Links 15/01/2024: LLM Failing Some More, Early Reactions to Taiwan's New Governance/Policy
Contents
- Leftovers
- Science
- Education
- Hardware
- Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
- Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Security
- Defence/Aggression
- Transparency/Investigative Reporting
- Environment
- Finance
- AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
- Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
- Civil Rights/Policing
- Internet Policy/Net Neutrality Monopolies/Monopsonies
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Leftovers
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CBC ☛ 2024-01-06 [Older] I worked Saturdays at the dump because I'm fascinated by what people throw out
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Ronnie Lutes ☛ Punctuation Reform
.While I know this will never happen, I truly do believe it would be a great system ?But honestly, why couldn’t it happen .English is fluid .Words change meaning constantly .Punctuation has even changed over its history !Let’s make it happen .Be the punctuation change you want to see in the world
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Jason Fry ☛ Leaving ProtonMail For FastMail
A few years ago I also moved the majority of my files out of Google Drive and into Proton Drive. This has been an absolute pain as you can only upload and download files manually in the web interface (or on mobile apps). There’s no desktop sync - that too has always been coming soon. It’s been several years and you still can’t do it on macOS. So a couple of months ago I moved my files to Filen, an end-to-end encrypted service that was developed and launched in the time since ProtonDrive launched. It includes desktop sync apps for Mac, Windows and Linux.
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Jeff Sheets ☛ Cloudflare _redirects
Moved my blog over here to Eleventy land from Blogger universe a few weeks back and focused on keeping old link paths alive to the legacy blogposts. This way any published links to the posts would continue working once everything was moved over. And now thanks to Kev Quirk’s post I realized the RSS feed URL was inadvertently broken in the process. So this weekend I set about to point the old Blogger RSS location of /feeds/posts/default to redirect to the new 11ty location of /feed.xml
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Science
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-01-10 [Older] Why getting astronauts to the moon is tough in 2024
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Science Alert ☛ Giant Solar Farms May Warp Weather on The Other Side of The Planet
Unintended consequences.
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Science Alert ☛ Boredom in Exams Is a Serious Problem, And It Could Be Hurting Your Grades
Does boredom impact test results?
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Science Alert ☛ Scientists Film Plant 'Talking' to Its Neighbor, And The Footage Is Incredible
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Science Alert ☛ Vast Volcanic Superstructure Found Growing In The Pacific Ocean
It’s the size of the UK.
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Science Alert ☛ Doomed US Moon Lander Is Now 'On a Path Towards Earth'
A fiery homecoming.
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Education
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PC Mag ☛ PCMag Encyclopedia
This technical reference covers every important computer concept and product with more than 30,000 entries and 10,000 charts, diagrams and photos.
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YLE ☛ Bookstores disappearing in Finland
The introduction of free upper secondary textbooks has squeezed booksellers.
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Hardware
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-01-10 [Older] Retro games: Why pixel graphics won't go out of fashion
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Hackaday ☛ Laptop Memory Upgradable Again
For some computing components, the bottleneck to improved speed and performance hasn’t been power consumption or clock speed but physical space. But a new memory standard may provide all of the power and space-saving benefits of soldered memory modules without losing any upgradability.
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Hackaday ☛ Möbius Tank’s Twisty Treads Became Bendy
[James Bruton]’s unusual Möbius Tank has gotten a little more unusual with the ability to bend itself, which allows it to perform turns even though it is a single-track vehicle.
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Hackaday ☛ UEVR Project Converts Games To VR, Whether They Like It Or Not
UEVR, or the Universal Unreal Engine VR Mod by [praydog] is made possible by some pretty neat software tricks. Reverse engineering concepts and advanced techniques used in game hacking are leveraged to add VR support, including motion controls, to applicable Unreal Engine games.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-01-11 [Older] 4 ways megacities are tackling air pollution
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-01-11 [Older] Europe prepares for a 'tridemic' of respiratory diseases
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CBC ☛ 2024-01-08 [Older] Honda, federal government to meet this week as reports emerge of possible EV plant deal
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CBC ☛ 2024-01-10 [Older] Who benefits most from Canada's ambitious EV targets? Maybe China
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-01-10 [Older] Ecuador 'in state of war' against cartels, says president
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Jacobin Magazine ☛ 2024-01-10 [Older] Canada’s Price Controls Make Its Drugs Cheaper. The US Should Impose Them Too.
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CBC ☛ 2024-01-11 [Older] Landmark study finds prescribing opioids dramatically reduced deaths, overdoses for drug users in B.C.
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CBC ☛ 2024-01-10 [Older] South Korea is banning dog meat. Why now?
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-01-10 [Older] Hydroxychloroquine: COVID 'cure' linked to 17,000 deaths
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CBC ☛ When you drink bottled water, you're drinking lots and lots of nanoplastics
Looking at five samples each of three common bottled water brands, researchers found particle levels ranged from 110,000 to 400,000 per litre, averaging at around 240,000, according to a study in Monday's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Futurism ☛ Doctors Alarmed by Young People Getting Cancer at Unprecedented Rates
As the Wall Street Journal reports, the shocking 2020 death of beloved actor Chadwick Boseman, who died of colorectal cancer at only 43 years old, seemed to wake the public up to the growing trend that researchers had been warning about for a decade prior.
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Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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France24 ☛ AI to impact 60% of advanced economy jobs, says IMF chief [Ed: Meaningless rubbish with buzzwords, courtesy of a clueless suit relaying talking points from Bill Gates et al in WEF]
Artificial intelligence (AI) will impact 60 percent of jobs in advanced economies, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva told AFP, shortly before departing for the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
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The Register UK ☛ ‘Technical glitch’ in payroll software sparks riots in Papua New Guinea
Asia in Brief Papua New Guinea (PNG) has implemented a two-week state of emergency after failure to reconfigure the nation’s payroll system for government employees sparked riots that resulted in multiple deaths.
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Hackaday ☛ Why The IPad Doesn’t Have A Calculator
For the handful among us who have an iPad tablet from Apple, some may have figured out by now that it lacks a feature that has come standard on any operating system since roughly the early 90s: a calculator application. Its absence on the iPad’s iPadOS is strange since the iPhones (iOS) have always had a calculator application built into the system. Even Apple’s laptop and desktop systems (MacOS/OS X/MacOS) include a calculator. As [Greg] at [Apple Explained] explains in a 2021 video, this seems to have originally been due to Steve Jobs, who didn’t like the scaled-up iOS calculator that the person in charge of iPad software development – [Scott Forstal] – and set an ultimatum to replace or drop it.
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The Register UK ☛ China loathes AirDrop so much it’s publicized an old flaw in Apple’s P2P protocol
“Because AirDrop does not require an Internet connection to be delivered, this behavior cannot be effectively monitored through conventional network monitoring methods, which has become a major problem for the public security organs to solve such cases,” states an article posted by the city of Beijing’s municipal government.
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John Stawinski IV ☛ Playing with Fire – How We Executed a Critical Supply Chain Attack on PyTorch
Security tends to lag behind adoption, and AI/ML is no exception.
Four months ago, Adnan Khan and I exploited a critical CI/CD vulnerability in PyTorch, one of the world’s leading ML platforms. Used by titans like Google, Meta, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin, PyTorch is a major target for hackers and nation-states alike.
Thankfully, we exploited this vulnerability before the bad guys.
Here is how we did it.
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The New Leaf Journal ☛ Shopping on AI (Sp)Amazon
Justin and Justina, two fictional and Brooklyn-based friends, combine to make up The New Leaf Journal’s fictional dialogue duo. In a previous dialogue, Justin expressed mock shock that two seemingly reputable Amazon retailers, GLBSUNION and CUZMAK, were selling defective products. Today, Justin came across an interesting piece of furniture from a different reputable Amazon seller, FOPEAS. However, furniture is expensive. Moreover, Justin has reason to believe that AI may have been involved in the product description. Rather than pull the trigger, Justin decided to ask Justina for advice.
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Akseli Lahtinen ☛ And who is going to clean up?
In podcast it was mentioned that current AI is like T-Ford of our era. I do agree. There are potential good in the tooling, but something else came up in my mind:
Guess who is going to end up cleaning up the mess that those "AI T-Fords" go crashing around, destroying lives, causing damage and such? On top of the climate change issues and other fun stuff we're currently suffering from?
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[Repeat] Security Week ☛ New Class of CI/CD Attacks Could Have Led to PyTorch Supply Chain Compromise
In short, an attacker can use a fork pull request to become a contributor to a repository that has a self-hosted runner attached, and then be able to run any GitHub workflow on the runner. If the runner was configured using the default steps, it is non-ephemeral, enabling persistent access.
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Elliot C Smith ☛ UX
Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have rapidly become commonplace tools. They’re the most transparent AI application I can think of, users know they’re interacting with an AI. Despite that, I see chat as a complex and difficult user experience for most applications. It’s similar to interacting with your computer via the command line, powerful but at the cost of a high bar. The dominance of OSX as a user friendly OS hints that chatting to AI will become reserved for power users.
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The New Stack ☛ 7 Guiding Principles for Working with LLMs
In Seven ways to think like the web, I codified a set of patterns that emerged from my experience as a web-first writer and software developer. The idea was (and is) that the web’s architecture — described by Roy Fielding as an internet-scale distributed hypermedia system — exhibits a grain that you want to align with. You don’t need a low-level understanding of TCP/IP or HTTP to work with the grain of the web, but you do need to develop intuitions about higher-order constructs: hyperlinks, structured and unstructured data, reusable components and services, the publish-and-subscribe communication pattern.
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Silicon Angle ☛ Anthropic researchers show AI systems can be taught to engage in deceptive behavior
A new research paper by the generative artificial intelligence startup Anthropic PBC shows that some AI systems can be taught to engage in deceptive behavior — and even worse, the models will attempt to resist efforts to remove such behaviors using the most common AI safety techniques.
Anthropic’s researchers demonstrated in a scientific paper how they’re able to create potentially dangerous “sleeper agent” AI models that can even conceal their deceptive nature during training and evaluation, before letting all hell break loose once they’re released in the wild.
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arXiv ☛ Sleeper Agents: Training Deceptive LLMs That Persist Through Safety Training
Humans are capable of strategically deceptive behavior: behaving helpfully in most situations, but then behaving very differently in order to pursue alternative objectives when given the opportunity. If an AI system learned such a deceptive strategy, could we detect it and remove it using current state-of-the-art safety training techniques? To study this question, we construct proof-of-concept examples of deceptive behavior in large language models (LLMs). For example, we train models that write secure code when the prompt states that the year is 2023, but insert exploitable code when the stated year is 2024. We find that such backdoored behavior can be made persistent, so that it is not removed by standard safety training techniques, including supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and adversarial training (eliciting unsafe behavior and then training to remove it). The backdoored behavior is most persistent in the largest models and in models trained to produce chain-of-thought reasoning about deceiving the training process, with the persistence remaining even when the chain-of-thought is distilled away. Furthermore, rather than removing backdoors, we find that adversarial training can teach models to better recognize their backdoor triggers, effectively hiding the unsafe behavior. Our results suggest that, once a model exhibits deceptive behavior, standard techniques could fail to remove such deception and create a false impression of safety.
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Security
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Privacy/Surveillance
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CBC ☛ 2024-01-12 [Older] Meta offers Canadian Facebook users $51M to settle lawsuit in 4 provinces
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Hackaday ☛ Bringing The Voice Assistant Home
For many, the voice assistants are helpful listeners. Just shout to the void, and a timer will be set, or Led Zepplin will start playing. For some, the lack of flexibility and reliance on cloud services is a severe drawback. [John Karabudak] is one of those people, and he runs his own voice assistant with an LLM (large language model) brain.
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Defence/Aggression
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-01-12 [Older] Israel-Hamas war: US 'will not tolerate' attacks on shipping
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-01-12 [Older] Myanmar: China says army and guerillas agreed to cease-fire
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CBC ☛ 2024-01-08 [Older] Trudeau says Canada looking at ways to designate Iran's IRGC as a terrorist organization
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-01-10 [Older] Israel-Hamas war: UN demands Houthis halt Red Sea attacks
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-01-12 [Older] Yemen's Houthis: Who are the Iran-backed militants?
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-01-11 [Older] US, UK airstrikes target Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-01-11 [Older] Red Sea attacks halt Tesla production at German plant
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-01-11 [Older] Philippines: German FM alarmed by South China Sea tensions
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-01-11 [Older] Taiwan looks to distant shores for economic growth
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-01-08 [Older] Ethiopia and Somalia: Conflict brewing over port deal
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-01-08 [Older] Former Gambian minister goes on trial in Switzerland
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-01-08 [Older] Bangladesh: What's next after PM Sheikh Hasina's reelection?
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El País ☛ Vanina Berghella, journalist: ‘We are better prepared for artificial intelligence than we were for social media’
Berghella is the director of the Latin American region for the International Fund for Public Interest Media (IFPIM). The organization advises, accompanies and financially supports dozens of independent media outlets in Central and South America. From her home in Buenos Aires, she speaks with EL PAÍS about the polarization of Argentine society, independent journalism in the region and the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the media.
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France24 ☛ N.Korea says it tested solid-fuel ballistic missile with hypersonic weapon
North Korea said Monday it had successfully test-fired a new ballistic missile tipped with a hypersonic maneuverable warhead, the latest breakthrough in its pursuit of advanced weaponry to threaten South Korean and US targets.
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The Straits Times ☛ Explainer: What are solid-fuel missiles, and why is North Korea developing them?
A new intermediate-range ballistic missile was tested on Jan 15.
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The Straits Times ☛ North Korea says it tested solid-fuel hypersonic missile
The move was condemned by the US, South Korea and Japan.
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New York Times ☛ North Korea Test-Fires Intermediate-Range Ballistic Missile
The launch, the first by the North this year, indicates that the country may be developing a new missile that could threaten U.S. military bases in the region.
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JURIST ☛ Malaysia anti-corruption agency questions former PM Ismail Sabri
The Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) said in a press release that it recorded the testimony of former prime minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob about the use of RM700 million in funds that were “spent for publicity and promotion purposes during the previous government’s administration” on Wednesday.
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New York Times ☛ Why Taiwan’s Election Matters to the World
Tensions over the island’s status have flared repeatedly for decades, especially as Washington’s relationship with China has grown more strained.
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teleSUR ☛ China Refuses the EE.UU. Position on Taiwanese Elections
"We strongly deplore and strongly oppose this, and have made solemn representations to the American side," the Chinese Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
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RFA ☛ US delegation begins Taiwan visit for post-election talks
The visit comes after the island elected Beijing-skeptic Lai Ching-te as its new leader.
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Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Beijing says ‘reunification’ with Taiwan remains ‘inevitable’ after China sceptic Lai Ching-te wins 2024 election
China said “reunification” with Taiwan remained “inevitable” after president-elect Lai Ching-te won Saturday’s pivotal election on the self-ruled island that Beijing claims as its own.
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Hong Kong Free Press ☛ US delegation begins Taiwan visit after voters pick China sceptic leader
A high-level US delegation will meet with “leading politicians” in Taiwan on Monday, after voters elected William Lai Ching-te of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) as the self-ruled island’s next president, ignoring warnings from Beijing.
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The Straits Times ☛ China’s military and government acquire Nvidia chips despite US ban
The sales by largely unknown Chinese suppliers highlight the difficulties that Washington faces.
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France24 ☛ Taiwan tells China to 'face reality' and respect election results
Taiwan on Sunday told China to "face reality" and respect its election result, after voters defied Beijing's warnings and chose pro-sovereignty candidate Lai Ching-te as president.
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YLE ☛ FM: No indication Hamas planned attack in Finland
Israel has accused Hamas of planning an attack on its embassy in Sweden.
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Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine
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Meduza ☛ Russian poet Lev Rubinstein has died — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Authorities in Russia’s Belgorod to install military-grade shelters, says governor — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Former Russian mayor, in prison on bribery charges, reportedly goes to fight in Ukraine — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ PepsiCo reportedly prohibits mention of war or support for Ukrainian army in its advertising in Ukraine — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ St. Petersburg governor says Russian soldiers who have seen ‘gender-neutral bathrooms’ in Ukraine understand what they are fighting for — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Russia Behind Bars head says prison heating being turned off to force inmates to go to war. Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service denies this. — Meduza
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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[Old] Dan Geer ☛ Why Speculate? A talk by Michael Crichton (R.I.P., 2008)
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward -- reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.
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Environment
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CBC ☛ Scientists work to stop self-cloning crayfish in Burlington, Ont., pond after 1st detection in Canada
An invasive species of crayfish that reproduces by cloning itself was discovered last summer in a Burlington, Ont., park — the first time the marbled crayfish has been identified in the wild in North America.
Since then, a group of experts has been working to stop the species from spreading.
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New York Times ☛ Scenes From the Harsh Winter Storm Sweeping the U.S.
As temperatures dipped to as low as minus 45 degrees in some parts this past weekend, here’s a look at how Americans have faced the brutal weather.
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CBC ☛ 2024-01-09 [Older] Environment Canada issues extreme cold warning for all of Alberta
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Energy/Transportation
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US News And World Report ☛ 2024-01-07 [Older] Honda Considers $14 Billion Plan for EV Production in Canada -Nikkei
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-01-09 [Older] The flood paradox: Bad or good for the environment?
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-01-09 [Older] United finds loose bolts on plane panels in 737 Max probe
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-01-12 [Older] Germany: A third of long-distance trains delayed in 2023
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CBC ☛ 2024-01-12 [Older] 2024 is the year the world could reach peak coal use. But it's a tough habit to quit
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CBC ☛ 2024-01-12 [Older] B.C.'s infamous fast ferries are on Facebook Marketplace, and if they aren't bought they'll be destroyed
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Terence Eden ☛ We pay 12p / kWh for electricity - thanks to a smart tariff and battery
We have a 4.8kWh battery. It is hooked up to the Internet and knows what our energy prices are minute-to-minute. When electricity is cheap, it charges up from the grid. When electricity is expensive, it discharges into our home. If we boil the kettle at 7pm, the sensors on the battery detect that we're using expensive electricity and starts outputting stored electricity.
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Seattle Times ☛ When Alaska flight 1282 blew open, a mom went into ‘go mode’ to protect her son
Faye said she’s disturbed by that and wants to know if the previous depressurization indications were in any way related to Friday’s accident.
“I’m very concerned that Alaska chose to forego maintenance on it and put that plane back in the sky,” she said.
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YLE ☛ Electricity prices modest as week begins
Temperatures are dropping next week, but electricity spot prices are not surging on Monday.
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Kev Quirk ☛ Warming up the Garage 🔥
After renovating the Garage, it's still very cold in there, thanks to Welsh winters. I have a small electric heater, but it wasn't good enough, so I upgraded.
Back in early January, while off work for the Christmas break, I decided it was a good time to service one of my motorbikes, specifically, my Royal Enfield.
Obligatory pictures of the Enfield in bits during the service:
[...]
It was cold outside, around 4°C (39°F), and it wasn't much warmer in the garage. So I switched on my little electric fan heater. I'd assumed that the little heater would have been enough to heat the room, but alas, after 3 hours it was still freezing cold in there. But was that just anecdotal, or fact? I needed data...
I have a little bluetooth thermometer that I keep in the garage to record temperature swings, so I checked the companion app, and sure enough in the 3 hours during the service, the temperature had raised a paltry 0.9°C (1.6°F):
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Wildlife/Nature
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CBC ☛ 2024-01-10 [Older] Why Canada has ordered lobster pounds to kill all egg-bearing female lobsters
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NYPost ☛ Animal shelter blasts pet owners to ‘get their act together’ as it struggles with throngs of callers asking to abandon dogs: ‘Be better humans’
“The dog you chose to get and now don’t find so darling because it isn’t a puppy anymore, is not our problem," the shelter wrote.
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Finance
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CBC ☛ 2024-01-07 [Older] 'Substantial' property tax increase coming to Toronto, city's budget chief warns
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CBC ☛ 2024-01-09 [Older] A wave of defaults has real estate lawyers urging presale buyers to be cautious
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-01-10 [Older] German construction sector faces major slump in 2024
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-01-10 [Older] Germany: Train strike, farmer protests cause disruption [Ed: This is exactly the intention, the headline should focus on their motivations]
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-01-08 [Older] Why are Germans hoarding billions of useless deutsche marks?
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-01-09 [Older] Germany train strikes can go ahead, court rules
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-01-09 [Older] How does the train drivers' strike affect freight transport?
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-01-10 [Older] German train strikes met with resignation and dismay by travelers
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‘Great talent is still critical’: Retail’s labor shortage can’t be filled by AI, execs say
At the National Retail Federation’s Big Show this year at NYC’s Javits Center, much of the conversation among executives and the technologies on the show floor revolved around artificial intelligence. Panelists and exhibitors alike talked up ways in which AI can replace or simplify the work that would normally take much more manpower to complete. Processes like analyzing inventory allocation to stores and analyzing sales trends were all candidates for AI automation.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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The Straits Times ☛ Vietnam Communist Party chief attends parliament session after health concerns
Communist Party head Nguyen Phu Trong attended a session of the National Assembly after concerns over his health.
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RFA ☛ Vietnam’s top leader attends party meeting amid health concerns
Nguyen Phu Trong made a short appearance at the National Assembly after missing meetings with Indonesian, Lao leaders.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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Hindustan Times ☛ Iran frees journalists jailed for covering Mahsa Amini's death
Niloufar Hamedi, 31, and Elaheh Mohammadi, 36, were "released from Evin prison on bail," according to the reformist Shargh newspaper. Other outlets in Iran also reported their release.
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RFERL ☛ Iranian Journalists Jailed Over Amini Coverage Granted 'Temporary' Release On Bail
Two Iranian journalists handed long prison terms for their coverage of the 2022 death in custody of Mahsa Amina have been granted “temporary release” on bail pending an appeal of their sentences, the country's judiciary said.
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CBC ☛ Iranian journalists released on bail after 17 months in prison for coverage of Mahsa Amini's death
Hamedi worked for the reformist newspaper Shargh, while Mohammadi worked for Ham-Mihan, also a reformist paper. They were detained in September 2022.
In May 2023, the United Nations awarded the journalists its premier prize for press freedom for their commitment to truth and accountability.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-01-11 [Older] EU farmer protests: What's driving tractors to the streets?
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-01-08 [Older] Germany's far-right exploits farmers' protests [Ed: German media trying to demonise disgruntled workers by associating them with racism]
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-01-08 [Older] German farmers' protest sparks chaos
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-01-08 [Older] Germany: Farmers' protest causes nationwide disruption
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-01-10 [Older] Why are German farmers so angry?
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teleSUR ☛ Ecuador: Release of Hostages From Prisons
National Service for Care of Adults Deprived of Liberty said that "the protocols of security and joint work with the Armed Forces and the National Police were successfully concluded".
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-01-11 [Older] Racism can make you sick
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CBC ☛ 2024-01-10 [Older] Tents torn down at encampment in central Edmonton as court battle continues
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Neritam ☛ The Privatization of Water Is a Scam
The neoliberal obsession with privatizing essential industries and services is haunting the UK. Profiteering by gas, oil, railways, mail, and other entities is the root cause of the current high inflation and misery for millions. The water industry has been hoisted by its own profiteering, and Thames Water, England’s largest water and sewage business, is teetering on the edge.
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RFERL ☛ 'Naked' And Defiant: Diary Of An Iranian Protester
RFE/RL's Radio Farda asked an Iranian woman to keep a diary for three months. Nesa, whose name has been changed to protect her identity, documents her fears and anger on the eve of the anniversary of the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini. Amini was arrested for allegedly violating the country's controversial hijab law. Her death in custody on September 16, 2022, sparked a wave of unprecedented anti-government protests in which hundreds died.
RFE/RL has narrated her diary entries.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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APNIC ☛ Beyond borders: A recap of Afghanistan’s School on Internet Governance 2023
The Afghanistan School on Internet Governance (AFSIG) concluded its fourth edition last month, marking a successful virtual return after a three-year hiatus. Established in 2017, AFSIG is regarded as one of the oldest Internet governance schools in South Asia. Its mission is to promote Internet knowledge through training, mentoring, community engagement, and collaboration.
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Copyrights
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Torrent Freak ☛ 10 Most Popular Torrent Sites of 2023
Continuing a long-standing annual tradition, today we publish our list of the most popular torrent sites at the start of 2024. Ranked by traffic estimates, we see that YTS remains on top, closely followed by 1337x and anime torrent site NYAA. TorrentGalaxy continues its rapid rise, ending up in fourth place.
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Torrent Freak ☛ Share With Care: 2,217 Domains Blocked, The Majority For Circumvention
This week marked the 10-year anniversary of 'Share With Care', an anti-piracy program that blocks pirate sites and then guides internet users to platforms where content can be consumed legally. With assistance from ISPs, over 2,200 pirate domains have been blocked over the past decade, the overwhelming majority for circumventing blocking.
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Project Runeberg ☛ Happy Public Domain Day 2024!
A year ago, at Public Domain Day 2023, the copyright expired for authors who died in 1952. Among them were two giants, Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun and Swedish explorer Sven Hedin. And we let go of both of them, thinking that others will surely digitize their works and we can wait and avoid duplicated effort. So how did it go?
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Vox ☛ The fight over plagiarism is the harbinger of a messy new era
Very few people involved in the mudslinging seem to cherish longstanding commitments to academic integrity, but they are more than willing to act as though they care about plagiarism a lot — or, alternatively, that plagiarism is no big deal — when it serves their political purposes.
As this latest battle of our neverending culture wars rages, it’s worth taking a step back and looking at some basic principles. Why is plagiarism a big deal? What does it mean to argue about it?
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The Register UK ☛ GitHub Copilot copyright case narrowed but not neutered
In a January 3, 2024 order [PDF], made public this week with redactions, Northern California District Judge Jon S. Tigar partially granted and partially denied the defendant companies' motion to dismiss.
Judge Tigar dismissed damage claims from two of the unidentified developer plaintiffs ("Does 3 and 4"). But he allowed the damage claims by "Does 1, 2, and 5" to proceed, which opens the door to seeking damages to the entire class of affected developers.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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#Lore24 - Day 12 - Archmages
According to the Crystal Spheres[1], even the flexible magic of a mage is still limited to a single sphere of influence. Archmages[2] are ones who are capable of tapping into multiple spheres to cast their magic. It is a glorified term for a capable mage who can use multiple elemental[3], reactional[4], or even more esoteric magic from the spheres of magic.
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Overcoming imposter syndrome in IT
You certainly know about the Imposter Syndrome (I'll refer to it as IS), unfortunately it's a very common problem in IT.
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First time thought sharer
Palm trees sway back and forth from the easy-going breeze. The sun shines bright and the sky is clear. Seagulls caw, the tide ebbs and flows, and the sound of laughter can be heard. In the distance beyond the palisade cliff, a single yellow boat moves in mellow fashion with the rhythm of ocean waves.
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Ode to Pomegranate
Pomegranate...I love you!!!!!!!!!!
You are so difficult to open up but I love you just the same. I know how to do it and I know how to make you spill as little blood as possible. When I score four lines down your body and rip you apart like a starving wolf. Hell yeah brother.
I see your fruit. Ruby red and shining like gems, glistening in the harsh yellow light of my dad's kitchen. You stain my hands as I pry you out, my nails cut short so I don't slice up your viscera.......wowzers!
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"Psychology and the Promethean Will" Excerpt
> William James used to suggest that even the maturest minds may not yet have developed a tenth of the functional possibilities of the great human forebrain, and later psychologists have shown that if once the habit and the desire are established, expanding horizons and the eager pursuit of knowledge may as readily characterize the later as the earlier decades of life. Yet mental growth is still so rare in the later decades that a matured intellect remains for most people an abnormal conception. The days of youth teem with fragments of living knowledge; with dawning philosophies; morning dreams; plans. But the human mind at forty is commonly vulgar, smug, deadened, and wastes its hours. Everywhere adult brains seem to resemble blighted trees that have died in the upper branches, but yet cling to a struggling green wisp of life about the lower trunk.
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To Call Upon A Friend
So, if you don't already know, I suffer from crippling social anxiety from my traumatic childhood abuse and neglect. It's really hard for me to make friends when I suffer trust issues. People often tell me I should get out more often, and I have tried that in the past, only for it to backfire on me several times.
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Politics and World Events
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Martin Luther King Jr. Day: Religious Diversity
It's Martin Luther King Jr. Day. This day was always impactful for me because MLK Jr. showed me what it means to help those beyond yourself. While Martin Luther King Jr. was always taught in school, unfortunately schools did not teach his religious values much, or his friendship with another great Theologian, Abraham Heschel. As a Black man who countered violence towards people of color with non-violence, he still found the time to support those outside of his own community. When you look at Abraham Heschel and Martin Luther King Jr.'s teachings, they follow in the same line as the Prophets of the Bible. Martin Luther King Jr. emphasized standing up for your principles and for other people, Abraham Heschel emphasized an evolving understanding of God and the Bible, and radical amazement.
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Isaiah 14:10-11: Maggots and Worms
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Technology and Free Software
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And who is gonna clean up
I was listening Late Night Linux podcast episode 264 and they were chatting about AI, as usual. This post was inspired by the discussion, but not really related to it.
In podcast it was mentioned that current AI is like T-Ford of our era. I do agree. There are potential good in the tooling, but something else came up in my mind:
Guess who is going to end up cleaning up the mess that those "AI T-Fords" go crashing around, destroying lives, causing damage and such? On top of the climate change issues and other fun stuff we're currently suffering from?
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Super Mario RPG
One of my favorite SNES games from my childhood is Super Mario RPG. I was extemely happy that Nintendo just released an HD remaster for the Nintendo Switch for future generations to enjoy.
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Internet/Gemini
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Gemini software Rosy-Crow: — What happened on 12/28? · 🐝 Addison
The app's Google Play audience more than doubled over a matter of a couple of days. I'm scratching my head about that one.
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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.