Nick @internic@qoto.org

Mastodon isn't perfect.

But the fact a social network exists that is completely free to use

has no venture capital investors

has no shareholders to answer to

has no growth targets

with a web interface with zero tracking cookies

and mobile apps with zero trackers at all

with ten thousand server administrators who donate their time for user safety

is - in my opinion - mindbogglingly cool, given the state of the world we live in. Not everything has to be shit. People make things better.

i do have to give Haliey Welch some credit for comedic timing. intentional or not, she perfectly timed her rugpull to steal the spotlight from bitcoin hitting $100K, a moment coiners have been awaiting for years. masterful stuff

Michael Gottlieb (@feynmanlectures), editor of the new edition of the Feynman lectures, has written a letter strongly disagreeing with some things Collier says in her video. You can see it here:

https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/info/other/Letter_to_John_Baez_regarding_Angela_Colliers_sham_video.pdf

I was not implicitly endorsing all of @acollierastro's claims in my first post. I merely said what I wanted to say.

Nor am I implicitly endorsing Gottlieb's claims here. I hope Gottlieb and Collier can discuss this without using me as an intermediary.

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New modeling study finds that if everyone in the United Kingdom had worn N95 or FFP2 masks from the start of the pandemic, the rate of COVID-19 transmission would have been 9 times lower.

‼️Tusky 27 Beta is out on Google Play!! If you want to try it and tell us how it is going, remember: opt in into its beta program.

➡️ Tusky F-Droid users: don,t worry, you will have it also, but it will take a little more to be available.

@TonyVladusich @shuttersparks @dougmerritt - thanks! My uncle was a physics teacher, and he gave me the Feynman Lectures, so I've wanted to explain physics since I was a kid, and I had some good role models. But if I'm good at explaining stuff, it probably also helped that I had a teaching job for 35 years, and my main hobby is explaining math and physics online. I practice every day.

Explaining calculus to freshmen who are forced to take the course is much harder than explaining black holes to an interested audience online! I was probably pretty bad at teaching for the first 5 or 10 years. One of my first teaching evaluations simply said "Fire him." But I really wanted to get good.

And that seems to be how it works with everything. I can't find it now, but there's an article I really like that explained the differences between Olympic-level swimmers and the second and third tier of swimmers. And one difference is that the best swimmers really enjoy doing all the exercises and drills that lesser swimmers find boring... probably because they are not just idly repeating the drill, but thinking all the time about how to improve.

TL;DR: They tested the genome of all the bat viruses that were in the Wuhan labs in 2021 and found that none are related to the Covid-19 one. Meaning that we have one more proof that Covid-19 did not "escape from a lab".

(I assume the link is paywalled but can't check now)
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03982-2

Ever wonder why @pixelfed doesn't have a spam problem?

- We prevent new users from sending DMs

- We built an automated spam detection service that can email you when spam is detected, and you can make the final decision

https://pixelfed.blog/p/2023/feature/autospam-and-naive-bayes-the-grandfather-of-spam-filters-still-making-waves

We have even more in store 🚀

#pixelfed #autospam #spam #prevention

I am curious about how many people posting about insurance companies have ever emailed their employer to specifically request that the employer advocate for an expansion of something with an insurance provider (I have done this several times).

Beech parquet flooring? Or solid pine? Limestone counter tops? Or stainless steel? Architecture firm Henning Larsen has published an open-source catalogue of the carbon impacts of interior products. Download “Unboxing Carbon” at https://henninglarsen.com/publications #ClimateAction

In some previous posts, I’ve been chipping away at the question of how two objects falling into a black hole appear from each other’s vantage, and now I’ve put all the pieces together to answer a question @johncarlosbaez posed on his blog:

If a fleet of spaceships all fall into a black hole from different starting points along the same radial line, how would the other ships appear to one in the middle of the fleet?

https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2024/11/30/black-hole-puzzle/

The plot here shows the “apparent distance” of the other ships (as determined by the angle each ship subtends, if you know its size, or by its parallax if you view it from slightly different positions). It also shows where the ships were located, when the light now being received from them was emitted.

The details are quite different depending on whether we’re seeing a ship that is closer to the black hole than us, by means of “outgoing light” — light moving away from the hole — versus a ship further from the hole that we see by “incoming light”.

Because the event horizon itself is formed by the paths through spacetime traced by outgoing light rays, we see all the ships closer to the hole than us cross the event horizon just as we cross it ourself.

But the incoming light from ships that are further from the hole than us reaches us later, for any given r coordinate where it was emitted, and we hit the singularity at the centre of the hole before we see any light emitted from those ships when they crossed the horizon.

EDITED TO ADD: This diagram has some mistakes. I’ve given a correct version in a reply.

When I read about these things I always think about some of the writing of @pluralistic on graceful failure modes. A product (system) is not defined by its success but by how good or poorly it fails. I've been teaching students that not considering (poor) failure modes is a huge liability.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/12/nightmare-zipcar-outage-is-a-warning-against-complete-app-dependency/

#failure #scalability #devops #management #governance

Tomorrow is my last lecture for both my astro courses. I always end my astronomy classes with The Pale Blue Dot speech, and I'll be pretty impressed with myself if I manage to get through it without crying tomorrow. It seems to get even harder every year. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO5FwsblpT8

"There is no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image...it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the Pale Blue Dot."

FBI releases PSA warning about all the ways that cybercriminals are using AI to commit fraud on a larger scale and to increase the success of their scams. The advisory warns about deepfaked videos and voice calls, as well as AI generated profile images to impersonate people.

Among their recommendations:

-Create a secret word or phrase with your family to verify their identity.

-Look for subtle imperfections in images and videos, such as distorted hands or feet, unrealistic teeth or eyes, indistinct or irregular faces, unrealistic accessories such as glasses or jewelry, inaccurate shadows, watermarks, lag time, voice matching, and unrealistic movements.

-Listen closely to the tone and word choice to distinguish between a legitimate phone call from a loved one and an AI-generated vocal cloning.

-If possible, limit online content of your image or voice, make social media accounts private, and limit followers to people you know to minimize fraudsters' capabilities to use generative AI software to create fraudulent identities for social engineering.

-Verify the identity of the person calling you by hanging up the phone, researching the contact of the bank or organization purporting to call you, and call the phone number directly.

-Never share sensitive information with people you have met only online or over the phone.

-Do not send money, gift cards, cryptocurrency, or other assets to people you do not know or have met only online or over the phone.

https://www.ic3.gov/PSA/2024/PSA241203

From now on, every time there is a new proposal to backdoor e2ee apps, we're just going to point to this, right?

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/us-officials-urge-americans-use-encrypted-apps-cyberattack-rcna182694

If you love Richard Feynman you've got to watch this video...

... where Angela Collier will ruthlessly dissect the mythology he built around himself. You probably won't agree with everything she says, and you may hate some of it, but it will still be thought-provoking.

I didn't know about what she calls "Feynman bros": lazy male students who read Surely You Must Be Joking, Mr. Feynman! and try to adopt the flashy womanizing persona he depicts there, instead of working hard on physics. I can easily believe they exist. So if you know a youngster who likes physics, don't give them that book. Instead do what my uncle did: give them The Feynman Lectures on Physics.

I didn't know these books and indeed every book 'by Feynman' was actually written by his Caltech colleague Robert Leighton or his son Ralph Leighton based on audiotapes of lectures or conversations. I still don't know how much of a role Feynman had in crafting these concoctions.

I *did* know that he once flew into a rage and tried to choke his second wife.

I did not know he was good with children, eagerly answering letters from them, etc. It's nice that Collier points out this good side.

I *did* notice, from his anecdotes, that he put a huge amount of work into trying to seem like a manly man rather than a nerd.

I didn't fully notice that almost none of his anecdotes feature the famous physicists he worked with at the Manhattan Project. Collier points out that this leaves him free to make things up.

I think she overlooks how he eagerly *points out* that he used tricks to seem smart. He explains the tricks to show they're not so hard.

I could go on....

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwKpj2ISQAc

While transfer students represent one of the most diverse student groups on campus, they usually don't ever get the chance to become a scientist.

Why? Because lab RAships are so massively competitive, acquired in the early years on campus, and limited, our most diverse (and often most deserving, hard-working and incredible) students are systematically less likely and able to access those positions.