Nick has moved to Mathstodon @internic@qoto.org

Appeals court blocks FCC’s efforts to bring back net neutrality rules
A three-judge panel ruled the FCC exceeded its authority reviving net neutrality.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/appeals-court-blocks-fccs-efforts-to-bring-back-net-neutrality-rules/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

In Arizona, private school parents can speak at public school board meetings and vote in board elections. But public school parents can’t freely attend a private school governing body’s meetings, even if the school is funded with taxpayer dollars: https://propub.li/41WKSu6

A new study finds radium is bioaccumulating in mussels in streams near fracking fields in Pennsylvania. The waste effluent produced by fracking operations is rich in radioactive materials including radium. It is harmful to the mussels and accumulates up the food chain, leading to us. The mussels are sentinels of the radioactive legacy of the fossil fuel industry, which actually produces more radioactive waste than the nuclear industry #clamFacts

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/02012025/elevated-levels-of-radium-found-in-western-pennsylvanias-freshwater-mussels/

"Apple has agreed to pay $95 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that its voice assistant Siri routinely recorded private conversations that were then sold to third parties for targeted ads." https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/apple-agrees-to-pay-95m-delete-private-conversations-siri-recorded/

In the interest of consolidation, for the time being I plan to stick to Bluesky as my main microblogging platform. That could change of course, but for now, you can find me at: https://bsky.app/profile/7homaslin.bsky.social

Tesla sales fell for the first time in over a decade
It sold more cars than it made in 2024 but slightly fewer than it sold in 2023.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2025/01/tesla-sales-fell-for-the-first-time-in-over-a-decade/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

Look I’m sorry I don’t make the rules but if you’re going to wish someone a happy public domain day you have to do it in a Mickey Mouse voice.

Reposting this from the other site at @ColinTheMathmo's request:

I've recently been talking a bit about how difficult it is to carefully check even well-written mathematics. I want to try to explain something about this by telling the story of some errors in the literature that (in part) led to the two papers below. 1/n

The era of ChatGPT is kind of horrifying for me as an instructor of mathematics... Not because I am worried students will use it to cheat (I don't care! All the worse for them!), but rather because many students may try to use it to *learn*.

For example, imagine that I give a proof in lecture and it is just a bit too breezy for a student (or, similarly, they find such a proof in a textbook). They don't understand it, so they ask ChatGPT to reproduce it for them, and they ask followup questions to the LLM as they go.

I experimented with this today, on a basic result in elementary number theory, and the results were disastrous... ChatGPT sent me on five different wild goose-chases with subtle and plausible-sounding intermediate claims that were just false. Every time I responded with "Hmm, but I don't think it is true that [XXX]", the LLM responded with something like "You are right to point out this error, thank you. It is indeed not true that [XXX], but nonetheless the overall proof strategy remains valid, because we can [...further gish-gallop containing subtle and plausible-sounding claims that happen to be false]."

I know enough to be able to pinpoint these false claims relatively quickly, but my students will probably not. They'll instead see them as valid steps that they can perform in their own proofs.

Switzerland very much showing off this afternoon...
It's the first day in over a week we've seen further than 20m due to heavy fog.
Happy New Year.

#HappyNewYear 🎉 Boost your #NewYear resolution with adaptive optics. By deforming a thin flexible mirror a thousand times per second you can correct atmospheric turbulence and get sharp astronomical images!

➡️ https://www.eso.org/public/teles-instr/technology/adaptive_optics/

📷 ESO/P. Weilbacher (AIP)

#astrodon #astronomy #astrophysics #space #science

Found that post about fruit New Year’s resolutions

Don’t forget that in 2025, the days of the week will be determined by your favourite LLM, trained on day/month pairs from 2004-2023.

So Jan 2 will have odds of:

1/10 of being Tue or Thu
3/20 of being Wed, Fri, Sat, Sun
1/5 of being Monday

HAPPY PUBLIC DOMAIN DAY!

Books which will enter the US public domain:

William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon (as serialized in Black Mask magazine)
John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold (Steinbeck's first novel)
Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica
Oliver La Farge, Laughing Boy: A Navajo Love Story
Patrick Hamilton, Rope

#books #literature #publicdomain
/1

Never change, slashdot, never change (you clearly won't)

Boggles the mind that nation state China managed to get into various US telcos.. and so did a 20 year old kid, who had to be doxxed by @briankrebs to even get arrested.

I'm hoping this one goes to trial so the feds are forced to reveal what happened - as I understand it, various telcos exported CDRs - call record data - and put it into Snowflake Telco Cloud, which didn't have a feature to require MFA for every telco user account, and some users forgot to enable it.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/12/u-s-army-soldier-arrested-in-att-verizon-extortions/