Nick @internic@social.cleverlibre.org

The 100th Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

I am happy to announce the publication of yet another new paper at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. This one is hot off the press; it was published today, 11th September 2023. The latest paper is in fact our 100th publication. It is also the 35th in Volume 6 (2023), which means that we have now published more papers so far this year than in the previous two years put together.

http://telescoper.blog/2023/09/11/the-100th-publication-at-the-open-journal-of-astrophysics/

Hello, here’s an #introduction:
I’m Ben Matthews. 
Currently I develop an #interactive #climate model 'SWIM’ (main topic of my posts here).
I live in Belgium, by the river Meuse. I’ve worked in univs/insts in (rev-order): Louvain-LN(be), Rio(br), Bern(ch) , Arendal(no), Copenhagen (dk), Qingdao(zh), Norwich(eng), Edinburgh(scot).
Origin english, I’,m also happy to discuss en français, español, portugues, русский, 中文, and a bit other langs… Much of each day I write code in #scala.

I strongly dislike the way the automatic differentiation page on Wikipedia is going.

There is some C++ code for forward mode AD. It builds an expression tree with variables named by strings ("x", "y", "z" and so on). It's precisely this kind of thing that delayed the widespread adoption of AD in the first place. Anyone skimming the page without knowing the subject is likely to get the impression that AD is similar to symbolic methods and fail to grasp that implementing forward mode AD is more like implementing complex numbers than symbolic methods.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_differentiation

I love my smart TV. I love the way it takes a long time to boot up because it's trying to refresh the advertisements on the home screen. I delight in the way it randomly restarts because it's downloaded an update without asking me, each of which makes the TV slower and slower with every subsequent install. I adore the way it buries the apps that I want to use, and that I use without fail every single time, below the apps that it's being paid to promote and which I have never touched in my life and would never use without the cold metal of a glock pressed hard against my sweating temple. I am infinitely thrilled by the way the interface lags constantly, due to the need to have one thousand unnecessary animations rendered on hardware ripped wholesale from a ten year old phone. I feel myself borne aloft on wings of pure joy when I am notified that my data will be collected and analysed to determine my useage patterns. Even now I am writing this from a field of beautiful flowers and soft luscious grass as I lie and look up happily at the bright blue sky, smiling happily to know that this is the future of technology

Papers from QuNet 2023, the first #SIGCOMM workshop on quantum networking, are available at
https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/3610251

Longtermism
http://smbc-comics.com/comic/longtermism-2 (click for full comic)
#smbc #hiveworks #comics

How #TechWorkers went from dreaming of starting revolutions, to dreaming of fake #startups, to dreaming of a job for life, to fearing layoffs to make way for #StockBuybacks.

https://doctorow.medium.com/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers-ad0a6b09f7e6?sk=6dc50e8e1afc9bbd523a2fee4959e5c0

#Precarity #Financialization #EndStageCapitalism

@DrSuzanne @mhoye we were specifically talking about the browsers she uses/or is forced to use re: this https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/googles-widely-opposed-ad-platform-the-privacy-sandbox-launches-in-chrome/

"So glad you're tapped into Engineering Dads on mastodon" -- my wife this morning as I narrate the data privacy things I want her to do across her devices 😂

Welp. Loading this up for my Data and Society students.

"Leaked Google Spreadsheet Reveals Black Employees Earn $20K Less Than White Colleagues"
https://peopleofcolorintech.com/articles/leaked-google-spreadsheet-reveals-black-employees-earn-20k-less-than-white-colleagues/

We want to believe. :) The truth is out there: Celebrate 30 years of The X-Files with our 30 favorite episodes. From alien abductions to monsters of the week, this sci-fi series had something for everyone. https://arstechnica.com/?p=1957642

#TheEconomist, quoting academics and political consultants, argues that #AI won’t have all that much effect on U.S. elections, albeit not for entirely comforting reasons: “Americans are so accustomed to being bombarded with claims and counterclaims about politics that they are more or less impervious to persuasion, whether by fake news or the truthful sort.” https://www.economist.com/united-states/2023/08/31/ai-will-change-american-elections-but-not-in-the-obvious-way

In all the talk of Burning Man and the Moroccan earthquake, not seeing a lot of reports on the super flooding in #Greece that occurred. They got 31.5 inches of rain in a single 24-hour period of time, supposedly three years’ worth of rain in two days, flooding flatlands and potentially spinning up permanent lakes in populated and agricultural areas.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66751510

Precarious
http://smbc-comics.com/comic/precarious (click for bonus panel)
#smbc #hiveworks #comics

By JWeiland @JPWeiland

🇺🇸 September 8th US update:

Community spread of COVID is "high", with a correction upwards last week as well. Current estimates:

🔸720,000 new infections/day
🔸1 in every 460 new people were infected today
🔸1 in every 46 people currently infected

#COVID19US #COVIDisNotOver #COVIDisAirborne @auscovid19

Twitter/X source: https://twitter.com/JPWeiland/status/1700277959532196168

@thatandromeda @spiegelmama @deadbeefthemonster

I think it's not just that they aged poorly. I think the role of movies in the lives of hacker types was just so very different back in the '70s, '80s, and '90s.

To be a computer nerd back then was countercultural. We got very very little representation, and almost all of it was extremely negative. The internet existed, but was itself countercultural: the mainstream had no idea it existed. There was no social media like we think of it today, meaning not just the form of the thing, but how deeply embedded it is in the larger society.

So for everyone who was countercultural, including computer nerds and science fiction and fantasy fans, every iota of culture that spoke to us was a treasure. We hoarded that stuff in our hearts.

U2's I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For is about a person that's getting increasingly frustrated trying to do a simple web search, but only getting ads and irrelevant links from Google.

Since I've seen a lot of chatter about people switching to #Firefox as Google ramps up the enshitification of #Chrome, let me tell you about a killer feature for people who (a) need multiple accounts on the same websites (eg. devs) or specifically (b) have to use multiple Google accounts.

Firefox has an official addon called Multi Account Containers that lets you trivially set up color coded tabs that have separate sets of cookies. Log into your dev account in one, and your test account in another. Log into your personal #gmail in one and have another tab next to it with your work Gmail. I'm actually not signed in to any Google accounts in most my tabs, I just have containers for the specific tasks I do on Google products.

It'll take you 30 seconds to set up.

Add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/

Mozilla's explanation: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers

When rock star Isaac May and theoretical physicist Brian Newton first teamed up to explore alternate realities, everybody laughed at them.

#MicroSF #Physics #Rock

X was caught inserting ads into people's feeds without disclosing they were ads!

I lean on the side of thinking this is a bug rather than deception; the very best of X falling apart. Either way, it's illegal and warrants an FTC investigation and a hefty fine.

This comes after X changed the way ads looked, removing the little “Promoted" text for smaller text that just reads "Ad."

Yikes!

https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/08/x-formerly-twitter-caught-running-unlabeled-ads-in-users-following-feeds/