ReHacked vol. 264: We Need To Rewild The Internet, Gigs Economy Around the World, Virtual Tour around Museo Nacional del Prado and more

We Need To Rewild The Internet #internet #society #longread

The story of German scientific forestry transmits a timeless truth: When we simplify complex systems, we destroy them, and the devastating consequences sometimes aren’t obvious until it’s too late.

That impulse to scour away the messiness that makes life resilient is what many conservation biologists call the “pathology of command and control.” Today, the same drive to centralize, control and extract has driven the internet to the same fate as the ravaged forests.

The internet’s 2010s, its boom years, may have been the first glorious harvest that exhausted a one-time bonanza of diversity. The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.

Make a donation - support Ukraine. My favourite: Support the Armed Forces of Ukraine | via National Bank of Ukraine. More options if you want alternatives. Also, very important Come Back Alive Foundation - Charity Organization.

Щира подяка. Разом до перемоги!

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The shining and the grim of the gig economy around the World

Gig worker rest stops are hard to find. Nippy wants to change that - Rest of World

Nippy has set up rest stops for gig workers in Argentina, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic.
The startup makes money by selling workers’ data to companies that offer benefits to gig workers.
Workers told Rest of World they did not know Nippy was selling their data.

Swiggy takes away health insurance when workers don’t meet quotas - Rest of World

Swiggy’s weekly ranking system allows workers to access health insurance depending on the number of “perfect” deliveries they make.
Delivery riders say they find the system convoluted and unfair.

Delivery worker Rakesh was dropping off food orders in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad in late January when he received a distressing call from his wife — she was in severe pain. Over the next three weeks, Rakesh had to drop everything to go to hospitals seeking a diagnosis for her.

More stories on Rest of World

Does light itself truly have an infinite lifetime? - Big Think #science #nature

But if all we have is the photon as we understand it in the Standard Model, then the photon is truly stable. A Universe filled with dark energy ensures, even as the photons that exist today redshift to arbitrarily low energies, that new ones will always get created, leading to a Universe with a finite and positive photon number and photon energy density at all times. We can only be certain of the rules to the extent that we’ve measured them, but unless there’s a big piece of the puzzle missing that we simply haven’t uncovered yet, we can count on the fact that photons might fade away, but they’ll never truly die.

Roche BCP #science

Big metabolic pathways infographic.

Pharmaceutical giant Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’ to save $2.15 billion | Fortune Europe #career #economy #management

In a bid to claw back $2.15 billion, the struggling pharmaceutical giant Bayer CEO is doing away with middle managers and 99% of the company’s 1,362-page corporate handbook, allowing nearly 100,000 employees to self-manage.Bayer, the 160-year-old German company known for inventing aspirin, has been stuck in a rut: Its market cap has plunged to two-decade lows—spurred by its so-far disastrous acquisition of Monsanto—and its CEO Bill Anderson believes that flattening hierarchy and slashing corporate bureaucracy could be key to turning it around.

The Former Slave Who Became a Cowboy, a Rancher, and a Texas Legend #history

One day in the late 1930s, Daniel Webster Wallace—“80 John,” as he was known in ranching circles—rode his favorite horse, Blondie, from his Mitchell County ranch to the Loraine post office. It was a familiar route for him in this mostly flat, sandy part of the state halfway between Midland and Abilene. He had made the six-mile round trip dozens of times. Wallace collected his mail then walked back to Blondie. In his time, 80 John had broken hundreds of broncs. His tougher-than-bull-hide body had never failed him. But on this day, he lacked the strength to swing his leg over the saddle. A group of men saw him struggling and hustled over to lift 80 John onto Blondie.

Motorwheels monowheels #history

First of all, you should use ANY alternative instead of LasPass, e.g. Bitwarden.

LastPass users targeted in phishing attacks good enough to trick even the savvy | Ars Technica #security #software

Password-manager LastPass users were recently targeted by a convincing phishing campaign that used a combination of email, SMS, and voice calls to trick targets into divulging their master passwords, company officials said.

The attackers used an advanced phishing-as-a-service kit discovered in February by researchers from mobile security firm Lookout. Dubbed CryptoChameleon for its focus on cryptocurrency accounts, the kit provides all the resources needed to trick even relatively savvy people into believing the communications are legitimate. Elements include high-quality URLs, a counterfeit single sign-on page for the service the target is using, and everything needed to make voice calls or send emails or texts in real time as targets are visiting a fake site. The end-to-end service can also bypass multi-factor authentication in the event a target is using the protection.

The End of an Era: Women Who Code Closing - Women Who Code #internet #news

Virtual Tour around Museo Nacional del Prado #art #culture

The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat #internet #technology #longread

Cyc: history's forgotten AI project - by I. A. Fisher #ai #history

Six miles north of downtown Austin, Texas, in an unassuming office park just off the Mopac Expressway, stands the headquarters of Cyc, one of the most ambitious artificial intelligence projects in history – a four decade-long effort to codify the common-sense knowledge that is the foundation of human reasoning. Its researchers have produced a corpus of 1.5 million concepts and 25 million rules that feed an inference engine with more than a thousand specialized submodules. The system can use both common-sense knowledge and deep domain expertise to make deductions from chains of reasonings that are thousands of steps long. Its users range from an Ohio research hospital to the National Security Agency.

Yet despite its impressive achievements, Cyc has been largely forgotten, left behind by a new generation of machine-learning algorithms that power the chatbots and self-driving cars of today. How did one of the grandest experiments in AI end up as a historical footnote?

The Forgotten War on Beepers - by Louis Anslow #history #communications #privacy

The pager panic began with a 1988 Washington Post report on the gadgets prevalence in the drug trade, quoting DEA and law enforcement officials. The piece was syndicated throughout the US under headlines like “Beepers flourish in drug business” , “Beepers Speed Drug Connections” and “Drug beepers: Paging devices popular with cocaine dealers”

ChatControl: EU ministers want to exempt themselves | European Pirate Party #privacy #politics #dystopia

According to the latest draft text of the controversial EU Child Sexual Abuse Regulation proposal leaked by the French news organization Contexte, which the EU member states discussed, the EU interior ministers want to exempt professional accounts of staff of intelligence agencies, police and military from the envisaged scanning of chats and messages (Article 1 (2a)). The regulation should also not apply to “confidential information” such as professional secrets (Article 1 (2b)). The EU governments reject the idea that the new EU Child Protection Centre should support them in the prevention of child sexual abuse and develop best practices for prevention initiatives (Article 43(8)).

Stop Acting Like You're Famous #lifehack

Blogging is fun and therapeutic. Grammar and editing aren’t. As long as your thoughts are coherent, don’t worry too much about writing mistakes or filtering yourself. Just use Grammarly to fix elementary-level errors and move on. It’s more about the writing process than the final product.

The most egregious thing you can do with any activity is daydream about how you can make money off of it. That’s the quickest way to optimize for the wrong things and suck the fun right out of it. Most likely you will stop doing the activity almost immediately, so save the money-making schemes for work.

In the end, find something you enjoy doing and just do it because you enjoy it. If you have to, make some goals for yourself, but never for your “audience”.

Behind the grand façade: The rich history of St. Louis City Hall #history #architecture #longread

The hero tax: Why 'selfless' workers are professionally exploited #society #economy #career #psychology

Open to exploitation

Stanley and Kay's second paper looked at the ways that heroisation may encourage exploitation at the workplace across many different fields, such as teaching, nursing, social work and policing.

Participants were first asked to rate whether the typical worker in each profession was a hero, on a scale of one (definitely no) to seven (definitely yes). They then had to judge how likely that person would be to volunteer to work an extra day without any reward. As expected, the participants' responses were correlated. When the participants considered a job to be heroic, they had much higher expectations that the workers would sacrifice their day off for free.

The researchers' final experiments studied the participants' opposition to policies that would harm workers' rights. Would the hero label reduce or increase people's outrage at news of teachers' pay cuts, for example? To find out, the psychologists provided text detailing a policy to cut schools' budgets, and then asked them to declare their attitude on a scale of one (strongly oppose) to seven (strongly support). In some cases, the text was accompanied by a cartoon image of teachers dressed in superhero costumes; in others, they simply saw the plain text.

Amazon ebooks: Are the Mikkelsen twins running a scam? Here’s our investigation - Vox #economy #ai #longread

These days, the trash ebook publishing landscape is fully saturated with grifters. There are blogs that talk about the industry, but they tend to be clickbait sites riddled with SEO keywords and affiliate links back and forth between each other. Virtually every single part of the self-publishing grift world that can be automated or monetized has been automated and monetized.

If you look a few years back, however, you find a very different landscape. In the internet of the early 2010s, lots of people were excited about making money with trash ebooks and trash audiobooks, but they weren’t yet all trying to scam one another on top of their eventual readers. They wrote real blogs about the process of the grift with their real human voices. They distinguished between schemes that were “white hat” (following the rules) and “black hat” (violating some terms of service). They compared strategies and teachers of strategies.

David Lynch Salone del Mobile thinking rooms now open | Wallpaper #culture #art

Visitors at Salone del Mobile 2024 can expect a new cinematic experience. The revered director David Lynch — known for cult films like Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire and Wild at Heart — has designed an exhibition entitled 'Interiors by David Lynch. A Thinking Room' on the grounds of the Rho Fiera. The exhibition marks a new kind of venture for the Oscar-winning auteur, but according to it curator, Antonio Monda, the New York University film professor and former artistic director of the Rome Film Festival, it’s not totally out of the blue.

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Dainius