News

Tech

  • Hacker News 13

  • Hacker News: Best Comments 7

    • New comment by x3sphere in "Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help"
      It's just insane that a gift card redemption can trigger this. What's the rationale? It would make more sense if they just locked the person out of redeeming gift cards or something, not the entire account. But reading horror stories like this is is why I only use the very bare minimum of any of these cloud services. Keep local copies of everything. For developer accounts, I always create them under a separate email so they're not tied to my personal. At least it can minimize the damage somewhat. It sucks that I have to take all these extra precautions though. It's definitely made me develop a do not trust any big corp mindset.
    • New comment by taxmeifyoucan in "Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options"
      For a hacker news article, it misses the crucial option - hacking a smart TV! I have LG OLED jailbroken using rootmy.tv, it was pretty trivial. It's basically a linux computer with a huge screen, you can customize it, SSH into it, map any commands to the remote, etc. Before I only used monitor, simple DP/HDMI input is all I wanted. But being able to take full control of the tv and connect it with other devices in the house I would normally get Rpi for is pretty convenient!
    • New comment by petetnt in "OpenAI are quietly adopting skills, now available in ChatGPT and Codex CLI"
      It’s impressive how every iteration tries to get further from pretending actual AGI would be anywhere close when we are basically writing library functions with the worst DSL known to man, markdown-with-english.
    • New comment by rubyfan in "Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence"
      Is it me or does this seem like naked corruption at its worst? These tech CEOs hang out at the White House and donate to superfluous causes and suddenly the executive is protecting their interests. This does nothing to protect working US citizens from AI alien (agents) coming to take their jobs and displace their incomes.
    • New comment by lucb1e in "Google releases its new Google Sans Flex font as open source"
      Where possible, I've stopped picking fonts that don't distinguish lowercase l and uppercase I. Words virtually always have redundancy (or context in the sentence) and it's fine in 98% of cases, but too often someone sends a token, password, name, or other string where you need to copy it out to another application to see it and just... why? Why bother? I/O test for Sans Flex: https://snipboard.io/wXCQq5.jpg It passes the O0 distinction but not the Il one Example of a font that passes, Ubuntu: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Ubuntu?preview.text=10%20I... (custom license but looks similar to GPL in that you can do what you want besides relicensing it as proprietary or removing credits) Another one, Nunito Sans, using the Open Font License: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Nunito+Sans?preview.text=1... IBM Plex Sans is another Open Font License option: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/IBM+Plex+Sans?preview.text... (it has an unusual capital Q style though)
    • New comment by popalchemist in "Id Software devs form "wall-to-wall" union"
      If the company's existence depends on the unfair exploitation of its staff, its foreclosure is inevitable and justified, and that is simply the price everyone involved must pay to maintain equilibrium.
    • New comment by stickfigure in "He set out to walk around the world. After 27 years, his quest is nearly over"
      Ugh, I looked this up and it completely ruined it for me: https://refuga.com/karl-bushby-the-man-who-chose-to-walk-aro... This is how much he had to sacrifice. Leaving his only son when he was just five and not being able to watch him grow up like any other normal father. He also sacrificed a father/son relationship that may never be restored. “Out of everyone I knew in this world, I knew my son least of all.” Karl didn’t have any means of communication with his son for years but managed to reach him after contacting one of his friends on Facebook. While he was away, his son was suffering from depression and self abuse and had to use medication and therapy. That's not sacrifice, that's abandonment. I have a young son not far from that age and trying to imagine how he'd feel if daddy just walked off nearly brings me to tears.

Weather

  • Wetterochs Feed 1

    • Wetter - weiterhin ruhig und relativ mild
      Hallo! Ein großes Lob an das deutsche ICON-Wettermodell! Während man noch vor einigen Jahren vorher kaum sagen konnte, ob es überhaupt Hochnebel geben wird oder nicht, wird inzwischen sogar dessen Untergrenze exakt vorausberechnet. Wegen der Vorhersage der Solarstrom-Erzeugung ist dieses Thema aber natürlich auch viel wichtiger geworden. Auch morgen am Sonntag ist es meist bedeckt durch Hochnebel. Dessen Untergrenze steigt aber von aktuell 350 m auf 700 m, so dass der Gesamteindruck nicht mehr ganz so trüb ist. Maximal werden 7 Grad erreicht. Der schwache Wind weht aus Süd. Am Montag lebt der Südostwind etwas auf mit mäßigen Böen. Dadurch werden Löcher in die Hochnebeldecke gerissen und gelegentlich scheint die Sonne. Am Dienstag lässt der Südostwind zwar wieder nach, aber die Wolkenlücken mit zeitweiligem Sonnenschein bleiben. Die Tageshöchsttemperaturen liegen bei 4 Grad. Und weil in den Nächten zeitweise die Sterne zu sehen sind, kann leichter Frost bis -2 Grad auftreten. Vorübergehend können sich auch Bodennebelfelder bilden. Im gesamten Zeitraum bleibt es niederschlagsfrei. Das ruhige, relativ milde und windschwache Wetter hält voraussichtlich noch bis Ende nächster Woche an. Vielleicht schafft es in der zweiten Wochenhälfte mal ein schwacher Tiefausläufer mit geringem Regen bis zu uns, ansonsten fallen weiterhin keine messbaren Niederschläge. Zu Weihnachten kommt dann Bewegung in die Geschichte, allerdings mit einer großen Streubreite, so dass man nicht so recht weiß, ob es sich um die tatsächliche Vorhersage einer Änderung handelt oder nur um eine wegen der langen Zeit anwachsende Unsicherheit. Wenn man sich alles anschaut, was so zusammengerechnet wird, dann ergibt sich folgende Weihnachts-Tendenz: durchschnittliche Temperaturen für die Jahreszeit (am Tag etwas über, nachts etwas unter 0 Grad), falls Niederschläge, dann in höheren Lagen Schnee und in tieferen Lagen eher Schneeregen oder Regen. Wetterochs Bitte unterstützen Sie die Wetterochs-Wettermail durch eine Spende!

AI

Science

  • Big Think 1

    • America’s post-apocalyptic maps reveal eerily familiar fault lines
      The United States has ended, but America continues. The question is: How? That’s the shortest possible summary for an entire genre of U.S.-centered, post-apocalyptic fiction. Call it “America after the Fall.” It’s a fertile genre, with plenty of maps to illustrate its dismal point. That point is not the future, but the present. Like other strands of sci-fi, post-apocalyptic fiction projects onto tomorrow the anxieties of today. And these maps of a catastrophic future are present-day America’s long, hard look in the mirror. A generous helping of moral turpitude Depending on the prevailing panic, the nature of the Fall typically varies between half a dozen usual suspects: nuclear war, alien invasion, a deadly pandemic, technological breakdown, climate collapse, civil war — each often infused with a generous helping of moral turpitude to lubricate the disaster. On the Future Map of North America by Gordon-Michael Scallion, three major seismic upheavals inundate most of the American West, as well as parts of the East Coast and much of the Mississippi and St Lawrence valleys, which are now connected via the Great Lakes (now a Great Sea). Following the physical dismemberment of North America, new promised lands emerge: Antarctica, now warm and fertile; and the fabled lands of Atlantis and Lemuria, risen above the waves once more (on this map east and west of North America, respectively).(Credit: David Rumsey Map Collection) This is a very American genre. Other countries may have similar worries about the future, but in the U.S., those are exacerbated by the peculiar nature of the American project — the idea of the country as a bold, unique and ongoing experiment in democratic self-governance, in perpetual danger of terminal failure. The unease about the precariousness of that project is heightened by another American specialty: the tension between secular progress and religious millenarianism, the latter being the ardent hope that a divinely ordained cataclysm will wash away the pride, greed, and debauchery resulting from all that so-called progress. That adds up to a lot of U.S.-focused post-apocalyptic thinking, writing, and mapping. One of the earliest literary examples of the genre is The Scarlet Plague (1912) by Jack London. Set in 2073, the novel looks back at an epidemic that wiped out most of humanity 60 years earlier. Survivors in the San Francisco Bay area are devolving from civilization back to primitivism. The old civilization recedes, and a new one emerges London’s book inspired Earth Abides (1949) by George R. Stewart. Itself an influential work, it provides many of the genre’s recurring templates: the protagonist traveling across an emptied-out America, scavenging for food and encountering small groups of survivors. As the comforts and knowledge of the old civilization recede, a new one emerges, cruder and more superstitious perhaps — but also more attuned to nature and survival. Overview of the cross-country journeys undertaken in Steven King’s The Stand. Precarious road trips across an emptied-out America have been a mainstay of post-apocalyptic fiction ever since George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides (1949). (Credit: Christ Solnordal/Etsy) Earth Abides informed several later plague-driven post-apocalyptic narratives, including Stephen King’s The Stand (1978), Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014), and arguably also the whole Walking Dead universe, as well as The Last of Us, the video game about a zombie-holocaust-by-fungus that morphed into a 2023 TV series. Stewart’s own novel finally got the TV treatment in 2024. Well-known examples of post-apocalypic Americas by causes other than epidemics include The Postman (a 1985 book turned into a movie in 1997), set in an America recovering from a nuclear exchange; Half Life 2 (the 2004 video game), after an alien takeover; One Second After (2009), in which an electro-magnetic pulse fries all electronics; J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962), set partly in a half-submerged New York City; and DMZ, a graphic novel series (2005 to 2012) about a second American civil war. The common thread in post-apocalyptic fiction is balkanization. After the Fall, the States disunite into smaller, mutually hostile geopolitical fragments: confederacies, theocracies, city-states, tribal zones, no-man’s lands. Those fragments may be speculative, but they’re not entirely random. They reflect the anxieties that pulse beneath the surface of contemporary American life. A “classic” map of the Divided States of America, featuring many of the subdivisions recurring in numerous amateur maps of a post-apocalyptic future, including religious entities (e.g. Mormon republic centered on Utah), libertarian and leftist enclaves (Cascadia in the Pacific Northwest and California, respectively), ethnic states (African-American in the Southeast, Mexican-American in the Southwest), and nostalgic revenants (the Confederacy, an independent Texas). (Credit: ThaDrummer/DeviantArt) Translated onto a map, the fragmentation of the U.S. provides a visual shock to the system. The map of the U.S. is one of the world’s most recognizable, most stable cartographic emblems. In its unified form, the map of the nation has the strength of a logo, symbolizing the Union itself. Perhaps the most violent shock is the physical rather than the merely political destruction of the United States, as on Gordon-Michael Scallion’s Future Map of North America (1996). A comet that would turn people blue From 1979 onward, Scallion received “visions” of coming events. Some he got right, notably the 1984 Mexico City earthquake and the 1988 election of George Bush Sr. as president. But most he got wrong, including the arrival of a comet that would turn people blue and give them psychic powers. And seismic shifts in the earth’s polarity and tectonics that would drown much of the world, including large parts of North America. While Scanlon focuses on the physical breakup of the United States, most other catastro-futurists — and they are legion — leave the coastline alone, and wreak havoc on the body politic instead. A fairly typical example is this Map of North America, 2150, which grants future independence to some of the most prominent political, ethnic, religious, and regional entities in today’s North America (which in this case generously includes Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean). Texas and California survive as sovereign republics. California, to indicate its (current) left-leaning politics, is a Democratic Republic, reminiscent of the nomenclature of former Communist countries, and mirrored farther south in the Democratic Republics of Aztlán and Baja California. Farther north, the Mormons have finally established their Holy Republic of Deseret, the liberals in Seattle and thereabouts are united in the Social Republic of Cascadia, and the Native Americans inland have proclaimed a Republic of Lakhota. Sitting uneasily in between is the Aryan Bastion, unsubtly boasting Hitlerburg and other all-too-Germanic-sounding place names. Some of the genre’s typical entities return on this map of North America in 2150. (Credit: Reddit/ImaginaryMaps) The Great Lakes are the natural setting for a Confederation, and New England is now a Commonwealth, stopping short just north of New York City, which is part of the United States of Columbia — perhaps the most direct descendant of the formerly united states. Further down are the Republic of New Afrika and the Confederate Republics of Dixie; the South never gets to turn the page on the Civil War. The League of the Mississippi is a re-Frenchified, re-enlarged Louisiana, and Libertalia is the Caribbean-oriented southern tip of Florida. In between all that: a vast, blank, and, one assumes, entirely lawless space. The franchised nation of Monaco These entities are the stalwart ingredients of many post-apocalyptic maps, operating under the assumption that, once the veil of unity is whisked away, historical and current divisions within the U.S. will assert themselves. A post-apocalyptic North America in 2092, as reimagined in 1992 by Generation X author Douglas Coupland: Dallas has been replaced by Dallas II, and New York City has been superseded by the Manhattan People’s Soviet. Did he foresee Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral win? (Credit: Alternate Timelines on X) Even the literary imagination of Douglas Coupland couldn’t escape these tropes. On a map of Canada and the United States in 2092, he identifies Cascadia in the Pacific Northwest, the states of Dixie and Texlahoma, and a theocracy in Utah. Some interesting flourishes, though: a Shrine of Tupelo (in memory of Elvis, supposedly); the Disney National Memory Storage Facility (in Orlando); and the franchised nation of Monaco (somewhere in New England). The Hunger Games provide a more radical departure from the post-apocalyptic tradition. Centuries into the future, a North America diminished by coastal flooding is home to the nation of Panem, which consists of 12 districts loosely centered on a Capitol located in the Rocky Mountains. As annual atonement for a failed rebellion, in which the 13th district was destroyed, each district must send a boy and a girl to the Capitol for the so-called Hunger Games, a fight to the death with prizes for the last players standing and their district. A decadent Capitol City extracting an annual blood tribute from its impoverished subject districts: you could read the future state of Panem as a heavy-handed metaphor for today’s U.S. federal government. (Credit: Dan McCall/PanemPropaganda) The books by Suzanne Collins don’t provide a map, nor are they explicit about the location and boundaries of the districts, so maps — mostly fan-made — vary. All, however, convey the impression of a continent reduced in vitality as well as size. The favorite risk du jour for institutional implosion of the U.S. is political division. Some have already suggested matching America’s institutions to the widening cultural gap between Red and Blue tribes, and splitting up the country into two nations, one for each tribe. Red and Blue America divided into two contiguous nations, thanks to a network of connecting nodes, reminiscent of the UN’s 1947 plan for the division of the Holy Land into Israel and Palestine. (Image: Dicken Schrader; see also Strange Maps #948) This suggestion, from 2019, is based loosely on election maps, but also ensures the Red and Blue nations are contiguous, thanks to a network of nodes where it is possible to cross over from one part of each zone into another. Map nerds will recognize this peculiar setup from the original 1947 proposal by the UN to divide the Holy Land between Arabs and Jews. What could go wrong? Texas and California, lumped together in the Western Forces Here’s what could go wrong: a second American Civil War is not a clean fight between two sides, but a free-for-all between multiple parties. One example is this map from the movie Civil War (2024), which purposely kept the politics vague in order to focus on the shock of full-scale American-on-American political violence. Because of that vagueness, Texas and California — typically on opposite sides of the political spectrum — were lumped together in the Western Forces. Other warring parties: the Florida Alliance, covering most of the South, a New People’s Army in the north and northwest, and the Loyalist States in between. The movie Civil War lumps Texas and California into the same rebel alliance, obfuscating the politics of the conflict; but its overall point – weak federal government overrun by secessionists – is arguably left-coded. (Credit: Reddit/ShittyMovieDetails) In the movie, a weakened central government is ultimately overwhelmed by the vaguely defined insurgent forces. On that basis, you could classify its outlook as “left-coded” — implicitly preferring the merits, however questionable, of unified authority over the havoc wreaked by rebels and secessionists, however well-intentioned. An analysis of the forces at play in The Last of Us justifies classifying it as a “right-coded” narrative. FEDRA, the rump of the central government surviving in a handful of fortified Quarantine Zones, is an authoritarian military junta, imposing martial law, rationing, and execution of dissidents. The good guys are the Fireflies, a revolutionary militia fighting to restore democracy. Most of America, though, is hostile territory. Even if you avoid the fungal zombies, the slavers and the cannibals, you’re still in danger of encountering sadistic Hunters, semi-fascist “Wolves”, or the religious cult called the Seraphites. Today is valuable enough to want to preserve In the post-apocalyptic future, true Americans are few and far between. And — subtext warning — perhaps they always were. In the post-apocalyptic universe in which The Last of Us is set, good and true “Americans” are few and far between. Perhaps the unspoken lesson here is that they always were – also in our current timeline. (Credit: Reddit/TheLastOfUs) Whatever the political coding, if you look at enough maps of America after the Fall, they will start to look familiar, almost reassuringly so. Yes, the U.S. is gone, and division, tyranny, and anarchy have taken its place. But each cracked map of the late, great U.S. retains an imprint of the good old days, an untapped reservoir of citizen-to-citizen benevolence, and a flickering spark of societal hope. This is perhaps the genre’s most pertinent takeaway: America is rehearsing its disaggregation in the safest possible arena — that of science fiction, the comments section of history. In the safety of post-apocalyptic fiction, America is fabricating a future that is nostalgic for the present. The message is that, even with all of its problems and divisions, today is valuable enough to want to preserve. But should the worst happen, then even on the other side of a possible future apocalypse, there is still hope. Why else would anyone make a map of it? To conclude, a whimsical look at post-apocalyptic North America by Jack Kirby of DC Comics. As mentioned by the poster: “This illustration is everything I love about comic books in one panel. DC failing to get the rights to the Planet of the Apes movies, Jack Kirby saying ‘Don’t worry, I can top that’, and then doing a whole map of goofy, colorful & evocative world-building.” (Credit: Zack Stentz/X) Strange Maps #1282 Got a strange map? Let me know at strangemaps@gmail.com. For more, follow Strange Maps on X and Facebook. This article America’s post-apocalyptic maps reveal eerily familiar fault lines is featured on Big Think.

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