@jimbob@aus.social
@jimbob@aus.social avatar

jimbob

@jimbob@aus.social

In unceeded lutruwita (ex. croweater) somewhere north of nipaluna. Angry scientist (fire, forest and spatial ecology, gis and #rstats). Weird music maker, proud NTEU

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jimbob, to random
@jimbob@aus.social avatar

X 4.5 solar flare, that's a big 'un

jimbob, to random
@jimbob@aus.social avatar

Conferences that insist you use their Powerpoint slide template for your talk :binfire:

jimbob, to random
@jimbob@aus.social avatar

Encampment for Palestine at UTAS

cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

I remember when I first saw a CPC464 in a shop I was working in, in 1984.

It was a very neat answer to what the market needed in 1982. But by 1984, cassette storage and Z80s were clearly long in the tooth—it came out the same year as the Macintosh, and 12 months late Atari STs and Amigas were showing up.
https://mastodon.social/@keyboards/112351091848131466

jimbob,
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@cstross yeah but the CPC 6128 though, wooah

jimbob, to random
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Right. It has happened. My institution now wants to develop teaching materials for a course by literally just running my papers through an LLM to "simplify" them. Have told the person requesting this my opinions on this idea.

jimbob,
@jimbob@aus.social avatar

@Ooze more polite and verbose, but yep that's pretty much it.

jimbob,
@jimbob@aus.social avatar

@Ooze yeah the NTEU are kinda interested in this issue, they have working groups on it, making a policy etc. but it's all a bit slow and behind the ball, compared to how fast the bullshit is coming down on us.

jimbob, to random
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Happy biscuit day everyone, when we celebrate the biscuit.

KathyReid, to mastodon
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Periodic reminder that I run the Fediverse AU server for and organisations who don't have a home on Mastodon.

https://fediverse.au

And here's a piece I wrote on why universities are reluctant to run their own Mastodon servers (recently updated with information on referrer tracking and social media platform support)

https://blog.kathyreid.id.au/2023/07/18/why-are-universities-reluctant-to-join-mastodon-and-the-fediverse/

jimbob,
@jimbob@aus.social avatar

@KathyReid a bit disturbing but also typical that the answer seems to be "there's nothing in it for us". Remember when universities used to be institutions of public service?

jimbob, to random
@jimbob@aus.social avatar

Some shots from last night with @GalFriday. And an owl.

pink and red aurora over mountains with stars visible above and trees in the foreground.
Pink and green aurora over mountains with stars behind.
A tan and white owl sitting on a pole, looking at the camera with intense orange eyes.

jimbob,
@jimbob@aus.social avatar

For anyone in high latitudes chasing auroras, I can recommend you use Glendale:

https://aurora-alerts.uk/index.php (link fixed)

You won't find the app in the app store, it's a progressive web app made by a brilliant, enthusiastic, opinionated amateur. Because it's a PWA it is slightly sucky on iPhones but still does the job, which is to be the only app which gives you up-to-the-minute forecasts and alerts. Other apps are all just "yeah tonight might be good" while Glendale is more "get outside right now" because of the live data it uses.

liamvhogan, to random
@liamvhogan@aus.social avatar

I once had to explain to someone what a specific bit of vintage furniture was for: a bedside table with a door closing on a large, half-metre cubed storage space. (It was for storing a chamber pot, and they were very common when houses had no interior toilets). I think we’ll be there soon with telephone tables, those half-desks with a side seat, for under the phone in the corridor

jimbob,
@jimbob@aus.social avatar

@liamvhogan "We used to respect computers"

aeva, to random
@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

I'm becoming increasingly convinced that it is inappropriate for bug trackers to be used as high level project management tools and vice versa.

jimbob,
@jimbob@aus.social avatar

@kwramm @paninid @tuban_muzuru @aeva hang on... People pay to use this crap? (Coming from an industry where we very much do not do things like Agile, but I have to occasionally collaborate with people who do)

jimbob, to random
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Computer touchers; what's a compiled programming language that is most like an interpreted language in terms of simplicity, abstracting memory management away from users etc. but which compiles down to a minimal-runtime executable?

jimbob, to random
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Some people still claim the English language doesn't have infixes. Unfuckingbelievable.

tootstorm, to random

How far will this utter depravity take us?

image/jpeg

jimbob,
@jimbob@aus.social avatar

@tootstorm Hi, I see you've started writing a Word Document. Would you like a Coke™️ with that?

KathyReid, to generativeAI
@KathyReid@aus.social avatar

"We were supposed to research #enshittification, not embrace it as a business model!" implored the DVC Research.

The Vice-Chancellor sighed audibly and exhaled.

"We're out of options."

She raised her hands, palms up, reminiscent of prayer.

"The research grants don't cover the research we do, much less the research we want to do.

International students have declined 20% year on year since India, China and Indonesia have on-shore partnerships with Deakin and Monash that still get the grads a permanent residency.

We have PhDs teaching most of the undergrad courses. The endowment took a major hit when the stock market crashed in '25.

Federation's gone bust, Adelaide's half the size it was before the merger, and you've seen CQ merge with SCU and James Cook and Charles Darwin just to be viable."

She took a sharp inhalation of burnt autumn air.

"It's tens of millions a year in recurring revenue. That's a School's worth of people."

"What do they get?"

"All the #LMS data, and lecture recordings."

"All of it?"

"Yeah, then new deltas each semester."

"So, what's to stop them using it to create #GenerativeAI that mimics a lecturer?"

"Good point, I suspect that's what their end game is."

"Given our smarts, couldn't we do that ourselves?

Use our LMS data and lecture recordings to build a personal assistant for students, you know, Diamond Age style?

Like an always-available personal tutor? Use #RAG, make sure it doesn't spit out bullshit?

We have the best in the world. Why sacrifice a long term advantage for short-term money?

What if we built it ourselves and white-labelled it for other #universities?"

The Vice-Chancellor raised her eyebrow.

And so #ProjectNell was born.

TO BE CONTINUED

#TootFic #MicroFiction

jimbob,
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@KathyReid this is too real

jimbob, to random
@jimbob@aus.social avatar

Personal gripe that is probably weird and paranoid but also a question; I deleted the Guardian app from my phone yesterday because 1) it now refuses to work or let you read anything if you don't sign up for an account, 2) I shouldn't have to give a newspaper my personal details to read the news, 3) it had taken over Guardian URLs on my phone, so when I try to just read the website it would divert to the app, and then tell me I couldn't read it because I'm not signed up.

However, breaking news alerts are useful to me. Not too many, not some random, algorithm-defined crap that interrupts me to tell me Gypsy-Rose sneezed. The Guardian's content coverage and frequency were about right. Can anyone recommend an app that generates breaking news notifications of a similar sort?

(I haven't had the ABC app on my phone since Tones/Scomo destroyed the institution - has it got any better lately or is all their news still just social engagement chasing?)

jimbob, to random
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Victorian government "Open Data" websites continue to be a massive disappointment. This not how "Open Data" works, you don't have an endless labyrinth of automatically generated spatial metadata pages to fight through, and then when you want a dataset you have to "order it" and wait 48 hours (but only 2 datasets at once please).

Just put a ZIP file containing the data on a website! It's real simple! Other states do it all the time!

jimbob,
@jimbob@aus.social avatar

Just thinking on this more, if the data, and updates to the data, are not programmatically accessible, it's not "Open Data". Human intervention to sign in/complete a captcha/wait for some period for an email to tell them where the data is a complete failure.

jimbob, to random
@jimbob@aus.social avatar

On this sacred , my full discography, 10 albums of mysterious ambience, is just AU$16.80, if you're into that sort of thing https://milford.bandcamp.com/

decryption, (edited ) to random
@decryption@aus.social avatar

deleted_by_author

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    jimbob,
    @jimbob@aus.social avatar

    @decryption sellers on Facebook marketplace are insane. The other day we saw a 12-year old Hyundai with >500,000 kms on it, they wanted $15,000.

    jimbob, to random
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    Last boost, a reminder that "VPN Service" just means "Sending all your internet traffic through some random dude who can intercept everything*. Sometimes that random dude is a Belarusian script kiddy, sometimes it's Mark Zuckerberg

    jimbob, to random
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    I've got an extremely crappy, cheap old Android tablet that, even when it was new, had a battery life of about an hour and took about 5 minutes just to open the browser app and load a site. It does still turn on (and then complains bitterly about out-of-date certificates etc.)

    Is there any hope for a device like this, can it be rooted and have some more sensible minimal OS installed on it?

    Back of the "WizTab"

    jimbob, to random
    @jimbob@aus.social avatar

    Who called it Microsoft Co-Pilot when Bing-man was right there

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