Slashdot reader prisoninmate shares this report from 9to5Linux:

Coming ten days after the previous Linux kernel security update, which only fixed 12 vulnerabilities that may lead to a privilege escalation, denial of service, or information leaks, the new Debian 13 Linux kernel security update is a massive one, and it patches no less than 68 security vulnerabilities in the Linux 6.12 LTS kernel. ebian 13 "Trixie" kernel security update are CVE-2026-64530, a use-after-free in the traffic-control subsystem leading to remote denial-of-service with potential for remote code execution, and CVE-2026-64531 (a.k.a. OVSwrap), a local-root vulnerability in the Open vSwitch datapath leading to local privilege escalation to root...

All Debian 13 "Trixie" users are urged to update their installations to Linux kernel 6.12.100-1 as soon as possible.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Als je moet, dan moet je. Maar maakt het uit hoe vaak je kakt? Onderzoekers claimen dat hoe lang poep in je lijf zit vóórdat je moet, een grote invloed kan hebben op je gezondheid op de lange termijn. Van je darmflora tot je risico op chronische ziektes: het schijnt allemaal samen te hangen met één simpel gegeven.

Wetenschappers noemen het de 'gut transit time', oftewel: de tijd die je eten nodig heeft om van je mond naar het toilet te reizen. Iedereen heeft daarin zijn eigen ritme en er bestaat geen exact 'normaal' aantal keer per dag dat je zou moeten poepen. De medische wereld houdt het over het algemeen op ergens tussen de drie keer per dag en drie keer per week.

Trage spijsvertering

Uit een onderzoek uit 2023, gepubliceerd in het gepast genaamde tijdschrift Gut, blijkt dat deze transporttijd een van de belangrijkste factoren is die bepaalt hoe het zit met de biljoenen bacteriën die in je darmen leven. Beweegt je eten te langzaam, dan raken die bacteriën op een gegeven moment door hun vezels heen en beginnen ze in plaats daarvan eiwitten aan te vreten.

Daarbij ontstaan stoffen die leiden tot de grote gezondheidsvijand van onze tijd: ontsteking. Ook kan het DNA-schade veroorzaken en mogelijk bijdragen aan darmkanker.

Hersenziektes

En dan wordt het pas echt spannend, want een verstoorde transittijd is ook in verband gebracht met aandoeningen als het prikkelbare darm syndroom en de ziekte van Crohn; en zelfs met heftige hersenaandoeningen als de ziekte van Parkinson, Alzheimer en multiple sclerose.

Toch hoef je niet meteen in paniek raken: wetenschappers weten nog altijd niet zeker of veranderingen in je spijsvertering die ziektes daadwerkelijk veróórzaken, of dat het juist andersom is en de ziektes de veranderingen in je darmen veroorzaken.

Zo krijg je je poeptrein weer op schema

Gelukkig kun je zelf best wat doen om je 'poeptrein' weer op een gezond schema te laten draaien. Denk aan een beter dieet, meer bewegen en zoveel mogelijk stress vermijden. Er zijn echter ook factoren waar je zelf weinig tot geen grip op hebt, zoals je leeftijd, je genen en eventuele bijwerkingen van medicijnen die je slikt.

Bron: Vice

LONDEN (ANP/RTR) - De groei van de industrie in de eurozone is in juli verder aangetrokken na een toename in juni, meldt marktonderzoeker S&P Global. De fabrieksproductie in het eurogebied steeg vorige maand in het snelste tempo in bijna 4,5 jaar.

De index van S&P Global die de mate van bedrijvigheid in de industrie van het eurogebied meet, nam in juli toe tot 51,9, van 51,4 in juni. Dat is het hoogste niveau sinds april. Een niveau van 50 of meer duidt op groei, daaronder op krimp. In april stond de index met 52,2 nog op het hoogste niveau in bijna vier jaar.

"Fabrikanten in de eurozone genieten van een zomerse groeispurt. Er zijn echter tekenen dat dit goede nieuws van korte duur kan zijn en dat het momentum dreigt af te nemen naarmate de herfst nadert", waarschuwde Chris Williamson, hoofdeconoom bij S&P Global.

De orders stegen in juli namelijk slechts marginaal en bleven ruim onder het tempo van de productiegroei. Dat wijst erop dat fabrieken vooral bezig zijn met het wegwerken van achterstanden in plaats van nieuwe orders.

CEUTA (ANP) - Het aantal mensen dat is omgekomen bij de migrantencrisis in Ceuta van afgelopen donderdag en vrijdag is opgelopen tot 88, meldt het bestuur van de Spaanse exclave aan persbureau EFE. De meesten van hen kwamen om door verdrinking.

De doden vielen toen binnen korte tijd circa 50.000 migranten, vermoedelijk vooral Marokkanen, Ceuta binnendrongen. Velen van hen kwamen zwemmend en moesten om een barrière in de zee heen zwemmen. Dat hebben tientallen mensen niet overleefd. Er zijn ook berichten over mensen die van rotswanden zijn gevallen, mogelijk terwijl ze uit het water aan land probeerden te komen.

Marokko meldde zondagavond elf doden, maar zei ook berichten over doden aan de andere kant van de grens nog te onderzoeken.

De massale aankomst zorgde voor veel onrust in Ceuta zelf, maar ook in andere Europese landen. Maandagmiddag praten ambassadeurs uit alle EU-landen over het incident, in voorbereiding op ingelast overleg van EU-ministers van Binnenlandse Zaken dinsdag.

Pop and rock legend tells Sunday Times of drinking problem and ill health after final Genesis tour in 2021

Phil Collins has said that he suffered life-threatening alcoholism in recent years.

Speaking to the Sunday Times, the pop and rock legend, 75, said that his drinking began after he stopped taking Antabuse, a drug that causes illness if alcohol is consumed, which he had been using since an earlier period of alcoholism.

Continue reading...

The latest in our ongoing series of writers picking their most beloved comfort films is a tribute to David Lynch’s gentlest movie

What was your gateway into the Lynchian empire? Maybe it was the elliptical horror of Mulholland Drive, with its labyrinth of dream and deceit. Perhaps it was the small-town banality of Twin Peaks or Blue Velvet, the gee-whiz vernacular and cherry-pie dispositions hiding a malice so pure behind those white picket fences. Or was it Wild at Heart, that nightmarish road movie where oddballs and deviants lurk at every bend, Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern tearing through America with unbridled passion and violence?

Weirdly, it was none of those for me. In fact, my introduction to David Lynch contained not one drop of sexual depravity or grisly malevolence. The film was The Straight Story and I was 15. Released in May 1999, it tells the real-life tale of Alvin Straight, a 73-year-old second world war vet who rode a lawnmower 300 miles across the midwest to reconcile with his ailing brother. While the title obviously names the main character, it also invites you to take Lynch at his word: that this is that fabled chronicler of the demented and the macabre playing it straight(ish). Think of it as Lynch does Disney: a family-friendly hymn to Americana, sparse and only a little bit strange, finding a gentle poetry in the everyday.

Continue reading...

It took a heatwave to get me to shed my shame and my sleeves, but now there’s no stopping me. Life is cooler in every way

‘Aren’t you hot in that?” was the question that plagued my summers as a teenager. I would never bare my arms; instead, I would cover up with a trusty black cardigan. Even T-shirts felt too revealing, too tight on the arm, too clinging to the body. I needed layers to feel comfortable. Well, comfortable isn’t the right word. I was never comfortable, despite telling everyone: “No, I’m not hot. I don’t really feel the heat.”

In my 20s and 30s, I collected a hot-weather capsule wardrobe of T-shirt dresses in various sizes, all baggy and sleeved. But why? I’m someone who should know better. I’ve read the books, I’ve shared the memes. I know, from body-positivity activists, that you don’t have to deny yourself the joy of being at the beach or pool just because a magazine tells you you have to get yourself “beach-body ready”: slimmer, hairless, perfect.

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From the 47-year-old runner who needs a double hip replacement to the 27-year-old CrossFitter with a ruptured ACL, those who push their bodies too hard often regret it. What are the lessons for the rest of us?

Jonathan Price has always been active and exercise-focused. Growing up in south Wales, rugby was his first love. Through school, university and beyond, he also surfed, rowed, played squash and ran competitively – on track, in 10k races and cross-country. Career and family demands meant that much of this fell away in later years, but the running stuck. He found time for marathons, half marathons – “I’d run a half marathon every weekend just for fun,” he says – and, through the working week, regular 30- or 40-minute runs to manage stress and clear his head. “I travel a lot for work,” says Price, now 50, a company CEO. “With running, all you need is a pair of running shoes and you can do it anywhere.”

By his mid-40s, though, Price’s body was beginning to object. He wasn’t recovering so well. “I could run just fine but I’d be in pain for two or three days afterwards,” he says. On top of this, every six months or so, his lower back seemed to seize up completely. A physiotherapist thought it was “tight hip flexors” and pointed Price towards “hip opening” exercises, designed to reduce stiffness and increase range of motion. Someone else prescribed him muscle relaxants, but the pain only deepened, and his range of movement continued to dip. Finally, in the summer of 2023, a chance encounter with a hip surgeon led to the diagnosis of osteoarthritis and, at the end of that year, Price, then 47, had a double hip replacement.

Continue reading...

Around the world, these trains have boosted economies, development and prestige. The costs of missing out are high

• Christian Wolmar is the author of Fast Track: The Extraordinary Story of High-Speed Rail

With all our grumbling about trains – and it is close to a national pastime – it is easy to forget the successes. There is a tale to tell, for example, about high-speed trains, that goes beyond the endless wrangling over HS2.

If you look at the history around the globe, as I have, you find that high-speed trains saved the railways. An industry that was gradually sinking into oblivion, thanks to motorways and aeroplanes, has been revitalised by a technological revolution that means trains travel faster, more safely and more comfortably.

Continue reading...

Iranian spokesperson says there are no plans to receive or send a delegation following US president’s assertion that talks would take place on Monday

• Trump says Iran talks set for Monday

Two ⁠tankers laden with ​Saudi oil crossed the Bab el-Mandeb strait over the weekend, data collected by Reuters showed on Monday, despite the maritime embargo against Saudi Arabia declared by the Iran-aligned Houthis at the end of last month.

Kpler data showed that 18 commodity vessels total passed the Bab el-Mandeb strait on Sunday, down from the 27 that passed on Saturday and the 28 on Friday.

Continue reading...

• Slovene great last rode in Vuelta during the 2019 edition

• ‘The time is right to go back,’ says five-time Tour winner

Cycling great Tadej Pogacar will return to the Vuelta a España for the first time since 2019, UAE Team Emirates confirmed on Monday.

“It’s true – he’s coming back,” wrote the five-time Tour de France winner’s team on social media platform X to announce his participation in the race, which starts on 22 August.

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Met het wagentje (hoge instap) terug van een maandje Birkenstocklopen in Benidorm? FLITS! Drie heerlijke weken Zuid-Frankrijk gehad met kids en sleurhut en maar vijf uur vertraging op de A16 bij Hazeldonk deze keer. FLITS! Ja we zijn op weg naar onweer bij het Gardameer we verheugen ons op de Autogrill. FLITS! Autobahn gepakt lekker dicht bij huis Duitsland wat een fijn land en die mensen zo Duits. FLITS! Keertje naar Kopenhagen geweest hartstikke leuk niet al te warm nu gelukkig weer op weg naar huis. FLITS! België. FLITS! Terug van de autovakantie naar elk ander Europees vakantieland in geldnood (Polen, Servië of Portugal?). FLITS! Of u nou 108, 109, 110 of, na de correctie, 105 kilometer per uur rijdt, vanaf vandaag moet u oppassen voor de jaarlijkse tweejaarlijkse Europese graaimarathon vermomd als FLITSMARATHON van de marathongraaiers van Roadpol. Bespaar uzelf de portemonneepijn, de vakantie was immers al zo duur. Flitsloze vaart!

Omdat ie zo leuk is

Social

etsu2 has added a photo to the pool:

The Transportation Ministry and the military have set up a joint task force to reroute freight and protect commercial ships.

Fabio Bruna posted a photo:

Koeien spotten van achter het vogelkijkscherm.

OPINION The UK's National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park (TNMoC) is a natural center of digital archaeology. It has restored, recreated, and documented landmark machines, from the wartime Colossus computer through to British mainframes of the '60s and '70s. Its collection from the dawn of the microprocessor age also attracts those who live to investigate such things. LLMs, still in their metaphorical diapers, might not sound like a good fit for the hallowed huts. But boy, are they ever. TNMoC has a YouTube channel, and puts out guest talks from anyone with something interesting to say about industry history. These include subspecies of retro geek who reverse-engineer long-abandoned systems, chips, and backwaters of digital history. They thoroughly deserve the sobriquet of digital archaeologists, as they display the profession's expected love of the obscure and the skills required to understand it properly. Their talks bear comparison with reverse-engineering presentations at DEF CON and Black Hat, peeling back layer after layer of mystery to reveal something unlikely ever to affect most of us. Of late, the TNMoC digital archaeology talks have rather suddenly sprouted a new theme – LLMs demonstrating surprising prowess in the art and science of rebuilding the past. One such was bringing Inmos Transputer systems back to life by designing an accelerator for the Acorn Archimedes, the first Arm-based computer. Retro's like that. Transputers were a 1980s UK effort to commercialize low-cost parallel processing. Programmed using their own brain-mangling specialist language, occam, Transputers were unparalleled if you understood how they worked and had a parallelizable task you could occam. Almost nobody did, and the technology was swept away by the time of the Pentium. There isn't much information available about the systems. Phil Pemberton, who designed the accelerator and gave the talk, admitted that he struggled to get his head around occam and doubted many users could have managed without high-level support from Inmos. But Claude Code could, getting his software working. An even more impressive Claude-powered reverse engineering effort, if marginally less obscure, was the disassembly and annotation of Acorn's 6502-based Network Filing System, NFS. This required a deep understanding not only of the code, but of Econet's LAN hardware and software – developed around 1980, before Ethernet became commonplace on microcomputers – plus much of the host hardware and software. The motivation was to write an Econet game, of which very few exist. Creator Rob Smallshire described the undertaking as a project of "infinite scope and no budget." Retro's like that – and it's not alone. The result is an impeccably structured and commented series of source code files, much better than ever existed before. The full story of how that came about is complex and absorbing, but boils down to Claude Code running and debugging emulators, spotting mismatches with chip datasheets, interpreting circuit diagrams and handbooks, simulating machine states, absorbing control flow graphs, and more. This resembles the way an expert human reverse engineer works and, in the right hands, Claude Code appears to deliver a dramatic increase in efficiency without sacrificing quality. A ROM can be processed in a day, fully commented, even to the point of Claude Code saying "Oh, that's clever" of particularly notable bits. "As a big AI skeptic, it just blew my mind," said a voice from the audience. TNMoC audiences are hardcore. This is not simply retro geekery; it is true digital archaeology with true modern implications. There's plenty of precedent. Forensic science owes a great deal to archaeology, such as excavation methodology, taphonomy – the study of what happens to organic remains after death – osteology, and the analysis of mass graves and conflict sites. Paleoclimatology informs modern climate science. And if you want near-infinite examples of how history has valuable lessons for every aspect of the modern day, just ask a historian. Best get comfortable first, though. There is an exact parallel here between digital archaeology and the forensic analysis of the contemporary crime scenes found in so many enterprises. It seems cheaper at the time to patch and wrap old systems to work in new environments than to go through the cost, disruption, and risk of rebuilding from scratch. People move on and documentation, such as there is, is lost, even as projects stay in place. Anyone with a few years in the engine rooms of corporate IT will know the right things to do to responsibly evolve and the many reasons why the wrong thing happens anyway. When migration, merger, reorg, or a new C-suite broom arrives, the skeletons come dancing out of the servers. Now, it seems, there are new ways to keep dem dry bones under control. A technology that can put flesh on the fossils of systems that vanished in the days of dial-up should have plenty to say about more recent antiques, for which far more code and documentation survives. As the digital archaeologists have shown, it's not a zero-effort magic wand. "Here's our server map, document it and tell me what to do" is an incantation for slop. Work with it with logic, reason, and iteration, though, and you'll be able to build the legacy system encyclopedia everyone needs and nobody has. Given enough context, LLMs are very good indeed at filling gaps, to the extent that critical, skeptical experts are regularly surprised and gratified by the results. They know what to do and what a right answer looks like, and thus can provide the context for the model to do the hard work. In the case of badly documented, poorly understood, and generally mysterious digital technology, we have the proof of concept that LLMs cut the mustard. You still need the skills and experience to make this fly. Don't wait for a deadline or a crisis: crack open a CLI and start experimenting on the ugliest monster in your life. Take care over security – mixing LLMs with corporate secrets is a live-fire exercise – and make sure anyone who might be unpleasantly surprised by what you find is in the loop. You can't prompt an LLM not to embarrass your boss, that's still up to you. If you are the boss, have at it. Not everyone is on the retro train. Steve Furber, co-creator of the BBC Micro and the Arm processor, has said he can't see the point of old computers because new ones are so much better. As he's spent his latter years designing million-core artificial brains, he has a point. But anyone who must keep alive that which should be dead – or put it out of everyone's misery – should watch what the older generation is doing with the corpses in its labs. It can be… electrifying. ®

Today's links

• Dualism: Why not both?
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: UK's Great Firewall falls; Mint the coins; Virtual pets v DRM; Getty copyfrauds 47,000 photos; Net Mexico-US illegal migration is zero; Build a wall (around Trump Tower); Remote-hacking big rigs; Collectible AOL CDs; Indefinite Gitmo; Circuit City rips DVDs; Real Names policies are abusive failures; Escher in a water drop; Maximally code-like bugs.
• Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
• 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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Dualism (permalink)

The greatest magic trick of them all is lying. The reason you can't figure out that coin vanish even after the conjurer performs it three times in a row is that they didn't do the same trick three times in a row! They did three different tricks: "Didn't catch it? Here, let me do it again!" is a lie:

https://magiciansmag.com/3-cool-coin-disappearing-trick/

There's times when it makes sense to treat two outcomes as the same, even if they were produced by very different means. As a reader, my enjoyment of your novel is the same whether it was dictated, typed on an Underwood Noiseless, keyed into a word processor, or scratched out with a fountain pen:

https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/writing-by-hand-is-good-for-your

There's plenty of routes that arrive at the same place, and if the destination is all that matters to you, it's fine to ignore the journey. But often, those end-points have subtle differences that are only revealed when things go wrong. If all you care about is how things work, chances are good that you're in for an unpleasant surprise when things fail.

I recently found myself arguing with an interviewer about whether AI is, or could be, conscious. We weren't arguing about whether it might someday be possible to make an artificial consciousness – as a materialist, I'll happily stipulate to this. I think that everything we call "consciousness" is the result of a physical process occurring within our bodies (and possibly around them?), so I think it's perfectly reasonable to imagine that someday we might create another physical process that produces the same effect.

But that's not what the interviewer wanted to argue about. His point was that teaching more words to the word-guessing program would produce consciousness, an argument I always liken to "breeding horses to run faster and faster until one of them foals a locomotive." In support of this (outlandish) proposition, the interviewer performed a kind of cognitive coin-trick: "I can often predict what my wife is going to say, and so can a chatbot that's been trained on her words. Therefore, we're both doing the same conscious work – and therefore the chatbot will eventually be as conscious as I am."

"Predicting what you will say through an understanding based on a theory of your mind" and "predicting what you are going to say based on a statistical analysis of your utterances" might produce the same outputs, but they are not the same trick. You can tell by what happens when the trick fails.

My wife and I have been together for 23 years now, and there's plenty of times that we can finish each other's sentences – and so can the autocomplete on our phones. The autocomplete manages the trick by exploiting the fact that we often repeat ourselves. But we manage the trick by understanding each other (and by exploiting the fact of repetition).

When my wife says something surprising – because she is angry or delighted, sad or happy – I can make a reliable guess about what caused my prediction to misfire. Our "sentence completion" trick doesn't emerge from a rough, automatically generated mental table of the statistical likelihood that word A will follow word B. We also understand why those combinations appear in each other's speech and writing.

"Understanding" and "statistical extrapolation" can often lead to the same place, but when they don't, "understanding" provides a way forward, while "extrapolation" founders. Both work fine, but only one fails gracefully. The two tricks only appear the same, but they are fundamentally different.

AI's investor story – and the science fiction tales of AI's eventual capabilities that underpin that investor story – makes heavy use of this conjurer's trick, in which two different outcomes are equated to one another because they resemble each other.

This "ignore the journey, focus on the destination" idea is baked very deeply into the way we think about AI. Take the "Turing Test," a complicated and nuanced thought-experiment proposed in 1950. Over the ensuing 75 years, Turing's thought-experiment has been stripped down into a blunt metric: "Can a chatbot trick a human into thinking it is also human?"

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

"I mistook a chatbot for a human" and "I took a human for a human" arrive at near-identical places, but they are subtly and importantly different. The erroneous assumption that my phone's autocomplete is actually a person who understands me well enough to finish my sentences works fine, but the instant I turn to it for understanding, it will fail very badly. Autocomplete's predictions are always grounded in who you used to be, which means autocomplete knows very little about who you are now, and absolutely nothing about who you will become:

https://reallifemag.com/instant-recall/

The low-rez Turing Test that captured popular discourse is profoundly misleading. It's the unsound foundation of a worldview that renders you incapable of distinguishing your understanding of your spouse from their phone's autocomplete function. It's the self-serving rationale that leads you to declare yourself a proud stochastic parrot:

https://xcancel.com/sama/status/1599471830255177728

The AI bubble is (seemingly) full of contradictions, but – like those baffling coin-tricks – these contradictions often resolve themselves very neatly once you realize that the "contradiction" is actually just two things that appear to be one.

For example, some of the billionaires who put up the first several hundred million for AI are solipsists who just don't believe other people are entirely real and therefore find it easy to believe that AI can do their jobs. Other billionaires are cynics who think that bosses can be sold defective worker-replacing chatbots because they're credulous suckers for that pitch, the same way they believe that desperate young men are suckers for Joe Rogan's useless and/or dangerous supplements and peptides:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/24/supplemental-income/#andrew-tate-gwyneth-paltrow

Billionaire AI true believers and billionaire AI cynics make for a powerful coalition. The roadblocks that might discourage the first group are easily hurdled by the second, and vice-versa. You don't have to believe AI works to believe it can be sold, and you don't have to be motivated by the sales opportunity to believe that AI is about to become god.

Almost every debate I get into about AI turns out to be an unjustified, unacknowledged conflation of two things that seem similar, but have profoundly different underlying characteristics. Take this argument: "Every time we extend rights to the nonhuman world – watersheds, endangered animals, ecosystems – the world gets better. Let's extend rights to AI – whether or not we think it's a 'person' and so reap those benefits."

This, too, is a coin trick. Extending rights to nature reliably makes the world better, but extending rights to constructs makes the world far worse (Exhibit A is corporate personhood) (obviously).

A few moments' thought reveals the difference. If we extend rights to a watershed, that might result in an AI data-center being killed. If we extend rights to AI, that might lead to sacrificing the watershed to cool the data-center:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/10/posthuman-as-in-no-humans/#hell-is-other-people

Then there's AI and labor. The world is full of skilled workers who have found ways to use AI on the job that they insist have improved their work. It's also full of skilled workers who warn us that on-the-job AI is producing tech debt at unimaginable scale, seriously depreciating the quality of the tools we use today, and setting us up for painful reckonings in the future.

This (seeming) contradiction melts away once you realize that these workers only appear to be doing the same thing. The first group of workers, excited about their AI-assisted output, are "centaurs": people assisted by machines; workers who choose the time and manner of their AI adoption. The second group are "reverse centaurs": people recruited to serve as peripherals for machines, who direct their actions and workflow:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington

Note that this isn't the same thing as saying "A skilled worker who adopts a tool willingly is always right and will produce a better output as a result." Nor is it saying, "The tool is so flawed that workers who claim it works for them must be deluded."

That's another coin trick! The reality – again – is that this is two things: some workers whose AI-assisted work is measurably worse are wrong about AI making their work better (centaurs, but wrong), and; some workers are being forced to use AI and know damned well that it's making their work worse (reverse centaurs).

Finally, there's an economic coin-trick: "AI will destroy jobs." Sure, yes, AI is destroying jobs. But there's a vast difference between "You got fired because an AI can do your job" and "You got fired because your boss was convinced that the AI can do your job, even though it cannot."

This is one of the most consequential coin-tricks, because it's a real convincer for the investors who are funding the AI bubble. The difference is huge: "AI can do your job" means you're well and truly screwed. If an AI can really replace a contract lawyer, then everyone who needs a contract written or evaluated should be on the side of mass technological unemployment for contract lawyers. The point of contract lawyers is to produce contracts, not to pay contract lawyers' law-school debts and mortgages.

BUT! If some BigLaw's credulous partners can be suckered into firing their juniors and replacing them with chatbots who bill you $1,200/hour to produce unenforceable, error-riddled contracts, then everyone who needs a contract is on the same side as the contract lawyers – united in opposition to their bosses:

https://www.loweringthebar.net/2026/06/its-finally-happened-both-sides-ai.html

Every time we fail to draw this distinction, we help an AI boss raise another billion dollars. Every time we insist on this distinction, we hasten the day that the AI bubble pops, thus sparing a few more everyday savers and innocent bystanders from being wiped out in the crash we can all see on the horizon:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-how-new-dealers.

As "Cathy" so aptly put it: "The thing that is a good tool for the skilled people is being sold as a thing to reduce the number of skilled people hired":

https://bsky.app/profile/cathyby.bsky.social/post/3ms3pzq57nc2c

The former is a normal technology. The latter is the root of a catastrophic folly that is destroying our environment, destroying workers' lives, destroying the quality of the goods and services we rely on, and which will shortly destroy our economy.

It's a distinction with a difference.

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• Suicide https://rev21.earth/product/suicide/

• New Mexico’s clean energy success story https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2026/07/new-mexicos-clean-energy-success-story/

• AI Data Center Turbines, Backlogged For Years, Are Suffering Early Deaths. Here's Why. https://www.investors.com/news/turbine-generator-ai-data-center-power-threat/

• Choice of Weapons https://kschroeder.substack.com/p/choice-of-weapons

• Brainwash An Executive Today! https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/brainwash-an-executive-today/

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Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Collectible AOL CDs https://web.archive.org/web/20011119212602/https://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,45585,00.html

#20yrsago Gonzales: Gitmo prisoners can be held indefinitely https://www.dawn.com/news/204441/guantanamo-detainees-may-remain-indefinitely-us-attorney-general-s-warning

#20yrsago Circuit City offers DVD ripping service https://web.archive.org/web/20060811215644/https://consumerist.com/consumer/circuit-city/circuit-city-flouts-the-dmca-for-a-tenner-192049.php

#15yrsago UK government kills Copyright Great Firewall, establishes user rights https://torrentfreak.com/uk-government-abandons-file-sharing-website-blocking-plans-110803/

#15yrsago Mugshot sites and mugshot removal sites: unholy blackmail symbiosis https://web.archive.org/web/20110817051528/https://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/08/mugshots/

#15yrsago Law prof: it would be legal to mint 2x $1 trillion platinum coins & use them to pay the US debt https://edition.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/07/28/balkin.obama.options/index.html?hpt=hp_c1

#15yrsago Virtual pets starve after bungled resolution to Second Life’s “unauthorized food” war https://web.archive.org/web/20110807214820/http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2011/08/sl-meeroos-griefed.html

#15yrsago Google Plus’s “Real Name” policy is abusive; Facebook is not a “Real Name” success story https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2011/08/04/real-names.html

#15yrsago Photo: Escher painting refracted in a drop of falling water https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/j5whr/water_drop_falling_in_front_of_an_mc_escher/

#15yrsago Getting digital copyright right: pay artists, but don’t break the Internet https://www.straight.com/article-415146/vancouver/interview-siggraph-2011-keynote-speaker-cory-doctorow-copyright-reform

#10yrsago After repeated budget cuts, Missouri’s underfunded Public Defender drafts the Governor to work for him https://web.archive.org/web/20160804061408/http://www.publicdefender.mo.gov/Newsfeed/Delegation_of_Representation.PDF

#10yrsago Spoofing GPS is surprisingly easy; detecting it is surprisingly hard https://spectrum.ieee.org/gps-spoofing

#10yrsago Decision to retain personally identifying information puts Australian census under threat https://web.archive.org/web/20160804124914/https://censusfail.com/

#10yrsago Residents of Silicon Valley homeless camp clear 48,000 Lbs of garbage from creek, ask for housing https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/08/03/san-jose-homeless-remove-24-tons-of-trash-from-coyote-creek/

#10yrsago Copyright Office to FCC: Hollywood should be able to killswitch your TV https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/08/copyright-office-jumps-set-top-box-debate-says-hollywood-should-control-your-tv

#10yrsago Walking Tables: a strandbeest for your dining room https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBOdZ6nhDJg

#10yrsago Lawsuit: Getty Images copyfrauded 47,000 photos from indie press agency Zuma https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/getty-images-sued-again-over-alleged-misuse-of-over-47000-photos/

#10yrsago Mexico-US illegal migration has been at zero for 8 years, and other eye-opening facts https://wnyc.org/story/bnch-migration-doug-massey/

#10yrsago Activists are crowdfunding to build a wall around Trump Tower https://www.indiegogo.com/en/projects/wallintrump/wall-in-trump#/

#10yrsago Chinese government decrees that it is always legal to video-record the police https://www.techdirt.com/2016/08/03/yes-you-read-that-correctly-china-says-ok-members-public-to-record-police/

#10yrsago Big rigs can be hijacked and driven with software-based attacks https://www.wired.com/2016/08/researchers-hack-big-rig-truck-hijack-accelerator-brakes/

#5yrsago Elite debt hits record heights https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/03/fitzgerald-was-an-optimist/#debt

#5yrsago Utilities governed like empires https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/04/eighty-sixed/#thank-you-come-again

#5yrsago Congress has allocated enough money to end the eviction crisis https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/04/eighty-sixed/#helicopter-not-found

#5yrsago Vaccine refusal and health insurance https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/04/eighty-sixed/#risk-management

#1yrago AI software assistants make the hardest kinds of bugs to spot https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/04/bad-vibe-coding/#maximally-codelike-bugs

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Virtual: EFFecting Change: Who the Machine Serves, Aug 12
  https://www.eff.org/event/effecting-change-who-machine-serves

• Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
  https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

• Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24
  https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/program/

• Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25
  https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification

• Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8
  https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/

• London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9
  https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn

• South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
  https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/

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

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• F@#$ the AI Overlords (On The Media)
  https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/articles/f-the-ai-overlords

• Why AI Won't Replace Workers, But Will Crash The Economy (Smart Cookies)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRRmUuxJolY

• AI and the Enshittification Era (The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dAIJRjb-Bw

• AI is not inevitable (Betakit)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbiTVkq1WHo

• A Conversation with Lina Khan (Law and Economy Student Network)
  https://www.youtube.com/live/7Ak5LZllqwE

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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

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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

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Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "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.

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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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