2024-04-08
Cool
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Eclipse 2024 - Andy Woodruff, cartographer
- crossing the path of the 2017 Eclipse at Carbondale, IL, at 2P CST.
etc
Horseshit
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Expelled Vanderbilt Student Thought He’d Escaped the Rampant Bigotry of the Deep South – Twitchy
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Large Cities And Cancer Share An Unexpected Similarity : ScienceAlert
A new study suggests that large cities, like London and Sydney, grow oddly similarly to malignant tumors. Researchers argue that the same key factors that govern the growth of cancer also seem to govern the spread of urban spaces.
(London) grew like cancer between 1831 and 2011. Mathematical models show that before the advent of the city's railway network, London's population was clustered in a small, central area. Long-distance travel to the fringes was expensive and difficult. The use of trains, however, permitted a shift to suburban living, allowing residents to live further and further out from the center. This seems to be a trend in other cities of the world, too: People tend to like living in lower-density areas if transportation to a central area is available.
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Procter & Gamble recalls 8.2 million laundry products for defective packaging - UPI.com
According to a The outer packaging can split open near the zipper track, posing a risk to children of the contents are ingested or exposed to the skin and eyes., the recall involves liquid laundry detergent packets packaged in flexible bags manufactured between September and February. The outer packaging can split open near the zipper track, posing a risk to children of the contents are ingested or exposed to the skin and eyes.
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Kids rode alligators at this forgotten Calif. amusement park
Boeing
celebrity gossip
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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Anonymous accounts use right-wing channels to spread misinformation | AP News
The reposts and expressions of shock from public figures followed quickly after a user on the social platform X who uses a pseudonym claimed that a government website had revealed “skyrocketing” rates of voters registering without a photo ID in three states this year — two of them crucial to the presidential contest.
State election officials soon found themselves forced to respond. They said the user, who pledges to fight, expose and mock “wokeness,” was wrong and had distorted Social Security Administration data. Actual voter registrations during the time period cited were much lower than the numbers being shared online.
by the time they tried to correct the record, the false claim had spread widely. In three days, the pseudonymous user’s claim amassed more than 63 million views on X, according to the platform’s metrics. A thorough explanation from Richer attracted a fraction of that, reaching 2.4 million users.
Musk
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X challenges Brazil's 'forced' order to block certain accounts
The social medial company said it is unaware why the blocking orders have been issued and is barred from giving details of the impacted accounts, adding that it is threatened with daily fines if it fails to comply. "This judge has applied massive fines, threatened to arrest our employees and cut off access to X in Brazil," Musk said when referring to a user's post on Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes' "free speech crackdown."
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X challenges Brazil's 'forced' order to block certain accounts
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Brazil threatens to regulate social media after clash with Elon Musk
“It is urgent to regulate social networks,” said (Brazil’s attorney-general) Jorge Messias. “We cannot live in a society in which billionaires domiciled abroad have control of social networks and put themselves in a position to violate the rule of law, failing to comply with court orders and threatening our authorities.”
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Elon Musk's leadership beginning to splinter Tesla loyalists as car sales drop
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Tesla accused in lawsuit of cheating California workers out of wages
Trump / War against the Right / Jan6
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Trump Media auditor has faced repeated criticism from regulators
The accounting firm picked to audit Donald Trump’s social media venture has had repeated run-ins with regulators and faced criticism for its failure to live up to professional standards in the US and Canada, according to a review of public filings. The Colorado firm, set up in 2009 by former IT consultant and Jeep enthusiast Ben Borgers, was thrust into the spotlight this week when its audit report on Trump Media & Technology Group flagged that the newly listed social media group could run out of money within a year.
The firm has targeted small- and microcap companies unable or unwilling to pay the higher rates charged by larger rivals, and appears to have kept its fees low by piling work on to its founder in particular. Ben Borgers is now the most prolific individual auditor of US public companies, personally signing 143 public company audit opinions in the past year, according to the research firm Ideagen Audit Analytics, five times more than any other US accountant.
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Inside Donald Trump’s secret plan to end the Ukraine-Russia war - The Washington Post
Former president Donald Trump has privately said he could end Russia’s war in Ukraine by pressuring Ukraine to give up some territory, according to people familiar with the plan. Trump’s proposal consists of pushing Ukraine to cede Crimea and the Donbas border region to Russia, according to people who discussed it with Trump or his advisers and spoke on the condition of anonymity because those conversations were confidential. That approach, which has not been previously reported, would dramatically reverse President Biden’s policy, which has emphasized curtailing Russian aggression and providing military aid to Ukraine.
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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Google is working on a 'lookup' button for unknown callers on Android
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Meta will label AI content to help prevent deepfakes on Facebook and Instagram
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Opinion | Happy 20th Anniversary, Gmail. I’m Sorry I’m Leaving You. - The New York Times
A few months ago, I euthanized that Gmail account. I have more than a million unread messages in my inbox. Most of what’s there is junk. But not all of it. I was missing too much that I needed to see. Search could not save me. I didn’t know what I was looking for. Google’s algorithms had begun failing me. What they thought was a “priority” and what I thought was a priority diverged. I set up an auto-responder telling anyone and everyone who emailed me that the address was dead.
- Email is a tool that requires consideration in care in use like any other. Learn to use your tools, instead of blaming them for your own disorganization. As many ills as we can blame on Google, this guy's problems aren't among them.
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
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Meta's AI image generator struggles with the concept of interracial couples
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Why our AI algorithms discriminate against people with disabilities
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To understand these social costs, we have to understand generative AI. It’s not an autonomous, intelligent system, able to think and decide like we do. Instead, as Emily Bender and colleagues emphasize, generative AI is a mimic of human action, parroting back our words and images. It doesn’t think, it guesses – and often quite badly in what is termed AI hallucination. Understanding generative AI as probabilistic systems highlights the social costs that follow from their development.
AI depends upon computing capacity: the more AI we deploy, the more computing capacity we need. Not only does this take computing capacity away from other, potentially more useful activities, it requires an enormous amount of energy. These environmental costs are well-known, but they will get significantly worse as AI spreads.
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Economicon / Business / Finance
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
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The father-of-two, who goes by Mitchell, was caught masturbating while following children around a H-E-B supermarket in Spring, just outside Houston. Further investigation led to him also being charged with indecency with a child by exposure - and the discovery of the videos. The couple's home was raided by heavily armed police and they were taken away in handcuffs while their two children, aged 18 and 10, and three dogs were rescued.
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Linwei Ding was a Google software engineer. He was also a prolific thief, say federal prosecutors.
Ding, whose home was searched by the FBI days before prosecutors say he was to board a one-way flight to China, was arrested in March and is now facing federal felony charges. He has pleaded not guilty. His case illustrates what American officials say is an ongoing nightmare for U.S. economic and national security: Some of America’s most prominent tech firms have had their virtual pockets picked by Chinese corporate spies and intelligence agencies.
Days after the Ding case was announced, prosecutors charged the owners of a Chinese company with conspiring to steal battery secrets from Tesla. This week, a government cybersecurity board ripped Microsoft for an “inadequate security culture” and a “cascade … of avoidable errors” that allowed Chinese intelligence hackers to compromise the company’s email software and gain access to the accounts of the U.S. commerce secretary.
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
World
Israel
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Journalist Who Broke Story on Israel's AI Warfare Discusses the Technology
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Former Mossad head Danny Yatom accuses Netanyahu of preventing hostages' return
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US plans to label goods from Jewish settlements in occupied West Bank
The Biden administration is drawing up plans to require goods produced in Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank to be clearly labelled as coming from there, according to US officials, another sign of White House unhappiness with the government of Benjamin Netanyahu. The final go-ahead for the move, and its timing, have not been decided but it is intended to increase pressure on Israel over rising settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, and comes amid US frustration with the Jewish state’s conduct of the war in Gaza. The move would reverse a policy introduced by the Donald Trump administration in 2020 that required goods produced in the West Bank to be labelled as “Made in Israel”.