Spyke

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Meta grants itself right to scrape content from business customers for model training

You authorize us [...] to [...] create test credentials to [...] crawl the domains [...] associated with your products or services.

Meta may use any content [...] to [...] train [...] Meta Company Products.

Basically, in exchange for being allowed to continue posting content on Facebook, you're giving them permission from now on to aggressively scrape your own sites for content to train their models.

To quote a famous Sith Lord: "I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it further."

science

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Powerful X-rays reveal enzymes in action

  • Researchers used SLAC’s Linac Coherent Light Source to study the AspH enzyme – a potential therapeutic target for cancer treatment – and the isopenicillin N synthase (IPNS) enzyme, which is essential for creating all of the medicinally important penicillin antibiotics.
  • By leveraging the power of ultrabright, ultrashort X-ray bursts, they found that these enzymes catalyze reactions in surprising ways.
  • If scientists can better understand the structure and function of these enzymes, they could potentially use them as biomarkers and therapeutic targets for cancer, or for a method to develop new antibiotics.

Femtosecond X-ray pulses. Very cool.

privacy

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Global Report on the Authoritarian use of Technology

From the article:

Key findings

  • In both democratic and authoritarian contexts, technologies are being deployed in ways that erode, and in some cases effectively dismantle, human rights.
  • Technology use risks facilitating or amplifying repressive practices and systems, and becoming an instrument of authoritarian governance.
  • Surveillance technologies are being expanded and entrenched with the purpose of exerting control over entire populations and/or specific groups of people such as journalists and human rights defenders.
  • The authoritarian use of technology is ultimately having a ‘chilling effect’.
  • Some technologies are disproportionately intrusive by design and should not be used.
  • Technologies’ use is often incompatible with the rule of law, lack redress and raise mass impunity risks.
  • A lack of transparency facilitates the authoritarian use of technologies.
science

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Most gun owners use lead ammunition, yet half don’t practice hygiene behaviors after shooting

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I disagree for two reasons. First, there's lots of ammo that's non jacketed lead. Start with .22LR, which is probably the most common ammo.

Second, I didn't think the jacketing helps that much in either hunting or indoor range contexts. In hunting, the bullet mushrooms or fragments or disintegrates, dispersing it's kinetic energy through lots of tissue; that's how it kills. Disintegration means there are lots of tiny lead bits scattered in the meat. And at the range, if the bullet hits a hard backstop, it again disintegrates into even finer pieces, making lead dust.

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