Corey Doctorow says current profitability (ie, breaking even by gouging drivers and riders) is as good as it gets for Uber.

https://pluralistic.net/2026/11/12/starvation-wages/#

'Uber's claims that they were profitable (based on accounting gimmicks) were lies, but they were also premature truths: the company did become profitable (through price-gouging and wage-theft). But there's a limit to how low you can push your workforce's wages, and even if the AI crash delivers a fresh cohort of desperate workers who subsidize Uber's operations for a few more years, they, too, will eventually find that they can't live on $2.50/hour.'

The Netherlands is discussing with the USA severe restrictions on the power of the ICC, restrictions which would make it ineffective in practice. The Netherlands is doing this to avoid threatened sanctions that would affect Dutch business interests.

https://rightsforum.org/en/diplomatic-sources-the-netherlands-is-negotiating-the-dismantling-of-the-international-criminal-court/

'The Court has been on the US sanctions list since 9 October. However, a number of sanctions will not come into force until 7 April 2027. These would largely paralyse the institution, leaving the European Union with virtually no choice but to activate the far-reaching blocking mechanism. This law obliges European parties to disregard US sanctions and to continue supplying services and goods to the Court and its staff.

The EU, and EU countries like the Netherlands, are, however, reluctant to activate the mechanism due to the consequences it could have for European businesses. For instance, European banks that disregard the US sanctions might find it much more difficult to do business in the US – or could face sanctions themselves.'

No, artificial intelligence will not cure cancer, heart disease and mental illness within ten years. But Anthropic's IPO may benefit from saying so.

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/breaking-eli-lilly-ceo-becomes-latest

'As I have discussed before, this is not going to happen on anything remotely like that timeline. Cancer is more than one thing, and it will take more than a decade to eradicate it; the bit about curing mental illness (and some other things) that quickly is absolute fantasy.

The response from experts on X has been swift, and absolutely (and appropriately) brutal.

I was hardly the only one to get serious Elizabeth Holmes vibes.'

Others with a Debian-based distro: are you having issues with updates?

I have two ongoing issues for some weeks now:

[1] Whatever primary and secondary repositories I select will work once, then fail at the next update. After selecting different repositories and rebuilding the cache, the update will work again ... but only once.

[2] Flatpak runtime package org.freedesktop.Platform sits in the Update Manager and never updates. If it's the only package when I click Install Updates, the utility thinks for a moment, and then ignores it.

After tweaking the repositories and ignoring the above package, other updates work without issue.

I'm on Linux Mint 22.3 with kernel 6.8.0-147-generic.

Any advice?

A wristwatch-type device that immediately calms Tourettes symptoms? And works for other neurological conditions? And may work for Parkinsons?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmp3g3e5q4zxo

'When he switched it on for the first time, he said he "instantaneously" felt the need to suppress his facial tics "going".

"As soon as it comes on, I can feel it," he said.

"I feel different... I feel new almost, which is strange. It's going to be such a big difference."'

Major manufacturers were asked seventeen questions about user privacy. Apple's (lack of) responses pose some questions for me.

https://www.theverge.com/tech/1012372/tv-privacy-acr-questions

'One month ago, I invited 11 companies, including Amazon, Apple, Google, Hisense, LG, Panasonic, Roku, Samsung, Sony, TCL, and Walmart’s Vizio to share those answers. We now have answers from the top three TV manufacturers as well as every major streaming device company. Some companies declined to answer. Below, you can see and compare how each company answered (or failed to answer) each question and then decide how you feel. (One company, Hisense, ignored our emails entirely.)'

Suddenly, Professor Liebowitz realizes he has come to the seminar without his duck.

https://www.thefarside.com/2026/11/10/4

This long Reddit thread captures most of the arguments for and against artificial intelligence -driven software development.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1xq2n3t/a_year_after_the_100_ai_mandate_nobody/

'"give each dev AI agents, rules and guardrails, and a robust CI pipeline, and you will 100% get a staggering output increase without sacrificing quality."

God, I hate that line. It says absolutely nothing, and it becomes the most upvoted comment on this thread.

"Rules": what rules?

"Guardrails": what guardrails?

"Robust CI pipeline": what? Your pipeline is not a guarantee of good code quality ...

"staggering output increase without sacrificing quality.": source, proofs, metrics? '

Well, the accurate instrumentation isn't itself artificial intelligence, it's merely applied to it. It results in a live page of interesting graphs.

https://endtime-instruments.org/ai-bubble-tracker

You'll see that Nvidia's stock value equals the GDP of the UK or India. You'll note that AI needs to be earning USD1.5 trillion a year to break even, and earned less than USD73 billion in the last twelve months. You'll be amazed and, eventually, befuddled.

Synaptic bought DisplayLink, and now claims that any attempt to improve DisplayLink's Linux performance breaches existing patents.

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1102549/acbc92e00cee3a3f/

'For the time being, Synaptics has succeeded in shutting down an effort to improve the way DisplayLink docks work with Linux. It is an unpleasant reminder that, while much of the current conversations in open-source communities are concerned with LLM-driven development, software patents still pose problems for free-software developers and users.'

I'll bet Putin wakes up every morning and asks himself "What can I get Yankee Poodle to do for me today?"

The Civilian's take on the weekend's elections is rather too close to the truth.

https://thecivilian.co.nz/political-leaders-say-public-feedback-has-been-valuable-but-final-government-must-reflect-operational-realities/

'Back in September, New Zealand’s head of internal communications, Paul Goldsmith, sought to reiterate the optional nature of the survey.

“It’s just a silly little bit of paper,” he said. “I mean, I don’t even know why we do it really, so if you don’t want, we’re very happy for you not to.”

Goldsmith said that if people really wanted to do the survey, they should let him know two weeks in advance, otherwise he may not even be able to get them the papers.'