Nick @internic@qoto.org

Google prioritizes profits over privacy by keeping third-party cookies in Chrome. It's time for privacy legislation to put you in control of your data. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/08/google-breaks-promise-block-third-party-cookies

I arrived at the Sydney Mathematical Research Institute, where I will be for the next three weeks. I will generally hang around to talk to people, and also give three lectures:

Friday August 6th: "What is type theory?" – SMRI Informal Seminar

Tuesday, August 13th: "Zeros" – National Science Week a public lecture (https://mathematical-research-institute.sydney.edu.au/event/zeros-andrejbauer/)

Friday, August 16th: "The anatomy of a proof assistant" - SMRI Informal Seminar

The informal seminars will be targeted at the curious mathematicians. The public lecture is a spectacle, of course.
Come to think of it, all three are a spectacle.

So RFK Jr. is just some sort of weird performance art piece, like rapper Joaquin Phoenix, right

okay, I finally found a good use for an LLM. no, really.

https://github-roast.pages.dev/

this thing is brutal

something that caught my eye when reading this weekend's FT

"In Janu­ary 2020, Intel was worth more than AMD and Nvidia com­bined. Today, those rivals are col­lect­ively worth nearly $2.6tn, while Intel is worth about $120bn."

And I couldn't resist when Amazon started showing me dice with eyes floating in them. This lot probably don't go through rigorous χ² testing.

@futurebird @mcc @rlmcneary2 @ramsey @hacks4pancakes @taylorlorenz I remember that story about how a young perfectly typical cis woman went to doctors for unspecified reasons, and for some reason they decided to test her karyotype and it was 46/XY.
So they decided to test her birth mother too... and turned out her birth mother was 46/XY too (but daughter's Y chromosome came from father, not from mother). Which didn't prevent her from getting pregnant two times and giving completely uneventful ordinary birth to a completely ordinary looking daughter.
One can only wonder how many other cases like that there are, untested.
(But transphobes of course would campaign to ban both the daughter and the mother from public women's toilets in the name of protecting women, even if some of them acknowledge it's a collateral damage.)

Link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2190741/

Chess hasn’t been updated in almost 200 years and it’s obvious the devs have abandoned it. The greedy creators took your money and laughed all the way to the bank.

I remember back in 705 AD when chess was fun. Then they started adding stupid features no one wanted like “castling” and “en passant” instead of listening to player feedback and fixing game-breaking bugs. I’ve been complaining for years about the collision-detection glitch with the horsey. The ‘clipping-through-pieces’ bug has been abused to death and the lazy devs refuse to fix it.

Don’t support this awful behaviour and boycott this company.

@ddritter

Twitter:
*I make a post at 9am and go about my day
*A racist replies with racial slurs at 9:15am
*Everyone sees the racist replies
*Everyone reports the racist replies
*Twitter mods take it down by 10am
*I check Twitter again at 11am, and never even see the racism!

Masto:
*I post at 9am
*Racists reply in such a way that only them and their followers see the racism
*So no one reports it
*Everyone gaslights me with "I don't see racism here!"

https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke /111012743709881062

@stux

Maybe?

Other social:
"Everyone sees every reply! But we fiddle with the order!"

Mastodon:
"Not everyone sees every reply! But the order of posts that are seen, is guaranteed to be strictly reverse chronological!"

Different trade-offs inherent in the architecture of each.

I've posted on here before about how Mastodon's trade-off makes it much easier to racially abuse Black people in the replies, and puts more of the burden of reporting that abuse on victims rather than the community.

@stib @stux

Yup.

So "algorithms" are not really the problem. It's who sets the objective function, and what their goal is, and over what timeframe.

And "strict reverse chronological" is an algorithm anyway.

@stux

🤔 People keep saying that Mastodon doesn't have this problem "because no algorithms," but Mastodon absolutely does have this problem.

For example, whether or not a fediverse user sees this post that I'm writing right now, depends on whether or not their admin thinks that they should see posts from hachyderm, or from me in particular. 🤷🏿‍♂️

Someone is still deciding which replies you see and which ones you don't see, presumably for your safety and enjoyment.

Predatory conferences are on the rise. Here are five ways to tackle them
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02445-y

BTW one small thing you can do to help. Download the SoundPrint app, and use it to take a noise measurement every time you visit a restaurant. Together we can build a useful crowdsourced map of restaurant noisiness.

Aside from sending cease and desists for parody websites, CrowdStrike sent a cease and desist for a label. The security industry should not try to abuse its power.

Google pulls Gemini AI ad from Olympics after backlash
https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/2/24212078/google-gemini-olympics-ad-backlash?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Posted into Google News @google-news-theverge

Two years ago, I experienced Sudden Sensorineural Hearing Loss (SSNHL), and am now almost completely deaf in one ear. This year, one of my colleagues had the same thing. Now I see there's a study out showing a strong correlation between COVID and SSNHL.
I guess that explains a lot. But, shit.
BTW If you find you suddenly lose hearing in one ear, get yourself to a specialist *immediately*. You have a 24-36 hour window to save your hearing before it becomes permanent.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(24)00338-9/fulltext