Astronomy Picture of the Day for Dec 25, 2023.
This beautiful image of the Basilica of Superga near Turin, Italy, framed by the peak of Monte Viso and a crescent moon behind it, was taken by Valerio Minato 10 days ago, after 5 unsuccessful attempts over 6 years. It takes a lot of planning and some good fortune to capture such an image. The alignment occurs about once a year and the weather Gods have to smile.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap231225.html
#APOD
1/n

Single-track railway north of Lillehammer, Norway. Slow, but beatiful.

World solar power doubled in the past 18 months. China passed 50% renewables with incredible and unanticipated speed, Europe is down to getting only 17% of its power from fossil fuels, solar has firmly outstripped coal in use and cost, and all signs point to 2023 as peak world carbon emissions, that we've hit the turn of the curve and carbon will now be lower every year. It's working! #ShareGoodNewsToo
https://futurecrunch.com/r/4f79a213?m=d62c57a4-125a-4b9d-b04d-bdfd23b8627c

based on the people i know who work in tech, when it comes to their home computers, 33 percent of the time it's a "cobbler's children have no shoes" situation, 33 percent a "cobbler's children have brand-new sneakers" situation, and rest, the lesser-known,"the cobbler's children wear mismatched shoes with rubber the cobbler started vulcanizing in their garage until they got bored" situation.

Linus on the #Linux #kernel release schedule wrt to the festive days ahead of us:

"'"my current plan is that -rc7 will happen this Saturday […] I'll do an rc8 the week after.

Then, unless anything odd happens, the final 6.7 release will be Jan 7th, and so the merge window for 6.8 will open Jan 8th. […]"'"

https://lore.kernel.org/all/CAHk-%3DwhceLbGZwuLnR0S3V_ajedDXj%3Ds86sm89m%2BVT2YrbG1NA@mail.gmail.com/ #LinuxKernel

"In your own words, how would you describe Libertarians?"

#SVB #CaturdayEveryday

sorry my schedule is full

https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2023-December/033317.html really feels like Old Internet (read the entire thread, it's amazing)

Brilliant thread:
https://social.v.st/@quixoticgeek/111581347216282762
@quixoticgeek "..you're probably wearing clothes as you read this. Have you ever stopped to think about how we got to the very probably woven cotton clothing you're wearing right now ?

Archimedes said there are three basic machines, the lever, pulley, and screw. In the renaissance the wheel and axle, the wedge and the inclined plane were added to the list. But I think something else should be added, a discovery that changed humanity.

String."

2/n

Here's how the "Ship of Theseus" page looked in July 2003 when it was first created! Since then, the article has been edited 1792 times. 0% of its original phrases remain.

“Pro-Israeli investors have created a culture of fear in tech where supporters of Palestinian freedom feel unable to raise their voices. I have spoken to many people in tech who are afraid that if they speak up, they’ll be unable to raise their next round, and lose 5-10 years of work on their venture, for their families and for their employees.

We must break the silence around the genocide in Gaza…we cannot continue to be complicit in this genocide.”

https://blog.paulbiggar.com/i-cant-sleep/

#israel #genocide

Remember in the 90s when computers screamed every time we connected them to the Internet, and we just thought they were overreacting?

🤘 IT IS TIME. 🤘

Oh KRAMPUS, GREAT OLD ONE FROM THE DEPTHS OF MOUNT DOOM. WE SUMMON YOU NOW!

#Linux h/t @thilo

May I present to you the #Linux #kernel of the beast: #LinuxKernel 6.6.6

Announcement: https://lore.kernel.org/all/2023121140-nervy-directed-5a9e@gregkh/

Commit & Tag: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git/commit/?h=linux-6.6.y&id=0c38b88c33239b236930264a5467dca6334792f3

Tarball: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.6.6.tar.xz

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot in the current battle over the future of (pseudo) AI is the cotton gin.

I live in a country where industrial progress is always considered a positive. It’s such a fundamental concept to the American exceptionalism claim that we are taught never to question it, let alone realize that it’s propaganda.

One such myth, taught early in grade school, is the story of Eli Whitney and the cotton gin. Here was a classic example of a labor-saving device that made millions of lives better. No more overworked people hand cleaning the cotton (slaves, though that was only mentioned much later, if at all). Better clothes and bedding for the world. Capitalism at its best.

But that’s only half the story of this great industrial time saver. Where did those cotton cleaners go? And what was the impact of speeding up the process?

Now that the cleaning bottleneck was gone, the focus was on picking cotton as fast as possible. Those cotton cleaners likely, and millions of other slaves definitely, were sent to the fields to pick cotton. There was an unprecedented explosion in the slave trade. Industrial time management and optimization methods were applied to human beings using elaborate rule-based systems written up in books. How hard to punish to get optimal productivity. How long their lifespans needed to be to get the lost production per dollar. Those techniques, practiced on the backs and lives of slaves, became the basis of how to run the industrial mills in the North. They are the ancestors of the techniques that your manager uses now to improve productivity.

Millions of people were sold into slavery and worked to death *because* of the cotton gin. The advance it provided did not, in fact save labor overall. Nor did it make life better overall. It made a very small set of people much much richer; especially the investors around the world who funded the banks who funded the slave purchases. It made a larger set of consumers more comfortable at the cost of the lives of those poorer. Over a hundred years later this model is still the basis for our society.

Modern “AI” is a cotton gin. It makes a lot of painstaking things much easier and available to everyone. Writing, reading, drawing, summarizing, reviewing medical cases, hiring, firing, tracking productivity, driving, identifying people in a lineup…they all can now be done automatically. Put aside whether it’s actually capable of doing any of those things *well*; the investors don’t care if their products are good, they only care if they can make more money off of them. So long as they work enough to sell, the errors, and the human cost of those errors, are irrelevant. And like the cotton gin, AI has other side effects. When those jobs are gone, are the new jobs better? Or are we all working that much harder, with even more negative consequences to our life if we fall off the treadmill? One more fear to keep us “productive”.

The Luddites learned this lesson the hard way, and history demonizes them for it; because history isn’t written by the losers.

They’ve wrapped “AI” with a shiny ribbon to make it fun and appealing to the masses. How could something so fun to play with be dangerous? But like the story we are told about the cotton gin, the true costs are hidden.

#ML #TESCREAL

The annual Wiki Loves Earth photo competition winners are out, and they are stunning. Take a deep breath and enjoy them: https://wikilovesearth.org/ #wikilovesearth #wikipedia #naturephotography #animalphotography

If an organization is serious about reducing #CarbonEmissions from #travel, commensurate with IPCC pathways to stay below 1.5C, it should:

* Manage total travel budgets in terms of CO2 emissions rather than cost;

* Set a baseline budget based on current travel patterns

* Reduce the total travel budget (in CO2) by 7% each year, every year, starting immediately.

(And no futzing around with offsets)

See: Stojanov et al, 2023:
https://assets.pubpub.org/aylk44gj/51686158621469.pdf

Link rot is so very, very real.

I just visited a site that 'archives' articles from 2015. The majority of links no longer works.

What to do? You could archive pages, and link to the archived pages (I've seen many people do this). But how durable is that? Will those archival sites exist still in 10 years time?

I'm used to consult books that are centuries old. That we're unable now to archive digital stuff for longer than a couple of years is terrifying. #archives #digitalhumanities

New blog post: The Big FIFO in the Cloud

I was recently made aware of an interesting issue, which appears to be a pretty fundamental property of the departure time-based traffic shaping that is used by BPF-based data planes, such as in the Cilium Bandwidth Manager.

It’s one of those things that seem really obvious in hindsight, but that no one thought about beforehand (apparently; or at least I didn’t). So I thought I’d write up an analysis to explain what’s going on and why it is a problem.

https://blog.tohojo.dk/2023/12/the-big-fifo-in-the-cloud.html

LibreQoS 1.4 released https://lwn.net/Articles/953286/ #LWN