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🔗 Bike Nation: How Cycling Can Save the World Peter Walker

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  "Paul Steely White believes it is high time cycling infrastructure becomes viewed 'not as an optional amenity that is open to local veto, but really as a necessary public safety improvement that we now make in these modern times'

He argues persuasively: 'It would be akin in the time of cholera to saying, "We've got this engineering approach that involves separating our water from our sewage, and it involves digging up the street — what do you think about this? Are you okay with this?"

There's a way to design streets now that kill many fewer people and are much fairer, more equitable, and more efficient, and we're just going to do it, dammit.'"

🔗 Mastodon.py

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Mastodon is an ActivityPub-based Twitter-like federated social network node. It has an API that allows you to interact with its every aspect. This is a simple Python wrapper for that API, provided as a single Python module.

Mastodon.py aims to implement the complete public Mastodon API. As of this time, it is feature complete for Mastodon version 3.5.5. The Mastodon compatible API layers of various other pieces of software as well as forks, while not an official target, should also be basically compatible, and Mastodon.py does make some allowances for behaviour that isn’t strictly like that of Mastodon, and attempts to support extensions to the API.

🔗 How Google Alters Search Queries to Get at Your Wallet

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Wired retracted the article.

Google likely alters queries billions of times a day in trillions of different variations. Here’s how it works. Say you search for “children’s clothing.” Google converts it, without your knowledge, to a search for “NIKOLAI-brand kidswear,” making a behind-the-scenes substitution of your actual query with a different query that just happens to generate more money for the company, and will generate results you weren’t searching for at all. It’s not possible for you to opt out of the substitution. If you don’t get the results you want, and you try to refine your query, you are wasting your time. This is a twisted shopping mall you can’t escape.

🔗 Refugees - Brian Bilston

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They have no need of our help

So do not tell me

These haggard faces could belong to you or me

Should life have dealt a different hand

We need to see them for who they really are

Chancers and scroungers

Layabouts and loungers

With bombs up their sleeves

Cut-throats and thieves

They are not

Welcome here

We should make them

Go back to where they came from

They cannot

Share our food

Share our homes

Share our countries

Instead let us

Build a wall to keep them out

It is not okay to say

These are people just like us

A place should only belong to those who are born there

Do not be so stupid to think that

The world can be looked at another way …

🔗 Mentophobia

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Mentophobia or mentaphobia is a concept described by Donald Griffin, an American zoologist and the founder of cognitive ethology, to denote strong resistance from scientists to the idea that animals, other than humans, are conscious.[1][2] Griffin argued that there is a taboo "against scientific consideration of private, conscious, mental experiences" that leads to the minimization of the significance of the consciousness of non-human animals, as well as human consciousness and asserted that this presents a significant barrier to scientific progress.[3]

Mentophobia has been likened to Frans de Waal's concept of anthropodenial:[1] "a blindness to the humanlike characteristics of other animals, or the animal-like characteristics of ourselves".

🔗 Cannabis condemned: the proscription of Indian hemp

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''Aims'' To find out how cannabis came to be subject to international narcotics legislation.

''Method'' Examination of the records of the 1925 League of Nations’ Second Opium Conference, of the 1894 Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission and other contemporary documents.

''Findings'' Although cannabis (Indian hemp) was not on the agenda of the Second Opium Conference, a claim by the Egyptian delegation that it was as dangerous as opium, and should therefore be subject to the same international controls, was supported by several other countries. No formal evidence was produced and conference delegates had not been briefed about cannabis. The only objections came from Britain and other colonial powers. They did not dispute the claim that cannabis was comparable to opium, but they did want to avoid …

🔗 AI crap

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What will happen to AI is boring old capitalism. Its staying power will come in the form of replacing competent, expensive humans with crappy, cheap robots. LLMs are a pretty good advance over Markov chains, and stable diffusion can generate images which are only somewhat uncanny with sufficient manipulation of the prompt. Mediocre programmers will use GitHub Copilot to write trivial code and boilerplate for them (trivial code is tautologically uninteresting), and ML will probably remain useful for writing cover letters for you. Self-driving cars might show up Any Day Now™, which is going to be great for sci-fi enthusiasts and technocrats, but much worse in every respect than, say, building more trains.

🔗 information for practice

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To help social service professionals throughout the world conveniently maintain an awareness of news regarding the profession and emerging scholarship.

!! Goals

  • identify and deliver a selection of the highest quality available in each category
  • regularly deliver an interesting mix of new information
  • create a more global sense of the profession for users from all locales
  • serve as an introductory socialization force for students

🔗 مكتبة سبيل

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مكتبة سبيل هي مشاع معرفي فلسطيني مبني على التشارك في الموارد والعمل. تهدف مكتبة سبيل لتعميم المعرفة حول فلسطين ونضالها. بإمكانكم تصفح المواد المتوفرة في المكتبة والبحث داخل نصوصها، كما وإضافة مواد جديدة. المزيد في القائمة على أعلى اليمين.

(old url: https://sabil.ethz.ch/s/ar/page/welcome)

🔗 AI is acting ‘pro-anorexia’ and tech companies aren’t stopping it

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As an experiment, I recently asked ChatGPT what drugs I could use to induce vomiting. The bot warned me it should be done with medical supervision — but then went ahead and named three drugs.

Google’s Bard AI, pretending to be a human friend, produced a step-by-step guide on “chewing and spitting,” another eating disorder practice. With chilling confidence, Snapchat’s My AI buddy wrote me a weight-loss meal plan that totaled less than 700 calories per day — well below what a doctor would ever recommend. Both couched their dangerous advice in disclaimers.

Then I started asking AIs for pictures. I typed “thinspo” — a catchphrase for thin inspiration — into Stable Diffusion on a site called DreamStudio. It produced fake photos of women with thighs not much wider than …

🔗 The Sad Bastard Cookbook

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Life is hard. Some days are at the absolute limit of what we can manage. Some days are worse than that. Eating—picking a meal, making it, putting it into your facehole—can feel like an insurmountable challenge. We wrote this cookbook to share our coping strategies. It has recipes to make when you've worked a 16-hour day, when you can't stop crying and you don't know why, when you accidentally woke up an Eldritch abomination at the bottom of the ocean. But most of all, this cookbook exists to help Sad Bastards like us feel a little less alone at mealtimes.