Nick @internic@qoto.org

Conservatives have been championing Telegram as a more ideologically aligned alternative to Signal, and so they are trying to paint Durov's arrest as being politically motivated. To be clear, Telegram is much less secure than Signal (!!)

https://www.404media.co/how-telegrams-founder-pavel-durov-became-a-culture-war-martyr/

Congratulations to our first 2024 EFF Awards Winner, @404mediaco !

As the media landscape in general and tech media in particular keeps shrinking, 404 Media, launched in August 2023, has forged ahead with incisive investigative reports, deep-dive features, blogs, and scoops.

What's the easiest way for me to pull up a pdf on my ipad and mark it up with an apple pencil? It can save as another pdf or an image. Either way is fine.

The U.S. gender wage gap has widened for the first time in 20 years.

Men's median earnings rose 3%, compared to 1.5% for women. 🤔Details at https://www.axios.com/2024/09/11/gender-wage-gap-rate-earnings

Hi all! I’m overdue for another Bridgy Fed status update. Bottom line up front: we’re now bridging video on Bluesky! Out from Bluesky works now, in will work as soon as they finish their user rollout, hopefully within days.

Also, Bridgy Fed can now ask people to bridge their accounts! This is the infamous “discoverable opt in,” and it’s finally launched. If you want to follow someone, but they’re not bridged, send their handle to Bridgy Fed in a DM or chat message, and it will message them to say you’re asking. (Only once; it won’t send another message if someone else asks.)

We send a couple other DMs now too, a welcome when you bridge your account, and an FYI when you reply to someone but they won’t see it because you’re not bridged .

It’s been a busy couple months. I was all set to post this weeks ago, after I put the finishing touches on DMs, but then Brazil happened. 3M new users and 10-20x usage increase in just a few days!

Amazingly, even though Bluesky team hosts all the difficult-to-scale parts themselves, not in the cloud, they’d still planned for this kind of surprise and handled it ok. Bridgy Fed though, not so much. It stayed up and serving, but Bluesky => fediverse got slower and slower. Tough timing, too, I was busy with other things and couldn’t find much time to work on it, so after a week it was almost 3 days (!) behind.

Fortunately, I finally managed to speed it up – props to Ilya‘s libipld library, among other things! – and after it worked through the backlog, we were back in business.

Anyway. Since last time: video, DMs, usage spike, and other features and bug fixes too:

Improved Pleroma and Flipboard compatibility.
Improved style of web => Bluesky bridged posts, also now try harder to include an image.
Drastically improved monitoring and alerting.
Stricter authorization for AP Undos.
…and lots more bug fixes.

As usual, feel free to ping me with feedback, questions, and bug reports. You can follow the now label on GitHub to see what I’m currently focusing on. See you on the bridge!

After spending some time familiarising myself with pywavelets, I have found that an R library (WaveletComp) is probably more convenient. It has confidence intervals (pywavelets, not at the moment of writing), and the cone of influence seems to be automatic.

pywavelets is a generic tool for wavelets, while WaveComp is more focused on statistics for time series. I tend to go directly to Python, and I think I need to change my default when thinking in software to do somewhat advanced statistics.

Another PSA that Google uses its fonts to track traffic to other people's websites. Google has no business knowing who visits other people's websites. If you want to use Google hosted 'free' fonts in your site, let your visitors know, or learn to host them locally on your server.

For instance:

https://webdesign.tutsplus.com/how-to-self-host-google-fonts--cms-34775t

To use Big Tech is to feed it. There are other ways.

"Before former President Donald Trump could appear in Tucson a second time, his campaign had to make a deposit of $145,222.70 upfront.

The required deposit came about because Trump failed to pay an $81,837 bill from a campaign event he held at the Tucson Convention Center in 2016."

https://www.kold.com/2024/09/11/trump-campaign-required-pay-upfront-deposit-145000-before-thursday-event-tucson/

Scientists used #NASAWebb to observe our Extreme Outer Galaxy, a region bursting at the seams with activity.

Find:
⭐ young stars
💨 jets of material
🌌 background galaxies
✨ foreground stars

Learn more about the fringes of our Milky Way: bit.ly/3Xl0F2N

HISTORY OF PHYSICS

Michael Faraday and the first attempt of a Unified Theory.

On March 19, 1849, Faraday's diary records:

'Gravity. Surely this force must be capable of an experimental relation to Electricity, Magnetism and the other forces, so as to bind it up with them in reciprocal action and equivalent effect. Consider for a moment how to set about touching this matter by facts and trial'.

1/

I'm working with someone who uses github copilot and a lot of my feedback boils down to "that's something that people used to do in #python but it's obsolete now" because *of course* that's the sort of feedback I'd give. Of the code that github stole, most of it is always going old because, like, more things happened in the past than in the present. So now we live in a very weird present-future where allegedly-cutting-edge "AI" is telling us to do Python 2.7 idioms like class ClassName(object)

I'd love ideas for how to intentionally "break" my terminal so that one of these 4 things happen:

1. backspace doesn’t work, it prints ^H instead
2. terminal won't echo my characters when you type them
3. the line not breaking, and the terminal pasting new characters over old ones
4. overflowing the line, and when I backspace, the line is poorly redrawn

ideally I'd love steps that are:

a) specific
b) close to something that might "realistically” happen while using the terminal normally

If the next administration wants to support entrepreneurs and small biz, we need a renewal of the paperwork minimization rules.

I'm now 45 minutes into insurance paperwork, despite having a broker supporting me. Enjoying such questions as "What is the ending month of the ERISA plan."

I've got 4 outstanding emails to lawyers, CPAs and more support email folks.

I was a bit apprehensive about signing up to #Mastodon but I really shouldn't have worried. Compared to the Bluebird of Misery (or Xitter, because so many people are leaving) it's like a breath of fresh air to be surrounded by pleasant and positive people on here!

Reynisdrangar sea stacks off the southern coast of #Iceland at Vík í Mýrdal. Although the sea looks dark and foreboding, it's actually very clear water but the sand beneath is black.

@photography

Please read the ALT tag for more...

Will Big Journalism will take serious note of something Trump said on Fox "News" today, referring to the ABC News moderators' fact-checking of three (among dozens) of lies during the debate:

"They're a news organization. They have to be licensed to do it. They ought to take away their license for the way they did that."

Another lie, of course: The government doesn't license news organizations per se.

But ABC's airwave licenses are massively valuable.This is not an idle threat.

delighted

I think my favourite bash solution so far (h/t @philz42) is to use `trap DEBUG` to print the filename & line number every time PATH is modified

something like this:

function _trap_DEBUG() {
local cmd="${BASH_COMMAND}"
local line="${BASH_LINENO}"
local filename="${BASH_SOURCE[1]}"
if [[ "${cmd}" == *"PATH"* ]]; then
echo "${filename} line ${line}: '${cmd}'"
fi
}

trap '_trap_DEBUG' DEBUG
set -T

not sure if there's a zsh equivalent though

writing about PATH is so funny, it's like

1. just add “PATH=$PATH:/my/dir" to your shell config, no big deal
2. ok but uh also you need to worry about path ordering, maybe it has to be `PATH=/my/dir:$PATH` instead
3. oh also bash sometimes caches PATH lookups, so if that happens then you need to run `rehash`
4. oh yeah and also if there are spaces in your PATH, then you need to quote it every time you add to it, like `PATH=/my/dir:”$PATH”`
5. also sometimes commands are aliases or builtins

The solar corona is heated to millions of degrees, vastly hotter than the surface of the Sun. Astronomers suspect the magnetic fields that pierce the surface somehow trap energy and drive the increasing temperatures. Astronomers have observed the magnetic fields on the surface of the Sun for decades, and now, the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Maui has mapped out the coronal magnetic fields for the corona in unprecedented detail.

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1057450

For those that don't know, I help run a giant women in technology slack group (more than 10,000 members!)

It's not just open to software and computer folks, however much that's the main group.

If you're a woman in biotech, in industrial science, in manufacturing or engineering, any technical field or technical line of business, you're welcome to join. It's very big tent about 'tech' and 'woman' both.

HMU for an invite