ReHacked vol. 222: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets, Monster gravitational waves spotted for first time, Collection of Van Gogh Works and more

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Twitter now requires an account to view tweets | TechCrunch #internet #socialnetworks

If you’re not logged into your Twitter account and try to view a tweet, you’ll be presented with a sign-in screen. And if you don’t want to have an account on the bird app, too bad!

Twitter hasn’t commented on this change, and given how sloppy the platform has been since Elon Musk’s takeover, it might just be a glitch. However, in a time when Twitter is struggling to grow its user base, it’s possible that this is a tactic to force silent lurkers into creating an account.

Happy 50th birthday, Ethernet | APNIC Blog #history #computers #hardware

Some 50 years ago, at the Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) of renowned photocopier company Xerox, a revolutionary approach to local digital networks was born. On 22 May 1973, Bob Metcalf authored a memo that described ‘X-Wire’, a 3Mbps common bus office network system.

Aspartame sweetener to be declared possible cancer risk by WHO, say reports | Health | The Guardian #health

A popular artificial sweetener used in thousands of products worldwide including Diet Coke, ice-cream and chewing gum is to be declared a possible cancer risk to humans, according to reports.

The World Health Organization’s cancer research arm, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), has conducted a safety review of aspartame and will publish a report next month.

It is preparing to label the sweetener as “possibly carcinogenic to humans”, Reuters reported on Thursday. That would mean there is some evidence linking aspartame to cancer, but that it is limited. The IARC has two more serious categories, “probably carcinogenic to humans” and “carcinogenic to humans”.

Google is about to make life more difficult for custom ROM fans #software

TL;DR

• Google has quietly deprecated support for the Dialer and Messaging apps in AOSP.
• This means brands need to use their own apps or Google’s latest phone and messaging apps.
• This news could also be a blow to the custom ROM community.

Monster gravitational waves spotted for first time #nature #space

After the historic first detection of the space-time rattles in 2015 using ground-based detectors, researchers could have now rediscovered Albert Einstein’s waves with an entirely different technique. The approach tracks changes in the distances between Earth and beacon stars in its Galactic neighbourhood called pulsars, which reveal how the space in between is stretched and squeezed by the passage of gravitational waves.

Whereas the original discovery spotted waves originating from the collision and merger of two star-sized black holes, the most likely source of the latest finding is the combined signal from many pairs of much larger black holes — millions or even billions of times the mass of the Sun — slowly orbiting each other in the hearts of distant galaxies. These waves are thousands of times stronger and longer than those found in 2015, with wavelengths of up to tens of light years. By contrast, the ripples detected since 2015 using a technique called interferometry are just tens or hundreds of kilometres long.

Hiroshi Yoshimura: Pioneering Environmental Music | Tokyo Weekender #culture #music #art #history

With clattering and clanking forests of scaffold and infinite convoys of machinery, Japanese cities are constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed endlessly around the ears of their mostly uncomplaining residents, who shrug off this pile-driving madness with practiced Zen-like forbearance. The round-the-clock jamboree of electronic chirrups, jingles and amplified messages — both commercial and advisory in nature — that make up the remainder of the trembling air, are for the most part accepted as being in the natural order of things. And perhaps they are.

Despite, or perhaps in direct response to this noisy climate, a select group of Japanese musicians from the 1970s and 1980s, taking their cues from Aki Takahashi’s influential performances of Erik Satie’s pre-minimalist ‘furniture music’ and the then-current ambient experiments of Brian Eno, created a new and distinctly Asian music of stark and transcendent tranquility. These serene and stylish soundscapes, temporarily forgotten at home, and until recently widely unknown elsewhere, have seen a contemporary surge of interest — in no small part thanks to that unexpected friend to musical archeologists of the non-mainstream; YouTube. This latter-day enthusiasm for kankyo ongaku (“environmental music”) has been stoked by the involvement of Spencer Doran of Visible Cloaks, who as well as overseeing a genre-defining compilation for crate-digging specialists Light in the Attic, has put out much-coveted re-releases on his own Empire of Signs label, jointly run with August Croy of Root Strata records.

Collection of Van Gogh Works #art

Fast machines, slow machines - Julio Merino (jmmv.dev) #hardware #software #history

Well, that was unexpected. I recorded a couple of crappy videos in 5 minutes, posted them on a Twitter thread, and went viral with 8.8K likes at this point. I really could not have predicted that, given that I’ve been posting what-I-believe-is interesting content for years and… nothing, almost-zero interest. Now that things have cooled down, it’s time to stir the pot and elaborate on those thoughts a bit more rationally.

To summarize, the Twitter thread shows two videos: one of an old computer running Windows NT 3.51 and one of a new computer running Windows 11. In each video, I opened and closed a command prompt, File Explorer, Notepad, and Paint. You can clearly see how apps on the old computer open up instantly whereas apps on the new computer show significant lag as they load. I questioned how computers are actually getting better when trivial things like this have regressed. And boom, the likes and reshares started coming in. Obviously some people had issues with my claims, but there seems to be an overwhelming majority of people that agree we have a problem.

To open up, I’ll stand my ground: latency in modern computer interfaces, with modern OSes and modern applications, is terrible and getting worse. This applies to smartphones as well. At the same time, while UIs were much more responsible on computers of the past, those computers were also awful in many ways: new systems have changed our lives substantially. So, what gives?

How feasible would this mission to Proxima Centauri be? #space #engineering #travel

Why Britain doesn’t build - Works in Progress #economy #longread

Green belts and New Towns

This building boom was not just a result of the Conservatives’ policy reforms. The new conservative government also had a lucky advantage: it was able to use sites that had been nominated for housing by Patrick Abercrombie, previously leader of the CPRE and hugely influential among planners.

Abercrombie himself was against only continuous and contiguous urban growth, not housebuilding in itself. His urbanistic vision was to replace unplanned urban ‘sprawl’ with planned growth through geographically distinct New Towns. He believed that, assuming these settlements were ‘in competent architectural hands and well planned’, they would ‘drop into place almost unnoticed’ and avoid the large-scale political opposition that earlier suburban expansion had faced.8

Consistent with these values, Abercrombie drew up the Greater London plan in 1944. This proposed two major policies. First, Britain was to establish a ‘green belt’ around London, with a seven-to-nine-mile-width (called a ‘radius’ in planning policy). Development on green belt land was to be almost completely banned. Second, there were to be ten New Towns connected to London via railways, on ten new sites inside and outside the green belt Abercrombie had nominated to accommodate London’s growth.

Europe’s Inflation Outlook Depends on How Corporate Profits Absorb Wage Gains #economy

Rising corporate profits account for almost half the increase in Europe’s inflation over the past two years as companies increased prices by more than spiking costs of imported energy. Now that workers are pushing for pay rises to recoup lost purchasing power, companies may have to accept a smaller profit share if inflation is to remain on track to reach the European Central Bank’s 2-percent target in 2025, as projected in our most recent World Economic Outlook.

Inflation in the euro area peaked at 10.6 percent in October 2022 as import costs surged after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and companies passed on more than this direct increase in costs to consumers. Inflation has since retreated to 6.1 percent in May, but core inflation—a more reliable measure of underlying price pressures—has proven more persistent. This is keeping the pressure on the ECB to add to recent interest-rate rises even though the euro area slipped into recession at the start of the year. Policymakers raised rates to a 22-year high of 3.5 percent in June.

French Illustrator Infuses Contemporary Film Posters With A Medieval Flair » Design You Trust #art #culture #fun

Hochbunker Pallasstraße #history #architecture

The bunker on Pallasstraße in Berlin-Schöneberg was built between 1943 and 1945 by Soviet forced labourers, who were held in the nearby school, often with their families. The bunker was located near the former Berlin Sportpalast (Berlin Sports Palace), where Joseph Goebbels gave his famous "total war" speech, and which was demolished in 1973. The five floors of the bunker were originally intended to contain offices and equipment for the nearby Reichspost (German postal service) telecommunications office. A freight lift was also to be added, the fortified openings of which are still visible.

Eight Ways to Say No With Grace and Style #psychology #career

What Type of Exercise Is Best for Mental Health? #health

The findings suggest that exercise is particularly helpful in certain situations. While the type of exercise didn’t matter, people got more mental health benefits out of higher-intensity exercise. If you’re doing something that makes you breathe hard, in other words, that’s a good sign.

And it seems like you don’t have to exercise obsessively to see benefits; less than 2.5 hours per week was actually better than more. The sweet spot was four to five sessions per week—not every day, but most days. Workouts don’t have to be long; there was no difference between 30-minute workouts and hourlong ones. The researchers suggest that this moderate amount of exercise may feel more manageable, so it doesn’t become a burden in people’s lives.

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Dainius