Facebook/Meta starts talking about the "Extend" phase of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish as predicted:
"“You could imagine an extension to the protocol eventually — of saying like, ‘I want to support micropayments,’ or … like, ‘hey, feel free to show me ads, if that supports you.’ Kind of like a way for you to self-label or self-opt-in. That would be great,”
"Evil doesn’t win because good is dumb. Evil wins because evil is easy. It’s so damnably easy to be stupid and hateful and ignorant and mean. It’s effortless. It’s easy not to regulate your behavior or your emotions because fuck everyone else that’s why. It’s easy to just go through life the way your parents told you to and hate anyone who lives differently..."
It's never not time to share this but expecially not now.
I posted on Boing Boing about "White Trash Wins Lotto," a cast album of a Gilbert and Sullivan-style musical about Axl Rose. (You can download the whole thing for free.)
Josh Marshall reports that no clear information has yet been reported on who the pro-Israel counter-protesters violently attacking student protesters at UCLA are. He's also seen no evidence they were arrested.
Reports uniformly say they were not students and were almost all men. They were wearing balaklavas.
"Ending free speech on college campuses is the leading edge of a bigger war against dissent that could already be lost by Nov. 5, and any contest of the election result that follows."
And while we’re at it, here’s @pluralistic's “Zuck’s Empire of Oily Rags” again, probably the best essay on Zuck’s Evil Empire ever written:
“No one would pay very much for this oil, but there were a lot of oily rags, and provided no one asked him to pay for the inevitable horrific fires that would result from filling the world’s garages with oily rags, he could turn a tidy profit.”
@gyokusai@pluralistic "In corrupt systems, a few bad actors cost everyone else billions in order to bring in millions – the savings a factory can realize from dumping pollution in the water supply are much smaller than the costs we all bear from being poisoned by effluent. But the costs are widely diffused while the gains are tightly concentrated, so the beneficiaries of corruption can always outspend their victims to stay clear." 👍👍
I'm talking to a journalist in a bit about NASA's new "space sustainability strategy" and this one sentence from the abstract seems to sum it up:
"Given the substantial upfront expenditures required to develop and deploy remediation capabilities and the potential delay in receiving benefits, these motivations do not appear to be sufficient to incentivize immediate action"
I'm going to have to read this more carefully, but did NASA just say they don't care about orbit?!
So, they didn't include a realistic number of future satellites (they didn't even get close to the CURRENT number of satellites by the time they finished the report) and they seem to have horribly underestimated the costs to operators when all of their satellites have collisions, and the estimates of costs for removing debris are all wild guesses. And they conclude that it's not worth the $$ to remove debris or limit future launches to protect orbit for the future.
WHERE THE WEB IS GOING: The convergence of LLMs and web advertising will lead to "ads" consisting of several hundred gigabytes of javascript containing a (weighted) neural network designed to generate unique per-user video advertisements—generated on your computer at your expense to ensure the imagery is unique and evades AI-based ad-blockers.
"AI spam" is an entire AI, squatting on your CPU and making it glow dull red as it works out how to capture your attention.
Whoa. This seems really important. New study suggests that changing the charging protocol from the presently common constant current charge to a high frequency pulsed square wave current could DOUBLE the lifetime of Li-ion batteries.
i.e. the 8 year life of an EV battery back could be extended to a much more reasonable 16 years. That's huge.
When Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman published White Rural Rage, I knew that we were in for a storm after I posted some excerpts from it on social media, and outraged folks embedded in the hard right trolled the hell out of the excerpts.
That kind of trolling, often organized and done as pack hunting, tells me a book or article has made a point that really deserves a hearing.
