Leftovers

• Michal Zelazny ☛ Far but close

  Some people still believe that the personal contact is obligatory to make and maintain the relationship. Maybe for some people it is. But I realized that I don’t need it anymore. I can be a close friends to people who I never met in person, and probably never will. But we have the internet, the best social media platform ever invented, The Web. The web isn’t social media and social media isn’t the web. We have e-mails, chat apps, we have video calls, and all that stuff. But this is just a beginning.

• Steve Ledlow ☛ Digital Relationships

  This brings me to my current feeling on where things can evolve beyond the boundaries of ease or efficiency. Typing was faster than writing. Drafting an email is faster again. Having a generative AI platform write a letter feels like a fascade. Sending a message to someone that may actually be generative AI is the moment that the coyote looks back and sees the roadrunner standing on the edge of the cliff and it dawn on him that there’s nothing beneath his feet but air. If digital is merely medium and methods, but relationship is still the term that gets the emphasis in the phrase, it’s my opinion that time marches on and I’m the beneficiary of many relationships that spawned and are fostered by a digital component. I have several digital friendships that have never crossed the boundary of in-person interaction. I have some that have never even crossed the boundary of email, which is perfectly fine for me. None of these relationships are ones that I think define much for me beyond community, career and camaraderie. My relationship with my wife is one rooted in in-person conversations and moments of physical connectedness. The digital aspects of our communication are supplemental, which feels like good balance with the scale tipped in the direction that makes us happy.

• Michal Zelazny ☛ People, not tools

  We don’t use tools anymore, they use us. In the past, tools needed us to exist, to be valuable. Now we need tools to… well, we can still exist without our tools, but we depend on them in so many ways that I think it’s safe to say that without them we would have a problem with everyday existence.

• Greg Morris ☛ There Is No Hack

  That one thing is usually buying their course (at just £1995), but that’s not the point of this post. The fact that people believe there is a hack to everything is really the issue. Everyone wants a quick, easy fix. 5 minute abs, diet pills, a stupid morning routine — whatever it is you are trying to achieve, all these ‘hacks’ are a waste of time.

  Everyone who is successful has worked hard (and perhaps had a few leg ups) and there is no replacement for it. I had a long conversation around this topic with my son once, when he was asking about shortcuts to wherever it was we were driving. I explained to him that there is no such thing as a shortcut, at all. There might be ways that appear shorter, or might shave some time off sometimes in very specific circumstances, but they simply don’t exist. They can’t exist. Otherwise, they would just be ‘the way’.

• Games

  • [Old] Good Old Days ☛ Leisure Suit Larry III: Passionate Patti in Pursuit of the Pulsating Pectorals

    [beranmuden] It all started, when we decided to give a glimpse on the game collections of The Good Old Days members. And as the big Sierra fan I am, I couldn't be more thrilled to see Mr Creosote also having Sierra games in his collection. This ignited a spark which led us to combine our strengths and weaknesses to create an all-covering Leisure Suit Larry III: Passionate Patti in Pursuit of the Pulsating Pectorals review.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Thord D Hedengren ☛ Text files are forever (possibly)

    Today, we can still open and read text files created in the early days of computing. Sure, there might be some encoding nonsense going on, but that's easy enough to fix, and a problem of the past thanks to established standards. It's a bit like HTML, the language that websites are built with: The standards makes it more future-proof than anything that requires software to run. Just look at all the Flash experiences we lost when Flash was deemed, and rightly so, a Bad Way to do things, and thus made obsolete.

• Science

  • YLE ☛ Survey cited by Finnish Employment Minister comes under fire by researchers

    The Federation of Finnish Entrepreneurs survey Satonen pointed to has since been called out by many researchers for its lack of scientific rigour, like Antti Kauhanen, Research Director at the Research Institute of the Finnish Economy (Etla), who has studied the subject.

    "There is no research design in the trade union survey that would allow an analysis of the impact of the changes," Kauhanen said.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • CBC ☛ 2024-01-26 [Older] Health centre in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., drops thousands of patients due to doctor shortage

  • Science Alert ☛ Video Games Could Put Millions at Risk of Permanent Hearing Loss

    Their systematic review identified 14 unique papers, which together involved over 50,000 people from nine different countries, all with a focus on the relationship between hearing loss and/or tinnitus and video games.

    The research spans a variety of gaming circumstances, including home computers and consoles, mobile games, gaming centers, and eSports.

    It's not just about turning the volume down. Both loudness and exposure time factor into the impact noise can have on your ears. As sound intensity increases, the safe exposure time drops drastically. So a three hour gaming session with the volume cranked can cause far more permanent damage than a 15-minute stint at the same level.

  • International Business Times ☛ Farmers Across the EU Unite in Protest: Costs Are Up While Prices Stay Down

    From fluctuating commodity prices to concerns about sustainability and environmental regulations, the agricultural community is grappling with a myriad of issues that demand urgent attention.

    One of the primary reasons for the farmers' unrest is the volatile nature of commodity prices.

    Fluctuations in the prices of agricultural products, exacerbated by market uncertainties and global economic conditions, directly impact farmers' income.

  • France24 ☛ Air pollution a factor in spiking cancer cases, report says

    As a global health watchdog, the WHO rarely has good news. It stayed true to its mission ahead of World Cancer Day, when its International Agency for Research on Cancer released a report on February 1 predicting an increase of some 35 million new cases of cancer by 2050. This represents an increase of 77% compared to 2022, noted WHO.

    Among the factors driving the expected increase in cancer rates was air pollution.

  • YLE ☛ Summer cottage prices in Finland fall after Covid boom

    While prices dropped by five percent nationwide, in some Finnish regions and municipalities, cottage prices increased.

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • Omicron Limited ☛ AI helps reveal the ancient origin story of floral colors

    New research led by Monash University experts used computer simulations to reveal the ancient link between bees and the evolution of colors in flowers. The research, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, simulated the landscape of the first flowering plants from many tens of millions of years ago, to test their visibility to pollinators like bees and birds.

  • Mandy Brown ☛ Whose risks? Whose benefits?

    What I find helpful about this recentering—of considering both the risk of change and the risk of the status quo—is how it reorients us towards a more realistic view of risk. No path, no choice, is ever entirely free of risks; no road we could walk is always and forever perfectly safe and clear and certain. When deciding whether to take a fork in the road or continue on, the choice isn’t between taking a risk or playing it safe; it’s between these risks and those risks. It’s a choice of which risks not whether to risk anything at all.

    I find that realization quite sobering.

  • Buttondown ☛ Is it possible for general purpose AI to do no harm?

    My focus here is on some of the specific challenges brought about by general purpose AI in the context of war, conflict, and increasing global uncertainty.

    The problem at the heart of this is definitely not rocket science: it’s the fact that irresponsible technology development has become the norm - and that doing things because you can, because they are interesting and possible, has become valorised as “innovation”. As I’ve said hundreds of times before, solving this is a social problem not just a technical or a legal challenge.

  • Marty Day ☛ When the hobby becomes a hustle. Or: Goddamnit why do I need to be on another app?

    I am so, so happy that someone wrote this piece.

    As a maintainer of a blog (hello.), promoter of a live event (hi there.), and host of a podcast (hey.), it’s quite sad and frustrating how much one needs to be capital-o Online to gain any focus or traction.

  • Vox ☛ Everyone’s a sellout now

    Corporate consolidation and streaming services have depleted artists’ traditional sources of revenue and decimated cultural industries. While Big Tech sites like Spotify claim they’re “democratizing” culture, they instead demand artists engage in double the labor to make a fraction of what they would have made under the old model. That labor amounts to constant self-promotion in the form of cheap trend-following, ever-changing posting strategies, and the nagging feeling that what you are really doing with your time is marketing, not art. Under the tyranny of algorithmic media distribution, artists, authors — anyone whose work concerns itself with what it means to be human — now have to be entrepreneurs, too.

  • New Statesman ☛ Lives are at risk when algorithms go wrong

    Although a little sooner than expected following the missed period, this could easily be an ectopic pregnancy – these occur in around 1 per cent of cases, where a fertilised egg implants somewhere outside the cavity of the womb. The commonest location is in a Fallopian tube. Most ectopics can be resolved without emergency care, but as the embryo grows and tries to establish a placenta, it occasionally damages and ruptures the tube, which can result in life-threatening internal bleeding. Most 111 Cat 3 cases don’t actually need an ambulance, but Keeley most certainly did – and she needed it far more quickly than 111’s algorithmic software had determined.

  • Futurism ☛ AI-Powered Clock Sometimes Hallucinates the Wrong Time

    And yet, amusing as these rhymes may be, there's still that hallucination problem. In an accompanying promotional video, Webb amusingly documents a moment where the clock, at half past four, reads: "A clock that defies all rhyme and reason / 4:30 PM, a temporal teason." And while here, the clock does get the time right, another detail is way off.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-02-02 [Older] Nairobi explosion: 3 dead, hundreds injured in Kenya's capital

  • Chris Coyier ☛ Gerrymandering

    Gerrymandering is a political technique where voting districts are drawn to advantage one group over another. In practice, it looks incredibly silly. There are geographical districts that make no sense whatsover, snaking through territory with no other purpose than to bring power to some in-group. An example is an area having some large population of people that vote undesirably, according to a group in power. They can draw lines around them such that they are all districted together such that that district effectively gets “one vote”, instead of having that large population sway multiple districts. (The reverse, splitting them up, is also a tactic.) How it’s still legal is a disgrace.

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ How TikTok is propelling African music into the global charts

    Tyla’s success illustrates the power of TikTok and YouTube to help artists find fan bases around the world, a role once reserved for music labels.

  • ANF News ☛ YPJ liberates a Yazidi woman from ISIS in Hol Camp

    Yazidi woman Kovan Aidi Khourto, who was among thousands of Yazidi girls and women kidnapped by ISIS during the Shengal genocide in 2014, has been freed by the YPJ during the ongoing operation in Hol Camp.

  • El País ☛ Hamas weaponry: Made in Gaza

    The October 7 attack in southern Israel by Hamas’ armed wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades, stunned the world with its scale and sophistication. The group displayed surprising offensive capabilities, catching almost everyone off guard. Especially astonishing was the variety of weapons used by the militants to kill a staggering 1,200 people.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-02-02 [Older] Sweden investigates 'terrorist' act near Israeli embassy

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • RFERL ☛ Turkey Confirms Imminent Putin Visit, Without Specifying Date

      Turkish Foreign Affairs Minister Hakan Fidan on February 4 confirmed an imminent visit by Russian President Vladimir Putin, without announcing an exact date.

    • RFERL ☛ Russia Charges Self-Exiled Ex-Duma Deputy Who Opposed War With 'High Treason'

      Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) has charged Kyiv-based Russian opposition politician Ilya Ponomaryov, a former State Duma deputy who opposed President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, with high treason and participation in a terrorist organization.

    • Latvia ☛ Baltic, Nordic politicians head to United States

      February 4 sees the Chairs of the Foreign Affairs Committees of the parliaments of the Nordic countries and the Baltic States begin their joint visit to the United States to highlight the importance of continued support to Ukraine, as well as to discuss defense cooperation and strengthening security on the NATO Eastern flank.

    • France24 ☛ US senators unveil $118.3 billion funding bill for Ukraine, Israel and border

      US senators on Sunday released the text of a much-anticipated deal that would unlock billions in new aid for Ukraine and Israel while tightening US border laws -- although its prospects for becoming law are unclear.

    • France24 ☛ Death toll from strike on bakery in occupied Ukraine rises to more than 20, Russia says

      Russia said Sunday the death toll from a Ukrainian strike on a bakery in the occupied eastern city of Lysychansk climbed to 28 people, including a child.

    • RFERL ☛ Report: G7, EU Consider Plan To Use Frozen Russian Assets As Collateral To Help Rebuild Ukraine

      The Group of Seven leading industrial nations and the EU are considering a proposal to use more than $250 billion in frozen Russian central bank assets as collateral to help fund the reconstruction of war-torn Ukraine, according to a report on February 4 by Bloomberg News.

    • RFERL ☛ U.S. Republican Lawmakers Announce Bill That Provides More Military Aid To Israel But None For Ukraine

      Republican lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives said they would move forward on a new package of military aid to Israel that leaves out more assistance for Ukraine.

    • RFERL ☛ Zelenskiy Meets Soldiers On Frontline Visit; Russia Says Rescue Effort Over In Lysychansk Attack

      Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy visited a frontline village on February 4, hailing the “warriors” who are fighting there amid reports he is preparing to fire his popular military commander.

    • New York Times ☛ Senators Release Border Deal to Unlock Ukraine Aid, but Fate Remains Uncertain

      After months of talks, a small group of Republicans and Democrats produced the text of a plan to clamp down on migration, but it faces an uphill path to enactment.

    • New York Times ☛ Ukraine Goes on Defense Against a Relentless Russia

      At the hot spots of the eastern front line, Ukrainian troops are outmanned, outgunned and digging in.

    • New York Times ☛ Monday Briefing: A Weekend of U.S.-Led Strikes

      Also, Ukraine’s grinding fight and China’s expanding nuclear arsenal.

    • Meduza ☛ Moscow pediatrician charged with spreading ‘fakes’ about Russian army after being accused by soldier’s widow of calling her deceased husband ‘a legitimate target for Ukraine’ — Meduza

    • France24 ☛ US strikes against Iran-linked groups anger Iraq, Syria as Russia calls for UN meeting

      The United States struck overnight Iran-backed groups in Iraq and Syria in retaliation for a deadly attack on US troops, drawing condemnation Saturday from government and groups in the region.

    • RFERL ☛ Berlin Monitoring Targeted Disruptions To Baltic Satellite Navigation

      German security agencies are closely tracking targeted disruptions of satellite navigation in the Baltic  Sea region.

    • Meduza ☛ Russian police raid private BDSM party in Yekaterinburg — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Russian presidential hopeful Boris Nadezhdin finds printing house to publish campaign materials after 60 other printing companies refused — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Former Russian State Duma deputy Ilya Ponomarev reportedly charged with treason and calling for terrorism — Meduza

    • RFERL ☛ Cosmonaut Sets Record For Cumulative Time In Space, Says Russian Agency

      Russia’s space agency said cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko had set a world record for total cumulative time spent in space.

• Environment

  • International Business Times ☛ Shell Reports 2023 Profits of $28.25 Billion Amid Market Shifts

    In June last year, Shell abandoned its target of cutting oil production each year for the rest of the decade. The International Energy Agency highlighted that no new fossil fuel project aligns with the globally accepted goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C. Shell acknowledged a reduction in oil production from 1.9 million barrels of oil equivalent per day in 2019 to 1.5 million in 2022.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Paris votes to triple parking fees for SUVs

    Parisians on Sunday voted in favor of hiking parking fees for large SUVs, as the French capital presses on with long-term plans to become a fully bikeable city.

    The outcome means large SUVs would be subject to a threefold increase in parking fees — €18 ($19.50) per hour for parking in the city center, or €12 further out.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ West's 'hot drought' is unprecedented in more than 500 years

    The study, published in late January, adds to an ever-growing slew of research that suggests human-caused climate change is warming the earth in ways never seen before. It furthers other research like one study, published last year, that showed the West's conditions over the last 20 years are the driest in 1,200 years because of climate change.

  • ABC ☛ North America experienced an unprecedented 'hot drought' in the last century, new research shows

    Researchers studied tree rings using a new technique called blue light intensity, which involves shining visible light into the ring on the blue wavelength on the spectrum, Karen King, assistant professor of physical geography at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and author of the study, told ABC News. This allows the observers to gather a surrogate measure of ring density from year to year, which is then used for temperature reconstructions, King said.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-02-02 [Older] New EU proposal aims to encourage sustainable consumption

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-02-03 [Older] Tesla ordered to pay $1.5 million over hazardous waste

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-02-02 [Older] German Bundestag approves controversial diesel subsidy cuts

    • DeSmog ☛ DeSmog Remembers Ross Gelbspan, Who Inspired Our Founding

      The DeSmog team was saddened to learn of the recent death of Ross Gelbspan, to whom we all owe a debt of gratitude and appreciation for his intrepid commitment to exposing those who made the climate crisis worse through their actions to deny the science and delay solutions.

      Without Ross Gelbspan, DeSmog may have never existed. It was Ross’s books and journalism that sparked the flames of outrage and opportunity that inspired Jim Hoggan to create the DeSmogBlog in late 2005. Jim had recently read Boiling Point, Ross’s 2004 book chronicling the fossil fuel industries’ strategy of denial and delay, which Gelbspan correctly labeled a crime against humanity.

  • Overpopulation

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-02-02 [Older] Ethiopia's hunger crisis threatens to eclipse prior disasters

    • New Statesman ☛ Enter the Age of Malthus

      There is no contradiction between a Malthusian Age and a decline in the rate at which populations grow. In absolute terms, the Earth’s population, now eight billion, will continue to increase until it levels off somewhere over ten billion. Beginning in the late 21st century, humankind will experience declines in populations that will bring their own challenges. That is not in dispute. But the decades immediately ahead of us will be another story. Indeed, populations are not uniformly greying. The ageing of the population is more apparent in the already developed, high-end economies of North America, Europe and East Asia. In Africa and much of the Global South, the trend is less dramatic and youth bulges will continue to challenge societies for years to come. Never before has the Earth had so many people, and so many young people in the poorest places.

      In this Malthusian Age, high levels of population chain-react with (and also help cause) climate change, by polluting the Earth with those fossil fuels that are necessary, in turn, to sustain more and more humanity with its rising living standards. High populations, especially in sprawling, slum-like developments, make floods, hurricanes and earthquakes worse and more terrifying than at any time in history, since people are living in dense concentrations in climatically and seismically fragile zones, where perhaps they were never meant to live in such numbers in the first place.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-02-03 [Older] Argentine lawmakers clear key hurdle in Milei's reform bill

  • El País ☛ To what extent can Taylor Swift influence the 2024 presidential elections?

    In an extremely polarized country, caught somewhere between malaise and extreme anger, there’s a figure who stands out: that of Taylor Swift, the 34-year-old singer, songwriter and mass phenomenon. She is Time magazine’s person of the year (the first in the entertainment world to achieve this feat) and a billionaire. No, Swift isn’t running for the White House, but she has 300 million very loyal followers on social media… people she wields a lot of influence over. But does she have enough sway to shift an electoral result? That’s a different story entirely.

  • The Strategist ☛ Will 2024 be the year of responsible AI?

    For anyone who has lived through the rise of the internet and social media, the AI revolution may evoke a sense of déjà vu—and raise two fundamental questions. Is it possible to maintain the current momentum without repeating the mistakes of the past? And can we create a world in which everyone, including the 2.6 billion people who remain offline, is able to thrive?

    Harnessing AI to bring about an equitable and human-centered future requires new, inclusive forms of innovation. But three promising trends offer hope for the year ahead.

  • Quartz ☛ How much a 30-second Super Bowl ad costs this year

    A 30-second spot at this year’s game cost about $7 million, AdAge reported. Though this year’s figure is similar to 2023’s price tag, it still represents an increase of 75% from a decade ago and over 200% from 20 years ago.

    A 30-second Super Bowl ad cost $4 million in 2014 and $2.3 milion in 2004, according USA Today’s Ad Meter.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-02-02 [Older] Fact check: AI-generated images of children in Gaza

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-01-26 [Older] Germany: Anti-far right protests spread to rural areas

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-02-02 [Older] East Germans take a stand against the far right

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-02-02 [Older] Germany: Are protests hurting the far right?

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-01-27 [Older] What do India's political logos symbolize?

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2024-01-26 [Older] Trudeau Aide: India Is Cooperating With Canada Amid Tensions Over Murdered Sikh

  • CBC ☛ 2024-01-26 [Older] Canada pauses funding to UN relief agency over workers' possible role in Oct. 7 attack on Israel

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Digital Music News ☛ Spotify Renews Joe Rogan Deal for a Reported $250 Million, Sans Exclusivity

    Neil Young pulled his music from Spotify in 2022 over Spotify’s exclusivity deal with Joe Rogan. Young took umbrage with some of the podcasters’ comments surrounding the COVID-19 vaccines—saying he could no longer support having his music alongside misinformation. At the time, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said his ambitions to make Spotify the “largest audio platform in the world” meant embracing a wide variety of content.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Netflix: Piracy is Difficult to Compete Against and Growing Rapidly

    As a member of ACE and the MPA, Netflix is at the frontline of the global battle against online piracy. The company doesn't often address the subject directly but in a recent SEC filing, Netflix writes that it's difficult to compete against the free entertainment piracy offers. Not only that, it's growing rapidly too.