News gathered 2024-09-16
(date: 2024-09-16 08:49:26)
Stuck in Space
date: 2024-09-16, updated: 2024-09-16, from: One Foot Tsunami
https://onefoottsunami.com/2024/09/16/stuck-in-space/
NanoPi Zero2 is a tiny, versatile headless PC with Gigabit Ethernet and an M.2 2230 connector for $18 and up
date: 2024-09-16, from: Liliputing
The NanoPi Zero2 is a tiny single-board computer that measures just 49.5 x 4.95 x 29mm (1.95″ x 1.95″ x 1.14″) when placed in an optional case, or just 45 x 45mm (1.77″ x 1.77″) when used without a case. But it’s a pretty versatile little machine too, with a Rockchip RK3528A quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 processor, […]
The post NanoPi Zero2 is a tiny, versatile headless PC with Gigabit Ethernet and an M.2 2230 connector for $18 and up appeared first on Liliputing.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-09-16, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Has it ever been suggested that journalists take an oath, similar to the one the President takes to: "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." Could be voluntary. Sports reporters might take a different oath.
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artII-S1-C8-1/ALDE_00001126/
Google Serves AI Slop as Top Result for One of the Most Famous Paintings in History
date: 2024-09-16, from: 404 Media Group
The first thing people saw when they searched Google for the artist Hieronymus Bosch was an AI-generated version of his Garden of Earthly Delights, one of the most famous paintings in art history.
Depending on what they are searching for, Google Search sometimes serves users a series of images above
Every webpage deserves to be a place
date: 2024-09-16, updated: 2024-09-16, from: Robin Rendle Essays
https://robinrendle.com/notes/every-webpage-deserves-to-be-a-place/
Postal Service chief ‘fully committed’ to timely US ballot deliveries
date: 2024-09-16, from: VOA News USA
Washington — U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy said on Monday he is “personally fully committed” to ensuring all 2024 presidential election ballots are delivered in a timely fashion and vowed to respond to concerns raised by state and local officials.
A group of about three dozen election officials from the National Association of State Election Directors and other groups on Wednesday raised serious concerns about USPS’s ability to deliver millions of ballots for the 2024 presidential election, citing questions “about processing facility operations, lost or delayed election mail, and front-line training deficiencies impacting USPS’s ability to deliver election mail in a timely and accurate manner.”
DeJoy said in a letter released on Monday that he would hold a call with state officials to address specific concerns.
The officials said that, despite repeated meetings with USPS election staff, “we have not seen improvement or concerted efforts to remediate our concerns.”
DeJoy said the USPS Office of Inspector General is auditing its plants and delivery units and will report any election mail issues they discover “and we will address those issues expeditiously.”
Starting Oct. 1, USPS will deploy ballot monitors and others in processing, retail and delivery units “to reinforce and amplify our policies and procedures on the ground”
USPS said on average it is currently delivering mail in 2.7 days but continues “to recommend as a common-sense measure that voters should mail their completed ballot before Election Day, and at least one week prior to their state’s deadline.”
The inspector general has said 46% of votes were cast by mail in the November 2020 presidential election, compared with 21% in the 2016 election.
USPS said in the 2020 general election, it delivered 99.89% of ballots from voters to election officials within seven days. Voting by mail in some states is set to start in the coming weeks.
Microsoft’s Copilot ‘Wave 2’ is a tsunami of unanswered questions
date: 2024-09-16, updated: 2024-09-16, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
What the next few months hold for the productivity chatbot
Microsoft’s Copilot Wave 2 has arrived, bringing agents and unanswered questions.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/16/microsoft_copilot_wave_2/
Time to Vote for the September 2024 + Post Topic
date: 2024-09-16, from: Computer ads from the Past
Your options are a couple of games, a Japanese computer and a word processor
https://computeradsfromthepast.substack.com/p/time-to-vote-for-the-september-2024
How are you doing, consumer?
date: 2024-09-16, from: Marketplace Morning Report
Retail sales data out Tuesday morning will offer a peek into how consumers are doing right now. As we inch closer to the holiday shopping season, a new forecast from consulting firm Deloitte predicts that holiday spending is likely to grow this year — but not quite as much as in the recent past. We’ll discuss. Also: backlash to digital nomads, and interest rate decisions this week in the U.S., U.K, and Japan.
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/how-are-you-doing-consumer
Germany’s CDU still struggling to restore data months after June cyberattack
date: 2024-09-16, updated: 2024-09-16, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Putting a spanner in work for plans of opposition party to launch a comeback during next year’s elections
One of Germany’s major political parties is still struggling to restore member data more than three months after a June cyberattack targeting its systems.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/16/nein_luck_for_germanys_cdu/
NASA Mobilizes Resource for HBCU Scholars, Highlighted at Conference
date: 2024-09-16, from: NASA breaking news
NASA will spotlight its program to engage underrepresented and underserved students in science, technology, engineering, and math at the 2024 National Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) Week Conference in Philadelphia, from Sunday, Sept. 15, to Thursday, Sept. 19. As part of the White House’s initiative to advance educational equity and economic opportunities through HBCUs, […]
Easter Island’s Ancient Population Never Faced Ecological Collapse, Suggests Another Study
date: 2024-09-16, from: Smithsonian Magazine
New DNA analysis adds to growing research indicating the famous Pacific island did not collapse from overuse of resources before the arrival of Europeans
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-09-16, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Comments on Manton's piece on cross-posting in the twitterverse.
https://micro.blog/manton/45594373
Snowflake’s Unistore still on ice years after announcement
date: 2024-09-16, updated: 2024-09-16, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Cloud unicorn struggles to make database that can do everything ‘margin positive’
Two years after announcing a database that can do analytics and transactions in the same system, Snowflake has yet to commercially launch Unistore, its CFO admitted.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/16/snowflake_unistore_delay/
The Air Force Is Researching a ‘MAD.AI’ That Would Adapt Drones to New Environments
date: 2024-09-16, from: 404 Media Group
The Air Force has contracted with a company called Qylur, whose tool is designed to continuously improve the AI systems of autonomous devices such as drones and UAVs.
Extreme Floods Are Devastating Europe
date: 2024-09-16, from: Heatmap News
Current conditions: Severe flooding in west and central Africa has displaced nearly one million people • Brazil is choking on wildfire smoke that can be seen from space • Shanghai was struck by Typhoon Bebinca, the strongest storm to hit the city in 75 years.
THE TOP FIVE
- Parts of Europe washed out by flooding from Storm Boris
Flooding across central and eastern Europe has killed at least 10 people and forced tens of thousands to evacuate. Since late last week, the slow-moving Storm Boris has dumped huge amounts of rain on the region, causing dams to burst and rivers to overflow and inundating communities in Austria, Poland, Hungary, Romania, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. Parts of eastern Germany are also on alert. In the Austrian capital of Vienna, the Wien River’s water level rose from about 20 inches to more than seven feet in the course of a day. Meanwhile some mountain regions received more than three feet of snow. In Poland, Prime Minister Donald Tusk today declared a state of natural disaster. According to the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center, the floods could be the worst since 2002.
Flooding
in
ViennaChristian
Bruna/Getty Images
The European Environment Agency has warned that flooding is likely to be “one of the most serious effects from climate change in Europe over coming decades.”
- Tropical cyclone approaches Carolinas
Both U.S. coasts are experiencing wild weather but of very different kinds. The National Hurricane Center issued tropical storm warnings for the Carolinas as “Tropical Cyclone Eight” approaches with 50 mph winds. The system could bring up to 8 inches of rain and flash floods. Meanwhile, on the West Coast, parts of California are expecting snow. The state issued its earliest snow advisory in 20 years for the Sierra Nevada mountain range, where up to 4 inches could fall through Monday afternoon.
- A quick roundup of COP29 developments
With COP29 now less than two months away, key players are working hard to lay the groundwork for the outcomes they’d like to see from the annual climate summit. Here are some recent developments:
- Host country Azerbaijan plans to call for a six-fold increase in energy storage capacity by 2030 at the summit in November, according to Bloomberg. The Global Green Energy Storage Pledge will ask more than 190 countries to back the goal, which would see storage capacity reach 1,500 gigawatts, up from 230 GW in 2022.
- A new report from the UN’s Standing Committee on Finance says $500 billion is needed each year to help poor nations adapt to climate change and transition to renewable energy. Setting a new goal on climate finance – up from $100 billion annually – will be one of the main agenda items in Baku.
- Large oil-producing countries are reportedly trying to impede any further progress on the global plan to phase out fossil fuels. Negotiators for western countries told the Financial Times that they’re exerting pressure on Azerbaijan to prioritize conversations at COP29 about how to go forward with the phase out, which was agreed at last year’s summit in Dubai. One negotiator told the FT that large emitters may try to use the finance negotiations to “block any meaningful progress on mitigation.”
- Study: U.S. to see rise in weather-related supply chain disruptions
A recent study finds that the risk of weather-related supply chain disruptions will rise more in the U.S. than in any other country over the next 15 years. This is because the country is starting from a pretty low baseline risk, thanks to the interconnectivity of all the states. “If a heatwave or period of extreme rainfall hits one part of the U.S., it is easily able to import goods and services from other areas,” CarbonBrief explained. But the risk won’t stay that low forever, and indeed the authors note that the U.S. “is subject to the strongest relative increases in consumption risks” through 2040 as weather shocks increase.
- Tesla’s surging Cybertruck sales are turning heads
Tesla sold 5,175 Cybertrucks in July, according to data from S&P Global Mobility. Sales of all other EV pickups combined during that month reached 5,546. Jesse Jenkins, a Princeton professor and energy systems engineering expert (and co-host of Heatmap’s climate podcast Shift Key) predicted back in December that the Cybertruck would be crushed by EV pickup rivals like the Ford F-150 Lightning and Rivian’s R1. But now…
THE KICKER
The U.S. Postal Service recently started rolling out its Next Generation Delivery Vehicles — most of which will be electric. The vehicles may not be beautiful, but as Paul Waldman argued for Heatmap, if you want to normalize EVs, “what better way than to have a funky-looking EV rolling down your street every day, delivering mail to your door?”
https://heatmap.news/climate/europe-flood-storm-boris-climate
HPE CEO: ‘Best interest of shareholders’ to pursue $4B damages from Lynch estate
date: 2024-09-16, updated: 2024-09-16, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
‘These are difficult decisions,’ says Antonio Neri
Antonio Neri, the former engineer turned chief executive at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, says the company has to pursue its $4 billion claim against former Autonomy boss Mike Lynch’s estate because it is “in the best interest of shareholders.”…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/16/hpe_lynch_damages/
55 Years Ago: Space Task Group Proposes Post-Apollo Plan to President Nixon
date: 2024-09-16, from: NASA breaking news
The Apollo 11 mission in July 1969 completed the goal set by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 to land a man on the Moon and return him safely to the Earth before the end of the decade. At the time, NASA planned nine more Apollo Moon landing missions of increasing complexity and an Earth […]
Prison just got rougher as band of heinously violent cybercrims sentenced to lengthy stints
date: 2024-09-16, updated: 2024-09-16, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Orchestrators of abductions, torture, crypto thefts, and more get their comeuppance
One cybercriminal of the most violent kind will spend his best years behind bars, as will 11 of his thug pals for a string of cryptocurrency robberies in the US.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/16/prison_just_got_rougher_as/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-09-16, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
If you ever think there’s no beauty in the details, watch this episode of The Bear. It stands alone.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forks_(The_Bear)
Remembering Iris Harrelson
date: 2024-09-16, from: Doc Searls (at Harvard), New Old Blog
In the late ’70s, I worked for a while at the Psychical Research Foundation, which then occupied a couple of houses on Duke University property and did scientific research into the possibility of life after death. My time there was a lever that has lifted my life on Earth ever since, including many deep and […]
https://doc.searls.com/2024/09/16/remembering-iris-harrelson/
ESA and Neuraspace ink 2-year deal for Space Traffic wrangling
date: 2024-09-16, updated: 2024-09-16, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Multi-million euro package to control satellite swerving and debris dodging
Neuraspace and the European Space Agency have signed a multi-million Euro contract spanning two years for the Portuguese company’s skills in space traffic management (STM).…
A new type of TikTok dance — one in court
date: 2024-09-16, from: Marketplace Morning Report
Later today, TikTok and U.S. government lawyers will face off at the U.S. Court of Appeals in D.C. It’s a crucial hearing that will help determine the fate of the video-sharing app in the United States, which could potentially be banned over national security concerns. Then, to kick off our “Office Politics” series examining how companies are responding to polarization, we’ll hear from Sticker Mule’s CEO about endorsing Trump and denouncing political divisiveness.
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/a-new-type-of-tiktok-dance-one-in-court
Scaling: The State of Play in AI
date: 2024-09-16, from: One Useful Thing
A brief intergenerational pause…
https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/scaling-the-state-of-play-in-ai
Soccer’s “trial of the century” starts
date: 2024-09-16, from: Marketplace Morning Report
From the BBC World Service: A hearing looking into the English club Manchester City’s alleged breaking of the Premier League’s financial rules is underway. The outcome could have enormous ramifications for the Premier League as a whole. Plus, Shanghai — China’s financial hub — has been hit by its worst typhoon in 70 years. And it’s becoming increasingly popular to travel while working remotely, but in some cities, there’s been a backlash against so-called “digital nomads.”
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/soccers-trial-of-the-century-starts
Chrome on the Mac uses less battery than Safari
date: 2024-09-16, from: OS News
It’s one of the most pervasive common wisdoms shared all over the web, no matter where you go – it’s one of those things everybody seems to universally agree on: Chrome will absolutely devastate your battery life on the Mac, and you should really be using Safari, because Apple’s special integration magic pixie dust sprinkles ensures Safari sips instead of gulps electricity. Whether you read random forum posters, Apple PR spokespeople, or Apple’s own executives on stage during events, this wisdom is hard to escape. Is it true, though? Well, Matt Birchler decided to do something entirely revolutionary and entirely unheard of: a benchmark. Back in the olden days of yore, we would run benchmarks to test the claims from companies and their PR departments, and Birchler decided to dust off this old technique and develop a routine to put the Chrome battery claims to the test. After 3 days of continuous testing on a freshly installed 14” MacBook Pro with an M2 Pro processor and 16 GB RAM running the latest stable releases of both browsers, Birchler came to some interesting conclusions. In my 3-hour tests, Safari consumed 18.67% of my battery each time on average, and Chrome averaged 17.33% battery drain. That works out to about 9% less battery drain from Chrome than Safari. Yes, you read that right, I found Chrome was easier on my battery than Safari. While I did experience some variability in each 3 hour test run, Chrome came out on top in 5 of the 6 direct comparisons. ↫ Matt Birchler His methodology seems quite sound and a good representation of what most laptop users will use their browser for: YouTube, social media, a few news websites, and editing a Google Doc, in a 20 minute loop that was repeated for three hours per test. Multiple of these three hour tests were then ran to counter variability. I highly doubt using different websites will radically change the results, but I obviously am curious to see a similar test ran on Windows and Linux, x86 and ARM, for a more complete picture that goes beyond just the Mac. Conventional wisdom is sometimes wrong, and I think we have a classic case of that here. While there may have been a time in the past where Chrome on the Mac devastated battery life, it seems Chrome and Chromium engineers have closed the gap, and in some cases even beat Safari. Now, this doesn’t mean everybody should rush and switch to Chrome, since there are countless other reasons to use Safari over Chrome other than supposed battery life advantages. With Apple PR arguing that alternative browser engines should not be allowed on iOS because Chrome would devastate iOS’ battery life, tests like these are more important than ever, and I hope we’re going to see more of them. Tech media always just seems to copy/paste whatever manufacturers and corporations claim without so much as a hint of skepticism, and this benchmark highlights the dangers of doing so, in case you didn’t already know believing corporations was a terribly idea.
https://www.osnews.com/story/140751/chrome-on-the-mac-uses-less-battery-than-safari/
The future of software? Imagine a bot, stamping on a human face – forever
date: 2024-09-16, updated: 2024-09-16, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Automation is driving the next wave of commoditization, threatening to replace skilled workers
Part 1 As we have said before, the software industry has a decades-long history of cost-cutting, commoditization, and a successful sales model of “pile ’em high, sell ’em cheap.” This has worrying consequences if your skill set is the next one to be commoditized. But there may be ways out of this narrowing commercial bottleneck.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/16/the_future_of_software_part_one/
10 amazing Raspberry Pi Zero projects | #MagPiMonday
date: 2024-09-16, from: Raspberry Pi News (.com)
The tiny microcomputer is still an incredible piece of kit.
The post 10 amazing Raspberry Pi Zero projects | #MagPiMonday appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/10-amazing-raspberry-pi-zero-projects-magpimonday/
Telcos scolded for unwanted erection of utility poles in race to wire up Britain
date: 2024-09-16, updated: 2024-09-16, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Telecoms minister pleads with operators to work together
The UK issue of multiplying telegraph poles is arising again, with telecoms minister Chris Bryant meeting operators over sharing their infrastructure and consulting residents before installation.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/16/uk_telegraph_poles/
NASA Johnson Honors Hispanic Heritage: Meet Manuel Retana
date: 2024-09-16, from: NASA breaking news
Manuel Retana arrived in the U.S. at 15 years old, unable to speak English and with nothing but a dream and $200 in his pocket. Now, he plays a crucial role implementing life support systems on spacecraft that will carry humans to the Moon and, eventually, Mars—paving the way for the next frontier of space […]
RISE with SAP sinking year on year
date: 2024-09-16, updated: 2024-09-16, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Gartner: ERP giant’s flagship cloud-and-upgrade package falls as a ratio of total sales with support deadline looming
The latest figures from Gartner indicate SAP is struggling to convince users of the value of its RISE with SAP package, launched to accelerate users’ ERP upgrades and switch to the cloud.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/16/gartner_finds_rise_with_sap/
The Coast Guard will hear from former OceanGate employees about the Titan implosion
date: 2024-09-16, from: VOA News USA
Condemnations, calls for better Secret Service protection follow apparent Trump assassination attempt
date: 2024-09-16, from: VOA News USA
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-09-16, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
House Republicans break with Trump in vow to accept 2024 election results.
https://www.axios.com/2024/09/14/house-republicans-trump-2024-election
Tito Jackson, member of the Jackson 5, has died at 70, family says
date: 2024-09-16, from: VOA News USA
China’s quantum* crypto tech may be unhackable, but it’s hardly a secret
date: 2024-09-16, updated: 2024-09-16, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
- Quite Unlikely A New Technology’s Useful, Man
Opinion We have a new call to arms in the 21st century battlefront between the West and China. The Middle Kingdom is building an uncrackable national infrastructure based on quantum key distribution (QKD). The laws of physics are being used against us, and we’re not keeping up, claims a think tank.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/16/opinion_column_quantum/
I don’t know what pressing Delete will do, but it seems safe enough!
date: 2024-09-16, updated: 2024-09-16, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
You’ve got mail … actually no, you’ve got nothing
Who, Me? Welcome once again to yet another Monday and another instalment of Who, Me? in which Register readers own up to the … let’s say “learning experiences” … they’ve enjoyed up in their careers.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/16/who_me/
250 million-plus unused IPv4 addresses should be left alone, argues network boffin
date: 2024-09-16, updated: 2024-09-16, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Tests show it’s just too hard to put the unused 240/4 block to work
The 240/4 block of IPv4 addresses – the six percent of the available IPv4 space that is currently not available for public use – should be left alone rather than being added to the pool of available internet resources, according to Geoff Huston, chief scientist of the Asia Pacific Network Internet Center.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/16/240_4_ipv4_block_unnecessary/
Indian central bank fines HP’s financial services arm
date: 2024-09-16, updated: 2024-09-16, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Alleges its governance was MIA and its KYC SNAFU
The Reserve Bank of India has fined HP Financial Services the equivalent of $12,400 for not complying with regulations – some related to Know Your Customer (KYC) measures – and failing to have necessary IT committees.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/16/india_rbi_fines_hp_finance/
Trump safe after second assassination attempt, authorities say
date: 2024-09-16, from: VOA News USA
Donald Trump is safe after what officials say was the second, unsuccessful assassination attempt in two months. The FBI took the lead after Sunday’s shooting with the suspect in custody – and with Americans facing another dramatic event in what is already a high-stakes, high-drama election. VOA White House correspondent Anita Powell reports from Washington.
China wants red flags on all AI-generated content posted online
date: 2024-09-16, updated: 2024-09-16, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Visible and audible warnings, plus metadata, with absence of info considered suspicious
China’s internet regulator on Saturday proposed a strict regime that will, if adopted, require digital platforms to label content created by artificial intelligence.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/16/china_ai_content_draft_regulations/
‘Shogun’ and ‘Hacks’ win top series Emmy Awards
date: 2024-09-16, from: VOA News USA
LOS ANGELES — “Hacks” won the comedy series at Sunday’s Emmy Awards, topping “The Bear,” which took home several of the night’s honors.
“Shogun” won the best drama series win, collecting a whopping 18 Emmys for its first season, just one of several historic wins.
Hiroyuki Sanada won best actor in a drama for “Shogun” on Sunday night at the Emmy Awards, and Anna Sawai won best actress as they became the first two Japanese actors to win Emmys.
Their wins gave the FX series momentum going into one of the night’s top awards, where “Shogun” won best drama series.
“The Bear” came back for seconds in a big way at the ceremony four times including best actor, best supporting actor and best supporting actress in a comedy, while British upstart “Baby Reindeer” won four of its own, including best limited series.
The star of FX’s “The Bear” Jeremy Allen White won best actor in a comedy for the second straight year, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach repeated as best supporting actor.
A surprise came when Liza Colón-Zayas won best supporting actor over major competition.
“How could I have thought it would be possible to be in the presence of Meryl Streep and Carol Burnett,” Colón-Zayas said as tears welled in her eyes as she accepted the award on the stage of the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles.
She is the first Latina to win in the category.
“To all the Latinas who are looking at me,” she said, “keep believing and vote.”
Netflix’s darkly quirky “Baby Reindeer” won best actor and best writing for the show’s creator and star Richard Gadd and best supporting actress for Jessica Gunning, who plays his tormentor.
Accepting the best limited series award, Gadd urged the makers of television to take chances.
“The only constant across any success in television is good storytelling,” he said. “Good storytelling that speaks to our times. So take risks, push boundaries. Explore the uncomfortable. Dare to fail in order to achieve.”
“Baby Reindeer” is based on a one man-stage show in which Gadd describes being sexually abused along with other emotional struggles.
Accepting that award, he said, “no matter how bad it gets, it always gets better.”
The Associated Press does not typically name people who say they have been sexually abused unless they come forward publicly as Gadd has.
Jodie Foster won her first Emmy to go with her two Oscars when she took best actress in a limited series for “True Detective: Night Country.”
The creator of “The Bear” was also a repeat winner. Christopher Storer took his second straight Emmy for directing, an award handed out by reunited “Happy Days” co-stars Ron Howard and Henry Winkler.
White said backstage that he was watching in the wings as Colón-Zayas won and “that was just the greatest.”
He also shouted out two acting wins the show had already scored at last weekend’s Creative Arts Emmy Awards, when Jamie Lee Curtis won best guest actress in a comedy for playing his mother, and Jon Bernthal won best guest actor for playing his big brother.
“The Bear” won six times including most of the top comedy categories at the strike-delayed Emmys in January.
While the third season of FX’s “The Bear” has already dropped, the trio won their second Emmys for its second, in which White’s chef Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto attempts to turn his family’s grungy Chicago sandwich shop into an elite restaurant. It could still win more Sunday night including best comedy series.
The father-son hosting duo of Eugene and Dan Levy in their monologue at the top of the show mocked the very dramatic “The Bear” being in the comedy category.
“In honor of ‘The Bear’ we will be making no jokes,” Eugene Levy said, to laughs.
Jean Smart won best actress in a comedy for “Hacks.” She has won for all three seasons of “Hacks,” and has six Emmys overall.
She beat nominees including Ayo Edebiri, who as co-star of “The Bear” moved from supporting actress, which she won in January, to lead actress.
Coming into the show the big story was “Shogun,” which had already taken the most Emmys for a show in a single season with 14 at the Creative Arts ceremony.
The FX series about lordly politicking in feudal Japan can still win best drama series.
If “Shogun” faces competition for the best drama prize, it could come for the sixth and final season of “The Crown,” the only show among the nominees that has won before in a category recently dominated by the retired “Succession.”
Elizabeth Debicki took best supporting actress in a drama for playing Princess Diana at the end of her life in the sixth and final season of the show.
“Playing this part, based on this unparalleled, incredible human being, has been my great privilege,” Debicki said. “It’s been a gift.”
Billy Crudup won best actor in a drama for “The Morning Show.”
Streep wasn’t the only Oscar winner trumped by a little-known name. Robert Downey Jr., the reigning best supporting actor winner for “Oppenheimer,” was considered the favorite to win best supporting actor in a limited series for “The Sympathizer,” but that award went to Lamorne Morris for “Fargo.”
“Robert Downey Jr. I have a poster of you in my house!” Morris said from the stage as he accepted his first Emmy.
Several awards were presented by themed teams from TV history, including sitcom dads George Lopez, Damon Wayans and Jesse Tyler Ferguson and TV moms Meredith Baxter, Connie Britton, and Susan Kelechi Watson.
https://www.voanews.com/a/shogun-and-hacks-win-top-series-emmy-awards/7785693.html
The winners: 76th annual Emmy Awards
date: 2024-09-16, from: VOA News USA
LOS ANGELES — The 76th annual Emmy Awards were handed out Sunday at the Peacock Theater in downtown Los Angeles.
“Shogun” set a single season record for most wins with 18. “Shogun” won best drama series, and Hiroyuki Sanada and Anna Sawai won acting awards for their roles.
“Hacks’’ won the award for best comedy series.”Baby Reindeer” and “The Bear’’ won four awards apiece.
Early winners included Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Jeremy Allen White and Liza Colón-Zayas, who won awards for their work in the comedy series “The Bear.”
Stars presenting Emmys to their peers included: Billy Crystal, Viola Davis, Selena Gomez, Steve Martin, Maya Rudolph and Martin Sheen.
Several actors and shows, including Rudolph, won last week. Rudolph won her sixth Emmy Award at last weekend’s Creative Arts Emmys for her voice work on “Big Mouth.” Jamie Lee Curtis also picked up a supporting actress Emmy last weekend for her appearance on “The Bear.”
Here’s a list of winners at Sunday’s Emmys:
Supporting actor in a comedy series
Ebon Moss-Bachrach, “The Bear”
Supporting actor in a drama series
Billy Crudup, “The Morning Show”
Actor in a comedy series
Jeremy Allen White, “The Bear”
Supporting actress in a comedy series
Liza Colón-Zayas, “The Bear”
Supporting actress in a drama series
Elizabeth Debicki, “The Crown”
Actress in a comedy series
Jean Smart, “Hacks”
Reality competition program
“The Traitors,” Peacock
Supporting actress limited
Jessica Gunning, “Baby Reindeer”
Scripted variety series
“Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,” HBO/Max
Writing for a variety special
Alex Edelman, “Just for Us”
Directing for a limited or anthology series
Steven Zaillian, “Ripley”
Writing for a comedy series
Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs and Jen Statsky, “Hacks”
Talk series
“The Daily Show,” Comedy Central
Supporting actor in a limited or anthology series
Lamorne Morris, “Fargo”
Writing for a drama series
Will Smith, “Slow Horses”
Writing for a limited series, anthology or movie
Richard Gadd, “Baby Reindeer”
Directing for a comedy series
Christopher Storer, “The Bear”
Governors award
Greg Berlanti
Directing for a drama series
Frederick E.O. Toye, “Shogun”
Actor in a limited, anthology series or movie
Richard Gadd, “Baby Reindeer”
Actress in a limited, anthology series or movie
Jodie Foster, “True Detective: Night Country”
Limited, anthology series or movie
“Baby Reindeer”
Actor in a drama series
Hiroyuki Sanada, “Shogun”
Actress in a drama series
Anna Sawai, “Shogun”
Drama series
“Shogun”
Comedy series
“Hacks”
https://www.voanews.com/a/the-winners-76th-annual-emmy-awards/7785694.html
23andMe settles class-action breach lawsuit for $30 million
date: 2024-09-16, updated: 2024-09-16, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Also: Apple to end NSO Group lawsuit; Malicious Python dev job offers; Dark web kingpins busted; and more
Infosec In Brief Genetic testing outfit 23andMe has settled a proposed class action case related to a 2023 data breach for $30 million.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/16/security_in_brief/
Small town in Kansas finds itself at the center of abortion debate
date: 2024-09-16, from: VOA News USA
PITTSBURG, Kan. — The Rev. Anthony Navaratnam stood before his congregation and urged them to pray for the women from surrounding states who will flock to the new abortion clinic in town that opened in August.
“God is giving us an opportunity to be missionaries in Pittsburg, Kansas,” he told those at Flag Church, which hosted a training on how to protest outside of the clinic.
The debate over reproductive rights has landed in this college town of 20,000 in the southeast corner of one of the few states left in the region still allowing abortions. It is near Missouri, Oklahoma and Arkansas and not terribly far from Texas.
A place this size, especially one in a historically red state, was unlikely to have an abortion clinic before Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022. Since then, Kansas has become one of five states that people are most likely to travel to in order to get an abortion when they’re unable to at home, said Caitlin Myers, an economics professor at Middlebury College who researches abortion policies.
Abortions spiked in Kansas by 152% after Roe, according to a recent analysis by the Guttmacher Institute, which supports abortion rights. Using Myers’ count, six of the clinics in Kansas, Illinois, New Mexico, North Carolina and Virginia that have opened or relocated post-Roe are in communities with fewer than 25,000 people. Two others are in communities of fewer than 50,000.
“Kansas is really the only one in this region that can provide care to many people in these surrounding states,” said Kensey Wright, a member of the board of directors for the Roe Fund in Oklahoma, which supports Kansas abortion clinics through grants.
“Without abortion clinics in that state, we would be without hope,” Wright said.
Providing abortions for out-of-state people
Housed in a former urology office, Pittsburg’s Planned Parenthood clinic sits across the street from a medical clinic run by a Catholic health care system. Behind the clinic are houses.
Clinic manager Logan Rink said her mother used to work in this building as a nurse — a connection that’s “small-town stuff.” She loves this town, and said her neighbors agree the clinic is needed. But she was guarded in her optimism, saying ” the reception that we are going to get from the community is going to be favorable in some ways and probably not always.”
Experts said smaller-sized clinics can be less overwhelming for women who are coming from rural areas, like those surrounding Pittsburg. But there is no anonymity in these smaller communities, where religious and family ties often run deep. Pittsburg was established in 1876, and settled largely by immigrants from Catholic-leaning countries who came to work at surrounding coal mines. There’s a typical main street and a state university with about 7,400 students.
“In a small town, it’s not just that you’ll know that person. Your family will know them. You will have known them for 40 years,” said Dr. Emily Walters, a supporter of the Pittsburg clinic who works as an anesthesiologist at a hospital in neighboring Missouri. “Your stories will be intertwined.”
She wondered aloud, “How do I see you at a protest and then see you the next day at the grocery store and still be able to be polite and civil with each other?”
Walters also chairs the Crawford County Democratic Party in an area that is increasingly Republican and has no Democratic state legislators — a change from 20 years ago when there were six. The county also has become increasingly religious in the same span; it now has twice as many white evangelical Protestants as the national average, and slightly more Catholics, according to the Public Religion Research Institute.
Just five weeks after Roe was overturned in 2022, voters in Kansas had to decide whether to strip the right to an abortion from the state constitution, which could have led to an outright ban. Despite the Republican and religious leanings, 55% of Crawford County voters were part of the 59% of voters statewide who killed the proposal.
It’s in line with an Associated Press-NORC poll from 2024 that showed 6 in 10 Americans think their state should generally allow a person to obtain a legal abortion if they don’t want to be pregnant for any reason. But the rural counties that surrounded Pittsburg chose otherwise at the ballot box.
“I remember people were stealing yard signs, putting up different ones in people’s yards,” said Anastin Journot, an 18-year-old from Independence, Kansas, who is majoring in elementary education at Pittsburg State. She said she was alarmed by Roe getting overturned, remembering she thought: “What if I’m in a situation where I’m needing to get an abortion and it’s not an option?”
Abortion in Kansas is generally legal up until the 22nd week of pregnancy. The clinic’s southern location puts it closer to states that have banned abortions instead of sending people to Kansas’ larger cities, where hours have been expanded and appointments are still in short supply.
About 60% to 65% of people who call Planned Parenthood clinics in Kansas for an abortion appointment are turned away because there isn’t enough capacity, said Emily Wales, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Plains. Already, Wales said, the bulk of people seeking abortions in Kansas are from out of state — mostly Texas, which is about five hours south. After that, it’s Missouri, a few minutes’ drive east and Oklahoma, less than an hour away. She said some come from as far away as Louisiana and even Florida, which now prohibits the procedure after six weeks.
Clinics “strategically placed near (a state’s) border can really help ease the congestion,” said Ushma Upadhyay, a public health scientist at the University of California San Francisco who studies abortion.
Most of the area that’s 100 miles from the new clinic has been designated as medically underserved for primary care by the federal government, and the number of obstetricians and gynecologists for every 100,000 female residents is less than half of the U.S. average.
For now, though, the focus at the Pittsburg clinic will be on abortion. Wales said Planned Parenthood wants to slowly add more services over the next two to three months, and one future goal for the clinic is to provide gender-affirming care. Neighboring states have restricted that, too.
“Pittsburg is going to lift up a whole lot of states in the South and help people get care,” Wales said.
But those additions, she added, will come after staff gets used to the patients and the presence of protesters and opposition.
Protesters are at the ready
Donations are up at Vie Medical Clinic, the town’s crisis pregnancy center, executive director Megan Newman said. Such centers are typically religiously affiliated and encourage clients to continue their pregnancies.
People opposed to the Planned Parenthood clinic also are picking up pamphlets about Vie so they can hand them out to those seeking abortions. “When we got word that Planned Parenthood was coming, you could just kind of feel that in the town,” Newman said.
Jeanne Napier, a 68-year-old who attends a local Baptist church, vowed as she shopped at the local mall that she’ll “be there every day with signs.”
Her daughter, Terri Napier, said in a phone interview she believes part of her parents’ opposition to the clinic is from watching her struggle about 20 years ago. She was in an abusive relationship with someone who has since died. She got pregnant. The family was fearful of bringing a child into the situation.
She had an abortion and spiraled into drug use. “I was at war with forgiving myself,” said the 43-year-old, who is now clean.
Jeanne Napier said she felt like she encouraged the abortion. “And I hate that,” she said, “because I wish I could take that sin upon myself, so it’s real personal. I had an active play in terminating a life, and we don’t have that right.”
Brianna Barnes, a 19-year-old journalism major at Pittsburg State who is from Wichita, has protested and prayed outside of a clinic in her hometown.
“If someone made eye contact with us, we just smiled at them, kind of showing that love and care because no one responds well to screaming, yelling, violence no matter what side it’s on,” she said just after arriving on campus for the fall semester. Most of the students the AP talked to voiced support for the clinic.
Her mother, Crystal Barnes, 42, turned to her daughter: “You’re going to be the odd man out being a Catholic, and conservative, especially with things like abortion. It is so heated.”
The Friday before the clinic opened, crews installed a wooden facade outside, the air filled with the smell of fresh-cut lumber. Walters, the local anesthesiologist, had stopped by to check on the progress.
Walters’ support comes from a personal place. When she was 20 and the same number of weeks pregnant, she went to an emergency room, bleeding. She said she was sent home to miscarry instead of having her labor induced or having a procedure to remove the fetus.
That experience — “horrific, and wouldn’t be considered standard of care, in modern practice,” she said — left her with a deep empathy for women in tough positions.
Just before the 2022 vote, an ad backed by 400 Kansas doctors who support abortion rights ran in some of the state’s largest papers, including The Kansas City Star. Walters’ name was listed first. During that time, her home address appeared online, a frightening prospect in a state where abortion provider Dr. George Tiller was shot dead in 2009 at his Wichita church by an anti-abortion extremist.
“It is critical health care for women,” she said. “It is going to be disruptive to Pittsburg. And that part hurts my heart.”
Which candidate is better for tech innovation? Venture capitalists divided on Harris or Trump
date: 2024-09-16, from: VOA News USA
LOS ANGELES — Being a venture capitalist carries a lot of prestige in Silicon Valley. Those who choose which startups to fund see themselves as fostering the next big waves of technology.
So when some of the industry’s biggest names endorsed former President Donald Trump and the onetime venture capitalist he picked for a running mate, JD Vance, people took notice.
Then hundreds of other venture capitalists — some high profile, others lesser-known — threw their weight behind Vice President Kamala Harris, drawing battle lines over which presidential candidate will be better for tech innovation and the conditions startups need to thrive.
Venture capitalist and Harris backer Stephen DeBerry says some of his best friends support Trump. Though centered in a part of Northern California known for liberal politics, the investors who help finance the tech industry have long been a more politically divided bunch.
“We ski together. Our families are together. We’re super tight,” said DeBerry, who runs the Bronze Venture Fund. “This is not about not being able to talk to each other. I love these guys — they’re almost all guys. They’re dear friends. We just have a difference of perspective on policy issues.”
It remains to be seen if the more than 700 venture capitalists who’ve voiced support for a movement called “VCs for Kamala” will match the pledges of Trump’s well-heeled supporters such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.
“There are a lot of practical reasons for VCs to support Trump,” including policies that could drive corporate profits and stock market values and favor wealthy benefactors, said David Cowan, an investor at Bessemer Venture Partners. But Cowan said he is supporting Harris as a VC with a “long-term investment horizon” because a “Trump world reeling from rampant income inequality, raging wars and global warming is not an attractive environment” for funding healthy businesses.
Several prominent VCs have voiced their support for Trump on Musk’s social platform X. Public records show some of them have donated to a new, pro-Trump super PAC called America PAC, whose donors include powerful tech industry conservatives with ties to SpaceX and Paypal and who run in Musk’s social circle. Also driving support is Trump’s embrace of cryptocurrency and promise to end an enforcement crackdown on the industry.
Although some Biden policies have alienated parts of the investment sector concerned about tax policy, antitrust scrutiny or overregulation, Harris’ bid for the presidency has reenergized interest from VCs who until recently sat on the sidelines.
“We buy risk, right? And we’re trying to buy the right type of risk,” Leslie Feinzaig, founder of “VCs for Kamala” said in an interview. “It’s really hard for these companies that are trying to build products and scale to do so in an unpredictable institutional environment.”
The schism in tech has left some firms split in their allegiances. Although venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, founders of the firm that is their namesake, endorsed Trump, one of their firm’s general partners, John O’Farrell, pledged his support for Harris. O’Farrell declined further comment.
Doug Leone, the former managing partner of Sequoia Capital, endorsed Trump in June, expressing concern on X “about the general direction of our country, the state of our broken immigration system, the ballooning deficit, and the foreign policy missteps, among other issues.” But Leone’s longtime business partner at Sequoia, Michael Moritz, wrote in the Financial Times that tech leaders supporting Trump “are making a big mistake.”
Much of the VC discourse about elections is in response to a July podcast and manifesto in which Andreessen and Horowitz backed Trump and outlined their vision of a “Little Tech Agenda” that they said contrasted with the policies sought by Big Tech.
They accused the U.S. government of increasing hostility toward startups and the VCs who fund them, citing Biden’s proposed higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations and regulations they said could hobble emerging industries involving blockchain and artificial intelligence.
Vance, a U.S. senator from Ohio who spent time in San Francisco working at Thiel’s investment firm, voiced a similar perspective about “little tech” more than a month before he was chosen as Trump’s running mate.
“The donors who were really involved in Silicon Valley in a pro-Trump way, they’re not big tech, right? They’re little tech. They’re starting innovative companies. They don’t want the government to destroy their ability to innovate,” Vance said in an interview on Fox News in June.
Complicating the allegiances is that a tough approach to breaking up the monopoly power of big corporations no longer falls along partisan lines. Vance has spoken favorably of Lina Khan, who Biden picked to lead the Federal Trade Commission and has taken on several tech giants. Meanwhile, some of the most influential VCs backing Harris — such as LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman; and Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla, an early investor in ChatGPT-maker OpenAI — have sharply criticized Khan’s approach.
U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democrat whose California district encompasses part of Silicon Valley, said Trump supporters are a vocal minority reflecting a “third or less” of the region’s tech community. But while the White House has appealed to tech entrepreneurs with its investments in clean energy, electric vehicles and semiconductors, Khanna said Democrats must do a better job of showing that they understand the appeal of digital assets.
Naseem Sayani, a general partner at Emmeline Ventures, said Andreessen and Horowitz’s support of Trump became a lightning rod for those in tech who do not back the Republican nominee. Sayani signed onto “VCs for Kamala,” she said, because she wanted the types of businesses that she helps fund to know that the investor community is not monolithic.
“We’re not single-profile founders anymore,” she said. “There’s women, there’s people of color, there’s all the intersections. How can they feel comfortable building businesses when the environment they’re in doesn’t actually support their existence in some ways?”
Plunging printer sales see Japan’s Ricoh plan 2,000 redundancies
date: 2024-09-16, updated: 2024-09-16, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Plus: Superapps in trouble across Asia; Indonesia connectivity doubles; Alibaba turns 25; and more!
ASIA IN BRIEF Japanese imaging device manufacturer Ricoh last week announced plans to cut 2,000.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/16/asian_tech_news_in_brief/
Trump unharmed after second assassination attempt, authorities say
date: 2024-09-16, from: VOA News USA
washington — Former U.S. President Donald Trump thanked the Secret Service and local police late Sunday, after what the FBI said was an apparent assassination attempt at his golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida.
“I would like to thank everyone for your concerns and well wishes – It was certainly an interesting day!” Trump said on his Truth Social service. “The job was done outstanding.”
The incident, in which Trump was not hurt, came two months after he was shot in the ear during a campaign event in Pennsylvania.
Members of Trump’s security detail were securing areas of the golf course ahead of where Trump was playing Sunday when they spotted a gunman in the bushes. Secret Service agents fired at the suspect, who fled the area and was later arrested.
The local sheriff said the suspect left behind an “AK-47-style rifle” with a scope, a GoPro camera and two backpacks.
“The Secret Service agent that was on the course did a fantastic job,” said Sheriff Ric Bradshaw of the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, in a briefing held by law enforcement shortly after. “What they do is they have an agent that jumps one hole ahead of time to where the president was at. And he was able to spot this rifle barrel sticking out of the fence and immediately engage that individual, at which time the individual took off.”
U.S. President Joe Biden said in a Sunday evening statement that he was relieved Trump was unharmed.
“As I have said many times, there is no place for political violence or for any violence ever in our country, and I have directed my team to continue to ensure that Secret Service has every resource, capability and protective measure necessary to ensure the former President’s continued safety,” he said.
Vice President Kamala Harris, who is running against Trump in the November presidential election, said she was “deeply disturbed by the possible assassination attempt of former President Trump.”
“As President Biden said, our Administration will ensure the Secret Service has every resource, capability, and protective measure necessary to carry out its critical mission,” Harris said in a statement.
Various national media sources, including The Associated Press, The New York Times and Fox News Channel, cited unnamed law enforcement officials who identified the suspect as Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, of Hawaii. Those officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the ongoing investigation.
Social media posts show Routh backing Trump’s 2020 election campaign, but more recent posts expressing support for Biden and Harris.
Routh also repeatedly discussed the war in Ukraine and appeared to try to recruit soldiers to aid in Ukraine’s war effort.
Trump has not announced any changes to his schedule and is set to speak live on X on Monday night from his Mar-a-Lago resort to launch his sons’ crypto platform.
Meanwhile, the leaders of a congressional bipartisan task force investigating the July 13 assassination attempt on Trump said they have requested a briefing by the Secret Service.
Some of the material for this story is from Reuters and The Associated Press.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-09-16, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Trump pledges to deport Haitians in Ohio city, but most are in US legally.
GSoC 2024: Reviving NewGVN
date: 2024-09-16, from: LLVM Blog
This summer I participated in GSoC under the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure. The goal of the project was to improve the NewGVN pass so that it can replace GVN as the main value numbering pass in LLVM.
Background
Global Value Numbering (GVN) consists of assigning value numbers such that instructions with the same value number are equivalent. NewGVN was introduced in 2016 to replace GVN. We now highlight a few aspects in which NewGVN is better than GVN.
A key advantage of NewGVN over GVN is that it is complete for loops,
while GVN is only complete for acyclical code. NewGVN is complete for
loops because when it first processes loops, it assumes that only the
first iteration will be executed, later corroborating these
assumptions—this is known as the optimistic assumption. In practice, the
optimistic assumption boils down to assuming that backedges are
unreachable and, consequently, that when evaluating phi instructions,
the values carried by them can be ignored. For instance, in the example
below, %a is optimistically evaluated to 0.
This leads to evaluating %c to %x, which in
turn leads to evaluating %a.i to 0. At this
point, there are two possibilities: either the assumption was correct
and the loop actually only executes once, and the value numbers computed
so far are correct, or the instructions in the loop need to be
reevaluated. Assume, for this example, that NewGVN could not prove that
only one iteration is executed. Then %a once again
evaluates to 0, and all other registers also evaluate to
the same. Thanks to the optimistic assumption, we were able to discover
that %a is loop-invariant and, moreover, that it is equal
to 0.
define i32 @optimistic(i32 %x, i32 %y){entry: br label %looploop: %a = phi i32 [0, %entry], [%a.i, %loop] ... %c = xor i32 %x, %a %a.i = sub i32 %x, %c br i1 ..., label %loop,label %exitexit: ret i32 %a}
On the other hand, GVN fails to detect this equivalence because it would
pessimistically evaluate %a to itself, and the previously
described evaluation steps would never take place.
Another advantage of NewGVN is the value numbering of memory operations using MemorySSA. It provides a functional view of memory where instructions that can modify memory produce a new memory version, which is then used by other memory operations. This greatly simplifies the detection of redundancies among memory operations. For example, two loads of the same type from equivalent pointers and memory versions are trivially equivalent.
define i32 @foo(i32 %v, ptr %p) {entry:; 1 = MemoryDef(liveOnEntry) store i32 %v, ptr %p, align 4; MemoryUse(1) %a = load i32, ptr %p, align 4; MemoryUse(1) %b = load i32, ptr %p, align 4; 2 = MemoryDef(1) call void @f(i32 %a); MemoryUse(2) %c = load i32, ptr %p, align 4 %d = sub i32 %b, %c ret i32 %d}
In the example above (annotated with MemorySSA), %a and
%b are equivalent, while %c is not. All three
loads are of the same type from the same pointer, but they don’t all
load from the same memory state. Loads %a and
%b load from the memory defined by the store (Memory
1), while %c loads from the memory defined by
the function call (Memory 2). GVN can also detect these
redundancies, but it relies on the more expensive and less general
MemoryDependenceAnalysis.
Despite these and other improvements NewGVN is still not widely used, mainly because it lacks partial redundancy elimination (PRE) and because it is bug-ridden.
Implementing PRE
Our main contribution was the development of a PRE stage for NewGVN (found here). Our solution relied on generalizing Phi-of-Ops. It performs a special case of PRE where the instruction depends on a phi instruction, and an equivalent value is available on every reaching path. This is achieved in two steps: phi-translation and phi-insertion.
Phi-translation consists of evaluating the original instruction in the context of each of its block’s predecessors. Phi operands are replaced by the value incoming from the predecessor. The value is available in the predecessor if the translated instruction is equivalent to a constant, function argument, or another instruction that dominates the predecessor.
Phi-insertion occurs after phi-translation if the value is available in every predecessor. At that point, a phi of the equivalent values is constructed and used to replace the original instruction. The full process is illustrated in the following example.
Our generalization eliminated the need for a dependent phi and introduced the ability to insert the missing values in cases where the instruction is partially redundant. To prevent increases in code size (ignoring the inserted phi instructions), the insertion is only made if it’s the only one required. The full process is illustrated in the following example.
Integrating PRE into the existing framework also allowed us to gain loop-invariant code motion (LICM) for free. The optimistic assumption, combined with PRE, allows NewGVN to speculatively hoist instructions out of loops. On the other hand, LICM in GVN relies on using LoopInfo and can only handle very specific cases.
Missing Features
The two main features our PRE implementation lacks are critical edge
splitting and load coercion. Critical edge splitting is required to
ensure that we do not insert instructions into paths where they won’t be
used. Currently, our implementation simply bails in such cases. Load
coercion allows us to detect equivalences of loaded values with
different types, such as loads of i32 and
float, and then coerce the loaded type using conversion
operations.
The difficulty in implementing these features is that NewGVN is designed to perform analysis and transformation in separate steps, while these features involve modifying the function during the analysis phase.
Results
We evaluated our implementation using the automated benchmarking tool Phoronix Test Suite from which we selected a set of 20 C/C++ applications (listed below).
| aircrack-ng | encode-flac | luajit | scimark2 |
| botan | espeak | mafft | simdjson |
| zstd | fftw | ngspice | sqlite-speedtest |
| crafty | john-the-ripper | quantlib | tjbench |
| draco | jpegxl | rnnoise | graphics-magick |
The default -O2 pipeline was used. The only change betweeen
compilations was the value numbering pass used.
Despite the missing features, we observed that our implementation, on average, performs 0.4% better than GVN. However, it is important to mention that our solution hasn’t been fine-tuned to consider the rest of the optimization pipeline, which resulted in some cases where our implementation regressed compared to both GVN and the existing NewGVN. The most severe case was with jpegxl, where our implementation, on average, performed 10% worse than GVN. It’s important to note that this was an outlier; excluding jpegxl, most regressions were at most 2%. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, we were unable to study these cases in more detail.
Future Work
In the future, we plan to implement the aforementioned missing features and fine-tune the heuristics for when to perform PRE to prevent the regressions discussed in the results section. Once these issues are addressed, we’ll upstream our implementation, bringing us a step closer to reviving NewGVN.
https://blog.llvm.org/posts/2024-09-01-reviving-newgvn/
FBI looking into anti-Haitian threats at Springfield, Ohio, university
date: 2024-09-15, from: VOA News USA
Episode 139 - HUTSPIEL
date: 2024-09-15, from: Advent of Computing
The early history of computer games is messy, weird, and surprising. This episode we are looking at HUTSPIEL, perhaps one of the oldest games ever played on a computer. It’s a wargame developed to simulate nuclear conflict… and it’s 100% analog. Join us as we find out just what tax dollars were being used for in 1955.
Selected Sources:
https://archive.org/details/hutspiel-a-theater-war-game - The HUTSPIEL paper
https://adventofcomputing.libsyn.com/episode-139-hutspiel
Trump shooting incident, reminder of past assassination attempts against US leaders
date: 2024-09-15, from: VOA News USA
Washington — The FBI is investigating what it said was another assassination attempt on Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
The incident occurred Sunday at the Trump International Golf Club West Palm Beach in Florida where Trump, the former president, was golfing.
Law enforcement officials said Secret Service saw a man with a rifle in the bushes and shot at the suspected assassin.
The suspect fled the bushes and was later apprehended on a highway, according to law enforcement.
Previous attempt on Trump
In July, Trump was shot by a gunman during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania in what the FBI said was an attempted assassination. The former president was wounded in the ear.
The Congressional Research Service says direct assaults against presidents, presidents-elect, and candidates have occurred on at least 15 separate occasions, with five resulting in death.
Below is a list of other previous attempts on the lives of American leaders, successful or not.
Assassinations
Four U.S. presidents were assassinated while in office.
Abraham Lincoln: Killed in 1865 by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theater in Washington.
James Garfield: Shot in 1881 in Washington at a train station and died of his wounds two and a half months later.
William McKinley: Assassinated in 1901 by an anarchist in Buffalo, New York.
John F. Kennedy: Assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963 in Dallas, Texas, as the president rode in a motorcade.
Leaders who survived assassination attempts
Four presidents were wounded but survived assassination attempts, while in office or afterward.
Donald Trump: Trump had just started a campaign speech in Pennsylvania on July 13 when shots rang out. Trump was shot in the ear. He was rushed by security officials to a black SUV.
Ronald Reagan: He was shot in 1981 outside the Hilton Hotel in Washington. Reagan was wounded when one of the bullets ricocheted off a limousine and struck him under the left armpit.
Gerald Ford: Survived two attempts on his life in less than three weeks in 1975 without being hurt.
Theodore Roosevelt: He was shot in the chest in 1912 while campaigning for election in Milwaukee but insisted on delivering his speech to supporters before being taken to a hospital.
Assassination attempts on other US leaders
Robert F. Kennedy: A U.S. presidential candidate, and a U.S. senator, Kennedy was assassinated in 1968 by a gunman in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
Alabama Governor George C. Wallace: A candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, he was shot in 1972 and became paralyzed from the waist down.
Emmys return with ‘Shogun’ and ‘The Bear’ leading the pack
date: 2024-09-15, from: VOA News USA
Los Angeles — Hollywood will dole out the annual Emmy Awards, the highest honors in television, Sunday at a red-carpet ceremony where the historical drama “Shogun” and restaurant tale “The Bear” are poised to dominate the night.
“Shogun,” a lavish epic about a power struggle in 17th-century Japan, is the front-runner to take the night’s top trophy for best drama series, according to awards pundits. Reigning best comedy champion “The Bear” is expected to claim that prize again.
Both shows debuted on the FX cable network and stream on Hulu, setting up a big night for owner Walt Disney and its TV chief Dana Walden.
Sunday’s ceremony will take place just eight months after the last Emmys, which aired in an unusual January slot because of disruptions caused by Hollywood labor strikes.
Back on a September schedule, the show will air live from downtown Los Angeles on Disney’s ABC starting at 5 p.m. Pacific time Sunday (12 a.m. GMT on Monday).
“Schitt’s Creek” father-son duo Eugene and Dan Levy will host the festivities. Producers have promised cast reunions from shows past, such as “Happy Days,” and other moments to celebrate the history of television.
Olympic gold medalist swimmer Caeleb Dressel and bronze medalist rugby player Ilona Maher also are scheduled to appear.
Ahead of the ceremony, “Shogun” has already set records. It won 14 trophies — the most ever for one season of a drama series — at last weekend’s Creative Arts Emmys, where awards were given for guest actors and crafts such as cinematography.
The expensive series was no sure thing. It had been in development for years before it came together with elaborate sets, makeup and costumes and storytelling that impressed critics with its attention to detail.
“That’s part of the Cinderella story of this series,” said Clayton Davis, awards editor at Hollywood publication Variety.
Competitors for best drama include British royal family saga “The Crown” and spy thriller “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” from Amazon’s Prime Video.
“The Bear” also performed well at the Creative Arts Emmys, earning seven awards. The show is competing with its second season, which featured a widely praised episode about a disastrous family holiday gathering.
HBO’s “Hacks,” about a 70-something comedienne and a millennial writer, could play the role of spoiler in the comedy category. Due to the timing of their seasons, the shows have never competed head-to-head at the Emmys.
Limited series looks like a lock for “Baby Reindeer,” awards watchers said. The Netflix series tells the tale of a bartender stalked and harassed by a customer.
Scottish comedian and star Richard Gadd has said the Netflix show is based on his real-life story, although a defamation lawsuit argues the stalker’s behavior is exaggerated.
Rivals for limited series include Netflix’s psychological thriller “Ripley,” FX’s “Fargo” and HBO’s “True Detective: Night Country,” starring lead actress nominee Jodie Foster.
Winners are chosen by the nearly 22,000 performers, directors, producers and other members of Hollywood’s Television Academy.
https://www.voanews.com/a/emmys-return-with-shogun-and-the-bear-leading-the-pack/7785280.html
‘Trump Train’ convoy surrounded Biden-Harris bus. Was it political violence?
date: 2024-09-15, from: VOA News USA
Austin, Texas — A Texas jury will soon decide whether a convoy of supporters of then-President Donald Trump violently intimidated former Democratic lawmaker Wendy Davis and two others on a Biden-Harris campaign bus when a so-called “Trump Train” boxed them in for more than an hour on a Texas highway days before the 2020 election.
The trial, which began on Sept. 9, resumes Monday and is expected to last another week.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs argued that six of the Trump Train drivers violated state and federal law. Lawyers for the defendants said they did not conspire against the Democrats on the bus and that their actions are protected speech.
Here’s what else to know: What happened on Oct. 30, 2020?
Dozens of cars and trucks organized by a local Trump Train group swarmed the bus on its way from San Antonio to Austin. It was the last day of early voting in Texas for the 2020 general election, and the bus was scheduled to make a stop in San Marcos for an event at Texas State University.
Video recorded by Davis shows pickup trucks with large Trump flags aggressively slowing down and boxing in the bus as it tried to move away from the Trump Train. One defendant hit a campaign volunteer’s car while the trucks occupied all lanes of traffic, slowing the bus and everyone around it to a 15-mph crawl.
Those on the bus — including Davis, a campaign staffer and the driver — repeatedly called 911 asking for help and a police escort through San Marcos, but when no law enforcement arrived, the campaign canceled the event and pushed forward to Austin.
San Marcos settled a separate lawsuit filed by the same three Democrats against the police, agreeing to pay $175,000 and mandate political violence training for law enforcement.
Davis testified that she felt she was being “taken hostage” and has sought treatment for anxiety.
In the days leading up to the event, Democrats were also intimidated, harassed and received death threats, the lawsuit said.
“I feel like they were enjoying making us afraid,” Davis testified. “It’s traumatic for all of us to revisit that day.”
What’s the plaintiffs’ argument?
In opening statements, an attorney for the plaintiffs said convoy organizers targeted the bus in a calculated attack to intimidate the Democrats in violation of the “Ku Klux Klan Act,” an 1871 federal law that bans political violence and intimidation.
“We’re here because of actions that put people’s lives in danger,” said Samuel Hall, an attorney with the law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher. The plaintiffs, he said, were “literally driven out of town by a swarm of trucks.”
The six Trump Train drivers succeeded in making the campaign cancel its remaining events in Texas in a war they believed was “between good and evil,” Hall said.
Two nonprofit advocacy groups, Texas Civil Rights Project and Protect Democracy, also are representing the three plaintiffs.
What’s the defense’s argument?
Attorneys for the defendants, who are accused of driving and organizing the convoy,
said they did not conspire to swarm the Democrats on the bus, which could have exited the highway at any point.
“This was a political rally. This was not some conspiracy to intimidate people,” said attorney Jason Greaves, who is representing two of the drivers.
The defense also argued that their clients’ actions were protected speech and that the trial is a concerted effort to “drain conservatives of their money,” according to Francisco Canseco, a lawyer for three of the defendants.
“It was a rah-rah group that sought to support and advocate for a candidate of their choice in a very loud way,” Canseco said during opening statements.
The defense lost a bid last month to have the case ruled in their favor without a trial. The judge wrote that “assaulting, intimidating, or imminently threatening others with force is not protected expression.”
China frees American pastor US claims was wrongly jailed, State Department says
date: 2024-09-15, from: VOA News USA
‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ No. 1 again; ‘Am I Racist’ cracks top 5
date: 2024-09-15, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/beetlejuice-beetlejuice-no-1-again-am-i-racist-cracks-top-5-/7785226.html
No Plane? No Problem
date: 2024-09-15, from: Tedium site
What it’s like to travel across the country via Amtrak—and what you need to know if you want to do it yourself.
https://feed.tedium.co/link/15204/16809116/amtrak-cross-country-travel-faq
Linux 6.11 released
date: 2024-09-15, from: OS News
Linus Torvalds just tagged the Linux 6.11 kernel as stable. There are many changes and new features in Linux 6.11 including numerous AMD CPU and GPU improvements, preparations for upcoming Intel platforms, initial block atomic write support for NVMe and SCSI drives, the DRM Panic infrastructure can now display a monochrome logo if desired, easier support for building Pacman kernel packages for Arch Linux, DeviceTree files for initial Snapdragon X1 laptops, and much more. ↫ Michael Larabel Especially the Snapdragon stuff interests me, as I really want to move to ARM for my laptop needs at some point, and I’m obviously not going to be using Windows or macOS. I hope the bringup for the Snapdragon laptop chips is smooth sailing from here and picks up pace, because I’d hate for Linux to miss out on this transition. Qualcomm talked big game about supporting Linux properly, but it feels like they’re – what a surprise – not backing those words up with actions so far.
https://www.osnews.com/story/140749/linux-6-11-released/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-09-15, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Trump is ‘safe following gunshots in his vicinity,’ campaign says in statement.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/15/politics/donald-trump-safe-shots/index.html
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-09-15, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
NotebookLM.
https://notebooklm.google.com/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-09-15, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Listening To The Algorithm.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-09-15, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Drone video loops around Iceland in a minute.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zdT6Z96mcH4&list=PLKgePfdoApjs0yJBJsINJl3T3ltRVSFjv&index=10&pp=iAQB
Media: Suspect identified in apparent assassination attempt of Trump
date: 2024-09-15, from: VOA News USA
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-09-15, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
“Laura Loomer is a crazy conspiracy theorist who regularly utters disgusting garbage intended to divide Republicans. A DNC plant couldn’t do a better job than she is doing to hurt President Trump’s chances of winning re-election.”
https://politicalwire.com/2024/09/15/bonus-quote-of-the-day-2070/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-09-15, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Manton Reece: Toward a common posting API.
https://www.manton.org/2024/09/14/toward-a-common.html
Thank you, Reg Readers: On Call has turned 500!
date: 2024-09-15, updated: 2024-09-15, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Started on a whim, almost a decade later it’s a fixture – and a marvelous demonstration of your wit and wisdom
A short while back, The Register published the 500th installment of On-Call, the reader-contributed column in which you share your tech support stories.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/15/on_call_500_columns_celebration/
Vance defends claim Haitian migrants are eating neighbors’ pets
date: 2024-09-15, from: VOA News USA
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-09-15, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
The European mind cannot comprehend this:
“The University of California just announced a list of military weaponry
it wants in order to escalate its warfare on its students:
3000
rounds of pepper munitions
500 rounds of 40mm impact
munitions
12 drones
9 grenade launchers
Read the full list here: https://regents.universityofcalifornia.edu/regmeet/sept24/c1.pdf “
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/113142712459870354
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-09-15, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
I used to think of Twitter as a coral reef, but its role as a world wide notification system is fading, and we haven't replaced it with anything. I wrote this in 2007 when the utility of Twitter was just becoming apparent.
http://scripting.com/stories/2007/04/28/twitterAsCoralReef.html
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-09-15, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
Every argument for the Oxford comma relies on propaganda built on the framing construct.
If you need the Oxford comma to resolve and ambiguity, you can also rewrite your sentence to not introduce the ambiguity in the first place.
And avoids the ugly-ass looking trailing comma.
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/113142500712692142
US, China military leaders finish discussions on South China Sea, other issues
date: 2024-09-15, from: VOA News USA
BANGKOK — Military leaders from the U.S. and China met in Beijing for routine talks that only resumed in January after being suspended for two years as ties between the two countries soured. The meetings ended Sunday and officials discussed ongoing issues such as Taiwan, the Russia-Ukraine war and clashes in the South China Sea.
Michael Chase, deputy assistant secretary of defense for China, Taiwan and Mongolia led a delegation to engage in the bilateral Defense Policy Coordination Talks, which were last held in January. While the talks weren’t expected to resolve long-standing differences in stances over issues ranging from South China Sea claims to Taiwan, the U.S. has continued to push for the discussions to avoid conflict.
The meetings were held after Chase attended the Xiangshan forum in Beijing, a defense forum that is China’s answer to the Shangri-La Dialogue.
Communication between the two militaries broke off in 2021, as U.S.-China tensions ratcheted up over widening differences on issues such as Taiwan’s sovereignty, the origin of COVID-19 and economic issues.
Beijing has ignored U.S. requests to engage in the past, especially over intercepts between U.S. and Chinese aircraft and ships. While communications resumed after U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping met in San Francisco last November, it is unclear whether the talks could continue as the U.S. is poised for a presidential election.
In the bilateral talks, the two sides discussed China’s support for Russia during the ongoing Ukraine war, as well as China’s actions in the South China Sea, said a U.S. senior defense official briefing reporters on the meetings. On Sunday, the Philippine ship at a disputed shoal, BRP Teresa Magbanua, had left to resupply and provide medical care to its crew members. The defense official said that they were “watching further developments there very closely.”
China’s claims over the South China Sea have become increasingly assertive, with increasing clashes with the Philippine coast guard. In August, both sides accused each other over a collision between their ships which left gaping holes in the Philippine ships.
The maritime claims have meant clashes at sea, such as at the Sabina Shoal, which both China and the Philippines claim. China had blocked attempts to resupply the BRP Teresa Magbanua, in August, with a force of 40 ships.
The Philippines said it would replace the ship immediately, but the departure of the ship raises questions of whether China would seize the shoal. Filipino scientists had previously found submerged piles of crushed corals in its shallows, leading to concern that China may be preparing to build a structure to stake its claim.
China confirmed the departure of the ship, which it said, “infringed on China’s territorial sovereignty.”
“During this period, China had taken control measures against the ship in accordance with the law and multiple attempts by the Philippine side to forcibly resupply the ship had failed,” China Coast Guard spokesperson Liu Dejun said in a statement.
Lexar’s SD 8.0 card support speeds up to 1700 MB/s, but there’s nothing to use it with
date: 2024-09-15, from: Liliputing
Lexar has introduced a new SD card with theoretical read speeds up to 1,700 MB/s and write speeds as high as 1,000 MB/s. But the word “theoretical” is doing a lot in that sentence, because right now there are no compatible devices on the market that will let you use the card at those speeds… […]
The post Lexar’s SD 8.0 card support speeds up to 1700 MB/s, but there’s nothing to use it with appeared first on Liliputing.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-09-15, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
"Well, as I said, you’re going to hear a bunch of lies. And that’s not actually a surprising fact." Exactly right. That's why Trump lying is not news in 2024.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2024/09/15/how-kamala-harris-dodged-the-two-truths-problem/
US Fed expected to announce its first interest rate cut since 2020
date: 2024-09-15, from: VOA News USA
Washington — The Federal Reserve is gearing up to announce its first interest rate cut for more than four years on Wednesday, with policymakers expected to debate how big a move to make less than two months before the U.S. presidential election.
Senior officials at the U.S. central bank including Fed chair Jerome Powell have in recent weeks indicated that a rate cut is coming this month, as inflation eases toward the bank’s long-term target of two percent, and the labor market continues to cool.
The Fed, which has a dual mandate from Congress to act independently to ensure both stable prices and maximum sustainable employment, has repeatedly stressed it will make its decision on rate cuts based solely on the economic data.
But a cut on Wednesday could still cause headaches for Powell, as it would land shortly before the election, in which former Republican president Donald Trump is running against the current Democratic vice president, Kamala Harris.
“As much as I think the Fed tries to say that they’re not a political animal, we are in a really wild cycle right now,” Alicia Modestino, an associate professor of economics at Northeastern University, told AFP.
How big a cut?
The debate among policymakers on Tuesday and Wednesday this week will likely center on whether to move by 25 or 50 basis points.
However, a rate cut of any size would be the Fed’s first since March 2020, when it slashed rates to near-zero in order to support the US economy through the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Fed started hiking rates in 2022 in response to a surge in inflation, fueled largely by a post-pandemic supply crunch and the war in Ukraine.
It has held its key lending rate at a two-decade high of between 5.25 and 5.50 percent for the past 14 months, waiting for economic conditions to improve.
Now, with inflation falling, the labor market cooling, and the US economy still growing, policymakers have decided that conditions are ripe for a cut.
Policymakers are left with a choice: making a small 25 basis point cut to ease into things, or a more aggressive cut of 50 basis points, which would be helpful for the labor market but could also risk reigniting inflation.
“I think that in advance of the November meeting, there’s not quite enough data to say we’re in jeopardy on the employment side,” said Modestino, who was previously a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
Analysts see the smaller cut as a safe bet.
“We expect the Fed to cut by 25bp [basis points],” economists at Bank of America wrote in a recent note to clients.
“The Fed likes predictability,” Modestino from Northeastern said. “It’s good for markets, good for consumers, good for workers.”
“So a 25 basis point cut now, followed up by another 25 basis point cut in November after the next round of economic data, offers a somewhat smoother glide path for the economy,” she added.
How many cuts?
While analysts overwhelmingly expect the Fed to start cutting in September, there is less clarity about what comes next.
Economists at some banks, including Goldman Sachs, expect cuts totaling 75 basis points over the last three meetings of the year, while others see more aggressive cuts, like economists at Citi, who have 125 basis points of easing as their base case.
“The continued softening of the labor market is likely to provoke larger-sized cuts if not at this FOMC meeting then in November and December,” the Citi economists wrote in a recent note to clients, referring to the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC).
The Fed will shed some light on the issue on Wednesday, when it publishes the updated economic forecasts of its 19-member FOMC — including their rate cut expectations.
In June, FOMC members sharply reduced the number of cuts they had penciled in for this year from a median of three down to just one amid a small uptick in inflation.
But as inflation has fallen and the labor market has weakened, expectations of more cuts have grown.
Traders also see a greater-than 99 percent chance of at least four more cuts in 2025, which would bring the Fed’s key lending rate down to between 3.5 and 3.75 percent — 175 basis points below current levels.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-09-15, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
NYT piece on Trump as star of The Apprentice.
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-09-15, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
Short four minute version:
https://youtu.be/a7cgzz5W8uM?si=pfKhFMDljkLZptXf
A good short complement to the “Israelism” documentary:
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/113141692649600328
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-09-15, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
“Our job was to make him look legitimate, to make him look like there was something behind it, even though we pretty much all knew that there wasn’t,” one producer said.
Hispanic Heritage Month puts diversity and culture at the forefront
date: 2024-09-15, from: VOA News USA
Tech billionaire returns to Earth after first private spacewalk
date: 2024-09-15, from: VOA News USA
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — A billionaire spacewalker returned to Earth with his crew on Sunday, ending a five-day trip that lifted them higher than anyone has traveled since NASA’s moonwalkers.
SpaceX’s capsule splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico near Florida’s Dry Tortugas in the predawn darkness, carrying tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, two SpaceX engineers and a former Air Force Thunderbird pilot.
They pulled off the first private spacewalk while orbiting nearly 740 kilometers above Earth, higher than the International Space Station and Hubble Space Telescope. Their spacecraft hit a peak altitude of 1,408 kilometers following Tuesday’s liftoff.
Isaacman became only the 264th person to perform a spacewalk since the former Soviet Union scored the first in 1965, and SpaceX’s Sarah Gillis the 265th. Until now, all spacewalks were done by professional astronauts.
“We are mission complete,” Isaacman radioed as the capsule bobbed in the water, awaiting the recovery team. Within an hour, all four were out of their spacecraft, pumping their fists with joy as they emerged onto the ship’s deck.
It was the first time SpaceX aimed for a splashdown near the Dry Tortugas, a cluster of islands 113 kilometers west of Key West. To celebrate the new location, SpaceX employees brought a big, green turtle balloon to Mission Control at company headquarters in Hawthorne, California. The company usually targets closer to the Florida coast, but two weeks of poor weather forecasts prompted SpaceX to look elsewhere.
During Thursday’s commercial spacewalk, the Dragon capsule’s hatch was open barely a half-hour. Isaacman emerged only up to his waist to briefly test SpaceX’s brand-new spacesuit followed by Gillis, who was knee-high as she flexed her arms and legs for several minutes. Gillis, a classically trained violinist, also held a performance in orbit earlier in the week.
The spacewalk lasted less than two hours, considerably shorter than those at the International Space Station. Most of that time was needed to depressurize the entire capsule and then restore the cabin air. Even SpaceX’s Anna Menon and Scott “Kidd” Poteet, who remained strapped in, wore spacesuits.
SpaceX considers the brief exercise a starting point to test spacesuit technology for future, longer missions to Mars.
This was Isaacman’s second chartered flight with SpaceX, with two more still ahead under his personally financed space exploration program named Polaris after the North Star. He paid an undisclosed sum for his first spaceflight in 2021, taking along contest winners and a pediatric cancer survivor while raising more than $250 million for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
For the just completed so-called Polaris Dawn mission, the founder and CEO of the Shift4 credit card-processing company shared the cost with SpaceX. Isaacman won’t divulge how much he spent.
Bag of Cheetos has huge impact on national park ecosystem
date: 2024-09-15, from: VOA News USA
ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico — A bag of Cheetos gets dropped and left on the floor. Seems inconsequential, right?
Hardly.
Rangers at Carlsbad Caverns National Park in southern New Mexico describe it as a “world-changing” event for the tiny microbes and insects that call this specialized subterranean environment home. The bag could have been there a day or two or maybe just hours, but those salty morsels of processed corn made soft by thick humidity triggered the growth of mold on the cavern floor and on nearby cave formations.
“To the ecosystem of the cave it had a huge impact,” the park noted in a social media post, explaining that cave crickets, mites, spiders and flies soon organized to eat and disperse the foreign mess, essentially spreading the contamination.
The bright orange bag was spotted off trail by a ranger during one of the regular sweeps that park staff make through the Big Room, the largest single cave chamber by volume in North America, at the end of each day. They are looking for straggling visitors and any litter or other waste that might have been left behind on the paved trail.
The Big Room is a popular spot at Carlsbad Caverns. It is a magical expanse filled with towering stalagmites, dainty stalactites and clusters of cave popcorn.
Tons of trash
From this underground wonderland in New Mexico to lake shores in Nevada, tributaries along the Grand Canyon and lagoons in Florida, park rangers and volunteers collect tons of trash left behind by visitors each year as part of an ongoing battle to keep unique ecosystems from being compromised while still allowing visitors access.
According to the National Park Service, more than 300 million people visit the national parks each year, bringing in and generating nearly 70 million tons of trash, most of which ends up where it belongs - in garbage bins and recycling containers.
But for the rest of the discarded snack bags and other debris, it often takes work to round up the waste, and organizations like Leave No Trace have been pushing their message at trailheads and online.
At Carlsbad Caverns, volunteers comb the caverns collecting lint. One five-day effort netted as much as 50 pounds (22.68 kilograms). Rangers also have sweep packs and spill kits for the more delicate and sometimes nasty work that can include cleaning up human waste along the trail.
“It’s such a dark area, sometimes people don’t notice that it’s there. So they walk through it and it tracks it throughout the entire cave,” said Joseph Ward, a park guide who is working specifically on getting the “leave no trace” message out to park visitors and classrooms.
The rangers’ kits can include gloves, trash bags, water, bleach mixtures for decontamination, vacuums and even bamboo toothbrushes and tweezers for those hard-to-reach spots.
As for the spilled Cheetos, Ward told The Associated Press that could have been avoided because the park doesn’t allow food beyond the confines of the historic underground lunchroom.
Cheetos response
After the bag was discovered in July, cave specialists at the park settled on the best way to clean it up. Most of the mess was scooped up, and a toothbrush was used to remove rings of mold and fungi that had spread to nearby cave formations. It was a 20-minute job.
Some jobs can take hours and involve several park employees, Ward said.
Robert Melnick, professor emeritus at the University of Oregon, has been studying the cultural landscape of Carlsbad Caverns, including features like a historic wooden staircase that has become another breeding ground for exotic mold and fungi. He and his team submitted a report to the park in recent days that details those resources and makes recommendations for how the park can manage them in the future.
The balancing act for park managers at Carlsbad and elsewhere, Melnick said, is meeting the dual mandate of preserving and protecting landscapes while also making them accessible.
“I don’t quite know how you would monitor it except to constantly remind people that the underground, the caves, are a very, very sensitive natural environment,” he said.
Pleas to treat the caverns with respect are plastered on signs throughout the park, rangers give orientations to visitors before they go underground, and reminders of the dos and don’ts are printed on the back of each ticket stub.
But sometimes there is a disconnect between awareness and personal responsibility, said JD Tanner, director of education and training at Leave No Trace.
Personal stake is vital
Many people may be aware of the need to “keep it pristine,” but Tanner said the message doesn’t always translate into action or there is a lack of understanding that small actions — even leaving a piece of trash — can have irreversible damage in a fragile ecosystem.
“If someone doesn’t feel a personal stake in the preservation of these environments, they may not take the rules seriously,” Tanner said.
Diana Northup, a microbiologist who has spent years studying cave environments around the world, once crawled up the main corridor at Carlsbad Caverns to log everything that humans left behind.
“So this is just one thing of very many,” she said of the Cheetos.
As many as 2,000 people go through the caverns on any given day during the busy season. With them come hair and skin fragments, and those fragments can have their own microbes on board.
“So it can be really, really bad or it can just be us and all the stuff we’re shedding,” Northup said of human contamination within cave environments. “But here’s the other side of the coin: The only way you can protect caves is for people to be able to see them and experience them.”
“The biggest thing,” she said, “is you have to get people to value and want to preserve the caves and let them know what they can do to have that happen.”
With expansion in India, Apple bolsters global manufacturing
date: 2024-09-15, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/apple-bolsters-global-manufacturing-with-expansion-in-india/7783792.html
From Chinese to Italians and beyond, maligning a culture via its food is longtime American habit
date: 2024-09-15, from: VOA News USA
new york — It’s a practice that’s about as American as apple pie — accusing immigrant and minority communities of engaging in bizarre or disgusting behaviors when it comes to what and how they eat and drink, a kind of shorthand for saying they don’t belong.
The latest iteration came at Tuesday’s presidential debate, when former President Donald Trump spotlighted a false online tempest around the Haitian immigrant community of Springfield, Ohio. He repeated the groundless claim previously spread by his running mate, JD Vance, that the immigrants were stealing dogs and cats, the precious pets belonging to their American neighbors, and eating them. The furor got enough attention that officials had to step in to refute it, saying there was no credible evidence of any such thing.
But while it might be enough to turn your stomach, such food-based accusations are not new. Far from it.
Food-related scorn and insults were hurled at immigrant Chinese communities on the West Coast in the late 1800s as they started coming to the United States in larger numbers, and in later decades spread to other Asian and Pacific Islander communities like Thai or Vietnamese. As recently as last year, a Thai restaurant in California was hit with the stereotype, which caused such an outpouring of undeserved vitriol that the owner had to close and move to another location.
Behind it is the idea that “you’re engaging in something that is not just a matter of taste, but a violation of what it is to be human,” said Paul Freedman, a professor of history at Yale University. By tarring Chinese immigrants as those who would eat things Americans would refuse to, it made them the “other.”
Food as flashpoint
Other communities, while not being accused of eating pets, have been criticized for the perceived strangeness of what they were cooking when they were new arrivals, such as Italians using too much garlic or Indians too much curry powder. Minority groups with a longer presence in the country were and are still not exempt from racist stereotypes — think derogatory references to Mexicans and beans or insulting African Americans with remarks about fried chicken and watermelon.
“There’s a slur for almost every ethnicity based on some kind of food that they eat,” said Amy Bentley, professor of nutrition and food studies at New York University. “And so that’s a very good way of disparaging people.”
That’s because food isn’t just sustenance. Embedded in human eating habits are some of the very building blocks of culture — things that make different peoples distinct and can be commandeered as fodder for ethnic hatred or political polemics.
“We need it to survive, but it’s also highly ritualized and highly symbolic. So the birthday cake, the anniversary, the things are commemorated and celebrated with food and drink,” Bentley said. “It’s just so highly integrated in all parts of our lives.”
And because “there’s specific variations of how humans do those rituals, how they eat, how they have shaped their cuisines, how they eat their food,” she added, “It can be as a theme of commonality … or it can be a form of distinct division.”
It’s not just the what. Insults can come from the how as well — eating with hands or chopsticks instead of forks and knives, for example. It can be seen in class-based bias against poorer people who didn’t have the same access to elaborate table settings or couldn’t afford to eat the same way the rich did — and used different, perhaps unfamiliar ingredients out of necessity.
Such disparagement can extend directly into current events. During the Second Gulf War, for example, Americans angry at France’s opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq started calling french fries “freedom fries.” And a much-used insulting term in the United States for Germans during the first two world wars was “krauts” — a slam on a culture where sauerkraut was a traditional food.
“Just what was wrong with the way urban immigrants ate?” Donna R. Gabaccia wrote in her 1998 book, “We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans.” In reviewing attitudes of the early 20th century and its demands for “100% Americanism,” she noted that “sauerkraut became ‘victory cabbage’” and one account complained of an Italian family “still eating spaghetti, not yet assimilated.”
More food culture, more fodder
Such stereotypes have persisted despite the fact that the American palate has significantly expanded in recent decades, thanks in part to the influx of those immigrant communities, with grocery stores carrying a wealth of ingredients that would baffle previous generations. The rise of restaurant culture has introduced many diners to authentic examples of cuisines they might have needed a passport to access in other eras.
After all, Bentley said, “when immigrants migrate to a different country, they bring their foodways with them and maintain them as they can. … It’s so reminiscent of family, community, home. They’re just really material, multisensory manifestations of who we are.”
Haitian food is just one example of that. Communities like those found in New York City and south Florida have added to the culinary landscape, using ingredients like goat, plantains and cassava.
So when Trump said that immigrants in Springfield — whom he called “the people that came in” — were eating dogs and cats and “the pets of the people that live there,” the echoes of his remarks played into not just food but culture itself.
And even though the American palate has broadened in recent decades, the persistence of food stereotypes — and outright insults, whether based in fact or completely made up — shows that just because Americans eat more broadly, it doesn’t mean that carries over into tolerance or nuance about other groups.
“It’s a fallacy to think that,” said Freedman. “It’s like the tourism fallacy that travel makes us more understanding of diversity. The best example right now is Mexican food. Lots and lots of people like Mexican food AND think that immigration needs to be stopped. There’s no link between enjoyment of a foreigner’s cuisine and that openness.”
US consumer watchdog finds school lunch fees taking toll on parents
date: 2024-09-15, from: VOA News USA
new york — Single mother Rebecca Wood, 45, was already dealing with high medical bills in 2020 when she noticed she was being charged a $2.49 “program fee” each time she loaded money onto her daughter’s school lunch account.
As more schools turn to cashless payment systems, more districts have contracted with processing companies that charge as much as $3.25 or 4% to 5% per transaction, according to a new report from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The report found that though legally schools must offer a fee-free option to pay by cash or check, there’s rarely transparency around it.
“It wouldn’t have been a big deal if I had hundreds of dollars to dump into her account at the beginning of the year,” Wood said. “I didn’t. I was paying as I went, which meant I was paying a fee every time. The $2.50 transaction fee was the price of a lunch. So I’d pay for six lunches, but only get five.”
The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the federal policy on fee-free school lunch, has mandated that districts inform families of their options since 2017, but even when parents are aware, having to pay by cash or check to avoid fees can be burdensome.
“It’s just massively inconvenient,” said Joanna Roa, 43, who works at Clemson University in South Carolina as a library specialist and has two school-aged children.
Roa said that when her son was in first grade and she saw the $3.25-per-transaction fee for lunch account transactions, she and her husband decided to send him to school with packed lunches instead.
“A dollar here and there, I expected,” she said. “But $3.25 per transaction, especially here in rural South Carolina where the cost of living is a lot lower — as are the salaries — is a lot.”
Roa said packing lunch for two kids every day, for two working parents, was an increased burden of time and effort. For the past two years, thanks to surplus funds, her school district has been providing free lunches in school, which has changed the equation, but Roa said that could end at any point.
In its review of the 300 largest public school districts in the U.S., the CFPB found that 87% of sampled districts contract with payment processors.
Within those districts, the companies charge an average of $2.37 or 4.4% of the total transaction, each time money is added to a child’s account. For families with lower incomes who can’t afford to load large sums in one go, those fees can hit weekly or even more frequently, increasing costs disproportionately. Families that qualify for free or reduced lunch pay as much as 60 cents per dollar in fees when paying for school lunches electronically, according to the report.
In Wood’s case, she researched the fees and learned about the USDA requirement to offer fee-free payment by cash or by check. When she pointed this out to the superintendent of her daughter’s Massachusetts school district, the administrator said the lack of transparency was an oversight. To protest, Wood had planned to pay for her daughter’s lunches in coins at the school office, together with other parents. But then the pandemic hit, changing, among other things, school lunch policy.
In subsequent years, Wood became part of a campaign that successfully pushed for universal free school lunches in the state, but she continues to protest school processing fees for families.
“Even if lunch itself is free, if you want to buy something a la carte, or an extra lunch, or some other transaction, you still have to pay that fee,” Wood said. “They take money from people who need it the most.”
While payment companies maintain that school districts have the chance to negotiate fees and rates when they form their contracts, the CFPB found that complex company structures “may insulate companies from competition and make school districts less likely to negotiate.” Just three companies — MySchoolBucks, SchoolCafe, and LINQ Connect — dominate the market, according to the report.
Without the ability to choose which company to work with, “families have fewer ways to avoid harmful practices,” the agency said, “including those that may violate federal consumer protection law.”
The companies named in the report did not respond to requests for comment.
I’m a parent facing these fees. What can I do?
Know that you always have a right to pay by cash or check, under federal policy. You can also request that your school district negotiate down the fees with their payment processing company, or request that the district cover the fees directly, which can give them leverage in negotiating a contract.
If your school is located in a low-income area, you may also check whether your district qualifies for the Community Eligibility Provision, which would allow the school to provide free breakfast and lunch to all enrolled students. More information on the CEP is available at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s website.
Boeing strike could last ‘a while’; workers confident of higher wages, union says
date: 2024-09-15, from: VOA News USA
SEATTLE — A strike at Boeing “could go on for a while” as workers are confident they can get bigger wage increases and an improved pension, union leader Jon Holden said in an interview with National Public Radio on Saturday.
More than 30,000 members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), who produce Boeing’s top-selling 737 MAX and other jets in the Seattle and Portland, began a strike Friday after overwhelmingly voting down a new contract.
Boeing and union negotiators are to return to the bargaining table next week, in talks overseen by U.S. federal mediators, after more than 94% of workers voted to reject an initial contract offer that Holden had endorsed.
Holden said the priorities for his members were a bigger wage increase and the restoration of a defined-benefit pension scheme that the union lost during a previous round of negotiations with Boeing a decade ago.
“We have the most leverage and the most power at the most opportune time that we’ve ever had in our history, and our members are expecting us to use it,” Holden told NPR.
“I know that our members are confident. They’re standing shoulder to shoulder and they’re ready. So it (the strike) could go on for a while,” he said.
The initial deal included a 25% pay raise spread over four years and a commitment by Boeing to build its next commercial jet in the Seattle region, if the plane program is launched within the four-year period of the contract.
Union members, venting frustration at years of stagnant wages and rising living costs, said removal of a performance bonus in the Boeing offer would erode half of the headline salary increase.
Boeing’s stock fell 3.7% on Friday. It has tumbled almost 40% so far this year, slashing the company’s market value by roughly $58 billion.
A long strike could further damage Boeing’s finances, already groaning because of $60 billion in debt. A lengthy pause on plane production would also weigh on airlines that fly Boeing jets and suppliers that manufacture parts.
How I got pitched by Anna Delvey
date: 2024-09-15, updated: 2024-09-15, from: Anil Dash
https://anildash.com/2024/09/15/anna-delvey-pitch/
Full Circle Weekly News 383
date: 2024-09-15, from: Full Circle Magazine
Credits
- Host: @bardictriad, @zaivala
- Bumper: Canonical
- Theme Music: From The Dust - Stardust
- https://soundcloud.com/ftdmusic
- CC BY 4.0
https://fullcirclemagazine.org/podcasts/podcast-383/
pgmoneta 0.14
date: 2024-09-15, from: PostgreSQL News
The pgmoneta community is happy to announce version 0.14.0.
New features
- Annotate backups with custom comments
- Reimplement management layer - all commands now support JSON and YAML-like output
- Remove deprecated CLI commands
pgmoneta
pgmoneta is a backup / restore solution for PostgreSQL 13+.
Read our getting started guide to setup pgmoneta for your backup needs.
Features
- Full backup
- Restore
- Compression (gzip, zstd, lz4, bzip2)
- AES encryption support
- Symlink support
- WAL shipping support
- Hot standby
- Prometheus support
- Remote management
- Offline mode
- Transport Layer Security (TLS) v1.2+ support
- Daemon mode
- User vault
Learn more on our web site or GitHub. Follow on Twitter.
pgmoneta is released under the 3-clause BSD license.