this is a good move and–as the article notes–was suggested by a sortition-based climate commission France did a few years back. they suggested a higher limit of 4 hours, but 2.5 is still pretty good:

France’s Citizens’ Convention on Climate, which was created by President Emmanuel Macron in 2019 and included 150 members of the public, had proposed scrapping plane journeys where train journeys of under four hours existed.

i can still make twitter work with tweetdeck and heavily curated lists but i fully anticipate this will eventually be axed and i’ll have to manually check news sites a lot more frequently than i currently do

i’m pretty sure Parler recently folded, actually, because it had been entirely crowded out by the others

just in general, i think we need to strongly consider reductions to copyright term lengths and the scope of what even can be copyrighted. artists being paid shouldn’t come with the downside of “basically all of the human cultural work you grow up with being unable to be substantially remixed or adapted in a new way during your lifetime”. there’s stuff which is older than any living human which is still under copyright, which is absurdist

it’s kind of funny a .gif service is even worth enough that you could lose 260 million on selling it. shutterstock is also an interesting company to be acquiring it

it’s the precedent that counts here more than the monetary damages, usually, because you can use the precedent to keep hitting them like this

Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, which oversees the General Data Protection Regulation, on Monday handed down the fine for Meta, saying that Facebook had violated its rules requiring platforms to ensure data transfers from Europe to the US have appropriate safeguards in place.

Instead, the DPC found that the platform’s EU-US data flows had relied on contractual clauses that “did not address the risks to the fundamental rights and freedoms” of users, despite an earlier judgment from the EU’s Court of Justice mandating that it better protect individuals’ information from invasive US surveillance programmes. The record EU fine over privacy violations comes after the Luxembourg regulator levied a €746mn sanction on Amazon in 2021.

According to the DPC, Facebook’s EU operation also has five months to “suspend any future transfer of personal data to the US” and six months to cease the processing — including storage — of any European citizens’ personal information in the US that was previously transferred in violation of GDPR.

it ultimately seems like a problem you have to solve at the source by just taking a wrecking ball to the benefits of pumping out spam. even the existence of SEO as a concept increasingly seems like a huge mistake we need to double back on

i heard of this one years ago when it was first launched and then never again, which seems pretty indicative of the desire for new search engines. i just assumed it quietly folded due to the pandemic honestly, lol

since it’s essentially payouts for individuals and corporations are assumed guilty (and can be jointly held liable under the bill) until proven innocent, it adds up significantly

SB 556 says children or seniors diagnosed with lung ailments, those who endure dangerous pregnancies and residents diagnosed with cancer who live within 3,200 feet of an active well can sue companies and their board members. The payout runs between $250,000 and $1 million, with potential for doubling or tripling penalties as a “deterrent.” About 2.76 million people in California live within that zone, according to FracTracker. State prosecuting authorities would also have the ability to sue companies to recoup costs for public health programs.

evidently it has not deterred about 100,000 people, which…

this is one of the craziest privacy policies i’ve ever seen. this was verbatim published, yes including the typos and the parenthetical that’s apparently an internal comment

“As noted in the Terms of Use, we do not knowingly collect or solicitPersonal Data about children under 13 years of age; ifyou are a child under the age of 13, please do not attempt to register for orotherwise use the Services or send us any Personal Data. Use of the Servicesmay capture the physical presence of a child under the age of 13, but noPersonal Data about the child is collected. If we learn we have collectedPersonal Data from a child under 13 years of age, we will delete thatinformation as quickly as possible. (I don’t know that this is accurate. Do wehave to say we will delete the information or is there another way aroundthis)? If you believe that a child under 13 years of age may have providedPersonal Data to us, please contact us at…”

actually ridiculous here:

Dr. Jared Mumm, a campus rodeo instructor who also teaches agricultural classes, sent an email on Monday to a group of students informing them that he had submitted grades for their last three essay assignments of the semester. Everyone would be receiving an “X” in the course, Mumm explained, because he had used “Chat GTP” (the OpenAI chatbot is actually called “ChatGPT”) to test whether they’d used the software to write the papers — and the bot claimed to have authored every single one.

“I copy and paste your responses in [ChatGPT] and [it] will tell me if the program generated the content,” he wrote, saying he had tested each paper twice. He offered the class a makeup assignment to avoid the failing grade — which could otherwise, in theory, threaten their graduation status.

I hope this gets lots of publicity and further aggravate these editor’s reputation.

it’s been quite a rallying cry for IA, although unfortunately i’m not sure how much individual people can do besides donate to them

it’s just laughable this guy is taken seriously or considered principled by anybody. beyond obviously being anti-“free speech” this is literally less principled than and a regression from previous Twitter policy, which was generally to take the throttling even if it meant people lost access to the website. i cannot believe there is a world in which i am defending Twitter Jack, but he was at least better on this front than Elon

hardly surprising given elon’s descent into far-right and reactionary politics—bellingcat in particular is a magnet for this sort of selective targeting because its reporting is inconvenient to a lot of political dogmatists.

(ironically, this also means elon has some common cause with a subset of Twitter’s “far-left” and “anticolonialist” cranks, some of whom are vehement defenders of Bashar al-Assad and think bellingcat is some sort of CIA-backed, pro-regime change front for believing chemical weapons were used on Syrian civilians)

one can only hope that, with the CEO switchover, this is another of elon’s dumb ideas which is quietly dropped and never spoken of again for being incredibly stupid

this is, as we say, not ideal:

Why it matters: The study reveals that seawater is intruding deep into northwest Greenland’s Petermann Glacier, thinning the ice from below.

Petermann acts like a doorstop, holding back vast quantities of land-based ice. As the glacier thins, inland ice moves faster into the ocean, raising global sea levels. If all that inland ice were to melt, it would raise global sea levels by about 1.6 feet, the study found.

study in question: Surge of neurophysiological coupling and connectivity of gamma oscillations in the dying human brain

it’ll looks like that’ll depend on where the road is. all of the possibilities from over-the-road wires to inductive charging seem to require being hooked up to the power grid–the energy is not being kinetically created here or something like that