Still subject to a planning approval process:

https://ca.movies.yahoo.com/sadiq-khan-set-decision-londons-...

Aand it's dead

https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/other/stratford-msg-sphere-...

The original article says:

> Despite this objection from locals, planning permission was granted last year.

Which amazes me. Why on earth would Newham approve this? Your article has a clue:

> Plans for the Stratford sphere were approved by the London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC) last year, despite fierce opposition from some locals.

I vaguely remember that as part of the olympics "redevelopment", planning powers in this area were transferred from the council to LLDC. Who, being a bunch of unelected quangocrats, don't give a shit about residents, and have signed this off.

Indeed. The headline has overeager use of the present tense clearly!

And that is where it will die.

100%. The tech my father tried to use in the last year of his MND was so poor (effort to train it, reality of what it delivered- jilted voice).

The impact on his quality of life - imagine not being able to communicate at all - would have been massive were it better.

This makes me wonder whether we could create a standard monologue that someone could record, which provides a complete set of training data for that individual. Something about a quick brown fox and a lazy dog would be apropos here, but I suspect the length would be more Shakespearian than that simple typographic clever sentence.

I expect it will be a while until we can fully utilize that data, but I have to imagine that something could be done today to preserve my voice (while I am still in my prime). Effectively, this would be a sort of vocal cryogenics, betting that we can do something today that will allow us to take advantage of future technology.

This is basically what you do currently for a TTS engine if you have ALS or similar. The search term you want is "voice banking". You are given a long list of words and sentences, often complex, to read out that have all the different sounds and then these are re combined by the software. The problem is that by the time you know you need this, you often already have speech problems and so making clear sounds is difficult. Also if you're like my relative who was trilingual you would need to do it in all three languages using the current system. She got a half way decent voice bank in her native tongue, but it was still noticeably slurred. She didn't even attempt it in her second and third tongues.

The "Dicks Sporting Goods" email is insane - probably hourly at the moment, from what would appear obviously bogus email senders. What is the non-obvious answer as to why these get through?

These are so absolutely ridiculous. The only (dumb) reason I can think of is that there is a large ML model which got used to seeing certain character sequences as not spam and spammers are starting to exploit it.

It's kinda shocking as Gmail spam filtering was virtually flawless for over a decade, and now it's falling apart.

Maybe the spammers learned about adversarial networks?

Any non-ML method would trivially catch these spammers though. They share the common traits of

1. Sending identical emails to large numbers of users. 2. Using fake emails from fake domains. 3. Not looking at all like a regular email.

This is the stuff that 90s era spam filters could block.

> This is the stuff that 90s era spam filters could block.

But we are now in 2022. Those filters are loooong gone. I bet that in 20 years they will be sold as new technology.

I received 3 of these the other day. For those not aware, Dicks is the largest sporting goods store chain in the USA.

DICKS SPORTINGGOODS!! <[email protected]>

Subject: You've beean chosen! SPF: PASS with IP 40.107.117.103 Learn more DKIM: 'PASS' with domain acohhovldzbqmulu.ml

Dicks Sporting Goods Winner <[email protected]> Subject: -You've been chosen! SPF: PASS with IP 40.107.215.70 Learn more DKIM: 'PASS' with domain chistezlhekofu.ml Learn more

Google detects them all as Persian, and asks if I want to translate.

Also interesting:

Message ID <[email protected]>

The only text in the message:

Your Name Came Up For a YETI Hopper M//20 Cooler customer Gift

Ends up linking to here: https://templarswoards.com/39adf46955f3971c805bc32b65a2cb08

After filling out a 'survey' it asks for name, address, email, phone

https://www.simplediscountshop.com/staging/backpack/refresht...

It then asks for a credit card number to pay the $6.95 shipping

Funny enough, those emails caught my attention too and I was even trying to `curl -v` my way through the redirect chain before stumbling upon this thread.

Weirdly, in my case the links in the email were pointing at lnkd.in/<some payload>, which is a legit Linked in domain. However, with that payload it was 301-me to some garbage script on google storage and then some shady website. I'm curious how did they make lnkd.in respond with 301 to whatever they want and can't there be a vulnerability of some sort.

I would guess that gmail is using some kind of sender address reputation system, and these hacked accounts have high reputation on account of being used for legitimate mail traffic for a significant amount of time.

Great article. Bosch seems to be the go to for most electric bikes sold in london. My experience so far is OK; school run replacement has been brilliant. The range estimation is ridiculously bad! I find the battery bars are better estimator.

I this spurs on more entrants or drives more features. Recharging feels too frequent. There's no feedback on 'driving' style and impact on range. I'd love regenerative breaking. Silly things like a clock on the control pane would be hugely useful options.

I don't doubt many legit uses, but similar subjective observation in London. Frequently vandalised, message board for sex workers, or defacto public urinals. It was surprisingly easy to get one removed from a nearby street given minimal usage and general abuse.

Reeder + Feedly.

I spent a lovely afternoon there in '16 doing just that and concur about the odd vibe / fascinating but stagnated promise.

My dad took my brother and I in the early or maybe mid 80s. I remember feeling like it was falling apart faster than they were building it and it was a cool spot but didn't seem to be going anywhere. Seems it hasn't changed much. My surprise is actually that it has kept going all this time.

Same - hugely frustrating.

Do they not still allow quite a lot of whale hunting?

Small numbers of subsistence and traditional/ritual hunting by the Inuit, not "quite a lot" and monitored by the Department of Fisheries.

I think they allow First Nations to hunt a certain amount —don’t know how that affects sustainability though; it’s for sustenance.

First Nations hunting rights typically do not extend to commercial rights (i.e., first nations can hunt but not sell the meat) so I would be surprised to learn there's much in the way of whaling still happening nowadays. First I heard of it still being legal, though I'm not surprised to learn it - treaty rights are very slow to be renegotiated.

Japan is restarting their whaling, after 30 years

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-46682976

A lot no. Some, in sustainable ways yes.

Dumb question - how automated is an automated solution that 'refactors COBOL to java' in 18 months? Impressed with the solution / outcome.

At a wild guess, I’d imagine getting something working probably took about 18 hours, with the rest of the time spent writing tests and defining behaviour of the legacy system to prove that the port actually worked