Preceduto da feroci critiche ma anche da recensioni positive, il nuovo album di Neil Young non è certo un disco da buttare. L’inglese Mojo, che dà quattro stelle a cani e porci, gli affibbia uno striminzito due e mezzo, altri addirittura due stelle... Leggi e ascolta...

ᗩᐯᗩIᒪᗩᗷᒪᗴ

2025-11-04 09:29:14

Neil Young + Promise Of The Real - The Monsanto Years (2015)

Preceduto da feroci critiche ma anche da recensioni positive, il nuovo album di Neil Young non è certo un disco da buttare. L’inglese Mojo, che dà quattro stelle a cani e porci, gli affibbia uno striminzito due e mezzo, altri addirittura due stelle. Onestamente, dopo averlo ascoltato abbastanza velocemente (ne siamo venuti in possesso quando il numero di Luglio era già chiuso), non possiamo definire questo disco brutto, assolutamente no. Ci sono almeno quattro canzoni sopra la media, quindi belle e, anche se qualcuna ha un titolo bizzarro (su tutte A Rock Star Bucks A Coffee Shop) il mio giudizio è decisamente positivo... artesuono.blogspot.com/2015/07…

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Ascolta il disco: album.link/s/3H13KvqouxpPgY2OV…

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Neil Young + Promise Of The Real - The Monsanto Years (2015)

di Paolo Carù Preceduto da feroci critiche ma anche da recensioni positive, il nuovo album di Neil Young non è certo un disco da buttar...

^{Silvano Bottaro (Blogger)}

Until recently, if you had asked us to guess whether a mass movement to protect democracy is growing in the United States, we would have expressed skepticism. We’ve watched law firms and universities capitulate, heard little from business leaders, bemoaned the Democrats’ geriatric leadership, and nodded along to many of our friends telling us they’ve needed to stop following the news to maintain their mental health. “News avoidance” has reached an all-time high, with some 42 percent of Americans reporting that they “sometimes or often avoid the news.”

We study social change, and even we were surprised to learn that, by some estimates, six of the eight largest protests in U.S. history have taken place since 2017. While careful counts are not yet available, the No Kings marches this past Saturday will almost surely have earned a top spot on the list. In Philadelphia alone, early estimates were that more than 20,000 people would join the protest downtown, with dozens of parallel marches planned in surrounding counties.

The Golden Age of Protest Is Now

Collective action in the U.S. is surging. Recognizing our shared momentum may be key to saving democracy.

^{The MIT Press Reader}

Compounding the targeted attacks and demolitions of Gaza's buildings are restrictions meted out by Israeli authorities on the entry of various essential aid, including materials for tents.

Amjad al-Shawa, head of the Palestinian NGO Network in Gaza, noted that most of the tents used by the displaced people are worn out and do not meet the minimum requirements for shelter.

There is an urgent need for about 300,000 new tents before the arrival of winter in order to avoid an imminent humanitarian and environmental disaster, he stressed.

According to Thawabta, the ceasefire deal stipulated the introduction of more than 300,000 tents and mobile homes to shelter the over 288,000 displaced Palestinian families.

But Thawabta added that Israel did not adhere to the stipulations regarding the shelters as well as other necessities that should have entered the blockaded strip, including essential food, medicine, heavy machinery and fuel.

Between the start of the ceasefire and the end of October, only 3,203 trucks entered out of the stipulated 13,200.

On a daily basis, an average of only 145 commercial and aid trucks entered the Gaza Strip, the media office noted, while the original plan required the entry of at least 600 trucks per day.

The upcoming winter is set to worsen the already dire situation in the Gaza Strip, where Palestinians face starvation, displacement and disease.

The Gaza Media Office stated that Israel has dropped over 200,000 tonnes of bombs during the past two years, leaving more than 90 percent of the enclave destroyed.

Much of Gaza's infrastructure — including homes, schools, universities, mosques, churches, public spaces and health centres — has been reduced to rubble.

In late October, the UN agency for Palestine refugees (Unrwa) urged that "humanitarian access must be restored" as colder temperatures are expected.

"As winter approaches in Gaza, people are increasingly in need of shelter and warmth," Unrwa posted on X (formerly known as Twitter).

Israel continues to strike Gaza and block entry of tents despite truce deal

The Israeli army has continued to attack various areas across the Gaza Strip, as troops carry out demolitions of buildings despite the lack of shelters amid dropping temperatures.

^{Mera Aladam (Middle East Eye)}

Wikipedia is the most ambitious multilingual project after the Bible: There are editions in over 340 languages, and a further 400 even more obscure ones are being developed and tested. Many of these smaller editions have been swamped with automatically translated content as AI has become increasingly accessible. Volunteers working on four African languages, for instance, estimated to MIT Technology Review that between 40% and 60% of articles in their Wikipedia editions were uncorrected machine translations. And after auditing the Wikipedia edition in Inuktitut, an Indigenous language close to Greenlandic that’s spoken in Canada, MIT Technology Review estimates that more than two-thirds of pages containing more than several sentences feature portions created this way.

This is beginning to cause a wicked problem. AI systems, from Google Translate to ChatGPT, learn to “speak” new languages by scraping huge quantities of text from the internet. Wikipedia is sometimes the largest source of online linguistic data for languages with few speakers—so any errors on those pages, grammatical or otherwise, can poison the wells that AI is expected to draw from. That can make the models’ translation of these languages particularly error-prone, which creates a sort of linguistic doom loop as people continue to add more and more poorly translated Wikipedia pages using those tools, and AI models continue to train from poorly translated pages. It’s a complicated problem, but it boils down to a simple concept: Garbage in, garbage out.

“These models are built on raw data,” says Kevin Scannell, a former professor of computer science at Saint Louis University who now builds computer software tailored for endangered languages. “They will try and learn everything about a language from scratch. There is no other input. There are no grammar books. There are no dictionaries. There is nothing other than the text that is inputted.”

There isn’t perfect data on the scale of this problem, particularly because a lot of AI training data is kept confidential and the field continues to evolve rapidly. But back in 2020, Wikipedia was estimated to make up more than half the training data that was fed into AI models translating some languages spoken by millions across Africa, including Malagasy, Yoruba, and Shona. In 2022, a research team from Germany that looked into what data could be obtained by online scraping even found that Wikipedia was the sole easily accessible source of online linguistic data for 27 under-resourced languages.

This could have significant repercussions in cases where Wikipedia is poorly written—potentially pushing the most vulnerable languages on Earth toward the precipice as future generations begin to turn away from them.

“Wikipedia will be reflected in the AI models for these languages,” says Trond Trosterud, a computational linguist at the University of Tromsø in Norway, who has been raising the alarm about the potentially harmful outcomes of badly run Wikipedia editions for years. “I find it hard to imagine it will not have consequences. And, of course, the more dominant position that Wikipedia has, the worse it will be.”

How AI and Wikipedia have sent vulnerable languages into a doom spiral

Machine translators have made it easier than ever to create error-plagued Wikipedia articles in obscure languages. What happens when AI models get trained on junk pages?

^{Jacob Judah (MIT Technology Review)}

Sensitive content Clicca per aprire/chiudere

Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi went missing on Sunday after leaving a note to the family and abandoning her car by the beach.

She was found at night alive and in good condition and brought to police custody.

Israeli Channel 12 news reported that police suspect Tomer-Yerushalmi staged the attempted suicide to get rid of her phone, which she tossed into the sea. The letter she left behind was described as "ambiguous" and staged.

She appeared in court on Monday with another suspect in the same case.

Before her disappearance on Sunday, Tomer-Yerushalmi was set to be questioned over last year's leak of surveillance footage purportedly showing soldiers at Sde Teiman detention camp gang-raping a Palestinian detainee behind riot shields.

On Wednesday, the Israeli army launched a criminal investigation into the leak.

Two days later, Tomer-Yerushalmi admitted leaking the video and resigned.

The scandal has received widespread coverage in Israel, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday calling for an independent investigation into the leak, which he says caused "enormous damage to Israel's public image".

"This is perhaps the most severe propaganda attack that the state of Israel has experienced since its establishment," Netanyahu said.

The footage Tomer-Yerushalmi leaked was published in August last year amid backlash from ultranationalist Israelis at the time over a military investigation into the alleged gang-rape.

Tomer-Yerushalmi said she leaked the footage to counter pressure from far-right groups attacking the Military Advocate General's office.

At least nine Israeli soldiers were questioned over the assault in late July 2024, sparking widespread anger across Israel, with polls showing that a majority believe the accused officers should not face criminal charges.

Only five soldiers were eventually indicted for "severe abuse" of the detainee, but not for rape. The trial is ongoing.

On Sunday, the accused soldiers called for the case to be dropped.

(Tagged as NSFW for the disturbing subject matter.)

Majority of Israeli Jews believe prison rape suspects shouldn't face criminal charges

A new poll has suggested a majority of Israelis believe the prison officials accused of sexually assaulting a Palestinian detainee should not face criminal charges and just be disciplined by the army.

^{MEE staff (Middle East Eye)}

Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

Do you and your human family have interest in sharing an exciting IRL experience supporting your [team of choice] with other human fans at The Big Game? In that case, don the chosen color of your [team of choice] and head to the local [iconic stadium]; Ticketmaster has exciting ticket deals, and soon you and your human family can look as happy and excited as these virtual avatars:

Ticketmaster's personalized AI slop ads are a glimpse at the future of social media advertising, a harbinger of system that Mark Zuckerberg described last week in a Meta earnings call. This future is one where AI is used both for ad targeting and for ad generation; eventually ads are going to be hyperpersonalized to individual users, further siloing the social media experience: "Advertisers are increasingly just going to be able to give us a business objective and give us a credit card or bank account, and have the AI system basically figure out everything else that’s necessary, including generating video or different types of creative that might resonate with different people that are personalized in different ways, finding who the right customers are,” Zuckerberg said.

404 Media

2025-11-03 15:04:23

The Future of Advertising Is AI Generated Ads That Are Directly Personalized to You

Do you and your human family have interest in sharing an exciting IRL experience supporting your [team of choice] with other human fans at The Big Game? In that case, don the chosen color of your [team of choice] and head to the local [iconic stadium]; Ticketmaster has exciting ticket deals, and soon you and your human family can look as happy and excited as these virtual avatars:

Ticketmaster's personalized AI slop ads are a glimpse at the future of social media advertising, a harbinger of system that Mark Zuckerberg described last week in a Meta earnings call. This future is one where AI is used both for ad targeting and for ad generation; eventually ads are going to be hyperpersonalized to individual users, further siloing the social media experience: "Advertisers are increasingly just going to be able to give us a business objective and give us a credit card or bank account, and have the AI system basically figure out everything else that’s necessary, including generating video or different types of creative that might resonate with different people that are personalized in different ways, finding who the right customers are,” Zuckerberg said.

The Ticketmaster example you see above is rudimentary and crude, but everything we've seen over the last few months suggests that the real way Meta is bringing in revenue with AI is not through its consumer-facing products but with AI ad creation and targeting products for advertisers that allows them to create many different versions of any given ad and then to show that ad only to people it is likely to be effective on.

💡
Do you work in the advertising industry and have any insight into how generative AI is changing ad creative and targeting? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at jason.404. Otherwise, send me an email at jason@404media.co.

Ticketmaster, in this case, has has invented several virtual families whose football team allegiances change presumably based on a series of demographic, geographic, and behavioral factors that would cause you to be targeted by one of its ads. I found these ads after I was targeted by one suggesting I join this ethnically ambiguous, dead-eyed family of generic blue hat wearers at the World Series to root on, I guess, the Dodgers. I looked Ticketmaster up in Facebook’s ad library and found that it is running a series of clearly AI-generated ads, many of which use the same templates and taglines.

“There’s nothing like a sea of gold. See Vanderbilt football live and in color.” “There’s nothing like a sea of red. See USC football live and in color.” “There’s nothing like a sea of maize. See Michigan football live and in color,” and so on and so forth. There are a couple dozen of these ads for college football, and a few others that use different AI-generated people. My favorite is this one, which features the back of AI people’s heads standing and cheering at other fans and not facing where the game or field would be.

As AI slop goes, this is relatively tame fare, but it is notable that a company as big as Ticketmaster is using generative AI for its Facebook ads. It is also an instructive example that shows a big reason why Facebook and Google are bringing in so much revenue right now, and highlights the fact that social media is not so slowly being completely drowned in low-effort AI content and ads.

Here's why you're seeing more AI ads on social media, and why Meta and its advertising clients seem intent on making this the future of advertising.

- Generative AI creative material is cheap: The effort and cost required to make this series of ads is incredibly low. Generating something like this is easy and, at most, requires just a small amount of human prompting and touchup after it is generated. But most importantly, Ticketmaster doesn’t have to worry about paying human models or photographers, does not have to worry about licensing stock photos, and, notably, there are no logos or actual places highlighted in any of these ads. There are no players, no teams, just the evocation of such. There is no need to get permission from or pay for logo licensing (this reminds me of a Wheaties box of Cal Ripken that I got as a kid in the immediate aftermath of him breaking the 2131 consecutive games record. In the boxes released immediately, he was wearing only a black t-shirt and a black helmet. A few days later, after General Mills presumably secured the rights to use Orioles logos, they started selling the same box with his Orioles jersey and helmet on them).

- Less money on creative means more budget for spend, and more varieties of ads: I’ve written about this before, but a big trend in advertising right now is AI-powered ad creative trial and error. Using AI, it is now possible to make an essentially endless number of different variations of a single ad that uses slightly different language, slightly different images, slightly different calls to actions, and different links. AI targeting also means that “successful” variations of ads will essentially automatically find the audience that they’re supposed to. This means that companies can just flood social media with zillions of variations of low-effort AI ads, put their “spend” (their ad budget) into the versions that perform best, and let the targeting algorithms do the rest. AI in this case is a scaling tactic. There is no need to spend tons of time, money, and human resources refining ad copy and designing thoughtful, clever, funny, charming, or eye-catching ads. You can simply publish tons of different versions of low-effort bullshit, and largely people will only see the ones that perform well.

- This is Meta’s business model now: Meta’s user-facing commercial generative AI tools are pretty embarrassing and in my limited experience its chatbot and image and video generation tools are more rudimentary than OpenAI’s, Google’s, and other popular AI companies’ tools. There is nothing to suggest that Meta is making any real progress on Mark Zuckerberg’s apparent goal of “superintelligence.” But its AI and machine learning-powered ad targeting and ad variation tools seem to be very successful and are resulting in companies spending way more money on ads, many of which look terrible to me but which are apparently quite successful. Meta announced its third quarter earnings on Wednesday, and in its earnings call, it highlighted both Advantage+ and Andromeda, two AI advertising products that do what I described in the bullet above.

Advantage+ is its advertiser-facing AI ad optimization platform which lets advertisers optimize targeting, but also lets them use generative AI to create a bunch of variations of ads: “Advantage+ creative generates ad variations so they are personalized to each individual viewer in your audience, based on what each person might respond to,” the company advertises.

“Within our Advantage+ creative suite, the number of advertisers using at least one of our video generation features was up 20% versus the prior quarter as adoption of image animation and video expansion continues to scale. We’ve also added more generative AI features to make it easier for advertisers to optimize their ad creatives and drive increased performance. In Q3, we introduced AI-generated music so advertisers can have music generated for their ad that aligns with the tone and message of the creative,” Meta said in its third quarter earnings report.

Susan Li, Meta's CFO, said "now advertisers running sales, app or lead campaigns have end-to-end automation turned on from the beginning, allowing our systems to look across our platform to optimize performance by automatically choosing criteria like who to show the ads to and where to show them."

Andromeda, meanwhile, is designed to “supercharge Advantage+ automation with the next-gen personalized ads retrieval engine.” It is basically a machine learning-powered ad targeting tool, which helps the platform determine which ad, and which variation of an ad, to show a specific user: “Andromeda significantly enhances Meta’s ads system by enabling the integration of AI that optimizes and improves personalization capabilities at the retrieval stage and improves return on ad spend,” the company explains.

This is all going toward a place where Meta itself is delivering hyper personalized, generative AI slop ads for each individual user. In the Meta earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg described exactly this future: “Advertisers are increasingly just going to be able to give us a business objective and give us a credit card or bank account, and have the AI system basically figure out everything else that’s necessary, including generating video or different types of creative that might resonate with different people that are personalized in different ways, finding who the right customers are.”

I don’t know if Ticketmaster used Advantage+ for this ad campaign, or if this ad campaign is successful (Ticketmaster did not respond to a request for comment). But the tactics being deployed here are an early version of what Zuckerberg is describing, and what is obviously happening to social media right now.

Meta Andromeda: Supercharging Advantage+ automation with the next-gen personalized ads retrieval engine - Engineering at Meta

Andromeda is Meta’s proprietary machine learning (ML) system design for retrieval in ad recommendation focused on delivering a step-function improvement in value to our advertisers and people.  Thi…

^{Neeraj Bhatia (Meta)}

cross-posted from: lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/56920779

torrentfreak.com/global-piracy…

Global Piracy Injunction Targets VidSrc Domains, Hydra Regenerates in Russia * TorrentFreak

An attempt to quickly suspend a dozen or so VidSrc domains aimed to do significant damage, but the site lives on thanks to a backup plan.

^{Andy Maxwell (TF Publishing)}

At Lincoln Center Theater, a new play from the makers of “The Jungle” tries to dramatize the negotiations that led to the Kyoto Protocol.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/03/theater/kyoto-review.html?unlocked_article_code=1.yk8.M_eE.97mOrXROibgB

Legal resident ‘Subu’ Vedam being held in short-term center after getting murder conviction overturned earlier this year

Two different courts have called on immigration officials to halt deportation of a Pennsylvania man who spent more than 40 years in prison for a murder conviction that was recently overturned.

Subramanyam Vedam, 64, was brought to the United States by his parents when he was nine months old. Vedam is a legal permanent resident, and according to his lawyer, had his citizenship application accepted prior to his arrest in 1982. He is known by his relatives as “Subu”, per the Associated Press.

He is currently being held in a short-term center in Alexandria, Louisiana, which is equipped with an airstrip for deportations.

Two courts urge ICE to halt deportation of man wrongfully imprisoned for more than 40 years

^{Cy Neff (The Guardian)}

I found this article from earlier this year: blog.discourse.org/2025/04/dis…

However, I haven't come across that much content from Discourse platforms over here on Lemmy/Piefed. Is there more work to do with the plugins, or should we work with organizations running Discourse to help them connect with us?

For example, the threadiverse communities for OpenStreetMaps is relatively small, and being able to see / contribute to community.openstreetmap.org would be amazing.

Zohran Mamdani looks poised to become mayor of the most important city in the world tomorrow, despite the New York Times (and other major media) doing its best to smother his campaign in its crib.

Mangione, Mamdani and the Media

^{Ken Klippenstein}

Re-using old silicon means that dropping “old” GPUs can affect “new” products.

After confusing driver release, AMD says old GPUs are still actively supported

^{Andrew Cunningham (Ars Technica)}

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/google-confirms-ai-search-will-have-ads-but-they-may-look-different/

A parte scoprire che i suoi voti in educazione fisica sono scarsi, Momoka a scuola scopre di avere un ammiratore segreto...

stuff.octt.eu.org/2025/11/wris…

...Kimberly-Clark is buying Kenvue in a nearly $50 billion cash and stock deal...

Hi, how to check if One-Click-Hoster download links are online/offline without jdownloader? Any tool or website?

Thanks for any help 😀

I wish they linked a source on this, but overall seems like a breakthrough.

Chinese boffins have emerged from their smoke filled labs with a way to stop chips from going pear-shaped during manufacture by literally freezing the process mid-flow.

According to researchers at Peking University, Tsinghua, and HKU, the new method can slash lithography defects by a 99 per cent.

One of the trickiest bits of making semiconductors is photolithography, where light is used to “print” circuits onto silicon wafers. It’s rather like developing a microscopic photograph, except it costs billions and breaks more often.

The process involves spreading a photoresist, a light-sensitive goo, over the wafer. Ultraviolet light then shines through a mask that carries the circuit pattern, and the exposed material is chemically developed so some bits dissolve while others stay put. What remains forms the stencil for the later steps, like etching the metal or silicon layers.

That’s all well and good until the photoresist starts misbehaving. During development, dissolved material sometimes clumps together into microscopic particles that can stick back onto the wafer. At five-nanometre or smaller nodes, even a 30-nanometre blob can ruin a circuit.

China freezes chip chemistry to slash defects by 99 per cent

Cryogenic trick gives Beijing’s fabs a leg-up Chinese boffins have emerged from their smoke filled labs with a way to stop chips from going pear-shaped during manufacture by literally freezing the process mid-flow.

^{Nick Farrell (Fudzilla)}

This month, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine archived its trillionth webpage, and the nonprofit invited its more than 1,200 library partners and 800,000 daily users to join a celebration of the moment. To honor “three decades of safeguarding the world’s online heritage,” the city of San Francisco declared October 22 to be “Internet Archive Day.” The Archive was also recently designated a federal depository library by Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who proclaimed the organization a “perfect fit” to expand “access to federal government publications amid an increasingly digital landscape.”

The Internet Archive might sound like a thriving organization, but it only recently emerged from years of bruising copyright battles that threatened to bankrupt the beloved library project. In the end, the fight led to more than 500,000 books being removed from the Archive’s “Open Library.”

“We survived,” Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle told Ars. “But it wiped out the Library.”

An Internet Archive spokesperson confirmed to Ars that the archive currently faces no major lawsuits and no active threats to its collections. Kahle thinks “the world became stupider” when the Open Library was gutted—but he’s moving forward with new ideas.

Internet Archive’s legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost

“We survived, but it wiped out the library,” Internet Archive’s founder says.

^{Ashley Belanger (Ars Technica)}