Y’all like trains? Ask your rep to vote no for Amtrak budget cuts.
https://www.hsrail.org/blog/ask-your-representative-to-vote-no-thud-fy24-budget/
US expands financial data breach reporting requirements: non-banking institutions will be required to report breaches under revised Safeguards Rule enforced by the Federal Trade Commission.
https://www.databreachtoday.com/ftc-expands-financial-data-breach-reporting-requirements-a-23418
Hey FediScience people.
An important step in handing over ownership of this site to the community was taken yesterday.
We have officially founded the FediScience association. A big thanks to the 20 founding members who attended and managed to stay awake:)
We will now go through the process of registering and applying for charitable status and hopefully be a fully fledged registered association ("e.V." in Germany ) early next year.
More info about membership etc to follow in due course.
Whoa, Tumblr loses $30M a year?! https://mastodon.social/@_jv_/111325789700431425
“AI has never had much of a reflexive critical practice, any more than any other technical field. Criticisms of the field, no matter how sophisticated and scholarly they might be, are certain to be met with the assertion that the author simply fails to understand a basic point.”
Lessons Learned in Trying to Reform AI, Philip Agre 1997.
Might as well be written in 2023.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13548565221132243
And the last step was a 15 min walk to the hotel.
When I said at the reception that I was coming from the Netherlands by train, I was asked how long it took, certainly 15-20 hours? Uhm no, very much not. I think all problems that trains can have sometimes, lots of folks are also overestimating how long it would take...
Anyway: good night! Will try to get some sleep ahead of tomorrow's long talk on sustainability and academic travel.
Satire is dead and The Economist killed it.
People following me for cybersecurity content: Chris Bing, one of the most distinguished reporters on this beat, recently joined the Fediverse. Chris has broken way too many stories to count and also has valuable insight into all things related to hacking. Please follow him.
And please boost for reach.
Happy #Halloween! 🎃👻🕸️
(#JWST Image of the Crab nebula: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Webb/Webb_sees_Crab_Nebula_in_new_light ; gif by my amazing colleague O.)
Registrations for the island country of Anguilla's TLD— .ai —now brings in enough revenue to account for 10% of the nation's GDP.
The island is 35 sq. mi., with a population of about 15,000 people.
I just posted two video lectures from my undergrad complex analysis course. One is about Cauchy's theorem and the other is about Jordan's lemma. They both involve beautiful mathematical arguments – I hope you enjoy them!
Cauchy’s theorem
https://youtu.be/AjrkNlgwT_U
Jordan’s lemma
https://youtu.be/C5rukxDDW8U
Someday I hope to post all the lectures in this course, but for now I'm just posting occasional Zoom videos that I've recorded for whatever random reason.
Mathematician Karl Weierstrass was born #OTD, Halloween, in 1815.
The fools at The Academy all said he was mad, but in 1872 he announced that he had succeeded in creating a ~monster~.
Image: Smithsonian Institution Libraries
#ReverseEngineering is continually beaten down by DMCA-EULA combinations. Corporations want to silence your work. After getting tired of this, I decided to write about it.
I'm releasing a book called "Hacktivist Field Guide: Reverse engineering" that aims to help #hacktivist & #hackers to navigate the tricky legal world of reverse engineering.
It's available early to subscribers on my website and will be release each week though my newsletter.
If you don't want to subscribe, it will be released in full in the coming months.
Link: https://www.0x0v1.com/0x0v1-newsletter-hacktivist-field-guide-reverse-engineering-part-2/
This is available free.
Hear Classic Readings of Poe’s “The Raven” by Vincent Price, James Earl Jones, Christopher Walken, Neil Gaiman. Also: the perfect time to binge "Fall of the House of Usher" on Netflix. :) https://www.openculture.com/2023/10/hear-classic-readings-of-poes-the-raven.html
Helping someone debug someone, said they asked chatgpt about what a series of bit shift operations were doing. He thought it was actually evaluating the code, yno like it presents itself as doing. Instead its example was a) not the code he put in, with b) incorrect annotations, and c) even more incorrect sample outputs. Has been doing this all day and had just started considering maybe chatGPT was wrong.
I was like first of all never do that again, and explained how chatGPT wasnt doing anything like what he thought it was doing. We spent 2 minutes isolating that code, printing out the bit string after each operation, and he immediately understood what was going on.
I fucking hate these LLMs. Empowerment is learning how to figure things out, how to make tools for yourself and how to debug problems. These things are worse than disempowering, teaching people to be dependent on something that teaches them bullshit.
Theoretical physicist by training (PhD in quantum open systems/quantum information), University lecturer for a bit, and currently paying the bills as an engineer working in optical communication (implementation) and quantum communication (concepts), though still pursuing a little science on the side. I'm interested in physics and math, of course, but I enjoy learning about really any area of science, philosophy, and many other academic areas as well. My biggest other interest is hiking and generally being out in nature.