Nick @internic@qoto.org

From a behavioral and psychological perspective (not interested in this thread in an "arguing about whether our estimation is right" perspective lol), I think the halting, difficult, but clearly emerging work of starting to reckon with the climate costs of computing is so incredibly cool and important. Some questions I want research to ask about this include:

Deep Space Network is talking to BOTH Voyager spacecraft right now!

• If you die in the Matrix, you no longer die in real life. We've fixed this critical bug. (Sorry about that!)

One thing about having a serious injury is that you're outside of normal life. It's easy to dissociate and become enveloped in the depressing painful world of your injury.

Visits from friends and family over the last few weeks have been very important to me. They make me feel connected to my real self and my real life.

If you have friends or family who are in the hospital or recovering at home, take time to visit. A 30 minute chit-chat may not seem like a lot to you, but it will to them.

"As an astronomer, I already had good reasons to worry about SpaceX." Worries like: light pollution from mega-constellations, atmospheric pollution from launches and disintegrations, and now silo-sized space junk dropping on people's farms. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/spacex-dropped-space-junk-on-my-neighbors-farm-heres-what-happened-next/ by @sundogplanets

ICYMI, AT&T has acknowledged that cyber thieves stole basically the phone bills for all of their customers. The data includes information you would see on a phone bill, including the source and destination of calls on your AT&T mobile device(s), and the same for SMS messages.

AT&T said it delayed disclosing the breach "on national security and public safety concerns." And we're learning now that the FBI has confirmed this.

AT&T's SEC filing says some cellular site tower information is also among the data accessed by the intruders, which could be used to determine the approximate location of where a call was made or text message sent.

This raises an important question: Was the AT&T customer data stolen from a law enforcement portal set up by AT&T? Sure seems like it.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/12/att-phone-records-stolen-data-breach/

Engineers - what magic wand change would change your frigid-to-adversarial relationship with security to a healthy, collaborative one pretty much overnight?

I've been an engineer, an AppSec person, and I'm now a researcher at a static analysis company. We have a great tool for solving technical problems but we keep seeing people who come to us interested in our technical solution, but their self-assessment of their relationship with engineering is mid to bad.

The problem isn't the tooling it's your relationship with your developers and while the specific reasons are often hyper-specific, I'm hoping I can collect some common threads and collate them into some guidance we can amplify.

#softwareengineering

The death of precedent is the death of the slippery-slope argument for constitutional law. The Supreme Court just does whatever they want.

“If we defend Terrible Thing, then Good Thing will also be protected!”

No. That is no longer correct. We are living in a post-consistency legal world.

Cars prove far deadlier than guns in #NYC so far this year https://gothamist.com/news/cars-prove-far-deadlier-than-guns-in-nyc-so-far-this-year

Orange felon is trying to bamboozle voters by claiming he's never heard of the Heritage Foundation, the architect of Project 2025 that wants to refashion the US into a christian nationalist country. The head of HF recently said "we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be."

It's understandable why unhinged Trump wants to distance himself: he knows the even many republicans oppose Project 2025.

Here he is giving a keynote at the HF's annual meeting in 2022 saying: "“And Heritage does such an incredible job at that. This is a great group, and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detailed plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America. And that’s coming, that’s coming."

Please share this video with any t(Rump) supporters you think might be swayed.

Conversations about software metrics love to talk about precision without ever talking about ecological validity and implementation goals and in that, face much the same challenge as certain areas of medical diagnosis.

If you can get an amazing image of the brain for a patient whose problem is in the lungs you don't just keep forcing them through better and better brain scans. You accept the shitty limitations of the lung imaging and start to make it better eg by gathering samples over time

The kind of day where I want to stop putting out research and findings on specific topics and just switch into meta scientific methods commentary and teaching, this is like the "I'll open a bakery" of applied intervention science

NPR: The grant, from Eric and Wendy Schmidt, will be used to launch regional newsrooms in Appalachia and the Mountain West. It will also be used to strengthen existing public media collaboratives in New England, the Midwest and California.#news #NPR https://www.npr.org/2024/07/11/nx-s1-5035231/npr-regional-newsroom-grant-appalachia-mountain-west-schmidt

@fl @highergeometer - yes, there's a board of arXiv "moderators" and they try to prevent bad papers from getting on the arXiv, according to some unknown definition of "bad", so they apparently read at least some of the papers - though the details are intentionally not open to the public.

Some details are here:

https://info.arxiv.org/help/moderation/index.html

My paper has finally appeared on the arXiv after 18 days in moderation! I submitted it on June 23rd.

"The Moduli Space of Acute Triangles"

Abstract: As an introduction to the concept of "moduli space" we consider the moduli space of similarity classes of acute and right triangles in the plane. This has a map to the moduli space of elliptic curves which is onto and generically three-to-one. The reason is that from any acute or right triangle we can construct an elliptic curve, and every elliptic curve is isomorphic to one constructed this way.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.06201

Thanks to @highergeometer for noticing this even before I did!

I thought I'd seen someone I follow on Mastodon post a study suggesting that code quality degrades (mostly in terms of bugs, I think) with the use of GenIA coding assistants, but now for the life of my I can't find the post or the paper. If anyone has any idea about a study that meets this rough description, I'd appreciate a pointer (ones that claim the reverse effect would also be of interest).

I'm not sure who might have originally posted it. @baldur, @grimalkina, and @mhoye seem like possible suspects, but I guess it could have been a lot of people.

Spending a work week on 5-hour-a-day video calls with a GitHub engineer running experiments to determine exactly how their product behaves in various scenarios involving GPG signed commits, because they don't have documentation explaining the results intended by their design and can't find the engineers who built it to ask them

Just normal tech industry things

Boris Grokh, “Military target”, 2024