Adnan @Decad3nce@qoto.org

One thing that's getting a little lost in this mix, is that some of the people desperately holding on at Twitter are because they are trapped by either healthcare or visas.

That there are systemic traps that trap worker in America so they feel unable to move freely to new employers who want them and would have better pay or conditions is *nuts* and deserves a lot more attention than it gets.

@rootfs I reported his reply to one of the devs, where he accused them of having Tourette’s. Unsurprisingly, his moderation team decided it didn’t violate their CoC. Which now states “Elon can do whatever he wants”.

WSJ: "Cryptocurrency lender Genesis was seeking an emergency loan of $1 billion from investors before it told clients it was suspending redemptions this week..."

https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-news-today-11-17-2022/card/crypto-lender-genesis-sought-emergency-loan-of-1-billion-by-monday-573TThK17Ke15FYwJzLR

@mattblaze @jeffjarvis This strongly argues for organizations of journalists to create their own instances with rules and practices serving the health of public discourse.

You may have heard that the principals of the collapsed FTX crypto exchange were into Effective Altruism.

Let me explain what Effective Altruism is:

* Some charities are more effective than others, and you should donate to the more effective ones.

yeah, sounds obvious and sensible

* As a first-worlder, you are basically rich, even if you don’t feel like it, and you therefore have an ethical obligation to contribute to those who aren’t - almost certainly more than you do now.

this is pretty sound reasoning actually, I can get behind this

* Therefore, we can and should stack-rank every charitable initiative in the world according to an objective numerical scoring system,

wait what

* and clearly the most cost-effective initiative possible for all of humanity is donating to fight the prospect of unfriendly artificial intelligence,,

what the

* and oh look, we just happen to have a charity for that precise purpose right here! WHAT ARE THE ODDS,,,,

fuckin

Every year, students in my CS 488 Software Development course work in teams of 4-8 to build software for an external customer. If you are in the Portland, Oregon area, that customer could be you!

Last year's ​projects included:

* A video game to teach people about earthquake preparedness.
* Creative animation software for an artist.
* A tool to help a faculty member organize course content.

Do you (or someone you know in a local organization) have a computational problem for which you need a piece of software? Let me know and maybe we can help you out.

WHAT YOU GET

Free custom software! This comes with some caveats:

* We usually produce stand-alone desktop applications. Other things are possible, but I'd prefer to stay within this realm.
* These are mostly seniors working on their first large piece of software. I make no guarantees as to quality; you might get something that you can use to do real work, but you might just get a fragile "proof of concept". We use an agile development technique that regularly reexamines goals, priorities, and expectations; this leads to a good probability that we'll have something working by the end of the semester, even if some of your more optimistic features have to be dropped.
* There probably won't be anyone to maintain your program after the semester is over. You might be able to hire some juniors to do more work on it.

WHAT YOU GIVE (We'll work with you on all of these things)

* Create an initial description of your project.
* Create and maintain a list of "user stories"​ (​things that you want your program to do​)​.
* Commit to meet with the students every other week to discuss progress and priorities. This must be a firm commitment; it's a disaster for me ​and ​the students and me if a customer flakes out.

Please boost and let me know ASAP if you're interested!

#software #ComputerScience #education #portland #pdx

Babe, wake up, a new #JWST image just dropped.

Light from the protostar L1527 escapes above and below an edge-on protoplanetary disk (the dark line at the center of the image), creating an hourglass shape. This illuminates the cavities carved as ejected material from the star collides with the surrounding, dusty nebula.

Dust scatters shorter wavelengths of light, so blue areas are where the dust is thinner and orange areas are where the dust is more dense.

https://webbtelescope.org/contents/news-releases/2022/news-2022-055

#astronomy

NPR reporting that Poland has now withdrawn it's #Article4 request, but #NATO perm reps will nevertheless meet at 10am Brussels local time in response to discuss the situation.

That's 9am London, 4am EST, 11am Kyiv time.

NATO Gen Sec Stoltenberg will then brief the press at approximately 1230pm local time

https://www.pwnallthethings.com/p/live-polish-missile-strike-what-do

Fantastischer Ausblick. #artemis - via Alexander Gerst / #astroalex

Folks wondering what's going on with the #Polish missile strikes (and let's not forget: the 100 other missile strikes in #Ukraine) over here:
https://www.pwnallthethings.com/p/live-polish-missile-strike-what-do

musk is now forcing his way into people's notifications.

"Try reading the following out loud:

Hashtag screenreaders for the hashtag blind and hashtag VisuallyImpaired read every hashtag HashTags out loud and so it's hard for people with hashtag VisualImpairment to get the sense of the post because it's being constantly interrupted by well-meaning hashtag accessibility hashtag allies.

Easier to read with a block of hashtags at the bottom:
#screenreaders #VisuallyImpaired #blind #allies #Hashtags #accessibility"
--original author unknown

Incredibly, it appears that among the "bloatware" that was shut down by Elon over on the other site... was the "microservice" that sends the 2FA codes you need to securely log in. https://twitter.com/zachsilberberg/status/1592228112770924544

I sometimes like to think of early #Android as an experiment in libertarianism... showing that it doesn't work.