Nick @internic@social.cleverlibre.org

From the series “Astrophysics In The Forest” here a black hole with an accretion disk and its axial relativistic jet.
#photography #astrophysics #forest #Astrodon

Do you, or have you ever, used a graphical user interface? If you use #Windows, #macOS, or any version of #Linux with a window manager or desktop environment, you can thank Dr. Clarence "Skip" Ellis.

Dr. Ellis worked at Xerox PARC, the research organization that developed the modern GUI. Icons, windows, the mouse, Ethernet-based networking, laser printing - all of these (and more) came out of PARC. Dr. Ellis led the team that created Officetalk, the first program to use icons and the Internet. He got his start at 15 years old showing a local tech company how to reuse punch cards, which was a game-changer back in 1958.

Oh, and he was also the first black man to earn a PhD in Computer Science.

#BlackHistoryMonth #BlackHistory #BlackMastodon #ComputerScience @blackmastodon

https://elective.collegeboard.org/clarence-skip-ellis-computer-science-pioneer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Ellis_(computer_scientist)
https://www.redhat.com/en/command-line-heroes/season-6/clarence-ellis

@perigee @slothrop

Most software is designed to be great for a very small set of people and one of many varieties of terrible for nearly everyone else.

"Accessibility Options" are so limited and fall short of what's possible. Even though most people will have poor vision as they age, or struggle with touch interfaces due to dexterity at some point in life.

I wish there was a way to bring more focus and investment to this issue.

They did WHAT
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/02/05/no-data-no-problem-undisclosed-tinkering-in-excel-behind-economics-paper/

In ads: Our apps mind their business. Not yours.

In court: Given Apple’s extensive privacy disclosures, no reasonable user would expect that their actions in Apple’s apps would be private from Apple.

#Privacy #Security #Cybersecurity #Apple #iPhone #InfoSec #dataprivacy

Let's take a journey through space to other worlds with #ClimateDeniers desperately seeking solace on lonely planets.

Confidently asserted while also claiming that we can't measure temperature trends here on Earth: "Mars and Jupiter are not warming, and anyway the sun has recently been cooling slightly."

Does this make sense? No, but it's still fair-to-middling in daily #ClimateMythRebuttal access at Skeptical Science.

Newly revised; critical review welcome!

https://skepticalscience.com/global-warming-other-planets-solar-system-basic.htm?utm-sourc=mastodon&utm-campaign=socialnetworks&utm-term=sks

ugh

I think if I were a movie director or writer I would definitely make the story take place before cell phones. There's like 1000x more plausible plots available when everyone involved doesn't know everything all the time, in real time. It's almost like the demarcation between when the world used candlelight to see and the adoption of the electric lightbulb.

A friend sent this to me and y'all might enjoy

“The emissions from production of computing devices exceed the emissions from operating them, so even if devices are more energy efficient producing more of them will make the emissions problem worse. Therefore we must extend the useful life of our computing devices. As a society we need to start treating computational resources as finite and precious, to be utilised only when necessary, and as effectively as possible.” https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.06642

Cory Doctorow ( @pluralistic ) writes:

"Disruption" is nowhere to be seen when it comes to the tech sector.

Five giant companies have been running the show for more than a decade.
A couple of these companies (Apple, Microsoft) are Gen-Xers, having been born in the 70s, then there's a couple of Millennials (Amazon, Google), and that one Gen-Z kid (Facebook).

Big Tech shows no sign of being disrupted, despite the continuous enshittification of their core products and services.

How can this be? Has Big Tech disrupted disruption itself?

That's the contention of "Coopting Disruption," a new paper from two law profs: Mark Lemley (Stanford) and Matthew Wansley (Yeshiva U):

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4713845

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/05/cyber-dunning-kruger/

Fun reading about how even @pluralistic falls for phishing sometimes thanks to all the enshittification of getting in touch with necessary services making us less likely to catch the red flags.

I've clicked on a few of my office's "phishing tests" which at least gets me more "watch this social engineering info video" even if the videos are so bad that you can't help zone out.

#Tech #Phishing #Scams

This week's Behind the Blog is out!
- Emanuel and Sam on constant NSFW reporting
- Jason on bypassing censorship while in Indonesia
- Me on what happens next with fake IDs a mouse click away https://www.404media.co/behind-the-blog-not-safe-for-whose-work/

"A matrix with zeros on the diagonal and positive numbers elsewhere is called a zero-diagonal matrix. Zero-diagonal matrices are not invertible. This means that there is no matrix that can be multiplied by the zero-diagonal matrix to produce the identity matrix." -- Google's AI

Canada vows to ban Flipper Zero device in crackdown on car theft

How do you ban a device built with open source hardware and software anyway?

https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/02/canada-vows-to-ban-flipper-zero-device-in-crackdown-on-car-theft/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

Meta is downranking/hiding political content on Threads. The company says Threads will “not recommend any content/accounts that post about politics.”

Here’s the issue: what counts as “politics” is often any news abt people who have had their whole existence politicized, such as news about Black people, LGBTQ people, disabled ppl, women, etc. Climate scientists, public health experts etc also considered “political” https://www.axios.com/2024/02/09/meta-political-content-moderation-threads

NASA's Deep Space Network communicates with a fleet of robotic spacecraft across the Solar System. These communications use radio waves, but now they're testing a new system that can send high-bandwidth signals using lasers. One disk, Deep Space Station 13, was recently retrofitted with an optical receiver to simultaneously receive radio and laser communications. In a recent test, it received 40 times more data from laser communication than can be transmitted via radio.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-new-experimental-antenna-tracks-deep-space-laser

Our atomic fountain is now - for the first time - able to launch atoms! Great to see all the progress happening on the apparatus I spent the last years setting up
@quantumsensing
https://qoto.org/@quantumsensing/111902546549965338

#AtomInterferometry #Physics #PhDLife #QuantumSensing

One day, the Sun will expand into a red giant and vaporize Mercury, Venus, and Earth.

But astronomers have found what may be planets orbiting dead stars, showing that some planets can survive that fate. Words by me:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/planets-orbiting-dead-stars-foretell-the-solar-systems-far-future-fate/