Nick @internic@qoto.org

The Moon Dressed Like Saturn https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap240901.html #APOD

Hey folks, if you want to know how to improve your product, ask open ended questions.

This tweet brought to you by Marriott*, whose "Are you happy with the product" asked to select between 8 categories of problems they think represent user behavior. At their scale, why not ask for freeform text and categorize it as "fits an existing category well" or "doesn't"?

*Not actually sponsored by Marriott.

The physics laws that the standard model is built on do not explicitly require that leptons behave exactly the same, but they seem to do so. This is a good enough reason to check, particularly because some other experiments maybe see differences. This #CMSPaper 1336 tests this for the very difficult B_c meson, and the results agree with the standardmodel (within large, 28%, uncertainties) https://buff.ly/3AIqJfw

“It was a simple but brilliant design stroke: rather than a window where people paste text and allow the LLM to extend it, ChatGPT framed it as a chat window.”

"The practical risks of AI are not that they become super capable thinking machines. It is building complex systems around machines we falsely assume are capable of greater discernment and logic than they possess."

Just two of the excellent insights in this piece.

https://www.techpolicy.press/challenging-the-myths-of-generative-ai/

Meanwhile, BlueSky is a Brazilian site now.

It’s Brazil’s site now, everyone else just lives in it.

It's become hard to follow Covid levels, and I've got a bunch of travel coming up over the next few months (NC, LA, MA, and MO), so I put together this bot that publishes state-by-state Covid levels, as tracked in wastewater. It posts once weekly, Saturday, which is when the CDC updates their numbers.

I basically just made this for me, but perhaps others might find it useful.
https://botsin.space/@covid_wastewater/113059650109973797

Humble Bundle offering a (sadly US only) package of 39 Discworld ebooks for $18. My favorite book series. Absolutely worth it if you haven't tried them.

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/terry-pratchetts-discworld-harpercollins-encore-books

#Discworld #fantasy #books #bookstodon

I’ve been trying to get this shot for years and I finally got it on #Caturday

It's starting to get properly dark at night in the Highlands, if my recent posts didn't hint enough ;)
Midsummer we basically don't have "astronomical night" for a couple of months. But the night sky is getting pretty again, looking forward to Orion.

What's your favorite recent UPLIFTING sff read?

Doesn't mean it can't be sad or hard or painful but something that connected you to hope and imagination in the end...?

Anybody here on either Bookwyrm or Storygraph? I'm tied of how badly Goodreads sucks. If Bookwyrm, suggestions for an instance?

the history of using barbed wire to communicate is surprisingly long and almost entirely undocumented, even though barbed wire fence phones in particular were an essential part of early- to mid-twentieth century rural life in many parts of the U.S. and Canada! to that end, I've posted a brief history of barbed wire and barbed wire fence phones on my blog, excerpted from my book _Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook_. enjoy and please share! #othernetworks https://loriemerson.net/2024/08/31/a-brief-history-of-barbed-wire-fence-telephone-networks/

Karl Jansky invented the field of radio astronomy #OTD in 1932.

During a solar eclipse he saw no change in the faint radio hiss he'd been monitoring, which ruled out the sun as a source. He soon attributed this "star noise" to large ionized gas clouds near the center of the Milky Way.

Years ago, I created a bot that posted Sun Tzu quotes, if Sun Tzu had written about cyber war. When X closed up API access that bot broke, and it never was high on my list of priorities to bring here. Well, I just fixed that. May I introduce you to @SunTzuCyber, which posts hourly. The posts are set up as unlisted/quiet public, so they won't show up in timelines unless you follow it.

Profs: How did you come up with your lab's name? Tell us the origin story.

What are some best practices? What are things to avoid?

Got a killer acronym? How did you come up with it?

Pls repost/share to get this post get out of the awful filter bubble

#academia #academicchatter #stem #science

A good friend of mine notes that while nobody ever _declares_ a Sev0 incident, one of the most notable signals you're in a Sev0 incident is when lawyers who have no reason to be there and nothing to add start joining incident calls so that whatever is said in those calls is now sheltered by attorney-client privilege.

https://www.courtwatch.news/p/heres-22-examples-of-google-employees