Leftovers

• Latvia ☛ Latvian theater director Zane Kreicberga dies

  On the night of June 11, Latvian theater director, professor at the Latvian Academy of Culture (LKA) and theoretician of performing arts Zane Kreicberga (1971–2024) passed away after a serious illness, her relatives announced on Facebook.

• Science

  • Site36 ☛ Against academic freedom: German Ministry led by Liberals wanted to withdraw funding from scientists

    The Ministry of Education in Germany considered sanctions against the signatories of an open letter following the eviction of a pro-Palestinian university occupation. These academics complain that open debates are hardly possible any more. After freedom of expression and freedom of assembly, academic freedom in Germany is also being jeopardised by the Gaza war. >

• Hardware

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Nvidia will increase shader counts but not ROPS on RTX 50-series GPUs — except on the lowest tier GB207, according to leak

    Nvidia's Blackwell gaming-oriented GPU architecture will reportedly not boast any additional render output units compared with Ada Lovelace, according to a leaker. Nvidia will be relying on the Blackwell architecture itself to provide performance improvements, which can of course be designed to work around potential ROPS limitations.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-04 [Older] 'Heatflation' in Middle East: How high will food prices go?

  • New York Times ☛ No, a Remote Amazon Tribe Did Not Get Addicted to Porn

    A Times story about the arrival of high-speed internet in a remote Amazon tribe spiraled into its own cautionary tale on the dark side of the web.

  • Digital Music News ☛ Red Lobster Features Flavor Flav in Crabfest Promo After Rapper Buys Entire Menu

    In May 2024, seafood chain Red Lobster announced it was filing for bankruptcy. Upon hearing the news, Flavor Flav bought the entire menu. Now the rapper is featuring prominently in their Crabfest promos in an attempt to draw in crowds.

  • European Commission ☛ Commission secures access for Member States to 665,000 doses of zoonotic influenza vaccines to prevent avian flu

    Today, the Commission's HERA as part of its mandate on preparedness, has signed on behalf of participating Member States, a joint procurement framework contract for the supply of up to 665,000 pre-pandemic vaccine doses of the up-to-date Zoonotic Influenza Vaccine Seqirus.

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • JURIST ☛ HRW report reveals pictures of Brazil children misused to train Hey Hi (AI) tools

    Personal pictures of Brazilian children have been misused to power artificial intelligence tools, global watchdog Human Rights Watch reported Monday. Pictures of children are being included without their knowledge or consent in a data set that companies are using for Hey Hi (AI) tools to be trained.

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ LLMs Acting Deceptively

    New research: “Deception abilities emerged in large language models“:

    Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are currently at the forefront of intertwining Hey Hi (AI) systems with human communication and everyday life. Thus, aligning them with human values is of great importance. However, given the steady increase in reasoning abilities, future LLMs are under suspicion of becoming able to deceive human operators and utilizing this ability to bypass monitoring efforts. As a prerequisite to this, LLMs need to possess a conceptual understanding of deception strategies. /blockquote>

  • New York Times ☛ Mistral, a French Hey Hi (AI) Start-Up, Is Valued at $6.2 Billion [Ed: Bubble is stupidity and buzzwords]

    Created by alumni from Meta and Google, Mistral is just a year old and has already raised more than $1 billion in total from investors, leading to eye-popping valuations.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Musk says he'll ban all Fashion Company Apple devices if Proprietary Chaffbot Company is integrated at the OS level — claims it would represent a massive security risk

    Elon claims that Fashion Company Apple has no clue what Proprietary Chaffbot Company will do it users' data after it processes their requests.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Reason ☛ Preliminary FBI Data: Crime Steeply Declined in Early 2024

    While the data is far from perfect, if the overall trend holds, violent crime could be back to pre-COVID levels by the end of the year.

  • RFA ☛ How Fentanylware (TikTok) made a barefoot Vietnamese ‘monk’ go viral

    Thich Minh Tue and his simple lifestyle gained myriad online admirers but authorities detained him.

  • Press Gazette ☛ ITN election diary: Report from the frontline of the first Tiktok election [interference]

    ITV News launched a politics-specific Tiktok - but then had less time than anticipated to grow it before the election.

  • Reason ☛ Free Speech Unmuted: Internet Policy and Free Speech, with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Silicon Valley) [Ed: TikTok is an attack on free speech; some people just don'tm get it and twist things completely]

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-04 [Older] Hungary's Orban under pressure before EU elections

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-04 [Older] Holocaust survivors urge young EU voters to shun far right

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-04 [Older] Belgian election tests limits of media's far-right boycott

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-04 [Older] Are North Korea's trash balloons a sign of bigger tensions?

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-05 [Older] Slovakia: Robert Fico makes first comments since shooting

• Environment

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-04 [Older] Germany floods caused by rare 'Vb' weather conditions

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-04 [Older] Germany faces flood emergency in Danube River region

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-04 [Older] Germany floods: Rain eases as fifth death confirmed

  • Energy/Transportation

    • European Commission ☛ Speech by Commissioner Simson at the opening session of the 2024 European Sustainable Energy Week

• Finance

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-04 [Older] Opportunity Card: A boon for Germany's labor market?

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-05 [Older] UK: King Charles banknotes enter circulation

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • New York Times ☛ The Gay-Bashing Email Splitting Colorado’s Republican Party

    The MAGA movement tears another state Republican Party apart.

  • Daniel Pocock ☛ Motoring Enthusiast Party & Group Voting Tickets for Ireland?

    The leading candidate in the Midlands-North-West ballot, Luke "Ming" Flanagan, demonstrates his authenticity by driving a car from 2001. When constituents seek advice about motoring issues, Ming is just as prepared as any other candidate to share his experience.

    Looking at the tiny number of votes that elected the AMEP senator, it is very tempting to criticize the group voting ticket system. On the other hand, looking at the count taking place here in Castlebar, we can see very few people fill out all 27 boxes on the enormous ballot papers. Therefore, approximately ten percent of ballot papers are being set aside in each transfer of preferences. Could there be a middle ground?

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • JURIST ☛ US appeals court upholds public school ban of student wearing transgender-critical shirt

    The US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit on Sunday upheld a Massachusetts public middle school’s prohibition against one of its students from wearing a shirt with a message critical of transgender ideology.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Gemini* and Gopher

  • Personal/Opinions

    • Re: Cold Tea?! ☕

      I'm quite happy to drink cold tea. The flavours are still there, but they're subtler.

      I've heard that flavours of almost anything are stronger when it's hot. It's something to do with volatile scent molecules wafting up the back of your nose. Something like that. But when it's cold you still get some of them, and I like a cooler mouth-feel.

    • Overheard at work

  • Technology and Free Software

    • Timeless Tech: Capturing daily life with a revived Palm Zire 72s PDA

      I recently described how I got my hands on a 20 year old Palm Zire 72s with a dead battery that I managed to bring back to life.

    • Pocket Reform in use

      My position at work have been changed from June 3 to a more challenging one. Thus the frequency of my posts might decrease even more.

      Anyway, it means more travelling, too. So the Pocket Reform [1] laptop can be useful more than I originally thought. Its orthogonal keyboard is quite nice (not as hard to use as I feared) but some keys are hidden and I need to learn how to access them. Also the Czech accents can be complicated (but I still have to try the Czech layout).

      The screen is nice and the keyboard backlight is both nice and easy to configure. The machine is faster than the original Reform 2 (with its original CPU which of course can be upgraded).

    • British OSes?

      Logout [1] (the creator of the Bongusta, you know) wrote two nice posts about the operating systems from the Great Britain. While the RiscOS is known to me (I'm not saying I'm able to use it!) the OS of the Sinclair QL is something I never saw on a real hardware.

    • Internet/Gemini

      • Just when I thought it was safe to run a gopher server

        It appeared I had traded the problem of high CPU (Central Processing Unit) usage [1] for a memory leak.