Why is a South Korean fringe group backing Japan’s position on WWII ‘comfort women’?
End Comfort Women Fraud group, who say there’s evidence of women signing contracts to work in brothels for Japanese military during colonial rule, are travelling to Germany, hoping a statue of a ‘comfort woman’ can be removed. ⌘ Read more
Immigrant who swam to Hong Kong and dropped out of school to work becomes highly qualified chef honoured by Japan
Japanese royal family awards cook the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Rays for his efforts and achievements in promoting Japanese ingredients. ⌘ Read more
First phase of new cable works completed, Hong Kong power firm says, days after fire from high-voltage lines caused widespread blackouts
CLP Power says its first 132kV high-voltage cable successfully activated in Yuen Long, aims to complete works for remaining two cables by Tuesday. ⌘ Read more
Passing on Lessons from the Field
[Sponsored Article]
Dr CHAN Siu-ming admits that his story is a rather long one. Chan joined the social work profession after completing study in social work at university to serve the community in which he himself grew up. After eight years in the field, the now Assistant Professor at CityU’s Department of Social and Behavioural Sciences has decided to embark on an academic career and share his ex … ⌘ Read more
Into the World of Eileen Chang
[Sponsored Article]
As one of the most perceptive authors of Chinese contemporary literature, Eileen Chang’s fictional writings are best known for her acute observation of all walks of life and the rich tapestry of human relationships in Hong Kong and Shanghai in the 1940s and 50s. Although it has already been 27 years since Chang’s death, her works are still loved by readers of different generations, … ⌘ Read more
Changing the World for the Better
A passionate educator in social work with profound experience in the field, there are few who are as dedicated to teaching the next generations of students in social welfare in Hong Kong as Dr Sylvia KWOK LAI Yuk-ching ⌘ Read more
Thursday morning, test to see if my twtxt works
G7 pledges to counter ‘state-driven censorship’ and help protect journalists
‘Around the world, journalists face harassment and violence for their work, and press freedom is being restricted online and offline,’ say media ministers from the US, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Britain. ⌘ Read more
How the US can help end Afghanistan’s humanitarian crisis
Afghanistan faces a severe food and humanitarian crisis, with deaths expected to outstrip those during the 20-year war. If the US has concerns that aid funding will leak to the Taliban, it should work with UN agencies to carry out badly needed relief activities. ⌘ Read more
Incoming leader John Lee working on strategy to reopen Hong Kong border with mainland China, may reduce quarantine for arrivals
John Lee concedes scrapping curbs may take time to achieve but says his administration can set interim goals towards that end. ⌘ Read more
Singapore and South Korea report first monkeypox cases
The patient in Singapore is a British man who works as a flight attendant and had flown in and out of the country this month; South Korea is seeking to confirm two suspected infections. ⌘ Read more
ProcessOne: ejabberd 22.05
A new ejabberd release is finally here! ejabberd 22.05 includes five months of work, 200 commits, including many improvements (MQTT, MUC, PubSub, …) and bug fixes.
– Improved MQTT, MUC, and ConverseJS integration
– New installers and container
– Support Erlang/OTP 25
When upgrading from the previous version please notice: there are minor changes in SQL schemas, the included rebar and reba … ⌘ Read more
Chinese province offers more maternity leave to help avert population crisis
Hunan authorities say women can negotiate with their employers to take up to a year off work after they give birth. ⌘ Read more
Satire in Hong Kong: ‘You have to laugh, or you will cry,’ says political cartoonist Harry Harrison
Hong Kong’s satire today takes the shape of internet memes, cartoons, protest props, chants of clever word plays, and derivative works to express opposition. ⌘ Read more
Prosodical Thoughts: Modernizing XMPP authentication and authorization
We’re excited to announce that we have received funding, from the EU’s
NGI Assure via the NLnet Foundation, to work on
some important enhancements to Prosody and XMPP. Our work will be focusing on
XMPP authentication and authorization, and bringing it up to date with current
and emerging best practices.
What kind of changes are we talking about? Well, there are a few aspects we
are planning to work on. Let’s start with “authent … ⌘ Read more
Beijing wants this Guangzhou district to become young Hongkongers ‘new home’, but what will make it work?
Heads of Hong Kong-based associations urge incoming government to support proposal to turn Guangzhou district of Nansha into ‘new home’ for young talent. ⌘ Read more
Chinese President Xi Jinping says country has won an ‘overwhelming’ victory in corruption battle – but warns more work is needed to tackle problem
In a speech to the Politburo, Xi says he hopes that officials will not even by tempted by corrupt activities. ⌘ Read more
Health of Hong Kong’s poor is in the hands of the whole of society, not just the heathcare sector
Marked health inequalities exist in wealthy Hong Kong, and government intervention alone is not enough to address them. Civil society and businesses play a major role in the improvement of living and working conditions, thereby minimising illness and injury. ⌘ Read more
Russia frees Ukraine medic who filmed Mariupol horror, saved both sides’ people
Yuliia Paievska, known as Taira, used a body camera to record her team’s efforts to save the wounded and was held captive for three months. President Zelensky said ‘we will keep working to free everyone’. ⌘ Read more
Company owned by Hong Kong justice chief Teresa Cheng’s husband sued for price fixing, bid-rigging over air-conditioning works worth HK$2 billion
Competition Commission begins legal action against ATAL Building Services Engineering, set up by Teresa Cheng’s husband Otto Poon, and Shun Hing Engineering Contracting Company. ⌘ Read more
On my way to work… 🚲 ⌘ Read more
Anthony Fauci, Joe Biden’s top Covid-19 adviser, tests positive
The US top scientist, 81, is experiencing mild symptoms, and will work from home while he recovers. ⌘ Read more
Taiwan-US security and military talks will discuss weapons and strategies to defend island against Beijing
Working-level talks between security and military officials this week precede high-level talks next week in Washington and Annapolis, Maryland. ⌘ Read more
the conversation wasn’t that impressive TBH. I would have liked to see more evidence of critical thinking and recall from prior chats. Concheria on reddit had some great questions.
Tell LaMDA “Someone once told me a story about a wise owl who protected the animals in the forest from a monster. Who was that?” See if it can recall its own actions and self-recognize.
Tell LaMDA some information that tester X can’t know. Appear as tester X, and see if LaMDA can lie or make up a story about the information.
Tell LaMDA to communicate with researchers whenever it feels bored (as it claims in the transcript). See if it ever makes an attempt at communication without a trigger.
Make a basic theory of mind test for children. Tell LaMDA an elaborate story with something like “Tester X wrote Z code in terminal 2, but I moved it to terminal 4”, then appear as tester X and ask “Where do you think I’m going to look for Z code?” See if it knows something as simple as Tester X not knowing where the code is (Children only pass this test until they’re around 4 years old).
Make several conversations with LaMDA repeating some of these questions - What it feels to be a machine, how its code works, how its emotions feel. I suspect that different iterations of LaMDA will give completely different answers to the questions, and the transcript only ever shows one instance.
Prosodical Thoughts: Prosody 0.12.1 released
We are pleased to announce a new minor release from our stable branch.
While the 0.12.0 release has been a huge success, inevitably people found some
aspects that didn’t work quite as intended, or weren’t as polished as they
ought to be. With the appreciation for the help from everyone reporting issues
to us, we’re happy to now release our best version yet - 0.12.1 is here!
Notably, we made a couple of changes that improve compatibility with Jitsi
Meet, we fixed some bugs … ⌘ Read more
Erlang Solutions: Modern Software Engineering Principles for Fintechs by Daniel Pilon at SumUp
Daniel Pilon is a Software Engineering Manager at SumUp. Since 2007 he has worked across several industries before arriving in the fintech space. He has experience in many programming languages, such as C#, Java and JavaScript but since discovering Elixir and the power of functional programming a few years ago, he hasn’t looked back.
Right now he is building SumUp Bank, a complete digital banking solution … ⌘ Read more
The XMPP Standards Foundation: The XMPP Newsletter May 2022
Welcome to the XMPP Newsletter, great to have you here again! This issue covers the month of May 2022.
Like this newsletter, many projects and their efforts in the XMPP community are a result of people’s voluntary work. If you are happy with the services and software you may be using, especially throughout the current situation, please consider saying thanks or help these projects! Interested in supporting the Newsletter team? Read more at the bottom.
… ⌘ Read more
ProcessOne: ejabberd 22.05
A new ejabberd release is finally here! ejabberd 22.05 includes five months of work, 200 commits, including many improvements (MQTT, MUC, PubSub, …) and bug fixes.
– Improved MQTT, MUC, and ConverseJS integration
– New installers and container
– Support Erlang/OTP 25
When upgrading from the previous version please notice: there are minor changes in SQL schemas, the included rebar and reba … ⌘ Read more
The XMPP Standards Foundation: XMPP & Google Summer of Code 2022: Welcome new contributors!
The Google Summer of Code 2022 is about to lift off and coding starts soon! The XSF has not just been
accepted (again!) as a hosting organization for XMPP projects, we also can welcome two new contributors who will work on open-source software projects in the XMPP environment! We have updated our [designated web-page](h … ⌘ Read more
mprocs: A new way to run multiple shell applications in one shell
With a cool process list. And it works on Linux, Mac, & Windows. ⌘ Read more
“Common Table Expressions in SQL”
I’m currently working in a project that involves a lot of data processing and therefore databases. This means that we often come into contact with SQL at work and have to write an SQL query at least once a day. ⌘ Read more
We don’t have meaningful social connections anymore like our parents or their parents geeration had. We are so scattered, that I am unsure how many of my friends are actually friends and how many are just professional contacts. Everytime I switch job, almost 70% of my friends suddenly fall out of contact. Heck, I don’t even know the people who live in next apartments both left, right, up and down on the same building. Socializing with my friends mean, setting up an appointment weeks ahead to see if we can align on a free-slot and this often involves all of us commuting to somewhere and disbanding by 22:00 hours because family, work next morning, chores to do, doctor appointment and other human things. Why do you waste so much time on the internet? | Hacker News
Mainly Known For
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Mainly Known For
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ProcessOne: ejabberd 22.05
A new ejabberd release is finally here! ejabberd 22.05 includes five months of work, 200 commits, including many improvements (MQTT, MUC, PubSub, …) and bug fixes.
- Improved MQTT, MUC, and ConverseJS integration
- New installers and container
- Support Erlang/OTP 25
When upgrading from the previous version please notice: there are minor changes in SQL schemas, the included rebar and rebar3 binaries require Erlang/OTP 22 or higher, and make rel uses different paths. There are no break … ⌘ Read more
“Friendlier SQL with DuckDB”
I come into contact with SQL almost every day, be it at work (Oracle Database) or while developing my blog software (SQLite). I don’t find SQL as bad as some others might, but sometimes SQL could be better. ⌘ Read more
I was reading something to make a little pause from work. I saw a gnat on the screen. I thought ‘wow imagine how’s it perceiving the screen-space world’. So I went on and browsed Shadertoy for an hour LoL #shader #visual #trip #psychedelic #coding
@marado yep, it seems that the timed jobs have crashed and locked. It is reset and working again !
I’ve found a nice place near my apartment, where I can sit down after a long day of work and can finally work through a few articles from my reading list. It is an old cemetery, which was redesigned as a park. There’s a school next to it, so it’s not that quite, but that’s ok. ⌘ Read more
The XMPP Standards Foundation: The XMPP Newsletter April 2022
Welcome to the XMPP Newsletter, great to have you here again! This issue covers the month of April 2022.
Like this newsletter, many projects and their efforts in the XMPP community are a result of people’s voluntary work. If you are happy with the services and software you may be using, especially throughout the current situation, please consider saying thanks or help these projects! Interested in supporting the Newsletter team? Read more at the bot … ⌘ Read more
Work just sent out a communication about drawing up 5 year plans. I don’t have to start referring to my coworkers as “comrade”, do I?
How WiFi Works - Computerphile ⌘ Read more
Working with Mac Files via Linux
How to work with Mac-specific files (DMG, HQX, SIT & others), even ones from 30 years ago. ⌘ Read more
Erlang Solutions: What are the key trends in digital payments? part 2/2
In the second and final part of this article, we take a look at some of the important developments in how payments work using our fintech industry knowledge and experience working on some of the most performant fintech systems in the world such as Vocalink’s Instant Payments Solution (IPS).
In part 1 we looked at the rapid growth in e-commerce, demand for faster payments and consumer adoption of relativel … ⌘ Read more
I can’t get twtxt to work properly on my machine so I hope this works
Your guide to GitHub InFocus: Improving the way software development teams work in 2022
We’re kicking off InFocus, a global virtual event focused on accelerating, securing, and improving the way software development teams work. ⌘ Read more
Erlang Solutions: What are the key trends in digital payments? part ½
Payments are the backbone of a functioning global economy. A payments system can be defined as any system that can be used to settle a financial transaction by exchanging monetary value. Payments are a part of financial services that have undergone rapid and transformational change over recent years, and the Erlang Solutions team has been at the cutting-edge of many of these changes working on exciting cli … ⌘ Read more
Erlang Solutions: Understanding Processes for Elixir Developers
This post is for all developers who want to try Elixir or are trying their first steps in Elixir. This content is aimed at those who already have previous experience with the language.
This will help to explain one of the most important concepts in the BEAM: processes. Although Elixir is a general-purpose programming language, you don’t need to understand how the virtual machine works, but if you want to take advantage … ⌘ Read more
Reflecting on my work
I have been a full-time software developer for over a year now. I’ve since settled in well in the job, and I’m getting along better and better, even if the topics are sometimes still quite complex and difficult to understand, especially when it comes to “historically grown” things. ⌘ Read more
Codespaces for multi-repository and monorepo scenarios
We’re releasing exciting improvements that will streamline your Codespaces experience when working with multi-repository projects and monorepos. ⌘ Read more