“Based on these findings, the Advisory Committee concludes that Tilburg University, as a moral actor, cannot remain passive and must act.”

https://www.tilburguniversity.edu/about/organization/advisory-committee-collaborations/collaborations-partners-israel/publication-advice-collaboration-academic-partners-israel

According to the article
“COVID was not supposed
to play a major role
in the Olympics anymore —
but Paris 2024
has shown that for the athletes,
it's still an issue”
and while I know
that you are not an Olympian
please be aware
that COVID is still an issue
for you as well.

"Higher education funding reform requires a more radical rethink and an approach that values the university sector as a whole. This funding reform needs to focus on the public values we want universities to pursue, recognising that the radical shift to a market-based system in recent decades is beginning to undermine the long-term viability of the sector." https://theconversation.com/university-finances-are-in-a-perilous-state-its-the-result-of-market-competition-and-debt-based-expansion-234862

J.D. Vance is a Manchurian candidate backed by money from Peter Thiel, Musk and other techlords, and adheres to a neoreactionary/Dark Enlightenment ideology cooked up by Mencius Moldbug (aka Curtis Yarvin) that caters to their desire to be a new technofeudalist aristocracy.
Musk and Thiel pushed Trump to nominate him, and now Musk is bankrolling the Trump campaign. They want Vance to inherit the dynasty after Trump turns elections into a formality.
This guy is seriously scary.
https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/the-meaning-of-jd-vance

PhD students in metascience can sign up to present their work at the first Paul Meehl Graduate School PhD day on September 20th in Eindhoven - a one day conference to present your work and get feedback from peers. Sign up before August 15: https://paulmeehlschool.github.io/news/phdday_announce/

the Republican party of the 2000's would have somehow parlayed that shooting into a resolution to start bombing some wholly unrelated country by Monday morning. but these current guys take nearly all their cues from midwit online trolls, and so far the strongest reaction they have mustered is "uhhhbghh women in the secret service? what's next, a lady Ghostbuster?"

It's damning of the state of healthcare that they are reinstating mask mandates at cycle races before they reinstate them in hospitals.

https://www.cyclingnews.com/news/tour-de-france-reintroduces-mask-mandate-amid-covid-19-concerns/

Mozilla holding everyone for ransom and saying they will post everyones bookmarks and browser history in public unless we all paid $50 to fund Firefox development forever would genuinely be a better business decision than giving in to adtech. Literally the only thing anyone who uses it wants from them is an uncompromised browser. Value goes to zero otherwise

Orban's party, Fidesz, established a new (right-wing) group inside the EU Parliament. Enough MEPs from other groups joined that this new group, Patriots for Europe, will be the third largest force in the EU Parliament.

Balkan Insight wrote about it: https://balkaninsight.com/2024/07/09/patriot-games-viktor-orban-goes-on-the-offensive/

COVID isn’t over and I don’t know what it’s gonna take to convince people but we have to keep trying. #COVID #CovidIsNotOver #LongCovid

Le monde entier est en burn-out.
Il est urgent d'apprendre à en faire moins.

A fascinating and disturbing look at how finite-element engineering simulations, though potentially very accurate, are nonetheless sometimes wildly wrong thanks to old/misused code, and dodgy shortcuts that Gilbert Strang calls “variational crimes”.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-math-of-cracks-can-make-planes-bridges-and-dams-safer/

Since 2007, Google has been buying cheap carbon offsets to say it’s carbon neutral. Now, as generative AI has cause its emissions to soar, it’s stopped buying those offsets and no longer claims carbon neutrality.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-08/google-is-no-longer-claiming-to-be-carbon-neutral

#tech #ai #google #climate

Après les responsables d'instance du Comité national, c'est au tour des instances représentatives du Conseil national des universités de se prononcer pour faire barrage contre l'extrême droite.

shell scripting is such a fascinating combination of janky and magical

you write like four lines and it does something really useful and it feels wild that it works at all

Never ceases to stump me that we have the technology to kill 99.95% of airborne viruses, proven to work, non-invasive, cheap to deploy and install, and is produced at scale already and we just like - collectively - kind of just don't really use it.

HEPA-grade air filtration is proven, cheap, and makes everyone's lives strictly better. It, like, makes zero fiscal sense for governments not to mandate its use in all covered public spaces ASAP.

I may have made a thing

Les scientifiques du Comité national de la recherche scientifique appellent à faire barrage à l'extrême-droite aux élections législatives.

https://www.cnrs.fr/comitenational/struc_coord/c3n/motions/Motion_C3N-Appel_scientifiques_Comite-national_recherche-scientifique-a-faire-barrage-a-lextreme-droite-aux-elections-legislatives.pdf

You can tell when a computer is thinking rapidly because it goes clickclickclickclickclick really fast. You may notice computers stopped doing this around 2007, that's because that was when they got fast enough they didn't have to think anymore. Since 2007 all computers have just sort of been phoning it in. That's why you buy a more powerful computer every five years but they never *feel* like they get any faster: Loafing

So, I read “Gender Queer” by Maia Kobabe and I think I never felt this seen before. These panels about pronouns absolutely perfectly sum up how I feel about correcting people when they misgender me.

And this is just one page of the graphic novel. It is such a great book. Highly recommend.