Tootfinder

An absolutely extraordinary look at how to improve rendering of ASCII art, first in static images, then in motion. As he gets into contrast enhancement for complex grayscale animations, the vector lookup works starts to be parallel to work happening with language models. Just an excellent narration. https://alexharri.com/blog/ascii-…

Payments using facial recognition are growing in South Korea as the tech improves; South Korean fintech app Toss has scaled its "Facepay" service to 1M users (Nami Matsuura/Nikkei Asia)
https://asia.nikkei.com/business/techn

Internationale Atomenergiebehörde besorgt über Zustand des AKW Saporischschja
Nach dem Ausfall der Notstromleitung des AKW Saporischschja ist die Sicherheit des Kernkraftwerks gefährdet. Die Internationale Atomenergiebehörde ist besorgt.

Someone Used This Coin as Bus Fare and Worker Discovers it was Minted by the Phoenicians 2,000 Years Ago https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/someone-used-this-coin-as-bus-fare-man-discovers-it-was-minted-by-the-phoenicia…

caida_as: CAIDA AS graphs (2004-2007)
A sequence of 122 network snapshots denoting Autonomous System (AS) relationships on the Internet, from 2004-2007, inferred using the Serial-1 method from RouteViews BGP table snapshots and a set of heuristics.
This network has 24078 nodes and 98112 edges.
Tags: Technological, Communication, Unweighted, Temporal

“When we think of technology as a tool that can be used for good as well as evil, we also think that we are in control of why, when, and for what it is used. But this is only partly the case. We may decide to buy a car to drive ourselves to work. And thus we may think of the car as a tool to achieve our goal of getting to work as fast as possible. But we never made the decision that fast is better than slow. It’s an idea that comes with the car. So is the idea that it should be easy and conveni…

What @… says is what a lot of us have been lamenting since the ICE invasion started. Shouldn’t local police protect citizens from ICE?? Why this hasn’t happened is a really good question. Factors to consider:
- “Obstructing a federal agent” is illegal, and local police / politicians feel constrained by that (even if the agents themselves don’t seem constrained by the actual law at all, only by what they think they can get away with)
- Police can in theory cite federal agents for e.g. traffic violations or illegal plate swapping after the fact, as long as they’re not “obstructing” the agents — but how do you cite a masked person with fake plates who refuses to give ID?
- Some police are visibly supportive of ICE, chumming it up with them and giving literal fist bumps; a nontrivial subset are outright closet Nazis. A lot of people don’t really see any need to go past “ACAB” as a full explanation for all of this — and certainly The ACAB Hypothesis is…um, not really being proved false right now in Minneapolis.
- I think some police quietly resent ICE for stepping on their turf, but that does not seem to have boiled up into actual confrontation in MSP. One police leader here painted it in early Dec as “some people want to instigate a confrontation between Minneapolis Police, and that’s not going to happen.” Police culture says that police should be a neutral party in a dispute between ICE and residents, and actually protecting residents would be taking sides. (Duh, yes, taking sides that way is your literal job, you dumbasses…but I digress.)
- Some police (especially leadership) really want to get on the community’s good side after the murder of George Floyd, and see this as an opportunity, but unfortunately this has materialized entirely as non-interventionist support: “We responded to a 911 call and help a distressed resident after her husband was abducted!” “We transported children left parentless on the streets by ICE safely back to their home!” “Our officers volunteered at the food shelf!” OK, nice, good for you buddy.
So yeah, I’m wondering this too, and am bitter about it. https://tilde.zone/@n1xnx/115928447564126393

„Dark Galaxy“: Neu entdeckte Galaxie besteht zu 99 Prozent aus Dunkler Materie
Im 300 Millionen Lichtjahre entfernten Perseus-Galaxienhaufen wurde jetzt eine Galaxie entdeckt, die fast vollständig aus Dunkler Materie besteht.

Memo: Xbox President Sarah Bond, long thought to be Phil Spencer's heir, is leaving; Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty is promoted to Chief Content Officer (Ryan McCaffrey/IGN)
https://www.ign.com/articles/phil-spencer…

Sources: SoftBank plans to form a consortium to build a $33B power plant in Ohio, set to produce 9.2 GW for AI data centers, as part of the US-Japan trade deal (Nikkei Asia)
https://asia.nikkei.com/economy/trade-war/trump-ta…