The Death of the Mind

It’s frustrating how few news organizations these days are willing to call out nonsense for being nonsense. Too many feel they need to do one of those “view from nowhere” things where they pro/con everything. That’s why I appreciate The Verge, a news site that has spent years actually taking a stand. Its latest is a piece by Emma Roth, calling out the spate of age verification laws, and what a disaster they are for privacy online.
The article is great, and goes through a number of things that we’ve highlighted over the past few months, including the French data protection agency, CNIL, saying that no age verification tech protects privacy, and a similar report from the…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/05/19/the-verge-rightly-calls-out-online-age-verification-laws-as-a-threat-to-your-privacy-the-open-internet/

Over the past few decades, scientists have been making fewer and fewer innovative breakthroughs. The blame lies with academia’s increasingly competitive, metrics-driven model, which discourages creativity and risk-taking.
Disruptions in science have seen a steady and steep decline over the last decades. (Lea Suzuki / the San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images) When I think of “disruptive” science, I remember the first pathbreaking scientist I saw: the late Nobel Laureate Oliver Smithies. In the presentation I heard him give, he reflected on his life and advised young scientists about their careers. “Very often ideas for research come from our experiences or memories,” he said. “It takes only one moment for the…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://jacobin.com/2023/05/science-neoliberal-model-innovation-publications-quantifying-wage-labor/

A 3,200 year-old ancient Egyptian tablet, held by the British Museum, was a work supervisor’s attendance sheet used to register the reasons workers were absent. The article in My Modern Met is here.

“Other employees were absent due to their own illnesses.

— Read the rest

External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2023/05/10/ancient-egyptian-tablet-is-an-attendance-sheet-listing-excuses-for-missing-work.html

Just a small experiment – for now?

YouTube has begun showing a pop-up to some viewers warning them that “ad blockers are not allowed” on the video-sharing site.…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/05/10/youtube_ad_blockers/

Earlier today, the Liberal party convention approved (subject to a final vote) two stunning policy resolutions with enormous implications for freedom of expression. First, as discussed yesterday, it approved a resolution that seeks to “hold on-line information services accountable for the veracity of material published on their platforms and to limit publication only to material whose sources can be traced.” If enacted, the policy would undermine freedom of the press and could even spark widespread censorship on Internet platforms. In addition, it passed a resolution to develop “truth in political advertising” legislation to be administered by an oversight body. There are legitimate concerns about the “truthiness” of all political parties communications, but political truth oversight bodies…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2023/05/this-must-stop-government-and-liberal-party-go-all-in-on-speech-regulation-with-political-truth-oversight-bodies-mandated-press-source-tracing-and-disclosure-of-critics-communications/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=this-must-stop-government-and-liberal-party-go-all-in-on-speech-regulation-with-political-truth-oversight-bodies-mandated-press-source-tracing-and-disclosure-of-critics-communications

As my entry for PGSQL Phriday #008, I want to give some example queries you can use with pg_stat_statements as a starting point for different challenges!Reduce your workloadIf you’re looking to reduce load on your system as a whole, a great starting point is looking at your statements by total time, for example: select (total_exec_time + total_plan_time)::int as total_time, total_exec_time::int, total_plan_time::int, mean_exec_time::int, calls, query
from pg_stat_statements
order by total_time desc
limit 50; This will return the 50 queries that take the most time across all calls, meaning that fast queries that are executed a lot can rank ahead of slow queries that are executed infrequently. This is likely to be a good proxy for which queries are responsible for…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://postgr.es/p/5Kh

Airbnb is destroying communities which many people like to visit, as
many houses in them are now used as hotel rooms and there is not much in the way of housing to rent for all year.

I would never use airbnb anyway, since you are required to (1) run
nonfree software and (2) identify yourself to the company. I don’t mind
if the owner of the apartment or room knows who I am, but not a company!

External feed Read More at the Source: https://stallman.org/archives/2023-mar-jun.html#4_May_2023_(Airbnb_destroying_communities)

After his death earlier this week, the whole world is remembering Jerry Springer’s trashy talk show. But nobody is talking about Springer’s 2004 role as an antiwar US president who took on the military-industrial complex and won.
Jerry Springer attends the Galaxy British Book Awards at Grosvenor House Hotel on April 3, 2009 in London, United Kingdom. (Danny Martindale / Getty Images) Jerry Springer, who died this past week at the age of seventy-nine, might end up being remembered for being a lot of things: the disgraced city councilman who paid for sex with a check; the Cincinnati mayor with a social conscience who once said, “if a man has five…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://jacobin.com/2023/04/jerry-springer-the-defender-movie-war-on-terror-us-foreign-policy/

‘Reject this capitalist logic’ urges French legion within Linux slinger

Exclusive  Red Hat’s decision to lay off around 800 people, or four percent of the company, has not only upset employees, it’s fueled calls to unionize.…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/04/28/red_hat_layoffs_union/