Nick @internic@qoto.org

"New Anti-Toxicity Features on Bluesky"

Thoughts?

https://bsky.social/about/blog/08-28-2024-anti-toxicity-features

🇫🇷 French authorities issued arrest warrants for #Telegram CEO Pavel Durov and his co-founder brother Nikolai in March, according to a French administrative document seen exclusively by POLITICO.

The document indicates the French undercover investigation into Telegram is wider and began months earlier than previously known. The case revolves around Telegram’s refusal to cooperate with a French police enquiry into child sex abuse.

https://www.politico.eu/article/exclusive-telegram-ceo-brother-nikolai-durov-wanted-france-authorities-pavel-durov/

#france

For the 10th birthday of Signal, I did a Big Interview with its president Meredith Whittaker.

We ended up talking about how her focus for Signal goes beyond encryption or privacy, to creating an alternative to surveillance capitalism—or even capitalism, period.

https://www.wired.com/story/meredith-whittaker-signal/

Hi #astrodon!

Exciting news: I’ll be defending my PhD in 254 days — May 9th, 2025! 🎓✨

While writing up that thesis, I'm also applying for postdocs starting ~Aug 2025. If you know of any positions, fellowships or have advice, I’d love your input! 🙏🏻❤️

Blogged a few thoughts on the OSI's latest draft of a definition for "Open Source AI", which notably doesn't require that the training data itself be released under on open source license: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/27/open-source-ai/

A whopping 80% of new US electricity capacity this year came from solar and battery storage

The number is set to rise to 96% by the end of the year

https://www.techspot.com/news/104451-whopping-80-new-us-electricity-capacity-year-came.html

Today I'm launching something near and dear to my heart...VERY near and dear 😂 -- a podcast project with my phenomenal favorite neuroscientist (& wife), @analog_ashley !

On "Change, Technically" we're coming to your ears to share tales of who gets to be technical. We dig into STEM pathways & how leaders can learn from psych and neuroscience to think about cultivating innovation. We share our stories from classrooms to software teams. Plus new Cat & Ashley lore!

https://www.changetechnically.fyi/

It's pretty cool that an open-source project is using another FLOSS solution. Impressive stats for sure. Debian's gitlab instance, salsa.debian.org: has ~15.500 users, 79.000 projects, 750 groups, 31.000 forks, 14.600 issues, and 64.000 merge requests? We are active! https://micronews.debian.org/2024/1724368366.html #linux #opensource

“The way to look at mental health care from an insurance perspective is: I don’t want to attract those people. I am never going to make money on them,” said Ron Howrigon, a consultant who used to manage contracts with providers for major insurers. “One way to get rid of those people or not get them is to not have a great network.”

https://projects.propublica.org/why-i-left-the-network/

By synchronizing the signals captured by radio-telescopes all over the Earth, the Event Horizon Telescope unveiled the shadow of the supermassive black holes at the center of the Milky Way and the M87 galaxy.

One way to improve the resolution of these images is to observe a shorter wavelengths. This is easier said than done due to different reasons, but new test observations are paving the way for that:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OcmKAyr1qQ&t=10s

#astronomy #astrodon #space #science

I just got this answer from Google AI. This isn’t a photoshop or a joke. This is a product being offered by one of the biggest and most influential companies in the world, demonstrating this paradigm-shatteringly important new technology. 🤦‍♀️ #mazeldon

Good news. Sovereign Tech Fund to Invest €686,400 in #FreeBSD Infrastructure Modernization https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/sovereign-tech-fund-to-invest-e686400-in-freebsd-infrastructure-modernization/ #unix #opensource

@dpiponi
It's funny how old sci-fi was sure that we'd be all using videophones. But even though video technology is easily available, we not only don't use it much, but we prefer text over voice.

Also, nobody predicted emojis.

So much for recursive self-improvement. @aatish shows how #AI is prone to recursive self-degradation. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/08/26/upshot/ai-synthetic-data.html?unlocked_article_code=1.GE4.lhGf.kghLIJZdAC6I

As someone new to teaching kids, I’m looking others to follow who post about public school teaching. Please help!! #education

Today I learned a new rebuttal to the constant response from tech bros to me complaining about satellite pollution: WeLL JuSt PuT ALL yOuR tEleScOpEs iNtO SpAcE! While astronomers have way more ground-based research telescopes, greenhouse gas emissions from astronomy are dominated by the few space missions. I had no idea there was such a big discrepancy.

Thanks for the great/depressing/important paper @jknodlseder

https://astrodon.social/@jknodlseder/113028380162373253

It’s confirmed: Boeing Starliner astronauts will return on a SpaceX Crew Dragon. Here’s my deep dive into how it’ll happen, how and why NASA made the decisions, and what it means for the future of Boeing Starliner.

Newsletter tomorrow @ 11 am ET: adastraspace.com

https://youtu.be/NdQkSayD_f0

Physicist like to study all sorts of simplified situations, but here's one I haven't seen them discuss. I call it an 'energy particle'. It's an imaginary thing that has no qualities except energy, which can be any number ≥ 0.

Do you know a better name for this thing - or can you make one up? The word 'particle' may fool people into thinking it has a position and velocity. It doesn't. All it has is energy.

Here's one reason it's fun to think about energy particles - even though they probably don't exist.

Use statistical mechanics! At temperature T, the probability that an energy particle has energy E is proportional to exp(-E/kT) where k is Boltzmann's constant. From this you can show its mean energy is kT, and the standard deviation of its energy is also kT.

Now suppose you have N energy particles at temperature T, not interacting with each other. Each one acts as above. In the limit where N → ∞ you can use the Central Limit Theorem to show the probability distribution of their total energy approaches a Gaussian with mean NkT and standard deviation √N kT. Writing out the formula for this Gaussian, you'll see you've shown Stirling's famous formula

N! ~ sqrt(2πN) (N/e)ᴺ

I find this cool.

The math of the argument is here, without any talk of physics:

https://ghoshadi.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/a-probabilistic-proof-of-stirlings-formula/

But being a lover of physics, I want to dramatize this proof of Stirling's formula using 'energy particles'.

Unsolicited remark after I posted this:

https://mastodon.social/@franco_vazza/113027548803257038

personally, and despite (or exactly because?) I mostly do numerics in astrophysics, I tend to dislike the colossal #MachineLearning wave which has swallowed our field, and I do not want to do anything in first person with that.

However, pattern recognition and accelerating visual tasks which are vital, yet tedious and long for humans, seems to be the right application of ML to me..

#science #astronomy