I still use gmail and drive for work but otherwise I'm never logged into anything google at home. Today when I tried to expand on a restaurant's hours it wouldn't let me see them without logging in, although it still worked in incognito. This restaurant screenshot is just a random other example I tried, but for the one I was actually checking google had the correct hours while the official website hasn't been updated in awhile and had the old ones (website said they're still open for dinner but they've only been doing lunch for a year or so now)

Hi! I'm a Finnish developer, and I've been scraping GPU/CPU/RAM/SSD prices across Europe for months now. I got tired of seeing the prices in Finland, so I built pricesquirrel.com, a real-time price comparison tool across 25+ European stores in 9 countries.

Some things that surprised me from the data:

GPU prices have risen ~19% across the EU over the past month, verified using a fixed basket of 176 models tracked daily at 3+ retailers, specifically to avoid the trap of cheap cards selling out and skewing the average. Germany +19.6%, France +18.1%, so it's broad-based, not one country.

Germany is consistently the cheapest EU country for hardware overall, likely due to strong retailer competition (Alternate, NBB, Mindfactory, and others all fighting for the same customers), which keeps margins thin.

Also worth noting: Amazon isn't always the cheapest option for PC hardware specifically, dedicated European retailers frequently beat it on price. The tool makes it easy to check without defaulting to Amazon out of habit.

Technical side, since I imagine some of you will ask: scraper on Hetzner + SQLite backend, Next.js frontend, updated every 6 hours. Fully self-built, no funding, no team.

I track ~25 stores across DE, NL, FR, FI, ES, IT, BE, PL, SE. Open to feedback on the tool, or suggestions for stores I'm missing.

via bluesky

Crossposted from https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/46783815

Health data appears to be most affected by administration’s attempt to wipe findings that don’t align with its priorities, tracker shows

A database of federal law enforcement officer misconduct records. A survey measuring physical, sexual and emotional violence against children and youth. Real-time pollution readings collected by air quality monitors from US embassies around the world.

These are among the hundreds of federal datasets that the Trump administration has taken down or altered as part of its aggressive campaign to wipe all mentions of data findings that do not align with the administration’s priorities.

Over the past year and a half, at least 28 federal datasets have been deleted and another 338 data collections have been modified, according to an online tracker released last week from dataindex.us, a group of data policy experts, researchers and developers that formed last year to monitor changes to government data.

“We’re at a very vulnerable point as a nation,” said Denice Ross, former US chief data scientist under the Biden administration and a cofounder of dataindex.us. “We’re facing a future where we are not going to have the information that we need to make decisions that will save lives and benefit American communities.”

Crossposted from https://lemmy.world/post/50807832

Today's game is Control. I went Anchor hunting today and did that whole questline. I can't believe i had never done it up until that point. I would have expected me to easily have a run in with that location considering how accessible it is.

Nonetheless, I escorted the guy out. Then went back, found out i needed the levitate ability, progressed the story far enough to get it, then went all the way back to get it.

With this playthrough i'm not rushing through as much either. As such i've found so many references to Alan Wake that i just missed on my first playthrough. Such as this page with a narration by the man himself. There's also a Coffee Thermos and a few pages describing people going through events similar to Alan's Dreams.

I also found out i can pick up the projectors. There's nothing interesting about this, i just thought it was cool. I feel like a lot of games would just tie the projectors down rather than rendering a whole extra thing for rotating them and such. It was pretty cool.

I made my way through the whole Ordinary AWE site and i'm about to head over to the Research wing to mess with the projectors. This was about the point i remember last time getting too before the last "push" and finishing the main game. So i may very well finish it tomorrow and move back to the DLC.

Amelia Boynton Robinson (1911 - 2015)

Fri Aug 18, 1911

Image: Amelia Boynton Robinson on February 21st, 2015 [Wikipedia]

Amelia Boynton Robinson, born on this day in 1911, was an American civil rights activist who played a key role in the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches.

In 1964 and 1965, Boynton worked with Martin Luther King, Diane Nash, James Bevel, and others of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to plan civil rights demonstrations. During the infamous "Bloody Sunday" attack on the Selma to Montgomery marchers, Boynton suffered throat burns from tear gas and was beaten unconscious by police on horseback.

Despite suffering this violence, Boynton participated in the next two marches. The third was successful, and reached Montgomery on March 24th with more than 25,000 participants.

"I was brought up by people who loved others. I love people. We had no animosity. We had no feeling that we hate anyone."

- Amelia Boynton Robinson

• Date: 1911-08-18
• Learn More: snccdigital.org, www.blackpast.org, en.wikipedia.org.
• Tags: #CivilRights, #Birthdays.
• Source: www.apeoplescalendar.org

A Sydney library has removed a book critical of Israel called How to Sell a Genocide, following a complaint reportedly from a survivor of the Bondi beach terror attack.

How to Sell a Genocide critiques what it claims is the US media’s “complicity in the destruction of Gaza”.

The decision to remove the book was criticised by its author, Adam Johnson, who said calling Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide was not “a fringe or radical position”.

“They seem to be objecting largely based on the title using the word ‘genocide’,” Johnson said.

Lee Jae Myung reiterates desire for full command back in Seoul’s hands after Donald Trump cuts joint exercises, citing warm ties with Kim Jong-un

South Korea’s president ⁠has renewed his push to regain independent control of the military from the US in the event of war and urged faster progress in acquiring nuclear-powered submarines after Donald Trump’s order to cut joint drills.

On Sunday night, Trump instructed the Pentagon to “substantially reduce” this week’s joint military exercises with South Korea, saying the nuclear-armed North “has been unthreatening and respectful” and that the US president had a “very good relationship with Kim Jong-un”.

Lee Jae Myung said on Tuesday that Seoul should ​proceed without disruption with ‌the planned transfer, during his term, of ‌wartime operational control, or Opcon, of South Korean forces from the US – a goal he and the government have long held.

The hormones are working!
God my legs are long 😭

Crossposted from https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/74144681

The symbol for Amazon's VGT3, the Las Vegas facility where it scans book for AI training data.

Amazon is buying massive quantities of books, scanning them for AI training data, and destroying them in the process.

A 404 Media investigation was able to reveal Amazon’s book buying operation, which hasn’t been previously reported, by placing a tracking device in a rare book we suspected would be acquired by an AI company for training data, and following it around the country to its final destination.

That final destination was an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, Nevada. Amazon employees who work at this location say all they do is receive massive shipments of printed books which they then cut the bindings off in order to scan the books more quickly. The printed book is destroyed in the process. The logo of the Amazon team that works at this warehouse, called VGT3, is a dinosaur, brandishing its teeth and with a book in its hands.

“Amazon purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use,” an Amazon spokesperson told me in a statement.

The world’s AI companies are constantly looking for, and spending extreme resources to locate, more material to train their AI models. With books, that sometimes means destroying them in the process, something that large parts of the public have spoken up against, and which we can now confirm Amazon is doing.

In July, I published a story about booksellers who reported a historical spike in sales starting in the past year. They suspected this spike in sales was due to AI companies acquiring any books they can in search of new training data. Printed books are valuable as training data because a lot of the text they contain is not readily available on the internet, which AI companies have already scraped. The data is also conveniently organized and, if the book was printed before 2022, is guaranteed to be free of AI-generated text, which can make any AI model that is trained on it worse via a recursive process called “model collapse.”

📖 Do you know work at a facility where you scan books? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at @emanuel.404. Otherwise, send me an email at emanuel@404media.co.

These booksellers suspected AI companies were behind these large bulk purchases because of the high number of books they were buying, the seemingly random choice of books, and the fact that these buyers, unlike libraries and universities, did not seem price sensitive at all. But booksellers couldn’t say for certain who was behind the large purchases because the marketplaces where they sell their books keep the buyers anonymous. When an order comes in, a bookseller ships the sold books to a warehouse operated by the marketplaces, where books are sorted and then sent to the buyer.

In July, one bookseller told me they received a very large order of around 1,000 books on Biblio, one of these marketplaces. The seller agreed to put an Apple AirTag provided by 404 Media in one of the books included in this order so we could see where the book was going. And by extension, which company, AI or otherwise, was behind this massive order. 404 Media granted the bookseller anonymity because they worried sharing this information would harm their business. Biblio did not respond to a request for comment.

I've seen Gladiator (there's a scene involving a chariot when it flipped over, I've spotted what appeared to be a gas cannister) which definitely didn't exist during the Roman times. Also, from Pearl Harbor (2001): from one scene, you can see the USS Arizona memorial in the background if you look closely even though the movie is meant to depict 1941 during WWII.