it to benefit themselves at the manufacturer's expenses is either disingenuous…or unserious. You bought it, it's yours. But just as this vibe-coded adversarial interop has drawn both valid and spurious criticism, it's also drawn excitement that is partially justified and partially overblown. When it comes to reviving bricked devices or rooting out the surveillance and ads from your smart TV, vibe-coded interop tools are genuinely exciting. These are the kinds of enshittification that can truly be remediated with individual jailbreaks. But the real, meaty examples of enshittification can't be addressed on an individual level – they require systemic fixes. If you jailbreak your iPhone so that it can use alternative app stores, that fact is not sufficient to cause those alternative app stores to come into existence. If we want to stop Apple from levying a $100b "app tax" on the digital economy, it's not enough for individuals to vibe-code their own iPhone patches. We need to repeal the law that bans jailbreaking iPhones, so that a would-be alternative app store can raise capital and pay programmers and tech support staff and salespeople to assemble rival catalogs of software and help customers figure out how to get up their phones to use it. The same goes for jailbreaking your printer so it accepts generic ink. Sure, this may work for you if you're up for refilling your own cartridges, and I'm sure that you can find someone on Alibaba who will sell you ink by the gallon. But the mere fact that a few users have secretly and privately jailbroken their inkjets won't conjure up a generic inkjet cartridge manufacturing sector. For that to happen, we need to make jailbreaking printers legal, not just possible. Indeed, if we want to improve the quality of all that jailbreaking code the chatbots are writing and circulating, we need to be able to put those jailbreaks in public repositories for public inspection and public critique. It's possible for some of the code produced by an LLM to be slop, and for other code to be fine, and for yet a third tranche of code to be remediable slop that can be made robust and reliable through auditing and refactoring. You can't figure out which is which if you have to keep that vibe code a secret on pain of a long prison-sentence. I think there's good cause to be excited at the prospect of getting your devices working better, or just working at all. I think that even if the code stops working after a while, that's still fine – either you got more use out of your device than you would have without the new code, or maybe you just make more code that runs for a while for you, and then you do it again. These individual improvements to your devices and technology are worth celebrating. But they are no substitute for systemic intervention. If we're going to have a new, good internet, a post-American internet that truly disenshittifies America's defective tech exports and replaces them with robust, transparent digital public goods, we need to make reverse-engineering legal again. Once we fix our policy, then we can fix our code: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition Hey look at this (permalink) Musk's Fake Flying Car And 'CEO Said A Thing!' Journalism https://karlbode.com/musks-fake-flying-car-and-ceo-said-a-thing-journalism/ High schoolers, students: the twilight of macronism https://thomaspiketty.wordpress.com/2026/10/20/high-schoolers-students-the-twilight-of-macronism/ The Singularity has been postponed https://johnquigginblog.substack.com/p/the-singularity-has-been-postponed-e77 How to install an app on your Commodore 64 https://www.anildash.com/2026/10/08/install-an-app-commodore-64/ A scammer could use what’s already exposed about you. https://www.malwarebytes.com/out-there Object permanence (permalink) #25yrsago Secret recording of Labour Whip demanding support for Iraq invasion https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/oct/22/uk.september11 #25yrsago LoC launches emulator-based digital file preservation https://web.archive.org/web/20011217002337/http://www.techreview.com/magazine/oct01/innovation5.asp #25yrsago Kevin Mitnick to play CIA lackey https://web.archive.org/web/20011111105016/http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/22395.html #15yrsago ACLU Tennessee brings suit against ICE officers who broke into house and said, “We don’t need a warrant, we’re ICE, the warrant is coming out of my balls.” https://web.archive.org/web/20111025092605/http://www.aclu.org/blog/immigrants-rights/we-dont-need-warrant-were-ice/ #15yrsago WIPO’s secret, corporate-run trademark enforcement meeting https://web.archive.org/web/20220121054715/https://craphound.com/PROGRAMManilaEdited10212011-FINAL.pdf #15yrsago Canada’s Supreme Court: Linking isn’t libel https://web.archive.org/web/20111026134334/http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-15374238 #15yrsago HOWTO recreate the Haunted Mansion’s singing busts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRtiiMW47i4 #10yrsago Facebook’s crackdown on publishers feeds has sites paying celebs to repost https://digiday.com/media/facebook-thirsty-publishers-turn-celebrities-worm-news-feed/ #10yrsago Internet-destroying outages were caused by “amateurish” IoT malware https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/10/hacked-cameras-dvrs-powered-todays-massive-internet-outage/ #10yrsago Tory minister’s filibuster kills Turing’s law and pardons for 65,000 persecuted gay men https://www.theguardian.com/law/2016/oct/21/chris-bryant-commons-plea-gay-pardon-law #10yrsago Trump hotels, faced with massive declines in bookings, rebrand as “Scion Hotels” https://web.archive.org/web/20161023182616/http://www.travelandleisure.com/hotels-resorts/trump-scion-hotels Upcoming appearances (permalink) Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46 Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24 https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai Vienna: TED AI, Oct 28-30 https://tedai-vienna.ted.com/ Kilkenny (Kilkenomics), Nov 6-8 https://kilkenomics.com/ Courtenay: Enshittification (Sid Williams Theatre Society), Nov 10 https://www.sidwilliamstheatre.com/events/cory-doctorow-talks-enshittification/ Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ Oxford: Ministry of the Future, Nov 23 https://ministryforthefuture.co.uk/events.html Sheffield: Reverse Centaur at Juno Books, Nov 25 https://www.outsavvy.com/event/40274/cory-doctorow-in-conversation Virtual: Enshittification, AI, and the Future of Technology (UBC Master of Educational Technology), Nov 28 https://met.ubc.ca/2026/09/met-speaker-series-cory-doctorow-enshittification-ai-and-the-future-of-technology/ Oxford: Bennett Oxford Symposium on Open Code in Science, Dec 9 https://www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/events/2026-bennett-institute-symposium/ Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6 https://montreal2027.ca/en Recent appearances (permalink) Life After AI (Brain Bar) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPPa43-n0vI Terms of Service with Clare Duffy (CNN) https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/terms-of-service-with-clare-duffy/episodes/458ce968-af5d-11f0-b539-13ed2afe25f8 AI, Work, and Power (Software Engineering Daily) AI, Work, and Power https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/podcasts/cory-doctorow-on-ai-work-and-power/ AI, Corporate Power, and the Fight for Worker Control (Plutopia) https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-ai-corporate-power-and-the-fight-for-worker-control/ How to Think About AI—Before It’s Too Late (Daniel Solove) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0xR3uEgGcc Latest books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 533 (27469 total). "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. 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