1/ On this last day of 2024, I thought this might interest those of you following our progress in detail. Here is a summary of all the One-Way Light Travel Times of the Voyager spacecraft over 2024.
The first thing to note is that the plot lines have different vertical axes! While the times are _offset_, the scale is the same. If you plot both these times on a single vertical scale, you can barely see the sinusoidal shape. Remember: green with green, blue with blue.
OK, why is there this shape? Because the distance measurements are being made from a moving platform: Earth. The sinusoidal variance is because of Earth's orbit around the Sun. At certain times of year, the Earth is actually moving towards the Voyagers faster than they are leaving, so the distance _decreases_.
Continues...
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Looks like Google did a not so nice thing. The Google Authenticator app no longer will generate the codes for some items, including Google's own account. This happened after they offered to backup all items to their cloud in case you lose your phone; if you don't do that, their app will break itself like this.
Two-factor authentication is about 'one thing you know and one thing you have'. The first thing is your password, the second thing your phone. The generated codes on your phone prove that you have your phone. Backing up the app in your Google account renders the latter useless and puts you back at one-factor authentication.
Of course you can and maybe should backup the secrets stored in the app. But that must be on 'something you have' and not somebody's cloud.
#GoogleAuthenticator
I went to the Christmas market in Maastricht today. It was nice and cold and crowded. It gets dark quickly this close to midwinter.
Photos taken with Canon EOS R10 and Canon RF 28 F2.8. Cc-by.
#ChristmasMarket #Maastricht #Photography
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Over six decades, Jill and I had the honor of calling Jimmy Carter a dear friend.
But, what’s extraordinary about Jimmy Carter, though, is that millions of people throughout America and the world who never met him thought of him as a dear friend as well.
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My dishwasher was like 'hold my beer' and didn't hold its water anymore. Meanwhile my tablet seems to be fixed for now by uninstalling the TikTok app (it literally caused the display to flash, have interference, etc).
Insider trading tip for people trading in Samsung shares: both my tablet and phone are showing near-end-of-life signs and I may soon need to be buying new ones. With the insane device prices nowadays, this sure is going to raise their shares.(Just to be clear, the above is obviously sarcasm. I have no inside knowledge. Just a consumer.)
Insider trading tip for people trading in Samsung shares: both my tablet and phone are showing near-end-of-life signs and I may soon need to be buying new ones. With the insane device prices nowadays, this sure is going to raise their shares.
(Just to be clear, the above is obviously sarcasm. I have no inside knowledge. Just a consumer.)
your experience is how I expected mine to be if I had actually given the technology a chance.
Machine learning has been useful for decades, mostly quietly. The red flag against LLMs for me (aside from the authorship laundering and mass poaching of content) was there scramble by all companies to shoehorn it into their products, like a solution looking for a problem; I’ve yet to see it actually solve.
@carbontwelve I used machine learning in my PhD. The use case there was data prefetching. This was an ideal task for ML, because the benefits of a correct answer were high and the cost of an incorrect answer were low. In the worst case, your prefetching evicts something from cache that you need later, but a 60% accuracy in predictions is a big overall improvement.
Programming is the opposite. The benefits of being able to generate correct code faster 80% of the time are small but the costs of generating incorrect code even 1% of the time are high. The entire shift-left movement is about finding and preventing bugs earlier.
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> In plenty of programming "the costs of generating incorrect code even 1% of the time are" pretty inconsequential, actually.
I guess it depends on the size of your codebase and how easy it is to spot the bug introduced by the LLM. It a lot of cases debugging can take up much more time than writing new code.
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Understanding Engineer Speak
Event Descriptions:
- High Impedance Air Gap
⩵ It wasn't plugged in🔌 - Kinetic Disassembly
⩵ It blew up💥 - Organic Grounding
⩵ It electrocuted someone⚡ - Percussive Maintenance
⩵ It was hit with a hammer🔨 - Thermal Reconfiguring
⩵ It melted🔥
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Spring can't come fast enough!
The trailer for the new film with Jenna Ortega is out! Death of a Unicorn, coming soon.
#JennaOrtega #DeathOfAUnicorn
instagram.com/reel/DDuPMQQo2wv…
From A24, the studio that brought you X, a film with Jenna Ortega, Death of a Unicorn.
#JennaOrtega #DeathOfAUnicorn
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice with Jenna Ortega and The Pod Generation with Emilia Clarke arrived on blu-ray!
The German release of the latter has an alternative title Baby To Go, which isn't even in German. In my own country hardly any discs are released anymore, so we have to make do with these German releases.
#JennaOrtega #BeetlejuiceBeetlejuice #EmiliaClarke #ThePodGeneration #BabyToGo
instagram.com/p/DDKM1eJJwbp/
#JennaOrtega #Wednesday
So here's yet another example of #Google Search AI Overviews completely missing the point of a question and giving misleading/wrong answers. I asked Google how much larger a 75 inch TV is than a 55 inch TV. Google replied with an AI Overview (as below) declaring the 75 was 36% larger than the 55, "meaning the viewing area is significantly bigger on the 75 inch screen", it confidently declared.
Only 36%? That doesn't seem right. We're talking about viewing area, as the AI reply itself stated.
So what went wrong? If you look at the calculation that the AI answer used, it simply calculated how much longer the diagonal of the 75 is vs. the 55. Yeah, it's about 36% longer. But that's NOT the viewing area.
If you calculate out the actual viewing area, a term mentioned by the AI answer itself, the actual result is that the 75 viewing area is about 86% (!) larger than the 55. Not a mere 36%.
So the AI Overview answer was utterly misleading at best, and just plain stupid wrong at worst. Not even close.
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youtu.be/LmhV3gVWbKY
#CorinaBradley
#CorinaBradley
#MirandaCosgrove
youtu.be/dAfYBOsQQY8
Glow is also in Best this year, as last year, side-Glow as it were.
Canon EOS R10, RF-S 10-18mm. cc-by.
#Photography #Glow2024
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#Glow2024
Glow Eindhoven 2024.
I tried to take some photos with my Canon EOS R10, with the RF 50mm 1.8 lens, some with the RF 28mm 2.8.
#Photography #Glow #GlowEindhoven #Glow2024
Birds. Possibly a sparrowhawk and a pigeon.
Canon EOS R10 with Canon RF 100-400mm.
#Photography #Birds
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#USPol
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Fixed my @F-Droid app on my tablet as I found it had a radically different idea of which versions of several apps were available than my phone had. Both were also behind reality, but that is normal. I noticed this because the @Tuta app failed to download, maybe because such an old version (August) no longer existed. Somehow going into the 'nearby people' function triggered a new wifi permission popup, or maybe it was me toggling wifi off-and-on that fixed it. But after that thumbnails and screenshots loaded again and new(-ish) app versions were shown.
In researching this I found the remark that F-droid has supported unattended upgrades for a while. That is a feature I was really waiting for, as clicking Install on each separate update then wait a minute then click the next etc was getting really annoying. But it is not happening for me. Turns out that this is only available for newer Android versions, which neither of these devices has... See f-droid.org/2024/02/01/twif.ht… .
#StephanieLeonidas #MarchingPowder
#StephanieLeonidas #MarchingPowder
youtu.be/VPZ4NY-HKP8
We’re excited to launch Mosaic: a new initiative from the Bonfire team that empowers organisations by creating their own customised and federated digital space - built just for them.
✨ Learn more about Mosaic: bonfirenetworks.org/mosaic/
📣 Read our announcement post: bonfirenetworks.org/posts/mosa…
🧵 1 / 5
Bonfire
A federated social network for individuals and communities to design, operate and control their own digital lives.bonfirenetworks.org
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That’s understandable, yeah we’re in a tricky position for grants as we’re so international. A grant to support both your work and our main dev would be amazing.
I’m not a tech person myself (just experience with Arts funding). So, a bit out of the loop regarding funding help available… any leads you could point us to? I’d be happy to help with the application
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Made it to the start of the Eindhoven City Run (5km, this year relegated to the Saturday and not on the actual Marathon day). Also made it to the finish, but I was too tired to take another photo. My time was 34:29, not the slowest ever despite having to hold back due to an injury (the uphill bits were difficult for more than the normal reasons). Made it back home too and added to my collection.
I'd wish they had changing facilities near the finish line, or at all since on Saturday nothing is available. It was a long cold walk back in my t-shirt... Sitting here now trying to warm back up.
#EindhovenCityRun #ASMLMarathonEindhoven
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There are no good and bad deportations. Someone's documentation status does not mean they deserve to be uprooted, detained in a desert, sent to some other country.
However, there is a *second* problem. In the previous Trump administration there was a running issue where Trump tried to deport people to Mexico, and Mexico did not allow this for a simple reason: It did not believe these people were Mexicans. And in fact, most of them probably were not.
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Again: No one deserves this. Being born in Mexico does not mean you should be sent to Mexico. But there's a bad problem and a worse problem and the worse problem is *what happens when the U.S. government holds large numbers of people its officers have already mentally dehumanized indefinitely in remote locations in Texas*.
The first thing that will happen is that the detainees will be subjected to forced labor. The second thing (or maybe first thing) is that some of them will die.
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Great thread.
Sadly, you most likely are right. I believe there's another component to this, trump wants to be as famous as Hitler and for the same reasons, though never being defeated or seen as wrong.
On the gates of Auschwitz:
"Arbeit Macht Frei"
Translation
"work makes one free"
Michelle Hughes
in reply to mcc • • •I kept trying to explain to cis het white people what I was scared of. I kept having a problem where whenever I made a specific prediction (even a prediction like "Trump will keep this widely publicized campaign promise"), they would come up with a reason why my specific prediction would not happen exactly as I laid it out, and therefore I have nothing to worry about.
The stuff you're saying is the stuff I'd been saying. It's refreshing to see someone else say it instead of dismiss it.
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(Thread addendum)
I want you to know, when you read this link, that the Laken Riley act received 11 votes from Senate Democrats¹, and if it had not received those votes it would have failed at cloture like every Democratic initiative does when the Democrats have a bare majority. Don't take that as a statement about blame. Just think about it.
apnews.com/article/trump-signs…
¹ More than that in the House, but that's not procedural significant.
At signing of Laken Riley Act, Trump says he plans to send migrants in US illegally to Guantanamo
WILL WEISSERT (AP News)bob
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Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)mcc
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Cassandra is only carbon now
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Mark T. Tomczak
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Yep. Gross. And at least one of them I met several times and he should have known better.
He's lost my support, and I can't fathom where he was coming from on this topic.
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The Guantanamo facility could hold “dangerous criminals” and people who are “hard to deport,”
... those people are citizens. He's talking about citizens, and likely (from some court arguments) native Americans.
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and i’m scared of this
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cognitively accessible math
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