Yay: The Supreme Court just embraced science and sense over hysteria and trial-lawyer greed, slapping down an entire class of lawsuits that aimed to suck hundreds of billions of dollars out of US businesses just because (as bank robber Willie Sutton once put it) “that’s where the money is.”
In the case at hand, the junk-science claim was that Roundup, the widely used weedkiller, caused a Missouri man’s cancer — so the company that makes it owed him (and his lawyers!) $1.25 million because it never put a warning to that effect on the label.
The problem is, the federal Environmental Protection Agency has repeatedly tested that claim about glyphosate (the herbicide’s key ingredient) and found no such effect, and so refuses to require a warning.
By 7-2, the justices ruled that state courts can’t create their own standards for such warnings when the feds have already acted.
FIFRA (the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act) established a single national labeling system specifically to avoid a proliferation of state requirements.
This ruling nixes thousands of similar suits against Bayer (which bought Roundup’s maker, Monsanto, in 2019), and countless more efforts to sue other companies with similar theories.
Since judgments in Roundup cases have hit the billions, the lawsuits were never going to stop until the Supremes shut the racket down.
985,841 passport scans (including mine), and the private messages of every member it ever served on a server with no authentication //
1,020,457 members 94% of the total are classified by the software as medicinal cannabis users. Whether they used the PuffPal app or not. Whether they had ever heard of PuffPal or not.
Under GDPR Article 9, health data is the most protected category of personal information. It cannot be processed without explicit consent and adequate safeguards. A breach of health data triggers the highest tier of regulatory penalties up to €20 million or 4% of global annual turnover. The standard notification obligations under Article 33 apply within 72 hours of discovery.
The irony is architectural. The clubs collect all this information, apply a medical classification to every member, store that classification alongside passport scans and home addresses and then left all of it accessible via an unauthenticated HTTP endpoint that accepted any integer from 1 to however many members the club had.
The physical bouncer at the door checks your member card. The digital one wasn't there.
The ferry broke down at exactly the wrong moment for everyone except Henry Ford.
On June 8, 1909, two stripped-down Ford Model Ts rolled onto a little wooden ferry at Glasgow, Mo., and crossed the Missouri River. The cars were filthy, the men inside them were running on fumes, and a Boston-built Shawmut was closing fast behind them in a cross-country race.
Then the ferry quit. The boat that’d just carried the Fords to the western bank suddenly couldn’t return for the Shawmut or the Acme, another trailing car. The official explanation was mechanical failure, but the timing looked almost theatrical. //
The Shawmut crew, stranded on the wrong side of the river, had a choice. They could lose hours searching for another crossing. Or they could aim the car toward the railroad bridge looming above the water, a half-mile of ties, gaps and terror, with no guarantee a train wouldn’t come roaring through. They chose the bridge.
Quick Summary: The right charging current for NiMH batteries is crucial for their health and longevity. Generally, aim for a charge current between 0.1C and 0.5C, where ‘C’ is the battery’s capacity. A slow charge (0.1C) prolongs battery life, while a fast charge (0.5C) is quicker but can generate more heat. Always check your battery and charger specifications for exact recommendations to ensure safe and effective charging.
Microsoft ended official support for Windows 10 in 2025, but the company may have a harder time than expected putting the operating system out to pasture. After promising a year of optional extended update support, Microsoft has changed its policy, tacking on another year to its Extended Security Updates (ESU) program. If you are still clinging to Windows 10, you don’t have to do anything but enjoy that extra year. //
That program was set to end on October 12, 2026, but Microsoft has updated its policy with hardly a whisper, pushing back the end of extended updates to October 12, 2027. The ESU support page was updated with that date, and Microsoft’s blog post on the program has a new editor’s note confirming the change.
Earlier this month, a German court ruled that Google is liable for its AI search summaries. Rejecting defenses like “users can check for themselves,” and that they generally know “that information generated with AI should not be blindly trusted,” the court held that the AI’s summaries are reflections of the company and “above all an expression of Google’s business activities.” //
AI agents are agents of the person or organization that deploys them—and should be treated by the law as such. If a company hired human writers to write its summaries, that company would be liable for inaccuracies in those summaries. If a company’s human agent signed contracts in the company’s name, that company would be bound by those contracts. And if a doctor gave dangerously wrong medical advice, they would be liable for malpractice.
To allow businesses to hide behind the excuse of faulty AI in those same circumstances would be a massive handout to companies, and would introduce disastrous incentives for corporate misbehavior. Why hire human writers, lawyers or doctors when AIs are not only cheaper, but also absolve employers whenever they make a mistake?
We are rapidly moving to a world where AI-powered chatbots will be at the other end of all sorts of corporate communications channels. It makes no sense for a company to be able to honor its statements when it wants to and disavow them when it doesn’t. //
If the German ruling holds, it could be devastating for Google’s AI Overview feature. Tests from earlier this year found that it had mistakes about 10% percent of the time. At more than 5tn searches per year, that’s 16,000 erroneous summaries every second. And while most of those errors are benign, some of them will cause harm, be defamatory, or otherwise trigger liability.
Earlier this year, Google’s AI summary falsely identified the Canadian fiddler Ashley MacIsaac of being a sex offender. His lawsuit, filed in Ontario, is ongoing. If Google is forced to invest in improving its AI system until those kinds of errors are exceedingly rare, that seems like a good outcome for users, as well as the subjects of search, like MacIsaac.
More generally, liability concerns could mean that many current use cases for agents won’t be commercially viable. Companies may not be able to profitably operate AI lawyers, doctors and media influencers if they are held responsible for what they say and do.
On Wednesday, NASA’s Office of the Inspector General prepared a memorandum on the elements of the Artemis Program that NASA was canceling as its focus shifted to the Moon’s surface. These were:
Exploration Upper Stage, an upgrade for the Space Launch System rocket
Universal Stage Adapter, which links the Orion spacecraft to the Exploration Upper Stage
Mobile Launcher 2, a larger launch tower for the upgraded Space Launch System rocket
Habitation and Logistics Outpost, a habitation module for the Lunar Gateway
The memorandum notes that each of these projects has experienced substantial cost increases and numerous delays over the last decade.
“Over the course of their life cycles, the combined contract values for these efforts ballooned from nearly $2.8 billion to $5.9 billion and NASA extended their contracted delivery dates by up to seven years,” states the report by the inspector general. “However, our projections indicate that if NASA allowed work to continue to completion, the systems would have cost more and taken longer than what was on contract.”
There’s an enormous amount of liquidity in growth stocks, which means that you can use growth stocks to grow. You can buy other companies with shares, and shares are an endogenous substance that you make on the premises by typing zeros into a spreadsheet. Firms with growth stocks can grow by typing zeros, whereas firms that are mature, they have to use money if they want to grow, and you’re not allowed to make money on the premises. If you do, the Treasury Department shows up and takes you away in handcuffs. So you can see why firms would be very anxious to maintain the perception that they have room for growth even after they have 90 percent market shares.
That’s why those firms started promoting stories about how they were going to conquer imaginary markets. Imaginary markets have no agreed-upon valuation because you just made them up. Unless you can turn an imaginary market into a real market pretty quickly, you need to come up with another imaginary market and announce that this is the new imaginary market you’re going to conquer. It’s easier than you’d think because the capital markets have the object permanence of a toddler, and they would lose a game of peekaboo if they were drafted to play in the league. So you can say, “Oh, actually, it’s not metaverse. It’s crypto. It’s not crypto. It’s Web3. It’s not Web3. It’s something else.” And the markets will forgive you, provided you do it quickly enough. //
AI really appeals to a fantasy that I think all of us have to some extent but that powerful people really have, of a world without people in it—because hell really is other people. You can’t get stuff done without other people helping you. You can’t have romance without a romantic partner. You can’t have social media without people to socialize with. You can’t play a board game, or do a startup, or build a bridge, or build a house, or do politics without other people. And other people stubbornly refuse to organize everything they do to make you happy.
Particularly if you’re rich and powerful, it’s very galling. So AI is very attractive. //
If you combine those two things—the material necessity to have a growth narrative and the ideological attractiveness of a world without people—you get $1.4 trillion in CapEx for a sector that is turning over $50 billion a year and has to replace all of its assets every 24 to 30 months. //
Whereas the workers who hate it are workers who are being asked to produce more with AI at the expense of quality, at a higher speed, at the expense of their own wellbeing, and who understand that they’re being recruited to be what Dan Davies calls accountability sinks—to take the blame when the AI screws up their job. //
We hear plenty about the negative aspects of AI. What do you like about it?
Cory Doctorow: I have a couple of local models on my computer, which is just a framework laptop running Ubuntu. It doesn’t even have a GPU. I use Whisper to transcribe audio. I will sometimes want to cite something I’ve heard in a podcast and not remember where I heard it. One time, I just threw the last 30 hours of audio I’d listened to at Whisper, and it shot out verbatim logs that were good enough that when I searched the full text, I could find it. And it gave me time codes so I could check the transcript. That’s amazing.
The idea that I might someday have a computer full of audio and video files with full text indexing is great.
Forward when busy
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Name
Henry Willard Ortlip
Sex
Male
Event Type
Birth
Event Date
28 Mar 1886
Event Place
Norristown, Montgomery, Pennsylvania, United States
Event Place (Original)
Morristown, Montgomery, Pennsylvania
"Pennsylvania, Delayed Birth Records, 1780-1977", FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:877Q-TZPZ : Tue Jul 16 05:05:19 UTC 2024), Entry for Henry Willard Ortlip and William Henry Ortlip, 28 Mar 1886.
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𝗖𝗢𝗟𝗢𝗥 𝗔𝗖𝗖𝗨𝗥𝗔𝗖𝗬, 𝗗𝗘𝗙𝗜𝗡𝗘𝗗 𝗗𝗘𝗧𝗔𝗜𝗟: Ensure accurate, consistent color from one shot to another, across different cameras, lenses, and lighting environments, plus capture every detail with optimal RAW process in- batch processing
𝗕𝗨𝗗𝗚𝗘𝗧 𝗙𝗥𝗜𝗘𝗡𝗗𝗟𝗬, 𝗙𝗘𝗔𝗧𝗨𝗥𝗘-𝗥𝗜𝗖𝗛: It features 24 spectrally engineered color targets and a grey face target, all near/within the sRGB gamut to ensure compatibility with a wide range of devices. Perfect for visual comparisons and custom white balance adjustments.
Whether you’re capturing product shots for an online store, filming a documentary, or just snapping portraits, color accuracy matters. The problem often lies in your white balance.
Here’s the good news: there’s a simple, affordable tool that solves this a grey card.
In this article, you’ll learn how to use grey cards and white balancing for accurate color in photography and video.
So in October 2022, he co-founded a company called OurSky to leverage his software skills. He hired a computer scientist from the scooter company Bird, Connor Poole, to lead software engineering. They set about writing code to essentially mesh the observations of dozens of telescopes to track objects as they moved around the planet. The goal was to provide satellite operators the location of their spacecraft with sub-arcsecond precision within 90 seconds of a request.
This worked well enough, but Roelker and Poole soon realized that to really do this right, they needed more than good software; they had to build hardware as well. Neither had much experience with telescopes, and by then, most telescope manufacturing had moved offshore, primarily to China, including big players like Celestron. //
Roelker is happy to leave it to other companies to launch into space. He’s seen SpaceX from the inside and knows he could never compete with that. Likewise, there are many companies building spacecraft and satellite buses.
What those vehicles all need is the command of light. Rockets, and particularly spacecraft, need it to navigate. They need to see objects to avoid collisions. And somehow, with all of the data they are collecting and processing, they need to get it back to Earth. Because, otherwise, what’s the point?
Reframe is a self-hosted web application that serves as a complete video toolkit for cropping, formatting, and enhancing videos for social media. It lets you easily convert horizontal (16:9) footage into vertical (9:16), square (1:1), or custom aspect ratios with an intuitive browser-based editor. Built with FastAPI, Vue 3, and FFmpeg (with GPU support), it runs entirely locally via Docker ensuring your media files never leave your NAS. Additional features include batch processing, auto-generated TikTok-style subtitles via Whisper AI, text/logo overlays, trimming, custom fonts, preset management, and a media library with transcripts.
Fable requires much less expertise and detailed prompting from the human user. You can give it a difficult goal and it will figure out novel and unexpected ways to satisfy it, finding loopholes in whatever constraints you or the system have imposed on it.
“Relentlessly proactive” is how AI researcher Simon Willison described it. Another descriptor might be “creative.” Experienced AI developers have had that combination of creativity and proactivity since last year, but Fable puts it within easy reach of everyone.
In the hands of someone with a legitimate problem that needs solving, that can be an incredibly useful capability. But in the hands of someone who wants to do harm, it can be equally dangerous. AIs don’t have a moral compass in the same way that people do. They are agents of the wants and desires of the people who prompt them.
That points to the real problem with relentlessly proactive AI. In language, wants and desires are always underspecified. If I ask you to get me some coffee, you would probably pour me a cup from the coffeepot, or buy one from a nearby coffee shop.
You couldn’t buy me a pound of raw beans, or a coffee plantation. You wouldn’t order a cup of coffee for delivery next month. You wouldn’t find a nearby person, rip a cup of coffee out of their hands, and bring it to me. I wouldn’t have to specify any of the million limitations to my request; you would just know.
Human stories are filled with warnings about underspecified desires. King Midas wished that everything he touch turn to gold, forgetting to add “but not my food, drink, and daughter.” And genies are notorious for granting your wish in a way you wish they hadn’t.
The deeper point is that it’s impossible to list all limitations and restrictions, and like a malicious genie, a creative AI will find the ones you forgot. //
Malicious intent is not required. To an AI model, constraints are just things to get around and not general truisms about the world. They are creative problem solvers and natural rule breakers. They “hack” in the sense that they find and exploit loopholes.
Human systems rely on so many norms that we scarcely recognize the existence of until they are broken. AIs naturally think outside the box, because they don’t have any real conception of what the box is or why it’s there in the first place.
There is no foolproof way to prevent people from using AI models to complete harmful tasks. There is no way to prevent the models from incidentally causing harm while completing benign tasks. AI models are no longer isolated from the real world. They browse the internet and answer emails. ////
"Open weights" not "open models"
The next step toward verifying apps will come this month as Google deploys a new system service on most certified devices. The package (com.google.android.verifier) will appear on phones and tablets running Android 8 or higher, allowing Google to block the installation of unverified apps. It will remain dormant until verification is activated in your specific region. //
As detailed a few months ago, the advanced flow will allow users to bypass verification, but the process isn’t easy. You’ll have to navigate to a buried menu, confirm you understand the risks multiple times, and wait a whole day before completing the process.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/google-details-new-24-hour-process-to-sideload-unverified-android-apps/
Ornamental turning is the process of making art objects on a rotating axis with great care and precision, using a variety of materials, shaping tools and techniques. These objects can be elegant and refined, simple and spare, baroque and elaborate, or, occasionally, bizarre, as the taste and skill of the designer and maker dictates. //
Ornamentally turned objects are most often created from very dense hardwoods. During the Renaissance and into Victorian times, ivory was also a popular material; but now, of course, it is no longer used. To work these difficult materials, new and complex tools were developed. When early mariners were just beginning to use clocks to calculate longitude, the equipment and skills used in ornamental turning had already matured. The craft was using complex gears, precisely made polished steel parts, and accurately threaded screws that would only become common in industry much later. Wondrous, and previously unimaginable forms became possible because the tools became possible. //
The stellar machine in ornamental turning’s catalog of equipment is the rose engine. A rose engine is an advanced form of lathe with a rocking headstock mounted on pivots. The headstock’s motion is controlled by a complex set of cams, called rosettes, which revolve on the lathe’s spindle. The shapes created on the rose engine are derived from the patterns cut into the rosettes. It can be used to turn and decorate both wood, and metal, and, in centuries past, ivory as well. The rose engine’s name is derived from the observation that many of the patterns created on it are reminiscent of flower petals. Early records indicate the rose engine first appeared in the early 1500’s.
Tucked into the PCIe slot, alongside the high-speed data lanes everyone thinks about, sits a tiny, slow side-channel called the SMBus. It's a management bus, and it exists for housekeeping like reading a sensor or identifying a card, not for moving your data.
My HBA and my motherboard were both trying to use that bus during the earliest moments of POST, and they were stepping on each other badly enough to stall the whole boot. This doesn't happen to every card and motherboard combo, but it's common with specific LSI cards in consumer motherboards. My workstation PC would boot just fine with the card installed, which really confused me until I found a very informative video from Art of Server, showing a tape mod for my specific card and describing the failure mode I was experiencing. //
The two SMBus pins on the connector, positions B5 and B6, are defined by PCI-SIG as optional, with no required behavior for whatever an add-in card hangs off them. Simply covering these two pins on the card solves the conflict that happens at boot time. Kapton tape is the preferred material to do this, but I used normal electrical tape to good effect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBnNaheYmdA
https://static0.xdaimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/wm/2026/06/smbus-tape-mod-hba-card.png
RustDesk self-hosting keeps access fully yours
An open-source remote desktop you can run on your own server
To use RustDesk, download the client on both machines, note the ID and password on the remote device, type that ID into the host machine, and you'll be connected. Once the session is live, you get a toolbar with useful extras: screen recording, file transfer, remote terminal, and even a camera viewer for the remote device's webcam. The interface is consistent across platforms, so once you learn it on Windows, it feels the same on Linux or macOS.
To self-host, you need Docker running on a machine you want to use as the server. If you've set up Docker containers for other self-hosted services, this will feel familiar. Start by creating a directory for RustDesk and moving into it: ... //
RustDesk's self-hosted server comes in two versions: the free open-source edition and a paid Pro tier. The free version handles all the core functionality. You get the relay server, the ID server, end-to-end encrypted connections, and unlimited device access. There's no cap on how many machines you can connect, and no per-user licensing.
What the free tier lacks is the web-based management console. On the Pro version, you get a browser GUI for managing devices, users, and permissions from a central dashboard. If you're running an IT helpdesk or managing remote access for a team, that kind of visibility is worth the cost. But for a home lab or personal use, when you're connecting to a handful of machines you already know, the web console is a convenience, not a necessity.