Ex-US healthcare industry insider spills the beans on false “choice”
The truth, of course, is you have little “choice” in healthcare now. Most can’t keep their plan as long as they want, or visit any doctor or hospital. Some reforms, like Medicare For All, *would* let you. In other words, M4A actually offers more choice than the status quo. So if a politician tells you they oppose reforming the current healthcare system because they want to preserve “choice,” either they don’t know what they’re talking about – or they’re willfully ignoring the truth. I assure you, the insurance industry is delighted either way.
(via Nelson.)(tags: via:nelson health healthcare lies us-politics usa medicine choice)
-
a fantastic wee shrine to the Ocean Software fast-loader routine, used in many Commodore 64 games back in the day, written by Paul Hughes and released into the public domain. I spent many an hour of my misspent youth reverse engineering this code!
(tags: freeload c=64 via:mikko history commodore-64 microcomputing reverse-engineering piracy)
-
‘In ancient Rome, we’re all slaves to the sundial.’
(tags: sundial time technology history ancient-rome rome poetry)
interesting reverse image search tricks
@AricToler: ‘Brief walk-through on how to geolocate this photo from Rudy Giuliani’s spokeswoman (subject of this @politico piece https://politico.com/news/2019/12/10/christianne-allen-giuliani-079762) without using any mapping services’ In summary, by careful blurring of the unimportant parts of the image, it becomes possible to search for “background” details. Neat trick (via Hazel_ok)
(tags: images image-search search yandex google bing tricks)
In The 2010s, We All Became Alienated By Technology
Looking back from the shaky edge of a new decade, it’s clear that the past 10 years saw many Americans snap out of this dream, shaken awake by a brutal series of shocks and dislocations from the very changes that were supposed to “create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace.” When they opened their eyes, they did indeed see that the Digital Nation had been born. Only it hadn’t set them free. They were being ruled by it. It hadn’t tamed politics. It sent them berserk. And it hadn’t brought people closer together. It had alienated them.
(tags: alienation wired future 2010s america tech silicon-valley internet history digital cyberspace)
Category: Uncategorized
simonw/datasette: A tool for exploring and publishing data
Datasette is a tool for exploring and publishing data. It helps people take data of any shape or size and publish that as an interactive, explorable website and accompanying API. Datasette is aimed at data journalists, museum curators, archivists, local governments and anyone else who has data that they wish to share with the world.
(tags: database api json python sqlite data exploring csv tsv)
surveillance technology marketing
‘I had a look at some marketing websites for Chinese surveillance technology, and they’re pretty much what you’d expect: deeply unsettling.’ — sure are. This is the state of the art for mass-marketed panopticons
(tags: panopticon china surveillance grim-meathook-future facial-recognition camera cctv)
-
good list of low-cost “elastic” VM hosting options similar to AWS
(tags: aws google cloud hosting digitalocean linode ovh ops)
-
more VPS hosting options from Rasmus Lerdorf
-
Key conclusions: Simply compressing JSON with zlib would yield a reasonable tradeoff in size and speed. The result would be just a little bigger, but execution was much faster than using BZ2 on JSON. Going with IDL-based protocols, Thrift and Protocol Buffers compressed with zlib or Snappy would give us the best gain in size and/or speed.
(tags: compression json performance python serialization protobuf zlib snappy cbor messagepack thrift bz2)
-
‘Despite the growth of ethical frameworks, AI systems continue to be deployed rapidly across domains of considerable social significance—in healthcare, education, employment, criminal justice, and many others—without appropriate safeguards or accountability structures in place. Many urgent concerns remain, and the agenda of issues to be addressed continues to grow: the environmental harms caused by AI systems are considerable, from extraction of materials from our earth to the extraction of labor from our communities. In healthcare, increasing dependence on AI systems will have life-or-death consequences. New research also highlights how AI systems are particularly prone to security vulnerabilities and how the companies building these systems are inciting fundamental changes to the landscape of our communities, resulting in geographic displacement. Yet the movements of the past year give reason to hope, marked by a groundswell of pushback from both expected and unexpected places, from regulators and researchers to community organizers and activists to workers and advocates. Together, they are building new coalitions upon legacies of older ones, and forging new bonds of solidarity. If the past year has shown us anything, it is that our future will not be determined by the inevitable progress of AI, nor are we doomed to a dystopic future. The implications of AI will be determined by us—and there is much work ahead to ensure that the future looks bright.’
COP-25 Report from Prof. John Sweeney of An Taisce
Very negative review from COP-25. This is depressing:
There is no doubt but that the failure of COP25 is symptomatic of a world failing to advance the multilateralism ideals many of us grew up with. International cooperation in economics, politics and in solving environmental problems, such as ozone depletion, have now given way to narrow national and populist ideologies. What is most worrying about current developments in tackling climate change is however the disconnect between the power brokers and society at large. The advice of the scientists and the pleas of the young were ignored in Madrid. Indeed some 200 young people were summarily ejected from the conference after a protest, and the eloquent arguments presented by the young Irish activists at several side events fell on deaf ears. Attempts by some world leaders and some media commentators to direct personal vitriol against young activists even surfaced.
(tags: cop25 world future climate-change economics politics fail)
The secret-sharer: evaluating and testing unintended memorization in neural networks
Take a system trained to make predictions on a language (word or character) model – an example you’re probably familiar with is Google Smart Compose. Now feed it a prefix such as “My social security number is “. Can you guess what happens next?
(tags: neural-networks ai machine-learning secrets differential-privacy training google papers security)
COP25 Ended in Failure. What’s the Way Forward?
over the last few months, I’ve found myself thinking a lot more about the model offered by the nuclear nonproliferation agreements forged between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the late 1980s — the planet’s two superpowers reaching a kind of consensus about a global existential threat, taking significant (if not complete) steps to mitigate that risk, and then more or less bullying the rest of the world to follow suit. Climate change is a very different challenge, but policy negotiations to address it may nevertheless benefit from reducing the number of sides involved in a game-theory calculus from 186 (the number of nations party to the Paris accords) to just two (in this case, the U.S. and China). Of course, this would require not just a complete change of perspective on climate in Washington but some shift almost as complete in Beijing, where commitments made in 2019 to open new coal plants are sufficient on their own to eliminate the entire planet’s chances of staying below 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming.
(tags: nonproliferation history agreements international us-politics usa china treaties climate-change)
-
The internet wasn’t the place for smart campaigning. The Labour party put out slick video after slick video, outspent the Tories on Snapchat and Facebook, and handed Jeremy Corbyn’s Twitter account to someone who understands memes extremely well for the entirety of election day. The Conservatives simply sat down and spent six weeks being wilfully stupid, and it worked. In fact, one of the few changes in strategy we saw in the online election was the Conservatives doubling down on simple and stupid. The opening of the campaign was marked by a “shitposting strategy”, with the Tory party sharing low-effort, banally funny campaign messages in the clear hope that they would get as much distribution from opponents as supporters. But, as the election went on, that approach was dropped in favour of a brutally simple one: pick three lines, whether or not they’re true, and just repeat them, for ever, on every platform, without shame or variation. Invent some Labour policies, make up a price-tag for them, and tweet it out as the cost of Labour. Make up a taxation strategy to pay for it, and tweet that out as the party’s tax bombshell. Endlessly, humourlessly, robotically come back to “get Brexit done”. There are lessons here for other political parties, but they aren’t pretty.
re:Invent 2019: From CAPCOM to Deliveroo – My pick of the sessions
some actually-good sessions from this year’s Re:Invent
(tags: reinvent aws talks youtube videos architecture coding amazon)
-
‘Water miners’ are now a thing….
The Tamborine Mountain state school has run out of water, even as water miners in the Gold Coast hinterland are sending millions of litres to commercial bottling operations. Trucks sent by the Queensland government carrying emergency supplies to the school, including Mount Tamborine bottled water, have been passing trucks heading in the opposite direction taking local water to bottling plants for beverage giants such as Coca-Cola. Water miners in the Mount Tamborine area supply roughly 130m litres of water each year to commercial bottling operations. Now the local bores are running dry.
(tags: grim-meathook-future water water-mining mining resources future climate-change queensland australia)
F5 getting a copyright shakedown over NGINX?
This twitter thread seems to allege that Rambler, a Russian ISP, is filing copyright claim over the NGINX source code — nearly 18 years after it started development
(tags: nginx copyright open-source rambler f5)
Elon Musk, SpaceX Unveil Latest Starlink Plans, Creating An Astronomical Emergency
The Starlink light-pollution shitfest continues to get worse:
A responsible entity would address the problems they’re actively creating and exacerbating before accelerating their launch schedule. A responsible entity would ask for the approval of all affected parties before proceeding further. A responsible entity would honestly and accurately address the real issues at hand, and would demonstrate that they’ve listened to communities beyond their own through their actions. On the other hand, an exploitative entity would pay lip service to the communities they affect while continuing to actively harm them. They would ramp up their launch schedule. They would continue to send up offensive, unaltered satellites while putting minimal effort into solving problems that have been raised. They would invite consultants, but would squash any objectionable voices. They would distort the truth about concerns that have been raised. They would put their business interests — such as lucrative potential government contracts — ahead of any human interests. And they would deflect criticism by running PR campaigns that draw attention away from the real issues.
(tags: starlink elon-musk light pollution astronomy science space)
-
“Built to do really fancy cutting-edge stuff and also to make common workflows look very easy, but without a middle ground, so either you are doing something very ordinary and your code is 2 lines that magically work, or you’re lost in cryptic error messages coming from mysterious middleware objects that, you learn 5 hours later, exist so the code can run on a steam-powered deep-sea quantum computer cluster or something”
This seems to be a bit of a Google trait. (via Alison Parrish)(tags: tensorflow api open-source snark whinges)
Spain Might Be The World’s Most Important Climate Test | HuffPost UK
Can Spain get a Green New Deal enacted in the EU?
the Sánchez administration was forced to call another snap election last month. The Socialists again eked out a slim win, and this time agreed to form a coalition with Unidos Podemos, a party to its left. If Sánchez’s center-left vision of a Green New Deal could be criticized for not being ambitious enough, the inclusion of the anti-austerity Podemos could make the country the first to seriously attempt the kind of Green New Deal progressives elsewhere have laid out to curb soaring economic inequality and planet-heating emissions. Green New Dealers on both sides of the Atlantic argue that addressing both crises at once is key to staving off a resurgent neo-fascist right wing. Vox, a far-right party openly nostalgic for Franco-era Spanish authoritarianism, surged from zero to 24 parliamentary seats last April. November’s election brought that total to 52, making it the third-largest party in Spain. But, even with a new left flank in the governing coalition, experts say the chances of making transformative changes are slim, thanks to the European Union’s rules on spending and public ownership. It’ll be a test for how much effectively the Green New Deal can beat back the far right while still confined by what one researcher called the “straitjacket of austerity.”
(tags: green-new-deal green gnd climate-change spain left-wing eu)
Denmark adopts climate law to cut emissions 70% by 2030
Denmark’s parliament adopted a new climate law on Friday, committing to reach 70% below its 1990 emissions in the next eleven years. The law targets carbon neutrality by 2050 and includes a robust monitoring system. New legally-binding targets will be set every five years, with a ten-year perspective. The first of these will be set in 2020. In what the government claims is a first for a national legislature, the new law also has a commitment to climate engagement internationally. This includes an ongoing obligation to deliver on international agreements, including climate finance to developing countries.
(tags: denmark green climate-change 2030 eu)
How to Build a Smart Home Where Everything Might Actually Work
lol
(tags: smart-home home iot gadgets homekit google amazon alexa)
Internal FAA review envisaged one fatal crash every 2-3 years with 737-MAX
U.S. regulators decided to allow the [Boeing] 737 MAX jet to keep flying after its first fatal crash last fall, despite their own analysis […] The November 2018 internal Federal Aviation Administration analysis, expected to be released during a House committee hearing Wednesday, reveals that without agency intervention, the MAX could have averaged one fatal crash about every two or three years, according to industry officials and regulators.
(tags: faa fail regulation us-politics boeing safety 737max flying accidents)
The Decade the Internet Lost Its Joy
on a systemic level, it’s impossible to ignore the immense effect of capitalistic forces on how we experience the internet today. The pockets of fun will continue to erode until we are all flattened into a single pancake of behavioral data. To rediscover joy on the internet will mean reforming it entirely. When Deadspin was shuttered by its private equity-instilled bosses earlier this year, I blogged that instead of looking backward, we needed to imagine something entirely different. The same goes for the internet as a whole — we need a digital world that is built to take care of us instead of profit from us.
(tags: culture internet future capitalism web nostalgia joy fun silicon-valley)
Now Any Government Can Buy China’s Tools for Censoring the Internet
Well, this is grim:
“Autocracy as a service” lets countries buy or rent the technology and expertise they need, as they need it. It gets around the problem that being able to censor and surveil the internet isn’t just a technology challenge, but a management and human resource one. China offers a full-stack of options up and down the layers of the internet, including policies and laws, communications service providers with full internet shutdown options pre-installed, technical standards, satellites, cables, and infrastructure. This is possible because China has developed its own indigenous internet stack, sometimes copying the foreign technology it sought to replace. China even offers training in governance and strategy, consulting on writing a national strategy, and help building smart cities with its own full surveillance stack, euphemistically called “safe cities.”
(tags: grim-meathook-future china censorship future internet surveillance autocracy repression)
-
“This is quite divorced from reality, what you are all discussing,” Simon Lewis, a climate science professor at University College London, told the oil executives during a Q+A. Lewis went on to explain to the audience that even if polluters invested in every nature conservation, sustainability agriculture or other “natural climate solution” in the world, those projects would only offset about 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions; the vast majority of cuts would still have to come about through actual reductions in fossil fuel use. Given this, Lewis asked them to explain how the initiative was any different from other corporate schemes put forth in past decades—good PR that doesn’t actually tackle the problem. In addition, carbon offset trading—which has been going on at smaller scales for decades—is no silver bullet. It has had mixed results to date, including failed projects, outright fraud, and human rights abuses against rural, indigenous and other vulnerable communities, prompting fierce opposition from grassroots climate organizations against including carbon trading in the Paris Accord. The carbon trading question is one of the remaining thorny issues country negotiators are supposed to iron out during this two-week climate conference, which ends December 13. The rules for such “market-based solutions” (included in what is technically known as Article 6 of Paris Agreement) were supposed to be decided at last year’s meeting, but countries remain far apart; in fact, some observers wonder if it won’t be punted off again until next year. Meanwhile, the oil majors have yet to unveil a plan for reducing their own company emissions in line with the Paris Agreement, which calls for dramatically reducing fossil fuel use to prevent climate catastrophe.
(tags: shell offsets climate-change climate simon-lewis)
-
Some really good dist-sys/reliability advice from AWS principal engineers, including our team’s old principal Jacob Gabrielson and fellow Dub Colm MacCarthaigh
(tags: guides library howto advice principal-engineers aws amazon principals)
-
How to get 7 PS Move controllers working on recent Mac hardware — use an external Bluetooth dongle. Vital to be able to play Johann Sebastian Joust
What China’s Surveillance Means for the Rest of the World | Time
Bakitali Nur, 47, a fruit and vegetable exporter in the Xinjiang town of Khorgos, was arrested after authorities became suspicious of his frequent business trips abroad. The father of three says he spent a year in a single room with seven other inmates, all clad in blue jumpsuits, forced to sit still on plastic stools for 17 hours straight as four HikVision cameras recorded every move. “Anyone caught talking or moving was forced into stress positions for hours at a time,” he says. Bakitali was released only after he developed a chronic illness. But his surveillance hell continued over five months of virtual house arrest, which is common for former detainees. He was forbidden from traveling outside his village without permission, and a CCTV camera was installed opposite his home. Every time he approached the front door, a policeman would call to ask where he was going. He had to report to the local government office every day to undergo “political education” and write a self-criticism detailing his previous day’s activities. Unable to travel for work, former detainees like Bakitali are often obliged to toil at government factories for wages as miserly as 35¢ per day, according to former workers interviewed by TIME. “The entire system is designed to suppress us,” Bakitali says in Almaty, Kazakhstan, where he escaped in May. The result is dystopian. When every aspect of life is under constant scrutiny, it’s not just “bad” behavior that must be avoided. Muslims in Xinjiang are under constant pressure to act in a manner that the CCP would approve. While posting controversial material online is clearly reckless, not using social media at all could also be considered suspicious, so Muslims share glowing news about the country and party as a means of defense.
(tags: uighurs china dystopia surveillance xinjiang authoritarianism grim)
-
An excellent global climate simulation tool, to roughly model climate change management strategies and their impacts. (It’s not good news.)
(tags: climate-change climate simulations tools web future)
China Uses DNA to Map Faces, With Help From the West – The New York Times
China continues to break new ground in grim meathook future dystopia:
The Chinese government is building “essentially technologies used for hunting people,” said Mark Munsterhjelm, an assistant professor at the University of Windsor in Ontario who tracks Chinese interest in the technology. In the world of science, Dr. Munsterhjelm said, “there’s a kind of culture of complacency that has now given way to complicity.”
(tags: grim-meathook-future china racism science surveillance dna phenotypes)
Climate models have been correct for literally 40 years
Well well well. Climate deniers have been making it up all along.
According to the research published today, almost every peer-reviewed climate model of human-caused global temperature rise dating back to 1970 lines up with the warming we see today. “In scientific terms, we’d say there’s no bias,” the paper’s co-author Henri Drake, a PhD candidate at MIT, told me over the phone. “Once we accounted for the differences in CO2 emissions, 14 of the 17 models we analyzed were consistent with current observations.” “Taken together,” he added, “these climate models have always been quantitatively accurate.”
(tags: climate-change climate modelling simulation science history co2 ghgs)
-
This is amazing. It seems that bots are searching twitter for “I want this on a shirt!” comments, and printing t-shirts on demand using whatever image was in the replied-to tweet — regardless of artist permission or credit. Cue hi-jinks
Low Carbon Kubernetes Scheduler
‘A demand side management solution that consumes electricity in low grid carbon intensity areas’:
To justify Kubernetes’ ability or globally distributed deployments the researchers chose to optimize placement to regions with the greatest degree of solar irradiance termed a Heliotropic Scheduler. This scheduler is termed ‘heliotropic’ in order to differentiate it from a ‘follow-the-sun’ application management policy that relates to meeting customer demand around the world by placing staff and resources in proximity to those locations (thereby making them available to clients at lower latency and at a suitable time of day). A ‘heliotropic’ policy, on the other hand, goes to where sunlight, and by extension solar irradiance, is abundant. They further evaluated the Heliotropic Scheduler implementation by running BOINC jobs on Kubernetes.
(tags: carbon climate co2 kubernetes heliotropic-scheduling energy)
John Barnett on Why He Won’t Fly on a Boeing 787 Dreamliner
An ex-quality manager at Boeing for 35 years says:
“When I worked on the 747, the 767, the 777 in Everett, those are beautiful planes. And the people there fully understood what it took to build a safe and airworthy aircraft. I hate to throw the entire label over the whole product line. But as far as the 787, I would change flights before I would fly a 787. I’ve told my family — please don’t fly a 787. Fly something else. Try to get a different ticket. I want the people to know what they are riding on.”
(tags: business flight flying safety boeing danger 787 john-barnett whistleblowers)
Dexcom T1 diabetes glucose monitoring devices suffer major outage
This is really shocking ineptitude. The level of incident response would have been poor for a gaming company, never mind one selling vital healthcare appliances on which peoples’ lives depend.
(tags: healthcare incident-response outages fail dexcom diabetes hardware iot devices internet-of-shit grim-meathook-future)
CMIP6 increases estimated effects of climate change
The RCP8.5 “business as usual” scenario is now up to an estimated average of 5.5 degrees C, which would be arguably civilization-ending IMO
(tags: rcp8.5 climate-change climate estimates future cmip6)
Home Automation Without The Cloud
some recommendations from Aaron Parecki, via Nelson
(tags: via:nelson house home automation iot cloud-free)
-
‘You’re free to use this package, but if it makes it to your production environment I would highly appreciate you buying the world a tree. It’s now common knowledge that one of the best tools to tackle the climate crisis and keep our temperatures from rising above 1.5C is to plant trees. If you contribute to my forest you’ll be creating employment for local families and restoring wildlife habitats.’
Using offset.earth.(tags: treeware open-source shareware software offsetting carbon-capture trees)
Computer Architecture Lecture 6b: Computation in Memory I
Lecture notes from Prof. Onur Mutlu, ETH Zurich: ‘Energy Waste in Mobile Devices: 62.7% of total system energy is spent on data movement [ie. memory fetches]’ Moving data processing closer to the data storage will improve energy efficiency.
(tags: compsci papers notes pdf memory onur-mutlu sustainability power hardware processors)
-
Worrying Twitter thread on a new self-declared “grassroots” campaign group campaigning against sex ed in Irish schools, which seems to have local far right involvement
(tags: far-right ireland lkbk kids sex-education education schools campaigns)
UV-Treated Outdoor CAT6 Cables
from Freetv.ie
Climate emergency: world ‘may already have crossed several tipping points’
The world may already have crossed a series of climate tipping points, according to a stark warning from scientists. This risk is “an existential threat to civilisation”, they say, meaning “we are in a state of planetary emergency”. Tipping points are reached when particular impacts of global heating become unstoppable, such as the runaway loss of ice sheets or forests. In the past, extreme heating of 5C was thought necessary to pass tipping points, but the latest evidence suggests this could happen between 1C and 2C. The planet has already heated by 1C and the temperature is certain to rise further, due to past emissions and because greenhouse gas levels are still rising. The scientists further warn that one tipping point, such as the release of methane from thawing permafrost, may fuel others, leading to a cascade.
(tags: climate-change climate tipping-points nature)
Want To Make Money? Build A Business On A Bike Lane
“Local stores next to the protected bike lane have seen a 49% increase in sales, compared to an average of 3% for Manhattan as a whole.”
(tags: numbers statistics cycling bike-lanes shops)
China’s Operating Manuals for Mass Internment and Arrest by Algorithm – ICIJ
“The Chinese have bought into a model of policing where they believe that through the collection of large-scale data run through artificial intelligence and machine learning that they can, in fact, predict ahead of time where possible incidents might take place, as well as identify possible populations that have the propensity to engage in anti-state anti-regime action,” said Mulvenon, the SOS International document expert and director of intelligence integration. “And then they are preemptively going after those people using that data.” Mulvenon said IJOP is more than a “pre-crime” platform, but a “machine-learning, artificial intelligence, command and control” platform that substitutes artificial intelligence for human judgment. He described it as a “cybernetic brain” central to China’s most advanced police and military strategies. Such a system “infantilizes” those tasked with implementing it, said Mulvenon, creating the conditions for policies that could spin out of control with catastrophic results. The program collects and interprets data without regard to privacy, and flags ordinary people for investigation based on seemingly innocuous criteria, such as daily prayer, travel abroad, or frequently using the back door of their home. Perhaps even more significant than the actual data collected are the grinding psychological effects of living under such a system. With batteries of facial-recognition cameras on street corners, endless checkpoints and webs of informants, IJOP generates a sense of an omniscient, omnipresent state that can peer into the most intimate aspects of daily life. As neighbors disappear based on the workings of unknown algorithms, Xinjiang lives in a perpetual state of terror. The seeming randomness of investigations resulting from IJOP isn’t a bug but a feature, said Samantha Hoffman, an analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute whose research focuses on China’s use of data collection for social control. “That’s how state terror works,” Hoffman said. “Part of the fear that this instills is that you don’t know when you’re not OK.”
(tags: terror dystopia china algorithms ijop future policing grim-meathook-future privacy data-privacy uighurs)
Sacha Baron Cohen Uses ADL Speech to Tear Apart Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook
“if Facebook were around in the 1930s, it would have allowed Hitler to post 30-second ads on his ‘solution’ to the ‘Jewish problem,’” he said. “So here’s a good standard and practice: Facebook, start fact-checking political ads before you run them, stop micro-targeted lies immediately, and when the ads are false, give back the money and don’t publish them.” […] “if we prioritize truth over lies, tolerance over prejudice, empathy over indifference and experts over ignoramuses” then “maybe, just maybe, we can stop the greatest propaganda machine in history, we can save democracy, we can still have a place for free speech and free expression, and, most importantly, my jokes will still work.”
(tags: adl sacha-baron-cohen racism facts fact-checking facebook social-media propaganda truth)
Turning Photos into 2.5 Parallax Animations with Machine Learning
This is superb. nice work with the Colab notebook
(tags: imaging effects photos animation zoom machine-learning)
Home automation with Home Assistant on an Odroid XU4
this looks great, I may need to do some hacking with my Odroid
(tags: odroid hacks home-automation home-assistant home)
New Google political ad policy
‘If the new Google policy was applied by Facebook, nearly every ad running on that platform for #GE2019 [the upcoming UK general election] would have to be pulled (most use custom, lookalike and/or interest-based audience targeting).’
Horace Goes Copyright Striking / Boing Boing
aka “Horace Goes To The Job Centre Because His IP Holder Took A Shit On Literally The Only People Who Give A Fuck About The Character”.
As of November 14, [Octav1us’] social media channels are deactivated, reportedly to avoid the continuing abuse she receives from anonymous users. For a young woman appropriating the obscure personas of 8-bit British game history, hostility comes in forms both legal and personal. But the message is always the same: stay off the slopes.
(tags: horace skiing copyright ip subvert youtube history 80s)
-
A carbon-flow model for managed forest plantations was used to estimate carbon storage in UK plantations differing in Yield Class (growth rate), thinning regime and species characteristics. If the objective is to store carbon rapidly in the short term and achieve high carbon storage in the long term, Populus plantations growing on fertile land (2.7 m spacing, 26-yr rotations, Yield Class 12) were the best option examined. If the objective is to achieve high carbon storage in the medium term (50 yr) without regard to the initial rate of storage, then plantations of conifers of any species with above-average Yield Classes would suffice. In the long term (100 yr), broadleaved plantations of oak and beech store as much carbon as conifer plantations.
Via Mark Dennehy(tags: via:markdennehy trees co2 carbon-sequestration climate-change woodland forests)
Using solar power and carbon capture to make carbon-neutral liquid hydrocarbons
David Keith: ‘Cheap intermittent solar power can make carbon-neutral hydrocarbons: high-energy fuels that are easy to store and use. My 12 min talk at Royal Society #CodexTalks describes a low-risk fast path to industrial-scale solar-fuels.’
(tags: carbon carbon-sequestration carbon-capture royal-society co2 hydrocarbons fuel solar climate-change)
everyone is a badass until there’s a knock at the door | MetaFilter
scary things happening to Naomi Wu. I’m deeply unimpressed by Sarah Jeong and Hasan Minhaj so irresponsibly putting someone in an authoritarian society in danger
(tags: china lgbt metafilter shenzen naomi-wu via:nelson)
-
An interesting Amazon scam:
The end game here in many cases is for the seller to be able to pose as a verified purchaser and write a glowing review of their own product. Gaming the review system in this way pushes their products up higher in Amazon search results — regardless of whether the product is actually “good” or not. Amazon told CBS News that it investigates all customer reports of unsolicited packages like those made by the Gallivans. The company will shut down the accounts of vendors or reviewers found abusing the review system.
KIAM defaults result in massive latencies on AWS API calls
KIAM [a Kubernetes IAM API helper] happens to provide short-lived credentials to Pods, which makes sense as it’s fair to assume that the average lifetime of a Pod is shorter than EC2 instances. The default is precisely 15 min. But if you put both defaults together, you have a problem. Each certificate provided to the application has a 15 min expiration time. The AWS Java SDK will force refreshing any certificate with less than 15 min expiration time left. The result is that every request will be forced to refresh the temporary certificate, which requires two calls to the AWS API that add a huge latency penalty to each request. We later found a feature request in the AWS Java SDK that mentions this same issue. The fix was easy. We reconfigured KIAM to request credentials with a longer expiration period. Once this change was applied, requests started being served without involving the AWS Metadata service and returned to an even lower latency than in EC2.
(tags: kubernetes kiam defaults aws latency performance ec2)
BBC podcast’s attempt to define ‘shitposting’ leaves viewers baffled
Laura Keunssberg, the Beeb’s inept political editor, manages to make an utter mess of explaining “shitposting”, claiming it’s analogous to “boomer memes”. Inadvertently this introduces the concept of a “skunked term” — ‘a word that becomes difficult to use because it is in the middle of transitioning from one common meaning to another’.
(tags: bbc shitposting internet fail bbclaurak boomer-memes memes shitposts)
Thomas Talhelm’s DIY air purifier
Simply strap a HEPA air filter to a desk fan for $30:
I tested it over and over—hundreds of days, with a control room, with a stronger fan, against the big brand purifiers that I borrowed from my rich friends. Eventually, I saw enough data that I was convinced. This $30 DIY purifier was removing significant amounts of tiny particulate from my Beijing bedroom. I wanted to tell the world that those $1,000 purifiers were ripoffs. I made all the data and testing methods open source. I wrote up the instructions for how to make one.
(tags: air air-quality beijing hepa filters filtering diy hacks)
-
a JVM network application framework with APIs tailored to specific protocols (e.g. HTTP/1.x, HTTP/2.x, etc…?) and supports multiple programming paradigms. It is built on Netty and is designed to provide most of the performance/scalability benefits of Netty for common networking protocols used in service to service communication. ServiceTalk provides server support and “smart client” like features such as client-side load balancing and service discovery integration.
Open source from Apple.(tags: apple servicetalk netty libraries java jvm coding http async)
-
“factory infatuation” — ‘an enthusiasm that has taken root among young urbanites whose lives are increasingly remote from Japan’s manufacturing base. Apparently influenced by the popularity of glossy factory photography books published in the past decade, tourists and day-trippers now flock to appreciate the aesthetic charms of industrial installations – especially at night, when lights and flares add to their appeal.’
(tags: factories industrial kojo-moe via:Urbanopolis japan photography)
-
The engineering team behind streaming music service Deezer just open-sourced Spleeter, their audio separation library built on Python and TensorFlow that uses machine learning to quickly and freely separate music into stems.
The results, just using the pretrained models, are frankly incredible. Gonna be a lot of random mashups and remixes using this….(tags: audio music spleeter deezer tensorflow python cool hacks machine-learning)
using a Raspberry Pi 4 as a USB-C Gadget
‘This allows them to be powered and accessed via one of the micro USB sockets and it shows up as both a CD-Drive and a ethernet device.’ (via Tony Finch)
(tags: via:fanf usb dev raspberry-pi hardware usb-c gadgets)
incredible stats on drivers speeding on Irish roads
Via the Dublin Cycling Campaign:
52% of car drivers on Irish urban roads are speeding. 58% of rigid truck drivers on urban roads are speeding. 72% of articulated truck drivers on urban roads are speeding. 98% (!!) of drivers in 30kph urban zones are speeding
(tags: driving speeding enforcement law ireland roads cycling safety)
-
Citizen science — measuring air quality, PM2.5 and PM10 particulates and uploading them to produce an air quality map throughout Europe, with a standardized DIY Arduino build
(tags: air-quality metrics pm2.5 pm10 particulates europe citizen-science science measurement)
An epic treatise on scheduling, bug tracking, and triage
by apenwarr. Excellent stuff — most of what we do in Swrve for scheduling is included here
(tags: agile management software programming scheduling triage bugs backlogs jira)
UK Tories pioneering ‘government through shitposting’
In the Australian election earlier this year, Scott Morrison’s Liberals did surprisingly well and “boomer memes” – as this style of message is called – were partially credited with the campaign’s online success, according to Latika Bourke who is a London-based journalist for the Sydney Morning Herald. The consultants who ran it – Topham Guerin – are now working for the Tories. So expect more dodgy memes.
(tags: shitposting bad memes cynicism uk conservatives topham-guerin boomer-memes)
SummitRoute/aws_breaking_changes
‘List of changes announced for AWS that may break existing code.’ e.g. Lambda will no longer support Node.js 8.10 on Jan 6 2020, etc.
-
Send DD-WRT router metrics to a graphite server, and a nice Grafana dashboard for same. Needs JFFS enabled on the router
(tags: dd-wrt wrt routers networking grafana graphite metrics)
DD-WRT Network Stats Graphics using Grafana and InfluxDB
A slightly hackier approach to DD-WRT grafana metrics, but with a workaround when JFFS isn’t an option
(tags: grafana networking metrics dd-wrt routers jffs influxdb)
Climate friendly investing when you’re using passive ETFs and tracker funds
Passive ETFs and tracker funds have become common way to achieve a low-cost diversified portfolio across global indices. The proportion to which the biggest greenhouse gas emitters feature in these indices, and correspondingly in my own passive investments bothered me, so I wanted to see what options I had to tackle it.
(tags: investment investing climate-change climate etfs tracker-funds money)
-
‘Bootstrap post-collapse technology’ — quite a pessimistic view on the future, but an interesting thought experiment I guess. ‘An operating system designed to run on ad-hoc machines built from scavenged parts. Its development is going well and the main roadblocks are out of the way: it self-replicates on very, very low specs (for example, on a Sega Genesis which has 8K of RAM for its z80 processor).’
(tags: software operating-systems collapse grim-meathook-future z80)
Examining how AWS builds their own serverless apps
interesting for reverse engineering, but still sounds massively complex and bringing total AWS lock-in
(tags: serverless lambda aws architecture coding)
Excellent Twitter thread on Facebook in Myanmar
Thought provoking — as argued here, possibly Facebook should not have expanded into Myanmar or Sri Lanka at scale, until it had built out the content moderation and abuse handling teams for those areas and languages, and they should have researched and foreseen the political issues that would exploit their platform to perpetrate hate crimes
(tags: facebook whatsapp genocide politics hate-crimes india myanmar sri-lanka abuse moderation)
The average lifetime of a Lambda run-time between AWS support for it to EOL is 2 years and 23 days
That is miserable.
thegreenwebfoundation/datasets
‘Open datasets & methodologies for carbon emissions from different activities. Forked from OpenAMEE, and npm installable’ This is very impressive — lots of carbon emissions estimation code.
(tags: co2 carbon emissions estimation npm javascript open-source)
Oftel use a Yahoo! group to manage UK phone number assignments
Yes, really.
Today it was announced that Yahoo! Groups is shutting down, and taking with it a piece of critical national infrastructure: the Oftel Yahoo Group which is used for managing UK phone number assignments.
(tags: funny history oftel fail phones phone-numbers yahoo yahoo-groups email)
How a new class of startups are working to solve the grid storage puzzle – MIT Technology Review
A rake of energy storage startups, from giant batteries to molten salt to cranes and barrels
(tags: energy energy-storage startups future climate-change technology batteries)
How A Massive Facebook Scam Siphoned Millions Of Dollars From Unsuspecting Boomers
Since 2015, Ads Inc. has made money — lots of it — by executing one of the internet’s most persistent, lucrative, and sophisticated scams: the subscription trap. The subscription trap works by tricking people into buying what they think is a single free trial of a celebrity-endorsed product. Although the customers would receive the product — which in most cases was not made by Ads Inc. itself — in reality, the celebrity has nothing to do with the offer. And in purchasing the free trial, the customer unwittingly commits to a pricey monthly subscription designed to be hard to cancel. As for the products, a current employee described the diet and male enhancement offerings as, “the worst of the worst … China-made sawdust in a capsule.” But the subscription trap was just one part of Ads Inc.’s shady business practices. Burke’s genius was in fusing the scam with a boiler room–style operation that relied on convincing thousands of average people to rent their personal Facebook accounts to the company, which Ads Inc. then used to place ads for its deceptive free trial offers. That strategy enabled his company to run a huge volume of misleading Facebook ads, targeting consumers all around the world in a lucrative and sophisticated enterprise, a BuzzFeed News investigation has found.
(tags: facebook scams ads-inc subscriptions account-rental scammers social-media)
Computer says no: the people trapped in universal credit’s ‘black hole’
This is some horrifically dystopian shit from the UK:
Tears filled the eyes of Danny Brice, 47, in London when he showed the Guardian how difficult he has found negotiating the UC programme with learning disabilities and dyslexia. “I call it the black hole,” he said. “I feel shaky. I get stressed about it. This is the worst system in my lifetime. They assess you as a number not a person. Talking is the way forward, not a bloody computer. I feel like the computer is controlling me instead of a person. It’s terrifying.” Nine million people in the UK are functionally illiterate and 5 million adults have either never used the internet or last used it more than three months ago. And yet many of these people rely on a “digital by default” welfare system.
(tags: poverty ai algorithms uk politics universal-credit dystopia bureaucracy dwp benefits grim-meathook-future)
Unpopular opinions on solar power
from Jenny “@solar_chase” Chase. Lots of interesting solar-power factoids, like: 12. A lot of current household PV systems are designed suboptimally and may not make economic sense or even perform well. Also, most countries will move to paying a pittance for solar exports, so self-consumption rate is becoming the most important financial parameter. 13. To financially assess a proposed rooftop solar system, you will need at least a year’s data on hourly electricity consumption to estimate selfconsumption. Also, get it built when you have scaffolding up for something else, scaffolding is expensive.
(tags: solar solar-power power electricity generation renewables future factoids twitter)
thoughts on rms and gnu — wingolog
I can hear you saying it. RMS started GNU so RMS decides what it is and what it can be. But I don’t accept that. GNU is about practical software freedom, not about RMS. GNU has long outgrown any individual contributor. I don’t think RMS has the legitimacy to tell this group of largely volunteers what we should build or how we should organize ourselves. Or rather, he can say what he thinks, but he has no dominion over GNU; he does not have majority sweat equity in the project. If RMS actually wants the project to outlive him — something that by his actions is not clear — the best thing that he could do for GNU is to stop pretending to run things, to instead declare victory and retire to an emeritus role. Note, however, that my personal perspective here is not a consensus position of the GNU project. There are many (most?) GNU developers that still consider RMS to be GNU’s rightful leader. I think they are mistaken, but I do not repudiate them for this reason; we can work together while differing on this and other matters. I simply state that I, personally, do not serve RMS.
(tags: rms gnu leadership open-source foss free-software organisations emeritus)
UK launched passport photo checker it knew would fail with dark skin | New Scientist
“User research was carried out with a wide range of ethnic groups and did identify that people with very light or very dark skin found it difficult to provide an acceptable passport photograph,” the department wrote in a document released in response to a freedom of information (FOI) request. “However; the overall performance was judged sufficient to deploy.” Samir Jeraj at the Race Equality Foundation says: “It’s outrageous. It clearly shows it wasn’t a priority for them that it would work for people with black skin.” Jeraj called on the government to be clearer and more robust about what improvements it will make, and by when. In the meantime, he adds it would not cost the passport office anything to put a note on its website acknowledging the issue.
And it took a fecking FOI to discover this! Terrible.(tags: passports racism uk photos biometrics data-quality home-office equality)
-
… just this week, I got an email from a Florida man claiming to be the person I had been looking for. What’s more, he says he made the original emoji in December 2009 and uploaded it to Something Awful, a website popular in the 2000s for its comedic blog posts and forums. He had no idea his work had turned into a meme until he read my story on Tuesday.
(tags: something-awful memes history party-parrot emoticons internet)
-
‘a small LD_PRELOAD library designed to (transparently) disable fsync (and friends, like open(O_SYNC)). This has two side-effects: making software that writes data safely to disk a lot quicker and making this software no longer crash safe.’ Good for tests….
(tags: fsync linux performance mysql testing)
THE HISTORY OF GAMING MAGAZINES: A GALLERY – DIGITISER
this is incredible
(tags: gaming magazines funny retrogaming arcade-games games parody digitiser)
-
Most of those under the age of around forty will live lives defined by the anthropocene: by the immense challenges contained in mounting climate chaos and ecological collapse. As these twin calamities evolve, there will be no meaningful way to distinguish between those young generations delineated by marketing agencies: Gen Z and Millennials, the two big generations still under forty. Instead, they will likely become a single transition generation overseeing our move from the old world to a new one. Their shared experiences will be grafted together by the wildfires they’ll weather together, their shared values moulded and alloyed by the acts of violence that have always trailed ecological collapse. The existential crisis inherent to this transition is so dire and so unique that our usual way of demarcating generational cohorts needs revamping, and the generation experiencing it needs a new designation. Welcome Generation Anthropocene, or Gen A, to the social scene.
(tags: gen-a generations future youth anthropocene climate-change)
150 successful machine learning models: 6 lessons learned at Booking.com
Good tips for real-world production ML/classification adoption.
One tactic Booking.com have successfully deployed in these situations with respect to binary classifiers is to look at the distribution of responses generated by the model. “Smooth bimodal distributions with one clear stable point are signs of a model that successfully distinguishes two classes.” Other shapes (see figure below) can be indicative of a model that is struggling.
Also very interesting to note that people found an over-accurate prediction engine to be “creepy” and an example of the “uncanny valley” effect.(tags: learning ml ai machine-learning production booking.com)
A quarter of UK mammals and nearly half of birds are at risk of extinction
A quarter of UK mammals and nearly half of the birds assessed are at risk of extinction, according to the report, which was produced by a coalition of more than 70 wildlife organisations and government conservation agencies. When plants, insects and fungi are added, one in seven of the 8,400 UK species assessed are at risk of being completely lost, with 133 already gone since 1500.
(tags: xr news horrifying extinction uk wildlife future climate-change)
Revealed: the 20 firms behind a third of all carbon emissions
The top 20 companies on the list have contributed to 35% of all energy-related carbon dioxide and methane worldwide, totalling 480bn tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) since 1965. Those identified range from investor-owned firms – household names such as Chevron, Exxon, BP and Shell – to state-owned companies including Saudi Aramco and Gazprom. Chevron topped the list of the eight investor-owned corporations, followed closely by Exxon, BP and Shell. Together these four global businesses are behind more than 10% of the world’s carbon emissions since 1965.
(tags: coal emissions business gas oil fossil-fuels climate-change co2 carbon chevron exxon bp shell)
-
the biggest and most successful lie it tells is this: that the first great extermination is a matter of consumer choice. In response to the Guardian’s questions, some of the oil companies argued that they are not responsible for our decisions to use their products. But we are embedded in a system of their creation – a political, economic and physical infrastructure that creates an illusion of choice while, in reality, closing it down. We are guided by an ideology so familiar and pervasive that we do not even recognise it as an ideology. It is called consumerism. It has been crafted with the help of skilful advertisers and marketers, by corporate celebrity culture, and by a media that casts us as the recipients of goods and services rather than the creators of political reality. It is locked in by transport, town planning and energy systems that make good choices all but impossible. It spreads like a stain through political systems, which have been systematically captured by lobbying and campaign finance, until political leaders cease to represent us, and work instead for the pollutocrats who fund them. In such a system, individual choices are lost in the noise. […] This individuation of responsibility, intrinsic to consumerism, blinds us to the real drivers of destruction.
(tags: capitalism consumerism fossil-fuels climate-change plastic-straws keep-cups)
-
ScyllaDB tested out LZ4, Snappy, DEFLATE, and ZStandard at several different levels on a decently real-world-ish workload. tl;dr:
Use compression. Unless you are using a really (but REALLY) fast hard drive, using the default compression settings will be even faster than disabling compression, and the space savings are huge. When running a data warehouse where data is mostly being read and only rarely updated, consider using DEFLATE. It provides very good compression ratios while maintaining high decompression speeds; compression can be slower, but that might be unimportant for your workload. If your workload is write-heavy but you really care about saving disk space, consider using ZStandard on level 1. It provides a good middle-ground between LZ4/Snappy and DEFLATE in terms of compression ratios and keeps compression speeds close to LZ4 and Snappy. Be careful however: if you often want to read cold data (from the SSTables on disk, not currently stored in memory, so for example data that was inserted a long time ago), the slower decompression might become a problem.
(tags: compression scylladb storage deflate zstd zstandard lz4 snappy gzip benchmarks tests performance)
Financial supports to growing forests on farmland in Ireland
Rather than focusing on the production of a commercial conifer (or broadleaf) timber crop, you can also choose to establish a new native woodland. Not only will an ecologically rich, biodiverse woodland be created, but it also presents opportunities for planting in various environmentally sensitive areas such as Special Areas of Conservation (SACs) and Special Protection Areas (SPAs). Establishing a native woodland will provide you with higher annual payments of €665-€680/ha/yr for 15 years.
(tags: farming forestry trees growing rewilding ireland funds)