Brian Beach has moved @bwbeach@qoto.org

The “Liberal Arts” education is a suite of skills, philosophical stances, and information that has been refined over hundreds of years. It includes both technical skills and problem solving techniques— it provides a foundation for more specialized study but also for philosophical reflection. It evolves over time, but isn’t subject whims of the market or fashion.

What is the role of Computer Science in the Platonic ideal of the liberal arts education?

Whoever is doing the writing at the FTC is doing outstanding work, I had no idea: https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2023/02/keep-your-ai-claims-check

Science at its best is bold because, as Richard Feynman put it, it can be defined as "the belief in the ignorance of authority." At the same time, science is humble because, in Ed Yong's words, it is not about discovering Truth but rather consists of "an erratic stumble toward gradually diminished uncertainty." Paradoxically, both features trigger religious authoritarians.

We ran hachyderm.io, which is ruby on rails + postgres, off of 32 vCPUs, 128GB of ram, and 2 failing hard drives RAID 10'd with international NFS and IOPS performance measuring in the *dozens*

And 45,000 active users

Had the storage been faster than a 1997 floppy disk, we could've cut compute and ram by 80% and not suffered that much at all

Y'all really don't understand how far a single laptop can really push things anymore cause we waste computers so hard

https://mastodon.social/@GeePawHill/112613403362243583

Fifty years of diff and merge: https://exple.tive.org/blarg/2024/06/14/fifty-years-of-diff-and-merge/

“The #Stanford #Internet Observatory has played a critical role in understanding a range of #digital harms,” said Kate Starbird, who led the University of Washington’s work on the Partnership & continues to publish on #election #misinformation.

Starbird said that while most #academic studies of #online #manipulation look backward from much later, the Observatory’s “rapid analysis” helped people around the world understand what they were seeing on #platforms as it happened.

#disinformation

Rows of lace patterns left behind at the abandoned Scranton Lace Company in Scranton, PA. These huge sheets were essentially punchcard code that told the machinery how to produce the desired pattern. See the rest of the photos and read the history on Abandoned America: https://www.abandonedamerica.us/scranton-lace-factory

This is *terrible.* Stanford buckles under to Jim Jordan & litigation, dismantling the Stanford Internet Observatory (retreating to safe subjects like child porn). Alex Stamos & Renee DiResta, both gone, call this "a quintessential example of the weaponization of government." h/t Casey Newton
https://www.platformer.news/stanford-internet-observatory-shutdown-stamos-diresta-sio/

I am talking o a reporter about this in a couple hours: https://regina.ctvnews.ca/from-outer-space-sask-farmers-baffled-after-discovering-strange-wreckage-in-field-1.6880353

This is about an hour away from my farm, so this'll be a fun conversation, and yet another great opportunity to tell a lot of people about what a huge problem we have with unregulated commercialization of orbit. (Also I just redid my slides for my public talk next week, this is going in!)

This is why I support Propublica.

If you want democracy to continue, I urge you to support them as well.

They are doing better investigative reporting than any major news organization.

And it matters.

#NationalSecurity #Microsoft #HomelandSecurity #Election2024 #Security #Hacking #SolarWinds #SolarWind #NuclearArsenal #NIH

https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-solarwinds-golden-saml-data-breach-russian-hackers

The people of the future will read about millions of non-electric cars and trucks driving around in dense urban centers huffing fumes with the same horror we now feel reading about all the places we used to put asbestos— or the way they used to make dresses and ribbons of celluloid: in an era when there were fireplaces and candles all over the place.

After some conversations with friends NOT on the fediverse I've arrived at calling it "independent social media."

This is better than "open source" or other titles, it better conveys the central difference.

“We’re producing more energy than ever before in this nation. We have the strongest economy in the world, and we are beating China for the first time in decades. More people went to work this morning in America than at any other time in our nation’s history. So I’ve got a message to Donald Trump and all his negativity and his whining: Stop sh*t talking America. This is the greatest country on earth, and it’s time that we all start acting like it.” - Josh Shapiro https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-11-2024

I generally support good bike infrastructure, but visiting places that have even decent bike infra radicalizes me

As I travel down a protected bike lane the wind whispers in my ear "you could have this all the time. Doesn't your community deserve nice things, too?"

It does, wind. It does.

It is really difficult to be poor in America. Not only are you dehumanized, you also get the worst Byzantine rules about anything and everything.

https://www.npr.org/2024/06/08/g-s1-3475/social-security-ssi-asset-limits