tobychev @tobychev@qoto.org

On a day when every other post I see is re. tech stocks are plummeting and dragging the rest of the markets down; or Google being ruled a monopoly by US courts

I once again invite people who post about "tech" without filters or CWs

but request others to CW "politics"

to consider why and how "politics" is different for them, and why

#Mastodon

Climate change deniers make up nearly a quarter of US Congress

Climate denialists – 23 in Senate and 100 in House – are all Republicans and make US an outlier internationally

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/05/climate-change-denial-congress

'Analyses of R&D spending and equity investment in biotech predict that the industry is capable of weathering a drop in revenue due to lower drug prices, with no corresponding loss in new approved drugs.'

https://www.fiercebiotech.com/research/analyses-predict-reduction-drug-prices-due-inflation-reduction-act-wont-hurt-biotech

Really cool study investigating correlations and differences in music perception in relation to native langue, in particular whether your native tongue is tonal or not. TL;DR speaking a tonal language means you're better at perceiving pitch, but worse at perceiving rhythm!

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2023.03.067

"No way to prevent this" say users of only language where this regularly happens

https://xeiaso.net/shitposts/no-way-to-prevent-this/CVE-2024-5535/

Astronomers from the University of Helsinki have found that the rotational profile of a nearby #star, V889 Herculis, differs considerably from that of the Sun.

The star rotates the fastest at a latitude of about 40 degrees, while both the equator and polar regions rotate more slowly.

The observation provides insights into the fundamental stellar #astrophysics and helps understanding the activity of the Sun, its spot structures and eruptions.

#astronomy
https://www.helsinki.fi/en/news/space/rotation-nearby-star-stuns-astronomers

This is hilariously bad peak bubble bullshit marketing. The value proposition of this product is apparently you don't have any human friends so you want inane LLM babble at the press of a button to convey the impression of a "friend" interacting with you.

It's like a Furby without the fur.

https://www.friend.com/product.html

Wind and solar energy overtake fossil fuels to provide 30% of EU electricity

Report finds 13 member states generated more energy from wind and solar power than coal and gas for first time in 2024

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/jul/30/renewables-overtake-fossil-fuels-to-provide-30-of-eu-electricity

As many as 50,000 queer people currently serve in the Ukrainian Armed Forces and the country offers them and their partners no legal protections.@timkmak’s Counteroffensive looks at what happens when an LGBTQ+ serviceperson is injured, killed or goes missing during the war, as well as the possibility of new legislation on civil partnerships, and the challenges of making that happen in a conflict zone.

https://www.counteroffensive.news/p/ukrainian-lgbtq-soldiers-face-injustice

#Ukraine #LGBTQ #UkraineRussia #Newstodon #NewstodonFriday #FollowFriday

We've got solar panels and when there's not enough power being generated to cover usage of big appliances I like to pretend I'm a star ship captain by turning stuff off from non essential systems. I issue commands like divert power from lights to tumble dryer.

'A dazzled Congress gave Netanyahu fifty-eight standing ovations, lasting about half of the speech’s duration and marking a record in US history, or perhaps any country’s history, at more than 400 percent the number Kim Jong Un receives in North Korea, thus breaking Netanyahu’s own record from 2015, when his forty-three-minute speech received forty-three standing ovations and rounds of applause from nearly every single US lawmaker. After a long, torturous hour of cheering and clapping, lawmakers scrambled on the House floor to shake Netanyahu’s hand.'

https://jacobin.com/2024/07/benjamin-netanyahu-address-us-congress/

I'm pro-shark on this one

"The statistics in this article mostly refer to unprovoked bites. But there have been reports of shark attacks from people feeding, grabbing, petting, kicking, chasing and, in at least one case, kissing wild sharks. These types of attacks seem to be especially common among social media influencers."

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/07/26/well/shark-season-attacks-survival-tips.html

Det är alltså tusen pers som ansökte om omställningsstudiestöd FÖRRA VÅREN som inte har fått besked ännu. Och om man istället söker studielån och bidrag eftersom det kan dröja så länge kan man inte få omställningsstudiestöd för den tiden. Det är ju helt vrickat.

A wildfire started in the hills northeast of Chico, California, USA. These photos, taken on July 25, 2024, show the smoke at the Allen Telescope Array in Hat Creek, California, USA. From our local staff: "We are still getting heavy smoke from the fire and the air quality is hazardous. At the time of writing, the head of the fire is just 35 miles southwest of the observatory between Highway 36 and 44. We are monitoring the situation closely and we might need to evacuate at some point."

#parkfire

Good Lord, how depressing is that Google Gemini ad about getting the AI to write your kid’s fan letter to her hero athlete? Why not get Midjourney to make a picture to enclose as well? What do they think it means for a child to write a fan latter, or for a recipient to read one?

@kjhealy “Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard AI made at camp”

I’ll add some personal bonus information to why I’ve come to think opening a git issue is peer review.

I started my PhD by beginning to develop little software/hardware tools by myself. I could “finish” them off and get a publication out of it (actual academic currency) and leave it at that, as happens ever too often.

Yet, I believe that we (the scientific community) need fewer projects, that are (1) better maintained, (2) with a larger community and (3) better adoption. I think this is crucial to ensure not just future reproducibility, but also that skills we researchers acquire (and learned how to use a piece of software is a skill that takes valuable time) will benefit us for much longer.

So what I decided, instead, I re-aligned, and decided my efforts were better spent contributing to existing projects that were *almost* what I needed, but not quite. Rather than committing code, I’ve written countless detailed feature requests and bug reports, spending countless hours coming up with minimal reproducible examples to help the developers pin down issues. I’ve worked closely with a number of project maintainers improving their projects (at least I think so) without contributing a line of code.

I think it’s the best decision I could possibly have made. It means the software that is already used widely (or that I think will be) improved, and personally I have had so many great interactions because of it. But there is no formal way this adds *anything* to my CV - grant applications, job applications are completely unaffected by what I consider some of my most important contributions to science as of now.