News gathered 2024-03-13

(date: 2024-03-13 09:15:09)

Role of the pea protein aggregation state on their interfacial properties

date: 2024-03-15, from: ETH Zurich, recently added

Grasberger K.F.; Lund F.W.; Simonsen A.C.; Hammershøj M.; Fischer P.; Corredig M.

http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11850/649585 Save to Pocket

Economy-wide impacts of socio-politically driven net-zero energy systems in europe

date: 2024-03-15, from: ETH Zurich, recently added

Mayer, Jakob; Süsser, Diana; Pickering, Bryn; Bachner, Gabriel; Sanvito, Francesco Davide

http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11850/659857 Save to Pocket

2024-03-07 Why do we even blog?

date: 2024-03-13, from: Alex Schroeder’s Blog

2024-03-07 Why do we even blog?

The urge to blog lives in a strange place. One speaks to an imagined audience. It is not enough to imagine an audience, though. It’s more than writing into a booklet, “Dear Diary, …” – and yet we do it even if there are no comments. Sure, I never had a lot of comments. But I think I’m just as happy getting the occasional email or reply on the fediverse. The thought of somebody reading the words is terrifying. And once I got that first comment, once I started linking the blog from my profiles, putting it out there for others to find, inviting people to read and implicitly, to judge… I started discovered that the blog was something I feared. The blog is a thrill. It makes me nervous. The heart beats. The heart bleeds.

Back when the blog had comments, I used to be anxious about comments. First, there’s a comment. Is it good or bad? Do I read it now? Do I risk a look? But then the imagined audience is still there and now it’s worse. How will I react as I am being watched? Blogging turns into a performance where I feel like I’m demonstrating my moral character. I am not a racist! I am not a white supremacist! I am not a homophobe! Or am I? All the discourse online has made me self-conscious. I really don’t want to be what I fear I might be without knowing it. I keep thinking of the idea that people who aren’t very observant being unable to perceive their own faults. The requirements go up when I learn more.

The effect of all that anxiety, for me, is that I take things seriously. Words are serious. I try to put my word where my heart is. I try to weight them carefully. I weigh my heart. Writing is morally intense. It doesn’t matter how long or how short the page, how trivial or how controversial the topic.

And above all of it hangs the grey sky of unspoken words, of thoughts unexamined and all that maladjustment, all the failures, all the judgements. How often have I found myself falling short of my own measure.

To blog is to wrestle with that. I imagine an audience that is strangely interested in all the things I am interested in. I write for them, for me, for my future self that looks back, the heart full of regret. I struggle for virtue and I put it into words for you and me, the imagined reader and myself. As proof. “I struggled!” I struggle. I keep on struggling to discover what is right and to do what is right.

Blogging is like writing secret confessions. I write about the things that I think I did well because I did them wrong and then I changed my mind. I write about the things I know because I did not know them before. And who cares about those laborious system administration blog posts where I struggle with this or that ephemeral problem. All these issues are lost pages. Nobody cares. People find their answers on Stack Overflow or Reddit or some other centralized platform where middlemen gamify the experience so that we can help each other while on the thread-mill for their pockets. And who cares about those blog posts about growing old or playing games? People read them and move on. Like I do, when I’m reading online. Even if I am moved, I will move on. And there are so many posts to read, the folders on my disk with saved articles and snippets are more like compost heaps, where layer upon layer of good stuff gets dropped, never to see the light of day again.

Perhaps it sparked a thought somewhere, and perhaps that spark starts a fire, somewhere, much later. There is practically no connection and that is fine. The world moves and humanity is moved like a dreamer, one thought knows not the next, and we all partake in that eternal digestion of the sleepless mind. Our books, our journals, our blogs, our posts, they all participate. Perhaps we fall for those waves of outrage and the galaxy brain has a seizure as we all throw our weight around in unison, crushing innocent lives, leaving those we hurt behind, forgetting them as quickly as we forget about the outrage.

Or perhaps blogging is leaving a trail of blazing sparks, each one sparking a fire in the next generation. Spending time reading blogs and posts on social media has certainly changed me.

Perhaps I would have grown older differently without reading blogs and blogging. And this is why I cannot stop blogging. To blog in that half-shadow where perhaps our thoughts are read and perhaps they are not, where every text lights up and shines and drops and sinks onto that great pile where thousands of text are rotting, that is to participate in the galaxy brain that is our world. Some of us can vote and some of us can talk. Some of us can fight and some of us will weep. I try to blog.

I try to blog to prove to myself that it was a struggle, that I tried to think long and hard about things and that I tried to do the right thing. I keep failing and so I must keep blogging.

#Blogs

p1k3 wrote back in 2022:

Writing about writing. Programming about programming. Meetings about meetings. The mind reflecting on its own function. … Writing about writing might not have quite the same potential for nested, generative dysfunction, but it often produces artifacts just as unintelligible. – meta meta

That quote seemed very appropriate for one of the two threads in my posts. The other thread is about the audience and I got a comment on that, too, by the same author:

Not that I have much to add here, but I do relate to this one. The ongoing tension of these feelings contrasted with the sense that (as I’m sure I’ve said many times before) existing in public seems almost entirely unsupportable to me now. And yet: Nothing else has quite the same power as writing for this audience you can never be sure of. The one that might not even exist, but if it does might be all kinds of things.

The pain of existing in public is a great way to put it.

2024-03-08. How to overcome that impostor feeling where you reread that text you wrote and you want to throw it away. Not worth the electrons it was written with! But who’s doing the judging: you, or that imagined audience I was talking about?

I think the point of blogging is for there to be a tiny, non-threatening audience. And really, who is going to read my blog? Internet stranger-friends, mutuals on fedi, those kinds of people. Maybe my parents. (Hi mom!) I can always anonymoblog somewhere else if I’m feeling anxious. Because writing in a paper notebook I don’t feel judged. Surely there’s a similar place, online. The key is to find that happy state where the imagined audience adds a little zest but not the Twitter wolves or Hacker News, or whatever the particular blogging nightmare might be.

For me, this imagined audience is more important than getting it right. Which is why I write my blog posts with the wiki spirit. All these sites are pretty similar, in essence. Blog, wiki, digital garden, Zettelkasten, there’s not enough difference to draw lines. It’s all a question of intent, of culture, of belonging. The blog spirit is to write pages over time, and they disappear into the archive. The digital garden spirit is to write unfinished articles and papers, to be refined or not. The Zettelkasten spirit is to follow the trail of thoughts you thought and add new branches, small notes with new thoughts leading to more thoughts on new notes. And the wiki spirit is to write and edit online, to hit the Save button and then it’s live. There is no editor, there is no draft. Wiki is like brutalism in content management. I can see the page sources and the end result is obvious and full of that old web power. It’s not an app. The software has no idea of process. The wiki spirit is to open that window, write the text and hit save. And then I read it again, and edit it. And tomorrow, I read it again, and edit it. And next week, perhaps, I read it again, and edit it.

I no longer live in the Wiki Now. The pages are intended for future readers but they are not timeless. I add timestamps all over the place. The blog spirit is strong. The pages do disappear into the great compost of thoughts. The archive gobbles them up. I do go back but I don’t rewrite the pages completely. I’m more likely to simply add a timestamp and some thoughts like I did on this page.

I do remove stuff I stumble across that I don’t like at all. I do leave some bad things in there to remind me of bad decisions made, of bad opinions held.

What I want to say, most of all, is that blog posts aren’t gems. They are not precious books. They are not newspaper articles. They are not job applications. And if I don’t like it tomorrow, I edit it. I revise it. Or I write a new page saying how I learned something, or regret something, or I add something. I add stuff to the bottom of pages or I add new pages. What I don’t do is polish the old posts. There will be more great posts in the future. The important part is the writing.

2024-03-09. I’m reading The work of creation in the age of AI by Andrew Perfors and thinking about the part where meaning is discussed.

Meaning without an audience:

If I am writing an essay or diary entry to myself, the goal is … generally to clarify my own thoughts, to identify flaws in my thinking, or to distil the logic and motivations behind my ideas. I might have a more emotional goal - I might want to vent to myself or to express a feeling. I might want to improve my emotional regulation, feel better about life, or change those feelings somehow.

And then with an audience:

… once I decided I might actually want to post it, I changed it in important ways. I included a lot more explanation of things that were clear in my head but I thought would be non-obvious to others (and, in so doing, often I clarified them for myself too!). I fiddled with the structure and the argument flow, took some things out, put others in.

I got an email from @bouncepaw with a link to a reply. Thanks!

This is how it starts:

This article gets better every time I open it because Alex adds something to it.

I wrote about my propensity to “add” to pages up above (I’m doing it again!) and perhaps this would be a good place to talk about the two “views” for this site: blog & wiki.

A blog is organized by the timeline. The Home page lists all the pages in the order of their creation.

A wiki is organized by Recent Changes. The Changes page lists all the pages recently edited (unless I unset a checkbox).

So this site has both natures. And both views have a feed: blog feed & wiki feed.

I think you need quite some wiki-affinity to subscribe to the wiki feed. But it’s there for you.

2024-03-10. Got another reply by email, by fab – who hosts their site on Gopher, Gemini, and the web. Reminds me of the time I had a working Gopher setup. And now I’m remembering the endless bot spiders. Yikes. I still think there should be a way to better control the bots.

2024-03-11. Dozens also wrote a blog about blogging!

You may be wondering where blogs come from and why you would do a blog. If so, keep reading! – doing a blog

2024-03-13. acdw wrote a list of reasons for why don’t i blog?

https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2024-03-07-why-blog Save to Pocket

@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-03-13, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)

Heather Cox Richardson has a great read on how discredited Hur is, it was a total partisan hatchet job, done from inside the DoJ. And none of the big journalists even asked the question – where is this asshole coming from. Our journalists, today, who protest that we need them to keep our democracy, and then they assassinate it. When are we ever going to stand up and put a stop to this. BTW, Substack where she hosts her incredible writing, makes it impossible to find a web link to a story you recieve via email. It’s very easy to get to the article in their app. I prefer the open web, and always will. I don’t want Substack’s app.

http://scripting.com/2024/03/13.html#a160935 Save to Pocket

ONEXPLAYER 2 Pro handheld gaming PC with Ryzen 7 8840U launches for $1049 and up

date: 2024-03-13, from: Liliputing

The ONEXPLAYER 2 Pro is a handheld gaming PC with an 8.4 inch, 2560 x 1600 pixel display,  an AMD Ryzen 7 processor featuring RDNA 3 graphics and a set of detachable controllers that give the little like a Nintendo Switch. One Netbook first launched the ONEXPLAYER 2 Pro in the summer of 2023, and […]

The post ONEXPLAYER 2 Pro handheld gaming PC with Ryzen 7 8840U launches for $1049 and up appeared first on Liliputing.

https://liliputing.com/onexplayer-2-pro-handheld-gaming-pc-with-ryzen-7-8840u-coming-soon/ Save to Pocket

2024-03-13 Marking the Web’s 35th Birthday: A Shorter Letter

date: 2024-03-13, from: Alex Schroeder’s Blog

2024-03-13 Marking the Web’s 35th Birthday: A Shorter Letter

I think there are people with more interesting ideas than what Tim Berners-Lee has to say, given what I just read. His post is on Medium so I had to read in eww, the browser built into Emacs. 😂 The most interesting fragment was this:

collectivise their solutions, and … overturn the online world being dictated by profit to one that is dictated by the needs of humanity

It’s pretty much out of context because it follows something like this:

there is a need, an urgent need, for others to do the same, to back the morally courageous leadership that is rising

How weird is that? I started thinking. Where is that morally courageous leadership that is rising? Are they morally courageous but not in other ways? Is their morality courageous because their morals aren’t recognized as morals or their morals might seem amoral to others? Or is amorality considered moral in the mainstream? Or isn’t it rather that the mainstream knows full well what is moral but can’t help the systemic pressures of having to earn money? Why isn’t he advocating for system change? Is that what collectivisation is about? What exactly are we collectivising? The solutions? The products? The capital? Or is he just saying that the morally ambiguous but courageous leaders have ideas that we, collectively, ought to support? And the “fundamental change” he has in mind are “Contract for the Web” and “Solid Protocol”? I… I don’t know… We must “champion the efforts of those visionary individuals who are actively working to build a new, improved system”? It just feels so weird. How about this alternative:

1. We need a web that is built for the people, by the people.
2. We need free ourselves from the shackles and fetters of corporations.
3. Remove corporations and their representatives from all governing bodies and committees.
4. All positions to be paid positions. Don’t let those on the corporate payrolls take over.
5. One human, one vote. No strings attached. Don’t tie votes to membership fees. This is for all of humanity.

It took me two minutes to write something that seemed a bit more visionary than what Tim Berners-Lee had in mind and if you like it, please don’t champion me but talk to some friends and do a little thing, no matter how small, to support a few more people on the web. Run a forum, a wiki, provide email services, run a fediverse instance, run a HTML course at the library, collect money for a mutual aid fund, something, anything. The only conditions are:

1. it must be a concrete thing that you are actually doing
2. it must benefit more people than are involved in doing it

It’s OK to cap it. But it’s important to start it. Just make it a point to enable somebody else. And just like that, we’re taking back the web.

#Web

@ohyran commented on fedi:

“Its hardware all the way down”. The internet created this fantasy of a secondary realm outside of the physical confines of our reality - that allowed us to think that the person who controlled the narrative in that alternative universe had some control. In fact the people in control of hardware, if that’s servers or cables or switches, are in control. There is no second reality.

https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2024-03-13-open-web Save to Pocket

Bring On The Big Guns: Tesla Cybertruck Versus .50 Caliber Sniper Rifle

date: 2024-03-13, from: Inside EVs News

This ain’t no handgun.

https://insideevs.com/news/711817/tesla-cybertruck-bullets-50-caliber-rifle/ Save to Pocket

Microsoft Copilot for Security prepares for April liftoff

date: 2024-03-13, updated: 2024-03-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

Automated AI helper intended to make security more manageable

Microsoft Copilot for Security, a subscription AI security service, will be generally available on April 1, 2024, the company announced on Wednesday.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/13/microsoft_copilot_for_security_ready/ Save to Pocket

Why both Vision Pro & Quest are Good & Great?

date: 2024-03-13, from: Om Malik blog

If you have been a regular reader, then you know very well how I feel about Vision Pro, which is the best entertainment device I have ever owned (outside of my iPad.) And you also know that I think it is a two-horse race between Meta and Apple. (You can see my comments in this CNBC story.) Hugo Barra, …

https://om.co/2024/03/13/why-both-vision-pro-quest-are-good-great/ Save to Pocket

Intel continues prepping the Linux kernel for X86S

date: 2024-03-13, from: OS News

Nearly one year ago Intel published the X86S specification (formerly stylized as “X86-S”) for simplifying the Intel architecture by removing support for 16-bit and 32-bit operating systems. X86S is a big step forward with dropping legacy mode, 5-level paging improvements, and other modernization improvements for x86_64. With the Linux 6.9 kernel more x86S bits are in place for this ongoing effort. ↫ Michael Larabel I doubt we’ll see much fallout from these changes.

https://www.osnews.com/story/138808/intel-continues-prepping-the-linux-kernel-for-x86s/ Save to Pocket

Best of the West: The Hotline’s selections for the top players and coach from across the region

date: 2024-03-13, from: San Jose Mercury News

Arizona’s Caleb Love and Utah State’s Great Osobor were two of the top players in the western third of the country in 2023-24.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/03/13/best-of-the-west-the-hotlines-selections-for-the-top-players-and-coach-from-across-the-region/ Save to Pocket

@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-03-13, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)

I was glad to hear that Om Malik, one of the (original) ur-bloggers, has a blogroll on his site. I was almost going to say "still" but blogrolls are now officially on their way back.

https://om.co/blogroll/ Save to Pocket

What a ‘real world’ hydrogen pickup looks like and why it should end the conversation

date: 2024-03-13, from: Electrek Feed

This hydrogen-powered GM commercial truck offers 300 miles of range and “generates enough electricity to power 250 typical American homes” (for a few minutes?). Just not at the same time.

more…

https://electrek.co/2024/03/13/what-real-world-hydrogen-pickup-looks-like-and-why-it-should-end-the-conversation/ Save to Pocket

On trimming the silence from our lives. “One of the more distressing…

date: 2024-03-13, updated: 2024-03-13, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/03/0044183-on-trimming-the-silence-f Save to Pocket

Judge in Georgia Election Case Dismisses Some Trump Charges

date: 2024-03-13, from: VOA News USA

ATLANTA, GEORGIA — The judge overseeing the Georgia election interference case on Wednesday dismissed some of the charges against former President Donald Trump, but many other counts in the indictment remain. 

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee wrote in an order that six of the counts in the indictment must be quashed, including three against Trump, the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee. 

But the order leaves intact other charges, and the judge wrote that prosecutors could seek a new indictment on the charges he dismissed. 

The six charges are about soliciting elected officials to violate their oaths of office. That includes two charges related to the phone call Trump made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a fellow Republican, on January 2, 2021. 

“All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” Trump said. 

The case accuses Trump and 18 others of conspiring to overturn his 2020 election loss in the state to Democrat Joe Biden. Trump has pleaded not guilty. 

The ruling comes as McAfee is also considering a bid by defendants to have Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis removed from the case. Defendants have alleged that Willis has a conflict of interest because of her romantic relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade.

https://www.voanews.com/a/judge-in-georgia-election-case-dismisses-some-trump-charges/7525940.html Save to Pocket

@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-03-13, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)

This image was the result of a late night collaboration with ChatGPT. For some reason it can’t spell anything right, and when I asked it to correct the spelling it mocked me. But I loved the design. It understood the hard part of what I was asking for.

http://scripting.com/2024/03/13.html#a153021 Save to Pocket

European Union lawmakers line up to defend world’s first AI Act

date: 2024-03-13, updated: 2024-03-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

Rules were not bent for Big Tech, politicians say

The European Parliament has enacted the world’s first legislation designed specifically to address the risk of artificial intelligence, including biometric categorization and manipulation of human behavior, as well as stricter rules for the introduction of generative AI.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/13/eu_ai_act/ Save to Pocket

Blacklight Updated With New Tracking Info and Caching Options

date: 2024-03-13, from: The Markup blog

Our privacy scanner can now return more up-to-date information

https://themarkup.org/blacklight/2024/03/13/blacklight-updated-with-new-tracking-info-and-caching-options Save to Pocket

Rivian R3 Design Was Inspired By Some Of The Greatest Names In Rallying

date: 2024-03-13, from: Inside EVs News

The design team had the gravel-throwing Lancia Delta Integrale and Audi Quattro coupe from the 1980s on the image board.

https://insideevs.com/news/712194/rivian-r3-design-inspired-lancia-delta-integrale-audi-quattro/ Save to Pocket

‘Chemical cat’ on the loose in Japanese city

date: 2024-03-13, updated: 2024-03-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

Unlikely to survive hexavalent chromium dip, officials ask residents to keep an eye out

A cat covered in toxic chemicals is wandering the streets of Fukuyama in Japan, and locals are being warned not to go near.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/13/cat_chemical_vat_japan/ Save to Pocket

Yamaha Sweetens bLU cRU Support For SxS And ATV Racing

date: 2024-03-13, from: Ride Apart, Electric Motorcycle News

Handsome cash prizes and incentives await the top racers fielding Yamaha machines.

https://www.rideapart.com/news/711613/yamaha-blu-cru-support-atv-sxs-prizes/ Save to Pocket

An important consideration about Pi 5 overclocking

date: 2024-03-13, from: Jeff Geerling blog

An important consideration about Pi 5 overclocking

        <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"><p><em>Silicon lottery</em>.</p>

Now that the Raspberry Pi 5s been readily available (at least in most regions) for a few months, more people started messing with clocks, trying to get the most speed possible out of their Pi 5s.

Unlike the Pi 4, the Pi 5 is typically comfortable at 2.6 or even 2.8 GHz, and some Pi 5s can hit 3.0 GHz (but no higher—more on why tomorrow).

After some testing, I found the default 2.4 GHz clock on the Pi 5 is pretty much the efficiency sweet spot, and after a lot more testing recently, I can confirm that’s still the case, testing a number of Pi 5 samples.

  <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"><span>Jeff Geerling</span></span>

March 13, 2024

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/important-consideration-about-pi-5-overclocking Save to Pocket

Museum-Worthy?

date: 2024-03-13, updated: 2024-03-13, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/03/museum-worthy Save to Pocket

BYD reveals cheaper e2 electric crossover starting under $13,000 to undercut ICE cars

date: 2024-03-13, from: Electrek Feed

BYD is launching another lower-priced electric model. The Chinese automaker introduced the new BYD e2 Honor Edition, starting under $13,000, in its latest move to steal market share from gas-powered cars.

more…

https://electrek.co/2024/03/13/byd-unveils-new-e2-ev-starting-13k-undercut-ice-cars/ Save to Pocket

49ers set to sign LB Kendricks with Greenlaw’s recovery in question

date: 2024-03-13, from: San Jose Mercury News

Linebacker Eric Kendricks is expected to sign today with the 49ers, who need help as Dre Greenlaw recovers from his Achilles tear in the Super Bowl.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/03/13/veteran-eric-kendricks-coming-to-fill-49ers-need-at-linebacker/ Save to Pocket

House passes bill that would lead to a TikTok ban if Chinese owner doesn’t sell. Senate path unclear

date: 2024-03-13, from: San Jose Mercury News

The lawmakers contend that ByteDance is beholden to the Chinese government, which could demand access to the data of TikTok’s consumers in the U.S. any time it wants.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/03/13/house-passes-bill-that-would-lead-to-a-tiktok-ban-if-chinese-owner-doesnt-sell-senate-path-unclear/ Save to Pocket

Valley Fair in San Jose expands luxury collection with new merchants

date: 2024-03-13, from: San Jose Mercury News

Westfield Valley Fair in San Jose is expanding its luxury stores collection.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/03/13/san-jose-real-estate-store-retail-luxury-valley-fair-build-economy/ Save to Pocket

Lenovo Legion Tab is an Android gaming tablet (that already launched in China last summer)

date: 2024-03-13, from: Liliputing

The Lenovo Legion Tab is an Android tablet with an 8.8 inch, 2560 x 1600 pixel display featuring a 144 Hz refresh rate, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 processor, 12GB of LPDDR5x RAM, and 256GB of storage. Aimed at mobile gamers, the tablet will be available in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia beginning this […]

The post Lenovo Legion Tab is an Android gaming tablet (that already launched in China last summer) appeared first on Liliputing.

https://liliputing.com/lenovo-legion-tab-is-an-android-gaming-tablet-that-already-launched-in-china-last-summer/ Save to Pocket

The U.S. Wants to Ban TikTok for the Sins of Every Social Media Company

date: 2024-03-13, from: 404 Media Group

The TikTok situation is an untenable mess. Banning it will further balkanize the internet.

https://www.404media.co/the-u-s-wants-to-ban-tiktok-for-the-sins-of-every-social-media-company/ Save to Pocket

Teslas Depreciate Way Faster Than Maseratis Or Alfa Romeos: Study

date: 2024-03-13, from: Inside EVs News

A new report for iSeeCars blames Tesla’s aggressive price cuts for the cars’ rapid depreciation.

https://insideevs.com/news/712157/why-do-teslas-depreciate-so-fast/ Save to Pocket

New York Times: OpenAI’s claim we ‘hacked’ its products both ‘irrelevant’ and ‘false’

date: 2024-03-13, updated: 2024-03-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

Media giant’s counterfiling accuses AI darling of ‘spin’ in copyright infringement case

The New York Times has fired back another legal salvo at OpenAI after the ChatGPT maker accused it of manipulating the chatbot to regurgitate the media group’s content.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/13/nyt_hacking_response/ Save to Pocket

U.S. Has ‘No Evidence’ of Alien Technology, New Pentagon Report Finds

date: 2024-03-13, from: Smithsonian Magazine

A review of government investigations into unidentified anomalous phenomena since 1945 found that “most sightings were ordinary objects and phenomena and the result of misidentification”

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/us-has-no-evidence-of-alien-technology-new-pentagon-report-finds-180983938/ Save to Pocket

Judge dismisses some charges against Trump in the Georgia 2020 election interference case

date: 2024-03-13, from: San Jose Mercury News

The judge overseeing the Georgia 2020 election interference case has dismissed some of the charges against ex-President Donald Trump, but others remain. Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee wrote Wednesday in an order that six of the charges in the indictment must be quashed, including three against Trump. The order leaves intact many other charges in the indictment. The judge wrote that prosecutors could seek a new indictment on the charges he dismissed. The six charges in question have to do with soliciting elected officials to violate their oaths of office. One of the counts stems from a phone call Trump made to fellow Republican Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Jan. 2, 2021. Trump denies wrongdoing.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/03/13/judge-dismisses-some-charges-against-trump-in-the-georgia-2020-election-interference-case/ Save to Pocket

‘The Rest of the World Disappears’: Claire Voisin on Mathematical Creativity

date: 2024-03-13, from: Quanta Magazine

The post ‘The Rest of the World Disappears’: Claire Voisin on Mathematical Creativity first appeared on Quanta Magazine

https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-mathematician-on-creativity-art-logic-and-language-20240313/ Save to Pocket

‘A huge catastrophe waiting to happen’: Aryan Brotherhood drama spills into Northern California courtroom as lawyer joins in the name-calling

date: 2024-03-13, from: San Jose Mercury News

Ronald Dean Yandell and Danny Troxell haven’t exactly been shy about their desire to kill one another, according to a U.S. Marshall officer who testified the two loudly exchanged threats the whole way back to prison.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/03/13/a-huge-catastrophe-waiting-to-happen-aryan-brotherhood-drama-spills-into-federal-courtroom-lawyer-joins-in-the-name-calling/ Save to Pocket

Pentagon said to have pulled $2.5B Intel defense chips grant

date: 2024-03-13, updated: 2024-03-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

Plus: Trump reportedly gave chipmaker license to sell to Huawei back in the day…

The Pentagon has reportedly declined to grant $2.5 billion to Intel for the production of defense-related semiconductors, which could leave the Department of Commerce to foot the entire bill.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/13/intel_defense_grant/ Save to Pocket

Family Dollar and Dollar Tree will close 1,000 stores

date: 2024-03-13, from: San Jose Mercury News

Family Dollar was hit with a record fine this year for violating product safety standards after selling items that were stocked in a rat-infested warehouse in West Memphis filled with live, dead and decaying rodents.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/03/13/family-dollar-and-dollar-tree-will-close-1000-stores/ Save to Pocket

Inside Chile’s plan to shorten the workweek

date: 2024-03-13, from: Marketplace Morning Report

A year ago, Chilean officials voted to reduce the workweek from 45 hours, longer than in most industrialized countries, to 40. The new rule gives businesses until 2028 to tick down to 40 and is aimed at improving work-life balance. We check how the rollout is going. And the S&P 500 closed at a record high on Tuesday. Can the good times last? We hear the bull’s case for the market.

https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/inside-chiles-plan-to-shorten-the-workweek Save to Pocket

Photographing the elusive, city-living bobcats of San Jose

date: 2024-03-13, from: San Jose Mercury News

The screeching, growing, rodent-hunting cats have proven quite adaptable to the urban environment.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/03/13/photographing-the-elusive-city-living-bobcats-of-san-jose/ Save to Pocket

Pay less to fly: New strategies for finding cheap airfares now

date: 2024-03-13, from: San Jose Mercury News

Airfares are through the roof right now, but there are some ways to reduce the wallet impact, from tracking fare surges to reverse-engineering your destination. Here’s how.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/03/13/pay-less-to-fly-new-strategies-for-finding-cheap-airfares-now/ Save to Pocket

The end of classic Outlook for Windows is coming. Are you ready?

date: 2024-03-13, updated: 2024-03-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

Microsoft prepares to replace an old faithful with something shiny, new, and lacking key features. Sound familiar?

Analysts have warned that some enterprises have a mountain to climb ahead of Microsoft’s planned phase-out of the classic Outlook for Windows. 2029 is the earliest cut-off date for support, but some key functionality is still missing from the veteran app’s replacement.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/13/the_end_of_classic_outlook/ Save to Pocket

Article Spotlight: Downsizing a heavyweight: factors and methods that revise weight estimates of the giant fossil whale Perucetus colossus

date: 2024-03-13, from: PeerJ blog

https://peerj.com/blog/post/115284888969/article-spotlight-downsizing-a-heavyweight-factors-and-methods-that-revise-weight-estimates-of-the-giant-fossil-whale-perucetus-colossus/ Save to Pocket

When Will Methane Emissions Fall?

date: 2024-03-13, from: Heatmap News

Current conditions: Storms dropped hail stones big enough to leave craters in the ground in Argentina • Denver is expecting more than a foot of snow • A wildfire outbreak is possible in Texas and Oklahoma.

THE TOP FIVE

1. IEA: Methane emissions from energy still high but could fall soon

Methane emissions from energy production around the world reached a record high in 2019, and have remained at that level ever since, with 2023 being no exception, according to the International Energy Agency’s 2024 Global Methane Tracker. Methane is a greenhouse gas that traps more heat than carbon dioxide, and is responsible for about one-third of the total rise in global temperatures compared to pre-industrial levels. Fossil fuel production is not the only source of methane emissions, but it is a big one, and it is within our control. Improvements to oil and gas infrastructure can reduce methane leaks, for example.

Energy production is the third largest source of methane emissions. IEA

Last year oil, gas, and coal producers added more than 120 million metric tonnes of methane to the atmosphere, a number that is “unacceptably high,” said the IEA’s chief energy economist Tim Gould. The agency called for a 75% reduction in methane emissions from fossil fuels this decade to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, and said new policies, pledges, and methane-tracking satellites could bring emissions down soon. “If all methane pledges made by countries and companies to date are implemented in full and on time, it would be sufficient to cut methane emissions from fossil fuels by 50% by 2030,” the IEA said. “However, most pledges are not yet backed up by plans for implementation.”

2. Biden administration unveils infrastructure plan for electric freight trucks

The Biden administration yesterday released details of its plan to create the infrastructure needed to electrify the nation’s trucking fleet. “Heavy duty vehicles have a disproportionate effect on pollution, as large diesel engines release many more particulate emissions than light-duty vehicles do,” explained Jameson Dow at Electrek. Indeed the transportation sector accounts for about 30% of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions, and more than a fifth of that comes from the biggest trucks. Phase 1 of the plan is to build out charging and hydrogen fueling hubs along some 12,000 miles of roads between 2024 and 2027, targeting some of the busiest routes first, including those around major ports. After the hubs are established, the subsequent phases would then connect those hubs to one another, and then expand the network. Here is a look at the hubs:

Joint Office of Energy and Transportation

3. Climate change threatens world’s banana production

Did you know there’s a World Banana Forum? The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FOA) hosts the annual gathering so the “main stakeholders of the global banana supply-chain work together to achieve consensus on best practices for sustainable production and trade.” This week the event took place in Rome, and climate change was top of the agenda. “Farmers are battling daily with unpredictable weather patterns, scorching sun, floods, hurricanes, and increased cases of plant diseases,” said Anna Pierides, a sustainable sourcing manager at the Fairtrade Foundation. She warned that farmers may go out of business if they do not get more support and see fairer prices. “There will be some price increases, indeed,” said Pascal Liu, senior economist at the FAO. “If there’s not a major increase in supply, I project that banana prices will remain relatively high in the coming years.” Bananas are the world’s most exported fruit.

4. Greta Thunberg hauled away from Swedish parliament

For the second day in a row, police forcibly removed Greta Thunberg from the entrance to the Swedish parliament in Stockholm. The 21-year-old climate activist and other protesters began their demonstration there yesterday, protesting against what they see as inaction from political leaders in addressing the climate crisis. After Thunberg refused to move, police lifted her by the arms and put her about 20 meters away from the building’s door.

5. Bezos Earth Fund invests in making meat alternatives taste better

Jeff Bezos’ philanthropic organization, the Bezos Earth Fund, is pouring $60 million into setting up hubs at universities where researchers will work to improve the texture, taste, and nutritional value of meat alternatives. We’re not talking about “lab grown” meat here, but plant products made to taste like meat. Animal agriculture accounts for up to 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the United Nations, and meat consumption is expected to grow by 50% by 2050. Meat alternatives could reduce the environmental footprint of the food system, but only if they taste good enough to convert enough meat lovers. Last week Oscar Mayer announced it had partnered with a Bezos-backed food startup to create meatless hot dogs and sausages that “not only deliver on great taste, but also bring the smell, appearance, texture, and grill marks consumers desire and want.”

Oscar Mayer’s plant-based sausges and hot dogs KraftHeinz

THE KICKER

Heatmap News has been named Hottest in Sustainability on Adweek’s 2024 Media Hot List for quickly becoming “a critical part of the climate news landscape.”

https://heatmap.news/climate/methane-iea-fossil-fuels Save to Pocket

This Bay Area county relies on Head Start to prepare kids for school — but can only fund a fraction of the demand

date: 2024-03-13, from: San Jose Mercury News

Officials say federal aid has left a gap in access to Head Start programs, which help reduce intergenerational poverty and prepare children for school.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/03/13/this-bay-area-county-relies-on-head-start-to-prepare-kids-for-school-but-can-only-fund-a-fraction-of-the-demand/ Save to Pocket

Announcing worldwide availability of Arm Advisory Service for developers

date: 2024-03-13, from: Windows Developer Blog

In October 2023, Microsoft introduced the Arm Advisory Service. Since then, interest has risen steeply. This is no surprise, as

The post Announcing worldwide availability of Arm Advisory Service for developers appeared first on Windows Developer Blog.

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2024/03/13/announcing-worldwide-availability-of-arm-advisory-service-for-developers/ Save to Pocket

Cadillac teases new Opulent Velocity performance EV concept, is it too little too late?

date: 2024-03-13, from: Electrek Feed

Cadillac gave a sneak peek of “the future of electric performance,” teasing its new Opulent Velocity EV concept. But with GM falling behind in the EV market, is a concept enough at this point?

more…

https://electrek.co/2024/03/13/cadillac-teases-new-opulent-velocity-performance-ev/ Save to Pocket

The Human-Sized Dog Bed

date: 2024-03-13, updated: 2024-03-13, from: One Foot Tsunami

https://onefoottsunami.com/2024/03/13/the-human-sized-dog-bed/ Save to Pocket

Massively Popular Safe Locks Have Secret Backdoor Codes

date: 2024-03-13, from: 404 Media Group

Senator Ron Wyden has found that the DoD banned the use of such locks for U.S. government systems, but deliberately kept information about the backdoors from the public.

https://www.404media.co/massively-popular-safe-locks-have-secret-backdoor-codes/ Save to Pocket

Podcast: How Hackers Steal Mountains of Oxy and Adderall

date: 2024-03-13, from: 404 Media Group

Fraudsters and hackers hijack the electronic prescription system; 404 Media is included in a Russia disinformation campaign; and how we bypassed the “no-go voice” policy of ElevenLabs.

https://www.404media.co/404-media-podcast-hackers-order-drugs-week-29/ Save to Pocket

Nvidia rival Cerebras says it’s revived Moore’s Law with third-gen waferscale chips

date: 2024-03-13, updated: 2024-03-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

Startup is also working with Qualcomm on optimized models for its Cloud AI 100 Ultra inference chips

Cerebras revealed its latest dinner-plate sized AI chip on Wednesday, which it claims offers twice the performance per watt of its predecessor, alongside a collaboration with Qualcomm aimed at accelerating machine learning inferencing.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/13/cerebras_claims_to_have_revived/ Save to Pocket

Cheers! NASA’s Webb Finds Ethanol, Other Icy Ingredients for Worlds

date: 2024-03-13, from: NASA breaking news

What do margaritas, vinegar, and ant stings have in common? They contain chemical ingredients that NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has identified surrounding two young protostars known as IRAS 2A and IRAS 23385. Although planets are not yet forming around those stars, these and other molecules detected there by Webb represent key ingredients for making […]

https://science.nasa.gov/missions/webb/cheers-nasas-webb-finds-ethanol-other-icy-ingredients-for-worlds/ Save to Pocket

Cadillac Opulent Velocity Concept Teased As First V-Series EV

date: 2024-03-13, from: Inside EVs News

The video has some go-fast noises, so this might be good.

https://insideevs.com/news/712226/cadillac-opulent-velocity-concept-ev-v-series/ Save to Pocket

Exeet Quads Are Some Wild Superbike Quad Conversions

date: 2024-03-13, from: Ride Apart, Electric Motorcycle News

Fancy a supercharged 200-horsepower quad based on a Kawasaki Z H2?

https://www.rideapart.com/news/711293/exeet-superbike-quad-conversions/ Save to Pocket

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-03-13, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)

I thought it was a done deal the kids would get these MacBook airs for school next year, but after reading this, maybe the pro is a better model:

https://appleinsider.com/inside/15-inch-macbook-air/vs/m3-15-inch-macbook-air-vs-m3-14-inch-macbook-pro—-comparison

https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/112088390655073945 Save to Pocket

Volkswagen Group Reaffirms Internal Combustion Will Be ‘Phased Out’ Eventually

date: 2024-03-13, from: Inside EVs News

Plus, Ford and Tesla get nailed for driver-assistance systems, and when it comes to “software-defined cars,” you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

https://insideevs.com/news/712197/vw-group-new-models-2024/ Save to Pocket

Oracle AI buzz means Larry Ellison’s worth $15B more today

date: 2024-03-13, updated: 2024-03-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

And here you were saying tech hadn’t yet made a difference to someone special

Larry Ellison’s personal wealth is inextricably linked to Oracle and yesterday it ballooned by more than $15 billion following a 12 percent rally of Big Red’s stock on the news that it is building an AI datacenter and has a deal with AI darling Nvidia.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/13/larry_ellison_worth_15_billion/ Save to Pocket

Archaeologists Unearth the Long-Lost Top Half of an Enormous Ramses II Statue

date: 2024-03-13, from: Smithsonian Magazine

A German researcher found the lower section of the Egyptian pharaoh’s likeness nearly 100 years ago

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/archaeologists-unearth-long-lost-top-half-enormous-ramses-II-statue-180983937/ Save to Pocket

@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-03-13, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)

The Knicks have been slumping since two of their top players have been out with injuries for over a month, after having an amazing January. One of the two star players came back last night, and what a difference! They went from being a team that could barely put a starting five on the court to having the deepest bench in the NBA. I was trying to do the math, but came up empty. They were absolutely unstoppable. Now that they have two superstars on the court at once, the opposing team can’t just double or triple-team the one player, it’s basically impossible to defend against their schtick. At the same time, the Knicks are great at defense. When the second injured player comes back, and it seems that will be soon, we might be back in the January mode that was so exciting. Even so, last night’s game was a return to greatness. They blew out the 76ers, something that would have been unthinkable a couple of years ago. It’s fun being a Knicks fan again! ❤️

http://scripting.com/2024/03/13.html#a122730 Save to Pocket

NASA Glenn Prepares Media for Solar Eclipse Event

date: 2024-03-13, from: NASA breaking news

NASA Glenn Research Center’s Office of Communications invited media to an Eclipse Preview at Great Lakes Science Center (GLSC), home of the NASA Glenn Visitor Center, on Feb. 13. During the event, news outlets previewed the Science Center’s Total Eclipse Fest 2024, which is scheduled to take place April 6-8, and learned everything they need to […]

https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/glenn/nasa-glenn-prepares-media-for-solar-eclipse-event/ Save to Pocket

Tri-C Students Shadow NASA Professionals

date: 2024-03-13, from: NASA breaking news

Students from Cuyahoga Community College (Tri-C) visited NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland on Feb. 15 to shadow NASA professionals in a variety of career areas – from offices to laboratories. During the event, students and their advisor acquired knowledge about the NASA Internship Program, Pathways Internship Program, and NASA Community College Aerospace Scholars program. […]

https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/glenn/tri-c-students-shadow-nasa-professionals/ Save to Pocket

Engaging Students at Gallery Opening

date: 2024-03-13, from: NASA breaking news

On Feb. 23, NASA’s Glenn Research Center representatives were on hand to help celebrate the ribbon cutting and opening of Great Lakes Science Center’s Cleveland Creates Gallery. The gallery highlights the extraordinary breakthroughs being made by the city of Cleveland’s diverse industries.   During the opening, several hundred middle and high school students and museum visitors […]

https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/glenn/engaging-students-at-gallery-opening/ Save to Pocket

NASA Rolls Out Lunar Tires at Monster Jams

date: 2024-03-13, from: NASA breaking news

Few things rev the engines of Monster Jam fans more than tires—including lunar tires. NASA’s Glenn Research Center recently gained traction with amplified audiences at Monster Jams in Milwaukee, Jan. 20-21, and in Cleveland, Feb. 16-17. During pit parties, NASA’s outreach team rolled out its replica lunar rover tire to show visitors the work NASA […]

https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/glenn/nasa-rolls-out-lunar-tires-at-monster-jams/ Save to Pocket

Stanford University failed to detect ransomware intruders for 4 months

date: 2024-03-13, updated: 2024-03-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

27,000 individuals had data stolen, which for some included names and social security numbers

Stanford University says the cybersecurity incident it dealt with last year was indeed ransomware, which it failed to spot for more than four months.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/13/stanford_university_ransomware/ Save to Pocket

Still Relevant: English Learners Show And Tell In The Classroom

date: 2024-03-13, updated: 2024-03-13, from: The LAist

Through thoughtfully chosen objects, students at Mt. San Antonio College share a longing for family and friends, challenges they’ve faced, and changes in perspective.

https://laist.com/news/education/community-college-english-learners-for-credit-esl-classes Save to Pocket

Polestar 3 Price Reduced By $10,500, Range Increased By Up to 15 Miles

date: 2024-03-13, from: Inside EVs News

The base version starts at $73,400, while the Performance one has a $79,400 MSRP.

https://insideevs.com/news/712141/polestar3-new-pricing-more-range/ Save to Pocket

Whistleblowing While Black: How Truth-Telling Changes the Careers of Black Women in Tech

date: 2024-03-13, from: The Markup blog

Black women whistleblowers not only jeopardize their professional prospects, experts say, but often face more intense backlash

https://themarkup.org/news/2024/03/13/whistleblowing-while-black-how-truth-telling-changes-the-careers-of-black-women-in-tech Save to Pocket

Incoming 2025 Polestar 3 gains additional variants and now starts at a lower price

date: 2024-03-13, from: Electrek Feed

Just ahead of first deliveries in the US later this year, Polestar has introduced two additional variants of the 2025 Polestar 3 SUV, including a new base-level dual motor version that starts at a price of $73,400. Other updates include add-on packages that are now standard and eligibility for lease incentives.

more…

https://electrek.co/2024/03/13/2025-polestar-3-gains-additional-variants-now-starts-at-price-73400/ Save to Pocket

What working from home does to commercial construction

date: 2024-03-13, from: Marketplace Morning Report

We’ve been hearing a lot about troubled commercial real estate loans, high office vacancy rates and continued remote work. All of these factors and more are feeding back up the food chain to the folks who design and build office towers and other commercial properties. We’ll discuss. Also: $300 million in new military aid to Ukraine, and a virtual fitness company CEO on staying strong in a changing market.

https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/what-working-from-home-does-to-commercial-construction Save to Pocket

Argentina’s inflation rate finally falls

date: 2024-03-13, from: Marketplace Morning Report

From the BBC World Service: Argentina’s inflation — the world’s highest — has slowed down from 20.6% in January to 13.2% in February. Then, hundreds of U.K. post office managers were wrongly prosecuted after faulty computer software calculated that money was missing from their branches. Today, the government will introduce legislation to quash the convictions. And businesses in Chile are preparing to cut their employees’ hours from 45 to 40 hours a week following a new law.

https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/argentinas-inflation-rate-finally-falls Save to Pocket

A 1,000-Year-Old Viking Sword Emerges From an English River

date: 2024-03-13, from: Smithsonian Magazine

Discovered by a magnet fisher, the weapon dates to between 850 and 975, during the Vikings’ violent conquest of Britain

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/1000-year-old-viking-sword-emerges-from-english-river-180983936/ Save to Pocket

Burglars Using Wi-Fi Jammers to Disable Security Cameras

date: 2024-03-13, updated: 2024-03-12, from: Bruce Schneier blog

The arms race continues, as burglars are learning how to use jammers to disable Wi-Fi security cameras.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/03/burglars-using-wi-fi-jammers-to-disable-security-cameras.html Save to Pocket

Can AI shorten PC replacement cycles? Dell seems to think so

date: 2024-03-13, updated: 2024-03-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

Might be wishful thinking from finance exec following two-year computer sector recession

AI could be the mechanism to shorten notebook replacement cycles, according to the chief financial officer at Dell.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/13/dell_exec_reckons_aipowered_laptops/ Save to Pocket

Historic Staff Spotlight: Faye Geeslin

date: 2024-03-13, from: National Archives, Pieces of History blog

It’s Women’s History Month, and we are taking a look at past staff and their many contributions to the National Archives throughout history. Today’s staff spotlight is on Faye Geeslin, who served as the administrative assistant for three Archivists of the United States.  Faye Geeslin (née Faye Killingsworth) was born on October 24, 1912, in … Continue reading Historic Staff Spotlight: Faye Geeslin

https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2024/03/13/historic-staff-spotlight-faye-geeslin/ Save to Pocket

Velo AI smart bike light

date: 2024-03-13, from: Raspberry Pi News (.com)

This smart bike light with road monitoring relies on Raspberry Pi’s capable low-power compute.

The post Velo AI smart bike light appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/velo-ai-smart-bike-light/ Save to Pocket

Sunak’s defunct SaaS scheme spent seven percent of budget designed to help 100,000 SMEs

date: 2024-03-13, updated: 2024-03-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

Unicorn Kingdom prime minister fails to provide £300 million of magic software beans promised

A local software subsidy scheme launched by UK PM Rishi Sunak, designed to help struggling small businesses following the pandemic, has spent less than seven percent of its £300 million budget.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/13/sunak_software_scheme_spends_7/ Save to Pocket

A Conversation With Biden’s Former Top Economic Advisor, Part 1

date: 2024-03-13, from: Heatmap News

Few people have shaped Bidenomics more than Brian Deese.

From 2021 to 2023, Deese led the National Economic Council at the White House, serving as President Joe Biden’s top economic aide during such events as the post-pandemic recovery, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act.

Before that, Deese was global head of sustainable investing for Blackrock and a senior political advisor to President Barack Obama. He’s now the Institute Innovation Fellow at MIT, where he helps lead the Clean Investment Monitor, a project that tracks investment in climate technology and infrastructure across the U.S. economy.

On this episode, Deese joins Shift Key for a two-part conversation. Part 1 focuses on the future of Bidenomics, Biden’s State of the Union speech, what the 2024 campaign might mean for the politics and policy of climate change.

Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.

Here is an excerpt from our conversation:

Robinson Meyer: I want to start by talking about the State of the Union. Jesse, I feel like you had a stronger response to the State of the Union than I did. Where I saw it and I was like, yes, the president is talking about the IRA, he’s talking about big climate legislation, primarily in a jobs context. I feel like you were maybe more surprised.

Jesse Jenkins: What I was kind of expecting was Biden to lean in a bit more on the manufacturing Renaissance story. And he referenced it a couple times as sort of the high level numbers, which we can come back to, which probably came from your Clean Investment Monitor project, if I’m not mistaken. And he told the story of the Belvedere plant that was saved from bankruptcy through the UAW negotiations and is now being rebuilt as a EV manufacturing facility. But I was expecting him to say something more broadly about how we have been talking about bringing manufacturing jobs back to America for my entire lifetime, right, for decades.

And the previous president, of course, also made lots of promises about trying to support US manufacturing. And then of course, did basically nothing to do that. And Biden has an incredible track record on that front, an enormous amount of investment happening across multiple sectors, and in particular in the clean energy domain.
And maybe this is just the limits of a State of the Union address where you got to touch a lot of different issues. But I kind of expected him to lean into that a little bit more and to make it clear that it wasn’t just this one plant, that there are dozens of stories like Belvedere out there across the economy that are being fueled specifically by the Inflation Reduction Act, which by the way, he did never really mention by name.

So I was curious how you saw it and if you thought he had the right balance or maybe could have leaned in more or could do so in the future.

Brian Deese: Well, I think one of the things about State of the Unions is that its quality and moments are often more important than quantity. And so I think that may be a little bit of what’s going on.

But let me step back. Look, I think it was an excellent speech and I think it was delivered in an even more excellent way. And at the top line, the speech was designed to drive pace and clear contrast.

It’s interesting that some of the reaction has been partisan. But if you actually go through the speech, it’s really clear-eyed contrast. And a lot of the things where the contrast exists are between, as the president said multiple times, his predecessor and the vast majority of the American people. And that’s smart.

And the pace was evident from the get-go and positioned President Biden to do exactly what he wanted to do, was to get in the chamber at the podium and go at this thing and demonstrate his capability, but also his enthusiasm. I think for people who actually watched it on TV, you saw not only a president who was in command, but who was having a lot of fun. And a lot of fun because I think he believed in what he was doing.

So that’s the most important. And when you’re structuring a speech like this, you want to say, if that’s your goal is to try to have clear contrast and pace, how do you keep that going? I think in some ways the most important line which goes, Jesse, to the point you are making is he said something to the effect of, it doesn’t make the news, it doesn’t make the headlines, but in thousands of cities across America, people are writing the greatest comeback story never told.

And I would anticipate that in that idea, in thousands of cities and towns across America, greatest comeback story never told will be a consistent refrain and a throughline to try to get at exactly your point, which is there’s an element of that, which reflects a little bit of immediate criticism, right? The greatest comeback story never told, which is why do we never hear about these things going on again?

But it also reflects the kind of great American story that these comeback stories are in fact happening. And for the people and the communities themselves, it matters.

And look, I think that that’s where Belvedere fit in, which is oftentimes the best way to try to bring to life that idea is not by trying to describe or animate all of the ways in which it’s happening across the country and people like the three of us get very gripped by the overarching statistics.

But the story and the story of Belvedere was one that if you look across the speech, there aren’t that many moments where you can actually tell a story like that. And so there was a clear decision to say, this is a story and we are going to tell the story about clean energy manufacturing through the lens of a place and a community, which is really about jobs and grit and resilience. And for those who weren’t paying line by line attention to the story of Belvedere, is Belvedere, Illinois, home of a storied Chrysler plant that was initiated in 1965 I’ll continue to refer to Stellantis as Chrysler because I still can’t get over the idea that we’re not still referring it to as that name, but was basically for a whole bunch of reasons an auto plant that was on its back and then was closed and for a variety of reasons, including the strength of UAW’s negotiating posture, but also the prospect of bringing battery manufacturing here to the U.S., Belvedere has gone from, you know, is really a Phoenix rising story in a pretty concrete way.

So my takeaway from Jesse, your surprise, is that in fact, what the president did was provide a frame for going out and telling that great comeback story and going and telling it. And in fact, the way to tell it will actually be in individual stories in most cases.

Jenkins: Yeah, I think that makes sense. I guess what I was thinking was there’d be an opportunity to draw a sharper contrast, which would be pretty consistent with the rest of the speech between President Biden and his quote unquote predecessor. In the sense that really, I mean, we, we’ve been literally politicians have been promising to bring manufacturing back since the 70s and 80s, right.

And now we are seeing that investment really thanks to a whole suite of policies, some of them bipartisan, like CHIPS and Science, and some of them, you know, I think with broad support in the American public, like you’re saying, Brian, even if the partisan nature of the congressional debate right now, you know, makes it seem more partisan than it is, it’s, you know, these are broadly popular policies. So it was kind of expecting a little bit more contrast there.

This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by…

Advanced Energy United educates, engages, and advocates for policies that allow our member companies to compete to power our economy with 100% clean energy, working with decision makers and energy market regulators to achieve this goal. Together, we are united in our mission to accelerate the transition to 100% clean energy in America. Learn more at advancedenergyunited.org/heatmap

KORE Power provides the commercial, industrial, and utility markets with functional solutions that advance the clean energy transition worldwide. KORE Power’s technology and manufacturing capabilities provide direct access to next generation battery cells, energy storage systems that scale to grid+, EV power & infrastructure, and intuitive asset management to unlock energy strategies across a myriad of applications. Explore more at korepower.com.

Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.

https://heatmap.news/podcast/shift-key-episode-6-brian-deese Save to Pocket

Fedora 41’s GNOME to go Wayland-only, says goodbye to X.org

date: 2024-03-13, updated: 2024-03-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

Don’t worry, you can still put it back, but it’s an accessibility snag

The Fedora development team is discussing dropping the GNOME on X11 session in Fedora 41, meaning that the flagship edition will be Wayland-only.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/13/fedora_41_drops_x_gnome/ Save to Pocket

Gary Horton | Joe Biden Stakes Out Reelection

date: 2024-03-13, from: The Signal

President Joe Biden delivered his 2024 State of the Union address last week.   No doubt, Team Biden amped up their guy prior to the speech. Six cups of coffee? A shot of adrenaline? Whatever, Biden came out feisty and energetic (for Biden) and for over 60 minutes delivered a robust speech, both prepared and […]

The post Gary Horton | Joe Biden Stakes Out Reelection appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.

https://signalscv.com/2024/03/gary-horton-joe-biden-stakes-out-reelection/ Save to Pocket

Mark White | Forward, Neutral, Reverse

date: 2024-03-13, from: The Signal

Regarding Gary Horton’s column on March 6: Loud people — what does that even mean ­— pushing for Reverse, quiet people in Neutral and “some” forever pressing forward Drive gears. First of all, when you drive forward into a dead end or a cliff, you need to go into reverse – duh! Go forward on […]

The post Mark White | Forward, Neutral, Reverse appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.

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David Godfrey | Letter Writer Confused, Once Again

date: 2024-03-13, from: The Signal

In a recent letter (Feb. 22), Lois Eisenberg once again played the labeling game by attributing some crazy Taylor Swift conspiracy to the “MAGA Cult” and the Republican Party. No doubt she heard some crazy conspiracy story somewhere (those are everywhere) and has decided that the “Republican elites,” whoever they are, and the MAGA cult […]

The post David Godfrey | Letter Writer Confused, Once Again appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.

https://signalscv.com/2024/03/david-godfrey-letter-writer-confused-once-again/ Save to Pocket

Erik Larsen | Truth, Consequences and Science

date: 2024-03-13, from: The Signal

David Hegg’s Sunday column “Truth or Consequences?” (March 3) shows a lack of understanding of how the scientific method works, the difference between gender and sex, or the difference between morals and ethics. As a proud product of Santa Clarita’s excellent school system, I’d like to share some “truths” with him.   While the current […]

The post Erik Larsen | Truth, Consequences and Science appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.

https://signalscv.com/2024/03/erik-larsen-truth-consequences-and-science/ Save to Pocket

Katherine Markova | A Committed Climate Champion

date: 2024-03-13, from: The Signal

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the wider climate scientistic community, 2023 was the world’s warmest year on record by far, and 2024 is projected to be even hotter yet.   Climate change is the issue of our times. In 2024 we must elect leaders to the California Legislature to reduce emissions […]

The post Katherine Markova | A Committed Climate Champion appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.

https://signalscv.com/2024/03/katherine-markova-a-committed-climate-champion/ Save to Pocket

Researchers jimmy OpenAI’s and Google’s closed models

date: 2024-03-13, updated: 2024-03-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

Infosec folk aren’t thrilled that if you poke APIs enough, you learn AI’s secrets

Boffins have managed to pry open closed AI services from OpenAI and Google with an attack that recovers an otherwise hidden portion of transformer models.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/13/researchers_pry_open_closed_models/ Save to Pocket

The Savvy Senior | How to Get ‘Extra Help’ Paying for Prescriptions

date: 2024-03-13, from: The Signal

Dear Savvy Senior,  Does Medicare offer any financial assistance programs to help seniors with their medication costs? I recently enrolled in a Medicare drug plan, but I take some expensive medications that have high out-of-pocket costs and need some help.  — Living on a Shoestring  Dear Living,  Yes, there’s a low-income subsidy program called “Extra […]

The post The Savvy Senior | How to Get ‘Extra Help’ Paying for Prescriptions appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.

https://signalscv.com/2024/03/the-savvy-senior-how-to-get-extra-help-paying-for-prescriptions/ Save to Pocket

Office Hours: Will 2024 be another contested election?

date: 2024-03-13, from: Robert Reich on Substack

If Trump loses, what will he attempt to do and what should Dems be planning for right now?

https://robertreich.substack.com/p/office-hours-will-2024-be-another Save to Pocket

Your PC can probably run inferencing just fine – so it’s already an AI PC

date: 2024-03-13, updated: 2024-03-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

Language models are entirely happy on the desktop

Opinion  What is it that makes a PC an AI PC? Beyond some vague hand-waving at the presence “neural processing units” and other features only available on the latest-and-greatest silicon, no-one has come up with a definition beyond an attempt to market some FOMO.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/13/age_of_ai_pc/ Save to Pocket

Today in SCV History (March 13)

date: 2024-03-13, from: SCV New (TV Station)

1882 – Henry Mayo Newhall dies at 56 of erysipelas he contracted in SCV, his immune system having been weakened by malaria 2 years earlier. [story

https://scvnews.com/today-in-scv-history-march-13/ Save to Pocket

Japan’s first private satellite launch imitates SpaceX’s giant explosions

date: 2024-03-13, updated: 2024-03-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

KAIROS detonated a few seconds after clearing the launchpad

Video  On another bad day for Japan’s space industry, the nation’s first private satellite launch failed within seconds of launch.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/13/space_one_kairos_launch_fail/ Save to Pocket

March 12, 2024 (Tuesday)

date: 2024-03-13, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog

Today, Democratic voters in Georgia gave President Joe Biden enough delegates to win the Democratic nomination for president when the Democratic National Convention is held in August. Republican voters in Georgia, Hawaii, Mississippi, and Washington gave Trump enough delegates to win the Republican presidential nomination, although former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who dropped out of the race last week, continues to win voters—more than 21% in Washington.

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-12-2024-tuesday Save to Pocket

Chinese smartphone brand Xiaomi adds electric vehicle to its mobility offerings

date: 2024-03-13, updated: 2024-03-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

100,000 Chinese drivers join queue just to check out the ‘SU7’ in a showroom

The electric vehicle subsidiary of Chinese consumer electronics brand Xiaomi on Tuesday announced its first product – the Speed Ultra 7 (SU7) sedan – will be ready for deliveries this month.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/13/xiaomi_ev_ready/ Save to Pocket

Berkeley to Return Parking Lot on Sacred Site to Ohlone Tribe

date: 2024-03-13, from: VOA News USA

SAN FRANCISCO — A San Francisco Bay Area parking lot that sits on top of a sacred tribal shell mound dating back 5,700 years has been returned to the Ohlone people by the Berkeley City Council after a settlement with developers who own the land.

Berkeley’s City Council voted unanimously Tuesday to adopt an ordinance giving the title of the land to the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, a women-led, San Francisco Bay Area collective that works to return land to Indigenous people and that raised the funds needed to reach the agreement. 

“This was a long, long effort but it was honestly worth it because what we’re doing today is righting past wrongs and returning stolen land to the people who once lived on it,” said Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin. 

The nearly 1-hectare parking lot is the only undeveloped portion of the West Berkeley shell mound, a three-block area Berkeley designated as a landmark in 2000. 

Before Spanish colonizers arrived in the region, that area held a village and a massive shell mound with a height of 6 meters and the length and width of a football field that was a ceremonial and burial site. Built over years with mussel, clam and oyster shells, human remains, and artifacts, the mound also served as a lookout. 

The Spanish removed the Ohlone from their villages and forced them into labor at local missions. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Anglo settlers took over the land and razed the shell mound to line roadbeds in Berkeley with shells.

“It’s a very sad and shameful history,” said Berkeley City Councilmember Sophie Hahn, who spearheaded the effort to return the land to the Ohlone. 

“This was the site of a thriving village going back at least 5,700 years and there are still Ohlone people among us and their connection to this site is very, very deep and very real, and this is what we are honoring,” she added. 

The agreement with Berkeley-based Ruegg & Ellsworth LLC, which owns the parking lot, comes after a six-year legal fight that started in 2018 when the developer sued the city after officials denied its application to build a 260-unit apartment building with 50% affordable housing and along with retail and parking space. 

The settlement was reached after Ruegg & Ellsworth agreed to accept $27 million to settle all outstanding claims and to turn the property over to Berkeley. The Sogorea Te’ Land Trust contributed $25.5 million and Berkeley paid $1.5 million, officials said.

The trust plans to build a commemorative park with a new shell mound and a cultural center to house some of the pottery, jewelry, baskets and other artifacts found over the years and that are in the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. 

Corrina Gould, co-founder of the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, addressed council members before they voted, saying their vote was the culmination of the work of thousands of people over many years. 

The mound that once stood there was “a place where we first said goodbye to someone,” she said. “To have this place saved forever, I am beyond words.”

Gould, who is also tribal chair of the Confederated Villages of Lisjan Ohlone, attended the meeting via video conference and wiped away tears after Berkeley’s City Council voted to return the land.

https://www.voanews.com/a/berkeley-to-return-parking-lot-on-sacred-site-to-ohlone-tribe/7525466.html Save to Pocket

Big Shake-Up at Santa Barbara Public Library

date: 2024-03-13, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News

Library Director Jessica Cadiente and Library Services Manager Molly Wetta have been placed on indefinite leave.

The post Big Shake-Up at Santa Barbara Public Library appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.

https://www.independent.com/2024/03/12/big-shake-up-at-santa-barbara-public-library/ Save to Pocket

South Korea cracks down on offshore e-commerce, with seeming focus on China

date: 2024-03-13, updated: 2024-03-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

Seoul wants AliExpress and Temu to step up customer service, maybe Meta too

South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission has announced a raft of measures aimed at ensuring offshore e-commerce services meet their service and support obligations. And it looks to be aimed squarely at Chinese retailers.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/13/south_korea_e_commerce_crackdown/ Save to Pocket

What is the Difference Between a Caucus and a Primary?

date: 2024-03-13, from: VOA News USA

Before a presidential election can be held, political parties must choose their nominees. That is done either through primaries or caucuses.

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Diversity and Female Artists in the Rising Music Industry

date: 2024-03-13, from: The Sundail (CSUN student paper)

Festival season is upon us, and with that comes a whole new array of lineups and artists on the rise. Similar to other industries, the music industry has had a…

https://sundial.csun.edu/179383/arts-entertainment/entertainment/diversity-and-female-artists-in-the-rising-music-industry/ Save to Pocket

City Council members to get slight pay raises 

date: 2024-03-13, from: The Signal

The Santa Clarita City Council approved at Tuesday’s meeting an amended motion to give council members a 2.5% pay raise starting in 2025.  The amendment from Councilwoman Marsha McLean came after the council voted against 10% pay raises, due to a technicality. McLean and Mayor Pro Tem Bill Miranda voted for the larger raise, with […]

The post <strong>City Council members to get slight pay raises</strong>  appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.

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Garcia calls for Chiquita landfill closure 

date: 2024-03-13, from: The Signal

Schiavo issues call for state declaration of emergency  Rep. Mike Garcia, R-Santa Clarita, called on Chiquita Canyon Landfill to cease operations while the facility addresses its growing problems, during a virtual address to the landfill’s Community Advisory Committee on Tuesday night, acknowledging county and state regulators’ growing frustration over problems at the Castaic facility.  Assemblywoman […]

The post <strong>Garcia calls for Chiquita landfill closure</strong>  appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.

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SBART Press Luncheon: Gabriel Lea Receives Scholar Athlete of the Year Award For Laguna Blanca

date: 2024-03-13, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News

Elina Stump, Jesse Di Maggio, Madeline Ferries and Will Harman received SBART Athlete of the Week awards.

The post SBART Press Luncheon: Gabriel Lea Receives Scholar Athlete of the Year Award For Laguna Blanca appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.

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Charges still pending in year-old fatal hit-and-run 

date: 2024-03-13, from: The Signal

California Highway Patrol officers are still working to bring to justice the driver they think is responsible for a fatal hit-and-run collision in Agua Dulce in early 2023, officers said Monday.  Frustrated family members of Jeff Engels’ family have been waiting for answers since the tragedy on Feb. 7, 2023.  On that day, Engels was driving […]

The post <strong>Charges still pending in year-old fatal hit-and-run</strong>  appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.

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Dirty data shocks Indian taxpayers with huge bills

date: 2024-03-13, updated: 2024-03-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

Extra zeroes added to transaction values, just a handful of days before a payment deadline

India’s income tax collection efforts hit a snag this week when it was found that an automated data feed somehow added an extra two zeroes to the value of taxable transactions, resulting in the issuance of notices to individuals that wrongly overstated their tax liabilities.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/13/india_tax_goof/ Save to Pocket

GitHub fixes pull request delay that derailed developers

date: 2024-03-13, updated: 2024-03-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

Went down yesterday, too, longer and harder. Maybe we should call it GitFlub?

GitHub is experiencing a second day of degraded performance, following a bad update that threw the code locker into chaos.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/13/github_outage_two_days_running/ Save to Pocket

March 14: Arts Commission to Review Updates on City Art Projects

date: 2024-03-13, from: SCV New (TV Station)

The Santa Clarita Arts Commission is holding its regular meeting in City Hall’s Council Chambers Thursday, March 14 at 6 p.m

https://scvnews.com/march-14-arts-commission-to-review-updates-on-city-art-projects/ Save to Pocket

Classified Document Hearing Shows Stiff Partisan Divides on Biden’s Responsibility, Memory

date: 2024-03-13, from: VOA News USA

WASHINGTON — Members of Congress on Tuesday turned a hearing about President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents into a charged referendum on a question central to the upcoming presidential election: the 81-year-old’s mental fitness. 

The Biden administration and their main challengers, the backers of presumptive Republican candidate Donald Trump, emerged from the House Judiciary Committee’s five-hour grilling of Special Counsel Robert Hur with radically different answers to that question.

They also starkly disagreed over Hur’s decision not to file criminal charges, despite concluding in his February report that Biden “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials as a private citizen.”

Criminal charges were not warranted, Hur argued in announcing his decision in early February, because, he said, Biden would likely present himself to a jury as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” — words that Republican legislators repeated, repeatedly, during the hearing. 

Afterward, Ian Sams, spokesperson for the White House counsel’s office, gave his take:

“The main thing I took away from the hearing today was that we had three hours of the Republicans showing just how hypocritical they’re willing to be in order to politically attack the president at the same time that they and the Democrats and the special counsel himself laid bare exactly why there is no case here,” he said.

“The case is closed, the evidence did not support bringing charges, and it’s over,” Sams said. “It’s time to move on.”

Alex Pfeiffer, a spokesperson for Trump’s Make America Great Again movement, offered his own conclusion.

“Joe Biden put America’s national security at risk with his illegal retention and disclosure of classified material,” he said. “Biden lied about his wrongdoing in a national press conference, which begs the question — what else is Joe Biden lying about?” 

Further muddying the picture on the matter is Hur’s own grammatically complex statement: 

“The word exoneration does not appear anywhere in my report and that is not my conclusion,” Hur said. 

A newly released transcript of Hur’s five-hour interview held last year with Biden, includes instances of Biden saying he couldn’t recall details or citing dates incorrectly, appearing to say in one instance that his eldest son died in 2017 and that Trump, who was elected in 2016, was “elected in November of 2017.”

“The transcript is now available for every American to see, for all media to see,” Sams said. He noted it shows that, despite the confusion over the year of Beau Biden’s death, it shows that Biden correctly cited the date: May 30. 

“I think that you saw the anger and emotional reaction of a father who still experiences the pain of that loss every single day,” Sams said. 

Many Republicans used their five-minute question periods to compare Biden’s situation to that of his challenger. Trump, too, faces criminal charges over his handling of classified documents after he left office. He was initially slapped with 37 felony counts, including charges that he obstructed justice by failing to return the documents even in response to a subpoena. It’s not clear when that case will go to trial. 

Florida Representative Matt Gaetz, in one sentence, took aim at the justice system and Biden’s mental acuity: “This guy’s not getting treated the same way as Trump, because the elevator is not going to the top floor, so we can’t prove intent.”

Democrats resisted that characterization. 

“Joe Biden is a competent, good president who knows American values,” Tennessee Representative Steve Cohen said.

Hur, in his opening statement, said he would “refrain from speculating or commenting on areas outside the scope of the investigation.”

But he also responded to criticism that he overstepped, saying he could not have reached the conclusion he did “without assessing the president’s state of mind.”

Other elected representatives chose not to ask Hur any questions, such as Missouri Representative Cori Bush, a Democrat, who described Hur’s report as a “partisan hit job” — though she said it was appropriate for both Trump and Biden to be investigated. 

“Our country deserves better than this,” she said of the hearing. 

Texas Representative Nathaniel Moran praised Hur’s efforts, asking him only yes-or-no questions and suggesting Biden could be ruled incompetent by a District of Columbia court and placed under guardianship. And he repeated the critical line from Hur’s report — words sure to echo over November’s presidential contest — although he prefaced it with an adjective, calling Biden a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

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@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-03-13, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)

Today Dropbox's paper, my favorite tool to write and share documents lost two documents that I had been editing for hours.

I can reproduce at will. No trace left of them.

I suspect this loved product is falling into neglect.

I tried Notion, but god it is slow. Are there other alternatives, for shared document editing that are fast and use Markdown for their backend?

https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/112085903623915325 Save to Pocket

Daily EV recap: Tesla offers early CT deliveries to select shareholders, Porsche to launch new EVs

date: 2024-03-13, from: Electrek Feed

Listen to a recap of the top stories of the day from Electrek. Quick Charge is now available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, TuneIn and…

https://electrek.co/2024/03/12/daily-ev-recap-tesla-offers-early-ct-deliveries-to-select-shareholders-porsche-to-launch-new-evs/ Save to Pocket

Steven Sinofsky: ‘Building Under Regulation’

date: 2024-03-13, updated: 2024-03-13, from: Daring Fireball

https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/215-building-under-regulation Save to Pocket

CSUN Prof Confident Media Will Survive Recent Newsroom Upheavals

date: 2024-03-13, from: SCV New (TV Station)

As political polarization threatens the foundations of American democracy, newsrooms across the nation — which have long played a vital role in checking political power and keeping the citizenry informed — are laying off staff or disappearing all together

https://scvnews.com/csun-prof-confident-media-will-survive-recent-newsroom-upheavals/ Save to Pocket

@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-03-13, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)

MacWrite and MacPaint, a coral reef.

http://scripting.com/2013/01/24/whatAboutMacwriteAndMacpaint.html Save to Pocket

March 28: VIA After Five Business Mixer at Resurgence IT

date: 2024-03-13, from: SCV New (TV Station)

Connect with other businesses and attend the Valley Industry Association After Five networking mixer on Thursday, March. 28, from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., at Resurgence IT, 25031 Avenue Stanford STE 10, Valencia, CA 91354.

https://scvnews.com/march-28-via-after-five-business-mixer-at-resurgence-it/ Save to Pocket

@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-03-13, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)

Tim Berners-Lee’s idea for user-owned and controlled storage is good. Can’t tell you how many times, as a developer, I wanted this. To get it going it’ll need at least a couple of compelling apps, to seed the bootstrap. Like MacWrite and MacPaint for the Mac. Without that, it can’t even begin. I could help with their bootstrap if I had some belief they had would not crush developers, which is harder to do than it sounds. The only times it has worked for me, for a little while, was when I created the platform and apps and content (you need all three). But the huge companies have no vision for the role of developers, so these things rarely even get off the ground, and who’s going to sign up to believe in the goodness of a huge company. It’s a very steep road TBL has chosen to travel. I have argued with my friends at Automattic that they are in a golden position to do this since they already have a large installed base product that’s popular with users, and lots of developers who could make good use of storage attached to each account. I hope someone with deep pockets and longevity does it. Then we can really start building an app ecosystem on the net. We’ve been doing this for 35 years as TBL points out, and we still haven’t created an economic developer ecosystem on the web. Storage, believe it or not, is the big missing piece.

http://scripting.com/2024/03/12.html#a012558 Save to Pocket

Haiti’s Prime Minister Announces Resignation; US Pledges $100M More in Security Funds

date: 2024-03-13, from: VOA News USA

Haiti Prime Minister Ariel Henry announced his resignation Tuesday, the day after the United States pledged another $100 million to a United Nations-backed multinational security force intended to assist Haitian police in combating gangs, along with $33 million in humanitarian aid. VOA State Department Bureau Chief Nike Ching reports.

https://www.voanews.com/a/haiti-s-prime-minister-announces-resignation-us-pledges-100m-more-in-security-funds/7525361.html Save to Pocket

Meet the Proxinator: A hyperbox that puts SATA at the heart of VMware migrations

date: 2024-03-13, updated: 2024-03-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

Proxmox box sees fresh dedicated hardware become part of the market for Virtzilla alternatives

Exclusive  Every vendor capable of spelling “virtualization” has spent a good chunk of 2024 making a pitch for its products as a fine alternative for folks discomfited by Broadcom’s takeover of VMware. Canadian outfit 45Drives has taken matters a step further by creating an entire product – the Proxinator – to lure those considering the open source Proxmox hyperconverged infrastructure stack.…

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Matadors hoping to win big at Big West Championships in Henderson

date: 2024-03-13, from: The Sundail (CSUN student paper)

In year one of the Andy Newman era of CSUN men’s basketball, Newman successfully navigated the Matadors to the seventh seed in the 2024 Big West Basketball Championships. The Matadors…

https://sundial.csun.edu/179379/sports/matadors-hoping-to-win-big-at-big-west-championships-in-henderson/ Save to Pocket

Wednesday 13 March, 2024

date: 2024-03-13, from: John Naughton’s online diary

My TV critic I was the Observer’s TV critic for eight years, so I’ve done my tour of duty as a couch potato. Accordingly, I now watch very little TV, and this guy stands watching me accusingly whenever I succumb. … Continue reading →

https://memex.naughtons.org/wednesday-13-march-2024/39234/ Save to Pocket

TMU’s Kylee Sears Wins NAIA National Championship

date: 2024-03-13, from: SCV New (TV Station)

Kylee Sears won the 200-yard Freestyle by nearly two seconds Friday to win the first-ever national championship for The Master’s University in swimming

https://scvnews.com/tmus-kylee-sears-wins-naia-national-championship/ Save to Pocket

Biden, Trump Capture Their Parties’ Nominations, Set 2020 Rematch

date: 2024-03-13, from: VOA News USA

https://www.voanews.com/a/biden-captures-democratic-nomination-trump-on-pace-to-secure-republican/7525350.html Save to Pocket

March 16: ‘Astronaut School’ HOPE Theatre Arts Storytime

date: 2024-03-13, from: SCV New (TV Station)

Embark on a galactic journey when HOPE Theatre Arts presents “Astronaut School!,” a free Storytime event for kids and their adults

https://scvnews.com/march-16-astronaut-school-hope-theatre-arts-storytime/ Save to Pocket

March Patch Tuesday sees Hyper-V join the guest-host escape club

date: 2024-03-13, updated: 2024-03-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

Critical bugs galore among 61 Microsoft fixes, 56 from Adobe, a dozen from SAP, and a fistful from Fortinet

Patch Tuesday  Microsoft’s monthly patch drop has arrived, delivering a mere 61 CVE-tagged vulnerabilities – none listed as under active attack or already known to the public.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/13/patch_tuesday_march_2024/ Save to Pocket

Subject codes, incomplete and unreliable, have got to go

date: 2024-03-13, from: Crossref Blog

Subject classifications have been available via the REST API for many years but have not been complete or reliable from the start and will soon be deprecated.

The subject metadata element was born out of a Labs experiment intended to enrich the metadata returned via Crossref Metadata Search with All Subject Journal Classification codes from Scopus. This feature was developed when the REST API was still fairly new, and we now recognize that the initial implementation worked its way into the service prematurely.

While subject classifications in Crossref metadata could be very useful, the current implementation in the REST API is problematic for three primary reasons:

They are misleadingly exposed in the API as a property of the work, when in fact they are a property of the container (e.g. a journal or conference proceeding). Just because a journal’s broad topic category is “X” doesn’t mean that a particular article in the journal is about “X.”

Existing works may have outdated subjects. Originally, subject codes were not updated periodically. However, subjects exposed in the /journals route are now updated once a day. Those exposed via the /works endpoint are indexed along with works, and so when a new subject list is ingested, new DOIs start getting new subjects, but existing works may have outdated subjects. We don’t have a mechanism for forcing updates when incorrect subject values are returned via the REST API, so this data can be stale and incorrect.

They are not applied to everything. This is because the Scopus list does not cover all the journals that Crossref has (conversely, the Scopus list contains some journals Crossref does not have), and does not contain other container types.

The Labs team investigated options for improving subject classification coverage but ultimately concluded that there are insufficient solutions to the coverage problem. For more, please see Esha Datta’s findings published at Force11’s Upstream: https://doi.org/10.54900/n6dnt-xpq48

Where does that leave us? Rather than continuing to supply unreliable and misleading subject category metadata, we will be deprecating this feature in the coming weeks. To minimize disruption and avoid breaking changes at this time, we will be removing this data from our index, so the subject element will simply be empty. We may remove the subject element in the future.

We know that the community’s desire for subject-based analysis of metadata is very strong, and we have supported efforts to establish a multidisciplinary taxonomy. Inaccurate codes in the meantime do not help but actually hinder these efforts, giving the false impression that they are correct.

We aim to deprecate the subject codes in April of this year.

Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns by leaving a comment below, which will start a thread in our community forum.

Frequently asked questions

Q. Will the subject field continue to be available and functional?
A. The subject metadata element will continue to be included in the JSON response but will not return any values.

Q. Will new subject codes be added in the future?
A. We do not have any current plans to add new subject codes in the future.

Q. I received a notification about this, but we don’t use subject codes. Do I need to do anything?
A. No, if you do not currently use the subject element, you do not need to do anything about this change.

Q. I noticed that wrong or inaccurate subject codes were assigned to my works. Is this a solution?
A. Yes. Until we can identify an accurate and sustainable system for assigning subject codes to Crossref metadata records, we want to stop assigning inaccurate subject codes and remove all existing assignments.

https://www.crossref.org/blog/subject-codes-incomplete-and-unreliable-have-got-to-go/ Save to Pocket

A Collection of Design Engineers

date: 2024-03-13, from: Maggie Appleton blog

https://maggieappleton.com/design-engineers Save to Pocket

Schiavo Calls for State of Emergency in Response to Chiquita Canyon Landfill Crisis

date: 2024-03-12, from: SCV New (TV Station)

California State Assemblywoman Pilar Schiavo, D-Chatsworth, announced a significant step towards addressing the severe environmental and public health crisis at the Chiquita Canyon Landfill by formally requesting California Governor Gavin Newsom declare a state of emergency in Los Angeles County.

https://scvnews.com/schiavo-calls-for-state-of-emergency-in-response-to-chiquita-canyon-landfill-crisis/ Save to Pocket

Matadors come up empty as CSUN’s rally falls short versus Hawaii

date: 2024-03-12, from: The Sundail (CSUN student paper)

The Matadors, who broke their 26-game losing streak on the road against UC San Diego (12-19, 8-12 Big West) in a nail-biting overtime win last week, hosted their final regular…

https://sundial.csun.edu/179373/sports/matadors-come-up-empty-as-csuns-rally-falls-short-versus-hawaii/ Save to Pocket

The US Southeast is getting its first EV battery supply chain project

date: 2024-03-12, from: Electrek Feed

Japan’s UBE Corporation will build an EV battery chemicals factory in Louisiana to set up a US EV battery supply chain – and compete with China.

more…

https://electrek.co/2024/03/12/us-southeast-first-ev-battery-supply-chain-project/ Save to Pocket

Review | Newly Empowered Dylan-ism

date: 2024-03-12, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News

Cat Power code-switches into transformative Dylan tribute at the Lobero.

The post Review | Newly Empowered Dylan-ism appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.

https://www.independent.com/2024/03/12/review-newly-empowered-dylan-ism/ Save to Pocket

Santa Barbara Musician is Bringing “Melodic House” Music to Studio Sound Room

date: 2024-03-12, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News

TVLI is coming out with his debut album and performing alongside his friend DJ Traveler at Studio Sound Room on Friday March 15.

The post Santa Barbara Musician is Bringing “Melodic House” Music to Studio Sound Room  appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.

https://www.independent.com/2024/03/12/santa-barbara-musician-is-bringing-melodic-house-music-to-studio-sound-room/ Save to Pocket

Saenger Associates, GrowthPhases AG Announce Partnership

date: 2024-03-12, from: SCV New (TV Station)

Saenger Associates and GrowthPhases AG, LLC are pleased to announce their partnership to expand each company’s client offering to include retained executive search, interim management and business consulting

https://scvnews.com/saenger-associates-growthphases-ag-announce-partnership/ Save to Pocket

Dasung’s newest Paperlike Color is a 12 inch portable E Ink monitor

date: 2024-03-12, from: Liliputing

The Dasung Paperlike Color (12 inch) is a portable monitor featuring a 2560 x 1200 pixel E Ink Kaleido 3 color display. Up for pre-order in China for 4,999 CNY (about $700), it’s not exactly the cheapest portable display that money can buy. But it is less than half the price of the 25.3 inch Dasung Paperlike […]

The post Dasung’s newest Paperlike Color is a 12 inch portable E Ink monitor appeared first on Liliputing.

https://liliputing.com/dasungs-newest-paperlike-color-is-a-12-inch-portable-e-ink-monitor/ Save to Pocket

Press Release: On COVID 4 year anniversary: Experts call on CDC to recommit to public accountability

date: 2024-03-12, from: Peoples CDC blog

Press Release FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: TUESDAY, March 12, 2024 Register for March 13 8 PT/11 ET Online Press Conference Here   Contact for People’s CDC:  Lara Jirmanus, lara.jirmanus@gmail.com cell (781)864-8879 info@peoplescdc.org    On COVID 4 year anniversary: Experts call on CDC to recommit to public accountability  Release policy paper demonstrating CDC has aligned guidance with… Continue reading Press Release: On COVID 4 year anniversary: Experts call on CDC to recommit to public accountability

https://peoplescdc.org/2024/03/12/covid4yearanniversary/ Save to Pocket

Meta sues ex infra VP for allegedly stealing top-secret datacenter blueprints

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

Exec accused of using own work PC to swipe confidential AI and staffing docs for stealth cloud startup

An ex-Meta veep has been sued by his former bosses for “brazenly disloyal and dishonest conduct” – and by that, they mean he allegedly stole confidential documents to help him build and recruit colleagues for an AI cloud startup. …

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/12/meta_vp_infrastructure_allegations/ Save to Pocket

Wilk Names Jewelry Fixx Small Business of the Month

date: 2024-03-12, from: SCV New (TV Station)

California State Sen. Scott Wilk (R-Santa Clarita) has recognize Santa Clarita-based Jewelry Fixx as Senate District 21’s Small Business of the Month

https://scvnews.com/wilk-names-jewelry-fixx-small-business-of-the-month/ Save to Pocket

Analysis: Does North Korea’s Kim Want Another Summit With Trump?

date: 2024-03-12, from: VOA News USA

washington — A re-elected U.S. President Donald Trump could well awaken the following day to a phone call inviting him to Pyongyang for a summit with Kim Jong Un, says a veteran of the two previous Trump-Kim summits in 2018 and 2019.

“If I were Kim Jong Un talking to my advisers in Pyongyang, I’d be thinking of whether I [should] call President-elect Trump the day after the election to congratulate him” and say, “Why don’t you come to Pyongyang? Let’s meet here,” says former Trump adviser John Bolton.

“And Trump might do it,” continued Bolton in an interview with VOA’s Korean Service on Friday.

Bolton served as national security adviser during the period in which Trump and Kim exchanged frequent letters and conducted summits in Singapore in June 2018 and Hanoi in February 2019, as well as an impromptu meeting at the inter-Korean border in June 2019.

The Hanoi summit broke down when Trump walked away from Kim’s offer to dismantle North Korea’s main nuclear plant at Yongbyon in exchange for sanctions relief, and Kim has refused to engage with the United States or South Korea since U.S.-North Korean talks broke down in Stockholm eight months later.

But Bolton said that does not rule out the possibility that Kim might try again, or that Trump might accept.

“The danger with another Trump administration is he prizes making deals more than the substance of the deals, which he often doesn’t understand in the international context,” said Bolton, who has frequently criticized the former president’s approach to foreign affairs since leaving his administration.

Gary Samore, former White House coordinator for arms control and weapons of mass destruction during the Obama administration, told VOA via phone on Friday, “Kim Jong Un may very well believe that if there’s another summit, he can persuade Trump to lift international economic sanctions” and “weaken the U.S.-ROK [South Korea] alliance as Trump did in the Singapore meeting.”

At a news conference following his 2018 summit with Kim in Singapore, Trump announced the U.S. would suspend military drills with South Korea, describing them as “very provocative” and “tremendously expensive.”

Joint exercises resumed, however, under Trump’s successor, President Joe Biden. The U.S. and South Korea are currently holding the annual Freedom Shield exercise. It began on March 4 and will continue through Thursday.

Harry Kazianis, a senior editor at the website 19FortyFive and president of the Rogue States Project, thinks another Trump-Kim summit would be unlikely.

“Right now, North Korea is likely getting billions of dollars a year from Russia to help Putin arm his military in the Ukraine war and likely little sanctions enforcement from China. If those conditions were to hold, Kim has very little to gain from dealing with Trump,” he said.

But, he told VOA via email on Friday, Kim might need to engage with the American leader again if Trump were to bring the war in Ukraine to an end and successfully pressure China to enforce sanctions.

Scott Snyder, director of the program on U.S.-Korea policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, said via email on Friday that Pyongyang has made clear it is not interested in talks.

For diplomacy to resume, he said “both sides would have to find a way of putting the Hanoi experience behind them and establishing a new modus vivendi and mutually beneficial rationales for pursuing a new relationship.”

Sangjin Cho contributed to this report.

https://www.voanews.com/a/analysis-does-north-korea-s-kim-want-another-summit-with-trump-/7524941.html Save to Pocket

County Chief Sustainability Office Annual Report

date: 2024-03-12, from: SCV New (TV Station)

Check out the Los Angeles County Chief Sustainability Office’s newly released Annual Report, which details the progress the county has made on the 12 overarching goals of the OurCounty Plan.

https://scvnews.com/county-chief-sustainability-office-annual-report/ Save to Pocket

Warped & Bendy Pen Plots

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-12, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/03/warped-bendy-pen-plots Save to Pocket

Tesla takes over new industrial park in Austin suburb, potentially for battery production

date: 2024-03-12, from: Electrek Feed

Tesla has taken over most of a new industrial park project in Austin’s suburb of Kyle. The reason why is not confirmed, but it could be for battery production.

more…

https://electrek.co/2024/03/12/tesla-takes-over-industrial-park-austin-suburb-potentially-battery-production/ Save to Pocket

The ROI on GenAI might not be so great, after all

date: 2024-03-12, from: Gary Marcus blog

Anyone remember this piece? We are starting to see some signs in that direction. The WSJ recently reported that Microsoft Copilot was perhaps underwhelming some customers. Today Stephanie Palazzolo The Information asked: A longer story there (that she pointed to in the above)) was

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/the-roi-on-genai-might-not-be-so Save to Pocket

Sansum Clinic Hiring Event

date: 2024-03-12, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News

Date:               Tuesday, March 19, 2024       Time:              9:00am – 5:00pm Location:         215 Pesetas Lane, Santa Barbara Park and enter from the Multi-Specialty Clinic entrance

The post Sansum Clinic Hiring Event  appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.

https://www.independent.com/2024/03/12/sansum-clinic-hiring-event/ Save to Pocket

Biden, Trump Could Capture Their Parties’ Presidential Nominations in Tuesday Voting

date: 2024-03-12, from: VOA News USA

https://www.voanews.com/a/7524908.html Save to Pocket

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-03-12, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)

Reminder, today is withCheckedContinuation appreciation day.

https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/112084899565848547 Save to Pocket

Brussels Airport just added 700 EV chargers and they don’t have idle fees

date: 2024-03-12, from: Electrek Feed

Brussels Airport in Belgium now has 750 EV chargers, and it wants you to leave your EV plugged in when you go on holiday.

more…

https://electrek.co/2024/03/12/brussels-airport-700-ev-chargers-and-they-dont-have-idle-fees/ Save to Pocket

Banks Want To Protect Their Junkiest Junk Fee

date: 2024-03-12, from: The Lever News

Banks are fighting a rule that would stop predatory fees they claim they don’t even charge.

https://www.levernews.com/banks-want-to-protect-their-junkiest-junk-fee/ Save to Pocket

Hyundai to launch a new rugged off-road IONIQ 5 XRT model in the US

date: 2024-03-12, from: Electrek Feed

After the IONIQ 5 earned Hyundai’s first N-brand treatment, it’s now due for a rugged, off-road XRT upgrade. How will it compare to Rivian’s recently revealed R3X?

more…

https://electrek.co/2024/03/12/hyundai-launch-rugged-off-road-ioniq-5-xrt-variant-us/ Save to Pocket

Jim Martini, a short story by Michael Bible. “He wasn’t one of…

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-12, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/03/0044171-jim-martini-a-short-story Save to Pocket

Biden admin debuts infrastructure plan to electrify nation’s trucks by 2040

date: 2024-03-12, from: Electrek Feed

The Biden Administration has released the first-ever strategy document detailing its plan to target specific freight corridors for infrastructure improvement, with the intent of helping to reach its goal of 100% zero-emission new truck sales by 2040.

more…

https://electrek.co/2024/03/12/biden-admin-debuts-infrastructure-plan-to-electrify-freight-by-2040-a-first/ Save to Pocket

NASA Expanding Lunar Exploration with Upgraded SLS Mega Rocket Design

date: 2024-03-12, from: NASA breaking news

By: Martin Burkey As NASA prepares for its first crewed Artemis missions, the agency is making preparations to build, test, and assemble the next evolution of its SLS (Space Launch System) rocket. The larger and power powerful version of SLS, known as Block 1B, can send a crew and large pieces of hardware to the […]

https://www.nasa.gov/general/nasa-expanding-lunar-exploration-with-upgraded-sls-mega-rocket-design/ Save to Pocket

Don’t Look Up: Cicadas Produce High-Speed Jets of Urine

date: 2024-03-12, from: Smithsonian Magazine

The noisy, winged insects produce pee the same way that much larger animals do, according to a new study

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/dont-look-up-cicadas-produce-high-speed-jets-of-urine-180983935/ Save to Pocket

IBM said to be binning off more staff as ‘workforce rebalance’ continues

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

Next logical step after rounds of voluntary layoffs

IBM is back in the layoff headlines after reportedly slashing jobs in its marketing and communications divisions. …

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/12/ibm_reportedly_laying_off_staff/ Save to Pocket

Hart Authors Legislation to Address California’s Idle Oil Well Crisis

date: 2024-03-12, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News

SACRAMENTO, CA –Today Assemblymember Gregg Hart (D-Santa Barbara) announced Assembly Bill 1866, which will address the urgent climate and public health

The post Hart Authors Legislation to Address California’s Idle Oil Well Crisis appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.

https://www.independent.com/2024/03/12/hart-authors-legislation-to-address-californias-idle-oil-well-crisis/ Save to Pocket

Local Partnering Organizations Launch Free Mobile Vision Clinic

date: 2024-03-12, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News

March 5th, 2024, Santa Barbara, CA – In a groundbreaking initiative aimed at expanding access to vision care for local underserved

The post Local Partnering Organizations Launch Free Mobile Vision Clinic appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.

https://www.independent.com/2024/03/12/local-partnering-organizations-launch-free-mobile-vision-clinic/ Save to Pocket

Reps. Schiff, Garcia, 35+ California Colleagues Call on FEMA To Reimburse Local Governments For Funds Spent Supporting A COVID-19 Pandemic Homeless Program

date: 2024-03-12, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News

Washington, D.C.— Today, Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) joined Representative Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) and over 35 members of the California delegation in calling

The post Reps. Schiff, Garcia, 35+ California Colleagues Call on FEMA To Reimburse Local Governments For Funds Spent Supporting A COVID-19 Pandemic Homeless Program appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.

https://www.independent.com/2024/03/12/reps-schiff-garcia-35-california-colleagues-call-on-fema-to-reimburse-local-governments-for-funds-spent-supporting-a-covid-19-pandemic-homeless-program/ Save to Pocket

Time Travel Movies, Ranked

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-12, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/03/time-travel-movies-ranked Save to Pocket

BYD’s Quality Problems Hit International Markets: Report

date: 2024-03-12, from: Inside EVs News

EVs piling in European warehouses and logistics-related quality issues are new headaches for the world’s largest EV maker.

https://insideevs.com/news/712148/byd-quality-problems-hit-international-markets/ Save to Pocket

Motorola’s new Moto G Power and Moto G (2024) budget phones pack 120 Hz displays and 50MP cameras

date: 2024-03-12, from: Liliputing

Motorola has unveiled two new budget smartphones with big batteries, high screen refresh rates, and fairly low starting prices. The new Moto G 5G (2024) will be available from wireless carriers later this month, and unlocked models are expected to sell for $200 when it hits retail in May. And the Moto G Power 5G (2024) is a […]

The post Motorola’s new Moto G Power and Moto G (2024) budget phones pack 120 Hz displays and 50MP cameras appeared first on Liliputing.

https://liliputing.com/motorolas-new-moto-g-power-and-moto-g-2024-budget-phones-pack-120-hz-displays-and-50mp-cameras/ Save to Pocket

Hyundai reveals IONIQ 5 N price starts at $66,100, topping the Tesla Model Y Performance

date: 2024-03-12, from: Electrek Feed

The first Hyundai N brand high-performance EV will start at $66,100 (excluding destination). Hyundai says the 641 hp IONIQ 5 N starting price sets a “new benchmark for engaging, all-electric high performance.” But how does it stack up against the Tesla Model Y Performance?

more…

https://electrek.co/2024/03/12/hyundai-ioniq-5-n-price-66100-topping-tesla-model-y/ Save to Pocket

¡Si Se Puede! Unity March scheduled forMarch 21 at Santa Barbara City College

date: 2024-03-12, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News

SANTA BARBARA, Calif., March 12, 2024 — The Santa Barbara City College (SBCC) first-year experience and student empowerment program ¡Raíces: First

The post ¡Si Se Puede! Unity March scheduled forMarch 21 at Santa Barbara City College appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.

https://www.independent.com/2024/03/12/si-se-puede-unity-march-scheduled-formarch-21-at-santa-barbara-city-college/ Save to Pocket

Review | Meow Meow Is Wow Wow Wow at Santa Barbara Lobero

date: 2024-03-12, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News

Postmodern cabaret show combines comedy, music, and social commentary to pack a purr-worthy punch.

The post Review | Meow Meow Is Wow Wow Wow at Santa Barbara Lobero appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.

https://www.independent.com/2024/03/12/review-meow-meow-is-wow-wow-wow-at-santa-barbara-lobero/ Save to Pocket

‘Strange’ New Prehistoric Bird Discovered in China and Named for David Attenborough

date: 2024-03-12, from: Smithsonian Magazine

The proto-bird lived some 120 million years ago and did not have teeth—a trait more similar to birds of today than to birds of its time—sharpening scientists’ understanding of avian evolution

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/strange-new-prehistoric-bird-discovered-in-china-and-named-for-david-attenborough-180983934/ Save to Pocket

Why a 1-Cent Postage Stamp Could Sell for $5 Million

date: 2024-03-12, from: Smithsonian Magazine

If predictions are accurate, the sale would be the highest ever for an American postage mark

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-a-1-cent-postage-stamp-could-sell-for-5-million-180983940/ Save to Pocket

Knitting a Fuzzy Record of Climate Change

date: 2024-03-12, from: Heatmap News

Trina Messer knew the weather in Dallas-Forth Worth had been unusually warm this year, but she hadn’t anticipated needing her clay-colored yarn in February. “Today we are expecting a high in the 90s!!!,” she marveled in a Facebook update last week, adding regretfully, “I was hoping for more blues, but it is what it is.”

Messer, a retired educator of 30 years, started crocheting in 2022, the natural evolution of a knitting habit she’d picked up while bored during the pandemic. So far, she has made several scarves and hats, a big cardigan “almost like a coat,” and even a couple of throw blankets. Then, in January, she began work on her biggest project yet: a temperature blanket.

Temperature blankets aren’t always blankets — they can be scarves, shawls, and even crocheted snakes. The basic premise, though, is the same: Over the course of a year, knitters, crocheters, and embroiderers add a new row, stitch, or square to their project every day, with the color of yarn corresponding to the temperature of the location where they live. In recent years, this community has grown massive, in essence creating a de facto visual record of climate change for thousands of locations around the world. “From December 1 until today, I’ve had over 26,000 people join,” Sarah Moerdyk, the creator and moderator of Facebook’s largest temperature blanket group, told me in February. For most of its existence, beginning in 2017, the group wasn’t “super active,” hovering around a few hundred members. “In a matter of three months, it’s really blown up.”

Messer chose to break her earth-toned palette into 10-degree intervals, ranging from a white yarn that represents temperatures below 19 degrees Fahrenheit to “chili red” for days over 110. She even has a special yarn, “silver sparkle,” to log days with snowfall. Thankfully, she’d already purchased the clay-colored yarn she’d designated for temperatures between 90 and 99 degrees, even though she hadn’t expected to need it until late March or April.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the contiguous United States just concluded its warmest meteorological winter in recorded history. Across the country, temperatures were 5.4 degrees above average; in some states, like Wisconsin, it was nearly 10 degrees above what it should have been for the period between December and February. “This is not normal,” Messer told me a couple weeks ago, when her phone showed it was 91 degrees near Dallas. “Don’t think it’s like this all the time.”

Despite temperature blankets’ resemblance to climatologist Ed Hawkins’ famous warming stripes, the concept predates his 2018 graphics. Perhaps more surprisingly, it wasn’t initially conceived as a commentary on climate change. As far as I — and others — have been able to gather, Kristen Cooper, a craftsperson and beekeeper living in northern British Columbia, was the first to come up with the concept that evolved into the modern temperature blanket challenge when she described a similar scarf pattern in a 2013 blog post. “You record the day’s highest temperature by knitting one row in the color designated for each temperature,” she wrote. By the end of the year, “you will have a visual, colorful graph of the temperatures of your area.”

Cooper told me she, in turn, had been inspired by knitter and author Lea Redmond’s “sky scarf,” a project from 2008 (and later, a book) that involved knitting a row a day in a color that “best captures the essence of the sky out your window.” Redmond was slightly skeptical of the idea that she could be the temperature blanket’s progenitor. Her project tried to capture “the embodied experience of looking at this beauty of the sky every day,” she told me. Temperature projects, by contrast, rely on numbers that people retrieve from a thermometer in their kitchen — or, “I’m guessing, a lot of people just check the internet.”

Lea Redmond’s “sky scarf,” depicting the colors of her local sky, photographed while in progress. The rainbow represents not a temperature variation, but a literal rainbow Redmond spotted in the sky that day.Courtesy of Lea Redmond

Internet data doesn’t have the immediacy of events unfolding in real-time, outside your window. But representing temperature data at all requires a level of emotional remove that Redmond, personally, was a little wary of: For example, when wildfires turned day to night in California in 2020, “temperature-wise, that would not have shown up in a temperature scarf, but in a sky scarf, that stripe would have looked like shit.”

Cooper, for her part, never finished the first temperature scarf because she realized that if she missed a day, she couldn’t accurately make it up — her rural town didn’t have its own weather station — which would defeat the whole point of the project. But while she eventually moved on, swept up by life with a new baby, the knitting world took the concept and ran with it. “I hadn’t really been following along, but every now and then, a completely random post by strangers on Facebook or Instagram will pop up showing a temperature blanket,” Cooper told me. “And I’m always so amazed at how far the concept has traveled.”

Only recently have artists started using conceptual knitting and crocheting projects as explicit commentaries on climate change. In 2017, after the inauguration of President Trump, yarn shop owner Emily McNeil and data scientist Asy Connelly launched the Tempestry Project — which uses standardized colors and ranges to create historic temperature records — half as a joke and half out of real anxiety over the possibility of climate information disappearing from government websites. “We weren’t really thinking about temperature blankets,” McNeil told me. “I guess I knew that they existed, but it wasn’t really on my radar when we started it.”

The Chicago Tempestry Collection, created by participants from all over the country. Emily McNeil’s Paleo New Normal, above, shows the annual deviation from average temperature from 1CE (on the left) to 2021CE (on the right). The darker the blue, the colder than average the year and the darker the red, the warmer than average the year.Courtesy of The Tempestry Project. Photographed by the museum.

Admittedly, sifting through all that climate data can take an emotional toll during the hours or days it takes to complete a tapestry. In addition to tapestries representing individual years, which rely on historical data rather than real-time observations, the Tempestry Project also facilitates multi-year “New Normal” tapestries that are directly inspired by Hawkins’ warming stripes. “The first one that I knit had me in tears as the colder colors just fade out, and you are never going to get those again,” McNeil said. (When I asked how they deal with the feelings brought up by the project, McNeil and Connelly told me dryly, “A lot of wine.”)

Temperature blanket knitters and crocheters can similarly feel alarmed by what’s unfolding in their hands. Moerdyk told me the warm weather in the northern hemisphere has been a big topic in the Facebook group, with some people having to quick-order summer colors or make special trips to the store to accommodate the winter heat in their projects. Perversely, the weirdness becomes kind of thrilling. “It’s fun to hear people say, ‘My colors are going nuts right now,’” Moerdyk said. Especially this early in the year, “to put all of a sudden this really warm temperature color in — it’s memorable. You’ll look back and say, ‘Oh my gosh, remember that time in February we had a 70-degree day? That was crazy.’”

The result is that temperature blankets become an accessible way of discussing climate change, without any of the political baggage. Moerdyk originally started the Facebook group for her friends but has since recorded participants from 1,114 different locations, including every state and over a dozen countries. She said the community has remained surprisingly civil despite all that diversity — some of it surely ideological. But temperature blankets are “not really a controversial topic,” Moerdyk said. “No matter what you believe in, temperature changes.”

Moerdyk, based in Michigan, shows off her finished 2017 temperature blanket.Courtesy of Sarah Moerdyk

For the thousands of hobbyists who’ve taken on temperature blanket projects, the craft becomes a way to witness the immediate changes in their environment that aren’t necessarily wholly negative. “If you’re looking at temperature blankets as a climate marker, that can get heavy,” Heather Walpole, the owner of Ewe Ewe Yarns, which sells temperature blanket starter bundles, told me. “But we’re still living our lives and we have a desire to create.”

Redmond, the sky scarf creator, finds this kind of creative intentionality to be the key. “It’s not like I invented stripes having meaning,” she joked. “But I do think most stripes on most garments in most stores in the United States today are meaningless. That just seems like such a missed opportunity.” It’s not that having a throw blanket or a scarf with weather-coordinated stripes will change the world. But displaying or wearing a beautiful object inspires others to ask questions: Where did you get that? Did you make it yourself? “They’re story sparks,” Redmond said. “They’re excuses to tell your story.”

This already weirdly warm year is still in its relatively chilly opening chapters, but the savviest knitters are already hurrying to stock up on yarns for June and July. As Messer, the Texas-based knitter, told me, “If this summer is anything like last summer,” then her blanket will have “a whole lot of burnt orange and red.”

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Pacific Allies React to Final Security Pact Funding Approval

date: 2024-03-12, from: VOA News USA

Critical funds to counter China in the Pacific are finally approved for three U.S. allies: Palau, Micronesia and the Marshall Islands. Over the weekend, U.S. President Joe Biden signed into law $7 billion over 20 years in funding for the Compacts of Free Association as part of a partial government funding bill. VOA’s Jessica Stone reports. Camera: Jessica Stone, Greg Harong

https://www.voanews.com/a/pacific-allies-react-to-final-security-pact-funding-approval-/7524706.html Save to Pocket

Samsung and SK halt sales of used chipmaking gear to brokers

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

Reports indicate Korean giants fear ‘backlash’ from US over resale of lithography equipment to Middle Kingdom

Just a week after it emerged that Dutch chip equipment manufacturer ASML was under US pressure to stop servicing and reparing its tech sold to customers in China, Samsung and SK hynix are feeling the squeeze too.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/12/samsung_skhynix_stop_sales_of_used_chipmaking_kit_to_brokers/ Save to Pocket

App Store WTF of the Week: DealMachine for Real Estate

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-12, from: Daring Fireball

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dealmachine-for-real-estate/id1136936300 Save to Pocket

The Hyundai Ioniq 5 N Costs $67,475

date: 2024-03-12, from: Inside EVs News

The electric, all-wheel-drive hot hatch comes in only one configuration.

https://insideevs.com/news/712145/2025-hyundai-ioniq-5-n-pricing/ Save to Pocket

Mac Stuck in Recovery After Login

date: 2024-03-12, from: Michael Tsai

After writing on my report card that all my Apple hardware was working reliably, I’ve now started having what may be hardware trouble with my 2019 Intel MacBook Pro. Sometimes, whether I’m using it or it’s just sitting there, it will let out the sneeze sound and kernel panic. This Mac has always done that, […]

https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/03/12/mac-stuck-in-recovery-after-login/ Save to Pocket

Microsoft Ending Windows Subsystem for Android

date: 2024-03-12, from: Michael Tsai

Microsoft (via Hacker News, 9to5Mac): Microsoft is ending support for the Windows Subsystem for Android™️ (WSA). As a result, the Amazon Appstore on Windows and all applications and games dependent on WSA will no longer be supported beginning March 5, 2025. Steve Troughton-Smith: Never depend on Microsoft for anything. Alan Miller: This seems like the […]

https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/03/12/microsoft-ending-windows-subsystem-for-android/ Save to Pocket

Features Lost Across Versions of macOS

date: 2024-03-12, from: Michael Tsai

Michael Schmitt: Article Do You Use It? How TidBITS Readers Install macOS Updates - TidBITS says that “Some people even wait until Apple announces or even releases the next macOS version, under the theory that it somehow isn’t fully baked until then.”. I wait until the next major release, but not under that theory.It used […]

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Volkswagen ID.3 Production Won’t Expand Due To ‘Low Demand’: Report

date: 2024-03-12, from: Inside EVs News

Zwickau, Germany will remain the main production site for the ID.3 in Europe, probably due to insufficient demand.

https://insideevs.com/news/712093/volkswagen-id3-wolfsburg-production-canceled/ Save to Pocket

What Would You Do With $27,000 Worth of Free Gas?

date: 2024-03-12, from: Ride Apart, Electric Motorcycle News

Hey Siri, how many gallons of gas does it take to do a “Long Way Round”?

https://www.rideapart.com/news/712118/free-gas-glitch-27000-dollars-stolen/ Save to Pocket

New US Airstrike in Somalia Kills Three al-Shabab Fighters

date: 2024-03-12, from: VOA News USA

https://www.voanews.com/a/new-us-airstrike-in-somalia-kills-three-al-shabab-fighters/7524675.html Save to Pocket

US Providing $300 Million in New Ukraine Military Aid

date: 2024-03-12, from: VOA News USA

pentagon — The United States is providing a new round of military aid for Ukraine valued at up to $300 million, the first such announcement since late December, in what defense officials have called an “ad hoc” package made possible through U.S. Army procurement savings.

National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan announced the 55th presidential drawdown authority (PDA) package at the White House on Tuesday and said it would include artillery rounds and munitions for HIMARS, weapons desperately needed on the Ukrainian front lines where shortages abound.

“This ammunition will keep Ukrainians’ guns firing for a period, but only a short period,” Sullivan said.

Pentagon press secretary Major General Pat Ryder added that the package would provide Stinger anti-aircraft missiles along with anti-armor systems. He said the artillery rounds would include 155-mm dual purpose improved cluster munition rounds, which officials tell VOA the Army no longer uses.

The funding for this package came from savings garnered in “multiple contract actions over multiple months” where the Army was able to “buy things at a better price” than initially budgeted, according to senior defense officials who spoke to reporters on conditional of anonymity ahead of the White House announcement.

“This is a bit of an ad hoc or one-time shot. We don’t know if or when future savings will come in, and we certainly can’t count on this as a way of doing business,” one of the senior defense officials said.

In one example provided by the officials, the Army had initially estimated the cost of 25-mm rounds at $130 but was able to negotiate the price down to $93.

The savings were then placed back into the U.S. funding pot for Ukraine aid, a process that has happened several times but wasn’t considered as newsworthy during those times because the fund wasn’t “broke” before, according to defense officials.

$10 billion shortfall

The aid package comes despite a Pentagon funding shortfall of about $10 billion for U.S. military weapons needed to replace those already sent to Ukraine, a shortfall that requires additional money from Congress to fix, according to top defense officials.

“We don’t foresee a likely alternative outside of the supplemental funding [bill] or having that money added into an appropriations bill in order to achieve the replenishment that we need,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks told reporters on Monday.

Pentagon officials expected to get the funding to replenish those stocks in a supplemental request from the Biden administration, which included billions of additional dollars in aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. However, Congress has yet to pass a supplemental aid bill because of arguments on spending and U.S. border security.

Because it has been 15 months since Congress last approved money to help Ukraine, defense officials say Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has expressed concerns about any future drawdowns.

The department still has about $4 billion in authority to send weapons to Ukraine, but there is no congressionally approved money left to replenish the Pentagon’s weapons stockpiles.

“We have the ability to move funds out of our stocks, but without the ability to replenish them, we are putting our own readiness at some risks,” according to one senior defense official.

The $10 billion shortfall is tied to the way the Pentagon has accounted for the aid sent to Ukraine. Last June, the Pentagon said it overestimated the value of weapons sent to Ukraine by about $6.2 billion over the past two years.

When calculating its aid package estimates, the Department of Defense was counting the cost incurred to replace the weapons given to Ukraine, while it said it should have been totaling the cost of the systems actually sent, officials told VOA at the time.

The error provided the Pentagon the legal cover needed to send more aid to Ukraine, but the problem remained that more funds would be needed to replenish U.S. military stockpiles with newer, costlier weapons.

Asked by VOA why the Pentagon was willing to use its savings to send more aid for Ukraine but was not willing to dip into the $4 billion of remaining presidential drawdown authority, one of the senior defense officials told reporters that “the lack of clarity” from Congress on whether they will approve additional aid makes the Pentagon “very reluctant to dig the hole deeper.”

“In this case, we are not digging the hole deeper. We’re staying even, while recognizing that Ukraine is in a very tough spot this moment,” the defense official added.

https://www.voanews.com/a/us-providing-300-million-in-new-ukraine-military-aid-/7524692.html Save to Pocket

Mexican journalists launch a new outlet from the ashes of the country’s shuttered state news agency

date: 2024-03-12, from: Nieman Journalism Lab

Former employees of Mexico’s now-defunct state news agency, Notimex, launched the Mexican Association of Information (AMEXI) last Thursday as a new news outlet covering the country’s deepest challenges, according to an announcement posted on Twitter. 🚨 #ULTIMAHORA 🚨 A más de dos meses de concretarse el cierre de #Notimex por instrucción del presidente @lopezobrador_, este…

https://www.niemanlab.org/2024/03/mexican-journalists-launch-a-new-outlet-from-the-ashes-of-the-countrys-shuttered-state-news-agency/ Save to Pocket

You Could Run a ‘Penguin Post Office’ in Antarctica

date: 2024-03-12, from: Smithsonian Magazine

Three new hires will spend five months living among gentoo penguins and sorting postcards at the world’s southernmost post office

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/you-could-run-penguin-post-office-antarctica-180983939/ Save to Pocket

@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-03-12, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)

BTW, has Twitter abandoned “tweet” as a trademark? Is it now public domain? Could someone ask?

http://scripting.com/2024/03/12.html#a184646 Save to Pocket

A look at the cool new toilets out there….

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-12, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/03/0044164-after-decades-of-being-tr Save to Pocket

@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-03-12, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)

We need a protocol for embedding a tweet in a web page. We used to have one with Twitter, but it now works only intermittently. Mastodon has one, and I have been able to use it. But really it would be nice to have a sort of jQuery of this stuff. If they’re all going to create their own APIs we obviously need a container for that so developers don’t have to worry about all of it.

http://scripting.com/2024/03/12.html#a184457 Save to Pocket

Rebooting the blogroll bootstrap

date: 2024-03-12, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News

Manton is doing great work.

His micro.blog system is pioneering a new form of blogrolls.

We’ve been working together behind the scenes to make sure his stuff interops with mine.

That’s imho the best part.

PS: Blogrolls is where the social web started.

PPS: I have to write a short “what is a blogroll” doc, re OPML and RSS. There’s not a lot to it. So it needs to be written down. Will do.

PPPS: I’m having flashbacks to Manila. We’re using GitHub more or less the same way. We had a better scripting system. I also know that WordPress can be that too, and plan to use that in my software.

http://scripting.com/2024/03/12/184321.html?title=rebootingTheBlogrollBootstrap Save to Pocket

@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-03-12, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)

Today I’m working on titles.

http://scripting.com/2024/03/12.html#a184111 Save to Pocket

Amazon Tells Warehouse Workers to Close Their Eyes and Think Happy Thoughts

date: 2024-03-12, from: 404 Media Group

“Close your eyes and think about something that makes you happy,” the screen, titled “Savoring,” instructs Amazon fulfillment center workers.

https://www.404media.co/amazon-amazen-workingwell-savoring/ Save to Pocket

Biden Raved About EVs to the Special Counsel: ‘Damn, They’re Quick’

date: 2024-03-12, from: Heatmap News

It is the great Faustian bargain of the American presidency: To lead the world’s most powerful nation, you have to give up driving forever.

For some leaders, this sacrifice can be excruciating. Given the opportunity to climb behind the wheel of a Mack truck in 2017, then-President Trump honked the horn, mimed driving, and was reported generally looking like “he wanted to steal it.” Later, in 2020, during a rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania, the president gazed longingly at some “nice trucks” nearby and wondered aloud, “You think I could hop into one of them and drive it away? I’d love to do it. Just drive the hell outta here.”

This destiny has been especially cruel for car guy and speed junkie Joe Biden — so much so, in fact, that during his interview last fall with Robert Hur, the special counsel investigating allegations that Biden mishandled classified documents, the president complained about only being allowed to drive his beloved Corvette up and down his driveway.

According to Biden, there is at least one silver lining that comes with the highest office in the land: “Probably one of the best parts to being vice president and president, I get to drive all these, you know, electric vehicles,” the president raved to his interviewers. “I have. Damn, they’re quick.”

The transcript goes on:

President Biden: You know, think about this. You had one of those big 4x4s, the — I think it’s a Ford Bronco, whatever it is. Zero to 60 in 4.6.

Robert Hur: Yes.

Marc Krickbaum, deputy special counsel: Instant torque.

Hur: That’s fast.

Biden: Yeah. By the way, you know how it works?

(laughter)

Biden: It’s really cool.

Hur: Sir, I’d love — I would love, love to hear more about this, but I do have a few more questions to get through.

Biden: You can take 30 seconds, but you put your foot on the brake, you hit, you hit a button that’s in the — and it says “launch.”

(laughter)

Biden: You step your foot on the accelerator all the way down —

Hur: Woah.

Biden: — until it gets to about 6, 7 grand. Then all of a sudden, it will say “launch.” All you do is take your foot off the brake. (makes car sound)

[Interview transcript]

In this limited context, at least, Hur’s later questioning of the president’s mental acuity seems a little unfair. Tell me you wouldn’t make excited car noises if you had the chance to experience instant torque, especially if you’d hung up your own car keys over a decade before.

It almost — almost — makes getting elected worth it.

https://heatmap.news/sparks/biden-evs-special-counsel Save to Pocket

Biden’s budget proposal boosts CISA funding to $3B

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

Plus almost $1.5b for health-care cybersecurity

US President Joe Biden has asked Congress to approve an extra $103 million in funding for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, bringing CISA’s total budget to $3 billion.…

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Biden Meets Polish Leaders Amid Anxiety Over US Support for Ukraine

date: 2024-03-12, from: VOA News USA

Washington — On the day that Poland commemorates 25 years as a member of NATO, President Joe Biden hosted Polish President Andrzej Duda and Prime Minister Donald Tusk at the White House amid anxiety over future U.S. funding to help Ukraine fend off Moscow’s invasion. 

“America’s commitment to Poland is ironclad,” Biden told reporters Tuesday ahead of the meeting.

The meeting comes as the administration announced another security assistance package to Ukraine — $300 million of weapons and equipment. The funds come from “unanticipated cost savings” refunded to the Department of Defense, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said during a press briefing on Tuesday.

“It’s not nearly enough,” Biden said of the package, urging Republicans in the House of Representatives to pass the Senate-approved foreign aid package that includes $60 billion for Ukraine “before it’s too late.”

“Russia’s aggression against Ukraine” has demonstrated that the United States is “the security leader,” Duda said. He reiterated calls to fellow alliance members to boost their defense spending to 3% of their GDP to defend against Russia’s aggression. 

Poland contributes 3.9% of its GDP to defense, almost twice the current NATO target of 2%, and the highest in percentage of GDP. The U.S. is the second-largest contributor by percentage, at 3.5% of GDP, but the largest within NATO in total dollar amount.

Duda’s proposal highlights the anxiety felt by Poland and other countries on NATO’s eastern flank that feel most threatened by Moscow’s aggression and comes as some in the western part of the alliance are pushing for a diplomatic resolution to the Ukraine war.

However, it’s aspirational and unlikely to be adopted anytime soon, as many within NATO have yet to meet even the 2% GDP target, said Michal Baranowski, managing director for GMF East, at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

In an opinion piece Monday in The Washington Post, Duda highlighted Russia’s alarming militarization, with Moscow earmarking nearly 30% of its annual budget for military spending. He underscored the threat posed by Russian President Vladimir Putin, calling it the most significant challenge to global peace since the Cold War era.

More US troops

Duda, who under the Polish system represents the country in foreign affairs, and Tusk, the head of government in Poland, are bitter political rivals intensely locked in various domestic struggles but have vowed to speak with one voice on Ukraine, NATO and relations with Washington.

Warsaw advocates for more U.S. military presence in Poland, where approximately 10,000 U.S. personnel are on rotation. Washington is not keen on the idea, with Biden telling reporters Monday that there is “no need for more troops at the Polish border.”

Sullivan reinforced the message, saying the alliance is “postured well,” and that plans “to defend Poland, should it come to that, are strong.”

Sullivan said the U.S. will move forward with a new $2 billion Foreign Military Financing direct loan to Poland and will offer to sell Poland 96 Apache helicopters. Also Tuesday, the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs notified Congress of their approval to sell more than $3 billion worth of missiles to Poland.

Meeting congressional leaders

Earlier Tuesday, Duda and Tusk met with Democratic and Republican congressional leaders and advocated support for Ukraine. Duda said it is “a key element for containing Putin and Russia’s imperial ambitions.”

Democrats and the White House are convinced the foreign aid package has the votes to pass in the House of Representatives, but Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson has refused to bring it to the floor for a vote.

Having Polish leaders communicate to lawmakers the need for Washington to be a responsible ally is key, Baranowski told VOA, but it’s unlikely to be the final push that would break the logjam. Many House Republicans are allies of Donald Trump and support the former president’s opposition to providing foreign aid unless it’s structured as a loan.

Earlier this week, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán told the Hungarian state news channel that Trump would not give “a penny” to support Ukraine, and “therefore, the war will end.” Orbán’s comments followed his meeting with Trump last week.

Asked for confirmation, the Trump campaign said a “top priority” in the former president’s “second term” will be “to quickly negotiate an end to the Russia-Ukraine war,” and that “European nations should be paying more of the cost of the conflict.”

“He will do what is necessary to restore peace and rebuild American strength and deterrence on the world stage, and he is the only person who can make that happen,” Steven Cheung, the campaign’s communications director, said in a statement to VOA.

Trump’s claims have further fueled European anxiety over U.S. commitment to the alliance, particularly if there’s a change in administrations following the American presidential election in November.

Last month, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee said he’d “encourage” Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” if a NATO country didn’t spend enough on defense. 

European officials have been increasingly concerned.

“We need to send this message to Russia collectively — the EU. and the U.S. — that there is no fatigue, and that we will support Ukraine to defend itself,” one European diplomat speaking on the condition of anonymity recently told VOA.

NATO summit 

According to the White House, the leaders will coordinate strategies ahead of the forthcoming NATO 75th Anniversary Summit in Washington in July. Warsaw wants to ensure that regional defense plans agreed to at the 2023 NATO summit in Vilnius are “not only well-planned, but actually resourced with troops to provide the level of deterrence and defense” needed on NATO’s eastern flank, Baranowski said. 

Reinforcing U.S.-Polish partnership in energy security is another main topic. Warsaw has earmarked $40 billion to build two nuclear plants. The first one is being built by Westinghouse, an American company.

It has been 25 years since a Polish president and prime minister visited Washington at the same time. In 1999, President Alexander Kwasniewski and Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek attended NATO’s 50th Anniversary Summit in the U.S. capital.

VOA national security correspondent Jeff Seldin and VOA chief national correspondent Steve Herman contributed to this report.

https://www.voanews.com/a/biden-meets-polish-leaders-amid-anxiety-on-us-support-for-neighboring-ukraine-/7524602.html Save to Pocket

A new AI-powered tool can help journalists detect audio deepfakes in Spanish

date: 2024-03-12, from: Nieman Journalism Lab

Journalists can now identify Spanish-language deepfake audio using a new tool called VerificAudio launched Tuesday, according to an announcement from Prisa Media. “In a new disinformation ecosystem where cloned voices are now almost imperceptible and in 2024 50% of the population will vote, today we are launching an application project from #IA to #audio: VerificAudio,…

https://www.niemanlab.org/2024/03/a-new-ai-powered-tool-can-help-journalists-detect-audio-deepfakes-in-spanish/ Save to Pocket

Rivian R3 electric crossover design influenced by iconic rally cars like the Audi Quattro

date: 2024-03-12, from: Electrek Feed

Rivian shocked the industry after unveiling the R3 electric crossover, a smaller and even more affordable EV than the R2. But, it was the high-performance R3X that grabbed people’s attention with a modern design take on iconic rally cars of the past.

more…

https://electrek.co/2024/03/12/rivian-r3-electric-crossover-design-iconic-rally-cars/ Save to Pocket

Google Play Games for Windows is adding support for native PC games

date: 2024-03-12, from: Liliputing

The Google Play Games app for Windows debuted in early 2022, allowing users in a handful of countries to run a handful of Android games on their PCs. Since then, it’s expanded to support 3,000 games that are available to play in more than 140 countries. Now Google has made a surprise announcement: Google Play […]

The post Google Play Games for Windows is adding support for native PC games appeared first on Liliputing.

https://liliputing.com/google-play-games-for-windows-is-adding-support-for-native-pc-games/ Save to Pocket

The Middle Corridor: A Renaissance in Global Commerce

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-12, from: RAND blog

Although the Middle Corridor offers promise, its journey toward becoming a viable strategic alternative to existing trade routes will be met with tough challenges. With renewed international investment and cooperation, the Middle Corridor could emerge as a cornerstone of 21st-century trade connectivity across the Eurasian landscape and beyond.

https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2024/03/the-middle-corridor-a-renaissance-in-global-commerce.html Save to Pocket

Tech Today: Suspended Solar Panels See the Light

date: 2024-03-12, from: NASA breaking news

In the 80 years since the shocking collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington, engineers have designed suspended structures to minimize their universal weakness: resonance. If not designed to deal with oscillations caused by forces like wind, the frequency of these forces would cause tensions to build and inevitably break the structure. When Jim […]

https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/stmd/tech-transfer/spinoffs/tech-today-suspended-solar-panels-see-the-light/ Save to Pocket

@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-03-12, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)

I bet someone could develop and AI bot that takes a NYT article and removes the spin. It’d be interesting to see the befores and afters.

http://scripting.com/2024/03/12.html#a180325 Save to Pocket

Zach Seward on appropriate and inappropriate uses of AI and machine learning…

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-12, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/03/0044181-zach-seward-on-appropriat Save to Pocket

Two Ford F-150 Lightnings Race 1,000 Miles: Tesla Supercharger Vs Electrify America

date: 2024-03-12, from: Inside EVs News

Cooking frozen pizza in an oven in one of the F-150s might have led to it losing the race. But would you rather have oven-fresh pizza or a bag of chips?

https://insideevs.com/news/711854/ford-f150-lightning-supercharger-versus-electrify-america/ Save to Pocket

Now you can compare your Chromium browser with that other Chromium browser using Speedometer 3.0

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

When almost everyone has the same engine, are benchmarks so important?

The latest Speedometer, a benchmark measuring web responsiveness, is out in version 3.0. However, some browser makers have questioned how helpful such benchmarking is in the era of shared rendering engines.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/12/speedometer_30_adds_new_workloads/ Save to Pocket

Communications Services Project

date: 2024-03-12, from: NASA breaking news

Overview NASA’s Communications Services Project, known as CSP, is pioneering a new era of space communications by partnering with industry to provide commercial space relay communications services for NASA missions near Earth. CSP’s goal is to validate and deliver these commercial communication services to the Near Space Network by 2030. To meet this goal, CSP […]

https://www.nasa.gov/general/communications-services-project/ Save to Pocket

NASA Astronauts Jasmin Moghbeli and Loral O’Hara Read “First Woman”

date: 2024-03-12, from: NASA breaking news

In this image from Jan. 12, 2024, NASA astronauts Jasmin Moghbeli (left) and Loral O’Hara pose with a copy of “First Woman”, NASA’s first graphic novel, inside the International Space Station’s cupola. The interactive graphic novel chronicles the adventures of fictional astronaut Callie Rodriguez, the first woman to explore the Moon. Through Callie’s journey, “First […]

https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/nasa-astronauts-jasmin-moghbeli-and-loral-ohara-read-first-woman/ Save to Pocket

NASA’s Europa Clipper Solar Arrays Successfully Deploy at Kennedy Space Center

date: 2024-03-12, from: NASA breaking news

On March 6, technicians working inside the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida unfolded and fully extended the first of two five-panel solar arrays for the agency’s Europa Clipper spacecraft. Each solar array measures 46.5 feet in length. For the operation, the team suspended the solar array on a gravity […]

https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/nasas-europa-clipper-solar-arrays-successfully-deploy-at-kennedy-space-center/ Save to Pocket

US House Passes Bill Forcing Chinese Company to Give Up TikTok

date: 2024-03-12, from: VOA News USA

WASHINGTON — The U.S. House of Representatives approved legislation Wednesday that would force the popular TikTok video app to either separate from its Chinese-owned parent company ByteDance or sell the U.S. version of the software.

The bipartisan Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act “gives TikTok six months to eliminate foreign adversary control — which would include ByteDance divesting its current ownership — to remain available in the United States,” said Representative Mike Gallagher, chairman of the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, and Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, the top Democrat on the committee.

“All TikTok would have to do is separate from CCP-controlled ByteDance. However, if TikTok chose not to rid itself of this CCP control, the application would no longer be offered in U.S. app stores. But TikTok would have no one but itself to blame,” the lawmakers said in a prepared statement.

Here’s what we know about the legislation and what happens next in the U.S. Senate.

Why is TikTok under scrutiny?

“The concern is that TikTok could transfer personal information to its parent company ByteDance, who in turn could transfer it to the Chinese government,” Caitlin Chin-Rothmann, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told VOA.

Chin-Rothmann said concerns by some members of Congress about the Chinese Communist Party potentially controlling TikTok’s algorithm for propaganda purposes have not yet been proven.

“That’s not to say that, in the future, there’s not a risk that the Chinese government could exert pressure,” she said.

What does TikTok say about the legislation?

TikTok on Monday called the legislation a “ban” and has repeatedly denied the allegations against it. In a statement last week on X, formerly Twitter, the company said the “legislation has a predetermined outcome: a total ban of TikTok in the United States.”

How do lawmakers view the legislation?

The bill had strong support from House Democrats and Republicans, despite congressional offices receiving floods of phone calls from Americans concerned about losing access to the social media app.

House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters last week, “It’s an important bipartisan measure to take on China, our largest geopolitical foe, which is actively undermining our economy and security.”

What about the Senate?

The bill could face a much harder road to passage in the Democratic-controlled Senate, where Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has said it will face consideration in the appropriate committees.

“I will listen to their views on the bill and determine the best path,” Schumer said in a statement.

Some Senate Democrats, including Mark Warner, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, have expressed doubts about the legality of singling out a social media app in legislation. He has introduced alternative legislation more broadly targeting apps that collect personal data.

But Warner told CBS News on Sunday that the TikTok app is a serious national security concern.

“If you don’t think the Chinese Communist Party can twist that algorithm to make it the news that they see reflective of their views, then I don’t think you appreciate the nature of the threat,” Warner said.

How do the leading 2024 presidential candidates feel about the bill?

The White House said it welcomes the legislation, even though the Biden campaign joined TikTok recently as an effort to reach out to younger voters.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters the bill ensures “ownership isn’t in the hands of those who may do us harm.”

Former President Donald Trump — who initially called for a ban of the app in 2020 — has now changed course, arguing that Facebook will be empowered if TikTok is no longer available.

“There’s a lot of good, and there’s a lot of bad with TikTok. But the thing I don’t like is that without TikTok, you’re going to make Facebook bigger,” the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee told U.S. cable network CNBC in a phone interview this week.

What happens after the bill passes the House?

Apart from constitutional concerns over preventing U.S. citizens from exercising their right to free speech, the bill could also be difficult to legally enforce and face challenges in U.S. courts.

“Chinese export control laws could potentially prevent the sale of TikTok’s algorithm,” Chin-Rothmann said. “A divestiture would be very logistically difficult, in general. TikTok is one of the largest companies in the world. So, any buyer would have to be very large, as well. They would have to have a strategic interest in purchasing TikTok, and then the merger would have to not raise antitrust concerns in the United States.”

https://www.voanews.com/a/us-house-expected-to-pass-bill-forcing-chinese-company-to-give-up-tiktok/7524573.html Save to Pocket

Save $150 on Anker’s new 768Wh power station at $499, Segway e-SuperScooter now $1,441 off, more

date: 2024-03-12, from: Electrek Feed

Headlining today’s green deals is the first-ever discount on Anker’s new SOLIX C800 Plus Portable Power Station at $499, with bundle options available as well. It is joined by Segway’s rarely discounted GT2P SuperScooter for $2,559, as well as a one-day deal on the Greenworks 1900 PSI Electric Pressure Washer with a detergent tank for $120. Plus, all of the other best new Green Deals landing this week.

Head below for other New Green Deals we’ve found today and, of course, Electrek’s best EV buying and leasing deals. Also, check out the new Electrek Tesla Shop for the best deals on Tesla accessories.

more…

https://electrek.co/2024/03/12/anker-solix-c800-plus-power-station-segway-gt2p-superscooter-and-more-deals/ Save to Pocket

@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-03-12, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)

This screen shot illustrates the core weakness of Mastodon. We need the ability to log on to Mastodon, not to an instance. A factoring of that functionality. It totally could work, some person, company, foundation or whatever could build software that acts as a simplifier. Have you ever used plex.tv? Somehow they manage to do it. You’re connected to someone’s server, but you log on through one site.

http://scripting.com/2024/03/12.html#a173344 Save to Pocket

[Sponsor] CloudSLAW

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-12, from: Daring Fireball

https://slaw.securosis.com/?utm_source=df Save to Pocket

How Photos Were Transmitted by Wire in the 1930s

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-12, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/03/how-photos-were-transmitted-by-wire-in-the-1930s Save to Pocket

Caltech’s Path to Decarbonization

date: 2024-03-12, from: The California Tech (Caltech student paper)

Caltech’s innovative, industrious research apparatus hides a dirty secret: a reliance on fossil fuels. But that is set to change.

https://tech.caltech.edu/2024/03/12/caltechs-path-to-decarbonization/ Save to Pocket

Trump ‘tried to sell Truth Social to Musk’ as SPAC deal stalled

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

Talk about an unholy social media alliance

Faced with mounting legal troubles and a sputtering special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) deal, former president Donald Trump reportedly turned somewhere unexpected last year to offload his flailing social media platform, Truth Social: X owner and Tesla technoking Elon Musk. …

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/12/donald_trump_tried_to_sell/ Save to Pocket

That Time Cub House Honda Made A Monkey x Dragon Ball Limited Edition Bike

date: 2024-03-12, from: Ride Apart, Electric Motorcycle News

What better way can you think of to pay tribute to the one and only Akira Toriyama?

https://www.rideapart.com/news/712117/cub-house-honda-monkey-dragonball/ Save to Pocket

Core logic again

date: 2024-03-12, from: Logic Matters blog

I have mentioned Neil Tennant’s system(s) of what he calls Core Logic once or twice before on this blog, in friendly terms. For the very shortest of introductions to the core idea of his brand of relevant logic, see my post here on the occasion of the publication of his book on the topic. (And […]

The post Core logic again appeared first on Logic Matters.

https://www.logicmatters.net/2024/03/12/core-logic-again/ Save to Pocket

My most used apps have “AI” inside

date: 2024-03-12, from: Om Malik blog

At present, these are my most used web/desktop/mobile apps. Honorable Mentions:  Topaz Labs AI & Google Labs’ (AI Search.) Legacy Apps & Services that I still use a lot: Apple Mail, Apple Music (Classical), Plex, VLC, Twitter, Safari, and Apple Notes. Frankly, they all need some AI-Botox ASAP! Quick Thoughts: Apart from #7, all of them have “AI.” Except #10, all of them have a …

https://om.co/2024/03/12/my-most-used-apps-have-ai-inside/ Save to Pocket

March 11, 2024

date: 2024-03-12, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-11-2024 Save to Pocket

JetBrains is still mad at Rapid7 for the ransomware attacks on its customers

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

War of words wages on between vendors divided

Last week, we wrote about how security outfit Rapid7 threw JetBrains, the company behind the popular CI/CD platform TeamCity, under the bus over allegations of silent patching. Now, JetBrains has gone on the offensive.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/12/jetbrains_is_still_mad_at/ Save to Pocket

Apple Adjusts DMA Plan to Offer Direct Download of Apps From the Web (With a Big Asterisk), Custom Link-Out Screens, and Marketplaces Solely for the Distribution of the Developer’s Own Apps

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-12, from: Daring Fireball

https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=8c1m8hqt Save to Pocket

Banana Pi’s $31 BPI-WiFi 6 router runs a fork of OpenWrt

date: 2024-03-12, from: Liliputing

The Banana Pi BPI-WiFi 6 Router is an inexpensive router with a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor, four antennas, and three Gigabit Ethernet ports (in addition to the WAN input). Available from Banana Pi’s AliExpress store for $31 (plus shipping, which adds another $13 for customers in the US at time of publication), this inexpensive router is also […]

The post Banana Pi’s $31 BPI-WiFi 6 router runs a fork of OpenWrt appeared first on Liliputing.

https://liliputing.com/banana-pis-31-bpi-wifi-6-router-runs-a-fork-of-openwrt/ Save to Pocket

@Tomosino’s Mastodon feed (date: 2024-03-12, from: Tomosino’s Mastodon feed)

It’s always Friday somewhere

https://labs.tomasino.org/it-s-always-friday-somewhere/

https://tilde.zone/@tomasino/112083602031306556 Save to Pocket

BYD is ‘just getting started’ in Europe with plans to triple its EV market share

date: 2024-03-12, from: Electrek Feed

China’s BYD will challenge automakers in Europe with plans to triple its share in the EV market by 2025. After dominating its home market, BYD is expanding its brand overseas.

more…

https://electrek.co/2024/03/12/byd-triple-ev-market-share-europe/ Save to Pocket

A list of rejected Icelandic female names. (“Edith” is okay, “Judith” is…

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-12, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/03/0044160-in-iceland-only-names-whi Save to Pocket

Donald Trump trashes electric cars and again shows he knows nothing about them

date: 2024-03-12, from: Electrek Feed

Donald Trump has talked about electric cars in a new interview, and as usual, he has decided to trash them and show that he doesn’t know much about them.

more…

https://electrek.co/2024/03/12/donald-trump-trashes-electric-cars-and-again-shows-knows-nothing-about-them/ Save to Pocket

US Prosecutor Defends Biden ‘Poor Memory’ Report to House Panel

date: 2024-03-12, from: VOA News USA

Washington — The U.S. prosecutor who sparked a political firestorm last month with a report saying President Joe Biden had a “poor memory” appeared before a congressional committee on Tuesday to defend his assessment.

Special Counsel Robert Hur arrived to speak to the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, which has been one of the panels conducting an impeachment inquiry into Biden, 81.

“My assessment in the report about the relevance of the President’s memory was necessary and accurate and fair,” Hur said in his prepared opening statement. “I did not sanitize my explanation. Nor did I disparage the President unfairly. I explained to the Attorney General my decision and the reasons for it. That’s what I was required to do.”

A transcript of Hur’s interview with Biden reviewed by Reuters, conducted last October as Biden grappled with the fallout from Hamas’s Oct. 7 assault on Israel, showed that the president brought up the issue of his memory first.

“I’m a young man, so it’s not a problem,” Biden, 81, said jokingly to Hur when the prosecutor said he’d be asking questions about events that happened years earlier, the transcript showed.

Hur appears in Congress the week after Biden made a fiery State of the Union speech that signaled an aggressive start to the Democratic president’s reelection campaign, a rematch with Republican predecessor Donald Trump.

Hur’s employment at the Justice Department ended on Monday, the department said.

His report said he would not seek charges against Biden for retaining classified documents after leaving office as vice president in 2017, but drew anger from the White House for its depiction of Biden.

“We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” the report said.

Biden, the oldest person to hold the office of the U.S. president in history, lashed out against the characterization in public remarks, saying his memory was fine, and Vice President Kamala Harris called the report politically motivated.

Trump, 77, is facing multiple criminal prosecutions, including one over his own mishandling of classified documents and is set to face off with Biden in November’s presidential election.  

Trump and allies have accused the Justice Department of having a double standard, but prosecutors said Trump actively obstructed their search for the documents and did not cooperate with the investigation into them. Hur said Biden was generally cooperative with the probe.

Hur was appointed as a U.S. attorney by Trump and made special counsel by Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland after Biden’s documents surfaced.

House Republicans have requested underlying documents related to the probe, but have said the Justice Department has not complied.

House Republicans allege that Biden and his family improperly profited from policy decisions Biden participated in as vice president in 2009-17, though they have so far not released any evidence showing that Biden benefited financially. The White House has denied wrongdoing.

House Republicans have invited Biden’s son Hunter Biden to a public hearing on March 20, but it is not clear whether the younger Biden will participate.

https://www.voanews.com/a/us-prosecutor-defends-biden-poor-memory-report-to-house-panel/7524369.html Save to Pocket

The Most Affordable 2024 EVs With At Least 300 Miles Of EPA Range

date: 2024-03-12, from: Inside EVs News

If having over 300 miles of range is a priority, the upcoming Chevrolet Equinox EV might be a game changer.

https://insideevs.com/news/712022/affordable-evs-300miles-epa-range/ Save to Pocket

How China Became A Battery Manufacturing Juggernaut

date: 2024-03-12, from: Inside EVs News

When the U.S. pulled back investment in EV and battery manufacturing, China doubled down. Now, over 80% of the world’s lithium-ion batteries are made in China.

https://insideevs.com/news/711990/how-china-became-global-battery-manufacturing-leader/ Save to Pocket

Sau Ung Loo Chan, An Advocate for American Citizenship and Immigrant Rights

date: 2024-03-12, from: National Archives, Text Message blog

Today’s post is written by Ruth Chan, archivist and Subject Matter Expert for Asian American and Pacific Islander records Special thanks to Holly Rivet, Archives Specialist at the National Archives at St. Louis; Katie Seitz, Archives Specialist at the National Archives in Washington DC; and Victoria Blue, Public Affairs Specialist, for access to the records … Continue reading Sau Ung Loo Chan, An Advocate for American Citizenship and Immigrant Rights

https://text-message.blogs.archives.gov/2024/03/12/sau-ung-loo-chan-an-advocate-for-american-citizenship-and-immigrant-rights/ Save to Pocket

Google searches for boss to get grip on climate, energy costs of this AI hype cycle

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

Hyperscalers increasingly looking over shoulders as workloads grow

AI and its effect on datacenter energy consumption are a concern at Google’s parent Alphabet, with the search giant seeking a manager to lead on AI/ML Carbon Reduction and Net Zero efforts.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/12/google_job_ad_and_alphabet/ Save to Pocket

Pac-12 MBB: Our postseason Hot Seat assessment and look at which coaches could depart on their own

date: 2024-03-12, from: San Jose Mercury News

Welcome to our team-by-team assessment of the head coaches and the likelihood of a vacancy this spring.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/03/12/pac-12-mbb-our-postseason-hot-seat-assessment-and-look-at-which-coaches-could-depart-on-their-own/ Save to Pocket

Bosch’s first 28 MPH electric bike with Smart System in US launched in Gazelle Eclipse

date: 2024-03-12, from: Electrek Feed

Gazelle Bikes, the largest Dutch bicycle maker with dozens of popular bicycle models, has just announced the launch of its Gazelle Eclipse trekking model for the US market.

more…

https://electrek.co/2024/03/12/boschs-first-28-mph-electric-bike-with-smart-system-in-us-launched-in-gazelle-eclipse/ Save to Pocket

Eric Carmen, known for songs ‘All by Myself’ and ‘Hungry Eyes,’ dies at 74

date: 2024-03-12, from: San Jose Mercury News

“All by Myself,” “Make Me Lose Control and “Hungry Eyes” peaked in top 10 of Billboard’s Hot 100 and each spent more than four months on the chart.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/03/12/eric-carmen-known-for-songs-all-by-myself-and-hungry-eyes-dies-at-74/ Save to Pocket

Scientists in Alaska Develop Cloud-Based Data to Predict Volcanic Eruptions

date: 2024-03-12, from: VOA News USA

Scientists in Alaska are developing a cloud-based approach to storing and analyzing data about volcanoes, in hopes of increasing the speed with which they can predict eruptions. Phil Dierking has our story. (Camera and Produced by: Philip Dierking)

https://www.voanews.com/a/scientists-in-alaska-develop-cloud-based-data-to-predict-volcanic-eruptions/7524360.html Save to Pocket

MELE PCG02 Pro fanless pocket-sized PC updated with an Intel N100 processor

date: 2024-03-12, from: Liliputing

The Mele PCG02 Pro is a tiny desktop computer that measures just 146 x 61 x 20mm (5.8″ x 2.4″ x 0.8″). It’s smaller than a typical smartphone, but packs the hardware of a full-fledged Windows (or Linux) PC. Mele first launched the PCG02 Pro a few years ago with Intel Gemini Lake and Jasper […]

The post MELE PCG02 Pro fanless pocket-sized PC updated with an Intel N100 processor appeared first on Liliputing.

https://liliputing.com/mele-pcg02-pro-fanless-pocket-sized-pc-updated-with-an-intel-n100-processor/ Save to Pocket

Porsche ‘Overwhelmed’ By Orders For Electric Macan: CEO

date: 2024-03-12, from: Inside EVs News

Porsche kicks off the biggest year of new product launches in its entire history, and the electric Macan seems off to a good start.

https://insideevs.com/news/712077/porsche-macan-electric-orders-2024/ Save to Pocket

Airbnb is banning the use of indoor security cameras in the platform’s listings worldwide

date: 2024-03-12, from: San Jose Mercury News

Airbnb expects the policy update to impact a small number of hosts because the majority of its listings do not report having indoor security cameras.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/03/12/airbnb-is-banning-the-use-of-indoor-security-cameras-in-the-platforms-listings-worldwide/ Save to Pocket

The Neo-Luddite Movement

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-12, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/03/the-neo-luddite-movement Save to Pocket

Automakers May Be Sharing Your Driver Data With Insurance Brokers

date: 2024-03-12, from: Inside EVs News

Plus, Tesla is prioritizing Cybertruck deliveries to high-value shareholders and Volvo says its future EV charging times will drop by 30%

https://insideevs.com/news/712079/automakers-insurance-data-brokers-criticalmaterials/ Save to Pocket

NASA’s FY2025 budget request means tough times ahead for Chandra and Hubble

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

But Artemis is still OK, so that’s alright then

NASA has published its budget request for the fiscal year 2025, and it is not good news for the Hubble Space Telescope or the Chandra X-ray Observatory.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/12/nasas_fy2025_budget_request_means/ Save to Pocket

Petabit Optical Media?

date: 2024-03-12, from: David Rosenthal’s blog

Source

we increase the capacity of [optical data storage] to the petabit level by extending the planar recording architecture to three dimensions with hundreds of layers, meanwhile breaking the optical diffraction limit barrier of the recorded spots. We develop an optical recording medium based on a photoresist film doped with aggregation-induced emission dye, which can be optically stimulated by femtosecond laser beams. This film is highly transparent and uniform, and the aggregation-induced emission phenomenon provides the storage mechanism. It can also be inhibited by another deactivating beam, resulting in a recording spot with a super-resolution scale. This technology makes it possible to achieve exabit-level storage by stacking nanoscale disks into arrays, which is essential in big data centres with limited space.

The ODS has a capacity of up to 1.6 Pb for a DVD-sized disk area through the recording of 100 layers on both sides of our ultrathin single disk.

The capacity of a single 3D nanoscale disk is approximately equivalent to that of a petabit-level Blu-ray library (15.2 Pb, DA-BH7010, Hualu, China) or an HDD data array (12.64 Pb, EMC PowerVault ME5084, Dell, USA).

Figure 3a

The transition from the second to the third state is initiated by the 515-nm femtosecond Gaussian-shaped laser beam and deactivated by the 639-nm CW doughnut-shaped laser beam.

Figure 3c

the development of next-generation industry-oriented nanoscale ODS that is much less expensive than state-of-the-art optical disk libraries and HDD data arrays will fulfil the vast data storage requirements of the big-data era.

Six years ago I wrote:

time-scales in the storage industry are long. Disk is a 60-year-old technology, tape is at least 65 years old, CDs are 35 years old, flash is 30 years old and has yet to impact bulk data storage.

Source

Six years on flash has finally impacted the bulk storage market, but it isn’t predicted to ship as many bits as hard disks for another four years, when it will be a 40-year-old technology. Actual demonstrations of DNA storage are only 12 years old, and similar demonstrations of silica media are 15 years old. History suggests it will be decades before these technologies impact the storage market.

• “new disk memory that could bring disk memory into the Petabyte range” - no, that is the Petabit range.
• Optical disks “were outcompeted by hard disks”. - no, write-once removable media and on-line storage are two completely different markets. Optical disks lost out to the cloud and to a lesser extent by flash.
• “the information density on compact disks or any optical storage is ultimately limited by the frequency of the laser light” - well yes, but she is talking about a paper describing a 2000-times increase in capacity using laser light.
• “in modern flash drives the information is stored in little magnetizable cells that are a few atoms in size” - no, flash isn’t a magnetic technology. She also misses that modern flash is a volumetric not a planar technology, just like the technology in the paper.
• “figured out how to write data in multiple layers” - no, Blu-ray is a multi-layer technology more than a decade old. They figured out how to write a lot more layers of much smaller bits.
• “this could work up to hundreds of layers” - well, they only demonstrated 100 layers, so hundreds plural is speculation. To get to the petabyte range needs at least 500 layers or much smaller bits. Note that modern flash has over 100 layers.

https://blog.dshr.org/2024/03/petabit-optical-media.html Save to Pocket

Gear Up With Touratech’s New Aventuro Pro Carbon ADV Helmet

date: 2024-03-12, from: Ride Apart, Electric Motorcycle News

Lightweight, well-ventilated, and safe—what more could you ask for?

https://www.rideapart.com/news/711295/touratech-aventuro-pro-carbon-helmet/ Save to Pocket

Millennials will be worse off than their parents, right? Maybe not.

date: 2024-03-12, from: Marketplace Morning Report

It’s practically accepted as truth at this point: Millennials would be the first generation to be worse off than their parents. But recent research casts some doubt on that assessment. We’ll consider some economic findings that reframe things a bit. Plus, prices were up 3.2% annually in February, and month-over-month price increases seem to be going in the wrong direction. That’s not something the Federal Reserve will be happy about.

https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/millennials-will-be-worse-off-than-their-parents-right-maybe-not Save to Pocket

Campbell suspect admits to distributing revenge porn

date: 2024-03-12, from: San Jose Mercury News

Charged with distributing intimate images with intent to humiliate.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/03/12/campbell-suspect-admits-to-distributing-revenge-porn/ Save to Pocket

Four Astronauts From Four Countries Return to Earth After Six Months in Orbit

date: 2024-03-12, from: VOA News USA

Cape Canaveral, Florida — Four astronauts from four countries caught a lift back to Earth with SpaceX on Tuesday to end a half-year mission at the International Space Station.

Their capsule streaked across the U.S. in the predawn darkness and splashed into the Gulf of Mexico near the Florida Panhandle.

NASA’s Jasmin Moghbeli, a Marine helicopter pilot, led the returning crew of Denmark’s Andreas Mogensen, Japan’s Satoshi Furukawa and Russia’s Konstantin Borisov.

They moved into the space station last August. Their replacements arrived last week in their own SpaceX capsule.

“We left you some peanut butter and tortillas,” Moghbeli radioed after departing the orbiting complex on Monday. Replied NASA’s Loral O’Hara: “I miss you guys already and thanks for that very generous gift.”

O’Hara has another few weeks at the space station before leaving aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule.

Before leaving the space station, Mogensen said via X, formerly known as Twitter, that he couldn’t wait to hear “birds singing in the trees” and also craved crunchy food.

NASA prefers multiple travel options in case of rocket trouble. Boeing should start providing astronaut taxi service with a two-pilot test flight in early May.

https://www.voanews.com/a/four-astronauts-from-four-countries-return-to-earth-after-six-months-in-orbit/7524235.html Save to Pocket

Can This Detachable Cable Make Curbside EV Charging Less Annoying?

date: 2024-03-12, from: Inside EVs News

New York startup itselectric hit an important milestone with its detachable Level 2 chargers, coming soon to Detroit and other cities.

https://insideevs.com/news/712002/itselectric-curbside-detachable-cable-exclusive/ Save to Pocket

Oracle investors hear the magic word ‘Nvidia’ and boom! Buy, buy, buy

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

Forget the piffle about real world results, let’s look at the potential of wundertech

Oracle disappointed Wall Street analysts after its latest quarterly revenue haul missed market estimates, although teasing an AI deal with en vogue Nvidia proved enough to bolster Big Red’s share price.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/12/oracle_ai_revenue/ Save to Pocket

Oracle revenue growth dips below forecast but investors like the sound of promised Nvidia deal

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

Forget the piffle about real world results, lets look at the potential of wundertech

Oracle disappointed Wall Street analysts after its latest quarterly revenue haul missed market estimates, although teasing an AI deal with en vogue Nvidia proved enough to bolster Big Red’s share price.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/12/oracle_revenue_growth_dips_below/ Save to Pocket

Los Gatos residents report suspicious men claiming to be PG&E employees

date: 2024-03-12, from: San Jose Mercury News

Suspects ask to see utility bills.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/03/12/los-gatos-residents-report-suspicious-men-claiming-to-be-pge-employees/ Save to Pocket

Porsche sticks to EV sales target with new electric Macan already seeing strong orders

date: 2024-03-12, from: Electrek Feed

Porsche is launching four new vehicles this year, its most ever. This will include the new all-electric Macan EV, which Porsche says is already seeing strong orders.

more…

https://electrek.co/2024/03/12/porsche-ev-sales-goal-strong-macan-ev-orders/ Save to Pocket

Porsche’s new electric Macan earns 10,000 orders ahead of deliveries

date: 2024-03-12, from: Electrek Feed

Porsche is launching four new vehicles this year, its most ever. This will include the new all-electric Macan EV, which Porsche says is already seeing strong orders.

more…

https://electrek.co/2024/03/12/porsche-macan-ev-10000-orders-deliveries/ Save to Pocket

Amazon’s Hidden Chatbot Recommends Nazi Books and Lies About Amazon Working Conditions

date: 2024-03-12, from: 404 Media Group

An AI tool created to let people search reviews actually lets you use it like any other chatbot.

https://www.404media.co/amazons-hidden-chatbot-recommends-nazi-books-and-lies-about-amazon-working-conditions/ Save to Pocket

I grew up near Menomonie, WI in the freezing cold north, but…

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-12, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/03/0044180-i-grew-up-near-menomonie Save to Pocket

A Northern California city gave a homeless camp a lease as an experiment. Here’s what happened

date: 2024-03-12, from: San Jose Mercury News

Camp Resolution, a completely self-governed, city-sanctioned homeless encampment, was supposed to be a model Sacramento could copy for future sites. That didn’t happen, and now it’s under threat of prosecution.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/03/12/sacramento-gave-a-homeless-camp-a-lease-as-an-experiment-heres-what-happened/ Save to Pocket

Los Gatos town manager to step down after nearly 10 years

date: 2024-03-12, from: San Jose Mercury News

Laurel Prevetti: ‘Other aspects of life are important to pursue’

https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/03/12/los-gatos-town-manager-to-step-down-after-nearly-10-years/ Save to Pocket

Physicists Finally Find a Problem That Only Quantum Computers Can Do

date: 2024-03-12, from: Quanta Magazine

The post Physicists Finally Find a Problem That Only Quantum Computers Can Do first appeared on Quanta Magazine

https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-finally-find-a-problem-only-quantum-computers-can-do-20240312/ Save to Pocket

Heatmap News Named Hottest in Sustainability on Adweek’s 2024 Media Hot List

date: 2024-03-12, from: Heatmap News

New York, NY: Climate news website Heatmap News was named Hottest in Sustainability on Adweek’s 2024 Media Hot List, released today. Adweek’s Hot List honors the best in media across TV, media, digital, and tech. Writing about Heatmap, Adweek wrote: “Less than a year later, it’s become a critical part of the climate news landscape – boasting 2.5 million unique online readers, around half a million monthly readers and over 50,000 newsletter subscribers.”

Co-founder and Editor-in-Chief Nico Lauricella said: “On behalf of Heatmap, we are grateful to Adweek for this incredible recognition. Over the past year, Heatmap has carved out a unique and important place in the media landscape with insightful, evidence-based reporting on climate change and decarbonization. I am proud of our team for their hard work and diligence in making Heatmap a trusted resource for so many readers and we’re excited for what’s in store this year.”

Since Heatmap’s founding in early 2023, it has become the go-to source for an influential audience of readers who care about climate, energy and sustainability. Heatmap’s journalists have broken major stories, taken down popular media narratives on climate change and decarbonization, authored explainers on key climate and energy transition issues, and developed practical guides on how to navigate our changing planet. In addition to its reporting, Heatmap has fielded, analyzed, and reported on two national surveys (The Heatmap Climate Poll), and recently launched its first podcast, Shift Key, hosted by Executive Editor Robinson Meyer and regular contributor and Princeton Professor Jesse Jenkins.

Heatmap has 500,000 monthly readers and is regularly cited by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, NPR, MSNBC, Politico, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Fortune, The Verge, Slate, and Semafor. Heatmap journalists are frequently interviewed on radio and TV, including All In With Chris Hayes, The Ezra Klein Show, 1A, The Brian Lehrer Show, All Things Considered, and more, to discuss their reporting. And Heatmap’s advertisers and sponsors have included some of the most notable brands in climate, clean energy, and sustainability.

About Heatmap News: Heatmap News is climate news for the real world. We tell the inside story of the race to fix the planet, with deep reporting on emerging decarbonization trends, like electric vehicles, clean hydrogen, and carbon capture, in addition to climate change and its impact on our economy, politics, and society.

For press inquiries, please contact Anna Durrett at press@heatmap.news.

For advertising inquiries, please reach out to Mike Munsell at mike@heatmap.news.

To stay in touch, please sign up for our newsletter:

https://heatmap.news/heatmap-news-named-hottest-in-sustainability-on-adweeks-2024-media-hot-list Save to Pocket

Zero-Boil-Off Tank Experiments to Enable Long-Duration Space Exploration

date: 2024-03-12, from: NASA breaking news

Do we have enough fuel to get to our destination? This is probably one of the first questions that comes to mind whenever your family gets ready to embark on a road trip. If the trip is long, you will need to visit gas stations along your route to refuel during your travel. NASA is grappling with similar issues as it gets ready to embark on a sustainable mission back to the Moon and plans future missions to Mars.

https://science.nasa.gov/science-research/science-enabling-technology/zero-boil-off-tank-experiments-to-enable-long-duration-space-exploration/ Save to Pocket

US Inflation Rises in February in Sign Price Pressures Remain Elevated

date: 2024-03-12, from: VOA News USA

WASHINGTON — Consumer prices in the United States picked up last month, a sign that inflation remains a persistent challenge for the Federal Reserve and for President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign, both of which are counting on a steady easing of price pressures this year. 

Prices rose 0.4% from January to February, higher than the previous month’s figure of 0.3%, the Labor Department said Tuesday. Compared with a year earlier, consumer prices rose 3.2% last month, faster than January’s 3.1% annual pace. 

Excluding volatile food and energy prices, so-called “core” prices also climbed 0.4% from January to February, matching the previous month’s increase and a faster pace than is consistent with the Fed’s 2% target. Core inflation is watched especially closely because it typically provides a better read of where inflation is likely headed. 

Pricier gas pushed up overall inflation, with pump prices rising 3.8% just from January to February. Grocery prices, though, were unchanged last month and are up just 1% from a year earlier. The cost of clothing, used cars and rent also increased in February, raising the inflation figure. 

Despite February’s elevated figures, most economists expect inflation to continue slowly declining this year. At the same time, the uptick last month may underscore the Fed’s cautious approach toward interest rate cuts. 

Overall inflation has plummeted from a peak of 9.1% in June 2022, although it’s now easing more slowly than it did last spring and summer. The prices of some goods — from appliances to furniture to used cars — are falling after clogged supply chains during the pandemic sent prices soaring higher. There are more new cars on dealer lots and electronics on store shelves. 

By contrast, prices for dental care, car repairs and other services are still rising faster than they did before the pandemic. Car insurance has shot higher, reflecting rising costs for repairs and replacement. And after having sharply raised pay for nurses and other in-demand staff, hospitals are passing their higher wage costs on to patients in the form of higher prices. 

Voter perceptions of inflation are sure to occupy a central place in this year’s presidential election. Despite a healthy job market and a record-high stock market, polls show that many Americans blame Biden for the surge in consumer prices that began in 2021. Although inflationary pressures have significantly eased, average prices remain far above where they stood three years ago. 

In his State of the Union speech last week, Biden highlighted steps he has taken to reduce costs, like capping the price of insulin for Medicare patients. The president also criticized many large companies for engaging in “price gouging” and so-called “shrinkflation,” in which a company shrinks the amount of product inside a package rather than raising the price. 

“Too many corporations raise prices to pad their profits, charging more and more for less and less,” Biden said. 

Fed Chair Jerome Powell signaled in congressional testimony last week that the central bank is getting closer to cutting rates. After meeting in January, Fed officials said in a statement that they needed “greater confidence” that inflation was steadily falling to their 2% target level. Since then, several of the Fed’s policymakers have said they believe prices will keep declining. One reason, they suggested, is that consumers are increasingly pushing back against higher prices by seeking out cheaper alternatives. 

Most economists expect the Fed’s first rate cut to occur in June, although May is also possible. When the Fed cuts its benchmark rate, over time it reduces borrowing costs for mortgages, car loans, credit cards and business loans. 

One factor that could keep inflation elevated is the still-healthy economy. Although most economists had expected a recession to occur last year, hiring and growth were strong and remain healthy. The economy expanded 2.5% last year and could grow at about the same pace in the first three months of this year, according to the Federal Reserve’s Atlanta branch. 

Last week, the Labor Department said employers added a robust 275,000 jobs in February, the latest in a streak of solid hiring gains, and the unemployment rate stayed below 4% for the 25th straight month. That is the longest such streak since the 1960s. 

Still, the unemployment rate rose from 3.7% to 3.9%, and wage growth slowed. Both trends could make the Fed feel more confident that the economy is cooling, which could help keep inflation falling and lead the central bank to begin cutting rates.

https://www.voanews.com/a/us-inflation-rises-in-february-in-sign-price-pressures-remain-elevated/7524216.html Save to Pocket

No App Store needed: Apple caves, will allow sideloading in EU

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

Think this’ll help you escape the fees? Nope – Apple still wants a cut for letting devs install things on user devices

Apple’s compliance measures with the EU’s Digital Markets Act haven’t exactly been universally well received, so the iMaker is making a few tweaks to appease the software-developing masses. …

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/12/apple_update_eu_devs_can_distribute_from_websites/ Save to Pocket

NASA’s Roman Team Selects Survey to Map Our Galaxy’s Far Side

date: 2024-03-12, from: NASA breaking news

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope team has announced plans for an unprecedented survey of the plane of our Milky Way galaxy. It will peer deeper into this region than any other survey, mapping more of our galaxy’s stars than all previous observations combined. “There’s a really broad range of science we can explore with […]

https://www.nasa.gov/missions/roman-space-telescope/nasas-roman-team-selects-survey-to-map-our-galaxys-far-side/ Save to Pocket

Why Is 404 Media Included in a Fake Netflix Trailer Made by Russia?

date: 2024-03-12, from: 404 Media Group

A sprawling disinformation campaign is targeting journalists and making 404 Media part of the story.

https://www.404media.co/why-is-404-media-included-in-a-fake-netflix-trailer-made-by-russia/ Save to Pocket

He prosecuted child sex predators. Now, he’s going after Meta for allegedly enabling them

date: 2024-03-12, from: San Jose Mercury News

Investigators in New Mexico’s attorney general’s office created multiple fake Facebook and Instagram profiles posing as young teens, which the suit alleges were served sexually suggestive content and, in some cases, urged to send pornographic content of themselves.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/03/12/he-prosecuted-child-sex-predators-now-hes-going-after-meta-for-allegedly-enabling-them-2/ Save to Pocket

Out today from Dr. Lisa Mosconi: The Menopause Brain. It’s a reexamination…

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-12, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/03/0044178-out-today-from-dr-lisa Save to Pocket

What to do on the nights you are struggling with insomnia, according to experts

date: 2024-03-12, from: San Jose Mercury News

Chronic insomnia is when a person takes more than 30 minutes to fall asleep or fall back asleep up to three times a week for more than three months.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/03/12/what-to-do-on-the-nights-you-are-struggling-with-insomnia-according-to-experts/ Save to Pocket

March 12, 1928: St. Francis Dam bursts

date: 2024-03-12, from: The Signal

By Signal Staff  The failure of the St. Francis Dam at midnight, March 12, 1928, killed more than 400 people, leveled farms and homesteads, destroyed property and livestock and changed the way dam safety is addressed across the nation.   Today marks the 96th anniversary of the disaster, which a path of devastation from San […]

The post March 12, 1928: St. Francis Dam bursts appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.

https://signalscv.com/2024/03/march-12-1928-st-francis-dam-bursts/ Save to Pocket

Telegram eyes IPO as user numbers close in on 1 billion

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

Chat app chaps may even turn a profit this year

Telegram’s CEO has begun discussing an initial public offering (IPO) as the messaging platform’s user count nears the billion mark.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/12/telegram_eyes_ipo_as_user/ Save to Pocket

Jonathan Glazer’s ‘The Zone of Interest won’t let us look away —…

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-12, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/03/0044179-jonathan-glazers-the-zone Save to Pocket

Internal Emails Show Cops Thought ‘Call of Duty’ Recruitment Ad Could Piss Off Activision

date: 2024-03-12, from: 404 Media Group

Internal emails obtained by 404 Media show that police who made a ‘Call of Duty’ themed recruitment poster were more worried about legal issues from Activision than the obviously problematic framing of policing as a video game.

https://www.404media.co/call-of-duty-cops-more-worried-about-activision-than-portraying-city-as-war-zone/ Save to Pocket

Tesla Hack Lets Bad Guys Create A Spare Key For Your Car In Seconds

date: 2024-03-12, from: Inside EVs News

Owners are tricked into entering their account details by emulating Tesla’s free wifi at Superchargers.

https://insideevs.com/news/711999/tesla-hack-phishing-spare-key/ Save to Pocket

American Honda Issues Stop Sale/Recall On Three Motorcycles

date: 2024-03-12, from: Ride Apart, Electric Motorcycle News

Certain 2018-2019 CBR1000RR, 2018-2020 CBR600RR, and 2017-2024 Gold Wings are affected.

https://www.rideapart.com/news/711445/honda-stop-sale-recall-fuelpump/ Save to Pocket

A Kind of Male Lingerie

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-12, from: One Foot Tsunami

https://onefoottsunami.com/2024/03/12/a-kind-of-male-lingerie/ Save to Pocket

What Biden’s Budget Proposal Says About Climate Projects

date: 2024-03-12, from: Heatmap News

Current conditions: Tropical storm Filipo will make landfall on Mozambique’s coast today • Morel season has begun in parts of the Midwest • It is cold and cloudy in Stockholm, where police forcibly removed climate activst Greta Thunberg from the entrance to parliament.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Climate and energy ‘figure prominently’ in Biden’s budget

President Biden proposed a $7.3 trillion budget yesterday, and his “climate and energy promises figured prominently,” reported E&E News. Biden requested $17.8 billion for the Interior Department to help with climate resilience, national parks, wildfire management, tribal programs, ecosystem restoration, and water infrastructure in the west. He wants $11 billion for the EPA and $51 billion for the Department of Energy to tackle climate change and help fund the energy transition. The proposal calls for funding toward expanding the “Climate Corps.” Biden also asked Congress to put $500 million into the international Green Climate Fund in 2025, and then more in the following years. And he wants to make this spending mandatory. The budget would also “cut wasteful subsidies to Big Oil and other special interests,” Biden said. As Morning Brew noted, the budget proposal has “about as much chance of getting passed by Congress as a bill guaranteeing each American a pet unicorn, so it’s mostly a statement of Biden’s priorities.”

2. U.S. EV prices drop 13% year-over-year

EV prices in the U.S. have dropped by about 13% in the last year, according to Kelley Blue Book. The drop “has been led in part by the Tesla Model 3 and Model Y, the two most popular EVs in the U.S.,” explained Michelle Lewis at Electrek. However, EVs are still more expensive than “mainstream non-luxury vehicles,” said Stephanie Valdez Streaty, director of Industry Insights at Cox Automotive.

3. Report: BYD struggles to ramp up overseas EV sales

Chinese EV maker BYD has reportedly hit a speed bump on the road to international expansion. Having dominated the Chinese market and established itself as the top-selling EV maker in the world, BYD set an internal goal of selling 400,000 cars overseas this year. But a global slowdown in EV sales growth has hampered that effort, reported The Wall Street Journal. “As of the end of last year, more than 10,000 BYD passenger cars were waiting in warehouses in Europe,” the Journal added, “and the certificates authorizing them to be sold in the European Union are set to expire soon, meaning it may not be possible to sell them in Europe.” At the same time, quality control issues have been cropping up in some vehicles, and higher prices in Europe are making it more difficult for the company to compete with better-known brands.

4. U.K. emissions hit 145-year low

Greenhouse gas emissions in the UK fell last year to their lowest level since 1879, according to analysis from Carbon Brief. The decline is attributed mainly to a drop in gas demand thanks to higher electricity imports and warmer temperatures. As recently as 2014, the power sector was the UK’s largest source of emissions, but now it has been eclipsed by transportation, buildings, industry, and agriculture. “Transport emissions have barely changed over the past several decades as more efficient cars have been offset by increased traffic,” Carbon Brief explained. Remarkably, coal use in the country is at its lowest level since the 1730s, “when George II was on the throne.” The emissions drop is good news but “with only one coal-fired power station remaining and the power sector overall now likely only the fifth-largest contributor to UK emissions, the country will need to start cutting into gas power and looking to other sectors” to meet net zero by 2050. Meanwhile, the British government today announced a plan to build new gas plants.

5. Seaside town’s $500K new protective sand dune washes away in 3 days

Residents in Salisbury, Massachusetts, last week finished building a $500,000 sand dune meant to protect their beachside homes from rising tides and repeated storms. Three days later, the barrier, made of 14,000 tons of sand, washed away when a storm brought historic high tides to the seaside town. “We got hit with three storms – two in January, one now – at the highest astronomical tides possible,” said Rick Rigoli, who oversaw the project. The sea level off the Massachusetts coast has risen by 8 inches since 1950, and is now rising by about 1 inch every 8 years.

https://heatmap.news/politics/biden-budget-byd-ev Save to Pocket

European Commission’s use of Microsoft 365 infringes data protection law for EU institutions and bodies

date: 2024-03-12, from: OS News

Following its investigation, the EDPS has found that the European Commission (Commission) has infringed several key data protection rules when using Microsoft 365. In its decision, the EDPS imposes corrective measures on the Commission. ↫ European Data Protection Supervisor You often hear people state that EU rules and regulations are designed exclusively to harm non-EU companies. The massive amounts of fines and corrective actions handed out to EU companies in all kinds of sectors already disprove this notion, and here’s a case where even the European Commission itself gets a slap on the wrist for violating its own rules and regulations – rules and regulations, we’re often told by especially American corporatists, are designed specifically to target poor American businesses. Not that corporatists have any use for reality and facts, but still.

https://www.osnews.com/story/138790/european-commissions-use-of-microsoft-365-infringes-data-protection-law-for-eu-institutions-and-bodies/ Save to Pocket

New EV Prices Went Down Over $2,000 On Average In February

date: 2024-03-12, from: Inside EVs News

Electric vehicles were still generally $5,000 more than the industry average, though. But things are getting better.

https://insideevs.com/news/712024/new-ev-prices-down-2000-usd-february-us/ Save to Pocket

Bullitt Group had $256 cash in the bank at the end, PWC reveals

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

IP sold to founders in pre-pack administration, product warranties unaffected

The founders of Bullitt Group and subsidiary Bullitt Satellite Connect bought the IP for £210,000 ($269,000) excluding VAT in a pre-pack administration on the same day that PWC was appointed to liquidate the biz.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/12/bullitt_group_had_200_cash/ Save to Pocket

Lectric ONE shockingly unveiled as low-cost premium e-bike with auto-shifting gearbox

date: 2024-03-12, from: Electrek Feed

In what is likely to the biggest shock unveiling in the e-bike industry so far this year, leading electric bike maker Lectric Ebikes has just rolled out the new Lectric ONE. Positioned as a premium commuter e-bike in the budget space, the new model marks equally new territory for the low-cost e-bike company turned premium space competitor.

more…

https://electrek.co/2024/03/12/lectric-one-shockingly-unveiled-as-low-cost-premium-e-bike-with-auto-shifting-gearbox/ Save to Pocket

Molly Peters | Alarmed by Board Member Letter

date: 2024-03-12, from: The Signal

I reside in Los Angeles, but I have been a teacher in the William S. Hart Union High School District for 20 years, and I was very alarmed by board member Linda Storli’s Feb. 27 letter in The Signal, specifically her misrepresentation of facts around the state of the current Hart district budget. The following […]

The post Molly Peters | Alarmed by Board Member Letter appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.

https://signalscv.com/2024/03/molly-peters-alarmed-by-board-member-letter/ Save to Pocket

Steve Petzold | Hit ‘Pause’ on Hart Mascot Change

date: 2024-03-12, from: The Signal

The following is a copy of a letter sent to the board of the William S. Hart Union High School District. I am asking you to suspend all pending actions regarding the transitioning of the Hart High School wordmark, namesake, catch phrase, your so-called “mascot,” until an ad hoc committee of trustees including board member […]

The post Steve Petzold | Hit ‘Pause’ on Hart Mascot Change appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.

https://signalscv.com/2024/03/steve-petzold-hit-pause-on-hart-mascot-change/ Save to Pocket

AI and the NYT

date: 2024-03-12, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News

Zach Seward, a friend from my days at Harvard and NYU, got a kickass job, starting up the AI effort at the NYT. He’s just the right guy for it. Young, curious, creative, and very ambitious. And he has a strong startup journalism background. I couldn’t think of anyone I’d want more to be in this position.

Now that he’s published notes for a talk he gave at SXSW, it’s time to share some ideas I have for the NYT re AI.

• Current events. This is something ChatGPT doesn’t do. Not sure why. I’d like to be able to connect to ai.nytimes.com and ask it to give me a rundown on the lawyer who’s testifying in Congress today about how our president is “elderly.” I don’t want pointers to stories, though they should be included in the response, I want a custom report, like the ones ChatGPT provides, that answers the questions I have about the MAGA lawyer. Maybe the AI will just give me the story without the spin.
• More useful NYT archives. When I was a kid I spent so much time at the big library in Jamaica (Queens) going back through microfilm of the NYT from before I was born. So far all we’ve done is replicate the microfilm user experience (which is great and very useful) but the thing that ChatGPT does so well is prepare custom reports. All that source material, used to answer very specific questions. Answer questions like “has anything notorious happened in the neighborhood I grew up in, as far as the NYT knows?”
• Sell a service to your readers where you manage the archive of their blogs, and in doing so you create a much broader archive for historians, journalists and others to study in the future, and, in the context of AI, feed it all kinds of perspective on the time we live in. Maybe in the future history won’t be written by the winners (lotsa luck with that). Anyway, if at some point the NYT and other journalism outlets will harness the energy, knowledge and intelligence of the readers, why not start now?

I criticize the NYT a lot, I know. But that means I care. When I stop criticizing you’ll know that I’ve given up.

Alan Kay said of the Mac, it’s the first personal computer worth criticizing. That’s the spirit.

http://scripting.com/2024/03/12/120111.html?title=aiAndTheNyt Save to Pocket

Pro-Palestinian Activists Damage Balfour Portrait at Cambridge University

date: 2024-03-12, from: Smithsonian Magazine

The 1917 Balfour Declaration was a pivotal declaration of British support for a “national home for the Jewish people”

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/pro-palestinian-activists-damage-arthur-james-balfour-portrait-180983932/ Save to Pocket

UK council yanks IT systems and phone lines offline following cyber ambush

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

Targeting recovery this week, officials still trying to ‘dentify the nature of the incident’

Leicester City Council says IT systems and a number of its critical service phone lines will remain down until later this week at the earliest following a “cyber incident”.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/12/leicester_city_council_stays_shtum/ Save to Pocket

Wages have been outpacing inflation — but there’s a catch

date: 2024-03-12, from: Marketplace Morning Report

While the purchasing power of earnings started to catch up to inflation last year, lower- and middle-income workers have been playing catch-up and are trying to dig out of debt. Meanwhile, Americans are working fewer hours on average, and fewer hours can cause total earnings to trail price gains. Also: a closer look at New York Community Bank’s lifeline and an examination of those earmarks in the $460 billion spending package.

https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/wages-have-been-outpacing-inflation-but-theres-a-catch Save to Pocket

Jailbreaking LLMs with ASCII Art

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-11, from: Bruce Schneier blog

Researchers have demonstrated that putting words in ASCII art can cause LLMs—GPT-3.5, GPT-4, Gemini, Claude, and Llama2—to ignore their safety instructions.

Research paper.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/03/jailbreaking-llms-with-ascii-art.html Save to Pocket

@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-03-12, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)

Jonathan Glazer on his holocaust film The Zone of Interest: ‘This is not about the past, it’s about now.’

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/dec/10/jonathan-glazer-the-zone-of-interest-auschwitz-under-the-skin-interview Save to Pocket

Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU66 released

date: 2024-03-12, from: OS News

Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU 66 is now available via ‘pkg update’ from the support repository or by downloading the SRU from My Oracle Support Doc ID 2433412.1. Highlights of the changes in this release are given in the release announcement and important information to read before installing it is provided in the Readme linked from the above support document. This blog post provides more details about selected new features and interface changes in this SRU, as well as some preparation work for changes coming in future SRUs. ↫ Alan Coopersmith and Jan Pechanec Oracle is still developing Solaris. I still find it very difficult to care after Oracle’s bullshittery.

https://www.osnews.com/story/138788/oracle-solaris-11-4-sru66-released/ Save to Pocket

Understanding Risk, Artificial Intelligence, and Improving Software Quality

date: 2024-03-12, from: NASA breaking news

The software discipline has broad involvement across each of the NASA Mission Directorates. Some recent discipline focus and development areas are highlighted below, along with a look at the Software Technical Discipline Team’s (TDT) approach to evolving discipline best practices toward the future. Understanding Automation Risk Software creates automation. Reliance on that automation is increasing […]

https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/nesc/understanding-risk-artificial-intelligence-and-improving-software-quality/ Save to Pocket

Splashdown! NASA’s SpaceX Crew-7 Finishes Mission, Returns to Earth

date: 2024-03-12, from: NASA breaking news

NASA’s SpaceX Crew-7 completed the agency’s seventh commercial crew rotation mission to the International Space Station on Tuesday after splashing down safely in a Dragon spacecraft off the coast of Pensacola, Florida. The international crew of four spent 199 days in orbit. NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli, ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Andreas Mogensen, JAXA (Japan Aerospace […]

https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/splashdown-nasas-spacex-crew-7-finishes-mission-returns-to-earth/ Save to Pocket

We asked Intel to define ‘AI PC’. Its reply: ‘Anything with our latest CPUs’

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

If it has a GPU and NPU, plus VNNI and DP4a instructions, it qualifies. But it’s not a brand like vPro or Ultrabook

If you’re confused about what makes a PC an “AI PC,” you’re not alone. But finally have something of an answer: if it packs a GPU, a processor that boasts a neural processing unit and can handle VNNI and Dp4a instructions, it qualifies – at least according to Robert Hallock, Intel’s senior director of technical marketing.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/12/what_is_an_ai_pc/ Save to Pocket

These commercial brands are testing Level 4 autonomous trucks through Plus partnership

date: 2024-03-12, from: Electrek Feed

Autonomous driving software specialist Plus has announced a long-term partnership with several commercial fleet developers under the Traton Group, including MAN, Scania, and Navistar, to deploy Level 4 autonomous trucks globally. Public road testing is already underway on two continents.

more…

https://electrek.co/2024/03/12/commercial-brands-testing-level-4-autonomous-trucks-plus-partnership/ Save to Pocket

The Next Accident: How Do We Prevent It?

date: 2024-03-12, from: NASA breaking news

By Andrew Chaikin, Independent Space Historian and member of the NESC Human Factors Technical Discipline Team  I recently watched NESC Deputy Director Mike Kirsch stand before a roomful of engineers at the Langley Research Center and tell them that with every passing day, NASA breaks a record: the longest stretch without a major accident in […]

https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/nesc/the-next-accident-how-do-we-prevent-it/ Save to Pocket

Operational Modal Analysis of the Artemis I Dynamic Rollout Test

date: 2024-03-12, from: NASA breaking news

Operational modal analysis (OMA) techniques have been used to identify the modal characteristics of the Artemis I launch vehicle during the Dynamic Rollout Test (DRT) and Wet Dress Rehearsal (WDR) configuration prior to launch. Forces induced during rollout and on the launch pad are not directly measurable, thus necessitating a unique approach. NASA is developing […]

https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/nesc/operational-modal-analysis-of-the-artemis-i-dynamic-rollout-test/ Save to Pocket

Haiti’s leader resigns

date: 2024-03-12, from: Marketplace Morning Report

From the BBC World Service: Haiti’s prime minister, Ariel Henry, has resigned after days of fierce fighting in the capital, Port-au-Prince. Heavily armed gangs have been roaming the streets there demanding his resignation. Then, India’s Supreme Court has told the country’s state bank to reveal the details of a scheme that allows political parties to receive anonymous donations. And later, as farmer protests continue across Europe, we look at what’s driving them.

https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/haitis-leader-resigns Save to Pocket

Looking Back, Moving Forward

date: 2024-03-12, from: NASA breaking news

Interview with NESC Director, Tim Wilson  Upon reaching its 20th year of operations at NASA in 2023, the NESC is busier than it has ever been. With a portfolio of more than 160 in-progress requests from Agency programs, NESC Director Tim Wilson spends much of his day prioritizing, allocating funds from the organization’s fixed budget […]

https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/nesc/looking-back-moving-forward/ Save to Pocket

NESC Publications – Based on NESC Assessments

date: 2024-03-12, from: NASA breaking news

NASA Technical Memorandums (TM), NASA Technical Publications (TP), and NASA Contractor Reports (CR)  Technical Papers, Conference Proceedings, and Technical Presentations Avionics   Flight Mechanics Loads and Dynamics Software Space Environments Structures Systems Engineering Thermal Control and Protection 

https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/nesc/nesc-publications-based-on-nesc-assessments/ Save to Pocket

NESC Honor Awards

date: 2024-03-12, from: NASA breaking news

NESC Honor Awards are given each year to NASA employees, industry representatives, and other stakeholders for their efforts and achievements in engineering, leadership, teamwork, and communication. These awards formally recognize those who have made outstanding contributions to the NESC mission, demonstrate engineering and technical excellence, and foster an open environment.  NESC Director’s Award Honors individuals for […]

https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/nesc/nesc-honor-awards/ Save to Pocket

Most Impactful NESC Assessments

date: 2024-03-12, from: NASA breaking news

After reflecting on the more than 1,200 assessments completed by the NESC over the last 20 years, Director Tim Wilson selected these assessments as his top three. They were selected because they would likely have the greatest and most lasting impact on human life and the furtherance of the NESC mission. He shared why their […]

https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/nesc/most-impactful-nesc-assessments/ Save to Pocket

This smart disco ball changes colour like a chameleon

date: 2024-03-12, from: Raspberry Pi News (.com)

Tim van de Vathorst loves to party, so he built the world’s smartest disco ball using a Raspberry Pi and roughly a bajillion LEDs.

The post This smart disco ball changes colour like a chameleon appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/this-smart-disco-ball-changes-colour-like-a-chameleon/ Save to Pocket

Home Office’s shiny immigration system glitches causing delays

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

Amid reports emerge of technical issues, immigration teams keep 24-year-old legacy system up and running

Technical issues with the Home Office’s new case management system for immigration is causing delays to claims and frustration for staff.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/12/home_offices_new_immigration_system/ Save to Pocket

Tesla pushes new FSD Beta v12 update, no new note, but Musk says it’s a ‘big release’

date: 2024-03-12, from: Electrek Feed

Tesla has started to push a new Full Self-Driving Beta v12 software update. It’s still not going wide, there’s no new release note, but CEO Elon Musk says it’s a “big release”.

more…

https://electrek.co/2024/03/12/tesla-pushes-new-fsd-beta-v12-update-no-new-note-but-musk-big-release/ Save to Pocket

US Delegation Leaves Saudi Arabia Early Over Kippah Row

date: 2024-03-12, from: VOA News USA

https://www.voanews.com/a/us-delegation-leaves-saudi-arabia-early-over-kippah-row/7523949.html Save to Pocket

2024-02-28 Use of a calendar

date: 2024-03-12, from: Alex Schroeder’s Blog

2024-02-28 Use of a calendar

In the last millennium, I used the Emacs Diary for my calendar. I mean, why not? The Emacs Calendar is great. Better than the cal command-line utility, in any case. But eventually the world got mobile phones and I wanted an online calendar.

The example from the Emacs Diary documentation:

12/22/2015  Twentieth wedding anniversary!
10/22       Ruth's birthday.
* 21, *:    Payday
Tuesday--weekly meeting with grad students at 10am
         Supowit, Shen, Bitner, and Kapoor to attend.
1/13/89     Friday the thirteenth!!
thu 4pm     squash game with Lloyd.
mar 16      Dad's birthday
April 15, 2016 Income tax due.
* 15        time cards due.

Back then, Google didn’t want to be evil and I used Google Calendar. When Google changed its mind, so did I. I switched to Radicale.

And yet, I sort of missed those diary file entries.

Today, @tadzik posted a link to caleb.

caleb will do its best to interpret a calendar event description, create a valid iCalendar event for it and optionally upload it to a CalDAV server.

Nice!

Example usage, from the README:

$ caleb friday 5pm beer

My main problem was that it took me a while to figure out what the correct CalDAV URL is. I looked into my iPhone accounts (my first mistake) and tried https://example.org/radicale/alex, then https://example.org/radicale/alex/, then https://example.org/radicale/alex/Alex – some of these URLs failed silently, some of them created new collections with the iCalendar filename as the collection name… and I didn’t get an warnings or error messages. I mean, it makes sense. It’s like a filesystem, you can save whatever you want. But it’s not what the calendar apps expect.

So, how do I discover the correct URL? Using a command-line WebDAV explorer like cadaver. The following example shows how I log into Radicale and list the contents of the two directory I found. One of them is full of .vcf files (contacts), the other is full of .ics files (calendar entries). That’s the one!

~/src/caleb $ cadaver https://example.org/radicale/alex/
Authentication required for Radicale - Password Required on server `example.org':
Username: alex
Password: *secret*

dav:/radicale/alex/> ls
Listing collection `/radicale/alex/': succeeded.
Coll:   6304bd43-5d45-208b-0e44-893e509cf3da    1239216  Feb  7 08:13
Coll:   cae8e041-61d9-b51a-57db-294b07e8dc1e     520978  Feb 28 11:43
dav:/radicale/alex/> ls 6304bd43-5d45-208b-0e44-893e509cf3da
Listing collection `/radicale/alex/6304bd43-5d45-208b-0e44-893e509cf3da/': succeeded.
        0008345A-1EFB-4FC2-9545-BB1D7B2EE6E0.vcf        295  Jun 19  2020
        000ED281-A0C8-46F2-B3EB-1D13E4224281.vcf        241  Feb 25  2023
        007A5E7D-8947-4FC1-95B5-BBADEA9E27DC.vcf        267  Jul 14  2023
        ...
dav:/radicale/alex/> ls cae8e041-61d9-b51a-57db-294b07e8dc1e
Listing collection `/radicale/alex/cae8e041-61d9-b51a-57db-294b07e8dc1e/': succeeded.
        00A3A923-47C0-4BE4-B2BF-E365965C3975.ics       1043  May 29  2022
        011F4EF6-B431-4531-BB3D-D1E45BD665AB.ics       1266  Sep 10 00:19
        02909CE2-D363-436B-858D-3A243A10693E.ics        962  Jun  9  2023
        ...

Now I’m finally ready to go back to caleb and create the config file, ~/.config/caleb.conf:

[caldav]
url = "https://example.org/radicale/alex/cae8e041-61d9-b51a-57db-294b07e8dc1e"
username = "alex"
password = "*secret*"

Enjoy!

#Administration #Caleb #CalDAV #WebDAV

2024-03-12. @Preuk suggested Remind.

Remind is a sophisticated calendar and alarm program. – Remind

https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2024-02-28-calendar Save to Pocket

Microsoft calls AI privacy complaint ‘doomsday hyperbole’

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

Plaintiffs seek termination of permissionless and unpaid AI data harvesting

In early February, Microsoft accused the plaintiffs suing the software maker and its partner OpenAI over alleged AI privacy violations of evoking “doomsday hyperbole about AI as a threat to civilization.”…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/12/microsoft_doomsday_hyperbole_ai_filing/ Save to Pocket

Attacks on UK fiber networks mount: Operators beg govt to step in

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

Some simply chop cables in ducts, others pour in petrol and set ‘the whole lot alight’

Alternative network providers are calling on UK government to help protect against a growing number of local physical attacks on fiber infrastructure.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/12/uk_network_operators_want_government/ Save to Pocket

The global anti-democracy movement, co-chaired by D. Trump and V. Putin

date: 2024-03-12, from: Robert Reich on Substack

The art of the deal

https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-global-anti-democracy-movement Save to Pocket

Network Rail steps back from geofencing over safety fears

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

Award winning tech turns out to be less than accurate

Network Rail has become the latest company to flag the risks of smart technology implementations despite receiving a safety award for geofencing applications.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/12/network_rail_pulls_geofencing_over/ Save to Pocket

The Killer-Sunshine State

date: 2024-03-12, from: The Lever News

A state effort to outlaw workplace heat-protection standards is a preview of what will happen as the GOP’s war on workers collides with our climate reality.

https://www.levernews.com/the-killer-sunshine-state/ Save to Pocket

Housekeeping

date: 2024-03-12, from: Manu - I write blog

            <p>Spring is almost here! Birds are chirping, days are getting longer. What a lovely time of the year. Housekeeping post to share a bunch of stuff with you all.</p>

Jarrod managed to remove an item from my to-do list since he made a site for the One a Month Club. I was planning to set up a page here on the site but I guess I don’t need to do that anymore. If you decide to join send him an email.

Ratika started Kadambari, a book written online, chapter by chapter. Such a lovely idea, one worth supporting.

Chuck created a page for People and Blogs on FeedLand. In there you’ll find:

• the interviews
• posts from the blogs featured in the series
• posts from all the blogs mentioned in the interviews

It is such a useful resource. I have a folder with all the P&B blogs in my RSS reader but having an online page is a lot more convenient.

            <hr>
            <h2>Get in touch</h2>                <p>Have something to share? Want me as your <a href="https://manuelmoreale.com/i-ll-read-it">first reader</a>? Get in touch. My inbox is always open.</p>                <a href="mailto:hello@manuelmoreale.com">Connect</a> — 
            <a href="https://manuelmoreale.com/guestbook">Guestbook</a>
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            <h2>One a month</h2>                <p>That's how little it takes to help with my <a href="https://manuelmoreale.com/on-dreams-and-goals">goal</a>. If you feel generous, consider supporting what I do.</p>                <a href="https://ko-fi.com/manuelmoreale">Donate</a> — 
            <a href="https://manuelmoreale.com/supporters">Supporters</a>
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            <h2>People and Blogs</h2>                <p>I ask people to talk about themselves and their blogs. <a href="https://peopleandblogs.com/">Learn more</a> or subscribe.</p>                <a href="https://manuelmoreale.com/feed/peopleandblogs">RSS</a> — 
            <a href="https://buttondown.email/peopleandblogs">Email</a>
        

https://manuelmoreale.com/@/page/N45UDozkq5qESbAn Save to Pocket

Today in SCV History (March 12)

date: 2024-03-12, from: SCV New (TV Station)

1928 – St. Francis Dam collapses at 11:57:30 PM, killing an estimated 411 people from Saugus to the sea.[stories & photos

https://scvnews.com/today-in-scv-history-march-12/ Save to Pocket

Mahindra electrifying its three-wheelers across India with the help of IRP

date: 2024-03-12, from: Electrek Feed

It’s hard to imagine India’s roads without picturing the country’s popular three-wheelers weaving around traffic jams. They’re a staple of India’s transportation ecosystem, and now leading three-wheeler manufacturer Mahindra is hoping to turn them all electric with the help of IRP Systems’ cutting-edge electric vehicle technology.

more…

https://electrek.co/2024/03/12/mahindra-electrifying-its-three-wheelers-across-india-with-the-help-of-irp/ Save to Pocket

French government sites disrupted by très grande DDoS

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

Russia and Sudan top the list of suspects

Several French government websites have been disrupted by a severe distributed denial of service attack.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/12/france_ddos/ Save to Pocket

San Marcos Softball Outlasts Rival Dos Pueblos to Claim 4-3 Victory

date: 2024-03-12, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News

Kamilah Morales led the charge for San Marcos with three clutch hits.

The post San Marcos Softball Outlasts Rival Dos Pueblos to Claim 4-3 Victory appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.

https://www.independent.com/2024/03/11/san-marcos-softball-outlasts-rival-dos-pueblos-to-claim-4-3-victory/ Save to Pocket

Singapore startup SiliconBox to open packaging fab in Northern Italy

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

Shared cultural values sealed the deal and we’re struggling to figure out what they are

Singapore-based semiconductor packaging company Silicon Box announced on Monday it will invest $3.6 billion to build a manufacturing facility in Northern Italy.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/12/singapore_italy_fab/ Save to Pocket

pre-order :: The Singularity is Nearer

date: 2024-03-12, from: Ray Kurzwel’s feed

Ray Kurzweil’s new book The Singularity is Nearer is now available for pre-order. The book will be released June 2024. Please visit the official book website to learn more + click-through for the book’s listing on fine book-sellers. book website :: visit Enjoy !

https://www.thekurzweillibrary.com/pre-order-the-singularity-is-nearer Save to Pocket

March 11, 2024 (Monday)

date: 2024-03-12, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog

Authoritarian prime minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary visited former president Trump in Florida on Friday, and on Sunday, Orbán assured Hungarian state media that Trump “will not give a penny in the Ukraine-Russia war. Therefore, the war will end, because it is obvious that Ukraine can not stand on its own feet.” Russian state media gloated at the news, and that Trump’s MAGA allies in Congress are already helping him end support for Ukraine.

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-11-2024-monday Save to Pocket

Fixing nginx Error: Undefined constant PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_USE_BUFFERED_QUERY

date: 2024-03-12, from: Jeff Geerling blog

Fixing nginx Error: Undefined constant PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_USE_BUFFERED_QUERY

        <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"><p>I install a <em>lot</em> of Drupal sites day to day, especially when I'm doing dev work.</p>

In the course of doing that, sometimes I’ll be working on infrastructure—whether that’s an Ansible playbook to configure a Docker container, or testing something on a fresh server or VM.

In any case, I run into the following error every so often in my Nginx error.log:

"php-fpm" nginx Error: Undefined constant PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_USE_BUFFERED_QUERY

The funny thing is, I don’t have that error when I’m running CLI commands, like vendor/bin/drush, and can even install and manage the Drupal site and database on the CLI.

The problem, in my case, was that I had applied php-fpm configs using Ansible, but in my playbook I hadn’t restarted php-fpm (in my case, on Ubuntu 22.04, php8.3-fpm) after doing so. So FPM was running with outdated config and didn’t know that the MySQL/MariaDB drivers were even present on the system.

  <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"><span>Jeff Geerling</span></span>

March 11, 2024

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/fixing-nginx-error-undefined-constant-pdomysqlattrusebufferedquery Save to Pocket

Tesla starts offering early Cybertruck delivery for long-term TSLA shareholders

date: 2024-03-12, from: Electrek Feed

Tesla has put up a webpage allowing TSLA shareholders to register for early Cybertruck delivery, as long as they fit certain criteria. It could give us a hint as to how Cybertruck deliveries are going.

more…

https://electrek.co/2024/03/11/tesla-starts-offering-early-cybertruck-delivery-for-long-term-tsla-shareholders/ Save to Pocket

February 2024 – Volume 64 Issue 7

date: 2024-03-12, from: The Sundail (CSUN student paper)

Letter from the Editor: Issue 7 Volume 64 Yesterday’s News: Powerful Matadoras through the Ages Power in Numbers: Demographic Rankings Programmed Prejudice: Fighting Racism in AI Media Querencia     …

https://sundial.csun.edu/179124/print-editions/february-2024-volume-64-issue-7/ Save to Pocket

Intelligence Community Report Warns Lawmakers About US Disengagement From Ukraine

date: 2024-03-12, from: VOA News USA

In its annual global threats assessment report Monday, the U.S. intelligence community told lawmakers that the war in Ukraine is at a turning point whose outcome will depend on American assistance. VOA’s congressional correspondent Katherine Gypson has more from the Senate, where lawmakers called on the House to take up the $95 billion foreign aid bill.

https://www.voanews.com/a/intelligence-community-report-warns-lawmakers-about-us-disengagement-from-ukraine/7523830.html Save to Pocket

US Intelligence Chiefs Deliver Grim Warning on Ukraine

date: 2024-03-12, from: VOA News USA

WASHINGTON — The frozen military conflict between Ukraine and Russia is starting to thaw and will likely tilt in Moscow’s favor if the United States fails to quickly come through with additional military aid, according to top U.S. intelligence officials, in a grim assessment delivered to U.S. lawmakers.

Monday’s warning comes nearly a month after the U.S. Senate voted in favor of a stand-alone foreign aid bill that would send $60 billion in aid to Ukraine as it tries to hold on to territorial gains more than two years after Russian forces invaded.

But the lawmakers in the House of Representatives have refused to bring the bill up for a vote, leaving other Western nations scrambling to provide Ukraine with enough weapons and ammunition to hold off a renewed Russian offensive.

The $60 billion “is absolutely critical to Ukraine’s defense right now,” Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

“Ukraine’s retreat from Avdiivka and their struggle to stave off further territorial losses in the past few weeks have exposed the erosion of Ukraine’s military capabilities with the declining availability of external military aid,” she said. “Without that assistance, it is hard to imagine how Ukraine will be able to maintain the extremely hard-fought advances it has made against the Russians.”

The director of the Central Intelligence Agency told lawmakers the war is at a crossroads, and that what happens next likely hinges on the provision of U.S. aid.

“The Ukrainians are not running out of courage and tenacity. They’re running out of ammunition,” said the CIA’s William Burns. “And we’re running out of time to help them.”

Both Haines and Burns reiterated previous assessments: that up until now, Ukraine’s military has inflicted serious damage on Russia’s forces.

U.S. officials believe at least 315,000 Russian troops have been killed or wounded, and that two-thirds of Russia’s prewar tank inventory has been destroyed. The Russian military, which had been undergoing a modernization program, has been set back years.

Russia’s invasion has also served to galvanize the West, with Sweden and Finland joining the NATO military alliance.

But Haines and Burns told lawmakers that none of those strategic defeats have managed to change the calculus of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“Putin continues to judge that time is on his side,” Haines said, cautioning that the Russian leader is as entrenched as ever.

“He continues to see NATO enlargement and Western support for Ukraine as reinforcing his long-held belief that the United States and Europe seek to restrict Russian power and undermine him,” she said, telling lawmakers that Putin’s response has been to push ahead with efforts to grow the Russian military, pouring more money into ammunition production and into the purchase of military supplies from Iran and North Korea.

U.S. intelligence officials also see signs Putin is continuing to move forward with plans to modernize and fortify Russia’s nuclear weapons arsenal, already thought to be the largest and most diverse in the world.

And there are signs that Russia is willing to take chances to gain an advantage.

“We remain concerned that Moscow will put at risk long-standing global norms against the use of asymmetric or strategically destabilizing weapons, including in space and in the cyber domain,” Haines said.

Some lawmakers echoed the concerns, urging colleagues to pass the legislation to get Ukraine the military supplies it needs.

“My fear is the decision thus far by the House of Representatives not to even take up legislation that would support Ukraine in the fight against Putin aggression has been one of the most short-sighted decisions on a national security issue that I can possibly imagine,” said Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner, a Democrat.

“The impact and long-term consequences of us abandoning Ukraine … it’s a 50-year mistake that would haunt this country,” added independent Senator Angus King.

And U.S. intelligence officials warned of a cascading global impact if the additional aid for Ukraine fails to materialize.

“The consequence of that will not just be for Ukraine or for European security but across the Indo-Pacific,” said the CIA’s Burns. “If we’re seen to be walking away from Ukraine, not only is that going to feed doubts amongst our allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific, it’s going to stoke the ambitions of the Chinese leadership in contingencies ranging from Taiwan to the South China Sea.”

The intelligence officials said while China remains wary, for now, it has been emboldened by Russia.

In particular, the intelligence officials said Russia was forced to grant China some long-sought concessions in exchange for support for Moscow’s war against Ukraine.

Iran and North Korea have likewise benefited, they said, warning the impact remains to be seen.

The changing dynamics have “the potential to undermine, among other things, long-held nonproliferation norms,” Haines said.

But she added that while Russia, China, Iran and North Korea are growing closer, the prospects for a true alliance are, for now, remote.

“Parochial interests, a desire to avoid entanglements, and weariness of harm and instability from each other’s actions will likely limit their cooperation … absent direct conflict between one of these countries and the United States,” Haines said.

Israel – Gaza

The U.S. intelligence officials also addressed concerns about the ongoing conflict in Gaza, where Israeli forces continue to pursue fighters of the Hamas terror group despite warnings from the United Nations and aid groups about the devastating impact on civilians.

“We’re going to continue to work hard at this — I don’t think anybody can guarantee success,” the CIA’s Burns told lawmakers when asked about ongoing efforts to get a temporary cease-fire.

Burn recently traveled to the Middle East to meet with officials from Israel, Egypt and Qatar.

He said the deal currently under consideration would provide for the return of about 40 Israeli hostages still held by Hamas, most of them wounded or ill women or older men, in exchange for a six-week-long cease-fire that would allow the U.S. and its allies to surge in desperately needed aid.

“I understand Israel’s need, and the president [Joe Biden] has emphasized this, to respond to the brutish attack that Israelis suffered on the 7th of October [by Hamas],” Burns told Republican Senator Tom Cotton.

“But I think we all also have to be mindful of the, you know, enormous toll that this has taken on innocent civilians in Gaza,” he added.

Gaza fallout

Haines further warned lawmakers that the crisis in Gaza has “galvanized violence by a range of actors,” and that it “is likely that the Gaza conflict will have a generational impact on terrorism.”

But Haines said for now, Iran and its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, appear reluctant to try to push too hard to manipulate the fighting for their benefit.

“We continue to assess that Hezbollah and Iran do not want to cause an escalation of the conflict that pulls us or them into a full-out war,” she said.

Still, Haines acknowledged other Iranian-linked groups, like the Houthis in Yemen, have become “aggressive actors,” launching dozens of attacks on international shipping.

Katherine Gypson contributed to this report.

https://www.voanews.com/a/us-intelligence-chiefs-deliver-grim-warning-for-ukraine/7523825.html Save to Pocket

Some things to consider when deciding whether to start building with “AI” in libraries and archives.

date: 2024-03-12, from: Ed Summers blog, Inkdroid

I was asked to participate in a panel at work about AI. I initially declined, but once it became clear that I would be allowed to get on my soapbox and rant for 15 minutes I agreed. Below are my notes and some slides. This was not a fun post to write or present. I’m sure it rubbed some people the wrong way, and I am genuinely sorry for that.

I’ve done a little bit of work with AI, like downloading some models from Hugging Face as part of named entity recognition experiments, running Whisper on some interviews that I wanted a transcript for, testing out Google’s new file identification tool, and writing a bot to use the OpenAI API to generate some fake diary entries from some random words a friend of mine was publishing.

But as I listened to my CPU fan spinning, all this experience has really done is reinforce some concerns I have as a software developer about the AI industry, and the application of these technologies in libraries and archives.

It’s not that I don’t think these tools and methods have some use in the cultural heritage sector, but I do think we need to think carefully and critically about them. I’m sure you will be familiar with at least a few of these topics, but I thought it could be useful to bring them together, with links to learn more, and also close each one out with some tactics for addressing them.

If you take nothing else from this presentation I’d like it to be that despite what the “boomers” and “doomers” would like you to believe, the ascendency of AI is not inevitable, and we have decisions to make. What we decide to do will have a big impact on how these technologies get deployed.

Much of this perspective is informed by my own interest in Science and Technology Studies, which encourages an understanding of technology in its social and historical context, and to remember that “it could be otherwise” (Woolgar, 2014). It was also informed by reading Dan McQuillan’s book Resisting AI (highly recommended).

Despite the recent surge of interest in Large Language Models and Generative AI tools (ChatGPT, DALL-E, etc), AI is part of long history of computer automation, which is continuing to transform our work, and our lives. I have tended to prefer the term Machine Learning (ML) to AI, because it has more specificity when discussing the recent application of statistical algorithms to increasingly large datasets, using increasingly large computing environments. But I’ve also come to appreciate that the term AI is actually useful for talking about this longer trajectory of automation, stretching back to the beginnings of modern computing. Looking at this technology as part of a very long project, involving a shifting set of actors is important.

However the areas that I’m going to touch on here refer mostly to recent developments with Large Language Models, although some of them are relevant for more specialized forms machine learning as well. There are five points of concern, and for each area I’ll include a tactic for addressing it in libraries and archives.

Bias

ML models are built using data. Recent advances in Deep Learning have largely been the result of applying decades old algorithms to increasingly large amounts of data collected from the web. The data that is used to train these models is significant because the models necessarily reflect the data that was used to create them. Unfortunately corporations are increasingly tight lipped about the data that has been used to train these models (more on that next).

Some commonly used datasets like CommonCrawl represent significantly large collections of web data, but the web is a big place, and decisions have gone into what websites were collected. CommonCrawl is not representative of the web as a whole. Furthermore LLMs encode biases that are present in today’s society. Blindly using and becoming dependent on LLMs risks further encrusting these biases and participating in systemic racism.

As LLMs are used to generate more and more web content there is also a risk that this data is again collected and used to train future models. This process has been called Model Collapse and has been shown to lead to a process of forgetting. OpenAI launched a tool for identifying content generated with an LLM and had to shut it down 6 months later because it didn’t work, and its not clear that it can even be done with reliability. What would it mean to only train these models with pre-2023 data?

Tactic: When evaluating an AI tool always see if you can identify what data has been used to train the model(s). How has it been “cleaned” or shaped? How is it updated?

Intellectual Property

Since LLMs have been built with data collected from the web this includes many types of content, from openly licensed datasets designed to be shared, to copyrighted books like those found in the books1,2,3 datasets, which are rumored to have been assembled from shadow libraries like Library Genesis and SciHub. Over the last year we’ve seen several lawsuits including from the Authors Guild challenging OpenAI’s use of copyrighted materials in building their GPT models.

In some ways these types of lawsuits are not new to the web. Napster was challenged by the Recording Industry Association of American; Google Books was sued by the Authors Guild in the mid 2000s; the Internet Archive has been recently sued over its Open Library platform. But what makes LLMs a bit different is the way they transform the content they’ve collected, rather than making it available verbatim. The US Copyright Office published a notice of inquiry last year to gather information about the use of copyrighted materials in AI tools, which we can expect to hear more about this year.

But this is not just an issue for blatantly pirated material.

Many websites are The New York Times is also suing because of how millions of their openly published news stories were used by OpenAI to train their models, without a license. OpenAI is in the midst of trying to negotiate licensing contracts after the fact with many big players.

The way LLMs function represents a big shift in how the web ecosystem has evolved. Web search engines like Google crawl web pages to index them, and provide users with search results that link back to the original website. Similarly, social media platforms have provided a place to discuss web content by sharing links to it, driving other users to the web publisher.

In the LLM paradigm users never leave the ChatGPT interface, and the original publisher is completely cut out of the virtuous circle. LLMs are enclosing the web commons, and threaten to choke off the very sources of content that they used. Web publishers will lose the ability to understand how their content is being used.

Some web publishers have chosen to tell LLM bots to stop using robots.txt. Not all the bots collecting data from the web for LLMs will respect robots.txt files. In one experiment Ben Welsh found that 54% of news publishers (628 out of 1156) have decided to block OpenAI, Google AI, or CommonCrawl.

Tactic: What content should we make available to Generative AI tools. What would our donors want?

Verifiability

One of the reasons why ChatGPT doesn’t link to websites as citations is that it doesn’t know what to link to. In LLMs the neural network doesn’t record information about where a particular piece of data came from. As LLMs get integrated into more traditional search tools the challenge is to make generated text verifiable in the sense that the results include in-line citations, which should support the statement that they are used in.

Verifiability is important for understanding when generated content is out of alignment with the world, a so called “hallucination”. It’s also important for explaining why the model generated the response it did, when trying to debug why some interaction went wrong. Explainability is an active research area in the ML/AI community, and it’s not clear that given the model size and the size of the training data, whether the models can be made explainable, because at a fundamental level we don’t understand why they work. Generative AI applications that include citations have been shown to be unreliable, and provide a false sense of security.

The lack of explainability in LLMs presents real problems for libraries and archives whose raison d’être is to provide users with documents, whether they are books, maps, photographs, sound recordings, films, letters, etc. We describe these documents, and preserve these documents, in order to provide access to them, so that users can derive meaning from them. If we use an LLM to generate a response to a query or prompt, and we can’t back up the response with citations to these documents, this a problem.

This lack of verifiability is starting to be a problem for Wikipedia too.

Tactic: Library and archives professionals have a role in evaluating how AI tools cite documents as evidence.

Work

Part of the value proposition behind recent AI tools like GitHub’s Copilot, ChatGPT or DALL-E is that they democratize access to some skill whether it be writing code, authoring news stories, or creating illustrations. But is it democratic to systematically undermine creative workers, by stealing their content without having asked to use it in the first place?

When you make a decision to use these tools you are potentially replacing a person’s skill with a service. Furthermore you are binding your own organization to the whims of a corporation which would like nothing better than for you to divest of your organization’s expertise and become completely dependent on their service. It’s a trap.

If the past is any guide, we can also expect that skilled creative jobs will be replaced with lower paid jobs that involve mundane cleaning of the messes that have been made by automation. Or in the words of screenwriter C. Robert Cargill (quoted in the previous link):

The immediate fear of AI isn’t that us writers will have our work replaced by artificially generated content. It’s that we will be underpaid to rewrite that trash into something we could have done better from the start. This is what the WGA is opposing and the studios want.

LLMs like ChatGPT are built using a technique called Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF). The important part here is the human feedback. Who is providing this feedback? Are they users of the system? What types of systematic biases does this training introduce? Are they lower paid “ghost workers”?

Tactic: When evaluating the use of AI tools involve the people whose work is impacted in the decision making and implementation.

Sustainability

Probably the most troubling aspect to the latest wave of AI technology is their environmental impact. Recent advances in LLMs were not achieved through a better understanding of how neural networks work, but by using existing algorithms with massive amounts of data and compute resources. This training can takes months of time, and needs to be repeated to keep models up to date.

Apparently the initial training of GPT-4 took $100 million. The training relies on Graphical Processor Units (GPU) which are faster than CPUs for the types of computation that LLMs demand, but require up to four times as much energy to run. Data centers require water to cool, sometimes in environments where it is scarce. This isn’t just a problem for training models, it’s a bigger problem for querying them which has been estimated to be 60-100 times more in terms of energy utilization. Another problem lurking here is the lack of data from data centers that provides transparency about what is going on.

Is this the really the right direction for us to be headed as we are trying to reduce energy costs globally to limit global warming?

The tech industry is incentivized to try to make AI infrastructures more efficient. But Jevons Paradox will likely hold: technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used, but the falling cost of use induces increases in demand enough that the resource use is increased.

My links runneth over:

• Energy and Policy Considerations for Deep Learning in NLP
• The growing energy footprint of artificial intelligence
• A systematic review of Green AI
• The growing energy footprint of artificial intelligence
• Markey, Heinrich, Eshoo, Beyer Introduce Legislation to Investigate, Measure Environmental Impacts of Artificial Intelligence

Tactic: Libraries and archives should be looking for ways to reduce energy consumption not increase it.

Security and Privacy

Generative AI is a dual use technology. Experts are increasingly worried that it will be used to create disinformation as well as fake interactions online. We’ve had court cases where filings made by lawyers contained citations to cases that didn’t exist. AI generated voice robo-calls have been made illegal because of how AI tools were used to impersonate Biden’s voice. Bad actors can manipulate images and video to target specific groups because the tools are more powerful and accessible. There are possible ways to mitigate this by using trusted sources of information and provable ways of sharing the provenance of media.

Since the mechanics of how LLMs generate content are not explainable they are susceptible to attacks like what Simon Willison calls prompt injection. This is where a prompt is crafted to subvert the original design of the system to generate an intended response. This has serious ramifications for the use of LLM technology as glue between other automated systems. Indeed this was recently demonstrated by researchers using OpenAI and Google APIs to execute arbitrary code, and exfiltrate personal information.

While its not great to conflate privacy with security, I’m running out of time, and it’s important to note that privacy is also a problem. As LLM APIs are deeply integrated into applications, data will flow from one context into another. For example Docusign and Dropbox recently announced that they were integrated OpenAI into their products. When enabled your data will flow to OpenAI who may or may not use it to further train their models.

Tactic: support legislation that gives users agency over their data and practices that help ensure authenticity and provenance.

References

https://inkdroid.org/2024/03/12/ai/ Save to Pocket

★ Once More Unto the Apple / Epic / European-Commission Breach, Dear Friends, Once More

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-12, from: Daring Fireball

Although Apple as an institution granted, revoked, and under public pressure reinstated Epic’s new account, from the perspective of Apple leadership, they only revoked a new account that had been created through an automated system — not for criticism, per se, but for the same reason Epic’s Fortnite developer account remains revoked and Fortnite remains unavailable on Apple platforms worldwide: for the 2020 Fortnite IAP Trojan horse stunt.

https://daringfireball.net/2024/03/once_more_unto_the_apple-epic-european-commission_breach Save to Pocket

US State Department Requests $4 Billion To Outcompete China

date: 2024-03-12, from: VOA News USA

WASHINGTON — The United States must employ “all the tools at our disposal” to outcompete China, a top U.S. State Department official said on Monday, as the Biden administration unveiled its budget request for the 2025 fiscal year.

The request includes $4 billion over five years in mandatory funding for this purpose, including $2 billion to create a new international infrastructure fund to provide a credible, reliable alternative to Chinese infrastructure funding, Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources Rich Verma told a news briefing.

The other $2 billion was earmarked for “game-changing investments” to help Indo-Pacific countries push back against “predatory efforts,” he said, adding that those would include efforts to improve governance and the rule of law.

The State Department requested a separate $4 billion in discretionary funding to cover foreign assistance and diplomatic engagement in the region.

U.S. efforts to fund infrastructure in developing countries have long been dwarfed by China’s massive Belt and Road Initiative, a 10-year-old project to build infrastructure and energy networks connecting Asia with Africa and Europe through overland and maritime routes.

According to a report by U.S. researchers last November, Chinese financial institutions lent $1.34 trillion to developing countries from 2000 to 2021.

“We must employ all the tools at our disposal to outcompete China, wherever possible,” Verma said, also referring to China by the initials of its official name, the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

He said the request for fiscal 2025 would allow the U.S. “to continue to invest in the foundations of our strength at home, align with like-minded partners to strengthen our shared interests and address the challenges posed by the PRC, and harness those assets to compete with the PRC and defend our interests.”

Verma said the infrastructure fund would support “transformative, quality and sustainable hard infrastructure projects.”

At the 2023 G20 Summit in India, U.S. officials said President Joe Biden and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi co-hosted a group of G20 leaders to accelerate investments in high-quality infrastructure projects and development of economic corridors through a Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGI).

This came after the Group of Seven rich Western countries’ leaders pledged in 2022 to raise $600 billion in private and public funds over five years to finance needed infrastructure in developing countries and counter the Belt and Road project.

Overseas finance has won Beijing friends across the developing world, while drawing criticism from the West and in some recipient countries, including Sri Lanka and Zambia, that infrastructure projects it funded saddled them with debt they were unable to repay.

https://www.voanews.com/a/us-state-department-requests-4-billion-to-outcompete-china/7523822.html Save to Pocket

Cisco is a fashion retailer now, with a spring collection to prove it

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

Promises quarterly lookbooks of branded tat, powered by branded kit

Cisco has become a fashion retailer.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/12/cisco_fashion_retail/ Save to Pocket

Former US Official’s Work for Chinese Client Stirs Concern Over Disclosure Loopholes

date: 2024-03-12, from: VOA News USA

WASHINGTON — When a Chinese drone company came under U.S. government scrutiny over its alleged ties to China’s military, the company turned to one of America’s pre-eminent lawyers: Loretta Lynch, a former attorney general in the Obama administration.

Lynch, who ran the U.S. Department of Justice from 2015 to 2017 and is now a partner at the Paul, Weiss law firm, wrote a letter to a senior Defense Department official last July on behalf of SZ DJI Technology Co Ltd, asking that her client be removed from a list of Chinese military companies.

Advocating for foreign clients is legal and U.S. law includes a public disclosure exemption for lawyers.

But the letter, seen by Reuters, is an example of what transparency advocates and some members of Congress - dozens of whom have supported bills to change rules - say are gaps in the law that allow lawyers and lobbyists, including former officials, to avoid disclosing their advocacy for companies possibly subject to U.S. sanctions.

The Paul, Weiss law firm declined to comment on the letter, and Lynch did not respond to Reuters emails. DJI also declined to comment, but it has said previously that it is not a military company and that it was prepared to formally challenge its inclusion on the list.

The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), a decades-old law requiring public disclosure of work done on behalf of non-U.S. entities, includes a list of exemptions, including for commercial activities and legal representation.

The work by the onetime top U.S. law enforcement officer on behalf of a company the Department of Defense says poses “threats to national security” comes as U.S. agencies warn about companies with links to China’s Communist Party and as lawmakers push to tighten FARA’s disclosure requirements.

The U.S. Treasury and Commerce departments say DJI supported biometric surveillance and tracking of Muslim Uyghur minorities in China.

The Defense Department did not respond to a request for comment on Lynch’s letter. DJI remained on the Pentagon list when it was updated in late January.

The Justice Department also declined comment on the letter and broader FARA enforcement.

Almost a dozen critics of FARA told Reuters the law’s loopholes have allowed less transparency for other companies with alleged ties to China’s military, including surveillance technology firm Hikvision and biotech firm WuXi AppTec.

Jim Risch, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, says reforms to the law are needed, given the blurry lines between many Chinese companies and the Chinese government, and to keep former members of the U.S. government from effectively lobbying on their behalf.

“It is appalling that former senior U.S. officials use their connections to serve the interests of U.S. adversaries,” Risch said.

However, the American Civil Liberties Union and others assert that broadening disclosure requirements could act as a barrier to legally protected free speech.

In 2022 the ACLU and 13 other groups wrote to the Justice Department about their concerns, cautioning that problems with the law could “enable selective enforcement for bad faith or malicious reasons.”

Others argue that stricter FARA rules on disclosure could give authoritarian countries like Russia and China cover for their own stifling of free speech.

Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law school professor, said some countries, such as Russia, label citizens and reporters as foreign agents to limit their activities.

“I do have concerns over some past investigations and prosecutions that targeted individuals who appeared to be engaging in First Amendment activities,” Turley told Reuters.

Requesting a meeting

The Pentagon in 2022 placed DJI on its Chinese Military Companies list, a designation that serves as a warning about the risks of conducting business with those entities.

In her letter to Assistant Secretary of Defense Laura Taylor-Kale on behalf of DJI, Lynch urged the department to promptly remove the drone maker.

“The wide use and dependence on DJI products by a variety of U.S. stakeholders reinforces the importance and urgency of deleting DJI from the list,” Lynch wrote.

She added that DJI requested “a meeting to discuss this matter.” Reuters could not establish whether that meeting occurred.

Also signing the letter, labeled “confidential treatment requested,” were former Assistant United States Attorney Michael Gertzman and Associate White House Counsel in the Obama administration Roberto Gonzalez – now both partners at Paul, Weiss.

Gertzman and Gonzalez did not respond to requests for comment.

FARA enforcement has intensified in recent years, with the Justice Department prosecuting individuals for their work on behalf of Chinese interests and pushing some law firms to register.

Paul, Weiss attorneys have acknowledged growing enforcement tied to China.

In a 2022 memo to clients about a U.S. court’s dismissal of a FARA case against casino magnate Steve Wynn, Lynch, Gonzalez and other Paul, Weiss attorneys wrote: “The targeting of lobbying on behalf of China by the DOJ is further evidence of the Biden Administration’s intention to use all of the legal tools at its disposal in a multi-faceted strategy to counter the perceived threat posed by China.”

Paul, Weiss did not respond to questions about the memo and a White House spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

At the Justice Department’s request, the Sidley Austin law firm in 2022 retroactively registered its lobbying on behalf of Hikvision, a company the U.S. says has been implicated in human rights violations toward Uyghurs.

Sidley Austin declined to comment on its registration. While the firm had not originally filed under FARA it had disclosed under the Lobbying Disclosure Act, which has less rigorous disclosure requirements, according to the Justice Department.

The Justice Department has called for the repeal of an LDA exemption from FARA filing.

Hikvision did not respond to a request for comment but has previously denied reports that the company is complicit in human rights abuses.

Congressional pressure again has begun to tick up.

On March 5, the House of Representatives select committee on China asked the Justice Department to review trade association Biotechnology Innovation Organization’s lobbying on behalf of Chinese biotech firm WuXi AppTec for possible FARA requirements.

BIO told Reuters that its advocacy was fulfilling its duty to let Congress and patients know the impact of potential policies and “nothing more.”

WuXi AppTec, when asked by Reuters about the House committee’s request, said it objected to “inaccurate assertions and preemptive actions against our company without due process,” adding it was confident lawmakers would see it as a trusted partner.

Reform is up to Congress

Some experts, including those who have concerns about extending FARA’s reach, agree the law is vague and presents particular challenges for attorneys.

David Laufman, a partner at law firm Wiggin and Dana who previously oversaw the Justice Department’s FARA enforcement, said while lawyers may not need to register under FARA if they avoid policy discussions with government officials, the only way to know for certain is to seek an opinion from the Justice Department.

“In the meantime, life goes on for attorneys. We have to represent our clients,” he said.

Reforms to the law would be up to Congress. Several bipartisan bills to close FARA loopholes have been proposed.

One, proposed last year in the House and Senate, could require retroactive FARA registration by anyone who acts as an “agent for a foreign principal.”

https://www.voanews.com/a/former-us-official-s-work-for-chinese-client-stirs-concern-over-disclosure-loopholes/7523818.html Save to Pocket

Palau’s President Relieved by Security Pact Funding Approval

date: 2024-03-12, from: VOA News USA

Washington — Critical funds to counter China in the Pacific are finally on their way to three U.S. allies: Palau, Micronesia and the Marshall Islands.

On Friday, the Senate passed a funding package that provides $7 billion over 20 years for the Compacts of Free Association (COFA) as part of a partial government funding bill. It was signed into law by President Joe Biden over the weekend.

“Extending Compact-related assistance is a critical component of the administration’s Pacific Partnership, Indo-Pacific, and National Security Strategies,” said U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in a statement. “We look forward to working with our partners in the Freely Associated States over the next two decades of COFA-related cooperation.”

The compacts are agreements that give the U.S. strategic access to these regions of the Pacific Ocean. In return, the U.S. provides grants to fund education, health care and infrastructure in these nations, whose citizens are then entitled to study, work and live in the U.S. without a visa.

The United States has had compact agreements in effect with Micronesia and the Marshalls since 1986 and with Palau since 1994.

The compacts’ renewals were signed last year but funding stalled as U.S. lawmakers struggled to reach agreement on full-year spending. Palau has been forced to borrow to pay for basic government services like education and health care while waiting for $890 million — its share of the funds.

“It’s not Oct. 1, but it’s at least within this fiscal year, and really just in time,” Palau President Surangel Whipps Jr. told VOA in an interview on Monday.

“[This] allows us to stop borrowing to keep government operations going; it allows us to hire those critical police officers, health care workers and education teachers that we need,” he said.

Palau’s economy tanked after Chinese tourism dropped by more than 50% in the wake of the COVID pandemic. The island nation maintains diplomatic relations with Taiwan under repeated pressure from Beijing to switch alliances.

Whipps says he recently met with investors from Singapore and Japan, as well as United Airlines with a request for direct service to Japan. He said now that COFA is funded, he can promise a stable and secure environment to financiers.

“[It’s important that we’re] opening up new markets so that we’re diversified and more resilient, not so dependent on the Chinese tourism, which could be weaponized,” said Whipps.

Coordinated push

The final passage comes after a coordinated pressure campaign, from members of Congress as well as the Pacific region.

“The COFA agreements send a clear message of U.S. commitment to the Pacific region and take a much-needed international strong stand for the ideals of democracy and freedom,” American Samoa Representative Aumua Amata Coleman Radewagen said in a statement after the House passed COFA on Wednesday.

“I’ve appreciated the partnership of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle and thank the many advocates – in Hawaii and in COFA communities across the country – whose hard work made this victory possible,” Hawaii Senator Mazie Hirono said in a statement after the Senate passed COFA, Friday.

The leaders of Micronesia and the Marshall Islands joined Whipps in February in drafting a letter to congressional leaders warning of the consequences of not funding the compacts.

Like Palau, the Marshall Islands maintains diplomatic relations with Taiwan, while Micronesia has diplomatic relations with Beijing.

“There have been ‘carrot and stick’ efforts from the PRC [People’s Republic of China] to shift our alliances, including discontinuing support of Taiwan,” Marshall Islands President Hilda Heine wrote in the February letter.

At a Nuclear Remembrance Day ceremony in the Marshall Islands on March 1, President Heine said the funding delay had created doubt.

“At some point, our nation needs to seriously consider other options available to us if the U.S. is unable or unwilling to keep its commitments to us. Our nation has been a steadfast ally of the United States, but that should not be taken for granted,” she told the audience.

Delay sends signal

Experts say Washington’s funding delay sent a signal to the rest of the Pacific that undermines U.S. credibility.

“They see our agreements with these three Pacific nations as the bellwether for our entire engagement with the region,” Kathryn Hendel Paik, Center for Strategic and International Studies senior fellow, said Monday in an interview with VOA.

“Our waffling on this has really made them question a relationship that they were already starting to be skeptical on because, historically, we have not always been there for the Pacific and we’ve not always showed up the way we should have,” she said.

Charles Paul, Marshall Islands ambassador to the U.S., told VOA via Zoom on Monday, “We’re looking forward to having the compacts approved.”

He added that the agreement includes about $700 million to address the health impacts of radiation introduced in the 67 American atmospheric nuclear tests between 1946 and 1958.

In a 13-minute video posted Saturday on Facebook, Wesley Sinima, president of the Federated States of Micronesia, said the funding delay stirred up “doubt and uncertainty.” He added, however, that the final agreement will “contribute to greater peace and prosperity” for the Micronesian people and “greater security and stability for the Indo-Pacific region and the world.”

As for Palau, President Whipps said he’s been invited to Washington in the coming weeks for an exchange of diplomatic notes to finalize the compacts. He hopes to attend.

https://www.voanews.com/a/palau-s-president-relieved-by-security-pact-funding-approval/7523806.html Save to Pocket

Business Insider Report Claims Apple Is Testing an AI-Powered Ads Platform

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-12, from: Daring Fireball

https://9to5mac.com/2024/03/11/report-apple-testing-ai-powered-ads-platform/ Save to Pocket

Quick Charge Podcast: March 11, 2024

date: 2024-03-12, from: Electrek Feed

Listen to a recap of the top stories of the day from Electrek. Quick Charge is now available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, TuneIn and…

https://electrek.co/2024/03/11/quick-charge-podcast-march-11-2024/ Save to Pocket

Steven Spielberg, FineWoven Case Owner, Photographs His Hamburger at an Oscars Party Using an iPhone 15 Pro

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-12, from: Daring Fireball

https://twitter.com/etnow/status/1767076793696370832 Save to Pocket

@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-03-12, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)

100 Greatest Beatles Songs.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/100-greatest-beatles-songs-154008/if-i-fell-180281/ Save to Pocket

US Commits $100 Million More to Multinational Force for Haiti Amid Violence

date: 2024-03-12, from: VOA News USA

STATE DEPARTMENT — U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced on Monday the United States would commit an additional $100 million to a United Nations-backed multinational security force intended to assist Haitian police in combating gangs, along with $33 million in humanitarian aid.

This would bring the total of U.S. contribution to the security force to $300 million.

In February, the United States pledged $200 million to support the Kenya-led Multinational Security Support mission, or MSS, in Haiti. The U.S. said that the deployment of the mission will help the Haitian National Police create the security conditions necessary to conduct free and fair elections.

Monday, Blinken joined Caribbean leaders in Kingston, Jamaica, to discuss a proposal to “expedite a political transition” to resolve the unfolding crisis in Haiti, including possible deployment of the U.N.-backed multinational security forces.

The proposal, developed in partnership with the Caribbean Community, known as CARICOM, and Haitian stakeholders, comes as Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry faces pressure to resign or agree to a transitional council.

According to a statement by U.S. officials, the transition would occur via “the creation of a broad-based, independent presidential college,” a reference to a proposed committee that would oversee Haiti ahead of elections.

In Kingston, Blinken said that the Haitian people are confronting “a political crisis, escalating violence, unrest,” an “untenable situation” that requires urgent action both politically and in terms of security.

State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told VOA that the United States aims to accelerate the deployment of the U.N.-backed mission U.N. Multinational Security Support, or MSS, mission in Haiti, because escalating gang violence is endangering its government.

“We continue to look to expedite that mission as soon as possible,” Miller said during a Monday briefing, adding the U.S. has been in conversation about the deployment with the government of Kenya and other countries.

“I can assure you that the United States will do its part to fund that important mission,” Miller said.

UN reaction

At the United Nations, all 15 U.N. Security Council members strongly condemned “the increasing violence, criminal activities, mass displacement of civilians and human rights abuses” in a Monday statement.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ chief of staff is representing the U.N. at the CARICOM meeting in Kingston.

“The MSS mission is a critical step toward creating an environment conducive to free and fair elections, as well as alleviating the humanitarian crisis,” said U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield.

The expedient MSS deployment is a top priority for U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration, she said.

Canada has committed $91.2 million, and others, including Benin, France, Germany, Jamaica and Spain, have announced financial, personnel and logistical support.

Sunday, the U.S. military airlifted nonessential embassy personnel from Haiti and deployed additional U.S. forces to reinforce embassy security. This operation is in response to escalating gang violence that has prompted hundreds of thousands to flee their homes and threatens to bring down the government.

The State Department said the security situation in Haiti is “unpredictable and dangerous,” and the U.S. Embassy’s ability to assist U.S. citizens is “severely limited.”

The State Department’s travel advisory for Haiti has remained at Level Four — do not travel to Haiti — since July 2023.

“U.S. Embassy Port-au-Prince has been on Ordered Departure status since July 27, 2023. Adjustments during this time are not uncommon, nor do they represent a change in our overall posture,” a State Department spokesperson told VOA.

Concerns from critics

Some critics note that while both Democratic and Republican lawmakers support ensuring a more stable Haiti, some are concerned about the Biden administration’s policy toward the nation.

Ana Rosa Quintana-Lovett, a senior policy director for the Vandenberg Coalition think tank in Washington, said Haiti’s political future is not being driven by Haitians but rather by the international donor community.

She told VOA Monday that Haitian Prime Minister Henry’s “leadership is untenable” and that Henry fails to grasp that he does not have the support of the Haitian people.

“The United States needs to understand that whatever diplomatic messages they are publicly releasing, frankly, are falling on (Henry’s) deaf ears,” she added.

She also pointed out congressional concerns over proposed Kenyan-led multinational forces. “Kenyan forces don’t speak Creole, so how are they going to engage and work with the Haitian National Police? I mean, there are just so many loopholes in the approach,” she said.

Dire situation

Haiti declared a state of emergency on March 3, following attacks by gangs on the main prisons in the capital city of Port-au-Prince. Prime Minister Henry was in Kenya at the time, finalizing a deal for a U.N.-supported peacekeeping mission aimed at addressing Haiti’s gang violence.

The gangs demanded Henry’s resignation. He is reportedly stranded in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico.

Amid escalating gang violence in Port-au-Prince, the Haitian government extended the state of emergency until April 3, and the nighttime curfew until Monday.

According to the International Organization for Migration’s office in Haiti, the violence perpetrated by armed gangs has forced over 360,000 people across Haiti to flee their homes.

UNICEF has warned that critical social services in Haiti are on the verge of collapse, and that the humanitarian response that millions of children and civilians rely on as a last resort has been severely impaired.

Political transition process

Henry was appointed, not elected, after the assassination of President Jovenel Moise in 2021. Henry had initially promised to step down by early February but later said security must be reestablished first to conduct free and fair elections.

On February 29, CARICOM said the Haitian prime minister had committed to organizing general elections by August 31, 2025. CARICOM stated its intention to send an assessment team by March 31 of this year to evaluate electoral needs, aiming to support the planning and establishment of relevant institutions.

Margaret Besheer contributed to this report.

https://www.voanews.com/a/us-commits-100-million-more-to-multinational-force-for-haiti-amid-violence/7523790.html Save to Pocket

Hart school board expected to certify second interim financial report 

date: 2024-03-12, from: The Signal

The William S. Hart Union High School District governing board is expected at Wednesday’s meeting to positively certify the district’s second interim financial report, according to the agenda.  That’s one of many topics that is up for discussion on Wednesday, along with a demographics report and a project that would see the Valencia High School […]

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https://signalscv.com/2024/03/hart-school-board-expected-to-certify-second-interim-financial-report/ Save to Pocket

@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-03-12, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)

What U.S. States Have Legal Weed in 2024?

https://lifehacker.com/where-is-weed-legal-in-the-us Save to Pocket

Mars After Midnight is now available

date: 2024-03-12, from: Playdate Blog

👽 Mars After Midnight, the new game from Lucas Pope—maker of Papers, Please and Return of Obra Dinn—is here. It’s an entrant-screening, mess-tidying, session-planning work simulator. Buy it in Catalog on your Playdate, or on our website. We hope you enjoy your shift at The Off-Colony Community Support Center. Get Mars After Midnight

https://news.play.date/news/mars-after-midnight/ Save to Pocket

Swift on Playdate

date: 2024-03-12, from: Playdate Blog

Here’s some exciting news for Playdate developers: the Swift team’s newly-announced embedded language support means you can now write Playdate games in Swift! Expressive and performant.

https://news.play.date/news/swift-on-playdate/ Save to Pocket

Singapore’s central bank warns AI isn’t ready to handle monetary policy

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

LLMs show promise, but are ‘not yet capable of providing credible explanations for their own predictions’

A senior policymaker at Singapore’s central bank, the Monetary Authority, has suggested that artificial intelligence technology is not yet suitable to inform its policy development work.…

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Pentagon Needs $10B to Replace Weapons Already Sent to Ukraine, Officials Say

date: 2024-03-12, from: VOA News USA

pentagon — The Pentagon has a funding shortfall of about $10 billion for U.S. military weapons needed to replace those already sent to Ukraine, a shortfall that requires additional money from Congress to fix, top Defense Department officials said Monday.

“We don’t foresee a likely alternative outside of the supplemental funding [bill] or having that money added into an appropriations bill in order to achieve the replenishment that we need,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks told reporters.

“We are probably looking at about $10 billion to replace everything, everything that we’ve given in terms of supplies to Ukraine,” one official told VOA.

Pentagon officials expected to get the funding to replenish those stocks in a supplemental request from the Biden administration, which included billions of additional dollars in aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. However, Congress has yet to pass a supplemental aid bill because of arguments on spending and U.S. border security.

The shortfall is tied to the way the Pentagon has accounted for the aid sent to Ukraine. Last June, the Pentagon said it overestimated the value of weapons sent to Ukraine by about $6.2 billion over the past two years.

When calculating its aid package estimates, the Department of Defense was counting the cost incurred to replace the weapons given to Ukraine, while it said it should have been totaling the cost of the systems actually sent, officials told VOA at the time.

The error provided the Pentagon the legal cover needed to send more aid to Ukraine, but the problem remained that more funds would be needed to replenish U.S. military stockpiles with newer, costlier weapons.

Failing to replenish U.S. stockpiles would negatively affect the military’s readiness, another defense official told VOA.

The department still has about $4 billion in authority to send aid to Ukraine, but Pentagon officials have told reporters that sending additional aid without the ability to replenish U.S. weapons stockpiles would be a risk the Defense Department is not willing to take at this time.

But Retired Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery, a defense analyst with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told VOA there are key weapons the U.S. could send Kyiv without compromising military readiness, “because the Army no longer needs them.”

One weapon would be 155-millimeter cluster munitions, which Montgomery says the U.S. doesn’t use in combat planning.

“That would give 155-mm ammunition to the Ukrainians very quickly,” he said.

Another weapon that could be immediately sent without incurring a cost on U.S. military readiness would be M113 armored vehicles.

“We have thousands of them that we’re getting rid of. We could transfer these to Ukraine,” he told VOA.

https://www.voanews.com/a/pentagon-needs-10b-to-replace-weapons-already-sent-to-ukraine-officials-say/7523377.html Save to Pocket

Election Results: Local Races Updated as of Monday, March 11

date: 2024-03-12, from: The Signal

Ballot counts updated, about 230,000 remain for L.A. County  News release   The Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office announced the fifth post-Election Night ballot count update for the March 5 Presidential Primary Election.  The update includes 84,323 ballots processed since the fourth Post-Election Night update. The total election results count is now 1,401,547, which […]

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https://signalscv.com/2024/03/election-results-local-races-updated-as-of-monday-march-11/ Save to Pocket

One person transported after traffic collision involving pedestrian

date: 2024-03-12, from: The Signal

One person was transported to a local hospital due to a traffic collision involving a pedestrian on Monday afternoon in Newhall, according to Los Angeles County Fire Department officials.   First responders received reports of a traffic collision on the 24800 block of Railroad Avenue in Newhall at 3:47 p.m. and arrived at the scene of […]

The post One person transported after traffic collision involving pedestrian   appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.

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Chiquita Canyon Landfill opens applications for relocation assistance

date: 2024-03-12, from: The Signal

L.A. County 5th District Supervisor Kathryn Barger shared a website Monday created by Waste Connections for residents seeking financial assistance from Chiquita Canyon Landfill’s Community Relief Program.  The website mentions funds available for “temporary relocation,” “home hardening” and “increased utility bills,” for the neighborhoods of Val Verde, Live Oak, Hasley Hills, Hillcrest Parkway, Hasley Canyon […]

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Where Heat Pumps Win — And Where They Lose

date: 2024-03-12, from: Heatmap News

Some Americans install heat pumps because they care about climate change. But most people aren’t going to make the switch until it makes sense economically. Pinpointing where and for whom heat pumps are a good investment is surprisingly tricky because U.S. housing is so diverse, with a wide range of building sizes and ages, situated in different local climates with different utility rates.

But for the first time, researchers at the National Renewable Energy Lab have sorted through much of this complexity to get deeper to the truth about the costs, benefits, and challenges of deploying heat pumps in the U.S.

Ultimately, they found that heat pumps are a cost-effective choice in roughly 65 million U.S. homes, or about 60% of the country — and that’s before taking into account available subsidies. But there are substantial economic barriers to widespread adoption.

It’s hard to overstate how detailed the study is. The authors started with a model of 550,000 statistically representative households — basically housing archetypes that typify different combinations of building size, age, occupancy level, local climate, heating usage patterns, and existing heating systems. Each one represents about 242 real-world households. Then the authors looked at how switching to a heat pump would affect greenhouse gas emissions and energy bills across all of these different homes in a wide range of scenarios. They considered heat pumps with lower and higher efficiency ratings, and whether or not the building owner pursued insulation upgrades. They looked at different scenarios for how quickly the grid would decarbonize, how sensitive the results were to energy prices, and how subsidies from the Inflation Reduction Act affect the economics.

The paper has many interesting findings beyond the top-line result. Here are five things that stood out.

1. Heat pumps will lower greenhouse gas emissions immediately, period.

Eric Wilson, a senior research engineer at NREL and the study’s lead author, told me one of his motivations was to try to settle the question of whether heat pumps reduce emissions.

“I see a lot of people saying, well, the grid is still dirty in this state, and maybe it makes sense to wait five years to put in a heat pump because it could increase emissions,” he said.

But he found that in each of the 48 contiguous U.S. states, switching to a heat pump reduces emissions today, even if that heat pump is one of the cheaper, less-efficient models. Heat pumps are just so much more efficient than other options that they still reduce emissions despite today’s relatively dirty grid.

On average, each home could cut between 2.5 to 4.4 tons of carbon over the approximately 16 years the equipment lasts, meaning widespread adoption could result in a 5% to 9% drop in national economy-wide emissions. The effect is much more pronounced in some states, like those in the Northeast, where a lot of homes currently use fossil fuels for heating. A household in Maine that installs a high efficiency model, combined with completing insulation upgrades, would reduce emissions by an average of 11 tons per year — or about the equivalent of taking two cars off the road for a year.

2. The best heat pumps need to get a lot cheaper.

The study breaks down the costs of switching to a heat pump in a few different ways.

First, there’s the up-front costs of upgrading to a heat pump, which are relatively high. A lower-rated, less efficient heat pump system may be a cheaper option than a new furnace or boiler for about 43% of households. But a higher-performing heat pump is almost always more expensive, costing an extra $8,000 to $13,000 before government subsidies (more on them later). That alone might keep heat pumps out of reach for many households.

Next, there’s the potential for bill savings — which is significant. Using state average electricity and gas rates in the winter of 2021 to 2022, the study found that 86% of households can save money on their utility bills by switching to a medium-efficiency heat pump, and a whopping 95% of households will see their bills go down if they install the highest efficiency system.

So in theory, if homeowners do have the extra cash to put down, there’s a chance they could make up for high up-front costs in bill savings over time. But how good a chance?

Putting this all together, the authors looked at what percentage of households that upgraded to heat pumps would see a positive cash flow, calculated as the “net present value,” from the initial investment. Here, the results were less rosy. In many cases, high up-front costs cancel out potential savings. For example, despite the near-certain bill savings from buying one of the most efficient heat pump models, only 21% of households would see an overall economic benefit from the switch.

Still, more than half of all homes would see a positive cash flow by switching to a cheaper, minimum-efficiency heat pump.

Distribution of energy bill savings, upgrade costs, and unsubsidized net present value, relative to a reference equipment replacement scenario, using energy prices from winter 2021 to 2022 Courtesy NREL / Wilson et al., Heat pumps for all? Distributions of the costs and benefits of residential air-source heat pumps in the United States, Joule (2024), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2024.01.022

These findings underscore the importance of bringing down the cost of more efficient heat pump models, which are out of reach for many Americans but can provide significant energy bill savings. The authors suggest that policymakers can help by deploying incentives more strategically and pursuing research on “lower-cost, higher performance, and easier to install equipment.” There also may be opportunities for bulk purchasing and aggregating installations across an apartment building or neighborhood.

3. Heat pumps almost always beat propane, fuel oil, or electric resistance heaters. Natural gas is more complicated.

When it comes to bill savings, the study found that those who have systems that run on propane, fuel oil, or electric resistance heaters will pretty much always lower their bills by switching to a heat pump, no matter how efficient it is. But those who use natural gas are far more likely to lower their bills if they can afford to switch to one of the pricier, better-performing heat pumps — which cuts into the value proposition.

The following maps show the percentage of homes in each state that would see a positive cash flow from switching to a heat pump, looking at those switching from natural gas, electric resistance, or fuel oil and propane, illustrating how the value proposition is most challenging for those using natural gas.

Percentage of homes that currently have air conditioning that will see a positive cash flow from switching to a heat pump from natural gas, electricity, and fuel oil and propane. Courtesy NREL / Wilson et al. 2024

The authors also note that fixed charges on natural gas bills can play a significant role in the economics of switching to a heat pump. Most natural gas utilities charge customers a fixed amount each month, regardless of how much gas they use. If a homeowner switches to heat pumps but continues using gas for cooking, they’ll still have to pay the full fee, which can be as high as $34 a month, whereas homes that fully electrify can avoid these fees.

4. Heat pumps might increase costs for homes without air conditioners.

The results I described in the previous two sections include homes both with and without existing air conditioning systems of some kind. (With the exception of the maps, which only consider homes that have air conditioning already.)

But since heat pumps provide both heating and cooling, the economics are actually quite different for those households who already have air conditioners versus those who don’t. If a household already has A/C, heat pumps appear more favorable, because a family would be able to replace two systems — an air conditioner and a furnace — with just one. If there is no pre-existing air conditioner, the heat pump will not only have higher up-front costs, but it’s more likely to increase energy bills, since the family might start using the heat pump for cooling in addition to heating.

Here are the same maps included in the previous section, but looking just at homes that do not have air conditioning.

Percentage of homes that do not have air conditioning that will see a positive cash flow from switching to a heat pump. The first column is homes that currently use natural gas, the second column is those that us electricity, and the third is those that use fuel oil and propane. Courtesy NREL / Wilson et al. 2024

There are basically zero cases where a house with natural gas heating, and no A/C, will save by switching to a heat pump. However, that result doesn’t take into account the benefits of getting air conditioning for the first time.

“They didn’t include the new value that someone has, especially in a warming world and a world with more heat waves, of now having an air conditioner in your home,” Kevin Kircher, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, told me. “So if you add that in, I think the economics look better.”

5. All signs point to the economics of heat pumps improving.

None of the results in the previous sections take into account the various subsidies that states and the federal government offer for heat pumps. For example, the Inflation Reduction Act included a $2,000 tax credit for heat pumps and an additional $11,500 in rebates for low- and moderate-income households. Both will increase the percentage of households for whom the investment will pencil out.

The study also doesn’t take into account the potential for homes to use smart controls that optimize their systems, or the opportunity for households to participate in demand response programs which will pay them to turn down their thermostats by a few degrees when the grid is taxed. Kircher, the Purdue professor, recently published a study of a real-world house in a cold climate where smart controls reduced heating energy costs by 23-34%.

Finally, one big takeaway from the study was that the results are very sensitive to the price ratio between natural gas rates and electricity rates, and there are reasons to believe that may become more favorable. For example, as more renewable energy is deployed, electricity could become more affordable. Meanwhile, if the U.S. increases exports of liquified natural gas, the cost of domestic natural gas could go up. The study cites a 2022 survey of oil and gas executives which found that 69% expect ’’the age of inexpensive U.S. natural gas to end by year-end 2025.”

“Big modeling like this entails a lot of assumptions about the future that are really hard to pin down with any real precision,” said Kircher. “But I think there’s cause for optimism there.”

https://heatmap.news/economy/heat-pumps-national-renewable-energ-lab Save to Pocket

White House and lawmakers increase pressure on UnitedHealth to ease providers’ pain

date: 2024-03-12, updated: 2024-03-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

US senator calls cyber attack ‘inexcusable,’ calls for mandatory security rules

The Biden administration and US lawmakers are turning up the pressure on UnitedHealth group to ease medical providers’ pain after the ransomware attack on Change Healthcare, by expediting payments to hospitals, physicians and pharmacists – among other tactics.…

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Volvo Cars says its new partner will reduce its EVs’ charging time by 30%

date: 2024-03-12, from: Electrek Feed

Volvo Cars has partnered with Imperial College London spinoff Breathe Battery Technologies to reduce its EVs’ charging time by 30%.

more…

https://electrek.co/2024/03/11/volvo-cars-reduce-ev-charging-time-30-percent/ Save to Pocket