Links 23/10/2023: Many Pfizer Layoffs and Criticism of Activision/Blizzard Takeover
Contents
- Leftovers
- Gemini* and Gopher
-
Leftovers
-
Hackaday ☛ Custom Fume Hood For Safe Electroless Plating
There are plenty of chemical processes that happen commonly around the house that, if we’re really following safety protocols to the letter, should be done in a fume hood. Most of us will have had that experience with soldering various electronics, especially if we’re not exactly sure where the solder came from or how old it is. For [John]’s electroless plating process, though, he definitely can’t straddle that line and went about building a fume hood to vent some of the more harmful gasses out of a window.
-
Science
-
Hackaday ☛ 3D Printing On A Spinning Rod
FDM 3D printing traditionally operates on a layer-by-layer basis, using a flat bed to construct parts. However, [Humphrey Wittingtonsworth IV] demonstrates in his video how this process can be significantly enhanced in terms of mechanical strength and print speed by experimenting with printing on a rotating rod instead of the standard flat bed.
-
Hackaday ☛ Math Book Gets Real With Complex
The [Math Sorcerer] loves books. His latest acquisition is the famous Real and Complex Analysis, which is a very stout math book. How stout? Well, there are several chapters on holomorphic functions, including how to do a Fourier transform on such a function. There’s also an appendix about Hausdorff’s maximality theorem. What are those? Beats us; read the book. You can also watch the short video review of the text below.
-
-
Education
-
New York Times ☛ The Worst Scandal in American Higher Education Isn’t in the Ivy League
In fact, I’d argue that the moral collapse at Liberty University in Virginia may well be the most consequential education scandal in the United States, not simply because the details themselves are shocking and appalling, but because Liberty’s misconduct both symbolizes and contributes to the crisis engulfing Christian America. It embodies a cultural and political approach that turns Christian theology on its head.
-
Uwe Friedrichsen ☛ Rethinking job ads - Part 2
In the first part of this two-part blog post, I explained why I think most job ads today are rather pointless and are not particularly helpful in finding the people you need. Then I discussed some pointers that lead the way towards better criteria for job ads and mapped them against the typical job ad of today.
In this second post, we will go a step further and look at how job ads could look like that reflect the actual needs of today better. We will also discuss what it means for the interview process because you cannot really separate the ads and the interview process. Finally, we will sum it all up.
-
-
Hardware
-
Hackaday ☛ Antique Motherboard Speaks
[Bits und Bolts] has been restoring an old PC motherboard with the infamous bad electrolytic capacitors. The video of his exploits was interesting enough, but pretty standard stuff. What we found interesting though, was an odd feature of the ASUS Bios called “Post Reporter” that let the motherboard speak error codes and status through the external speaker. (Video, embedded below.) We aren’t sure who wanted that, and since we haven’t seen it around lately, we are guessing the answer was nobody wanted it.
-
Hackaday ☛ Adobe Scientist Cuts A Dash With LCD Shifting Dress
Adobe research scientist [Christine Dierk] showed off an interesting new project at the Adobe Max conference: Project Primrose, a dress covered with a series of liquid crystal panels that could react to movement, changing the design of the dress. Now, Adobe has released a paper showing some of the technical details of the process.
-
[Repeat] Dan Langille ☛ Moving 4x storage devices into a new home
Yesterday I did some scavenging of some servers which I’m going to dispose of. I managed to put together 4 x 1TB storage devices: 2 x NVMe sticks and 2 x SSDs. I also pulled a riser card from an R730 and relocated it to another host.
The NVMe sticks are mounted on these PCIe cards, which I do not regret buying. They came with full height and low-profile brackets. More to the point: I saved them and need them to get them into the riser card mentioned above.
I first installed those devices into r730-03, and then thought better of it and moved them to r730-01.
Along the way, I also moved a fiber card into the same server.
-
-
Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
-
Newsweek ☛ Pfizer Announces Layoffs as COVID Vaccine Revenue Slumps
The pharmaceutical giant has announced it will slash its headcount to save money through 2024, though it did not specify how many jobs will be lost.
-
Gregory Hammond ☛ Potential danger of using your real name online?
While there are many positives of getting to know someone by their real name while online, there are some dangers of using your real name online.
This isn’t talking about a particular event or person that prompted this, as there are too many events that happen every year when something happens because someone has their real name online.
-
Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Estonians learn to keep flower fields just for bees
Rannu Seeme OÜ, an Estonian plant nursery, has been nominated for the European Beekeeping Award for its work in creating bee foraging flower fields suitable for Estonian conditions, where flowers were traditionally grown for biomass and nitrogen enrichment, Maaleht reports.
-
New York Times ☛ Climate Change Is Keeping Therapists Up at Night
It had been a challenging few years, Bryant told me when I first called to talk about his work. There were some ways in which climate fears were a natural fit in the therapy room, and he believed the field had coalesced around some answers that felt clear and useful. But treating those fears also stirred up lots of complicated questions that no one was quite sure how to answer. The traditional focus of his field, Bryant said, could be oversimplified as “fixing the individual”: treating patients as separate entities working on their personal growth. Climate change, by contrast, was a species-wide problem, a profound and constant reminder of how deeply intertwined we all are in complex systems — atmospheric, biospheric, economic — that are much bigger than us. It sometimes felt like a direct challenge to old therapeutic paradigms — and perhaps a chance to replace them with something better.
-
-
Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
-
Bits & Bytes: The Activision/Blizzard Deal Stinks
Did you miss me? Yeah, me neither. Anyhoo, Bits & Bytes is back after a long hiatus as there’s plenty to talk about still in the world of video games. This time around it’s the long-gestating acquisition of Activision/Blizzard by Microsoft. And the whole thing stinks, I tell you.
-
Quartz ☛ AI firms are paying professional actors $150 an hour to lend emotions to avatars
The timing is rather striking. Shooting began in Los Angeles in July, the same month the actors strike began, leaving many performers—whose labor concerns include what AI means for their jobs—without pay.
-
Daniel Miessler ☛ How to Fix Your Apple Watch / iPhone Not Unlocking a HomeKey Lock
The fix is to simply hold it close for longer—maybe like 5-7 seconds or so.
-
Matt Rickard ☛ Retrieval Augmented Generation
The problem: LLMs are limited with the context window of information they can process. Most models today can only accept around 4,000 tokens of context (about 3,000 words). Some models, like Anthropic’s Claude, can handle up to 100,000 (but that comes at the cost of quality, compute, and time).
-
-
Security
-
Privacy/Surveillance
-
Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Digital identity app mRiik delayed, legal amendments necessary
The preliminary phase of testing for mRiik, the national digital identity application that was launched January this year, has been completed; however, additional technological and legislative modifications are necessary. It is yet unclear when digital identity public services via mobile devices will be available.
-
Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Hongkong Post latest local entity to suffer a data security breach – over 7,000 customer emails leaked
According to a Secretariat Press Office statement on Friday, the incident “involved an unauthorised party making countless attempts, through Hongkong Post’s electronic service function, to test and try to guess the registered email addresses of Hongkong Post’s account holders.”
-
-
-
Defence/Aggression
-
Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Minister: Illegal migration surge is harming Schengen credibility
The recent developments in rising illegal migration has meant the fight against organized crime and human trafficking must be redoubled, and this was uppermost in the minds of those attending the JHA meeting, Läänemets wen ton.
-
Meduza ☛ Riot police raid mosque in Moscow region, forcibly taking worshippers to military enlistment office
He also added that a certain colonel later met with those who refused to sign a contract and announced that they had “decided to be given the opportunity to serve under conscription”.
-
Futurism ☛ Instagram Apologizes for Bug that Added “Terrorist” to Palestinian User Bios
Amid bombing campaigns, a humanitarian crisis, rampant misinformation, and international discord that's said to be tearing the American government apart, Instagram's auto-translation algorithm seems to have changed at least two users' bios mentions of Palestine to include the word "terrorist."
-
404 Media ☛ Instagram ‘Sincerely Apologizes’ For Inserting ‘Terrorist’ Into Palestinian Bio Translations
When he pressed the “See translation” option, the phrase was replaced with "Praise be to god, Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom." He tried it again with just the ٱلْحَمْدُ لِلَّٰهِ portion of the phrase in the bio, without the word Palestinian or the flag emoji, and it translated to “Thank God.”
-
Deutsche Welle ☛ Kazakhstan announces ban on hijabs in schools
The Kazakh government's recent announcement of a ban on wearing the hijab headscarf in educational institutions has sparked fierce debate in the country.
-
El País ☛ The last Christians in Gaza lock themselves in a church to avoid bombs and exile: ‘Our place is here’
Among the more than two million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, there is a tiny Christian community of about 1,000 people. It’s been in decline over the years, especially since the Islamist movement Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007. Like other Gazans, they suffer from the isolation and lack of freedom of Israel’s 16-year-long blockade. But the Christians also have to deal with being excluded from work and society, which is pushed by sectors linked to Hamas and other radical Islamists movements present in the area.
-
Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine
-
-
Environment
-
Energy/Transportation
-
Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Beijing cites ‘national security’ as it tightens curbs on graphite exports key to batteries for electric vehicles
And under measures unveiled Friday by the Ministry of Commerce, exporters must apply for permits to sell two types of graphite to foreign customers.
-
-
Overpopulation
-
[Old] Reuters ☛ U.N. sees steep Gaza population growth in 30 years, with economic problems ahead
The report forecast an increase in Gaza’s population of 2 million to 4.8 million in 2050, outpacing that of the West Bank, where the number of people is predicted to rise from the current 2.9 million to 4.7 million.
Thomsen said that even by 2030 there would be 1.3 million additional people in Gaza, territory ruled by the Hamas Islamist group, and meeting their needs will be challenging.
-
[Old] UN ☛ Population growth in occupied Palestinian territory to drive demand for housing, services – UN
Fertility rates are twice the rate of those in the more advanced areas in the region – a trend that is expected to bring its population from the current 4.7 million to 6.9 by 2030 and to 9.5 million by 2050. The highest rate of growth is expected to occur in Gaza, where the report estimates a population of 1.85 million will reach 3.1 million by 2030 and 4.7 million by 2050.
-
-
-
Finance
-
Business Standard ☛ Indian technology companies sacked more staff this year than in 2022
Rahul Jain (name changed), a 25-year-old who worked with a digital transformation and automation startup based out of Bengaluru, saw greater job uncertainty lately amid lower funding and the economic downturn.
-
TechStory Media ☛ Dropbox Returns 25% of San Francisco Headquarters to Landlord Amid Softening Commercial Real Estate Market - TechStory
Dropbox to downsize SF HQ, return space to landlord in response to pandemic impact. Termination fees of $79M
-
-
AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
-
New York Times ☛ LinkedIn issues warning to a site shaming pro-Palestinian sentiment.
The site, which was created 10 days ago, comes amid a wider debate over online expression during a fraught international conflict. Similar lists have also been created to track college students who have spoken out in support of Palestinians, while Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, said it took down nearly 800,000 pieces of Hebrew and Arabic language content for violating its rules in the three days after the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7.
-
Futurism ☛ New York Bill Would Require a Background Check for 3D Printers, Like a Gun
Imagine a future in which if you want to buy a 3D printer, you have to submit yourself to a criminal background check. That sounds weirdly dystopian, but a bill just proposed in the New York State Assembly would actually require this drastic step.
The bill, A8132, would require sellers to perform a background check on buyers purchasing 3D printers "capable of making firearms or their components" — another sign that government officials are getting increasingly heated over "ghost guns," which are homemade weapons with no serial numbers and hence are untraceable by law enforcement.
-
-
Censorship/Free Speech
-
Deutsche Welle ☛ Salman Rushdie receives prestigious German Peace Prize
British-Indian writer Salman Rushdie was on Sunday presented with the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in Frankfurt's historic St Paul's Church.
The German Peace Prize comes with a €25,000 ($27,300) payment and is one of the most prestigious awards in Germany. It was first awarded in 1950.
Praising Rushdie in a speech, his friend and fellow writer Daniel Kehlmann described the author as "possibly the most important defender of freedom of art and speech of our time"
Rushdie, who survived a stabbing attack last year, also pledged to continue defending the freedom of speech.
-
-
Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
-
ANF News ☛ Two female journalists sentenced to prison for reporting on the killing of Jina Amini
The Iranian judiciary announced the sentences in the cases against journalists Elaheh Mohammadi and Nilufar Hamedi, who were among the first media workers in Iran to report on the killing of Jina Mahsa Amini in Tehran on 16 September 2022.
Branch 15 of the Islamic Revolutionary Court ruled that the two journalists were found guilty of three separate crimes.
-
The Washington Post ☛ Russian tycoon claims he is behind Forbes purchase, audiotapes show
Musaev’s comments raise fresh questions about potential foreign influence in a major media deal, which has been a source of controversy for more than a year, attracting criticism on Capitol Hill and scrutiny by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.
-
-
Civil Rights/Policing
-
The Atlantic ☛ Forget the Bomb and Help Iranians Fight Their Regime
Hamas, an offshoot of the Sunni Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, is an independent actor but has ties to the Islamic Republic that have grown substantially over the years. Its political head, Ismail Haniyeh, has often visited Tehran and Beirut, where other Hamas officials are in regular contact with the Lebanese Hezbollah, Iran’s most powerful, operationally savvy proxy. As Iranians in ever larger numbers have rejected the Islamic Revolution and its theocracy, the clerical regime has sought affirmation and legitimacy abroad—an aggressive disposition that isn’t likely to abate until Iranian dissent finally triumphs.
-
Reuters ☛ Iranian teenager Armita Geravand is 'brain dead': state media
Iran has denied that Geravand was hurt after a confrontation on Oct. 1 with officers enforcing the mandatory Islamic dress code in the Tehran metro.
-
Deutsche Welle ☛ Iran: Teen Armita Geravand 'brain dead' after hijab incident
According the Kurdish-focused rights group Hengaw, which is based in Norway, Geravand was attacked by the country's morality police while she was riding on the Tehran subway without a headscarf.
-
Forbes ☛ Iranian Teenager Armita Geravand Is ‘Brain Dead’ After Alleged Assault By Police Over Hijab
Armita Geravand was hospitalized almost a month ago after an apparent encounter with Iran’s so-called morality police on October 1 that witnesses said led to her beating on a train in the nation’s capital, but authorities have insisted she fainted and said her death was due to pre-existing medical conditions, the BBC reported.
-
NBC ☛ Iranian teenager 'brain-dead' weeks after subway incident, state media reports
Armita Gerevand, 16, was hospitalized the morning of Oct. 1. The prominent Iranian Kurdish rights group Hengaw, which is based in Norway, said she suffered a “severe physical assault” at the hands of government agents at a subway station in Iran’s capital, Tehran, for allegedly violating the country’s strict Islamic dress code.
-
The Week ☛ Iran: Teen Armita Geravand 'brain dead' after alleged encounter with police
The incident took place on October 1. Activists had accused the morality police of assaulting her for not wearing a hijab. However, Iran had denied reports of Geravand being hurt after the confrontation. Geravand had collapsed after boarding the metro train.
-
The Telegraph UK ☛ Iranian girl ‘brain dead’ after morality police beating over hijab
Human rights groups such as Hengaw were the first to make the 16-year-old’s hospitalisation public, publishing photos of her on social media that showed her unconscious with a respiratory tube and bandage over her head, visibly on life support.
-
-
Monopolies
-
Jacobin Magazine ☛ Cory Doctorow’s Vision for a Just Tech Revolution
In the opening lines of Cory Doctorow’s latest work, The Internet Con, a take-no-prisoners declaration sets the tone: “This is a book for people who want to destroy big tech. It’s not a book for people who want to tame big tech. There’s no fixing big tech.” However, Doctorow is quick to stress a critical distinction, vital to the battle against Silicon Valley: the fact that technology, in and of itself, is not the root issue.
Doctorow is unambiguous on the matter: “Technology isn’t the problem,” he writes. The problem isn’t the rise of new technologies, but what we do with them. He emphasizes that our focus should turn toward who benefits from technology and who it affects. As he puts it, we should “stop thinking about what technology does and start thinking about who technology does it to and who it does it for.”
Jacobin’s David Moscrop caught up with Doctorow recently to talk over Big Tech, rent extraction, forthcoming books, and reactionary anti–climate action warriors.
-
Copyrights
-
Quartz ☛ How should creators be compensated for their work training AI models?
Generative AI technology sounds complicated, but it mainly comes down to three things: an AI model, computing resources, and data. The salary demands of people who provide the first two ingredients “are reasonably well accommodated—like researchers or engineers,” said Jun-Yan Zhu, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute and head of the Generative Intelligence Lab.
But the tech industry is only just beginning to acknowledge the value of the data that creators provide with their content.
-
Torrent Freak ☛ Pirate Infrastructure: The CDNs and Hosting Companies Under U.S. Scrutiny
Whether pirate sites specialize in the latest Hollywood movies, huge archives of TV shows, or thousands of live premium TV channels via IPTV, reliance on third-party services is a common denominator. As a result, hosts, CDNs, and other intermediaries are increasingly seen as facilitators and part of the overall problem. Recent reports to the USTR reveal the names and locations of platforms giving rightsholders the most piracy-related headaches.
-
-
-
-
Gemini* and Gopher
-
Personal/Opinions
-
humane death
Since my dog died, I've realized once again that there barely is a form of humane death. I think my childhood guinea pig came pretty close to it: Just died in his sleep, peacefully. But that happens so rarely. Even when beings die quickly, their body reacts in a way, or the circumstance was brutal, unfair and not at all humane.
-
-
Technology and Free Software
-
Internet/Gemini
-
Two months of Gemini
That's about two months that I've been posting in Gemini protocol, in parallel of HTML/HTTP. It was not in the original plan when I decided to do another blog in English. But I had it in mind for a year, when I was still using my Jekyll blog. I remember that I was laughing at Gemini when I first heard about it. Using a different browser for this is something against my idea of an open web. But for two years I had been trying to simplify the way I «produce» posts on a blog. Gemini made it easier than anything else because I'm writing in markdown and there's not much to change to make a Gemtext.
In my new static blog, no more Jekyll or Hugo or any other static site generator. I'm not far from Gemini and I will explain this in detail in 2024. My articles and posts are written in .md. I just need to copy and modify the head and the bottom of the document in .gmi. Another change to the index in .gmi and that's it. Now that I have found a server to put the blog in gemini, it's as simple as a sftp command line or whatever you use (rsync...). Easier than that ? If Gemini files were in .md and real markdown, perhaps? [...] I just read a series of posts (1) and answers about how we should save our Gemini capsules. I have to admit that many gemlogs and capsules listed in aggregators or sites are now offline. It's like waves. Some were online for a year or two in 2020-2021, and now there's a new wave of new sites (like mine) with many gemlogs created for a try. Real living gemlogs are very few. Saving gemlogs, why not, like a wayback machine for Gemini. But where ? On archive.org, maybe ? But the other point is on websites in general and blogs. I made at least 8 versions of my French blog, from Spip to Dotclear, Wordpress, Jekyll...and changing URL each time. But I haven't lost anything important for me. I now have a mirror and one of the mirror is going to survive without me, I think. If it's only a hobby, something for fun, it's also a small part of web-history, human history, aninfinitely small part, so small that you can forget it...or not.
-
-
-
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.