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cultures offended by certain fonts
FLOSS Weekly Episode 858: YottaDB: Sometimes the Solution is Bigger Servers
#Mastodon mentioned 🎉 🍾
국채 매입을 하긴 하는데 QE라고 이야기하기엔 ... 좀 그렇군
expectation: I will ship an assert_same! macro that use gumtree and chawathe for powerful structural diffing so that I can have great looking diagnostics when my tests fail
reality: one of my own tests now spins for half an hour because it's busy doing deep diffing of a very, very, very large tree.
다시 자야지
FOMC 0.25% 금리인하, 30일간 $40B QE 발표.
Pileated woodpecker, carving up a tree. New blog post: https://wanderinweeta.blogspot.com/2025/12/red-headed-wood-carver.html #VancouverIsland #Birds #Birding #NaturePhotography
"It was long thought impossible to infer clear types from the constantly shifting skies. But based on the journals [Luke Howard, industrial chemist by trade and amateur meteorologist by calling] kept since the age of ten, Howard became the first to name standard cloud formations systematically. "
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/essay-on-the-modification-of-clouds/
Is it a bubble?
Link: https://www.oaktreecapital.com/insights/memo/is-it-a-bubble
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46220640
The EC hit X with a 120M fine for DSA transparency violations. But as the European politicians cannot get themselves to leave the platform, it shows the underlying issues with how the politicians (dont) understand how power works on social platforms.
https://connectedplaces.online/the-digital-services-act-and-theories-of-power/
The Digital Services Act and Theories of Power
The European Commission put a 120M EUR fine on X for DSA violations. But as the European politicians cannot get themselves to leave the platform, it shows the issues with how they understand how power works on social platforms.
connectedplaces.online · connectedplaces.online
Link author: 
Laurens Hof@laurenshof@connectedplaces.online
Ok, does anyone know what's up with giant lists of time zones? I'm constantly having to scroll them, searching for a city that I know is in the same time zone as me. How do they decide which options to use? I usually look for New York but it wasn't in the most recent picker. I ended up having to google "what time zone is Monticello, Kentucky in" to find a match.
I find this very user unfriendly although maybe it's because I'm terrible at geography
Golang's big miss on memory arenas
Link: https://avittig.medium.com/golangs-big-miss-on-memory-arenas-f1375524cc90
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46142589
We have been teaching advanced topics in Swift for 8 years, and we are now distilling everything into a format that makes it possible to leverage our best practices in your code base.
By pre-seeding your editor's context with these documents you'll be coding the Point-Free way!
Tell me you don't look at your logs without telling me that you don't look at your logs: arrange to log perfectly routine events as 'level=ERROR' reports.
Thank you, Prometheus Blackbox version 0.28.0, you have been voted off the island. We will not be upgrading to you from 0.27.0. Maybe there will be a 0.28.1, one can hope. (Yes, reported.)
All forms of age-gating are “a privacy nightmare that burdens the civil liberties of people both young and old,” EFF’s 
@aaronmackey told Al Jazeera, forcing all to share sensitive information that could be abused or hacked. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/12/9/why-is-australia-banning-social-media-for-teenagers
The Digital Services Act and Theories of Power
Right in the heart of the European quarters in Brussels is the Parlamentarium, the visitors centre for the European Parliament. When I was in Brussels this summer, and I had an entire Sunday to myself to wander around the city, I found myself in front of the building, and decided to enter the Parlamentarium on a whim. I was curious how the European Union understands itself, and the visitor’s centre for the Parliament itself seemed like a good place to learn a bit more about what stories the EU deems important to tell about itself. One thing that was immediately clear is that the EU thinks it is very important to make the stories about the EU accessible to everyone. There are clear and proud advertisements that the Parliamentarium can be experienced in any of the EU’s 24 languages, and on the website the EU can only wait until the second sentence to tell you that the Parlamentarium “can be experienced in any of the European Union’s 24 official languages.”
It seems like the EU thinks of themselves as an institute that cares deeply about making their information available to all of their citizens. Think about it, everything is translated to 24 languages!
When you enter the exposition, it starts on the ground floor with a history of the European Union, from the world wars, to the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community, to the growth of the Union after the fall of the Wall, the creation of the euro, up until the present. The diversity of language and communication is in full display in this exhibition, with walls covered with photos of historical moments, accompanied by explanatory texts in continuously changing languages.
After the short history, you move down a floor, where an extensive set of displays explains how the current EU system works, what the different parties are, and who the members of parliament (MEP) of your country are. Another set of displays and computers shows you all the MEPs, and invites you to click on the MEPs of your country, to learn about their background and what they stand for. Helpfully, this interface also shows you what your MEP has been saying about politics. If you go into this menu, you get presented with a big button labeled X, that opens up the MEP’s feed on X and shows their most recent posts on X. Besides the option to email the MEP, no other option to know more about what each MEP is saying is presented.
The EU is clear in their communications: If you speak any of the 23 official languages of the European Union that is not English, you’ll have to travel to Brussels to get information in your language. Otherwise, it all happens on X, the everything app, including the official and non-official communications by all of Europe’s elected officials.
While the EU is using their visitors centre to tell stories how utterly dependent the government is on X for their communications, the European Commission (EC) is getting more annoyed with the platform. After 2 years of deliberation, the European Commission issued its first DSA non-compliance fine, with a penalty of €120 million for X. While people have many types of misgivings with X, mainly focused on the types of hate speech that are flourishing on the platform, the EC focused on one specific part of the DSA: its transparency obligations. The problems that the EC found are specific to that context. X deceived users by selling “verified” badges to anyone willing to pay, making it impossible to distinguish authentic accounts from potential scammers. The platform’s advertising repository was deliberately crippled with design features and access barriers that made meaningful research impossible. And X blocked researchers from accessing public data, prohibiting scraping while charging prohibitive fees for API access. The maximum possible fine under the DSA is 6% of global turnover, and with an estimated revenue for X of 2.5B USD for 2024 it means that the EC chose a penalty fairly close to the maximum of 150M USD.
The same day, the Commission announced it had accepted binding commitments from TikTok on advertising transparency, with the platform agreeing to provide complete ad transparency. This means that TikTok’s advertisement repository, which provides insight in the ads that are running on the platform, will provide better insight to researchers, with some fairly technical improvements: updating the repository within 24h, showing the full ad with urls, targeting criteria and demographic data, as well as additional search tools.
That the EC made these both announcements on the same day is a deliberate strategy, illustrated by how EC spokesperson Thomas Regnier explicitly frames the fine for X in contrast with the compliance of TikTok in the announcement post. The EC is clearly very worried about accusations of censorship, and via the juxtapositioning of TikTok and X they hoped to show what the two possible outcomes are of the DSA: cooperate like TikTok, pledge some fairly technical updates and achieve a settlement, or go for confrontation and get close to the maximum possible fine.
It’s worth noticing what the Commission did not fine here, with their investigations that opened over two years ago still ongoing regarding the “dissemination of illegal content” and the “effectiveness of measures taken to combat information manipulation on the platform”. The EC says that on this subject “the investigation continues.” It seems that the first enforcement addressing procedural failures serves as a testing bed to figure out how platforms like X, but also the US government, will respond to an enforcement action, before moving to the more contentious points of illegal content and misinformation on the platform.
Henna Virkkunen, the Commission’s executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, further shows how careful and hesitant the EC is being here, saying that “This decision is about transparency” and “nothing to do with censorship”. The fine was “proportionate,” she said, and “we are not here to impose the highest fines.” Her language use shows that the Commission is aware of how this decision will be framed, and is trying to control the narrative. Meanwhile, Musk and Trump are not particularly convinced by this, with Musk calling the EU the Fourth Reich, retweeting a picture of a nazi swastika underneath the EU flag, and calls for abolishing the EU. Trump meanwhile called Europeans ‘impotent’ regarding political deals on Ukraine, and it’s not entirely clear that couching the announcement of a fine in such careful language is sending a message of political strength to Trump.
The timeline shows how the DSA’s regulatory approach operates on a different speed than political events. Formal investigation into X opened in December 2023, with preliminary findings issued July 2024, and a fine announced December 2025, for a total time for transparency violations of two years. This is only for the transparency violations, with the more complex investigations into content manipulation and election interference are still ongoing with no completion date.
Embedded in the DSA is a theory about what X actually is. It treats platforms like X as communications infrastructure where speech happens, and the platform is conceptualised as a singular place, mostly neutral, with certain obligations for moderation and transparency attached. It views platforms as companies that are capitalistic in a textbook understanding of capitalistic companies: entities with the goal profit maximalisation, that are responsive to legal and economic incentives. This place can be regulated properly via transparency and via a set of complex process requirements. The platform companies that run these places will then implement these requirements as they are incentivised to do so via legal and economic pressures. The DSA’s approach follows from this understanding: establish transparency requirements, ensure researcher access, and prohibit deceptive design practices.
Under this framework, the platform is regulable through procedural obligations. The DSA mandates transparent ad repositories so researchers can detect coordinated campaigns, requires platforms to provide data access so systemic risks can be studied, and prohibits deceptive design like selling “verification” to anyone without actually verifying identity. These requirements target the infrastructure layer. They don’t directly regulate what content appears or how algorithms amplify it. Instead, they create transparency and access that should enable identification of harms, which then triggers other enforcement mechanisms. The procedural requirements are the foundation on which content-level interventions could eventually rest. This is a highly procedural approach, with the idea that if the procedural infrastructure is right, then either the platforms will naturally trend towards ‘good’ outcomes for speech, or the infrastructure yields proof of the platform misbehaving, which can then be punished via other regulations.
X under Musk’s leadership operates in a manner that the architects of the DSA clearly did not account for however. Musk’s X is a major platform operated primarily as a political vehicle rather than a profit-maximizing business. There is little in Musk’s behaviour that indicates that commercial optimisation of X is his priority, from haphazardly gutting the workforce to alienating major advertisers, and altering the algorithm to favour right-wing speech. This resulted in cratering ad revenue for X. Musk’s choices do not make sense from the perspective of a business textbook, but do make sense if you understand the platform as Musk’s personal project, with changes made haphazardly and erratically to suit his needs. That his demands and ideas can instantly switch between petty and personal to strategic promotion of Musk’s affiliation with nazi ideology, is a further indication that the incentives of the platform are vastly different than what the DSA assumes.
This is why enforcement of DSA regulations fails when it comes into contact with platforms like X, as the DSA regulates companies by threatening revenue and market access. But X is an organisation that sees its platform as a political instrument, and that happens to have something resembling a corporate structure attached to it. Musk has the personal wealth to subsidise operational losses indefinitely. Furthermore, Tesla’s stock price is at an all time high, and more than triple in price since his takeover in fall 2022. This shows that Musk is generating exorbitant amounts of wealth by treating X this way. X functions implicitly as the marketing outlet for Musk’s personal empire, as financial commentator Matt Levine says: “It is sometimes useful to think of all of Elon Musk’s ventures as one big company.” He wrote that in context of the DSA threatening fines against X in October 2024, but also says, while it makes sense to think of all of Musk’s ventures as a single company, there is a risk against being an actual single company: “See, you’re not really supposed to do that: X is its own company, with its own corporate structure and owners; 6% of X’s revenue is 6% of X’s revenue, not 6% of the revenue of Musk’s other companies. But if everyone thinks of the Musk Mars Conglomerate as a single company, then there’s a risk that it will be treated that way.”
Levine’s analysis proved to be prescient, and the EC treated X as a separate entity, and not part of Musk’s total conglomerate, over a year later X indeed got a fine close to 6% of Musk’s revenue, for 120M EUR. But considering Musk’s personal wealth has grown from around 130 billion to 470 billion dollars, a staggering tripling in three years for a total growth of 340 billion dollars, a 120 million euro penalty seems like an hilariously good deal in favour of Musk.
Where the EC treats X as a communications network, Musk understands intuitively that X is something more than that, although he does not spell it out explicitly. Social networking platforms are collective sense making tools. Social networking platforms, whether that’s X, Instagram or TikTok, are platforms that we use to shape our common knowledge, and to determine which political opinions are currently in-vogue. These platforms are used to create a shared reality. This goes from how TikTok and Instagram influencers can push Dubai Chocolate into a global hype, to how the conversations on X shape what’s inside the political Overton window. The algorithmic feeds actively shape which voices get amplified, which narratives spread, and which facts feel established. Henry Farrell summarises the problem as: “The fundamental problem, as I see it, is not that social media misinforms individuals about what is true or untrue but that it creates publics with malformed collective understandings.” The fundamental power of platforms like X comes from its ownership over the tools to shape the collective understandings of the public, and allows them to be malformed in favour of fascism.
Viewing platforms like X exclusively through the lens of a communications network, without taking into account how the platform affects collective knowledge, leads to two problems, both on the individual level and on the political level. This misunderstanding operates at both the individual and regulatory level.
As Robin Berjon explains clearly in a recent article how staying on X have “a completely faulty understanding of how power works in the digital sphere and operate according to mental models of social media that simply do not match reality.” They imagine X as a public square that can be occupied or reclaimed, or as a neutral venue where audiences can be addressed. But as Berjon points out, platforms like X function like a personalised newspaper, not as a public space. The platform exerts editorial control over what everyone sees. Some platforms make this editorial decisions based on business reasons, while platforms like X make these decisions much more on political reasons. The DSA is also written from the same perspective: it imagines a neutral infrastructure that could be made transparent and accountable, rather than an editorial system whose owner has no interest in neutrality and is insulated from the economic pressures that regulation assumes.
Jon Worth recently created an extensive wall of shame, posting on a per-commissioner-basis whether they were still posting on X, and found that 25 out of 27 European Commissioners have posted on X in the last week, and 24 out of 27 generally post every week, and none of them have stopped posting since the takeover of X by Musk.
It is indicative of how the EC places itself in a position of weakness. After two years of investigation, coalition politics, legal proceedings, and all the EC has to show for it is a measly €120 million fine and the hope for incremental improvement in transparency practices.
The behaviour of the Commissioners demonstrate how utterly dependent the EU has become on X for their communications. It seems that they can only conceive of power via proximity, and that’s why they feel the need to be on X, as that’s where the social power is. There does not seem to be any understanding by any of the European politicians that they have agency and can take power over social infrastructure themselves. By their own actions they have relegated themselves to a place of dependency, where they cling on to shibboleths of transparency, in the vain hope to regain a sliver of control.
Digital sovereignty has become a buzzword in Europe, but how the EU and the EC treat X, both via the DSA’s regulation as well as with their daily usage, showcase that digital sovereignty is not much more than just that, a buzzword. What does digital sovereignty even mean when you are negotiating terms of platform transparency with a platform who’s owner explicitly calls for the abolishment of the EU, and who is backed by the US government who just released a National Security Strategy that calls European regulation illegitimate censorship? How does a better ad transparency system on X lead in any sort of way to digital sovereignty for Europe?
Sovereignty means having actual power, and this recent DSA fine makes it crystal clear that the EC wields a painfully small amount of it. What’s worse, the continuing presence of virtually all Commissars on X showcases that the European leaders both lack the awareness of how digital power gets constructed, as well as how their continuous presence on X creates and legitimises the power of the people who are actively out in the open working to undermine the existence of the European Union itself.
Social networks built on open protocols, like ATProto and ActivityPub, are designed around an entirely different premise than the DSA. Where the DSA’s theory of power comes from a top-down regulatory control over platform behaviour, the theory of open protocols is to make the type of power that the centralised platforms currently have structurally impossible. There is no single entity that controls the algorithm that needs to be regulated, because there is no single algorithm. Nor can a single entity block the EC’s ads because there is no single entity to do the blocking.
In a recent blog post, Mastodon calls for “social sovereignty”, as a response to how X can retaliate against government institutions. Mastodon understands social sovereignty here as public institutions taking control of their social media presence, mainly by running their own social networking servers on software like Mastodon. They mention explicitly that the EC already has their own Mastodon server, at ec.social-network.europa.eu, and invite other organisations to follow suit. That the EC already has their social sovereign presence, but only uses it for press releases without any of the Commissioners using the platform, further accentuates the large gap between the rhetoric and behaviour. Still, the infrastructure for alternative ways for the EC to take power already exists. Initiatives like Eurosky further indicate that the tools for the EC to shift power structures away from the platforms they’re trying to regulate are available.
Open social networking protocols offer a fundamentally different model of sovereignty from what the DSA tries to accomplish however. The DSA positions the EC as regulator sitting above platforms, using fines and transparency requirements to shape the behaviour of the platforms. Open protocols position the EC as simply one node among many equals.
This indicates a real loss of power for the EC: from regulating platforms with billions of users, to simply running a server as equals, with no meaningful power over the network. But the honest question is if this power over X actually truly existed in a meaningful sense, or if this power always was a legal fiction. That the DSA can only level a fine of 120 million euro against a platform owner who used that platform to gain over 340 billion dollars in wealth, and is using that power to actively influence politics to abolish the existence of the European Union, suggests the latter.
The Parlamentarium tells visitors that the EU makes itself accessible to every citizen. But when you want to know what your MEP actually thinks, there is only one platform to go. Until that changes, digital sovereignty remains nothing more than a story that the EU tells about itself.
https://connectedplaces.online/the-digital-services-act-and-theories-of-power/
Factor 0.101 now available
Link: https://re.factorcode.org/2025/12/factor-0-101-now-available.html
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46216583
큰? 카메라를 왜 쓰나면, 결국 내가 보고 기억한 장면을 재현하기 위해서다. Jpeg 저장(폰카처럼)은 카메라가 본 것을 기록할 뿐이니까. 재현, 혹은 구축하려면 많은 정보가 필요하다. 내 처지에서 많은 돈😭과 노력이 이를 위해 쓰여졌다. 근데, 남한테 권할 건 아닌 거 같아. 🤣😇🤦♂️ 그냥 하이엔드 스마트폰이 대부분의 경우 더 좋은 선택이다.
All forms of age-gating are “a privacy nightmare that burdens the civil liberties of people both young and old,” EFF’s @aaronmackey told Al Jazeera, forcing all to share sensitive information that could be abused or hacked. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/12/9/why-is-australia-banning-social-media-for-teenagers
물은 빛을 틀어서 보여준다. 파문은 아름답다.
Qwen3-Omni-Flash-2025-12-01：a next-generation native multimodal large model
Link: https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3-omni-flash-20251201
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46219538
We're releasing more upgrades to Claude Code CLI:
- Async subagents
- Instant compact
- Custom session names
- Usage stats
【NHKニュース速報 04:02】
米ＦＲＢ 政策金利０．２５％引き下げ
３会合連続 雇用重視し景気を下支えへ
#ニュース #NHKニュース速報
Germany covers nearly 56 percent of 2025 electricity use with renewables
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-covers-nearly-56-percent-2025-electricity-use-renewables #cleanenergy #energytransition #solar #PV #windpower
Spritely office hours happening now! https://community.spritely.institute/t/next-office-hours-on-12-10/779?u=cwebber
ICANN has crimes against humanity to answer for. Not like, war crimes. More like misdemeanors against humanity. Shoplifting against humanity. Crimes which are only large because they are committed against the entire earth at once
Inter 175A Berline 1956.
—Source Amazing Classic Cars.
잠이 안 와
ACM has named 61 new Distinguished Members for 2025! 🌍💡
Recognized for breakthroughs in computing and dedicated service to our community, this diverse group represents top institutions across 15 countries. Their work advances AI, HCI, mobile computing, security, sustainability, and more.
Congratulations to the 2025 class! https://awards.acm.org/distinguished-members
#ACMDistinguishedMembers #computing
Quite excited. About to see Kraftwerk for the first time.
ACM has named 61 new Distinguished Members for 2025! 🌍💡
Recognized for breakthroughs in computing and dedicated service to our community, this diverse group represents top institutions across 15 countries. Their work advances AI, HCI, mobile computing, security, sustainability, and more.
Congratulations to the 2025 class! https://awards.acm.org/distinguished-members
#ACMDistinguishedMembers #computing
전부 아시아구먼.
Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News discussions with hindsight
Link: https://karpathy.bearblog.dev/auto-grade-hn/
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46220540
ㅠ
Human Rights Day in SF Dec 10, 12-1 PM at the City Hall East Steps
Today Dec 10 at noon at City Hall, the California Alliance for Retired Americans (CARA) will read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and discuss ways of fighting back. Join them in solidarity.
This week’s newsletter: buff.ly/2rqJxnN
Valve: HDMI Forum Continues to Block HDMI 2.1 for Linux
Link: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Valve-HDMI-Forum-Continues-to-Block-HDMI-2-1-for-Linux-11107440.html
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46220488
Human Rights Day in SF Dec 10, 12-1 PM at the City Hall East Steps
Today Dec 10 at noon at City Hall, the California Alliance for Retired Americans (CARA) will read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and discuss ways of fighting back. Join them in solidarity.
This week’s newsletter: buff.ly/2rqJxnN
탤레그램 유통되는 유사 케이스들 확인했는데 아무래도 타 사이트 크레덴셜 리크를 파생시킨 패턴 같다.
Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban
Link: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/australia-social-media-ban-takes-effect-world-first-2025-12-09/
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46208348
Dr. Anna Latour
Andy Piper
Chris Siebenmann
Evan Prodromou
Chao-c'
Andreas Freise