ElectroVagrant

Any of you that celebrate Halloween already up to anything? Movie marathons/rewatches, books/short story reading/rereading, playing/replaying games, or whatever else?

Also, for those wanting to share spooky vibes, you might check out the following communities:
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[email protected]

Archive link.

Cloud apps like Google Docs and Trello are popular because they enable real-time collaboration with colleagues, and they make it easy for us to access our work from all of our devices. However, by centralizing data storage on servers, cloud apps also take away ownership and agency from users. If a service shuts down, the software stops functioning, and data created with that software is lost.

In this article we propose “local-first software”: a set of principles for software that enables both collaboration and ownership for users. Local-first ideals include the ability to work offline and collaborate across multiple devices, while also improving the security, privacy, long-term preservation, and user control of data.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20265433

Canadian National Railway said on Friday that labor union Unifor has filed a notice of dispute to the Canadian Minister of Labor, just three days after initiating negotiations.

Also known as "conciliation", the notice of dispute can be sent by either party to the Canadian Minister of Labor during a negotiation and typically results in the appointment of a conciliation officer to assist the parties in reaching an agreement.

On a brutal day for the frail and aging Pope Francis, the king of Belgium, its prime minister and the rector of the Catholic university that invited him here all ripped into the institution he heads for a spectrum of sins: for covering up cases of clergy sex abuse and being far behind the times on embracing women and the LGBTQ+ community in the church.

And that was all before Francis met with the people most harmed by the Catholic Church in Belgium — the men and women who were raped and molested by priests as children. Seventeen abuse survivors spent two hours with Francis on Friday evening, telling him of their trauma, shame and pain and demanding reparations from the church.

In May a huge iceberg broke off from an Antarctic ice shelf, drifted, and came to a stop - right in front of “maybe the world’s unluckiest” penguins.

Like a door shutting, the iceberg's huge walls sealed off the Halley Bay colony from the sea.

It seemed to spell the end for hundreds of newly-hatched fluffy chicks whose mothers, out hunting for food, may no longer have been able to reach them.

Then, a few weeks ago, the iceberg shifted and got on the move again.

Some bittersweet news, with an important reminder of how much more precarious life is for creatures living on the Earth's poles due to the changing climate.

Canadian National Railway said on Friday that labor union Unifor has filed a notice of dispute to the Canadian Minister of Labor, just three days after initiating negotiations.

Also known as "conciliation", the notice of dispute can be sent by either party to the Canadian Minister of Labor during a negotiation and typically results in the appointment of a conciliation officer to assist the parties in reaching an agreement.

Buried in a roughly 200-page quarterly filing from JPMorgan Chase last month were eight words that underscore how contentious the bank’s relationship with the government has become.

The lender disclosed that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau could punish JPMorgan for its role in Zelle, the giant peer-to-peer digital payments network. The bank is accused of failing to kick criminal accounts off its platform and failing to compensate some scam victims, according to people who declined to be identified speaking about an ongoing investigation.

In response, JPMorgan issued a thinly veiled threat: “The firm is evaluating next steps, including litigation.”

Title is original from site.

Note: article may be paywalled if you've read all your free articles from Wired for now. Archive link in that event.

[...] Against the back wall, where one might find confessionals in a different kind of church, there’s a tower of humming black servers. These servers hold around 10 percent of the Internet Archive’s vast digital holdings, which includes 835 billion web pages, 44 million books and texts, and 15 million audio recordings, among other artifacts. Tiny lights on each server blink on and off each time someone opens an old webpage or checks out a book or otherwise uses the Archive’s services. The constant, arrhythmic flickers make for a hypnotic light show. Nobody looks more delighted about this display than Kahle.

It is no exaggeration to say that digital archiving as we know it would not exist without the Internet Archive—and that, as the world’s knowledge repositories increasingly go online, archiving as we know it would not be as functional. Its most famous project, the Wayback Machine, is a repository of web pages that functions as an unparalleled record of the internet. Zoomed out, the Internet Archive is one of the most important historical-preservation organizations in the world. The Wayback Machine has assumed a default position as a safety valve against digital oblivion. The rhapsodic regard the Internet Archive inspires is earned—without it, the world would lose its best public resource on internet history.

Note: article may be paywalled if you've read all your free articles from Wired for now. Archive link in that event.

In a video uploaded to the Chinese social media platform Bilibili in October, a Shein warehouse worker in southern China with black-rimmed glasses tells the camera he picked 650 clothing items during his last shift—a feat he claims to have accomplished, in part, by not taking a single bathroom break. The worker says the sacrifice would help him reach his goal of earning 10,000 RMB (nearly $1,500 at the time) a month at his job picking and packing customer orders for Shein, the global fast-fashion juggernaut valued last year at $66 billion.

In a separate Bilibili video posted a few days later, a different Shein staffer says that he is “sweating profusely after picking goods all night,” but he’s grateful, at least, that his team leader is friendly. In a third clip shared to the short-form video platform Kuaishou in November, another Shein worker with long hair pulled back into a low ponytail tells the camera she is having trouble lifting her left hand after completing an 11-and-a-half hour shift at a Shein warehouse. “My first time working in logistics, there won’t be a second time,” reads the caption.

Note: title is drawn from the article, and I'd argue is rather exaggerated given the contents. A better title might be, "A Look Into Shein's Reliance on Gig Workers". Just realized this may be behind paywall for some, archive link in the event of that.

RT was long known to be government-funded and a source of Russian propaganda. But it claimed to be independent. It hired American journalists, and featured some big names like former CNN host Larry King. The channel’s aesthetic was sleek, modern, and cable news-like. But over the years, as American relations with Russia cooled, skepticism of RT grew.

Now, the U.S. government has accused RT and its parent company, Rossiya Segodnya, of going beyond propaganda, as part of the Kremlin’s efforts to destabilize democracies and erode international support for Ukraine.

Researchers have designed a robotic “artificial skin” that is as unique as the team’s animal inspiration—the platypus. Created by collaborators between China’s Tsinghua University and the Beijing Institute of Nanoenergy and Nanosystems, the dual-sensory system can interpret information not just from direct physical touch, but also through detecting electrostatic changes in the air around it.

Although I'm sharing the Popular Science article for easier reading, I'd recommend checking out the journal article it cites, as it gets into the details of the research. Best of all? Journal article's open access, so from what I can tell by checking between browsers, it's not paywalled!