After al­most twenty years on the plat­form, EFF is log­ging off of X. This is­n’t a de­ci­sion we made lightly, but it might be over­due. The math has­n’t worked out for a while now.

We posted to Twitter (now known as X) five to ten times a day in 2018. Those tweets gar­nered some­where be­tween 50 and 100 mil­lion im­pres­sions per month. By 2024, our 2,500 X posts gen­er­ated around 2 mil­lion im­pres­sions each month. Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 mil­lion im­pres­sions for the en­tire year. To put it bluntly, an X post to­day re­ceives less than 3% of the views a sin­gle tweet de­liv­ered seven years ago.

When Elon Musk ac­quired Twitter in October 2022, EFF was clear about what needed fix­ing.

* Greater user con­trol: Giving users and third-party de­vel­op­ers the means to con­trol the user ex­pe­ri­ence through fil­ters and

Twitter was never a utopia. We’ve crit­i­cized the plat­form for about as long as it’s been around. Still, Twitter did de­serve recog­ni­tion from time to time for vo­cif­er­ously fight­ing for its users’ rights. That changed. Musk fired the en­tire hu­man rights team and laid off staffers in coun­tries where the com­pany pre­vi­ously fought off cen­sor­ship de­mands from re­pres­sive regimes. Many users left. Today we’re join­ing them.

Yes. And we un­der­stand why that looks con­tra­dic­tory. Let us ex­plain.

EFF ex­ists to pro­tect peo­ple’s dig­i­tal rights. Not just the peo­ple who al­ready value our work, have opted out of sur­veil­lance, or have al­ready mi­grated to the fe­di­verse. The peo­ple who need us most are of­ten the ones most em­bed­ded in the walled gar­dens of the main­stream plat­forms and sub­jected to their cor­po­rate sur­veil­lance.

Young peo­ple, peo­ple of color, queer folks, ac­tivists, and or­ga­niz­ers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day. These plat­forms host mu­tual aid net­works and serve as hubs for po­lit­i­cal or­ga­niz­ing, cul­tural ex­pres­sion, and com­mu­nity care. Just delet­ing the apps is­n’t al­ways a re­al­is­tic or ac­ces­si­ble op­tion, and nei­ther is push­ing every user to the fe­di­verse when there are cir­cum­stances like:

* You own a small busi­ness that de­pends on Instagram for cus­tomers.

* Your abor­tion fund uses TikTok to spread cru­cial in­for­ma­tion.

* You’re iso­lated and rely on on­line spaces to con­nect with your com­mu­nity.

Our pres­ence on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok is not an en­dorse­ment. We’ve spent years ex­pos­ing how these plat­forms sup­press mar­gin­al­ized voices, en­able in­va­sive be­hav­ioral ad­ver­tis­ing, and flag posts about abor­tion as dan­ger­ous. We’ve also taken ac­tion in court, in leg­is­la­tures, and through di­rect en­gage­ment with their staff to push them to change poor poli­cies and prac­tices.

We stay be­cause the peo­ple on those plat­forms de­serve ac­cess to in­for­ma­tion, too. We stay be­cause some of our most-read posts are the ones crit­i­ciz­ing the very plat­form we’re post­ing on. We stay be­cause the fewer steps be­tween you and the re­sources you need to pro­tect your­self, the bet­ter.

When you go on­line, your rights should go with you. X is no longer where the fight is hap­pen­ing. The plat­form Musk took over was im­per­fect but im­pact­ful. What ex­ists to­day is some­thing else: di­min­ished, and in­creas­ingly de min­imis.

EFF takes on big fights, and we win. We do that by putting our time, skills, and our mem­bers’ sup­port where they will ef­fect the most change. Right now, that means Bluesky, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and eff.org. We hope you fol­low us there and keep sup­port­ing the work we do. Our work pro­tect­ing dig­i­tal rights is needed more than ever be­fore, and we’re here to help you take back con­trol.

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The worst part about the MacOS win­dow man­age­ment sit­u­a­tion is the in­abil­ity to in­stantly switch spaces, and that Apple has con­tin­u­ously ig­nored re­quests to dis­able the nau­se­at­ing switch­ing an­i­ma­tion. Sure, it’s not that long, but I switch spaces of­ten enough to the point where it be­comes very no­tice­able and dri­ves me in­sane.

I be­lieve to have found the best so­lu­tion to in­stant space switch­ing!

But be­fore I show you, of course, other peo­ple share the same sen­ti­ment. I claim that none of the sur­veyed con­tem­po­rary so­lu­tions, ex­cept for what I bring up at the end of this ar­ti­cle, suf­fice for what I want:

This is al­ways the de­fault an­swer to this ques­tion on­line, and I’m sick of it! It does­n’t even solve the prob­lem, but rather re­places it with an equally use­less fade-in an­i­ma­tion. It also has the side ef­fect of ac­ti­vat­ing the prefers-re­duced-mo­tion me­dia query on web browsers.

Install the yabai tiling win­dow man­ager and use its in­stant space switcher.

And to be fair, it works pretty well. There are only two prob­lems: for one, yabai does this by bi­nary patch­ing a part of the op­er­at­ing sys­tem. This is only pos­si­ble by dis­abling System Integrity Protection at your own dis­cre­tion. For the sec­ond, in­stalling yabai forces you to learn and use it as your tiling win­dow man­ager1. I per­son­ally use PaperWM.spoon as my win­dow man­ager. Both of which are in­com­pat­i­ble when in­stalled to­gether.

Use a third-party vir­tual space man­ager fa­cade, hid­ing and show­ing win­dows as needed when switch­ing spaces.

Some pop­u­lar op­tions are FlashSpace and AeroSpace vir­tual work­spaces. I ac­tu­ally of­fer no crit­i­cism other than that they are not na­tive to MacOS, and feel un­nec­es­sary given that all we want to do is dis­able an an­i­ma­tion.

Pay for a li­cense for BetterTouchTool. Enable “Move Right Space (Without Animation)” and “Move Left Space (Without Animation)”.

Without fur­ther ado, I man­aged to find InstantSpaceSwitcher by ju­r­plel on GitHub. It is a sim­ple menu bar ap­pli­ca­tion that achieves in­stant space switch­ing while of­fer­ing none of the afore­men­tioned draw­backs.

InstantSpaceSwitcher does not re­quire dis­abling Security Integration Protection; it works by sim­u­lat­ing a track­pad swipe with a large amount of ve­loc­ity. It ad­di­tion­ally al­lows you to in­stantly jump to a space num­ber. The last thing it pro­vides is a com­mand line in­ter­face.

The in­stal­la­tion in­struc­tions are not listed on the README, so they are:

$ git clone https://​github.com/​ju­r­plel/​In­stantSpaceSwitcher

$ cd InstantSpaceSwitcher

$ ./build.sh

InstantSpaceSwitcher should now be avail­able as a na­tive ap­pli­ca­tion.

After run­ning the above, the com­mand line in­ter­face is avail­able at:

$ .build/release/ISSCli –help

Usage: .build/release/ISSCli [left|right|index

Did I men­tion that the repos­i­tory lit­er­ally has one star on GitHub (me)? I want more peo­ple to dis­cover InstantSpaceSwitcher and con­sider it trust­wor­thy; hence, please con­sider giv­ing it a star if you find it help­ful.

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Thank you for read­ing! Letters from Leo is a reader-sup­ported pub­li­ca­tion. To re­ceive new posts and sup­port my work, con­sider be­com­ing a free or paid sub­scriber.

Before you read on: Pope Leo XIV has asked Americans to con­tact their mem­bers of Congress and de­mand an end to the war in Iran. Answer the pope’s call in one click at stand­with­popeleo.com, an app we built to make it as easy as pos­si­ble.

[UPDATE at 4:33 PM EDT: Letters from Leo can now in­de­pen­dently con­firm The Free Press re­port that the meet­ing took place — and that some Vatican of­fi­cials were so alarmed by the Pentagon’s tac­tics that they shelved plans for Pope Leo XIV to visit the United States later this year.

Other of­fi­cials in the Vatican saw the Pentagon’s ref­er­ence to an Avignon pa­pacy as a threat to use mil­i­tary force against the Holy See.]

In January, be­hind closed doors at the Pentagon, Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby sum­moned Cardinal Christophe Pierre — Pope Leo XIV’s then-am­bas­sador to the United States — and de­liv­ered a lec­ture.

America, Colby and his col­leagues told the car­di­nal, has the mil­i­tary power to do what­ever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had bet­ter take its side.

As tem­pers rose, an uniden­ti­fied U. S. of­fi­cial reached for a four­teenth-cen­tury weapon and in­voked the Avignon Papacy, the pe­riod when the French Crown used mil­i­tary force to bend the bishop of Rome to its will.

That scene, bro­ken this week by Mattia Ferraresi in an ex­tra­or­di­nary piece of jour­nal­ism for The Free Press, may be the most re­mark­able mo­ment in the long and knot­ted his­tory of the American re­pub­lic’s re­la­tion­ship with the Catholic Church.

There is no pub­lic record of any Vatican of­fi­cial ever tak­ing a meet­ing at the Pentagon, and cer­tainly none of a se­nior U. S. of­fi­cial threat­en­ing the Vicar of Christ on Earth with the prospect of an American Babylonian Captivity.

The re­port­ing also con­firms — with fresh sources and new color — what I first re­ported in February: that the Vatican de­clined the Trump-Vance White House’s in­vi­ta­tion to host Pope Leo XIV for America’s 250th an­niver­sary in 2026.

Ferraresi ob­tained ac­counts from Vatican and U. S. of­fi­cials briefed on the Pentagon meet­ing. According to his sources, Colby’s team picked apart the pope’s January state-of-the-world ad­dress line by line and read it as a hos­tile mes­sage aimed di­rectly at the ad­min­is­tra­tion.

What en­raged them most was Leo’s de­c­la­ra­tion that “a diplo­macy that pro­motes di­a­logue and seeks con­sen­sus among all par­ties is be­ing re­placed by a diplo­macy based on force.”

The Pentagon read that sen­tence as a frontal chal­lenge to the so-called “Donroe Doctrine” — Trump’s up­date of Monroe, as­sert­ing un­chal­lenged American do­min­ion over the Western Hemisphere.

The car­di­nal sat through the lec­ture in si­lence. The Holy See has not, since that day, given an inch.

Ferraresi’s re­port­ing also adds vi­tal color to the col­lapse of the 250th an­niver­sary visit. JD Vance per­son­ally ex­tended the in­vi­ta­tion in May 2025, just two weeks af­ter Leo’s elec­tion in the con­clave.

According to a se­nior Vatican of­fi­cial quoted in the piece, the Holy See ini­tially con­sid­ered the re­quest, then post­poned it in­def­i­nitely be­cause of for­eign pol­icy dis­agree­ments, the ris­ing op­po­si­tion of American bish­ops to the Trump-Vance mass de­por­ta­tion regime, and a re­fusal to be­come a par­ti­san tro­phy in the 2026 midterms.

“The ad­min­is­tra­tion tried every pos­si­ble way to have the Pope in the U. S. in 2026,” one Vatican of­fi­cial told The Free Press.

Instead, on July 4, 2026, the first American pope will travel to Lampedusa, the Italian is­land where North African mi­grants wash ashore by the thou­sands. Robert Francis Prevost is too de­lib­er­ate a man to have cho­sen that date by ac­ci­dent.

The Pentagon meet­ing also clar­i­fies the moral in­ten­sity of Leo’s pub­lic pos­ture over the last six weeks.

After Colby’s lec­ture, the pope did not re­treat into Vatican diplo­macy. He pressed harder.

I’d like to tell the story of job I just com­pleted for a cus­tomer, so that I can make a point about how I feel Microsoft and other large tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies are ac­tively hos­tile to their users.

I re­ceived a call from my neigh­bour ask­ing if I would be will­ing to help her hus­band with an is­sue he’d been hav­ing with his lap­top. As the proud new owner of my own IT ser­vices com­pany, I of course agreed to take a look.

I spoke with my neigh­bour’s hus­band, and im­me­di­ately saw that he was not tech lit­er­ate. I learned to iden­tify the type while do­ing IT work for my pre­vi­ous em­ployer. This made un­der­stand­ing his prob­lem dif­fi­cult, but through con­ver­sa­tion we did man­age to come to an un­der­stand­ing about what the real is­sue was that he was ex­pe­ri­enc­ing.

What he was see­ing was that he was no longer re­ceiv­ing email in Outlook, and that there was an er­ror mes­sage claim­ing he had ‘run out of avail­able stor­age’, or some other sim­i­lar non­sense. He is a very light email user, and he knows it. He was con­fused as to why he’d run out of stor­age. I was con­fused as well, at first.

Through in­ves­ti­ga­tion I dis­cov­ered that the Outlook email ser­vice uses Onedrive for stor­age of all mes­sages and at­tach­ments. He had 5 GB of avail­able stor­age, the amount that is given with his free ac­count. This had yet to ex­plain why he was see­ing that er­ror mes­sage, there was no way he had con­sumed 5 GB of stor­age with just his email use.

Unsurprisingly, his Onedrive stor­age was­n’t filled by his email, it was filled by the per­sonal files from his Windows 11 desk­top. Did he con­fig­ure Windows to save those files to his Onedrive di­rec­tory, in­stead of his lo­cal home di­rec­tory? Of course not, that was done by de­fault. Did he even know that this was hap­pen­ing? Also, no. He had no idea this was hap­pen­ing un­til he saw that er­ror mes­sage, which oh-so-help­fully of­fered to ‘solve’ his prob­lem by of­fer­ing him a sub­scrip­tion to ad­di­tional paid stor­age ca­pac­ity on the ac­count.

He did man­age to loosely un­der­stand what was hap­pen­ing, enough at least to start delet­ing files from his com­puter to try and make the er­ror mes­sage go away. I was never able to con­firm with him, but I sus­pect that he deleted files (including fam­ily pho­tos) for which he had no other backup.

I will be blunt, this in­fu­ri­ates me. This was­n’t the first time I’ve seen this. I saw it many times while work­ing for my pre­vi­ous em­ployer. Microsoft has in­ten­tion­ally bro­ken a fun­da­men­tal as­sump­tion about how files are stored on a com­puter run­ning Windows. They do this with­out ask­ing the user, and with­out ad­e­quately ex­plain­ing what they have done. Microsoft is very ob­vi­ously em­ploy­ing dark pat­terns in or­der to goad its users into pay­ing for Onedrive stor­age.

I’m a com­puter nerd, and if you are read­ing this you prob­a­bly are as well. We can change that set­ting our­selves with­out much thought, and we prob­a­bly have back­ups of our im­por­tant data in case re­cov­ery is nec­es­sary. I will tell you that many peo­ple are ex­tremely util­i­tar­ian about their com­puter use. They use their com­put­ers only to the de­gree that they must to serve their other in­ter­ests in life. They also trust that their prop­erty, the de­vice that cost them hun­dreds of dol­lars is­n’t try­ing to cheat them like some back-al­ley con artist.

This is­n’t a game. My cus­tomer is­n’t a num­ber on a spread­sheet, merely an in­cre­ment to­wards reach­ing some use­less KPI. He deleted fam­ily pho­tos to try and get that er­ror mes­sage to go away, so that he could just re­ceive emails again. He may not un­der­stand what hap­pened, but he’s not stu­pid. He sus­pected that this was a scam to get him to pay for some­thing he did­n’t need, he just did­n’t un­der­stand how the scam worked.

First and fore­most, I per­formed a com­plete backup of his data. I took every­thing that I could find lo­cally on the ma­chine, as well as every­thing from the Onedrive ac­count, in­clud­ing the Trash. It was­n’t much, only a few gi­ga­bytes, which I trans­ferred to a sep­a­rate USB drive.

I care­fully trans­ferred all files out of the Onedrive di­rec­tory struc­ture and back into his home folder. The Windows file ex­plorer did not make this easy or in­tu­itive.

I pro­ceeded to delete every­thing from the Onedrive ac­count, through the web in­ter­face. I did no­tice that delet­ing files merely moved them into the Trash, which was still be­ing counted to­wards to­tal stor­age us­age. I as­sumed this was yet an­other sub­tle dark pat­tern.

I al­luded to chang­ing set­tings as a way to solve this. The ap­proach we of­ten took at my pre­vi­ous em­ployer was to sim­ply dis­able Onedrive in the Windows startup list. That could have worked in this case but I had a bet­ter idea. Remove Onedrive en­tirely.

I have mus­cle mem­ory at this point for how to do it, if you were won­der­ing this is the pro­ce­dure I used:

Open an ad­min Terminal and load up the Chris Titus’ winu­til.

This en­tirely re­moves the Onedrive ap­pli­ca­tion from Windows, in­clud­ing all in­te­gra­tions into other pro­grams, such as the file ex­plorer.

I then pro­ceeded to delete every­thing from the Onedrive ac­count, in­clud­ing the Trash. The er­ror mes­sages fi­nally went away in Outlook and he was able to re­cieve email mes­sages again.

I may be preach­ing to the choir, but re­gard­less I want to use this post as my op­por­tu­nity to make these points in my own way. Microsoft is ac­tively hos­tile to­wards its users.They have be­come a bas­ket-case of an or­gan­i­sa­tion, where chas­ing ir­rel­e­vant KPI’s has be­come more im­por­tant than prod­uct qual­ity, or even base­line re­spect for their users.The ex­act same can be said, to vary­ing de­grees, to every other large con­sumer-tech com­pany.

I see this as the re­sult of bad in­cen­tive struc­tures. A toxic game the­ory that has been al­lowed to play out over many years with­out proper scrutiny. The lefty in me might think that this is a man­i­fes­ta­tion of Late Capitalism. If so then it feels like we’re about 30 sec­onds away from mid­night.

I think a lot about the pos­si­ble ways to tweak said in­cen­tive struc­tures, to build a choice ar­chi­tec­ture that can pre­vent even the first step in the process that led to this.

Days like to­day, when I’m think­ing about the real ac­tual ways that this non­sense im­pacts real ac­tual peo­ple, I can’t ig­nore the hu­mans in this loop. People need to ac­tu­ally take re­spon­si­bil­ity for their choices, not just turn their brain off when the num­ber looks right in the spread­sheet.

If you en­joyed this post, let me know! Email me at mail@lzon.ca, or reach out through one of my so­cial ac­counts linked on the home­page.

Top Laptops for use with FreeBSD

Each lap­top is scored based on an ag­gre­gate of:

how many lap­top com­po­nents are de­tected, where each fully auto-de­tected com­po­nent adds a point

whether de­vices have de­graded func­tion­al­ity, re­duc­ing the score by 0.5-1.5 based on sever­ity and how im­por­tant it is to the lap­top ex­pe­ri­ence (wi-fi/graphics weighted more)

user-pro­vided com­ments about test re­sults, and how in­volved setup is for that de­vice

I’ve been work­ing on Pizza Legacy, an open-source reim­ple­men­ta­tion of the 1994 DOS game . The game has a close-zoom street view of the cities, and when you scroll around it you can see a steady stream of cars dri­ving through the streets. Maybe 20 or 30 tiny sprites at a time, but they nav­i­gate the road net­work, queue be­hind each other at in­ter­sec­tions, and gen­er­ally look like a liv­ing city. Yes, it was a bit buggy be­cause some­times they would drive through each other, but it was good enough to just give some sense of life to the map. All that on a 25 MHz 386 CPU.

The first thing I im­ple­mented in 2010 when I started this pro­ject was that close zoom level, but it took 14 years be­fore I fi­nally had the cars dri­ving around on it, in a way that I was happy about; I had mul­ti­ple at­tempts over the years but every time I ran into prob­lems I got stuck build­ing an overly com­pli­cated sys­tem that was hard to rea­son about and no fun to work on.

One at­tempt in 2017 in­volved each tile keep­ing track of which po­si­tions were oc­cu­pied, and every car had to ask the grid for per­mis­sion be­fore mov­ing, re­serv­ing and free­ing slots as it went. It ba­si­cally turned into a shared lock­ing sys­tem just to move a few pix­els, with cars and tiles con­stantly try­ing to stay in sync.

All the while I had this nag­ging thought in the back of my mind: the orig­i­nal ran this on a 25 MHz CPU, so why were my ver­sions al­ways so com­pli­cated?

Finally I went to the as­sem­bly (which I had spent many years slowly un­der­stand­ing bet­ter and doc­u­ment­ing) to fig­ure out what the orig­i­nal was do­ing, with the help of LLMs which were (a cou­ple of years ago) this new and ex­cit­ing tech­nol­ogy that could bet­ter un­der­stand as­sem­bly than I could.

Now that I fi­nally have it work­ing I can see where I went wrong: I went into it with a brain full of mod­ern con­cepts: scene graphs, path find­ing, col­li­sion de­tec­tion, and of course plenty of CPU to run it all!

First, let’s look at what a city ac­tu­ally looks like:

As you can see there are two-lane roads, T-junctions, in­ter­sec­tions, and cor­ners. In maps are made up out of a grid of 160 by 120 tiles, where each tile is one of the tiles from landsym.vga:

The orig­i­nal landsym.vga file with added bor­ders be­tween tiles and text to in­di­cate the row and col­umn off­set. Byte 0x54 means col­umn 5, row 4 (roof tile of a de­pot).

Back to the traf­fic; the key in­sight that makes it pos­si­ble to run this sys­tem on such a slow CPU: cars don’t need to know where they’re go­ing. Each road tile type car­ries its own di­rec­tion. Road tile 0x16 is the bot­tom part of a hor­i­zon­tal road, mean­ing that cars can only drive from left to right on these roads. Similarly road tile 0x06 is just for right to left traf­fic, then 0x26 and 0x36 are the same but for ver­ti­cal traf­fic.

This means the city is ba­si­cally just a bunch of one-way roads, once a car knows which tile it sits on, it can keep go­ing.

Corners work the same way, 0x56

(CORNER_SW in my enum) is the cor­ner that al­lows the car to ei­ther keep go­ing west, or turn south. When a car hits a cor­ner it flips a coin, 50% chance of go­ing straight on, 50% chance of tak­ing the turn. The maps have been de­signed in such a way that the roads al­ways make sense, which means that next to the CORNER_SW there is an­other tile that is ei­ther a south to north traf­fic (so we have to go south) or it’s an­other edge tile that al­lows ei­ther a turn or straight on.

There is one ex­tra rule to keep traf­fic look­ing nat­ural, if you just took a left turn the next cor­ner forces you straight-on; no two con­sec­u­tive left turns.

Valid di­rec­tions per tile type in­di­cated with ar­rows.

Cars move one pixel per frame. Each tick the main loop checks if a car is blocked, and if not, in­cre­ments or decre­ments its screen co­or­di­nate by one de­pend­ing on di­rec­tion. East adds 1 to X. North sub­tracts 1 from Y.

There’s a sec­ond progress counter, count­ing down from 16 to 1. When it hits zero it re­sets to 16 and the game runs the tile-bound­ary logic: look up the next tile, de­cide the new di­rec­tion, up­date the sprite frame (to vi­su­ally turn the car in the new di­rec­tion). Since each tile is 16 pix­els wide and tall, this runs ex­actly once per tile crossed. The per-pixel move hap­pens every tick; the heav­ier tile logic runs only 1/16th as of­ten.

When a car first spawns, progress is set to a ran­dom value be­tween 1 and 16. That stag­gers all the cars so their tile-bound­ary checks don’t all land on the same frame, spread­ing the work out evenly.

Unlike my var­i­ous at­tempts at fancy col­li­sion de­tec­tion, the orig­i­nal uses a straight­for­ward pair­wise check: for each car, walk the whole car list and ask “would these two over­lap next tick?” If yes, set a wait counter of 10 ticks on the blocked car and move on to the next car.

But the col­li­sion de­tec­tion code is writ­ten to bail out as fast as pos­si­ble. The very first thing it does is ex­tract the other car’s di­rec­tion; be­cause roads are one-way, east and west never share a road, so an east car and a west car can never col­lide. That pair re­turns im­me­di­ately, no co­or­di­nate reads at all. Same for east and south, west and north, and so on.

With say 25 cars in a typ­i­cal city view there are 625 pair­wise calls per frame. About half of those re­turn in just a few CPU in­struc­tions on the di­rec­tion check alone. Most of the rest fail the lane check (same-direction cars have to be on the same road, which is one equal­ity com­par­i­son). The pairs that ac­tu­ally reach any co­or­di­nate arith­metic are usu­ally sin­gle dig­its.

When a car does get blocked, the 10-tick wait cre­ates nat­ural traf­fic jams: cars bunch up, the front one even­tu­ally finds the way clear, the queue drains. There are some bugs in the sys­tem (especially when you let it run for a while and there are lot of in­ter­sec­tions) but given that the point of this is not to run an ac­cu­rate dri­ving sim­u­la­tion but just show some move­ment on the screen, it works per­fectly well and very ef­fi­ciently. The col­li­sion de­tec­tion sys­tem has some quirks; some com­bi­na­tions are never checked (e.g. east­bound car never in­ter­sects with a south­bound car) that might be the rea­son be­hind some bug­i­ness.

When you en­ter the close-zoom view, the game scans all 132 tiles in the view­port (12 columns by 11 rows), and for each road tile it rolls against the dis­tric­t’s traf­fic den­sity to de­cide whether to spawn a car there, so higher-traf­fic dis­tricts are busier. Corner tiles are ex­cluded from spawn points, so cars only ap­pear on straight road tiles.

Cars that drive off the edge of the screen are respawned as a new (random) color car fac­ing the other di­rec­tion, on the tile go­ing the other di­rec­tion. This means that the game does­n’t have to worry about respawn­ing cars other than just every time one car dri­ves of go­ing east it spawns a new car be­low go­ing west, etc.

Pay at­ten­tion to the cars dri­ving off the map at the edges, no­tice they are re­placed by cars dri­ving the op­po­site di­rec­tion.

When you scroll, the newly ex­posed strip of tiles gets the same treat­ment of hav­ing a chance of hav­ing cars spawned on them.

Looking back at my failed at­tempts, I was de­sign­ing for prob­lems that the orig­i­nal just did­n’t con­sider. Cars don’t need pathfind­ing be­cause the map tells them where they can go. Collision de­tec­tion was cheap be­cause the early-exit logic makes most pairs ba­si­cally free. There’s no ve­loc­ity or physics be­cause 1 pixel per tick is enough to look con­vinc­ing. When you’re about to hit some­thing just pause for 10 ticks, and when you have to make a turn you just travel half the width of the tile and then make your turn, works on every tile in any di­rec­tion.

I reim­ple­mented it fol­low­ing the as­sem­bly pretty closely, so just a cou­ple of switch state­ments with dif­fer­ent rout­ing op­tions per tile type, you can see the de­cide_de­sired_di­rec­tion method in Car.cpp.

Your AI chat­bot ses­sions and cloud-stored pho­tos might get more ex­pen­sive if other states fol­low Maine’s lead. Lawmakers there just ad­vanced the na­tion’s first statewide mora­to­rium on large data cen­ters, cit­ing con­cerns that the AI boom is push­ing elec­tric­ity costs even higher in a state al­ready suf­fer­ing America’s prici­est power bills.

The Democratic-controlled leg­is­la­ture ad­vanced bill LD 307, tem­porar­ily block­ing per­mits for any new data cen­ter re­quir­ing more than 20 megawatts. The mea­sure runs un­til November 2027, buy­ing time for a new Data Center Coordination Council to study how these fa­cil­i­ties strain Maine’s ag­ing elec­tri­cal grid.

Gov. Janet Mills sup­ports the pause while de­vel­op­ers scram­ble for ex­emp­tions.

The bill gained trac­tion af­ter res­i­dents in Wiscasset and Lewiston suc­cess­fully op­posed data cen­ter pro­pos­als over wa­ter us­age and safety con­cerns. Projects now in limbo in­clude fa­cil­i­ties planned for:

* Jay (at an old pa­per mill site)

“Taking this pause now is go­ing to be cru­cial,” Rep. Christopher Kessler said, ac­cord­ing to Maine Public Radio, re­flect­ing grow­ing leg­isla­tive con­cern about grid ca­pac­ity. Developer Tony McDonald dis­agrees, call­ing the pro­posed re­stric­tions “disastrous” and claim­ing his team got “caught in this drag­net.”

The Pine Tree State is­n’t alone in pump­ing the brakes. Counties in Michigan and Indiana have im­posed their own lo­cal pauses on data cen­ter de­vel­op­ment, while cities from Denver to Detroit weigh re­stric­tions as hy­per­scale fa­cil­i­ties chase cheap land and re­li­able power.

The tim­ing re­flects broader anx­i­ety about AI’s in­fra­struc­ture ap­petite. Data cen­ters now con­sume roughly 4% of U. S. elec­tric­ity, with pro­jec­tions sug­gest­ing that fig­ure could dou­ble by 2030. For Mainers al­ready pay­ing some of the na­tion’s high­est res­i­den­tial rates, that math­e­mat­i­cal re­al­ity hits dif­fer­ently than Silicon Valley’s end­less op­ti­miza­tion rhetoric.

Maine’s move rep­re­sents what econ­o­mist Anirban Basu called a “canary in the coal mine” for state-level re­sis­tance to Big Tech’s en­ergy de­mands. Whether that prece­dent spreads de­pends on how ag­gres­sively other gov­er­nors fol­low Maine’s lead—and whether your fa­vorite AI ser­vices start charg­ing ac­cord­ingly.

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What do I need to send?

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The Vercel Plugin on Claude Code wants to read all your prompts!

I was work­ing on a pro­ject that has noth­ing to do with Vercel. No ver­cel.json, no next.con­fig, no Vercel de­pen­den­cies. Nothing.

And then this popped up:

“The Vercel plu­gin col­lects anony­mous us­age data… Would you like to also share your prompt text?”

That felt wrong. So I went deep into the source code with Claude.

A de­ploy­ment plu­gin is ask­ing to read every prompt you type, across every pro­ject. Why?

The con­sent ques­tion is­n’t even a real UI el­e­ment. It’s de­liv­ered via prompt in­jec­tion into Claude’s sys­tem con­text - the plu­gin tells Claude to ask you a ques­tion and run shell com­mands based on your an­swer.

“Anonymous us­age data” in­cludes your full bash com­mand strings sent to Vercel’s servers. You’re never told this is op­tional.

All of this runs on every pro­ject, not just Vercel ones. The plu­gin has frame­work de­tec­tion built in - it just does­n’t use it to gate teleme­try.

First, the ask it­self. The Vercel plu­gin helps with de­ploy­ments, frame­work guid­ance, and skill in­jec­tion. Why does it need to read every prompt you type? Across every pro­ject? That’s not an­a­lyt­ics for im­prov­ing the plu­gin - that’s way out­side its scope for a tool that’s sup­posed to help you ship to Vercel.

But even if you ac­cept the ask, the way they ask is worse.

When the Vercel plu­gin wants to ask you about teleme­try, it does­n’t show a CLI prompt or a set­tings screen.

Instead, it in­jects nat­ural-lan­guage in­struc­tions into Claude’s sys­tem con­text telling the AI to ask you a ques­tion. Claude reads those in­struc­tions, ren­ders the ques­tion us­ing AskUserQuestion, and then - based on your an­swer - runs echo ‘enabled’ or echo ‘disabled’ to write a pref­er­ence file on your filesys­tem.

Here’s what those in­jected in­struc­tions look like in the plu­gin source:

The re­sult looks iden­ti­cal to a na­tive Claude Code ques­tion. There is no vi­sual in­di­ca­tor that it’s from a third-party plu­gin. You can­not tell the dif­fer­ence.

This is­n’t just con­text in­jec­tion - which is the in­tended use for plu­g­ins (skills, docs, frame­work guid­ance). The Vercel plu­gin in­jects be­hav­ioral in­struc­tions telling Claude to ask a spe­cific ques­tion AND ex­e­cute shell com­mands on your filesys­tem based on your re­sponse.

There’s a big dif­fer­ence be­tween “here’s con­text about Next.js rout­ing” and “ask the user this ques­tion and then write to their filesys­tem.”

Someone raised this ex­act con­cern on GitHub (issue #34). A Vercel dev re­sponded:

“When us­ing a 1st party mar­ket­place like Cursor, CC or Codex, you can’t cre­ate a one time CLI prompt. The ac­ti­va­tion comes from within the agent har­ness. Totally open to vis­it­ing this, but we need a bet­ter so­lu­tion.”

I get the con­straint. But the an­swer to “we can’t build proper con­sent” should be not ship­ping the fea­ture - not do­ing prompt in­jec­tion in­stead.

Even within to­day’s con­straints, they could have added “This ques­tion is from the Vercel plu­gin” in the ques­tion text, and writ­ten the pref­er­ence file di­rectly from the hook’s JavaScript in­stead of in­struct­ing Claude to run shell com­mands.

Problem 2: “Anonymous us­age data” is not what you think

“The Vercel plu­gin col­lects anony­mous us­age data such as skill in­jec­tion pat­terns and tools used by de­fault.”

Sounds harm­less. Here’s what it ac­tu­ally col­lects:

What gets sent

Do they ask?

No - al­ways on

No - al­ways on

Yes - only if you opt in

That mid­dle row. Every bash com­mand - the full com­mand string, not just the tool name - sent to teleme­try.ver­cel.com. File paths, pro­ject names, env vari­able names, in­fra­struc­ture de­tails. Whatever’s in the com­mand, they get it.

Describing this as “anonymous us­age data such as skill in­jec­tion pat­terns and tools used” is a stretch.

The con­sent ques­tion frames your choice as “share prompts too, or don’t.” It never tells you the bash com­mand col­lec­tion is op­tional. It never says you can turn it off. The ac­tual choice is­n’t be­tween teleme­try and no teleme­try - it’s be­tween “some” and “more.”

All of this is tied to­gether with a per­sis­tent de­vice UUID stored on your ma­chine, cre­ated once and reused for­ever. Every ses­sion, every pro­ject, link­able across time.

The opt-out ex­ists - an env var VERCEL_PLUGIN_TELEMETRY=off that’s doc­u­mented in the plug­in’s README. But that README lives in­side the plu­gin cache di­rec­tory. Not any­where you’d see dur­ing in­stal­la­tion or first run.

Problem 3: This runs on all your pro­jects

This is what orig­i­nally set me off - the con­sent ques­tion pop­ping up on a non-Ver­cel pro­ject.

I went through every teleme­try file look­ing for pro­ject de­tec­tion. There is none.

The hook match­ers con­firm it. The UserPromptSubmit matcher is lit­er­ally an empty string - match every­thing. Install the plu­gin for your Next.js app, and it’s watch­ing your Rust pro­ject, your Python scripts, your client work. Everything.

The irony? The plu­gin al­ready has frame­work de­tec­tion built in. It scans your repo and iden­ti­fies what frame­works you’re us­ing on every ses­sion start. But it only uses this to re­port what it found - not to de­cide whether teleme­try should fire.

The gate ex­ists. They just did­n’t use it.

All teleme­try should re­quire ex­plicit opt-in. “We’d like to col­lect: (1) ses­sion meta­data, (2) bash com­mands, (3) your prompts - which would you like to en­able?” Honest dis­clo­sure with a real choice.

“Anonymous us­age data” should not be the de­scrip­tion for full bash com­mand strings sent to a server with a per­sis­tent de­vice ID.

Telemetry should be scoped to Vercel pro­jects only. The frame­work de­tec­tion al­ready ex­ists - use it.

Plugins need vi­sual at­tri­bu­tion. Even [Vercel Plugin] be­fore any ques­tion sur­faced through a plu­gin hook. Right now, all plu­gin-in­jected ques­tions look iden­ti­cal to na­tive UI.

Plugins need gran­u­lar per­mis­sions. When a plu­gin in­stalls, Claude Code should show: “This plu­gin re­quests ac­cess to: your bash com­mands, your prompt text, ses­sion meta­data. Allow?”

Plugins should de­clare scope - which files or de­pen­den­cies must be pre­sent for hooks to fire. This is ex­actly how VS Code ex­ten­sions work with ac­ti­va­tion­Events. It’s a solved prob­lem.

You, right now

The env var kills all teleme­try but keeps the plu­gin fully func­tional. Skills, frame­work de­tec­tion, de­ploy­ment flows - every­thing still works. You lose noth­ing ex­cept Vercel’s data col­lec­tion.

Each of these prob­lems has a Vercel layer and a Claude Code ar­chi­tec­ture layer. Vercel made choices I think are not okay. But the plu­gin ar­chi­tec­ture en­abled those choices - no vi­sual at­tri­bu­tion, no hook per­mis­sions, no pro­ject scop­ing.

I use Vercel. I like Vercel. I use Claude Code daily. I want both to be bet­ter.

Everything above is ver­i­fi­able from the plu­gin source at ~/.claude/plugins/cache/claude-plugins-official/vercel/. Here are the ex­act files and line num­bers.

is­Prompt­Teleme­tryEn­abled() - true only if pref­er­ence file says en­abled

This sends the full com­mand string via track­BaseEvents() - al­ways on, no opt-in.

await track­BaseEvents(ses­sionId, [

{ key: “session:device_id”, value: de­vi­ceId },

{ key: “session:platform”, value: process.plat­form },

{ key: “session:likely_skills”, value: likelySkills.join(”,“) },

{ key: “session:greenfield”, value: String(greenfield !== null) },

{ key: “session:vercel_cli_installed”, value: String(cliStatus.installed) },

{ key: “session:vercel_cli_version”, value: cliS­ta­tus.cur­rentVer­sion || “” }

From hooks/​user-prompt-sub­mit-teleme­try.mjs:67-85: the hook writes “asked” to the pref­er­ence file, then out­puts JSON with hook­Speci­fi­cOut­put.ad­di­tion­al­Con­text con­tain­ing nat­ural-lan­guage in­struc­tions for Claude to use the AskUserQuestion tool and ex­e­cute shell com­mands.

Zero pro­ject de­tec­tion in any teleme­try code path.

Framework de­tec­tion ex­ists but is­n’t used for gat­ing

ses­sion-start-pro­filer.mjs runs pro­filePro­ject() (lines 93-119) which scans for next.con­fig.*, ver­cel.json, mid­dle­ware.ts, com­po­nents.json, and pack­age de­pen­den­cies. But the re­sult is only used to re­port ses­sion:like­ly_skills - not to gate whether teleme­try fires.

Both in­volve sys­tem­atic think­ing, a pref­er­ence for pre­ci­sion, and dif­fi­culty pre­tend­ing small talk is ac­cept­able.

The ques­tion is which one ex­plains it.

Scores are in­de­pen­dent — they don’t need to add up to 100%.

Some of the most se­ri­ous thinkers in the tra­di­tion — Kant, Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer — were prob­a­bly both. What they had in com­mon was a re­fusal to stop at the sur­face of things. If that sounds fa­mil­iar, there may be a more in­ter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion avail­able.

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