Don Thompson @guardeddon@social.cleverlibre.org
Long career in telecoms, aerospace & IT. Adept at troubleshooting & problem resolution.
Fascinated by the milieu.
Pic: JFK 22L over the captain's shoulder.
Joined Nov 2022
Don Thompson
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Sit back and enjoy @Mer__edith being right about things: https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/25/signals-meredith-whittaker-ai-is-fundamentally-a-surveillance-technology/
Don Thompson
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Lighthouses of the United Kingdom. I rather like how this turned out. And it didn't take 42 hours. 😅
#rayshader adventures, an #rstats tale
@bloor
I’ve been helping friends out and using their Tesla Model Y in that endeavour. The comfort factors you describe are great, this EV is a really easy drive (putting aside Tesla’s automatics, which apart from cruise ctrl I’ve totally ignored). Last run was well within a full charge range but this Thu & Fri I’m likely to need at least one recharge (Belfast to rural Donegal to Dublin & back to Belfast). Slightly more demanding but I have a few opportunities to bag a 50kW recharger after leg 1.
Don Thompson
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The German state of Saxony has started their own #mastodon server at https://social.sachsen.de/
The server is intended for the departments and organisations that are part of the government of Saxony.
It is run by the Saxon Data Protection Authority ( @sdtb ), who states:
“I am pleased that I can provide public bodies with a data protection-compliant social network for their public relations work."
https://www.datenschutz.sachsen.de/social-media-sdtb-startet-mit-eigener-mastodon-instanz-6314.html
Don Thompson
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Don Thompson
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SO good -- the best follow the money reporting on who's behind the global attack on digital privacy yet.
TLDR: it's law enforcement x AI companies posing as NGOs w a commercial interest in selling scammy mass scanning tech. Deeply cynical, deeply shady.
Don Thompson
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AoIR will not be using Twitter/X during #AoIR2023. We will be posting here. Please see this announcement for additional information and details. https://aoir.org/aoir2023onmastodon/
Don Thompson
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I'd really welcome *technical* and NOT *political/ethical* answers to this question
I am still trying to get my head around Bluesky
Is the AT Protocol - in what it can do already, or in the short term will be able to do - better than ActivityPub that is behind Mastodon?
I can find nothing decent that explains this in layperson's terms…
Don Thompson
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First truly magical #auroraborealis of the season for me. Glad I got dressed and ventured outside. And the dog got an extra walk so he was happy too! #aurora #northernlights #norrsken
@CivilityFan @t0nyyates
Never forget Elcaset!
Don Thompson
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This network has by far the best vision. The front ends for mobile and desktop are as usuable as any other. The open source code and robustness of the server structure against tech monsters is highly attractive. For some reason, all the excitment and growth is in Bluesky and Threads. We are repeating the Betamax/VHS mistake.
Don Thompson
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Don Thompson
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The huge tragedy of the UK is that for 31 of the past 44 years The Tories and their asset-stripping short-termism has downgraded our country.
We have gone from being the second most equal society in Europe (after Germany) in 1975 to the most unequal society in Europe with crumbling infrastructure, collapsing services, bankrupt councils, & an NHS about to implode.
Once voted out they must never be allowed to rule again. Tories offer us nothing but poverty, pain, death, ignorance, & insecurity,
Don Thompson
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I thought it might be interesting for some of the #gischat members of Mastodon to share some of my everyday map making. A thread with a single map and some info on the data, techniques, tips, and tricks. Let's go!
Daily #mapmaking with #qgis
This map shows a recent #InSAR analysis for a volcanic caldera named Torfajökull. The InSAR signal shows there is surface inflation in the center of the volcanic caldera indicating sub-surface magma movement.
🧵 1/10
@HarkMahlberg @cloudguy@mastodon.terabyte-computing.com
There’s the virtual bike club, the virtual craft club, the virtual ham radio shack, the virtual culinary skills space, and so on, a space for everyone.
That idea of the global town square hasn’t really worked out so well, has it?
Even large IRL human conurbations are an aggregation of many smaller places, each with their own identity and public spaces.
To me, the fediverse seems to take the best of the IRL experience while allowing me to reach across the world.
@stevesplace @JackEric @davidallengreen
Thankfully none of the Horizon system ran on Sun SuperSPARC hardware, a platform designed with a fundamental flaw. No ECC on databuses. Sun wrote a patch to determine if an error occurred in kernel code, if that was the case the crashed, if user code it just kept going.
Horizon did migrate to Solaris but on Fujitsu’s own SPARC based design which exploited mainframe principles.
That was just the hardware.
Horizon didn’t involve formal methods, in the early phases (ever?), everyone was learning. Corporate/institutional ‘knowledge’ was migrating from an ICL-VME mainframe mindset to NT as an enterprise platform. NT had many gaps as an enterprise platform in the early development of Horizon.
To make the assumption, a computer should be regarded as operating correctly, is deeply flawed. Attempting to apply caveats would be similarly flawed.
Don Thompson
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A much-requested feature added to Mastodon 4.2.0 is the ability to follow accounts in Lists while hiding them from your Home timeline.
To do this:
1. Log into your server's website
2. Click on Lists (on mobile it's an icon with three dots and three lines)
3. Click on the list whose contents you want to hide on Home
4. Click the slider icon in the top right corner
5. Activate the option labelled "Hide these posts from home"
(Note that this hides that specific list's entire contents from Home.)
Don Thompson
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Everyone has a tiny LLM inside them that says, "as an AI language model, I don't feel like folding the laundry today."
Don Thompson
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Just renewed our domain and hosting sponsorship for usenet.org.uk
Don Thompson
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Looking for news on Mastodon? Consider these excellent accounts:
Long career in telecoms, aerospace & IT. Adept at troubleshooting & problem resolution.
Fascinated by the milieu.
Pic: JFK 22L over the captain's shoulder.
Joined Nov 2022
