Links 05/01/2024: Twitter's Diminishing Value and Deplatforming in Geminispace
Contents
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Leftovers
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Hackaday ☛ A Few Reasonable Rules For The Responsible Use Of New Technology
If there’s one thing which probably unites all of Hackaday’s community, it’s a love of technology. We live to hear about the very latest developments before anyone else, and the chances are for a lot of them we’ll all have a pretty good idea how they work. But if there’s something which probably annoys a lot of us the most, it’s when we see a piece of new technology misused. A lot of us are open-source enthusiasts not because we’re averse to commercial profit, but because we’ve seen the effects of monopolistic practices distorting the market with their new technologies and making matters worse, not better. After all, if a new technology isn’t capable of making the world a better place in some way, what use is it?
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Science
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New York Times ☛ ‘World’s Oldest Pyramid’? A Study’s Claim Troubles Archaeologists
The study, under investigation by its publisher, has fueled a dispute over the age of a partially excavated site and prompted warnings about the dangers of nationalist mythmaking.
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Hardware
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CNX Software ☛ The PCOM-B65A COM Express module is powered by defective chip maker Intel Core Ultra Processors
Taiwan-based embedded systems manufacturer, Portwell, has announced a new COM Express Type 6 Basic module based on the defective chip maker Intel Core Ultra processor platform. The Portwell PCOM-B65A module is a minimal COM Express module that comes with either one of the H-series or U-series processors in the Core Ultra series. The defective chip maker Intel Core Ultra series (formerly known as Meteor Lake) uses Intel’s 3D performance hybrid architecture (two core microarchitectures on a chip) to optimize performance and distribute workloads efficiently.
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The Next Platform ☛ Ethernet Switching Bucks The Server Recession Trend
You might be thinking that with all of the investment in Hey Hi (AI) systems these days that the boom in InfiniBand interconnect sales would be eating into sales of high-end Ethernet interconnects in the datacenter.
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CNX Software ☛ Qotom Q20332G9-S10 fanless “mini PC” features four 10 GbE and five 2.5GbE ports
Qotom Q20332G9-S10 is described as a fanless mini PC or somewhat more accurately as a router PC with four 10GbE SFP+ cages and five 2.5GbE RJ45 ports powered by an defective chip maker Intel Atom C3758R Denverton Refresh eight-core processor first introduced in 2020. I would rather call it a network appliance than anything with “PC” in its name since the system only comes with VGA video output (e.g. no HDMI or DisplayPort output), no audio support, and Denverton server processors lack an internal GPU.
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Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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Vice Media Group ☛ This Hey Hi (AI) Chatbot is Trained to Jailbreak Other Chatbots
Researchers used an open-source tool to generate malicious prompts that evade content filters in ChatGPT, Bard, and Bing Chat.
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Security
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Bruce Schneier ☛ Facial Recognition Systems in the US
A helpful summary of which US retail stores are using facial recognition, thinking about using it, or currently not planning on using it. (This, of course, can all change without notice.)
Three years ago, I wrote that campaigns to ban facial recognition are too narrow. The problem here is identification, correlation, and then discrimination. There’s no difference whether the identification technology is facial recognition, the MAC address of our phones, gait recognition, license plate recognition, or anything else. Facial recognition is just the easiest technology right now...
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Defence/Aggression
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ADF ☛ Benin Boosts Security in North in Face of Extremist Attacks
Deep in Benin’s Pendjari National Park, a former luxury resort has become a military base. There, Soldiers are tracking the movements of extremists coming and going from neighboring Burkina Faso in an effort to stop a surge in violence.
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CS Monitor ☛ El Salvador candidate: Breaking the law – in a popular way?
Salvadorans say Nayib Bukele broke the law in running for reelection, but most still support him, thanks to improvements in security and crime during his presidency.
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JURIST ☛ Manipur militant attack leaves 6 security personnel injured
India’s Manipur Police reported Tuesday that armed factions initiated an assault on state security forces, which resulted in the injury of six security personnel. Manipur is a state in northeastern India which has been subject to instability because of ethnic clashes over the past year.
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Environment
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Energy/Transportation
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Latvia ☛ Rīga Airport unveils security line for passengers with children
A separate security line – a family line for passengers traveling with children under the age of seven – has been established at the Rīga International Airport at the beginning of this year, airport representative Ilze Salna said January 3.
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Hackaday ☛ Retrotechtacular: The Fell Locomotive
If you were to visit a railway almost anywhere in the world, you would find that unless it was in some way running heritage trains, the locomotives would bear a similarity to each other. Electric traction is the norm, whether it comes from a trackside supply or from a diesel generator. In the middle of the last century, as the industry moved away from steam traction though, this was far from a certainty. Without much in the way of power electronics, it was a challenge to reliably and efficiently control a large traction motor, so there were competing traction schemes using mechanical gearboxes or hydraulic drives. One of these is the subject of an archive film released by the oil company Shell, and it’s a fascinating journey into a technology that might have been.
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Wildlife/Nature
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Science Alert ☛ Earliest Evidence Yet Reveals Photosynthesis Evolved at Least 1.75 Billion Years Ago
Rewriting Earth's life story.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Techdirt ☛ Fidelity Sure Seems To Regret Its Decision To Contribute To Elon’s Wild Social Media Adventure
A few months ago we noted that Fidelity, which had contributed over $300 million to help Elon purchase Twitter a little over a year ago, had already marked down its investment by 65%. This news came out at basically the same time that Elon himself admitted the company’s value was down 56% (from $44 billion to $19 billion).
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Techdirt ☛ Sending Cops To Search Classrooms For Controversial Books Is Just Something We Do Now, I Guess
Thanks to politicians (including a former president) being overly willing to scratch the bigoted itch of a voting bloc that appears to prefer the brutal caress of fascism to the freedoms of a democratic republic, far too many state and local legislators are crafting and enacting laws designed to relegate a whole lot of the nation to the lower echelons of society.
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JURIST ☛ Bangladesh court convicts Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus on labor law violations
A Bangladeshi labor court has convicted Nobel Peace Laureate Muhammad Yunus and three of his associates from Grameen Telecom, a company founded by Yunus, for violating the country’s labor laws. Each of the accused were sentenced to six months in jail on Monday. However, the court immediately granted all four bail, pending appeal.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Hong Kong media mogul Jimmy Lai used Apple Daily newspaper to ‘sway public opinion,’ ‘promote hatred,’ court hears
Hong Kong media mogul Jimmy Lai used his pro-democracy tabloid Fashion Company Apple Daily, which ceased operations in 2021, as a platform to “sway public opinion” and “promote hatred” against Beijing and Hong Kong authorities, a court has heard as the closely-watched national security trial entered its fifth day.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Rlang ☛ How Inclusivity, Women in STEM, and Trips to the Pub Together Enrich the Manchester R User Group in the UK
The R Consortium recently reached out to Abbie Brookes, Senior Analyst and Hey Hi (AI) Consultant at Datacove, co-founder and organizer of the Manchester R User Group. -
JURIST ☛ Hong Kong Department of Justice removed national security cases databases days after publications
Hong Kong Department of Justice (DOJ) removed the database that contained national security law-related convictions 5 days after its publication, local media Hong Kong Free Press (HKFP) reported on Tuesday.
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Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Ex-Hong Kong lawyer Michael Vidler receives UK’s OBE honour for ‘services to justice and human rights’
British lawyer Michael Vidler has been awarded an Order of the British Empire (OBE) honour for “services to Justice and to Human Rights in Hong Kong.”
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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Digital Music News ☛ Spotify Keeps Crashing on Android Following Latest Update
Spotify keeps crashing on Android following the December 30 beta update in the Play Store. Here’s the latest. Android users in Spotify’s beta program have noticed the Spotify app crashing since the end of the year.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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Things are not good
I have been suffering from sleeplessness again. I haven't woken up before 8 or gone to sleep before midnight for a couple of years now, so my sleep schedule is a car wreck on the back of a shipwreck because of a tsunami. No matter what I try, the space between going to sleep and actually being asleep feels like a canyon that I can't cross without breking a few bones. This is the small death, the place where all your anxieties live, and boy are they having a party.
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Where did December go?
I spent all of my free time working on a MUD that has yet to be named. It has crafting, combat and special attacks, but incomplete skills and magic yet. There are several maps all connected and navigable with some basic creatures and game-world elements. It’s been a lot of fun. I’ll eventually make it public when it has enough stuff to do in it. I’m still working on how the skill system and magic will work. A good friend is helping me hammer out game system mechanics as I’ve decided I just don’t want the headache of dealing with weird licenses for the few systems I’ve been reading about.
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gratefulness
I recently thought about all the good things in my life and how happy I am about them. I am so proud of myself too for managing all of it. I sometimes tend to forget how much I really accomplished over the past few years because it becomes the new normal, but meeting others who are still struggling with certain issues and also remembering when I used to struggle helps to keep being grateful and not take it for granted.
I feel like I cannot talk about most of these in my real life or anywhere associated with the very little online presence I have, because it looks like bragging. Complaining and trauma dumping is normalized, but talking about positive things draws envy, anger, and negative competition. Or people might think it is a lie to build a brand, become an influencer, attract sponsors and followers and become famous. It's like only these kinds of people are allowed to display a perfect life now and reap the benefits; people want to follow them and keep up with them as a sort of motivation and interest in how this person's life will progress, but it's harder to stomach when it is one of the people you might know in real life.
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The Best Year in a While
Now that I'm back from vacation and have some time to write, I want to take a quick look back at 2023. Well, I don't think a quick look will be that possible given how many awesome things happened but I'll at least give it a shot.
It's so hard to believe it's only been a year since I was getting ready to start my final semester at university. You could tell me it's been three already and I'd probably believe you. I finished fairly strong, or at least compared to the year before which was easily my most difficult. Having the end so close in sight paid off and I'm glad I was able to push through. And now that it's over I can finally look back on it with a little nostalgia.
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Hearth Stories
This is in regard to my previous post about starting a sci-fi and fantasy magazine...[1][2]
I have lagged in announcing this here, but the first issue of my science-fiction/fantasy slice of life magazine was released on December 21st. Which was quite a relief. I stupidly updated one of the tools I use to produce the final ebooks and it broke. Or I thought it did. It turns out the problem was with some shared library that Calibre uses (Calibre is called under the hood of the tool that I use). The problem seems to exist within the versions available in debian for me... In any case it broke the generation of azw3 files. Epub generated fine, so I used a web converter to go from epub to azw3. It seems to have worked ok.
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Doing alright
Hey. I'm getting quieter as I don't feel the need to write to calm myself.
As I'm getting busy, too. Not very busy, but busy enough that I actually go to sleep at normal hours.
I guess I should keep the habit going. It really did help.
I realized that these posts were appearing in smolpub's timeline. I don't know how I feel about that. I'm writing for no one to hear me, but I can't do it if no one can hear me. I don't see anything harmful in that for now. I'll keep it going. I'm not self-coherent, nobody is.
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Politics and World Events
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Numbification via genders over-crying big bad wolfie things
Antenna appears to be a privately run service, and per my understanding of "conservative" I can't imagine "a conservative" standing with anyone against a privately run service.
My nervous system relegated antisemitism to what might be called "The Boy Cries Wolf Bin" decades ago, as it tired of re-experiencing such charges too often seeming more over someone disagreeing with a Jewish person about anything than an attack on Jews as "a people".
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Perhaps I'm jaded, but to me AI seems closer to smoke and mirrors than fire....
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deplatforming
We've really got to raise the bar in talking about issues of free speech in small web spaces, myself included.
In my post yesterday I barely alluded to "censorship" being a misnomer for what happened on Antenna (simply with the quotes in the title) but neglected to point it out properly in the post body.
Others have now pointed this out, but if someone makes a post on their own gemini server, and that post remains on their own gemini server, censorship has not occurred. Instead, a *different* gemini server declined to host links to that post. In it's capacity as a link aggregator you could stretch to call Antenna a "platform", and thus we get to the more appropriate description of what happened here: deplatforming.
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Free speech must have limits. If calls for genocide (explicit or implied) don't reach your limit, I submit that your position is intellectually lazy.
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Censorship
Now he can play the victim card because he was censored. Now he can say he was targeted for his beliefs. It does not make your point look stronger if you have to silence the opposition.
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Censorship?
Even Substack has now received calls for censoring certain extreme content. Fortunately, they have so far resisted. Being for free speech doesn't mean you endorse every indefensible message, but letting folks express their worldview based on their own misunderstandings makes it possible to counter them with better arguments.
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Seeing is believing
The problem isn't humans per se, but humans mentally ill on the notion of having/being a self/individual.
Seeing humans as one sees plants, trees, and stars happens the instant the *repeated belief* that both you and they are persons/selves/individuals is dropped.
Separate what's obviously there from what's obviously mentally assumed/added/imagined....
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Technology and Free Software
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Crontab Footguns
That's right, one for each foot! Or at least one for each foot, as you may find more, and anyways I don't know how many feet you have.
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Encoding videos in AV1, h264 and mpeg2 with FFmpeg
AV1 is implemented in libaom and svt-av1. Libaom is the reference codec, it produces smaller files than svt-av1 but it is slow. The svt-av1 encoder is optimized for speed and produces bigger files than libaom.
I usually encode videos in 2 passes, libaom uses my 16 cores at 33% in pass 1 while svt-av1 uses the 16 cores at 100%. In pass 2, libaom uses 2 cores at 100% and svt1-av1 uses the 16 cores at 100%.
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Updated recipe, compiling PostgREST 12.0.2 (M1)
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Monopolies/Monopsonies
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* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.