LINKS 08 – 2023 01 – 14
13 — 14
Reviews of Chat GPT plugins for content generation on WordPress
The use of artificial intelligence AI and Chat GPT for content creation on websites is becoming increasingly popular. In this article, we will explore five Chat GPT plugins for WordPress that will assist you in automatically generating unique content.
Mining companies push back as Biden set to announce new Grand Canyon national monument in Arizona: ‘We need uranium’
President Joe Biden will use his visit to Arizona on Tuesday to formally announce a national monument designation for the greater Grand Canyon, making Native American tribes’ and environmentalists’ decades-long vision to preserve the land a reality.
Taliban’s Massively Successful Opium Eradication Raises Questions About What US Was Doing All Along
Neil Gaiman Won’t Let Good Omens’ Story End Like That
It’s been a few weeks since Good Omens season two dropped on Prime Video, and let me tell you the Aziracrow girlies (non-gendered) have been eating good and also sobbing into their meals for the past two weeks. I’m not going to spoil it, as the entire season dropped at once and I would like more people to watch the show, but what I will say is that it ends on an absolutely devastating cliffhanger. Emotionally speaking.
Julius Caesar was once captured by pirates. Then he got revenge.
The 25-year-old Caesar treated his captors like his personal underlings. After being released, the future dictator hunted down the pirates and crucified them. Though (probably) part propaganda, the story foreshadows the future that awaited Caesar.
55 Cloud Computing Statistics That Will Blow Your Mind (Updated 2023)
It happened and continues to happen — even faster now. Before 2020, cloud computing was already booming. But as remote work boomed in the following two years, it accelerated exponentially.
How to download ultra high-res images of works from Google Arts and Culture
I wanted a framed print of The Lady with an Ermine when we were redesigning our workspace during lockdown. Important works such as this painting by Leonardo da Vinci usually have high-resolution images online. The typical sources are Wikimedia Commons and Google Arts and Culture.
Visualizing The Global Population By Water Security Levels
The US Military Suicide Crisis
09 — 12
July 2023: Global air and ocean temperatures reach new record highs
Complete List of AdBlock Testing Tools
This is a list I have collected of tools to test if your adblock is working and give you the ability to find more ads to build your block lists. These tools will be great for anyone testing out their PiHole, PFBlockerNG, NextDNS, Technitium, Adguard Home, or any other DNS SinkHole based ad blocking. These websites and tools are also useful for anyone looking to build their own AdBlocker.
Is that viral ‘superconductor’ legit?
A newly discovered material called LK-99 kicked off a frenzy to see if it really was a game-changing superconductor. The results are disappointing.
Virgin Galactic’s first space tourism flight set to take off
The three passengers — Jon Goodwin, 80; Keisha Schahaff, 46; and her daughter Anastatia Mayers, 18 — will spend a few minutes in space, where they can admire the curvature of the Earth and briefly float in weightlessness.
Hackerkollektiv cDc kündigt quelloffenes Verschlüsselungsframework an
Privatsphäre für alle: Das kostenlos verfügbare P2P-Framework Veilid der Gruppe “Cult of the Dead Cow” soll App-Entwicklern die Verschlüsselung erleichtern.
Photographer’s Epic Gigapixel Photo of Huge Concert Hides 3 Waldos
A photographer has created a stunning four-gigapixel, super-high-resolution photo of a vibrant Rammstein concert featuring 55,000 revelers and three Where’s Waldos.
Roelof Bos spent 13 days shooting the gigapixel photo with the main day coming when the heavy metal rockers played. Viewers can get the full experience by heading to Bos’s website where you can zoom right in on any part of the 350-acre site and try to find the hidden Waldos.
DARPA and NASA Aim to Test Nuclear Rocket by 2026
If you want to fly to Mars, you have to pick your departure date carefully. The ideal launch windows only come around every 26 months, and those launch windows are narrow because the planets need to be in alignment. Literally.
A fast rocket could widen those windows, shorten the trip’s duration, and spare time-sensitive cargo as well as passengers. The trouble is that the speed of today’s chemical rockets is limited by the fuel and oxygen they can carry.
Nvidia teams up with Hugging Face to offer cloud-based AI training
Tampa mayor reels in $1.1 million of cocaine during family fishing trip: report
Reporter ohne Grenzen mahnt FPÖ Wien, Angriffe auf Journalisten einzustellen
In einer Aussendung greift die FPÖ Wien Fabian Schmid massiv an. Schmid ist Leitender Redakteur und Investigativjournalist beim STANDARD. Die Wiener Freiheitlichen behaupten, Schmid berichte unrichtig, und schreiben, dass es ihm “vielleicht intellektuell schwerfällt”, die Stadtverfassung zu lesen.
Hopes Dashed: LK-99 Falls Short Of Room-Temperature Superconductor Glory
Less than a week after South Korean researchers claimed in two new papers that they had developed a superconductor that operates at room temperature under standard atmospheric pressure,which would have mind-blowing implications for transmitting electricity with zero resistance at normal temperatures, all hopes have been dashed by an already-skeptical scientific community.
4 crucial tests LK-99 must pass to be a true superconductor
These 4 tests, none of which have yet been passed, will separate fact from fiction.
Virgin Galactic Launches “First Private Astronaut Mission”
Space tourism company Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc. is launching its first private space flight Thursday morning. The flight, called “Galactic 02,” will carry three paying customers from Spaceport America in New Mexico to the edge of space.
Gerhard Polt, die Gebrüder Well und Die Toten Hosen begeistern in Wien
Der Abend “Forever – eine kulturelle Zumutung” beschäftigte sich mit der Normalität, der Zukunft des alpinen Tourismus – und natürlich der immergrünen Dummheit
Experiencing scientific revolutions: the 1660s and the 2020s
2023 is shaping up to be an important year in the history of science. And no, I’m not talking about the reputed room-temperature semiconductor LK-99, which seems increasingly likely to be a dud.
07 — 08
4 great books written in a wildly experimental style
Every now and again, an innovative novel overhauls the very definition of the art form. There are novels written as letters and puzzles, novels without named characters, and even novels that are formatted like screenplays. Here are four books whose experimental style opened up new opportunities for future generations of writers.
Browser-password-stealer — Get All The Saved Passwords, Credit Cards And Bookmarks From Chromium Based Browsers Supports Chromium 80 And Above!
Mark Zuckerberg is ‘not holding my breath’ for August 26th fight date with Elon Musk
Don’t Use Mozilla VPN (Security Problems and Incompetence); Just Get Mullvad. Bonus: SeaMonkey 2.53.17, WEI, Firefox on Linux Getting Worse.
Biden’s intelligence advisers recommend reforming FBI access to controversial spying tool
Bill Gates-backed nuclear contender Terra Power aims to build dozens of UK reactors
Billionen Geisterplaneten streifen sternlos durch unsere Milchstraße
Laut neuesten Schätzungen dürfte es in unserer Galaxie bis zu 20-mal mehr planetare Vagabunden geben als Fixsterne
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Homo sapiens is #9. Who were the eight other human species?
Most experts agree that our species, Homo sapiens (Latin for “wise men”), is the ninth and youngest human species. The lives of the other eight species tell a story of how humans slowly evolved away from the other apes, developing the ability to walk, eat meat, hunt, build shelters, and perform symbolic acts. Our ancestors probably pushed our closest relatives, the Neanderthals, to extinction. Wise guys finish last.
Clown Jango Edwards ist gestorben
Der auch in Österreich äußerst beliebte US-Amerikaner erlag in Barcelona einer Krebserkrankung. Er wurde 73 Jahre alt.
Microsoft-Funded Attacks on Free Software Under the Guise of ‘Open Source’
95 Tesla deaths have involved fires or Autopilot. How the EV maker fares in fatalities per million miles
Bayerische Geologen stoßen auf Spuren des ersten Massensterbens der Erdgeschichte
Die neu entdeckte Gesteinsschicht ist 443 Millionen Jahre alt und zeugt von der Dezimierung von 85 Prozent allen Lebens
Pixel Planet Generator by Deep-Fold
Showcase of shader code for Godot game engine
Codex Atlanticus Leonardo Da Vinci’s
codex-atlanticus.ambrosiana.it
Criminals Have Created Their Own ChatGPT Clones
Cybercriminals are touting large language models that could help them with phishing or creating malware. But the AI chatbots could just be their own kind of scam.
“Normal” ist für Michael Köhlmeier ein “bösartiger Kampfbegriff”
‘A guy with $200 million can’t afford a fact checker?’ Joe Rogan battered for spreading Kari Lake lies
05 ‑06
Windows Repair Toolbox
By running Windows Repair Toolbox, you accept COMPLETE responsibility for ANYTHING that happens. This tool has ZERO WARRANTY for any purpose. Run it AT YOUR OWN RISK.
https://windows-repair-toolbox.com
Ancient necromancy: A skull-filled cave near Jerusalem was a gateway to the underworld
Archaeologists exploring the Te’omim Cave in the Jerusalem Hills have found more than 120 oil lamps dated to the Late Roman and Early Byzantine periods tucked away in narrow, difficult-to-reach crevices. Because of their placement, not to mention their proximity to several human skulls, it’s unlikely they were used for lighting. But if they weren’t used for lighting, then what were they used for?
https://bigthink.com/the-past/necromancy-jerusalem-cave
Barbie earns $1 billion at the box office worldwide
Las Vegas Sphere Live Stream
China & Russia Sent Huge Naval Flotilla Toward Alaska; US Responds By Dispatching Destroyers
The drills by Washington’s most powerful nuclear-armed rivals was called in The Wall Street Journal “the largest such flotilla to approach American shores” in recent history, but it never entered American territorial waters.
Step-by-Step Guide to Capturing Great Milky Way Photographs
Unmasking Cloudflare Hosted Sites: Unveiling the Real IP Address
Cloudflare, a popular content delivery network and DDoS protection service, is widely used to enhance the security and performance of websites. One of its key features is hiding the actual IP address of the origin server, making it challenging for attackers to directly target the server.
archive.today: On the trail of the mysterious guerrilla archivist of the Internet
Do you like reading articles in publications like Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal or the Economist, but can’t afford to pay what can be hundreds of dollars a year in subscriptions? If so, odds are you’ve already stumbled on archive.today, which provides easy access to these and much more: just paste in the article link, and you’ll get back a snapshot of the page, full content included.
Try the Last Internet Kermit Server
What is this mysterious protocol? Who uses it and what is its story?
This story is a winding one, beginning in 1981. Kermit is, to the best of my knowledge, the oldest actively-maintained software package with an original developer still participating. It is also a scripting language, an Internet server, a (scriptable!) SSH client, and a file transfer protocol.
https://www.complete.org/kermit
An arrowhead made of meteoritic iron from the late Bronze Age settlement of Mörigen, Switzerland and its possible source
Archaeological artefacts made of meteoritic iron were searched for in Switzerland.
A Bronze Age arrowhead from Mörigen, made of meteoritic iron, was discovered.
Entirely non-destructive analyses prove the meteoritic origin of the arrowhead.
The Mörigen arrowhead is not made of iron from the nearby Twannberg strewn field.
The Kaalijarv meteorite, Estonia, is proposed as a possible source of the Mörigen iron.
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((___)) ((___))
[ x x ] _ [ x x ]
\ / _ |_|_ _ _|_ _|_ |_ _ _| _ _. _| _ _ \ /
(' ') (_|_|| |_ (_) | |_ | |(/_ (_|(/_(_|(_| (_(_)\_/\_/ (' ')
(U) (U)
.ooM cDc communications .ooM
CULT OF THE DEAD COW Breaks The Internet
(and you can too!)
What is dead shall rise again!
Come do a hacktivism with the cDc, as we launch a THING that will once again
change the world, with the style and chaos that only the herd can bring. Let
us bless you with a revolutionary communications system that will disrupt the
balance of power.
Cult of the Dead Cow Wants to Save Internet Privacy with a New Encryption Protocol
At a time when threats to digital privacy are at an all-time high, one of the web’s most formidable hacktivist groups may offer a solution with “Veilid.”
04
Solving World War II Photo Mysteries With Open Source Techniques
Open source investigative techniques can be used to uncover all sorts of interesting information about disinformation narratives, potential war crimes or even conspiracy communities. But these same practices can also be used to solve mysteries from the past.
For example, the ‘Finding the location WW1 & WW2’ Facebook group seeks to employ geolocation techniques to identify where unknown and undated images from the first and second World Wars were taken.
Open-Source Cell Phone Based On ESP32
The phone uses an ESP32 at its core, with a SIM800L GSM modem to interact with the cell network, including retrieving the system time. A small battery is included as well as all of the support circuitry for charging it as well as a USB interface that can communicate to a PC. The operating system for the phone is built from the ground up as well, with a touch screen interface allowing the user to make phone calls, send text messages, store contacts, and a few other basic features. There’s also a GPS application though, allowing the phone to know basic location information.
https://github.com/paxo-rch/paxos_8
Ask Ethan: Is LK-99 the holy grail of superconductors?
Recent claims put LK-99 as the first room temperature, ambient pressure superconductor ever. Has the game changed, or is it merely hype?
Brave’s privacy-focused search engine can now find images and videos
Brave’s search engine no longer requires that you jump to Bing or Google just to find photos or videos. The company has introduced image and video queries to Brave Search, helping you find media while maintaining the same levels of privacy and freedom of access. You won’t have to worry about being profiled through your picture hunts, or risk missing politically sensitive content (if unintentionally) pulled from another engine’s index.
Verletzt man mit Bildgeneratoren Urheberrechte?
Midjourney oder Stable Diffusion holen sich Inspiration bei alten Bildern und kreieren ein neues Werk. Wenn dieser Output zu nahe am Original liegt, können Schadenersatzansprüche drohen
Royal Mail celebrates 40th anniversary of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series with special stamps.
Top 12 vulnerabilities routinely exploited in 2022
World’s 1st ‘boomerang meteorite’ — a rock that left Earth, spent millennia in space, then returned — possibly discovered in the Sahara Desert
Spanish Colonists were Desperate for European Food
Spanish colonists in the Americas were terrified that their essential humors would change if they ate local food.
For Spaniards who arrived in the Americas during the early decades of colonization, the desire for food from home wasn’t just about nostalgia or comfort. As historian Rebecca Earle writes, in their understanding of human physiology, it was literally a matter of maintaining their identity and even of physical survival.
LSD statt Koks: Psychedelika erobern die Clubs
Vergangenes Jahr im Februar war ich auf dem Weg zu einem Warehouse-Rave in London, als ich mich plötzlich unwohl fühlte. Ich sagte der Freundin, mit der ich unterwegs war, dass ich nichts trinken oder nehmen will, wovon ich einen Kater kriegen könnte. Zwei Jahre Pandemie und eine frische Trennung obendrauf hatten mir ziemlich zugesetzt. “Willst du vielleicht ein bisschen Acid probieren?”, fragte sie und bot mir ein Viertel einer LSD-Pappe an – etwa 25 Mikrogramm, wie sie meinte. Ich wollte.
03
IBM and NASA have teamed up to develop an open-source, geospatial foundational model that will enable researchers and scientists to utilize artificial intelligence (AI) to track the effects of climate change, monitor deforestation, predict crop yields, and analyze greenhouse gas emissions.
https://huggingface.co/ibm-nasa-geospatial
The Cartel That Controls the US Meat Industry
Water-Purifying Cup Makes Drinkable Water From Creeks and Streams
These calamities also served as motivation for a researcher at The University of Texas at Austin to refocus her work on innovations that can help communities respond to severe weather events. Her latest project is a mug-sized device that can quickly clean water using a small jolt of electricity to fish out bacterial cells. In lab experiments, the device was able to remove 99.997% of E. coli bacteria from 2- to 3‑ounce samples taken from Waller Creek in Austin in approximately 20 minutes, with the capacity to do more.
Serbian coal miners uncover Roman ship
Archaeologists in Serbia are painstakingly brushing sand and soil off the ancient woodwork of a Roman ship discovered by miners in a vast opencast coal quarry.
After an excavator at the Drmno mine uncovered some timber, experts from the site of a nearby former Roman settlement known as Viminacium rushed to try and preserve the skeleton of the ship, the second such discovery in the area since 2020.
San Quentin Prisoners Form a Film Company With Hollywood Backing
Inmates at San Quentin prison are being given the opportunity to learn film production in a scheme backed by Hollywood.
The notorious prison in California where Johnny Cash famously performed in 1959 and 1969 is offering convicts the opportunity to learn the craft of film and television production in the hope that they will be able to forge a career in entertainment after they are released.
Wie Junkfood das Gehirn beeinflusst
Hochverarbeitete Lebensmittel sollen Angstzustände, Depressionen und neurodegenerative Erkrankungen befeuern. Vieles ist noch unklar – doch es gibt immer mehr Daten.
Is “groupthink” in science a problem or a myth?
Whenever a new idea comes around, scientists are quick to pounce on any problems it may have, and any conflicts that it has with already-existing data. To the public eye, this might look like scientists are succumbing to groupthink, and an unreasonable resistance to any new ideas. This isn’t the case at all, however. It’s precisely the success of our current theories in the face of extraordinarily precise and diverse lines of evidence that make them so powerful. The accusations of “groupthink” are merely a myth.
US drug overdose deaths hit record high in 2022 as some states — including Washington — see big surge
Drug deaths nationwide hit a new record in 2022. 109,680 people died as the fentanyl crisis continued to deepen, according to preliminary data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Polaschek: “Wer Wissenschaft angreift, greift auch die Demokratie an”
Wissenschaftsbotschafter sollen in den Schulen das Verständnis für und das Verstehen von Wissenschaft fördern – und so das demokratische Fundament stärken
EU Commission adopts regulation to ban all fluorescent lighting by September 2023
The European Commission has now adopted 12 regulations under the RoHS Directive effectively banning fluorescent lighting for sale in the EU by September 2023. On a cumulative basis between 2023 and 2035, the much-delayed decision to phase-out these mercury-containing lamps will save approximately €18.2 billion, as well as 190 TWh of electricity and 1.8 metric tonnes of toxic mercury. The EU decision will provide crucial support to a global effort to phase-out fluorescents under the Minamata Convention on Mercury, where a key decision is expected in late March.
$51,000 Trash Cans: Senate Votes To Throw $886 Billion At Defense; How Much Money Is Wasted?
Stargazing in a Multi-Sensory Universe
It may seem obvious to say that stargazing is, at its heart, a visual hobby. You sit outside in the darkness, and allow your pupils to dilate, letting in as much faint light as possible — and then you can see the universe. As much as I love to look at the night sky, I am happy to disabuse new stargazers of this notion. Stargazing is multi-sensory. As you visually time travel, seeing light that is hundreds, thousands, or even millions of years old, your body is aware of your immediate surroundings. You can smell the night air; feel the chill on your skin; hear the crickets, the hydraulic brakes of the city bus, or the wind in the trees; touch the drops of condensation that form in your tent or on your porch. Taste is really the only sense missing, unless you’ve planned ahead and have s’mores on hand, in which case, good job.
01 – 02
Canon’s new security-focused ‘SPAD’ camera can capture color video in complete darkness
Canon has just unveiled the MS-500, an unusual model that’s one of the most sensitive non-infrared cameras ever developed. It uses the highest-resolution 1‑inch SPAD (Single-photon avalanche diode) sensor yet (3.2 megapixels), and an interchangeable lens mount that allows clear color shooting in light as low as 0.001 lux, according to Canon — less than a clear moonless sky.
Agents of Chaos: Thomas King Forçade, High Times, and the Paranoid End of the 1970s
“Like an obsessed detective hunting a man without a face, Sean Howe has turned the life of Tom Forçade into a detailed metaphor explaining why the seventies were sublime, why the seventies failed, and how those two things are intractably connected.”―Chuck Klosterman, author of The Nineties
“A dizzying ride through the hazy, contentious, loopy world of American radicalism in the sixties and seventies. In Tom Forçade, Howe has found the perfect character for tracing the multifarious histories of the era, from the parties and protests to the sativa-smogged subbasements where idealists, pranksters, and conspiracists clashed. Richly drawn, deadly serious, utterly comical, this book gave me a contact high!”―Joe Hagan, author of Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine
“A gob-smacking roller coaster through the 1970s — who knew the ‘Me Decade’ had such a wild, frightening, and, yes, chaotic underbelly? It’s time to finally give Tom Forçade, faults and all, his rightful place among First Amendment freedom fighters.”―Tom O’Neill, author of Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties
“Who was Tom Forçade? A revolutionary guru? A hippie con man? An undercover cop? In Sean Howe’s brilliant book, he’s a weird one-man secret history of seventies America, a mystery man who keeps showing up everywhere from the early underground press to the punk-rock explosion. Agents of Chaos turns this bizarre tale into an obsessively fascinating and addictive epic, like a countercultural thriller. This book is a brilliant jigsaw puzzle that also turns out to be a mirror.”―Rob Sheffield, author of Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World
SIGGRAPH 2023 papers on the web
Note that when possible I link to the page containing the link to the actual PDF or PS of the preprint. I prefer this as it gives some context to the paper and avoids possible copyright problems with direct linking. Thus you may need to search on the page to find the actual document.
https://kesen.realtimerendering.com/sig2023.html
https://s2023.siggraph.org
See 2023’s Perseid meteor shower: the best in years
In 2023, on the nights of August 12th and 13th, the Perseid meteor shower will reach its peak, giving Earthly observers a chance to see upward of 100 meteors-per-hour. The meteor shower peaks on the weekend this year, while only a waning crescent Moon graces the skies, making for nearly ideal viewing conditions. Although the Perseids are slowly getting weaker over time, this year’s show should be the best in several years, and the second weekend in August is the best time to view it!
China begins trial operations with world’s largest solar telescope array
The Daocheng Solar Radio Telescope (DSRT) consists of 313 dishes, each with a diameter of 19.7 feet (6 meters), forming a circle with a circumference of 1.95 miles (3.14 kilometers). A 328-feet-high (100 m) calibration tower stands in the center of the ring.
https://www.space.com/china-solar-telescope-array-trials
The Live Music Archive Lets You Stream/Download More Than 250,000 Concert Recordings – for Free
The Internet Archive maintains an enormous Live Music Archive of concert recordings, not all of them by the Grateful Dead. There are more than 17,000 such recordings in its Grateful Dead collection — 2,000 more than when last we featured it here on Open Culture — but one must compare that figure to the 250,000 items now in the whole of the LMA. “It would be a great story to have the first item as part of the collection to be some rare Grateful Dead recording from 1968,” says a post at the Internet Archive blog reflecting on the twentieth anniversary of the LMA last year, “but it is actually an unassuming Rusted Root audience recording from August 24, 2001.”
https://archive.org/details/etree?tab=collection
Why You Need to Get Caught Up With “Reservation Dogs”
The series, which begins its third season today, represents an important milestone in Indigenous representation
Nvidia AI Image Generator Fits on a Floppy Disk and Takes 4 Minutes to Train
In the rapidly evolving landscape of AI art creation tools, Nvidia researchers have introduced an innovative new text-to-image personalization method called Perfusion. But it’s not a million-dollar super heavyweight model like its competitors. With a size of just 100KB and a 4‑minute training time, Perfusion allows significant creative flexibility in portraying personalized concepts while maintaining their identity.
https://research.nvidia.com/labs/par/Perfusion
Google’s AI search is getting more video and better links
Google’s AI-powered Search Generative Experience is getting a big new feature: images and video. If you’ve enabled the AI-based SGE feature in Search Labs, you’ll now start to see more multimedia in the colorful summary box at the top of your search results. Google’s also working on making that summary box appear faster and adding more context to the links it puts in the box.
Photographer Captures American Nomads Living Life on the Road