Progressive Politics Aatube • 3 hours ago • 91%

Now obviously we all espouse ranked voting, but the most popular rule—the single transferable vote—is known to sometimes eliminate candidates for getting too many votes, which is what happened in the 2022 Alaska special election (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotonicity_criterion#Runoff_voting for an explanation of how this happens). So, which voting rule do you like the most? I'm new to this world, but so far the Dowdall system seems like a good compromise.

Uplifting News Aatube • 14 hours ago • 100%

> > > Today, the Los Angeles Unified School District has a goal of converting at least 30 percent of every schoolyard to green space, a years-long project that it expects to cost $3 billion. By its own estimate, about 475 schools do not meet that standard and, of them, more than 200 elementary schools have less than 10 percent green space. This analysis does not include school parking lots or truck delivery areas — paved surfaces that are likely to remain that way and raise the temperature around schools. > > > > > Webster, after years of waiting, is now on the list of schools to be renovated by the Trust for Public Land. The nonprofit will work with a class of third-graders and landscape architects for the next year to design a new schoolyard. Projects like this can take two to three years to complete, at a cost ranging from $400,000 to as much as $2.5 million, said Danielle Denk, who directs the organization’s schoolyard transformation work. In Philadelphia, most of the money for these projects comes from the water department, which is trying to make the city more capable of absorbing storm runoff. > >

News Aatube • 14 hours ago • 88%

> > > Mr. Routh, a former roofing contractor from Greensboro, N.C., was interviewed by The New York Times in 2023 for an article about Americans volunteering to aid the war effort in Ukraine. Mr. Routh, who had no military experience, said he had traveled to the country after Russia’s invasion and wanted to recruit Afghan soldiers to fight there. > > > > In a telephone interview with The New York Times in 2023, when Mr. Routh was in Washington, he spoke with the self-assuredness of a seasoned diplomat who thought his plans to support Ukraine’s war effort were sure to succeed. But he appeared to have little patience for anyone who got in his way. When an American foreign fighter seemed to talk down to him in a Facebook message he shared with The New York Times, Mr. Routh said, “he needs to be shot.” > > > > In the interview, Mr. Routh said he was in Washington to meet with the U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, known as the Helsinki Commission “for two hours” to help push for more support for Ukraine. The commission is led by members of Congress and staffed by congressional aides. It is influential on matters of democracy and security and has been vocal in supporting Ukraine. > > > > Mr. Routh also said he was seeking recruits for Ukraine from among Afghan soldiers who had fled the Taliban. He said he planned to move them, in some cases illegally, from Pakistan and Iran to Ukraine. He said dozens had expressed interest. > > > > > A man with the same name and similar age as Mr. Routh was arrested in 2002 in Greensboro, N.C., after barricading himself inside a building with a fully automatic weapon, according to the Greensboro News & Record newspaper. > > > > > In a May 2020 post, he invited Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, to Hawaii for a vacation and offered to act as “ambassador and liaison” to resolve disputes between the two nations. > >

Linux Aatube • 1 week ago • 96%

itsfoss.com

Covers meaning of chapters and sections, `whatis`, `whereis`, and `man -k`.

Mildly Interesting Aatube • 1 week ago • 94%

Link goes to its Fandom wiki. I trust that you have your own extension that will redirect it to your preferred Fandom viewer.

Technology Aatube • 2 weeks ago • 99%

Identical text perceived as *less* credible when presented as a Wikipedia article than as simulated ChatGPT or Alexa output. The researchers note that these results might be influenced by the fact that it is easier to discern factual errors on a static text page like a Wikipedia than when listening to the spoken audio of Alexa or watching the streaming chat-like presentation of ChatGPT. > > > However, exploratory analyses yielded an interesting discrepancy between perceived information credibility when being exposed to actual information and global trustworthiness ratings regarding the three information search applications. Here, online encyclopedias were rated as most trustworthy, while no significant differences were observed between voice-based and dynamic text-based agents. > > > > > Contrary to our predictions, people felt higher enjoyment [measured using questions like "I found reading the information / listening to the information entertaining"] when information was presented as static or dynamic text compared to the voice-based agent, while the two text-based conditions did not significantly differ. In Experiment 2, we expected to replicate this pattern of results but found that people also felt higher enjoyment with the dynamic text-based agent than the static text. > > Edit: Added "for credibility" to title

196 Aatube • 2 weeks ago • 98%

source: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/31/world/europe/germany-saxony-elections.html

News Aatube • 2 weeks ago • 99%

www.nytimes.com

> > > Joel Nigg, a professor of psychiatry at Oregon Health and Science University, performed a similar review in 2012. He had expected to find evidence that would reassure those who were worried about food dyes, he said. However, he also found a small but significant increase in hyperactivity when children consumed the dyes. Other researchers have come to similar conclusions. > > > > Dr. Nigg and other experts have acknowledged the various limitations with the research. In addition to most of the available studies being small, many are also decades old and some rely on parents’ reports of their children’s behaviors, which can be biased. Some also tested dyes that weren’t used in the United States, making it difficult to say if the results apply to children in this country. > > > > No large, representative studies have been done on children in the United States, Dr. Nigg said. And researchers aren’t sure how, exactly, the dyes might increase hyperactivity; one study in children suggested that regulation of histamine, a neurotransmitter that can affect behavior, may be involved. In some studies on rodents, researchers have also reported that high levels of the dyes could cause cellular damage and affect signaling and structures in the brain. > > > > The F.D.A., along with an international committee of food safety experts, has emphasized the limitations of the research while maintaining that the food dyes currently approved in the United States are safe. > > > > > Industry groups, including the Consumer Brands Association, which represents packaged food and drink companies, as well as the International Association of Color Manufacturers and the American Beverage Association, have opposed the bill. > > > > Jim Coughlin, a nutritional toxicologist who has reviewed the research and testified against the bill on behalf of Consumer Brands Association, said that the studies had been too inconsistent to convince him that the dyes were harmful. > > > > But Dr. Nigg said that given the scientific uncertainty — and the fact that dyes add no nutritional value to meals — it makes sense to avoid having them in schools. > > > > “There’s a reasonable suspicion that food dyes may be harmful, at least for some kids,” Dr. Nigg said. “So why expose them to it?” > >

Music Aatube • 3 weeks ago • 16%

omg vampire weekend made a psych album and it sounds amazing holy shit #music #indierock

KDE Aatube • 3 weeks ago • 100%

invent.kde.org

Kross was a scripting framework dropped in KDE Frameworks 6 with no announcement that I could find. I'm trying to find a reason to add to Wikipedia.

Technology Aatube • 3 weeks ago • 19%

because we shouldn't be humanizing AI while depersonalizing the actual people who use stuff, according to MIT Technology Review.

Open Source Aatube • 3 weeks ago • 97%

plus the usual betterfox

World News Aatube • 3 weeks ago • 97%

> > > Kronan said cucumbers have sold out in stores across Iceland. The sales picked up so quickly that the store did not have time to prepare, said Gudrun Adalsteinsdottir, the company’s chief executive. “We are, just literally, eating it up,” joked Gudny Ljosba Hreinsdottir, 29, who runs Wake Up Reykjavik, an Icelandic tourism company with a walking food tour.. > >

pics Aatube • 3 weeks ago • 89%

idk why this looks kinda good, i somehow feel like it's supposed to not look good

World News Aatube • 4 weeks ago • 72%

www.nytimes.com

> > > The celestial event, which is visible from Sunday to Wednesday morning, probably won’t happen again until 2037. A “blue” moon bears no connection to the color blue, and the moon won’t have a colorful tinge. Instead, a blue moon is used to describe what is effectively an additional full moon, one that violates the rule of thumb, that there is one full moon in a month, or three full moons in a season. > >

News Aatube • 4 weeks ago • 98%

www.nytimes.com

Investigation into Canada's [New Brunswick brain syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Brunswick_neurological_syndrome_of_unknown_cause) is being blocked by the province, whose claims that the syndrome is various existing diseases have been debunked by federal experts, who suggest that the provincial government controlled by its forestry industry is blocking the investigation to retain tourism and industry.

Today I Learned Aatube • 4 weeks ago • 94%

www.iospress.com

> > > It was only in the early 1980s that the first tangible evidence connecting a toxicant with neurodegeneration came to light. In a tragic experiment of nature, a group of drug users in California accidentally injected themselves with a bad batch of designer heroin and began suffering from symptoms closely resembling those of Parkinson’s disease. Investigators traced the batch to a back-alley chemist who had synthesized the drugs and found that he had mistakenly created a neurotoxin precursor known as MPTP as part of the concoction. As it turned out, MPTP also resembled aspects of the chemical makeup of paraquat, a common herbicide, opening the door to the notion that perhaps chronic exposure to synthetic toxins was triggering Parkinson’s in aging patients the same way that the bad batch of heroin had in the users. Since then, advancements in molecular and genetic testing have continued to reinforce the idea. Recent studies have linked brain disorders with chronic exposure to cyanobacterial blooms, pesticides, air pollution and numerous other toxicants. Some researchers have gone so far as to describe Parkinson’s disease in particular as “man-made.” > > > > —[As summarized by the New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/14/magazine/canada-brain-disease-dementia.html). > >

Uplifting News Aatube • 4 weeks ago • 97%

Shola's DNA samples helped researchers decipher a new variant of progressive retinal atrophy. Now, other dogs can be checked for the gene that causes the blindness condition before being used for breeding. She's also really cute.

Excellent Reads Aatube • 4 weeks ago • 88%

www.vox.com

Really cleverly and comedically written. "Summer is too hot, too boring, and too long."

Wikipedia Aatube • 4 weeks ago • 100%

> > > The Von Restorff effect, also known as the "isolation effect", predicts that when multiple homogeneous stimuli are presented, the stimulus that differs from the rest is more likely to be remembered. The theory was coined by German psychiatrist and pediatrician Hedwig von Restorff (1906–1962), who, in her 1933 study, found that when participants were presented with a list of categorically similar items with one distinctive, isolated item on the list, memory for the item was improved. > > Please tell me that this is also the name for the cognitive bias where one notices a slightly uncommon scenario while not taking notice of the mundane scenario and believes that somehow the uncommon scenario is really common.

Not The Onion Aatube • 1 month ago • 87%

The X repost has since been deleted. I think what he should really do is post himself in a swimsuit swimming across the swimmably drinkable Yangtze river.

Technology Aatube • 1 month ago • 98%

> > > A paper[1] presented in June at the NAACL 2024 conference describes "how to apply large language models to write grounded and organized long-form articles from scratch, with comparable breadth and depth to Wikipedia pages." A "research prototype" version of the resulting "STORM" system is available online and has already attracted thousands of users. This is the most advanced system for automatically creating Wikipedia-like articles that has been published to date. > > > > The authors hail from Monica S. Lam's group at Stanford, which has also published several other papers involving LLMs and Wikimedia projects since 2023 (see our previous coverage: WikiChat, "the first few-shot LLM-based chatbot that almost never hallucinates" – a paper that received the Wikimedia Foundation's "Research Award of the Year" some weeks ago). > > Please read the article before commenting. Also, coming right up, another paper creates a structural diagram in comic sans.

Not The Onion Aatube • 1 month ago • 97%

www.thedailybeast.com

> > > JD Vance briskly marched up to Air Force 2, Kamala Harris’ plane, planning to give political reporters a show as he confronted the vice president uninvited on Wednesday. His power-play dreams, like most of his chaotic veep run, were immediately thwarted once he realized Harris was not present. “I just wanted to check out my future plane,” Vance told campaign reporters gathered on the tarmac in Wisconsin. > >

Technology Aatube • 1 month ago • 95%

www.vox.com

> > > [L]ately, Anthropic has been in the headlines for less noble reasons: It’s pushing back on a landmark California bill to regulate AI. It’s taking money from Google and Amazon in a way that’s drawing antitrust scrutiny. And it’s being accused of aggressively scraping data from websites without permission, harming their performance. > > > > > It was supposed to be different from OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. In fact, all of Anthropic’s founders once worked at OpenAI but quit in part because of differences over safety culture there, and moved to spin up their own company that would build AI more responsibly. > > > > > An AI company may want to build safe systems, but in such a hype-filled industry, it faces enormous pressure to be first out of the gate. The company needs to pull in investors to supply the gargantuan sums of money needed to build top AI models, and to do that, it needs to satisfy them by showing a path to huge profits. Oh, and the stakes — should the tech go wrong — are much higher than with almost any previous technology. > >

World News Aatube • 1 month ago • 97%

www.nytimes.com

> > > Ms. Reeves accused the Conservative Party of making spending commitments on plans such as road repairs and building new hospitals “knowing the money wasn’t there.” Some of those plans would scrapped or reviewed. “Today she will fool absolutely no one with a shameful attempt to lay the ground for tax rises she didn’t have the courage to tell us about,” Jeremy Hunt, the previous chancellor, said in response to Ms. Reeves’s statement in Parliament. > > > > > Rachel Reeves, the chancellor of the Exchequer, said on Monday that there was a hole of 22 billion pounds (about $28 billion) in the country’s coffers this year because spending needs had exceeded expected revenue. To begin plugging the gap, she announced a series of measures to cut about £5.5 billion this year and another £8 billion next year, including reducing spending on consultants and a previously announced decision to end a program to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda. > > > > > [A] substantial part of the spending gap comes from the Labour government’s plans to increase public sector pay. Ms. Reeves said she had accepted recommendations from independent review bodies to increase public sector wages about 6 percent this year, adding £9 billion to the budget. She said government departments would need to find up to £3 billion worth of savings to help pay for this. > > > > > With a strict eye on bringing debt levels down, Labour scaled back green investment plans and withheld committing to big public spending projects even before the election. Now it is sticking to this restraint. The government has said it would need to lean heavily on private sector investment to expand the economy. > > > > > Economists and other analysts, including the Institute for Fiscal Studies, have argued that these cuts did not seem deliverable and that neither of the main political parties was honest before the election about the scale of the pressures on the public finances, which would require either spending cuts or tax increases. Last week, Ben Zaranko, an economist at the institute, said that “a reckoning with the fiscal reality was inevitable.” > >

Technology Aatube • 2 months ago • 95%

> > > The TRACTOR program aims to automate the translation of legacy C code to Rust. The goal is to achieve the same quality and style that a skilled Rust developer would produce, thereby eliminating the entire class of memory safety security vulnerabilities present in C programs. This program may involve novel combinations of software analysis, such as static analysis and dynamic analysis, and machine learning techniques like large language models. > > Highlights from the forum thread: > > > There's even a conspiracy theory that the Rust Foundation's 501 organization type was chosen so it can conduct lobbying. The implication being that the Rust Foundation is behind government recommendations to move toward memory safe languages. (Big Borrow-Checker, if you will). > > > > > Assuming a worst case scenario, this could be the worst thing to happen to Rust’s image. We end up with billions of lines of rewritten Rust code that is full of soundness and logic bugs, and that no one understands. > > > > > DARPA funds some projects on a "there is an infinitesimal chance of success, but if you succeed, it's a big deal" basis. Silent Talk is an example here - very unlikely to succeed, even at the beginning, but if you could hold a radio conversation without sound, that'd be a huge deal for special operations forces. > >

Technology Aatube • 2 months ago • 34%

> > > The company says it’s proof that quality AI models don’t have to include controversial copyrighted content. Adobe trained Firefly on content that had an explicit license allowing AI training, which means the bulk of the training data comes from Adobe’s library of stock photos, says Greenfield. The company offers creators extra compensation when material is used to train AI models, he adds. > > > > > This is in contrast to the status quo in AI today, where tech companies scrape the web indiscriminately and have a limited understanding of what of what the training data includes. Because of these practices, the AI datasets inevitably include copyrighted content and personal data, and research has uncovered toxic content, such as child sexual abuse material. > >

Programmer Humor Aatube • 2 months ago • 98%

store.steampowered.com

> > > QL was our first game and although it was a big milestone for us, it was created at a time before we understood version control software. We do not have access to the source code anymore and cannot make any fixes or changes to the game. Because of this, we have decided to disable the ability for anyone to buy copies of the game. Thank you for your time and feel free to reach out to us. > > The trailer looks like an awesome vaporwave freeze tag indie game.

Not The Onion Aatube • 2 months ago • 95%

www.tomshardware.com

> > > Windows 3.1, launched in 1992, is likely not getting any updates. So, when CrowdStrike pushed the faulty update to all its customers, Southwest wasn’t affected (because it didn’t receive an update to begin with). > > > > > Aside from Windows 3.1, Southwest also uses Windows 95 for its staff scheduling system. > > > > > One X user suggested that the company switch to Windows XP—it’s also no longer updated, and it can run Windows 3.1 applications via compatibility mode. > >

Excellent Reads Aatube • 2 months ago • 96%

...from EasyOS, a Linux distro, which moved to the .img format.

Today I Learned Aatube • 2 months ago • 91%

Some government employee made the “new logo” in the 90s for NCSA software (the Common Gateway Interface), and government work is public domain. Just more evidence that big brother shall releaseth thee work and soul /s