A new Incogni survey suggests Americans are pulling back from social media, with more than half saying "maintaining an online presence feels like work" and 55% reporting they post less than they did five years ago. "The full study concludes that there's been a significant shift in public attitudes toward social media," reports PCMag. "Where it was once fun and relaxing, it's now growing dark and angsty..." From the report: As the chart shows, there's also a clear correlation with age. A full 60% of Gen Z respondents feel the pain of maintaining a social presence. Perhaps they have a niggling hope that they might still be discovered as an influencer? Those of us in the Boomer category are clearly more relaxed about it, with just 38% saying that maintaining a social presence feels like work. The survey quizzed respondents about how they feel when they don't keep up with checking their socials and, by extension, how they'd feel if they just plain quit. They were given choices, both positive (peace, relaxation, and relief) and negative (anxiety, fear of missing out, and discomfort).

Overall, positive reactions held slightly greater sway, with an average of about 21% compared with 19% for negative reactions. The Gen Y contingent accentuated that split, with 25% positive and 21% negative, while Gen X went even further, with 20% positive and just 13% negative. But the Gen Z group flipped the results, identifying 27% negative and 26% positive reactions to going without social media.

There's another force pushing folks away from the socials: increasing politicization. Of the survey's respondents, 44% agreed that political content is driving people away from social media, and only 20% disagreed. Among Gen Z respondents, the impetus was stronger: 48% agreed, and just 13% disagreed. These negative feelings associated with politics only serve to highlight the positive reactions to deleting your social media.

Are you posting less on social media than you did five years ago, and are you being more selective about who can see what you post? Then you're with the majority. More than half of the respondents answered yes to each of those questions. But would you ever parlay fewer posts into no posts (aka quit posting entirely)? When asked what it would take to finally get them to terminate a social media account, a die-hard group of one in six respondents said there's nothing that could make them quit. But more than half could picture quitting due to security concerns, and almost half accepted the possibility that harassment or hate speech could send them packing. Others cited the amount of time wasted on scrolling through social media and the mental health threats of doomscrolling.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The European Union is considering major new restrictions on children's access to social media, including age limits, phased access, and an outright ban. "This is not about whether children can access social media," said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. "It is about when social media can access our children." The Verge reports: Social media platforms could also be forced to prove their services are not harmful before young people are allowed to use them. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the bloc's executive arm could propose new legislation within months, after reviewing recommendations from a panel of experts released today.

The panel recommended using a phased approach, including "no screens at all" for children under 3, supervised internet use for those under 13, and some limits for older teens. It also said social media platforms should have to prove their services are safe to younger users, an approach von der Leyen said she supports. Von der Leyen said the Commission will consider the report and return with proposals "after the summer." Any legislation would still need approval from the European Parliament and the EU's 27 member countries before becoming law across the bloc.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: A state-owned newspaper in China recently published a satellite image of a data center in Gainesville, Va., writing in English that the development of artificial intelligence posed a threat to Americans' physical and financial well-being. A comic strip made to look as if it had been published by a Maryland news outlet -- created with OpenAI's ChatGPT by people in China, the tech company said -- circulated on X this year, blaming data centers for soaring electricity bills. It showed a tycoon smoking a cigar and clutching bags of cash. A video shared on X by a known covert Russian influence operation questioned the viability of a data center that an American company, Firebird, is constructing in Armenia, the small Caucasus nation that has been a focus of Kremlin pressure. "The country's electrical grid instability may render it useless," the video's narrator says.

All are examples of a push by foreign adversaries to seize on what polls have shown is deep ambivalence -- verging at times on hostility -- about the spread of the data centers needed to power A.I. in the United States and elsewhere. China, Russia and, to a lesser extent, Iran have sought to use state media outlets to turn the controversy over data centers in the United States into "a domestic fracture point," according to a new analysis by Alethea, a threat intelligence company, which identified scores of articles and posts on social media this year. These campaigns, whose impact on public opinion remains to be seen, have raised alarms in Washington, where A.I. is seen as a top issue heading into this year's midterm elections.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Universe of Short Film is an amazing site for watching, sharing, and connecting around short films. This is really cool…not sure why the site isn’t better known.

From XKCD, a tour of some of the Earth’s deepest and most notable holes, including mines, caves, boreholes, subway stations, lakes, tunnels, neutrino detectors, and, of course, the Mariana Trench.

I was surprised to learn that a pair of boreholes, the Kola Superdeep Borehole and the Deepwater Horizon Borehole, are actually deeper than the Mariana Trench. Explain XKCD has more info on each of the various holes, including the truly bonkers Cave of Crystals in Mexico.

Tags: geology · infoviz · Randall Munroe · xkcd

Ocean Vuong has a photograpy show opening at The Wadsworth Museum in Hartford, CT in August. Vuong used “portraiture, landscape, and snapshots to document queer and immigrant life in the Connecticut River Valley over two decades”.

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Jongens waar hebben we dit aan verdiend. 's Werelds twee marktleiders in discours-creatie (Clav en Eretz Yisrael) vinden elkaar op het snijvlak van geo-mogging en clip-farming. En het heeft gewoon echt alles. De bovenstaande IDF-soldate Shira Braun die zegt een beheerder te zijn van het IDF TikTok-account is, heeft een probleem. Het Israëlische i24News schrijft: "The IDF Spokesperson's Unit said Braun had acted without authorization. "The soldier acted without coordination with her commanders, and her conduct does not meet the standards expected of IDF soldiers," the IDF said in a statement. "The incident is under investigation, and the soldier will face disciplinary action." En daar maakte AL JAZEERA dan weer een video over jongens wat is de wereld toch mooi soms. Inmiddels is gebleken dat ze uit het IDF social media-team gehaald wordt, en herplaatst is als KOK. 

Vervolgens vertelt Clav onderstaand dat hij gedineerd heeft met Netanyahu-adviseurs en dat er besproken werd hoe Netanyahu meer 'gehumaniseerd' kon worden. Waar het antwoord dan op was dat Clav met hem naar de sportschool zou kunnen gaan en dit ge-livestreamed kon worden.

Weer daarna wordt hij stevig aan de tand gevoeld tijdens een Israëlisch tv-interview over die keer dat hij in een club Kanye West's Heil Hitler zong met o.a. Nick Fuentes, de Tate-broers, Sneako en Amrou Fudl, en meer in het algemeen zijn 'relatie' met Nick Fuentes (die vrij miniem is). 

En wéér daarna scheldt de dochter van rabbijn Schmuley, degene die bekend staat om haar kosjere sekswinkel, Clav de huid vol tijdens een etentje, ook wegens het zingen van dat Heil Hitler-lied.

Al met al: reden genoeg voor Clav om zijn reis door Israël voortijd af te breken: "People are so negative to you here. It almost makes you want to say, well then I'm not going to come back. That's why I'm leaving". Gelukkig hebben we de beelden nog, allemaal onderstaand.

Echt een gemiste kans voor Israël hoor, Clav kwam er met de beste intenties en dat land kan elke positieve PR gebruiken. Is ze niet gelukt, zonde. Hier nog beelden dat hij verbaal belaagd wordt bij zijn hotel. Een generational fumble, noemen de jongeren dat.

Diner met Netanyahu's adviseurs

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Voortijdig beëindigd 'vijandig' interview over Heil Hitler-zangfestijn en band met Nick Fuentues

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Niet alle Israeli's fan van Clavs Heil Hitler-zangfestijn met Nick Fuentes & Co

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Israeli's hebben hier echt de bal laten vallen hey

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JAAAA het Al-Jazeera filmpje over de geschorste IDF-soldate

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Clav heeft genoeg gezien van het beloofde land

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Nederland waterland. Dat ligt niet alleen ontzettend lekker in het gehoor, het ís ook nog eens zo. MAAR VOOR HOELANG NOG? Al tijden wordt gewaarschuwd voor grote watertekorten en zelfs De T. zucht, maar nu brengt Nieuwsuur ons een waarschuwing rechtstreeks van de Landelijke Coördinatiecommissie Waterverdeling, die stelt dat we waterwise zo'n beetje teruggaan naar het jaar 1976 (toen Joop den Uyl nog kraanbeheerder was). We zitten pas een paar dagen in fase 1: dreigend watertekort, maar fase 2: feitelijk watertekort ligt al op de loer. Dat raakt in de eerste plaats scheepvaart en boeren, alleen op een gegeven moment komt ook de burger in de zee van ellende terecht, zeker met die eeuwigdurende hittegolf waar we in zitten. En ja, mogen we dan straks nog wel dweilen? Plantjes water geven? De was doen in een teil? Kan er dan nog muntjesloos gedoucht of moeten we de zweetgeur van Jeroen van sales op kantoor gaan gedogen? Dat worden onsmakelijke toestanden in Nederland. Gelukkig kunnen we in plaats van drinkwater nog altijd aan het bier (toch geldt ook hier: hoelang nog?), verder ziet het er allemaal bepaald niet positief uit.

Goed genuanceerd verhaal wel

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De hopeloze toestand in het Slavische theater volgt u wellicht in ons onregelmatigheidsklassement van de Weekupdates maar voor deze banger breken we de week graag weer op. Een FAB-3000, een 3.000 kilo zware zweefbom met een explosieve lading van 1.400 kilo die onder een Su-34 jachtbommenwerper geknoopt wordt en dan een kilometer of 40 van het doelwit op deze manier wordt losgelaten om het zelf uit te zoeken. Heel precies zijn ze niet. En dan krijg je dus deze ellende, in Orikhiv, oblast Zaporizhzhia. Op een woonblok, waar weinig mensen meer wonen, dus we zullen het volgens de Code van de Volkskrant wel geen genocide noemen. En er zijn natuurlijk minder Joden bij betrokken!

When it comes to AI services, you don't necessarily get what you pay for. It turns out that AI models with expensive tokens may cost less than models with cheap tokens for particular tasks. And the tooling attached to those models can have a significant effect on cost and output quality. Databricks, which sells data analytics software and services, recently devised an internal coding benchmark to assess the tradeoff between price and performance using various AI models. Matei Zaharia, CTO of Databricks and associate professor of computer science at UC Berkeley, said the company undertook the evaluation because models are often tuned to existing benchmark tests like SWE-Bench – which is "broken," according to OpenAI. Databricks devised its benchmark using real engineering tasks performed by its staff to assess how AI agents perform. Zaharia said while the results reflect the company's internal codebase, other companies should be able to conduct similar evaluations using their own code. One of the things Databricks found was that open weight models like Z.ai's GLM 5.2 are competitive with frontier models, like Anthropic's Opus 4.8. "It landed in the top capability tier, statistically tied with Opus 4.8 on quality, but costing $1.28/task against Opus’s $1.94," the company said in its report. But the price-per-token doesn't tell the whole story. Databricks contends that price-per-task needs to be considered. "Cheaper per-token does not imply cheaper per-task," said Zaharia in a social media post. "For example, Sonnet 5 costs less per token than Opus 4.8 but used more tokens, resulting in higher cost and lower quality." So while Anthropic's Sonnet 5 was around 1.7x cheaper than Opus 4.8 on a per-token basis, it was more costly on a per-task basis – $2.09 for Sonnet 5 compared to $1.94 for Opus 4.8. That's because it completed tasks less often (81 percent compared to 87 percent), and consumed more tokens to achieve the desired result. Academics already reached this conclusion, noting back in March that in about a third of the model comparisons they conducted, the model with the lower listed price ended up costing more. "For example, Gemini 3 Flash's listed price is 80 percent cheaper than GPT-5.4's, yet its actual cost across all tasks is 38 percent higher," they observed. The other thing that had a significant impact on test results was the harness – software like Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and the Pi coding agent – which passes user input to the model, invokes various tools, and returns results. "Harnesses make a huge difference in cost-performance," said Zaharia. "The very simple Pi harness got the same success rate as harnesses from the LLM vendors with Opus and GPT 5.5, but at 2x less cost!" Zaharia attributed the difference to the size of the input – the context – passed to the model with every turn. When Claude Code served as the harness for Opus 4.8, Databricks measured a context of 742,000 tokens per task, compared to 236,999 for Pi. That's about 3.2x fewer tokens overall. With Codex, the total context per task was 1,235,000 tokens, compared to 665,000 tokens for Pi, which is known for its minimal system prompt. Zaharia said the results explain why Databricks built a tool called Omnigent to harness the harnesses – it's a wrapper for combining and swapping multiple coding agents. It's the front-end equivalent of the kind of back-end model swapping that OpenRouter enables. ®

Is your sex life as private and personal as you think it is? Or is it shaped by – and constantly shaping, in turn – the society and systems you exist in? 

This week we’re joined by Dr. Angela Jones, who asks these questions and much more in their new book, Sex in Public. Angela is a professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University. In addition to scholarly works published in many distinguished journals including Porn Studies and The Black Scholar, they’re the author, co-author and/or editor of several books, including Black Lives Matter: A Reference Handbook and Camming: Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Industry which came out in 2020 and advanced and informed a lot of my own understanding of the online adult industry especially.

Their latest book, Sex in Public: The Transformative Social Power of Our Erotic Lives, just launched. As Angela writes: “Revolutionizing how we talk about sex means thinking not just about what a single solitary person should or shouldn't do in bed.” 

We get into the history of sexology, how sex toys complicate our understanding of what counts as sex, whether sex needs a definition at all, what happened when they bought and used a sex doll, and why the most vulnerable moments in their book are also the ones everyone wants to discuss. 

Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.

Become a paid subscriber for early access to these interview episodes and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.

Sex in Public: The Transformative Social Power of Our Erotic Lives

Cash/Consent by Lorelei Lee

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Al sinds zijn verkiezingswinst in april wilde premier Péter Magyar dat president Tamás Sulyok aftrad. Sulyok, die door Magyar werd bestempeld als een „marionet” van de radicaal-rechtse oud-premier Viktor Orbán, weigerde dat.

Microsoft geeft als eerste grote Amerikaanse partij inzicht in het stroomverbruik van zijn datacenters in Nederland. Dat is groot, en groeit de komende jaren bovendien hard. Terwijl andere datacenteruitbaters zwijgen, verhardt de strijd om toekomstige aansluitingen op het stroomnet.

Ongeveer een kwart van de geslaagden op havo en vwo kiest voor een tussenjaar. Ze willen reizen, sporten, een taal leren, vrijwilligerswerk doen. En ze zijn op zoek naar persoonlijke groei. „Ik weet nog niet zo goed wat mijn kwaliteiten zijn.”

Jeongmin Lee is interested in the ways “memory is carried through craft and repetition.” On traditional Korean mulberry paper, or hanji, Lee draws delicate lines in ink and pigments known as bunchae, rendering rippling textures that whirl across the page. Steeped in local folklore and mythology, the Busan-based artist creates surreal scenes that conjure fantastical tales of life by the sea.

“Most of my recent projects begin with reading regional folktales, visiting places connected to those stories, and collecting fragments of history, mythology, and oral traditions,” she says. “I rarely paint a folktale exactly as it’s written; I’m more interested in its symbols, emotions, and the questions it leaves behind.”

Many of Lee’s compositions focus on women’s knowledge, labor, and resilience and how those qualities emerge through coastal storytelling. Tales of powerful sea gods and the diving traditions of the haenyeo commingle into balanced illustrations that translate the symbols and motifs of the region anew.

While her approach is labor-intensive, Lee enjoys utilizing such a meticulous, meditative technique. “Painting with traditional pigments requires a slow, layered process. The colors are built gradually, allowing the paper and pigments to create subtle textures that wouldn’t be possible with other materials,” she adds. “It gives me space to sit with these stories while I paint them.

Many of the works shown here are part of Daughters of the Sea, an ongoing series recently on view at the SĀBRS Festival in Riga. Lee hopes to expand the project into one that’s participatory and connects similar narratives from across the globe. “I’m exploring ways that folklore can become something people experience and talk about together, rather than something that exists only on a gallery wall,” Lee shares.

She’s also currently working on a graphic novel centering on Busan’s mythology and folklore, which she hopes to complete next year. Keep up with her projects on Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Korea’s Coastal Folklore Surfaces in Jeongmin Lee’s Ink Illustrations appeared first on Colossal.

I have a Pi 4 B that, after a power failure, seems unable to talk HDMI in any resolution higher than 1024x768. I have tried both ports, multiple cables, multiple monitors, and a known-good CF card.

# xrandr Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1024 x 768, maximum 7680 x 7680 HDMI-1 connected primary 1024x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 0mm x 0mm 1024x768 60.00* 800x600 60.32 56.25 848x480 60.00 640x480 59.94 HDMI-2 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)

I have also tried various permutations of hdmi_force_hotplug, hdmi_group, hdmi_mode, hdmi_force_mode, hdmi_force_hotplug and hdmi_drive in config.txt, and video=HDMI-A-1:1920x1080@60D in cmdline.txt with no change.

Before I toss it in the trash, does anyone know what could have caused this and if it is fixable? Is this a known failure mode of the video hardware scorching itself somehow?

Do not speculate. Do not just google it for me.

Previously, previously.

Ik leerde Tiong Ang kennen via Remy Jungerman met wie hij in 2002 een residentie deed in Indonesië. Ik ben zijn werk sindsdien blijven volgen, eerst toen ik meer reisde op afstand en sinds ik [Meer...]

Original Mastodon Post

A voxel Tokyo in real Japan time – ride the Yamanote line and study Japanese: https://jivx.com/densha

Discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48890959