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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
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Pakistani content moderators are exhausted and stuck – Rest of World
It’s dirty work and somebody is doing it… but can (or even: should) the categorisation of user-generated-content with respect to per-platform “policy” somehow be a stepping-stone into the mythic goal of a career in “tech?” Is that supposed to be a thing? Were people promised that? Quote: They wanted careers in tech. They’re stuck as
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Having it both ways: Larry Wall, Perl and the technology and culture of the early web | a critical analysis of the impact of Perl
I’m pretty sure that the author is simply restating that Perl allowed ordinary geeks to participate in Web development & research … with a subtext that that’s unusual since the web ought to have been stitched-up as a (Marxist?) vision of industry exploiting the worker, possibly a-la Stallman. If so, the author’s dog’s tail is
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Johannes Kepler University Linz reports significant DDoS attack targeted at @torproject HSDirs hosted on-site; seek reports from other Tor operators of similar, for analysis
* The attack was more advanced than simply saturating the upstream with bandwidth/packets, but had proper handshakes with the Tor relays, trying to cause resource exhaustion on the application level (we have seen this pattern multiple times in the last 6+ months, but this one was much more massive in terms of incoming packets).* The
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The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion
An eye-opening read; all it takes is the supposedly best of intentions for ordinary people to become complicit in censorship and suppression, even in a genre which is almost defined by diversity and inclusion: https://file770.com/the-2023-hugo-awards-a-report-on-censorship-and-exclusion/
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Science fiction authors were excluded from awards for fear of offending China
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/science-fiction-authors-excluded-hugo-awards-china-rcna139134
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You! Yes you! Are you an “evil privacy nerd?”
Because apparently the way to an anti-monopolistic better society, for some, is to mandate corporate surveillance that elsewhere the same people have been fighting *against* for many years.
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Has Wired Given Up On Fact Checking? Publishes Facts-Optional Screed Against Section 230 That Gets Almost Everything Wrong
“The article is terrible, full of factual mistakes and nonsense, and @wired should be ashamed.” mmasnick on Threads https://www.techdirt.com/2024/02/15/has-wired-given-up-on-fact-checking-publishes-facts-optional-screed-against-section-230-that-gets-almost-everything-wrong/