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Meghan Cross on Twitter “Can a ghost and a zombie come from the same person? …”
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Most Top News Sites Block AI Bots. Right-Wing Media Welcomes Them | WIRED
Gosh, who would ever have predicted this? That flight from engagement on “toxic but populous” platforms — including the internet as a whole, where toxicity may be defined as not being paid — cedes public narrative to misinformation? https://www.wired.com/story/most-news-sites-block-ai-bots-right-wing-media-welcomes-them/
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“…policy implications of the development of virtual worlds – civil, company, commercial and intellectual property law issues” | …some common sense, some utterly bonkers stuff in this European Parliament report
Link is below; what worries me is not the reflective stuff which describes where we are, but the direction which their virtual finger is implicitly pointing by merely writing some of this stuff. Goodbye anonymity. Hello legally-mandated online identity and “rights for digital avatars”. And does anyone remember what a “NFT” was? REPORT on policy…
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(2022) Lasers reveal ancient pyramids and canals hidden in the Amazon | …basically a nice little primer on LIDAR and its use in archaeology, pretty pictures
The laser pulse repetition rate was 200?kHz. Flight altitude was 200 m above ground level, airspeed was 45?knots. Missions were flown in 200-m parallel strips, with 50% overlap. Data post-processing was done by M.S. (ArcTron) using the RIEGL software RiAnalyze. He successfully overcame fundamental problems in the raw data resulting from a time offset of 18?s…
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Grapefruit Is One of the Weirdest Fruits on the Planet | grapefruit history and drug interactions | Gastro Obscura
I knew it was weird, I didn’t know it was this weird. Grapefruit has a high volume of compounds called furanocoumarins, which are designed to protect the fruit from fungal infections. When you ingest grapefruit, those furanocoumarins take your cytochrome P450 enzymes offline. There’s no coming back. Grapefruit is powerful, and those cytochromes are donezo.…
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(2019) From Culinary Dud To Stud: How Dutch Plant Breeders Built Our Brussels Sprouts Boom | The Salt | NPR
I remember most of the brassicas of my youth with abject horror, especially my grandmother’s approach to boiling bitter, coarsely-sliced cabbage until it was practically white and then plating-up extremely rubbery stalky bits with ham which somehow had been both boiled-and-dessicated, serving it with blunt cutlery that was “too good to sharpen” and a streak…
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Both of these agencies want a piece of Microsoft’s Open AI partnership | POLITICO
It’s coming to something when government agencies are fighting a mafia turf-war over which one of them gets to regulate something which hasn’t really happened but which they feel ought to have happened / they feel may have kinda, sorta happened-ish, headcanon-style. The Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission are deep in discussions over…
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Looks like Ireland is spinning up its own online safety bill
The consultation document weighs-in at a mere 84 pages. However will they achieve anything with something so small? PDF: https://cnam.ie/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Draft_Online_Safety_Code_Consultation_Document_Final.pdf Via: https://www.threads.net/@mneylon/post/C2ZyqxCsohI/?igshid=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==
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Politicians should be using dedicated political messenger apps with record retention
As I have said previously: no app is obligatory for communication, and the device is the point of integration of apps for the user; so if there’s a requirement for records retention (and there should be) then politicians, civil servants and spads should be obligated to use a custom chat app to communicate securely amongst…
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DakotaTheKat on Twitter: “I have acquired the fabled NSA “FURBIE (sic) ALERT” memo” | …this is delightful
If you still have a Twitter account, this is delightful: someone FOIAed the late-90s panic about sound-recording Furby toys at the NSA — which I dimly remember at the time as part of the associated Furby moral panic / security zeitgeist, and that we have seen repeatedly since, in part amplified by (2016) IoT and (2023)…
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“Is it time to give up on old news?” | …thought-provoking essay from Jeff Jarvis
With newspaper circulation dropping we need to ask whether they have both been out-evolved by online communication and actively made themselves undesirable to their potential new consumers. Jeff offers a community-insider perspective. I recommend reading the whole thing. The way out of this will be to educate and empower our next generation, not in so-called…
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Former Linux kernel engineer Alan Cox weighs in on computer-data-as-evidence given the sketchy reliability of data-at-scale
Nice to see Alan sticking his oar back into the public discourse, below; I’ve been too occupied to muse on the bigger picture of the Post Office/Horizon scandal, but in a world of bitflips from cosmic-ray events (not to mention as Alan does: malware) perhaps the law needs to stop relying on data which lacks…