Lou Katz @lou@entropyservice.com

Ending Unfettered Military Aid to Israel and Restoring UNRWA Funding https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/04/24/ending-unfettered-military-aid-to-israel-and-restoring-unrwa-funding/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

New from me: The media should be celebrating college protesters instead of demonizing them https://presswatchers.org/2024/04/the-media-should-be-celebrating-college-protesters-instead-of-demonizing-them/

My million dollar idea I want someone to steal and do, so I can be a customer.

"Dumb Stuff" we sell electronic appliances that aren't Internet connected. That's all.

That's it. That's the pitch. I would buy the <bleep> out of this company if their electronic gadgets were even half way decent, and repairable.

Electronic, no wifi, regular screws to open it up. That's it. Do those three things, and you can be sold by this store.

I will pay this business to curate and find these devices for me.

Google fires more employees over protest of cloud contract with Israel https://www.axios.com/2024/04/23/google-fires-employees-protest-israel-contract-nimbus?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

NASA recovered a space probe's 47-year-old computer with about as much memory as my old Commodore 64 over a distance of 15 billion miles so it can (hopefully) continue to do science work, and it reminds me of how much ingenuity used to go into computers back when the assumption was you couldn't consume the water and electricity of a small nation just to power Ask Jeeves.

@pluralistic

> The point of monopoly power isn't just getting too big to fail and too big to jail – it's getting too big to care.

This line is just pure... 👨‍🍳😘

A company that pays $0.36-$1/query for electricity and (scarce, fresh) water can't indefinitely give those queries away by the millions to people who are expected to revise those queries dozens of times before eliciting the perfect botshit rendition of "instructions for removing a grilled cheese sandwich from a VCR in the style of the King James Bible":

https://www.semianalysis.com/p/the-inference-cost-of-search-disruption

2/

@mikeolson I love that there's no hyperbole in the announcement and explanation. It's pretty dry considering everyone who understands it well enough knows it's one of the great feats of modern engineering

I asked my cousin
the college student
if she feels unsafe
on her university campus
and she replied that yes
she does feel unsafe
on her university campus
not because of flags
or protests or tents or chants
but because she
is the only masked person
in most of her classes.

On Saturday I rode from my front door to the state capitol -- 115 miles (185 km)! -- as part of Ride 4 a Reason, our annual fundraiser for public schools in Oakland.

I did it faster than I ever have before, 7 hours and 8 minutes of moving time!

Donate:

https://www.r4rschools.org/cfarivar/Donate

NASA successfully debugged a 46-year-old computer that has a latency of nearly two full days. That is truly awesome.

https://blogs.nasa.gov/voyager/2024/04/22/nasas-voyager-1-resumes-sending-engineering-updates-to-earth/

Last November, NASA's Voyager 1 sent home garbled data, and engineers traced the problem to the flight data subsystem (FDS). The problem turned out to be a single chip in the FDS memory. They couldn't repair the chip but could move the affected code into sections and store them in different parts of the FDS system. They tested the new system this week, sending signals to the Voyager 1, 22.5 light-hours away. It worked, and Voyager 1 is back.

https://blogs.nasa.gov/voyager/2024/04/22/nasas-voyager-1-resumes-sending-engineering-updates-to-earth/

The long-distance (2-day latency to outside the solar system) reconnection to Voyager represents the best of humanity.

In awe of the people who do these things...

Who’s laughing at NASA now for buying the extended space probe warranty.
https://blogs.nasa.gov/voyager/2024/04/22/nasas-voyager-1-resumes-sending-engineering-updates-to-earth/

I made a thing called 'Living QR code'. It's a QR code that consists of live webcam video but remains scannable!

I gave a demo during the lightning talks at #Hackaday Berlin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BG1bW7P5s44 (my talk starts 52’44)

Code is here: https://github.com/twisst/living_QR_code

Israel’s Starvation Campaign Could Affect Palestinians for Generations to Come https://truthout.org/articles/israels-starvation-campaign-could-affect-palestinians-for-generations-to-come/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

Here's the thing about Trump's demands for immunity.

The only other president to demand immunity was Nixon.

People don't ask for immunity on principle or for fun -- they ask for immunity BECAUSE THEY COMMITTED CRIMES.

You can tell the Old Testament is the product of a desert people, because when they tried to imagine the end of the world they went with “rained for forty days and forty nights”, which in Ireland is just called Spring.

@gyokusai @pluralistic "In corrupt systems, a few bad actors cost everyone else billions in order to bring in millions – the savings a factory can realize from dumping pollution in the water supply are much smaller than the costs we all bear from being poisoned by effluent. But the costs are widely diffused while the gains are tightly concentrated, so the beneficiaries of corruption can always outspend their victims to stay clear." 👍👍