KnottedNickers @KnottedNickers@qoto.org

WHO sounds the alarm: New COVID variant is most transmissible yet

So Federal, state, and local governments plan to address the situation by… continuing to do absofuckinglutely nothing at all.

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/siounds-alarm-new-covid-variant-transmissible/story?id=96236451

#Covid #Covid19

So energizing to see all this activity after just a few hours of launching the United Federation of Instances repo.

https://gitlab.com/ufoi/constitution

We already have 7 discussions going on and 2 merge requests for the proposal... The more people keep getting involved the more energy I have to put more into it. Cant wait to finish a draft of the bylaws.

#UFoI #UFI @ufoi

Wow - this could be a huge public health win. Turns out light at ~200nm is safe for humans but inactivates viruses.

https://knowablemagazine.org/article/health-disease/2022/how-fight-covid-with-light

A few recommendations for life on Mastodon:

1) Follow anyone you think looks potentially interesting; you can always unfollow later, and they may lead you to new people via boosted posts.

2) Boost posts you think are worthy, so others can discover new content.

3) Don't obsess on replicating your Twitter follows on Mastodon; let it be its own experience, and grow it organically. Obvs follow anyone you miss from Twitter, but this isn't a 1:1 replacement; have fun, follow your instincts.

From Clarence Thomas to Brett Kavanaugh to Samuel Alito, the stench of corruption—or, at a minimum, serious ethical violations—is growing ever stronger around the Supreme Court. And John Roberts continues to do nothing about it. Will Congress act?https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/the-stench-of-corruption-is-growing-stronger-around-the-supreme-court/

"Loving to see the world burn!" - geometry edition.

I'm impressed by a Google Maps feature I just used for the first time. Walking around Manhattan, and it complained that location accuracy was low. Usually that's followed by it instructions for calibrating the accelerometer, involving a complex pas-de-deux with your phone.

This time it just asked me to point the camera at... basically anything. It instantly recognized my position from a random view on a random street.

While clearly it knew my approximate location, so the search space isn't unlimited, there could be different cars going by, etc. etc., not to mention an arbitrary field of view. I'm impressed.

Anyone have any details on how this computation is done?

#visual #algorithms #geolocation #Google

Can “social battery recharging” make its way into academic conference programmes already? Asking for a friend.
#introvert #SociallyDrained #tired #QuietTime

President Biden extends moratorium on student loan payments - https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/president-biden-extends-moratorium-student-loan-payments/story?id=93815609

I'm actually envious of Elon Musk's children.

They're the only people who never have to hear from him!

Who Is Dying from COVID Now, and Why
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/who-is-dying-from-covid-now-and-why/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=health&utm_content=link&utm_term=2022-11-21_featured-this-week&spMailingID=72353499&spUserID=OTE2Njc3ODY2OTQS1&spJobID=2260735746&spReportId=MjI2MDczNTc0NgS2

Back in the 1960s, Robert Noyce recommended incentive pay for one of his top performers at Fairchild Semiconductor. A Fairchild director replied “isn’t the fact that we’re not going to fire them in the morning incentive enough?”

Noyce left soon after to start Intel

Not gonna lie - this is the coolest thing I've seen in a long time. I dare say it has the same game-changer potential that docker had. Only alpha, but already insanely useful.

https://github.com/teaxyz/cli

Musk seems to think that he can solve the problems and conflicts of a forum that serves hundreds of millions of people from every corner of humanity by:

- cutting staff down to a lean team of more "hardcore" engineers

- firing everyone responsible for dealing with social, policy, and legal issues

- chasing away recognized experts and celebrities who've been providing free content

- making the place more welcoming to nazis

Sounds like a plan.

In regards to Elon Musk reinstating Donald Trump on twitter: I’ll just never understand being the richest man in the world and still wanting to be some fascist’s little bitch.

Fired from the bird site? Or another company? Wikimedia is hiring! Come work on the last best place on the internet.

https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/jobs/#section-1

Every time someone from the Other Place pops up over here, it's like sitting in a country pub in a snowstorm and seeing someone you really like coming in through the door.

For those making the #twittermigration : the Debirdify tool has been helpful in locating and re-following your community across the fediverse https://pruvisto.org/debirdify/

i reckon we will quickly face moderation related challenges with mastodon, as people (including griefers and trolls) decide to join, but because it's an open platform we have the potential to experiment with and pioneer moderation approaches ourselves, instead of relegating it to a black box in a birdsite

Censorship and Suppression of Covid-19 Heterodoxy: Tactics and Counter-Tactics

Controverses sur les connaissances et les politiques liées au COVID.
Pour contrer la menace que représentent les médecins et les scientifiques qui contestent la position officielle des autorités sanitaires gouvernementales et intergouvernementales, des partisans de cette orthodoxie ont entrepris de censurer ceux qui défendent des points de vue divergents.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11024-022-09479-4