Nick @internic@social.cleverlibre.org

This, my friend, is where they keep the #wildflowers around here.

#Montana #hiking #wilderness #photography

Fox Mulder has joined the picket line. And he Believes

#geoscience

After some years, rescuers arrived at the deserted island to find the man had set up farms, shelter, and modern amenities. He had even cobbled together a server out of fragments of wreckage and was self-hosting two single-user fediverse instances on VMs running Alpine Linux.

"But what is the second one for?" the rescuers asked. "Are you running glitch-soc, or trying out Calckey, or what?"

"Oh," said the man proudly, "that is the instance I refuse to federate with."

Rereading Marcus Aurelius and I know there's a tendency to compare stoicism and Buddhism, but stoicism as I read it has much more emphasis on you, the human, just being an absolute piece of trash. That is:

Buddhist: There is no self, so don't worry about the self.
Stoic: The self is a little piece of crap in an infinite universe, so don't worry about the self.

Remember Galactica, the Meta fake-science machine? That was at least 10 hype cycles ago. Anyhow, here's @emilymbender and I putting on a whole BSG bit to discuss Yann LeCun's tweets in podcast form!

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2126417/episodes/13237698

See how easy it is to forgive debt?

When I did all those interviews as an Oscar nominee last year, I said I thought our society was still only in the part of #DontLookUp where the comet could be stopped.

But lately I’m worried we’ve quickly moved into the shopping-for-fingerling-potatoes-for-the-last-dinner phase.

"Striking images show plastic litter in the world’s most remote coral reefs

A survey of 84 coral ecosystems at 25 locations across the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian ocean basins found plastic debris from human activities in almost all of them, both shallow and deep.

The study team, led by marine biologist Hudson Pinheiro at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, set out to survey biodiversity on remote reefs, which the researchers expected to be pristine. But during their sampling, they noticed that “these places are not as pristine as we were thinking”, Pinheiro says. It turned out that 77 of the 84 ecosystems contained macroplastics — plastic items measuring 5 centimetres or more across. The researchers found that this type of plastic waste made up 88% of all human-generated rubbish on the reefs."

🔗: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02271-8

#Ocean #plastics #Pollution #PlasticsPollution #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange

It's interesting the way much of TV and film has worked to pretend the pandemic never happened. I rarely see people wearing masks in TV in a contemporary setting and characters rarely refer to it. (Obviously there are some exceptions.)

It goes some way towards helping me understand another mystery: why so much fiction written after 1918 makes very little reference to the Spanish Flu despite it surely looming large in the lives of so many people.

#Threads stopped working for me a few days ago. Now, on both iOS and Android apps, all I ever get is a “Sorry, something went wrong” error. Reinstalling doesn’t fix it. It’s a shame, because the app was doing so well. That may not be a popular opinion on Mastodon, but I’m a fan of anything that pries people away from Twitter.

Found a solution to AI alignment

Four of the tweets denied the #Holocaust in explicit terms, one said “blacks should be gassed and sent with space x to Mars”, while a sixth compared Covid vaccination programmes to mass extermination in Nazi death camps. All were reported in January but Twitter ruled that three of the tweets did not violate its guidelines and failed to respond to the other reports, the legal action claims.

#Twitter faces legal challenge after failing to remove reported #hate tweets
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/10/twitter-faces-legal-challenge-after-failing-to-remove-reported-hate-tweets

How it started. (March 7, 2023):
“Elon Musk says Twitter may reach positive cash flow by second quarter”

How its going (July 15, 2023):
“Elon Musk says Twitter's cash flow still negative as ad revenue drops 50 per cent”

No more comments. 😏

#ElonMusk #Twitter #TheShipIsSinking

Until I moved from the dead bird site to Mastodon I never realized that I had so much pent up civility.

@dangoodin maybe the next stage of software engineering maturity will be a public, mandatory registration of security issues and root cause analysis, like the Chemical Safety Board, with a purpose to describe and mitigate classes of human frailty that cause these issues in the first place

Last year for my birthday I got a PhD, a nice job, and a pretty hectic move. This year I just want good memories and universal justice and liberation.

Multichain finally confirms their CEO was arrested in China

July 14, 2023
https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=multichain-finally-confirms-their-ceo-was-arrested-in-china

Astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell was born #OTD in 1943. As a grad student at Cambridge in 1967, she discovered an entirely new type of celestial object: Pulsars!

Photo: National Science & Media Museum / Science & Society Picture Library