Nick @internic@social.cleverlibre.org

[Tech] workers, if your job offers a matching program for charitable giving, you can use their money to support something that matters to you. If that something is Signal, our tax ID number is 82-4506840.

The U.S. General Services Administration has launched Notify.gov! They've implemented GOV.UK Notify (developed by the GDS), which was subsequently reused in Canadia as GC Notify. Now the U.S. is reusing this public domain, open source system, making it available to state and local governments to communicate with the public about access to benefits. Wisconsin, Washington, Norfolk, and Montgomery County MD are the first four customers. https://www.gsa.gov/blog/2023/12/14/gsa-launches-pilot-partnerships-to-help-people-get-benefits-through-text-messaging

Mickey Mouse is about to enter the public domain! This is not a drill! US law paused the expiration of copyright for decades beginning in the late 1990s, but on January 1, 2024, copyrights issued in 1928 expire. The mouse is included.

@pluralistic has an excellent discussion of the legal history and what it means here:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/15/mouse-liberation-front/#free-mickey

As concerns about the spread of misinformation continue to rise, journalists are increasingly tasked with correcting people’s beliefs about false information. To help broadcast news orgs with these efforts, we tested two different fact-checking approaches. https://bit.ly/CMEFactChecks

Looks like a second edition of my Singular Optics textbook is a go: first time I’ll be doing a second edition of any of my works.

I'm looking for a sketch which I'm 90% sure was from The Mitchell And Webb sound.

It was an advert for a supermarket which was basically "our massive economies of scale make us more efficient so it's pointless to shop elsewhere."

Anyone know which one it was? Thanks!

#Comedy #TipOfMyTongue

Elon Musk told bankers they wouldn’t lose any money on Twitter purchase

Lenders unlikely to get even 60 cents on the dollar for the bonds and loans.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/elon-musk-told-bankers-they-wouldnt-lose-any-money-on-twitter-purchase/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

The headline is that Stanford researchers have found ChatGPT hasn’t increased the percentage of students who cheat.

The only problem is that the data shows most students cheat (60%-70%) so cheating is already at crisis levels and all of these cheats now got better tools.

A follow up study should be how much more effective are the cheats at going undetected and cheating on even more topics than before.

If ChatGPT did your schoolwork maybe it deserves your job after all?
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/13/tech/chatgpt-did-not-increase-cheating-in-high-schools/index.html

There is no rational reason for Mastodon to limit posts to 500 characters by default.

If the limit was 100s of KB, people who still wanted to divide every thought up into a thread still could; nothing stopping them.

But if someone wanted to post a gigantic essay, they also could, and I'd see a little "More >>" link and I could ignore them faster.

We have decades of history proving that length limits do not make people concise: they just make people post threads.

Some mind-blowing, and stunning work in a new pre-print! 👀👀👀👀

If you go to a dark enough sky, you will, with your eyes, notice two bright clouds in the southern sky. These are the Magellanic Clouds (Large and Small) and they are the closest galaxies to our Milky Way (our Galaxy is trying to eat them up). They are only 160,000 - 200,000 light years from us.

The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) has been a bit of a mystery in that astronomers have debated its shape.

Now, a new study - using Australia's radio interferometer ASKAP - has taken a real close look at the SMC, and found it might actually be not one - BUT TWO galactic systems lying along the line of sight.

Huge!

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.07750

HT John Wu (Bluesky)

📸 ESO/S. Brunier

#Galaxies #MagellanicClouds #SmallMagellanicCloud #Astrodon

Show me the most 80's thing you can think of!

Today on #TheBigPicture, I reflect on the power of our votes. They're more than personal choices—they're tools for the greater good. https://thinkbigpicture.substack.com/p/george-takei-voting-internment-democrat

New from 404 Media: major security issue at networking giant Ubiquiti. Users are reporting randomly being given access to *other* peoples' security camera feeds, photos, and devices. Multiple people reported issue, Ubiquiti investigating https://www.404media.co/ubiquiti-users-somehow-being-fed-access-to-strangers-security-cameras/

A while back I posted to announce we were enabling the use of #rust as a development language within @thunderbird

Pleased to say that we've now landed support, and as of today it's possible to write new libraries and xpcom components using #rustlang, as part of the libxul build!

https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/8a0750b85f6d85fbf5c2e17a29fbc8112112c374

Don't worry, we're not about to "RIIR" - this is enabling new code next year to supercharge the backend architecture for your favourite mail client.

Interesting article, published in Nature.

“#LLMs are being proposed for use in the healthcare setting, with some models already connecting to electronic health record systems. However, this study shows that based on our findings, these #LLMs could potentially cause harm by perpetuating debunked, racist ideas”

#AI #hype #technology #LLM

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-023-00939-z

At the very end of the book, Varoufakis calls for “a cloud rebellion to overthrow technofeudalism.” This section is very short – and short on details. That’s not a knock against the book: there are plenty of very good books that consist primarily or entirely of analysis of the problems with a system, without having to lay out a detailed program for solving those problems.

But for what it’s worth, I think there is a way to plan and execute a “cloud rebellion” – a way to use laws, technology, reverse-engineering and human rights frameworks to shatter the platforms and seize the means of computation. I lay out that program in The Internet Con: How the Seize the Means of Computation, a book I published with Verso Books a couple weeks ago:

https://www.versobooks.com/products/3035-the-internet-con

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-10-05/yanis-varoufakiss-technofeudalism-what-killed-capitalism/

#economics #pluralistic @pluralistic

PSA: #ESA's science directorate will likely open a call for a Science Communication and Education Manager on January ~Jan 8 with applications due ~3 weeks later. This opportunity is open to ESA Member State nationals and will be based in Spain (at ESAC).

If you are interested, keep your eyes open!

#LookUp, my good people! The peak of the #Geminids meteor shower is tonight & tomorrow!

The Geminids are thought to originate from asteroid Phaethon: a weird beast that emits dust a bit like a comet. These dust bunnies then becomes the meteor shower.

JAXA's DESTINY+ mission is scheduled to launch in 2025 and fly past Phaethon to check it out at close quarters, and find out a bit more about its composition. It's possible dust from such "active asteroids" could have delivered organics to Earth.

@pluralistic in https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/12/without-interoperability-apple-customers-will-never-be-secure you say "The gold standard for security claims is technical proof" and "iMessage offers end-to-end encrypted messaging." But we don't have that proof for imessage. In theory, a ton work on binary analysis on ios and imessage could give some assurance (for a few days until apple forces an update). You'd need to break apple's security to even get a copy of the binaries and disassemble them. Free software is the best path to trustworthy software.