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2023 was a big year for laser communications at ! It saw the first bi-directional laser communications relay with the performed by the mission (at over 1 Gbps), a 267 Mbps downlink from deep space (19 million miles away) by the mission, and 200 Gbps throughput on a laser link with a LEO orbiting spacecraft by the mission.

Ars Technica  
A cat video highlighted a big year for lasers in space NASA has invested more than $700 million in testing laser communications in space. https://...
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Any #PeerTube gurus around? Why, when I post a link to a video that is not on my local instance are people getting a pop-up and redirected? I thought we were all Fediverse and you can watch any video from anywhere?

Is it a setting at my end, or something at the other end? Am I doing something wrong?

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Greetings Mastodon!

My name is Sean Closson I'm an illustrator from a little village in Maine, USA. I make a lot of art featuring prehistoric creatures.

You can buy prints, tshirts, and other cool things with my work on it here:
coffeeisblack.redbubble.com

You can follow me on various other sites here:
linktr.ee/thecoffeeisblack

#introduction #paleoart #sciart #illustration #digitalart #digitalillustration #artistsonmastodon

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A new preprint from Manoel Horta Ribeiro, Shagun Jhaver, Jordi Cluet i Martinell, Marie Reignier-Tayar, and Robert West reveals the results of a first-of-a-kind “longitudinal, quasi-experimental study of 165 deplatforming events targeted at 101 influencers.” It finds that deplatforming works in reducing overall online attention paid to norm-violating figures. techpolicy.press/deplatforming

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I have ALMOST FINISHED this bonus review paper that I am writing (FOR WHOMST?!?!!?!) on integrating psychological affordances into how we define developer experience 😍

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It's mind-blowing how young some of our knowledge about the Universe is 🤯

⭐ It's only since the seminal thesis of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin in 1925 that we know that stars are mainly made of hydrogen & helium:
▶️ physicsworld.com/a/cecilia-pay

🌀 And it's just so less than 100 years ago since Hubble, building on Henrietta Swan Leavitt’s period-luminosity relation for Cepheids, has shown that our own Milky Way is just one galaxy among many:
▶️ mastodon.social/@mcnees/111681

#VicisAstro #Astrodon #astronomy

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A reminder as the country remembers the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021 by self-described ‘patriots’:

🇺🇲 Patriotism encompasses devotion to the country as a whole.

🇺🇲 Nationalism refers to devotion to only one group or people over others.

Pictured: An image from 1950 shows Superman – a refugee from another planet and a character created by two Jewish immigrants – teaching that patriotism should drive out nationalism.

theconversation.com/what-is-th

#USPolitics #Politics #Trump #Jan6

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I wonder if people uploading to @internetarchive with a user account generally realize that the email address associated with the account gets publicly attached to every upload and that you can search for uploads by email address. The entire UI makes it seem like all this would be based on the (more-anonymous) screen name. Even the sign up page implies your screen name “is how others will see you”:

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The hill I will die on re: Jan 6th is that we should stop referring to it as an assault "on the Capitol" (a building) and call it an attack on Congress (the legislative branch of the US government composed of duly elected officials who were in danger of being killed/kidnapped for political ends).

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The lasting legacy of generative AI will be distrust. I assume over half the performance reviews & peer feedback I read from now one will be as fake as a birthday card.

I assume travel photos and videos are fake on Instagram. Now I can’t even trust a Zoom video of a coworker.

Generative AI reminds me of social media except we skipped all the years of blissfully thinking it could do no wrong and went straight to all the downsides & startups minting billionaires.

heygen.com

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No, COVID mRNA Vaccines Won't Damage Your DNA. You have a “better chance of becoming Spider-Man” than being harmed by DNA from COVID vaccines. scientificamerican.com/article

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Criminal fines and fees do not improve public safety or serve as an effective deterrent in reducing further crime.

Also troubling: The negative consequences of fines and fees are disproportionately felt by people of color and those who are poor.

Some states, including Arizona, have begun scrapping court costs and fees for people unable to pay.
theconversation.com/certain-st
#criminaljustice #fedilaw #inequality

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A minor mystery that'd been bugging me when I poked around the literature on slide rules was why the ones with scales for hyperbolic functions were called "vector type". What's the specific connection between hyperbolic functions and vectors? To me there didn't seem to be one unless the vectors were in Minkowski spacetime or a hyperbolic space.

As far as I can tell, the answer is that these were sold to engineers and what they called a "vector" was specifically what I sometimes heard called a "phasor", that is, a complex number, thought of as a vector in the Argand plane, used for solving differential equations in an electronic circuit or a mechanical system. And frequently the solutions to these equations involve hyperbolic functions as well as trig functions, hence the need to evaluate them.

followingtherules.info/vectorh

It's interesting to me since this is not what I would call a "vector calculation" at all; it's solving differential equations with complex numbers. But subcultures had their own jargon and their own ways of thinking about things.

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The hero Polish hackers who fixed DRM-bricked trains have explained how they did it. There was DRM that killed power to trains, broke emergency brakes and compressors if trains had been to independent repair yard. One train was also programmed to arbitrarily break on December 21, which actually happened two weeks ago:

404media.co/polish-hackers-exp

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New from 404 Media: a Google contractor is paying parents $50 to film their children in sunglasses, hats, etc with the collected data including "eyelid shape" and "skin tone." Google confirmed the data collection in a statement; said to verify age 404media.co/google-telus-pays-

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This visualization shows the weather patterns on the exoplanet WASP-121 b, also known as Tylos. This video has been slowed to observe the patterns in the exoplanet's atmosphere in closer detail.

Credit: NASA, ESA, Q. Changeat (ESA/STScI), M. Zamani (ESA/Hubble).

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