Beyond Silicon Valley: The global fight against AI’s ecological footprint - Rest of World #ai #society

Individuals and communities are resisting the demands and practices of Big Tech’s AI infrastructure — such as data centers and digital labor — due to their environmental and social costs.

Adoption of artificial intelligence is on the rise worldwide, but the pace is uneven. As the global economy shifts increasingly toward AI-driven production and processes, wealthier nations are reaping the benefits faster, and poorer countries risk being left further behind, exacerbating economic and social divides, the United Nations has warned.

At the same time, Silicon Valley relies on resources in nations including Chile, Kenya, and the Philippines to develop its chips, train its AI models, and build its data centers. Workers and local communities in these countries are now pushing back against the demands and practices of big tech companies, which are resulting in enormous environmental and social costs to them, Carine Roos, a doctoral researcher at the University of Sheffield in the U.K., told Rest of World.

“Many discussions still approach AI primarily as a digital technology, but in many of these countries, AI is becoming visible through the infrastructures that sustain it: data centers, mineral extraction, energy demand, water-intensive cooling systems, and digital labor chains,” she said.

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A 1977 Time Capsule, Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder #space #engineering #history

Right now, more than 15 billion miles from Earth, a 48-year-old spacecraft is hurtling through interstellar space at 38,000 miles per hour.

It is the farthest human-made object in the universe.

It is sending back scientific data that no other instrument in existence can collect.

And it is doing all of this on 69 kilobytes of memory and an 8-track tape recorder.

The phone in your pocket has roughly one million times more memory than the computer running Voyager 1.

A single low-resolution photograph taken on that same phone contains more data than Voyager 1’s entire onboard storage.

And yet here it is, still functioning, still transmitting, still making discoveries in a region of space no spacecraft has ever reached before, almost half a century after it left Earth on a mission originally designed to last five years.

Voyager 1 is, by any measure, the most improbable success story in the history of human exploration.

Adults Lose Skills to AI. Children Never Build Them. | Psychology Today #ai #society

KEY POINTS

• Adults who offload thinking to AI lose capacity they built. Children may never build it at all.
• When students process information through the same model, the result may be similar minds.
• Auditing AI output requires expertise the child is still supposed to be developing.
• In a study, developers who delegated coding to AI produced working code but failed conceptual understanding.

Open source rewrite of the original Civilization 1 Game designed by Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley in year 1991 #software #copyrigts #opensource

Copyright considerations The available code is not a full working copy of the game. To run OpenCiv1 you are legally required to own your own copy of the DOS Civilization game. This is the reason that not a single file from the original Civilization 1 game is included in this GitHub repository as they are copyrighted.

The part of the game assembly code is emulated with Virtual CPU, and the rest of the code has been rewritten from scratch until all of the code is replaced with new copyright free code. The other resources (like graphics, music and text) will also be completely replaced with copyright free resources before publishing the complete game.

Current status The game is in working state, but you have to legally own the Original game (the .txt, .pic and .pal files have to be present).

Hong Kong Police Can Now Demand Phone Passwords Under New Security Rules - Gadget Review #privacy

• Hong Kong police can force device unlocking without warrants under expanded security laws
• Refusing to provide passwords carries one year jail plus HK$100,000 fine penalties
• New rules make encrypted messaging apps and VPNs potential criminal liability tools

Japan now has a special desk for people who work at home with a pet cat #interesting

The Neko House Desk understands who’s really in charge of your home, and helps you convince them to let you have some space too.

A big part of the appeal of working from home is that even if you’re still working for somebody else, you get much more control over your immediate environment. Want to play music during your shift, while also spending it all in your pajamas and setting the thermostat to whatever temperature you want? Go right ahead! No one is going to stop you.

Internal push to end Windows 11’s Microsoft Account rule | Windows Central #microsoft #software #privacy

Yesterday, Microsoft unveiled a sweeping set of changes coming soon to Windows 11 that are designed to address common complaints and issues that people have with the platform. Everything from slow performance to unreliable updates, AI bloat, and excessive ads and enshittification are being tackled.

It's all great news, but there's one big issue that Microsoft notably isn't addressing with these sweeping changes, and that's Windows 11's forced Microsoft account requirements. Even with all these improvements in tow, Windows 11 will still force you to setup an internet connection and sign-in with a Microsoft account during the out of box experience.

The real reason some people are instantly likable - Big Think #psychology

TL;DR

• Being socially magnetic isn’t only about your confidence, status, or attractiveness. 
• A major factor is interpersonal warmth, writes psychology educator Francesca Tighinean.
• Displaying warmth — by, for example, being the first to welcome others or by showing a bit of vulnerability — draws people in and can lower their social anxiety.

Obsolete Sounds #interesting

Obsolete Sounds is the world’s biggest collection of disappearing sounds and sounds that have become extinct – remixed and reimagined to create a brand new form of listening.

Explore the sounds below – you can filter by category and hit “info” to learn more about each pair of sounds. 

Vitruvian #software

Vitruvian — also known as V\OS — is the human-centric Operating System. Built on Linux and inspired by BeOS, it brings the elegance and simplicity of a classic operating system to modern hardware — without sacrificing the power and hardware support that Linux provides.

Custom-built kernel modules and real-time patches deliver a responsive, low-latency desktop experience. The BeOS/Haiku API is supported on Linux with minimal to no changes required to application source code.

The Logfile Navigator | The Logfile Navigator, lnav for short, is an advanced log file viewer for the small-scale. #software

Merge, tail, search, filter, and query log files with ease.

No server. No setup. Still featureful.

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