The Verge reports: Google is testing a dark mode for desktop search, Google confirmed to The Verge. If the test has rolled out to you and your system is set to dark mode, the background of Google's search pages will be a very dark gray... It's unclear how widely the test has been rolled out. A couple of Verge staffers had their search pages automatically switch to dark mode, and 9to5Google and some people on Twitter have seen the new dark mode, too. But Google's search pages are still white for me, even though I have dark mode turned on right now on macOS. It's also unclear if or when dark mode for desktop search might be officially rolled out more broadly. "We're always testing new ways to improve our experience for our users, but don't have anything specific to announce right now," Google said in a statement to The Verge.

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A recital of some facts.

1. The US is great at running elections. We have been running them since inception, longer than any other country in the world. We are the gold standard in elections.
2. That said our elections are not perfect, but their imperfections heavily favor Republicans.
3. The 2020 election was a standard US presidential election.
4. It was secure, fair and not in any way rigged.
5. Joe Biden won the election, in terms of votes, and in the Electoral College.
6. On January 6, Trump supporters attacked the US Congress, and came close to overthrowing the elected government of the United States. This was and still is shocking. We have not fully processed yet what happened on January 6.
7. Whether you think Trump caused it or not doesn't matter for this question. Trump supporters did it, in his name. It seems impossible for one to support Trump at this point, and not also support and accept the insurrection. If you self-proclaim as a Trump supporter, you also support the overthrow of the elected government of the United States by force. Sorry if this is news to you but you are not a patriot, you are a traitor.
8. Before the insurrection you could possibly shrug off our "differences" but now your friends who are Trump supporters are no longer willing to accept the result of a fair election, and their response to the fair election is to try to overthrow the government. You can't accept this. Even if they are family members. You have to turn your back on them.
9. I thought Julian Castro said it brilliantly at the impeachment trial. Asked if he was concerned about Trump winning in 2024, he said no -- he was afraid of Trump losing. He's afraid of a repeat of what happened on January 6. He's right to be afraid.
10. Trump supporters live in an incompatible alternate country. The two cannot co-exist. We have to defeat them. It's not just about the people who crashed the Capitol, it's about the people who accept that. No excuses, not interested in discussing. We do not co-exist.

The price of bitcoin — now over $57,000 — has nearly doubled in the last 7 weeks. Even Elon Musk tweeted that its price seems high — though one analyst tells Bloomberg that Tesla has already made a profit of nearly $1 billion from its recent Bitcoin investment, more than it earned selling electric cars in all of 2020. Yet speaking about bitcoin, Bill Gates said "It'd be good to get rid of that" in a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, arguing that cryptocurrency "allows for certain criminal activities." And the world's third-wealthiest man also seemed dubious about the significance of GameStop's stock surge: Bill Gates told CNBC the Reddit-fueled trading mania in GameStop and other stocks was reminiscent of betting at a casino and not investing. "People enjoy gambling. Sadly, it's a zero-sum game," the billionaire philanthropist told CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin in an interview that aired Thursday on Squawk Box. "The idea that you drive a valuation way, way beyond what is rational, it's hard to see that societally as a good use of time," Gates added. "And, you know, the people who get in it early get a windfall. The people who get in late feel like suckers...." Gates expressed concern about the role social media played in the GameStop saga and its potential implications for the U.S. equity market. "Reddit forums where people have a reason to kind of push something and get out at those high prices, you know, the SEC has got to look at this because we don't think of the stock market as just performing a casino-like role," said Gates, the third-wealthiest person in the world. "We have restrictions on gambling activities...." Some have said the GameStop craze carried populist characteristics, with smaller investors trying to stick it to hedge funds and big Wall Street firms. Gates said if that really were the aim of individual investors, it will not end well. "If the general public investor is pitted against the hedge funds, over time, the hedge funds will come out ahead," said Gates. "I'm sure there'll be lots of stories of people who got caught up in the frenzy, which really served no societal purpose."

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A recital of some facts.

1. The US is great at running elections. We have been running them since inception, longer than any other country in the world. We are the gold standard in elections.
2. That said our elections are not perfect, but their imperfections heavily favor Republicans.
3. The 2020 presidential election was secure and fair and not in any way rigged.
4. Joe Biden won the election, by a wide margin of votes, and in the Electoral College.
5. On January 6, Trump supporters attacked the US Congress, and came very close to overthrowing the elected government of the United States. This was and still is shocking. We have not fully processed yet what happened on January 6.
6. Whether you think Trump caused it or not doesn't matter for this question. Trump supporters did it, in his name. It seems impossible for one to support Trump at this point, and not also accept the insurrection. I'd be interested in hearing anyone's opinion on how this could be. For now I'm going to assume if you have a Trump sign on your car, or you self-proclaim as a Trump supporter, you also support the overthrow of the elected government of the United States by force.
7. So things changed after the insurrection. Where before you could shrug off the "differences" now your friends who are Trump supporters are no longer willing to accept the result of a fair election. I thought Ted Lieu said it brilliantly at the impeachment trial. Asked if he was concerned about Trump winning in 2024, he said no -- he was afraid of Trump losing. He's afraid of a repeat of what happened on January 6. He's right to be afraid of that. We have to make the point very clear, Trump supporters are living in an incompatible alternate universe. The two cannot co-exist. We have to defeat them, and soon. It's not just about the people who crashed the Capitol, it's more about the people who accept that. No excuses, not interested in discussing. We do not co-exist.

In the year 2000, Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich answered questions from Slashdot's readers. Late Friday night, the AV Club described Metallica's appearance at the opening ceremonies for the (now online) version of Blizzard Entertainment's annual event BlizzCon: The opening ceremonies were being broadcast online, both through the official BlizzCon page, YouTube, and Twitch. And you know what happens when licensed music gets played on the internet, don't you, folks? That's right: Copyright issues! Per Uproxx, the audio of James, Lars, and the boys' performance apparently went out as per usual on YouTube and the BlizzCon page — although the whole thing appears to have been excised from the YouTube upload of the event. But on Twitch... On Twitch, things did not go so well. Which is to say that, even though it was being hosted on the company's official twitchgaming channel, the performance was ominously preceded by a chyron noting that "The upcoming musical performance is subject to copyright protection by the applicable copyright holder." And then this happened.... Can we prove that someone at Twitch intentionally picked the dorkiest, most Zelda forest-ass music imaginable to have Metallica rock their little hearts out to, instead of broadcasting their extremely copyrighted music (and thus having to deal with the possibility of issuing one of their ubiquitous DMCA takedown notices to themselves)? Obviously not.... On the other hand, we can prove that it is extremely funny to watch this happen, especially — as many people have pointed out — since Metallica is at least partially responsible for the restrictive character of many online musical streaming laws that dominate the internet today, after their high-profile campaign against Napster way back at the dawn of the MP3. In other news, Diablo II is being remastered and re-released later this year.

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I Care a Lot is a very fine movie, in a way, the best movie I've seen in a long time. The beginning is hard to watch, but if you're getting on in years, you should know that what they depict actually happens, out of the blue people are committed, by strangers, and their assets stolen, legally. Anyway, once you get over that hump, almost every time you turn a corner, there's something new and wonderful. I haven't had my attention held by a movie like this in a long time.

"When NASA's Perseverance rover landed on Mars this week, it also brought the Linux operating system to the Red Planet," reports PC Magazine: The tidbit was mentioned in an interview NASA software engineer Tim Canham gave to IEEE Spectrum. The helicopter-like drone on board the Perseverance rover uses a Linux-powered software framework the space agency open-sourced a few years ago. "This the first time we'll be flying Linux on Mars. We're actually running on a Linux operating system," Canham said. It also might be the first time NASA has brought a Linux-based device to Mars. "There isn't a previous use of Linux that I'm aware of, definitely on the previous rovers," Canham told PCMag in an email. Past Mars rovers have used proprietary OSes, largely from the software company Wind River Systems. The same is true for the Perseverance rover itself; the machine has been installed with Wind River's VxWorks, which was used on past Mars missions. The article also notes that the helicopter-like drone Ingenuity "was built using off-the-shelf parts, including Qualcomm's Snapdragon 801 processor, a smartphone chip." "Ingenuity is purely a technology demonstration," notes ZDNet. "It's not designed to support the Perseverance mission, which is searching for signs of ancient life and collecting rock and dirt samples for later missions to return to Earth. Its mission is to show that it's possible to fly on Mars using commercial off-the-shelf hardware and open-source software."

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A team of researchers from Sydney's University of New South Wales and the South Australian Museum have investigated how the reversal of Earth's magnetic pole about 42,000 years could have changed earth's atmosphere. CNN reports: "Using the ancient trees we could measure, and date, the spike in atmospheric radiocarbon levels caused by the collapse of Earth's magnetic field," Chris Turney, a professor at UNSW Science, director of the university's Earth and Sustainability Science Research Center and co-lead author of the study, said in a statement. The team compared their new timescale with site records from caves, ice cores and peat bogs around the world. Researchers found that the reversal led to "pronounced climate change." Their modeling showed that ice sheet and glacier growth in North America and shifts in major wind belts and tropical storm systems could be traced back to the period of the magnetic pole switch, which scientists named the "Adams Event." "Effectively, the Earth's magnetic field almost disappeared, and it opened the planet up to all these high energy particles from outer space. It would've been an incredibly scary time, almost like the end of days," Turney said. Researchers say the Adams Event could explain many of Earth's evolutionary mysteries, including the extinction of Neanderthals and the sudden widespread appearance of figurative art in caves worldwide... [T]he ionized air would've increased the frequency of electrical storms — something that scientists think caused humans to seek shelter in caves... In the paper, published in the journal Science, experts say there is currently rapid movement of the north magnetic pole across the Northern Hemisphere — which could signal another reversal is on the cards. "This speed — alongside the weakening of Earth's magnetic field by around nine per cent in the past 170 years — could indicate an upcoming reversal," said Alan Cooper, honorary researcher at the South Australian Museum. "If a similar event happened today, the consequences would be huge for modern society. Incoming cosmic radiation would destroy our electric power grids and satellite networks," he said. Human activity has already pushed carbon in the atmosphere to levels "never seen by humanity before," Cooper said. "A magnetic pole reversal or extreme change in Sun activity would be unprecedented climate change accelerants. We urgently need to get carbon emissions down before such a random event happens again," he added.

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Today is the 30th anniversary of the Python programming language, "which has never been more popular, arguably thanks to the rise of data science and AI projects in the enterprise," writes Venture Beat. To celebrate the historical releases file has been updated to include Guido van Rossum's original 0.9.1 beta release from 1991. (Its ReadMe file advises that Python 0.9 "can be used instead of shell, Awk or Perl scripts, to write prototypes of real applications, or as an extension language of large systems, you name it.") And meanwhile, VentureBeat interviewed Pablo Galindo, one of the five members of the 2021 Python Steering Council and a software engineer at Bloomberg: VentureBeat: What's your current assessment of Python? Galindo: Python is a very mature language, and it has evolved. It also has a bunch of things that it carries over. Python has some baggage that nowadays feels a bit old, but the community and the ecosystem has to be preserved. It's similar to how C and C++ are evolving right now. When you make changes to the language, it's quite dangerous [because you can] break things. That's what people are scared of the most. But even though Python is quite old, there are big changes. The Python 3.1 release for this October will include pattern matching, which is one of the biggest syntax changes that Python has seen in a long time. We can learn from other languages. I think we're happy to say that we are still evolving and adapting. We have a good experience with respecting the importance of backwards compatibility. VentureBeat: If you could be Python king for a day, what would you change? Galindo: I would be a horrible King for a day. The first order of business would be to fix all these things that we have acquired over the years in the language. That would require breaking a bunch of things. Obviously, I will not do that, but I think one of the things I really would like to see in the future is for Python to become faster than it is. I think Python still has a lot of potential to become faster. I'm thinking this will be impossible. But one can dream. VentureBeat: What do you know now about Python today that you wish you knew when you first began using it? Galindo: I think the most important thing I learned is how many different uses there are for Python. It's important to listen to all these sorts of users when considering the evolution of the language. It's quite surprising and quite revealing to consider how changes or improvements will conflict or will interact with other users of the language. That's something that when I started I didn't even consider. It would be good if people could be empathetic to us changing the language when we have to balance these things.

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ZDNet reports: When it comes to defending the intellectual property (IP) rights of Linux and open-source software, global leading banks aren't the first businesses to come to mind. Things have changed. Barclays, the London-based global corporate and investment bank, and the TD Bank Group, with its 26-million global customers, have joined the leading open-source IP defense group, the Open Invention Network (OIN). For years, the OIN, the largest patent non-aggression consortium, has protected Linux from patent attacks and patent trolls. Recently, it expanded its scope from core Linux programs and adjacent open-source code by expanding its Linux System Definition. In particular, that means patents relating to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) 10 and the Extended File Allocation Table exFAT file system are now protected... Besides joining the OIN, Barclay is also joining the LOT Network. This is another fast-growing nonprofit group of companies that aims to stop patent trolls in their tracks. It has more than 1,100 member companies and covers over 2 million patent assets. Why? The "IP and Patentable Innovations Lead" at TD noted that activity from so-called patent assertion entities "continues to trend upward in the banking industry," according to ZDNet. He argues they "have become a tax on business and we're willing to explore any reasonable means to address such risks..."

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Finally a future-of-journalism pundit who sees (and says) that the users are a huge asset that the news industry has ceded to Facebook and Twitter. There's simply too much news happening to let the journalists try to cover it all. We need a cooperative effort. And despite all the trash talk from journalism about Facebook, a lot of very important stuff happens there, without their awareness or help. Someday they will wake up and realize they aren't doing anything anyone wants or needs. The politicos they used to control go direct to voters, as do the businesses to the consumers. We're all solving problems and all they're doing is trying to get clicks for their ads.

My perspective has shifted pretty radically since being twice-vaccinated.

Business Insider reports: Facebook executives knew for years its "potential reach" advertising metric was inflated and overruled an employee warning to adjust it to avoid a revenue hit, plaintiffs of a lawsuit against the social media giant argued in an unredacted court filing. Gizmodo writes: In a nutshell, this class action suit, which was first filed back in 2018, alleges that Facebook massaged figures for "Potential Reach" — an estimate that Facebook gives its advertisers for the number of people that might see their ad — to goad advertisers into spending more money on the platform, all in the hopes of reaching the people that Facebook had promised. These filings detail that some of Facebook's top brass, including Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, were fully aware that the company spent years exaggerating the number of eyeballs its advertisers could reach... Thanks to these unsealed filings, we know just how inflated some of those figures were. Here's an example: in 2018, Facebook told its advertisers that it had a Potential Reach of 230 million adults across the U.S., out of the 250 million adults that were counted by U.S. census data that year. But according to a 2018 Pew Research study, only about 68% (or 170 million adults) actually use the platform at all. Sandberg acknowledged in an internal email that "she'd known about problems with Potential Reach for years." But she repeatedly shot down employee's attempts to rectify those figures, according to the filing. Internally, employees acknowledged that while the product bills itself as an estimate for how many "people" your ad might reach, it is, at best, an estimate for the number of accounts — including the untold numbers of fakes and duplicates. Some employees even ran the numbers in 2018, just to see what would happen if known duplicate accounts were cut out of Potential Reach, and saw a 10% drop in the numbers advertisers were given. Facebook chose not to cut them... The suit points out that numbers Facebook continues to give its advertisers make even less sense, like telling them it can reach "100 million" 18-to-34 year old's across the country. Census data shows there's in fact only 76 million of them — and we know not all of them use Facebook.

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I was once invited to speak at an RSS conference in NY. I was living in Florida, they refused to pay my expenses, so I sold advertising for my speech. The promoters were offended. Of course all that anyone wanted to talk about at the conference was how to add advertising to RSS.

Josiah Elleston-Burrell had done everything to make his dream of studying architecture a reality. But, suddenly, in the pandemic summer of 2020, he found his fate was no longer in his hands -- and began a determined battle to reclaim his future. From a long read at The Guardian: The algorithm did what it was supposed to do. Humans, in the end, had no stomach for what it was supposed to do. Algorithms don't go rogue, they don't go on mutant rampages, they only sometimes reveal and amplify the cruddy human biases that underpin them. Ofqual's mistake was to think this exercise -- which made plain our usual tricks for filtering and limiting young lives -- would be morally tolerable as it played out in public view.

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