Yeah, so this is why many astronomers are less than completely excited about the Artemis missions. (Which is not to detract from the courage and hard work of everyone who made Artemis II so successful! But we have to understand there are other motives involved than science and inspiration.)

So something interesting that happened this week: Mastodon announced that they'd received €614,000 from Sovereign Tech Agency (german), and with part of that funding they're going to be implementing support for the FediMod FIRES protocol which I spent last year building whilst barely surviving.

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AI autocompletion in IDEs that can't be turned off easily is actually awful for beginners. Someone today in class typed two lines of code and then their IDE wrote out another 10 lines that solved the entire problem. Great! That skips 30 minutes of time spent learning programming logic

Did the Artemis II mission get you excited about humanity’s quest for the stars? Follow this astronomy feed, which highlights some of Bluesky’s best posts on our fascinating universe: bsky.app/profile/emil...

Astrophotographers - I'm prepping an outreach talk and I want to include a wide-angle picture of the night sky that includes the Pleiades. It shouldn't be zoomed in almost at all - I want it to emulate what you would see with your eyes. Does anyone have one? 🔭 Thinking of something like this:

I feel like high-quality atproto-based replacements for old/bloaty enterprise software could be an amazing way to get more people onto the ecosystem. I don't know if the upcoming permissioned data spec is good enough that e.g. SAP accounting for a company could be replaced, but like... maybe?

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I'm in this post and I don't like it

This is a really nice analysis of the impact of proposed satellite constellations on ground-based astronomy. 🔭☄️ One thing that might otherwise get lost in the margins is that these satellite constellations would waste many, many billions of euros of government funding spent on telescopes.

Nice new (peer-reviewed) analysis of the impact of satellite constellations on ground-based astronomical observations. By Olivier Hainault from @eso.org 🔭https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.09427

This study asked graduate students to use LLMs to try and produce original astronomy research - it's an interesting experiment. While there were some uses, there were also a lot of predictable failures (e.g. false citations or summaries). 🔭☄️

Has anyone else been completely non-excited by Artemis II, or is it just me? I find it immensely hard to celebrate a mission that represents all that decades of NASA budget cuts was able to produce. It's also difficult to root for anything with a US flag on it right now. 🤷‍♀️

Orbán's electoral crushing is a far greater achievement than most people outside Hungary realise. He systemically consolidated power for 16 years, fixed the electoral map, abused govt power for political purposes & censored media. The hurdles that Hungarians overcame for this moment were immense.

Immensely happy for Hungary today ♥️🇭🇺 welcome back to democratic Europe!

I wish it didn't take Signal Desktop so long to load my messages every time 😭 encryption is important, but gosh is it slow

“The open web […] didn't win because the tools were better. It won because a critical mass of people decided that the alternative, a handful of AOL-style walled gardens choosing what everyone saw, was not the future they wanted. Then they built their way out of it.” timtrautmann.com/blog/the-ner...

finally, 2026 will be the year of the Linux desktop

This is quite extraordinary- scientists set a kind of trap for AI chat bots by inventing a fake disease. AI told people it was real and… the deliberately bogus preprints started being cited in peer reviewed literature 🫣 🧪 #MedSky www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The Center for Computational Astrophysics @flatironinstitute.org is hiring a new Research Software Engineer to work on @astropy.org and to support the software and computing efforts within the CCA. Apply by May 22! apply.interfolio.com/184639 🔭 🧪 ☄️

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'lil reminder in these trying times that this app has a feed of astronomy posts that we hand-vet as being from real astronomers. So, if you're looking for something MUCH more fun to scroll:

One of the hardest things to get across to most software people with great intentions is *how strong defaults are* and how tired everyone else is of dorking around trying to get things to work, but this understanding is the thing that made Apple, for all its many flaws, such a giant.

This ×100. Feeds are best for power users, but some sort of groups/communities feature would go SUCH a long way on the app.

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Two weeks ago, the Hungarian opposition was bracing for a false flag operation, an "emergency" that would allow Viktor Orban to turn the tide or even cancel an election he is losing. Now it appears to have arrived

time is a flat circle, ive been on here since april 2024 and this happens like every six months

There's not really any rules around how social media sites should grow - we only really saw one epoch of exponential platform growth in the 2000s where every idea was brand new, except for maybe TikTok. Bluesky may or may not have its time but extrapolation is famously near-impossible

A fantastic recap of the #AtmosphereConf:

The President's Budget Request proposes a 47% cut to NASA Science, a 55% cut to NSF, and a 13% cut to the DOE Office of Science. AAS President Dr. Dara Norman sent a call to action to AAS members via email today. Urge your members of Congress to reject these cuts now! aas.org/reject-2027-...

My takeaway from Atmosphere: it needs to be WAY easier for builders to get paid So I built at.fund at.fund detects the tools you use, and tells you how to fund the builders who make those tools. And if you're a builder, it takes seconds to add records to that tell your users how to fund you 👍

The cool folks from the Eurosky team just brought you a new site: eurosky.tech, portal to the Atmosphere. I'd say it's the crispest explanation so far of what the Atmosphere brings: 1. one account 2. that works with a bunch of apps, and 3. your data from all apps is yours, portable, interoperable.

🧵 The Attie backlash feels familiar. Not the "AI is bad part" but the "Company absorbs community feature" part. I spent 10+ years in the Magento ecosystem and watched eBay/Adobe do this multiple times. Were people upset? Yeah. Did we survive? Also yeah. Grandpa tells a story 👇

mood

Oh the irony

Ok I am at 25.5 hours of being awake and it's starting to get messy I forgot how to order coffee I did, eventually, manage to order coffee (aka my jetlag cure)

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NINE HOURS OF MANSPREADING 🫠 I tried to ask him to move twice already, but he just does not get why taking up space is a problem (shocker)

I should ask them for some dairy so I can go into anaphylactic shock just to be rogue and punish the airline with an unplanned diversion to Greenland lmao

oh delightful, air canada messed up my dietary requirements food order again so I'm once again left fasting on a long-hauling flight, also the guy next to me is manspreading so hard and I'm so squashed yay

The Museum of Anthropology is an absolute must-visit if you are ever in Vancouver. I have never seen so much indigenous art in one place, and especially not presented in a way that tries to center indigenous voices & history like this museum does. Also: the architecture is stunning.

Idaho Governor Brad Little has signed the law that makes it a felony punishable up to 5 years in prison for trans people to use the bathroom. He did so on trans day of visibility. www.advocate.com/politics/sta...

Nick Fuentes is racking up millions of listens to his podcasts, and you men out there who don’t hate women need to know exactly how much they do and what they’re stating openly all the time.

The sooner the Atmosphere becomes less Bluesky-centric, the better for everyone, include Bluesky PBC. It's fantastic to have bsky as a launching pad, but the Atmosphere's potential is so so much bigger. Let this year be the year we have big succesful apps where the bsky association is incidental.

"When I reached out to Bluesky after the conference, I was told they expected this reaction. They knew the announcement would be hard for some in the community. If you expect the reaction and you do it anyway ... that's a choice. That's a communication failure at the organizational level." 👏👏👏👏👏👏

Fun fact, my first gig was in PR/community management for a small MMO game. As with many gaming communities, that community was SO difficult to keep happy. But you HAVE to embrace and invest in good PR - without users, you don't have a product.

"This is Anthropic’s second major leak in five days... For a company building AI tools that request filesystem, terminal, and codebase access, these operational security lapses raise trust questions." Lmao

Thinking that everything you see is AI-generated is as bad as thinking nothing is AI-generated It's harder than ever to know what to believe, but you're lost if you believe nothing

Just read an essay that ended with (paraphrased so you can't search for it) "I can trust my colleagues here at Cambridge University to use LLMs correctly. But can I trust people at lesser universities?" and oh fuck off lmao

The challenge with Attie for the builder community isn't the use of AI. It's the question of whether Bluesky begins absorbing/cannibalizing existing ecosystems within the Atmosphere.