Nick @internic@qoto.org

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

#mtbos #EduTooter #edu
https://onedtech.philhillaa.com/p/prospective-online-students-want-async-sync-mix
Phil Hill is amazing and anayltical.
The lede (he also doesn't call it "tl/dr" for the too long, didn't read nonsense)
is that ed tech needs to stop thinking of online learning as synchronous or asynchronous. WE CAN MIX. From the newsletter:
"This conclusion could have been the lede for the survey release. Nearly nine in ten prospective online students would be willing to attend synchronous sessions in an otherwise asynchronous course to improve their ability to learn the material, and most of those would prefer once per week.

I’ll repeat my conclusions from 2021.

I think that the challenge, or opportunity, over the next few years is for schools to figure out how to combine asynchronous methods that preserve anywhere / anytime access with synchronous methods, increasingly with video, that meaningfully increase student engagement. That’s not a new concept, but as William Gibson noted, “The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.” How do we increase the large-scale adoption of the methods that work? That is the key opportunity."
Anybody want to work with me to do that with math?

Kudos to whoever created this. I wish I could credit them.

I think it's probably about time to make a general announcement that after two INTENSE years sciencing in public I'm going into committed rest, recovery, family & focus time for the rest of 2024 ☺️.

If it's not something already in motion, I will most definitely be slow if not entirely offline on following up on brand new invites, chats, talk requests, collaboration opps, etc. Please know this is circumstantial & I still welcome them (for '25!)

Excited to be resting and (hopefully) creating. 🌲

Today I was prompted (ha ha) by a question Anders Sandberg asked the latest GPT: at what angle should you throw a projectile — subject to uniform gravity, and ignoring air resistance — in order to maximise the length of its trajectory?

[The Chatbot got quite close, but fell over at the end, being too lazy to compute an easy derivative, and then screwing up its numerical solution to a needlessly difficult formulation of the problem.]

It’s well known that to maximise the horizontal distance travelled, you should launch the projectile at 45°. But to maximise the distance along its parabolic path before it hits the ground, the angle turns out to satisfy the beautiful transcendental equation:

s arctanh(s) = 1

where s = sin(θ)

This is solved by:

s ≈ 56.47°

Starting to see people link to perplexity.ai answers in their blog posts instead of Wikipedia even though the perplexity answer is literally just paraphrasing (not even summarising) the Wikipedia entry. 😑

interesting tooling somebody recommended in a chat earlier today: “I spent a couple months building a newsletter generator in the early days of ChatGPT going back and forth in Python. I gave Replit 1 prompt with the same requirements I used with ChatGPT, and it spit out working code in about 15min.” https://replit.com/

This kind of automation (really just the supercharged evolution of autocomplete that has been in IDEs for years) is one area I think LLMs can provide real value in a way that is both familiar (people have been using autocomplete for years) and helps avoid the most common risks that arise when using these things as general knowledge engines.

Help! My granddaughter asks why the spoon in a glass of water looks bigger than in air. How do I explain geometric optics and the reflective index of water to a 2 ½ year old … 😳🙈?
#physics #scicomm

I cannot even believe this misinformation coming out of the Florida Department of Health. This is just beyond the pale. They are discouraging the use of mRNA COVID vaccines. This is beyond irresponsible. It is malpractice.

https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/FLDOH/bulletins/3b56786

Conservatives have been championing Telegram as a more ideologically aligned alternative to Signal, and so they are trying to paint Durov's arrest as being politically motivated. To be clear, Telegram is much less secure than Signal (!!)

https://www.404media.co/how-telegrams-founder-pavel-durov-became-a-culture-war-martyr/

Congratulations to our first 2024 EFF Awards Winner, @404mediaco !

As the media landscape in general and tech media in particular keeps shrinking, 404 Media, launched in August 2023, has forged ahead with incisive investigative reports, deep-dive features, blogs, and scoops.

What's the easiest way for me to pull up a pdf on my ipad and mark it up with an apple pencil? It can save as another pdf or an image. Either way is fine.

The U.S. gender wage gap has widened for the first time in 20 years.

Men's median earnings rose 3%, compared to 1.5% for women. 🤔Details at https://www.axios.com/2024/09/11/gender-wage-gap-rate-earnings

Hi all! I’m overdue for another Bridgy Fed status update. Bottom line up front: we’re now bridging video on Bluesky! Out from Bluesky works now, in will work as soon as they finish their user rollout, hopefully within days.

Also, Bridgy Fed can now ask people to bridge their accounts! This is the infamous “discoverable opt in,” and it’s finally launched. If you want to follow someone, but they’re not bridged, send their handle to Bridgy Fed in a DM or chat message, and it will message them to say you’re asking. (Only once; it won’t send another message if someone else asks.)

We send a couple other DMs now too, a welcome when you bridge your account, and an FYI when you reply to someone but they won’t see it because you’re not bridged .

It’s been a busy couple months. I was all set to post this weeks ago, after I put the finishing touches on DMs, but then Brazil happened. 3M new users and 10-20x usage increase in just a few days!

Amazingly, even though Bluesky team hosts all the difficult-to-scale parts themselves, not in the cloud, they’d still planned for this kind of surprise and handled it ok. Bridgy Fed though, not so much. It stayed up and serving, but Bluesky => fediverse got slower and slower. Tough timing, too, I was busy with other things and couldn’t find much time to work on it, so after a week it was almost 3 days (!) behind.

Fortunately, I finally managed to speed it up – props to Ilya‘s libipld library, among other things! – and after it worked through the backlog, we were back in business.

Anyway. Since last time: video, DMs, usage spike, and other features and bug fixes too:

Improved Pleroma and Flipboard compatibility.
Improved style of web => Bluesky bridged posts, also now try harder to include an image.
Drastically improved monitoring and alerting.
Stricter authorization for AP Undos.
…and lots more bug fixes.

As usual, feel free to ping me with feedback, questions, and bug reports. You can follow the now label on GitHub to see what I’m currently focusing on. See you on the bridge!