A weekly collection of links to interesting things curated by Colin Wright.
Border Line War
From Norway to Kazakhstan, Russia’s neighbors hold a tenuous line. Along this new Iron Curtain, images capture life haunted by the ghost of an empire that insists it has no boundaries.
In Favor of Enjoying Things on Purpose
The human being is an enjoyment-seeking creature. There’s a reason people are always trying to restrain themselves from excessive eating, drinking, scrolling, and shopping. It’s perfectly normal to pursue these and other pleasures even to the point of serious problems and early death.
Even though we are born enjoyment-mongers, we tend to overlook the greatest and most reliable source of enjoyment, which is our ability to consciously enjoy the stuff that happens anyway. We barely even talk about it.
For example, you probably sit down in a chair or on a couch ten or fifteen times a day. You can easily enjoy each of these instances of sitting down, if you make a point of it. It can feel great to relax into any decent chair. But how many times do you sit down without relishing it even a bit?
Cyberattack on Vehicle Breathalyzer Company Leaves Drivers Stranded Across the US
A cyberattack on a U.S. vehicle breathalyzer company has left drivers across the United States stranded and unable to start their vehicles.
The company, Intoxalock, says on its website that it is “currently experiencing downtime” after a cyberattack on March 14. Intoxalock sells breathalyzer devices that fit into vehicle ignition switches, and is used by people who are required to provide a negative alcohol breath sample to start their car.
Intoxalock spokesperson Rachael Larson confirmed to TechCrunch that the company had been hit by a cyberattack. Larson said the company took steps to “temporarily pause some of our systems as a precautionary measure.”
Thousands of People Are Selling Their Identities to Train AI – but at What Cost?
One morning last year, Jacobus Louw set out on his daily neighborhood walk to feed the seagulls he finds along the way. Except this time, he recorded several videos of his feet and the view as he walked on the pavement. The video earned him $14, about 10 times the country’s minimum wage, or for Louw, a 27-year-old based in Cape Town, South Africa, half a week’s worth of groceries.
The video was for an “Urban Navigation” task Louw found on Kled AI, an app that pays contributors for uploading their data, such as videos and photos, to train artificial intelligence models. In a couple of weeks, Louw made $50 by uploading pictures and videos of his everyday life.
Orbital Data Centers, Part 1: There’s No Way This Is Economically Viable, Right?
Let’s start with the basics. What, exactly, is an orbital data center?
On the ground, data centers are typically large, warehouse-sized facilities filled with racks of storage and servers, and usually some high-speed networking gear to connect everything. A data center can be small or large, but the ones SpaceX is looking to supplant are of the big kind—the ones operated by major industry players like Amazon Web Services and Google, which provide most of the online services you use today. These are sprawling buildings, or even campuses of buildings, with redundant connections to the electrical grid, on-site generators, massive banks of batteries, and enormous cooling systems to handle the heat being shed by thousands upon thousands of machines operating around the clock.
An orbital data center replicates all of that, but in space.
Lab-Grown Food Pipe Offers New Hope for Young Patients
UK scientists have grown fully functioning food pipes in a lab and successfully transplanted them into mini pigs.
Experts say the breakthrough, reported in the journal Nature Biotechnology, offers real hope to patients like two-year-old Casey Mcintyre, who was born with 11cm missing from his oesophagus.
His mum, Silviya, said they had been made aware before Casey was born that he would have major issues with his food pipe and need extensive surgeries.
Doctors have since moved his stomach up to bridge the “gap”, but it’s been a long road and he still has a feeding tube while he develops his swallowing.