News gathered 2024-08-28
(date: 2024-08-28 08:22:41)
NASA’s billion-dollar launcher is behind schedule and burning cash
date: 2024-08-28, updated: 2024-08-28, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Stop us if you’ve heard this one before
NASA is receiving yet another Moon-related kicking. This time, it is over the Mobile Launcher 2 (ML-2) project, on which the agency plans to assemble and launch the beefier versions of its Space Launch System.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/28/nasa_ml2_oig/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-28, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Help Democrats hold the Senate and win back the House by supporting these 6 Senate and 29 House races.
https://www.dferlist.org/page/WhitneyList
New NASA Study Tallies Carbon Emissions From Massive Canadian Fires
date: 2024-08-28, from: NASA breaking news
Extreme wildfires like these will continue to have a large impact on global climate. Stoked by Canada’s warmest and driest conditions in decades, extreme forest fires in 2023 released about 640 million metric tons of carbon, NASA scientists have found. That’s comparable in magnitude to the annual fossil fuel emissions of a large industrialized nation. […]
https://www.nasa.gov/earth/new-nasa-study-tallies-carbon-emissions-from-massive-canadian-fires/
The parents are not alright, surgeon general says
date: 2024-08-28, from: Marketplace Morning Report
This morning, the U.S. surgeon general issued a public health advisory regarding the mental health of parents. Vivek Murthy says parents are dealing with significant stresses that prior generations didn’t have to deal with, and they need more support from the government and their employers. Plus, dude, we’re getting the band back together! A look at at the economics behind why Oasis is going on a reunion tour.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-28, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Believe it or not, there was a time when it was controversial to think that the web would be two-way, meaning that normal people would be able to publish. Here's the outline of a speech I gave in Y2K at an XML conference in San Jose.
http://scripting.com/davenet/2000/03/02/theTwowayweb.html
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-28, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Get set for the beatification of the original computer mouse.
https://newatlas.com/collectibles/englebart-mouse-mother-of-all-demos-auction/
Eclipse Soundscapes AudioMoth Donations Will Study Nature at Night
date: 2024-08-28, from: NASA breaking news
During the April 8, 2024 total solar eclipse, approximately 770 AudioMoth recording devices were used to capture sound data as part of the Eclipse Soundscapes Project — a multisensory participatory science (also known as “citizen science”) project that is studying how eclipses impact life on Earth. Following the eclipse, participants had the option to keep […]
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-08-28, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
Godot now has a native Metal backend!
No more emulated Vulcan on Apple platforms!
Kudos to @stuartcarnie for this amazing work.
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/113040140160875939
‘Uncertainty’ drives LinkedIn to migrate from CentOS to Azure Linux
date: 2024-08-28, updated: 2024-08-28, from: Liam Proven’s articles at the Register
Significant improvements to Microsoft’s in-house Linux may follow
<p>Microsoft's in-house professional networking site is moving to Microsoft's in-house Linux. This could mean that big changes are coming for the former CBL-Mariner distro.</p> https://go.theregister.com/i/cfa/https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/28/linkedin_azure_linux/
‘Uncertainty’ drives LinkedIn to migrate from CentOS to Azure Linux
date: 2024-08-28, updated: 2024-08-28, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Significant improvements to Microsoft’s in-house Linux may follow
Microsoft’s in-house professional networking site is moving to Microsoft’s in-house Linux. This could mean that big changes are coming for the former CBL-Mariner distro.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/28/linkedin_azure_linux/
20,000-Year-Old Columbian Mammoth Bones Discovered in Texas
date: 2024-08-28, from: Smithsonian Magazine
While fishing at an undisclosed lake, Sabrina Solomon slipped and fell—and came face to face with the remains
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/columbian-mammoth-bones-discovered-texas-180984979/
Podcast: Is the Arrest of Telegram Founder Pavel Durov an Attack on Encryption?
date: 2024-08-28, from: 404 Media Group
The 404 Media podcast discusses France’s crackdown on Telegram.
This Is Doom Running on a Diffusion Model
date: 2024-08-28, from: 404 Media Group
GameNGen is an interesting proof-of-concept for a diffusion model-based “game engine.”
https://www.404media.co/this-is-doom-running-on-a-diffusion-model/
@Tomosino’s Mastodon feed (date: 2024-08-28, from: Tomosino’s Mastodon feed)
Things you notice when working from a coffee shop abroad as an expat:
- Americans are loud.
That’s it.
https://tilde.zone/@tomasino/113040044604323367
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-08-28, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
I didn’t think there was structural ecosystem support for a viable VSCode fork.
But Cursor proved me wrong, they have enough gravity pull that they might become the first viable fork of it, and I am glad this layer of the onion has been peeled.
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/113040020217465629
Young people from conflict regions pledge to work for peace
date: 2024-08-28, from: VOA News USA
In the summer of 1993, 46 Israeli, Palestinian, Egyptian and American kids gathered at a camp in the state of Maine. The camp was the brainchild of journalist and author John Wallach, who wanted to provide children of war the chance to build a more secure future. Jeff Swicord reports. Videographer: Karina Chaudhury
https://www.voanews.com/a/young-people-from-conflict-regions-pledge-to-work-for-peace/7762124.html
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-28, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Note to the Harris campaign: This Google search should return a complete list of your ads. Or a pointer to a site with a complete list of your ads. I want to make sure everyone who follows me sees every one of them! Let us help you help us.
https://www.google.com/search?q=site:youtube.com+harris+ads&tbm=nws
Microsoft partners beware: Action Pack to be retired in 2025
date: 2024-08-28, updated: 2024-08-28, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Windows giant continues march away from on-prem and into a cloudy future
Microsoft is to discontinue the Microsoft Action Pack and Microsoft Learning Pack on January 21, 2025, sending partners off to potentially pricier and cloudier options.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/28/microsoft_action_pack_2025/
Appliance and Tractor Companies Lobby Against Giving the Military the Right to Repair
date: 2024-08-28, from: 404 Media Group
The U.S. military deals with the same repair monopolies consumers do.
Hubble Traces Star Formation in a Nearby Nebula
date: 2024-08-28, from: NASA breaking news
NGC 261 blooms a brilliant ruby red against a myriad of stars in this new image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Discovered on Sept. 5, 1826 by Scottish astronomer James Dunlop, this nebula is located in one of the Milky Way’s closest galactic companions, the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). The ionized gas blazing from within […]
From Copilot to Copirate: How data thieves could hijack Microsoft’s chatbot
date: 2024-08-28, updated: 2024-08-28, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Prompt injection, ASCII smuggling, and other swashbuckling attacks on the horizon
Microsoft has fixed flaws in Copilot that allowed attackers to steal users’ emails and other personal data by chaining together a series of LLM-specific attacks, beginning with prompt injection.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/28/microsoft_copilot_copirate/
See a Mysterious Postcard That Was Delivered 121 Years Late
date: 2024-08-28, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The handwritten note, which bears a 1903 postmark, recently arrived at a building society in Wales
Lego’s New Plan to Ditch Fossil Fuels
date: 2024-08-28, from: Heatmap News
Current conditions: Torrential rain caused a dam to burst in eastern Sudan, killing at least 30 people • Brazil’s environment minister said the country is “at war” with wildfires • The scorching heat that has blanketed the Midwest this week is shifting east.
THE TOP FIVE
- 3 takeaways from the DOE’s energy jobs report
The U.S. Department of Energy’s annual Energy and Employment report is out today. It’s a compendium of information on employment and job growth across the many energy-related sectors of the economy, and contains hundreds of data points on which job areas grew, which shrank, and by how much in 2023. The report “is perhaps one of the current administration’s last opportunities to prove that President Biden’s — and, by extension, Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’ — policies to stimulate the U.S. economy with investments in clean energy are working,” wrote Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo. Here are her three takeaways:
- The total number of clean energy jobs grew 4.2% last year, double the rate of job growth in the rest of the energy industry as well as in the economy at large. It’s also up from 3.9% the year before. The flipside: Fossil fuel jobs still accounted for 44% of new employment. In other words, it looks like fossil fuel-related energy fields are not just standing still, they are growing.
- The unionization rate for clean energy jobs surpassed that of the energy sector as a whole last year for the first time. The report attributes the rise to an overall increase in construction and utility employment — two industries that already have high union density.
- Diversity in energy jobs remains abysmal. Women held just 26% of energy jobs last year, despite making up 47% of the national workforce. Black workers are also particularly underrepresented in the energy sector, holding just 9% of energy jobs compared to 13% of the job market as a whole.
- Sunrise Movement campaign for Harris will target 1.5 million
Americans
The Sunrise Movement, a climate change group led by young people, this week launched an effort to reach out to 1.5 million Americans about voting for Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris. The campaign will rely on 3,000 volunteers to contact voters in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania to remind them of the differences between Harris and her Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, on the issue of climate change. But the Sunrise Movement won’t go so far as to offer its endorsement to Harris just yet – if it ever does. It’s waiting for her to flesh out her climate policies before making a decision. For what it’s worth, the group never officially endorsed President Biden.
“Young climate voters could decide this election,” Sunrise communications director Stevie O’Hanlon said in a statement. “The Harris-Walz ticket means millions more young voters are tuning in and considering voting. We’re going all-out to reach those voters and mobilize our generation to defeat Trump this November. And it’s why we will continue to urge the Harris campaign to put forward a bold vision that will energize young voters.”
- Lego announces plan to stop using fossil fuels to make plastic toy
bricks
Lego, the world’s largest toymaker, announced today that it will remove fossil fuels from its plastic bricks by 2032. The plan is to make toys using a new kind of renewable and recycled plastic made from biowaste, like oil or fat discarded from the food industry. This is more expensive than using cheap and plentiful fossil fuels, and the company will pay up to 70% more for the certified renewable resin in hopes that this will spur on production of recycled and renewable plastics. Lego will dig into operating profit to pay for the added expense rather than hiking prices, CEO Niels Christiansen told the Financial Times. Thanks in part to the company’s partnership with the makers of the Fortnite video game, profits in the first half of 2024 were up a record 26%, even as the broader toy market declined by 1%. Most virgin plastics are made from fossil fuels, and plastic production is projected to be a new growth market for oil in the years to come.
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- Report: Zero-carbon sources accounted for 40% of global electricity
generation last year
Last year marked the first time that zero-carbon energy sources comprised more than 40% of the world’s electricity generation, according to new data from BloombergNEF. Here’s the actual breakdown: 57% fossil fuels, 24% nuclear and hydroelectric, 17% renewables like wind and solar. More than 90% of new energy capacity added last year came from wind and solar, up from 83% in 2022. Fossil fuels were just 6% of new capacity. “We have seen a step-change in renewable energy compared to a few years before,” said Sofia Maia, energy transition analyst at BloombergNEF. “There’s now no question this is the largest source of new power generation, wherever you go.”
- More and more U.S. schools install solar power
The amount of solar power installed at K-12 schools in America has quadrupled since 2014, Electrek reported, citing a new report from clean energy nonprofit Generation180. Last year alone, more than 800 schools added solar panels. The amount of solar energy generated by K-12 schools in the country is enough to power 330,000 households. These schools save money on energy bills, and many redirect that funding into student and community programs. The top states in terms of school solar capacity are California, New Jersey, Arizona, Massachusetts, and Connecticut.
THE KICKER
China’s efforts to reduce air pollution over the last decade or so have resulted in the average citizen’s lifespan increasing by two years.
https://heatmap.news/culture/lego-plastic-bricks-fossil-fuel
Missing Fujitsu PCs? It’s back with a fresh lineup of 16 models
date: 2024-08-28, updated: 2024-08-28, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Business left Europe last year, but remains ticking away
Fujitsu this week announced 16 new business notebooks, desktops, tablets, and workstations.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/28/fujitsu_announces_16_pcs/
Will it be “chip, chip, hooray” later today?
date: 2024-08-28, from: Marketplace Morning Report
The stock for semiconductor chipmaker Nvidia has skyrocketed with the growth of generative artificial intelligence like ChatGPT. But investors have noticed that the actual profits from AI have tended to lag the hype. Today, Nvidia will release its profits and we’ll learn how much of this underlying hardware AI companies are still buying. And later: how Aug. 28 keeps showing up at turning points in the Civil Rights Movement.
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/will-it-be-chip-chip-hooray-later-today
Enterprise SAP users split between on-prem and cloud as migration challenges loom
date: 2024-08-28, updated: 2024-08-28, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
This is despite the German vendor’s preferred upgrade path
There is an even split for large enterprise customers of SAP ERP systems between on-prem and the public cloud – the German vendor’s preferred upgrade path – according to NTT Data, a major global SI and partner.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/28/sap_on_prem_cloud_split/
U.K.’s prime minister makes landmark post-Brexit visit to Berlin
date: 2024-08-28, from: Marketplace Morning Report
From the BBC World Service: Sir Keir Starmer is meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. It’s the start of a landmark post-Brexit visit to Berlin, where the aim is to reset the United Kingdom’s relationship with Germany and the broader European Union. Also on the show: halted Toyota production in Japan, an oil leak in the Red Sea and a U.K.-based company that sees value in bringing onboard older workers.
As the Apple Watch turns 10, disabled users demand real accessibility
date: 2024-08-28, updated: 2024-08-28, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Forget wrist acrobatics, we need smarter wake word detection and on-device voice recognition
Opinion Apple is gearing up for its annual fall event, where new iPhone and Apple Watch models traditionally make their debut. This year marks a significant milestone: It’s been 10 years since the launch of the original Apple Watch. To commemorate this anniversary, the tech giant is expected to unveil a special edition, unofficially named the Apple Watch X.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/28/apple_watch_accessibility/
US clean energy jobs growth rate double that of overall jobs, report says
date: 2024-08-28, from: VOA News USA
Washington — Jobs in the U.S. clean energy industry in 2023 grew at more than double the rate of the country’s overall jobs, and unionization in clean energy surpassed for the first time the rate in the wider energy industry, the Energy Department said on Wednesday.
Employment in clean energy businesses - including wind, solar, nuclear and battery storage — rose by 142,000 jobs, or 4.2% last year, up from a rise of 3.9% in 2022, the U.S. Energy and Employment Report said. The rate was above the overall U.S. job growth rate of 2% in 2023.
Unionization rates in clean energy hit 12.4%, more than the 11% in the overall energy business, it said. That was driven by growth in construction and utility industries and after legislation passed in 2022 including the bipartisan CHIPS Act and President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, the department said.
Construction jobs in clean energy, driven by the legislation and private-sector investments, “is expected to continue for decades to build out the clean energy infrastructure that we need,” Betony Jones, the Energy Department’s head of energy jobs, told reporters in a call. While unionized members “might move from project to project, there is continuity of that work in order for workers to make a career in that industry,” she said.
Employment in the utility scale and rooftop solar industries grew 5.3% adding more than 18,000 jobs, it said. The solar installation industry in California, the country’s most populous state, says it has lost more than 17,000 jobs due to high interest rates and the state’s lowering of net meter rates that allow customers to be credited for excess power their rooftop panels generate.
New jobs in fossil fuels were mixed. The natural gas workforce grew by more than 77,000 or 13.3%, while jobs in petroleum fell more than 44,000 or 6%. Coal jobs fell nearly 8,500 or 5.3% as power generation continued to switch from coal to gas, wind and solar. White House climate adviser Ali Zaidi told reporters that the report showed the administration’s commitment to pursue both energy and climate security.
Energy remained a mostly male workforce with an average of 73% in 2023 compared with the national workforce average that was 53% male, the same numbers as in the previous year. Women accounted for about half the energy jobs added in 2022, but only 17% of the jobs added in 2023, the report said.
3 Takeaways From the Department of Energy’s Big New Jobs Report
date: 2024-08-28, from: Heatmap News
The Biden administration has struggled to convince Americans that it has done much of anything to improve the economy. Despite a strong labor market, low unemployment, and steady GDP growth, a recent Gallup poll found that 70% of Americans believe the economy is “getting worse.” As recently as three months ago, about half the country was under the impression that unemployment is at a 50-year high, despite the true rate being at a nearly 50-year low, according to a poll conducted for The Guardian. Prior to the Democratic National Convention earlier this month, poll results from ABC News and the Washington Post showed voters had more faith in Donald Trump to steward the economy than they did in Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.
A new report published Wednesday is perhaps one of the current administration’s last opportunities to prove that Biden’s — and, by extension, Harris’ — policies to stimulate the U.S. economy with investments in clean energy are working. The U.S. Department of Energy’s annual Energy and Employment report, a compendium of information on employment and job growth across the many energy-related sectors of the economy, contains hundreds of data points on which job areas grew, which shrank, and by how much in 2023. There is also a 300-plus page addendum with data on every state, illustrating which industries are taking off where. As the Deputy Secretary of Energy David Turk said on a press call this week, it is the “best snapshot we have of who works in the energy field and what jobs they’re performing.”
The snapshot shows that policies like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act are indeed turning the massive ship that is the energy economy, and doing so in a way that creates good jobs, albeit slowly, and in fits and starts. Here are three themes from the data that stuck out.
- Clean energy jobs are multiplying. So are fossil fuel jobs.
The report highlights major growth in clean energy jobs, which it defines as those relating to “net-zero emissions aligned technologies.” That includes renewable energy, nuclear, non-fossil energy efficiency, zero emissions vehicles, and carbon capture, utilization, and storage. In 2023, these fields accounted for more than half — 56% — of new jobs in the energy sector as a whole. The total number of clean energy jobs grew 4.2% last year, which is double the rate of job growth in the rest of the energy industry as well as in the economy at large. It’s also up from 3.9% the year before.
One of the fastest growing fields was low-emissions vehicles, which added nearly 25,000 jobs last year, with the majority of them (17,000) in battery electric vehicles. EV charging jobs also saw a major increase of 25%, although the field is still small, employing fewer than 3,000 people. Roles on renewable energy projects also expanded significantly, accounting for 79% of net new employment in electric power generation, including more than 18,000 new jobs in solar.
There’s a flipside to these numbers. Although we added more clean energy jobs than fossil fuel energy jobs last year, the latter still accounted for 44% of new employment. In other words, it looks like fossil fuel-related energy fields are not just standing still, they are growing. In some cases, this may not be the full story — for example, jobs working on gasoline and diesel vehicles grew more than those working on EVs in absolute terms, adding more than 39,000 positions last year. Many of those were likely maintenance and repair jobs, however, which saw more growth overall than manufacturing.
But in other sectors, the numbers are trending in the other direction. Coal power jobs declined, but at a lower rate than in 2022. Coal mining jobs, on the other hand, increased by 3.4%, which is more than three times what employers anticipated when the DOE surveyed them last year. Now these employers are predicting coal mining jobs will grow again by more than 9% this year. As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin has reported, coal plant retirements have slowed due to concerns about grid reliability and soaring electricity demand.
White House National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi acknowledged the opposing trends during the press conference, noting that President Biden has worked to bring down gas prices and to “have the supplies that we need to run the economy” even as he pursues economy-wide decarbonization. “I think what you see in the jobs report is a reflection of the commitment to pursue energy and climate security, to manage our short term needs and the long term imperative,” he said.
- Union density in clean energy is increasing
The unionization rate for clean energy jobs surpassed that of the energy sector as a whole last year for the first time, with 12.4% of clean energy workers represented by a union, compared to 11% in the entire energy sector. The report attributes the rise to an overall increase in construction and utility employment — two industries that already have high union density.
My own recent reporting found that the labor provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act seem to be working to improve the quality of clean energy jobs and expand opportunities for union labor. Union leaders told me they are seeing more opportunities in renewables — particularly in solar — than before, and that their apprenticeship programs are growing.
That may be contributing to another trend identified by the new report: Employers in all energy fields reported that it was not as difficult to find workers as they said it was the year before.
“We’re really encouraged by the high rates of unionization in clean energy,” Betony Jones, the director of the Office of Energy Jobs, said on the press call this week, “because good jobs attract workers, and better jobs attract better workers. The data show that employers are having an easier time finding qualified workers, so these two things go hand in hand.”
Many of the gains have been in clean energy construction, jobs that are inherently short-term. But Jones pushed back on that distinction. “The construction activity that’s being driven by BIL and IRA and private sector investments across the country is expected to continue for decades,” she said. “So while workers might move from project to project, there is continuity of that work in order for workers to make a career in that industry.”
Unions have also made some inroads in manufacturing. Earlier this year, the United Auto Workers ratified a contract with Ultium Cells to produce EV batteries in Ohio. And earlier this month, the United Steelworkers Union reached a neutrality agreement with Convalt Energy, a solar manufacturer planning to open a new factory in New York. That means the company has agreed not to interfere with workers’ efforts to unionize.
- Diversity in energy jobs is still abysmal
When I was reporting on the shortage of residential electricians in the country a few years ago, I was shocked to learn that women made up less than 2% of the field. But the issue is not unique to electricians, and its effects aren’t limited to women. Clean energy jobs — and energy jobs more generally — are largely performed by white men. Despite many new efforts going on around the country to diversify the workforce, not much progress has been made.
Women held just 26% of energy jobs last year, despite making up 47% of the national workforce. When new jobs came along, an even smaller proportion, 17%, were filled by women. That’s way worse than the previous year, when half of new energy jobs were filled by women. Black workers are also particularly underrepresented in the energy sector, holding just 9% of energy jobs compared to 13% of the job market as a whole.
Other underrepresented groups were able to gain more market share. Hispanic and Latino workers filled about a third of new energy jobs and now make up 18% of the sector, compared with 19% of the national workforce.
Cynthia Finley, the vice president for workforce and strategic innovation at the Interstate Renewable Energy Council, told me that increasing diversity in the energy workforce requires a two-pronged approach — helping employers understand how to find workers from other demographics, but also bringing awareness about these jobs to a more diverse population. As more money from the Inflation Reduction Act — such as the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund that will be rolling out over the next year — flows to communities for clean energy, her group aims to seize the opportunity.
“Our hope is to be in those same underrepresented communities that the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund attempts to serve,” she said, “and to bring the career awareness and the outreach and exploration about these jobs and connect them to quality training and education at the same time. So not only are we getting homes that are more energy efficient, but the workforce comes from these same communities as well.”
https://heatmap.news/economy/2023-energy-and-employment-report
Where the computer industry went wrong – the early hits
date: 2024-08-28, updated: 2024-08-28, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
A personal collection of the memorable missteps and fumbles
Part 1: The eight-bit era You’ll find below an informal roundup of the slip-ups and missteps that stick in the mind of The Reg FOSS desk, from the dawn of the microcomputer industry onwards. We are certain that we’ve missed plenty – let us know your favorites.…
Where the computer industry went wrong – the early hits
date: 2024-08-28, updated: 2024-08-28, from: Liam Proven’s articles at the Register
Part 1: The eight-bit era A personal collection of the memorable missteps and fumbles
<p>You'll find below an informal roundup of the slip-ups and missteps that stick in the mind of The Reg FOSS desk, from the dawn of the microcomputer industry onwards. We are certain that we've missed plenty – let us know your favorites.</p> How 2025 Could Reshape Climate Policy — Whoever Wins the Election
date: 2024-08-28, from: Heatmap News
It’s time to start talking about a big year for climate politics and policy: 2025. No matter who wins this fall’s elections, next year’s executive and legislative climate policy will be huge for America’s decarbonization strategy. Congress is all but guaranteed to negotiate over key parts of the country’s tax code, and whoever controls the White House will have to finalize the Inflation Reduction Act’s last few big programs.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Jesse and Rob are joined by
Josh
Freed, who leads Third Way’s climate and energy program, to game
out the most likely scenarios. If Trump wins with a Republican Congress,
will they repeal the Inflation Reduction Act? What if Trump wins but
Democrats take the House? And what would Kamala Harris do with a
trifecta? Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive
editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems
engineering at Princeton University.
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:
Jesse Jenkins: Where climate policy succeeds the most, in my view, is where it sits in an intersectional role — where it is not climate policy as purely climate policy, but rather climate policy as something that is tied to a broader agenda. And one that — as you articulated, Josh — at least in rhetoric, is something that is bipartisan. It’s a prior set of priorities, shared across the political divide, to see American companies do well, and to see America play a strong role in the world stage. I think the details of that are obviously very important, and there’s a lot of different ways that could go.
Josh Freed: And Jesse, one other point I think you made that’s really important is, because of the transformative nature of the Inflation Reduction Act, and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and even Justice40 and everything else that we’ve seen, climate policy is an underpinning of so much of whatever the next Democratic administration, a Harris administration, would do that, rhetorically, it may not even be mentioned that much. We didn’t hear Kamala Harris discuss climate change extensively last night in her remarks. However, when she talks about security, when she talks about economic opportunity, when she talks about the strength of the American economy, it is driven in by what we are seeing happen and what happens next on all of the mechanisms that the Inflation Reduction Act created, and on the potential for us to get permitting reform, whether it’s later this year or next year.
It’s this very interesting next step for us in climate and clean energy policy, where it is just implicit that it’s happening rather than something that has to be explicitly talked about as much politically. And so, you know, this isn’t something where we necessarily need to have a President Harris marching around the country, talking about it explicitly, because people are going to see and feel that it’s going to look different, and therefore it can be weaved into whatever new way forward she is describing because people will see their communities looking and feeling differently than they did four, six, eight, 10 years ago. If I think of some of the other components that we were talking about — permitting reform gets unlocked. Some of the challenges that we’re seeing because deployment takes a little while, because delivery of grants takes a little while, get unstuck even more. And she provides that broader vision.
And I think that one of the things is that, Joe Biden, when he ran in 2020, talked about himself in somewhat the context of a transitional figure. And he bridged the old economy and a different way of doing things than we do in 2022, 2024, with what the future looks like. And Kamala really is positioning herself as a new generation and next chapter of leadership. And so if you see the benefits of it — and she talks about what’s happening within some sort of broader context, which I think is going to have more of a care economy focus, a very muscular American foreign policy focus — again, it’s going to be implicit in all of that, and there will be evidence of it.
Robinson Meyer: I guess I feel like I can imagine this as a campaign line, coming out maybe later in October, as the Fed’s going to cut, inflation should hopefully moderate, the labor market hopefully won’t soften too much, and then you can start to make an affirmative case about the economy. I think one issue that Harris has had broadly here is that she has to signal that she understands that voters are not happy with the current state of the economy.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Watershed’s climate data engine helps companies measure and reduce their emissions, turning the data they already have into an audit-ready carbon footprint backed by the latest climate science. Get the sustainability data you need in weeks, not months. Learn more at watershed.com.
As a global leader in PV and ESS solutions, Sungrow invests heavily in research and development, constantly pushing the boundaries of solar and battery inverter technology. Discover why Sungrow is the essential component of the clean energy transition by visiting sungrowpower.com.
Antenna Group helps you connect with customers, policymakers, investors, and strategic partners to influence markets and accelerate adoption. Visit antennagroup.com to learn more.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
https://heatmap.news/podcast/shift-key-s2-e3-third-way
Rocket Factory Augsburg breaks down the SaxaVord blowout
date: 2024-08-28, updated: 2024-08-28, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
‘Enjoy the footage. It has cost us quite some money to generate’
With impressive speed and candor, Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA) has provided an update on the anomaly that caused last week’s rocket firing at SaxaVord in Shetland, Scotland, to end explosively.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/28/rocket_factory_augsburg_saxavord/
Sols 4287-4288: Back on the Road
date: 2024-08-28, from: NASA breaking news
Earth planning date: Monday, Aug. 26, 2024 Today’s planning day was a good example of how our team comes together to make quick decisions based on new information and science priorities. The original intent of today’s plan was to perform contact science on some interesting bright-toned rubbly rocks in our workspace, seen in the image […]
https://science.nasa.gov/blog/sols-4287-4288-back-on-the-road/
Woman uses AirTags to nab alleged parcel-pinching scum
date: 2024-08-28, updated: 2024-08-28, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Phew! Consumer-grade tracking devices are good for more than finding your keys and stalking
Theft of packages is an ongoing problem, so one California woman tried a high tech solution to the problem – and her use of Apple’s consumer-grade AirTags tracking devices led to two arrests.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/28/airtag_mail_arrests/
Gartner warns Omnissa – formerly VMware’s end-user compute biz – represents new risks
date: 2024-08-28, updated: 2024-08-28, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Weak roadmap, tricky migration path, and Broadcom dependencies add up to uncertainty
Analyst firm Gartner has advised customers of Omnissa – the company spun out from VMware’s end-user compute business – that they need to take stock because the new org isn’t yet able to offer a strong roadmap.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/28/gartner_omnissa_vmware_euc_strategy/
Big Tech: Malaysia won’t let us set our own rules and that’s not fair and makes us grumpy
date: 2024-08-28, updated: 2024-08-28, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Asia Internet Coalition asks for rethink of social media licensing law with the old ‘You’ll scare away investors’ line – a week after AWS opened a region
The Asia Internet Coalition (AIC), a lobby group whose members include Google, Meta, Amazon, Twitter (aka X), LinkedIn, Apple, and other Big Tech players, has called on the prime minister of Malaysia to rethink laws requiring social media and instant messaging providers to secure operating licenses.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/28/big_tech_wants_to_set_own_rules/
Salmon will soon swim freely in the Klamath River for first time in a century
date: 2024-08-28, from: VOA News USA
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-08-28, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
The standardized .NET intermediate language is a fabulous tool in too many different ways, but it also imposes tremendous friction on the design space.
Reading this Swift proposal is fascinating because it shows the additional design space that is much easier to reach:
https://forums.swift.org/t/integer-generic-parameters/74181
I would out actors and modern swift concurrency on that bucket as well.
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/113037259117761801
What might Kamala Harris’ Mideast policy look like?
date: 2024-08-28, from: VOA News USA
Washington — The White House welcomed on Tuesday the rescue of an Israeli hostage abducted October 7 by Hamas and said a Gaza cease-fire deal is being finalized.
But even if an agreement is reached, a truce is unlikely to extend beyond the six weeks of phase one of the three-phase deal. The next U.S. administration will still inherit the role of managing tensions in the region.
Since becoming the Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris has aimed to strike a balance between reaffirming U.S. support for Israel and advocating for Palestinian humanitarian needs — in essence, signaling a continuation of President Joe Biden’s policies on the Israel-Hamas war and, more broadly, the Middle East.
Harris summed up her position in her acceptance speech as the Democratic presidential nominee at the party’s convention in Chicago.
“President Biden and I are working to end this war such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination,” she said.
Democrats are enthusiastic about Harris, even though she has not yet laid out her own policies. And unlike Biden, a longtime member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, most of Harris’ exposure to foreign policy was during her tenure as vice president.
Not having “foreign policy baggage” might benefit Harris in the eyes of Democratic voters, said Natasha Hall, senior fellow with the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Hall pointed out that in October 2002, Biden was one of 77 senators who gave President George W. Bush the authority to use force in Iraq, a decision that eventually became a liability for Biden, much as his staunch support for Israel has become the most divisive issue in his own party.
Adviser’s influence
Those looking to see whether Harris’ Mideast policy will diverge from Biden’s can look to her national security adviser, Phillip Gordon, who is expected to remain in the role if she is elected. He would be the principal adviser to the president on all national security issues, including foreign policy.
“Phil Gordon is the type of adviser that colors in the lines,” Hall told VOA. “He’s the kind of person that I think very much is sort of old-fashioned American foreign policy.”
Gordon was against ousting Iraqi President Saddam Hussein from power in 2003. He chronicled American efforts to overthrow leaders in the Middle East in his 2020 book, “Losing the Long Game: The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East.”
“The U.S. policy debate about the Middle East suffers from the fallacy that there is an external American solution to every problem, even when decades of painful experience suggest that this is not the case,” he wrote. “And regime change is the worst ‘solution.’”
Such an outlook would make a Harris administration “very, very cautious to deal assertively with Iran,” said Jonathan Rynhold, head of the Political Studies Department at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University.
From an Israeli perspective, however, Harris’ direct involvement in the administration’s recent decision to deploy more military assets to the Middle East to deter Iran is good news, Rynhold told VOA.
“If that is the policy that she goes on to adopt, then that crosses the minimal threshold of what Israel needs on Iran,” he said. “It may not be what Israel desires, which is a more forceful approach, but it is not a passive one.”
Current Harris aides have told VOA that she intends to stay on the path that Biden has laid out: working beyond a cease-fire toward a two-state solution without sacrificing Israel’s security.
Harris’ former national security adviser while she was in the Senate, Halie Soifer, agreed.
“The vice president and the president have supported U.S. military assistance to Israel, not just for the existing agreement that we have with Israel,” said Soifer, who is now the CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America. “But also an increase this year because of their security needs,” she told VOA
Generational and personal background
Biden’s generation, with a more visceral sense of the Holocaust, views Israel as a tiny democracy surrounded by hostile Arab powers. People of Harris’ generation and younger see Israel for what it is today: a thriving democracy and the region’s top military power. While Biden and Harris may share the same goal for Israel’s security, there’s not the same emotional resonance, Rynhold said.
Younger Americans “don’t remember a time when Jews and Israel were extremely vulnerable,” he said. “So they don’t have a same sense of that continuing vulnerability that President Biden really has.”
And for the president, Israel is integral to the story of America’s role in the world.
“America is there to prevent the Holocaust. America is there to support democracies, and Israel is central to his way of understanding that role,” Rynhold said.
If elected, Harris would become the first person to hold the highest office in the land whose parents are both immigrants. Barack Obama’s father was born in Kenya, and Donald Trump’s mother was born in the U.K. Harris’ father came from Jamaica and her mother, from India.
Unlike Biden, who often underscores that he is a Zionist, a loaded term often viewed with scorn in many parts of the world, Harris may be more sensitive to views from the Global South.
In a 2018 speech to an Indian American group, Harris spoke fondly of childhood visits to the home of her maternal grandfather, P.V. Gopalan, describing him as someone who had fought for “freedom and for justice and for independence.”
“She is aware of how the rest of the world may feel about the Middle East, about neocolonialism, neoimperialism,” Hall said. “I really hope that she has the opportunity to bring those experiences to bear if she becomes the president.”
But it’s hard to tell what a Harris doctrine would eventually look like.
“What she says now is directed to winning an election and keeping the Democratic Party together,” Rynhold said.
And since the party is evenly split between those sympathetic to Israel and those sympathetic to the Palestinians, she must express platitudes, he said.
“And that’s what she has done.”
https://www.voanews.com/a/what-might-kamala-harris-mideast-policy-look-like-/7760769.html
Chinese broadband satellites may be Beijing’s flying spying censors, think tank warns
date: 2024-08-28, updated: 2024-08-28, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Ground stations are the perfect place for the Great Firewall to block things China finds unpleasant
The multiple constellations of broadband-beaming satellites planned by Chinese companies could conceivably run the nation’s “Great Firewall” content censorship system, according to think tank The Australian Strategic Policy Institute. And if they do, using the services will be dangerous.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/28/aspi_china_satellite_broadband_risk/
CNN to interview Harris, Walz on Thursday
date: 2024-08-28, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/cnn-to-interview-harris-walz-on-thursday-/7759735.html
Migrating KeyboardKit to Swift 6 Language Mode
date: 2024-08-28, from: Michael Tsai
Douglas Hill (tweet): Over the weekend, I updated KeyboardKit to full data race safety with Swift 6 language mode. KeyboardKit is my open source framework that‘s the easiest way to add comprehensive hardware keyboard control to an iPad, iPhone, or Mac Catalyst app.This is a great test case because KeyboardKit is a small UI framework […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/08/27/migrating-keyboardkit-to-swift-6-language-mode/
Marlinspike on Agile and Security
date: 2024-08-28, from: Michael Tsai
Brandon Vigliarolo (Hacker News): Marlinspike opened the second day of Black Hat with a talk that was ostensibly supposed to be a fireside chat with Black Hat founder Jeff Moss, but the Signal founder stole the show with an opening chat laying out a case for reclaiming the “magic” of software development that’s been lost […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/08/27/marlinspike-on-agile-and-security/
The NeXT IPO That Never Happened
date: 2024-08-28, from: Michael Tsai
Hansen Hsu (2017, via David Kopec): Had Steve Jobs’ first company not bought his second, history likely would have been very different. Apple might not exist today. No iPhone. But what could have happened to NeXT? Former NeXT software leader and then-Apple Senior VP of Software Avie Tevanian has donated to the Computer History Museum […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/08/27/the-next-ipo-that-never-happened/
The Insane Engineering of the Game Boy
date: 2024-08-28, from: Michael Tsai
Real Engineering (via John Gruber): The original Gameboy was launched in 1989 and was received with mixed reviews. While its success is ingrained in our cultural memory now, when it was launched it was a technologically inferior product. The Gameboy was designed to be a cheap, low-powered, portable gaming system. It was limited in many […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/08/27/the-insane-engineering-of-the-game-boy/
Copper’s reach is shrinking so Broadcom is strapping optics directly to GPUs
date: 2024-08-28, updated: 2024-08-28, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
What good is going fast if you can’t get past the next rack?
In modern AI systems, using PCIe to stitch together accelerators is already too slow. Nvidia and AMD use specialized interconnects like NVLink and Infinity Fabric for this reason – but at the 900-plus GB/sec these links push, copper will only carry you so far.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/28/broadcom_optics_gpus/
Lilbits: Witcher 3 on RISC-V, Windows Terminal, and HMD’s Barbie Phone
date: 2024-08-28, from: Liliputing
The developers behind the Box86 and Box64 emulators has managed to get the Witcher up and running on a computer with a RISC-V processor. Of course, it doesn’t run well, even on a Milk-V Pioneer with a 64-core processor and an AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT graphics, but it’s still pretty impressive that it runs at […]
The post Lilbits: Witcher 3 on RISC-V, Windows Terminal, and HMD’s Barbie Phone appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/lilbits-witcher-3-on-risc-v-windows-terminal-and-hmds-barbie-phone/
PG Failover Slots 1.1.0 Released
date: 2024-08-28, from: PostgreSQL News
PG Failover Slots 1.1.0 Released
EDB is pleased to announce the release of PG Failover Slots (pg_failover_slots) 1.1.0. This release includes support for the upcoming PostgreSQL 17, bug fixes, and additional configuration options. You can find PG Failover Slots on GitHub, where you will also find the latest Release notes. PG Failover Slots is open-source software under the PostgreSQL license.
Designed for users with logical replication publications on Postgres databases that are part of a streaming replication architecture, PG Failover Slots avoids the need for logical replication subscribers to reseed their logical replication tables when the logical replication publisher is part of a physical streaming replication architecture, and a new standby gets promoted to primary.
Since the replication slot used by logical replication is only maintained on the primary node, downstream subscribers will not receive any new changes from the newly promoted primary until the slot is created. Picking up logical replication changes from the newly promoted standby is unsafe because the information that includes which data a subscriber has confirmed receiving and which log data still needs to be retained for the subscriber will have been lost, resulting in an unknown gap in data.
PG Failover Slots makes logical replication slots usable across a physical failover via the following features:
- Copies any missing replication slots from the primary to the standby
- Removes any slots from the standby that aren’t found on the primary
- Periodically synchronizes the position of slots on the standby based on the primary
- Ensures that selected standbys receive data before any of the logical slot walsenders can send data to consumers
https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/pg-failover-slots-110-released-2919/
The myth of perfect metadata matching
date: 2024-08-28, from: Crossref Blog
In our previous instalments of the blog series about matching (see part 1 and part 2), we explained what metadata matching is, why it is important and described its basic terminology. In this entry, we will discuss a few common beliefs about metadata matching that are often encountered when interacting with users, developers, integrators, and other stakeholders. Spoiler alert: we are calling them myths because these beliefs are not true! Read on to learn why.
If you have stuck with us this far in our series, hopefully, you are at least a bit excited about the possibility of creating new relationships between the works, authors, institutions, preprints, datasets, and myriad other objects in our existing scholarly metadata. Who would not want all of these to be better connected?
We have to pause for a moment and be honest with you: metadata matching is a complex problem, and doing it correctly requires significant effort. What is worse, even if we do everything right, our matching won’t be perfect. This may be counterintuitive. Perhaps you’ve heard that matching is not a hard problem, or have encountered people surprised that a matching strategy returned a wrong or incomplete answer. Sometimes, it is obvious to a person from looking at some specific example that a match should (or should not) have been made, so they naturally assume that a change to account for this has to be simple.
Misconceptions like these can be problematic. They create confusion around matching, drive users’ expectations to unreasonable levels, and make people drastically underestimate the effort needed to build and integrate matching strategies. So let’s dive right in and debunk a few common myths about metadata matching.
Myth #1: A metadata matching strategy should be 100% correct
Anyone who has built or supported a matching strategy has likely encountered the following belief: it is possible to develop a perfect strategy, meaning one that always returns the correct results, no matter the inputs. The unfortunate truth is that while one’s aim should always be to design matching strategies that return correct results, once we move beyond the simplest class of problems or artificially clean data, no strategy can achieve this outcome. In thinking through why this is the case, some inherent constraints become obvious:
The inputs to matching are often strings in human-readable formats, which can vary wildly in their structure, order and completeness. Since they’re intended to be parsed by people, instead of machines, they’re inherently lossy and frequently unstructured, anticipating that a person can infer from the source context what is being referenced. Matching strategies, although built to make sense of unstructured data, unfortunately, don’t have the luxury of this flexibility. A strategy has to account for translating a messy, partial, or inconsistent input into a correct and structured match.
Consider, for example, the following inputs to an affiliation matching strategy:
- “Department of Radiology, St. Mary’s Hospital, London W2 1NY, UK”
- “Saint Mary’s Hospital, Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust”
- “St. Mary’s Medical Center, San Francisco, CA”
- “St Mary’s Hosp., Dublin”
- “St Mary’s Hospital Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust”
- “聖マリア病院”
In order to correctly identify the organisations mentioned here, the matching strategy must be able to distinguish between different ways of representing the same institution, disambiguate multiple institutions that have similar names, and handle variant forms for the parts of each name (Saint/St./St), identify the same name in different languages (“聖マリア病院” is Japanese for “St. Mary’s Hospital”), and make assumptions about partial or ambiguous locations translating to more precise references. While a person reviewing each of these strings might be able to accomplish these tasks, even here there are some challenges. Does “St Mary’s Hosp., Dublin” refer to the hospital in Ireland or a separate hospital in one of the many cities that share this name? Should we presume that because “聖マリア病院” is in Japanese, this refers to a hospital in Japan? Would someone, by default, be aware that St. Mary’s Hospital in London is part of the Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, such that inputs one and five refer to the same organisation?
An additional challenge lies in the quality of the data, which in the context of matching, encompasses both the input and the dataset being matched against. In real world circumstances, no dataset is fully accurate, complete, or current and certainly not all three. As a result, there will always be functionally random differences between inputs to the strategy and the entities to be matched. A theoretically perfect matching strategy would thus need to distinguish between inconsequential discrepancies resulting from gaps, errors, and variable forms of reference and actual, meaningful differences indicating an incorrect match. As one might imagine, this would require near total knowledge of the meaning and context for all inputs and outputs, a nigh-on impossible task for any person or system!
As a consequence, no metadata matching strategy will ever be perfect. It is unreasonable for us to expect them to be. This does not mean, of course, that all strategies are equally flawed or destined to forever return middling results. Some are better than others and we can improve them over time. Which brings us to the next myth:
Myth #2: It is always a good idea to adapt the matching strategy to a specific input
Matching strategies are not static. They can - and should - be improved. There is, however, a deceptive trap that one can fall into when attempting to improve a matching strategy. Whenever we encounter an incorrect or missing result for a specific input, we treat this problem like a software bug and try to adapt the strategy to work better for it, without considering all other cases.
The more complicated reality is that the quality of matching results is controlled through a complex set of trade-offs between precision and recall that determine the kind and number of relationships created between items:
- Precision is calculated as the number of correctly matched relationships resulting from a strategy, divided by the total number of matched relationships. It can also be interpreted as the probability that a match is correct. Low precision indicates a high rate of false positives, which are incorrect relationships created by the strategy.
- Recall is calculated as the number of correctly matched relationships resulting from a strategy, divided by the number of true (expected) relationships. It can also be interpreted as the probability that a true (correct) relationship will be created by the strategy. Low recall means a high rate of false negatives, which are relationships that should have been created by the strategy but were not made.
The diagram depicts false negatives and false positives. The ideal outcome would be that the ellipses are identical, matched relationships are exactly the same as true relationships, and there are no false negatives or false positives. In practice, we try to make the intersection as big as possible.
The tradeoff between precision and recall roughly means that modifying the strategy to improve recall will decrease precision, and vice versa.
Imagine, for example, we received a report about a relationship that was missed by matching because of a partial, noisy, or ambiguous input. We might be tempted to resolve this issue by relaxing our matching criteria. Unfortunately, this will have a cost of a higher overall rate of false positive matches.
Conversely, if we encounter a case where the matching has returned an incorrect match, we might attempt to make the matching strategy stricter to avoid this result. We should remember, however, that this may have the consequence of causing the strategy to skip many perfectly valid matches.
The tradeoff between precision and recall. (a) A strict strategy prioritises precision over recall resulting in more false negatives. (b) A relaxed strategy prioritises recall over precision resulting in more false positives.
Striking this balance becomes even more difficult when attempting to address multiple issues at once, or considering constraints like the time and resources consumed by each aspect of the strategy. Each choice can compound the individual effects in unanticipated and expensive ways. The aim of matching ultimately then can’t be to achieve perfect results for every single case. Fixing one particular situation might not be desirable, as it can result in breaking multiple other cases. Instead, we have to find a locally optimal balance that optimises the strategy’s utility, relative to these inherent limitations. This means accepting some level of imperfection as not just inevitable, but necessary for implementing a workable strategy. When you consider all this, you might conclude that…
Myth #3: We shouldn’t do large-scale, unsupervised matching
Imperfect matching strategies, when applied automatically to real-world large datasets, might:
- Fail to discover some relationships (false negatives), an outcome that may not be terribly problematic. In the worst case scenario, we have wasted a great deal of effort developing matching strategies that do not improve our metadata.
- Create incorrect relationships between items (false positives), what seems like a potentially larger problem, where we have added incorrect relationships to the metadata.
Many have the instinct to avoid false positives at any cost, even if this means missing many additional correct relationships at the same time. They might come to the conclusion that if we cannot have 100% precision (see our previous myth), we simply should not allow matching strategies to act in an automated, unsupervised way on large datasets. While there might be circumstances where this belief is rational, in the context of the scholarly record, this notion is seriously flawed.
First, if you are dealing with any medium to large-sized dataset, it almost certainly contains errors, even before you apply any automated processing to it. Even if data is submitted and curated by users, they can still make mistakes, and might themselves be using automated tools for extracting the data from other sources, without your knowledge. It is thus not entirely obvious that applying an (imperfect) matching strategy to create more relationships would actually make the data quality worse.
Second, while we cannot eliminate all matching errors, we can place a high priority on precision when developing strategies, with the aim of keeping the number of incorrectly matched results as low as possible. We can also make use of additional mechanisms to easily correct for incorrectly matched results, for example doing so manually, in response to error reports.
Finally, the results of matching should always contain provenance information to distinguish them from those that have been manually curated. This way, the users can make their own decisions about whether to use and trust the matching results, relative to their use case.
By applying those additional checks, we can minimise the negative effects of incorrect matching, while at the same time reap the benefits of filling gaps in the scholarly record.
Myth #4: We can only ever guess at the accuracy of our matching results
In attempting to determine the correctness of our matching, we immediately encounter a number of inherent limitations. The sheer amount of entries in many datasets prevents a thorough, manual validation of the results, but if instead, we use too few or specific items as our benchmarks, these are unlikely to be representative of overall performance. The unpredictable nature of future data adds another wrinkle: will our matching always be as successful as when we first benchmarked it or will its performance degrade relative to some change in the data?
With so many unknowns, are we then doomed? No! We have rigorous and scientific tools at our disposal that can help us estimate how accurate our matching will be. How do we use them? Well, that is a big and fairly technical topic, so we will leave you with this little cliffhanger. See you in the next post!
https://www.crossref.org/blog/the-myth-of-perfect-metadata-matching/
Facebook whistleblower calls for transparency in social media, AI
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Frances Haugen says navigating the digital world requires a North Star
Frances Haugen, a transparency and accountability advocate known for blowing the whistle on Facebook, believes the tech industry needs to find a North Star to navigate through ethical and privacy risks.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/27/facebook_transparency_ai/
Taking Some Time
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: Jason Kottke blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/taking-some-time
How would a potential Harris administration handle Mideast tensions?
date: 2024-08-27, from: VOA News USA
White House officials welcomed the rescue of an Israeli hostage held by Hamas Tuesday and said they are finalizing a Gaza cease-fire deal. But even if an agreement is reached, a future U.S. administration will still inherit the problem of managing tensions in the Middle East. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara looks at potential U.S. policy under Vice President Kamala Harris should she win the November presidential election.
What it takes to run The Witcher 3 on RISC-V
date: 2024-08-27, from: OS News
The Box64 project, which allows you to run Linux x86-64 binaries on non-x86 architectures like ARM and RISC-V, has achieved a major milestone with its RISC-V backend. It’s been over a year since our last update on the state of the RISC-V backend, and we recently successfully ran The Witcher 3 on an RISC-V PC, which I believe is the first AAA game ever to run on an RISC-V machine. So I thought this would be a perfect time to write an update, and here it comes. ↫ Box86/Box64 blog Calling this a monumental achievement would be underselling it. Just in case you understand how complex running The Witcher 3 on RISC-V really is: they’re running a Windows x86 game on Linux on RISC-V using Box64, Wine, and DXVK. This was only made possible relatively recently due to more and more x86 instructions making their way into RISC-V, as well as newer RISC-V machines that can accept modern graphics cards. The Witcher 3 can runs at about 15 frame per second in-game, using the 64-core RISC-V processor in the Milk-V Pioneer combined with an AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT GPU. That may not sound like much, but considering the complexity underpinning even running this game at all in this environment it’s actually kind of amazing. It seems Box64 could become as important to gaming on ARM and RISC-V Linux as Wine and Proton were for gaming x86 Linux. There’s still a lot more work to be done, and the linked article details a number of x86 instructions that are particularly important for x86 emulation, but are not available on RISC-V. The end result is that RISC-V has to run multiple instructions to emulate a single x86 instruction (“a whole of 10 instructions for a simple byte add”), which obviously affects performance.
https://www.osnews.com/story/140607/what-it-takes-to-run-the-witcher-3-on-risc-v/
Microsoft hands over Mono to the Wine project
date: 2024-08-27, from: OS News
Microsoft is handing over the Mono project to WineHQ, which came as a bit of a surprise announcement today. We are happy to announce that the WineHQ organization will be taking over as the stewards of the Mono Project upstream at wine-mono/Mono · GitLab (winehq.org). Source code in existing mono/mono and other repos will remain available, although repos may be archived. Binaries will remain available for up to four years. Microsoft maintains a modern fork of Mono runtime in the dotnet/runtime repo and has been progressively moving workloads to that fork. That work is now complete, and we recommend that active Mono users and maintainers of Mono-based app frameworks migrate to .NET which includes work from this fork. ↫ Mono’s website Wine make use of Mono, so this seems like a natural home for the project. Mono is an open source implementation of Microsoft’s .NET, and is available on a wide variety of platforms, but lately it’s been languishing a bit, with no major release since 2019, and only small patches since then. Microsoft gained stewardship over the Mono project when it acquired Xamarin in 2016.
https://www.osnews.com/story/140605/microsoft-hands-over-mono-to-the-wine-project/
freebsd-rustdate: updating FreeBSD, but a lot faster
date: 2024-08-27, from: OS News
This is freebsd-rustdate, a reimplementation of freebsd-update. It’s primarily written because of how slow freebsd-update is, and is written in rust because I felt like it. In usage, it’s expected to be similar, but not identical to freebsd-update. There are probably a number of minor edge-case differences I don’t even know about, but there are a number of larger ones that are intentional too. ↫ Matthew Fuller I love it when someone takes on a very well-established tool that’s used by countless people who probably barely think about how it could be improved. In this case, the performance improvements are nothing short of extraordinary, but of course, its author Matthew Fuller rightfully points out that you really shouldn’t be using this on any production system. It has not received even one percent of the kind of testing and eyeballs that the regular update tool in FreeBSD has received, so there may be edge cases or bugs. Improving the speed of the update process is always welcome. If it’s slow and time-consuming, people might postpone the updates because they’re getting in the way of what they want to do at the moment. Sure, I doubt the average FreeBSD user is the kind of person to postpone updates and run an insecure system in the meantime, but it might still draw a few people across the line to quickly get them done before continuing their work. This new rust-based FreeBSD update tool is definitely not going to be replacing the current one any time soon, nor is it even a part of the FreeBSD project in the first place, so there’s no need to worry about any potential breakage to your FreeBSD system because they’re replacing a battle-tested tool with a new one. All this does for now is highlight that there’s gains to be made here, and that’s a goal worth pursuing.
https://www.osnews.com/story/140603/freebsd-rustdate-updating-freebsd-but-a-lot-faster/
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-08-27, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
"Your Immune System is not a Muscle"
https://rachel.fast.ai/posts/2024-08-13-crowds-vs-friends/
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/113036261927153483
Tenstorrent’s Blackhole chips boast 768 RISC-V cores and almost as many FLOPS
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Shove 32 of ’em in a box and you’ve got nearly 24 petaFLOPS of FP8 perf
Hot Chips RISC-V champion Tenstorrent offered the closest look yet at its upcoming Blackhole AI accelerators at Hot Chips this week, which they claim can outperform an Nvidia A100 in raw compute and scalability.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/27/tenstorrent_ai_blackhole/
US urges certain ‘negative actors’ not to fuel Sudan’s civil war
date: 2024-08-27, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — The United States is urging certain foreign nations not to fuel Sudan’s civil war by arming fighting factions, as the country faces one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
Meanwhile, Washington has also called on Sudan’s warring sides to enforce a code of conduct to reduce abuses, noting that the army is considering the proposal after its rival paramilitary forces have agreed to it.
More than 25 million people face acute hunger and more than 10 million have been displaced from their homes since fighting erupted in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces, or SAF, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, the State Department said.
“Unfortunately, we’ve seen a significant proliferation of the number of external actors that are playing a role on both sides,” and they are not putting the interest of the Sudanese people “at the core of this,” said Tom Perriello, U.S. special envoy for Sudan.
“In addition to UAE [the United Arab Emirates] supporting the RSF,” Perriello told reporters on Tuesday, “we see foreign fighters coming in from across the Sahel. We’ve seen Iran, Russia, other negative actors on the SAF side.”
U.S.-brokered peace talks on Sudan that concluded last week in Geneva failed to end the country’s 16-month conflict. But one of the warring sides, the RSF, agreed to a code of conduct pledging to avoid violence against women, exploitation at checkpoints and the destruction of crops.
Perriello said that the U.S. has presented the proposal to the SAF leaders who were absent in the Switzerland negotiations.
“They have the code of conduct in front of them. We hope to get a response from them in the coming days,” Perriello said.
The United States has accused the SAF and RSF of war crimes, with the RSF specifically charged with ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity targeting the indigenous African-origin people of Darfur.
During the talks in Geneva, the U.S., along with representatives from the African Union, the United Arab Emirates, the United Nations, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Switzerland, focused on reopening three humanitarian corridors — the Western border crossing in Darfur at Adre, the northern Dabbah Road from Port Sudan and the southern access route through Sennar.
Later this week, the U.S. will have a first formal follow-up with the heads of delegations.
Humanitarian assistance deliveries have resumed via two of the three routes: across the border at Adre from Chad and along the Dabbah Road into famine-stricken areas of Sudan.
In a statement late Monday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken welcomed the reopening of humanitarian corridors, saying lack of humanitarian aid access into Darfur over the past six months has exacerbated the historic levels of famine and acute hunger across Sudan, particularly within the Zamzam camp.
Leonardo da Vinci Studied the Science of Smell
date: 2024-08-27, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The artist experimented with perfumes and created his own fragrances from flowers and fruit
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/leonardo-da-vinci-studied-the-science-of-smell-180984978/
Special counsel files new indictment in Trump Jan. 6 case
date: 2024-08-27, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — Special counsel Jack Smith filed a new indictment Tuesday against Donald Trump over his efforts to undo the 2020 presidential election. The indictment keeps the same criminal charges but narrows the allegations against him following a Supreme Court opinion that conferred broad immunity on former presidents.
The new indictment removes a section of the indictment that had accused Trump of trying to use the law enforcement powers of the Justice Department to overturn his election loss, an area of conduct for which the Supreme Court, in a 6-3 opinion last month, said that Trump was absolutely immune from prosecution.
The stripped-down criminal case represents a first effort by prosecutors to comply with a Supreme Court opinion likely to result in a significant revision of the allegations against Trump over his efforts to block the peaceful transfer of power. It was filed three days ahead of a deadline for prosecutors and defense lawyers to tell the judge in the case how they wanted to proceed in light of that opinion, which said former presidents are presumptively immune from prosecution for official White House acts.
The two sides will be back in court for a status hearing next week, the first such appearance in months given that the case had been effectively frozen since last December as Trump’s immunity appeal worked its way through the justice system.
In a statement on his Truth Social platform, Trump called the new indictment “an act of desperation” and an “effort to resurrect a ‘dead’ Witch Hunt.’” He said the new case has “all the problems of the old Indictment, and should be dismissed IMMEDIATELY.”
The special counsel’s office said the updated indictment, filed in federal court in Washington, was issued by a grand jury that had not previously heard evidence in the case. It said in a statement that the indictment “reflects the Government’s efforts to respect and implement the Supreme Court’s holdings and remand instructions.”
The central revision in the updated criminal case concerns Trump’s dealings with the Justice Department.
The original indictment included allegations that Trump tried to enlist the department in his failed effort to undo his election loss, including by conducting sham investigations and telling states — incorrectly — that significant fraud had been detected.
It detailed how Jeffrey Clark, a top official in the Trump Justice Department, wanted to send a letter to elected officials in certain states falsely claiming that the department had “identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election” and had asked top department officials to sign it, but they refused.
Clark’s support for Trump’s election fraud claims led Trump to openly contemplate naming him as acting attorney general in place of Jeffrey Rosen, who led the department in the final weeks of the Trump administration. Trump ultimately relented in that idea “when he was told it would result in mass resignations at the Justice Department,” according to the original indictment. Rosen remained on as acting attorney general through the end of Trump’s tenure
The new case no longer references Clark as a co-conspirator. Trump’s co-conspirators were not named in either indictment, but they have been identified through public records and other means.
In its opinion, the Supreme Court held that a president’s interactions with the Justice Department constitute official acts for which he is entitled to immunity, effectively stripping those allegations from the case.
“As we have explained, the President’s power to remove ‘executive officers of the United States whom he has appointed’ may not be regulated by Congress or reviewed by the courts,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court.
The justices returned other core allegations in the case to U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, the trial judge presiding over the case, to determine what constitutes an official act protected from prosecution.
The new indictment still includes one of the more stunning allegations brought by Smith — that Trump participated in a scheme orchestrated by allies to enlist slates of fraudulent electors in battleground states won by Democrat Joe Biden who would falsely attest that Trump had won in those states.
It also retains allegations that Trump sought to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to reject legitimate electoral votes, and that Trump and his allies exploited the chaos at the Capitol on Jan. 6 in an attempt to further delay the certification of Biden’s victory.
Roberts wrote in his majority opinion that the interactions between Trump and Pence amounted to official conduct for which “Trump is at least presumptively immune from prosecution.”
The question, Roberts wrote, is whether the government can rebut “that presumption of immunity.”
https://www.voanews.com/a/special-counsel-files-new-indictment-in-trump-january-6-case/7759296.html
Perseverance Kicks off the Crater Rim Campaign!
date: 2024-08-27, from: NASA breaking news
Perseverance is officially headed into a new phase of scientific investigation on the Jezero Crater rim!
https://science.nasa.gov/blog/perseverance-kicks-off-the-crater-rim-campaign/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-27, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Gen. McMaster’s blistering account of the Trump White House.
https://www.aol.com/news/gen-mcmaster-blistering-account-trump-150002216.html
All of a Sudden, Americans Love Hybrids
date: 2024-08-27, from: Heatmap News
The American EV market has seen its fair share of tumult this year — Ford canceled its three-row SUV, Tesla canceled its $25,000 mass-market EV, and EV sales growth dropped sharply in the first quarter. But from all this darkness, a glimmer of hope has emerged: The market for hybrids is surging.
Electric and hybrid vehicle sales made up 18.7% of all new light-duty vehicles sold in the second quarter of this year, according to new data from Wards Intelligence analyzed by the Energy Information Administration. That’s up from 17.8% in the first three months of the year.
This increase was “driven primarily” by hybrid sales, according to Wards and the EIA, which grew almost 31% from 2023 and made up almost 10% of light-duty sales in the second quarter. Sales of plug-in hybrids grew, as well, while the battery electric vehicle share of the market was about flat compared to the second quarter of last year.
The trend appears to be continuing into the back half of the year. In July, hybrid sales were up about 23% in the U.S. compared to July of last year, and the gap between hybrid and electric sales grew, according to data from Morgan Stanley.
“A lot of the EV slowdown we’ve seen has been really pronounced in the first quarter of this year given Tesla’s performance,” Corey Cantor, an EV analyst at BloombergNEF, told me. “A lot of that story at a macro level is Tesla taking a step back.”
To recap: Elon Musk’s company has not refreshed much of its existing model lineup in several years and is now facing increasing competition overseas from Chinese automakers, plus basically every other automaker in the United States market. It also gutted the team behind its Supercharger network — regarded by observers as one of its biggest differentiators — even as its peers have largely adopted Tesla’s own charging standard. While Tesla used to dominate U.S. EV sales, it no longer makes up even half the domestic market; the estimated 53,000 vehicles Tesla sold in July represented 48% of all EV sales that month, according to Morgan Stanley.
But the travails of one very prominent electric car company aren’t the whole story, and exactly why hybrid sales have been so strong is not exactly clear. Gasoline prices are well off their recent 2022 highs as well as their 2008 recent peak when adjusted for wages. One reason may be that the increased prevalence of battery electric vehicles may have normalized hybrid sales, as hybrids are no longer the most “green-coded’ type of vehicle. (To wit: The “Smug Alert!” episode of South Park aired in March 2006.)
The other reason may be far simpler: cost. Cantor cited Edmunds data showing that in April of this year, even when you throw out Tesla and other direct sellers, hybrids’ average transaction price was about $44,000 compared to $59,000 for battery electric.
“EVs still have a long way to go,” Cantor said. “Hybrids are an attractive option not only because of normalization, but also a lot of them are pretty affordable.” This is especially true for the biggest player in hybrid vehicles, Toyota: A 2024 Corolla hybrid will cost between about $23,500 and $28,500, according to Edmunds, while a standard Corolla goes for between $22,000 and $27,000.
This combination of higher prices and slacking demand for BEVs explains why Ford canceled its three-row BEV SUV, according to Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas in a note to clients. “Ford scaled back and delayed its EV strategy to match consumer demand (slower) and costs (still too high).”
But what may be most affordable for drivers may not be ideal for the planet.
While standard hybrids have lower lifetime emissions than internal combustion vehicles, annual greenhouse gas emissions from hybrids are about two-and-a-half times those of battery electric vehicles, according to the Department of Energy. And, Cantor noted, cars bought today will likely be on the road for around 10 years.
“Hybrids can’t be the long-term climate solution. They don’t do enough to mitigate emissions,” Cantor said. “To meet climate targets you’re looking all-electric by the mid 2030s.”
https://heatmap.news/electric-vehicles/hybrid-ev-sales-surging
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-08-27, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
The Mono Runtime that implements the .NET-Framework style APIs has moved to WineHQ:
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/113035849186274027
What the Federal Government Can Learn From Gordon Gekko
date: 2024-08-27, from: Heatmap News
The United States produces more natural gas and crude oil than any other country ― it isn’t even a contest. But these “molecules of U.S. freedom” aren’t free: They’re extracted and transported through a network of rigs, drills, pumps, and pipes that are, increasingly, controlled and operated by myriad private equity companies. As a society, we have a strong interest in winding down these climate-polluting assets in a swift yet orderly fashion. But as businesses, their private equity owners don’t.
Over the past decade, pressure from shareholders and activists has succeeded in pushing many fossil fuel majors to consider how best to reduce their emissions. (Although that, too, has come at a cost.) But rather than winding down or cleaning up their most polluting and least profitable assets, many have instead simply divested. Coal companies in West Virginia have sold off their mines to undercapitalized vulture firms, which rely on continued coal sales to (in theory) pay for expensive environmental remediation costs. The same is happening in the oil and gas industry, where private equity firms have rolled up many of the drilling sites and pipelines, the capillaries and veins of the country’s energy infrastructure.
Shielded from the scrutiny of public markets, private equity funds have thus become some of the country’s top methane emitters by asset ownership in the natural gas sector. These opaque owners, capitalizing on other companies’ disinterest in holding high-emitting assets, are betting that fossil fuel infrastructure will keep paying out for quite some time; recent massive increases in expected energy demand have only juiced this trend toward industry consolidation.
Private equity firms and private debt funds, with their short-term profit horizons, concealed balance sheets, and seeming imperviousness to tighter financial regulation and shareholder activism, work well with fossil fuel assets, particularly those sold at fire-sale prices by publicly traded fossil fuel majors. Despite those assets’ long-term market value instability, their near-term cash flow prospects are what matter.
But what’s been good for fossil fuel majors’ balance sheets has been bad for the planet. Many of these buyout firms — well-capitalized private equity funds and scrappy vulture funds, alike — are not budgeting anywhere near enough for environmental remediation. One company, Diversified Energy Co, has been purchasing the rights to operate almost-depleted natural gas wellheads at scale, extending many of their lifespans by decades; far too few wellheads are closed each year to stem the methane spewing unimpeded into the atmosphere.
Rather than accept a situation where utilities and fossil fuel majors toss their liabilities to unaccountable vulture funds, sustainability-conscious investors and shareholder groups have begun screening transactions for responsible asset phaseout plans. But the lack of a binding set of transition standards has revealed a huge coordination problem: What counts as a responsible phaseout, particularly when private asset owners get to decide? The federal government has put down guidelines, but not its foot. A disorganized drawdown of assets under a patchy regulatory framework, without a doubt, leaves vulnerable communities on the hook for the financial, environmental, and health damages.
Progressive analysts have long argued that nationalizing fossil fuel assets and folding them into a state holding company is the best solution to sidestep this particular problem. The federal government is well staffed with energy and electricity experts who, operating under a public mandate to preserve grid reliability, can phase out fossil fuel assets on a unified, coherent timeline responsive to community needs while continuing to operate those assets as the “peaker” or “reserve” capacity required to ensure grid stability. A series of climate shocks has even convinced conservative leaders in Texas of the importance of public power for grid resilience, achieved through state ownership of “peaker” gas plants. This course of action is far worse than investments in, say, battery capacity ― California, for instance, is now reaping the benefits of massive battery deployment, which reduces the state’s need for gas ― but the logic behind building public reserve capacity is sound.
What advocates of a state holding company-type model do not often discuss is how exactly a government goes about acquiring all these soon-to-be-stranded fossil fuel assets. As just one example, a recent proposal from the Roosevelt Institute suggests that a state holding company should be “free to engage in debt financing, make equity investments, and acquire assets.” Sure, proposals like these are meant to buttress the case for why nationalization is a far better way to achieve a managed phaseout than surrendering that process to yield-seeking investors, not to detail the financial mechanics of a buyout. But still: this is vague!
Actually thinking through the specifics suggests that, interestingly enough, a comprehensive state-led buyout program could work a lot like an existing private equity transaction, for two key reasons.
Before we get there, we should separate private equity’s deserved reputation as an opaque asset owner from the way the industry works. Private equity’s calling card, the “leveraged buyout,” is little more than the act of raising debt to 1) purchase equity in and, therefore, ownership over an asset, and 2) refinance the asset’s liabilities. To do so, private equity funds work with banks or, more commonly these days, private debt or private credit funds, to raise debt that is generally backed by the combined assets of the purchaser firm and purchased asset.
But leveraged buyouts themselves are technically something that any financial institution could do. Take the federal government, the country’s most liquid debt issuer, whose debt anchors the global economy and backstops private financial institutions. It could raise debt (leverage) to finance a buyout of fossil fuel assets at interest rates far lower than private investors could. And because private credit funds, like other institutional investors, already buy loads of government bonds to match their liabilities and hedge their risks, this kind of nationwide leveraged buyout ― which would require substantial new debt issuance ― could actually help stabilize the financial system against potential shocks from within notoriously inscrutable private markets. The government can do exactly what private equity does, only a lot better, and with wider benefits.
The government has already planted the seeds of a leveraged buyout program across the country’s coal ash heaps. The Loan Programs Office, thanks to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act, now offers far-below-market-rate loan guarantees to developers, including state governments and utility companies, seeking to repurpose fossil fuel assets through its Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment program. This program’s authority allows borrowers to use their financing for “refinancing outstanding indebtedness directly associated with eligible Energy Infrastructure.” All policymakers have to do now is scrap the program’s 2026 end date and, ideally, endow a federal institution with the power to borrow from this authority to purchase and refinance fossil fuel assets, rather than leave that task solely in the hands of state governments and utilities, with their varying capacities for and interest in coordinating a coherent phaseout plan. And now that interest rates are poised to fall, this refinancing becomes much cheaper.
That’s reason number one. Reason number two has to do with private equity funds’ ability to shield the assets in their portfolio from valuation volatility on publicly traded stock markets. Private equity funds need not publicize how much their portfolios are worth, except at infrequent intervals and when they sell assets. But thanks to private equity’s reputation as a high-return investment, fund investors pay a premium for the illiquidity of not always knowing the value of their assets. Purchase assets, juice returns, sell, and repeat ― this is the conventional private equity playbook.
But macroeconomic conditions today are such that private equity companies are now struggling to sell their portfolios. High interest rates have made leveraged buyouts of new assets and refinancing debts on unsold assets much more costly, and have tempered rapid asset value growth. As this once-frenetic industry slows down, funds are anxious to get assets off their books ― hence the recent wave of consolidation.
This is an opportune moment for the Feds to step in. It’s not just that the government’s capacity for undertaking leveraged buyouts is the greatest; more importantly, it never needs to sell. The valuation volatility that first prompts fossil fuel majors to divest from dying, dangerous assets yet incentivizes private equity funds to pump as much as they can out of them to resell them later at a profit is simply not something the federal government needs to worry about. A state holding company can siphon distressed assets off public markets and shut down the “merry-go-round” of asset sales and resales.
Objections to government intervention here are likely premised on the fact that, well, it’s the government. But the government would still be purchasing assets from private owners on financial markets, just like any market actor would. Today’s uncoordinated constellation of private fossil fuel firms and funds, on the other hand, cannot manage a coordinated phaseout, especially not under binding profitability constraints ― which the federal government does not share.
Local communities can’t finance phaseouts or cleanups themselves, and leaving hundreds of billions of dollars worth of stranded assets in the hands of under-regulated private firms will only accelerate climate catastrophe. The government must use the financial techniques that private equity funds have already pioneered to bring them to heel, in service of public goals.
https://heatmap.news/economy/clean-energy-leveraged-buyout
Intel’s Software Guard Extensions broken? Don’t panic
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-28, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
More of a storm in a teacup
Today’s news that Intel’s Software Guard Extensions (SGX) security system is open to abuse may be overstated.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/27/intel_root_key_xeons/
Iran’s Khamenei opens door to talks with US over Tehran’s nuclear program
date: 2024-08-27, from: VOA News USA
Dubai, UAE — Iran’s supreme leader opened the door Tuesday to renewed negotiations with the United States over his country’s rapidly advancing nuclear program, telling its civilian government there was “no harm” in engaging with its “enemy.”
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s remarks set clear red lines for any talks taking place under the government of reformist President Masoud Pezeshkian and renewed his warnings that Washington wasn’t to be trusted.
But his comments mirror those around the time of Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, which saw Tehran’s nuclear program greatly curtailed in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions. Yet it remains unclear just how much room Pezeshkian will have to maneuver, as tensions remain high in the wider Middle East over the Israel-Hamas war and as the U.S. prepares for a presidential election in November.
“This does not mean that we cannot interact with the same enemy in certain situations,” Khamenei said, according to a transcript on his official website.
Khamenei, who has the final say on all state matters, also warned Pezeshkian’s Cabinet, “Do not trust the enemy.”
Khamenei, 85, has occasionally urged talks or dismissed them with Washington after then-President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew the United States from the deal in 2018.
There have been indirect talks between Iran and the U.S. in recent years mediated by Oman and Qatar, two of the United States’ Middle East interlocutors when it comes to Iran.
Asked for comment, the U.S. State Department told The Associated Press: “We will judge Iran’s leadership by their actions, not their words.”
“We have long said that we ultimately view diplomacy as the best way to achieve an effective, sustainable solution with regard to Iran’s nuclear program,” it said. “However, we are far away from anything like that right now given Iran’s escalations across the board, including its nuclear escalations and its failure to cooperate” with the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations nuclear watchdog.
Since the deal’s collapse, Iran has abandoned all limits the deal put on its program and enriches uranium to up to 60% purity — near weapons-grade levels of 90%.
Surveillance cameras installed by the IAEA have been disrupted, while Iran has barred some of the Vienna-based agency’s most experienced inspectors. Iranian officials also have increasingly threatened that they could pursue atomic weapons.
Meanwhile, tensions between Iran and Israel have hit a new high during the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip. Tehran launched an unprecedented drone-and-missile attack on Israel in April after years of a shadow war between the two countries reached a climax with Israel’s apparent attack on an Iranian consular building in Syria that killed two Iranian generals and others.
The assassination in Tehran of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh also prompted Iran to threaten to retaliate against Israel.
Pezeshkian campaigned partly on a promise to reengage the West with negotiations. Khamenei’s remarks as Iran’s paramount leader could provide him with the political cover to do so.
“After doing everything we can, a tactical retreat might sometimes be necessary, but we should not abandon our goals or opinions at the first sign of difficulty,” Khameini also said Tuesday.
However, it’s not just Iran that’s facing a new presidency. The U.S. will hold a presidential election on November 5, with Vice President Kamala Harris and Trump as the leading candidates. Iran has been concerned about Trump’s return to power.
Harris, in a speech to the Democratic National Convention last week, said: “I will never hesitate to take whatever action is necessary to defend our forces and our interests against Iran and Iran-backed terrorists.”
The RANE Network, a risk-intelligence firm, said if Harris wins, “the likelihood of a deal will rise as the Israel-Hamas war winds down.”
“Once negotiations begin, Iran will likely demand more protections regarding a potential U.S. withdrawal from a new deal after the United States walked away from the previous deal in 2018,” RANE said in an analysis Tuesday.
Tuesday’s meeting between Khamenei and Pezeshkian’s Cabinet included an appearance by former Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who helped Iran reach the 2015 deal. After the meeting, Zarif said in an online message that he would continue to serve as a vice president in Pezeshkian’s administration after earlier publicly resigning over the makeup of the Cabinet.
Things Become Other Things: A Walking Memoir
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: Jason Kottke blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/things-become-other-things-a-walking-memoir
@Tomosino’s Mastodon feed (date: 2024-08-27, from: Tomosino’s Mastodon feed)
I just found out that a restaurant I liked the last time I was in Chicago has since closed down. That happened in 2022. I was last in the city in 2005. Time goes by too quickly. Years add up fast. Of course things change over 20 years, but it never feels like 20 years.
Once again I imagine the difficulties of being an immortal being. Decades fly by. What about centuries?
https://tilde.zone/@tomasino/113035633797869530
A last look at the Living Computers museum before collection heads to auction
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
A guided tour of vintage hardware set to be scattered to the winds
The Living Computers museum’s tech collection is set for auction. Retired Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer took a last look and mused on the theme of donor’s remorse.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/27/living_computers/
Edith Zimmerman: “My main thing is trying to figure out who I…
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: Jason Kottke blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/0045189-edith-zimmerman-my-main-t
New Hampshire resident dies after testing positive for mosquito-borne encephalitis virus
date: 2024-08-27, from: VOA News USA
Google’s Irish bit barn plans denied over eco shortfall
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
DCs on the Emerald Isle better be green, says Dublin council - unless your name is Microsoft
Google’s plans to expand its Dublin datacenter presence have been derailed by Irish county officials who say the project isn’t sustainable enough. …
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/27/google_data_center_ireland/
Cultivating the Magic Sauce for Surviving Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: RAND blog
Survival rates for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest vary significantly by location, highlighting the need to identify and disseminate best practices from high-performing communities. What are the key factors that improve survival?
Broadcom boss Hock Tan says public cloud gave IT departments PTSD
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
While datacenter silos have left you ‘so screwed’
VMware Explore Broadcom CEO Hock Tan has opened the VMware Explore conference by saying CEOs’ decisions to push their companies into public clouds have left their IT departments with post-traumatic stress disorder, while silos of datacenter tech have left tech teams “screwed”.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/27/vmware_explore_hock_tan_keynote/
Pilet is a modular cyberdeck with a Raspberry Pi 5 for brains, a 7 inch display and 7 hours of battery life
date: 2024-08-27, from: Liliputing
The Pilet is a tablet computer with a 7 inch touchscreen display and a modular design that lets you attach a physical keyboard or other add-ons via a slot on the bottom. Powered by a Raspberry Pi 5, the system should support a wide range of GNU/Linux distributions and software designed for that credit card-sized […]
The post Pilet is a modular cyberdeck with a Raspberry Pi 5 for brains, a 7 inch display and 7 hours of battery life appeared first on Liliputing.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-27, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Imagine Harris saying "If the press says we're bad you know that means we're good." She could say that in her big interview. 😀
http://scripting.com/2024/08/27.html#a175917
What We Learned In Our First Year of 404 Media. “We are…
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: Jason Kottke blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/0045188-what-we-learned-in-our
Hubble Pinpoints a Dim, Starry Mini-galaxy
date: 2024-08-27, from: NASA breaking news
A glittering collection of stars shines against a background of much more distant galaxies in this view from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope of the Pegasus Dwarf spheroidal galaxy, also known as Andromeda VI. The Andromeda galaxy, also known as Messier 31, is the Milky Way’s closest grand spiral galaxy neighbor, and is host to at […]
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/hubble-pinpoints-a-dim-starry-mini-galaxy/
Unlocking the Pixel 9 bootloader breaks some Pixel AI apps
date: 2024-08-27, from: Liliputing
Google’s newest smartphones have better cameras, improved fingerprint sensors, more RAM, and other hardware upgrades when compared to the previous-generation. But some of the key selling points for the new Pixel 9 series smartphones are their new AI capabilities. Now that the phones have begun shipping though, some users have found that some of those […]
The post Unlocking the Pixel 9 bootloader breaks some Pixel AI apps appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/unlocking-the-pixel-9-bootloader-breaks-some-pixel-ai-apps/
Drawing of the Bastille Cherished by George Washington Goes to Auction
date: 2024-08-27, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The artwork was a gift from the Marquis de Lafayette, who also included the fortress’ key
What Are the Best Policies for Reducing Carbon Emissions? A New Study Has Some Answers
date: 2024-08-27, from: Smithsonian Magazine
An analysis of policies implemented between 1998 and 2022 found that just 63 were successful
Volt Typhoon suspected of exploiting Versa SD-WAN bug since June
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
The same Beijing-backed cyber spy crew the feds say burrowed into US critical infrastructure
It looks like China’s Volt Typhoon has found a new way into American networks as Versa has disclosed a nation-state backed attacker has exploited a high-severity bug affecting all of its SD-WAN customers using Versa Director.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/27/chinas_volt_typhoon_versa/
NASA, Boeing Optimizing Vehicle Assembly Building High Bay for Future SLS Stage Production
date: 2024-08-27, from: NASA breaking news
NASA is preparing space at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida for upcoming assembly activities of the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket core stage for future Artemis missions, beginning with Artemis III. Teams are currently outfitting the assembly building’s High Bay 2 for future vertical assembly of the rocket stage that will help power […]
The TinyAwards have announced the winners of the 2024 competition: One Minute…
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: Jason Kottke blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/0045186-the-tinyawards-have-annou
NASA’s Europa Clipper Gets Set of Super-Size Solar Arrays
date: 2024-08-27, from: NASA breaking news
The largest spacecraft NASA has ever built for planetary exploration just got its ‘wings’ — massive solar arrays to power it on the journey to Jupiter’s icy moon Europa. NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft recently got outfitted with a set of enormous solar arrays at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Each measuring about 46½ […]
Introducing DISRUPT: Advocating for Inclusion and Social Justice at CSUN
date: 2024-08-27, from: The Sundail (CSUN student paper)
While brainstorming ways to complete community service hours, DISRUPT founder and CSUN alumna Alyssa Avila learned that disability advocacy clubs were being formed on other college campuses, and decided that…
Letter From The Editor
date: 2024-08-27, from: The Sundail (CSUN student paper)
Dear CSUN readers, Welcome to the Fall 2024 semester! As the summer comes to a close and a new year is in full swing, there is a world of new…
https://sundial.csun.edu/183950/print-editions/letter-from-the-editor-7/
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-08-27, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
You are welcome:
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/113035050455517258
IBM reveals upcoming chips to power large-scale AI on next-gen big iron
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Telum II Processor and Spyre Accelerator set to boost performance and expand IO capacity
IBM has unveiled a more powerful processor for its famed mainframe systems, promising enhanced on-chip AI acceleration for inferencing plus integrated data processing unit (DPU) to boost IO handling.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/27/ibm_telum_ii_mainframes/
From the School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins, What to Know…
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: Jason Kottke blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/0045185-from-the-school-of-public
Barcelona, Spain
date: 2024-08-27, from: mrusme blog
“Barcelona is a city on the northeastern coast of Spain. It is the capital and largest city of the autonomous community of Catalonia, as well as the second-most populous municipality of Spain.”
https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/travel/spain/barcelona/
An extensive report by Erin Kissane and Darius Kazemi on how governance,…
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: Jason Kottke blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/0045184-an-extensive-report-by-er
Cerebras gives waferscale chips inferencing twist, claims 1,800 token per sec generation rates
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Faster than you can read? More like blink and you’ll miss the hallucination
Hot Chips Inference performance in many modern generative AI workloads is usually a function of memory bandwidth rather than compute. The faster you can shuttle bits in and out of a high-bandwidth memory (HBM) the faster the model can generate a response.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/27/cerebras_ai_inference/
It’s Raining Cats and Dogs! Records about Cats and Dogs in the National Register of Historic Places
date: 2024-08-27, from: National Archives, Text Message blog
Here we are in the Dog Days of August and maybe some summer thunderstorms are pouring down rain like cats and dogs. Did you know there are properties in the National Register of Historic Places that are specific to Cats and Dogs? In Gurdon, Arkansas is the Hoo-Hoo Monument (National Archives Identifier 26141731) “built in … Continue reading It’s Raining Cats and Dogs! Records about Cats and Dogs in the National Register of Historic Places
Halogencore
date: 2024-08-27, from: John August blog
John welcomes journalist/screenwriter Max Read to look at the emerging sub-genre “halogencore” – stories of corporate malfeasance that are less about uncovering corruption as they are about characters learning to ignore it. They look at the evolution of the sub-genre, how these movies function, and why it’s important to define genres at all. We also […] The post Halogencore first appeared on John August.
https://johnaugust.com/2024/halogencore
Don’t Ever Invade China: Xi Jinping Prioritizes Border, Coastal, and Air Defense
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: RAND blog
China’s national defense policy prioritizes safeguarding national territorial sovereignty and maritime rights with an emphasis on border, coastal, and air defense. Leader Xi Jinping underscored mainland defense in a recent speech. What does Beijing’s carefully crafted, high-profile political signaling tell us?
Oasis is reuniting after 16 years with a 14-stop tour of the…
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: Jason Kottke blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/0045183-oasis-is-reuniting-after-
Our Moon Was Likely Covered in a Magma Ocean Long Ago, and New Data From India’s Lunar Rover Supports That Theory
date: 2024-08-27, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Soil composition measurements from the Chandrayaan-3 mission reveal white rock called ferroan anorthosite, which would have floated to the surface in an ocean of magma
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-27, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Greg Sargent interview with James Carville – lots of insight.
https://newrepublic.com/article/185316/james-carville-trump-deep-troubleand-knows
Boom Supersonic takes baby steps toward breaking the sound barrier
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Twitchy roll resolved, landing gear works on one-third size demonstrator
Aircraft biz Boom Supersonic completed the second test flight of its XB-1 demonstrator vehicle on Monday, during which the landing gear was retracted and extended for the first time and its new roll damper was tested.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/27/boom_supersonic_flight_two/
Next-gen Khadas Mind modular mini PC coming in September with Intel Core Ultra
date: 2024-08-27, from: Liliputing
The Khadas Mind is an unusual mini PC that stuffs a processor, memory, storage, and a small battery into a pocket-sized device that can be used as a standalone computer. But what really sets the Khadas Mind apart from other mini PCs is the Mind Link interface that lets you connect an external graphics dock or […]
The post Next-gen Khadas Mind modular mini PC coming in September with Intel Core Ultra appeared first on Liliputing.
Another Black Eye for Boeing
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: One Foot Tsunami
https://onefoottsunami.com/2024/08/27/another-black-eye-for-boeing/
40 Years Ago: President Reagan Announces Teacher in Space Project
date: 2024-08-27, from: NASA breaking news
On Aug. 27, 1984, President Ronald W. Reagan announced the Teacher in Space project as part of NASA’s Space Flight Participant Program to expand the space shuttle experience to a wider set of private citizens who would communicate the experience to the public. From 11,000 teacher applicants, each of the 50 states and territories selected […]
https://www.nasa.gov/history/40-years-ago-president-reagan-announces-teacher-in-space-project/
Zuckerberg admits Biden administration pressured Meta to police COVID posts
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
‘The government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,’ says Facebook founder
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is giving ammunition to conspiracy theorists with a letter to the House Judiciary Committee in which he claims the Biden administration pressured his company on multiple occasions to censor posts related to COVID-19.…
The Albertsons-Kroger deal has its day in court
date: 2024-08-27, from: Marketplace Morning Report
A federal judge in Oregon will continue hearing arguments about whether to pause efforts to merge the grocery chains Albertsons and Kroger in a nearly $25 billion deal. The Federal Trade Commission believes prices would go up and consumers would lose. We’ll hear more. Plus, Canada announces sweeping tariffs on Chinese EVs, San Fransisco Fed President Mary Daly chats about rate cuts, and businesses cater to India’s growing elderly population.
Microsoft security tools questioned for treating employees as threats
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Cracked Labs examines how workplace surveillance turns workers into suspects
Software designed to address legitimate business concerns about cyber security and compliance treats employees as threats, normalizing intrusive surveillance in the workplace, according to a report by Cracked Labs.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/27/microsoft_workplace_surveillance/
Authors Alliance and SPARC Supporting Legal Pathways to Open Access for Scholarly Works
date: 2024-08-27, from: Authors Union blogs
Authors Alliance and SPARC are excited to announce a new collaboration to address critical legal issues surrounding open access to scholarly publications. One of our goals with this project is to clarify legal pathways to open access in support of federal agencies working to comply with the Memorandum on “Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access […]
Washingtonians Love to Hate Brutalist Architecture. But What If We Could Fix It?
date: 2024-08-27, from: Smithsonian Magazine
An exhibition at the National Building Museum investigates the history and future of the much-maligned architectural style
Wizards Behind the Curtain: Johnson’s Administrative Team Makes Missions Possible
date: 2024-08-27, from: NASA breaking news
For every NASA astronaut who serves as a public face of human spaceflight, there are thousands of people working behind the scenes to make the agency’s missions a success. Even the smallest tasks impact NASA’s ability to explore and innovate for the benefit of humanity. The team of administrative assistants and secretaries who work at […]
Hubble Pinpoints a Dim, Starry Mini-galaxy
date: 2024-08-27, from: NASA breaking news
A glittering collection of stars shines against a background of much more distant galaxies in this view from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope of the Pegasus Dwarf spheroidal galaxy, also known as Andromeda VI. The Andromeda galaxy, also known as Messier 31, is the Milky Way’s closest grand spiral galaxy neighbor, and is host to at […]
https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/hubble-pinpoints-a-dim-starry-mini-galaxy/
1 in 10 Minors Say Their Friends Use AI to Generate Nudes of Other Kids, Survey Finds
date: 2024-08-27, from: 404 Media Group
A new survey attempts to quantify just how common it is for minors to AI-generate nudes of other minors.
VMware reveals how it will deliver Broadcom’s unified hybrid cloud … sometime soon
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Claims just two management consoles will emerge
VMware Explore VMware by Broadcom has opened its annual user conference by teasing version nine of its flagship Cloud Foundation (VCF) suite – a major upgrade touted as delivering on past promises of an easy-to-consume hybrid cloud suite – but hasn’t said when it will arrive.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/27/vmware_cloud_foundation_nine_preview/
Heat Killed More Than 2,000 People in the U.S. Last Year
date: 2024-08-27, from: Heatmap News
Current conditions: Typhoon Shanshan is headed toward southwestern Japan with the power of a Category 3 hurricane • Flooding in Bangladesh has killed 23 people and stranded 1.24 million families • Australia just experienced its hottest winter temperature ever recorded.
THE TOP FIVE
- Midwest heat wave intensifies
Excessive heat warnings and heat advisories are in place across much of the Midwest as a heat wave intensifies across large swathes of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio. In Chicago, the heat index could climb to 115 degrees Fahrenheit today before temperatures begin to come down Wednesday. But the shifting weather is likely to be accompanied by intense thunderstorms across the Midwest tonight and tomorrow.
- U.S. heat-related deaths on the rise
Extreme heat killed 2,325 people in America last year, the highest number in nearly 25 years, according to a new study published in the journal American Medical Association. The data shows 21,518 heat-related deaths since 1999, with the number of deaths remaining steady until 2016, when they began to rise noticeably. Last year the number surpassed 2,000 for the first time in the recorded time period. The age-adjusted rate of heat deaths per capita has also been rising. It stood at 0.17 deaths per 100,000 people in 2015, and reached 0.63 last year. “As temperatures continue to rise because of climate change, the recent increasing trend is likely to continue,” the researchers wrote. “Local authorities in high-risk areas should consider investing in the expansion of access to hydration centers and public cooling centers or other buildings with air conditioning.”
U.S.
heat-related mortality rates over
time.
American
Medical Association
- Meta taps geothermal startup to power data centers
Geothermal startup Sage Geosystems will supply Facebook parent Meta with 150 megawatts of geothermal power in a new deal announced yesterday. The zero-carbon electricity will be used to power Meta’s data centers, starting in 2027, according to a press release. The facility will be built somewhere “east of the Rocky Mountains.” Earlier this month Sage Geosystems became the first geothermal energy storage project to connect to the grid, storing excess clean energy to be used by Texas’ grid operator. This deal with Meta, however, marks Sage’s first move into actually generating around-the-clock, zero-emission electricity by pumping water into the hot rocks that sit beneath the Earth’s surface to create steam. Another geothermal startup, Fervo Energy, is working with Google to power the tech giant’s data centers.
- Canada hits Chinese EVs with 100% tariffs
Canada announced yesterday it will impose 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs starting October 1 in an effort to prevent cheap cars from flooding the market and threatening Canadian auto manufacturing. New levies might also be applied to other clean technologies, including batteries and solar panels, after a 30-day consultation period. “Actors like China have chosen to give themselves an unfair advantage in the global marketplace, compromising the security of our critical industries and displacing dedicated Canadian autos and metal workers,” said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Last year Canada imported $1.6 billion worth of Chinese EVs, up from just $74 million in 2022, according to Bloomberg. The jump coincided with Tesla’s move to ship Model Y vehicles from Shanghai to the port of Vancouver. But as Reuters noted, “Ottawa is trying to position Canada as a critical part of the global EV supply chain and had come under pressure from domestic industry to act against China.” Canada’s move puts it in alignment with the U.S. and the European Union, which have both taken steps to hike tariffs on Chinese EVs.
Get Heatmap AM directly in your inbox every morning:
- Guterres sounds the alarm about sea level rise
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned yesterday at the Pacific Island Forum Leaders Meeting in Tonga that the “surging seas are coming for us all.” The comments come as two new reports – from the World Meteorological Organization and the U.N. – underscore the growing threat of rising seas for coastal communities and low-lying island nations. Oceans have risen by approximately 9 inches since 1880, and the rate of sea level rise has more than doubled over the past 10 years, driven by melting land ice and the expansion of sea water as it warms.
The Pacific islands are uniquely exposed, the reports say, but the problem is global. Under a scenario in which temperatures rise by 3 degrees Celsius, by 2050 New York City, Boston, New Orleans, and Atlantic City are all expected to see sea levels rise between 9 and 16 inches. “Across the world, around a billion people live in coastal areas threatened by our swelling ocean,” Guterres said. “Yet even though some sea level rise is inevitable, its scale, pace, and impact are not. That depends on our decisions.”
THE KICKER
A typical customer of PG&E will see their electricity bills rise by more than $400 this year to help pay for the California utility’s wildfire risk mitigation efforts.
https://heatmap.news/climate/heat-deaths-america-climate-change
The Windows Control Panel joins the ranks of the undead
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
As users wail, Microsoft tweaks its text to drop the word ‘deprecated’
Microsoft has updated its Windows system configuration tools document and excised all references to deprecating the venerable Control Panel in the wake of an outcry from Reg readers.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/27/the_windows_control_panel_joins/
Introducing Web Cache API support on Deno Deploy
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: Deno blog
The Web Cache API offers sub-millisecond read latency, multi-Gbps write throughput, and unbounded storage. Here’s how you can use it.
https://deno.com/blog/deploy-cache-api
Reading the icons of “Quickstart”
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: Uninformative blog
https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2024-08-27/0/POSTING-en.html
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-27, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
"Whenever I, or someone else, posts a link to this blog on Mastodon, it DDoS's me and brings the site down for a couple minutes."
https://kevquirk.com/blog/mastodon-is-ddosing-me
It’s back-to-school season … and near triple-digit temps in some places
date: 2024-08-27, from: Marketplace Morning Report
You may have heard the phrase “be cool, stay in school” before. That’s a bit hard when it’s this hot out though. More than 10,000 schools nationwide lack air conditioning, according to the Center for Climate Integrity. Installing ACs is costly — but so is heat’s impact on student learning. Also on the program: We’ll look at the growing push to erase medical debt, a burden impacting millions of Americans.
Wild week of US weather includes heat wave, tropical storm, landslide, flash flood and snow
date: 2024-08-27, from: VOA News USA
FALCON HEIGHTS, Minn. — It’s been a wild week of weather in many parts of the United States, from heat waves to snowstorms to flash floods.
Here’s a look at some of the weather events:
Midwest sizzles under heat wave
Millions of people in the Midwest have been enduring dangerous heat and humidity.
An emergency medicine physician treating Minnesota State Fair-goers for heat illnesses saw firefighters cut rings off two people’s swollen fingers Monday in hot weather that combined with humidity made it feel well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.7 degrees Celsius).
Soaring late summer temperatures also prompted some Midwestern schools to let out early or cancel sports practices. The National Weather Service issued heat warnings or advisories across Minnesota, Iowa, South Dakota, Illinois, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Wisconsin and Oklahoma. Several cities including Chicago opened cooling centers.
Forecasters said Tuesday also will be scorching hot for areas of the Midwest before the heat wave shifts to the south and east.
West Coast mountains get early snowstorm
An unusually cold storm on the mountain peaks along the West Coast late last week brought a hint of winter in August. The system dropped out of the Gulf of Alaska, down through the Pacific Northwest and into California. Mount Rainier, southeast of Seattle, got a high-elevation dusting, as did central Oregon’s Mt. Bachelor resort.
Mount Shasta, the Cascade Range volcano that rises to 14,163 feet (4,317 meters) above far northern California, wore a white blanket after the storm clouds passed. The mountain’s Helen Lake, which sits at 10,400 feet (3,170 meters) received about half a foot of snow (15 centimeters), and there were greater amounts at higher elevations, according to the U.S. Forest Service’s Shasta Ranger Station.
Tropical storm dumps heavy rain on Hawaii
Three tropical cyclones swirled over the Pacific Ocean on Tuesday, including Tropical Storm Hone, which brought heavy rain to Hawaii; Hurricane Gilma, which was weakening; and Tropical Storm Hector, which was churning westward, far off the southern tip of the Baja California peninsula of Mexico.
The biggest impacts from Tropical Storm Hone (pronounced hoe-NEH) were rainfall and flash floods that resulted in road closures, downed power lines and damaged trees in some areas of the Big Island, said William Ahue, a forecaster at the Central Pacific Hurricane Center in Honolulu. No injuries or major damage had been reported, authorities said.
Deadly Alaska landslide crashes into homes
A landslide that cut a path down a steep, thickly forested hillside crashed into several homes in Ketchikan, Alaska, in the latest such disaster to strike the mountainous region. Sunday’s slide killed one person and injured three others and prompted the mandatory evacuation of nearby homes in the city, a popular cruise ship stop along the famed Inside Passage in the southeastern Alaska panhandle.
The slide area remained unstable Monday, and authorities said that state and local geologists were arriving to assess the area for potential secondary slides. Last November, six people — including a family of five — were killed when a landslide destroyed two homes in Wrangell, north of Ketchikan.
Flash flood hits Grand Canyon National Park
The body of an Arizona woman who disappeared in Grand Canyon National Park after a flash flood was recovered Sunday, park rangers said. The body of Chenoa Nickerson, 33, was discovered by a group rafting down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, the park said in a statement.
Nickerson was hiking along Havasu Creek about a half-mile (800 meters) from where it meets up with the Colorado River when the flash flood struck. Nickerson’s husband was among the more than 100 people safely evacuated.
The flood trapped several hikers in the area above and below Beaver Falls, one of a series of usually blue-green waterfalls that draw tourists from around the world to the Havasupai Tribe’s reservation. The area is prone to flooding that turns its iconic waterfalls chocolate brown.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-27, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
I learned that there were hippie programmers, who loved programming the way hippies love acid rock, weed, making love not war, patchouli oil, The Dead, getting back to the land, saying truth to power, sticking it to the man, etc etc.
http://scripting.com/2016/08/27/nerdsAndHippies.html
Meta digs deep to strike geothermal power deal for its US datacenters
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Teaming up with Sage Geosystems, house of Facbook plans to tap into Earth’s fiery underbelly
Meta and Sage Geosystems are striking a deal under which geothermal energy provided by Sage will be used to deliver renewable power for Meta’s US datacenters, intended to help reduce their carbon dioxide footprint.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/27/meta_geothermal_energy/
Canada to impose 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs
date: 2024-08-27, from: Marketplace Morning Report
From the BBC World Service: Following the lead of the U.S. and the European Union, Canada says it will impose a 100% tariff on imports of Chinese electric vehicles and a 25% tariff on imported steel and aluminum from China. Plus, it’s estimated that there will be 350 million adults over 60 in India by 2050; so it’s no surprise that companies are increasingly looking to cash in on the silver economy’s substantial spending power.
Blue Origin sets October 13 for first New Glenn EscaPADE to Mars
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Must launch to catch the red planet alignment window despite occasional testing ‘anomalies’
Jeff Bezos’s rocket venture, Blue Origin, has set a date of no earlier than October 13 for the inaugural mission of the New Glenn rocket, with a payload set for Mars.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/27/blue_origin_sets_october_13/
Wavelength
date: 2024-08-27, from: Status-Q blog
I haven’t posted for a while, partly because I’m on a small boat here in the Argolian Gulf, courtesy of my kind friend Philip Sargent. The photo above was taken just a couple of minutes ago. It’s my first trip to Greece, and I’m loving it. The temperatures well into the 30s are hard to Continue Reading
https://statusq.org/archives/2024/08/27/12149/
Zuckerberg says Biden administration officials pressured Meta to censor some COVID-19 content
date: 2024-08-27, from: VOA News USA
The elusive dream of cloud portability: Why migrating workloads isn’t so simple
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Despite early promises, moving between providers remains a complex and costly endeavor
Analysis One of the promises of the public cloud was that customers would be able to migrate workloads if they wished, taking advantage of market freedom to switch to a different provider if it offered lower costs or some other advantage. What happened to that dream?…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/27/what_happened_to_cloud_portability/
The future of AI/ML depends on the reality of today – and it’s not pretty
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
The return of Windows Recall is more than a bad flashback
Opinion Companies love to use familiar words in unorthodox ways. “We value your privacy” is really the digital equivalent of a mugger admiring your phone. And “partnering”? Usually, it means “The one with more money is bribing the one with more cred.”…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/27/opinion_ai_ml/
Emulating the early Macintosh floppy drive
date: 2024-08-27, from: OS News
I have been working on an emulator for early (Motorola 68000-powered) Macintosh computers. While implementing the disk drive, I noticed documentation was scattered and hard to find. Now that I have a working implementation, this post is my attempt to document everything in one place. ↫ Thomas Exactly what it says on the tin – everything you ever wanted to know about the disk drive on early Macintosh computers.
https://www.osnews.com/story/140599/emulating-the-early-macintosh-floppy-drive/
How de-Googled is Lineage OS?
date: 2024-08-27, from: OS News
On the whole, I’m satisfied that Lineage OS, as I use it, is preventing nearly all of Google’s data collection. I don’t install or use any Google services, I don’t enable A-GPS, I don’t use Chromium or the built-in browser. I could eliminate more arcane aspects of data collection – like the Internet connectivity check – if I wanted to take the trouble. I don’t think that taking reasonable precautions to avoid becoming part of Google’s data collection economy makes me a tinfoil-hatter. Nevertheless, I would probably use GrapheneOS instead, if I had devices that supported it. Ironically, if I wanted to use GrapheneOS, I’d have to buy Google-branded mobile devices, which is an irony that really stings. ↫ Kevin Boone The existence of Android versions like LineageOS, GrapheneOS, /e/OS, and similar, other de-Googled mobile operating systems is absolutely vital. The market is dominated by Google Android and iOS, and since full alternatives that aren’t Android or iOS are effectively impossible, de-Googled Android is the best we’re going to get. Regulators must ensure that banks, government ID applications, popular messaging platforms, and similarly crucial applications work 100% reliably on de-Googled Android, and do not require Google Play Services in any way, shape, or form. In The Netherlands, there are basically three banks that control the market, and there’s really just one messaging application that rules the country – WhatsApp – and their use is effectively required to participate in society. Consequently, these applications and platforms should be accessible by as many people as possible, and that definitely includes de-Googled Android devices. Being alive should not be taxed by Apple or Google.
https://www.osnews.com/story/140597/how-de-googled-is-lineage-os/
Dr Helen Fisher, MRI maven who showed just how love works, dies at 79
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
It’s all about your chemistry
Noted anthropologist Dr Helen Fisher, who lead groundbreaking research into how the brain deals with love and passion, has died at the age of 79 after suffering endometrial cancer.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/27/helen_fisher_obituary/
MASTER PLAN, Ep 3: The Memo That Changed America
date: 2024-08-27, from: The Lever News
Our third episode introduces the architect behind the master plan’s original blueprint, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell.
https://www.levernews.com/master-plan-episode-3-the-memo-that-changed-america/
Judge acquits web dev accused of spreading fake news that led to UK riots
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
With a warning: Words have power
A Pakistani court on Monday acquitted a man of cyber terrorism charges after he allegedly spread fake news on social media websites that sparked riots across the UK earlier this month.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/27/pakistan_fake_news_uk_riots/
Infosys CEO promises jobs to 2,000 graduate recruits it has kept on hold for two years
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-28, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
But they have to show up for unpaid training, or lose their jobs-in-waiting
Infosys CEO Salil Parekh has promised to honor job offers made over two years ago to graduates yet to be employed by the outsourcing giant.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/27/infosys_freshers_wait/
Biden calls ruling wrong, as Texas judge suspends immigration reform policy
date: 2024-08-27, from: VOA News USA
Houston — A Texas judge has ordered a temporary pause on a policy that would streamline the process for spouses of U.S. citizens to obtain legal status in the country, a blow to one of U.S. President Joe Biden’s biggest immigration reform policies.
Judge J. Campbell Barker granted a 14-day administrative stay Monday in a case brought by the Republican attorneys general of 16 U.S. states challenging the policy.
In June, Biden announced the new policy, which streamlined a pathway to citizenship for an estimated half a million immigrants married to U.S. nationals.
The 16 states bringing the lawsuit, however, say the policy is costing them millions of dollars in public services — including health care, education and law enforcement — used by the immigrants.
In a statement Tuesday, Biden called the new ruling “wrong” while promising to “continue to fight to secure our border and fix our broken immigration system.”
Judge Barker wrote in his order that the “claims are substantial and warrant closer consideration than the court has been able to afford to date.”
“This is just the first step. We are going to keep fighting for Texas, our country, and the rule of law,” said Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, whose state is party to the case, in a post on social media platform X after the order.
The Biden administration has been struggling to address immigration, a hugely divisive issue for many Americans ahead of November’s presidential election, which will see Vice President Kamala Harris take on Republican Donald Trump.
The Democratic Party is walking a fine line of seeking to be tougher on illegal migrants while also introducing reforms to the country’s inefficient immigration system.
Trump’s campaign for the White House has centered on portraying the United States as under assault by what he calls a migrant “invasion.”
The new rules would streamline the process for those who already qualify for permanent residence by removing a requirement that they leave the country as part of the application process.
“These families should not be needlessly separated. They should be able to stay together, and my Administration will not stop fighting for them,” Biden said in his statement.
The rules applied to those in the country for at least 10 years and married to a U.S. citizen before June 17, 2024, and also applied to an estimated 50,000 stepchildren of U.S. citizens.
Those approved would be granted work authorization and the right to stay in the United States for up to three years while they apply for a green card, which is a pathway to full citizenship.
Monday’s ruling suspends the granting of this “parole in place” status, but does not halt the government from continuing to accept applications for the status.
In a statement, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) confirmed it would continue to take applications but would not grant any until the stay was lifted.
“The District Court’s administrative stay order does not affect any applications that were approved before the administrative stay order was issued,” USCIS said.
Immigrant rights group Justice Action Center said the order was an “extreme measure.”
“To halt a process for which Texas has not been able to provide an iota of evidence that it would harm the state is baffling,” said group founder Karen Tumlin.
The Justice Action Center earlier Monday filed a motion seeking to intervene in the lawsuit to defend the program.
Thailand spins up approval for Western Digital to make more spinning rust
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Kingdom sees growing demand for hard disks and drives to maintain global dominance
The Kingdom of Thailand yesterday approved Western Digital’s plans to expand its hard disk manufacturing facilities in the nation.…
Army private who fled to North Korea will plead guilty to desertion
date: 2024-08-27, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — An Army private who fled to North Korea just over a year ago will plead guilty to desertion and four other charges and take responsibility for his conduct, his lawyer said Monday.
Travis King’s attorney, Franklin D. Rosenblatt, told The Associated Press that King intends to admit guilt to a total of five military offenses, including desertion and assaulting an officer. Nine other offenses, including possession of sexual images of a child, will be withdrawn and dismissed under the terms of the deal.
King will be given an opportunity at a Sept. 20 hearing at Fort Bliss, Texas, to discuss his actions and explain what he did.
“He wants to take responsibility for the things that he did,” Rosenblatt said.
In a separate statement, he added, “Travis is grateful to his friends and family who have supported him, and to all outside his circle who did not pre-judge his case based on the initial allegations.”
He declined to comment on a possible sentence that his client might face. Desertion is a serious charge and can result in imprisonment.
The AP reported last month that the two sides were in plea talks.
King bolted across the heavily fortified border from South Korea in July 2023, and became the first American detained in North Korea in nearly five years.
His run into North Korea came soon after he was released from a South Korean prison where he had served nearly two months on assault charges.
About a week after his release from the prison, military officers took him to the airport so he could return to Fort Bliss to face disciplinary action. He was escorted as far as customs, but instead of getting on the plane, he joined a civilian tour of the Korean border village of Panmunjom. He then ran across the border, which is lined with guards and often crowded with tourists.
He was detained by North Korea, but after about two months, Pyongyang abruptly announced that it would expel him. On Sept. 28, he was flown to back to Texas, and has been in custody there.
The U.S. military in October filed a series of charges against King under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, including desertion, as well as kicking and punching other officers, unlawfully possessing alcohol, making a false statement and possessing a video of a child engaged in sexual activity. Those allegations date back to July 10, the same day he was released from the prison.
Can Crypto, China cause Dollardrums?
date: 2024-08-27, from: Om Malik blog
Link: The Changing Role of the U.S. Dollar / Brookings TLDR: Whether it’s sanctions overuse, U.S. political dysfunction or crypto-led fintech innovations, the dollar can’t take its preeminence for granted anymore. Key Points: My Thoughts: More than military dominance, the U.S. dollar has been the key instrument for America’s global dominance. It remains so, but it will increasingly come under pressure due to digitization and disaggregation of money. This is very much a continuation of the “routing around …
https://om.co/2024/08/26/dollardrums/
Trump tries to tie rival Harris to chaotic Afghanistan exit
date: 2024-08-27, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump used the third anniversary on Monday of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan to try to pin the chaotic pullout on his Democratic rival for the White House, Kamala Harris.
Trump participated in a wreath-laying ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery honoring the 13 servicemembers killed during the U.S. exit, then later in Detroit blamed Harris, the vice president, and President Joe Biden for what he termed a “catastrophic” withdrawal.
“Caused by Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, the humiliation in Afghanistan set off the collapse of American credibility and respect all over the world,” Trump said in an address to the National Guard Association of the United States.
It was the latest attempt by Trump and his campaign to raise doubts about Harris’ fitness to serve as commander-in-chief as the Nov. 5 election draws near and comes after Harris last week proclaimed herself ready to lead the nation’s armed forces.
The U.S. troop pullout and evacuation of U.S. and allied officials, citizens and Afghans at risk of Taliban retribution saw crowds of desperate Afghans trying to enter Kabul airport and men clinging to aircraft as they taxied down runways in August 2021.
An Islamic State suicide bomber killed 13 U.S. servicemembers and more than 150 Afghans outside an airport gate.
Harris’ campaign said the fault lay with Trump’s tenure as president.
“The Biden-Harris administration inherited a mess from Donald Trump,” said Ammar Moussa, a Harris spokesperson. “Trump wants America to forget that he had four years to get out of Afghanistan but failed to do it.”
The Biden administration was following a withdrawal commitment and timeline that the Trump administration had negotiated with the Taliban in 2020.
A review released by the U.S. State Department in 2023 found fault with both the Trump and Biden administrations in the run-up to the withdrawal.
In recent weeks, Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance, also have sought to turn Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz’s decades of service into a political vulnerability. Former military service is often a key selling point for candidates in U.S. political campaigns.
The Republicans have accused Walz of exaggerating his rank in the Army National Guard, where he served for 24 years. Walz has described himself as a retired command sergeant major, one of the highest noncommissioned officer positions in the Army. While he achieved that rank, he did not meet the requirements to retire with that title.
The Harris campaign deleted a reference this month to Walz’s rank as a “command sergeant major” on its website. The campaign also now says Walz “misspoke” in 2018 during his gubernatorial campaign in Minnesota when he referred to “weapons of war, that I carried in war.” Walz was never deployed to a war zone.
Trump, 78, never served in the military. Though he was of draft age during the Vietnam War, he received four student deferments and a health-related one after he received a diagnosis for bone spurs in his feet.
Vance served in the Marine Corps for four years as a combat correspondent and was deployed to Iraq for roughly seven months. His position mainly involved writing reports of military activity for public dissemination and at times interacting with the media.
Harris has not served in the military.
Harris told CNN in 2021 that she was the last person in the room with Biden when he decided to pull U.S. forces from Afghanistan and end America’s longest war. She also said that she was comfortable with Biden’s decision, but it remains unclear what role she played in the discussion.
Both Biden and Harris released statements marking the anniversary on Monday.
“These 13 devoted patriots represent the best of America, putting our beloved nation and their fellow Americans above themselves and deploying into danger to keep their fellow citizens safe,” Harris said.
Asked Monday why Biden and Harris weren’t marking the anniversary of the Abbey Gate attack as Trump did at Arlington National Cemetery, White House national security spokesman John Kirby told reporters that Trump had been personally invited by the family members and he called it one way to honor the fallen.
“Another way is to continue to work,” Kirby said. “Maybe not with a lot of fanfare, maybe not with a lot of public attention, maybe not with TV cameras, but to work with might and main every single day to make sure that the families of the fallen and of those who were injured and wounded, not just at Abbey Gate, but over the course of the 20-some odd years that we were in Afghanistan, have the support that they need.”
Also Monday, House Speaker Mike Johnson announced that Congress will posthumously honor the 13 service members by presenting their families with the Congressional Gold Medal next month. It’s the highest civilian award that Congress can bestow.
Some information for this article came from The Associated Press.
https://www.voanews.com/a/trump-tries-to-tie-rival-harris-to-chaotic-afghanistan-exit/7758346.html
Telegram Founder Arrested
date: 2024-08-27, from: Michael Tsai
Nadeem Badshah and Reuters (Hacker News): Pavel Durov, billionaire co-founder and chief executive of the Telegram messaging app, was arrested at the Bourget airport outside Paris on Saturday evening, TF1 TV said, citing an unnamed source. […] Telegram offers end-to-end encrypted messaging and users can also set up “channels” to disseminate information quickly to followers. […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/08/26/telegram-founder-arrested/
CarPlay Spinning Its Wheels
date: 2024-08-27, from: Michael Tsai
Dan Moren: But even against this backdrop, CarPlay increasingly found itself squeezed by a variety of factors: automobile manufacturers who didn’t want to cede control to an outside force, internal Apple forces focusing on the nascent car project, and increased competition from Google, which not only debuted its own Android Auto feature a year after […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/08/26/carplay-spinning-its-wheels/
Using Codable and Enums in SwiftData Models
date: 2024-08-27, from: Michael Tsai
Fatbobman (Reddit): In SwiftData’s default storage implementation, the method of persisting the people attribute is not by converting data into binary format through encoders such as JSONEncoder and storing it in a single field (similar to Core Data’s Value Transformer). Instead, SwiftData creates separate fields for each attribute of Codable data within the table corresponding […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/08/26/using-codable-and-enums-in-swiftdata-models/
Chrome’s Manifest V3 and uBlock Origin
date: 2024-08-27, from: Michael Tsai
Michael Crider (Hacker News): A change in Chrome’s extension support — from the Manifest V2 framework to the newer V3 — is being billed as a way to make browser add-ons safer, more efficient, and compliant with modern APIs. But it’s also deprecating features that complex extensions reply upon.One of those extensions is uBlock Origin, […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/08/26/chromes-manifest-v3-and-ublock-origin/
Trial opens for man charged with killing 10 people at Colorado supermarket
date: 2024-08-27, from: VOA News USA
denver — Jury selection began Monday in the long-delayed trial of a man charged with murdering 10 people at a Colorado supermarket in 2021, a case in which the suspect was ruled mentally unfit to face prosecution before pleading not guilty by reason of insanity.
The outcome hinges on whether the defense can convince jurors that Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, 25, was so mentally ill at the time of the mass shooting that he failed to comprehend the difference between right and wrong and thus should not be held legally responsible for the killings.
The basic facts of the case are not in dispute. Alissa stormed a King Soopers grocery store in Boulder, about 28 miles (45 km) northwest of Denver, on March 22, 2021, armed with a legally purchased Ruger AR-556 pistol, which resembles an AR-15-style rifle.
Police say he killed two people in the store’s parking lot before shooting eight others to death inside the supermarket. Among those killed was a police officer responding to the scene.
The shooting spree ended when a police officer shot Alissa in the leg, leading the gunman, wearing only his underwear, to surrender. He has remained in custody since the day of the shooting.
Alissa is charged with 10 counts of first-degree murder, in addition to dozens of counts of attempted murder, assault and weapons offenses stemming from the incident.
A conviction would carry an automatic sentence of life in prison without parole. There is no death penalty in Colorado.
The trial officially got under way on Monday morning with the judge and attorneys for both sides beginning the process of choosing jurors to hear the case, a court spokesperson said.
Jury selection is expected to wrap up by week’s end, with opening statements possible as early as Friday, or on Tuesday following the U.S. Labor Day holiday.
The case against Alissa stalled after he underwent a court-ordered psychiatric evaluation and was diagnosed with schizophrenia in late 2021. Boulder District Judge Ingrid Bakke, relying on the conclusions of state psychologists, then deemed him incompetent to stand trial.
In November 2023, Bakke found that the defendant’s mental condition had improved sufficiently under psychiatric treatment to rule him restored to competency, allowing the prosecution to move forward.
Competence is a legal determination that weighs whether criminal defendants understand the charges against them and can meaningfully assist in their own defense. An insanity plea relates instead to the defendant’s mental status at the time of the alleged crime.
Grim details of the killings emerged during his plea hearing last year, when a Boulder homicide detective testified that Alissa shot one man in the back, then pursued the victim as he tried to crawl away and shot him again, killing him. The detective also testified the suspect shot and wounded a woman, then fired multiple additional rounds at her as she curled up in a fetal position, killing her.
All the victims struck by gunfire died of their wounds, authorities said.
A precise motive for the killings has not been suggested by prosecutors, though according to a psychologist who treated the gunman at a state mental hospital, Alissa had said he wanted to “commit suicide by cop.”
Slop is Good
date: 2024-08-27, from: furbo.org
I’ve been thinking about all the generative AI slop that’s appearing, especially with tools like “Reimagine”, and I think it’s going to be a great thing for the open web. Why? Because Google is unwittingly shooting itself in the foot in a way that will change the character of the web. How? The web has […]
https://furbo.org/2024/08/26/slop-is-good/
Social platform X edits AI chatbot after election officials warn that it spreads misinformation
date: 2024-08-27, from: VOA News USA
chicago — The social media platform X has made a change to its AIchatbot after five secretaries of state warned it was spreading election misinformation.
Top election officials from Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Washington sent a letter this month to Elon Musk complaining that the platform’s AI chatbot, Grok, produced false information about state ballot deadlines shortly after President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race.
The secretaries of state requested that the chatbot instead direct users who ask election-related questions to CanIVote.org, a voting information website run by the National Association of Secretaries of State.
Before listing responses to election-related questions, the chatbot now says, “For accurate and up-to-date information about the 2024 U.S. Elections, please visit Vote.gov.”
Both websites are “trustworthy resources that can connect voters with their local election officials,” the five secretaries of state said in a shared statement.
“We appreciate X’s action to improve their platform and hope they continue to make improvements that will ensure their users have access to accurate information from trusted sources in this critical election year,” they said.
Grok is available only to subscribers of the premium versions of X. But the five secretaries of state who signed the letter said election misinformation from Grok has been shared across multiple social media platforms, reaching millions of people. Grok continued to repeat the false information for 10 days before it was corrected, the secretaries said. The platform did not respond to a request for comment.
The change promoting a link to an official voting website does not seem to address Grok’s ability to create misleading AI-generated images related to elections. People have been using the tool to flood the platform with fake images of candidates, including Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.
Grok debuted last year for X premium and premium plus subscribers and was touted by Musk as a “rebellious” AI chatbot that will answer “spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems.”
Social media platforms have faced mounting scrutiny for their role in spreading misinformation, including about elections. The letter also warned that inaccuracies are to be expected for AI products, especially chatbots such as Grok that are based on large language models.
Since Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and renamed it to X, watchdog groups have raised concerns over a surge in hate speech and misinformation being amplified on the platform, as well as cuts to the staff that had been moderating content.
Experts say the moves represent a regression from progress made by social media platforms attempting to better combat political disinformation after the 2016 U.S. presidential contest and could precipitate a worsening misinformation landscape ahead of this year’s November elections.
New unique package
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: Go language blog
New package for interning in Go 1.23.
@daily_cache implementation in Python
date: 2024-08-27, from: Max Halford Blog
I spend a lot of time at Carbonfact working on datasets shared by our customers. We typically set things up so that our customers can export data automatically. They usually deposit files to a GCP bucket, with a script, once a day. We then have an ETL script for each customer that runs afterwards to fetch their latest data and process it. During development, I load customer data to my laptop and work on it.