By Erica C. Barnett You might think that after granting a permit for a day-long anti-LGBTQ rally in a park…

The post Pro-LGBTQ Protesters Stuck Outside Barricades As Far-Right “Rattle In Seattle” Took Over City Hall appeared first on PubliCola.

If you had been happy with the knowledge that the universe will end in a googol years, which is to say, ten to the power of 100, then we have terrible news. We’re sorry to be the ones to let you know that the world will in fact end in ten to the power of 78. What’s the deal? Hawking radiation and black holes. Here’s more, from Astrobnomy Now:

Originally, Hawking radiation described black holes emitting faint energy due to quantum fluctuations, suggesting they could slowly evaporate. But physicists Heino Falcke, Michael Vendrell, and Walter van Suijlekom have expanded this idea. They suggest Hawking-like radiation applies not only to black holes but to any massive object with a gravitational field—white dwarfs and neutron stars included.

Their calculations revealed that white dwarfs, long thought to last 10¹⁰⁰ years, would instead vanish in just 10⁷⁸ years. Even neutron stars and stellar black holes decay in about 10⁶⁷ years—nearly the same, despite the stronger gravity of black holes. Why? Black holes lack a surface, allowing them to reabsorb some radiation and slow down decay.

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Yahoo Finance reports that Mark Zuckerberg made bold predictions for investors on Meta's earnings call this week — about advertisers. "AI has already made us better at targeting and finding the audiences that will be interested in their products than many businesses are themselves," Zuck said, "and that keeps improving..." "If we deliver on this vision, then over the coming years, I think that the increased productivity from AI will make advertising a meaningfully larger share of global GDP than it is today..." If investors are still searching for answers to nagging questions about how massive AI investments will pay off, Zuckerberg provided the clearest reply yet: It will strengthen our core business. In fact, it is our business... On what many believe to be the cusp of an economic downturn, Meta isn't pitching its AI developments as an add-on to its operations, but as something central to its core proposition of targeted advertising... "While Meta's investments in GenAI have spooked certain investors who continue to question the return on these investments, we saw further signs of GenAI monetization in the firm's ad business," wrote Morningstar equity analyst Malik Ahmed Khan in a note on Thursday. In a powerful showing, coming after Alphabet's own impressive results, Meta noted that a new ads recommendation model it's testing for Reels has already boosted conversion rates by 5%. And nearly one-third of advertisers were using AI creative tools in the past quarter. For Zuckerberg, the enhancements AI offers to finding the right consumers and providing measurable results strengthen the case for boosting capacity and for a revamped model of advertising's scope. And with the company set to invest upwards of $70 billion toward its AI opportunity this year, the bet is not all about ads, of course. Zuckerberg outlined four other areas of focus for its AI efforts: business messaging, Meta AI, AI devices, and more engaging experiences. Meta's efforts can also be viewed as an ambitious play to take on its rivals across tech's legacy and emerging platforms. As John Blackledge, senior analyst at TD Cowen, said in a note on Thursday, the AI opportunities Zuckerberg outlined are about "ultimately taking on Google search, iPhone and ChatGPT all at once." In the pre-AI world, "Businesses used to have to generate their own ad creative and define what audiences they wanted to reach," Zuckerberg told Meta's investors this week. And by Friday's closing, Meta's stock had jumped 12.6% over its value Wednesday morning, leading Yahoo Finance to conclude that Wall Street "appears to be buying into" Zuckerberg's vision.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President's campaign continues against man he claims covered up evidence of electoral fraud in 2020

Chris Krebs, former CISA director and current political punching bag for the US President, says his Global Entry membership was revoked.…

Software developer Xe Iaso reached a breaking point earlier this year when aggressive AI crawler traffic from Amazon overwhelmed their Git repository service, repeatedly causing instability and downtime. Despite configuring standard defensive measures—adjusting robots.txt, blocking known crawler user-agents, and filtering suspicious traffic—Iaso found that AI crawlers continued evading all attempts to stop them, spoofing user-agents and cycling through residential IP addresses as proxies.

Desperate for a solution, Iaso eventually resorted to moving their server behind a VPN and creating "Anubis," a custom-built proof-of-work challenge system that forces web browsers to solve computational puzzles before accessing the site. "It's futile to block AI crawler bots because they lie, change their user agent, use residential IP addresses as proxies, and more," Iaso wrote in a blog post titled "a desperate cry for help." "I don't want to have to close off my Gitea server to the public, but I will if I have to."

Iaso's story highlights a broader crisis rapidly spreading across the open source community, as what appear to be aggressive AI crawlers increasingly overload community-maintained infrastructure, causing what amounts to persistent distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on vital public resources. According to a comprehensive recent report from LibreNews, some open source projects now see as much as 97 percent of their traffic originating from AI companies' bots, dramatically increasing bandwidth costs, service instability, and burdening already stretched-thin maintainers.

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