If there's a kind of cringe porn I can enjoy, the Horizon scandal is it. I'm seeing a bunch of little crimes and sorta-kinda engineering all stacking up to produce catastrophes. Looking forward to the definitive pop-tech-history full-length book.
BBC News: 'Damaging' testimony withheld from pregnant postmistress trial (By Nalini Sivathasan and Lorna Acquah)
'Damaging' testimony withheld from pregnant postmistress trial
A draft report that may have undermined the prosecution case was changed, documents seen by the BBC show.By Nalini Sivathasan and Lorna Acquah (BBC News)
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Australia's city flags: What are they and is it time to change any of them?
From Sydney to Perth to Wagga Wagga, many of Australia's cities have flags. But they're mostly unknown and unloved. Here's why.Nick Baker (ABC News)
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Weird to recognise myself in the first part of a "history of" video 🧓 So glad to see 春游 only going from strength to strength!
https://www.youtube.com/embed/0O9UDQKpH_c
YouTube: History of Chun You Festival(春游历史短片)
History of Chun You Festival(春游历史短片)
The time has come!Like Jupiter revolves around the sun, Chun You has been in orbit for twelve years. From the Morning Bar courtyard in Flower Town to our cur...YouTube
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THREAD: 7 months of work later, my Globe & Mail investigation into an Ethiopian state Facebook campaign reveals that at least 200 Ethiopian state institutions, from town administrations to ministries & even academic institutions, are using their Facebook pages to misinform & lure vulnerable women into being recruited for domestic worker jobs in Saudi Arabia, despite the grave dangers that enable human trafficking.
Another example of Meta platforms causing real life harm.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-ethiopia-domestic-work-saudi-arabia-facebook/
Ethiopian Facebook campaign for migrant workers enables human trafficking, forced labour in Saudia Arabia, advocates say
Human rights researchers have condemned Ethiopia’s domestic work program, citing exploitation and rampant abuse of migrant workers in Saudi ArabiaZecharias Zelalem (The Globe and Mail)
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The Fedivision song contest is ON!
What is Fedivision? We are a light-hearted musical competition among amateur musicians on the Fediverse. You can submit one original unreleased piece < 4 minutes long in any genre. In May 2024, we will listen to all the entries and the fediverse votes on the best song!
Now in its fourth year, we have a brand new dedicated instance. Please follow this account to be kept informed. PLEASE BOOST this post so that all your musician friends get the word.
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AI models found to show language bias by recommending Black defendents be 'sentenced to death'
— The thing about this that terrifies me is the implication that lethal racism is embedded pervasively in our written culture at so deep a level that simple attempts to sanitize the LLM input data corpus doesn't even scratch the surface of the problem. https://www.euronews.com/next/2024/03/09/ai-models-found-to-show-language-bias-by-recommending-black-defendents-be-sentenced-to-dea
AI models found to show language bias by recommending Black defendents be 'sentenced to death'
Large language models (LLMs) are more likely to criminalise users that use African American English, the results of a new Cornell University study show.Anna Desmarais (Euronews.com)
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Tipoff from @kw217: Kazakhstan, which has not observed daylight saving for 20 years, is turning the clocks back at 0:00 on 1 March 2024, to 23:00 on leap day February 29 2024.
Definitely playing time zones on Hard Mode, Kazakhstan. Thanks for doing some QA on stacked edge cases for us all!
https://www.timeanddate.com/time/change/kazakhstan
Daylight Saving Time 2024 in Kazakhstan
When do the clocks spring forward or fall back in Kazakhstan? Daylight Saving Time for 2024 and other years.www.timeanddate.com
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this has been public for about a month, though!
https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz-announce/2024-February/000081.html
Author:
Perrin pressed forward through the beech woodlands. Where an oak or a larch broke through the tree cover he enjoyed the cool breeze. At a creek he could pick a few hawthorne berries. But as he rested under an old willow, he wondered if he could reach the pine forest before nightfall.
My brain:
Dude is in trees. There are trees and also trees and trees. There was wind. At a water he ate tree fruit. He sat under a tree. He wants to get out of the trees and into different trees.
Iver likes this.
How #FOSDEM helped to kick-start the setup of an open public transport routing service: https://volkerkrause.eu/2024/02/10/fosdem-2024-open-public-transport-routing.html
Very excited to see where this will go!
FOSDEM 2024 and Open Public Transport Routing
Last weekend I attended FOSDEM as part of KDE’s presence there, gave a talk about semantic data extraction of travel-related emails, met old long-time friend...volkerkrause.eu
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I've never had any accountancy training. But at one point zaomengshe.com needed financial reports, and I said "How hard can it be? I'll write some Python scripts." So the one thing I do know about accountancy, is that it is FUCKING HARD with financial partners who are incapable of attaching unique IDs to transactions. Which is all of them.
That's why, although I barely dare to say it, I kinda have some sympathy for Fujitsu here.
Woah! I did not expect this to go through at all. I had fully expected to begin the process of giving up my existing citizenships this year.
https://ard.social/users/tagesschau/statuses/111781537631783164
The Wandering Shop: Charlie Stross (@cstross@wandering.shop)
This seems like the perfect chance to pitch my phone OS based on neoliberal orthodoxy. Instead of calling malloc() like godless communists, apps bid for memory in an on-device currency. And not just memory! CPU time, network connectivity, storage. Programs can trade off space/time performance based on the device's current market conditions. As the consumer, you can mint as much currency as you like, and allocate it to apps according to how much you value their use. Preorders will open soon, as soon as I get my Bahamas bank account set up.
(Not a reply because I believe Charlie has blocked me. And this post isn't likely to do me any favours either.)
Charlie Stross (@cstross@wandering.shop)
Every time I see some well-meaning folks advocating "tax the rich!!" I wonder, why not think big and abolish money instead? Money isn't merely a symptom of poverty, as Iain Banks pointed out: money creates poverty—there's a potentially infinite supp…The Wandering Shop
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ActivityPub
The ActivityPub protocol is a decentralized social networking protocol based upon the ActivityStreams 2.0 data format.WordPress.org
Interesting quote from Google's #gemini team:
"LLMs also struggle with tasks requiring high-level reasoning abilities like causal understanding, logical deduction, and counterfactual reasoning even though they achieve impressive performance on exam benchmarks."
Which is another way of saying LLMs are the exact opposite of critical thinking. That could be a useful shorthand. "Is critical thinking important in this task?" "Yes" ⇒ "LLM-free zone".
https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/06/google_gemini_ai/
Google launches Gemini AI systems, claims it's beating OpenAI and others - mostly
Gemini accepts text, images, audio, and video and comes in three flavorsKatyanna Quach (The Register)
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"Ford’s methods were so influential that they became known simply as Fordism (something that Google and Facebook still haven’t achieved.)"
I dearly hope "Googlism" becomes a term for something you keep vague when telling people you have a doctor's appointment.
https://crookedtimber.org/2023/11/08/silicon-valley-is-the-detroit-of-the-future/
Silicon Valley is the Detroit of the Future
In the U.S., there is a city where industrial visionaries, state leaders, and financial titans all clamor to go. They want to see the future being made today. Revolutionary new ways of working are …Crooked Timber
Oh, interesting. I saw a brief popup at the station on the weekend and ignored it.
https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/11/flipper-zero-gadget-that-doses-iphones-takes-once-esoteric-attacks-mainstream/
Ars Technica: This tiny device is sending updated iPhones into a never-ending DoS loop
This tiny device is sending updated iPhones into a never-ending DoS loop
No cure yet for a popular iPhone attack, except for turning off Bluetooth.Ars Technica
"We're migrating the company wiki, as part of the cleanup all pages without an edit in the last 6 months will be archived."
-- real thing said by a free-roaming employee not wearing a Hannibal Lecter muzzle.
Huge news if true. This would be a worrying escalation that could throw the whole region into chaos, with implications for the supply chain worldwide. #bbc https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-66887236
BBC News: Giggles on the sofa! Pigeon CCTV has BBC hosts in tears
Giggles on the sofa! Pigeon CCTV has BBC hosts in tears
BBC Breakfast presenters react to footage showing a bird flying into an unsuspecting man's head.BBC News
Ow ow ow my eyes! Sadly, much as I'd like to blame this on ChatGPT, I'm betting a human is responsible.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/08/arts/ai-chatgpt-curators-museums.html
The New York Times: Museum Curators Evaluate A.I. Threat by Giving It the Reins (Zachary Small)
Museum Curators Evaluate A.I. Threat by Giving It the Reins
When Duke University’s art museum asked ChatGPT to organize an exhibition, it chose some unexpected artworks. But it also mistitled objects and wrote errant descriptions.Zachary Small (The New York Times)
I would definitely have gone with the headline "Repair company lobbies for law change to permit expanding business into commercial machinery." Sometimes clickbait tactics are used for good, not evil. #ifixit https://youtu.be/2uCpY3tFTIA
YouTube: Why McDonald's Ice Cream Machines Are Always Broken and How To Fix Them
Why McDonald's Ice Cream Machines Are Always Broken and How To Fix Them
You’ve got to feel sorry for those poor McDonald's employees. Why is it that their ice cream machines are always broken? If you check the historical data, y...YouTube
My reaction when Naomi Wu went offline was basically "that's a shame, but you're probably right not to make a big fuss or fight this." Guess I misinterpreted that.
"Literally the only thing that was keeping me online for the past few years was they were worried it would make China look bad if they cracked down on me. Now that they know that I could be dead in a ditch tomorrow and no one would give a shit or say a word I’m 1000x less safe here."
https://www.hackingbutlegal.com/naomi-wu-and-the-silence-that-speaks-volumes/
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I'm getting error 500 at https://git.friendi.ca/friendica/friendica, does someone need to go give it a kick?
Composer error on first Friendica install · Issue #13344 · friendica/friendica
Im geting this error trying to install composer on a friendica first install. [RuntimeException] Failed to execute git clone --no-checkout -- 'https://Friendlica:***@git.friendi.ca/friendica/php-js...GitHub
How can airlines justify forbidding "skiplagging"?
The Risks of ‘Skiplagging’
Booking a flight with a layover in the city that’s the real destination for the traveler can net big bargains, but airlines prohibit the practice.Christine Chung (The New York Times)
I bumped into the name "Horatio Alger Association" but decided I couldn't be bothered following up. Slacktivist puts it in context:
Hard work and clean living were never enough for the street urchins and matchstick boys in his books. The ones who achieved success only managed to do so because they were assisted by older, wealthy, unmarried men who took those boys off the streets and into their homes.
If you think there might be a creepy subtext to that, you’re wrong. It’s not a subtext at all.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2023/08/11/ragged-dick/
slacktivist: Ragged Dick (Fred Clark)
Ragged Dick
The "Horatio Alger Association" is called that because it's members are basically Billy Zane in "Titanic," not because they approve of grooming young boys for sex.Fred Clark (slacktivist)
Oops, maps.me finally went away. It used to be a good app, it worked offline and almost all the screen was map. They gradually cluttered the screen with more and more junk, and now you can't download more than ten regional maps, not enough even for a whole country. It's now useless as an application for, like, viewing maps.
Are there any free apps for viewing OSM offline any more? #openstreetmap
#OsmAnd~
Global Mobile Map Viewing & Navigation for Offline and Online OSM Maps
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.osmand.plus/
OsmAnd~ | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository
Global Mobile Map Viewing & Navigation for Offline and Online OSM Mapsf-droid.org
Meat Lego Gnosticism put on a good show, but anything after the first two albums is unlistenable. https://crookedtimber.org/2023/08/09/mary-harrington-on-the-family/
Crooked Timber: Mary Harrington on the Family
Mary Harrington on the Family
Late July, The Wall Street Journal published five short pieces under the title, “Have We Ruined Sex?” Among the five pieces was one by Mary Harrington. In her contribution she argues that the sexua…Crooked Timber
Deborah Pickett
in reply to Deborah Pickett • • •Steveg58
in reply to Deborah Pickett • • •Deborah Pickett
in reply to Deborah Pickett • • •Deborah Pickett
in reply to Deborah Pickett • • •Deborah Pickett
in reply to Deborah Pickett • • •Deborah Pickett
in reply to Deborah Pickett • • •devopscats
in reply to Deborah Pickett • • •now channeling memories of the intro to Australia You’re Standing in it flag scenes…
https://youtu.be/1ZaYhbaydUc?si=iRgp-5Kb6OPJjYVH
Australia Your standing in it Opening 1984
YouTubeDeborah Pickett
in reply to devopscats • • •Glen Turner (VK5TU)
in reply to Deborah Pickett • • •@devopscats Adelaide's flag looks a bit silly, but it was an early attempt at agricultural region branding (eg, as done well by Italy's Puglia).
So the design had to be able to be stenciled to a burlap sack.
Matthew Exon
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Deborah Pickett
in reply to Matthew Exon • • •Matthew Exon likes this.
Wonderdog
in reply to Deborah Pickett • • •/dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s2
in reply to Deborah Pickett • • •Deborah Pickett
in reply to /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s2 • • •/dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s2
in reply to Deborah Pickett • • •Stuart
in reply to Deborah Pickett • • •Deborah Pickett
in reply to Stuart • • •Wonderdog
in reply to Deborah Pickett • • •tjhowse
in reply to Deborah Pickett • • •I think the yellow and blue combination looks terrible. Brisbane's flag is a real shemozzle.
Though looking at other cities' flags for the first time... Brisbane's is about on par.
lucie digitální
in reply to Deborah Pickett • • •Deborah Pickett
in reply to lucie digitální • • •noodle
in reply to lucie digitální • • •Content warning: Ackchyually
@luciedigitalni In b4 a less accurate correction
https://blog.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/the-symbols-of-medicine/
The symbols of medicine: a story of snakes, staffs and Greek gods
Science Museum Group BlogDeborah Pickett
in reply to noodle • • •Content warning: Ackchyually
VirtualWolf
in reply to Deborah Pickett • • •(gobsmacked)
in reply to Deborah Pickett • • •