ISIS is now harder to track online—but that's good news
technologies like the Dark Web are often thought of as fitting to the group’s security demands, they are largely useless to its outreach goals. ISIS needs to be where more users already are; otherwise, it’s just talking to itself alone in an empty room. For the first time since ISIS embraced social media in the early 2010s, there seem to be strong signs of the government-tech sector collaboration myself and others have been calling for. ISIS is not gone and will not be for a long time, but a critical pillar of its life force has been cracked. It’s something to not only embrace, but also demand continue.
The Orchid network is a decentralized, open source VPN for securely anonymous internet access, even in China. 75% of humans live with restricted or censored access today
We describe an elaborate rock art panel from the limestone cave of Leang Bulu’ Sipong that portrays several figures that appear to represent therianthropes hunting wild pigs and dwarf bovids; this painting has been dated to at least 44 ka on the basis of uranium-series analysis of overlying speleothems. This hunting scene is currently the oldest pictorial record of storytelling and the earliest figurative artwork in the world.
2021-11-13: The New Yorker has a nice background article, and it turns out newer research pushed the age 1 ka back:
The painting of the warty pig was at least 45 ka old. This makes it the oldest known example of figurative cave art in the world. The implications of these dates are profound. The famous animal paintings in the Chauvet cave, of France, are dated at 35 ka BP; the Sulawesi warty pig outdoes them by 10 ka. Many archeologists and anthropologists talk about a “great leap forward” in human culture, suggesting that it occurred 30-60 ka BP. During this “leap,” Homo sapiens initiated behaviors characteristic of modern humans. Such discoveries indicate that the leap may have occurred toward the more ancient end of that range. The warty pig also upends any lingering belief that figurative cave art was a European thing. “The early cave art in Europe is so spectacular that it was hard for archeologists to tear their eyes away from it”. This sometimes resulted in a “not fully conscious Eurocentrism.”
2023-01-06: Insights into the why of cave paintings
the number of marks on the cave paintings was a record, by lunar month, of the animals’ mating seasons. Ice Age hunter-gatherers were the first to use a systemic calendar and marks to record information about major ecological events within that calendar
At the airy and plant-filled, 16-seat cafe, See makes 3 kinds of breakfast burritos. 1 with chorizo, New Mexican red chile, white cheddar, scrambled eggs, and hash browns; another with all the same ingredients except for New Mexican green chile and bacon; and a third, vegan option with refried Navajo pinto beans, chipotle salsa, New Mexican green chile, and hash browns.
There’s still a lot of potential to build more efficient and larger scale computing systems, particularly ones tailored for machine learning. And I think the basic research that has been done in the last 5 or 6 years still has a lot of room to be applied in all the ways that it should be. We’ll collaborate with our Google product colleagues to get a lot of these things out into real-world uses.
But we also are looking at what are the next major problems on the horizon, given what we can do today and what we can’t do. We want to build systems that can generalize to a new task. Being able to do things with much less data and with much less computation is going to be interesting and important.
Maybe energy can be created and destroyed, or maybe the notion doesn’t quite make sense. To reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity will require a quantum theory of gravity. Physicists disagree vehemently on what such a theory will look like, but most agree on one thing: The notion of spacetime will disappear at the fundamental quantum-gravity level. In that case, conservation laws lose their relevance completely. How can you say a certain quantity does not change with time if there is no time at the fundamental level?
The march to specialized silicon, from CPU to GPU to FPGA to ASIC is now going further, to analog and quantum processing. At a high level, we are recapitulating our evolutionary computational march in silicon, and an ever-growing % of our compute will be massively parallel and in-memory processing, just like our cortex
Between the widely spaced lines of Homer’s text there are several interlinear notes (glosses) explaining difficult words or archaic grammatical features of the text for the reader. All this was designed for a fuller and deeper understanding of the poems. This remarkable manuscript preserves centuries of Homeric scholarship in the form of a handy manual that ensured the transmission of not only Homer and the memory of Troy but also a whole range of other texts, grammars, scientific works, fables, literary and metrical works for the following centuries.
There is an urgent need to digitally capture the planet’s surface, providing a record for future ecologists, archaeologists, and historians. The Earth Archive project plans to do just that.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 