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I’m dialling in the new coffee grinder for espresso…
…and I love the results. I’m not a huge coffee snob but I am a huge coffee nerd and I find my fun in wringing the best coffee I can out of the equipment I have available — or that I can design & 3D print. The increasingly limiting factor for the past few years
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Google dodging huge financial penalties imposed by regulator for excessive blocking of legitimate content
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/russia-fines-google-decillion-youtube-lawsuit-b2638752.html A Russian court has fined Google $2.5 decillion for allegedly blocking pro-Kremlin propaganda on YouTube. The fine, which is the equivalent of $2.5 trillion trillion trillion, is the result of four years of accumulated fines, with the figure currently doubling every week under Russian law. …be honest, you thought this was going to be
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“There’s No Dublin Halloween Parade As Fake Website Causes Confusion” | …IS IT A CYBER ATTACK? IS IT AI?
Misinformation is perennial and human: From questions in online forums to TikTok Live streamers looking around Parnell Square, there’s been some confusion this evening over Dublin’s Halloween Parade. Unfortunately, people have been left “ghosted” by the phantom parade which seems to have all been part of an ad-revenue scam. https://goosed.ie/news/no-dublin-halloween-parade/
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Tension between US copyright office vs: video game historians regarding circumvention of copy protection
Unlike print media — where books written 500 years ago are challenging but at least still readable by eyeballs today — the platforms upon which video games run operate and die on Moore’s Law timescales: a device which is 10 in human years might as well be 30+ years of Moore’s Time, and 20 human
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Annoyed Redditors tanking Google Search results illustrates perils of AI scrapers | Ars Technica
As ever we observe people putting technology to novel use by leveraging aspects of its implementation (not design, merely implementation) in ways that other parts of civil society — not to mention the journalistic fourth estate — otherwise describe as challenging or problematic: A trend on Reddit that sees Londoners giving false restaurant recommendations in
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After Pause, NASA’s Voyager 1 Communicating With Mission Team | NASA
It’s been a long time since September 1977 and it’s still going, just… On Oct. 24, NASA reconnected with the Voyager 1 spacecraft after a brief pause in communications. The spacecraft recently turned off one of its two radio transmitters, and the team is now working to determine what caused the issue. https://blogs.nasa.gov/voyager/2024/10/28/after-pause-nasas-voyager-1-communicating-with-mission-team/
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“A surprising device is capturing the vibe of a single street corner in San Francisco” | …it’s not surveillance if it’s art
This is a few weeks old now, but still fun; it thoroughly epitomises the issue of “intent” being a major aspect of threat / that software and services are not inherently evil just because they have a particular metaphorical “shape” https://www.npr.org/2024/10/04/nx-s1-5135714/an-old-phone-in-a-plastic-box-captures-the-cultural-vibes-of-a-san-francisco-neighborhood …and it got spotted:
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As many people have pointed out, there are literally movies about this scenario
…to name just the big ones. AI ‘Will Enhance’ Nuclear Command and Control, Says Stratcom Boss
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The ITU is not a fit body to govern the internet, and neither is the UN
This short thread by Dominique Lazanski shows why governments (and their preferred fora such as the ITU) must be kept away from internet policy decisions and technical standards. For all of its faults the IETF at least takes the neutral stance that all governments are potentially hostile to the public good, and that political horse
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New coffee grinder on order
Coffee is an essential of life and taken very seriously at Chez Muffett, although I don’t regularly throw enormous amounts of money at anything else other than actual beans; instead my goal is to wring as much value out of what I can afford to get on a budget. But my beloved Baratza Virtuoso is
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If Donald Trump’s team OPSEC is so weak that they are open to people claiming to be him on random burner phones, AI voice synthesis presents an existential danger
The ramifications of this tweet are terrifying:
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China Adds 160 Gigawatts in First 3 Quarters of 2024 | CleanTechnica
China apparently weaning itself off of oil — can’t think why. For comparison the UK total demand averaged over a year comes out to something like 38GW https://cleantechnica.com/2024/10/26/china-adds-160-gigawatts-in-first-3-quarters-of-2024/ Via Matt Green