Nick @internic@social.cleverlibre.org

I have never felt more respected or validated in my life than when I drove this onto the elementary school playground this morning

And the last step was a 15 min walk to the hotel.

When I said at the reception that I was coming from the Netherlands by train, I was asked how long it took, certainly 15-20 hours? Uhm no, very much not. I think all problems that trains can have sometimes, lots of folks are also overestimating how long it would take...

Anyway: good night! Will try to get some sleep ahead of tomorrow's long talk on sustainability and academic travel.

Best ensemble Halloween costumes

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/10/30/what-a-third-world-war-would-mean-for-investors

Satire is dead and The Economist killed it.

People following me for cybersecurity content: Chris Bing, one of the most distinguished reporters on this beat, recently joined the Fediverse. Chris has broken way too many stories to count and also has valuable insight into all things related to hacking. Please follow him.

@Bing_Chris

And please boost for reach.

Happy #Halloween! 🎃👻🕸️

(#JWST Image of the Crab nebula: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Webb/Webb_sees_Crab_Nebula_in_new_light ; gif by my amazing colleague O.)

#astrodon

Scientists can live for eons when hiding in cold areas because metabolism slows down.

Registrations for the island country of Anguilla's TLD— .ai —now brings in enough revenue to account for 10% of the nation's GDP.

The island is 35 sq. mi., with a population of about 15,000 people.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/08/ai-fever-turns-anguillas-ai-domain-into-a-digital-gold-mine/

#Internet

Republicans are lying when they say slashing IRS funds will lower the deficit. For each extra $1 the IRS spends auditing rich tax cheats, it can collect $12. Defunding the IRS will INCREASE the deficit.

They want to help their rich donors cheat, while the rest of us pay for it.

I just posted two video lectures from my undergrad complex analysis course. One is about Cauchy's theorem and the other is about Jordan's lemma. They both involve beautiful mathematical arguments – I hope you enjoy them!

Cauchy’s theorem
https://youtu.be/AjrkNlgwT_U

Jordan’s lemma
https://youtu.be/C5rukxDDW8U

Someday I hope to post all the lectures in this course, but for now I'm just posting occasional Zoom videos that I've recorded for whatever random reason.

Mathematician Karl Weierstrass was born #OTD, Halloween, in 1815.

The fools at The Academy all said he was mad, but in 1872 he announced that he had succeeded in creating a ~monster~.

Image: Smithsonian Institution Libraries

#ReverseEngineering is continually beaten down by DMCA-EULA combinations. Corporations want to silence your work. After getting tired of this, I decided to write about it.

I'm releasing a book called "Hacktivist Field Guide: Reverse engineering" that aims to help #hacktivist & #hackers to navigate the tricky legal world of reverse engineering.

It's available early to subscribers on my website and will be release each week though my newsletter.

If you don't want to subscribe, it will be released in full in the coming months.

Link: https://www.0x0v1.com/0x0v1-newsletter-hacktivist-field-guide-reverse-engineering-part-2/

This is available free.

#hacking #hacktivism #writer #journalism #books

Hear Classic Readings of Poe’s “The Raven” by Vincent Price, James Earl Jones, Christopher Walken, Neil Gaiman. Also: the perfect time to binge "Fall of the House of Usher" on Netflix. :) https://www.openculture.com/2023/10/hear-classic-readings-of-poes-the-raven.html

Helping someone debug someone, said they asked chatgpt about what a series of bit shift operations were doing. He thought it was actually evaluating the code, yno like it presents itself as doing. Instead its example was a) not the code he put in, with b) incorrect annotations, and c) even more incorrect sample outputs. Has been doing this all day and had just started considering maybe chatGPT was wrong.

I was like first of all never do that again, and explained how chatGPT wasnt doing anything like what he thought it was doing. We spent 2 minutes isolating that code, printing out the bit string after each operation, and he immediately understood what was going on.

I fucking hate these LLMs. Empowerment is learning how to figure things out, how to make tools for yourself and how to debug problems. These things are worse than disempowering, teaching people to be dependent on something that teaches them bullshit.

🎃The Witch Head Nebula🎃

Image Credit: NASA / STScI Digitized Sky Survey / Noel Carboni

Walled gardens, lock in, anti-interoperability, etc.

Makes me laugh every time I think of Satya Nadella testifying against Google in the DOJ Search antitrust action.

Microsoft starts blocking ‘unauthorized’ Xbox controllers and accessories - The Verge https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/30/23938206/microsoft-xbox-controller-block-unauthorized-accessory-error-0x82d60002?utm_content=bufferf90d8&utm_medium=social&utm_source=bufferapp.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Why is blood red, what makes it smell metallic, and what's behind the different types? This graphic takes a look! https://wp.me/s4aPLT-blood

Significant UX upgrade in Mastodon. If you're looking at someone else's post on a different server than your own, you no longer have to do multiple clicks and copy/paste to share the item.

You just put your own hosting server into the popup box and it shows you the post in context in your own timeline, and you can share it from there.

No this isn't perfect -- still too many steps.

But it's a major improvement.

Which means it’s actually worth even less than that.

https://www.axios.com/2023/10/29/fidelity-twitter-x-value-elon-musk

A sobering thought! #statistics #analytics more at timoelliott.com/blog/cartoons