Nick @internic@qoto.org

Reddit signed a deal with Google to use its data to train LLMs. To celebrate, we made a firefox extension that lets you replace all your comments with any text of your choosing. All we ask is that you not choose something copyrighted. The New York Times is currently suing OpenAI for training ChatGPT on its copyrighted material, and we wouldn't want Reddit's uniquely valuable data to become hopelessly intermingled with that of litigious copyright-holders.

https://theluddite.org/#!post/reddit-extension

Well fascinating. "Gender concealment gap."

I wonder if this shows up in the disclosure of failures inside of workplaces. The part of me that did a dissertation on disclosure will NEVER shut up.

Considering women also get far steeper penalties FOR the disclosure of negative grades*, this is even more amazing because you'd think that would be extra incentive to conceal.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w32350

*Eg you have to be a high achieving woman in STEM to be judged equivalent to a low achieving man

OH HEY

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10491133

🎉 New preprint! 🎉
A short technical note—of interest to folks working on black hole perturbation theory. I give conditions for a handy gauge choice to also freeze the location of the event horizon of a black hole.
"Can a radiation gauge be horizon-locking?"
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.10113

An #OTD thread from last year, about the scientific contributions of Julius Oppenheimer.

A lot of "common knowledge" about black holes – infinite redshift, the slow progress of an infalling observer from the point of view of a distant spectator – can be traced back to an influential paper Oppenheimer wrote in 1939.
https://mastodon.social/@mcnees/110245056828062741

I don't think it's appreciated enough that Hendrik Antoon Lorentz used a hypothetical electron to explain the optical properties of matter in 1892, before the electron was actually discovered in 1897.

We at WIRED reported 6 weeks ago that the hackers behind the Change Healthcare ransomware debacle received a $22 million payment. Only now has Change Healthcare confirmed that it paid—while also noting that stolen patient data is still at risk of leaking. https://www.wired.com/story/change-healthcare-admits-it-paid-ransomware-hackers/

👋 Should we resume posting here?

I cried at the Voyager news today. I also know why.

Because for every techbro out there, there's a talented engineer quietly working to make things actually better.

That gives me hope.

Hope is in short supply these days.

In a society where privacy had any meaning at all, the top executives at UnitedHealth would be fired -- with no golden parachutes -- or, better yet, indicted for their incompetence and indifference. https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/22/unitedhealth-change-healthcare-hackers-substantial-proportion-americans/

Who’s laughing at NASA now for buying the extended space probe warranty.
https://blogs.nasa.gov/voyager/2024/04/22/nasas-voyager-1-resumes-sending-engineering-updates-to-earth/

What's the one #Linux or #Unix command-line tool you absolutely can't live without?

Biden leads Trump by a six-point margin (53% to 47%) among those who say they will definitely vote in November, according to the latest Marist poll. https://maristpoll.marist.edu/polls/election-2024-april/

The "Pillars of Creation", as seen from my driveway. This is the central structure in Messier 16, the Eagle Nebula which is now rising very early in the morning.

#astrophotography

There is a newly discovered zero-day being used in the wild in yet another file transfer application -- in CrushFTP. It doesn't appear there is a CVE yet for this flaw.

https://www.crushftp.com/crush11wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=Update

Latest release that includes a patch is 11.1.0_3. Release notes:

https://crushftp.com/version11_build.html

Discussion on Reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/crowdstrike/comments/1c88788/situational_awareness_20240419_crushftp_virtual/?ref=news.risky.biz

Find out what that "#SeaLevelRise is 3.5 feet" means for where you live:

https://ss2.climatecentral.org/#12/42.3601/-71.0589?show=satellite&projections=0-K14_RCP85-SLR&level=5&unit=feet&pois=hide

Adjust the level on the map to view the level of flooding for other values of SLR.

The link directs to the Boston area. At SLR = 5 feet, Cambridge is done. The Back Bay is a bay.

From worlds where stars do not twinkle, to lands where you must outrun the sun-rise to survive, "Alien Earths" by Lisa Kaltenegger is packed with truly delicious visuals of what we might find on the surface of an exoplanet.

Kaltenegger gives a personal account of what it's like working at the cutting edge of uncovering the nature of these alien worlds, with many amusing anecdotes such the perils of interdisciplinary work!

My book review is here in Science Magazine 🔗! https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ado1465

#IEEEQuantumWeek deadline is extended! Check your email or the website for details.