tobychev @tobychev@qoto.org

How many professional programmers are working on pointless and/or actively harmful products?

Give me your best guess.

(If you vote, please boost to diversify the results. It’s polite.)

Bra artikel om den långdragna konflikten som ledde till att hela Astronomiska institutionen i Lund lades ner. Har själv skrivit ett tiotal artiklar om detta.

Astronomisk kollaps i Lund | Forskning & Framsteg
https://fof.se/artikel/2024/6/astronomisk-kollaps-i-lund/

#lund

More than 550 hajj pilgrims die in Mecca as temperatures exceed 50°C (122°F).

Temperatures hit 51.8°C (125°F) at the Grand Mosque in Mecca on Monday, the Saudi national meteorology centre said.

Saudi officials report treating more than 2,000 people for heat stress

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/18/hundreds-of-hajj-pilgrims-die-in-mecca-from-heat-related-illness

HISTORY OF PHYSICS

During the post-war years, the US quickly became embroiled both in the cold war and in an internal anti- communist frenzy. Driven by Senator McCarthy, stigmas then became into vogue.

Unfortunately, acceptance of stigmas by the populace appears to foster the malignant creation of additional stigmas, specially in an environment that is dominated by religious fanaticism. Thus, in keeping with the times, a very powerful secondary stigma began to develop within the physics community towards anyone who sacrilegiously was critical of quantum theory’s fundamentals.

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As Russia’s war drags on and the number of Russians charged with treason rises, phone scams aiming to cash in on citizens’ fear of prosecution continue to run rampant. A new report from BBC Russian tells the stories of two people targeted by these scams.
https://t.co/EPkdwrVN5G

i think we should stop giving our ai bots female names (alexa, siri) and give them names from the old white boys club (john, james, chad) in honor of how overconfident and annoying they are even when they’re completely wrong or making stuff up

This Is Your Brain on Climate Change: How the Heating Planet Causes Psychological Changes.

Living on our heating planet doesn’t just affect our lungs, hearts, and immune systems but also can harm our brains, affecting our moods and behavior. #ClimateChange

https://www.prevention.com/health/a60986884/climate-change-causes-brain-changes/

The last time a big galaxy crashed into ours was between 8 and 11 billion years ago. It added about 50 billion solar masses to our galaxy. And its remains, still visible today, are called the Sausage.

Why the funny name? It's the red thing in the picture! This picture shows orbits of various typical stars in the Milky Way. The z direction is at right angles to the galactic disk. There are 3 quite different kinds of stars:

• The green orbit is a star in the galactic disk, like our Sun.

• The blue orbit is a star in the galactic halo. These stars tend to be very old: over 12 billion years old.

• The red orbit is a star in the Sausage. It moves back and forth in a very narrow orbit!

We learned about the Sausage only after 2014, when an EU-run satellite called Gaia began carefully measuring the velocities of many stars in the Milky Way. Many dwarf galaxies that collided with the Milky Way were already known. But the Sausage was hard to detect until we got good at watching stars move by repeatedly measuring their position!

Redshifts are only good for telling if something is moving toward or away from you. Stars in the Sausage are moving back and forth from our point of view. Gaia accurately measured the position of a billion astronomical objects, measuring each 70 times in its five-year life.

For more on the Sausage:

https://people.ast.cam.ac.uk/~vasily/gaia_sausage/info.html

This is *terrible.* Stanford buckles under to Jim Jordan & litigation, dismantling the Stanford Internet Observatory (retreating to safe subjects like child porn). Alex Stamos & Renee DiResta, both gone, call this "a quintessential example of the weaponization of government." h/t Casey Newton
https://www.platformer.news/stanford-internet-observatory-shutdown-stamos-diresta-sio/

The US military is once again irresponsibly weaponizing public health.

Reuters reports on an anti-vax propaganda campaign to spread fear of China’s vaccine. Health experts say this scenario is similar to when the CIA used a fake vaccination program to hunt for Bin Laden. Discovery of the ruse led to a backlash against an unrelated polio vaccination campaign, including attacks on healthcare workers, contributing to the reemergence of the deadly disease in the country.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covid-propaganda/

In 2022, Google settled a class action lawsuit for systematically underpaying 15,500 female employees.

It’s now Apple’s turn in the hot seat as they’ve been hit with a lawsuit for systematically underpaying 12,000 female employees.

Apple bases pay on people’s previous salaries or pay expectations which creates a systemic disparity as women tend to have lower values for these than men.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-accused-lawsuit-underpaying-female-workers-california-2024-06-13/

The alarm went off earlier than usual. Naveen dragged himself out of bead and stared, bleary-eyed at the clock. Half nine in the evening? Ugh, he'd barely even got to sleep.

Still. A job's a job. He downed a glass of water in one, put on the sensor feedback gloves and the helmet, looked for motivation in the photo of his family he'd taped to the inside of the booth, thought "what does that bastard want this time" to himself, then lowered the visor and went to work.

Eight thousand miles away, Jake nudged his AI TeslaBot. Why the hell did this thing take so long to boot up? He could have made his own Nespresso by now.

#microfiction