Tag: learning (2025)

Posted on
by

Haleluya Hadero of the Associated Press begins her report [Haleluya Hadero for The Associated Press]:

Hearing a lot about Lemon8 lately? You’re not the only one.

I have not heard of Lemon8. Is this going to be another Temu situation?

Ms. Hadero continued:

Amid a looming U.S. ban on TikTok, content creators have been pushing the platform’s sister app. Lemon8 resembles an amalgamation of the types of short-form videos found on TikTok and the picture-perfect aesthetic of Instagram and Pinterest.

Sister? TikTok has siblings other than the for-Chinese version of TikTok (since China does not allow TikTok)?

Like its popular relation, Lemon8 is owned by China-based ByteDance, whose collection of internationally available apps also includes the video editing app CapCut and the photo and art editing app Hypic. In addition, the company operates Douyin, the Chinese sibling of TikTok that follows Beijing’s strict censorship rules.

TikTok should be banned (you were right the first time Mr. President-elect). When it tries to give you a lemon, you should also ban the lemon. When it tries to give you eight lemons, you should ban all eight lemons.

 

Posted on
by
Meta's fact-checking exit prompts urgent IFCN meeting by Pranav Dixit (Business Insider)
According to a 2023 report published by the IFCN, income from Meta's Third-Party Fact-Checking Program and grants remain fact-checkers' predominant revenue streams.

Business Insider referenced a 2023 report from the International Fact-Checking Network (shudders) about how the fact-checking complex is funded. [Business Insider] I followed a link to the report (credit to Business Insider for including it) and found the relevant passage:

Income from Meta’s Third-Party Fact-Checking Program and grants remain fact-checkers’ predominant revenue streams. Notably, grants now support approximately 87% of survey respondents, overtaking Meta’s 3PFC as the most common funding source. Other significant sources include training activities (55%) and memberships or user donations (50%).

[2023 State of Fact-Checkers Report by IFCN]

Meta was the second-biggest funder of the fact-checking complex after unpsecified grants. Page 14 of the report noted that 63.5% of members of the IFCN participated in Facebook’s third party fact-checking (3PFC) program in 2023, which was actually down from 66.7% in 2022, 66.3% in 2021, and 79.2% in 2020. Page 15 of the report noted that only 14.6% participated in TikTok’s (which should be banned) fact-checking program (the report noted that every participant in TikTok’s program also participated in Facebook’s program).

That the fact-checking complex was receiving significant funding from Facebook was hardly a secret, but the particulars are interesting now that Facebook is ending its fact-checking program. Regardless of how this changes Facebook, it will likely have a material effect on the revenue of some of the fact-checking entitities which participated in Facebook’s program. For whatever it is worth, I consider this news a positive development for reasons I discussed back in 2020 in my little-read Proposals for Fact-Checking Reform essay (which came at the height of the fact-checking industrial complex’s power). For a more incisive take, I largely agree with John Sexton’s post yesterday in HotAir, which was what initially led me to the Business Insider and IFCN reports. [John Sexton]

Posted on
by

On December 18, 2024, the Wall Street Journal reported that “U.S. authorities are investigating whether a Chinese company whose popular home-internet routers have been linked to cyberattacks poses a national-security risk and are considering banning the devices.” I learned a few interesting facts beyond the top-line story:

  • “The router-manufacturer TP-Link, established in China, has roughly 65% of the U.S. market for routers for homes and small businesses.” TP-Link’s home and small business marketshare for routers was only 20% in 2019. The Wall Street Journal attributes the jump to an increase in working from home beginning in 2020 and TP-Link’s low prices.
  • “The Justice Department is investigating whether the price discrepancies violate a federal law that prohibits attempts at monopolies by selling products for less than they cost to make…” (Note: For whatever it is worth, I do not think TP-Link is strikingly cheap compared to other “popular” consumer routers and access points, but I could be off.)
  • TP-Link devices are used by the Department of Defense, Drug Enforcement Agency, NASA, and other agencies.
  • “An analysis from Microsoft published in October found that a Chinese hacking entity maintains a large network of compromised network devices mostly comprising thousands of TP-Link routers.”
  • According to the Journal, people familiar with the TP-Link investigation have stated that the company does not engage with security researches complainted about security flaws in TP-Link products.
  • “TP-Link routers don’t appear to be related to China’s alleged breaches of at least eight U.S. telecom firms by a group dubbed Salt Typhoon…” Chinese hackers instead targeted out-of-date routers built by Cisco and Netgear.
  • Taiwan has banned government and educational facilities from using TP-Link routers. India issued a warning in 2024 that TP-Link routers present a security risk.

[Source: U.S. Weighs Ban on Chinese-Made Router in Millions of American Homes (Wall Street Journal). Original Link. Archived Link.]

I used a TP-Link router for several years before upgrading to a MikroTik hAP ac3 router. As of the writing of the instant post, I still use a TP-Link wireless access point (it is a pure AP, no router capabilities), but I am in the process of swapping it out for a Netgear router with OpenWrt, which I will use as an Access Point instead of a router.

Posted on
by

Project Owlnet is in the business of banding saw-whet owls to learn more about them. Kayla Randall of Smithsonian Magazine explained how they accomplish this:

The group uses an audio lure to entice the birds, capturing them in mist nets to bring back to the banding station. Once there, they place aluminum bands on the birds—’friendship bracelets for science,’ as they’re called within the project. Project participants also measure the owls’ bills, wings and tails.

While I did not know how one would catch and band a saw-whet owl despite having written All About the Saw-whet Owl back in 2021, that passage is not the thing I learned of the day. What caught my attention was how the researchers estimate how old individual Saw-whet owls are:

They use a blacklight to look at the underside of the owls’ wings and see their molt pattern, which helps determine their ages, a difficult task. Old feathers don’t glow as brightly under the light because the pigment has faded, while new feathers have a brighter glow, Boyle Acuti says.

I would not have guessed that they use blacklights to estimate the age of Saw-whet owls. [Source: Kaya Randall for Smithsonian Magazine]

Posted on
by
Commercial Gaming Revenue Growth Continues in Q3 2024, Driving Industry’s 15th Consecutive Quarter of Growth - American Gaming Association (americangaming.org)
Americans legally wagered $30.3 billion on sports [in Q3 2024], generating $3.24 billion in quarterly revenue (+42.4% YoY). Recent market launches in Kentucky, Maine, North Carolina and Vermont contributed to this growth.

According to a press release by the American Gaming Association (always working to improve the lives and morals of Americans), “Americans wagered 30.3 billion on sports” in Q3 2024. [American Gaming Association] This of course only counts legal sports betting,  for example bets like those placed on the official gambling app of our nation’s capital. According to the press release, this legal sports gambling “generat[ed] $3.24 billion in quarterly revenue (+42.4 YoY).” I noted while reading the summary that “legal sports betting” generated more revenue than iGaming in Q4 2024 ($3.24 billion vs $2.08 billion) but substantially less than “[t]raditional brick-and-mortar casino gambling” ($12.28 billion). However, both sports betting and iGaming saw significant YoY increases (the latter was +30.3 YoY) while traditional gambling saw a tiny contraction (-0.9 YoY).

Posted on
by
Best Of 2024: A Trip To Machida, The Real-Life 'Pallet Town' That Inspired Pokémon by Tokyo Game Life (Nintendo Life)
[Machida's] most famous tourist attraction is not Pokémon-related at all. Machida Squirrel Garden is a small petting zoo that features over two hundred squirrels that live in colourfully painted houses. You can even feed and pet the squirrels, though don’t be surprised if they dart off after filling their bellies.

According to animal cafes[dot]com, the Machida Squirrel Garden not only hosts “[h]undreds of adventurous squirrels,” but also “a guinea pig village housing at least a hundred guinea pigs, and some fenced-in pens inhabited by rabbits, small tortoises, chipmunks, and prairie dogs.” [animalcafes.com] I’m sold.

(PS: Don’t tell the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation about this place.)