Nick @internic@social.cleverlibre.org

Behold the instrument that I built as a grad student that I’m still using decades later to make femtomolar level tracer measurements.

More scientists should build their own instruments.

"What have I freed people to do in their immediate environment" is a really important question -- as opposed to "what can I force people to do" -- we aren't asking the former enough when we're thinking about trying to improve this big terrifying great beautiful shared home of ours

Rite Aid’s AI facial recognition system falsely and disproportionately identified women and people of color as likely shoplifters.

Rite Aid employees acting on false alerts from the systems followed customers around stores, searched them, ordered some to leave and, if they refused, called the police to confront or remove them, at times in front of friends and family. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/21/business/rite-aid-ai-facial-recognition.html

No idea why, but A City on Mars is super discounted on Amazon right now: https://www.amazon.com/City-Mars-settle-thought-through/dp/1984881728

ESO reused this photo in a press release on climate change and astronomy (here: https://www.eso.org/public/blog/climate-change/?fbclid=IwAR0eme1MJSGNGxICR1C8WFwRXkbScqYE8yMOpDzfPis7ub1tRjRdwmfRHVo ) and I feel compelled to share it, as it's one of my favourite photos of the VLT UT4 laser guide star system in operation. It was taken with a drone by Gerhard Hüdepohl, details here: https://www.eso.org/public/images/potw1820a/

When the MAVIS instrument ( https://mavis-ao.org/ ) is installed on this telescope in a few years' time we'll be installing splitters to divide each of these laser beams into two, increasing the total number to 8.

#Astrodon #Astronomy #Telescope #Laser

Seven swans to rule them all
Six geese to find them
Five gold rings to bring them all
And in the pear tree bind them

Myers-Briggs? Oh you mean business school horoscopes

If you're feeling any sort of impostor syndrome, watch this presentation where the guy leading the team that's just-in-time optimizing-for-parallelism shell script recompilation admits at the end that after having done all that he still has to look up the bash "if then else" syntax every time.

Maybe you're not an impostor, maybe you're succeeding even though all this stuff is genuinely hard to use.

https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi22/presentation/kallas

Incredibly, OG Mickey Mouse will slip off his copyright coil on Jan. 1. https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/mickey-mouse-public-domain-disney-copyright-lawsuits-1235844322/

Meta has engaged in a “systemic and global” censorship of pro-Palestinian content.

In a scathing 51-page report, Human Rights Watch documented and reviewed more than a thousand reported instances of Meta removing content and suspending or permanently banning accounts on Facebook and Instagram that were supportive of Palestinians https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/dec/21/meta-facebook-instagram-pro-palestine-censorship-human-rights-watch-report

Bluesky has RSS 2.0 feeds for every user, built-in.

Now we have a basis for interop between Mastodon and Bluesky. Important milestone.

What can we build with this? Start thinking, building.

New scientific paper just published! 🧪 https://opg.optica.org/oe/fulltext.cfm?uri=oe-32-1-813&id=544785

@mhoye

Pasting this article about an alternative to Substack in these threads: https://raggedfeathers.com/@lilithsaintcrow/111620074261796868

Hey Substackers, guess you have seen the news about Substack refusing to remove Nazi content or stop paying Nazi content authors (https://oldfriends.live/@paul/111620175373418478), and maybe your thinking, Hey I left Twitter when the Nazi's arrived, guess I should leave Substack too! But where to go?

Good news, WordPress.com known for hosted WordPress Blogs (that now attach to the fediverse!), now has hosted WordPress Newsletters.

Check it out here: https://wordpress.com/newsletter/#:~:text=If%20you%20already%20have%20a,whenever%20you%20publish%20new%20posts

#WordPressNewsletter

I’m not an Occupationist (“PEACEFULLY & PATRIOTICALLY”), Crooked Ben Sisko is!!!

In case you or someone you know is interested in moving your newsletter: we can migrate _everything_ for you. Subscribers, posts, paid subscriptions, images, the whole nine yards. It takes minutes, not hours.

fantastic news!

Accessibility update: arXiv now offers papers in HTML format
🔗 https://blog.arxiv.org/2023/12/21/accessibility-update-arxiv-now-offers-papers-in-html-format/
#science