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I was looking for a free alternative to Duolingo and of course I can get free self-guided online language courses through the library. Of course I can! Honestly, man. Libraries. Use them, love them, defend them 📚❤️

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Modern software development be like: I wrote 10 lines of code to call an API that calls another API, which calls yet another API that finally turns on a lightbulb. Pray that Cloudflare or AWS will not be down during this operation; otherwise, there will be no light for you.

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Disney recently acquired the "Alien" franchise. That means, since the aliens have a queen, all the xenomorphs are Disney princesses.

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Random thought:

If Chrome thinks I can't browse without the help of AI, why do billionaires think we **need** humans on Mars to do the exploration instead of robots?

Can we all just admit that it's ok to want to go to Mars but we don't actually **need** to go to Mars?

@sundogplanets @marcoshuerta One reason I always hesitated to use that approach when writing tests was that I feared now I'd be testing test taker strategy along with subject matter. You always do that to some extent, of course, but I always feared that the "choose your own adventure" test style would make that worse. That being said, I do think that students like it.

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If anyone has Instagram, my PBS station is doing March Madness brackets for our programs.

It’s just for fun, but I’d be grateful for any votes for the series I write & host, Serving Up Science ⬇️
instagram.com/stories/wkaroffi

It’s a show all about where our food comes from & it’s impact on our bodies & the planet.

Thank you ☺️

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@yojimbo @adamshostack @campuscodi @sambowne

I’m not sure it’s social engineering. We can send a “perfect” password prompt using ESC sequences (and hide the banner), exactly when a user types their password correctly. I know that for me, if I type my password for ssh or sudo, and they output “password incorrect, try again”, I’ll just type it in again assuming I made a mistake. This allows priv-esc from low privilege users. And no, it definitely did not need a logo :)

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"If all experts communicated clearly about the continued risks of the virus [covid, SARS-CoV-2], Dr. Lara Jirmanus [MD, MPH, Harvard FXB Center for Health & Human Rights] thinks people might be more open to precautions like masking, staying home when sick, and getting vaccinated" -TIME time.com/6960789/covid-19-caut

With quotes from @luckytran and @lindyg.bsky.social

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The words "under God" were added to the US Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, during the Cold War, under the Eisenhower administration, to mark a distinction between the USA and so-called 'godless' communism of the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China.

When people today quote "one nation, under God" as evidence that the founders of this country created a Christian Nationalist country, they are repeating historical inaccuracies. You are welcome to correct them.

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Why spaceflight is hard, part 3: space is big.

The moon is 250000 miles away, which is 3 days at 3500 mph. Mars is 140–1000 times farther, and the stars farther still. A leisurely 420 year trip to Proxima Centauri requires "only" 1% c, but that looks scarier in more familiar units: Δv=3000 km/s.

Using the rocket equation, generously assuming propellants with vₑ=10 km/s, we get the ridiculous mass ratio 2×10¹³⁰. Nope. Experimental nuclear thermal rockets might get up to vₑ=50 km/s, bringing the mass ratio down to 10²⁶. Still nope. Maybe we can somehow find something even more exotic that gives us another factor of 10, with vₑ=500 km/s? That's a mass ratio of 400, meaning 99.8% of the ship is fuel, and it gets worse when you remember it also needs fuel to slow down.

Going fast enough to get to another star within one lifetime is harder still, let alone going so fast that time dilation gets interesting. Those "lighthugger" and "NAFAL" ships are almost as magical as warp drives and TARDISes and fairy rings.

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Me trying to explain modern development practices to normies:
Me: yeah, we don’t know how long it will take, or how much it will cost, tbh we don’t really know what we’re going to make. We need to figure that out. Get a feel for the people and the problem, make some stuff that seems useful and see how it goes.
Them: What kind of hippie bullshit is this???
Me: You should’ve seen the crap we made when we thought we knew what we were doing…
Them: Who would go along with this nonsense?
Me: … the people who had to deal with what we made before…?
Them: What part of this even partially resembles Engineering???
Me: so… the thing… that we’ll figure out is the thing we should make?
Them: yeah?
Me: Well, we’ll do that… But At Scale!
Them: what on earth does that even mean??? Gimme my money back!!!

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When creating PDFs, avoid using "Print to PDF." A screen reader user may still be able to access the text of PDFs created this way, but heading structure, alternative text, and any other tag structure will be lost. Using "Save As" or "Export" can preserve these tags.

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IF IMMUNITY IS NOT GRANTED TO A PREFECT, EVERY PREFECT THAT LEAVES TEROK NOR WILL BE IMMEDIATELY INDICTED BY THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT. WITHOUT COMPLETE IMMUNITY, A PREFECT OF BAJOR FROM THE CARDASSIAN UNION WOULD NOT BE ABLE TO PROPERLY FUNCTION!

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RSS is making something of a comeback (it never went away, though Google and Facebook did their best to kill it), because forward-looking publishers see the value.

The excellent @404mediaco news site explains "How We Built a Full Text RSS Feed" on the Ghost newsletter/blog software, and shared the process with all Ghost users. Kudos all around.

404media.co/email/4e6c0b81-03f

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the fact that we've gotten 19 replies and almost all of them are recommending different readers helps us know that supporting RSS was definitely the right decision, so you can read us wherever you want!

I (jason) am going to try out feeeed

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Aw I got an Outstanding Reviewer award from SIGCSE! I wish more conferences would do these - I think that they're very encouraging/motivating for junior researchers in particular, and might incentivize folks to review with care. <3

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You can read more about the image above here chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2023 and browse the Chandra photo gallery to see some of the other incredible images and science the Chandra Observatory has brought us. #SaveChandra

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