DecaturNature @DecaturNature@social.cleverlibre.org

If you want something to look forward to, Mastodon 4.0 will be released on Monday so soon enough you'll be able to translate posts and follow hashtags!

When I joined Mastodon, everyone was saying “just pick a server (instance) it doesn’t really matter which one.” I saw Universeodon and thought “hey, that sounds cool!” Turns out it’s literally for people who love planets and space! 😂 Oops!!

I stand by my choice 🌏💫💀🖤

For our 1 year anniversary virtual events, we'll have talks, panels and breakout discussions with attendees.

Sign up here: https://bit.ly/3NRaLSG

Why should we always clean up after harmful tech rather than implementing our imagination of a technological future that serves us?

@demandprogress @GovTrack @eff @pogowatchdog @team @CREW @weareoversight @epicprivacy

Also, if you personally work on (federal) #opengov or #accountability issues, let me know, because I want to follow your account.

Having been here since 2016, I can tell you there is definitely no such thing as a consensus on usage of content warnings on the fediverse. It's a decentralized network that doesn't belong to any one party, so by definition there is no single culture on it. Different corners have different expectations and customs.

The Keck Planet Finder is now operational and has seen first light.

The first spectrum was taken of 51 Pegasi, the star hosting the first exoplanet around a main sequence star ever detected.

The PI of KPF is professor Andrew Howard. https://exoplanets.caltech.edu/kpf/

Little Mastodon tip if like me you find the content warning culture here overly annoying, you can just go into your settings and tell it to auto-show all posts and/or all sensitive posts. So you can effectively get rid of the content warnings for yourself but let everyone else still have them, which is cool.

4. You can see how early this is for this much #flu and influenza-like illnesses in this graph. The notched red line that's rising sharply way to the left is 2022-23.
It kind of reminds me of ...

The daily pandemic briefing Ground Truths today is on 2 publications regarding Covid reinfections and #LongCovid https://erictopol.substack.com/p/covid-reinfections-and-long-covid

Early adopter?

The Donnelly Centre @ University of Toronto is hiring 3 (❗) tenure-track positions in computational biology & functional #genomics.

Learn more about the positions & how to apply here: https://bit.ly/DonnellyRecruitment2022

Applications close January 16, 2023.
#bioinformatics #job

Very into "critical ignoring" as a technique for maintaining sanity and clarity online.
1. Self-nudging: removing distractions
2. Lateral reading: vetting information by leaving the online source and verifying it elsewhere
3. Do-not-feed-the-trolls: don't reward malicious actors with attention.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/09637214221121570

Starting off day 2 of #VGE22, @EvolveDotZoo@twitter.com is looking to #AI for the future of genomic epidemiology & phylodynamics, so asked OpenAI to write him a song... 😂

Oliver Pybus ends his talk saying we need to start pairing genomes with serology, demographics, and other metadata to maximize the value of genomic surveillance systems #VGE22

A reminder for anyone new to mastodon who might not be happy with some of the racist and bad actors out there on other servers... Just import the fediblock list to your personal blocks and you will be safe from the vast majority of bad actors.

If you want to join us on the QOTO matrix server (A chat room server that is federated like here) then check out this post. IT has some spaces you can join to find some interesting rooms to be a part of, all active rooms.

since a lot of folks are becoming newly interested in escaping corporate silos and moving to community-based services, are you aware of @matrix?

Matrix is to Slack and Discord, what Mastodon is to Twitter: a decentralized, federated network based on open standards/specs. It also supports full end-to-end encryption, just like Signal, so you can exchange messages privately!

If you find the fediverse interesting/inspiring, I recommend giving matrix a whirl. The quickest way to get started is to head over to https://app.element.io/ and make a (free!) account (although you can also join any number of other home servers, or host your own--they all talk to each other!).

If you _do_ end up checking it out, please do say hi! I'm @zkat:zkat.tech over there. I also manage a "space" (a group of channels, kinda like a Discord server) that you can join by clicking here: https://matrix.to/#/!tKdDSgQTxQzcOuTXqV:matrix.org?via=zkat.tech&via=matrix.org&via=envs.net

I hope this sparks your interest! I'd love to see you over there, too!

I am very happy to pay a little bit of money directly to a mastodon instance

(the wikipedia model of sustainability)

so that others with less resources don't have to,

in order to keep things running for everyone,

than to pay to keep a billionaires fragile ego intact for a symbolic thumbs up