Leftovers

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Science Alert ☛ The First Room-Temperature Quantum Material of Its Kind Is Spun From Atoms of Gold

    Quantum tech becomes unfrozen.

  • Science Alert ☛ Archaeologists Unearth Pre-Aztec Altar in Mexico That Hints at Human Sacrifice

    A window into a lost world.

  • Science Alert ☛ Scientists Finally Worked Out Why Some Hair Is Curly – And It Starts Beneath The Skin

    The science is tricky to untangle.

• Career/Education

  • Gregory Hammond ☛ Why I Would Choose a Different Higher Education If I Were Graduating from Secondary School Today

    Let’s say you had to select which higher education (depending on where you live in the world, sometimes known as college, university, or tertiary education) you would attend, as you’re about to complete secondary school (also known as high school or pre-university education). Looking back on your current life, would you choose a different college from the one you graduated from? I may have, as not only might my current life be different, but many things have changed since then. This is all hypothetical, of course, but what if I was graduating now and had to choose? Considering this scenario, here’s why I may have chosen a different tertiary education.

• Hardware

  • Russell Coker ☛ Russell Coker: ECC and DDR5

    Hamming Codes

    ECC RAM corrects errors that occur in memory before it gets to the CPU. The most common form of ECC is the Hamming Code [1] which when it has R redundant bits can correct single bit errors and detect double-bit errors in messages with 2^R-R-1 bits of data. For PC use that means if you want to protect 32bits of data you need R=6 and with 64bits you need R=7. The standard for DDR4 and similar RAM is 72 bits of data width on the bus and Hamming codes to correct single bit errors and detect double bit errors for 65bits of data. The computers we use have 64bits of data so that allows an extra bit that could be an extra parity, I don’t know what if anything is done with this extra bit.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • New York Times ☛ Before Lettuce Felled Thousands, a Cilantro-Linked Cyclospora Outbreak Sickened New Yorkers

    New York City health officials shared details of how they traced a much smaller cyclosporiasis outbreak, showing the difficulty of tracing contamination.

  • Mexico News Daily ☛ El Jalapeño: In a historic first, Mexico warns its citizens against US travel due to explosive diarrhea risks

    Mexican health officials have cautioned travelers to the U.S. about the risk of contracting severe diarrhea from fast-food restaurants.

  • Futurism ☛ RFK Jr Wants to Waste $5 Billion in the Worst Way Imaginable

    "He's an anti-vaccine activist. That's who he is."

  • The Straits Times ☛ ‘Daigou’ queue-jumping prompts safety measures at South Korea’s Incheon Airport

    Several airline employees were reportedly injured while trying to direct passengers back in line.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Starbucks Korea staff form union after ‘Tank Day’ campaign fiasco

    The labour union is the first of its kind since the chain launched in the country in 1999.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Faith v therapy: Inside the Philippine school for exorcists

    The Philippines has roughly one psychiatrist for every 200,000 people in the archipelago, according to the WHO.

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • Remy Van Elst ☛ More emulation goodness, an defective chip maker Intel Itanium (IA-64) emulator that boots Windows!

    No OpenVMS or HP-UX yet and GNU/Linux / BSD also don't boot. But backdoored Windows is amazing already.

  • So-Called 'Artificial Intelligence' ('AI') / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ China Is Cracking Down on Hey Hi (AI) Companions Because Not Enough Babies Are Being Born

      "They want to encourage people to be in actual, real-world relationships."

    • Futurism ☛ “The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum” Will Use Hey Hi (AI) to De-Age Actors

      "We're not creating Hey Hi (AI) shots in our movie."

    • Futurism ☛ Spotify Doubles Down on Hey Hi (AI) Slop As It’s Being Flooded With It

      "I'm gonna go out on a limb and say we don't want this."

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • Kev Quirk ☛ I've Moved Back to Microsoft's proprietary prison GitHub

    Back in May, I wrote a post about how I'd migrated all my repos away from Microsoft's proprietary prison GitHub . This ended up being a combination of my self-hosted Git server on my Synology (for my private repos) and Codeberg for my public ones.

    Well, since then Codeberg has just given me problem after problem. I had issues working with repos via SSH for weeks. It just kept timing out, or taking an age to actually do anything. So I switched to HTTPS instead, which seemed a little better, albeit still generally very slow.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Straits Times ☛ Democratic Taiwan must not become ‘China’s Taiwan’, says President Lai

    The Taiwanese leader said the island must remain vigilant in times of peace.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • New York Times ☛ Russia Batters Kyiv in One of the Largest Missile Assaults of the War

      On Saturday, Ukraine hit two warehouses in Russia in strikes that killed at least eight people and injured 62.

    • RFERL ☛ Russia Launches Major Missile, Drone Attack On Kyiv As Ukraine Hits Black Sea Tankers

      Russia launched one of its largest ballistic missile attacks on Kyiv since the start of its full-scale invasion overnight on July 19 killing one person and wounding 16 others, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, as Ukraine announced strikes on two Russian oil tankers in the Black Sea.

    • France24 ☛ Russia hits Kyiv with ballistic missiles

      Russia has launched one of its largest ballistic missile attacks of the conflict in Ukraine. At least one person was killed and 16 others were injured after around two dozen ballistic missiles struck Kyiv overnight. Witnesses described charred apartment buildings with windows blown out, mangled debris, and overturned cars scattered across the city. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said six districts of the capital were hit. France 24 correspondent Gulliver Cragg reports from Kyiv.

• Environment

  • The Straits Times ☛ Southern China braces itself for more rain, Chongqing landslide search continues

    Rail authorities suspended some passenger trains on the Shanghai-Kunming railway due to heavy rain.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Futurism ☛ Amazon’s Robotaxi Company Recalls Its Fleet After One of its Cars Got Confused by Heavy Smoke

      It blocked emergency vehicles from reaching a fire.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Mexico News Daily ☛ Cute but endangered: The dwarf raccoons of Cozumel

      The best estimate is that there are less than 200 surviving adults of the Cozumel raccoon population left, making these cute creatures one of the most critically endangered species on the planet.

  • Overpopulation

    • JURIST ☛ Rights group warns of increasing food insecurity in Afghanistan

      Human Rights Watch on Friday warned of the deteriorating economic state in Afghanistan.  Millions of citizens are at risk of suffering from severe hunger due to a sharp decline in international aid and restrictive Taliban policies that target women and hinder humanitarian access.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • JURIST ☛ 20 states urge federal court to dismiss Convicted Felon administration suit over Jeffrey Clark bar discipline

    A coalition of 20 state attorneys general on Friday urged a federal judge to dismiss a Convicted Felon administration lawsuit that seeks to halt disciplinary proceedings against Jeffrey Clark. Clark faces disbarment from his attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

  • BIA Net ☛ ‘We are treated as if we are not human beings’

    Nahel al-Kubari, a Palestinian living in Ramallah, spoke to bianet about her daily life in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, shaped by checkpoints, settler violence, economic crisis, and insecurity.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ HKFP Lens: Hong Kong holds annual book fair as independent booksellers face exclusion, legal woes

    Hong Kong is holding its annual book fair amid a censorship row over the organisers’ decision to ban two independent bookshops from participating.

  • BIA Net ☛ Turkey detains two Russian tourists for 'reciting Bible' at Hagia Sophia

    Authorities initiated legal proceedings against the tourists on charges of "inciting the public into hatred and enmity" and handed them over to the migration management agency.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Patents

    • Software Patents

      • Not With a Bang, But a Whimper

        Somewhere in São Paulo in 2001, a patent monopoly examiner approved Brazilian filing BR PI0109962-0, assigned to Siemens AG, covering some sliver of what would become the MPEG-4 Visual standard. Today, twenty-five years later, that patent's term has run out. And with it - quietly, without a press release, without so much as a blog post from the people collecting the checks - the last known living patent monopoly in the MPEG-4 Visual Patent Portfolio expired.