tobychev @tobychev@qoto.org

This was inevitable: EU's new ban on vehicles exiting Russia forced a Ukrainian refugee with terminal cancer to wait in line with everyone else at the Estonian border as her son pushed her in a wheelchair for nearly a mile. She couldn't get an ambulance. https://www.bbc.com/russian/news-66838864?ocid=wsrussian.social.in-app-messaging.telegram..russiantelegram_.edit

In "we can adapt" news:
• 1998: cracks reported in dams
• 2011: project to fix them halted
• budget allocated to fix them every year since but nothing done
• 2021: audit bureau criticises procrastination
• 2022: engineer warns of catastrophe

People who say that adaptation is cheap and easy and will somehow just happen automatically are wrong. It requires sustained political will to overcome the in-built tendency not to act to mitigate serious risks which haven't yet materialised.

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/libya-burst-dams-had-decades-old-cracks-says-official

California 🇺🇸 has sued 👨‍⚖️ several of the world’s biggest #oil companies, including #ExxonMobil, #Shell & #BP, claiming they deceived the public for decades about how the burning of #FossilFuels is destroying the planet https://www.ft.com/content/3b655443-5721-4524-9e8f-ffbf314b06a7

J'apprends la langue française, mais aussi la culture française. Qu'en pensez-vous ?

Inspired by @pnorman’s animation, here’s a year of daily OpenStreetMap tile traffic. One frame per UTC day, from the start of September 2022 through end of August 2023. It’s from the public log aggregates, so some low-traffic tiles are left out for (I assume) efficiency and privacy.

Seven years ago today, Jimi Joonas Karttunen was beaten to death by neo-nazis in Helsinki, Finland.
Never forget.
Never forgive.

It would see that SocArXiv is a sociologist-run, academy-owned, non-profit, service organization that distributes thousands of papers by its members for free /3

🪨ᷡͦͭͪͥᷠᷚ

How big problem it is that cross-validation (CV) is biased? I briefly discuss some points on this.

0. Unbiasedness has a special role in statistics, and too often there are dichotomous comments that something is not valid or is inferior because it's not unbiased. However, often the non-zero bias is negligible, and by modifying the estimator we may even increase bias but reduce the variance a lot, providing an overall improved performance.

The normalisation of the extreme-right by the centre-right in Sweden went like this.

- we will never work with them.

- we happened to vote the same way as them.

- since we know they also like this policy, we will propose it. But we are not working with them!

- our policies are based on extreme-right support so it makes sense to talk to them

- a local council will be run with extreme-right support. But never nationally!

- YOLO national government with extreme right support, it's normal now

“I know how this information looks—when taken out of context, it seems bad,” Exxon CEO Darren Woods said in response to the Wall Street Journal’s inquiry about the documents that show Exxon executives strategized over how to diminish concerns about warming temperatures, and they sought to muddle scientific findings that might hurt its oil-and-gas business.

Lol. In what context does this look good?

https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/exxon-climate-change-documents-e2e9e6af

Philosophy has a WEIRD people problem too: “we analyzed 171 experimental philosophy studies published between 2017 and 2023. We found that most studies tested only Western populations but generalized beyond them without justification”

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/philosophy-of-science/article/hasty-generalizations-are-pervasive-in-experimental-philosophy-a-systematic-analysis/27AF62B58334B5120F3317CE9E6259C7

Alexey Navalny’s co-defendant Daniel Kholodny is just one of Russia’s estimated 600 political prisoners. In his letter from a penal colony, Kholodny explains why letters and postcards from the outside (and even from abroad) matter so much to inmates.
https://t.co/wB5VVu0y1l

From the observational point of view, the situation has dramatically improved over the years, and now some of the most spectacular images by modern telescopes are of radio galaxies.

They show a broad variety of magneto-fluido dynamical instabilities, perturbations and interactions with the medium, unexpected threads, edges, and even more weird stuff.

Look at this one:

Företag som inte ens stöder vanliga jäkla diakriter bör förgöras.

Most CS degrees have students do a "traffic light" exercise at some point: build an model of an intersection, run the stoplights.

Those lessons sometimes ask questions like "Are there pedestrians in your model? Maybe bikes? How about buses? Exactly who lives in the neighbourhood, do they relies on public transit? Et cetera.

A question I like to ask students, that always gets a lot of uncomfortable silence is: at what point do these decisions stop being software, and start being public policy?

Hans och Barbara Bergströms finansierar medier som sprider konspirationsteorier, förintelseförnekande och nazistisk propaganda, enligt Expos kommande nummer. https://mailchi.mp/1c1474c8de0c/tack-8244461

PSA for #Peertube instance owners:

Block/ignore the peertube.se instance immediately. This is run by and used by the Nordfront organization for Nazi propaganda.

It's the first match on Google if you're located in Sweden, which is problematic.

Please boost for exposure.

Hot take: currency symbols are units, like kg or Hz. And units go AFTER the number, not before!

Techbros: self driving cars are inevitable!

Also techbros: prove you are human by performing a task that computers can’t do, like identifying traffic lights.