Nick @internic@qoto.org

I said for the last three years (thinking about the waves of discourse in tech on this) but really, the story of this paper starts far, far further back, to the beginning of my interest in psychology and in the measurement of human ability, which I confronted when I had to take a standardized test for the first time, as I shared about in a talk at Monktoberfest (link below)

https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/113521762777915059

Let's make something crystal clear.

If a book about "the psychology of programming" that was published when the first class at Princeton university that included women was still two years away from graduating is still quoted around as a holy bible in tech communities, but I, a PhD in psych who was a fellow in CSE/Cog Sci and went on to found a developer tool startup AND a scientific lab to do open science *for developers*, cannot share a preprint, What. Are. We. Doing.

>> "TikTok is getting it's own Mastodon-like competitor."

Well, look at that.

#tiktok #loops #SocialMedia
#fediverse #censorship

https://mashable.com/article/loops-fediverse-tiktok-alternative#:~:text=The%20fediverse%20is%20growing.,option%20for%20X%2C%20formerly%20Twitter

One thing we have already discussed so, before I will say anything else, I will repeat: content addressing is really good, and I'd like to see it happen in ActivityPub, and it's *possible to do*, I even wrote a demo of it https://gitlab.com/spritely/golem/blob/master/README.org

Bluesky does the right thing here, AP should too

People are trying; most notably alice has done some great work recently: https://alice.bsky.sh/post/3laega7icmi2q

So now someone *can* run their own Relay (not the AppView yet, but maybe soon), and we're getting a sense of the cost and scale. This is good news; we didn't know before.

Our preprint has been viewed 1806 times.

@anthrocypher and I now have the opportunity to do the funniest thing and describe how much our work on developer productivity DISRUPTS developer productivity. Pls take my very serious survey for this purpose

https://forms.gle/pg3yk9jdHtjXaKKMA

Elizabeth Warren calls for crackdown on Internet “monopoly” you’ve never heard of
Senator wants to investigate whether VeriSign is ripping off customers and violating antitrust laws.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/11/elizabeth-warren-calls-for-crackdown-on-internet-monopoly-youve-never-heard-of/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

For the last three years, I have thought often about why individual-level "explanations" of developers' ability, potential & productivity trouble me, and why I think they ultimately keep us from the things we most deeply want to understand and cultivate: software development problem-solving *cultures*

With @anthrocypher , we came together as a scientist and an expert practitioner to propose a different model: a cumulative culture theory of developer problem-solving

https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/tfjyw

PowerPoint has built-in functionality that makes it trivial to find Creative Commons-licensed photos and embed them into presentations…crediting the photos to "Unknown Author." (This explains the presentation I saw two weeks ago that had slide after slide with photos credit to “Unknown Author" under a "CC-BY" license, ironically.) This is *profoundly* shitty on Microsoft's part.
https://ruby.social/@pushcx/113527607863576300

Probably the most thoughtful thread I’ve read yet regarding Bluesky, Mastadon, and the future of federated content.

Read the thread first and then pounce into the paper.

From: @cwebber
https://social.coop/@cwebber/113527462572885698

How Decentralized Is Bluesky Really? https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

A technical deep-dive, since people have been asking me for my thoughts. I'll expand a bit on some of the key points here in a thread. 🧵

@BartoszMilewski - trust the equivalence principle: any small enough patch of spacetime is indistinguishable from Minkowski spacetime for a free-falling particle.

If you fall through the event horizon of an enormous black hole with your arm outstretched before you, your hand doesn't disappear as it crosses the horizon. But if you use rockets to hover outside the horizon and stick your arm in, it gets ripped off and disappears from view.

Hey, don't forget: the deadline to apply to the Adjoint School is December 1st!

This is a great thing to do if you're interested in using category theory to tackle problems in topics like quantum computation, machine learning, numerical analysis or graph theory.

Many applied category theorists I know have gotten their start at this school. You’ll work online on a research project with a mentor and a team of other students for several months. Then you’ll get together for several days at the end of May at the University of Florida, in Gainesville. Then comes the big annual conference on applied category theory, ACT2025.

You can apply here now:

https://adjointschool.com/apply.html

For more details, including the list of mentors and their research projects, go here:

https://adjointschool.com/2025.html

Important dates:

• Application opens: November 1, 2024
• Application deadline: December 1, 2024
• School runs: January-May, 2025
• Research week dates: May 26-30, 2025

Who should apply?

Anyone, from anywhere in the world, who is interested in applying category-theoretic methods to problems outside of pure mathematics. This is emphatically not restricted to math students, but one should be comfortable working with mathematics. Knowledge of basic category-theoretic language—the definition of monoidal category for example—is encouraged.

The school will consider advanced undergraduates, PhD students, post-docs, as well as people working outside of academia. Members of groups which are underrepresented in the mathematics and computer science communities are especially encouraged to apply.

One of the worst misfeatures of #Mastodon from a safety angle: If you get an abusive reply to your post, you can't remove it even by blocking the person. Even after blocking, your server still shows the abusive reply to everyone else.

There has been a patch ready to fix this for 2 years, 6 months, and 1 day. @Gargron has not approved it, and has provided *zero* explanation for why he will not allow it to be merged.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/18468

As you're freely falling through the air you don't feel any force except the wind - but you're also getting *stretched* a tiny amount because gravity is a bit stronger near your feet. This is called a 'tidal force' because it creates tides: for example, water on the side of the Earth facing the Moon is pulled toward the Moon more than water on the opposite side.

As a star falls toward a black hole it can get stretched and even destroyed by this tidal force - we've seen it happen! It can create a huge flare of radiation.

But surprisingly, the bigger the black hole, the smaller the tidal force is near the event horizon. We could be falling through the event horizon of a truly enormous black hole right now, and we'd never notice - though I consider this very unlikely.

More importantly, a star like the Sun will only get disrupted *before* it crosses the event horizon if the black hole is < 100 million solar masses. Otherwise it will get sucked in and be lost to sight without any drama!

The big black hole in the center of our galaxy is only 4 million solar masses, so this 'silent death' doesn't happen here. But it happens elsewhere. The biggest black hole known is 66 *billion* solar masses!

Black holes emit flares of light that we don't understand. Some must be from stars falling in. But many flares show very little light in hydrogen's spectral lines! This talk is pretty fun, and it's all about these mysteries.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6cFy34wsyM

On SciComm.xyz, we have a rule about the use of image description; there are good reasons for that.

The most important one is because we believe that people using screen-readers (or with sight-related problems) should be 1st-class citizens on the Fediverse and should not feel excluded by inaccessible content.

But there are also very down-to-earth reasons why scientists and science communicators should use image descriptions.

A thread.
1/3

#accessibility #SciComm #science

Wizard Zines is doing another Big Zine Sale again this year on **Friday, November 29th**! One day only.

here’s a google calendar link for the duration of the sale if you want a reminder: https://wzrd.page/cal (or ical: https://wzrd.page/cal.ics)

I'm looking for some good resources on navigating conflict and difficult conversations in academia/science/the workplace for grad students and other early career researchers. Does that exist?

Hi all, I'm a french physicist from Marseille.

I work at the interface between statistical physics, network science and sociology (sometimes labelled #sociophysics or #ComputationalSocialScience). I'm basically interested in universal properties in human behaviour, and the mechanisms responsible for these properties.

I also teach maths, network science and Python in Aix-Marseille Univ.