ReHacked #84: The Truth, by Stanisław Lem, How Indian lawyers, scientists gave Sci-Hub its first legal defence team, Text entered into Windows’ Run dialogue gets sent to Microsoft’s telemetry and more
~ 1650 BCE (~ 3600 years ago), a cosmic airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam, a Middle-Bronze-Age city in the southern Jordan Valley northeast of the Dead Sea.
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Instagram's Body Image Problem May Be Unfixable, Experts Say | Time #internet #socialnetworks #psychology #health
The features within Instagram that cause teenage girls to develop negative feelings about their body image may be baked into the very core of the platform, researchers and former employees have said in the wake of new revelations that the company did not disclose what it knew about its impact on young users.
Facebook, which owns Instagram, has known for years that the platform is harmful to the mental health of many teenagers—particularly girls—but has kept internal research about the issue private, according to a Wall Street Journal report published Tuesday.
How Indian lawyers, scientists gave Sci-Hub its first legal defence team #copyrights
Alexandra Elbakyan learned about the lawsuit filed against her platform, Sci-Hub, in India and did what she had always done in similar situations before — nothing.
In December 2020, three academic publishing giants -- Elsevier, American Chemical Society and Wiley -- moved the Delhi High Court against Sci-Hub, a pirate website which hosts thousands of copyrighted scientific papers and makes them available for free to students and academics. The site claims to host over 87 million research papers. India has the second-largest number of Sci-Hub users in the world.
Based in Kazakhstan, Elbakyan has been sued in the US and across Europe. Not bothering to hire lawyers, she has gone undefended. Not so in India.
The Truth, by Stanisław Lem | The MIT Press Reader #literature #culture #longread
Lem's 1964 story, published in English for the first time, tells the tale of a scientist in an insane asylum theorizing that the sun is alive.
A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea | Scientific Reports #nature #history
~ 1650 BCE (~ 3600 years ago), a cosmic airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam, a Middle-Bronze-Age city in the southern Jordan Valley northeast of the Dead Sea. The proposed airburst was larger than the 1908 explosion over Tunguska, Russia, where a ~ 50-m-wide bolide detonated with ~ 1000× more energy than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. A city-wide ~ 1.5-m-thick carbon-and-ash-rich destruction layer contains peak concentrations of shocked quartz (~ 5–10 GPa); melted pottery and mudbricks; diamond-like carbon; soot; Fe- and Si-rich spherules; CaCO3 spherules from melted plaster; and melted platinum, iridium, nickel, gold, silver, zircon, chromite, and quartz. Heating experiments indicate temperatures exceeded 2000 °C. Amid city-side devastation, the airburst demolished 12+ m of the 4-to-5-story palace complex and the massive 4-m-thick mudbrick rampart, while causing extreme disarticulation and skeletal fragmentation in nearby humans. An airburst-related influx of salt (~ 4 wt.%) produced hypersalinity, inhibited agriculture, and caused a ~ 300–600-year-long abandonment of ~ 120 regional settlements within a > 25-km radius. Tall el-Hammam may be the second oldest city/town destroyed by a cosmic airburst/impact, after Abu Hureyra, Syria, and possibly the earliest site with an oral tradition that was written down (Genesis). Tunguska-scale airbursts can devastate entire cities/regions and thus, pose a severe modern-day hazard.
PySimpleGUI/PySimpleGUI #software
Transforms the tkinter, Qt, WxPython, and Remi (browser-based) GUI frameworks into a simpler interface. The window definition is simplified by using Python core data types understood by beginners (lists and dictionaries). Further simplification happens by changing event handling from a callback-based model to a message passing one.
TikTokers Are Trading Stocks By Copying What Members Of Congress Do #economy #socialnetworks
Young investors have a new strategy: watching financial disclosures of sitting members of Congress for stock tips.
Among a certain community of individual investors on TikTok, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's stock trading disclosures are a treasure trove. "Shouts out to Nancy Pelosi, the stock market's biggest whale," said user 'ceowatchlist.' Another said, "I've come to the conclusion that Nancy Pelosi is a psychic," while adding that she is the "queen of investing."
"She knew," declared Chris Josephs, analyzing a particular trade in Pelosi's financial disclosures. "And you would have known if you had followed her portfolio."
The truly epic BYTE magazine covers by Robert Tinney #computers #history
The truly epic BYTE magazine covers by Robert Tinney
They just don’t make computer magazines like they used to. The computer mags of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s had style. Attitude. There was something truly special about them. Quite possibly the greatest among them, being BYTE (technically it was just “Byte”, but they always drew it as uppercase on the cover). Starting in 1975, that beautiful publication …
Freedom on the Net 2021: The Global Drive to Control Big Tech | Freedom House #internet #freespeech #privacy
Global internet freedom declined for the 11th consecutive year. The greatest deteriorations were documented in Myanmar, Belarus, and Uganda, where state forces cracked down amid electoral and constitutional crises. Myanmar’s 14-point score decline is the largest registered since the Freedom on the Net project began.
7GUIs #programming #learning
7GUIs (7 Graphical User Interfaces) is a programming benchmark to compare implementations in terms of their notation. 7GUIs defines 7 tasks that represent typical challenges in GUI programming. This site implements the 7 tasks using vanilla HTML, CSS & JavaScript. Click a link below to see a description of a task, the rendered GUI & links to its code.
COVID has killed about as many Americans as estimated toll from 1918-19 flu | PBS NewsHour #health
COVID-19 has now killed about as many Americans as the 1918-19 Spanish flu pandemic did — approximately 675,000. And like the worldwide scourge of a century ago, the coronavirus may never entirely disappear from our midst.
Instead, scientists hope the virus that causes COVID-19 becomes a mild seasonal bug as human immunity strengthens through vaccination and repeated infection. That would take time.
Monotty Desktopio | vtm #software
Terminal multiplexer with TUI window manager and multi-party session sharing
Waydroid #software
Waydroid uses Linux namespaces (user, pid, uts, net, mount, ipc) to run a full Android system in a container and provide Android applications on any GNU/Linux-based platform.
The Android inside the container has direct access to needed hardwares.
The Android runtime environment ships with a minimal customized Android system image based on LineageOS. The used image is currently based on Android 10
20 Reasons To Quit Social Media: #socialnetworks #psychology
1. You Have More Free Time
2. You Compare Less With Others
3. You Stop Buying Things You Don’t Need
4. You Stop Doing Things You Don’t Want To Do
5. You Focus On Your Goals
6. You Get More Social
7. You Start Looking For Having Meaningful Dialogues
8. You Stop Dehumanizing Humans
9. You Avoid Groupthink
10. You Transition From FOMO to JOMO
11. You Start To Use Social Media
12. You Get Your Attention Back
13. You Start To Seek Finite Resources
14. You Become More Present
15. You Focus On The Important Things
16. You Have More Time To Think
17. You Realize Who Your Real Friends Are
18. You Stop Supporting Monopolies
19. You Focus On Yourself
20. You Transition From Consumer to Creator
The rain pattered lightly on the harbour of the Belgian port city of Ghent when, on 21 June 2021, a team of professional divers slipped below the surface into the emerald murk. The Brazilian tanker, heavy with fruit juice bound for Australia, had already crossed the Atlantic Ocean, but its journey wasn’t halfway done as the divers felt their way along the barnacled serration of its hull. They were looking for the sea chest, a metallic inlet below the water line, through which the ship draws seawater to cool its engines. Tucked inside, they found what they were looking for: three long sacks, each wrapped in a thick black plastic bag and trussed with black and white striped nautical rope.
Busting the 10x software engineer myth | Swarmia #creer
The best strategy for most companies is not a relentless focus on trying to hire “the best” in hopes of finding 10x unicorn engineers. Rather, it is to make sure that the normal, capable engineers you can hire and retain perform their best. The organizations that can turn ordinary teams into high-performing ones will be the winners – and the engineers in them too.
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