Lou Katz @lou@entropyservice.com

In light of a bit of snark I've been seeing here, please remember that (Conservative) Prime Minister Harper muzzled Canadian scientists in 2013 and Alberta has never rescinded those rules.

Wireless doorbells resting on their chargers.

It's difficult to view as anything but an essentially political statement that it takes editing source files and recompiling the #Mastodon stack to simply increase the maximum permitted post length at any given Mastodon site. This should have been made an easily configurable runtime parameter long ago, and the fact that it still hasn't is extremely problematic.

American Businessmen looking at cancer research: meh, I don't think we need this really

American Businessmen looking at a 5-slide powerpoint with a single line going up on the last slide that a twenty year old consultant made and labeled "five bazillionty dollars": give this man everything

Sometimes The Onion just writes the perfect headline.

#TheOnion

I recently broke the frames of my bifocals. Really aggravated about my eyesight. I use bifocals for driving, for distance (+2.5) and dashboard (roughly arm's length, +3.5), but I need about +4.0 for desktop computer, and about +5.0 for reading/phone/tablet/detail work. I find progressives unsuited for desktop computer due to the restricted size of in-focus area. Currently I carry around FOUR pair, the bifocals for driving, over-the-top sunglasses, +4.0 readers, and +5.0 readers.

Say it with me: "If you collect the data, you better have a plan for what happens when it's leaked."

Furthermore, the data broker industry must be destroyed.

https://www.404media.co/hackers-claim-massive-breach-of-location-data-giant-threaten-to-leak-data/

@adamshostack @karpathy all of the science in ML is being swamped by nonsense

The fact the richest man in the world is successfully meddling with elections all across Europe and America, should have you worry about all the other rich people that aren't publicly announcing it.

holy living fuck, it is amazing to be running #debian instead of #windows again after all these years. i feel like i'm alone with my computer instead of, like, being in the room with a bunch of adtech execs.

#foss #OpenSource

Them: Naww! Did you adopt a cat?

Me: No. That’s my biological cat.

We had no idea “Democracy Dies in Darkness” was a mission statement.

Trump: The King of Hate: The attempt to get around the Constitution on birthright citizenship by claiming the U.S. doesn't have "jurisdiction" over undocumented immigrants is total bull. The clear intent was to exclude the children of diplomats who have diplomatic immunity. If the U.S. didn't have "jurisdiction" over undocumented immigrants, they couldn't be arrested, charged with crimes, jailed, etc. And obviously, that's not the case. So many hateful people -- and they all love Trump because he's the King of Hate.

Because this is the talk of the #internet again: you don't preserve digital media by stuffing the One True Version in an #archive. Make countless copies and scatter them to the wind. Make each a different format. You don't know which of them will still be readable next decade, so *don't try to guess*.

That goes for analog media too. The Library of Alexandria contained copies. Many classic paintings only survived as copies.

Copying is how life itself beats death. Embrace it.

The peculiar tragedy of X is that it has made one nostalgic for Twitter - rather like missing a toothache while experiencing electrocution.

Buried in a story about yet another Elsevier journal editorial board resigning en masse (Journal of Human Evolution, https://retractionwatch.com/2024/12/27/evolution-journal-editors-resign-en-masse-to-protest-elsevier-changes/), there is an alarming new development in Elsevier's publication practices:

"In fall of 2023, for example, without consulting or informing the editors, Elsevier initiated the use of AI during production, creating article proofs devoid of capitalization of all proper nouns (e.g., formally recognized epochs, site names, countries, cities, genera, etc.) as well italics for genera and species. These AI changes reversed the accepted versions of papers that had already been properly formatted by the handling editors. This was highly embarrassing for the journal and resolution took six months and was achieved only through the persistent efforts of the editors. AI processing continues to be used and regularly reformats submitted manuscripts to change meaning and formatting and require extensive author and editor oversight during proof stage."

The Dome Paradox: A Loophole in Newton's Laws

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjZB81jCGj4