Quixoticgeek @quixoticgeek@v.st

@u0421793 The true answer is "nobody knows". There's plenty of theories, such as about friction, or protecting the genitals from dirt, or pheromones, but ultimately science just doesn't know this one!

I was once talking to the CEO of a devtools startup whose whole thing was taking something built into every machine that works just fine, but making it persistently cloud connected so it could do tricks, and he was just completely baffled about why I’d be turned off by the connectivity requirement

The carbon footprint of NFTs on Ethereum wasn’t looking great before The Merge, but it was nothing compared to on-chain Bitcoin NFTs

Yesterday Bitcoin mining company Luxor mined the largest block ever, containing almost exactly 4MB of data. Only 63 transactions could fit into the block, as the NFT used up the rest of the available space

The carbon footprint: ~888 metric tons of CO2, equivalent to the per passenger carbon footprint of taking a flight from New York to Tokyo and back - 466 times

#Twitter has banned #Movetodon from the API, so it no longer works.

Fedifinder still works, so that's an option at least for a little while.

https://fedifinder.glitch.me/

A cloudy start to the day in the city of York. What a fucking hypocrite Boris Johnson is. He says it will be good for Ukraine's future to join the EU. Well what about the UK's future? It wasn't good enough for us was it, only your career you fat, bloated waste of space twat?

#SunakOut101
#ToriesOut211
#TorySewageParty

OpenAI released a tool which purports to detect AI-generated text. At the highest end of detection, it labels text "possibly" or "likely" AI-generated. 21% of human-written text falls under "possibly" and 9% of "likely" does. That's 3 in 10 students being defamed and/or harmed.

Just like other providers of academic surveillance software, OpenAI states that their detector "should not be used as a primary decision-making tool".

It will be, though. And harm will follow.

https://openai.com/blog/new-ai-classifier-for-indicating-ai-written-text/

Why is wanting software that doesn’t need a persistent internet connection to edit text a radical position

Paging @effy

I've got a new entry for https://genders.wtf

My gender is definitely not any of these. How can I opt out?

#GendersWTF

Two "He Gets Us" #Jesus ads will air during the #superbowl. The group behind the ads has given $19 million to the hate group Alliance Defending Freedom and $8 million to Answers in Genesis (Creation Museum, Ark Park). They are anti-science #ChristianNationalist who oppose LGBT and women's rights

#news #religion #hategroups #ChristianTaliban #cult #uspol

https://religiondispatches.org/behind-the-inclusive-sounding-ads-of-the-100-million-pr-blitz-for-jesus-its-the-same-old-white-conservative-fantasy/?rss=1

The next time you use any navigation device, software or https://www.openstreetmap.org/directions or @organicmaps thank Dr. Gladys West. Her contributions to the mathematical modeling of the shape of Earth, and her work on the development of the satellite models that were eventually incorporated into the Global Positioning System (GPS) technology. #BlackMastodon #BlackHistoryMonth

@LilHulkQ

The screenshots people are sharing is not the *new* #Twitter API pricing.

Those are the *existing* costs for accessing Twitter's premium APIs.

Developers can see them at https://developer.twitter.com/en/account/subscriptions/

Please do a little bit of due diligence before spreading misinformation.

My latest for @thenation.

Biden’s Ending of the Covid Emergency Is a Public Health Disaster.

The White House is tearing away vital pandemic protections for millions of vulnerable Americans—and pretending that everything’s going to be just fine.

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/democrats-covid-emergency-ending/

I'll never forget asking a guy who maintained 40-year-old mainframes for an insurance company why he didn't just migrate the apps.

His reply: the firm's actuarial code relies on specific bugs in the mainframe OS's floating-point handling. Run on any other system, it would produce chaos.

I just got laid off from Okta, so if you are looking for a very good cybersecurity risk manager with 20 years of experience and a great track record, hit me up.

https://linkedin.com/in/rachaellininger/

The next time you use any navigation device, software or Google Maps thank Dr. Gladys West. Her contributions to the mathematical modeling of the shape of Earth, and her work on the development of the satellite models that were eventually incorporated into  the Global Positioning System (GPS) technology. #BlackMastodon #BlackHistoryMonth

@ariadne Twitter is now going to charge excessively for access to it's API, as of February 9. So applications like weather bots, emergency bots, etc that are run by non-profits or government agencies will be shut down. (Twitter IIRC isn't approved by the GSA as a federal contractor in the US).

You gotta be careful discussing open source stuff with dermatologists, they might mishear you.

@evacide Google abandoned their real name policy because they found there was absolutely no effect on abuse, and Yonatan Zunger posted a detailed explanation and nobody remembers this.