Democratic lawmakers in Congress are furious
after the Trump administration announced plans to
💥limit classified information that is typically shared with both houses of the legislature -- following a leak regarding the U.S.’s recent military strikes on Iran.
After President Donald Trump and members of his cabinet claimed his ordered attacks on three sites in Iran last weekend “obliterated” the country’s nuclear capabilities,
a leaked intelligence document disputed tha…
I rarely leave my neighborhood these days, so when the opportunity came last weekend to visit a town about 80 km from my home, I took a little detour to visit and take photos of the town’s only national historical marker.
(Those who have been following me long enough know that documenting historical markers in #Wikidata and
Affaire de Bétharram : en 1998, les ratés de la justice face aux agresseurs présumés
https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2025/06/25/affaire-de-betharram-en-1998-les-rates-de-la-…
PACER electronic filing system under attack by hackers, federal judge warns lawmakers https://therecord.media/pacer-filing-system-under-attack
Historic Tokyo Bridge Liberated from Concrete Overpass Will Shine Again Thanks to Grassroots Campaign https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/historic-tokyo-bridge-pulled-out-from-under-highway-overpass-following-gra…
Just saw this:
#AI can mean a lot of things these days, but lots of the popular meanings imply a bevy of harms that I definitely wouldn't feel are worth a cute fish game. In fact, these harms are so acute that even "just" playing into the AI hype becomes its own kind of harm (it's similar to blockchain in that way).
@… noticed that the authors claim the code base is 80% AI generated, which is a red flag because people with sound moral compasses wouldn't be using AI to "help" write code in the first place. The authors aren't by some miracle people who couldn't build this app without help, in case that influences your thinking about it: they have the skills to write the code themselves, although it likely would have taken longer (but also been better).
I was more interested in the fish-classification AI, and how much it might be dependent on datacenters. Thankfully, a quick glance at the code confirms they're using ONNX and running a self-trained neural network on your device. While the exponentially-increasing energy & water demands of datacenters to support billion-parameter models are a real concern, this is not that. Even a non-AI game can burn a lot of cycles on someone's phone, and I don't think there's anything to complain about energy-wise if we're just using cycles on the end user's device as long as we're not having them keep it on for hours crunching numbers like blockchain stuff does. Running whatever stuff locally while the user is playing a game is a negligible environmental concern, unlike, say, calling out to ChatGPT where you're directly feeding datacenter demand. Since they claimed to have trained the network themselves, and since it's actually totally reasonable to make your own dataset for this and get good-enough-for-a-silly-game results with just a few hundred examples, I don't have any ethical objections to the data sourcing or training processes either. Hooray! This is finally an example of "ethical use of neutral networks" that I can hold up as an example of what people should be doing instead of the BS they are doing.
But wait... Remember what I said about feeding the AI hype being its own form of harm? Yeah, between using AI tools for coding and calling their classifier "AI" in a way that makes it seem like the same kind of thing as ChatGPT et al., they're leaning into the hype rather than helping restrain it. And that means they're causing harm. Big AI companies can point to them and say "look AI enables cute things you like" when AI didn't actually enable it. So I'm feeling meh about this cute game and won't be sharing it aside from this post. If you love the cute fish, you don't really have to feel bad for playing with it, but I'd feel bad for advertising it without a disclaimer.
Comscore: US box office revenue from May 1 have reached $3.53B, making it clear sales will be short of the $4B summer threshold, last attained in 2023 (Rebecca Rubin/Variety)
https://variety.com/2025/film/box-office/summer-box-office-wont-reach-4-b…
Probabilistic generalization of Spivey-type relation for degenerate Bell polynomials
Taekyun Kim, Dae San Kim
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.17228 https://arxi…
Indie open gaming marketplace Itch.io abruptly deindexes NSFW content from its browse and search pages after payment processors raised concerns, following Steam (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/712890/itch-removes-adult-nsfw…
Senate Democrats are increasingly concerned that President Donald Trump is considering striking Iran without seeking authorization from Congress
— or even filling them in on his plans.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Virginia) is mounting a last-ditch push to force a vote as soon as next week
to restrain Trump from attacking Iran without Congress’s approval.

Other Senate Democrats say the White House has not briefed them on its plans for a potential strike.
And some are warn…