From the article: “In some ways, the current situation has spurred an arms race. YouTube has inadvertently improved ad blockers, as the new knowledge and techniques gained from innovating within the YouTube platform are also applicable to other ad and tracking systems.”

I’m sure the email I sent to an academics using proton has gone in the spam. :( too bad

MENLO PARK, Calif. (AP) — The parent company of Instagram and Facebook has sued the Federal Trade Commission in an attempt to stop the agency from reopening a 2020 privacy settlement with the company that would prohibit it from profiting from data it collects on users under 18.

In a lawsuit filed late Wednesday in federal court in Washington, D.C., Meta Platforms Inc. said it is challenging “the structurally unconstitutional authority exercised by the FTC” in reopening the privacy agreement.

Social media divides us, makes us more extreme and less empathetic, it riles us up or sucks us into doom scrolling, making us stressed and depressed. It feels like we need to touch grass and escape to the real world.

New research shows that we might have largely misinterpreted why this is the case. It turns out that the social media internet may uniquely undermine the way our brains work but not in the way you think.

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November 28, 2023 - Turbo Pascal turns 40

Turbo Pascal was introduced by Borland in November 1983. It's officially turning 40 years old this month.

Turbo Pascal was a milestone product for the industry, it started Borland as a company and it was the first popular Integrated Development Environment or IDE. It was a great product for the time, and its success was incredible.

You can read more about Turbo Pascal it in this recent blog post from David I, but also on Wikipedia and many other sources including blog posts of mine, including the talk I did this summer in the first Pascal World Congress in Salamanca.

At Embarcadero, the company continuing working on the successors of Turbo Pascal, we just shipped version 36 of that compiler. In fact when you read "Embarcadero Delphi for Win32 compiler version 36.0" (the version of the command line compiler in Delphi 12 Athens) the compiler version number, 36, dates back to the first Turbo Pascal. Not only that, we decided to dedicate the product Easter Egg to this great anniversary.

It’s ChatGPT's first "birthday". And it was a very eventful first year for the field of AI.

Researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute, who said their study was the largest of its kind, said they found no evidence to support “popular ideas that certain groups are more at risk” from the technology.

However, Andrew Przybylski, professor at the institute—part of the University of Oxford—said that the data necessary to establish a causal connection was “absent” without more cooperation from tech companies. If apps do harm mental health, only the companies that build them have the user data that could prove it, he said.

TL;DR: Tumblr is discontinuing its Post Plus feature, allowing creators to charge for content, starting December 1st. This decision follows a leaked memo about downsizing due to struggles in meeting usage and revenue targets. Post Plus, introduced in 2021, didn't meet expectations, leading to its discontinuation. Existing Post Plus content will be private from January 2024, and creators can't produce new Post Plus content. Tipping will remain, but the future of Blaze, the sponsored post feature, is uncertain. (via chatGPT)