De verwarming op 25 graden, de ramen wijd open en een gezin in korte broek. Erica Meijerink van de Energiebank Rotterdam vergeet haar eerste huisbezoek nooit meer. Het gezin had geen idee wat er misging. Die onwetendheid komt de coördinator vaker tegen, ook bij hoogopgeleiden. “Wij doen de aanname dat iedereen het wel weet. En dat is niet zo.”

Die oude fondueset, de vaas van je tante, de jas die je al drie winters niet aanhad: weg ermee, of toch maar bewaren? Met de ‘contactloze’ opruimmethode hoef je dat niet meteen te beslissen. Je zet de twijfelgevallen in een doos, sluit hem af en kijkt pas na zes maanden wat je hebt gemist.

De Amerikaanse opruimexpert Katrina Teeple, oprichter van het bedrijf Operation Organization, legt de methode uit aan het tijdschrift Real Simple. Haar idee: je ervaart eerst hoe je huis voelt met minder spullen. Pas daarna neem je afscheid.

Waarom opruimen zo vaak vastloopt

Haal je een kast leeg, dan moet je bij elk ding een keuze maken. Na een paar uur raak je uitgeput van al die kleine beslissingen. Psychologen noemen dat beslissingsmoeheid. “Beslissingsmoeheid bestaat echt”, zegt Teeple.

Met de doos stel je die keuze uit. Je hoeft niet te weten of je de spullen ooit nog nodig hebt, je merkt het vanzelf. Volgens Teeple zie je zo “hoe je huis voelt en werkt als je minder houdt”.

Ze gebruikt de methode vooral bij mensen die net beginnen met ontspullen, die erg aan hun spullen hechten of die midden in een grote verandering zitten, zoals een verhuizing naar een kleiner huis.

Geef jezelf genoeg tijd om te ervaren hoe het leven zonder die rommel is.

1. Zorg voor dozen, zakken en een stift

Teeple raadt voor een goede start acht middelgrote verhuisdozen en vier vuilniszakken aan, plus een watervaste stift. Maak eerst foto’s van de ruimtes die je gaat aanpakken. Dan zie je straks hoeveel ruimte je hebt gewonnen.

2. Plan het in je agenda

Reserveer een week lang twee ongestoorde uren per dag, of twee hele weekenden. Begin met spullen waar je weinig gevoel bij hebt, zoals feestversiering en kleding van het andere seizoen. Dat gaat sneller en geeft vertrouwen voor de lastigere kasten.

3. Werk kamer voor kamer

Blijf in één ruimte tot die opgeruimd genoeg voelt. Kapotte en onbruikbare spullen gaan meteen in de vuilniszak. Wat nog bruikbaar is maar waar je aan twijfelt, gaat in een doos.

Bij spullen met emotionele waarde bepaal je zelf of je ze binnen handbereik houdt of tijdelijk wegzet. Het stuk over sentimentele spullen en vijf andere opruimtrucs geeft daar meer houvast bij.

4. Label de dozen en zet ze uit het zicht

Schrijf op elke doos wat erin zit en de datum. Zet hem op zolder, in de schuur of boven op een kast, waar je hem niet elke dag ziet. Zo kom je minder in de verleiding om er toch weer in te gaan graven.

5. Kies een datum en houd je eraan

Dit is volgens Teeple het belangrijkste deel. Zet een datum zes maanden verder in je agenda en blijf tot dan van de dozen af. “Een datum zes maanden vooruit is een goed idee, ook al denken mensen: dat is zó lang!”, zegt ze. Ben je eerder tevreden over je opgeruimde huis, dan mag de doos eerder weg.

Rommel slaat je zelfvertrouwen aan gruzelementen. Je hebt het gevoel dat je nooit meer bijkomt.

6. Open de doos en wees eerlijk

Is de datum daar, kijk dan wat je in een half jaar echt hebt gemist. Grote kans dat het om weinig gaat. De rest kun je verkopen, naar de kringloop brengen of weggooien. Wil je daarna verder, kijk dan welke spullen je zonder nadenken meteen kunt wegdoen.

Meer weten?

Bronnen: Real Simple, Yahoo Life

TEHERAN (ANP/AFP/RTR) - De hoogste leider van Iran, Mojtaba Khamenei, heeft gezegd dat iedereen die een koerswijziging in het beleid van de Verenigde Staten verwacht zich ernstig vergist. Dit zei hij nadat de eerste uitslagen van de midterms in de VS wijzen op een nederlaag voor de Republikeinse partij van president Donald Trump.

De vijandigheid van de VS jegens Iran verandert niet door politieke verschuivingen of door concessies te doen aan het land, aldus Khamenei in een verklaring op zijn website. Ook waarschuwde hij voor een reactie van grotere omvang op nieuwe Amerikaanse agressie. Hij voegde eraan toe dat Amerikaanse bases in de regio en de controle over de Straat van Hormuz deel uitmaakten tegen de campagne die ze voeren tegen Amerikaanse heerschappij.

Bij de midterms hebben de Democraten de controle over het Congres overgenomen, waardoor het makkelijker wordt om wetten aan te nemen. Trump kan nog wel zijn vetorecht gebruiken om deze tegen te houden.

DORDRECHT (ANP) - Chemieconcern Chemours in Dordrecht zou zo snel mogelijk moeten stoppen met het uitstoten van PFAS-stoffen en een schadevergoeding moeten betalen aan circa 550.000 mensen die woonachtig zijn in Dordrecht en omstreken. De stichting PFAS Vrij Green Claim wil dat afdwingen bij de civiele rechter en is officieel een collectieve rechtszaak gestart.

Inmiddels hebben "vele duizenden" mensen zich aangesloten bij de massaclaim, zegt de stichting. De dagvaarding werd woensdag symbolisch aan Chemours aangeboden door bestuursleden.

Volgens PFAS Vrij zijn omwonenden jarenlang blootgesteld aan PFAS-stoffen die Chemours uitstootte en in het water, de lucht en het milieu belandden. PFAS is een verzamelnaam voor chemische stoffen die worden gebruikt voor onder meer antiaanbaklagen in pannen. Ze worden in verband gebracht met verschillende ziekten en aandoeningen, zoals kanker en vruchtbaarheidsproblemen.

LONDEN (ANP/RTR) - Jake Paul zet een punt achter zijn bokscarrière als hij op kerstavond verliest van Cédric Doumbé. Dat stelt de bekende Amerikaanse influencer en verloofde van schaatsster Jutta Leerdam in een video op sociale media. Daarin gaat hij in op het gevecht op 24 december in Dubai.

De 29-jarige Paul durfde het vorig jaar december aan om tegen de Britse oud-wereldkampioen bij de zwaargewichten Anthony Joshua te boksen. De Amerikaan ging knock-out in de zesde ronde en brak zijn kaak op meerdere plekken.

"Dit is een gevaarlijk gevecht", zegt Paul in de video over de komende confrontatie met de Kameroens-Franse Doumbé. "Cédric heeft zijn hele carrière tegen 'killers' gevochten. Hij is tweevoudig wereldkampioen kickboksen en voor niemand bang. Als hij wint, hang ik mijn bokshandschoenen aan de wilgen en stop ik ermee. Maar als hij verliest, dan is de man die zichzelf 'De Beste' noemt, in elkaar geslagen door een youtuber met een kaak van titanium."

ajpscs posted a photo:

東京で雨
BLACK RAIN
東京 ALLEY
© ajpscs

Ministers urged to go further than proposed cut to 110 decibels to ease acute stress on birds and others animals

Campaigners are calling on the government to protect the welfare of wild animals by cutting the maximum noise level of fireworks sold to the public from 120 to 90 decibels.

The Center for Wild Animal Welfare (CWAW) has said lowering the limit to 90 decibels – which is about one-eighth of the loudness of 120 decibels – would help to protect millions of wild animals from acute stress by reducing the area over which a firework disturbs surrounding wildlife.

Continue reading...

Today's links

• The AI fatfinger economy has come for my receipts app: Every heretofore useful button now summons a useless AI genie.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Army Times v Rumsfeld; RIAA v soccer mom; Skateboard truck table; Internet scare-story prof won't show her workings; IoT botnet v Liberia; BLM v TPP.
• Upcoming appearances: Kilkenny, Courtenay, Vancouver, Folkestone, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Montreal.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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The AI fatfinger economy has come for my receipts app (permalink)

"AI is being shoved down our throats" can mean any of several things. It can mean that our bosses are demanding that we use AI in reckless or nonsensical ways on the job:

https://www.404media.co/manifestos-fear-and-loser-thinking-inside-protons-ai-reckoning/

It can mean that Elon Musk and the NASDAQ have colluded to force ordinary retirement savers to bail out his emirati and tech oligarch buddies:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/05/technology/spacex-indexes-401k.html

These are arguably the most important ways in which AI is shoved down our throats, but the most visible form of conscription into the number-go-up AI project is happening at the user interface level. This UI fuckery predates AI. For more than a decade, tech companies and their executives have colluded to trick, coerce and force you into using new features that they wanted to sell to their investors as the future of their companies.

Remember Google Plus, the Facebook-killing social layer that was going to give Google access to a new, multi-trillion-dollar market? Bradley Horowitz, then a VP at Google, charged every product team with cramming G+ into their offerings, tying their bonuses to G+ usage (at companies like Google, your bonus can dwarf your base salary).

Now, googlers are bright and resourceful people, and if you tell them that they can double their earnings by getting users to click on Google Plus buttons, they'll come up with all kinds of ways to get you to do this. Some of those gambits will be the kind of thing that Horowitz doubtless hoped for: innovative and creative ways to add value to Google's core offerings with G+ features.

But when the stakes are that high, Goodhart's Law inevitably comes into play: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

The easiest way to get a user to click on a G+ button is to replace whatever button that user hits most often with a G+ version. Rather than introducing users to Google Plus in a way that turns them into G+ fans, you just frustrate them by tricking them into clicking on a useless button.

From a product manager's perspective, it's worth making whatever changes as are needed to ensure that your salary is doubled because you hit your "key performance indicator" (KPI), even if it's at the expense of your users' loyalty to your product. Preserving user loyalty at the expense of half your wages is a bad trade.

When a machine learning system does this, we call it "reward hacking." AI programmers create an "objective function" for their system, a single number that the system will try every tactic to increase; then, more often than not, the AI program finds perverse shortcuts to make the number go up whether or not it achieves the programmer's goal:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reward_hacking

For example, if you charge an AI with coming up with the shortest run through a video game, it might well discover a bug that makes it impervious to enemy attacks or just lets it teleport to the end of the game. To avoid these perverse outcomes, programmers have to add more and more specificity to their objective functions: "speed run the game without teleporting or discovering an immortality hack."

Not for nothing, many science fiction writers (including me) have noted that tech bosses' fear of their own AI systems is a kind of emotional spillover from their frustrations with the corporations they run, where underlings engage in the same kinds of reward hacking that we see from chatbots:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/14/timmy-share/#a-superior-moral-justification-for-selfishness

Despite the ease with which metrics can be gamed, tech bosses remained committed to the use of KPIs to shift the priorities of their organizations, and they use the same objective function refinement technique that programmers use for reward-hacking AIs in a bid to prevent cheating by employees who hit their KPIs any way they can.

This explains a lot about the experience of watching a video on your phone. Any time you tune into a show on a streaming platform, you are forced to handle your phone with the delicacy of a photonegative. If any part of your hand brushes any part of the screen, you will immediately be whisked away from the video you're watching to an entirely different one:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/15/the-fatfinger-economy/

Worse, after your program has been replaced with this new one, there's no obvious way to get back to the show you were just watching. This is very weird, considering that the "back button" has been a part of computer interfaces since 1981:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/back%20button

The reason you don't get a back button is reward hacking. Streaming video platforms are under enormous pressure to successfully recommend their back-catalog to their users, because the alternative (commissioning or purchasing a steady stream of popular new shows) is very expensive. Investors put a lot of stock in streaming services' "successful recommendation" rate.

So streaming service bosses charge their product teams with making "successful recommendations." The easiest way to "recommend a show" is to booby-trap the streaming service's UI so that touching any part of the screen takes you to a video you never asked to see.

This is obvious reward hacking, so streaming bosses refined their objective function: they made their teams' bonuses contingent on getting you to watch a new video for a minimum time-frame. This in turn triggered the next volley in the reward-hacking wars, in which product teams took away the back button. This gives users any number of greased slides that whisk them away to a new video. To get back to the old video, users are forced to climb a greased pole.

This is the fatfinger economy: created in the 2010s by teams at large tech companies with KPI-obsessed bosses; refined in the 2020s by teams at bottom-line obsessed streaming media companies; and now perfected by teams being charged with cramming AI into every corner of our lives:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/02/kpis-off/#principal-agentic-ai-problem

The fatfinger economy is an extraordinary beneficiary of the drive to add "telemetry" to all of our apps. Today, an app vendor can call up a dashboard and find out which buttons and fields and sliders see the most use, and they can use that ranked list to figure out which buttons to replace with AI-demon-summoning lookalikes that help product teams "prove" to their bosses that they've "successfully integrated AI" and lets their bosses prove to their investors that "users value AI features."

I recently switched from Android to Graphene, a de-googled phone operating system. Graphene's maintainers are blissfully free from the imperative to show that "users value AI features," and that's why I have never accidentally summoned up an undismissable AI by tapping a Graphene UI element.

It's a different story when it comes to apps. Graphene has many different ways to install apps, including via Google Play (Google's default Android store). That's useful because it lets you install your old Android apps after switching to Graphene, but it does leave you exposed to the fatfinger economy.

Last week, I got a painful reminder of the progress of the fatfinger economy outside of Graphene's utopian pocket-universe. I make extensive use of an app called "Genius Scanner," which lets me scan receipts and email them to myself (I do this a lot because, as a freelancer, I have to track a lot of different expenses). I bought a lifetime subscription to Genius Scanner in 2023, after getting burned by Camscanner (my previous, now enshittified scanning app), and I've been perfectly happy with it…until now.

Genius Scanner is obviously under pressure to drive AI adoption. I can tell because they've taken away the most important UI element and swapped it for a worse-than-useless AI button.

Here's how I use Genius Scanner: I press the "make new scan" button and line up the receipt on the screen. Then I press the "retitle" button, which brings up a field that is populated with the current date and time (16 characters in all). This text used to be selected so that hitting the little "x" next to it deleted it, making it easy to title a new scan. After that, I'd just email it to myself.

As of last week, though, there is no button that deletes the date and time so you can enter a useful title. That little "x" has been replaced with a button that brings up an ad for the company's new AI tools, which cost $40/year. There's no way to tell the system that you're not interested in buying a new subscription for the tool that you've already bought a lifetime sub for, and there's no way to get that little "x" back.

To be clear: that little "x" represents one quarter of my receipt scanning workflow. They have swapped it out for an ad for a new subscription AI feature, and gave me 16 new keypresses on the backspace button to replace that single tap on the "x." I have seen that ad about 100 times at this point, because I keep tapping the spot where the "x" used to be.

I'm certain that the company knew that its paying customers relied on the "x" to accomplish a vital function in any scanning app (giving good, descriptive titles to scans). They need the AI number to go up, so they replaced the "x" with the AI ad, which will let them tell their investors that they've got "strong consumer interest in their AI features."

Meanwhile, they already have my money, so there's no way I can punish them for their decision to screw me over to juke a meaningless stat. It's as neat (and depressing) an example of the principle that "even if you're paying for the product, you're still the product" that you could ask for.

It's also a perfect little object-lesson in the ways that companies can report increasing AI interest and usage without generating any interest or usage. In the fatfinger economy, every metric is a target, and is thereby rendered meaningless.

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• Google Will Turn Off Search for Schools That Reject A.I. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/03/us/google-search-schools-restrict-ai.html

• Private Credit's State Backstop: How Private Equity Socializes Risk Through Insurers https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7152239

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Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Army Times: Rumsfeld must go! https://web.archive.org/web/20061107220242/http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/110406Z.shtml

#20yrsago UK is a surveillance society http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6108496.stm

#20yrsago Record companies sue soccer mom’s kids https://web.archive.org/web/20061104145550/https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/02/AR2006110200114.html

#15yrsago HOWTO make your own skateboard truck lazy-susan table https://www.instructables.com/Skateboard-Table/

#15yrsago Home Secretary to OccupyLondon: you’re scaring the tourists https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-15588987

#15yrsago Judge whose daughter released video of him beating her suspended from bench during judicial investigation https://web.archive.org/web/20111105234141/http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_VIDEOTAPED_BEATING_TEXAS

#15yrsago Prof who keeps announcing links between the Internet, childhood dementia and autism should publish theories in a scientific journal https://www.badscience.net/2011/11/why-wont-professor-greenfield-publish-this-theory-in-a-scientific-journal/

#10yrsago Internet of Things botnet threatens to knock the entire country of Liberia offline https://doublepulsar.com/shadows-kill-mirai-ddos-botnet-testing-large-scale-attacks-sending-threatening-messages-about-6a61553d1c7#.zg4448j8w

#10yrsago Black Lives Matter declares its opposition to TPP https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/11/gauis-publius-tpp-has-picked-up-a-powerful-enemy-black-lives-matter.html

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Kilkenny (Kilkenomics), Nov 6-8
  https://kilkenomics.com/

• Courtenay: Enshittification (Sid Williams Theatre Society), Nov 10
  https://www.sidwilliamstheatre.com/events/cory-doctorow-talks-enshittification/

• Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
  https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/

• Folkestone Writers Festival, Nov 16
  https://www.creativefolkestone.org.uk/whats-on/cory-doctorow-the-internet-is-broken-now-what/

• Oxford: Ministry of the Future, Nov 23
  https://ministryforthefuture.co.uk/events.html

• Sheffield: Reverse Centaur at Juno Books, Nov 25
  https://www.outsavvy.com/event/40274/cory-doctorow-in-conversation

• Virtual: Enshittification, AI, and the Future of Technology (UBC Master of Educational Technology), Nov 28
  https://met.ubc.ca/2026/09/met-speaker-series-cory-doctorow-enshittification-ai-and-the-future-of-technology/

• Oxford: Bennett Oxford Symposium on Open Code in Science, Dec 9
  https://www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/events/2026-bennett-institute-symposium/

• Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6
  https://montreal2027.ca/en

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• Clint Eastwood (No Gods No Mayors)
  https://www.patreon.com/NoGodsNoMayors/posts/clint-eastwood-173008088

• Life After AI (Brain Bar)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPPa43-n0vI

• Terms of Service with Clare Duffy (CNN)
  https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/terms-of-service-with-clare-duffy/episodes/458ce968-af5d-11f0-b539-13ed2afe25f8

• AI, Work, and Power (Software Engineering Daily)
  AI, Work, and Power https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/podcasts/cory-doctorow-on-ai-work-and-power/

• AI, Corporate Power, and the Fight for Worker Control (Plutopia)
  https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-ai-corporate-power-and-the-fight-for-worker-control/

---

Latest books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

---

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

---

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 544 (32413 total).

• "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

---

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Mark Hughes and Giorgio Piola divulge how Mercedes managed to get their front wing upgrade to work from Austin onwards.