The Death of the Mind

I’ve released man-db 2.11.0
(announcement,
NEWS), and
uploaded it to Debian unstable.
The biggest chunk of work here was fixing some extremely long-standing
issues with how the database is built. Despite being in the package name,
man-db’s database is much less important than it used to be: most uses of
man(1) haven’t required it in a long time, and both hardware and
software
improvements
mean that even some searches can be done by brute force without needing
prior indexing. However, the database is still needed for the whatis(1)
and apropos(1) commands.
The database has a simple format – no relational structure here, it’s just a
simple key-value database using old-fashioned DBM-like interfaces and
composing a few fields to form values – but there are a number of subtleties
involved. The issues tend to…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~cjwatson/blog/reproducible-man-db-databases.html

US businesses have been inventing “holidays” as excuses to get people
to spend money for more than a century.
About 10 of the many examples.

I decided long ago to disregard all the holidays that pressure people
to give gifts.
I would not “celebrate” Record Store Day, but I do wish there were a
good record store in Boston, with a big selection of classical and
world records — I would visit it from time to time to look for
interesting CDs to buy. The CD is the last media substrate that was
invented without malfeatures to restrict people or impose nonfree
technology, and I am happy to use it.
Meanwhile: Out, out, damned Spotify! It has the same injustices as Amazon…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://stallman.org/archives/2022-jul-oct.html#14_October_2022_(Inventing_holidays_to_get_people_to_spend)

by Heather Vogell, ProPublica, with data analysis by Haru Coryne, ProPublica, and Ryan Little ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. On a summer day last year, a group of real estate tech executives gathered at a conference hall in Nashville to boast about one of their company’s signature products: software that uses a mysterious algorithm to help landlords push the highest possible rents on tenants. “Never before have we seen these numbers,” said Jay Parsons, a vice president of RealPage, as conventiongoers wandered by. Apartment rents had recently shot up by as much as 14.5%, he said…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent

Enlarge / In culture, nerve cells spontaneously form the structures needed to communicate with each other. (credit: JUAN GAERTNER / Getty Images)
One of the more exciting developments in AI has been the development of algorithms that can teach themselves the rules of a system. Early versions of things like game-playing algorithms had to be given the basics of a game. But newer versions don’t need that—they simply need a system that keeps track of some reward like a score, and they can figure out which actions maximize that without needing a formal description of the game’s rules.
A paper released by the journal Neuron takes this a step further by using actual neurons…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1889781

Federal voting rights laws have long held that voters cannot be disenfranchised for making a mistake that is not “material”. In other words, if the error made by the voter is merely technical and does not truly pertain to that voter’s ability to cast a vote, the error should not be used to discard the ballot.
On May 27, 2022, the Third Circuit had used that provision of federal law to allow some ballots to be counted in a Pennsylvania local race held in 2021. Even though certain mail-in ballots did not have the “date” blank filled in by the voter, the Court ruled that the ballots should count. All the arriving ballots had been date-stamped by…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2022/10/11/u-s-supreme-court-erases-third-circuit-decisions-on-materiality-in-determining-whether-a-ballot-is-valid/

Enlarge (credit: Image courtesy of University of Sydney)
Today, Nature Astronomy released a paper that shows off the sorts of science the Webb Telescope was designed to produce. Early on, the new telescope was pointed at a system of two massive stars that orbit each other closely. Ground-based observations had detected a ring or two produced by the interactions of these giants; the Webb was able to determine that there are at least 17 concentric rings of material that have been put in place over the previous 130 years.
And just to show off, astronomers were able to obtain a spectrum of the material that forms the rings.
It’s difficult to express just how bizarre…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1889489

by Mike Hixenbaugh and Suzy Khimm, NBC News, and Agnel Philip, ProPublica, photography by Stephanie Mei-Ling, special to ProPublica and NBC News ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. More than a decade before the Penn State University child sex abuse scandal broke, an assistant football coach told his supervisors that he had seen Jerry Sandusky molesting a young boy in the shower. When this was revealed during Sandusky’s criminal trial in 2012, it prompted public outcry: Why hadn’t anyone reported the abuse sooner? In response, Pennsylvania lawmakers enacted sweeping reforms to prevent anything like it from ever happening…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.propublica.org/article/mandatory-reporting-strains-systems-punishes-poor-families