Links 22/01/2024: Microsoft's Chatbot Openly Promotes Fascism, Getty Images Latest to Call for Action
Contents
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Leftovers
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Amit Gawande ☛ #micropost
I wish every blog post had a footer with easy ways to respond, preferably via email. The early days of blogging were simple, with a plain comments section. All one had to do was add details about themselves and comment. Spam ruined the simplicity, and accounts were required to be created just to add a comment.
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Jason Kratz ☛ Notes on migrating Ghost and Mailgun to a new domain
These instructions are obviously geared toward that tech stack but should be similar to many other setups.
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Mere Civilian ☛ Travel Router
The Travel Router was a frustrating disappointment because it only worked for a few minutes and the connection would end.
Let me explain. I connected my iPhone to the USB port on the Travel Router. Then, I connected a ethernet cable on the LAN port of the Travel Router which was connected to the WAN port of my UNIFI Dream Machine (my home router).
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Ruben Schade ☛ Possessions are a gas, not a liquid
I love the physical and mental weight that’s lifted when I get rid of stuff, but it’s also oddly demoralising when you spend an entire day off doing all this organising with little noticable impact!
Stuff expands to fill whatever container you put it in, whether it’s a bookshelf, cupboard, drawer, or desk. I suppose it’s all the more reason to keep trucking on… and to at least attempt to not accumulate more of it in the first placefirst place.
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Tom Greenwood ☛ Is materialism really such a bad thing?
As I pondered this thought over the New Year, I stumbled upon an old radio lecture by Alan Watts called Unpreachable Religion, in which he presents the idea that we may have things back to front. Our modern culture is constantly accused of being interested in absolutely nothing but material values and yet, he argues that we don’t even care about the material world. In the lecture he says; [...]
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Tommy Palmer ☛ Tales from a solo dev: You want it? You merge it.
It has to be done, and has to be done quickly, so trust your own instincts.
Maybe in 10 years time, new developers will be questioning all your decisions and slagging you off via emojis. You won’t care though, because you’ll be long gone, sipping cocktails on a beach on your island that you bought with the proceeds of the IPO. Hopefully.
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CBC ☛ How technology is helping municipalities crack down on illegal short-term rentals
In recent years, municipal governments across Canada have strengthened regulations to limit short-term rentals. Enforcing those rules, however, can be tricky because most listings don't include an address.
But the jobs of investigators like Katolyk are getting a lot easier thanks to new tech platforms that use artificial intelligence to help uncover illegal listings.
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Science
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Science Alert ☛ Women Still Typically Outlive Men, But That Gender Gap Is Slowly Closing
A glimpse into the future.
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Science Alert ☛ We Now Know Why This Common Rock Is So Good at Growing Clouds
The curious case of feldspar.
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Hardware
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[Repeat] Ruben Schade ☛ A 2024 Yellow Pages monitor stand
I had a hulking big 19-inch Dell CRT when I was a kid. Monitors today still don’t match the colour depth, contrast, and sheer weight of that beast, and it even had a vastly superior 4:3 aspect ratio. It was great as a display, and a tremendous way to get exercise when one had to move house.
Problem was, the stand upon which it pivoted and moved around lacked sufficient height for my ergonomic requirements. I had a short desk, and by the time I was into my last growth spurt as a kid, I found myself looking down onto it from my advanced height. I needed something to prop it up to avoid neck strain. But what with?
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Hackaday ☛ 640k Was Never Enough For Anyone: How DOS Broke Free
On modern desktop and laptop computers, there is rarely a need to think about memory. We all have many gigabytes of the stuff, and it’s just there. Our operating system does the heavy lifting of working out what goes where and what needs to be paged to disk, and we just get on with reading Hackaday, that noblest of computing pursuits. This was not always the case though, and for early PCs in particular the limitations of the 8086 processor gave the need for some significant gymnastics in search of an extra few kilobytes. [Julio Merion] has an interesting run-down of the DOS memory map, and how memory expansion happened on computers physically unable to see much of it.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Tracy Durnell ☛ Misadventures in leaded dishware
The past couple weeks, I have fallen down the lead-in-consumer-goods rabbit hole. This is not a rabbit hole I’m happy to learn exists. And the deeper I’ve burrowed, the angrier I’ve gotten. Because it’s not just vintage goods.
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Science Alert ☛ Nearly 1 in 5 Online Health Tests 'Quackery'. Here's How to Avoid Them.
Ask these four questions first.
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Science Alert ☛ 'Smoking Gun': Study Reveals How Virus May Trigger Multiple Sclerosis
A big step closer.
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Science Alert ☛ Expert Reveals What Happens to Your Liver When You Quit Alcohol
The changes happen in just weeks.
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France24 ☛ French warship turned field hospital treats injured Gazans off Egyptian coast
About 1,000 people from Gaza have been treated in a French field hospital aboard a ship off the coast of Egypt, its captain said, providing care for some as health infrastructure in the war-devastated enclave collapses.
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The Straits Times ☛ No rain a pain for Malaysia’s padi farmers
Parts of Kedah have not seen rain since late December.
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Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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India Times ☛ AI, machine learning systems, drones show new-age face of Kerala's plantation sector
Automation is employed in a big way in irrigation as well as spraying of pesticides across plantations, besides diagnosis of pests infesting crops, the release said
As many as 166 stalls by 120 entrepreneurs were open for the public at the expo organised by the Plantation Directorate of the State Industries Department.
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Defence/Aggression
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New Statesman ☛ Revealed: how the City of London keeps Putin’s oil flowing: The Russian war machine is being helped by British companies.
Oil tankers have a commercial life expectancy of around 25 years, of which Myra – built in 2006 – has already done a busy 18; she covered 94,000 nautical miles last year. Similar tankers pass within a few miles of the English coast on an almost daily basis, carrying crude oil and oil products from Russia to refineries in Turkey, India and China. Our navy watches them go past, and in London, beneath the noses of our regulators and politicians, businesses quietly profit from the trade that finances Vladimir Putin’s brutal war in Ukraine.
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France24 ☛ 🔴Live: EU foreign ministers to meet Israeli, Palestinian counterparts, push for lasting solution
EU foreign ministers will push for peace between Israelis and Palestinians during meetings Monday, after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected a future two-state solution. The Palestinian death toll from the war has soared past 25,000, the Gaza Health Ministry said Sunday. Israel announced the death of another hostage and appeared far from achieving its goals of freeing more than 100 others and eradicating the militant group.
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New York Times ☛ Monday Briefing: U.S. Pushes for New Hostage Talks
Plus the meaning of North Korea’s threats.
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RFA ☛ N Korea asserts military commitment amid underwater nuclear test doubts
Pyongyang claimed it had conducted the test last week; Seoul has expressed skepticism, deeming it ‘improbable.’
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New York Times ☛ Is North Korea Planning a War?
An intensification of nuclear threats from North Korea while the world is preoccupied with other wars has ignited an urgent debate over Mr. Kim’s motives.
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Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Investigation under way after China fire kills 13 schoolchildren as they slept in a dormitory
Authorities in central China’s Henan Province were on Sunday looking into the cause of a night-time fire that killed 13 schoolchildren as they slept in a dormitory.
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RFERL ☛ Four Survivors Found After Rescuers Reach Remote Site Of Plane Crash In Northern Afghanistan
Four people survived the crash of a Moscow-bound chartered ambulance flight in a mountainous area of northeastern Afghanistan, according to the Russian aviation authority on January 21.
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teleSUR ☛ Russian Private Airplane Crashes in Afghanistan
Four of the six passengers survived.
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Meduza ☛ Russian jet carrying six people crashes in Afghanistan, four survivors found — Meduza
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Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine
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Meduza ☛ At least 25 people killed and 20 injured in attack on market in occupied Donetsk — Meduza
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France24 ☛ Dozens killed in strike on market in Russian-occupied city of Donetsk
Moscow-installed officials said Ukrainian shelling killed at least 27 people and wounded 25 on Sunday at a market on the outskirts of Donetsk, a Russian-occupied city in the eastern part of the country.
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The Strategist ☛ What happens if the West abandons Ukraine?
Western leaders are well aware of the dangers of a Russian victory in Ukraine.
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JURIST ☛ Russia draft law would confiscate assets from people ‘spreading false information’
Russian government officials announced Saturday that it is preparing a bill to facilitate the confiscation of both money and property from people who are found to violate the law surrounding false information and the ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Vyacheslav Volodin, chairman of the Duma, outlined details of the bill on Telegram.
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RFERL ☛ Strike On Market In Russian-Occupied Donetsk Kills 27, De-Facto Official Says
At least 27 people were killed on January 21 by shelling at a market on the outskirts of the city of Donetsk in Russian-occupied Ukraine, the head of the Russian-installed authority in Donetsk said.
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YLE ☛ Niinistö: Ukrainian drone attack on Russia not a threat to Finland
Finnish President Sauli Niinistö said that Finland is unlikely to get involved in the suspected drone strike on a Russian natural gas terminal on the Gulf of Finland.
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New York Times ☛ Deadly Blast Hits Market in Russia-Held Donetsk, Ukraine, Officials Say
The pro-Moscow authorities in the eastern city of Donetsk said 25 people were killed and 20 others were wounded. It was not possible to independently confirm which side launched the strike.
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Meduza ☛ Russian forces capture village of Krokhmalne in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Drone attack on Russian fuel terminal reportedly organized by Ukraine’s Security Service — Meduza
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RFERL ☛ Russian Energy Company Suspends Some Operations At Baltic Sea Terminal After Fire
The Russian energy company Novatak suspended some operations at its liquified natural gas (LNG) terminal in the Russian Baltic Sea port of Ust-Luga after a fire erupted early on January 21 following reports of drone sightings in the area.
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Environment
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The Straits Times ☛ 47 buried in south-west China landslide
The landslide took place at 5.51am in Zhenxiong County, and more than 200 people were urgently evacuated from the area.
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Energy/Transportation
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Wim Vanderbauwhede ☛ Emissions from ChatGPT are much higher than from conventional search
Chat-assisted search is one of the key applications for ChatGPT. To illustrate the impact of ChatGPT-style augmented search queries more clearly, I compare the energy consumption and emission of a ChatGPT-style query with that of a conventional Google search-style query. If all search queries are replaced by ChatGPT-style queries, what does that mean for energy consumption and emissions?
tl;dr: Emissions would increase by 60x.
In a previous post I wrote about the potential climate impact from widespread adoption of ChatGPT-style Large Language Models. My projections are in line with those made by de Vries in his recent article [5]. In this post, I look in more detail at the increase in energy consumption from using ChatGPT for search tasks.
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Jasper Tandy ☛ Saturday
The battery was so flat that all the electronics had gone weird and it was registering no fuel (despite the fact that I definitely fuelled it) so we drove 45 miles to return the van on "zero" fuel. The breakdown guy said it was fine to refuel it with the engine running, but there is no way I will ever refuel a vehicle with a running engine. Against my better judgment we stopped the engine, put a small amount of fuel in (which didn't register!) then carrier on driving. One of the most unpleasant journeys of my life.
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Overpopulation
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The Straits Times ☛ Despite S. Korea’s low birth rate, babies are still being sent overseas for adoption
In 2021, South Korea was ranked fifth globally in terms of the number of children sent abroad.
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Finance
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The Straits Times ☛ Malaysia’s economic reforms set to eat into budgets of middle, high-income households
The government is shifting to targeted subsidies for fuel and electricity, and imposing tax hikes.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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The Nation ☛ The DeSantis Debacle Is Over
Meatball Ron. Ol’ Pudding Fingers. DeSanctimonious. DeSanctus. Tiny D.
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The Straits Times ☛ K-pop campaign: Indonesia’s first election candidate from S. Korea sets social control media abuzz
Lawyer Kim Chong-Sung became an Indonesian citizen 10 years ago.
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The Straits Times ☛ ‘Long list’ of people to be called over Malaysia’s anti-graft raids
Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission confirmed that officers raided businessman’s four companies.
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The Straits Times ☛ Diplomatic isolation, military pressure: Taiwan’s Lai Ching-te faces early test from China
Beijing is likely to ignore his overtures and not deal with him till he acknowledges the 1992 Consensus.
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The Straits Times ☛ Taiwan says it spotted six more Chinese balloons, one crossed island
Taiwan's Defence Ministry accused China of threatening aviation safety.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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JURIST ☛ Pakistan experiences [Internet] disruption during virtual PTI rally
Netblocks issued a statement declaring that their official metric demonstrated disruptions to X (formerly known as Twitter), Facebook, Instagram and Youtube. PTI’s virtual rally was live-streamed during this disruption, in which key leaders of PTI, including barrister Gohar Ali Khan Ghor, spoke during the event. The party paid tribute to Imran Khan, who they state has been “illegally incarcerated” for 169 days. This was their second rally to be held before Pakistan’s next election, which is set to be held in just over two weeks.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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RFERL ☛ Kyrgyzstan's Vibrant Media Space In Peril After Journalists Raided, Jailed
That plunge was in large part due to the authorities' decision to put severe restrictions on RFE/RL's Kyrgyz Service -- including freezing its bank accounts -- in October 2022.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Modern Diplomacy ☛ My DEI Experience -It Must be Removed
What I learned in my assessment when attending mandatory online DEI sessions taught by company-approved third-party experts was more about what seemed to be a political advocacy movement on behalf of a certain cross-section of people that we were told are oppressed. Now, most employees are supportive with good intentions to participate and help make the environment a positive place to work, however it was very clear that colleagues began to feel uncomfortable as the DEI moderators delivered the message.
Being a white man, I was depicted as the oppressor or perhaps a racist for my skin colour. I wondered how people of colour felt during the session as the oppressed. These were my colleagues and friends, and now there seemed to be a wall of division going up that did not previously exist.
It was made clear that there could not be a status of “not being a racist”, rather you have to be “anti-racist”. In other words, you cannot remain silent, and you are pressured to take action to demonstrate your allegiance to this ideological mantra. This was beginning to make me feel like recruitment for the paramilitary storm troopers, also known as “Brown Shirts”, who organized activities to intimidate opponents and Jews.
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Trademarks
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Right of Publicity
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Silicon Angle ☛ OpenAI suspends startup that used GPT-4 model to impersonate presidential candidate Dean Phillips
Dean.Bot is a chatbot that was created by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs Matt Krisiloff and Jed Somers. The duo created a political action committee, or Super PAC, called We Deserve Better, that has supported Phillips (pictured) ahead of the New Hampshire primary that takes place on Tuesday.
In a statement to the Washington Post, which first reported the news, OpenAI said it “recently removed a developer account that was knowingly violating our API usage policies, which disallow political campaigning or impersonating an individual without consent.”
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The Washington Post ☛ OpenAI suspends bot developer for presidential hopeful Dean Phillips
OpenAI also said in its blog post that it does not “allow people to build applications for political campaigning and lobbying.” Per an earlier story by The Washington Post, the intent of Dean.Bot was to engage with potential supporters and spread the candidate’s message. Following the Post’s inquiry, Delphi initially removed ChatGPT from the bot and kept it running with other, open-source tools before ultimately taking it town altogether on Friday night once OpenAI stepped in.
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Futurism ☛ Group Linked to Sam Altman Launches AI to Defeat Joe Biden
So it's interesting that a group with deep ties to Altman would launch an AI-powered chatbot to try to unseat Biden, who wants to curb AI technology. One of the founders of the super PAC, Matt Krisiloff, used to be an employee of OpenAI and apparently dated Altman.
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Copyrights
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Torrent Freak ☛ 'Canada is a Video Piracy Hotspot While Brazil Sees Piracy in Decline'
A recent report estimated that there were over 141 billion visits to pirate sites in 2023. This number is large, but rather meaningless without proper context. Today, we take a look at how piracy trends are evolving in different countries. Canada emerges as a piracy hotspot, while Brazil shows a decline in piracy rates. Meanwhile, there are plenty of piracy growth regions too.
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International Business Times ☛ Getty Images CEO Calls for Supporting Creative Industries With Licensed Imagery AI Training
Earlier in 2023, the Sunak government chalked out a plan to overcome the barriers faced by AI companies and users as they can't use copyrighted material from digital image libraries. In response to a consultation from the intellectual [sic] property [sic] office, the UK government said it will support AI companies in accessing copyrighted work for training AI models.
The creative industries are viewing this as a step backwards from the copyright exemption for text and data mining.
On Thursday, January 18, the government further elaborated on its stance when Viscount Camrose told the Commons Committee that it is taking "a balanced and pragmatic approach to the issues that have been raised, which helps secure the UK's position as a world leader in AI" while supporting the thriving creative sectors.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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Lunar Observations: Fairbanks, AK, USA: 2024-01-20 (Publ. 2024-01-21)
Last night I spent about 30 minutes observing the waxing gibbous Moon, starting about 9pm. The great thing about observing the moon is that it is bright enough that I can observe it in the front yard of my apartment, where otherwise I would be tortured by light pollution in the skies and the glaring brightness of street and house lights in every direction. I used my old Jupiter 60-AZ refractor. I tried the 6mm eyepiece first but couldn't get it focused — not sure what was going on there. So I switched to the 12mm eyepiece. I also used the neodymium filter, as it seems to make the moon features look a little sharper.
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Never Been Happier to Drop a Grand
Well, $1229 to be precise, after the conversion. The schedules have finally aligned, and the Toronto Blue Jays will finally (finally!) be playing the Minnesota Twins at Target Field during the summer break. I mean, they play them a bunch every year anyway, but we've been checking, and it's always before July, or after Labour Day. My partner's schedule doesn't really permit vacations outside of July and August. So we can finally make the long drive. We're going with some friends. Load up the SUV, make a weekend of it.
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Charlotte's web
Of *course* this species is going to boil the ocean - as opposed to taking meaningful action - en route to literally boiling the ocean....
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Which English Bible Translation Should I Use?
There are over one-hundred complete English Bible translations available these days. How does someone choose the most accurate, most readable, or least theologically biased translation?
Below I will try to cover some basic reasons there are multiple different English translations, and how those same reasons, along with some additional considerations, can help you to make a good choice for your own Bible study needs. I cannot cover every possible English translation, so I'll focus on a handful of the more widely accepted and bestselling translations as examples.
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Lore24 - Day 21 - On Mage Smiths
Related but much different than mage knights[1], a mage smith[2] is a mage who imbues items with magical power, creates items using magic, and recharges steam engines. This is a dangerous profession since artifacts are known to react poorly to feedback[3] and frequently explode when not properly shielded.
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Day 20 - On Mage Knights
A mage knight[1] is a mage who focused on combat magic. They are regarded highly in most societies that are built on colonization and domination. It is a combination of a political and military title.
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Technology and Free Software
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Nobody cares about independent digital infrastructure
When I talk with people who do activism and we're doing the usual exchange of personal values, I'll often say something to the effect of "I'm interested in independent digital infrastructure." This is, I think, a very pragmatic way of saying that I advocate for free software. What makes the "independent digital infrastructure" characterization more "pragmatic" is the fact that it focuses less on the ethics of free software and more on the value it adds to a community.
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Don't want a line to break in emacs even in auto-fill-mode?
Have you ever been editing a file in emacs where there a specific lines that should not be wrapped, but you are using auto-fill-mode and they accidently get wrapped? The emacs variable fill-nobreak-predicate is your friend!
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When a walled garden becomes a preserve
Mozilla just created a new bug tracker to list all of the ways the big platforms (Windows, IOS/OSX and Android) have used dishonest or disingenuous tactics to keep independent browsers at a disadvantage.
[...]
At this point, Apple's refusal to allow another browser engine on it's platforms might be the only thing keeping Chrome from being able to fully dictate the direction of the web.
Yeah, that's right. I'm defending Apple here. Not because I agree with their policy. Their policy is the worst kind of protectionist crap and it definitely has some negative effects. That said, I think it's obvious at this point that Mozilla, and Firefox, are not going to be any impediment to Google throwing their weight around and just dictating policy to the w3c. They have no appreciable market share, they aren't actually a player anymore. I use Firefox and desperately want them to rise from the ashes, but let's face it - they're in ashes right now. So with that in mind, what is the last player besides Google and Chrome that has any significant market share (and therefore power) in the browser space? Well it's Apple, with their captive audience of IPhone and Macbook devotees, who are all using Safari. Even if they install another browser, if it's running on an Apple device then it's using WebKit to render pages. This means that Google can't take web standards in a direction that Apple won't go without fracturing the internet in two.
[...]
Am I being ridiculous? Maybe a little. Just let it be a reminder is all I ask, that ecosystems are complex things, and even predators have an important place in them. In fact sometimes removing a predator can cause the entire ecosystem to crash. I'd like to avoid that.
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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.