Nick @internic@social.cleverlibre.org

If you’re not building the next Figma, you probably don’t need a SPA. Basic HTML/CSS web apps offer the best, fastest, most accessible user experience for regular text, images and forms. They’re also cheap and they last forever.

Maybe you need a couple of web components if you’re doing something really fancy, but that’s it. Enough of this nonsense, please.

— Someone who probably uses your app and weeps.

Question for AI/ML scientists out there, regarding the enormous energy needs for the tech. This should have been easy to calculate well before the technology started to get into production, so I'm surprised it's only starting to be publically considered a problem. I'm sure there has been research on computational complexity of ML algorithms, LLMs etc. Or is it more complicated than that ? Are we in a grey zone where we don't know how things are supposed to scale until we try ? @cazencott

If I had a talk called "How to Fight Dirty for Good Culture" and it's about lessons learned from doing evidence & action research work with groups (nonprofits, health, community groups, queer collectives, kids out of school) engaged in incredibly tough circumstances and battles -- and helping them win -- is there a home for this at a tech conference somewhere??

Open to suggestions! Virtual especially appreciated. I've been noodling on this talk for a while and I think it's here :D

Did you know you can easily search through your own Mastodon posts?

Just include from:me in the search field.

Instead of this, you can include in:library to show posts you have interacted with or written yourself.

If you want to search through posts of a specific user, include from:username (e.g. from:@metin)

#mastodon #MastoTips #FediTips #tip #tips #information #knowledge #fediverse

Just to make this clear to the non-Germans amongst my mutuals: there were not "10s of thousands" on the streets against #fascism in #Germany but 100s of thousands, probably around 1.4 million in total. The largest demonstrations since reunification.

Would you give your phone’s password to your boss and let them examine your phone for hours without you in the room?

When you install the “MDM” (mobile device management) that your employer likely requires to access work email and other things, YOU ARE DOING EXACTLY THAT and hoping that your employer is trustworthy.

I realize not everyone gets a choice in this, but if you have one, take it. I personally have two phones: a work one and a personal one.

A thing I wrote in a recent draft:

"...on the team side, the reality of team practices that claim to be autonomous at large organizations is that supposed independence of action is frequently sustained by senior members or managers “protecting” their teams from external dependencies and taking on the work of advocacy as individual responsibility (Moe et al., 2019; Hicks, et al 2023)."

I think this is a big point with large psychological implications although software journals, alas, did not

Just read @pluralistic 's blog post about the difficulty that @2600 is having, both with its publication and producing the #HOPE con. This is tragic - I've never attended HOPE, but I've seen many videos and read so many recaps and articles inspired by it. Support 2600 today!

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/19/hope-less/#hack-the-planet

https://www.hope.net/
https://store.2600.com/products/tickets-to-hope-xv

@michaelgemar - yes, it's really exciting how big stars speed up near the end of their lives!

For a red giant 25 times the mass of our Sun:

• Hydrogen fusion lasts 7 million years

• Helium fusion lasts 500,000 years

• Carbon fusion lasts 600 years

• Neon fusion lasts 1 year

• Oxygen fusion lasts 6 months

• Silicon fusion lasts 1 day

https://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/ryden.1/ast162_4/notes15.html

I just learned about the idea of a 'pair-instability supernova'. This a way for a star between 130 and 250 times the mass of our Sun to go boom. In fact it can explode so violently that it doesn't leave behind enough material to form a black hole. This is why we don't see many black holes in this mass range.

It relies on how light can turn into matter and antimatter!

Here's the idea:

When a star is this huge, its core can get so hot that the radiation inside is mainly gamma rays. These are so energetic that some turn into electron-positron pairs. This reduces the radiation pressure which helps hold up the star. So the star begins to collapse. This makes the core even hotter, producing more gamma ways, but these again turn into electron-positron pairs... so we can get a runaway reaction!

The collapse compresses the star's core so much that it becomes a thermonuclear fusion bomb, burning up all the star's fuel in about 2 seconds. So much energy is released that the star shoots apart, leaving no black hole or other remnant.

This kind of runaway reaction is called a 'pair instability':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair-instability_supernova

It's a bit tricky, because you might think the extra gamma rays would *increase* the radiation pressure... but apparently for stars in this mass range they turn into electron-positron pairs so fast this doesn't happen. Understanding that would take math, and I haven't gone through that math.

Recalling the details of past events is a skill only humans were thought to possess. In fact, some experts have argued, with some pushback, that “episodic memory” sets humans apart from other animals. Now, rats may be the latest creatures from the animal world to disprove that theory. Here’s more from Science Alert, including how the way we “ask” animals if they remember may influence results. https://flip.it/ncsEOs
#Science #Memory #Animals #Humans #Rats

Just a phenomenal lit review opening this paper making the point that visual explanations and visualizations of mechanistic phenomena play a key role in many areas of science but are understudied vs verbal explanations.

"[visual explanations] naturally exploit shape-based and spatial cues to expose both the relevant part-based and relational abstractions that underlie mechanistic understanding"

Developmental psych also cited in this work nicely, something a lot of cog sci ignores.

@erictopol Wow, I didn't know about that 1918 flu link to Parkinson's disease. If that's new to others, this quote from a BBC news article summarizes:

"In the 1960s, epidemiologists studying the long-term prognosis of survivors of the 1918 Spanish Influenza began to notice an unusual trend. Those who were born between 1888 and 1924 – meaning they were either infants or in young adulthood at the time of the pandemic – appeared to have been two or three times more likely to develop Parkinson’s disease at some point in their life than those born at different times.
It was a striking finding. For while the potential neurological consequences of flu infections have been documented by doctors for centuries – there are medical reports of this which date back to 1385 – the sheer scale of the Spanish Flu, which infected around 500 million people globally, meant scientists could link a heightened risk of disease to the pandemic.
In recent years, an elevated risk of Parkinson's has also been identified in the survivors of outbreaks of HIV, West Nile virus, Japanese encephalitis, Coxsackie, Western Equine virus and the Epstein-Barr virus. Neurologists attempting to understand why this happens believe that each of these viruses are capable of crossing into the brain, and in some cases damaging the fragile structures which control the co-ordination of movement, known as the basal ganglia, initiating a process of degeneration which can lead to Parkinson's."

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220127-could-covid-19-still-be-affecting-us-in-decades-to-come

It's been *40 years* since #EmmanuelGoldstein launched the seminal, essential, world-changing *@2600: The #Hacker Quarterly*. *2600* wasn't the first #phreak/hacker zine, but it was the most important, spawning a global subculture dedicated to the noble pursuit of technological self-determination:

https://www.2600.com/

1/

@deflarerOfClouds I hear you!!
Cory did kinda bury the lede - the bit about email is pretty far in:

"Once again, HOPE has been scheduled for its new digs in Queens, July 12-14. Last week, HOPE sent out an email blast to their subscribers telling them the news. They expected to sell 500 tickets in the first 24 hours. They didn't even come close:

https://www.2600.com/content/hope-ticket-sales-update

It turns out that Google and the other major mail providers don't like emails with the word "hacker" in them. The cartel that decides which email gets delivered, and which messages go to spam, or get blocked altogether, mass-blocked the HOPE 2024 announcement. Email may be the last federated, open platform we have, but mass concentration has created a system where it's nearly impossible to get your email delivered unless you're willing to play by Gmail's rules:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/10/dead-letters/ "
etc...

Gift link: Russian government hackers broke into Microsoft’s systems and stole executive emails. The company is already under investigation for lapses that allowed diplomats’ emails to be taken by the Chinese. My story is here. https://wapo.st/3U3Aqgl

The new “No AI FRAUD Act” would sweep everything from pictures of your kid to recordings of political events into a law that is meant to protect our likenesses from being used for false depictions. Congress should not even consider it.  https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/01/no-ai-fraud-act-creates-way-more-problems-it-solves

Ron Rivest estimated in 1977 that factoring a 125-digit semiprime would require 40 quadrillion years, using the best algorithm known and the fastest computers of the day...

...In 2015, the same RSA-129 number was factored in about one day, with the CADO-NFS open source implementation of number field sieve, using a commercial cloud computing service for about $30.