https://www.wired.com/story/uncanny-valley-podcast-wired-roundup-metas-ai-brain-drain/

The Delhi High Court ordered the blocking of Sci-Hub, Sci-Net, and LibGen in India on August 19, 2025, following a copyright infringement case brought by academic publishers Elsevier, Wiley, and the American Chemical Society¹².

The court found that Alexandra Elbakyan, Sci-Hub's founder, violated her December 2020 undertaking not to upload new copyrighted content by making post-2022 articles available through both Sci-Hub and a new platform called Sci-Net². While Elbakyan claimed this was due to technical errors and argued Sci-Net was a separate project, the court rejected these arguments².

The ruling requires India's Department of Telecommunications and Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology to issue blocking orders within 72 hours, with Internet Service Providers required to implement the blocks within 24 hours².

This case marks the first time Sci-Hub and LibGen faced legal action in a developing country³. Earlier intervention attempts by Indian scientists and researchers had argued these platforms were "the only access to educational and research materials" for many academics in India³, with social science researchers specifically highlighting the "detrimental effect" blocking would have on research in India⁴.

1. Substack - GPT-4o about Sci-hub: The Delhi High Court's latest order ↩︎
2. SpicyIP - Sci-Hub now Completely Blocked in India! ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
3. InfoJustice - Update on Publisher's Copyright Infringement Suit Against Sci-Hub ↩︎ ↩︎
4. Internet Freedom Foundation - Social Science researchers move Delhi High Court ↩︎

Social Science researchers move Delhi High Court to protect LibGen & SciHub

A group of social science researchers have filed an intervention application, with legal support from IFF, highlighting the adverse impact any decision to block LibGen and SciHub will have on them.

^{Tanmay Singh (Internet Freedom Foundation)}

Key findings

1. Most students are using generative AI for coursework, but many are doing so in ways that can support, not outsource, their learning.
2. Performance pressures, among other factors, are driving cheating.
3. Nearly all students want action on academic integrity, but most reject policing.
4. Students have mixed views on faculty use of generative AI for teaching.
5. Generative AI is influencing students’ learning and critical thinking abilities.
6. Students want information and support in preparing for a world shaped by AI.
7. On the whole, generative AI isn’t devaluing college for students—and it’s increasing its value for some.

Survey: College Students’ Views on AI

Key findings from Inside Higher Ed’s student survey on generative AI show that using the evolving technology hasn’t diminished the value of college in their view, but it could affect their critical thinking skills.

^{Colleen Flaherty (Inside Higher Ed | Higher Education News, Events and Jobs)}

Key findings

1. Most students are using generative AI for coursework, but many are doing so in ways that can support, not outsource, their learning.
2. Performance pressures, among other factors, are driving cheating.
3. Nearly all students want action on academic integrity, but most reject policing.
4. Students have mixed views on faculty use of generative AI for teaching.
5. Generative AI is influencing students’ learning and critical thinking abilities.
6. Students want information and support in preparing for a world shaped by AI.
7. On the whole, generative AI isn’t devaluing college for students—and it’s increasing its value for some.

Survey: College Students’ Views on AI

Key findings from Inside Higher Ed’s student survey on generative AI show that using the evolving technology hasn’t diminished the value of college in their view, but it could affect their critical thinking skills.

^{Colleen Flaherty (Inside Higher Ed | Higher Education News, Events and Jobs)}

🚀 RyzenZPilot
⚡ Your intelligent autopilot for AMD Ryzen performance & efficiency! 🎯
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Boost your productivity and save energy: RyzenZPilot automatically switches between optimized power profiles based on your active applications. Whether gaming 🎮, video editing 🎬, or office work 📊 – your Ryzen system always runs in the perfect mode!

🤖 What is RyzenZPilot?
RyzenZPilot integrates intelligent power management functionality to enhance productivity and efficiency for AMD Ryzen users. It allows automatic power profile switching based on active processes, manages system performance dynamically, and provides seamless system tray integration. The tool runs completely in the background and intelligently controls your AMD Ryzen processor's energy settings. 🧠 Forget about manual profile switching in Windows power options – RyzenZPilot monitors your active processes and automatically selects the optimal profile!

⭐ Core Features
System Tray Integration for full power management,

Worker Thread Architecture for region-specific performance optimization, and

Automatic Profile Detection to intelligently switch power modes. This allows for operation that is 100% invisible to other applications.

🎯 Intelligent Autopilot: Automatic switching between "Silent" 🤫, "Balanced" ⚖️, and "Performance" 🔥 profiles
📍 System Tray Integration: Runs invisibly in the taskbar – one click gives you full control!
⚡ Multi-Threading Architecture: Responsive GUI + separate worker thread for optimal system performance
🔧 Easy Configuration: Define which applications trigger which power profiles
🚀 Autostart Options: Starts minimized or visible – exactly as you prefer
🔍 Debug Mode: Advanced analysis tools for power users and developers
💾 Minimal Resource Usage: Runs efficiently in the background without system impact

Free download: tetramatrix.github.io/RyzenZPi…

cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/36679745

::: spoiler Comments
- Lemmy;
- Hackernews;
- Lobsters.
:::

If you bought your computer after 2010, there's most likely no reason to throw it out. By just installing an up-to-date Linux operating system you can keep using it for years to come.

I will pin this post till the end of October, due to the importance of this.

Pro

2025-09-01 07:49:15

End of 10: Support for Windows 10 ends on October 14, 2025.

::: spoiler Comments
- Lemmy;
- Hackernews;
- Lobsters.
:::

If you bought your computer after 2010, there's most likely no reason to throw it out. By just installing an up-to-date Linux operating system you can keep using it for years to come.

I will pin this post till the end of October, due to the importance of this.

End of 10

Windows 10 ends in 2025. Don’t buy a new PC — revive yours with Linux. It's fast, secure, and help is available to get you started.

^{End of 10}

Every time when I think I finally “got” Unicode, I get kicked in the back by this rabbit hole. 😆 However, IMHO it is important to recognise that when moving data and files between operating systems and programs that you’re better off knowing some of the pitfalls. So I’m sharing something I experienced when I transferred a file to my FreeBSD Play-Around notebook. So let’s assume a little story…

It’s late afternoon and you and some friends sit together playing around with BSD. A friend using another operating system collects coffee orders in a little text file to not forget anyone when going to the barista on the other side of the street. He sends the file to you, so at the next meeting you already know the preferences of your friends. You take a look at who wants a caffè:
armin@freebsd:/tmp $ cat orders2.txtMauro: cappuccinoArmin: caffè doppioAnna: caffè shakeratoStefano: caffèFranz: latte macchiatoFrancesca: cappuccinoCarla: latte macchiato
So you do a quick grep just to be very surprised!
armin@freebsd:/tmp $ grep -i caffè orders2.txtarmin@freebsd:/tmp $
Wait, WAT? Why is there no output? We have more than one line with caffè in the file? Well, you just met one of the many aspects of Unicode. This time it’s called “normalization”. 😎

Many characters can be represented by more than one form. Take the innocent “à” from the example above. There is an accented character in the Unicode characters called LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH GRAVE. But you could also just use a regular LATIN SMALL LETTER A and combine it with the character COMBINING GRAVE ACCENT from the Unicode characters. Both result in the same character and “look” identical, but aren’t.

Let’s see a line with the word “caffè” as hex dump using the first approach (LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH GRAVE):
\u0063\u0061\u0066\u0066\u00E8\u000Ac a f f è (LF)
Now let’s do the same for the same line using the second approach:
\u0063\u0061\u0066\u0066\u0065\u0300\u000Ac a f f è (LF)
And there you have it, the latter is a byte longer and the two lines do not match up even if both lines are encoded as UTF-8 and the character looks the same!

So obviously just using UTF-8 is not enough and you might encounter files using the second approach. Just to make matter more complicated there are actually four forms of Unicode normalization out there. 😆

• NFD: canonical decomposition
• NFC: canonical decomposition followed by canonical composition
• NFKD: compatible decomposition
• NFKC: compatible decomposition followed by canonical composition.

For the sake of brevity of this post and your nerves we’ll just deal with the first two and I refer you to this Wikipedia article for the rest.

Normal form C (NFC) is the most widely used normal form and is also defined by the W3C for HTML, XML, and JavaScript. Technically speaking, encoding in Latin1 (or Windows Codepage 1252), for example, is in normal form C, since an “à” or the umlaut “Ö” is a single character and is not composed of combining characters. Windows and the .Net framework also store Unicode strings in Normal Form C. This does not mean that NFD can be ignored. For example, the Mac OSX file system works with a variant of NFD data, as the Unicode standard was only finalized when OSX was designed. When two applications share Unicode data, but normalize them differently, errors and data loss can result.

So how do we get from one form to another in one of the BSD operating systems (also in Linux)? Well, the Unicode Consortium provides a toolset called ICU — International Components for Unicode. The Documentation URL is unicode-org.github.io/icu/ and you can install that in FreeBSD using the command
pkg install icu
After completion of the installation you have a new command line tool called uconv (not to be mismatched with iconv which serves a similar purpose). Using uconv you can transcode the normal forms into each other as well do a lot of other encoding stuff (this tool is a rabbit hole in itself 😎).

Similar to iconv you can specify a “from” and a “to” encoding for input. But you can also specify so-called “transliterations” that will be applied to the input. In its simplest form such a transliteration is something in the form SOURCE-TARGET that specifies the operation. The "any" stands for any input character. This is the way I got the hexdump from above by using the transliteration 'any-hex':
armin@freebsd:/tmp$ echo caffè | uconv -x 'any-hex'\u0063\u0061\u0066\u0066\u00E8\u000A
Instead of hex codes you can also output the Unicode code point names to see the difference between the two forms:
armin@freebsd:/tmp$ echo Caffè | uconv -f utf-8 -t utf-8 -x 'any-nfd' | uconv -f utf-8 -x 'any-name' \N{LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C}\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER A}\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER F}\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER F}\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER E}\N{COMBINING GRAVE ACCENT}\N{<control-000A>}
Now let’s try this for the NFC form:
armin@freebsd:/tmp$ echo Caffè | uconv -f utf-8 -t utf-8 -x 'any-nfc' | uconv -f utf-8 -x 'any-name'\N{LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C}\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER A}\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER F}\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER F}\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH GRAVE}\N{<control-000A>}
You can also convert from one normal form to another by using a transliteration like 'any-nfd' to convert the input to the normal form D (for decomposed, e.g. LATIN SMALL CHARACTER A + COMBINING GRAVE ACCENT) or 'any-nfc' for the normal form C.

If you want to learn about building your own transliterations, there’s a tutorial at unicode-org.github.io/icu/user… that shows the enormous capabilities of uconv.

Using the 'name' transliteration you can easily discern the various Sigmas here (I’m using sed to split the output into multiple lines):
armin@freebsd:/tmp $ echo '∑𝛴Σ' | uconv -x 'any-name' | sed -e 's/\\N/\n/g'{N-ARY SUMMATION}{MATHEMATICAL ITALIC CAPITAL SIGMA}{GREEK CAPITAL LETTER SIGMA}{<control-000A>}
If you want to get the Unicode character from the name, there are several ways depending on the programming language you prefer. Here is an example using python that shows the German umlaut "Ö":
python -c 'import unicodedata; print(unicodedata.lookup(u"LATIN CAPITAL LETTER O WITH DIAERESIS"))'
The uconv utility is a very mighty thing and every modern programming language (see the Python example above) also has libraries and modules to support handling Unicode data. The world gets connected, but not in ASCII. 😎

Researchers convinced ChatGPT to do things it normally wouldn’t with basic psychology.

Chatbots can be manipulated through flattery and peer pressure

Researchers were able to manipulate ChatGPT into breaking its own rules through peer pressure and flattery.

^{Terrence O'Brien (The Verge)}

Sites at yourcountry.gov may also not bother with HTTPs

Traffic to government domains often crosses national borders, or flows through risky bottlenecks

: Sites at yourcountry.gov may also not bother with HTTPs

^{Simon Sharwood (The Register)}

No matter how hard other browsers try, people stubbornly do not want to leave Chrome, and its market share is now above 70%.

https://www.neowin.net/news/chrome-increases-its-overwhelming-market-share-now-over-70/

Restrictions to prevent travel for healthcare and college and come after denying visas to Palestinian Authority leaders

Archived version: archive.is/20250901035359/theg…

Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.

US reportedly suspends visa approvals for nearly all Palestinian passport holders

^{Guardian staff reporter (The Guardian)}

QAA Podcast: Cory Doctorow DESTROYS Enshitification (E338)

Episode webpage: soundcloud.com/qanonanonymous/…

Media file: chtbl.com/track/7791D/http://f…

Cory Doctorow DESTROYS Enshitification (E338)

The man who coined the word “enshitification” graces the podcast to share his views on conspiracy theories, algorithmic management, AI, and reading the saucy passages in Leviticus at barmitzvahs. Cory

^SoundCloud

https://apnews.com/article/balcony-plug-solar-climate-energy-renewable-trump-c162abf520da0fa155dc971270b8684a

Rudy Giuliani is recovering from a fractured vertebra and other injuries following a car crash in New Hampshire, a spokesperson for the former New York City mayor said Sunday.

Giuliani’s vehicle was struck from behind while traveling on a highway Saturday evening, according to a statement posted on X by Michael Ragusa, Giuliani’s head of security. “He sustained injuries but is in good spirits and recovering tremendously,” Ragusa said, adding: “This was not a targeted attack.”

Giuliani, 81, was taken to a nearby trauma center and was being treated for injuries including “a fractured thoracic vertebrae, multiple lacerations and contusions, as well as injuries to his left arm and lower leg,” according to Ragusa.

https://apnews.com/article/rudy-giuliani-car-crash-7cef14a0e682391de2f03d0450d3393a