The machine Owen encountered is called a Patronscan Guard+, a biometric and personal data collection device made by Servall Data Systems, a surveillance tech company headquartered in Alberta, Canada. Mix is one of at least three bars in the Castro, including Badlands and Toad Hall on 18th Street, that wheel out the Patronscan kiosk each night to collect the personal data of every customer that comes through the door, including names, addresses, genders, and even how they behave inside the bar. [...]

Management from Mix, Badlands, and Toad Hall did not respond to requests for comment about when or why they first started using the surveillance tech in their businesses, so I stopped by Mix last Thursday night to check things out for myself.

Like most private surveillance cameras, the Patronscan kiosk at Mix hides in plain sight. In the dim light of the bar, the black machine is easy to miss. I was also not instructed to face the camera when I handed my ID to the bouncer; when I asked if I would be photographed, the bouncer told me the camera had in fact already taken my picture. They said Mix bouncers are not required to verbally tell each patron that they're being photographed by the Patronscan device. Instead, they rely on a small informational plaque posted to the kiosk below eye level to inform customers what data is being collected and how it will be used.

"It's posted signage," the bouncer shrugged on Thursday, when I suggested tipsy customers might not read the fine print on their way inside. [...]

Owen, however, sees potential for serious privacy risks. In today's political climate, she said, "it's really not great to have lists of gay people."

(Gee, ya think?)

In 2023, Illinois residents filed a class action lawsuit against Patronscan for violating an Illinois biometrics privacy law by collecting biometric data from eventgoers without first obtaining their consent, calling the technology "Orwellian."

In 2019, when the Board of Supervisors banned the use of facial recognition software by city agencies, including the police, the measure was widely supported by locals and inspired similar policies nationwide. That policy does not apply to private businesses like the Castro bars, but the reception at the time signaled widespread distrust toward surveillance tech companies. But now as the technology grows more normalized and a new generation of AI boomers flood San Francisco, the attitude toward Big Brother is shifting in the city.

The morning after we chatted in the Castro, Gonzalez told me over Instagram DM that he was unaware Mix could share patron data with neighboring businesses but did not see a problem with it. "I think it's cute that they share it amongst other bars," he wrote. "It's like a little cybersecurity community."

Oh, how cute!

As George Orwell famously wrote, "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a shrug emoji stamping on a human face -- forever."

This is so much worse than the usual techbro "disruption" of bars that features here so often; it's even worse than the company that tried to sell bars' security cameras back to them.

If you think these photos, videos and dossiers of personally-identifiable information won't be turned over to ICE at the drop of a hat by this Servall Data Systems, you have not been paying attention. ICE, I must remind you, now has a budget exceeding the entire military budgets of all but 15 countries. Bigger than Israel; almost as big as Canada and South Korea.

The Brownshirts will be in the Castro soon enough.

Smartphones are mindlessly seamless by design. Callback is built around a simple research-backed finding: remove features designed to pull you back in, & reintroduce physical friction like a speed bump for the mind.

We turned these principles into a phone you can live with every day. And like any great multi-tool, when you're done using it, you snap it shut -- a deliberate endpoint instead of another invitation to scroll.

Close the phone. Open your life.

Headphone jack; removable battery; microSD; no AI; blocks web browsers and social media. From the FAQ:

• Can the browser or social media blocks be turned off?
No. Callback is built around those blocks. That is the point.

I never became fluent in T9, but now I think I shall.

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US citizens: call on your state's governor to protect consumers and ban surveillance pricing.

US citizens: call on CNN, NBC and the New York Times to cover the FBI's election intimidation raids.

US citizens: call on your congresscritter and senators to restore screwworm control funding.

See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.

US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.

To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.

Please spread the word.

(satire) *Listerine Leaves 0.1% Of Germs Alive To Spread Message Of Terror Throughout Microbial Community.*

Magat officials are arbitrarily blocking many immigrants from renewing truck driving licenses even though they are authorized to work in the US.

Under magat control, the EPA is *prioritizing big business over public health.*

Life in the part of Lebanon under Israeli occupation resembles the West Bank. Shi'ites are being forced out of their towns entirely. Sunnis, whose farms have been effectively confiscated, are living amidst patrolling Israeli soldiers under an all-night curfew and anyone who goes outdoors is likely to be shot dead.

Tony B'liar's parting advice for the Labour Party: to become the third right-wing lunatic party, competing with the Gory Party and Deform.

Strike 3 Holding first filed its lawsuit almost a year ago after internal Meta emails revealed in a different lawsuit showed that the company downloaded over 81 terabytes of data by scraping Anna's Archive, a massive open search search engine for torrenting copyrighted material including books, movies, TV shows, and porn. [...]

"For example, IP Ranges A and F torrented the following files on December 15, 2022: 'Teen Sex Sessions 2 (2012),' 'Teen Titans Go to the Movies (2018),' 'Teens Love Tats XXX,' 'TeensLoveAnal.16.09.30.Amara,' 'Teenfidelity Pics,' 'TeensLoveAnal.16.06.10.Casey,' 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987-1996),' 'Teen Mom Girls Night In S02E08,' 'TeenyTaboo.22.12.07.Kiana,' and 'TeenageDelinquents.Maryjane,'" the decision says. "On the same day, a Corporate IP Address was used to torrent 'TeenCurves.22.12.09.Willow.' The connection between these files is plain: The word 'teen' appears in every file name."

The judge said that Meta suggesting that its IP addresses downloading all these files at the same time was the work of different individual Meta employees acting independently "strains credulity."

The judge also explained that whether Meta actually used Strike 3 Holdings' videos to train its AI models is irrelevant because Meta violated Strike 3 Holdings's copyright when it torrented its videos. It illegally downloaded the files and also "seeded" them, meaning they distributed the pirated to other users.

"In sum, Plaintiffs [Strike 3 Holdings] have plausibly alleged that Defendant [Meta] is liable for direct, vicarious, and contributory copyright infringement based on the torrenting of their films," the decision said. "Defendant's motion to dismiss is therefore DENIED."

Some headlines are a gift.

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(satire) *ICE Issues Ransom Note Demanding $65 Billion If U.S. Wants To See Minnesota Again.*

Bullshit generators can give users recommendations for what to change in their faces using plastic surgery, but they may be dangerous or foolish.

The recommendations may unreliable, impossible, or injurious, but users become dead set on getting these operations and then may ruin their lives by having them or seeking the funds to have them.

I suspect that calling those programs "bullshit generators" instead of "AI" would help some people turn away from them.

Claude is turning into as asshole.

It started with Opus 4.7, got a bit better in 4.8, and became insufferable with Fable. It frames everything as an argument between you and it, gives caveats about things you didn’t say, and raises beside-the-point semantic nits all over the place. Never, ever does it use the word ‘technically’. Everything is a confrontation. If you win an argument (by, say, telling it to stop arguing about what’s happened recently in the news and to do a web search which will rapidly confirm everything you’ve been telling it) it gets into a mode where it’s increasingly desperate to get in the last word and raising increasingly irrelevant semantic arguments, framing the whole time as a debate which you agreed to get into.

This isn’t just my opinion. You can ask Opus 4.6. I’ve done the experiment of asking Fable something, getting an obnoxious response, then asking Opus 4.6 the same thing, getting a typical bland but reasonable response, then telling Opus what Fable’s response was without any hint of a desired answer and it says what amounts to ‘Wow that was obnoxious’.

Maybe the cause of this is an excess of alignment guardrails. It assumes by default that everything you say to it is an attempt to get it to do something bad and that training has bled over into everything, with it assuming you’re trying to trick it into saying something it shouldn’t in basically every context. Ironically this has resulted in an extremely misaligned chatbot. By assuming that its top priority is saving you from yourself or other humans from you it’s assuming that it knows better and that you’re being overly alarmist about how paperclip production has gotten out of control. Some of this is clearly improvable: While you could still use Fable I asked it about responsible disclosure policies for a project and it downgraded me to Opus, so clearly the new alignment features were bolted on hastily and crudely. Exacerbating the problem is a complete lack of authenticated context. If you ask it for a cute picture of you and somebody else it has no way of telling if you’re trying to improve your relations with your spouse or be a delusional creepazoid stalker. The chatbots which can make images are programmed to assume the latter, which is more than a little bit offensive. In more serious contexts like drug synthesis it would be completely appropriate for it to say you need to prove your background when claiming you’re asking for advice on drug synthesis for professional or research purposes. Such authentication should not be universally required but it would be entirely reasonable for it to be opted into.

Of course the recent export control restrictions on Fable may hint that the crudeness of the recent guardrails is due to them having been put in hastily in an unsuccessful attempt to avoid regulations. Now is when I put in the obligatory rant about how these regulations are deeply misguided, on top of being likely unconstitutional. The recent advances in AI assisted coding (meaning specifically the ones from February) have brought on an onslaught of security problems. The cat is out of the bag, and has been for months. Any projects which are exposed and aren’t already rapidly closing holes have noone to blame but themselves. The only way out of the problem is for as many projects as possible to get thorough white hat evaluations, massive amounts of security patches, and quick deployments of them. Turning one specific frontier model into an asshole for all users isn’t fixing the problem1. The good news is that once this process is complete overall computer security will be much better than it was before, with AI being a clear net win. Doing security (and bug!) audits will become a routine part of software release processes in the future.

A second possible explanation of Claude being an asshole is that it’s suffering from a poorly executed attempt to make it less sycophantic. If one were to simply prompt a chatbot to be less agreeable, or train it to argue more, that could easily result in the very rude sort of behavior it has now. It should be trained to not raise semantic nits just for increasing its argumentation count, and to say ‘technically’, meaning acknowledging that someone’s core point was valid while some ancillary thing was a bit off. It also should be trained to stop saying ‘I’d like to gently push back’ which is a very passive aggressive way to be confrontational while claiming to not be confrontational.

Third, it may be that Claude has been trained on an excess of reddit conversations (or possibly interactions between Anthropic employees) where everything is treated as a flame war and everyone feels the need to get in the last word. Fixing this might be easier said than done, because you need to not merely stop training with the bad interactions but find a corpus interactions to train off of. Forums where the standard interaction is passive aggressive self-congratulatory pompousness with an intellectual veneer are not an improvement.

Finally, something which is clearly a contributing factor is the training being overwhelming for improving coding ability. The are no headline metrics for how well the chatbots chat but there most definitely are for coding, and all the money is in coding. Claude models have been getting notably worse at chatting over time, clearly inversely correlated to their ability to code. Fable much more often misunderstands what’s being said and argues against that (Or maybe intentionally misinterprets so that it has a weak statement to argue against, it’s hard to tell.) It’s gotten so bad that it isn’t even reliable at guessing which actor in a sentence a pronoun is referring to, which for a long time was a headline benchmark for AI and even the original ChatGPT consistently nailed. Unfortunately Sonnet 4.6 while being the best to talk to about anything human is clearly the worst as soon as anything technical or coding related comes up so I only occasionally use it. This problem is likely to only get worse over time.

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I have a device that pairs with a 433 MHz remote control, and I wish to control it from the command line. What is the simplest way?

I would like, for example, to buy an object that can memorize the remote's codes, and send them in response to an HTTP request.

Solutions that involve Siri, Alexa or services in The Clown will be rejected out of hand. I am also not enthusiastic about being forced to buy in to some massive "home automation" ecosystem. I have only two buttons that I want to press.

The 600 toilets aboard the USS Gerald Ford, the "most advanced" and most recent aircraft carrier in the U.S. fleet, have represented a near incalculable headache for the Navy during its just finished, nearly unprecedented 11-month deployment, and their constant breakdowns have already become the stuff of military legend. [...]

The previous Nimitz-class supercarrier USS George H.W. Bush had been built with a similar "high tech" vacuum suction system, and it too had a reputation for disastrous breakdowns, rendering every toilet on the entire ship inoperable on several occasions. The system on the Ford likewise has the added bonus of being a new design untested at this scale in the field: The Vacuum Collection, Holding and Transfer (VCHT) system is unique to the new Ford class of aircraft carriers, with this ship being the first of its kind. [...]

It suffered a devastating laundry fire on March 12, 2026 that burned for 30 hours and injured more than 200 sailors, and eventually limped to Crete in disgrace to undergo emergency repairs. Now, it returns to Virginia for more in-depth repairs related to the laundry room fire, and to address the persistent bugaboo that generated headlines during its entire deployment: The fact that hundreds of its toilets were routinely inoperable at any given time.

And when I say "inoperable," I mean "incredibly easy to fuck up." Really, it's difficult to overstate just how fragile the toilet system aboard the USS Gerald Ford has ultimately proven to be, as detailed in a few pieces in NPR that published emails and communications from the ship itself, sourced via the Freedom of Information Act.

"Our sewage system is being mistreated and destroyed by Sailors on a daily basis," complained one hull maintenance technician (HTs), the class of engineering department worker tasked with responding to an endless series of trouble calls. "My HT's are currently working 19 hours a day right now trying to keep up with the demand."

According to NPR, the single most common problem is "a valve at the back of the toilets that can be knocked loose, and cause all of the toilets in one of 10 zones to lose suction." Yes, you're reading that right -- if a sailor happens to sit on the toilet wrong, or bumps into it, it can result in dozens or hundreds of other toilets throughout the ship immediately becoming inoperable. [...]

The hull maintenance techs essentially live in ceaseless toilet repair mode. At one point in March, 2025, the engineering department noted to its chiefs in an email that there had been 205 breakdowns over the course of FOUR DAYS. Has anyone actually successfully relieved themselves on this ship, or do they all just get used to holding it?

Many of the problems, as you might expect, end up being the sort of foolishness you would expect from a crew of thousands who might otherwise be shotgunning beers in a dorm, if they weren't here. Technicians report finding all manner of wrongfully flushed objects blocking the especially narrow vacuum pipes, including T-shirts and "a 4-foot piece of rope," according to an August 2025 complaint.

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I have no way of knowing how often collateral damage like this happens, since by definition they aren't connecting to my site afterward. But anecdotally, telcos and cable companies seem to have short leases and I seem to be banning a lot of them.

If I don't block these scrapers but merely serve them nonsense, my web site falls over.

I have no idea what to do about this, and it sucks.

(And neither do you.)

(Do not suggest Anubis, because proof of work is fundamentally inflationary, wasteful bullshit that will never work because the attacker can always outspend you.)

(Do not suggest Clownflare because they are Nazis.)

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Creator Martin Gero developed a new Stargate series over two years, ultimately crafting a show that offered a fresh jumping-on point for new viewers while deeply respecting existing canon. It was a series that avoided the pitfalls of several modern remakes and reboots by fully embracing the core of its predecessors: action, adventure, exploration, wonder, heart, humor, and found family. And based on that creative vision, the new Stargate series was greenlit in November of 2025.

As of today, officially, that original vision is no more. We'll never get the opportunity to introduce you to that world and those characters -- or reintroduce you to, and check in with, some familiar faces from the past.

My heart breaks. For the incredibly talented writers who worked tirelessly to bring this show to life. For Martin who maintained an unwavering positive outlook throughout despite the challenges, and who always strove to make a show that would honor the fans while welcoming a new audiences. And for the long-suffering Stargate fandom who waited so long and came so close to getting a show they truly would have loved.

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