Tracking Starbucks’ ’widely recyclable’ cups: none ended up at recycling
Electronic Bluetooth Trackers Placed in Starbucks’ In-Store Recycling Bins Followed the Polypropylene Cups to Landfills and Incinerators For Immediate Release: May 20, 2026 Contacts: A three-month national investigation by Beyond Plastics found that not a single tracked Starbucks cold-beverage cup ended up at a recycling facility — even when the cups were placed in clearly […]
Why is Inkwell stuck in review
I submitted Inkwell for iOS to Apple for review on April 21st. It has gone through numerous rejections, code changes, resubmissions, clarifications, one phone call, and one appeal to the review board, which I’m still waiting to hear back on. What’s the hold up? I’ve hinted at some of the issues, but I’ve tried hard […]
Formal Verification Gates for AI Coding Loops
Some of the most serious software bugs are also the most boring. A user should not be able to read another tenant’s data. Nobody disagrees with this, nobody stands up in a design review to defend Alice reading Bob’s records, and yet broken access control remains the #1 category on the OWASP Top 10. These […]
Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk apparently used AI to write her latest novel
Update: On Tuesday afternoon, Tokarczuk sent a statement to Lit Hub via her publisher, Riverhead, denying she used AI in her writing for anything other than research. Read it here. We also updated the text below to more accurately reflect the form of Tokarczuk’s remarks. At a recent event in Poznań (covered in Polish), Nobel […]
Testing distributed systems with AI agents
Two skills for AI coding agents that design and run claim-driven tests for distributed and stateful systems. Together they produce a structured Markdown test plan and a findings report with 9-state verdicts and an explicit SUT / harness / checker / environment blame classification. A reviewer reads the two artifacts and decides whether to ship; […]
Victory: Tennessee man jailed 37 days for Trump meme wins $835,000 settlement
NASHVILLE, May 20, 2026 — After spending 37 days in jail for nothing more than posting a meme, retired Tennessee law enforcement officer Larry Bushart has won a substantial settlement from the county and sheriff behind his arrest. Represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and Phillips & Phillips, PLLC, Larry Bushart filed […]
America’s Greatest Strategic Blunder: The Imprisonment of Qian Xuesen
In August 1955, the United States traded one man for eleven U.S. Air Force airmen at the Wang-Johnson talks in Geneva. The eleven were the crew of a B-29 shot down over China in January 1953 and convicted as spies. The one man was Qian Xuesen, the co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the colonel […]
Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment
Visa et Mastercard, maîtres incontestés du paiement en Europe, font désormais face à une offensive coordonnée de cinq champions nationaux. © Olgsera Le paysage bancaire européen s’apprête à vivre un séisme. Des acteurs majeurs comme Bizum en Espagne, Bancomat en Italie, MB WAY au Portugal et Vipps MobilePay dans les pays du Nord s’unissent officiellement […]
Meta blocks human rights accounts from reaching audiences in Arabia and the UAE
The undersigned organisations condemn Meta’s recent decision to restrict the Facebook and Instagram accounts of independent NGOs, researchers, and civil society figures from reaching audiences in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). This is the latest in a pattern of major technology companies, including Meta, acting as enforcement arms for repressive governments in the Gulf. […]
Anna’s Archive Hit with $19.5M Default Judgment and Global Domain Takedown Order
Home > Piracy > A coalition of thirteen major publishers has won a massive $19.5 million default judgment against shadow library Anna’s Archive. A New York federal judge fully approved the publishers’ requests, issuing a broad permanent injunction that orders more than twenty specific global registries, hosts, and service providers to immediately disable the site’s […]