Mad cow disease, also known as Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, is when cows ingest contaminated meal, which can be sometimes made up of other cows. It was considered a disaster for the cattle industry in the 1990s.

Anyway, I bring it up because this is basically how LLM slop is starting to work now. All the nutritional grass has been eaten and now what’s left is the contaminated meal made from other LLMs. The LLMs eat the meal, and soon we will have, like Mad LLM disease or something

Good grief. Starlink v2 satellites are generating 32 times more radio emission than previous generations! This is totally blinding to radio telescopes and will stop us doing science in this part of the spectrum.

BBC News coverage: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy4dnr8zemgo

Journal article: https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2024/09/aa51856-24/aa51856-24.html

#astronomy #starlink #losingthesky

Elon Musk's Starlink satellites 'blocking' view of the universe

Radio waves from the satellites are "blinding" radio telescopes and hurting research, say scientists.

^{Georgina Rannard (BBC News)}

Yknow what saddens me

Flappy bird is back bc some crypto asshole done a legal shenanigan to get it declared an abondened IP, to use it for a crypto garbage mobile app under that IP, against the wishes and without paying the original creator

So, when it's for scamming people, we can actually declare stuff as abandon ware, but not when someone just wants to bury a beloved series or franchise, like the English dub of sailor moon, which you can only pirate now

This is why you can't steal from a corporation, it's called reclamation

Hug the Tail 🐺

#furry

Have you ever had a healthcare worker get angry with you for protecting yourself? Have you detected a critical error and had them argue or tell you you’re wrong?

I had a terrifying experience this week where one of my homecare nurses tried to administer insulin. I’m NOT a diabetic. I’m on nursing services for blood pressure checks and IV saline because I’m dangerously hypotensive.

I told them “I think you have the wrong patient I’m not on insulin” and they became very upset. They tried to force it on me and told me my file would be noted as “noncompliance” and I might lose the homecare services.

I held my ground and asked them to double check the file as they clearly had me mixed up with another patient.

They finally did - albeit through sighs and eyerolls. They didn’t apologize - they just left and said the next nurse could deal with my issues.

This js terrifying. Many people on homecare are elderly and/or not mentally competent and can’t always check and double check what they’re being given. What if I had been extra woozy or had passed out before they arrived? What happens if you administer insulin to someone on alot of meds and not diabetic?

More importantly - WHY are we not trusted to know our own bodies? Women, disabled people, marginalized individuals… it’s almost always the same experience. We’re told we’re wrong and threatened with loss of care, non compliance, psych holds or worse.

Is the fact that I demand they wear a respirator before entering playing a role? Could it be that they’re overworked and frequently sick because of unmitigated COVID spread?

We need masks and clean air in healthcare NOW. We can’t keep infecting and reinfecting healthcare workers and expecting that there won’t be consequences.

We absolutely shouldn’t be infecting high risk patients who are relying on them for life saving care.

If you’re a HCW who stopped masking - please start again. For your health and the health of your patients.

If a patient tells you a certain medication or procedure will be harmful - listen to them. We know our bodies & deserve to be respected.

I may write an essay about this experience when I’m less exhausted and angry. In the meantime you can read one of my other examples of medical gaslighting & misogyny … one which very nearly cost me my life:

https://www.disabledginger.com/p/my-most-dangerous-er-experience-and

#CovidIsAirborne #CovidCautious #CovidIsNotOver #CleanAir #WearaMask #Disability #LongCovid #Ableism #Denial #CleanAir #Pandemic #PublicHealth #InfectionControl #Eugenics #SafeHealthcare #N95 #Respirators #MasksWork #MaskUp #Spoonie #Discrimination #Dysautonomia #mecfs #pots #mcas #communitycare #wearamask #chronicillness #keepmasksinhealthcare

Hello!

30 trillion cells in my body are human, whatever that means, and 38 trillion are various bacteria! There are a bunch of viruses too which are currently impacting my functionality!

I am 68 trillion microorganisms in a trench coat which results in a sort of self-propelling, self-replicating digestion tube, but I am paid to act as if I am a clean, rational, thinking machine!

This is very stressful for all 68 trillion of us, so sometimes we complain about it on the internet.

"David Lammy says climate change is more urgent threat than terrorism or Putin"

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/david-lammy-climate-change-terrorism-putin-urgent-b2614258.html

David Lammy says climate change is more urgent threat than terrorism or Putin

Foreign secretary says tackling the global warming crisis will also boost economic growth in the UK, as he compares risks to the Russian president who is threatening war with Nato

^{Kate Devlin (The Independent)}

I think I've found my new favorite #OSM web app:
https://openwhatevermap.xyz/

#OpenStreetMap

Content warning: Mozilla thing Reveal/hide

You don't need to have somehow "known" that you were nonbinary as a child if that's not how things went for you.

There are many ways to learn about yourself, and all of them are legitimate.

Some flowers bloom in the spring, others in the summer, and some can even push up through the snow.

You have (and will) change and learn in your own time, which is always going to be the right time.

#nonbinarypositivity #nonbinarypride #nonbinary #questioning #genderquestioning

I left the Microsoft world back in ~ 2011 to be a full time Ruby, Rails, & Web dev. It was such a relief to be operating in a world of open source libraries and frameworks.

Now I see entire companies built upon open source stacks using (Microsoft) TypeScript, running in (Microsoft) Visual Studio Code, collaborating on (Microsoft) GitHub, using (Microsoft) AI coding tools that plagiarise open source code, and running Linux _inside_ (Microsoft) Windows with WSL.

What the hell happened, hackers???

There's this (largely unpracticed) idea on Wall St that every once in a while you should sell your entire portfolio and then decide which stocks you actually want to buy back. It's a way of dealing with the Endowment Effect which says that people have a bias toward overvaluing things they already own

I think every police dept should fire 10% of the force every six months, and let an independent panel determine who should be hired back based on interviews and unredacted copies of their files

Dodging boulders and stealing priceless relics, Indiana Skunk grabs his whip and brushes his tail as he sets off to the adventure.

I know what's the music you are humming on your head!

Skunktember is here, and I had this sketch saved from a little bit more than a year ago, sketched on Photoshop and finished recently on Procreate.

Reason why on the time-lapse process video is only shown the coloring part. You can see it on the first comment on my Telegram art channel: https://t.me/panda_paco
Or the full version at supporting me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/pandapaco or Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/panda_paco

mastodon is so fucking tedious. i literally cannot follow people on types.pl and they can't follow me because of feuds between the admins of the instances

like, i get that you might not want to like automatically cache data etc etc but for fucks sake, i can't even opt IN to being followed?

mastodon is so terrible at times

You may have heard of the /.well-known/ path, and the security.txt file, but there is a new one you should be aware of too:

/.well-known/change-password

It should redirect to your change password form, so password managers can easily send users there.

https://securinglaravel.com/security-tip-a-well-known-url-for/

Security Tip: A Well-Known URL for Changing Passwords

[Tip#73] You may have heard of the `/.well-known/` path, and the security.txt file, but there is a new one called `change-password` you should be aware of too!

^{Stephen Rees-Carter (Securing Laravel)}

More analogue photography?
YES!
I'm still enjoying it and love to experiment with chemistry, Filmstock and time.

The black and white pictures are shot on Fomapan 100, developed in Fomadon Excel at the recommended time.

The Color pictures are on Kodak Colour plus 200, developed using "my standard" Adenol C-41 mix.
But this time with a hacked together controller to closely monitor the temperature.

📍 East & Luitpoldhütte
w/ @Ican
w/ Spectrie
w/ Ari

Billionaire Larry Ellison says a vast AI-fueled surveillance system can ensure 'citizens will be on their best behavior'

Can all the billionaires please just finally fuck off to Mars and leave the rest of us alone

The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-simple-html/

I've told this story at conferences - but due to the general situation I thought I'd retell it here.

A few years ago I was doing policy research in a housing benefits office in London. They are singularly unlovely places. The walls are brightened up with posters offering helpful services for people fleeing domestic violence. The security guards on the door are cautiously indifferent to anyone walking in. The air is filled with tense conversations between partners - drowned out by the noise of screaming kids.

In the middle, a young woman sits on a hard plastic chair. She is surrounded by canvas-bags containing her worldly possessions. She doesn't look like she is in a great emotional place right now. Clutched in her hands is a games console - a PlayStation Portable. She stares at it intensely; blocking out the world with Candy Crush.

Or, at least, that's what I thought.

Walking behind her, I glance at her console and recognise the screen she's on. She's connected to the complementary WiFi and is browsing the GOV.UK pages on Housing Benefit. She's not slicing fruit; she's arming herself with knowledge.

The PSP's web browser is - charitably - pathetic. It is slow, frequently runs out of memory, and can only open 3 tabs at a time.

But the GOV.UK pages are written in simple HTML. They are designed to be lightweight and will work even on rubbish browsers. They have to. This is for everyone.

Not everyone has a big monitor, or a multi-core CPU burning through the teraflops, or a broadband connection.

The photographer Chase Jarvis coined the phrase "the best camera is the one that’s with you". He meant that having a crappy instamatic with you at an important moment is better than having the best camera in the world locked up in your car.

The same is true of web browsers. If you have a smart TV, it probably has a crappy browser.

My old car had a built-in crappy web browser.

Both are painful to use - but they work!

If your laptop and phone both got stolen - how easily could you conduct online life through the worst browser you have? If you have to file an insurance claim online - will you get sent a simple HTML form to fill in, or a DOCX which won't render?

What vital information or services are forbidden to you due to being trapped in PDFs or horrendously complicated web sites?

Are you developing public services? Or a system that people might access when they're in desperate need of help? Plain HTML works. A small bit of simple CSS will make look decent. JavaScript is probably unnecessary - but can be used to progressively enhance stuff. Add alt text to images so people paying per MB can understand what the images are for (and, you know, accessibility).

Go sit in an uncomfortable chair, in an uncomfortable location, and stare at an uncomfortably small screen with an uncomfortably outdated web browser. How easy is it to use the websites you've created?

I chatted briefly to the young woman afterwards. She'd been kicked out by her parents and her friends had given her the bus fare to the housing benefits office. She had nothing but praise for how helpful the staff had been. I asked about the PSP - a hand-me-down from an older brother - and the web browser. Her reply was "It's shit. But it worked."

I think that's all we can strive for.

Here are some stats on games consoles visiting GOV.UK

Matt Hobbs (@TheRealNooshu@hachyderm.io)

@TheRealNooshu

Replying to @TheRealNooshuInterestingly we have 3,574 users visiting GOV.UK on games consoles:
• Xbox - 2,062
• Playstation 4 - 1,457
• Playstation Vita - 25
• Nintendo WiiU - 14
• Nintendo 3DS - 16
20/22

---

❤️ 29💬 1♻️ 010:45 - Mon 01 February 2021

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-simple-html/

#HTML5 #web #WeekNotes #work