Sylvain Miermont @miermont@social.cleverlibre.org

The Mighty french #glaciology institute in Grenoble @IGE is now here. A hugely recommended follow #FF

https://fediscience.org/@IGE/111798914708847337
IGE - #Video

‼️ Uncover the challenges of understanding Greenland's massive ice sheet and its potential impact on sea-level rise 🌊

https://youtu.be/X8GRmHnZEwA?si=lr3dJDcA03DJOvK9

@H2020PROTECT

Thrilled to give the opening keynote at the High-Temperature Heat Pump Symposium in Copenhagen!

The conference has grown from just 65 people in 2017 to 400 today. It shows the momentum for industrial heat pumps is there.

"If you need a sign, it's bad design"

Here a sign explaining it's a fountain (very similar to the bins in the area) and where to press to get water...

Big news in bug math. This is the first year since 1803 when both 13-year cicadas and 17-year cicadas will emerge from the ground simultaneously in the US!

13 and 17 are both prime. It's believed cicadas evolved to have prime-number life cycles to avoid predators that emerge more frequently, like once every 4 years or 5 years or... whatever. By showing up infrequently, with a prime number life cycle, they can starve out those predators.

And since 13 and 17 are both prime and 13 × 17 = 221, both kinds of cicadas emerge simultaneously only once every 221 years. And

1803 + 221 = 2024

so now they'll both emerge simultaneously and we'll have 𝑙𝑜𝑡𝑠 of cicadas!

Also, this year the two kinds can interbreed!

The last time the Northern Illinois Brood’s 17-year cycle aligned with the Great Southern Brood’s 13-year cycle, Thomas Jefferson was president.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/19/science/cicadas-emergence-broods.html

KiCad needs funding for its next release cycle.
If you do PCB design, esp. if its your job, consider donating.

Even if you don't use KiCad yourself as your main tool (like myself) its still an incredibly important piece of infrastructure for the industry as a whole.

https://www.kicad.org/blog/2024/01/2023-End-of-Year-Fund-Drive/

German law is making security research a risky business.

Current news: A court found a developer guilty of “hacking.” His crime: he was tasked with looking into a software that produced way too many log messages. And he discovered that this software was making a MySQL connection to the vendor’s database server.

When he checked that MySQL connection, he realized that the database contained data belonging to not merely his client but all of the vendor’s customers. So he immediately informed the vendor – and while they fixed this vulnerability they also pressed charges.

There was apparently considerable discussion as to whether hardcoding database credentials in the application (visible as plain text, not even decompiling required) is sufficient protection to justify hacking charges. But the court ruling says: yes, there was a password, so there is a protection mechanism which was circumvented, and that’s hacking.

I very much hope that there will be a next instance ruling overturning this decision again. But it’s exactly as people feared: no matter how flawed the supposed “protection,” its mere existence turns security research into criminal hacking under the German law. This has a chilling effect on legitimate research, allowing companies to get away with inadequate security and in the end endangering users.

Source: https://www.heise.de/news/Warum-ein-Sicherheitsforscher-im-Fall-Modern-Solution-verurteilt-wurde-9601392.html

Happy 40th Birthday to probably one of the most important and influential computer games ever written, Elite.

#Elite #Elite40 #Retrocomputing #BBCMicro

https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/18/elite_game_retro/

On being listed in the court document of artists whose work was used to train Midjourney with 4,000 of my closest friends and Willem De Kooning (1/3)

This project was for a gift exchange, so I couldn't share it until now. It's a (large!) laptop bag/backpack with 100 LEDs in the front flap arranged in a Fibonacci spiral (inspired by @jasoncoon ) and diffused through a Voronoi arrangement of 3D printed translucent black PETG tiles.

Everyone talks about how the first 'computers' were people (usually women), but how about the first packet switches? #ComputerHistory

oh dang

the headline is "randomware," the bigger exploit is _lying to the user about applied torque so that they inadequately torque bolts_.

like on that boeing just now.

are these used in aircraft assembly and maintenance? because one of the things they were able to do was change bolt tightness while making it look correct on the screen.

has this been quietly exploited already? is this already a zero-day?

https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/01/network-connected-wrenches-used-in-factories-can-be-hacked-for-sabotage-or-ransomware/

The Problem with Trolley Car Problems

I started out saying this as a joke, but gradually, over time, I've come to realize it's actually accurate.

The true solution to almost all "trolley car" problems is to find who keeps tying people to the tracks.

In trolley car problems, the people tied to the tracks always represent some disadvantaged sector of society — poor people, homeless people, no healthcare, minorites, etc — or even just (pardon the expression) "regular" lower class people.

And the "problem" is always "do you let those people be run over in order to save a billionaire, or a corporation, or the banking industry, or some sector of the economy, etc.

And again ... why are those people tied to the tracks in the first place? What is wrong with our economy/society/legal system, that we have those people stuck in those disadvantaged positions?

So the next time you see a trolley car problem — even the comedy/shitpost/joke problems — ask yourself, "who are those people tied to the track, and how did they get there in the first place?

this is such bullshit. language has nothing to do with preferred timestamp format. please don't assume things like this.

In Oulu, #Finland, temperatures will be down to -20 C this week.

Yet 12% of all journeys in the city will be by bicycle.

How do they do it? Good wayfinding for starters, with symbols projected onto the snow...❄️ 🚲 🧵

A while back I wrote a couple of blog posts about how I think LLMs will be a net negative (at least in the near term), due to the extreme overhyping giving people unrealistic expectations of their ability. The direct result will be an overall degrade in internet usability as people begin flooding platforms with low quality spam that they erroneously believe to be high quality. Previously it was fairly easy to spot someone who doesn't know what they're talking about, but now LLMs enable them to word things convincingly enough to waste the time of even domain experts.

Even now I'm still often surprised by all the creative ways that people are finding to waste other's time. I just saw this post from one of the curl maintainers reporting that they've been receiving nonsense bug bounty reports based on LLM hallucinations, which I imagine is likely due to people trying to automate bug hunting despite lacking the understanding to confirm their finding. They reported that in one case the submission was convincing enough that they went over the code 3 times before coming to the conclusion that no bug existed and the report was likely AI generate.

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/01/02/the-i-in-llm-stands-for-intelligence/

If you're using Firefox, your first add-on should be uBlock Origin. At this point, it's not just blocking ads. It's basic Internet hygiene.

However, especially if you handle sensitive sites like bank/payment portals or one to several social accounts, your second add-on should be this little thing called Firefox Multi-Account Containers.

It's extremely useful. You can keep the defaults or wipe them all and make your own. So long as you don't sign in to things outside of containers, things opened in Firefox by default won't have access to your accounts. Sites you sign in to will only be signed in on that specific container. Links followed in Fun will not have access to your already signed-in sites on Bank. Links opened from your social account in Personal don't risk accidental interactions from a different social account under Professional.

Social containers are even more helpful for sites that don't support account switching. Even if they do, all you have to do is use a different account in each container and you can view both accounts side-by-side.

Oh, and it's published by Mozilla themselves within Firefox's add-on repository. You can trust it about as much as you trust Firefox.