NotesNew data reveals the hidden network of African workers powering AI, as they push for transparency from the global companies that employ them indirectly.Unfurl
NotesItâs the only kind of trade war that Canadian politicians can win against Americans: the kind where prices for Canadians donât go up because of tariffs; where the price of apps, repair, parts, and upgrades goes way down; and where a new, high-tech manufacturing sector pulls in vast sums from customers all over the world.FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesPeople with less knowledge about AI are actually more open to using the technology. We call this difference in adoption propensity the âlower literacy-higher receptivityâ link.Unfurl
NotesThe more I see of the degradation and commodification of everything around us, the more I feel like wishing Bryan Johnson good luck with his diet of bonemeal and pine-cone rinds, and the constant monitoring of his night-time erections. FeedUnfurl
NotesMetaâs size makes it de facto unkillable, and Iâm sure itâll exist in some form for centuries. But itâs my hope that it will exist in the sense that IBM exists today. Theoretically you know itâs out there, but itâs very hard to grasp the point of it and it feels thoroughly irrelevant. Nobody remembers who started it or why.FeedUnfurl
NotesPaged Out! is a free experimental (one article == one page) technical magazine about programming (especially programming tricks!), hacking, security hacking, retro computers, modern computers, electronics, demoscene, and other similar topics.FeedUnfurl
NotesWhy the fall from grace? One reason is that the collateral consequences of the current Big Tech business model are too obvious to ignore. The list is old hat by now: centralization, surveillance, information control. It goes on, and itâs not hypothetical. Concentrating such vast power in a few hands does not lead to good things. No, it leads to things like the CrowdStrike outage of mid-2024, when corner-cutting by Microsoft led to critical infrastructureâfrom hospitals to banks to traffic systemsâfailing globally for an extended period.FeedUnfurl
NotesWhen Iâm driving, itâs actually unsafe for my car to be operated in that way. Itâs hard to generalize and say, buttons are always easy and good, and touchscreens are difficult and bad, or vice versa. Buttons tend to offer you a really limited range of possibilities in terms of what you can do. Maybe that simplicity of limiting our field of choices offers more safety in certain situations.FeedUnfurl
NotesThe WSJ has been on the button beat for a while. In a 2023 piece titled What Our Phones, Cars and Refrigerators Need: More Buttons, writer Nicole Nguyen detailed the challenges of touch screen interfaces being deployed in kitchen objects. After a pot of water boiled over on her induction stove, she was unable to turn down the burner because the touch screen has gotten wet. âI rage poked,â she wrote, âwhere a simple knob would have sufficed.âFeedUnfurl
NotesHiring processes should focus on problem-solving, collaboration, and growth in relevant areas. Unrealistic expectations donât attract the best talent â they just exhaust and discourage it. If companies want adaptable developers, they should focus on the long-term ability to learn, not how fast someone can tackle an arbitrary test. Dropping these absurd assignments and focusing on what really counts could foster a better, more inclusive tech culture.Unfurl
NotesI lost my job in March and Iâve been slowly starting to look for my next thing. Iâve been talking to other folks whoâve been laid off to get a sense of the job market â and the stories theyâre sharing give me flashbacks to twenty years ago.FeedUnfurl
NotesThis article will discuss my own efforts to create a simple application using Godot Engineâââspecifically an RSS reader. Itâs probably one of the more common simple applications one might create for a given frameworkâââwhich tests out things like networking, parsing, rendering, and saving preferences.Unfurl
NotesAmong the clones manufactured by the Communists was the Cobra or CoBra. The name stands for COmputere BRAsov, with Brasov being the town in central Romania where these machines were assembled to be used by enterprises. Of course, ordinary people couldnât buy themâwhich is what first led several students at the Politehnica University of Bucharest deciding to build them themselves.Unfurl
NotesItâs just such a bummer to see a place that I remember as openminded, laid back, creative, nonjudgmental erupting with all this anger, everyone pointing fingers, blaming people that really arenât to blame. Come on, guys. Youâre better than this.FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesToday, Green's academic dean contacted him to ask that "all copies" of the blog post be removed from university servers. Green said that the move was not "my Dean's fault," but he did not elaborate. Were cryptology professors at Johns Hopkins not allowed to say, as Green had, things like:Unfurl
Notes The question to me -- as an American and as someone who cares about the integrity of speech -- is how we restore faith in our technology. I don't have the answers to this question right now. Unfortunately this is a long-term problem that will consume the output of researchers and technologists much more talented than I am. I only hope to be involved in the process.FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesIf you want to try HyperCard yourself, you can download an archive containing a hard disk image with Mac OS 8 and HyperCard installed, plus the ROM image file needed for most emulators, here.FeedUnfurl
NotesUpdate: Click here if you would like to try HyperCard yourself. Our seventh-grade class was led into a room full of brand-new Macintosh Performas. The dayâs lesson was a crash course in the use of an uncomplicated yet marvelous program. via PocketFeedUnfurl
NotesPirateBox can be configured to run on many devices, including wireless routers, single-board computers, laptops, and mobile phones. Key hardware platforms include the TP-Link MR3020 and the Raspberry Pi both of which start at US$35.Unfurl
NotesPirateBox is a self-contained mobile communication and file sharing device. Simply turn it on to transform any space into a free and open communications and file sharing network.Unfurl
NotesStay away from super-cheap AC adapters built by mystery manufacturers. Spend the extra few dollars to get a brand-name AC adapter. It will be safer, produce less interference, and your device's touchscreen will perform better. FeedUnfurl
NotesSteve and I had talked about making a tiny arcade machine for his little chibi Street Fighter guys (street fighter guys fighting each other but in their own game â very meta).FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesThis low-resolution memory device packs in just a few bytes of data. But itâs enough to spell out [Michael Kohn's] name. Heâs been experimenting with using paper discs for data storage.FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesTucked neatly between Yahoo! headquarters and Lockheed Martin is a row of unmarked warehouses. To the common passerby, it's nothing more than an office park surrounded by perfectly manicured lawns. But to those who are in on the secret, there's a place full of technology treasures waiting to be unearthed. It's called the Weird Stuff Warehouse, and for more than 27 years it's been providing the Bay Area with a surplus of old and new technology. It's not just a Goodwill for antiquated hardware, thoughâit's also a step back through time. Inside this warehouse, it's an era when RAID controllers were the size of a modern-day sound card and Windows 95 reigned supreme.Unfurl
NotesThe women who have advanced in our community, and have overcome the hardships that are inherent to being in such a minority, almost certainly function at a higher level than the average community member.FeedUnfurl
NotesWith Thunderboltâą Express Dock, all your drives, networking, input and output devices connect to the 8 ports on the back. It in turn connects to your laptop through 1 Thunderbolt port. In short, eight cables become one cable.Unfurl
NotesFinally youâll want to create a script (Iâm using a Makefile) that the user can run to encrypt and decrypt the file. This script uses OpenSSL, and specifically CAST5, to encrypt/decrypt the fileFeedEmbedUnfurl
Notes"Trapped between two men's rooms, I flipped out. I had to pee and this was NOT OK. An usher pointed me around the corner, where the Family Restroom was relabeled "Ladies." It was a one-seater."Unfurl
NotesCritics have suggested plenty of reasonable reforms, from eliminating software patents to clamping down on "trolls" who buy up patent portfolios only so they can file lawsuits. But do we need a more radical solution? Would we be possibly be better off without any patents at all?FeedUnfurl
NotesGiven technology's focus on the latest and greatest, it's easy to forget that much of this "latest and greatest" wouldn't even be possible without the work Mozilla did for years with Firefox. Or that dominating the browser market was never Mozilla's aim with Firefox.
Quixotic as it may sound, the purpose of Firefox was always to spread Web freedom.FeedUnfurl
NotesToday, an American electronics company can only be exempt from Chinaâs rare earth export quotas by manufacturing within China. So thatâs what most companies, including Apple, are doing. The only other solution is for us to stop consuming so muchâan option that people rarely find appealing. Not as appealing as a retina display, at least.FeedUnfurl
NotesInterxion today unveiled âsleeping podsâ at its London data center campus, allowing staff to sleep amongst the racks to ensure that the facility will be fully staffed throughout the Games. allowing engineering staff to stay on site 24/7 should congestion on the travel and road networks become too severe, making it difficult for critical staff to travel to and from the site in a timely fashion.Unfurl
NotesQuicken Loans has started the website www.valleytodetroit.com to promote the Motor City to Yahoo workers axed last week. Quickenâs businesses include mortgages, venture capital and sports graphics.FeedUnfurl
NotesThe way we got to this point, this place where weâre all friends and donât tolerate sexist and homophobic behavior, is in no small part thanks to booze. If we want to continue to expand this community and make the rest of the world a more tolerant place weâll have to continue to value the personal over the professional.Unfurl
NotesObviously, "brogrammers" aren't the only ones in our community who enjoy alcohol. Ryan correctly points out that drinking is widespread, yet "brogrammers" are, thankfully, a small though obnoxious minority. So we can ask bigger questions - What is it about alcohol that we like? What does it do to us? Then finally, how should we incorporate it into community events?Unfurl
NotesJavaScript had a difficult childhood. It grew up in lawless neighbourhoods surrounded by gangs. It spent a lot of time listening to its parents fighting with one another about what they wanted it to be when it grew up. As any young language would, it tried hard to please its parents (and that barmy committee of uncles, and all the other random people trying to shape its future). As a result it suffers from what can only be described as behavioural quirks. Depending on which gang itâs hanging out with it will sometimes happily talk to you through its console.log, at other times refuse to say anything, and yet other times it will blow up in your face (but not tell you why).Unfurl
NotesSo it was as proponents of the Hollywood-funded bill curmudgeonly shot down all but two amendments proposed by its opponents, who fought to dramatically alter the document to preserve security and free speech on the net. But the chilling takeaway of this whole debacle was the irrefutable air of anti-intellectualism; that inescapable absurdity that we have members of Congress voting on a technical bill who do not posses any technical knowledge on the subject and do not find it imperative to recognize those who do.Unfurl
Notes If we had to imagine our dream DIY project chances are it would involve Arduino, Twitter and, of course, cats. How we'd combine those things we're not sure, but we'll admit to being big fans of Samuel Cox's eSleeper, which turns a hollowed-out eMac into a bed for his feline. Inside the shell is an Arduino Ethernet connected to an IR sensor, some LEDs and a sound shield. When the cat breaks the infrared beam it triggers the iconic Mac chime and turns on a series color-shifting LEDs for a little mood lighting. From there the clock starts ticking. When little Fluffy (Captain Whiskers? Matlock? Penny? Greg?) decides she's had enough napping and leaves the white plastic cocoon, tripping the IR sensor again, a random phrase is tweeted, along with the length of the cat's siesta. Check out the video after the break to see the eSleeper in all its adorable DIY glory. FeedUnfurl
NotesA little over a month ago, the revolutionary Lytro light-field camera became available for pre-order. But a few lucky pro photographers have been using the Lytro and its âliving pictureâ technology for the last few months, and now we can see their stunning results. Unfurl
NotesOverall we can say the Git migration was a success. It turned out to be an immense task with a maze of dependencies, but in the end weâre on a current version control system that should last for years to come. It opens up many new workflow possibilites and solves some of our existing problems, not to mention itâs blazing fast. If youâre more interested in the technical instead of the social migration of SVN to Git, I wrote a blog post a few years ago on my personal blog that you may be interested in, and thereâs also a couple of pointers over on github on how to make the conversion.FeedUnfurl
NotesWhen it came time to try out some old-school computing [Quinn Dunki] grabbed a 6502 processor and got to work. For those that are unfamiliar, this is the first chip that was both powerful, affordable, and available to the hobby computing market back in the 1970âČs. They were used in Apple computers, Commodore 64, and a slew of other hardware.Unfurl
NotesDreamHack is by far the largest LAN party in the world (or âdigital festivalâ as the organizers like to call it), and as a result the infrastructure is second to none. Wiring up more than 12,000 devices to a single network is difficult â and keeping them sufficiently watered with plenty of internet bandwidth is even harder. Fortunately, this year, Telia and Cisco provided no less than 120 gigabits of internet bandwidth â or about 10Mbps per attendee; not bad.Unfurl
How Big Techâs AI labor supply chain relies on hidden African workers - Rest of World
Aaron Ross Powell | Writer and Podcaster
What if Canada stopped upholding U.S. tech companiesâ intellectual property? - CCPA
Knowing less about AI makes people more open to having it in their lives â new research
SĂ©amas O'Reilly: The world is an objectively worse place because of tech-bro oligarchs
Dan McKinley :: On Misery
Paged Out!
The Beginning of the End of Big Tech | WIRED
Tactile Controls: Why Buttons Are Making a Comeback - IEEE Spectrum
Tech companies are clamoring to re-buttonize their products
Please, Stop the Absurd Coding Challenges | _blackentropy
The A.I. Bubble is Bursting with Ed Zitron - YouTube
Creating an RSS Reader in Godot Engine (part 1) â Andrew Wooldridge â Medium
The underground story of Cobra, the 1980sâ illicit handmade computer | Ars Technica
enoughalready » San Francisco Is Eating Itself
Crypto prof asked to remove NSA-related blog post | Ars Technica
A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering: A note on the NSA, the future, and fixing mistakes
Loper OS » How to Run HyperCard Under Emulation
PirateBox by David Darts
Mini Arcade featuring slideshow | Dave Nunez's Blog v2.0
Paper ROM
The Weird Stuff Warehouse is where old tech goes to retire | Ars Technica
VC&G | Revisiting Hotline, the 1990s Internet BBS Platform
Sean Coates blogs: Affirmative Wager
John Resig - Keeping Passwords in Source Control
The Case for Abolishing Patents (Yes, All of Them) - Business - The Atlantic
Firefox's birthday present to us: Teaching tech titans about DIY upstarts âą The Register
Why the iPad Has to be Made in China | iFixit
Interxion Readies Staff 'Sleeping Pods' for Olympics » Data Center Knowledge
Mortgage Lender Wooing Laid-Off Yahoo Workers To Detroit « CBS San Francisco
eSleeper combines cats, Arduino and Twitter in an eMac shell (video) -- Engadget
Moving from SVN to Git in 1,000 easy steps! « Code as Craft
