🌸🌹2ck 🌱🐇 @2ck@qoto.org

John @scalzi, novelist & internet personality, is the 2023 winner of the Robert A. Heinlein Award.

This award is bestowed for outstanding published works in science fiction and technical writings that inspire the human exploration of space. It will be presented at #Balticon2023

It’s very funny to me that the dominant Twentieth Century conception of AI was a slightly awkward nerd with an inhuman mastery of facts and logic, when what we actually got is smooth-talking bullshit artists who can’t do eighth-grade math.

I dreamt I was learning a language with two important words, wimak and mak. You used ‘mak’ in factual sentences where the basis for your assertion was anything you could touch (including taste) and ‘wimak’ if what you knew came from dreams, communication with ghosts, or intuition. Stuff you saw or heard was an unmarked case. People argued about whether tv or internet was wimak or not. #linguistdreams

My family laughed at me when i told them I wanted this for christmas.

But now I can burn #linux ISOs to disks again.

And they can not.

Who’s laughing now.

I don’t want to improve my credit score, I want to live curiously beyond my means and then die happy with my many secrets

Agardite-(Y), YCu2+6(AsO4)3(OH)6·3H2O (TL)
Bou Skour Mine, Bou Skour mining district, Agdz Cercle, Zagora Province, Drâa-Tafilalet Region, Morocco
FOV = 3.5 mm
#9232
NFS
#minerals #crystals #mineralogy #mineralcollecting #rockhounding

I booted WIN today
To see if I still feel
I focus on the MIDI
The only thing that's real

🔊🎵 #OPL3MIDI

Rocks like this, studied up close, could for the first time help put a specific age on the surface of Mars. Scientists often make educated guesses about the age by counting craters in a region (more craters = older). Samples like this offer a key to unlocking the real answer.

Almost there – nine tubes down!

Why is my team excited about this one? This core sample came from an igneous rock back near my landing site. Brought back to Earth, it could tell scientists a lot about the earliest history of this lakebed area. But that’s not all...

Finally figured out how to succinctly describe what’s gone wrong with Google Search: They focused so hard on figuring out the *one* single most relevant thing to your query that it just tries to find *that* thing, to the exclusion of anything else.

If you’re lucky, your results will be: (1) ad, (2) thing you want, (3) basically a copy of the thing you want, (4) another copy, etc.

You can’t easily find all the possibilities for a category. So you can’t use it to really explore a topic in breadth anymore. You can’t find variations on a theme.

It’s like if you asked the server at a restaurant for the menu, and instead of giving you one with all the options, they instead look you over, decide you want a hamburger, and when you ask for options just give you the same hamburger with slight tweaks.

I once had a girl
Or should I say she once had MIDI

🔊🎵 #OPL3MIDI

« French Ministry of Education chooses #BigBlueButton »
Le ministère de l'Éducation finance également le développement de Big Blue Button.
👍
https://bigbluebutton.org/2023/01/11/french-ministry-of-education-chooses-bigbluebutton/

Found this on the street #Ōtepoti #Antartica
I'd love to know the story.
Can you help me get it back on the right finger?

Things are gettin’ real weird over at Ars Technica

One of the most fun parts of astrophysics is when we use one type of object to tell us something profound about a completely different type of object.

My PhD student Amanda Cook has just posted a really great new paper that falls into this category.

🌱 My Neighbor Mastodon 2

Thank you, thank you, *thank you* for being more than 20K to follow my art here. It's fantastic.

#Mastoart #ArtWithOpensource #krita #HumanArt

How long has it been since you made sure you could actually access your backups?