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NASA Universe

#TBT to October 1604, when sky watchers spotted a new bright dot among the stars. This supernova was named for German astronomer Johannes Kepler, who studied it extensively. Our telescopes still observe its slowly expanding remnant!

Learn more: go.nasa.gov/4dFNVZF

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Elizabeth Tasker

Our new paper (led by newly minted graduate, Florian Lalande) on using machine learning to impute unknown exoplanet properties has just dropped!

Let's talk deets...

We're edging towards a stunning 6,000 exoplanet discoveries. It's a huge database that should be outright PLUNDERED for trends that can reveal how planets form and evolve. However, use is throttled by the fact that database has so many missing properties it's got more holes than a sponge. (cont...)

📘 : astro.theoj.org/article/124538

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franco_vazza

Thread on international conferences, remote attending etc...

So for the first time ever I was invited in the SOC (=Scientific Organising Committee) of a conference abroad.

Before joining, I made clear that a prerequisite for me was that a minimum amount of remote attendees/speakers should be allowed: we cannot go fully back to pre-covid.

I was reassured and so was happy to serve in the past months by setting up the program, deciding speakers etc.

Sadly...

#astrodon #astronomy #science

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Alastair McKinstry

Parking machine scam, Ireland.

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Mark McCaughrean

Your 80-year old reminder of the ethical decision you make if you choose to dissociate your fantasies of space exploration & love of rockets from the politics of the people building & launching them.

Credit: Deutsches Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archive), via Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0

commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil

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J. Nathan Matias 🦣

So grateful in an era where so much online advice comes from generative AI without any grounding in evidence, that someone has actually made a robot to test the best phone cables.

It may seem like a small thing, but it really matters.

consumerreports.org/electronic

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jwz

Mosaic Netscape 0.9 was released 30 years ago today.

According to my notes, it went live shortly after midnight on Oct 13, 1994. We sat in the conference room in the dark and listened to different sound effects fired for each different platform that was downloaded. At some point late that night I wandered off and wrote the first version of the page that loaded when you pressed the "What's Cool" button in the toolbar. (A couple days later, Jim Clark would go ballistic...

jwz.org/b/yka7

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nixCraft 🐧

Ever wonder when your system last updated a package when using a Debian or Ubuntu Linux? Let's check Firefox, for example. Type this:

```
grep -B4 firefox /var/log/apt/history.log
```

See cyberciti.biz/faq/debian-ubunt for more info.

#debian #ubuntu #linux #sysadmin

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nixCraft 🐧

In the past few weeks, Apple canceled the following:

a) A multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI

b) Apple officially cancels autonomous driving permit (Apple already scrapped its self-driving electric car project after ten years of research)

c) Apple engineers confirmed that AIs don't understand reasoning and stuff like that.

While the whole tech industry is going AI-first, Apple is more cautious and isn't buying AI buzz. What do you think this indicates?

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Cat Hicks

Someone in misinformation research really needs to follow-up with all the biologists and other researchers (so many grad student open science folks!!) who worked to keep floods of misinformation about covid off preprint servers as best they could. It's an invisible heroic battle that hasn't been talked about enough and I've only heard about it from personal conversations. Way more interested in this than Wikipedia editing or whatever.

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Nick

@grimalkina I would boost this, except that I assume that would only lead to you taking grief over it.

But, yeah, some people seem to be determined to ignore the fact social networks are valuable insofar as they connect us to people, so a lot of their value is defined by who is there. And this is even more important for people who use it professionally, as you describe.

There is a significant faction of Mastodon that dismisses the importance of growth (seeing this priority as a mindset inappropriately imported from the corporate world), but it's just a fact that network effects mean a small social network will always be of limited value to most people, so growth is important if one wants to offer something of value.

I would very much like to see an open future for social media, but the hostility to growth and discoverability I see on Mastodon makes me skeptical it can ever deliver that future. I hope Bluesky will still demonstrate meaningful federation and deliver that future. But in any case, expecting people are just going to abandon their friends and colleagues is just unrealistic.

I actually enjoy the vibe of the conversations I have on Mastodon more, but it is clear to me that Bluesky is much more vibrant at this point and a far more viable Twitter replacement for most people.

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Jon Udell

I don't know what's more astonishing: the new typesetting language José Reyes explains here, or the depth and quality of the explanation.

blog.jreyesr.com/posts/typst/

#typst #latex

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SpeakerToManagers

This has been my personal experience with MS Copilot: the (small) improvements in coding speed are not worth the vigilance with which you have to review the generated code.
open.substack.com/pub/garymarc

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NPR (bot)

NPR: All the available evidence suggests that a miniscule number of noncitizens vote illegally in federal elections and not in numbers that would sway the outcome of any race.#news #NPR npr.org/2024/10/12/nx-s1-51477

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Micah Lee

I've having the most frustrating time trying to set up a Debian repository.

I have a signing key, I have a signed InRelease file which points to Package.gz files, which point to my .deb packages.

When I run `apt update`, the repo updates successfully and the signature verifies. But when I run `apt search [packagename]`, it doesn't see my package.

I'm not even sure what to search for since there are no error messages. Anyone else hit this problem with Debian repos?

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George Musser

Convolutional neural networks—the machine-learning systems routinely used for image recognition—are inherently limited, according to a new study by @lamaral and colleagues. #ConvNets fail on data above a certain threshold of complexity. They lean too heavily on shortcuts—spurious correlations that don’t generalize—and on localized features such as texture, to the neglect of the overall scene. h/t @manlius doi.org/10.1063/5.0213905 #AI

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Cat Hicks

When I can step back from the salaries involved (otherwise excruciating) it's really funny to watch computer science gradually and weirdly rediscover many classic statistics problems as it reinvents its own applied statistics

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Dr. Doro (she/her)

New job and new place means new #introduction post!

Hi, I'm Doro!
I'm a #Physics PostDoc at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics near #Munich, Germany! I play with ultracold atoms in lattices of laser light to simulate other quantum systems!
I'm also a fan of open source software (#FOSS), #Linux, and I code in #python for work and for fun!
I love SciFi in all forms, especially #StarTrek and #DoctorWho.
No tolerance for discrimination of any kind. :lgbtq:

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Dan Piponi

This, but with chemistry instead of physics.

Has the literature prize been announced yet?

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Catherynne M. Valente

From my new essay about America’s abuse cycle at the hands of toxic political party-parents…

catvalente.substack.com/p/wait

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