“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

This is from … checks notes … an AI company. 🤨

Twitter has long been described, even by its most ardent users, as a hellsite. But under Elon Musk, Twitter has evolved into a platform that is indistinguishable from the wastelands of alternative social-media sites such as Truth Social and Parler. It is now a right-wing social network.

Spot on.

The Rivian R1T truck and R1S SUV run on batteries as large as 135kWh. The Hummer EV’s 212kWh battery is heavier than a Honda Civic.

Its what?!?

It finds that when schools get more money, students tend to score better on tests and stay in school longer, at least according to the majority of rigorous studies on the topic.

No kidding. 🤦‍♂️ Education is so vastly underfunded across the board even small increases in money will have a net positive effect. Is there some amount of diminishing returns? Sure. But we are so far from that end of the spectrum one can only hope and dream that would be actually be a problem.

The podcast business isn’t profitable yet,

It’s been years and how many billions ?!?

The new board’s only purview is to maintain roads and other essential infrastructure. The agreement limiting the board’s powers is effective for perpetuity or — should that be successfully challenged in court — at least “until 21 years after the death of the last survivor of the descendants of King Charles III, King of England living as of the date of this Declaration.”

That’s a pretty long time.

Right there in the title.

Those magazines are increasingly seen as an area where policy changes could lessen the carnage that has become emblematic of attacks waged with AR-15s and other guns, according to a growing body of research and interviews with experts and law enforcement veterans. An emerging consensus among these experts — and one that has taken hold in some state legislatures — is that mandating smaller magazines would force mass shooters to pause to reload, allowing people to flee or fight back.

Or. And hear me out. Ban personal ownership of guns. You want a gun for hunting? Fine. The process takes longer than filing for a passport, costs several hundred dollars out of pocket, and requires an on going safety training license. The gun will be serialized and registered with the state. An annual registration fee will be required. Failure to keep up on any of the above will result in seizure of the gun and a permanent ban from any and all gun ownership indefinitely. Private injury insurance will also be required. Similar to owning and operating a motor vehicle, which has actual societal value.

In the coming years, we believe that urban life will rely less and less on providing adequate storage for cars, and the cities of the future will eagerly embrace making urban neighborhoods more inclusive, pedestrian-oriented, and climate friendly.

As someone who lives in an almost exclusive car first city, I look forward to these changes. I will happily turn in my ridiculous SUV for an electric cargo bike. I lived in London for a while and constantly miss the car free lifestyle. Able to hope from bus to bus, read on the tube, and trains to just about anywhere. I was able to get a coffee or sandwich with a short walk. Today it’s get in the car, drive a short distance, park, then get my coffee. Repeat to get home. 😭

Signal president Meredith Whittaker previously told BBC News it “would absolutely, 100% walk” and stop providing services in the UK if required by the bill to weaken the privacy of its encrypted messaging system.

I would switch over from iMessage to Signal based on this ethos alone.

This HTML course for web developers provides a solid overview for developers, from novice to expert level HTML. If you’re completely new to HTML, you will learn how to build structurally sound content. If you’ve been building websites for years, this course may fill in gaps in knowledge that you didn’t even know you had.

Absolutely worth it.

Late Wednesday afternoon, Twitter began experiencing international outages, with many users unable to perform basic functions like tweeting, sending direct messages, and following accounts. When Ars reporters attempted to tweet, an error message was generated saying that a daily limit of tweets had been reached, even from accounts that had not tweeted that day. According to Twitter, users typically have to tweet 2,400 times to reach the platform’s daily limit.

Cracks in the damn.

–update seems to be back up back up

Manatee County’s January directive, obtained by The Post, says teachers who maintain elementary and secondary classroom libraries must “remove or cover all materials that have not been vetted” in accordance with state law. Going forward, any classroom library books must be “reviewed by a media specialist using the FDOE guidelines” before they are “presented and approved” at a special school meeting and finally “signed off by the principal.” When one teacher emailed Manatee Superintendent Cynthia Saunders with questions and concerns about the directive, Saunders replied that violating the state law on book collection could lead to “a felony of the third degree,” according to a copy of the superintendent’s email obtained by The Post.

Absolutely disgusting.

In any event, now that Gatsby has been gobbled up, it’s clear that Netlify is one of the strongest players in this ecosystem — regardless of whether it’s a Jamstack company or one focused on “composable architectures.” Vercel is now probably its closest competitor, although CDN companies like Fastly and Cloudflare are also successfully mining this space.

It’s tough to be a cloud provider, and it was likely that we’d see a survival of just a few major players as they acquire their less successful competition. It will be interesting to see if niche offerings like Deno Deploy or Fly.io can carve out a sustainable business.

To help prevent repeat incidents, Reuters says the FAA has implemented a one-hour delay in the time it takes for its databases to synchronize, which is supposed to block any erroneous changes from instantly taking effect in the backup database. The agency also “now requires at least two individuals to be present during the maintenance of the NOTAM system, including one federal manager.”

To ensure this isolated event that has not happened before never happens again we’ve implemented an appropriate over reaction process on top of all the other processes we have in place to ensure other failed events don’t happen again.

While OpenAI already has a product called Codex, which can convert natural language into working code, the company’s hiring spree indicates that it’s looking to advance that technology, potentially creating a working replacement for some human coders. 

LOL. Good luck with that. 😂

“The challenge is that a consumer doesn’t see the true value that manufacturers see in terms of how that data can help them in the long run. So they don’t really care for spending time to just connect it,” Henry Kim, US director of LG’s smart device division ThinQ, told the Journal.

LG told the Journal that fewer than half of its smart appliances—which represent 80–90 percent of its sold appliances—stay connected to the Internet. Whirlpool reported that “more than half” are connected. Wi-Fi-connected smart appliances may be connected when they’re first set up, but a new Internet provider, router hardware, or Wi-Fi password could take the device offline. And a smart oven is likely to be far down the list of devices to set up again once that happens.

Yeah no kidding. What customer wants to get notifications from their dishwasher or stove? On top of that I don’t want a services subscription to a washing machine I bought. I just want it to wash clothes not tag me on Instagram.

Why are so many tech companies laying people off right now?

The tech industry layoffs are basically an instance of social contagion, in which companies imitate what others are doing. If you look for reasons for why companies do layoffs, the reason is that everybody else is doing it. Layoffs are the result of imitative behavior and are not particularly evidence-based.

I’ve had people say to me that they know layoffs are harmful to company well-being, let alone the well-being of employees, and don’t accomplish much, but everybody is doing layoffs and their board is asking why they aren’t doing layoffs also.

Little evidence based decision making happening across the industry when it comes to layouts. Feels like the same social contagion of a bank run.

• You need a library that is different from React, but similar enough that people might actually use it
• You need say it’s “fast”
• You need 10 influencers to get hyped about it because it’s “fast”
• You need a CLI
• You need a specialized linter/formatter
• You need a build process

The final note is absolutely 🤌

A really good collection. Some I use everyday like ‘jq’ and others I am definitely gonna try.

I don’t generally call for anyone to be fired, but an App Store reviewer who cannot see how Ice Cubes “differ[s] from a mobile web browsing experience” is an embarrassment to the company, and providing fodder for every frustrated developer who thinks Apple has completely lost its way as a company and platform steward that respects the work of independent developers.

Jon Gruber isn’t wrong. The idea that a very well designed app for iOS, iPad, and MacOS would be simply brushed aside from app review as a ‘simple web wrapper’ is absolutely maddening. (I too have the TestFlight version on my iPhone and it’s fantastically well done. A delight to use)

But according to Elluswamy, the demo was “specific to some predetermined route,” compared to the production version of the tech that was just relying on input from cameras and sensors. “It was using additional premapped information to drive,” he said, after telling lawyers that the route the car followed had previously been 3D mapped. At the time the video was being made, Elluswamy was an engineer on the team that helped with the video.

In other words, Tesla’s Autopilot was not capable of dynamic route planning, instead requiring the company’s engineers to map out the route it would take for the purposes of the promotional video.

Maybe it’s time for another price cut. 😬

The motivation, according to the bill’s preamble, is that the oil and gas industry is important to the state, a state with fewer than 600,000 residents. Wyoming is proud of its oil and gas industry, and that gas—here presumably meaning “gasoline” and not the natural gas referred to in the bill’s early sentences—powers vehicles that drive on the state’s vast stretches of highway.

Lol. Good luck with that.

-update

WY also declines funds to expand EV chargers

A group of artists represented by the Joseph Saveri Law Firm has filed a US federal class-action lawsuit in San Francisco against AI-art companies Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt for alleged violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, violations of the right of publicity, and unlawful competition.

It really was only a matter of time before the explosion AI art generators made its way to the courts. I’m not sure anyone can say for certain how it will shake out. Even Getty Images has files a suit Getty vs Stable Diffusion

Remember web scraping is more or less legal from a 2020 ruling

On September 9, the U.S. 9th circuit court of Appeals ruled (Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of California) that web scraping public sites does not violate the CFAA (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act). This is a really important decision. The court not only legalized this practice, but also prohibited competitors from removing information from your site automatically if the site is public. The court confirmed the clear logic that the entry of the web scraper bot is not legally different from the entry of the browser. In both cases, the “user” requests open data — and does something with it on their side.

“AFBF is pleased to announce this agreement with John Deere,” said AFBF President Zippy Duvall. “It addresses a long-running issue for farmers and ranchers when it comes to accessing tools, information, and resources, while protecting John Deere’s intellectual property rights and ensuring equipment safety. A piece of equipment is a major investment. Farmers must have the freedom to choose where equipment is repaired, or to repair it themselves, to help control costs. The MOU commits John Deere to ensuring farmers and independent repair facilities have access to many of the tools and software needed to grow the food, fuel, and fiber America’s families rely on.”

“This agreement reaffirms the longstanding commitment Deere has made to ensure our customers have the diagnostic tools and information they need to make many repairs to their machines. We look forward to working alongside the American Farm Bureau and our customers in the months and years ahead to ensure farmers continue to have the tools and resources to diagnose, maintain, and repair their equipment,” said David Gilmore, SVP of ag and turf sales and marketing at John Deere.

Can we just stop for a minute and note that the President of the American Farm Bureau Federation’s first name is Zippy. Not his nickname or middle name, his first name. That’s awesome.