Nick @internic@qoto.org

The design goal of Bluesky is:

A) Don't fail like Twitter: you lose your content when a billionaire has a drug-fueled midlife crisis and buys it.
B) Don't fail like Mastodon: you lose all your content when your instance admin running on donated coffee goes broke.

#fediverse #bluesky #twitter #msatodon #socialNetworking #ATProto

Just randomly looked up whether my book on Falling Felines and Fundamental Physics had gotten any scientific citations, and it turns out that physicist Frank Wilczek has referred to it.

University of Colorado Boulder is ending their relationship with Proctorio. 1,403 people signed a petition calling for them to stop the use of Proctorio. Congratulations to all CU Boulder students. 🎉

Petition: https://www.change.org/p/university-of-colorado-boulder-stop-use-of-proctorio-at-cu-boulder-over-privacy-concerns

News Link: https://oit.colorado.edu/services/teaching-learning-applications/proctorio

Kurzweil really got the whole singularity thing upside-down. The purpose of computers isn't to do stuff better, but to do more stuff cheaply. It costs money to put a 99.9999% reliable knob in a car to control the temperature. It's cheaper to install some voice recognition software that has an 80% chance of lowering the temperature successfully (and maybe has a 5% chance of giving you directions to Temperance, MI).

Similarly "AI" gives ways to add even more layers to the customer service labyrinth making it ever harder for users to penetrate it. When things don't work we just have to accept it because it's too much effort to get anything fixed.

And the next generation of software will of course be written even more cheaply using the previous generation's unreliable software giving us even more unreliable software.

Along the way we can also train people to lower their expectations.

The singularity will be in completely the opposite direction to what Kurzweil predicted.

Update. This editorial sketches a fantasy of #AI-assisted #PeerReview, then argues that it's "not far-fetched".
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-024-01228-0

PS: I call it far-fetched. And you?

If you ever doubted what a wonderful place we have here, have a look at this thread.

I spent a few minutes messing about with stars and spectres, and found a periodic tiling using stars, spectres and propellers.

In response @simontatham and @pieter found an infinite family of such tilings, generalising the theory of spectre tilings; then they moved on to do the analogous thing for hats!

https://mathstodon.xyz/@robinhouston/112649956899613346

The scam-heavy crytpocurrency industry, flush with money from the latest inflated bubble, is pouring vast sums into American elections. Their goal is to to be an unregulated "market" or an industry that is regulated only in ways they like.

Our economy is risky enough now, but this would push it closer to the edge.

See these stories:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/17/technology/-crypto-influence-election.html

and

https://www.citationneeded.news/2024-cryptocurrency-election-spending/

You should follow @molly0xfff for the lowdown on this scandal.

HISTORY OF PHYSICS

Wolfgang Pauli and the development of the non-Abelian gauge theory.

It is known that Pauli was a harsh critic about bad physics, a great sensor. This cause unintended damage to some young physicists who saw their ideas to be restrained.

He coined the phrase “not even wrong” to describe theories that cannot be falsified or cannot be used to make predictions about the natural world.

1/

Here is what Einstein's 1905 looked like:

March 17: Finish photoelectric effect paper

April 30: "Uh, I should probably finish my dissertation?"

May 11: Publish Brownian Motion paper

May: Finalize core ideas of special relativity

June 30: Publish 1st special relativity paper

September 27: Publish 2nd special relativity paper

So... I apparently won the Locus Award for Best Editor. Stunned. Thank you to all the voters, readers, and everyone I worked with in 2023. Wow!

"Read-only" CoinStats crypto application enables wallet breaches

June 22, 2024
https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=coinstats-wallet-compromises

Wait, let me get this straight - Apple is willing to partner with Facebook on AI, but not make their products privacy compliant in the EU?

Kind of makes sense though, doesn't it? Privacy compliance and Facebook don't exactly go well together.

I'm glad that after more than ten years, people are finally opening their eyes to just how much of a scam Apple's privacy talk has been.

https://www.neowin.net/news/apple-and-meta-have-discussed-an-ai-partnership-according-to-reports/

Around #solstice, the #sunlight of the setting Sun fills a room in my house. The door of that room has a small #keyhole that lets a bit of light go outside the room, projecting in it onto a hallway wall. It becomes like a giant #CameraObscura. Here's a short #timelapse of todays' #Sun at sunset projected on the wall.

Wow. A restaurant in Chicago O’Hare, one of the biggest airports in the world, banned an infectious disease doctor from entering because they were wearing a mask. This is unacceptable.

I actually believe it's a pretty strong social norm in software to act like we DON'T have social norms around these here parts 🤠 drives me bananas.

The cryptocurrency industry Super PAC Fairshake is now #1 out of all Super PACs by total funds raised.

They've raised more than $175 million to influence upcoming elections in the US, and have more than $100 million of it still waiting to deploy.

#CryptoLobby #Fairshake #USPolitics #cryptocurrency