Emperor

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/16316509

TiddlyWiki is a “non-linear personal web notebook,” as well as an exemplar project in the open source community. It can be a note-taking or information-ordering system in a similar vein to Obsidian or Notion, although TiddlyWiki was launched back in 2004. It can also be thought of as producing a wiki with interactive components.

However, as I discovered to my cost, TiddlyWiki has never had a strong “start here,” because it is not tailored to one specific task. Obsidian, by comparison, has the advantage of a clear vision of what it does. TiddlyWiki bewilders you with options at first because it hasn’t been designed to be sold. The community focus is on adapting it to different use cases.

So I’m going to take the advice in this explainer and use TiddlyDesktop while mentioning that there are plenty of other arrangements. It is, after all, just HTML and JavaScript. Let’s get started…

Scratch a digital capitalist and you’ll find a technological determinist – someone who believes that technology drives history. These people see themselves as agents of what Joseph Schumpeter famously described as “creative destruction”. They revel in “moving fast and breaking things” as the Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, used to put it until his PR people convinced him it was not a good vibe, not least because it implied leaving taxpayers to pick up the broken pieces.

Tech determinism is an ideology, really; it’s what determines how you think when you don’t even know that you’re thinking. And it feeds on a narrative of technological inevitability, which says that new stuff is coming down the line whether you like it or not. As the writer LM Sacasas puts it, “all assertions of inevitability have agendas, and narratives of technological inevitability provide convenient cover for tech companies to secure their desired ends, minimise resistance, and convince consumers that they are buying into a necessary, if not necessarily desirable future”.

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How refreshing it is, then, to come across an account of what happens when the deterministic myth collides with democratic reality. It takes the form of “Resisting technological inevitability: Google Wing’s delivery drones and the fight for our skies”, a striking academic paper soon to be published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, ie a pukka journal. Authored by Anna Zenz and Julia Powles of, respectively, the Law School and Tech & Policy Lab of the University of Western Australia, it relates how a big tech company sought to dominate a new market, regardless of societal consequences, using a shiny new technology – delivery drones. And how alert, resourceful and determined citizens saw off the “experiment

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An unofficial community for NeoDB, a very promising federated "everything" rating and reviewing database.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/13249285

A book about book bans has been banned in a Florida school district.

Ban This Book, a children’s book written by Alan Gratz, will no longer be available in the Indian River county school district since the school board voted to remove the book last month.

Gratz’s book, which came out in 2017, follows fourth-grader Amy Anne Ollinger as she tries to check out her favorite book. Ollinger is told by the librarian she cannot, because it was banned after a classmate’s parent thought it was inappropriate. She then creates a secret banned-books library, entering into “an unexpected battle over book banning, censorship, and who has the right to decide what she and her fellow students can read”, according to the book’s description on Gratz’s website.

In a peculiar case of life imitating art, Jennifer Pippin, a parent in the coastal community, challenged the book.

Pippin’s opposition is what prompted the school board to vote 3-2 in favor of removing it from shelves. The vote happened despite the district’s book-review committee vetting the work and deciding to keep it in schools.

Indian River county school board members disagreed with how Gratz’s book referred to other works that had been taken out of school, and accused it of “teaching rebellion of school-board authority”, according to the Tallahassee Democrat.

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The latest Star Wars game for mobile and Switch.

A global shortage of oranges that sent prices soaring has prompted some orange juice manufacturers to consider turning to alternative fruits to make the breakfast staple.

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"There are three main factors driving the soaring price of orange juice, and it's drought, disease and demand," Ted Jenkin, oXYGen Financial CEO and co-founder, told FOX Business.

The spike stems from declining output in Florida, which is the primary U.S. producer, and disease and extreme weather events in Brazil, which accounts for about 70% of global production.

Orange trees in Brazil have been suffering from a disease known as citrus greening. Once infected, citrus trees produce fruits that are partially green, small, misshapen and bitter. There is no cure, and trees typically die within a few years of infection.

The disease, along with severe heat waves and drought that occurred during the pivotal phases of flowering and early fruit formation, have put Brazil on track to register one of its worst orange harvests in more than three decades, according to a new report published by Fundecitrus and CitrusBR.

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In the past, orange juice makers have avoided long-term shortages by freezing juice stock, which can be preserved and used for up to two years, according to the Financial Times. However, even that frozen stock is dissipating because of a three-year shortage build-up.

Cools said that manufacturers may have to consider using a different fruit, like mandarins, because their trees are more resistant to the greening disease. However, that could be a lengthy process.

Thirteen counties in Oregon have voted in favor of measures to begin negotiations on seceding from the state and joining neighboring Idaho.

The latest county to endorse the initiative was Crook County, where voters approved the “Greater Idaho Measure” on Tuesday. The proposal aims to move Oregon’s border approximately 200 miles to the west, which would place 14 counties and several partial counties under Idaho’s jurisdiction.

“The Oregon/Idaho line was established 163 years ago and is now outdated,” the movement’s website says. “It makes no sense in its current location because it doesn’t match the location of the cultural divide in Oregon.”

The organizers of the Greater Idaho movement argue that residents in eastern Oregon feel increasingly alienated by the state’s progressive policies, which they say contribute to high crime rates. Their website says becoming part of Idaho would offer lower taxes and improved representation and governance for the communities.

“We want an economy that is not held back by Oregon regulations and taxes, including environmental regulations,” Greater Idaho executive director Matt McCaw, said, according to the Daily Mail. “We’ll still have federal and Idaho regulations, and that’s plenty. Idaho knows how to respect rural counties and their livelihoods.”

Archive

cross-posted from: https://zerobytes.monster/post/1072393

The original post: /r/nottheonion by /u/The_Ethics_Officer on 2024-05-25 00:48:15.

Republican state Rep. Alex Kolodin said he used ChatGPT to write a subsection of House Bill 2394, which tackles AI-related impersonations of people by allowing Arizona residents to legally assert they are not featured in deepfake videos.

“I used it to write the part of the bill that had to do with defining what a deepfake was,” Kolodin told NBC News. “I was really struggling with the technical aspects of how to define what a deepfake was,” he said. “So I thought to myself, ‘Well, why not ask the subject matter expert, ChatGPT?’”

The bill was signed into law by Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs on Tuesday. The legislation allows Arizona residents to obtain a court order stating the person identified in the deepfake video is not them.

Kolodin said that the portions ChatGPT created were precise.

“In fact, the portion of the bill that ChatGPT wrote was probably one of the least amended portions,” he said.

Hobbs was not aware of the portion of the legislation being authored by ChatGPT.

“I kind of wanted it to be a surprise once the bill got signed,” Kolodin said, noting that it was part of the plan.

Former President Trump said he wants President Biden to be drug-tested before their first debate.

“I’m gonna demand a drug test too, by the way,” Trump said at the Minnesota Republican Party’s Lincoln Reagan Dinner Friday. “I am, no I really am. I don’t want him coming in like the State of the Union, he was high as a kite.”

Trump has previously stated in a radio interview that Biden was “all jacked up” at the beginning of his State of the Union address, as well as “higher than a kite.”

A pro-Trump New Yorker unveiled his latest piece of political performance art outside the Manhattan courtroom where Trump’s criminal trial is underway on Thursday, launching 100 pink penis-shaped balloons decorated with the faces of Trump foes like Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg and Judge Juan Merchan. The artist, Scott Lobaido of Staten Island, told the New York Post that the “art installation” is entitled “Dicks of Hazard” to show that “these guys are a bunch of useless dicks.” Lobaido’s piece, which reportedly cost $1,500 in supplies and at least two days of labor to affix the portraits and properly weigh the balloons, was unveiled on the same day that Trump cronies Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), and their posse of MAGA diehards rolled up to express their support for the candidate, who is facing 34 felony charges related to a concealed affair with a porn star that could’ve cost him the 2016 election.