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ARTE’s Le dessous des images released a video about the CrowdStrike-related IT outages in July 2024. This video traces the history of the “blue screens of death” in Windows and explores how it relates to larger themes present in speculative fiction.

An article in the Korea Herald I read today discussed the use of funeral wreaths as a protest metho in South Korea. These wreaths, traditionally used for funerals, are now being sent with messages to convey dissatisfaction.

One recent example of this is K-Pop fans who protested against a dispute between artists and their management company.

In reaction, some fans sent funeral wreaths to the agency’s headquarters in Seoul with messages such as “Hong Seunghan Out,” “Remove Hong Seunghan,” and “Riize is Forever Six” to protest his return.

In an article at The MIT Press Reader, Prof. Robert Hassan argues that Friedrich Nietzsche’s use of the Malling-Hansen writing ball may have influenced his philosophical work, boosting his productivity and altering his writing style and analytical depth.

Typing transformed Nietzsche’s consciousness — it affected how he thought about and expressed the world as he understood it. The literary scholar Walter Ong has said that writing as a technology was not simply an exterior aid but an “interior transformation of consciousness” […] The typewriter, with its capacities and its limits, its opportunities, and its curtailments, restructured his consciousness and therefore reorganized his philosophical and creative expression.

In their decision to abandon reunification, North Korea is eliminating all symbols that represented a unified Korean peninsula. I found that some of these logos, including Air Koryo’s, were actually quite beautiful. Their national air carrier logo featured a flying crane with wings shaped like the Korean Peninsula. To learn more, check out the following article from NK News.

North Korea’s national carrier Air Koryo has changed its logo to comply with a new state policy opposing unification with South Korea, according to NK News analysis. The former logo featured a flying crane with an outstretched wing in the loose shape of the Korean Peninsula. But the peninsula shape has now been replaced with a more tapered wing with stylized horizontal stripes.

The presence of pet dogs and strollers for small dogs is highly noticeable in South Korea, including where I live. A recent article from Korea JoongAng Daily suggests that the increase in dog strollers might also be due to changes in policies at shops and venues, which now require dogs to be in strollers for entry.

In Korea, more venues require pets to be kept in carriers or strollers when indoors. This trend has led to a rise in dog strollers as a necessity for pet owners who wish to bring their furry companions along when they go out. […] The Hyundai Seoul department store in Yeouido also offers dog stroller rentals. The store allows pets in strollers or carriers in most areas, except for food sections. Hyundai Department Store has adopted similar policies across its branches, catering to pet owners by permitting indoor access for pets in designated strollers or bags.

You should check out this informative Vox video that discusses why electric cars require artificial sound. The video provides captivating insights into the technology behind sound production in electric cars, known as “Acoustic Vehicle Alerting Systems,” and the creative designers who develop distinctive sounds that meet specific criteria.

In a recent episode of the BBC podcast “Thinking Allowed,” Grazia Ting Deng shares fascinating research on the spread of Chinese-owned coffee bars in Italy. As a former Bologna resident, I too was initially surprised by the high number of bars managed by Chinese or Chinese-Italian people. These bars served some of the best and most reasonably priced coffees, cappuccinos (complete with coffee art!), and breakfast pastries. The only aspect I didn’t like was that their cafes were often selling lottery tickets and having gambling machines in the back.

Grazia Ting Deng, Lecturer at Brandeis University’s Department of Anthropology, explores the paradox of “Chinese espresso". The coffee bar is a cornerstone of Italian urban life, with city residents sipping espresso at more than 100,000 of these local businesses throughout the country. So why is espresso in Italy increasingly prepared by Chinese baristas in Chinese-managed coffee bars? Deng investigates the rapid spread of Chinese-owned coffee bars since the Great Recession of 2008 and draws on her extensive ethnographic research in Bologna. She finds that longtime residents have come, sometimes resentfully, to regard Chinese expresso as a new normal and immigrants have assumed traditional roles, even as they are regarded as racial others.

Here is a noteworthy product announcement from Cloudflare. To combat the increase of AI-related web crawlers, the company is introducing tools to assist companies in managing and monetizing their website data. According to their blog post, this also tackles the issue of AI services decreasing website traffic by users opting for LLM services instead of visiting websites.

The rise of AI Large Language Models (LLMs) and other generative tools created a murkier third category. Unlike malicious bots, the crawlers associated with these platforms are not actively trying to knock your site offline or to get in the way of your customers. They are not trying to steal sensitive data; they just want to scan what is already public on your site.

However, unlike helpful bots, these AI-related crawlers do not necessarily drive traffic to your site. AI Data Scraper bots scan the content on your site to train new LLMs. Your material is then put into a kind of blender, mixed up with other content, and used to answer questions from users without attribution or the need for users to visit your site. Another type of crawler, AI Search Crawler bots, scan your content and attempt to cite it when responding to a user’s search. The downside is that those users might just stay inside of that interface, rather than visit your site, because an answer is assembled on the page in front of them.

See also this news article on The Register.

While reading The Korean Herald at my local library, I came across a column by Robert J. Fouser about the “soundscape of Korean cities”. It’s possible that he’s correct about cities like Seoul being quieter due to reduced noise from cars, public transportation, and people. However, I can certainly confirm that there are other noise disturbances, such as the music coming from street shops and the sounds of people’s digital devices (notifications, audio from videos). Here’s an excerpt from the article:

The sounds of the digital revolution are everywhere, most noticeable in the beeps of notifications. Sometimes a beep nearby causes people to check their phones. And the ubiquitous KakaoTalk sounds are now embedded in the soundscape of Korean cities. By law, cameras on Korean mobile phones are required to produce a shutter click, which creates a burst of clicks when many people take pictures of the same thing.

It seems to me that the acceptance of noises greatly varies depending on the place. My local library is one of those places that is incredibly quiet and serene. There’s even a sign reminding people to be mindful of their noise levels when using the keyboard and mouse.

Tim Harford released another outstanding episode in his “Cautionary Tale” podcast series. The episode is called “Flying Too High: AI and AirFrance Flight 447” and tells a a frightening tale of a fatal plane crash caused by pilot errors when the fly-by-wire system temporarily malfunctioned.

The episode presents interesting concepts, one of which is the de-skilling of pilots, causing them to make incorrect assessments and take wrong actions because of lack of experience of flying without the systems. The automation paradox is that as automation becomes more sophisticated and reduces the need for human intervention, human skills become even more critical for handling exceptional and often dangerous situations.