Links 12/06/2024: 'Hey Hi' (AI) Bubble Imploding Already, Danish Media Threatens to Sue OpenAI
Contents
- Leftovers
- Science
- Education
- Hardware
- Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
- Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Defence/Aggression
- Transparency/Investigative Reporting
- Environment
- Finance
- AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
- Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
- Civil Rights/Policing
- Digital Restrictions (DRM) Monopolies/Monopsonies
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Leftovers
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Leon Mika ☛ Word Cloud
Seems like a good idea so that’s what I did, taking the contents of the first page of this blog. Here it is: [...]
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Hackaday ☛ Maker Skill Trees Help You Level Up Your Craft
Hacking and making are great fun due to their open ended nature, but being able to try anything can make the task of selecting your next project daunting. [Steph Piper] is here with her Maker Skill Trees to give you a map to leveling up your skills.
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Hackaday ☛ BikeBeamer Adds POV Display To Bicycle Wheels
Unless you’re living in a bicycle paradise like the Netherlands, most people will choose to add some sort of illumination to their bicycle to help drivers take note that there’s something other than a car using the road. Generally, simple flashing LEDs for both the front and the rear is a pretty good start, but it doesn’t hurt to add a few more lights to the bicycle or increase their brightness. On the other hand, if you want to add some style to your bicycle lighting system then this persistence of vision (POV) display called the BikeBeamer from [locxter] might be just the thing.
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Standards/Consortia
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Federal News Network ☛ NARA to remove analog records as part of new digitization standards
The National Archives and Records Administration will be moving away from analog records and are now requiring agencies to transfer records to them in digital format. NARA’s digitization standard is expected to begin at the end of June 2024.
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Science
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Science Alert ☛ What Is 'Ozempic Face', And Why Is It So Controversial?
It's not a medical term.
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Science Alert ☛ Most Fast Radio Bursts Blip Just Once, And We Might Soon Know Why
They continue to mystify us.
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Science Alert ☛ Caffeine Has an Intriguing Effect on The Brains of Parkinson's Patients
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Education
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Nicolas Magand ☛ WWDC 2024 observations
Yesterday, Apple unveiled most of the new software features coming to MacOS, iOS, VisionOS, iPadOS, WatchOS, etc. These are my initial impressions, although I haven’t read much about it yet, so please bear with me.
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Crooked Timber ☛ On Student protests and academic freedom
That being so, student protests can play a two-fold role in furthering this mission in light of scarce resources (not the least time): first, they are a means of articulating what is worthy of academic attention and what ought to be the focus on discovery. Most student protests fit easily under this role. This fits quite naturally with Max Weber’s account of how to think about the philosophy of social science and the vocation of a scientist. Second, student protests can themselves be seen as experiments in living and as such they can have epistemic benefits to the academic community, and wider society. I won’t repeat the argument for these points here, but will modestly develop them below.
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Kev Quirk ☛ My Knee-Jerk Reaction to WWDC24
It was an interesting event that didn't really contain many surprises, but I wanted to share some of my thoughts on the whole thing. Because, you know, that's what people do, right?
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Hardware
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[Repeat] Ruben Schade ☛ LED bulbs
I also distinctly remember LEDs being touted as more reliable than other bulbs, such as halogens and incandescents. But my experience doesn’t mirror this at all. In the three small apartments Clara and have lived in, we’ve had to change an LED bulb at least every few months, if not more frequently. By contrast, my dad once quipped they almost never had to change incandescents in the houses we lived in.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Bridge Michigan ☛ How many abortions in Michigan? The state can’t say under new law
Moreover, the data no longer will be collected in a state that has become a haven for residents from out of state who arrive here for abortions that are banned in their home states.
The data collection was one of the few remaining safeguards for patients, according to abortion opponents, in a procedure that happens about 30,000 a year in Michigan either in clinics or, in the case of medication abortion, in private homes.
“It's basic quality assurance,” Dr. Catherine Stark told Bridge.
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US Navy Times ☛ Navy explores how to get ‘forever chemicals’ out of sailor uniforms
In fiscal 2024, the service began work on developing an alternative to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, for the water- and stain-repellent coatings used on coats and external layers, according to budget documents.
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Reason ☛ More Evidence that Bans on Flavored Vaping Products May Increase Teen Smoking
Policies that increase the use of traditional cigarettes are unlikely to improve public health.
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Latvia ☛ Conference to mark Yoga Day on June 21 in Latvia
The tenth International Day of Yoga will be celebrated in Latvia on June 21 with a practice session on the lawn of the Academic Center of the University of Latvia (LU) near the Nature House, followed by a conference "Creative Imagination as a Way to Liberation", the LU said.
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Latvia ☛ Prescription meds prices planned to shrink by quarter in Latvia
This autumn, the prices of prescription medicines should decrease by 15-20%, according to the new pricing model for prescription medicines developed by the Ministry of Health and presented on Tuesday, 11 June.
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Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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Baldur Bjarnason ☛ The lifecycle of a tech bubble – Baldur Bjarnason
I responded to one of these posts with something along the following lines
"It’s a little bit too early to say the bubble is bursting."
"The “cash out” stage is not the “bubble bursting” stage. “Cashing out” happens once some investors start to think the bubble might be peaking."
[...] Then COVID added even more air into the bubble by letting the industry convince itself that the economy had permanently transitioned into remote working. Tech genuinely believed that the entire economy would be mediated by big tech companies forever and ever and that they’d be able to – effectively – enforce a private tax on the world economy. -
Ben Tsai ☛ Disdain for AI
What I find frustrating about 90% of the AI features, solutions, and products out there is that they are removing friction in the wrong places and diverting us from opportunities to grow and learn.
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Cory Dransfeldt ☛ It's not just a blog
I've learned a lot doing this and the site has sprawled from a self-contained repository to a repository containing the front end, Cloudflare workers as APIs that get updated of their own accord, a CDN, a database, a CMS. It'd be hard to say it's not all over-engineered. But — it's fun and that's been the most important thing to me.
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Vox ☛ Megan Thee Stallion was targeted by a sexually explicit deepfake. It’s a huge problem.
Deepfakes are videos that often use AI to effectively superimpose someone’s face onto a different body — real or invented — making it appear like they’re doing the actions of the person in the clip. They can include everything from clips that make it seem like a politician is giving an interview they never did to nonconsensual sexually explicit videos that swap in people’s faces.
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The Verge ☛ Apple IDs are becoming Apple Accounts
Apple is rebranding Apple accounts from Apple ID to (the arguably more straightforward) Apple Account. “With the releases of iOS 18, iPadOS 18, macOS Sequoia, and watchOS 11, Apple ID is renamed to Apple Account for a consistent sign-in experience across Apple services and devices, and relies on a user’s existing credentials,” Apple wrote in a Tuesday post on its Newsroom.
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New York Times ☛ Is Slop A.I.’s Answer to Spam? A Phrase Emerges for Bad Search.
Slop, at least in the fast-moving world of online message boards, is a broad term that has developed some traction in reference to shoddy or unwanted A.I. content in social media, art, books and, increasingly, in search results.
Google suggesting that you could add nontoxic glue to make cheese stick to a pizza? That’s slop. So is a low-price digital book that seems like the one you were looking for, but not quite. And those posts in your Facebook feed that seemingly came from nowhere? They’re slop as well.
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Matt Webb ☛ Observations on Siri, Apple Intelligence, and hiding in plain sight (Interconnected)
Apple launched “Apple Intelligence” yesterday – their take on AI.
I want to zoom in on the new Siri but first here’s my mental model of the whole thing.
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The Walrus ☛ AI Is a False God | The Walrus
Before we do, in fact, cede any more ground to our tech overlords, it’s worth casting one’s mind back to the mid-1990s and the arrival of the World Wide Web. That, too, came with profound assertions of a new utopia, a connected world in which borders, difference, and privation would end. Today, you would be hard pressed to argue that the internet has been some sort of unproblematic good. The fanciful did come true; we can carry the whole world’s knowledge in our pockets. This just had the rather strange effect of driving people a bit mad, fostering discontent and polarization, assisting a renewed surge of the far right, and destabilizing both democracy and truth. It’s not that one should simply resist technology; it can, after all, also have liberating effects. Rather, when big tech comes bearing gifts, you should probably look closely at what’s in the box.
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Defence/Aggression
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-08 [Older] Germany sees dramatic rise in domestic violence
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-07 [Older] Danish PM Mette Frederiksen assaulted in Copenhagen
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-08 [Older] Macron hosts US President Biden in Paris during state visit
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-08 [Older] US Astronaut William Anders killed in a plane crash
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RFA ☛ South Korea fires warning shots as North Korean soldiers cross border
Seoul’s joint chiefs of staff believe Sunday’s encroachment was a mistake as signs aren’t clearly visible.
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RFA ☛ Canadian Parliament supports Tibet’s self-determination
The motion recognizes that Tibetans are victims of China’s systemic cultural assimilation.
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The Straits Times ☛ Two US men jailed for conspiracy to sell Iranian oil to China
WASHINGTON - Two Texas men convicted by a U.S. jury in November of trying to sell Iranian petroleum in violation of sanctions imposed by Washington and of conspiracy to commit money laundering were sentenced on Tuesday to 45 months in prison, the Justice Department said.
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RFA ☛ Vietnam's South China Sea island building sets record in 2024: report
Hanoi has created as much new land in 6 months as the previous 2 years combined.
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RFA ☛ 4 American teachers are stabbed in knife attack in China
A 55-year-old suspect is arrested; the instructors and a bystander are hospitalized and out of danger.
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RFA ☛ China is now fining Uyghur prisoners’ families
A 70-year-old man is arrested for failing to pay a fine linked to the imprisonment of his 2 sons.
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ADF ☛ Islamic State Group Alters Tactics Under New Leadership in Mozambique
The Islamic State group is operating in new places and using new tactics in Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province after losing key leaders and being driven from former bases. The IS has increased the use of improvised explosive devices while dispersing into smaller camps in dense forests and conducting cross-province operations.
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Semafor Inc ☛ House Democrats are planning a resistance playbook for Trump’s return
Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., is spearheading a task force to oppose Project 2025, the plan crafted by conservative groups to replace much of the current federal bureaucracy with reliably right-wing personnel and pursue dramatic policy changes through administrative fiat.
“Project 2025 is the clearest signal we could possibly ask for in terms of what Trump would do in a second term, and it is alarming in every way,” Huffman told Semafor. “We’ve got work to do to make sure people know about it and make sure they take it seriously.”
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New Yorker ☛ Are We Doomed? Here’s How to Think About It
Brown, eighty-six years old, spoke with the energy of someone sixty years his junior who has somehow had conversations with Xi Jinping and is deeply knowledgeable about the trillions of dollars spent on military weapons globally. “We’re in a real pickle,” he said. He brought up Ellsberg, a longtime advocate of nuclear disarmament. Ellsberg, who died last June, thought that the most likely scenario leading to nuclear war was a launch happening by mistake, Brown said. There are numerous examples of close calls. In June, 1980, the NORAD missile-warning displays showed twenty-two hundred Soviet nuclear missiles en route to the United States. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s national-security adviser, was alerted by a late-night phone call. Fighter planes had been sent out to search the skies, and launch keys for the U.S.’s ballistic missiles were removed from their safes. Brzezinski had only minutes to decide whether to advise a retaliatory strike. Then he received another phone call: it was a false alarm, a computer glitch—there were no incoming missiles. In 1983, a Soviet early-warning satellite system reported five incoming American missiles. Stanislav Petrov, who was on duty at the command center, convinced his superiors that it was most likely an error; if the Americans were attacking, they wouldn’t have launched so few missiles. In both instances, only a handful of people stood between nuclear holocaust and the status quo.
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Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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Rachel ☛ Some early results for feed reader behavior monitoring
There's one big thing to keep in mind here: I am assessing individual feed reader installations, including whatever config values the user might have set globally or on the test feed in particular. Those config values can be the difference between "amazing" and "get it away from me".
That means a single good entry doesn't necessarily mean that every install of that program will behave perfectly. It also means that a single bad entry doesn't mean that all of them will be terrible.
I've broken them down into a few groups.
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The Nation ☛ Daniel Ellsberg’s Moral Acuity Is More Necessary Than Ever
Dan had made history in 1971 by revealing the top-secret Pentagon Papers, exposing the constant litany of official lies that accompanied the US escalation of the Vietnam War. In response, the government used the blunderbuss of the World War I-era Espionage Act to prosecute him. At age 41, he faced a possible prison sentence of more than 100 years. But his trial ended abruptly with all charges dismissed when the Nixon administration’s illegal interference in the case came to light in mid-1972. Five decades later, he reflected: “Looking back, the chance that I would get out of 12 felony counts from Richard Nixon was close to zero. It was a miracle.”
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Environment
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University of Michigan ☛ New swap shop aids U-M researchers, sustainability goals
The Lab Swap Shop will open from 1-3 p.m. each Thursday, with online shopping available any time. New inventory is added on an ongoing basis. Expanded hours and information will be available on the Lab Reuse Program webpage.
The shop is an expansion of the longstanding Lab Reuse Program, which enables U-M to redistribute surplus chemicals, equipment and materials to researchers across the Ann Arbor campus.
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New York Times ☛ A New Way to Talk About Heat
Record-breaking temperatures are pushing experts and public health officials to come up with a new vocabulary to warn the public about extreme heat.
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Energy/Transportation
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DeSmog ☛ Big Banks Have Funded Climate Crisis With Nearly $7 Trillion Since Paris Agreement
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Hackaday ☛ From Nissan ICE Pickup To BEV With Nissan Leaf Heart
Last year [Jimmy] got a request from a customer ([Dave]) to help convert a 1998 Nissan Frontier pickup into an electric drive vehicle, with a crashed 2019 Nissan Leaf providing the battery and electric motor for the conversion. He has documented the months-long journey with plenty of photos, as well as a series of videos over at the [EVSwap Conversions] YouTube channel. While the idea sounds easy enough, there’s a lot more to it than swapping out the ICE with an electric motor and sticking some batteries to the bottom of the car somewhere with double-sided tape. The pickup truck got effectively stripped down and gutted, before the 110 kW (150 HP) motor got installed using an adapter plate.
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The Nation ☛ Has NY Governor Kathy Hochul Killed Congestion Pricing For Good?
Or just until after the election? Either way, she’s blown a $15 billion hole in the MTA budget, leaving New Yorkers with overcrowded streets, filthy air, and an underfunded subway.
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New York Times ☛ Opponents of Hochul’s Move to Halt Congestion Pricing May Go to Court
Mr. Lander is planning to outline the likely avenues of litigation at a news conference on Wednesday. The gathering underscores the swelling outrage among environmental and transportation advocates who have spent years persuading the government to enact tolls on drivers entering Manhattan’s core — only to see Ms. Hochul abruptly halt the plan less than a month before it was to go into effect.
Michael Gerrard, a prominent environmental lawyer at Columbia University, is spearheading the coalition’s legal strategy, alongside a New York University law professor, Roderick Hills, and Eric A. Goldstein, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
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Vox ☛ Why did Kathy Hochul kill congestion pricing? How a bogus driving myth doomed NYC to more bad traffic
In New York City, where the majority of residents don’t own a car, it seems odd to assert that a policy benefitting transit users, pedestrians, and cyclists is bad for attracting customers. Commuters who drive into Manhattan have significantly higher incomes than others who work in the borough, so Hochul’s claim that killing congestion pricing would relieve New York’s cost of living crisis is just as suspect.
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States Newsroom ☛ Highway humor is over some drivers' heads
As the summer vacation season gets going, millions of America’s interstate drivers can expect to find more puns, silly turns of phrase or cultural references on those massive missives.
But federal safety officials aren’t amused by states’ cheek. In recent years, they’ve begun to discourage what they view as overly creative messages, fearing that in trying to entertain drivers, highway officials are confusing rather than enlightening them. Some states, most recently Arizona and New Jersey, have pushed back. As a result, officials at the Federal Highway Administration clarified this year that they’re not banning road-sign humor outright.
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Silicon Angle ☛ GM gives troubled Cruise self-driving car unit $850M amid strategic review
General Motors Co. announced today that it’s giving its troubled self-driving car unit, Cruise LLC, $850 million in funding while it works out what to do next in terms of its strategy and funding. Bloomberg reported that the announcement was made by GM Chief Financial Officer Paul Jacobson at an investor conference in New York.
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Wildlife/Nature
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The Straits Times ☛ South Korea-born panda to make debut in Sichuan
The female panda will make her debut at the base on June 12 and will then be on show regularly.
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Hakai Magazine ☛ A Step Forward in Stingray Science
Perlman’s lab in Long Beach, California—aptly called STABB, for Stingray and Butterfly Biomechanics Lab (the butterfly project is currently paused)—explores how and why stingrays move and behave the way they do. Seal Beach, one of the city’s popular surf spots, five kilometers from the lab, is colloquially known as Ray Bay. Stingrays love to congregate there in the calm, warm waters at the mouth of the San Gabriel River, and lifeguards document upward of 500 painful stab injuries from rays each year. Studying the rays’ behavior and their stinging process can open a new window into human interactions with what the lab calls “danger pancakes,” Perlman says.
His research focuses on round rays—the most abundant ray species inhabiting California’s waters. Their behavior also makes them the most dangerous to unsuspecting passersby. While other rays quickly flee at the hint of danger, round rays stay buried in the sand and even hold their breath as a predator such as a juvenile great white shark—or a perceived predator such as a human—goes by, relying on their mottled color for camouflage. It’s this protective behavior that makes them far more likely to get stepped on and explains why the vast majority of stingray injuries in California are attributed to round rays, rather than the bat rays or diamond stingrays that also live in the area.
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NPR ☛ Wild elephants may have names that other elephants use to call them
So Pardo and some colleagues analyzed recordings of 469 rumbling calls that wild African elephants had made to each other in the Amboseli National Park and Samburu and Buffalo Springs National Reserves in Kenya between 1986 and 2022.
For every recorded call, the researchers knew the identity of the elephant making the rumble as well as, based on the context, the elephant that was being addressed.
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Overpopulation
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Finance
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CBC ☛ 2024-06-07 [Older] Canada Disability Benefit won't lift 'hundreds of thousands' out of poverty, new numbers confirm
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Manuel Moreale ☛ The money conundrum
I discussed this topic in the past with various people and one of the feedback I got is to treat work just as a way of earning enough to free more time that I can then use to help others. That’s a reasonable suggestion but I just can’t apply it to my life. I don’t know why, I can’t get into that type of mindset. I’m sure part of this is the good old impostor syndrome which I’ll have to confront at some point but part is just the nature of who I am as a person.
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CBC ☛ 2024-06-07 [Older] Union for Canada's border workers extends job action deadline as mediation continues
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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[Old] Jacobin Magazine ☛ Religiosity Isn’t Done Changing Our World
Secondarily, I would say that, nowadays, when Christianity has been so clearly co-opted by the right wing in order to promote what are profoundly anti-Jesus ideas and programs — you know, taking free health care from individuals, promoting unchecked capitalism and the free market, denying the dignity of LGBTQ people, closing borders to refugees fleeing violence and war — it is important that we historians unearth the actual message of Jesus, which was so radical at the time that, were he to preach any of the things that he preached in his day and time today, not only would he be utterly rejected by most Christians but he might be arrested and killed just like he was two thousand years ago.
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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NYPost ☛ Passenger banned from flight over viral packing trick: ‘Stop listening to the internet’
The man tried to push himself onto the plane, “and they were like, bro, back away, we gave you your chance, and you didn’t pay for it.”
She added that they ended up calling the police on the guy who was then escorted out.
“So stop listening to the internet,” she concluded.
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New York Times ☛ Titan Submersible Investigation Declares Frightening Transcript a Fake
“I’m confident it’s a false transcript,” said Capt. Jason D. Neubauer, who retired from the U.S. Coast Guard and serves as chairman of the Marine Board of Investigation, the agency’s highest level of inquiry. “It was made up.” Its authorship is not known.
Despite the log’s air of authenticity, the federal team saw through the pretense for a variety of reasons. Significantly, Mr. Neubauer’s team gained access to the records of the actual communications between the submersible and its mother ship, which remain an undisclosed part of the federal investigation.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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The Dissenter ☛ Mississippi News Outlet Asks State Supreme Court To Stop Former Governor's Attack On Journalism
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FAIR ☛ A Maryland House Race Shows How Not to Cover AIPAC
The biggest outside spender in the 2022 Democratic primaries was an unlikely group: the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. This year, AIPAC—a group backed by Republican mega-donors that is devoted to maintaining strong US support for the far-right government of Israel—is going even bigger, aiming to spend a cool $100 million via its super PAC, the United Democracy Project.
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The Nation ☛ Martha-Ann Alito Can’t Wait to Let Her Freak Flag Fly
I guess I’m a little worried about that. And what does being of German heritage have to do with anything? (I can use my imagination.) Alito made clear at another point that “them” was the media.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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The Atlantic ☛ The Death of the Dining Room
But in many new apartments, even a space to put a table and chairs is absent. Eating is relegated to couches and bedrooms, and hosting a meal has become virtually impossible. This isn’t simply a response to consumer preferences. The housing crisis—and the arbitrary regulations that fuel it—is killing off places to eat whether we like it or not, designing loneliness into American floor plans. If dining space keeps dying, the U.S. might not have a chance to get it back.
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CBC ☛ 2024-06-07 [Older] 'This is why we need Pride,' Manitoba region's Pride president says after food truck receives vandalism threats
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CBC ☛ 2024-06-07 [Older] 'You have to dance, enjoy, and sing': How Black voices are breathing life into northern Ontario churches
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CBC ☛ 2024-06-07 [Older] Canadian businessman Frank Stronach charged in sex assault probe
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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David Rosenthal ☛ Video Game Preservation
This post started with Timothy Geigner's One YouTuber’s Quest For Political Action To Preserve Old Video Games. He lays out the problem: [...]
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Copyrights
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Torrent Freak ☛ German ISPs Block Romslab Due to Widespread Game Piracy
As part of a voluntary agreement with copyright holders, German Internet service providers must block structurally infringing websites. The list expanded recently with Romslab, a site that offers links to pirated games and emulators such as Yuzu and Ryujinx. Official records redact the name of the game company that requested the blockade, but several signs point in the direction of a 135-year-old Japanese corporation.
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Torrent Freak ☛ Piracy Shield 2: Just When IPTV Pirates Thought it Was Safe
Italy's solution to IPTV piracy is already operating beyond the limits of its design. Piracy Shield launched in February under new law that compels all 300+ of the country's ISPs to block pirate streaming services. It now transpires that Italy's blocking system was only designed to accommodate 70 ISPs and now times out under the strain. By end of 2024, Piracy Shield Phase 2 will make its debut.
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Wired ☛ Danish Media Threatens to Sue OpenAI
“We want remuneration for our work [which] they have used to train their model,” says Karen Rønde, CEO of the Danish Press Publications’ Collective Management Organization (DPCMO), which represents 99 percent of Danish media outlets, including state broadcaster DR and TV 2. Rønde says the DPCMO plans to sue if a deal is not reached in the next year.
AI has created a new front in copyright law after a series of lawsuits claimed that OpenAI, which is backed by Microsoft, scraped news companies’ websites without permission in order to train its AI models. Soon after those lawsuits, OpenAI struck a series of licensing deals with major publishers, enabling the company to train its future iterations of ChatGPT on their content. Financial terms for the deals have not been disclosed.
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Gemini* and Gopher
Monopolies/Monopsonies
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