Leftovers

• Omicron Limited ☛ Song lyrics are getting simpler, more repetitive: Study

  You're not just getting older. Song lyrics really are becoming simpler and more repetitive, according to a study published on Thursday.

  Lyrics have also become angrier and more self-obsessed over the last 40 years, the study found, reinforcing the opinions of cranky aging music fans everywhere.

• Amit Patel ☛ Text effects

  In Week 4 of the year, I tried out various ways of using distances in signed distance field fonts. In Week 5 I wanted to do something different. I decided to explore what I could do treating each character as its own sprite and then applying sprite antimation. The week turned out to be fun but I didn’t learn as much as I hoped I would. To start, I copied the code from the previous week so that I would have a working program right away. Then I removed things I didn’t care about this week and added new code. This is like forking a project but for my weekly experiments I tend to copy the code instead of forking.

• Simone Silvestroni ☛ Minimalism as a product

  The American modern version is clearly fixated on decluttering, but it also comes with a specific aesthetic. Their Instagram-perfect shots of big empty houses, proudly showing very few objects in the obligatory subdued palette, promote a way of life that looks unrealistic and fake. The fabricated social media friendly “free-in-exchange-for-your-email-address” PDF of 16 Rules to Declutter Your Life preaches on valid principles, while seemingly reducing them to a bourgeois vision through capitalist lenses.

  Such lifestyle is not attainable by normal people. I mean the regular folks who need to go to work, cook their food, do the laundry, maybe some gardening or else — they can’t afford to spend buckets of money on few hyped products, buy coffee beans from a remote region in South America that cost half a salary at the point of sale. Above all, they cannot keep their place within a spotless private hospital aesthetic, because they actually live in there. They don’t usually give TED talks either, especially not to promote some other form of inspirational American Dream that’s great to sell another book.

• Thomas Rigby ☛ Everything is video

  There's also an off putting (to me, at least) "uncanny valley" thing about these video responses that make me feel uncomfortable; it's kind of like a real conversation but it's not.

• [Repeat] David Revoy ☛ The end of Pepper&Carrot and my next project. - David Revoy

  I am planning to finish the Pepper & Carrot series relatively soon. But this change will not happen tomorrow or next month, I still have four more episodes to release before I get to my planned "~The End~". And as you know, it may take a while, especially since the episodes will be difficult to write and draw.

• Adam Newbold ☛ Neatnik Notes · Reply Cards

  Above all else, it was a lot of fun to make, and it didn’t take very long from start to finish. I don’t know if anyone will actually use it, but as with everything I make, I know that I’ll use it (and that’s good enough for me!).

• Kev Quirk ☛ Wouter Groeneveld

  Talking with Wouter for the month was really interesting. We talked about a lot of stuff, including academia, baking, the big city vs the countryside, board games and a whole lot more.

• Kev Quirk ☛ March 2024 PenPal - Wouter Groeneveld

  Wouter and I just wrapped up our email conversation for March 2024. We talked about a lot of stuff, including academia, baking, the big city vs the countryside, board games and a whole lot more.

  Thanks, Wouter. I really enjoyed chatting with you for the last month!

• Lee Peterson ☛ Trying not to tie project income to success

  I’ve been slowly trying to build a small income from my creative endeavours, nothing to pay the bills but something to help pay for the running of the site and help me grow my content. I’d like to move up a tier on my WordPress plan so trying to help support those payments.

• Manuel Moreale ☛ Why I write

  The more I write on this site, the more I realize that what I’m trying to do is to connect. I’m trying to connect with others—with you—but I’m also trying to help others connect with each other. And, in a weird way, I’m also trying to connect with myself.

• [Old] Detroit Public TV ☛ WRIF D.R.E.A.D. Card: Detroit's Rock Radio Loyalty Program | One Detroit

  We all have them— loyalty cards stuffed in our wallets or key tags hanging from our keychains, but the WRIF D.R.E.A.D. card may have just been the first loyalty program made specifically for rock ‘n roll music lovers. Known for its long history of zany, innovative radio personalities and unique marketing promotions, the WRIF D.R.E.A.D. card was the icing on the radio station’s promotional cake, circulating hundreds of thousands of cards across Detroit.

  One Detroit senior producer Bill Kubota and “Detroit Remember When: Made in the Motor City” host Erik Smith sit down with several former members of WRIF Radio to hear more about the radio station’s rise to popularity in the late 1970s and 1980s and examine how it became one of the most well-known Detroit rock radio stations still to this day.

• Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-26 [Older] British Museum sues former curator over stolen artifacts

• James G ☛ Evening

  I like to watch movies and write in the late evenings, into the wee hours of the night. This Saturday, I found myself more active than normal. I watched Clue, a comedy murder mystery movie based on the board game Cluedo.

  While the movie was not as funny as I had hoped, it was entertaining: the mystery kept me intrigued until the end, despite the question "should I turn this off?" in the back of my head. I then, as one does (he says sarcastically), went to do the dishes. I was dissatisfied with how many plates and glasses required cleaning. I found a new rush of energy so I went to clean the plates and cups. I never do the dishes at night, but there is a first time for everything!

• Standards/Consortia

  • James G ☛ Updating my website RSS feed

    A reader suggested that I publish all my post text in my feed. Others suggested that this was their preferred way of reading content in their social reading tools of choice. I asked the IndieWeb community what I could do to publish my full text without having to show all of the content for my most recent five posts on my home page. gRegor came up with a simple and elegant solution: have a separate page with all the post text from which the post microformats could be used to generate an RSS feed.

• Science

  • Futurism ☛ Top Astronomer Warns That Elon Musk's Mars Plans Are a Dangerous Delusion

    But Martin Rees, respected astrophysicist and member of the Royal Households of the United Kingdom under the lofty title of "Astronomer Royal," is saying not so fast — and calling Musk's plans a "dangerous illusion."

    He made his bold-face remarks for the House of Lords' podcast Lord Speaker’s Corner, as spotted by The Telegraph, in which he also called Musk an "extraordinary figure” who has a "rather strange personality," alluding to Musk's increasingly erratic behavior.

  • Science Alert ☛ Astronauts Have an Unexpected Ability That Helps Them 'Fly' Through Space

    Usually, the vestibular system works in tandem with the visual system to sense how far, how fast, and in which direction we've traveled. But in orbit, astronauts have less 'load' on tiny particles that swoosh about in the inner ear's fluids and may become more sensitive to visual information in compensation.

  • New York Times ☛ Daniel C. Lynch, Founder of Major Computer Exhibition, Dies at 82

    After working on the earliest version of the internet, he saw its potential and founded a conference on computer networking equipment.

• Education

  • CBC ☛ 2024-03-27 [Older] Kids missing more school since pandemic, CBC analysis finds

  • [Old] Make Use Of ☛ How to Generate and Learn Morse Code Using the Linux Terminal

    Morse code may be less important these days for communication, but it's worth learning for some applications. One of the best ways to learn Morse code is to hear it.

    If you use Linux, there's a command-line program that can help you do just that. It's called morse. This program translates any text into the audio dots and dashes of Morse code.

• Hardware

  • Quartz ☛ Amelia Earhart plane wreckage potentially spotted by deep-sea drone

    South Carolina’s Deep Sea Vision, a marine robotics company, used a $9 million underwater drone called the HUGIN 6000 AUV from Kongsberg to scope out the sea floor around Howland Island. The drone uses a newly developed type of sonar called synthetic aperture sonar (SAS), which can produce high-resolution pictures of the seafloor at distances of 20,000 feet. The tech has already been used for everything from classifying underwater critters we humans struggle to see with the naked eye, to better understanding shipwreck sites.

  • Gannett ☛ How an underwater drone searched for Amelia Earhart's missing plane

    The deep-water HUGIN 6000 AUV uses synthetic aperture sonar (SAS), a newly developed sonar that can produce high-resolution pictures. The technology is capable of classifying underwater habitats or biological creatures, imaging shipwreck locations and describing the composition of bottom sediments.

    This AUV is launched from a ship and can operate independently without any physical connection to a ship or remote control from the surface. It can reach depths of nearly 20,000 feet − nearly 4 miles.

  • Hackaday ☛ Modular Vacuum Table Custom-Fits The Parts

    [enhydra] needed to modify a bunch of side inserts from some cheap ABS enclosures, and to save time and effort, he created a simple vacuum table with swappable inserts to precisely fit the parts. Suction is provided by a shop vacuum (plugged in near the bottom in the photo above) and it worked very well! Sealing and gaskets weren’t even required.

  • Hackaday ☛ Drop-In Switch Mode Regulators

    Perhaps the simplest way to regulate a DC voltage is using a voltage divider and/or an active device like a Zener diode. Besides simplicity, they have the additional advantage of not being particularly noisy, but with a major caveat: they are terribly inefficient. To solve this problem a switching regulator can be used instead, but that generally increases complexity and noise. With careful design, though, a switching regulator can be constructed to almost completely replicate a linear regulator like this drop-in TO3 replacement. (Google Translate from German)

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Some Melbourne coffee reviews

    Clara and I didn’t go out of our way to find great coffee around Melbourne, but we kept stumbling across it! Here were a small selection of our favourites, in no specific order.

  • Science Alert ☛ Eating Fatty Food Days Before Surgery May Impair Memory

    The post-op effects lasted weeks in mice.

  • New Yorker ☛ Restaurant Review: Caribbean Staples Made “Healthy as a Motha”

    HAAM, in Williamsburg, veganizes Dominican and Trinidadian food without diminishing it.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Japan and China experts discuss Fukushima treated wastewater discharge

    Japanese and Chinese experts held talks on treated wastewater from the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant, Japan’s foreign ministry said late Saturday, the first such talks to be announced since Tokyo began releasing the water into the ocean last year.

  • Ignacio Brasca ☛ Information Bombs: the danger of reading everything online | Happiness Machines

    Switching from reading blog posts to reading books (digital and physical ones) substantially improved my mental health since sometimes blog posts abstract to thousands of hours of information in small (of what I call) information bombs that make us believe we learn when in reality it’s just filling the gaps with noise or craters, these bombs I mentioned have the logical structure as follows: [...]

  • Vadim Kravcenko ☛ Mental Health in Software Engineering

    First off, anxiety and burnout are real, and they don't just go away on their own. I learned this the hard way. So, recognizing when you're starting to burn out or get anxious is crucial. For me, it was about noticing when I started to dread work I usually enjoyed and the random sense of apocalyptic doom or when my sleep went sideways. I mean, I don’t think anyone can miss those signs, but it took me half a year to recognize them and go to a psychotherapist. I thought I had the winter blues. Go figure…

    Saying “No” to anything non-critical in your off time, as well as setting boundaries between work and the rest of your life. I’m not very good at this yet, but I am learning to shut off after work hours. No reading emails, no "quick checks" on projects, no MacBook even. It's still challenging, but it’s getting better. Also, sometimes my partners call me on the weekends to do something; unless it’s something critical, I tell them I will handle it on Monday. Trust me, the world won't end if you tell someone you’ll do it 24 or 48 hours later.

  • The Hill ☛ Teens’ latest social media trend? Self-diagnosing their mental health issues

    Experts said they have regularly observed the practice too, and that the solution is not as simple as taking away phones or chastising teenagers who turn to free methods to receive mental health advice when more comprehensive assistance may be difficult to get.

    “Kids are all coming in and I’m asking them, ‘Where did you get this diagnosis?’” said Don Grant, a national adviser for Healthy Device Management who previously ran his own practice. Grant said he would get responses such as “Oh, there’s an influence,” “Oh, I took a quiz,” or “Oh, there’s a group on social media that talks about it.”

    Influencers and online groups are “convincing these kids they have all these diagnoses,” he said.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Sahara dust cloud smothers Germany, France and Switzerland

    The blanket of Saharan dust affected air quality in some areas.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Saharan dust smothers Switzerland, southeast France

    In neighboring France, local authorities in the southeast and south announced that the air pollution threshold was breached on Saturday, with the Herault department asking residents to avoid intense physical effort, particularly those with heart or respiratory problems.

    The Sahara desert releases 60 to 200 million tonnes of mineral dust per year. While the largest particles come rapidly back down to earth, the smallest can travel thousands of kilometers.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-26 [Older] Brazil probes Jair Bolsonaro's stay at Hungarian embassy

  • CBC ☛ 2024-03-24 [Older] With inconsistent support for brain injuries in Canada, peer groups are a lifeline

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-26 [Older] Germany: Cocoa prices ahead of Easter hit 20-year high

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-26 [Older] Kenya releases first starvation cult bodies to families

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-25 [Older] Florida passes law restricting teen social media access

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-25 [Older] Germany rejects skills test for elderly drivers

  • CBC ☛ 2024-03-25 [Older] Calgary judge rules 27-year-old can go ahead with medically-assisted death despite father's concerns

  • CBC ☛ 2024-03-26 [Older] Health Canada banned this chemical used on hydro poles. Now power producers say they're running out

  • CBC ☛ 2024-03-27 [Older] Rural Ontario man finds high levels of radioactive gas in new home — wants others to check

  • CBC ☛ 2024-03-26 [Older] Canada is building a new lab to handle some of the most dangerous diseases in the world

  • CBC ☛ 2024-03-27 [Older] [Canadian] Ontario regulator exploring legal options to address allegations of corporate pressure at pharmacies

  • Science Alert ☛ Thousands of Eels Found Dead in New Zealand, And It's Not The First Time

  • Science Alert ☛ Autism Can Boost Cognitive Performance, And We May Finally Know Why

    The results are surprising.

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • US News And World Report ☛ India Rescuing Citizens Forced Into Cyber Fraud Schemes in Cambodia

    The Indian embassy in Cambodia is working with Cambodian authorities and has rescued and repatriated about 250 Indians, including 75 in the last three months, India's Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said in a statement on Saturday.

    Jaiswal was responding to Indian news reports that stated more than 5,000 Indians are trapped in Cambodia and being forced to carry out cyber frauds on people back home.

  • Futurism ☛ Crazed CEOs Adding AI to Home Appliances

    Well, get ready for more AI because CEOs at appliance companies want to put AI in your oven and other household items, Forbes reports, which sounds like a privacy and functionality hellscape waiting to happen.

    "Generative AI in your oven? Why not?" writes tech influencer and self-proclaimed futurist Bernard Marr in a Forbes column dripping with AI enthusiasm. "After all, AI has been creeping into our homes for years (think smart lightbulbs and Alexa) — but thanks to generative AI, these interactions will become even more human and more personal."

  • Hamel Husain ☛ - Your AI Product Needs Evals

    I started working with language models five years ago when I led the team that created CodeSearchNet, a precursor to GitHub CoPilot. Since then, I’ve seen many successful and unsuccessful approaches to building LLM products. I’ve found that unsuccessful products almost always share a common root cause: a failure to create robust evaluation systems.

    I’m currently an independent consultant who helps companies build domain-specific AI products. I hope companies can save thousands of dollars in consulting fees by reading this post carefully. As much as I love making money, I hate seeing folks make the same mistake repeatedly.

    This post outlines my thoughts on building evaluation systems for LLMs-powered AI products.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ AI safety protocols might be missing the biggest threat

    “What humans want,” of course, isn’t a monolith. Different people want different things and have countless ideas of what constitutes “the greater good.” I think most of us would rightly be concerned if an artificial intelligence were aligned with Vladimir Putin’s or Kim Jong Un’s visions of an optimal world.

  • Mike Rockwell ☛ Apple Versus the World

    But today, it feels like they make more poor decisions than good ones. I’m sort-of stuck, though, because of the services lock-in and a small number of third-party apps that there aren’t any good options for on other platforms.

  • Simon Willison ☛ Running OCR against PDFs and images directly in your browser

    I attended the Story Discovery At Scale data journalism conference at Stanford this week. One of the perennial hot topics at any journalism conference concerns data extraction: how can we best get data out of PDFs and images?

  • Gizmodo ☛ CEO of Firm Tapped for AI Metal Detectors in NYC Subways Says Subways Are Not a 'Good Use-Case'

    “Subways in particular are not a place that we think is a good use-case for us,” said Peter George, the top executive at Evolv Technologies, during a recent call with journalists. “Both for the [concept of operations] and being below ground and interference with the railways — [subways are] not a great use-case,” he reiterated. While George didn’t elaborate on why they’re not useful in that context, it’s not a particularly good look for the Mayor’s Office.

  • The Hill ☛ NYC plans to use a gun detector pilot program in subways 

    The weapons detection technology will be implemented in late June following a 90-day waiting period, in which police will identify companies that carry this technology and evaluate the technology’s effectiveness. Adams did not disclose which subway stations will be picked for the program.

    During Thursday’s press conference at the Fulton Street Subway Station, Adams unveiled a scanner from Massachusetts-based security technology company Evolv, which has faced allegations of doctoring its testing results, The Associated Press reported.

  • VOA News ☛ Gmail Revolutionized Email 20 Years Ago

    The jokes were consistently over-the-top, and people learned to laugh them off as another example of Google mischief. That's why Page and Brin decided to unveil something no one would believe was possible 20 years ago on April Fool's Day.

    It was Gmail, a free service boasting 1 gigabyte of storage per account, an amount that sounds almost pedestrian in an age of 1-terabyte iPhones. But it sounded like a preposterous amount of email capacity back then, enough to store about 13,500 emails before running out of space compared to just 30 to 60 emails in the then-leading webmail services run by Yahoo and Microsoft. That translated into 250 to 500 times more email storage space.

  • Xe's Blog ☛ Introducing ChatMimi: The Xe Iaso Cinematic Universe (XICU) Chatbot

    Computers are complicated and this field changes so rapidly that it's hard to keep up. That's why we're excited to announce the release of ChatMimi, the Xe Iaso Cinematic Universe (XICU) chatbot. ChatMimi is a conversational agent that can help you with all your computer-related questions. Whether you're a beginner or an expert, ChatMimi is here to assist you.

  • Neowin ☛ Discord to start showing ads in the coming week after resisting for almost a decade

    Popular gaming social media platform Discord Is no longer going to be one of the rare ad-free havens of the tech market. The Wall Street Journal reported that the startup with over 200 million monthly active users plans to start showing advertisements “in the coming week”.

    “The paid promotions are from videogame makers and will offer users gifts for completing in-game tasks while their friends watch on Discord,” WSJ specified, adding that the platform plans to hire more than a dozen sales personnel.

    While ads are a common occurrence on free services or even some subscription-based platforms, such as streaming services, Discord has resisted the trend since its foundation in May 2015, almost nine years ago.

  • Don Marti: LLMs and reputation management

    One of the big problems with widespread use of large language models (LLMs) is going to be that reputation management firms will be able to put up a lot of content to try to clean up mentions of their own clients. Other players will also, in a totally deniable way, be able to put up their own text to train LLMs to say bad stuff about people who are opposed to their clients in some way. What is seen as important material about a person from the point of view of, say, a reporter or Wikipedia editor, is not necessarily going to be what gets pulled out a big pile of crawled text by an LLM.

    You can kind of see what’s possible by looking at 20th century history. Many Axis officers from World War II have a lot of content about them on the Internet somewhere.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • CBC ☛ 2024-03-22 [Older] Albertans have lost at least $156M to fraud this decade. Many others don't report the crime

    • Wired ☛ OpenAI Can Re-Create Human Voices—but Won’t Release the Tech Yet

      Once a voice is cloned, a user can input text into the Voice Engine and get an AI-generated voice result. But OpenAI is not ready to widely release its technology. The company initially planned to launch a pilot program for developers to sign up for the Voice Engine API earlier this month. But after more consideration about ethical implications, the company decided to scale back its ambitions for now.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Armin Ronacher ☛ Skin in the Game | Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings

      Over the years it has been pretty clear that some folks are contributing in the Open Source space and don't want to have their name attached to their contributions. I'm not going to judge if they have legitimate reasons for doing so or if pseudonymity a good or bad thing. That it is happening, is simply a fact of life. The consequences of that however are quite interesting and I think worth discussing.

    • The Hill ☛ California governor to deploy 500 surveillance cameras to Oakland to fight crime

      Hundreds of high-tech surveillance cameras are being installed in the city of Oakland and surrounding freeways to battle crime, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Friday.

      Newsom, a Democrat, said in a news release that the California Highway Patrol has contracted with Flock Safety to install 480 cameras that can identify and track vehicles by license plate, type, color and even decals and bumper stickers. The cameras will provide authorities with real-time alerts of suspect vehicles.

• Defence/Aggression

  • El País ☛ Building bombings and 14-year-old hitmen: Organized crime overwhelms Sweden

    Power struggles between Swedish [sic] mafia clans make the Scandinavian country one of the most violent in Europe

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Column: Trump, California would clash on EVs, offshore drilling

    “It’s breathtaking how easily manipulated this man is,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement. “His only interest is pleasing Big Oil CEOs, and mortgaging our kids and the planet in the process.”

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-27 [Older] Haiti: France evacuates 240 French and EU citizens

  • New York Times ☛ Pope Francis, in Easter Message, Calls for Gaza Cease-Fire

    Pope Francis’ decisions to reduce his participation in two major Holy Week events had raised fears about his health.

  • CBC ☛ 2024-03-26 [Older] Canada targeted by same Chinese crackers the U.S., U.K. accuse of cyberespionage that hit millions

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-25 [Older] Malawi: Call for 'urgent support' after disaster declared

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-25 [Older] Nigeria: Joy as rescued kidnapped schoolchildren reunited with families

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-27 [Older] IDF-Hezbollah exchange kills several in Lebanon, Israel

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-27 [Older] India summons US diplomat following Kejriwal comments

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-27 [Older] Moscow attack: Why intelligence agencies share information

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-27 [Older] Moscow concert hall attack death toll rises to 140

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-27 [Older] Myanmar: 'No space for a quick fix,' says ex-UN country head

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-27 [Older] Sweden Quran burner says he will go to Norway

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-23 [Older] Somali pirates to face trial after India navy capture

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-23 [Older] India summons German diplomat over Kejriwal arrest comments

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-25 [Older] India and Germany push to boost defense ties

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-25 [Older] Japan requested summit with Kim Jong Un, North Korea says

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-23 [Older] Philippines supply ships clash with Chinese coast guard

  • CBC ☛ 2024-03-26 [Older] Violence in N.L. schools worse than it's ever been, teachers' union says

  • CBC ☛ 2024-03-26 [Older] RCMP say 4 found dead inside rural home near Neudorf, Sask., were all family members

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-24 [Older] France raises terror alert after Moscow theater attack

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-24 [Older] Germany's Baerbock demands humanitarian cease-fire in Gaza

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-24 [Older] Haiti: France offers evacuation flights to its citizens

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-24 [Older] Mexico: Scores of kidnapped victims rescued, dozens still missing

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-24 [Older] Nigeria: More than 100 kidnapped schoolchildren rescued

  • France24 ☛ 🔴Live: Deadly Israeli strike hits hospital tent camp in Gaza

    An Israeli air strike hit a tent camp in the courtyard of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in central Gaza on Sunday, killing at least four people and wounding 17, World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. Tedros said a WHO team was at the hospital when the strike occurred. The Israeli military earlier said the strike targeted an Islamic Jihad “command centre”.

  • New York Times ☛ In Yemen, Conflict and Hunger Stalk a Lean Ramadan

    Airstrikes, crippling inflation and a drop in foreign aid are raising alarms about a new humanitarian crisis in the world’s poorest Arab country.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Syria says two civilians hurt in Israeli strikes on Damascus outskirts

    Two civilians have been injured in Israeli strikes on the outskirts of Damascus on Sunday, the Syrian defence ministry said, in the second such attack on the country in a few days.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Bodies of eight Chinese migrants found on beach in Mexico after boat capsize

    The bodies of eight Chinese migrants were found on a beach in southern Mexico after the boat they were traveling in capsized, officials said Saturday.

  • Hackaday ☛ A Threat Level Monitor For Everyone

    A TV news pundit might on any given evening in 2024 look at the viewers and gravely announce that we are living in uncertain times. Those of us who’ve been around for a bit longer than we’d like to admit would see that, scratch our heads, and ask “Have we ever not lived in uncertain times?” If all this uncertainty is getting to you though, you can now reassure yourself as [Ian Williams] has, with a threat level monitor which displays the UK’s current level of projected fear threat level.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Latvia ☛ Powerful LTV documentary from Ukraine available to watch online

      Latvian Television has made another of its powerful documentary films available with English-language subtitles.

    • Latvia ☛ Ukrainian egg-painting tradition adds color to Easter in Latvia

      In many Latvian households, eggs are dyed and decorated at Easter. Now another colorful addition to the Easter-tide table has arrived with Ukrainians finding refuge in Latvia.

    • Atlantic Council ☛ Ukraine urgently needs air defenses as Russia decimates power grid

      A new Russian air offensive has destroyed much of Ukraine's civilian energy infrastructure in a matter of days and threatens to spark a humanitarian catastrophe if Ukraine does not urgently receive enhanced air defenses, writes Suriya Evans-Pritchard Jayanti.

    • France24 ☛ France to deliver old armoured vehicles, new missiles to Ukraine

      France will deliver hundreds of old armoured vehicles and new surface-to-air missiles to Ukraine in its war against Russia, French Defence Minister Sébastien Lecornu said on Sunday. The announcement came as a Russian cruise missile strike on infrastructure in Ukraine’s western Lviv region killed one man, while another man died in an attack in Ukraine's northeastern region.

    • RFERL ☛ Zelenskiy Vows Ukraine Will 'Endure' Amid Relentless Russian Missiles, Drones

      Ukraine suffered another night of Russian bombardment, with drones and missiles targeting civilian sites in the south and the west of the country, Kyiv’s military said, as a defiant Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy vowed his country will "endure" despite the ongoing Russian onslaught.

    • New York Times ☛ A Russian Defector’s Killing Raises Specter of Hit Squads

      The death in Spain of Maksim Kuzminov, a pilot who delivered a helicopter and secret documents to Ukraine, has raised fears that the Kremlin is again targeting its enemies.

    • RFERL ☛ Russia Launches 'Counterterrorism Operation' In Daghestan; 3 Detained

      Three people have been detained after Russia launched what it described as a “counterterrorism operation” in the southern region of Daghestan, Russian state news agencies reported, quoting the National Anti-Terrorism Committee (NAC).

    • New York Times ☛ We Still Haven’t Figured Out How to Beat ISIS

      Stripping the Islamic State of its self-proclaimed caliphate is not the same as beating it.

    • New York Times ☛ Ewan McGregor and Mary Elizabeth Winstead Check In to ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’

      The actors, who met while filming “Fargo” in 2017, are now married and have reunited onscreen in “A Gentleman in Moscow.”

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • El País ☛ Next stop: a global tax on the super-rich?

    This modest but powerful circle of individuals is not only accumulating more wealth, it is also sharpening its strategies to ease its bill to the public treasury. According to the EU Tax Observatory’s Global Tax Evasion 2024 report, the mega-rich — i.e., those with wealth in excess of $1 billion — pay a derisory percentage of personal taxes like personal income tax relative to their fortune: an effective rate of between 0% and 0.5%.

    There are many examples of this. When the pandemic was still at its height in the summer of 2021, the income tax returns of the 25 richest people in the U.S., such as Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg, were published. According to this information released by the ProPublica network of journalists, the country’s leading tycoons shoulder a lower effective rate than the working class.

  • Futurism ☛ The Person Who Was in Charge of OpenAI's $175 Million Fund Appears to Be Fake

    A doozy of a scoop by the newsletter Nongaap Investing and extensively followed up by Business Insider certainly makes us wonder. The gist is that for a period of time in 2023, the person in charge of OpenAI's $175 million startup fund appears to have been completely fake — and OpenAI says the documents filed with the California Secretary of State to put the fake person in charge were "completely fabricated."

  • New York Times ☛ Revisiting Florida 2000 and the Butterfly Effect

    We’ll never know what would have happened if the Supreme Court had allowed the recount to continue. But I don’t think it’s always appreciated that we probably do know that Mr. Gore would have won Florida, and therefore the presidency, if it weren’t for the infamous “butterfly ballot” in Palm Beach County.

  • Futurism ☛ Investigation Finds What Really Happens If You Actually Click Those ░P░U░S░S░Y░I░N░B░I░O░ Links

    In an investigation conducted by technology writer John Herrman for New York Magazine, the journalist found that ultimately, all those hilariously-horny declarations lead to the same place: a scammy Dutch-owned sexual fantasy chat site that outsources its labor to low-income countries.

• Environment

  • Eco-Business ☛ Spike in deforestation in Indonesian protected area linked to shadowy firms based in tax havens

    The deforestation rate has soared in a protected area for Indigenous communities and critically endangered species in Indonesia, with a domain nearly half the size of Singapore cleared over the past three years, a report by a network of environmental groups has found.

  • New York Times ☛ Methane From Landfills Is a Big Driver of Climate Change, Study Says

    These landfills also belch methane, a powerful, planet-warming gas, on average at almost three times the rate reported to federal regulators, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science.

    The study measured methane emissions at roughly 20 percent of 1,200 or so large, operating landfills in the United States. It adds to a growing body of evidence that landfills are a significant driver of climate change, said Riley Duren, founder of the public-private partnership Carbon Mapper, who took part in the study.

  • AAAS ☛ Quantifying methane emissions from United States landfills | Science

    Methane is the most important trace greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide, and anthropogenic emissions account for more than half of the global total. Landfills containing solid waste are potentially major sources of methane, but their importance has remained poorly constrained. Cusworth et al. report data gathered by airborne imaging spectrometers from about 20% of open US landfills to show that considerable point source emissions can be detected at a majority of sites. These results underline the need for better monitoring of landfill emissions to help guide climate change mitigation policy. —H. Jesse Smith

  • CBC ☛ 2024-03-24 [Older] Rio Tinto says it's a green mining giant. Its footprint in Quebec and beyond tells a different story

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-25 [Older] The hidden environmental cost of mining sand

  • CBC ☛ 2024-03-27 [Older] Canada is still backing the fossil fuel industry with billions, report finds

  • RFERL ☛ Death Toll Rises To 10 As Torrential Rains, Landslides Strike Pakistan's Northwest

    The death toll has risen to 10 people, with a least 12 others injured, over the past 48 hours as heavy rains and landslides have wreaked havoc in Pakistan’s northwestern Kyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, officials said on March 31.

  • New York Times ☛ Can We Engineer Our Way Out of the Climate Crisis?

    Blocking solar rays. Sucking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Ideas that sound like science fiction are now starting to become reality, raising concerns about safety.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Leon Mika ☛ Canberra Railway Museum

      Went to the Canberra Railway Museum this morning. Quite a wide variety of locomotives and carriages being restored, with many of them quite accessible to guests, including the cabin. Here’s a selection of the more interesting sites.

    • CS Monitor ☛ Transportation spending surges to historic levels. Will US get historic results?

      The United States has never spent so much money on transportation, dams, sewer and water systems, electric transmission lines, and other networks. As a share of gross domestic product, today’s effort is bigger than infrastructure spending under the New Deal and the most spent in the last half-century. Looking strictly at the surge in transportation funding, experts on both right and left are cheering what the Biden administration has billed as a once-in-a-generation effort to rebuild and improve.

      Whether the nation will get once-in-a-generation results, however, remains unclear. Inflation has eroded some of the federal funding boost. There are concerns that state and local governments are spending on mundane fixes instead of innovative projects with more bang for the buck.

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-24 [Older] Germany: Massive Autobahn pileup leaves 2 dead

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-24 [Older] Hungary: Deaths reported after rally car hits spectators

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-25 [Older] How one German solar startup is blowing against the wind

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-27 [Older] Lufthansa, Verdi union reach deal for ground staff

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-26 [Older] Germany: Bahn, train drivers agree to 35-hour week in deal

    • CBC ☛ 2024-03-22 [Older] Stellantis recalls 10,000 vehicles in Canada for airbag defects

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-26 [Older] How crypto heists help North Korea fund its nuclear program

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-26 [Older] Is India doing enough to woo Tesla, other e-car makers?

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-25 [Older] Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun to step down by end of 2024

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-25 [Older] Germany: Bahn and GDL train drivers' union strike pay deal

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-25 [Older] Northvolt launches electric car battery plant in Germany

    • CBC ☛ 2024-03-27 [Older] B.C. files unexplained wealth order to seize cash, gold bars from Quadriga crypto scam co-founder

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • CBC ☛ 2024-03-23 [Older] Yamnuska Wolfdog Sanctuary in Alberta hopes to expand as 15 new additions settle in

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-25 [Older] Germany's brown hare population jumps to record high

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ Rattlesnakes on Santa Catalina Island have learned that it pays to be unusually aggressive

      A year ago, the team discovered the first evidence that a stressed rattlesnake can find solace in the presence of a nearby companion, or “friend,” leading to a healthy, stable heart rate, similar to the way humans calm each other down.

      Now, they have seized on a new explanation for the unusually heightened levels of defensive behavior of rattlesnakes on Santa Catalina Island: It pays to rattle more, bite more often and inject more toxin on an island where they could be trampled or stomped to death by imported goats, pigs, bison and deer, according to a study published recently in the scientific journal Toxins.

      “The results of this study unambiguously revealed substantially greater defensiveness in Catalina rattlesnakes compared to mainland rattlesnakes,” the study says.

    • CBC ☛ 2024-03-26 [Older] Stranded killer whale was pregnant, necropsy shows

    • CBC ☛ 2024-03-26 [Older] New documentary shows gender diversity par for the course in nature

  • Overpopulation

    • CBC ☛ 2024-03-27 [Older] Alberta's population surges by record-setting 202,000 people: Here's where they all came from

    • JURIST ☛ UN experts raise concerns about Guadeloupe water crisis and censorship

      After a last-minute ban was imposed on a planned debate about the water crisis in Guadeloupe, organized by Antilles University, UN experts voiced concerns about censorship of human rights advocates, whistleblowers and scientists speaking out about the water shortages’ possible solutions. They said, “Water is a fundamental issue, and everyone deserves access to a thorough understanding of how it works and to exercise the right to participate freely in shaping public decisions and policies.”

    • New York Times ☛ Water Crisis in India’s Silicon Valley

      Bengaluru gets plenty of rain. But the city did not properly adapt as its soaring population strained traditional water sources.

• Finance

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-25 [Older] Pakistan seeks long-term IMF bailout to fix broken economy

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Intel CEO's compensation still trails AMD CEO's by half — despite a significant boost in 2023

    Earlier this week it was revealed that Intel’s CEO Pat Gelsinger had earned a big rise in 2023. However, the extra millions mean Gelsinger is still only receiving approximately half the total compensation AMD CEO Lisa Su receives. We are still awaiting Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's 2023 total compensation figures.

  • CBC ☛ 2024-03-25 [Older] Manitoba OKs $530M settlement after judge found province improperly kept money from children in care

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-27 [Older] Japan's yen dips to 34-year low against US dollar

  • CBC ☛ 2024-03-26 [Older] Ontario deficit will triple as economy weakens, 2024 budget shows

  • CBC ☛ 2024-03-26 [Older] Canada Goose is laying off 17 per cent of its global corporate staff

  • CBC ☛ 2024-03-26 [Older] Canada's need to improve productivity has reached emergency level, says Bank of Canada official

  • CBC ☛ 2024-03-27 [Older] Ontario colleges to face biggest hit from foreign student cap

  • YLE ☛ May deadline for many to claim tax deductions

    Tax returns are on the agenda for millions of taxpayers in Finland this spring, and a median income earner can claim a couple of common tax deductions worth up to 160 euros.

  • YLE ☛ Yle Poll: Finns not keen on pension cuts

    Government ministers have talked about a need for billions of euros in spending cuts to next year's state budget. They are expected to negotiate those adjustments in the coming months.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Register UK ☛ Sega continues layoff streak with 240 European staff gone

    According to the video games veteran, it had 3,459 employees as of March of last year, meaning 240 layoffs takes away roughly seven percent of that top figure, in line with recent layoffs at other studios. The ax is set to fall at the Sega Europe office, and Sega's UK-based developers Sega Hardlight and Creative Assembly.

  • RFERL ☛ U.S. Ambassador Issues Rare Statement On Warning Before Russia's Crocus Massacre

    Ambassador Lynne Tracy said several Russian officials had “misrepresented and publicly dismissed” the usefulness of information passed on to Russian security services earlier this month related to threats from the Islamic State, which claimed responsibility for the attack soon after it was over.

    In the statement, Tracy reiterated that the information shared with Russian authorities was in writing and was specific, timely, and credible.

  • BIA Net ☛ Turkey local elections marred by irregularities in Kurdish provinces

    Mass voting by security officers who were relocated fro other provinces is reported throughout the country's predominantly Kurdish-populated regions.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-26 [Older] Pakistan: 5 Chinese workers killed in bombing

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-26 [Older] Senegal: Will Faye bring change after election victory?

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • New York Times ☛ The Lawyers Using Defamation Lawsuits to Address Political Disinformation

      Michael J. Gottlieb is part of a cadre of lawyers deploying defamation, one of the oldest areas of the law, against a tide of political disinformation.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-25 [Older] Spain: Judge halts blocking of Telegram pending probe

  • Reason ☛ Journal of Free Speech Law: "Fake News, Lies, and Other Familiar Problems," by Prof. Sam Lebovic

    The fifth of twelve articles from the Knight Institute’s Lies, Free Speech, and the Law symposium.

  • The Markup ☛ NYC’s AI Chatbot Tells Businesses to Break the Law – The Markup

    The problem, however, is that the city’s chatbot is telling businesses to break the law.

    Five months after launch, it’s clear that while the bot appears authoritative, the information it provides on housing policy, worker rights, and rules for entrepreneurs is often incomplete and in worst-case scenarios “dangerously inaccurate,” as one local housing policy expert told The Markup.

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ States rush to combat AI threat to elections

    This year’s presidential election will be the first since generative AI — a form of artificial intelligence that can create new content, including images, audio, and video — became widely available. That’s raising fears that millions of voters could be deceived by a barrage of political deepfakes.

    But, while Congress has done little to address the issue, states are moving aggressively to respond — though questions remain about how effective any new measures to combat AI-created disinformation will be.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-26 [Older] Julian Assange can appeal extradition, UK High Court rules [Ed: Misleading headline]

  • CBC ☛ 2024-03-25 [Older] Judge confirms plan to restructure Atlantic Canada newspaper chain

  • The Hill ☛ Russian journalist who covered Navalny’s trial jailed in Moscow on extremism

    Favorskaya, identified also as Antonina Kravtsova, was ordered by a Moscow court Friday to remain in custody pending an investigation and trial until at least May 28, The Associated Press reported.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Julian Assange’s Basic Press Freedoms Are Still in Danger

    In granting Julian Assange only the most limited appeal rights, the UK High Court has deliberately closed its eyes to the press freedom issues at stake and shown a grotesque indifference to Assange’s basic human rights.

  • VOA News ☛ Iranian TV journalist stabbed in London in stable condition

    London's Metropolitan Police has said its counterterrorism unit is investigating the stabbing, given previous hostile threats by Iran against perceived opponents in Britain.

    The force said the motive was unclear and officers were keeping "an open mind," but that "the victim's occupation as a journalist at a Persian-language media organization based in the U.K." was being considered.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • CBC ☛ 2024-03-22 [Older] Family sues Winnipeg care home operators after woman strangled by privacy curtain on her birthday

  • CBC ☛ 2024-03-24 [Older] Anti-authority narratives could tear 'fabric of society,' intelligence report warns

  • The Scotsman ☛ Top officer warns Hate Crime Act could harm trust in police

    “What we’re going to be asking police to do is identify the tipping point between what is offensive and when offensive becomes abusive and therefore is subject to the legislation.”

  • Omicron Limited ☛ The Gambia may allow female genital mutilation again, another sign of a global trend eroding women's rights

    The Gambia's criminalization of FGM was not the first in west Africa but it came as a surprise. The president at the time, Yahya Jammeh, declared the rampant cultural tradition a non-religious practice that caused harm. There was some dissent within the country but human rights groups welcomed the ban.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• The Telegraph UK ☛ I tried to survive 24 hours without using 'Big Five' tech – and my life became impossible

  I am not the first to experiment with going Big Tech-free. In 2019, the tech reporter Kashmir Hill embarked upon a six-week-long mission to eliminate the tech giants from her life and find alternatives. She used a custom-built VPN (virtual private network) to block the Big Tech companies one by one – and found it was impossible.

  “Much of the digital world became inaccessible,” she wrote. “I came to think of Amazon and Google as the providers of the very infrastructure of the internet, so embedded in the architecture of the digital world that even their competitors had to rely on their services.” When she blocked Google, the entire internet slowed down, because almost every site relied on Google to track its users or supply its fonts.

  Lawmakers are keenly aware of the dominance of the tech giants. This week, the EU launched probes into Apple, Google and Meta under the Digital Markets Act (DMA), landmark legislation that gives the EU licence to rein in Big Tech if it suspects that these companies have an unfair advantage over competitors.

• Patents

  • Dennis Crouch/Patently-O ☛ Jury Instructions and Objective Indicia of Nonobviousness: Federal Circuit Grants New Trial in Inline Plastics v. Lacerta

    In a recent decision, the Federal Circuit vacated a judgment of invalidity and remanded for a new trial, holding that the district court’s jury instruction on objective indicia of nonobviousness constituted prejudicial legal error. The case, Inline Plastics Corp. v. Lacerta Group, LLC, No. 2022-1954 (Fed. Cir. Mar. 27, 2024), involved patents relating to tamper-resistant and tamper-evident food containers.

  • Kangaroo Courts

    • [Satire] Microsoft trains Unified Patent Court judges to count to 5 with its new AI assistant | FFII

      Microsoft’s lead patent attorney William Gates has been elected as part-time judge at the Unified Patent Court. The Unified Patent Court is understaffed for the mathematics field of technology.

• Copyrights

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Researchers propose two new killer whale species

    Cope, secretary of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, slapped his own introduction on the paper with descriptions and Latin names of the orcas inhabiting the Northern Pacific.

    Because of rules governing the scientific naming of animals, Cope would forever be credited with the names believed to have been chosen by Scammon. Nevermind that Cope probably never saw a living killer whale.

    The paper also misidentified Scammon and gave him little credit. When the whaler saw it, he was furious, according to the biography.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ UK Govt: "Pronounced Inaccuracies" in Press Reports on IP-Related Matters

    A study on emerging public perceptions of intellectual property in UK media has found that there are "pronounced inaccuracies in the reporting on IP related matters in the UK Press." An initial review published by the UK's Intellectual Property Office notes that inaccurate reporting may be due to a "lack of understanding." Further investigation would be required to find out the "cause and extent" and the subsequent impact on IP rights as understood by the public.

  • CBC ☛ 2024-03-25 [Older] Parents file $1.5M lawsuit after Quebec teacher accused of selling students' artwork online