Excel has featured in plenty of workplace blunders — though its defenders will be quick to blame human error. The financial world is littered with tales of costly spreadsheet errors. Excel has also been blamed for botching gene names in over a third of genomics papers (because it labelled them as dates); underreporting covid-19 cases in England (because it only had a limited number of rows in which to record the results); and disrupting the trial of January 6th rioters in America (because sensitive information was left in hidden cells).
Such snafus have not dented Excel’s dominance. Might artificial intelligence (AI) steal its crown? With whizzy new tools powered by the technology promising to make data analysis easier, the familiar grid of numbers and calculations could soon feel outdated. Rather than replacing spreadsheets, though, AI might make them even better. Last month Microsoft introduced an AI assistant for Excel which lets users crunch data using natural-language prompts. Excel, and its faithful, aren’t ready to be filtered out just yet.
“No matter what the actual requirements document says, what your users really want is for you to implement Excel for them.”
The company I work for makes a complicated piece of enterprise software. The tool we made to feed new data into the system is all Excel based. It spits out Excel sheets, you fill them in with your data, and it loads it back in. We use Excel because we asked what people wanted, and every single user said Excel. We have tools to do direct data feeds from other databases, or just about any other data source, but most people use the Excel tool for the initial data load.
As much as I dislike Microsoft, Excel has its place. I use it for planning purposes, mainly budgets, and the occasional data recording (temporary recording before transferring data to processing software). Also works for mocking up rough schedule drafts, drafting a simple table to be ingested elsewhere, tracking tasks when a multirow, multicolumn table is needed, or for storing lookup tables to be used in software elsewhere.
So plenty of uses, especially if much math is not really needed. But the moment serious calculations come into play … yeah, not so much. Unless you are very careful. Returns diminish quickly and other tools are just more appropriate / better / faster / more reliable.
In the end, not surprising. Spreadsheets *do* have their place.
Anyone who’s had to deal with Google Shits knows why Excel wont die.
The Department of Defense wants technology so it can fabricate online personas that are indistinguishable from real people.
The United States’ secretive Special Operations Command is looking for companies to help create deepfake internet users so convincing that neither humans nor computers will be able to detect they are fake, according to a procurement document reviewed by The Intercept.
The plan, mentioned in a new 76-page wish list by the Department of Defense’s Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, outlines advanced technologies desired for country’s most elite, clandestine military efforts. “Special Operations Forces (SOF) are interested in technologies that can generate convincing online personas for use on social media platforms, social networking sites, and other online content,” the entry reads.
Please create a lot of AIs to populate social media platforms. If we get enough of them talking to each other, then all of the actual people can leave them, and we might have a cultural renaissance as we are freed of our societal addiction to social media.
(…including Slashdot…)
Folks on the alt-left and the alt-right, all political parties, all governments, our friends and our enemies are all looking for the same thing!
Basically it will turn the entire internet into a cesspool where truth and facts will be drown in a flood of bullshit from all quarters.
Yeah, I know we’re pretty much there already, but this will just make it worse.
“Going to”?
Where have you been the past 100 years? The USA has always meddled in foreign countries, including in manipulating elections. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not condoning it from any party, just saying that it’s a bit late for your righteous indignation.
Half the world’s population already faces water scarcity, and that number is set to rise as the climate crisis worsens, according to a report from the Global Commission on the Economics of Water published on Thursday.
Demand for fresh water will outstrip supply by 40% by the end of the decade, because the world’s water systems are being put under “unprecedented stress,” the report found. The commission found that governments and experts have vastly underestimated the amount of water needed for people to have decent lives. While 50 to 100 litres a day are required for each person’s health and hygiene, in fact people require about 4,000 litres a day in order to have adequate nutrition and a dignified life. For most regions, that volume cannot be achieved locally, so people are dependent on trade — in food, clothing and consumer goods — to meet their needs.
Some countries benefit more than others from “green water,” which is soil moisture that is necessary for food production, as opposed to “blue water” from rivers and lakes. The report found that water moves around the world in “atmospheric rivers” which transport moisture from one region to another.
Don’t panic everyone. The good news is the billionaires won’t suffer. In fact, they working right now with citizen advocacy groups like Project 2025 to make sure that we never receive any of the bad news, right up until we’re being swept away by the flash flood, burning alive in a wildfire, or living in the landfills so generously provided to us by the billionaires from the leavings of their unbounded appetites and excesses.
Seawater has salt and other dissolved minerals in it which make it particularly toxic. To remove these dissolved substances requires enormous amounts of energy, and as a byproduct has significant quantities of said minerals, which you then have to dispose of.
As to using pipes, well, pipes designed for transporting hydrocarbons aren’t likely without massive retrofitting (read: replacing) to carry other fluids.
If you’re not losing sleep over this, that’s because you’re an idiot, or you plan on being dead soon.
" And every year that these companies produce money…”
Nobody “produces money” or “makes money”; those are just metaphorical phrases. What rich people do is to part other people from their money, by a variety of means of which the most effective is deception.
We have to work on the 20% waste of global food production. That’s the low hanging fruit, as it were. Discarding misshapen but perfectly edible fruits and vegetables should be relegated to the dustbin of history. Preservable grains and pulses should be staples for everybody. Supply chains with massive waste should be deprecated.
It’s not the whole answer but you have to start somewhere, right?
“The commission found that governments and experts have vastly underestimated the amount of water needed for people to have decent lives”.
And that is obviously due to “anthropogenic global warming”.
Partly. Anthropogenic global warming is shifting rainfall patterns, so some places that used to grow food are drying out, while other places are getting too much rainfall.
However, a significant part of the problem is that population growth has meant that people are depleting aquifers faster than they get refilled, so it’s not all due to climate change.
Starting on October 14, 2024, news outlets including Yahoo and NME reported that year-over-year, the U.S. vinyl market was down 33 percent. The data for these articles came from a weekly report from Billboard called “Market Watch,” which automatically updates with data provided by the company Luminate. Amid the vinyl revolution, this news signified a shift in buyer habits: a sales decline among vinyl for the first time in 17 years.
On October 15, Discogs contacted Chris Muratore, director of partnerships at Luminate, who confirmed that the reported data is incorrect. Vinyl sales are actually up 6.2 percent. Billboard has since added language to their “Market Watch” report, clearing up the error. Luminate has been the gold standard for physical music sales numbers for decades. However, at the beginning of this year, the company changed its reporting process, frustrating many record store owners and industry personnel.
Why would this trifle be newsworthy? What’s next, linking to antique cylindrical recording sales?
Ah come on. A significant part of owning Vinyl was the physical experience. Do you remember the beautiful artwork on the covers? Do you remember the feel of the delicate record as you carefully removed it and placed it on your player? And the care and love you gave to you deck & needle?
It’s almost like the music was a secondary pleasure.
And I say that while not being a Vinyl enthusiast. Man, some of them went way into the experience. Anyone remember oxygen free cables? :)
So are most people who listen to vinyl.
“We will prevent illegal leaks of advanced technologies to raise the global competitiveness of our companies and strengthen technology leadership,” Minister Choi Sang-mok said.
The government will set up a “big data” system aimed at preventing technology leaks at the patent agency and introduce new regulations to ensure stronger punishment for culprits, Choi said. He did not specify what the stronger penalties would be under the new regulations. In the past five years, there have been 97 attempts to leak business secrets to a foreign country, with 40 of them in the semiconductor industry, according to the National Intelligence Service.
I’m trying to keep the image of a naked Rupert Murdoch and his succession of younger women out of my mind.
Impact, an app that describes itself as “AI-powered infrastructure for shaping and managing narratives in the modern world,” is testing a way to organize and activate supporters on social media in order to promote certain political messages. The app aims to summon groups of supporters who will flood social media with AI-written talking points designed to game social media algorithms. In video demos and an overview document provided to people interested in using a prototype of the app that have been viewed by 404 Media, Impact shows how it can send push notifications to groups of supporters directing them at a specific social media post and provide them with AI-generated text they can copy and paste in order to flood the replies with counter arguments.
Is this what evil looks like?
The man on the pulpit says, and the flock follows like sheep.
The man on the radio says, and the flock nods their head and parrots what he says.
The talking heads on tv say, and the flock nods and parrots what he says
Same with the internet ever since the Endless September
And now it’s worse. Every idiot is assured a megaphone with global reach.
Something has to give, before the machines pit us against each other via social media manipulation.
Sometimes you see something and there’s no doubt that the person behind it knew they were doing the wrong thing and didn’t care.
This is one of those things. The kind of thing that makes me regress into my old conservative opinions that involve beating the people involved until they adjust their opinions or die.
The first step would be to recognize that NOTHING YOU SEE OR READ SHAPES REALITY.
Reality is a thing.
It really does, objectively, exist. Definitions apply to it for us to think about them. Without our definitions, without even us, reality persists.
(I shudder that I feel like people are going to dispute that)
One thing, added to another thing, equals two things. This is irrefutable no matter how many semantic games someone wants to play around it.
It doesn’t matter on your origin, your viewpoint, your politics, time of day, zodiac sign, gender, or even your sanity: reality IS.
How we perceive it is mutable and does depend on a lot of those things.
But no, despite the ubiquity of the meme, perception is not reality. It is only PERCEPTION.
I can only hope that we as a species survive long enough to evolve stouter, more engaged, more sophisticated perceptual filters to understand that the shadows in advertising, in social media, delivered by strangers and even friends with agendas ALL need to be evaluated against our base understandings of reality and as a first-pass, filtered/weighted thereby.
The United States Department of Justice (DoJ) has indicted two Sudanese nationals for their alleged role in operating the hacktivist group Anonymous Sudan. The group claimed fame for conducting “tens of thousands” of large-scale and crippling Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDoS attacks) targeting critical infrastructure, corporate networks, and government agencies globally. Ahmed Salah Yousif Omer, 22, and Alaa Salah Yusuuf Omer, 27, stand accused of conspiracy to damage protected computers. Ahmed Salah faces additional charges for damaging protected computers. The duo is believed to have controlled Anonymous Sudan, which, since early 2023, launched attacks on high-profile entities such as ChatGPT, UAE’s Flydubai Airline, London Internet Exchange, Microsoft, and the Israeli BAZAN Group.
The group and its clients also utilized the Distributed Cloud Attack Tool (DCAT) to conduct over 35,000 DDoS attacks. These attacks targeted sensitive government and critical infrastructure in the U.S. and globally, including the Department of Justice, Department of Defense, FBI, State Department, and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. The attacks, which sometimes lasted days, reportedly caused major damage, often crippling websites and networks. For instance, the attack on Cedars-Sinai Medical Center forced the redirection of incoming patients for eight hours, causing over $10 million in damages to U.S. victims.
…but you understand that until the consequence of this is extreme and brutal, these won’t stop - right?
I’m talking about something more than just killing them. I’m talking about very much older school levels of punishment before they’re ~allowed~ to die.
If we’re too civilized to do that, understand that I"m fine with that!
The consequence is that we have to accept that with the internet we simply will eternally have vital infrastructure exposed to assault from awful people around the world. People who have otherwise very little to lose and who are just as smart as the people defending these services.
Hanging, drawing & quartering or boiling in oil didn’t end treason.
And there’s a pretty good chance that you’d trigger reprisals from suicide bombers
While CSAC is an industry group rather than a government body, it has close ties to the Chinese state and the raft of accusations against Intel, published in a long post on its official WeChat account, could trigger a security review from China’s powerful cyberspace regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC). “It is recommended that a network security review is initiated on the products Intel sells in China, so as to effectively safeguard China’s national security and the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese consumers,” CSAC said. […]
CSAC in its post accuses Intel chips, including Xeon processors used for artificial intelligence tasks, of carrying several vulnerabilities, concluding that Intel “has major defects when it comes to product quality, security management, indicating that it is extremely irresponsible attitude towards customers.” The industry group goes on to state that operating systems embedded in all Intel processors are vulnerable to backdoors created by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). “This poses a great security threat to the critical information infrastructures of countries all over the world, including China…the use of Intel products poses a serious risk to national security.” CSAC said.
That’s a clever move. China knows that the US is turning to intel out of concern that China could either destroy TSMC (e.g. in an invasion) or has agents who can report on vulnerabilities to them. Taking action to limit intel sales in China is an effective way to handicap the US’s attempt to protect their access to high end lithography.
Sure, it’s not like intel doesn’t have security issues or problems. But from a security POV they are no worse than AMD and probably no worse than companies like Apple (whose chips may seem more secure because information is more restricted and security researchers have fewer tools).
What does access to high end lithography equipment have to do with Intel? As far as I know most of the really top of the line lithography machines used in cutting edge chip production are made by ASML in the Netherlands (despite the Europeans supposedly having no tech industry) especially extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machines. Intel is in fact heavily reliant on ASML’s EUV tech for the production of high-performance chips. If the US wants to secure for itself some kind preferential access to ASML lithography tech they are going to have to take that up with the Netherlands government and ASML. That being said, I don’t really see the need for this since so far the Netherlands and ASML have complied with US request for restrictions on the export of Lithography machines to China and have no issues with supplying the US with whatever it needs. If anything, ASML should consider seriously refactoring their China operations for security since their offices there have been the source of several serious IP breaches by their Chinese employees. If there is one thing the Chinese would love to do it’s buy up or outright steal the IP they need for making cutting edge EUV machines. On top of that I seriously hope both European and US intelligence agencies have that company under a microscope hunting for IP thieves, that and made sure ASML’s computer systems are not accessible from the internet like those of F-35 contractors because I guarantee you the Chinese in particular probably have an entire taskforce with an unlimited budget dedicated to breaching their systems and stealing their research data.
> Taking action to limit intel sales in China is an effective way to handicap the US’s attempt to protect their access to high end lithography.
Uh wut? Sure they can beat on American companies in the on going trade war for Cold War reasons but how does this demand for a security review in any way handicap the US’s effort to limit high end shipments to China? Those are two unrelated topics. Intel is not going to send China the plans for a cutting edge lithography machine or start sending higher end chips in violation of sanctions.
IMO, we should be working hard to separate our economy entirely from China anyway. In the same way some American companies, to their shame, supported Nazi Germany long after knowing what evil shit they were, we should get out of China asap, too. We don’t need their money or goods so badly that we should deal with them at the expense of our morals and ethics.
I supported Trump starting the trade war and supported Biden doubling down on key aspects of it. We should continue that path until full separation is achieved. Don’t trade will evil countries is something all leaders should easily agree with no matter their other politics.
“has major defects when it comes to product quality, security management, indicating that it is extremely irresponsible attitude towards customers.”
“This poses a great security threat to the critical information infrastructures of countries all over the world, including China…the use of Intel products poses a serious risk to national security.”
I would say this is a proper assessment of Intel.
The industry group goes on to state that operating systems embedded in all Intel processors are vulnerable to backdoors created by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).
This gives the NSA too much credit but I understand why they might think so. The actual hardware design flaws are clearly the result of placing a priority on performance above security concerns. It would be far more plausible if the NSA provided hardware bug finding support like they do for software and MS Windows: fix the easily found stuff, keep the deep compromises secret. The NSA has a suuuper heavy focus on being undetected, so making a direct request for a design modification is going to create accomplices which means creating a possible information leaks.
However, minor alterations resulting in bizarre flaws in the Intel Management Engine could easily be placed there by NSA request, possibly under the guise of being bugfixes (which they do submit for software), especially since the IME source code is beyond public inspection. I could also see them doing the same for various network devices.
There are many facets to this move by China. It’s obviously a move by the Chinese government, as a private group wouldn’t have the motivation or the courage to do this without explicit government approval.
I suppose Intel products might have backdoors, but the real intrigue is how this might play out. Is this just a bit of economic saber rattling, or is China willing to up the ante? In the case of escalation, Chinese exports would certainly be subject to similar “examinations.” Or is this the response to US “examinations” of TikTok?
SpaceX submitted a request to the FCC to modify the second generation, Gen2, of its Starlink satellite system with changes that SpaceX said will allow the constellation to deliver gigabit-speed broadband. SpaceX submitted the filing to the FCC on Oct. 11, and it was made public on Tuesday. The operator wants to make changes to the orbital configuration and operational parameters, and requests modifications for its Gen2 frequency authorization.
These modifications “will enable the Gen2 system to deliver gigabit-speed, truly low-latency broadband and ubiquitous mobile connectivity to all Americans and the billions of people globally who still lack access to adequate broadband,” Jameson Dempsey, SpaceX director of Satellite Policy said in the filing. For comparison, Starlink’s current statement on service speeds is that users typically experience download speeds between 25 and 220 Mbps, and a majority of users experience speeds over 100 Mbps. In 2022, the FCC partially approved SpaceX to deploy a Gen2 Starlink constellation of up to 7,500 satellites for fixed satellite services (FSS) in the Ku- and Ka-bands, then later authorized Gen2 operations using additional frequencies in the E- and V-bands. SpaceX reported that since then, it has deployed more than 3,000 satellites in the Gen2 system and the full Starlink constellation serves more than four million people.
All of it comes down by itself due to atmospheric drag. It’s a LEO constellation. The cost of removing the orbital parts of Starlink is literally zero.
So, I wonder what more noise they’re gonna add.
Next, they should launch telescopes.
Once Starship is able to launch commercial payloads, it will become very cheap to put all sorts of telescopes in orbit where you no longer have to worry about atmospheric distortion and various satellites photo bombing your nighttime sky shots.
Once Starship is able to launch commercial payloads, it will become very cheap to put all sorts of telescopes in orbit
This.
Filling the night sky with light, radio waves, etc. - it may not be pretty, but it is inevitable. The best place for astronomy is…somewhere else. Put telescopes far, far away from earth. A great spot would be the Lagrange point on the far side of the moon. That would give you a nice, big shield from all the radio and light noise from Earth. A relay station in polar lunar orbit, and the astronomers can have a field day.
All of that will be possible in just a few years. Starship is a huge game-changer.
The earth doesn’t have a permanent dark side either. But if you are looking at the stars, you will get a better view when the side of the planet you are on is facing away from the sun.
Why are so-called Progressives against actual progress?
It’s called caution. You may have heard of it, though you clearly don’t know much about it. It’s not a new idea, but to the people who believe in moving fast and breaking things, I’m sure it sounds weird. When your actions have the potential to affect millions or billions of others, an abundance of it should be used.
Real-time video deepfakes are a growing threat for governments, businesses, and individuals. Recently, the chairman of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations mistakenly took a video call with someone pretending to be a Ukrainian official. An international engineering company lost millions of dollars earlier in 2024 when one employee was tricked by a deepfake video call. Also, romance scams targeting everyday individuals have employed similar techniques. “It’s probably only a matter of months before we’re going to start seeing an explosion of deepfake video, face-to-face fraud,” says Ben Colman, CEO and cofounder at Reality Defender. When it comes to video calls, especially in high-stakes situations, seeing should not be believing.
The startup is laser-focused on partnering with business and government clients to help thwart AI-powered deepfakes. Even with this core mission, Colman doesn’t want his company to be seen as more broadly standing against artificial intelligence developments. “We’re very pro-AI,” he says. “We think that 99.999 percent of use cases are transformational — for medicine, for productivity, for creativity — but in these kinds of very, very small edge cases the risks are disproportionately bad.” Reality Defender’s plan for the real-time detector is to start with a plug-in for Zoom that can make active predictions about whether others on a video call are real or AI-powered impersonations. The company is currently working on benchmarking the tool to determine how accurately it discerns real video participants from fake ones. Unfortunately, it’s not something you’ll likely be able to try out soon. The new software feature will only be available in beta for some of the startup’s clients.
As Reality Defender works to improve the detection accuracy of its models, Colman says that access to more data is a critical challenge to overcome — a common refrain from the current batch of AI-focused startups. He’s hopeful more partnerships will fill in these gaps, and without specifics, hints at multiple new deals likely coming next year. After ElevenLabs was tied to a deepfake voice call of US president Joe Biden, the AI-audio startup struck a deal with Reality Defender to mitigate potential misuse. […] “We don’t ask my 80-year-old mother to flag ransomware in an email,” says Colman. “Because she’s not a computer science expert.” In the future, it’s possible real-time video authentication, if AI detection continues to improve and shows to be reliably accurate, will be as taken for granted as that malware scanner quietly humming along in the background of your email inbox.
It can detect deepfakes? So can I. Their business plan is one.
Cool! Do you have a Dockerfile available so I can deploy you into our K8s cluster?
Or are you not scaleable enough to help us meet our compliance requirements?
Just a headsup, this isn’t about you. Its about the other 8.2bil-1 people in the world
No, lasers aren’t focused.
Yeah, I’ve seen people claim that too. Doesn’t mean it’s correct.
https://www.edmundoptics.com/f/laser-focusing-singlet-lenses/39590/
Those who use that phrase are selling something.
Well, no sh!t… People usually make startups to sell something.
It can detect deepfakes? So can I.
Good for you. I, however, can not, or at least I’m not at all sure that I can. And the majority of the human population is just like me concerning this.
With all that said, I highly doubt that what this startup has can detect deepfakes, either. It’s trying to play an unwinnable game of cat and mouse. It might at best be able to detect yesterday’s deepfakes, while today’s ones are flooding our lives, and tomorrow it will be the same, and the day after tomorrow too. The ship has sailed. Now the only thing we can do is educate people to NOT trust anything they see or hear in an electronic medium. See something on the street, and you may trust it. See some video in YT or on TV, then assume that it’s a lie. Yes, it will be immensely painful to do this, and it will be accompanied by a severe economic hit and a societal turmoil, but we might have no other choice. Either this, or perhaps start a Butlerian Jihad and start training mentats.
The problem with any technology like this that can be run cheaply by the end user is that the more advanced attackers can just take that software and train models to specifically trick it. Sure, maybe it catches the low effort attacks but at the cost of potentially helping the more advanced attacks seem more legitimate when they don’t trigger the fake detection.
The real solution is the same one we used back before photography, audio and video were common and people could pretend to be anyone they wanted in a letter. People need to be skeptical and authenticate interactions in other ways — be it via shared knowledge or cryptography.
—-
Yes, if you only run the detection on a server and limit reporting — for instance only report a fake/non-fake determination after several minutes of video — and don’t share information about how the technology works adversarial training might be difficult but that has it’s own problems. If researchers can’t put the reliability of the security to the test there is every incentive just to half-ass it and eventually attackers will figure out the vulnerabilities like most security through obscurity.
To establish if standing provided any health benefits, the researchers studied data from 83,013 adults who are part of the UK Biobank health records database. These people did not have heart disease at the start of the study and wore devices on their wrists to track movement. The team found that for every extra 30 minutes spent standing beyond two hours, the risk of circulatory disease increased by 11%. Standing was not found to reduce the risk of heart conditions such as stroke, heart failure and coronary heart disease, the researchers said.“The key takeaway is that standing for too long will not offset an otherwise sedentary lifestyle and could be risky for some people in terms of circulatory health,” said Dr Matthew Ahmadi, of the University of Sydney’s faculty of medicine and health. “We found that standing more does not improve cardiovascular health over the long-term and increases the risk of circulatory issues.”
So we shouldn’t sit, and we shouldn’t stand. Perhaps there is a lying desk?
Here is some background info on the subject for those interested.
Once again, and “as always” lately, the study being reported is valid and meaningful (about a relatively minor issue), but the reporting is sensationalistic.
Personally, I “can’t stand” standing desks. My son won’t do any desk work without standing at one. It’s personal preferences, so do what makes you happy and productive. The “health risks” are generally minor, and they are 100% entirely preventable with the simple measure of wearing compression stockings.
But, by way of technical background, here is the medical stuff:
The heart pumps blood through arteries to peripheral tissues, gas and fluids exchange in the capillaries, and spent blood returns through the veins, to the chest where it is “refurbished” then recirculated. The biomechanics and the potential diseases and disabilities that can occur are night and day different between arteries and veins. When the article says “circulatory disease” and “circulatory health”, it is lumping it all together in a way that may play to laymen reporting, but is not technically meaningful.
When the arteries get diseased, such as the main degenerative disease of atherosclerosis (“hardening of the arteries”), life-sustaining arterial circulation is diminished, which can lead to (1) exercise induced angina (muscular pain and weakness when blood supply is insufficient for metabolic demands), and infarcts (dead !) if there is sudden complete occlusion due to blood clots forming on the atheromas, such as stroke and heart attack. Non-degenerative diseases of blood hypercoagulability and of autoimmune vasculitis cause similar risks for people in any age group. When these same degenerative or pathological processes affect the root of the circulation, the heart, the risks and misery are compounded. Also, the heart and major arteries operate under high pressure (the range between systolic and diastolic, integrated as the “map”, mean arterial pressure) which if too high leads to pressure and shear stresses in the arteries which is a major contribution to the pathogenesis of these diseases (along with other risk factors such as smoking, diabetes, hyperlipidemias). These serious life-and-limb threatening disorders are hallmarks of arterial disease, and this is what is implied when talking about “cardiovascular disease”.
In contrast, the veins are not subject to these diseases. They operate at low pressures. Vascular pressures must always be judged relative to ambient atmospheric pressure. A systolic pressure 120 torr in the aorta means 120 mm Hg over atmospheric. In the complementary vein, the vena cava, pressures are 5 torr. This is reflected in the mural thickness, thick walled arteries versus thin walled veins. According to LaPlace’s Law, mural tension, cylinder radius, and luminal pressure are related by T = Pr, so venous pressures being lower have lower mural tension. Vascular thickness is controlled by tensile stresses on the tissues, so arteries adapt by getting thicker, but arteries and veins and all vessels in between have the same mural stress by adjusting the numbers of layers of cells. But with low pressures, mural stresses that lead to tissue injury, inflammation, and atherosclerosis are absent in the veins.
The veins have a different issue. We, humans, stand upright. Blood that has circulated to the lower extremities must then move uphill against gravity to return to the heart. Negative pressures in the right atrium, “suction” during diastole, are insufficient to counteract the hydrostatic pressure of the 1-2 meter column of blood in the veins while we are standing. The effect is that blood in the feet and legs will start to accumulate and engorge the veins and increase pressure - unless there is an accessory mechanism to keep venous blood moving uphill against gravity back to the heart. That happens in two ways. First are the venous valves. In the veins, there are two-leaf “bicuspid” valves every few centimeters that direct flow back to the heart,
No. You are meant to be moving. That way the blood doesn’t pool up in your legs. The veins don’t have muscles and need the contractions in the surrounding muscles to keep the blood moving.
Also people fainting from standing too long is a thing. It often happens in military formations during boring ceremonies.
They should use two baskets. At some Japanese supermarkets they have an empty basket at the till that they transfer your stuff to as they scan it. You then pay and take the basket over to a packing area where you put what you bought in your bags. Your original basket becomes the new empty one.
Dane Stuckey, the former Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) of big data analytics and AI firm Palantir, has joined OpenAI CISO. Stuckey served in senior security roles at Palantir for more than ten years, including 6 plus years as the company’s CISO. In his new role, Stuckey said he would be working alongside Matt Knight, Head of Security at OpenAI.“Security is germane to OpenAI’s mission,” said Stuckey in a post on X. “It is critical we meet the highest standards for compliance, trust, and security to protect hundreds of millions of users of our products, enable democratic institutions to maximally benefit from these technologies, and drive the development of safe AGI for the world.”
and posts PR boilerplate about his new employer.
Exiting stuff.
Robinhood launched its long-awaited desktop platform and added futures and index options trading features to its mobile app on Wednesday, as the fintech firm aims to take market share from traditional brokerages. The 11-year-old commission-free trading app, which became synonymous with mom-and-pop investors in 2021, is now seeking to mature into a full-fledged financial services provider and compete with established brokerages that serve institutional investors. The Menlo Park, California-based company said its desktop trading platform, dubbed "Robinhood Legend,” will focus on active traders.You can tune in to the company’s live product announcement on YouTube.
The platform, available at no additional cost, will offer advanced trading tools, real-time data, as well as custom and preset layouts. Meanwhile, the app will allow users to trade futures on the benchmark S&P 500 index, oil and bitcoin, among others. Customers can also trade index options. […] Subscribers to Robinhood’s premium Gold tier will be able to trade futures for as low as 50 cents per contract, while non-Gold users will need to pay a commission of 75 cents.
You mean the guys who stop you from trading because you’re affecting the big boys? Fuck them. Fuck them hard. And fuck their slashvertisement, too.
What does a “desktop trading platform” get me that a website doesn’t? I’m sick of services that require you to use an “app” which is usually just a thinly disguised browser. On mobile they do this so that the app can steal my location, contacts, etc. but why are they doing it on desktop?
Each registered business can confirm its info is accurate and add additional details like photos or special offers. Collecting verified, up-to-date business information could be useful for Apple if it ever launches its own search engine or inside features for Apple Intelligence instead of sending users to outside sources like Google, Yelp, or Meta. Branded Mail is a feature businesses can sign up for today before it starts rolling out to users later this year, potentially making emails easier to identify in a sea of unread messages.You can read more about it in Apple’s press release.
Additionally, if companies opt into Business Caller ID, Apple will display their name, logo, and department on an iPhone’s inbound call screen. This feature should come in handy when you’re trying to figure out whether the random number that’s calling you is spam, or if it’s a legitimate business. It will start rolling out next year. A smaller update coming to Apple’s Tap to Pay service will let companies show their logo when accepting payments instead of just displaying a category icon.
“I always wanted ads on my phone calls and texts”....said no one ever.
Step 1. Someone develops a new technology and irons out the kinks.
Step 2. Eventually Apple decided to release their own version.
Step 3. Apple users are oblivious to new/cutting edge technology and therefore hail Apple’s version as “revolutionary”.
What? So brainwashed that we can no longer see what is advertising and what is communication.
So, branded or not, those calls are not going to connect with me, ever - unless they leave a voicemail that gives me an actual reason to call them back.
I actually had an idea a while back about a way to add verification to calls without requiring any changes to the network. You set up a registar that can verify identities (preferably not a shitty SSL cert type scenario) and issues a key to the entity. When they phone you, they also send a messsage to the registar , signed with the key, saying “im trying to call number xyz”. When your phone rings, it checks the registar to see if that number has an entry, and if it does, is there a call being made from them. If the registar replies “Yes and yes” , its a safe call to answer , if it replies “Yes and no” then its spoofed and should be blocked, If it replies “no and no” then its an unknown situation.
From there the regiistar can keep a statistical track of whos calling who tto see if theres a pattern of spoofing and potentially block it.
Downsides: It would need to be opt in so people can choose if they want to live with the possible privacy implications. It could also be used by govts via subpoenas for nefarious purpose. There may well be a decentreralized alternative that negates this problem.
It could be argued that…
…x86 is the worst possible processor architecture, but it wouldn’t matter. It became the standard and there is LOTS of important, expensive x86 software out there. Backward compatibility is essential. Any new processor architecture MUST include PERFECT x86 emulation at reasonable performance. From what I’ve read, Snapdragon does not meet this requirement