@Techmeme@techhub.social2025-10-15 13:17:49
Apple debuts its M5 chip, with a 10-core GPU, a Neural Accelerator in each core, enabling 4x the performance of M4, and a 10-core CPU with six efficiency cores (Hartley Charlton/MacRumors)
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/10/15/apple-unveils-m5-chip-with-n…
@mariyadelano@hachyderm.io2025-08-14 15:01:03
I’m so proud of my little brother.
I just spoke to him in his dorm room at a top 30 college here in the US, he just arrived for freshman orientation.
He got in on a full ride - tuition, housing, food, books, travel, stipend for daily expenses. Won a competitive scholarship to do so.
More than that, he’s had a tougher road than most to get there:
- he had to suddenly move away from Manila, Philippines (where he grew up) in middle school because of COVID restrictions that didn’t let kids go outside (2020)
- then, just as he adjusted to school and a different language in our home country, Ukraine, Russia invaded (2022)
- he stayed in Greece for a month while I was calling our congressional representative here in NY and negotiating with the US embassy to get them a visa ASAP to enter the US and be with me and my husband. There were no paths for Ukrainian refugees yet, we just wanted them with us temporarily for a few months to figure out what options they even had next.
- he had to wait, not going to school, with no clue where they’d move next, until TPS became available to Ukrainians and they got to stay here in the US
- then he had to continue high school in yet another system, yet another country, amidst news of bombings and destruction back home
- my mother wasn’t allowed to work for months while their documents were pending, so we had to raise money with a public GoFundMe campaign and my husband and I maxed out our credit cards to help them get by
- they shared a one-room cottage for the first year, graciously hosted for free by an elderly local couple
- he saw a therapist who also graciously took him in for free while they didn’t have insurance
- he had to graduate high school amidst news of other immigrant students getting arrested, detained, and deported at their own graduations around the country
- he wasn’t sure if he would even make it to college as this administration publicly considered canceling TPS for Ukrainians and cutting off their pathway to maintaining legal status.
We don’t know what tomorrow holds. But he’s there. He’s on campus. He got to go to college.
I love him so much.
@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2025-09-14 12:01:38
TL;DR: what if instead of denying the harms of fascism, we denied its suppressive threats of punishment
Many of us have really sharpened our denial skills since the advent of the ongoing pandemic (perhaps you even hesitated at the word "ongoing" there and thought "maybe I won't read this one, it seems like it'll be tiresome"). I don't say this as a preface to a fiery condemnation or a plea to "sanity" or a bunch of evidence of how bad things are, because I too have honed my denial skills in these recent years, and I feel like talking about that development.
Denial comes in many forms, including strategic information avoidance ("I don't have time to look that up right now", "I keep forgetting to look into that", "well this author made a tiny mistake, so I'll click away and read something else", "I'm so tired of hearing about this, let me scroll farther", etc.) strategic dismissal ("look, there's a bit of uncertainty here, I should ignore this", "this doesn't line up perfectly with my anecdotal experience, it must be completely wrong", etc.) and strategic forgetting ("I don't remember what that one study said exactly; it was painful to think about", "I forgot exactly what my friend was saying when we got into that argument", etc.). It's in fact a kind of skill that you can get better at, along with the complementary skill of compartmentalization. It can of course be incredibly harmful, and a huge genre of fables exists precisely to highlight its harms, but it also has some short-term psychological benefits, chiefly in the form of muting anxiety. This is not an endorsement of denial (the harms can be catastrophic), but I want to acknowledge that there *are* short-term benefits. Via compartmentalization, it's even possible to be honest with ourselves about some of our own denials without giving them up immediately.
But as I said earlier, I'm not here to talk you out of your denials. Instead, given that we are so good at denial now, I'm here to ask you to be strategic about it. In particular, we live in a world awash with propaganda/advertising that serves both political and commercial ends. Why not use some of our denial skills to counteract that?
For example, I know quite a few people in complete denial of our current political situation, but those who aren't (including myself) often express consternation about just how many people in the country are supporting literal fascism. Of course, logically that appearance of widespread support is going to be partly a lie, given how much our public media is beholden to the fascists or outright in their side. Finding better facts on the true level of support is hard, but in the meantime, why not be in denial about the "fact" that Trump has widespread popular support?
To give another example: advertisers constantly barrage us with messages about our bodies and weight, trying to keep us insecure (and thus in the mood to spend money to "fix" the problem). For sure cutting through that bullshit by reading about body positivity etc. is a better solution, but in the meantime, why not be in denial about there being anything wrong with your body?
This kind of intentional denial certainly has its own risks (our bodies do actually need regular maintenance, for example, so complete denial on that front is risky) but there's definitely a whole lot of misinformation out there that it would be better to ignore. To the extent such denial expands to a more general denial of underlying problems, this idea of intentional denial is probably just bad. But I sure wish that in a world where people (including myself) routinely deny significant widespread dangers like COVID-19's long-term risks or the ongoing harms of escalating fascism, they'd at least also deny some of the propaganda keeping them unhappy and passive. Instead of being in denial about US-run concentration camps, why not be in denial that the state will be able to punish you for resisting them?
@Mediagazer@mstdn.social2025-08-15 13:15:58
Q&A with independent journalist Molly White, who writes the tech and crypto newsletter Citation Needed, which has ~29K subscribers, including ~2,400 paid (Sarah Scire/Nieman Lab)
https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/08/independent-journali…
@metacurity@infosec.exchange2025-10-14 16:20:26
In case you missed it, my piece yesterday on the 176 CISA employees fired last Friday, which will not go behind the customary archive paywall.
It's critical to note that sources told me more RIFs are in store for the nation's embattled cybersecurity agency.
https://www.
@kuba@toot.kuba-orlik.name2025-10-15 11:09:23
> It’s not just that people expect the news to inform them about what’s going on in the world. Most think that it does.
https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die-from
@padraig@mastodon.ie2025-09-15 09:23:17
@… It worked! https://…
@publicvoit@graz.social2025-10-15 07:54:06
@Techmeme@techhub.social2025-10-15 13:12:18
Apple updates the Vision Pro with an M5 chip, rendering 10% more pixels, and a Dual Knit Band for a more comfortable fit, available on October 22 for $3,499 (Apple)
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/10/apple-vision-pro-upgraded-with-th…
@Techmeme@techhub.social2025-08-14 16:46:02
Q&A with OpenAI VP and Head of ChatGPT Nick Turley on ChatGPT's future, showing ads in chatbots, hallucinations, GPT-5 blowback, 4o, subscriptions, and more (Alex Heath/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/decoder-podcast-w
