Locally correctable codes need barely any information to fix errors, but they’re extremely long. Now we know that the simplest versions can’t get any shorter.

Guidance issued for intelligence officers in Israel appears to show the U.S. military providing intelligence for airstrikes in Gaza.

A total of 702 workers were affected in Mountain View, San Francisco and Sunnyvale, including many in the user experience design division, which focuses on improving how customers interact with the company’s products. Google initially filed an incorrect notice that said San Francisco layoffs were in Sunnyvale. A revised notice reviewed by the Chronicle indicated that four San Francisco offices were affected.

Archaeologists once believed the ancient Amazon rainforest was an inhospitable place, sparsely populated by bands of hunter-gatherers. But the remains of enormous earthworks, pyramids, and roads from Bolivia to Brazil discovered over the past 2 decades have proved conclusively that the Amazon was home to large, complex societies long before European colonizers arrived. Now, there’s evidence that another human society—the oldest yet—left its mark on the region: A dense network of interconnected cities, now hidden beneath the forest in Ecuador’s Upano Valley, has been revealed by the laser mapping technology called lidar. The settlements, described today in Science, are at least 2500 years old, more than 1000 years older than any other known complex Amazonian society. Lidar, which allows researchers to see through forest cover and reconstruct the ancient sites below, “is revolutionizing our understanding of the Amazon in pre-Columbian times,” says Carla Jaimes Betancourt, an archaeologist at the University of Bonn who wasn’t involved in the new work. Finding such an ancient urban network in the Upano Valley highlights the long-unrecognized diversity of ancient Amazonian cultures, which archaeologists are just beginning to be able to reconstruct. Stéphen Rostain, an archaeologist at CNRS, France’s national research agency, began excavating in the Upano Valley nearly 30 years ago. His team focused on two large settlements, called Sangay and Kilamope, and found mounds organized around central plazas, pottery decorated with paint and incised lines, and large jugs holding the remains of the traditional maize beer chicha. Radiocarbon dates showed the Upano sites were occupied from around 500 B.C.E. to between 300 C.E. and 600 C.E. “I knew that we had a lot of mounds, a lot of structures,” Rostain says. “But I didn’t have a complete overview of the region.” That changed when Ecuador’s National Institute for Cultural Heritage funded a lidar survey of the valley in 2015. Specially equipped planes beamed laser pulses into the forest and measured their return path, revealing topographic features otherwise invisible under the trees.

A right-wing Tennessee school board member backed by the Moms for Liberty group has been arrested on shoplifting charges. Keri Blair, who was elected in November 2022 following a campaign against tolerant "social agendas," is accused of stealing items from Target seven times between Nov. 25 and Dec. 20, reported WATN-TV.

The selling or sharing of a person’s private location data could potentially be used to target abortion seekers.

MONTREAL — A Black Montreal theatre performer has filed a lawsuit against an anti-racism activist who he says falsely associated him with racism against Black people. Franck Sylvestre argues in the suit filed at the Montreal courthouse on Wednesday that Alain Babineau made unreasonable claims about a puppet in a theatre piece Sylvestre created for children, damaging his career. Babineau "unreasonably associated the plaintiff and his puppet with racism, with the submission of Black people to white people and even white supremacism and the dehumanization of Black people," the lawsuit reads. The criticism was an attack on Sylvestre's reputation, it adds, and an attempt "to expose him to the hatred and contempt of the public in general and the Black community in particular."

South Africa laid out a list of alleged genocidal acts by Israel while seeking an injunction against the war.

Stand-up comedian George Carlin has been brought back to life in an artificial intelligence-generated special called 'I'm Glad I'm Dead.'

Jesus Christ lady, get a grip!

In her recent book, Nihilistic Times: Thinking With Max Weber, the political theorist Wendy Brown offers a meditation on the political and academic ethos that many think has marked American society since Donald Trump’s election, but which she treats as longer in the making. We are living in nihilistic times, Brown argues, due to centuries of eroding religious authority over values, the inability of science and reason to provide successful alternatives, and the commercialization of contemporary life. The result is a crisis of human values, which are simultaneously personalized, politicized and instrumentalized. “Compressed to hash tags, bumper stickers, yard signs, ephemeral group identities or advertising bait… values lose their depth and endurance…their capacity to shape moral order.” Hence the decline, she continues, in legislative and popular commitments to substantive democratic debates about values, including the value of truth, and the rise of polemics and power politics in their stead. What, then, is to be done? In offering answers to these questions, Brown turns to two famous lectures delivered by Max Weber, the famous German sociologist, at the end of the First World War: “Politics as a Vocation” and “Science as a Vocation.” These lectures spell out Weber’s thinking on the effects of nihilism on both scholarly and political work and his attempt to stand up for basic values in both.

For the last six months, Valve has kept a tight grip on the release of "AI games"--or more accurately games developed using some aspect of machine learning--being released on Steam. Not anymore. In July 2023, Valve said that games made using machine learning content were being denied a spot on the store mostly because "there is some legal uncertainty relating to data used to train AI models". In other words, there are huge legal uncertainties surrounding the data used to train AI models, since so much of it was scraped from copyrighted work without the artist's (or owner's) knowledge or consent. Despite those uncertainties being far from resolved--indeed they've been in the headlines just this week when OpenAI said "it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials"--Valve have today decided to say fuck it and just let most of the games be released anyway. In a blog post, the company says they "needed some time to learn about the fast-moving and legally murky space of AI technology", and over those months have learned that...it's fine? Or fine enough for Valve to start making money off games made using machine learning content, at least?

The Biden administration is due in federal court later this month, while Israel faces charges of genocide at The Hague this week.

There's no need for an AI device

Extremism has migrated from the streets to the center of the Republican Party. What is the role of the journalist in such an environment?

Search teams were deployed following an avalanche Wednesday at a California ski resort near Lake Tahoe, officials said.

It was only about halfway done, but the script David Lynch wrote for the sequel to his 1984 adaptation of Frank Herbert's novel, "Dune," was still better than "Dune Messiah."

Jeffrey Epstein's Zorro Ranch was burgled in 2018, and 20-40 guns stolen. Epstein's employees never reported the stolen guns' serial numbers.

X has silently removed the feature for paid subscribers to set an NFT as a profile picture, which was introduced in 2022.

The fucking peons are expressing their thoughts