The Verge: “Leap seconds cause chaos for computers — so Meta wants to get rid of them”

When a leap second was added in 2012, it caused substantial outages for sites like Foursquare, Reddit, LinkedIn, and Yelp. By 2015, when the next leap second was due, engineers had mostly learned their lessons, but there were still some glitches. Ditto 2016. As Linux creator Linus Torvalds put it: Almost every time we have a leap second, we find something. It’s really annoying, because it’s a classic case of code that is basically never run, and thus not tested by users under their normal conditions.

This is why social media conglomerate Meta wants to get rid of the leap second. In a blog post published yesterday, the company’s engineering team outlined their argument against adding leap seconds, saying it’s an adjustment that mainly benefits scientists and astronomers (as it allows them to make observations of celestial bodies using UTC). This benefit is less important than it once was, says Meta, and outweighed by the confusion leap seconds cause in the tech world.

Introducing new leap seconds is a risky practice that does more harm than good, and we believe it is time to introduce new technologies to replace it, says the company.

James Vincent

Sounds like a self-serving proposal rooted in the arrogant belief that tech companies are so important to our lives and economy that their points of view take precedence over anyone else’s. Maybe Facebook should simply hire better software engineers, and devise methods to test run code related to handling leap seconds before deploying it into production. I mean, Facebook’s servers can’t handle leap seconds once in a while, but we’re supposed to trust them to build entire self-contained virtual reality worlds?!

The Wall Street Journal: “How the German Economic Machine broke down”

The German economic miracle—its rise from devastation after World War II to become one of the richest countries in the world—has largely been based on exports. Roughly one-quarter of German jobs depend on exports, compared with about 6% in the U.S. Germany’s home market is too small to absorb the surplus production of its industrial firms.

But German exports have stalled since late 2017 after adjusting for inflation, and industrial output has shrunk by about 15%. That partly reflects a loss of competitiveness: German industry has fallen behind Italy’s in recent years, weighed down by surging labor costs, high corporate taxes and decades of low investment caused by a nationwide focus on debt reduction.

New barriers to international trade have also sprung up amid skepticism in some places of the benefits of an integrated world economy. In the U.S., former President Donald Trump imposed tariffs on goods imported from China and the European Union, among others. Mr. Trump was long critical of Germany’s big trade surpluses and threatened to impose tariffs on imported German autos.

Tom Fairless

A fine example of journalists taking a thesis and presenting facts in favor while quietly dismissing anything that might contradict it. Case in point: the article names examples of manufacturers complaining about rising energy costs and higher wage levels in Germany and considering relocating production to other countries, but the companies cited here are fairly small, with employees in the hundreds or low thousands. The article conveniently sidesteps if these companies would actually be able to relocate, or if that would be the more cost-efficient decision. Outsourcing manufacturing is complicated and time-consuming, a process that involves learning local regulations, building new facilities, training workers, all of which could take years to breakeven; in that time the energy crisis in Germany could very well subside.

The largest example, Ford, isn’t even considering shutting down manufacturing, instead gets mentioned because it chose to expand into Spain instead of Germany. And the article makes no reference to the recently opened Tesla Gigafactory near Berlin – the high demand for workers at this facility may be one of the reasons Ford decided to search for a more distant location, instead of competing for the same workforce.

CNN Travel: “New photos show what future of space tourism could look like”

The space tourism race is now firing on all rockets, but one company is hoping to carve out a niche as “the only carbon-neutral, zero-emission way” to travel to the edge of space.

Florida-based Space Perspective plans to take passengers up to 100,000 feet for suborbital adventures in a pressurized capsule suspended from an enormous high-tech version of a hot-air balloon. New images released July 27 show the latest patented capsule design for its Spaceship Neptune craft.

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Space Perspective aims to begin transporting groups of up to eight passengers on six-hour flights by the end of 2024. That projected time frame has moved from an earlier estimate of the beginning of that year.

As it doesn’t leave Earth’s gravity, no specialist training will be required and travelers will be able to walk around the capsule environment. The company claims the boarding process will be as simple as that of an airplane.

The trips will involve a two-hour gentle ascent above 99% of the Earth’s atmosphere. There’ll then be another leisurely two hours for passengers to enjoy the views from the cabin before the spaceship makes its two-hour descent to the ocean. Voyage to shore will be completed by ship.

Maureen O'Hare

I’m skeptical in general of ‘carbon-neutral’ claims – and here in particular of their projected timeline for the first flight, since the article mentions multiple times that some of their patents are pending and Space Perspective performed a single, uncrewed, test launch to this day. That being said, if this company manages to pull this off, it would be an awesome way to experience near-space, much better than the couple of minutes currently offered by Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic – and an unexpected chapter in the long, and riddled with failures and setbacks, history of airships.

Current Affairs: “The Dangerous Populist Science of Yuval Noah Harari”

Harari is careful to fashion himself as an objective scribe. He takes pains to tell us he is presenting the worldview of the Dataists, and not his own. But then he does something very sneaky. The Dataist view may strike you as some eccentric fringe notion, he says, but in fact it has already conquered most of the scientific establishment. In presenting the Dataist worldview as conclusive (having conquered most of the scientific establishment), he tells us that it is “objectively” true that humans are algorithms, and our march to obsolescence—as the passive recipients of decisions made by better algorithms—is unavoidable, because it is integrally tied to our humanity. Turning to the footnote in support of this sweeping statement, we find that of the four books he cites, three have been written by non-scientists—a music publicist, a trendcaster, and a magazine publisher.⁴

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Harari has seduced us with his storytelling, but a close look at his record shows that he sacrifices science to sensationalism, often makes grave factual errors, and portrays what should be speculative as certain. The basis on which he makes his statements is obscure, as he rarely provides adequate footnotes or references and is remarkably stingy with acknowledging thinkers⁵ who formulated the ideas he presents as his own. And most dangerous of all, he reinforces the narratives of surveillance capitalists, giving them a free pass to manipulate our behaviors to suit their commercial interests. To save ourselves from this current crisis, and the ones ahead of us, we must forcefully reject the dangerous populist science of Yuval Noah Harari.

Darshana Narayanan

I have been skeptical of Harari’s writing and motives for a long time without reading his books – and, if the examples in this article are representative of his work, I’m glad I didn’t waste any time trying to. Good to see a well-researched piece debunking his simplistic, and often wrong, concepts. Unfortunately, people are too quick and eager to gobble up simplistic world views that comfort them instead of using the slightest amount of critical thinking.

The Verge: “Windows 11’s widgets can now trigger notifications on your taskbar”

All Windows 11 users will start to see these new widget notifications in the coming days and weeks, thanks to an update to the Windows Web Experience Pack that powers Microsoft’s widgets feature. The notifications appear as live animations on the taskbar weather widget, and include alerts for thunderstorms and even ticker alerts when stocks you’re following go up or down.

When something important happens related to one of your other widgets, you may see an announcement from that widget on your taskbar, explains Microsoft in a support article. These announcements are meant to be quick and glanceable, and if you don’t interact with them, the taskbar will return to showing you the weather.

Tom Warren

I have noticed this change myself yesterday and I have to say, like many of the changes brought on by Windows 11, I am not a fan… Having regular weather updates in the taskbar felt fine, informative enough without becoming a distraction, but alternating these with stock notifications is rapidly becoming annoying. And unfortunately, as the article mentions, users don’t seem to have any controls over which notifications can appear on the taskbar widget, nor their duration or frequency. The only option available to escape these distractions for the time being is to… disable the widget button on the taskbar altogether – an extreme solution that likely goes against what Microsoft engineers intended for this feature.