Nick @internic@qoto.org

Comet A3 Tsuchinshan-Atlas from DarkSkyLand last night, just barely showing the horizon in the lower right. In the lower left is Venus setting. The really cool thing was that I could see it with the unaided eye. Wish I could share that.

@mhoye I have a very blunt answer to what

BlueSky users *interact*

Here is an example, this are from an artist who is posting in both BlueSky and Mastodon at the same time, he is not a big famous artist but just look at the number of likes and boosts.

In the same time he got 49 likes and 9 boosts on BlueSky

And 1 like and 1 boost on Mastodon

You can yell that numbers don't matter all you want, they do

And as long we are a void being yell, we will keep loosing users

Ran the 'The Murkmire Malevolence' module tonight and we had a blast. It's a heist story a la Leverage. Took about 4 hours. Highly recommend Keys from the Golden Vault if you DM D&D.

Today: Trying to get an LLM to give me some scientific references for a specific question. Both GPT4 and Claude listed plausible-sounding references. Almost all were fake.

When called out on this, the replies were of the type "Upon further analysis, it appears the references I provided were fabricated. Here are some genuine reliable references" (...invents some more...). And Claude says something like "The articles I mentioned were not real but just for illustrative purposes." ...

:-((

I have the best update after teaching my mom to play her first video game a month ago 😂

My little brother and I were catching up and he said "Can you please explain to me why I called our mother and she started talking about "superior graphics" in the choice between gaming consoles?!"

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was born #OTD in 1910. He established an upper limit on the mass of stable white dwarf stars, and made numerous contributions to astrophysics and relativity.

Above the Chandrasekhar Limit – about 1.44 solar masses – electron degeneracy pressure cannot prevent a stellar remnant’s gravitational collapse into a neutron star or black hole.

Photo: Stephen Lewellyn / AIP

Google has officially begun killing uBlock Origin. It's an attack on focus, privacy, and security. In our newest video I dive into what's going on and what your options are:
https://youtu.be/nmO5dvn8jN0

@mhoye I’ve been on here over a year now and it’s the only social media I use, however, I’m now at the point where I’m considering giving up and going to Bluesky. I have a number of reasons, but it seems like a lot of people here like it the way it is. They might want more people here, but they don’t want it to change, they just want people to like what is and criticize people who don’t. That’s fine, but to what I think your point is, that isn’t going to attract more people.

I am once again trying to solve Problems with Email™ using technology. I am destined to fail because email problems are social problems. So adding technology just leaves me with two problems.

Nevertheless. I would like to store archived mail on my own hard drive, in an easily-accessed, portable format — like a maildir. Then I should be able to copy, move, access, archive, sync, whatever, using regular tools which interact with files. Ideally all the mail clients I use could just work with a maildir directly, but as you may be aware… kids these days… get off my lawn &c. &c. So I think that the practical compromise would be to run a little local IMAP server which just serves to read and write to the maildir in my home directory.

My question for the lazy/indie/fedi-hivemind is this: what’s the safest, smallest, simplest tool I can run to speak maildir to my filesystem and IMAP to my mail client? (And, implied: why is all of this the absolutely wrong way to go about this?)

I feel a little guilty asking a question like this at 5pm on a Friday; I worry that I’m going to nerdsnipe someone’s entire evening. Well, someone else’s, at least.

Born #onthisday 114 years ago, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was an Indian-American astrophysicist who was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize for Physics (along with William A. Fowler) for the "...theoretical studies of the physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of the stars" [1].

Chandrasekhar's amazing discovery of the limit for the maximum mass of a stable white dwarf star [2] is known as the Chandrasekhar Limit. The currently accepted value of the Chandrasekhar Limit is about 1.4 M☉ (solar masses), or about 2.765 × 10^30 kg [3].

Learn more about Chandrasekhar and the Chandrasekhar Limit here https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/the-chandrasekhar-limit-the-threshold-that-makes-life-possible/ and here https://galileo-unbound.blog/2019/01/07/chandrasekhars-limit.

References
--------------
[1] "The Nobel Prize in Physics 1983", https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1983/summary/

[2] "The Maximum Mass of Ideal White Dwarfs", https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1931ApJ....74...81C

[3] "Chandrasekhar limit", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chandrasekhar_limit

#chandrasekhar #chandrasekharlimit #physics

There's a thing they teach you about intervention science and it's that you absolutely cannot under any circumstances get more attached to your intervention than to the reality of the people the intervention is impacting.

23andMe faces an uncertain future — so does your genetic data.

@carlypage looks at what you can do to delete your data ahead of a potential sale or privatization of 23andMe.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/19/23andme-faces-an-uncertain-future-so-does-your-genetic-data/

@griff

Brave is a hard no for me for a few reasons, most notably: (1) the founder is hostile to gay rights, aka human rights and (2) the browser promotes that whole cryptocurrency ponzi scheme mythology.

Simulated small-scale dynamo turbulence in a volume of ~100kpc^3, with a numerical Reynolds number of about ~1e3 and stationary subsonic forcing, using ENZO-MHD.

Something like this - if plasmas were just a simple fluid on all scales, which they are not - should be happening also in the #space inbetween galaxies, over scales of several hundreds million years.

#astronomy #astrodon #SimulatedUniverses

“Chromium’s influence on Chromium alternatives - Seirdy”

https://seirdy.one/notes/2024/10/06/chromium-influence-on-chromium-alternatives/

> I don’t think most people realize how Firefox and Safari depend on Google for more than “just” revenue from default search engine deals and prototyping new web platform features.

Even the latest release of WPE/GTK WebKit uses Skia for 2D rendering.

@BartoszMilewski - I find cosmology to be in much better shape than particle physics, mainly because we're awash in new and ever more precise data. There are definitely lots of interesting conceptual problems about how we do cosmology, and it's true most scientific papers don't discuss them much - and some astrophysicists run wild in ways that need to be pushed back against. But there are people who write about these issues seriously, so I don't think 'drive-by shootings' are helpful, where you try to poke holes in assumptions but then run off before the conversation can get serious.

Cosmology is in such better shape than when I was a youth, in the 1960s, that it's hard for me to despair. Back then the (old) textbooks I read treated the argument between the Big Bang and steady state model as largely a matter of taste - e.g. some people just *didn't like* the idea of a universe that began at some moment in time. Now we're getting ever more accurate measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation, etc., and in the 2030s LISA may see the cosmic gravitational background radiation, which could go back to the time of electroweak symmetry breaking, around 10⁻¹² seconds after the Big Bang. So it's getting harder and harder to make up fairly simple theories that fit the data.

(Yes, there are always infinitely many theories that fit the data, but if we let that paralyze us science would never have happened.)

@mhoye I like this place & there's good people here. But in general terms we're not a welcoming community.

We have people who are mad potential new users didn't leave Twitter sooner.

We have people who are mad if you choose dot social instead of their personal instance.

We're not a difficult place to navigate but It can be challenging for a newbie. We need to figure out how it can be user friendly.

We're the least popular of the "new" choices.

These are some of the challenges I see.

Microsoft enabled the notorious "Recall" with the last update (for Windows 11 copilot+ enabled pcs only). It's part of the OS and can't be uninstalled. This software stores metadata about EVERYTHING that appears on your screen, including passwords/urls/images/videos/any messages you send or emails etc

To disable this gross spyware, run the following as admin on the command line:

Dism /Online /Disable-Feature
/Featurename:Recall

#Windows #Spyware #Recall #PrivacyAbuse

BTW I have no idea how much Google has spent protecting just my site over the past 8 years, but it has to be a LOT. The economics of defending dinky sites like mine don't scale very well and sometimes require some fairly custom solutions. I just remember after I exited Akamai's protective harbor and started casting about for pricing on DDoS protection, the figures I was quoted were more than I made in a year, and could expand dramatically depending on how evil the adversary wanted to be.

I wrote about this in more detail not long after I put the site behind Shield.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/02/how-google-took-on-mirai-krebsonsecurity/

They're not wrong.