For years, China’s government has used what’s known as the
“Great Firewall” to censor the internet inside its country and block access to select foreign websites.
Now, a document leak shows that little-known Chinese company
'Geedge' is exporting these tools to other countries,
including Myanmar, Pakistan, Kazakhstan and Ethiopia.
The AI boom has pushed SF's residential rents up by the most in the US over the past year, as AI companies lease apartments and offer rent stipends to employees (Natallie Rocha/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10…
email_company: Manufacturing company email (2010)
A network of emails among employee email addresses at a mid-sized manufacturing company. Each directed edge represents an email sent from address i to address j. Edges are timestamped, and occurred over a 6 month period in an unspecified year.
This network has 167 nodes and 82927 edges.
Tags: Social, Communication, Unweighted, Multigraph, Timestamps
VVD’er Thom van Campen voelde ‘weerzin’ en had ‘buikpijn’ over kabinet met PVV: ‘Ik heb er wél voor getekend’ - NRC
#NLpol
A local cancer institute has a giant inflatable colon, maybe 3m in diameter and 6m long, set up at a community event.
Where does one even go to make such a thing? I feel like there's a single digit number of companies globally that specialize in making custom printed/sculpted inflatable props like this. It's certainly not something you'd buy COTS.
Like anybody who makes bouncy castles *could* but I suspect most such companies just do standard designs
As the system comes up, the component builders will from time to time appear,
bearing hot new versions of their pieces -- faster, smaller, more complete,
or putatively less buggy. The replacement of a working component by a new
version requires the same systematic testing procedure that adding a new
component does, although it should require less time, for more complete and
efficient test cases will usually be available.
-- Frederick Brooks Jr., "The Myt…
This is a subtweet...
People who are not anti-capitalist sometimes wonder: "Why is there a monopoly on X life-critical thing?" (E.g., epipens, insulin, web search).
This one is really simple actually: because monopolies are more profitable than competition, and the foundation of capitalism is that capital = power.
Various societies have recognized the necropolitical outcomes of monopolies and have tried to erect barriers to monopoly; we all know that monopolies are bad, death-and-suffering-causing things. But since these societies mostly remain capitalist, they allow these barriers to be eroded by the power of capital (to do otherwise would be to repudiate capitalism because it puts a limit on the power of money). The barriers are ineffective, and the capital = power equation holds, and monopolies result and get to do their killing & maiming thing (remember: even things like social media monopolies that you wouldn't expect to pay for political assassinations like a mining company still profit from inciting genocides). *Sometimes* there are oligopolies instead of monopolies, but instances of really competitive markets are pretty rare for things that are widely sought-after.
The "government will manage the markets to prevent bad outcomes like monopolies" strategy has failed repeatedly, spectacularly, and almost universally. To actually prevent monopolies you need a population that no longer believes that money should equal power, it's that simple. Sadly, it's actually not that simple, since all of the alternatives which equate something else to power, like "the king" or "party loyalty as judged by the supreme leader" have the same problems or worse. The attitude you need to cultivate is "nobody should have power," which is hard because *all* of the power-systems we have constantly propagandize against this attitude in myriad ways. Still, in the future once we've broken free of this age where hierarchy is accepted, people will look back and wonder whether the historical records are even credible given how much needless death and suffering were endured with little resistance.
#anarchy #capitalism
Malaysian companies dominate PNG forest-clearance permits: report https://news.mongabay.com/2025/12/malaysian-companies-dominate-png-forest-clearance-permits-report/
Rebecca Heineman, legendary game designer, Interplay co-founder, programmer, and the first formally recognized US Space Invaders champion, died at 62 in October (Ted Litchfield/PC Gamer)
https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-indus…
A look at Huawei's efforts to build an independent Chinese chip supply chain; through vehicles like Hubble, it has invested in 60 chip companies since 2019 (Itsuro Fujino/Nikkei Asia)
https://asia.nikkei.com/business/tech/