Nick @internic@qoto.org

Over 50,000 people support @ProPublica's investigative journalism. We're a non-profit, web-first newsroom that investigates abuses of trust in the public interest.

We're beginning our fall member drive, and I want to show how vibrant and engaged the fediverse community is. If you have the means, please consider a donation.

https://give.propublica.org/give/346423/#!/donation/checkout?c_src=ben_mastodon

#journalism #fediverse

PKfail, the supply chain debacle stemming from use of non-production platform keys marked do not trust, has been found on hundreds of new devices, some used by voting machines, ATMs, and point of sale terminals.

https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/09/secure-boot-neutering-pkfail-debacle-is-more-prevalent-than-anyone-knew/

I've always valued having conservative friends and working through differences, but I am stunned at how much harder it has gotten since the debate. Even people I otherwise respect are rallying around Trump. Their Facebook feeds are filled with more misinformation than I could possibly counter - it overwhelms reasonable discourse. I fear the country is heading to a very dark place.

My old friend, the animator Peter Chung, has released the first of our Zoom conversations! We range over many topics: artistic, scientific and philosophical.

He writes:

John Baez is a world renowned smart guy with interest in a wide range of subjects beyond his specialties of theoretical physics and pure mathematics. We have been close friends since twelfth grade, when we were new students at Langley High School in Virginia in 1978-79. In spite of having divergent career paths, I think we shared an outsider's view of high school culture that brought us together. I've wanted to interview John for a while, and this is the first of a series of dialogues which I hope will be of interest to listeners. John has requested that our dialogues be available to everyone without paywall restrictions.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/podcast-42-john-112137861?utm_id=a172f2fd-ae12-420a-a092-18bd677d6532

How do abortion pills work? What are common side effects? Who shouldn’t take abortion medication? We answered frequently asked questions about abortion pills.

#FAQ #Abortion #Health #RoeVWade #AbortionPills #FDA

https://www.propublica.org/article/abortion-pills-safety-questions-answered

hope you're feline calm and relaxed on this lazy sunday

#Caturday #SilentSunday

Has #Rosetta touched your life?

Did it inspire you to pick up a different subject at university or made you call a pet 'Philae'? Was your research informed by Rosetta data or have you created art (or a cake!) based on Rosetta images?

My colleagues at #ESA are creating an online exhibition to showcase your stories - you can submit words, images, videos, audio files or links to published material:

▶️ https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Rosetta/Rosetta_s_legacy_how_were_you_inspired

Deadline is 12 October 2024

#astrodon

So one of the things that is important about social media is that you can use it to really broaden your exposure to lived experiences out side of your own.

One of the many reasons this is important is because sometimes your life changes. And those lived experiences that used to seem far away from you suddenly become your own actual life.

For me, this was hearing people talk about disability.

I have played a little bit with OpenAI's new iteration of GPT, GPT-o1, which performs an initial reasoning step before running the LLM. It is certainly a more capable tool than previous iterations, though still struggling with the most advanced research mathematical tasks.

Here are some concrete experiments (with a prototype version of the model that I was granted access to). In https://chatgpt.com/share/2ecd7b73-3607-46b3-b855-b29003333b87 I repeated an experiment from https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/109948249160170335 in which I asked GPT to answer a vaguely worded mathematical query which could be solved by identifying a suitable theorem (Cramer's theorem) from the literature. Previously, GPT was able to mention some relevant concepts but the details were hallucinated nonsense. This time around, Cramer's theorem was identified and a perfectly satisfactory answer was given. (1/3)

A friend of mine asked me to help with her website just last year. It took me a while to figure it out. It was an old cpanel install with static html files updated over ftp. It offended my dev sensibilities.

I asked if she wanted to upgrade to something like squarespace. Then I realized that didn't make any sense. She didn't care about any of that, and the website she had only cost her $15 per year. So I just made the simple edits she needed and then let her move on with her life.

Hey kids! Starting tomorrow, you too can give your money over to a new "high-yield crypto investment" scheme endorsed by former president Trump, and run by his sons, including 18 y/o Baron, who is cited as the "chief visionary."

Sounds like a brilliant investment (for the Trump family):

"A whopping 70% of Trump-backed World Liberty Financial's WLFI tokens will be reserved for the project's insiders, according to a white paper draft obtained by CoinDesk. Of the remaining 30% of the tokens distributed via a public sale, the founding team will also receive a portion of the proceeds."

Because nothing screams legit like a high-yield investment scheme. Add crypto and it's uber-legit: https://www.investor.gov/protect-your-investments/fraud/types-fraud/high-yield-investment-programs

CoinDesk quotes a Trump fan and crypto investor predicting disaster: "It'll be the juiciest DeFi target ever and it's forked from a protocol that itself was hacked). it's also an obvious target for the SEC. at best it's an unnecessary distraction, at worst it's a huge embarrassment and source of (additional) legal trouble."

https://www.coindesk.com/business/2024/09/04/in-trump-backed-crypto-project-insiders-are-poised-for-unusually-big-paydays/

#shamelessgrifters

@benroyce

I love the modern world and I will fight about it.

I love my antibiotics and clean drinking water.

Does anyone here use DuckDuckGo, the browser, on macOS? I’ve been trying it out and am pretty happy with it, aside from the fact that tabs don’t always close when I hit cmd+W. I *think* it might have something to do with how the tabs are created, but I have no idea. It’s irritating.

Anyone else see this behaviour?

https://duckduckgo.com/

#DuckDuckGo #MacOS

I can't entirely back this up, but here's what I'm feeling. Bluesky could grow to be a close approximation of what Twitter was. That will be cool for those who miss the golden age of Twitter. But mastodon has the potential to be something new and different. It's not constrained by what came before.

I agree with this thread for the most part. Except for one important thing. We really have to stop convincing ourselves that the only alternative to extractive capitalism is people overworking for free and burning out. It's not better. In fact it's worse in *almost* every way. This approach might push back against extractive capitalism. But for the people who are actually burdened, it makes their real lives under capitalism worse.
https://oliphant.social/@oliphant/113136636513087913

Throughout history, falsely blaming marginalized groups for the spread of diseases has contributed to hate crimes, ethnic cleansing, genocides, and the holocaust. This kind of rhetoric must never be accepted or normalized.

My decision to go industry-independent unlocked the journey that defined my career for the last ten years.

In that time, CAT Lab has worked directly with communities who donate data, collaborating on research that has measurably made online platforms safer & more understanding for hundreds of millions of people. By working with the public, we can make a difference without having to strike deals with unreliable corporate partners or violating people's privacy. I'm so grateful I made that choice.

So this got some traction overnight. A few details:

Much of the filing hinges on the claim that, through their 2013 code of ethics, the publisher’s industry association agreed to set the price of peer review at zero.

I’m not an antitrust lawyer, but the core case law here seems pretty strong. In particular, in National Society of Professional Engineers, the Supreme Court said “a code of ethics can still be illegal price fixing”: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=1917928030443042074

The Indian vulture collapse is one of the worst wildlife disasters in history, and I meet people all the time who have never heard of it. In a few decades, India lost nearly all of its vultures. That cascaded into hundreds of thousands of human deaths, billions of dollars in damage, and a cultural loss that can't even really be measured.

My latest for the Washington Post is about the value of vultures, in hopes that we appreciate ours a little more.

#birds #vultures

https://wapo.st/4elK4Sn