Links 10/01/2024: Many More Layoffs and LLMs Failing (Media Belatedly Mentions This)
Contents
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Leftovers
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Joel Chrono ☛ Blogging consistently
I’ve been meaning to write more often across the whole year, unlike last time. This is why I am going to willingly not post more than 4 blogposts per week, and I’ll try to make around 2 most of the time. Of course some weeks will have to contain 3 just to stay within the timeframe of a year, but it must be done.
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MWL ☛ Blog Archive
This whole incident has reminded me that search engines are useless. It has also trained me to waste time.
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Pete Brown ☛ Making webhosting tech easier and more friendly
That said, I tend think the answer is not “make self-hosting easier,” because I’m not sure that is possible. “(W)ebsite generators that people can just unzip, upload to the shared hosting they’ve just paid for” just isn’t something most people are even going to do. The people who are going to do that—regardless of how “easy” it is—are probably the ones who already have blogs.
No, I think the answer is more likely to be found in the growing array of independent hosted blogging tools.
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Robert Pfotenhauer ☛ Indieweb: A great idea messed up
I like the basic idea of the Indieweb - Your content is yours, You are better connected, You are in control - and have already tried to integrate my small site into the indiewebring, which failed. And to be honest, after 2 days of trying I didn't feel like it anymore.
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Colin Walker ☛ Pen pals update
I've been saying for years that IndieWeb technology needs to be simpler to implement. That's IndieWeb - one word.
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Giles Turnbull ☛ Let’s make the indie web easier
We need more self-hosted platforms for personal publishing that aren’t Wordpress. And don’t point me to Hugo or Netlify or Eleventy or all those things - all of them are great, but none of them are simple enough. We need web publishing tools that do not require users to open the Terminal at all. And we need lots of them.
We need a whole galaxy of options.
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University of Toronto ☛ How far back we want our metrics to go depends on what they're for
I mentioned recently in passing (in this entry) that our Prometheus metrics system is currently set to keep metrics for 'ten years' (3650 days, which is not quite ten years given leap days) and we sort of intend to keep them forever. That got me to thinking about how sensible this is, and how much usage we have for metrics that go back that far (we're already keeping over five years of metrics). The best answer I can come up with is that it depends on what the metrics are for and about.
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Cory Dransfeldt ☛ Your site, your home, your web
The most interesting outlet, to me, has been a resurgent interest in personal websites, blogs and digital gardens. We lost platforms for expression and connection that were convenient, but which we never owned.
What we have, is an opportunity to rethink how we present ourselves online, how we connect and at what pace we choose to do so. We can still write, we can still post, we can still share and we can still talk to one another.
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Flamed Fury ☛ Summer Days On The Beach
Down here in Aotearoa, our festive season coincides with summer, marking a unique celebration of Christmas and the New Year amidst sun-drenched days. These traditions offer a different charm compared to the wintry festivities of the northern hemisphere.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Gizmodo ☛ Apple Sends Out $92 Payments to Users Whose iPhones Were Slowed Down
Roughly seven years later, iPhone users are getting some money back for that wonderful user experience. Apple admitted to reducing the battery life and performance of iPhones with software upgrades in 2017, as a means to extend the life of old batteries. A key problem in the ‘batterygate’ fiasco was that Apple didn’t tell users the latest IOS update was about to make their iPhones way worse – it just happened. The company was promptly hit with class action lawsuits over this practice and settled to pay over $300 million in 2020.
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Science
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CoryDoctorow ☛ Kelly and Zach Weinersmith's "A City On Mars"
The Weinersmiths make the (convincing) case that ever aspect of space settlement is vastly beyond our current or reasonably foreseeable technical capability. What's more, every argument in favor of pursuing space settlement is errant nonsense. And finally: all the energy we are putting into space settlement actually holds back real space science, which offers numerous benefits to our species and planet (and is just darned cool).
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Futurism ☛ Experts Warn Against Strip Mining the Moon
Those experts make a straightforward point: the more development occurs on the Moon, be it for habitats or resources taken back to Earth, the less scientists can use our planet's natural satellite for study.
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New York Times ☛ How Astronomers Are Saving Astronomy From Satellites — For Now
Earth’s orbits are filling with satellites at an astounding pace. Already there are more than 9,000 satellites orbiting the planet, and more than 5,000 of them belong to Starlink, the constellation built by SpaceX to beam internet service down to Earth. They are to be joined by thousands of satellites from other companies and countries in the decades ahead.
The more of them there are, the greater the satellites’ interference with ground astronomy’s ability to answer questions about the cosmos — and humanity’s place in it.
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Brr ☛ Redeployment Part One
In this series of posts, I will catch you all up on the process for “redeploying”, aka “getting the heck out of Antarctica”. This roughly covers the time period from September 2023 through November 2023.
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Education
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Henrique Dias ☛ Reflecting on What I Want To Learn Next
Due to all the restructuring that has been happening at work, I am supposedly going to be working at a different company from next Monday on. The team will still be working on the same projects, albeit with more to choose our own direction. This has also given me time to reflect and think about what I want to learn and do next.
Over the past few months, I have been feeling unchallenged. It mostly comes from all the uncertainty of the restructuring. With it, we weren’t able to start any larger project that would involve deeper technical dives where I could learn much more. Nevertheless, looking at what we are planning right now, I still have doubts about the future.
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Bruce Schneier ☛ Second Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reimagining Democracy
My thinking is very broad here. Modern democracy was invented in the mid-eighteenth century, using mid-eighteenth-century technology. Were democracy to be invented from scratch today, with today’s technologies, it would look very different. Representation would look different. Adjudication would look different. Resource allocation and reallocation would look different. Everything would look different, because we would have much more powerful technology to build on and no legacy systems to worry about.
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Hardware
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GamingOnLinux ☛ MSI officially announced the Claw A1M handheld with Intel
Well there it is! MSI Claw A1M is the official name of the next big vendor to jump into the handheld gaming space to take on the likes of the Steam Deck, ROG Ally and the Lenovo Legion Go. Unlike the Steam Deck which runs SteamOS Linux, once again we have a vendor going with Windows 11.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Lee Peterson ☛ How important are ergonomics to smartphone makers?
We’ve slowly seen a ramp up of weight and more boxy designs over the years from Apple especially and a 6.1” screen appears to on the small size nowadays with 6.5”+ being the norm.
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ABC ☛ Screen time for kids under 2 linked to sensory differences in toddlerhood: Study
The study, led by researchers at Drexel University, follows previous research showing how screen time impacts the ways kids speak, hear, feel and think.
A study published last year found that screen time for 1-year-olds was associated with developmental delays in problem-solving and communication as early as ages 2 and 4.
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Drexel University ☛ Putting Your Toddler in Front of the TV? You Might Hurt Their Ability to Process the World Around Them, New Data Suggests
The findings add to a growing list of concerning health and developmental outcomes linked to screen time in infants and toddlers, including language delay, autism spectrum disorder, behavioral issues, sleep struggles, attention problems and problem-solving delays.
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NYPost ☛ Children should avoid screen time until this age, experts warn: ‘Important implications’
Children should be prohibited from screen time until the age of 3 as it can lead to developmental delays, a new study published in JAMA Pediatrics found.
Researchers at Drexel University discovered that babies and toddlers who are allowed screen time are more likely to display atypical sensory behaviors associated with neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
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NYPost ☛ Bottled water contains 100 times more plastic particles than previously thought: study
The peer-reviewed study, the first to test for particles under 1 micrometer in length — or 1/70 the width of a human hair — found the liter bottles were loaded with an average of 240,000 plastic particles, according to the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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The Hill ☛ Bottled water industry pushes back on new study warning of nanoplastics
The researchers determined this by using lasers to identify plastic particles smaller than those that had been detectible before. These findings extended scientists’ ability to identify plastic fragments to the previously uncharted nano-scale — made up of fragments measurable in billionths of a meter, or the approximate size of a virus.
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The Hill ☛ Bottled water contains hundreds of thousands of potentially dangerous plastic fragments: Study
The team was concerned by nanoplastics, which are particles thousands of times smaller — measurable in billionths of a meter. These smaller sizes can translate to greater danger, Yan said, “because the smaller the particle size, they are easy to get into the human bodies and then cross different barriers.”
The tiny compounds, Yan added, “can cross into the blood, and then can cross the different barriers to get into the cells,” interfering with the organelles — cellular organs — “and causing them to malfunction.”
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NYPost ☛ Facebook, Instagram limiting more content for teens as regulatory pressure mounts
Meta is under pressure both in the US and Europe over allegations that its apps are addictive and have helped fuel a youth mental health crisis.
Attorneys general of 33 US states including California and New York sued the company in October, saying it repeatedly misled the public about the dangers of its platforms.
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Chris Coyier ☛ Water
But what if instead of dumping the powder packet in, you took out some tiny tweezers and somehow only took one tiny tiny bit of grain of Crystal Light and put it in the water. That counts, right? Like you won’t even taste it. It’s not even there. There is probably less Crystal Light in that water than microplastics. I think it still counts.
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Pro Publica ☛ Michigan Insurers Must Pay for Proven Cancer Treatments, State Confirms
In a victory for many cancer patients in Michigan, the state’s top insurance regulator told health plans on Monday that they cannot deny coverage for clinically proven cancer treatments, and she made it clear for the first time that this includes cutting-edge genetic and biologic therapies.
The move follows weeks of questions from ProPublica and pressure from state lawmakers after the news organization reported in November that an insurer there refused to pay for the only treatment that could save the life of Forrest VanPatten, a 50-year-old father of two, even though a state law requires insurers to pay for proven cancer drugs.
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Pro Publica ☛ How the VA Fails Veterans on Mental Health
A veteran with a known history of suicidal thoughts showed up at a St. Louis hospital before dawn one morning and was left unmonitored in an exam room for hours.
Another was deemed at risk of suicide by a hospital psychiatrist in Washington, D.C., then forcibly discharged, even as he tried to stay, by the same hospital’s emergency department.
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Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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TechCrunch ☛ German startup Pitch switches CEO and lays off two-thirds of its workforce
Pitch, the company behind a collaborative presentation software for businesses, is scaling back and bootstrapping, with CEO and co-founder Christian Reber stepping down and two-thirds of its employees losing their jobs.
This translates roughly to 80 personnel, based on the 120 headcount figure Pitch has published on its about page.
Reber made the announcement in a social media post earlier today, confirming that the company’s co-founder and CTO Adam Renklint will be stepping into the hot-seat with immediate effect, with Reber retaining a seat on the company board.
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Game Rant ☛ Unity’s Latest Round of Layoffs May Be the Biggest Yet
Unity is planning on laying off as much as 25% of its staff, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The past year has been tricky for the company following its controversial pricing model update that prompted outrage from developers and pushed Unity CEO to step down. With the latest layoff announcement, Unity's turbulent situation only appears to be getting more challenging.
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GamingOnLinux ☛ Unity cutting 25% of staff (about 1,800 people) as part of restructuring
Ouch. We're only just into week 2 of 2024 and Unity Software are cutting away a huge amount of their staff, as things aren't looking great for the Unity game engine.
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Hackaday ☛ Adding AI To NPCs Is Easy, Doing It Well Is Hard
Adding natural language interfaces to software is easier than ever, and that led [creikey] to prototype a game that hinges on communicating with NPCs. The prototype went through multiple iterations during which he mainly discovered things that did not work well. Ultimately, it led to [creikey] settling on a western-themed game called Dante’s Cowboy which he hopes to release as an experiment. He begins talking about the game around the 4:43 mark in the video, which directly precedes a recording of a presentation he gives at as an indie developer.
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Hackaday ☛ AI Pet Door Rejects Dead Mice
If you have pet with a little access door to the outside world, and that pet happens to be a cat, you’re likely on the receiving end of all kinds of lifeless little lagniappes. Don’t worry, it’s CES season out in Las Vegas and a company called Flappie has the solution — an AI-powered cat door that rejects dead mice and other would-be offerings.
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Tracy Durnell ☛ Generated content is an invasive species in the online ecosystem
And corporations are also trying to argue that their products should not be bound by the same legalities that human artists and writers are bound by. Their products only work with copyrighted material, and that means it’s only economically viable if they steal the training data. Like invasive species, they don’t play by the same rules: the rest of us peons must wait 95 years to play with fucking Steamboat Willie, but they get to gobble down anything they want for free instantly and use it to (try to) drive us out of work.
Let’s starve out this species invasion before it collapses our information ecosystem ✊
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Futurism ☛ Duolingo Fires Translators in Favor of AI
In other words, if this claim is true, it would mean that translators are seeing their knowledge-based work reduced to what could effectively be considered AI quality assurance.
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Jose Munoz ☛ My subscriptions and how I track them with Notion
Contrary to most people, I love subscriptions, specifically App subscriptions. If I integrate an app into my daily workflow and routines, I want that app to be constantly updated, up to date with new iOS features, and have good support. Sadly, the subscription model is one of the best ways of reassuring this.
After seeing other people’s subscriptions, I feel like I fall on too many. So, I hope writing and rationalizing about each one helps me narrow the down.
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Silicon Angle ☛ Industrial cybersecurity alert: Bosch Rexroth pneumatic wrenches vulnerable to hacking
The vulnerabilities reside in the Bosch Rexroth NXA015S-36V-B smart nutrunner, a popular pneumatic torque wrench. Pneumatic torque wrenches on vehicle production lines are used to apply a specific, precise torque to fasteners, ensuring the correct assembly and safety of the vehicles. Torque is a measure of the rotational force applied to an object, typically used to ensure that fasteners such as nuts and bolts are tightened to the correct degree.
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David Rosenthal ☛ Autonomous Vehicles: Trough of Disillusionment
The most obvious symptom is the implosion of General Motors' Cruise robotaxi division. Brad Templeton worked on autonomy at Waymo and is an enthusiast for the technology. But in Robocar 2023 In Review: The Fall Of Cruise he acknowledges that things aren't going well: [...]
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Scoop News Group ☛ AI is helping US spies catch stealthy Chinese hacking ops, NSA official says
Recent Chinese operations do not rely on traditional or known malware that might be easily flagged based on signatures, Joyce explained. Instead, the hackers takes advantage of architecture implementation flaws or misconfigurations, or default passwords to get into networks, create accounts or users that appear to be legitimate, which are then used to move around the networks or perform activities that typical users don’t normally do.
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Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Guest Post — Hanging in the Balance: Generative AI Versus Scholarly Publishing
“Use ChatGPT at your own peril. Just as I would not recommend collaborating with a colleague with pseudologia fantastica, I do not recommend ChatGPT as an aid to scientific writing,” writes Robin Emsley in a March 2023 editorial in the Nature journal Schizophrenia, citing the bot’s tendency to invent references. These hallucinations, as they are known, invent false information that is presented by the bot with a dispassionate factual tone that invites trust, and often requires an expert in the subject to detect.
Chatbot developers have heard that concern, and most chatbots allow users to adjust the “creativity” of responses, from very creative, dialed down to “just the facts, please.” In this conservative mode, Bing Chat, for example, does a decent job of using real references—though they all need to be double checked.
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CS Monitor ☛ Africa’s deep think in being an AI leader
There are already more than 2,400 AI organizations in Africa spanning a range of contexts, from health care and agriculture to education and government statistics. The International Data Corporation estimates that global digital investment in Africa will double from 2023 levels in three years. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced last October it would invest $30 million to support “home-grown” AI innovators.
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Federal News Network ☛ America’s enemies could poison AI data, NIST warns
The Pentagon is ordering a 30-day review to look into why the White House, Congress and senior Defense officials weren’t notified about Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s hospitalization last week. The review will be led by Jennifer Walsh, DoD’s director of administration and management. While that process is underway, the department is also adding some new temporary notification rules. Any time the Defense secretary is unable to carry out his duties, a chain of senior Pentagon officials and the White House Situation Room will be notified by email that the deputy secretary is temporarily in charge. That apparently didn’t happen during Austin’s health incident last week. The Pentagon still hasn’t made clear what that incident involved — saying only that Austin suffered complications from an elective medical procedure.
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India Times ☛ Microsoft's OpenAI investment risks EU merger probe, EU regulators say
The Commission on Tuesday also gave interested parties until March 11 to provide feedback on competition in virtual worlds and generative artificial intelligence.
It also sent requests for information to several large digital companies on the two topics.
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Silicon Angle ☛ EU weighing whether Microsoft-OpenAI alliance could be subject to antitrust probe
Officials raised the possibility of such an investigation in an announcement published today. “The European Commission is checking whether Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI might be reviewable under the EU Merger Regulation,” the document reads. EU antitrust reviews can lead to fines and a ruling requiring the affected companies to change their business practices.
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GamingOnLinux ☛ OpenAI say it would be 'impossible' to train AI without pinching copyrighted works
I really fear for the internet and what it will become in even just another year, with the rise of AI writing and AI art being used in place of real people. And now OpenAI openly state they need to use copyrighted works for training material.
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Futurism ☛ University Enrolling AI-Powered "Students" Who Will Turn in Assignments, Participate in Class Discussions
In an experiment led by associate professor Kasey Thompson, AI students dubbed Ann and Fry will be listening — or scanning through? — lectures, work on assignments, and even actively participate in discussions with other students, per the report.
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Democracy Now ☛ Profit Over Safety: Boeing Supplier Ignored Safety Warnings Before Jet Door Blowout, The Lever Reports
Less than a month before a door plug on a Boeing aircraft blew off midflight, employees at Spirit AeroSystems, a subcontractor for Boeing, had tried to warn corporate officials about serious safety problems with parts for 737 MAX jets. But those warnings went unheeded, and the employees were told to falsify records, according to a new investigation by The Lever on a federal complaint filed by workers at Spirit. “In some cases, workers were retaliated against for trying to raise those alarms,” says journalist David Sirota. “These workers in this federal complaint are alleging essentially a culture of defects, a culture of fraud, a culture of retaliation.”
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The Dissenter ☛ After Another Incident, Boeing Whistleblower Warns Against Corporation's Requests For 'Safety Exemptions'
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Security
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Silicon Angle ☛ Intel targets automotive sector with AI-enabled system-on-chip for next-generation cars
At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas today, the company unveiled a new Software-Defined Vehicle system-on-chip that’s said to have been engineered to infuse AI experiences into next-generation vehicles. The SoCs are flexible too, since developers will be able to say exactly what kind of processing they want in a car.
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India Times ☛ Intel challenges Nvidia, Qualcomm with 'AI PC' chips for cars
Intel also said it will acquire Silicon Mobility, a French startup that designs system-on-a-chip technology and software for controlling electric vehicle motors and onboard charging systems. Intel did not disclose a purchase price for the closely held company, controlled by venture funds Cipio Partners and Capital-E.
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Matt Birchler ☛ Who’s ready for Walmart to decide what food you buy?
First, for many people, you don’t buy as much food as you need to fill the fridge, you buy as much as you can afford that week, and that amount can vary week to week.
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Keenan ☛ I’m turning off my website analytics because I’m very brave and I promise I truly do not care about the numbers
But, let's be honest: it's mostly noise. The data sucks and also the data sucks. It sucks because it's basic and trivial and mostly just "a person went to this page and they stayed for a moment," and it sucks because it's a distraction. As much as I want to create a story and develop a better understanding and make a connection, I'm not going to find that in an IP address no matter how hard I try. Cosplaying internet detective doesn't do much to sate my curiosity, it just lets me spin my wheels and trick me into thinking I'm being productive.
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EDRI ☛ Data Protection Day
To celebrate Data Protection Day (28 January), the Council of Europe (CoE), CPDP and the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) are co-organising a one-day event full of keynote speeches and panel discussions on how to safeguard individuals’ rights to privacy and data protection.
The conference aims to focus on the latest developments and challenges happening in the data protection world, such as: Global data flows, Digital Governance, Regulating AI, Harmonising of GDPR procedures.
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DNA Lounge ☛ Wherein we have had a second ATM stolen
This is very annoying to me, as someone who pays for everything in cash when possible (partly out of a reflexive-but-futile do-not-track instinct, and partly because I'd rather that all of the money go to the business instead of around 3.5% of it going to parasitic middlemen in fees).
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YLE ☛ Supo: Chinese government may see your Tiktok data
The Finnish Security and Intelligence Service (Supo) says it's possible that the Chinese authorities can view users' data on Tiktok, a short-form video social media platform.
Supo told Yle that Chinese law requires Chinese companies and individuals to assist the country's intelligence authorities if necessary. This means Chinese intelligence can gain access to Tiktok user data, regardless of the views or wishes of the platform's parent company, Bytedance.
According to Supo, Tiktok collects an exceptionally large amount of information from mobile devices and their users.
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Defence/Aggression
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La Prensa Latina ☛ Ecuador suspends classes due to serious security crisis
Quito, Jan 9 (Prensa Latina) Ecuador´s Education Ministry on Tuesday announced the suspension of on-site classes nationwide as a result of the country´s serious security crisis as well as armed conflict decreed by President Daniel Noboa.
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Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine
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Environment
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Energy/Transportation
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Outside Interactive Inc ☛ How California’s New Pedestrian Signal Law Makes Biking Safer
There are many ways to improve safety on streets for people not driving. Bike lanes are an obvious one, as are simply adding sidewalks that are wide enough for pedestrians to feel comfortable. But one of the easiest ways to make streets safer is with the Leading Pedestrian Interval, or an LPI.
LPIs were one of the most important parts of California Bill A.B. 1909, which went into effect January 1st. According to the California Bicycle Coalition, people biking will now be able to cross intersections whenever pedestrians are allowed to go. As it turns out, the LPI is one of the easiest ways to make streets safer for people biking.
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Finance
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Quartz ☛ Big tech is sliding down Glassdoor's ranking of top employers
It’s no secret that the tech industry is having a tough time. Apparently, so are its employees.
Google and Microsoft saw their rankings sink on Glassdoor’s list of the top 100 companies to work in 2024. Google’s ranking plummeted from No. 8 to No. 26, while Microsoft’s fell less dramatically from No. 13 to No. 18. And for the second year in a row, other big tech companies Meta, Zillow, and Zoom didn’t make the list at all.
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India Times ☛ SEC account hack renews spotlight on X's security concerns
The [attackers] posted false news about a widely anticipated announcement the SEC was expected to make about bitcoin, leading the cryptocurrency's price to spike and alarming observers. The false post on @SECGov said the securities regulator had approved exchange-traded funds to hold bitcoin. The SEC deleted the post roughly 30 minutes after it appeared.
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Democracy Now ☛ “The Cost of Inheritance”: Meet the Descendants of Enslavers and Enslaved Fighting for Reparations
We look at The Cost of Inheritance, a new documentary that examines the growing movement for reparations for Black American descendants of people who were enslaved and addressing the historical injustices they have faced. While some of this is being done by city and state commissions tasked with studying reparations, others are attempting to address systemic racism at the local and personal level, as detailed in the film. “It’s pretty incredible, the pace in which we see reparations moving,” says filmmaker Yoruba Richen, who is hopeful that this work will eventually push the federal government into action. We also hear from Lotte Lieb Dula, a descendant of an enslaver in the Mississippi Delta, and Randy Quarterman, whose ancestor Zeike Quarterman was held in bondage, about how they are addressing the legacy of slavery in their personal lives.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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India Times ☛ Amazon's Twitch to lay off 35% of workforce: report
Amazon.com's streaming unit Twitch is set to cut 35% of its staff, or about 500 workers, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the plans.
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Silicon Angle ☛ In another cutback, Twitch lays off 500 people, 35% of staff
The Amazon.com Inc.-owned livestreaming platform Twitch will reportedly lose about 35% of its staff in another round of layoffs, Bloomberg reported today.
The layoffs, which will number about 500, are expected to be announced Wednesday. This follows two earlier rounds of layoffs in 2023, which amounted to around 400 staff losing their jobs, while the company has also seen the departure of some of its top executives in recent months.
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Daniel Miller ☛ Trust in Organizations
"They look to processes or systems as a quick fix for the lack of trust."
"They single out individuals to blame for the situation."
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Federal News Network ☛ Distinguished cybersecurity career leads to a Presidential Rank Award
Ken Bible Well: I hope it recognizes the continuous or continued service that I’ve had as an executive. You mentioned the Marine Corps contributions or the time that I spent in the Pentagon and really working through the network modernization plan for the Marine Corps, some of the investments that I championed and resilient communications as we were coming out of the land wars and moving into more maritime expeditionary and the tactical cloud, really being a champion for the tactical edge and deployment of cloud technology. But in DHS, I came over in January 2021, which, right as the scope of the SolarWinds incident was really being realized. And I think the focus within DHS was the leadership that I had in the recovery effort and really enduring types of things that we’ve been able to put in place as a result of thinking about that recovery. So things like our need to be able to prioritize cybersecurity investments. So we develop a unified cybersecurity maturity model, which allowed us to look at ourselves at a program component and as a department level in terms of our cybersecurity maturity, and prioritize investments that we’re making. Importantly, to thinking about supply chain risk management, which is really at the heart of what happened in SolarWinds and really catalyzing some discussion about how would we assess our vendors who build systems for us or that provide services for us? So that’s translated into a cyber hygiene assessment that was part of the Secretary’s priority on using our contracting authority to build up American cyber security posture and industry. I think that’s been very profound and impactful. So I’m very proud of that work. And then third, just how we look at ourselves in different ways. So launching the hack, DHS initiatives that we put in place to be able to debug bounties, to bring external researchers in, to look at our systems. And as CIO [Eric] Hysen says, the cheapest insurance you can buy, because now you’re leveraging the power of the external researcher to see what might have been missed when a program was being developed.
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Alex Ewerlöf ☛ If you’re laid off
There are tons of nice advice on social media targeting those who have lost their job. I won’t repeat them.
Instead, I'll write what I would need to read in this situation because I have been betrayed by companies before and it took me too long to recover.
Looking back, I wish I had read a frank post like this (I'll keep it in archive for myself at least).
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India Times ☛ Data cloud firm Snowflake names ex-Microsoft executive Vijayant Rai as new India MD
Before joining Snowflake, Rai served as the executive director for Microsoft India and was the country leader for its banking and financial services segment. Prior to this, he held leadership roles in Salesforce, SAP, Oracle and IBM, among others. The new MD has over 27 years of experience.
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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New York Times ☛ No, That’s Not Taylor Swift Peddling Le Creuset Cookware
In Ms. Swift’s case, experts said, artificial intelligence technology helped create a synthetic version of the singer’s voice, which was cobbled together with footage of her alongside clips showing Le Creuset Dutch ovens. In several ads, Ms. Swift’s cloned voice addressed “Swifties” — her fans — and said she was “thrilled” to be handing out free cookware sets. All people had to do was click on a button and answer a few questions before the end of the day.
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VOA News ☛ Verified X User Recycles 20-Year-Old Photo to Hype Houthi Red Sea Threat
Social media users, apparently sympathetic to the Houthis’ cause, have been hyping the threat posed by the Yemeni group.
This includes repeatedly sharing recycled images of ship attacks from the past and falsely linking them to current events in the Red Sea.
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CS Monitor ☛ Getting real on China disinformation
Taiwan is the world’s top target for disinformation, according to the Digital Society Project. It is a practice-ground for China’s efforts worldwide. This election, said presidential front-runner Lai Ching-te of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party, will serve as a “testament to our commitment to democracy.”
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CBC ☛ U.S. SEC has not approved bitcoin ETFs, says social media account was compromised
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said Tuesday afternoon that a social media post saying it had approved a spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) was false and its account had been compromised.
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Deutsche Welle ☛ Bitcoin surges after US regulator X account [compromise]
The price of bitcoin briefly spiked Tuesday after an announcement of the approval of a long-awaited bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) on X, formerly known as Twitter, turned out to be fake.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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The Conversation ☛ Freedom of thought is being threatened by states, big tech and even ourselves. Here’s what we can do to protect it
Advances in neuroscience may heighten this threat to free thought. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerburg are among those in a race to read our minds with the help of artificial intelligence (AI). In 2021, the UN warned of the risks of neural technologies predicting, identifying and modifying our thoughts. Manhattan projects of the mind threaten to make lab rats of us all.
We could respond by calling on our right to freedom of thought. It’s there waiting for us, created in 1948 by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 18) and later becoming international law. But anyone reaching for this right may be horrified to find it hollow, bereft of any clear definition and unfit for purpose.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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Techdirt ☛ ‘The Messenger’ Promised To Revolutionize Journalism, Then Fell Flat On Its Face
Early last year new journalism outlet named “The Messenger” launched to great fanfare.
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CPJ ☛ Ukrainian journalist Oleh Baturyn receives threats online after report on politician
“I associate the threats exclusively with the publication about Valery Saltykov since the authors of these messages directly write that Valery Saltykov is a very good person and I should be raped and mutilated” for the 31 December report about him, Baturyn told CPJ.
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Futurism ☛ Twitter Suddenly Suspends Journalists Critical of Elon Musk
In short, perhaps it's best to finally say goodbye to the "flaming dumpster" — in Musk's own words — once and for all, a slow and excruciating demise that arguably can't happen fast enough.
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Vice Media Group ☛ X Purges Prominent Journalists, Leftists With No Explanation
The ban was carried out with no overarching explanation; suspended accounts link to the X terms of service, which cover a wide range of possible violations.
“I haven't received any communications from Twitter/X about why I have been suspended,” Monacelli told Motherboard in an email. “I can't think of anything I've posted lately that would be worthy of suspensions. Although I have written multiple critical reports about Twitter/X and Elon Musk.”
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Democracy Now ☛ “Complete Hypocrisy”: Activist Bree Newsome Bass on Biden Fighting Racism While Funding Gaza Genocide
President Biden delivered his second campaign speech of the year Monday at the historic Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where a white supremacist gunman killed nine people in 2015. Biden remembered the victims, spoke of the “poison of white supremacy” and assailed his Republican rivals for not taking racism seriously, but Biden’s speech was interrupted at one point by protesters demanding a ceasefire in Gaza, where Israel’s U.S.-backed war has killed over 23,000 people. “There’s no way we’re fighting white supremacy … in the midst of genocide,” says artist and activist Bree Newsome Bass, who criticizes Biden for using the Black church as a political prop. “The last thing that we need is to carry on business as usual.” In 2015, Newsome Bass climbed a 30-foot flagpole outside the South Carolina Capitol to remove the Confederate flag following the church massacre.
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International Business Times ☛ Taliban Arrests Women For Not Wearing Hijab 'Properly'
"If a woman is caught without a hijab, her mahram (a male guardian) will be warned. The second time, the guardian will be summoned [by Taliban officials], and after repeated summons, her guardian will be imprisoned for three days," added the statement. The decree even suggested that women should not leave their houses unless necessary.
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PHR ☛ California Police Attack Dogs Cause Permanent Injuries, Disfigurement, and Death: PHR Expert Medical Opinion
“Californians have suffered extreme physical and psychological harms from the unleashed brutality of police attack dogs,” said Altaf Saadi, MD, a neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, Assistant Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School, and PHR medical expert who co-authored the expert opinion. “We reviewed multiple records of instances where police dogs were deployed against people who posed no threat to police or others. The bites from police attack dogs – which are disproportionately weaponized against Black Californians – cause deep and lasting wounds that often result in long-term pain and permanent disability, including nerve injury, loss of function of arms and legs, disfigurement, and enduring psychological trauma.”
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India Times ☛ Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella can be questioned in gamers' Activision deal lawsuit
The gamers' case has advanced in parallel to a lawsuit the Federal Trade Commission filed last year to block the deal. Corley in that case declined to stop the purchase, and the FTC in December asked a federal appeals court to revive the agency's challenge.
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India Times ☛ EU examines Microsoft investment in OpenAI
The European Union's competition regulator said Tuesday it was looking into Microsoft's investment into ChatGPT developer OpenAI to see if it merits further investigation under the bloc's merger rules. The European Commission said in a statement it was "checking whether Microsoft's investment in OpenAI might be reviewable under the EU Merger Regulation".
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Greece ☛ Microsoft’s OpenAI investment could face EU merger probe, EU regulators say
The Commission said some agreements agreed between large digital market players and generative AI developers and providers were being investigated for their impact on market dynamics. It did not name the companies.
The Commission on Tuesday also gave interested parties until March 11 to provide feedback on competition in virtual worlds and generative artificial intelligence.
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Patents
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Software Patents
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India Times ☛ Google faces multibillion-dollar US patent trial over AI technology
A Google court filing said that Singular has requested up to $7 billion in monetary damages, which would be more than double the largest-ever patent infringement award in U.S. history.
Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda called Singular's patents "dubious" and said that Google developed its processors "independently over many years."
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Copyrights
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Futurism ☛ AI Image Generators Are Spitting Out Copyrighted Characters, Raising Possibility of Catastrophic Lawsuit
Lending weight to those complaints, it's true that AI image generators like Midjourney and OpenAI's DALL-E 3 can also easily be used to produce potentially copyright-infringing images, as Marcus and Southen show in a series of experiments.
"After a bit of experimentation (and in a discovery that led us to collaborate), Southen found that it was in fact easy to generate many plagiaristic outputs, with brief prompts related to commercial films," the piece reads.
The evidence is pretty damning: an original image showing a series of well-known Marvel superheroes can easily be reproduced, albeit slightly modified, using detailed prompts devised by Southen.
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Torrent Freak ☛ Pirate Sites Worldwide Face Emerging, Perpetual Threat of Domain Seizures
Pirate sites are facing an emerging and potentially global threat of domain name seizures that goes way beyond anything seen before. A pirate site blocking order obtained by the studios of the MPA in India encapsulates the incremental steps taken in recent years. The end result is so expansive that almost any site offering the studios' content, even that yet to be made, could face perpetual domain name suspensions. No matter where they are in the world.
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Torrent Freak ☛ Video Piracy Visits Rose to 141 Billion in 2023, Report Shows
In 2023 there were over 141 billion visits to pirate sites worldwide, with the United States and India identified as the top traffic sources. New data published by piracy tracking firm MUSO and consulting firm Kearney further shows that movie and TV show piracy remains dominant. The report is limited to video content, which appears to have increased globally in recent years.
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Techdirt ☛ Plagiarism Is Fine [Ed: Techdirt keeps making excuses for Microsoft, including attacks on copyleft.]
There’s plenty of hypocrisy and bad faith to go around in the ridiculous Claudine Gay plagiarism scandal. While Gay’s accusers are right that she technically violated Harvard’s plagiarism rules by copying phrases either without quotation marks or required attribution, they don’t actually care about plagiarism, only “scalping” Gay. What’s more, their own plagiarism accusations have already started biting them back. And while Gay’s defenders are right that her offenses were comically trivial, because she copied mere banalities, Harvard students are punished severely for doing exactly the same thing. In fact, some of Gay’s defenders probably did the punishing.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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🔤SpellBinding — CDEHITW Wordo: FAXES
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My "Better Together" Games of 2023
If you know what this is, I think you'd be shocked if it weren't at the top of this list.
The idea is simple. You and your buddies have been hired on to a company that flies around to buildings scattered across different moons in search of scrap that can be sold off for a profit. Along the way you'll run into different hazards and creatures that I'll just say are best left alone. You have a couple days to work together to hit your profit quota.
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Special Edition — Retrospection and Intentions, 2023 Edition
TL;DR: If 2023 was my year of creation, then what will 2024 be?
[...]
It's over a week since New Year's Eve, yet it feels like 2023 still has its hooks in me: projects unfinished, plans that fell through, goals dropped. But what's done is done: I can't rewind time, no matter how much I want to slap Past Me silly. All I can do now is learn from the past and prepare for the future.
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Politics and World Events
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The old nothing
That kinda misrepresents the science nerds. I don’t like ‘em either but let’s not misrepresent them.
Instead, their view is that matter (and/or energy, which is equivalent to matter at a c² rate) is constant.
The atheists aren’t saying that there was nothing before everything. They’re saying that there was no “before” because time itself started when the universe started.
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Orthodox Christmas
On Orthodox Christmas this year I woke in the tent next to first daughter. It was 1C after 12 hours of rain. My feet were warm, so was she. I helped her get boots on. She went outside to pee. I followed.
I ate leftover lentils and rice, reheated oatmeal on a camp stove for her, sausages and cheese for us both. Heated milk. Hot chocolate with butter and coconut oil for my thermos, for later.
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Science
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Is 100! + 1 a Prime Number
100! is such a big number that the answer to the question is "probably no".
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Technology and Free Software
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My workstation, January 2024
I'd forgotten that lobste.rs runs a "post your battlestation pics" thread every year!
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Configure Lynx to See UTF-8 Chars
What browser do you use to view plain-text files on Gopher? I use "lynx". The other day, I published a math problem with "special" chars. Thos chars are known as superscript digits. They are not part of the ASCII character set. So, by default I see some funny strings instead of what I've expected... That can be changed by setting varaibles in the configuration file. To find the configuration file, start the lynx browser. Then press "O" for options. Get to the bottom of the page.
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My Revenge At Quora
I don't remember joining a knowledge-sharing network to see arguments between left-wingers and right-wingers. For that sort of things Facebook is good enough! But not only that I see it every time I go to a Quora page, I also get it to my e-mail in their digest. I had decided to leave the Quora site in my language, but when I went to Quora in English, I saw a popup message inviting me to join Quora in my language. What the zark? I don't even know how to change my account setting to stop seeeing such suggestion.
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agrajag dev log 1
I've been preoccupied with pagination--a core issue for a device intended to be used for reading, but that does not support fluid scrolling.
Computing pagination isn't terribly difficult: lay out each paragraph, then emit its lines into the current page. If the page is full prior to emitting a line, break the page and emit into a new page. Once all paragraphs have been emitted, the set of page breaks is the pagination. Any change to the layout (e.g. changing the default text style) requires recomputing the pagination.
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How teaching vi to secretaries brought LLMs to humanity
Unix was new, and vi made people think that computers could be used by non-programmers, for example secretaries (who used to do a lot of typing, dictation, on typewriters!). If you could get secretaries to use vi, they will same so much time!
They liked this idea enough to bring psychologists on board.
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My GTD Digital File System - I.P.R.
I recently realized that the disorganized file and folder system I've been using was slowing down my ability to find the data I needed for various projects and next actions. I needed to find a method to organize my digital files in a more efficient manner.
A quick search online lead me to several file management systems like Johnny Decimal and the PARA Method. All interesting and useful systems in their own right, but after trying each of them out for several weeks, they just didn't fit for my method of task and project management-- GTD.
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Site Reliability Engineering - Part 3: On-Call Culture and the Human Aspect
This is the third part of my Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) series. I am currently employed as a Site Reliability Engineer and will try to share what SRE is about in this blog series.
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I'm not a server guy: Ubuntu and Python
I'm not a server guy. For me, servers are just a means to an end: building and running something cool. For that matter, I'm really not an engineer or developer. Writing software is just a mechanism for me to create cool things. While I appreciate aspects of the craft, it's largely not important to me. This approach usually doesn't cause problems and enables me to mostly ignore the grinding treadmill that is modern software development.
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Internet/Gemini
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I wonder why today, of all days, I'm feeling this level of melancholy?
Yesterday at the “every-other-week” D&D (Dungeons and Dragons) game (played via Zoom [1] these days), I couldn't bring up the virtual map the DM (Dungeon Master) uses because my web browser didn't support WebGL [2], despite my updating the entire operating system, including the web browser, just 10 minutes earlier.
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Dogma for SimpleWeb
SimpleWeb is not SlowWeb (1) because someone (2) used that as a trademark. It's not very far from smolweb (3) but not so precise on the code. It is a web designed for everyone, everywhere, even with a slow network and a small bandwidth. It is more a friend of Permacomputing (4) because you can use small or old terminals to do it....or a Keep It Simple, Stupid / KISS (5) concept.
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New themes?
Hello everybody! It's been awhile since I have checked into the pub.
Hope everybody is having a good new year.
I wanted to see if anybody knows if there are themes available for the pub site? I am currently using the midnight theme here and I love it. Just curious if there are more?
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Owl.Report - Managing RSS Feeds with Simplicity
I have tried many different RSS feed readers over the last twenty years. Most do basically what I need them to do-- show me RSS feeds for sites I follow-- but they also typically have bloated features, high reoccurring costs, and distracting interfaces that I don't need.
Just recently, while investigating the Gemini protocol, I stumbled across the Owl.Report RSS feed reader (not directly a part of the Gemini protocol). The Owl.Report's focus is on simplicity and essential RSS functionality. It has just what I need to quickly read and manage my RSS feeds. As icing on the cake, it's open source, so you can host your own instance, and a one-time $5 contribution if you prefer to use the hosted instance (for a key to register).
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2024-01-09
In addition to my gopher site, I also have a small website hosted on SDF. It's random mishmash of stuff which is honestly pretty fitting for early web style websites.
One of the things that I really wanted to do with the website was program it in old HTML like HTML 3.2 and HTML 4.0 to keep up with the retro theme.
However, one modern thing I did do as an accomodation to modern users is add the viewport meta tag. This allows mobile devices to have a more zoomed in view of the page.
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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.