Tag: journalism

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Pook-Emu Bee will be taking the weekend off, first for Newsletter Saturday and probably for Sunday, so let us finish this work week strong before I return to my day job.

Two One Way signs and a State St street sign on the ground with construction in Brooklyn Heights.
I took this photo at the corner of State and Clinton Streets in Brooklyn Heights on the evening of August 26, 2026. This is just up the block from where I documented two downed Stop Signs on State in October 2020.

1 | Study Linking Solar Farms to Bird Loss Draws Scrutiny in China (Jiang Xinyi for Sixth Tone. August 28, 2026.)
I found myself scrutinizing the claim that the Chinese government is focusing on solar because it is concerned with China’s carbon emissions.

2 | What the $131 Billion F-15 Contract May Mean For the Air Force (Stephen Losey for Air & Space Forces Magazine. August 27, 2026.)
It may not end up costing $131 billion. Use-dependent.

3 | Brave launches Email Aliases and new Brave Accounts that keep passwords off its servers (Mauricio B. Holguin for AlternativeTo. August 28, 2026.)
I approve of making email aliases more accessable. With that being said here, I will stick with my SimpleLogin subscription.

4 | “Difference, Power & Oppression”: OSU Requires Students to Take Courses on How to “Disrupt” the “Systems of Oppression” in the United States” (Jonathan Turley. August 19, 2026.)
With hope, at least some of the students will come away wanting to disrupt systems of ideological indoctrination in higher education.

5 | Data Center Madness Isn’t About AI (Cremieux Recueil. August 27, 2026.)
This is a good survey of surveys. His conclusions check out but I’ll submit AI is at a minimum not helping the perception of the data centers.

6 | Unhinged straphanger stabs MTA cleaner who scolded him for urinating on busy NYC subway platform: cops, sources (Amanda Woods for the New York Post. August 27, 2026.)
I’d say this guy is behaving like a dog but that would be uncharitable to most of the dogs. Worse yet, he’s probably going around trying to mark every Subway station in New York City without paying the fare.

7 | Italian Teen Girl Nearly Killed by Propeller on Migrant Smuggler Boat (Oliver JJ Lane for Breitbart. August 27, 2026.)
I’d say that I’m looking forward to Sardinian law enforcement explaining why they seem to have been on a mission to minimize the near-vehicular homicide right up until video became public, but alas… I doubt any such explanation is forthcoming.

8 | Wealthy Americans look to New Zealand as demand for ‘golden visas’ booms (Eric Revell for Fox Business. August 10, 2026.)
$5 million? I tip my hat to New Zealand. That is much more expensive that our (often-abused) EB-5 program.

9 | Why won’t the Times name ALL the thieves it has ID’d up in Albany? (New York Post Editorial Board. August 21, 2026.)
I agree with the Post Editorial Board’s theory. With that being said, have they considered that the NYP is one of the most-circulated newspapers in the United States and has major corporate backing? They could… I don’t know… dig into the issue themselves and name names that the Times omitted for reasons we can only imagine? Who works decides.

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I have not published “daily” Pook-Emu Bee links since June 23. But today is the start of a new month. Let us turn over a new leaf in July with the Pook-Emu Bee.

Photograph of an inlet pond in Brooklyn Bridge Park with Pier 2 in the immediate background and the Manhattan Skyline in the distant background. We see geese in the water.
I took this photograph in Brooklyn Bridge Park on the morning of July 1, 2026. It is difficult to see here, but there were pigeons and doves on the stone path and ducks on the rocks, so we had a meeting of four varieties of birds by the water.

1. Nina Totenberg Sincerely Apologizes For An Inexplicable Error (Josh Blackman at The Volokh Conspiracy. June 30, 2026.)

Her explanation for falsely reporting that Justice Alito was retiring makes no sense. But then again, even given her partisan impulses (noted by Mr. Blackman in the article), it is hard to figure what the game was here.

2. Meta fights soaring hardware costs by reusing old DDR4 server memory in new DDR5-only servers — custom CXL 2.0 chip marries legacy DDR4-2400 with cutting-edge DDR5-6400 (Anton Shilov for Tom’s Hardware. June 30, 2026.)

Add “Meta has to skimp on RAM” to the reasons why my current 2020 computer build is going to have to be in it for the long haul.

3. Rejecting the Luxury of Hobbies (Ennui Vagaries. June 30, 2026.)

This description of how the social media “influencers” treat “hobbies” sounds like what I would have expected. Of course, this is why I don’t follow the “influencers.”

4. Colo-radical: Socialist Who Called 9/11 ‘Inevitable’ Takes Down 15-Term Incumbent in Denver House Primary (Ethan Barton for The Washington Free Beacon. July 1, 2026.)

I still remember the burning smell from across the river when the Islamist terrorists she plays rhetorical footsie with (that was charitable) flew two planes into the World Trade Center. This scenario would most certainly have been difficult to explain a couple of decades ago.

5. COSMIC Desktop’s Frosted Glass Is Giving Windows Aero Vibes (Michael Larabel for Phoronix. June 2, 2026.)

I thought Vista looked decent back when I used it for a couple of years, so I am unsurprisingly not opposed to this frosted glass aesthetic.

6. America’s immigrant tech workers are paying an uncertainty tax (Ananya Bhattacharya for Rest of World. June 30, 2026.)

This article is confusing in that I can’t figure out if the author sees that the point of the now-temporarily-enjoined H-1B fee and other impending regulatory changes is to produce the outcome he is describing (granting potential disagreements on what the H-1B program is ideally for).

7. Sega’s Crazy Taxi Spins Its Wheels Thanks To Another GenAI Kerfuffle (Damien McFerran for Time Extension. June 30, 2026.)

I choose to remember Sega for inspiring me to take up video games in 1993-94.

8. Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez’s wild past of fetish parties, drugs and gruesome chicken stunt exposed (Annie Gaus for the New York Post. June 28, 2026.)

Her college life in 2012 sounds much more dramatic than mine watching Puella Magica Madoka in the Brooklyn College library with a friend. With that being said, I can look past many questionable college life choices if she manages to fix the whole blinding headlights issue.

9. Two new Casio Vintage watches with step tracker, bluetooth on their way (Anubhav Sharma for Notebook Check. June 29, 2026.)

I might be interested if they work with Gadgetbridge. My atomic non-smart watch is a Casio and I am a fan.

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Liked Daily News Stuff 18 June 2026 by Pixy Misa (ai.mee.nu)
Amodei is every bit as much of a weasel as Sam Altman. And while Altman is a sociopath and a compulsive liar, Amodei is something much worse: He's whiny.

I look forward to reading Pixy Misa’s Daily News Stuff posts (seven days a week), which feature links to tech and political news with irreverent commentary. Pixy Misa is a pseudonymous Australian server admin (I think) who, in addition to posting on tech and politics, also sometimes posts about anime (sadly not as much of late as before) and Hololive (I don’t really understand it). I usually read Pixy Misa’s posts on Ace of Spades HQ (where they are syndicated), but they appear first (or simultaneously) on Ambient Irony. Here, Pixy Misa offers a humorous take on Dario Amodei vs Sam Altman, prompted by Mr. Amodei’s method of marketing Anthropic’s AI products by warning tech scribes about how dangerous they are and how it recently backfired on him, opining that Mr. Amodei is worse, or more irritating, because he is whiny. To be sure, being whiny is a big negative feather in his cap.

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Saturday was Newsletter day and I was busy on Sunday, so our daily Pook-Emu Bee links had the weekend off. But there are no such impediments this Monday, so I am back with my regularly scheduled links.

1. Indie developer lands in Steam approval limbo after being flagged for IP infringement over in-game references to their own past work (Amber V for Automation West. May 4, 2026.)

A cautionary and potentially instructive story for people who want to promote their own projects in games they publish to Steam (albeit very frustrating for the developer, assuming the facts are true as presented).

2. Ask.com, aka Ask Jeeves, has officially shut down after nearly 30 years online (Paul for AlternativeTo. May 4, 2026.)

You may read this story and think “what?” or “that didn’t die 15 years ago?” But I read it and sighed. I may need to write a Norton Safe Search follow-up article (see my original research article).

3. GameStop Proposes to Acquire eBay at $125.00 Per Share (GameStop Corp. May 3, 2026.)

Out: To the Moon. In: To the eBay.

4. Lipton releases… Pudding Milk Tea in Japan?!? (Oona McGee for SoraNews24. May 1, 2026.)

I’d try it. But it would probably take too much effort.

5. Reporting, the Easy Way (John Hinderaker for PowerLine. May 3, 2026.)

I publish long articles without compensation. Never once have I published a purported quote gleaned from a search engine’s AI summary of a query. But some N.Y. Times journalists who are being paid take a different, looser approach to gathering quotes. (Albeit credit to the Times for correctly identifying the error and not deflecting blame.)

6. Growing Sinkhole Causes Safety Concerns In Red Hook (Aurora Fowlkes for News12 Brooklyn. May 3, 2026.)

I walked by that intersection yesterday but did not notice the sinkhole. How close did I come to falling inside Red Hook?

7. Lime Wants Mamdani To Bring More Scooter Share To NYC (Sophia Lebowitz for StreetsBlog NYC. April 30, 2026.)

Absolutely not. This suggestion is a lemon.

8. Tucker Carlson nicotine pouches part of $4M in cargo recovered as theft ring exposed (Daniel Farr for the New York Post. May 2, 2026.)

Prediction: I wonder how he is going to attribute this to Israel and Mike Huckabee. Or has he already done so? I may not be upp to date.

9. The Wrong Kind of Black Poet (Ernest Jesuyemi for Compact. May 4, 2026.)

Interesting and thoughtful essay.

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Replied to Testing suggests Google's AI Overviews tell millions of lies per hour by Ryan Whitwam (Ars Technica)
A new analysis from The New York Times attempted to assess the accuracy of [Google Search's] AI Overviews, finding it’s right 90 percent of the time. The flip side is that 1 in 10 AI answers is wrong, and for Google, that means hundreds of thousands of lies going out every minute of the day.

Ars Technica published an article by Ryan Whitwam titled Testing suggests Google’s AI Overviews tell millions of lies per hour. The article itself is about a New York Times investigation into the accuracy of Google’s AI overviews. The framing in the headline matches the first paragraph: “…1 in 10 AI answers is wrong, and for Google, that means hundreds of thousands of lies going out every minute of the day” (emphasis added).

While I am not a fan of “AI” replacing traditional search and have even published information about creating custom search engine shortcuts for DuckDuckGo’s No AI mode and Google Search, I am also not a fan of Mr. Whitwam‘s framing. Google’s generative AI implementation does not tell lies. It has no concept of truth or falsity. It returns purportedly responsive text to specific queries in accordance with its programming and index. It no more “lies” when the text is inaccurate than it “tells the truth” when the text is accurate. Assigning agency to agents confuses the issues.

(I will add as a separate issue that for those of us who support “traditional” search, framing the debate in terms of how accurate the AI results are is the wrong approach. Google and other traditional search engines often surface articles and posts with inaccurate information. As I noted in my prior writing, there are reasons for supporting traditional search and human authorship that go beyond assessing whether chatbots or the highest trafficked websites are more likely to spit out incorrect information.)

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There were no Pook-Emu Bee links on Saturday because it was newsletter day (22 links in issue 275!). There were no Pook-Emu Bee links on Sunday because I failed. But today is Monday. Monday is a fun day. I will not fail. In fact, I may even have some bonus links (either to make up for yesterday or to keep my link list under control).

1. 420 Court’s Façade Takes Shape in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn (Michael Young and Matt Pruznick for New York YIMBY. April 13, 2026.)

Carroll Gardens is next to Cobble Hill, which is one of Brooklyn’s historic districts. The line between Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill is easy to miss. Yet, as I noted in 2020, Carroll Gardens is not a historic district. With that in mind, this new construction is not bad.

2. Placard Abuse Clogs Downtown Brooklyn Bike Lane (Brooklyn Today. April 13, 2026.)

Placard abuse is a well-known problem. But must everything be about the struggles of bikers? The bikers in the area behave terribly even where the bike lanes are unimpeded.

3. Investors Juice BlackBerry as the SaaS-y Company Racks Up Contracts (Jamie Wilde for The Daily Upside*. April 13, 2026.)

Making QWERTY phones offered more value.

4. Morgan Library (I Love Beets. April 13, 2026.)

I have not been to the Morgan Library in a long time, but these photographs indicate that it is as aesthetic as I remember it.

5. ProPublica journalists walk off the job in first U.S. newsroom strike over AI (Andrew Deck for NiemanLab. April 9, 2026.)

I reached the “choose your fighter” screen between ProPublica and big AI. Then I left the game on and went for a walk.

6. Doki Doki Literature Club Removed from Google Play Store Following Policy Violation or Is This Just Another Attempt by Monika for Our Attention? (It’s Not, They Really Delisted It) (Azario Lopez for Noisy Pixel. April 9, 2026.)

While I never “reviewed” Doki Doki Literature Club, I referenced it in my review of a freeware visual novel called Save the Date in expressing my hope that Save the Date would be published on Steam, Itch, and other places where more people could find it. I never played the “paid” version of Doki Doki Literature Club, but from my knowledge of the free version, this decision strikes me as odd. It certainly deserves an “M” rating (which I presumre age-gates downloads/purchases) but I am sure there is more objectionable “content” on Google Play Store. Of course, I use F-Droid, so what do I know?

7. The Death of the Small Point Guard? (James Barlowe. April 10, 2026.)

Is there really a “death”? How many instances in NBA history have we had where the undisputed best player on a championship team was a “small” point guard? Off the top of my head: 2014-15 and 2022-23 Golden State Warriors (Stephen Curry), 1988-89 and 89-90 Detroit Pistons (Isiah Thomas), and 1972-73 New York Knicks (Walt Frazier). You could argue for a few additional cases in the 1950-51 Rochester Royals (Bob Davies), 1969-70 Knicks (Frazier). 2003-04 Pistons (Chauncey Billups), and 2016-17 and 2017-18 Warriors (Curry). I suppose one could try to include Dennis Johnson since he was “small” and add the 1978-79 Seattle SuperSonics? But if this is all we can come up with, it does not seem like building a team “around” a small point guard has ever been the best path to an NBA championship.

8. Ascendance of a Bookworm anime studio acknowledges gen AI use in opening, promises to replace offending scenes with hand-drawn art (Dorde P for Automation West. April 10, 2026.)

I never watched the first few seasons, and I doubt I will ever catch up. Were I planning to catch up, this would not encourage me. With that being said, I have 2.5 seasons worth of anime to catch up on. Every news article reminds me.

9. Friends Don’t Let Friends Play Monopoly (Dan Lewis for Now I Know. April 3, 2020.)

I never played Monopoly. No one ever tried to convince me to play Monopoly. Now I know that Dan Lewis does not think I should play Monopoly.

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Another day ending in -day (that isn’t Saturday) means it is time for another edition of Pook-Emu Bee links.

1. Astonishing Find in the Czech Republic: Hikers Discover a 3.7 Kilogram Serbian/Bosnian Gold Treasure (Leman Altuntas for Arkeonews. April 8, 2026.)

While the current market valuation is primarily based on the intrinsic value of the gold, the historical significance of the discovery is expected to be far greater. Under Czech law, the fortunate hikers who stumbled upon this treasure may be entitled to a reward of up to 10% of its value.

2. The New York Times, Ladies and Gentlemen (Andrew Stiles for The Washington Free Beacon. April 8, 2026.)

The Times issued a correction after a headline in the print edition incorrectly referred to NATO as the ‘North American Treaty Organization.; The error prompted references to a 2016 Times profile of former Obama guru Ben Rhodes, in which he touted his ability to manipulate journalists who ‘literally know nothing’ about the subjects they cover.

3. People are licking Nintendo Switch game cartridges again after Japanese user compares taste to sakura buds (Carlos “Zoto” Zotomayor for Automation West. April 8, 2026.)

Maybe the internet was a mistake: Nippon edition.

4. Moto returns to the tablet space with the mid-range Moto Pad (2026) (Brad Linder at Liliputing. April 8, 2026.)

I’m still curious whether any future Motorola tablets will support GrapheneOS.

5. Gershwin on GhostBSD: A Retro Future Built on GNUstep (The Axis of Bozz. April 4, 2026.)

I should try a BSD at some point but there are already many things on my “to-do” list.

6. Delta Chat: Zero metadata, group descriptions, native audio/video calls and much more! (Delta Chat Blog. March 31, 2026.)

Native voice/video calls is a significant addition. But I am waiting for the return of markdown support.

7. Tulips・チューリップ (Daniel Sofer at Hermosawave Photography. April 4, 2026.)

It looks sunny outside so I present you with pretty tulips.

8. The Dead End Sign in Red Hook, Brooklyn (Nicholas A. Ferrell at The New Leaf Journal. April 8, 2021.)

Talk about a “this day in history five years ago” punctuation mark.

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I skimmed an August 10, 2025 report in The New York Times about the New York City Mayor’s race titled Mamdani Tries to Build Bridges to Black Voters who Snubbed Him in June. The article itself is mostly fine, although it is unclear to me why a story about Mr. Mamdani’s efforts to convince black people to vote for him required the talents of three NYT reporters. But the headline, which is most likely not the fault of the journalists, strikes me as odd. One may come away with the impression that Mr. Mamdani was, or is, entitled to votes, and that certain voters are determined to blow it off. It is not as if Mr. Mamdani was rejected for a handshake, not invited to the party, or Tim Duncan and Shaquille O’Neal in the 2001 NBA MVP race. Why not just say he lost among black voters generally or did not do as well with black voters as he did with other demographic groups?

(Further reading: I touched on the events of the 2025 Primary in an article on minor candidate Jim Walden’s campaign car for those who want additional context.)

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On August 10, 2025, amNY reported on a lethal shooting in Sunset Park (Brooklyn) the night before:

Police said officers from the 72nd Precinct responded to a 911 call reporting a shooting at 57th Street and Fourth Avenue in Sunset Park.

I have not been to Sunset Park in a while (I discussed it briefly in one NLJ article). I was last there in October 2021 when I walked through the entirety of Sunset Park in the evening (probably starting around 8:30-9:00 PM) on my way home from Dyker Heights/Bay Ridge. It struck me as mostly fine then, but I could see it coming off worse with block parties. But that aside, one part of this article puzzled me:

When they arrived, they found 45-year-old Roberto Cuevas with a gunshot wound to the back amid the remnants of the party.

“[R]emnants of the party” is doing some work here. Were the “remnants” still there waiting for the police to arrive or were they still partying? In light of the fact that someone (possibly a party-goer) shot dead another man (also possibly a party-goer), I suppose both are possible. This phrasing is too open-ended. But setting that aside, I am glad I do not live somewhere where late night/early morning block parties are a thing.

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Replied to I Read the Would-be Trump Assassin’s Book So You Don’t Have To by River Page (The Free Press)
‘Ukraine’s Unwinnable War’ is a window into the strange mind of Ryan Routh.

I came across an article in my feed reader from The Free Press titled I Read the Would-be Trump Assassin’s Book So You Don’t Have To. I could not read much of the article because it is paywalled (it was part of one of my Real Clear feeds). That is all well in good since I do not have to read the book it is about. But one quote from the article excerpt caught my attention:

Although Routh’s precise motive remains unclear, his self-published book—Ukraine’s Unwinnable War: The Fatal Flaw of Democracy, World Abandonment and the Global Citizen—Taiwan, Afghanistan, North Korea and the End of Humanity (2023)—offers some insights into his worldview.

What was the precise motive of a man staking out a golf course to shoot former President Trump? I search and search for an answer, again today I search.

(PS: While I am sure his book must be riveting I submit that I would be more interested in what he was doing on his myriad foreign excursions.)

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Sports Illusrated, fresh off an AI article controversy, selected Colorado Buffaloes college football coach Deion Sanders as its Sportsperson of the Year. Mr. Sanders took over as head coach at Colorado after the football team went 1-11 in 2022. Sports Illustrated noted that the team improved greatly in Coach Sanders’ first season:

As for the actual football? It’s been an adventure. Colorado is massively improved over 2022, when it was by far the worst Power 5 program. The Buffaloes were outscored by 29.1 points per game last year, compared to 6.7 this year

The team lost its final six games to finish 4-8. While that is better than the 1-11 record Colorado posted in 2022, it is still sub-par.

Sportsperson of the Year is a nebulous award, But a college football coach coming off a 4-8 season, regardless of the circumstances leading up to the season, does not seem like a likely candidate. If they want to honor Mr. Sanders, why not wait 2-3 seasons to see how Colorado football looks after Mr. Sanders has more time to build the program in his image and bring in his recruits? What award be left to give Coach Sanders if Colorado is 11-1 at this point in 2025?

On the other hand, if the Sportsperson of the Year award is to honor sports figures who give human and AI journalists things to write about, the eminently quotable Coach Sanders had one of the best cases in 2023.

(I would have submitted now former Texas A&M football coach Jimbo Fisher for earning $76.8 million to not coach Texas A&M.)