2024-04-01
etc
-
2023 goes down as one of the safest years in commercial aviation history
hype and hyperbole seem to follow every minor incident these days, a phenomenon that I blame, in part, on the dearth of legitimately serious accidents. It often feels as if flying is getting more dangerous, when statistically we’re safer than ever. To wit, according to the annual report just released by the International Air Transport Association (IATA) 2023 goes down as one of the safest years in commercial aviation history. Not a single fatal accident was recorded involving a commercial jet. Not one.
-
Kia recalls over 427K Telluride SUVs because they might roll away while parked
Horseshit
-
The U.S. is exploring a railroad for the moon. It has a good reason
-
Opinion | The internet is failing at making humanity smarter - The Washington Post
The internet also makes it easier to find communities that can reinforce and embellish any given conspiracy theory, no matter how improbable. “Old wives’ tales” and hoaxes are not new, of course, but it’s hard to imagine QAnon lore proliferating as widely and quickly and with such elaborate detail in a pre-internet era. Those who wish to spread misinformation — perhaps for political or financial gain — can now efficiently share their message at scale. The puzzle is why consumers haven’t grown savvier about spotting misinformation. During the 2016 election cycle, lots of Americans proved easily manipulable by Russian trolls and disinformation agents on Facebook. But those Facebook victims were disproportionately older users who hadn’t grown up in the digital era and presumably had less practice scrutinizing the credibility of online sources.
-
Information Bombs: the danger of reading everything online | Happiness Machines
The Feynman way of learning is entirely antagonistic to this way of learning; articles are just pills of information trying to be as quick as possible for the reader to read and move on. Link aggregators such as slashdot or hn make us addicted to some data. Not information per se, but data. The reader who ingests knowledge without knowing these gaps in his mind will find it useless to try to put into practice what he just read since they don’t have the right tools to do it.
-
Why some vehicles are set to lose access to carpool lanes in California
-
Can this man get Gen Z (and the rest of us) off their phones?
-
You don't put ketchup on a Chicago-style hot dog, and Heinz is fighting that tradition. The condiment company is putting dispensable Heinz stations outside restaurants that don't serve its ketchup.
- In Chicago? Yeeccch. You know what's going to happen to these things, right? "public fleshlight" will just be the start. Rats will be all over it. And then the humans will do even worse things.
Electric / Self Driving cars
-
Self-driving semi-trucks are coming to America's highways (Archive)
Alarmed by the slow pace of federal regulation, labor and safety advocates are pushing legislation in several states to ban driverless trucks outright. So far, the effort has been unsuccessful. The California legislature approved a measure last year that would have required human operators in all autonomous trucks, but Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) vetoed it, calling it “unnecessary” in light of state regulations that already ban autonomous vehicles over 10,000 pounds.
Obit
-
Israeli tech entrepreneurs die in California plane crash
A couple from Israel who made a name for themselves as well as a fortune in the tech industry were killed after their plane crashed in a California town near the Nevada border on Saturday night, according to officials and reports. Identified by Israeli media as former professional soccer player Liron Petrushka and Naomi Petrushka, the married couple had been living in California over the last few years. They were attempting to land at Truckee Tahoe airport shortly after 6.30pm on Saturday when their plane crashed and they died.
Musk
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
-
Not every student needs algebra 2. UC should be flexible on math requirement
the reason UC professors have given for rejecting the courses is odd: Even though students might not be planning to enter STEM fields when they begin college, many of them change their minds later. Algebra 2 is a prerequisite for those studies.
-
IEEE no longer accepts Lena image containing submissions from 4/1 onward
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
TechSuck / Geek Bait
-
(2019) The Original Sin of Free Software
The ideal of the developer as an individual is hard-coded into the DNA of the Free Software Movement and its various children. There are various reasons for this; Stallman’s original tracts, for example, idealise his struggles with the collapse of the “social club” of MIT’s AI Lab and emphasise his private struggles against the loss of his community, these experiences are the cornerstone of his personal identity. Bruce Perens, father of the Debian Project, holds to the peculiar American cult of the Individualist Libertarian, as does Eric Raymond, the programmer/chronicler who devised the Open Source concept with Perens in the late 1990s - free software without the freedom.
It is important to remember that the American version of Libertarianism, as espoused by Ayn Rand and her ideologues, is nothing to do with the Franco-European tradition of libertarianism, a spectrum of leftist anarchism running from Babeuf through Déjacque to Faure. American Libertarianism should more accurately be described as “anarchist-capitalism”, a strain of pseudo-political thought which idolises the popular concept of the Old West as a high-point of western civilisation, when men were men and justice as dispensed from the barrel of a gun.
-
Fast and concise probabilistic filters in Python – Daniel Lemire's blog
-
Microsoft Helping Out in Making the Linux Kernel Language More Inclusive
For the most part the terminology within the code and code comments is adjusted from master and slave to instead using controller and target (or client). But even to these patches some questions were raised as the industry specifications tend to refer to the new controller/target terminology as opposed to client as is used in most of these new kernel patches. Among upstream kernel developers there is apparently not a clear consensus yet on settling between client and target.
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Economicon / Business / Finance
-
Cocoa prices rise to fresh records: Will we run out of chocolate?
Cocoa prices briefly surged to all-time highs on Tuesday, touching over $10,000 (€9,234.3) per ton, before settling back at $9,622 per ton on Wednesday morning, following disappointing harvests in key cocoa-producing countries such as Ghana and Ivory Coast. The crop also saw a 19.8% gain in the past week, as well as a 42.4% rise this month. In the past year, cocoa prices have jumped about 231%.
-
Fired Americans Say Indian Firm Gave Their Jobs to H-1B Visa Holders
Since late December, at least 22 workers have filed complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against TCS, whose clients have included dozens of the U.S.’s biggest firms. The American former TCS employees are Caucasians, Asian-Americans and Hispanic Americans ranging in age from their 40s to their 60s and living in more than a dozen U.S. states. Many have master’s of business administration or other advanced degrees, according to the complaints, which were reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
-
Behind Massive Mail-In Ballot Push Is A Little-Noticed Executive Order | ZeroHedge
-
(1922) The Limitations of the Law
Vice President Coolidge address before the American Bar Association
there is another part of the great accumulating body of our laws that has been rapidly increasing of late, which is the result of other motives. Broadly speaking, it is the attempt to raise the moral standard of society by legislation.
-
America is divided over major efforts to rewrite child labor laws
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
-
As Space Threats Mount, U.S. Lags in Protecting GPS Services - The New York Times
Global positioning satellites serve as clocks in the sky, and their signals have become fundamental to the global economy — as essential for telecommunications, 911 services and financial exchanges as they are for drivers and lost pedestrians. But those services are increasingly vulnerable as space is rapidly militarized and satellite signals are attacked on Earth. Yet, unlike China, the United States does not have a Plan B for civilians should those signals get knocked out in space or on land.
- There's room for signatures in the design spec: GPS signals - Wikipedia
World
-
Germany legalises private cannabis on April 1
The new law will allow adults to carry up to 25 grams of cannabis for their own consumption and store up to 50 grams at home. It is now slated to come into effect on April 1.
-
Turkish local elections: Opposition stuns Erdogan with historic victory
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
-
Climate change is delaying world clocks' need for a 'negative leap second'
here's where things get a bit weird. Human-induced climate change actually acts to slow down the planet's rotation, Agnew says, because when ice melts at the poles, the planet gets a bit more oblong — wider at the equators — and less spherical. That means Earth spins a little slower, like when an ice skater holds their arms out, rather than pulling them in.