Nick @internic@social.cleverlibre.org

We are celebrating Christmas at partner's parents with the same raclette grill as 20 years ago - which is pretty impressive, but not quiet as much as the Voyager spacecrafts 😅 Voyager 2 was launched on August 20, 1977 - still working, still teaching us new things about the most external parts of the solar system.

With many thanks to @schnedan for the idea :)

#astrodon #SciArt #wisskomm #scicomm #VicisArt #voyager #voyager2

In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should return to their home towns to fix their parents’ mobile phone, email and computer problems.

It's all fun and games marrying a lab scientist until it's Christmas morning and she's saying "measure twice cut once" and "oh fun it's time for the trigonometry!" about your gingerbread house

For this year's gingerbread I made... the VLA!

#gingerbread #astronomy #radioastronomy #space

sandy paws

Also here: Cat, who considers himself one of the Christmas gifts, and also one of the two reasons all the baubles hang so high.

Joyeux Noël

#OTD in 2021 🚀

What a beautiful view we had from the Toucan site at Kourou that Christmas morning 🥰

What a perfect (& loud 😱) ride we got from #Ariane5 #VA256 towards the Sun-Earth L2 point 🌞🌎🌗🛰

And what a stunning observatory #JWST has proved to be in the two years since 🔭✨

Such a privilege to be involved for more than a quarter of a century & there's so much more to come 🖖🤘

#Astrodon #Astronomy #SpaceScience #ExploreTogether #NASA #ESA #CSA #SoundOn #SpaceRocks
#MerryChristmas

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate, from about 2,400 light-years away

#astrophotography

Reuters has taken down -- globally -- an important hacking-for-profit investigation that included details about an Indian hacking "entrepreneur" -- because he got a court in that country to say so.

This is a huge danger to free speech and serious journalism.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/who-is-killing-all-these-stories-about-rajat-khare-controversial-tech-mogul

Reuters deserved praise for its initial investigation. It deserves the opposite now.

(The New Yorker is apparently one of the few publications that hasn't bowed to the pressure.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-crime/a-confession-exposes-indias-secret-hacking-industry

I just love my dear friend’s tree, don’t you?!

#MerryChristmas to all who celebrate! #books

We have a winner! "Enshittification" is our Word of the Week of the Year for 2023. And we have an interview with @pluralistic who coined the word.

It's all in a special live episode with our friends.

Video and audio here, or wherever you get podcasts:
http://becauselanguage.com/89-words-of-the-week-of-the-year-2023/

Finished A City on Mars, by Kelly and @ZachWeinersmith. Very funny, well researched, and still approachable. You don't expect the most reasonable text on space settlement to come from a Weinersmith but here we are!

https://amzn.to/3txXqcw

A silent night in Bethlehem. https://apnews.com/article/e408a3e48d18c69a7a0b018505cdc732

#ChristmasEve #FelizNavidad #Nativity

interesting post on passkeys and the problem with resident keys

"How Hype Will Turn Your Security Key Into Junk"
🔗 https://fy.blackhats.net.au/blog/2023-02-02-how-hype-will-turn-your-security-key-into-junk/

The thing about building an "everything" app (payments commerce messaging etc)is that it doesn't work if you won't build it for ~everyone.

Unless you can - for example - get an entire family to use it regardless of their political leaning, you will fail.

An everything app must be as inoffensive and apolitical and non ideological as possible.

Whatsapp. Facebook messenger. Etc.

Musk openly does not want X to be that.

https://joanwestenberg.com/blog/the-everything-app-has-to-work-for-everyone

Uh…Merry Christmas!

Something I'm really fascinated by is how AI gets defined in pop culture. I was reading a thread the other day where a student who had used grammarly, and several other machine learning tools, was complaining that a prof dinged them for using AI. The dividing line seemed to be that the AI hadn't done all the work? I've also heard people say "I used AI to write" meaning the AI was prompted. Language change during the next 20 years on this stuff will be interesting.

My Sonoma State FiLES guest lecture, "On Bullshit Engines," is also available to view for free:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DpM_TXq2ws