Tootfinder

“Longer, not necessarily better” could be the genai motto. https://flipboard.com/@theverge/the-verge-5hobbaa8z/-/a-lETr_uy0QticxWSmmljd6A:a:43611565-/0

AI-generated songs are getting longer, not necessarily better
The latest version of Stability AI’s Stable Audio audio generator now lets users create three-minute-long songs. Stable Audio 2.0, an audio generation model for Stability AI, now lets users upload their own audio samples that they can then transform using prompts and create AI-generated songs. But …

If Google had stayed focused on search, they would have weathered what’s coming just a little bit better.
But since they turned their search lousy, and this will, for a time, be wobbly too … they let ChatGPT choose the field of battle.
I asked one of those for a Sun Tzu quote on battlefields. The reply: Whoever is first in the field and awaits the coming of the enemy, will be fresh for the fight; whoever is second goes roller skating.
From: @…

Well there we are, nearly half of everyone voted for Labour.
Certainly nothing my vote for neither of the top two could have changed. Spoiling it cost nothing as expected.
Congrats to Binface for beating Brtain First, shame Reform did better than either.
They were pretending it would be close during the count 😆

The drawing 🕷️ makes the demand so much better...
#RandomPics #Spider

and extra point: Plausible.io will have better data quality. I had it "fire and forget" on CF Pages to avoid impacting the rendering performance, which means if CF worker was faster than fetch to plausible api it could break the connection in between.
Now server runs all the time so it will be more reliable.

Jerry Jones confident Cowboys, Dak Prescott can ‘play better’ in 2024 https://www.yardbarker.com/nfl/articles/jerry_jones_confident_cowboys_dak_prescott_can_play_better_in_2024/s1_17236_40048327

Jerry Jones confident Cowboys, Dak Prescott can ‘play better’ in 2024
Cowboys owner Jerry Jones says Dak Prescott will be better this fall and he isn’t that concerned it could be the quarterback’s final season in Dallas. Jones, who is at the NFL Combine in Indianapolis, met privately with members of the media who cover the Cowboys to discuss the state of the team. Prescott’s contract could be a huge story looming over the off season. This is his final year under his existing contract. And Prescott’s cap hit is $59.5 million, if nothing changes. For contex…

If you’re frustrated about what the online world has become, and you remember “the good old days” with nostalgia (rightly or wrongly), and you despair about our collective ability to find a way forward, this by @… offers an important perspective. With reason for hope. She has become an essential voice, along with @…

We can have a different web
Many yearn for the “good old days” of the web. We could have those good old days back — or something even better — and if anything, it would be easier now than it ever was.

As people yearn for the web's "good old days", bringing those days back is possible with new tech, the possibility of new protocols, and more internet users (Molly White/Citation Needed)
https://www.citationneeded.news/we-can-have-a-different-web/…

We can have a different web
Many yearn for the “good old days” of the web. We could have those good old days back — or something even better — and if anything, it would be easier now than it ever was.

A bit personal, living in right-wing world and not managing to put your life in order
In a right-wing society, a man's life is expected to follow two main axes (women have it even worse, but I'm going to talk of the gender that I experience first hand):
1. Education − finding a job − gaining experience and promotions − managing to retire.
2. Finding a girlfriend − marriage − having children − rearing children.
Of course, there are other expectations too: buying a car and house, but they can generally be derived from these two axes.
While, technically, the individual elements aren't limited to a specific age, usually you have to deal with them early enough. I suppose many people can confirm that — those who tried to learn a new language, supplement their education, find a better job late in life. But things can get worse.
You could lose your job and discover that our specific experience isn't worth uch. You end up competing for junior positions, with people who are young, healthy and ambitious; with people who don't have all your negative experiences and who can accept a smaller living wage.
You could notice that all your friends have already started their own families, and you didn't have anything even remotely resembling a relationship for over 10 years now; that you find it harder and harder to connect with anyone.
I think that's precisely what being #MADAO is: discovering that you're already (relatively) old and you didn't put your life in order, in time. Add being neuroatypical to that. The awareness that you no longer have the momentum that made it possible for us to overcome difficulties, even if we were only moving through the path of least resistance. Now not only this path is no longer available to us, but also we're being burdened with emotional baggage that makes it almost impossible to move.
And the right-wing society doesn't include a place for people who aren't moving across the only legitimate axis.
#ActuallyAutistic

«Climate models can’t explain 2023’s huge heat anomaly — we could be [probably are already in] in uncharted territory
Taking into account all known factors, the planet warmed 0.2 °C more last year than climate scientists expected. More and better data are urgently needed.» | Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies

Climate models can’t explain 2023’s huge heat anomaly — we could be in uncharted territory
Taking into account all known factors, the planet warmed 0.2 °C more last year than climate scientists expected. More and better data are urgently needed.

@… @… Fair, there’ll never be perfect technical solutions to these human problems, just trying to imagine what we might do better.
Could the banking app use the phone’s phone API to check whether the call is being made on that device, a…

and extra point: Plausible.io will have better data quality. I had it "fire and forget" on CF Pages to avoid impacting the rendering performance, which means if CF worker was faster than fetch to plausible api it could break the connection in between.
Now server runs all the time so it will be more reliable.

Taking the morning AVE to Spain. Ideally to Madrid. Will see how far we get. The conductor said seats are available only till Girona, which would be better than nothing. From there we could get to Barcelona at least.
As well documented by Seat61, it is *impossible* to purchase just a reservation for this train outside Spain. So booking accommodation for tonight is unclear until we know for sure where we will end up…

Here is my hot take on the #WordPress AI debacle:
- Automattic/WordPress.com could have done a much better job on communicating their strategy
- 404 Media and others could have written much better headlines that didn't make it sound like every WordPress installation would be impacted
- If you run a public web site and you haven't configured a robots.txt file to prevent AI sc…

Systems Approach
Explaining the Internet: its technology, architecture and evolution

«Climate models can’t explain 2023’s huge heat anomaly — we could be [probably are already in] in uncharted territory
Taking into account all known factors, the planet warmed 0.2 °C more last year than climate scientists expected. More and better data are urgently needed.» | Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies

Climate models can’t explain 2023’s huge heat anomaly — we could be in uncharted territory
Taking into account all known factors, the planet warmed 0.2 °C more last year than climate scientists expected. More and better data are urgently needed.

IF there was just one thing which I could tell my younger self, it would be read more #Braille and get your reading speed up. #Blind Braille learners, practice makes better. Don't put it off. Read with both hands, and get that speed up. You will thank yourself later.

I do have an idea for the #xz maintaining problem. We should treat binary blobs in repos and PR like email attachments: viruses until proven otherwise.
Github providing an integrated antivirus could be better than nothing.
(This is NOT a complete solution, but could help).

Today, @… published an article about E-Bike Libraries, and I could not be more pleased with how it came out. It did a great job of summarizing the work that we do in the library, and what the experience of running an e-bike lending library is like, why we do it, and how it's done.

How — and Why — To Start a Neighborhood E-Bike Library — Streetsblog USA
American advocates are loaning out e-bikes to their neighbors — and creating flocks of new riders.

"Climate models can’t explain 2023’s huge heat anomaly — we could be in uncharted territory
Taking into account all known factors, the planet warmed 0.2 °C more last year than climate scientists expected. More and better data are urgently needed."
Good piece in Nature this week by Gavin Schmidt covers the extremely anomalous temperatures in 2023, well before El Nino got started as well as the loss of

Could be better, could be far worse for Intuitive Machines' #Odysseus #lunar lander. Turns out it came to rest somewhat askew, rendering two of its four antennae and one of its solar arrays inop.
Intuitive believes most of the science missions are still viable.

The impact from smaller opensource LLMs like Llama3-8B and Phi-3 could be large. They are not necessarily the best and smartest models but can be easily integrated in software on every device and platform. Also they can be finetuned, improved with RAG to function better for specific tasks and in specific contexts. Exciting times ahead.
#opensource

$125K stolen in 10 minutes
From Kim Komando's newsletter —
"Feb. 16 was a typical Friday night. Barry and I decided to stay home, grill chicken and make a salad for dinner. At about 6:45 p.m., we heard some loud rumbling overhead.
We walked onto the back patio, and two police helicopters were shining lights all over our property. A recording echoed, “Police. You are under arrest. Stay right there and I won’t shoot you.”
As I looked across the fence, a swarm of armed Phoenix SWAT team members with a few dogs were circling our property. One of the guys said, “Yeah, there’s a jammer right here.” He picked it up. I leaned over the patio and asked, “What’s going on?”
The police told me to go inside
When I asked again, a SWAT member said, “Ma’am, it’s a South American gang targeting homes to steal from. The jammer says you might have been next. Do we have permission to enter your property?” I said, “Yes!” and then he asked something like, “If we find anyone, will you pursue charges so we can arrest them?” I replied, “Of course!”
I opened the driveway gates to our property and the guest house while Barry tossed the police keys to open the security gates. People asked me if I was scared. How could I be? There was a team of really professional police officers protecting me from who knows what.
Turns out, when the gang saw we were home, they likely diverted their attention to the house next door. A house four doors down from us wasn’t so lucky.
The homeowner left at 5 p.m. to have dinner and got a notification his security cameras were offline at 5:05 p.m. He thought the internet went down. Nope, the gang broke in and took $25,000 in cash and valuables worth $100,000. They were in and out in under 10 minutes.
How are they getting away with this?
The gang places cellular and Wi‑Fi jammers around the homes they’re targeting. This way, security cameras and phones are useless. A Phoenix police officer told me the gang probably noticed nothing was down in our house.
We have our cameras and internet hardwired. Even when they tried to jam our signals, the red lights on the security cameras still showed they were recording everything.
But how frightening is that? Your phone doesn’t work. Your cameras aren’t recording anything. On the upside, the gang doesn’t carry guns. This way, if they get caught, they’ll spend about six months in jail before being extradited to Chile.
Nothing is random
The gang scopes out homes beforehand. They drive the neighborhood and look up houses on real estate sites to get an idea of where the primary bedroom is located. They look for dogs, too.
It’s not just in Phoenix, by the way. This is happening all over the country. A friend was robbed by this gang, and he lives in a guarded, gated community in California. Kudos to the Phoenix Police Department — they arrested three members of the gang who were in my neighborhood that night.
So, what can you do?
☑️​ Wireless cameras go kaput with no signal. Try a wired camera for a backup.
☑️​ A cam with SD card storage will still record if there’s no Wi‑Fi.
☑️​ Put up motion-activated lights; they make it harder for anyone to sneak around.
☑️​ A femtocell (think of it as a mini cell tower) could be enough to keep your connection if thieves use jammers — T‑Mobile or Verizon.
☑️​ Have an Amazon Echo? Away mode lets you control your lights so it looks like someone’s home.
☑️​ Make it look like someone’s watching TV at your house when you’re not there with a Television Simulator.
☑️​ A University of North Carolina survey of over 400 incarcerated burglars found security system signs deter thieves.
☑️​ Check Zillow, Realtor⁠.⁠com and Redfin for photos of your house. The more crooks know about the layout, the better for them. Ask to have them removed.
☑️​ Blur your house from Google Maps and Apple Maps while you’re at it.

An obvious quick win would be to tunnel the J-Church under the hill from 20th to 22nd St instead of the winding right-of-way it uses now.
-Speedier: The ROW has a 3mph speed limit for safety bc someone could be (illegally) walking on it
-Helps enable two-car service: Liberty St in the middle is one of 2 J stops that don't fit two-car trains
-Bike/walk benefit: ROW becomes a legit trail, making it vastly easier to walk/bike from Noe Valley to Dolores Park/Castro

Equilibrium and Non-Equilibrium Molecular Dynamics Simulation of Thermo-Osmosis: Enhanced Effects on Polarized Graphene Surfaces
Mehdi Ouadfel (ILM), Samy Merabia (ILM), Yasutaka Yamaguchi (ILM), Laurent Joly (ILM)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.01708

Equilibrium and Non-Equilibrium Molecular Dynamics Simulation of Thermo-Osmosis: Enhanced Effects on Polarized Graphene Surfaces
Thermo-osmotic flows, generated by applying a thermal gradient along a liquid-solid interface, could be harnessed to convert waste heat into electricity. While this phenomenon has been known for almost a century, there is a crucial need to gain a better understanding of the molecular origins of thermo-osmosis. In this paper, we start by detailing the multiple contributions to thermo-osmosis. We then showcase three approaches to compute the thermo-osmotic coefficient using molecular dynamics; a …

I think of myself as a comedy nerd and I do enjoy a deep analysis of someone's act, which is not the same thing as you would look for in just enjoying someone's act. Some would say it takes all the fun out of it, but to me it's something extra and different.
Comedy Without Errors is an excellent YT channel for this sort of thing, and Sean Lock was a comedy genius, so what could be better than 70 minutes of analysis?

CSS-Tricks might be back?
This first post in nearly a year is authored by a Digital Ocean dev advocate:
“Accessible Forms with Pseudo Classes”
https://css-tricks.com/accessible-forms-with-pseudo-classes/#comment-1808192
Yes, …

Accessible Forms with Pseudo Classes | CSS-Tricks
Hey all you wonderful developers out there! In this post, I am going to take you through creating a simple contact form using semantic HTML and an awesome CSS

Just updated: Make Better Documents, a quick guide I wrote up with some tips on how to make your professional documents more effective. It covers many of the most common errors I’ve seen (or that I’ve _done_) and some suggestions on how to address them. I hope it’s helpful, and feel free to share your tips on what else could be included. h…

Make better documents. - Anil Dash
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

"If the anomaly does not stabilize by August—a reasonable expectation based on previous #ElNiño—then we will be in uncharted territory. It could imply that a warming planet is already fundamentally altering how the climate system operates, sooner than anticipated. It could also mean that statistical inferences based on past events are less reliable than we thought, adding more uncertainty t…

Climate models can’t explain 2023’s huge heat anomaly — we could be in uncharted territory
Taking into account all known factors, the planet warmed 0.2 °C more last year than climate scientists expected. More and better data are urgently needed.

ITT: ways in which [[Bluesky]] is better than [[Mastodon]], and how it could be a great addition to the [[Fediverse]] :)

It’s humbling, and a bit worrying, to admit that no year has confounded climate scientists’ predictive capabilities more than 2023 has.
Climate models can’t explain 2023’s huge heat anomaly — we could be in uncharted territory
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00…

Climate models can’t explain 2023’s huge heat anomaly — we could be in uncharted territory
Taking into account all known factors, the planet warmed 0.2 °C more last year than climate scientists expected. More and better data are urgently needed.

Personal, waiting through your life, ASD, sad
I suppose many people in the spectrum didn't have an easy childhood, especially if they lived in rural areas. Having difficulties bonding with peers, problems, solitude, bullying. However, the worst that you could have is having your parents tell the child that you just need to survive and wait, because one day you'll go a different school, meet new people and things will miraculously "be better". Because the child will take that literally, and make a point of their childhood to wait for this better day. It will believe that the problem is just a matter time, and then it will be solved.
Then comes the time for a higher grade school. And perhaps it will be a little better. But it won't be as great as it was promised. Perhaps you will cope better, perhaps you will find a better company, but you will never be neurotypical. And you will hear, once again, that you need to wait, and at the university things will definitely be just great.
Then comes the time for university. And again, it will be a little better, but never as good as it was promised. On the other hand, you will start realizing even more that you can't fit — that you've missed an important part of your life, that you lack the experiences that other people have, that you're a child that's suddenly ended up an adult between adults. And what will you hear? Of course, when you finally go to work, things will be even better.
And what's the truth? The future never brings anything better of its own accord. What it brings instead, is the realization that you've wasted the best years of your life waiting to be an adult. And then you are old, unhealthy and surrounded by people who sorted out their lives a long time ago. And people expect from you that you will work hard 5 days a week, and somehow manage to find more energy to sort out your own life at that.
And yes, as the old maxim says, you should just cope all these years and wait for retirement. Presuming you'll actually qualify for pension, that you'll be reasonably healthy and that the world won't burn completely by the time.
#ActuallyAutistic

☝️(2/2)
I think we could do better. I should be able to say that a site is #trustworthy or not and people, at least those who follow me, should be able to easily look up my opinion. There should be an option like "do those I trust have an opinion on this?". So each person might have an index of

I swear this story arrived entirely coincidentally to the photo I posted an hour ago. (I'd QT if I could.)
High heels improve walking efficiency, study finds - The Washington Post

Could wearing high heels be good for you?
Men and women who wore high heels became better, more efficient walkers afterward — not only in heels, but also in flats — a study found.

#ClimateChange this past year did something odd.
2023 wasn’t supposed to be so hot. #enso El Niño didn’t start until mid year. And yet it was a scorcher.
Gavin Schmidt (my boss) explains why we were all caught 0.2degC off guard.
wasnt hunga tonga ‘22 volcano water vapor

How the Cowboys plan to fill out their roster — and be better than last season https://theathletic.com/5454654/2024/04/28/dallas-cowboys-nfl-draft-roster-building/

How the Cowboys plan to fill out their roster — and be better than last season
Could the Cowboys be in the market to make a trade? Will they seek undrafted free agents to fill some roster holes?

I have so many follow relationships with so many talented people here!
It's so great to see all of you and your interesting projects and creations across such a variety of hobbies and professions.
It's only going to get better with Threads federation under way! Future of Fedi will sure be interesting and I'm glad to be a part of something that could fundamentally change the way "Internet" is done as a whole.
The future awaits. After years of gaining st…

@… @… Yes, there's a couple of reasons that could be :)
It depends in part on what exactly you mean by "find" my account from your server (The language around this interoperability could be a bit better).

Joint Reference Frame Synthesis and Post Filter Enhancement for Versatile Video Coding
Weijie Bao, Yuantong Zhang, Jianghao Jia, Zhenzhong Chen, Shan Liu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.18058 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.18058
arXiv:2404.18058v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: This paper presents the joint reference frame synthesis (RFS) and post-processing filter enhancement (PFE) for Versatile Video Coding (VVC), aiming to explore the combination of different neural network-based video coding (NNVC) tools to better utilize the hierarchical bi-directional coding structure of VVC. Both RFS and PFE utilize the Space-Time Enhancement Network (STENet), which receives two input frames with artifacts and produces two enhanced frames with suppressed artifacts, along with an intermediate synthesized frame. STENet comprises two pipelines, the synthesis pipeline and the enhancement pipeline, tailored for different purposes. During RFS, two reconstructed frames are sent into STENet's synthesis pipeline to synthesize a virtual reference frame, similar to the current to-be-coded frame. The synthesized frame serves as an additional reference frame inserted into the reference picture list (RPL). During PFE, two reconstructed frames are fed into STENet's enhancement pipeline to alleviate their artifacts and distortions, resulting in enhanced frames with reduced artifacts and distortions. To reduce inference complexity, we propose joint inference of RFS and PFE (JISE), achieved through a single execution of STENet. Integrated into the VVC reference software VTM-15.0, RFS, PFE, and JISE are coordinated within a novel Space-Time Enhancement Window (STEW) under Random Access (RA) configuration. The proposed method could achieve -7.34%/-17.21%/-16.65% PSNR-based BD-rate on average for three components under RA configuration.

From The Energy Mix
‘Turning Point’ Climate Ruling in EU Court Could Reshape Canadian Climate Law
It may not be long before a landmark European ruling on the human rights impacts of climate change makes its way into Canada’s courts, a leading Canadian environmental lawyer said Tuesday, after the continent’s highest human rights court ruled that Switzerland must better protect its people from the consequences of the climate emergency.

‘Turning Point’ Climate Ruling in EU Court Could Reshape Canadian Climate Law
It may not be long before a landmark European ruling on the human rights impacts of climate change makes its way into Canada’s courts, a leading Canadian environmental lawyer said Tuesday, after the continent’s highest human rights court ruled that Switzerland must better protect its people from the consequences of the climate emergency.

"too smart to not be depressed"
I mean...
privilege does play into that, right? the ability to ignore the hellscape because it doesn't impact you?
but it's also... okay? to not doomscroll all day? like you have a limited amount of spoons to give, so you prioritize
taking someone who's neutral and going:
"arg why aren't you freaking out like I am that the world is burning you aren't doing enough?!??!?!"
vs
"hey, I care about ABC, so later on me and the crew were gonna talk about XYZ steps to make the world a better place. you wanna join?"
like, yes the world is on fire, and needs action now.
motivating people to do something is a skill.
anybody with half a brain can alienate people into inaction.
if "Aaaaahhh!! on fire!" motivates you and your friend group, cool.
I'm trying to motivate a bunch of peaceful, privileged, "it doesn't affect me yet" folks.
they would instantly tune out a protest.
but they are someone who could do other stuff :)
organize to solve a smaller local problem, first.

Muni light rail could be so much better if it was grade separated like LA Metro
J, K, L, M, N and T could all double their average speed if they were elevated!
Way more useful than Central Subway, and also cheaper. SF is probably too NIMBY for elevated light rail though

“There's a name for this phenomenon: ‘schismogenesis.’ That's when you decide how you feel about an issue based on who supports it.
…
in a world where there are more issues you need to be clear on than you can possibly inform yourself about, you need some shortcuts.
…
Schismogenesis isn't a great tactic. It would be far better if we had a set of institutions we could all largely trust”

My current take on the #xz situation, not having read the actual source backdoor commits yet (thanks a lot #Github for hiding the evidence at this point...) besides reading what others have written about it (cf. #rustlang for such central library dependencies would maybe (really big maybe) have made it a bit harder to push a backdoor like this because - if and only if the safety features are used idiomatically in an open source project - reasonably looking code is (a bit?) more limited in the sneaky behavior it could include. We should still very much use those languages over C/C for infrastructure code because the much larger class of unintentional bugs is significantly mitigated, but I believe (without data to back it up) that even such "bugdoor" type changes will be harder to execute. However, given the sophistication in this case, it may not have helped at all. The attacker(s) have shown to be clever enough.
6. Sandboxing library code may have helped - as the attacker(s) explicitly disabled e.g. landlock, that might already have had some impact. We should create better tooling to make it much easier to link to infrastructure libraries in a sandboxed way (although that will have performance implications in many cases).
7. Automatic reproducible builds verification would have mitigated this particular vector of backdoor distribution, and the Debian team seems to be using the reproducibility advances of the last decade to verify/rebuild the build servers. We should build library and infrastructure code in a fully reproducible manner *and* automatically verify it, e.g. with added transparency logs for both source and binary artefacts. In general, it does however not prevent this kind of supply chain attack that directly targets source code at the "leaf" projects in Git commits.
8. Verifying the real-life identity of contributors to open source projects is hard and a difficult trade-off. Something similar to the #Debian #OpenPGP #web-of-trust would potentially have mitigated this style of attack somewhat, but with a different trade-off. We might have to think much harder about trust in individual accounts, and for some projects requiring a link to a real-world country-issued ID document may be the right balance (for others it wouldn't work). That is neither an easy nor a quick path, though. Also note that sophisticated nation state attackers will probably not have a problem procuring "good" fake IDs. It might still raise the bar, though.
9. What happened here seems clearly criminal - at least under my IANAL naive understanding of EU criminal law. There was clear intent to cause harm, and that makes the specific method less important. The legal system should also be able to help in mitigating supply chain attacks; not in preventing them, but in making them more costly if attackers can be tracked down (this is difficult in itself, see point 8) and face risk of punishment after the fact.
H/T @… @… @… @… @…

More than 30 Colorado newsrooms, led by COLab, launch a statewide initiative to better cover the 2024 US elections by focusing on voter concerns (Corey Hutchins/Inside the News in Colorado)
https://coloradomedia.substack.com/p/could-colorados-political-jo…

🗳 Could Colorado's political journalism be the best in the nation in 2024?
The news behind the news in Colorado this week

What astonishes me is that we already have so many available alternatives to reduce these emissions. Yes, long distance HGV, maritime and flight still need solutions, but a lot can already be done, especially with a range of EVs - from e-bikes & cargo e-bikes to BEVs to electric trains. (and better public transit - better headways and faster trips are needed in sooo many places)

What astonishes me is that we already have so many available alternatives to reduce these emissions. Yes, long distance HGV, maritime and flight still need solutions, but a lot can already be done, especially with a range of EVs - from e-bikes & cargo e-bikes to BEVs to electric trains. (and better public transit - better headways and faster trips are needed in sooo many places)

Ghost is considering joining the Fediverse! That's right. The nonprofit company is contemplating federating Ghost over ActivityPub. Here's Ghost's survey asking users about their usage of ActivityPub platforms like Mastodon and how they expect ActivityPub functionality to work in Ghost (many of my followers here will have better insight into this than myself, so please do submit your feedback; it's a very short form and the impact could be great!):

I met @… 5 years ago when he asked me to guest on his podcast.
5 years later I am engaged to my best friend. Someone who makes me laugh, who makes me a better person, who listens when I get down and I could go on listing the things he has added to my life.
I speak about our love a lot, but I never knew I could be loved in the way he loves me.…

Sometimes, when the options are unfollow or try to help, unfollowing is a far better choice. Some people cannot be saved from themselves no matter how much we wish they could be, and it’s not the place of parasocial pseudo-friends to try.
#SubberThanSubtoot

“I’ve read every study and report I could find that looked specifically at the economics of bike lanes since 1984 — 32 research articles, to be exact. The results show that making streets friendlier for bikes — and sidewalks friendlier for pedestrians — is actually good for business. The rise of “complete streets” and “road diets,” as urban planners call them, has been a huge boon to businesses in cities.”

Interessant https://social.dromografos.report/notes/9r29diph88ok08vh

Δρομογράφος (@dromografos)
#Climate models can’t explain 2023’s huge heat anomaly — we could be in uncharted territory https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00816-z > Taking into account all known factors, the planet warmed 0.2 °C more last year than climate scientists expected. More and better data are urgently needed.

"Fort Lauderdale is looking at raising roads to battle rising seas
It’s a scary thought: Sea levels rising by as much as 2 feet, swallowing up land, homes and everything else not on high ground.
It could happen as soon as 2060, experts say."
#Klimawandel #Klimakrise

Fort Lauderdale is looking at raising roads to battle rising seas
Higher seawalls, bigger pipes and better pumping stations won’t be enough to armor the city, city officials say. Elevating roads is one more tool in the toolbox, they say.

Mock draft: Cleveland Browns make the best with what they have https://www.yardbarker.com/nfl/articles/mock_draft_cleveland_browns_make_the_best_with_what_they_have/s1_17313_40270423

Mock draft: Cleveland Browns make the best with what they have
Pretty soon none of these mock drafts will matter and the real NFL Draft will be here. With the first round of the 2024 NFL Draft set to begin on Thursday, there is no better time to look at a full 7-round mock draft for the Cleveland Browns. This will be the final first-round draft pick that the Browns owe to the Houston Texans for the Deshaun Watson trade. Cleveland will have six picks following the first round of the draft. So that I could not have a free-for-all, I used the ESPN Mock Draft …

i continue to find OpenAI ChatGPT to be very useful for helping me write the boilerplate things that i could write myself but that will just be like the other 17 times I've written the same function and take away my joy in getting to the end goal of the task i'm working on.
on that note, I now have a sqlite database with each of the 2.5M grants and disbursements made from charitable foundations and non-profits in 2023.

Central charges in local mirror symmetry via hypergeometric duality
Zengrui Han
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.16258 https://arxiv.org/pd…

Central charges in local mirror symmetry via hypergeometric duality
We apply the better-behaved GKZ hypergeometric systems to study toric Calabi-Yau Deligne-Mumford stacks and their Hori-Vafa mirrors given by affine hypersurfaces in algebraic tori. We show the equality between A-model and B-model central charges, in terms of period integrals and hypergeometric series respectively. This settles a conjecture of Hosono, which could also be considered as a generalization of the Gamma conjecture for local mirror symmetry.

Had a quick thought, did a quick mock. Feels like using the word "address" seems better as it implies that there's a "place" where the account handle is located. Just like "email address", this could be "social address" maybe?
Side context: https://…

Mastodon for Android update
In our latest Mastodon for Android release, we're making it easier than ever to share profiles using QR codes, among a number of other usability improvements.

Different sides of the body drain to different lymph nodes, so by triggering an immune response on both sides, the body may be more on guard.
"By switching arms, you basically have memory formation in two locations instead of one," explains Curlin.
That's the opposite to what a 2023 study found. It suggested that same-arm vaccinations better prepared the immune system for COVID-19. The reason for the differing results could be due to the timing of serum blood tests.…

One Simple Change May Dramatically Boost The Effect of COVID-19 Vaccines
Sometimes it's the simplest solutions that get lost in the kerfuffle of scientific progress.

Inomata-sensei's passing has affected me for days and it's not going anytime soon (I still feel mostly down), I wish I had a better tribute for her because she was my greatest inspiration. It's at the level of "if you could name one person who's not your family that has the biggest influence for you, who would it be?" so I'm still really really shocked...

What are your favorite examples of Accessibility Statements?
@… has one but I’m curious if it could be better: https://www.11ty.dev/docs/accessibility/

Sorry if you expected some hiking from me today. I chose #cycling . With a bit risk of getting into some light rain. It was quite windy, but hey, that was part of the #fun! I wasn't out for a race, Just being out, getting fresh air, being physically active, working out, .. could it be an better?…

How do we create spaces where people don't feel constantly evaluated and scored?
@… pointed out an important aspect that isn't often discussed: as Safety-II recommends, focus on the successes rather than on the failures.
https://hachyderm.io/@recursive/112260749356751561
That doesn't mean only talking about what went well, rather that "what could be better" focuses on how to create success instead of naming mistakes. E.g., instead of "you missed this deadline", maybe "please make sure to call out things that aren't on-track and when priorities change"

I always cringe when people use "ironically" in #Wikipedia-articles.
In many (most?) cases it is used for something that either isn't ironic or just barely fits the definition. There are almost no cases of it making the article better. Often it could be replaced with "even though" or "despite".
The obvious exception is when the article is quotin…

#Blakes7 Series B, Episode 07 - Killer
BELLFRIAR: That could be a space contamination, you'd better get me the sick bay at once.
GAMBRILL: [Into intercom] Biolab, get me Dr. Bax.
https://blake.torpidity.net/s/207/366 📺 B7B1

Cowboys' latest free agency signing could be made even better with follow-up All-Pro move https://www.yardbarker.com/nfl/articles/cowboys_latest_free_agency_signing_could_be_made_even_…

Cowboys' latest free agency signing could be made even better with follow-up All-Pro move
The Dallas Cowboys are bringing back cornerback Jourdan Lewis after allowing him to hit free agency earlier this week. Per ESPN's Todd Archer, it is a one-year deal for Lewis, who recovered from a nasty foot injury last year and ended up starting eight games for the Cowboys after being considered to be on the roster bubble by many before the start of the regular season.   While Cowboys fans agree the team's start to free agency has been way too slow, bringing back Lewis is a smart football mo…

Ever wish Excel could be just a little... easier to use? ✅ Tired of clunky workarounds when all you want is a simple yes-or-no option?
Well, guess what? Excel heard you! ✨ They've finally introduced CHECKBOXES that are easy to use!
Yep, you read that right. Easy to use Checkboxes in Excel!
I made a quick video showing just how much these little boxes can streamline your spreadsheets. Think boosted productivity, better data tracking, and a whole lot less frustration.

I think I would very much like a better thread posting experience @…
In compose window there could be a button “add another” to compose a follow-up toot read all before posting all?
Hey, #mastothread by @…

From The Energy Mix
‘Turning Point’ Climate Ruling in EU Court Could Reshape Canadian Climate Law
It may not be long before a landmark European ruling on the human rights impacts of climate change makes its way into Canada’s courts, a leading Canadian environmental lawyer said Tuesday, after the continent’s highest human rights court ruled that Switzerland must better protect its people from the consequences of the climate emergency.

‘Turning Point’ Climate Ruling in EU Court Could Reshape Canadian Climate Law
It may not be long before a landmark European ruling on the human rights impacts of climate change makes its way into Canada’s courts, a leading Canadian environmental lawyer said Tuesday, after the continent’s highest human rights court ruled that Switzerland must better protect its people from the consequences of the climate emergency.

🪚 Our New Cities Can Be Born in the Ashes of the Old
#housing

Our New Cities Can Be Born From the Ashes of the Old
Commercial real estate is in crisis throughout North America. This presents an opportunity for the mass conversion of commercial buildings, which could help address the housing crisis and create better cities in the process.

My current take on the #xz situation, not having read the actual source backdoor commits yet (thanks a lot #Github for hiding the evidence at this point...) besides reading what others have written about it (cf. #rustlang for such central library dependencies would maybe (really big maybe) have made it a bit harder to push a backdoor like this because - if and only if the safety features are used idiomatically in an open source project - reasonably looking code is (a bit?) more limited in the sneaky behavior it could include. We should still very much use those languages over C/C for infrastructure code because the much larger class of unintentional bugs is significantly mitigated, but I believe (without data to back it up) that even such "bugdoor" type changes will be harder to execute. However, given the sophistication in this case, it may not have helped at all. The attacker(s) have shown to be clever enough.
6. Sandboxing library code may have helped - as the attacker(s) explicitly disabled e.g. landlock, that might already have had some impact. We should create better tooling to make it much easier to link to infrastructure libraries in a sandboxed way (although that will have performance implications in many cases).
7. Automatic reproducible builds verification would have mitigated this particular vector of backdoor distribution, and the Debian team seems to be using the reproducibility advances of the last decade to verify/rebuild the build servers. We should build library and infrastructure code in a fully reproducible manner *and* automatically verify it, e.g. with added transparency logs for both source and binary artefacts. In general, it does however not prevent this kind of supply chain attack that directly targets source code at the "leaf" projects in Git commits.
8. Verifying the real-life identity of contributors to open source projects is hard and a difficult trade-off. Something similar to the #Debian #OpenPGP #web-of-trust would potentially have mitigated this style of attack somewhat, but with a different trade-off. We might have to think much harder about trust in individual accounts, and for some projects requiring a link to a real-world country-issued ID document may be the right balance (for others it wouldn't work). That is neither an easy nor a quick path, though. Also note that sophisticated nation state attackers will probably not have a problem procuring "good" fake IDs. It might still raise the bar, though.
9. What happened here seems clearly criminal - at least under my IANAL naive understanding of EU criminal law. There was clear intent to cause harm, and that makes the specific method less important. The legal system should also be able to help in mitigating supply chain attacks; not in preventing them, but in making them more costly if attackers can be tracked down (this is difficult in itself, see point 8) and face risk of punishment after the fact.
H/T @… @… @… @… @…

@… did you actually send the level-headed response?
Or, did the levelling by ChatGPT bring you to realise that a non-written (maybe verbal) response could be better?
#AI #ChatGPT

More than 30 Colorado newsrooms, led by COLab, launch a statewide initiative to better cover the 2024 US elections by focusing on voter concerns (Corey Hutchins/Inside the News in Colorado)
https://coloradomedia.substack.com/p/could-colorados-political-jo…

🗳 Could Colorado's political journalism be the best in the nation in 2024?
The news behind the news in Colorado this week

I have an under the desk #treadmill and I love it - but it could be better. 😂 It's belt is 16" while the space between the legs of my #desk is 44" wide.
This means that I have to step off the treadmill or #work

The post discusses a paper on cybersecurity communication to C-suite execs. It advises CISOs to articulate security issues and vulnerabilities in a balanced, risk-based manner. They should explain potential financial consequences and cost to mitigate risks. CISOs should use a strategic approach, presenting various options with respective consequences, costs, and efforts. Analogies could be used for better understanding. https://reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/comments/1bghhre/

A severe local flood and social events show a similar impact on human mobility
Simone Loreti, Margreth Keiler, Andreas Zischg
https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.17899

A severe local flood and social events show a similar impact on human mobility
While a social event, such as a concert or a food festival, is a common experience to people, a natural disaster is experienced by a fewer individuals. The ordinary and common ground experience of social events could be therefore used to better understand the complex impacts of uncommon, but devastating natural events on society, such as floods. Based on this idea, we present a comparison - in terms of human mobility -, between an extreme local flood that occurred in 2017 in Switzerland, and so…

Today’s soundtrack to lower my BP after battling the incompetence and corporate morass that is Walmart in trying to return a defective laptop. No exaggeration —on my 25th day and over 9 hours logged. Kafka could not have done better.
Monica Pustilnic plays these compositions with a delicacy and sensitivity that takes me into a much more pleasant place.

Anyone know, is there a dentist anywhere in the UK where they're doing science-based covid precautions?
Everyone in FFP3s or better, all the time?
(not only for so-called "aerosol-generating procedures")
air filters with a capacity high enough to turn over the room's air in between patients?
staff testing?
Even if too far away from me, I'd like to at least be able to say to the rest of them that it exists and they _could_ do the same.
Boosts welcome.
#UK #dentists #CovidIsAirborne

Every new Mastodon update, I look for changes to the moderation system and have been accustomed to be disappointed...🤦‍♂️
Before anyone says "the mobile dev is different than the main dev". Yeah I know this is probably the case, but it doesn't change the fact that there could be better moderation options.
I shouldn't need to VIEW illegal content to make it not exist on my instance...
#Mastodon #Fediverse #MastoAdmin

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.01283 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCL_…

Quality and Quantity of Machine Translation References for Automatic Metrics
Automatic machine translation metrics typically rely on human translations to determine the quality of system translations. Common wisdom in the field dictates that the human references should be of very high quality. However, there are no cost-benefit analyses that could be used to guide practitioners who plan to collect references for machine translation evaluation. We find that higher-quality references lead to better metric correlations with humans at the segment-level. Having up to 7 refer…

Monday arrives with the promise of pizza once more 🍕
Our evergreen topics of Free and Open Technology and Society, Fedi, and making the world a better place, will have an extra twist this week: Art!
Has a piece of art on a wall ever changed your life?
Has anything?
Has PIZZA ever changed your life? Today could be your day!
6pm @ Victory Cafe
If you're wondering "Am I invited? Am I welcome?" you are invited and welcome! Come!

"stick a few versions back"
"wait a few days after any particular version pushes"
what I kinda want is
1) "wait for bugs to be reported on that version"
or
2) "wait for other people's integration/smoke tests in production to pass"
but 1 doesn't have good tooling or could be abused
and 2 is asking other companies to try it first
(hey, maybe they have better 2% rolling/gradual deploys)

What are your favorite examples of Accessibility Statements?
@… has one but I’m curious if it could be better: https://www.11ty.dev/docs/accessibility/

Hi friends! I was just out for a quick hike with my wife. Lovely sunny weather with just some snow at the top. It's weird because I feel so tired. That's also why I haven't been posting for a couple of days. But I'm sure things are going to be better soon!
Enjoy your Saturday!
#nature

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.00506 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csHC_…

Generative artificial intelligence enhances creativity but reduces the diversity of novel content
Creativity is core to being human. Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) holds promise for humans to be more creative by offering new ideas, or less creative by anchoring on GenAI ideas. We study the causal impact of GenAI on the production of a creative output in an online experimental study where some writers are could obtain ideas for a story from a GenAI platform. Access to GenAI ideas causes an increase in the writer's creativity with stories being evaluated as better written and more…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.08745 has been replaced.
link: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=a

PLAN: Variance-Aware Private Mean Estimation
Differentially private mean estimation is an important building block in privacy-preserving algorithms for data analysis and machine learning. Though the trade-off between privacy and utility is well understood in the worst case, many datasets exhibit structure that could potentially be exploited to yield better algorithms. In this paper we present $\textit{Private Limit Adapted Noise}$ (PLAN), a family of differentially private algorithms for mean estimation in the setting where inputs are ind…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.06421 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_mat…

On Better Approximation Order for the Nonlinear Meyer-König and Zeller Operator of Maximum Product Kind
Using maximum instead of sum, nonlinear Meyer-König and Zeller operator of maximum product kind is introduced by Bede et al. The present paper deals with the approximation processes for this operator. Especially in, it was indicated that the order of approximation of this operator to the function f under the modulus is and it could not be improved except for some subclasses of functions. Contrary to this claim, we will show that a better order of approximation can be obtained with the help of …

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.04440 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCY_…

Big Bang, Low Bar -- Risk Assessment in the Public Arena
One of the basic principles of risk management is that we should always keep an eye on ways that things could go badly wrong, even if they seem unlikely. The more disastrous a potential failure, the more improbable it needs to be, before we can safely ignore it. This principle may seem obvious, but it is easily overlooked in public discourse about risk, even by well-qualified commentators who should certainly know better. The present piece is prompted by neglect of the principle in recent discu…

The post discusses a paper on cybersecurity communication to C-suite execs. It advises CISOs to articulate security issues and vulnerabilities in a balanced, risk-based manner. They should explain potential financial consequences and cost to mitigate risks. CISOs should use a strategic approach, presenting various options with respective consequences, costs, and efforts. Analogies could be used for better understanding. https://reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/comments/1bghhre/

"stick a few versions back"
"wait a few days after any particular version pushes"
what I kinda want is
1) "wait for bugs to be reported on that version"
or
2) "wait for other people's integration/smoke tests in production to pass"
but 1 doesn't have good tooling or could be abused
and 2 is asking other companies to try it first
(hey, maybe they have better 2% rolling/gradual deploys)

Anyone know, is there a dentist anywhere in the UK where they're doing science-based covid precautions?
Everyone in FFP3s or better, all the time?
(not only for so-called "aerosol-generating procedures")
air filters with a capacity high enough to turn over the room's air in between patients?
staff testing?
Even if too far away from me, I'd like to at least be able to say to the rest of them that it exists and they _could_ do the same.
Boosts welcome.
#UK #dentists #CovidIsAirborne

Cowboys QB Dak Prescott Gets Brutally Honest About Future https://www.yardbarker.com/nfl/articles/cowboys_qb_dak_prescott_gets_brutally_honest_about_future/s1_17150_40271484

Cowboys QB Dak Prescott Gets Brutally Honest About Future
The Dallas Cowboys have reached a stalemate with quarterback Dak Prescott in contract negotiations, which could spell trouble for his future with the franchise. Apparently, Prescott is already envisioning his future as a member of another team. “I’m not going to say I fear being here or not. I don’t fear either situation, to be candid with you,” Prescott said Friday from the Children’s Cancer Fund Gala, via Jon Machota of The Athletic. “I love this game and love to play and love to …

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.12500 has been replaced.
link: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=a

Analysis of two-component Gibbs samplers using the theory of two projections
The theory of two projections is utilized to study two-component Gibbs samplers. Through this theory, previously intractable problems regarding the asymptotic variances of two-component Gibbs samplers are reduced to elementary matrix algebra exercises. It is found that in terms of asymptotic variance, the two-component random-scan Gibbs sampler is never much worse, and could be considerably better than its deterministic-scan counterpart, provided that the selection probability is appropriately …

Dallas Cowboys Looking To Steal Chiefs’ Unsung Hero? https://www.yardbarker.com/nfl/articles/dallas_cowboys_looking_to_steal_chiefs_unsung_hero/s1_17150_39979355

Dallas Cowboys Looking To Steal Chiefs’ Unsung Hero?
The Dallas Cowboys may be eyeing a strategic move akin to the Kansas City Chiefs’ playbook to bolster their chances of clinching a Super Bowl title in 2024. Reid Hanson of USA Today has compiled a list of premier free agent wide receivers that could potentially elevate the Cowboys’ roster. Among the notable names spotlighted is Mecole Hardman, the Kansas City Chiefs’ wide receiver celebrated for his game-winning touchdown catch in the Super Bowl. While Hanson suggests there might be bette…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.15224 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_nuc…

Distinguishing fission-like events from deep-inelastic collisions
We propose two functions to distinguish fission-like events from quasi-elastic (QE) scattering and deep inelastic collisions (DIC), for a better analysis of the measured mass-total kinetic energy distributions of binary fragments formed in fusion-fission reactions. We note that the ratio of capture to DIC events evidently decreases with the decreasing of the depth of the capture pocket predicted from the Skyrme energy density functional, with which the capture pocket could be extracted from the…

Cowboys Could Add NFC Rival’s ‘Short-Yardage Bruiser’: Analyst https://heavy.com/sports/dallas-cowboys/cowboys-add-packers-bruiser-aj-dillon/

Cowboys Could Add NFC Rival’s ‘Short-Yardage Bruiser’: Analyst
The Dallas Cowboys could be an ideal landing spot for one of the better short-yardage and goal-line backs in the NFL.

Jerry Jones’ version of all-in is far from fans’ expectations https://www.yardbarker.com/nfl/articles/jerry_jones_version_of_all_in_is_far_from_fans_expectations/s1_17100_40071633

Jerry Jones’ version of all-in is far from fans’ expectations
Recent comments by Dallas Cowboys Owner/General Manager Jerry Jones have Cowboys Nation slamming their fists on the table. Jerry Jones, in an interview at the 2024 NFL Combine, was asked about free agency and whether the Cowboys are taking an “all-in” approach. His response was, for lack of a better word…frustrating. “So you could have a free agent, and rather than have that free agent, (he) would cost you as much as three other players would cost you. Well, we are going to be all in wi…