The new colonization of Africa
Six years in the making, jaw-dropping new film The Grab shows a secret scramble by governments and private firms to buy up global resources
The Grab hears from farmers with horrific tales of displacement – prolonged homelessness, the death of a toddler from the cold, bulldozed ancestral burial sites. The culprit is not one country or company but a shadowy network of mercenary interests, farms backed by “a Russian doll of LLCs and LLCs” (…)
The inability of computers to do math is not merely theoretical. It poses a major practical problem in getting computers to do what people want them to do. A handout called “Dangers of Computer Arithmetic,” from a computer science course at the Rochester Institute of Technology, for instance, notes several operations that are likely to cause problems, among them “adding quantities of very different magnitude” and “calculating the difference of two very large values.”
Great effort has been expended in hiding these realities from ordinary users. The impression given to casual users is that computer math just works. But the underlying reality of “just works” is a quite complicated substructure invented by clever humans, and reality sometimes slips through the cracks. Try typing “999,999,999,999,999 minus 999,999,999,999,998” into Google, for an illustration of how hazardous it is for a computer to calculate the difference of two very large values.
Y.A.T.E.
kitty – The fast, feature-rich, GPU based terminal emulator.
I was not told about Mr Gum before yesterday!
Natboff! One Million Years of Stupidity.
(…) a hysterical collection of stories, all set in Mr Gum’s hometown of Lamonic Bibber. Strap on your laughter goggles as you embark on a time-travelling journey through the funniest and maddest moments in history.
Qlock – A JavaScript Quine Clock.
Displays the current time in a seven-segment style, embedded within its own JavaScript source code. (321 bytes)
Hypermedia Systems
The revolutionary ideas that empowered the Web.
I’ve been working in the field of hypermedia for close to thirty years and have seen quite a few books, papers, dissertations, and programming platforms come and go in that time. Occasionally, one of these works “nails it” — provides the right mix of theory and practice delivered in a way that helps readers make a connection between their own efforts and the activities of the community at large. I am happy to say that this book is one of those works.
I 💙 Krita!
25 Years of Krita!
Twenty-five years. A quarter century. That's how long we've been working on Krita. Well, what would become Krita. It started out as KImageShop, but that name was nuked by a now long-dead German lawyer. Then it was renamed to Krayon, and that name was also nuked. Then it was renamed to Krita, and that name stuck.
What does the public in six countries think of generative AI in news?
Looking at journalism and news media more closely, we have found that many believe generative AI is already relatively widely used for many different tasks, but that they are, in most cases, not convinced these uses of AI make news better – they mostly expect it to make it cheaper to produce.
What role for revenge in Jewish life, literature and culture?
Because of the displacement of modern Jewish vengeance from Europe onto the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the vengeful war taking place since 7 October is even more dangerous and tragic. To begin imagining a better future for both Israelis and Palestinians, it is imperative to be more aware of this cultural history with its memories, traumas and numerous blind spots.
