Tootfinder

Recall the case of Indiana University Bloomington computer science professor XiaoFeng Wang who was abruptly terminated from the university along with this wife, and had his two homes searched by the FBI. The case is ongoing.
He is a co-author of a recently submitted report dated January 23, 2026 entitled "Trojans in Artificial Intelligence", for the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), the depa…

Trojans in Artificial Intelligence (TrojAI) Final Report
The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) launched the TrojAI program to confront an emerging vulnerability in modern artificial intelligence: the threat of AI Trojans. These AI trojans are malicious, hidden backdoors intentionally embedded within an AI model that can cause a system to fail in unexpected ways, or allow a malicious actor to hijack the AI model at will. This multi-year initiative helped to map out the complex nature of the threat, pioneered foundational detecti…

The worst thing about AI coding assistants maybe isn’t the tech but the people who constantly rub it into your face how great they find it and how you should do it too and you’re wrong not trying it and “why not just do a little bit”.
I’m wondering if they’re talking about programming or snorting cocaine.

This is why I don't fully trust 48hills, even though they're on "my side" in being pro-labor and anti-billionaire. Tim Redmond thinks it's a good thing that a 100% affordable housing development was forced to lop a floor off to preserve views 😫
"The staff reached out to the neighbors,[...]took feedback, and as a result made some changes that lowered the height of the new buildings. That, in a reasonable world, is how this should work" No it's not!!…

Supes approve affordable senior housing project—but discussion raises larger issue - 48 hills
Nonprofit housers are good neighbors. Speculators are not. But Wiener's law treats both the same way

No one wants to build bad products. But in an industry where programmers implement features to order, it can be hard to shake that feeling.
This is how orgs see the ROI of UX: as a soothing function to tell everyone they're doing a good job. And as a scapegoat, when we finally learn otherwise.
UX cheerleading is doing the industry no favors.
#UX

Stop doing UX cheerleading
Design is being hijacked to create legitimacy for bad ideas. We can do better.

Sources: the WH is pressuring Utah Republican State Rep. Doug Fiefia to abandon HB 286, an AI transparency and kids' safety bill similar to California's AI law (Maria Curi/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/02/15/white-house-utah-ai-transparency-bill

White House pressures Utah lawmaker to kill AI transparency bill
It's a sign that the Trump administration is now starting to intervene with the states in its efforts to squash AI regulation.

"On Wednesday evening, the Twin Cities chapter of Indivisible, a nationwide grassroots progressive advocacy organization, hosted a training on how to be an effective constitutional observer of ICE operations. In Minnesota alone, some 23,000 people have received the training, according to the organization."
showed how to fight ICE and win - Salon.com
https://www.salon.com/2026/02/13/minneapolis-showed-how-to-fight-ice-and-win/

A Q&A with PBS Kids' Sara DeWitt on the effect of cuts to the $112M Ready to Learn grant, including potentially partnering with ad tech companies (Abbey White/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/pbs-k…

How PBS Kids Hopes to Save Children’s Programming
A leading exec at the public broadcasting institution breaks down the impact of recent government cuts and what to do about them

In which I build Unicode character tables and fail to serialize large automata, “Losing 1½ Million Lines of Go“:
https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2026/01/14/Unicode-Properties
(And in which I find myself sliding into the

“The transformation has been bewildering. It feels like the blink of an eye, though I guess it’s been about three years. The culture has changed immensely in that short time. When I identified with the programmer culture, it was about programming. Now programming is a means to an end ("let’s see how fast we can build a surveillance state!") or simply an unwanted chore to be avoided.”
https://ratfactor.com/tech-nope2

A look at iRobot, founded in 1990, and its slow collapse after regulatory pressure killed Amazon's $1.7B acquisition in 2024, and the rising Chinese competition (Connie Loizos/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/14/how-irobot-lost-its-way-home/

How iRobot lost its way home | TechCrunch
iRobot survived three decades of competition, but couldn't survive European regulators killing its Amazon buyout. Now it's being taken over by its own supplier in bankruptcy court.