Category: Uncategorized


  • Since its founding in 2014, the company raised around $450 million in venture capital funds and other investments. While there is still a small smattering of startups trying to build hyperloops, the demise of one of the biggest hyperloop companies signals the end of the dream that originated with Elon Musk’s so-called “alpha paper” in 2013. It…


  • “Hip-hop being a voice for the voiceless, this was an opportunity for me to give a voice for the environment.” https://www.teaonews.co.nz/2023/12/22/a-climate-change-poem-turned-hip-hop-song/


  • For MY2022, the EPA says that the average real-world CO2 emissions for all new vehicles fell by 10 g/mile to 337 g/mile, the lowest average it has ever measured. Similarly, real-world fuel economy increased by 0.6 mpg for MY2022, to 26 mpg—this, too, is a record high and the single-largest year-on-year improvement for both CO2 and mpg…


  • Zithers are German in origin, though some of the earliest zither-like instruments date back to 400 BCE China. The laser cut version [Nicolas] created had five strings to hammer on, though the type used in classical music arrangements typically contain upwards of thirty strings. The zither family of instruments may have given way to the…


  • Disney’s relationship to copyright is wildly contradictory. It’s the poster child for the public domain’s power as a source of inspiration for worthy (and profitable) new works. It’s also the chief villain in the impoverishment and near-extinction of the public domain. Truly, every pirate wants to be an admiral. Disney’s reliance on – and sabotage…


  • The hosting of the recent COP28 climate summit by the United Arab Emirates, one of the world’s leading petroleum exporters, exemplified exactly this puffery and, sadly enough, it’s just one instance of this greenwashing world of ours. Everywhere you look, you’ll note other versions, but it certainly was a classic example. Emirati businessman Sultan Ahmed…


  • Yet Another Vector for ML Fuckerytm Training set auditing… it’s a *must* A popular training dataset for AI image generation contained links to child abuse imagery, Stanford’s Internet Observatory found, potentially allowing AI models to create harmful content.   LAION-5B, a dataset used by Stable Diffusion creator Stability AI and Google’s Imagen image generators, included at least…


  • On December 14, the country launched its reusable spaceplane from the Gobi Desert, as the state-run news agency Xinhua reported at the time. According to the brief update, its third flight will be used to verify reusable spaceplane technologies and carry out science experiments. But according to amateur astronomer and satellite tracker Scott Tilley, who’s been closely tracking the…



  • Some people, mainly from the privileged West, think that colonialism is long over. Others are sure that colonialism has never stopped. This book explores a third possibility: that not only is colonialism still continuing, but that right now it is morphing into its most powerful version yet. We call this data colonialism. Data colonialism is…