Nick @internic@social.cleverlibre.org

Ignite Minds, Not Books

#Toronto #TorontoPublicLibrary #MetroRef #BannedBooks #MomsForLiberty

@emc2 "This section smacks of someone who had a few internet discussions on something, put together a 101 pamphlet on it and suddenly thinks they're an expert."

This happens so often with people who got really lucky earlier in life, and think of themselves as some kind of genius. You also see it a lot in the Hacker News comment section (similar effect: people lucky to have an aptitude for software thinking that they're universally brilliant 🙄)

Alright, as I promised, it's time to read and respond to Andreessen's manifest. Sorry for the delay, everyone, I've been super busy these past weeks (and I also got sick somewhere in there).

#tech #politics

@Wolven I believe @pluralistic calls this 'criti-hype'. If you're saying LLMs will create the Gray Goo that'll end the world, you're still saying they're significant, same as if you were hailing them as humanity's salvation - both ideas make the Line Go Up, which is all that matters.

University-hosted instance social.uibk.ac.at: We are continuing to increase our presence here on Mastodon for science communication. By establishing our own instance, we aim to contribute to a positive development of the #Fediverse.
We are thus (further) limiting our involvement on X.

Organizational units of the University of Innsbruck are welcome to use the instance social.uibk.ac.at!

Details and support: https://www.uibk.ac.at/en/newsroom/2023/university-of-innsbruck-focuses-on-mastodon/

#scicomm #foss

Matrix needs a new protocol and server implementation that's robust and far less resource hungry. It needs a massive focus on anti-abuse and moderation tools due to how much federation enables abuse. Every server with open registration needs a large team of full time mods/admins.

Stop treating open source projects and foundations like consumer-facing businesses.

Unless you've got a paid support contract that's being neglected, or there's a grave concern, it's inappropriate to escalate issues to massively public forums.

Maintainers and the staffers and volunteers at foundations are already overworked.

Don't make it harder for them to address your issue by ALSO making them waste time firefighting in public.

#OpenSource #FOSS #FLOSS

Getting real tired of the media gaslighting anyone who still takes covid seriously by trying to claim people who don't want brain damage or heart damage or strokes or ME/CFS or diabetes or nerve pain or a bunch of other issues are just "overly anxious" about covid now and it's because we haven't been given "guidance" on how to "adapt to the new normal"

Meanwhile, in the land where science has actual meaning, covid is 4x deadlier than the flu, several orders of magnitude more likely to lead to chronic postviral illness, and people enjoying the "new normal" are getting it 1-3 or more times a year whereas I can count the number of times I've had influenza in 40 years on one hand. Also, award winning viral disease experts talk about how important it is to get covid as infrequently as possible

But sure. I'm just "overly anxious" about getting the brain eating, heart destroying, diabetes inducing, immune system depleting, neuron fusing plague that nobody is trying to stop from spreading anymore

#CMSPaper 1246 summarises how CMS uses #MachineLearning to improve its already outstanding muon identification. The collision in the pic was identified using machine learning 🤖 🛑 💪

Read more in the very accessible paper here 👉 https://buff.ly/3soZ4wr

W3C TAG election now open. Seven individuals are nominated for five seats on the Technical Architecture Group.

The TAG is chartered with stewardship of the Web architecture.

They document and build consensus around principles of Web architecture to interpret and clarify these principles when necessary; resolve issues involving general Web architecture brought to the TAG; and help coordinate cross-technology architecture developments inside and outside W3C.
https://www.w3.org/news/2023/w3c-opens-technical-architecture-group-tag-election/

Sam Altman is back as OpenAI CEO with a new board.

And of course the new board was hand picked to no longer restrict Altman so he can run OpenAI as a business as he sees fit (until he jumps to one of his own things he's been preparing for months now).

The interesting aspect of this: The new board no longer has any women, the only woman on the old board was replaced by Larry Summers who's known to think that women just have less "intrinsic aptitude" for "science and engineering". So Yeah. Says a lot about what OpenAI considers important.

Happy 36th anniversary of the Max Headroom Signal Hijacking, for those who celebrate.

Big discussion here! https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/11/a-city-on-mars-reality-kills-space-settlement-dreams/

Pleased that most of it is quite thoughtful, and hopeful that our book will nudge things more in that direction.

If I vote to fire myself, can I get hired by microsoft to keep doing my job?

I think of my iPhone as a sort of sketchbook for photos I might take some day — or photos that I ought to have taken but probably never will.

Here, the beautiful Queensland University of Technology, Garden Point Campus, Brisbane.

The Most Shocking Discovery in Astrophysics Is 25 Years Old. A quarter of a century after detecting dark energy, scientists are still trying to figure out what it is https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-most-shocking-discovery-in-astrophysics-is-25-years-old/

"10 min 1 paper" - here is how it works:

Set yourself a timer for 10 mins. Take the topmost paper on your 'to read' pile. (you have such a pile. It might be digital.)
Take one sheet of empty paper and a pen (our a page in a pretty notebook, potentially digital) and

Answer the following three questions:
- what are the main players in this paper?
- what is the main result?
- what goes into the proof?

Along the way you might find other stuff that seems noteworthy, pictures you like and questions that arise.
Write it all down (ideally on one page).

Once the timer goes off you are done!

Repeat the next morning with a new paper.

Let's welcome @TypeScript on Mastodon 👋
Some volunteers are reaching out to large open-source projects to get them an official (verified) account here, if you are a maintainer for some of them, it often do not take much to get it done 👍