Daily Archives: January 31, 2024

Cory Doctorow’s McLuhan lecture on enshittification (30 Jan 2024)

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Last year, I coined the term ‘enshittification,’ to describe the way that platforms decay. That obscene little word did big numbers, it really hit the zeitgeist. I mean, the American Dialect Society made it their Word of the Year for 2023 (which, I suppose, means that now I’m definitely getting a poop emoji on my tombstone).

So what’s enshittification and why did it catch fire? It’s my theory explaining how the internet was colonized by platforms, and why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, and why it matters – and what we can do about it.

We’re all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit.

It’s frustrating. It’s demoralizing. It’s even terrifying.

I think that the enshittification framework goes a long way to explaining it, moving us out of the mysterious realm of the ‘great forces of history,’ and into the material world of specific decisions made by named people – decisions we can reverse and people whose addresses and pitchfork sizes we can learn.

Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It’s not just a way to say ‘things are getting worse’ (though of course, it’s fine with me if you want to use it that way. It’s an English word. We don’t have der Rat für Englisch Rechtschreibung. English is a free for all. Go nuts, meine Kerle).

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Source: Pluralistic: My McLuhan lecture on enshittification (30 Jan 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

It’s a good essay on what enshittification is, what causes it, why it’s so bad and some ideas on how to get rid of it. Very worth reading.

EASA and IATA start work on aviation GPS interference

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flight course of an aircraft being gps spoofed and almost entering dangerous airspace

The European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and the International Air Transport Association (IATA) held a recent workshop on incidents where people spoofed and jammed satellite navigation systems, and concluded these pose a “significant challenge” to safety.

Mitigating the risks posed by such actions will require measures to be enacted in the short term as well as medium and long term timescales, the two bodies said. They want to start by sharing information about the incidents and any potential remedies.

In Europe, this information sharing will occur through the European Occurrence Reporting scheme and EASA’s Data4Safety program. Given the global nature of the problem, a broader solution would be better, but this would have to be pursued at a later date, EASA said.

Inevitably, another of the measures involves retaining traditional navigation aids to ensure there is a conventional backup for GNSS navigation, while a third calls for guidance from aircraft manufacturers to airlines and other aircraft operators to ensure they know how to manage jamming and spoofing situations.

As a further measure, EASA said it will inform all relevant stakeholders, which includes airlines, air navigation service providers, airports and the air industry, about recorded incidents.

Interference with global navigation systems can take one of two forms: jamming requires nothing more than transmitting a radio signal strong enough to drown out those from GPS satellites, while spoofing is more insidious and involves transmitting fake signals that fool the receiver into calculating its position incorrectly.

According to EASA, jamming and spoofing incidents have increasingly threatened the integrity of location services across Eastern Europe and the Middle East in recent years.

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Source: GPS interference now a major flight safety concern • The Register

Design Secrets Of Fantastic, Hand-made Puzzle Boxes

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[Kagen Sound] is a woodworker and artist who gives a great behind-the-scenes look at his amazingly high-quality puzzle boxes (video). Not only do his varied puzzle box designs show his math background, but they are all made entirely of wood. There are no nails or fasteners; just intricately-fitted wood and some glue.

There’s a lot of variety in his designs, and while it’s all fantastic from beginning to end, two things stood out to us as being of particular interest. One is the “Plus Box” which makes a clicking sound when the pieces are moved (at 2:47) thanks to a clever wooden spring. [Kagen] shows an example of the concept, where a flat wood piece with slots cut from the sides acts as a spring and clicks into notches when moved, providing audible and tactile feedback without anything other than wood.

The other is a patterned puzzle box (at 7:10) whose geometric designs change as the user moves the pieces. A reminder that [Kagen]’s devices are made entirely of wood and glue, so the design comes from two different types of wood assembled and cut at an angle to create the patterns seen. [Kagen] shaves thin layers of veneer from this block to attach to the puzzle pieces as needed to create the patterns without resorting to ink, paint, or decals.

[Kagen] has a math degree but is entirely self-taught as a woodworker, so don’t let lack of formal training stop you from experimenting. You can watch him give a tour of his work in the video, embedded below.

Feeling the urge to make your own puzzle boxes? Take a look at some we’ve seen over the years, and we even have a collection of single-line cryptex fonts to make laser-engraving puzzle bits a little easier.

 

Source: Design Secrets Of Fantastic, Hand-made Puzzle Boxes | Hackaday

Music causes similar emotions and bodily sensations across cultures

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people of different ethnic backgrounds dancing with music notes floating in the air

“Music that evoked different emotions, such as happiness, sadness or fear, caused different bodily sensations in our study. For example, happy and danceable music was felt in the arms and legs, while tender and sad music was felt in the chest area,” explains Academy Research Fellow Vesa Putkinen.

The emotions and bodily sensations evoked by music were similar across Western and Asian listeners. The bodily sensations were also linked with the music-induced emotions.

“Certain acoustic features of music were associated with similar emotions in both Western and Asian listeners. Music with a clear beat was found happy and danceable while dissonance in music was associated with aggressiveness. Since these sensations are similar across different cultures, music-induced emotions are likely independent of culture and learning and based on inherited biological mechanisms,” says Professor Lauri Nummenmaa.

“Music’s influence on the body is universal. People move to music in all cultures and synchronized postures, movements and vocalizations are a universal sign for affiliation

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Source: Music causes similar emotions and bodily sensations across cultures | ScienceDaily

AI can better retain what it learns by mimicking human sleep

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Concetto Spampinato and his colleagues at the University of Catania, Italy, were looking for ways to avoid a phenomenon known as “catastrophic forgetting”, where an AI model trained to do a new task loses the ability to carry out jobs it previously aced. For instance, a model trained to identify animals could learn to spot different fish species, but then it might inadvertently lose its proficiency at recognising birds.

They developed a new method of training AI called wake-sleep consolidated learning (WSCL), which mimics the way human brains reinforce new information. People shuffle short-term memories of experiences and lessons learned throughout the day into long-term memories while sleeping. The researchers say this method of learning can be applied to any existing AI.

Models using WSCL are trained as usual on a set of data for the “awake” phase. But they are also programmed to have periods of “sleeping”, where they parse through a sample of awake data, as well as a highlight reel from previous lessons.

Take an animal identification model more recently trained on images of marine life: during a sleep period, it would be shown snapshots of fishes, but also a smattering of birds, lions and elephants from older lessons. Spampinato says this is akin to humans mulling over new and old memories while sleeping, spotting connections and patterns and integrating them into our minds. The new data teaches the AI a fresh ability, while the remainder of the old data prevents the recently acquired skill from pushing out existing ones.

Crucially, WSCL also has a period of “dreaming”, when it consumes entirely novel data made from mashing together previous concepts. For instance, the animal model might be fed abstract images showing combinations of giraffes crossed with fish, or lions crossed with elephants. Spampinato says this phase helps to merge previous paths of digital “neurons”, freeing up space for other concepts in the future. It also primes unused neurons with patterns that will help them pick up new lessons more easily.

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Spampinato tested three existing AI models using a traditional training method, followed by WSCL training. Then he and his team compared the performances using three standard benchmarks for image identification. The researchers found their newly developed technique led to a significant accuracy boost – the sleep-trained models were 2 to 12 per cent more likely to correctly identify the contents of an image. They also measured an increase in the WSCL systems’ “forward transfer”, a metric indicating how much old knowledge a model uses to learn a new task. The research indicated AI trained with the sleep method remembered old tasks better than the traditionally trained systems.

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Source: AI can better retain what it learns by mimicking human sleep | New Scientist