Nick @internic@qoto.org

@pluralistic

^ Some good news from the EU:

Irish reunification has to happen in the next couple of weeks if we're going to stay in line with Star Trek canon. Just saying.

🚀 Astrodon Needs Your Support! 🪐

For 2 years, Astrodon.social has been a home for space enthusiasts across the Fediverse. With over 4,000 members and a growing, active community, it’s been amazing to see how this little experiment has turned into something so vibrant and meaningful.

But running Astrodon isn’t free - hosting costs have grown to €260/month, and it’s no longer sustainable for me to fund it alone. To keep Astrodon independent and ad-free, I’m launching a funding campaign!

How You Can Help:
- Check out the new Astrodon Store for space-themed merch: https://store.astrodon.social
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Every little bit helps keep our cosmic corner of the Fediverse thriving. Thank you for being part of this incredible journey! 💫

Headlines for news articles too long for you to read in your busy day?

Why not have an LLM probabilistically “summarise” them into something even shorter that’s easier to take in at a glance, and … might or might not say the same thing as the original.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd0elzk24dno

I was really curious what would be this article, based on the title. The answer was, oddly, that there was not much there. I really don't understand what the point of the article was. But it brings up an odd question in my mind: what does the phrase "artificial gravity" really mean?

I think both phenomena discussed in the article are situations where momentum or stress exerts non-negligible gravitational influence, instead of mass, but that's just what general relativity predicts, so should that really be considered "artificial" gravity? What about the apparent gravity experienced inside, say, a rotating space station? Arguably that's not gravity at all.

I guess I'd just never before appreciated how odd the notion of "artificial gravity" is. I think if you look at how it's often used, "artificial gravity" probably usually means any phenomenon where people or objects experience having weight which is not due to the presence of mass nearby (which means it can include things that are not artificial and things that are not gravity).

After a week of tinkering I have, I think, finally finished standing up my own #Mastodon instance. I was surprised by how straight forward it was and I thought it might be useful to share my approach, for those who may be considering doing the same.

I should make it clear that there are far more useful guides out there and I am by no means an expert - I am just a mathematician who enjoys tinkering with things. There will be nothing profound in the thread below, but I hope it is useful.

🧵 1/N

Incredible essay about the importance and challenges of digital archival by Maxwell Neely-Cohen, as well as the various imperfect strategies to achieve “century-scale” digital archives.

https://lil.law.harvard.edu/century-scale-storage/

"We picked a century scale because most physical objects can survive 100 years in good care. It is attainable, and yet we selected it because the design of mainstream digital storage mediums are nowhere close to even considering this mark."

1/

#archival

Three weeks ago I wrote "How decentralized is Bluesky really?" https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

Shortly thereafter, @bnewbold wrote his response: https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lbvbtqrg5t2t

I have written my (final) response blogpost: https://dustycloud.org/blog/re-re-bluesky-decentralization/

And as last time, 🧵. Buckle up.

Multifaceted, high-precision campaign targets malicious and benevolent hackers alike.

https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/12/yearlong-supply-chain-attack-targeting-security-pros-steals-390k-credentials/?comments-page=1#comments

Apple AI is writing wrong headlines and making up false stories. Here are BBC AND NYT iPhone screenshot of the misleading BBC/NYT notification https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd0elzk24dno.amp

h/t to @johnshier

Yesterdays link to the Let‘s Encrypt blog dragged in some people who seem to think that CAs are unnecessary or even evil.

LE is s very small group who set out to improve the terrible CA situation and the fucking middle box corruptions.

They did that successfully with a budget that a medium sized city spends on its department for car license plates.

So, my advice: don‘t yell at people who made the world somewhat better or you‘ll soon run out of ones who try.💁🏻‍♂️

A reminder to all who may have Visa, AmEx, or Master Card gift cards now and in the future. Often you'll wind up with a small balance on them that doesn't make it worthwhile to make a purchase with it online or in a store. Something like US$1.60 or less.

Go to Wikipedia, Archive.org, your local animal shelter, or just about any worthwhile nonprofit and donate that odd amount on their web page.

#donations #nonprofit #giving #Holidays #Christmas #Kwanza

"Memory-safe PNG decoders now vastly outperform C PNG libraries"

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1ha7uyi/memorysafe_png_decoders_now_vastly_outperform_c/

How to catch the Geminids, one of the strongest meteor showers of the year.

@AssociatedPress reports: "The shower often produces meteors with a distinctly more yellow glow, likely due to the unusual origin material, said Sally Brummel, planetarium manager at the University of Minnesota’s Bell Museum."

https://flip.it/pvsIGt

#Geminids #Meteor #Space #Astronomy #Science

Just finished "A City on Mars" and it was SO GOOD. I learned so much and laughed so hard. Thank you for writing it, @ZachWeinersmith!

Required reading for anyone who thinks we're going to live in space anytime soon (especially the biology section, wowza). I kinda wish I had read the hilarious and informative space law section before SpaceX debris fell near my house...

Also fun to see @michael_w_busch (as well as a bunch of other research colleagues) in the acknowledgements

Euclid's original text on geometry is almost as hard to reconstruct as the Big Bang. All we have is echoes of echoes of echoes.

The oldest surviving copy of Euclid’s book, handwritten on parchment, dates back to 888 AD. That's old - but it's 1200 years after Euclid!

In 1897, some fragments of the book were found in an ancient garbage dump in Egypt. These date back to 300 AD. That's really old - but still about 600 years after Euclid.

How did we get Euclid's Elements? This 'family tree' created by the biochemist Herbert M. Sauro begins to answer that question. It's pretty damned interesting.

The earliest transmission of Euclid from Greece to western Europe went via Arabic, and I'm interested in this stage. At that time western Europe was like the barbarian boondocks, far from the center of the civilized world. Unfortunately Sauro just has one entry saying "Arabic (~800 AD)" for what is actually a complicated process. I'm not scolding him - I just want more!

Luckily more is known about Arabic translations of Euclid. There's a lot already in Heath's famous 1908 translation of the Elements. When I asked around on the History of Science and Mathematics Stackexhange, the nice folks there found two family trees besides Sauro's:

https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/18090/what-is-the-family-tree-of-translations-of-euclids-elements

If I had time, I might try to combine all these family trees into one huge beautiful chart.

For more by Herbert M. Sauro, go to his website:

https://euclid.analogmachine.org/early-history

I am super excited to share that my forthcoming book with @alex, THE AI CON: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want, is now available for pre-order!

All the details here: https://thecon.ai/

"Hey, I discovered an amazing formula!"

"Wow, that looks implausible. Did you prove it?"

"No, but I checked it to 15 decimal places!"

"You should have checked it to 20 decimal places."

It's great to make guesses in math. But it really does pay to prove them. A story like this actually happened:

https://mathoverflow.net/questions/251636/numerical-coincidence-why-is-sumxk2-sumxk1-22-for-x-0-8

In fact the "coincidence" shown below not a coincidence at all!

It's a fact about the Jacobi theta functions θ₂ and θ₃, which I define below. These functions are important in the study of elliptic curves. It's not very hard to show that as x gets bigger and approaches 1, we have θ₂(x) - θ₃(x) → 0. But fact it goes to zero very fast, so

|θ₂(4/5) - θ₃(4/5)| ≈ 9.3 × 10⁻¹⁹

We can go on with this game:

|θ₂(9/10) - θ₃(9/10)| ≈ 4.5 × 10⁻⁴⁰

and so on.