Bookmarks - ai, war, ukraine, drone

These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week.

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Beavis and Butt-Head Become A.I. Tech Bros

Will A.I. finally be able to help Beavis and Butt-Head score? It did everybody else’s homework; they deserve something!

ai humor video

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Long Wave radio era set to end with switch-off

A campaign has begun to get two large transmitter masts listed, after the BBC’s Long Wave (LW) service is turned off.

The 700ft (213m) high Wychbold Masts in the Worcestershire countryside can be seen for miles and are often used as a landmark for drivers on the M5 near Droitwich.

They have been in use since 1934 for sending the signal across the country, as well as for transmitting important messages during the World War Two.

Local history experts and the Twentieth Century Society have called for them to become listed, due to their “historical importance”.

Droitwich was picked as a central location for the station and masts so Long Wave could reach everywhere in the UK.

bbc delete museum radio

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Definition of Done: The Complete Guide with Examples & Checklist

The Definition of Done isn’t just another Scrum formality - it’s the quality gatekeeper that prevents technical debt accumulation and ensures every Sprint delivers potentially shippable Increments. This critical commitment allows teams to:

• Eliminate quality ambiguity through explicit, measurable standards everyone understands
• Prevent scope creep by clearly defining when work is complete vs. when it’s still in progress
• Enable predictable releases because “done” means genuinely releasable, not “mostly done”
• Support distributed teams with automated verification reducing synchronous communication needs
• Scale consistently across multiple teams working on the same product with shared standards

management programming software

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tags.pub

A global hashtag server for the ActivityPub network.

tags.pub is a server for the ActivityPub network. It provides one account like foo@tags.pub for every hashtag like #foo. When public content is posted on the ActivityPub network with that hashtag, the foo@tags.pub account shares the content to its followers.

More information is available at https://tags.pub/.

activitypub hashtag javascript socialmedia

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The Last Quiet Thing

For most of human history, you bought a thing, and it was yours, and it was finished.

That word is nearly extinct.

Nothing you own is finished. Everything exists in a state of permanent incompletion, permanently needing. Your phone needs updates, needs charging, needs storage cleared, needs passwords rotated.

change design maintenance software

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New AI Tools for Stanford Arrive June 30

OpenAI ChatGPT Edu, Google Gemini Enterprise, and Anthropic Claude for Education will be available to Stanford faculty, students, postdocs, and staff on June 30. Details on how to get access to these tools from University IT (UIT) are below. These offerings are part of a campus pilot through August 2027.

This pilot was initiated in response to strong demand across campus for access to these tools, which many research groups and individuals have been purchasing on their own. Stanford’s licenses will enable better data protection as well as more favorable pricing. At the end of the pilot, utilization of the tools will be evaluated prior to continuation.

Use of these new capabilities is meant to support our teaching and research mission. As these tools create exciting new opportunities, it is important to conform AI usage to Stanford’s data protection, privacy, and academic integrity policies.

Please remember sensitive data (e.g., student records, protected health information, financial data, etc.) need to conform to Responsible Agentic AI and Responsible AI guidance. Regardless of your role on campus, you retain full responsibility for verifying AI outputs. This approach reinforces our collective responsibility to protect Stanford’s data and to take an ethical and responsible approach to using these powerful tools.

ai anthropic google openai stanford

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2nd International Workshop on Low Carbon Computing (loco2026)

The carbon footprint of ICT is rising despite the urgent need to decarbonise society and to stay within planetary boundaries. The operational and embodied carbon emissions from ICT are already estimated to contribute between 2 to 3 percent of the global emissions and new technologies such as AI is driving overall growth in data centre demand, which globally rivals that of entire nations. This growth in emissions from computing is unsustainable and alternative low emissions pathways for computing are urgently needed.

The LOCO workshop provides a forum for radical ideas, early work, and critical perspectives that aims to reduce the emissions from computing.

computing conference energy sustainability

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Flower Framework: What is Federated Learning?

Federated Learning simply reverses this approach. It enables machine learning on distributed data by moving the training to the data, instead of moving the data to the training. Here’s a one-liner explanation:

Centralized machine learning: move the data to the computation

Federated (machine) Learning: move the computation to the data

By doing so, Federated Learning enables us to use machine learning (and other data science approaches) in areas where it wasn’t possible before. We can now train excellent medical AI models by enabling different hospitals to work together. We can solve financial fraud by training AI models on the data of different financial institutions. We can build novel privacy-enhancing applications (such as secure messaging) that have better built-in AI than their non-privacy-enhancing alternatives. And those are just a few of the examples that come to mind. As we deploy Federated Learning, we discover more and more areas that can suddenly be reinvented because they now have access to vast amounts of previously inaccessible data.

data federation ml privacy

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Overlooked No More: Robbie Basho, Guitar Mystic Who Sought Enlightenment in Sound

For the visionary steel-string guitarist, pianist, composer and singer Robbie Basho, making music was more than a vocation; it was a way to assuage a lifetime of psychological and physical distress — pain that only ended with his death, at age 45.

Beginning in the early 1960s, Basho expanded the steel-string guitar’s vocabulary using alternative tunings and experimental forms to create trance-like compositions.

He forged a distinctive style that drew an array of traditional world music from India, Japan, France, Germany, Persia, China and Native America. An early example is which incorporates the flavor of North Indian classical raga, using an open harmonic structure, droning strings and improvisation to enter into a deeply personal state — an immovable, hypnotic track that bends time.

guitar music

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Old fishing nets from France become vital protection against Russian drones in Ukraine

In the fishing ports along France’s Brittany coast, the discarded fishing nets pile up along the coastal quaysides.

The lifespan of a deep-sea net is between 12 and 24 months, after which they become worn and beyond repair. Until now, the estimated 800 tonnes of nets scrapped every year have been a problem.

Now, the horsehair netting, once used to trawl monkfish from the sea bed, is being used for another catch: Russian drones.

The Breton charity Kernic Solidarités has sent two consignments of nets measuring a total of 280km to Ukraine to be used to protect soldiers and civilians along the frontline where fighting is fiercest.

drone ukraine war

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Anti-Drone Nets

Recently it’s been widely reported that nets are being used as a low-tech but highly effective defence against drones. But there are many kinds of nets, and they are used differently.

drone ukraine war

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dead-web-index-data

A reachability census of the most popular domains on the web. Every domain in the DomCop top-10M popularity list (this release: the full top 10 million) is probed and labelled alive / redirect / blocked / dead — once by an honest polite bot and once by a browser-like reachability client.

commoncrawl dns measurement webarchive