Daniel Miessler danielmiessler.com:

„ “Facebook is tearing us apart!”, they say.

Well, no. What’s tearing us apart is exposing humanity to itself. More people seeing what others believe. More people seeing who others love. More people seeing how others behave. More people seeing who others are.

That exposure brings out innate ugliness and innate negativity. Until 2010 or so that ugliness was quite isolated, like back in our hunter-gatherer groups. It was there, but it was small and private and isolated.

What technology has done is expose that ugly truth to the world. And now we’re on fire.

We see the same thing with machine learning. You teach it to learn about human culture by showing it a corpus of our behavior and it comes back as a raunchy, sexist, racist.

“Machine learning is raunchy, sexist, and racist.” Nope. It’s just a mirror. That’s us that we’re seeing, reflected back.

Right, so this is horribly depressing. So what’s the plan?“

group RealClimate:

“Despite upward adjustments of historical warming estimates by around 0.08ºC, the new IPCC report provides remarkably robust policy advice. The main temperature projections for the scenarios are similar under a like-with-like comparison, the remaining carbon budgets are very close to previously stated ones and our best estimate of when we experience 1.5ºC warming under a future scenario has stayed pretty much the same: the early or mid 2030s. It seems like the only thing that is changing across 30 years of IPCC reports is that the time is running. And given lackluster mitigation action, time seems to be running out. “

“Worldwide Tech” Nuzzel Newsletter by Marcel Weiss:

This is hilarious.

Interconnected:

„ The first characters sent on ARPANET, the predecessor to the internet, by Charley Kline, 1969: lo – for “login,” but it crashed.“

Glyn Moody Techdirt.:

„On the plus side, this flagrant omission could make it more likely that a legal challenge to the EU Copyright Directive at the EU’s top court — something that is bound to come — would be successful, and lead to Article 17 being struck down completely.“

Seth Godin Seth Godin’s Blog on marketing, tribes and respect:

„But this, this moment of ours is now normal.

For now.

And then, there will be another normal.

There is no “the new normal”. Because that’s definitive.“

The Economist:

„First, we only ask for your time when we have something worth saying. Second, the horse race is not everything.“

Matt Simon at WIRED:

a city the size of Toronto flushes hundreds of billions of microfibers into the ocean each year.

So this research at the very least snaps in place a missing piece of the microplastic cycle puzzle: A whole lot of particles are swirling in the Atlantic, and scientists have already shown to be the case in the Pacific, as well: California’s famous Monterey Bay—a famous conservation success story—is loaded with the stuff. And again, this new research only looked at the top 200 meters of the Atlantic, and the researchers were only looking at a particular size range of particles, and they didn’t include a tally of microfibers. So the real concentration of microplastics in the ocean may be far higher than this paper’s range of 12 to 21 million metric tons.

"And we say, OK, so that’s a minimum estimate, isn’t it?" says Lampitt. "Because when you’re looking at this size category, we’re only looking at these plastics. And we still come up with a colossal figure. So that’s where the alarm bells really start ringing."

Deutsche Welle: DW.com – Business:

yes, please

Bradley Berman Electrek:

“The impacts of the pandemic are unpredictable. It’s concerning that Chinese car buyers are switching from public transit to personal vehicles.

However, that process was already underway. Now it appears to be accelerating. This is occurring just as production of new EVs from Tesla, Volkswagen, Byton, General Motors, and others, are ramping up. They are the best crop of long-range EVs ever offered in China.

If global auto sales rebound, the shift to electric vehicles could be faster than anybody predicted.”