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π El Paquete Semanal
El Paquete Semanal ("The Weekly Package") or El Paquete is a one terabyte collection of digital material distributed since around 2008 on the underground market in Cuba as a substitute for broadband Internet. Since 2015, it has been the primary source of entertainment for millions of Cubans, as Internet in Cuba has been suppressed for many years with only about a 38.8% Internet penetration rate as of 2018. El Paquete Semanal has its own page that is running in the United States, where one could view its contents and is consistently updated every week.
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- "El Paquete Semanal" | 2023-06-11 | 183 Upvotes 51 Comments
π Italian Brainrot
Italian brainrot is a series of surrealist Internet memes that emerged in early 2025 characterized by absurd photos of AI-generated creatures with pseudo-Italian names. The phenomenon quickly spread across social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, owing to its combination of synthesized "Italian" voiceovers, grotesque, funny visuals, and nonsensical narrative.
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- "Italian Brainrot" | 2025-05-31 | 12 Upvotes 2 Comments
π Five Eyes Surveillance Targets
The Five Eyes (FVEY) is an anglophone intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. These countries are parties to the multilateral UKUSA Agreement, a treaty for joint cooperation in signals intelligence.
The origins of the FVEY can be traced back to the postβWorld War II period, when the Atlantic Charter was issued by the Allies to lay out their goals for a post-war world. During the course of the Cold War, the ECHELON surveillance system was initially developed by the FVEY to monitor the communications of the former Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, although it is now used to monitor billions of private communications worldwide.
In the late 1990s, the existence of ECHELON was disclosed to the public, triggering a major debate in the European Parliament and, to a lesser extent, the United States Congress. As part of efforts in the ongoing War on Terror since 2001, the FVEY further expanded their surveillance capabilities, with much emphasis placed on monitoring the World Wide Web. The former NSA contractor Edward Snowden described the Five Eyes as a "supra-national intelligence organisation that does not answer to the known laws of its own countries". Documents leaked by Snowden in 2013 revealed that the FVEY has been spying on one another's citizens and sharing the collected information with each other in order to circumvent restrictive domestic regulations on surveillance of citizens.
In spite of continued controversy over its methods, the Five Eyes relationship remains one of the most comprehensive known espionage alliances in history.
Since processed intelligence is gathered from multiple sources, the intelligence shared is not restricted to signals intelligence (SIGINT) and often involves defence intelligence as well as human intelligence (HUMINT) and geospatial intelligence (GEOINT). The following table provides an overview of most of the FVEY agencies involved in such forms of data sharing.
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- "Five Eyes Surveillance Targets" | 2014-07-12 | 20 Upvotes 1 Comments
π First They Came
"First they came ..." is the poetic form of a post-war confessional prose by the German Lutheran pastor Martin NiemΓΆller (1892β1984). It is about the cowardice of German intellectuals and certain clergyβincluding, by his own admission, NiemΓΆller himselfβfollowing the Nazis' rise to power and subsequent incremental purging of their chosen targets, group after group. Many variations and adaptations in the spirit of the original have been published in the English language. It deals with themes of persecution, guilt, repentance, and personal responsibility.
π Aptronym
An aptronym, aptonym or euonym is a personal name aptly or peculiarly suited to its owner.
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- "Aptronym" | 2013-10-24 | 38 Upvotes 38 Comments
π John McCarthy Has Died
John McCarthy (September 4, 1927 β October 24, 2011) was an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist. McCarthy was one of the founders of the discipline of artificial intelligence. He coined the term "artificial intelligence" (AI), developed the Lisp programming language family, significantly influenced the design of the ALGOL programming language, popularized time-sharing, invented garbage collection, and was very influential in the early development of AI.
McCarthy spent most of his career at Stanford University. He received many accolades and honors, such as the 1971 Turing Award for his contributions to the topic of AI, the United States National Medal of Science, and the Kyoto Prize.
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- "John McCarthy Has Died" | 2011-10-24 | 1619 Upvotes 218 Comments
π Effective Accelerationism
Effective accelerationism, often abbreviated as "e/acc", is a 21st-century philosophical movement advocating an explicit pro-technology stance. Its proponents believe that artificial intelligence-driven progress is a great social equalizer which should be pushed forward. They see themselves as a counterweight to the cautious view that AI is highly unpredictable and needs to be regulated, often giving their opponents the derogatory labels of "doomers" or "decels" (short for deceleration).
Central to effective accelerationism is the belief that propelling technological progress at any cost is the only ethically justifiable course of action. The movement carries utopian undertones and argues that humans need to develop and build faster to ensure their survival and propagate consciousness throughout the universe.
Although effective accelerationism has been described as a fringe movement, it has gained mainstream visibility. A number of high-profile Silicon Valley figures, including investors Marc Andreessen and Garry Tan, explicitly endorsed the movement by adding "e/acc" to their public social media profiles. Yann LeCun and Andrew Ng are seen as further supporters, as they have argued for less restrictive AI regulation.
Discussed on
- "Effective Accelerationism" | 2024-01-08 | 21 Upvotes 20 Comments
π Traveling Wave Reactor
A traveling-wave reactor (TWR) is a proposed type of nuclear fission reactor that can convert fertile material into usable fuel through nuclear transmutation, in tandem with the burnup of fissile material. TWRs differ from other kinds of fast-neutron and breeder reactors in their ability to use fuel efficiently without uranium enrichment or reprocessing, instead directly using depleted uranium, natural uranium, thorium, spent fuel removed from light water reactors, or some combination of these materials. The concept is still in the development stage and no TWRs have ever been built.
The name refers to the fact that fission remains confined to a boundary zone in the reactor core that slowly advances over time. TWRs could theoretically run self-sustained for decades without refueling or removing spent fuel.
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- "Traveling Wave Reactor" | 2019-10-05 | 76 Upvotes 66 Comments
π Object Oriented Role Analysis and Modeling
The Object Oriented Role Analysis and Modeling (OOram) is a method, based on the concept of role, for performing object-oriented modeling.
Originally (1989) coined Object Oriented Role Analysis, Synthesis and Structuring (OORASS), the method focuses on describing patterns of interaction without connecting the interaction to particular objects/instances. OOram was originally developed by Trygve Reenskaug (1996), a professor at the University of Oslo and the founder of the Norwegian IT company Taskon. The use of "roles" in OOram is similar in application to that of Agent-oriented programming.
Enterprise models created according to OOram may have a number of views, with each view presenting certain aspects of a model. The following ten views are proposed:
- Area of concern view: Textual description of a phenomenon represented in the role model.
- Stimulus-response view: Describes how environment roles may trigger activities in the organization (stimulus), together with the effect (response).
- Role list view: List describing all roles of a role model together with attributes and textual explanation.
- Semantic view: Describes meaning of roles and relationships between roles.
- Collaboration view: Describes patterns of roles and message paths.
- Interface view: Describes all messages that can be sent along a message path.
- Scenario view: Provides a sample sequence of messages flowing between roles (a concrete example).
- Process view: Describes data flow between roles and associated activities performed by the roles.
- State diagram view: For each role, the legal states can be described together with messages that trigger transitions.
- Method specification view: Describes what messages to send for each method belonging to a role. May also specify procedures to perform.
OOram suggests a varied mix of formal and informal notations and languages for representing and communicating models. Which view to use depends upon the needs in a particular situation.
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- "Object Oriented Role Analysis and Modeling" | 2020-03-10 | 38 Upvotes 19 Comments
π Universal Disk Format
Universal Disk Format (UDF) is a profile of the specification known as ISO/IEC 13346 and ECMA-167 and is an open vendor-neutral file system for computer data storage for a broad range of media. In practice, it has been most widely used for DVDs and newer optical disc formats, supplanting ISO 9660. Due to its design, it is very well suited to incremental updates on both recordable and (re)writable optical media. UDF is developed and maintained by the Optical Storage Technology Association (OSTA).
Normally, authoring software will master a UDF file system in a batch process and write it to optical media in a single pass. But when packet writing to rewritable media, such as CD-RW, UDF allows files to be created, deleted and changed on-disc just as a general-purpose filesystem would on removable media like floppy disks and flash drives. This is also possible on write-once media, such as CD-R, but in that case the space occupied by the deleted files cannot be reclaimed (and instead becomes inaccessible).
Multi-session mastering is also possible in UDF, though some implementations may be unable to read disks with multiple sessions.
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- "Universal Disk Format" | 2013-01-20 | 10 Upvotes 10 Comments