xAI rolls out Grok Imagine 1.0, which it says can generate 720p 10-second videos with better audio, and says Imagine generated 1.245B videos in the past 30 days (@…)
https://x.com/xai/status/2018164753810…

xAI (@xai) on X
Introducing Grok Imagine 1.0, our biggest leap yet. 1.0 unlocks 10-second videos, 720p resolution, and dramatically better audio. Imagine has generated 1.245 billion videos in the last 30 days alone. Try it now: https://t.co/zGhs9czkC5

Over the last days, I wrote a personal tag-page about #music and how it relates to me: https://karl-voit.at/tags/music/
Have fun, if you're interested in my point of views.
And there is more in the pipe…

Two days ago, I had eight (out of one hundred and forty) unit tests failing, and I wasn't happy with my code. Last night, I had forty failing, and I thought things were improving. This morning I have one hundred and twenty four failing, so I *know* I'm on the right path!
#Software
#Lisp

The British Ministry of Defence (MoD)
has said it is ⚠️moving families from the RAF Akrotiri airbase in #Cyprus
⚡️after it was targeted in a suspected Iranian drone strike last night
at around midnight local time (22:00 GMT), in an attack which caused limited damage but no casualties,
🔥Cyprus has put authorities on alert,
closing schools and evacuating people where necessary,

Health Stuff

Recovered somewhat from whatever that weird fit was at the end of last year.

NHS still has me on some sort of list I think, appointment might turn up next year. Last contact with them they were suggesting maybe November.
But the private treatment gave me the
MRI which
showed nothing weird and post-fit symptoms have been reducing.
Experimented with eating meat to see if that helped.
Tried eating meat for a month to see if it reduced the post-fit symptoms. Maybe it did? Tried vegetarian again and maybe it got worse?
Hard to tell with intermittent symptoms and a terrible memory.
Decided it's more likely to do good than harm (to me, entirely harm to the animals obviously), and eat meat till the end of the year.
While I'm better, I don't really feel fully recovered enough to want to change things so more meat next year I think.
One of those symptoms is that booze tolerance dropped to like zero. Very rarely had more than four pints in a day this year and very rarely more than one night a
week.
Much high number than the target there really.
Tripped over a guy-rope and fell onto the wrist.
Did two days of the festival and the drive home thinking it almost certainly wasn't broken and only confirmed it was when I got home and the hospital put it in a cast.

Welp, my back is banjaxxed.
Had pain last week, but heat patches sorted it by Wednesday.
It has been fine for the last few days
Until today when I lifted a bucket of coal and I near collapsed with the shooting pain.
Good thing I bought extra heat pads...
#noxp

Fennesz, The Last Days Of May. #sound
https://fenneszreleases.bandcamp.com/…

Things have been a •lot• quieter in Minneapolis the last 5 days. There have been only a handful of kidnappings. (“Only a handful of kidnappings!” Words I can’t believe I’m actually saying….) Some days 1. Some days 0. (0 known, anyway.)
Things are •much• quieter. I am doing things I’ve been neglecting for weeks, months. I am posting about programming again.
And…not “but!”…and—
Nobody here, nobody, thinks we’re done with ICE and CBP.
1/

Uhuh the server that holds my blogs has been under attack from China. dcscience.net (blog) and onemol.org.uk (serious stuff) have been down for lots of 5 - 10 minutes periods during the last couple of days. It's improving now, thanks to the wonderful people at #PositiveInternet,
#posipeople

I don’t know what the hell ICE / CBP / FBI?? / other feds are up to, but we’ve had several •huge• swarms of federal vehicles rolling out these last few days.
They aren’t doing the kinds of chaotic off-the-street kidnappings there were doing all through Dec and Jan. But they sure are up to •something•.
1/

The attack mounted jointly by Israel and the US on Iran had been planned for months,
but the timing, in the midst of negotiations between Iran and the US,
will again raise questions about whether Washington was ever serious about striking a deal with Tehran.
In June last year, Israel, with the US later in tow, launched a 10-day attack on Iran just three days before Iran and the US were due to meet for a sixth set of talks.
So this assault, in the middle of a second ne…

Good Morning #Canada
Apparently the earth moved last night but I didn't feel a thing. An earthquake, a magnitude 3.7 to 4.1 depending on different reports, was reported in my neighbourhood near Orilla Ontario last night. The epicenter was across Lake Simcoe, approximately 35km away from my home and 5km deep. Maybe the lake reduced the impact and we do have a pretty good mattress.
There are 4,000 ish earthquakes measured in Canada annually but most are minor. Perhaps 40 might be large enough or not remote, and people will feel the ground shaking. That's about 1 every 8 days. Most of our earthquakes occur along the West Coast, the High Arctic, and lower frequency along the eastern seaboard. Earthquakes are monitored by the National Seismograph Network with approximately 100 seismographs distributed across Canada.
I know you're wondering about the 10 largest earthquakes ever felt in Canada. I got you covered...
#CanadaIsAwesome #Seismology
https://www.earthquakescanada.nrcan.gc.ca/pprs-pprp/pubs/GF-GI/GEOFACT_largest-earthquakes_e.pdf

So I know I haven't been very active over here the last few days, December hasn't been very kind to me (or 2025 for that matter), but there's always a silver lining: For example on the 11th I got to see the amazing Shonen Knife perform for the first time in South America!

The Last Living American White Male: A Novel of Obsolescence and Love
The title may make you uncomfortable. That was the point. For the past year, I have been living inside a grey city that exists only in my imagination, spending my days with a garbage man named Robert James Miller and an administrative processing unit named Alma. Today, their story is finally available to readers. The Last Living American White Male…

The Last Living American White Male: A Novel of Obsolescence and Love | David Boles, Blogs
The title may make you uncomfortable. That was the point. For the past year, I have been living inside a grey city that exists only in my imagination, spending my days with a garbage man named Robe…

For the last few days i was avoiding the online as much as i could on a suicidal episode, self isolating from the noise of the world. Yet paradoxically to some, the best thing to happen during this time and the main reason im back so soon was listening to almost nothing but cassettes from the NOISE-ARCH archive. tap in.
https://archive.org…

Tomorrow in my History of Here course - one of my department's intro classes - we'll be discussing letters written in response to early-20th-c speeding tickets. My favorite claims it's unfair since he'd sped with so many cars before and never gotten a ticket ("as this is the fifteenth car that he has been the owner of, and has never been fined for speeding, he feels that he is being imposed upon by the commission").

Excess and evidence: Excuses for speeding in the early days of the car
As the summer wanes many car owners think about enjoying one last road trip and police officers think about managing chaotic long weekends on the highways. As long as cars have been on the road, sp…

I have no idea what's going around linkedin these days but I've now been contacted by *two* people in the last week or so convinced that they can build an ASIC SERDES IP with LLMs.
The total lack of understanding of the problem domain, much less potential solutions, is deafening.

While using the Wayback Machine the last few days, I've had a lot of "503 Service Unavailable" errors. I'm seeing those errors not just when archiving pages, but also when retrieving pages from the archive as well.
In the past, I've seen issues with Wayback Machine short-term corresponding to an event that would trigger a lot of archiving (example: a major government agency caught deleting web content.)

Last boost: I keep saying this for everything. Even social media. It isn't the most helpful to see that a post was written "three days ago"...

Raiders Get Strong Maxx Crosby Claim Amid Trade Speculation https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/las-vegas-raiders/maxx-crosby-trade-claim-amy-trask/

I feel like #Wordle has been a little harsh on me the last few days. Maybe the events of the world are depressing it.
Wordle 1 684 4/6
🟨⬛🟩⬛⬛
⬛⬛🟨⬛⬛
⬛⬛🟨🟨⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

In the last couple of days I have had two different types of NUC sized computers, both with Intel x86-64 processors (of different generations) that refuse to put out a video signal via HDMI to an LG 4K monitor.
If I switch to Display port (either via a true DP interface on the NUC or via a USB4==>DP cable) things work just fine.
Weird.

⏳Seems like forever since I pulled out the 90mm/2.8 lens that I used to shoot this African daisy last summer... and yeah, I will reboot my photo processing pipeline one of these days
#photo #photography #flowers

Presently taking good advantage of the last days of legal 3D printing (before they ban all CNC devices in case somebody uses one to make a gun) to print some ducting adapters for the laser engraver exhaust

104 murders in 107 days -- One of the more surreal phenomena of the last year ... (Radley Balko/The Watch)
https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/104-murders-in-107-days
http://www.memeorandum.com/251219/p35#a251219p35

Last 7 days:
▫️Car bomb in Moscow kills Russian General...
▫️Huge Russian strikes on Ukraine...
▫️Greta Thunberg arrested...
▫️DOJ 'discovers' 1M new Epstein docs...
▫️7th most prescribed drug linked to overdoses...
Bari Weiss: "It's been a slow news week."
Original post:

I just can't seem to get this scene out of my head this last few days. No particular reason.
https://youtu.be/f2Lc_1aNdZA?si=8d3ljTJGS9VgQ8xK&t=71

The last 5 days have been a bit wild for the GCVE.eu initiative.
What started as steady work suddenly picked up real momentum:
The public GCVE.eu database instance - https://db.gcve.eu/ - caught the attention of the media, sparking discussions well beyond our usual circles
We publishe…

Vulnerability-Lookup
Vulnerability-Lookup - Fast vulnerability lookup correlation from different sources.

The Department of Homeland Security was caught lying Thursday about ⚠️ abandoning a blind refugee who was later found dead on the street.
The Department of Homeland Security claimed that the Tim Hortons in Buffalo
where federal agents left Nurul Amin Shah Alam,
a 56-year-old Burmese refugee who was blind and spoke no English,
was “determined to be a warm, safe location near his last known address.”
Video footage reviewed by The Washington Post, however, showed t…

DHS Caught Lying About Blind Refugee Agents Left to Die in Buffalo
Shah Alam was blind and spoke no English. He was found dead five days after Border Patrol agents left him outside a closed coffee shop at night.

My wife sent me this article and reminded me of a conversation we had last March, just 2 days after we sold our house in Caledon...
Me: I'm really looking forward to finding a new house in Barrie or Innisfil.
Her: I'm worried there's gonna be a lot more snow to deal with.
Me: It won't be any different than we get here in Caledon. You're worried about nothing.
Her: We'll see....
https://www.ctvnews.ca/barrie/article/barrie-breaks-record-for-longest-continuous-weather-event-in-city-history/

Colts to start Philip Rivers vs. Seahawks just days after QB came out of retirement https://www.nfl.com/news/colts-to-start-philip-rivers-vs-seahawks-just-days-after-qb-came-out-of-retirement

Sources: Paramount CEO David Ellison met with Trump last week for two conversations; Trump has said he will stay out of Netflix-Paramount competition for WBD (Brian Stelter/CNN)
https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/12/media/david-ellison-tr…

Trump met with David Ellison days before saying he’s ‘not involved’ in Paramount’s Netflix battle
The timing of the meetings — early last week — is notable because Trump was asked by NBC’s Tom Llamas on Wednesday about Paramount and Netflix’s battle for WBD, and he said, “I haven’t been involved.”

The last days of May

Mage Session 1:
Three mages enter the apartment of a missing person that increasingly looks like a crime scene. One of the characters is a private investigator, one an Etherite maker, the third a VA college student.
Investigator: »When we enter the apartment, DON'T touch anything. If you absolutely need to, I have a spare pair of gloves.«
*Group is entering the apartment*
The apartment is very messy. There is food left out on the counter for the last two days.

Oh, today is my iTunes Match-iversary. I pay Apple ~$30CAD annually for them to store and sync my 30 year old digital music collection of like ... 100GB and counting.
Looks like I wrote about it last year.
Most of my music purchases are Bandcamp/indie these days and uploaded to my home Ampache. https://bsky.ap…

Boris (@bmann.ca)
Oh, today is my iTunes Match-iversary. I pay Apple ~$30CAD annually for them to store and sync my 30 year old digital music collection of like ... 100GB and counting. Looks like I wrote about it last year. Most of my music purchases are Bandcamp/indie these days and uploaded to my home Ampache.

RE: https://www.franzgraf.de/blog/2025/5848/
I wrote about the photo walk I did last sunday. I guess I'll post the photos in the next couple of days separately as well.
On location I didn't expect too much, but I came back with a couple of beautiful

Over the last year my fedi feed has gone from aloof disinterest in LLMs to what feels like 50% anti-LLM diatribes. I can see why but I kind of miss the old days! I guess post-AI has not yet arrived.

With these recent days of news showing that the Trump regime is on their heels about ICE, my refrain has been: “It’s working. Punch harder.”
Last night I let myself savor the “It’s working” part for a few happy minutes, but this morning I’m squarely focused on “Punch harder.”

It’s Ilhan. Last night, I was attacked at a town hall meeting.
A man rushed up to me and sprayed me with an unknown substance from a syringe. Thankfully, my security team acted quickly to take him down.
I’m okay. I’m not going to be intimidated from doing my work. I don’t let bullies win.
But this shows something important. Just a few days ago, I texted you to explain that Trump’s constant racist, hateful attacks and the far-right threats that they bring require me to hire …

Ilhan Omar for Congress
Send her back

The latest pain report is that the new medication and increased old medication may be working because the last two days I managed to sleep until 5am (instead of 3am) and the pain hasn’t been as bad.
10 more days until my next appointment where they electrify a needle inserted into my back.

Last year at GÉANT #SecurityDays 2025, 160 participants from 28 countries came together in Prague to share challenges, learn from each other, and talk openly about what security really looks like across the #Research &

Dallas Cowboys 2026 NFL Draft: Linebacker Rankings and Fit https://insidethestar.com/dallas-cowboys-2026-nfl-draft-linebacker-rankings-and-fit

The world has felt too suffocating to keep up with or comment on the last couple of weeks. Sorry.
I’ve been reading more though. Books are nice. I like books. Fiction calms me down more these days, but a lot of nonfiction feels relevant and urgent, so it spikes my curiosity.
I just like myself better when I read books every day and am disciplined enough to read most books start to finish within 1-2 weeks of starting them.

Things I have learned over the last two days consolidating all the VMs in the homelab to the same OS:
- Plex is absolutely horrible and hates NFS. It also hates you.
- Docker volumes are annoying as hell, but easy to deal with if you know how to get the data out of the volumes. If you're rocking a lot of them it will be a pain to move them to another server.
- Forgejo actions are also a pain in the ass.
- Moving my `step-ca` information from one server to another wa…

xAI engineer Sulaiman Ghori says he has "left" the company days after appearing on a podcast last week claiming that xAI had been skirting regulations and more (AJ Dellinger/Gizmodo)
https://gizmodo.com/engineer-at-elon-m

Engineer at Elon Musk's xAI Departs After Spilling the Beans in Podcast Interview
Interesting timing.

I have at least two more converts to The Story Graph in the last couple days, yanking them away from Amazon’s Good Reads.
I use it:
https://app.thestorygraph.com/profile/aardrian
Not perfect but definitely *not* Amazon. Just sayin’.

A ship named Theseus has been visiting Savannah for the last several days, but it's unclear whether it's the same ship that came before.

heard a great firsthand terence mckennaism last night: "things seemed to be going along just fine. the stones came out with satanic majesties & the prospects for real psychedelic rock seemed limitless. and then the Band released music from big pink & everything seemed to go into reverse all at once." on one hand, lol. i dig big pink most days. but also kind of a mostly defensible position, especially taking into account the nonmusical backdrop of 1967-1968.

Your regular reminder that you can find all of our Gaza Verified families’ fundraisers (those who use GoFundMe and Chuffed) in a single list at:
https://gaza-verified.org/donate/
The list is ordered by those who have received the least in donations over the last seven days.
If you can, plea…

Gaza Verified
We’ve personally had video conversations on Signal with the people from Gaza whose Mastodon accounts on the fediverse are listed here and we verify that their accounts are genuine. – Joy & Aral Balkan

Yesterday was my last day of this term's teaching Communication at the School of Engineering. So time to say good by to the little fellow living in TH547 and attending all lectures! He was there even on days none of the 33 students showed up
#AcademicChatter #TeachingElephant

Last two days at work until Jan 5th start tomorrow 💪

I've spend more time outside the last few days, than the entire month of December (almost)

Wow, just managed to fix a problem that has hounded me the last few days: after a reboot, one of my home servers (Ubuntu 24.04, 2 NVMEs with XFS filesystems) couldn't find its RAID 1 boot volume, claiming 'duplicate MD device names in conf file were found'. Gulp. Managed to find the solution here:

We've had snow on the ground since early November. The daily high has been lower than -10°C for the past week or three.
The “questioning why we even live here" has come very early this year.
(But the days are getting longer, and the coldest days are often the brightest/sunniest…)
It's normally not cool to tell people how to medicate, but polite reminder: take your Vitamin D, friends. I'm at 3x the RDA and last time I tested, I was *still* way below optimal.…

This should be fun. I just got a FedEx ship notice for a package arriving in the next couple of days.
The shipper is listed as Digi-Key.
But my last DK order was back in November. The invoice number on the order doesn't show up in my order history. And I searched my order history back to April and found no backorders.
So this is either a backorder from the Stone Age or somebody bought me a Christmas present.
Either way it'll be a surprise lol.

100 of the ~280 linden trees of #Mäkelänkatu in #Helsinki have been cut. Some of the last trunks are being removed right now.
Judging from the growth rings, some of these trees were about 50 years old and had their best days a few decades ago, but also some good summers recently. Trees rarely…

I'm thinking very little had to do with the bike.
"Even though these ...bikes seem pretty normal and safe, if you're not wearing a helmet, and you're intoxicated, they can be really dangerous, and in my case, a life-or-death situation."
https://www.abc.…

Injured e-bike rider's warning after spending nine days in coma
More than 200 people were treated for e-bike related injuries at a single Sydney hospital last year, with one medical professor describing the trend as an "epidemic".

I listened to two AI generated presentations in the last two days. Yes, students and junior scholars were mimicking jargon they did not fully understand already before AI, but listening to them read out jargon they did not even mimic themselves is really another level of cringe. Yes, I know these are fancy words that people in our field would likely use, but you know, I was actually more interested in what _you_ think about the subject. 🙄

I did skim through a Python GTK Adwaita tutorial in the last few days. Besides stumbling over some deprecations here and there it worked really well so far. For some stuff I needed to look up other projects how they solved my current issues. It's interesting how more experienced developers structured their code to layout their applications' windows. And it's interesting that I begin to understand what's going on in the code.

I was on vacation the last two and a half weeks and I did NOT do any work, not even a little bit, for 14 days. Not finishing a paper, not grading, no grant applications, no reviews. This is what it was like and it was glorious. Special thanks to my parents-in-law for the all-inclusive pampering #academicChatter #break

Void, with encrypted zfs, on the laptop. Dwm or River. Tbc. But Gentoo dwm is calling. Possibly before Tet.
NixOS with KDE on the N150. Solid.
Finally revived the old NUC with Slackware Tilers: Sway and Mango. And Dank. Great stuff.
The Thinkpad that wasn't sold: this will be either TileOS or Hatchery, a project by Troutcobbler, an old ArchLabs mate. Both Debian, tiling wm's. Cool. Check them out.
The last one will be after Tet, I'm off for a couple of days fo…

My most-played artists from the last 30 days.
#Music #LibreFM

Last breakfast for a few days, Marie and I head out to Columbus tomorrow. Today she made cinnamon rolls? Egg and bacon, tea and coffee. #TogetherBreakfast https://photos.app.goo.gl/XFafoDJ2gW25fC4X6

One I somehow missed last year and may have even made my top 20 because of how damn good it is, NYC punks KALEIDOSCOPE and their LP 'Cities of Fear' that was written and recorded in just a few days in 2024. Some KILLER, catchy, rough, angry hardcore punk the way it SHOULD be. ffo MDC, Poison Idea, Crucifix.
https://

In positive news, after the cold snap we've had since November, the last couple of days' warmer weather coupled with the heavy rain we had over night thawed the ground enough for us to plant the garlic. We also discovered a few forgotten radishes in the process.
#gardening

Been out cycling for an hour. The last days were a mix of cold and sunshine. The result is that my usual loop has quite a couple of sections which are fully iced. And no rough ice but plain like a mirror.
We decided to change the course a little bit. But it was fine to get out

I understand the reason for two-factor authentication, but for rarely used services, it's just painful when authentication with the last iPhone is gone for years. And now the verification takes up to three days, and all that is authenticated is my email address, which has been the same for decades – isn't that enough? #quick

Alibaba says Qwen generated 120M in orders from Chinese users over the past six days, ahead of the Lunar New Year; Alibaba is giving a ~$3.60 shopping voucher (Juro Osawa/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/al…

Alibaba’s Holiday AI Shopping Campaign Generates 120 Million Orders
Alibaba Group said its Qwen chatbot app’s AI e-commerce service has generated more than 120 million orders from Chinese consumers over the past six days, since the company last week started giving away free shopping vouchers to the app’s users. Alibaba, ByteDance and Tencent Holdings have all started offering giveaways and other incentives to promote their AI chatbot apps ahead of the Lunar

There’s definitely a hopeful feeling in having room to worry about Space Camp fundraising right now, instead of, say, ICE staging at the local Target parking lot yet again (with Target’s tacit blessing, damn them). It’s been quiet in the city these last few days. Fingers crossed.
Hopeful, but also melancholy: even if ICE does in fact draw down to pre-Dec levels, our “after” is not really going to come for a long time — and when it does, it will feel more like a scar than a sunrise.
/end

A balmy 0° today in Reykjavík. Can really feel the difference between the last few days.

I should have bought that mini PC earlier last year. Unfortunately there were a number of must-do projects and should do projects that popped up that sucked up a huge amount out of our bank account.
Must do
- Furnace & AC - End of life. Went with a good heat pump with a furnace backup to handle those cold days.
- Hot water tank - end of life and Insurance wouldn't pay for repairs if it flooded the basement. The new tank is much more energy efficient.
- Ga…

So, the last two days of ripping/encoding went well, very happy with the new encoder module and the overall results. The `svt-av1-psyex` encoder did awesome work, and there's nothing like seeing a 6.5GB file get reduced down to 190MB without a noticeable loss of quality.
The last show took about 1.5 to 2 hours to encode per episode, thankful that I had more than one encoder running at the same time. Gonna call everything a success.

No puede ser mšs sencillo configurar #USENET en #neomutt https://aliquote.org/post/neomutt-and-usen…

Raiders Receive Big Maxx Crosby, Fernando Mendoza Trade Take https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/las-vegas-raiders/big-maxx-crosby-fernando-mendoza-take/

Still a few days of Disney left so I'm catching up on Star Wars. Episode VIII (The Last Jedi) is... not good, right? So far everything feels ridiculous: space bombers are "dropping" bombs onto another ship and when they are destroyed they are slowing sinking "downwards" like WW2 bombers. Spaceships that are nothing but burning debris still have perfect gravity. And Princess Leia can fly through the vacuum of space like superman?

"This single task of managing memory has proven to be one of the most difficult, let alone to grasp and understand, but most importantly, to get right.
Because not getting this right meant crashes, security issues, resource shortages, unhappy customers, and lots of white hair. To make things worse, pretty much every programming language comes these days with their own ideas of how to keep track of things on the heap."

Souvenir
On Monday, June 6th, 2011, after Steve Jobs' last public appearance as a keynote speaker, took place the "Developer Tools Kickoff" session at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference, also known as WWDC. That day, Chris Lattner, creator of the LLVM compiler infrastructure and the Swift programming language, introduced a new feature of the Objective-C language to thunderous applause. This feature, still present in Swift, is known as "Automatic Reference Counting", or ARC.

Shindagin Hollow Road on one of the last days will be open before it gets snowed in
#photo #photography #shindaginhollow

You see a detective on the TV and he’s interviewing all the suspects asking them what they were doing on the night of the murder a month ago last Tuesday night.
And on the TV, the suspects all know. Right away.
If you asked me ten years ago though, I’d have had barely any clue. If you’re lucky it’d have been something planned in my calendar but mostly, dunno. Watching TV maybe? No idea what show. Was that a night I was in the pub?
As we all get older this problem increases I’m told. Eventually full on senility sets in.
But what if you have already built the habit to record what you’re doing? To be able to look back and revise and review how you spent your days? An external aid as a crutch to your own forgetful brain’s cortex?
So I started this Exocortex Log over a decade ago and now I can answer: Ten years ago on Tuesday I was having dinner with the guitarist from my band and his girlfriend and they burned the pudding.
The app has been half finished and barely able to even record let alone review for most of that time, but now it’s ready enough that someone else might use it too if they want.
Try it out: #lifeLog #app #memoryAid

Memos: Will Lewis has stepped down as WaPo publisher and CEO; former Tumblr CEO Jeff D'Onofrio, who joined WaPo last June as CFO, is acting publisher and CEO (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/07/technology/washington-post-will-lewis.html

Washington Post C.E.O. Will Lewis Steps Down After Stormy Tenure
His departure came days after the company cut 30 percent of the staff. He will be replaced in the interim by Jeff D’Onofrio, the chief financial officer, the company said.

ICE activity seems to have been relatively quiet the last couple of days in my part of Minneapolis.
I heard they’ve been super active recently in the outer suburbs and rural areas, and it sure doesn’t seem like anybody’s assuming we’re done with their awfulness here in the middle of the city. But I’m happily embracing the chance to take a breath.

Last time in Sweden was midsommmar 2022, in Umeå. And it actually did not get dark. But also I wasn’t really sleepy during those days
This time, it's almost winter solstice and I'm way more north in Luleå. Sunrise at 9:37, sundown at 13:11 😲 We will see how that goes
#AnnerOstseeIssesImmerSchön

I just wanted to let you all know that the observer who was kidnapped yesterday (start of this thread) was released safely last night. (I say “kidnapped” not as an exaggeration, but as a fact: no part of that resembled a lawful arrest.) Minor scrapes, more determined than ever. Huge relief.
ICE apparently continues to believe that indefinite detention of observers is not something they can get away with yet. They are still generally releasing observers after many long hours but not days, generally with no proper booking and no charges.
Sadly, this is not the case for people they deem sufficiently brown-skinned to deport.

Good Morning #Canada
Are you still looking for that perfect Christmas gift? Years ago I found myself shopping for my wife's Christmas present on December 23rd. Never again. For those of you still shopping it's inevitable that you're going to be standing in front of the Gift Card rack and mentally convincing yourself that the recipient will love a full gas tank or a Timmies coffee and donut. Canadians will buy close to $12 billion in Gift Cards in 2025, with a lot of that in the next 5 days. Recent changes to legislation have made it illegal to charge processing or activation fees on cards purchased with cash and there is no expiry date. That last point is important because companies are betting that a certain percentage of cards are never redeemed and it's estimated that approximately 40% of all cards are never used. I personally like getting a gift card as it allows me to choose something I want, and I always thank the gifter once I've used it.
#CanadaIsAwesome #GiftCards
YES, I love giving and receiving Gift Cards
NO, I'm not happy when I have to buy or get a Gift Card

I got energized by a blog post by Jorge Castro, the tireless promotor of Bluefin and all things OCI.
That's how I got busy the last couple of days in setting up Aurorix, my own take on Aurora (the KDE sister of Bluefin).
It's been an incredible lot of fun, and the result is something that works very well for me. Expect more details later on in this journey.
Now, don't worry, Slackware with Mango is superb and Gentoo (after losing it's KDE flavor for me) will be…

The light has been unreal the last few days. Here’s some pictures from Harpa…

The last couple of days have been relatively quiet in Minneapolis. ICE seems to have been much less active in the city, though everyone (including me) is sort of afraid to talk about that too much lest we jinx it.
They seem to have been more active in the suburbs, and maybe that’s all it is: a geographic shift.
Maybe the cold is keeping them inside. (A bunch of them are from places like TX and VA, and I’m sure they don’t know how to dress.)
1/

went thru my bookmarks and found BOOTED HARLEYDUDE. whyd i never go thru this kings site before???
http://bootedman.com/

Deaths in ICE detention centers have occurred with increasing frequency in recent months,
as Trump’s immigration crackdown floods these facilities with record numbers of detainees.
At least 30 people died in detention last year
— the highest in two decades
— and Lunas Campos is one of four who died in the first nine days of 2026 alone, according to ICE,
which posts information about all detainee deaths on its website.
Medical examiner believes death of Ca…

Medical examiner believes death of man in ICE custody was homicide, recording says
A fellow detainee says he witnessed Geraldo Lunas Campos being choked to death by guards at the ICE detention center in Texas on Jan. 3.

Spotify lowers monetization eligibility for video podcasters to three episodes, 2,000 consumption hours, and 1,000 engaged audience members over a 30-day period (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/07/spotify-lowers-monetization-t…

Spotify lowers monetization threshold for video podcasts | TechCrunch
Spotify is dropping the minimum episode requirement to three, minimum consumption hours to 2,000, and engaged audience member threshold to 1,000 over the last 30 days.

The House narrowly passed a spending package by a 217-214 vote,
reopening the government through the rest of the fiscal year
and passing a two-week continuing resolution to fund the Department of Homeland Security.
The measure was the product of a last minute deal in the Senate last week to avoid a broader shutdown.
Democrats objected to fully funding DHS in the wake of recent fatal shootings involving immigration agents in Minneapolis.
The $1.2 trillion packag…

How every House member voted on the shutdown and ICE funding
See how your representative voted to end the partial shutdown and fund most of the government through September. Congress only has ten days to reach an agreement on ICE funding

Infosys co-founder
NR Narayana Murthy
called for Indian workers to adopt a 70-hour week last year,
-- but he thinks that’s still not enough and wants to take things further.
Speaking during a recent interview,
Murthy called for an increase in working hours from 70 to 72.
That number represents the total hours worked by those on the infamous '996' schedule,
which involves working from 9am to 9pm, six days a week.
This approach, Murthy not…

Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy called for a 70 hour week last year — now he says that’s not enough
Murthy thinks longer hours akin to China’s '996' approach are the key to success

Apparently ICE abducted parents and just left their young kids just sitting there alone, unassisted and unattended — in not one but •two• separate incidents in the Twin Cities in the last few days.
In one case, they left school-age kids alone in the house after a pre-dawn raid. In another, they snatched a father driving his kids home and just left the kids there in the car.
In both cases, the kids are OK — but only because strangers came along to help.

Over two days of questioning
during his Senate confirmation hearings last year,
Robert F Kennedy Jr repeated the same answer.
He said the closely scrutinized trip he took to Samoa in 2019,
which came ahead of a devastating measles outbreak,
had “nothing to do with vaccines”.
Documents obtained by the Guardian and the Associated Press undermine that testimony.
Emails sent by staff at the US embassy and the United Nations provide, for the first time, …

OK, I was being sarcastic with “that’s nice,” but seriously, the good news here is that the last few days they’ve been viciously threatening legal observers, sometimes at gunpoint, at levels about as high as any time in Jan and •far• higher than Dec
oh wait
That was bad news too, nm

Iran’s supreme leader has vowed that authorities will not back down in the face of a rapidly growing protest movement,
setting the stage for an intensified violent crackdown on the second day of a nationwide internet shutdown.
Protests have raged in cities and towns across the country in recent days,
posing a threat to the authority of the regime, which has been significantly weakened since the last large protest movement in the country in 2022.
Another round of demon…

The Trump administration has filed for the #expedited #deportation
of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos
and his family,
days after a federal judge ordered their release from immigration detention. 
The 5-year-old and his father, Adrian Conejo Arias,
were detained by federal agents last wee…

Administration seeking expedited removal of 5-year-old and family, Rep. Castro says
The DHS said the removal proceedings are not expedited but "standard procedure."

Donald Trump has been accused of “corruption, plain and simple”
after it was revealed that a member of the Emirati royal family was behind a $500m investment into the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company.
Ethics experts say the deal
– struck just days before the US president’s inauguration last January
– amounts to a deep conflict of interest for the White House,
amid calls for a congressional investigation into the transaction.
Months after the deal, the…