When I was a kid, my dad had stacks of Fortran paper punch cards. Programming with punch cards on shared mainframes was a slow, deliberate process which required a lot of time, effort and coordination.
Things are really different today. You’ve got home computers and screens and graphic IDEs and all sorts of manuals and support you can lean on. You can solve problems in a fraction of the time.
Yet despite all these improvements, people are still working 40-50+ hours a week, but for even less money.
Better #technology has only improved the working lives of very few people.
A new ferroelectric polymer that efficiently converts electrical energy into mechanical strain has been developed by Penn State researchers. This material, showing potential for use in medical devices and robotics, overcomes traditional piezoelectric limitations.
Now you can have working QR codes that look like artwork: Redditor creates working anime QR codes using Stable Diffusion
On Tuesday, a Reddit user named “nhciao” posted a series of artistic QR codes created using the Stable Diffusion AI image-synthesis model that can still be read as functional QR codes by smartphone camera apps. The functional pieces reflect artistic styles in ...continues
Tor is a valuable tool for browsing the web anonymously, but since it's powered by volunteers willing to share some bandwidth and a computer, it's always in need of additional help. Which is why EFF is announcing the Tor University Challenge, a project asking universities to start running Tor...
I had a Twitter account, but never actively used it. Twitter was basically an #InfoSec newsfeed so I just used #RSS feeds instead. There was no interaction when I was on it. Nobody cared what a peon like me was doing. The algorithm would gladly bury me.
Once Elon bought Twitter, I immediately deleted my stagnant Twitter account.
That also got Mastodon in the news, so I looked into it.
I'd even sent off a few emails to some instances around various #Technology and #LGBT things, but didn't get any replies.
I found infosec.exchange and thought it might be like a LinkedIn thing where you talk about professional stuff with professional people.
My original profile was very formal.
What I found here was not LinkedIn or Twitter or Facebook or Instagram.
This place feels like a cross between old school forums and IRC with a dash of LiveJournal. I half expect to be able to use / emotes or bbcode.
I have conversations here.
I make connections that matter.
I can talk to folks about magick, philosophy, info sec, transgender issues, discordianism, neurodiversity, the environment, politics, horror movies, video games, writing, what books to read, TV shows, the news, sexuality.
Really I can generally find people to talk about anything thanks to hashtags and federation.
I know this place isn't perfect. I know it has massive racism, anti-LGBT, trolling, and spam issues that individual users can't possibly combat alone.
@jerry is a great admin and his team does an impressive job moderating. I give him something like $12 a month ($15 minus fees) for the privilege of using this instance and that's honestly not enough.
I'm glad to be here. I haven't been this involved in any sort of interactive social media since the heyday of #SomethingAwful (I am protected).
Soon the telescope platform at ESO's Paranal Observatory in #Chile will look very different at night: all four of the 8.2 m telescopes of the VLT will be equipped with lasers! This is one of the ongoing upgrades of the GRAVITY+ instrument, which will allow us to study black holes, stars and planets like never before.
March 29th, 1995: Netscape Communications Corporation goes public. Netscape Navigator was a dominant web browser in the early days of the internet. Its IPO was a landmark event, fueling the dot-com boom of the late 1990s.
New from me: Pornhub is facing GDPR complaints for allegedly illegally processing people’s data.
It’s claimed:
Pornhub doesn’t ask for consent to use tracking cookies. All that appears on its homepage is a notice saying cookies are used and an ‘OK’ button, there’s no way to opt out
It’s unclear what data Pornhub shares with third party companies and its own network of businesses
And Pornhub assigns people sexual preferences based on the videos they watch, with no way to consent to this or change it
Perhaps most surprising, to me, is Pornhub keeps a list of the videos you watch saved in your browser. Each time you watch a video, it’s ID is added to a growing list (even if you’re not logged in)
Cyprus’s data protection regulator has confirmed and audit into Pornhub is ongoing
You may have been hearing media buzz about Korean researchers who claims to have created a room-temperature superconductor that also works at standard, ambient pressure.
This is a "huge if true" moment BUT the work has not yet been peer reviewed or independently verified. Here's the paper, plus a short contextual thread. https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.12008#science#technology
For those of you who wanted the full history of how Musk lost control of X during the X/Confinity merger, @every were kind enough to commission me to write it.
#Veritasium published an AWESOME video about the very unlikely invention of the blue LED. It’s an incredible story and you really should view it. It also contains the best visualization of semiconductors I’ve ever seen.
I witnessed the drama of the blue LED live in the 1990s. I watched tech magazines show dim blue prototypes for years until Nichia suddenly burst on the scenes with a bright blue LED and it changed the world. I watched as they created their first white LEDs ($1 apiece) which I gawked at in person. I was at Honeywell when they finally made white LEDs in surface-mount format (still $1 apiece). We used 50 of them as the backlight in the aviation GPS navigator I worked on (at $50 the backlight was one of the most expensive components in the whole system). They were so hot (100 mW each for a total of 5 W) we used them as heaters when the unit was below operating temperatures.
When I read about how Nakamura got screwed by Nichia, I was livid.
@pluralistic brilliantly clarifying our modern world for us, as usual:
We’re nowhere near the point where an AI can do your job, but we’re well past the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job.
Tradition, technology come together for winter jacket lit by body heat
Sofia Parra was among a number of industrial design students from Carleton University in Ottawa to make a trip to the Na-Cho Nyak Dun First Nation community of Mayo, Yukon.
Parra met with a group of women in the First Nations garment program and together they helped create a coat that lights up using the body heat of the wearer.
Seeing the colossal dome of ESO's Extremely Large #Telescope moving for the first time is mind-blowing! 🤯
In this first test engineers used special hydraulic devices to rotate the dome 10 m back and forth at 1 cm/s. Once it's operational it'll move at about 5 km/h with motorised bogies.
Quite impressive, as the skeleton currently weighs ~2500 tons and it'll weigh ~6100 tons when finished!
While Jitsi is open-source, most people use the platform they provide, meet.jit.si [http://meet.jit.si], for immediate conference calls. They have now introduced a “Know Your Customer” policy and require at least one of the attendees to log in with a Facebook, Github (Microsoft), or Google account. If you prefer not to...
Artificial Muscles Flex for the First Time: Ferroelectric Polymer Innovation in Robotics (scitechdaily.com)
A new ferroelectric polymer that efficiently converts electrical energy into mechanical strain has been developed by Penn State researchers. This material, showing potential for use in medical devices and robotics, overcomes traditional piezoelectric limitations.
Announcing the Tor University Challenge | EFF.org (www.eff.org)
Tor is a valuable tool for browsing the web anonymously, but since it's powered by volunteers willing to share some bandwidth and a computer, it's always in need of additional help. Which is why EFF is announcing the Tor University Challenge, a project asking universities to start running Tor...
Jitsi, the open-source video conferencing platform, now requires a Google, Microsoft, or Facebook account for their online service. - Beehaw (beehaw.org)
While Jitsi is open-source, most people use the platform they provide, meet.jit.si [http://meet.jit.si], for immediate conference calls. They have now introduced a “Know Your Customer” policy and require at least one of the attendees to log in with a Facebook, Github (Microsoft), or Google account. If you prefer not to...
OC Porn Historically Decides Tech Adoption... Fediverse?
Historically, porn has organically decided which platform or formats become dominant. It's incredibly anti-censorship, but walks many fine lines....