tobychev @tobychev@qoto.org

No-one (?) would seriously say “With AI, people can make awesome Eclipse images whenever they like! No need to learn how, or wait for one to arrive!” But for many activities, AI types often do in effect argue “Why learn to do anything/have any experience that someone else—or a machine—can do better?”

Despite all their hype in AI, we found that Transformers do not outperform #Cellpose for cellular segmentation tasks: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.04.06.587952v1

#bioinformatics #biology #machinelearning

Alexander Demidenko, a Russian man who helped hundreds of Ukrainians return from Russia back to Ukraine after the start of the full-scale war until his arrest in October 2023, has reportedly died in pre-trial detention.
https://t.co/AntzZmzDUN

I think it should be obvious now that our international laws of war, like the Geneva Conventions, are only as good as our ability and willingness to enforce them.
I.e., not good at all right now.
Violators are still war criminals. Just unpunished ones.

You could easily fund ten honest scientists with the grant money stolen by Ranga Dias.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00976-y

Elon Musk never wanted to build the low-cost car, according to Walter Isaacson. He wanted the design team to focus on the robotaxi, but they eventually convinced him to do both. Now he’s overruled them again.

If the board really cares about Tesla, they’d use this to oust Musk.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-scraps-low-cost-car-plans-amid-fierce-chinese-ev-competition-2024-04-05/

#tech #elonmusk #transport #evs #tesla

"[the] computer that provided hundreds of charts for Joan Quigley, the [President Ronald and Nancy] Reagans' astrologer, who determined the timing of important events in the Reagan presidency such as: the take off times for Air Force One for important trips, the timing of all presidential press conferences, the signing of numerous anti-nuclear treaties with the Soviet Union."

https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102746921

WHAT THE FUCK

Colombia is firing an Assistant Professor who taught human rights and public health courses for teaching that Israel is a “colonial settler state” (aka a completely reasonable position backed by mounds of scholarship). https://www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2024/04/04/mailman-professor-abdul-kayum-ahmed-to-receive-letter-of-nonrenewal-following-claims-of-political-indoctrination/?fbclid=IwAR3LHKK47UQBTR49YBx9uQfj0v0Co6WXuXDvzgHidanAi_BDBHBnrpXBqmE_aem_ATYYaKKz2XnoxPY2DNeH0hual_DYozCnSLVOQtZQ-S43LUgtltbsCzRADomo8NNyIBE

Country music is popular across the United States because a quack doctor in Kansas in the 1920s who treated impotent men by surgically implanting goat testicles into their scrotum lost his medical license, so he ran for Governor of Kansas because that job would let him assign new members who would reinstate his license to the state medical board, and he only lost because the Republican and Democratic parties changed the election rules to throw out any votes for him that didn't write in his full name in a single approved way, so he moved to Texas and set up a million-watt radio station across the Mexican border that let him blast quack medical advice and sales pitches for health elixirs across the entire continent, and he needed something to fill the time when he wasn't on the air selling "joy juice," so he filled it with country music

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_R._Brinkley

Today I published a state-by-state guide to all of 2024's state supreme court races.

Abortion, voting rights, & other civil rights issues keep coming down to who voters put on bench... & they're electing 82 judges this year.

No excuse to not know! https://boltsmag.org/your-state-by-state-guide-to-the-2024-supreme-court-elections/

NASA has selected 3 teams to develop the Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV) - Intuitive Machines, Lunar Outpost and Venturi Astrolab.

The 12-month feasibility task-order will be followed by down-selection to one vendor.

Rover-as-a-Service - vendor is responsible for DevOps and , transportation to the moon’s south polar region.

Key req'ments – carry 2 suited astronauts, remote controlled uncrewed operation, robotic arm, operate in extreme temps at the lunar South Pole.

https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-selects-companies-to-advance-moon-mobility-for-artemis-missions/
1/n

War is failure.

Moral failure, diplomatic failure, democratic failure, systems failure.

War is what failure looks like. https://mastodonapp.uk/@georgepotter/112208562115386469

“It would be untrue to say that we are not afraid of Putin and threats to us”, says Russian exile news site Meduza’s editor-in-chief Ivan Kolpakov. Read my interview with him on Scoop! https://www.scoopmagasin.se/artiklar/english/meduza

"or" and "else" are both common constructs in programming languages, but "or else" is typically a syntax error. this is a major deficiency. we need to be able to threaten our code.

Report into MS breach is out: https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2024-04/CSRB_Review_of_the_Summer_2023_MEO_Intrusion_Final_508c.pdf

I had a tweet in 2021 saying MSTIC should not use the Nation State Notification process to hide breaches from the public.

That was a reference to the Affirmed Networks breach - aka Azure for Operators - listed in this report. They hid it.

The website for Azure for Operators at the time had Satya’s face on it.. that breach, which they refused to share details about, apparently led to this one.

Assam’s land sale ban between Hindus and Muslims may be unconstitutional – but it's happening anyway

Scroll found that the bar on inter-faith land sale has already been unofficial policy in Barpeta district since 2019.

#assam #land #communalism #hindutva #BJP #BJPStates #IndianMuslims #india

https://scroll.in/article/1065849/assams-land-sale-ban-between-hindus-and-muslims-may-be-unconstitutional-but-it-s-happening-anyway

Dr Ali Frolop on good form this morning. But Douglas has confided in me that the size of the internet in bits is now > Avogadro’s Number, so data should be an uncountable noun, like water
#astrodon

https://arxiv.org/html/2403.19937v1

"Me: Can I see that book from 1571?
Librarian: of course."

she looks looks it up on the shelf list, which looks centuries old in the Biblioteca Angelica in Rome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblioteca_Angelica

4/6

In Pusesavali: doctored images, destroyed lives

In Maharashtra, majoritarian Hindutva mobs are whipping up the communal cauldron. Photoshopped images, doctored videos and rumours are enough to set them off, resulting in the loss of Muslim lives and property.

#maharashtra #satara #pusesavali #HinduMobs #IndianMuslims #CommunalViolence #hindutva #MaharashtraPolice #BJPStates #india

https://ruralindiaonline.org/en/articles/in-pusesavali-doctored-images-destroyed-lives/

Researchers are beginning to capture data that seems to show Meta's pivot away from political and news content.

This shift on Facebook, between spring and winter 2023, is wild:

https://psychoftech.substack.com/p/social-media-that-is-bad-for-the-world