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Dan Goodin

@griff

Brave is a hard no for me for a few reasons, most notably: (1) the founder is hostile to gay rights, aka human rights and (2) the browser promotes that whole cryptocurrency ponzi scheme mythology.

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franco_vazza

Simulated small-scale dynamo turbulence in a volume of ~100kpc^3, with a numerical Reynolds number of about ~1e3 and stationary subsonic forcing, using ENZO-MHD.

Something like this - if plasmas were just a simple fluid on all scales, which they are not - should be happening also in the #space inbetween galaxies, over scales of several hundreds million years.

#astronomy #astrodon #SimulatedUniverses

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Baldur Bjarnason

“Chromium’s influence on Chromium alternatives - Seirdy”

seirdy.one/notes/2024/10/06/ch

> I don’t think most people realize how Firefox and Safari depend on Google for more than “just” revenue from default search engine deals and prototyping new web platform features.

Even the latest release of WPE/GTK WebKit uses Skia for 2D rendering.

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Nick

@tokyo_0 To the contrary, it would seem you still don't understand me, because your post implies positions I don't hold (e.g. that Mastodon needs "corrosive algorithmic feeds"), but I don't think continuing this thread further would be productive.

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Nick

@tokyo_0 @oblomov @_elena @mcc @mhoye You seem to have missed my point, so let me restate it a bit differently: The idea of having an algorithmically weighted feed or not as it's often discussed here is essentially a false dichotomy, in which you either have a very simplistic chronological following feed or you have the sort of highly-optimized, psychologically manipulative, completely opaque algorithm of something like Twitter or Facebook. But, in fact, those are just some extremes of a huge parameter space of feed weighting/ordering algorithms. It's a bit like saying you only want to walk places because you refuse to ride in a self-driving autonomous vehicle, ignoring the fact that there are other types of cars, or bikes, or busses, or trains.

To give a concrete example: Someone has constructed a feed on Bluesky that shows you posts of people you follow but surfaces posts more prominently from people who post less frequently, so your quiet but interesting friends are not drowned out by your more prolific ones. Another feed just shows you the most recent post from each person you follow and that's it, so you see everyone equally and are not tempted by the infinite scroll. No opaque weighting schemes there, just some slightly-less-simplistic alternatives to a Mastodon-style feed (which also exists on Bluesky as the default "Following" feed) that help people find the posts they want to see.

To be clear, I don't necessarily think that Bluesky's approach of letting anyone make any sort of feed (within some, fairly loose, restrictions) will be good, because the feeds can impact the culture even for the users who don't use them. But I do think that refusing to have anything but the dead simplest feed types makes it hard for people to find the posts and people they're interested in, and that is a bad idea. But by indulging in this false dichotomy about having "an algorithm", I think people here are talking themselves into the placating notion that this shortcoming is, in fact, a virtue.

@oblomov @_elena @mcc @mhoye

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John Carlos Baez

@BartoszMilewski - I find cosmology to be in much better shape than particle physics, mainly because we're awash in new and ever more precise data. There are definitely lots of interesting conceptual problems about how we do cosmology, and it's true most scientific papers don't discuss them much - and some astrophysicists run wild in ways that need to be pushed back against. But there are people who write about these issues seriously, so I don't think 'drive-by shootings' are helpful, where you try to poke holes in assumptions but then run off before the conversation can get serious.

Cosmology is in such better shape than when I was a youth, in the 1960s, that it's hard for me to despair. Back then the (old) textbooks I read treated the argument between the Big Bang and steady state model as largely a matter of taste - e.g. some people just *didn't like* the idea of a universe that began at some moment in time. Now we're getting ever more accurate measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation, etc., and in the 2030s LISA may see the cosmic gravitational background radiation, which could go back to the time of electroweak symmetry breaking, around 10⁻¹² seconds after the Big Bang. So it's getting harder and harder to make up fairly simple theories that fit the data.

(Yes, there are always infinitely many theories that fit the data, but if we let that paralyze us science would never have happened.)

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Nick

@oblomov @_elena @mcc @mhoye To address just one point, though, people on Mastodon often repeat the fiction that we "don't have an algorithm." Of course, Mastodon has feeds which are populated by software, so by definition it has an algorithm. But my purpose in saying that isn't to nitpick semantics. I say it because admitting this then forces one to describe the situation differently: Mastodon only supports a fixed set of limited, very simplistic algorithms.

The direct implication of this is that many users will have use cases for which these don't work well (because they're fixed and simplistic), and in those cases the posts won't get from their authors to the people who want to see them. And then those users will go elsewhere, like Bluesky, which has algorithmic choice (an unlimited selection of first party and 3rd party feeds).

It's a pretty simple reality, but one that largely gets ignored on Mastodon and obscured by the comforting and self-congratulatory fiction that "we don't have an algorithm."

Personally, I feel that on Mastodon I would benefit from feeds like some of those that exist on Bluesky, but I like other things about Mastodon, so I keep using it despite this shortcoming.

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Nick

@oblomov @_elena @mcc @mhoye When you're invested in something (as people in this thread are invested in Mastodon) and people don't like it, it's tempting to believe that they don't like it because of some fault of theirs, they're stupid, or ignorant, or lazy, etc. However, this is generally self-deception, so when I find myself thinking this way, I generally try to suppress that urge and look for other reasons.

I use both networks currently. Though generally I prefer Mastodon for myself, I see plenty of valid reasons why one would prefer Bluesky. I won't try to list them, as I see that most of the ones I have in mind have already been mentioned elsewhere in response to the OP. I would encourage folks to actually listen to those rather than formulating more comforting hypothetical explanations.

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Nick boosted
Happy Thanksgiving! 🦃

@mhoye I like this place & there's good people here. But in general terms we're not a welcoming community.

We have people who are mad potential new users didn't leave Twitter sooner.

We have people who are mad if you choose dot social instead of their personal instance.

We're not a difficult place to navigate but It can be challenging for a newbie. We need to figure out how it can be user friendly.

We're the least popular of the "new" choices.

These are some of the challenges I see.

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Ciarán McNally

Microsoft enabled the notorious "Recall" with the last update (for Windows 11 copilot+ enabled pcs only). It's part of the OS and can't be uninstalled. This software stores metadata about EVERYTHING that appears on your screen, including passwords/urls/images/videos/any messages you send or emails etc

To disable this gross spyware, run the following as admin on the command line:

Dism /Online /Disable-Feature
/Featurename:Recall

#Windows #Spyware #Recall #PrivacyAbuse

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BrianKrebs

BTW I have no idea how much Google has spent protecting just my site over the past 8 years, but it has to be a LOT. The economics of defending dinky sites like mine don't scale very well and sometimes require some fairly custom solutions. I just remember after I exited Akamai's protective harbor and started casting about for pricing on DDoS protection, the figures I was quoted were more than I made in a year, and could expand dramatically depending on how evil the adversary wanted to be.

I wrote about this in more detail not long after I put the site behind Shield.

krebsonsecurity.com/2017/02/ho

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Galactic Stone 🇺🇦

They're not wrong.

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Zack Whittaker

Well this data breach just got a lot worse.

Fidelity filed several other data breach notices, which confirm that the unauthorized third-party "accessed and retrieved certain documents related to Fidelity customers and other individuals by submitting fraudulent requests to an internal database that housed images of documents pertaining to Fidelity customers."

Fidelity also confirmed SSNs and driver's licenses were compromised in the data breach.

More: techcrunch.com/2024/10/10/fide

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Nick

@mhoye Given that most Mastodon servers don't really seem to have a clearly-sustainable long-term strategy to fund their operations, arguably a Mastodon account may not be that long term either.

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Nick

@hashraydamon @mhoye It would be interesting to know how many followers each of those accounts have. I assume some of the difference is due to the difference in the number active users (I think Bluesky has considerably more at this point), but I suspect another key factor is the lack algorithmic suggestions on Mastodon. Having a basic chronological feed of people you follow and stuff they boost makes it easy to miss things from people you follow and even harder to discover stuff from anyone else. I have definitely seen a number of people I follow say that posting on Mastodon feels like yelling into the void, and many of them left for that reason.

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mhoye

Look, people choosing bluesky, likely knowing full well that it will eventually go bad and they’ll need to relocate again… we can scold people like that for choosing a precarious VC backed service, or maybe we can recognize that in the social media space that some people are … migrants.

Maybe we should ask ourselves what Bluesky offers now, in the near term, that’s compelling to people who might not enjoy the luxury of a long term, and ask what their choices say about us in the process.

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Scott Francis

email: “SoCal Edison is enabling MFA for all accounts!”
me: haha, woot
*clicks*
"MFA options are text message or automated voice call.”

ಠ_ಠ

(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

(There is no excuse, in almost 2025, for anybody to still be rolling out new SMS-based multi-factor authentication. This is like the nonfat, sugar-free, decaf latte: the "why bother?” of MFA.)

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Greg Wilson

Xavier 2024: "An evidence-based and critical analysis of the Fediverse decentralization promises" arxiv.org/abs/2408.15383 "Our findings suggest that Fediverse will face significant challenges in fulfilling its decentralization promises, potentially hindering its ability to positively impact the social Web on a large scale." #nwit

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j_bertolotti

"The US top rate of tax in 1944 was 97%. The postwar top rate from 1945-63 was 94%, and it was 70% from 1965-80. This was the period of the largest expansion of the US economy in the nation's history."

Taxing the rich is the most Conservative policy you can think of, but somehow conservatives keep claiming that is a radical Socialist idea. 🤷‍♂️

pluralistic.net/2024/10/15/pik by @pluralistic

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Dr Lucy Rogers

Hello everyone - did I mention I wrote this a while back? #Space #Rockets

It's aimed at adults, it has no equations, and many young or very young adults have found it interesting and useful too. As have space scientists, astronautical students, and, apparently, astronauts.

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