Science

Interesting Engineering ☛ Qubits break long-held quantum limit by evolving in superposed time paths

By letting a qubit evolve under a superposition (the property that enables a quantum object to exist in multiple states at the same time) of different time evolutions, they have pushed quantum correlations (the link between quantum objects or systems) beyond what was long considered an unbreakable bound.

Rlang ☛ Functional Analysis of Networks with freeCount

Functional analysis is useful for determining the functions of a set of interesting genes. These gene sets can be lists of genes produced from different analysis, including weighted gene co-expression network analysis (WGCNA).

What biological functions are driving the differences in gene co-expression?

The freeCount FA app will help you perform functional analysis of gene sets, which can be produced from differential expression (DE) or network analysis.

Burak Emir ☛ Indexed Reverse Polish Notation, an Alternative to AST

Today, I want to write about one such technique, an alternative to Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs). Inspired by the parse tree representation in the Carbon compiler, this post explains a way to represent parsed source code using a variation of Reverse Polish Notation (RPN), in a contiguous array.

We call this Indexed RPN. Ordering program parts in a linear sequence very naturally leads to machine interpretation, which is well-known for calculators but maybe a little less well known when there are scoped definitions and control flow structures.

This is by no means a new way of doing things, but with modern machines having plenty of memory, there may have been less pressure to reach for techniques that memory-friendly.

Career/Education

Science Alert ☛ Scientists Analyzed The Obituaries of 38 Million Americans. Here’s What They Found.

By analyzing the words that appeared again and again in memorials, we could see which values communities chose to emphasize when looking back on the lives of their loved ones, and how those patterns changed over time. Because the dataset included 38 million obituaries, the analysis ran on a supercomputer.

Westenberg ☛ The Harvest Will Come

What I failed to notice: that the fallow periods were doing something too. They were composting. I was taking in books and conversations and experiences without the pressure to immediately metabolize them into output. I was wandering without a map, which meant I sometimes stumbled into territory I never would have found if I’d been navigating by GPS.

The harvest seasons, when they returned, drew on seeds I hadn’t remembered planting.

Jason Becker ☛ Settled

I take comfort in feeling myself settle. I can feel the release of strain from holding up uncertainty. I can feel the sand seeping into the cracks, expertly filling me up. I know that sand starts as impermanent, and that I still have time for small adjustments, just as I know that sand in time becomes stone. When I settle, it frees my energy and my attention. It creates space above me that can continue to grapple with those areas that need to change. It gives me capacity to keep moving, keep straining, keep growing, and keep open the other parts of me.

Hardware

The Verge ☛ The best thing I bought this year: a portable mechanical keyboard

Now, I am no connoisseur of mechanical keyboards, but I find the Air60 V2 to be delightful to type on. Its low-profile keys don’t have the same travel and feedback as my regular keyboard or my vintage IBM Model M, but it is still an enormous improvement over my MacBook’s scissor switch keyboard. The Moss switches offer decent-enough thock, but they’re not so loud that I would avoid using the keyboard in public. It might be a bit much for a quiet cafe, but I’ve sat and worked on articles and short stories while seated at a bar and definitely didn’t feel self-conscious about it.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

Vox ☛ Antibiotic drugs in meat production surged in 2024, according to new FDA data

Around a decade ago, the US implemented new rules to limit the widespread use of antibiotics in meat and dairy production, in an effort to combat the nation’s antibiotic resistance crisis. The regulations helped: Antibiotic sales for use on farms plunged by 43 percent from 2015 to 2017, and plateaued thereafter.

But now, that progress appears to be backsliding. According to recently published data from the Food and Drug Administration, sales of antibiotics for use in livestock surged by an alarming 15.8 percent in 2024 from the previous year.

Louie Mantia ☛ A Matter of Perspective

From that perspective, why even bother getting angry?

The Grocer ☛ Toffee Crisp and Blue Riband are no longer ‘chocolate’

In the UK, confectionery can only lawfully be described as milk chocolate if it contains a minimum of 20% cocoa solids and 20% milk solids.

Proprietary

The Register UK ☛ Microsoft RasMan 0-day gets an unofficial patch and exploit

RasMan is a critical Windows service that manages VPN and other remote network connections, and CVE-2025-59230 allows an authorized attacker to elevate privileges locally and gain SYSTEM privileges. It essentially takes advantage of the fact that when RasMan is not running, any process can impersonate RasMan and execute code on an RPC endpoint - a condition the exploit depends on.

Bleeping Computer ☛ Over 10,000 Docker Hub images found leaking credentials, auth keys

More than 10,000 Docker Hub container images expose data that should be protected, including live credentials to production systems, CI/CD databases, or LLM model keys.

The secrets impact a little over 100 organizations, among them are a Fortune 500 company and a major national bank.

Paris Buttfield-Addison ☛ 20 Years of Digital Life, Gone in an Instant, thanks to Apple | hey.paris

Summary: A major brick-and-mortar store sold an Apple Gift Card that Apple seemingly took offence to, and locked out my entire Apple ID, effectively bricking my devices and my iCloud Account, Apple Developer ID, and everything associated with it, and I have no recourse. Can you help? Email paris AT paris.id.au (and read on for the details). ❤️

Here’s how Apple “Permanently” locked my Apple ID.

I am writing this as a desperate measure. After nearly 30 years as a loyal customer, authoring technical books on Apple’s own programming languages (Objective-C and Swift), and spending tens upon tens upon tens of thousands of dollars on devices, apps, conferences, and services, I have been locked out of my personal and professional digital life with no explanation and no recourse.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

Nebraska Examiner ☛ States will keep pushing AI laws despite Trump’s efforts to stop them

The letter, signed by 280 state lawmakers from across the country, shows that state legislators from both parties want to retain their ability to craft their own AI legislation, said South Dakota Democratic state Sen. Liz Larson, who co-wrote the letter.

Earlier this year, South Dakota Republican Gov. Larry Rhoden signed the state’s first artificial intelligence law, authored by Larson, prohibiting the use of a deepfake — a digitally altered photo or video that can make someone appear to be doing just about anything — to influence an election.

The Nation ☛ The Slop of Things to Come

If you hunt down an archived version of it, you will instantly recognize the McDonald’s ad as unadulterated AI slop. It’s got that weird soft-light patina on faces and a host of twitchy character movements that earmark it as hygienic fakery. If you freeze-frame it at any point, you’ll spy an odd background “actor” taking up space for no discernible reason, or a Library of Babel set design that no sane human being would occupy. And as with most popular AI videos, there’s also the uncanny lack of an implied moment before or after. The cascading sequences in the ad are all atemporal—Santa on a sleigh stuck in traffic, a woman caught in a tram’s closing doors and violently whipped offscreen, kitchen spills, anthropomorphic cookies burning in an oven—and, for some reason, crying.

The Nation ☛ Corporate Democrats Are Foolishly Surrendering the AI Fight

Whether intentionally or not, the cover highlights many of the reasons AI has become a polarizing political issue. Like AI itself, Time has elevated the ultrarich at the expense of the working class, who are displaced and erased. The cover also thwarts creativity by mindlessly aping an earlier work of art, another shared trait with AI.

The Register UK ☛ AI datacenter boom could end badly, Goldman Sachs warns

But doubts have been raised about just how much return on investment (ROI) will come from the current AI frenzy, with IT firm Lenovo finding earlier this year that many business leaders were unconvinced that AI is worth the expense, while another report claimed that forecasts of future demand are based on little more than guesswork.

The Register UK ☛ BA boss fears AI agents could make brands invisible

That shift poses an existential branding challenge for airlines, hotels, and other travel firms whose products are selected less by people browsing and more by machines optimizing outcomes on their behalf, according to Doyle. If AI agents become the default gatekeepers, the question for BA is no longer just how to appeal to customers, but how to ensure the airline remains legible, relevant, and trusted by software acting in their stead.

Social Control Media

The Age AU ☛ Moffat Beach death: Teenage girl dies after cliff fall on Sunshine Coast

Nine News Queensland reported she had jumped the fence to take a photo when she slipped.

Bystanders rushed to the clifftop, and a second woman was injured while trying to help.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

The Center for Investigative Reporting ☛ How a US Citizen Was Scanned With ICE’s Facial Recognition Tech

“This is a flagrant violation of rights and incompatible with a free society,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy project director for the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “Immigration agents have no business scanning our faces with this glitchy, privacy-destroying technology—especially after often stopping people based on nothing more than the color of their skin or the neighborhood they live in.”

SBS ☛ US could ask Australian tourists to submit five years of social media history

Under the proposed new rules, the collection of social media data would become a "mandatory" part of ESTA applications.

Applicants would need to provide their social media histories from the last five years, according to the notice.

They would also have to submit other "high-value data fields" including phone numbers from the last five years, email addresses from the past decade, personal details of family members and biometric information.

Ruben Schade ☛ Social media history to enter the US

It’s all pretty egregious. You start to wonder what the point of visa-free travel is between (former?) allies if the approval process starts to look like… well, a visa. Which if I’m going to go through that, I may as well head back to Vietnam instead. I know right, it’s a hard life, but someone has to travel it!

Don Marti ☛ catalog retail after DROP: a web publisher opportunity?

The Delete Request and Opt-out Platform (DROP) is coming to California. California residents will get one web site to delete their information from all 500 registered data brokers in the state. DROP is the result of the California DELETE Act, which Tom Kemp, now director of CalPrivacy, wrote an Analysis on when it passed in 2023.

Ben Werdmuller ☛ T.S.A. Is Providing Air Passenger Data to Immigration Agents for Deportation Effort

The identity of every single domestic air traveler has been sent to ICE since March of this year: [...]

Defence/Aggression

The Moscow Times ☛ EU Agrees to Indefinite Freeze of Russian Central Bank Assets

The move removes a major hurdle to using the roughly 210 billion euros in Russian sovereign assets immobilized in Europe to support Ukraine as Russia’s nearly four-year invasion drags on.

CS Monitor ☛ No one has faced trial for 2020 ‘fake electors’ plan. In Wisconsin, it might happen.

On Monday, three people charged in what became known as the “fake electors” plan are in court for a pretrial hearing in a case that is one of a vanishing few still moving forward.

Hamilton Nolan ☛ If He Builds It, Tear It Down

It is equally important that every voracious tech company, defense contractor, and wealthy pardon-seeking criminal giving the money to build this insult to architecture understand that their investment in bootlicking will not pay off. On the contrary. We have your names, you rogues. When your patron is finally run out of town, attractive graphics with all of your names will be broadcast as we eradicate the ill-conceived product of your payoffs. We will erect a nice historic marker on the rebuilt East Wing noting the identities of the unpatriotic collection of corporatists who rushed to grovel in front of the mad king in search of personal gain. These leeches of democracy will be classed with the Benedict Arnolds of American history. We will see to that. That is part of the deal. That is what is going to happen.

Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

[Old] NATO ☛ Countering hybrid threats | NATO Topic

Hybrid threats combine military and non-military as well as covert and overt means, including disinformation, cyber attacks, economic pressure, deployment of irregular armed groups and use of regular forces. Hybrid methods are used to blur the lines between war and peace, and attempt to sow doubt in the minds of target populations. They aim to destabilise and undermine societies.

The speed, scale and intensity of hybrid threats have increased in recent years. Being prepared to prevent, counter and respond to hybrid attacks, whether by state or non-state actors, is a top priority for NATO.

[Old] CSIS ☛ Russia’s Shadow War Against the West

Russia is conducting an escalating and violent campaign of sabotage and subversion against European and U.S. targets in Europe led by Russian military intelligence (the GRU), according to a new CSIS database of Russian activity. The number of Russian attacks nearly tripled between 2023 and 2024. Russia’s primary targets have included transportation, government, critical infrastructure, and industry, and its main weapons and tactics have included explosives, blunt or edged instruments (such as anchors), and electronic attack. Despite the increase in Russian attacks, Western countries have not developed an effective strategy to counter these attacks.

Environment

Energy/Transportation

Futurism ☛ Literal Teens Are Losing It All at [Cryptocurrency] Casinos

According to new reporting from the New York Times, teenagers and young adults are blowing their fortunes on shady online [cryptocurrency] casinos, lured there by a sleazy web of streamers and celebrities who are paid to essentially be casino recruiters.

Wired ☛ Google Data Centers Are Returning Nuclear Power to Tornado Country

A destructive storm in 2020 prematurely shut down Iowa’s only nuclear plant. With Google’s plans to reopen it to power nearby data centers, will extreme weather threaten the reactor’s safety?

Nick Heer ☛ Boom Says Its Hypothetical Jet Engine Produces ‘Clean’ Electricity, and I Think Words Mean Things

The promotional video for this Superpower generator promises “42 megawatts of clean electricity”. This is, I will remind you, powered by a jet engine. I think even an advertising standards body used to hyperbole would question that definition of “clean”.

NPR ☛ Germany’s train service is one of Europe’s worst. How did it get so bad?

After decades of neglect, the government has announced a 100-billion-euro investment in rail infrastructure. But Lukas Iffländer, vice chair of the railway passenger lobby group Pro Bahn, says it will take more than money to get German trains back on track.

"We are now paying the price for years and years of neglect, basically since 1998," Iffländer says. It’s not just crumbling tracks and sticky signals that need attention, he explains, but the network operator’s overly bureaucratic infrastructure.

Overpopulation

Los Angeles Times ☛ Federal gov’t should stop giving scarce water for free, report says

The water that flows down irrigation canals to some of the West’s biggest expanses of farmland comes courtesy of the federal government for a very low price — even, in some cases, for free.

In a new study, researchers analyzed wholesale prices charged by the federal government in California, Arizona and Nevada, and found that large agricultural water agencies pay only a fraction of what cities pay, if anything at all. They said these “dirt-cheap” prices cost taxpayers, add to the strains on scarce water, and discourage conservation — even as the Colorado River’s depleted reservoirs continue to decline.

Finance

India Times ☛ Govt eyes big push to digital currency programme, says official

Nagaraju said that new government schemes driven through digital currencies can help scale this programme. The CBDC, a digital currency issued by the central bank for everyday transactions, was launched in late 2022.

Linuxiac ☛ KDE Surpasses 2025 Fundraiser Goal With Record Community Support

I say this because, according to the latest data, KDE has surpassed its 2025 fundraising goal by a wide margin, reaching €276K—an impressive 276% of the original €100K target. Updated daily, the campaign’s progress bar now stretches far beyond its intended limit, reflecting an exceptional wave of support from users and contributors across the open-source community.

CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Federal Wallet Inspectors

Look, I’m not trying to say that new technologies never raise gnarly new legal questions, but what I am saying is that a lot of the time, the "new legal challenges" raised by technology are somewhere between 95-100% bullshit, ginned up by none-too-bright tech bros and their investors, and then swallowed by regulators and lawmakers who are either so credulous they’d lose a game of peek-a-boo, or (likely) in on the scam.

Take "fintech." As Trashfuture’s Riley Quinn is fond of saying, "when you hear ‘fintech,’ think ‘unregulated bank’": [...]

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

The Local SE ☛ ‘I feel alienated’: American dual nationals in Europe ready to renounce citizenship

On December 1st 2025, Republican Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio introduced the "Exclusive Citizenship Act of 2025” to the US Senate. The proposed bill, if it ever became law, would effectively force Americans to choose between their American passport and any foreign citizenship. Understandably it sparked shockwaves among US passport holders living in Europe and around the world.

Hong Kong Free Press ☛ EU agrees three-euro small parcel tax to tackle China flood

EU finance ministers agreed Friday to impose a three-euro duty on all small parcels imported into the bloc starting July 1, 2026, to help tackle a flood of cheap imports by the likes of Shein and Temu.

The Moscow Times ☛ Belarus Frees Protest Leader, Nobel Laureate in Deal With U.S.

Belarus has released 123 prisoners, including protest leader Maria Kalesnikava, Nobel Peace Prize-winning rights activist Ales Bialiatski and ex-presidential candidate Viktar Babaryka, in exchange for the United States lifting some of its sanctions on Minsk.

CBC ☛ Belarus frees Nobel winner, top opposition figures as U.S. lifts more sanctions

In return, the United States agreed to lift sanctions on Belarusian potash. Potash is a key component in fertilizers, and the former Soviet state is a leading global producer.

The prisoner release was by far the biggest by Lukashenko since Trump’s administration opened talks this year with the veteran authoritarian leader, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

US News And World Report ☛ Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and Others Who Took on Belarus’ President Are Among the Freed Prisoners

Belarusian authorities have freed 123 prisoners, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ales Bialiatski and key opposition figures Maria Kolesnikova and Viktar Babaryka, as part of a deal with Washington that lifted U.S. sanctions on the Eastern European country’s vital fertilizer exports

Court House News ☛ Belarus releases Nobel prize laureate Bialiatski in exchange for US sanctions relief

A close ally of Russia, Minsk has faced Western isolation and sanctions for years. Lukashenko has ruled the nation of 9.5 million with an iron fist for more than three decades, and the country has been repeatedly sanctioned by Western countries both for its crackdown on human rights and for allowing Moscow to use its territory in the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Belarus has released hundreds of prisoners since July 2024.

Earlier Saturday, the United States said it was lifting sanctions on Belarusian potash in the latest sign of a thaw between Washington and the isolated autocracy.

Pivot to AI ☛ Why Disney just put $1 billion into OpenAI

Disney thinks it’s the Mafia. But OpenAI is not a regular business you can send the boys round to shake down. It’s a weird money-burning scam that’s shaped a bit like a business.

So OpenAI just talked Disney, the biggest thugs in Hollywood, into giving them money for a bag of magic beans. One thing I’ll give Scam Altman, he’s got a silver tongue. Best monorail salesman in the business.

What does all this mean?

Variety ☛ Disney Accuses Google of Using AI to Engage in Copyright Infringement on ‘Massive Scale’

As Disney has gone into business with OpenAI, the Mouse House is accusing Google of copyright infringement on a “massive scale” using AI models and services to “commercially exploit and distribute” infringing images and videos.

On Wednesday evening, attorneys for Disney sent a cease-and-desist letter to Google, demanding that Google stop the alleged infringement in its AI systems.

Censorship/Free Speech

RFERL ☛ Iranian Nobel Prize Laureate Narges Mohammadi Arrested

According to the Narges Mohammadi Foundation, the arrest took place on December 11, during an event marking the seventh day after the death of Khosrow Alikordi, a prominent lawyer and human rights advocate.

Hong Kong Free Press ☛ China defends jailing bookseller Gui Minhai after UN group urges release

Human rights experts called Gui’s detention “arbitrary” in an opinion adopted by the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) dated October and made public on Wednesday.

The Telegraph UK ☛ ‘I dared to question gender theory at Cambridge. Students carved Terf into my door’

“Her tone was completely different to anything that it had ever been to my face,” she said. “She told me that I was a bigot and that everyone deserved to know my hateful views on trans people.”

The friend then ended the call and Ms Sewell had a panic attack. Over the next fortnight, she struggled to sleep and said she was “completely cut off by pretty much all of my friends, bar maybe one or two”.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

Gregory Hammond ☛ My thoughts on slow journalism

I know I’m tired of reading articles that include with “company did not immediately respond to a request for comment”, keep being updated with new information, or I find the worst to be new articles coming out with more information. If these companies engaged with slow journalism, not only would all of this hopefully stop, it would allow journalists to produce better stories, and hopefully gain more readers.

Rolling Stone ☛ How Sean Combs’ Latest Move Is a Threat to Journalists Worldwide

The footage includes Combs launching into a tirade against former Danity Kane and Diddy-Dirty Money artist Dawn Richard after learning of her sexual harassment lawsuit against him and strategizing with his attorneys days before his September 2024 arrest. “We have to find somebody that’ll work with us,” Combs says in the footage. “That has dealt in the dirtiest of dirty business. We’re losing!”

Asked how he got the footage, executive producer Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson declined to answer, explaining, “I figured most journalists would not disclose their sources.” (Side note: Some federal appellate judges could learn a thing or two about journalist-source confidentiality from Jackson.)

Civil Rights/Policing

NDTV ☛ ‘Pins On Map’: How Chicago Students Are Tracking Immigration Raids

Student and veteran journalists say that college newsrooms, independent media and legacy outlets across Chicago are now working together in ways that upend decades of cutthroat competition, building tools to track enforcement and collaborating on information.

Nebraska Examiner ☛ Wounded Knee Massacre site protection bill passes Congress

U.S. Rep. Dusty Johnson, R-South Dakota, sponsored the legislation in the House, where it passed in January. Sen. Mike Rounds sponsored the legislation in the Senate, where it passed Thursday, with Majority Leader John Thune as a cosponsor. Both are Republicans from South Dakota.

Manuel Matuzović ☛ A11y Considerations in Math on the Web - HTMHell

Maybe it has happened to you that you wanted to write some formulas in HTML to display on a website, and even though there are multiple ways to do it, accessibility is often not considered in the process. How the formula is read by screen readers is crucial to ensure that we don’t leave anyone behind. And the main assistive technologies are in different stages, as we will see.

Manuel Matuzović ☛ Hell is other people’s markup - HTMHell

Before I continue, it might be worth explaining a bit about what I do in my day-to-day role to provide context about why this all came about.

Rolling Stone ☛ Frank Ray, Country Singer, Blasts ICE for Detaining Brother-in-Law

"There’s a difference between heroes ... and systems that forget people are human," he wrote on social media

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

BoingBoing ☛ Cory Doctorow on enshittification and Big Tech monopolies

Cory said don’t blame consumers for the state of the [Internet]. The responsibility lies with policymakers who allowed these monopolies to form and with the companies that exploited every available loophole. His solution involves antitrust enforcement, tech worker unions, and giving users the ability to take their data and connections with them when they leave a platform.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

Semafor Inc ☛ Opposition to Netflix-Warner deal grows in Washington

“The transaction warrants rigorous antitrust review under all applicable antitrust merger and monopolization laws and, to the extent appropriate, a lawsuit to block it,” Scott wrote in the letter, which was sent to the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission and reviewed by Semafor.

Copyrights

Torrent Freak ☛ Online Piracy Can Boost Box Office Revenue, Study Suggests

A new academic study counterintuitively concludes that online piracy can boost revenue for some films. By analyzing years of box office data, as well as upload details from The Pirate Bay, researchers found that high-quality leaks of "spectacle" movies, such as Marvel blockbusters, appear to increase theater attendance. For "story-driven" films, however, the opposite is true.