Nick @internic@social.cleverlibre.org

Ooh, a good one by way of @davidgerard — screecaps show what happens when you ask ChatGPT how many sunflowers you need to process to extract 1 litre of sunflower oil. By page 3 we're well into straitjacket territory …

(NOTE: Unfortunately I can't provide alt-text for these images, I tried but they each contain over 1500 characters; you'll need to OCR them yourself. They're in sequence, 1-4.)

The Case for Keeping Masks Mandatory in Health Care

#covid @whn

https://whn.global/scientific/the-case-for-keeping-masks-mandatory-in-health-care/

so here's my rather weird, completely true, and mostly hilarious, experience with the FBI today.

Got home and looked at my phone and saw I have a new VM. the person claims to an FBI agent & wants to talk about a year-old tweet. "You're not in any trouble, call me back & we'll clear this up." So i google the phone number & it's not an FBI office. so i just assume this is a scam.

Happy birthday to #mathematician, aeronautical #engineer, philanthropist and Cherokee ‘hidden figure’ of the space race: Mary Golda Ross (1908-2008).⁠
⁠
Great-great-granddaughter of Chief John Ross, who was forced to lead his people on the Trail of Tears, Ross attributed her success in math to the Cherokee tradition of encouraging equal education for boys and girls. She went to…

🧵 1/n

#printmaking #sciart #womenInSTEM #Indigineer #SpaceRace #planetaryScience #linocut #MastoArt

We're not receiving enough testing feedback from users on Pixel Fold. Since it's not as common as other devices, we need a higher proportion of users to help with using the Beta channel and providing feedback for releases in our #testing:grapheneos.org channel on Matrix.

I know this is controversial here, but as a journalist and writer, I really want global search on Mastodon -> “An upcoming patch for Mastodon, which is currently in the testing phase, will introduce federated cross-instance full text search” https://dotart.blog/dotart-blog/full-text-search-coming

*sigh* https://downfall.page “[Q] What is the overhead for the mitigation?
[A] This depends on whether Gather is in the critical execution path of a program. According to Intel, some workloads may experience up to 50% overhead.”

Madeline Miller, author of Circe and one of my favorite living writers, on the increasingly stigmatized fight to avoid reinfection while dealing with long covid:

“…how long am I going to do this? Until indoor air is safe for all, until vaccines prevent transmission, until there’s a cure for long covid. Until I’m not risking my family’s future on a grocery run. Because the truth is that however immortal we feel, we are all just one infection away from a new life.”

https://wapo.st/3s1vP2i 🎁🔗

An observation on how #Mastodon is growing 👀

Over the past month, multiple journalists from top outlets have contacted me related to content I’ve shared.

While this was not uncommon on #Twitter when I was active there, it’s relatively new for me in the #fediverse. I suspect this suggests professional news outlets are becoming more comfortable here & posts have increasing impact. Good.

This feature would be fantastic in Thunderbird, don't you think? 👀 😉

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2023/08/firefox-117-private-translation

Hey #EnergyMastodon, we finally got set up here so I guess we should do an #introduction

Catalyst is an all-remote worker #Cooperative focused on open #DataEngineering, analysis, and open source software. We mostly work with public US data related to the energy system, pulling together information from #FERC, #EIA, #EPA, and other agencies and trying to turn it into analysis-ready database tables so advocates, policymakers, & researchers can focus on their own novel work instead.

Important development in the journalism / social media world: Australia's big broadcaster, ABC, is shutting down its Twitter presence due to the growing toxicity at the Saudi-government-funded site. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/aug/09/abc-australia-leaves-twitter-x-elon-musk?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

Naturally, Musk responded with his usual deceit, an absurd claim about free speech mumble mumble.

has anyone seen a really good analysis of the problems with git's command line UI? Would love to read it. for example:

* `git checkout` is dangerous and has too many different jobs
* for a tool that's supposed to make changes easy to undo, you actually need to learn a LOT of different ways go back to the previous state

(not looking for git tutorials or explanations of why you think git's UI is actually good, just an analysis of the problems)

The ebook of my novel #RedTeamBlues is only $2.99 today! (US only, sorry!)

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865861/redteamblues

Nuclear physicist Leona Woods Marshall Libby was born #OTD in 1919.

She helped direct the development of the Hanford site reactors during the Manhattan Project, was the only woman on Enrico Fermi's Chicago Pile team, and was present when Chicago Pile-1 went critical.

New: A massive cyberattack targeting the U.K. voter register is one of the U.K.’s largest ever hacks, with more than 40 million voters affected.

TechCrunch has marked up 🖍️ the Electoral Commission's cyberattack notice to dissect what was said about the hack, and what was left out.

More: https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/09/parsing-uk-electoral-commission-cyberattack/

Wells Fargo among banks fined $549M after hiding employee texts from regulators

Banks have been fined more than $2.5 billion for violating record-keeping laws.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/08/wells-fargo-among-banks-fined-549m-after-hiding-employee-texts-from-regulators/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

Crocodiles make the best baby monitors.

https://www.science.org/content/article/crocodiles-alarmingly-attuned-cries-of-human-infants

YouTube will no longer show recommendations if you disable watch history.

This both makes the connection clearer that the recommendations are based on what you’ve previously watched and not some “nefarious algorithm” and continues big tech’s march to please the EU’s anti-algorithm demands.

https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/08/youtube-update-homepage-watch-history/

@eff announced the Tor University Challenge, a project asking universities to start running Tor relays on campus. Find all the resources you need to convince your university and faculty to contribute to safeguarding people's digital rights: https://toruniversity.eff.org/