Attention humans! There are a “few” links coming in that I’ve read over the past few weeks. Switching from an attempt at weekly publishing to a monthly thing is quite nice. Gives more time to go and sort through things that matter or are interesting. And yes I’m aware that my Youtube/Invidious Embedding is somehow inconsistent 😀
The Line (profgalloway.com)
I sometimes listen to Scott Galloway on his Podcast “The Pivot” and he mentioned his blog lately, so this made it into my reading list.
Whether you agree this is what the man is, think he’s cosplaying a Nazi for business reasons, or believe he’s just a misunderstood genius, the question remains: What is to be done when the richest man on the planet, who controls the world’s most valuable car company and a global satellite communications network, uses his wholly owned social media platform to increasingly and unapologetically aid and abet bigotry and antisemitism?
«Die Halbierungsinitiative muss abgelehnt werden» (republik.ch)
Knapp 5 Jahre später und wir sind zurück bei der No-Billag Initiative, anderer Anstrich, ähnliche Auswirkungen.
Mit welcher Motivation wollen die Initianten die SRG Ihrer Meinung nach zurückbinden?
Es ist wissenschaftlich sehr gut belegt, dass die Demokratiequalität in Ländern mit einem breit genutzten und gleichzeitig unabhängigen öffentlichen Rundfunk deutlich besser ist. Ich vermute, dass sich dessen auch jene Kreise bewusst sind, die sich für die Halbierungsinitiative starkmachen. Vielleicht soll auch Platz geschaffen werden für Investoren mit einer politischen Agenda.
What has changed in CPU cores in M3 chips? (eclecticlight.co)
In depth view on how Apple optimizes on their M3 Chips. It’s interesting to see how they push forward on that and leave the Intels and AMDs way back. We’ll see what happens in 10 years, maybe we all switch back to CISC processors.
Debunking the Myth of “Anonymous” Data (eff.org)
However, in practice, any attempt at de-identification requires removal not only of your identifiable information, but also of information that can identify you when considered in combination with other information known about you. Here’s an example:
- First, think about the number of people that share your specific ZIP or postal code.
- Next, think about how many of those people also share your birthday.
- Now, think about how many people share your exact birthday, ZIP code, and gender.
According to one landmark study, these three characteristics are enough to uniquely identify 87% of the U.S. population. A different study showed that 63% of the U.S. population can be uniquely identified from these three facts.
tl;dr – there is on such thing as being anonymous on the web…
magnolia1234 / Bypass Paywalls Firefox Clean (gitlab.com)
Add-on allows you to read articles from (supported) sites that implement a paywall.
You can also add a domain as custom site and try to bypass the paywall.
Weekly updates are released for fixes and new sites.
I guess my theme these days is … bypassing Ad-Limitations
Für den Abfall produziert (greenpeace.ch)
Spannende Recherche von Greenpeace zu retournierten oder Neuwaren, die direkt im Recycling landen. Wir sollten uns im globalen Rahmen mal über Degrowth gedanken machen.
Detailhändler vernichten grosse Mengen an Neuwaren. Das lässt sich trotz vieler fehlender Informationen feststellen. Vernichten oder zerstören bedeutet in diesem Zusammenhang, dass der Wert des Produkts abnimmt, also Downcycling, Recycling, Verbrennung oder Deponierung.
Fust beispielsweise sagt, 40 Prozent ihrer unverkauften Neuwaren gingen an Entsorgungsunternehmen. Das sind über 268 Tonnen pro Jahr. Digitec Galaxus, Competec und Interdiscount beantworteten die Frage nach der Gewichtsangabe der unverkauften Waren nicht, so dass wir unsere eigenen Schätzungen vornehmen mussten.
Die Unternehmen zu vergleichen, ist nicht einfach: So verkaufen beispielsweise manche durch Kund:innen retournierte Produkte als «geprüfte und gebrauchte» Produkte selber wieder, während andere Dritte damit beauftragen.
I like RSS as a standard because it is (colinwalker.blog)
I like RSS as a standard because it is:
established
mature
simple
well understood
well supported
extensible via namespaces
kamranahmedse/local-ses: Trap and test AWS SES emails locally (github.com)
The title says it all 🙂 a local service to trap SES mails for debugging
McKinsey und die Klimakonferenz: Die Untergangsberater (spiegel.de)
Es ist, als träfen sich Drogenabhängige zur Gruppentherapie, aber der vermeintliche Therapeut ist ein Großdealer mit professioneller Marketingunterstützung.
Wenn es doch nicht so unglaublich entmächtigend wäre dem ganzen Spiel da zuzuschauen…
GPU Survival Toolkit for the AI age: The bare minimum every developer must know (journal.hexmos.com)
In today’s AI age, the majority of developers train in the CPU way. This knowledge has been part of our academics as well, so it’s obvious to think and problem-solve in a CPU-oriented way.
However, the problem with CPUs is that they rely on a sequential architecture. In today’s world, where we are dependent on numerous parallel tasks, CPUs are unable to work well in these scenarios.
Great points made there right from the start, with new architectures you also need to re-learn a few things. May that be for “AI” or just GPU capable things.
SanDisk Extreme Pro Failures Result From Design Flaw, Says Researcher (tomshardware.com)
This is a very ugly situation when the vendor acts in the way and just ignores you flat out.
Earth Now (gis.earthdata.nasa.gov)
NASA monitors our home planet using near-real time data and imagery made available fully and openly to the world.
Go and have a look – The quite up to date satellite imagery is mindblowing 😀
I promise this story about fonts is interesting (youtube.com)
Sinking Lego Ships (youtube.com)
Gesehen beim Kraftfuttermischwerk
The Age of the Grift Shift (tante.cc)
A terribly good read by Tante on the current behavior of many companies to just seamlessly move over to the next shiny thing on the garner quadrant.
the “grift shift”. In that article the term is used in reference to a whole bunch of VC firms who – after crypto/web3 had imploded – seamlessly rebranded themselves as “AI” firms. And if you’ve heard me speak in the last few months you know me often opening with jokingly referencing the same dynamic on Linkedin where the crypto influencers turned into Metaverse influencers and now have turned into “AI” influencers.
There was a somewhat big scandal recently about a popular YouTube tech show doing shoddy work, abusing their workers and after trying to ignore it one excuse was the murderous schedule: “We can’t do good work because we need to put out a video every day.” Whether that explanation holds any water (in my experience people who abuse their workers and coworkers do that regardless of the stress) it’s telling how putting anything out every day has priority over what it is or means. “I need to say something every day, but I don’t have something to say every day” is a shitty position that pretty mush crushes a human soul after a while but the millions that channel made probably help to dry some tears.
Why am I talking about YouTube when we were talking about the grift shift? It’s not because everyone on YouTube is a grifter or that it is worse than many other platforms (TBH I feel like Linkedin is a bit worse and let’s not even talk about Twitter), it is because YouTube’s way of thinking about “content” has reshaped our tech discourse structurally. Which is a bit of the problem given how especially in western countries we basically outsourced “Future” to tech instead of also thinking about maybe for example political visions.
Discontinuing Bibliogram (bibliogram.art)
A bit of a dated blog on how hard it is for people running infrastructure to bypass the login-walls and evade exhaustive tracking.
0 KB Social Media Embeds (chriscoyier.net)
Kind of what I do here – But nicely written down 🙂
I Trapped 200 Scammers in an Impossible Maze (youtube.com)
TeamPiped/Piped: An alternative privacy-friendly YouTube frontend which is efficient by design. (github.com)
A Youtube Frontend alternative similar to Invidious – Didn’t look into it yet but it looks promising 🙂
YouTube’s Crackdown Spurs Record Uninstalls of Ad Blockers (wired.com)
#enshitification – Sure you can argue that “you can pay a few bucks for a subscription” but … well no thanks.
Revealed: Our Plans For Thunderbird On Android (blog.thunderbird.net)
For years, we’ve wanted to extend Thunderbird beyond the desktop, and the path to delivering a great Thunderbird on Android™ experience started in 2018.
That’s when Thunderbird Product Manager Ryan Lee Sipes first met up with Christian Ketterer (aka “cketti”), the project maintainer for open-source Android email client K-9 Mail. The two instantly wanted to find a way for the two projects to collaborate. Throughout the following few years, the conversation evolved into how to create an awesome, seamless email experience across platforms.
But Ryan and cketti both agreed that the final product had to reflect the shared values of both projects. It had to be open source, respect the user, and be a perfect fit for power users who crave customization and a rich feature set.
“Ultimately,” Sipes says, “it made sense to work together instead of developing a mobile client from scratch.”
Wow didn’t see that coming our way but I feel this is a very good way forward for K9
Youtube’s Anti-adblock and uBlock Origin (andadinosaur.com)
Since May, uBO has been in a cat-and-mouse game with YouTube. And they’ve shown incredible resilience, especially when you consider that there are only two people on the uBO team dealing with YouTube.
The uBO team members are all volunteers. They’ve gone above and beyond to meet every little request from their users. But there’s a limit to how much they can take. At some point, the constant demands become too much, and they will leave uBO for good. It’s one thing to play cat and mouse with YouTube. It’s quite another to deal with a wave of angry users.
Maybe that’s how YouTube will win this war of attrition.
Youtube is basically bleeding out the efforts of uBlock contributors by just making things hard and confusing till people give up. Similar to what happened to bibliogram (see above)
Dabu Fantastic und stimmreise.ch – «Dene wos guet geit» (youtube.com)
Personalisierte Werbung – Bezahlen für keine Werbung: Meta führt ein Bezahlmodell ein (srf.ch)
Der Facebook-Konzern Meta verdient mit personalisierter Werbung Milliarden. Nun können Userinnen und User sich von dieser Werbung freikaufen. Meta bietet neu in der EU, der Schweiz sowie in Island, Liechtenstein und Norwegen für Facebook und Instagram ein Bezahl-Abo für werbefreie Nutzung an.
En-Shit-I-Fi-Cation ist das Wort, das wir hier suchen. Ich nutze Insta nur noch über den Browser und die Nutzbarkeit ist so unterirdisch, dass sich dadurch meine Nutzungszeit drastisch reduziert hat. Ist glaubich eine Win-Win Situation
Typisch Volksmusik? – Eine Tradition im Wandel der Zeit (youtube.com)
Schöne Doku wenn du 3 Stunden Zeit hast 🙂
Disney+ neu mit Werbung: Die 10 wichtigsten Fragen und Antworten (galaxus.ch)
Am Presselunch spricht Disney derzeit von bis zu 4 Minuten pro Stunde. Das seien, so betonte man immer wieder, deutlich weniger als die üblichen 12 Minuten pro Stunde aus dem linearen Fernsehen. Ebenso hebte man aber das Wort «derzeit» hervor. Es sei nicht ausgeschlossen, so die Medienverantwortlichen, dass es in weit entfernter Zukunft mehr Werbung pro Stunde geben könne. Übersetzt heisst das: Es wird mehr Werbung pro Stunde geben. Die Frage ist nur, wann.
LEL – Es gibt Gründe wieso die Dienste so gross geworden sind, weil sie keine Werbung hatten. Das Argument das es ja “weniger Werbung als im Free-TV” ist… den Nerv/Dreistigkeit muss man haben 🙃
Freu mich schon, wenn die Streamer in ein paar Jahren sich über steigende Piraterie beklagen.
Behind the scenes: An Apple Event shot on iPhone (youtube.com)
Filmed on an iPhone is a big claim – And backed by Cinema-Gear and huge Lights costing around 200k$+. But sure you can do crazy things with it 🙂
Unterirdischer Gütertransport – Mega-Logistikprojekt Cargo sous terrain nimmt Fahrt auf (srf.ch)
Ich bin gespannt, ob das Monsterprojekt irgendwann wirklich wirklich da ist.