Your Smartphone, Their Rules: App Stores Enable Corporate-Government Censorship
Subscribe to the Free Future NewsletterFree Future home Who controls what you can do on your mobile phone? What happens when your device can only run what the government decides is OK? We are dangerously close to this kind of totalitarian control, thanks to a combination of government overreach and technocratic infrastructure choices. Most Americans […]
The Peaceful Transfer of Power in Open Source Projects
Most of the people who run Open Source projects are mortal. Recent history shows us that they will all eventually die, or get bored, or win the lottery, or get sick, or be conscripted, or lose their mind. If you’ve ever visited a foreign country’s national history museum, I guarantee you’ve read this little snippet: […]
Breakthrough in antimatter production
A new cooling technique means that the ALPHA experiment at CERN’s Antimatter Factory can produce antihydrogen atoms eight times faster than before In a paper published today in Nature Communications, researchers at the ALPHA experiment at CERN’s Antimatter Factory report a new technique that allows them to produce over 15 000 antihydrogen atoms – the […]
The $1k AWS Mistake
A cautionary tale about AWS VPC networking, NAT Gateways, and how a missing VPC Endpoint turned our S3 data transfers into an expensive lesson. I’ve been using AWS since around 2007. Back then, EC2 storage was entirely ephemeral and stopping an instance meant losing all your data. The platform has come a long way since […]
Multimodal Diffusion Language Models for Thinking-Aware Editing and Generation
🌌 Introduction Demo: Parallel text-image generation in action. While thinking-aware generation aims to improve performance on complex tasks, we identify a critical failure mode where existing sequential, autoregressive approaches can paradoxically degrade performance due to error propagation. To systematically analyze this issue, we propose ParaBench, a new benchmark designed to evaluate both text and image […]
A down detector for down detector’s down detector
Downdetector’s Downdetector’s Downdetector A tiny independent status checker. All Systems Operational Downdetector’s Downdetector is responding normally from all regions. CHECKS BY REGION Region Status HTTP Latency London, GB ● Up 200 320 ms Sydney, AU ● Up 200 468 ms New Jersey, US ● Up 200 504 ms Last checked: 2 minutes ago – 3 […]
I just want working RCS messaging
November 18, 2025 I’m in over a month now with non-working RCS on my iPhone 15 Pro. Apple blames the carriers, the carriers tell me it’s not them (mostly T-Mobile since I have good contacts there). They tell me they can’t really do anything about iPhones not working on RCS, go back to Apple. This […]
Neopets.com Changed My Life (2019)
Ah, Neopets. Many people my age (aka millennials) know about the kid’s website where you made a Neopet to take care of. You named it, fed it, and even could give it a pet of its own. Not to mention the hundreds of cool games you could play on there. Just the name brings back […]
I made a down detector for down detector
Checks by region Region Status HTTP Latency Loading region checks…
Lucent 7 R/E 5ESS Telephone Switch Rescue
I am still recovering from the fairly challenging logistical project of saving a Lucent 5ESS. This is a whale of a project and I am still in a state of disbelief that I have gotten to this point. Thanks to my wife, brother, and a few friends for their help and the University of Arizona […]