Nick @internic@social.cleverlibre.org

Publisher Conde Nast is cutting costs at the expense of high-quality journalism and fairness to its dedicated employees. Just a small sample:

OpenAI must defend ChatGPT fabrications after failing to defeat libel suit

ChatGPT users may soon learn whether false outputs will be allowed to ruin lives.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/openai-must-defend-chatgpt-fabrications-after-failing-to-defeat-libel-suit/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

Sitting in a Spanish restaurant and five British middle aged guys on the neighboring table seem to have adopted the German (Austrian?) grandma on her first trip alone after the death of her husband into their group ... 🥺

This world still had its amazing moments 💚

🌅 Good morning.

New #research from Consumer Reports offers a rare look into the scope of Meta's online surveillance.

It goes way beyond what most may expect—Meta can know many of the websites you visit and even what you’re doing IRL.

@jonkeegan with the details: https://themarkup.org/privacy/2024/01/17/each-facebook-user-is-monitored-by-thousands-of-companies-study-indicates

How a 27-Year-Old Codebreaker Busted the Myth of Bitcoin’s Anonymity. Once, drug dealers and money launderers saw cryptocurrency as perfectly untraceable. Then a grad student named Sarah Meiklejohn proved them all wrong—and set the stage for a decade-long crackdown. https://www.wired.com/story/27-year-old-codebreaker-busted-myth-bitcoins-anonymity/

The third edition of my textbook, Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos, was published today. You can preview the first 68 pages on Google Books, or take a look at the preface below to see what's new. The main new thing is a chapter on the Kuramoto model! Hope you enjoy it.

Twitter alternative Bluesky launches RSS feeds https://boingboing.net/2024/01/16/twitter-alternative-bluesky-launches-rss-feeds.html

Greetings, all! I am in DC now, and tomorrow morning, I will be testifying before the US Senate's Homeland Security committee regarding the Cyber Safety Review Board's impact on our industry and on cyber safety in the US over the last couple of years.

You can follow it here or it might also be on C-SPAN - honestly I wouldn't know how to tell you how to find it on a TV :-) https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/hearings/the-cyber-safety-review-board-expectations-outcomes-and-enduring-questions-2/

Steamboat Willie 4k scan, uncompressed: cool! it shows the soundtrack on the side of the film as well. @internetarchive

Torrent'ed 35GBytes at 22MB/sec (26 min) from archive.org

Public domain day celebrations next week: https://blog.archive.org/2024/01/16/next-week-celebrate-the-public-domain-in-person-online/

https://archive.org/details/steamboat-willie-16mm-film-scan-4k-lossless

In a new preprint, my co-authors and I critique the increasingly broad way the concept of tipping points is being employed by natural and social scientists in climate research. We propose a correction to an excess of lumping that we think is causing confusion that may distract urgent climate action. We hope to provoke critical reflection that advances climate research and its synthesis, assessment, and communication.

https://doi.org/10.22541/essoar.170542965.59092060/v1

Apparently the mobile home park where my dad lived changed its name to "Error! Reference source not found"

For my hackathon project I did try to make CFA (Cat Factor Authentication, using your cat's microchip as a second factor) a thing 😆 The project did win a prize, but more for the experimentation then the actual result https://wpengine.com/blog/hackathon-december-2023/

#catsofmastodon #mfa #hackathon #wpengine

I’m reading lots of zero-substance criticisms of the word ‘enshittification’ by @pluralistic.

Ok so you don’t like it, then don’t use it. Invent something better (if you think it you can).

I think it’s brought the conversation to a wider audience.

The #GUSTO #Telescope currently circling #Antarctica onboard a #NASA #balloon flying at 125.000 ft completed almost 16 days of flight and one and a half turns to the south pole.

So far, it has become the most successful flight of a balloon campaign marked by leaking balloons.

The mission aims to remain aloft for another 40 days before being carried away from the continent when the volar vortex disintegrates and finally sinks into the Ocean.

Live track: https://www.csbf.nasa.gov/map/balloon8/flight736N.htm

We at @QuantinuumQC are pleased to announce the closing of a $300 million equity fundraise at a $5 billion pre-money valuation. The investors in this funding round are JP Morgan Chase, Mitsui Group, biotech company Amgen, and Honeywell.

https://www.quantinuum.com/news/honeywell-announces-the-closing-of-300-million-equity-investment-round-for-quantinuum-at-5b-pre-money-valuation

When retailers added self-checkout the expectation was that it would save them money by offloading work to customers.

In practice they now have to worry about theft and or helping customers with ID checks for booze. Many now consider it a wash.

I honestly wonder if a similar thing will happen with adoption of generative AI. Will some businesses find it takes just as much or more work to review the output of AIs than to just have humans do it?

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20240111-it-hasnt-delivered-the-spectacular-failure-of-self-checkout-technology

Beware anyone who rushes to declare a new variant mild. Many did this for Omicron and got it badly wrong. Omicron turned out to be one of the most deadly waves for many countries At very least people should wait until a wave is well over before making any assessment. We also need to include the impact of Long COVID.

I've easily found tech people on Mastodon but it's been harder to find #psychology and #neuroscience people, and I've noticed I followed mostly men, too. I've been consciously following new people when I see boosts, but it's really slow.

Then I found this tool, which finds people who are followed by people you follow, based on public information (so no permissions required!). Really nice way to get more of a diverse feed.

(And if I've just followed you today, hi!)

https://followgraph.vercel.app/

Text from an abstract: "...we also offer a number of new conjectures."

From reading the actual paper, I have inferred that the number is 1.

@wikipedia Happy birthday! Ours is tomorrow. Here's a Flickr Commons photo set for you.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/statelibraryofnsw/albums/72157621355833719/