It's becoming increasingly clear to me that Reflect Orbital's fucking stupid giant mirror satellite, with absolutely NOTHING useful to offer, which will cause countless safety issues, ecological disasters, and destroy the night sky, is going to launch.

A bunch of astronomers and I have sent out a fact sheet about them to a bunch of journalists, but very few are going to write about this. So, let me try posting it all here.

Here's what I know about Reflect Orbital and all the downsides:

Here we are again: stunned, floored, full of hope, because of you–each of you wonderful humans in the #Python community. Since we shared the news about our withdrawal from the NSF grant opportunity two weeks ago, we have received over $160,000 in donations across nearly 2000 donors, which includes 313 new Members–WOW!

Ah ... a federal guarantee for AI financing ... somehow I thought this was all such a sure thing that they couldn't possibly need the government to bail them out?

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/if-you-thought-the-2008-bank-bailout

Had a nice visitor this afternoon

@Laberpferd @ewen @laird ...or they just have their own cellular interface...

https://lwn.net/Articles/850218/

@ewen OpenWrt makes setting up an alternative SSID trivially easy; there is really no reason *not* to do it. (And little reason not to run OpenWrt, but that's a separate story...)

"The manufacturer had the power to remotely disable devices and used it against me for blocking their data collection."

https://codetiger.github.io/blog/the-day-my-smart-vacuum-turned-against-me/

...and people wonder why I resist having that kind of stuff in my home...

@ansuz @dmarti An interesting list, but the absence of Kagi is a rather glaring hole ... I switched over a while ago and have not been even mildly tempted to look back.

@cstross Says 2025 is the pivot year where everything changes ... definitely worth a read.

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2025/10/the-pivot-1.html

@vbabka @cceckman Indeed it does; it's an amazingly insecure system saved only by the fact that things can be undone, for a period at least.

(I was once informed by the bank handling LWN's account that unauthorized withdrawals can be reliably reversed, but only within 24 hours of the event. That has a lot to do with why I compulsively check the account every day, rather than, say, the eternal hope that somehow a vast fortune will have materialized there overnight. But one can still hope.)

For whatever reason, I seem to have ended up with a position high on the list of people who, somebody thinks, are desperate to borrow money for their company from random people who show up offering it. It's generally at least a half-dozen phone calls and texts per day, plus all of the emails.

I'm guessing the scam is something like "we'll wire you the money right away, just give us your account number", or "the financing is all lined up, we just need you to pay an administrative fee first". I am not curious enough to find out.

It sure would be nice if all those bozos would go away.

Every town in Italy (as in much of Europe) has its own special cheese that is made only there. Still, this one, found in Norcia, struck me as a bit more special than most...

No, I didn't try it.

There are days when I feel like I want to find a different world to live in; this post from Kevin Kelly has brought that feeling to the fore. Consider:

Some authors have it backwards. They believe that AI companies should pay them for training AIs on their books. But I predict in a very short while, authors will be paying AI companies to ensure that their books are included in the education and training of AIs.

Or perhaps...

If a book can be more easily parsed by an AI, its influence will be greater. Therefore many books will be written and formatted with an eye on their main audience. Writing for AIs will become a skill like any other, and something you can get better at. Authors could actively seek to optimize their work for AI ingestion, perhaps even collaborating with AI companies to ensure their content is properly understood, and integrated.

Kevin has certainly consumed large amounts of Kool-Aid on this one. Personally, I plan to keep writing for humans, even if that is seemingly obsolete.

Taken in Porto last week - definitely a pretty place

@liw @lwn the world will survive, barely, but we miss you anyway!

@liw I have found https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/don-t-fuck-with-paste/ to be a most helpful add-on for such sites; I think there's a Chrome version too.

It would appear that US folks have until Monday to provide comments on the administration's plan to say that greenhouse gasses are just fine and there is no need to try not to emit them:

https://electrek.co/2025/09/20/2-days-left-to-comment-on-epas-plan-to-raise-gas-prices-76c-gal-kill-thousands/

On the radar: running multiple Linux kernels on a single system:

https://lwn.net/ml/all/20250918222607.186488-1-xiyou.wangcong@gmail.com

Just really looking at the patches now, could be interesting.

@pixelambacht The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner featuring, among other things, the original network worm! Had I not encountered that book at an impressionable age, I might never have entered this field at all.

Some days simply require going for a bike ride