Leftovers

• Makoism ☛ Your Goal Broke the System

  If you want to fix or change something long-term, you must invest in the system that creates/shapes the environment. Clear asserts that focusing on the processes and habits that lead to desired outcomes rather than fixating on the outcomes themselves can shift your mindset toward continuous improvement and adaptability.

• Leon Mika ☛ Why I Keep Multiple Blogs

  I’m currently keeping four separate blogs: this one, one for checkins to places I’ve visited, one for remembering how to do something for work, and one for projects I’m working on1. This arrangement came about after a few years of spinning out and combining topics to and from a single blog, generally following the tension I felt after publishing something, wondering if that was the right place for it. As strange as it is to say it, this multi-blogging arrangement gives me the lowest amount of tension for writing online.

• Amit Patel ☛ SDF curved text

  These are common in cartography, not only in fantasy maps like Tolkein’s but also in real-world maps. Eduard Imhof’s classic 1975 paper, Positioning Names on Maps has a ton of great advice on how to position labels, and not only recommends curving text, but also sketches out examples: [...]

• Robert Birming ☛ Inspired by Everyday

  Even if a text doesn't explicitly describe a specific event, it's often the underlying inspiration. Something I've seen, something I've heard, something someone has done.

• YLE ☛ Tove Jansson archipelago film premieres in London

  The movie was filmed in the summer of 2023 in Finland, including archipelago locations in Kotka, Porvoo and Espoo, according to the official Moomin website, which also offers the first clip from the film to be released.

• Science

  • Antipope ☛ Conceptual models of space colonization

    I'm thinking morose thoughts about the practical prospects for space colonization (ahem: stripped of the colonialist rhetoric, manifest destiny bullshit, "the Earth's too fragile and vulnerable to keep all our eggs in one basket", and the other post-hoc attempts at justification) and trying to sort them out in case I ever feel inclined to go back to writing the sort of medium term SF epic that Kim Stanley Robinson nailed in his Mars trilogy in the 1980s.

    And what I'm nibbling on is, to paraphrase Oliver Cromwell, the big question of what if all our models or paradigms for how to structure a colony effort are wrong?

  • Redowan Delowar ☛ Topological sort

    I was fiddling with graphlib in the Python stdlib and found it quite nifty. It processes a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG), where tasks (nodes) are connected by directed edges (dependencies), and returns the correct execution order. The “acyclic” part ensures no circular dependencies.

    Topological sorting is useful for arranging tasks so that each one follows its dependencies. It’s widely used in scheduling, build systems, dependency resolution, and database migrations.

  • India Times ☛ Google’s triumph on the Nobel stage resolves a 50-year-old mystery

    AlphaFold 2, an AI model developed through Google’s DeepMind initiative, cracked the code for predicting complex protein structures from amino acid sequences. It resulted in the accurate prediction of nearly 200 million known proteins. AlphaFold has been used by over two million researchers globally, in areas such as antibiotic resistance and creating enzymes capable of breaking down plastics.

  • [Old] International Planetarium Society ☛ Article by Jim Louden - 1987 - International Planetarium Society, Inc.

    I claim the best way to generate support for space exploration is simply to tell people what it's already discovered. We're talking education, not propaganda, and no hard sell is necessary. In my experience, and contrary to what you might expect, people get bored very quickly with "relevant" or "practical" presentations of space, such as sermons on spinoff. What turns them on is black holes and the volcanoes of Io and how many two-billion-atom-bomb-equivalent explosions it took to cover the moon with overlapping 50-mile craters and why the clouds of Venus are made of concentrated sulfuric acid. In fairness, that may just reflect my own abilities and limitations. I happen to be a good explainer of pure facts and a lousy politician. You may find different interest patterns; in fact, I'd be interested to hear if you do. Meanwhile, I think it's safe advice to say: share your interests; do what you do well; and then give your audience plenty of chance for feedback.

• Education

  • Alex Sirac ☛ [Article] multilingualism and the internet – Alex

    This post, like many others on my blog, is in English. The main reasons: [...]

• Hardware

  • Old VCR ☛ Refurb weekend: the Symbolics MacIvory Lisp machine I have hated

    Every collector has that machine, the machine they sunk so much time and, often, money into that they would have defenestrated it years ago except for all the aforementioned time and money. Yours truly is no exception.

    That machine is my first Lisp Machine and my only one actually using real Lisp Machine hardware, this Symbolics MacIvory III in a Macintosh IIci host. To date it's cost me over $6000 total, primarily its initial purchase price, but also to rehabilitate it and just keep it alive. That's nearly as much as what I paid out of pocket for my $7300 (in 2018) POWER9 Raptor Talos II Linux workstation and my $10,000+ IBM POWER6 server, which I acquired in 2010 and in 2024 dollars would be over $14,000 — and both of those machines have been substantially less troublesome.

  • Crooked Timber ☛ Sunday photoblogging: punch card loom

    Kids today probably don’t know about punched cards, but when I was at school we all had to play around with them a bit as we learnt about state-of-the-art computing …. But the technology derives from weaving, and from the Jacquard loom of 1804.

  • Tedium ☛ How Outsourcing Led Gateway 2000 Astray

    Today in Tedium: Whatever your opinion of the ongoing trade war between the U.S. and China, and the way tariffs often get used as a cudgel in that battle, the fact of the matter is, it represents something of a proxy battle over the United States’ place in the world of manufacturing. And computers are, quite often, in the line of fire. Earlier this year, there was a freak-out moment when it looked like Chinese-made semiconductors (including GPUs) were about to see a huge tariff hike, though that was delayed for a while. Companies that play both sides, like Apple, have had to do gladhanding to keep their tariffs low—apparently Tim Cook personally gave Donald Trump a $6,000 Mac Pro in exchange for lower tariffs on that computer’s fancy parts. We closely associate modern computing with Chinese production apparatuses, to the point where it makes no logistical sense to slap a “made in the USA” sticker on the box. But just a few decades ago, a lot more computers were assembled in the U.S. Why did that change? Perhaps the fate of a company whose boxes literally screamed Americana has a lot of the answers. Today’s Tedium considers how globalization changed Gateway 2000. — Ernie @ Tedium

  • Hackaday ☛ A Homebrew Gas Chromatograph That Won’t Bust Your Budget

    Chances are good that most of us will go through life without ever having to perform gas chromatography, and if we do have the occasion to do so, it’ll likely be on a professional basis using a somewhat expensive commercial instrument. That doesn’t mean you can’t roll your own gas chromatograph, though, and if you make a few compromises, it’s not even all that expensive.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Michal Zelazny ☛ Forward - Michal Zelazny

    The past cannot be erased or forgotten; there is experience in the past, there is wisdom there. Who I am, who we all are, is the result of what has ever happened in the past. But life lies ahead.

    To live is to move forward.

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • TechStory Media ☛ Tech Giants Slash Jobs: August and September Witness Major Layoffs

    The tech industry has faced another round of significant layoffs, affecting thousands of workers globally from August to September 2024. With major companies like Intel, Cisco, and Infineon announcing large-scale job cuts, this period marked the most extensive layoffs since January.

  • Nick Heer ☛ Tesla Robotaxi, Robovan, and Robot

    These announcements are almost certainly bullshit, and correctly contextualized by Gitlin. Mix the axiom “what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence” with the boy who cried “wolf!”, and the result is this media event — and that is without factoring in the usual Tesla sloppiness. These are three brand new products, all of which are purportedly future-defining, rambled about in the span of about thirty minutes on a random Thursday in October. Nothing is finished. Musk called two of the products “Cybercab” and “Optimus Robots”, but the company’s website refers to them as “Robotaxi” and “Tesla Bot”. Everything is hypothetical until proven otherwise.

  • SBS ☛ Why you could see deepfake ads in the run-up to the next federal election

    Deepfake political advertisements with videos pretending to be the prime minister or opposition leader will be allowed at the next federal election under contentious recommendations from an artificial intelligence (AI) inquiry .

    Voluntary rules about labelling AI content could be fast-tracked in time for the 2025 election, and mandatory restrictions applied to political ads when they are ready.

  • The Washington Post ☛ This threat hunter chases U.S. foes exploiting AI to sway the election

    That attention underscored Nimmo’s place at the vanguard in confronting the dramatic boost that artificial intelligence can provide to foreign adversaries’ disinformation operations. In 2016, Nimmo was one of the first researchers to identify how the Kremlin interfered in U.S. politics online. Now tech companies, government officials and other researchers are looking to him to ferret out foreign adversaries who are using OpenAI’s tools to stoke chaos in the tenuous weeks before Americans vote again on Nov. 5.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Matt Birchler ☛ Home Depot is finally rolling out contactless payments (yes, the "finally" is warranted")

      Contactless payments are wonderful, and this is the part of the post where I clarify that while the Apple-centric press are calling this Home Depot adding Apple Pay, technically they're adding contactless payments, which means all contactless options, including Apple Pay, will work. Google Pay, Samsung Pay, PayPal, and simply tapping your card will all work as well.

    • Femte Juli ☛ The way to end Chat Control 2

      The European Parliament could—and should—demand for Chat Control 2 to be withdrawn before approving the new European Commission.

      On November 5th, the European Parliament’s LIBE committee will hold its hearing with Magnus Brunner, Austria – the new EU commissioner for internal affairs. As such, he will be responsible for Chat Control 2 / the CSAM regulation.

      These hearings are always a power play between the Commission and the Parliament. Often, one or several proposed commissioners will have to be replaced.

    • The Trade Desk ☛ Google never cared about privacy | The Current

      Among the thousands of Google internal documents made public during the U.S. v. Google ad tech antitrust case, there’s a bit of back and forth between two Google employees from September 2020 that seems to give window into the company’s thinking.

      One employee wrote that he received “feedback from PS [Privacy Sandbox], we should avoid direct mentions of sign-in and email consent in our MSA to align with the negotiating strategy where we will not be specific about our alternative approach for measurement and attribution."

    • Alan Byrne ☛ ESPHome room presence detection with Bermuda BLE Trilateration — Home Automation Guy

      In my previous smart home I used a platform called ESPresense, which used ESP devices to sniff out the Bluetooth addresses of my and my partners mobile phones. The phones were configured to transmit Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons at regular intervals, which ESPresence would listen out for. Based on the signal strength of each of these BLE beacons it could roughly determine which phone, and therefore which person, was in each room.

      This worked great, but it had one major drawback: I had to dedicate a whole ESP32 device to running ESPresense. I use ESP32 devices all over my home to do various jobs, and these run ESPHome. I have Everything Presence One’s and Lites doing presence detection, I have an ESP32 bed sensor that detects if we’re in bed, and I’d like to be able to use these existing ESPHome devices to do the tracking alongside whatever other job they’re already doing.

    • Zimbabwe ☛ Zimbabwe Installs E-gates at Main Airport

      Travellers with e-passports will scan their passports, their fingerprint and also their face. The system will then verify the identity of the traveller from the data and grant them access. The system will serve Zimbabwean passport holders at entry and exit points.

    • CBC ☛ Why your brain could be the next frontier of data privacy

      Others, however, say brain data is the next frontier of privacy, and we need to pass laws to protect our brain data now.

      "There are obviously a lot of bad actors out in the world that are going to try to use these devices for really worrying purposes," Jared Genser, a human rights lawyer and co-founder of the Neurorights Foundation, told As It Happens host Nil Köksal.

    • El País ☛ Tinder: Hard times for Tinder and Bumble: Why investors are cashing in their dating app stock

      Why are investors cashing in their stocks in these companies? Various reports blame the platforms themselves for having raised in-app prices to increase earnings. But in reality, things are more complicated. Tinder has a range of rates, from $3.99 to $499.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Germany: WWII bomb defused in Hamburg's nightlife district

    The discovery of a World War II-era bomb forced the partial evacuation of the Sternschanze nightlife district in the German city of Hamburg late Saturday.

  • Deccan Chronicle ☛ Cyberattacks strike Iran's nuclear facilities, govt bodies

    Iran's nuclear facilities, along with crucial networks for fuel distribution, municipal services, transportation, and ports were also targeted [sic]. "These incidents re just a small part of the many areas spread across the country," said Firouzabadi, former secretary of Iran's Supreme Council of Cybersecurity.

  • VOA News ☛ Sweden wants EU to classify Revolutionary Guards as terrorist organization

    "We want Sweden to seriously address, together with other EU countries, the incredibly problematic connection between the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its destructive role in the (Middle East) region, but also its increasing actions in various European countries, including Sweden," Kristersson told the Expressen daily.

  • NPR ☛ Shocking revelations about teens in redacted TikTok documents

    Kids as young as 15 were stripping on TikTok’s live feature fueled by adults who were paying for it.

    That’s what TikTok learned when it launched an internal investigation after a report on Forbes. Officials at TikTok discovered that there was “a high” number of underage streamers receiving a “gift” or “coin” in exchange for stripping — real money converted into a digital currency often in the form of a plush toy or a flower.

  • Forbes ☛ TikTok ‘Designed To Be An Addiction Machine, Targeting Children’ Says AG Coleman

    According to internal communications cited in the suits, TikTok found that users, especially teens, could become addicted to the app within 35 minutes of usage, typically after viewing around 260 videos. This time frame aligns with findings that TikTok videos, usually lasting only a few seconds, can quickly become habit-forming, leading to excessive screen time and impacting essential activities such as sleep, education, and personal relationships.

  • France24 ☛ Internal TikTok documents show prioritization of traffic over well-being

    The papers reveal TikTok's awareness of its platform's appeal and its recommendation algorithm, which offers a seemingly endless chain of short videos.

    One unnamed TikTok executive noted the need to be "cognizant" of the app's impact on "sleep, and eating, and moving around the room, and looking at someone in the eyes."

  • Business Insider ☛ TikTok Knows Its Algorithm Harms Kids, Internal Documents Show - Business Insider

    Internal research accidentally revealed this week indicates TikTok knew its algorithm was harmful.

    Lawyers for children harmed by social media say the apps have long known they are hurting kids.

  • The Globe And Mail CA ☛ TikTok is designed to be addictive to kids and causes them harm, US states' lawsuits say - The Globe and Mail

    At the heart of each lawsuit is the TikTok algorithm, which powers what users see on the platform by populating the app’s main “For You” feed with content tailored to people’s interests. The lawsuits note TikTok design features that they say addict children to the platform, such as the ability to scroll endlessly through content, push notifications that come with built-in “buzzes” and face filters that create unattainable appearances for users.

    “They’ve chosen profit over the health and safety, well-being and future of our children," California Attorney General Rob Bonta said at a news conference in San Francisco. "And that is not something we can accept. So we’ve sued.”

  • VOA News ☛ Afghan man imprisoned in France, accused of planning 'violent action'

    This 27-year-old Afghan, living in the southern U.S. state of Oklahoma, was in contact on the Telegram messaging service with a person identified by the FBI as an IS recruiter, according to American judicial authorities.

  • The Straits Times ☛ China starts new round of war games near Taiwan, offers no end date

    It said it was a warning to the "separatist acts of Taiwan independence forces".

  • France24 ☛ China encircles Taiwan with planes and ships in 'stern warning' to separatists

    China deployed planes and ships around Taiwan in military drills on Monday, issuing a "stern warning" to separatist forces. This marks the fourth large-scale exercise in two years, as Beijing refuses to rule out force in its efforts to control Taiwan. The drills follow US Secretary Antony Blinken's caution against aggressive actions after Taiwan's National Day.

• Environment

  • Connor Tumbleson ☛ Hurricane Milton & Tampa

    All I learned was it gets dark quick once the sun goes down. The damage from the assholes who crossed lawns was visible and having multiple pumps cleared the standing water extremely quick. I didn't see any dams or higher water level, so I returned home with some pictures and bug bites.

    So for now I don't know what to expect, but perhaps I'll wake up with more water outside.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • The Scotsman ☛ AI-assisted cameras to detect 2 of the riskiest driver behaviours trialled in Scottish first

      Images captured by multiple cameras attached to a van are processed using AI to analyse whether a motorist could be using a phone or driving without a seat belt. Transport Secretary Fiona Hyslop told The Scotsman: “That deterrence aspect should ensure that people don’t do things that are clearly a risk to themselves and to other drivers.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Vintage Everyday ☛ Extraordinary Photos of 1,400-Year-Old Ginkgo Tree Shedding Its Leaves

      Ginkgos would probably be totally extinct if it weren’t for human cultivation starting about 4000 years ago in China. They are the last remnant of the species that covered the entire planet during the last part of the dinosaur era and were cultivated from rare refugia in the Himalayas for religious reasons.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Semafor Inc ☛ Gaza infighting roils Condé Nast execs

    In September 2020, Condé Nast hired its first head of diversity, equity and inclusion. It was a point of pride for the magazine publisher: Yashica Olden, a veteran DEI officer, became the highest-ranking nonwhite employee at a company that had been roiled by a year of internal frustrations around race. Olden had a long and accomplished resume leading diversity at WPP, the United Nations World Food Program, Credit Suisse, and other major organizations.

  • Nick Heer ☛ Matt Mullenweg and WordPress Hijack the Advanced Custom Fields Plugin

    ACF was created by Elliot Condon who, in 2021, sold it to Delicious Brains. At this point, it was used on millions of websites, a few of which I built. I consider it near-irreplaceable for some specific and tricky development tasks. A year later, the entire Delicious Brains plugin catalogue was sold to WPEngine.

  • Andy Simpkins ☛ The state of the art – Koipond

    Next we joined these networks together and the [Internet] was born. The dream of a paperless office might actually become realised – we can now send email (and documents) from one organisation (or individual) to another via email. We can make our specialist computers applications available outside just the office and web servers / web apps come of age.

  • NDTV ☛ More Billionaires Back Kamala Harris Over Donald Trump. Who They Are

    According to Forbes, 76 billionaires are backing Kamala Harris, while 49 billionaires have been identified as supporters of Donald Trump.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • RTL ☛ 'No laughing matter': 'Stolen satire' feeds US election misinformation

      The nonprofit News Literacy Project (NLP) calls such misinformation "stolen satire" -- plucking satirical content from its original context and presenting it as accurate information without a clear disclaimer.

      "People who aren't in on the joke take it at face value," Hannah Covington, a senior director at NLP, told AFP.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The Verge ☛ X blocked hacked JD Vance dossier links after the Trump campaign flagged it

    That’s a markedly different set of actions than those Musk took two years ago after criticizing Twitter’s decision to suppress a 2020 news story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. He called the choice “a violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment” and seeded internal documents related to the decision to certain journalists to report on — which doxxed people in the process.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • VOA News ☛ Tributes to Ukrainian journalist who died in Russian custody 

    Roshchyna is the 12th Ukrainian journalist to die as a result of their work since the full invasion of Ukraine, and the first to die in Russian custody, according to Oksana Romaniuk, executive director of the Ukrainian nonprofit, the Institute of Mass Information.

  • The Nation ☛ Harris Rocked the Media Blitz That Big Media Mocked

    The idiocy of the big media’s dismissing Harris’s interviewers can be refuted simply by its massive and varying audiences: Stern draws an estimated 10 million listeners, and his audience is three-quarters male. Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy is the number-one podcast on Spotify, and reaches 5 million listeners a week, overwhelmingly female. The View is the number-one daytime talk show, averaging 2.5 million viewers, most of them women. The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is the top-rated nighttime talk show, also averaging 2.5 million viewers. Harris’s 60 Minutes appearance drew 5.7 million voters, second only to Monday Night Football. No ratings are available yet for the Univision Town Hall. It’s mathematically dubious to simply add up the shows’ viewership, since some people watch more than one, but let’s do it anyway: More than 25 million people potentially viewed Harris’s media swing; millions more likely saw the Univision special.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Alabama Reflector ☛ As AI takes the helm of decision making, signs of perpetuating historic biases emerge

    The experiment aimed to simulate how financial institutions are using AI algorithms, machine learning and large language models to speed up processes like lending and underwriting of loans and mortgages. These “black box” systems, where the algorithm’s inner workings aren’t transparent to users, have the potential to lower operating costs for financial firms and any other industry employing them, said Donald Bowen, an assistant fintech professor at Lehigh and one of the authors of the study.

    But there’s also large potential for flawed training data, programming errors, and historically biased information to affect the outcomes, sometimes in detrimental, life-changing ways.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Millions of people across the US use well water, but very few test it often enough to make sure it's safe

    About 23 million U.S. households depend on private wells as their primary drinking water source. These homeowners are entirely responsible for ensuring that the water from their wells is safe for human consumption.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Big Tech Markets Its Snake Oil as Progressivism

    The company, which has been accused of anti-labor practices, is also currently in the courts arguing that the National Labor Relations Board is unconstitutional. It’s revealing that a company whose promotional materials trade in care and compassion draws such a firm line in the sand when it comes to supporting those fighting for a better workplace.

  • NPR ☛ Goodbye, Columbus? Here's what Indigenous Peoples' Day means to Native Americans

    There are no set rules on how one should appreciate the day, said Van Heuvelen, a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe from South Dakota. It's all about reflection, recognition, celebration and an education.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Publishers face 20% game revenue reduction if Denuvo DRM is cracked quickly, according to new study

    A recently published study on the PC video games market looks at the impact that anti-piracy tech is having on the business. Specifically, The Revenue Effects of Denuvo Digital Rights Management on PC Video Games, by William M. Volckmann II, looks at the revenue impacts of DRM protections being cracked or bypassed.

  • [Old] Tom's Hardware ☛ Denuvo Claims Its DRM Does Not Hinder Gaming Performance

    Even if the claims are true, gamers will still hate the inconvenience of a DRM

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• TechTarget ☛ Visa antitrust lawsuit explained: What happens next

  The DOJ has filed an antitrust lawsuit against Visa, alleging it has unlawfully monopolized the U.S. debit card market, limiting competition and charging exorbitant fees.

• India Times ☛ Indonesia asks Apple, Google to block China's Temu to protect small merchants

  Indonesia has asked Alphabet's Google and Apple to block Chinese fast fashion e-commerce firm Temu in their application stores in the country so it cannot be downloaded, a minister said on Friday.

  The move was intended to pre-emptively protect the country's small and medium-sized businesses against cheap products being offered by PDD Holdings' Temu, communications minister Budi Arie Setiadi told Reuters, even though authorities have not found any transactions yet by its residents on the platform.

• India Times ☛ Google: Google wants US judge's app store ruling put on hold

  Google has asked a California federal judge to pause his sweeping court order requiring it to open up its app store Play to greater competition.

• Trademarks

  • Right of Publicity

    • New York Times ☛ ChatGPT’s Voice Mode Can Impersonate You and Others

      When you think of what a voice programmed by artificial intelligence would sound like, you might picture something robotic and stilted, with a staccato cadence incapable of capturing the inflections, speed and emotion required to sound even somewhat human. But this is 2024, and the robots have gotten a serious upgrade. Now they can imitate voices, accents and intonation to an almost creepy degree — for better or worse.

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Piracy Shield May Reduce Illegal Sports Streaming, Traffic Analysis Suggests

    Italy's Piracy Shield blocking system was launched early 2024 promising to end the flood of pirate IPTV providers saturating the local market. Site-blocking proponents' claims of huge success were met by reports of significant failures. In the absence of any useful, credible data being made available by those behind Piracy Shield, researchers in Italy are trying to answer the big question: Is Piracy Shield effective at reducing access to pirated live sports streams?