Sylvain Miermont @miermont@social.cleverlibre.org

Happy Birthday to one of the most beloved media players out there!!! 🥳 ✨

@videolan

#opensource

The stylish, unknown & extremely rare SEGA AI COMPUTER (1986) promised natural language processing and "artificial intelligence" via its Prolog interpreter.

We're making available today, for the first time ever: system roms, game cards, tapes recordings, scans, photos, MAME driver & more: https://smspower.org/SegaAI

I would like to ask the people who marvel about the Fermi Paradox and hope to one day communicate with an extraterrestrial civilization what they think about our inability or unwillingness to communicate with the other technological civilization we have right under our noses on Earth: the termites.

Gonna need to throw every trick in the book at this layout.

This book, that is. Luckily the little one is asleep so she's not trying to read it :p

Douglas Allchin, Jonathan Osborne, and I have a new paper out about teaching science in this age of online misinformation.

The idea is simple: we tell people to trust the science, but we rarely teach students about the social processes that make it trustworthy.

https://carlbergstrom.com/publications/pdfs/2024JCST.pdf

This passage from @debcha's "How Infrastructure works" is such a truth that often gets forgotten or ignored on the hunt for profit. It's a very familiar and recurring theme in resilience engineering texts and research. And it also rings true for me in this current trend of continuous layoffs that take more and more slack and capacity out of tech systems being maintained (in addition to the human cost) as remaining humans need to do more work in the same amount of time.

Look, the amount of road wear increases exponentially to weight. Road damage is proportional to weight per axle to the 4th power. bigger cars means more road work, more repaving, more taxes to pay for all of that overbuilt nonsense. All while just the same number of people are being transported.

SUVs and "light trucks" should be taxed on a curve which represents the roads which they rely on to exist as a transit method, and the dumbasses actually buying the SUVs should pay that tax instead of literally all of the rest of us including those who don't even own cars.

We're gonna need a term for "absolutely beautiful but catastrophically inappropriate for the season" weather. This century is so stupid already

@jlsksr The city of Melbourne used FPGA based PDP-11 emulator boards because you can no longer buy PDP-11's so they could contiinue to use their train control software https://webinfo.uk/webdocssl/irse-kbase/ref-viewer.aspx?refno=1559669757&document=2.10%20strangaric%20-%20legacy%20train%20control%20system%20stabilisation.pdf

@technicat the original Mac UI devs noticed and solved so many problems in *1986* that more recent Web 2.0+ frontend devs just ignore -- like this one, *drag delay* -- solving the problem that when the user moves their cursor towards an item on a popup menu, the mouse may drift outside the lines momentarily *en route*, so you should make sure not to close the menu prematurely; these days lots of popup menus instantly pop closed if you stray outside their bounds #UI #UX

Related to LNG:

The world’s 1,300 largest methane-polluting sites have been identified from space, thanks to an endeavor by environmental intelligence company Kayrros.

Thanks to satellite surveillance, the exact sources of potent planet-warming pollution are finally exposed. “Previously, we could measure the amount of methane in the atmosphere, but now we really know exactly where it’s coming from,”

Open access datalike this can have a big impact!
#ClimateSolutions #ClimateProgress #Methane

NASA stated that the Ingenuity helicopter has officially taken its last flight. 72 out of 5 planned flights is pretty darn good.

There is really good stats thinking you can do on this and there are many models for mapping this type of change, but you won't get this thinking from business analytics or mainstream data science unfortunately. You need to look to the sciences that have done causal inference in complex real world situations.

People often say "ugh stop overthinking it. Just set a target and measure a change."

All models are wrong etc, but on some topics putting "simple" over everything is fundamentally broken.

This is also why it is incomprehensible that so much software research on human behavior does not follow the scientific standards of so many other fields in reporting demographics and treating things like group differences (or similarities) as a valid analysis, and indeed, even asking itself to take a representative sample across identities.

It's embarrassing that people publish papers with entirely male samples and are acclaimed as experts on the future of software engineering practices.

This thread is a great example of something applied scientists like me warn about A LOT with assumptions about average increases and decreases. Disaggregated and longitudinal analysis with domain expertise is necessary to understand changes in complex experience, most of all those that are about evaluations of complex systems like our social systems.

In fact this exact problem of response collapse was something I raised an objection about in my first tech job at Google

https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/111811331356331786

hey, you know those "tell me what you were doing when you crashed" boxes you almost never fill out?

I just want you to know that the last... 3? crashes I've worked on have all had BRILLIANT clues for what was wrong in there from users. If you have ANY idea what you were doing, and can put it into words? please, please do, your assistance is HUGELY appreciated. Even just "I was adjusting the app settings” can be a clue!

(also, remember that it's a human reading it eventually, be kind!)
#work

#SeminarAlert | IGE presents a not-to-be-missed series of seminars on the science of #climate #attribution 🌍
🗓 January 26 and February 2 - 13:30-14:30
📍 IGE - Saint Martin d'Hères campus
To join online 🔗 https://univ-grenoble-alpes-fr.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMvdu2opz8jHd2lTeg8i9W1A1EuJftY4CpJ#/registration

More info: https://www.ige-grenoble.fr/Seminaire-IGE?id_reponse=108