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2023-03-21

Cyclists Now Outnumber Motorists In City Of London

  • Cyclists are now the single largest vehicular mode counted during peak times on City streets, representing 40% of road traffic in the City and 27% throughout the day.
  • Over the last decade, the use of motor vehicles has been increasingly restricted in the financial heart of the U.K.
  • The number of pedestrians is currently below pre-pandemic figures and volumes of motor vehicles are also 80% of what they were in 2019, but cyclist numbers are at 102% of pre-pandemic levels.

Amazon to lay off 9,000 more workers in addition to earlier cuts

  • Amazon will lay off 9,000 more employees in its cloud computing, advertising, human resources and Twitch units.
  • The decision was made to streamline costs and took into account the uncertain economy and future.
  • These job cuts are in addition to a previously announced round that lasted from November to January, which affected over 18,000 staffers and primarily impacted retail, devices, recruiting, and HR groups.
  • The company's CEO, Andy Jassy, aims to operate leaner this year but remains optimistic about investing in "long-term customer experiences that can meaningfully improve customers' lives and Amazon as a whole."

Web fingerprinting is worse than I thought

  • Web fingerprinting is a technique used by websites to identify and track individual users through the use of information on their web browser and device configuration, without relying on cookies or other persistent storage.
  • Fingerprinting is sold as a service to e-commerce websites for fraud prevention and website security.
  • This article details how a company called FingerprintJS is selling fingerprinting as a service to other websites, and presents tests demonstrating the efficacy of fingerprinting and best strategies for protecting against it.
  • Using Tor Browser or Firefox with resistFingerprinting=true provides more protection than using Chromium-based browsers like Google Chrome or Brave.
  • VPNs do not offer protection against fingerprinting.
  • Ken Thompson, co-creator of UNIX and programmer, talked about his 75-year-long passion project of organizing and compiling audio equipment and experimentation.
  • He discussed his acquisition of a player piano and demonstrated his jukebox, which has 24 buttons and uses iPads to play music, including piano rolls and early record sales.
  • Despite copyright issues, he expressed interest in donating his large collection of music CDs to someone who could use them.
  • Thompson also discussed his contributions to Unix and his decision to switch from Apple to Linux.

Adobe Firefly: AI Art Generator

  • Adobe has unveiled Firefly, a creative generative AI model that lets users generate a range of creative designs and settings using everyday language.
  • Users can upload graphics to generate poster and banner designs, experiment with different edits on videos, mix elements of two or more photos and eventually create 3D models.
  • Firefly will be integrated into Adobe Creative Cloud and aims to significantly enhance creativity by offering generative AI tools that cater to the creative community's needs and workflows.
  • Adobe has committed to developing creative generative AI in a responsible way and is working to stand up for accountability, responsibility, and transparency in generative AI through the Content Authenticity Initiative and Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity.

Asahi Linux releases updated GPU driver with improved performance and compatibility

  • The Asahi Linux team has released version 0.3 of its GPU driver, which includes huge performance improvements, improved compatibility with Mesa, and explicit sync support, thereby increasing CPU-GPU parallelism.
  • Asahi Linux has been working on open-source GPU drivers for Apple Silicon for the past year and recently designed a userspace API for each class of GPU, which is the interface between the kernel and userspace parts of the driver.
  • The batch tracking system was developed to handle the submission of batches that aren't active but are submitted to increase efficiency.
  • The new driver also supports multi-VM, multi-job submission, ability to execute compute shaders, and includes stub support for blit commands, while memory safety bugs in the DRM scheduler component have been fixed.
  • The decision to close DPReview was made as part of the website's annual operating plan review by its parent company.
  • The website will be available in read-only mode until a limited time after 10 April, after which it will be unavailable.
  • Users can request a download of all their uploaded content until 6 April.
  • The website's editorial team will continue to work on reviews and aims to deliver some of its best-ever content before closing down.
  • DPReview has been providing informative content, reviews, and news for photographers around the world for nearly 25 years.
  • DPReview published a list of the most popular point-and-shoot cameras rented out by camera and lens rental company Lensrentals, revealing that smartphones with advanced camera systems may have made the concept of "point-and-shoot" cameras obsolete. However, some photographers still prefer the simplicity and reliability of dedicated cameras.

Mailchimp blacklists users who open the browser's dev tools

  • MailChimp users have reported being blocked from their accounts after opening their browser's dev tools while editing emails.
  • Commenters noted that the ban might be related to cross-site scripting vulnerabilities caused by the use of unescaped or malformed HTML in the console or to APIs interacting with the system's web application firewall.
  • Some speculated that Mailchimp was trying to prevent users from inspecting email templates or reverse-engineering email campaigns or that the blocking mechanism was to prevent users from using ad-blockers.
  • The issue has raised concerns about restrictions on development tools and the implications for developers, who may be denied essential tools for their work by overly aggressive or cautious security mechanisms.

Petals allows collaborative use of 100B+ language models

  • Petals allows collaborative use of large language models (e.g. BLOOM-176B) by loading a small part of the model and teaming up with others serving the other parts.
  • Users can run inference or fine-tuning, with single-batch inference running at ≈ 1 sec per token, and parallel inference reaching hundreds of tokens/sec.
  • Petals offers more flexibility than classic language model APIs, with the ability to employ any fine-tuning and sampling methods, execute custom paths through the model, or see its hidden states. It uses PyTorch for added flexibility.
  • Currently on a waitlist, but users can try it in ColabDocs on GitHub or join the Discord channel to follow its development.

So you've installed fzf – now what?

  • Fzf is a command line tool that enables fuzzy finding of files and directories.
  • Keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl+R and Alt+C can improve search efficiency.
  • Fzf can be used in combination with other UNIX tools like grep and vi for an improved searching experience.
  • Pairing fzf with rg, a fast recursive grep tool, can provide even quicker searches.