SoylentNews

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-taught-pet-parrots-to-video-call-each-other-and-the-birds-loved-it-180982041/

Domesticated parrots that learned to initiate video chats with other pet parrots had a variety of positive experiences, such as learning new skills, researchers from Northeastern University, the University of Glasgow and MIT report this month in Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544548.3581166

Following a pilot experiment and expert survey, we ran a three-month study with 18 pet birds to evaluate the potential value and usability of a parrot-parrot video-calling system. We assessed the system in terms of perception, agency, engagement, and overall perceived benefits. With 147 bird-triggered calls, our results show that 1) every bird used the system, 2) most birds exhibited high motivation and intentionality, and 3) all caretakers reported perceived benefits, some arguably life-transformative, such as learning to forage or even to fly by watching others. We report on individual insights and propose considerations regarding ethics and the potential of parrot video-calling for enrichment.

Thousands of people descended on Canada's capital to protest vaccine mandates for truckers and other public health restrictions.
https://www.businessinsider.com/thousands-canada-protest-covid-19-vaccine-mandates-truckers-justin-trudeau-2022-1

What would be the best weapons for a zombie apocalypse, assuming you are somehow immune to becoming a zombie and a very tiny minority of other humans are immune too. Also include the price/cost and weight of the weapons (and ammo where applicable) for comparison.

Assume the zombies move at similar speeds to humans, and most aren't particularly smart but they somehow don't need blood or air to keep moving, so destroying the brain or decapitation is the generally accepted way of quickly stopping them.

Flanged maces might be good (haven't found a video on how good such weapons are at destroying skulls though[1]). Pole weapons might be good too if you have more skill. Wonder which would be more tiring to use.

Guns would be good but they are probably better reserved for use against other surviving humans and maybe for hunting (if you're not gonna use a bow).

[1] You might have to resort to attacking the limbs if you come up against a zombie wearing a full face helmet...

https://thehackernews.com/2021/12/extremely-critical-log4j-vulnerability.html

"An attacker who can control log messages or log message parameters can execute arbitrary code loaded from LDAP servers when message lookup substitution is enabled,"

How'd they think of such dumb stuff and release it?

"given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" lol.

Only if the eyes are attached to brains with skillz and they're not intentionally adding exploits to the code (thanks NSA and gang).

https://www.vice.com/en/article/k78v9m/researchers-defeated-advanced-facial-recognition-tech-using-makeup

In their experiment, the researchers defined their 20 participants as blacklisted individuals so their identification would be flagged by the system. They then used a selfie app called YouCam Makeup to digitally apply makeup to the facial images according to the heatmap which targets the most identifiable regions of the face.. A makeup artist then emulated the digital makeup onto the participants using natural-looking makeup in order to test the target model’s ability to identify them in a realistic situation.

I've been wondering for a long while - when computers have so much RAM and CPUs so many transistors, why not start moving towards having separate stacks for data/parameters and return addresses? Why keep mixing data and return addresses in the same stack? Hasn't that been proven to be unhygienic and unsafe?

It won't solve all security problems but it should make it harder for return addresses to be overwritten accidentally/maliciously (and attackers running arbitrary code of their choice).

Also would CPUs be able to do some performance optimizations if they can safely assume an address stack only has addresses?

Nancy Pelosi got reelected as Speaker. If there's no President and no Vice President, the Speaker acts as President till there's one right? :)

Sec. 9. And be it further enacted, That in case of removal, death, resignation or inability both of the President and Vice President of the United States, the President of the Senate pro tempore, and in case there shall be no President of the Senate, then the Speaker of the House of Representatives, for the time being shall act as President of the United States until the disability be removed or a President shall be elected.

For many months I've resorted to using 32 bit versions of browsers in order to limit memory usage to not more than 4GB. So far things seem better. There's no perceptible difference in stability/instability and performance for my usage. If ever my browser tried to use more than 4GB, it's likely to be a bug or malicious JS and it or the offending tab should die anyway rather than successfully use the rest of my computer's RAM.

Maybe other people need their browsers to be able to use more than 4GB of RAM but in my experience even 64 bit Firefox starts behaving strangely way before it gets close to that (slowness, corrupted graphics, etc).

Perhaps one day browsers will need more than 4GB for browsing normal sites but meanwhile I hope 32 bit versions will continue to be available for long enough. Same for other software that shouldn't use that much RAM. I don't want to have to resort to running VMs/containers just to restrict browsers to reasonable RAM usage.

I do use 64 bit versions for stuff like video encoding, or file compression.

https://slate.com/business/2019/05/freedom-gas-molecules-of-freedom-department-of-energy.html

the Department of Energy is doing what it can to promote an efficient regulatory system that allows for molecules of U.S. freedom to be exported to the world

Increasing export capacity from the Freeport LNG project is critical to spreading freedom gas throughout the world by giving America’s allies a diverse and affordable source of clean energy.”

Unlike Iran's fossil fuels:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/29/washington-warns-hong-kong-to-watch-for-vessel-carrying-iranian-oil.html
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-asia-fueloil/iranian-fuel-oil-cargo-sits-off-malaysia-as-u-s-urges-sanctions-compliance-idUSKCN1RA0XT

p.s. note the latter link has Malaysia in the title, url and body but...

some Iranian fuel oil made its way into a storage terminal in Singapore via ship-to-ship transfers using four tankers

(Singapore is indeed next to Malaysia but a closer friend of the USA and Israel than the "anti-semitic" Malaysia ;) ).

Finally got around to look for something to rein in web browser memory usage in Windows and found this:
https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/685826/Set-process-memory-limit-with-Process-Governor

Seems to work well enough. Sometimes a browser process goes way past the limit (especially when reloading gmail for some reason) but it's much better than without controls.

In my experience web browsers aren't "well mannered" when it comes to memory usage, the more RAM a system has the more they use and they don't tend to free it up well even when other applications start to need it (e.g. I want to start up a VM). And there really isn't that much gain to me from Firefox using many GBs of RAM (with multiple 2GB processes) vs it being limited to a max of 500M to 600M per process (total maybe 2GB). In fact Firefox seems to get slower when it uses that much RAM.

Surprisingly for Windows there doesn't seem to be many other easy options than Process Governor (for Linux/BSD there's stuff like ulimit), even though the Windows OS itself actually supports such stuff.