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“…we need evidence from you that the harm [Apple killing WebApps is] choosing to inflict on EU businesses & consumers is real & significant”
Genuinely wondering if this will throw up anything significant; I’m pretty sure the only webapps I use are Mandelbrot generators and a random Aeropress recipe generator. Apple will break Web Apps (PWAs) in the EU within the next week ?? In order to stop them, we need evidence from you that the harm they are…
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A turf war between people who want to ban social media for teenagers vs: those who want it regulated to the point of Orwellian surveillance — there can be only one!
Pardon the Highlander reference, but I never thought I’d encounter a drama* of child safety activists, so mutually exclusive in their approaches that each cannot allow the other to exist. On one side the Ghey followers, seeking outright bans on phone & social media access, so post-Brexit children can enjoy the 1970s all over again.…
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How to solve all AI-oversight issues at a stroke: Nationalised Foundation Models and free GPU access in Public Libraries; cc: @vestager
Apparently the big problem with Foundation Models is not that they are a concordance of online speech which — given enough time and resource — absolutely anyone can build, which is an issue that nobody wants to address yet. No, the problem is Capitalism, and Monopoly, and apparently all these companies giving away foundation models…
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*This* is how you should teach children how to be — and to make *others* — safer, online
Watch the video. This campaign is doing everything that the Online Safety Act — and its proponents — should be doing; a “Sliding Doors” story of choices and their consequences. I cannot imagine UK activists ever writing: “Sexting is sending and receiving intimate photos and videos online. Exciting, because it is a way of flirting.…
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Content Moderation and Data Protection | ICO releases a short PDF, which is a bit of a Curate’s Egg on moderation issues
So I am reading this and trying to be positive, but still I get the sense of “when all you do is data protection, everything is a data protection problem” — this occasionally leaks out where ICO refer to platforms that use (rather than practise) moderation, as if it were some sort of tool. It’s…
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There’s the thing about AI and “computers can’t be held accountable so must never make decisions”, but then we demand cars be fitted with cameras to not drift over white lines and this happens
[…] I was passing a bicycle the other day, and did what most people do on a road with no other cars – I just drifted over the center line to make room. Without using my turn indicator, because I was just making room. But the car’s lane-assist had gotten accidentally enabled, so the car…
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Civil Society: “Woe! Save us, regulators, for evil Capitalism has anticompetitively killed all innovation!” Free Software Community: “Hi! Here’s a new Browser engine, built from scratch!”
Ladybird is an ongoing project to build an independent web browser from scratch. It is being developed as part of the SerenityOS/serenity project on GitHub. There are no downloadable binaries yet, as the project is still very unstable. You can follow the build instructions to build it for yourself. This page is not fancy because we are focusing on…
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The Berkeley Software Distribution | … rich and detailed history of the back story of BSD Unix
My first encounter was 4.2 BSD but I didn’t really know where it came from until now… https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-berkley-software-distribution via Rich Salz on TUHS
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No data? No problem! Undisclosed tinkering in Excel behind economics paper | Retraction Watch
We are all worried about LLMs; meanwhile, Economics Professors are using Excel Autofill and copypasta from random countries to flesh-out datasets: Heshmati told the student he had used Excel’s autofill function to mend the data. He had marked anywhere from two to four observations before or after the missing values and dragged the selected cells…
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The WhatsApp group Smartphone Free Childhood was created […] in response to their fears around children’s smartphone use | … I think I can see several issues here
Like: how do they usually communicate remotely with their kids? Quote: ‘It went nuts’: Thousands join UK parents calling for smartphone-free childhood … More than 4,000 parents have joined a group committed to barring young children from having smartphones https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/feb/17/thousands-join-uk-parents-calling-for-smartphone-free-childhood
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This evening’s 3D-Print: Wine Rack Stackers
I have two 1990s vintage cheapo wine racks but an alcove which is only big enough to fit 1.6 of them; so I cut the bottom off of one using tin snips, and then 3D printed some butterfly ties so that they can be stacked on top of each other. The tie has the same…