RE: https://social.treehouse.systems/@Elizafox/117121647701210529
Most of the software my University pays huge fees for, are just clunky databases that Microsoft Access for Windows95 would have put to shame.
I finished #Expedition33 . I am happy I played it, but also very happy it is over. The best part of the game are the story and the ambience, but by Act 3 the story stops progressing until you go and fight the final boss (i.e. Act 3 is just boring).
94% #SolarEclipse as seen from #Exeter (UK)
HISTORY OF PHYSICS
The outstanding Italian physicist Daniele Amati, who passed away recently (RIP), studied in Argentina.
In 1952, together with his classmate Alberto Sirlin, he stayed at CBPq (Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Fisicas / Brasilian Center of Physical Research) in Rio de Janeiro.
At that time, Feynman arrived and they took part of his lectures.
in 1954, Amati returned to Italy and in the summer he attended a one-month course given by Fermi.
He compared Fermi and Feynman this roughly as follows: you ask a question to Feynman and, in many cases, he invents on the spot a clever and very original argument to answer the question; you understand the argument but at the same time you have the strong feeling that in no way you would have thought of it. You ask a question to Fermi and his answer is so simple that you have the strong feeling that you should have thought of it yourself!
There is a biography of Feynman, “To the Beat of a Different Drum”, by the historian J. Mehra, where he is asked about his graduate students. He replied that there were three students on whom he felt he had a very positive influence: Daniele Amati and Alberto Sirlin in Brasil, and Sam Berman, one of his students in Caltech. "I always say that those two (referring to Amati & Sirlin) were the students that really learned from me”.
--end
The following is a valid DOS COM executable that prints "HELLO" in the lower right corner of the screen.
You can copy these emoji into a text editor, and save it as EMOJI.COM. it should be 141 bytes.
It will run in DosBox-X, with the following options:
cpu cputype=8086
machine cga
🐸☺️🐰🐎♐🗃️🧯🧯🧯🐮💗🦮♐🐰🐹🗃️🧯🧯🧯🧯💗🪗🧯😗🧮😗🧮😗🐮😪😔⭐
may god have mercy on my soul.
Today I encountered the word "porosifiable" (meaning: something that can be made porous).
Neologisms are weird, fascinating beasts 😉
My commissions are OPEN. If you wanna see your fav thriving check my site. Or spread the word! #art #commission
https://ko-fi.com/toppynoppy/commissions
@mekkaokereke "I didn't vote for this" = "I voted for this thinking magically it wouldn't affect me." :blobcatfacepalm:
Interesting on #OpenAI maths results: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/openais-latest-math-breakthroughs-commit-research-misconduct-experts-say/
Not just the sloppy failures to cite work that the LLMs will 100% have ingested, or the company's prioritisation of hype: their SOP, and right that they get called out for it in research.
But I'm more interested in the observation that the solutions aren't really interesting: "elementary", just at superhuman scale. Like the 4-colour problem, the solution is obtained but we've not really learned anything. Which was the actual point
My coughing situation: in the few hours I managed to sleep tonight I dreamt about coughing 😞
Francesco #Guccini (14 June 1940 – 6 August 2026)
Mi piace sempre ricodare i cantanti con canzoni magari meno note ma allegre e buffe.
Un nuovo studio condotto da docenti e ricercatori delle università italiane quantifica per la prima volta i costi reali del clima per il nostro paese entro il 2050: fino a 52 miliardi di danni al turismo, 30 all’agricoltura e rischi sistemici per le infrastrutture, con il debito pubblico a rischio di superare il 200% del PIL. Impatti devastanti che colpiranno soprattutto le aree e le fasce più fragili del Mezzogiorno
Frictionless creativity does not fukin' exist."
Can I request all of my student to watch this video? (Swap creativity for learning and it still 100% applies.)
Thankfully it is not difficult to protect yourself. You need a filter that will let less that one part in a thousand to pass (do not bother with the exact number, just go with something CE certified). These are very cheap to produce, and since you are likely to need them for less than a hour, they are usually mounted on flimsy paper frames. As long as you don't break them, they are fine.
What is NOT fine are sunglasses. They let way too much light through. Even worse, avoid binoculars&co like the plague.
Another very safe option is what is called a pinhole camera. Take an opaque screen (I have successfully used cereal boxes before), make a small hole in it, and let the sun shine through it. Beyond (in the shadow of the screen) you will see a very crisp image of the sun, which is very safe to watch.
If you want to be romantic (and you live in a place that allows you to do it), you can sit below a tree with a well-developed canopy. The small spaces between the leaves will each behave like a pinhole camera, and you will get tens or hundreds images of the eclipse on the grass. Very pretty ;-)
2/2
Health and Safety for the solar Eclipse
On August 12 a large chunk of western Europe will experience a solar eclipse (here in the UK it won't be full, but 90-95% of the sun covered will be a beautiful spectacle anyway). Since I have read the most nonsensical advice on how to watch the eclipse (yes, this is the internet after all) let me try to help.
First of all: why is looking at an eclipse dangerous for your eyes?
The sun is BRIGHT. Our eyes evolved to see things using the small fraction of the sun's light that is scattered by a given object and reaches our eyes, which makes the sun painful to watch directly. Furthermore the sun is far away, which means that the rays of light arrive to us almost perfectly parallel to each other (if you want to be technical, the sun appears as a spatially coherent source), which means that the lens in our eyes will make an amazing job at focusing that light into a small spot on our retina. High brightness + small spot = your retina will burn and get scarred. Not fun.
To make things worse, during the full eclipse there is a short time when the sun is fully obscured, and thus you don't need any protection to see the beautiful corona around it. But as soon as the moon move, the brightness skyrocket again and if you don't have any protection, it is "scarred retina" time.
1/2
Every Waaagh must begin somewhere. Mine is beginning here.
OpenAI: we put our evilest AI in a sandbox that did in fact have an internet connection but mediated through a proxy that was only supposed to allow downloading python junk. It circumvented the proxy and we failed to notice for FIVE DAYS that it was going on an interstate crime spree with the internet connection it wasn't supposed to be using instead of solving the benchmark. Haha no we don't believe we deserve to be criminally liable, but buy our stuff and maybe one day you will have the honor of taking the fall for our product!
Anthropic: we put our evilest AI in a "sandbox" by telling it in its prompt that it had no internet connection. Reader, there was no sandbox. It was just a normal internet connection. The AI uploaded a malicious PyPI package to the real public internet. The ethical guardrails failed because the AI concluded the prompt about the sandbox couldn't possibly be a lie, because the system date is 2026, which is clearly fake and wouldn't be seen on the real internet, which ended around 2023. Oh no, how could we have foreseen or prevented these crimes? We are helpless in the face of the genius of our creation but cautiously optimistic that everything will be fine 🙂
Hugging Face: if we complain about all the crimes committed against us, we will be sued off the face of the earth, so here's a technical deep-dive on how cool and fun it was to be victimized 🫠
An article at NikkeiAsia claims that hidden debt at Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and Oracle has shot up to about $1.65 trillion this year, due to huge AI investments.
What's "hidden debt"? Under existing accounting rules, companies don't need to put certain kinds of debt on their balance sheets. It's enough for them to mention it in annotations to their quarterly financial statements. So you have to dig a bit to find it.
This includes money that tech companies borrow for servers and GPUs that haven't yet been delivered yet, and data centers that aren't yet operational. These kinds of hidden debt are ballooning, and experts are getting nervous.
For more details, see
• Kohei Yamada, Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65tn on opaque AI funding, NikkeiAsia, July 21, 2026. Archived at https://archive.is/wlbqs
A quote:
"Tech giants are already relying on issuing corporate bonds and new shares because their investment expenditures are exceeding their earnings. Their fundraising from institutional investors on top of that is leading to overheated capital investment.
In a March report, economists at the Bank for International Settlements referred to the mechanism of raising funds from institutional investors without increasing debt on their balance sheets as "shadow borrowing." They expressed concern about the risk of data center projects stalling and AI anxieties spreading throughout the market.
An executive at a Japanese auditing firm said concerns were growing that the tech companies' "actual financial burden is significantly larger than what can be seen on their balance sheets.""
The whole Hugging Face/Openai thing just reeks of scam. It's a publicity stunt, it helps keep them in the media, trying to scare people into being wowed by their horrible next word picker.
folks are assuming that it must of happened... because they said so?
If it happened, it would be fucking CFAA felony.
And there's no way to know if it's totally cleaned up on HF's side, *that's not how compromises of infrastructure work*
Cowboy Space (I hate their name so much) published their consolidated response a week ago but we just noticed it. EDIT: It was due at 5pm EDT today. So... I guess I have to read this shit. Swearing a lot here will get me through it.
A reminder: this is the 4th company that wants to launch fucking enormous "AI data center" satellites into sun-synchronous terminator orbits, giving Earth a ring. This particular company wants 20,000 satellites in one ring.