Category Archives: News

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Deadlocked Supreme Court Rejects Bid for Religious Charter School in Oklahoma

Source: NYT > U.S.

Article note: This is surprising good news among all the bad.

In a 4-to-4 decision, the court upheld a ruling by the Oklahoma Supreme Court that blocked the school.

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Nvidia’s RTX 5060 review debacle should be a wake-up call for gamers and reviewers

Source: The Verge - All Posts

Article note: I've been waiting for a clear summary of this greasy shit from outside the terminally online gamer segment and their hysterics. It... actually does seem to be as greasy as the hysterics. I shouldn't be surprised.
A mockup of an RTX 5060 graphics card in a PC, backlit by Nvidia’s green strakes / vents on a wall like so many overlapping bird feathers.

Nvidia has gone too far.

This week, the company reportedly attempted to delay, derail, and manipulate reviews of its $299 GeForce RTX 5060 graphics card, which would normally be its bestselling GPU of the generation. Nvidia has repeatedly and publicly said the budget 60-series cards are its most popular, and this year it reportedly tried to ensure it by withholding access and pressuring reviewers to paint them in the best light possible.

Nvidia might have wanted to prevent a repeat of 2022, when it launched this card's predecessor. Those reviews were harsh. The 4060 was called a "slap in the face to gamers" and a "wet fart of a GPU." I had guessed the 5060 was headed for the same fate after seeing how reviewers handled the 5080, which similarly showcased how little Nvidia's hardware has improved year over year and relies on software to make up the gaps.

But Nvidia had other plans.

Here are the tactics that Nvidia reportedly just used to throw us off the 5060's true scent, as individually described by GamersNexus, VideoCardz, Hardware Unboxed, GameStar.de, Digital Foundry, and more:

  • Nvidia decided to launch its RTX 5060 on May 19th, when most reviewers would be at Computex i …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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Mozilla to shut down Pocket on July 8

Source: Hacker News

Article note: I never liked pocket, and was annoyed when Mozilla pushed it so aggressively ... But this has a lot of the same vibe as when Google Reader went out, cutting off accessible curation and archive method for the media people consume. I took the lesson that time and went to self hosted, tt-rss has its issues, but at least the data is in my control and even if the project disappeared it's open source so I could run it long enough to perform a more controlled migration. Conspiratorially, there is a _real_ bias for the last years against any tool that gives users curatorial control over the content they consume, algorithmic coercion is way more profitable and manipulative for the whole publishing ecosystem.
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By default, Signal doesn’t recall

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Making the various user-hostile things injected into Windows to support interests parties-not-the-user fight, so they disable each other. Using the DRM hooks to block screen capture to block Recall. Clever, but gross.
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Under RFK Jr., COVID shots will only be available to people 65+, high-risk groups

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: Fuck. Gonna make schools a shit show in the fall if their bullshit holds.

Under the control of anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Food and Drug Administration is unilaterally terminating universal access to seasonal COVID-19 vaccines; instead, only people who are age 65 years and older and people with underlying conditions that put them at risk of severe COVID-19 will have access to seasonal boosters moving forward.

The move was laid out in a commentary article published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, written by Trump administration FDA Commissioner Martin Makary and the agency's new top vaccine regulator, Vinay Prasad.

The article lays out a new framework for approving seasonal COVID-19 vaccines, as well as a rationale for the change—which was made without input from independent advisory committees for the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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KDE is finally getting a native virtual machine manager called “Karton”

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Reserved hope about this. I really wish the libvirt and SPICE ecosystem this (and virt-manager and gnome boxes) weren't so rough, especially for desktop virtualization use. The deep KVM/QEMU tooling is very solid, the USB pass-through story has improved to "Basically usable" in the last year or two which was a long term showstopper that kept me on VirtualBox for some tasks. A UI that isn't as awful as virt-manager would help with usability.
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US, China agree to roll back tariffs – but only for 90 days

Source: The Register

Article note: Oh good, sanity has prevailed before things got _really_ bad, and all we got was a market crash, a massive weakening of US foreign interests by damaging the dollar as a reserve currency, and a few weeks of crony capitalism exception/extortion shenanigans. I suppose now Donnie Dipshit is going to announce what a brilliant and powerful negotiator he is and the cult members will believe him.

IT projects may remain in limbo due to deal being far from final, but markets are up, so Trump'll declare a win

world war fee  The impending disaster of trade-freezing tariffs on Chinese imports to the US has been averted, but like a Chinese cargo ship anchored off the coast of California, it's not gone entirely.…

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US Copyright Office found AI companies sometimes breach copyright. Next day its boss was fired

Source: The Register

Article note: I'm very much a copyright minimalist, I think the terms should be shorter and private use exceptions broader... and even I think the mass infringement of recent works for commercial use by the AI douches is gross.

Some see an action to benefit Elon. The White House sees an agency obsessed with DEI

The head of the US Copyright Office has reportedly been fired, the day after agency concluded that builders of AI models use of copyrighted material went beyond existing doctrines of fair use.…

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Testing different temperature sensors for a DIY thermostat

Source: adafruit industries blog

Article note: Super useful for putting together effective devices from questionable China export parts. Would love to have similar results for a range of sensing devices.

Oleg Tarasov has tested six temperature sensors for use in a thermostat project.

A crucial step towards my goal of individual room temperature control is to be able to measure current room temperature with precision and minimum amount of lag.

Important note: all of my sensors were sourced from China, and most of them from AliExpress. I did not get my sensors from official distributors, so there is a real possibility that all sensors I tested were unreliable knock-offs.

I thought that I’ll just slap together a couple of random sensors, write some code and be done with my per-room thermostats project. Instead, I’m doing this on and off for almost half a year and get a occasional raised eyebrow from my wife while dipping weird-looking stuff in ice water � But it’s actually fun and I learn a lot of stuff in the process, and isn’t it this the true goal?

See the testing process in the post here.

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Signal clone used by Trump official stops operations after report it was hacked

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: It's an absolute onion of incompetence. Doing high-net shit over commercial software on the public internet. Getting caught doing it by adding the most wrong people possible to your chats, and using your public phone numbers, and letting the media photograph the behavior. Picking the most secure option... but using a version hacked by an Israeli spyware vendor to allow retention, so you can pretend to comply with records acts. Getting hacked because said Israeli spyware vendor who appears to have hired a mediocre college student to do the modifications. It's honestly hard to imaging someone fucking up harder.

A messaging service used by former National Security Advisor Mike Waltz has temporarily shut down while the company investigates an apparent hack. The messaging app is used to access and archive Signal messages but is not made by Signal itself.

404 Media reported yesterday that a hacker stole data "from TeleMessage, an obscure Israeli company that sells modified versions of Signal and other messaging apps to the US government to archive messages." 404 Media interviewed the hacker and reported that the data stolen "contains the contents of some direct messages and group chats sent using [TeleMessage's] Signal clone, as well as modified versions of WhatsApp, Telegram, and WeChat."

TeleMessage is based in Israel and was acquired in February 2024 by Smarsh, a company headquartered in Portland, Oregon. Smarsh provided a statement to Ars today saying it has temporarily shut down all TeleMessage services.

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