As a dangerous and evil man drives people away from Xitter, many stories are talking up Bluesky as the destination for the diaspora. This piece explains why I kind of like Bluesky but, for the moment, have no intention of moving my online social life away from the Fediverse. (By “Fediverse” I mean…

Die Post hofft nach wie vor auf den Erfolg des elektronischen Patientendossiers. Jetzt schiebt sie die Plattform in die Cloud und versucht damit, politischen Prozessen vorzugreifen. Kolumnist Reto Vogt gefällt das nicht. Das elektronische Patientendossier ist seit vier Jahren ein Projekt voller…

On May 21, 1946, the Canadian physicist Louis Slotin was demonstrating to several other Los Alamos scientists how to do a criticality experiment. Slotin wasn’t really doing an experiment at the time, in the sense of taking careful scientific measurements — he was simply showing how one would do…

Im Internet und auf der Straße äußern einzelne linke Gruppen Sympathien für die Terrorwelle der Hamas. Hier erklärt Autor Nicholas Potter von der Amadeu Antonio Stiftung, weshalb Antisemitismus in der Linken gern übersehen wird, welche Gruppen besonders problematisch sind und wie sich „Fridays for…

Essay: «Wer die Selbstbestimmung als höchste Errungenschaft der Gegenwart feiert, dürfte gegen die Suizidkapsel Sarco nichts einzuwenden haben» Nr. 44 – 31. Oktober 2024 Gibt es das wirklich, ein selbstbestimmtes Sterben? Eine Spurensuche auf dem Balkon einer Sterbenden, bei Exit, in Kanada und im…

Anil Dash, “Don’t Call It a Substack”: We constrain our imaginations when we subordinate our creations to names owned by fascist tycoons. Imagine the author of a book telling people to “read my Amazon”. A great director trying to promote their film by saying “click on my Max”. That’s how much…

Google Scholar, a tool used by researchers around the world, was founded by two researchers. We started Scholar in 2004, physically delivering hard drives to the office (see fact number 2), and two decades later adding new AI features (see fact number 6). To celebrate 20 years of Google Scholar,…

by Ploum on 2023-03-03 Jack Dorsey, Twitter co-founder, is trying to launch Bluesky, a "decentralised Twitter" and people are wondering how it compares to Mastodon. I remember when Jack started to speak about "project bluesky" on Twitter, years ago. ActivityPub was a lot more niche and he ignored…

John Graham-Cumming doesn’t ping me often, but when he does I pay attention. His day job is the CTO of the security giant Cloudflare, but he is also a lay historian of technology, guided by a righteous compass. He might be best known for successfully leading a campaign to force the UK government to…

Introduction Dobble (also called Spot It!), is a card game that uses special circular cards, each with a number (8 in the standard pack, 6 in the kids pack) of symbols or image. There are various ways to play, but they all the games involve finding which symbol is common to two cards. The cards are…

BLENDER.ORG Download Get the latest Blender, older versions, or experimental builds. What's New Stay up-to-date with the new features in the latest Blender releases. LEARNING & RESOURCES Blender Studio Access production assets and knowledge from the open movies. Manual Documentation on the usage and…

Getting a grip For the strongest disc golf throws, it’s all in the thumbs Amateur players got the best results by placing thumbs about 3 centimeters from the outer edge. Jennifer Ouellette – Oct 23, 2024 11:15 PM | 33 Undergraduate student Calvin Teague demonstrates an optimal thumb grip on a…

This August, I’ll be in academia for three years. I’ve reflected on education and collaboration, and how to minimize friction by writing papers using just Markdown. Of course, many’s the time I’ve spent the last three years hunched behind a glowing screen, fingers cramped and ready to press the…

Recently the Barbican museum in London held an exhibition called the Rain Room. It was an installation in which water poured from the ceiling, but sensors detected where people were standing and would turn off the taps above their heads so they didn’t get wet. It was a clever and engaging piece of…

You were going to get one-click access to the full text of nearly every book that’s ever been published. Books still in print you’d have to pay for, but everything else—a collection slated to grow larger than the holdings at the Library of Congress, Harvard, the University of Michigan, at any of the…

Published: September 27, 2024 Updated: January 11, 2025 Note This post is a little more hasty than some of my others, in the interest of keeping up with unfolding events. I hope you’ll bear with the jumble of thoughts. It’s being actively edited; use the table of contents below to jump to any…

Teeth are our meeting place with the outside world, the point of attack. Crystalline and mineral in nature, teeth show us at our most mollusc-like. The fact that we can grow them, lose them and grow them again (if only once) seems to ally us with reptiles and the largest of the cartilaginous fish.…

In the Swiss Alps, I Explore an Automobile-Free Paradise // When you think about it, there are very few inhabited places in the world that haven't been touched by automobile traffic. The empire of internal combustion and asphalt has stretched its tendrils into virtually every hamlet and outpost, no…

The womb is a remarkable organ — a muscular, pear-shaped chamber that supports the transformation of a tiny cluster of dividing cells into an entirely new person. All humans begin their lives in this sturdy chamber. At least for now. Several research groups are busily developing artificial wombs to…

The shift When I set out to improve my tainted reputation with chatbots, I discovered a new world of A.I. manipulation. New Listen to this article · 14:53 min Learn more Credit...Illustration by Aaron Fernandez By Reporting from San Francisco Aug. 30, 2024 I have a problem: A.I. chatbots don’t like…

“By some estimates, more than 80 percent of AI projects fail—twice the rate of failure for information technology projects that do not involve AI.” – The Root Causes of Failure for Artificial Intelligence Projects and How They Can Succeed A study by the RAND Corporation (found via David Gerard’s…

The image—created by legendary Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai nearly 200 years ago—has been turned into an emoji, is appearing on a Japanese bank note this year, and has inspired countless artists across decades. With the iconic artwork returning to the Art Institute’s galleries this fall (on…

Cambry and Zack Nelson founded Not a Wheelchair and are on a mission to mass produce a quality, affordable wheelchair. Photos by Kim Raff. Tanner Green is concerned about the tiny aluminum plugs left behind when you cut 30 holes in the seat rail of a wheelchair. The cutting is done by an enormous…

You have opened the Post Editor, and found within yourself the courage to type Content. Critically, you have yet to click “Publish”. This is the moment where a lot of people go horribly, irrecoverably wrong. Yes I absolutely will review your draft, and do not even worry about sending it to me. I…

Beihilfe zum Suizid: «Dann drücken Sie diesen Knopf» Nr. 40 – 3. Oktober 2024 Vergangene Woche kam erstmals die Suizidkapsel «Sarco» zum Einsatz. Steht sie für eine unethische Technologisierung des Sterbens? Oder ist das einfach nur die Weiterführung der liberalen Praxis der Suizidhilfe? Von…

When I was young, Germany still had conscription meaning that every (able bodied, there were many reasons the military wouldn’t accept you) boy/young man would be forced to spend a few months doing military service after school (or in some cases after job training). The amount of month changed (it…

CGIIdeas/Commentary | 05/13/2013 11:46 am | I’ve come across people who believe that Max Headroom, the Channel 4 character from the Eighties (pictured at top), was a genuine piece of computer animation. But although he was conceived by the animators Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel (of Cucumber Films…

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge Meta has acknowledged that all text and photos that adult Facebook and Instagram users have publicly published since 2007 have been fed into its artificial intelligence models. Australia’s ABC News reports that Meta’s global privacy director, Melinda…

In der EU wird seit letztem Mittwoch wieder über die sogenannte «Chatkontrolle» verhandelt. Worum geht es da? Und welche Auswirkungen hat das auf die Schweiz? Inhalte Der Schwesterartikel «Depeschen aus der Zukunft: Rückblick auf das erste Jahr Chatkontrolle» bietet mit seinem fiktiven Setting einen…

Dies ist ein Gedankenexperiment über die Konsequenzen, wenn die Europäische Union ihren aktuell wieder in Diskussion befindlichen Gesetzesentwurf in die Tat umsetzt. Mit diesem Gesetz sollen alle Bilder und Videos, die von Personen geteilt werden, gescannt werden, ob sie nicht möglicherweise…

🗓 posted Sep 12, 2024 by Josh Erb 🔢 2557 words 🏷 #development #web Travel posts on my blog now have maps at the top. With any big(ger) change to this website, I like to take a minute to walk through why I did it, and how it came together. I enjoy doing this a) because it's a nice memento of how I…

Amnesty International on Wednesday accused Facebook’s parent company Meta of having “substantially contributed” to human rights violations perpetrated against Myanmar’s Rohingya ethnic group. In a new report, Amnesty claims that Facebook’s algorithms “proactively amplified” anti-Rohingya content. It…

However distant our schooldays, the start of the academic year makes everyone want to turn over a new leaf, to work harder and smarter; to be better. None of us has the whole answer but everyone has a tiny thing that works for them, and this list is based on the hope that some of those tiny things…