2024-12-17
1820's rocked, craftsmanship is dead, Bering Swamp, Satanic Panic misremembered, tokenized meshes, data starvation, Amazon runs on blood, clemency regrets, WI school shooter, Romania reasons
etc
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Charles Petzold: The Best Decade in Music
If we’re truly attempting to identify the decade during which the greatest quantity of beloved and enduring music was composed, I believe that to be the 1820s.
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Oldest Human Genomes Reveal How a Small Group Burst Out of Africa
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Why is it so hard to buy things that work well?
when I worked at a small chip startup, we had in-house capability to do end-to-end chip processing (with the exception of having its own fabs), which is unusual for a small chip startup. When the first wafer of a new design came off of a fab, we'd have the wafer flown to us on a flight, at which point someone would use a wafer saw to cut the wafer into individual chips so we could start testing ASAP. This was often considered absurd in the same way that it would be considered absurd for a small software startup to manage its own on-prem hardware. After all, the wafer saw and the expertise necessary to go from a wafer to a working chip will be idle over 99% of the time. Having full-time equipment and expertise that you use less than 1% of the time is a classic example of the kind of thing you should outsource, but if you price out having people competent to do this plus having the equipment available to do it, even at fairly low volumes, it's cheaper to do it in-house even if the equipment and expertise for it are idle 99% of the time. More importantly, you'll get much better service (faster turnaround) in house, letting you ship at a higher cadence. I've both worked at companies that have tried to contract this kind of thing out as well as talked with many people who've done that and you get slower, less reliable, service at a higher cost.
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People cross the Darien Gap today... The Famous Bering Land Bridge Was More Like a Swamp
the name “Bering Land Bridge” is often misleading. The landscape was not a literal bridge that necessarily compelled ancient humans and animals to cross it—it was a sprawling region in its own right that allowed for species to spread between Siberia and North America when sea levels were about 400 feet (122 meters) lower than today. It was a viable habitat in its own right.
Horseshit
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Is doom scrolling rotting our brains? The evidence is getting harder to ignore
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Casino refuses to pay 7-figure jackpot claiming it is a computer bug
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Those old phones you've kept tucked away are now worth a small fortune
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If Humans Die Out, Octopuses Have the Chops for the Next Civilization
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As the Olympics Approach, LA Considers Crackdown on Illegal Vacation Rentals
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F1's high-stakes gamble on Las Vegas GP is already paying out
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
Musk
Electric / Self Driving cars
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
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Extremist Pop Culture, the American Evangelical Right, and the "Satanic Panic"
The “Satanic Panic,” a movement of religious extremism that began around 1980 and ended in the mid-1990s, was part of a wider period of sweeping moral panic among the American far-Right in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. During that time, American news media outlets and law enforcement agencies received an increasing number of reports about clandestine cults that were purportedly abusing children in rituals dedicated to Satan. This was a bizarre historical phenomenon that courts, journalists, and politicians were struggling to understand. In 1980, the eccentric psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder first described this movement as part of “Satanic Ritual Abuse,” in a book that he co-wrote with former patient Michelle Smith, entitled Michelle Remembers.In it, Smith, “unlocked” a childhood memory of being abused at the hands of her mother and a local clandestine Satanic cult. Over the years, the Satanic Panic has attracted the attention of scholars of religion and politics, including Jeffrey S. Victor who links many of the political effects of the Satanic Panic to the publication of Michelle Remembers. Indeed, Smith’s account captivated audiences as a national best-seller, even attracting an interview with Oprah Winfrey.
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Study: Young children less likely than adults to see discrimination as harmful
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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The sweet Raspberry taste of success masks a missed opportunity
Success here not only keeps an industry sector alive, it guides the continued relevance of Pi evolution in ways that benefit us all. We look at the Pi 500 and don't see a ridiculously functional, very low budget educational and home computer built around open source, but something unexpandable with missing options and internal tinkering discouraged. Try finding anything near as good. How dare we? These may be the misperceptions of an ungrateful, entitled nerdery too used to a good thing, but there's a deeper truth at work. In part, this is an unavoidable consequence of the Raspberry Pi idea growing from a single, focused product of "a BBC Micro for today" to a revival of proficiency in low-level software and hardware skills amongst a very diverse enterprise that serves many different audiences. In part, this is because, despite the ethos of early microcomputing still fuelling the Raspberry Pi-maker's thinking, it isn't possible to recapitulate the raw excitement that happened back then.
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High-Fidelity 3D Mesh Generation at Scale with Meshtron | NVIDIA Technical Blog
Meshtron is an autoregressive model that generates mesh tokens. It shares the same working principle as autoregressive language models such as GPTs. A mesh can easily be converted to a sequence of tokens. The basic building block of a mesh is a triangle face, which can be represented with nine tokens. A mesh can thus be represented uniquely as a sequence of tokens by chaining these face tokens together according to a bottom-to-top sorted order.
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In IT? Need cash? Cybersecurity whistleblowers are earning big payouts
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
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Marc Andreessen Warns Against 'Government-Protected Cartel' of Major AI
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The AI revolution is running out of data. What can researchers do?
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Natural brains are often hooked to many sensory apparatus for a constant stream of new data input, which appears to be quite important for their function.
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Meta joins forces with Elon Musk to try to block OpenAI's for-profit transition
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Sam Altman reckons with a growing threat to OpenAI: Elon Musk
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AI in workplace is forcing younger tech workers to rethink their career paths
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
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How the mother of all bubbles will pop: betting against American exceptionalism
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90-hour-a-week Wall Street bankers snorting lines of Adderall at their desks
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"Since they bought the movie studio" might be a better way of saying it: Sony hasn't been this hot since it made the Walkman
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Fintech company collapsed and took $90M of people's life savings with it
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A Ride-Hailing Startup in Washington Tries to 'Out-Uber Uber'
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The affordable housing shortage is reshaping parts of rural America
Like rural communities across the country, Celina is seeing a housing boom that made it America’s fastest growing city in 2023. Now, pastures have been replaced with densely packed homes, golf carts zip around planned communities where tractors once plowed and local businesses are being replaced with big box chains. While the expansion of the suburbs is nothing new, a surge in home prices over the past several years has supercharged the trend, pushing homebuyers across the country further out from city centers to areas like Celina where land is cheaper and more plentiful and local barriers for developers tend to be lower.
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Investment fund 'aggressively' sells Magnificent 7 stocks amid fears of AI costs
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Sudden Loss of Undocumented Workers Threw Tech Supplier into Upheaval
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The most fulfilling jobs in America may not be the ones you expect
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Amazon facing strike threats as Senate report details hidden widespread injuries
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
Trump
Democrats / Biden Inc
Left Angst
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recall "Facebook is all in on Obama": How Silicon Valley is disrupting democracy
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Trump transition team to roll back Biden EV, emissions policies
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It's in the Constitution... Trump eyes privatizing US Postal Service, citing financial losses
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New Administration to block the government and military from buying EVs
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Trump Likely to Kill Federal Reporting Rule That Reveals Number of Tesla Crashes
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
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Hackers Jailbreak Digital License Plates to Make Others Pay Tolls and Tickets
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Live Updates: At Least 5 Dead at Wisconsin Christian School, Including Shooter - The New York Times
A juvenile opened fire at a Christian school in Madison, Wis., on Monday morning, killing at least four people before the suspect was found dead inside the school, the police said. At least five other people were injured in the shooting at the Abundant Life Christian School, which serves about 390 children from kindergarten through 12th grade, the police said. Their injuries ranged from minor to life-threatening, the police said.
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
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Feds urged to deploy high-tech drone hunters to solve mystery behind sightings
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Watchdog to issue new guidance after report finds air fryers may be listening
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How to protect yourself in the face of the Salt Typhoon phone network hack.
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In the 1970s, the CIA Created a Robot Dragonfly Spy. Now We Know How It Works
World
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Germany Is Unraveling and the Decline Threatens to Become Irreversible
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Serbian authorities using spyware to illegally surveil activists, report finds
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Swedish minister eyes energy crisis steps, blames German nuclear phase-out
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Man filmed being rescued from Syrian jail may have provided ‘false identity,’ CNN admits.
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Assad Breaks Silence From Moscow, Denies 'Planned' Syria Departure | ZeroHedge
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A Web of Intimidation – Algerian Government's Global Crackdown on Dissenters
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Romania’s Constitutional Coup Is Meant To Buy More Time For NATO In Ukraine
Nothing like this has ever happened before. Nobody alleges that the electoral process itself was fraudulent. The only claim is that classified evidence supposedly exists allegedly suggesting that the popularization of Georgescu’s content on TikTok might have been inorganic. When all was said and done, however, more voters still chose him over anyone else. This means that speculative degrees of separation between them and a foreign actor via social media was enough to annual the election. This is a disturbing precedent that can easily be exploited by the West the next time that a populist conservative-nationalist with “politically incorrect” foreign policy views wins an election. At the time of writing, a redo hasn’t yet been scheduled, but it’s expected after the new pro-Western parliament convenes on 20 December. About that, their elections were held after the first presidential round, but no accusations of foul play followed. This is obviously due to the West receiving its desired result.
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Chrystia Freeland Resigns, Threatening Trudeau's Hold on Power
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
China
Health / Medicine
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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Global thermal coal exports and power use to hit new highs in 2024
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We show that the accident both halted the growth of the US reactor fleet, and stifled innovation in nuclear physics. We propose a mechanism by which accumulated scientific knowledge determines the capacity of nuclear reactors, and find that some 55 billion tons of CO2 emissions, 2.3 million premature deaths, and 14 trillion USD in health costs could have been avoided, had we displaced fossil fuels with nuclear power.
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2023, 2024 climate change records defy scientific explanation
At the American Geophysical Union conference in Washington last week, top climate researchers discussed how to account for the steep, as yet incompletely explained warming spike seen during 2023 and 2024. They dissected studies that investigated suspects such as changes in low-level cloudiness, a pollution reduction measure that altered the amount of sulfur in marine shipping fuels and a strong El Niño event to try to explain temperature trends. Between the lines: At the end of a Dec. 10 session on the causes of the 2023 and 2024 warming spike, NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt asked for a show of hands from those attending the year's largest climate science conference. Only a smattering went up when Schmidt asked them to agree with the statement: "We have understood the anomalies in '23 and '24 with all of the information that has been presented here and that exists elsewhere." Instead, the overwhelming majority backed the position that a sufficient explanation hasn't been offered and more research is needed.
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Climate chemistry model finds "non-negligible" impacts of hydrogen fuel leakage
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Florida workers died in the heat. Their deaths were kept from authorities
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Yes. "B" Ark. Does Space Need Environmentalists?
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Huge math error corrected in black plastic study; authors say it doesn't matter