2024-10-09

authority via action, port automation, hurricanes, touching nature, tech undermines democracy, .io shit what now, Pi runs AMD GPU, FEMA aint that broke, Rooski spies in the UK, lead pipes bad.

Worthy

• you get the authority to do things by stepping up and doing them

  This is when I realized how vast the gulf between me and this well-meaning academic actually was. In her world, creativity has structures. And hierarchies. And defining institutions. And it would be completely reasonable to ask me where I got my permission from. Where I got my authority from. This was several years before the whole open-source thing. But even then one of the most obvious features of the hacker culture was that you get the authority to do things by stepping up and doing them. You don't create because somebody tells you you can, but because you must. There's a problem in front of you that needs solving and it's in your nature to do that.

etc

• Rare 'Steve' phenomenon dazzles in UK skies

• Norse obtained walrus ivory from deep Arctic, possibly interior Canadian Arctic

• Do U.S. Ports Need More Automation?

  despite Daggett and the ILA doing everything in their power to turn people against their cause, the case for port automation isn’t straightforward. It is true that U.S. ports perform poorly compared to ports around the world, but it’s hard to blame this entirely on a lack of automation. Few ports around the world are automated, and the most heavily automated ports (including in the U.S.) don’t necessarily perform the best. Lack of automation may be partly behind poor American port performance, but there are many other factors as well.

Hurricanes

• Perfect straight line frequency waves

• How did Hurricane Milton reach category 5 strength so quickly?

• As Milton Nears, Flood-Proof Fences Will Face a Major Test in Tampa

  • Milton storm surge could be too much for Tampa General's 'AquaFence'

• Gas stations run empty as panic grips Florida ahead of Hurricane Milton

• Fears of Hurricane Milton Drive Millions From Their Homes in Florida - The New York Times

• The government shipped up 3 pallets of electric chainsaws to us in a community without power

  • Report: Government Sends Electric Chainsaws To Appalachian Town Without Power | Not the Bee

  The original poster said his community in Little Switzerland, North Carolina, received these chainsaws from a U.S. Army Chinook helicopter ... and that it has been the only government assistance their community has received.

• Officials face antisemitic attacks on X over Hurricane Helene response - The Washington Post

  Top officials in North Carolina and at the Federal Emergency Management Agency responding to Helene are being subjected to a flurry of antisemitic attacks, causing some of them to fear for their safety as they prepare for another hurricane to strike Florida. The attacks, which include wild claims that Jewish officials are conspiring to orchestrate the disasters, sabotage the recovery or even seize victims’ property, are being fomented largely on Elon Musk’s X. Antisemitic tropes have commingled on the site with false rumors and conspiracy theories amid the chaos of the recovery effort, according to a report released Tuesday by the nonprofit Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD).

• blackhawk propwash incident

  My original post, identifying the helicopter as: ‘Fury 147 is a UH-60 assigned to the Connecticut Army National Guard. Flight tracker has it in the area at the correct time.’ my original post which included the flightradar24.com link, disappeared and my 𝕏 was throttled for ~24 hours.

• Elon Succeeded Where FEMA Failed | The Free Press

  With a handful of receivers in hand, the Starbuck team got the police and fire departments in Johnson County, Tennessee, back online—including their 911 emergency service. “They hadn’t had power in three days,” said Starbuck. When Starbuck found out that 100 Starlink receivers ordered by the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency hadn’t yet arrived, he sent a direct message on X to Elon Musk, who had his team rush dozens more receivers to the area. He also made a list of badly needed supplies, like work gloves, mops, tents, and shovels, which he posted on X; within 24 hours, his followers were sending supplies to east Tennessee.

  Starbuck wasn’t the only one who stepped in. Countless others have stepped into the breach, including Isaiah Burch, a helicopter pilot who flew bottled water and diapers to North Carolina; Tracy Roberts, a South Carolina realtor who coordinated 15 planes and ten copters; and Republican state representative Jeremy Faison, who used his pest control office in Newport, Tennessee, as a central point of contact for people sending aid. But while all these people raced to help the victims of Hurricane Helene, where was the federal government?

Horseshit

• Want Growth? Kill Small Businesses

• The funhouse mirror factory: How social media distorts perceptions

• Why U.S. Regulators See Minicars as the Enemy

• The Nazi of Oak Park – Chicago Magazine

  It was December 4, 1982, ... Reinhold Kulle, the high school’s chief custodian, had been a Nazi.

• King Charles didn't realise what cling film was and 'shrieked' first time he saw it - Mirror Online

• (Oct 4) How did 50K dockworkers strike at US ports with only 25K jobs?

  Nearly 50,000 dockworkers launched a strike this week at ports from Maine to Texas — but, in a bizarre quirk that has resulted from massive concessions to the union over the decades, the affected ports only employ 25,000. There’s a massive gulf in the numbers between those who show up for work and total membership in the powerful International Longshoremen’s Association, which won a deal late Thursday for a 62% wage increase over the next six years. That’s because half of the dockworkers at the East and Gulf coast ports are allowed to sit at home collecting “container royalties” negotiated decades ago to protect against job losses that result from innovation,

• The Price of a Mega Millions Ticket Will More Than Double to $5

• Dozen states sue TikTok over app's effect on kids' mental health

• Sovereignty: A pretext for Latin America's autocrats to attack NGOs

• A Particle Accelerator Spanning the Gulf of Mexico Could Unlock New Physics

• getting closer to nature

  Yesterday we caught a young raccoon in the trap. We debated what to do with it, we decided to just let it go a few miles away instead of killing it. The thing was VICIOUS. So he took some bear spray with him in the car just in case he would need it when he let the raccoon go.

celebrity gossip

• Gates Is Terrified of Trump Exposing Epstein's Client List

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Mozilla Says WhatsApp Must Act to Protect Elections

  Elections for about half the world’s population take place in 2024. But the integrity of these elections is under threat, because WhatsApp isn't doing enough to identify patterns of networked disinformation and hate speech on its platform – which can quickly turn into political violence. Mozilla is making an urgent call for WhatsApp to implement three simple changes in its product to slow the spread of political disinformation and other harmful content on its platform.

  (The language and call to action was updated on 31 May 2024,)

• Amazon, Tesla and Meta among top companies undermining democracy, report

  Some of the world’s largest companies have been accused of undermining democracy across the world by financially backing far-right political movements, funding and exacerbating the climate crisis, and violating trade union rights and human rights in a report published on Monday by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC).

• 'What's at stake is the world'

  when it comes to American tech companies, Ressa argues they’ve chosen a side. “I would say Big Tech right now is on the side of autocrats and dictators,” she said. “It enables their rise. It breaks down our shared reality.” Ressa warns that the erosion of trust in public institutions that she witnessed in the Philippines is happening in the U.S. And that reversing course will require the collective action of fact-based media and a fresh set of guardrails on technology companies.

• Foreign operations are manipulating social media to influence your views

Musk

• Musk's Super Pac Offers $47 to Those Who Help It Find Trump Voters

• US House panel probes FCC decision to deny Starlink nearly $900M

• Ask HN: Starlink Competitor Without Musk? | Hacker News

• Elon Musk Is Now Seizing Other People's Twitter Accounts to Promote Donald Trump

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Tesla Cybertruck 'too big and sharp' for European roads, say campaigners

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Cognizant Discriminated Against Non-Indian Workers, US Jury Says

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Nobel Prize goes to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton work on machine learning

  • Geoffrey Hinton, the Godfather of Deep Learning, Wins Nobel Prize in Physics

• The Atlantic Did Me Dirty - Carrie M. Santo-Thomas

  Horowitch’s article reflects a frighteningly narrow definition of what constitutes worthwhile literature. Passing references to Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment, and even my unit about The Odyssey, confine literary merit to a very small, very old, very white, and very male box. As a staunch advocate for diverse and representative literature, I was immediately curious about the actual texts at the center of this “crisis” so I asked Horowitch directly what types of books were the sticking points in her professor friends’ curricula. Unsurprisingly, it was canonical classics. As Horowitch points out, I am just “one public-high school teacher in Illinois,” but while professors at elite universities sound the alarm over Gen Z undergrads not finishing Les Miserables because they are uninterested in reading a pompous French man drone on for chapters about the Paris sewer system, my colleagues and I have developed professional toolboxes with endless other ways to inspire our students to read about justice, compassion, and redemption.

  And that’s a good thing, since Gen Z and Gen Alpha don’t cow to authority for authority’s sake. They simply won’t do things they don’t want to do, and I actually kinda love that. The rising young generations want texts that matter to them, that reflect their lives and experiences. So when we force-feed yet another vanilla canonical dust collector, and then complain that they aren’t playing along, it’s just not a good look for us.

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• US judge orders Google to open up Google Play to rivals

  • US judge orders Google to open app store to rivals

  • Why we're appealing the Epic Games verdict

• Apple Potentially Facing Worst Leak Since iPhone 4 Was Left in a Bar

• WP Engine / WordPress, Briefly

• The Disappearance of an Internet Domain

  On October 3, the British government announced that it was giving up sovereignty over a small tropical atoll in the Indian Ocean known as the Chagos Islands. The islands would be handed over to the neighboring island country of Mauritius, about 1,100 miles off the southeastern coast of Africa. The story did not make the tech press, but perhaps it should have. The decision to transfer the islands to their new owner will result in the loss of one of the tech and gaming industry’s preferred top-level domains: .io.

  • A UK treaty could spell the end of the .io domain

• TikTok is 'digital nicotine' meant to hook kids, AGs fume in new suits

• Mary Hubbard New Executive Director of Wordpress.org

  • photomatt is "the dude" HN comments

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Rust Resumes Rise in Popularity

• A popular but wrong way to convert a string to uppercase or lowercase - The Old New Thing

  • HN comments

• Carmack on 'simulator sickness'

  Simulator sickness tends to come from high quality rendering of smooth angle changes that you aren’t directly controlling. Skillfully playing an FPS yourself has your brain expecting every angle change, but a third person camera that is only loosely coupled to your actions can be a problem. Closely watching other people play can also be a problem. We first saw this after I got glQuake running on SGI hardware, and SGI invited us to their Dallas headquarters to try it out on a high end Infinite Reality system. A 3DFX could run 640x480 30 fps, but this system could run 1280x1024 60 fps. The room was dark, and I was playing the game on a big monitor at a quality we had never seen. Michael Abrash, watching behind me, got so sick he had to go sit down.

• Use an External GPU on Raspberry Pi 5 for 4K Gaming | Jeff Geerling

  Now comes the fun part. The Pi 5 supposedly supports 4K display output. But if you use it at 60 Hz, even normal UI elements will feel a bit laggy. With the RX 460, I get smooth 60 Hz output at 4K resolution. I also installed Doom 3 with Pi-Apps, and got a solid 60 fps at 4K. Outside of games, I ran glmark2-es2, and on the Pi's internal V3D graphics, I got a score of about 1800. On the external AMD RX 460, I got 2383.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Foxconn chairman: AI investment boom has time to go as language models evolve

• Large Language Models as Markov Chains

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• SpaceX launches Europe's Hera asteroid mission ahead of Hurricane Milton

• The satellite spectrum battle that could shape the new space economy

  In early August, when corporate activity was in a summer lull, Elon Musk’s SpaceX quietly opened up a new front in a global battle over a scarce and precious resource: radio spectrum. Its target was an obscure international regulation governing the way spectrum, the invisible highway of electromagnetic waves that enables all wireless technology, is shared by satellite operators in different orbits. And the chosen weapon was the US regulator, the Federal Communications Commission. On August 9, SpaceX petitioned the FCC to loosen globally agreed power limits on transmissions from operators like itself in low Earth orbit, the region of space up to 2,000km above the planet’s surface set to be a pivotal arena in the future of communication, transportation and defence. The so-called equivalent power flux density rules were set more than 20 years ago to ensure signals from low Earth orbit do not interfere with those from systems in higher geostationary, or fixed, orbit.

Crypto con games

• FTX creditors will make money on bankruptcy

  • FTX Customers Will Get Back Billions After Judge OKs Bankruptcy Plan

• The Rise of Monero: Isis-K's Preferred Cryptocurrency for Terror Financing

• HBO Documentary Suggests Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto Is Peter Todd

  • one rebuttal

Economicon / Business / Finance

• California's $20 Minimum Wage for Fast Food Workers Hasn't Hurt Employment

• Samsung issues public apology as earnings disappoint

• Roblox: Inflated Key Metrics for Wall Street and a Pedophile Hellscape for Kids

  • Hindenburg Research shorts Roblox, alleging inflated metrics

  • Roblox shares react to Hindenburg Research's latest report

• Boeing at Risk of Junk Rating with S&P Amid Strike

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Untapped Relief: FEMA Is Sitting on Billions of Unused Disaster Funds

  While FEMA is expected to ask Congress for new money, budget experts note a surprising fact: FEMA is currently sitting on untapped reserves appropriated for past disasters stretching back decades. An August report from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General noted that in 2022, FEMA “estimated that 847 disaster declarations with approximately $73 billion in unliquidated funds remained open.” Drilling down on that data, the OIG found that $8.3 billion of that total was for disasters declared in 2012 or earlier.

• A Troubled Place | City Journal

  The basic pattern in Charleroi has been replicated in thousands of cities and towns across America: the federal government has opened the borders to all comers; a web of publicly funded NGOs has facilitated the flow of migrants within the country; local industries have welcomed the arrival of cheap, pliant labor. And, under these enormous pressures, places like Charleroi often revert to an older form: that of the company town, in which an open conspiracy of government, charity, and industry reshapes the society to its advantage—whether the citizens want it or not.

• Cards Against Humanity Pays You to Give a Shit

  If you’re a registered voter in PA, GA, NV, AZ, NC, WI, or MI, just type your name into this dumb website for his PAC, put “MuskIsDumb@cah.lol” as your referrer, and they'll be legally obligated to pay us $47. The more people who do this, the more Musk money we’ll get to un-fuck America. If he doesn’t pay up, we’ll sue him again.

Harris / Democrats

• Kamala's 60 minutes interview continues to improve

  • Here's what happened

  60Minutes released a preview of the Kamala interview before it aired. Netanyahu word salad clip got dunked on relentlessly. So… 60Minutes cut it from the version which actually aired on TV. Makes you wonder what else was left on the cutting room floor.

Biden Inc

• Biden spoke to DeSantis and Tampa Mayor to discuss preparation

Trump / Right / Jan6

• Supreme Court Boots Musk's Fight with Jack Smith over Trump's Twitter Records

• CNN Panelist Aisha Mills: "As A Black Lesbian" Is Donald Trump Going To "Attempt To Exterminate" My Bad Genes?

• Trump sent Covid tests to Putin during 2020 shortage, new book says

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Chinese hackers access US telecom firms, worrying national security officials

  • Salt typhoon: Hackers attacked telecoms and ISPs because of "safe" backdoor

  • How a Clinton-era law opened up US secrets to China.

• Taiwan nixes next-gen fighter, opts to try to buy from US

World

• High Court ruling might mean executives face 'lower bar' for prosecutions

• Russian spies 'on sustained mission to generate mayhem in British streets', says MI5 boss

  The MI5 director general said Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, deemed responsible for the 2018 chemical weapon attack in Salisbury against double agent Sergei Skripal that resulted in the death of local woman Dawn Sturgess, has been active in the recruitment of criminals. “The GRU in particular is on a sustained mission to generate mayhem on British and European streets,” he said. “We’ve seen arson, sabotage and more. Dangerous actions conducted with increasing recklessness.”

• What the 'India hype' hides: Economic malaise and a broken country

Iran / Houthi

• Unusual earthquake raises alarms: Is Iran testing its first nuclear bomb?

China

• Rising tension in South China Sea disrupts Asia's subsea cable system

Health / Medicine

• Don't expect human life expectancy to grow much more, researcher says

  • Implausibility of life extension in humans in the twenty-first century

• What happens to all of 23andMe's genetic DNA data?

• The Truth About Lithium Might Never Come Out

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Why a bird flu case in Missouri is worrying experts

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• When Two Sea Aliens Become One

• A Changing Climate Is Scorching the Amazon, the World's Biggest River

• UN warns water cycle becoming ever more erratic

• Earth's 'vital signs' show humanity's future in balance, say climate experts

• Wild wheat: The key to food security in a warming world

• For How Much Longer Can Life Continue on This Troubled Planet?

• Lead Drinking-Water Pipes Must Be Replaced Nationwide, EPA Says

• Dolphins 'smile' at each other when they play and to avoid misunderstanding