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Topics in the latest edition of my "Cornerstone of democracy" newsletter -- a compendium of the best of political reporting/commentary (and more) -- include:

-- Australian TV news covers the U.S. elections better than American TV
-- What's at stake, again
-- Trump-loving immigrant oligarch's contempt for U.S. law started early

I curate to save you time. Please subscribe (it's free), and let other folks know about it.

cornerstone.ghost.io/essential

I just Googled a term I didn’t know, and Google’s AI Overview informed me that the Second Coming of Christ is a tenet of Judaism.

I’m really worried that people are taking Google’s AI Overview at face value.
Here’s an example where I happen to have the background knowledge to tell me how wildly wrong this is. But I don’t have background knowledge about everything, and students have a lot less than I do.
#generativeAI #Informationliteracy #teaching #AIOverview #Google

Air Canada has this cool system now where there are no human employees at the check in counter at all, and instead you register your baggage with a little touch screen and place it on a conveyor belt, and then the touch screen displays an error, and there's nothing you can do because there are no fucking human employees present to deal with it

Latest strip. At the Lancaster, PA rally, Trump got on the subject of his mental fitness and stated “I have no cognitive. She may have a cognitive problem, but there’s no cognitive problem… Got no cognitive.”

#cartoon #uspol #USPolitics #election #election2024

Today's #Rust #API design lesson: to make multithreaded programs possible, sometimes you have to exchange some compile-time safety for runtime safety.

Specifically, objects containing &references can't be sent between threads. You'd need to send the referred object together, but Rust can't do that.

The next best thing is to wrap the referred object *everywhere* in an Arc<> and hand out clones instead of references. Bad news for &mut refs, now you must count them manually.

#rustlang #coding

One area where post-consumer plastic recycling is actually happening is black plastic, such as for kitchen utensils and takeout containers. They're made from recycled electronics products, flame-retardants and all. A supermajority of tested spatulas and sushi trays children's toys contained cancer-causing levels of flame retardants that are banned in the U.S.

Plastic recycling: On the rare occasion where it’s not a myth, it is bad! cnn.com/2024/10/01/health/flam

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US pol 

Hubzilla vs. Mastodon comparison, two weeks into Hubzilla use (1,333 words) 

Francesca Albanese: "The entire population of Gaza is at risk of dying in a genocide that has been announced & executed under our watch."

"Albanese was responding to an earlier statement from the UN humanitarian chief Joyce Msuya warning that the entire population of North Gaza is at risk of dying under Israel’s siege."

aje.io/18noxx?update=3276800

#NorthGaza #GazaGenocide #GeneralsPlan #US .

"Zionists are openly calling to “shut down” the upcoming Toronto talk by United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese. On October 10, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Canada’s largest mental health and addiction teaching hospital, canceled a panel discussion on “workplace mental health” that included a screening of the 1984 film Gaza Ghetto: Portrait of a Palestinian Family..."

thecanadafiles.com/articles/zi

"The U.S. Department of Agriculture said that since 2022, when the national outbreak started, 104 million birds have been affected in 48 states...No infected birds or eggs have entered the food supply...according to the Department of Agriculture"

🧐 Idk, seems pretty unlikely to me that both those statements can be true...and we know for sure the first one is.

seattletimes.com/nation-world/

Anyone who thinks they can vote their way out of fascism with their wallet has never seen a billionaire’s wallet.

If now isn't a time to dump 'windows', when is?

Microsoft fires employees who organized vigil for Palestinians killed in Gaza | AP News
apnews.com/article/microsoft-f

"More evidence has emerged that AI-driven demand for energy to power datacenters is prolonging the life of coal-fired plants in the US."

theregister.com/2024/10/14/ai_

Never underestimate the ability of techbros to underestimate the amount of damage they are doing in the world.

I expect automatic transcription to make mistakes confusing similar-sounding words, but this? yikes. apnews.com/article/ai-artifici

This tool has been used to transcribe 7 million doctor visits, transcriptions which can't be checked for errors as the source audio was deleted. #AIIsGoingGreat

Hi! We "upgraded" our primary @matrix chat, (#codeberg.org:matrix.org) to room version 10. Upgrades are a part of the Matrix protocol: They create a new room in the place of the old one, and send invites to everyone in the old room. If you were in the old room, you should have received an invite.

We had 1588 members, but it seems like we only sent ~1180 invites. If you were a member of the chat, please accept the invite! If you haven't received one, please let us know!

matrix.to/#/#codeberg-space:ma

Elon Musk, enemy of ‘open borders,’ launched his career working illegally

washingtonpost.com/business/20

Impound all his wealth as it stemmed from a crime.

In the immortal words of the boring VC mouthpiece Mike Ethereum, "Make crime illegal"

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